The Nights are Quiet in Tehran by Shida Bazyar

  Of the International Booker Prize shortlist for 2026, The Nights are Quiet in Tehran by Shida Bazyar is my penultimate read, with only the winner remaining. This year’s International Booker Prize seems to have much more of a theme than last, each book reflecting some level of arbitrary rule and tension between the individual and societal expectations. Bazyar explores these ideas through the sometimes confusing historical milieu of Iran, jumping through the narrative in decades across generations: Behzad in 1979, Nahid in 1989, Laleh in 1999, Mo in 2009, and Tara’s un-yeared epilogue.

Like other novels that have multiple narrators, I feel like each section took some acclimatizing. Every new decade was an adjustment period, and it took me probably fifteen pages or so to really get into the flow of the ‘new voice.’ By the end of each section, I felt generally invested; in particular, Behzad’s section involves a plan to transport leaflets and operate through cloak and dagger to contribute to a Marxist revolution. The plan involves a car tradeoff, secret passwords, and mysterious signals like a woman standing in a doorway. That political intrigue was one of the most compelling moments in the first half of the book for me; I also liked Behzad’s quiet, nearly invisible romance with Nahid and the way it developed through a few glances at revolutionary meetings.

Nahid’s section takes on a more domestic flavour—that is, on the surface. Below the surface, there’s a clear concern with the people who’ve been imprisoned, the people who’ve been lost, and the guilt that goes along with leaving them behind. One of my favourite scenes in Nahid’s part is when she and her husband receive a letter that offers a surface reading and a hidden one. The letter “spoke of a lightning strike, a crumbling in the backyard, and rats scuttering through the cracks and getting into her house” (82). It goes on to talk about a rat “hiding stubbornly in her kitchen” enjoying a “nice life of food and familial love” (82). The letters ends in italics: “Walls are crumbling everywhere, and they’ll never stop!” (82). I love the scene of Behzad and Nahid reading the letter together, agreeing, among other things, that the crumbling walls referenced a bomb hitting the prison where their friend was being held, implying that the rat in the house is a harboured former political prisoner. I appreciate the way The Nights are Quiet in Tehran shows how new networks of meaning form in response to censorship, to oppression.

Of all the sections, though, Laleh’s was by far my favourite. The section takes place after years in Germany and Laleh returns with her mother to Iran. Her experience as a teenage girl in Iran, alienated from her friends and relatives, is the most compelling and personal experience in the book. It gives the book a beautiful balance between the historico-political context and the more tangible everyday experiences that define us. Watching Laleh do something as simple as getting her eyebrows done or keeping a secret boyfriend is elevated to an epic status. It’s also around this time that I started reading the book aloud and really noticed the beautiful cadence of the phrases. There’s a beauty that is easy to gloss over if reading too quickly, but following the punctuation gives the sentences a warmly hypnotic quality.

For Mo’s part, the voice is very different. His priorities are very different from his sibling’s and I was pleasantly taken aback by the mention of Russian ska-punk in the opening pages. While Laleh grows into a politically engaged adult (like her parents), Mo is more concerned about his social bonds. He somewhat reluctantly gets involved with the student protests and stays up late watching Youtube videos about Iran when his friend’s girlfriend comes to sleep in his bed. Mo’s concerns are generally less political, and he distances himself from his family’s engagements—at least for the first stages of his journey.

All of the International Booker Prize short list have been good, even great, but Bazyar’s entry falls into the middle of the pack for me through no fault of her own. I think if I were more informed and educated about the history of Tehran and Iran in general, some of the more quiet resonances would land more meaningfully. Keeping track of the different allegiances and the symbolism of small actions would be a little easier.

That being said, I liked The Nights are Quiet in Tehran. While my interest in the sections fluctuates and I need to reset at each new decade, ultimately I found myself connecting with the characters and getting entranced by the pace and rhythms of the writing. There was a lot to like, and, while I have a lot of gaps in my own knowledge, it did make me feel like a more competent and worldly person. I hope that’s true, but it may be too utopian.

Oh, and one more thing: the epilogue offers a glimpse into the future (?). By virtue of the section not having a specific date listed, we might want to believe it’s 2019 to fit the pattern, but the lack of a year suggests that a resolution is both too far off and that it could happen at any moment. The epilogue is about the renewal following the death of an oppressive leader. It’s a moment of liberation, a moment of return for Behzad and Nahid. I hope I live to see that moment.

Happy reading!

Lamb by Christopher Moore

In the opening of Christopher Moore’s Lamb offers a warning and defence. This is an apocryphal book of the Bible being written by Jesus’ childhood pal Biff to cover the years underrepresented in the other books of the Bible—essentially from Jesus at 5 years old until thirty three. While Moore, I think, stays true to the spirit of Jesus’ personality, the situations he’s placed in are absurd and I think the more seriously religious might find it borders on the blasphemous.

The book’s frame narrative takes place in a motel room to which Biff, recently resurrected, has been confined by the angel Raziel. He’s been granted the gift of modern language and instructed to write this apocryphal text. Throughout the book, he has a few zany escape attempts and Raziel is lampooned as being obsessed with (but not fully comprehending) the soap operas on TV.

The core narrative, though, works through the various stages of Jesus’ life and operates somewhat like a Bildungsroman as Jesus (Joshua in this text) grapples with the idea of being the messiah. The childhood friendship between Joshua, Biff, and Mary is an endearing journey peppered with conflict with their local authorities. Joshua discovers his capacity for miracles, including resurrecting the dead (it’s not always perfect to start…), and when the conflict escalates, Biff and Joshua go on a journey to discover whether Joshua is indeed the messiah.

What follows is a mix of a Bildungsroman, humour novel, and fantasy adventure. The absurdity of some of the episodes would, I’m sure, upset people, but it’s delivered in such a tongue-in-cheek way that it’s hard to be too hurt by it. Biff plays opposite to Joshua; while Joshua is increasingly self-serious, pious, and compassionate, Biff is much more fast and loose with morals and decorum. One of the most memorable episodes, for instance, is that Joshua needs to understand sex (while remaining strictly celibate) and so Biff acts as a ‘tutor’ by bedding sex workers every night while Joshua listens through the wall or has Biff explain the experience afterward. It’s a reasonably lengthy section, a drawn out ‘bit.’

Biff as narrator is unselfserious and Moore draws on different kinds of humour. Some of the stories he tells, like the aforementioned tutelage, demonstrate Moore’s commitment to the long-form joke. In other moments, Moore operates via irony and sarcasm (indeed, Biff claims to have invented sarcasm). Some of the funnier moments are when Josh uses Biff’s own (sarcasm) weapon against him or operates with a bit of mischievousness (like compulsively poking everybody who gets referred to as ‘untouchable’). There’s some allusive humour that draws on Bible stories; Moore reworks moments like turning water into wine and jokes around being lost in the desert. One of my favourite ‘bits’ is that Biff continually justifies his actions with wisdom from nonexistent books of the Bible. He tells Josh one of his aphorisms: “for it is written: ‘Give a man a fish and he eats for a day, but teach a man to be a fish and his friends eat for a week” (293). When Josh asks him where that is written, they have the following exchange:

“That is not written. Where is that written?”

“Amphibians five-seven.”

“There’s no friggin’ Amphibians in the Bible.”

“Plague of frogs. Ha! Gotcha!” (293)

Those fun exchanges are just cheeky enough in their wordplay to spark a smile. Sometimes it’s the restraint that pays off, whereas the more excessive gags don’t have, for me, a comedic payoff.

Lamb is also more plot-driven than most of the books I read. There are distinct phases of the story that each could serve as standalone episodes. In particular, Joshua and Biff meet up with the three wise men. In the first, they stay at Balthasar’s palace, which takes on a Bluebeardesque mystery: there are Chinese concubines all around and a door that must never be opened. Amidst the debauchery, Biff opens the door and unleashes a demon—it becomes a fantastical adventure where the demon murders the women and then Joshua, Balthasar, Biff, and Joy are fighting back to control the creature. Then, they journey to see Gaspar in India. This part of the book is, in my view, the most controversial. Moore’s depiction of India plays into some harmful stereotypes; the men are depicted as both overly sexualized and effeminate, and Hinduism is presented as barbaric, with brutal human sacrifices. Melchior’s section is probably the most tame and least distinctive in its depiction. The final phase of the book revolves first around gathering the apostles, delivering the sermon on the mount, and his subsequent crucifixion (is this whole book a cruci-fiction?). The section wherein we’re recruiting apostles really drags, but the drama of writing the sermon on the mount is pretty strong. I also liked the tension leading up to the crucifixion where Joshua is committed to his sacrifice and tricks Biff and Maggie (Mary Magdalene) into not saving him.

The ending of the book is a surprise, which is odd given that we know the Bible story. Biff’s narrative ends with Jesus on the cross and we return to the present timeline, where Biff is released from his responsibility and reunites with Maggie, who tells him that Jesus came back. Biff says he had heard but that he couldn’t bring himself to see him, which established a nice pathos for Biff. The book, though, ends pretty abruptly.

Overall, Lamb was reasonably engaging and somewhat funny, but it didn’t fully grip me. The tone of the book was pretty consistent and Biff’s sarcastic and ironic tone is consistent and well-delivered. The book may be a little overlong, in my opinion, and a tad repetitive. While the book’s excesses are important to its vision, it does at times wear a little thin. The book has some philosophical bits, like Joshua’s reflections on Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism—he also learns kung-fu—but mainly it feels like a book geared towards entertainment.

I hope you enjoy it; happy reading!

Cultish by Amanda Montell

  If there’s someone that can make linguistics cool and fun, it’s Amanda Montell. I previously read her book Wordslut, which was a fun breakdown of ‘profane’ language. Cultish retains a similar accessibility and lets Montell’s lively voice shine. It is a contemporary examination of the language games cult leaders play in order to manipulate their audience.

Montell begins the reflection essentially with what we think of as “actual” cult leaders. She gives an account of Jim Jones and the Jamestown massacre, for example. She draws on personal accounts, archival recordings, and other scholarship to explain how Jones was able to maintain such control over his adherents despite the obvious lies and contradictions. Montell describes how language operates to prevent deep consideration of ideas. For Jonestown in particular, I appreciated how Montell drew on the work of Sikivu Hutchinson to explore the narrative of how Jim Jones drew on progressive ideology to manipulate people and ultimately deploy racist stereotypes to his advantage.

There are a few elements that re-emerge across different contexts. In addition to dehumanizing ‘out groups’, Montell identifies the “us vs. them” structures that give cult adherents a sense of belonging they might not otherwise be experiencing. The us/them and in/out group mentality at the core of cults serves to elevate some at the expense of others. This also leads to ‘purity tests’ that give validity to the cult followers’ experience. At the same time, cults operate on the principle that there is always another layer of purity that adherents can never achieve.

The most memorable case study for this is scientology. For instance, in scientology (and other cult-like settings), words are given new meanings that become a kind of code to those “in the know.” Again, that is able to contribute to an in-group and an out-group. We see this in all kinds of places; different communities have their own lexicon. What is different about scientology is that if a member is found to have used a word incorrectly, they are subjected to rigorous “testing” (re-programming) until they demonstrate that they now have the accepted understanding of the word. I found that section pretty compelling because it seemed the most codified and controlled use of language of the different groups in question. 

Despite other cult-like settings not being as interventionist, necessarily, in their adherents’ use of language, there are certain patterns that emerge. One chapter of the text is focused on Multi-level Marketing schemes and another focuses on fitness crazes, like spin and Bikram yoga, and Montell highlights how formulaic their messaging can be. Montell is pretty funny in creating fake outreach messages of a woman trying to recruit for her MLM. As entertaining (and informative) as it is to explain the patterns in the #girlboss dialect, Montell is also pretty sympathetic to those folks that get duped. She highlights the research that shows how cult adherents are not necessarily ignorant but that they hold a more optimistic disposition.

One of the most useful elements of Montell’s analysis of language is her commentary on “thought-terminating clichés.” Those are all those phrases that are designed to make people stop reflecting. Statements like “it is what it is” stand out as an example that encourages people to just stop thinking. Montell touches on the Trump cult briefly, but I can’t help but think of “thought-terminating clichés” like Make America Great Again as a response to any challenge to critical thinking.

Amanda Montell is a special voice in contemporary discourse. I think she’s such an accessible writer that writes in a fun and engaging voice about contemporary issues. The topics she’s addressing are deep and academic, but are delivered with such clarity that readers are made to feel welcome within the complexity of the discourse. I think I liked Wordslut a bit better, but Cultish is more broadly applicable across contexts.

Happy reading!

Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq

“No matter how simple some things might seem, they’re not, or at least not always.” So begins Banu Mushtaq’s story, “The Arabic Teacher and Gobi Manchuri.” The opening paragraph to the story reads like an artistic vision for what the short stories in Heart Lamp explore. The passage continues:

People behave in strange and illogical ways when they’re afraid they may have to take responsibility. I have reason to think about such things. The revelation that I can no longer justify my own erratic behaviour on these terms is a recent one, however; it came to me many years after the event itself. No doubt this awareness gradually became stronger over time, but, even so, various aspects of that incident jump up from the depths of my memory every now and then, with a thud and without any warning. (187)

This personal reflection from the story’s lawyer protagonist gives voice to the deeply human quality of the stories from this year’s International Booker Prize winner. Banu Mushtaq’s stories are probing, examining seemingly simple phenomenon and adding layers of nuance so that the “illogical ways” people behave are explained more richly. For a number of characters, indeed, their behaviours are ways of coping with the fear of taking responsibility. In “The Shroud,” for example, the main character promises to, but ultimately neglects to, buy a funeral shroud for a poor woman while she’s on her Hajj, and has a complete breakdown from the guilt. In “A Decision of the Heart,” there’s a complex interplay of conflict between a man, wife, and her mother-in-law, which prompts the son to get his mother married off. The conflicted impulses of the story read like a Dostoyevski novel, with characters engaging in self-destruction to avoid confronting their own flaws.

The declarative tone of the passage above is also reflective of why I think that of all this year’s International Booker Prize shortlist, Heart Lamp is most likely to be seen as a ‘classic.’ The collection is not afraid of making assertions about humanity and grapples with art’s most classic topics: love, death, marriage, birth, religion. 

The construction of the stories is also compelling. It’s here that I’ll have to offer my first disclaimer in reviewing Heart Lamp. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I tend not to enjoy the short story as a literary form as much as I do poetry or novels; they often feel to me like seeing a passing acquaintance rather than bonding with a close friend. Just as I start to get to know the characters, their story is done. I had a similar dilemma with Mushtaq’s stories, but to her credit the artful construction of the narratives is an intriguing twist on the genre. Many of the stories start with descriptions of a particular set of circumstances and characters before shifting mid-stream to their ‘real focus,’ that is, the main character and conflict. Besides the social-realism of the approach, I also appreciate the resonances it creates. For instance, characters in the first part of a story may be introduced and we hear about their marriage and children before the ‘real’ focus of the story kicks in and we see another angle for the topic through another set of eyes. The doubling effect, sometimes only noticeable upon review, lets the stories cover a lot of ground in relatively little space.

Beyond the construction of the stories, their actual use of language also feels ‘classic.’ There’s a directness in the writing that imbues it with the authority of “the Greats.” Mashtuq is self-assured and offers stylistic flourishes strategically. There’s a scene in the story “Fire Rain,” for instance, that recounts a man’s burial and subsequent exhumation. The imagery of the scene offers some unsavory details about the “rotten body in the brand new, starched shroud” (38). Given the circumstances of the burial, it was “too rotten for ritual bathing” and “the foul smell made them want to retch, but no one showed it on their faces” (38). In context, the scene rides the line of comic and macabre and the paragraph ends with some symbolism of jasmine buds that hadn’t bloomed before offering the phrase “not all blooms have the fortune of adorning a bride; some flowers bloom only for mausoleums” (38). The poetic line resonates beautifully and stands out as an example of Mashtuq’s style.

Another factor in making the book read like a classic is the use of an omniscient narrator in most of the stories, which affords Mushtaq the opportunity to comment on a number of perspectives and universalizes the characters’ experiences. At this point, I feel I need to offer an additional disclaimer. A lot of what the stories’ characters go through is far disconnected from my own experiences. The barrier is my own lack of knowledge, but the characters are generally Muslim Indians and it is sometimes difficult for me to interpret characters’ feelings, given the role of Islam in their lives. The failure to grapple with nuances is my own, but in my reading the characters are more like ‘figures’ in most of the stories. They have discernible purposes and traits but they did not yet feel fully resonant for me. Apologies to Mushtaq for my own experiential gap here.

It’s tempting with any collection to give a full play-by-play of each short story Heart Lamp has to offer, but documenting all twelve feels quite impossible, particularly given that there are stories nestled within other stories. One trend I would note is that across the collection, the endings are almost always satisfying. “Stone Slabs for Shaista Mahal,” the first story in the collection, depicts couples essentially competing with one another to show their love. One of the husbands says how he would build a Mahal for his wife to show how devoted he is to her. There’s some problems with this idea: first of all, it implies that she will die. At the conclusion of the story, his wife does indeed die and he remarries and talks about how much he loves his new wife—he never builds the Mahal. The discussion that follows was my first hint of Mushtaq’s craftsmanship for a fine ending.

My favourite ending is probably to the collection’s namesake. In “Heart Lamp,” a woman’s husband has lost all affection for her and is cavorting with another woman. Feeling desperately alone, the woman decides it is time to end her life. She circles the rooms of the house with kerosene, deciding which room would be best for self-immolation. The tension of the scene is finely crafted; it’s as if she is being controlled by some obscure force. You also feel concern for her sleeping children: would they escape the fire? She ends up outside, doused in kerosene, but before she ignites, her daughter comes out and makes the plea for her to stay. The central character “picked up the sobbing baby and hugged Salma to her chest, and, feeling as if she was being comforted, touched and understood by a friend, Mehrun’s eyes became heavy, and all she could say was, ‘Forgive me, my darling,’ as the darkness of the night was thawing” (111). I really love the phrasing of the ending: “the darkness of the night was thawing.” To me, that implies light. The idea of there being natural light, light of a different tenor, than the light that would have resulted from her ignition is such a great image to end the story on. It leaves things tense, tortured, but with that creeping light of optimism. 

Sadly, one of my favourite stories in the collection had the least satisfying conclusion. “The Arabic Teacher and Gobi Manchuri” is about a woman who works as a lawyer. She is separated from her husband and has two daughters that she can’t spend much time with, so she hires a private tutor. There’s a shroud of mystery around him as an outsider and she has concerns about leaving him alone with her daughters. There’s the implication that he, an unmarried man, might do something untoward. He’s surprisingly good with the girls, and even surprises their mother by having them stage a beautiful performance. One day the mother catches the three with oil all over their fingers in the kitchen and the teacher never shows his face in their house again. Supposedly, he got a fake recipe for making gobi manchuri. He’s obsessed with it. He eats it like I eat chips. For some reason, this breeds more distrust in the main character and everyone around. He’s framed as an unmanly man. It’s really weird and I was fascinated by it. It felt like a fun-house mirror of The Vegetarian by Han Kang—this guy that wanted to just eat his deep-fried cauliflower or whatever. The main character keeps hearing about this man trying to marry women but calling it off unless they can make gobi manchuri. The story ends by implying that he’s been fired from work, has married a woman, and that he beats her—but the main character still feels compelled to help him for some reason. It’s an understated tale that I thought was really compelling and the only of the stories that really felt like it ended too soon.

Peoples’ idiosyncrasies and hypocrisies take up their fair share of the stories. In that respect, “A Decision of the Heart” really shone as a perplexing nuance of desires. I also really liked the story “High-Heeled Shoe” and its symbolism. Like most stories, it offered multiple layers worth exploring. The story focuses on a man and wife who are in the process of renovating his house. He has chosen to sell off parts of it for rentals to make some extra money, meaning that he has also had to cut down the family’s mango tree. Throughout the story, different characters offer their reflections on the meaning of that mango tree to them, which has its own beauty. The real focus, though, is that the man is obsessed with his brother’s wife’s high-heeled shoe. He covets them (and her feet) as she floats through rooms. He becomes monomaniacal about it and his obsession makes him barge into a shop and demand they sell him the high-heeled shoes that match his sister-in-law’s. He makes his wife wear them, putting them on in a glass chair (like a reverse image of Cinderella?) even though they don’t fit and she can’t walk in them. He has already packed away her other shoes and she’s forced to walk home unevenly, eventually collapsing and hearing her unborn child calling out to her from the womb. The consequences of a man’s jealousy and obsession hit hard. “The Shroud” follows a similar path of unfulfilled desires and misplaced interests. I briefly mentioned that story earlier, so I won’t belabour the point here, but the fact that the main character loves shopping for herself (she buys a carpet and makes her husband lug it around during their Hajj) while not buying a kafan for her poor neighbour leads to a grief and guilt as literary as “The Tell-Tale Heart.” The desperation she experiences to fulfil her promise when it’s too late is as moving as it as pathetic. I loved it.

“Soft Whispers” and “A Taste of Heaven” are the two other stories that I found to be most noteworthy. Like the others, they are rich and layered. “Soft Whispers”, written in first person, has such a wonderful sequence embedded in the middle where the young girl is at a pond where a boy is trapping birds for the entertainment of other children. I can’t quote the whole sequence, but Mushtaq depicts his mischief beautifully. The boy asks the girl if she wants an egg from the bird he has trapped. He then proceeds to slit its throat, cut open its guts, and pull the egg out for her. The other kids are all clambering to see it, and so she holds it closed in her fist and as they all try to see, she crushes it. It feels symbolic. Then, the boy dives underwater and pops up and kisses her on the cheek. She sobs and tells her mom all about it. Flashing forward, the boy becomes a religious leader. The sequence has such a strong focus. In “A Taste of Heaven,” we see more childhood mischief. Again, the story is really about other things for most of it, but essentially the kids have an aunt (?) that lost her husband when she was young and she never remarried. One girl gives the woman’s ja-namaz (prayer rug) from her wedding to a boy so he can clean oil off of his bike. Despite being stoic and pleasant about everything, the woman essentially has a breakdown over this. Long story short, the children come together to conspire and the woman walks in. The most mischievous of the three children gives her a Pepsi and tells her that it’s the drink from the afterlife, that she has indeed passed away and that they are angels. She asks: if she has made it to the afterlife, where is her husband? They sprinkle flowers from behind her and say that he is there but that she musn’t look at him. The whole scene plays out like something out of The Decameron or 1001 Nights. After that, though, the whole family is placed in a position where they essentially have to keep up the ruse that she’s in heaven and all she drinks is Pepsi and the kids are worried about the guilt of murdering her with malnutrition. The whole story was both entertaining and troubling. It’s certainly one of the most memorable in the collection.

So here we are. It’s the end of the year. I left Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp as the final book for my reading goal (70 books) and my final review of all of this year’s International Booker Prize shortlist. Heart Lamp won, so it only seemed appropriate to leave it for last. While I have some contextual barriers and preferences for novels over short stories, Mushtaq still offered a good deal of discussion-worthy stories. They’re provocative and well-wrought. Where the characters feel figural, the stories themselves achieve, I think, what ‘classic’ literature aimed to accomplish: Mushtaq offers a clear vision for humanity’s biggest issues: life, death, birth, marriage, religion—alongside all those other feelings of guilt and jealousy that pop up along the way. Every International Booker Prize shortlist has been so different and compelling in their own ways, and I’m glad that Mushtaq’s English translation has found such success.

To another year of reading.

All the best.

Erewhon Revisited by Samuel Butler

  Back in May, I read Erewhon by Samuel Butler, which is essentially a fictional travelogue where the main character documents the Erewhonian way of life. In the first volume, there are a number of treatises interspersed, documenting their beliefs regarding economics, life and death, religion, and so forth. Erewhon Revisited is much more straightforward as a novel; it documents the protagonist’s return to Erewhon and subsequent return home, where he tells his son everything that has happened. It seems rare that the sequel is so different from the original—here, we have more characters, more action, more of a complete narrative.

Here’s the premise in a nutshell: the protagonist returns to Erewhon, to find it much changed. He arrives to find himself amongst ominous statues and he encounters two strangers—Hanky and Panky. Their mannerisms reveal that he is ill-prepared: his dress is no longer the Erewhonian style; he hunts and eats partridges (which is against the law); he discovers that any foreigners are immediately thrown into the “Blue Pool” with no questions asked—murdered by drowning. Through a series of clever maneuvers, the protagonist, Higgs, tricks Hanky and Panky into believing that he is the ranger authority over the preserve and encourages them to eat the partridges, too, rendering them equally complicit. When Higgs arrives to town, he finds that the Erewhonian culture now revolves around a religion called Sunchildism. As it turns out, at the end of the first book (twenty years earlier) when he departed Erewhon in a hot air balloon with his stolen bride, it prompted a revolution in their attitudes and they now worship him, though Butler lampoons the veracity of religious conviction—the Erewhonians get his story wrong and there is no consensus on what he actually was ‘preaching.’ Conveniently, they are creating a new temple dedicated to him and, through a series of coincidences (including that Higgs had a long-lost son with his sister-in-law), he is in a position to declare himself the actual Sunchild. From there, there is a bunch of legalese rigamarole to bring the false prophets to justice and allow the Sunchild to escape. The book is somewhat of a thought experiment regarding the second coming of Jesus: what if Jesus were to return and try to correct the errors his worshippers have made since his departure?

Being from 1870s, the style of the book will likely present to modern readers as “stuffy”. The language is formal. The sentence structures are elaborate, replete with multiple subordinate clauses, sometimes stretching for multiple pages as the author, Samuel Butler, navigates the complexities of Erewhonian culture relative to others, and in particular, British society. (See what I did there?).

I don’t have a lot of thoughtful commentary about the book. The best I can say is that the novel is more engaging than its predecessor in that it is more story-driven. The pace is still on the slower side, which the narrator acknowledges around page 600, often going into more detail than I think is really necessary. The suspense before the temple dedication is pretty fun, but it gets overdrawn when in the lead-up there is a full diagram of the temple with a full description of the different areas of the temple and where everyone was seated. Most of those details weren’t necessary for the drama of the scene and served mainly to deflate it.

I also have a few minor gripes about the sequencing of the book. More than once, there is a dramatic moment that is narrated in reverse: we are told the outcome and then we see the events that led there. It’s kind of similar to Lord of the Rings in that sense: the suspense gets sucked out when we know in advance that Gandalf escaped the Balrog, for example. There’s something to be said for not burying the lead, but there’s something more to be said for letting the story take its course.

Overall, the book (and the duology) is alright. I think a more thorough study of the text in an academic setting would provide some more layers to appreciate the text. I think the satire of the text would shine through a little more if I knew the ins and outs of British politics at the time. Instead, I’ll just live in ignorance and console myself with the fact that I’ve read a minor classic.

Happy reading!

Geek Love by Katherine Dunn

[Caution: Full of spoilers]

The climax of the Spike Jonze film Adaptation, written by Charlie Kaufman, sees twin Nicolas Cages in conversation. One Cage, Charlie Kaufman, confesses his admiration for his brother Donald, whose seeming obliviousness protects him from harm. Charlie remembers a moment from their younger years when Donald was in love with a girl who, along with her friends, ridiculed him behind his back. Donald says he was not oblivious, but rather that his love was his and her response was her business. The emotional climax of the speech is when Donald tells his brother, “You are what you love, not what loves you.” I can’t help but feel that Greek Love by Katherine Dunn serves as a significant precedent to Adaptation and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, though Dunn’s work so disturbs me that it will linger in my memory for, I’m sure, decades to come.

At its core, Geek Love is a family chronicle that documents the Binewskis, who tour their Fabulon circus across the United States. The father, Al, and the mother, Crystal Lil, use chemical and medical experimentation to create freakish progeny to attract audiences to their show. Of the surviving children, there are four or five for most of the book. From eldest to youngest, there is Arturo, “Aqua Boy”, who has fins and flippers where most people have limbs, conjoined piano-playing twins Iphigenia and Elektra, albino hunchback Olympia (the narrator for most of the text), and Fortunato (Chick), a seeming “norm” who has telekinetic abilities. The novel also runs parallel along two timelines; in the present, Oly has a daughter with a tail, Miranda, who was adopted at an early age and who, working at a strip club, has been approached by a wealthy benefactor with the offer to remove her tail. The past more thoroughly details the family’s growth and decline as a family carnival.

What begins reasonably innocuously—Al calls his children “dreamlets” since he and Lil dreamed them up, which I find so endearing—quickly becomes haunting. The more you reflect, the more you realize how awful these characters are. The most obviously evil is Arty, who I would argue is one of fiction’s most horrific villains, but Oly and Chick engage in their fair share of immorality. Love twists the family. Arturo becomes a cultish figure because he has an insatiable desire to be loved. Meanwhile, Chick and Oly do his bidding because they love him. Despite Arty seeing his siblings as disposable, they define themselves by their love of him and tend to him, and it gives the adage from Adaptation a haunting, ominous quality.

Katherine Dunn’s gift in this novel is creating such twisted figures—their physical deformities are irrelevant: what is truly twisted is the logic of love throughout the book. The family engages in a kind of race to the bottom. Early on, the family is attacked by a man who shoots each of them, but none of them fatally. Oly narrates her conversation with Arturo: “Arty narrowed his long eyelids and said I was flattering myself and there was nothing about me special enough to make anybody want to kill me. Arty was the master deflater, but his reaction convinced me only that he didn’t want to kill me. Funny how target potential became a status symbol among us” (85). The characters strive to be freakish; Katherine Dunn inverts society’s general perspective: being ‘normal’ is seen as the worst thing to be. (As an aside, I would also point to Katherine Dunn’s mastery of the craft, which reveals itself upon rereading. In this passage, Dunn refers to Arty as the “master deflater.” Later, he does something horrific to the twins and Elly is described two hundred pages later as being “reduced [...] to a permanent state resembling the liquid droop of decayed zucchini” (272), as if her head has deflated. Brilliant, subtle touch.)

Two contradictory impulses turn Arturo into a sinister, horrific character. On the one hand, he refuses to be anything but the most exemplary “freak.” Any time someone starts to seem more freakish than him, he prevents their success. Most obviously and dramatically, Arturo attempts to suffocate his younger brother Chick when he realizes the implications of Chick having telekinetic powers. He also places anonymous calls to ensure that Chick’s pickpocketing and gambling fixing rackets are stopped and that his and his father’s life are threatened. It’s implied that he also previously murdered a younger sibling that was born crocodile-like and threatened to impinge on his Aqua Boy show. The other side of this exceptionalism, though, is that Arturo and their audience buy into an ethos of wanting to be most strange, most freakish. In fact, Arty turns his circus act into a gospel where he targets a miserable woman and tells her she wants to be like him—he essentially hypnotizes her and tells her that if you are deformed, you are liberated from the complete banality of ‘norm’ existence. You become elevated by distinguishing yourself from others. Arturo establishes a cult, making the carnival more and more of his personal recruitment tool. His adherents, wanting to be just like him and not like the normals slowly and sequentially have their limbs amputated: novices remove their fingers and toes and the Elevated have hacked away at their bodies so thoroughly that they are heads and torsos, wrapped in bandages in retirement homes. It’s revolting seeing how persuasive Arturo is and the willingness of his followers to remove their limbs on purpose.

The entire storyline of Arturo’s cult is disturbing in its own right, but isn’t without its real world parallels. The cult of personality he inspires in others as he commands their subservience and his Machiavellian machinations draws clear parallels with fascist figures past and present. At one point, there’s a journalist following Arturo and his notes replicate their lively conversations. In one point, Arturo expounds a Nietszchian slave mentality that feels a little too real:

Only a lunatic would want to be president. These lunatics are created deliberately by those who wish to be presided over. You’ve seen it a thousand times. We create a leader by locating one in the crowd who is standing up. This may well be because there are no chairs or because his knees are fused by arthritis. It doesn’t matter. We designate this victim as a ‘stand-up guy’ by the simple expedient of sitting down around him. (227)

But Arturo gets worse. Dunn crafts the story masterfully, where there are just enough moments of foreshadowing to anticipate what will happen, but giving enough freedom to titillate readers with possibilities. The man who tried to murder the Binewskis later murders his wife and attempts to take his own life, accidentally rendering his face into an unrecognizable mush. He gets a job with the carnival to serve as a security guard to Arty. The Bag Man, so called, demonstrates the same devotion as the others but also loves the twins. To spite them for their success, Arty arranges for the Bag Man to marry the twins against their will. When they protest, he sends a threat disguised to sound conciliatory. There’s a Chekhov’s gun moment where I felt the anticipatory thrill of speculation—who is going to get shot? How is it going to happen? I’ll spare you the details of my own theories.

Long story short, the Bag Man impregnates the twins, who do not agree on whether they want the child. Arturo makes arrangements under the guise of providing them with an abortion, but behind the scenes has been asking the doctor about whether it would be possible to separate them. She tells him it isn’t so he asks whether it would be possible to just get rid of one of them. When she asks which one, he says it doesn’t matter. I find his callousness so haunting. Elly is lobotomized and Iphy carries the deflated head on her shoulder, having to manually move the limbs that Elly used to control. It gets even more disturbing when Elly tries to ‘come back’ from her lobotomy, assisted by Chick’s telekinesis. I won’t ruin the climax of the book, but it made me want to throw up with how uncomfortable it was.

On the topic of Chick’s telekinesis, I thought it was a really compelling account of the power. He describes reality like water. It wants to move but is held in containers: “Water always wants to move but it can’t unless we give it a hole, a pipe to go through. We can make it go any direction” (109). He describes himself as “the plumbing that lets it flow through [...] But the wanting to move is in the thing itself” (109). I liked how Dunn inverts how I typically think of telekinesis. Rather than telekinesis forcing objects to move, it’s more like permitting things to do what they would want to do. This essentially gives Chick godlike powers—even over life and death, as we see in several parts of the book. Yet, it’s tastefully understated; Chick truly has the powers but it’s Arturo whose influence wins out—mainly because Fortunato is so empathetic and feels the pain of things doing what they would prefer not to.

If I have one complaint about the structure of the book, it’s that the climax happens a little too suddenly. There’s such a glorious build-up but the final ‘event’ happens with minimal explanation. It’s the one place where the breadcrumbs could have been planted a little more thoroughly. That being said, there’s still an incredible haunting moment where many people are killed, among whom is Al. Crystal Lil has thoroughly declined into dementia and she

runs to where he’s lying and rips off her blouse---pulls her skirt down---hikes her underpants tight against her crotch. She’s saying, ‘Al … broken … just completely broken … we’ll have to start over.’ She crouches over Al’s body, straddling his thighs, fumbling his belt, opening his zipper, yanking those white jodhpurs down to his hips and talking softly. She settles herself over his limp penis and she rocks, rubbing her crotch against him, stroking his chest, not noticing the half of his face that isn’t there anymore---not noticing the handless stump of his arm smoldering, but rubbing herself slowly like a cat against and running her hands inside his shirt against his chest hair and saying, ‘Broken … Al … after all our work … we’ll start again … Al … you and me … Al.’” (320-321)

Like so many others in the text, this moment inspires equal parts empathy and revulsion. It gives the ending a more tragic quality, where otherwise it might have been more appropriate to cheer for fictional villains being stopped. I feel badly for Lil, who has been lost to herself through such frequent drug use.

Overall, the book is exemplary in its characterization, its plot, and its thematic developments. The children’s secret lives create the perfect context for engaging betrayals. There’s a great comment early on when Oly says, “it is [...] the common grief of children at having to protect their parents from reality” (105). Lil and Al are increasingly disconnected from the goings-on at the carnival and are oblivious to the downward spiral of the family. Oly notes, “it is bitter for the young to see what awful innocence adults grow into, that terrible vulnerability that must be sheltered from the rodent mire of childhood” (105). The aphorism seems to speak to Oly as a character, as well. She has the level of awareness that what she’s doing is wrong and deigns to hide it, but continues to do Arty’s bidding. In the closing pages of the book, she expresses some of her conflicted feelings about Arturo:

I won’t try to call my feeling for Arty love. Call it focus. My focus on Arty was an ailment, noncommunicable, and, even to me all these years later, incomprehensible. Now I despise myself. But even so I remember, in hot floods, the way he slept, still as death, with his face washed flat, stony as a carved tomb and exquisite. His weakness and his ravening bitter needs were terrible, and beautiful, and irresistible as an earthquake. He scalded or smothered anyone he needed, but his needing and the hurt that it caused me were the most life I have ever had. Remember what a poor thing I have always been and forgive me. (315)

If we are what we love, not what loves us, then Oly is a megalomaniacal sociopath and Arturo is nothing. He seems to express some guilt over what he did to Elly—but I don’t buy it. I think even his guilt is a tactic. Oly is drawn into loving Arturo’s weakness but her empathy for him leaves a string of bodies in their wake. In a number of ways, empathy for one another is what destroys the family. Arturo cannot stop being nothing because he loves nothing—he relies on the love of others and can only define himself as the leader that demands devotion and never provides it.

Even in the frame narrative, Olympia’s morality is complex and twisted. As OI mentioned, the book is framed by Oly secretly monitoring the daughter she gave up for adoption now that her daughter is in art school. A wealthy woman offers to pay Miranda money to remove her tail—it seems to be a win-win: she can make $10k and she can be a ‘normal’ woman. Oly takes it upon herself to ensure that the surgery never happens. On the one hand, it is redemption for preventing Miranda the trauma that Arturo imbued to so many others. On the other hand, he is taking away Miranda’s choice, imposing freakishness onto her when she would prefer to just be ‘normal’. The questions of autonomy, manipulation, and choice are complex, making the ending just as uncomfortable as the rest of the book.

Despite the discomfort Dunn inspires, there are a number of reflections that are so poignant that it’s hard to deny the deeply human quality of the book. It’s weird and subversive but it reads like capital-L Literature. Towards the end of the book Olympia reflects on her upbringing. She tells Miranda

I was full-grown before I ever set foot in a house without wheels. Of course I had been in stores, offices, fuel stations, barns, and warehouses. But I had never walked through the door of a place where people slept and ate and bathed and picked their noses, and, as the saying goes, ‘lived,’ unless the place was three times longer than it was wide and came equipped with road shocks and tires. (321)

The passage comes towards the end of the book, but reads like the opening reflections to a Victorian Bildungsroman. It also makes me more empathetic to Oly, putting her trauma in perspective. Of course she would do what Arty wants—it was the surest way to ensure herself a place in the family and a home. She elaborates on how uncomfortable it is to be inside a home. It gives her a kind of self-consciousness hitherto unknown: “This mystery appeared when I first stood in a rooted house. I hadn’t understood before that anything about me needed explaining. It’s all very well to read about houses, and see houses from the road, and to tell yourself, That’s where folks live. But it’s another thing entirely to walk inside and stand there” (322).

Geek Love is a house that let me walk inside and stand there. It inspired the same discomfort. The same uncertainty. It’s a book that made me question my values and morals, the limits of my empathy. It’s a book that disturbs me not only because the characters are so malicious and sadistic towards each other, but because it makes me confront the full implications of my values and ethics, the boundaries of what love entails. Geek Love is truly a one of a kind work, a work of freakish originality. I am so grateful it was recommended to me.

Happy reading!