Category: Books

An anguish like ether: Dreaming of Dead People by Rosalind Belben

Abruptly, I was lonely. A slight ache opening into a grand, raw wound, very cutting. Bother it. I was, I am, lonely.

Lavinia, the narrator of Rosalind Belben’s fourth novel, Dreaming of Dead People, is thirty-six years old and, in terms of marriage and child-bearing potential, past her prime. At least in the context of the mid-seventies English society within which she defines herself. Standing on the cusp of spinsterhood, she wonders how she got to be where she is, longing to make sense of the tangle of emotions that beset her as she readies herself to leave the fancies and expectations of her past behind and move on with the rest of her life. Through an extended monologue that shifts between measured reflection, unguarded self-exposition, and fanciful and poetic imaginings, a portrait emerges of an intelligent and introspective woman trying to find her place in the world.

In his introduction to And Other Stories’ re-release of this 1979 novel, writer and critic Gabriel Josipovici describes it as, in his mind, Belben’s finest book. Anyone who has read The Limit (1974, re-issued in 2023) will know that she often writes about the physical needs, desires and sufferings of people and animals with a blunt frankness that can be difficult to read simply because she tends to approach such subjects with a naked honesty that can be alarming. There is some of that here—most notably when her protagonist launches into a an account of her exploration of masturbation that is as graphic as it is wryly funny—but there is so much more. This is a complex, emotionally intense narrative with experimental shifts in style and tone, and vivid lyrical passages. Lavinia is a strong personality that some may find hard to connect with (that was not my experience), but she will likely linger in the reader’s imagination long after the last page is turned.

Truth be told, Lavinia’s tale is a maze of contradictions. Though she speaks of loneliness and a longing for children, she has a defiant and independent spirit that runs counter to what she claims to have wanted. The spectre of the spinster that haunts her, is one very much rooted in her rural upbringing and on characters from books of her childhood like Mary Swainson from Arthur Ransome’s  Swallows and Amazons series. However, Lavinia had never waited at home for a suitor to arrive; her early twenties were filled with travel, adventure, and lovers—even an unwanted pregnancy terminated without regret—but this free-spirited life comes to an abrupt end when her mother is diagnosed with a serious illness and she returns home to be with her, thinking the end is near. When her mother defies expectations, living for five years beyond the predicted two, she stays on in a state of conflicted hope and dismay. Yet, once her freedom is returned to her in full, she finds herself unable to pick up where she left off:

I thought I could resume. It was stupid. A lot of water had gone churning through the mill. I was older. I hadn’t the slightest inclination to sally forth metaphorically and look for a fuck as if I’d been twenty-one again. I didn’t fancy anyone I met, well, hardly anyone. Something had happened to me. I was changed, reclusive, and I daresay unlucky.

Measuring herself against other women, Lavinia admits ato n anxiety about her future self—be that the self “in five years, one year, ten minutes”—and wonders if, one day, she will feel fear or regret, or not much either way. She wonders what she should feel. At thirty-six and untouched sexually for ten years now, she worries that she will one day find herself endlessly feeding on memories of a past when she loved and was loved, watching them recede into the distance as her body wrinkles and ages. Her destiny seems fixed, she acknowledges as much, but she looks for release elsewhere:

I turned to nature. To tracks in the snow. To things that lead somewhere. I love rivers, canals, streams, water which holds the mirror up. I love lakes. I imagine swimming very much. The clasp of water, of glittering liquid. I will squat in my imagination by a loch in the Highlands dabbling my toes and watching my own body as it breaks the ripples, stroking the glass face, into the sun or away from it, toward the motionless invisible heron, stubbing my feet on a submerged tree trunk. I am anxious about drowning; I am not out of reach of help, out of my depth; and the long-tailed tits twitter in the pine tree tops. I wait for the osprey which could change one’s life but which never appears, forever a possible, and its absence.

Belben writes about nature with a poetic intensity that is quite wonderful, revealing a deep connection to the natural world, that her protagonist clearly shares—among a number of biographical details—and, at least for Lavinia, the roots lie not only in her rural childhood, but in an early and passionate identification with Robin Hood.

In the chapter “Cuckoo,” with its integration of ballads from the medieval legends, she depicts her hero without some of the more fanciful inventions which she tends to reject, focusing instead on the degree to which he was an outcast, living outside the law without rights, as a non-person. “Therein a metaphor of myself,” she insists. But then she goes on to invent an erotic encounter between Robin Hood and Hilda, the wife of Sir Richard at Lee, allowing the hero to flee before daybreak, frightened by his conflicting emotions, but ever feeling he’d left something unfinished. A metaphor indeed.

Lavinia’s own emotional world is complicated, though she tries to maintain a hardened, matter-of-fact attitude even when chronicling painful circumstances like the need to let go of a beloved dog, or the tensions of her relationship with her family. After her mother’s death, she moves to the city, in part to avoid the suspicion and pity with which spinsterhood is viewed in the country. London offers her an anonymity she treasures, but it comes with costs. Here she imagines in detail how it would be to raise a daughter she would name Jessie, fretting over the understanding of animals and nature the child would miss out on, and worrying that Jessie would not inherit her mother’s love of language and literature. She is working her way through a parenthood that will never materialize, this vicarious motherhood that stands, perhaps, as a parallel process to grieving her own complicated relationship with her mother. She is also attempting to resolve her state of placelessness, her sense of belonging to neither the city nor the country.

In London no life; no ditches; no hedgerows; no death. No worms, no bugs; no thorns, no wire. No cattle, no stock of any sort. No thrills and no excitement. It is undramatic.

Venturing back into rural solitude she feels invigorated, at least for a few hours:

But the country is a great deceiver. Because it is, of course, no longer there: the land of my imagination. I have been sniffing and sniffing; and the rose is blown. A lot of the country has become ghastly. Bungaloid, obliterated, crowded, and spoiled. It is . . . progress.

She has to venture further to regain the natural connection she craves, returning in memory to a trip to the Highlands as, for a stretch, the narrative becomes a rich and vivid piece of nature writing. And then, following this Scottish reverie, we reach the final, ecstatic, dream-filled title chapter. Herein the reckoning. In her own way, Lavinia comes to make sense of her life.

With an inventive narrative that is ever shifting gears, moving from language that can be blunt and coarse, to the rich and poetic, to the deeply introspective, even obsessive, Lavinia’s monologue can be a little disorienting at times. Form and style are mutable, and it is not always apparent whether she is remembering a real event, re-imagining a memory, or reasoning her way through her own uncertainties. But ultimately this is a novel of grief and loss, of mourning loved ones who have passed and a future that will never exist, thus learning to open oneself up to the freedom that lies beyond defined expectations and roles.

Dreaming of Dead People by Rosalind Belben, with an introduction by Gabriel Josipovici, is published by And Other Stories.

You can listen to Rosalind Belben read from the chapter about Jessie here:

The words / created their own states of being: “it” by Inger Christensen

It may seem hard to imagine that a single poem (or sequence of poems) extending over 200 pages could become an instant hit upon publication, embraced by critics and the public alike, but that is exactly what happened when Danish poet Inger Christensen released what would become known as her masterwork, it, in 1969. What, you might wonder, does this simple pronoun, “it,” refer to. It might be simpler to ask what “it” does not refer to, for here it is simply the personal pronoun for the impersonal verb “to be”—as in “it is.” Danish, like English, necessitates such a construction, so this epic, moving as it does from the most basic elements, expanding in relation to one another, on into a world formed and named in its process of coming into being, and finally differentiated into individual, experiential existence, is a grand orchestral exploration of the nature of life. But it is also a piece that pulls you into to its rhythms, echoes and images. In Denmark it has become so iconic that sections have been set to music and certain lines from it have entered the daily lexicon.

In her introduction to the 2006 English translation by Susanna Nied, poet Anne Carson views Christensen as a contemporary counterpart of Greek epic poet Hesiod combining elements of his hymn of creation, Theogyny, and his moral guide, Works and Days: “Her det [it] is at once a hymn of praise to reality and a scathing comment on how we make reality what it is. The dazzled and the didactic interfuse in det.” However, the requirement for a personal pronoun for “to be” which does not exist the same way in Greek, means that her cosmogony is also a cosmology—a condition made explicit in the structure and realization of it. In a 1970 article, “In the Beginning was the Flesh” (quoted by Carson but since made available in its entirety in the essay collection The Condition of Secrecy), Christensen talks about some of the thinkers and artists, including linguist Noam Chomsky, whose ideas contributed to the genesis of what she a began to realize would be a creation poem:

Then I started thinking a little about this sentence: “In the beginning was the Word . . . and the Word was made flesh,” I thought, what if we could think the unthinkable: that flesh could speak, that one cell could signal to another, so that the whole inarticulate world suddenly partook in the following impossible (to human awareness) experience: In the beginning was the flesh, and the flesh was made words . . .

To maintain a hold on the duality of these two paradoxical conditions, she started to write as if she wasn’t there, “as if it (“I”) were just a bit of flesh talking, a bit of protoplasm, acted as if I were just following along, while a language, a world, took shape.” She called this part, the opening of her work, the time before consciousness, PROLOGOS. However, although it first emerges as a pre-sentence entity, the poems that comprise this section follow a strict mathematical formula. Each line consists of 66 characters (in the original Danish) and there is one 66 line poem, two 33-line poems, three 22-line poems, six 11-line poems, eleven 6-line poems and so on until the final set of sixty-six single-line poems. (The translation is unable to preserve the character count of each line, but does keep the number of lines.) Thus, PROLOGOS sets the cosmological grounding for the poem to follow, moving from the most fundamental elements—beginning, of course, with “It. That’s it. That started it. It is. Goes on. Moves. Beyond. Becomes.”—and moving through abstract form and function, slowly evolving over time. Cosmic. Geological. Natural. Communal. And, finally, individual.

It’s come around. Come to stand on its own, confront itself. To disengage from the mass and stand out. It’s engaged in an evolution, shifted its stance, attained eminently engaging expression. Has pursued itself and accidentally found itself. As a natural result. Has come to stand for itself. And can begin by itself. To experiment with sets of freestanding, free-floating expressions. Occasionally with straight-swimming ones. Dreaming. In another world. To imply itself.

(from PROLOGOS)

The main body of the poem, LOGOS, explores the word as creative principle, or, as Christensen puts it: “The place where things are consciously staged, put into action, into relationship.” It contains three sections, STAGE, ACTION, and TEXT which are each further divided into eight subsections of eight poems each (Christensen, as ever, loves mathematical and musical structure). The inspiration for the subsections came from a work titled Præpositioners teori (A Theory of Prepositions) by Viggo Brøndal, an attempt to classify the words languages use to show relationship. She selected:

eight terms that could stay in a state of flux and at the same time give order to the indistinctiveness that a state of flux necessarily must produce: symmetry, transitivity, continuity, connectivity, variability, extension, integrity, and universality.

And thus, the stage was set, so to speak.

It is perhaps not surprising that the poems that comprise the first section, STAGE, are more varied in structure and form than those we will see later, order comes with time. Words are at work: “The words / created their own states of being / made a world out of ‘world.’” (STAGE, symmetries, 7), but it not a smooth operation. Here the imagery moves between descriptions of natural processes, and the intentional creation of sets, painted and varnished to “represent” mountains and scenery. A tension exists between what is and the way it can be expressed:

And when it’s said that words fly
(like birds that fill an end-
lessly vanishing space)
it’s probably to conceal the fact
that words are not one
with the world they describe.
Words do not have wings.
And neither do they flower nor will
but they take potential flowers
and set them in a garden
which they then set
in an image of a garden
in an image, etc.
The words stay where they are
while the world vanishes
This is a criticism of the way language is used
Because it’s a criticism of the way things are.

(from STAGE, connectiveness, 1)

When “I” becomes part of the dynamic, the relationship between humans and language becomes more complex, and existential questions begin to arise. This first part also introduces a wide variety of images, motifs, and refrains that will recur throughout the work as a whole, providing a coherency to it when read and experienced (as it is meant to be) as a single long poem.

With ACTION and continuing on through TEXT, Christensen introduces more structure—employing both formal and experimental forms— to the poems within each subsection, adopting a consistent line count, verse pattern and rhyme, if relevant, for at least the majority of the eight poems (Susanna Nied’s award-winning translation preserves form and rhyme whenever possible), thus adding an ever-shifting musicality to the poetry. Thematically, the net she casts is wide, taking in the natural world (deserts, forests, gardens), human awareness (self-identity, hope, despair, sex, death), and community engagement (cities, hospitals, factories). Her vision encompasses the personal and the political, always returning to the power of language, the fundamental quality of the word, creating and mediating the world as we know it, alone and in relation to others:

A society can be so stone-hard
That it fuses into a block
A people can be so stone-hard
That life goes into shock

And the heart is all in shadow
And the heart has almost stopped
Till some begin to build
A city as soft as a body

(ACTION, symmetries, 8)

Throughout the ACTION section, one can see the influence of the 1960s on Christensen’s  worldview and some of the imagery she employs. Of course, the more political and economic currents change, the more they stay the same. Poetry is timeless and this vibrant, life-affirming epic aims to reach beyond the limits of time—as does language—and as such, the third part, TEXT, offers poems that begin to speak to passion and meaning in living and loving. The tone, if not strictly prescriptive, carries positive energies. There are no promises that things will be easy or pain-free, but it is worth trying, even in a world that contains darkness and corruption.

After the fourth morning I seek
the lips’ speechless expression

Again and again I stand completely
still so the wheel goes around and
there’s no cause for panic

What you gave my thought is no-
where, with a body that’s a
gift to the earth

What you gave me is pure rest / restlessness

My passion:  to go further

(TEXT, variabilities, 4)

By the close of this section, the “I”, the speaker, has come to an understanding of her interconnectedness with the world, and all that it contains.

Then, finally, comes the EPILOGOS. Beginning and ending with “That’s it” this piece works its way through the many shades and facets of fear we encounter as embodied beings, to slowly embrace words as the very cells of the body, and ultimately find freedom in letting go:

Erotic attempts
when the body
in its blind
sexual
activity
strives to be invisible
the cells are words
when the body
is lost
in it all
and lost
as it is
persists
survives
surpasses
itself
and its limits
the cells are words

(from EPILOGOS)

This is a work that, the deeper you get into it, benefits from longer, sustained reading sessions (especially if inclined, as I tend to be, to move slowly through a collection of poems). Although any one of the poems in this extended, structured sequence could stand on its own, they speak to one another, repeating and re-imagining phrases and imagery—a quality that tends to mark Christensen’s poetry and prose—so that the reading builds its own exhilarating momentum. it is an experience.

it by Inger Christensen is translated from the Danish by Susanna Nied with an Introduction by Anne Carson and published by New Directions.

As we live by metaphors so we die: The Limit by Rosalind Belben

Ilario watched Anna waiting to die.

For months on end he is forced to sit beside a person whom he loves—very much—whose poor head must be filled with thoughts, and images of death.

Spare and unflinching in its depiction of an unconventional love and a most conventional death, Rosalind Belben’s The Limit presents the story of a middle-aged English woman, prematurely aged and ravaged by cancer, and her much younger Italian seaman husband, as the one gradually loses her ability to function and the other copes with his feelings of growing distaste and deepening love for his ailing wife. It is one of the strangest books I have ever read, but one that, beyond its often coarse, blunt descriptions of both lovemaking and illness—sex and death—lies a portrait of an unlikely love affair grounded in a shared sensibility that defied the many sharp contrasts between them and that will endure beyond the grave.

As Paul Griffiths notes in his helpful introduction, The Limit, Belben’s third book, first published in 1974, was a marked departure from her first two. Although other writers were, in the 1970s, determined to “shake” up the English novel, Belben’s writing “was like no other and remains startling half a century later.” Her narrative style is idiosyncratic. Temporality can be compressed or expanded in unexpected ways, syntax continually surprises, and sentences are often abruptly shortened or laced with a series of colons. Perspective shifts abruptly from third to first person, slipping in and out of Ilario’s or Anna’s thoughts, depending on the chapter. And the chapters themselves are thematic, with each theme repeated three (and in one case, four) times, but they do not follow a regular sequence, nor are they chronological but together they build in intensity and intimacy, in spite of, or perhaps because of, the often harsh bluntness of the narrative with its moments of ugliness and beauty.

Belben’s themes—Transmigration, Rapture, Grief, Sea-Change, Childhood, Future—all take their titles from definitions found in the Hamlyn Encyclopedia World Dictionary.  The Rapture chapters, for instance, are titled “The Carrying of a Person to Another Place or Sphere of Existence,” Grief is “A Cause or Occasion of Keen Distress or Sorrow,” Transmigration becomes “The Passage of a Soul at Death into Another Body.” Yet as lofty sounding as these chapters may sound, Anna and Ilario are not believers:

God had been disposed of long ago.

Neither she nor I acknowledged the divinity. Our faith lay in mankind, not in its mythical maker. She showed little sign of abdicating conviction for a god she spent her life denying. We agreed upon the possibility of a different reality: but that did not leave Anna any hope.

Thus she embarks into a dark journey, one which her husband must now help her navigate, but on dry land his seaman’s skills leave him feeling ill equipped. In their relationship, Ilario confesses, she had always directed and guided his way. “Without a wife, without her, I am nothing, I am useless. Was always useless.”

Anna’s side of the narrative is internalized. She is past conversation; she thinks of dying. Her memories carry her back to childhood and to earlier times in her marriage. But the man attending to her at home or sitting at her bedside in the hospital barely registers in the present. He is alone—save for the passing companionship of other husbands visiting their own sick wives and awkward interactions with Anna’s siblings. Yet as time passes, he feels closer than ever to the “elderly” woman slowly fading away. His wife.

The Limit is not an easy read: Ilario’s descriptions of Anna’s body, in their intimate moments and his later ministrations in her final days, are frank, at time uncomfortable, but oddly not without a certain tenderness. Meanwhile, Anna’s childhood memories hint at the pain and dark secrets in her respectable English family:

Protect me from my mother. Make my father beloved come alive.  Rise: my dog from the dead. But prayers are seldom if ever answered. Anna is born in 1922 (twenty years will pass before his birth): childhood proves unsatisfactory, an unsalutary experience: and to it the Anna grown up is irreversibly linked, to it pieces of her now are related: they are part of her score yet do not, repeat not, determine her whole works. Simply, her machinery lacked oil in the past. I hate my mother.

She revisits disturbing events from her youth, their lasting impact. When she meets Ilario, it is unsurprising that she is forty and still a virgin. Yet, it is the unlikely love that binds this odd couple together that makes this novella so intriguing.

One can imagine that in choosing a partner so different in age, culture, and class, Anna is freeing herself from the constraints of her family background. We don’t know enough about Ilario’s past to know what might have first attracted him to this plain, older woman. “An iron maiden. Forged in a landscape of snow.” But, scenes  drawn from their decade of marriage indicate strong mutual interests. They both harbour a love of travel and a love of the sea. Anna, before illness overtakes her, is a sturdy, adventurous woman,  unbothered when she and Ilario find themselves facing a man dying of leprosy in North Africa, nor does the threat of a tempest at sea frighten her. Quite opposite, in fact. The Sea-Change chapters each offer snapshots of their time together away from England, of their shared companionship in calm and in adversity, but the third such chapter is especially exhilarating. Ilario as a young captain, awakes to find his ship facing a life threatening storm at sea—all while his wife is onboard:

Ilario wished she could be spirited to landfall. He noticed a glittery expression: she adored the crisis, the whole situation. Not a clue did she have, la poverina, unreal in an unreal world. Addicted to unreal drama.

He assesses the heavy and unstable loads down in the hold. Orders them secured and secured again. Comforts his experienced bosun whom he knows well:

Fear not: soon we shall plough on through our appalling conditions, trusting a stability we in reality don’t possess. He smiles, loving his ship and his wife, his wife and his ship: Ilario takes heart. The tops of the waves already sprinkled the bridge: it could hardly be mere spray. But he relaxed, eating a marmalade sandwich.

Ilario’s love is steadfast.  Sometimes its strength even seems to surprise him. And as the Future chapters show, even as other adventures and women cross his path, no one can dislodge the place Anna continues to hold in his heart. Illness and death, dying seen from the inside and from the bedside, may be the central focus of this novella, but at heart it is a story that demonstrates just how inexplicable and enduring love can be, a work not soon forgotten.

The Limit by Rosalind Belben with an Introduction by Paul Griffiths is published by New York Review Books Classics.

For all the possible and impossible futures: Earthrise Stories Pasts Potentials Prophesies by Priya Sarukkai Chabria

Of late, concern for the environment has fallen out of fashion in much of the world. Where I live, and in any other regions, oil companies, and forestry and mining interests exercise an outsize influence on governments, especially in a world of global economic uncertainty, fueling resistance to monitoring greenhouse gas emissions, investing in clean energy projects or promoting electric vehicles. It’s suddenly become too expensive, too inefficient to worry about the future. Besides, many insist that climate change is a hoax. So by the time we really feel the heat, so to speak, it will be too late to act. What stories will we, or rather our ancestors, tell to make sense of the damage done?  Will it even matter?

For Indian poet and writer Priya Sarukkai Chabria, the fate of our planet is an ongoing and vital theme. She sees it as a question that arises in the myths and traditions of a distant past, swirls around the influence of technology and artificial intelligence shaping our present existence, and reaches far into the future where an unknown realm of possibilities can only be imagined. Yet, she is prepared to explore new ways of thinking about and envisioning what we have come from and where we may be going. Now a wide-ranging selection of her poignant and thought-provoking fictional imaginings have been gathered in her new book, Earthrise Stories: Pasts Potentials Prophesies.

As a novelist and short story writer, Chabria has long sought expression through speculative fiction, typically with a strong Indian sensibility, and this collection highlights her strength in this genre, along with her distinct ability to flesh out the sensual intensity of her female protagonists, be they drawn from epic literature, or existing on a far distant timeline. But more than anything, these stories form a coherent project  in which the reality of climate degradation and what it means for the fate of the planet is a driving force. As she says in her Introduction:

I write stories of Earth, and some of the ways we could love her as she spins through our present dark time; the small gem of her seemingly weightless sphere spiraling through space, circling the sun like a prayer, sapphire and emerald as the eye of a dream, summoning tenderness.

Earthrise is divided into six sections, each one featuring a striking illustration by artist Gargi Sharma, and expanding in different spatial directions. “Past Re-Presented” is rooted in mythic times; “Now” searches for grounding in our ever-evolving present; “Ten Years from Now” turns to nonhuman life, natural and artificial; “In the Near Future” reaches deeper into the consequences for nature and a memory of humankind; “In the Far Future” contemplates the possible regeneration of a nearly dead planet; and, finally, “Prophesies that Come True” reintroduces a recognizably human narrator in in one story and offers a comet-focused cautionary tale in the other. Together, the eighteen stories that comprise this volume take the reader on a journey through time and space, marked by a  wide variety of shifting voices, styles, and tones.

The opening section re-animates tales drawn from Indian myth, legend, and literary tradition.  Characters like the celestial nymphs (aspara) Menaka and Urvaśī are realized as full-bodied sensual creatures rising above their passionate and tragic circumstances to set commonly accepted records straight. Episodes from the Mahabharata and the Ramayana are re-imagined with multi-dimensional, even cosmic, elements to at once reinforce their timelessness and set a foundation for many of the stories to follow.

The mood changes abruptly, however, as we enter the realm of the present day. The stories in “Now” are playful and inventive in style, but darkness and warnings lurk in their narrative themes. War, migration, economic turmoil, ecological devastation, and the increasing presence of robotic and artificial intelligence all feature here. There is even a lecture—or the draft of one—about the promises of a technologically driven future in one of my favourite pieces, “Cockaigne A Reappraisal (Draft) by Dr Indumati Jones (To be presented at UTIIMDS),” a text complete with the professor’s own personal notes to self:

With augmented AI inputs that analyse large amounts of financial data this sector is being steered towards making more predictive decisions in the stock market, and can tailor options to meet the investment patterns of specific financial firms. (Add examples. Quote sources?) On a lighter note, (smile here) Photoshop will be relegated to the past as in-camera devices will automatically correct flaws. Power outages like the one I’m currently experiencing will be out-dated — pun intended! — (smile here) as various AI driven units will be linked to a central intelligence system – as is already occurring in certain Smart Cities worldwide.

Dr Jones’s cynical optimism aside, the atmosphere that dominates the four stories in this section is ominous.

Ten years on, things are no better, flora and fauna are in serious decline (the author setting a fictional report in her hometown of Pune, even) and hopes that damages might be undone are outsourced to the services of a LoveBot  who can customize a dream, but has no power to make it come true. Moving on, further into the future, the Eco-Lit exam that makes up the content of one of the stories of the next section, leaves no question about ecological outcomes, but the prose in other tales becomes more poetic, dream-driven and, in one story, “The Princess: A Parable,”  folkloric. But the hard reality of the potential fate (or fates) of the Earth and the life she once sustained cannot be denied.

Yet, this is where Chabria’s stories of Earth take a detour from the classic dystopian formula. Although she leaves no question about the destructive tendencies of man and the fragility of life on our planet, when we reach the far distant future, there is the hint of a utopian possibility, however unlikely (and unlike anything we have ever known) that might be. In the two penultimate stories, she envisions variations on a world where life at its most fundamental cellular level has been preserved, integrated with novel notions of consciousness, historical awareness, and the means to reproduce or self-evolve. In this sort of speculative realm, the poetic, passionate energy that fills Chabria’s female protagonists charges her post-human narrators. “Paused,” for instance, imagines a planet where proto or potential lifeforms that can decide how they wish to evolve. But it is a lonely existence, and evolving is a process fraught with challenges. After an aborted attempt, her narrator retreats in a panic:

I trigger TEMP TORPOR in myself. It causes shuddering standstill of all activities. Cessation shocks my systems. Quieten down, please, down. Alarm still volcanoes. Shuush, shuuhh. Quieten to hill size. Rolling boulders. Be still, shuush. Become pebble size. Still, be still. Be spore. Be a drop of silence, a bead of spreading stillness. My systems slow, calm. I’m sliding into deep sleep; almost a hibernating pod again. Scan the damage. I must create low energy compounds to coat the membrane till it can sustain survival. I’m barely born but must manage so much!

Clearly, earthly recovery will be a slow and painful, but re-birth, in this scenario, could be intentional, not accidental. What then?

Earthrise presents many questions, and offers no clear solutions (except, of course, the ones we’re already boldly ignoring). Yet, in drawing on such a vast array of inspirations, from mythology, history, science—natural, physical, ecological— and, of course, poetry, Chabria has crafted a collection that values life, all life, not just the hair-covered, supposedly “Wise Ones.” It is sad and hopeful—a warning, a promise, and a prayer.

Earthrise Stories: Pasts Potentials Prophesies by Priya Sarukkai Chabria is published by Red River Story. (Available worldwide through Amazon.)

Dream follows dream: Ceilings by Zuzana Brabcová

Drink them up, swallow those clouds, gulp them down with all your might, because all you’ve got to look forward to now are ceilings.

As Ema, the fifty year-old protagonist of Zuzana Brabcová’s Ceilings, takes in her last view of the overcast skies over Prague before the ambulance attendant leads her into the Addiction Treatment Centre of the hospital, she knows that it will be months before she  sees them again—except, of course, in the strange, troubled, and fantastic dreams and psychotic episodes that will accompany her through the trials of detox. She’s been here before and is well aware of what lies ahead.

The daughter of two literary historians, Brabcová (1959–2015) was born in Prague. Under the Communist regime, she was denied the right to attend university so she worked as a librarian, a hospital attendant and a cleaner. Following the Velvet Revolution, she worked as an editor. Her first novel Far from the Tree, initially published abroad in 1987, won the inaugural Jiří Orten Prize. Ceilings (2012), recently released in Tereza Veverka Novická’s powerful English translation, was her fourth novel, a vivid, hypnotic account of one woman’s transit through drug rehab that clearly illustrates why she has been rightfully compared to Leonora Carrington and Unica Zurn (whose artwork graces the cover).

As soon as Ema enters the hospital, The Garden as it is known, she finds herself in a world that operates on its own set of rules and regulations. The clock is now set to institutional time, where order attempts to define but can never fully contain either the camaraderie or conflicts between an eccentric collection of women—druggie or alkie?—caught in an ever-swirling cascade of medications and madness. For Ema, navigating the neuroses and idiosyncrasies of her fellow inmates is as challenging as navigating her own, as delusions, paranoias, and troubled memories blur the fragile boundaries between reality and dream, external and internal existence.

This fluidity is reflected in a polyphonic narrative which moves smoothly between third and first person, often pulling in and out of Ema’s head in a single paragraph. Add to this, asides in second person, where Ema either addresses herself or directs her thoughts to her daughter Rybka, her lesbian partner Dita, or other family members. Finally, there is a second first person narrator, Ema’s brother—a “twin” although they were born one year apart—not an alter ego, but a distinct male gendered self. Ash. He emerges at an early age, perhaps to serve as a shield against the uncertain and frightening world both inside and outside the home, and inside and outside Ema’s own unstable emotional space. Ash comes into his own when they are very young, realizing he is different:

I said to myself this secret of mine must be something like chickenpox; okay, in that case an autovaccine was needed to reduce the most visible traces to a minimum. So I decided to become a normal little boy, if that’s what they wanted: I’d fight over toys in the sandbox and might even pee my pants in a temper tantrum, and I’d clap and giggle over my birthday cake; all this could be learned by observing other children. I methodically began to appropriate the behaviour of others, their expressions, emotions, and gestures, and chose from this panoply the ones I considered useful, purposefully aping them. It was glorious: one by one, every sensation sunk into the hollowed-out nutshell of nothingness.

My rebirth every morning soon became routine, and I put on my face like a prothesis.

Ema and Ash are not exactly like two manifestations of  a dissociative condition, nor do they represent a typical binary gender identity. Ema takes comfort in Ash’s existence, while he is both protective of and frustrated with his “sister,” yet cognizant of his own unreality, of the fact that he was not born and cannot die.

Confined to the hospital, Ema is forced to contend with various difficult personalities, while finding her place and forging alliances among the other patients and the nursing staff. Reality can be an anxious state. Meanwhile, dreams and episodes of delirium carry her back into her (or Ash’s) past, but the scenes are strange, distorted, and disturbing.  And she is haunted not only in her restless sleep; the ceilings that hang that above her are a constant reminder that she is trapped:

It’s come back after my body expelled, at least to some extent, the poisons that were competing with it. I’m in a room, I need to get out, I rise to the ceiling. I tear though it, really easily, because the walls and ceiling are made of cardboard, and I find myself in another room.  I escape through a chink into another room and so on and so forth, again and again, one room replaces another, always the ceiling, never the sky. But what if it’s not the dream that’s come back to me, but it’s me who’s come back to it? Maybe the waking life of Ema Černá is merely a sequence of pauses, brief interruptions of flight with no beginning and no end.

Ema’s dilemma, her inability to successfully integrate her internal and external reality, reflecting a lifetime of emotional and mental health challenges mediated by substance abuse, is the driving force of this intense, vulnerable, and moving novel, one that draws on Brabacová’s own experiences, including time in psychiatric rehab (and, one might imagine, the perspective afforded through her work as a hospital orderly). Its raw, unapologetic narrative slips seamlessly between voice and perspective, continually cross-referencing itself, to create a world—one woman’s world, past and present—that for all its surreal elements is cohesive, sympathetic and real.

Ceilings by Zuzana Brabcová is translated from the Czech by Tereza Veverka Novická and published by Twisted Spoon Press.

“There is something about only being able to get lost when you’re not thinking about it”: Natalja’s Stories by Inger Christensen

—There was once a woman who travelled all the way from Crimea to Denmark so that she could bury her mother.

This woman, Natalja, was born in Russia to a Danish woman who had been abducted by a Russian silk trader, and when the Revolution broke out she and her mother were forced to flee the country. Along the way, her mother became sick and died of dysentery, so Natalja gathered some ashes from the mass funeral pyre, placing them into the Chinese crock they’d been carrying, and made her way to Copenhagen. This story, told and retold, each time with a new angle or embellishment, is passed onto the woman’s granddaughter, also named Natalja, who then tells and retells variations on the themes in her grandmother’s stories letting them veer off in wild, often outlandish ways. Gathered together these stories comprise Inger Christensen’s strange, little shape-shifting novella, Natalja’s Stories, originally published in Danish in 1988, and now available from New Directions in Denise Newman’s English translation.

Reading like interlinked or echoing stories, each of the seven chapters of this book is narrated by a woman named Natalja—presumably the granddaughter of the Russian-born Natalja described above—but who is she really? A Danish woman living in Paris, a French woman who assumes Natalja’s identity, or a writer writing her own or someone else’s stories? Or all of the above. As with Christensen’s intricately layered novella Azorno, meanings are fluid, shifting even as the same images, events, and characters (or to put it simply, the same phrases, sentences, passages) reappear in ever changing forms and contexts.

The book opens with “Natalja’s story about destiny” which details her grandmother’s account of how she came to be born in Russia and the circumstances that brought her to Copenhagen. Each one of the stories that follow can be understood as variations on this theme of destiny—being caught in it, escaping it, or reshaping it.  Even the very act of telling a story seems to have its own force of will as our narrator muses in the opening of “Natalja’s story about liquor”:

There was once a cat named Mirage. That’s more or less how I thought I would begin my story. Now of course you can say it’s already begun as I thought it would—there once was a cat named Mirage and so on—whatever I come up with now doesn’t matter because it would be just one of countless but similar false beginnings. And if it had been a true beginning I would not have noticed it, would not have mistrusted it. I would not have ceased its development and so on.

But why hide the fact that only Mirage the cat holds the picture of this story and thereby knows its correct imperceptible beginning, while I am obliged to pick and choose between random sentences that say nothing to me because I’m unable to see where in the story they belong?

As reality and identities shift, revolving around repeating characters, scenes, and motifs, the stories that emerge are by turns amusing, absurd, intriguing. There are murders, mysteries, and even a man so dangerously irresistible that he may have been not only the younger Natalja’s love, but also the lover of her mother and her grandmother.  Our narrator, in her varying incarnations, seems to be inclined to allow herself to fall into unlikely situations, only realizing later that the power to reinvent herself, to become someone else, belongs to her. But it doesn’t exactly resolve how she fits into the overall narrative—if there even is one.

Composed as part of a seven-writer project modeled after Boccaccio’s Decameron, Natalja’s Stories explores a theme common throughout Christensen’s poetry and prose: the way language creates and shapes meaning. As such, the experience of reading her fiction can be akin to wandering through a maze or a hall or mirrors (or both). The inclination may be to try to dissect it logically, but in this case there may be multiple logical intersections at play.  It’s perhaps best to let go and enjoy getting lost in a world where realities continually change and simply marvel at the  connections that arise when you least expect them.

Natalja’s Stories: A Novel by Inger Christensen is translated from the Danish by Denise Newman and published by New Directions.

A life lost in stories: My Kingdom is Dying by Evald Flisar

Evald Flisar (b. 1945) is one of Slovenia’s best known and most prolific writers. He has travelled extensively, his work has been translated into at least forty languages,  and his plays have been performed around the world. But, as is not uncommon for writers from his corner of Europe, it is one thing to be widely read, quite another to be a household name—at least beyond one’s native borders. This is, in fact, something that is a fate long understood by  the aging narrator of My Kingdom is Dying, subtitled Storytelling at the End of the World, a characteristically unusual tribute to the life of a writer, originally published in Slovene in 2020, and now available in David Limon’s English translation, just in time to honour the author’s eightieth birthday earlier this year.

This charming and slyly subversive novel is a celebration of the power of storytelling, formally and informally. The unnamed protagonist is a highly respected novelist and short story writer who, like Flisar himself, has travelled widely and lived and worked in both Slovenia and London. He is quite a quirky, at times even arrogant, character whose life story, as he tells it, has all the qualities of a sophisticated tall tale, one that is gleefully anachronistic, blending profound insights with absurd happenings, and blurring the line between possible fact and pure fantasy. The basic narrative unfolds as the narrator is recovering from a freak accident with the daily assistance of a live-in Carer with whom he shares accounts of his past, including his early development as a writer with the encouragement of his grandfather, the pleasures and pitfalls of his career, his life-long obsession to write a completely original story, and the mysterious figure of Scheherazade who, as if emerging from his youthful reimagining of the Arabian Nights, has followed him around the world, appearing when he least expects it.

His adventures are extraordinary and feature an diverse range of real life authors and literary figures—at times holding close to actual details, like the arc of a Borges story or the make-up of a real Booker Prize jury—but because it also leans toward the bizarre, Flisar is able to get away some pretty pointed observations about the literary world with all its pretensions. His narrator takes swipes at critics, fellow writers, editors, publishers, and prize juries. But one must assume that much of this is levelled with tongue firmly planted in cheek. After all, one of our hero’s regular targets is genre writers—in contrast to serious writers of literature such as himself—all in what is a clear genre hybrid blending memoir (fictitious and factual) with fairytale, horror, mystery, and fragments of travelogue. (Of note, several accounts take place in India, and, for the absurdity of events that unfold there, Flisar’s familiarity with the country and its cities, especially Kolkata, is evident.)

By the narrator’s own account, everything was proceeding smoothly, book deal followed book deal, until the sudden onset of writer’s block upended his world. One day, stories presented themselves to him as usual, rising out of a daily act so pedestrian as opening the newspaper over his morning coffee and the next day, the well had inexplicably run dry. No stories came. If storytelling gave him his meaning, not to mention a career,  what might be the fate of  a storyteller who could no longer tell stories?

It had never seemed possible that it would be storytelling that would bring me to the edge of a nervous breakdown and change me into the kind of person who I liked to write about. This time it happened, not within the framework of an imagined story, but in the reality in which I was forced to live, even if only because of loyalty to the activity that I saw as my “mission”, for I knew that withdrawal from the world, when we lack a way forward and begin to psychologically drown, is always possible and, with the abundance of chemical means available, can also be painless, even instant. But each such thought, that I might withdraw from the world before my natural end (thus showing that I was not a victim, but rather the master of my fate), automatically became transformed into a story that I simply had to write and share with others. With that, the wish for a leap into the next life lost its power and validity.

Now without this critical lifeline, would he be able to hold off his darkest thoughts? When he confessed his predicament to his editor, it was suggested that he seek treatment, all expenses paid, at an exclusive clinic in Switzerland where his writer’s block might be cured. The clinic, ominously named Berghof, turns out to be a dark, dank castle in the middle of a lake where, so far as he can tell, all of his fellow patients seem to be seriously mentally ill. The treatment is absurdly brutal, the doctors appear to be madmen, and it is not until he emerges from his solitary routine that he finds himself among the likes of Saul Bellow, Martin Amis,  J.M. Coetzee, Graham Greene, and others. And it just gets stranger from there.

Flisar has a fondness for exploring serious themes within environments that are by turns whimsical and grotesque (see my review of My Father’s Dreams). He is especially interested in the behaviour his characters exhibit under psychological pressures—and his protagonist here is subject to more than a few impulsive reactions when he feels threatened. But, at the same time, in narrating his story to his Carer, a woman he grows increasingly close to, he is able to maintain the storyteller’s objective distance, at least until boundaries between myth and reality finally dissolve. In the end, despite—or perhaps because of—its many spirited and unlikely detours, My Kingdom is Dying is a tribute to storytelling  so rich with literary illusions and intertextual elements  that it holds a depth its seemingly light, eccentric tone belies.

My Kingdom is Dying by Evald Flisar is translated from the Slovene by David Limon and published by Istros Books.

Memories, visions, and grief: The Dissenters by Youssef Rakha

I think I hear the dawn azan much earlier than it is supposed to sound. The world, spaced out, is speeding down some derelict highway in time. And long before my attic visions start, Shimo, I am thinking it is time that happens to people. We talk about having and saving and wasting it as if it is ours to work with, but really it is we who are time’s property. It molds and meddles with us, changes us without our knowing, so that one day we wake up with no idea who we are. And suddenly the life we’ve lived is no longer ours.

Youssef Rakha’s latest novel, his first composed in English, explores the remarkable, multi-dimensional life  of a strong-willed, enigmatic woman, set against the tumultuous years of recent Egyptian history, from the mid-fifties through the January Revolution of 2011 and its aftermath. But to put it like that sounds too simple, too conventional, for the tale that The Dissenters unleashes. Not content to embark on a straightforward narrative (which would not be his style anyhow), Rakha has chosen to tell the story of Amna Hanim Abu Zahra—Nimo to her friends, Mouna to her husband and children—through the memories and hallucinatory visions of her eldest son Nour. In the wake of his mother’s death, his grief-tinged, ecstatic narrative unfolds in a series of letters to his estranged younger sister Shimo in California. He wishes to share with her the understanding of Mouna, their mother, that he has gained through the strange rift in the fabric of time that has allowed him, within the confines of the cramped attic of the their family home, to slip into her earlier existence, living, reliving or closely observing her experiences, even those from long before he was born.

The Dissenters is, then, essentially a one-sided epistolatory novel consisting of three long letters with an interlude stolen from Mouna’s own notebook. Nour engages his sister directly and imagines her responses, but the apparent silence on her end provides no indication whether his dream-inspired insights will manage to heal, as he hopes, the unresolved rupture between mother and daughter that precipitated  Shimo’s unannounced departure from Cairo years earlier. However, it would seem that this is not the only loose end Nour is attempting to tie up. He is a forty-five year-old journalist who returned home to live with his mother after his divorce in 2010, and there is much that he must resolve with respect to his own life and his relationship to his country.

Moving between more recent, post-revolution events to which Nour—and in one section Mouna herself—can speak directly, and the attic revelations that reach back further into the past, Rakha unwinds a tale that works with, and against, temporal framings to create a narrative that slowly builds to reveal a full, multi-dimensional portrait of a singular woman and the shifting political, social, and civic world around her. Nour’s earliest visions take him back to 1956 when his mother, a teenager still known as Amna, is deprived of a chance to take her baccalaureate  exams and forced to marry a forty year-old man her family has selected. The awkward marriage will remain unconsummated and ultimately be dissolved, which allows young Amna the opportunity to finally pursue her dream of going to college.

There she will meet Amin, the young Communist lawyer who steals her heart and gives her the name “Mouna,” but their newfound joy is short-lived, as he is arrested and imprisoned a few short months after they move in together. The years of their separation, Nour tells his sister, see their mother exercising a new confidence and independence as she finishes school and enters the workforce. As a modern, stylish Egyptian woman, her friends and colleagues call her “Nimo.” When Amin is released from jail, a diminished and disillusioned man, she continues to work, even finding herself, for a time, acting as a secret agent. And then, at last, in 1969 Nour is born. By the time her second child, another boy, arrives, Mouna is again transformed. She has remade herself as a pious, middle-class Muslim mother.

The alternate thread of Nour’s correspondence with his sister, who is thirteen years younger than he is, explores more recent family matters including their parent’s comfortable estrangement, their brother Abid’s sadistic tendencies, and the circumstances that seem to have caused Shimo’s relationship with her mother to become strained and then permanently broken. But the primary focus is the dramatic impact that the 2011 revolution had on their mother. It seemed to awaken a long dormant political spirit in Mouna, giving her a new purpose and a new life.  On February 11, the night Mubarak stepped down from power, Nour walks home from Tahrir Square and is distraught to find that she is not there. Immediately his mind goes to all manner of horrors, imagining her lying in a puddle on the sidewalk.  And then, she appears, holding a flag, smartly dressed, her headscarf gone:

—You’re home early Mouna trills, the premillennial warmth of her voice restored.

Now my mother is smiling for real: an expression utterly unlike the baraka she used to project going about her devotional duties. I haven’t seen such peacefulness in her face since before Baba died. She stands waving her flag, then steps over the puddle that no longer shows her dead.

—I couldn’t stay home on a day like this, now, could I, she says. Besides, I just took the Metro to Kast El Ainy and walked to Tahrir. C’était incroyable, ya Nour. Hold your head high, you’re Egyptian, we chanted. But it wasn’t just a chant, you understand. It was real.

Soon, however, Mouna becomes aware of a strange and disturbing phenomenon. Something that others do not seem to register. Suddenly women are jumping off roofs and out of windows. She begins to investigate, finding a few others who also seem to be aware of this unusual trend. She even tries to recruit Nour, encouraging him to report on the situation. He doesn’t know what to make of the Jumpers,  but she sees a truth in their tragedies. These ill-fated women become a mystery, and then an obsession, even a madness, that fuels Mouna’s final years as the promise of the revolution turns again to upheaval and violence.

This ambitious, hypnotic novel tells a story that is very intimate, turning at times erotic or violent, but it is about much more than the life of one woman. For one thing, the conscious incongruity of having a complex woman’s life recounted and, at times experienced, through the vessel of a man sets up an interesting dynamic, speaking as it does to the shifting roles and restrictions that impact women in Egyptian society from an unlikely angle. Of course, The Dissenters also addresses the price paid by anyone who defies political and social conventions, and highlights the challenges of navigating  the forces of power for one’s own safety or (as in the case of Abid who joins the Secret Police) one’s advantage. Thus, Mouna’s story is much much larger than she is. As Nour confides to his sister:

But I’m no longer talking of my mother, am I. I’m talking of the Mother of the World. Surely you know that’s what Egypt is called, dear sister. At moments like this it seems as if Amna Abu Zahra is a fractal of our country, her biography a variation on its history, a version of the same story.

Finally, although Rakha is writing this novel in English—a language Nour and his sister share—his prose carries a strong Egyptian flavour. Many Arabic terms and expressions are woven into the text without comment or glossary (one can always look them up, mind you), and because Mouna was educated in French schools growing up and continued to use the language in her working years, French phrases regularly appear in her speech. This distinctive voice, in conjunction with the rhythmic flow of a narrative structure that blends the fantastical possibility of Nour’s visions with the reality of his own need for understanding and reconciliation, makes for a compelling and exceptionally rewarding read.

The Dissenters by Youssef Rakha is published by Graywolf Press.

A mirror to a life: Self-Portrait in the Studio by Giorgio Agamben

A form of life that keeps itself in relation to a poetic practice, however that may be, is always in the studio, always in the studio.

Granted that what Giorgio Agamben calls a “studio” might be better understood by English language readers as a “study,” the ideal space is the same: some kind of a desk , plenty of shelving for books, and some room on the walls for  a few well-chosen prints or framed memorabilia. Over the years the Italian philosopher has occupied a number of studios, most rented or borrowed from friends, and each one, revisited through photographs often grainy or discoloured, contains the memories of friends and colleagues and others who have, through their writing, influenced and inspired him. With this slender, generously illustrated volume, Self-Portrait in the Studio, Agamben reflects on his own intellectual journey, which is, in his case, nothing less than a life journey, from the sixties through to the present day, via photographs, paintings, poems, beloved books, and precious friendships.

In this day of the ubiquitous selfie—that practice of intentionally placing oneself front and centre at any site of interest—one might expect a book with “self-portrait” (autoritratto) in the title to be a self-focused venture. Yet, although Agamben does appear with friends, mentors and fellow students in a number of  the included photographs, his motivation is to centre those whose words and ideas have touched him and the lessons they have passed on. In a parenthetical aside he addresses this objective:

(What am I doing in this book? Am I not running the risk, as Ginevra [his spouse] says, of turning my studio into a museum through which I lead readers by the hand? Do I not remain too present, while I would have liked to disappear in the faces of friends and our meetings? To be sure, for me inhabiting meant to experience these friendships and meetings with the greatest possible intensity. But instead of inhabiting, is it not having that has got the upper hand? I believe I must run this risk. There is one thing, though, that I would like to make perfectly clear: that I am an epigone in the literal sense of the word, a being that is generated only out of others, and that never renounces this dependency, living in a continuous, happy epigenesis.)

This desire to stay out of his own way goes a long way to explaining the surprisingly engaging nature of this book. It is not a  detailed or rigorous intellectual autobiography, but rather a chance to spend a little time with a philosopher who truly seems to delight in the exchange of ideas, someone who wishes to honour some of the friendships, writers and artists who have helped shape his own development over the years.  Of course, given that he is writing from the vantage point of his early eighties, there is also a clear appreciation of the fact that the themes and dreams of a life are ever necessarily unfinished. In his preamble he muses: “While all our faculties seem to dimmish and fail us, the imagination grows to excess and takes up all possible space.” There are regrets—for example, sorrow that he did not come to appreciate Ingeborg Bachmann’s poetry while she was still alive—but the text ends with a positive, and still forward looking, affirmation of life and love.

Progress through this book of memories is essentially chronological, Agamben employs objects in or associations with his various  studio settings as touchstones that trigger memories of a particular person or persons who came into his life, and, frequently, the poets or writers that any one connection might have him led to explore. The tapestry of a life of ideas ever expanding, moving from friendships with important contemporary literary and intellectual figures, to meditations on the ideas of those he came to know only through their work, and back again. He never devotes more than a few pages to any one individual, social group, or writer as he honours those who have influenced and inspired his own thought over time.

For myself, many of the individuals he talks about, including those he counts among his important friendships, were previously unknown to me (but easy to look up, of course), but others, especially the writers he feels a strong connection to—like Simone Weil, Walter Benjamin, Hölderlin, and Robert Walser—were not. Of particular interest is the way he considers our relationships to those we read carefully or enjoy close intellectual companionship—what is it to engage intensely with the ideas of others?

As he makes his way along this retrospective pathway, Agamben draws some striking connections that he measures himself against in assessing his own life. Notably, he comments on a piece written just three years before Walser’s commitment to the hospital where he would spend the rest of his life, in which he questions the idea that Hölderlin’s last decades were ones of misery, suggesting instead that his loss of his senses wisely  afforded him the time and space to dream :

The tower in the carpenter’s house in Tübingen and the little hospital room in Herisau: these are two places on which we should never tire of meditating. What was accomplished within those walls—the refusal of reason on the part of two peerless poets—is the strongest objection that has ever been raised against our civilization. And once again, in the words of Simone Weil: only those who have accepted the most extreme state of social degradation can speak the truth.

I also believe that in the world that befell me, everything that seems desirable to me and seems worth living for can find a place only in a museum or a prison or a mental hospital. I know this with absolute certainty, but unlike Walser I have not had the courage to follow out all its consequences. In this sense, my relation to the facts of my existence that could not happen is just as—if not more—important than my relation to those that did. In our society, everything that is allowed to happen is of little interest, and an authentic autobiography should rather occupy itself with facts that did not.

So where does that put his little exercise in self-reflection? In a class of its own. With Self-Portrait in the Studio,  Agamben, traces a rich network of interconnection, through personal contacts, study and research, and even, in some locations, a coincidental proximity to history, to produce a work that is entertaining, intelligent and humane.

Self-Portrait in the Studio by Giorgio Agamben is translated from the Italian by Kevin Attell and published by Seagull Books.

What the streets cannot retain: Border Documents by Arturo Soto

Considering the escalating tensions on the Mexico – US border, heightened even more under the present American administration, Mexican photographer and writer Arturo Soto’s new photo book, Border Documents, is an especially opportune release. The images belong to today; the texts to another time. The late fifties through the late seventies, to be exact. They reflect the environment in which his father grew up in the deeply entwined sister cities of Juárez, Mexico and El Paso, Texas. That world has been irrevocably altered by social and political forces over the past three or four decades, but this uniquely personal project sets out to attempt to “see” echoes of a remembered past in the urban landscape of today. The challenges arise not simply from the passage of time, but from the reputation, both earned and exaggerated, that this area now bears. As Soto points out in his Afterword:

People acquainted with Juárez, particularly those outside of Mexico, tend to know it for its infamies. The femicides of the late nineties cemented an infernal image of the city amply propagated in pop culture. A few years later, the ‘war on drugs’ further precipitated the erosion of civic life, which encouraged the media to focus its attention solely on the gruesome side of things. Such a narrow understanding renders everyday life invisible, putting it at risk of being lost. The past cannot be restored, but it can be conjured for insight to understand past and present lives.

The presentation of Border Documents is clean and spare. (See selections here.) Two-tone school photos of the senior Soto from the sixties and seventies line the inside of the front and back covers. Stark black and white photographs, taken in Ciudad Juárez and El Paso in 2016, appear as almost ghostly images of the streets and neighbourhoods of his childhood and youth. They are characterized by harsh light, sharp angles, lonely vistas. Parked cars are common, but few people are in sight (notably there is one where the photographer’s shadow stretches out from the lower right corner). By contrast, the accompanying vignettes are populated with a vivid cast of friends, classmates, grandmothers, siblings, parents and other relatives. The juxtaposition of the chronological collection of memories, anecdotes, and musings filled with life in all its shades of joy and discontent against contemporary images of the settings where they once took place demonstrates the complex reality of the environments in which we grow up and the degree to which they are both preserved and lost over time.

A case in point, border crossing. Apart from being a source of employment opportunities for Juárez residents, legal or not, El Paso was also a destination for amusements, such as a trip to the zoo, or, more commonly, a place to acquire goods and access services otherwise unavailable at home. An early memory from 1958 captures a child’s early impressions of the experience:

We took the transnational trolley to shop at JC Penney, everyone’s favorite store. The journey felt tediously long despite the short distance because of the long immigration line. They even forced some passengers to get vaccinated before letting them in. Overheard conversations had led me to believe things were much nicer on the other side, but everything looked more or less the same once we reached El Chuco. Over time, I found reference points that sparked my imagination along the route. Some of my favorites were the old customs building, the Spirit of St. Louis replica above a cantina and the clay figures of sleeping Mexicans flanking Don Marcos Flores’ house. A former municipal president, he had a gift shop close to the Santa Fe bridge. My grandma Esther cashed the money my aunt wired her from Los Angeles there. Don Marcos, always at the entrance, greeted her by name, which made me feel distinguished.

However, the photograph that faces the above memory depicts, from across the cracked pavement of West 4th Avenue, a plain, all-purpose structure with its available services painted right onto its front wall in English and Spanish—Copies, Fax, Foto, Income Tax, Public Notary, Medicare, Medicaid. Hard to picture such a destination sparking a child’s imagination today.

Some of the photographs captured appear to closely align with the accounts of the relative freedom afforded by a makeshift cement and brick playground in a barrio defined by specific streets and bridges. Perhaps these scenes are little changed with time. Of course, not every photo has a story, though each one has a location indicated. Likewise, not every story is matched to a photo. Soto’s father’s anecdotes carry enough humour, wisdom, and empathy to form vivid portraits on their own. He recalls, for example, a near spiritual crisis on the occasion of his First Communion with his sister Elsa in 1963. His mother was able to find him a second hand outfit and, with luck and a generous repayment plan, a most elegant new dress for Elsa. Simply clothing the outside, however, was not enough:

My peace of mind and the purity of my soul proved harder to secure. Some distant relatives were in town, and my cousin kissed me while playing a game. I felt very conflicted. This happened after my confession, and we had just been instructed on the consequences of receiving communion in a state of sin. I went back to the church and explained myself to the priest. He laughed and made me promise not to do it again but assigned me no penance. Liberated, I bought an orange from the market, feeling closer and closer to heaven with every slice I ate.

Life was not easy—along with the typical boyhood and adolescent adventures, and misadventures with friends and siblings, there was an alcoholic uncle, a father inclined to infidelity and other challenges—but the reflections Soto’s father shares show a distinct compassion or understanding, even if it is filtered through an adult’s appreciation of his younger self. One can see why his son who grew up listening to his stories would be inspired to encourage him to engage in this project even if some memories would be destined to transcend the physical spaces in which they were formed:

I keep a sad memory of the Cine Reforma. I watched there El Señor Doctor when Cantinflas was at the height of fame. Since overselling tickets was standard, I had to watch it on my feet. At some point, I thought I recognized someone a few rows ahead, but it wasn’t until the credits rolled that I made out my uncle Carmelo, a subject of constant gossip in our family. My dad used to say that his sister, the fearful Aunt Berta, would seize Carmelo’s salary. On Sundays, she would give him just enough for a newspaper, a shoeshine, and a movie ticket. I always thought my dad exaggerated the situation, but I confirmed my uncle’s capitulation was true that day.

As in Arturo Soto’s earlier work, a strong thread of social commentary is woven into the relationship between images and commentary. He is drawn to challenging the existing assumptions about a place by focusing on the ordinary to expose the everyday reality overshadowed by the outsized image an urban centre may otherwise project. His last work, A Certain Logic of Expectations (see my review) was the outcome of his time spent studying for his PhD in Fine Art at Oxford University during the BREXIT years. But rather than focusing on the famed campus environment, he turned his camera on the other Oxford, the working class community that belongs to a geographically larger but psychologically and socially distinct space from the hallowed University environs. Of course, he views this world from the perspective of a Mexican outsider who can’t help but marvel at how relatively safe and clean even the “rough” parts of town feel. However, with this new collaborative project, he is exploring an urban environment he frequently visited while growing up in Mexico City, but that always felt at odds with the images his father’s anecdotes had conjured. In revisiting these streets, avenues and corners, Soto allows his camera to offer a visual counterpoint to the record of his father’s memories and the result is a very powerful—and personal—documentary that crosses borders, both temporal and political.

Border Documents by Arturo Soto is published by and available from Eriskay Connection.