novels – Koba English

Jag sjunger och bergen dansar

Most of the reviews here recently are from an international book club my American friend in Turkey invited me to at the beginning of the year. Which is to say, Jag sjunger och bergen dansar by Irene Solà was our pick for May!

Much like with En attendant la montée des eaux, the back-of-the-book summary for this one (in my opinion) mischaracterized the plot as well as the tone of the book. In this case, the blurb for Jag sjunger… suggests that the book is a kind of bildungsroman focusing on a pair of Catalonian siblings, or perhaps a family portrait. At least that’s the case with the Swedish blurb (my own rough translation):

Farmer and poet Domènec lives a rural life in the Pyrenees mountains in northern Catalonia, in the lingering shadows of a war-torn past. One day, out picking mushrooms during a thunderstorm, he is struck dead by lightning. Left behind are his wife, Sió, and their two children, Mia and Hilari. Together, they have to remember and create their lives in a mythological landscape where people, as well as nature, have something to say about the land’s unhealed wounds–but also about the possibilities of love.

When I Sing, Mountains Dance is a marvelous novel depicting, in a unique poetic style overflowing with literary delight, previously unspoken Catalonian experiences and a people subject to the whims of Mother Nature.

The book doesn’t really focus on Sió, Mia, and Hilari trying to collectively remember Domènec. Nor does it focus on how they struggle to create a life for themselves. It’s more of a portrait of an entire community and landscape anchored in a pair of tragic events. Because what’s not clear from that summary is that most of the book’s perspective characters are not, in fact, Sió, Mia, or Hilari. Not only do we get to hear from their neighbors; we get to hear from anonymous visiting tourists to their village, storm clouds, ghosts, dogs, mushrooms, even the mountains themselves. And where Solà really excels in Jag sjunger… is in crafting a genuine variety of voices, often supernatural or otherwordly. Each chapter is so self-contained that you could equally call the book a collection of short stories rather than a novel, even as the red thread of Mia and Hilari brings many of them together.

I’ve had a mixed experience with novels written by poets. Kris is a powerful work of art and I enjoyed On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, while Ixelles left a lot to be desired. I think the determining factor here is the novel’s structure: are we talking about a straightforward, traditional plot? Or something more avant garde? The common denominator in all three books I enjoyed was their episodic, decentralized structure. The timeline is often erratic, jumping across chronology, in favor of presenting specific scenes or images rather than a straightforward narrative with a beginning, middle, and end. The same holds true for Jag sjunger…: we begin with the death of Domènec and we end with Mia (perhaps?) achieving something like closure about various tragedies in her life, but in between the timescale is just all over the place. When poets aren’t afraid to lean into their strengths and experiment with a form rather than try to capitulate to established market norms, that’s when interesting art happens.

And finally, I love seeing how book covers vary internationally. The English language ones all feature a landscape, with assorted flora in the foreground and the Pyrenees in the background. The Swedish edition, on the other hand, focuses almost entirely on the mushrooms, with only a subtle framing from the contours of the Pyrenees. (It took a minute of staring to realize it was supposed to be the Pyrenees and not just a ragged piece of fabric or paper.) Tranan knows how to appeal to their target demographic.

En attendant la montée des eaux

As can be inferred from the sparse updates here, I haven’t finished many books lately. This is attributable to being busy with work but also the fact that the book I was most recently trying to get through was Maryse Condé‘s En attendant la montée des eaux. According to my check-out dates from the library, I started this one back in February. My tardy pace is no way any fault of Condé’s, since I was engrossed in her writing and the story from the beginning—it’s always the natural consequence of reading in French.

I first became aware of Condé through a short biography in one of Karavan’s 2024 issues following her death last April. Now and again the journal will include one of these retrospectives on the death of a particular favorite (of the magazine’s editorial staff? of the Swedish literati?), which is a handy if somewhat grim way for me to discover new authors. Stockholm library has a fairly wide offering of her books in the original French, so I could get started right away. I put Moi, Tituba sorcière… on my Storygraph TBR, but mostly as a placeholder for any Condé book. En attendant… happened to be the first and easiest one to find.

En attendant la montée des eaux follows obstetrician Babakar, a Malian now residing in Guadeloupe, in the chaos surrounding his surprise adoption of an orphaned infant. In the middle of a dark and stormy night, the young Movar appears on Babakar’s doorstep and asks him assist in an emergency birth. The child’s father is unknown, though presumed murdered back in Haiti; the mother, an undocumented Haitian migrant named Reinette, dies in childbirth before Babakar can do anything to save her. Still scarred by the loss of his beloved wife and their unborn child to political violence back in Africa, Babakar takes it upon himself to adopt the newborn and names her Anaïs. This act promptly throws his life into disarray: the native Guadeloupeans, who had never been fond of him but who take an even dimmer view of Haitian immigrants, slowly abandon his practice, while as far as the local Haitians are concerned Babakar has stolen one of their children. On top of this, Babakar’s closest confidante and only friend passes away shortly afterwards. It’s not surprising, then, that when Movar returns and demands that Babakar bring Anaïs to Haiti in accordance with the wishes of her dying mother, Babakar just shrugs his shoulders and decides, “why not?” Once in Haiti, Babakar quickly settles in with Movar’s family: his friend and mentor Fouad and two younger sisters, Jahina and Myriam.

This sets up the various stories, long and short, that take up the bulk of the book. This is really my only criticism, which isn’t really a criticism as such but more an observation: Anaïs is absent for most of the book, and when she does appear, Babakar doesn’t really seem to be parenting her all that much, no matter how much we are assured by the narration that she is the light of his life. This makes sense structurally, because the story of Babakar and Anaïs is the set dressing for bringing the ensemble cast together. At a rough estimate I would say that at least a third, maybe half, of En attendant... consists of flashbacks from Babakar as well as the various secondary characters: Movar, the Haitian migrant who had been desperately in love with Reinette and who had been the one to bring Babakar into things; Movar’s friend and mentor Fouad, a Palestinian chef and would-be poet exiled from Lebanon to Haiti; Reinette’s estranged sister Estrella; Estrella’s jilted lover Roji. Together they give Condé an excuse to present these different narratives alongside each other in one book. But this structure has a weird side effect where all of the present-day scenes involving Anaïs feel a bit like an afterthought.

I’m not alone in this sentiment, it seems. The first thing I do after finishing a book is to see what other people thought of it, not because I don’t have an opinion of my own but because it’s always gratifying to see someone validate your own take. Other times, a reviewer will level a particular piece of criticism that makes me stop and reflect on my own experience of the book: do I agree or disagree? In this case, a lot of other readers felt the story dragged. While I can understand why other people might feel that way, I personally didn’t. Perhaps this is in part a marketing issue, as the English summary of the book suggests a much more breathless, nail-biting story than what takes place:

Babakar is a doctor living alone, with only the memories of his childhood in Mali. In his dreams, he receives visits from his blue-eyed mother and his ex-lover Azelia, both now gone, as are the hopes and aspirations he’s carried with him since his arrival in Guadeloupe. Until, one day, the child Anaïs comes into his life, forcing him to abandon his solitude. Anaïs’s Haitian mother died in childbirth, leaving her daughter destitute―now Babakar is all she has, and he wants to offer this little girl a future. Together they fly to Haiti, a beautiful, mysterious island plagued by violence, government corruption, and rebellion. Once there, Babakar and his two friends, the Haitian Movar and the Palestinian Fouad, three different identities looking for a more compassionate world, begin a desperate search for Anaïs’s family.

“Desperate” is not quite the word I would use. Anaïs’s family consists solely of Estrella, who proves trivially easy to track down. To the extent any search in this story is desperate, it’s the living’s search for the dead: Movar’s search for Reinette, and then later Jahina and Myriam’s search for Movar. Desperation? Absolutely. Just not the kind advertised on the back of the book.

Likewise, a lot of people were put off by the seemingly relentless tragedy. Maybe the fact that I crawled through the book over the course of three months helped in this regard, as I never felt overwhelmed by all of the (and this is a technical term) bummer shit. Upon reflection, of course, I’d say that yeah, of course En attendant… is filled with a lot of bummer shit. It’s about colonialism, about neoliberalism, about power; you can’t tackle these subjects and keep everything sunshine and roses. Again, this might have been a case of false advertising, though more subtly: to my reading that English summary is making a promise that the story doesn’t really keep. I don’t know that Babakar, Movar, or Fouad would say that they were looking for a more compassionate world as such, and I don’t think they’ve found one by the end of the book, either.

But if it’s a book filled with tragedy, then Condé keeps a light enough touch throughout that (for me) it never comes across as relentless. I’m a cynical, jaded reader, and I consider myself highly sensitive (maybe even oversensitive) to even the slightest impression of tragedy wielded as a blunt tool of emotional manipulation. I’m not here for your teenage cancer patients and their romance, John Green, and I think it was tacky of you to write the book in the first place. In En attendant… the deaths and devastation are presented as plain facts of life, inevitable occurrences on a long enough timeline. In a brief aside, for example, Babakar has failed to save the miscarriage of a young teenage mother (fifteen years old, the book tells us). The mother is described as exhibiting both relief and a false display of mourning, but then Condé adds, off-handedly, that the girl’s relief would be short lived because not much later she would find herself pregnant again. In a single sentence, the enormity of this event is deflated and the whole thing becomes almost blasé.

This perspective is maybe a natural consequence of Condé’s narrative ambivalence. Not ideological ambivalence, to be clear: political violence and instability only leads to suffering, especially for those at the bottom. No one advocating for such is portrayed sympathetically, regardless of who they claim to represent. But narrative ambivalence in terms of what is fact and what is fiction, what is the true nature of events. While nothing in En attendant… is quite as drastic as in, say, “In a Bamboo Grove,” Condé often presents us with parallel narratives or interpretations of events that are so precisely weighed that either (or both) could be true. Babakar’s nightly visits from his mother are treated as factual events, but Haitian vodoun practitioners consistently fail to work any similar miracles for characters in the novel. Babakar unearths a variety of accounts of his wife’s death, all of which are unsatisfactory but all of which could equally be true. Fouad dreams of being a poet and subtly boasts about his natural talent, but we never read any of his work and only have Babakar’s thoroughly nonplussed response by which to judge Fouad’s work. Estrella’s account of herself and her life is not entirely incompatible with what we hear about her from Roji, even if in one story she’s the heroine and another the villain—and then she dies before we can learn more to judge for ourselves.

The Swedish translation from Helena Böhme was well done. There are brief conversations throughout the book in Creole, posing an extra problem to solve: even if the translator herself can decode them, how to present them to the reader? Böhme opted to keep the original and then present a Swedish translation in brackets, which I think is the optimal way to present both the difference between Creole and French (the class difference, the Self/Other difference) and the translated meaning. There’s also a list of Caribbean and West African terms at the back that Böhme chose not to render in Swedish at all. Some of them seemed simple enough that she could have included the explanation in the text, I thought, but others were more complex or abstract. The English translation is from Condé’s husband, Richard Philcox, and was longlisted for the 2021 National Book Award for Translated Literature. Even though I didn’t read it, I assume you’re in good hands there.

An Unnecessary Woman

After years of an uncertain future on my TBR—always tempted to admit defeat and remove it, yet never quite gave in—my WhatsApp book club decided the issue for me and made Rabih Alameddine’s An Unnecessary Woman our read for March.

My reluctance about getting around to An Unnecessary Woman was entirely because I thought it would be a very serious, morose book. I think I added it to my TBR at about the same time as Bel Canto, and then after I read Bel Canto last year assumed An Unnecessary Woman would be more of the same.

This was not the case at all!

An Unnecessary Woman unfolds over the space of two days in the life of the narrator Aaliya, a childless divorcée living alone in Beirut who has just accidentally dyed her hair blue. After working for years in a bookstore, she is now retired (or unemployed? her source of income was unclear to me) and spends her days translating her favorite books into Arabic. In the space of these two days, the isolated and solitary Aaliya reflects on her life in Beirut, her rare friendships and strained familial relationships, her love of music and literature. Aaliya and Renée from L’Élégance du hérisson would get on like a house on fire.

I go through periods in my life where I get very grumpy and frustrated with fiction. There are so many books, so many novels, what’s the point of trying to wade through the tidal wave of stories out there? Maris Kreizman over on LitHub expressed it well, though less from a reader or existentialist perspective and more from a publishing perspective. An Unnecessary Woman was just the book I needed to read in that sort of mood.

The Idiot

The Idiot made me feel like an idiot: there’s my pithy one-sentence review.

Crime and Punishment was one of my favorite pieces of required reading in high school (and one of my favorite books, full stop), so I went on a bit of a Dostoyevsky collecting spree in my early twenties. The Brothers Karamazov, Notes From the Underground, The House of the Dead and, of course, The Idiot got piled on my TBR with abandon, but I only ever finished Brothers.

Well, now that I’m making a more concerted effort to clear out my TBR, it was time to finish that project!

I made an attempt at The Idiot in Swedish a few years ago, but I quickly gave up—I was swamped with work and didn’t have the focus left for Dostoyevsky in Swedish (even if I was curious about translations besides Constance Garnett’s). Browsing the shelves at the freshly renovated library at Medborgarplatsen back in January, I came across the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation (pictured here) and decided why not! So here we are.

The translation is great and I would like to sing the praises of the abundance of explanatory end notes. Very interesting, very informative, very essential. Well done, Pevear and Volokhonsky! I might have cleared one book out of the TBR queue by finishing this, but I also just added two more because now I’m deeply curious about their treatment of the Dostoyevsky I’ve already read.

But man oh man, as far as a story goes this was a confounding bummer for me, which is why it made me feel like an idiot. I am bad at subtext even in the best of times; with novels of a certain age it’s all but impossible. I would never have guessed at Totsky’s sexual exploitation of Nastasya Filippovna if I weren’t reading summaries of the book as I finished each part.

And while I appreciate the larger point, or the thought, or motivation, or whatever behind the book—what happens when you take an Actually Good person and throw them into real society?—the society in question felt populated by flat characters who were either extreme melodramatic stereotypes or bland interchangeable nobodies, making their response to pure angelic precious baby Myshkin not particularly interesting. In a lot of ways The Idiot was the complete opposite of what I remember from Crime and Punishment or The Brothers Karamazov, with complicated characters presented with nuance and depth, but I read them so long ago that maybe I’m just making that up.

Characters aside, the structure is also a bit loosey-goosey. There are whole pivotal sections that just happen off-screen, off the page, that people only refer to in weird info dumps, like Nastasya Filippovna ping-ponging back and forth between Prince Myshkin and Rogozhin. There’s no urgent organizing crisis or imminent threat, no murder to solve (or get away with), just a Jane Austen problem of who gets to marry whom. The one saving grace is that it ends in murder, which is more than you can say for a Jane Austen novel.

Speaking of: it would be great if someone could Wide Sargasso Sea the novel from Nastasya Flippovna’s perspective, and maybe someday someone will. I’d be the first to sign up to read it.

Trois femmes puissantes

After I fell in love with Marie NDiaye through La Vengeance m’appartient, I was thrilled to find out that the Stockholm library also had Trois femmes puissantes. In French, Swedish, and English to boot!

I racked up a late fee in excess of SEK 200 in order to really suck the marrow out of this one, though there were long periods where I just didn’t have the time or the mental capacity to engage with French. My insistence on reading sections in French, then Swedish (Ragna Essén, translator), then English (John Fletcher, translator), then French again means that the 230-odd pages ballooned into nearly 1,000 pages. I forgive myself! Even if this very nearly tanked my French reading goals for 2024!

Trois femmes puissantes is a collection of character sketches of three women whose lives are (possibly?) loosely intertwined. First we have Norah, a successful lawyer who has returned to her father in Senegal on an urgent matter—mounting the legal defense of her beloved brother, who stands accused of killing his stepmother with whom he’d been having an affair. Then we have Fanta, though her story is told through the perspective of Rudi, her French husband. We meet the couple destitute in France, several years after being forced to leave Senegal. Finally we have Khady Demba, a young Senegalese widow who finds herself forced to emigrate to Europe.

The thematic elements of parent-child relationships and the ripple effects of toxic masculinity connect all three stories, though there are hints or more explicit material links as well. We actually first meet Khady in Norah’s story, as a domestic worker in her father’s house. Norah’s father acquired and then lost a substantial amount of wealth through the ownership of a tourist village in Dakar—one that Rudi’s father may or may not have been engaged in constructing. (NDiaye doesn’t make it clear either way; I decided to read it that way because it gives a nice symmetry and mutuality to all the relationships among the women.) And finally, we learn that Fanta is a distant relation of Khady, and it’s the prospect of Fanta’s imagined wealth in France that sets Khady on the road to Europe.

Like in La Vengeance m’appartient, NDiaye leaves a lot of questions unanswered. Norah’s and Fanta’s stories end fairly inconclusively: we don’t know the outcome of Norah’s trial, we don’t know whether Rudi’s epiphany will materially change the quality of Fanta’s life. Only Khady’s story ends with a clear, decisive outcome. All three stories were fantastic; Norah’s was my favorite, because I found Norah’s ambiguous relationship with her father so compelling, but the way NDiaye builds tension and suspense in the other two is just superb.

However, once again I have to note that I was annoyed by the English translation. At this point, maybe I just have to admit defeat when it comes to French. I didn’t like the English translation of La Vengeance m’appartient, either, but that was a different translator (Jordan Stump). If two different translators both produce fairly similar translations of the same author, then I’m willing to admit that the problem is me. I’m by no means fluent in French; I don’t have an inner ear attuned enough to judge French prose for being clunky, or old-fashioned, or exceptionally beautiful. It’s back to the Pevear and Volokhonsky debate all over again: sometimes the original is just plain awkward.

That said, while Fletcher doesn’t seem to have much of his own commentary out in the world, the little I read in this article by Lily Meyer over on Public Books didn’t necessarily endear him to me. I didn’t care for Stump’s writing style in interviews, either, but he at least didn’t come across as ambiguous or even hostile to NDiaye’s writing as Fletcher does here. And I’ll keep throwing myself at the brick walls of NDiaye’s writing because whatever my level of competence in French may be, there is something in her writing that I find magnetic and spooky.

Ormens väg på hälleberget

This was another move in my last-ditch effort to reach my yearly “books I’ve owned for over a year” goal. I doubt I’ll reach twelve (two more by the end of the year? unlikely), but reaching ten is good enough for me. That’s a nice round number.

Ormens väg på hälleberget has a whole cultural cachet that I was unaware of when my mother-in-law gave me a copy. I had no idea about the movie, about Torgny Lindgren, about anything. I put off reading it for years because I knew it would probably be bleak and unrelenting. Not only judging by the blurb on the back of the book but by the fact that my mother-in-law has a taste for the bleak and unrelenting. I think the same mechanism that allows David Lynch to be a relatively normal—even pleasant and cheerful—person while making incredibly disturbing movies is at play in her personality, too.

No surprise, Ormens väg på hälleberget is indeed bleak and unrelenting! But it was also good that I put off reading it for so long, because the novel is written almost entirely in a nineteenth century dialect that would have been incomprehensible to me when I first received it nine or ten years ago.

The story follows Johan Johansson, or often just Jani, as he bears witness to the exploitation of his mother, his sister, and eventually his wife under the insatiable lust of the local merchant family, first the patriarch Ol Karlsa and then his son Karl Orsa. It would be easy for this kind of story to descend into overwrought melodrama, but Jani is so disassociated from what’s happening around him that the tone stays firmly tragic.

Beyond that I don’t think Lindgren needs a review from me. Ormens väg på halleberget is a modern classic, Lindgren was a member of the Swedish Academy, who am I to have anything interesting to say about his work. But if anyone is in the mood for something bleak and unrelenting, it’s available in English as The Way of the Serpent.

Merry Christmas!

The Dragon’s Village

Numbers are hard. I realized sometime in November that I had miscounted my progress in my “ten books I already own” goal and began scouring my shelves for something short that I could knock out.

Enter the dragon. Or technically: YuanTsung Chen’s The Dragon’s Village.

This is yet another stop on the “selections of bookstores” past tour: I picked it up from What The Book? in Seoul in its glory days, at the airy and well-lit second-floor location overlooking Itaewon-ro. Pour one out. Press F to pay respects.

An image of What The Book's old storefront on Itaewon-ro. — From Derek Versus Lonely Planet

In my mind’s eye, I can still see the shelf where I picked it up, and I can remember that my decision to buy it was because I knew nothing about Chinese history generally, recent or otherwise, and that reading about the land reform and the Great Leap Forward seemed like it would be a good self-improvement project.

It just took a while!

The Dragon’s Village languished unread in my library for over a decade. I started a couple times but couldn’t get into it. Now with my arbitrary deadline looming, I got to work and pushed through my initial resistance to finish the book.

The setting is 1949 China. The 17-year-old narrator, Guan Ling-ling, joins a revolutionary theater group and is sent to the remote village of Longxiang in northwest China to help carry out the land reform. The Dragon’s Village follows her trials and tribulations as she works alongside party cadres and sympathetic villagers to establish what they hope will be a better, more just, more equitable world. Chen frankly describes the misery of peasant life and the bleakness of the landscape, setting the context for why—at least in certain regions—the promise of land and wealth redistribution could gain the foothold it did. She also bluntly chronicles the obstacles and setbacks she and the other party cadres face, and equally sets the context for why the redistribution plans didn’t gain even more of a foothold. Through the novel we become witness to a pivotal moment in time, full of potential, when things might still have been otherwise but yet were not. It ends before anything has truly been settled, on a note of optimism and hope that still carries the weight of historical inevitably, as Ling-ling is speaking to an elderly and utterly destitute village woman:

“Da Niang, come. Come and get your land. It’s time.”

Chen’s style is hard to enjoy for its own sake, and even when I was deep into the story I was reading on despite the prose, not because of it; at best it didn’t get in the way. As far as I can tell, Chen wrote the novel in English, so there’s not a matter of translation at play here (officially, anyway). The phrase I kept thinking of to describe her style was “flat affect,” where the emotional tenor is always subdued almost the point of nonexistence. The other thing that put me off at first, but gets better as the novel progresses (mostly because people just talk less) is the tendency for characters to infodump during dialogue in a way that doesn’t sound like how anyone would actually talk.

Chen is very clear that this is a novel that draws from real life. “The story is fiction, but it is true,” is how she describes it in the foreword: a roman à clef. How real are the peasants we read about? How have their stories been refined, joined together, teased apart to become the people that Ling-ling meets? While the specific character we read about known as “the virgin widow” might not have a one-to-one correspondence with a single person who lived and died on this earth, the circumstances of her life were no doubt real for countless women. As an amalgamation of their biographies, the fictional virgin widow becomes true.

Or, maybe, in this case Chen drew on one very specific person she met in her land reform experience. Who knows!

This kind of blurred line, or overlap, between fiction and true didn’t bother me as much as it did in, say, Ali Smith’s Summer. Actually, it didn’t bother me at all. The Dragon’s Village is a novel but it reads more like a documentary or a diary of historical experiences and events, while Summer is a fictional plot specifically crafted to deliver a rhetorical (dare I say political?) point. “Based on a true story” is a lot easier to swallow if what follows at least gives the appearance of neutral documentation rather than rhetorical posturing.

(The more I reflect on Summer, it seems like the less I like it. Ouch.)

Of course, as an account of one of the major global political events of the twentieth century The Dragon’s Village can’t really be read non-politically. I don’t know the background to the novel’s publication, or the waters Chen had to navigate to get it published, but I have to assume it was tricky. Ling-ling is presented as an idealist who believes in the revolution and who wants to help the people she sees living in abject poverty, but she also clearly distances herself from the extremes of Maoist cult of personality. At one point she is distressed to see that her elderly hostess Da Niang has replaced an image of the kitchen god on the wall with an image of Chairman Mao. Not because Ling-ling has any allegiance to the folk traditions encompassing the kitchen god—she considers them all superstitions—but because she is wary of what the single-minded adulation of Chairman Mao might lead to.

Zao Jun - The Kitchen God — I went and Googled “Chinese kitchen god” so you don’t have to.

The story is fiction, but it is true. Does this moment in the book reflect an exchange or insight Chen had in the moment? Was it a flourish she was encouraged to add to a novel that might otherwise land as not hostile enough to Maoism?

Chen’s other books also seem to be largely autobiographical (The Secret Listener and Return to the Middle Kingdom), and with The Secret Listener (published in 2021!) the criticism leveraged against her seems to be based in this blending of fact and fiction. I want to have something intelligent to say here about who is criticizing her for what and what any given audience expects out of an account of Maoist China but I’m fresh out of brain. An interview with the New York Times only vaguely mentions that it’s men calling her a “fabulist,” but no names or further details are given, and I’m too tired to research. As it stands, for me The Dragon’s Village is a valuable primary-ish source for a very singular moment in history. When I decided to really sit down and finish the book, I assumed I would toss it on the giveaway pile afterwards. But there is something about it that I want to keep in my library. Warning? Reminder? Enigma?

All three?

The Josie Gambit

Back in the summer, forces beyond my understanding compelled me to look up The Josie Gambit, a book I read in fourth grade or so. I remembered it as unsettling, with an ending that I didn’t quite get but nonetheless felt a bit grim. Maybe it was the ending that made the book stick in my head better than a lot of things I was reading at that age, who knows. But I would think about it now and again over the years, wondering if I should read it again, and finally I got the idea to check on the Internet Archive.

A note from Future Katherine!

I first wrote this post sometime in July. Just a couple of weeks before I finally hit the “schedule” button, the Internet Archive suffered a massive DDOS attack and was offline for days to fix the issue. The Internet Archive is an invaluable resource, and will probably only become more important as we stumble into an era of deepfakes and unreality. Please consider donating to support their work!

Of course, the juvenile mystery/thriller of your childhood is much less unsettling when you read it again as an adult. And honestly the jury’s out on whether this post will ever see the light of day, because discussing middle grade nostalgia reads seems like filler content.

Another note from Future Katherine! The time for filler content has come.

Our protagonist is twelve-year-old Greg, who’s spending the school year with his grandmother out in Idaho while his single mom travels for work. He’s long been friendly with the neighbor family, the Nolans, whose patriarch taught him how to play chess. Now his friend Josie Nolan is having a rough patch with her friend Tory. Things get weird and dramatic, Greg joins the school chess club, and he finally cracks the case of why Tory is acting so weird.

Reading The Josie Gambit now as an adult in 2024, it is immensely Of The 80s. Single moms! Divorce! Scandal over implied drug use! I mean just look at that cover!

But what sets it apart is Mary Francis Shura’s pitch perfect narrative voice for Greg and also the seriousness with which the book takes chess. Greg’s thinking about chess and observations of chess games is what helps him figure out why Tory is acting the way she is, and the narration is peppered with the kind of insights into chess strategy that you would expect from a preteen who was pretty serious about the game. There’s even an appendix (still written from Greg’s perspective) to explain the basic rules and mechanics.

I get now why I thought it was unsettling, but as an adult it’s not really the stuff of nightmares. A fun read if you come across it somewhere!

En man som heter Ove

I deeply resent that En man som heter Ove made me cry.

I’m inherently distrustful of media that makes me cry and my first instinct is always to take a step back and pick apart the story to see if it used any gimmicks or cheap tricks to manipulate me. (See, for example, Ali Smith’s Summer.) And while Fredrik Backman did a great job with strategically revealing the significant pieces of Ove’s backstory so that each moment hits with maximum impact, that’s good storytelling, not a cheap trick. Likewise certain story elements could have landed as overly melodramatic if the rest of the book wasn’t more or less farcical.

No, En man… hadn’t cheated to get those tears out of me. So why the resentment?

The book follows a man called Ove (quel surpris) in the weeks after being nudged into early retirement/laid off from his job. A chance accident with a car trailer and his mailbox gets him drawn into the lives of his new neighbors, and then gradually some of his older ones. In the process we flash back to the important episodes of Ove’s life up until that point, none of which I’ll go into detail here because they count as spoilers in my view. It’s not a spoiler, however, to note that the climactic point of conflict in the story is a faceoff between agents of the municipal social service authority on one side and Ove and his neighbors on the other. That’s when I had the thought: I wonder how Backman votes.

By that point in the book, it’s become clear that one of the consistent themes in the challenges Ove has faced in his life is “men in white shirts,” which function very clearly as a stand-in for the state. Which is fine and good; I’ve had my own very personal struggles with Swedish authorities and how they have either failed (from my perspective) to carry out their function or how they have enabled (again, from my perspective) individual bad actors to gatekeep access to resources that are essential for a decent quality of life.

However!

I’ve also had experiences where they (from my perspective) carried out their function, and in doing so furthered the best interests of myself or my loved ones. It has been, on the whole, a mixed bag of personal experiences.

The bag in En man… is not mixed; it’s uniformly pretty bad. Sometimes it’s a kind of bad that seems (sadly) pretty likely or reasonable, but other times it’s a kind of bad that made me raise a metaphorical eyebrow. Was it drawing from a lived experience, or was it drawing uncritically from the rumor mill about state overreach?

The biggest conflict out of all the “men in white shirts” conflicts is where a man in his 60s with pretty profound Alzheimer’s will spend the rest of his days: at home with his wife or institutionalized? For maximum drama, during this scene the Bad State Dude is present with three other assistants to (implicitly) physically overpower the elderly wife who wants to take care of her husband in their home herself. The state has a monopoly on violence, yes, yadda yadda yadda, but the intimidation here is so blatant that I had to wonder: in a real life version of this situation, is this how things would go?

(Contrast this scene with a recent story from Hem och hyra about how elderly individuals currently residing in regular apartments who apply for a spot in senior living facilities are often denied one, including people with severe dementia, Alzheimer’s, or depression. The state isn’t coming to kidnap people out of their homes but is rather refusing to let them move into one that they feel would be much more suitable.)

Backman also includes scenes with the inverse dynamics, so to speak: problems that could potentially be solved through the intervention of a state or municipal authority are instead addressed by individuals. The municipality refuses to build a wheelchair ramp at a school for one of the teachers, or to provide wheelchair adaptations for her kitchen, so Ove builds all of that himself. An abusive husband gets beaten up by Ove and another neighbor, after which the abuser just disappears out of his victim’s life forever, never to return*. After trying and failing to get problem tenants evicted, the same neighbor plants some narcotics on the property and then calls the cops. (I guess you can split that last one either way, since at the end of the day involving the police is a way of involving the state.)

*Rarely how it works out in real life situations of domestic violence!

It’s a bit like re-watching Ghostbusters with an adult’s political understanding and sensibilities: all those scenes with the suit from the Environmental Protection Agency have a tone that’s more than just comedy. Subtext and all of that.

That said, Sweden is not the US. A plot point (or recurring theme) in a novel about the uselessness, incompetence, or even malice, of municipal authorities maybe is less toxic or remarkable here because you don’t have the same years and years of toxic discourse in the culture. I’m not sure how all that works.

Therein lies the resentment, I suppose: the vague feeling that I got judo’d into agreeing with an implicit argument I wouldn’t have agreed with if it were presented more explicitly in something like an essay or opinion piece. That I had maybe fallen for a form of propaganda. The fact that I really liked the book despite myself.

Another contributing factor to the resentment for me is probably also the portrayal of Ove’s fat neighbor, Jimmy. While Ove’s fixation on the size of Jimmy’s body and constant narrative comment on it can be attributed to coming from a perspective character with certain beliefs about the world, it’s the author who chooses to portray Jimmy as constantly either eating or about to eat (and always too much, is the implication). This is presented as incidental comic relief, but it’s not particularly clever or original. None of the other secondary characters—the neighbors Ove ultimately comes to befriend—are reduced to such a flat trope, so Jimmy’s treatment feels out of place.

None of this is to be read like I think Backman has some kind of agenda with En man…, either. I emphatically do not. If he did, then the book wouldn’t have been nearly as good as it is because agendas ruin (most) books. But stories arise out of our beliefs about the world, from the grand to the banal, and there are enough recurring themes in this story that it makes me wonder if I can see the beliefs behind them. There’s even an extent to which I think I would probably agree with him in some of those beliefs. Way before I was ever wondering about Backman’s politics, I had the thought: is this the collective Swedish cultural fantasy? “This” being: wanting a friendly stranger to just land on your doorstep with nearly aggressive kindness and to forcibly include you in a social group.

It’s not at all surprising that En man… struck such a nerve with Swedes. Zakrisson mentions the book by name in Grannskapsrevolutionen and the research that she presents there supports the general background feeling in the novel: that the average person (Swede? Stockholmer?) feels isolated and lonely and disconnected from the people around them. And unlike some of the conflicts with the “white shirts” Ove has throughout the novel, the solution to that problem is maybe only possible at a grassroots, individual level. There’s no municipal authority that can come and declare by fiat that this or that collection of buildings is a community. Individual actors have to decide to say hello, or help change a bike tire, or whatever else. The happy ending of En man… no doubt reflects the world a lot of its readers wished they lived in, where they felt like part of a meaningful social network.

Anyway thank you for coming to my TEDtalk about a goofy comedy novel that clearly didn’t deserve THIS much critical analysis.

Doktor Glas Daily

One of the few books I have left of my personal library at my parents’ house in the US is a Swedish paperback copy of Doktor Glas. It’s an early testament to my Swedish studies, with penciled notes covering the first page (after which point I gave up taking notes). I flipped through it while I was home, without anything else in Swedish except Min är hämnden—which was of course dependent on how quickly I could get through the French first. As my eyes fell over the opening paragraph, I remembered the email newsletter that I’d heard so much about: Dracula Daily. In case you missed it, web designer Matt Kirkland got the idea to set up a Substack that sends subscribers bite-sized (har har) chunks of Dracula to people via email. Dracula is an epistolary novel, so the episodic format of an email newsletter pretty neatly aligns with the original structure of the novel. On the dates of the letters (or newspaper articles, etc.), the newsletter sends out the corresponding chapter by email. It’s become quite popular. There are memes.

Then I noticed that the date of the first entry in Doktor Glas, June 12, wasn’t too far behind the actual calendar date.

Wouldn’t it be fun to do a version of Dracula Daily with this?

Thus I read Doktor Glas for the third or fourth time, this time in brief extracts, letting the story unfold for me in real time at the same pace as it unfolds for Tyko Glas.

I’d previously done a short walking tour of Stockholm based on the book as well. It was a fantastic idea, but presented through a bloated app that was a bit too gimmicky for the source material and that just about drained all the battery life out of my phone in little over an hour. Maybe one year I’ll combine the two and attempt to be in the right places on the right dates to get my reading done.

I mention all of this because October 7 is the date of the final chapter in Doktor Glas. This year’s reading is now over, and I can say that reading a book in this kind of controlled release format had a surprising effect on the entire experience.

Normally when you read a novel you’re compressing days, months, years of time into a few hours of a reading experience, or quite possibly extending a day or even just one or two hours of events into a reading experience that’s much longer than twenty-four hours. (I defy anyone, for example, to get through all of Ulysses in a single day.) But when you move through the story at the same speed as the character does, it becomes embodied in a very specific way. You have to move through the same stretches of time as them, waiting just as long as they do for something to happen. With the specific combination of Doktor Glas and living in Stockholm, the setting around you cycles through the same seasons that Glas describes. (Climate change reading of Doktor Glas: how do his descriptions of weather in Stockholm from June to September compare to what the equivalent period is like here now?)

On a spookier note, at times the practice took on a spiritual dimension, not dissimilar to what Zoltan describes in “Reading Jane Eyre as a Sacred Text.” There were even moments when it felt like outright bibliomancy. On a day when I felt absolutely terrible, for example, because I felt like I had made a fool out of myself in matters of friendship, Glas addresses the jilted Fru Gregorious: “Du måste komma över det. Du skall se att livet ännu har mycket för dig. Du skall vara stark.” Coincidence or not, there was something comforting about stumbling across those exact words in that precise moment.

The Dracula Daily format is also a fun exercise in patience and delayed gratification in a world where the default habit is to consume an entire book, show, series, whatever as quickly as possible. On the one hand it can make a big important classic less intimidating, but for something as relatively short as Doktor Glas it has the opposite effect, slowing you down and preventing you from reading the whole thing in just a few days. You pay closer attention. If all I have to read today is this paragraph, then I might as well look up this or that word that I can kind of guess at but don’t know for certain. I might as well read the whole section two or three times. Several weeks go by without any entries, building anticipation; other times the next chapter is no longer the inevitable forward momentum of a story but a pleasant surprise that you had nearly forgotten about.

This was a rewarding exercise and I’m grateful to Matt Kirkland for inadvertently giving me the idea. I look forward to applying it to other books.