Ru by Kim Thúy

  Kim Thúy is a writer of beautiful books that work through a series of resonances. Each book is a series of connected sketches that read like prose poems. Being Thúy’s first book, Ru lays the foundation of Thúy’s special magic.

Ru is the story of a Vietnamese family whose lives are forever disrupted by war. The central character’s family has their home occupied by Communist soldiers and flee by boat through Malaysia, where they lived in a refugee camp, before moving on to Montreal. The novel recounts vignettes from their lives and the characters they meet along the way. The book hops between the present and different pasts, often in a free-associative Proustian way. For example, the narrator recounts going to a lotus pond in a suburb of Hanoi where “there were always two or three women with bent backs and trembling hands, sitting in a small round boat, using a stick to move across the water and drop leaves into open lotus blossoms” (40). Lovely description aside, the passage continues that “They would come back the next day to collect them one by one before the petals faded, after the captive tea leaves had absorbed the scent of the pistils during the night. They told me that every one of those tea leaves preserved the soul of the short-lived flowers” (40). The passage ends there, but the following page (chapter?) begins that “Photos could not preserve the soul of our first Christmas trees” (41). We jump from the past to the present around a concept: preservation of the soul. Visually, there’s enough of a contrast between a lotus and a Christmas tree, the latter of which whose “branches gathered in the woods of suburban Montreal, stuck in the rim of a spare tire covered with a white sheet, seem bare and lacking in magic, but in reality they were much prettier than the eight-foot-tall spruce trees we have nowadays” (41). I’m a little bit stunned by the way Thúy cleaves contrasting ideas together through a more metaphorical or conceptual connection. This is one example, but most of the text operates with this associational approach.

The character studies throughout the text are opportunities to form rich portraits while also offering philosophical insights into the human experience. Often, we hear about the behaviour of a character and the passage culminates with some reflection that sums up the core of the person. One agèd character passes away but “he hadn’t grown old before he died. He had stopped time by continuing to enjoy himself, to live until the end with the lightness of a young man” (59).Another character is particularly severe and “all the fun of childhood slipped between her fingers while, in the name of propriety, she was forbidding her sisters to dance” (62). These observations feel both particular and universal and hover on that horizon in a touching way.

The vignettes throughout the novel also stand out as cautionary tales or flash fictions that would fit in something like The One Thousand and One Nights. In one vignette, the narrator is in a cube van on the way to pick strawberries or beans and her mother tells her the story of another day labourer who would wait for her employer across the street every day. The narrator’s grandfather’s gardner would bring her a treat for breakfast every day and one morning he fails to appear. She keeps waiting and he keeps failing to appear. The story becomes a more tragic tale where the woman brings the narrator’s mother “a sheet of paper darkened with question marks, nothing else” (71) and then the mother never sees her again, “She disappeared not knowing that the gardener had asked his parents in vain for permission to marry her” (71). As it turns out, the grandfather had accepted the gardener’s parents’ request to send him away and “no one told [the day labourer] that the gardner, her own love, had been forced to go away, unable to leave her a letter because she was illiterate, because she was a young woman travelling in the company of men, because her skin had been burned too dark by the sun” (71). The vignette works as a standalone tale, but also picks up on some of the broader themes of displacement and loss that resonate throughout the text.

In another vignette, Thúy’s symbolism rings out. The narrator discusses Monsieur An, who was nearly executed. She talks about how “the days followed one another like the links of a chain—the first fastened around their necks, the last to the center of the earth” (86). The idea of links in a chain feels significant for the structure of the novel as a whole, but also Monsieur An “felt his chain getting shorter when the soldiers took him out of the ranks and made him kneel in the mud before the fleeting, frightened, empty gazes of his former colleagues, their bodies barely covered with rags and skin” (86). The idea of chains securing people in place and the impact of them being severed serves as an interesting juxtaposition to the unmoored freedom of refugees who have lost everything. The meaning of freedom, the significance of freedom, is uneven across similar characters. Monsieur An felt “the hot metal of the pistol” against his temple, and “in one last act of rebellion he raised his head to look at the sky” (86). In that desperation, he sees all the shades of blue in the sky equally intensely and experiences a Platonic dazzling “almost to the point of blindness” (87). Then, “at the same time, he could hear the click of the trigger drop into silence [...] That night, the shades of blue that he’d seen earlier filed past his eyes like a film being screened over and over” (87). After surviving, he feels that “the sky had cut his chain, had saved him, freed him, while some of the others were suffocated to death, dried up in containers without having a chance to count the blues of the sky” (87). The idea of the chain being severed gives him complete freedom but also gives him commitments: “every day, then, he set himself the task of listing those colours—for the others” (87).

The narrator takes away the message that Monsieur An “taught [her] about nuance” (88) and then jumps to another central figure in her life, Monsieur Minh, who “gave [her] the urge to write” (88). She describes how he took being a delivery man very serious and how “he was saved not by the sky but by writing” (88). She talks about the books he had written during his time at the re-education camp, “always on the one piece of paper he possessed, page by page, chapter by chapter, an unending story” (88). There’s a replacing of his senses through writing: “without writing, he wouldn’t have heard the snow melting or leaves growing or clouds sailing through the sky” (88). I like the idea of hearing the snow melting but “nor would he have seen the dead end of a thought, the remains of a star or the texture of a comma” (88). I love that phrase: “the texture of a comma.” It gives writing such a sensual dimension and that same character then recites words in his personal dictionary “like a mantra, like a march toward the voice” (88).

As the book comes to a close, Thúy reflects on the power of stories themselves. Running through the text there is reference to a pink bracelet and then it turns into a reflection on time and truth. It has been long lost and “absolutely no one will know the true story of the pink bracelet once the acrylic has decomposed into dust, once the years have accumulated in the thousands, in hundreds of strata, because after only thirty years I already recognize our old selves only through fragments, through scars, through glimmers of light” (139). In the final pages, then, she reflects on the thirty years of Vietnam rising like a phoenix from “its iron curtain.” It’s in the final pages where the artistic vision of the text is given a clear articulation:

“Alone as much as together, all those individuals from my past have shaken the grime off their backs in order to spread their wings with plumage of red and gold, before thrusting themselves sharply towards the great blue space, decorating my children’s sky, showing them that one horizon always hides another and it goes on like that to infinity, to the unspeakable beauty of renewal, to intangible rapture” (141).

The idea that the individuals are both alone and together is similar to the vignettes and the resonances between them throughout the novel. There’s also reference to vibrant colour and decorating “my children’s sky,” which recalls Monsieur An’s near-execution. There’s always another horizon, always another layer. The critical optimism of the text shines through, that there’s an “unspeakable beauty of renewal”, even if these memories are borne from wounds.

The final passage remarks on the legacies that feed into the book, into history, into truth: “it is true all the way to the possibility of this book, to the moment when my words glide across the curve of your lips, to the sheets of white paper that put up with my trail, or rather the trail of those who have walked before me, for me” (141). The narrator comments on moving “in the trace of their footsteps as in a waking dream where the scent of a newly blown poppy is no longer a perfume but a blossoming: where the deep red of a maple  leaf in autumn is no longer a colour but a grace; where a country is no longer a place but a lullaby” (141). I love the way Thúy allows for these near-synesthesiac supplantations and imbues colour with metaphysical significance. Laying out the philosophy after having so thoroughly demonstrated it closes the book beautifully, where the final line seems to speak for the whole book: “And also, where an outstretched hand is no longer a gesture but a moment of love, lasting until sleep, until waking, until everyday life” (141).

Happy reading!

Minor Detail by Adania Shibli

    There are times that books call your name. Some Minor Detail stands out and draws you in. In the case of Adania Shibli’s novel, I’m not sure what it was: it’s a thin volume, a black spine with white text, and completely unassuming on the shelf. Yet, in perusing the collection at The Bookshelf it called to me and when I read the back it was surprisingly contemporaneous. It’s a novel about life under occupation in Palestine with one narrative taking place in 1949 and one a number of years later.

As you can imagine, the book is steeped in controversy. 

I’ll first provide a short summary of its reception that I’ve gleaned from Wikipedia. The book was published in Arabic in 2016, but received an English translation in 2020. When the English translation was published, it seemed to be met with a slew of positive reviews. Shibli’s novel was the finalist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature and was longlisted for the International Booker Prize, and then it was selected for the LiBeratupreis in Germany following a German translation in 2022. Before the Frankfurt Book Fair, the organization LitProm cancelled the awards ceremony, and postponed it to an unspecified date. The rationale was the “war between Israel and Hamas.” There was an outcry from a number of public intellectuals and they wrote an open letter in defence of Palestinian writers. On the other side of the coin, some of the LitProm jurors objected to the book who claimed it was “anti-Israel” and “antisemitic.”

I can see some people objecting to the book as being anti-Israel because the soldiers don’t come across very well. The entire first half of Minor Detail is about Israeli soldiers patrolling the desert a year after 700, 000 Palestinians were displaced in 1948. The soldiers come across a group of Bedouins and proceed to slaughter them, leaving only a young teenage girl alive. I’ll allow you the sorrow of your own imagination to determine what this group of soldiers did to her before murdering her, too. So, yes, Israel does not come across particularly well in this work of fiction. Except, well, this happened.

In the second half of the novel, the unnamed Palestinian narrator goes looking for information on the case, compelled to investigate because of the strange parallel that it happened on the same day as her birth, twenty-five years earlier. Readers then witness the lengths she has to go to find information, including obtaining false papers so that she can pass through checkpoints, and eventually, seemingly, being killed by Israeli soldiers on patrol (though the ending of the book does not explicitly state that). Again, it’s not as if events like this have never happened, so to claim that the book is anti-Israel is maybe the case insofar as the realities of Israeli occupation are anti-humanitarian.

As a literary work, I think the content of the book and its style compliment each other beautifully to evoke the oppressive feeling and the dread of living under occupation. There are certain motifs that recur and repeat again and again, making it feel like there is no escape and no alternative. For instance, the book continually refers to white soap suds, crushing insects, sand clinging to grass, the smell of gasoline, dust, bug bites, and so on. Add to that the blazon of place names and maps to see the disorienting and oppressive reality for the central character. As she navigates to a place long-gone, she pulls out a slew of Palestinian maps and Israeli maps and finds them in contradiction. There are long lists of names, past and present, that make the distance feel interminable, even more so since the village she’s seeking has likely been destroyed.

There’s also a sense of anonymity that pervades the text. None of the characters are named, which I find yields simultaneous and diverging effects. For instance, in not naming the girl who is raped and murdered, she is not given the dignity of human life. When the narrator in the second section is described in somewhat parallel terms, the anonymity gives them a sense of affinity—because both are somewhat lacking in their identities, they are more connected (and more than just because of her birth date). As for the Israeli soldiers and the other Israelis the second narrator encounters, their lack of identity seems to imbue them with the cold banality of evil. 

The other piece of this is the permeability or non-permeability of borders. The narrator for the second half of the book notes that she has an “inability [...] to identify borders between things, and evaluate situations rationally and logically” (59). That mindset proves infectious. There are descriptions that seem like there’s no border between past and present, and you know rationally that it wouldn’t be possible, and yet… For example, there’s an Israeli man who runs a museum and when the narrator asks him about his past, he talks about finding a girl in the desert when he was a soldier and you know it wouldn’t be him—the time frame doesn’t seem right—but it’s tempting to think that that barrier between identity has been eradicated (especially since they have no names). There’s a barking dog in the first section. There’s a barking dog in the second section. It’s tempting to believe it’s the same dog that has some sort of knowledge of circumstances—but of course, this is impossible unless the dog is a new record holder for age.

Minor Detail trains you to be perceptive to little details, potentially to a disorienting effect. In the same passage about the inability to identify borders, the narrator continues as follows:

[it] leads me to see the fly shit on a painting and not the painting itself, as the saying goes. And it is possible, at first glance, to mock this tendency, which could compel someone, after the building next to their office at their new job is bombed, to be more concerned about the dust that was created by the bombing and that landed on their desk than about the killing of the three young men who had barricaded themselves inside, for instance. But despite this, there are some who consider this way of seeing, which is to say, focusing intently on the most minor details, like dust on the desk or fly shit on a painting, as the only way to arrive at the truth and definitive proof of its existence. (59)

This is one of those “master key” passages that gives you a way of approaching the text. As alluded to above, the second half of the book starts with the narrator going to her new job. She goes to the building for the first time and someone opens a window to prevent it from shattering when the bombs drop. She finds herself irritated by the dust from that building that lands on her hand, and it’s those small obsessions that distracts from the the big picture, as she notes in her narration. She describes the “dust on the desk or fly shit on a painting” as the nuanced, precise attention to detail. While she diminishes their importance, it is also revelatory of an ethical imperative. Consider, for instance, how many young people have been murdered in the Israel-Palestine conflict. Yet, the narrator is focused on one particular death, one particular girl, and her entire journey is intent on one minor detail.

There’s a convergence of aesthetics and ethics here. In considering the fly shit on the painting, the narrator continues that “There are even art historians who make these same claims. All right, they don’t exactly claim to notice fly shit on a painting, but they do make a point of focusing on the least significant details, not the most significant ones, in order to determine, for example, whether a painting is an original or a copy” (59). There is an interaction between the forest and the trees and their inseparability seems to be the focus here. For the most fundamental issues to be determined (is it an original or a copy?), we can only arrive at that by focusing on the minutiae. “Forgers,” she continues, “pay attention to major, significant details, like the roundness of the subject’s face or the position of the body, and these they reproduce precisely. However, they rarely pay attention to little details like earlobes or fingernails or toenails, which is why they ultimately fail to perfectly replicate the painting” (59). There’s a reading of the world that cares for that which is least significant, paradoxically being the most significant. 

Hence, the details of the book are of utmost importance. There are a number of symbols, metaphors, and allegorical readings involved. For instance, the girl’s murder takes place on the narrator’s birthday—as though her death is the ‘birth’ of the second woman. I’m sure there’s a parallel there to how acts of violence give ‘birth’ to their resistance. At the symbolic level, there’s a number of details related to animals and animality. In the first section, there’s a dog that persistently barks (a symbol of conscience? guilt?). There’s also a section where the main soldier is bitten by a bug and his leg becomes increasingly infected and painful. It seems to be symbolic of his own personal guilt and his own loss of humanity. His response to finding bugs in his room is then to crush all of them, going around destroying every one of these nuisances. It’s also telling that when they first come across the girl in the desert after murdering everyone in her group, including their camels, she is described as a beetle. 

Another recurring motif is that of sand, and in particular its ability to absorb that which is around it. For instance, there’s a chilling moment after the Bedouins are killed where Shibli lingers on blood in the sand. The sand sucks up the blood and darkens but then it disappears. Later, when the soldier is spraying the girl down, again the water is absorbed into the sand. There’s an implication that the landscape absorbs life; there’s also the implication that the historical landscape of Israel-Palestine comes from the blood of others. In another chilling detail, when the Bedouins are murdered, the camels are killed and there’s a clump of grass with sand still clinging to it. It’s an evocative image, charged with meaning, with layers of being uprooted, of clinging for dear life, and so on.

There are subterranean connections that operate in that image, in particular. Later in the book, the narrator says, “one cannot rule out the possibility of a connection between the two events, or the existence of a hidden link, as one sometimes finds with plants, for instance, like when a clutch of grass is pulled out by the roots, and you think you’ve got rid of it entirely, only for grass of the exact same species to grow back in the same spot a quarter of a century later” (60-61). I find the premise compelling. In a clever narrative technique, the second narrator describes things that we know about that are completely inaccessible to her. She would never have known about the camel clutching the grass, and here she is narrating something inexplicably similar. I think the suggestion here, too, is that the imperative toward eradication is a doomed venture—impossible to fully remove the subterranean links that bring people together across time and space, “trespassing borders once again” (61).

Where the message becomes less obvious is when echoes exist between characters that would have a more unlikely connection. Shibli lingers on the soap suds that whiten the girl’s body when she is being hosed down like an animal. Shibli then provides a scene of the soldier shaving and it lingers once more on the white soap suds on his skin. Why is it that the soldier and his victim are brought into this mysterious identification?

When actively seeking answers and trying to find connection, the second narrator experiences a series of challenges. It’s a halting kind of narrative. There are blockades and heightened tension of her not knowing whether she’ll be able to pass or if some serious harm will befall her. One of the most powerful lines in the book comes from the journey out. She describes driving the car she rented to investigate this half-a-decade-old murder, noting that as she tries to start the engine, “what appears to be a spider begins spinning its threads around me, tightening them into something like a barrier, impenetrable if only because they’re so fragile” (64). The next line is again one of the most crucial “key passages” of the book: “It’s the barrier of fear, fashioned from fear of the barrier” (64).

As the narrator repeatedly notes, she defies barriers—but this can serve as a disadvantage. Towards the end of the novel, the narrator has been driving around all day and ‘spill[s] some gasoline on [her] hands and pants” (92). I felt an immediate dread. Gas—first of all, that potentially flammable material that now coats her—is referenced earlier in the novel in an ominous way. The girl that is murdered smells of gasoline when the soldier first rapes her. The smell is so offensive to him, actually, that he turns his head away. [Sidenote here: this would be a good opportunity to re-read Slavoj Zizek’s Violence, which has a section about how we are willing to accept strangers until we can smell them on the bus.] The girl is also covered in gasoline prior to her death.

For the narrator to be covered in gasoline evokes a terrible dread. Again, it’s the minor details—-the echoes—-that, if you read them, mean the most. The narrator describes being covered in the smell of gasoline racing ahead of her. As she gets closer to the Nirim settlement where these events took place, she seems to be aligned more and more with the girl. There’s then a stilted narration of the route to get there and all the blocks in place that prevent you from getting there in the most direct fashion. As she is increasingly drawn into the past and aligned with the victim from 1949, you can feel the danger increase, which is why the ending of the book feels so ominous. Her investigation into the past is halted when she notices Israeli soldiers and tries to act inconspicuous before being, presumably, shot to death, perhaps in the same location as the former victim.

When paying attention to very minor details, the slight changes seem even more significant. Nowhere is this more emblematic than when dust comes in the window from the bombing and irritates her to a bombing later in the book. In a different context, the following passage appears:

Bombing sounds very different depending on how close one is to the place being bombed, or how far. The rumblings from  this shelling aren’t strong at all, and the noise isn’t unsettling; rather, it’s a deep, heavy sound, like a languorous pounding on a massive drum. And the bombs causing it don’t shake the building I’m in, even though the walls are thin and made of light wood; they don’t shatter the glass, even though the windows are closed. And when I get out of bed and open the windows, the room isn’t filled with a thick cloud of shuddersome dust; instead, what sneaks inside is the soft, tender air of dawn. I keep listening, my ears trained to the sound of repeated bombings, and I feel a strange closeness with Gaza, as well as a desire to hear the shelling from nearby, and to touch motes of dust from the buildings being bombed. The absence of dust brings an awareness of how profoundly far I am from anything familiar, and how impossible it will be to return. (94)

I have very little to say about this particular quotation, other than the fact that it is representative of Shibli’s distinct style. One reviewer described it as “controlled,” and I think that is actually the perfect description. Every detail matters and gives life. Every detail is a step toward justice.

And it is in the dust that we find our strange closeness. May we cultivate that closeness and overcome together.

Milkman by Anna Burns

    When a novel is so completely original, clever, and fresh, it’s hard to know exactly where to start with a review. Falling into such a category is Anna Burns’ Milkman. While I finished it nearly a week ago, I haven’t been able to bring the right words to the experience. I’ll venture to begin, instead, by explaining why it was necessary for me to buy and read this book. It’s a delightful tripartite:

1. The vibrant pinks and oranges of the cover.

2. Its status as a winner of the Man Booker Prize (2018).

3. The back of the book, where the first two sentences read as follows: “In an unnamed city, middle sister stands out for the wrong reasons. She reads while walking, for one.”

    Being an aficionado of reading-while-walking, the book called my name. Despite the fact that people read from their phones while walking all the time, strangers routinely make comments—for better or for worse—on my apparently odd behaviour, so I felt a personal connection to the central character and the author immediately.

    The main character’s relatable affectation was the tip of the iceberg. As I dove into the book, I found the writing style, characters, plot, and themes of the text completely engrossing. Even though the pace of the book is slow, the narratological style repetitive, and the digressions into minutiae numerous, I felt compelled to read on. The compulsion is rare to find and, to me, is a good indicator of how finely wrought this book is.

    Allow me to begin with the premise of the story. Despite not being named, the milieu is central to the novel. The country is under immense political and religious duress; ideological divides and the resultant instability mean that many teenage citizens try to restore control over their lives by joining with local paramilitaries—and most families have at least one dead child as a result. Knowing that Burns hails from Northern Ireland biases me somewhat into believing that the story takes place in the Troubles of the 1970s, but the story has a universal quality that could easily set the story in areas of post-war strife like, say, Berlin or Palestine. Ultimately if Burns had wanted this to be an Irish-specific tale, she would have identified the city by name.

    Despite having a historical framework, I found myself frequently destabilized by the little details that pop up. For instance, middle sister’s maybe-boyfriend (this is how he is referred to throughout the novel) obtains a car part that comes from “across the water” (i.e. it’s a supercharger from a Bentley) and it’s seen as a scandal. There seems to be mistrust between both the U.S. and Russia, positioning the characters as in the midst of the Cold War, though their conflict is more localized—more immediate.

    These factors create an atmosphere of paranoia and suspicion. The words of middle sister establish the framework for the story succinctly: 

“These were knife-edge times, primal times, with everybody suspicious of everybody. You could have a nice wee conversation with someone here, then go away and think, that was a nice, unguarded conversation I just had there — least until you start playing it back in your head later on. At that point you start to worry that you said ‘this’ or ‘that’, not because ‘this’ or ‘that’ were contentious. It was that people were quick to point fingers, to judge, to add on even in peaceful times, so it would be hard to fathom fingers not getting pointed and words not being added, also being judged in these turbulent times, resulting too, not in having your feelings hurt upon discovering others were talking about you, as in having individuals in balaclavas and Halloween masks, guns at the ready, turning up in the middle of the night at your door” (27-28).

The characterization of the milieu as “knife-edge” times is just excellent, and the way that middle sister characterizes those knife-edge times is wonderful. I love the deployment of a vague haze, like her use of ‘this’ or ‘that’, devoid of concrete examples. As a bit of a missed opportunity I think it would have been great to say that you worry about saying ‘this’ or ‘that’ not because ‘this’ or ‘that’ were contentious but because you  were meant to say ‘that’ when you said ‘this’ and ‘this’ when you were supposed to say ‘that’. The style encapsulates the vague haze of the society and the adopted anonymity when times are so uncertain. Characters are generally not given names; for one, certain ‘cultural’ names are forbidden, but also, given the rates of premature death, why give names beyond ‘eldest sister’ or ‘second brother-in-law’.  

    Ultimately, these knife-edge times drive the plot. While reading-while-walking, middle sister is approached by Milkman (not a milkman), who seems to have intimate knowledge of her and her family’s history. His presence is a threat in its own right, but it incites rumours that he and middle sister are in a relationship, that she is in high political standing, locally, by proximity to a paramilitary, and so on. Middle sister is already “beyond the pale” because of her reading-while-walking habits, but Milkman stalking her now makes middle sister’s mom paranoid that she isn’t getting married, incites doubt in her maybe-boyfriend (who, incidentally, it’s intimated will be on the receiving end of Milkman’s car bomb), and her local entanglements get increasingly complex.

    The main beats of the story are simple. Each chapter is rooted in one of middle sister’s interactions with Milkman and Anna Burns turns the screw each time. That said, the tangential stories provide rich characterization and ‘world-building’, as it were. Lest I give the impression that the book is predominantly historico-political, that serves as the backdrop but the story is essentially human.

    For instance, middle sister is in a maybe-relationship with maybe-boyfriend and the two are in perpetual, understated conflict. They have a routine, but not being necessarily official nor planning necessarily to wed, their relationship is in perpetual peril. It’s also a secret, which is a cause for her mother’s anxiety and feeds into the rumours that middle sister is involved with Milkman. There’s a colourful cast of characters, each of which inspire sympathy and repulsion. Off-putting to the neighbourhood, one boy is always singing doom and gloom about nuclear weapons—until he’s murdered. Another girl poisons people in the neighbourhood for mysterious reasons. The characters are provided with rich backstories in nearly every case. Even maybe-boyfriend’s parents are given a darkly comic background that made me feel invested in their lives. They decide to abandon their children to pursue careers in showbusiness:

“They had written a note, said the neighbours, but had forgotten to leave it; indeed primarily they had forgotten to write it and so had written it then forwarded it back from their undisclosed destination when they reached it, not deliberately undisclosed but because they hadn't time or memory or understanding to put a sender's address at the top. According to the postmark it was not just a country over a water, but a country over many, many waters. Also, they forgot their former address, the house they'd lived in for twenty-four years ever since getting married until twenty-four hours earlier when they left. In the end they'd hazarded the address in the hope the street itself might sort things out for them and, thanks to the resourcefulness of the street, it managed to do just that. It forwarded the letter to their offspring and this letter, after it had done the rounds of the neighbours before reaching the hands of the brothers, said: 'Sorry kids. Seeing things in right relation we should never have had children. We're just off dancing forever. Sorry again - but at least now you're grown up.' After this, there was an afterthought: ‘Well, those of you who aren't grown up can be finished by those of you who are - and look, please have everything- including the house.' The parents insisted their boys take the house, that they themselves didn't want it; that all they wanted was what they had with them — each other, their choreomania and their numerous trunks of fabulous dancing clothes. The letter ended, 'Goodbye eldest sone, goodbye second elder sone, goodbye younger sone, goodbye youngest sone - goodbye all dearr lovelyy sones’ but with no signature of ' parents' or 'your fond but lukewarm mother and father'. Instead they signed it 'dancers', then there were four kisses, after which the sons never heard from their parents again. Except on TV. Increasingly this couple would be on TV, because they proved themselves, despite middle age, exceptional youthful ballroom-dancing champions. (39)

Apologies for the lengthy passage, but I think it reflects a few of the quirks of Burns’ writing. There’s the repetitive language and sentence structures that recycle details over and over—perhaps there’s a Beckettian lilt to the work in that respect—that comes across as hypnotic, but also lively and full of personality. The ‘voice’ is so distinct, and in addition there’s a dark humour to the passage. The seriousness of the parents abandoning their children is undercut by their blasé attitudes as dancers and I find that disconnect fantastic.

    The disconnect also works in reverse. In a chilling flashback scene, middle sister’s father is in hospital and the perception of humour skews the scene darker. It’s revealed throughout the text that her father was mentally unwell, and middle sister has a distinct memory of a confession—a secret shared between them. When talking about his pain, Da mentions his backside, and “wee sisters giggled” (56). He talks about how the pain “kept coming, kept repeating, kept being awful, [his] whole life through” (56). He then expounds on his life in a self-effacing, self-abnegating way that is just awful to witness, particularly because middle sister’s mom is determinedly unsympathetic to Da’s mental illness. He explains, “there had been a recklessness, wife [...] an abandonment, a rejection of me by me that had begun years earlier — I was going to die anyway, wouldn’t live long anyway, any day now I’ll be dead, all the time, violently murdered — so he may as well have me, ‘cos he knew all along he was going to have me, couldn’t stop him from having me. All shut down. Get it over with. Not going freshly into that place of terror, which was why, wife, it never felt right between me and you” (56). It becomes clear that Da underwent significant sexual trauma in his younger years, but wee sisters don’t understand, so they continue to giggle throughout the scene. The wee sisters find humour in funny words (like “buttocks”), but are oblivious to the darkness taking place at the moment: 'Did he,' da then asked, looking straight at me and seeming for a moment fully to comprehend me, ‘Did he ...rape you, brother ... as well?’ (56). The complex family dynamic is given some additional tension, but the psychological turns are best left to the author.

    The entire novel, though, explores the psyche of characters so beautifully, with middle sister being developed particularly well. Her personality (and the milieu) comes through in the narration with an odd mix of sophistication and naivete. For instance, her vocabulary is advanced but conceptually she is still sometimes woefully innocent—for example, she sees her own life as being constructed by other peoples’ rumours, but doesn’t recognize that the same might be true of poisoner girl. That said, her consciousness of how things are is generally profound.

    There’s a section I found absolutely heart-wrenching, but too long to quote in its entirety here. Essentially, middle sister goes through a conscious process of prolonged dissociation. She actively chooses to render herself an expressionless void of a person. She recounts the process of emptying herself out over several uninterrupted pages. She likens the process to the adage told when making a face: you’re going to get stuck like that. That happens to her spiritually. Not wanting to confirm or deny rumours about her, she responds to everything with “I don’t know.” It’s a tragic passage that is elevated by Burns’ deft hand. [cf. pp. 175-179].

    Essentially, the section reflects at the individual level what middle sister had noticed of their society as a whole, but you go in with the expectation that she is somehow different, beyond the influence of her society’s deadening effect. She notes, “So shiny was bad, and ‘too sad’ was bad, and ‘too joyous’ was bad, which meant you had to go around not being anything, also not thinking, least not at top level, which was why everybody kept their private thoughts safe and sound in those recesses underneath” (91). Incidentally, this is brought up in relation to her father: “We thought, because we were told, that whenever he disappeared he was off to long hours of work, long days of work, lengthy weeks of work in some faraway town or country or, if not that, that he was seeing some specialist doctor far away because of the pains he was getting in his back. But it was mental hospitals, and it was mental breakdowns, which meant cover-up, which meant shame, which meant even more shame in his case because he was a man” (91).

    In any case, the novel revolves around themes of perception and what we are willing to admit to ourselves. In one crucial scene, a French teacher challenges one of the most basic truths we tend to learn: the sky is blue. They read a poem that gives a poetic response to the sky and nobody is willing to admit that more is possible. Using such a juvenile example as a starting place, it becomes emblematic of the text’s deeper themes: 

“Of course we knew really that the sky could be more than blue, two more, but why should any of us admit to that? I myself have never admitted it. Not even the week before when I experienced my first sunset with maybe-boyfriend did I admit it. Even then, even though there were more colours than the acceptable three in the sky – blue (the day sky), black (the night sky), and white (clouds) — that evening still I kept my mouth shut. And now the others in this class — all older than me, some as old as thirty -– also weren’t admitting it. It was the convention not to admit it, not to accept detail for this type of detail would mean choice and choice would mean responsibility and what if we failed in our responsibility? Failed too, to the interrogation of the consequence of seeing more than we could cope with? Worse, what if it was nice, whatever it was, and we liked it, got used to it, were cheered up by it, came to rely upon it, only for it to go away, or be wrenched away, never to come back again? Better not to have had it in the first place was the prevailing feeling, and that was why blue was the colour for our sky to be. Teacher though, wasn’t leaving it at that. (70-71).

In rewriting that passage, it occurs to me that there’s a thematic connection to one of my favourite books of all time, Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. This refusal to admit what we secretly know—to both be told and not be told—that fills our lives with so much tragedy is illuminated here. The officially mandated colours of the sky are clearly insufficient, but because the characters feel their happiness to be so precarious that they dare not embrace that which is more beautiful. The idea of not being able to cope with the loss of the sky’s colours is a poetic, heartbreaking turn.

    The theme extends into their romantic lives. There’s a motif throughout the book of people having, essentially, a true love and then the person they actually marry for practical and political reasons. Again, its reminiscent of Never Let Me Go in that respect, but it’s articulated beautifully here in its own right. In particular, there’s a section at the end where middle sister’s mother is faced with the decision to pursue the milkman (not to be confused with Milkman, of course). He is probably her proper love, but then is essentially told by the local women to give him up so that a long-suffering woman can lay claim to him instead. It’s painful and sincere and just a beautiful turn in the final pages of the book. Incidentally, file this book under: “books that have a perfect final sentence.”

    Actually, there are so many excellent moments and vignettes throughout the book. When maybe-boyfriend criticizes middle sister for her voiding, it’s a powerful conflict. She narrates, “At first I was stumped which gave him time to fit in extra charges of an unattractive numbed state he had observed was creeping over me, that he felt was starting to invade and possess me, saying it was as if I was no longer a living person but one of those jointed wooden dollies that artists use in — which was when I had to stop him because I couldn’t bear for him to finish on my growing numbed condition only to start in on my face” (193-194). The fact that he turns on her for that is a powerful moment, followed up a few pages later [cf. 199-202] by him confronting her on her reading-while-walking habit.

    So, what is the problem with reading-while-walking? A number of characters, well-intentioned and not, challenge her behaviour. It’s largely framed as being apolitical, or anti-political, in a time that one cannot afford to be. Third brother-in-law, for example, speaks to her seriously not about Milkman, but about her reading:

“he embarked on a careful disquisition that I guessed he'd been having for some time in his head. This was on the subject of my reading-while-walking. Books and walking. Me. And walking. And reading. That thing again. [...] 'It's that I think, said third brother-in-law, 'that you should not do that, that it's not safe, not natural, not dutiful to self, that by doing so you're switching yourself off, you’re abandoning yourself, that you might as well betake yourself for a stroll amongst the lions and the might tigers, that you’re putting yourself at the mercy of hard and cunning and unruly dark forces, that you might as well be walking with your hands in your pockets–-' 'Wouldn't be able to hold the book then—’ ‘Not funny. he said, 'It's that anybody could sneak up. They could run up,' he emphasised. 'Drive up. Good godfathers, sister-in-law! They could dander up, with you — defences down, no longer alert, no longer strenuously reconnoitring and surveying the environment and if you’re reading aloud—’ [...] This was getting ridiculous. 'But if you're undertaking the unsafe procedure of reading-while-walking and cutting off consciousness and not paying attention and ignoring your surroundings…” (58).

I adore these passages (and there are several) where people voice their critiques. The idea that reading is positioned as a withdrawal is, in my mind, backward, but given appropriate attention as a criticism. I also love the phrasing and dismissive attitude of middle sister: “Books and walking. Me. And walking. And reading. That thing again” is just a perfect rejection of peoples’ criticism. When he later brings up the walking-while-reading criticism again, she starts to make objections: “‘Okay,’ I said. ‘’So if I were to stop walking-while-reading, and hands in pockets, and little night torches, and instead looked right and left and right again for dangerous, unscrupulous forces, does that mean I’ll end up happy?” (63). The sentence which follows is just brutal: ““It’s not about being happy,’ he said, which was, and still is, the saddest remark I’ve ever heard” (63). The way that Burns takes such a simple premise as walking-and-reading and transforms it into something so symbolic is finely crafted, especially when given voice by her central character. Again I find myself reflected in her:

“It was my opinion that with my reading-while-walking I was doing both at the same time. And why should I not? I knew that by reading while I walked I was losing touch in a critical sense with communal up-to-dateness and that, indeed, was risky. It was important to be in the know, to keep up with, especially when things here got added on to at such a rapid compound rate. On the other hand, being up on, having awareness, clocking everything—both of rumour and of actuality—didn’t prevent things from happening or allow for intervention on, or reversal of things that had already happened. Knowledge didn’t guarantee power, safety and relief—leaving no outlet for dispersal either, of all the heightened stimuli that had been built by being up on in the first place. Purposely not wanting to know therefore, was exactly what my reading-while-walking was about. It was a vigilance not to be vigilant, and my return to exercising with brother-in-law, that too, was part of my vigilance” (65).

You have likely inferred by now that this novel has a philosophical bent to it. I think—and I may be overreaching here—that classic literature walks the balance of the narrative, the aesthetic, and the philosophical. At times, the philosophical can be outright heavy handed (consider for instance the treatise George Orwell embeds into 1984). But the best novels have a gentle touch where the philosophy and the narrative compliment one another. In my mind, Burns has achieved that balance and Burns has created a classic. 

    The fog of war that surrounds the novel allows for all kinds of observations about perception, identity, fate, hope, and epistemology. I was drawn in particular to the reflections on perception and Burns’ suggestion of the jamais vu, a blanking out of that which cannot be accepted (in Ishiguro terms: being both told and not told). Middle sister is concerned about the renouncers forcing on her a comprehensive and thus conflicting opinion of them. She says:

“This is what happens when doors swing open on inner contraries. Impossible then, with all these irreconcilables, to account, not just politically-correctly, but even sensibly for oneself. Hence, the dichotomy, the cauterising, the jamais vu, the blanking-out, the reading-while-walking—even my consideration of whether to forgo the current codex altogether for the safety of the scroll and papyrus of earlier centuries. Otherwise, if unmediated forces and feelings burst into my consciousness, I wouldn’t know what to do” (113).

This willed lack of complexity is a compelling idea to consider from the perspective of epistemology and returns us once more to the idea of the sky having more than three potential colours. The way that Burns navigates the individual amid the political is so perceptive, so persuasive, I found it hard to resist. 

    Essentially. The intertwining of the milieu with the plot with the themes—and heck, even the narrative voice—makes the whole experience aesthetically gratifying in every respect, so much so that in attempting to the book justice I’m consistently failing. Milkman is a one-of-a-kind reading experience, though it would likely appeal to fans of Ishiguro for its more human themes, Roberto Bolaño’s By Night in Chile meets Miriam Toews’ a complicated kindness for its milieu, or even Beckett or Joyce for its language. Being a book so finely honed and being a book like no other, I feel that Milkman has earned my highest praise. It’s the kind of book I want to force on all my most thoughtful friends and on all my most engaged students. I love its sweet, slow burn.

    Really happy reading! This book is an absolute achievement.