Death In Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh

        I’ve heard the hype around Ottessa Moshfegh for a few years as a new voice for the messy woman trope, hyped up in particular by both BookTok and my students but validated by some of my esteemed readerly friends. I was very kindly gifted Death in Her Hands as my introduction to her oeuvre. I’m told it’s her worst work, but even so I found it a really interesting project.

The book starts with a note: “Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn’t me. Here is her dead body.” A compelling opening. Ripe for an unfolding murder mystery. But instead Moshfegh draws from and subverts the mystery genre in equal measure to a really interesting effect.

The investigation reads more like a dream sequence that would feel at home in a Murakami novel—or more accurately, The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro, in which the central character is perpetually waylaid by half-formed plots and doubtful illusions. Each step of the journey—or in this case the investigation—seems to be interrupted before reaching completion, never quite circling back into coherence. A vital clue is found only to be interrupted by her dog going missing; the quest for a missing dog is interrupted by a fainting spell, and so on. From the first pages of the book I trained myself to expect irresolution—and that is the best mindset to go in with; I don’t expect anyone who wants a whodunnit will close this book with a sigh of satisfaction.

That’s because Death in Her Hands is largely a book of possibility. At the level of the word, of the sentence, events are framed in the conditional while perpetually denying resolution. Consider this passage as emblematic of what the book achieves; I’ll take the liberty of bolding the words that point towards equivocation:

If any of them knew Magda, if they cared about her, they hadn’t noticed she’d been gone. She hadn’t shown up for work. Maybe she’d gone out, with Blake, I supposed, and they had gotten in some trouble. [...] What nerve he had, leaving Magda’s body all alone. He must have been involved somehow. I wasn’t an expert in crime, but I knew this much: Black was a suspect. He had contact with Magda’s dead body. He knew something. It wasn’t me. His denial only made him seem scared and paranoid. And if I knew anything about paranoia, it was that it sprang from guilt and regret. Always. I’d seen it clear as day in Walter when we were having our troubles. “You’re crazy,” guilty people say. They try to dismiss your inquiries. “You’re paranoic,” Walter insisted. Guilty people will try to divert your attention. “Vee vere just talkink! I vas just helping her!” he said. Nobody will ever find her. Blake was guilty of something, whether of murder or neglect or stupidity, I didn’t know yet. If there were any actions to be taken, the first would be to find that boy. I had little to go on. But then again, the town was small. He was literate, that Blake. I knew that at least. And he had enough common sense to know if someone was alive or not. He must have felt Magda’s wrist or throat. I wondered how long he’d waited, wishing or not wishing for her heart to beat. (62)

Look at the language here: “if”s, “or”s, “maybe”s, and if we’re feeling generous the speculative “must have.” There’s a vagueness and hedging: “I wasn’t an expert,” “I didn’t know yet,” “I had little to go on,” or “then again.” The mist of uncertainty permeates the novel.

As the story progresses, the central character, 70 year old Vesta Gul becomes a detective, using the search engine Ask Jeeves (RIP) at the library to search for tips on solving murders and writing detective stories. It’s somewhat comic, this elderly woman playing detective, but there’s a surreal and metafictional quality to the work. For example, in the lengthy passage I quoted above, she notes that “paranoia [...] sprang from guilt and regret” (62). In this section, she’s alluding to her husband’s adultery, which is later shown to be quite extensive. His gaslighting seems to be a contributing factor to her paranoia. Elsewhere, she also discusses how he was so good at solving murder mysteries and said how obvious the solutions were if you knew the conventions—the culprit was always the person just west of center. With these details, I myself was sprung into a paranoiac mentality: is Vesta gaslighting us and she really knows who killed Magda. Is her husband himself the person just west of center, guilty of taking the life of one of his student devotees? 

The surrealism of the text is predominantly a result of Vesta’s strange relationship to narrative. Throughout the book, Vesta develops theories of who is involved in the mystery, developing a list of suspects from around town. She invents Blake, the young man who was trying to help the rebellious (but vulnerable) Magda. Magda ends up renting a room in Shirley’s house as a favour but Magda also works a job caring for an old man and maybe being romantically involved with his son and at least one other abusive man. It’s the kind of network of associations that would feel like Laura Palmer’s in Twin Peaks. The strange part, though, is that Vesta encounters these people as if they are real. In following Blake’s tracks, she finds a poem in William Blake’s poetry that has been underlined in a library book and then uses that to guide her. When a woman locks her car keys inside her car and asks Vesta for help, Vesta stumbles into the Shirley she invented. The creep at the gas station has the same name as the one she invented for one of her creeps. The coincidences abound, so much so that it can’t possibly be true. It’s as though Vesta enters in and out of the narrative she herself invented and it brings doubt as to whether any of this is real.

As a brief aside, I can’t help but notice that Vesta Gul continually corrects people on her name throughout the book. It is specifically not said as Vesta Gool but as Vesta Gul. Either way, it has an odd resonance with the word “vestibule” and I can’t help but feel that the central character of Death In Her Hands is in a similar kind of liminal space, both in- and out- of the stories she enters. When she’s filling in character sheets for the people in her mystery story (she was told she needs a list of suspects), she invents a “ghoul” for the story (again, oddly resonant with her name—implicating her, perhaps, in her own story). When she writes the name though, the ‘u’ and the ‘l’ blend together into a ghod combo and thereafter she names the unseen shadowy monster in the story as Ghod. Ghod exerts agency and chaos into her story—it’s only later that she encounters a police officer and equates Ghod with the law. 

The encounters Vesta has with other characters often reads as stilted and awkward, which adds to the atmospheric oddity of the text. For example, at one point, Vesta discovers that her car won’t start and when she calls a repairman she discovers her wires have been cut. The repairman suggests maybe she cut her own wires. The conversation orbits the possibility of repair before the repairman gets metaphysical. She asks, “can you fix it?” and he says, “It can’t be fixed. What you have here is irreparable damage. Don’t you know there is no life after death? You know this it, don’t you? You aren’t going anywhere” (198). It seems to me a leap that no real person would make at that moment. As they continue their conversation, Vesta suggests she’ll walk if she has to and he responds with the ominous, “All I can say is that when you walk into that forest, that forest is all you’ll see” (198). It’s the kind of aphoristic line that could be translated into the Twin Peaks red room. There’s an uncomfortable communion between Vesta and her townsfolk. Vesta approaches a house looking for her dog and stumbles upon a death party for a woman who is not seeking cancer treatment and has invited her friends to gather for a last hoorah. The two talk about being neighbors (everybody mentions that Vesta lives on “the old Girl Scout camp”) and they share memories. The woman says she went there when she was little and had intended to buy it. She refers to the ghost story that circulated about it. Vesta is incredulous: “‘Ghost story?’ I said. I tried to laugh, but it came out as a cackle” (207). The both of them seem to be ghosts themselves, in that liminal space between life and death. The woman says, “Ghod told us your name once. What was it again? He’ll be here later. We’ve cast him as the lead investigator with instructions to come dressed as Sherlock Holmes. But he’ll probably show up in his uniform, as always” (207). There are layers of fiction here: Vesta has invented the character Ghod, embodied him in the police officer, and now a new character is referring to him in the same way despite there being no way she would have that knowledge. Within this fiction, the woman is hosting a party in which everyone comes in disguise: a murder mystery party is its own fiction within the fiction.

There are several other motifs that play into this idea of guiding fictions. Early in the book we’re introduced to Pastor Jimmy, a man with a radio show offering religious guidance. Vesta listens to his fire and brimstone advice and internalizes his voice. She calls in to the show and struggles to express herself but Pastor Jimmy attempts some guidance; later, when she talks to the repairman later on, he reveals that Pastor Jimmy has been dead for years and that all the shows are reruns (198). Pastor Jimmy is presented as an illusion responsive to the inner workings of Vesta’s imagination. When her dog Charlie goes missing, Vesta considers enlisting (the maybe fictional) Shirley’s help and then the police’s help. From there, she imagines a whole scenario and uses it as justification for not following up. Again, the sentences switch to the conditional tense:

But I had no phone, and involving Shirley would only complicate things. I could imagine the kind of laughter I’d get if I called the police.
“Crazy old lady, the old Girl Scout, her dog went missing,” they’d say around the station.
“Wonder where he went.”
“Dumb old mutt.”
“Probably ran away. Who’d want to stick around with that old hag, that monster, that witch? Hansel and Gretel, is that the story? The crazy old hag who lived alone in the woods? Or am I thinking of Goldilocks? Whatever it is, she’s a bitch, that’s for sure.”
Brutes, those cops were, talking about me that way. Didn’t they know I’d been the wife of a scientist? Didn’t they know I’d worn the most elegant silk blend dresses, gone to dinners at the university? The wife of a state senator had complimented me on my hairdo. They’d printed my picture in the paper a few times. I’d sung in a chorus at college. I’d studied Japanese calligraphy. (187)

Vesta imagines what they would say. Even when she imagines what they say, even in her imagination they’re uncertain: the dog “probably” ran away. The way Vesta imagines herself in the eyes of others is pretty critical. She characterizes herself as the monster of a fairy tale before trying to counteract it with who she actually was. Also worth noting, though, is how often these assessments are all phrased as questions.

In fact, one of the novel’s key questions is that of identity. Who is Vesta? Who is Magda? Are any of these people actually people? Early in the text, Vesta narrates that “It was important to keep an open mind. I could be anybody” (17). She’s referring to the note she found, but there’s a doubling here. She continues to say that “there was something to be gleaned from the serious and youthful ballpoint pen, the precise print, the strange nonadmission, the nobodyness of I. Blank.” (17). She corrects people on her name “to avoid confusion.” There’s a motif of names and their implications—even her dog is named Charlie so that “when we were feeling regal, [she]’d call him Charles” (17). 

A key aspect of the book is Vesta’s relationship with her dog. Her dog is somewhat emblematic of her own experiences. One day her dog Charlie brings her a dead bird. Despite an apparent disjointedness, there’s a clear parallel here. Death is brought to Vesta in the form of a note, but also in the form of a bird. Death is dropped at her feet: “That morning with the meadowlark was, perhaps, a significant day for Charlie. He discovered his innate purpose, some instinct kicked in. But what could I possibly want with that dead bird? I hadn’t shot it down, nobody had. It was an odd thing to feel impelled to retrieve. Such are instincts. They aren’t always reasonable, and often they lead us down dangerous paths” (15). Vesta and Charlie are aligned through a compulsion to retrieve a dead thing. She recognizes the danger for Charlie, but ignores the danger for herself. She doesn’t seem to recognize her own compulsion even in the same moment: “I kept my eyes on the path on the walk home, one hand holding Charlie’s leash, the other tucked inside my coat, grasping the note, to keep it safe, I told myself” (15). She also reflects on Charlie’s origin. She explains how Charlie was discovered two months ago in black duffel bag on the riverbank and how he was the only one of the litter that survived. She narrates, “I spent a minute piecing that together” (17). Vesta stitches reality into place. “From then on,” she says, “I pictured myself as the one who had come upon the black duffel in the mud, under the bridge where the river thins, and that I had unzipped the bag to find a huddled swarm of heady, raisin-coloured pups, only one of them breathing, and that one was mine” (17). She recreates the moment, a revisionist moment where she can reforge her relationship with Charlie and with her sense of self.

If I were to sum up the book’s core motifs, it’s about identity, imagination, paranoia, death, storytelling, and so on. In one moment, Vesta loads Charlie into the car and decides not to go lock her cabin door: “No, I wouldn’t. There was nobody lurking out there in the woods, I told myself. Suspicion invites danger, doesn’t it?” (48). Vesta recognizes that suspicion invites danger—but can’t help herself but feel that suspicion everywhere she goes. She brings danger to herself while recognizing that if you “keep the imagination soft and happy, [...] only good things will come” (48). If this mystery is all a matter of perspective, Vesta might project a better outcome with a shift in her mindset. In that passage, she proceeds to list all the dead things out in the woods, starting with Magda and then working towards mice and rabbits that are never found and none of them were ever buried. “What’s so wrong about that?” she asks herself, “Nothing. God’s green Earth, I told myself” (48). There’s a strange distancing taking place where Vesta tries to downplay the death of a human being. Yet, she returns. She obsesses. She tries to find a solution that will bring coherence to this death.

Death In Her Hands is a dream sequence—perhaps more accurately described as a nightmare—where dream logic guides us through a series of detours. It creates an atmosphere of suspension and paranoia where not even Vesta is above suspicion. It’s worth noting that her beloved dog becomes terrified of her after it returns from being missing. The line between the imagined and the real blurs, leading to an irresolution that would not satisfy many readers, though it worked for me. The novel reads as almost an anti-mystery. The note points to a body, but ultimately we’re left without corpus delicti. As much as Vesta follows the rules, the clues never add up. So here we are. Adrift.

Happy reading!

On Earth As It Is Beneath by Ana Paula Maia

        File On Earth as It Is Beneath under “intense short novels.” Nominated for the International Booker Prize 2026, Ana Paula Maia and translator Padma Viswanathan present the bleak final days of a penal colony isolated from the rest of the world and seemingly forgotten completely. At the opening of the novel, the remaining prisoners can be counted essentially on one hand and as the novel progresses we learn more about the root cause of their dwindling numbers: the warden of the penal colony, a Colonel Kurtz type named Melquíades who hunts prisoners for sport under the guise of giving them the “opportunity” to escape. The colony is beyond all hope and even Melquíades and the remaining guard, Taborda, know it.

        The backdrop of the novel is that the inspector will soon be paying a visit—and several of the colony’s residents see it as a portent of their doom: how could his inspection lead to anything but? The paranoiac atmosphere of the novel is finely wrought, partially because we see each of the residents in isolation and in communion with one another. Bronco Gil, arguably the main character, has plans of escape and advertises those to a trustworthy fellow inmate who later drugs him to disrupt the plan. When Melquíades goes missing, Taborda holes up in a tower with a gun, fearing an uprising from the remaining three prisoners. None of the prisoners can leave the compound, knowing that their ankle monitors double as bombs that will detonate once they reach a certain distance. It’s an oppressive atmosphere rendered all the more ominous as the prisoners dig graves for their fallen comrades—only to find more graves, unspeakable horrors held within boxes mistaken for treasure chests.

        Bronco Gil reflects on his escape plan and he remembers that they had been preparing soil for planting: “The harsh sun burned his brown skin as, with quiet concentration, he dug like someone searching for a secret” (45). Maia then describes in rich detail him finding a human skull and eventually the whole skeleton, bound at the wrists and ankles. He continually discovered more bounds buried in this way: skeletons “of the enslaved, who had lived and died here” (45). The existential reflection kicks in: “Bronco wondered who knew what had happened inside these walls. He understood that he hadn’t been sent here to serve out his sentence but rather to be executed” (45). The ominous grounds reflects Melquíades’ “hunting prisoners, applying what he called his socio-educational measures” (45). Maia’s characterization of the central villain is compelling; Taborda explains that his boss “had gone crazy in recent months, between confinement, isolation and having to live alongside the evil inside every man in this place” (45). So much of the tension in the early section of the book is the knowledge that “Melquíades will never let anyone leave, not even Taborda, and, in the end, he’ll take his own life too. He could never live in society again; he’s eaten away by the system he defends” (45). It’s reminiscent of some of literature’s most unhinged villains—Cormac McCarthy’s Anton Chigurh or, as I mentioned, Colonel Kurtz from Heart of Darkness. There’s also a layer to it that implies a historical trauma. There is a lot of speculation about the land, but it’s implied that it was the site of mass disappearance and murder, a place of enslavement, torture, and killing. It’s like a haunted house narrative, a story of demonic possession at the hands of history. Given the South American flare of the story, it also feels like an allusive commentary on their difficult histories.

        The interaction between the characters drives the tension, and Maia’s experience as a screenwriter really shines through. For example, we’re given the backstory for how Bronco Gil arrived in prison. Serving as a naive hitman-for-hire, he’s paid to get revenge on a man who killed a woman’s loved one. Ironically, she coaxes two thousand dollars from the man to help care for her sick child—which she then uses to pay for the hit on him. Clean. When Bronco Gil arrives to kill him, there’s a quiet moment where the man asks if he can feed his cats first, which Bronco Gil allows. They then end up in conversation about why the man is being killed, who paid for it, and so on. The tension of the scene is excellent.

        Later in the novel, the inspector Heitor does arrive but Taborda is the one providing the tour. Heitor is asking questions about the colony’s operation that Taborda and the inmates are answering evasively. It’s an interesting moment where the dynamic of the novel shifts: no longer is Taborda a functionary for Melquíades; no longer is Taborda a paranoiac hiding in a tower from the prisoners—Taborda and the inmates form a strange allegiance to one another, covering up for one another’s failings in the hope of making their way through the inspection. It’s comic—nearly a Weekend at Bernie’s type farce—but equally tense. Heitor is asking where Melquíades has gone (“oh, he sent his resignation but the mail must never have gotten there…”), why the colony has dropped from over forty prisoners to under five (“well, there was the outbreak…”), well where were the sick sent (“Melquíades is the only one who had the records, but he sent them to various hospitals…”). On Earth As It Is Beneath shows how easily farce can tip into suspense.

        Taborda’s mental well-being, like the other characters, decays when strained. Early in the book, the prisoners are burying one of their fallen comrades; they come across a box that has horrors within it that make them physically sick and it is largely left as a mystery for the audience what has made this more horrible than their other daily experiences. When Taborda is forced to give Heitor a tour of the colony, Taborda gives up the ruse and reveals that baby skeletons are buried all throughout the colony’s land—that the horror existed long before them and has continued to descend into madness. When Heitor returns to the kitchen, the cook Valdênio prepares the inspector a coffee. Heitor promises the old man that he’ll get them out of prison by the end of the day, but he wants to know the mysterious identity of the prisoner they’re keeping in solitary confinement. When Valdênio reveals that it’s Melquíades, Heitor is astonished. “Why didn’t you all tell who he was?” Heitor asks, and Valdênio responds, “Because we wanted to kill him and spare you” (88). The moment is tense—and by coincidence that statement ends the page. For a moment, it seems like they might kill the inspector, too, to save their skins and not reveal the truth. I’ll leave you to sit in that suspense.

        For such a short novel, it’s action-packed and the twists were superb. Maia outlines Melquíades’ ritual of hunting prisoners. He’ll unclip them both from their bomb anklets and give them thirty seconds to run, after which he hunts them down and murders them. Nobody has ever escaped—hence why Bronco Gil has developed a whole plan about killing Melquíades, stealing his jeep, cutting off his own foot, and driving as far as he can. At one point, though, Melquíades sets two prisoners free and one legitimately escapes. When Melquíades tracks him down, the prisoner is able to knock him out. Later, in a jaw-dropping moment, Melquíades returns to camp dressed in a prisoner’s uniform. The tension of not knowing what he’ll do is expertly delivered; we’ve seen Melquíades act erratically—murderously—and so to see him stumble back into the prison creates an excellent sense of terror, which is undercut by irony.

        In fact, the whole book is fueled with irony. I’ll be spoiling the ending in this paragraph, so feel free to jump ahead. The irony of the ending feels allegorical in nature. Bronco Gil escapes with Valdênio and as they reach the limits of the compound, Valdênio chooses to leave first—he’s old, there’s nothing left for him, etc. He doesn’t explode. The bombs on their ankle monitors were a lie and they might have escaped at any time. In addition to that irony, Bronco Gil is picked up as a hitchhiker and offered a job. The man offering him the job knows full well he was a criminal sent to this Kafka-esque prison (the prisoners are never told why they, of all criminals, were selected for this particular placement.) The man sees Bronco Gil’s ability to survive and escape as an asset, ignoring his criminal past—he will be an asset at the slaughterhouse (a slaughterhouse of all things—think of the parallels!). The man reveals that everyone knows the prison is a horrific place and that nobody ever leaves that hell. Everyone knows that convicts go in and never come out, but nobody seems to really question it or know the specifics. There’s meaning here well worth discussing; I’d love to teach this book to see what people come up with.

        Similarly, Maia has a great sense of imagery and symbolism. The description of the setting is delivered with rich detail and there’s a bit of symbolism that would fit right in with Lord of the Flies: Melquíades collects boar heads that Bronco Gil has killed for him and has them taxidermied—but there are no suitable eyes to be found anywhere (nobody is able to boar witness…with apologies to the concept of language). Melquíades reflects, “It’ll take me a while to get used to those eyes being empty, but apart from that, it’s perfect” (22). The fact that he, too, is a lifeless, soulless entity might reveal some of his own affinities—and fear of—the eyeless boar.

        On Earth As It Is Beneath is a really compelling narrative. The plot and tension drives the work, but it’s elevated beyond an action-thriller by Maia’s deft hand with imagery, symbolism, characterization, and philosophy. There’s enough secrecy and paranoia in the book to compel readers onward and the interactions between the characters really build the suspense that takes the comic and returns it with a rictus visage. It was a great experience—and easily readable within a day for an added bonus.

        Happy reading!

I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman

           It isn’t every day that I read a book based on the BookTok hype, but I found myself intrigued by Jacqueline Harpman’s I Who Have Never Known Men. The hype is a little strange, given that the book was originally published thirty years ago. I suppose the renewed traction is the result of its new 2022 translation by Sophie Macintosh. It also turned out to be part of a pattern in my reading for 2025—novels about women in isolated situations.

I Who Have Never Known Men is a post-apocalyptic novel that offers more questions than answers. The novel’s protagonist is the youngest girl in a group of women who’ve been imprisoned in an underground bunker, continually surveilled by men with whips. The women were previously unknown to each other, don’t know how they got there, don’t know why they’re being monitored. It’s a world shrouded in mystery—and it might not even be our world; it’s heavily implied that they’re on a different planet entirely, which is a fun twist.

Our protagonist knows nothing of how the world was before and so is doubly othered. Like the other women, she can’t explain why things are the way they are. Unlike other women, she has no point of comparison. The conspiratorial nature of the book is presented early on and its ambiguity is one of the highlights of the text. In conversation with other women, the narrator is told, “No one has the slightest idea what’s behind all this. There isn’t the slightest clue. They rounded up the adults—you’re almost certainly here by accident. At first—well, not really at first, because there’s a period that remains hazy in everybody’s minds—but after that, from the time when our memories became clearer, we know we used to think all the time” (25). The mystery goes on: the men could have killed all the women or taken them away elsewhere, but the men don’t kill them. The interlocutor says, “your arrival would have brought news, and the one thing we are certain of is that they don’t want us to know anything. We came to the conclusion that they left you here because any decision can be analysed, and that their lack of decision indicated the only thing they wanted us to know, which is that we must know nothing” (25). There’s a perversity in the captors’ logic. Their calculated ambiguity disrupts all comprehension.

There’s a kind of relationship between knowledge and desire that emerges in the early chapters of the book. Following the conversation above, the protagonist notes that she “experienced a mild light-headedness which was rather pleasant. It reminded me vaguely of the eruption and I promised myself I’d see if I could work it into one of my stories” (25). She notes how “never had any of the women spoken to [her] at such length” and she “sensed that she’d passed on to me everything she knew” (25). There’s a kind of titillation in knowing things, in having secrets revealed. When she refers to “the eruption,” she alludes to a kind of early adolescent fantasy about one of the guards, a figure of knowledge-power (how Foucault!). That fantasy itself, also rendered ambiguous, is pretty twisted. It’s somewhere around Stockholm Syndrome but without the language to even describe her experience.

When the protagonist senses the importance of secrets, she dabbles in formulating her own. In her experiments, she reflects:

Andrea, who was the brightest of the women, immediately grasped that it wasn’t the actual content of the secret that mattered, but the fact that while living under the continual scrutiny of other women, it was possible to claim to have a secret and be believed. This seemed too complicated for the women to understand and they dismissed Anthea with a gesture of annoyance, demanding that the secret be prised from me. (18)

What I appreciate about Harpman’s approach is that she sets up early that the structure of the secret is what matters, not the content. The rest of the book breeds that paranoiac thinking. The key plot points in the book are secrets. Partway through the novel, the women all escape the bunker. With no explanation, the men are gone, the doors are open, and the women are free to go. They then wander what may or may not be Earth, unsure of whether they’ll ever find another refuge. The group does eventually find equally inexplicable bunkers: bunkers where the women have all died without being released, but then there are also bunkers of men, so the potential explanations fall apart. Later, the protagonist comes across a bus of deceased guards wearing gas masks and things—again, with no explanation offered. The secret prevails.

I forgot to mark off the passage, but there’s even a part about how questions keep her going. After questions, there are new questions, and those questions give us purpose. It’s interesting how Harpman brings together the idea of secrecy, desire, power, and purpose.

The other element that was most compelling to me philosophically was the idea of time. The narrator essentially invents time from scratch. She starts to measure her heartbeat, counting the regular rhythm of its beats. She then extrapolates to count minutes and hours. I have to say, it’s pretty unbelievable to think she would actually be able to keep track of time while doing other things. If I suspend my disbelief entirely, what I think is more interesting is that the earliest experiences the narrator tells us about are related to desire, secrecy, and then time, the lattermost being the one that starts to give meaning to experiences. Time is converted into a weapon—if she can measure time, she can plot against the guards. I find that a really engaging way of thinking through the fundamentals of being human.

Admittedly, it’s been several months since I actually read this book and I’m trying to catch up on my reviews now, but I did find there were several moving sequences. The book spans decades. As the women get older, the central character takes on the role of euthanizing them. Rather than succumbing to illness or disease, the main character stabs them through the heart, not having particular hang-ups about suicide (for example). It’s heartbreaking to watch as the women die one after the other. The relationships are ambiguously romantic and it’s painful to see the narrator lose the woman closest to her and to be left alone forever.

Overall, I’d say I quite enjoyed the book. Given how much the characters focus on what happened, I would have expected there to be answers, but that’s not how the world works. There’s a heartfulness to the book, even if the narrator sometimes comes across as cold. The plot is mysterious and its ambiguity is compelling. It’s a philosophic meditation that is as frustrating as it is moving. A lot of people really hyped this up as being a perfect book; I’m not sure that’s quite true, but I did like it. It’s worth the read.

Happy reading!

Kairos by Jennny

        The first page of International Booker Prize winner Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck is excellent. In dialogue without quotation marks or attribution, someone asks, “Will you come to my funeral?” It’s a great opening line, and the interlocutor resists answering directly but he wears her down and she responds, “Sure [...] I’ll come to your funeral” (5). Four months later, on her birthday, she gets news of his death. She doesn’t go to his funeral. Instead, she puts together a series of musical selections and listens in private. 

It’s a fantastic opening, but my view of the novel overall is much more conflicted, more challenging to articulate. Here’s the premise: at the start of the novel, Katharina is a nineteen year old girl who has a chance encounter with a much older man (older even than her father) and it leads to a fast and furious romance—ick! What is presented as rose-tinted romance glosses over a seriously concerning relationship, even when it’s at its best. When it is at its worst, well, it’s even more explicitly egregious. Hans is an exacting partner with BDSM proclivities and a domineering attitude. At one point, Katharina sleeps with a more age-appropriate partner and when Hans discovers the truth, he becomes incensed, paranoid, obsessive. He abuses her verbally and physically, he “celebrates” anniversaries of her betrayal, accuses her of the worst—and all this despite the fact that Hans is himself married and that his romance with Katharina is already an affair. There’s a self-destructive impulse that seems to motivate his attitudes, similar in some ways to Marcel Proust’s The Captive and the Fugitive.

All of this takes place against the backdrop of Cold War Germany, with Katharina and Hans being on the East, Soviet side. That context flavours the text and peppers it with some additional tension, which Erpenbeck, in my mind, doesn’t fully capitalize on until the final act of the book, and only in the epilogue does it seem immediately pertinent to the characters in question—the “twist” ending adding a layer to the narrative that warrants some consideration (but I won’t spoil it right away).

There are two areas where the book most shines: the characterization and the style. Erpenbeck’s tone is finely wrought. In some areas, the phrasing is precise and even terse. In others, there are clear flourishes and the arrangement of short bursts in the writing are poetic. There’s a philosophical bent to the text that makes it feel rich and worth reading even when the initial romance of the text fizzles.

There’s a great moment early on where the lovers are talking and, as creepy as it is, Hans has memories of her as an (even younger) child and it points to the disconnect of memory. Hans comments on her childhood hairstyle and Erpenbeck writes that “only a decade ago, her mother was sitting by her bedside reading cautionary tales from Struwwelpeter to her till she fall asleep; he sets down the spoon and shakes out a cigarette. Do you smoke? No. She remembers the cut-off pigtail, and the demonstration and the shame she felt at going out in public looking so mutilated. But she had forgotten that her mother had set her on her shoulders and carried her past the podium to comfort her” (14). The moment is punctuated by Katharina’s reflection: “Strange [...] all these years a little bit of my life has gone on existing in this stranger’s head. And now he’s given it back to me” (14). This notion of being given your identity back after having lost it and that your identity is spread out among strangers is a compelling picture of identity. Then about fifteen pages later, there’s a reversal. Instead of Hans remembering something about her she forgot, she tells him that her grandfather used to take her fishing when she was little. Then, “He has a sudden vision of her sitting on a pier, bare legs dangling, holding a fishing rod. The power of a simple sentence like that, he thinks. Makes you see something, whether you want to or not” (26). There’s a reversal where Hans now sees the past without having actually seen it, where he projects an image of her identity backward.

Admittedly, some (and I use that word with extreme caution) of the moments in the text are romantic in their own twisted way. One morning, Katharina is leaving the apartment and Hans runs to his bookcase. He comes back with a book, and then carefully tears out a page that he then presents to her. He tells her to read it later “but she can’t wait past the moment when he’s waved goodbye to her on the first bend of the stairs and closed the front door behind him” (61). She reads the passage and it’s a romantic poem, which is fine, but I like her response even better: “Has he gone back to his room and already put the book back? The page she is holding will always be missing from it. That gap, she thinks, is the first trace of her in his world” (61). There’s a kind of romance to this idea that she exists as a trace in his life, that there’s an artifact that shows his affection for her. That said, it is tempered by much more caution. What does it mean, for example, that her existence is an absence? What she is is a gap. In some ways it makes me think of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, since he sets the terms of her existence, partially through her erasure. One of their traditions is that Hans holds out Katharina’s coat and she puts her arms in the wrong way so that she can position for a hug. Even when the relationship is completely fraught, “there is one thing they still do that hasn’t changed: when they leave a place together, he holds out her coat, she slips into it frontwise, briefly holds him in her arms, then slips it off and puts it on the right way around. But probably even these habits, in which they took pleasure and pride, and which confirmed their intimacy, are nothing more than a hollow-bellied Trojan horse” (195). Once again there’s an image of emptiness—their affection is a gap. So, even when there is a hint of romance, there’s a kind of performativity to it devoid of meaning.

Actually, the book is more Lolita-like when considering that Hans takes such control over Katharina in the middle of the book, literally dictating her words for her when she has to write a letter to another man. His paranoia is reminiscent of Humbert Humbert going on a road trip across America, pulling Delores out of school or moving cities when he suspects her of having a connection to someone other than him. When Hans discovers Katharina’s betrayal (remember: HE IS MARRIED), he berates her in a sickening way that is perfectly wrought. I’ll quote the passage at length here as Hans professes that he will save their relationship, but grinds her into nothing at the same time. Note her complete demoralization, even becoming just a “bumpy head” by synecdoche:

Katarina nods with her intact skull, only her ideas are concussed.

If I am to try and rescue us, then I must approach the clarification of this matter like a job.

The bumpy head looks down and nods.

Then from now on everything regarding your time in Frankfurt is material for my investigation.

The bumpy head looks down and nods.

I need to understand what happened. If I don’t understand, it could happen a second time. And then I’m lost.

The bumpy head looks down and nods.

If you are not honest with me to the bottom of your soul, then our love doesn’t stand a chance.

Our love, that is, he is her and she is him. The bumpy head looks down and nods. She’s just a colony, a periphery of his. Flesh of his flesh, blood of his blood.

I can only do this work if you are totally honest: expose your diaries, your notebooks, everything you jotted down, all your letters.

The bumpy head looks down and nods.

Everything you failed to record or referred to in some different way you must complete in accordance with the truth.

The bumpy head looks down and nods.

Think about it: Anything you don’t tell me now, anything that remains in the dark, that you don’t reveal, anything like that remains undissolved and will work against us. Against us, against me, but most of all against you.

I know, says the bumpy head, looks down and nods.

That night, Hans writes to Katharina again:

I implore you, don’t be a coward. (170).

The passage is chilling. Hans demands to interrogate her, literally wanting to know everything is about her “transgression.” The relationship is approached almost as a political task, a building up of a revolution from the ground up. What makes the passage so gross to me is her dehumanization and then her absorption into him: “he is her and she is him,” “She’s just a colony, a periphery of his,” “F;esh of his flesh blood of his blood.” The grandeur and religiosity is particularly gross.

Hans then forces Katharina to write to a man she’s been intimate with to end their relationship. He dictates to her, so much so that she is no longer her own person with her own voice:

 

Then sit down here, and I’ll show you how to put an end to a relationship like that, if you’re at all serious about your remorse that is.

I am serious.

Then take a pencil and a piece of paper and make a start: “Vadim---”

Can’t I say, “Dear Vadim”?

Are you serious?

All right, then, just “Vadim.”

Now write: “You only wanted a fuck, and so did I.”

I can’t write that.

So you want him to trail after you forever?

No.

Think about it.

She writes.

Next: “It was all right, but I’ve had better.”

I would never say anything like that, he’ll tell right away that it’s not from me.

He’ll see your handwriting and believe you, just as I believed all the lies you wrote me.

She writes.

“So save yourself the trouble.”

He’s not a bad person.

Oh, I’m moved.

This will hurt him.

It’s meant to. It’s about securing an outcome.

She writes.

Write: “Katharina.”

She writes: Katharina.

Hans shudders at the sight of her signature.

Henceforth, he says, I’d like you to type all your letters to me. I can’t stand the sight of your handwriting.

Katharina nods mutely, without looking up. (174)

 

Hans replaces her voice with his own to dictate her life. I think one of the saddest things is that Hans forces her to type her letters. The intimacy of her handwriting becomes an affront to him and he dictates abusive letters onto a cassette tape, which he delivers to her and to which she must respond. It’s painful watching them have dinner, for example, and then he gives her the tape that will berate her once again. Erpenbeck writes, “He doesn’t even want to keep a diary anymore. She has smashed his memory, and there is no future in sight. When he meets her in the café, he sits down at her table without saying hello, as if there were no time anymore, no going away and no coming back, no looking back and no anticipation either, as though they were both locked into a lightless labyrinth in which they sometimes met, sometimes not” (178).

To highlight for a moment the poetic nature of Erpenbeck’s text, I’d like to point to a few moments in the work that stand out. In one moment, Katharina “has no eyes for the people coming in, neither the man in the white overalls, nor the ladies who go into the cubicles, nor does she see the mother and child. [...] No, she is clasping her two hands around Hans’s face, and pressing right up against him, so that he and she with mouths and noses and closed eyes are all alone together in a room made of skin” (138). That line about being alone together in a room made of skin is so disgusting, so intimate, so insular. It’s an engaging phrase—and then Erpenbeck follows up with a list of memories they ask each other about: “do you remember…” over and over, almost like a list poem. Later, Erpenbeck describes how “Suddenly time is a steel corset” (264) and it strikes me how much of the poetic lines deal with issues of confinement.

Part of the drama of the novel, actually, is watching how the seeds of the relationship already lay the groundwork of disaster. Even in the beginning, there is a constant accounting process that does not bode well. What is presented romantically foreshadows the demanding nature of Hans as a partner: “So they tell each other—and tell themselves—everything about the way it was, three weeks ago, when they first met. Some things they both know, some one of them has forgotten, or the other, some one of them didn’t notice, or the other, some one of them thought but didn’t say, and some the other, and so what was present just three weeks ago deepens in the course of an afternoon, deepens, changes its nature, and yet keeps its overall outline which both of them recognize” (63). At least in the beginning, the process is collaborative. They share their memory and develop self-understanding as a team, but they mark such minutiae anniversaries. Hans in particular prides himself on sharing particular pieces of music with Katharina, which he then refuses to listen to when she “ruins” the memory of them.

The toxicity of the relationship becomes increasingly clear. Hans is an author and Katharina goes to bed: “She knows that it’s perfectly possible that while she’s asleep he’s maybe writing the sentences that will sunder them. Just when the bill for everything is due, just before their wishes become reality, everything is once more up for grabs, teetering at the top and maybe about to collapse, she knows that” (113). She recognizes the tenuousness, and it actually seems that both her and Hans thrive on that uncertainty. They need to be “teetering on the edge” to provide the relationship with meaning. They fail to be comfortable: “Yesterday, he fell asleep with her, two spoons on the narrow bed, and she thought she had never been happier in her life. But sometimes he clings on to her too hard. Sometimes he says: I feel tense—and that means she has to take her clothes off. And other times it’s so perfect she could die. What does she want from him? […] He thought he was addicted to her, he wrote not long ago, and she thought, no, she’s addicted to making him addicted” (113). The relationship is a complex powerplay of domination and submission that never quite reaches stasis.

It’s hard to identify precisely why the relationship feels like it aligns with the history of Germany. In the final act of the book, there’s a bit more explicit discussion of the changes in Germany (especially because there’s a time-jump ahead to after the fall of the Berlin wall.) I suppose there’s a comparable philosophy for Hans: he cannot handle changes to arrangements. He tries to calcify everything in his relationship with Katharina and resist changes in their dynamics. When the wall falls, he is with his wife, Ingrid, who had been out protesting “a moribund East German regime” (265). Hans does not protest and they have the following exchange: “I don’t understand you, she had said to him that night, now at last we’re in a position to change something. Well, you change away, Hans had replied. Her protest today, by contrast, strikes her as pathetic, futile. Is this what freedom feels like? Not having an enemy you can put a name to? She is grateful to Hans for not saying anything” (265). He wants to resist change, but it also seems to be true for him that the freedom of not having an enemy is less liberatory than confining. Hans seems his most liberated to do as he pleases when he can point to a specific enemy that threatens his relationship with Katharina. Incidentally, there’s a moment when he pretends to have spoken directly to the man Katharina cheated with and tells her all the things he said, which she denies and denies and denies before he finally admits that he invented the encounter and that all the things he mentioned were his own imagination and he just had to confirm.

Despite all of the denials, Hans cannot trust Katharina for anything. Even when sleeping with her, she is forced to respond to accusations that he gives her on cassette: “The day before yesterday, she gave him her answers to the second cassette, but he hasn’t read them yet. He said, what if she just serves up a fresh helping of lies, now that she’s gotten in the habit of deceiving him [...] You know, he says to Katharina, and brushes the ash off, even if we’re sometimes fleetingly happy, it doesn’t feel like a new start to me. It just feels like a really long farewell” (188). It’s lines like that that I feel can be read on multiple registers. It’s a depressing idea for any relationship, of course, but the idea of a revolution being more of a long farewell seems like it might hold true, especially with the paranoiac parallels of Soviet spies and the Cold War, etc. Jeeze, if this had been published before my Master’s, this would have been a great fit for my essay.

There’s a section that cites philosophy that also lends itself well to the more personal dynamics of the text. The book questions whether class consciousness can even be raised: “How can the relationship between the new ruling class and their art be sponsored when the ruling class wants to unwind after shift? Unwind, switch off its brain and its memory? By beauty? Still? All right. Two more Gray Monks, and a ragout fin, what about you, the same for me, OK, then two ragouts fins. Beauty as a Trojan horse? As a sugared pill? That’s not enough. And it’s a trick. The contents are not cut-and-dried, art is a process, not a product” (194). Hans seems to go against the grain of this raising of class consciousness. In the midst of critiquing the distracting effect of art on consciousness, we see them in a fine dining situation. There’s a repetition of the idea of a Trojan horse, which is an interesting motif that carries through the text—an illusory form that is empty (is that indeed their relationship? Katharina and Hans show the form of a relationship but the content is empty?).

The passage continues that “Beauty needs to be interwoven with truth. What you see at a glance and whatever lies beneath needs to be one and the same. As for that beauty, the poet said it is only the beginning of terror anyway. The contradictory nature of beauty. The searching that gives beauty its profundity. The joy of digging under the surface. The joy of questioning. The connection, therefore, between artist and working-class public is one that depends on the shared experience of work” (194). That passage proves integral to the book. Hans is obsessed with the truth of Katharina’s experience. He just has to keep digging because he can’t accept the difference between beauty and truth: “what you see at a glance and whatever lies beneath needs to be one and the same” and he cannot reconcile with the idea of a secret. It’s the obsessiveness of “digging under the surface”—continually probing for a perpetually receding truth. For more information on this, read my unpublished thesis project on paranoid epistemes. Linking back, Hans is obsessed with digging and so he can find no peace in the relationship; the joy of the relationship is the perpetual hunt. Following this line of thinking, Hans says, “art has nothing to do with a happy ending [...] and is only tolerable as hope.” He notes that “happy ending only present as hope” (194). And, if we’re thinking about how art has nothing to do with happy endings, if we suggest that unhappy endings are more artful, then Kairos is indeed a work of art.

The book hovers around questions of where to go next: in terms of their relationship, in terms of their history, and so on. Katharina considers “where shall she go, whose paths have been abolished? Certainly not back to her attic” (139). Instead, she goes to a cinema and imagines (remembers?) when Hans once said how “no one can match the Russians at editing and montage” (139). The connections between montage are often implied, a pathway left to be inferred. In many ways, Kairos reflects a similar approach, there are lots of small moments that provide insight into their relationship, a number of vignettes strewn together. After seeing the film, Katharina reflects on time: “Time steps out onto the street, and everything there is also over. Time feels so sticky, it’s as though it had lost all capacity for passing” (139). In another passage, Katharina considers how “time, which is invisible, becomes indirectly visible in terms of unhappiness. As though unhappiness were the costume of time. But at the same time, she thinks, this unhappiness isn’t just a wrapping, it has its own interior, a creature that, once it’s born, follows its own roads and has its own time. It’s strange, she thinks, that almost a year has passed, and she has been wholly unable to affect Hans’s disappointment” (219). There seems to be a conflict of time and, for Hans, time is ever-inaccessible: “the present only made sense for him when he could see it as a past-in-waiting that he could control. Now the present seems empty. He feels time pushing forward, but without his participation. Forward, in a manner of speaking. Him, and everyone else. Animals. Plants. Everything finite” (195). Yet, in the wake of the betrayal, “he has made memory, step by step, now his production is lamed. All quiet” (195). When he looks inward he is “staring blankly into the dark hole that is now his inner self” (195). He then immediately feels compelled to blame it on Katharina and show explain her to herself, essentially. The point is that their relationship changes their relationship to time and it seems consistent with the historical moment: things are moving forward, but are also based on a memory of an ideology, but are also frozen in time, separate from the rest of the world.

Taken together, Kairos is many things. The start of the book was immediately engaging. It’s tonally superb and the tension of the relationship is well-established for at least the first half of the book. The philosophical and historical layers to the text make it a worthwhile read, even if the second half of the book reads as somewhat repetitive and slow. In another way, Erpenbeck is after a magic trick that is largely effective. At one point, Erpenbeck notes how “Making the obvious unobvious is the trick of it” (49). It’s obvious that the relationship is doomed, obvious that the central characters are on a path of destruction, but it is making the obvious unobvious that is a trick. Similarly, Hans knows the truth and Katharina is obvious about it, but he strives to make the obvious unobvious for himself since the pleasure is in the searching. The obviousness of Hans’ unfaithfulness and hypocrisy is also disguised and glossed over so frequently. There’s a twist in the end of the book that is also obvious, but Erpenbeck makes it just unobvious enough for the premise to land. 

Kairos was mostly good and it’s a complex and emotional novel. If you choose to read it, I hope you like it—but if things aren’t going well, remember you can always step away. The central characters of this book need to take that to heart, too.

Happy reading!