Reviews – Page 9 – Koba English

Ixelles

Another book club book, this time for the local book club whose April meeting I may or may not have the schedule and mental fortitude to attend. (Not because of the club. Everyone is lovely. Rather, because work is busy.) I don’t keep too much track of assorted literary prizes, but I knew enough to know that De kommer att drunkna i sina mödrars tårar won the August Prize a couple of years ago, so when Johannes Anyuru’s Ixelles was tapped as our next pick I decided to read it. The premise was interesting, and I always prioritize book club picks that are Swedish originals instead of the English best-sellers I already hear too much about.

I still can’t decide if the problem was with the book or with me.

The problem could have been with me because I already spend most of my waking life* reading, writing, dealing with language, processing Swedish; there comes a point where, when I’m reading Swedish fiction, my brain doesn’t know what to do with words anymore. At that point the language triggers a near-synesthetic experience where my nose detects the faintest whiff of brackish water and I feel a salty taste at the back of my tongue, and it’s not anything fun or embodied or anything like being immersed in the language. It’s rather that point in the meal where you’ve had too much and the food no longer tastes good because your body is smashing all kinds of physiological buttons to get you to stop eating.

*I say “waking life” because despite everything, I still dream exclusively in English.

I had those moments a lot during Ixelles. In the book’s defense (since this is a me problem), I don’t think I would have had them if I had been reading the book during the off season. I also don’t think I would have had them if I had slowed down, taken my time, instead of trying to bulldozer my way through the library copy to get it returned in a timely manner.

But maybe the problem was with the book. I skimmed or even skipped substantial portions without losing the thread of the story, which I consider a flaw rather than a strength in a novel. The summary alludes to a tight, dramatic thriller (maybe that’s how we have to market books here in the birthplace of Nordic noir?) but what you end up with is a lot of plodding around: waxing poetic (hah) about the reality of voices, of fictional characters, and a lot of dialogue that doesn’t sound like how people actually talk but like scrapped lines from mildly interesting poetry. Occasionally some plot happens.

Ruth is a single teen mom. Or she was originally a teen mom, but now she’s well into adulthood. Her son, Em, is huge into a tabletop roleplaying game that I assume is Dungeons & Dragons but hey, we could pretend it’s Pathfinder since Anyuru never actually names it. (Would Wizards of the Coast raise a stink all the way in the US? Actually, knowing Wizards of the Coast, I wouldn’t be surprised.) Em’s father, Mio, was murdered before Em was born.

Ruth has a mysterious and cynical PR style job that is essentially a troll and astroturf factory on steroids. The first assignment we see her take, for example, is from an understated luxury men’s fashion line that has unwittingly become associated with a Belgian gang. This is obviously not the branding they’re looking for and so Ruth manages to create an artificial online brouhaha accusing the brand of being racist, which neatly solves the gang association.

The story really gets started when Ruth takes a job on behalf of the local government: her old neighborhood, the projects where she grew up and met Em’s father, is slated to be demolished so a highway can be put in. Residents are obviously not happy about this decision and Ruth has been contracted to kneecap the burgeoning protest. The job brings her back to her old neighborhood and she gets tangled up in a minor bit of intrigue, as the rumor mill informs her that Mio isn’t really dead. Rummaging through the contents of an unconscious boy’s backpack she finds a CD with a recording of someone claiming to be Mio, talking about his life in “the nothing department.” The CDs (because there are several, dozens, hundreds maybe, turning up in backpacks and lockers everywhere) have become something of an underground hit here in the projects and all of the youths are talking about them.

Of course none of this has to play out straightforward and so we get a lot of flashbacks that don’t do anything; the characters are all pretty bland, like even Anyuru himself doesn’t care for them, so the departures from the main story seem pointless. Even Ruth has a distant, uninteresting quality to her that perhaps comes from Anyuru’s decision, as a man in his 40s, to make the protagonist a single mom in her 20s. He has no inner lived experience of that kind and so is unable to imbue her with anything concrete and grounding in that regard.

On the other hand, we get a lot about Ruth at work on her troll job, which seems like it could potentially be pretty interesting. The conceit is like something out of a William Gibson novel (a bit like the inverse of Cayce Pollard out of Pattern Recognition), but in execution it’s not nearly as snappy. She’s decided to create a writer “character” for this assignment and so (sometimes) writes, but mostly banters with her boss about what kind of person this character should be in dialogue that I think Anyuru finds very witty and on the nose but that I thought was just self-indulgent and insufferable. All in all, Ruth’s job is a bit of a snooze fest that keeps us away from the one point of intrigue in the story: the mysterious CDs.

The one notable overlap between author and protagonist is poetry. Ruth is a gifted poet, or supposed to be, and her poetry gets her noticed by the mysterious agency that now employs her. Yet somehow the whole thing feels like a combination of bizarre metaphor (artistry of some kind being a form of acceptance and success for marginalized people in mainstream society) and wishful thinking/self aggrandizing (poetry is such a gift, it points to something unbelievably special about a person, and here is a universe where it is given its proper due). A lot of hay is made about how Ruth’s gift for language and creating characters is what makes her good at her job, which is a funny thing to read in a novel where the characters are all dull and bland.

To get back to the story: the mystery of Mio’s death (and the proliferation of CDs purporting to be recorded by him) is solved for the reader, so to the extent that it’s a murder mystery or thriller, Ixelles delivers on that front. You find out whodunnit and why. I won’t spoil that part of the story here, since it’s a bit of a spoiler-y plot twist, but I will say that I found the resolution banal and deflating.

I think there’s just something with novels by poets that makes me lose my patience. An ear for language is important in a novel, yes, but so is understanding characterization, pacing, and plot, and you don’t get good at those just from writing poetry. The book progresses through weird pointless interludes of excerpts from the mysterious CDs, Em and Ruth playing Dungeons & Dragons (or Pathfinder!), flashbacks with Ruth that don’t establish anything we couldn’t already infer (she was in love with Mio? you don’t say!) or dream sequences from secondary characters. One thread of the flashbacks is with Mio, and that’s the only thread that actually contributes to the story itself.

I also don’t understand the appeal of setting novels in completely foreign countries, which wow when I phrase it like that sounds narrow and small-minded. To be more specific: characters traveling to places, or living as expats or outsiders in foreign places, is a literary well that will never run dry. That’s not what I mean by setting a story in a foreign country.

Anyuru is Swedish and is writing in Swedish; all of the characters in Ixelles are Belgian, whether immigrant or first generation or otherwise. I don’t know that there was anything in the story being better served by being set in Belgium than in Sweden, and a cursory Google search does not indicate that Anyuru has any particular history with or connection to Brussels specifically or Belgium generally. If he was trying to make a sly point about EU politics (Brussels as a stand-in for Europe as a whole, EU parliament, etc.), then it was lost on me. I have a tiny brain. A tiny brain that is overwhelmed by unfamiliar Flemish names.

The comparison that came up for me while I read was Samlade Verk, and on reflection it’s not surprising as both books kind of have a lot in common. The August Prize is perhaps the most obvious and banal of those commonalities, followed by their relative long length. But both books feature single parents with legendary disappeared partners; the authors even cross age and gender lines to write their complete opposite (Sandgren writing an older father and Anyuru writing a younger mother). There are plenty of offhand cultural references, and the stories both hinge on fictional writers (Sandgren creates one for her protagonist to be obsessed with; Ruth creates one as part of her astroturfing assignment in the projects). Both books cast sidelong glances at colonialism (the disappeared mother in Samlade Verk wrote her thesis on the topic; several of the African diaspora characters voice opinions on the topic in Ixelles). Both books jump around in chronology and rely heavily on flashback, or at least a jumbled timeline.

So why did I love Samlade Verk but turn up my nose at Ixelles?

Sandgren got a lot of guff from the neighborhood book club members for being young—or rather, trying too hard (in their opinion) to establish sections of the book as being The Eighties to compensate for not actually having experienced The Eighties. I can’t know how that part of the book hits for readers who remember the 80s, since I’m only a year older than Sandgren myself. But I absolutely recognized a lot of the characters she was putting on page because I’d either been them or I’d gone to school with them. Sandgren writes about the frustrations of studying philosophy in the way only a fellow philosophy student can really manage, which gave her characters depth and had me invested in the story, even when they were flawed and crappy people.

Not so in Ixelles, and here again the problem might be with me because I didn’t grow up in the projects of Brussels (or Araby in Växjö, for that matter). I didn’t have a wealth of experience I could use to project on to characters and fill in the blanks, which I’m sure I did with Samlade Verk. But I’d argue that in Ixelles there is still a lack of interiority based in lived experience; the best we get is other people telling us how we should feel about characters or what their primary traits are. Ruth’s boss explains to us that Ruth a gifted poet and that’s why he offered her a job. A stranger on the bus tells Em that Mio bought everyone on the block PlayStations for Christmas one year. Mio tells us—through Ruth’s recollections—that Ruth’s best friend Harsha is a busybody but also the beloved neighborhood big sister. But Ruth herself never agonizes over her writing, Mio’s generosity stays off the page even in flashbacks, and in all of her interactions with Ruth, Harsha is kind of cold and distant and awkward.

Despite its heft, Samlade Verk had a red thread running through it, a sharp focus and with clearly delineated branches: the mother who just left, and the husband and children she left behind. The fact that it runs for 600? 700? pages speaks more to the depth that Sandgren explores in her characters rather than the breadth of topics, and a lot of that is due to exactly that interiority. Ixelles, on the other hand, eschews character depth for a breadth of “I think this is an important topic” or “I think this is a cool idea.” Instead of being one cohesive book, Ixelles becomes two or three or five, all glued together into a clunky whole that is a disservice to all of the potential books it could have been.

Terminal Boredom

I’m a big fan of email newsletters. Everyone gave up on RSS feeds, apparently, but now email newsletters are making a comeback. Or maybe they never left, who knows. I’m a big fan of LitHub, which keeps me up to date on at least some of the happenings in the literary world. This is how I stumbled on Izumi Suzuki and news of her first translation into English in 2021 through Verso Books, titled Terminal Boredom. Now in 2023 another collection has been published (Hit Parade of Tears), and the Austin Feminist Sci-Fi Book Club made Terminal Boredom a read for March.

While I can’t comment on the quality of the translations qua translations, it would probably be fun to compare them against each other, as six translators were engaged for the seven stories in the collection: Polly Barton, Sam Bett, David Boyd, Daniel Joseph, Aiko Masubuchi and Helen O’Horan.

There are similarities to Murakami (references to music are deeply embedded in the stories) and Oyamada (the mood in Terminal Boredom is about as queasy as Weasels in the Attic). I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that Suzuki was an influence on both of them; in particular, it’s worth noting that Murakami and Suzuki were exactly the same age, and Murakami would have owned a jazz club for the same period of time Suzuki was married to avant garde jazz saxophonist Kaoru Abe. A cursory internet search didn’t turn up anything linking the two biographically but I expect I’d have to go excavating in Japanese to really find out more.

Somewhere in all of the hasty background reading I did for this entry I saw Suzuki’s work described as “SF short stories of manners,” which I’d argue rises above being merely a disservice to becoming a gross misunderstanding, but maybe that was a reference to work that’s not in the Terminal Boredom collection. (For an actual science fiction novel of manners, I would direct your attention to The Sky is Yours.) A blurb on the back compares Suzuki to Ursula K. LeGuin, which is a much more apt comparison. Our disaffected protagonists live in a variety of dystopias, some on Earth and some on other planets. All of these dystopias reflect and magnify troubling dynamics we already see today: hyperpatriarchal norms and power structures, overconsumption of mass media, colonialism and its fallout, addiction.

I think one of the problems I have with dystopias is that authors insist on being dramatic and emotive about how terrible this reality is. My personal conspiracy theory is that someone, somewhere along the editorial process (the authors themselves? their editors at the publisher?), knows that the world building in those novels is flimsy and lazy, like a mustache-twirling villain who’s simply evil for no other reason than the author needs conflict in their story. But this conspirator also knows that good world building takes precious time that they don’t have in the consumer capitalist book publishing world, so all of that is skipped in favor of The Rule of Drama. Populate the book with meticulously detailed, almost comical misery and punctuate it with emotionally-charged scenes to paper over the shoddy groundwork. The Hunger Games is a great example of this. Lots of drama, lots of pathos, but if you stop and think about the actual logic of the world for more than five minutes, you realize it doesn’t make a lick of sense.

The Rule of Drama does not apply to Suzuki’s stories. Pathos is minimal; emotions are most often muted, which makes actual teary moments stand out. There is no litany of “here are all the terrible consequences waiting for you in this world”; they are gestured to when relevant and left largely to the imagination. The result is a somewhat ironic city pop vibe, like city pop from hell. The indifferent resignation characters display about their surroundings—flatly accepting their reality as a trivial matter of fact instead of being wild, passionate rebels advocating for change—is ironically enough what makes the dystopia land and feel real. As a result, the setting has enough internal consistency to stand up to the five minutes of thought under whose weight The Hunger Games collapses.

That said, the language itself in all of the stories felt a bit stilted and clunky. It was present in some more than others, so it becomes hard to know if it’s a variation in the source material or a variation in translator. It’s also similar to the prose in Weasels in the Attic, but since that was translated by one of the translators in this collection, it’s hard to ascertain whether it’s a similarity in writing style, a quirk of translating Japanese to English generally, or a personal choice of that particular translator.

In the end Terminal Boredom was one of those “eat your vegetables” books for me. From a larger, overall perspective: yes, more overlooked writers translated into English, objectively good thing, especially overlooked women writers. To that end, my aesthetic response to the book doesn’t even matter.

On a personal level, I still think it was definitely good for my bookish self to have read Terminal Boredom. Whatever the prose, it’s still full of lots of good ideas, the kind that are fodder for kickstarting other people’s imaginations. It’s also a quick read; none of the stories are overly long or meandering because Suzuki gets right to the point in all of them. I’m even curious enough to look up Hit Parade of Tears. But I didn’t walk away from this with a new favorite short story, either.

Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow

Sometimes the books we read transcend their mere bookishness in the world and become something akin to life milestones, mementos of a particular point in our lives. Under the Net is a fantastic book on its own, made all the more fantastic for me because I bought it at the now-defunct “What The Book?” in Seoul and read the bulk of it in Gimpo airport, hoping against hope that a seat would open up after I missed my initial flight to Jeju. (One did. I had a great time.) Naturally that specific copy that I own, with the handwritten note to the previous owner and a What The Book? receipt still in it, immediately transports me to South Korea in July 2012. But any discussion of that book in general, or Iris Murdoch generally, will also bring along memories of that time of my life.

Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow and Jerome K. Jerome is similarly of a specific time for me, though in a grimmer way. An acquaintance recommended it (another left field book) sometime in 2019 and close on to winter I was reading a free ebook version from Project Gutenberg on the subway to work. I remember closing the ereader app and pocketing my phone as I came up the stairs of Hötorget, dawn only just getting started, everything still half-dark. I remember pulling my phone out on my way home in the evening and dashing off a quick message to them to say, Thanks for the rec, this is hilarious! before opening the ereader app back up for the return trip.

And then I didn’t have many commutes for a long time after that, for some reason!

I also forgot about Idle Thoughts for a long while, though whether that’s because of Covid or because of my own distractability is hard to say. Here I am, three years later, and I finally finished it, and now the book has become emblematic of my journey through coronatider.

Well, that’s a bit melodramatic. I have a good memory for a lot of things, but I would be hard pressed to summarize the entire collection and tell you which essays I finished before Covid, which during, and which after (if you want to say that there’s an after, which is debatable). Another book that needs no review, no introduction, no hype; Jerome has earned his place in English literary history. But for all of that historicity, reading Idle Thoughts today feels surprisingly fresh and relevant. Plus ça change.

Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century

Another book club book, this time the Discord book club. Turns out if you let me show up once, I never leave. (Well, except that time I dropped in to discuss Solaris and then didn’t attend another meeting until Light From Uncommon Stars.)

Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century is a snappy little collection of short stories from Kim Fu. They all go pretty quick, making this book another member of the illustrious One-Sit Read Club for me. I’m struggling to remember any others except The Crying of Lot 49, but I know there’s at least one more besides. Possibly Kokoro? Honorable mention: The Seep.

As a short story collection, there’s not really any plot to recount. Around half of the stories flirt with science fiction, or speculative fiction, however you want to call it, whether by relying on technology beyond what’s currently available or by inventing scientifically plausible monsters, illnesses, or mutations. Regardless of genre, all of the stories share a deft, light touch that in the end is possibly a bit too light. Few of them have a closed or definitive ending; a bit like Weasels in the Attic, they all have the sensation of a kind of literary show and tell. “Here’s this weird idea I had. Sure is weird, isn’t it? Anyway…” Sometimes this works for the subject matter, but other times it feels a little bit like a cop-out, like Fu couldn’t figure out what the logical conclusion of their idea should be. This was maybe the most frustrating in “#ClimbingNation,” which has enough paydirt drama and conflict set up in just one post-funeral scene to fuel an entire novel (hidden stashes of gold bars! unresolved guilt! mysterious pasts!) but instead simply ends. On the other hand, it works well in “Doll,” where that kind of unresolved tension works because the story is classic, old-school horror straight out of Weird Tales. Then there’s a third class of story where the lack of conclusive ending renders the entire story forgettable. Like, very literally forgettable—in the hour between finishing the book and starting this post, I still had to look up reviews to remind myself of what I had just read.

My personal favorite out of the collection was “Pre-Simulation Consultation XF007867,” the first story in the collection and which maybe doomed the other stories by setting expectations too high because it is really, really good. I might have even choked up a bit. And while I don’t know that “Twenty Hours” is necessarily a great story, it perfectly encapsulates a particular mood and dynamic that I recognize from being in a long-term relationship so I’ll credit Fu with that much.

Overall I’m not mad I read it, because Fu has a way with words and it’s a delight to reside in their world, even for those too-brief moments. I expect it’s a bit hard to track down at the moment due to new release hype, but if you come across it in the bookshelves in a year or two it’s worth the browse.

Axplock ur idéhistorien II

I guess the theme so far in 2023 is “reading other people’s books.” I closed out 2022 with The Power of the Dog and then ended up reading Stick (twice! for translation’s sake!) straightaway in 2023, both at the recommendation of a friend. In between those, Axplock ur idéhistorien II arrived on my doorstep—a book I’d promised to babysit for a digital nomad friend who wanted to order it off Adlibris but had no Swedish address to ship to.

And one does not ask me to babysit a book without expecting me to read it.

It’s a tidy little collection spanning just about two hundred years of Western thought, with a focus on the major social ideas that continue to leave their mark on politics today. (This is a polite way to say that a few of the selections are nothing less than noxious.) The selections are abridged when necessary, with context for each selection as well as a short biography of each author:

Kant, “Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?”
Hegel, “Reason in History”
Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity
Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety
Marx & Engels, “The Communist Manifesto”
Gobineau, “An Essay on the Inequality of Human Races”
Bremer, Hertha
Darwin, On the Origin of Species
Mill, “The Subjection of Women”
Spencer, The Man Versus the State
Nietzsche, On the Geneaology of Morality
Freud, Introduction to Psychoanalysis
“Program of the NSDAP”
Mussolini, “The Doctrine of Fascism”
Beauvoir, The Second Sex
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition

If you took the above table of contents as a reading list it would probably keep you busy for a year, so collections like these with just The Hits and the central theses are great to have on hand and are much cheaper than, say, a first-year philosophy survey course textbook. (Did I keep mine because I knew I would want to revisit it later? Yes. Have I done so? Actually, also yes.) I might buy my own copies of both volumes just to have around for reference, who knows.

Do I have a similar English recommendation? Not really. Passion of the Western Mind has a similar, if broader scope, but it’s entirely a secondary source. I had Ten Great Works of Philosophy in my library for years and kind of wish I still had it.

Weasels in the Attic

All told I’m in three different book clubs, to whom I have varying levels of allegiance. At one end of the spectrum there’s the Austin Feminist Sci-Fi Book Club, to which I am more or less firmly committed and which accounts for around 25% of my annual book consumption. One step below that is the neighborhood dinner and book club, which I abstain from attending during The Season at work, but whose selections I often read on my own because I’m otherwise not plugged in to new, or at least recent, Swedish releases. At the other end of the spectrum is the ultra casual “buddy read” group in one of my Discord servers, which I usually ignore unless I’ve already read the book. Such was the case with Light From Uncommon Stars, which was an Austin Feminist Sci-Fi Book Club pick for November and then a Discord buddy read for December, meaning this was the rare occasion I was part of the Discord book chat and witness to the process of selecting the next buddy ready book.

That was a long preamble to say, “I read Hiroko Oyamada’s Weasels in the Attic because it was a book club read for a book club I don’t normally attend.”

I also read it because it was short, because as a translator I appreciate reading works in translation, and because it sounded intriguing. It’s hard, even, to decide between classing it as a novella or as a short story collection. We have the same characters throughout, all riffing on the theme of indifference, or even antipathy, towards parenthood, but their only common thread is the same narrator. Each story? chapter? on its own feels a bit unearthly: deliberately flat and almost imagist, where the point isn’t a clever plot or character development but just the mood of the scene.

The word “sinister” comes up in different reviews of the book, but maybe a better word would be “uneasy.” You get that horror movie knot in your stomach, but the other shoe never drops. The narrator’s friends, Urabe and Saiki don’t come across as great husbands, or even decent men, but the narrative doesn’t stick around long enough to confirm or deny those allegations. It’s possible that the young, vulnerable girl Urabe caught eating his stock of fish food is now his wife, but then again, maybe she isn’t. We don’t find out either way. Both of them boss their (significantly) younger wives around and do very little to help in entertaining their guests, but things fail to rise about the level of the inconsiderate to demeaning or abusive. Likewise, the infants in the story are not particularly cuddly or even robust creatures, and in the stories where they appear you have the sense that they’re not going to survive until the end of the chapter (but they do).

If great art, according to Aristotle, is supposed to elicit some sense of catharsis in its audience, then he would have hated this book. (We’ll pretend for a minute that he would have understood the context of modern suburban Japan.) Oyamada shows you a few uncomfortable scenes and then leaves. The result is unsettling.

Did I like it? Hard to say. But it’s so short and goes so quickly—I read it cover to cover before I rolled out of bed one Saturday morning—that I’m not mad I read it, either.

Debt: The First 5,000 Years

Here’s the rare “book off the TBR” win! Of course, Debt: The First 5,000 Years was a relevantly recent TBR addition that has not undergone the shameful, years-long limbo that other titles have, but any progress is progress.

If you look back at the non-fiction I read in 2022 (especially the non-fiction I read and enjoyed in 2022), you can see something of a common denominator:

Caliban and the Witch, Jakartametoden and Handels: Maktelitens Skola all go a very long way towards explaining how capitalism as we know it came to be and how its current norms and structure are maintained. Project Censored’s State of the Free Press 2022 is reportage often aimed at critiquing those norms and structure and, if you want to stretch the conceit, ancient Rome is where we like to start the story of Europe, and it is Europe from which springs everything else the other selections touch on. (Temples of the Sky is the odd one out, a niche hobby read.)

Whether this trend is due to the natural progression of my interests, the years I’ve now spent absorbed in financial reports, the turbulent times we live in, or some other constellation of factors, who can say. Regardless, it continued straight away into 2022 with Debt.

I’m not lucid enough a thinker to provide a pat nutshell summary of my own, so I’ll lift the one on the book’s Archive.org page:

[Debt] explores the historical relationship of debt with social institutions such as barter, marriage, friendship, slavery, law, religion, war and government; in short, much of the fabric of human life in society. It draws on the history and anthropology of a number of civilizations, large and small, from the first known records of debt from Sumer, in 3500 BC until the present.

And then the one from the back of the book itself:

Before there was money, there was debt. For more than 5,000 years, since the beginnings of the first agrarian empires, humans have used elaborate credit systems to buy and sell goods—that is, long before the invention of coins or cash. It is in this era that we also first encounter a society divided into debtors and creditors—which lives on in full force to this day.

So says anthropologist David Graeber in a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom. He shows that arguments about debt and debt forgiveness have been at the center of political debates from Renaissance Italy to Imperial China, as well as sparking innumerable insurrections. He also brilliantly demonstrates that the language of the ancient works of law and religion (words like “guilt,” “sin,” and “redemption”) derive in large part from ancient debates about debt, and shape even our most basic ideas of right and wrong.

We are still fighting these battles today.

This is the best kind of nonfiction: written by a knowledgeable academic for a lay audience without insulting their intelligence or devolving into jargon and obscure terminology, with a heaping helping of works cited at the end.

In many ways, this is the less crackpot-y, more grounded and more academic answer to Sacred Economics, which I read a few years ago and which helped keep me oriented in Debt. A lot of what Eisenstein describes as “gifts” seems to overlap with what Graeber describes as the favors that, with the advent of currency, turn into debt. Neither of them mention each other, however. Both books came out in 2011*, so I’m not sure whether it’s Graeber or Eisenstein who should be referring to the other. (Graeber might have felt that Eisenstein wasn’t nearly academically rigorous enough to cite and too out-there to be worth engaging with otherwise, and I can’t say I would have blamed him.) They definitely draw from at least a few of the same sources, such as Marcel Mauss.

I expect I will end up re-reading it later in the year, as it’s so dense with information and argumentation that there’s no way you can absorb it all at once. (Maybe you can. I can’t.) For now, time to give my brain a bit of a break.

*I think. It’s hard to tell, precisely, with Sacred Economics beyond “before 2012.”

Orlando

As established in my StoryGraph Wrap-Up post, the Austin Feminist Science Fiction Book Club is responsible for just about 25% or so of my reading every year. Here’s me getting a head start on the first meeting of 2023, finishing Virginia Woolf’s Orlando right at the end of 2022.

As this selection might imply, the Austin Feminist Science Fiction Book Club applies a very generous definition of “science fiction.” This is only a good thing, in my opinion, because it keeps things fresh and varied. I have no complaints about Orlando being included and I think I even voted for it in our poll.

I just wish I could like Virginia Woolf.

I don’t understand what my problem is. I love Mrs Dalloway, enough that it’s one of the few books I’ve re-read in my life, but anything else I’ve ever attempted just leaves me cold. “Why aren’t you Mrs Dalloway?” I lament as I read, until I either finish the book (Orlando) or give up on it entirely (To the Lighthouse, A Room of One’s Own). Is it a disconnect of time? Culture? Class? I’m reminded of my colleague’s complaint about Thomas Savage: “You love yourself too much, book.”

I won’t dispute Woolf’s place in the English canon, her role in feminist literature, or the esteemed reputation she enjoys today. My point isn’t that she’s Objectively Bad, Actually or Extremely Overrated (I save that hot take for Jane Austen!). I think she is, on balance, very well deserving of her posthumous success and reputation. I just lack the necessary receptors in my reading brain to actually enjoy her writing.

The Big Balloon (A Love Story)

I decided to get an early start on some classic New Year’s resolutions like decluttering and ending long-term toxic relationships by having an emergency gallbladder removal two days after Christmas!

Medical drawing of a gallbladder — This one does not spark joy!

It also left me with three and a half days of nothing to do but chip away at my ebook collection; I didn’t take my purse and its ever-present paperback with me to the ER, as I fully expected to return home the same day. Well, well, well. Fortunately my phone is a miniature library of obscure and half-forgotten ebooks and I could keep myself distracted in the long waits between ultrasounds and discussions with surgeons. Most of that time was spent with the back half of Rick Berlin’s The Big Balloon (A Love Story), which up to that point I’d been reading on my morning commute.

I’m not hip to the Boston art scene, I didn’t know who Rick Berlin was before I bought the book, I’d never heard of any of his musical projects. But he put out an ad for the book on one of my go-to podcasts and since the premise sounded unique, or at least interesting, I decided to give it a try. I feel that’s only worth mentioning because someone who’s either a fan of Berlin, or familiar with his artistic milieu, will probably have a different response to it than I did.

Out of every possible Pandemic Project or Pandemic Novel, The Big Balloon is maybe the only one I can imagine that will be at all tolerable to revisit in more normal times (if we ever have more normal times). Even though the book is the direct result of COVID-19, it’s never about COVID-19. The conceit is simply this: The Big Balloon is a collection photos of items around Berlin’s home and reflections, stories and reminisces related to each item. Each little essay is entirely self-contained, with no attempt to impose chronological or thematic order on the collection (aside from organizing it into chapters based on rooms). The result is like a literary version of a Cubist portrait, where different years of Berlin’s life and different aspects of himself are presented simultaneously—or as close to simultaneously as you can get in something you read. Something about using the limitations of lockdowns to open up a vast interior world, etc. etc.

The Big Balloon worked well for commute and hospital reading because each essay was never especially long, so I could dip in and out according to subway arrivals or morphine-addled focus. And that was precisely the intended effect:

There is no linear structure to this book. No over-arching narrative. Each entry is self-contained. One piece can relate to another, but it isn’t necessary to make that connection. The reader can pick it up, crack it open anywhere, read a section and put it down. The ‘chapters’ are just the rooms in my house.

It could be said that I chose this odd-ball format for bathroom reading. For those with short attention spans. On the other hand, much as I love the twists and turns of a full blown story, the Haiku simplicity of disparate entries exposes Berlin as if opening the paper window flaps of a Twelve Days Of Christmas holiday card in no particular order.

The highly personal nature of the material also, in a way, made up for the fact that I wasn’t allowed to have any visitors. I wasn’t exactly starved for social contact generally, between the two other patients sharing my room and chatting with the nurses doing their rounds, but that’s not the same as time with your nearest and dearest in the darkest, coldest days of the year. The next best thing was Berlin plunging right to the depths of his own psyche to share with me, and the rest of his readership:

The Big Balloon is super personal. Most art, at least the art I love best, is personal. From another’s truth one extrapolates one’s own echo, wisdom, embarrassment and laughter. That’s what I’d hope for you, dear reader. That you’d laugh or at least find something self-relevant in these independent passages of my peculiar life.

A creative not-so-little undertaking that makes me want to ask the same of my friends, or save up for a dry spell on the ol’ bloggo. “Choose ten things around your house and write an essay about each one of them.” Maybe make that an additional step in the KonMari method.

Happy New Year!

Light From Uncommon Stars

Unless you went to high school with me, you probably don’t know that I played the violin in orchestra.

Well, now you do, I guess?

I was never particularly good, let me be clear. It would be fair to say I was a perfectly mediocre violinist. Nonetheless I enjoyed orchestra and continued throughout my entire high school career, concert orchestra as well as pit orchestra. I don’t really think about the violin very often—usually only when I listen to a particular symphonic piece we performed, where my memory of it is more deeply embodied than with other music. Who knows, maybe my brain is still sending phantom signals to my lefthand fingers and bow arm.

Light From Uncommon Stars, on the other hand, made me think about the violin a lot.

Our heroine is Katrina Nguyen, a trans teenager and gifted violinist. Legendary violin instructor Shizuka Satomi hears Katrina playing in a park and decides to take her on as a student so she can complete her Faustian bargain with the demon Tremon Philippe and deliver Katrina’s soul to Hell. Alien refugee and spaceship captain Lan Tran has fled to Earth with her family and fallen in love with Shizuka after she visits the donut shop Tran runs as a cover operation for constructing a stargate.

Catch all that?

There is a lot going on in Light From Uncommon Stars, and while it’s at times a fun and dizzying combination of science fiction and demons from Hell and classical music, sometimes it’s a bit too much. Memories and flashbacks appear out of nowhere without adding anything to the story or its characters. Shizuka’s grand declamations and philosophical reflections about the power of musical performance are at once too long and too shallow to really ring true for me. All of this crowds out more interesting material for me, like Katrina’s genuinely insightful and touching reflection on gender identity through the metaphor of Bartok’s Sonata for Solo Violin.

Nor does Aoki flinch from at least gesturing at the more traumatic events of Katrina’s previous life, which don’t always blend well with the wacky feel-good sci-fi hijinks. There were moments where it hit something like anti-lagom (mogal?), exactly wrong instead of exactly right: what should be goofy space shit feels a bit out of place compared to what just happened in the last chapter; betrayal that would take a lot of time and therapy to work through in the real world is brushed aside almost immediately to get our wacky plot on the road.

But there are violins.

According to her author bio, Aoki is also a composer. This is hardly surprising given the countless musical references, including several to—of course—Paganini. (And yet, apparently Tartini’s “Devil’s Trill Sonata” was too on the nose for Aoki to use here? Missed opportunity, if you ask me.) I don’t know if Aoki is also a violinist, but whether it was lived experience or impeccable research, many of the violin-specific asides landed for me in an almost visceral way; the same embodied memory as when I hear a piece I performed in orchestra. “Does she need some tape on her fingerboard?” is one withering remark from the antagonist about Katrina’s inexpertise that made me cringe in shame: that controversial, or at least pedestrian, method was how I had been taught. Crappy rosin in plastic cases. Tuning forks. The way it feels to slide a wire mute over the bridge. Viola jokes. (Or, well, one viola joke. Which was mostly implied.) All of that was an absolute delight, to the point where I began to get a bit irritated when the book wasn’t talking about music. (Or food. Lots of food in this book. Her bio doesn’t mention it but I bet Aoki would call herself a foodie.)

Violins, however, are not enough. To put it bluntly, there was a lot in Light From Uncommon Stars that was simply not written for me. I don’t mean that because of the subject matter beyond my own lived experience (I’m not Asian, I’m not trans), but rather on a more “philosophy of reading” level.

Any conflict not immediately related to the relationships between Shizuka, Katrina, and Tran inevitably comes to a pat conclusion within a page or two. Minor villains are either destroyed immediately after their appearance (a racist storeowner drops dead of a heart attack half an hour after he disses Katrina’s violin; the emcee of a talent showcase who makes transphobic jokes at Katrina’s expense suffers a housefire), disappear entirely from the narrative (Katrina’s awful roommates), or are declared irredeemably toxic by Implied Word of God and summarily consigned by Katrina to the memory hole with no mourning or regret (Katrina’s parents). All of these had the potential to be the site of really thoughtful consideration and nuanced storytelling, but Aoki just sidesteps them, which then inspires the question of why include those conflicts or characters in the first place.

Everything neat and tidy, warm fuzzies and bear hugs for everybody.

I get why people want that in a book. I get in that mood sometimes, too. But I wasn’t in that mood when I picked up Light From Uncommon Stars so I had a hard time enjoying the book on those terms. Settling back into my violinist body, though? Even for just a couple of hours? That’s what I’m here for.