She Who Remains by Rene Karabash

  She Who Remains is a book of in-betweens and dualities that begins my journey into reading this year’s shortlist for the International Booker Prize and Rene Karabash touches on something interesting and special. For a book so short, it also offers a surprising number of twists that make it an emotional, enriching experience.

For the power of She Who Remains to land, it requires some cultural context. The book’s conflict is rooted in the Kanun of Lekё Dukagjini, which is a set of informal laws and traditions passed down orally with roots in Northern Albania, Kosovo, Macedonia, Serbia, Montenegro, Croatia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Among the practices of Kanun are blood feuds and blood taxes. One example relevant to She Who Remains is that when a woman gets married, her father makes a gift to her husband that includes, among other things, a single bullet—if, on their wedding night, the husband finds his wife to be impure, he uses that bullet to kill her. If you wrong another family, they may send a messenger to initiate a blood feud and they are allowed to kill someone from your family—a short stay of 24 hours, or a long stay of about a month, may be requested, but is rarely provided. After an indeterminate amount of time, you are then able to enact your own revenge. Absolutely critical to She Who Remains, though, is the concept of a “sworn virgin.” According to custom, pure women are able to take the oath to become a sworn virgin. After taking the oath, sworn virgins are then considered men and are afforded the privileges of men that women are not able to access. 

Rene Karabash’s novel explores these concepts structured like a structured collage of pieces. We start with a description of what a sworn virgin is and then Karabash provides a poem about a girl in her mother’s womb hearing her dad praying for a boy and the unborn girl strangling herself with her umbilical cord. The book then provides an excerpt from the Bible recounting Cain’s murder of Abel. Following that, the story ‘begins’ with a flashforward of a man being murdered: the narrator’s father. He is given a courteous greeting before he is shot and killed according to Kanun decrees. Then we flash back to Bejika, the narrator, giving her oath to become a sworn virgin and, by extension, to live as a man, Matija.

I wish there was a simple way to tell this story.

There’s not; it’s a layered, complex remix of moments. There’s a subtle frame narrative at play where Bejika is talking to a journalist (it’s later revealed that Bejika is the last living sworn virgin), but it’s subtle enough that we as audience get to be aligned with the journalist and we get brought along in the misinformation and misremembering of our unreliable narrator.

Karabash’s fragmentary style for the narration plays into some wonderful ambiguity. For instance, after Bejika undertakes the oath, the narration reads: “I exit the change and for the very first time I feel // I walk home” (19). Karabash builds up our expectation for her to express what she feels, but before we hear an actual emotion she cuts off, which makes it seem like it’s the first time she feels anything. There are also moments when it’s unclear who is speaking, aligning them in an interesting and unpredictable way—maybe implicating them together would be the better word choice here.

The plot of the book is finely wrought and elicited from me several gasps. There are phrases and scenes that repeat, and upon their repetition they recontextualize moments in surprising ways. In effect, it meant I got to have my heart broken more than once from the same moment. For example, it has been arranged that Bekija marry a man she is not interested in. She instead takes the sworn virgin oath to escape and it’s heartbreaking because it means that a blood feud will start: the man’s family will seek revenge for the betrothal betrayal. Bejika is given a black armband and she must choose who will wear it and become the target of the murder. Will she give it to her father or her brother? It’s a painful choice, especially because she chooses unexpectedly. She picks her younger brother, whom she’d spent so much time protecting.

The narrative poem at the start of the book, I assumed, was a standalone piece that accompanied the work thematically, but it also seems to parallel, literally, events in the book. Bejika seems to recall from the womb her dad talking about wanting a boy. Indeed, her mother was pregnant with twins but lost her would-be brother. Despite this sorrow for her parents, her father actually seems quite good to her and sees her as the favourite, even after her younger brother is miraculously born. He treats Bejika like a boy and allows her to do things that promote their special bond. When her brother Sále is born, though, there’s a tragic tension to their dynamic. Sále is presented as a tiny menace; we’re given a poem about him crushing walnuts with a rock, “he fills his mouth and leaves no room for another walnut / the walnuts have not yet ripened and they dye his hands black / their green skins shatter under the rock / green water sprays Sále’s legs / darkened his skin where the specks land” (35). He is initially presented as an impatient young man who refuses to wait for walnuts to ripen. There’s something vaguely ominous in the image of him crushing these so indiscriminately and darkening himself. This is also presented alongside the image of Murash (Bejika’s betrothed) popping his head over the fence, and the juxtaposition feels oddly resonant. The daughter Bejika is the golden son and Sále is never boyish enough to be their father’s boy. Bejika even tries to defend him. In one moment, she kills a rabbit and gives the credit to Sále. The boy is publicly praised publicly, briefly, before being horribly reprimanded in private. The unfairness of the family dynamically, tragic as it is, is wrought beautifully, but is all that more painful when Bejika selects her brother as the target for the blood tax her family owes.

But of course, the strength of She Who Remains is in its layering. What initially appears as a preference not to marry the man selected for her is imbued with new significance after the fact. Bejika recounts her rape prior to the wedding. She’s late in milking cows when a man enters:

“I can feel his breath on me, he’s drunk milk before he’s come here, the village whispers that at dusk he enters the goat barn and drinks milk straight from the goats’ teats, there’s other things they say about him but I don’t want to know, Kuka is now right next to me, he stands over me like a stone pillar, I’m a moth, nailed to a brick wall by the pins of his eyes, his eyes don’t glow in the dark because coals glow only when you’ve set them on fire, his eyes are black as though they’ve been gouged out, or the person behind them has been

Kuka, don’t, let go of me” (55).

I find the description powerful—not so much the metaphor of being a moth nailed to a brick wall, but more about is eyes not glowing because they’ve not been set on fire. You can also see what I mean about the dialogue. Without quotation marks, we can infer who is speaking (or maybe thinking). There’s also the critical comma after “don’t” that shows thoughtful craftsmanship over the sentence. It could easily transform into “don’t let go of me” without that comma, but I’m going to let that hang there for a moment. In recounting her rape, Bejika’s thoughts and dialogue are ambiguously presented:

“go play with the other boys on the hill, I saw them on my way here, they’re still
there, playing tipcat, I’ll go home and won’t tell anyone that you were here

I shouldn’t have said that, Kua’s strong arms encircle my waist and we plunge toward the copper milk buckets, we fall and the buckets clang like church bells, the milk buckets are our wedding buckets, my dress swims in pulp of milk and mud, the buckets ring to the beat of the rider, ding ding ding ding then faster ding ding ding ding.” (55)

What might have started in the imagination becomes real; she acknowledges that she said the piece about going to play with the other boys aloud and that it had consequences for her. There’s a haunting “ding ding ding ding” of the buckets, which echoes through the novel, and the scene transforms into one of marriage: “the milk buckets are our wedding buckets, my dress swims in pulp of milk and mud” (55). Evoking the wedding imbues the scene with a deeper, layered terror. You realize that not only has she been raped, but that this rape renders her ‘impure’ for her fiance, who, upon discovering that she is not a virgin, is equipped to kill her. Indeed, Bejika dreams that very scenario on the eve of her oath.

The scene is heartbreaking on multiple levels, and it becomes heartbreaking in a different way later in the book. Outside of the frame narrative, Bejika is receiving letters from her brother Sále. It’s clear from context that she has not replied to him (and only later is it revealed that she didn’t respond because she can’t read). Sále perpetually alludes to some deeper understanding, planting doubts in the reader as to the course of events.

Spoilers to follow.

The scene of the Bejika’s rape that prompted all this sorrow—her brother running away, her father’s murder, her living as a sworn virgin—in fact, is a story she has told the journalist. Sále’s letters allude to the unspoken truth of that night. At several moments, Bejika recounts a childhood friend with whom she read books but then lost contact. She and Dhana were close, so much so that whispers circulated around them—why are they reading books? Was she never taught to read? It’s revealed that those whispers were something more and that is what happened in the barn that night. Seemingly because of the suspicion, Dhana is being taken away and on the eve of her departure she meets Bejika in the barn. Bejika remembers the scene as follows:

“Dhana kisses my eyes, kisses my mouth, then she stops and buries her face in my hair, I’m leaving, I already know what this is, this is the end of the world, I still remember her salty kisses and the small hole in the wall I’d never seen before, when Dhana cried out loud, I’ll find you, the last of the daylight drained away from it, and the moment we left the dairy, eternal night would come for the both of us” (111).

Instead of being a scene of sorrow for the rape of a young girl, the story transforms with the new layer: it’s a story of a forbidden romance, an impossible love between two young girls. This recognition that it’s the end of their world, that this is their final meeting, is imbued with sorrow precisely because it is so close to joy. Throughout the scene and throughout the book, Bejika asks herself “am I dying or being born” and in this scene she asks “am I being born or am I being murdered in her arms” (111). Their love destroys them. For Bejika, this makes her impure; it is her death. Their love is the death of her father. When they part, Bejika touches “where the wet is” and it is wet with blood.

The revelation for the audience is sad, of course, but Karabash continues to layer the sadness. There’s the question of who is at fault in these circumstances. When Sále writes his letters, he alludes to the idea of forgiveness. We assume it is forgiveness for giving him the black armband, and that he is perhaps sorry for running away and leaving their dad to be killed. After Bejika narrates the real events in the dairy, Sále’s letter states that he “had the strong desire to hear the truth directly from you and for us to ask each other for forgiveness, but it seems I’m the one who has to ask for it first” (113). He says how he witnessed everything in the dairy: “You know how much I loved to follow you around, I even trailed you in secret sometimes” (113). He reveals that he peeked through a hole and watched and witnessed the whole thing. He bore witness. The two are bound together in guilt. 

That motif persists throughout the book. Later, it’s revealed that Dhana had written her a letter she couldn’t read. They reunite and the impossibility of their bond is, for a moment, overcome:

“Bekija, the woman who’s come off the bus cries out, the woman who’s headed to where my name means she who lives, she who remains alive, she who has saved herself, Bekija looks to the woman, then to the newborn calf, she cries, she smiles and she cries, the two cry and laugh together, Bekija gets up and goes to embrace the woman, the two stay holding each other for a long time, they say nothing, the calf finds its mother’s teat and begins to suckle noisily, a fly lands on its left ear, the cow keeps licking her child and it is precisely there, by this picture and in this moment that the two women feel immortality, they’ve discovered joy and in this joy there is love, and in the center of this love is the immeasurable, that, which is eternal, that, which cannot be called by name” (146).

This love transcends, but at what cost? Bejika has lived as a man for most of her life, her father was killed, her brother lost, and so on. It’s been a life of tragedy for her and in this moment, notably again centered around cows and the dairy, they “feel immortality.” Their reunion is undercut, still, by guilt. Dhana departs, leaving a letter behind. In that letter, she says, “It must be written for you and me to be eternally separated by something, and to shoulder the responsibility before God for every indirect murder we’ve committed” (137). The two feel more like star crossed lovers than Romeo and Juliet ever did, and recognizing that they’re both bound by their guilt is another tragic layer to the story, especially since the guilt originates from a system neither of them developed. Dhana comments on “that fairy-tale naivete where love exists outside of guilt and all else” (137). It’s a temporary reprieve from the eternal, “late at night and early in the morning, when the hands leave their clocks, and time is nothing but a detail, a blemish on the visage of a planet that, anytime [Dhana] gaze[s] into [Bejika’s] eyes, [she] makes [her] question whether it is even turning” (137). The letter goes on in a more sensual way recounting their reunion with a tender eroticism forever marred by their tragic pasts.

There’s yet another tragic element to the text revealed only when Bejika and Dhana reunite. Bejika develops a sudden sickness and needs to be hospitalized. It’s only then revealed that she’s lived another lie: when her mother bled out her twin, that wasn’t quite the truth. What happened was a fetus in fetu, where Bejika, as a baby, absorbed her other twin, but that twin continued to grow inside her. It’s a real thing, apparently, happening in one out of every 500, 000 sets of twins. There’s an irony here that undercuts Bejika’s own self-concept. For example, she always faulted herself for not being born a boy or strangling herself in the womb. Moreover, she converts to living as a man and lives most of her life as such, as though she was giving body to her lost twin. It also helps to account for the feeling she has that there’s someone inside her. She has always been dual and this symbolism gives voice to that.

I really loved this book. I felt it had so much to offer stylistically and emotionally. The concept is strong, the collaged and remixed structure enhances the novel’s power, and I thought it dealt with interesting themes in a complex way. It made me understand a little bit more about the world and pushed me to expand. I’m not sure what else I could ask for. So far, I think this is my frontrunner for my personal International Booker Prize readathon.

Happy reading!

On the Calculation of Volume III by Solvej Balle

        Well, it’s the 18th of November again—at the start of the book, for the 1144th time. On the Calculation of Volume III finds Tara Selter once again awaking on a day in which everyone—or nearly everyone—awakes with no memory that they’ve lived this day before. If you’ll recall from Volume II, Tara was traveling around chasing seasons around the world and the cliffhanger of Volume II is that it appears someone else is having the same experience.

That’s where Volume III opens: Tara Selter has met a man who also has agency within the apparent timeloop. This immediately sets Volume III apart; it’s an engaging progression of the story as Tara and Henry get to bounce theories off of each other. Tara, with a dedicated academic interest in Roman history (ha!), is auditing a University lecture and due to her cultivated observational powers, she notices a man—and he notices her— as someone who was not there the previous day. 

This entry feels more personal, knowing that the other character has shared experience. In previous volumes, there were some tender moments between her and her sister and her husband, but there was always a sense of futility knowing that they would reset. Here, we get more of a connection, a sigh of relief that Tara is no longer alone. What Balle does that is brilliant, though, is giving just a hint of unease in a moment of respite. Tara acknowledges that there’s “a promise of more conversations, but not only that” (32). She takes a moment to reflect that “there is something alarming about the thought of being bound to a random person. There is the certainty of having gained a travel companion, but also the sense of having been assigned some of the responsibility for their baggage” (32). Balle subverts the idea of an uncomplicated companionship and adds just that extra bit of tension to an apocalyptic scenario.

Still, they get along well enough, mostly—they tell each other about their first November 18ths. In Tara’s journal, she explains that “Henry insisted on recounting every last detail. He described the pattern and play of colors in the glass, or at least he tried, and I reciprocated with details of my own. So we sat there, each with our own hues, light, and sensations, attempting to throw them into a shared pool” (39). There’s a couple of noteworthy pieces here. First, is the idea of reciprocity and shared experience, but there’s a subtle contrast here with Tara’s experience. The two of them share their experiences, drawing specifically on the visible and tangible: “hues, light” and the “sensations.” Elsewhere in the book, though, Tara gets obsessed with sound. She hears sounds and sounds within sounds, listening for the subtle gradients of, for example, the screeching of a train track or a puddle splashing. It becomes clear they have different ways of navigating. They also have different experiences of time and Tara points out some of their contrasting views. Henry describes the eternal change of season between fall and winter and how “he had enjoyed walking around in all these dualities” (39). He describes “two discrete sets of hours” and being between worlds, “parallel realities” (39).Henry “felt at home when, every so often, sunlight fell through the windows of his apartment: brightly colored through the upper panes and almost pristinely clear through the lower” (39). He has a clear division within him. A world of straight lines. Tara’s life feels more like concentric circles.

Where it gets really interesting seeing their different perspectives about what is happening. Tara’s revisits some ideas explored in previous volumes, including the concern that she’s a monster devouring the world, or that she’s at the bottom of a Roman urn inside a larger Roman urn inside a larger Roman urn ad infinitum (apologies for the mixed Roman-Latin presentation). Tara and Henry get into a heated philosophical debate about history, which I adored. I’ll try not to cite the entire passage I wrote down, but Henry sets out the idea that history has been about men and typically doesn’t focus on women’s concerns.

But here’s the thing.

Tara is a historical materialist. She is interested in the practical, tangible details of history (she was researching the significance of wheat harvests for Ancient Romans, for instance). So, when Henry offers his perspective about history Tara reflects: “Did he think that history was the history of power and men? That it was about great battles and great decisions? That I wasn’t interested in history because it wasn’t about me? Or about some kind of women’s world, which was my world?” (51). Henry protests that that is a mischaracterization, “but still, he thought I must feel excluded from historical accounts since they had never been written by women, for women, or about women’s lives” (51). He qualifies a few exceptions “as if women were the last passengers hastily pulled aboard a departing train” (51). Tara argues that if he was right, “shouldn’t it follow that I would only be interested in women’s things? If I could only be interested in women’s history, then surely he must also believe that my interest was confined to women’s things. Did he really think my interest in things was limited to hairpins and pot lids?” (51). Henry rephrases and says that he understood and she says she doesn’t understand how he could understand—a little obstinately, she admits. She asks a question that reinforces the way material historical realities cut across gender divides: “What then was this world of women that should interest me? Was a ship from the Bronze Age found on the seabed off the coast of Turkey more his history than mine? Were a thousand pounds of copper and a hundred pounds of tin intended for ships and weapons and axes the real history, after which a few pounds could be spared for the women? For hairpins and a trivet for the stockpot?” (51). She continues with even more pointed questions:

“And when did something become women’s history, anyway? Was it only after the ship with its raw materials and metals docked at the harbor, once those metals had been transported and processed and finally fashioned into a hairpin that it became my history? Did the raw materials belong to men’s history? And was he trying to say that there were two histories: one with wars and laws, with ideas and political decisions, with grand exploits and weapons and transports by sea and axes and cutthroat razors, and another with hairpins and kitchen utensils, with childbirth and children’s tears, and perhaps a loom in the corner?” (51-52).

In addition to the critical considerations about history, I also appreciate that Tara is essentially reframing the conversation around the Ship of Theseus thought experiment. If we reconstruct a ship one piece at a time, at what point is it no longer the same ship? Tara connects it to the notion of history: at what point are things disconnected from one another? At one point does our interconnectedness fall apart?

Tara admits that she doesn’t know why she pressed the point so hard. She comments, though, that she felt like she and Henry were in a boat in the middle of nowhere and not knowing where they were going but that he suddenly was sawing their boat to pieces. She reinforces: “Our history was shared, I said. We have always split the work. Don’t tell me women didn’t take part in wars or that men never scrubbed floors. History is full of female spies and male housekeepers, I said” (52). She goes on to question how many times animals were caught in traps invented by women, and whether snares and knives are women’s history rather than men’s. “How much grain,” she asks, “did he think had been harvested by women? Should harvesting tools then be counted as men’s history?” (52) I’m lingering on this just because I find it so powerful and I suspect critical to Balle’s entire project. We’re dealing with time. We’re dealing with time not moving forward. We need to grapple with the implications of the progression or non-progression of time.

While I think this is a rich passage, I think probably my favourite reflection of Tara’s historical interests can be summarized in one phrase:

“I wasn’t interested in the outcome of the war but in the buttons on the soldier’s uniform” (49).

The book isn’t purely theoretical, of course—but it is slow moving. Between the first three volumes, we’re looking at 517 pages and the moments that could be classified as plot events are few and far between. Perhaps that’s why I found the midpoint of Volume III so startling. Tara has gone back home and lurks around her house like a ghost, not interfering with her husband’s routine as she did in the first book. As she gets more obsessed with sound, she hears a bang at the door and is alarmed: this is new. The audience feels the suspense rise as they realize that this is something new. She opens the door: “Her name was Olga Periti. She was not a bird. She was stuck in the eighteenth of November. She needed my help, she said. She spoke in English. She asked if I was Tara Selter and which language I preferred to speak” (105). It’s a gutpunch of a moment because not only has the number of people repeating November 18th increased by one, but it sparks so many more questions: How does she know this is Tara? How did she get her address? Why is she here?

The book progresses with an increasing cast of people who have found one another. Still no explanations for why they’re living the same day, but watching them seek each other out is a compelling turn. It gives the book a much more human quality where these oddball companions bump and clash with their visions for the ‘new world.’

Long story short, we build to a party of four partway through the novel and Tara outlines her experiences to them. She tells them about her husband and attempts to bring him into the 18th of November. She describes “sneaking up on the sounds and catching a smidgen of what is lost. About sounds that ceased to be empty shells once you got closer. A world that opened up” (125). She talks about her days becoming shapeless and the unravelling of her pattern: “soundless, unbounded, and utterly without shape” (125).

As the group grows, we have more positions to tend to. Olga had previously met Ralf, but the two separated after an argument about what they should be doing day-to-day. Tara goes about her days trying to cause as little harm as possible (her and Henry eat garbage because ‘good food’ does still disappear). Tara wants to leave “only the faintest traces” (127). Olga, however, wants to change the world in a more systemic sense, the specifics of which remain somewhat ambiguous. Olga’s friend Ralf, however, operates in a more localized sense. He wants to research every death, accident, trauma, and prevent them from happening—a task so totally massive that only people repeating the same day over and over would be able to achieve. Olga thinks this piecemeal approach is pointless, while Ralf suggests that acting locally is creating a new system. Ralf operates under the assumption that the day will, at some point, resume—neither Tara nor I are convinced. Olga objects to Ralf’s approach because “he was not solving the real issues. The structural ones. The fundamental  ones. The foundation itself” (128). Again, Balle offers a compelling several pages of philosophical debate between characters and then works towards one line that is representative of the entire debate: “Ralf thought Olga wanted to drain the sea of water. Olga asserted that Ralf wanted to correct commas” (128).

Ralf goes about saving people about to die in accidents and draws the rest of the group to the idea with a grand vision of developing a system of warnings. He literally gives a slideshow presentation, which has a touch of humour to it, making the entire project feel a bit like a timeshare. It sets us up (along with another twist at the end) for the fourth part of this 7-part series.

Balle’s writing is somewhat documentary in its style. Tara reports objectively, almost like a scientific journal. At the same time, her voice offers some rich detail. Despite what I said about her emphasis on sound rather than sight, there’s a great series of imagistic moments. When describing conceptions of time, for example, Tara reports that Olga sees time as “tectonic plates sliding beneath each other, different layers of time” (164). Tara, by contrast, sees time “more like the edges of lawns or like weeds, or hedges and flower beds and things that merge together or overshadow each other as they grow” (164). If we return to the moment that Tara and Henry compare their first days, she also presents Henry’s description with rich detail: “The trees were still orange, golden leaves lay scattered on the ground, but winter was in the air. A crispness. As if Autumn was inside things and winter filled the gaps between them” (39). Tara recounts the visual details he provides and then says, “I told him about the sounds of the city, the philosopher’s tooth, the shoes I had followed. [...] I had found myself following far too many sounds, and each time I got closer, I discovered other sounds within them. Behind the hiss of the coffee machine, there was a heavier, metallic noise. Behind the clattering of  the tram, there was a sliding sound, an additional screech you didn’t hear at first” (79). She goes on like that a little further and I find it such a rich way of thinking through the world. It’s as though Balle’s narrator becomes more perceptive and, in turn, the journal she’s writing becomes more lush and precise in its descriptions.

I think Balle is working on a very special project here and if On the Calculation of Volume III is any indication, I suspect that the series will become more engaging, more bizarre. More compelling.

See you next time for November 18th, presumably, November 18 #1893 next. Happy reading!

Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers' Rights by Molly Smith and Juno Mac

As you can likely infer from the title, we’re entering some difficult territory with Revolting Prostitutes by Molly Smith and Juno Mac. This is a nonfiction book that confronts the challenging discourse surrounding sex work wherein the authors recognize that it would likely be better for women if sex work did not exist at all, but, since it does, we are obligated to establish better practices for protecting those in the industry.

A foundational aspect of the text is defining sex work as work, in some ways like any other. People often make moral arguments against sex work and decry (especially, but not exclusively) women selling or “renting” their bodies for a fee. The argument starts to break down, though, when you try to explain the difference between a sex worker selling her body and the destruction any number of people subject their bodies to for work. Consider, more directly, a miner whose body is perpetually sore or, to take it further, an Uber driver who never sleeps and so subjects themself to any number of illnesses. Gig economy work notwithstanding, we have a number of protections for workers—so what is the difference? The line of reasoning is reflective of the authors’ approach. Not that their work isn’t data-driven, but Smith and Mac tend to wax more philosophical and offer reasoned arguments for the ethical treatment of sex workers. They remain consistently informative, if a little general, and probe into the paradoxes of the industry.

Particularly compelling to me is the way they break down sex work prevention laws and expose them for their injustice. For example, in an effort to eradicate sex work, several countries have decreed that there shalt be no brothels and have put in anti-trafficking measures. The problem, though, lies in the definitions of these practices. For instance, a brothel is defined as any place in which sex work takes place by more than one worker. What does not get factored in is whether the workers are there at the same time, whether they know each other, and so on. Smith and Mac give the example that two women engaged in sex work might rent an apartment together to save on rent and be around as backup in the case of unsafe situations. Even if they are not working at the same time, and even if they also live where they work, their apartment gets counted as a brothel. Similarly, if you ‘harbour’ anyone involved in sex work, depending on where you are, you might get classed as a sex trafficker—including if you have a friend or family member in your life that engages in sex work and happens to sleep over at your house. These laws effectively serve only to cut off sex workers from their communities and make sex work less safe.

Another measure that people have attempted is to criminalize not sex workers but their clients. While we’re all prepared to shame people for being in the industry, the reality is that there are people willing to buy sex. Smith and Mac are quick to point out, though, that sex workers need the money, while their clients do not need to buy sex—there is an unevenly distributed need. And, like abortion—making it illegal means it will still happen, just less safely. So, when clients are criminalized, it has a few effects; it decreases the amount of vetted, trusted clients. In turn, workers are more willing to accept riskier clients—clients more prone to violence or not paying or having STIs. 

Smith and Mac expose a number of hypocrisies that arise from not listening to the lived experiences of sex workers. Early on, they note that anti-prostitution organizations hire unpaid interns for months with no arrangements made for housing. These jobs, which could be paid, are nonetheless advertised as unpaid internships. The women most able to take on these roles are those who can afford to do unpaid work—that is, women in a position of privilege from where sex work is something to be abolished, not a pathway open to women who have suffered at the hands of national and global policies. Smith and Mac continually return to the notion that sex work is a product of circumstances imposed on desperate people—people who have been rendered illegal as they flee from circumstances beyond their control, and so forth. Particularly when it comes to trafficking, we could make a pretty circular venn diagram of people who oppose migration and those who oppose sex work. Well, in the case of trafficking, making everyone “illegal” paves the way for exploitative sex work of the people they claim in another breath that they want to protect.

Revolting Prostitutes is thus a difficult book to grapple with. It exists in a space of grey areas: prostitution is not ideal, yet needs to be protected. We want to reduce the necessity of sex work, but can’t criminalize it. We want to help people get out of the industry while recognizing that it is a viable income for some subset of the population. There are also, I imagine, far more sex workers in the world than you expect, especially if you broaden the definition beyond prostitution alone. This is not a book of easy answers, but is certainly a book of compassionate ones.

Happy reading!

The Bradshaw Variations by Rachel Cusk

        Perhaps I wasn’t in the best place for reading The Bradshaw Variations, but it feels like a rare miss from Rachel Cusk. Cusk’s second place and Kudos left me feeling enlightened, if depressed, and I thought the characters and scenes were so powerfully wrought. Turning to The Bradshaw Variations, I can appreciate its project of focusing on the minutiae of a banal life, but it felt like both too much and too little.

Cusk’s writing of the minutiae, I think I read somewhere, is offered as a challenge to the male writers who dwell in the banal. I’m thinking about my scathing review of John Updike’s Terrorist, wherein pages are spent on him fat shaming a woman trying to pick up the remote control from the floor. Cusk dwells in similar minutiae, though not nearly as abrasively and in a much more philosophical register. I can get behind the philosophy of elevating the everyday (it doesn’t all have to be grand narratives and epic quests!), but even so The Bradshaw Variations felt a little thin.

The central premise is that Tonie Swann takes on the English headship at her school and the increased demands of her job mean that Thomas, her husband, has to stay home and care for their young daughter. Cusk explores the ways that such a change can impact family dynamics. One of my favourite scenes in the text is when Tonie corrects Thomas when he talks about their daughter’s friend’s mother. When he has a more extended conversation with her, he notices all the details that Tonie got slightly wrong and has that little bit of relish at his vindication.

In fact, the characters in the book are all pretty petty. In another scene, there is an older couple who tend to a garden. The man is out working and the woman is out somewhere, long after she’d promised to return home. The man gets increasingly annoyed and then engages in self-denial as his revenge. When the woman returns and finds he never had his tea and biscuits, he tells her, “You said you’d be here. It seemed sensible to wait” (43). In fact, the narration tells us, “He is parched, and when he straightens up from stooping over the gravel he is slightly dizzy. She stands there with flushed cheeks, her mouth drooping at the corners. Sometimes he forgets that he and she are old, and then the sight of her reminds him” (43). When she insists on making the tea, he refuses: “I don’t want it now. I don’t like to have tea later than four. It spoils my supper” (43). They engage in a back-and-forth where she offers and her refuses and so on and so on. In the pettiness of the moment there’s a philosophical introspection:

He bends down again with his trowel. He can see her feet beside him on the gravel path, the ropes of blue veins, the calloused toes bunched in her sandals. He wonders what she will do. The air between them seems to tremble; the atmosphere is a dark bud straining to burst into flower. He wants its offering, of love or violence. He wants to be located in the maze of his own rigidity and offered something. That is the test, as it has always been. (43).

The image of a “dark bud straining to burst into flower” seems a perfect symbol for the moment. The ambiguity of “love or violence” being at the core of the bloom also encapsulates the tension of the moment and when she continues questioning him about why he didn’t have tea, “He does not reply. This is not what she ought to have said. It leaves him in the maze; it asks him to find his own way out” (43). I think it’s a great reflection of the way we hold certain expectations of others and how those expectations trap us to our own detriment. When the woman decides to have tea on her own,

He hears her crunch away. She is gone. He feels presence of a terrible void, advancing on him, coldly enveloping him. It is silence: Gus has turned his mower off. Later he hears her return through the dusk to where he still bends over the gravel, weeding. She places a cup of tea at his feet with two bourbon biscuits in the saucer, and then swiftly she is gone again. The biscuits are his favourite kind. He watches them out of the corner of his eye as he works; he meditates on them darkly. They have, he decides, been spoilt. He has been separated forever from their sweetness. He lets the tea go cold. When it grows dark he returns to the house and pours it down the sink, and places the biscuits back in their tin. (43-44).

I really like that moment. To me, it works as a standalone scene or a short story. It’s a scene that clearly expresses a particular kind of petty drama and the tensions of self-interest and relationship-building. It’s also a way of making use of the plethora of characters in the book in a way that feels self-contained and authentic.

One of my issues with the book is that I don’t really care about anybody other than the two main characters, and even then somewhat minimally. Thomas’ extended family is introduced; parents, brothers, sisters-in-law, and so on. Mostly, I had a hard time distinguishing who was who—they all get introduced essentially at once and there were very few actual events to build an understanding of their lives. I think part of the point of the book, actually, is that none of the characters are particularly likeable. Tonie comes across as cold and superior, with the added insult of having an affair that is never addressed. From a plot perspective, the awful secrets of the book don’t seem to matter much. The fact that there is a secret is the point itself. 

I’m not giving up on Cusk by any means—her more recent work has been some of the most captivating work I’ve read lately—but I will say, The Bradshaw Variations just didn’t “hit the same.”

Nonetheless, happy reading!

Critical Hits: Writers Playing Video Games by Robert J. Lennon and Carmen Maria Machado

  I’m going to try something new this year and keep my reviews a bit more brief. That’s going to be a challenge since Critical Hits: Writers Playing Video Games has such a rich offering of essays about many kinds of games and experiences. The essays address issues of race, class, disability, gender, sexuality, capitalism, militarism, mental health, grief, and so on. It’s a great range of topics, if skewing a little too positively towards the video game industry.

There is a ton to discuss, but I’ll try to give just a brief overview of the essays and highlight just a few of my favourite essays along the way, which evoked a sense of connection and shared nostalgia over games from the past and thoughtfulness towards issues in the present. 

Elissa Washuta, a Native author from the Cowlitz people of Washington State, writes about The Last Of Us in “I Struggled a Long Time with Surviving.” She offers an Indigenous reading of the ethics and apocalyptic framework of the game alongside a more personal narrative of her choice to be sterilized despite a long history of forced sterilization of Indigenous people in North America.

“This Kind of Animal” by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah sings the praises of Disco Elysium as a literary masterpiece, compelling me to play deeper into that detective RPG game with over a million lines of dialogue. There’s again a personal touch of trying to figure out his troubled relationship with his deceased father.

Max Delsohn’s “Thinking like the Knight” contrasts the lesbian idealism he savoured in Undertale with the more calculated and complex maneuvering of Hollow Knight, where every choice matters and which has taught him how to maneuver the world without taking a hit.

Keith S. Wilson offers the essay “Mule Milk,” which is a strange and engaging collage of thoughts about race, the environment, the existence of mules, slavery, pigeons, and Final Fantasy VI. It was a compelling case for reading race into the pixelated nostalgia of Final Fantasy VI. The central character, Terra, from one of my favourite Final Fantasy games ever, is presented as Black-coded and Keith reading his race into non-Black characters problematizes the industry while finding a beautiful, if troubled, identification in popular media. It’s a deeply thoughtful and somewhat oblique piece, perfect for academics.

“Staying with the Trouble” by Octavia Bright is a narrativization of discovering (and cheating through the age-barrier quiz of) Leisure Suit Larry on her uncle’s computer. It’s a compelling read and it speaks to a special time of Sierra adventure games while also that temptation of the illicit. Ultimately, Bright turns to the profound loneliness of the hypersexed game and the rules imposed on masculinity, eventually contrasting the game with Stray. It was excellent and poignant.

“Narnia Made of Pixels” by Charlie Jane Anders offers an overview of portal-fantasy films with a video game focus with some commentary on the way that game films reproduce capitalist logics of ownership of the system. It also touches on the possibilities for trans experience in such gaming worlds.

Jamil Jan Kochai’s essay “Cathartic Warfare” is an excellent reflection of being brown and seeing the slaughter of Afghan insurgents in Call of Duty. The essay is an excellent reflection of the militarism of games told from the perspective of someone who is depicted as the enemy and compelled to kill himself via the American army. I’ll be giving this one to my students for sure.

“The Cocoon” by Ander Monson is a thorough catalogue of all the Alien and Predator (and Alien Vs. Predator) games. The essay reads as a little excessive, offering full bullet points for all fifty (or more) games in the franchise but then leads to a discussion of connection with others. 

“Video Game Boss” is a brief autobiographical comic where Marinaomi depicts the misogyny of the game industry and weighing the pros and cons of leaving and the sense of responsibility towards women in general.

There’s a fascinating essay about white supremacy and the resurgence of Viking-based media, from Assassin’s Creed to Dragon Age: Inquisition, offered by Vanessa Villarreal’s “In the Shadow of the Wolf.” It’s challenging to summarize but it’s a very good grappling with how white supremacy draws on false histories of Vikings.

If you’re more interested in capitalism and the time-and-money-suck of mobile games, Tony Tulathimutte’s essay on Clash of Clans, “Clash Rules Everything Around Me.” It’s another excellent meditation on the value of time and consideration of what counts as a waste of time and waste of money. It’s an excellent discussion piece that I will also be giving my students.

“The Great Indoorsmen” by Eleanor Henderson is a touchingly personal essay about trying to buy a Playstation 5 for her sons and what gaming together means for connection, particularly with reference to teaching each other secrets in Super Mario Bros. There’s also a moment about “cheating” when creating a save state (rather than having to start all over), which I think would be a great concept to explore further.

“I Was a Transgender Supersoldier” by Nat Steele is a fascinating re-reading of Halo as a trans narrative. There’s also a great shout-out to Word Rescue for MS-DOS, and I loved that little slice of nostalgia. The narrative is compelling—what does it mean to embody a faceless character? I think this is another one that could enrich my students.

“Ninjas and Foxes” by Alexander Chee is an interesting reflection on Ninja Gaiden Black and Jade Empire, considering depictions of Asian culture. He comments on the way that Japanese made games depict Asian characters as more Western and problematizes that there seems to be more authentic Asian representation (Chinese, Indian, Japanese, etc.) in a Western-produced game and what it means for his personal identity.

“No Traces” by Stephen Sexton is about identification with a character when playing games alongside someone else. He talks about how he and his friend played Metal Gear Solid together and how key moments took place where he didn’t know whether he was playing or whether his friend was playing and how in some ways it does not matter. There’s also a narrative about his friend’s secret connection to the IRA and it felt cohesive.

“Status Effect” by Larissa Pham, at its core, is about being able to measure our pain. Referring to Genshin Impact as its core text, Pham thinks about buffs, debuffs, and status effects in RPG games. It’s an attempt to reconsider depression as a status effect that is measurable and can be remedied and managed.

“Ruined Ground” by J. Robert Lennon is an essay about Fallout 76, the pandemic, and familial connection. The most beautiful moment in the essay, though, almost crushing in its beauty and sorrow, is when the author is playing online and most people have their mics off. One couple is playing and accidentally left their mics on and Lennon reproduces the conversation they had; they were both sick and they were trying to figure out how to not go to work, but having to go to work. It is so powerfully human and so sad, especially in the context of the pandemic. 

The final essay in the collection, “We’re More Ghosts Than People” by Hanif Abdurraqib, is a complete knockout of an essay. It is part religious reflection, part grappling with grief, part about choices. It’s an essay about Red Dead Redemption 2 and consideration of the morality of the game. The central conceit of the essay is that while the author does not necessarily believe in heaven, he still has to believe in heaven for others and to try to help others. I identified a lot with the author’s desire to do good—I hate when games force me into ethically questionable positions. As an aside, in Grand Theft Auto 5, also produced by Rockstar Games, you are asked to kidnap an actor and then leave him in the way of a train to be killed to death, or you can let him out when he pleads for his life. I wanted to let him out, but you only get a “Trophy” for killing him. I find such moments really troubling. Abdurraqib’s essay ends with him, and Arthur Morgan of Read Dead Redemption 2, watching digital sunsets before either of them dies, refusing to finish the game a second time. It’s absolutely stunning and the perfect ending for the collection:

In my own orbits, in the center of trying to wrestle with my own goodness or badness was another option: complete stillness. I was most stagnant in my youth when I was trying to prevent myself from pursuing my lesser angels. My self-control is only a little better now, and so I do welcome the idling world, no matter how it comes and no matter how it might end up going. I find a type of salvation in holding patterns. Not one heaven, but many small, disparate ones. I sit on my couch for an hour without moving, and make a man sit at the edge of a cliff without moving, both of us watching a fake sky drown in color, both of us not yet sure when we’re going to die or how much time we have left. There are probably better ways to attempt the playing of God, but there are certainly far worse. (220)

Already, my ambitions to be more brief in my reviews have been thwarted. Hopefully the overview of the book entices you to read more. There were so many moving moments in the text, so much nostalgia and longing, so much hope and opportunity. It’s a profoundly human work for profoundly digital people.

Time to hit reset. Time to start again.