Category Archives: What is literature for?

January 6, 2015 · 9:23 pm

China Mieville’s “Perdido Street Station”–Reading the first item in a trilogy as a prequel

After waiting for a considerable while for China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station to become available at my local library, long after I’d already read his loosely (very loosely) connected second and third books pertaining to the same world (The Scar and Iron Council), I was ready to write a post.  Nevertheless, it was the middle of the Christmas-New Year’s holiday break, and so I gave myself a few weeks off to do what people do during the holidays, at least partially due to the grim nature of the first book, which since I read it last functioned as a sort of prequel, willy-nilly.  Somehow, it was so masterful that I wanted to comment upon it, but so dour and again “grim” that I couldn’t bring myself to put a blight on the holidays by focusing on it.

Now, however, the New Year has begun, and it’s time to face realities, so since my New Year’s resolution, such as it is, is to get back to a more regular posting schedule, it’s time to face Perdido Street Station head-on.  First let me say that the book begins at the beginning in the sense of building the world of New Crobuzon, a city which reminds me very much of a world-class city like London (the city of which Miéville is a citizen).  It’s in the first book thus that we get hints of themes and types of characters developed in all three of the books.  For example, the government and the militia are overwhelmingly strong and overbearing, putting their fingers not only in every legal “pie” going, but also in most of the illegal ones, whatever will turn a profit for the individuals in power.  As well, there are drugs and illicit activities abounding in the society at large, which the government polices on the one hand and attempts to regulate for their own use on the other.  Challenging the nature of this corruption are such bodies as the outlawed rebel presses, one of which publishes the forbidden newspaper Runagate Rampant, and folk heroes such as Jack Half-a-Prayer, a rebel who helps from the shadows to set things right in whatever way he can.  Caught in between are natives of many races, like the khepri (semi-human semi-beetles) and the vodyanoi (frog-like characters capable of controlling water power), and cactacae (cactus people), who must choose sides and duck prejudice and unfairness.

The main character of this book is a scientist-cum-renegade named Isaac Grimnebulin, who is approached by a member of a humanoid bird race from the desert, called a garuda.  This garuda asks him to rebuild or restore his wings, which have been removed as a punishment for a crime against another garuda.  The garuda claims that he is unable to explain the crime in the language that a human would comprehend, but it involved depriving another garuda of choice in one of his/her life decisions.  They become friends, and in the process of trying to study flying things in order to know how to use aerodynamics and his special study of crisis technology, Isaac unintentionally becomes involved in a massive plot which brings danger to the whole city, and which he and his friends must correct.

At the center of the conspiracy is a costly drug known as “dreamshit,” a substance which not only the government but also any number of criminals are trying to control the distribution of.  This substance comes from a phenomenally powerful and dangerous creature known as a slake-moth, a huge flying being whose larvae are fed on the dreamshit which humans steal and take as a drug.  When Isaac unknowingly raises a caterpillar that becomes a slake-moth and breaks free, freeing as well its brothers and sisters from a laboratory where they are kept, all hell breaks loose, to put it mildly.  The government is hunting Isaac and his friends for even ever having had the slake-moth, and for interfering in their plans to sell them to a gangster.  And in ignorance of this conspiracy between the government and the gangster, Mr. Motley, Isaac’s khepri lover Lin accepts a job from the gangster which she thinks is simple because it seems only to involve making a statue of him.

The book is involved, painful, and full of incident; it is as full of harsh events and no-way-out circumstances as any realistic novel.  There is no way that this book could bear the typical label of science fiction/fantasy, “escape literature,” because the creatures, characters, events, and symbols of everyday life are all paralleled by what is actually in our world, regardless of how unrealistic they at first seem.  Note, however, that I am not calling it a bad book; on the contrary, it’s a real gem of a book to read and think about, and I’m even glad that I read it last, because I think it’s no less substantial than the other two books and even surpasses them in the sense that it initiates the reader into a new kind of fiction which while fantastic in specifics is full of humanism and moral pointedness in its generalities and themes.  Don’t go here if you are looking for an escape; but go here if you are in search of a finely-crafted, highly artistic literary experience that fulfills most reasonable expectations of surprising you and rewarding you and confirming your experiences and intuitions of how living beings should and should not treat each other.  You will certainly find what you seek in this book by China Miéville.

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November 16, 2014 · 8:37 pm

Anatomy of a Revolution–China Mieville’s “Iron Council”

I’ve reviewed two or three of China Miéville’s books before, and it’s important to say that each one, even those taking place in the same imaginative world, are all unique from each other.  Perdido Street Station, the first of three books about New Crobuzon, a world-class city state of Bas-Lag, was not available from the library when I first started, so I picked up with the second book, The Scar, read and reviewed it, and now I’ve finished the third book, Iron Council, and have some remarks which I hope are pertinent to make about it.  By the time I get to the original book, Perdido Street Station, I should be able to read it as a sort of prequel, and I’m sure I will still enjoy it.  But on with Iron Council.

Whereas The Scar took place on the sea and was in a sort of middle-time, with its emphasis on New Crobuzon as a world sea power, Iron Council shows the city many years later torn apart from without and within by a war with the powerful Tesh sea-lords and thaumaturges, and by the anarchy and rebellion of its disadvantaged and dissenting citizens.  The so-called Iron Council is a group of rebels who have taken over a train which was supposed to cross the continent to the “greater glory” of New Crobuzon.  But instead of building a railway from the East to the West, as was the mission of the man in charge, a mad visionary named Weather Wrightby, the Iron Councillors–composed of the free people, the enslaved “Remade” peoples (who have been physically altered with animal and machine parts by the government of New Crobuzon to punish them for offenses), and the peoples of other kinds of life forms who have been maltreated by the government–have taken off with the train across continent by laying down tracks and then taking them up behind as the train passes.  They then re-use the ties and rails in front of the train again, and continue repeating the process, making it difficult for the government militia to follow them.

Meanwhile, back in New Crobuzon, the many different factions in rebellion who are loosely loyal to a central Caucus of rebels, yet often can’t agree among themselves about goals and resources, take inspiration from the tales they hear at a distance about the Iron Council, and sporadically there are citizens going back and forth from one group to the other, carrying messages and forming alliances.  Each group has its difficulties and trials, and the book shows these in detail:  for the Iron Councillors and their followers, it’s a matter of staying alive through a rough journey across an unknown continent with dangers such as smokestone (smoke which rises unpredictably from the earth like a geyser and creates a stone figure from whatever it touches) and the cacotopic stain, a portion of the land wherein everything flows and slides, including the landscape and the strange beasts that emerge from it.  The travellers themselves are sometimes suddenly made to shift shape and die horrible deaths in the peculiar effluvia of the terrain, and yet they manage to emerge and sow in their path villages and homesteads by the train’s road.

But as dreadful visitations from the magicians of Tesh act upon the city of New Crobuzon, so at the same time the government sees an opportunity to crack the whip again over its escapees; the militia has circled the continent by water, and approached from the West to get at the Iron Councillors, hoping to end their ability to inspire revolution amongst the Caucus and revolutionaries at home in the city.  The book is bifurcated, with some chapters telling the tale of Ori, a young revolutionary in the city, and the friends and cohorts he finds, and other chapters telling the tale of Cutter and Judah Low (a golem-maker of rare quality) and their friends and associates.  As the book works toward its close, representatives of the two groups come together in the city and try to fight the government as one, yet the many factions, the uncertain information, and the massive effort aimed against them keep them constantly off-balance.  This picture that Miéville paints is fantastic in some of its specifics, such as the otherworldly monsters and thaumaturgy that invest the story with its horrific aspects, yet the picture is highly true-to-life in its portrait of the interactions of people fighting and trying to win through together.  It is everyman’s story of a revolution, and in the middle of it is the tender and frustrated love of Cutter for Judah Low, an inner story which takes place almost certainly in every revolt where people are close and must trust each other with their lives.

As I have said, the verisimilitude of the book when it comes to the interactions that guide peoples’ allegiances and loyalties in a revolution is spot-on; even those who have never as much as read a factual book about mutiny or rebellion will recognize the players in the drama in the book as they attempt to forge bonds or break ties or achieve their goals.  After all, these faces are those of the real-life heroes and villains we see every day as we listen to the news, gossip about celebrities and political figures, and vote someone into or out of office.  Granted, the book is fiction and is about an extreme season in a country’s history; yet I believe you too will begin to feel that the characters in this book remind you of someone you have heard about from the daily news, some rebel or warlord or senator.  In China Miéville’s fantasy/science fiction, we constantly deal with the real, and see the shadows of a past, present, and perhaps of a future familiar to us.  I won’t give away the book’s ending, but I will say that it is “lyrical,” as the blurb writer on the cover says, and is in some ways the only possible ending which could walk evenly between euphoria and despair; give the book a read sometime soon, and I predict that you too will be impressed with this author’s outstanding ability to provoke, entertain, and teach with a new voice.

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November 9, 2014 · 8:23 pm

When is a cicatrix a metaphor, and when is it actual?–China Mieville’s “The Scar”

A scar, or a cicatrix, or a series of scars, appears pertinently in three or four places in the book The Scar by China Miéville.  It is the second of his three books about the world of New Crobuzon and its denizens, the first being Perdido Street Station and the third being Iron Council.  The books are loosely connected and feature a world of cityscapes, seascapes, hard laws, and maritime justice.  This book, The Scar, happens to be the one I picked up first, and so I’m making my post on it first, not having read Perdido Street Station yet.  The Scar itself embodies a scar across the face of New Crobuzon, taking place mostly on the imaginary world of Bas-Lag’s oceans and seas in a piratical kingdom known as Armada, one opposed to New Crobuzon’s rule of the easily known parts of the world’s waters, and subsisting on what it can steal and rob from others.

But I should start at the beginning.  The main protagonist, a woman named Bellis Coldwine, is fleeing her beloved New Crobuzon in a ship bound for colonies in Nova Esperium because she is afraid of being questioned by authorities for her possible connections with a scientist known as Isaac, a man having something to do with a contagion in New Crobuzon.  She has done nothing, but has a strong feeling that this will not help her to maintain her own rights and freedom from imprisonment.  In fact, she uses her abilities as a translator of arcane languages to win her a berth aboard the Terpsichoria, a ship which also contains in its hull a number of prisoners with their own kinds of actual scars.  Their scars are the physical ones of the “Remade,” people whose bodies have been fitted with odd and outlandish limbs and gadgets to punish them for some infraction or other.  Her logic that outlaws are more comfortable in the colonies is fine, as far as it goes; that is, until the New Crobuzoner ship reaches the land of some of its allies, the cray people, only to find that one of its own three drilling towers maintained on the cray people’s harbor is missing!

At this point, things begin to destabilize around Bellis, and because of decisions taken by others, over which she has no control, she finds herself prisoner in a casual way aboard a pirate vessel which absorbs the ship she is on and adds it to a floating pirate city farther away in the waters, a city made up not only of its own native citizens, but far more of a community of freed Remade (or fRemade) peoples, people who have accepted a change in allegiance in exchange for their lives, and odd people from here and there across the face of the world who have lost their homes to the pirates or to chance.

Bellis never gives up hope of getting back home to New Crubuzon, where she hopes she will be able to return when she is no longer being sought.  But before this can happen, she goes through a scarring and self-changing life experience in the pirate city.  The city is divided into ridings ruled by powerful sea-lords, not excluding one called the Brucolac (a vampir), who has a “cadre” of vampirs working with him.  Another riding, or city section, is ruled by a man and woman called “the Lovers,” who have a strange history which Bellis Coldwine gradually susses out with the mysteriously inclined help of their henchman, one Uther Doul, a mercenary fighter who controls a mysterious Possible Sword, which makes several different possibilities happen at once when he fights.  Bellis is appalled by the way the lovers join, by making mirror image cuts on themselves and the other as an act of twisted love; they, of course, have scars, but more scarring still is the experience they foist upon the city, the experience of seeking a mysterious rift in the world called “The Scar,” where all things and all possibilities exist at once.

When Bellis and a man whom she thinks of as a sort of ally, one New Crobuzon spy named Silas Fennec (or Simon Fench) plot to sneak a message back to New Crobuzon about a supposedly eager-to-invade people named the grindylows, and involve a loyal fRemade man named Tanner Sack in their plot, Bellis finds out too late that she has been played by Silas Fennec, as has Tanner Sack, and there is actually much more than meets the eye to this spy who supposedly had only escape at heart.  She and Tanner Sack both are punished with lashes on the back, and thus she painfully and in agony acquires her own scars in this world, where the scars are both physical and psychic, but seemingly in equal measure hurtful.  But Silas Fennec has much more to suffer than they, not only from the pirate’s sense of justice, but also from the grindylows, who skulk along the bottom of the oceans until their time to strike comes.

There is a lot of wounding in this book, many weeping cuts and hacks and numerous psychological and physical bruises, and a lot of blood.  Throughout the book, Bellis is writing a letter to a friend at home, which is interspersed with the narrative sections written in third person about her, as well as sections told in first person from several others’ points of view.  Both Bellis’s letter and her narrative sections as well as those of the others startle and shock with their grisly details; this is not a book for someone with a weak stomach.

Still, this book is consistent in several major ways with other books I’ve read by Miéville:  it is full of unexpected twists and turns; alliances change and merge as the book progresses; the book is an intellectual delight at the same time as it is a visceral nightmare; and one makes it through the nightmare by following the patterns of thought traced by a main figure who thinks and feels his or her way through the bloody images and happenings, to a resolution that strikes one as being a sort of “settling” for the best that can happen, under adverse circumstances.  This resolution pattern is what gives the books a strong sense of reality which makes the fantasy/science fiction elements more believable.  And Miéville never once condescends to his readers, in fact he imposes stresses and strains on his readers’ ability to understand by insisting on not offering translations and explanations of terminology, but by instead merely presenting items of lexicon and interpretation simply and making the reader progress ahead with an imperfect sense of what exactly is meant, which of course is mimetic of the experience the characters are going through.  Above all, no one character knows everything:  there’s no final sense of authority to appeal to.  All rules are conditioned by circumstances of conjecture and hypothesis, until the truth, at least the probable truth, becomes clear to main characters and thus to the reader.  Most things, by the end, are simply a matter of personal choice, but not free choice unconditioned by life’s circumstances, rather by acceptance that there are limited moves available left on the chess board, and one must take oneself in hand and choose one’s own outcome.  And this is what makes Miéville’s work so exciting–the combination of outrageous fantasy with hard choices and realistic character traits.  But don’t take my word for it–read one of his works soon, and see for yourself.  Chances are, he will leave a creative cicatrix on your imagination, he will leave his mark on you.  One thing is certain, whether you like what you are able to visualize from his word pictures or not, you will certainly “see” them, in all their vivid (and sometimes gory) vitality, and my prediction is that you will be eager to read him again and again.

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October 23, 2014 · 7:39 pm

Just an experiment, folks! Nothing to worry about (unless it works poorly)….

Today, I tried to do a post.  I managed it, but for the last 1/2 hour or so, I was typing only about 12 short words a minute, and having to wait in between my letters for quite some time.  This is very frustrating; I was already used to some of the weird features of the changes that WordPress.com put into effect about two or three months ago, but not to be able to finish my post without waiting for aeons seems ridiculous.  I clicked on the line which offered a “new posting experience,” and I hope that now my problems are over, though the typing still can’t keep up with my speed.  I guess we’ll find out in the next lengthy post!  For now, I’ve just finished a post today, and it’s time for a late lunch (and therefore, time to face a different challenge and make eggplant hummus–a cross between baba ghannouj and regular hummus).  See you next time, I hope, and one can only hope the posting will work sufficiently well that I don’t go bald from excessive hair wrenching!  Shadowoperator

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October 4, 2014 · 6:37 pm

“Weird Things Customers Say in Bookstores”–Jen Campbell’s humorous salute to the reading public

When I was young, my family owned a small-town bookstore.  It was at the center of town, and was not only a favorite spot for people to pick up their periodicals and bestsellers, but was as well the best source of literary novels and authors which students in the local schools and colleges were being asked to read for class.  We lived in a community which was fairly literate, but even so, we still had many odd encounters and requests for books that were strange and peculiar.  So is it any wonder that when I encountered Jen Campbell’s book Weird Things Customers Say in Bookstores that I felt an immediate sense of kinship, and laughed my fool head off while reading from cover to cover?

Just to give you a few examples, under the chapter “Literary Pursuits,” Jen lists this gem:  “Where’s your true fiction section?”  Or this one:  “This Abraham Lincoln:  Vampire Hunter book has to be the most historically accurate fiction book I’ve read.”  Under “What Was That Title Again?” Jen quotes this:  “I’m looking for some books on my kid’s summer reading list.  Do you have Tequila Mockingbird?”  Or, “Do you have Fiddler on a Hot Tin Roof?”  Under “Parents and Kids”:  “Customer:  These books are really stupid, aren’t they?  Bookseller:  Which ones?  Customer:  You know, the ones where animals, such as cats and mice, are best friends.  Bookseller:  I suppose they’re not very realistic, but then that’s fiction.  Customer:  They’re more than unrealistic; they’re really stupid.  Bookseller:  Well, writers use that kind of thing to teach kids about accepting people different to themselves, you know?  Customer:  Yeah, well, books shouldn’t pretend that different people get on like that, and that everything is “la de da” and wonderful, should they?  Kids should learn that life’s a bitch, and the sooner the better.”  Under “You Want What?”:  “Customer:  Didn’t this place used to be a camera store?  Bookseller:  Yes, it did, but we bought the place a year ago.  Customer:  And now you’re a…  Bookseller:  …a bookstore.  Customer:  Right.  Yes.  So, where do you keep the cameras?”  Under “Customers Behaving Badly”:   “Customer:  I’d like a refund on this book please.  Bookseller:  What seems to be the problem?  Customer:  I barely touched it.  It’s  ridiculous!  Bookseller:  What do you mean?  Customer:  I mean all I did was drop it in the bath by accident.  And now, I mean, just look at it:  the thing’s unreadable!”  Under “Isn’t It Obvious?”:  Customer:  Excuse me, do you have any signed copies of Shakespeare plays?  Bookseller:  Er…do you mean signed by the people who performed the play?  Customer:  No, I mean signed by William Shakespeare.  Bookseller: …”  Under “Books for Kindling”:  Customer:  Do you guys sell used e-books?  Bookseller (laughing):  No…  Customer (angrily):  Why not?”  Under “The Adult Section”:  “Customer:  Hi, do you have that sperm cookbook?  Bookseller:  No.  Customer:  That’s a shame.  I really wanted to try it.  Have you tried it?  Bookseller:  I have not.”  Under “Higher Powers”:  “Customer:  Do you have a book that interprets life?  Bookseller:  I’m not sure I know what you mean.  Customer:  Well, I was out hiking the other day, and I saw a wolf.  I want to know what that meant.”  Under “Out of Print:  “Customer:  What kind of bookstore is this?  Bookseller:  We’re an antiquarian bookstore.  Customer:  Oh, so you sell books about fish.”  And these I’ve blurbed about are only the beginning:  for the small price of $15.00 in the U.S. (in Canada it’s $16.00), you can read many, many more and longer exchanges, even more fraught with those sources of constant comedy and commiseration, human intellectual frailty and sometimes sheer thoughtlessness.

To give a bit about the history of this book, here’s Jen Campbell (a native of the U.K. where she currently works in a bookstore).  In the introduction about her work at the bookstore Ripping Yarns in London (the bookstore named after Monty Pythoners Terry Jones and Michael Palin), she says:  “After a particularly strange day about a year ago in which I was asked if books were edible, I started putting some choice ‘Weird Things Customers Say…’ quotes up on my blog (jen-campbell.blogspot.com).  The intent wasn’t to mock or antagonize our customers.  Far from it.  Most of the people I meet everyday are amazing, an integral part of our north London neighborhood and the lifeblood of our business in a tough time for booksellers.  But, as anyone who works in retail probably knows, there are some encounters that simply leave you speechless.”

Other bookstores and book fiends quoted Jen Campbell on Twitter, Neil Gaiman blogged about them, and Jen was finally asked to publish a book of them by a book publishing company in the U.K.  Booksellers from many different states of the union and provinces in Canada joined in the fun and contributed their favorite quotes to the book, and their stores and general locations are identified (though no individuals are named) in the coda of each quote.  For a great light read and a real hoot of an experience with how one may oneself come across to strangers on days when one isn’t at one’s best, perhaps, you could do a lot worse than to pick up this book for yourself and your friends.  One thing’s for sure:  you can’t imagine many people trying to return this one!

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October 4, 2014 · 5:06 pm

William Gaddis’s monumental book “The Recognitions”–Faith, fraud, belief, and “cross questions and silly answers”

Finally, I have finished reading William Gaddis’s 956 page novel The Recognitions and have to report that it, like David Foster Wallace’s book Infinite Jest (which is even longer) is another satiric group of novels-within-a-novel.  There are several sets of characters cross-relating and interacting in Gaddis’s novel, but even though the ends are more neatly tied up than in Wallace’s book, there’s the same tendency to switch from protagonist to protagonist (and even to the occasional anti-hero) and back again.

The main protagonist for much of the book is Wyatt Gwyon, whose father is a Protestant minister of a strict sect.  But unlike most such ministers, Reverend Gwyon has a wide and varied education about other religions and especially seems to prefer those considered pagan by most Christians.  As time goes on, he becomes more and more wound up in such subjects as animal and human sacrifice, and as a sort of side note to all the other things going on in the novel, ends his days in an asylum.  His son is another case.  Wyatt is an accomplished artist from early on, but his Aunt May has shamed him about “taking the Lord’s works in vain” by presuming to copy them artistically to such an extent that it has affected his sanity too, to satirical and humorous ends.  Here’s an early section of the novel in which Aunt May, his only living female relative, expounds upon her beliefs and scolds him:

“–Don’t you love our Lord Jesus, after all?  He said he did.  –Then why do you try to take His place?  Our Lord is the only true creator, and only sinful people try to emulate Him, she went on, her voice sinking to that patient tone it assumed when it promised most danger.  –Do you remember Lucifer?  who Lucifer is?  –Lucifer is the morning star, he began hopefully, –Father says…  –Father says!…her voice cut him through.  –Lucifer was the archangel who refused to serve Our Lord.  To sin is to falsify something in the Divine Order, and that is what Lucifer did.  His name means Bringer of Light but he was not satisfied to bring the light of Our Lord to man, he tried to steal the power of Our Lord and to bring his own light to man.  He tried to become original, she pronounced malignantly, shaping that word round the whole structure of damnation, repeating it, crumpling the drawing of the robin in her hand, –original, to steal Our Lord’s authority, to command his own destiny, to bear his own light!  That is why Satan is the Fallen Angel, for he rebelled when he tried to emulate Our Lord Jesus.  And he won his own dominion, didn’t he.  Didn’t he!  And his own light is the light of the fires of Hell!  Is that what you want?  Is that what you want?  Is that what you want?  There may have been, by now, many things that Wyatt wanted to do to Jesus:  emulate was not one of them.”

The punctuation is a trifle difficult to follow, since Gaddis uses dashes and not quotation marks, and often runs sentences into each other which rightly belong in separate paragraphs.  Still, I think it’s easy to grasp the dark satiric humor of Aunt May’s homily and its reaction on the timid though artistically gifted boy Wyatt, as he grows up.  He matures convinced that he is damned, but still unable to stop drawing.  The upshot of it all, however, is that he is very inept at completing his own original pictures, but instead only feels at home when creating fradulent pictures.  He is original in spite of himself, however:  he doesn’t facsimilate already existing pictures and sell these fake copies.  Instead, he paints “new” and “original” pictures never before seen and passes them off as the works of famous artists which have only recently “surfaced.”  Thus, his psyche manages to have it both ways.

From the topic of Wyatt, the topic switches to all sorts of social and societal frauds going on in his immediate circle of friends, a real bohemian crowd with no actual artistic pretentions to support or excuse their lifestyles.  There is the further question of spiritual belief as it affects a man named Stanley, a devout man who wants to lead to God a worldly woman called Agnes Deigh (a pun on “Agnes Dei,” “Lamb of God”).  His continual misadventures with her as they discuss their beliefs back and forth and he gets her to go on a pilgrimage with him to Europe to see the canonization of a young female saint are fraught with a different set of religious traditions and questions, as Stanley is a Catholic.  But one very funny element in all this is the presence of a Mister Sinisterra, a forger who also regards himself as an artist.  In a very amusing crosstalk act of “cross questions and silly answers” which happens as a matter of mistaken identity when he passes forged notes for distribution to a man named Otto, an acquaintance of Wyatt’s, he gets involved in going to Europe as well, and tries to “forge” a mummy out of Wyatt’s mother Camilla’s bones (which ironically and highly coincidentally were interred next to those of the young female saint aforementioned, in San Zwingli, Spain).  Instead, he causes the mother’s bones to get mistaken by the celebrants of the canonization as the young girl’s, and he himself drags the young girl’s corpse around all over the place disguised as an old woman in heavy dress and a mantilla.  Much comedy ensues, though of a highly equivocal nature.

There are several other cases of mistaken identity or mistaken intent in the book, and the slowest portions are in fact those about the lurid parties of the group of Wyatt’s one-time associates, as they party across New York City and other world cities.  Wyatt dies well before the end of the book, so it’s not a book tied to one protagonist.  The book in fact ends with Stanley’s demise, as he finally achieves his ambition of playing his organ works on a famous old organ in Italy.  But due to the fact that he is unable to understand Italian, he doesn’t understand what the sacristan of the church has tried to tell him, which is to leave out the bass notes, as the building is too old to stand up under the reverberations of the bass as well as treble.  After the sacristan leaves, Stanley performs his of course genuine works (in opposition to all the fake things and people there have been in the book), complete of course with the bass notes.  The building falls on him, supplying the ironic ending:  faking is a way of contemptuously or wryly or in some state of disbelief withstanding the world; the genuine and sincere end up getting the short end of the stick.

There are many, many incidents in the book and not a few characters that I haven’t described, but the book is so rich and so long that I fear I will have to leave you to read it for yourself.  It’s another one of those books that you may find you want to read slowly and live with for a while; you’ll find many a dark and sardonic laugh inside, I can guarantee you that much.  Also, I at least found many passages, such as the incidents when characters were mistaking someone else’s identity and no one discovered the mistake until much later, which just tickled my funny bone enough to make me laugh aloud, repeatedly.  I hope you too will find this book to your liking, and I recommend it highly, though again wanting to point out that Gaddis’s form of notating his conversations and enclosing paragraphs is irregular, and so will probably provide a challenge.  No matter, though:  at least no one can say it isn’t genuine and original!

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October 4, 2014 · 3:56 pm

The Tale of a Journey, and Its Ending (Back at Home)

Well, folks, I’ve recently returned from a trip with my immediate family to my and my brother’s undergraduate institution for fun, merriment, and one of those notable trips down Memory Lane, and though we had a great time going there, I have to report that Cornell University and the environs have changed considerably.  A lot of businesses which one thought would be there forever are no longer, and ones which remain have changed almost out of recognition, though sometimes for the better.  We eschewed the formal reunions and the organized trips and went where we remembered things being the best, the most interesting, or sometimes the most grueling (because of course since we had my young nephew with us, we had to impress him with tales of just how horrific things could be, as well as reassuring him that should he go there later, he would be able to surmount difficulties as well).  We started out the trip with breakfast near the beginning of our trip, and then met a good friend in another town later for lunch at a Belgian restaurant, which was a new cuisine for us.  Suffice it to say, it was excellent.  Then, we headed straight for Ithaca.  We got to our motel, and then went to an exceptional Thai restaurant down on The Commons (what the level ground is called downtown, which is not on one of the two mountainsides where Cornell University and Ithaca College are respectively located).  It was called Thai Basil, and was one of the best restaurants around of any kind.  Not only did they make special room for us on a very crowded night when we somewhat inconsiderately came by without a reservation, but the food and the ambience were outstanding.  The waitstaff was accomodating and very polite, coming by the table quite frequently to see what else we needed even though they were filled to capacity and clearly expecting many more.  It was a happy, happy time to end the first leg of our trip.

The next morning and day were the heart of our trip, as we toured around the campus and saw what had changed.  After taking the car around to show my nephew all the places my brother and I had lived (he came through 6 years after me), we parked it (though so booming and hearty, Ithaca is still a city where even up around the university it’s possible to find parking fairly quickly).  Then, I went (like a city dweller) to sit on the corner of College Ave. at Collegetown Bagels.  This is a place with a rich history, and one of the places that has changed much since our first exposure to it.  In the old days, there was no seating; you went into a large room and up to a counter where there were bins of numerous different kinds of bagels, and the man or woman behind the counter took your order and slathered whatever you’d chosen onto your bagel.  Someone rang you up at the register and you left.  Because I didn’t come from a bagel-conscious area, and I got to Ithaca back in the 1970’s, before bagels were popular all over the U.S., I’d never tasted one before; it was a real novelty, one which I hastened to introduce my family to when they came up to visit.  When my mother first tasted them years ago, she wasn’t impressed, being used to the softer bread products of our own hometown.  But in about six months or so, she was strangely longing to have one again.  And thus another cuisine touched our family.  Still, Collegetown Bagels has vastly expanded its operations in the time since even my brother was there after me.  The whole corner of College Ave. is now Collegetown Bagels, and they have tons of outdoor seating.  As well, the counter space is totally new (at least to me) with a complicated “filing-past” procedure of ordering, and beer choices, and a very innovative and ornate menu of items, as well as additional food and juice items of every sort that you could want.  So, I chose to sit and take in the pedestrian traffic and watch the crowds (and incidentally, save a table) for my mother, brother, and nephew, who were planning to hike down one of the several gorges–the motto?  “Ithaca is Gorges”–before having a late breakfast.  I had chosen a plain whole wheat bagel with butter, a bit of yoghurt, and a juice to wait for them with, and soon got into conversation with someone who’d been there when I was and had been in the town since.  He was able to tell me that sadly, some campus traditions no longer prevailed.  For example, dogs are no longer allowed to roam free on the Cornell campus (into the classrooms and etc., where before they were always good for a diversion from our studies); students no longer “borrow” lunch trays from the main dining halls to slide down the steep slope behind Uris Library in the snow anymore; and other such sad passings.  But when I queried as to why there were now such big nets underneath the bridges, he was able to reassure me that at least one unenviable tradition had changed for the better:  despairing students have been prevented from “gorging out” (jumping into the gorges in mostly successful and regrettable suicide attempts).  As well, when my family rejoined me for a late breakfast (and like a hobbit, I had a little something else to help fill up the spaces), they had to report that the gorge they had hiked up was perhaps a bit less scenic than before, because it had had to be paved along the side and reinforced due to a recent flood, which had washed some trees away.  We ate then moved on to tour the campus.

There were people waving to us from the bell tower of the library as the carillon concert began.  As if just to please my nephew (who had at his first sight of the campus up on the hill from a distance said that it reminded him of Harry Potter’s school Hogwarts), students were playing a non-levitational form of quidditch when we got to the Arts Quad.  We watched for a while, and then went round looking at the old buildings, noticing as well places where new constructions had been added (nothing’s ever totally the same way you left it, and I suppose that’s as it should be).  Nevertheless, I was dismayed to learn that the coffeehouse “The Temple of Zeus” in the English building of Goldwin Smith Hall is no longer there or perhaps not what it was, and I saw no happy outpouring of students from “The Green Dragon” in the Architecture and Fine Arts building of Sibley Hall, though that’s not to say they weren’t there at least lurking in spirit somewhere.  I was nostalgic for this area because it’s where I spent most of my time, as an English major in Goldwin Smith and as a dual Theatre major in Lincoln Hall.  But I have to be happy for the English majors that they are getting a new Humanities Building right next door, and the Theatre students now have a grand new performing arts center in Schwarz, which I saw when I was sitting having breakfast in the morning, as it was centrally located.

Next, we went to show my nephew where my brother and I had lived in our respective dorms on North Campus, and the North Campus Union, and other sights.  I, of course, was mournful to observe that the Pancake House–scene of many an early and riotous breakfast after a night of heavy carousing for me and my undergraduate friends–was no longer above the power house along another waterway, but we were rewarded with the sight of a baby blue egret perched on the dam fishing, so it wasn’t all bad.  Finally, we went back to the car and once again my nephew was rewarded in his hopes and ambitions:  earlier, when we had been driving past a sign on the road that said “Deer Crossing,” he had hoped to be able to see a deer.  Now, however, as we were parked just by someone’s backyard in hillside Ithaca, we saw a deer, an older female, standing quietly feeding on someone’s flower bed.  My brother pointed out the tumor which had unfortunately formed on her back knee joint.  She was not really afraid of us, but just kept a watchful eye out as we quietly started the car and pulled out.  We had our last group touring session of the day by going down to Lake Cayuga and sitting there in Stewart Park, under the willows.  It was very warm and yet breezy in a pleasant way; we in fact had good weather the entire weekend.  Next, my brother wanted to take my mother to see the falls at Taughhannock Park, so we went there.  I, however, had worn my weary legs out, so while the three of them hiked five miles in and five miles back out, I sat in the car park under a shade tree and watched all the young families and their kids and dogs coming to enjoy the lawns and water.  Finally, it was time to go out to dinner again, and man! were we ready for it this day!

My brother found us a wonderful Indian restaurant up on the hill on Eddy St., where though I was very sad to see that the magnificent Cabbagetown Café of vegetarian fame and excellence was no longer on a corner, I was amply requited with a fine Indian dinner.  I wish I could remember the exact name of the restaurant, but there were two Indian restaurants side by side, and my brother left us to choose one, and as they both looked very inviting and hospitable, I cannot recall which one we visited.  But both had a five-star rating, so if you happen to be visiting, we went to the one a little further down the hill of Eddy Street toward Martin Luther King St., and if you can’t find room there, maybe the one a little further just up the hill will have room for you.  Again, we were welcomed without a reservation, which was excellent, and the dinner moreover was absolutely first-rate.  We ended the evening by driving downtown to Purity Ice Cream, a favorite haunt of my brother’s in the old days, and my nephew was rendered replete with good fare and happy memories.

The next morning, we had to go, but we started out in a leisurely fashion and went to see some more falls at the bottom of another gorge (my brother is clearly training my nephew to be a vigorous fellow).  Then, we went to another fine restaurant (I know, it sounds like all we did was walk and eat!).  We had our breakfast at the Sunset Grill, which was up on one of the high hills of Ithaca, and from which we could see Cornell University sitting on another mountaintop at a distance.  It was several notches up from the average diner food, everything was pristine and clean and bright and cheery, they had an “endless cup of coffee,” and we got to eat out on their porch area, in the gorgeous morning air.  Now, it really was time to go.  We gassed up the car and headed back, stopping in the evening to have dinner at a restaurant just an hour from my brother’s house, where we were not let down either from all the fine fare we had already been served.  It was a “country style” restaurant, but though I’d had premonitions of everything being covered in cheap gravy and being served overboiled vegetables, that’s not what it was about at all.  It was instead just as fine a dining experience as all the rest, and concluded our trip in a perfect manner.

We drove to my brother’s house full of our experiences and adventures, and busy discussing the traditions which still seemed to be observed, and the things that had changed for the better or worse.  One thing is certain:  as one might expect (though older people like us never quite seem to get the gist of this the first time they encounter it, and need repeated exposures to this awareness to “get the picture”), the torch has been passed to a new generation, and they are happy with what they have in the main, just as we were happy with what we had, mostly.  And that’s all as it should be!  Heaven only knows what my nephew will see if and when he goes to Ithaca.  Or maybe he will break tradition and go somewhere else, where he will likely discover his own favorite things to expose his family to.  Only time will tell!  In the meantime, we had a great family outing, and yet another good experience of family bonding.  And after all, that’s what it was all about!

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August 23, 2014 · 8:37 pm

“Don’t be such a tease, love; we don’t have forever!”–or, Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress”

Have you ever wondered what was the best way to spur a potential lover to make the possible actual and real?  Have you ever tried to decide just which purveyor of public wisdom could give you a hint as to what to say?  Well, if you don’t mind reading a witty and rhetorically versatile 46-line poem from 1681 (or perhaps reading it together in a romantic setting with your chosen one), you might not have to look any further.  The Restoration poet Andrew Marvell put it excellently well in his short poem “To His Coy Mistress,” in which the word “mistress” represents only a potential sometimes, not necessarily an actual physical lover.  It may, in fact, be a woman whom one admires and addresses poems to, or it may be an actual mistress in the physical sense.  Yet, in this poem, the physical interaction doesn’t seem to have happened yet, which is the source of the lover-poet’s grievance.  Let’s give it a quick read, shall we?

“Had we but world enough, and time,/This coyness, lady, were no crime./We would sit down, and think which way/To walk, and pass our long love’s day./Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side/Shoudst rubies find; I by the tide/ Of Humber would complain.  I would/Love you ten years before the flood,/And you should, if you please, refuse/Till the conversion of the Jews./My vegetable love should grow/Vaster than empires and more slow;/An hundred years should go to praise/Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;/Two hundred to adore each breast,/But thirty thousand to the rest;/An age at least to every part,/And the last age should show your heart./For, lady, you deserve this state,/Nor would I love at lower rate./But at my back I always hear/Time’s wingéd chariot hurrying near;/And yonder all before us lie/Deserts of vast eternity./Thy beauty shall no more be found;/Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound/My echoing song; then worms shall try/That long-preserved virginity,/And your quaint honor turn to dust,/And into ashes all my lust:/The grave’s a fine and private place,/But none, I think, do there embrace./Now therefore, while the youthful hue/Sits on thy skin like morning glow,/And while thy willing soul transpires/At every pore with instant fires,/Now let us sport us while we may,/And now, like amorous birds of prey,/Rather at once our time devour/Than languish in his slow-chapped power./Let us roll all our strength and all/Our sweetness up into one ball,/And tear our pleasures with rough strife/Thorough the iron gates of life:/Thus, though we cannot make our sun/Stand still, yet we will make him run.”

This is quite a charming poem, but it would be foolish to ignore the definitely frank summary of what lies in the grave, also.  Let’s take the poem apart and explicate it in a standard way for a moment.  First, the lover points to the “clock” of their daily life and says that if they had time, only had time, that his mistress’s “coyness were no crime,” which is to say that 1) they don’t have time and 2) it is therefore a crime for her to be so coy.  Then using a rhetorical figure in which one says, “if such and such were the case, I would say so and so, but it clearly isn’t the case, so I’m not saying it,” he in fact does come up with a bit of the (hurried) and overdone praise which he assumes the lady is desiring before parting with her favors.  He therefore does say what she is wanting to hear, but says it in cagey brief form.  Just a few points in passing:  when he says that she would find rubies by the Ganges, he is using a standard symbol of virginity, rubies, and when he says that if only they had time, she could hold him off and barter and continue coy “until the conversion of the Jews,” he is speaking of an old-fashioned religious folk tradition which says that the Jews will convert at the end of recorded history.  Clearly, she cannot continue to deny the poet until then in actuality, because both will be dead by such an unimaginable time in the future.  He next says that if he could court her as she deserves, his “vegetable love” would progress very slowly, which is what she seems to want in holding him off.  This “vegetable” element is important because it was believed at the time that eating only vegetables was a way of curbing sensual appetites, and thus his “vegetable love” would have time to mature at a very slow pace.

Next, he tells her just how long he would spend on praising each part of her, but notice always the conditional tenses throughout the poem, those “had we [if we had],” “shoudst,” “should,” “would,” etc., all indicating in this case conditions contrary to fact.  He admits that she certainly deserves this amount of time for her praise (and of course he’s using the figure of hyperbole, or extended exaggeration, here), and that he would not love “at lower rate,” which suggests a slightly mercantile metaphor of exchange, his praise and adulation in exchange for her maidenhead, which is the subject of the next part of the poem.

First, he brings up the subject of time directly again, and tradition has it that when he says “But at my back I always hear/Time’s wingéd chariot hurrying near,” Marvell is expressing his awareness of the difference in their ages, he being a somewhat older man to her younger years and bloom of youth.  He in a sense makes a desperate but quite articulate, direct, frank, and sneaky attack upon her vanity and attempts to affect her by an account of graveyard rot, in what were for the time both metaphorical and well-known terms:  he says that when she is in the grave, no one will see her beauty and he won’t be there to praise it; worms will “try” (pierce) her “long-preserved virginity” (hymen, or maidenhead), and turn her “quaint honor” into dust, as well as “all [his] lust” (his penis and the rest of him) into ashes.  The term “quaint” at the time was a standard pun upon “cunt,” and so he is moving in for the bald and forthright rhetorical “kill shot,” trying to encourage her by a different and quite original plea to her vanity.

The rest is very obvious.  He praises her again for the “youthful hue” which “Sits on thy skin like morning glow,” and notes that her soul is willing, and she is as aching with passion as he (“every pore” has “instant fires”).  He suggests that like birds of prey they bolt the “food” of their love rather than letting time eke them out little by little.  In suggesting that they put their “sweetness” all into “one ball,” he is invoking a game image of the several different games like croquet that were played at the time, only their play is quite serious, because they are rolling this “ball” not through wickets, but “Thorough the iron gates of life.”  One alternate explanation is that the ball is a missile aimed at a city under fire, and the iron gates are the city walls.  As the hymen is torn in the initial act of love, so the lovers will “tear our pleasures with rough strife,” yet though there is an element of truthful roughness in the language, their pleasures are still seen as pleasures.  The reference to being unable to make the sun stand still is a reference to the myth of Zeus, the Greek father of the gods, who made the night remain for a week so that he could experience love with Alcmena, a mortal.  What this part of the poem in effect means is that though the lovers cannot do what Zeus did, they can make their sun “run,” that is, they can force the days and nights to pass quickly in their enjoyment of each other.

The virtuosity of this poem I think I have indicated, and I believe it’s quite clear that this poem is a masterpiece of the “make much of time,” or “make hay while the sun shines” genre.  So, the next time you’re genuinely in a pickle and need a persuasive set of reasons as to why a lover should pay attention to your pleas, you could do worse than quote Andrew Marvell’s poem–you might succeed with such a master at your shoulder, and the worst that could happen to you is probably receiving an “Oooh, gross; how can you say that to me?” when you explain the graveyard bits!  Oh, well; maybe it just wasn’t “meant to be.”  At least you learned a great poem, and that’s something.

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August 18, 2014 · 7:27 pm

China Mieville’s “Embassytown”–The mindbending adventure and danger of language

Though it may seem odd or simply untrue to say, there’s a good chance that at some point in our Terran history, self-expression and dialogue with others were among the most dangerous forms of activity possible.  Maybe it could justifiably be said that they still are.  This is not simply due to the possibility of being misunderstood, but also because of how language can cause us to go beyond our own limitations and into unknown, uncharted mental and emotional territory.  In China Miéville’s sci-fi masterpiece Embassytown, a whole way of life is riding on dialogues with the indigenes of the planet of Dagostin, the Ariekes, or the Hosts, as they are called by the humans who have come there to live, and as they are also referred to by the “exoterres” the Kedis and the Shur’asis as well.

This book is a challenge to read, not only because there is at least one new vocabulary term or concept to be mastered on each page, but because the author leaves one to put the pieces together himself or herself, with only a few subtle hints here and there.  Some of the new conceptual territory includes the notion that age is measured not in Terran days, months, weeks, or years, but in something called kilohours.  The children are not brought up by their birth parents and may never even see them, but instead are brought up by a series of “shiftparents,” who look after them in turn.  The buildings and devices?  Many of them are not built, but grown, to be called biorigging and other such terms, and they are largely produced by the Hosts, who trade them with the humans in exchange for favors and considerations I will get to in a moment.  The air in Embassytown is not breathable by humans, so a special atmosphere is created with the help of the Hosts for their guests.  One step outside with lungs open, and the humans begin to sicken and die.

Embassytown is technically an outpost of Bremen, which is officially in charge of what happens, yet is in fact a little out of touch, as it turns out, with some of the most dangerous events to its own supremacy.  Yet in the tale told by Avice Benner Cho, a female human born in Embassytown, who has been an immerser (a crew member of space ships), it’s neither the elements which seem strange to us in the science fiction nor the encounters per se with the Hosts, the Ariekes, which pose the danger.  It’s language itself which not only ends up being the real challenge to the humans, but which is also the “main character” of the story.  But you want things in an orderly fashion, don’t you?  So I’ll give a bit of how the story goes at the beginning.

Avice is remembering her childhood and past in sections called “Formerly,” and is telling things which have happened in a more recent time, the “middle distance” of the story, in the sections called “Latterday.” It’s only halfway through the book that the action becomes simply sequential.  One of the first things that happens early on is that a friend of her, Yohn, becomes ill because of a childish game the young humans play, which consists in seeing how far out of human bounds and into the Hosts’ section they can go to leave a mark and come back.  Yohn accidentally breathes the inimical natural atmosphere, and a strange “cleaved” human named “Bren,” a middle-aged man, who is an acquaintance of the Hosts, helps the Hosts retrieve him.  Avice is asked to comfort Yohn while he is ill.  Avice doesn’t know exactly what “cleaved” means until much later in the book, or why Bren is avoided by other humans, but the children giggle at him and are in awe of him as well.

Not long after this, the Hosts ask to “borrow” Avice to make a simile of her for their Language.  This is Language with a capital “L,” because to the Hosts, Language and thought are simultaneous, and they apparently cannot lie.  It simply is not in their nature, as it seems.  When they want to be able to say that something is “like” something else, or that someone did something “as” something or someone else did, they first have to have an actual instance of the person or event having been or happened as they describe, so that they can make the comparison.  In order that they can say “like the human girl who ate what was given her,” they first have to borrow Avice to construct the factual sentence “There was a human girl who in pain ate what was given her in an old room built for eating in which eating had not happened for a long time.”  They therefore cause her a minimum of pain and give her something to eat in an old deserted restaurant; after that, she becomes a simile and is part of their Language rehearsals from time to time.  As it later turns out, there are humans who represent other tropes and parts of speech as well.  But first, before Avice becomes aware of them, or perhaps it’s only before the reader is told about them, she becomes an immerser, a crew member for space voyages, and is admired when she voyages and returns for the questionable activity of “floaking,” a sort of goofing off and hanging out which is a kind of glamour cast by immersers over the people who admire them for their piratical abilities.

The story progresses, and we learn that humans can only communicate with Hosts by using Ambassadors, two cloned humans who speak different words at the same exact instant, which is what the Hosts understand, and is how they speak.  But the Hosts initially perceive these two humans as one, and don’t have any conception of individuality.  In fact, they are unable to lie, and are simultaneously thrilled and fascinated by listening to humans construct lies, from simple lies such as telling them that something is red which is blue, or perhaps saying something ridiculous, innane, or poetical, such as that birds swim in the ocean.  But even though Avice is used to things which would seem strange to most real-life contemporary humans, such as marrying her husband Scile in a “nonconnubial love match,” or having for a best friend Ehrsul, a trid (tri-d projection of a woman), when she becomes involved in an intrigue caused by the dominant Bremen’s plot to circumvent Embassytown’s status by sending an Ambassador from its own ranks (an Ambassador of a variety described in advance, mysteriously, as “impossible”–but I won’t ruin the suspense), her glamour as a “floaker” can only help her own so far.  Instead, she must throw in her lot with those who are trying to save Embassytown by a very unusual means of dealing with the Hosts, and again, it’s spoiler alert time.

Suffice it to say that this is a grand sci-fi adventure with structuralist and deconstructionist theories of language acquisition and usage, yet it’s also a great read that anyone, versed in language theories or not, can enjoy.  In fact, the very difference between a simile and a metaphor, between “referring” and “signifying,” is at stake, and Embassytown itself revitalizes and casts it own glamour over how we speak and relate to each other every day.  I hope all my readers will have a chance to finish this book, and will enjoy it as much as I did.  What more could one ask for as a reader, after all, but a sci-fi adventure thriller which takes its venue of play in the fields of language themselves?

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August 6, 2014 · 5:05 pm

Leslye Walton’s “The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender”–A Tour de Force of Magical Realism

If I wrote to tell you today that The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender is the tale of a young woman named Ava who becomes the victim of a crime, you’d probably yawn a bit, stretch and sigh, and say “There are lots of stories of that kind out there–why should I read one more?”  But if I were to tell you that she had previously been mistaken as an angel by a whole Seattle neighborhood, perhaps you’d be a little more interested.  And if I then told you that this is because she had wings, maybe I’d have you hooked.  You’d say, perhaps, “Okay, then, I’ll read your crime story, and we’ll see just what this is really all about.”

Well, what it’s really all about, in the author Leslye Walton’s words, is this:  the story is “inspired by a particularly long sulk in a particularly cold rainstorm spent pondering the logic, or rather, lack thereof, in love–the ways we coax ourselves to love, to continue loving, to leave love behind.”  That sounds ordinary enough, doesn’t it?  But then, Walton tells us that sulking in the rain is the general way she herself, like a daffodil, can achieve beauty, and our attention is drawn away from logic and towards the whimsical.

As you might guess, the crime is only in a minor way what the story is “about.”  It’s a novel of magical realism, and passes continually to and fro between realistic descriptions and events and magical ones, in a nearly seamless flow that keeps one reading to see what miracle or odd happening will occur next.  Some realistic odd happenings or conditions, such as Ava’s twin brother Henry’s not being willing to speak most of the time, are explained by his seer-like state; his main vision of doom and disaster turns out to be verified, not only in the attack upon his sister Ava, but also in the more realistic natural world’s symptoms of global warming, first a drought and then a flood of rains, connected in this story with magical happenings as well.

To begin at the beginning, however, the connection between Ava Lavender’s non-functional wings and her ancestry is quite clear:  for at least a third of the novel, before we ever even meet her mother, we are in the equally magical world of her immediate forebears, her maternal great-grandfather Beauregard Roux, who moves his family to the New World and into his beloved “Manhatine,” followed by her grandmother Emilienne and her siblings René, Margaux, and Pierette.  The connection with both birds and ghosts is fairly constant throughout the novel also:  great-aunt Pierette, upon having fallen in love with an older man who liked bird-watching, turned herself into a canary, we are told.  And Emilienne, after her husband Connor Lavender moves her to Seattle, her siblings all having died, continues to see and converse with their ghosts in her new home.  As well, she sees the ghost of the little girl who previously lived in the house, one Fatima Inês, appearing along with theirs, particularly at crucial times in the novel.  In this sense, Ava’s connection with birds is not only a matter of heredity, but also of environment, because in Fatima Inês’s room, there are a host of doves who have mated with crows, leaving feathers everywhere.  As well, after Jack Griffith, the young erring father of Ava and Henry deserts her mother Viviane for another woman, the handyman Gabe, who lives in the house, becomes a sort of foster father to the children even though Viviane remains for a long time emotionally remote due to her unrequited love for Jack; Gabe hangs a feather mobile over Ava’s crib before she is born, which is rather as if yet another line of “inspiration” has occurred to make her part human, part bird.  Yet, her fondest wish is to be treated simply as a girl, and before the end of the novel, a young man, Rowe, brother to her friend Cardigan, seems to be the solution to this problem.

There is also the obsessed young Nathaniel Sorrows, however, a strange kind of religious fanatic who poses a threat to Ava’s desire to be ordinary, as he has an idolatrous fixation with her.  Though I won’t give away the very end of the novel, I should say that he is key to the resolution of the plot, and is disposed of plot-wise as well, just as the other odd characters have sometimes been.

Among some of the minor characters there is Wilhelmina, a native American woman with mystical powers who helps Emilienne run the family bakery, and Penelope, who does so as well.  And though it may not be usual to include a bakery as a character, as a magical sort of personality, the bakery is responsible for all the superlative tastes and good smells and wonderful pastries and breads that finally lure the townspeople away from their belief that Emilienne and Wilhelmina are both witches, and draw them in to enthusiastic support of the business.

Times of the year, seasons, solstices and equinoxes, are symbolically important in this story too; the summer solstice, for example, is Fatima’s anniversary of her birthdate, and the people of the town celebrate it as much for the one reason as for the other.  Other odd happenings include things from the very first of the book, when Mama Roux, Beauregard’s wife, is said to become transparent and disappear after he has (actually) mysteriously disappeared; this is not simply a symbolic book, however, and it’s not just that she becomes “transparent” and so forth in terms of personality.  By the way the event is recounted, it’s clear that it’s meant to be “real.”  Then, there is the man in Seattle who, after his wife leaves him, begins to dream her dreams; once again, though there is a symbolic element to this statement, it is also meant to be real, as real as it ever is in a work of magical realism.

Walton does show her rhetorical hand in her fiction here and there of course, and in direct statements that occur alongside the plotline rhetoric.  For example, about three-fourths of the way through the book, she speaks of the “malformed cousins of love,” “lust, narcissism, self-interest.”  When the children Ava and Henry, now in their teens, finally venture outside of the protective surroundings of their house on solstice, Walton has her narrator comment:  “..[C]hildren betray[] their parents by being their own people.”  Near the end of the novel, when grandmother Emilienne is sitting by the bed of the wounded Ava, she is said to think of “all the scars love’s victims carry.”  Still, the main tendency of the novel is to be whimsical, mysterious, magical, and thoroughly engaging, without that emotional drop that the reader often feels when the ending is not unrelievedly happy (and that’s a hint but not a spoiler).  It is, however, a quite spell-binding book, from start to finish, and I would encourage everyone interested in this type of fiction (and even those for whom it would be a first encounter with magical realism) to read it.  Who knows, maybe if you read it, your canary or parakeet will begin giving you significant looks before dropping a feather on your page and initiating an intellectual or poetic conversation!  At the very least, you will have experienced a gifted new writer’s début novel, and may be a bit more mystical, philosophical, or wise about the departures or desertions of loved ones and other machinations of fate.

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