Fiction Reviews

Fragments of a Paradise

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

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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Fiction Reviews

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

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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Fiction Reviews

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

May Our Joy Endure

Kev Lambert
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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Fiction Reviews

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

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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Fiction Reviews

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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Fiction Reviews

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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Fiction Reviews

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

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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Fiction Reviews

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

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?”

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Fiction Reviews

Satellite Image

Michelle Berry
Wolsak & Wynn ($19)

by Adam McPhee

Ginny and Matt, the protagonists of Michelle Berry’s new novel Satellite Image, realize it’s time to quit the city after Ginny is robbed at knife point. They buy a house after a single showing in a small town a short drive away; the house needs some work, but it’s nice enough, and it faces a ravine. Anxious to move in, Ginny looks their new house up online and sees an image showing what seems to be a body in the yard. She calls to Matt, and he confirms her impression, but suddenly the image updates, and the body is gone. Sure of what they saw but unable to find it again, they move in.

In their new hometown of Parkville—a nondescript Canadian locale perhaps geared in its genericness toward a wider American readership—Ginny and Matt host a dinner party, and the neighbors tell them that the previous owners of the house were a bit odd. The elderly couple kept to themselves and had an absurd number of packages delivered to their doorstep. Then things start getting weird: Someone is invading their yard space, moving their Halloween decorations, and eventually entering the house. At one of Ginny’s dinner parties—now a regular occurrence—this uninvited guest sneaks into the kitchen and rearranges the chicken bones on a pile of dirty dishes to leave a threatening message.

Berry withholds the solution to all the intrigue until in the book’s very last pages, a choice that doesn’t allow the protagonists much chance to absorb or react. Yet, as it keeps suggesting questions and refusing answers, Satellite Image maintains a steady propulsion that enlivens its mundane subject matter and linear narrative structure—an effect many thriller writers aspire to achieve.

Beyond its traditional genre elements, Satellite Image offers particular insight into the often-unsettling process of settling into a new home. The questions Ginny and Matt ask themselves aren’t so atypical: Why did the previous owners take all the lightbulbs but leave behind so many canned goods? What’s up with that window that doesn’t lock properly, that low overhang on the roof, the discrepancies between old photos and the way the place looks now? For Berry’s characters, these questions have consequences that may cause the heart to race, but for her readers they’re an opportunity to reflect on the sorts of things everyone encounters when they move somewhere new: the eerie idiosyncrasies of everyday life.

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Fiction Reviews

Scaffolding - The Anthropologists

Scaffolding
Lauren Elkin
Farrar, Straus and Giroux ($28)

The Anthropologists
Ayşegül Savaş
Bloomsbury ($24.99)

by Sarah Moorhouse

The question of how to take up space—a question particularly relevant in the wake of the pandemic—is the common theme of Lauren Elkin’s Scaffolding and Ayşegül Savaş’s The Anthropologists. Both novels follow couples working out how to build a life together, aware that such decisions will set the course for their future. For Aysa, the protagonist of The Anthropologists, creating a home is a structural process that makes things “sturdy.” Anna, the protagonist of Scaffolding, by contrast, is restless within the “official containers” of her marriage and driven to experiment with modes of habitation that offer more openness. Situated at similar transitional points in their lives, Elkin’s and Savaş’s characters behave very differently: Aysa is determined to create rules and habits that will help solidify the contours of her life with her husband Manu, whereas Anna seeks to dismantle her routine, bent on grasping a hazily-defined form of freedom.

Anna’s distrust of stability stems, it seems, from an event that exposed the fragility of it: she and her husband David have recently suffered a miscarriage. In the aftermath of this tragedy, Anna has been laid off from her work as a therapist and David has moved temporarily to London, leaving her alone in their Paris apartment where she obsesses over a kitchen renovation. The couple’s life together has been put on hold. What’s more, Anna is preoccupied by memories of Jonathan, her great love who left her with little explanation a decade prior. Unable to put the past to rest, Anna frets about the elements of her husband’s romantic history that she cannot be a part of, wondering: “was I shorter, taller, thinner, fatter, darker, lighter than the girls he’d been with?”

Anna worries that it is impossible “to come to each other new,” yet it’s that lack of newness that makes others interesting to her. She constantly speculates about the inner lives of those around her, from the previous occupant of her Paris apartment (whose life we learn about in a cleverly structured middle section of the novel) to the nameless man she sees at the bakery each morning. Alone in Paris, Anna befriends her neighbor Clementine and is immediately enraptured by her charisma and turbulent romantic history. Fiercely opposed to marriage and untied to a particular career, Clementine occupies what Anna sees as a “borderless realm.” By bringing her new friend into her apartment, Anna begins to test her own borders.

Clementine offers Anna an alternative to the strict parameters of marriage and a lifestyle defined through its rejection of that “border protecting a country of two.” But this supposedly radical way of living nonetheless requires its own dividing lines. We learn that Clementine has a boyfriend, and his identity—spoiler alert—is none other than the Jonathan whom Anna cannot move on from. When the two reunite, a love triangle ensues that threatens to upend Anna’s marriage as well as her fledging friendship with Clementine. It becomes clear that an affair, like marriage, revolves around the question of territory. Anna compartmentalises her actions, musing that “being with Jonathan doesn’t entirely feel like infidelity to David—in a way, it feels like fidelity to some younger version of myself.”

By plotting relationships in the language of physical spaces, Elkin erects a satisfying stylistic architecture for the novel. Infidelity, according to her model, unfolds as “a series of inoffensive doors you open, so by the time you find yourself in front of the one that counts . . . you are too far gone.” Hence the novel’s title: the scaffolding stage, during which things aren’t yet set, is preferable for Anna to the finished product, with its threat of making one stuck. (We see what that stuckness might look like when the narrative briefly switches to the lives of the previous occupants of Anna’s apartment; bored and contemplating infidelity, Florence and Henry have begun to feel that their marriage, like Florence’s wedding ring, “didn’t quite fit.”) At the end of the novel, Anna walks past the Tour Saint-Jacques and remembers how it looked when it was being restored: “I loved it better with the scaffolding,” she says, “when we didn’t know what was taking shape beneath.”

If the central anxiety of Elkin’s novel is the prospect of belonging to a place, a marriage, and a way of life, this same prospect is Savaş’s characters’ central hope. Far from lamenting an inability to come to each other “new,” Aysa and Manu feel too new. Having moved together to an unspecified city in a country far away from their respective places of origin, the couple are unmoored from customs and community. Rituals are what make a life “real” for Aysa, and the couple’s quest to buy a flat—which is told through a series of property visits—is tied up with their mission to assemble “elements with which . . . to build a home.”

The irony, of course, is that they already have one, for where Scaffolding puts monogamy to the test, The Anthropologists offers an ode to it. The couple’s relationship anchors the narrative; though Aysa does worry about the “smallness” of her life, fretting about far-away relatives and lamenting that she only has one “native friend” in the city, she and Manu occupy not only a “country of two” (to recall Clementine’s derisive assessment) but their own expansive world. Aysa remembers how, when they got together, “the world . . . stretched large enough for the two of us—a whole universe—and it left everything else behind a curtain.” Savaş maps out this “universe” with understated grace: the couple’s shared nicknames and ways of comforting one another, their liking for pastries and detective shows, their few but rich friendships.

As the novel progresses, Aysa builds a mental list of her rituals with Manu, acting as anthropologist of their two-person society. At the same time, as part of her research for a documentary she is making, she conducts a series of interviews with strangers in the park, seeking to identify and record the invisible habits that anchor people to this public space. Some come to run laps, others to play music, still others simply to breathe. As she makes progress with these two projects of filming and house-hunting, Aysa’s anxiety about her and Manu’s rootlessness begins to lessen. Beyond the eccentricities of individual routine, she realizes, “there was, also, only one way to live beneath the multitude of forms, one way forward through the fleeting hours of a day.”

Both Elkin and Savaş suggest that we leave traces of ourselves in the spaces we inhabit—we can’t help but put down roots. The longer Anna stays in Paris while David is in London, the harder it becomes for the two to understand one another. Meanwhile, Aysa’s increasing cultural belonging is bittersweet because it takes her further from her family; wearing a trench coat to greet her father when he comes to visit, she cringes when he exclaims, “you fit right in.” In a recent interview with The New Yorker, Savaş reflected on this theme of cultural belonging in the novel: the narrator of The Anthropologists, she explains, “feels torn between various ideas of home; she does not know which one she should commit to.”

While this is true, The Anthropologists is not a novel of anguish because, as the couple forge new connections, they discover a source of continual, calm joy. With Ravi, their closest friend, they bond over a shared disdain of therapy and what they see as its “decadence” (an amusing contrast with Elkin’s cast of therapists). This “was a binding element of our friendship, a way to set ourselves apart,” recalls Aysa; “we stuck to it like a motto, an animating spirit of our group.” Such in-jokes and shared tastes, rather than a place’s physical features or landmarks, create the feeling of home. And so, the couple’s search for a new place to live becomes a process of attempting to divine what the intangible details of their future lives might look like. With each visit, they try to pin down the atmosphere of the space: is it a place where they might have children? Will they argue there?

Wrapped up in this process is guesswork about the lives of the current or previous inhabitants. Entering one flat, the couple immediately sense that something is off: “Some misconfiguration, as if the rooms had been joined the wrong way.” They feel justified in this intuition when they learn that the couple who own the property have just separated. Aysa relates the incident to her grandmother, who pronounces that the place “must be teeming with them” but advises: “Let them be and get on with your own life.” This way of acknowledging the private lives of others, which overlap with us in space but remain always at a remove, emerges in Scaffolding too: Anna detects traces of her predecessors everywhere in her flat, from the wallpaper to the ancient dishwasher. With her renovation finally complete, Anna hopes for a clean slate: “there are no more ghosts here,” she decides.

If these uncanny absent presences have a particular significance in both novels, it’s that they remind us that home, our inhabitancy of a given space, is ever temporary. Steadiness ebbs and flows—we seek it, we resist it. Ultimately, it’s clear in both Scaffolding and The Anthropologists that no real equivalence exists between the brick and mortar of a house and the constant flux of human emotion. Propelled by the invisible relationships and customs that shape our days, we are all to become “ghosts”—and that’s fine.

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Fiction Reviews