The Hearing Test by Eliza Barry Callahan

        If you somehow don’t have enough to worry about, I offer you this: it is possible, apparently, to have sudden onset deafness for no discernible reason. Such was the case for author Eliza Barry Callahan and the character in her debut novel The Hearing Test. For a year of their lives, they have difficulty hearing and face the fear of never hearing properly again.

In one powerful section, fictional Eliza spends evenings listening to music she wants to remember if her hearing loss is permanent. She “believed that the more [she] listened to these songs, the more clearly [she] would be able to replay them for [herself] in a future when [she] could no longer hear them” (87). As someone who has allowed music to be such a significant part of my life—and someone likely to blow out his ears at loud concerts—the passage seemed so sad and resonant. Callahan continues, “I limited what I listened to, worrying there might be a limit to what I could retain with specificity” (87). I’ve had that thought myself: how well can songs live in the heart of my memory? How well would I be able to replicate them if I never heard them again? The fact is, it would not go well. The following paragraph of Callahan’s novel reads:

But soon I found myself bored by the slim selection and the repetition and feared that this process of sonic tattooing might ruin the music itself. I no longer associated the songs with memories but rather the songs themselves became memories. I stopped listening to music altogether. The highest fidelity sound is in the head. (87)

I’ll put the novelty of the phrase “sonic tattooing” on pause for now to focus on the pain of this moment. I’ve framed it as sad because it resonates with me personally, but it’s also worth noting that the narrator of the book is a composer whose livelihood is connected to her ability to hear.

Beyond the central premise of the book, the plot is pretty thin. It is not event-driven, but more so a referential collage. Much of the book offers philosophical considerations of sound and silence, linguistic and literary considerations, references to composers’ works, summaries of movies, and so on. One passage offers a reflection on how the word “silence” works linguistically: “simple and unremarkable patterns around the word, such as that seeing, staring, hanging, or watching are often coupled with silence. That the adverb completely often precedes silent. That the verb fall often precedes silent. That the architecture of silence is the gaze. That silence is without transition. That silence is dressed as an injury” (31-32). Sometimes, the referentiality of the novel is alienating—namely when I do not have the same frame of reference. When Roland Barthes, Deleuze and Guattari, John Cage, and Virginia Woolf get shout-outs, though, I have the satisfaction of saying to myself, “Hey! I know that allusion!”. When I don’t know the references, Callahan’s descriptions are inconsistent in the detail they offer to invite readers like me into the experience. Especially since there are few plot events, the assemblage of allusions comes across alternatingly as sloppy and too convenient or cutesy (a nearby store called John’s Cages, for instance).

I will say, though, that one of Callahan’s references in particular was thematically fitting and deeply engrossing. Fictional Eliza has been alerted to the presence of “The Petersburg Popper. The Soviet Sonata. The Commie Contana,” a perpetual radio broadcast from Moscow. I had to double-check to make sure, but it actually exists. Known as “The Buzzer,” the transmission is a continuous buzz that is sometimes sprinkled with voice messages, bits of song, coded transmissions, etc. The parallel of the intentional buzz and the ongoing buzz in Eliza’s hearing is a really nice connection to explore, and Eliza reviews posts in a forum about the station that documents what people heard through the buzz. I find her descriptions haunting and beautiful, especially because reading about what other people heard, and everyone searching this buzz for meaning together—regardless of their ability or inability to hear—offers a depressing and tenuous kind of community. Also, the significance of the sound is out of reach for all those involved as an equalizer.

In terms of the style, I admit that for much of the book I found it a little lacking. The sentence structures seemed repetitive and a bit bland. Huge revelations are presented with the same linguistic flare as tying your shoes. That said, some moments really pop. There’s a scene in the latter part of the book where Eliza seems to have phone sex with her ex boyfriend’s ex girlfriend and the sentence-structure deteriorates in a really interesting way leading towards the, er, climax. There are also some lovely visuals that pepper the text. In one scene, she’s looking at outer space and comments on comets: “A wet white star dragged across a black sheet? A mistake—touched before dried?” (121). She remembers Virginia Woolf saying that the “gigantic cinema” should not play to a “perpetually empty house” (121). She then aligns herself with the house and says, “I saw the comet—a weak flashlight. God searching the basement” (121). Moments like that help give voice to the visual artist in Callahan.

There’s more than a touch of the philosophical of the book, too. Some of it really resonates with me, while other moments seem a little muddled or undercooked. For example, she gives a Heideggerian observation about how “the attempt to escape the frame only leads to the expansion of the frame. We end up drudging more of life back into the frame of art” (25). I also appreciated her commentary on misinterpretation: “I found clarity in misinterpretation. And I thought that our misinterpretations are perhaps the most individual and specific things we have” (54). I love the implications of that and I remember my own fair share of beloved misinterpretations. There’s a deep truth there that I hope Callahan opts to explore in other literary works. On the flip side of things, there are some more comments I’m more hesitant to praise. While I like them, when I pause to think about them I’m not entirely sure they work. For instance, the line I referenced earlier that “the architecture of silence is the gaze” has an appealing quality to it but if you try to think through the synesthesia doesn’t entirely land for me. There’s another part where a character philosophizes that “when you have no particular place to be, and you are in a foreign or unfamiliar place, you are actually moving around with the specific purpose of locating a place within yourself at which you may or may not arrive” (63). It feels true, but at the same time—is it too commonplace? And too clunky in its phrasing? I’m divided.

Overall, I think The Hearing Test is a good debut and Callahan is clearly learnèd in the discourse of sound and silence. The collage-like presentation of the book offers a snapshot of an experience more than a story. It’s a slice of life—essentially a year. Narratively, I feel like it would benefit from being a bit more constructed, which is weird for me to say because normally I love that unstructured stuff.

Happy reading!

Geek Love by Katherine Dunn

[Caution: Full of spoilers]

The climax of the Spike Jonze film Adaptation, written by Charlie Kaufman, sees twin Nicolas Cages in conversation. One Cage, Charlie Kaufman, confesses his admiration for his brother Donald, whose seeming obliviousness protects him from harm. Charlie remembers a moment from their younger years when Donald was in love with a girl who, along with her friends, ridiculed him behind his back. Donald says he was not oblivious, but rather that his love was his and her response was her business. The emotional climax of the speech is when Donald tells his brother, “You are what you love, not what loves you.” I can’t help but feel that Greek Love by Katherine Dunn serves as a significant precedent to Adaptation and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, though Dunn’s work so disturbs me that it will linger in my memory for, I’m sure, decades to come.

At its core, Geek Love is a family chronicle that documents the Binewskis, who tour their Fabulon circus across the United States. The father, Al, and the mother, Crystal Lil, use chemical and medical experimentation to create freakish progeny to attract audiences to their show. Of the surviving children, there are four or five for most of the book. From eldest to youngest, there is Arturo, “Aqua Boy”, who has fins and flippers where most people have limbs, conjoined piano-playing twins Iphigenia and Elektra, albino hunchback Olympia (the narrator for most of the text), and Fortunato (Chick), a seeming “norm” who has telekinetic abilities. The novel also runs parallel along two timelines; in the present, Oly has a daughter with a tail, Miranda, who was adopted at an early age and who, working at a strip club, has been approached by a wealthy benefactor with the offer to remove her tail. The past more thoroughly details the family’s growth and decline as a family carnival.

What begins reasonably innocuously—Al calls his children “dreamlets” since he and Lil dreamed them up, which I find so endearing—quickly becomes haunting. The more you reflect, the more you realize how awful these characters are. The most obviously evil is Arty, who I would argue is one of fiction’s most horrific villains, but Oly and Chick engage in their fair share of immorality. Love twists the family. Arturo becomes a cultish figure because he has an insatiable desire to be loved. Meanwhile, Chick and Oly do his bidding because they love him. Despite Arty seeing his siblings as disposable, they define themselves by their love of him and tend to him, and it gives the adage from Adaptation a haunting, ominous quality.

Katherine Dunn’s gift in this novel is creating such twisted figures—their physical deformities are irrelevant: what is truly twisted is the logic of love throughout the book. The family engages in a kind of race to the bottom. Early on, the family is attacked by a man who shoots each of them, but none of them fatally. Oly narrates her conversation with Arturo: “Arty narrowed his long eyelids and said I was flattering myself and there was nothing about me special enough to make anybody want to kill me. Arty was the master deflater, but his reaction convinced me only that he didn’t want to kill me. Funny how target potential became a status symbol among us” (85). The characters strive to be freakish; Katherine Dunn inverts society’s general perspective: being ‘normal’ is seen as the worst thing to be. (As an aside, I would also point to Katherine Dunn’s mastery of the craft, which reveals itself upon rereading. In this passage, Dunn refers to Arty as the “master deflater.” Later, he does something horrific to the twins and Elly is described two hundred pages later as being “reduced [...] to a permanent state resembling the liquid droop of decayed zucchini” (272), as if her head has deflated. Brilliant, subtle touch.)

Two contradictory impulses turn Arturo into a sinister, horrific character. On the one hand, he refuses to be anything but the most exemplary “freak.” Any time someone starts to seem more freakish than him, he prevents their success. Most obviously and dramatically, Arturo attempts to suffocate his younger brother Chick when he realizes the implications of Chick having telekinetic powers. He also places anonymous calls to ensure that Chick’s pickpocketing and gambling fixing rackets are stopped and that his and his father’s life are threatened. It’s implied that he also previously murdered a younger sibling that was born crocodile-like and threatened to impinge on his Aqua Boy show. The other side of this exceptionalism, though, is that Arturo and their audience buy into an ethos of wanting to be most strange, most freakish. In fact, Arty turns his circus act into a gospel where he targets a miserable woman and tells her she wants to be like him—he essentially hypnotizes her and tells her that if you are deformed, you are liberated from the complete banality of ‘norm’ existence. You become elevated by distinguishing yourself from others. Arturo establishes a cult, making the carnival more and more of his personal recruitment tool. His adherents, wanting to be just like him and not like the normals slowly and sequentially have their limbs amputated: novices remove their fingers and toes and the Elevated have hacked away at their bodies so thoroughly that they are heads and torsos, wrapped in bandages in retirement homes. It’s revolting seeing how persuasive Arturo is and the willingness of his followers to remove their limbs on purpose.

The entire storyline of Arturo’s cult is disturbing in its own right, but isn’t without its real world parallels. The cult of personality he inspires in others as he commands their subservience and his Machiavellian machinations draws clear parallels with fascist figures past and present. At one point, there’s a journalist following Arturo and his notes replicate their lively conversations. In one point, Arturo expounds a Nietszchian slave mentality that feels a little too real:

Only a lunatic would want to be president. These lunatics are created deliberately by those who wish to be presided over. You’ve seen it a thousand times. We create a leader by locating one in the crowd who is standing up. This may well be because there are no chairs or because his knees are fused by arthritis. It doesn’t matter. We designate this victim as a ‘stand-up guy’ by the simple expedient of sitting down around him. (227)

But Arturo gets worse. Dunn crafts the story masterfully, where there are just enough moments of foreshadowing to anticipate what will happen, but giving enough freedom to titillate readers with possibilities. The man who tried to murder the Binewskis later murders his wife and attempts to take his own life, accidentally rendering his face into an unrecognizable mush. He gets a job with the carnival to serve as a security guard to Arty. The Bag Man, so called, demonstrates the same devotion as the others but also loves the twins. To spite them for their success, Arty arranges for the Bag Man to marry the twins against their will. When they protest, he sends a threat disguised to sound conciliatory. There’s a Chekhov’s gun moment where I felt the anticipatory thrill of speculation—who is going to get shot? How is it going to happen? I’ll spare you the details of my own theories.

Long story short, the Bag Man impregnates the twins, who do not agree on whether they want the child. Arturo makes arrangements under the guise of providing them with an abortion, but behind the scenes has been asking the doctor about whether it would be possible to separate them. She tells him it isn’t so he asks whether it would be possible to just get rid of one of them. When she asks which one, he says it doesn’t matter. I find his callousness so haunting. Elly is lobotomized and Iphy carries the deflated head on her shoulder, having to manually move the limbs that Elly used to control. It gets even more disturbing when Elly tries to ‘come back’ from her lobotomy, assisted by Chick’s telekinesis. I won’t ruin the climax of the book, but it made me want to throw up with how uncomfortable it was.

On the topic of Chick’s telekinesis, I thought it was a really compelling account of the power. He describes reality like water. It wants to move but is held in containers: “Water always wants to move but it can’t unless we give it a hole, a pipe to go through. We can make it go any direction” (109). He describes himself as “the plumbing that lets it flow through [...] But the wanting to move is in the thing itself” (109). I liked how Dunn inverts how I typically think of telekinesis. Rather than telekinesis forcing objects to move, it’s more like permitting things to do what they would want to do. This essentially gives Chick godlike powers—even over life and death, as we see in several parts of the book. Yet, it’s tastefully understated; Chick truly has the powers but it’s Arturo whose influence wins out—mainly because Fortunato is so empathetic and feels the pain of things doing what they would prefer not to.

If I have one complaint about the structure of the book, it’s that the climax happens a little too suddenly. There’s such a glorious build-up but the final ‘event’ happens with minimal explanation. It’s the one place where the breadcrumbs could have been planted a little more thoroughly. That being said, there’s still an incredible haunting moment where many people are killed, among whom is Al. Crystal Lil has thoroughly declined into dementia and she

runs to where he’s lying and rips off her blouse---pulls her skirt down---hikes her underpants tight against her crotch. She’s saying, ‘Al … broken … just completely broken … we’ll have to start over.’ She crouches over Al’s body, straddling his thighs, fumbling his belt, opening his zipper, yanking those white jodhpurs down to his hips and talking softly. She settles herself over his limp penis and she rocks, rubbing her crotch against him, stroking his chest, not noticing the half of his face that isn’t there anymore---not noticing the handless stump of his arm smoldering, but rubbing herself slowly like a cat against and running her hands inside his shirt against his chest hair and saying, ‘Broken … Al … after all our work … we’ll start again … Al … you and me … Al.’” (320-321)

Like so many others in the text, this moment inspires equal parts empathy and revulsion. It gives the ending a more tragic quality, where otherwise it might have been more appropriate to cheer for fictional villains being stopped. I feel badly for Lil, who has been lost to herself through such frequent drug use.

Overall, the book is exemplary in its characterization, its plot, and its thematic developments. The children’s secret lives create the perfect context for engaging betrayals. There’s a great comment early on when Oly says, “it is [...] the common grief of children at having to protect their parents from reality” (105). Lil and Al are increasingly disconnected from the goings-on at the carnival and are oblivious to the downward spiral of the family. Oly notes, “it is bitter for the young to see what awful innocence adults grow into, that terrible vulnerability that must be sheltered from the rodent mire of childhood” (105). The aphorism seems to speak to Oly as a character, as well. She has the level of awareness that what she’s doing is wrong and deigns to hide it, but continues to do Arty’s bidding. In the closing pages of the book, she expresses some of her conflicted feelings about Arturo:

I won’t try to call my feeling for Arty love. Call it focus. My focus on Arty was an ailment, noncommunicable, and, even to me all these years later, incomprehensible. Now I despise myself. But even so I remember, in hot floods, the way he slept, still as death, with his face washed flat, stony as a carved tomb and exquisite. His weakness and his ravening bitter needs were terrible, and beautiful, and irresistible as an earthquake. He scalded or smothered anyone he needed, but his needing and the hurt that it caused me were the most life I have ever had. Remember what a poor thing I have always been and forgive me. (315)

If we are what we love, not what loves us, then Oly is a megalomaniacal sociopath and Arturo is nothing. He seems to express some guilt over what he did to Elly—but I don’t buy it. I think even his guilt is a tactic. Oly is drawn into loving Arturo’s weakness but her empathy for him leaves a string of bodies in their wake. In a number of ways, empathy for one another is what destroys the family. Arturo cannot stop being nothing because he loves nothing—he relies on the love of others and can only define himself as the leader that demands devotion and never provides it.

Even in the frame narrative, Olympia’s morality is complex and twisted. As OI mentioned, the book is framed by Oly secretly monitoring the daughter she gave up for adoption now that her daughter is in art school. A wealthy woman offers to pay Miranda money to remove her tail—it seems to be a win-win: she can make $10k and she can be a ‘normal’ woman. Oly takes it upon herself to ensure that the surgery never happens. On the one hand, it is redemption for preventing Miranda the trauma that Arturo imbued to so many others. On the other hand, he is taking away Miranda’s choice, imposing freakishness onto her when she would prefer to just be ‘normal’. The questions of autonomy, manipulation, and choice are complex, making the ending just as uncomfortable as the rest of the book.

Despite the discomfort Dunn inspires, there are a number of reflections that are so poignant that it’s hard to deny the deeply human quality of the book. It’s weird and subversive but it reads like capital-L Literature. Towards the end of the book Olympia reflects on her upbringing. She tells Miranda

I was full-grown before I ever set foot in a house without wheels. Of course I had been in stores, offices, fuel stations, barns, and warehouses. But I had never walked through the door of a place where people slept and ate and bathed and picked their noses, and, as the saying goes, ‘lived,’ unless the place was three times longer than it was wide and came equipped with road shocks and tires. (321)

The passage comes towards the end of the book, but reads like the opening reflections to a Victorian Bildungsroman. It also makes me more empathetic to Oly, putting her trauma in perspective. Of course she would do what Arty wants—it was the surest way to ensure herself a place in the family and a home. She elaborates on how uncomfortable it is to be inside a home. It gives her a kind of self-consciousness hitherto unknown: “This mystery appeared when I first stood in a rooted house. I hadn’t understood before that anything about me needed explaining. It’s all very well to read about houses, and see houses from the road, and to tell yourself, That’s where folks live. But it’s another thing entirely to walk inside and stand there” (322).

Geek Love is a house that let me walk inside and stand there. It inspired the same discomfort. The same uncertainty. It’s a book that made me question my values and morals, the limits of my empathy. It’s a book that disturbs me not only because the characters are so malicious and sadistic towards each other, but because it makes me confront the full implications of my values and ethics, the boundaries of what love entails. Geek Love is truly a one of a kind work, a work of freakish originality. I am so grateful it was recommended to me.

Happy reading!

Knot Body by Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch

        In the poem “ Portrait of a Body in Pause,” Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch says they keep “hitting command + F to make sure pain makes up less than 10% of [their] word count.” They then document 22 words that come up frequently throughout the collection that characterize their chronic pain. Knot Body is a little project that is part memoir, part essay, part poetry collection (often prose poetry) that establishes a clear focus that elevates its personal-focus above Instapoet contemporaries.

Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch offers a distinct perspective. Pulling from the bio at the end of the book, I’d note that they are a queer Arab poet living in unceded Kanien’kehá:ka territory. While the poems touch somewhat on being Arab, most of the focus is on being trans and living with the chronic pain of fibromyalgia (and also exposing some of the transphobic practices in diagnosis (apparently fibromyalgia is a woman’s disease). El Bechelany-Lynch writes in a conversational style, indeed sometimes with direct address to the audience. Many of the poems start with the line, “Dear friends, lover, and in-betweens” and proceed through an epistolary mode that lends it a personable quality (although the poet notes in one poem that they make a distinct attempt to ride the line of fictionalized autobiography.)

Many of the sections address what the pain is like, how it affects relationships with others, and how it interacts with other aspects of the poet’s identity. The collection is insightful and asks some challenging questions about how we interact with others who have chronic pain and invisible disabilities. The conversational style is sometimes peppered with more explicitly poetic passages, but what the collection does best is offer an account of personal experience. It’s a document in a life that can promote empathy, understanding, and connection. Allow it to expand your perspective.

Happy reading!

Greek Lessons by Han Kang

        Characters neither see nor speak evil in the most recent translation of Han Kang’s oeuvre, Greek Lessons. The story focuses on two central characters, one being a mute woman whose only son is being taken away because her mutism has made her, in the eyes of the courts, unfavourable relative to her ex-husband. She shares a mutual vulnerability with the other main character, her Greek teacher, who is going blind and needs to memorize the text of his lessons because he can no longer make out small words. Their conditions create between them a tender bond and their relationship becomes the central driving force of the novel.

Told alternatingly between them, the narrative reveals small moments without ever fully disclosing the timeline, causation, or outcome of these characters’ strangely joined fates. Despite being stylistically rich, there’s a kind of terseness to the narrative that imbues the novel with a somewhat mysterious and ethereal voice. Admittedly, I found myself struggling to navigate the gaps in the story, projecting motivations and narratives that dwelt beneath the surface, particularly in the early stages of the Greek teacher’s sections. 

For example, about a third of the way through the novel there is a section where the Greek teacher appears to be writing a letter to the mute woman in the second person: “You watched my lips intently,” he writes, “then met my eyes with a dazed look” (41). However, he’s actually writing letters to a lost love who was deaf. The moment is a tragic one because the Greek instructor then tells his love that “at some point we would live together, and that I would go blind. That when I was unable to see, we would need spoken words” (41). It’s a moment riddled with pain. His insistence on spoken language becomes a form of betrayal to his young love and an ignorant oversight of her feelings. He admits, of course, “You couldn’t have known how often I longed to turn back time, how much I wanted to take back those foolish words” (41). Kang offers a surprising parallel, though, in the future of the novel. Temporarily temporally confused, I found myself making connections across the narratives. The moment above could be transplanted into the future where the Greek instructor falls in love with a mute woman. There are (at least) two possibilities here. On the one hand, we can see the seeds of the relationship’s destruction early on: eventually words will fail them. The more optimistic reading is that the Greek instructor has learned from his past and, driven by his regret, is ready to accept a relationship without the spoken word.

In addition to the emotional charge of the moment, the passage is elevated through Kang’s lush descriptions: 

Your face turned cold and hard and you threw me out of the workshop, where the scent of the wood had been intensified by the drizzle. You wouldn’t see me anymore, of course wouldn’t kiss me, wouldn’t let me bury my face in your long black hair, the sweetly scented nape of your neck, or your delicate collarbone, wouldn’t let me slide my ardent hand under your shirt to feel your heartbeat, steadfastly refused to see me even when I loitered in front of your house from the early hours, slammed the workshop door shut whether my fingers got caught or not, and eventually, one night a few weeks later, punched my frantically beseeching face. (41).

The heartbreak of the moment—those small moments that devastate us—rings so true in Kang’s description. Even the construction of the sentence, a prolonged, caesura-rich expanse emulates that experience, that longing for a connection rendered remote.

I have a profound admiration for authors who write profoundly different books. As much as I love, say, Kafka, all of his books are essentially the same. Not so for Kang; all of her books have a different flavour. That said, Greek Lessons does have certain echoes of her other works: the mutism of The Vegetarian, the flashes of second person narration from Human Acts, and the poetic and linguistic precision of The White Book all find home here. What makes the project even more intriguing to me is the context in which it exists. There were controversies in Deborah Smith’s translation of The Vegetarian, and Kang has found an additional translator here, but it’s interesting in that I’m dealing with a book written in Korean, translated into English, which deals with characters translating Korean into German, German into Korean, Korean into Greek, and vice versa, with a character who can’t vocalize words from the language. The layers of translation form their own complex network of puzzles for the possibilities of language.

Kang seems to reflect on this throughout the text, as well. There are a number of reflections on the structure and vocabulary of the Greek language. For instance, there are some considerations about how in Greek the form of words changes based on its role in the sentence, hence you must know the complete idea before you opt to meander your way through step-by-step; it’s a language that requires wholeness. Kang offers the following musing:

A language as cold as a pillar of ice.

A language that does not wait to be combined with any other prior to use, a supremely self-sufficient language.

A language that can part the lips only after irrevocably determining causality and manner. (16)

That final line offers, perhaps, an avenue for explaining the main character’s lack of speech. How can one speak without having complete knowledge of what to articulate?

Other grammatical reflections circulate around the “middle voice”, bringing agency into question. Kang gives credence to Wittgenstein’s adage that “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world” — the linguistic structure of our language gives rise to the philosophical possibilities we can explore. One phrase uses the middle voice to explain that “truth destroys foolishness” and the Greek teacher questions its validity in his letter: ”When truth destroys foolishness, is truth necessarily altered by the encounter, influenced by the very thing it has destroyed? Does a fissure form in foolishness when it destroys truth? When my foolishness destroyed love, if I claim that that foolishness was equally undone in the process, would you call that sophistry?” It all comes back, he notes, to “Voice. Your voice. The sound [he] has not forgotten in more than twenty years.” 

As you can probably see, there’s a wistful romance (in both the literary and conventional sense) that underpins the novel as a whole, though it exists in a melancholic register. There are several gorgeous sequences of wandering (again: lack of purpose, perhaps) that are all seasoned with sadness. The student walks through the streets and we are provided with the following passage:

The lily magnolia, lit by the glow from the street lights, scatters its bruised petals to the winds. She walks past the voluptuous blooms straining the branches and through the spring night air, which is thick with an anticipatory sweetness of crushed petals. She occasionally raises her hands to her face, despite the knowledge that her cheeks are dry. (17).

The beauty of the images are consistently undercut. The petals are “bruised”, the glow of street lights “scatters” them. The “voluptuous blooms” are “straining the branches” before the mention of the petals being “crushed.” That ability to balance the lush and the grim is a nicely crafted approach. When Kang references the character’s cheeks being dry, we get the sense of the impossibility of expression; beyond her mutism, even her body refuses to communicate her interiority. Just a few pages later the narrator states: “If only she’d made a map of the route her tears used to take. / If only she’d used a needle to engrave pinpricks, or even just traces of blood, over the route where the words used to flow” (19).

Almost halfway through the book later, the mute woman is on another journey at night. Her son has gone to bed and she wanders the city streets. It’s a beautiful sequence, and its culmination is a masterful move:

When midnight is near, she discovers that she has arrived at the entrance to an unfamiliar cinema. The lights are off in the booth; all the tickets for the final film have been sold. Without realizing what she is doing she approaches the booth’s translucent acrylic partition. She brings her lips close to its eight black holes, then flinches away. As if a terrifying force might blast out of those neat, orderly holes and forcibly aspirate her voice from her lips and throat. (89).

I love how ominous this moment is. The image is perfect. Perfect. Perfect. Perfect. Her being barred from the seeing the film—locked out of the conversation—is a nice touch, but that image of the booth with all those big holes for speaking into takes on a monstrous quality. It’s like a haunting invitation of mouths, which she almost brings herself to kiss. Their vampiric quality, the idea that it could forcibly “aspirate her voice from her lips and throat” is incredibly powerful to me. It’s a perfectly climactic moment to end the scene and one of the most memorable images from the book.

There’s a sense in which poetry flows through the characters. Kang’s juxtaposition of images craft the mood well. In one scene, we have a list of ‘red’ details:

“A rose.”

 

“The inner red of a watermelon, blooming like a flower, when you split it open.”

 

“The night of Buddha’s Birthday.”

 

“Snowflakes.”

 

“The face of a woman long gone.”

 

“I won’t be waking from a dream and opening my eyes;

the world is what will close when I wake from a dream.” (146).

“The world is what will close when I wake from a dream.” Parse that sentence. Kang’s grammar, even in translation, is a surprise. The fact that that comes at the opposite of a rose (famous for opening into a beautiful bloom), a closing of the world outside of a dream adds layers to the text.

The parallels that run throughout the text create a tightly wrought novel. The evocation of a dream above is not the first. In fact, the Greek instructor recounts a recurring dream that also draws parallel to the mute woman’s walks. He notes that he had “ceaselessly recurring dreams [he]’d had since [his] teens, when [he] began [his] new life in Germany” (64). He notes, “In these dreams it was always dusk, I was on a bus, and the shopfront signs in the street outside bore unfamiliar writing that was neither my mother tongue nor German. My dream-self always wanted to alight from this wrong bus I’d taken, but didn’t know which bus was the right one, or how to get to another bus stop. Nor could I recall my original destination. There was nothing I could do but stay where I was, sitting at the back, staring out into the streets that were darkening moment by moment” (64). The futility and aimlessness of his journey and his own lack of control travelling on bus routes is a nice reflection of the inevitability of his situation. He is going blind (hence the dream being at dusk), and it’s out of his control (hence navigating the world at the whim of others). The closer you look, the more appropriate each of Kang’s artistic choices are. 

 

What’s surprising, perhaps, is just how similar the Greek instructor and the student are, though in a distorted form. Consider some of the key factors above: busses and the lack of mobility, the lack of vision that characterizes the Greek instructor’s world, and so on. The student has a moment where”sleep evades her. She has goosebumps on her arms and at the back of her neck from the aggressive air conditioning” (90). When she looks out the window, she sees a bus. She then sees a range of other fragmentary images: “Muffins and slices of cake in various colors [...] displayed in the clear-glass fridges of dazzlingly illuminated cafes” (90), and a fake diamond necklace at a jewlery show, “an enormous poster covering one side of a building” (90) for a film (evoking her other night walk, too). She then talks about what it was like “after losing words” (91). Kang notes that “there were times when that world rose up in front of her eyes, overlaying whatever scene was already there” (91). If the world closes when she wakes from a dream, here we have a world opening. It’s also a contrast to the Greek instructor’s experience: while his world diminishes, for her there is an “overlay”---a doubling of the world rather than a restriction. And yet, when she rides a bus she gets to the academy and there’s a “long corridor that led to the classroom” (91). It feels restrictive. That said, the imagery is still lush: “When gazing at afternoon sunlight, quiet and trees, leaves, the patterns of yellow light between them. When walking beneath the neon signs and colored bulbs that flashed noisily, as if it fit to burst” (91). First, note how the narration retains visual imagery that would be inaccessible to the Greek teacher. Second, note how there is no subject to these sentences. Neither ‘she’ nor ‘her’ are any part of the experience. The grammatical constructions have removed her, alienated her. The passage culminates with the idea that “Once she lost words, all such scenery became fragmented, each piece distinct and separate—like the colored paper inside the kaleidoscope, shifting silently, repeatedly and in concert to form new patterns” (91). The scenery became fragmented, just like the sentence fragments that present them. And yet, there’s hope for more—the dash amends the loss of images with even more lush imagery.

I liked Greek Lessons, and it’s the kind of razor-thin book that offers more rewards the more attention it is paid. Even in writing this review, I feel like new details have revealed themselves, blooming open. It’s that fine attention to detail that is becoming less feasible for the Greek instructor to such tragic effect.

Take the time. Read—this book, all books, the world—with care. It’s well worth it.

C by Tom McCarthy

    The world is comprised of resonances. In one scene from Tom McCarthy’s novel C, characters discuss a theory that sound is never truly lost. The theory suggests that, like atoms, sounds never truly disappear but are simply reconfigured or dispersed beyond detection. They believe that, given advanced enough technology, we’d be able to hear every sound that ever transpired: every bomb in every war, the original performance of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, every whisper between lovers. All of human history could be decoded.

    Oddly enough, I’d set aside a partially finished C for months before picking it up and then within a day or two, a non-fiction audiobook I’m reading referenced that same theory. The resonance transcended texts. The resonances, though, don’t end there. It occurrs to me that the precocious children of the novel who invent a kind of life-sized chess-like game on their school-for-the-deaf-slash-home have a very similar dynamic to Nabokovian characters like Ada and Van. More than anything, though, C reads as a reminder of Remainder, McCarthy’s first novel.

    Even the most diligent of devotees will be unlikely to remember the premise of Remainder outlined in a review from 2021, so it is, in brief, this: a man wins a huge settlement following an accident that left him permanently disabled. He spends that wealth recreating moments he bore witness to with an increasingly insidious bent, “recreating” moments that hadn’t actually happened and leading towards a horrific conclusion of people and matter being disintegrated into nothingness.

    C takes a different approach, largely focusing on auditory replication. Each phase of the novel, in some ways approaches the question from a slightly different angle. In the first section, for instance, the central characters, Serge and Sophia, live with their father, who runs a school for deaf children. He teaches the students to emulate sounds, well enough to perform plays that have some amusing misinterpretations and malapropisms. In the second part, Serge goes to war and works underground digging and following tunnels, many of which carry messages via wire to between locales. Eventually, Serge goes to a few seances where the medium interprets the spectral and speaks as someone deceased (well, sort of—more on that later) and ultimately works in Egypt as a dignitary of sorts amid spies acting like average people tracing etchings off of ancient monuments. At every stage, the novel explores the idea of replication and resonance.

    

    In that respect, the novel is incredibly consistent and it is those existential, posthumanist simulacra and threads in McCarthy’s work that I find compelling. In terms of the narrative structure, I found the pacing to be much less consistent. At times, the novel seemed to drag on (like the war sections—yawn!) while others accelerated, sometimes straight past their most compelling elements. To draw an example from the less compelling war scenes, what does stand out is this idea of Serge not as an individual human but as something more transcendental—particularly becomes it seems to emerge concordantly with violence. In one scene, Serge is making love with a woman and he imagines himself being shot, “imagines the bullet piercing the jacket’s leather and travelling onwards through both the observer and Cecile, then, broken, down into a million particles, lodging in him not only harmlessly but also beneficially, as though he were both its and the other two’s final destinations, the natural conclusion of a process whose trajectory conjoined them all” (165). It’s moments like that I find so uncomfortable in McCarthy’s work; there’s a sense of bliss in being joined with everything else in the world, but it seems to come at the expense of visceral destruction—it would be worth revisiting Remainder in that respect, but the ending of C has a similar ethos: Serge becomes a container for all the threads of the world, a kind of convergence point between all the different lines and shapes and figures in his life. The tragedy, if it can be called that, is that Serge only feels that sense of unity as he succumbs to a fever that a medical professional deems unrecoverable. These passages are often compelling in their descriptive nature and their existential considerations. In another passage, Serge imagines his plane going down and the pleasure of burning to death and having his skin melt into the metal. McCarthy does not shy away from the potential of posthumanism to replace an unsatisfactory existence with an assemblage more mechanistic. McCarthy recounts the “hollow” men of war who are all “terrified of becoming carboneezay, flamers. [...] the ‘orange death’ that stalks them in the sky to catch up with them even on the ground: paraffin lamps have been replaced by electric bulbs inside the mess; even sparking up cigarettes causes the men to shudder as they flip the lighter’s lid shut with a kind of angry vehemence” (164). This terror impacts all the pilots, so prone to fiery deaths in World War I, but “Serge alone remains unharmed by the prospect of a fiery airborne end. He’s not unaware of it: just unbothered. The idea that his flesh could melt and fuse with the machine parts pleases him. When they sing their song about taking cylinders out of kidneys, he imagines the whole process playing itself out backwards, brain and connecting rod merging to form one, ultra-intelligent organ, his back quivering in pleasure as pumps and pistons plunge into it, heat and liver being spliced with valve and filter to create a whole new, streamlined mechanism” (164). The sense of transcendence is obvious and “Sometimes he dreams he’s growing wings and, waking up, prods at his breastbone, trying to discern an outward swelling in it; each rib feels like a strut. He shakes after flights just like the others, but he doesn’t mind: the vibrations make him feel alive” (164). There’s a gruesomeness to the posthumanizing process. The visuals in the passage are viscerally revolting, despite their existential potential of having an “ultra-intelligent organ” that is both man and machine.

    There are at least two important caveats that I should acknowledge lest ye dismiss wholesale the idea of assemblage for fear of its destructive implications. One moment feels particularly resonant with the fantasy of fusing with the destroyed airplane but is played much differently. Serge picks up a woman and brings her back to his place. The narrator recounts that “during sex, her gasps have the same high and squeaky pitch as her voice during conversation, as though arousal, for her, were a heightened form of indignation. Kneeling behind her, he watches the flushes move from her neck down her spine and along her rib-lines” (262). While not without its painful tinge (her indignation), the change to the body is given a more positive spin. While earlier Serge described his spine and ribs being melded with burning steel, here the evocation of bones being filled with an animated flush emerge alongside sexual pleasure. At the same time, the flush is personified as though spreading through her body like an infection, as though her body is not fixed to her own identity or experience.

    Earlier, the assemblage takes a more collective form. Serge finds himself fascinated by a jazz band because “they look like machine parts too, extensions of their instruments, the stoppers, valves and tubes. Their bodies twitch and quiver with eclectic agitation. So do the bodies of the dancers. One girl, gyrating with another, lets a shriek out: it’s a shriek of joy that manages to carry on its underside a note of anxiety, a distress signal. The music carries signals too: Serge’s eyes glaze over as he tunes into them. There are several, gathering within the noise only to lose their shape again and slip away” (212). Each individual is reduced to its component parts—but notably not destroyed. Instead, there is an overtone of joyful celebration—and yet, “its underside a note of anxiety, a distress signal”, as though even pleasure and suffering are inseparable experience. I’d also like to briefly identify that music carries signals, but only in the sense that I’ll return to the idea of signals and codes later.

    As a character, Serge is less compelling as the novel progresses. The highlight was seeing his friendship develop with his sister and their tenuous alliances amidst a strain of secrets. The pair humanized one another—in the way that we might consider humanizing—in a way that gets lost over time as Serge becomes a kind of ‘central character figure’ drifting through the novel. Thematically, the move is consistent with the idea of his diffusion into space and function. When Serge develops an addiction to morphine, the drugs take over his body and he spends afternoons watching the setting merge together: “Airfields, tennis courts and cityscapes merge into and out of one another across contours of rock and hill. Gore curls around his forearms; lichen stains his clothes: the landscape seems to penetrate his skin and grow inside him, replacing viscera and brain with heather, lavender and fern, as though he really were no more than a stuffed dummy” (185). The emptiness at the core of Serge is a double-edged sword. It enhances the cerebral experience of the novel to see what unity between entities can look like: lichen in our lungs and whatnot. The downside is that, narratively speaking, I found it difficult to really find myself rooting for Serge as a character. His goals and passions recede so thoroughly into the landscape it’s almost as though he is a stuffed dummy out in the field. In the narrator’s own words, Serge lets the echo of words “echo from him as though he were some kind of sounding box, hollow and resonant” (189). It continues on to say that “The question of who ‘me’ is, or what time the ‘still’ refers to, is no longer irksome: the dispersed, exterior mi previously held captive by the air, carried within its grain and texture, has joined with the interior one, their union then expanding to become a general condition, until “me” is every name in history; all times have fused into a now” (189). The passage goes on with increasing elaborate strangeness, but ultimately it is a passage about the diffusion of the individual into a universal and the necessary erasure that involves. The moments that stand out for Serge are rooted in moments of choice or personal loss. His discovery of Sophia’s death is as shocking to us as it is to him. Another moment of significant choice and intrigue is the seance that I alluded to earlier. In brief, Serge discovers that the medium and her team are faking receiving messages from beyond the grave (as with Remainder — the simulacra is never completely satisfactory). They are using a secret set-up involving a radio transmitter and Serge decides to take over the method to expose their fraud, resulting in the distress of his girlfriend, who relied on the hope she received from receiving vague messages. I loved the tension of the scene, which came across as both comic and tragic. Seeing Serge make decisions was a reminder that he was more than just a vehicle for the plot, but also a character.

    The novel, though, is most engaging in its broad conceptual strokes. I find it to be such a compelling puzzle to figure out McCarthy’s overall vision. His style fosters a sense of paranoia. In my Master’s, I looked at paranoid reading and, briefly, reparative reading. McCarthy is definitely rooted in the former camp. Remember earlier that the music seemed to be carrying secret signals. The novel fosters promotes and proliferates a sense of paranoid reading as Serge seeks out his drugs. He “learns other passwords too [....] by announcing himself favourable to liquorice, then purchasing either a flask of perfume or a box of sweetmeats. Serge is able to procure much more than he ostensibly requests; at an antique dealer’s out in Kensington, the code works the other way, one or other (sometimes both) of two Oriental objets d’art, calligraphic watercolours bearing (originally, at least, quite accidentally, Serge imagines) the likenesses of the Wester letters C and H, appearing in the window to indicate the availability of various stock. He starts seeing all of London’s surfaces and happenings as potentially encrypted: street signage, chalk-marks scrawled on walls, phrases on newspaper vendors’ stalls and sandwich boards, snatches of conversations heard in passing, the arrangements of flowers on windowsills or clothes on washing lines” (211). Through Serge, McCarthy initiates us into a world of secret connections. It’s difficult to resist the allure of an interconnected web of secrets and codes. Moreover, Serge being able to recognize the symbols draws him into relationship with others: “he also comes to realise just how many of his fellow citizens are subject to the same vices as him. He picks up the tell-tale signals all over town [...] Sometimes a look passes between him and a chance companion on the bus, or in a queue, or someone brushed past in a doorway, a look of mutual recognition of the type that members of a secret sect might give each other” (211). McCarthy illuminates how the structure of a secret relies on its exclusivity and yet it has a force that draws people together. In this case, there’s also a parallel that the landscape bleeds into human behaviours and vice versa. Later on in the novel, one of Serge’s associates explains how half of the people in the region are spies and if they’re not spies they’re suspected of being spies, effectively making them part of the “whole maddening caboodle as if they had been” (265). The idea of authenticity is no longer relevant. People are cast into a post-factual role, which adds another layer to simulacra: one need not be the Thing in order to be the thing.

    The process involves simultaneous creation and erasure, which McCarthy highlights in an Egyptian tomb. Serge gets excited at the number of scarabs with words and sequences of words carved into their undersides. Laura explains that the scarabs are “the deceased’s unreported deeds, clandestine history and guilty conscience” (290). She continues that “what’s engraved on them are spells to censor all these secrets, so they won’t come out at judgment and weigh down the heart” and Serge is amazed: “So the scarab withholds the vital information even as it records it? Even as it prints?” (290). It’s reminiscent of Derrida’s discussion of Plato’s pharmakon: writing is both the poison and the antidote, both memory and forgetting. We write to remember what we could otherwise forget. Carlisle, earlier in the novel, says that “Painting’s painting, writing writing. Never the twain. It’s all wrong, aesthetically speaking: all the depth and texture of a summer countryside steam-rollered into a flat page” (147). In typically strange fashion, Serge responds, “That’s what I like about it” (147). To return to the topic of spying, the cycle means that “if we appear to take something seriously, well, they take it seriously too” (265). After a specifically auditory-based malapropism, the character corrects the term for this effect from ‘feedback’ to ‘bleedback.’ (265). The messages come back “mutated but still recognisable” (265). To me, the statement reads as a statement on McCarthy’s work itself. C is a mutated but still recognisable Remainder. The same kinds of themes emerge in this strange pursuit of that which is more-than-authentic. This inversion is what makes the novel so compelling. Stylistically, I think writing in the present tense really works to McCarthy’s advantage: it gives a purported immediacy and truth to a narrative that is replete with insincerity. The whole thing reads as backwards, like in a scene where people are digging and “it occurs to Serge that, far from removing earth between them and the outside world, they’re adding it around them: digging themselves in, not out” (183). In that same scene, Serge reflects that he likes being in the tunnels because it’s the only chance for him to masturbate. There’s a kind of hedonism in solitude, which we can hold up against the destruction of interconnectedness.elsewhere in the book. Certainly, rereading Freud’s work on the death drive and Beyond the Pleasure Principle—-even Civilization and its Discontents—could certainly prove illuminating here.

    

    There’s also a Kafkaesque resonance. In particular, Kafka’s story “The Burrow” stands out in that respect. In Kafka’s story, a burrowing animal feels itself safe in its burrow, but feels increasingly paranoid about being attacked. In turn, it digs more tunnels to increase its escape routes, but as it proliferates its exits, so too its entrances—and hence the number of potential trackers. McCarthy has a similar scene wherein Serge is fascinated by the tunnellers and moles listening to “netherer moles undermining their undermining. If they did hear them doing this, he tells himself, then they could dig an even lower tunnel, undermining the under-undermining: on and on forever, or at least for as long as the volume and mass of the globe allowed it—until earth gave over to a molten core, or bypassing this, they emerged in Australia to find there was no war there and, unable to return in time for action, sat around aimlessly blinking in the daylight” (167?).

    The ending of the novel was also oddly resonant, as if a collage of moments. It could have been lifted from a version of Heart of Darkness from Kurtz’ perspective, but with a feverish “the horror! the horror!” twisted into “the ecstasy! the ecstasy!” In Serge’s descent, everything merges into a singularity. Meanwhile, the final passage of the book refers to the wake “etched out across the water’s surface; then it fades as well, although no one is there to see it go” (310). It’s hard not to see a parallel to The Great Gatsby where “we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Here we have no boat, just the wake, the residue of an imitation, a mere suggestion of a boat. Moreover, there’s nobody even to see it. There’s a melancholic absence, partially mitigated by Serge’s sense of wholeness with the world.

    Ultimately, C did not produce the same emotional impact on me as Remainder. I actually took a significant break from the book and struggled to pick it up again. Remainder made me feel much more personally invested because it tapped in so effectively to my sense of jouissance as well as visceral disgust at my lack of thoughtfulness. C explored similar ideas in all kinds of fun-house-mirror-ways, orbiting around ideas of interconnectedness and the transcendent. Yet, it felt less human, perhaps because it was less individualistic in nature.

    This is a book that will linger with me. If nothing else, it’s certainly provocative.

    Happy reading!