After the night, day breaks: The Brush by Eliana Hernández-Pachón

Pablo and Ester live in the hills. Their children are grown. Their lives are simple, bound to the land, but lately there have been signs, omens. Pablo is concerned:

For some time now
he’s felt a heavy change pressing the air,
and can’t explain it.
Like when
he walks through town at night,
and when he hears the animals
can’t sleep.

Sensing danger, he gathers some papers and items in a box and goes out to bury it while Ester sleeps. And then they come.

Between the 16th and the 21st of February, 2000, members of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia descended upon the Montes de Maria region and attacked the people:

During this incident, known as the Massacre of El Salado, paramilitary forces tortured, slashed, decapitated, and sexually assaulted the defenseless population, forcing their relatives and neighbors to watch the executions. Throughout, the militiamen played drums they found in the village cultural center and blasted music on speakers they took from people’s homes.

Sixty people were killed. The Colombian Marine Corps battalion charged with protecting the area was nowhere in sight—they had withdrawn the day before the massacre began. With The Brush, a taut work of narrative poetry, Colombian poet and educator Eliana Hernández-Pachón draws on the official 2009 report on the massacre to bring the story of this brutal event into focus in an unusual and affecting manner.

The tragedy of this horror exists on many levels—the unimaginable terror of the attack itself which was not an isolated event, the lingering trauma of the survivors, and the years of fighting for a formal apology and reparations from the government. As a story well-known within Colombia, the poet says in an interview that “if I was going to tell it anew, then I would need a new form.” Her approach is to pass the account on to several distinct characters or voices and allow these diverse perspectives to carry the varied layers of this tragedy.

The first of three sections belongs to Pablo who has reason to be worried about the growing tensions. He will not survive the attack. The second part belongs to the thoughts of Ester, his wife, in the days that follow. She wonders where Pablo is, what might have happened, heading out into the brush to try to find him. And then…

Crossing the glade, she sees
a shadow vanish
in a glimmer of undergrowth.
Hey! she shouts.
And the woman approaches warily
leading a little girl by the hand.
A whisper first, and now her clearer voice:
They did it to me with a knife, the woman says
and points to a mark on her arm.
They also did things
I can’t talk about.

Knowing it is unsafe to return, the two women and child are now forced to keep moving through the brush.

In the third section, the Brush—the dense, living forest vegetation—is granted it own direct, poetic voice. It is The Brush that stands as witness, to sights, sounds and sensations, from the crushing footfalls of the approaching militants and falling bodies in the town square, to the careful movement through the forest of survivors, and, finally, to the blossoms and blooms that will welcome those who eventually return.

In conversation with The Brush’s testimony, Hernández-Pachón engages input from The Investigators and The Witnesses. These perspectives, drawn from official sources, define and correct one another, while the Brush adds its own comments and clarifications. The human choruses are presented in prose, but even if the Witnesses’ offerings are more poetic in tone, both stand in sharp tonal contrast with the lyrical, omniscient voice of the Brush. The Brush, it turns out, can tell a tale of horror and grief that people, especially those who have been victimized, are often unable to fully articulate.

The questions still survive:
what does it think about, the brush, somnambulist,
after it’s seen it all?
The day that follows night returns
its artifice, the well-known
interlocking of the hours:
how is it that time didn’t stop,
why do the grain’s unopened eyes
keep growing?

A disconcerting calmness rests over this book-length sequence of poems that, in a mere 57 pages, manages to capture the contradictions and harmonies that arise in response to acts of extreme violence. That calmness serves to unsettle the reader and honour the survivors, while placing this event within a wider ecosystem and granting a voice to nature, the one force, perhaps, that can truly offer both understanding and healing.

The Brush by Eliana Hernández-Pachón with an Afterword by Héctor Abad is translated from the Spanish by Robin Myers and published by Archipelago Books.

The vanished railway station: An Old Carriage with Curtains by Ghassan Zaqtan

In the western foothills of the Hebron Mountains, about forty kilometres southwest of Jerusalem, lies what remains of Zakariyya, a village with a history stretching back millennia. It was the birthplace of the parents of Palestinian poet and writer Ghassan Zaqtan. When the community was occupied and depopulated by Israeli forces following the Nakba, they were forced flee to Beit Jala near Bethlehem. That is where Zaqtan was born in 1954. Seven years later, in 1961, circumstances compelled his family to move again, this time to Karameh refugee camp in the Jordan Valley, across the river from Jericho. Though the settlement was destroyed during the 1968 War of Attrition, Zaqtan would return to it as the setting for his 1995 novella Describing the Past (published in English in 2016), the tale of three teenagers coming of age and dealing with love and loss in a world haunted by war, death, and dislocation. With Where The Bird Disappeared (2015), Zaqtan’s second prose work to appear in translation in 2018, the village of Zakariyya comes into central focus. This lyrical, almost fable-like story follows the fate of two boys, Zakariyya and Yahya, who grow up in the village. They are both in love with Sara. However, the arrival of “armed Jewish forces” changes everything.

Now, with the English release of Zaqtan’s 2011 novella, An Old Carriage with Curtains, the three works—all translated by Samuel Wilder—can be seen as a loosely linked trilogy, or as being in conversation with one another. Each is different, and, as such, not need be read in any particular sequence, but they are bound by a common spare, poetic, dreamlike narrative style, and by echoing images and motifs. Yet, this third book seems closer to the author’s own life, suggesting that it is somewhat more autobiographical. Here the protagonist is an unnamed middle-aged man living in Ramallah. His aging mother, who lives in Jordan, longs to see her birthplace again for the first time since the “migration.” It is the place that has always loomed large in his family’s history, its existence nearly mythical, its sudden loss impossible to put into perspective:

He arrived late to Zakariyya, his village, occupied since 1948, where his father and mother were born. Somewhere in a drawer inside the house there was a faded, tormented picture that redeemed nothing, but which kept in place the stories that amassed in the family home. The picture showed a distant spectre of forest trees, and the ghosts of houses at the far-right edge of the frame. This was all it contained. It looked tired, faded, closed; nonetheless, it asserted some incredible forbearance. Under the pressure of the cruel importance placed on it, it could hardly go on existing, pressed down by the dependence of all those contradictory memories, all the longing that pervaded their stories.

By the time of the key events traced in this novel, the protagonist has passed through or near the abandoned townsite a number of times, but he has resisted sending his mother any photographs, as he had promised. Now, as her anticipated visit nears, her descriptive recollections of Zakariyya take on new dimensions and details. For the first time, she talks of a railway station and a Palestinian Jewish friend she used to meet there as a child, but her son has seen no sign of a station or tracks. This disconnect causes him to feel that the images and memories he has been trying to preserve for her are hollow, “not convincingly alive, because the railway station was gone. Its absence diffused through life, evaporating everything.”

Absence, the mutability of memory, and the importance of stories to sustain individual and collective identity are common elements of Zaqtan’s fiction. In An Old Carriage with Curtains, the nonlinear narrative proceeds through short scenes that move between a number of themes or threads. Some are conceptual, others more practical. Because movement is restricted, there is the matter of obtaining the required permits, a frustrating, complicated and time-consuming process that becomes, for many Palestinians, a fruitless life-long ritual. For the protagonist, his current application for a Visitor’s Permit that will allow him to travel to see his mother in Ammam has taken three tries; his efforts to secure one to allow her to visit her homeland just once has taken much longer. But, what he does finally manage to obtain for her, sadly, does not include either Jerusalem where she had hoped to pray, or Zakariyya; nor is it the prize she had long dreamed of, the right to return for good.

Permit in hand, there is then the question of making the passage between the West Bank and Jordan across the Allenby Bridge. The protagonist’s somewhat surreal experiences on his way to see his mother form one of the novel’s central threads. Broken down into snapshot vignettes, there are the queues, the restless waiting travellers, an old man who makes repeated and increasingly desperate attempts to pass through a mechanized gate, and a woman soldier who, when checking his documents, betrays the recognized agreement he maintains between himself, a Palestinian, and them. She simply asks him a question: Do you like to travel? Innocent enough in any other reality of human interaction, her unexpected transgression unnerves him.

Another thread that appears throughout the narrative features Hind, an actress friend with whom he has a relationship he does not fully understand, though he senses that his role is primarily be that of a listener, an audience. Thus, her voice enters his narrative directly, in first person, as he recalls stories she has told him about her own life or family, even if he is not always certain whether he has remembered them accurately or added his own embellishment. She seems to carry an anger that she accuses him of lacking whereas, by contrast, he tends to exhibit a more contained, thoughtful, and melancholic perspective.

Finally, as a tale of journeys—across borders and into the past—passages, landscapes, and the idea of home play an important role. The novel opens with the protagonist making his way along the Wadi Qelt , following the ancient path between Jerusalem and Jericho, aware that he is walking in “the valley of the shadow of death,” en route  to the Monastery of Saint George which he had visited as a young school boy. Yet, when he reaches it, he finds it closed to visitors for the day, and he is denied a chance to reclaim his memories. Later, an intellectual detour will take him on an exploration of the exile literature of Naim Kattan, Emile Habibi, Imre Kertész, and Muhammad al-Qaysi. And, more than once, his thoughts turn back to the first time he returned to his homeland in 1994, to the trip by road from Gaza to Ramallah, past Zakariyya and nearing, but not passing through, his own birthplace near Bethlehem. He knows that any specific location, a house or community, can be emptied, reoccupied or left to fall into decay, but a history inextricable from the landscape—its hills, valleys and roads—cannot be destroyed:

The story of Palestine was hidden inside the roads, he thought, where the depth and necessity of things appear, where cold description was overturned, yielding to a depth found in trails that connect, vectors passing through the mountains and strange wadis. It was not the quest for exaggerated aesthetics of poets and romantic novelists, but a scene of painful, violent, uncontrolled energy, cold and bitter directions that course through astonishing, contradictory forms, forging ways through the alloy of fear, belief, rebellion, contentment and self-annihilation. The lote tree of the lowlands connected to the olive tree the hills. All this confusion, he thought, was like some rough draft of wisdom thrown on the shoulders of this country.

The story of Palestine is still being written, in defiance of the forces that have escalated the attack on its right to exist. This novel, with its maze of checkpoints, permits, and restrictions is only more relevant now than it was a dozen years earlier. In fact, in one scene the protagonist says to Hind, “I didn’t sleep well. They are bombing Gaza.” Thus, on its own or in concert with Describing the Past and Where the Bird Disappeared, An Old Carriage with Curtains evokes a contemporary portrait of a world attuned to the voices of the past, facing an uncertain future, where the preservation of the spirit of memory against its inevitable tendency to shift and transform itself may be the only way to move forward. And, if one continues to listen to the stories of others, that vanished railway station might even be found.

An Old Carriage with Curtains by Ghassan Zaqtan is translated from the Arabic by Samuel Wilder and published by Seagull Books.

When no words can be found: [. . .] by Fady Joudah

How will I go on living
with orchestras that conduct my thirst?
It’s been done before.
There are precedents, always will be,
and there will be Gaza after the dark times.
There will be gauze. And we will stand
indicted for not standing against the word
and our studies of the word
that dissect what ceases to be water.

– from “[. . .]” p. 16

When we talk about a literary work being timely, it often means that a piece from the past holds a new relevance in our current world. [. . .], Fady Joudah’s sixth poetry collection, is not simply timely in that sense, it is of this exact moment as it is occurring. Most of the poems here were written between October and December of 2023, during the first three months of Israel’s war against the Palestinians in Gaza. The grief, the anger, and the defiance is palpable. But so is faith in the persistence of love. And, in keeping with the explicitly wordless title of this volume, more than half of the poems share the same title—[. . .]—an expression, as Joudah indicates in an interview with Boris Dralyuk in The New Inquiry, of silence, silencing, and an invitation to listen “in silence to the Palestinian in their silence.”

Joudah is a Palestinian American poet, translator, and physician who lives in Houston, Texas. He draws on all of the facets of his identity, personal and professional, in his poetry, but from the earliest days of the current assault in Gaza he has also been called upon by certain American media outlets to provide the “Palestinian perspective,” even as many of his own family were being killed. Now that this new collection has been released, he continues to respond to interview requests, but the focus has shifted (and if not, he changes the venue).  One senses that it is important that he continually protect his very human ordinariness from a culture that wants “to hear and read me only as a voice in the aftermath of disaster and as a wound at that, not much more.” (Yale Review)

The poems in [. . .], composed, for the most part, during a condensed period of great political and emotional distress, carry an urgency that commands attention. Palestinians have long responded to the ongoing attacks and displacement they’ve endured for the past seventy-five years through poetry and prose, with the recurrence of the same images, themes and situations affecting a sort of echoing tradition. A piece written decades ago, feels like it was written yesterday. But over the last six months, as we’ve witnessed the intentional destruction of universities and libraries, and the targeted killing of potential record keepers—poets and journalists. Joudah’s response, to this intensified attempt at erasure is, like that of his contemporaries, to keep talking about what is happening, as it is happening.

When did the new war begin?

Whoever gets to write it most
Gets to erase it best.

The new war has been coming for a long time.
The old war has been going for a long time.

Coming to a body near me, and going on in my body.

– from “I Seem As If I Am: Ten Maqams, # 6”

Is it possible, then, to effectively answer genocide? The International Courts and a steady stream of horrifying images delivered straight to our phones do not seem to be making a significant difference. It seems that any formal declaration will only be made, as we’ve seen too many times before, long after the fact. But that is no reason to stop writing—and not just to document, but to be able to acknowledge the small moments of truth and beauty that keep hope alive:

In Gaza, a girl and her brother
rescued their fish
from the rubble of airstrikes. A miracle

its tiny bowl
didn’t shatter.

– from “[. . .]” p. 33

A review, especially of an important collection like this one, can only go so far. Joudah offers very interesting insights into his work that are worth seeking out. I have linked two interviews above, but others can be found, including a free online event as part of the Transnational Literature Series that I’m looking forward to on April 11, 2024.

[. . .] by Fady Joudah is published by Milkweed Editions.

But I was a child of the jungle: The Understory by Saneh Sangsuk

Toward the end of the Afterword to his novel The Understory, Thai author Saneh Sangsuk, having acknowledged the myriad of sources and resources that informed his tale, describes just how his work originated and quickly assumed a life of its own:

One day in early 2002, I had set out to write a short story, which was meant to be a very short story. What I had had in mind was a ghost story precisely of the kind often subject to ridicule. But after two paragraphs, The Understory began to take shape. The story that I had started had shifted toward a new direction, and I, considerably irritated and discouraged, submitted to it, watched it from afar, to see how it would unfold.

To imagine a potential novel-length work asserting itself after only two paragraphs, is an indication that the seeds of the tale had possibly been simmering the writer’s imagination for decades, but it’s also important to recognize that each paragraph in the final printed edition of this book extends for at least ten pages or more. So that is a little more of a runway than it first sounds. Nonetheless, if Sangsuk found himself so immediately swept up in his own creation, that same energy is fully transmitted to the reader in this engrossing tale of an inveterate storyteller determined to share the magic of a disappearing habitat and the wisdom of a fading culture before it is too late.

The third person narrative of the first quarter or so of The Understory introduces the village of Praeknamdang, a small farming community in Thailand, and the eccentric ninety-three year-old abbot of the local temple, Luang Paw Tien. Seventy-three years into his monkhood, this ancient man still continues his daily alms walk, some seven kilometres long, accompanied by his beloved ox, a practice he will maintain until illness and old age finally claim him years later. By then, the village will be on the verge of being abandoned. But when this story takes place, or rather, when the story within this story is told, it is the winter of 2510 BE, or 1967 CE, and Luang Paw Tien is still defying his age and actively engaged in his community. This year, however, has been a difficult one, marked by a flood that devastated the season’s rice crop. The villagers, young and old, are despondent, and their loving monk is worried about them. At night, as everyone gathers around a communal fire, he joins them as usual. He was always welcome. Night after night, he would entertain the villagers with stories drawn from his long journey to India to visit the Buddha’s birthplace, or with one of the countless tales—funny, spooky, or fantastic—that comprised his regular repertoire of entertainments. “To the serious-minded adults, he was the teller of tall tales who breached the precept concerning monks and untruthful speech, but to the children, he was a trove of magical stories.”

Yet, on this particular night, he feels that he has run out of stories and hand-me-down tales. His thoughts are troubled:

Whenever the old bhikkhu thought of the fates of the men and women and children of Praeknamdang, a terrible gloom would wash over him and fill his heart. The shadow of decline and deterioration had long loomed over those fields, and that shadow now seemed to be growing ever larger and more intense, since large swaths of the jungle had been destroyed, and it seemed he was the only one able to sense the ruinous omens. The dull hums of tragedy emanating from beneath the ground were as powerful as tsunamis, and it seemed he was the only one able to sense their menace. The village was soon to become deserted, and that it would be deserted seemed inescapable. The natives and their children and grandchildren would one day be relegated to the position of serfs because, even in those years, rights to the land that had from time immemorial belonged to the people of Praeknamdang were falling into the hands of people from elsewhere.

Aware that the adults may already to be lost to this inevitable state of affairs, Luang Paw Tien decides to turn his full attention to the eager and attentive children gathered around him and launches into a personal account of his own childhood and early adulthood—an account that begins with a little historical context and soon erupts into a lively monologue featuring his eccentric hunter father, Old Man Jumpa, his patient farmer mother, Mae Duangbulan, and an ongoing life and death battle with the jungle’s most feared inhabitant, the tiger.

The world in which Luang Paw Tien grew up was one in which the dense jungle with all its riches and dangers hovered close around Praeknamdang, and shaped both the lives and the imaginations of the villagers. As a child of the forest, Luang Paw Tien was acquainted with its magic and its perils from a young age, but one stood above all:

In the jungle, even in the full light of day, even when I was trekking with Old Man Junpa or with other grownups, a tiger’s growl, however far away it was, made my heart skip a beat. And during those times when I was less than well-behaved and wandered off playing, as children do, a tiger’s growl, even from afar, even in the full light of day, triggered a rash of goosebumps all over my body. When a tiger revealed itself, no matter where, all the different animals would call out frenzied, panicked warnings to their own kind, and next thing you knew, silence would spread through that part of the jungle.

When the tiger does strike close to home, in a deadly and horrifying way, the future monk is only ten years old it changes the course of his life quickly. But, seasoned storyteller that he is, he allows the story to unfold slowly, somehow managing to maintain the level of excitement and throughout.

As narrator, Lunag Paw Tien is openly blending a mix of folklore and fact, reminding his listeners that there once were beliefs and practices that might now sound strange to those who have grown up in world where the jungle has been pushed back and somewhat tamed in the interest of agriculture. But when he young, the jungle was still capable of keeping man in his place. As an author, Saneh Sangsuk, draws on a wealth of materials to evoke a disappeared way of life. He demonstrates a deep respect for nature and traditional practices, one that comes through no matter how eccentric and larger-than-life his characters and story may be. That is because

The Understory is, above all, a celebration of the power of oral storytelling. As such, the most infectious element of this novel lies in the rhythmic energy and flow of the narrative which is captured to great effect in Mui Poopoksakul’s translation. In an interview for Asymptote, she describes how meticulous he is with language and how sensitive he is to its musicality. She says that when she first started working with him, she was surprised that he could state the exact length of time it should take to read any one of his works. She thought it might be some kind of exaggeration:

But as it turned out, he just has a very clear idea of how his texts should sound. I don’t know if he’s actually timed it, but when you talk to him, it almost feels like he has, because he has such a specific idea of the flow. It was only after I spent a lot of time talking with him that I realized that he was not kidding when he said those numbers. And so, working on his texts, I have to be hyper-aware of rhythm.

Her translation so adeptly captures the a musical flow in English, that this text, with its long unbroken paragraphs, moves at such a keenly calibrated pace and just the right level of sustained suspense that it is an absolute delight to read.

The Understory by Saneh Sangsuk is translated from the Thai by Mui Poopoksakul and published in North America by Deep Vellum. The UK edition is published by Peirene.

Snakes and ladders: Traces of Boots on Tongue and Other Stories by Rajkamal Chaudhary

There is a deep darkness in all directions, and we are sitting on the naked floor, awaiting light. When will the light come? Dipu unwraps the sheet from her body and lays it on the ground. She feels along the wall and keeps the bottle and the glass in a corner. Then asks—Who else is here? Chandravati, are you here? Nothing is visible in the dark. Not even one’s limbs. And in this darkness, Dipu’s voice shimmers like a white silver sword—Why don’t you say something? The sounds from here can’t be heard upstairs. And by now the owner must have paid off the police. Now why are you scared? Why not say something? Who else is here?

(from “Some People in a Burning House”)

A police raid has sent an assortment of women and their customers—a salesman, a student, an engineer, an old man—to the cold, bare basement of a brothel. By matchlight they try to sort out their situation. And then they realize, it’s not a raid but a fire. The building is aflame and no one knows what might be happening upstairs.

Welcome to the world of Rajkamal Chaudhary. This world is one that is in transition. The mid-twentieth century is a time of upheaval. The aftermath of World War Two sees the Cold War, and various conflicts and revolutions on the rise. In India, the newly independent nation is trying to define itself after the end of British colonial rule. Following a long struggle for freedom and the disruption of Partition, there is displacement, dissolution, and wide-spread poverty. The future looks less certain and less rosy than that which might have been imagined. Chaudhary, as perhaps the first avant-garde Hindi-language writer, drew inspiration directly from this unstable period, and, eschewing the moralistic literary traditions, painted a vivid, often vulgar, portrait of his time.

Born in northern Bihar in 1929, Chaudhary had strict religious upbringing, but his childhood was marked by the death of his mother when he was young, and his father’s subsequent remarriage to woman close to his own age. After high school he moved to Patna to attend college where he eventually graduated with a degree in Commerce, but by then he was already drawn to literary pursuits. His earliest works, poetry and prose, were published in Maithili, but Hindi soon proved a more productive and lucrative language. Much of his Hindi work was produced during the six years he lived in Calcutta in the late fifties and early sixties where he also came into contact with the young avant-garde poets of the Hungryalist movement. When he died in 1967, at the age of thirty-seven, he had written eleven novels, seven short story collections and hundreds of poems in Hindi and Maithili. Twelve of his Hindi stories are gathered in the collection Traces of Boots on Tongue, published last year by Seagull Books. In her Introduction, translator Saudamini Deo writes of his idiosyncratic style:

The stories in this collection are montages, flashes, almost documentary-like glimpses of the past that no longer feels like the past. Much like the novelle vague cinema that broke down boundaries between realty and fiction, Chaudhary’s stories seem to reject the characteristic formality of earlier Hindi literature and embrace a newer, more modern cadence of a world where there is no longer either god or morality, not even the desire for it. He is a writer writing not in a closed room but on the streets, in plein-air.

These stories are populated with unsettled individuals from all social classes, disillusioned artists and writers, unhappy husbands and wives, angry widows and widowers, lost madmen and madwomen. And a curious abundance of snakes, real and allegorical. As a man whose adult life was characterized by complicated relationships with women—two marriages and multiple affairs—Chaudhary tackled sex and sexuality with an openness that was unconventional for his times, to say the least. Some of that is reflected in the selections here, such as “Sisters-in-law” in which one of two women, widowed young, who support themselves servicing their local community’s healthy supply of “rascals,” has an disturbing experience. In another story, a boy befriends an effeminate classmate and finds himself in the terrifying clutches of his sexually aggressive mother.

Anger, bitterness, and anxiety fuel many of his characters and their interactions. Others are lost and confused, often struggling with reality, be it due to illness or intoxication. In “Veni Sanhar,” a young second wife and new mother, recently recovered from typhoid, suffers from periodic hallucinations. While her older husband attends to his business indoors, the servant and her stepson try to look after her and the baby. “Warriors Don’t Worry About the Right Time,” revolves around a man who insists he sees his dead wife coming to the well. His is a refusal to accept the truth, a refusal to move on:

Uncle spends his time on the veranda, and in the evening, after drinking bhang, reflects on what has and has not happened. There is no worry about the present. There is no hope or wish to turn or shape the present to one’s will. Stories and tales about what has passed please the mind. What has passed was better, appropriate, preferable. And, by thinking about what has not passed, the present remains forgotten and lost.

Some of Chaudhary’s stories are gritty, others melancholy. The shorter tales are more likely to have more internal coherence, but the longer, more intricate ones tend to unfold slowly through film-like scenes and vignettes. What is happening is not always immediately clear, and the endings hang in the air. One of the most intricate stories, “Like a Wall of Glass,” features a commercial artist, Kapoor, who wishes to transcend the constraints of money and produce a true work of art. He has his heart set on painting the wife of a well-known folk-art specialist—a man intent on preserving the past glories of Indian culture—but his inspiration personal is the abstract modernist Henry Moore. Yet, he realizes the absurdity of his ambitions:

Art! Culture! Creation! Expression! Beauty! How pointless and futile these words have become! But then, what possesses meaning after all? Money? An evening with a woman? Falling ill? Going mad? Committing suicide after writing a letter to friends? What is truth? What is sin? What is man himself? Morality? The point of life? The point of creation? What is man himself? Why doesn’t he die? Then, again, Kapoor starts smiling at the emptiness of his questions.

The anxious artist swings from confidence to disappointment and back as he pursues his goal. But even producing a brilliant painting, an ideal work of art, cannot achieve whatever he thinks he might be aiming for.

Chaudhary’s particular vivid, if often uncomfortable, portrayal of mid-twentieth century India in flux had trouble finding an audience outside of the literary journals of his day as it was deemed too indecent and immoral for the literary mainstream. Now that a selection of his stories is finally available in English, his work may well surprise and appeal to contemporary readers comfortable with more unconventional or less structured narratives. His characters and the situations in which they find themselves are troubled with unanswered questions that are still valid in our own volatile world. But understand that his stories, like life itself, offer no easy solutions.

Traces of Boots on Tongue and Other Stories by Rajkamal Chaudhary is translated from the Hindi by Saudamini Deo and published by Seagull Books.

I rarely look in the mirror: Spent Light by Lara Pawson

There are days when I want to embody the qualities of a thing. To be effective, but not affected. To be present but not involved.

So, in case you haven’t heard, it begins with a toaster. The first thing that the narrator of Lara Pawson’s Spent Light wants to tell us is about the second-hand toaster her neighbour gives her one day, the first toaster she says she has ever owned. She takes it home and examines it. Fondles it. Compares the shape of its buttons to pellets of rat shit, as one does. In fact, if nothing else, the first few pages of this book let us know that this is a woman with an oddly fleshy approach to inanimate objects, but she’s not really talking to us. Rather, the reader is listening in on a one-sided monologue addressed to her partner who is presumably already well acquainted with her idiosyncrasies, and possibly even has his own.

The classification on the back cover reads: Fiction/Memoir/History and it’s hard to say whether that’s a help or a hinderance. Pawson’s last book, This Is the Place to Be, fell more neatly, if unconventionally, into the category of memoir. It is the brilliant, fractured and often disturbing telling of a life—a blend of self-observation, memory, and an account of her experiences as a war correspondent in Angola. Spent Light may seem similar, but it is not only stranger, it blurs the history and memories with fiction. One might be inclined to call it “autofiction,” a term as over-applied to current literature as “tastes like chicken” is to any unfamiliar meat dish, but what we learn about the woman at the centre of this book is at once intimate and ambiguous. She speaks about bodily functions and culinary adventures with squirrels and her obsessions with the walls and floors and objects in her house, but what she chooses to reveal about herself is actually limited. She has spent time in Africa and elsewhere, but we don’t know why. She sometimes experiences a certain gender anxiety, but it is fleeting. And, since she is speaking to someone who knows her well, any shared experience that she is recalling does not require unnecessary context. The stories in themselves, personal and powerful, are sufficient.

Through her observations and meditations on objects, chores, possessions, nature, her dog, and the banality of everyday violence, our narrator is not only becoming her own strange, living, breathing curiosity cabinet, she is also weaving a web that stretches out into the wider existence of calculated and gruesome cruelty—a world of slavery, colonial exploitation, and war. Sometimes her thoughts drift to horrors of the past, of the last century and centuries before, but at other times the horror is with us in an even more present way than it was, at least for those who were not paying attention, when Pawson wrote this book and had her protagonist contemplate the chipped fridge magnet with the word GAZA emblazoned on it:

The first time I held it, I felt quite overwhelmed. I thought about the hands that had made it, and the hands those hands have held, and the lives lived by the owners of all those hands. I thought about the bread that has been torn in those hands, the taps that have been turned and the water that has washed. I thought about the hair that has been untangled between the fingers on those hands, and the wire fences to which they have clung.

That is the risk. Things come, things go. The history of man’s brutality against man is always with us, and Spent Light’s narrator cannot help but incorporate these images into her quotidian reflection on the world around her and her place in it. Every action, every object has an association with a memory, or an intimation of violence, or both. A fridge magnet is never just a fridge magnet.

This book, I suppose in keeping with its tripartite classification, is very difficult to summarize succinctly. Pawson’s prose is sharp and unsparing. It moves swiftly, shifting from unlikely observation to shocking image to expression of affection and on again. It possesses a certain terrible beauty, to reference Yeats, but it is also very human and often very funny. It does not fail to remind us of the potential darkness that lurks inside each one of us, yet it also celebrates the capacity to look to the light—in nature, in love, in the ordinary things we cherish, and in the memories we hold dear. A compelling read, it is one that sits uneasily, strangely, and wonderfully in a light of its own making.

Spent Light by Lara Pawson is published by CB editions.

Am I really me? Barcode: Fifteen Stories by Krisztina Tóth

When one speaks of a short story collection as “loosely linked” there is often the implication that some kind of continuous theme, or even set of characters, connecting the individual pieces to a greater or lesser extent. Krisztina Tóth’s debut collection, Barcode, originally published in Hungary in 2006, is a little different in this respect. The narrators or protagonists are all Hungarian, and timewise, their settings are in keeping with the age of the author who was born in 1970, but, even if some stories may contain possible biographical elements, the voices and circumstances do not suggest that all, or even any of the fifteen feature the same character. Rather, what connects the stories of these girls and women is a motif—all contain reference to a “line” or “lines” of some kind as noted in the story’s subtitle. We find borderlines, blood lines, grid lines, baseline, the line’s busy, and so on. It is a interesting way of providing continuity to a varied collection of tales. In fact, in her introduction, Tímea Turi tells us that the first element of the Hungarian word for “barcode” translates as “line.” Thus, each piece has something to say about the lines that define, restrict, or even scar us.

One can also say that the collection of stories in Barcode cross the “line” marking the end of Communism in Eastern Europe and its replacement with democratically elected governments— a line that corresponds with, as it would for Tóth herself, the end of adolescence and the beginning of early adulthood. The harbinger of that transition in Hungary is observed in “Outline Map (Life Line)” as a young university student on a fateful visit to a summer cottage with her first boyfriend remarks:

It was 32 degrees; we slathered each other with suntan lotion as we watched the TV. The General Secretary of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party János Kádár has died. Actually, I felt rather sorry for him. Sorry that I would no longer be hearing his name in the news bulletins, sorry that the landscape of our childhood would soon disappear, that the crêperie shack on Kálvin Square had been demolished and that entire blocks of houses were disappearing, that the streets twisted and turned in odd directions, that in the sequence of events some kind of curious, unbridgeable gap was being created.

The stories set in childhood reflect Hungary of the 1970s and 80s—contaminated housing estates, a military style summer camp, an idealized fascination with “the West”—whereas the stories with adult protagonists deal with the demands of career, relationships, and motherhood, sometimes even venturing beyond Hungary, to Japan and Paris, for instance, where, if anything, the characters’ Hungarian identities are even more evident in contrast to their foreign surroundings.

The majority of the stories in Barcode are first person monologues with unnamed narrators, who have strong, distinctive voices. They are often seeking to understand and define themselves within their families, their romantic relationships (and infatuations) and within their communities. They may be speaking to immediate events or looking back at their younger, more naïve selves, sometimes with considerable insight. In one of my favourite stories, “The Pencil Case (Guidelines),” a girl recounts her primary school experiences at a time when “the colour both of our gowns and our copy books was indigo.” The narrative cleverly captures a shift in self awareness that occurs when she is wrongly accused of tripping a classmate, but allows herself to take the blame—in her retelling there is suddenly both an “I” and a “she” who becomes separated from her own name and identity and remains that way:

Later, too, the body belonging to the name continued to say nothing, responding with an obstinate silence and a blank, unflinching stare to the teacher’s interrogation, and as for the name, she began to hear it as casually and forgetfully as her cardigan and  the PE kit she invariably left behind somewhere or other. She became an actor in that weird film witnessed in the schoolyard, which the I had seen and in which she had been found guilty and which from this day on I, the name, had consistently to bear through all the indigo days that followed.

Her circumstances so clearly reflect the way many a shy child manages to navigate a system—grade school—in which they are out of place and unable to speak for themselves.

Although the stories are not organized in a strictly chronological fashion in this volume, they generally move from childhood through adolescence to adulthood, the latter stories tending to feature the more mature protagonists. Here strained romances, pregnancy, miscarriage, and self-image  take the place of childhood joys and fears. As in “What’s this Mark Here? (Bikini Line),” where a woman traces the history of her relationship to her body from her first bathing suit through to childbirth via caesarean section. The pictures she draws along the way are vivid:

My first swimsuit isn’t a swimsuit. It’s a pair of trunks. At that age there’s no big difference between boys and girls: it’s just chubby, flat-footed kids’ bodies running about on the sands. The sun shines. I’m crouched down by a wooden tub, blinking into the camera. It must have been lovely in the hot sand. I show the photo to my son. Mum, he says, that isn’t you, that’s a little girl. Indeed: am I really me? In the background a fleshy female leg in slippers consisting of two blue crossed strips of rubber: beach slippers. The legs belong to my grandmother, who would soon take a step or two into the water, pulling a rubber dinghy. We are sailing.

Fifteen stories, fifteen girls and women, each growing up and finding their way. Tóth’s poetic background (she was a well-established poet when this book first came out) serves her well as she crafts memorable portraits of female life in Hungary and beyond. More than a decade and a half after first publication, they speak to timeless aspects of female experience. And, no review would be complete without mentioning the striking presentation of this volume with barcode-like like lines across the top and bottom of each page and unique designs setting off each tale.

Barcode: Fifteen Stories by Krisztina Tóth is translated from the Hungarian by Peter Sherwood and published by Jantar Publishing.

Casting light on a fading world: For Now, It Is Night by Hari Krishna Kaul

It was so cold! I felt as if I were sleeping on ice. It was a large room and there were three of us in it. The windows were shut but they were without panes. Outside, it was raining heavily and the strong winds from the Pir Panjal came in gusts. The wind, this biting cold of Banihal, blew strongly through the room of the tourist hostel. Despite being indoors, it was as if we were sleeping outside.

Thus opens the title story of For Now, It Is Night, a collection of short stories drawn from across the career of Kashmiri writer Hari Krishna Kaul. In less than six pages, this tale of three travellers, strangers before they find themselves sharing a room on a stormy night after their bus driver decided it was too late and, perhaps, too dangerous to attempt to cross the Banipal Pass of the Pir Panjal range of the lower Himalya. One man is decidedly unhappy with the delay, the other almost mystically inured to the biting cold, while the restless protagonist finds himself questioning reality as the night drags on. It is a simple story that deftly conveys the cold, the discomfort, and the loneliness of three stranded souls unable to find even the slightest comfort in one another’s company. It is the perfect distillation of Kaul’s ability to capture the complicated dynamics that bind and divide individuals, on both an intimate and a wider community level.

Born in Kashmir in 1934, Kaul spent most of his life in his homeland where he taught Hindi literature until 1990, when he was forced to join the exodus of Hindu Kashmiris from the region. He settled in Delhi where he lived, in exile, until his death in 2009. His work captures the details of Hindu Kashmiri life in old-town Srinagar during the last decades of the twentieth century, as well as the shifting socio-political tensions of the time. Over his lifetime, he published short stories, a novel and many plays for radio and television. For Now, It Is Night draws from all of his story collections, the first two published in 1972 and 1985, respectively and the latter published in 1996 and 2001, following his relocation to Delhi. However, what makes this selection of his work especially valuable and unique, lies in the combined effort of a team of translators.

As his niece, Kalpana Raina, describes in her Introduction, she had long heard of her uncle’s importance in modern Kashmiri literature, but until she had her father read some his stories to her—she could speak the language but not read it—she did not appreciate his eye for detail or empathy for his characters, their settings and their predicaments:

This was the world he had grown up in and his ambivalent relationship with it is quite clear in the forewords he wrote to his four collections of short stories. The are no grand themes in Kaul’s work, but an exploration and ultimately an acceptance of human limitations. He used his personal experiences to explore universal themes of isolation, individual and collective alienation, and the shifting circumstances of a community that went on to experience a significant loss of homeland, culture, and ultimately language.

Raina hoped that fresh new translations of her uncle’s stories might bring renewed attention to his work, and to that end, she recruited three young scholars and writers who could read Kashmiri and the Nastaliq script to collaborate with her on this project. They encountered unexpected challenges, first tracking down original manuscripts which were often not in the best condition, and then later with the more recent political upheavals in Kashmir and the pandemic. Despite the roadblocks, the final product is the result of a close engagement between four translators, “all native Kashmiri speakers, but representing a diversity of gender, age, experiences, and religious identity,” each bringing an important perspective and background.

The stories gathered in For Now, It Is Night, vary from domestic dramas, to surreal fables, to explorations of the uneasy relationships between Hindus and Muslims and between those of differing social standing. The narrators and protagonists often reveal much through their bluster and denial than what they openly admit to. In the opening story, “Sunshine,” for instance, the only one with a strong female character at its centre, Poshkuj arrives in Delhi to stay with younger son and his wife, certain that she has finally entered warmth and civilization. She has nothing good to say about her other son and “that fishwife,” but her bitter asides also reveal that she is put out and disturbed by her young daughter-in-law’s open-mindedness and rejection of Kashmiri social niceties. She is unable to comprehend the size of the city, its strangely quiet neighbourhoods, or the shocking mention of “Pakistan.” In fact the only thing she fully embraces is the sunshine, the glorious sunshine:

One could die for this sunshine. This is truly the only worthwhile thing in Delhi. She raised her sari slightly and scratched her right leg. She looked at her chapped skin and cursed the cold of Kashmir that was so hard on one’s hands and feet. Reflecting on the weather, she remembered her grandson, Bittĕ. Poor boy! How miserable he is, with his chilblains. How many times I told that monster mother of his that her son’s feet needed attention. Make sure he wears socks and fur-lined shoes, I said. But would that woman listen to me? Of course, fur-lined shoes are expensive and Gasha barely manages to get by. He doesn’t even have an overcoat for himself and shivers in the cold. She sighed. It’s all a matter of one’s fate.

The eighteen stories that comprise this collection demonstrate Kaul’s ability to craft a moving tale with vivid characters, caught up in events or circumstances that continually surprise and engage his reader. Some fall on the side of the fantastic like “Tomorrow—A Never-Ending Story” about two school boys who shirk their commitment to learning their times tables with such determination that they end up trapped in time, endlessly repeating Class IV while the rest of their classmates and peers grow up and move on with their lives, or “The Tongue and the Egg,” a bizarre fable in which two officers are charged with facilitating the collection of six million eggs, searching and even torturing or killing those thought to be hiding eggs, all for a bizarre purpose. Others begin on an eccentric note before taking a sharp emotional turn, such as “The Mourners” wherein two whimsically named young men, Tarzan and Doctor are called to assist with the funeral rites of their friend Pedro whose mother has just died. The subtle dynamics that bind fathers and sons, husbands and wives, and grandmothers and grandsons are teased out in stories that, more often than not, speak to the loneliness and isolation within families, heightened when distance pulls generations apart.

Kalpana Raina tells us that the selection of the stories in this collection was made with input from a small group of Kaul’s contemporaries and some younger students. The stories were then recorded in an effort to engage members of her family and the extended diaspora who could not read the script. That, together with the involvement of four translators, two of whom have contributed additional Notes, gives this volume a range and depth that truly honours Kaul’s contribution to Kashmiri literature and makes it accessible to a new generation of English language readers.

For Now, It Is Night by Hari Krishna Kaul is translated from the Kashmiri by Kalpana Raina, Tanveer Ajsi, Gowhar Fazili, and Gowhar Yaqoob, and published by Archipelago Books.

An extraordinary interrogation: Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe

I want to tell how sorrow makes a shape that is familiar. And how that familiar thing can be difficult to both name and to narrate. (Note 83)

For the past week or so I have been sitting in the presence of this singular text. I have been ill, so it has had a little extra time to spin through my fevered brain. And yet, it is not easy to articulate my response.

Ordinary Notes is a text one must come to openhearted and openminded. Over the course of 248 numbered “Notes,” writer and professor Christina Sharpe examines, interrogates and honours the reality of ordinary Black existence. This collection of reflections and observations, some as brief as a single sentence, others extending for several pages, supplemented at times with photographs, documents, and artworks, may appear fragmented yet there is form and direction as Sharpe moves through a series of themes or inquiries, with careful focus and lyrical intensity. The result is a dynamic response to the many horrors and losses faced by Black communities, in the face of white supremacy, historically and recently, but, at the same time, it is a deeply personal work—a memoir, an acknowledgement of the writers and artists who have inspired her, and, above all, a love letter to her mother.

Although a wealth of thinkers, writers and historical figures are referenced in Ordinary Notes, Ida Wright Sharpe is the central inspirational figure in this project. In a number of the earliest notes, Sharpe reflects on the resolve of some of the earliest Black individuals to challenge the colour divide in middle class America: Elizabeth Eckford daring to attend an all-white high school in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957, or a Black family moving into an all-white Pennsylvania neighbourhood in the early 1960s. She recognizes an echo of her own experience years later as the only Black student at an all-white Catholic elementary school and then as one of a small number of Black students in a public junior high where it seemed she had made good friends.

Sharpe describes how her mother, recognizing that these friendships her daughter had made were destined to shift with the onset of adolescence, wanted to ensure that she had the necessary knowledge to make her own life choices moving forward—choices she might not have even known she had:

This telling set into motion a series of events that fundamentally changed me.

My mother wanted me to build a life that was nourishing and Black.

My mother wanted me to live in spaces where I would be reflected back to myself without particular distortions.

She spare me tremendous pain.

This Black note changed the course of my life. (from Note 10)

Later Sharpe will explore the lives of her mother and her grandmother, whom she did not know, and the nurturing atmosphere within which she was raised. In a world where Black people are still subjugated in so many areas of ordinary life and society, her mother was determined to ensure that she and her siblings were exposed to literature and arts in which they could see themselves as valued and strong.

As one makes one’s way through this volume, it is perhaps best to take time to stop and process what is being presented, take advantage of the generous footnotes as needed, pay attention to the images. Many of the impressions of anti-Black brutality may be historical, others very recent and widely covered. Slavery, lynching, police violence. Museum visits commemorating historical injustices are described. A multitude of Black voices are welcomed into a conversation with the past and present, the voices of Toni Morrison, Dionne Brand, Audre Lorde, bell hooks and many more. As the Notes accumulate, the observations, reflections, and memories naturally and gradually gather into an examination—a questioning—of the way art, beauty, and literature can form a positive understanding of the meaning of Black experience.

The primary audience Sharpe is addressing and speaking with in Ordinary Notes is a Black one. But a white reader open to listening will find much to both challenge and expand understanding and, as with any intentional engagement with literature, where one comes from and one’s own experiences will inform the reading. Sharpe makes some telling observations about the expectations the often-white reader or reviewer, by virtue of colonialism, brings to a book by a Black writer, fostering a view that “all of that book’s explorations, its meanings, and its ambitions lodge in a place called identity.” They may then praise the writer that “‘bravely’ eschews identity” or does not centre their work strictly in “Black life” as if this is to be commended:

These readers and reviewers are stuck on something they call identity and not something called life or genre or craft or intertextuality or invention or literary tradition.

These readers continually misread the note. They decant all complexity, all invention into that thing they name identity that they imagine is both not complex and not relevant to them.  (from Note 97)

This comment strikes me as applicable to the way much literature is presently reduced to identity, whatever that “identity” is perceived to be, when seen as something distinct from a reader or reviewer’s own experience, disregarding that we are all much more complicated—and ordinary—than any arbitrary designation of identity.

Some things I remember but they no longer live on the surface of my days. (Note 198)

Ordinary Notes has been my companion throughout this Black History Month. It has stimulated much reflection, especially on the legacy of anti-Black racism that is still with us and growing, along with other elements of racism and intolerance, as we don’t have to look too far to see. It challenges me to think more deeply about these issues and explore some of the authors and artists she highlights with whom I should become better acquainted.

Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe is published by Knopf Canada, Farrar, Straus & Giroux in the US, and Daunt Books in the UK.

As boundaries blur: A few words and a link to my response to Decima by Eben Venter

A few months ago, I was invited to write a response to a new novel by South African author Eben Venter for knaap.brief, a weekly queer newsletter that publishes work in Afrikaans and English. I have been sticking to my own private corner of the literary universe for the past few years, so this invitation was both unexpected and welcome. There was a time when I read a lot of South African literature—and I still have shelves full of books waiting—so I was familiar with the author and had heard some very good things about his latest work. This seemed a good opportunity to read the novel and write for an editor again. However, since the request was for a response rather than a formal review (though the approach was left to me), I allowed myself to bring the personal into my essay as this book, which is set primarily in the  Eastern Cape Province, inevitably brought back both good and painful memories of time spent in the same region with a very dear friend who has been gone now for more than seven years (remembered here).

The novel, Decima, revolves around the disturbing historical and contemporary conditions threatening rhinoceros in general, and one aging female black rhino in particular. It is also the story of the love between a son and his mother, and about loss and grief. Skillfully balancing memoir, fiction, history, and natural science, Venter creates a story that lingers long in the imagination—and one that refuses to prioritize the human experience of the world. The perspective of Decima, the rhino cow at the centre of this tale, is essential and effectively evoked.

The animal is, as Venter imagines her, intelligent, sensitive, and alert. Solitary but not isolated from either her own kin or the other creatures with whom she shares her environment, she moves her massive bulk through the veld, seeking food, water, and shade. Decima’s reality is gently anthropomorphized, or rather, translated for a human audience.

My full response to this singular novel can be found here. (Also reproduced below if you’re unable to read it on the site.)

Decima by Eben Venter is published by Penguin Random House South Africa. An Afrikaans edition, translated by the author, is also available and both can be obtained outside South Africa as e-books.

As Boundaries Blur  (published at Knaap.brief, 02/18/24)

Dear Wemar

Facing the empty page, I have been wondering for words for more than a week now.

I have been invited to respond to Decima, the latest novel by Eben Venter. Respond. I was told that it does not have to be in the form of a conventional review which, in a way, would be much easier. Reviews have an internal logic and form; reviews, at least in my practice, require a certain neutrality in language and tone. Ideally, a review is about the book, not the reviewer. I respond when I cannot help but stand in my own way and make “I” statements, and when it comes to this inventive and deeply affecting novel, I have a lot I want to try to say.

First off, I am not South African, but a number of years ago I did spend a few weeks in the country, primarily in the Eastern Cape, with one of the best friends I have ever been blessed to know—an incredibly gifted super-butch dyke who has been gone now for over seven years. It was Ulla who first introduced me to Eben Venter’s Trencherman. She would have just loved this book; she would have related to Decima. So this review is for Ulla. After all, it is a book about love, and a book about loss. I loved her like a sister, but I couldn’t save her life.

Decima is a slippery text. Memoir, fiction, metafiction, natural science, history and social commentary all fall into place in a fragmented yet fluid narrative. Fragmentary works are somewhat fashionable, but too often they are forced, as an author tries to shoehorn so many clever facts and ideas into some kind of cohesive whole. However, when they flow effortlessly, the writer in me gets excited—at once caught up in the story and marvelling at how the pieces fit together so naturally. Decima works because the author allows himself, or a faintly fictionalized version of himself, to hold the continuity of the narrative. He lives in Australia but is back in his native South Africa, staying with his aging mother at her home in a Port Elizabeth seniors complex, while he conducts research for the novel he intends to write about the fate of the rhinoceros. As he gathers information he travels to townships and nature reserves and national parks. His memories regularly take him back to his rural childhood, and briefly, in more recent years, to New York and Belgium. His historical inquiries take him to Nepal and to a shipwreck off the coast of Europe, and cast a harsh light on the colonial exploits of King Leopold II of Belgium and the big game expeditions of Theodore Roosevelt. Along the way, he steps aside as needed to invite fictional characters—researchers, natural medicine practitioners, kingpins and middlemen—to expose the network and the demand that fuels the trafficking of rhino horn.

That is just a very rough sketch of the kind of web Venter weaves, moving continuously from place to place, across time, from fiction to fact and back again. But central to it all is a rhinoceros cow, the eponymous Decima, orphaned as a young calf when her mother was killed, and now the aging matriarch of her own crash—her decedents—who live amid the rolling hills of the Eastern Cape’s Great Fish Nature Reserve. One of a dwindling number of critically endangered black rhinos, Diceros bicornis, she passes her time eating, sleeping, watching and waiting.

But we do not simply observe her, we inhabit her world. From the inside. And this is the true magic that sets this novel apart from any other eco-fiction I’ve read.

I will admit I was cautious when I learned that this was a narrative that slipped into the mind of a rhino. It’s always a dangerous game to attempt to adopt an animal-eye view (and Venter does focus on the rhino’s eye early on in his detailed imagining of the drowning of a frightened captive rhino torn from its Himalayan home, meant to be delivered as gift for Pope Leo X) but without Decima’s perspective we would really only have half of what is a very complex story. The animal is, as Venter imagines her, intelligent, sensitive, and alert. Solitary but not isolated from either her own kin or the other creatures with whom she shares her environment, she moves her massive bulk through the veld, seeking food, water, and shade. Decima’s reality is gently anthropomorphized, or rather, translated for a human audience. Her awareness of her surroundings, her ability to gather information from the scents she picks up in the breeze or left in the dung deposited by other members of her crash, and her attention to the shifting angle of the sun and the cycles of the moon reveal a rich inner existence. As the full moon nears, her anxiety grows. She knows that the greatest threat she and her kind face is from a kind of creature that is not native to her space and that the moon’s full force will leave no place to hide.

The complexity, the shades of grey, that emerge in this multifaceted tale lie, of course, entirely on the human side of the equation and the reach is wide, across continents and centuries. Venter wisely lets these factors arise without resorting to obvious moralizing. Some villains are clear, some well-meaning folk might risk being overzealous, and those tasked with the direct protection of threatened species know the obstacles they are up against. However, if it is somewhat daring to attempt to take a reader inside a wild animal’s mind, Venter also opens up the thoughts and motivations of two poachers, both from economically deprived backgrounds, who have their own reservations and fears about the dangerous task they agree to perform.

As the novel progresses, the boundaries between the author’s research, his memories, his relationship with his mother, the facts he has gathered and the fictional characters he has met or imagined into being, including Decima herself, blur. Tension builds as the events leading up to the inevitable encounter between poachers and rhino take centre stage. In the aftermath, the narrative falls back into the realm of what feels more solidly memoirish. That is, we return to the story of the narrator as author and son with a mother who is aging and alone.

On its own, Decima is an exceptionally impressive novel, one that is very difficult to let go of even weeks after one is finished. I hope it gets more attention outside South Africa—here in Canada it is only available as an e-book—but, at the same time, as a work that Venter composed in English (and self-translated into Afrikaans), it reads with a rich South African tone and flavour. Usually, a South African book written in or translated into English, then edited for publication in an international market can be linguistically neutered to the point where there’s not even a bakkie in sight. This is not the case here. And, on a more personal level, my reading experience, and my response the this book, has unleashed a flood of memories: the long bus trip from Cape Town to East London and back, an afternoon at Addo Elephant National Park where we were the object of fascination for a juvenile rooikat, and watching the sun burst into flame over the sour veld, night after night, with a friend who, in the end, could not outrun the black clouds that chased her. So, even if there is a qualitative difference between what I might call a response and a review, sometimes the boundaries between the two are not that clear after all.

Oh, and having had a glimpse of the world through Decima’s eyes, I’ll never think of the full moon the same way again.