Words and Things Reviews ☠️

I was severely disappointed by this book. This may have been because this author has been hyped for me for years now. I had my eyes on this book for three years and finally reading it, its metaphors are so ham-fisted, it makes the title feel ironic. Perhaps groundbreaking for its first publication in the early 2000s, it offers very little that other feminist novelists haven’t done wildly better since. The fact that it won the Nobel Prize 20 years after it probably should have is astounding. What I mean is that this book is by no means timeless. The way it deals with patriarchy, mental illness, and anorexia under the guise of body horror is woeful at best, problematic at worst. Our main character has no inner life outside of the symbol she is meant to represent. She is devoid of life and the remaining life she is given is sapped into nothing by her growing madness supposedly rooted in a deeply Freudian relationship with her patriarchal father and sexist caricature of a husband. The supposed psychotic break signaled by a prophetic, ominous dream and an abrupt turn to vegetarianism is so deeply undercooked that the most baffling thing about it is that anyone conjured up the words “terrifying” or “extraordinary” to accompany it. None of these characters have life, they are either caricatures or symbols.

This book gives the illusion of being buoyed by a strong feminist critique with intense social depth, when really its striding in shallow waters, ankle deep.

On a side note, the fact that Ian McEwan and Eimear McBride describe this slow descent into self-induced starvation stemming from the patriarchal domination of womens’ bodies that leads to severe schizophrenic psychosis, causing our main character to nihilistically efface the functions of her own body and reproductive organs to become a living object (a tree) before ultimately killing herself from starvation, as “brutal and beautiful” and “a novel of sexuality and madness” leads me to believe they severely misunderstood the book? Did they only read the second chapter where she’s coerced into becoming a sex object for her brother-in-law and think “wow artsy”? Like, seek help, jfc.

In the future, I’ll devote more time to the constant commentary surrounding her deteriorating state focused on the size of her breasts and sexual organs, e.g., the fact that the most worrying concerns always seems to be “her boobs are too small to be sexually attractive now that she’s lost all this weight” or “she no longer has a period” (“She hasn’t had her period for a long time now, and now that her weight has dropped below thirty kilos, of course there is nothing left of her breasts. She lies there looking like a freakish overgrown child, devoid of any secondary sexual characteristics", p. 151) signifying that the loss of her reproductive worth solidifies her social death as a woman, are again for sure social critiques, but also again so heavy handed it feels like I’m being slapped and force fed the critique by the author in the same way that the main character’s father slaps and force feeds her meat. It’s not so bad that I’d take up the fruit knife myself, but god it gets mighty enticing as the same one-note critique is drawn out to an agonizing proportions. Time will tell if I think I am being too harsh on this book. Perhaps it will haunt me in a way that changes my opinion, though I doubt it.

I just finished my first October 2024 read. A surprising amount of pedophilia and even a little bestiality. An intense and even grotesque meditation on despair and raging self-defiance.

Specific, but unorganized thoughts around “despair”:

Brando really hated himself and especially that he loved Luismi. SO much violence and self-hatred…such hells that everyone put themselves through. It really reversed Sartre’s line from No Exit “Hell is other people”. Nah, hell is the traps we lay for ourselves and blame on other people. So many layers of self-denial, self-effacement, and self-deception in this book. Vindictiveness. Refusing to forgive. Raging against the people you love/love you—or rather who youre supposed to love/love you — out of sheer self-deception. It feels like every single character in this book will fight tooth and nail for the veils they wear, refusing to see themselves or others as they really are. The scariest thing about this book is the horrifying masks everyone clings to. Kierkegaard would have a field day with these characters. Here you find varying degrees of people in hell: those in defiance and the demonic. Those in defiance: “those who defiantly will to be themselves. Who are offended by and in defiance of all existence, yet will to be themselves almost flouting their agony…They do not hope in the possibility of help, especially from God. And to seek help from someone else—no, not for all the world do they want that. Rather than to seek help, they prefer to be themselves with all the agonies of hell…raging against everything and everyone to prove that they are right, to have torment on hand and that no one can take it from them. (SUD, 71-2)” And the worst offenders in this hell Melchor writes about, the demonic: “In hatred toward existence, it wills to be itself; wills to be itself in accordance with its misery [this is Brando for sure I think]… Rebelling against all existence, it feels it has obtained evidence against it, against its goodness…to adhere to its denunciation of its self and God out of malice and spite…to be themselves in their torment in order to stand against God as witness to him being a second-rate author.” (SUD, 73-4)

I think only the witch is in despair of a lesser degree. But on god this book should be retitled “The Sickness Unto Death: The Novel” because its subject is surely despair of intensifying degrees.

There's something about these stories that make me incredibly, yet sweetly, sad. Kawakami manages to imbue so much longing in what can only be described as magical surrealism. Sure an octopus, a fox, or a sea horse is a shapeshifter that has become human, but the focus is not this strangeness. Sure, its strange to the characters in our story but what takes center stage is the incredible sense of loneliness and longing that is at the heart of being human, even and especially for these creatures. Characters live for hundreds of years and lament over how their memories fade. What lingers are ephemeral moment of physical touch. The way the touch of someone lingers on your skin. Ghosts of past intimacies whisper in the wind, encircle our characters in their warm beds.

None of this is overly depressing. Death, grief, solitude, longing, unrequited love, loss, apathy, blurred senses of identity, and the feel of someone's hand in yours. There is such tenuous connections in these short stories that are somehow pregnant with the weight of all the meaning in the world. As weird as it gets, as strange a world you inhabit with Kawakami, it never feels alien. This book is a steady underground stream brimming with life and wonder; let it take you. It has all the imagination and brilliance of Kenji Miyazawa's Night Train to the Stars or Leonora Carrington at her best in The Hearing Trumpet.

"He was well aware of the depth of my feelings for him. Nor could I believe that he utterly lacked similar feelings for me. Still, something had kept us from moving forward. A misalignment of some kind. It was sad, and he was trying to cover that sadness with a crude smokescreen of language. He was acting at once sensitive and sly, and it broke my heart." (145)

Truly, a master at work.

The first thing I read by Olga Tokarczuk was her afterward to Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet. It was so exceptionally written that I sought her out for my next haul of books back in December 2021. I would save her for last. I’m so happy I did. Primeval felt like the wonder of Italo Calvino’s The Complete Cosmicomics mixed with the genealogical tragedy of Gabriel García Márquez’s 100 Years of Solitude. There’s so much here that Tokarczuk gives her reader. So much to mourn, so much to grow with. The magical realism is like a sieve for all the events of these people’s lives, sifting the meaning out of all the heavy events. What you have is an outpouring of beautiful, sometimes tragic episodes. Too many times, the world is cruel, the people are unfaithful and false. But distilled are the moments of pure sincerity, like the moment Florentynka forgives the moon.

Is the world of Primeval really a singular universe for our characters? Can they really not leave? Is leaving an illusion? It doesn’t matter because for us, the reader, and so many who live their lives there, Primeval is the whole universe. And the world ends over and again:

“the sorrow that under[lies] everything. The sorrow that [is] present in every single thing, in every phenomenon . . .  it’s impossible to grasp everything at once.”

Archived (Originally reviewed 1/13/2021)

It took me less than a week to finish Sally Rooney’s Normal People. For once, the titular quote headlining the cover wasn’t simply there for looks: “A novel that demands to be read compulsively…” The book spills a narrative so captivating because in many ways you can undoubtedly identify with both Connell and Marianne and their complicated relationship as it weaves through the various stages of their lives. You root for them. You hope, just as you hope for yourself and your own complicated relationships, that things will work out no matter how messy they get; that these two people who seem fated for each other are in fact fated for each other and happily find each other in the end. Before I even picked up the book I was reminded of David Nicholl’s One Day and was subsequently preparing myself for a similar scenario to play out where [SPOILER] one of them dies in the end. I never forgave Nicholls for playing with my heart like that. At the time, I read that particular novel with my high school best friend, who I was incidentally in love with at the time. We’re still friends to this day. She recommended this book to me in fact. So, no doubt, like many others who read this book I was thinking of those bygone days in those opening chapters. I think it’s impossible not to get swept up in the familiarity of your own feelings when reading about the intimacy of others. You overlay your own memories like tracing paper, watching your life play out through these characters. It’s cathartic or therapeutic or maybe both. Connell and Marianne have such a complicated relationship that progresses through various stages of college life (depression, anxiety, bad relationships, muggings and beatings, various misunderstandings), there’s much to relate to. You’re invested immediately because you are invested into your own history seen in their dynamic. You want them to succeed because you want to succeed in your own happiness.

Thankfully the similarities between One Day and Normal People are not so extensive that we have to watch one of our main characters die just as they finally make it work. Yet, this does not then mean that Rooney gives us what we want. I don’t think she ever intended to. This is not a love story. Think 500 Days of Summer: “You should know that this is not a love story.” On the contrary, it’s a story about people and how they change us. Something, based on my conversations with friends (pun intended), the tv show may have missed. Indeed, one might read this novel or watch the show and be convinced and subsequently repulsed by the way the book/show seems to glorify an unhealthy relationship. Indeed, it may seem like Rooney purports the fatalistic idea that a woman needs to be saved and loved by a man in order to be whole (e.g., Marianne can only feel whole when Connell loves her). Or, and no less worse, that it makes it seem okay for Connell to constantly take advantage of a woman who so obviously is struggling with the traumatic events of her past (they take advantage of each other. I will show that this demonstrates the messy minutia of the role of power relationships and how it is never so clean cut) Does she play on the trope of a male savior? How can we reconcile the lines “she is an abyss he can reach into, an empty space for him to fill…Her body is just an item of property, and though it has been handed around and misused in various ways, it has somehow always belonged to him, and she feels like returning to him now. (242)?” I don’t think she does play on this trope. Instead, I think a more nuanced reading reveals a (corruptible) power dynamic that is inherent to all relationships (with others and ourselves) that Marianne eventually plays out in horrific ways due to her unresolved and continuing trauma. Rooney zooms in on these power relationships so much so that they seem to be the main theme of the book. Through these two characters Rooney demonstrates what we, every day, “normal people,” (roll credits) are willing to move and be moved by; how we are willing to comport ourselves around and for other people and for what reasons (even if they are not explicit to the people involved); the kinds of people we allow ourselves to become, actively pursue, fall into, or otherwise. It’s the reason why Marianne reflects on how she allowed herself to get caught up with Peggy and Jamie in the first place, people who exchange social currency in extremely materialistic, empty ways that she once deemed herself above. It’s also the reason why there is constant meditation on how people see each other and how they are willing to change to meet the gaze of another or themselves. After all, the ending line of the book, interspersed between Marianne and Connell’s conversation is “people can really change one another (273).” Let’s look at how people can really change one another by first focusing in on Marianne’s relationship with self-perception, love, and power dynamics—all of which lead her to the most provocative points in the book (of which I am offering a defense against the notion that Rooney falls for the male savior trope): sexual violence.

First, Marianne’s desire to be physically abused during sex is neither primarily rooted in a relationship with others nor derives from sexual gratification (barring characterizing her as a masochist and preventing a reading of the novel as an unfair depiction of BDSM culture). For Marianne, the sexual violence she submits to is primarily a relationship she has with herself. She desires to submit to the will of another, but never considers this an actual relationship. It’s rather, for her, a form of self-annihilation and subjugation. We see this most clearly in Sweden when Lukas begins to dominate her during their nude photoshoot. She submits (albeit reluctantly and unwillingly) to being gagged and having her wrists and ankles tied, but repulsively draws the line at Lukas’s words: “You see, I love you and I know you love me (203).” Marianne confesses that she “feels nothing” for Lukas. She uses him as a means to an end; the end being the confirmation of her supposed worthlessness, her ability to disappear so exceptionally into the nothingness that eats at her from inside: “You’re worthless, Lukas likes to tell her. You’re nothing. And she feels like nothing, an absence to be forcibly filled in. It isn’t that she likes the feeling, but it relieves her somehow (196).” I contend that this sense of worthlessness stems from the trauma she constantly grapples with at home. From an early age, Marianne is made to believe she is a monster incapable of being loved. Her father abuses her and her mom until he dies. Her brother picks up where her father left off with an added (heavy, incessant) dose of verbal beratement and psychological manipulation while her mother downplays the abuse and gives Marianne the impression that she has never and will never be a good enough daughter, upping the anty on the psychological manipulation (as if it could go any higher!). Her earliest experiences with love are already tied inextricably with violence and self-hatred and, knowing no other form of love, she accepts the hand fate has dealt her. In the place of love, she’ll accept violence. Why? Because it’s the most familiar form of love she has. As cheesy a line as it is, Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower line, “We accept the love we think we deserve” fits quite nicely here.

 Second, the perversion of her violent obsessions stems from a distortion in the power dynamic of a regular relationship: she does not believe she is worthy of love so she lives a farce of it, an extreme exaggeration of the element power plays in a healthy relationship. Connell is her healthiest relationship in the entire book. This does not mean that it is the pinnacle of healthy relationships, only that in terms of reference, Connell is the only thing she has that resembles a “normal” relationship in her life (her saving grace in terms of how she identifies herself. So long as she has Connell and he doesn’t see her as a monster, she can hold on to the shred of belief that she is not the monster she punishes herself for). This is important to note because it dispels the criticism that Rooney is in any way glorifying their dynamic. She is in fact demonstrating how to write a character well. We know that Marianne’s inclinations derive foremost from the trauma that has intertwined violence and love at home, but it’s after Connell that she begins to nose dive into sexual violence. In her words: “It’s not that I get off to being degraded as such…It’s about the dynamic, more than what actually happens…It was different with you…I didn’t need to play any games with you…It was real. With Jamie it’s like I’m acting out a part, I just pretend to feel that way, like I’m in his power. But with you that really was the dynamic, I actually had those feelings, I would have done anything you wanted me to” (137-9). Violence is the place holder for the real dynamic she had with Connell. But what was this real dynamic? We know its extreme distortion, but what is it a distortion of? Let’s examine their relationship at two specific points: first in high school, which starts the dynamic (and her life, she confesses) and second, in college, which solidifies her identification of that dynamic.

 In high school, Connell is the first and only person to actually talk to Marianne. He breaks the ice on what she assumes is the general opinion of her when he tells her that he doesn’t hate her. “That gets her attention (6)” and from then on Connell holds a special kind of power over her. She sees in him a version of herself that she doesn’t hate and for that she’s willing to do whatever he wants. Relationships, with all their intentions, impulses, and (inclinations?), are messy, let alone high school relationships. Connell takes advantage of Marianne.

 1. By being kept a secret, it confirms that love (acc. to her personal narrative) is rooted in self-hatred; she is not worthy enough to be publicized. 2. By being ignored, he confirms her mother’s claims that she is monstrosity that cannot be loved. 3. By going to the Debs with her humiliator, Connell justifies the violence done to her and ultimately rejects her (or at least this is how it is interpreted… more on the role of misinterpretation later), confirming that love is tied with repudiation and humiliation. (Or this could all be bullshit) [I think I might be digging to deep into her psyche.]

 In college, their dynamic becomes easy, tactful. The give and take of their relationship is the best we see in the novel. The power dynamic is an open field designed for free play. It’s not ironic that a misunderstanding tears them asunder. Another example of how the lines aren’t so easily drawn. I love Rooney for this. You first think, “oh what a fucking prick! First he fucking takes advantage of her in high school for sex then he dumps her in college?” But you know it doesn’t make sense. When you get the full picture of the break up you see that neither of them breaks up with the other, but wrapped in their own insecurities assumes the worst. The lovable dumb asses.

 Rooney writes that the moment Connell tells her he loves her, her life begins. If there is a narrative tension for our main character (who is undoubtedly Marianne btw) it is between two points in the novel: this moment where she is trapped in the cycle of identifying love and trauma as one and the end when she is freed from it (what hold these two poles together is Connell—how she sees herself through Connells eyes).

 When Rooney writes the above, it’s Marianne at her most vulnerable and confused. “How can someone ever confuse that violence with love?” The book doesn’t elevate Connell for not wanting to be violent with her in bed, nor does it justify Marianne’s craving for violence. Marianne is able to reclaim her life, not because Connell saves her, but because through Connell she can recognize a version of herself that she doesn’t hate, one that doesn’t need corrected through violence. This recognition is wholly her own by the end without Connell.

  This review remains incomplete and at times fragmentary. The main argument ends up petering out, I realize, but it is not without a conclusion. Yet, I don’t think I will be able to pick up the loose ends I left for myself one year ago without re-reading it, but I believe it is whole enough to be published here. I remember this book and mini-series fondly. It spoke to a debate I was having with a lover at the time on if love and power were inextricable. I argued that power is an imminent part in all relations, especially love. She disagreed, arguing that the purest love transcended power completely. I never could convince her that power need not be so negative. That, in the end, the most implicit expressions of love that come out of great relationships were nothing if not the resonations of each individual’s power. What is such a love if not vibrating along the same frequency? If power were music, love would be harmony and resonance, conflict discordant. The fluctuations of power tell a story and lovers embody that story through each gesture, through each anticipation (be it anticipation of lips on flesh or a reassuring touch, a knowing glance). Power is embodied and the love that overflows from moving and being moved by a lover, partner, or friend cannot be without that power. To say you have power over me doesn’t have to be dominating (as Marianne discovered). To say you have power over me can also mean: I am moved by you, inspired, overjoyed. I comport my life to our mutual concerns, to the way you simply fill up a room. I consider you in my decisions; you have an interest in the future I project. My body feels the weight of your presence and I allow myself to be affected by it. To say you have power over me can also mean I love you.

And love, just as power, is polysemic; it has so many meanings and forms of expression. In Marianne’s case, through her growth, it was recognizing that (self)love always already operates on a field of power with all the traps and pitfalls of conflict and violence. Loving oneself through the eyes of another, through the eyes of Connell, allowed her to, in the end, let go of that image, let go of Connell. It wasn’t Connell that sustained her. It wasn’t Connell who either was the exception to the rule of her worthlessness or the best example. She realizes it was a false dichotomy, a distortion of power/love she saw in her everyday life. That’s why in the end she can let him go. Her love for him was no longer tied to the love she had for herself. She loved him selflessly; she felt the weight of his presence and knew that his absence wouldn’t break her.

I’m far too emotionally exhausted after reading The Door to organize my thoughts on this masterpiece. There wasn’t a single chapter, not one, that didn’t reach out and choke you. This book is far too personal to me to ever write my usual review, just as Kamala Pulingandla’s first novel Zigzags. So I will say only a few words. Magda Szabó is the best novelist I have ever read in my life and this book is dense with emotion; it’s dense with sentiment and the precarious, bewilderment, absurdity of love. Of not knowing how to love, how to receive it, how to give it, but loving nonetheless. Like Abigail before it, it displays the living complexities of recognition and understanding with such sobriety and sincerity that it is impossible not to experience this book as a living artifact, a touchstone of the vulnerability and history between loved ones.

How best to sum up my feelings? From the opening pages, you know that this will be far closer to a tragedy than a heartwarming tale, but in the true spirit of Szabó, just because you know something is going to happen in her story, far from frees you from the weight of it. Instead, the anticipation makes everything weigh all the heavier. The more you know, the harder it hits you: Everything unravels and turns to ash in tragedy. The most devastating personal events stem from the most thoughtless actions. “How could you have been capable of doing it?” a character asks. It is a question our protagonist agonizes over for the rest of her life and one each of us, in our own ways, grapple with. How are we ever capable of the things we do to the people we love? For not recognizing when we were needed in an earnest way? When our moment to demonstrate we understood slipped past without our noticing? How are any of us so easily blinded to those dire moments? Michel Foucault, in his introduction to Kant’s Anthropology, wrote that it was an irony that Kant felt the need to supplement his three critiques with this final treatise, not realizing the whole world—the way in which he had categorized it—had slipped out underneath him. The Anthropology itself demonstrated that it spoke of a world that no longer fit in the paradigm of the previous three critiques. I imagine this is often how life happens out underneath us. We focus our attention so intensely on the projects at hand, imagining we understand, only to overlook what was essential in the moment it would have mattered most. But it’s gone; it’s irretrievable, irrevocable, and we are left to make sense of how we missed it by so wide a margin, if we come to recognize it at all.

I was disappointed by Killing Commendatore in the end. Rather, I was disappointed with its ending, especially the way it’s penultimate resolution regarding the transformation of our main character rested on warmly accepting the rape he committed—to the point that he was no longer ashamed of the dream act, but exceedingly embraced it as the magical narrative’s gift. Those last lines read, “I went to Yuzu in a dream as I wandered from town to town in northeastern Japan. I made love to her while she was asleep, stealing into her dream and impregnating her, so that nine months later she bore a child. I love this idea (although I hold it in secret). That child’s father is me as Idea, or perhaps me as Metaphor. Just as the Commendatore visited me, or as Donna Anna guided me through the dark, so did I, in some alternate world, deposit my seed in Yuzu’s womb” (733). Gross. He valorizes the act that he earlier was ashamed of and explicitly called rape. If he embraces the act as occurring in the world—even if in the end he’s a loving father to this child—then it does not excuse the incident of rape. Even if they were expressions of desires deep within the recesses of his unconscious mind made real as Idea. If he holds that they had actual consequences, then like K in Kafka on the Shore, he needs to accept the fact that “in dreams responsibility begins.” Are we supposed to take him stepping up to the plate and coming back home and raising a daughter that might not be his as him taking responsibility?

I’m torn by this book. On the one hand, I admire its magical realism. I was taken on a journey and the experience was undeniably magical, especially navigating the underworld. I adored the solitude on that mountain with our main character too. But on the other hand, it leans so heavily into Metaphor and Idea that it can easily frustrate its reader when their expectations are surreptitiously subverted. Why did our main character need to go through the underworld if it wasn’t related to saving Mariye at all (she was trapped in Menshiki’s home until the cleaning people came!)? Because the reason he had to go through the underworld wasn’t because of Mariye. He had to learn from Tomohiko’s and Menshiki’s past so that he could take on the task of being a good husband and father. To take the second chance that neither Tomohiko nor Menshiki could. If Metaphors run parallel as they do in the underworld, then so did Tomohiko, Menshiki, and our protagonist. There’s a reason why the first realization our protagonist has when he escapes the underworld is that he needs to call his ex-wife. But in terms of narrative flow, this is extremely frustrating and unsatisfying. Why is she the resolution when she has only pervaded the narrative as the impetus that started our story? Why does it have to be a circle he closes—meaning the true circle all along was him going back to his cheating, sorry ass wife? All the while you are supposed to be keenly aware of these parallel lines, but the problem is you don’t give a damn! To hell with Yuzu. She was cheating and gave no indication of actual character growth in the time of their separation. She openly admitted that she has no control around beautiful men. She decides to carry her child to term, and our protagonist just goes back and lets her off the hook? No consequences to her real-world actions? She just gets to go back to her job and have this stay-at-home husband? No repercussions to the fact that she initiated this divorce with no remorse for her infidelity. Why does he go back? How does this make sense for the narrative? The protagonist has literally given no thought to it. He just abandons the work he has been doing and goes back to doing simple portraits presumably because “he’s had enough of Ideas for now.” The argument could be made, sticking with the parallel metaphors, that he is giving up what Menshiki and Tomohiko had, the success and the trauma because they were ultimately left a void in the end.

It could be about decisiveness in the face of Ideas. And while that’s wonderful in theory, in practice it comes off as weak. I remember pausing midway through the second to last chapter and vocally voicing my disappointment, describing the experience as Murakami blowing up a balloon with me waiting for the apotheosis, where it pops—the climax—only for him to just let it slowly deflate. There was no real resolution to the narrative. Things just happened and our apathetic character, ever reluctant to be involved, nonetheless getting involved and doing things that weren’t all that efficacious in the end. It was nauseatingly annoying to reveal that Mariye, the whole time she was missing, was just at Menshiki’s. Nothing actually sinister occurred that would warrant the Commendatore making a huge fuss about. Hell, if it wasn’t for Tomohiko needing to see the resolution of his failed assassination attempt before he died, I wouldn’t be satisfied with impetus to start the journey into the spirit world at all. Because why, why lead us on as if the trip through the underworld had any actual relationship with Mariye’s disappearance outside of happen stance? Again, things just happened. What about the guy without a face who showed up in our preface? WHERE WAS THE PAYOFF? I was so excited when we finally met him only for it to have no bearing on the plot whatsoever. I get that the ending is supposed to be this joyous, Nietzschean eternal return, but it lacked the actual affirmation of life that comes with it and stayed behind in Schopenhauerian resignation.

Overall, it was brilliantly Schopenhauerian (in the artistic sense). I shouldn’t leave that part out, but I’m left feeling frustrated. Perhaps my friend Charli was right. Maybe Murakami just doesn’t know how to end a story. His short stories are masterpieces, but his novels tend to be hit or miss. Hell, I didn’t even mention his weird obsession with describing a 13-year-old girl’s breasts, as if her sole concern in a moment of crisis ultimately circled back to her breasts. Literally half of whatever Mariye said was about her body. It was awkward and uncomfortable, even if she was going through puberty.

But I would like to return to the lack of pay off. I’ve sat with our nameless protagonist for weeks. I grew attached to the Commendatore just as the protagonist did. Don’t get me wrong, Murakami still managed to compellingly write. He definitely wasn’t phoning it in with his most recent novel. I genuinely felt the creepy vibes when the Commendatore was killed, dragging Long Face out into the open. It was incessantly eerie. Had it been any other author, they would have leaned into the creepiness, but it was Murakami, so it became charming and mostly harmless. This was a common theme throughout the novel. It would build and even break off on a horror-esque cliff hanger. The ringing of the bell in the house for instance. We knew it would happen. We were just waiting for it. What had they released when they dug up the shrine? When would he hear the bell in the studio? The fear was palpable even if the main character denied he felt fear. No doubt, Murakami can build tension. But he consistently deflated that tension in a charming way. This was one of the positive aspects of the novel, I admit. I just didn’t like the way it came to a head in the finale. It worked well again when Tomohiko Amada’s living spirit came to the house to ponder his painting too. The sheer terror in those moments. The sensation of knowing someone or something is in the room with you was beautifully illustrated. The way he would describe those moments and how intuition would whisper, “it’s best not to turn on the light.” Mother fucker that shit was good. I mean just the sheer preface alone: waking up to a faceless man staring at you asking you to paint his portrait in this demonic voice? Like I said, he subverted it in the next page because it’s not that kind of book. Murakami has a way of neutralizing the fear into something almost heartwarming or magical. With the bell ringing in the studio, it was the quirky and loveable Commendatore. With the stranger in the night, it was Amada pondering his painting under the moonlight. And then finally with Long Face, he was just a lowly Metaphor who meant no harm; you even feel bad for the poor thing despite how creepy he was. The faceless man…is left unresolved as I have said (come to think of it so is the man with the white Subaru). I really admired those parts of the story, even the subsequent deflation of the horror, precisely because of how well he landed the reversal. What disappointed me was that he failed to build the tension where it was needed most. After having deflated the creepiness of Long Face, it robbed the eeriness of the underworld. We had the veiled threat of Double Metaphors (and he expected too much of a payoff from them than what he had prepared for us), but we never really got to feel them in the same way we did the Idea or Amada when they showed up. We never got to feel them lurking in the shadows in the underworld. They were more concept than the actual concepts in the book because they only ever appeared as a hazy notion of “forgetting onself when the metaphor got too abstract” or simply when you beagn to lose yourself to it altogether. It’s not that they lacked physicality, it’s that they lacked a locality in the story. Where were they? How did they really interact with our character and how could they have been brought out without necessarily needing to describe them, much like what he had done when he first wrote about the ringing of the bell. It got too heady and, for lack of a better term, metaphorical. He himself was falling prey to double metaphors in his own book, which didn’t feel especially meta as it did weak.

What bothered me about this book is that there were such good elements in it. It actually has a great story in it. Like one of our protagonist’s paintings, you can see the form in it, but something went wrong. Is it unfinished? I didn’t know that Murakami “wrote with no plan” but having found that out, I can definitely tell that was the case here. I even thought so independently while reading it. As I made my way through Mariye’s account of where she was, I could see the cracks in the narrative that made me stop and suspect that the reason it felt so disjointed was because even all the way up to our protagonist making his way through the spirit world, Murakami himself did not know where Mariye was. This was the problem. You could tell the author was wondering where she was too and the threads of the stories that could have been, linger even as Mariye begins telling her canon tale. You can just tell that this wasn’t fleshed out beforehand. It was an afterthought, which makes it all the more frustrating and unbelievable when you find out Mariye was just chilling at Menshiki’s this whole time. No, Menshiki didn’t kidnap her. No, she didn’t slip into the underworld while crawling through her “secret passage.” No, her secret passage itself didn’t turn out to be somehow part of the underworld that she got lost in. The latter was the most obvious direction for the story to take. I fully expected her to take her shortcut and then get lost in a place that only going into the underworld would resolve. I expected her to be in real danger. The problem is we know Menshiki well enough at this point to know that he was NOT a danger to Mariye. She was never in any danger to begin with. The stakes were not high! Had Menshiki found her, he would have taken her home immediately. The narrative was clearly running in the direction of “Mariye is in danger, a danger that only our protagonist can save her from.” The Commendatore hinted this much was the case when he warned our protagonist to accept the invitation so that “a series of events could lead to Mariye being safe.” But the series of events that he went through had absolutely ZERO effect on Mariye’s situation at all. It’s a wonder that two got together afterwards to discuss the similarities because there were none. The whole reason Mariye was able to leave the house (which she was not actually in any real danger in in the first place) was because it was a cleaning day. There was no “I must act now!” moment promised by the Commendatore. There was NO connection between the actions our protagonist did in the underworld and Mariye’s situation in the real world. One could say “no connection that we could see.” And I would respond “fuck you, no. That’s just bad writing and a cop out.” Murakami wanted so bad for us to believe that Menshiki had a shadow self lurking around the house acting on his unconscious desires much like our protagonist’s shadow self who raped his wife. We were supposed to believe that Menshiki had this “void that attracted negative things” and that that was supposed to be the danger Mariye was exposed to, but why? Why bring up some brand-new development like that in the last act? Why wasn’t this foreshadowed if this was endgame? If his “shadow self” or vague “negative entities” he attracted were the reason Mariye couldn’t escape, why weren’t they given more attention earlier? We’ve been with this character for 500 pages, and he’s been relatively innocent. Even his prison story, which would have been the prime time to delve into his “shadow self” and “negative entities,” was flat and boring in the end. He used it as a way to overcome his own inner trial. Even the notion of him projecting himself out of solitary was met with admitted failure having no trace of dramatic irony to hint at the fact that this wasn’t true, that he did in fact have a shadow self and that it would be important later. No, if Menshiki was untrustworthy, he was vaguely so. For, he had been nothing but utterly forthright with our protagonist this whole time. It seems like Murakami didn’t know what he wanted to initiate this “opening of the circle.” It ended up being simultaneously Menshiki and the painting. This was actually the most frustrating thing about the book now that I think about it. The third act was trash. From the moment Mariye says she’s been at Menshiki’s the whole time and on, the book invariably nosedives.

I truly believe that the actual story, the unfinished thread Murakami has saved as a draft somewhere on his computer has an outline of some kind showing that Mariye’s “secret passage” led to the underworld, and she somehow got stuck. Our protagonist’s actions in the Land of Metaphor which follows the Principle of Connectivity were meant to somehow free her from the underworld. But we did not get to see that ending. It’s now buried away in some folder or erased. I do not and cannot know if this imaginary manuscript also ended with our protagonist going back to his wife, but I imagine it does. I wish it didn’t. I feel like that was the only thing Murakami unequivocally knew was going to happen. But it would have been much better had our protagonist moved on. That’s my personal opinion of course. But in dreams begins responsibility, so he had to return. Whatever. The main point is, the better version of this story saw Mariye actually trapped in the spirit world where actual stakes were involved, where she could have been lost, where she could have seen her mother and unlocked memories that had been locked by trauma, where she somehow connected with Menshiki, where she actually had an active role to play in the Land of Metaphor and the plot were she herself not merely a vehicle for our protagonist’s own growth as a soon to be father. It drives me crazy how good this book could have been. We could have cried our eyes out had we seen Mariye’s mother pushing her to escape the spirit world parallel to our protagonist’s own experience. They could have escaped together and given each other strength as Donna Anna appeared to the protagonist as his little sister and to Mariye as her mother. It could have been beautiful to have her and him escape into the pit together, her fate officially tied up with the pit as foreshadowed in the paintings (another thing that had no real payoff. How was she tied to the pit and why did the painting of the pit shift from saying “something is going to happen” to “something is underway?”). The pit wouldn’t have been sealed when they arrived. Having restored the ladder to the pit earlier, the two would have escaped together and discussed the transformative effects of their momentous journey through the underworld: How our protagonist saved Mariye. How they both had to claim amnesia but shared this experience together in the underworld where they were reunited with their loved ones a la What Dreams May Come. Where they maybe even came to some conclusion about themselves. Perhaps the protagonist’s would be calling his ex-wife still, and Mariye realizing…something that actually monumentally changed her and meant something to her as a character. Not “time is my ally, so I don’t have to worry! I’ll get to live to see my titties get big and nipples get hard uwu.” They could still close the circle together by wrapping up the paintings and putting them in the attic and she can still cry in his arms, and it will have weight because of the ordeal that they went through TOGETHER. This is what I wanted the ending to be. It’s what the author wrote it to be. It’s where it was meant to go after 500 pages.

I am truly at a loss for words. In spite of this I will recover some for the sake of this notoriously strange and wonderful book,  The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington. Every four to six months—give or take a month—I delightfully shelve the last of my unread books and go to my local bookstore to repopulate my bookshelf with new literature. With every visit, I have made it a habit to pick up, along with my list of ten books already in the queue, a book I have never heard of. I call this a chance book; one which I have had no intention of ever picking up because until the moment I hold it in my hands I am completely unaware of its existence. The chance book is one which I am inexplicably drawn to for any number of reasons that I do not care to critically analyze. It could be as simple as the cover design or a staff suggestion; the only thing that matters when picking up a chance book is how it feels to me. The chance book is always a gamble, especially because it is seemingly entirely dependent on my disposition and mood when I am at the bookstore, but I am happy to say that I have never been dealt a losing hand when gambling with a chance book! In fact, nearly every chance book I have brought home has turned out to be one of my most cherished books. The Hearing Trumpet is no exception.

 There are many who might classify this book as magical realism and in every respect they would surely be right, but I think a book like this kind of shines past magical realism and enters what Antoine Volodine coined as “post-exotic” literature. Post-exotic literature presupposes magical realism and adds the requisite of madness. The world of the novel starts off familiar before slowly unraveling into an imagination gone mad, where the reader and hero of the novel must accept this world for the story to continue. In a way, it’s more surrealist than anything. The story often runs off in seeming tangents, but not enough to feel like you are ever being completely whisked away from the narrative thread. It’s that the thread becomes aqueous; before you realize it, it’s no longer like a taut rope in your hands that you follow from beginning to end, but a river you’re floating in with all its various avenues and apertures. The fluidity of the river gives it its narrative continuity. As such, a post-exotic novel sweeps you up in its current and takes you to unimagined (and sometimes even supposed unimaginable!) places. Carrington’s novel sweeps you up as you tacitly accept nursing homes with bizarre architectures, wellness cults superimposed over magical rites, murder mystery, imprisoned demigods, ancient deities clashing with Christian heathens, witchcraft and riddles, vampires and werewolves, and eventual cataclysm. And all from the viewpoint of a ninety two year old, hard of hearing woman! I applaud this book for juggling all of these without a hint of sardonicism, but a plethora of irony. It’s a novel that can look you directly in the eye and utter a reasonable sentence while rending the world apart with sheer madness and delight, proving that wisdom and sincere kindness can bloom from strange, irrational gardens. Carrington isn’t shy about it: the world in which we now live is too unkind and nihilistic for any loving goddess to nourish. I am being intentionally vague with this one.

 I am half tempted to reflect on Martin Heidegger’s claim about the departure of the gods (as an indication of our relationship with being), Nietzsche’s parable of the madman proclaiming the death of god (and how we killed him), and Carrington’s claim of humanity rejecting the “Pneuma [creative life force] of the Goddess” by entering the atomic age. I’ll say only this, Heidegger contended that the culmination of human reason (rationality and logic; the birth of metaphysics) started in Ancient Greece, was found in the Holocaust in Germany and the nuclear holocaust in Japan. That is to say, our rational way of technocratically cutting up the world led us to eventually viewing every being in the world at human disposal—even fellow humans. In this way we do violence to physis (being), according to Heidegger. Our relationship with being is so utterly distorted by our transition from “physis (being) to techne (technicity)” (through history of metaphysics beginning with Plato and Aristotle) that the world became sufficiently abstract, available to sight only through a conceptual gaze of how this or that (being) could be useful. And the gods—a placeholder for meaning—thus departed. Nietzsche’s madman gallivanted through the streets with his lantern screaming that god was dead and we killed him. He poses follow up questions to this announcement: How will we comfort ourselves? Must we ourselves not become gods to be worthy of the deed? The murder of god here is the displacement of absolute meaning. To comfort ourselves we attempt to become gods with our use of reason, but can’t even wash the blood from our violent usurpation. Carrington too addresses violence and nihilism. The nihilism propagated by Christianity and the violence of nuclear holocaust are key in humanity’s rejection of the life giving force of the Goddess (meaning and goodness overflow from her chalice (the Holy Grail)). This, for Carrington, manifests principally through the masculine tendency to dominate and control. (Indeed, it's no coincidence that it's a goddess after all who has been usurped by her "Sterile Brothers." This is a feminist critique par excellence)

“That is a cruel ethics I would have you know—cruel and cowardly. This looking aside—with the bodily and the spiritual eye—it is to this that is due the persistence of so much misery and injustice. If one had but the courage to look steadily whenever one’s own fellow-creatures are pining in pain and misery and the courage to reflect on what one saw…” 188

A lover gifted this book to me. She was working on a show that involved Bertha von Suttner’s contribution to the invention of the Nobel Peace Prize and had read this as research. She talked it up on our hike as we shared the same disposition against war. I was so intrigued that she later came over with this copy in hand.

I imagine that for some time Bertha von Suttner sought to convey the atrocities of war to deter her reader from glorifying it through familiar sentiments such as the “noble war spirit” or nationalism, but ran up against the problem of keeping the reader’s gaze. How can one adequately capture a reader’s attention when there is a tendency to look away and rest securely in the platitudes that cover over anything unpleasant? How does an author reach an audience that does not want to hear or see and even when confronted with the burden of sight, as many of her stubborn characters are, “… renounce beforehand the attempt to reason and understand (95).” These questions were surely on her mind. I imagine that in answering these questions, and to keep in stride with the ever rising death knell of those sacrificed to war, Suttner made a startling realization. War’s roots, its necropolitics, are nihilism; that is, meaninglessness, the denial of life, whose only foe is the affirmation of life. Suttner offers us such an affirmation in Lay Down Your Arms. As much as this book is a treatise on the irrationality of war and an argument for peace, it is also a tale and hope for life: “No, the world is not…all lamentation and cruelty. Compassion and love are alive within it...even [in] this time of suffering…The future belongs to goodness. (213)” I find it supremely fitting that the medium that she chose against the nihilism of war was an autobiography; the writing of one’s life. Of course, the medium has practical attractions. For instance, it protects against that tendency of historical accounts to peel off into mere abstractions when detailing a timeline of war, so easily forgetting each and every one of those people who horrifically suffered and died, but this only proves my point. To stave off and shed the nihilism that celebrates, excuses, and even exalts war in all its forms—to circumvent and dispel its insidious claim on the thoughts and opinions of her readers—Suttner offers a text filled with love and reason, felicity and compassion juxtaposed against tragedy and thoughtlessness. Indeed, Suttner demonstrates the thoughtlessness of evil present in the war machine by clearly portraying the acceptance of war as a matter of course, the substance that fills the idle chatter of the bored. Something not altogether different from what, approximately 100 years later, Hannah Arendt would write about in reference to the Germans during the holocaust. Though again Suttner does so not in the oft cold pen of a historian, but one of a fictional autobiographer, which purposefully sets out to awaken in your own heart the realization of such evils.

 As such, there is an equal balance of romance and war commentary, more often with the two overlapping. Without a doubt, she achieves her goal of evoking a passionate cry of “lay down your arms,” at least from this reader. It’s hard not to when she spins a tale that has you so deeply invested in the characters. You find yourself rooting for the love between Martha and Frederick, desperately wanting to tell her father off, and deeply admiring Frederick Tilling’s cogent and honest contribution to a politically and philosophically one sided debate. There were even a few times where I had to look away from the book to properly mourn the loss of certain characters. [SPOILERS] When Conrad died, for instance, by shooting himself in the head at his betrothed’s grave. I remembered that early morning horse ride where Martha was to meet Frederick so that they might fully confess there love to one another. How Conrad, in riding up to his would be sister-in-law to ask for her favor in winning her sisters hand, took the hint that Martha was trying to hook up with Frederick and gave her this “get it girl” look. He had finally won Lilly over only for her to die of cholera before they could wed. And of course, losing Frederick was the hardest of all, the heaviest blow for our Martha. For being German in Paris in the midst of the Franco-Prussian war, he was dragged out of his apartment under suspicion of espionage and shot in the street. The senseless paranoia and enmity of war turned his neighbors into murderers. [END SPOILERS] Suttner displays a breadth of investigation not limited to the format of fiction. In the midst of these calamitous events, Suttner utilizes Martha to investigate the cause of the wars she’s involved in. She undertakes a whole genealogy of them—sifting through supposedly broken treaties and provocations. War, she finds, suspends reason, morals, and sense. The cause is quickly forgotten once war breaks out and in the midst of it, anything goes and all under a Christian god who vacillates his favor between those who fight each other in his name. Propaganda, rhetoric far divorced from any actual truth, is the principle seed that sows generations of enmity, inviting even more retribution by blood ad infinitum. It drives the war machine to its ultimate end of total annihilation, what Freud would later describe in his Civilization and Its Discontents as Thanatos—the death drive.

 Principally, this book offers us a glimpse behind the everyday bullshit used to justify war. It’s wild to read the presentiments Suttner had about the future, especially in regards to anticipating the eventual threat of a weapon so terrible soldiers would no longer be needed, and annihilation would be threatened on such a grand scale that the concept of a Red Cross would be laughable. And while still maintaining her hope for a future that’s progressed so far in reason, war could be abandoned. All of this from the late 19th century! It’s tragic. She recognized too well that often forgotten tragedy in activism: “Achieve? I? I am not so foolish as to hope that I personally shall bring about the conversion…[One] who is penetrated by any cause cannot do better than work for it—than devote [one’s] life to it, even if [one] knows how little [one’s] life, in and by itself, can contribute towards its victory. (215)” This book is so important because the world is still, quite despite the hopes and consistent work of generations of activists, constantly torn asunder by war (esp. through veiled neo-liberal imperialism). Its pages offer the nudge needed to keep working. It reminds us that the work needed to unravel the knots of generations of unjust wars may be tedious, but well worth it. It simultaneously shows us how far we have come (e.g., the United Nations, etc.) and how much work we still have yet to do. As I sit here 160 years after Bertha von Suttner finished this book, war is still regarded as a necessary evil. America’s military, for instance, is the largest in the world. There is still such an ardent, blind faith in serving. Further, the government purposefully preys on the poor to recruit those still in high school into a 20 year contract on the promise of adequate healthcare, education, and housing in exchange for unquestioning loyalty when it comes to butchering people in the Middle East. Our neo-war machine tosses these veterans aside when they come back broken in mind and body to be forgotten on the streets or killed by their own hand. The pinnacle of our radical change has culminated in an American president who still bombs the homes of civilians in foreign countries for its resources, all under the pretext of preventing war and safeguarding national “interests”. The same logic used during the Austro-Prussian and Franco-Prussian wars. How the machinations of a few war mongering fools drags an entire people into the temple of Mars—the last remaining Greco-Roman god we offer regular sacrifice. And we Americans, the worst hypocrites to inherit the title of “world power” stand above the world on a pedestal of our own refuse screaming about how outstandingly moral we are, dictating the terms of global discourse by focusing on what others mustn’t say or do all while ignoring our own prison camps, xenophobia, terrorism, and blithe American ignorance.

I bought this book a day after watching Stranger Than Fiction. I remember the final act of that film with me jumping from my bed, glued to the screen with my shirt in my mouth. It was the most ecstatic I had felt about a film. I remember pacing my room after the credits started rolling exclaiming “Amor Fati! Amor Fati!” as if I was Tomas exclaiming “Es muss sein! Es muss sein!” in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I even journaled about it—a rare feat of inspiration from a movie for me. Amor Fati, similar to Tomas’s startling, passionate realization through the German “Es muss Sein” (if not Kundera’s original philosophical inspiration), is to lovingly accept life as it is, to not want to change a single aspect; literally: to love one’s fate. Friedrich Nietzsche utilizes the term in reference to his conception of the Eternal Return, a concept best summed up in a recapitulation of one of his most famous aphorisms from The Gay Science. He writes of an occasion where some time in the middle of the night a demon sneaks in through your window and declaims that your life as you have lived it, in all of its subtleties and nuances, must now be lived again in the exact same way infinitely and for all of eternity. Nietzsche then poses the question: would you thrash and curse this unholy demon for such a torturous prophecy or would you praise him as a god? The latter reaction would be one that thoroughly comprehends Amor Fati. It’s a dictum that’s meant to call your attention to the greatest weight: your decisiveness. Can you live a life wherein each decision carries the weight of choosing this once more and infinitely more, “to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal? (Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 274)?” It’s like carpe diem with the stakes at their absolute highest. It’s not simply a dictum that encourages satisfying a pleasure principle or breaching convention to pursue creativity. No, it cannot be boiled down to something so cheap and cliché. It cannot be a platitude, for amor fati represents the earnestness of existence. This repetition (as Nietzsche’s philosophic, religious brother Søren Kierkegaard points out) is actuality, the pathos of being at all. What are you willing to stake yourself on? Who are you willing to become? Who are you NOW? This is the moment of decisiveness, one we are fated for every single moment of our existence and amor fati is loving this fate in all of its joys, suffering, and tremendous upheavals. It charges you with the meaning of your life and what you will make of it. How terrifying! But passion always is, for passio is suffering. What are you willing to suffer for?

           Finishing the film, where a character has suddenly realized they are a character in a novel that is doomed to die and as such seeks out their author, perfectly encapsulated these questions and stakes on screen in a wonderfully meaningful way. With these themes being so blatantly philosophical and even based in philosophy, I wondered if it was based on a book. To my surprise, the very title of the film was plucked from Miguel de Unamuno’s Niebla (Fog): “Truth is stranger than fiction (89).” From a Wikipedia article I learned that the film was indeed loosely based off of Niebla. Though I had a long list of books in the queue, I resolved to specially order this book’s English translation through my bookstore the next morning.

           I was too quick to say I was surprised by the fact that the film was based on Unamuno’s book. I should’ve said I was excited to find my suspicions proven correct. The film was based not just on any old novel, but a nivola (not novela) by the great Spanish existentialist author Miguel de Unamuno, lover of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. The themes were blatant because an existentialist wrote them in! Aha! The book began well enough. I was pulled in by the notion that our main character Augusto experienced life as in a great fog, where the events and vicissitudes of life cater to the dispositions through which we are experiencing them: “We don’t succumb to the great joys and sorrows of life because they are cloaked in an enormous fog of small incidents. That’s what life is: a fog. Life is a nebula (18).” The book, as described above, was fashioned as a nivola. Unamuno describes a nivola in the prologue through his character Victor, who happens to be the best friend of the titular Augusto, as a novel but without it’s constraints in form where the entire book happens in dialogue or monologue. While I was initially pulled in by this experiment and challenge against modernism’s realist fiction, I quickly grew weary of Augusto’s philosophical ruminations, which surprisingly tended toward fatalism or worse, Cartesianism. I understand that when dealing with doubting one’s own existence it’s almost inevitable for Descartes to rear his ugly head for being one of the first philosophically respected authors to openly doubt everything save one’s own existence (except that he should publish in Latin—a story for another time) through the famous cogito ergo sum, but it became an unbearable metaphysical metafiction: “You doubt therefore you think. You think, therefore you are (135).” It culminated in one of my least favorite ruminations. Once Augusto finally visits Unamuno and suggests that just as Augusto is simply a dream of his, Unamuno and all of his readers are a dream of God’s, destined for the same fate as poor, hapless Augusto. No matter the vicissitudes of life, no matter the specifics, we’re all doomed to be killed off by God when he has nothing left to do with us in the drama of our life. In Augusto’s words: “I’m to die a fictional character? Fine, my lord and creator, Don Miguel, you’ll die too, you too, and return to the nothingness from which you came. God will stop dreaming you. You’ll die. Yes, you’ll die, even if you don’t want to. You’ll die and all those who read my story will die. All of them. Not a single one will be left. They’re all fictional characters like me, just like me. All of them, every single one of them will die. I’m telling you this. I, Augusto Pérez, a fictional character just like all of you—nivolesque, just like you. Because you, my creator, Don Miguel, are nothing but another nivolesque character, as are your readers, as am I, Augusto Pérez, your victim (164).” It reeks of Berkeleyan Idealism, this idea that we exist in the mind of God, yet it does beg the question, as a writer, what becomes of our characters when we are done with them? What becomes of us?

           The story itself was meant to be a tragicomic. I could see the themes of absurdity, farce, and dark humor that would later be picked up and perfected by Borges, Vonnegut, and Calvino. Yet, while Unamuno was pressing the limits of what could be done with a modernist novel, it still remains a modernist novel. In this way it really reminded me of Martin Heidegger’s contention that the philosophical work we do now cannot be one of “another beginning,” but one that paves the way for that other beginning just as Nietzsche paved a path for thinking out of the 19th century. That’s all philosophically loaded, but it simply means we can’t uproot ourselves from our own interpretive situation. We can’t completely invent anew. Even if we are playing at the limits of thinking, speaking, and writing, we still operate in front of a backdrop that informs every sentence we write or word we say. We can never start from a blank slate so we’re constantly carrying some kind of baggage over from our time. This isn’t a fault, it’s just what is. We cannot completely imagine otherwise out of our current condition without losing the conventions that make it communicable at all. We’d end up in the neigh mystical writings of Maurice Blanchot. The modernist baggage Unamuno carries over is present in the drama of Augusto’s life. He’s torn by his longings for both Eugenia and Rosario. [SPOILER] Eugenia ends up playing Augusto for the fool he is. She spurned his advances and he acts with the pathos of a romantic hero of the 19th century. He all the more forcefully pursues her until he is undone and justifies his behavior through the madness of love. He seduces the woman who irons his clothes, Rosario, in a fit of mania because he can’t act out his desires with his supposed beloved Eugenia. What follows from these encounters ends up being a deeply sexist meditation on the psychological nature of Woman—how a man is in love with the idea of a woman until he loves one woman. Being brought down to the particular, he can then properly love the general because all women share one soul such that in loving one, he loves all. A very Platonic way to regard women as objects of affection. One could say that Unamuno is purposefully playing on these modernist tropes, but then I’d ask in the end what, substantially, is the difference between playing on a trope and falling for one for a reader? In the end, it’s the same side. I don’t think Unamuno would disagree: “Being on this side of nature is the same as being on that side of it…Every straight line is the curve of a circumference, with an infinite radius, that comes together in infinity. So being on this side…is the same as being on that side of it (135).” Would this confusion of the two not be an enactment of the very goal of the nivola? I digress as the nivola does.

“In any work of literature the most interesting bits are in the detail…(323)” How pleasant for a book to fulfill its own precept. What made Abigail so wonderful to read was the detail—not in that meticulous, doled out minutia sort of way, no. Any book can be monotonously detailed, but Abigail wasn’t afraid of illustrating the life of the Matula at the expense of its setting. In fact, with so many books foregrounding the horrors of World War Two, the everyday lives of the people it effected are lost in the cacophony. The lived experience of the war becomes chimerical next to the monstrous machine of war with all its milestones and impersonal mass tragedies (e.g., the fire bombing of Dresden, D-day, or the Holocaust), losses, and victories. Abigail is special because the war is experienced in the background of the lives it effects; it rears its head in subtle ways. Nazis are never explicitly mentioned. It tells the story of the advancing German occupation in terms of political divide and everyday opinion. Notably, it tells you the story of the war through Gina’s eyes: a girl orphaned in a strictly religious school so far from home for reasons she can’t piece together until much later. Szabó depicts this war as what it was: complete upheaval. So much of history is abstracted so that it can be easily digested. So much of history is propaganda. The Germans were the first victims of Nazism. The Jewish people who died in the Holocaust were German; how gloriously we fail to see this. Germany was killing itself and its own people long before it decided to kill others. Szabó illustrates what this kind of precedent would mean for everyday people. It shows the war by peering into the lives of those who are slowly made into lowly heroes by necessity—by necessary choice, whose lives are unfortunately and inevitably intertwined in this world. The resistance within Germany, Hungary, Austria, and Serbia is so often forgotten when we justify the indiscriminate slaughter of German occupied cities (e.g., the fire bombing of Dresden). We Americans stand as the great liberators of tyranny, when the real work to overturn tyranny was done locally, by the people who most suffered from it. If evil is born from banality, then combating evil, extirpating it, is subverting and undoing that banality at every turn. That is what Konig represented as—SPOILER—both the dissident of Arkod and Abigail. He, with Mraz and Mitsi (not to mention the General himself), worked to stifle the propaganda and the glib acceptance of evil’s insidious grasp on Hungary and Serbia.

In many ways, it is reminiscent of Milan Kundera, who is praised for so expertly weaving his characters’ lives just north of Budapest in Prague among the horrific circumstances of Communist Russia’s occupation. Magda Szabó, however, far surpasses Kundera with her quiet focus to detail and the indiscriminate colorful lives of each and every one of her characters; she doesn’t describe life in terms of an immaterial zeitgeist but generates it. Further, she does not fall prey to the needless pitfalls of the male gaze or farcical erotic  commentary against a tyrannical regime. Granted, the German and Russian occupation of Serbia and Czech respectively yields starkly different stories and one may argue that sexual perversion as a means of political subversion is as much very Czech as very suited for a critique against Soviet occupation. I would counter this, however, by strongly pointing out that Milan Kundera’s obsession with placing “the female” as the border by which transgression into contemplation is possible makes his characters one dimensional and often grotesque (Cf. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting’s scene where the narrator admits to wanting to violently rape the woman who was helping him publish his work while blacklisted by the secret police or the short story involving a woman raped by children as she tries to escape to a time before the consequences of Soviet occupation). When you make women the border you must transgress to think anew, rape becomes the given and acceptable mode for that achievement. Szabó tells entirely different stories full of real life characters where the zeitgeist isn’t some abstract notion to latch onto through and by which her characters come alive but the medium through which they move that nuances their decisions and character traits.