Bonsai by Alejandro Zambra

Despite being just under eighty pages, Alejandro Zambra’s Bonsai is surprisingly hard to summarize. It’s a book essentially about two lives: Julio’s, which doesn’t end, and Emilia, whose does. The two young scholars develop a relationship while studying for exams and part of the book is about the blooming and withering of their romances. It’s a simple ‘slice of life’ but I felt the book to be funny, tender, creative, and grounded.

The young Julio has two meaningful relationships—one with Emilia and, later, one with Maria. At the time in his life when he meets Emilia, we are told that “Julio has avoided serious relationships, hiding not from women but from seriousness, since by that point he knew that seriousness was every bit as dangerous as women, if not more so” (5). I like that idea of trying to avoid seriousness, and I can’t help but feel like Zambra’s approach to writing is infused with a humour that puts theory into practice. For instance, there’s a funny part in which both Julio and Emilia have lied about reading Proust and have to act as though they’ve read In Search of Lost Time. In another part, Julio pretends that he has become a translator for a writer to impress Maria and that lie leads him into inventing a book and lying about its premise, only for him to be thwarted by the truth. There’s a real comic element in Bonsai that is hard to resist but also that elevates the darker threads of the text. 

I’ve left out the second half of the passage about Julio avoiding seriousness. The passage continues as follows: “Julio knew he was doomed to seriousness, and he tried, stubbornly, to thwart his serious fate, even as he stoically awaited that frightening and inevitable day when seriousness would come to settle in his life for good” (5). Zambra balances the light and the dark, the satire and the serious. The ending of the book, which I won’t spoil, concludes on a somber note and driving around in a 30, 000 peso cab ride. It’s touching and beautiful and ‘serious’—it is, in Zambra’s words elsewhere, “a light tale that becomes heavy” (13).

I think the real core of the book is the relationships between the characters, who are relatable and likable in all of their flaws. Zambra has a particular talent for capturing the spirit of young love. For instance, when Emilia and Julio start their relationship it “was a relationship riddled with truths, with personal disclosures that quickly built up a complicity they strove to see as unassailable” (13). That characterization rings true—there are those couples that come to orbit only one another and there’s a sort of metanarrative about the writing of their lives: “This is the story of two student enthusiasts of the truth, aficionados of deploying words that seem like truth, of smoking endless cigarettes, and of enclosing themselves within the violent complacency of those who believe themselves better and purer that others, than that immense and detestable group called everyone else” (13). The grandiose language serves to both elevate and belittle them at the same time. I liked that because it feels so much the way I ought to have been treated as a young lad.

In another scene of the young couple, Emilia’s friend does not like Julio and says that she has changed since being with him. Emilia defends her relationship, possibly not believing her own words: “Why would you want to be with someone if they didn’t change your life?” (18). Zambra’s description of the incident is that “She said that, and Julio was there when she said it: that life only made sense if you found someone who would change it, who would destroy your life as you knew it. Anita found the theory a little dubious, but she didn’t argue. She knew that when Emilia used that tone there was no point in contradicting her” (18). The grand pronouncements of lovers serve as the groundwork for the book and put Bonsai alongside the literary precedents it references (Madame Bovary, for instance). It feels connected; classic in its own way.

I also have to say, I really like the way the book we read has interjections and uncertainties from the narrator and comes to parallel the book that Julio improvises when “translating” from a successful author. There’s a haphazardness to the narrative that mimics Julio’s own unprompted inventions. Even the fact that the story is not strictly about Julio and Emilia but also jumps to Julio and Maria seems unplanned. The quick transition into new narratives and the short chapters places us in the middle of invention.

I don’t have a ton to say about this book, but I really liked it. I thoroughly enjoyed the characters and the voice of the writing and it’s always impressive when an author can navigate two distinct tones (somber and comic) and make me feel for the characters so deeply in fewer than a hundred pages. I commend Zambra’s Bonsai—looking forward to reading more of his work soon.

Happy reading!

100 Simple Secret of Great Relationships: What Scientists Have Learned and How You Can Use It by David Niven

        In this relationship self-help book, David Niven offers a hundred simple secrets, which, when we really get into it, feels like an overpromise. Each of the chapters spans two pages (or three at most) and they all follow the same formula: a short paragraph to explain the ‘secret,’ an anecdote or case study of people demonstrating that secret in their relationships, and then a related factoid to close. The formula gives 100 Simple Secrets of Great Relationships an accessible, if repetitive, quality.

Ultimately, it feels like Niven’s work skirts along the surface and could easily be cut in half. A number of the chapters offer mirror images to each other. For instance, “No One Wins the Comparison Game” and “Beware Second Opinions” could just be one chapter that addresses both comparing your relationship to others’ and receiving their input. While some of the advice is good advice, it’s nothing revolutionary. Moreover, some of the advice offers principles but not really step-by-step instruction. For instance, the chapter “Be Willing to Evolve” essentially says that relationships are better if people are less rigid in their thinking. Well, yeah. Of course. But Niven doesn’t offer a practical strategy for becoming more willing to evolve.

Scaling back on the quantity of ‘secrets’ would give Niven the space to elaborate in more meaningful ways on ‘quality’ secrets. The anecdotes sometimes appear disconnected from the opening paragraph from each of the chapters or insufficiently exploratory. What I really wanted more of was analysis of the factoids at the end of each chapter. I wanted more information on the methodology for the studies or further elaboration on the factors and variables. I guess I was hoping for a more scientific approach than an anecdotal one. At the same time, the book felt weirdly dated. It was talking about gender stereotypes on television that seem long past prevalent and the fact that there was any controversy over men doing housework seems laughable. A lot can change in 20 years, I suppose.

In the end, the book just felt like it was doing too much and not enough simultaneously. It’s probably not going to hurt, but I don’t see this being any more valuable than other resources out on the market for people looking to deepen their relationships.

Happy reading!

The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante

        [Editor’s note: I actually missed the Ferrante book club, so oops.] Three months ago, I read The Wall by Marlen Haushofer as a book club novel for Type in Toronto. In the latest installment of book club, we’re taking a look at The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante, another book where a woman is blindsided into isolation and must care for dependents with an increasing level of frustration. It seems that Type has a type. But I’m underselling it for comedic effect. The Days of Abandonment is a challenging, existential work about relationships, responsibilities, and selfhood. 

The book opens with Olga’s husband leaving her, seemingly spontaneously, after years of marriage. This sends Olga into a spiral of obsession and rage, especially when she discovers that her husband has left her for an inappropriately younger woman. She engages in rash behaviours, all the while fearing that she is descending into a misanthropic trope she witnessed in her childhood: the poverella, who was similarly abandoned and similarly acted erratically. Now that she is in a similar position, Olga finds herself unable but to attack her husband when she sees him in public and engage in a sordid and failed sexual encounter with her neighbour, whom she hates. Meanwhile, her dog and her son are incredibly sick, much to her annoyance, and her daughter offers her intense judgment while she dissociates to the point of needing her daughter to stab her to bring her back to reality. The group of them gets locked in their apartment and the book spirals into a frenetic madness. 

Plot-wise, the book is pretty thin. Depth-wise, it’s incredibly rich. It’s a finely wrought exploration of the psychological dynamics of identity, relationships, time, and existence. I ended up documenting a number of passages from the text, and, admittedly, I’m about as chaotic in my notetaking as Ferrante’s narrator is in her actions.

The initial pull of the book is the secrecy in which the abandonment is shrouded. There is a history of her husband trying to end the relationship and so Olga has a level of doubt that he may return. Upon reflecting about a previous attempt for him to end the relationship, she notes, “five days later he telephoned me in embarrassment, justified himself, said that there had come upon him a sudden absence of sense” (10), and says that “the phrase made an impression” about lingered with her. The question of whether he will come back lingers and, as she gets into increasingly desperate attempts to get in touch with him, it builds towards the conversation of whether there’s another woman. He says there is, but for a reader, I found there was that little bit of doubt: is he lying about a paramour because it’s the easiest way to make a clean break?

Of course, it is eventually confirmed that Mario is indeed seeing another woman and is not coming back. Olga gets more paranoiac, more obsessive. It’s uncomfortable to observe, but the book challenges its readers by presenting a feminine version of the male messiness at which nobody blinks. The vulgarity of her speech, the crassness of her comments, the repetitiousness in her thought patterns are all recognizable—in someone like Henry Miller. Olga notes that as a girl she “had liked obscene language, it gave [her] a sense of masculine freedom” (22). She continues, “Now I knew that obscenity could raise sparks of madness if it came from a mouth as controlled as mine” (22).

Indeed, Ferrante’s novel offers a kind of metacommentary on the literary history of the rejected woman. Her narrator describes being given a book and reading it, “But when [she] gave her back the volume, [she] made an arrogant statement: these women are stupid. Cultured women, in comfortable circumstances, they broke like knick-knacks in the hands of their straying men. They seemed sentimental fools” (21). Olga’s narration continues, “I wanted to be different, I wanted to write stories about women with resources, women of invincible stories about women with resources, women of invincible words, not a manual for the abandoned wife with her lost love at the top of her thoughts” (21). Her writing philosophy opens the door for the very messiness (that is, complexity) of human emotion: “I had pretensions. I didn’t like the impenetrable page, like a lowered blind. I liked light, air between the slats. I wanted to write stories full of breezes, of filtered rays where dust motes danced. And then I loved the writers who made you look through every line, to gaze downward and feel the vertigo of the depths, the blackness of inferno” (21). When childhood Olga tells her teacher that, her reaction suggests that she lost someone and it is only twenty years later that she suspects the same thing is happening to her. The passage continues with repetitive disbelief: how could Mario leave? How could he “become uninterested in [her] life, like a plant watered for years that is abruptly allowed to die of drought” (21). 

Olga obsesses over the past. Now that her marriage has collapsed, she sees herself in her distraught elementary school teacher; she sees herself in the poverella; she sees herself in the novel she had so abhorred: “Of that book from my adolescence the few sentences I had memorized at the time came to mind: I am clean I am true I am playing with my cards on the table” (22). She reflects, though, that “those were affirmations of derailment” (22). Again, Ferrante offers a hint to the style of obsessive rejection: “I had better remember, always put in the commas. A person who utters such words has already crossed the line, feels the need for self-exaltation and therefore approaches confusion” (22). There are several other moments in the text in which she recalls the need for commas, the lack of which point towards her increasing deterioration (“Hold the commas, hold the periods. It’s not easy to go from the happy serenity of a romantic stroll to the chaos, to the incoherence of the world” (70)).

Throughout the entire book, there’s a divide between what Olga rationally knows against the unfathomability of being left. On the one hand, she admits, “I was ashamed of myself” (34) while on the other she “couldn’t do anything about it” (34). Her desperation leads to a self-destructiveness, hoping that in performing her inability to exist without Mario that it will lure him back. She notes, “I couldn’t think of anything except how to get him back I soon developed an obsession to see him, tell him what I could no longer manage, show him how diminished I was without him” (34). It’s a psychologically complex response in which she attempts to align their different conceptions of reality: “I was sure that, stricken by a kind of blindness, he had lost the capacity to place me and the children in our true situation and imagined that we continued to live as we always had, peacefully. Maybe he even thought we were a little relieved, because finally I didn’t have to worry about him, and the children didn’t have to fear his authority, and so Gianni was no longer reprimanded if he hit Ilaria and Illaria was no longer reprimanded if she tormented her brother, and we all lived—we on one side, he on the other—happily” (34-35). She wants to try to force Mario’s perception, which is such a limited point of view and yet feels completely plausible in the context of loss: “I hoped that if he could see us, if he knew about the state of the house, if he could follow for a single day our life as it had become—disorderly, anxious, taut as a wire digging into the flesh—if he could read my letters and understand the serious work I was doing to sort out the breakdown of our relationship, he would immediately be persuaded to return to his family” (35).

At this point, you may be noticing how much of Ferrante’s text is being reproduced here in full. There are a few reasons for that. First, I think that Ferrante’s prose is compelling since it so accurately captures the desperation of her character. The skewed logic, the lapse in clear-thinking (which harkens back to what Mario had said to her). The other reason I want to replicate Ferrante’s words faithfully here is because the excess in Olga’s speech is, I think, critical to the work.

I mentioned Olga’s parallel to her husband. Mario claims a “sudden absence of sense” (10). That becomes an underlying apothegm for the novel. She has lost her sense and the novel offers a glorious conclusion to the throughline. When Olga is able to meet her husband on a level playing field, she admits that she no longer loves him. He makes some assumptions, which Olga then corrects: “I don’t love you anymore because, to justify yourself, you said that you had fallen into a void, an absence of sense, and it wasn’t true” (185). When her husband says it was true, she again corrects him: “No. Now I know what an absence of sense is and what happens if you manage to get back to the surface from it. You, you don’t know. At most you glanced down, you got frightened, and you plugged up the hole with Carla’s body” (185). I love the way these lines simultaneously offer a visceral response (“plugged up the hole with Carla’s body”) and an existential one. She confronts the depths of her own sorrow and disassociation from herself head-on, leaning into the isolation rather than trying to overcome her loneliness with other men—although there is one scene, where…well…

But more importantly, the novel confronts the relationship of Olga—and women in general—to time. Again, it becomes a kind of inversion between Mario and Olga. She remembers a conversation they had and narrates it as follows:

I don’t know exactly what he said. If I have to be honest, I think that he mentioned only the fact that, when you live with someone, sleep in the same bed, the body of the other becomes like a clock, ‘a meter,’ he said—he used just that expression—‘a meter of life, which runs along leaving a wake of anguish.’ But I had the impression that he wanted to say something else, certainly I understood more than what he actually said, and with an increasing, calculated vulgarity that first he tried to repress and which then silenced him I hissed:

‘You mean that I brought you anguish? You mean that sleeping with me you felt yourself growing old? You measured death by my ass, by how once it was firm and what it is now? Is that what you mean?’ (40)

Ferrante illustrates the way women embody time. I’ve seen a number of novels and philosophers which suggest that women have a deeper connection to time (whether it be through the notion of a ‘biological clock’ or something more metaphysical). But the way that Ferrante offers such a scathing critique of the hypocrisy of male midlife crises is so compelling here. This is particularly so because in the pages that follow, Olga follows her husband with “a million recriminations” in her mind. The actual objection she raises, though, is about how she provided him time; she created time. While the argument has been trod before, Ferrante does so in a particularly compelling way. She narrates, “I wanted to cry: don’t touch anything; they are things you worked on while I was there, I was taking care of you, I was doing the shopping, the cooking, it’s time that belongs to me in a way, leave everything there. But now I was frightened of the consequences of every word I had uttered, of those that I could utter, I was afraid I had disgusted him, that he would go away for good” (42). Again, there’s the tension between the righteous critique of her husband and the desperate fear of losing him for all time.

In many ways, The Days of Abandonment is a book about self-sacrifice, of losing oneself to others, and how women are especially subject to such demands. Continuing on with the discussion of time, Olga elaborates:

I had taken away my own time and added it to his to make him more powerful. I had put aside my own aspirations to go along with his. At every crisis of despair I had set aside my own crises to comfort him. I had disappeared into his minutes, into his hours, so that he could concentrate. I had taken care of the house, I had taken care of the meals, I had taken care of the children I had taken care of all the boring details of everyday life, while he stubbornly climbed the ladder up from our unprivileged beginnings. And now, now he had left me, carrying off, abruptly, all that time, all that energy, all that effort I had given him, to enjoy its fruits with someone else, a stranger who had not lifted a finger to bear him and rear him and make him become what he had become. It seemed to me an action so unjust, a behaviour so offensive that I couldn’t believe it, and sometimes I thought his mind had been obscured, he had lost the memory of us, was helpless and at risk, and it seemed to me that I loved him as I had never loved him, with anxiety rather than with passion, and I thought he had a pressing need for me. (63)

I love that passage. The personification of time—or rather its becoming material—-is particularly effective. The way Olga equates her gestures into quantifiable, measurable units, makes the impact felt that much more powerfully. The latter half of the passage provides a more refined discussion around types of love.

Olga demonstrates love in many ways to her other dependents, albeit with frustration and increasing dissociation. She hates their dog, for example: “Stupid dog, stupid dog, whom Mario had given as a puppy to Gianni and Ilaria, who had grown up in our house, had become an affectionate creature—but really he was a gift from my husband to himself” (54). She critiques Mario for his selfishness, since he “had dreamed of a dog like that since he was a child, not something wished for by Gianni and Ilaria, spoiled dog, dog that always got its way” (54). There are a number of moments where Olga abuses the dog, alternatingly being obliged to care for it.

Indeed, the dog becomes a symbol of Ogla’s obligations. Partway through the novel, Olga gets trapped in the apartment with her children and the dog, Otto. They are accidentally locked in and Olga cannot get the key to work. The obligations pile up and cause her to spiral into the self-destructiveness that she had formerly tried to portray to Mario—now, unseen by anyone else, she lives out her own prophecy. Problem after problem emerges. The dog gets sick. The son gets sick. There are ants: “they ran in a line along the base of the bookcase, they had returned to besiege the house” (126). With the ants in particular, Ferrante offers an interesting suggestion. The ants are described as “perhaps [...] the only black thread that held [the apartment] together, that kept it from disintegrating completely” (126). The notion that this flaw is precisely what grounds the apartment in reality for Olga is indeed reflective of the bigger picture: without her wards, Olga would fall apart completely. As for the ants,

without their obstinancy [...] Ilaria would now be on a splinter of floor much farther away that she seems and the room where Gianni is lying would be harder to reach than a castle whose drawbridge has been raised, and the room of pain where Otto is in agony would be a leper colony, and impenetrable, and my very emotions and thoughts and memories of the past, foreign places and the city of my birth and the table under which I listened to my mother’s stories, would be a speck of dust in the burning light of August. Leave the ants in peace. Maybe they weren’t an enemy, I had been wrong to try to exterminate them. At times the solidity of things is entrusted to irritating elements that appear to disrupt their cohesion” (126).

That final line seems to serve as a key to the text as a whole. Fissures are what reflect reality, what draw Olga back—as I mentioned, Olga gets her daughter Ilaria to stab her when she starts to lose focus while trying to tend to all of the issues she’s facing.

One of those issues is her disassociation from herself. Her loss of self manifests in various ways throughout the novel. In one gruelling encounter, she tries to give herself to her neighbour in one of the most (intentionally) awkward sexual encounters I’ve read in a novel. At first, Olga disassociates from herself using her body, but later uses her body to return to herself. All the while, she “thought of beauty as a constant effort to eliminate corporeality” (97). She describes how she “wanted him to love [her] body forgetful of what one knows of bodies. Beauty. [She] thought anxiously. Is this forgetfulness. Or maybe not” (97). She blames her mother for “the obsessive bodily attention of women” and describes a moment of connection when a young office mate of hers “farted without embarrassment and, with laughing eyes, gave [her] a half smile of complicity” (97). Again, we are psychologically contradictory. On the one hand, she wants to eliminate her corporeality. By the same token, it is her corporeality that allows her to connect with herself and others. In a pivotal moment, she describes taking off makeup and seeing herself in a triptych-style mirror. She sees “the two halves of [her] face separately, far apart, and [she] was drawn first by [her] right profile, then by the left” (123). The fragmentary nature of her reflection renders all angles of her unfamiliar to herself. She then rearranges the mirrors to see herself differently and remarks, “there is no technical means of reproduction that, up to now, has managed to surpass the mirror and the dream” (123). While using a mirror as symbolism for a fragmented identity is a little trite, Ferrante still renders the scene compelling. Two of the three reflections speak against Olga and “over those two half portions, Olga had scant control, she was not very resistant, not very persistent” (123). There is “the worse side, the better side, geometry of the hidden” (123). She continues, “If I had lived in the belief that I was the frontal Olga, others had always attributed to me the shifting, uncertain welding of the two profiles, an inclusive image that I knew nothing about” (123). She reflects on which version of herself she thought she was giving others and who others received.

I really like the way Ferrante explores the question of how we see one another. At one point, her daughter makes a statement about how Olga hits the children. Olga objects: “I didn’t hit them, I had never done it, at most I had threatened to do it” (102). She thinks, though, that “maybe for children there’s no difference between what one threatens and what one really does” (102). She continues, “the words immediately made the future real, and the wound of the punishment still burned even when I no longer remembered the fault that I would or could have committed” (102). She remembers her mother threatening to cut off her hands, “and those words were a pair of long, burnished steel scissors that came out of her mouth, jawlike blades that closed over the wrists, leaving stumps sewed up with a needle and thread from her spools” (102-103). Nonetheless, she tries to explain to her daughter that she never hit her and at most said she would slap her, but realizes “there’s no difference [...] and hearing that thought in [her] head scared [her]” (103). The difference between reality and our perception erodes and Olga “ended up in an alluvial flow that eliminated boundaries” (103). Again, the bodily is what comes to matter most: “The word ‘slap’ is not this slap” (103). Olga then slaps her daughter to prove the point. It’s chilling.

Later, when Ilaria puts on makeup, Olga is disturbed by her imitator: “What did it mean, we were identical, at that moment I needed to be identical only to myself” (121). She is nauseated by the experience and “Everything began to break down again” (121). Olga starts to wonder, “Maybe [...] Ilaria herself wasn’t Ilaria” (121). Again, Olga refers back to stories from her past—The Vomero and the poverella. She wonders if they have somehow transcended time and are actually these figures from the past, feeling, “without realizing it, I had been transformed into one of them, a figure of childish fantasies, and now Ilaria as only returning to me my true image, she had tried to resemble me by making herself up like me” (121). Olga enters the abyss. Her lapse of sense is characterized as follows:

This was the reality that I was about to discover, behind the appearance of so many years. I was already no longer I, I was someone else, as I had feared since waking up, as I had feared since who knows when. Now any resistance was useless, I was lost just as I was laboring with all my strength not to lose myself, I was no longer there, at the entrance to my house, in front of the reinforced door, coming to grips with that disobedient key. I was only pretending to be there, as in a child’s game. (121)

I’m rambling. I’m giving away the best parts and existential reflections. At the same time, I’ve withheld a number of scenes. The actual beats in the plot have been wildly underreported. One of the things I’ve hardly mentioned is the sordid affair she has with her neighbour, which leads to a number of reflections on sex and connection. She hates him, he hates her dog, she hates her dog, she needs him to help save her dog, and—when they can’t—to bury it. There’s a moment too when she thinks she sees her dog: “it seemed to me that the shade of Otto had joyously crossed the scene like a dark vein through bright, living flesh, I wasn’t frightened. The whole future—I thought—will be that way, life lives together with the damp odor of the land of the dead attention with inattention, passionate leaps of the heart along with abrupt losses of meaning. But it wouldn’t be worse than the past” (176).

Returning for a moment to the topic of sex, I’ll offer one passage that reflects the crassness that Olga reclaims it with justified feminine rage:

we consummate life and lose it because in some long-ago time someone, in the desire to unload his cock inside us, was nice, chose us among women [...] “we take for some sort of kindness addressed to us alone the banal desire for sex. We love his desire to fuck, we are so dazzled by it we think it’s the desire to fuck only us, us alone. Oh yes, he who is so special and who has recognized us as special. We give it a name, that desire of the cock, we personalize it, we call it my love. To hell with all that, that dazzlement, that unfounded titillation. Once he fucked me, now he fucks someone else, what claim do I have? Time passes, one goes, another arrives. I was about to swallow some pills, I wanted to sleep lying in the darkest depths of myself. (74).

Throughout the book, Ferrante offers perceptive insight into our internal storms. Whether it’s about the bodily or conceptions of self or time or relationships, there is a dark undercurrent that makes us question how we ought to live. The fissures seem to guide Olga’s way and when everything is going poorly she relies on the mantra “I love my husband and so all this has meaning” (88). She repeats that sentence as she falls asleep—of course, there’s some irony there which begs the question of—when she no longer loves her husband, does this journey then have no meaning?

As you can see, there is a lot to talk about for The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante. I have barely scratched the surface and worry about over-citing the book and offering very little commentary. It’s a shame I wasn’t able to make it to the book club, because I would love to have heard what others had to say about this descent—this true descent, not Mario’s superficial crisis.

Happy reading!

Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico

    Shortlisted for 2025’s International Booker Prize, Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection has rightly gotten a fair amount of attention from avid readers. Between the premise and style of the book, there is a lot to like. Perfection is about two expats living as creatives in Berlin, creating templates for websites or doing graphic design work for other creatives. Plot-wise, it’s pretty thin. We get a chapter, for instance, about what their apartment looks like. We get a chapter about their work. A chapter on what they do for fun. A chapter on their sex lives. Then, the final few chapters see their friends leaving Berlin and, feeling creeping ennui, sees them leaving Berlin for lackluster-to-dreadful experiences in Portugal and Sicily before Anna’s uncle dies and them establishing a hotel from his property.

    Character-wise, the book is a little bit thin there, too: Anna and Tom are consistently described as a unit. Perfection has two characters that never engage in dialogue and are distinguished from one another very rarely. They seem to experience the same joys, the same fears in leaving Berlin, the same sense of the present disappearing, the same hopes.

    Describing the plot as thin and the central characters as uniform, though, doesn’t really do the book justice. Perfection is conducted in such a stylistically interesting way.  The opening chapter of the book is just descriptions of photographs of an apartment at different angles. It’s a rich, imagistic tableau. The book is also divided into different verb tenses (present, imperfect, remote, future), and the style reflects the phases of AnnaTom / TomAnna’s lives. The book is replete with would bes and wills. The shifting verb tenses reflect the precarity of our lives and offer a commentary on our relationship to time in the present day.

    I suspect the prime appeal of Latronico’s novel is the commentary it offers on modern life, which cuts both ways. Tom and Anna love their remote jobs…sort of. The isolation isn’t ideal, but they are able to connect with other creatives. At the same time, they obsess over social media and post photos from wherever they are with the express purpose of making other people feel bad about not giving up steady work to travel and operate as creatives. The recurring description of their work as creating slightly-off-centered boxes parallels and critiques Tom and Anna’s frustration of everything being the same: they are creating the uniformity that bores them. But it pays the bills. The book also speaks to the collective ennui of experiences and our need for the new, different, and challenging against the more likely satisfying regularity. Tom and Anna’s sex life exemplifies that experience: they are consistently satisfied by one another, sometimes try to add something new into the routine, but ultimately are not adventurous enough to really push beyond what they know. Even when they attend sex clubs together, they do not venture out of their dyad, grateful that they do not have to take any STD tests.

    The end of the book is pretty interesting, too. In the final chapter, Tom and Anna take on managing a hotel. They host a number of clients for a weekend and then are set to restore the rooms to their previous condition. They must retain the image as presented on the website, which is a nice bookend to the first chapter. The reviewer to whom they offered a room publishes the piece with descriptions that they had agreed upon. The question is whether the effort that goes into crafting their lives is truly worth the detriment to the authenticity of their experiences. An open question.

    All things considered, Perfection doesn’t quite live up to its namesake, but the thoughtful project is uniquely memorable. It’s part novella-length character study, part commentary on the gig economy and the lives of remote workers, part existential reflection. It is / would be / will be a good book to take on.

    Happy reading!

All About Love by Kemmerick 'Bing Bong' Harrison

     

        Sometimes a book isn’t so much about the book as it is about the context of that book. All About Love is a book of poems by Kemmerick ‘Bing Bong’ Harrison, a Barbadian poet and joke writer. While on vacation, I met Harrison on the resort hawking his books. I passed him by one night and he caught me peeking at his books but we were running late for dinner, so I said I’d take a look later. The next afternoon, he was setting up his booth and he has quite the memory because he recognized me and beckoned me over.

Bing Bong told me to pick a number and then recited, from memory, the poem written on the page of the number I said. He has his books memorized and gave very dramatic readings of his poems and jokes. When I read his poems, I can hear his voice and remember his delivery. He’s a really charismatic guy, even though I don’t really share his humour.

I think the same is true for his poems. All About Love is a collection about love of different kinds: romantic, familial, religious, lustful, and so on. The collection is tonally disparate; there’s some comedically intended poems about unfaithful partners or gold-digging women presented alongside pleas for the government to against incest and for people to protect themselves from AIDS. There’s a sincerity to the collection that gives it a certain charm, but the poems have the sing-songy rhyme scheme of a budding high school poet. The rhyme scheme sometimes forces him into awkward line constructions. 

The target audience is almost definitely not me. The collection gives Chicken Soup for the Lover’s Soul vibes, but I have a soft spot for Harrison because he’s such a charming guy. 

There’s one thing that I think is really interesting about the collection and that I’ll ask Bing Bong about next time I see him is that there are two poems that reference wrong number phone calls that ended in long-term love. “Blind Date” establishes a dialogue between Frederick and not-Juliette. Frederick calls the wrong number and then really hits it off with the woman. The poem “Reflections” reprises the idea: someone meets someone new, get their number, calls, and then dialed the number wrong and the poem ends: “Now I’m old, beginning to gray / I often reflect upon that day / ‘Twas because of that phone call / I have you, my kids and all” (40). I really wonder if those poems are rooted in truth.

Well, Bing Bong, if I ever run into you again, I’ll ask. In the meantime, happy reading!

The Bradshaw Variations by Rachel Cusk

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nonetheless, happy reading!