On Earth As It Is Beneath by Ana Paula Maia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

        Happy reading!

Scenes from a Childhood by Jon Fosse

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy reading and happy New Year!

The Nothing by Hanif Kureishi

This book is a lurid and prurient piece of fiction. I don’t think my sense of humour is bleak enough to see the “diabolical fun” or the “funny [and] farcical” book the blurbs on the back advertise. Hanif Kureishi’s novella The Nothing is a miserable nightmare.

I see this novella as somewhat of a departure from Kureishi’s work, which I’d previously considered as being focused on the challenges of a postcolonial Britain. For instance, a number of his plays and short stories focus on the immigrant experience of assimilation and second generation immigrants wanting to reclaim their cultural heritage. 

Here, though, the concept is much different. The Nothing focuses on an infirm old man, Waldo, a generally well-praised filmmaker on his way out, winning “lifetime achievement awards” as a polite goodbye. He is married to a younger Punjabi wife, Zenab (Zee), and the first scene of the book is Waldo listening through the wall as she has sex with their friend Eddie. There’s a masochism to the scene that compels Waldo to want to hear more, diving into the pain with the deluded belief that by bringing himself closer to the source of his pain he can gain mastery over it. As such, Waldo seems to engineer situations to allow the affair to continue and to gather more and more evidence (or, at the very least, engage in some cuckoldistic voyeurism).

Following the first scene, the book is an episode revenge plot replete with complex mind games and psychological nuance. At least initially, Waldo seems to actively court Eddie on Zee’s behalf and manufactures scenarios that allow their intimacy. It is implied that he has held onto hedonism from the 60s and that he revels in the thrills of the novel—as such, he’s willing to be betrayed as a distorted kind of pleasure [think also Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom]. In any case, Waldo allows the couple to continue their amorous trysts so that he can listen, listen with his hearing aid, and eventually film them in his own kind of self-abuse. There’s a brutal scene in which Waldo is consulting his friend Anita, who accuses him of being paranoid. Waldo demands that she root through Eddie’s things and they find sexually explicit photos of other women and, I think, Zee. It’s a scene that churns the stomach in its raw depiction of paranoia and jealousy. It’s a moment Waldo is forced to confront the facts that the line between pleasure and pain is essentially indecipherable and that we cannot master our sorrow by exposing ourselves to it.

The novel is also a novel about devotion, though. Waldo can accept Zee’s infidelity; his wheelchair-bound body is incapable of much more than staring at her privates or using his mouth on her breasts. What Waldo cannot accept is that Zee is not completely devoted to him; he demands that her love be absolute. It’s a cringeworthy perspective that he demands her complete commitment to him, no matter how awful he is to her, which is reversed later on when Eddie refuses to do what Zee demands of him. I won’t spoil that moment, but it is a powerful one that reinforces just how awful every character in this book is.

Waldo’s philosophy of pleasure demands that he and Zee never have sex the same way twice, and he is seemingly a hedonist until he realizes that Zee is not absolutely devoted to him. He can live with her pleasure until her love is no longer exclusive. At that point, he starts sabotaging the lovers in increasingly twisted ways. I admit that I find the psychological nuances of the book somewhat difficult to follow (for instance, how Waldo gives Eddie money as a form of revenge against Zee). I suppose I’m too direct for these kind of games. That said, there are a number of tense and compelling moments where the screw is turned in obscurely villainous ways.

In one scene, Waldo is pressing Zee for details and he critizes Eddie. She defends her lover by justifying his behaviour with a recounting of his past. As it turns out, Eddie, as a young man, was sexually assaulted repeatedly by his teacher. The teacher continues to abuse him even years later and yet Eddie still feels compelled to meet with his former teacher. The chapter reads as a kind of short story of its own and escalates impressively. A scheme emerges where Eddie and his friend threaten to expose the teacher and their blackmail drives the instructor to commit suicide by jumping from a bridge. Eddie lives with the guilt and has not told the story to anyone else. Of course, Zee tells the story to humanize Eddie and, while Waldo does not initially believe it, he banks the information for later revenge.

Waldo exploits Eddie’s abuse later on in the novel. When Eddie and Zee are out at a restaurant having a great time and partying, Waldo calls and arranges for a waiter to deliver Eddie a message, claiming he will love it. The waiter goes to Eddie and whispers the teacher’s nickname for him, inspiring terror that this abuser is reaching him from beyond the grave. It’s a secret code that only a few people could know: Eddie, Zee, the deceased teacher, and only one other friend who is sworn to secrecy. The sheer terror the word inspires in Eddie is awful and forms a glorious parallel to his own torment of his abuser.

Without getting into the details too much, Waldo tries to expose Eddie as a fraud who exploits an array of women for financial gain. In a somewhat obscure little scheme, Eddie seems to have marked Zee as a last big grift, presumably waiting for Waldo’s inevitably prompt death to profit by proxy from Waldo’s will. It’s actually a little more sinister than that, since Zee and Eddie actively plot Waldo’s death. Waldo, though, tries to stay one step ahead of them and creates a final documentary about his own murder, which he forces Eddie to watch in a sadistic turn (Waldo really rides the line of sadomasochism, hey?). The climax of the book is pretty intense in that respect and Eddie is placed in a position between two contradictory forces, primed to but unable to murder his rival.

I would describe the novel as engaging, but not necessarily long lasting. The dialogue in the book is terse, probably more so than would be expected of a playwright. The characters are vile. The more enduring themes of adjusting to postcolonial life (there is some of this with Zee leaving her restrictive family and children behind…) give way to psychologically complex, if repugnant, considerations. I powered through the book in a day or two, but it’s not one that I think I’d be excited to revisit. It’s a kind of noir in the vein of Vladimir Nabokov’s Laughter in the Dark, but the elegantly dark humour of Nabokov is replaced here with more crass and abrasive vocabulary. 

I usually end with “happy reading!”, both an imperative statement and a kind of mantra. For this book, I don’t think that’s the best descriptor. It’s more like spending a few hours with the most miserable couple you know and then wanting to avoid them forever—that is, unless there’s a film adaptation (which I would definitely still watch). Happy reading?