American Woman by Susan Choi

     

        This year, Susan Choi was nominated for the Booker Prize for her new book, Flashlight, but we’re headed back in time twenty years to her second novel, American Woman. Even in this early work, later motifs in Choi’s work have become apparent. For example, American Woman’s main character bombs a building in protest, which gets echoed five years later as a central conceit in A Person of Interest. There’s a fair amount of reflection over whose story gets told and whose gets omitted, which is critical to Trust Exercise, released in 2019. My understanding is that Choi’s most recent work also makes reference to intergenerational narration with leaps back and forth across time—but I’ll need to get to Flashlight sometime later.

All things considered, American Woman was fine-to-good. It held the trademarks of Choi’s psychological probing and the moments of philosophizing between the pages of an otherwise character-driven piece. The book has a blessing and a curse when it comes to editing: there are passages that seem superfluous and it feels like the book could have been at least fifty pages shorter; at the same time, the book turns away from what feel like monumental events, like character deaths and failed heists. Part of what the novel is grappling with, though, is the way that we have selective focus. The book tells us the story is not about what we’ve been reading about, but something else entirely.

But we’ve gotten too conceptual too quickly. Here’s what the book is “about.” Jenny is a Japanese-American woman who bombed a government building in protest of America’s involvement in Vietnam. Prior to the book’s opening, Jenny relocates and works as a caretaker and restorer of a historic home in upstate New York. Frazer, a civil rights activist with a deep network of subversives, begins the book by tracking her down. They have history together and they have history together, but now he needs a favour. He has in his care a group of violent subversives who killed a number of police officers and who are the only ones of their cadre left alive after the slaughter. He needs to hide them and wants Jenny to tend to them while they write a book that will help make him a fortune. Their claim to fame is that they kidnapped the richest daughter in America and radicalized her to be one of them. She, Pauline, is under the care and tutelage of Juan and Yvonne as they hide from the authorities and drag Jenny into their mess.

The book meanders some while the characters are impelled (but continue not) to write their book, becoming an increasing drain on Jenny. That said, there are some moments that hit hard and some ambiguity over the political questions in the text. Choi refuses to provide audiences with the comfort of unambiguous answers. For example, what feels uncontroversial to me (resistance to the Vietnam war, advocating for civil rights) is complicated by Juan, the de facto leader of the cadre. Despite the stated aims towards equality, Juan is a domineering leader who comes across as misogynistic in many of his interactions with Jenny, Yvonne, and Pauline. Worse, maybe, is that during a late night conversation with Jenny he professes how she’s so much closer to reality and the revolution because of her race and, essentially, that it is a privilege to be the victim of racism. It’s sort of like the uncomfortable conversations in Jordan Peele’s Get Out. The whole conversation had my stomach twisting with discomfort: this figure of leftist revolution is steeped with racist (‘reverse racist’?) ideologies and seems totally oblivious to the Japanese internment camps (to which Jenny’s father was subjected.) Even Frazer’s attempt to do right by the criminals is compromised by his profiteering over their story. As with all things, it feels like the profit motive subsumes all intentions, noble or not.

Later, there’s a compelling twist where Pauline, the oblivious rich girl playing revolutionary, turns out to have masterminded a plot against Jenny, her seeming ally. The cadre plans a heist against one of Jenny’s contacts, and she is the critical piece standing in the way. Pauline is treated critically by Juan and Yvonne and she manipulates the situation to get closer to Jenny, winning her over to their side. It’s a compelling twist when Jenny realizes what has happened.

As I mentioned, there were a number of moments where the action is omitted, casting the audience into the fog of war. For instance, when the group finally gets the go ahead for the heist, it goes poorly. We don’t see the scene as a play-by-play, but only as a retrospective. Hence, we don’t get to see how someone ends up shot, and for some time it’s unclear whether Yvonne and Juan even survived. From there, we instead see Jenny and Pauline’s ride to their new lives and a new book essentially begins, one which recounts the fugitives’ search for a more regular, quiet life. In that section, psychological meditations persist. There’s question of whether the two are in love, or just what kind of relationship this is, exactly.

Running parallel to the main narrative is the story of Jenny’s father. I appreciate what Choi is doing here, drawing parallels with the injustice of Japanese internment camps and the injustice of the Vietnam war. Most of the memories from Jenny’s past, though, didn’t feel particularly resonant to me. In the last third of the book, there’s an account of the escape from the internment camp and Jenny’s father’s role (or lack of role) within it. The implications echo through the decades.

For all the book covers, I felt that the end of the book felt rushed. The last fifty pages or so account for the capture of various fugitives and how they respond to their apprehension—but the focus is not really the focus. Part of the book is about how the media reshapes stories, how the truth gets lost in retelling. So, the story isn’t so much about how the characters respond to being arrested and tried, but about how the public interprets the situation. Similarly, the book’s focus is not about events, but rather how characters respond to them—and more importantly, how readers respond. At the part of the book that would be the climax, we shift towards the past with Jenny’s father’s story. This formal choice seems to imply that the true heart of the story is not even what we see in the present, but deeply rooted in the past.

These formal flares help to carry the novel’s overall themes. Choi’s knack for psychological exploration and the surprise turns of the novel make it engaging, although I admit that the text felt a little bloated and repetitive. I think there’s a masterful hand at work here, but one still seeking its stride. The themes are well-worth discussing, but it requires some more digging and effort than I suspect average readers would be willing to engage in.

Happy reading!

Les pénitences par Alex Viens

     Before I even start this review, I need to give a shout out to the bookstore where I got it from. Un Livre à Soi is a francophone bookstore in Montreal that I had the luck of wandering into. While I was there, a woman asked if I needed any help and I asked for recommendations for Montrealian authors. She then handed me book after book, giving me summaries in French that I felt very proud of myself for understanding. After she handed me probably six books, she asked for another employee’s recommendations for novels by Montreal writers and that employee gave me several more. While she was giving me recommendations, yet another employee gave me some suggestions. In the end, I ended up with a stack of probably twelve books to sort through. When I made some decisions, I took them to the counter and the first woman said, “Oh, but these aren’t for you right?” and I replied (all of this in French), “Oh, no, they are. I’m trying to practice.” The man behind the counter then said, “Oh, well, since you’re practicing, I’ll give you 10% off.” It was a really beautiful experience so good on Un Livre à Soi for being so welcoming. Such was the genesis of me reading Les pénitences by Alex Viens. Again, I just have to say that I really enjoyed the experience of reading a novel in French and actually getting most of it. It was a refreshing change of pace. 

Alex Viens’ novel focuses on Jules, a young woman visiting her father, Denis, after over a decade of being no contact. A mystery opens the book: after much debate and delay, Jules has brought a box to Denis and we are not told what is in the box. We only know it is something that Jules’ mother, estranged from Denis, was reluctant to give over.

The early part of the book depicts its fair share of qualified tenderness. Denis’ estrangement from his ex and children is apparent and it’s clear that he’s not the healthiest father figure, living in a run-down apartment, alcoholic and foul-mouthed, listening to The Cure records on repeat and complaining about the world. He’s a miserable grump that insists on Jules staying for longer than she really has to. That said, there are some moments where the two connect in fraught gentleness.

At Denis’ insistence, they go to the store to buy booze, where Denis makes a racist comment to the cashier that the cashier passes off as ‘just how Denis is.’ When they get back to the apartment, they share a joint and get high in the washroom. Denis also prepares a meal for Jules—a kind of elevated poverty-pasta dish with lots of sauce. Between all the drinking, though, Jules doesn’t feel hungry and Denis becomes furious that his daughter won’t eat the meal he has so lovingly prepared. He starts to yell, demanding that she finish, making her eat until she vomits in her lap and he gets to swoop in and say how much he always loved taking care of his sick children.

Denis’ aggression comes across as a little bit too much, a cartoonish kind of evil, but it seems more plausible as the book goes on. With increasing frequency, the book flashes back and forth through time. We see how Denis interacted with his two children, Jules and Charlie. In short, it’s a long stream of abusive moments and pitting the family against itself. He is overprotective, refusing to let them out of the house, and demanding that one of them take fault when they misbehave. If they snuck out, Jules and Charlie knew that one of them had to fess up to being the ringleader and take the punishment for them both. It was a breeding ground for resentment, which got even worse when the parents split up and Jules ran away to live with her mom while Charlie remained behind to ‘take care of’ their dad, being subjected to, in Jules’ mind, his continual abuse.

Viens’ storytelling makes for some rich ethical debate. There are wrongs done in every direction. Charlie tries to escape to her mom’s, and Jules invites her to stay, but she goes home to Denis and is forced into a position of having to say that she was gathering information for what she could say in court. Denis is trying to get full custody and so Charlie furnishes him with info only for it to be spun in the other direction where Denis says that if she were to share any of that with the court it would only mean he’d have to increase his alimony payments. The family is continually in a no-win situation.

In the present of the book, Jules’ conflict with her father continues to escalate throughout their night together. As if it were a scene in a horror movie, Denis locks Jules into the apartment after his looming shadow follows her down the hall. He then takes the mysterious box and locks himself in the bathroom. In an attempt to get him out, Jules starts acting out by pouring out his beers, throwing a brick through the television set, and screaming to make him come out and give her the key.

It’s hard to talk about the book in a way that won’t ruin the surprise. Throughout the book, I had an idea of what might be in the box and Viens continues to turn the screw to make you feel the tension of what might happen to it. When, at the end of the book, it’s revealed what’s in the box and then what’s really in the box, it adds an engaging dynamic. It’s the kind of ‘twist’ that makes you rethink the entire family dynamic, which becomes even more violent in the closing pages of the text. It’s a family drama that could easily be transformed into a moody, brooding, complex horror. I am having a hard time resisting revealing the answer to Brad Pitt’s demand to know what’s in the box?

Viens’ depiction of poverty and its impacts is also really compelling. The initial depiction of Denis’ apartment is evocatively developed. Viens describes how everyone watches television really loudly. The passage elaborates on how the thin walls allow you to hear what everybody else is up to. There’s students climaxing together, a sad old man who cries and hits his head against the wall, an upstairs neighbour screaming at her boyfriend to stop. There’s a comment about how the walls offer such little intimacy but how everyone turns a blind eye to one another because police are worse than noise: <<Les murs offrent si peu d’intimité qu’ils font de ces logements les lieux les plus secrets au monde, dans l’indifférence du vivre et laisser vivre, où les gens se mêlent de leurs affaires pour obtenir pareille clémence de la part des autres. Ici, on n’appelle pas la police. On aime encore moins la police que le bruit>> (20). The image of squalor is finely established and sets the tone for the book pretty early on. In another early passage, Viens describes the contents of Denis’ fridge and freezer. Delissio pizzas, ice cream sandwiches, and so on. The passage describes how he takes out his Ziploc bag of pot and how it’s not just the regular Ziplocs, but the ones with the special slider: <<Le sac de Denis en est un avec une glissière en plastique. Ceux qui valent cher, ceux qui rendent jaloux les camarades de classe à l’heure du sandwich au baloney, ceux qu’on a envie de transmettre à ses descendants>> (26). It’s such a telling moment that this little detail on a Ziploc bag becomes a class marker. It reminds me of the opening passage of Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami, in which she talks about how you can tell who grew up poor by asking how many windows there were in their home. I appreciate the way the passage takes this little detail and elevates it to the status of an heirloom. 

I would say that the book has a generally accessible style and has these nice flourishes of description to elevate it. The flashbacks pace the book nicely and add tension to the ‘present’ moment of the text. While the main characters’ evils towards one another are sometimes over the top, there’s enough tenderness to avoid easy answers on the characters, and the final moments of the story offer a compelling reason to re-read the hundred and twenty preceding pages. Memory is hazy. Experiences are subject to revision—though none of the characters, Viens reminds us, have quite the capacity for self-reflection they would need to change their ways. It’s a downer ending, though not in the way you’d anticipate.

Happy reading!

Girls Against God by Jenny Hval

        There is an illicit pleasure in reading Jenny Hval’s Girls Against God. The main character is charged with hate and sees hate as a true creative force; the titillating cynicism and adolescent rage of the book couldn’t help but bring smiles to my face.

The main character of Hval’s novel is a young girl in conservative Norway that is looking for any kind of alternative to the quotidian existence she sees around her. To that end, she has an obsession with black metal and witchcraft and what she refers to as the “cosmic internet.” The novel follows these fascinations as it jumps around in time; we see her early roots as a member of a black metal band that (maybe) never actually plays concerts—instead she engages in performances so subterranean as to be undetectable and not even music related. The lines between music, visual art, witchcraft, and language collapse. So too does the idea of an independent producer become incomprehensible as subversive art becomes by necessity a collective, collaborative work. The other component of the book follows the main character’s filmic ambitions, including a full account of her film in the back third of the film. If you’re looking for a conventional story, Girls Against God is largely lacking, but if you’re looking for some vibes and philosophical reflection, Hval’s work is an absolute treat.

If you’re a true devotee of my reviews, you might remember my commentary on The Hearing Test by Eliza Barry Callahan. I find that premise extraordinarily unlikely. One of my critiques of The Hearing Test is its referentiality to other art works and it really relies heavily on readers’ knowledge. Girls Against God does something similar, but Hval is much more generous in elaborating on its touchstones. There are extended summaries and analyses of the works, often replete with imagery. In that way, the text is more accessible even in its offputtingness. Or, maybe it’s just that the touchstones are more part of my cultural lexicon.

Hval expounds in particular on the aesthetic of early black metal—an interesting angle, given the author’s own musical style. She describes music videos found as extra features on early black metal CDs and the way she describes its grittiness and content and wild cuts and sweeping shots of high-contrast nature is just perfect. In the aesthetic, she sees a primitivism that restores sincerity to art. When planning for her film, she notes, “I don’t know what the film is going to be about yet, but I like the early black metal aesthetic, so near to my own childhood. Strangely, it gives me hope, hope that it’s possible to make art primitively, in a way that isn’t steeped in professionalism and compromise. Art that still hates. I remember how much hope there is in hatred” (8). That manifesto sets the direction for all of the main character’s efforts. I adore this notion that hatred is hope—indeed, there has to be hope for there to be hatred, or else we would simply have indifference and apathy.

Throughout the book, she seeks connection with others through various means. One way that manifests is in the Satanism associated with black metal: “I can establish a connection or a pact, demonstrated through the connect-the-dots drawing between myself and the world of the gods, the underworld, or between myself in the past tense and myself in the present. Or all of it simultaneously. Maybe I could even draw up a map between me and you” (26). She’s trying to be part of something bigger than just herself. The connect-the-dots metaphor works in that way; she’s looking to be the lines between points. To that end, when she plans her film, she thinks, “Maybe this film has created a place to meet” (26). She makes a direct address to the audience—which is in itself odd, given that there is not a frame narrative that establishes she’s writing for others. Nonetheless, she presents the audience with a series of questions: “Do you also recognize the desire for secret and impossible connections? Do you recognise the loneliness, could we share in it? Could we get closer to each other? Could you and I and the film be the start of a we? A we which takes the form of an expanding community of girls who hate?” (26).

Hval’s narrator’s gesture is twofold. On the one hand, she’s aiming to escape the prison of subjectivity and on the other she’s trying to build a subterranean network of connection. Reflecting about her relationship with religion, she notes, “Sin is still inside me; everything is my fault and my responsibility, because I’m doomed to be alone, locked inside this subjectivity” (37). There is an exhaustion to the process of creating oneself: “I am so tired of chasing after it, this subjectivity, looking for something that’s all mine, that doesn’t have any context, surroundings or background. It’s so lonely. It’s so limited. It’s so heavy” (37). I appreciate this angle to exploring the posthumanist principle that we are not individuals but rather we exist in a context that has formulated us. She continues, “The subject is reflected negatively, the subject is so alone, so threatened, so scared, so dying, so guilty” (37). She considers how she wants to swap some of these negatives for “something else, something shared” (37). The passage ends with a delightful crescendo and what some might deem an anticlimax but which nonetheless has a ring of truth for those in the know. She concludes the passage, “I want to take part in a chaos of collective energy. I want to be in a band” (37). The fact that a band is what embodies that collective energy and chaos is just so humorous but also it imbues me with a sense of nostalgia and the optimism of such a project. The other side of Hval’s project is the desire for community, specifically through her witchy communities: “In blasphemy, there’s a secret pact, a desire for a community that isn’t rooted in the Christian, Southern spirit” (43). She elaborates on how the subversiveness allows for these connections:

Blasphemy protects us against the moral fables we grew up with; blasphemy renounces anything that requires our submission. It shows us a crack in this reality, through which we can pass into another, more open meeting place. Blasphemy has not forgotten where it came from; it maintains that defiance and energy. Blasphemy looks for new ways of saying we. And the band is a we, a community that happens without anyone asking. It’s an unknown communal place, an impossible place. In a place like that, we can make art magic. (43)

I love that spirit of togetherness and spontaneity. I feel like it elevates the idea of being in a band to a metaphysical tour de force.

I’ll return to that in a moment, but I also want to bring up the idea of time. Bands shape sound in time, so there’s a bit of a connection already. There’s also a stunning series of pages—too long to quote here—where the narrator describes her experiences with the early days of the internet. She describes its cosmic power, its ability to connect people across time. It brought me back in time, completely. The way that she describes the experience of finding communities, largely anonymously, and sharing files, connecting over subterranean media—it’s a perfect blast from the past. Then, towards the end of the book, the narrator gives an account of a photograph. Just before the photograph, she blasphemes and she delights in the moment where it is impossible to tell her apart from her well-behaved classmates. She notes that it is “impossible for an unknowing eye to spot the difference in our smiles, but at the moment this picture was taken, I’ve just said fucking hell, in the middle of the photo shoot” (214). The moment is imbued with a power because, even though it’s such a mundane kind of rebellion, it is elevated as symbolic of the collapse between herself and others—yet one that is distilled in time. In aspic? She continues on to say that “Half the class are about to stop smiling; they are about to look around for the sinner as they cautiously cross themselves and touch their hands to their hearts” (214). It’s a moment where the offense has not yet been detected and “a moment later, everything will be defined, crossed, damned, forgiven and blessed” (214). The moment that lacks definition has its subversive power: “right now, in this image, there is chaos; the students aren’t sure what happened yet, who said the word” (214). She continues, “Sound is faster than comprehension, faster than what they call heart and soul and sin. Right now my voice could have come from any of my Christian classmates, a slip of the tongue, a Tourette’s tic; that’s why they react and why they are about to cross themselves” (214). Hval seems to present the idea that a sin has its power when it has not yet been defined or remedied; sin exists as potential and “everyone in the class is a potential sinner” (214). The narrator notes, “the uncertainty is shapeless, even in the middle of this conformity; they themselves aren’t exempt; the guilt includes everyone in the room and leaks from one thing to another. No one remains dry, everyone is defined” (214). It’s a great parallel to the idea of everyone existing in connection with one another. Everyone gets joined by sin and guilt into one mass and “just as the most evangelical of them feel defiled when we’re taught by the lesbian teacher; they fear that she’ll lure them over to her side, that they will say what she says, that they’ll become, or realise that they already are, like her” (214). The notion of the subversiveness awakening something in its audience gives it a compelling power—and there’s a kind of optimism in that.

Towards the end of the book, there is dedicated focus to the symbolism of aspic. Aspic is a kind of jelly in which other things float. It’s a great symbol for the lack of distinction between individual entities. A passage that identifies the sense of connection in aspic reads as follows:

Aspic is made from the collagen in the bone marrow of pigs, and I dream it’s also made from our own bones and our own marrow, because marrow is the very best we have to give of ourselves. In the marrow is found the collagen, the creative power, the coherence. The same sounds ring in marrow as in margin. In my language it’s even the same word. In the margins are the experiments, the bonus material, the unwritten scenes, the unused leftovers, a suggestion for a new world, a suggestion for impossible connections. In the margins are the comments, the hope and hate, suspended in the thick, translucent marrow broth. (229).

For all its sprawling nature, Girls Against God has a knack for recreating this kind of connective aspic. There are a number of strange false starts to the book that float around. The focus on the margins and experiments is critical to what Girls Against God is up to. It is itself “bonus material”---auxilliary content about other works. It is the unused leftovers; consider, for example, we get the fragment of her film as an additional chapter that takes up a reasonable portion of the book. 

Girls Against God asks a question that I find perpetually troubling whether it’s phrased as “can the subaltern speak?” as it is in the work of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, or as it appears in Mark Fisher’s question about capitalism: “is there no alternative?”, or indeed, as it is asked by Terese in Girls Against God, “Why does resistance always end up just polishing the traditions?” (69). Hval is exploring the idea of how we might preserve a space of genuine resistance to tradition, a genuine alternative that does not get subsumed into the aspic like everything else. She notes this paradoxical position—wanting to have connection as a form of subversion and yet preserving a special space for the truly radical. Hval offers an extended meditation on the topic: “Think about that word, EXCLUDED. To exclude something, to explain something. THe nature of the subversive isn’t actually to be directly visible but to roam the shadows, to give texture to the seemingly shiny and clean, to scrawl public walls with inexplicable nonsigns that refuse to materialize into language” (96). She’s looking for that shadow space: “the subversive desires to be seen and not seen simultaneously, it desires both to be excluded and to be explained” (96). I think that’s a critical observation for the counterculture; we are riding the line between legibility and rewriting. The trouble, as Hval notes, is that “it’s so easily muted, left behind, forgotten, excluded without being explained. Or it gets picked up and transformed into a language we all understand, that is, explained, but for some reason that always seems to mean commercialised” (96). This succinct passage puts to words the trouble I feel with my own subversive subcultures—how much are we preaching to the choir? When we are preaching to the masses, how does the meaning get hidden behind dollar signs?

I really appreciated the way Hval characterized the grotesque resistance in black metal music videos. I’m not sure I recorded the quotation, but there’s a part where she describes the sound of the music like flies and worms wiggling out of the tape. As she navigates the “cosmic internet” she finds additional videos and details to supplement her research into primitivism in art. She finds a clip of “a black metal gig that looks as if it took place in an assembly hall in an early nineties secondary school” (8). In her note, “wholesome Norwegian youths talk amongst themselves and walk in and out of the room while the band plays on, completely unaffected. Black metal crawls unnoticed through adolescence, mine too” (8). There’s a real love of the genre and the music scene that shines in Hval’s work. There’s a sincerity and authenticity to the depiction of shows like this—I can vividly picture videos of grainy punk shows in a rented church. She thinks about how “it doesn’t burrow down completely. But for as long as it’s there it lives and crawls” (8). She reflects on how one one of the youths in the video could have been her “if [she]’d been a few years older, or if the clip had been from 1997 and not 1991. If [she] hadn’t been a girl and excluded from the black screen” (8). She concludes, “It could have been me: we could have hated, all of us, together. Instead I had to hate alone. Provincial hatred” (8). In the description of black metal music videos, the graininess of the image, the rapid cuts, the high contrast colour palettes, and so on, brought me back to a special moment where the internet made all kinds of possibilities real. Essentially, it was a modern day dada movement. I think in particular of the revolution it caused in my brain when I saw the video for Some Girls’ “...Warm Milk” or the freneticism of The Locusts’ album Plague Soundscapes. Sure, it’s not quite the genre Hval described, but it’s adjacent enough to feel the same.

Hval’s book is, in many ways, about representation and connection. She philosophizes that “to describe is also to construct form and perspective; it’s the reflex of mortal dread” (206). She wonders, “could language be used for something else? Aren’t there other reasons to write? If we let go of the descriptions, will we discover that we’re no longer moving at all, since we already exist within everything in here?” (206). Girls Against God is a quest to renegotiate with language and art: “we’re given up shapes, our own shells and components and we’re back in a flow, that gelatinous substance that ruled the earth before the harder minerals, rock types, skeletons and shells came into existence. This could be the beginning, the white egg, the original place, the original life” (206). Girls Against God is a quest to find that area of potential, the origins, the not-yet before everything gets established and codified. 

Hval meanders in all the right directions. It felt to me to be a deeply intimate and resonant novel that was also accompanied by humour and thoughtfulness. Hval’s other novel, Paradise Rot, had a bit more in terms of story, but she clearly has a gift for introspection and ambitious projects to revolutionize both literature and the world.

Hope we can appreciate the margins without taking out their teeth. Happy hating!

History of Ash by Khadija Marouazi

    History of Ash by Khadija Marouazi transports the reader to Morocco following the Years of Lead in the 1970s and1980s, focusing on political prisoners Mouline, Leila, and a range of other figures that occupy the jail, suffering torture at the hands of guards and the isolation endemic to their confinement. Marouazi’s work finds itself in a particular literary tradition of prison novels, sidling up beside the likes of Fyodor Dostoyevski’s The House of the Dead, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, Herta Müller’s THe Hunger Angel, or even Assata Shakur’s autobiography.

    What History of Ash does, essentially, is demonstrate the impossibility of the prison novel as a genre.

    Prison novels like History of Ash are trapped in a paradox: by definition, prison restricts the agency of its occupants. In order to do justice (as it were) to the nature of prison, it requires characters in the story not to be able to effect changes in their circumstances. Unfortunately, the more accurate the representation is, the less characters are able to drive a narrative—which might, in my mind, explain why so many prison novels are episodic in nature, offering these brief slices of prison life without a grander narrative regarding liberation. To do otherwise might tend toward the glorification of fundamentally inhumane practices.

    Similarly, the characters in the novel are reduced to numbers in the eyes of the state. Marouazi replicates that feeling for the reader, somewhat, in that most of the characters are decontextualized from their circumstances. For instance, the book gives very little information about why the characters are actually imprisoned (perhaps to value their identities and avoid making their crimes the defining feature of their identities). Narratively, it serves some purpose—as a reader with no knowledge Morocco’s Years of Lead, it makes it difficult to connect. As much as it should have felt like an intimate look at their lives, what ended up happening is that the characters often fell flat; I needed more to latch onto so that they didn’t feel like empty signifiers.

    That said, there are some moments that are genuinely beautifully done that provide a glimpse into the hearts of these figures. For instance, the first chapter sees Mouline in his cell being routinely taken out in order to be tortured. When a mouse comes to occupy his cell, he starts screaming in terror, concerned about infection and disease. Over time, though, Mouline starts identifying with the mouse, gives it a name, and treats it as a kind of secret friend. Then, when the guards are interrogating and torturing Mouline, he gives the mouse’s name as a secret informant. It’s a wonderful moment of humour and rebellion—nobody knows the name of Mouline’s mouse (or that it even exists), and then the politicians are sent on a wild goose chase to apprehend this high level leftist that doesn’t exist. There’s also an entertaining scene where the prisoners arrange a heist of sorts to ensure that married prisoners are able to meet surreptitiously to time their sex with the woman’s ovulation to guarantee a child.

    On the opposite side of the emotional spectrum, there’s a fracture in a relationship that feels devastating. Mouline fractures his relationship with Leila while in prison—it’s actually darkly funny because the premise seems to be that Mouline would like to be polygamous but hypocritically denies Leila the same opportunities. The sexist hypocrisy isn’t funny, but it’s a little ironic that the man in prison is insisting on having multiple women—it seems amusing and impracticable. In any case, Leila stops visiting him in prison, and Mouline does not know the reason for it immediately. The implications are devastating: he is abandoned for reasons unknown and that lack of knowledge is heartbreaking. The existential implications are somewhat understated—when you’re a prisoner, you don’t have the freedom to see people by your own choice and you have no control in trying to remedy a situation if the relationship has been fractured.

    Stylistically, the novel is often beautifully written. One of my favourite lines I feel can stand on its own without context: “That’s how all beautiful things are in my country … they only come as echoes and rust” (4). Some of the beauty emerges in the discussion of characters, as well. When describing Leila, Mouline says, that “I was constantly putting off trying to catch her, because once you caught this woman, she would just slip away again. Leila would slip away like water from the palm of your hand, or like air you won’t be able to breathe in a second time, or like a wave you can’t dive into twice. [...] Leila was the lily of the soul, and I was the sad desert thorn” (37). It’s a beautifully constructed passage that combines water imagery and floral imagery. The idea of Leila slipping away like water is lovely, and then the idea of him being a “sad desert thorn”, with the implication of being deprived of water, is a powerful turn.

    It’s in these small moments of beauty that History of Ash really shines. In a novel made bleak with isolation, confinement, and torture, it’s as though these poetic moments are what express the indomitable spirit of the characters in the text. Despite their lack of agency and despite their reduction to being numbers, there is still something that remains. 

    In that respect, the ending of the book is an interesting turn. A lot of the time in prison is glossed over and then we are able to witness the return home. It’s a moment with very little fanfare and great anxiety. The moment of the key being used in the lock is a powerful one and the recognition of all that has changed and all that has been preserved is a poignant note on which to end the text.

    Overall, it’s hard to grapple with the paradoxes of prison novels and History of Ash in particular. I feel like I have misunderstood a number of details or missed out on some of the nuances. As an overall text, I think its main highlight is its style and its main detraction is the episodic nature of the text. In some ways, reading the text feels as if I’m as adrift as these prisoners: a sense of the unknown becomes the darkest cloud.

Nostalgia by M. G. Vassanji

    Whatever you do, I insist that you do not imagine a pink elephant rolling a grapefruit on the beach. You pictured that as you read it? Darn, well, forget all about it. I never mentioned it and this never happened.

    Nostalgia is a dystopian novel by M. G. Vassanji that focuses on the dangerous power of memory in a world where death is, essentially, nonexistent and almost definitively meaningless. In a futuristic Toronto (and North America in general), a caste system of sorts has emerged. In the “third world”, the citizens are depicted as cannibalistic ‘savages’ who are able to enter North America only in infinitesimally small numbers (I recognize the problematic nature of using such terms, but it does seem to apply in the world of exacerbated inequality of the novel). In North America, there are two groups, as well. The lower in the hierarchy are people who were naturally born, have actual families, and have limited opportunities to enter the workforce because most of the jobs go to those who are ‘rejuvenated’—people who had previous lives that they’ve abandoned for something new. Since life is essentially endless, ‘rejuvies’ are people who felt the crushing weight of previous memories and needed to escape, so they are reconstructed both outside and in. They are given memories and all their previous life is meant to be forever sealed off—but memory has a way of bubbling up.

    Leaky Memory Syndrome, aka Nostalgia, proves fatal, particularly when entwined with government conspiracies. You are not supposed to remember the pink elephant rolling a grapefruit. So, a new form of doctor has emerged—-a doctor that patches holes in rejuvies’ new psyches and medicates to ensure repression. Vassanji introduces the central premise of the text early on:

“From as long back as we can imagine, we humans have striven for immortality. Now that, in our rough and ready way, we’ve begun to approach it, we face the problem of what to do with the vast amount of information we carry. Even if the brain allowed such storage capacity, who would want to be burdened by quantities of redundant, interfering memories? Painful and messy ones? Therefore as regeneration techniques advanced to allow the body to last longer, mind renewal grew alongside. The term is colloquial and inaccurate, of course—what is a mind, after all? No matter, as someone quipped. In fact, it’s selected portions of long-term memory that we renew. New memories in new bodies. New lives. That’s the ideal, though we are still far from it. The body may creak and wobble; memory develop a crack or hole. In the leaked memory syndrome, or Nostalgia, thoughts burrow from a previous life into the conscious mind, threatening to pull the sufferer into an internal abyss” (7).

This brings us to the central character, Dr. Frank Sina. He himself underwent the procedure that replaced all his previous memories and now serves as one such doctor, consulting with people who want to be reborn and people who struggle with repressing forbidden memories. Frank Sina (where’s the missing ‘tra’ on his name?—this actually is relevant, I think) engages with a patient named Presley whose leaky memories seem oddly resonant: it’s midnight, the lion is out. As Presley reveals his few leaky memories, Frank seems to have his own imagination run away with him and finds himself getting wrapped up in a much more sinister plot.

    The novel has an engaging premise. The idea of rewriting old memories for essentially immortal people is a valuable thought experiment in the value of memory in general. The world of the novel allows for all kinds of exploration into deeper issues and themes, ranging from colonialism to class to race to religion to mortality. For instance, there’s an extraordinarily compelling section where Dr. Sina is consulting with a woman who wants to be reborn. It is essentially a conversation about suicide because she’s giving up everything, including her loved ones. The faith that she has in her (basically) reincarnation proves to override any deterrents towards a more traditional suicide. The philosophical implications really draw me in in that respect. 

    A question that emerges to me is: what responsibility do we have to our future selves? What responsibility do we have to ourselves when we don’t exist yet?

    In Nostalgia’s world, reincarnation is a mixed blessing verging on a curse. It’s unpredictable; you don’t know which of your qualities will be transferred or what your new situation will be, though it’s implied that you’ll land reasonably safely into a new career. The question then becomes: how is this different than death? Your old self is eradicated, your new self is completely disconnected from your past self’s expectations. You’re a new person that knows some version of you used to exist. Vassanji offers at least some justification for why the impulse would be desirable, though he could go further in exploring the implications. Understandably, people might feel compelled to escape their memories, but the incentive to start fresh when you won’t experience it seems a little senseless. It’s only towards the end of the novel that Vassanji reveals that your past self passes along funds to your future self to help them land safely, which I guess gives some assurance of well-being in their new life.

    The philosophical implications of the novel are worth deeper consideration, but so too are its narrative possibilities. For instance, there are sections where Frank, our narrator, recounts beautiful memories of his parents and childhood. Yet, you know these memories are fake. They’re a story invented by someone whose job it is to create new lives. It’s a twisted approach where the narrator is unreliable to himself and to the audience. It’s also an engaging idea that you might have memories but not be able to see them; memory becomes something more felt than seen or lived. 

    It’s possible to view the book in terms of recent technological developments, as well. Though it was written in 2016, it’s prescient of things like ChatGPT. (Has anyone asked ChatGPT to write its autobiography?). AI is a life form of sorts, compiled by memories of others, memories that become its own, despite it never having any authentic experience of them. It’s fitting that one of the central characters in Vassanji’s work is an AI program with whom Frank dialogues. Yet, it has the agency to track what he does and offer privacy when so requested. The use of AI as a device is an effective parallel to the more humanistic (or posthumanistic) concerns of the novel as a whole.

    Incidentally, Vassanji seems to have a knack for finding meaningful parallels from the cultural zeitgeist. At one point, Frank is being threatened and Andy Warhol’s repetitious Elvis painting appears in view of his office. It’s a clear reference to Frank’s dealing with the patient Presley—a little on the nose, but it’s more nuanced than that when you also consider that both texts deal with a repetition of identity. Just as Elvis is replicated ad nauseam, the people in this story are repeated, albeit nonidentically, rather than allowing themselves to die.

    I’ve scratched the surface of the story’s premise, but there are a number of layers that are worth discussing. I’m going to attempt to avoid spoiling central plot points, but be warned that it may occur. Frank Sina is dating a young woman named Joanie, who is having an affair behind his back and who is secretly part of a growing protest movement that calls for older people to off themselves to make room for the younger, naturally born generation that finds itself devoid of opportunities. Meanwhile Frank meets an Indian woman who is part of a pseudo-Hindu movement that encourages people to naturally die and repair the karmic cycle. One of the members of her group self-immolates—in more ways than one this book reminds me of Unless by Carol Shields—and Frank finds himself engaged in religious and spiritual exploration alongside his new friend. Meanwhile, a reporter named Holly Chu has gone to Maskinia, the nation of cannibalistic poor people. While reporting there, she is kidnapped, presumably eaten—but she reemerges as a convert calling for understanding for the anti-Western-decadence militaristic group, of which she is now a part. Meanwhile, Presley tries to maintain his leaky memories and the government pressures Frank to find his client and report his whereabouts. In short, there’s a lot going on.

    While I enjoyed the novel overall, there’s an element of its structure I found somewhat disagreeable. While alternating between the other storylines, Frank writes in a journal, initially digitally, but fearing the AI reporting him, he switches to writing by hand. The journals recount stories about Holly Chu and Presley and explores their previous lives. The alternating narrative approach was and is in vogue, but here it felt largely unnecessary. Of course, by the end of the novel all the threads weave together. Fair enough, I suppose, but it was a little too predictable how everything would fit; suggesting the hidden narrative would have been enough.

    Stylistically, the book was well-developed. I initially found it off-putting, perhaps because you’re thrown into the text immediately. (Is this Heidegger’s thrownness at work? Is that the experience when you are reborn mid-life?). Really, I think it’s because the second sentence is a fragment with many clauses and little context: “A stray thought like a foreign body, an impurity in his mind, a banner floating cheekily against the sunny blue of his normalcy” (1). The more immersed I became in the novel, the more the style agreed with me. The presentation of the dialogue also led to some interesting opportunities. In a conversation with his unfaithful partner, Frank narrates the following: “The edge in the tone, that silly response shouted guilt to me. And I replied mutely, It matters, but it doesn’t matter, because I know. And you know that I know” (18). Due to the lack of quotation marks, there’s a moment of ambiguity—what does he actually say? Moments later it becomes clear that he did not say ‘the quiet part out loud’, but there’s that brief moment of doubt. It’s a stylistic way to reflect this ambiguous border between there-and-not-there, and while subtle, it felt like it added to the thematic consistency of the book.

    The book was probably the closest thing I’ve read to a page-turner in quite some time. While it’s a high-concept novel, it remains grounded enough in reality and engaging enough in its plot that it works as a pretty versatile novel. There are lots of points of entry and I could see it being incorporated as a dystopian novel in a high school English course. It would certainly lead to some interesting and meaningful conversations.

    Hey, do you remember an animal from the start of this review?

    The book sets up the danger of thinking and the danger of memory. If I ever write my dissertation, it will be about the epistemological and political concerns of nostalgia in fiction and here there’s a very clear risk involved. On the topic of unwanted thoughts, “the trick then is not to try and understand them, unravel the thoughts—that only feeds the syndrome and revives those dead circuits in the brain—and brings more of them back. And you don’t want that” (16).

    There’s also a clear parallel with the idea of the value of fiction. Lives themselves are fictions that have purpose: “To our eyes, every life story is one more narrative, to be examined for structure and meaning and coherence; for its utility. And then a life enters your life, your heart. It’s no longer just a narrative, it’s your ache, moment by moment. That’s what had happened to me” (21). Vassanji qualifies that we are just narrative. Life and stories are experienced differently, but it’s clear that fiction has just as much value for enabling us to go on—in this book, literally so: you are given a fake backstory so that you can keep on living.

    To me, there’s a lingering question that the book does not yet address satisfactorily. It seems a central problem that memories are connected to others—i.e. one memory is connected to another one, and one person’s memories are connected to other people. We do see some of the way in which one person’s memories awaken memories in someone else, but it just seems unlikely that an individualized memory-replacement program would be possible to contain. I suppose that’s why memory leakage occurs, but when everything is so connected to everything else I can’t fathom ever being able to isolate memories and reprogram new ones. Imagine, for example, if Proust’s madeleine were erased from In Search of Lost Time. I guess that’s why the world of Nostalgia is an all-or-nothing game, but the containment of particular memories just seems impossible. And what if you were to encounter people from your previous life? Also, there are some things that we have collective memories of—shared knowledge, shared experiences that would always need to be accounted for. How profoundly isolating it would be if you were not given a memory that serves as a touchstone for everyone around you—-I suppose that’s why the generation gap emerges as a problem in the novel, since everyone has different cultural memory and has been alive for different lengths of time.

    That was a bit of a tangent, but the pink elephant on the beach has nevertheless lingered with you, hasn’t it?

    Anyway, I really liked this book. While the ending petered out more than I would have hoped, there is enough substance in the core concepts of the book and the intrigue of the plot that I found it really compelling. Ironically, Nostalgia will likely remain in my memory for quite some time.

    Happy reading, folks!