She Who Remains by Rene Karabash

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kuka, don’t, let go of me” (55).

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

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

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

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

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

Spoilers to follow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy reading!

An Equal Music by Vikram Seth

There’s an unfortunate phenomenon in which authors sometimes fall victim to their own success. For some, that means they stop pushing themselves and coast off of a formula that works. For Vikram Seth, it means he has slipped into Joseph Hellerism. It may be apocryphal, but Joseph Heller purportedly was asked how he’d respond to critics who say he’s never written a book better than Catch 22 and he purportedly responded, “I’d respond by saying that no one has written a book better than Catch 22.” Seth’s epic romance A Suitable Boy, clocking in at 1474 pages, is hard to live up to—it has such a rich cast of characters and is beautifully woven with multiple storylines. An Equal Music is also a love story of sorts, and it’s fine but it is unable to reach the same heights as his previous work.

The novel is about a quartet of musicians and follows, in part, their career. I quite liked witnessing the dynamics between Piers, Helen, Billy, and Michael (our protagonist and narrator) as they are offered important performances and a recording contract for Bach’s The Art of the Fugue. I also appreciated their superfan that follows them around, their lush agent, Erica, and the bigwig Ysobel that offers them a record contract. Even more engaging to me is that, early in the text, Michael’s girlfriend (and violin student) Virginie puts him on to an obscure work that he didn’t realize existed—a recording of Beethoven’s string quartet in C. minor, Op. 104. I seem to love the idea of ‘lost media’ in books, and watching Michael track down this lost piece was engaging.

The symbolism of that record also serves a functional purpose for the book. Michael unearths something that he thought was lost. On the same day, he’s on one bus passing by another and sees a woman he hasn’t seen in ten years on the opposite side. Ten years prior, they had a romantic relationship, but their careers went in different directions and there’s clear tension and regret over not seeing that relationship through. So, Michael reaches out and tries to get in touch with her on the same day he has found that long lost record. The record disappears from the story for a time and later resurfaces (this word choice is perhaps in poor taste) at the climax when it is flung into a lake and sinks for all time.

The trouble of the novel is the love story at its core. Readers will all have different interpretations, I’m sure, but to me I found Michael profoundly unlikable as a romantic lead. First of all, the fact that he is sleeping with his younger pupil is distasteful in itself, but he also does not treat Virginie very well. On the phone, he’s terse; he’s evasive and belittles her, and he stops engaging with her intimately. The fact is, he’s not in love with her and tells her as much. Worse, he cheats on her. When he and Julia encounter one another, they resume a romance, and she too is unfaithful to her partner. I have a hard time getting behind their romance because Michael is pushy with her and doesn’t respect her boundaries. He repeatedly does not listen to her when Julia says no. Time and time again he insists on intruding in her life, and it felt more desperate than passionate.

Perhaps I could let the obsessiveness and infidelity slide if there were enough moments to show the light they bring out in each other, but there doesn’t feel to me enough tenderness to justify the relationship. The relationship is entirely clouded by a brooding tone; the situation seems impossible—not in an erotic or fun impossible, but in a depressing impossible. I interpret the situation as Michael wanting a fresh start while Julia is looking for the perfect ending. Michael wants to relive their time ten years prior and refuses to let go of the past. Meanwhile, Julia is at the end of her musical career and it appears to me like she’s trying to settle the score (!) before she retires from playing piano. The disconnect between them sets up for a disastrous bond.

Later in the book, there’s a great scene in which Julia’s husband invites Michael to a party at their home. The invitation and the party itself are riddled with potential innuendos. It creates an atmosphere of suspicion: does he know? I would have liked that scene to go on for longer, actually; lingering in that ambiguity creates a great tension for the story that has otherwise read as a bit repetitive. Michael sits in the discomfort, narrating in a series of questions about whether Julia’s husband has found them out and what the consequences might be. In my view, Seth pulls the ripcord a bit too soon and Julia reveals that yes, he knows, no she doesn’t know how, yes she can tell from his face. 

To Seth’s credit, as unlikable as Michael is, Julia remains a sympathetic character. The secret at the core of her character is that she is going deaf. (Note to self: finally get around to watching the movie Sound of Metal). She knows that things are ending for her, and so her connection with Michael is mournful. She plays music with him as a quintet knowing that it will be the last time she will perform with others, and Michael cannot accept it. There’s an awkwardness surrounding her deafness, a secret that Michael finds himself forced to share (he’s the worst!—how dare he betray her confidence like that? Revealing her secret could ruin her!).

In fact, most of the characters are fleshed out pretty beautifully. They feel distinct. Authentic. When I think about the classics of literary fiction, particularly in the British tradition, I think of novels populated with unique and memorable characters. Seth seems to capitalize on that approach. The members of the quartet all have their affectations and interests, but Michael also engages with a broad range of colourful characters. Mrs. Formby, for example, is a family friend and former teacher to Michael whose spirit really shines. Her generosity leads to her promoting his career and loaning him (essentially for life), his prized violin. Seth’s knack for populating his books with real people is one of the highlights of the text.

On the topic of the violin, what I found disappointing in the story structure is its ending. Throughout the book, Michael and Julia’s relationship sits in the foreground and there are any number of moments that I think warrant a permanent dissolution of their affair. When it finally happens for real, it feels weirdly unearned—not a genuine climax, but simple period at the end of a sentence. Even throwing the record into the lake feels understated. The denouement goes in an entirely different direction; with about forty pages to go, the story is no longer primarily about Michael’s romantic endeavour. Instead, we see him quit the quartet and mill about purposelessly. We also find out that Mrs. Formby has died and has left Michael her violin. In life, she had told Michael that he would need to return it so that she could rearrange her assets and give funds to her nephew. Michael accepted that the time was coming, and is surprised to find out she had a change of heart before her death. Her nephew then reaches out, threatening a lawsuit. This bit of drama is short-lived and as a result gives the ending an unfocused quality. The conflict is an echo of the novel’s main theme: the pain of loss, the joy of recovery, the deepening pain of once again losing that which we thought was returned. The obscure record, Julia, the violin: they each follow a similar pattern. To that end, the violin lawsuit piece makes sense, but it feels like a whimper at the end of the movement rather than a crescendo. It feels like the characters don’t really learn anything, but get to enjoy their stasis. Michael, at the end of the novel, has not committed to returning to the quartet and goes back and forth on whether to go to Julia’s performance of The Art of the Fugue. He simply cannot stay away from the beautiful music—and music is a clear stand-in for Julia and vice versa.

As you’ve likely noted, there are clear parallels between the characters’ emotional states and the other elements of the text. The descriptions of the instrumentation, for example, often mimic the depressive streaks of the characters. The description of the violin and how it is touched mimics the way Michael feels, too. There are lush descriptions of both sound and visuals; partly, Seth seems to highlight the visuals when Julia is losing her hearing, which is a nice touch. There’s a clear craftsmanship to the work; the novel is quite proficient in that respect.

An Equal Music is generally good, but if you’re like me you’re going to have to accept that the main character is unlikable. It’s a love story that makes more sense as a cerebral exercise rather than one of the heart. The bond between the lovers seems to me more about their contexts and life circumstances than genuine affectionate moments, so it doesn’t quite land for me in that respect. I still like Vikram Seth’s writing and his ability to economically flesh out characters is a true talent. Now that I’ve read Seth’s three published novels, I’m going to have to convert to his poetry or wait for the encore: A Suitable Girl —a sequel thirty three years in the making (so far).

In the intermission, happy reading!

Scenes from a Childhood by Jon Fosse

        Jon Fosse’s writing is truly inspiring to me. The distinctness of his incantatory voice is entrancing, magic as a modern day Beckett. Like his other works, Scenes from a Childhood reads like pure poetry, despite being essentially a collection of flash fiction, short stories, and little novellas.

There are five sections in Scenes from a Childhood. The first retains the same title as the collection and offers a kind of semi-fictive memoir through a series of vignettes. “How It Started” is a tender, more extended short story of a boy’s first kiss with a girl. Fosse navigates the complexity of feelings of young teenagers and the imagery is absolutely stunning. “Dreamt in Stone” is about witnessing a slow avalanche and imagining all the small stones shifting—which is, incidentally, what the narrator feels in himself. “And Then My Dog Will Come Back To Me” is the longest piece in the collection, essentially serving as a standalone revenge fantasy. “Little Sister” returns to childhood and focuses on a four year old with his three year old sister and their misadventures, ending on a beautifully sad moment of the boy’s parents recounting a time he crassly embarrassed himself when he was two and everyone dying of laughter.

Of the lot, I think “Scenes from a Childhood” is my favourite. Fosse’s style is well-suited to the specificity of the vignettes. Fosse’s language is rarely complex; the bare simplicity of the language is touching, and the repetitiousness of his phrasing, the sentences that go on and on with commas and subordinate clauses, the return to key images and mantra-like phrases—all these are suited to encapsulate the experience of memory. I always love getting to hear about particular moments in someone else’s formative years; despite having a different upbringing Fosse’s semi-fictions are so resonant and connect me with memories of my own childhood that have long been buried. The scenes are often concise, pared down to the essential. “Hamburger,” for example, is a one-paragraph account of being hungry but having no money for food, “just enough for the bus ride home” (25). Atle “Is sitting at the same table, he is a few years older than me and they say he’s a terrible drinker” (25). He’s set up as a kind of Boo Radley figure and “He buys himself a hamburger” (25). The narrator continues, “I am so hungry. I don’t say anything. But then Atle asks if I’m in the mood for a hamburger and he goes and buys a hamburger for me too. I’m sure that Atle has barely any more money than I do, and still he buys me a hamburger. It tastes incredible” (25). The vignette ends there, and the story feels absolutely complete. It’s just a quiet moment where an outsider shares with another outsider, a simple gesture that is so mundane, but exactly the kind of thing people remember. In another vignette, Atle (the same Atle?) is at a community centre during a dance. The narrator steps out of the youth centre and sees that Atle has a full bag of beers. He waves a beer around, offering it to the narrator, and—isn’t life just like this?—”he turns somehow and drops the bottle and then falls head first down the stairs” (26). These odd and fateful spasms! The narrator runs over and Atle is “smiling up at [him] from the middle of a mess of blood and [he] sees that [Atle has] broken all his front teeth” (26). Again, the story ends there and it’s enough. The postcard tells us everything we need to connect and see why this scene would stand out.

One of the more extended scenes, though still only about a page and a half, is “My Grandmother is Lying in Bed.” It’s a moving account of the narrator’s grandmother passing away. As if by fate, the grandmother has been sent to hospital and the narrator is going to school in the same city. They’re both away from home but bound together. In the hospital, “There’s another bed along the other wall and someone’s lying there talking nonsense all the time” (19). The details of the interaction are so briefly described: “My grandmother smiles a t me. I smile back at her. I ask her how it’s going and she shakes her head from side to side” (19). The two then have a brief conversation where the narrator essentially trains his grandmother to respond to questions: “Do you want to come back home? I say. / I see her mouth trying to move. / Yes? I say. / My grandmother looks at me. I say yes again, slowly, clearly moving my lips. My grandmother looks at my lips. She shapes her own lips, copying mine. / Yes, she says” (19). Following this moment, a new section of the vignette starts. In part two, Fosse accounts for similarities and differences in the two experiences. He brings her bananas. Again, the narrator instructs her speech: “Everything all right? I say” [notice how the questions are framed as declarative statements instead of questions] “My grandmother doesn’t answer. / No, I say. / My grandmother looks at my lips, I say no again, slowly moving my mouth clearly” (19-20). The repetition illustrates their ongoing dynamic, but this time the grandmother can only make “some strange sounds” (20). In the face of her suffering, the narrator relates that “things are going well at school. [...] I tell her about where I’m living” (20). It’s the kind of futile storytelling that I think fills the silence when we can’t confront suffering directly and then they manage to find connection: “I tell her about someone I don’t like and my grandmother shakes her head and he eyes smile and we agree completely” (20). The final section of the vignette points to a disconnect when she’s actually passing; she’s scared and the narrator says, “I think she’s scared because she’s about to die and because she’s Christian. I see my grandmother writhe from side to side to her white nightgown. I’m not Christian. I  put the bag of oranges I’ve brought down on the bedside table” (20). I can’t quite articulate why I find it so powerful, if perhaps not for the repetition of the phrases and the recycling (with a difference) of previous parts of the story.

I don’t know if there’s a specific word for repetition-with-a-difference as a literary device. I find it powerful, whatever it may be. In “Its Maybe Four O’Clock,” there’s a great deal of imagery and embedded in the middle of it are two phrases that describe an old barn: “A rusty hook is hanging from the door-frame. The door is hanging from the door-frame too” (10). I love constructions like that where you could just say both things are hanging from the door-frame but each are given their own separate, unique, but conceptually linked existence. The whole of “It’s Maybe Four O’Clock” is just beautiful imagery. I offer it here in its entirety:

It’s maybe four o’clock when Trygve and I go out to the old barn. My grandfather built this barn but now it’s falling apart, the unpainted planks in the walls are rotting away, there are holes in the wall you can see through in some places and a couple of the roof tiles lying in the nettles, three more sticking out of a puddle of mud. A rusty hook is hanging from the door-frame. The door is hanging from the door-frame too, attached with hay-baling cord, swinging crookedly. A warm summer day, afternoon. Trugve and I sit on a large round stone a few yards from the barn. There are plastic bags under our legs with our lunches inside, slices of bread with brown cheese, we each have a soft drink. It’s hot. We’re both sweating. Mosquitoes are buzzing round our heads. (10)

I find Fosse has such a beautiful knack for description that he requires neither many nor fancy words to create a complete picture. Just lovely.

Perhaps my favourite imagery in the book as a whole comes from the story “How It Started.” The story revolves around teens who meet at a community centre and go gallivanting together before walking one another home. There’s a scene in which they are huddled under a bus shelter as rain pours down and they play a kissing game. In just a few words, Fosse creates a vivid image: “The rain picks up, the wind gets stronger and the waves beating on the shore sound clearer. The evening gets darker. We dare to get closer to each other” (68). The passage then continues with a Beckettian description of systems (think: the pebble-sorting scenes in Malloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnameable). The narrator explains, “We say Kiss, and once the ones who said it were assigned to the ones who were to receive the kiss, who, according to the random chance of the game, were going to be kissed, when those going to kiss step out of the darkness towards those who are going to be kissed, no one looks, we all look down” (68). Even these convoluted and unnecessary explanations add to the tone of the piece. We then return to the imagery: “There is only darkness and rain around the pair, we others have disappeared, each into our own mute solitude even though there is a silent companionship surrounding the solitude, yes, a companionship, where no one says anything but we are with each other, not that we’re people for each other, but we’re there, and then it was her turn and I catch a sight of her eyes in the darkness” (68-69). Fosse is a master of describing darkness and light. The idea of these characters illuminated despite the darkness and rain and other obstructions around them is beautiful to me. The story then continues with a description of their first kiss and the sentence goes on for quite some time, but what I appreciate is how the physical qualities of the characters are mirrored. Embedded within the other description of the event, the narrator comments, “with my hair, with my body [...] I stand there, not feeling the rain” (69). Several clauses later, he stands there in his “wet jacket, [his] hands hanging straight down” and she comes out of the darkness “with her eyes, with her hair” (69). The parallel construction of the miniscule parts of them that emerge is like little illuminations in the gloom and then they “stand there, jacket to jacket” and feels “the warmth from her lips, her mouth, and wetness, / a warm wetness, nothing more, but so unlike anything else, so separate, a single short second and everything’s different, there in the bus shelter, the darkness, the rain” (69). A master of the form. The choice adjectives and the use of commas to pace the passage are just stunning.

Meanwhile, “And Then My Dog Will Come Back To Me” reflects an uncharacteristically vindictive character—I’m not saying it isn’t justified: a neighbour shoots and kills his dog. He then goes on a quest for revenge, repeating to himself how much he hates the man and how he’s going to kill him, before literally doing so. The repetitive phrases of Fosse’s writing usually feel spiritual to me and inspire a tenderness for his characters; their repeated phrases are like a periapt. Seeing repetitive phrases that are here rage-fueled feels more obsessive, compulsive, scary. There’s a tension in “And Then My Dog Will Come Back To Me” that shows the diversity of emotion Fosse is able to create. The story is a slow tension, where repetition prolongs the experience and uncertainty. Will the man follow through on his mission? Seeing the first-hand account of this distressed man also breeds sympathy as you see his thoughts become more muddled and disjointed, expecting that his dog will return to him at any moment—a dog whose head was blown away and whom he has already buried. It’s a powerful piece.

Returning to “Scenes from a Childhood,” there’s a section called “Asle Has Never Read a Book.” It goes as follows: “Asle has never read a book. And then they read a novel for school. Asle discovers he really likes it, because everything that in life only moves back and forth is like music somehow in the novel, so he really likes it, but it’s not exactly the same as music, because he knows what music is but this is a kind of music where everything that goes back and forth stays quiet and nice to think about” (42). Scenes from a Childhood,  indeed all of Fosse’s work, has that musical quality. I adore the way he’s able to string the audience along with such musicality, and evoke the same emotion as do the swells of powerful music.

That makes it all the stranger when he offers the strangely imperative comment in “I Always Agree With Those Who Disagree”: “I understand that some of what matters most is missing from our lives. So there needs to be a revolution” (49). I feel like Fosse has the power to bestow that which is missing from our lives, and if, as Adrienne Rich says in her poem “Dreamwood” that “poetry / isn’t revolution but a way of knowing”, Fosse also seems to offer a new approach, a new way of knowing and a new way of being through his writing. However prosaic, Fosse’s writing is poetry. I am elevated by it every time I read his work.

Happy reading and happy New Year!