Under the Eye of the Big Bird by Hiromi Kawakami

For years, I’ve seen Hiromi Kawakami’s short story collections on the shelf at the book store and think “I should really read some of her work.” Well, by coincidence, her book Under the Eye of the Big Bird was shortlisted for this year’s 2025 International Booker Prize and my partner has purchased the shortlisted works for me so that I can judge for myself. So, I’ve finally dived into Kawakami’s writing.

Under the Eye of the Big Bird is a strange book. I hesitate to call it a short story collection, because each section takes place in the same world, but I hesitate to call it a novel because it’s profoundly episodic. The characters between each chapter change, for the most part, although some characters repeat or we see a throughline between the narratives. Readers are thrown into the book without context and it feels truly alienating. We are the outsiders caught up mid-stream trying to figure out how the world operates.

I’m not sure I have the specifics, really, though towards the end there is some more explicit exposition. Come to think of it, Kawakami might have shown some more restraint and trusted the readers a little more—one character gives the entire history of the world in a conversation with children. In any case, the world feels foreign. The events are taking place hundreds or thousands of years in the future, and humans are just about extinct. They now reside in what we can infer as separate communities without any contact, vaguely united by “mothers” and “watchers” who care for them. Meanwhile, each of the characters seems to be a replica or reincarnation of a previous version of themselves. In one community, this means they have names like 32 of 6 (the 32nd copy of the 6th model or something to that effect). In other communities, it means that you might open the door and find a younger version of yourself, which is your cue to get out of town and be replaced.

That very thing happens in the early chapter “Narcissi.” The chapter’s opening line is “I turned up today. / I opened the front door, and there stood a much younger me, with long hair” (13). The two engage in conversation as the new model moves in. This leads to some of the most interesting grammatical and conceptual content of Under the Eye of the Big Bird. The boundary between self and other-self gets muddled in an interesting way: “As I watched me walk away, I recalled the day the great mother had left” (20). This odd mirroring and duality of selfhood then becomes even more strange as the two swap memories and experiences. The new version of the character arrived in a hovercraft, hid it in the bushes, and approached the home of her predecessor. The predecessor, now having to leave, creeps into the bushes and finds the hovercraft “she” rode in on. It’s an engaging concept, especially because it’s so early on and everything is unfamiliar; Kawakami reels you in as you try to explain the scenes.

On the topic of swapping memories, there are also characters that can essentially connect with other creatures telekinetically. It almost reads like Animorphs except the character seems to be inside a hawk’s brain, witnessing its world, while their physical body remains in place. This psychic connection emerges in several of the stories to explore Kawakami’s themes of love and connection. In one section of the book, split over two parts, Kawakami recounts the tragic story of two lovers. Each has the ability to ‘scan’ the other—that is, dive into the depths of one another’s minds and retrieve any kind of thought or feeling. The woman is both clairvoyant and telepathic and, out of respect, the man refuses to scan her. He comes across as noble and kind until he becomes jealous enough to scan her, finds her complete love of him, and then disappears out of shame. It’s a Blackbeard’s closets kind of situation. In the next section, though, the perspective switches to the young woman’s and we see that she is unfaithful and that her clairvoyance has led her to see how their relationship would operate, how he would behave, and so on and so forth. Him reading love within her mind is chalked up to his lack of practice with scanning—he’s pathetic and she pities him.

Those two chapters stand out as being self-sufficient in their story arcs, while others are components in Kawakami’s narrative mosaic. Eventually the book builds to a section where there is only one great mother left and two girls. Hope for the human race is essentially zero until one of the girls draws on knowledge from the past and starts cloning animals. She has some success over about eighty years, and you might expect it to end there before she’s successfully cloned a human, but then since these beings live for hundreds of years you realize she’s still got some time. If you’d like the spoiler version of the story, I offer it following this sentence. As it turns out, when the human race began to decline, they started experimenting with cloning to help the human race survive; then, they tried to use AI to enhance the defects and whatnot until it became the case that AI embedded itself into human DNA. The mothers are previous iterations of AI that get replaced with the younger versions of themselves; the great mother is the AI that’s miles ahead of the others—but now that seems to be failing and there is likely no hope left.

There’s a lot to like about Under the Eye of the Big Bird—it’s an impressive foray into some creative territory with some cutting-edge concepts that remain the human touch. The downside to the book is that the characters are, by necessity, forgettable and largely underdeveloped. I didn’t feel all that connected to the characters and then before long they would be replaced by another set that drove the world-building forward but felt more like conceptual devices than individuals. It’s a catch-22 with high concept books.

I have to give Kawakami points for offering such a unique project. Now next time when I’m in the bookstore maybe I’ll need to actually pick up her short story collections.

Happy reading!

Endsickness by Sofia Alarcon

    I hesitate to call Sofia Alarcon’s Endsickness a graphic novel. The word ‘novel’ implies to me a certain kind of continuity of characters and settings. Endsickness, however, is more like eight short stories that are thematically connected, all geared towards answering the question of how we continue to live while living in the end times. Each section is pretty short and is distinct in its own way, and one of the great strengths of Alaron’s work is that the art style changes between different sections to tell different stories.

    In the first section, “Positive Thinking,” is a series of affirmations juxtaposed with more ominous imagery (e.g. “All is well in my world” affirms the woman wearing a gas mask to bed). Then she envisions leaving everything behind and going to live in the woods. It’s a quirky art style and the woman has a nonchalant expression—that is, until the reality sets in that she hates bugs and will probably die.

    “Special Delivery” has a vibrant, almost neon pop-art style that depicts the same neighbourhood over and over, with children wearing gas masks and zombies chasing joggers and AK47s in the street and UFOs setting houses ablaze. The section tells its story almost exclusively through images with no text until the punchline—the special delivery is an Amazon package of a Live Laugh Love sign.

    “Patagonia” is a less memorable section about buying a sweater before descending into a despairing meditation on capitalism and forest fires and the need for a shift in perspective, like, for example, to the VIP suite to a house on the hill. Meanwhile, “Adaptation” takes us through the entire history of amoeba to dinosaurs to people and a reflection on the necessity of interdependence between species and their contexts, the unfathomable improbability of the our existence, and the question of whether capitalism will outpace our ability to adapt with its capacity to destroy.

    “Afterlife” strips away the colour and vibrancy of the other pages and provides a black-and-white narrative before returning to a colourful and scraggly-illustrated section called “Lonesome Garry.” It’s about a human man in the zoo being watched by animals, the last human of the species. They observe him mowing grass and engaging in other human rituals, though he fails in his courtship and we see the tragedy of a species dying out forever. The story, I learned from the acknowledgements page, is based on the last Pinta island tortoise and that gives it additional tragic force.

    One of the more memorable sections is “Icarus,” which I thought was nicely stylized for, essentially, a Socratic dialogue in space in which astronauts question the nature of progress. Do we ever really move forward? Or is time just a loop and us humans keep making the same mistakes over and over and over and over? Are we a spiral that slightly progresses? Is reincarnation a thing? I think that section addresses so many of the central questions in a meaningful way while also having some of the most distinct artwork in the text. Even within just a few pages, there’s a more pencil-crayon style that shifts to a largely black-and-white traditional comic style with great pops of colour.

    The final section, “Genesis,” is further exploration of the destructiveness of our consumerism, featuring a replicated Nick Cage pillow.

    Alarcon’s work is a quick read, but examining the images enriches the storytelling. I loved the art style of the comics, and the themes are all worth thinking about and taking action on. What’s troubling is that there’s a sort of haunting resignation throughout the text which I find it difficult to confront; I suppose that’s the reason Endsickness earns its name—how can we come to terms with the global catastrophes confronting us?

    So, uh, happy (?) reading, I guess…

The Story of Stuff by Annie Leonard

        We live in a world of stuff. Not waste, necessarily, but certainly close to it. The Story of Stuff by Annie Leonard is a book-length project that developed from a 20 minute animation about where our stuff comes from and the devastating environmental impact of rampant consumerism. Throughout the book, Leonard documents the life cycle of a number of consumer goods, including everything from plastics to books to electronics. In terms of breadth, it’s hard to think of another book that covers so much ground—even if the sections that truly shine are the ones that go into some more depth.

Because our society is structured such as it is, it will be hard to truly accept and live by the central tenet of the book: we need to consume less. You’ve likely heard of the despiriting statistics. I am particularly struck by things like “How Many Earths.” If everyone were to live as people do in Canada and the United States, we would need to have 5.1 Earths’ worth of resources. Meanwhile, Earth Overshoot Day is the day each year when we have consumed nature’s resources and start dipping into reserves. This year was July 24th, by the way—barely halfway through the year. The statistics are harrowing.

Leonard offers some resources to help to curb our consumption or to verify the ‘ethical’ production of various goods (including plastics, diamonds, and so on). Our everyday practices as individuals, though, are insufficient for the kind of change needed. Even our mantra of “reduce, reuse, recycle” only goes so far—and Leonard offers some compelling research about why recycling is actually the least effective and least important of the three. Recycling can be energy intensive and we need to get into distinctions between pre- and post-consumer recycling. Are the materials being used for the same kind of product? Are they being broken down and mixed into other forms for manufacture of other goods? At the end of the day, the only way out is to use less, but the existence of capitalism demands continually more production of goods.

Industries and policies need to change. It’s pretty disheartening that even when policies are brought into place by local or federal governments, they can still be superseded by global-level organizations like the WTO. The policies also demand enforcement that is not always forthcoming, though Leonard offers some wonderful examples of resistance. To that end, Leonard offered some really compelling commentary on the exploitation of Haiti, including the way the WTO’s regulations limit the viability of farming. Also, Philadelphia burned a bunch of waste in incinerators (don’t get Leonard started on incinerators!) and sent the ash to Haiti. This is not allowed, and the United States had to clean up the waste. Leonard documents going to the Mayor’s event in a kind of flash mob demanding action, and she followed a boat carrying waste to ensure they didn’t drop it anywhere it wasn’t meant to go. One port they stopped at mysteriously was ablaze and the waste had to continue its journey. Ultimately, they dumped it in the ocean—but they were brought to justice. Moments like that are inspirational, but we need continual pressure to ensure that polices are established and enforced.

The other two big ideas I think are worth exploring further are externalized costs and extended producer responsibility. As for externalized costs, those are all the resource costs that companies get away with using without paying for. For instance, the environmental costs or degradation to the natural world as a result of their manufacturing processes are not seen as something companies need to pay for. Essentially, the costs are externalized to communities that feel the impact while not impacting the company directly. As an aside, I appreciate that Leonard talks about economics and the GDP as an insufficient metric for measuring it. The GDP fails to account for resource loss and externalized costs and simplifies to the point of meaninglessness. The other key component that I think we need to advocate for is extended producer responsibility. This means that companies are responsible for the entire lifecycle of their goods. Environmental choices have often been displaced onto consumers (e.g. I could buy post-it notes or recycled post-it notes). EPR suggests that the company producing the goods needs to take responsibility for the post-consumer life of their products. Having EPR policies would be a complete gamechanger for how we create goods and distribute them.

Overall, The Story of Stuff serves as a great primer for key issues in consumption and environmentalism. The sheer number of topics Leonard covers—and the statistics themselves—are overwhelming. It’s unfortunate because on the one hand I want to really focus in on one aspect of waste and try to advocate for improvements, but the book also shows how interconnected all these policies are. It’s as though we need to take responsibility for everything because, really, we do. My hope is that having these conversations leads to direct action and I hope you’ll join.

Happy reading and advocating!

How to Blow Up a Pipeline by Andreas Malm

Andreas Malm’s book won’t actually tell you how to blow up a pipeline—and, to all the corporations and governments reading this, I assure you: I am not going to blow up a pipeline. That being said, How to Blow Up a Pipeline is certainly a provocative title that drew me in. The text is less of a how-to manual and more of a book of philosophical and political theory. Offered as a short primer, it is a defence of taking action in a world in desperate need of it.

Andreas Malm essentially makes the case that typical liberal reactions to climate catastrophes is not leading us to the kinds of change that are necessary in order to save the planet and human life as we know it and that “radical” alternatives are necessary. Demonstrations, protest signs, and letters aren’t cutting it. Running parallel to Rob Nixon’s “Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor,” Malm makes the case that corporations and governments are actively killing people through their ongoing inaction and active facilitation of environmental destruction. By allowing polluters to continue polluting, so runs Malm’s argument, it is a form of mass murder.

How To Blow Up A Pipeline makes the case that our typical climate action is ineffective. Our “demonstrations” and “protests” do nothing to shift policy. Our impassioned speeches are not moving the needle for any of the people out there causing the most pollution. There are times when environmental movements and animal liberation movements can rely on peaceful protest to gain public trust and generate conversation, winning hearts and minds, but sitting by peacefully is not putting any pressure on the pollution industry to change.

As an alternative, and at least implicitly referencing The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon, Malm encourages violence. Recognizing that violence against people is generally unpalatable for garnering support for a movement and that it would lose the moral high ground by doing so, Malm’s main tactic essentially shifts towards violence against property. He references a project in which air was let out of tires for high-polluting vehicles. It’s an inconvenience that consumers need to consider and that puts pressure to change consumption behaviours. I might make the case now that we’re seeing similar kinds of destruction against Tesla (although they’re supposedly the eco-friendly option…).

Reconstructing the argument could be done through a series of syllogisms and in the moment, it was pretty persuasive. The objection might be raised that property destruction would do more harm than good for average consumers, but the reality is that we cannot allow the status quo to persist. We need to make it inconvenient and undesirable for people to pollute.

Nor can we revert to despair. Malm challenges the hedonistic laissez-faire of some intellectuals that feel none of the direct impacts of climate change. If it is too late to make a change, it is still not acceptable either to throw our hands up in the air and shout that we might as well enjoy our final days and pollute as much as we please. Malm refers to intellectual figures like Jonathan Franzen who asks that since it’s too late, why should we deprive ourselves of the same joys other polluters get to have? Of course, Malm rejects this self-serving philosophy.

Malm suggests that every revolt has been put down by the defeatists. Yet, there is still a political function for hope: “Hope is not a door, but the sense that there might be a door somewhere. [...] Hope is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency.” People voice a common objection to controversial situations: “If only people had protested peacefully, change could have happened.” Malm shows how the objection falls flat and refers to all kinds of historical precedents where change only happens when there are strategic, active interventions. Some may protest peacefully, of course, but the real changemakers are the ones who actively dismantle the system by force.

And thus we are here. A world in need of fewer pipelines and more action. May the book serve as a kick in the pants and the light of a fuse.

Happy reading!

Wade in the Water by Tracy K. Smith

I first encountered Tracy K. Smith as editor for the excellent anthology The Best American Poetry 2021. Flash forward three years or so and, by pure coincidence, I received Wade in the Water as a gift. The book is a collection of Smith’s poems, divided into four distinct sections, each with something a little different to offer.

The subject matters and themes are mostly self-contained within each of the  four sections, though of course there are some areas of overlap. The first section takes on a more pastoral and reverent quality with personal anecdotes and connections blended in. The second section is a series of found poems that deal with the racist history of the United States, while the third takes a more environmental and political focus. The final section deals with family connection, and motherhood in particular.

Some of the early poems have great quotable lines and turns of phrase. In the poem “Garden of Eden,” Smith provides a blazon of delights before announcing that “Everyone I knew was living / The same desolate luxury, / Each ashamed of the same things: / Innocence of privacy” (5). The lines imbue the banality of life with a tragic quality, particularly with the phrase “desolate luxury” that hits right in the heart. The follow up poem, “The Angels,” offers rich imagery and builds towards an absence, all the more impactful for the richness that preceded it: “A rust-stained pipe / Where a house once stood, which I / Take each time I pass it for an owl. / Bright whorl so dangerous and near. // My mother sat whispering with it / At the end of her life / While all the rooms of our house / Filled up with night” (7). I adore the metonym (or is it the synecdoche?) of the pipe that intimates what is already gone, and the fact that the rooms “filled up with night” is a beautiful conclusion, since an absence (the darkness) is palpably filling up space.

In an unlikely turn of events for me, I actually found Smith’s longer works more compelling than the shorter ones, which passed by a little too quickly to make an impact. The second section of the collection capitalizes on her strength with long-form poems. It is worthwhile to quote from Smith’s “Notes” section to describe what she has done:

The text for “I Will Tell You the Truth about This, I Will Tell You All about It” is composed entirely of letters and statements of African Americans enlisted in the Civil War, and those of their wives, widows, parents, and children. While the primary documents in question have been abridged, the poem preserves the original spellings and punctuation to the extent possible throughout. [...] Once I began reading these texts, it became clear to me that the voices in question should command all of the space within my poem. I hope that they have been arranged in such a way as to highlight certain of the main factors affecting blacks during the Civil War, chiefly: the compound effects of slavery and war upon the African American family; the injustices to which black soldiers were often subject; the difficulty black soldiers and their widows faced in attempting to claim pensions after the war; and the persistence, good faith, dignity, and commitment to the ideals of democracy that ran through the many appeals to President Lincoln, the Freedmen’s Bureau, and other authorities to whom petitions were routinely addressed during and after the war. (77-78)

Smith then gives a thorough list of the sources from which the poem is pulled. There are then a few pages of citations for the letters and depositions from which the poem was pulled. As Smith notes, the “original spellings and punctuation” have been preserved, spelling mistakes and all. Smith’s work as a poet becomes, essentially, a matter of arrangement, a collage. The work is cohesive in its voice and themes, despite being an amalgam of others. The poems on their own do not seem particularly “quotable” but then the narrative of the piece shines.

Similarly, the third section of the collection takes a more overtly political focus, especially with respect to the immigration discourse in the United States and the climate crisis. The longest poem in the third section is “Watershed,” which is similarly a found poem drawn from an article from January 6th, 2016 in the New York Times Magazine and excerpts of the narratives of survivors of near-death experiences. The poem has a gravitas that is difficult to ignore.

I have to appreciate writers that take on very different topics, so when the final section deals with motherhood, it’s a surprising and refreshing change. The poem “Dusk,” for example, shifts the tone of the collection. It deals with the tension between a mother and her child and the strange resentments that build. The poem begins with the question, “What woke to war in me those years / When my daughter had first grown into / A solid self-centered self?” (68). She then reflects on the minutiae that infuriate her: “I’d watch her / Sit at the table—well, not quite sit, / More like stand on one leg while / The other knee hovered just over the chair” (68). She suggests how her daughter wouldn’t lower herself in case of a fire “or a great black / Blizzard of waves let loose in the kitchen / And she’d need to make her escape” (68). Smith extrapolates this failure to sit into a larger, more existential idea that “She’d trust no one but herself, her own / New lean always jittering legs to carry her — / Where exactly? Where would a child go? To there. There alone” (68). The poem continues to explain the disconnect as personified with her resting an elbow on the table, bending her leg, not making eye contact. It leads to Smith’s existential crisis that she thought she’d have more time before her daughter grew up: “I thought / My body would have taken longer going / About the inevitable feat of repelling her” (68). It’s a great piece that highlights those small moments that are imbued with such significance for us.

Smith also does a good job of personifying concepts. For instance, the poem “New Road Station” gives life to history as a concept: “History is in a hurry. It moves like a woman / Corralling her children onto a crowded bus” (42). It documents her journey, “Hammering the driver’s headrest with her fist” (42). The world around her seems to be actively engaged in watching her, with flies “watching with their million eyes, never bored” and crows that “cluck and caw at the woman in their frenzy” (42). The poem takes a turn at its midpoint, though, announcing that “history is not a woman // And it is not the crowd forming in a square” (42). Smith deflates the enigma of history and then says how it is not even “the rapt silence of a room / Where a film of history is right now being screened” (42). There’s a clever interplay of No and Now at the core of the poem, rejecting and asserting. There’s then the inversal where history stops being the woman on the bus and instead is the bus “that will only wait so long / Before cranking its engine to barrel down // The road” (42). Smith opens up possibilities for what history could be that are more intimate and then redirects to a child’s views, curled up in his mother’s arm “who believes history must sleep inside a tomb, // Or the belly of a bomb” (42). The poem ends on that note, and I like that the rhyme does not quite work and I like that the zeugma links the ideas with a good deal of gravity. The fact that the belly of the bomb is the last line of the poem, and the only one not presented in a couplet, gives it added weight.

In another poem, “Charity,” the concept is personified again. It characterizes her “like a squat old machine, / Off-kilter but still chugging along / The uphill stretch of sidewalk / On Harrison Street, handbag slung / Crosswise and, I’m guessing, heavy” (64). The poem presents as a kind of parable for the concept where she “bend[s] forward to tussle with gravity” (64). Her feet are off-balance, seemingly fighting against each other, and her shoulders are braced “as if lashed / By step after step after step” (64). She stares unflinchingly. There’s a great twist at the end, though, presented in italics, where the hitherto unknown speaker of the poem responds to the idea of charity. She states, “I am you, one day out of five, / Tired empty, hating what I carry / But afraid to lay it down, stingy, / Angry, doing violence to others / By the sheer freight of my gloom, / Halfway home, wanting to stop, to quit / But keeping going mostly out of spite” (64). The speaker’s response to charity seems so deeply human in its contradictions. There’s the resentment of doing good, of hating what you carry but not being able to lay it down. I think the anger that emerges from the “sheer freight of [...] gloom” feels sincere and authentic, and using spite as a motivator to keep going rings true in its vulnerability.

Taken together, these poems form what I see as a good collection. The project is interesting; even when the poems individually don’t “do it” for me, the concept and craftsmanship of their assemblage is a noble project. Smith’s personality emerges with such lovely sincerity and honesty in the more personal poems and passionate insight in the political ones. It’s not likely to be the most memorable collection I’ve ever read, but it’s worth your time—it’s likely only to take an afternoon, anyhow.

Happy reading!

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

  Braiding Sweetgrass has made quite an impact in a number of fields, most notably environmentalism, Indigenous studies, and literature. Robin Wall Kimmerer is a Potawatomi botanist who recounts some personal stories that parallel ecological phenomena and Indigenous teachings. Each chapter deals with a foundational concept to her study of plants and connects to either a personal story, an environmental project, or an Indigenous teaching.

There’s an anecdote early on that I find endearing, relatable, and quietly subversive. Kimmerer recounts applying to a botany program and when she is questioned about it, she tells the instructor that she wants to know, essentially, how the plants know which colours work together. It’s an aesthetic or poetic concern, rather than a scientific one—at least insofar as the instructor is concerned. Kimmerer’s gentle challenge to the discourse, though, is that these are not separate conversations, but rather different angles to the same one. She then draws on Potawatomi (and other Indigenous) stories to explain the logic that binds the natural world together.

The book’s style is appreciatory, warm—celebratory. Admittedly, I listened to the audiobook for this one and the reading of the text has such a gentle cadence, appropriate to the style of the book. It’s inviting, of course, but I found that the text lacks bite. Edge. I suppose that says more about me as a consumer that I need conflict; I need tension in order for something to be worth my while—which is very much against what Kimmerer advocates for here. Something in me is broken where I can’t appreciate the simple beauty of the world for what it is.

As such, the highlight of Braiding Sweetgrass, in my mind, is when Kimmerer talks about w*ndig*s (my understanding is that their name should not be spoken, so I’ll refrain here). Kimmerer identifies the cannibalistic creatures as symbols of unrestrained capitalism. They are relentless, unable to be satiated. Kimmerer’s storytelling on the issue is finely wrought and it becomes even more complex when considering the context of past and present Indigenous people. She suggests that the spirit of the w*ndig*s corrupts Indigenous people and makes them ravenous for flesh; capitalism does the same. Kimmerer then problematizes the fact that rather than dismantling capitalism, people strive to integrate themselves within it—it’s actually a similar line of reasoning to a section of Living in the End Times by Slavoj Zizek where the left no longer seeks to dismantle capitalism, but rather become more active participants within it, essentially selling out rather than reshaping the world. The alignment of the w*ndig* with capital is persuasive and offers an engaging story for how we’ve let things get so far.

Another section of the book deals with salamanders and the war effort in Afghanistan. I have to say, this one feels less intuitively connected, making the book come across as a little more disordered. The idea of studying salamander crossing and car-induced fatalities is interesting on its own (for instance, they have a morbid formula for deciding how many salamanders have been crushed by measuring the squish radius). The chapter jumps back and forth to a discussion of young men in Afghanistan in tanks. The connection, though, is tenuous and feels more like an insertion of politics into an otherwise innocuous project.

It was interesting to hear about the specific projects of which Kimmerer has been a part. In addition to the salamander study, she recounts excursions with students to learn in the field (she had to argue the relevance, of course, given that her work falls outside the traditional purviews of science). She recounts the cleaning of Onondaga Lake and the disastrous impacts of mercury waste. The individual projects hold weight and are worth learning about, but the broader lessons are where the book shines.

For instance, it becomes clear from the book that maintaining the environment is not enough. More is required of us. Kimmerer expounds on the idea of gift giving. She explains cultural norms for giving and receiving gifts and the idea of reciprocity. The land is a gift, it gives us gifts, and we are responsible for showing gratitude for those gifts and giving back in return. There are some engaging philosophical meditations on what it would mean for nature to show gratitude, as well. She often refers to Indigenous stories to help support the science—for instance, she discusses the Three Sisters (beans, squash, and corn) and how they are mutually beneficial to one another. Kimmerer returns to the notions of respect and reciprocity frequently, making the key lessons of the text completely clear, but also bloating the book somewhat with repetition.

Many people have recommended this book to me and I’m glad to have finally gotten to it. Unfortunately, the book as a whole does not really resonate with me to leave a lasting impression. It’s a matter of taste, I suppose—I was hoping for something more explicitly revolutionary, something visceral and bombasti. Instead, Braiding Sweetgrass is a calm, inviting work of philosophy. Its warmth may warm the spirit and inspire, but I don’t think it’s going to make people take to the streets and demand change.

That being said, I hope you receive the gift of nature and grant it your own respect and reciprocity. Happy reading!

The Suicide Museum by Ariel Dorfman

[This review is pretty delayed, so the timeline of its introduction no longer makes sense, but here we are.]

For the last two weeks, when people asked what I was reading, I would respond evasively—I was reading a book about Chile; it was a book about the overthrow of Salvador Allende; it was a mystery novel of sorts, and so on—I was careful not to share the title of the book, given its off-putting title: The Suicide Museum, written by Ariel Dorfman. If you find the title alarming, well, you should. The book is punishing, but one of the most compelling novels I read this year.

The essential premise is this: a Chilean exile, Ariel Dorfman, is tasked by a mysterious billionaire, Joseph Hortha, to investigate the circumstances of Salvador Allende’s death. There are competing versions of the story, and for reasons unknown, the billionaire wants to know whether Allende went down fighting during the coup or whether he took his own life. Dorfman travels around investigating and interviewing witnesses close to the revolution, almost in the style of a detective novel, measuring one account against another. Meanwhile, Ariel attempts to write a detective novel that addresses the “disappeared” and other unspoken horrors of Pinochet’s regime. Partway through, Hortha reveals the importance of Allende’s death: Hortha is building a Suicide Museum, a gruelling exhibit that leads its visitors through rooms and rooms of photographs of people who have taken their own lives, building towards an ecological exhibit of tree photographs. His message: we are all collectively involved in the suicide of our species and we need to be compelled to take action. Allende’s photograph (or lack of) will determine the impact of the project.

What I love about The Suicide Museum is that it draws from so many rich wells. There are any number of angles through which it could be discussed. With respect to literary theory alone, I could see essays written about it through a New Historical lens, a Marxist lens, a feminist lens, a Poststructuralist lens, an ecocritical lens, and beyond. I sometimes think about what makes books ‘classic’: how do we know they will endure? To me, Dorfman captures the spirit of a classic: a book that doesn’t shy away from engaging in important conversations across multiple fields and disciplines. The sheer breadth of the work makes it well-worth reading and, if our species doesn’t self-eradicate, it will continue to be a powerful work for years to come.

Conceptually, I found the book riveting, if sometimes challenging. It was sometimes hard to remember which character was which (i.e. who had what role in witnessing Allende’s death). I would not say that characterization is one of the strong points of the novel, but also I would make a very poor detective because I don’t keep the details straight. Nonetheless, I found myself engrossed in this mystery, which again—I’m not clear, entirely, on the truth of the matter. The ambiguity and lack of resolution is, in many ways, critical to the work itself.

The fictional Dorfman points towards the challenges of writing about history in a conversation with Hortha. The billionaire asks him whether Ariel has ever wanted to write a novel about Allende, to which he responds, “Not really [...] I’m much too close to the subject. If I respected him less, maybe. But that admiration would kill freedom, the ability to shape the story anywhere it took me. It would be a lazy book, full of myths and no transgressions. A novelist dealing with a real person from the past must be ready to betray that person, to lie in order to tell a deeper truth. I could never do that. It would be exploitative. Writers have to be ruthless” (38). This passage proves critical for The Suicide Museum as a text. At the core of the text is a challenging engagement with the “freedom” afforded by story. Without spoiling too much, Ariel makes use of stories strategically, with ambiguous ethical commitments. The “transgressions” of the book emerge in its own lack of certainty, and Dorfman refuses to “betray” the memory of Allende, and yet … it does appear that lies support a “deeper truth.” Dorfman points towards the challenge of writing about history, particularly when it’s so deeply political. How does one follow the writerly advice to “kill your darlings” if you still firmly believe in their ultimate goodness? The passage recalls to me, in some ways, the film Adaptation, where Nicolas Cage’s character explains his plans for a film adaptation of a book and outlines everything he doesn’t want it to be—which is what the film Adaptation becomes.

Throughout The Suicide Museum, the boundaries between fiction and reality are complex. As the aforementioned conversation continues, Hortha asks if writers really have to be ruthless and sacrifice everything, including their families. The fictional Dorfman answers as follows:

“You pray it won’t come to that sort of choice … But the truth is I’ve already left my family, those real people I most love, unattended while I spend hours—in fact, months—with fictional characters who—I mean, those imaginary men and women only exist because I can conjure them up, and if I don’t keep faith with them, they’ll wither away, like a plant that dies from lack of water. That total dedication to my creatures gives me the right to be ruthless, condemn them to death or ruin, failure or blindness or solitude, according to the needs of the story” (38-39).

There are two elements of the text that get highlighted here. In the first case, he refers to the need to leave his family to commit to his art. Indeed, throughout the book, the fictional Ariel is confronted on the perceptions about Chile he has instilled in his family and his wife perceptively reads through his own self-deceptions to help dictate the direction of the novel. For a man who claims to be “ruthless” in pursuit of the truth, he has some pretty significant blindspots which only his family is able to draw attention to. The second piece here is the idea of being ruthless for the needs of the story. The novel is framed as a true story that Dorfman could only release after the death of Hortha—Ariel says he would not write about Hortha, and he keeps that promise until after Hortha dies. When Hortha asks, Ariel says Allende could only be written about after a hundred years. The contradiction is that, in Ariel’s words, “Someone might fictionalize him successfully, access a simulacrum of his thoughts and feelings, a simulacrum because it wouldn’t be Allende, but somebody else, a postmortem figment of the imagination. Even so, that novelist would have trouble. Allende’s story is so unbelievable that the result would probably reek of implausibility. Readers would protest that no, this could never have happened. [...] There would be scant room for the ambiguity and nuance that a novel demands. [...] Nothing should be sacred” (39-40). Yet, here we are, with a novel that is clearly about Hortha. Reading The Suicide Museum is surreal because even in its fictionality it feels so plausible that this might well be a memoir.

Of course, even the memoir’s truth-effect is called into question and rendered ambiguous. This crucial passage also identifies the motif of unfulfilled promises, both personal and political. Personal promises Ariel makes towards his wife, Hortha’s promises to not interfere with Ariel’s investigation, the promise of the Chilean revolution, and so on—all these are betrayed. Ariel tells Hortha that he’s “off-limits” and yet at the meta-level, this has clearly been betrayed. In Ariel’s defence, he says if he ever attempted such a literary experiment, he would have to be “brutal with my own self, merciless, ready to expose every weakness, invent weaknesses I don’t have. As long as it makes the book more interesting” (39). Even Ariel’s flaws may be “invented,” so there’s never the certainty Dorfman worries about for historical novels.

While this passage offers a map to the book, there are so many engaging moments that are hard to ignore. From the very beginning, the dynamic between Hortha and Ariel is compelling. The mystery that shrouds Hortha’s project is an effective hook that drew me in. The complicated relationship between them escalates naturally, and when Ariel consults with his wife on the project, she has a great moment of wisdom (actually, she may be the one character presented without flaws). She tells her husband, “This is what matters: he has to want this more than you do. Those are the rules of the game, of every game. In every relationship one of the parties wants something more than the other. And the one who wants it less gets the upper hand. So we’ll test him. See how engaged he really is, ready to bend over backward to get you on board” (133). The manipulation techniques that the two engage in add beautifully to the more espionage-y elements of the book. Later, Ariel and his wife run around playing detective and suspect they’re being followed. The two develop a plan where his wife engages in counter-spying and it’s maybe the most genre-fiction section of the book.

The book is an interesting project because it has the fun romp and thrills of a detective book, but has tonal shifts that are punishing—gruelling, even—that delve into more complex existential issues. I wish I could simply transcribe the entire outline of Hortha’s Suicide Museum. It goes on for pages and pages, not quite at the level of Bolaño’s 2666 but arguably more powerful. The entire process of walking through the museum is dispiriting and depressing as anything I’ve ever read. Yet, at the other side of the Suicide Museum is an optimism, or at least the potential for it. Reading through the Suicide Museum part is like a microcosm of the book itself—you get deeper and deeper into it, and it feels punishing, and then you come out on the other side with the message that we still have the potential to justify our lives by making life better for others.

Much of that motif emerges from Hortha’s experiences. He feels tremendous guilt over several formative moments in his life, and he recounts several times when he felt that he would commit suicide only to be spared by some miraculous sign. With a minor spoiler, Allende coming to power spared him at a pivotal moment. That said, though, the moment that most stands out to me is when Joseph fails to control himself in an interaction with bullies. For important context, Hortha was adopted during the Holocaust. I hope I remember this correctly, but following a school yard fight, his brother is actually taken and killed. He feels guilt over this, in spite of and maybe especially because his adoptive parents never fault him for it. That forms part of the impulse of having to justify his own life.

And yet even the truthfulness of our formative moments—the stories we tell ourselves—are not entirely reliable. Hortha notes,

“My adopted parents lied, explained it all away, claimed that Jan was arrested for having painted some obscenities on the Kommandant’s house on a dare, and that’s how I recalled it for years, they never made me feel responsible for that tragedy, they never said, We had a son and lost him because we treated you like a son, they never reproached me, they had taken me in willingly and continued to offer me warmth and love. Made it easy for me to mourn the loss of that elder brother as if I had no part in it, as if a tidal wave had swept him away, the earth had swallowed him, one more motive to hate the Nazis. So I never had to face what had been done to me, what I might have done to others, even less so after the war, when all people wanted was to forget the pain” (175).

The lingering guilt forms the backbone of many character motivations. Hortha feels guilt over this incident and also for working in plastics. There’s another fantastic moment in which Hortha catches a fish and discovers it filled with plastic: it’s a moment that he has to confront  his own guilt and it forms the basis of his environmental concerns later. For Ariel, he feels guilt towards his commitment towards Chile, or lack thereof, his self-imposed exile, his lack of success and recognition.

Throughout the book, characters have some wonderfully epiphanic moments in response to their internal guilt, one of my favourite being Hortha’s commentary on guilt itself. He describes a “moment of reckoning” (337). He says, “The whole of my life flashed in front of me, as if I were dying, as they say happens when you are about to die—and I was, in effect dying, the old me was dying. Things became crystal clear, what matters and what doesn’t. And at what matters, I had failed” (337). It’s a painful thing to experience, finally knowing what your priorities ought to be and simultaneously knowing that you haven’t succeeded. Hortha goes on to describe the guilt gnawing away at him: “That guilt made no sense [...] nothing I could have done to prevent the Nazis from … But you can’t argue with guilt. It devours reason” (337). In some ways, there’s a spirit in this book that defies reason. The bottomlessness of guilt is problematic and problematized: there’s a virtue in being ‘unreasonable.’ This unreasonable guilt makes Hortha “suppress” his painful memories, “and yet it must have persisted inside [him] driving [him] to make something of [himself], prove that [his] survival had been worthwhile” (337). It’s engaging to consider how we are formed by our mistakes, even when we don’t recognize them, and the idea of an unspoken undercurrent, an unconscious thread, is well-suited to a book about the ongoing ramifications of politics in Chile.

Hortha elevates the power of the imagination, that is, bringing those undercurrents to the surface. In describing his piscatorial epiphany, he recognizes that he needs to “make amends on an unheard-of scale” (340). He then talks about the spiritual experience and says it’s what authors and mystics experience “when caught in the fever of creativity” (340). He says, “The only way to save ourselves is to undo our civilization, unfound our cities, question the paradigm of modernity that has dominated our existence for the last centuries. To remedy what I had wrought, I needed the colossal, monstrous power of the imagination, conceive something that would not succumb to the same deficiencies of the technical mind that had led us to this bottleneck” (340). In some ways, I see him as being involved in a similar project to Mark Fisher. He’s looking for an alternative to capitalism, an alternative to consumption and destruction. The moment is not without irony: a billionaire who made his money on plastics is the secret environmentalist hero. That’s all the more reason to double-down on the idea of justifying our lives by making other lives better. It seems unlikely that we have the imaginative faculties to compensate here. Jeez, this would also work with a Freudian reading surrounding guilt, the unconscious, and civilization and its discontents.

Before coming to the epilogue of the book, I just wanted to briefly comment on some brief details. For one, there’s another beautiful scene involving symbolic woodpeckers. Hortha’s mom is sick and continually perturbed by a noisy woodpecker. Hortha’s response is riveting and is really richly symbolic. The fact that the end of the book also presents two or three lengthy conflicting reports on Allende’s death is a wonderful culmination. The decision must be made, in some way a classic choice: tell the truth to your own detriment, or tell a lie that benefits all? The ethical ramifications are well-worth considering and deeply complex.

Despite all this darkness, though, I can’t write off The Suicide Museum as a depressing book. At its core, there’s a valuable optimism. Sure, the book is about the end of all life on the planet, but there are some conciliatory remarks in the epilogue. Ultimately, “we are not alone on this journey. In that brief moment of light we can hurt one another or we can alleviate the suffering, in that interval or interlude or flicker, there is the chance to fight the darkness. Even if we know how it will vanish, ourselves, this world, eventually the Universe itself. To relieve the pain of others, could that not be what justifies a birth we did not choose, gives meaning to the life that we stumble along as best we can, is that love not a consolation for the death that will come despite our best efforts to ignore its existence?” (651). I return here to the idea of classic literature. As fun as cynical novels can be, I think they won’t last. A book really needs to be edifying to last, it needs to have some kind of reason we should read it, and Dorfman presents some conclusions here. It’s not uncomplicated; I’m suspicious of the simply-stated moralism of the book, particularly because of the earlier passage which rejects unambiguous readings of history. Even so, it’s one of those fictions that is more helpful than the complex nuances of the full truth.

The epilogue takes place thirty years after the events of the book. At the end of the book, Dorfman is, regarding the death of Allende, “still unsure, after this exploratory voyage, of what the outcome is to be, with only this wake-up call of a novel as my small, sometimes serious, sometimes playful, contribution” (675). There’s a poetic conclusion that is self-reflective regarding the impact of literary works: “I will soon be dead. Swallowed by the solitude I feared as a child. Hoping only for the immortality of being a drop of water in a river that reaches the sea” (675). The focus on language really takes centre stage, where Dorfman breaks down the idea of an “epilogue” itself as logos (discourse, speech, word) and epi (in addition, in conclusion, also) (675). Even when the book is over, there is still more — and does that not reflect well on the idea that we can build something stronger by redeeming our own mistakes and improving things for others?

The epigraph is critical to the project of the book. The Suicide Museum resists definition, and the epigraph ensures that the final word has not yet been spoken—there is always more. It presents a future-focused ethos: “What future for humanity, who will write our epilogue, who will our descendants give thanks to? Like the ancient redwoods that sang to Joseph Hortha, Allende is still speaking to the future. The unborn are listening, calling out, calling out as if they were ancestors, for the avenues full of trees, the alamedas of tomorrow, to open” (676). It echoes to me the future-thinking of Indigenous people, who try to consider the impact of their actions for the next seven generations. The book here subverts the idea of an epilogue: an epilogue is not a statement on where things end, but instead serves as a new prologue—a call to action for our collective survival.

This is a book that will stick with me for quite some time. After all, as Dorfman writes, “The last word has not yet been said” (676).