The Witch by Marie NDiaye

What an odd book this is. Marie NDiaye’s The Witch, translated by Jordan Stump, was shortlisted for this year’s International Booker Prize and despite its novella length (~130 pages), when I tried to summarize the plot to my partner it took me a solid 20 minutes. The Witch is partially a character study and partially a family drama focused on Lucie, a woman whose bloodline has the capacity for magic but whose talents are far inferior to those of her mother, her grandmother, and even her two daughters.

At the outset of the novel, we’re introduced to Lucie’s powers of divination—her ability to see into the past and into the future in a limited way, her visions accompanied by bloody tears. The novel begins with the completion of Lucie’s daughters’ training. Lucie has been training them in the basement and they’ve finally cried blood, a sure sign of their capabilities. I found the daughters to be particularly compelling figures. They’re oddly practical and detached, yet mischievous. At first, they don’t seem to make much use of their abilities, using their predictive powers merely to note that it’s raining tomorrow so they won’t be able to play basketball. As the novel progresses, they take on a more ominous quality—they transform into and out of being ravens and fly around, inspiring in their mother a certain pride but also fear of their inevitable departure, which they enact—transforming into ravens and flying away forever—when their Lucie tries to hold their hands in tandem).

In fact, a lot of the book revolves around generational disconnects and the tension between independence and collectivity. Witching serves as a kind of metaphor in that regard, being something that is passed down through generations of women. Lucie recognizes her own powers are relatively poor despite her mother’s powers being strong. Lucie’s mother tries to deny her powers, though, largely for the sake of her husband—Lucie does the same. NDiaye implies that it’s necessary for witches to be initiated into their skills before they turn thirteen, so there’s a kind of communion that must take place, but once the children are equipped with their skills, they have an alarming level of control over themselves and, potentially, others.

Indeed, the book feels disturbing precisely because of how disconnected everyone seems from one another. For example, Lucie has a neighbour, Isabelle, with a young son who is always on edge. Isabelle expresses a great deal of disdain for him and spends her time trying to get him into a private school in Paris so that she doesn’t have to deal with him. She alludes to leaving, pointing to the sky, and Lucie later sees Isabelle’s son on a school trip. Isabelle, meanwhile, has abandoned her son and husband, neither of whom seem happy—and indeed, Lucie sees the son in the future as a morose man. The book starts with a scene, too, where Lucie’s husband Pierrot brings home a guest from his timeshare-selling club (Pierrot’s job is to scam people into timeshares). It’s revealed that the man has abandoned his wife and child and that Pierrot has a strange reverence for him because he intends to, and does, do the same. Lucie’s mother is disconnected from her grandmother; Pierrot’s mother ultimately disowns her own daughter by the end of the novel, and that daughter ends a pregnancy. When Pierrot gets a new family, he keeps a smiling face while conversing with Lucie and simultaneously kicking his new partner’s children. Late in the book Lucie starts teaching and grows to resent her students, another form of generational disdain. There’s a motif throughout the book of people abandoning their families and hating children. It also seems to be that everyone remembers one another differently. Lucie continually expresses shock at how different people seem from when she last saw them and vice versa. There’s a feeling of disorientation that permeates the text.

One of the most marked disorientations is probably Pierrot’s sister. Lucie and her daughters Maud and Lise visit Pierrot’s mom and sister, the latter of which has become much more rotund and is heavily made up. It’s implied that she’s maybe selling sex, but it’s not confirmed—though she is pregnant. Maud and Lise want to have a fun night on the town with Lili and take her out. It’s implied they turn into ravens again. When they return the next morning they announce cheerily that there’s no more baby. It’s an ominous, compelling moment. It’s only in the closing pages of the book that we return to Lili. By the end, her mother has given up on her, thinking her daughter has gone insane. She keeps rambling about birds coming back to take her away or becoming a bird or some other kind of nonsense. She, too, is left with no one.

The book, for all its brevity, has a number of plot threads that are hard to summarize. If we follow the main character, the main points are that Pierrot has left her and the children behind. Lucie does not want him back, but discovers that he has taken 120, 000 francs that her father had given her. She tries to get the money back and discovers her husband’s whereabouts through divination; when she tracks him down he discovers he has a new partner, very religious, and three children. This, despite the fact that he wanted to eschew all conventions. He hated his wife, he hated his kids, he hated living in the suburbs, he hated his job, he hated conventions and patterns and he wanted out. When Lucie is unable to reclaim the money he stole (how does she think they’re living, the new woman wonders), she leaves. Meanwhile, she has a plan to ‘parent trap’ her parents. She can’t fathom how they were able to have a happy thirty years together and then part ways, now being separated for five years and with her mom having a new partner. So, she’s trying to convince her mom and dad to meet together for a cottage getaway she has arranged. Her mom insists it’s a terrible idea and warns of something very bad happening. Her dad says he’ll do it but he needs the 120, 000 francs back: turns out he was embezzling it from clients at his insurance agency and he’s sure he’ll get demoted but that he may be able to avoid arrest if he gives it back. Lucie does not tell him she doesn’t have it. The central threads are pretty compelling.

I’m left to wonder, though, about the idea of conventions and why the last act of the book gets so strange. NDiaye continually refers to the words on characters’ clothes, as if they are branded with slogans as placeholders for genuine experience. Pierrot rages against conventional bourgeois life. Maud and Lise are obsessed with TV, which Lucie aligns with premonition—she thinks perhaps her children are unimpressed with their divination powers because, thanks to television, nothing is surprising anymore. Lucie also reflects on the predictable secrets and disclosures of soap operas. We come into stories with expectations of how they can go.

The Witch does not follow such conventions.

In the last act, Lucie (re)encounters her neighbour Isabelle. It seems trite to ask who the real witch is, but Isabelle is certainly a contender. The dialogue between them feels ominous in its manipulation. Having been abandoned by her husband and her children, with her parents unlikely to reunite, Isabelle asks who still cares about Lucie and she would be hard pressed for an answer. She asks this under the guise of offering her a job at a new school she has started, funded by taxpayers: a school for Women’s Spiritual Health. To the reader, it feels like a deal with the devil, but Lucie accepts a position teaching divination to young women (Objective Knowledge of Past and Future for Self and Others). This, among other classes where teachers are continually depleted to their vampiric students, absorbing their energy. It’s another critique of bourgeois society where rich people take frivolous courses like Introduction to Therapeutic Colours, Advanced Knowledge of the Self, Progressive Discovery of the Unknown Muscle, and so on. Using her divination powers sap Lucie’s strength, and her students are perfectly content to have their pasts and futures told, so instead of actually teaching she just gives them the information they want (is this modern education with ChatGPT…?). In any case, she just gives fake information that is plausible enough.

There’s a really interesting moment in which Lucie reflects on her talents. She is teaching at a school where she sees everyone as frauds, “woo woo New Age” types. Being in that context, she doubts her own gifts: “I began to doubt that I’d ever possessed any gift other than fabrication, that the kind of power the women of my maternal family thought they enjoyed even existed” (116). She thinks about her gifts as mere superstition, and that the only thing it accomplished is that the women in her bloodline convinced themselves. She reflects that they convinced themselves so utterly “that we believed in what we thought we were seeing—of the truth of stories handed down by unhappy women, poor, downtrodden, naively cunning old women like my credulous ancestress, so passionate about divination, my mother’s mother” (116). She considers that her children did not turn into birds but instead hitchhiked or were arrested. She sees herself as “nothing more than a pathetic woman of a perfectly ordinary kind, abandoned, a fraud, like my fellow teachers, their faces worn down by drab torment, by mediocre calamity” (116). If we return to the idea of an individual against a collective, we see that she tries to pride herself on her unique talents but loses that sense of self by being among a community of people she cannot respect. She is absorbed into the same fraudulent existence as her counterparts, a parallel to her husband’s experience as a bourgeois salesman.

Here’s where the ending really takes an ironic turn that subverts our bourgeois expectations. The police show up and Isabelle placates them with respect to her educational institution, but sics them on Lucie. The students have accused her of—get this—not witchcraft. They accuse her of making things up and she is charged for being a charlatan and a fraud and taken to prison. It’s a great, darkly comic twist that where women have continually been tried for being witches, here we are with a witch being tried for not being a witch. All the same, the police won’t touch her, fearing that she is a witch, while charging her for not being one. The scene escalates, but I won’t spoil that part.

I will, however, spoil the culmination of her parents’ reunion. Skip this paragraph if you want to retain a sense of surprise. A common thread in International Booker Prize shortlisters this year is the idea of guilt and complicity. When Lucie tries to reunite her parents, her mom ultimately explains why their reunion is impossible and the explanation is fraught with emotional complexity. She explains as follows:

“She and my father had been married for twenty-five years without I-knew-what (her power, her gift) ever coming between them, both because my father was deeply skeptical and because she herself made very sure not to show any sign of it. She only worked marvels in secret. She did work them, yes, she couldn’t help herself, because she was enormously talented. But one evening, without in any way meaning to, my father caught her. Coming home earlier than usual, he spotted the tip of a serpent’s tail. She never doubted that she could easily make him forget that, so deep was his disbelief, and in any case he didn’t say anything, he didn’t shout, didn’t protest. He didn’t react at all. In truth, she had nothing to reproach him for. It was her, my mother, who, knowing that he’d seen what he wasn’t supposed to, felt her affection mutate as the days went by into a frenzied longing to destroy him. He had to be punished for letting himself see what he should have closed his eyes to, even if it wasn’t his fault. She would have done him some irreparable harm. She felt a need taking root in her, the need to punish him, crush him, destroy him, and there was no hope of quelling it. She didn’t hate him, no, but the enigmatic, powerful part of her that revealed itself only in solitude and darkness, that cold, imperious, violent part of her was at war with her usual goodwill toward my father. She would soon have used her genius to demolish him in some vile way. Realizing that, she left, she fled.” (87)

Like other International Booker Prize nominees, She Who Remains by Rene Karabash, On Earth As It Is Beneath by Ana Paula Maia, and The Director by Daniel Kehlmann, there’s this question of what makes someone guilty. There’s an ambiguity of who is at fault: the perpetrator or the witness, and the way in which the dynamic between them forever changes on the moment of recognition. There’s a complex ethics here that recalls Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee. The fact that she can’t forgive him for having seen her, for being recognized, is such a challenging and complex feeling to explore.

(Spoilers continue here). The way the storyline of the parents’ reunion plays out is such an odd and haunting one. Lucie’s mom’s new boyfriend comes to her to deliver a message. Her mom feigns being busy so as not to be seen. The message comes with a gift: a small can with a snail in it eating grass. That snail is her father. They went through with their reunion, but as promised Lucie’s mom has done something bad in transforming her ex into a snail, presumably forevermore. Lucie, meanwhile, hears from his insurance company that they are indeed pressing charges and he’ll be under arrest if he comes back. Then, when Lucie is arrested, she has her possessions taken away. When she’s released, her possessions are gone; she assumes her snaildad was tossed away and crushed under foot. A dark end for someone who tried so hard not to recognize magic. 

The ending of the novel is imbued with irony and sadness. Everyone feels disconnected. Everyone feels isolated. Even Pierrot, now expanding his new family with a new child, does not seem too thrilled about his new life, reverting to his dark visage once more.

NDiaye’s style is replete with complex sentences. Some of the clauses take readers on a full journey before revealing the central point. At the same time, the style feels direct and accessible. There’s a simplicity to the language, but a complexity to the expression. The sentences read like the magic visions of its central character: in some ways they are illuminating and vivid, in other ways sparse and oblique.

Despite the digital ink I’ve spilled on this review, The Witch perplexes me. I still don’t know how to feel about its strange tone and its unsettling dynamics. The characters feel cruel, cold, and distant, but I still feel for them—even and especially when they literally cease being human. The Witch is an uncomfortable read, and it’s difficult to navigate how our individualism puts us at odds across generations and how we abandon one another through our own pursuits. I’m sure there is much more to discuss here, but my augury is limited and I won’t be able to speak to all of the author’s intentions.

With that said, happy reading!

Dual Citizens by Alix Ohlin

  Dual Citizens by Alix Ohlin is a novel about two sisters caught between worlds—and replicates that experience for readers. The essential premise of the book is that sisters Lark and Robin (yes, really) have a tumultuous relationship with their mother Marianne, which drives Lark to study in the United States. Later, Robin follows and Lark acts as her substitute mother. Robin is a piano prodigy; Lark is a filmmaker. It does get more complicated than that, but those are the basics to keep in mind.

The novel has some moments that stand out as impactful, but I’ll return to those shortly.

First, I want to address two aspects of the book that I think don’t entirely work. For one, I can’t pinpoint whether it’s Lark’s voice or some other element, but the novel feels rather cold. I found it difficult to connect with the characters, particularly their mother Marianne. Lark offers very little sympathy to her mother and it’s hard to see past Lark’s narration and find the positives in Marianne for ourselves. The same applies for the other characters, too—it’s hard to tell whether they’re just unlikeable or whether Lark’s narration colours them so convincingly that they feel distant.

There are two elements in the dynamic between Lark and Marianne that I found edifying. Partway through the novel, Lark starts filming her mother for a one-on-one interview. The description of the filming sessions and Marianne’s openness show that brief glimmer into her that feels human. Later in the novel, Marianne has dementia and feels compelled to constantly clean. At the end of a tense interaction, Lark narrates, “She gave me a broom and together we swept away invisible dirt, wiped invisible cobwebs. Afterward we shared the pastries and drank the weak, cold tea she had made” (195). There’s something tender in that moment where both attend to an absence and have a shared vision of life that they generally don’t have. That tenderness seems to fade, though, when her mother passes. It lacks fanfare and even feeling, returning to a coldness that chills the novel.

The second issue is that I think the book lacks coherence. The focus of the novel is much harder to pinpoint than I implied in my opening paragraph. The book is a reasonably tight 272 pages in my edition, but it’s so jam-packed that it’s the longest short book I’ve read in a while. The first part reads like a bildungsroman of Lark setting out on her own and going to school. It’s Victorian-ish to start and we get a reasonably lengthy section of her learning about film and dating her first boy. Their relationship is annoying but well-developed; it felt like one of the more authentic and sincere elements of the book. Then there’s also a section about her horrible roommate, Robin arriving, and the roommate’s old cats dying while in the sisters’ care and the roommate’s reaction when she finds out. That, too, was a compelling moment that was reasonably rich in character development. From there, we get another lengthy section about Robin and Lark’s respective studies and dating lives; Robin becomes a piano prodigy that studies at Juilliard and then goes on to tour Europe before leaving her agent in the lurch and sending a postcard to Lark that reads “Don’t try to find me.” Meanwhile, Robin goes back to her studies in film, working on her own, and apprentice-editing for an established artsy filmmaker. The descriptions of the films, I found, were compelling. The images they inspired for me felt rich and I could imagine engaging in film analysis for films of that sort. Later, we see a fraught relationship between the filmmaker and his daughter and his daughter and Lark. The filmmaker and Lark start dating; they stop dating; Lark wants a child; Lark can’t have a child, and there’s lengthy discussion of it. There’s a section where Marianne becomes senile and is clearly in decline—again, there’s a great moment, but it doesn’t really go anywhere. The weirdest thing is that Robin essentially starts a wolf sanctuary and she has a barn where all the stalls house broken pianos—again it feels a little bit Victorian (I think about the wolves peppered throughout Wuthering Heights and the pianos in the barns feels like a Gothic secret). Of course Robin becomes a surrogate for Lark. Oh, and there’s a part about nursing a wolf back to health.

To me, the book is trying to tell too many stories at once. The parts just don’t seem to fit together and instead it feels like a piecemeal approach. To be generous to Ohlin, I’m going to accept that it’s intentionally structured to mirror Lark’s filmic experience. Film distorts time—like in a film, Dual Citizens allows us to jump across years. Like film, we jump cut between topics. Filmmakers splice and juxtapose. The filmmakers in the novel also have an intense focus; one of Lark’s mentors is an ardent feminist whose views are given voice through the characters, and the other has an intense focus on slice-of-life moments and holds an intense zoom. That also felt like Ohlin’s approach. Consider, for example, this description of Lark’s mentor’s film Potato, “which was released two years later, but not widely seen. It’s not hard to understand why. The film is slow, densely composed, exquisite. Every shot shows how he labored over it, and this is perhaps part of the problem: his fingerprints are on every frame, urging the view, Look how beautiful this is” (104). I would argue that the structure of this novel is similar: it is slow and densely composed. It is, in some ways, laborious to read with its intense focus. The passage describing the film continues, “It’s as if you’re not allowed to see anything for yourself” (104), which I think is how Lark’s narration makes me feel: we’re offered judgment and we have to follow her perspective on the other characters in the book. The passage continues as follows: 

The other problem (besides the title, which encouraged bad behaviour among writers, unable to restrain themselves from headlines like Spud Flick a Dud) is the film’s level of abstraction. The tight composition focuses on the threshers, the planters, the rolling escalators in which the trembling potatoes are fed into the gaping maw of the processor, the camera so close to the equipment that it becomes difficult to tell what the machines are doing. The whole experience is aestheticized, and for all the nearness, there is no intimacy. (104)

I think that the novel does very much the same, though not to the level of abstraction. Ohlin does, however, keep intense focus on particular moments and details. The amount of time dedicated to Lark’s first relationship: is it necessary? I’m not sure, but the novel seems unable to look away and, “for all the nearness, there is no intimacy” (104).

Similarly, Lark’s own approach to filmmaking (and indeed life), is that she “gathered tidbits—things I read, a picture that lingered, the memory of an afternoon in a movie theatre, the face of my sister as she laughed—and sometimes my head felt cluttered as an attic with them” (101). Dual Citizens embodies that piecemeal approach to storytelling. For Lark, “stitching a film together satisfied this collector’s itch perfectly, [her] magpie treasures woven and spackled into a nest” (101). The book is a series of moments, but loosely joined.

When the plot does have a “twist,” I feel like it was obvious. For instance, when Robin disappears from her European tour with the note not to find her, I immediately suspected it was an issue with an unplanned pregnancy. Probably a hundred and fifty to two hundred pages later my suspicions were confirmed and rather than it being a moment of shock and pathos, my reaction was more…”well, yeah.” I just hoped for something a little more cohesive and a little more surprising. The book trailed too far into the quotidian without offering the sorts of philosophical explorations of minutiae that I find so compelling in other similar works.

Overall, Dual Citizens had a few charms and a couple of moments that felt like highlights, but as a coherent project it felt a little flat and cold. Ohlin’s writing style is certainly descriptive enough and has flashes of inspiration that elevate its status in the literary world—but I was just hoping for something with a little more force, a little more complete.

Nonetheless, happy reading!

Ru by Kim Thúy

  Kim Thúy is a writer of beautiful books that work through a series of resonances. Each book is a series of connected sketches that read like prose poems. Being Thúy’s first book, Ru lays the foundation of Thúy’s special magic.

Ru is the story of a Vietnamese family whose lives are forever disrupted by war. The central character’s family has their home occupied by Communist soldiers and flee by boat through Malaysia, where they lived in a refugee camp, before moving on to Montreal. The novel recounts vignettes from their lives and the characters they meet along the way. The book hops between the present and different pasts, often in a free-associative Proustian way. For example, the narrator recounts going to a lotus pond in a suburb of Hanoi where “there were always two or three women with bent backs and trembling hands, sitting in a small round boat, using a stick to move across the water and drop leaves into open lotus blossoms” (40). Lovely description aside, the passage continues that “They would come back the next day to collect them one by one before the petals faded, after the captive tea leaves had absorbed the scent of the pistils during the night. They told me that every one of those tea leaves preserved the soul of the short-lived flowers” (40). The passage ends there, but the following page (chapter?) begins that “Photos could not preserve the soul of our first Christmas trees” (41). We jump from the past to the present around a concept: preservation of the soul. Visually, there’s enough of a contrast between a lotus and a Christmas tree, the latter of which whose “branches gathered in the woods of suburban Montreal, stuck in the rim of a spare tire covered with a white sheet, seem bare and lacking in magic, but in reality they were much prettier than the eight-foot-tall spruce trees we have nowadays” (41). I’m a little bit stunned by the way Thúy cleaves contrasting ideas together through a more metaphorical or conceptual connection. This is one example, but most of the text operates with this associational approach.

The character studies throughout the text are opportunities to form rich portraits while also offering philosophical insights into the human experience. Often, we hear about the behaviour of a character and the passage culminates with some reflection that sums up the core of the person. One agèd character passes away but “he hadn’t grown old before he died. He had stopped time by continuing to enjoy himself, to live until the end with the lightness of a young man” (59).Another character is particularly severe and “all the fun of childhood slipped between her fingers while, in the name of propriety, she was forbidding her sisters to dance” (62). These observations feel both particular and universal and hover on that horizon in a touching way.

The vignettes throughout the novel also stand out as cautionary tales or flash fictions that would fit in something like The One Thousand and One Nights. In one vignette, the narrator is in a cube van on the way to pick strawberries or beans and her mother tells her the story of another day labourer who would wait for her employer across the street every day. The narrator’s grandfather’s gardner would bring her a treat for breakfast every day and one morning he fails to appear. She keeps waiting and he keeps failing to appear. The story becomes a more tragic tale where the woman brings the narrator’s mother “a sheet of paper darkened with question marks, nothing else” (71) and then the mother never sees her again, “She disappeared not knowing that the gardener had asked his parents in vain for permission to marry her” (71). As it turns out, the grandfather had accepted the gardener’s parents’ request to send him away and “no one told [the day labourer] that the gardner, her own love, had been forced to go away, unable to leave her a letter because she was illiterate, because she was a young woman travelling in the company of men, because her skin had been burned too dark by the sun” (71). The vignette works as a standalone tale, but also picks up on some of the broader themes of displacement and loss that resonate throughout the text.

In another vignette, Thúy’s symbolism rings out. The narrator discusses Monsieur An, who was nearly executed. She talks about how “the days followed one another like the links of a chain—the first fastened around their necks, the last to the center of the earth” (86). The idea of links in a chain feels significant for the structure of the novel as a whole, but also Monsieur An “felt his chain getting shorter when the soldiers took him out of the ranks and made him kneel in the mud before the fleeting, frightened, empty gazes of his former colleagues, their bodies barely covered with rags and skin” (86). The idea of chains securing people in place and the impact of them being severed serves as an interesting juxtaposition to the unmoored freedom of refugees who have lost everything. The meaning of freedom, the significance of freedom, is uneven across similar characters. Monsieur An felt “the hot metal of the pistol” against his temple, and “in one last act of rebellion he raised his head to look at the sky” (86). In that desperation, he sees all the shades of blue in the sky equally intensely and experiences a Platonic dazzling “almost to the point of blindness” (87). Then, “at the same time, he could hear the click of the trigger drop into silence [...] That night, the shades of blue that he’d seen earlier filed past his eyes like a film being screened over and over” (87). After surviving, he feels that “the sky had cut his chain, had saved him, freed him, while some of the others were suffocated to death, dried up in containers without having a chance to count the blues of the sky” (87). The idea of the chain being severed gives him complete freedom but also gives him commitments: “every day, then, he set himself the task of listing those colours—for the others” (87).

The narrator takes away the message that Monsieur An “taught [her] about nuance” (88) and then jumps to another central figure in her life, Monsieur Minh, who “gave [her] the urge to write” (88). She describes how he took being a delivery man very serious and how “he was saved not by the sky but by writing” (88). She talks about the books he had written during his time at the re-education camp, “always on the one piece of paper he possessed, page by page, chapter by chapter, an unending story” (88). There’s a replacing of his senses through writing: “without writing, he wouldn’t have heard the snow melting or leaves growing or clouds sailing through the sky” (88). I like the idea of hearing the snow melting but “nor would he have seen the dead end of a thought, the remains of a star or the texture of a comma” (88). I love that phrase: “the texture of a comma.” It gives writing such a sensual dimension and that same character then recites words in his personal dictionary “like a mantra, like a march toward the voice” (88).

As the book comes to a close, Thúy reflects on the power of stories themselves. Running through the text there is reference to a pink bracelet and then it turns into a reflection on time and truth. It has been long lost and “absolutely no one will know the true story of the pink bracelet once the acrylic has decomposed into dust, once the years have accumulated in the thousands, in hundreds of strata, because after only thirty years I already recognize our old selves only through fragments, through scars, through glimmers of light” (139). In the final pages, then, she reflects on the thirty years of Vietnam rising like a phoenix from “its iron curtain.” It’s in the final pages where the artistic vision of the text is given a clear articulation:

“Alone as much as together, all those individuals from my past have shaken the grime off their backs in order to spread their wings with plumage of red and gold, before thrusting themselves sharply towards the great blue space, decorating my children’s sky, showing them that one horizon always hides another and it goes on like that to infinity, to the unspeakable beauty of renewal, to intangible rapture” (141).

The idea that the individuals are both alone and together is similar to the vignettes and the resonances between them throughout the novel. There’s also reference to vibrant colour and decorating “my children’s sky,” which recalls Monsieur An’s near-execution. There’s always another horizon, always another layer. The critical optimism of the text shines through, that there’s an “unspeakable beauty of renewal”, even if these memories are borne from wounds.

The final passage remarks on the legacies that feed into the book, into history, into truth: “it is true all the way to the possibility of this book, to the moment when my words glide across the curve of your lips, to the sheets of white paper that put up with my trail, or rather the trail of those who have walked before me, for me” (141). The narrator comments on moving “in the trace of their footsteps as in a waking dream where the scent of a newly blown poppy is no longer a perfume but a blossoming: where the deep red of a maple  leaf in autumn is no longer a colour but a grace; where a country is no longer a place but a lullaby” (141). I love the way Thúy allows for these near-synesthesiac supplantations and imbues colour with metaphysical significance. Laying out the philosophy after having so thoroughly demonstrated it closes the book beautifully, where the final line seems to speak for the whole book: “And also, where an outstretched hand is no longer a gesture but a moment of love, lasting until sleep, until waking, until everyday life” (141).

Happy reading!

The Private Lives of Trees by Alejandro Zambra

I’ve been on an Alejandro Zambra kick, and after reading his Chilean Poet a few weeks ago, I’m returning to one of his short fictions, The Private Lives of Trees, a one hundred page novella that explores similar themes to his other works: family, parenthood, time, memory, the act of writing.

The initial premise of the story is that Julián is at home with his stepdaughter Daniela waiting for his wife Verónica to come home from class. As he waits, he watches a soccer game from years earlier where he vaguely remembers the ending and reflects on the stories he tells Daniela where trees are central characters. He thinks about how he and Verónica met and he thinks about Daniela’s future when she will one day turn 30.

There’s a seeming omniscient eye that hovers over the tale, like in Samuel Beckett’s short stories or in Haruki Murakami’s After Dark. This writerly omniscience provides a passage early on in the texts that casts a shadow, perhaps the shadow of death, over the rest of the novel:

“But this is not a normal night, at least not yet. It’s still not completely certain that there will be a next day, since Verónica isn’t back yet from her drawing class. When she returns, the novel will end. But as long as she is gone, the book will continue. The book goes on until she returns, or until Julián is sure that she isn’t going to return. For now, Verónica is absent from the blue room, where Julián lulls the little girl to sleep with a story about the private lives of trees” (6).

The text’s premise rests on this out-of-text construction that knows when the novel will end. Like in other of Zambra’s works, the line between fiction and reality is fraught with odd divisions. Here, we are pitched the idea that either Verónica will return or she won’t—something that the narrator would presumably know about yet expresses doubt or ambivalence to the issue. Partway through the novel, Julián develops some hypotheses. In the first, his wife faces two blown tires and is walking down the highway in search of help in the middle of the night. In the second, his wife is underneath her teacher, entangled in an amorous tryst from which she’ll never return. No one version is given primacy.

Zambra then does something interesting with time and fiction. His central character presents some options of what will happen to his stepdaughter in the future. He leaps to her life in five year intervals, which are not impacted by the loss of her mother. Whether or not she returns, Daniela’s life plays out the same way with her at thirty reconnecting with her father and dating a man named Ernesto. Julián’s fictions then blur around temporally; she “will” be living a certain way, but then she is, and then she was, and the verb tenses get jumbled so that even astute readers are left uncertain regarding what happens or will happen in reality and what is part of her stepfather’s stories.

This blend of temporal shifts is something that gives Zambra’s work its subversive power. It continually pushes at its own boundaries. Even when it comes to the private lives of trees, the stories that Julián tells Daniela as bedtime stories, there’s also a part about him in real life getting a bonsai tree that serves as a symbol of his own writing process. He writes hundreds and hundreds of pages and then scales back, eventually curating 40 pages of a novel, possibly composed of other peoples’ voices as they pass the window. This selective process gives shape to his own manicured writing. Yet, it’s worth pointing out that Zambra has another short novel called Bonsai which retains enough parallel here to cast doubt on their self-sufficiency as texts à la Beckett or Paul Auster (who is specifically referenced and derided in this text).

Throughout the book, I couldn’t shake the metafictional note that it ends when Verónica comes home or when Julián stops believing that she will. In the final pages of the novel, we return to the present (rather than the fast-forward of Daniela’s possibly-fictional life) and Julián is taking Daniela to school and it seems her mother has still not returned home. Her English teacher bombards them and says how Daniela needs to step up her efforts. Julián goes on an anti-imperial rant to voice his distaste for English. The English teacher schedules a parent-teacher interview for the following week. The novel ends with Julián taking Daniela’s hand lovingly and saying that they’ll have to study English more. She agrees but says she has to get to class. Her stepdad gives her a kiss and then lets her go. The end. To me, that implies that that is the moment he realizes that Verónica is never going to come back. We’re left with that ominous feeling of her absence but at the same time consoled by his clear love for his stepdaughter, making it seem as if the mother’s disappearance is immaterial. It’s an unusual sort of end, a precariously happy ending that sustains an ongoing mystery.

The Private Lives of Trees demonstrates some of Zambra’s tenderness towards characters and stylistic charm. Perhaps Chilean Poet spoiled me—as I mentioned in my review for it, I consider it essentially perfect—but The Private Lives of Trees is a good novel that just doesn’t quite hit the same heights. It’s very good, and well worth the afternoon it will take you to read it, but Zambra is operating in the shadow of his own greatness and that is a demanding task for any author. It may be apocryphal, but Joseph Heller was apparently once asked how he felt that he had never written a book better than Catch-22, to which he responded that nobody had written a book better than Catch-22. I feel a bit of that same spirit operating here.

Happy reading!

Chilean Poet by Alejandro Zambra

There are times when the length of a review is a clear indicator of a reviewer’s feelings. I know from my own experience that my lengthiest reviews are the books I most adore or the books that inspire the most ire. This leaves me in an odd position for Alejandro Zambra’s Chilean Poet, a novel about which I took precisely zero notes but which I nonetheless see as essentially perfect.

Despite being published a mere four years ago (!), Chilean Poet already feels timeless, eternal, classic. It inspires a feeling I haven’t had towards contemporary novels very often, though Zadie Smith’s White Teeth comes to mind. I’m trying to identify why Zambra’s work feels like a classic already and I think it comes down to the fundamentals of novel writing just being done extremely well. Chilean Poet has a flexible, lively style that adapts itself to the purpose of scenes. The characters are all fleshed out beautifully and they feel authentic and relatable, even and especially in their flaws—at the core, they are all likable. The plot and structure provide the right balance of forward momentum whilst not abandoning the reflective interiority of the characters. There’s also something about the omniscience of the narrator that speaks to the timelessness of the tale.

It could be argued that the novel has three main characters: Gonzalo, Carla, and Vicente. Gonzalo and Carla are teenage lovers sneakily touching each other under a pancho who inevitably break up—partly because of Gonzalo’s love of poetry and Carla’s complete disinterest. Roughly six years later, the two reconnect and Gonzalo quickly and correctly deduces that Carla has a son, Vicente. The following six years are the flourishing of the trio’s domestic life, which is replete with the beauty of small moments and the quiet tragedies that undercut our bliss.

Zambra’s capacity for selection, for focus, is stunning. Each scene, even the quotidian, is critical. For instance, there’s a scene in which Gonzalo and Vicente are caught off guard by a clerk to name their bond. Awkwardly, they describe themselves as “friends” and then have a discussion about the connotations of the word step-father in different languages (stepfather in Spanish holds a diminutive). There’s a tragic moment where Carla miscarries and it sets off a sequence of events that feels (narratively satisfyingly) inevitable in the way only carefully constructed novels achieve. There’s a whole sequence in which Gonzalo reads his poems to Carla, who is unimpressed, and then plagiarizes poems from other poets, who impress her. He gets caught in a lie about publishing a book and he commits to the falsehood, which also forces him to withhold the information that destroys his relationship with Carla: he has been accepted into a PhD program in New York and it is time to leave.

Each of the characters are so distinctive and beautiful and true in all of their weird little details. Vicente, for instance, needs to be weaned off of his addiction to cat food when he’s six years old. The interiority of the characters makes them so rich and likable. Seeing their inner tensions is insightful about how people are while also being compelling in terms of the conflict. In the final movement of the book, Zambra reunites Gonzalo and Vicente after years of separation. The two discover a great deal of experiential overlap, both being passionate about poetry. In the final sequence, there’s a tension of whether the two will ultimately reconcile. There are some truly excellent lines of dialogue where they offer barbs alongside praise, and sometimes the comments are both praise and disparagement at the same time. Their fates are left ambiguous, and it feels so beautiful to see their own uncertainties emerge. The last page of the book, without ruining anything, is mischievously evasive, which gives readers a kind of uneasy optimism about their futures.

Gonzalo, Vicente, and Carla are my favourite characters. There is, however, a fourth main character—Pru. She’s an American journalist in her thirties that finds herself in Chile for a story following a messy breakup with her girlfriend. Her section gives more insight into Vicente, of course, but also she ends up on a story where she interviews all kinds of Chilean poets. Zambra has a real knack for being able to describe literary culture. Again, it’s riddled with tensions of people who like each other’s work but whose jealousy prevents them from open admiration and they pretend to read each other’s work to seem enlightened but also are trying to eschew everything in the name of a new generation of poetry. The whole culture of poetry is depicted as a bit of a farce and, like his character, it feels completely real.

I think it’s really hard to be funny in literature. Zambra, though, has great timing and great turns of phrase. There’s a playfulness to the text that gives it a light touch. The fact that the tone isn’t overly serious makes some of the dramatic moments hit that much harder. Who would have imagined that the simple act of rearranging a fridge magnet would have such a heartbreaking quality? (Incidentally, Zambra explores some translingual meditations, one of which is about how adjectives in Spanish are gendered—except for triste (sadness), implying that sadness knows no gender or bounds). 

Chilean Poet has some elements of the Künstlerroman tradition (novels that focus on the artistic development of its main character from their youth to adulthood). Think: James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or perhaps The Gift by Vladimir Nabokov. Throughout the book, we are treated to poems that the characters have written. Particularly in the final movement, the poems once again elevate the conflict and the insight into the characters. The commentary that runs alongside the poems and offers to the audience moments of such wonderful tenderness.

Against John Keats, I’d argue that beauty and truth are sometimes mutually exclusive. Not so here. The book is beautiful and true and touching. It’s gorgeous and sad and funny and moving. It had everything I would want from a genuine classic and offered, on top of that, surprise. I adored it. I hope at some point I’ll read this one again and feel the same magic and the same heartbreaking beauty the next time around.

Happy reading!