No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy

No Country for Old Men is a novel of borders. From the standpoint of genre, Cormac McCarthy plants himself at the border of Western and noir and pastoral. The novel also borders explicit violence while being, at times, understatedly reserved—same goes for its sentence structures: the dialogue is terse, brief; the narration provides clause after clause sewn together. All these stylistic choices run parallel to the novel’s setting: the border between Texas and Mexico, where a drug deal has gone horribly wrong.

Our protagonist, Llewellyn Moss, is out in the desert and stumbles across a heroin deal gone bad, one littered with dead bodies and a briefcase left behind full of cold hard cash. Llewellyn claims the case and takes it home to his skeptical wife, whom he keeps in the dark about his situation. To be fair, he’s completely truthful about the bag being full of money, but his dynamic with his wife assures that she will not believe him.

Unfortunately for Llewellyn, he has entered into a network of forces that far exceed his capacities. There are cartel members at war with each other, bounty hunters, and police that are trying to decipher what the heck is happening with all these dead bodies. One of my gripes with the text is that so many of the characters feel interchangeable. The terseness of the characters’ speech, for example, emphasized their wit but not their personalities. Each could be each—that is, except for the novel’s villain.

Bought to life in the film adaptation by Javier Bardem, Anton Chigurh is a truly iconic villain. In the text, his piercing blue eyes reflect a cold universe as he slaughters his way through Texas and beyond. Chigurh tracks down his pray and uses a cattle gun to murder people for as little as needing their car. His calculated and measured approach is sinister, but the text runs the risk of glorifying his ultraviolence by making him the character from whom we get the most insight into the novel’s core themes.

There are a few critical moments with Chigurh that serve the novel’s core themes. There is a moment when Chigurh initiates a gas station attendant into a coin toss game. He flips the coin and asks for the man to call it. The man protests because the stakes have not been made clear to him—he has nothing to gain. McCarthy is masterful in crafting the suspense of the scene, because we know that the man is betting on his life—and I think at some level he understands, too. Chigurh explains the genesis of the coin and the twenty years it took to get to that moment. Essentially, the scene is a reflection on fate. The past latches on and makes the moment inevitable—nearly. The only “choice” is left to chance for the man: a fateful 50/50. One of the reasons Chigurh is so compelling is because he, unlike the other characters in the book, seems to have a clear vision of how the world operates (more on this later). By giving him the chance to articulate his philosophy, he is given special priority in the reader’s mind, despite his horrific violence.

The other stand-out Chigurh murder-spree scene is when he kills Llewellyn’s wife. For a bit of a background, Llewellyn is provided the opportunity to return the money. Chigurh promises to kill him, but to let his wife live. Llewellyn is killed, somewhat randomly, at the hands of the cartel, undermining Chigurh as the agent of fatalism. Nonetheless, Chigurh arrives at Carla Jean’s house and tells her about his promise to kill her. Carla Jean protests, noting that Chigurh himself made the promise and that he could give up his mission. His rigidity assures her: no, the choice was already made.

The title of No Country for Old Men points towards the difference in philosophies at play. Chigurh reflects a precise, specific code for living. The world has rules, standards, and consequences, even if they’re partly determined by chance. What’s strange is that the sheriff, Ed Tom Bell, seems to have an affinity for Chigurh’s philosophy, even if he won’t acknowledge it. There’s a passage where Ed Tom explains how everything is changing and the younger generation no longer subscribes to conventions and so on. It’s as though he longs for the certainty and predictability of Chigurh’s philosophy.

This odd tension helps to explain, perhaps, Ed Tom’s obsession with—and inaction toward—Chigurh. Ed Tom cannot understand the logic of the villain’s chaos. He continually floats towards him but whenever he gets close, he shies away. In a moment of pursuit, Ed Tom seems to pull back, fearing his own death.

No Country for Old Men is unlike most books I read, especially in the realm of literary fiction. There are lengthy action sequences and pages of senseless slaughter. I initially found it a little challenging to get immersed—-there’s a lot of description of the desert and a play-by-play of the action. As the plot advances, I found myself more invested, if still a little confused about the interchangeable cast of characters. I wish there was a little more personality or experimentation with ‘voice’ for the characters, but the random anarchy of McCarthy’s world keeps the story running; there’s a moment when Chigurh is in a car accident and it could be what brings him down—except, he’s too clever. Following Chigurh murdering Carla Jean, I felt the story essentially had done what it needed to, but then Ed Tom provides a lengthy reflection that has the narrative peter out. 

Generally…I liked it! Happy reading!

We Do Not Part by Han Kang

It’s hard to write about the books that are most finely wrought. I finished Han Kang’s We Do Not Part a couple of weeks ago and I’ve been letting it sit with me because there are so many elements that all play off of one another. It’s hard to explain the craftsmanship of the book in a way that is both succinct and that does justice to Kang’s vision.

We Do Not Part is a novel that teeters on the edge of documentary and dream sequence. Some portions are narrated like investigative journalism, focused on fact and unravelling the threads of a messy history. Other portions read more like a dream sequence in which ghosts appear, the past and present are seemingly not in cooperation, and the impossible presents itself as a matter of course. At times, it felt reminiscent of The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro, where we are perpetually waiting for a resolution that is not, and never was, forthcoming (silly us for thinking so). The way Kang navigates these different registers is impressive and makes the book feel satisfying in more ways than one.

The timeline of the book might be a barrier for people’s immersion in the text. The novel jumps around into different times in Kyungha’s life, developing in particular her friendship with her colleague Inseon. Kyungha seems to imply that their relationship is not close, and yet there’s an intimacy between them that runs deep and, quite honestly, is beautiful in its quiet tenderness. Inseon is a filmmaker, and Kang’s accounts of her films are so vivid that it’s hard to imagine that they don’t exist. Years earlier, Kyungha shared an idea for a film, based on a recurring dream, with Inseon. The two have long planned to create the film, but, as in life, there are perpetual excuses not to start the project. The project is simple: place a bunch of cut-down trees upright again in the earth during a heavy snowfall and film as the snow piles up. It is, as Kyungha realizes, perhaps too late, an image of death.

At the start of the book, for reasons largely unexplained, Kyungha feels compelled to draft her will. She writes draft upon draft only to rip them up and realize she does not have anyone close enough to whom the will should be addressed. In the midst of the process, Inseon sends her a message asking her to come see her immediately. It turns out she is in the hospital having severed her fingers in an accident with her workshop—it turns out that she injured herself because she decided it was time to start their project and was cutting logs. It feels prophetic and poetic that she loses her fingers. Kyungha visits her in the hospital, where Inseon has to have her severed digits poked with a needle every three minutes or so to ensure her nerves don’t die before they can reattach her fingers.

As I mentioned, the friendship between them comes across beautifully. There’s a surreality to it that I really appreciate—and even just in terms of writing style alone, I would put We Do Not Part nearly on par with the author’s award-winning The Vegetarian. During Kyungha’s visit, Inseon asks her to go care for her bird. It’s been a few days and she’s worried that her pet will have run out of water and will pass away if Kyungha doesn’t go immediately. So, Kyungha makes a reluctant trip to Inseon’s remote village.

This is where the dream-like quality of the book really shines through. In the transitional, (dare I say) liminal space, we seem to shift to a dreamlike unreality. There’s an extended section, for example, where Kyungha is waiting for a bus that does not come. There’s an elderly woman waiting for the bus that seems to know the score, but it’s taking forever. And the snow just keeps coming down. It’s the kind of static, directionless, scene that might present as a dream. When Kyungha eventually disembarks from the bus and tries to trace a path to Inseon’s remote workshop, she falls in the dried up river and awakes ready to move forward—it’s unclear how long she was unconscious in the snow; in fact, it’s unclear whether she survived the fall at all.

From there, Kang develops a motif of death and rebirth. As one might predict, Kyungha arrives too late to save the bird. She takes the time to dig away the snow near the tree she thinks would be suitable for the bird’s gravesite and buries the bird with a great deal of care—only for it to return to life the next day. Later, Inseon arrives unexpectedly—after Kyungha attempts to contact her in the hospital and eventually a nurse answers the phone only to tell her to call back later. From there, it’s a Beloved-like surreality where it’s not clear if Inseon is a ghost or a spirit or living, breathing Inseon—if she’s a figment of Kyungha’s imagination, she seems to know far more than Kyungha possibly could.

The motifs in the text cycle and overlap in an intricate pattern. There is much about birds—Kyungha traces the shadows of birds on Inseon’s wall and the palimpsestic approach feels significant to the overall project of We Do Not Part. The book is infused with poetry throughout, but one moment in particular stands out where Inseon has encouraged Kyungha to feed the birds and she gives them some dry noodles: “Each time the birds bit off a piece of the noddle with their beaks, I felt the faint impact on my fingertips, like the lead of a mechanical pencil as it breaks” (102). There’s a fragility to the birds—to life—that carries on throughout the text.

Another motif, of course, is snow. This is one of the coldest books I can think of and, if you’re reading this on the 25th of January, it is entirely appropriate. The documentary angle of the book is giving a family history that intersects with the Jeju uprising. I’m no expert; my understanding is that the United States was influencing Korean elections and the Workers’ Party organized a general strike. The resistance of the ‘communists’ (including women and children) was violently put down by the Americans. The inhabitants of Jeju were summarily executed and hidden in mines. One of the most powerful moments, I thought, was when Inseon’s aunt and mother were away from the village while everyone else was rounded up, taken to an elementary schoolyard, and killed. Inseon’s mother and aunt then had to then go through the bodies, wiping the snow off their faces to find their relatives. There’s a ghostly parallel with snow accumulating on Kyungha’s face when she falls into the dried river. There’s a double-ghostly parallel when Kyungha and Inseon go lay down in the snow as it falls and they stare up at the sky, confusing stars and snow. The book is full of these stunning moments.

The book delights in its ambiguity. For instance, the opening of the book reveals that Kyungha has written a book about a massacre in South Korea and feels afflicted with a post-traumatic kind of response. It sounds like it could be autobiographical if you’re familiar with Han Kang’s Human Acts. There’s enough in We Do Not Part to separate it from reality, though. As I mentioned, there’s also ambiguity whether Inseon is a ghost or not. At the end of the book, it becomes unclear whether Kyungha is dead, Inseon is dead, neither, or both. Even the title, We Do Not Part, is given some commentary: Kyungha wonders whether it means that they do not separate or whether they never get the opportunity to ‘part’ and say goodbye as they should. The motif of not being able to say a proper goodbye is critical, given the political context and the Jeju massacre.

We Do Not Part offers a rich account of both political and personal experiences. It’s a stylistic masterpiece where everything is so densely packed into just a few hundred pages. It’s the kind of book that when I read the closing lines I thought, “Well, darn, I’ll never write anything that good.” It’s the kind of book that warrants, probably, endless rereading and interpretation. It requires you to sit inside its pages and watch the snow accumulate. Unfortunately, for now, I must trudge on to new territory.

Happy reading!

Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq

“No matter how simple some things might seem, they’re not, or at least not always.” So begins Banu Mushtaq’s story, “The Arabic Teacher and Gobi Manchuri.” The opening paragraph to the story reads like an artistic vision for what the short stories in Heart Lamp explore. The passage continues:

People behave in strange and illogical ways when they’re afraid they may have to take responsibility. I have reason to think about such things. The revelation that I can no longer justify my own erratic behaviour on these terms is a recent one, however; it came to me many years after the event itself. No doubt this awareness gradually became stronger over time, but, even so, various aspects of that incident jump up from the depths of my memory every now and then, with a thud and without any warning. (187)

This personal reflection from the story’s lawyer protagonist gives voice to the deeply human quality of the stories from this year’s International Booker Prize winner. Banu Mushtaq’s stories are probing, examining seemingly simple phenomenon and adding layers of nuance so that the “illogical ways” people behave are explained more richly. For a number of characters, indeed, their behaviours are ways of coping with the fear of taking responsibility. In “The Shroud,” for example, the main character promises to, but ultimately neglects to, buy a funeral shroud for a poor woman while she’s on her Hajj, and has a complete breakdown from the guilt. In “A Decision of the Heart,” there’s a complex interplay of conflict between a man, wife, and her mother-in-law, which prompts the son to get his mother married off. The conflicted impulses of the story read like a Dostoyevski novel, with characters engaging in self-destruction to avoid confronting their own flaws.

The declarative tone of the passage above is also reflective of why I think that of all this year’s International Booker Prize shortlist, Heart Lamp is most likely to be seen as a ‘classic.’ The collection is not afraid of making assertions about humanity and grapples with art’s most classic topics: love, death, marriage, birth, religion. 

The construction of the stories is also compelling. It’s here that I’ll have to offer my first disclaimer in reviewing Heart Lamp. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I tend not to enjoy the short story as a literary form as much as I do poetry or novels; they often feel to me like seeing a passing acquaintance rather than bonding with a close friend. Just as I start to get to know the characters, their story is done. I had a similar dilemma with Mushtaq’s stories, but to her credit the artful construction of the narratives is an intriguing twist on the genre. Many of the stories start with descriptions of a particular set of circumstances and characters before shifting mid-stream to their ‘real focus,’ that is, the main character and conflict. Besides the social-realism of the approach, I also appreciate the resonances it creates. For instance, characters in the first part of a story may be introduced and we hear about their marriage and children before the ‘real’ focus of the story kicks in and we see another angle for the topic through another set of eyes. The doubling effect, sometimes only noticeable upon review, lets the stories cover a lot of ground in relatively little space.

Beyond the construction of the stories, their actual use of language also feels ‘classic.’ There’s a directness in the writing that imbues it with the authority of “the Greats.” Mashtuq is self-assured and offers stylistic flourishes strategically. There’s a scene in the story “Fire Rain,” for instance, that recounts a man’s burial and subsequent exhumation. The imagery of the scene offers some unsavory details about the “rotten body in the brand new, starched shroud” (38). Given the circumstances of the burial, it was “too rotten for ritual bathing” and “the foul smell made them want to retch, but no one showed it on their faces” (38). In context, the scene rides the line of comic and macabre and the paragraph ends with some symbolism of jasmine buds that hadn’t bloomed before offering the phrase “not all blooms have the fortune of adorning a bride; some flowers bloom only for mausoleums” (38). The poetic line resonates beautifully and stands out as an example of Mashtuq’s style.

Another factor in making the book read like a classic is the use of an omniscient narrator in most of the stories, which affords Mushtaq the opportunity to comment on a number of perspectives and universalizes the characters’ experiences. At this point, I feel I need to offer an additional disclaimer. A lot of what the stories’ characters go through is far disconnected from my own experiences. The barrier is my own lack of knowledge, but the characters are generally Muslim Indians and it is sometimes difficult for me to interpret characters’ feelings, given the role of Islam in their lives. The failure to grapple with nuances is my own, but in my reading the characters are more like ‘figures’ in most of the stories. They have discernible purposes and traits but they did not yet feel fully resonant for me. Apologies to Mushtaq for my own experiential gap here.

It’s tempting with any collection to give a full play-by-play of each short story Heart Lamp has to offer, but documenting all twelve feels quite impossible, particularly given that there are stories nestled within other stories. One trend I would note is that across the collection, the endings are almost always satisfying. “Stone Slabs for Shaista Mahal,” the first story in the collection, depicts couples essentially competing with one another to show their love. One of the husbands says how he would build a Mahal for his wife to show how devoted he is to her. There’s some problems with this idea: first of all, it implies that she will die. At the conclusion of the story, his wife does indeed die and he remarries and talks about how much he loves his new wife—he never builds the Mahal. The discussion that follows was my first hint of Mushtaq’s craftsmanship for a fine ending.

My favourite ending is probably to the collection’s namesake. In “Heart Lamp,” a woman’s husband has lost all affection for her and is cavorting with another woman. Feeling desperately alone, the woman decides it is time to end her life. She circles the rooms of the house with kerosene, deciding which room would be best for self-immolation. The tension of the scene is finely crafted; it’s as if she is being controlled by some obscure force. You also feel concern for her sleeping children: would they escape the fire? She ends up outside, doused in kerosene, but before she ignites, her daughter comes out and makes the plea for her to stay. The central character “picked up the sobbing baby and hugged Salma to her chest, and, feeling as if she was being comforted, touched and understood by a friend, Mehrun’s eyes became heavy, and all she could say was, ‘Forgive me, my darling,’ as the darkness of the night was thawing” (111). I really love the phrasing of the ending: “the darkness of the night was thawing.” To me, that implies light. The idea of there being natural light, light of a different tenor, than the light that would have resulted from her ignition is such a great image to end the story on. It leaves things tense, tortured, but with that creeping light of optimism. 

Sadly, one of my favourite stories in the collection had the least satisfying conclusion. “The Arabic Teacher and Gobi Manchuri” is about a woman who works as a lawyer. She is separated from her husband and has two daughters that she can’t spend much time with, so she hires a private tutor. There’s a shroud of mystery around him as an outsider and she has concerns about leaving him alone with her daughters. There’s the implication that he, an unmarried man, might do something untoward. He’s surprisingly good with the girls, and even surprises their mother by having them stage a beautiful performance. One day the mother catches the three with oil all over their fingers in the kitchen and the teacher never shows his face in their house again. Supposedly, he got a fake recipe for making gobi manchuri. He’s obsessed with it. He eats it like I eat chips. For some reason, this breeds more distrust in the main character and everyone around. He’s framed as an unmanly man. It’s really weird and I was fascinated by it. It felt like a fun-house mirror of The Vegetarian by Han Kang—this guy that wanted to just eat his deep-fried cauliflower or whatever. The main character keeps hearing about this man trying to marry women but calling it off unless they can make gobi manchuri. The story ends by implying that he’s been fired from work, has married a woman, and that he beats her—but the main character still feels compelled to help him for some reason. It’s an understated tale that I thought was really compelling and the only of the stories that really felt like it ended too soon.

Peoples’ idiosyncrasies and hypocrisies take up their fair share of the stories. In that respect, “A Decision of the Heart” really shone as a perplexing nuance of desires. I also really liked the story “High-Heeled Shoe” and its symbolism. Like most stories, it offered multiple layers worth exploring. The story focuses on a man and wife who are in the process of renovating his house. He has chosen to sell off parts of it for rentals to make some extra money, meaning that he has also had to cut down the family’s mango tree. Throughout the story, different characters offer their reflections on the meaning of that mango tree to them, which has its own beauty. The real focus, though, is that the man is obsessed with his brother’s wife’s high-heeled shoe. He covets them (and her feet) as she floats through rooms. He becomes monomaniacal about it and his obsession makes him barge into a shop and demand they sell him the high-heeled shoes that match his sister-in-law’s. He makes his wife wear them, putting them on in a glass chair (like a reverse image of Cinderella?) even though they don’t fit and she can’t walk in them. He has already packed away her other shoes and she’s forced to walk home unevenly, eventually collapsing and hearing her unborn child calling out to her from the womb. The consequences of a man’s jealousy and obsession hit hard. “The Shroud” follows a similar path of unfulfilled desires and misplaced interests. I briefly mentioned that story earlier, so I won’t belabour the point here, but the fact that the main character loves shopping for herself (she buys a carpet and makes her husband lug it around during their Hajj) while not buying a kafan for her poor neighbour leads to a grief and guilt as literary as “The Tell-Tale Heart.” The desperation she experiences to fulfil her promise when it’s too late is as moving as it as pathetic. I loved it.

“Soft Whispers” and “A Taste of Heaven” are the two other stories that I found to be most noteworthy. Like the others, they are rich and layered. “Soft Whispers”, written in first person, has such a wonderful sequence embedded in the middle where the young girl is at a pond where a boy is trapping birds for the entertainment of other children. I can’t quote the whole sequence, but Mushtaq depicts his mischief beautifully. The boy asks the girl if she wants an egg from the bird he has trapped. He then proceeds to slit its throat, cut open its guts, and pull the egg out for her. The other kids are all clambering to see it, and so she holds it closed in her fist and as they all try to see, she crushes it. It feels symbolic. Then, the boy dives underwater and pops up and kisses her on the cheek. She sobs and tells her mom all about it. Flashing forward, the boy becomes a religious leader. The sequence has such a strong focus. In “A Taste of Heaven,” we see more childhood mischief. Again, the story is really about other things for most of it, but essentially the kids have an aunt (?) that lost her husband when she was young and she never remarried. One girl gives the woman’s ja-namaz (prayer rug) from her wedding to a boy so he can clean oil off of his bike. Despite being stoic and pleasant about everything, the woman essentially has a breakdown over this. Long story short, the children come together to conspire and the woman walks in. The most mischievous of the three children gives her a Pepsi and tells her that it’s the drink from the afterlife, that she has indeed passed away and that they are angels. She asks: if she has made it to the afterlife, where is her husband? They sprinkle flowers from behind her and say that he is there but that she musn’t look at him. The whole scene plays out like something out of The Decameron or 1001 Nights. After that, though, the whole family is placed in a position where they essentially have to keep up the ruse that she’s in heaven and all she drinks is Pepsi and the kids are worried about the guilt of murdering her with malnutrition. The whole story was both entertaining and troubling. It’s certainly one of the most memorable in the collection.

So here we are. It’s the end of the year. I left Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp as the final book for my reading goal (70 books) and my final review of all of this year’s International Booker Prize shortlist. Heart Lamp won, so it only seemed appropriate to leave it for last. While I have some contextual barriers and preferences for novels over short stories, Mushtaq still offered a good deal of discussion-worthy stories. They’re provocative and well-wrought. Where the characters feel figural, the stories themselves achieve, I think, what ‘classic’ literature aimed to accomplish: Mushtaq offers a clear vision for humanity’s biggest issues: life, death, birth, marriage, religion—alongside all those other feelings of guilt and jealousy that pop up along the way. Every International Booker Prize shortlist has been so different and compelling in their own ways, and I’m glad that Mushtaq’s English translation has found such success.

To another year of reading.

All the best.

The Annual Banquet of the Gravedigger's Guild by Mathias Énard

  Based primarily on its cover and the ‘book feel,’ I picked up The Annual Banquet of the Gravedigger’s Guild by Matthias Énard and it was a wild ride. We start with David Mazon, a PhD student in anthropology who has embarked on writing a thesis about a small town in France. I was immediately immersed; David’s flailing academic venture is represented with such wonderful humour, though not without empathy. He fails to make progress on his thesis and gets wrapped up in small-town dramas, where he is also compelled to break into a church to steal candles to light and heat the home of his crush’s grandfather. The story is recounted through David’s journal, which maintains a lively informal style and the humour is partly in his idiosyncrasies and partly in his obliviousness. The first part of the book sees him interact with the townsfolk and is essentially an extensive dramatis personae for the hundreds of pages to follow.

But it’s a bait-and-switch.

The first part of the book ends and the narrative transforms into alternating short bursts referred to as “Song”s and lengthy parades of the lives of others. I think the work critiques anthropology as a discipline because the subsequent sections demonstrate just how little David Mazon knows about the townspeople. Their personal dramas and backstories have been totally overshadowed by his fraught relationship with his girlfriend, drinking at the bar, and other country matters. So, the subsequent section reveals the backstories of his new love interest’s great grandfather, great grandmother, grandfather, grandmother, and mother. These are lengthy tales. It also revealed as a matter of course that reincarnation is real. As soon as someone dies, they are reborn as something else somewhere else; it’s similar to David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas in that respect, where Énard introduces a character and then introduces all the people they have been throughout history and all the people they will become.

There are a few aspects of Énard’s reincarnation that seem of particular interest. Number one is that reincarnation is not limited to species. We see a priest get reincarnated as a boar, for example. There are people reincarnated as other human children, but also trees, worms, and even seemingly non-sentient entities like a storm. The implications for time are also pretty interesting. Énard questions our assumption that lives and reincarnation work in some sort of linear fashion. Why would death and time care to follow our rules? So, it’s implied that when someone is reborn, they might be reborn into a past life or far in the future. This nonlinear mode of reincarnation offers us an interesting perspective on the implications for an individual soul across time.

The downside to this approach is that it raises the question about why I should care about any of the characters. What does it matter, for example, if someone used to be a Burgher or a farmhand or a piglet that lived for three days before it was abandoned to die? Énard has a unique storytelling approach that relies on excess to show the full scope of what escapes the eye of his seeming anthropological protagonist. I have to admit, though, it felt inconsequential knowing the multiple backstories and futures for these characters. One exception that was a wonderful touch, though, is that in the first part of the book David is constantly clearing out wormy vermin from his shower drain and wonders where they can all be coming from as he repeatedly kills them with chemical solutions. Much later in the book, Énard gives accounts of a series of murders conducted by different people in the history of the area. One is particularly grisly: a man kills his sister with an axe-blow to the head, rapes her dead body, and then cuts her open to find the source of his desire, removing organ after organ and then placing them back in her. When he is killed, we are told he is reborn in David Mazon’s drain as a worm. It’s a moment where the past-and-future-lives motif seems to connect to the central narrative in a satisfying way.

That being said, I keep talking about the central narrative as David Mazon’s, which isn’t quite fair; it is simply that his story felt the most immediate, most relatable. He gets some primacy because his story starts the novel and ends it, but there is a wealth of content in between. Énard seems to criticize David’s surface-level reading and that critique, I can’t help but feel, extends to me. At one point he interviews his new girlfriend’s grandfather for his thesis. He barely listens and asks inane questions. When the grandfather dies, he rebukes himself upon relistening to the recording:

I was embarrassed by the puerile questions I had asked and I thought, uh-oh, it’s going to take some creative editing to cut that out [...] I put on my headphones and listened to the three-hour recording. What a roller coaster. I was fascinated. It was like listening to a program on France Culture or reading a book in the Terre Humaine series—a long, arduous yet ultimately unique experience. Bloody idiot that I am, at the time I hadn’t listened to a word the old man was saying. It’s unbelievable, it’s as though I was resistant, as psychoanalysts say. The recording relates an extraordinary story. The death of his mother, his father’s suicide, the fact that he was illegitimate, cast out by his family, forced to work in the fields, robbed by his cousins of his rightful inheritance, forced to earn a living as a tractor driver, a knife grinder, sometimes a lumberjack—”two weeks we’d spend out younger, camp’d out in the swamps, hackin’ down trees, hewing elms, buckin’ the poplars, endin’ up sky west and crook’d.” Oh, he had a regional accent and an old-fashioned turn of phrase, but he was perfectly intelligible. It’s strange to think that during the recording session I was both present and absent. (375)

Upon reading that passage, I saw a little too much of myself. David misses so many important details, distracted by the immediate. Yet, when looking back on the interview he recognizes that there was a real story there—one that he needs to investigate further. That’s exactly what happened to me; I was seduced by the immediacy of David’s narrative to the point where I did not effectively appreciate the real story, that is, the full genesis of what had led to this moment in time for Lucie’s grandfather.

There were a number of storylines that were really compelling despite my ignorance. In one section, Lucie’s great grandmother is abused by her great grandfather, who is insistent on having a child. Yet, they seem unable to conceive and he beats and rapes his wife. In order to avoid the abuse, she pretends that she is pregnant. Appeased, he also gets called to war—and tries to plead his case that he cannot go because his wife is expecting, which is a horrific moment when it might work—and his wife expects him to die. As time progresses, though, she has to continue to fake her pregnancy until she gives it up, he returns unexpectedly and sees her through the window, leading to a violent misunderstanding. The different threads are woven with a deft hand.

The other side of things is that the book mimics David’s own thesis project. He flounders to complete it, loses himself in the minutiae of daily living. Towards the end, after years of not being able to complete his work, he applies to switch his studies to agriculture (denied!) and ends up abandoning his studies to work the land with Lucie. It is then revealed in full what has been the secret undercurrent of the book all along: environmentalism. There’s a real focus on ecology and preserving the land, including a whole subplot about activists preventing the use of land for artificial lakes. Given the premise that we are endlessly reincarnated, it instills a sense of importance in maintaining the environment (not that the characters are necessarily aware of the reincarnation Wheel).

The Annual Banquet of the Gravedigger’s Guild also revels in excess. Énard’s style is consistently lively, and the novel is heteroglossaic—there are many voices from many time periods. The sentences are sprawling with comma after comma. Énard picks up on the spirit of excess with plenty of reference to stories replete with detail (consider David’s interest in Victor Hugo, for instance). Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel in particular serves as a grotesque intertext for the sprawling novel before us. In fact, in the section that recounts the banquet of the Gravedigger’s Guild, the gravediggers take turns discussing philosophy and telling stories. It’s somewhat like The Decameron or perhaps more appropriately 120 Days of Sodom where the gravediggers tell bawdy tales spoken largely in rhyme, including a retelling of Gargantua’s mammoth sex organ and its emissions on the people below. There are also excessive descriptions; lengthy lists of the foods the gravediggers eat and, later, David’s packing list for a portage trip.

All of this excess might just be a joke.

One of the characters in town is Max, a local artist with a girlfriend named Lynn. In a Bluebeardian twist, when Max shows Lynn his glorious artistic project, she is horrified by its perversity and breaks off the relationship. The audience is not at the time told what Max’s artwork actually involves. Much much later, Max reveals his work to David and the audience finds out the source of Lynn’s horror: a maximalist photography exhibit of all of Max’s excrement. It makes me think that Énard is toying with the audience: there is so much shit to cover that we then build up with false pretension. When first seeing the work, David narrates that he could not bring himself to speak. He “wondered how an artist like Max could have forsaken beauty and plunged into abjectness. Some kind of depression, no doubt. Weltschmerz. The horrors of the world that plunge you deeper and deeper into excrement every day” (360). He continues, “This was not some subtly ironic game for art cognoscenti, nor a conceptual piece by Manzoni, an inside joke for the happy few, but an almost pathological immersion, a way of being in the shit, which to me seemed both borderline psychotic and very much part of the zeitgeist” (360). It feels like commentary on the excess that the book revels in. Then, David, when pressed for commentary, offers a glowing review to Max: 

I think it is very much a work of its time. It’s a reflection on the immediate, and on the infinite yet frustrating materiality of homo faber, who is capable of simultaneously producing art and excrement. This is not about sublimation, about the artist transforming shit into art. We live in the era of and, of conjunction. Art that is simultaneously this and that. The sublime and the shit. The impossibility of escaping from the mire, you know? (361).

David’s commentary is presented here as a lie and yet it also seems to serve as a commentary on the book itself. It is this and that. A ridiculous lie and an analysis of the work. The humour cuts both ways. It makes fun of the artist but also makes fun of us for imbuing the work with meaning. 

All this said, the ending of the book offers a pretty comforting and tidy ending. Sure, there are some loose ends regarding David’s academics, but starting a farm with Lucie and being in a happy relationship away from the city gives the idyll its gentle conclusion. Despite there being a lot of excess that drew me away from the book, the ending was pretty moving, actually. It isn’t unqualified—I expect there are some things I’ve missed that would challenge my naivety—but the warmth of the ending imbued the book with a sense of optimism that these lucky hominids had a great position in the Wheel of reincarnation.

There’s a lot to like in the book; it took me on a journey, for sure, sometimes to its own detriment, but there is enough here to make the book worth reading. There is much to discuss, the style is masterful, and some of the passages that shine really shine. I think if I were smarter, the book would get even better. If you pay close attention, there will be a lot here to hang onto.

Happy reading!

Seven Fallen Feathers: Racism, Death, and Hard Truths in a Northern City by Tanya Talaga

  I often think about the role of statistics in inciting people to feel sympathy and take action. The anonymity of numbers, unfortunately, disguises the profoundly horror of some aspects of human existence. It often feels like hundreds or thousands of people die and are absorbed into their status as a statistic. If we know someone, though, how can we quantify the loss of them? Such sorrow is impossible to fathom.

I also think about a line from the poem “Dreamwood” by Adrienne Rich that reads, in part, “she would recognize that poetry / isn’t revolution but a way of knowing / why it must come.” I wonder about that, too. Do words actually incite change? It feels increasingly unlikely as we see unquantifiable amounts of ink spilled to fight against politicians that daily make the world a worse place and seem undeterred by the looming ridicule on their epitaphs.

Tanya Talaga’s Seven Fallen Feathers is the same kind of knowing: a humanizing knowing. For years, this book was required reading for teenagers and teachers studying Indigenous issues—with good reason. It’s informative with respect to issues that came up in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, including the horrors of residential schools, the dismantling of families through biased adoption practices, the failures of law enforcement and legal proceedings, and so forth. The book is specifically focused, though, on telling the stories of real people. Talaga offers a thorough account of the tragic deaths of Indigenous students in Thunder Bay. The victims, though, are actually humanized in a way rare to nonfiction. Beyond just telling us their names, means of death, culprits responsible, and so forth, we get a sense of their interests, their friendships, their passions.

In turn, Seven Fallen Feathers is the kind of book that inspires us to see things differently, to see abstract issues as tangible. It’s the kind of book that inspires a revolution in thinking and proves instructive in empathy. There are moments of such profound devastation that the idea of blindly accepting injustices becomes beyond ludicrous. The deaths of the children feel personal, and Talaga’s account of the suicide attempts of an adult who cared for these students and lost everything else wring the heart at every level.

Talaga’s gifts as a writer carry the stories to a new level of resonance. She is journalistic in nature, but offers a narrative spin. Seven Fallen Feathers reads almost novelistically. The pacing of the events feels carefully crafted around story beats and the characterization of real people is wrought in fine detail. The language of the book is given such care and it reads beautifully. It has the engaging tone of a true crime podcast, but deals with systemic issues and maintains a deep focus on the people most deeply affected.

The book is compelling in every regard. It shows compassion for the community, offers a critical eye to systems that reinforce injustice, and provides the young people who lost their lives with the dignity and respect that they deserve. From a narrative standpoint, the book works. From a nonfiction informative standpoint, the book works. As a political act, the book works.

Now let’s do the work. Happy reading.