I’m going to share a poem by Frederick Seidel today, but the text of the poem will appear after a few introductory paragraphs, so that by the time you get there you are prepared to be offended.

I’ve been meaning to write about this collection, which I love, for a while, but I thought the time was right because the Paris Review has temporarily unlocked Seidel’s Art of Poetry interview, which quotes a description of his work as “excellent table manners combined with a savage display of appetite.” I will share a link after the poem.

The nature of the offense, with this poet, is different than it is with a lot of other writers. Among other things, Seidel writes about amoral behavior enabled by money and privilege. I remember reading high praise of this collection when it came out in 2009; more recently, I heard him described as a poet whose work is not aging well. In the interview, Seidel says, “I will say that learning how to write has to do in part with learning how to accede to yourself and your object, instead of writing what you think you ought to write, or what at that point in time the world thinks poetry is about. Or what you think you ought to be about. The moment comes, if it ever comes, when you have enough strength to give way, to give in to being who you are, to give in to your themes. Giving in to your obsessions, giving in to the things that you will be writing about over and over. And sometimes the things you’ll be writing about over and over are things that some people don’t find very nice.”

Taking offense is often part of the pleasure of reading something. But your reception depends on whether or not your readers are willing to be excited by your transgressions.

Kill Poem

Huntsman indeed is gone from Savile Row,

And Mr. Hall, the head cutter.

The red hunt coat Hall cut for me was utter

Red melton cloth thick as a carpet, cut just so.

One time I wore it riding my red Ducati racer—what a show!—

Matched exotics like a pair of lovely red egrets.

London once seemed the epitome of no regrets

And the old excellence one used to know

Of the chased-down fox bleeding its stink across the snow.

*

We follow blindly, clad in coats of pink,

A beast whose nature is to run and stink.

I am civilized in my pink but

Civilized is about having stuff.

The red coats are called “pinks.” Too much is almost enough.

No one knows why they are. I parade in the air

With my stuff and watch the disappearing scut

Of a deer. I am civilized but

Civilized life is actually about too much.

*

I parade in the air

And wait for the New Year

That then will, then will disappear.

I am trying not to care.

I am not able not to.

A short erect tail

Winks across the winter field.

All will be revealed.

I am in a winter field.

*

They really are everywhere.

They crawl around in one’s intimate hair.

They spread disease and despair.

They rape and pillage

In the middle of Sag Harbor Village.

They ferry Lyme disease.

The hunters’ guns bring them to their knees.

In Paris I used to call the Sri Lankan servants “Shrees.”

I am not able not to.

*

Winter, spring, Baghdad, fall,

Venery is written all

Over me like a rash,

Hair and the gash,

But also the Lehrer NewsHour and a wood fire and Bach.

A short erect tail

Winks across the killing field.

All will be revealed

I am in a killing field.

*

I remember the chasse à courre in the forest in the Cher.

I remember the English thoroughbreds ridden by the frogs.

I remember the weeping stag cornered by the dogs.

The stag at bay in the pond literally shed a tear.

A hunt servant in a tricorn hat waded out to cut its throat.

Nelson Aldrich on his horse vomited watching this.

The huntsman’s heraldic horn sounded the hallali.

The tune that cuts off the head. L’hallali!

Back to the chàteau to drink the blood. L’hallali!

*

I am in Paris being introduced at Billy’s.

1960, Avenue Paul-Valéry.

One of her beautiful imported English Lillys or Millys

Is walking around on her knees.

It is rather like that line of Paul Valéry’s.

Now get down on all fours, please.

We are ministers of state and then there is me chez Billy.

Deer garter-belt across our field of vision

And stand there waiting for our decision.

*

Our only decision was how to cook the venison.

I am civilized but

I see the silence

And write the words for the thought-balloon.

When the woods are the color of a macaroon,

Deer, death is near.

I write about its looks in my books.

I write disappearing scut.

I write rut.

*

The title is Kill Poetry.

And in the book poetry kills.

In the poem the stag at bay weeps, literally.

Kill poetry is the hallali on Avenue Paul-Valéry.

Get rid of poetry. Kill poetry.

Label on a vial of pills. Warning: Kill kill kill kills.

Its title is Kill Poem,

From the Book of Kills.

The antlered heads are mounted weeping all around the walls.

*

John F. Kennedy is mounted weeping on the wall.

His weeping brother Robert weeps nearby.

Martin Luther King, at bay in Memphis, exhausted, starts to cry.

His antlered head is mounted weeping on the wall.

Too much is almost enough, for crying out loud!

Bobby Kennedy announces to a nighttime crowd

That King has died, and then quotes Aeschylus, and then is killed.

Kill kill kill kills, appalls,

The American trophies covered in tears that deck the American halls.

*

In the Art of Poetry interview, which you can find here if you’re interested in learning more about this poet, he says, “I suppose I think that art itself is the supreme theme of art. And I don’t know whether that’s a cause for despair. Probably it is. Art can’t do anything.”

Does he really think that, or is it the sort of thing someone says because it sounds good in the moment you ask? I like him for saying it.

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Perumal Murugan writes in Tamil about farmers and other people living lives that are very place-based and communal, more remote from my own than a lot of lives I read about.

Although his books are translated into English, I feel that his writing in Tamil in some way reflects or determines the audience he’s imagining for his books. Like he’s not necessarily thinking about me as he writes, and whether he needs to make sure I understand things. Reading his books can feel like looking through a keyhole and trying to make sense of what I see.

One Part Woman is about a married couple who can’t conceive. Whether or not they have a child is not their business–it is the business of their extended families and all of their neighbors.

Here is an example:

She remembered a trip in Kali’s bullock cart some time ago. It was so crowded that the passengers were practically elbowing each other for space. Accompanying them from Vandukkaadu were Kannaaya and her two children. Her son, who was three or four years old, was dark and snot constantly dribbled from his nose. The girl was an infant; she hadn’t even started to crawl. Kanaaya was struggling to take care of the children while also holding on to all the things she was carrying for the temple offering. Her husband was walking behind the vehicle, since there was absolutely no space for him in it. Ponna took the infant from Kannaaya and kept it on her lap, making sure the sun didn’t bother the baby. The child was in utter delight at the vehicle’s bouncing up and down on the road, and it laughed whenever Ponna made a ‘kooooo’ sound twirling her tongue around.

Kannaya’s wedding had happened only a year after Ponna’s, but she already had two children one after the other. Whenever Ponna saw someone like that, she shrank from within. Despite her best efforts to cheer up, she would be sad the whole day. There were no words to describe the pride and joy glowing on the faces of women who managed to have a child within a year of their marriage. They also overdid it in front of Ponna. The baby, who was laughing until then, suddenly grunted. Ponna saw that the baby had defecated, wetting the little white cloth tied around her waist.

The stench was overpowering. What had Kannaaya eaten before feeding the child? Ponna’s sari too was wet with the child’s faeces. ‘Why does it stink so badly? Did you eat anything that you were not supposed to during the festival weeks?’ Ponna asked as she handed over the baby to Kannaaya. She could not bear the stench and the dampness on her sari. Everyone in the cart felt assailed by it and were trying to manage it by covering and twitching their noses. Kali stopped the cart at a well by the side of the road. Ponna ran to the well, took some water from the large water holder next to it and cleaned herself. Kannaaya cleaned the child’s legs and feet and also rinsed the cloth it was wearing.

Why carry the baby when she was travelling so far? Was the god going to be mad if she decided to come the next year instead? All right, if she still chose to go, shouldn’t she know what to feed the child before travel? Ponna was really annoyed. It felt like the stench from her sari had not fully gone.

‘This is making me retch. Kannaaya, don’t you think you should feed the infant something she can digest?’ she said.

And Kannaaya retorted, ‘Shit will stink. Is it only my baby’s shit that stinks? Does yours smell wonderful? You’d know if you’d had and raised a child of your own. You keep saying it stinks, as if I don’t know it!’

The worst thing was not Kannaaya’s remark that Ponna didn’t know what it took to raise a child. It was what Kannaaya muttered under her breath after that, which everyone heard anyway: ‘This childless woman smells a child’s ass and squirms at the sight of a child’s shit. How does she expect to be blessed with a child?’

Ponna broke into sobs. Kali did not know what to do. He just made a general remark: ‘Can’t you keep quiet? These women! They can never keep their tongues under control.’ But the argument had rippled out among the other passengers by then, and they took sides.

‘Once you have a child, you will have things like shit to deal with. You can’t be squeamish about that.’

‘You promptly lifted the child and gave it to its mother. Whom can she hand it over to in turn? Nobody. She has to do it herself, doesn’t she?’

It turned out that Ponna was more upset with the words of those who claimed to speak ins support of her than those who took Kannaaya’s side.

‘Who knows what curse it is that has kept her childless and suffering? How can you speak to her like that?’

‘Had she handled a child before, she would have done better. She didn’t know. That doesn’t mean you call her barren.’

‘Don’t cry, Ponna. This time next year Perumalsami would have given you a child.’

When I think about this book, I remember this scene, because the way Murugan has written it, the thing that Ponna desires is the pride that a woman feels when she has a child within a year of marriage. The children themselves, she does not desire. If she were living in a different time and place, she might consider different options. Did Ponna actually want to have children? Did she want to be married to Kali? But in this setting, these questions cannot arise.

I read this book because of the controversy it caused in India, which made it into the New Yorker and the New York Times. Here is the brief summary from the New Yorker:

Five years after his novel “Maadhorubaagan” (later published in English as “One Part Woman”) first appeared, in 2010, Murugan was threatened by conservatives from his own caste in the small town in South India where he lived. The novel is a portrait of a rural childless couple, Kali and Ponna, who are loving to each other but under tremendous social pressure to conceive a child. When the annual chariot festival draws near—a celebration of the half-male, half-female god Maadhorubaagan—Ponna is obliged to participate. This is especially true on the festival’s eighteenth night, when all men are considered gods and when childless women are permitted to have sex with young strangers. For Ponna, the night marks perhaps her last chance to become pregnant.

This depiction of what Murugan claimed was a traditional ritual outraged a class of his readers. In 2015, he was forced to sign an unconditional apology and to withdraw unsold copies of his book.

The part of this book that takes place at the festival includes such a tender depiction of Ponna. She wasn’t a character I always liked. I didn’t like the way she reacted when the baby pooped on her lap. But when she gets to the festival, which is an exciting special event that finds her out after dark, away from home, eating carnival food, the sense of possibility that suffuses everything is so great, and her response to it–joy and hope and specialness–makes you feel how forcefully her desires have always been subordinated to those of others. Murugan writes with tenderness about this character without insisting on her likeability, with powerful conviction that it matters what she wants. His interest in those things is his critique of a marriage and a community that lack interest in them.

I want to share one more passage from the New Yorker article I quoted above, because I agree with it:

Murugan is nothing if not a chronicler of the ordinary. Schoolchildren in India—and here I’m speaking from what I remember of my own experience—are taught that Mahatma Gandhi believed that the soul of India lived in its villages. While that is arguable, it cannot be doubted that most of India’s population is rural. But you wouldn’t know this from reading Indian fiction written in English. Indian writers who work in English are mostly from the middle or upper classes, educated in English-medium schools, and, if not residing in one of India’s busy metropolises, then living in the West. Their characters tend to be well-heeled urban citizens of a mobile republic. In contrast, Murugan lives in a small, agricultural town in southern India, and he writes in Tamil. His characters are overwhelmingly villagers or people in remote, small towns.

Tamil, by the way, is not the language of a small community. According to Wikipedia, about 79 million people speak it as their first language. Murugan’s books are probably the only ones I’ve ever read that were written in that language. What a world we live in!

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The poem I’m sharing below is from Diane Seuss’s collection Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl, but the picture is of frank: sonnets because I like the cover better, and that is also a great collection. You should read them both.

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American Run-On Sentences

HOG MARKET

bring your full-grown hogs to the white cinderblock free mermaid tails out front

OVERSIZE LOAD

you’d think they wouldn’t crowd the center line hauling carnival shit fools

JESUS IS REAL CAMPGROUND

get stocked fish pond free baptisms check out the view from calvary hill

CORN MAZE

we grew it screwy like to see people pay to get lost real crows too

DEER PROCESSING

the point of this business is to use every part testicles

The tags usually go inside the back cover, where author photos often are. I was well into this project when I noticed that one of the author photos was of a Black man.

I was startled not necessarily because I’m not used to seeing photos of Black authors, but because I hadn’t noticed how few of them I was seeing on the library shelves that morning until I saw one. So I started taking pictures of all of the author photos I saw that looked like they pictured Black authors. I count 9, out of 276 books. Here is a video of what 276 adult fiction books look like on the shelf.

By comparison, there was such an array of photos of white women authors that I found two different people who I felt like could be aspirational models for my own career - not in terms of their writing, but simply in terms of self-presentation.

Not all books have author photos, of course, including Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes, by Henry Van Dyke, a Black author from the midcentury who I had never heard of, even though he grew up in the same area I did. The book jacket describes it as “a lost midcentury classic–the misadventures of a queer Black teen sharing a house with two adoptive mothers, a lascivious cook, and a reticent ghost.”

His nephew, Erik Wood, wrote in a profile of Van Dyke and his work for LitHub: “Ladies found its readers, but it’s fair to say Henry was never a hit with the general reading public. Really, his public did not yet exist.”

The book is campy, Wood says, and readers were not ready for camp from Black authors, who were supposed to write about suffering, especially if their characters were queer.

So, since that book lacks an author photo, here is an image from Wikipedia of the author looking fabulous.

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I have heard from other parents that their children like to have all kinds of arcane things read aloud to them. Some children want cookbooks for their bedtime reading. Mine flips through this book, chooses a rover or a lander he likes the looks of, and asks me to read about it. Because we skipped the introduction and are reading things out of order, the individual descriptions arrive out of context. He will ask me to read, for example, about the Bendix MOCOM (1966), which is described like this:

The basic Apollo Command Module was examined by Bendix to determine those subsystems and components required in a mobility system to create the MOCOM concept. The propulsion system, the stabilization and control system, and the re-entry systems were not required in the mobile unit. Another variation considered was the Command Module shelter which would have been a modified Apollo Command module, similar to that used in MOCOM but placed as a static shelter atop a LM Truck descent stage.

Often when I’m reading out loud, I process none of it, and turn into a mindless voice that says things I can’t actually hear or understand. That happens with even very approachable texts, much less with something like this. Is my son following it? He sits in a posture of complete attention and, if I say it’s time to put the book away and get ready for school or go to bed or whatever, he begs me to read more.

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Although I’m really not interested in the material, I kind of love this book. I love that this information exists, and is available outside of NASA’s archives, and that someone (Apogee Books in Ontario) has gone to the trouble of arranging “some of the more serious designs developed by the major contractors up until the end of the Apollo moon landings.”

It also gave me Halloween costume ideas.

When I moved to Ireland, I had to learn a lot of new phrases. An easy one to talk about is “just after,” as in “I’m just after coming from my parents’ house.” It’s another way of saying that you’ve just done something. “I’m just after taking my exam” means “I’ve just taken my exam.” I think this is an Irish-language way of saying things that’s been brought into English.

English as spoken in Ireland (as opposed to Irish, which is a Gaelic language) is also called Hiberno-English, after Hibernia, the Latin name for Ireland. I grew accustomed to lots of locally specific words and sayings, such as using “yer man” or “yer one” to refer to some guy or some woman, or beginning sentences with “sure”, as in “Sure didn’t I see you at the park yesterday?”

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And there are certain characteristic pronunciations, like always adding a “u” sound between the letters “l” and “m,” so that the word “film” (which people always say, rather than “movie”, and which is always seen at the cinema, never the theater) becomes “fillum,” and the writer Colm Tóibín’s name is pronounced “Collum.”

I like to read contemporary books written by Irish writers who have very voice-y styles. Colin Barrett’s book Wild Houses, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2024, is one of these. Because of the characters’ word choices on the page, I can clearly hear them speaking, with all those specific pronunciations, in my mind. Here’s some dialogue from very early in the book. (I’ve taken out a little bit of the non-dialogue in between some of these lines to keep the emphasis on the spoken words.)

‘Your foot must be wringing,’ Dev said.

‘What?’ the kid said.

‘I said your foot must be wringing.’

The kid looked at his foot. He looked at Dev.

‘Such a size of a cunt,’ he said.

‘Dev’s a godly-sized unit all right.’

‘The lamhs on him. Like excavator buckets.’

‘You know this fella?” Gabe asked the kid.

The kid shrugged.

‘Never seen him about in Ballina?’

‘I’d nearly recall a cunt that huge if I had. Is he seven foot tall?’

‘Oh, he’s not far off it.’

The people speaking here live in a small town in the west of Ireland, and I think you’re hearing that here. They are also, like many of Barrett’s characters, small-time crooks. Incompetent heists are a recurring motif in his fiction, carried out by people whose horizons are very limited.

I read this book back-to-back with Glorious Exploits, another novel by an Irish writer, Ferdia Lennon. This book is set in ancient Syracuse, where the protagonist works in a quarry. Instead of making them sound antiquated, Lennon attempted to make his characters and setting understandable by emphasizing their working class-ness, which he did by giving them modern-day Dublin accents.

The writers are, I think, people who can turn this kind of speech on and off. Barrett and Lennon can paint with these colors, but they have other colors in the palette. Their characters, on the other hand, only have one register. If they had to speak in a more standard English, they would be silenced. In these books, a strong Irish vernacular is associated with being trapped in an underclass.

This is not a criticism. I will read the shit out of any book that’s written like this. They make me physically homesick for a country where, until recently, I thought I was going to grow old. I move my lips when I read.

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When writers are trying to find agents and sell their books to publishers, they are encouraged to come up with “comp titles” for their books. You are supposed to ask yourself, what is another book that is similar to my book? If, for example, you are writing an erotic, hockey-themed romance, you would compare your book to Heated Rivalry. Your comp title should have come out in the past two or three years and it should have sold well. Publishing is a business, and if you are approaching agents and publishers, you want them to be able to immediately grasp the concept of your book and to believe it’s likely to make money.

Timber & Lua, a collection of short stories recently published by Red Hen Press, was written in Vietlish. That means that each short story in the book was written in a mixture of Vietnamese and English, with a glossary to help you make sense of it. And, unlike my copy of “50 Spanish Short Stories” for language learners, this one was about lesbian sex robots. Here is an example:

Even if the lesbian sex robots (and other queer, surreal, futuristic subject matter) sound like they might be titillating, the literary style and experimental form of this book make it much less accessible for a wide audience. And so, if you must have comp titles and the only good comp title is one that came out recently and sold well, it invalidates a book like this one.

And that is why we have nonprofit, independent presses. I wrote about this last week. Red Hen was also an early publisher of Percival Everett. They face a budget crisis, induced in part by the Trump administration cuts to NEA grants, and they’ve set up a GoFundMe to try and stay in business.

Vi Khi Nào & Lily Hoàng wrote Timber & Lua collaboratively. They both have a history of collaborative work. Hoàng released a collection of short stories left unfinished by other writers, which she completed herself (and has spoken in interviews about other collaborative projects that may not have been published). Nào has collaborated on several books of poetry and prose before this one.

I would have thought this was relatively rare, but actually both authors are members of She Who Has No Master(s), a collective of womxn and nonbinary writers of the Vietnamese diaspora “who engage in collaborative, polyvocal, and hybrid-poetic works to enact a politics of connection across diasporic boundaries.” When I counted the collective’s “fluid and evolving members” as it appears on their website at the time of writing, I count 19 current members and eight past participants. Once again I’m struck by just how many people are out there making art, even within what seems like a very specific niche. And small presses like this one give us a chance to read it.

If you want to know more, I reviewed the book for Heavy Feather, here.

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I started this newsletter feeling irritated by the New York Times list of the best books (so far) of the 21st century. Most of the books were by American writers. (And according to Ainehi Edoro-Glines at lithub.com, only 13 were translated and only two were by African writers.) They tended to be Big Five books—published by the largest publishing houses, which are in the late stage of a corporate conglomeration process that transformed a formerly competitive industry that once had far more players.

If you are interested in reading outside a very normative list like the one published by the Times, a lot of your choices may be books that are published by nonprofit presses. Nonprofits are mission-driven, which in the case of publishing often means that a press has a specific artistic vision or is determined to put out a certain kind of book that doesn’t already exist in the world. For example, Deep Vellum Press publishes translations. Its CEO and publisher, Will Evans, believes that there is a “desperate need for more translations of world literature into English.” A nonprofit model allows a publisher to make decisions based on this belief that something is needed, rather than on profitability.

Readers argue passionately about the relationship between popularity and quality. Does mass appeal mean that something is not challenging enough? Is it snobbish to dismiss popular books, because a million readers can’t be wrong? I think an example like Deep Vellum sidesteps this argument. We can acknowledge that, while some translated books of literary fiction might break through to a large audience, it would be an exhausting challenge for a publisher who prioritized such books to try and keep the lights on by producing hit after hit. Popularity can be a good thing without having to be the only thing. It’s OK if something of value reaches only a small audience, a specialist audience, or an underserved group. And, to stay with the example of translations, once someone has done the work of making something available to an English-language audience, that text has entered our culture and can live beyond the limited horizon of revenue and expenses related to its first publication.

Of all the $5 billion in philanthropic dollars that went to the arts in the U.S. in 2023, only 1.9 percent of it was spent on literature. I wrote before about how the Rockefeller Foundation, credited with creating the MFA model of creative writing through many relatively small grants in the middle of the last century, no longer seems to make any literary grants at all. And while wealthy patrons may have their names on the wall at the opera or the symphony, patronizing a small press does not offer the same pathway to prestige. And many small presses that used to get federal funding from the National Endowment for the Arts received versions of this letter last year.

Here is an article explaining the NEA cuts, and a shared document that tracks arts organization whose NEA grants were terminated.

There are several prestigious independent presses in the Twin Cities, and this is a source of pride and identity for the area that makes funders more likely to invest. Both Graywolf Press and Coffee House Press moved to Minnesota from other states in the 1980s and incorporated as nonprofits because of the funding available. (In this article from way back in 2004, nonprofit presses name-checked the McKnight Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, the Bush Foundation, the Minnesota State Arts Board, and Target.) And the ongoing vibrancy of the area’s nonprofit presses and the ecosystem around them keeps support alive from foundations, corporations, and individuals.

And now something new is happening. The new Literary Arts Fund has started making grants. From their website:

The Literary Arts Fund is an unprecedented effort to dramatically increase support for and the visibility of the nonprofit literary arts field for the next five years, concluding in 2031, toward ensuring a healthy and more robust U.S. literary culture in support of creative writers.

The fund, initiated in 2023 by the Mellon Foundation as a collaborative effort with the Ford Foundation, Hawthornden Foundation, Lannan Foundation, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Poetry Foundation, and an anonymous foundation in service of the literary arts field’s needs and promise, will provide at least $50 million in support of the field and continue fundraising.

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This post has grown. I started thinking about it because I was looking at Graywolf’s website and was amazed by how many of the books I’ve read in the last few years, including some that really influenced me or made my life better, were published by them. You might find the same to be true for you. Or maybe you read James last year, after it won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer. James was published by one of the Big Five, but Percival Everett has been a prolific writer of strange, cult favorites for decades, and Graywolf has been his home. (They published Erasure, which became the 2023 Jeffrey Wright vehicle American Fiction.) While supporting his writing and making his work available to readers, they were also building the case that that work, as particular as it is, might connect with a more mainstream audience. Which set him up to receive a much bigger advance for James than he could ever have gotten from a small press.

I wrote before about the Graywolf title If An Egyptian Cannot Speak English. And I will get effusive sometime in the future about the poet Diane Seuss. Thank you for reading.

And thank you to Meagan Lobnitz, who wrote a research paper in 2015 as a student at Portland State University about nonprofit publishing, which is available as an open access document through PDXScholar and which helped me out a lot with this. I linked to it a couple of times above.

Martin Wong painted this portrait of his parents as the owners of a laundromat, looking out through its door. Wong’s parents looked like this, and the laundromat was real, but they didn’t own it. Wong made several paintings of Chinese laundries (all wonderful, see here), and he just imagined his parents inside this one.

His parents are united, without a gap between their bodies, looking out through the glass with open smiles for their son as he paints them. But they are separated from him by a closed door, standing proprietorially in a business that isn’t theirs, rendered in the electric darks of a Chinatown where it is always nighttime but no one is ever asleep. Wong’s Chinatown paintings are all dreamlike, their people wearing clothes from the 1940s, luminous dragons filling their skies. But this dream of a laundromat, so much more quotidian, feels more like an actual dream, with all the lonesomeness a dream can contain.

Martin Wong is not making new art. He died in 1999, so it’s possible now to see his output in its entirety, which to some extent is what this show is trying to do. The show is divided across two floors of the gallery, and although it’s called Chinatown USA, the upper floor where you enter shows the New York paintings Wong was better known for. Many of these are detailed paintings of the exteriors of tenement buildings on the Lower East Side, with a muted color palette and no trees in sight.

(I don’t have any pictures from that part of the show, but I do have some pictures of Wong’s paintings of just bricks, in a hallway outside the exhibition rooms. “No artist lavished more attention on bricks,” said the New York Times, and it’s true.)

I am writing this short post about the show today because there is not much time left to see Martin Wong: Chinatown USA in Chicago. The solo retrospective at the Lincoln Park gallery Wrightwood 659 will close on July 18. Here are a few more quotations I found about him that I thought were right:

Many aspects of Wong’s art practice over the years were centered around public space. He was a self-taught painter who originally studied as a ceramicist, and he made guerilla installations of his appealing early sculptures around San Francisco. He also participated in a theater collective there that performed in public parks. And later in life he collected graffiti and briefly ran a graffiti museum. Works and ephemera from these different stages of his life also appear in the show.

And speaking of urban spaces, if you go to the show you will also see the gallery itself, which from the outside is an apartment building in a residential neighborhood, but which has a soaring, concrete-floored interior designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Tadao Ando. A condo owner next door is suing owner Fred Eychaner over his plans to expand the gallery.

Wong didn’t show the Chinatown USA paintings until late in his life because he “didn’t want to be pigeonholed.” I’m bothered by the way the show’s catalogue states this but doesn’t elaborate. Because if a man with a Chinese last name (who described himself and painted himself as culturally part-Latino because of his Mexican stepfather) painted scenes with Chinese imagery, people would think of him foremost as Chinese? And they are not thinking of him that way if he doesn’t paint Chinese imagery? And what effect does it have either way? I’m not dismissing that, I just would have liked the text that accompanied the show to get into it a little bit more.

The Chinatown paintings are very beautiful and exciting in a double-edged way. They celebrate the showiest aspects of Chinese visual culture. There are a lot of Peking Opera masks. And I feel attracted to their outright beauty and Wong’s mythologizing instinct, and nervous about how I’m attracted to it. We know to be suspicious of things that look good, of our own attraction to things that look good. And when they look good and are also exotic-yet-familiar—for example, Chinese dragons, which I can recognize while knowing little about them—I feel doubly on my guard against just feeling what I want to feel, which is delight. Is that what Wong was feeling, when he was both compelled to make this work and to keep it secret?

This painting of the Nam Kue Chinese School in San Francisco also moved me. I don’t know whether there are a lot of white stucco buildings like this in China, but there certainly are a lot of them in California. Buildings that combine local architecture on the bottom with Chinese “flying eaves” on top are not a uniquely American phenomenon. But looking at these pictures gives me a familiar feeling of love for America, of yearning for my own country. Wong’s Chinatown is imaginary and so is mine.

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Today I’m just cross-posting my review of The Voice of Blood, a book of vampire stories, which you can read in The Common.

https://thecommononline.org/the-vampire-before-nafta-a-review-of-the-voice-of-blood/

The book first came out, in Spanish, in 1990. Which is starting to feel like a long time ago.

I hope you are all having a good summer and reading lots of vampire stuff.

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It didn’t feel like an oversight that I hadn’t read Beckett until I moved to Ireland.

I’m going to make several assertions about Irish writing right now, which I feel I have earned the right to make because of my long time living there. But I never managed to become an Irish writer, so remember that I have no authority and that assertions make asses of you and me.

Beckett is one of the literary icons of a small country that builds some of its identity, or at least some of the identity of its tourist industry, on its writers. Like many of its other writers, Beckett created his great works in exile, but Dublin is nonetheless a UNESCO City of Literature, and was recreated on the page by James Joyce, who supposedly got in touch from the foreign cities where he was writing Ulysses, asking friends and relatives to confirm shop names he was using in his book and count the number of steps at 7 Eccles Street.

Beckett is impeccably cool, his writing uncompromisingly bleak. When I read him I think he’s more gimlet-eyed about the world than I’m willing to be. His characters aren’t facing the bleakness of realistic situations. They’re facing the spiritual bleakness of a world that contains no meaning, no understanding, and no comfort. Is Beckett’s work the kind that people say is easier to admire than to love?

Much of Dublin’s building stock is old Georgian row houses, and, in a city with a housing crisis, the newspapers provoke a scandal every time they report on how many of them are vacant, and there are all these strategies to force landlords to rent them out or sell them. Once, when I lived there, I went to see a production of three of Beckett’s short plays, performed in three of these Georgian houses on Parnell Square, connected to each other, uninhabited and condemned. Volunteer docents guided us up and down hazardous staircases by the light of flashlights. Each play was staged in a different room in one of these houses, and after you’d watched one you had to make this intrepid journey through the conjoined buildings to get to the next one.

The plays were brutal. There’s one called Not I, a dramatic monologue in which an actress is strapped to a board with a hole in it for her mouth to stick through, and you listen and watch her spotlit mouth in the darkness, making forceful, fragmentary, stream-of-consciousness declarations.

It’s probably better to watch a video of it than to read the script. https://www.theguardian.com/stage/video/2014/feb/03/samuel-beckett-not-i-lisa-dwan

And here’s a great description by an actor of what it’s like to actually perform. https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2013/may/08/beckett-not-i-lisa-dwan

Am I a sucker for theater “experiences”? The plays themselves are strange enough; do I need to also be led up a fallen staircase in the dark? I like the feeling of being in on something, and the production company has gotten me to buy in to that. But it’s not harmful. One of the reasons we turn to art is for the chance to feel in on something. And Beckett, being difficult, provides that.

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My family has been listening to the Ramona Quimby books on audio during long drives. Stockard Channing is the narrator, and she hits the child voices a little hard. In the earliest books, when Ramona is really young, she sounds deranged. But then she is kind of deranged, ruining Beezus’s birthday cake by mixing an entire carton of eggs, shells and all, into the batter, and then ruining the second cake her mother tries to make by sticking her rubber doll into the center of the cake while it’s baking.

I got curious about Beverly Cleary, who started her career as a librarian and bookseller, and began writing because she disliked the books that were available at the time for children. From the New York Times:

“One morning during a lull, I picked up an easy-reading book and read, ‘Bow-wow. I like the green grass, said the puppy.’ How ridiculous, I thought. No puppy I had known talked like that.”

There is still a lot of crap for children, but there is also plenty of stuff that captures those small incidents that are mundane and intense at the same time. One of my family’s favorites is a book translated from Chinese called The Noodle Shop, by Xun Liu, which takes us through Yi’s day as he accompanies his parents to their restaurant early in the morning and then hangs around until late at night, when the shop closes, his dad stays to clean up, and his mother takes him on the long commute back home by public transit.

Nothing much happens in this book, and my son loved it when he was little. He liked the part where Yi tries to bring out a bunch of “non-recyclable plastic food containers” from storage and his mother warns him not to because they will break. Why does the book specify that the plastic food containers are non-recyclable? I’m guessing the original referred to the grade of plastic or something, which we don’t usually do in American English.

Yi does his homework at a table in the restaurant when things are quiet; during busy periods, he has to make room for customers. Sometimes he fetches pickled cabbage for somebody. “Is this a cultural thing?” my husband asks. “Do Chinese people like books where nothing happens?”

I hadn’t really noticed the lack of a plot, because I guess that’s who I am, until I was invited into my son’s Kindergarten class to read a book out loud to all the students and I nearly bored them to sleep with this one. There is no dread like realizing you’re losing an audience of five-year-olds.

But children’s books where nothing happens are some of my favorites. We also liked the Alfie books by Shirley Hughes, which are popular in the UK but not widely known in the US. In one book, Alfie finds a rock and names it Bonting. When he loses Bonting at the beach, his family spends ages trying unsuccessfully to find it, and Alfie cries himself to sleep in the car on the way home. In another book, Alfie impulsively locks his mother out of the house. Too short to reach the catch, and too young to follow the directions his mother is giving him through the letterbox, he stands on one side of the door and cries while she stands on the other, holding his little sister, who is also crying.

One of the great things about these books is that they’re not morality tales. The family improvises; Ramona’s aunt brings a store-bought cake. The consequences are not for the very young child who has misbehaved; they are that everyone else has to deal.

Are adults allowed to write and read books that find their plots and their emotional cores in the mundane? In one book, Ramona and her friend Howie spend every afternoon playing Brick Factory, in which they labor strenuously to grind bricks into powder. Do we have to be reading aloud to children to be allowed to enjoy this kind of thing?

I did relate, as a writer for adults, to this anecdote from the same New York Times article I referenced above:

When [Judy] Blume’s children were young, she’d come home from the library with armloads of books: “Most of them went into the ‘I don’t want to write books like these, they bore me’ pile,” she recalled. “Then I came to Beverly Cleary and I fell off the sofa, I was laughing so hard. I thought, oh my God, I want to write books like this.”

Mentally, I put everything I read into one or the other of those piles.

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The haiku of Issa are so short that I’m going to share both my favorites with you today. Maybe together they’ll give you a sense of how Issa encourages me to be at peace with myself.

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These translations (he calls them “versions”) are from Robert Hass’s The Essential Haiku. They do some of my favorite things. They make me feel like I’m sharing a human moment with a poet who lived a long time ago and very far away. They make me feel benevolent toward my fellow creatures. And they are short enough that they come to mind easily and in full whenever I need them. Maybe they will do the same for you.

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Raqib Shaw’s painting Paradise Lost was there for me when I needed it.

The artwork is installed on a very long wall in a gallery at the Art Institute of Chicago that was probably chosen because the wall is the right size, and not because Shaw’s painting has much to do with the gallery’s focus on Southeast Asian religious artworks from the museum’s permanent collection. If you walk from left to right, the painting takes you on an allegorical journey from innocence to experience, with Shaw as our main character, in a phantasmagorical Kashmir, the place where Shaw was born and from which he has spent most of his life in exile.

There is a section, early in the narrative, where baboons sitting in a tree use their long, sharp teeth to devour very small deer. There’s a baboon for every branch, identically exposing and tearing red meat from the bodies of their prey. The repetition of this motif, and the flowers on the branches, make it decorative–an effect that’s increased by the artist’s choice of hard, shiny enamel paint normally used on cars.

I had walked past the painting before, on my way to a different exhibit, and I came back (on a free admission day) just to look at it more carefully. I thought I needed to hurry because the show was about to close, but it has captured enough people that the Art Institute decided to extend the show through the end of November.

I tried to sit on the big windowsills in the opposite wall, with my back to the Metra tracks, and see the picture as a whole, but I really couldn’t look at it at all unless I was very close.

I had gotten some discouraging feedback on the book I’m working on, and I was feeling blue. It was galvanizing to see Shaw’s painting at that moment. I was interested in the epic centaur fight in the middle of the composition. I was interested in Shaw’s depiction of himself, later in the narrative, stretched out on his stomach on a marble floor, wearing kimono and gazing at his own face in a hand mirror. I was interested in how forcefully, through style and motif, Shaw was asserting himself in all of this. I asked myself whether I liked the painting. I suspected that I did not. But it was such a vivid example of insistence on a personal vision, which is what I’m trying to do, too.

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The Booker Prizes invited the shortlisted writers and translators to read from their works and livestreamed the event on YouTube. You can watch the author, Rene Karabash, read from the novel in the original Bulgarian, and then hear Izidora read her translation. The Emeritus Director of the prize, Fiammetta Rocco, also interviewed them. You can watch. (Their discussion, followed by the reading, starts at 24:05.)

And here is a link to my original discussion with Izidora (who wore a fabulous dress for this reading).

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It is hard not to quote almost every line from this book. What a writer Danticat is! So I will start where she started, because if she and her editor thought that this beginning would draw us in, they were probably right:

I found out I was pregnant the same day that my father’s rapid weight loss and chronic shortness of breath were positively diagnosed as end-stage pulmonary fibrosis.

It was a hot morning in early July 2004. I took a six thirty a.m. flight from Miami to accompany my father on a visit to a pulmonologist at Brooklyn’s Coney Island Hospital that afternoon. I’d planned to catch up on my sleep during the flight, but cramping in my lower abdomen kept me awake.

I interpreted the cramps as a sign of worry for my father. In the past few months his breathing had grown labored and loud and he’d been hospitalized three times. During his most recent hospital stay, he had been referred to a pulmonologist, who’d since performed a new battery of tests.

My father picked me up at the airport at nine a.m. We hadn’t seen each other in a month. Two years before, in August 2002, I had married and moved to Miami, where my then fiancé was living. Fearing my father’s disapproval, I hadn’t announced my intention to leave New York until a month before the wedding when my father summoned me to his room for a chat.

“How can you leave New York?” he asked while filling out a checkc on top of a book on his lap. Back then he was still healthy, yet lanky, with a body that looked and moved like an aging dancer’s, a receding hairline and half a head of salt-and-pepper hair.

Removing his steel-rimmed bifocals so I could better see his amber eyes, he had added in his slow, scratchy voice, “Your mother’s here in Brooklyn. I’m here. Two of your three brothers are here. You have no family in Miami. What if this man you’re moving there for mistreats you? Who are you going to turn to?”

The lecture ended with his handing me the equivalent of five months of his mortgage payments toward the wedding reception costs. Looking back now, I wish he’d simply said, “Don’t go. I’m going to get sick and I might die.”

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I am hoping to entice you to read this book by sharing this opening, without spoiling the twist. Danticat’s family is Haitian, and suffice it to say, this is the book that taught me that immigration detention exists. I was lucky that it was 2004 and I was an adult before I had to learn.

I heard Danticat’s name recently and remembered what a profound impression this book made on me, and realized it belongs in the series of posts I wrote recently about human migration. The pain in this book is incredible; the author’s ability to write about it so soon after the events actually occurred is an expression of her faith that writing about these things matters; the author’s great talent makes it a rare gift to us.

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Here are some other posts I wrote in this series. It won’t let me share previews of the last two, but I’ve linked to them here: Go, Went, Gone by Jenny Erpenbeck, and Beowulf and the North Before the Vikings, by Tom Shippey.

Argentine horror writer Mariana Enriquez has argued that there is no tradition of horror in Latin American fiction. She identifies Borges as an Argentine writer of the “weird”, but says there are few local, Argentine references in his weird fiction. And she claims that Catholicism destroyed local beliefs, and that local monster traditions have not made their way into fiction because of class prejudices against “superstitious beliefs of the illiterate.”

Enriquez wrote an influential essay on how she felt, as an aspiring horror writer in Argentina:

A tradition is a place to go to, to find other writers that share your history, your imagination, your language, and your little national traits. When you don’t have that tradition you are a little lost. You have to reinvent or, better yet, search for your own tradition with the guide of those very few pioneers or examples who went there before.

I knew I had to go find out what was my horror. Our horrors. I asked myself: what were the first written texts, the first horror texts that I had ever read? They were the testimonies of the dictatorship. Bodies disappeared. Common everyday houses which served as concentration camps in neighborhoods. The secrecy of it all, the negation of reality. Children in this time taken from their parents and given another name. It was phantasmagoric. I’m not saying that it was better or worse than something in the open. It was just different than the horror we associate with the genre. I was a child then, so it was imprinted on my imagination. I published my first book of horror and fantastic stories in 2009, and it had my first story where I used the disappeared in a genre fiction piece. I was worried as it was coming out. Genre is associated with entertainment and entertainment is associated with banality and I was scared to be accused of banalizing a serious subject. I don’t think entertainment in itself has any seed of banality, and I also believe that the prejudice against entertainment is born in the fact that it is popular and sometimes writers become elitists and we have a tendency to disapprove what people like. But fiction that also has entertained taught me more than structuralism.

The story came out though and nothing happened, which taught me something else: people don’t really pay attention to literature and I wasn’t important.

There was a lot of freedom in this invisibility.

I love this—that people don’t really pay attention to literature, and this is freeing.

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I had a lot of constantly shifting thoughts and feelings about this when I read Enriquez’s novel Our Share of Night, because I was questioning her depiction of the dictatorship and its crimes. I had been having trouble with the book’s depiction of a demonic cult. Here is how I wrote about it, in an early post on this blog:

The problem with this book is that it’s about a demonic cult, who kidnap, torture, rape, and murder. Many of their victims are children. The supernatural figure they serve, and call a god, devours human beings body and soul and collects their body parts. The characters are broadly written, with much of the work of characterization done by describing what they look like. The good guys are magnificent specimens, the bad guys are ugly, and none of them are nice. Any involvement with the cult or the demon it serves disfigures the personalities of the novel’s heroes, and its villains are utterly evil sadists. The sadism and gore are easier to take because they really don’t feel real, but still, you’re spending 600 pages in a world where the author has expended tremendous power of imagination on a repellant creation. I thought about the book when I wasn’t actively reading it, and my thoughts, over this winter vacation, were all full of clotted blood.

I decided I would write about this anyway, even if I couldn’t recommend it, because the process of reading it and changing my mind about it seemed interesting. But then I also changed my mind about the book again. The book begins during Argentina’s military dictatorship, and the cult leaders, who are wealthy collaborators with the dictatorship, use political prisoners as human sacrifices. Late in the book, after many vivid descriptions of the demon’s collection of dead body parts, we come to a scene where a journalist is watching the excavation of a pit that was used during those years as a mass grave. And I felt a little different about the author’s expenditure of energy on her gruesome fantasy world.

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So my relationship to Enriquez’s material changed almost in the opposite way that the author’s did. I thought she was being gross and gratuitous when she was making things up. And then when she brought in a reality that was gross and gratuitous, it put her fantasies in a more serious light. I like that she worried about this, and I like that no one reacted! It is indeed freeing. “People don’t really pay attention to literature and I am not important.” We should all tape this up above our desks.

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I was offered a residency at UCross this fall. It is in Wyoming, where I have never been, and it looks very pretty.

My most recent (and only) experience with a residency is that it can be truly transformative when you’re working on a book. I have high hopes for the next one.

Warning: this book contains disturbing material that I briefly discuss in this post. The book’s protagonist is a content moderator specializing in child pornography.

Content moderators at the fictional social media company in Moderation review videos that have been flagged as possible violations of the company’s guidelines. It isn’t always easy to tell whether something is what it seems to be. For example: Does a video that looks like child pornography feature an actual child, or is it a young adult who is pretending to be a child? New hires are required to give presentations explaining their judgments. One presenter pauses mid-presentation to vomit in a trash can under the lectern.

Our protagonist, Girlie, has been doing this job for years. She has outlasted her peers, and shown very few outward signs of distress or self-destruction. She specializes in child pornography cases. The video in question is real—she can tell by the child’s socks.

Girlie, and many of her colleagues, are Filipina. In the Las Vegas office of a tech company, as in many other industries in many places around the world, they are the people in the lowest-level, most punishing jobs, doing the work that can’t be automated, acting as the human sacrifices that make global capitalism possible.

Girlie has survived in this job by cutting herself off emotionally from everyone, even within her closest relationships. Her family, which had been prosperous, suffered during the economic crash of 2008 and has not recovered, and Girlie has an overwhelming sense of filial responsibility. She financially supports her mother and her cousin. But while she lives for them, she cannot treat them lovingly.

Then she gets a promotion that changes the day-to-day nature of her job. The company is developing a new virtual reality product, where users can wear VR gear and interact with each other in an immersive, three-dimensional virtual space, and it’s her job to go in among them and keep an eye on their interactions. Virtual assaults are shown, and the possibility that users will organize and create hateful spaces in this new reality is hinted at but not really explored. The book basically touches on Girlie’s new job but isn’t that interested in it. Mostly, the book turns its attention to how Girlie meets a nice guy and finds a good therapist, and how these people help her begin to take off some of her psychological armor.

So while the book began in a hair-raising fashion, I felt it almost immediately abandoned its premise and became a totally different book. I asked myself whether I really wanted the book to stay as brutal as it was at the beginning, and why. And it certainly was nicer to read about falling in love and taking swimming lessons than about, you know. But I hadn’t signed up for a romance novel. I had signed up for what seemed like it was going to be a confrontational, incisive book about modern labor.

When I wrote about Esther Yi’s novel Y/N, I said that the joy of reading the book was its ongoing, dogged commitment to its insane premise. This book was the opposite of that. It’s gotten some attention. It’s on the longlist for the Women’s Prize, and Castillo just received a Whiting Award. There is an excerpt from the book on the Whiting website, and I notice it’s from the beginning of the book, when it seems like it’s going to be something other than what it is. Are people responding to what the book might have been, rather than what it is? Why is that good enough?

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My publisher, Miami University Press, has added a donations page to their website.

Their annual novella prize is the contest that discovered and published Garth Greenwell’s debut, Mitko, which became the first section of What Belongs to You.

If you like to write novellas, if you think you might ever enter the contest, which turns 20 this year, this is a transformative opportunity.

Consider buying a book, or making a donation. Because if they are asking, that’s a hint that they need your support. If you let me know, I’ll make a donation to match whatever you donate or spend.

Months ago, told me she wished this book had been weirder.

As she suggested, I set out to try and write about what she meant.

The book is weird. Set on a single day, while Hernán Cortés and his small band of opportunists are waiting in Tenoxtitlan for a meeting with Moctezuma, it shows us the Nahua culture at the height of its development. When the conquistadores sit down for a diplomatic lunch, the soup is full of flowers. And all of the food contains hallucinogenic ingredients, so everyone is on a mild trip all the time. Enrigue’s descriptions hum. This is a strange, specific, and beautiful place, now lost, and the feeling of intense encounter with it does approximate the altered state that his characters are in.

Here is Moctezuma, relaxing in his rooms after lunch:

The shade, the meal he’d eaten, the tobacco, and the depths of autumn, about to subside into the darkness of the solstice–the masked days, as the shortest days of the years were called–sent a shiver down the emperor’s spine. He could have moved to the sunny side of the courtyard, but he was out of humor, and to be a pain in the ass he requested the goose-feather cape he wore in his rooms when it was cold. Etiquette demanded that he donate whatever tunic, cape, and headdress he wore at his public audience each morning, so he never appeared there in his white feather cloak, which he loved. He wore no earrings, necklaces, or lip plug. The tunic he had on now, also white, was embroidered with a simple border of flowers and sea snails. He was wearing plain sandals, adorned only with pearls–the gold-and-gem-encrusted sandals he’d worn to receive El Malinche were dazzling but very uncomfortable. He’d left them under the courtyard arch to feel the floor of swept clay under the soles of his feet.

Another inherently weird thing in the book is the use of language. Enrigue begins the book with a letter addressed to his English-language translator, Natasha Wimmer, in which he explains some of his choices and gives a pronunciation guide to names such as Atotoxtli, Moctezuma’s sister, with the “x” said like “sh.” Moctezuma, as you might intuit from the section quoted above, is depressed and on drugs, and has largely abandoned his duties. Cortes and his band have picked up an army of enemy soldiers on their march to Tenoxtitlan, and some of those soldiers may be in hiding within the city. Atotoxtli and Tlilpotonqui, the mayor, are very worried about this danger, trying to figure out what’s going on and prod Moctezuma into action, all the while convinced that if they annoy him or if he decides they are not useful anymore, he will have them executed. Enrigue gives a list of characters after his letter to his translator, so that as we follow Atotoxtli and Tlilpotonqui through their day, we can check back to remind ourselves who Cuitlahuac and Cuauhtemoc are. In his letter to his translator, Enrigue writes

Don’t worry too much about the Nahuatl words you come across. Mexican readers won’t know right away what a macehual or a pipil is either. Let the meanings reveal themselves: the brain likes to register new words. I don’t think it’s necessary to explain that huey tlatoani means “great lord of Tenochtitlan”--you get that as the story progresses. And I think it will follow logically in readers’ minds that huey Caxtilteca means Castilian lord. You don’t need experience of parliamentary systems to understand how a European government works when you watch a political TV series made across the Atlantic, do you? And to state the obvious, a calpulli isn’t the same thing as a neighborhood, and a military academy isn’t the same thing as a calmecac, though they are alike in some ways. As you read, everything will become clear.

The intention is not to give lessons in Nahuatl. It’s simply to recover the sounds of the language in some places. There’s nothing nostalgic about it, nor am I driven by ideology. All the spellings and all the Nahuatl terms are open to discussion. I realize that if an English speaker can say Moscow instead of Moskva, there’s no reason I should say Tenoxtitlan instead of Tenochtitlan, but I’m a writer and words matter to me. They may signify and signal, but I believe they also invoke.

Enrigue does not even get around, in this part, to discussing his choice to call Cortés “El Malinche.” Assuming this is Enrigue’s innovation and not something he got from someone else, he has named Cortés after his translator, as if he were merely her male consort, and the woman he was enslaving was the one everybody actually wanted to talk to.

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So in what ways is the book not weird enough?

Enrigue draws our attention to the constructedness of the book, not only by beginning with a letter to his translator but also several times within the text pointing out the fact that the story is made up. Our point of view character among the Spaniards is Jazmín Caldera, who strikes us as more sensitive and humane than his peers. At the beginning of a chapter where Caldera walks through Tenoxtitlan alone, making observations about the city, Enrigue says, “If Jazmín Caldera had existed,” he would have seen such and such. Later in the chapter he says, “Jazmín Caldera . . . has to be a learned conquistador–like Hernán Cortés or, to a lesser extent, the surgeon Bernal Díaz–for this novel to work.”

Enrigue also gives visions of the future to some of his characters. One sees the author sitting at his desk, writing the book we are reading. Some of them can hear a T. Rex song playing. I think Enrigue is trying to allow his characters to see forward into the future in the same way that we are seeing back into the past. This matters in part because the book is asking the question, What if the encounter between the Castilians and the Nahua had gone differently? The desperate maneuvering of Atotoxtli and Tlilpotonqui is interesting not necessarily because it is doomed, but because it might not be.

But these postmodern gestures lack heft. They seem to advertise a kind of experimentalism that only recognizes itself as experimental if it has certain hallmarks. Ah, here is the author appearing in his own work.

It’s not bad to mix these attention-grabbing features with more naturalistic writing, especially when that naturalistic writing is already weird enough to prepare the reader for things to get weirder. This combination of naturalism and postmodernism could feel exuberant, like, It’s got everything! But other than beginning with a letter to the translator, most of these postmodern gestures feel much less fresh and interesting than the rest of the writing. By writing intensely about a historic encounter, Enrigue has given us something strange and valuable. By embroidering it with techniques that were once innovative but have lost their freshness, he makes the book less strange.

, is this right?

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This Thursday, for those who celebrate, we will be having an event at Miami University of Ohio to commemorate 20 years of the Novella Prize and the launch of the newest title, When They Came Home, by . Terri will be reading, and so will , and so will I! You can join us in person or on Zoom.

https://humanitiescenter.miamioh.edu/event/three-novellas-a-reading-to-celebrate-20-years-of-the-miami-university-press-novella-prize