Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Lincoln in the Bardo is the strangest Civil War ghost story you will ever read. That aspect of the book is very good and creative and interesting. I don’t have much more to say about that aspect of it. The ending is fantastic; brilliant; life-affirming.

I’d like to advance the theory that Lincoln in the Bardo contains a sly defense of historical fiction. A defense, even, of experimental fiction.

Ever since Plato, ethicists have been uncomfortable with fiction. It has an eerie similarity to lying, for them. Aren’t there enough true stories to learn from? Why would you have to make anything up, except to deceive? How can we trust any insights we glean from your fiction, given that it’s not true? George Saunders has never been a dead child. How then can he write about them?

Quotations from historical source documents precede every section of Lincoln in the Bardo. Saunders shows us his research. If he had read even half the books he refers to, most people would consider him well-informed. This is one kind of defense: that the author can read what those who experienced a thing wrote about it. If you trust them, why can’t the author trust them?

But he does better. He gives a lengthy catalog of descriptions of the moon on the night of a particular party. Witnesses describe it as every possible color, and every possible shape. It’s white and full. Half-full and obscured by clouds. It’s blue-tinged. It’s green.

He did the same thing later on with Abraham Lincoln’s eyes. They’re brown. They’re brown-gray. They’re gray. They’re gray-blue. They’re blue.

Meteorological and astronomical science can tell us the moon’s actual shape that night. If Saunders had wanted it, he could have looked it up. But he wanted to show us how unreliable witness accounts are. Platonic critics of fiction are as beset by epistemological difficulties as anybody else.

You want the truth of lived experience? Not even the people it happened to get it right.

So we tell each other stories. And they’re part true and they’re part made up. And we know the author is trying to deceive us. The author is trying to deceive us into truth and beauty and virtue. Stories, even autobiographical stories, even first-hand witness accounts, aren’t true the way scientific measurements, mathematical formulas or religious/philosophical/political doctrines are meant to be true.

Stories are true the way a beating heart pumps blood.



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Census by Jesse Ball

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Ever since reading The Early Deaths of Lubeck, Brennan, Harp and Carr, I’ve been a bit mystified by Jesse Ball. How are his worlds so dreamlike, yet so sharp and well-defined? There’s never any mystery what things look like. And yet you’d never be able to say what historical period or country the stories take place in. (An exception to this is How To Set a Fire and Why.)

In the introduction to Census, he tells us that he grew up with a brother, who’s no longer alive. The brother had a learning disability of some kind. Ball expected to spend his life taking care of his brother, but that ended up not happening. Census is a kind of tribute to this brother.

It’s also a writing manual, in a way. A key to Ball’s strategy. I’m only guessing, of course. But knowing this about his early family life does seem to shine some light on his writing. As a young person, he must have become good at communicating with learning disabled people. This is how he’s able to write with such simplicity, and yet still reach the deepest emotional places. I’ll bet his books are very accessible to neurodivergent people. And I imagine they’re also easy to translate into other languages.

Maybe his brother is the true, invisible audience to his novels. I have absolutely no grounds to make that claim at all. Maybe I’m too sentimental.

I suppose, as somebody who values the ability to simplify language, I’m almost jealous of him. What better training as a writer than to grow up with a beloved, learning disabled brother?

Or maybe put it this way: if you imagined that you were writing to somebody who was distracted, or learning disabled, or perhaps not a native English speaker, or stressed out, wouldn’t that help your writing? You’d take as much of the burden of communication onto yourself as you possible could. You’d impose as little mental effort on your reader as you could. That’s one way of respecting them.

There are other ways of respecting your reader. But that’s one of them.

Of course it’s very complicated. Census does a fantastic job of communicating the nuances of these relationships.

One thing I particularly like is the tattooing. The protagonist, as part of the census, goes around tattooing people. It’s reminiscent of Kafka’s In the Penal Colony. But there’s a difference. Where, in In the Penal Colony, the state inscribes itself on bodies with an inhuman attitude and an ill-defined, transcendent purpose, in Census the protagonist carries out the state’s self-inscription with tenderness and a kind of ironic or absurdist detachment from any ostensible purpose it might serve. It’s as though the protagonist is aware of the criticism In the Penal Colony embodies and has accepted it. Yet he doesn’t fight the state, or flee from it, but accepts it as absurd, and then accepts his own absurdity as well.

It’s very interesting, and I’ll be chewing on it for a long time. There are insights there that diligent study will expose.



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Sudden Death by Alvaro Enrigue 5/5

I read this book because I had the opportunity to attend a reading by the author.

He’s brilliant.

As the novel shows, he’s vastly erudite, and Sudden Death is the fruit of deep reading in history. It could almost be non-fiction, on the order of The Devil in the White City, except for the many imagined scenes. He goes too deep into the interiority of the characters to call it non-fiction. And invents too rich a tapestry of interwoven details.

It’s better that way. This is an author who you want to let soar. Give him free reign to follow his own way, and he’s guaranteed to show you something interesting.

If you have the American edition of the book, you may appreciate knowing this, which he told us during the Q & A. He adds chapters as new translations of the book come out. For instance, many of the characters take on different names at different times. This is common in Latin cultures, according to him. Why it happens is a mystery, and he includes it in the novel not despite but because of the mystery. But his British editor was afraid it would confuse Anglophone readers. She wanted him to include a name chart in the back.

Instead, for the same of organicity, he inserted the chapter “On Names, and the Troubled History and Politics of How Things Are Named”.

(He knows his book better than I do. Obviously. But I think it does more harm than good. A name chart would have put me, an Anglophone, on notice to watch out for name changes. He could have trusted his readers more. Let us dwell in a beautiful Mexican mystery that he admits he doesn’t fully understand.)

There was a wonderful moment I want to tell you about.

He read not from Sudden Death but from an upcoming novel which Natasha Wimmer is translating. What he read from is an early draft translation.

There’s a scene in which a woman runs across the prairie, fleeing some danger. Her clothes are too constrictive, so as she goes she strips them off. Unties her dress strings, loosens her corset, etc. Then this phrase occurs: “Without slackening her pace”.

Mr. Enrigue paused. He can speak English, but he didn’t know the meaning of this phrase. Think of that! What an odd consequence of translation. It must be a strange feeling to read your own words in a language you know, but not understand them.

Natasha Wimmer had done something very elegant. English imagines pace as a rope. Work is pulling or carrying, and taut ropes show a greater pace. Spanish seems not to have this. To ‘slacken the pace’ is such a cliche that most English readers won’t notice the poetic resonance with slackening the cords that hold her costume together. But we’ll feel its elegance.

One final thought, this about the novel Sudden Death itself. It’s wonderful to get into the history of tennis. I love how he brings out the connection between tennis and fencing. (Most U.S. writers think of it as more like boxing; but after reading this it seems like fencing is more accurate.)

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Yoel Hoffman is incredible! This book is almost indescribable. Just read it.

This book has stage 4 incurable beauty. It’s like he took a more ‘normal’ novel and cut it into jigsaw pieces and mixed them all up and hammered them back together in a very different order. And made everything brighter and more mythical.

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You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine by Alexandra Kleeman

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Not gonna say a whole lot about it, but this book is about Christian theology. The cult is a reference to the early Gnostic heresies; it’s grappling with the some very theological problems; the boyfriend’s name is Chris.

It ends exactly right, by not resolving. It hovers on that edge between realism and absurdity. The world is as recognizable and coherent as our own world, and as weird as our own world. This is what absurdity does, when done well: it shows you the real world as it truly is, which is incredibly strange.



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Stephen Florida by Gabe Habash

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Sometimes I think that the highest artistic value is freedom. This book embodies narrative freedom to a great degree. What I’m saying is, we get a better sense of Stephen as a person because Gabe Habash is willing to end a sentence, put in a section break, and start a new sentence about something we’ve never heard of before and he’ll never mention again, than if he followed that sometimes-spoken rule that every section needs to have some immediately obvious reason for existing.

Writing like this gives me hope. There’s somebody out there who knows how to slacken the threads and not just tighten them. And his name is Gabe Habash.



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The Literary Conference by César Aira

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


The one thing Cesar Aira does better than any other writer, as far as I can tell, is give the impression that he is in perfect control; that he does exactly what he wants in his book and nobody can tell him what to do. In music, this is what Charles Mingus does. Or Captain Beefheart. It’s a great asset. He may lean on it a bit much in this one; it starts to take away from the absorption. But he’s clearly hiding deep secrets that we’ll never uncover, and the sense of fascination never goes away.

“If you’re listening to this song / You may think the chords are going wrong / But they’re not / We just wrote them like that”




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The Christ of Fish by Yoel Hoffmann

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Yoel Hoffman is incredible! This book is almost indescribable. Just read it.

This book has stage 4 incurable beauty. It’s like he took a more ‘normal’ novel and cut it into jigsaw pieces and mixed them all up and hammered them back together in a very different order. And made everything brighter and more mythical.



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The Art Lover by Carole Maso

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


The Art Lover is a requiem.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvCsj…



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Ema, the Captive by César Aira

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I have a secret list of words that evoke vision. I should have added to it while reading this, because I kept going, “Oh, that’s a good one!” Aira writes very beautifully. He makes Argentina seem like a fantastical dreamland, like Xanadu or Samarkand or El Dorado.

I think this might not be a novel, but rather a lengthy pastoral poem.

I think the key to the aesthetic of this book is that nobody in it ever needs anything. For instance, money is an important part of the book but nobody ever needs it. They smoke lots of cigarettes and drink from many different bottles, but nobody ever buys tobacco or alcohol. They hunt for food, or get it, without trading, from other people who have it. They live in houses because the houses are there, but sometimes not. Near the end Ema gets a loan to start a business, but the terms are 0.5 percent interest for 300 years; and she doesn’t need the business, and her workers don’t need jobs.

There are no diseases in this book. Even in situations where there really, really ought to be. There’s one mention of a blind man, but I’ll bet he was born that way.

It’s mostly about “Indians”, and its portrayal of them is deliberately fantastical in a way that seems to me to be more than half thought experiment; so now you know that.

Anyway, something is going on in this book and it’s mysterious in the best way. Maybe the people are all actually pheasants. No really, I actually think that might be what the book is about. It’s also possible that Ema was deeply traumatized prior to the start of the book and it’s all one years-long dissociative episode characterized by emotional detachment. Those are my two best theories.



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