novellas – Koba English

Stargate. En julberättelse

The same Swedish book club that picked Dead Souls, Stacken, Svälten, and Orbital this year opted for Ingvild H. Rishøi’s Stargate. En julberättelse (Eng: Brightly Shining) for June, at the suggestion of the newest member. Behind as I am in my annual reading quota, it was nice to have something short—even if reading a Christmas story in June feels a bit…odd.

It’s getting on to Christmas, and sisters Ronja and Melissa are trying to make do, since their alcoholic father is having another rough patch. He manages to get a job selling Christmas trees, but after a few good days he blows it and is back to his bad habits. Melissa steps up and offers to take over the job, working in the mornings and evenings after school but for less pay. One afternoon Ronja, desperate to be anywhere but home, turns up at the tree lot and Melissa’s coworker Tommy gets the idea to use Ronja to sell wreaths and other decorations. Shoppers can’t resist a cute kid, he reasons, and offers to split his commission from the wreath sales with the sisters. This goes well until it doesn’t—the owner of the business isn’t thrilled about child labor going on behind his back—and Ronja is left to her own devices. Things spin out pretty badly from there into an ambiguous ending that takes a sharp turn into fuzzy magical realism.

Putting aside the Christmas-in-June element, overall Stargate was an ambiguous reading experience for me. Up until the ending, I was torn between enjoying Rishøi’s writing (in the Swedish translation by Maria Lundquist) and resenting what I felt was emotional manipulation. Unearned sentimentality immediately sets off my alarm bells when it comes to books and movies, and at times it felt like Rishøi was laying it on with a trowel.

The ending, however, is a choice that deserves its own commentary. While Ronja is certainly a daydreamer, the rest of the book is almost hyperrealistic. The title of the book even comes from Star Gate, an actual dive bar in Oslo where the father drinks himself senseless. Abandoning that kind of stark realism in the home stretch for the total opposite gives the reader a bit of mood whiplash, and it also makes me wonder if Rishøi opted for that because she felt like she had written herself into a corner. Namely: if she’s going to end with Ronja’s death, how is she going to actually write it?

Whether Ronja dies is, I suppose, up for some debate. The fuzziness from the magical realism filter provides solid plausible deniability, after all. Maybe Ronja and Melissa are walking home! Maybe they’re really walking through the woods! Maybe it’s Ronja’s fever dream while Melissa is carrying her home! But given how closely Stargate resembles “The Little Match Girl,” I’m skeptical. My take on the ending is that Ronja dies. It’s a weird choice for a Christmas story, but then “The Little Match Girl” takes place on New Year’s Eve so there’s a parallel there.

I found a few reviews of the English translation (Shining Brightly), and more than one of them gave the book demerits for profanity, specifically for using the Lord’s name in vain. Did this get marketed in English as the kind of Christmas story that would appeal to devout Christians? Unclear to me.

Förvandlingen

I’m in a philosophy book and discussion club, which is responsible for a small chunk of the nonfiction I manage to get through during the year. Once in a while, however, the group votes for a novel instead of a strict philosophical treatise. That’s how I finally got around to reading Brave New World, for example. Fiction won again in the most recent poll and the book for June was Franz Kafka’s Die Verwandlung, known in Swedish as Förvandlingen and in English as The Metamorphosis.

I’d read it in high school, but since forgotten most of it. Since Kafka was a prominent figure in 1913, it seemed like a good time for me to return to the text regardless. I opted for a Swedish translation, even though my memory of the English is obviously quite dim.

There is a strong tradition in Swedish of translated German literature, so unsurprisingly there are multiple Swedish translations of Förvandlingen. The first one I got ahold of was the older one by Caleb J. Anderson and Karl Vennberg, originally published by Forum but now in a new edition from Modernista. I also managed to dig up the newer one from Hans Blomqvist and Erik Ågren at Bakhåll, complete with an afterword. I’m in the process of polling Swedes in my life about which one they prefer and why, and so far I have to say that there’s no clear winner.

That’s probably the most interesting thing to say about The Metamoporphosis. We all know the story and the famous opening line, what more need be said?

Here’s one nugget from high school that has stayed with me ever since, maybe because it’s only become even more relevant to me as an adult: if you take away the magical event of the first sentence, The Metamorphosis becomes one of the most realistic books ever written, an unflinching portrayal of how families respond to disability or illness.

I don’t know which critic or which writer it was. If memory serves, and it was indeed my twelfth grade English teacher who relayed it to me, then it has to predate 2004. Otherwise, I cobbled together my actual English class and an actual, later quote into a false memory. Regardless of where I first heard it, that quote has been kicking around in my head for years and I finally got to put it to the test, as it were, by coming back to The Metamorphosis over twenty years later. Bang on, I would say.

Dead Souls

I first read Gogol’s Dead Souls in 2014, and I remember even then being mostly baffled by the story. Not only the ending, the legendary mid-sentence cliffhanger, but Chichikov’s entire plan. What was buying these dead souls doing for him, exactly? Then earlier this year it was floated as a suggestion for my Swedish language book club so I had the chance to revisit the story twelve years later to see if I was a better reader.

Short answer: no!

But this time around I went digging afterwards for reviews and commentary, which cleared up my biggest point of confusion—the dead souls, which he was presumably acquiring at a bargain, could function as collateral for a loan—even while Gogol’s satire didn’t entirely land. Individual moments of slapstick got a smile or a chuckle out of me, but I’m a reader who is too far removed in time and geography to appreciate the more subtle digs at Russian aristocracy. (Except all the jokes about them speaking French, I know enough history to understand that much about the Russian upper class of the time.) Russian drama and pathos? Fine, great, love it, lay it on me. Russian comedy? Absolute head-scratcher.

Mostly I want to take the time to complain about The Internet These Days. After I finished Dead Souls again, I did what I normally do these days after a real puzzler of a book: look for blog posts or podcasts that might fill in the gaps of my understanding. The vast majority of what I found for Dead Souls was AI-generated slop. Most of it was simple Cliff’s Notes study guides for the YouTube generation—artificial voiceovers explaining the story to you over janky (I’d go so far as to say Eurojanky) art, either still or animated depending budget. A similarly janky short turned out to be an ad for a series of self-published historical fiction prequels (for lack of a better word) to famous classics. A couple videos, notable for being slightly less janky, used Dead Souls to support, of all things, the Tartarian Empire conspiracy theory, and lo and behold the channels associated with both of them are dedicated to proving, or propagandizing for, the mythical lost civilization.

Dead souls commenting on Dead Souls, if you will.

We’re drowning in useless bullshit that no one asked for, and that makes it impossible to find the useful stuff that we actually want. Of course, this is hardly news anymore and I’m not breaking any new ground with this claim. I just needed to vent my spleen for a minute. And since it’s better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, here are the cool and useful tidbits I managed to find despite the tsunami of slop.

The Bowie Book Club podcast is a great idea for a podcast. Even if I’m not a David Bowie fan myself, I’m glad people are out there doing something fun and creative like this. They did an episode on Dead Souls back in 2024.

While I can’t comment on the rest of his content, Mike Tyulpakov is at least a human standing there talking to you about Gogol. I’m willing to overlook uncritical appreciation of Jordan Peterson elsewhere in his videos in exchange for an interesting alternative interpretation/model of Dead Souls as a Russian language Odyssey rather than Russian language Divine Comedy. Admittedly it’s not an entirely new reading, but it’s always nice to get a hot take on Russian literature from an actual Russian.

For all my complaining about AI slop, the top hit in YouTube for me was still a human podcast with human faces. Unfortunately, it seems like to get to the top the two hosts have to lean into Manic Internet Hype Machine Podcast Energy, which I hate.

I also found a podcast episode from Vollrath Publishing, a one-man (or possibly husband-and-wife) publishing and podcasting venture. So far the one book they’ve released is a new edition of Frankenstein with new original artwork for the cover and the host’s own footnotes to the text. Could possibly be a publisher to watch? I might pick up their Frankenstein to see what exactly they’re doing.

And finally, the crowning jewel of all of this human work is StandardEbooks.org. They take public domain texts from online sources like the Internet Archive or Project Gutenberg and clean them up into polished, attractive, and eminently readable ebooks. Nice fonts, comfortable margins and line spacing, properly linked footnotes, no OCR madness. This time around I read their HTML version in my phone’s browser window, but they offer a variety of formats, including for Kindle and Kobo. They don’t know me, I’m not getting any kickback or commission, I’m just hyping them up because I appreciate what they’re doing.

Small Things Like These

Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These was the latest pick for the Swedish book club I’ve recently (if intermittently) started attending, and yet again they’ve opted for a translation into Swedish. (Previous entries include The Blind Owl, The World of Yesterday, The New York Trilogy.) No complaints from me, exactly, but I suppose that means I need to find other ways of keeping abreast of contemporary Swedish literature.

It’s getting on to Christmas in 1985 in New Ross, Ireland and protagonist Bill Furlong is working hard to get coal deliveries out and payments in to support his wife and five daughters. A delivery to a convent brings him into unusually close contact with behind-the-scenes matters at the local Magdalene laundry and (spoiler, I guess) the story ends with Furlong helping one of the girls escape.

Points for brevity and, despite the subject matter, not being an absolute morass of despair. I was expecting the conflict to revolve around one of Furlong’s own daughters being sent to the institution and spent most of the story trying to guess which one it would be. Maybe that was deliberate misdirection by Keegan, who’s to say? A lesser writer would have gone that direction, I’m sure, and I appreciate that she didn’t.

Otherwise, I imagine that a lot of the staying power a story like this has depends on the emotional resonance the setting has for a reader. I’m not Irish; I have no immediate connection to that particular tragedy. In the same vein, I expect a novel like Beloved hits different if you’re not American.

Den blinda ugglan

Sadeq Hedayat’s Den blinda ugglan (The Blind Owl, or Boof-e Kur in Persian) came to my attention through a member of my monthly philosophy reading group. Not because it had anything to do with philosophy, but because we were chatting about Swedish book clubs. I’d never heard of the book or the author before, and the description sounded intriguing:

The Blind Owl is described as a text without peer, with influences from Kafka and Poe as well as from Persian mythology and folk tales. A man recounts his life history to his own shadow. The confusion of losing his mystical lover has driven him to the edge of death or madness. Time and space have disintegrated and the same motifs, the same people constantly reappear in new forms.

The book can be read as a horror story, a surreal depiction of a nightmare or perhaps as an opium-laced game with distorted reflections. André Breton called the book one of the few true masterpieces.

The most frustrating thing for me now is finding out after the fact that it’s full of references to Persian mythology. That’s a huge field to dive into just for the sake of a short book, and yet without that knowledge it feels like the story loses a lot of its impact.

At the end of the day, I’m not sure what I read, but it cracked my idea of what a novel can be wide open. What we have, nominally, are the journalistic confessions of an ailing, unnamed narrator addressed to the shadows on his wall. Is he dying? Is he depressed? Both? Something else? In the first portion of the novella (no chapter breaks, only a handful of section breaks) he mourns the death of an otherworldly woman with whom he feels mystically connected. In the second we get distorted glimpses of a slightly less surreal life, with a domineering (though affectionate) mother-in-law and a promiscuous wife who withholds sex from the narrator. Are they the same people? Is this the same tale told twice, or is one just the opium-induced hallucination of the other? Is any of this even happening at all? Another review compared it to Steppenwolf but for my money, Den blinda ugglan is much, much weirder.

I happened to watch Mulholland Drive while I was reading this, so maybe that’s why the comparison is ready at hand for me to make, but the even so the two are similar. Putting aside the shared surface-level surrealism, they’re both bifurcated, with two distinct narratives that might or might not be connected, presented by two unreliable narrators who might or might not be the same person. Events in both parts are paradoxical or explicitly contradictory, though they are united by the names and images and phrases that recur in both parts. Romantic jealousy is also a key part of the narrative, whether literal or as a metaphor for a more spiritual struggle.

There’s my nutshell summary, I guess: What if Mulholland Drive were a novella written by an Iranian author living in Paris during the 1930s?

Avlägsen stjärna

The same bookish friend with opinions about Aslı Erdoğan and Tezer Özlü was so enchanted with Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 that she picked his much shorter Distant Star for the online book club she started this year. I opted for the Swedish translation by Lena E. Heyman because if I’m reading a translation anyway, why not boost my Swedish numbers for the year?

This is a short novel that retreads (and is maybe even literally the same text?) as Bolaño’s earlier Nazi Literature in the Americas. An unnamed narrator, who is understood to be Arturo Bolaño from Nazi Literature working together with a metafictional Roberto Bolaño, relates the story of skywriting poet and serial killer Carlos Wieder, alias Alberto Ruiz-Tagle. After making an initial splash in the years of Pinochet’s rule, Wieder vanishes into thin air.

Or so it seems.

Decades later, the unnamed narrator (now residing in Europe) is contacted by a Chilean detective on the hunt for Wieder. Hired by a very wealthy client who believes that Wieder is still alive, the detective in turn wants to hire the narrator to comb through a bizarre international collection of genre fiction magazines. The detective is convinced that Wieder has submitted work to at least some of them, but needs the narrator’s poetic and aesthetic sensibilities to more specifically hunt him down. The story ends with the narrator positively identifying Wieder in person at a café, after which point the detective pays a visit to Wieder at home to (it is understood) murder him.

Distant Star met mixed reviews in our book club. Despite being only novella in length, it’s full of long asides that are completely irrelevant to the primary story: German vocabulary, Paralympics mascots, Soviet generals, fictional (?) Chilean revolutionaries and literary movements. The ending is inconclusive; we never find out who this wealthy client is or why they want Wieder dead.

I probably liked it the best out of everyone, but that was maybe because I’m so busy with other things right now I didn’t have the focus or mental processing power left over to even try to make sense of anything. Something about the narrator’s journey through the zines and his attempt to hunt down Wieder by way of his publications also reminded me of Foucault’s Pendulum, a book that will always inspire warm and fuzzy feelings in me.

I also finished Avlägsen stjärna a week ago at the time of writing (this entry is backdated because I’m fussy). That kind of delay is not ideal for writing a more thoughtful review, but such is life.

By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept

Following hot on the heels of Mumbo Jumbo, the next entry on the list of “books I feel like should have been on my literary curriculum but never were” is By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, Elizabeth Smart’s intense…novella? multi-part prose poem?…regarding her long-term affair with poet George Barker. Did I know that when I grabbed it at random off the library shelf? Absolutely not. Did I think for a minute that the Elizabeth Smart of my own growing-up had written a novel with a title off a prog rock album? Shamefully, yes, but I was disabused of this notion as soon as I read the back of the book. Considering its light weight and my impending vacation, I figured this was a good contender for a back up English book to have with me and checked it out alongside Ali Smith’s Summer.

The comparison that immediately springs to mind is Requiem över en förlorad stad and Cold Nights of Childhood. We have a nameless woman wandering through the locations of her own memories, though the narrator seems more chronologically bound in Grand Central Station than in either of the other two. While highly surreal throughout, you can still trace a narrative thread that begins with meeting Barker in person, continues through the consummated affair and subsequent periods of separation until it ends sometime after the birth of the narrator’s child, all of which is rendered in evocative and startling metaphor. This will undoubtedly be a re-read for me at some point in the near future, though with my own copy that I can safely mark up and read at my leisure.

La maladie de la mort

In addition to an arbitrary percentage of Swedish reading, my annual reading goal also includes four books in French, lest those hours spent in French class go totally to waste. And just to drive home the point that I actually do have chill, this year was the first time since I introduced the goal that I actually met it.

By the skin of my teeth, with a Marguerite Duras novella at the buzzer, but nonetheless I met it! Merry Christmas to me.

La maladie de la mort (The Malady of Death, English translation available at the Internet Archive, also a worthy cause to donate to!) describes the brief relationship between an unnamed man (told in second person, so always just “vous”) and an unnamed woman he pays for sex-and-also-more. The man wants to experience love for once in his life, and the conditions of this transaction suggest what he thinks love is, or ought to be:

You say she mustn’t speak, like the women of her ancestors, must yield completely to you and your will, be entirely submissive like peasant women in the barns after the harvest when they’re exhausted and let the men come to them while they’re asleep. So that you may gradually get used to that shape moulding itself to yours, at your mercy as nuns are at God’s.

The woman denies being a prostitute, but still agrees to the deal, and over the course of their seaside hotel tryst she reads him for filth. Or, not filth exactly, but she’s able to name the character flaw within him that he’s never quite able to define. Whence the title of the work derives: she tells him that he is touched by the malady of death.

A lot about this situation is reminiscent of a chapter out of Jamie Bartlett’s The Dark Net, a book that is somehow nearly a decade old? Imagine a pre-Trump examination of 4chan. A simpler time. (As an aside, I was disappointed in The Dark Net because I thought it would be an examination of the actual Dark Net, meaning the stuff that happens online beyond the crawlable purview of search engines. It was actually about all of the antisocial but still highly Googlable behavior I was already aware of because I had a misspent, Terminally Online youth: pro-ana/pro-mia, suicide clubs, relentless online bullying campaigns, etc.)

One of the few things in The Dark Net that was actually of interest to me was the chapter on cam girls, maybe because I have limited (read as: zero) experience in that arena. The overwhelming consensus from the interviews that Bartlett conducted was that the best paying and most loyal customers for a cam girl often wanted, more than whatever explicit sexual experience, something that feminist theory would call “emotional labor” and that the cam girls called “the girlfriend experience.” This particular class of customer just wanted a space with another human being to give vent to their anxieties, blow off steam, maybe exhibit a level of vulnerability, and just overall to be seen—this on greater or equal footing than just sexual gratification.

The same dynamic seems to play out in La maladie de la mort. The man believes that what he’s missing is sex, he sets out terms and conditions that are built on that assumption, and as the relationship progresses (over a few days? weeks? the timeline is a bit muddy) the woman engages in a bit of psychological judo and by the end the man seems to realize…love wasn’t what he thought it was? He is inherently unloveable?

All you remember of the whole affair are certain words she said in her sleep, the ones that tell you what’s wrong with you: the malady of death.

Soon you give up, don’t look for her anymore, either in the town or at night or in the daytime.

Even so you have managed to live that love in the only way possible for you. Losing it before it happened.

Or he’s gay? (I missed the gay subtext in French and in English alike. Sometimes I’m not gifted at close reading.) Which then makes the extreme violence of the man’s initial terms for the relationship something on par with, say, Phil’s emotional abuse and psychological torture of Rose Gordon in The Power of the Dog. How aware either of these men are about their natural proclivities, or how they feel about them, is up for discussion.

Duras wrote in a variety of mediums, no stranger to film or stage, so it’s not surprising that her afterword on this very short piece is a reflection on how she would stage it as a play. Nor is it surprising that people have done exactly that!

Rose/House

Appropriately enough, this review of an Austin Feminist Sci-Fi Book Club pick will go up while I’m en route to Austin!

A Memory Called Empire and A Desolation Called Peace were some of the best sci-fi I read in…whatever year it was. So when a new novella from Arkady Martine was announced, I immediately suggested it to the Austin Feminist Sci-Fi Book Club.

Rose/House is a completely different beast from the Teixcalaanli books. Rather than the far-flung reaches of space, we’re on Earth in a relatively near future. A world-famous architect who incorporated AI into all of his creations has recently died in the last and best of his houses, Rose House. In accordance with his will, the only visitor allowed in the house is his archivist and former student Selene—and since the Rose House AI takes this protocol extremely seriously, it’s more than a little concerning when the AI calls the police to report the presence of a dead body inside the house. Selene is therefore flown in as a person of interest, not to mention that investigating officer Martinez has no other way of accessing her John Doe.

Some novels should be short stories; some short stories should be novels. Or I’m not sure what this should be. There’s a lot that’s implied that requires reading between the lines—something I’ve never been good at as a reader. The solution to the mystery also feels like a cheap trick, and the hint to a later plot twist was so heavily telegraphed earlier on that it feels unsatisfying.

A comparison naturally arises to Six Wakes (sci-fi locked room whodunnit) and on the plus side, this was a much quicker read and therefore all the more enjoyable for not wearing out its welcome. Nonetheless, Rose/House doesn’t live up to the impossibly high bar Martine set up in the Teixcalaanli novels; I would have been hard pressed to name her as the author if I hadn’t known going in. I don’t know that I necessarily want more Teixcalaanli novels from Martine—it’s always something of a tragedy, I think, when a character’s or series’ popularity essentially forces their author to continue along a track they’d much rather abandon—but the brand of noir in Rose/House doesn’t seem like her strong point.

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.