Yan Lianke. The Years, Months, Days. Trans. Carlos Rojas. Black Cat, 2017. 192 pages. $16.00.
Misfortune and hardship are the constant in Yan Lianke’s two novellas, which have the strange, airless quality of dreams: fantastical yet they feel real. In these unpredictable worlds animals are human-like companions, ghosts speak, and nature is an ogre, and even colors and sounds have a material existence. Lianke’s unconventional language, the agile metaphors and sly humor, deepens the sense of the extraordinary while hinting at a danger lurking just below the surface—the nightmare that unexpectedly pierces the dream.
In the aptly titled first novella The Years, Months, Days, time stretches indefinitely, punctuated only by the rising or setting of a monstrous sun. A severe drought has forced all but one of the inhabitants of a remote mountain village to flee. The Elder, as he is simply known, reasons that “I am seventy-two years old, and would surely die of exhaustion if I tried to walk for three days. If I’m going to die either way, I’d prefer to die in my own village.” And so, he stays behind with his faithful blind dog and a nascent, green corn seedling, which he devotes himself to in the hopes that it will flourish. The Elder concocts various strategies to survive, including weighing the sunlight, confronting a pack of spectral wolves, and outwitting a plague of rats. Eventually, the Elder realizes that for the seedling to grow it needs fertilizer; and he makes the ultimate sacrifice. In the end, nature appeased, the village “became so peaceful that you could even hear the bright sound of the sunrays knocking against one another and the moonbeams striking the ground.”
Nature is again the mercurial antagonist in the second novella Marrow, this time in the form of a mysterious illness. The widow Fourth Wife You has four children, all idiots. Each child was born normal and then “at the age of six months, their eyes grew dull and their pupils shrank.” The doctor tells her there is no antidote, “If you were to have a hundred children, they would all be idiots as well.” Undeterred, Fourth Wife You journeys from village to village to find suitors for her children, “wholers,” who are not afflicted with the sickness. The ghost of her dead husband is her only solace; she interacts with him constantly, asking his advice, and often berating him for leaving her alone. When she discovers a cure that is worse than the illness itself, she goes ahead with it anyway for the sake of her children.
With these inventive, eccentric tales, Lianke exposes life’s absurdities in all its brutality and tenderness, leaving readers shaking their heads while asking for more. —CC
Chloe Benjamin. The Immortalists. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2018. 346 pages. $26.00.
Chloe Benjamin’s second novel, The Immortalists, explores the dangerous potential of self-knowledge. The story opens in New York in the summer of 1969. The four Gold children—Simon, Klara, Daniel, and the eldest, Varya—visit a gypsy who admits them one at a time into her apartment and shares the date when each will die. What began as a fun adventure ends with tears and argument as each child reacts to this new knowledge. But what if the gypsy just made it up?
The jagged certainty of death shapes and energizes the novel, which Benjamin structures in four movements corresponding to each of the Gold children. In the first movement, Simon is a teenage runaway who discovers himself in San Francisco. At the ballet studio where he learns to dance, he falls in love with another man. They make a life together in the early eighties just as AIDS becomes endemic but before it has a name, when no one knows how to treat this mysterious plague. Klara is Simon’s fellow runaway to the West Coast, where throughout the eighties she hones her performance skills as a stage magician. During her audition in Vegas, she charms a handful of Mirage executives while performing sleight of hand: “Some magicians say that magic shatters your worldview. But I think magic holds the world together.” Unfortunately, magic can’t make Klara’s toxic self-doubt disappear.
In the third movement, Daniel is a post-9/11 military doctor who clears for combat soldiers not yet old enough to buy a beer. He’s certain that he could have done more to save his younger brother and sister, and it’s this burden that pushes him to his own violent end. In the final section, Varya is a researcher of longevity who prolongs her own life through strict caloric restriction, a regiment that she forces on her primate subjects at the Drake Institute for Research on Aging. Of the four Golds, she may be the only one to escape the weight of the gypsy’s prophecy. A journalist visits the Drake to interview Varya and the revelations that follow push her life off its rails and onto the open road.
The Immortalists, named for one of Klara’s more daring magic acts, is itself a magical performance. With remarkable control and insight, Benjamin conjures a family who struggles against the bounds of fate even as they strive to make their own destinies. —DB
Margaret Bradham Thornton. A Theory of Love. HarperCollins, 2018. 288 pages. $27.99.
Margaret Bradham Thornton’s second novel, A Theory of Love, excels at vivid, cinematic setting descriptions. Lush landscapes, bustling cities, elegant manors, and sparkling beaches all make an appearance here. The novel excels at painting travel-guide worthy portraits of various locales so insistently, in fact, that readers might suffer jet lag by the last chapter. Helen Gibbs, a journalist and Christopher Delavaux, an attorney/investor, globe trot through chapters titled “Bermeja,” “Sussex,” “Saint-Tropez,” “Fontainbleau,” “Cala Blava,” “London,” “Havana,” “Milan,” and “New York” as they fall in love, marry, and separate. Along the way they face some challenges, primarily Helen’s miscarriage and Christopher’s shady business partner, but also lesser, daily concerns, including dilemmas about whether to rent a car or take a helicopter and have a car delivered, or what gift to buy Helen’s brother, who “collects wine and first editions of Trollope.” This is to say, the stakes don’t seem all that high for this pair—there’s little danger, little tension, and little depth to their whirlwind relationship from the start. While indifference and distance between the characters (both physical and emotional) form the novel’s chief concerns, it’s not clear that Thornton intended to evoke that same sense of emptiness in her reader. While the novel tells us what Christopher and Helen are feeling at various points, its lens is focused on opulent imagery, characters’ pedigrees, dinner parties, and expensive leisure—alarming wealth and privilege, in other words. Because of the close third person narration, the reader understands this wealth and privilege to be the main focus for Helen and Christopher, also, and that makes it challenging to summon as much empathy about their relationship as a meditation on love should inspire. By the end of the book, the pair has reconnected after a short separation, and the novel offers entanglement theory—the idea that particles once entangled will always remain connected even across great distances—as both a metaphor for their relationship and an explanation of the title. The question is whether Helen and Christopher were ever truly entangled in the first place. —MB
Jamel Brinkley. A Lucky Man. A Public Space Book: Graywolf Press, 2018. 264 pages. $26.00.
In this tight, polished story collection, Brinkley tackles issues related to masculinity, fatherhood (including the impact of absentee fathers), and the multi-faceted ugly beast of racism and the lives it has marred.
In the opening story, “No More than a Bubble,” the premise of two college guys going out, hoping to get laid seems simple enough as they, with bravado, begin to sexualize their options at the party. To my delight, Brinkley turns the situation and the long adventure of a night on its head. By the end of the story, we don’t know who is predator and who is prey, completely unnerving one of the men, Claudius, as the girls push them to devolve into an odd foursome:
I turned to Claudius, standing there with his hands clasped in front of his genitals. Sybil went to him and moved his hands aside. His calves were thin in comparison to his muscular thighs. He had a well-developed chest but a bulging stomach, bisected by a vertical stripe of fuzzy hair. His penis was half-erect. Sybil placed the crushed fez back on his head to complete the description of his nudity. The girls told us to keep looking at one another, through the fear and embarrassment, all the way through the entire exposure. They wouldn’t let us proceed otherwise. Four naked bodies on the verge of sex together in one room had to be exactly that.
Many of Brinkley’s stories revolve around the mysterious power of the feminine, and its ability to cause men to come undone or try to perform to impress or capture a desired woman. As a woman, this was fascinating to witness.
In “I Happy Am,” perhaps one of my favorites in this stunning collection, we watch inner city kids, excited for a pool day trip to an affluent neighborhood, have their fantasy crushed when the woman hosting the event falls short of their expectations. Brinkley is not afraid to take on provocative racial issues and does so with extreme honesty.
“Everything the Mouth Eats” is a masterpiece of a story, one that reads like one of the greats wrote it, such as a modern day Richard Wright: He examines the complexity of a relationship between two brothers with true depth. “A Lucky Man,” showcases Brinkley’s deft pacing and tender observations.
This is an assured and important collection that could not be more timely. —TL
Rupert Thomson. Never Anyone But You. Other Press, 2018. 345 pages. $25.95.
The lifelong love story of Marcel Moore and Claude Cahun in Rupert Thomson’s eleventh novel Never Anyone But You begins with a gaze, which would be called “the first great moment of our lives.” In early twentieth-century France, their relationship must be hidden. By a stroke of luck, they find themselves protected when Claude’s father weds Marcel’s mother, making the girls sisters by marriage. But for Claude, troubled by neuroses and health issues, to be seen is her validation. As a result, she is confrontational, impulsive, and brash, from her dress and performance to her poetry and shaved head. The soft-spoken Marcel becomes a counter-balance, mooring Claude in the revelation of her view, which she captures in her drawings and photographs of Claude.
As the 1920s Paris culture erupts with glamorous possibilities for fluid expression, the women’s artistic work is recognized alongside Surrealists André Breton, Robert Desnos, Salavdor Dalí, and others. But in an era in which “women’s voices were only just beginning to be heard,” Marcel and Claude are viewed as more than artists. Upon introduction, Dalí unabashedly identifies them as “the famous lesbians of Paris.”
The public gaze exhausts Claude, and as World War II begins, the couple retreats to the idyllic island of Jersey. What follows is a stunning campaign of courage and creativity as the women willfully resist the German occupation while hoping to preserve the secrecy of their relationship and Claude’s Jewish heritage. To be seen risks their lives even as it validates their existence. Their devotion to each other and the commitment to their ideals of identity and artistic freedoms are deepened by their efforts to ease the suffering of others, even the German soldiers.
Wrought with deft beauty through Marcel’s intimate narration, the novel bears witness to the power to affect change through love, from the opening scene of the first bombing of the island, to the vision of Dalí’s three black swans bearing lighted candles onto the moonless lake. To look is to invent, Dalí had told them. But for Marcel and Claude, to be seen is profound. —SH
Beth Ann Fennelly. Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs. Norton, 2017. 111 pages. $22.95.
In her essay “Orange-Shaped Hole” from Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs, Beth Ann Fennelly recounts a dinner party twenty-five years ago with young bohemians in a flat in London in which a guest hurls an orange through a window for no apparent reason. Fennelly ends her piece with an address to the reader: “You’ve just read of a woman remembering an orange thrown through a window, without knowing why she remembers this. You will either remember reading this and know why you remember reading this, or you will remember reading this and not know why you remember reading this, or you will not remember reading this, possibly forever.” It is this particular blend of wit, self-awareness, and narrative intimacy that gives this charming and often heartbreaking collection its character. Ranging from one-line essays to six pages, Fennelly writes about marriage, motherhood, mortality, grief, Catholicism, poverty, and sexual desire, among other themes. Whimsical anecdotes, such as the time she had an ultrasound and the nurse frantically ushered the doctor into the room to take a look at the size of Fennelly’s unusually large bladder, are juxtaposed with tragicomic scenes. Just as we are amused by Fennelly’s small talk with a doctor in “Small Talk at Evanston General,” she turns to the doctor drawing dashes with a black Sharpie down her mother’s bare chest, “indicating where his scalpel would go.” In a series of tender essays titled “Married Love,” Fennelly writes: “As we lower onto the December-cold pleather seats of the minivan, we knock hands: both of us reaching to turn on the other’s seat warmer first.” The author of three poetry collections and the current Poet Laureate of Oxford, Mississippi, Fennelly’s poetic flare is evident in memorable imagery. In describing a woman on a plane sipping a Bloody Mary, Fennelly writes, “Her diamond ring broadcast sequins of light on the tray table.” In “Small Fry,” a grandfather who has snuck in a meal from McDonald’s covertly offers Fennelly a fry: “He held it out to me, a tiny sword, cold as if pulled from the heart of a stone.” Although Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs can be read in one sitting, it is worth your time to savor the language and the arresting immediacy of these small but poignant jewels. —GA
Fady Joudah. Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance. Milkweed Editions, 2018. 88 pages. $16.00.
Fady Joudah’s fourth book spends much of its time in search of forms that can adequately deliver the vast spaces between living and dead bodies, between past and present homelands, between the terrible violence of Israeli and American occupation, and the hopeful, if guarded, healing taking place in the hospital where the speaker in many of the poems works. This search plays out in an anxious ebb and flow between radical fragmentation and narrative coherence, which is particularly successful in the ten poems Joudah wrote in collaboration with Kurdish-Syrian poet Golan Haji that make up the middle section of the book.
Joudah deftly negotiates many variations of this tension between fragmentation and narrative. In the prose poem “Wisswass,” he begins “Encephalopathy. Unbidden thoughts. Intrusive. Identical molecular weight of riffraff. The utterance of brass, or ras. . . .” A series of images orbit a cognitive center in varying degrees of eccentricity. The “center” here is alluded to in the title (wisswass, loosely translated from Arabic as “obsessive thought”), and the marriage of fragments opens a tense space not just in the act of translation but also between the transnational Arab and American identity Joudah’s speaker straddles. We see this again in “After Wine,” one of the collaborative poems written with Golan Haji. The poem explores how distant lives tie together, concluding with a description of a relative who “sang of Guevara and Paul Robeson, went to Iraq and came back dead. His shrine was his body in a coffin in a boat that crossed the Tigris from east to west.” Joudah and Haji are good partners in form; the poems in this part of the book succeed in being the most affective and grounded.
The more narrative poems tend (predictably) to be clearer in their conceits, though many of the poems begin with abstraction and fragmentation, but resolve into narrative. The final poem, “Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance,” provides the book’s title and conclusion. “Footnotes” is primarily a fragmented litany of personal, almost surgical, loss (“I’d bury my sorrow alive / but my sorrow has bones”), but it resolves into a quiet, coherent narrative,
Here’s a lock of your toddler hair
and your baby teethbiting your dorsal wrist
in a perfect circle to tell the timethe marks take to disappear.
Joudah’s book at its most compelling offers an opportunity to enter the spaces where the politics of straddling multiple homes is complicated by being implicated and participant in a common violence, while embodying, through personal care, the connection that binds them together. —SC
Ghassan Abou-Zeineddine is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Kenyon College. He teaches creative writing and Anglophone Arab literature.
Mollie Boutell is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, where she teaches writing and serves as editor in chief of cream city review.
David Bowen cofounded New American Press and MAYDAY Magazine. His work has appeared in The Literary Review, Colorado Review, Flyway, and elsewhere. He completed a PhD at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and an MFA at the University of North Carolina–Greensboro. He lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Cleo Cacoulidis is a freelance writer currently living in Thessaloniki, Greece.
Sean M. Conrey’s most recent book of poems, The Book of Trees, was published in late 2017 by Saint Julian Press. His first collection, The Word in Edgewise (2014), is available from Brick Road Poetry Press. He is an assistant director in the Project Advance program at Syracuse University, where he also teaches in the English and Textual Studies Department.
Sherri H. Hoffman is a working writer, graphic designer, and sports fanatic. She holds an MFA from Pacific University and a PhD in English from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. Selected publications include Hawai’i Review, Potomac Review, Cimarron Review, december, and PANK. She loves birds, her family, and good coffee.
Taylor Larsen is the author of the debut novel, Stranger, Father, Beloved. She currently teaches fiction writing for Catapult and Pace University.