Fiction Reviews

Major Arcana

John Pistelli
Belt Publishing ($24.95)

by Andy Hartzell

It starts with a bang: A gunshot to the head, on a university campus, in Middle America, live-streamed. This action sets up Major Arcana as a story about “today,” the kind that would come with the tagline “ripped from the tabloids” if tabloids were still a thing. But as author John Pistelli plunges into the novel’s root question—why would an intelligent and seemingly happy college boy take his own life in such a public fashion?—its tendrils spread to encompass more characters, more mysteries, and more decades, until the story becomes a sort of secret history of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. “Today” is gradually revealed to be weirder than we thought it was.

The various plot trajectories revolve around a common center of gravity called Overman 3000, “Overman” being a thinly-veiled analog of Superman. It’s an artifact of the ’90s, when DC Comics editors boldly greenlit “transgressive” reboots of beloved golden-age franchises and magazine editors breathlessly declared comics not just for kids anymore. The fictional comic is written by Simon Magnus, an anarchic visionary with occult leanings who, while not quite a thinly-veiled analog of Alan Moore, borrows from that writer’s stock of colorful attributes.

Overman 3000 takes the familiar tropes of the Man of Steel myth—alien origin, secret identity, girl reporter love interest, bald billionaire nemesis—and pushes them to their limit and beyond, to the literal end of time. Its grand climax, which pits the superhero as the avatar of pure spirit against a villain transmogrified into the personification of meatspace, is a kind of latter-day gnostic scripture, a lurid orgy of cosmic destruction and rebirth. This story-within-a-story both reflects and influences the slightly-less melodramatic character arcs of the “real” characters in the novel.

In its mixture of literary ambition and old-fashioned showmanship, Major Arcana is a throwback to the efflorescence of popular literary fiction in the mid-late 20th century. It bears some superficial similarities to one of the hallmark works of that period, Robertson Davies’s Deptford Trilogy. That saga also starts with the seemingly inexplicable suicide of a Golden Boy, then spirals outward to follow a cast of eccentric characters, whose various destinies diverge wildly before converging again at the finale. Like Pistelli, Davies was a student of hermetic lore; both works are studded with esoteric references. But Davies’s work now reads like a relic from a lost world, a storybook world; a single history connects his novels back to those of Dickens and Hugo. Pistelli is writing after the end of history, and he knows it.

Life in the digital age is fragmented, discontinuous. How do you tell a coherent story in an incoherent age? It’s no wonder that many new novels forego the epic in favor of the miniature: the precision portrait of a particular subgroup, or the shifting lens of the author’s own subjective awareness. But Pistelli is out to prove that it’s still possible to paint on a big canvas. Major Arcana’s nine major characters represent a diverse set of identities, encompassing three generations and an unspecified number of genders. They share in common the experience of growing up after all the rules and expectations about growing up have been discarded. These are characters who must construct themselves out of the materials at hand: books, chance encounters, and various bits of cultural detritus. The personalities that emerge are complex, unstable, and a bit artificial, heightened-for-effect.

This operatic quality comes through especially in the book’s climactic sequences. Here, Pistelli piles on the sturm-und-drang without restraint—lightning even crackles on the horizon as characters launch into their aria-like monologues and fates are sealed. Though it begins in the neighborhood of realism, the novel ultimately lands somewhere in the realm of fantasy, though the segue is so subtle that one might not realize it until well after-the-fact, if at all.

Does each character represent a figure in the titular Arcana? It’s easy enough to identify Simon Magnus, the comic book writer, as “The Magician.” This is the arcana of action-without-effort, and Magnus refuses to be pinned down. “The Empress,” which is the arcana of sacred magic, might equate to the young manifestation coach Ash Del Greco. And the elusive Jacob Morrow, whose death kicks off the plot, is surely “The Fool.”

These three characters are in desperate search of transcendence, impatient to shake off all forms of constraint—not just the authority of parents, bosses, and priests, but that of nature: the body, and time itself. Other characters serve as counterweights, making the argument for living and dealing with the world as it is. The most eloquent case for fleshly existence is realized in the character of Diane del Greco, Ash’s mother, a woman of artistic and intellectual talents who consciously embraces the life of a suburban vulgarian and un-lapsed Catholic. Every major character is rendered empathetically, and we get a window into every point of view. But Pistelli’s sympathy seems to lie with the Devils, if only because he gives them the best speeches.

The book’s perspective on gender avoids collapsing into any predictable political take. Its two pivotal characters are both transgender, but what they’re ultimately seeking to trans isn’t merely gender, but materiality. Whether this is good or bad is left for the reader to decide. While it’s possible to read both characters as monsters, it’s equally possible to see them as heroes. Pistelli reserves his satirical judgment for those more minor characters who seek to put the rebel angels into politically conventional boxes; placing the transhumanist enterprise within the centuries-long context of Western expressive individualism, he lets us see them in a cosmic frame, as they see themselves.

The novel is liberally seasoned with allusions to writers of transcendental yearning: Dostoyevsky, Melville, and especially that great-granddaddy of the graphic novel, William Blake. More than two hundred years ago, at a time when Enlightenment rationalism claimed to have settled all the great questions, Blake proclaimed the idea that human nature could never be defined—that human beings would always strain toward the infinite. His prophetic works ultimately helped usher in the Romantic counterrevolution. Major Arcana hints that we might be living through a similar moment: The metanarratives may have all been deconstructed, but metaphysical desire lives on. The kids will pick up the pieces and make something mind-blowing. Might the lockdown generation, algorithmically sorted and managed as it is, even now be gearing up to risk everything for love? Stranger things have happened.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2025 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2025

Red Dog Farm

Nathaniel Ian Miller
Little, Brown and Company ($28)

by Sara Maurer

Perhaps no author looms larger in Icelandic literature than Halldór Laxness, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1955. In writing a book set on a far-flung Icelandic farm—as is Laxness’s 1934 novel Independent People, widely considered his masterpiece—Nathaniel Ian Miller faces the challenge of situating Red Dog Farm in the context of Iceland’s foremost literary figure’s foremost book. He approaches this task in the same way one of his characters, Víðir, comes “out from under his father’s heavy shadow”—by defining himself in opposition to him.

While the narrator of Red Dog Farm is a young man named Orri, it’s through his father, Víðir, that Miller engages the specter of Laxness. At first, Víðir and the hero of Independent People, Bjartur of Summerhouses, seem of a piece: They’re decidedly cantankerous, both farmers, poets, husbands, and fathers. Defiance and stubbornness seem to guide each man’s every move (Bjartur’s first line of dialogue in Independent People is a solitary “No”). Ostensibly, Laxness’s protagonist is driven by a desire for financial independence—a home, land, and livestock owned outright—yet as his story unfolds, he seems less driven by this ideal than by brutality. He refuses to improve his home or adequately feed and clothe his family, and he seems to value his sheep above human life.

Víðir, too, lives in opposition to the people around him, rejecting his neighbors’ old ways of doing things. He rides a motorcycle instead of a horse, raises beef cows instead of sheep, and has an Australian kelpie instead of an Icelandic sheepdog. Unlike the relentlessly independent Bjartur, though, Víðir relies completely on his wife’s college professor salary and his physician mother-in-law’s generosity. Where Bjartur treats his wife and children little better than livestock, Víðir coddles Orri, demands nothing of him. He loves his wife and “would’ve claimed all her time if he could justify it.” Shortly after she leaves him, Víðir reveals to Orri that he has been writing poetry: “I guess you’d call it free verse? Prose poems? I’m not sure.” You can almost hear Bjartur, who found comfort in “the old measures of the 18th century ballads and had always despised the writing of hymns in newfangled lyrics,” scoffing.

Toward the ends of their books, Bjartur and Víðir find themselves quite alone. As a result of his unrelenting pursuit of self-sufficiency, both of Bjartur’s wives are dead and most of his children have died or fled; only his son Gvendur remains. Víðir’s wife, similarly fed up with his reticence and discontent, has accepted a new position at a university in Reykjavik; Orri remains on the farm but is planning to move to Reykjavik as well. Each faces the question that farmers have faced since humans began farming: What will happen to the farm? It will come as no surprise that the sons choose opposite paths: One takes over his father’s farm while the other leaves both farming and father behind.

Rather than shying away from comparisons to Laxness’s classic, Miller leans into them: “To hell with Bjartur!” Víðir says at one point. Víðir’s rejection of the old ways reveals him as a new symbol for Icelandic masculinity. In casting off Bjartur’s heavy shadow, Miller challenges long-held cultural ideals of independence, perseverance, and stoicism, and offers readers a 21st-century hero—one who relinquishes power and embraces flexibility and tenderness.

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Fragments of a Paradise

Jean Giono
Translated by Paul Eprile
Archipelago Books ($18)

by Alice-Catherine Carls

Long before dictating the eight chapters of Fragments of a Paradise, Jean Giono spent three years translating Herman Melville’s Moby Dick; during World War II, he pursued this nautical theme with an homage to its author, Pour saluer Melville (“To Greet Melville”), published in 1941. Later, almost five years into the Nazi occupation of France and having been under suspicion of pre-war pacifism and wartime collaborationism, Giono conceived a Moby Dick à la française, turning Ahab’s anger into a scientific expedition to the South Atlantic in a surreal blend of science and poetry. These circumstances call for reading Fragments of a Paradise as both a literary feat and a testament.

Critics have seen the novel as a divide in Giono’s work, a shift away from the tragedy of the world that defined his earlier works. In Fragments of a Paradise, the main topic is no longer man’s confrontation with nature but his enchantment with it. Depending on one’s education or social status, the gateway to enchantment can be a child’s innocence, a scientist’s reasoned understanding, or the delightedly fearful awe of past legends. Officer Larreguy, a graduate of the prestigious engineering school Centrale, has an awakening that relies on all three when on a visit home he notices an unusually large ox footprint that reminds him of the winged bulls guarding the gates of the city of Nineveh he had learned about during history classes.

This quixotic quest for Arcadia leads the ship’s captain to the most remote island on earth, Tristan da Cunha, after struggling through angry seas and skies with pre-industrial tools (the only radio on board remains unused, and the sailing vessel is a three-mast corvette). This unmooring process, says Giono at the end of the book, is the only way to fight the dulling of one’s senses from the pettiness and boredom of a routine in which the deadly tanks and airplanes of war have replaced nature’s wonders. Fighting “the most terrifying thing a man can imagine: to be inanimate,” the book concludes, “This is why all the men on the ship are hastening to find a soul within themselves.”

The ship’s quest, however, remains unfinished. Michael Wood, in his pertinent introduction, lists critical interpretations but does not address whether Fragments of a Paradise should be considered a finished work. The open-ended status of the novel is in character with its focus on the dualities of life/death, good/evil, creation/destruction, and nature/civilization. Giono hinted at revisions, calling the eight chapters a “future poem”—perhaps emulating his friend C. F. Ramuz, who wrote “poetic novels.” On the other hand, Giono typically wrote quickly, and rarely made any corrections to his texts.

An armchair traveler who lived most of his life in a small town in southeastern France, Giono had an encyclopedic book knowledge of geography and foreign cultures. Interestingly, he does not list these disciplines among the expertises possessed by his fictional crew: “Zoology, Botany, Geology, Paleontology, Bacteriology, Hydrography, Oceanography, Meteorology, planetary Magnetism, atmospheric Electricity, and Gravity.” In the fourth and fifth chapters, the reader is served a heavy dose of what critics call “borrowed information” in the vein of Jules Verne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Joseph Conrad—or for that matter, Giono’s own readings of the complete works of 18th-century naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, who was a founder of the theory of ecological succession, and Jules Dumont d’Urville’s multi-volume Voyage de la corvette l’Astrolabe, published serially from 1830-1833. Giono also drops clues about his knowledge of current sea exploration; expeditions to the island of Tristan da Cunha in the 1920s and ’30s made the island popular, and the sporadic discovery of Antarctic islands in the 1930s by French expeditions perhaps explains Giono’s captain’s choice of a reconnaissance area between the 66th parallel and the Tropic of Cancer.

The novel’s structure is supported by Giono’s use of both poetic and scientific language, with shifts between scientific prose, nautical jargon, rank-and-file sailors’ idioms, and dialogues replete with vieille France formulas of politeness. The first three chapters are pure poetry. The Franco-Basque crew sees a giant stingray and sperm whale through the eyes of medieval writers and in the language of John Milton, so they are unable to explain the sea creatures’ extraordinary feats of light, sound, and smells. These are explained more scientifically by the captain and the ship’s officers in the following two chapters, with a profusion of details to anchor them in verisimilitude. Poetry returns when Noël Guinard, the storekeeper, climbs to the top of Tristan da Cunha, fulfilling Giono’s idea of complete solitude and preparation for death. Poetic images are scattered through the chapters; technicolor visions of monsters and sunsets and a symbiosis between land, sea, and sky unmoor the mind as surely as the motion of wind and water. Paul Eprile’s conscientious and sophisticated translation must be commended for sparingly “paring down” the original text and preserving its stylistic richness.

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High Solitude

Léon-Paul Fargue
Translated by Rainer J. Hanshe
Contra Mundum Press ($21.50)

by Patrick James Dunagan

Picture dragging yourself from bed with mounting anxiety in a small and dingy (yet Parisian, so not all bad) flat to the windows overlooking a boulevard and adjacent alleyways abuzz with city life. Looking out at streets you once rambled as a youth in jubilant company, with literature and art coursing through the veins, you now feel dejected as you begin a series of notes on Parisian city life. The writing isn’t some tell-all exploitative tale concerning now-famous lives of those you once knew. Rather, it’s a series of inner visions relating the strife and turmoil, sometimes imagined, that can be found in abundance on the city’s streets. Your name is Léon-Paul Fargue, and your book is High Solitude. 

Fargue’s idiosyncratic book resists easy classification. Are these tales autobiographical? Yes and no. Are they fiction? Sort of. Might they be essays cast in fictional glow? Perhaps, at least sometimes. Whatever it may be, the book certainly contributes to the literary lineage of the flâneur, that indelible Parisian lurker of corridors and street cafes: “How sad it was to walk on and encounter the utmost end without finding anything of what I had loved or hated! I was lost in a forest of strange noctilucas, in a helpless city that hovered like a hawk over the stampede. I recognized everything and I recognized nothing.”

The streets of Paris are a central theme, if not an outright character, in High Solitude; the descriptive detail and moody tenor of Fargue’s writing gives them an eerie glow. There’s also an edgy despair embroidering these scenes as outer and inner experience jostle against each other: “These endosmoses between the past and myself, these returns to experience, the gone-by, the ground-down, I am exhausted, I am overwhelmed, I am drunk with them.” As if trapped in a grim arcade, Fargue implores, “What can I do to avoid these hordes of myself that go up the avenues, stand in line at the stations, occupy café tables?” He doesn’t really have any answers, but on occasion proffers a learned observation or two: “Order offers mortals pillows. Disorder puts them on the road towards the possible.” These occasional morsels of guidance encourage readers along Fargue’s lonely peripatetic journey. 

Lacking cohesive narrative attraction, High Solitude does stumble here and there, only to recover and doggedly continue. Such is life, it suggests—although Fargue’s anecdotes and reflections magnify aspects of it few discover on their own.

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May Our Joy Endure

Kev Lambert
Translated by Donald Winkler
Biblioasis ($18.95)

by Marcie McCauley

The lifeless furred and feathered bodies and heavy Gothic font on the cover of Québécois writer Kev Lambert’s third novel, May Our Joy Endure, prepare readers for a tragic story, and we get one, of sorts. From its opening pages, the novel offers a trenchant social critique in a chaotic unspooling of words—Lambert’s prose is relentless as perspectives shift rapidly with scant stops for respite.

While the telling feels urgent, the novel’s construction is impeccable. The middle segment of the three-part narrative belongs to Céline Wachowski, a world-renowned architect and host of her own Netflix reality series, Old House, New House, just when her studio is breaking ground on a complex for the corporate behemoth “Webuy.” Titled “Time Passes”—a deft foreshadowing of Céline’s obsession with Proust—this center section is the most conventionally styled of the narrative; it is bookended by untitled segments written in more experimental prose. To top it all off, the novel’s final sentence echoes its title, creating a loop to snare the contents between them: an exacting design, not unlike the figure-eight-shaped blueprint Céline has created for Webuy.

Céline’s career began with residential structures in the ′90s, and as her portfolio swelled with celebrities’ homes and important buildings across the world’s capitals, her accomplishments as a woman in a male-dominated profession intensified her star-status. With due pride, she has brought the Webuy complex to her native Montréal, but an article in The New Yorker scrutinizes Céline’s commitment to “ethical architecture” and accusations about her surface and spiral. Caught in the firestorm of criticism, Céline laments that a “climate so injurious is only possible in Quebec where a plurality of discourses cannot possibly coexist,” recognizing it as “a vestigial heritage of the Yes or No referendum debates” in a “powerless and panicked” province.

Most importantly, however, the novel’s focus is on the frameworks that gain invisibility as structures take their true shapes in the world. Foundationally, readers can explore concepts like neoliberalism and gentrification; in the basement, injury and trauma lurk. Various windows reveal not only literary influences—James Baldwin and Nelly Arcan, Virginie Despentes and Virginia Woolf, and most significantly, Québécois author Marie-Claire Blais—but also intertextual relationships with Lambert’s previous books: Their first novel, You Will Love What You Have Killed (Biblioasis, 2020), explores the thin line between love and hate as well, and their second, Querelle of Roberval (Biblioasis, 2022), dissects power structures in the context of queer sexuality and labor politics.

As May Our Joy Endure suspends its heroine from a hook so that readers can examine the shell of what remains, the authorial voice seems to conclude that we’ve all had a hand in stringing her up, and that any one of us could be similarly exposed and flayed: “we can be as hypocritical as those we constantly reproach for their own hypocrisies.” Like the best social novels, Lambert’s holds up the mirror: We are not simply witnesses to the story, we are participants.

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Clean

Alia Trabucco Zerán
Translated by Sophie Hughes
Riverhead Books ($29)

by Dimitris Passas

It all begins with a laconic advertisement in the newspaper: “Housemaid wanted, presentable, full time.” Thus, Estela Garcia, a young woman from a rural community populated by a largely underprivileged population in the southern Chilean island of Chiloe, comes to the big city of Santiago to become the housemaid of an upper-crust household. Estela’s employers (only referred to by her as señor and señora) and their young daughter Julia, are the sole actors in this claustrophobic environment of class discrimination, cultural distinctions, and the struggle to endure a dreary life in which monotony quenches any form of meaning and distorts one’s sense of time and reality.

In her second novel, Alia Trabucco Zerán revisits themes that dominated her first work, The Remainder, which dealt with the residues left in Chilean society by Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. In Clean, the strictly domestic setting expels everything that takes place outside the house where Estela works as a cleaner, servant, and nanny. Trabucco Zerán offers as a backdrop Chile’s Estallido Social—the riots that erupted in the winter of 2019 after the sudden increase in the metro fare—yet the totality of her tale unfolds inside the house where Estela works.

The story starts with Estela being arrested for suspicion of foul play in Julia’s death. Sitting behind one-way glass, Estela narrates directly to silent interrogators,  determined to tell her own story. She often interjects comments directed to all those who may hear her—which of course includes us, the readers—urging them to keep notes of seemingly trivial details that are destined to play a major role in the story to come. As she says: “you have to skirt around the edge before getting to the heart of the story.”

Clean is not a typical domestic suspense novel, however; its prose blends the humdrum of Estela’s quotidian existence with her breakout insights and shrewd observations regarding universal, diachronic questions. As our narrator says, “This is a long story, my friends, . . . It’s a story born of a centuries-old tiredness and questions that presume too much.” Estela knows that she will never become a part of society’s upper echelons. Her wealthy employers’ thinly veiled hostility and distrust render her an outsider, bound to remain a stranger as long as she stays in the job. But she never leaves, and she voices the reason in the most austere and accurate of ways: “I never stopped believing I would leave that house, but routine is treacherous; the repetition of the same rituals . . . each one an attempt to gain mastery over time.”

One of the most striking elements of Clean is the way Trabucco Zerán sketches the contours of her youngest character. Julia is headstrong and inflexible, and her reactions to various emotional stimuli suggest that perhaps she should be visiting a specialist. However, her doctor father rejects this idea and keeps her as close as possible to teach her only what he deems necessary. As Estela’s crystalline narration illuminates the hidden dysfunctions and corrupt relationship dynamics in the family, it becomes evident that Julia’s detached parents and unloving upbringing have traumatized her from a very early age.

Sophie Hughes, who also translated The Remainder, again delivers Trabucco Zerán’s prose into English with skill and precision. While its distinctive mood may alienate genre-oriented readers, Clean is a slim but sparkling novel that will grab the attention of those who value literature that speaks truth to power.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2024-2025 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2025

An Incomplete Catalog of Disappearance

Diana Oropeza
Future Tense Books ($12)

by Eric Bies

In 2014, Semiotext(e) published a short posthumous work by the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre, an effort to circumscribe an entire universe of artistic loss in eighty breathless pages. That book, The Missing Pieces, does its darnedest, encompassing some five hundred items, from incinerated manuscripts and shredded letters to unfinished poems and vanished papyri. It’s the kind of book that will make one wonder whether, finally, more has been lost than found—whether, like the unfinished trilogy of Gogol’s Dead Souls, more shall remain destined to persist in the realm of ideas than ever come to exist.

An Incomplete Catalog of Disappearance, a beguiling new book by Diana Oropeza, is similarly slim, but it’s the opposite of breathless. With plenty of white space to spare, it’s a book to linger over, its relaxed arrangement calling to mind a line from Borges regarding The Book of Imaginary Beings: “Our wish would be that the curious dip into it from time to time in much the way one visits the changing forms revealed by a kaleidoscope.”

Indeed, Borges presides as a kind of patron saint over Oropeza’s book as a whole; a quotation from “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” a story that exemplifies the Argentine maestro’s penchant for blurring the boundaries of fiction and nonfiction, serves as an epigraph. In the same way that Borges counterfeited entire bibliographies, crafting fragments from old books that never really existed while never allowing the reader to doubt his belief in their reality, Oropeza has devised a series of vanishings that might as well have happened. Some of her sixty-odd pieces of nanofiction strain while others shoot right past the limits of credulity, bleeding into surrealism here and magical realism there, but each piece’s tone is assured, sincere if not solemn.

An Incomplete Catalog of Disappearance is fun-loving enough to describe illusionist David Copperfield disappearing the Statue of Liberty (and obvious enough, at times, to incorporate such tired territory as the Bermuda Triangle), but at its deepest points, Oropeza’s half-page inventions are earnest invitations to bear witness to everything that slips away. Reading them might not produce laughter or tears outright, but the book’s valences—mourning, absurdity, liberation—are easy enough to detect.

Flash fiction lives and dies by a fire that has mere seconds to light up a space, so it would be a mistake to jump into this book expecting Chekhov. But the parables of Kafka, the riddles of W. S. Merwin, the microcosmic visions of Lydia Davis—these are Oropeza’s touchstones, and when she’s good, she’s as good as any of them. No one sentence does her associative and often syntactically surprising style justice, but a line like “I found myself speaking inside a poem of Akbar’s, speaking of an atomized absence, speaking of ants carrying home the names of new colors” can give you an idea. Many of Orozepa’s scenarios are so memorable, so exacting, so self-contained, it’s a wonder the author managed to pin them down at all: “As it is told, the ghost had bitten a child on the hand. The following day, the child shocked everyone by suddenly playing the piano like a master.”

That Oropeza has a flair for economy doesn’t mean the work is slight. A piece titled “Translation,” for example, all but demands to be read three times in a row. This is how it opens:

In Spanish, “ojos” are “eyes,” but my dad hears the word “ice,” which is the English word for “hielo,” which is pronounced like “yellow.” The word for yellow in Spanish is “amarillo,” which is also the name of a place in Texas, nearly 500 miles from the Mexican border. Which translates to a seven-hour drive from home, which is actually shorter than my father’s workday. At his job, he translates for the housekeepers who often don’t speak English so they often don’t speak to anyone except my father, except to say “housekeeping” before they knock on the door and “es clean,” to let the front desk know the room es clean. The hotel staff think it’s an accent causing the mispronunciation of “is” but actually “es” is Spanish for “is,” so the women are not wrong, they are translating.

Perhaps some things will always be lost in translation. Meanwhile, An Incomplete Catalog of Disappearance sheds new light on loss, clarifying fresh facets of our prismatic reality even as it complicates old ones. Orozepa’s signal debut can be read in an afternoon, but it will compel you to remain in its orbit.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2024-2025 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2025

The Third Realm

Karl Ove Knausgaard
Translated by Martin Aitken
Penguin Press ($32)

by Sam Tiratto

In Sigrid Undset’s historical epic Kristin Lavransdatter, the titular character has an apocalyptic vision while prostrate on the cold stone floor of a cathedral: Saint Olaf himself bursts forth from his shrine and raises an army of the dead to go greet the Lord in prayer; the skeletons don their original muscle and flesh and follow in Olaf’s “blood-stained footsteps” for their new and eternal life. Wracked by guilt and the exhaustion of motherhood, Kristin beseeches Saint Olaf to pray for her.

One hundred years after the publication of Undset’s famed trilogy, Karl Ove Knausgaard explores the origins and the possible effects of such a vision in his latest novel, The Third Realm. The book continues the variegated story of a mysterious celestial event in modern-day Norway set forth in his two previous novels: The Morning Star ends as the mystery arrives, its story focused on the generally unconnected lives of nine ordinary Norwegians; The Wolves of Eternity digs into semi-autobiography as a young man in Cold War-era Norway uncovers a family secret that involves a Russian woman whose mother fell in love with a Norwegian man. The trumpet sounds at the end of Wolves by placing us back in the present, in awe of the frightful event that is only just beginning.

As in the medieval world of Kristin Lavransdatter, evil stalks the land in The Third Realm. The devil, black metal, nihilism, and even the unstable inner self are recurring themes as the nine characters grapple with swiftly eroding senses of security in an increasingly frightening world. Determined readers of the two preceding books may start to find payoff when some of the characters posit that the bizarre shifts in their lives—accidents, medical miracles, horrifying news stories—may be related to the celestial event. Jarle, a brain researcher obsessed with the inner lives of the comatose, seeks meaning beyond mere coincidence when he notices inexplicable electrical signals from a “brain dead” patient. So too does the detective piecing together the mystery of a grisly murder first witnessed in The Morning Star. Could the celestial event have anything to do with it? Other characters laugh at the superstition, and some are gripped by fear; one, a minister, doubts her own faith. But all are unsettled.

Knausgaard is well known for his digressive style, but unlike the six-volume autobiographical My Struggle series, where philosophical tangents come from the author directly, here his extensive references come through his characters. As the series deepens this has the effect of making the characters feel less distinct and more like varying personas of one another, or perhaps different versions of Knausgaard himself. It is fitting that one of them, Jarle, should spend a few moments musing on Pessoa, “that champion of the meaningless”—like Pessoa’s heteronyms, Knausgaard’s fractal personalities reveal more about each other the further inward into themselves they look. 

The Third Realm does spend more time with the characters’ spouses and friends, and the unnamed Norwegian town in which the novels are set is starting to feel like a symbiotic web, a neural network; each new development in the characters’ lives sends ripples through the community of the unknown. Like Undset’s Kristin, each character is fighting doggedly to maintain a grip on themselves in the face of the alienation of society—as well as the chilling realization that Satan may really, truly wander Norway’s fjords and fells. The smell of sulfur lingers.

Knausgaard invites patience and contemplation in The Third Realm, its title itself an allusion to one character’s cosmology of humans’ relationship with the divine. The book may be to some a meditation, to others a dissertation, and to others still a digression. Where The Wolves of Eternity felt laser-focused on revelations about the nature of consciousness—replete with a full-length essay concerning death and the Russian cosmist Nikolai Fyodorov—this book seems to falter (or, perhaps more generously, replies with doubt) when it is asked to provide a clear philosophy. At times some characters feel perilously close to figuring it all out before getting distracted or second-guessing themselves. This dallying makes for poor suspense, but it forces the reader to return to the difficult act of contemplation. Rather than Saint Olaf’s dead, we may be greeted with Hamlet’s father—a supernatural mystery still, but one concerned more urgently with matters of the living than those of the dead.

The Third Realm encourages readers to set aside the explanations they had in mind for the previous installments’ events and to consider new ones. The return of the dead is constantly revisited as a theme, but it passes through the perspectives of the novel’s many characters and the limited information they are given. We suspect that the dead will rise, but will it be through the return of Jesus? The rise of Satan? The mythology of Saint Olaf? The dead returning is the stuff of nightmares, but wouldn’t it also make life triumphant? Knausgaard takes a treacherous step forward into the world unpierced by human thought. We have no choice but to follow.

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Jonah and His Daughter

Ioana Pârvulescu
Translated by Alistair Ian Blyth
Istrosbooks ($16.99)

by Rick Henry

Ioana Pârvulescu’s Jonah and His Daughter is the latest in what might be considered a genre of its own: reimagined versions of works featuring women in the Old Testament. Pârvulescu delivers a new spin on this, taking as her starting point one of the shortest books in the Old Testament: the fable that recounts how the prophet Jonah comes to understand that God’s compassion extends to all. Pârvulescu builds a novel from that Biblical fable, adding characters, expanding dramatic events, and humanizing the main character by exploring his faults as he works through the conflicts that build to his ultimate crisis.

She could have left it at that, and have given us a perfectly fine novel. Pârvulescu, however, gives contemporary readers a second story—that of the story itself as it evolves in its passing from grandmother and mother to daughter (each daughter hears the story twice) through nearly one hundred generations. While names and property are passed father to son, storytelling becomes the province of mothers and daughters; free to interrupt Jonah’s story at will, Pârvulescu’s women offer their revisions, comment on the function of fiction, and rehearse the matriarchal line that undermines the dominant narrative of the patriarchy. With its explicit argument for the power of storytelling, Jonah and His Daughter invites us to read this Old Testament fable as something that deepens through time.

The story of Jonah begins as Jonah suffers the charge from God: Save the city of Ninevah from its depravity; let them know how bad they are and give them forty days to repent. But in Pârvulescu’s telling, we quickly find ourselves with Jonah’s daughter, Esther. Her grandfather, who has recently died, was everything to her, and her mother, who died giving birth to her, is long gone. She is left with Jonah, who “didn’t trouble himself at all about me.”

While the story builds to the storm and Jonah’s famed encounter with the whale, and eventually details how he overcomes the world view that only the anointed can be saved by getting depraved Ninevah to repent, it is important to note that it’s Esther who initiates the enduring story of her father—despite her difficulties with him, she feels compelled to ensure his legacy. Over the succeeding centuries, and despite being officially written down for the Bible, Jonah’s story maintains its oral foundation and susceptibility to change as the women continue its telling.

Pârvulescu’s hermeneutic transformations of the tale are impressive. Dalila relates the story of Jonah to her granddaughter Phoebe, but casts doubt on details, including the actual swallowing of Jonah by the monster. This, she argues, was embroidered by storytellers over the years “so that they could fill their children with awe and see their mouths agape”; Jonah might have been in a giant fish’s mouth or under its fin, but the point of the encounter, says Dalila, is to mark the moment when Jonah “regained his power of speech.” By the time Phoebe’s great-great-granddaughter hears the story, the purpose of storytelling has changed: now it is to bring joy and use the imagination to help find clarity in the world (a form of Aristotle’s “edify and delight”).

By the time of Cervantes, the story has become a fairy tale; should there be a “gap or something unbelievable, I’ll fill it in from my imagination, because otherwise, if everything has to be given a rational explanation, what’s the good of telling stories?” By the time of De Sade, the ability to describe debaucheries with abandon perhaps suggests why God directed Jonah to go to Ninevah in the first place. Science enters the story with detailed descriptions of childbirth and anatomy. And so it goes, to the Parisian art world of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the era of Hollywood, and the age of Internet.

At that point the story of Jonah is completed, but Pârvulescu offers one final transformation in an Epilogue, situated in the twenty-first century. Here the storyteller assumes prominence and Jonah’s story becomes her story, the book we now hold: Jonah and His Daughter. Embedded in that is yet another manifesto of sorts, one ultimately resting in literature as play.

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Black River

Nilanjana Roy
Pushkin Vertigo ($17.95)

by Josh Steinbauer

“What writers like Toni Morrison, and perhaps writers like me, are looking at is not who is the killer but the question of where does that rot come from?”
—Nilanjana Roy, Scroll.in Interview

The emergence of noir in the 1940s marked a particular shift of America’s outlook—the term described not only an artistic aesthetic, but the dark tone of post-war pessimism and societal nihilism toward corruption and crime. This is the tradition from which Indian author Nilanjana Roy’s new crime novel Black River flows. In Roy’s capable hands, the book transcends genre to deliver a study of grief and an affectionate portrait of friendship, but typical of noir, an undercurrent of social commentary runs deep. Roy’s decades as a columnist, journalist, editor, and cultural critic have been widely appreciated in India, and her work on religion, caste, and gender have converged to mark a particular shift of the country’s outlook.

Black River opens in a small fictional village downstream from Delhi. We spend just enough time in the tender conversations of eight-year-old Munia and her father Chand to feel the real weight of grief when the girl’s body is found dangling from a tree branch. The stage is set with the heartbroken father, the local thug, the village bigwig, and the cynical detective and his sidekick, all of whom immediately suspect the local batty homeless man. Mansoor is the first to find the child; even more incriminating, he is Muslim in a predominantly Hindu region. The rising threat of mob justice creates a ticking clock for the detective torn between easily closing the case and sensing that the half-coherent suspect is telling the truth: “His years in the police have not convinced him that there is much justice in the universe, or that it is his job to commit acts of justice. But he does not like deceit. He does not like loose ends.”

Roy leans into the hard-boiled tone and pace from the outset, but once the characters are established and the investigation has begun, the story shifts gears, rewinding the timeline to offer a portrait of Chand many years before this tragedy. As a young man, Chand eschews his father’s farm and travels to the city for a different life. Delhi would never have been called rustic, but at the very least, these are simpler times. He finds work as a butcher and lives along the Yamuna riverside with his best friend and his best friend’s wife; Khalid and Rabia are Muslim and on their own itinerant journeys, but the three of them find more common ground in the trenches of poverty than they lose over their differing religious backgrounds. We’re shown a difficult era met with friendship and communal struggle: “The music, those tunes—they bring back the old days, a time when my village did not feel the need to separate us into insiders and outsiders.”

If the flashback is played primarily for nostalgic contrast, it’s also important for showing us the origin of an enduring friendship. When we return to the present to pick up the police investigation, we return as well to Chand’s despair, and the balm for this bereavement comes in his rekindled communication with Rabia. This warmest part of the book holds space for the kind of affection and understanding that can only be traded by old friends. When Chand’s loss leads to his inability to imagine a future for himself, Rabia becomes the sage: “Maybe after some time you will know for sure if this is what you want, but at least get to the end of the first season of grieving.”

Rabia’s own story traces Muslim footprints in the shifting sands of India’s religious friction. When her son is to be married, a gang of Hindu nationalists taunt the wedding party with a banner that reads “India for True Indians.” As her family weighs options, their conversation digs at the systemic rot emboldening fundamentalists with less to gain from de-escalation or compromise. Rabia remembers the leader of this gang when he was a young reluctant student: “The thin, insecure boy who hid his uncertainties behind a screen of aggression had grown into this belligerent man.” Whether the antagonism is abated by cunning or pacification, the nationalists insist, “Some day, this side, that side won’t matter. It will all be ours.”

In general, blurbs are the hyperbole of the marketplace–especially when so bold as to proclaim a book “an elegy for India.” But in this case, the phrase points to what separates Black River from many other police procedurals out there: Roy’s commitment to cultural critique. She never lets it get in the way of a fast-paced noir whodunnit, but instead conjures a vital parallel layer. When the detective questions the town manager about the town’s wealthy patriarchs, the manager responds that the father was regarded as a man who “for every factory he built, every company he started, he also built schools, free clinics, shelters for cows, buffaloes, and retired tonga horses.” On the other hand, the son is out posting signs at the village edge declaring “No Muslims.” The legacies of father and son bely the more subtle mystery at the heart of Roy’s noir tale: What has happened to our country in a single generation? Or as Roy puts it, “If this is normal now, what will normal be for all of us tomorrow?”

Art courtesy of the reviewer, one in a series of renditions of writers alongside their words featured on his Instagram (@joshsteinbauer).

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