Tag: books

Slippery features, mocking voices: The Faces by Tove Ditlevsen

She put on her bathrobe and sat down at the dressing table, making as little noise as possible. In the mirror her face seemed to her tired and used, like an old glove. Her mouth was set in brackets by two faint, sketchy lines that stopped a little before the slope of her chin, as if the unknown artist had been called away in the middle of his work. Her eyes had that same open, sincere expression as in children who are telling a lie. Three delicate wrinkles lay like a pearl necklace around her neck, and they would dig deeper day by day. Would this face last out her time, this face that bore traces of so many things the world must know nothing about? Did it turn toward her with hostility whenever she wasn’t looking? And what would be underneath, when it fell apart one fine day?

Lise Mundus has an acute awareness of faces, her own and those of others—what they hold, what they hide, what they give away. And it seems to becoming more of an obsession. Not only has the sudden fame that accompanied her publication of a popular adult novel after years of writing children’s books pushed her face out into public view, but of late she has begun to question the motives of those around her. She already knows her husband is wildly unfaithful, she fears that she is losing touch with her children, and she resents the presence in her household of Gitte, the young housekeeper who looks after everything. And everyone. Haunted by crippling writer’s block, increasingly feeling isolated and alone, she begins to overhear hushed conversations rising through the plumbing and from behind closed doors. Her husband Gert has just suffered the loss of his mistress to suicide, and now, Lise is certain, he and Gitte are conspiring to push her to that same end.

The Faces, first published in 1968 by celebrated Danish writer Tove Ditlevsen, is a sharp, tight portrait of a woman’s spiralling descent into an episode of paranoid psychosis , her hospitalization, and subsequent recovery. Ditlevsen’s personal life was marked by domestic upheaval, addiction, and multiple psychiatric admissions, and she is clearly drawing on lived experience here, but she is doing so with poetic clarity and remarkable insight to impart a sense of what it is like to be unable to distinguish reality from hallucination and yet feel like one has full control of one’s sense, no matter how strange the experiences.  However, this is neither memoir nor autofiction. Rather, it is, even through its protagonist’s darkest moments of anxiety and confusion, a story told with great warmth, compassion, and even humour.

At first, there is nothing funny about the fragile state Lise is in as we first meet her. She is haunted by memories, appearances, and even the very rooms she occupies. No matter how she tries to hide her concerns, she believes that others are out to exploit her weaknesses—even her best friend Nadia, a psychologist who drops by to visit and strongly suggests that she stay away from the sleeping pills Gitte provides and call her psychiatrist instead. Lise wants to trust her friend, but what she detects in the faces around her and hears whispered behind her back is getting the better of her. She ends up doing the opposite. Convinced that Gert really does want her out of the way, she downs the entire bottle of pills (and immediately calls her psychiatrist to tell him she doesn’t want to die). She wakes up days later, in the toxic trauma centre.

Once she is medically stabilized, Lise is taken to the psychiatric hospital. By this time she is in a state of full-blown psychosis. Voices speak to her from speakers embedded in her pillow and from behind grates in the room to which she has been confined, strapped to the bed, after she failed to settle on the open ward. This room, which is actually a bathroom, becomes her safe space. She can hide here, protected by the voices that alternately attack her and warn her against the nurses and psychiatrist who are all part of their scheme to destroy her. It’s easy for her to believe the danger, she can read in their false faces. Convinced she is being poisoned, she refuses to eat and resists medication.

As the anti-psychotics begin to take effect, Lise starts to accept and embrace her insanity, no longer terrified, but now increasingly alert and wise to the subterfuge that surrounds her. At least, that’s what she thinks. Convinced, for instance, that a nurse has painted her face to look like someone from her past, Lise reasons that she “did it to confuse her and break down her resistance, but [she] saw right through such childish tricks with her healthy, clear sense of judgement.” And certain illusions are especially resistant, no matter how often (and patiently) she is corrected. She continually sees the male nurse named Petersen as her husband, even when the solidity of own perception starts to slip:

‘That’s right,’ said Gert, satisfied. ‘You’re starting to behave quite sensibly.’ His face was suddenly blurred, the way it looks when you’ve forgotten to wind the film and you’ve taken two pictures on top of each other.

‘You have two faces,’ she said, astonished. ‘That’s not allowed. You can only wear one face at a time.’

If the voices and hallucinations that have fueled her paranoia prompted a most desperate, potentially life-threatening action, their gradual retreat into the hard, tactile environment of the hospital ward leaves her fearing that she will be abandoned. Understanding that the manifestations of psychosis is rooted in one’s own disordered thoughts is unsettling, and for a time Lise actively resists the idea that she is moving toward returning home.

As a reader who has experienced an episode of manic psychosis and hospitalization (albeit under very different circumstances), I am always impressed when an author can capture the salient aspects of  mental illness—the internal reorientation of reality, the distortion of time— so clearly without sacrificing the literary and poetic qualities that contribute to a good story. Drawing on lived experience is not, in itself sufficient, Ditlevsen achieves this balance through point of view and by keeping her narrative short and focused.

When The Faces opens, Lise is already beset by suspicions and hallucinations, so we come to know her, and those around her, entirely through her increasing warped perceptions. With a tight third person perspective—ideal for conveying madness—there is no ground zero. At first, it’s difficult to tell whether there is a justification for her fears; it does look like there may be some gaslighting going on. Even when she swallows the handful of pills it’s not clear if she has been pushed to the limit by outside forces. Yet, once she’s committed to the psychiatric hospital where she wages her daily struggle against the voices that taunt her and her belief that she is the victim of a grand conspiracy, the extent of her illness becomes apparent. We can “hear” the outside voices of the nurses, doctors and other patients, in concert with what she thinks she hears. Now we have to listen and hope that she will slowly emerge from her psychotic state. The actual state of affairs at home, the “real” nature of her reality so to speak, won’t be revealed until she is finally ready to be released.

The Faces by Tove Ditlevsen is translated from the Danish by Tiina Nunnally and published by Penguin Books. (Also published by Picador)

Of ghosts and angels: The Painted Room by Inger Christensen

Recently re-issued by New Directions, Denise Newman’s translation of Inger Christensen’s 1976 novella The Painted Room might at first appear to be somewhat more conventional than the Danish poet’s experimental prose works like Azorno or Natalja’s Stories. That would, of course, be a premature assessment. Subtitled A Tale of Mantua, this slender three-part volume is set in, and revolves around, the court of Ludovico Gonzaga III and the painting of the famous Bridal Chamber by Andrea Mantegna in the mid-1400s, but it is more than a simple piece of historical fiction. By turns witty, magical, and wise, The Painted Room offers a pointed commentary on art and immortality, power and passion.

As Italy gradually splintered following the fall of the Roman Empire, it evolved into a patchwork of independent territories over which powerful families battled for control until, by the fifteenth century it was common for each of these regions to be held under the autocratic control of single princes. Mantua in northern Italy, ruled by the Gonzaga’s from 1328 to 1707, was not only a tyrannical, war-focused principality, but, as its ruling family sought to elevate its social status through patronage of the arts, architecture, and music, it would become an important cultural centre in the early years of the Renaissance.  In 1459, acclaimed artist Andrea Mantegna (1431-1506), noted for his striking compositions and innovative studies of perspective,  agreed to enter into the service of Ludovico, the Marquis of Mantua, and the following year he was appointed court painter—a position he would hold for over forty years. His masterpiece would be completed there, the Camera degli Sposi or The Bridal Chamber in the ducal palace, a room decorated with realistic architectural details, frescoes featuring interrelated narratives  and a spectacular illusionary ceiling that appears to be a concave structure with an oculus open to the sky. The painting of this room and its images, offer the inspiration for Christensen’s novel, but the story she weaves extends far beyond these four walls.

The first part, “The Diaries of Marsilio Andraesi: a selection” proports to be outtakes from the personal journal of Ludovico’s devoted secretary, pictured to the far left of the Bridal Chamber’s “court scene” fresco which features members of the Gonzaga family and their attendants. Here Andraesi is leaning in to listen to the prince who has turned to speak to him. From the secretary’s personal account, which begins in March of 1454, we get an unvarnished, if rather biased and often catty, record of events leading up to Mantegna’s arrival at Mantua through to his death in 1506. Andraesi is not impressed with his master’s persistent efforts to woo the celebrated artist and the reason for his resistance is unlikely. It seems that the painter’s wife, Nicolosia Bellini (of the Venetian artistic dynasty), was once his secret love, now forever lost. So he focuses his attention on rumours he’s heard of Mantegna’s reputation as a troublemaker trained in “arrogance, brutality, and the hunt for novelty.” He feels the prince’s idolatry will only lead to shame. But, of course, the offer is accepted and the secretary’s would-be romantic rival arrives, at first on his own, but soon followed by his family:

Today I finally caught a glimpse of Nicolosia. I became deathly pale and could barely move. My brain turned completely white and my heart so drained of blood that it could hardly beat; I froze. An angel in the fire of earthly feelings.
(17th of August, 1460)

Bitterness and jealously continue to colour Andraesi’s reports, especially as progress on decorating the palace room is slow, and his secret confrontations with Nicolosia intensify. Then, when Mantegna’s wife suddenly dies (at least in this version of reality), the relationship between the two men gradually begins to shift toward what will eventually become one of friendship and respect. In the meantime, Mantegna’s young children are devastated by the loss of their mother but comforted by their father’s inclusion of her likeness in his art. After all, in art, the dead live on. When the frescoes are finally completed in 1474, guests are welcomed for a dedication event in what Ludovico calls “The Painted Room,” but which the children have christened the “Ghost Room.” In his reflections on the occasion, Andraesi calls attention to the uncomfortable dynamic that exists between art and immortality:

There is more life in the paintings than in all of these lively and rapturous spectators who simply put on airs because they are afraid of the pictures’ soul which is their own. The pictures are like all great ghosts in Art who calmly and tirelessly wait for their living models to die. All those who have had the chance on this occasion to look at themselves in the light of Art’s exegesis have consequently entered  into a relationship with Death; and they must each conduct  their negotiations with him day by day over the time and place and manner of their dying, and about their measure of anxiety.

In the second part, Christensen’s narrative adopts an even more fantastic examination of life at court and its connections to the broader world. However, immortality continues to be a central theme, not explicitly through art but through children, legitimate or otherwise. Attention turns to the dwarf depicted in the “court scene,” a member of the prince’s entourage, re-imagined as Ludovico’s daughter and given the name Nana (Italian for dwarf). When we meet her she is distraught about her unfortunate fate, imagining that her diminutive height will deny her an opportunity to love and marry. The gardener steps in and arranges for her to marry his beautiful son Piero once they are both old enough.

Nana’s story adds an added dimension to the events recounted in the first part. On the day of her wedding three unknown women appear; no one is certain who they are but coincidentally Mantenga has captured their likenesses among the figures who are seen leaning over the balustrade that surrounds the oculus painted on the ceiling of the so-called Ghost Room. To Nana, they are clearly angels. They tell her that Piero is actually the son of Pope Pius II, and leave her what she calls “The Angel’s Book,” a volume that is in fact the popular erotic novel written by the Pope before his call to the priesthood, when he was known y his birth name, Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini. The Tale of Two Lovers tells of the tragic affair of Euryalus, one of the men waiting on a nobleman and Lucretia, the wife of a wealthy man. Their love is expressed through a series of letters until they are finally able to meet in bed. Variations on the theme of this tale are echoed and played upon as The Painted Room unfolds, along with the revelation of other surprising entanglements.

The final, dreamlike part of The Painted Room takes the form of a “how I spent my summer holidays” school assignment written by Bernadino, the then ten year-old son of Mantega. He details his role in assisting his father in his work on his masterpiece, describing much of the process involved in laying the foundation, and mixing and applying the paints. But then he realizes that he is expected to record some kind of trip or adventure when in truth he has gone nowhere. So taking inspiration from his younger sister, he imagines himself entering the background of one of his father’s paintings and meeting an aged Greco-Roman hero who has forgotten who he is. Yet another glance at the question of immortality through the daydreams of a child facilitated by the magic of art.

Inger Christensen’s fiction—and her poetry for that matter—tends to work with layers, variations, and cross-referenced themes. Her foray into the world of fifteenth century Italian court life is filled with art, intrigue, infidelity, and murder, blending fact and fantasy to create an informative, entertaining, and intelligent tale. And, like any one of Mantegna’s famous paintings, repeated visits and closer inspection promises to offer ever more detail and connections.

The Painted Room by Inger Christensen is translated from the Danish by Denise Newman and published by New Directions.

The truths we know and those we don’t: No One Knows Their Blood Type by Maya Abu Al-Hayyat

I don’t know which night I was conceived, but I do know that when nine months had passed, my life started to get complicated. All that I will relate here is not confirmed truth—these are stories I pass on from motley sources. None of them are entirely correct or straightforward, they follow the meandering intentions and motives of the storytellers.

Jumana, the central figure of Palestinian poet Maya Abu Al-Hayyat’s debut novel No One Knows Their Blood Type is,  as she tells us in an account of her early years living with an unloving aunt in 1980s Amman, a collector of secrets. The more she discovers, be it the rumour that her mother did not in fact die in the war in Lebanon, or the unwanted advances of a male cousin, the less certainty there is in her life.  As the story unfolds, shifting speakers and perspective backward and forward across more than three decades, it becomes clear that she is not the only member of her family haunted by secrets, doubts, and insecurity.

This slender, fragmented, nonchronological novel opens in a hospital in Jerusalem in 2007 where Jumana is assisting with the cleansing of the body of Malika, the gregarious midwife who has just passed away. She only knew this elderly Greek woman for less than two weeks—the time that she has been coming to visit her own dying father—but already she has fallen in love with her nephew Suheil, so she is almost family, so to speak.  However, when her father dies shortly after, the shock of attending to his body causes her to collapse and end up in emergency—a detour that will suddenly call into question her own relationship to the family she grew up in. Her father’s death certificate and her lab results reveal his blood type is O positive whereas hers is AB positive. While Suheil calmly shrugs it off as an error, Jumana is not so sure.

From here the novel moves back to Jumana’s account of her childhood in Amman. She and her older sister Yara were born in Beruit, but, at the ages of nine months and three years respectively, they are shipped off to live with their father’s sister in Amman. Their aunt treats them very poorly and the fate of their mother remains a mystery, while their father who in Spain with the PLO, is little more than a voice on the phone and a very occasional visitor. Then, in the early nineties when he has been exiled to Tunisia, the girls are packaged up and sent to join the father they barely know.

From here the narrative shifts to Tunisia in 1993. First, from the perspective of Abu al-Saeed, we see a man struggling with sudden single parenthood, anxious to protect—and if necessary, control—the honour of his two teenaged daughters. He goes to head with the eldest who is as stubborn as he is and, as a result, often incurs his wrath, while Jumana remains an enigma. He can’t figure her out, so he resents her. Meanwhile at work and among his fellow exiles he is frustrated, resentful, at odds with the world, and in turn he carries this frustration back home. When Yara picks up the thread, still in Tunisia, she details the close bond she and her sister have as security against their father, but even she notes, often with jealousy, how different Jumana seems. And then, when the signing of the Oslo Accords cements her father’s intent to return to Palestine, she not only feels despair at the thought of leaving her first love, but she wonders what it means to go “home” to a place she has never been.

Yet another angle to the story of this splintered and displaced family is offered from Amhal, the girls’ mother, as she gives her account of her life in Beruit from 1979 to 1982. She speaks of her unwanted and unhappy marriage to Abu al-Saeed, his disappointment with her failure to produce sons, and her longing to be with Omar, the young Lebanese man she truly loves. When her daughters are sent off to Amman she makes some effort to follow, but borders are difficult to cross and her direct account comes to an end. Jumana will later be in contact with her mother, but answers to the question that haunts her as she marries and has her own child, can only be addressed through DNA testing, but even then the whole question of her identity, not to mention her nationality, will be at risk if her father, or the man she knew as her father, was not related at all.

In his Afterword, translator Hazem JamJoum explians that his immediate attraction to this novel lay not in what was, but what it was not. Rather than writing to make grand statements against colonialism and oppression, or illustrate victimhood, he says: “It just assumes the grotesque facets of the workings of power, and conducts its conversation with whoever recognizes themselves as already in the fight.” He goes on to consider the questions might be more appropriate to ask, including:

Why do we lionize the figure of the revolutionary militant when that militant is, however understandably, transformed into a monster when it comes to those they supposedly love and cherish? Why aren’t questions about motherhood and fatherhood, sisterhood and kinship, love and friendship at the core of conversations about liberty and freedom? If they were, how would that change our notion of emancipation . . . should it change our notion of resistance?

If we ask such questions, and we should, this is a novel that raises more concerns than it settles. Which is okay. It is a story that is inextricable from Palestinian history, occupation, war, and exile, but its focus is on one girl and woman in particular, and the complex and delicate balance of relationships within the extended family network that surrounds her. The fragmented nature of the narrative gives us often conflicting interpretations and perspectives, and as such does not inspire an immediate empathy with any one character, even the primary protagonist. Siblings clash as much as they conspire, mothers struggle to connect with their infants, fathers respond in ways that often reflect their own upbringing, and decisions are made that may or may not be justified. But, in the end, what No One Knows Their Blood Type demonstrates so clearly, is that so often truth is not only relative, but ultimately elusive and perhaps there are times when it is better to leave it that way.

No One Knows Their Blood Type by Maya  Abu Al-Hayyat is translated from the Arabic by Hazem Jamjoum and published Cleveland State  University Poetry Center.

To go with the flow, or not: We Live Here Now by C. D. Rose

In Berlin, a sound artist—or, rather, as she would have it, a silence artist—sits in an Ikea-furnished rental apartment in Berlin. She is waiting to interview for a residency she has never heard of and didn’t apply for, but when an invitation, an advance and address arrived, she decided to follow up on their offer. But what are they really offering? And who are “they”? There are more questions than answers, but even more curious to  Rachel, there was something missing in this space in which she has found herself. An echo.

The sound of her greetings had no echo, as though it had been sucked up into the airlessness of this place, into the rug and the curtains. It should have been bouncing off this floor, these bare walls and the plate glass windows. This place should be all echo but there was none, none at all.

Elsewhere, the MV Atlantic Echo is making its way from the UK to Sri Lanka bearing twelve thousand containers, existing at the intersection of eight different companies and carrying, for the first time since the pandemic, a paying passenger who generally sticks to themself. One night, as the ship is crossing the Mediterranean, the Deputy Positioning Officer, the second in command, experiences an unexplained event during his watch—strange clouds gather, his equipment briefly goes dead, and momentarily the constant  grinding, throbbing, humming and droning of the massive ship falls silent.  It marks the beginning of a series of strange phenomena that will strike the ship and its crew members.

Meanwhile, an artist is commissioned to paint a portrait of an industry leader—though the exact nature of the industry his family has made their name in is shrouded in a complex maze of techno-gibberish—but he is having trouble capturing the essence, in fact any essence of the man. In China, another man sits in a “mid-range hotel of a Tier 3 city” trying to work on his master project, well aware that his identity and his ideas have been stolen and have been replicated into multiple versions of himself, but he is pretty sure he is the original. And, endlessly riding trains on a vast, interconnected web of mostly subterranean rails, a dishevelled man sleeps, dreams, and watches passengers come and go, wondering if he himself actually exists at all.

These are just some of the characters and strange circumstances that you will encounter in C. D. Rose’s surreal take on twenty-first century reality (such as it is), We Live Here Now. This inventive novel opens with an article by a fictional art critic looking back on the work of an elusive conceptual artist named Sigismunda (or Sigi) Conrad, with particular focus on her 2015 installation, We Live Here Now, a radical exploration of space and temporality that sparked controversy when people, a cleaner and several visitors, begin to vanish. The chapters that follow are set post-pandemic, and feature characters somehow connected with her or what is known of her whereabouts since 2015, either directly or indirectly. They read like a series of loosely linked short stories, sometimes intersecting directly, or bouncing off similar themes and motifs. One can find oneself listening for echoes, and tracing the flow, so to speak.

Each chapter adapts its tone, language, and energy to its protagonist(s) and subject matter. Rose’s milieu is the art world, with forays into experimental music and film. He is not only interested in the artist and the precarious nature of their work, but in the network of shippers, dealers, fixers, and those who inhabit the broader realm of intellectual manipulators, systems thinkers, and the beautiful people who want to be wherever something is happening.  There is a sense that, at least until we near the end, each story (again, that is the best way to describe the chapters) is playing out more or less simultaneously, even if a character is recalling events from an indeterminate past. The pandemic is, at least officially, in the rearview mirror and many artists, or those in adjacent businesses, are finding their footing again following a period of disruption that has been productive for some, less so for others. The settings are at once immediate and futuristic. It’s a world, or worlds, of WhatsApp, chat bots, iPads, and AI. It’s also a world where words, especially within certain commercial and intellectual enterprises, say a lot but mean little. When Ryan, the artist commissioned to portray the wealthy business man asks him to explain what it is that he does, the response has a familiar unintelligibility:

‘I direct strategic development and practice management. I work towards high-quality design which brings added value,’ he said. ‘We harness passion, knowledge and expertise to evolve powerful and pragmatic solutions and I inform and direct the ambition and quality of our work.’ He went on, scarcely pausing. ‘I develop strategy, over-seeing legacy, ensuring quality and continuation, while always searching for new possibilities. We are building, developing and ensuring sustainable resilience.’

And yet again it’s a world where objects and recordings go missing, sounds are suddenly either completely absent, or constant and unidentifiable, where light takes on strange distorting qualities, and space defies expectations. Some chapters/stories are more firmly grounded in what we might agree is the “actual” world, while others expand into other dimensions, but most navigate the shifting liminal space between illusion and reality. In other words, they take place where we live now, or will soon.

As a collection of loosely linked short stories that sometimes directly reference one another in unexpected and delightful ways, this book is brilliant fun. Rose is playing with all kinds of ideas about art, commerce, reality, and the banality of modern society. But whether it works as a whole is less certain. The framing of the project, beginning and ending with articles about two major exhibits by the elusive artist who connects all of the intervening stories, though necessary to a point, risks undermining the overall impact which may sound strange to say. What sets itself up as a mystery, offering clues, coincidences, and unlikely connections, is at its best, more a novel ideas, a dynamic map to the myriad interrelationships that connect us in a multi-dimensional universe that exists in theory but eludes us in practice. Or is it? Rose invites us and his extensive cast of characters to traverse a Klein bottle or enter an Escher artwork, but he’s leaving us to find our own way out.

We Live Here Now by C. D. Rose is published by Melville House.

“I never forgot. Everything is there. All I have to do is close my eyes.”: The Emperor by Mackenzy Orcel

I asked for none of this. I was waiting for the bus. I was waiting forever. I think I’ve been waiting since I was born. I sat on the floor for hours, fighting the urge to sleep. Looking beyond the clouds of dust that covered the horizon. The days went by, one looking just like the other. The bus wouldn’t come.

In an apartment in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, a man is waiting. He knows that eventually the police will find him. He has made no effort to hide. In fact, the crime he has just committed leaves him with an eerie sense of satisfaction. He has no regrets and is ready to serve whatever sentence he receives. He has known far worse confinement in his life, he is certain. Even freedom, such it was, offered a different form of slavery and only one brief respite of joy. As he awaits the inevitable, he revisits the events that have led him to this point, beginning as far back as he can clearly remember. The Emperor by Haitian writer Mackenzy Orcel is his story—fractured, pain-filled, and proud.

Our unnamed narrator does not know exactly how he came to be abandoned as a child, left alone by the roadside, but he does know that at some point he was swept up and taken into a rural community, or lakou, where a false vodou prophet—the Emperor—holds sway over a flock of worshippers, his sheep, who like slaves, work his fields and tend to his every need and desire. He demands absolute devotion, and punishes anyone who fails to fall into line. The narrator grows up in this unforgiving environment, identified by a number rather than a name, but he is not alone. He is  guided by the wisdom of a blind old man known as the Very Old Sheep, dedicated to the true traditions of voodoo, and aware of the risk of pretenders, and by his own internal compass,  a motivating force he refers to  as the Voice Within. Together they keep him from losing himself amid the brain-washed, weakened souls who surround the supposed holy man or seek his intervention with the divine:

Only the Emperor is granted the power of the word. To mould them to the shape of heart, his anger or his madness. What words capable of cauterizing wounds are not also accused of being lost or eternal? Yours were difficult to grasp. They reminded us of fond memories of the gods. Their goal was to intercede in our favour. To save us. To destroy us. To bring truth, morality and the past to an end. To transform others into obedient machines. A widespread and lucrative venture. You made a fortune off the penniless and their spoilt crumbs, their ill-gotten gains. You recreated an ancient formula.

Despite the very specific cruelties he dispensed upon his young sheep, it is the Emperor who inadvertently paves the way to his release from the lakou by forcing him to play a drum for the ritual dances. In drumming he finds expression, communication, that reaches others without words. He is punished for his disobedience, but is unable to conform. This ultimately leads to his expulsion from the community and, this time, the bus does come and carries him away to the city. He arrives in Port-au-Prince with no name, no education, and only a little cash he’d spirited away. Here he faces a new kind of brutality, but his past has prepared him for “its tyranny, its inhumanity.” He survives. He finds a job delivering newspapers, one of a crew of downcast men, working for a dishonest boss, but at least he is no longer captive. He is free. Until he falls in love.

With clean, clipped prose, finely translated by Nathan H. Dize, The Emperor is a  contemporary fable with gritty, violent undertones. The narrator’s fragmented monologue, largely addressed directly to the Emperor, moves back and forth in time, from the room where is waiting for that knock, knock, knock on his door, into his past, from his early experiences in the countryside to his hardscrabble life in the city, and, finally, to his criminal act. But it is not a strictly chronological account, nor is it always clear or consistent. It is uncertain how old he is; he seems to be both prematurely aged and preternaturally wise. Details from his time under the Emperor’s control continue to emerge throughout, a function in part of him being his primary audience. Yet, some of what he claims seems strange—there is a sense that he himself does not have as firm a grip on things as he thinks when he claims: “I never forgot. Everything is there. All I have to do is close my eyes.” One senses that he has never truly been free, the anger always simmering at or just below the surface of his narrative betrays him. And now he is waiting to surrender his liberty to the police, calm and unrepentant—he even has the evidence to prove his guilt sitting neatly beside him—but, perhaps, in a strange way, he is finally exercising his freedom by giving it up.

The Emperor by Mackenzy Orcel is translated from the French by Nathan H. Dize and published by Seagull 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.)

“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.