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!

Awaiting by Charisse Pearlina Weton

 

I’m going to begin with an embarrassing confession. I first started to write poetry (semi)seriously in University and at one point I wrote a long piece inspired by my stay in Italy called “anomie pompa.’ I’m sure the title meant something profound and clever, though now when I put the phrase into Google translate, I don’t get very far—or, more likely, I’m not as deep as I thought then. The poem was a kind of “mixed-media” collage, full of poetic bursts, dictionary definitions, stage directions, and scraps. At the time, I thought it was my best work ever: a postmodern tour-de-force. Now I’m not sure I could read it without my inner organs petrifying and my brain melting out my ears.

I bring this up because I started having flashbacks to my ex-masterwork while reading Charisse Pearlina Weston’s Awaiting. This is a poetry collection that, like the book in my previous review, was thrust into my hands with no context from Harneet. The back of the book describes it as “part autobiography, part play, part fictive dream as long poem” and as drawing “phrases and motifs from two seemingly disparate plays (Lorraine Hansberry’s What Use are Flowers? and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot) and entangles them into poetic remixes.” For context, I have no knowledge of Lorraine Hansberry’s work, but have read and seen Waiting for Godot several times. Even that did not prepare me, though, for engaging with Awaiting. If the words were lifted directly, I didn’t notice, though there was one part that sounded remarkably similar to a scene in Beckett’s novel Molloy. I would say, potentially, hesitantly, that Awaiting offers very little instruction for ‘how’ to read it; in particular, if this is meant as “part autobiography,” I wouldn’t say I know very much about Weston at all as a result.

But where thinking fails, Google succeeds: I did a Google search and discovered that Weston is a Black visual artist from Brooklyn (how does Harneet do it?! She’s always finding interesting people based on book covers alone). I wonder if engaging with Weston’s art in other mediums would help provide insight into the project here. I imagine she’s adept at speaking in multiple aesthetic languages, and seeing her at work in various forms would likely help me grapple with some of her key themes.

In any case, Awaiting is a bizarre little collection (?) of poems. It’s written as a play—sort of. The dramatis personae is pretty fun in that respect. The narrator is described as “the oiliness of memory” (7), the children are “the muted chorus” (8), and the audience is “the limit” (8). The characters that actually perform are Vision and a woman, who are both given lengthier descriptions.

The format of the poem seems to me to be integral to its core themes. The poem gravitates towards themes of performance and observation. Vision watches the woman. The woman seems to rotate the stage so that the audience is brought to her (rather than the usual inverse of the audience remaining seated and the performer coming to them.) It’s a nice coincidence that I recently finished a book about the male gaze and womens’ bodies that here we have a figure engaged in ambiguous motions being monitored by unspeaking audience members. I know the back of the book suggests this borrows from Waiting for Godot, but I’d be much more inclined to suggest it owes more to Beckett’s Quad and Quad II. It’s more about the motion than the words.

In that respect, there is a lot of playfulness around the spacing and layout of the poem. There is a section in the middle, for example, that is printed on black pages and is divided into some overlapping squares. Even in the main “narrative” (I’m hesitant to call it a story), there are at least two strands. There’s the sort of ‘narration’ which also serves as a dialogue with Vision’s marginal voice. I was drawn back to the description of the Audience as “the limit.” I find that particularly interesting since the limit of the page is taken up by Vision’s voice and we ourselves are forced into certain perspectives by the woman and are forced to navigate the artful and playful spacing of the page—a style I have long recognized the appeal of.

This isn’t to say Weston’s work relies purely on visual flare to create an interest. Her work has some excellent turns of phrase and linguistic intrigue. One passage, for instance, refers to “the kind of touch that flees, / yearns time for reverie, burns as fire / with no source, as beheaded heat, a hull / of agitated halting breath which floats lonely, / lovingly upwards to ceiling to roof to out of / out of reach” (45).First of all, I adore the phrase “beheaded heat.” Secondly, I appreciate the double-down and line break for “out of / out of.” The redoubling suggests an even further limit—not only is it out of reach, but it is beyond even the possibility of being out of reach.

The playfulness of the language seems to offer an alternative conception of relationships between self and society. There is, I would say, some political undertones to the work, though not as bludgeoningly transparent as Instagram poets. There is simultaneously a philosophical register I find difficult to resist: “We are in no danger of thinking anymore, / not here in the aftermath of vacated time, in the residue of barricaded remembrance / in the slow deliberate and deafening violence of curtain in a hasty crawl / to the meeting of itself” (40). There’s an ominous quality to the passage that evokes for me someone like Maurice Blanchot; the disaster, as he describes it, has a striking resemblance to “the aftermath of vacated time.” I think also about memory as an involuntary faculty, where there is the “residue of barricaded remembrance.” The “deafening violence of curtain” is also a great line, even if I can’t quite place it within a broader context of the poem—although it does seem to have a parallel to Nudités féminines: Images, pensées et sens du désir by Laurence Pelletier. 

Some of my favourite sections of the poem are the ones that are more sustained and, in some ways, direct. One section discusses “redacted lavender” (what a phrase, again!) “whose pages threaten turns / to so much more” (37). There’s a sort of violence to the language, or at least the possibility of it. The passage continues to discuss how “those professions unconscious / hardly ever arrive / but to the closure / thriving damp of solitude. / to the kind that boils / from its own, foreclosing longing” (37). In this section, there’s also an exploration of the central relationship in the collection. There’s a tenuousness to the connection and a recognition (or misrecognition) that the speaker documents as follows:

i liked when he called me
by another name
because it was deliberate
he told me later
to imagine so many different
things in the midst
of actions so specific

and so about being with

and in somewhere
so vast and small
in the same instance. (37)

There are a few moments in the poem that discuss being named and here the idea of multiple names reflects the multiplicity of identity. There is a shifting nature to who we are and here, tenuous though the relationship with Vision seems to be, the woman values this recognition of multiple identities existing simultaneously—”so vast and small / in the same instance” (37). The lines which follow serve an almost incantatory function in their repetition:

to imagine while

folding into the intimacy

he said
of my faltering soul
he said
of my faltering soul
he said
was a gift to never be
without remark.
and time.
within just those little
utterances
space chopping hour
doubles
and minutes crinkle. (37)

The notion of folding into one another really draws on some central themes in the work. I can picture all of the squares in the black page section similarly folding, overlapping, relying on one another. Here the repetition serves to redouble a statement (because saying it once is too precarious? Because saying it more makes it more real?). The motif of time also recurs and “minutes crinkle.” There’s a fuzziness and fragility, even a brittleness, to the rigidity of time that starts to poke through here.

Earlier in the text, there’s another section that is very well-developed and once again relies on doubling—of identity, of words. Weston writes, “forest i hardly hold any [longer] / except in the flesh of leaves / [amongst] dreams, i begin to fall / so deeply in love with loving / for the first time that i learn / to unusually speak in circular beats” (29). I suppose this is where Weston offers some strategy for reading her work. The repetition of “in love with loving” and noting that it’s the “first time” (again that time motif) sets up the premise of the book. The phrase “unusually speak in circular beats” is also unnatural. It would make more sense to say “speak unusually in circular beats” or “speak in unusually circular beats.” Yet here we have an unnatural-sounding phrase that initiates us into the work and inaugurates our expectations. Weston gives us an unnatural reading to prime us into the unnatural modes we’ll have to force ourselves into—again, the woman controls the audience, not the other way around.

That section of the poem then goes on to tell the story of the woman and her brother and their father, “at this point in the the play / a compilation of the admiral agent spy / the cyclopic tyrant scooping us up out from] / the squalor of our bleeding / breathing dark fleshy lives [and into the valleys of his decommissioned fingerprints]” (29). You can easily see the word substitutions or aural similarities that are hinted at, allowing multiple meanings to exist at once. For example, “the squalor of our bleeding” would likely double with the phrase “the squalor of our breeding”, given that the father is brought into the discussion immediately prior. Also, as an aside, “decommissioned fingerprints” is a perfect poetic phrase.

Within that same passage is a complicated development of the relationship. It’s unclear whether “a woman listens. leans in. holds up holds up / and neither i nor he in this draft / register / the one at the desk peering under / her.” It’s unclear how many people are actually in this situation. We’re not clear on whether she is experiencing or watching or remembering someone else’s memory. It’s even more complex because the next line introduces the first person: “as i remember it / thick rimmed glasses / her raising one light-skinned / freckled cheek to curl one side / of a full pale purple set of lips” (29). Is the first person also the third person? It feels playful to have a first person speaking in third person in a situation where the number of figures in the room is ambiguous. It should also be noted that I’m removing the spacing here, which makes the situation even more complex.

The collection offers a playfulness that is a devious as it is clever. It was unfair of me to suggest that Weston doesn’t teach us how to read her work. Square brackets offer a guideline to her linguistic shapeshifting:

[the face she makes
as] she [s]lightly pretends to [only]
half listen, [to only] half conceal
amusement by our blind [comfort
within the rubbery flesh ridges
of unfolded greatness]. i do distinctly
recall my brother’s Chesire smile
his white white teeth [purring] (29)

One element of the book that is strange to me (only one?) is that there is a sort of appendix that gives a full different (?) earlier (?) version of the poem. I’d be curious to discuss the genesis of the poem. It seems that the original appears as a footnote of sorts (and again reverses time—that which came first comes last). The extended version flourishes into a series of acts and scenes, but the relationship is not entirely clear. It warrants further examination.

Overall, I liked Awaiting. There is a lot about it that is perplexing, but being perplexed is not entirely without its charm. It almost inspires me to go back into my weirdness.

Happy reading, everyone!

Dark Constellations by Pola Oloixarac

  Pola Oloixarac’s book Dark Constellations is not so much a novel as a concept. Spanning three narratives over 142 years and condensed into a tight 202 pages, its cover review from AV Club touts that the book is “galactic in the stretch of its narrative ambitions.” The size of these ambitions, though, prevents the novel from feeling like any kind of story. It’s a speculative work that tries to combine so many underdeveloped concepts, which meant that by the time I had fifty pages left, I was dying for Oloixarac to just get on with it and bring the separate storylines together.

Sometimes a passing allusion gives a significant clue to a text. In this case, a passing reference to William Gibson’s Neuromancer hints at the aesthetic of the book, and, in my opinion, both books have a similarly alienating approach. There’s a kind of rapidity to the works, flashes of technological innovations that readers are immersed in without context, and producing a kind of whiplash of world-building. Admittedly, I’m betraying a lack of willingness to engage in challenging reading. Not that I want to have everything explained through exposition dumps, but the sheer number of concepts, characters, and decades is so alienating that the whole project of the book leaves me feeling cold and indifferent.

I’ll provide a brief summary here. I may have a number of details wrong.

Oloixarac presents three narratives. The first takes place in 1882 with a group of researchers (botanists? entomologists? evolutionary biologists?). From what I can tell, it involves a discovery of a kind of drug-like transcendence produced by licking flowers? It also seems to involve a kind of gross creature that burrows into peoples’ skins and then alters their minds. There is also maybe some kind of supernatural being or alien in an underground cave—is it a metaphor or literal? The second stage of the book takes place in 1983 and is focused around Cassio, the most developed of the endless train of characters. He is a budding hacker who works his way through systems and implants viruses. As his career continues, it seems that he has an idea of combining technology and living beings and later seems to be the human key to initiating a computer virus that crashes the economy briefly—that part takes place in 2024 and focuses on Piera, sort of, I guess. There’s some stuff about rats disguising themselves in human bodies, tracking the “dark constellations” of negative space in rat-movement patterns, a mass-surveillance system that seems to rely on olfactory knowledge of DNA. Everyone is always trackable at all times, despite the fact that humans are never single entities (the book notes that there is more bacteria in humans than whatever we consider as an identity).

I think the book is marred by several central flaws. First, there are too many characters and they come across as empty husks. Even at the climax of the book, Cassio’s betrayal of his company by unleashing a virus days before they sell the company is so obscure in its motivations that it fails to address the second of the central flaws (namely: it feels like there are no events.) I wouldn’t expect myself to align with Stephen King very often, but I recall he once gave writing advice that nobody cares about characters: people care about events. If the characters don’t do anything, there’s no reason to care about them. Oloixarac seems to ignore this advice, or rather I was so bewildered by everything happening in the book that it felt like nothing happened. These two issues contribute to the absolute core one: the novel lacks cohesion. The timeframe jumps around with very little overlap (with one exception being that Cassio and Piera work with one another)—and in fact, even the Cassio section span several years, so the timeframe is not clearly demarcated. The connection between licking plants and human viruses and olfactory surveillance systems is never explicitly addressed; it’s a sketch; it’s nodes of ideas—oh darn, it’s a constellation, isn’t it?

What makes the book interesting is its sociological bent. While again not feeling fully cohesive in the book, there are flashes of sexual politics inserted throughout that are engaging in their own right, if not fully explored in its implications for a posthumanist project. The posthumanist plurality of identity is worth exploring. The idea that none of us is singular, that we are influenced by other beings inside us, is a compelling premise that finds home in Dark Constellations. As I mentioned, I’m not entirely clear on whether aliens are real in the context of the novel. The way Oloixarac describes characters suggests alien inhabitation of their bodies, though reading it as a kind of techno-Marxist metaphor would be equally appropriate. Actually, referring back to the sexual politics of the book, I would say this alienation produces some of the grossest descriptions of sex I’ve read in a book: it’s a dissociated alien-like depiction that seems both medical and completely disgusting.

Overall, I have to say Dark Constellations has an interesting premise in exploring the morphing nature of symbiosis between humans and other entities, including technology as the next frontier, but ultimately leaves me scratching my head. Dark Constellations are the gaps between stellar configurations, a darkness the technophiles of the book are mapping (and thus erasing?) at the same time. The style of the book emulates those dark constellations: it feels like everything important about the book is happening between what is actually written. I started to read some reviews to see what other kinds of summary details would supplement my review, but even starting to read reviews I couldn’t help but feel: this isn’t worth my time. There isn’t enough there there.

Over and out.