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Ghostwalk, by Rebecca Stott

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I’ve been on a bit of a Cambridge streak in my reading lately, so here we are again. Stott’s debut novel opens like a mystery: Cambridge historian Elizabeth Vogelsang, whose potentially controversial book on Isaac Newton’s use of alchemy is nearly finished, is found drowned in a river at the end of her garden, clutching a prism. Lydia Brooke, one of her former students, is urged by Elizabeth’s son Cameron to finish the book.

One difficulty is that she has her own work to do. Another is that Cameron is her former lover whom she’s not sure she can resist. However, she does move into Elizabeth’s home, where she feels her mentor around her and where the light—and her computer—begin to play tricks on her.

Most of the book is told in the first person as though it were a letter from Lydia to Cameron, though some chapters of the manuscript are inserted. That manuscript, which is apparently only missing the last chapter, explores Newton’s rise to fame, a series of unsolved seventeenth-century murders, and if there might be a connection between them. Lydia begins to feel that intrigues and conspiracies from Newton’s past are creeping into the present.

Even as Lydia is trying to work out whether her mentor committed suicide or was murdered, Cameron is being menaced by an animal rights group over his work as a neuroscientist that involves experiments on animals. There’s also a fortune teller whom Elizabeth had apparently befriended—perhaps my favorite character—and an odd young woman named Will who seems to have some knowledge of the various forces threatening Cameron and Lydia.

The breadth of Stott’s research is stunning. We learn a lot about Newton’s life and work. She brings the seventeenth century to life, especially in the manuscript chapters. There’s a lot interesting information from that time period about glassmaking, the plague, optics, and of course alchemy.

This is such an intelligent book. And the dark yet lyrical atmosphere is perfect for an October read. However, I struggled to finish it. Much as I loved individual elements, the story as a whole felt murky. The parallel plots of the past and the present never quite came together, perhaps because the seventeenth-century conspiracies fascinated me while those in the present-day seemed irrelevant.

I’m also not a big fan of second-person point of view. Since she’s writing to him, Lydia refers to Cameron as “you,” which is fine occasionally. However, when she’s recounting dialogue, telling him what he’s said, she must use “you said” as the dialogue tag. This throws me out of the story because of course he knows what he’s said, but Stott is forced by her point of view choice into these clumsy conversations.

Still, there’s much to admire here. I learned a lot about Isaac Newton and alchemy. I reveled in gloomy back stairs in Cambridge colleges and a sun-filled studio set in an orchard. And I’m always curious about the ways the past bleeds into the present. Here’s an excerpt from the first chapter:

Lily went to prison because the seventeenth century was missing from her court records, from her story. Her time line needed to be longer, much longer, and there were many sidelines and tracks, twistings and turnings and yes, it was a labyrinth, a skein of silk that began to weave itself in 1665, 339 years ago.

I’ve been thinking about labyrinths this summer. Ariadne giving Theseus the thread so that he could find his way back out of the labyrinth, away from the black void of the flesh–eating Minotaur. Unravellings have to start somewhere. Now that I see, for the first time, how connected everything is, I know that the threads between Isaac Newton and us were all attached, like the ground elder under Kit’s soil.

Most of all, I admire Stott’s ambition. Ghostwalk is an enormously complicated story, thoroughly researched and well written. Most of all, it is intelligent and exercises our own little grey cells.

What do you look for in historical fiction? 

The Collected Regrets of Clover, by Mikki Brammer

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Clover, a quirky, awkward, and introverted 36-year-old, is fine living alone. She observes friendships and romances in films and the uncurtained window of the apartment across the street, but she has little need of them herself. It’s too hard to explain to people that what she knows best is death—death and the dying.

At five, Clover witnessed her kindergarten teacher’s death. Then, only a year later, her parents died in an accident while on vacation while traveling, leaving her to be brought up by her grandfather in New York City. She still lives in his West Village apartment, although he, too, died some years ago while she was traveling. Partly out of guilt at not being there for him, she became a death doula.

I’d never heard of a death doula, but apparently it’s a thing. Clover holds the hands of the dying, listens to their stories, helps them sort out their affairs. We all seek to understand the great mystery of death, don’t we? For Clover, the clues lie in their last words, which she writes in three journals that she has titled “Regrets,” “Advice,” and “Confessions.” She also likes to attend death cafés, where people gather to discuss death and share their experiences. Even there she’s only an observer. Her only real friend is Leo, her elderly black neighbor, who had been her grandfather’s best friend.

Things start to change when she meets Sebastian at a death café. He says he’s afraid of death and asks her to spend time with his dying grandmother. Ninety-one-year-old Claudia turns out to be a firecracker, a former journalist, whose one regret inspires Clover to go in search of the man from Claudia’s past. At the same time, Sebastian keeps turning up and—to her horror—eventually asks her out. When a friendly woman her age moves into the apartment downstairs, Clover tries to avoid having to meet her, but fails. Sylvie’s kindness and normalcy throw Clover’s isolation into relief and begin to wear down her resistance.

This intricate and surprising story manages to sidestep sentimentality and cliché. We are deep in Clover’s point of view as she reflects on her past decisions, her relationships, and the choices she has made. The author has blended these flashbacks into the story beautifully; also Clover’s introspective moments are handled well.  

I found this a lovely story, quiet and deep. Clover’s inexperience with social customs felt unforced and real, as did her compassion for and insight into those who are at the end of their lives. She shares a few tidbits from her three journals; I would love to read more.

Have you ever read a story about a death doula?

Brother of the More Famous Jack, by Barbara Trapido

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What a delight this novel is! I wrote a couple of weeks ago about “pleasure buttons:” the aspects of fiction that provide a pleasurable experience for readers. The missing one in that discussion turns out to be wit.

In Trapido’s debut novel, 18-year-old Katherine is eager to explore the world outside her mother’s petit-bourgeois bungalow, but is at first hesitant and only too aware of her own naïveté. It’s telling that in times of stress she turns to her favorite novel: Jane Austen’s Emma.

Lacking Emma’s self-assurance, Katherine assumes she’s blown her interview with the philosophy professor Jacob Goldman. She’s chosen philosophy as a shortcut to worldly wisdom, and does not realise that he’s thoroughly enchanted with her original bent of mind. He sees through her youthful lack of confidence to the potential rogue adventurer lurking underneath.

She then gets picked up by the much older John Millet, charmed by his aesthetic knowledge, not recognising that however much he flirts with her, what really turns him on are young men.  John carries her off for a weekend which turns out to be with the Goldman family: Jacob, a very pregnant Jane, and their many children.

The house, as it presents itself from the road, is like a house one might see on a jigsaw puzzle box, seasonally infested with tall hollyhocks. the kind one put together on a tea tray while recovering from the measles.

There’s the family you’re born with and the family you choose, and Katherine finds her real home with the eccentric and outrageous Goldman clan, quite aside from falling head over heels with oldest son Roger. They all adore her right back—even Roger, for a while anyway. In Jane, she finds her true parent.

[Jane] stands hugely in strong farmer’s wellingtons into which she has tucked some very old corduroy trousers. She has these tied together under a man’s shirt with pajama cords because the zip won’t come together over the bulge. Bits of hair are falling out of her dark brown plait.”

This hilarious, madcap novel is full of quips like the title. However, running alongside is a pungent critique of class in Britain, anti-Semitism, and women’s roles. First published in 1982, it might seem dated to modern readers, particularly the debate over women’s issues, such as motherhood vs work, and who does the dishes. However, recent events, such as the current push in the U.S. by a minority of radical evangelists to remove women from the workforce and keep them in the kitchen or making babies, make it newly relevant. It’s a good reminder that women’s gains toward equality have only come about recently and still encounter panic-stricken backlash.

Even the most revolting characters, such as macho Michele “a backward-looking romantic with right-wing views and left-wing friends” come across as hilarious when seen through Katherine’s amused and loving eyes, and then turn around and redeem themselves unexpectedly. It shouldn’t work; I should be horrified by some of the things these characters get up to.

Somehow, though, Katherine’s eagerness for adventure and the sheer number of fantastical goings-on lead to a suspension, not only of disbelief but of censure. I was swept up in a witty fairy tale and willing to go along with Katherine. Toward the end of the novel, a bit of sanity returns as Katherine, older and wiser, begins to see through the smokescreen of antic fun.

The story was not so much laugh-out-loud funny as snort-and-snicker witty, making it the sort of comedy I most relish. I thorough enjoyed this delightful novel and can’t wait to explore some of Trapido’s later works.

What novel has most amused you lately?

Walk the Blue Fields, by Claire Keegan

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In this second collection of short stories, the author of the remarkable novella Small Things Like These takes us to rural Ireland. The seven stories occur in the modern day but they seem timeless, as though they could be happening anytime in the last century. Partly this sense comes from the rural setting, where so little has changed, and partly because of the psychological realism of Keegan’s characters. We know these people.

Keegan is a brilliant writer, able to condense masses of meaning into a few pages, and those so clearly written that you almost miss the layers they encompass. I’ll just mention a couple of the stories, and tread lightly so as not to ruin them. As with the best stories, several of them turn on a secret revealed, and I would not spoil your discoveries.

As the title story begins, we are placed in a chapel decorated for a wedding, and a priest ready to officiate. The ceremony itself is dispensed with in a few sentences; the story concerns the immediate aftermath—the photos, the hotel reception, the speeches—as filtered through the priest’s eyes. We do not know his name since he is only referred to as “the priest” or called “Father.” It must be a poignant moment when you lose your identity and begin to be held at arm’s length.

A melancholy air comes forward as the priest locks up the church and heads to the reception. He’d rather walk down by the river, but the hotel is “where his duty lies.” As he walks down the avenue,

On either side, the trees are tall and here the wind is strangely human. A tender speech is combing through the willows. In a bare whisper, the elms lean. Something about the place conjures up the ancient past: the hound, the spear, the spinning wheel. There’s pleasure to be had in history. What’s recent is another matter and painful to recall.

Then we are caught up in the whirl of the reception. The scene comes to life through the banter, the details, the people described so acutely. I won’t go on; just know that you are in the hands of a master, and the story will take you to surprising places. The ending is particularly satisfying in the way tiny, almost unnoticed details from the beginning of the story come into play.

The combination of realism and lingering remnants of legends and superstitions are even more central in the last story, “The Night of the Quicken Trees.” That is ancient name for the rowan tree or mountain ash, well known for its magical properties.

Margaret Flusk—”a bold spear of a woman . . .  not yet forty”—moves into an isolated house on the coast in the autumn. The house had belonged to a priest, now dead, and is joined to another house of the same size. It’s inhabited by a forty-nine-year-old bachelor named Stark, who has an odd relationship with his goat Josephine. A blend of comedy, folklore, and the way isolation and loneliness can set a person askew, the story is surprising and inevitable at the same time.

I love the morning when Stack first comes to her door. “Margaret wasn’t dressed. She was scratching herself and thinking. She liked to roam around in her nightdress having a think, drinking tea in the mornings.”  Such a great description of someone used to living alone.  

I saw an interview with Keegan in which she said that rather than planning out her stories ahead of time, she lets her main character loose and follows their footsteps. Perhaps that is why we get the sense of discovering the story—and the story behind the story—along with her.

Although these quiet stories speak of lost opportunities, escape, and desire, they are told with “a measured, almost documentary reserve,” as one reviewer put it, which give the reader a little psychological distance, thus enabling us to appreciate the tiny moments that carry considerable meaning, as well as the larger threads of timeless situations and how people survive them.

What short story collection have you come across that entranced you?

Best Books I Read in 2024

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As a writer, I learn something from every book I read. In no particular order, these are ten of the best books I read in 2024. Please check the links to the blog archive for a fuller discussion of those I’ve reviewed.

Note: I did not include poetry here, though I read the work of some amazing poets, such as Richard Wilbur, Sam Schmidt, Linda Pastan, Ellen Bryant Voight, and Mahmoud Darwish. If you’re interested in reading a wider range of poets, consider joining in on the monthly Poetry Discussion Group I host. Free, no experience necessary, and copies of the poems are provided. Details on my website.

Fiction

  1. Our Missing Hearts, by Celeste Ng

Twelve-year-old Noah Gardner receives a letter from his mother, who disappeared several years earlier. It has been opened by the authorities of course, and is covered with drawings of cats. Noah and his father, formerly a linguistics professor but now demoted to a janitor, live in a U.S. that shows what our current country could easily become. Noah decides to find out once and for all what happened to his mother, a famous Chinese-American artist. A powerful story that puts our current social and political tensions into a (so far) fictional authoritarian world.

  1. The Cartographers, by Peng Shepherd

Nell Young loves maps and once dreamed of working with her brilliant father in the Map Room of the New York Public Library. Her even more brilliant cartographer mother died when Nell was a toddler. When Nell gets an emergency call from the New York Public Library, she embarks on a quest to identify the monster behind a string of thefts and murder. The delightfully complicated plot uses maps in surprising and satisfying ways.

  1. The American Queen, by Vanessa Miller

This fascinating novel is based on the true story of twenty-four-year-old Louella Bobo who in 1865 leads a group of her fellow former slaves to build a community in the Carolinas. The part I enjoyed most was the building of the Happy Land: how Louella managed to negotiate what they needed, the ways they found to make the money they needed, and the success of their communal sharing of all resources.

  1. Small Mercies, by Dennis Lehane

Mary Pat Fennessy just wants to find her daughter. It’s 1974, and life is hard in the grinding poverty of South Boston’s housing projects. She’s buried both her first husband and her son, who fought in Vietnam but came home to Southie to overdose on heroin. Her beloved second husband left her, and now her remaining child, Jules, has not come home from a night out with friends. In this complex story, Lehane shows how difficult it is to go against your tribe. It is a cracking good read, and accurate in its depiction of the time and place, at least according to my memories.

  1. The Old Capital, by Yasunari Kawabata

Chieko lives with her parents in the same building that houses their shop in Kyoto. This gentle story of a few months in her life begins with three images that embody themes central to Japanese literary tradition while later, more modern themes emerge. The microcosm of Chieko and her family holds a much larger story about how we handle the past—what we keep and what we discard—not only traditions but also our memories and our own identities.  This beautifully written story is one that will haunt me.

Nonfiction

  1. Vesper Flights, by Helen MacDonald

The author of the exquisite and deeply moving memoir H Is for Hawk returns with this collection of essays. She compares them to the objects you might find in an 18th-century cabinet of curiosities. As MacDonald opens the doors on these wonders of the natural world, she encourages us to see nature as something other than a reflection of ourselves. I read and reread these essays, loving the way she communicates the “qualitative texture of the world.”

  1. Burning Questions, by Margaret Atwood

Subtitled Essays and Occasional Pieces, 2004 to 2021, this is Atwood’s third collection of essays, speeches, book introductions, and reviews. What astonished me was how readable this heterogeneous collection is. Of course, we have Atwood’s voice throughout: intelligent, calm, learned, self-deprecating, and witty. For a more global understanding of the issues facing us, their interconnectedness, and how we can move forward, this book cannot be beat.

  1. Normal Women, by Phillipa Gregory

This astonishing book should be required reading everywhere in the Western world. This history of women in England for the last 900 years is fascinating and infuriating. Women have suffered ever since William the Conqueror brought his patriarchal ideas about the superiority of men over women to England in 1066, obliterating the more equitable society he found there. In this book, every assertion is backed up by example after example drawn from primary sources, starting with the Norman laws that dictated the so-called natural inferiority of women, morally, mentally, and physically. As the book progresses through the centuries, we get stories of many extraordinary women and their struggles.

  1. The Equivalents, by Maggie Doherty

Subtitled A Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960s, Doherty’s fascinating new book tells of the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study, created in 1960 to provide a stipend, office space, and a like-minded community to help women advance their careers as scholars and artists while also caring for a family. Doherty concentrates on a few of the first fellows: poets Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin, writer Tillie Olsen, sculptor Marianna Pineda and painter Barbara Swan. The book provides fascinating insight into the creative life and what can inspire or hinder it. It’s also a wonderful portrait of that era and of these remarkable women.

  1. Proust’s Duchess, by Caroline Weber

Even those who don’t care who inspired Proust’s Duchess of Guermantes may enjoy this biography of three fascinating women in fin-de-siécle Paris. At a time and in a society where women had no power, these three embarked upon “a conscious strategy of self-promotion.” Like so many today, they became famous for being famous. However, Weber goes beyond that easy judgment and delves into their lives, showing us that in striving to be celebrities, they wanted to be noticed. They wanted to assert some agency over their lives.

 

What are the best books you read in 2024?

Reprise: The Dark Is Rising, by Susan Cooper

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During the solstice season, I’m rereading this favorite series.  Here’s my earlier post about it:

This time of year, when the sun begins to return even though winter is just beginning (in the northern hemisphere), has been celebrated with rituals throughout the centuries. Prehistoric monuments such as Stonehenge, the building of which is believed to have begun around 3100 BCE, identify the precise moment of the winter and summer solstices. They probably had other uses as well; certainly Stonehenge was also a burial site and may be been used for religious ceremonies, a healing site, and/or as an astronomical observatory.

My favorite books about the solstice are The Dark Is Rising sequence, five fantasy novels by Susan Cooper for young adults. The author draws on Arthurian legends, Celtic and Norse mythology, and English folklore to tell the story of the struggle between good and evil.

In keeping with the season, these are identified as the Light and the Dark, which raised no cultural sensitivity concerns when the books were published in the 1960s and 1970s. Whatever we might think today of the persistent identification of dark colors with evil, these are still the best terms to describe the turmoil at the time of the winter solstice, when the sun tries to return and the darkness resists.

In these stories Will Stanton discovers that he is one of an ancient mystical people called “Old Ones” who are gifted with magical powers. He is the seventh son of a seventh son, and his eleventh birthday is the moment when he comes into his powers, including the ability to move through time. He is tasked to find the four Things of Power which the Old Ones need in order to vanquish the Dark.

Cooper’s five books are truly wonderful, especially for someone like me who grew up with these myths and legends. I can still picture that corner of my neighborhood library, just to one side of the front door, that held the books that captured my imagination as a child and put me on the path to become a writer.

The return of the sun inspires us with hope. Whether you are celebrating the winter solstice, Christmas, Kwanzaa, Diwali, Hanukkah, St. Lucia’s Day, the Lunar New Year, Las Posados, or another festival, I wish you joy, health, love and peace, now and in the coming year.

What are your favorite books of the season, however you celebrate it?

The Equivalents, by Maggie Doherty

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Subtitled A Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960s, Doherty’s fascinating new book tells of a “messy experiment” at Radcliffe College. President Mary Ingraham Bunting became concerned with what happened to the graduates of this all-women college. Since at that time women were expected to marry and spend their time caring for their husbands and family, these educated women were expected to give up their academic or creative pursuits, or reduce them to hobbies, in order to become what Virginia Woolf called “the angel in the house.”

Remembering her own career as a microbiologist–and now college president–while raising a family, Bunting created the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study in 1960. Fellowships provided a stipend, office space, and a like-minded community to help women advance their careers as scholars and artists while also caring for a family. For a two-year period, the Institute would provide a fellow the prerequisites for creative work, as described by Woolf in her famous essay “A Room of One’s Own.”

Doherty concentrates on a few of the first fellows: poets Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin, writer Tillie Olsen, sculptor Marianna Pineda and painter Barbara Swan. They called themselves The Equivalents per the Institute’s requirement “that applicants have either a doctorate or ‘the equivalent’ in creative achievement.” Her extensive research underlies this engaging story of five very different women and their creative journeys. And the book is so much more: a cultural history of the time, an in-depth look at creativity—what enhances it and what destroys it—and an examination of privilege.

I confess that it is the latter that most interests me because, after all, even in the 1950s and 1960s, while White women in droves were immersing themselves in being housewives, Black and working class women were already working while trying to raise a family. I appreciate that in covering the nascent second wave of feminism, Doherty includes the Black women’s movement. While acknowledging it isn’t “her” experience, she does examine the very real problems Black women had with what became the  mostly middle- and upper-class White women’s movement.

Tillie Olsen’s story provides a needed corrective to Sexton’s upper-class privilege and that of the others’ somewhat lesser privilege. Olsen was “a first-generation, working-class American, an itinerant, and an agitator” who said outright that “the true struggle was the class struggle.” After early publication and literary acclaim, she had been side-tracked by the overwhelming labor of house, family, and dead-end job. Eventually the author of the best-seller Silences, she was alert to all the things that keep us from creating.

The way Doherty sensitively examines these women’s different struggles and achievements lifts this narrative above the ghoulish interest in Sexton’s suicide attempts and the tendency to concentrate on those artists who have been anointed as important—almost exclusively White males at the time, or the handful of women championed by them—to look at a broad range of circumstances and personalities.

She acknowledges the privilege but goes deeper. As Olsen said, “There’s nothing wrong with privilege except that not everybody has it.” This is as true today as it was in the 1960s. Fellowships, grants, prizes are wonderful but not everyone has the resources—time and money—to pursue and take advantage of them. As a single parent working two and sometimes three jobs to support my family, my own writing career had to be mostly put on hold for years.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in the creative life and what can inspire or hinder it. It’s also a wonderful portrait of that era and of these remarkable women.

Do you have a room of your own?

Erasure, by Percival Everett

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Several friends have recommended the film American Fiction, and of course I wanted to read the novel first. Thelonious Ellison, nicknamed Monk in reference to the great jazz musician and composer, teaches at a California college and writes dense, experimental novels that attract almost no readers and the criticism that they do not reflect the African American experience. My immediate thought was: okay, we’re in fantasyland. In real life, such a writer would not be able to have a second novel printed, much less—I think it’s four—and retain a devoted literary agent.

As his latest novel racks up rejections from publishers, Monk is incensed that debut novel We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, written by a middle-class black woman who once visited “some relatives in Harlem for a couple of days,” is a huge bestseller and will be a movie. It embodies all the worst racial stereotypes, but is being hailed as a genuine and brilliant representation of the African American experience, a criticism frequently aimed at Monk’s work. Apparently it’s a takeoff on the real 1996 novel Push by a person using the pseudonym Sapphire.

Monk is infuriated not only by the praise and commercial success of this exploitative novel but also by the publishing industry and book-buying public’s obliteration of the experience of the many African Americans like himself. So he writes his own parody of these stereotypes and sends it to his agent using the obvious pseudonym of Stag R. Lee. He assumes everyone will recognise it for the satire that it is, and is shocked when it sells for a six-figure advance and a seven-figure movie deal.

Meanwhile, he is wrestling with family issues. His mother and sister in Washington, D.C. need his help, while his brother is suffering the personal and professional fallout of having come out as gay. Presenting a paper at a conference in D.C. gives him the opportunity to see his mother and sister, but also entails encounters with bitter literary rivals of his own.

A big chunk of the book is a complete version of his surprisingly successful novel, which I found painful to read. Well, I didn’t read more than the beginning and the end. I began to think that Everett’s real purpose with this novel was to laugh at all the snobby readers who agreed with Monk’s anger at the praise of anything reinforcing these heinous racial stereotypes, and then devoured and praised an example of the same.

Oh, and look! Commercial success for Everett’s book and now a movie deal. Very meta.

Everett also inserts the complete paper Monk presents at the conference, a send-up of semiotics. A little of each was enough. Satire that goes on too long becomes boring. On the other hand, I thought the frame story of the family was well done, especially the mother’s descent into Alzheimer’s. I began to think that this would have been better as a good novella or even a short story.

A little more thought led me to the realisation that—trying not to give away too much here—Monk in the frame story is actually doing the same things his protagonist in the parody does and experiencing the same frustrations; only the details are different. More meta; interesting, but not enough to sell me on including all the dreck.

Another thing I liked about the frame story was the representation of a writer’s mind. Every now and then Monk would get a story idea and create a short scene for it, or a thought would prompt him to create a short dialogue between two historical figures, philosophers, artists, etc. Plopped right into the story, these were brilliant. Been there, for sure.

There were a few more fantasyland moments, undercutting the supposed realism of the frame story. Overall, though, I found a lot of the book hilarious, boring at times, infuriating at others. A good workout!

Have you seen American Fiction or read the novel on which it’s based? What did you think of them?

Go, Went, Gone, by Jenny Erpenbeck

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Like Antonia in Alvarez’s Afterlife, Richard, a widower, has just retired from his career as a college professor in what was formerly East Berlin.

Perhaps many more years still lie before him, or perhaps only a few. In any case, from now on Richard will no longer have to get up early to appear at the Institute. As of today, he has time—plain and simple . . . his head still works just the same as before. What’s he going to do with the thoughts still thinking away inside his head?

Such transitional moments in our lives roll grief and possibility, loneliness and freedom into a turbulent mess. The first thing in Richard’s mind, however, is the calm lake on whose shore he lives, and the man who recently drowned there, his body never found. All summer everyone has avoided the lake: swimmers, fishermen, boaters. Nobody talks about it; they just stay away. It stays calm.

On a chance trip to Alexanderplatz, he doesn’t notice the African refugees staging a hunger strike there until he sees them on the news later. He didn’t notice them because he was thinking of the Polish town Rzeszów, which had a system of tunnels, essentially a second city underground, originally built in the Middle Ages where Jews took refuge when the Nazis invaded.

Moved by the refugees’ refusal to speak or give their names, the academic in Richard stirs to life: Here is a project! He decides to learn who these men are by interviewing them. Through Richard we hear their voices, their stories, and learn about what it is to be a refugee.

I loved Erpenbeck’s Visitation and looked forward to this novel. The beginning is brilliant. Her imagery and profound insight moved me deeply and had me marking page after page. However, the story slows as Richard starts tangling with bureaucracy and coaxing the refugees to talk to him. It’s a difficult tightrope for a writer: to reflect the tedium of the situation without boring the reader.

The story picks up again as we get to know the refugees individually, and as Germany’s bureaucracy begins to close in on them, narrowing their chances of being granted residence and thereby a work permit. As a lawyer whom Richard consults says, “The more highly developed a society is, the more its written laws come to replace common sense.”

Most members of my book club agreed that, while this was a challenging read, partly because of the pacing in the middle and partly because of the subject matter, it was also an important book to read. We all learned a lot, even those who already worked in refugee services. Those who read through to the end found it a worthy cap to the story, and were moved by the generous responses of the friends with whom Richard shared his stories of the refugees.

We talked about the symbolism of the drowned man. Like the Polish city, there are hidden things here as well as things we turn our eyes away from. When do you become visible? What do you have to do?

When you do become visible, as when Richard listens to the men and shares their stories with his friends, things do change—minds change.

I also found much here about communication woven into the story. Some have to do with the refugees’ struggle to learn German and Richard’s to learn some of their languages. Some have to do with how words are like borders: mutable signs, or written in sand, the way the boy from Niger learned his own language, lost when the wind blows.

The Italian laws have different borders in mind than the German laws do. What interests him is that as long as a border of the sort he’s been familiar with for most of his life runs along a particular stretch of land and is permeable in either direction after border control procedures, the intentions of the two  countries can be perceived by the use of barbed wire, the configuration of fortified barriers, and things of that sort. But the moment these borders are defined only by laws, ambiguity takes over, with each country responding , as it were, to questions its neighbor hasn’t asked . . .  Indeed, the law has made a shift from physical reality to the realm of language.

The border between life and death is here too: the chances that determine which side we will land on, the ghosts that cross over. Richard is sometimes nostalgic for the lost world of his childhood in East Berlin, before the wall came down. As one member of my book club noted, perhaps that early grounding in communal living makes Richard more open to caring about the fate of these others. Indeed, the novel calls out the weakness of capitalism: its callous disregard of the common good.

As Mary Oliver asked: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?” Here is one man’s answer.

What novel have you read that illuminates one of the great political issues of our time?

Dark Bird, by Sam Schmidt

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dark-bird

Sometimes you start a book, and you cannot stop until you have turned the last page.

That is what happened to me reading Schmidt’s new collection of poetry. In fact, it begs to be read as a whole. It begins so innocently, with a tree—“An ordinary tree”—a tree in winter, in a graveyard across from the author’s home. A tree with a crow in it.

Of course I thought of Haworth. The first time I visited the home of the Brontë sisters, a bleak day in the dregs of winter, I was shocked to find that their front yard was actually a cemetery. The Brontë parsonage lay right up against the graveyard and, beyond it, the grey stone church, and everywhere the crows, hoarsely screaming and rising in the air at my intrusion.

These poems stand up to the comparison, even to the echoes of the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, Eleanor Farjeon, and others. The reader is pulled in, made complicit in this openness to the world as we move through the year from winter to winter. One poem begins:

A tree revolves among faces.
When I open my eyes, it’s back as it
was. It was never a god in disguise.
It won’t reveal
a passage through. An exit
out. It’s not a young
woman—or an old one—
transformed.

Everything I look for in poetry is here: language that sings, lines concise and perfect as a snowflake, themes that speak to the universal heart of human existence, and surprising images that range from fairytales to news stories. Some of the images recur, spiraling into new meaning each time they appear.

I love that these poems circle around a graveyard. Anywhere we walk is a graveyard, isn’t it? Layers of rock and older civilisations, beings that came before us. They represent the geology of time, personal time and the earth’s time.

In my review of Schmidt’s previous collection, Suburban Myths, I praised the depth of emotion and experience in his work. Here he achieves that depth partly by the brilliance of his writing and partly by the force of his themes. Even more striking is how vulnerable the author allows himself to be and, therefore, how intensely powerful each poem is. Wrestling with demons from childhood, coming to terms with a father’s criticism and your own child’s independence, navigating a decades-old marriage—the more personal the poems are, the more they open us to ourselves.

He balances between silence and speech.
Between hope that he
might talk his way
into friendship with the sky. And
despair that he’s asking too much.

These songs invite us to walk through this world bookended by graveyard and family home. We enter, not a wood, but a single tree. We bang on the doors that are shut and unearth what is buried within us.

What poetry collection have you read that you kept reading and rereading?
 
 

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a copy of this book free from the author. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.