Puzzling Novel

 

I am baffled by Helen Oyeyemi’s novel Mr. Fox (published 2011). I understand three things:

1. It’s a retelling of the classic folktale of Bluebeard, originally published in Charles Perrault's 1697 fairy tale collection. Echoes of folktales about foxes also occur throughout. Bluebeard, you may recall, married many women and killed them by beheading them. Finally his last wife discovers his crimes when she opens a secret room that he has told her never to open.
2. The frame story of Mr. Fox is about a novelist named St. John Fox and his wife and about the stories he writes, especially stories about a woman named Mary Foxe and her murderous husbands. The stories reflect the many traditional interpretations of the Bluebeard legend. Was the moral of Perrault’s tale that wives shouldn’t be curious about their husbands’ past (and catch them at their crimes)? Or that they should be more assertive (and avoid being murdered)? The fictitious writer,  his wife, and embedded stories in the novel seem to explore the various interpretations of the original Bluebeard.
3. The invented stories also become a reality in the fictitious author’s personal life as the novel proceeds — or maybe they don’t, maybe the intermeshing is delusional and exists only in the minds of Mr. and Mrs. Fox. As one of them says: “I know what this is called—a folie à deux, a delusion shared by two or more people who live together.” (p. 235)

This novel is exhausting to read. That’s all I can say. I had exactly the same reaction to another book by this author — I wrote: “A very puzzling book, Gingerbread. I'm totally confused by it, but don't feel like rereading it to see if it makes more sense the second time through. I'm not sure I can write a coherent review.” (review of Gingerbread that I wrote)

Review © 2025 mae sander

Magic

 

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clarke,
illustrated by Portia Rosenberg.

I could not tell you why I decided to reread Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, except that its uncanny magical universe has something to do with a short new book by the same author. It’s a very long book: 850 pages, and it took me around a week of reading and being rather engaged with the history of the Napoleonic wars as experienced — and altered — by two English magicians and their circles of friends, relatives, acquaintances, and enemies. The magicians’ main enemy is a Fairy, a malevolent and self-centered creature. The fairy appears to many characters in the novel, and never means any good to them.

 

The fairy was described at his first appearance in the novel:

“a tall, handsome person with pale, perfect skin and an immense amount of hair, as pale and shining as thistle-down. His cold, blue eyes glittered and he had long dark eye-brows, which terminated in an upward flourish. He was dressed exactly like any other gentleman, except that his coat was of the brightest green imaginable – the colour of leaves in early summer.” (p. 90)

In the illustration, you can see the fairy who is obviously up to no good. Specifically, the magician Mr. Norrell has summoned him from a fairy realm beyond England to bring a beautiful young girl back from the dead. The bargain that’s made between magician and fairy is at the heart of many of the events in the novel. If you’ve ever read a fairy tale you wouldn’t be surprised at the consequences of such a bargain.

Another of Portia Rosenberg’s illustrations.

Mr Strange and Mr Norrell Take Tea

There are many plots and subplots about the two magicians Strange and Norrell and the magic that they do for the government of England, for individual noblemen, for their own interests, and in the case of Strange, for his wife. A number of other Englishmen want to be magicians as well, and they also play a role in the elaborate plot of the novel. All is tied together by the personalities of the magicians.

Both magicians are fond of taking a cup of tea, which is viewed as part of their deeply rooted Englishness. Being both typical and loyal is important to them and to the atmosphere of the novel.  When Mr. Norrell tries to offer his services to a Captain Harcourt-Bruce, the captain expects magical drama, troops of enchanted soldiers and swashbuckling magical victories. Instead, Norrell is rather an ordinary Englishman, not the leader of ideal fairy knights imagined by the military man: “That was Captain Harcourt-Bruce’s idea of a magician. That was the sort of thing which he now expected to see reproduced on every battlefield on the Continent. So when he saw Mr Norrell in his drawing-room in Hanover-square, and after he had sat and watched Mr Norrell peevishly complain to his footman, first that the cream in his tea was too creamy, and next that it was too watery – well, I shall not surprize you when I say he was somewhat disappointed.” (p. 107)

There’s even a reference to the supposed civilizing virtues of tea, concerning a captain who was  “entertaining the American savages and teaching them to drink tea (presumably with the idea that once a man had learnt to drink tea, the other habits and qualities that make up a Briton would naturally follow).” (p. 477) 

Mr. Norrell loved the comforts of his well-appointed home, and didn’t go out if he could help it. He preferred to stay in and read one of the thousands of books of magic in his collection; for example: “On a day in late December when storm clouds made Alpine landscapes in the sky above London, when the wind played such havoc in the heavens that the city was one moment plunged in gloom and the next illuminated by sunlight, when rain rattled upon the windowpane, Mr Norrell was seated comfortably in his library before a cheerful fire. The tea table spread with a quantity of good things stood before him and in his hand was Thomas Lanchester’s The Language of Birds.” p. 127.

Strange also finds comfort in his tea when he has some difficult issues that he calls “a wretched business from start to finish.” As he considered them, “he sipped his tea and ate a piece of toast.” (p. 441) Later when Strange is on the battlefield in Spain, he finds some Scots military men, and gives them some hard-boiled eggs he was carrying: “The Highlanders gave him some sweet, milky tea in return and soon they were chatting very companionably together.” (p. 473)

All this is in deep contrast to the foods that the fairy with thistledown hair has to offer his captives: “Here is a haunch of roasted wyvern and a pie of honeyed hummingbirds. Here is roasted salamander with a relish of pomegranates; here a delicate fricassee of the combs of cockatrices spiced with saffron and powdered rainbows and ornamented with gold stars! Now sit you down and eat!” (p. 500)

The famous military leader Wellington interacts with both magicians, especially with Jonathan Strange. He too enjoys English comforts even in the battlefield areas of Spain where the war is going on. His servants make sure to feed him properly: “As Wellington and his companions rode up to the castle they had just begun to lay it with plates of bread rolls, slices of Spanish ham, bowls of apricots and dishes of fresh butter. Wellington’s cook went off to fry fish, devil kidneys and make coffee.” (p. 347)

The appreciation of a typical English meal is shared by other English magicians, for example a man called Secundus, whose landlady brings him “a breakfast of two freshly grilled herrings, tea and fresh milk, and white bread and butter on a blue-and-white china plate.” (p. 26)

A woman in a weakened state begins to recover: “It was soon learnt that Miss Wintertowne had left her bed and, leaning upon Mr Norrell’s arm, had gone to her own sitting-room where she was now established in a chair by her fire and that she had asked for a cup of tea.” (p. 96)

Aromas and Odors

Now I’ve indulged myself by describing the way the author uses food and tea to create an atmosphere around the characters and their unusual lives. I should get down to business and actually review the book, but that’s been done by lots of other people. So I’ll just keep telling you a few things I found amusing.

I also appreciated the use of aromas and odors in the novel, especially the unpleasant aroma associated with an elderly woman whose cats create a rather potent situation (but I can’t say too much because this is quite a big part of the plot). Or the aroma of land and sea: “Instantly the sea became more ethereal and dreamlike, and the wood became more solid. Soon the sea was scarcely more than a faint silver shimmer among the dark trees and a salty tang mingling with the usual scents of a night-time wood.” (p. 667)

Here is a passage that describes the relief felt when a very dark magic spell is lifted from a city:

“There was a sudden rush of scents upon the air – scents of frost, winter earth and the nearby river. The colours and shapes of the park seemed simplified, as if England had been made afresh during the night. To the poor servants, who had been in some doubt whether they would ever see any thing but Dark and stars again, the sight was an exceedingly welcome one.” (p. 782)

More Magic

1871 Edition of The Princess
and the Goblin

Evidently, I enjoy books about magic. I didn’t give this much thought, but my fellow blogger Deb at Readerbuzz listed some magical fiction she was reading and I realized how much I have always liked certain types of magic in books, such as the magic of Ursula LeGuin’s Earthsea. Erin Morgenstern’s Night Circus entertained me, as did Harry Potter. (Lev Grossman: not so much.)

In childhood, I enjoyed the Oz books (which Deb is reading this year). I was very fond of The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald. I also loved fairy tales such as those by Hans Christian Andersen. And who doesn’t love the fairies in A Midsummernight’s Dream?

Here are a few books from Deb’s list that I have enjoyed reading in the past.

• Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett 
• Babel by R. F. Kuang
• A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki

For more of Deb’s choices, see her blog post: Magical Books I Loved that You Might Like to Read.

Review © 2024 mae sander

Shared with Deb’s Sunday Salon

Reading and TV

 Politics: Watching the Debate

New York Times reaction, similar to mine:
civility but Vance lied a lot in a very smooth, even unctuous way.

Antidote to Politics

One rainy afternoon we watched The Wizard of Oz. The four stars’ dancing on the Yellow Brick Road is unbelievable, no matter how many times I see it.

A Locked Room Mystery

Akimitsu Takagi (1920-1995) was a very popular and prolific Japanese mystery author. He wrote mysteries of a number of types — The Noh Mask Murder, first published in 1950, is a locked room mystery. I’ve read several Japanese locked room mysteries, each one more ingeniously complicated than the last. This one is absolutely convoluted, to the point that it seems exaggerated even for a classic mystery story. 

A Very Old Mystery Novel

The Greene Murder Case by S.S. Van Dine (pseudonym of Willard Huntington Wright, 1888-1939) features the sleuth Philo Vance. It was originally published in 1919 and many editions are still in print and available online — I read a free copy from Project Gutenberg. Van Dine’s writing has an amazingly modern feel to it, though the action is sometimes a little slower than in a modern mystery story. Descriptions of people and events create clear images — at least I found them that way. The murders all involve the Greenes, a wealthy family of adult children and a bedridden mother, who live with several servants in a large mansion near the East River in New York. A number of policemen and officials work with the private detective Philo Vance as the case proceeds. Suspense is built as more murders occur, and it was hard to stop reading once I started.

Here’s a very retro element of the novel: the detective drives a Hispano-Suiza,
and one of the characters drives a yellow Daimler. They chase around New York City.

I was reading The Greene Murder Case in a coffee shop! Just for a change of scene.

Blog post and original photo by mae sander © 2024

A Ghost Story: Silver Nitrate

Silvia Moreno-Garcia really knows how to write scary stories!
I did a detailed review of her novel Mexican Gothic here.

Lots of good stuff in this ghost-filled tale! Moreno-Garcia knows how to build suspense and horror, and how to embed the scary stuff in everyday concerns. The plot of Silver Nitrate is complicated and wonderfully worked out, involving a number of interesting characters with a variety of occult skills, all set in Mexico City in 1993.

The two main characters in Silver Nitrate -- Tristán and Montserrat -- are slowly swept into a ghost-hunting frenzy, as they try to lift a curse on a lost movie that was being filmed years earlier in a movie studio in Mexico City. The film had used silver nitrate film, an obsolete and dangerous medium. This explosive substance also, they discover, made a perfect vehicle for creating an elaborate portal to the world of evil spirits and occult intentions, as used by an adept and unscrupulous sorcerer and his followers. (But that's enough spoilers!)

Despite the pressures and the dangers Tristán and Montserrat face, they always manage to stop to eat and sleep and regain their strength. These mundane interruptions are very effective at prolonging the suspense that the author is building. For example, just after a grizzly murder, these two are walking along a street:

"The first week of December. It was the season to devour empanadas, eat rosca de reyes, and listen to the fireworks exploding late at night. He was hoping to drink all the way through the posadas—he’d work off the calories in January. It was not the month to be chasing after murderers."  (p. 156).

On a morning after the two of them encounter some very frightening things:

"Tristán plated the eggs. He’d found corn tortillas in the refrigerator, but he clung to his northern customs and preferred flour ones, so he warmed one for Montserrat but none for himself. They took the plates and the glasses filled with orange juice to the table. They ate quietly. The silence strained the ears." (p. 229).  

Or dining at the home of an elderly man who knows how to perform anti-ghost rituals they need to use, and who knows how to stop the attacks of the more and more threatening supernatural creatures in the story:

"The supper consisted of a watery chicken soup that had Tristán yearning for his mother’s lentil soup with chard and the comforts of his apartment." (p. 251).

Also fascinating: Nazi racism and theories of pure blood play a role in the motivation of the sorcerer's creation, and continue to affect the evil ghosts and evil survivors of the curse in Silver Nitrate. In her earlier novel, Mexican Gothic,  Moreno-Garcia similarly created supernatural monsters who looked like white men, and were driven by extreme views on the superiority of the white race and the inferiority of "the other." This is a convention I very much enjoy. As the New York Times reviewer expressed it: "Moreno-Garcia lays bare the compatibility of Nazi ideology with regional ideas of racial supremacy, discrimination against Indigenous groups and desires to mejorar la raza — 'better the race.'”

Note: The ghosts are real! The rivers of blood are real! The temptation to follow a ghost into the night is real! This is a genuine horror novel.

A Parallel Demonstration of Racism in Mexico

A demonstrably fake mummy displayed this week to the Mexican Congress, which is holding hearings 
on extraterrestrial life. DNA shows that this fake is made up of bones from several human and animal remains.

The history of this fake mummy, displayed to the Mexican Congress, is a long one. The participation of a number of fraudsters with faked credentials and lucrative social media campaign to support their "research" is depressingly predictable. In an article in Vox, “The true story of the fake unboxed aliens is wilder than actual aliens: All the greed, fraud, centuries of racism, and deteriorated llama skulls behind Mexico’s unboxed aliens.” author Aja Romano documents the fraud and the role of racism in enabling the fraudsters. I was very interested because it’s the same racist motivation that features in the novel Silver Nitrate.

Romano writes: “even beyond the travesty that is disturbing individual disinterred remains lie the centuries of societal attempts to diminish the glory of pre-Columbian artists and architects and turn their works into inconceivable ancient alien wonders.”

Interesting parallels thus seem to exixt between these various examples of sheer racism in South America and Mexico.

Review © 2023 mae sander.

Entertainments

A Concert: Shakti's 50th Anniversary Tour

The fusion music of the group Shakti featured at a concert at our local concert space, Hill Auditorium that we attended last Thursday. The University Musical Society of the University of Michigan presents a whole series of concerts each year: this was the first of the 2023-2024 season. The Shakti musicians are: John McLaughlin, Zakir Hussain, Shankar Mahadevan, Ganesh Rajagopalan, and Selvaganesh Vinayakram. The opener by Béla Fleck was also great.

Béla Fleck getting ready to play the banjo. I loved his version of “Rhapsody in Blue.”

Shakti — fantastic music! It’s Indian. It’s rock music. It’s indescribable.

A New Classic Film: Barbie

When Barbie drinks, there's no water in the cup -- it's all pretend play!

 A Ghost Story: Silver Nitrate

Silvia Moreno-Garcia really knows how to write scary stories!
Silver Nitrate is fun to read. Detailed review NOW HERE.

Remembering Fernando Botero (1932-2023)

Fernando Botero, "Mona Lisa," 1979. (source)

Fernando Botero, the Columbian artist, died this week. I remember him especially for his parodies of Mona Lisa. His obituary in the LA Times said that his "depictions of people and objects in plump, exaggerated forms became emblems of Colombian art around the world." (source)

UPDATE:  I posted a more detailed summary of the man and his work HERE.

 Fernando Botero, "Mona Lisa, Age 12," 1959. (source)

The NY Times described one of his early successes: 

"In 1961, the New York curator Dorothy Miller bought a Botero work, “Mona Lisa, Age Twelve,” for the Museum of Modern Art. It was a surprising choice, since Abstract Expressionism was then the rage, and Mr. Botero’s sketchy portrait of a chubby-cheeked child seemed out of place. It was placed on exhibit while the original Mona Lisa was being shown uptown, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art." (source)

Reviews and photos © 2023 mae sander.

Shared with Sunday Salon at Readerbuzz.

Shared on Monday with Elizabeth's Blog Party.

"Leave the World Behind"

 

"An aerial image shows the remains of an armored
Los Angeles Police Department tractor-trailer
after fireworks exploded Wednesday evening." (source)

In the image from the L.A.Times, you can see the result of a fireworks explosion. The fireworks had been confiscated and placed in a containment truck. The expected containment didn't work, and you can see how the truck disintegrated in the blast, which shook the surrounding neighborhood, broke windows, and left some homes "red tagged" because they were no longer safe. People nearby thought it was a bomb or an earthquake.

This week, our lives are full of big and little catastrophes, from hundreds of deaths in the heat wave in the Pacific Northwest to homes and roads flooded by extraordinary rainstorms in the Detroit area where I live. Not to mention the giant catastrophe of a pandemic that changed life all over the planet and isn't over yet. The net result is that we live with constant dread. As Paul Krugman says: "if you aren’t terrified, you aren’t paying attention." (Yes, Krugman's comment was in a different context, but it applies to all kinds of things.)

This week, I read a book about the end of the world. It was fiction, but the disaster story also included a big and unexplained explosion as well as a horrible number of things that make one think of real life on a crazy planet. Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam  takes place in a remote part of Long Island where New Yorkers go to escape everything about the lives they lead in the crowded city.

Shopping, possessions, brand names, status, making money, being someone, going the right places -- these are their values. The characters who face the apocalypse together are typical New York Americans, at least typical of fiction. Although they are all said to have professions, there's little about them that distinguishes the college professor from the financial adviser or from the school administrator. Their educations and jobs don't define them, their material lives do. The four adults and two children in the book are completely oblivious before the unexplained catastrophe and unprepared to deal with it. And in a way -- they don't deal with it, it just swamps them.

The novel starts when a family of four from Brooklyn are settling into a relatively isolated rental house a 20 minute drive from some unspecified beachside town. The house is very luxurious, and would be far beyond their means except as a brief vacation getaway. The furnishings and kitchen set-up impress the renters. 

The first thing they need is to stock this beautiful kitchen with food, and the wife goes into town to a supermarket. Clearly, the choices she makes define her. The following is long, but I think it shows what kind of book this is:

"The store was frigid, brightly lit, wide-aisled. She bought yogurt and blueberries. She bought sliced turkey, whole-grain bread, that pebbly mud-colored mustard, and mayonnaise. She bought potato chips and tortilla chips and jarred salsa full of cilantro, even though Archie refused to eat cilantro. She bought organic hot dogs and inexpensive buns and the same ketchup everyone bought. She bought cold, hard lemons and seltzer and Tito’s vodka and two bottles of nine-dollar red wine. She bought dried spaghetti and salted butter and a head of garlic. She bought thick-cut bacon and a two-pound bag of flour and twelve-dollar maple syrup in a faceted glass bottle like a tacky perfume. She bought a pound of ground coffee, so potent she could smell it through the vacuum seal, and size 4 coffee filters made of recycled paper. If you care? She cared! She bought a three-pack of paper towels, and a spray-on sunscreen, and aloe, because the children had inherited their father’s pale skin. She bought those fancy crackers you put out when there were guests, and Ritz crackers, which everyone liked best, and crumbly white cheddar cheese and extra-garlicky hummus and an unsliced hard salami and those carrots that are tumbled around until they’re the size of a child’s fingers. She bought packages of cookies from Pepperidge Farm and three pints of Ben & Jerry’s politically virtuous ice cream and a Duncan Hines boxed mix for a yellow cake and a Duncan Hines tub of chocolate frosting with a red plastic lid, because parenthood had taught her that on a vacation’s inevitable rainy day you could while away an hour by baking a boxed cake. She bought two tumescent zucchini, a bag of snap peas, a bouquet of curling kale so green it was almost black. She bought a bottle of olive oil and a box of Entenmann’s crumb-topped doughnuts, a bunch of bananas and a bag of white nectarines and two plastic packages of strawberries, a dozen brown eggs, a plastic box of prewashed spinach, a plastic container of olives, some heirloom tomatoes wrapped in crinkling cellophane, marbled green and shocking orange. She bought three pounds of ground beef and two packages of hamburger buns, their bottoms dusty with flour, and a jar of locally made pickles. She bought four avocados and three limes and a sandy bundle of cilantro even though Archie refused to eat cilantro. It was more than two hundred dollars, but never mind. (pp. 11-12). 

Soon after dinner, the owners of the house show up in a panic, having fled from a New York city that's in the worst blackout imaginable. There's a scene where the white people (the renters) don't trust the black people (the owners), which is clearly central to the author's thinking, though I didn't find it that wonderfully done. Then there's the long decline as they hear a huge explosion or other noise and the situation deteriorates. The end of the world is clearly upon them, though I didn't find it that wonderfully done. The author never reveals what exactly caused the disaster, though he parenthetically tells how it was worldwide and very fatal. I didn't find that so wonderful either. 

But the shopping is superb. The author in my opinion is better at social satire than he is at dystopian end-of-the world writing. I would like it better if it hadn't been so vague; however, in an interview, he said: “If anything, I have learned to frustrate the reader. I hope people realise that you can’t make sense of it. You wouldn’t. And that is what is chilling.” This is from a very fascinating interview in the Guardian (Rumaan Alam: "What we are experiencing now is part of a bigger moment") which inspired me to read the book. I'm not sorry I read it, despite what I see as its flaws.

Review © 2021 mae sander, images as credited.

"Parable of the Sower" by Octavia E. Butler

 

Octavia Butler (1947-2006) is a fascinating author. I have just read her book Parable of the Sower, which was published in 1993, and I will probably read the sequel, Parable of the Talents. The action in the book was in the distant future when Butler wrote it, but now it's in the immediate future, taking place from 2024 to 2027. The setting is California, which has been devastated by drought and unrest. 

Obviously the utterly chaotic, desperate, and violent situation in the futurist dystopia is not (yet?) a reality. The predictions of climate disasters, social unrest, completely predatory law enforcement, useless government, shortages of all basics including drinking water, and consequently impoverished populations have a lot of resonance now. Luckily, in real life as I write in 2021, we are still pretty much the same society that we were in the 1990s. 

The narrator of the book, a young woman named Lauren, is 15 years old at the start, but highly aware of the precarity of her family's situation. They live in a walled and guarded complex of homes and are constantly invaded by lawless thieves and vandals. Drugs are rampant, especially a drug that makes the addicts love to set fires and watch them. Of course things go from bad to worse. Lauren loses her family and goes on the road, living from hand to mouth, and defending herself and an accumulating group of other refugees.

Lauren has invented a kind of religion, finding a God in nature. She narrates her journey with the idea of expressing her religious thoughts, and it's fairly interesting. It reminds me of the philosophy of Spinoza, finding God in everything and everything in God. She writes: 

"Create no images of God. Accept the images that God has provided. They are everywhere, in everything. God is Change— Seed to tree, tree to forest; Rain to river, river to sea; Grubs to bees, bees to swarm. From one, many; from many, one; Forever uniting, growing, dissolving— forever Changing. The universe is God’s self-portrait." (p. 315).

The descriptions of the book are vivid and the action is extremely well presented, which is why I liked it. While life has become primitive, the people know about the rest of the country, and hear of all the other types of disaster such as cholera in Mississippi, drug epidemics in big cities, tornados in the South, a blizzard in the midwest, and a measles epidemic in New Jersey.  There are earthquakes that further destabilize life in California. 

Their news sources, however are becoming weaker as their electronic devices break and they definitely can't pay for new ones -- all money goes for basics. And basic human needs are less and less well-met, especially food and above all water, which is more expensive even than food.  Just a few examples, beginning with the narrator's favorite: "acorn bread that was full of dried fruit and nuts." (p. 55). Wheat and other grains have become so expensive that her family uses what grows in the dry California area where they live -- and obtains recipes from a book of American Indian lore. Inside their walled compound they also have orange and lemon trees and a rabbit warren which provides meat and skins. However, "Food prices are insane, always going up, never down. Everyone complains about them." (p. 80). 

Shopping is dangerous and difficult, with many dishonest merchants. At a reliable one:

“'Shop in peace,' the guard said with no hint of a smile. 

"I bought salt, a small tube of honey, and the cheapest of dried foods—oats, fruit, nuts, bean flour, lentils, plus a little dried beef—all that I thought Zahra and I could carry. And I bought more water and a few odd items: water purification tablets—just in case—and sun blocker, which even Zahra and I would need, some stuff for insect bites, and an ointment Dad used for muscle aches." (p. 174).

On the road:

"Cold camps are safer than cheery campfires. Yet tonight we cleared some ground, dug into a hillside, and made a small fire in the hollow. There we cooked some of my acorn meal with nuts and fruit. It was wonderful. Soon we’ll run out of it and we’ll have to survive on beans, cornmeal, oats—expensive stuff from stores. Acorns are home-food, and home is gone."  (p. 180).

"We had beans cooked with bits of dried meat, tomatoes, peppers, and onions. It was Sunday. There were public firepits in the park, and we had plenty of time. We even had a little wheat-flour bread and the baby had real baby food with his milk instead of mashed or mother-chewed bits of whatever we were eating." (p. 220). 

All in all, I liked this book, and found the author's predictions of future breakdown in society to be quite interesting. And I'm really glad we haven't deteriorated that far: the risk is far from over. Maybe we'll suffer this fate after all. I hope not. I haven't read any criticism or other reviews of this classic, so someone has probably already said all the things I have said here.

I wrote about Butler's novel Kindred when I read it last July (link). This post © 2021 mae sander.

Klara and the Sun: New from Ishiguro

All my books by Ishiguro.

Nourishment is a key to everything in Kazuo Ishiguro’s just-published novel, Klara and the Sun. However, nourishment comes not from food or drink, not from consumption, but directly from the sun. On the first page of the novel, Klara, the narrator, says she could walk up to the window display in the shop where she begins, 

“And if we were there at just the right time, we would see the Sun on his journey.... When I was lucky enough to see him like that, I’d lean my face forward to take in as much of his nourishment as I could.”

Klara and the others in the shop are AFs — Artificial Friends. They are awaiting the humans who will come and purchase them, and incorporate them into their lives. The shop Manager recognizes a particular sensitivity in Klara, who is especially adaptable to being a friend to a lonely human child in a world where (it will turn out) children are often very alone and friendless. Unsurprisingly, life for the humans who purchase Klara is in a new world beyond the one we current humans are living: but plausible. Of course the humans eat food — and drink coffee! But to Klara this is just part of the buzzing, busy world of sensory inputs that she has to process with her obviously artificial intelligence.

You could categorize this book as a dystopian fiction, but that wouldn’t help to see what Ishiguro is doing here, as Klara the AF describes the way she learn to interpret the input that comes from her world. First we read of her observations of the shop where she is becoming conscious of her surroundings and of the other AFs for sale there. Then we slowly learn of a new and rather painfully organized and controlled society where most of the humans are living in a frightening controlled existence, which we never grasp fully.

Klara’s vision is a fascinating theme of the novel, because her mind “sees” with machine intelligence. Sometimes she’s aware of a grid when the objects in her field of view are very numerous or confusing, and it often takes her a while to figure out what she is seeing and hearing. Frequently, she will list what she sees, and will include objects that a human observer would find irrelevant to what’s going on — for example, she’s very aware of Tow-Away Zone signs and “anti-parking” signs. As for other sensations: she admits at one point that she was not built with any sense of smell at all, and obviously has no sense of taste as she never eats (and views meals as social occasions, such as tense Sunday breakfasts). She doesn’t seem aware of much in the way of tactile sensations, either. Klara’s exceptional emotional intelligence, like her sight, still requires her to use reasoning in order to grasp feelings that humans seem to apprehend directly. The AF point of view on perception is kind of a tour-de-force of writing and imagination of the novelist.

Klara’s human, once she is purchased, is named Josie, a girl in her early teens, who lives in near-isolation with Chrissie, her mother, and Melania Housekeeper, their housekeeper. (I was never 100% certain if Melania was real or if she was “artificial.”) Only once do a group of adolescents gather, in an event that’s chaotic both for them and for Klara. At the end of the book, a few more characters become important, but no spoilers here. In Klara’s world, the most intelligent being is the Sun, creator of nourishment and all-seeing provider, and she believes deeply that she can communicate with the Sun and influence him to use his powers that she believes in. This becomes very central as the novel progresses to have an actual plot!

Here is the hardest question that Klara has to consider, posed by Josie’s father:

“Then let me ask you something else. Let me ask you this. Do you believe in the human heart? I don’t mean simply the organ, obviously. I’m speaking in the poetic sense.The human heart. Do you think there is such a thing? Something that makes each of us special and individual?” (p. 215)

The total impact of the book, it seems to me, is the consideration of this question, though the theme of alienation in Klara and the Sun is stronger than in any of Ishiguro’s other books. The behavior of her Sun emphasizes this point: Klara always watches the setting Sun, her idol, as he drops below a building on the horizon beyond the windows of Josie’s house. Sunset as she observes it is always in the same place. There’s nowhere on planet earth where this would be the behavior of the sun, which intensifies the alien mood. 

Review © 2021 mae sander.

What is a soul? Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go

Kazuo Ishiguro's novel Never Let Me Go explores a number of questions, subtly. For most of the book, Kathy, the narrator, systematically relates her memories of growing up at a special school called Hailsham somewhere in the English countryside, as well as her life afterwards.

To begin, Kathy explains that currently, at age 31, she works as a "carer" with responsibility for "donors." That is, organ donors. Many of these donors, the ones to whom she feels the strongest connection, also spent their early lives at Hailsham. As she introduces herself, she makes clear that Hailsham no longer exists, and that in fact she doesn't know exactly where it once stood. 

But it’s evident that she too will soon become an organ donor — and that in fact her entire cohort belong to a class of creatures that were created solely for the purpose of donating organs to the real, natural humans. While those who were brought up at Hailsham were privileged with a traditional education in the arts and humanities, others were not. Thus Kathy and her fellows are a kind of elite, but their looming fate is the same. The intensity and consciousness of the lives of Kathy and her fellow students contrasts to their status in society: not quite human, despite their deep and meaningful relationships and emotional lives. Above all, they cannot choose how to live or what do do with their own lives: they have only one future.

Ishiguro, who won the Nobel Prize in 2017, is renowned for writing simple and direct stories that force the reader to confront painful and profound questions. In this story, the question is what is a soul? Do these clones whose emotional and personal lives are both normal and vivid have souls? Reading this book again for the first time since it was published in 2005, I found it deeply painful. The parallels to actual social outcast groups are clear but it’s left to the reader to think about them — never is there a direct comparison to the world we actually inhabit. 

I chose to reread Never Let Me Go because Ishiguro’s newest book is being published this week, and amazon has promised that my copy will arrive Thursday. I have read several reviews of the new book along with Ishiguro’s small body of work (just 8 novels and a story collection before the new one). I believe it’s very hard to capture just what it is he is doing in his powerful yet seemingly simple novels. The more times I read them, the more challenging I find them. I’m really looking forward to the new one.

This review © 2021 mae sander.

Cthulhu Comes to Mexico

Mexican Gothic, published June, 2020

In the New Yorker this week is a list of "The Best Books We Read in 2020." Staff writer Rachel Syme chose Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s novel Mexican Gothic, a story about events in El Triunfo, a small and mysterious town in Mexico, in 1950. A very creepy family live there, in a horror show of a house. At the beginning, Noemí,  a very innocent young woman from Mexico City, is sent there to rescue her cousin. The cousin, Catalina, is the wife of one of the residents of the house, and has sent a mysterious letter begging for help. 

Reading Syme's recommendation, I was convinced: I bought it yesterday and already read it. Here's what she said.

"What makes 'Mexican Gothic' so fresh is not only its cramped, crawly ambience...but also the fact that it’s steeped in a deep colonial history that haunts the narrative. Is the house in El Triunfo really sick? Or is it just tainted by colonizers who want to strip the land down to its bones? Moreno-Garcia deftly raises these questions and then brings them all together in a gory, monstrous, and utterly satisfying twist."

Mexican Gothic definitely belongs to the genre of horror fiction -- not a type of novel I usually read. Like anything that is simultaneously fascinating and horrifying, you can't stop looking, or in this case, can't stop reading. The English family that inhabit the threatening house, and have lived there for over half a century, aren't just living there: they are trapped by the house and it's poisonous and murderous past, but I won't reveal more spoilers. The Gothic elements definitely include sexual threats to the pure and untouched Noemí, as well as many other creepy features that may be similar to other horror tales.

One repeated theme throughout the novel is the captivating idyll of fairy tales, which Catalina, the older of the two cousins, would read to Noemí during their childhood. In their thoughts are constant references to Snow White, Beauty and the Beast, and Sleeping Beauty, and to the horror of fairy tales:

"She recalled, rather grimly, that certain fairy tales end in blood. In Cinderella, the sisters cut off their feet, and Sleeping Beauty’s stepmother was pushed into a barrel full of snakes. That particular illustration on the last page of one of the books Catalina used to read to them suddenly came back to her, in all its vivid colors. Green and yellow serpents, the tails poking out of a barrel as the stepmother was stuffed into it." (p. 86). 

Moreno-Garcia has written several earlier novels that refer explicitly in their titles to the works of H. P. Lovecraft, though I've never read any of her other books. Mexican Gothic has some powerful resemblances to Lovecraft's tales. Lovecraft hated non-white people, and his monster Cthulhu embodied an inexpressible threat to white people (blogged here). Mexican Gothic, in contrast, depicts a supernaturally evil monster who himself is a white supremacist from England. He's the cruel colonial owner of a silver mine where Mexican workers have slaved and died, and he espouses eugenic and other racist theories that Noemí's college major, anthropology, have made her able to dispute. 

Another aspect of the theme of racism is the pallor of the very white people in the horror household, in contrast to Noemí's native Mexican complexion. The first person from the house that she meets is the most extreme example: "He was fair-haired and pale— she didn’t realize anyone could be that pale; goodness, did he ever wander into the sun?— his eyes uncertain, his mouth straining to form a smile or a greeting." (p. 17). Later: "He seemed a bit ghostly, still standing by the doorway, with the glow of the lanterns and candles in his room lighting his blond hair like an unearthly flame." (p. 179). And a reaction of one of the English wraith-like people to Noemí: “And what a pretty face you have. Dark skin, dark eyes. Such a novelty.” (p. 236). 

The anti-racist reversal of Mexican Gothic from Lovecraft's hatred of dark people makes it somewhat amusing, though knowing Lovecraft's work isn't necessary to enjoying the novel -- there's plenty to ponder if you are just aware of current racial politics. Other parallels to Lovecraft's work also appear -- for example, the association of the monstrous paterfamilias of the household with overpowering stinks, also a feature of the horrors presented by Lovecraft, as well as other writers. 

The passive and uncooperative servants and townspeople in the novel also create an atmosphere reminiscent of the New England towns which Lovecraft's alien monsters terrorized. Very nondescript meals (English style) that Noemí is served also recall the dull food in these New England towns; her first dinner: 

"The plates were taken away in silence, and in silence there came the main dish, chicken in an unappealing creamy white sauce with mushrooms. The wine they’d poured her was very dark and sweet. She didn’t like it." (p. 28).

Or the next morning: 

"Breakfast was brought to her on a tray. Thank goodness she did not have to sit down to eat with the whole family that morning, although who knew what dinner might bring. The chance for solitude made the porridge, toast, and jam she had been served a bit more appetizing. The drink available was tea, which she disliked. She was a coffee drinker, preferred it black, and this tea had a definite, faint, fruity scent to it." (p. 37). 

And at the end, the theme of fairy tales reappears at a crucial moment in the action:

"The scene reminded her of a picture in one of her childhood fairy tale books, when the wedding banquet is in place and an evil fairy walks into the room. She recalled the table laden with meats and pies, the women wearing high headdresses, and the men in box coats with huge sleeves." (p. 256). 

As I mentioned, Mexican Gothic is so suspenseful that you just can't stop reading! While it has similarities to traditional horror tales, including the Greek myth of Persephone which it mentions, it also has a highly original slant on the usual forms.

Blog post © 2020 mae sander.

Food in Science Fiction: Someone Else's Opinion

Understanding the many meanings of food and meals in literature is one of my favorite indoor sports. Aside: I don't care for any outdoor sports at all!

I guess I'm not the only one. Lizzy Saxe has written a very amusing article on this subject for LitHub:

ON THE FREAKY FOODS OF 
FICTIONAL WORLDS

FROM ABUNDANCE TO SCARCITY, WHAT EATING IN SCI-FI SAYS ABOUT THE REAL WORLD

After calling out several famous favorite foods of fictional people and creatures -- like honey and Winnie-the-Pooh  or madeleines and Proust's narrator -- she says "But in modern sci-fi, no one ever seems to have a good meal."

Saxe observes that science-fiction in the 1950s and 1960s often portrayed an abundance of food without exactly explaining where it came from or who cooked it. She hints that this was due to the predominance of male authors who by implication didn't need to know how meals appeared on the tables in their own conventional wife-run homes, so "Robbie the Robot can make anything at any time for anyone."

A next step in the role of food in speculative fiction reflects environmentalism, with awareness of how a planet -- not necessarily earth -- could be ruined by overconsumption, Saxe suggests. She offers examples of stories where food is scarce and a cause of friction or war, stories of starvation and apocalypse, imagined worlds where there are privileged diners and those on scarce rations, and more. She writes: "in imagining the future, writers use food as a symbol not only of hope and good luck, but of death, environmental warning, and class."

Saxe's conclusion is a bit over-optimistic, in my opinion, but it's an interesting conclusion to an article that explores many of the ideas that I'm fond of looking for when I read:

"If science fiction at its best provides a prism through which to examine the present, then we’re being sent a very clear message by authors as far back as Bradbury and as recent as Jemisin. Treating our planet—and each other—with disrespect will be our doom, but if we work hard to take care of both the people and the world around us, we can find ways to keep going in the years to come."

Illustration from the LitHub article. Odd choice, since Star Trek wasn't mentioned.

"The Fifth Season" by N.K.Jemisin

“I read everything. The No 1 thing I tell my students...is read diversely. And I’m not talking about demographics, though that’s part of it. Aesthetic diversity, genre diversity. It matters because it just makes us better informed, and it protects us from our worst instincts.”

So said Roxane Gay in a recent interview with Aida Edemariam titled: Roxane Gay: ‘Public discourse rarely allows for nuance. And see where that’s gotten us.’  According to this article, Gay "reserves a particular ire for those who read only literary fiction;" she particularly likes spy thrillers and romance novels, according to the interview.

I agree with Roxane Gay that a diet of all literary fiction is really tedious, and I really know it because I just read five or six works of literary fiction in a row. Some of them were set in other cultures or in American subcultures, but they were pretty typical of literary fiction.

Would Roxane Gay say to me what she said in the article: "Anybody who tells me, ‘I only read literary fiction,’ I’m just like, ‘Well, you’re an asshole. What are we going to talk about?’" Whatever Roxane Gay thinks, I felt like it was time to read something different, so I read The Fifth Season, N.K. Jemisin's Hugo Winner.

Unfortunately The Fifth Season didn't satisfy my taste in this type of literature. I prefer sci-fi and fantasy that has a certain type of spontaneity, where a naive character faces an unfamiliar society or other-worldly reality, but faces it from a purely human perspective. Examples -- The Wizard of Oz, The Hobbit, The Hunger Games, Alice in Wonderland, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, The Left Hand of Darkness, Anansi Boys, and Oryx and Crake come to mind. When I think about Dorothy, Bilbo, Katniss, Alice, Harry, Genly Ai, Charles Nancy, Snowman, and various others, I realize that the journey or life experience of every one of them boils down to an intelligent and resourceful central character facing a variety of new situations and challenges in a totally human way. No matter how strange the fantasy or sci-fi situation was, the authors gave these characters courage, empathy, and curiosity. The reader can join them in discovering their worlds. Not so in The Fifth Season.

While The Fifth Season did have a bizarre society and a non-earthly reality, it had far too much other baggage for my taste. Jemisin's characters possessed so many special powers that they simply were not facing their challenges as human beings, but as some other type of creature. Further, they were very well-informed and educated about the natural history, political history, and social history of their world, not at all naive in the same way as the characters in the books I enjoy the most.

I find the book had just way too much made-up stuff. It distracts from the central challenges of the characters. Their planet is full of seismic upheavals: small tremors, earthquakes, volcanos, tsunamis, and gigantic cracks in the earth. Whole cities are swallowed up. Moreover, there are human-type creatures who can harness these forces or who can trigger them unwittingly. There are other human-type creatures with other powers as well -- too many powers to leave them as really comprehensible individuals.

Their world is very bizarre and unstable, and full of invented technical terms and concepts -- so many of these that the book has an appendix explaining many words like orogene, stillhead, geomest, lorist, and sesuna. (Since these words exist only in this invented world, I'm not going to define them here, even though today could be Wordy Wednesday.) Moreover, this world has a very very complicated history which the characters often discuss -- they learned it in school. There's an appendix with a time line of this history too. For me, this is just too gimmicky.

As always, I look at the way food is used, and here are some examples of how distracting the excess of made-up stuff is, stretching the reader's attention so that the psychological side of things gets overwhelmed (which is probably ok with some readers, it's just the part that I prefer).

Here are some examples of the foods mentioned in The Fifth Season. In the type of book I like, foods evoke pleasure or not, and contribute to the reader's ability to empathize with fictional characters no matter how bizarre their lives. These passages, I feel, demonstrate that the over-use of inventions diminishes the vividness of human experiences:

"You’ve eaten something from your pack: cachebread smeared with salty akaba paste from the jar you stuffed into it a lifetime and a family ago. Akaba keeps well after it’s opened, but not forever, and now that you’ve opened it you’ll have to eat it for the next few meals until it’s gone. That’s okay because you like it." (Kindle Locations 962-964).

"...finding a couple of derminther mela— small melons with a hard shell that burrow underground during a Season, or so the geomests say— and rolling them into the remnants of their fire, which she’s very glad they hadn’t gotten around to smothering yet." (Kindle Locations 1564-1566).

"The station’s buildings hold all the comforts Syen’s been craving: hot water, soft beds, food that isn’t just cachebread and dried meat." (Kindle Locations 1735-1736).

"Room service arrives, bringing a tray of modest but filling local food. Fish is cheap in most Coaster comms, so Syen has treated herself by ordering a temtyr fillet, which is an expensive delicacy back in Yumenes. ... Syenite has a side dish of garlic yams and carmelized silvabees, in addition to her own meal, on a separate smaller plate." (Kindle Locations 1922-1928).

"...people get up for second helpings from the massive pot of spiced shrimp, rice, and smoked sea-bubble that is tonight’s meal." (Kindle Locations 4223-4224).

"... just grabbing a plate of roasted tulifish and braised threeleaf with sweetened barley that must have been stolen from some mainland comm." (Kindle Locations 4422-4423).

Yes, I did find some things to like in this book, but I don't feel that it matches up to my favorites that I mentioned above, or to many others by those same authors. I started with a quote from Roxane Gay that encouraged reading of non-literary fiction. Soon I plan to read something by Roxane Gay herself, though I haven't decided whether to read her fiction or her essays.

"Spoonbenders"

Spoonbenders, a novel by Daryl Gregory (published June 2017) bends the all-too-common dysfunctional-family stereotype into something new, strange, and highly readable. Maureen, the mother of the family at the center of the book has been dead for 21 years. In her 31 years of life, she had been a truly amazing and talented psychic. Her three children and her grandchildren inherited various forms of her gift.

Unfortunately, as the novel opens in 1995, not a single member of this family has ever found a comfortable or productive way to apply the unbelievable things they can do. Maureen's husband Teddy -- who has no psychic gifts at all -- had been a con man when she had met him, in the early 1960s. He mainly made a living playing cards with suckers or compulsive gamblers.

In the course of the novel we learn that while Teddy had worked for the mob, Maureen had been employed by a top-secret government spy service -- but I won't spoil the novel's revelations with more about this. Like much of the plot, which is full of revelations, surprises, and reversals, their activities in slight-of-hand and also in authentic psychic actions are all very amusing -- or as Mattie, the grandson with his own psychic powers realizes at the end: "Everything he knew about his family was not wrong, exactly, but turned sixty degrees." (pp. 393).

With their gifted children, Teddy and Maureen for a while had a vaudeville-type "magic" act combining Teddy's con-man skills with the very genuine psychic tricks the rest of the family could do. (Note: it's a fantasy novel!) Their near-success as performers ends with a disastrous TV appearance where they are shown up by one G. Randall Archibald. As I was reading, Archibald constantly reminded me, in an off-beat way, of the real life "Amazing Randy." In the acknowledgements, in fact, the author says:

"I owe an apology ... to one of my heroes, James Randi, aka the Amazing Randi. His lifelong crusade to investigate psychics, faith healers, mediums, and frauds of all paranormal stripes inspired a story that might provide aid and comfort to the enemy. ...  There are no mind readers, no remote viewers, no water dousers, no one who can warp kitchen utensils with the power of their mind— except in fiction. But isn’t that enough?"

As in many books I've enjoyed, I found that food often played a kind of grounding role in the very complicated, emotionally dangerous, and sometimes violent fantasy story. Chop suey, "an ultra-bland dish" their mother made sometimes; Greek lamb sausage, also a favorite childhood memory; hand-made pizza, associated with the unsavory mob associated with their father's card-sharking and their brother's dangerous debts ... the family eats pretty standard stuff. And somehow it becomes significant, thanks to the memories of their mother overseeing the children cooking her favorite recipes.

For example, in a hectic scene almost at the end of the novel, all the characters in the entire book gather in a single place: the family back yard and house, where Buddy, the clairvoyant brother is preparing a barbecue and where all the strands of the plot are somehow about to be wrapped up. Some quotes that characterize this assembly, which are interspersed with the exciting finale --

"'Could you make Mom’s lamb sausage?' Irene asks. 'You know, the ones with the feta and the mint?'" (p. 338) 

"Buddy had turned the back patio into an outdoor kitchen. Ground lamb sat out in big stainless steel bowls, and a plate held a mound of freshly chopped mint. God he loved Mom’s lamb sausage. Buddy was at the grill, wrapping potatoes in aluminum foil." (p. 349) 

"With Joshua’s help he managed to chop all the garlic, and on his own blended four pounds of ground meat and another pile of the mint-feta mixture, but now he’s almost out of time, and he has to make all the patties." (p. 352)

"Of course there could be no such thing as a normal picnic with her family." (p. 362). 

Finally Buddy, who had been tormented by his clairvoyant visions of both his past and his future, ends up with a normal restaurant meal: "He turned the plastic-coated pages in a slow simmer of panic. Each picture was more luscious than any pornographic photo he’d ever seen: seductively crossed chicken strips; gleaming pot roast; wet, juicy quesadillas; steaming piles of spaghetti. Too many choices. Far too many. The Build Your Own Burger section made his heart race. ... remembered meals were the ultimate comfort food. But to be set loose in an environment where not only could almost anything be ordered, but if that failed, could be assembled from a vast number of ingredients? Madness." (p. 396)

Dysfunctional families in popular lit these days are kind of a dime a dozen. Kids have problems with developing a sense of identity and understanding their rapidly changing minds and bodies. Parents have problems with kids, jobs, and money. Grandparents have problems with growing old and seeing how the next generation turned out. MEGO: "My Eyes Glaze Over." You can find it in Urban Dictionary. When I used to write management presentations, my most boring customer, who knew he was boring, brought up MEGO often when worrying about his impact.  It doesn't fit Spoonbenders, but it sure does fit a lot of other books!

PS -- This is a hilarious book. I'm not sure I was clear that it was really funny and fun to read!