|
|
| CARVIEW |
“Where was he, the one who remembered who I was?” – from “Doubt”
Richard Siken is out to make a statement with his new book. Even without an exclamation mark, the book’s title, I Do Know Something, handwritten in capital letters across the solid black front cover, suggests that the poet really means business. Then open the book and stare for a moment at the bright red endpapers, a detail from an artwork by Cecil Touchon called “Post Dogmatist Painting #934” (2017). Touchon’s piece depicts portions of large white letters of the alphabet, jumbled up and overlapping each other, so that the symbols of communication have become mute sculptural shapes, as if Robert Indiana’s famous “Love” sculpture had come tumbling down.
The poems in this, his third book, are all written in tight rectangular text blocks that afford the reader no way in or out between the first word and the last. No enjambments to ponder, just Siken’s singular, captivating voice. The title sentence comes from the book’s fifth poem, “Sidewalk,” in which Siken tells of turning up at a local hospital, sure that he is having a stroke, but no one there will believe him. The doctor tells him he is having a panic attack and sends him home. Five poems later, in “Metonymy,” a poem of staccato short sentences and phrases, a friend finally insists he call an ambulance and go to different hospital, where it is immediately recognized that he is having a stroke. “I slept, I peed myself, I fell off the mattress, I fell out of chairs talking wildly. I scared them, whoever they were, the people I was supposed to know. I knew who James was, he was on the phone. He was in California. You can’t stay there. You have to go to the hospital. You can go to a different hospital. I changed my clothes. It was like dressing a mannequin.” This book is his declaration of return, his account of the struggle to regain language and the use of his body, and of the need to rebuild his memory all over again, beginning with his family history.
At the beginning, I was just making a list of things I was trying to remember. I had a stroke. It wiped me clean. I had to claw my way back into a self, into a body. I lost my right side to numbness, and I had no vocabulary. The poems accumulated as autobiography by default because I had no artifice but felt a great need to get it right. I needed to figure out what a doorknob was, what a sandwich was. Crush played with the ideas of self and other, of overlap and clash and rupture. War of the Foxes played with the self and its representation in painting and in myth. These new pieces don’t play. They’re focused on rebuilding a self in a very serious way.
My neurologist said the fact that I am a painter and a poet is why I recovered. Because of the building of pathways—I already had such weird pathways built on lateral thinking, that continuing to paint and write poetry would help with the neuroplasticity. I made an amazing recovery. I’m lucid, and I can walk, and when I’m rested you can’t really tell I have a limp. I can use my right arm pretty well. So I can make a pretty good recommendation for the power of language and the need for poetry and painting. And maybe I do need to write, but I don’t need to publish and I don’t need to share—and that’s a different thing. [from an interview with Z.L. Nichols in BOMB Magazine Spring 2024 issue]
In three poems that come near the end of the book—”Line,” “Sentence,” and “Paragraph”—Siken tells the reader why he chose this format. I’ll quote from just two of them. From “Line”: “Orpheus descended. The red ribbon unspooled from his mouth in the darkness. He sang and it fluttered. [. . .] When does a line end? How long is a piece of string? A line ends when it is broken. [. . .] A sentence ends with a period but a line continues on. I wouldn’t break the line. I was afraid to. Too much was broken already.”
From “Paragraph”: “I didn’t know what to do with it so I put it in a box. [. . .] I set the margins and surrounded the thoughts on all sides. I made everything the same shape and concentrated on the space between the thoughts.” [My ellipses in both poems.]
Siken returns again and again to this theme that looks like miscommunication on the surface. It occurs primarily between himself and various medical professionals. In “The List,” the narrator complains about a nurse, his grief counselor, and his suicide counselor, all of whom have made up their minds about him based on other patients they have seen in the past. So he gives up on them and begins a second, apparently private notebook in which he is unafraid to write down what he is actually thinking. Here, he will not write in the terminology desired by the professionals. “A doorknob is a rock for the hand. It opens a hole in the wall. —A doorknob is your stupid head. You will not survive this.” As he puts it, “I built up meaning with a double set of books.” The poem “Pain Scale” begins: “My primary care physician is not a neurologist. He doesn’t understand the difference between sadness and damage. I do not like this man. He refuses adjectives. He wants me to say My pain is eight, instead of Thunderous and upsetting. When he says You’ll be fine, I have to explain that I won’t because I have never been fine, but I’m not saying it right.”
At this point, reading “Pain Scale,” which happens to sit exactly halfway through I Do Know Some Things, there is a line that makes it apparent that this theme of miscommunication that Siken has been writing about is about something larger than his stroke. He tells us in one of the poem’s lines that “I think many people struggle with my aesthetic.” I’m sure many of us have sat in a doctor’s office and have been asked to rank some strange pain on a pain scale of 1 to 10, which makes no sense at all. So, we look to a poem like “Spoon” to understand a little more what Siken means by “my aesthetic.” In “Spoon,” the narrator is trying to figure out what makes him different from his two stepbrothers, who were “comfortable, powerful” and “didn’t worry about things.” He begins with some fairly obvious observations: “I was smarter but they had stamina. I was good with hypotheticals but they knew how to get things done, real things, with tools.” Then he moves on to more meaningful differences. Here’s the ending of the poem: “I had a certain capacity, which was a generous way of saying that I had nothing. Their hands were full but their skies were empty. No clouds, no shapes to guess. I was blurry at the edges and unrelatable. Do not try to bend the spoon. There is no spoon. It is only you that bends. I was the spoon and there is no spoon. I was blisteringly invisible.”
“Blisteringly invisible” conjures up the incandescent idea of a superhero of some sort. The young narrator of “Spoon,” looking up at his two older, confident stepbrothers, is realizing, in effect, that he is a poet. He is seeing that the characteristics that seem to put him at a disadvantage—like being “blurry at the edges and unrelatable”—can be attributes of exceptional value elsewhere. Throughout this book, Siken plays with these two extreme opposites, the damaged, hospitalized stroke patient and the man who knows himself far better than the attending professionals and the brawny stepbrothers.
To put this all together though, Siken has the reader pinballing back and forth across the pages of I Do Know Something, puzzling his life story out, much as he himself is trying to pull his own past back out of the black hole of the stroke.
Ω
“I wanted to reclaim the self I had. I was honest because I had no filter. I’m glad I couldn’t lie because I would have been tempted to lie. Why rebuild a self out of contaminated parts? I didn’t think of it as proving I was real or inventing anything. I just wanted to remember my friends, my preferences, what a light switch was. I wasn’t fractured, I was erased. The goal of these poems was very small: try to remember.” From “An Interview with Richard Siken” in Wildness 40
Siken brilliantly uses rhetorical devices like metaphor and metonymy to make his descriptions of concepts and ordinary events vivid. Take a poem called “The Waves,” where all that Siken is really talking about is his struggle to sleep and think clearly while in a hospital bed that has rails. He thinks that the word drift seems to describe his situation and realizes that it is “a sea word.” And immediately the poem takes off in a Homeric direction. “I strung the words and everything under the shattered clouds in sentences. By which I mean, the wine-dark sea. It bruises where the oars strike. . . I am the mermaids singing, twisted in the sheets. I am, I have, I know and say. I know, I have, I will and do. Whitecaps and froth. I yelled at the waves. The ghost of myself slept deep. Try to finish, finish the thought. Do not drop anchor here. . . The fingered dawn. The terrible shore. The complicated mooring.”
Siken slyly moves from the hospital scene into a vivid metaphor of Odysseus on his ship during his multi-year attempt to return home. We see him struggling to get past the Sirens (or mermaids, as he calls them) who are singing to lure him ashore where his ship would crash and he would die. In the following few brief sentences of the poem, the scene flickers between the hospital room and the rough Mediterranean Sea. But Siken leaves it up to us to make the connections, to figure out where we are and when narrator is Siken or Homer. We go adrift in the text in much the same way that the poet went adrift in his hospital room.
The poems in I Do Know Something describe extraordinary physical and mental struggles, but somehow, they manage to seem effortless. In “Piano Lesson,” Siken writes about one particular development in the modern piano. “By 1837, with some refinement of the pedals, a player could sustain the notes even after their hands had moved away.” The musician/poet can lift his or her hands into the air and say “Voila! It’s all magic!” There has always been something fearless in Siken’s poetry, especially in his previous book Crush (2005). But now, broken and repairing, his writing is audacious. He does know something, indeed.
Richard Siken. I Do Know Something. Copper Canyon Press, 2025.
]]>
For decades I have been intrigued by novels and books of poetry in which the authors include photographs as an essential element of their “text.” How is each different author asking me, the reader, to respond to these visual interruptions or additions to their text? In 2025, I found a number of newly published examples of such books by writers from Australia, Austria, England, France, India, Italy, Mexico, Poland, Spain, and the United States, one of which included a photographer from South Africa. Undoubtedly, many more titles were published that escaped my attention, and as I become aware of them I will add them here. I don’t have the ability to purchase or physically see every title listed here. I often rely on Google, Amazon’s “Read Sample” option, publisher’s websites, and Vertigo readers to show me or describe to me the images within these books.
If you see a book of photo-embedded fiction or poetry that you want to call to my attention from this or any other year, just let me know in a comment anywhere on Vertigo. My thanks to the many readers who have already pointed me to books that I had not known about. [Last updated with new titles January 7, 2026]
Check out the extensive, ever-expanding bibliography of hundreds of titles which can be found at the pull-down menu Photo-Embedded Literature at the top of Vertigo. There are also two downloadable files: Embedded: A Bibliography of Photo-Embedded Fiction & Poetry from the 1890s to 2023 lists in chronological order the over 700 titles I had located as of May 2024. That is accompanied by a separate, downloadable Author & Artist Index. Both can be found at the Downloadable Bibliography tab at the top of this blog. At some point in the next year or so, it will be replaced by an expanded second edition.
Photo-Embedded Fiction & Poetry 2025
Nadia Alexis. Beyond the Watershed. CavanKerry Press, 2025. A powerful volume of poems and photography that deal with her parents’ journey from Haiti to the U.S. and the struggle that both she and her mother face with men and violence. In the final poem: “Woman no longer endangered.” The volume contains eight full-page evocative photographs by the author, each showing a woman in a white dress who is blurred and in motion in a forest setting.
Joshua Beckman. Firefly. Holyoke, MA: The Brother In Elysium, 2025. Firefly consists of sixteen poems Beckman wrote during the summer of 2018, with four new photo collages by Jon Beacham responding to the text. These poems were written during Beckman’s first summer living in the woods in upstate New York, where he spent more time with non-human creatures than human ones. Firefly resumes a conversation between the poet and artist that began ten years earlier with the book Porch Light: lamp and chair (2012). Letterpress edition of 225 copies.
Max Besora. The Fake Muse. Rochester: Open Letter, 2025. According to the publisher, The Fake Muse is “infused with the spirit of pulp fiction, b-movies, zines, and punk rock.” The Amazon preview shows two photographs in less than a dozen sample opening pages. It’s not clear how many more images there might be. Translated from the 2020 Catalan original by Mara Faye Lethem.
David Bevan. Sightings. Manchester: Configo, 2025. Sightings is a collection of six stories by Bevan, with photographs by Maya Sharp in response to the stories. The book is the sixth in a series of collaborations between writers and artists. Set mostly in the South Pennines, these stories offer a glimpse into the lives of characters diverted by the birds they encounter.
Claude Cahun. Cancelled Confessions (or Disavowals). Siglio, 2025. A new edition of Cahun’s 1930 masterpiece Aveux non Avenus (Paris: Édition due Carrefour). From the publisher’s website: “Thoughtfully redesigned to emulate the original artist’s book, this revised edition of the out-of-print English translation by Susan de Muth—originally published in the UK by the Tate in 2007 and in the U.S. by MIT Press in 2008—includes novelist and critic Pierre Mac Orlan’s original 1930 preface along with contemporary essays by scholar Amelia Groom and translator de Muth.” The Tate/MIT volumes were simply titled Disavowals. Cahun’s text is accompanied by a number of photocollages created in collaboration with her partner Marcel Moore (née Suzanne Malherbe).
Helen DeWitt & Ilya Gridneff. Your Name Here. Dalkey Archive Press, 2025. DeWitt & Gridneff’s giant, baggy, novel-like thing about trying and failing to jointly write and publish this novel contains nineteen small photographs, nearly all relating to Italian movies of the Fellini era (i.e., film stills, promotional images, etc.)
James Elkins. A Short Introduction to Anneliese. Unnamed Press, 2025. An abbreviated and edited version of the description from the publisher: “Over dinner and then over the phone, unemployed biologist Anneliese Glur peppers Samuel Emmer with wild, seemingly endless monologues about numerous long books. She is no longer sure that she is sane, and she needs Samuel to read her book—a comprehensive theory of the essence of life, that transcends category or definition—to see if it makes sense. But Samuel is aging quickly. Her way of talking sounds to him like music and her startling ideas have evaporated, leaving only melodies.” The second in a series of five novels, following Weak in Comparison to Dreams (2023). It contains an unknown number of photographs.
Caleb Femi. The Wickedest. NY: MCD, 2025. Femi’s book of poetry is about “the longest running house party in the South London shoob scene, always held at an undisclosed inner-city spot,” according to the publisher. It contains color photographs of dance parties by the author.
Radka Franczak. godzina wieloryba. Cyranka, 2025. The title translates as “The whaling hour.” A reader says: “the author of this novel in Polish apparently wears many hats: film school graduate, screenwriter, photographer… This comes across in the choice and layout of the photographs in the book – from small snapshots embedded in the text to full-page collages, ranging from (somewhat Sebaldian) pictures of a desktop space strewn with opened volumes, notebooks, photographs, to historical images, maps, and engravings, to b&w photos of deep-sea creatures… (Franczak also designed the book’s cover.) Similarly, the writing deliberately slips between genres: storytelling, travelog, journal, fictionalized biographies, scientific research – into whales and the climate catastrophe unfolding before our eyes, and how we all fit into it.”
Verónica Gerber Bicecci. La Compañía. NY: Columbia University Press, 2025. From Bicecci’s website: “This intervention of Amparo Dávila’s short story The Houseguest and the borrowed graphic elements of Manuel Felguérez’s The Aesthetic Machine, tell the story of a mining Company’s arrival in a small town, terrorizing its inhabitants.” From the Amazon website: “Based on a trip to the now abandoned Mexican mercury mining town of San Felipe Nuevo Mercurio, La Compañía explores the development of mercury mining as a technology and its present environmental consequences, both predictable and unforeseen, in what Cristina Rivera Garza [who writes the Epilogue] terms ‘an exemplary disappropriative work’.” La Compañía involves a rewriting of Amparo Dávila’s short story The Houseguest, changing specific aspects of the text (i.e. verb tenses are transposed to the future) so that the house guest becomes a menacing presence and the domestic helper who suffers the intimidation of La Compañía along with her unnamed female employer is the machine. A second part includes scientific reports dating from the 1950s to the present day, conversations with experts and miners, and excerpts from the story of Long, Tall José, which construct a history of mercury mining in the area and the subsequent environmental contamination. Both sections are accompanied by images that range from Gerber Bicecci’s intervened photographs of the ghost town and the surrounding area to technical diagrams and reinterpreted maps, plus pictograms from Manuel Felguérez’s La máquina estética (1975). Translated from the 2021 Spanish original by Christina MacSweeney.
Golden. Reprise: Poems and Photographs. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2025. According to Amazon: “Golden’s collection illuminates a path through national uprisings, anti-trans violence, family loss, and a global pandemic.” His color photographs include many self-portraits (see the cover for a good example), images of family & friends, and old family snapshots. This is Golden’s second collection of poetry & photography after their A Dead Name That Learned How to Live (2022).
Susan Howe. Penitential Cries. NY: New Directions, 2025. The long, seemingly autobiographical title poem is about aging, healthcare, and death, and includes numerous uncited, tantalizing quotations as the poet thinks about the poets and poetry of the past. The other major poem is “Sterling Park in the Dark,” which consists of fifty pages of her “woven” poems, which are made from parts of phrases, words, and individual letters woven together architectonically, reminding us how suggestive written language can be even when we cannot glimpse the context or the connection of the words on view. The book contains one photograph of the sailboat “Exit,” taken from N.L. Stebbin’s book The Yachtsman’s Album (Boston, 1896).
Caleb Klaces. Mr. Outside. London: Prototype, 2025. A son and an aging father, who is about to move to a care center, spend a difficult weekend together attempting to grapple with memories, discoveries, fears, and regrets. The novel includes a dozen or so small b&w photographs, which are apparently by the author. I recently wrote a bit more about the book here.
Hervé Le Tellier. The Name on the Wall. Open Letter, 2025. From the publisher’s website: “Struck by a name written on a facade of his new home, Le Tellier embarked on a quest to recover the history of André Chaix, a resistance fighter, a maquisard, killed at the age of 20 in August 1944.” A novel not unlike those of Patrick Modiano, The Name on the Wall combines historical fragments with fiction. It contains a number of photographs documenting Chaix’s life.
Joni Murphy. Barbara. Astra House: 2025. From the Amazon description: “Barbara is born shortly before World War II and lives through the conflict as a desert child trailing her father, an engineer in the famed and infamous Manhattan Project. When Barbara is thirteen, her beautiful, sensitive mother commits suicide. From that point on, these twin poles—the historic and the personal, the political and the violently intimate—vie for control of Barbara’s consciousness. As Barbara grows up and becomes a successful actress, traveling the world between film sets and love affairs, she takes on and sheds various roles—vampire’s victim and frontier prostitute; a saint and a bored housewife. She marries and divorces and marries again, the second time to a visionary director who proves to be the love of her life. Though they are not faithful to each other, their relationship provides the most enduring anchor in a remarkable life turbulent with fiction.” The novel contains an unknown number of photographs.
Cait O’Kane. The Wasted Land. Tripwire Journal, 2025. From the publisher’s website: “This documentary poem by Cait O’Kane is modeled after T.S. Eliot’s epic poem The Wasteland. It serves as a textual map of graffiti, narcotics, blight, & gentrification in the ‘changing neighborhood’ of Kensington, Philadelphia. Once a working-class enclave, this section of Philly has been portrayed internationally as the epicenter of the so-called ‘opioid epidemic’ enveloping the U$A. Punctuated by O’Kane’s photography, The Wasted Land moves through Kensington’s streets, avenues, & alleys, exploring intersections of capital, dispossession, development, & despair as the true epidemic plaguing its people.” It includes an unknown number of photographs.
Frances Presley. Black Fens Viral. Shearsman, 2025. Rectangular prose-poems that the author says are “the Black Fens [which] also brought back memories of my childhood in Lincolnshire. Depopulated by mechanised agriculture, it was a lonely landscape, as well as an ecological disaster.” The book uses photographs, some taken by the poet, some borrowed from a 1970s book on the flatlands, and some printed as negatives.
Gerhard Rühm. The Folded Clock: 100 number poems. Prague: Twisted Spoon, 2025. From the publisher’s website: “Blurring the distinction between “counting” and “recounting,” his “recitations” imaginatively translate arithmetic vocabulary into the mundane, the existential, or the cosmic, such as a history of the universe narrated as a solar year, from the Big Bang on January 1 to the moon landing in the last seconds of New Year’s Eve. Rühm’s images and texts unleash the sensual qualities of numerals to subvert our digit-filled environment with its pervasive intensification of seamless control.” The Folded Clock involves text, musical scores, and images (including at least one photograph), all, apparently, by the Austrian Rühm. Translated from the 2023 German original by Alexander Booth.
Dr. Ranganatha Sitaram. The Passing Spell: Life’s Kaleidoscope of Photo-Poems. Self-published, 2025. Dr. Sitaram is scientific director of brain imaging and more at St. Jude’s Research Hospital. The Passing Spell is “is an offering of photographs and poems from my life and travels in different parts of the world.”
Jeet Thayil. The Elsewhereans. Harper Collins India, 2025. From the publisher’s website: “From the backwaters of Kerala to the streets of Bombay, Hong Kong, Paris and beyond, Thayil maps the restless lives of those shaped by separation – both the ones who leave and the ones left behind. A hypnotic meditation on migration, loss, and the fragile threads of identity from one of the most brilliant voices in contemporary literature, The Elsewhereans is a novel of retrieval and reinvention—an elegy for vanished worlds, and a reckoning with the histories we inherit.” One reviewer described it as “a genre-defying novel that melds fiction, travelogue, memoir, a ghost story, a family saga, photographs and much else into a tale that unfolds across continents and decades.”
Gabriele Tinti & Roger Ballen. Hungry Ghosts. Eris, 2025. A collaboration between the Italian poet Tinti and the South African photographer Ballen. According to Amazon: Hungry Ghosts draws “inspiration from the Petavatthu verses of the Buddhist tradition,” and is an “evocation of the disturbing visions and the yearnings for a world beyond that have fed both ancient and modern understandings of the afterlife.”
R.L. Edmondson Vance. The Goddess Fortune: To Proper Is To Die. Self-published, 2025. From Amazon: “I am visual artist who uses a variety of media to explore feminist themes and the self. My approach to both art and poetry is the same; collage. I find images or words I am innately attracted to, cut them out, arranging and rearranging until I find the perfect picture. I am heavily influenced by the found object; discarded magazines, the sky in a piece of junk mail, the still frame of a paused movie, the shape of a scrap of paper, any likeness or shape that calls to me. I consider the images of prehistoric goddess figurines, paramount and central to my own art, as a found object; Something someone was compelled to create that was lost or discarded, then found again. My poems are inspired by the found word; fortune cookies, passing billboards, my teenage diaries, made up and mis-heard songs, overheard conversations, grocery lists, and all other manner of words heard or seen in serendipitous encounters. I use collage to create a sacred space for these images and words, ancient and new. I feed myself found words and images; digesting, reconstructing, honoring form and phrase, creating a sacred place for each, and then gluing every one down in its rightful place.” Her collages frequently use bits and pieces of photographs.
Anne Waldman. Mesopotopia. Penguin, 2025. From the publisher’s website: “Mesopotopia explores the vast sweep of our accelerating, precipitous world. From the cradle to the grave, from the mysterious poetic origins of Mesopotamia to our own dystopias of the twenty-first century.” The book reportedly has about a dozen photographs scattered throughout.
Bryan Washington. Palaver. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025. Washington’s novel is about a Jamaican mother and her gay son who is working as an English tutor in Tokyo, as they attempt to find reconciliation. It opens with three full-page b&w photographs of Tokyo and has additional such photographs between each section. The photographs are by the author.
Myriam Watthe-Delmotte. Indemne: Où va Moby-Dick? Actes Sud, 2025. A reader says: “A book which imagines an original edition of the white whale changing hands and traveling across time. Narrated by Ishmael, strangely immortal, shipwreck survivor, the novel follows the fate of the book from the hands of its author to modern times. It’s not about engaging with Melville’s text per se, as wondering about the effect a book may have on a life. It includes some color images (reproductions of paintings) as well as photographs.”
Since 2020, I have kept a brief running commentary on every book I have read in an annual Reading Log, and you can find my annotated comments on the nearly 100 books from 2025, along with all the previous years under the pull-down menu Old Reading Logs at the top of this page.
So here are my notable books from this year’s reading, alphabetically by author.
T.J. Clark. Heaven on Earth: Painting and the Life to Come. Thames & Hudson, 2018. Clark’s 2006 book The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing, in which he writes about his experience of looking at two paintings by Poussin almost daily over the course of about six months while on a fellowship at the Getty Museum, is a book I have read multiple times. He is a master at close looking and big ideas. What I like so much about Clark is that his writing always foregrounds his struggle to deal with the non-verbal through words. As Clark writes in his Introduction here, “Painting does not have anything to say.” How do we best speak about what we see with our eyes? Heaven on Earth includes essays on paintings by Giotto, Bruegel, Poussin, Veronese, and Picasso.
Don DeLillo. Libra. Library. Penguin, 1988. DeLillo has been writing about the American outlier for much of his career—the loners, kooks, paranoids, billionaires, and geniuses who seem to thrive in our death-cult nation—and he gets everything just right in this one, in my opinion. Lee Harvey Oswald, born under the sign of Libra, is perhaps the epitome of these loners—aggrieved, paranoid, cocky, ambitious, susceptible. This is DeLillo’s alternative history of the Kennedy assassination. But it’s also a multi-leveled novel about language—about the acronyms, cryptograms, and lingo of the CIA; the language of revolution, Communism, Marxism, and Trotsky; the brutal language of the Marine brig; the dishonest language of US government propaganda abroad; of Lee learning Russian and his Russian wife learning English. “After Oswald, men in America are no longer required to lead lives of quiet desperation.” They can just go buy a rifle and shoot somebody famous.
Richard Flanagan. Question 7. NY: Knopf, 2024. Many of us, I suspect, have wondered how the course of our lives might have been radically altered were it not for some very minor, perhaps accidental, event. Richard Flanagan has an example that takes the cake. Two people meet for a second time in a bookstore and kiss—the married and famous H.G. Wells and the as-yet unknown writer Rebecca West. According to Flanagan, this kiss will lead to Wells writing a book that will provide the inspiration for the physicist Leo Szilard to realize that nuclear fission holds the secret to the controlled chain reaction necessary to create an atomic bomb. And dropping the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ironically, saved Flanagan’s father from certain death in a Japanese slave camp, so that he, Richard, could eventually be born. In this digressive memoir/essay, Flanagan delves into family memories, the tragic devastation that British colonists brought upon the original Tasmanian peoples and their lands, and the history of the atomic bomb. It’s an utterly engaging piece of writing and a terrible indictment of humanity (or at least most of us).
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism. Oxford University Press, 1988. This wise, now classic book traces the attempts of Black writers to fashion a voice that truly captures the Black experience and Black vernacular, starting with slave narratives and ending with several key novels of the twentieth century, notably, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. Gates manages to provide solid scholarship with a sense of contagious excitement at what lies within the books he has chosen. I immediately read Zora Neale Hurston and reread parts of Ishmael Reed with new eyes.
Michael Gorra. The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War. Liveright, 2020. Michael Gorra is a very thoughtful close reader and an equally engaging writer. Here, he takes a number of William Faulkner’s novels and carefully examines them for what they say about Faulkner’s attitudes toward the Civil War, America’s unending racism problem, reconstruction, Jim Crow, and Black life in the South. As Gorra sees it, Faulkner came to believe that the defeat in the Civil War bequeathed the South a Lost Cause—a forever dream of a two-tiered society and White paradise that can one day be recovered. Too often he agreed with his fellow Whites’ hazy, wishful nostalgia for a different outcome to the Civil War. Gorra provides enough biography and history to make a very wise book about both Faulkner and America. The saddest word? “Was.” What once was (even if imaginary), can once be again. Or so people believe.
Susan Howe. Penitential Cries. New Directions, 2025. In the long title poem, the poet admits that it is “hard to make out the numbers” on the watch strapped to “a widow pariah’s thin arm.” The seemingly autobiographical poem is about aging and healthcare and death and includes numerous uncited, tantalizing quotations as the poet thinks about the poets and poetry of the past. The other major poem is “Sterling Park in the Dark,” which consists of fifty pages of her “woven” poems, which are made from parts of phrases, words, and individual letters woven together architectonically, reminding us how suggestive written language can be even when we cannot glimpse the context or the connection of the words on view.
Zora Neale Hurston. Their Eyes Were Watching God. 1937. Hurston’s novel of Janine, her three lovers/husbands, and their time in 1930s Jim Crow Florida is justifiably praised as brilliant. The writing is split between first-person and third, between Hurston’s version of Black speech when Janine is the narrator and more the straightforward prose of the omniscient narrator. The novel is also split between the perspectives of women and men and between Black and white worlds. Hurston’s message is that if one is forced to continually flip between two worlds, the place to thrive is in between. There seems to be at least one sentence on every page that can drop you dead with admiration. Hurston’s lengthy description of folks fleeing a hurricane rushing across the Everglades is simply astonishing. It was helpful to read this after finishing Henry Louis Gates’ book above.
Javier Marías. Tomás Nevinson. Knopf, 2023. The great Spaniard’s final novel is narrated by Nevinson, a Spaniard who has retired after serving more than two decades as a spy for England. But, in classic spy novel form, he is brought back for one last job, to decide which of three women living in a provincial Spanish city is the mastermind fundraiser behind several atrocious terrorist attacks. While on assignment in the aforesaid city, Nevinson realizes that he might be over the hill and have no more taste for the game, and he spends much of the novel in thought rather than in action. Marías uses Tomás Nevinson as a platform to write about the kind of topics that ran through all of his books, issues like trust, justice versus vengeance, loyalty, responsibility, democracy, and terrorism. Here he writes more freely and at greater length than in any of his other novels about ETA, the terrorist wing of the Basque Separatist organization. Tomás Nevinson is a thinking-person’s spy novel, translated from the 2021 Spanish original by Margaret Jull Costa. I wrote more about the novel here. It includes one photograph of the bloody aftermath of a terrorist bombing that is accompanied by a fascinating example of ekphrastic writing (which I wrote about here). This was a powerful book to end a great writing career.
Martha A. Sandweiss. The Girl in the Middle: A Recovered History of the American West. Princeton University Press, 2025. Sandweiss takes a single photograph by Alexander Gardner, the great photographer of the Civil War and the West, and tells a series of sharply detailed stories about the people in the picture. The photograph was made in the spring of 1868 at Fort Laramie, as members of a U.S. Peace Commission met with the leaders of multiple tribes, while thousands of their followers camped nearby. Six men, including famed Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman, stood in a line on the prairie, with an unnamed Native girl in the middle, facing the camera. Sandweiss provides deeply researched mini-biographies of several of the men, and she miraculously managed to recover the identity of the girl in the middle and tell the story of her extended family. The book shoves aside the myths of the West and of American history and reminds us of the real way the West was won—through violence and deceit. Sandweiss also demonstrates that photographs, used correctly, can better aid historical research. A phenomenally fascinating book.
Richard Siken. I Do Know Something. Copper Canyon Press, 2025. In Richard Siken’s astonishing new book of poems, I Do Know Something, the reader doesn’t stand a chance. The poems are written in tight rectangular text blocks that afford the reader no way in or out between the first word and the last. No enjambments to ponder, just Siken’s captivating, singular voice. Frequently, his poems will start out with a simple declarative sentence. “When I was ten, I had an imaginary friend.” Then he will meander, get lost, get lost again, and then suddenly, with a single line or two, snap the entire poem in place like a taut string, and it will become clear that every bit of meandering had a clear purpose: “By the time I was eleven, I stopped being sad and started being afraid.” Siken had a terrible stroke some years ago, and this book is his return, his struggle to regain language and the use of his body, and the need to rebuild his memory all over again, beginning with his family. Do not pass Go, do not collect $200, but buy this book immediately.
Sebastian Smee. Paris in Ruins: Love, War, and the Birth of Impressionism. NY: Norton, 2024. How could I not love a book about the Impressionists and the Paris Commune? Smee synthesizes a vast amount of material about the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, the ensuing Paris Commune, and a number of the Impressionist painters into a very readable history that focuses on painting in Paris in the 1860s and 1870s (more or less). Smee argues—and he’s not the first person to do so—that Impressionism grew directly out of the tragic years of 1870-72, when France lost a war that it started with Prussia, and then had to fight a protracted civil war in the streets of Paris with several hundred thousand of its own citizens dying as a result. The new paintings of the Impressionists “offered respite not only from the traumas of recent events and the scars still marking Paris itself but more generally from the stress and insecurity of living at the beginning of the modern age.” His main subjects are Berthe Morisot, Édouard Manet, and Edgar Degas. Very well done.
John Trefry. Plats. Inside the Castle, 2015. Plats will take you on a ride like no other book. If the front cover didn’t explicitly say that Plats was “A Novel,” one might be hard pressed to say what type of writing it really is. I’m half tempted to call it an abstract novel (if there is such a thing), except that it has a city (Los Angeles) and there are pronouns (but no characters, as far as I can tell). What Plats does do is use language in extraordinary ways to help the reader to conjure up images and situations that can only be constructed in the mind, to let the reader visualize the impossible. Yes,it’s one of those books where the reader does half of the work, but this is a bravura performance of language and pure imagination. Plats might be something you read just for the pleasure of reading Plats. I wrote more about the book here.
]]>
“Your parish all sinful and superstitious and muttery.”
Before Samantha Harvey wrote Orbital, her 2024 Booker-prize-winning novel about one day in the life of six astronauts circling the Earth in a space station, she improbably wrote The Western Wind (2018), which takes place across four days in an isolated English village at the end of the fifteenth century. The village’s biggest landowner has gone missing, possibly drowned in the river, and the citizenry is very concerned. If Thomas Newman committed suicide, “his house, his animals, his money, everything” would revert to the crown and the future of Oakham as an independent village would be in doubt. John Reve, the village priest and the book’s narrator, has assigned himself the task of calming everyone and getting to the bottom of matters, a task made more difficult when the region’s dean (or sheriff) arrives. The Archbishop wants him to investigate the death and report back quickly. He insists that Reve identify a murderer by Shrove Tuesday. By then, nearly a half dozen people will come to Reve and confess to murdering Newman for various reasons.
A village of scrags and outcasts. Oakham: Beastville, Pigtown, Nobridge. The village that came to no good; the only village for tens of miles that doesn’t trade wool, doesn’t make cloth, doesn’t have the skill to build a bridge.
The structural twist in The Western Wind is that we read the four days in reverse order. Chronologically speaking, the story begins on page 235 and ends on page 83, Shrove Tuesday, 1491. We are used to the idea that mysteries are solved at the end. But The Western Wind is a reminder that mysteries are usually unraveled as a result of knowledge and perceptions gained along the way. By playing out the four days in reverse, the truths behind key details that appear in the later days are only revealed through actions and conversations that happen in earlier days. Reve, as a priest, becomes a detective who doesn’t even have to leave his office to be given a constant stream of rumors and clues. The villagers come to him to confess what they have seen, heard, and done. But as each day unfolds, we also begin to learn that John Reve can be a very unreliable narrator. Is it because he has something to hide, or because he doesn’t know himself very well, or because he can’t be honest with himself? As Reve deals with his stricken parish and jousts with the dean, he tries his best to calm everyone down with his Shrove Monday sermon. He flourishes a common priest’s manual in his hand and tells his parishioners, “I have here a treatise, ‘On the Lord’s Prudent and Timely Use of the Wind’.”
It divulges how the wind can be sent by the Lord not to punish, but to save us from corrupted vapours and reward us for our good work. Think how the locust plague came in on an easterly wind and, at God’s fitful command, was blown out on a westerly—for the wind is God’s breath, and through it he speaks to us.
Needless to say, the western wind never comes.
In The Western Wind, Harvey permits her characters to take more time than she allowed those in Orbital to debate the big issues that seem to obsess her—things like God, religion, mankind’s purpose on Earth. In one flashback that takes place in the confessional, Reve and Thomas Newman, the man who disappeared, debate for several engrossing pages whether God wants us to appreciate the beauty of the world in which we live. Newman had just made a religious pilgrimage to Rome, and he lists and describes for several paragraphs the many sublime and exotic things he saw and experienced along the way—spices from China and the Red Sea, Venetian glass, elephant tusks, gems from India. “Did I know that music,” Newman said, “being of the air, has a perfect resonance with the air in the ear and the air in the human spirit—that music might therefore bring us direct to the Lord and heal us?” Reve, who believes that this world is nothing but a distraction and an endless series of temptations, sits in his confessional and thinks that Newman’s “words coming through the grille were moths disintegrating.” Newman finally goes too far and informs Reve that there are actually multiple translations of the Bible to be found out there in the world beyond Oakham. Reve sputters and abruptly ends the session before Newman can confess anything.
Orbital read more like non-fiction than fiction and thus seemed a strange choice to me for the Booker Prize for the best novel of 2024. The Western Wind, on the other hand, is eminently engaging as both an excellent mystery and a solid work of historical fiction. Harvey dramatically conveys a sense of an isolated English village where (to our eyes) the villagers’ religious beliefs blur with superstition and outright ignorance. But, the masterfully human John Reve is great reason to read the book. He’s an artful mixture of ambition, self-doubt, altruism, and zealotry. Throughout, he is tempted by a woman named Sarah, who regularly will come to him and “sit and face me bare-fronted as if it were a game, while my breath rucked at the back of my mouth and my hands splayed at my thighs.” Finally, one day she completely strips before him. “Two years I’d been in love with her, two years, and those bruising and thankless, which no doubt they were supposed to be. The Lord doesn’t set us easy tests and temptations.”
]]>
“A small thing is a big thing seen from afar, a big thing is a small thing seen up close.”
I’ve taken this quote from Samantha Harvey’s 2018 novel The Western Wind, but it feels more apt to her recent 2024 Booker Prize-winning novel Orbital, about a single day in the life of six astronauts orbiting in a space station 250 miles above Earth. I was immediately drawn in by the hints of poetry, mythology, and science that are blended in Orbital‘s first paragraph.
Rotating about the earth in their spacecraft they are so together, and so alone, that even their thoughts, their internal mythologies, at times convene. Sometimes they dream the same dreams—of fractals and blue spheres and familiar faces engulfed in dark, and of the bright energetic black of space that slams their senses. Raw space is a panther, feral and primal; they dream it stalking through their quarters.
The book’s focus rotates quickly from astronaut to astronaut, just as the space station rotates quickly around the earth. They see sixteen Earth sunrises and sixteen Earth sunsets for every one of their days. Orbital really feels like an ode to the Earth—or, perhaps, to the universe. Collectively, the six astronauts (four men and two women) spend much of the book looking out of the station’s windows, giving us pages of exceptional prose descriptions of what they see. The extent of these compelling visual reports of the Earth’s geography and its weather patterns (including an immense typhoon) and of the Moon and the stars makes sections of Orbital feel like a work of non-fiction nature writing. Similarly, the detailed accounts of the aging space station, the training and equipment of astronauts, the physiology of living for months in space, and the scientific experiments being conducted give portions of Orbital the flavor of color-filled, animated non-fiction science writing.
In the new morning of today’s fourth earth orbit the Saharan dust sweeps to the sea in hundred-mile ribbons. Hazy pale green shimmering sea, hazy tangerine land. This is Africa chiming with light. You can almost hear it, this light, from inside the craft. Gran Canaria’s steep radial gorges pile the island up like a sandcastle hastily built, and when the Atlas Mountains announce the end of the desert, clouds appear in the shape of a shark whose tail flips at the southern coast of Spain. . .
Harvey’s description of the Northern lights is one of the more bravura bits of writing in the book. Here is only a quarter of her paragraph: “The light gains edges and limbs; folds and opens. Strains against the inside of the atmosphere, writhes and flexes. Sends up plumes. Fluoresces and brightens. Detonates then in towers of light. Erupts clean through the atmosphere and puts up towers two hundred miles high. . . Remember this, each of them thinks. Remember this.”
After six months in space they will, in technical terms, have aged 0.007 seconds less than someone on earth. . . They know that the vision can weaken and the bones deteriorate. Even with so much exercise still the muscles will atrophy. The blood will clot and the brain will shift its fluid. The spine lengthens, the T cells struggle to reproduce, kidney stones form.
The only part of Orbital that really reads like fiction has to do with the characters. We learn a little about the lives of the six astronauts (two are technically Russian cosmonauts), who are each given an inch of depth. Anton, Roman, Shaun, Nell, Chie, and Pietro—two Russian, and one each American, English, Japanese, and Italian. Chie’s mother has died and she will not make it to the funeral. Roman is always thinking about his son in Moscow. Pietro has warned a friend who lives on an island in the Philippines that his family is in grave danger from the onrushing typhoon. Anton is secretly worried about a lump that recently appeared in his neck and his loveless marriage. Nell keeps want to challenge Shaun, not understanding how someone who believes in a creationist God can also be an astronaut.
The intellectual heft of Orbital comes largely in the form of brief forays, usually by the omniscient narrator, into topics that ease the reader into philosophical or political territory for a page or two. Occasionally the astronauts will discuss something that feels heavy momentarily—like the Challenger space shuttle disaster in 1986—but these episodes tend to be very brief.
As we saw in the opening paragraph quoted earlier, the six astronauts are introduced as a kind of collective unit and, at times, they seem to be providing a collective vision of Earth from on high. Harvey’s narrator frequently uses “they” and other plural pronouns and speaks in collective statements on behalf of all six. The most important of these moments comes halfway through the book. During the first part of any astronaut’s tour of duty on the space station, we are told, Earth will look to them like a planet without borders and a place where “a sense of friendliness and peace prevails.” But “before long, for all of them, a desire takes hold. It’s the desire—no, the need (fueled by fervour)—to protect this huge yet tiny earth.” As they each find themselves frustrated by the daily news from home and their own powerlessness, “one day something shifts. One day they look at the earth and they see the truth.” And what they see is “the politics of want.” The Earth, which they previously thought was so beautiful and benign before, they now see has been completely “sculpted and shaped” by politics.
Every retreating or retreated or disintegrated glacier, every granite shoulder of every mountain laid newly bare by snow that has never before melted, every scorched and blazing forest or bush, every shrinking ice sheet, every burning oil spill . . . the expanding green-blue geometries of evaporation ponds where lithium is mined from the brine, or Tunisian salt flats in cloisonné pink . . . The hand of politics is so visible from their vantage point that they don’t know how they could have missed it at first.
Harvey tucks one small puzzle into Orbital. Shaun, the American astronaut, keeps a postcard on board of the famous painting Las Meninas (1656) by Diego Velázquez that his wife mailed to him many years ago. On the back, she had written a short message that included several questions which he perpetually puzzles over. What is the subject of the painting? Who is looking at whom? In a casual conversation with Pietro, the Italian astronaut, Shaun suddenly sees the painting in a way that he had never seen it before and he finally has answers to those questions.
Orbital is full of lyrical writing on every one of its 207 pages, with hints of deeper things spread across the pages like breadcrumbs.
About the two covers: Aino-Maija Metsola, who designed the original 2024 British edition on the left for Vintage Books, also designed the covers for the Virginia Woolf series for Vintage Books about ten years ago. Kelly Winton designed the US edition on the right for Atlantic Monthly Press.
Forthcoming: a post on Harvey’s 2018 novel The Western Wind.
]]>
I’ve recently read two worthy novels that involved searching for a family member during a pandemic, both published by intriguing small indie presses (see below).
In Caleb Klaces’ Mr. Outside, which takes place during the COVID pandemic (although that barely comes into play), the unnamed narrator arrives at the home of his father, Thomas, to help him move into a care home. But Thomas, a poet and former priest who was fired for posing naked in photographs inside his own church, is nowhere to be found. His mind is failing and as the son explores his father’s house he finds only garbage, disorder, and other sights that confirm his father’s failing mental state. Along with a mysterious skirt.
Eventually, Thomas is found and father and son spend a weekend together grappling with memories, discoveries, fears, and regrets. Everything the son sees around him and nearly everything he touches seems disgusting. How could his father live like this? Apparently, he learns, Thomas just likes to wear a dress now and then. He writes “torrents” of complaining letters—to the supermarket, the local leisure center, Virgin Trains, English Heritage, the library, and so on. And he has repeatedly refused to trim the overgrown tree in the front yard. The painful discoveries feel endless and the son responds by going into panic mode. But eventually, he learns that by accepting Thomas as he really is will reduce the panic level. Over the weekend, many childhood memories come flooding back to him, and he finds he must reevaluate much of his childhood. His father must do some readjusting, as well. It’s a novel about two people negotiating a major life change between themselves, but also two people negotiating with their own pasts alone.
Klaces’ writing is appropriately disorienting, as befits a novel about senility and panic. It’s also acutely observant and tender. At one point in the book the son attempts to get his father to fill out the short biography required by the care center, and he begins by writing that Thomas was born in Wales.
“I was born inside a volcano,” he said, indicating with his finger that I was to replace my text with this new line.
“This is serious, Dad. They need to know who you are.”
“That is who I am. ‘I was born inside a volcano.’ Write that down on the piece of paper.”
I crossed out the fact that he was born in Wales. I wrote his version.
“Did you write it?”
“I was born inside a volcano.”
“Perfect. Now write, ‘As school I was captain of the rugby team. There wasn’t much competition for the position, given that I was the only boy with three arms.'”
. . .
He stared at the ceiling and conducted his silent orchestra. He delivered the next improbable chapter. I wrote down what he said. He was a dragonfly and he was a sparrow. He was a seal and he was a rat. He was middle-aged, a baby, and finally old.
Included in Mr. Outside are a dozen or so small photographs (snapshots, really). The blurb on the back of the book tells us that the book is based on the life of the author’s own father, so I think we can assume these might be his own photographs. The images don’t reproduce very well in halftone and some of them are a bit murky. But perhaps that’s the point.
Ω
Amid of a mass exodus northward fleeing the mysterious red sky, Flo is seeing fewer people every day and most of them are sick. Rebecca Grandsen’s novella Figures Crossing the Field Towards the Group is subtitled A Pilgrimage: An England in Delirium, and it follows Flo as she both runs for her life and searches for her brother through a nightmarish, dystopian English landscape. She comes across very strange individuals and small groups of people who have been driven mad or who have banded together to prepare for the apparent coming mass extinction in their own mysterious way. For example, there is the Honey Ghost, the Tent Man, the man who lusts, and the Illuminated Man. Flo travels through “somnambulant woods,” down roads that have “gone wild,” through a haze of golden grasses and spores, across fields that crunch beneath her feet, through “sick towns,” and finally to some white chalk cliffs.
The narration is written entirely in words of one syllable, except when characters speak. This forces compound and multi-syllabic words to be forced apart. Grandsen makes deliberately odd and antiquated word choices, and trims away strictly unnecessary words—all to slow the reader down and give her narrative the sense that it has somehow been removed from a specific time.
On some more and the crowd thins, lone bods stand in gloom, they do not know who they are, or ere, and there is no hope for them. Tween these lost peeps, Flo spies the back of rows of the cross, shapes caught in the dark glow of the camp torch at her rear now. Cross and cross and cross, all ace a dark world. Flo can not see what is out there. The dark is too much, the light takes the sight of it down. But the light hits each wood cross. Cru ci fix. There is bulk on each cross, on the side that turns to the sea, that Flo can not see yet.
This is a poet’s novel, a story of dystopian beauty and unspeakable brutality. Flo deals with sexual assault and, from a distance, witnesses human sacrifice, crucifixions, and cannibalism. “Rust cars sit, some burnt out, bon fi res up front, she sees stakes, and shakes her head. They did it. They did. They fell back on myth and made the worst of things bo il.” But perhaps because the possibility of mass extinction seems so real in the book, much of the writing focuses on the strange beauty of nature.
Bluff twines in need round a sun haze morn, birds nest their down with kind beaks, ruff soft breast on fair green boughs, lace wings step on flut green leaf, grass hops tend a verge at peace. Flo skates the back road through miles at rest in light, on her skin is the touch of no god, just the sol rise, just the room to float the world. Straw limbs form, sun lap field on for good, chaff rags, dolls in twist and knot born. Weed chain worn as a lop may queen crown, straw and gold and rust buds tug snug in fine hairs. A slow beast laps at a road side pot hole, cool drink on its tongue, puff tawn fur on its haut. Beasts nudge through field brush with ease and scamp with kicks.
Both novels are emotionally tough to read at times. And they should be.
Caleb Klaces. Mr. Outside. London: Prototype, 2025. Prototype is the London-based publisher of Kate Zambreno, Derek Jarman, Chloe Aridjis, Danielle Dutton, Bhanu Kapil, Stephen Watts, Iain Sinclair, and many other writers worth reading.
Rebecca Grandsen. Figures Crossing the Field Towards the Group. London: Tangerine Press, 2025. “Tangerine Press has been publishing misfits, mavericks and misanthropes since 2006,” including William S. Burroughs, Iain Sinclair, Will Self, and R. Crumb, just to pick a few.
]]>
In the last book he wrote before his death, Tomás Nevinson, Javier Marías reproduced a single photograph, an image credited on the copyright page to the Spanish photojournalist Pere Tordera. Marías used 297 words to describe what he saw in the photograph. He has used ekphrasis in a similar manner in several earlier books, describing in words what we can see in a photograph on the same page or a nearby page with our own eyes. What’s he doing in this description?
In this book, Nevinson is a Spaniard who thought he had retired from a career spying for England and who had returned to his position at an embassy office in Madrid. But then he is asked by his old handler to do one last job: ferret out which of three women now living in a provincial Spanish town was the fundraising mastermind behind several bloody terrorist attacks that occurred more than a decade before. For a long time, Nevinson wants to say ‘No.” He’s been away from his wife too long, he feels estranged from his children, and he is worried that he is rusty. His handler tries to convince him that this terrorist must be identified and must pay for the deaths and injuries she helped to cause in two horrific bombings in Barcelona and Zaragoza, Spain in 1987. The mention of these two events causes Nevinson to recall a photograph he saw in the press at that time. “It was just one of those images you never forget.” Marías then proceeds to have Nevinson describe and think about the photograph for a full page and a half.
At the heart of Nevinson’s recollection of the photograph is his 297-word description of what it depicts. This description occurs on the page prior to the reproduction, so we read his verbal version first.
Against a backdrop of desolation and destruction, the ground was strewn with rubble and, hanging over it all, a malignant cloud of smoke, a policeman, his tie visible beneath his uniform, and his face all bloodied, is running towards the camera carrying in his arms a little seven- or eight-year-old girl whose face is a picture of pain, pure pain. In the background – it was one of those black-and-white photographs you can’t take your eyes off of – you could see a couple, the husband with his arms around his wife, and the wife with one hand on a buggy in which her baby is still sitting, the child is, at most, a year old, and given his or her age, would forget everything it was now hearing and seeing. Elsewhere, you can see a father (I assume he’s the father) putting his arms out to another child of four or five, and beside him a taller girl, who appears to be staunchly coping on her own. What I remember most clearly, though, is the expression of the face of the young policeman, or was he perhaps a fireman, carrying the little girl. Although much of his face was covered in blood, so that you really couldn’t make out his features (the blood could have been his own or someone else’s, like the blood on the girl’s arm), his expression was a mixture of determination and profound pity, perhaps there was also an element of postponed rage and another of sheer incredulity at what he was witnessing. Determination to save the injured child he wasn’t even looking at, instead staring straight ahead, his gaze perhaps fixed straight on the hospital that he needs to reach as soon as possible. And profound pity for many possible reasons.
The very fact that this photograph is reproduced in Tomás Nevinson requires some slippage between the book’s narrator and its author. Tomás Nevinson is only remembering an image he saw ten years ago. (It’s a remarkably accurate memory, but then Nevinson has spent more than two decades risking his life on his ability to see and remember details.) It was Javier Marías who decided to have this photograph reproduced in the book so that readers could see it for themselves. I think this should prompt us to be more than a little curious about his text concerning the photograph. One of the things that Nevinson is doing in his description of the photograph quoted above is focusing our eyes on where he wants us to look. But I think Marías is intervening here, as well. Presumably, Marías saw the photograph in a somewhat better version and the image would have been clearer for him. As a result, he would have been aware that he needed to prepare the reader to pay attention to something that is nearly lost among the half-tone dots of the mediocre reproduction that his book would produce. I definitely think that is why he wanted to make sure the reader noticed that the young girl in the man’s arms has lost not only one of her sneakers but part of her left foot as well.
It might seem odd that Nevinson spends only sixteen words on the site of the bombing or on any other evidence of the terrorists’ bomb, such as the blown out car windows. If this photograph wasn’t reproduced in the book, the only thing we would know about it other than the commentary on the people in the forefront is this: “The ground was strewn with rubble and, hanging over it all, a malignant cloud of smoke.” Nevinson says absolutely nothing about a street that is lined with automobiles and buildings. Then again, we have to keep in mind the reason that Nevinson has recalled this image of a newspaper or magazine photograph from so long ago. He’s in the middle of making a very human equation. What would it take for him to go out and try to bring a terrorist to justice one more time? Apparently, property damage doesn’t enter into the equation for Nevinson, he’s only sensitive to the human cost of terrorism. Does visualizing the pained face and damaged foot of a young girl tip the scales for him? This is why Nevinson is only focusing on the human cost of the terrorist bombing that is visible in the photograph.
Nevinson’s 297-word description is embedded within a longer discussion of the photograph that takes place in his head because the photograph has led him to recall both the public horror and the political arguments that took place when ETA, the terrorist wing of the Basque Separatist Party, began bombing locations that involved children victims. As he sits and debates his own future with his handler, this factor weighs on Nevinson, but he still doesn’t make the decision to accept the job for another forty pages.
Ω
Marías/Nevinson uses nearly half of the 297-word description of the photograph to tell us about the expressions on the faces of the man and the girl in the foreground. The girl’s face, the reader is told, is “a picture of pain, pure pain.” Several phrases are used to explain what should be seen on the face of her rescuer: “a mixture of determination and profound pity” . . . “an element of postponed rage and another of sheer incredulity” . . . “Determination” . . . and, once again, “profound pity for many possible reasons.” Furthermore, the reader is told that that “his gaze [is] perhaps fixed straight on the hospital that he needs to reach as soon as possible.”
The idea that we can accurately read the emotions on other people’s faces is as old as time, but it first achieved a real scientific stamp of approval in 1872 when Charles Darwin published The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, illustrated with numerous photographs intended to show what certain emotions looked like on a variety of faces. Most of the photographs used in the book were made by the French neurologist Guillaume Duchenne de Boulogne, who, along with his colleague, Jean-Martin Charcot, conducted experiments on patients at Paris’ Salpêtrière, a university hospital. At least two decades before he published On the Origin of Species in 1859, Darwin had begun wondering whether the psychological aspects of life were hereditary. After considerable research and consultation with psychiatrists on the subject, he became convinced that there were some core expressions that were universal among all peoples and certain animals.
As a fiction writer, Marías can make up whatever story he wishes about the events that take place within a photograph. But when he lets the reader compare the photograph to his words, he is giving us the ability to compare his ekphrastic version with what we see. I happen to be of the school that believes that it’s not always possible to accurately judge what the expressions seen on the faces in photographs are “telling” us. I’ll let you be the judge if the face of the man in the photograph represents determination, pity, rage, and incredulity.
Javier Marías’ Tomás Nevinson. Knopf, 2023. See my earlier post on this novel.
]]>“Perhaps. You never know.” With these four words, Javier Marías (1951-2022) ended his remarkable literary career and fifteenth novel, Tomás Nevinson. These four words also aptly characterize the level of heightened uncertainty in which he kept his readers for many of the several thousand pages of his novels, throughout all of the lengthy, winding sentences in which he often said something one way, then said it another way, then found yet a third way to suggest the very same thing, and, more often than not, found a fourth variant, leaving the reader agasp at his gift of language. And, as his narrators and characters talked themselves through situations and options, weighing the pros and cons, they usually found themselves momentarily capable of convincing themselves of any possibility.
When you feel forced to do something, the solution is to convince yourself not only that you have to do it, but that it’s the best possible option. You can always find a reason for everything, or two or three or more, there’s nothing easier than coming up with reasons and thus feeling, quite impartially of course, that you have right on your side.
That is certainly the case with Tomás Nevinson. The plot is such that I can’t reveal much without spoiling the book, and I don’t want to let anything get in the way of your reading this book. These could be some of the most luxuriant 635 pages in your near future. Tomás Nevinson is a finely tuned, thinking person’s spy novel, with several ingenious plot twists. Nevinson, a Spaniard who had thought he was retired from a career spying for England and who had returned to his position at an embassy office in Madrid, is called back to do one last field job: ferret out which of three women in a provincial Spanish town was the fundraising mastermind behind several bloody terrorist attacks that occurred more than a decade before. Following a well-worn formula in spy fiction, Marías’ spy immediately regrets his decision and wonders if he is over the hill.
I had grown rusty, my faculties and my resolve had waned, perhaps I had grown lazy. I no longer believed in the defence of the Realm, in the purity of democracies or of the Crown, nor in the aseptic nature of the State or indeed in anything . . . I wasn’t even sure I wanted to punish crimes already committed. What was the point, what did it solve, since they could not be undone?
In fact, Nevinson had only recently returned from being away for a remarkable twelve years on secret assignments, “not just a continuous absence but a continuous silence too.” During that time, he had literally been declared dead and his wife, Berta Isla, technically became a widow. (Marías’ prior novel, Berta Isla, looked at the marriage and absences from her point of view.) Now, after all the times he has been ordered away on missions over a career of some twenty-five years, into other countries, with fake identities, and into total silence, Nevinson and his wife live in separate but nearby apartments.
As Nevinson becomes more aware of being manipulated into this decision by his handler, he begins to rethink the legitimacy, even the morality, of his own role, as well as his former loyalty to his adopted country England. He looks askance at his own spy agency; in fact, he is no longer sure if he works for MI5 or MI6. “How closely,” he thinks, “our [spy] organizations resemble mafias.” Nevinson’s growing insecurity gives Marías a forum to let Nevinson ponder all sorts of spy-adjacent topics, like trust, vengeance versus justice, loyalty, responsibility, democracy, terrorists, and state terrorism. Marías also writes more freely and at greater length than in any of his prior novels about ETA, the terrorist wing of the Basque Separatist Movement. But even as Nevinson questions the authority of his own spy organization and the possible legitimacy of his previous assignments, he must also come to terms with the matter of his own complicity, his personal guilt from the actions he had taken as a secret agent of the British government for two and a half decades.
Fifteen years ago, in a post about Fever and Spear, the first volume of his Your Face Tomorrow trilogy, I wrote: “Marías uses the world of spies and spying as a vast, flexible metaphor for literature.” Many of his novels have been about spies or their literary equivalents, translators, people who sit at the cusp between two worlds, moving information from one into another. Partway into Tomás Nevinson I began to wonder if perhaps Marías didn’t sometimes think of himself as a spy on the world around him, a spy who whose duty it was to report back to us what he thought about whatever he saw. It’s a role he never seems to exhaust in his fiction. Here, it takes until page 123 for Nevinson, who narrates his eponymous novel, to finally agree to accept the job that will consume him through the remainder of the book. Until the moment that he reluctantly makes this decision, he thinks at length about his past career, his mixed feelings about his handler, and how his life as a spy (or agent) has affected his marriage and relationship with his children. (In every one of Marías’ novels, the narrators and main characters spend great swaths of time just thinking.)
Ironically, when Nevinson is finally situated in the provincial Spanish city under cover as a schoolteacher named Centurión, he often sees his spy cover as a separate character from himself. During the time he is actively working on the problem of identifying the terrorist, he vacillates between referring to himself as “I” and as “Centurión,” sometimes within the same paragraph. Nevinson seems to need this literary schizophrenia to stay sane as he goes about his final job.
Marías reproduces a single photograph in Tomás Nevinson, an image credited on the copyright page to the photojournalist Pere Tordera that shows the aftermath of a terrorist bombing on a narrow street lined with cars. A policeman “is running towards the camera carrying in his arms a little seven- or eight-year-old girl, one of whose feet appears to have been half blown off, and whose face is a picture of pain, pure pain.”
It has always been easy to think of Marías as a conservative, highly traditional novelist. He’s an erudite writer of intricately plotted novels about highly educated, articulate characters who love to quote Shakespeare, John Milton, John Donne, William Butler Yeats, and other writers of the British and European canon. But with his death we’ve lost a writer we need now—someone humane, compassionate, and deeply moral. Late in Tomás Nevinson, the narrator has occasion to think of one of the important lessons he learned from a former MI5 instructor who taught him that: “We must always remain immune to the five contagions . . . Cruelty is contagious. Hatred is contagious. Faith is contagious. Madness is contagious. Stupidity is contagious.” Marías, always a harsh critic of the reign of Francisco Franco (who “contaminated” Spain), and who kept a wary eye on the compromises of post-Franco Spain, used Tomás Nevinson to offer some worrying opinions about the future of our democracies. “You only have to introduce a little truth into a lie for the lie to seem not just credible, but irrefutable.”
Javier Marías. Tomás Nevinson. Knopf, 2023. Translated from the 2021 Spanish original by Margaret Jull Costa.
]]>
In Shirley Hazzard’s first novel, The Evening of the Holiday (1966), we are told very little about Sophie, the young woman who comes from England to visit her invalid aunt for a short summer vacation. We never even learn Sophie’s last name. Hazzard wants us to remain in the here-and-now because that is where Sophie lives, unconcerned about her past or her future. At an afternoon social event one day, Sophie meets Tancredi, an architect whose wife has just left him, taking their children with him. (We never learn his last name either.) At first, Tancredi is unimpressed with the “archetypal Englishwoman,” who “was nothing special.” She seems unimpressed with him as well, deducing that she was only one year old when he was already in university. And very soon the reader begins to be unimpressed with Tancredi as well, when the word “conquest” creeps into his thinking, as he watches the Englishwoman more closely. “He liked the idea of supremacy and believed, correctly, that women want to be prevailed upon.” That single word “correctly,” slipped between commas by the book’s omniscient narrator, hammers home an unpleasant image of Tancredi.
Nevertheless, he begins to drive her around the countryside to introduce her to the sights, and he finds himself falling for her. She has some strange appeal for him, though she keeps her emotional distance. She eventually warns him she is going to return to England. “You’re a threat to me,” she tells him.
But she stays. “Nothing need be undone; nothing more need happen,” she tells herself. They continue to see each other and he immediately senses she is changing her opinion of him. Then the annual summer holiday happens in the city, celebrating some great battle that took place centuries earlier (the city was defeated). Sophie has decided to stay in the city, in her hotel room, avoiding the events of the festival as much as possible. Tancredi has gone to visit his children for a week. On the main evening of the holiday week, he telephones her. He has begun divorce proceedings. “I have to tell you something. Don’t be horrified. . . I’m in love with you. . . Would you come to Florence with me?” “Yes,” she says. Before we know it, she has moved into Tancredi’s house. It’s one of those sudden, unexplained, change-of-heart reversals that happen in Hazzard’s novels.
For the most part, Hazzard keeps the reader at arm’s length from the daily thoughts and decisions of Sophie and Tancredi. She leaves few, if any, clues to help us decide whether Tancredi has buried his sense of male superiority because of Sophie or why Sophie has finally fallen for Tancredi, or why she ultimately decided to break off the relationship and return to London. Is she really an independent woman or has she mistaken being decisive for true personal autonomy?
The Evening of the Holiday (Knopf) is less than 140 pages long and was originally published in the April 16, 1965, issue of The New Yorker. It contains some of the key ingredients of the three novels that lie in her future, but it reads a bit like a sketch. With less use of free indirect style, it is not as fully fleshed out with the interior thoughts of its main characters as her later novels. But, like all sketches, it leaves more to our imagination.
Ω
How tortuous, these strands of love.
After The Evening of the Holiday, with its simple plot and only two main characters, Shirley Hazzard’s second novel The Bay at Noon (1970) feels almost symphonic by comparison. At its heart it is the story of three couples, but it is also a portrait of a complex city (Naples, Italy), a report on a giant bureaucracy (NATO), and a scathing image of the new postwar military complexes. The writing in The Bay has taken a great leap forward. It is richer, more complex, much more dazzling than that of The Evening. Time, in Hazzard’s second novel, has become fractured. She moves the narrative back and forth across years without warning.
Jenny, the book’s narrator, has come from London shortly after the end of World War II to work at a giant NATO base in Naples, translating documents and doing other clerical tasks (read: women’s work). She is a watchful observer of how the gears of the world operate around her. She wants to be an independent woman. In addition to closely watching all the new people in her life, she often finds herself staring out at the Bay of Naples, which she describes as an “oval mirror.” A view of the Bay is inescapable from practically any vantage point across the city, as is Mount Vesuvius. Vesuvius, which sits at the edge of the Bay across from Naples, has ruined the city more than once, and is a constant reminder throughout the novel of the possibility of imminent disaster.
The Bay is structured around the relationships of three couples, all seen from Jenny’s perspective: there is her own on-again, off-again affair with a divorced Scotsman named Justin; the marriage between her brother Edmund and his wife Norah, which she analyses from a distance; and the ongoing romance between her new best friend in Naples, Gioconda, and Gianni, a film director who is separated from his wife but cannot obtain a divorce because it is prohibited by Italian law.
The novel is also a loving, if gritty portrayal of Naples, a “city of volcanic extravagance where a “sense of catastrophe, impending and actual, heightened the Neapolitan attachment to life.” Hazzard, who lived there for many years, paints a detailed picture of the streets and the people, and a panoramic view of the Bay and its stunning islands, notably Capri. Gianni warns Jenny that Naples will change her. “This will change everything for you,” he tells her. “Naples is a leap. It’s through the looking-glass.”
One way to characterize this novel is to rephrase Tolstoy’s opening sentence from Anna Karenina “All happy couples are alike; each unhappy couple is unhappy in its own way.” In every novel by Hazzard, a key motif is the question: Why are people attracted to each other? What turns that switch on and then, sometimes, off again? Why do some people (but especially women) commit to another despite all the shenanigans, the seemingly ever-present (but mostly male) issues of infidelity, the never-ending misogyny, and all the other potential risks to heartbreak? In Hazzard’s universe, what people call love can be a form of chemistry, a type of personal calculus, or several other excuses that characters give to stay with another person.
What is curious to me is that Hazzard is so brave and clinical at locating the illnesses in male-female relationships that she feels like a feminist. But she does not let any of her three female characters break free in The Bay at Noon. Jenny’s sister is destined to continue with her misguided marriage. After several terrible infractions and a very serious blow-up, Gioconda takes Gianni back for good, knowing he will never reform. And Jenny informs us that she, years after all her Naples era has ended, is back in London and is married to a lawyer. Nevertheless, she has been oddly haunted by Justin, the man she hardly seemed to care about in Naples, but who left the city one day without a word and disappeared. She now admits having searched for him everywhere. But, by accident, she reads in an newspaper article that he is one of several occupants of a small airplane that has disappeared and presumed to have crashed in the Caribbean. She can only think: “Trapped in the events, we must live through them in order to learn the outcome.”
Both of these novels are short and very entertaining, and they let the reader watch a masterful writer taking giant steps forwards toward the style that comes fully into its own with The Transit of Venus (1980), which I wrote about in my previous post.
The Evening of the Holiday. NY: Knopf, 1966.
The Bay at Noon. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1970.
]]>Shirley Hazzard’s novel The Transit of Venus (1980) is a novel I have looked forward to rereading for a long time. It’s brilliantly written, pleasantly quirky, and always keeps the forward momentum flowing. Over four decades she wrote four novels, and all of her major themes are prominent here—putting characters under a microscope, exerting nearly unbearable pressure on love, debating what it takes to have an ethical spine, and trying to move women out from under the thumb of men in both home and the public arena.
Transit follows two newly orphaned sisters and the tangled relationships they will have with the men who become their husbands, lovers, and admirers across some twenty-plus years. Caroline (Caro) and Grace Bell arrive in England as young women from Australia, anxious to restart their lives. They couldn’t be more different, and Transit is going to explore and exploit everything that sets them apart.
The most important of the male through-lines in Transit is that of Ted Tice, a young astronomer who makes a dramatic appearance on the book’s first page. A storm with devastating results has been predicted in the opening sentence.
That noon a man was walking slowly into a landscape under a branch of lightning. A frame of almost human expectancy defined this scene, which he entered from the left-hand corner. Every nerve—for even barns and wheelbarrows and things without tissue developed nerve in these moments—waited, fatalistic. Only he, kinetic, advanced against circumstances to a single destination.
Farmers moved methodically, leading animals or propelling machines to shelter. Beyond the horizon, provincial streets went frantic at the first drops. Wipers wagged on windshields, and people also charged and dodged to and fro, to and fro. Packages were bunged inside coat-fronts, newspapers upturned on new perms. A dog raced through a cathedral. Children ran in thrilling from playgrounds, windows thudded, doors slammed. Housewives were rushing, and crying out, “My washing.” And a sudden stripe of light split earth from sky.
Ted, small suitcase in hand, is walking to the house where he will start working with a famous elder astronomer, and where he will also meet the astronomer’s guests, the two Bell sisters. Grace Bell has already become engaged to the astronomer’s son, and before the evening is over, Ted will become smitten with the other sister, Caro. For most of the novel Ted will go all out to win her love, but she will turn him down repeatedly. Caro tells herself she has other standards. “There were necessities, of silence and comprehension that she valued more than love, thinking this a choice she had made.”
It is likely to go unnoticed by the reader at the time, but Hazzard foreshadows most of Transit within the first fifteen pages of the book. Each sister will marry the wrong man and will then engage in adultery as an attempt at course correction. Making the wrong choice is the way characters are tested in Hazzard’s universe. Ted, continually spurned by Caro, eventually marries, even though Caro continues to remain his North Star
The transit of Venus refers to the very rare event when Venus crosses in front of the sun, permitting astronomers (if the skies are clear!) to do measurements that help them extrapolate the distance between the Earth and both the Sun and Venus. (I’ll refer you to the Wikipedia article for precise details.) At the dinner when Ted first meets Caro, he tells a story about a transit of Venus that took place in the 18th century.
A Frenchman had traveled to India years before to observe a previous transit, and was delayed on the way by wars and misadventure. Having lost his original opportunity, he waited eight years in the East for that next transit, of 1769. When the day came, the visibility was freakishly poor, there was nothing to be seen. There would not be another transit for a century.
He was telling this to, and for, Caroline Bell.
Despite having only met Caro that day, Ted was already predicting his own fatalistic devotion to her by the middle of dinner. “His story has such nobility you can scarcely call it unsuccessful,” he added, referring both to the 18th century scientist and also, undoubtedly, to his future self.
Hazzard uses multiple weapons from her writer’s arsenal to focus our attention on her characters’ motivations and their innermost thoughts during their conversations and when they are together. Written in free indirect style, we are witness to the thoughts and micro-emotions of each of Hazzard’s main characters as they muse and interact, and when they are at decisive moments. This intimacy betrays the frequency with which characters misinterpret and mistranslate the words and actions of others, which in turn leads to bad or wrong decisions.
As is evident in the quotations I have selected, everything—the weather, the landscape, rooms, objects—conspires to even further underscore the mood of characters. For example, when Grace and Christian make up after a fight, the entire room becomes anthropomorphic: “meaning flowed slowly back, like a stain, into the cream rug; twill cushions miraculously reinflated; and a pair of Spode plates, mounted on a wall, renewed their encircling spell.”
Transit is also a novel about secrets, secrets withheld out of shame and fear. When the secrets are confessed, Caro finds that a significant part of her life had been led as a lie. Suddenly, a key part of her past had been swept away, leaving a giant gap.
Like each of the females who take the leading roles in Shirley Hazzard’s novels, Caro Bell is a richly complex character. As a young woman she is dynamic but naïve, ambitious but with just enough preconceived ideas about what she is looking for to make bad decisions.
But it is Grace who sums up their lives as they reach middle age. “At first,” Grace says, “there is something you expect of life. Later, there is what life expects of you. By the time you realize these are the same, it can be too late for expectations.”
Grace had discovered that men prefer not to go through with things. When the opposite occurred, it made history: Something you’ll always remember.
She said, “Women have to go through with things. Birth, for instance, or hopeless love. Men can evade forever.”
Near the end of the book, the two battle-scarred sisters sit together and exchange “some pain for a tragedy not exclusively theirs.” Grace has stuck out her marriage with self-satisfied, entitled Christian, despite his affairs. Caro fell passionately in love with London’s hot playwright of the moment, a married man, and had an affair with him that wounded her badly. Then she was “resurrected” by a marriage to a wealthy, but very appreciative American, except he died unexpectedly. Then, finally wishing she could see “all she had been blind to,” she is back where she began, face to face with Ted Tice. She has come to realize that he has had the ethical spine that almost no one else in the novel possessed.
Shirley Hazzard. The Transit of Venus. NY: Viking, 1980.
