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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Our Long Marvelous Dying

Anna DeForest
Little, Brown ($28)

by Xi Chen

In the opening pages of Anna DeForest’s sophomore novel Our Long Marvelous Dying, the nameless narrator, a first-year palliative care fellow at a hospital in Manhattan, speaks to a patient who claims to have psychic visions. The patient, bedbound and dying of pancreatic cancer, sees “disaster” and “catastrophe” in the world, but when asked about his future, he is afraid to look: “I want only one thing, he tells me, but I already know what it is. He wants to live forever.” But the narrator, with the aid of medical science, can envision the future too: “He will suffer a lot, and then he will die.”

This isn’t the first time DeForest has set fiction in the medical world. Their first novel, A History of Present Illness (Little, Brown, 2022), is a tale about the trials of medical school and residency told by a narrator “raised with a reverence for catastrophe.” That narrator makes a telling comment: “This fascination with disaster, both fear and fetish, I never quite outgrew. The truth is, you start to sort of wish for it.” Similarly, the narrator of Our Long Marvelous Dying trains “to be an expert in pain unto death,” surrounded at every moment by patients at the end even as the television reports pandemic deaths continuing to snowball and a cyclone hitting New York, drowning tenants in basement apartments. 

But why do some people pursue a medical subspecialty always surrounded by death? This question is often levied at people going into palliative care, which prioritizes minimizing suffering over curing disease—often but not always in patients with terminal illnesses. For many, the field of palliative care means escaping, at least to some degree, the plagues of academic medicine: elitist medical students, bigoted doctors, and detachment from the lived experiences of patients. Others may have a spiritual calling, or like DeForest’s narrator, they may be seeking spiritual enlightenment themselves. As a chaplain “from a line of monks who follow in the steps of the great Buddhist saints and meditate in the charnel grounds in India” says in the novel’s last chapter, “If you get through the morning forgetting that you will die . . . the morning has been wasted.”

While DeForest’s narrator may be looking for a deeper understanding of death, however, what they find instead is PR. During orientation, the fellows are given a lecture about “talking points, branding, an early introduction to the field’s bad rap.” The problem, the lecturer claims, “is all this talk about dying. The public does not want to hear about death. Lead with life, she says, lead with what you have to offer.” The fellows are instructed to avoid words like “Hospice,” “End-of-Life,” and “Terminal Illness,” which are “too aversively death-oriented and therefore unattractive” to patients and their families.

Medical bureaucracy’s penchant for sanitizing language and “burying the lede, elevating the plus side so patients will be willing to talk to us” is the villain of DeForest’s fiction, and it rears its ugly head throughout the book. Providers shield themselves with clinical lingo; for instance, the palliative nephrologist who observes the narrator question a patient about his metaphysical visions asks, “What was the therapeutic intent?” Many characters use gallows humor; after declaring a patient dead, a nurse practitioner laughs. “I used to have nightmares that my patients would die, she says. But now I have nightmares that they will not!”

Author Danielle Spencer, a scholar of narrative medicine, has written that the medical training tale is typically a quest narrative in which new trainees lose their idealism during the demanding rite of passage to becoming a doctor, until a “humbling and epiphanic experience about the essential humanity of doctors and patients” changes them and allows them to “practice medicine with greater empathy and caring.” DeForest’s novels are unique in the world of medical fiction in that they leave out this final redemptive step. Many patient encounters are described in Our Long Marvelous Dying, but not once does the narrator perform an action that substantially helps patients in any way. If they grow, it is not in clinical acumen but rather in helplessness and vulnerability, since patient encounters are frequently used as springboards for unearthing fragments of the narrator’s past traumas. 

Perhaps that is the point: the all-knowing physician only exists in the imagination. DeForest has no interest in showing their narrator being a healthcare hero, a figure whose illusory omnipotence comes from the assumption that clinical work is unambiguously empirical rather than interpretative. The narrator muses that if a doctor’s role is to save lives, then every life-saving act by a doctor is necessarily a failure because we all die. Medical crises frustrate patients and their families because seeing doctors appear powerless to help them can indeed feel like being abandoned by an uncaring god. 

Existential despair about this absence of authority under the weight of the medical sublime suffuses DeForest’s work. In A History of Present Illness, the narrator contemplates theodicies in the hospital and has long conversations about early Christianity with a seminarian. In Our Long Marvelous Dying, the narrator continuously ruminates on the missing male figures in their personal life: the sudden death of their bigoted father, the disappearance of their brother into drug rehab, and their increasing distance from their possibly cheating husband Eli, who is also a pastor. Where DeForest’s debut explored academic medicine’s obsession with absolution as an analog to Christianity, however, Our Long Marvelous Dying finds a religious parallel to palliative care in Buddhism and its interest in the worldly attachments responsible for human suffering.

After witnessing a series of deaths near the start of their fellowship, the narrator escapes upstate for several weekend trips to a monastery—one where nuns and monks have names like Sister Empathy and Brother Emptiness and speak only in Vietnamese. It immediately feels like home, the narrator says. Among strangers all traumatized by recent losses, the narrator can shake the role of doctor and become an anonymous listener in communion with others. One visitor has lost his son to suicide; another reveals that she’s been diagnosed with cancer and is awaiting surgery. When it’s the narrator’s turn to unload, they simply state, “I am taking a break from work.”

In an essay titled “Narrative Medicine and Negative Capability,” physician-writer Terence Holt argues that the dominant mode of public medical writing has been confessional: Atul Gawande admitting he botched a procedure in The New Yorker in 2011, for example, or Jerome Groopman atoning for missing a fatal diagnosis in her 2007 book How Doctors Think. Here, DeForest’s narrator refuses to confess. One could read this as evidence that the narrator has been rendered apathetic by their work, or worse, that they’re a parasite, only interested in collecting other people’s stories. Even when seeing a therapist, the narrator admits that they “avoided any self-disclosures; I turned all of our talks onto him . . . his time in finance, brief work as a Baptist pastor.”  But the reader has a different relationship with the narrator, who is constantly revealing aspects of their personal lives to us, including the “same tearing pain in the chest” that comes with every patient’s death. So, why doesn’t the doctor weep?

On their first day working in a clinic outside the hospital, the narrator meets a patient known as a “splitter,” a person whose judgments fall into stark binaries of good and evil. “I tend to fall on splitters’ good sides,” the narrator notes, “a tendency that points to something I know is wrong with my character: I allow too much.” The splitter has been treating her lung cancer with essential oils, and at a later visit reveals that she’s an anti-vaxxer, an anti-masker, a chem-trail believer, and a 9/11 truther. The narrator begins to “listen with two ears, two minds, one for what is real and one for what is true.” They become afraid of the splitter, to the point of canceling upcoming appointments. “She has shown me something strange inside of me,” the narrator explains, “a wound shaped like distrust and disgust and familiarity.”

Later, when the narrator hears that the splitter has died, they hardly seem fazed at all. This negative capability, or the ability to tolerate an ego divided by uncertainty, is the true endgame for both medical training and writing: It’s a way of being that allows humans to endure the daily assault of death, be it in our families, in the news, or in the dying person who needs care if you’re a medical professional—all while thinking about one’s own life and past traumas without breaking down. DeForest aims to cultivate this negative capability in the reader through their driven, elliptical prose, which even within one paragraph can shift from the practical details of organ donation to the emotional resonance of childhood trauma and calls to family members informing them of their loved one’s death. Among the most risk-taking American physician-writers working today, DeForest nimbly toes the line between fact and fiction until we find some footing in our mortality.

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Until August

Gabriel García Márquez
Translated by Anne McLean
Knopf ($22)

by Emil Siekkinen

Until August, a book often described as Gabriel García Márquez’s “lost novel,” was published this past March, an instant bestseller in countries around the world. The novel was never lost, however; it was abandoned by the author. The quality of the text has thus been debated—as it should be—but its mere presence in a career that includes international fame for the 1967 novel One Hundred Years of Solitude and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982 surely calls readers to ponder both its story and its backstory. 

García Márquez (1927-2014) was afflicted by dementia during his final years, and eventually he couldn’t recognize what he himself had written. The author’s last major effort turned out to be the 2002 autobiography Living to Tell the Tale, which he had intended to be the first in a trilogy, as it didn’t even reach the middle of his life. The last book of fiction he saw to publication in his lifetime was the 2005 novella Memories of My Melancholy Whores.

Work on that novella led García Márquez to shelve a longer, more ambitious novel he had begun; already feeling the effects of dementia, he felt it wasn’t cohering. He stated that the unfinished text should never be published, and actually that it should be destroyed. His sons, however, went against their father’s wishes in the name of posterity; drafts, notes, and chapter fragments, spread over 769 pages, ended up in an archive—the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin—where the material was given the name “We’ll see each other in August.”

Nearly ten years later, the author’s sons decided to betray their father once again: Believing the unfinished text contained some noteworthy literary achievements, they tasked editor Cristóbal Pera, who had worked on Living to Tell the Tale, with compiling a publishable narrative from the archived material. Until August was released on what would have been the author’s 97th birthday, March 6, 2024, nearly ten years after his passing.

Until August is certainly recognizable to those who know the Colombian author’s works. The narrative bears resemblance to the stories in Strange Pilgrims (1992), written in the 1970s and 1980s, and to Memories of My Melancholy Whores. But while these fictions were authored by a master in complete control of his craft, Until August is uneven. At times, the book offers outstanding sentences and surroundings that live and breathe:

The tumultuous market bazaars, which she’d claimed as her own since she was a little girl and where just the previous week she had been shopping with her daughter without the slightest fear, made her shudder as if she were in the streets of Calcutta, where gangs of garbage collectors used sticks to hit the bodies lying on the sidewalks at dawn, to find out which ones were sleeping and which were dead.

Likewise, the protagonist, Ana Magdalena Bach, is filled with the contradictions of being human; as one example, she yearns for yearly one-night stands on the island where her mother is buried, yet these encounters bring not only pleasure, but also anger, grief, and confusion. Elsewhere, however, the text is thinner and unpolished, and the abrupt ending confirms that Until August is definitely an unfinished piece of fiction. The theme might be love—something his sons argue is his main subject—or it might be solitude, which García Márquez himself claimed was his writing’s main preoccupation.

So is the book worth the betrayal? Until August doesn’t display a master in his prime, but it does offer a master class in how a narrative is composed: We watch as García Márquez gives up and continues, fails and succeeds. Here he struggles with a murky passage; there he writes a sentence as bright as the sun. These are moments in a writer’s life that the reading public rarely sees.

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To Hell with Poets

Baqytgul Sarmekova
Translated by Mirgul Kali
Tilted Axis Press (£12.99)

by Timothy Walsh

I first encountered Baqytgul Sarmekova’s stories last spring while driving with a friend across the endless steppe in southeastern Kazakhstan. Another friend had sent me a story by Sarmekova titled “The Black Colt,” and as we sped by vast herds of sheep and horses, usually tended by a lone “cowboy” on a horse, I read the story on my phone and was utterly charmed. Sarmekova’s acid-tongued narrator, bumptious wit, dark humor, and adroit compression made me realize at once that this was something new in Kazakh literature.

As we drove through an aul (village) near the border with Kyrgyzstan, the setting perfectly evoked Sarmekova’s story: villagers on horseback or guiding donkey carts hauling loads of dried dung past the occasional gleaming Mercedes. The old mosque and the houses where horses, cows, and donkeys grazed in the yards looked like a scene from centuries past—except for the telephone poles and power lines and a smattering of satellite dishes. It is this uneasy juxtaposition of old and new, tradition and modernity, that Sarmekova dissects in her stories.

Fortunately, a collection of Sarmekova’s stories, To Hell with Poets, is now available in an adroit and nimble first English translation by Mirgul Kali. Kali foregoes footnotes or a glossary, but smartly retains a smattering of Kazakh words that are understandable in context and impart an authentic seasoning. Her translation won a 2022 Pen/ Heim Award, which paved the way for this publication by a notable UK-based small press.

Like “The Black Colt,” each of the twenty stories in To Hell with Poets is highly compressed, distilled like cask-strength Scotch, and all the stories pack a wallop far beyond their weight class. In “The Brown House with the White Zhiguli,” we witness the downfall of a once-proud man and the distinctive house that gives him status as his n’er-do-well son arrives on the scene with disastrous consequences. In “One-Day Marriage,” a mother-and-daughter pair of grifters travel from aul to aul bilking unsuspecting families by arranging sham marriages. In “Moldir,” a vain and urbanized woman recounts a visit to her rural aul for a high school reunion, determined that her friends would see “how removed I’d been from shabby aul life since I moved to the city.” In a flashback during a pause in the conversation, we learn of the tragic fate of Moldir, who was bullied and traumatized by the remorseless narrator. “Dognity” is an unforgettably powerful story narrated by a dog. It is not a comedic tale, but a harrowing four-page noir that evokes a sordid human web of lust, murder, and treachery.

Sarmekova’s prose is direct and unadorned. Her descriptions are acid-etched, her imagery often startlingly apt. She describes a bus pulling into town: “Dragging its belly across the ground, the groaning old bus had finally reached the bazaar at the edge of the city and spat out its passengers.” Elsewhere, a wedding guest’s dress is “so tight that her breasts spilled over the top like swollen, over-proofed dough.” In “Monica,” a woman returns to her native aul and the grave of her brother, which becomes an unwanted reunion with a devoted, simple-minded old woman. Sarmekova sets the scene deftly:

Soon, the yellowish, moss-grown roofs tucked between drab colored hills overgrown with squat tamarisk bushes came into view. The squalid aul looked like a sloppy woman’s kitchen. The graveyard, which used to be nestled at the base of the hills, now sprawled out to the edge of the main road. A march of corpses, I thought to myself.

The stories in To Hell with Poets are unrelentingly bleak.  The characters usually die or experience various sorts of horrible or humiliating situations with all their hopes and dreams dashed. Yet Sarmekova’s authorial voice narrates black comedy with such verve and relish the reader can’t help but feel her pure joy in the act of storytelling, and this joy shines through, almost balancing the tragic outcomes of the characters.

Here is the description of Zharbagul in “The Black Colt,” an unlikely bride-to-be:

Before long, my grandfather returned with Zharbagul, whose bucket-shaped head bobbed up and down in his sidecar as they rode along the bumpy road. This was the first time we had ever met our aunty whose huge head, dark, rough, trowel-shaped face, and stumpy legs were a strange match with her thin pigtails, wire earrings, and lacy, ruffled dress.

Alas, on the next page, Zharbagul is jilted by death as the hapless Turar

stepped carelessly on the broken end of a downed power line and died, his body burned to a crisp. The adults who had gone to look at his body said, “He was grinning ear to ear when he passed on to the Great Beyond.” No one knew if he was beaming at the thought of his beloved Zharbagul or grimacing in pain when the fatal charge struck.

Mercifully, there are a few nostalgic tales focusing on two children growing up in a rural aul that offer some respite—Sarmekova likely sensed the need for a slow movement within her Breugelesque symphony—but mostly the stories of To Hell with Poets carry the reader like a carnival ride, evoking fear and delight simultaneously. The title story focuses on a love-sick would-be poet and a gray-haired mentor who seduces her after thundering out a “long-winded epic” at a wedding reception. In Kazakhstan, poets and poet-singers (akyn, zhirau and sal-seri) are still revered as cultural treasures, so the title To Hell with Poets is provocative—as if Sarmekova is throwing down the gauntlet with these bristling stories that careen across the landscape like tornadoes.

Sarmekova comes from Atyrau in western Kazakhstan on the shores of the Caspian Sea, far from the cultural centers of Almaty and Astana—which perhaps partly explains her originality. Atyrau also has the distinction of being where the Ural River empties into the Caspian—the Ural being the traditional dividing line between Europe and Asia. The city is, in fact, bisected by the Ural, so Sarmekova is from a place that has one foot in Europe and one in Asia, which seems fitting given the between-worlds ethos of so many of her stories.

Since the breakup of the Soviet Union thirty years ago, the literary world in Kazakhstan has evolved, largely jettisoning Socialist Realism and its nation-building celebratory novels in favor of forms that encompass the complexities of an ancient nomadic culture rudely wrenched against its will into the labyrinth of the modern, commercialized, mechanized world. Literature in Kazakhstan today is thriving, but so far only a handful of works have trickled out in English translation, most notably Talasbek Asemkulov’s masterpiece, A Life at Noon, Didar Amantay’s Selected Works, and a pioneering anthology, Amanat: Women’s Writing from Kazakhstan. One can only hope there is more on the horizon—and particularly one wonders what will come next from Sarmekova.

Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024

Brotherless Night

V. V. Ganeshananthan
Random House ($18)

by Ann Klefstad

V. V. Ganeshananthan’s 2023 novel Brotherless Night, a product of long and careful research and an amazing feat of empathic imagination at once, is now out in paperback, and has won both the Carol Shields Prize and the Women’s Prize for Fiction on its journey. The book is narrated by Sashikala Kulenthiren, a young girl living in the Tamil community of Jaffna in northern Sri Lanka. Sashi is driven to become a doctor like her grandfather, and is a serious and formidable student, pushing through initial failure and continuing despite the gradual crumbling of her community under the stresses of conflict. The successive losses of her four brothers, however, form the frame of the story.

In response to violent repression of Tamils (who are Hindu) by the Sri Lankan government (who represent the majority Sinhalese Buddhists), a number of Tamil militant groups form, including the Tamil Tigers. The past cruelties of the Sinhalese government gradually come to light through the screen of a happy family’s life; these events arise in the narrative like the smoke of distant fires, until the flames come to engulf the story entirely.

K, a neighbor boy, becomes Sashi’s most resonant attachment, neither a lover nor merely a friend. His anonymity throughout the book—he is always only K—feels like a reinforcement of the distance that ideology creates, as he becomes central to the Tigers’ struggle and recruits a reluctant Sashi to work at a field hospital. In a sign of foreboding, her first patient is one of her brothers; gradually all circumstances of life in Jaffna are enmeshed in the struggle, and violence and death are the price of refusal to participate.

Sashi is never a true believer but rather a faithful observer, clear-eyed and dispassionate in her account, even though heartrending losses mount. The Tigers are young men she knows; they are also killers of her teacher, of loved ones. Yet the government officials who have created the climate of violence are also people known to her, while Sinhalese neighbors help Sashi and her mother escape death at the hands of government soldiers. Nothing is black and white except the tragedies of violence.

Anjali Premachandran, Sashi’s teacher at her medical school, becomes a key figure in the novel; a researcher and reporter of events, she is drawn from an actual person, also a professor of anatomy at the medical school in Jaffna. Rajani Thiranagama was one of the authors of The Broken Palmyra, an account of the Sri Lankan civil war written by four Tamil professors comprising the University Teachers for Human Rights (Jaffna). They took on the mission of documenting human rights violations during the war no matter who committed them, developing research techniques that prioritized fact over passion. Ganeshananthan remarked in a January 2023 essay in LitHub, “Through reading their work, I came to believe that meaningful representation required self-critique. They wrote especially movingly and analytically about how the Tigers, a fascist movement, had arisen from Tamil society.”

Thiranagama was killed because of her truth-telling, but despite its roots in a harrowing and complicated real-world struggle, Brotherless Night does not over-explain but instead lets events simply unfold. Ganeshananthan’s prose, in fact, continually suggests the refusal of real life to conform itself to a Procrustean bed of ideologies. A scene in which a woman who had been raped by soldiers detonates a suicide bomb in a government office offers a brutal example: “The first small, potent blast caught her and the man together, and with her right arm gone and his left leg severed beneath the knee, they looked like one person, dancing. Her hair fell out of its pins into his open mouth.”

Having lived with the history of her country’s nearly three-decade civil war, Ganeshananthan has first experienced and then created a realm in which facile judgments are impossible. Brotherless Night is a testament to the relentless need for understanding tragedy through story.

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Walk the Darkness Down

Daniel Magariel
Bloomsbury ($27.99)

by Jonathan Fletcher

Daniel Magariel’s latest novel, Walk the Darkness Down, immerses readers into the troubled marriage of Les, a commercial fisherman, and Marlene, a frustrated homemaker. Marlene and Les have endured the worst tragedy conceivable—the death of a child—and though they remained together, their relationship (less a marriage than the inevitable conclusion of a long past romance) is as turbulent as the seas to which Les escapes in an effort to avoid the difficult conversation he and Marlene have needed to have for years.

With observations as insightful as they are sonically pleasing (“Sex has become primitive to him, violent, as grisly as a knifing”), Magariel never strays into the didactic, and the dialogue is equally crisp and effective:

I’m not moving down there. The crew needs me. I have a responsibility to them.
And what about to me?
They’re family.
Family?
Family.

Magariel also judiciously treats readers to purposeful, understated insights. At the end of the first chapter, Marlene clumsily fights Les, only to end up face down on the street in front of their apartment:

For a moment she believes he might somehow conjure Angie by uttering her name, which he’s refused to do for two years now. For a moment, turning her eyes to the top of the stairs, to all the light pouring out of their apartment, she stakes her life on the doorway not being empty.    

A story about two people whose life together has been mostly a life apart, Walk the Darkness Down relies on scenes in which such apartness is not only felt but explicit. Marlene finds an unusual hobby of sorts in befriending local sex workers from The Villas, a defunct motel that since essentially serves as a brothel, and taking them home to care for them: “She never entered the motel, never even pulled up to the lobby, and never brought home the same woman twice.” The arrangement is generally reciprocal: “On nights like these Marlene sees herself as a kind of archaeologist, exhuming the lives of others. As Marlene works, the woman she picked up an hour ago is remade into a girl.” Though Marlene’s “hobby” may not be entirely altruistic, her motives are sympathetic: In helping care for the sex workers, Marlene can feel she is symbolically saving her and Les’s late daughter Angie. Yet when Marlene is alone, this indirect salvation is not enough—it will take more than good deeds to heal. It will also take the understanding and involvement of Marlene’s detached husband—a reality not lost on Marlene as she cuddles one of the women at the end of the second chapter.

Magariel’s settings are equally important in establishing the distance between Marlene and Les. Eschewing lengthy and elaborate descriptions of the coastal town in which the couple lives and life at sea, Magariel instead treats the reader to dynamic and symbolically loaded sequences. At one point, Les looks out on the Atlantic Ocean from the trawler he’s stationed on, taking in the unfathomable scale and size of the sea and the life within it:

Out here bait balls the size of football fields appear from nowhere, the water surface suddenly sparkling with tens of thousands of glinting fish. Biblical weather arrives in full portent. On clear days, when the faint curve of the planet is the only delineation of sky and sea, thoughts warp toward the terrors of myth. Les might imagine a skyscraper tsunami lifting out of the horizon. Or in the inscrutable white of fog, the waters haunted and the hazy sun a second moon, the boat might steam into the open mouth of an awakened leviathan.

At times the environment in Walk the Darkness Down is reported or implicit within the plot. Josie, the latest sex worker taken in by Marlene, shares a news story about horseshoe crabs spawning early in the area, a moving echo of her own urgent situation:

They came up out of the ocean, laying their eggs way before they were supposed to, Josie says. But the awful thing is that the sand was too cold to bury them. So they just left them there. Bill [Josie’s pimp] calls it the tooth and claw, same with the birds, times when the human shine rubs away and the world becomes just a giant thing eating itself, one town at time, one species, one industry, one mother—she pauses—one child.

Besides obviously reflecting Marlene’s and Les’s loss, Josie’s reportage also serves as a tonal contrast to Les’s scene of contemplation on the trawler. Though foreshadowing impending danger, such a scene also suggests the possibility of hope—a possibility only achievable through cooperation and forgiveness. Magariel’s novel doesn’t shy away from sad, even tragic, truths, but also gives the reader a more positive reality to contemplate.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024

Praiseworthy

Alexis Wright
New Directions ($22.95)

by Simon Webster

In the opening pages of Praiseworthy, the latest novel by Australian author Alexis Wright, we meet Cause Man Steel, a raving dreamer performing his anxieties for the “clergy-oriented” people of the titular town. Cause—variously referred to as Widespread, for the breadth of his ideas, and Planet, for their cosmic nature—is a step ahead of the game. These are “cataclysmic times,” he preaches, but Praiseworthy people are survivors with “a sovereign world view.” The choir has heard this one before, but Cause is offering more than survival; he promises the townspeople they will “ride straight through the century on the back of the burning planet” and live to tell the tale.

The catastrophe that sets Cause in motion is a haze “full of broken ancestors breathing . . . virus air.” As the haze settles over Praiseworthy, the townspeople try everything to banish it:  They punch at it, play it Dvořák and Bach, lobby for its Constitutional exclusion. They curse it. They build a giant hologram scarecrow. They appeal to God and to the white government—Hail Marys and a Hail Mary. Resigned to its permanence, they promote it as a tourist attraction.

Eventually, the haze splits, metastasizing in the lungs of Ice Pick, the town’s mayor—a “rhapsodically self-proclaimed king of orators.” Possessed by the haze, Ice becomes “obsessed by whiteness”—his skin, even his eyeballs, turn white, and he covers his body with a “labyrinth of Casper the Ghost tattoos.” Ice warns his constituents that government help (in the form of explosives to blow up the haze) will never arrive if they “do not assimilate and be white,” and—with an eye on the upcoming election—promises to build “the new Praiseworthy into an all-bustling, all-glitter . . . Aboriginal world metropolis.”

But if Ice is a man of words, Cause is a man of action. Knowing that survival has always been an economic question, he looks backwards to look forwards, and decides to bet on donkeys; when global transportation systems collapse, he’ll be there with his carbon-neutral transport conglomerate. But his fleet needs a lodestar, a “Jesus donkey . . . the colour of an Apollo spaceship,” as was revealed to him in a dream. Cause feels called to greatness, like Genghis Khan, and for a few hundred pages, we follow him on his picaresque journey: Don Quixote in search of his ass.

It’s the family, of course, that suffers. Cause’s wife, Dance, has dreams too, and no “desire for being a stand-in for [him] as the social pariah of the community.” Their eldest son, Aboriginal Sovereignty—named for the words Cause most liked saying—is a seventeen-year-old amateur boxer and dancer; Tommyhawk, their youngest at eight, believes that Aboriginal parents are heartless and that all Aboriginal men are pedophiles—and acts accordingly. When his brother falls in love with his promise wife, who is only fifteen, Tommyhawk reports him, and Aboriginal Sovereignty is arrested for raping a minor.

Epic in scope, Praiseworthy is split into ten sections. The second opens with Aboriginal Sovereignty walking into the sea—“flat out disappearing into the mighty shark-infested ocean”—and continues for over a hundred pages as Tommyhawk, hiding nearby in a whale skeleton and eating a bag of chips, impatiently wills his brother on, a harrowing inversion of the story of Cain and Abel. Suicide by drowning is common in Praiseworthy, especially among the kids: “It was like a pied piper thing, somebody’s spirit coming up from the sea at night and talking rubbish to those children.” The sea has become a tomb, and fishermen involuntary “corpse hunters.” Shouldering Ecclesiastical pain, the people of Praiseworthy know that “wave after wave of their eternal tides of grief [will] end up plonking Aboriginal Sovereignty right back in the midst of the breathing heart and soul of the traditional country.”

Alexis Wright is a member of the Waanyi nation of the southern highlands of the Gulf of Carpentaria; she grew up in Cloncurry, a small town in northwestern Queensland about a thousand miles from the capital. She published her first novel in 1997 and in the quarter-century since has written furiously about violence, cruelty, injustice, and hopelessness in a humane, generous, and hopeful manner. As in her other works, church and state loom large in Praiseworthy, and are cast against the permanence of country. There are “sixty thousand lightning bolts in every dry storm,” an allusion to the “sixty thousand year plus cultural history of Aboriginal survival.” At a slight breeze, the churches of Praiseworthy topple “like a line of dominoes.”

In all of Wright’s books, language does power’s bidding. Praiseworthy people use “God words for renovating their Dreamtime cathedrals” and know “being literate in government affirmative action jargon talk” is essential. The colonial “gaol” is retained, and signs outlining the prohibition of liquor, pornography, and pedophiles in Praiseworthy are written in English—a language ignored by the old fishing people. Yet in the face of country, language recedes:

The old men and women eternally searching for the return of Aboriginal Sovereignty were bequeathed to nothingness, other than to a consciousness of interconnectedness where relatives were all life, and further related to ancestral creators, and further related back into deep time, and across all country places of land, sea, and skies.

The impassiveness of country is total. The seagulls “never once landed on any of these signs . . . nor had a single lizard, ant, or any other animal like a snake bothered twisting itself around a government signpost.” A few pages later, thunder roars, and forks of lightening “hit every single one of the signs . . . like a circle of firecrackers lit up on a cake.”

Still, language is persistent, and in Ice Pick, word becomes flesh. “See this piece of paper? That’s me . . . You are looking at the bodily incarnate of this piece of paper. I am the Commonwealth Government of Australia’s forward plan for Praiseworthy.” For Ice, assimilation is the key, and he implores his constituents to leave grief behind and embrace figures, multiplication, economics; follow him into the future and he will “make the ark pure again.” Aboriginal Sovereignty is the ultimate target:

He was being personified by the imagination of the nation-state, the dull dirty lens of Australian folk law. Yep! He was the ethnological story. He fed the hunger. Fattened the mudslinger’s narrative of racial vilification. He was the paedophile savage. You know what happens when you throw enough mud? Hallelujah! . . . The national narrative strengthened at the total cost of billions of dollars to hold back the tide of black justice through a simple illusion of fear, the dreaded uprising of the soul, the spirit of black savages attacking Australian domesticity. Nothingness achieved again, and again. Where was the light? Where was the flame to see the way?

Praiseworthy, a big novel in every sense, ranges from deep in the sea to the “dusty rivers of stars in the Milky Way” as well as across time and “through all the known spatial realities.” There are references to Borges and Calvino, Kafka and Krasznahorkai, as well as to a Waanyi language dictionary, Livy’s History of Rome, the operas of Belshazzar and Offenbach, Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, Donne and Shakespeare, Greek, Chinese, and Japanese mythologies, pop culture high and low, various oral traditions, and the Bible, again and again. It’s not tidy, and that’s the point—because it contains all of country, the “atmosphere, cosmos, stars, heavens, lands, seas, flora and fauna,” this latest outing from an exemplary Australian writer refutes domesticity and affirms sovereignty unapologetically. 

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024

Mother Howl

Craig Clavenger
Datura Books/Angry Robot Books ($17.99)

by Gavin Pate

It’s been eighteen years since Craig Clevenger’s previous novel, and his fans have long wondered if the next book would inhabit the same sinister world of broken criminals and slippery identities as his earlier works. With the release of Mother Howl, the answer is yes, and then some. The most ambitious of his three books, Mother Howl has a wider scope and takes more risks; the novel has equal parts gritty realism and swaths of the fantastic. It’s a crime story and a social commentary at once, a book unafraid to be philosophical about humanity’s purpose on Earth and how we must learn to deal with our pasts if we want to fulfill it.

Lyle Edison, the son of a serial killer, changed his name years ago to escape his father’s crimes; now, he is on the cusp of a new marriage and baby. Problem is, he’s trying to navigate The System: the hoops he must jump through while on probation and the malicious officials determined to reduce him to their shuffling paperwork. All the while, he worries someone will discover who he really is. Lyle’s predicament allows Clevenger to dive into the modern noir underworld of mandatory recovery groups and piss-tests, hard-screw probation officers, tenuous employment, and piles of mounting bills. The author carefully balances Lyle’s desire to do right by his new family and his urge to vanish again, though when the book begins, it is clear there is nowhere left for Lyle to hide.

While Lyle’s story is the dominant narrative, it is the mysterious character of Icarus who pushes Lyle from the shadows and forces him to confront his past. Icarus is a man on a mission, sent by a strange entity he calls the Mother Howl. Early in the novel, Icarus explains to a psychiatrist:

Captain, me and my crew, we cooled the earth. I’ve crumpled suns in my bare fist. Made those black hole things, pockets of space so dark they bend math. I watched you monkeys climb down from the trees, sprout thumbs and figure how to sharpen sticks so’s to roast marshmallows in front of cave paintings. And I’m just one of the clean-up guys. A clock puncher.

Is this the story of a fallen angel or another street-smart schizophrenic cut loose in the world? Clevenger impressively straddles these possibilities and keeps the reader as uncertain about Icarus’s identity as the other characters are.

The intertwined stories make for a slow burn, but in the process, Clevenger delivers a series of thoughtful set pieces that allow his themes of memory, identity, and survival to develop through the material stresses of society’s forgotten and ignored. In vivid prose that defies the traditionally curt style of the crime fiction genre, Clevenger carries the story along with powerful recurring images and poignant dialogue. Mother Howl might test the patience of those who like their noir shackled to reality and all their questions neatly answered, and some might find the distribution between Icarus and Lyle a bit uneven, but for those who read to the end, the rewards are plentiful— especially in the last fifty pages, where two expert scenes (one with Lyle and one with Icarus) tie together the story’s looming questions and reveal both the horror and the hope at its center.

As for the Mother Howl—the godlike transmission running like static through the world—the book will make you wonder if you’re tuned to it, and if not, what you’re missing, or what you’ve been refusing to hear. If Mother Howl tells us anything, it’s the importance of paying attention to the here and now.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2023-2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024

Loot

Tania James
Knopf ($28)

by Mukund Belliappa

Tania James’s third novel Loot recalls historian Marc Bloch’s observation that it is impossible to understand the past without being interested in the present. However, in the case of Tipu Sultan—the 18th-century Anglophobic South Indian ruler of the kingdom of Mysore whose reign is the setting for much of Loot—the past seems self-explanatory: It is laid out in propagandist colonial-era English tomes and in treasures carted away by the victorious British, some of which are still on display behind plexiglass. To evaluate that history through the lens of the present, though, one has to wade through a variety of opinions. Was Tipu an early “freedom-fighter,” as held by many postcolonial liberal and secular thinkers? Was he a modernizer because he developed rocket technology that would inspire William Congreve, started a silk industry, and embraced trade? Or was he just a garden-variety Islamist despot, as some contemporary Hindus think, if only because he is a hero to the Muslims of South Asia?

In the Western world, Tipu’s reputation as the latter (based mainly on his harsh treatment of British prisoners) had been well established long before his end. As the kind of bloodthirsty figure the British needed to depict their colonial expansion as a heroic endeavor, Tipu (aka Teepoo, Tipoo, Tippoo Sahib, Tipu Saeb, etc.) appeared as a bogeyman for a century and a half in English fiction, plays, travelogues, and tales of colonial derring-do. Loot, a thoughtful and obviously well-researched historical novel, offers a corrective of sorts.

James threads her narrative around the fictional life of a real toy. Known as “Tipu’s tiger,” this life-sized, crudely built, automaton depicting a tiger devouring a red-uniformed English soldier was discovered in Tipu’s palace—the perfect loot to showcase his hatred of the English. European technicians in India, to flatter their royal employers, tended to showcase their virtuosity by putting together eccentric and eye-catching doodads rather than useful machinery. The protagonist of Loot is a young Muslim man named Abbas, a talented toymaker apprenticed to the French clockmaker named Lucien, who has been commissioned by Tipu to produce the mechanical wonder.

The first half of Loot, set in Tipu’s capital fortress of Srirangapatna in the 1790s, sympathetically shows a beleaguered ruler in the waning years of his reign. Dealing with both the unreasonable demands of Governor-General Richard Wellesley (the architect of British expansion Tipu calls a “walking hemorrhoid”) and with spies deployed by a rival chieftain, the Maratha Nana Phadnavis (aka the “termite”), Tipu seems resigned to a final showdown. Under the flimsiest of pretexts—two centuries later, historians would compare them to those under which the U.S. invaded Iraq—Wellesley launches a massive British attack against Mysore, and among the spoils of eventual victory for the British is Tipu’s tiger; it is chosen by Colonel Horace Selwyn, but he soon dies of dysentery, so his aide, a sepoy named Rangappa Rao, carries the Colonel’s remains and his possessions, including the life-sized toy, to the Colonel’s widow in England.

Four characters make it out of the carnage of Tipu’s capital to Europe and to the second phase of Loot. Lucien simply returns to Rouen to run his watch and clock repair shop. Abbas escapes India as an assistant to a ship’s carpenter and eventually makes his way to Lucien’s shop, which is being run by a half-Indian girl named Jehane—the third person to survive the razing of Tipu’s capital—after Lucien’s death. Abbas and Jehane hatch a plan to travel to Mrs. Selwyn’s castle in England, hoping to exchange some assorted memorabilia for Tipu’s tiger; the high-society widow has meanwhile been garnering attention by showing off the automaton. In England, Abbas and Jehane immediately run afoul of Rum, who is Mrs. Selwyn’s “personal secretary and land agent,” as well as her controlling lover and the fourth person to have escaped Srirangapatna—though unlike the other three, he takes great joy in Tipu’s demise.

It turns out we have met Rum before, briefly, at the “prize” ceremony after Tipu’s defeat, when he was introduced as a “sepoy with the Madras Infantry.” Rum is the nickname of Rangappa Rao. He is a central figure in the final sections of the novel set at Cloverpoint Castle, Mrs. Selwyn’s sprawling country home (which of course, because she is a collector, has a museum-like vastness, with “no humble rooms”). To find the former lowly sepoy as the virtual Lord of the Manor is puzzling, though James hurriedly fills in how Rum ended up as a sepoy: His parents, officials of a minor kingdom that was brutally subdued by Tipu’s father Haider Ali, were killed during the purge after the subjugation, forcing him to seek employment with the East India Company. Still, a reader might find his current station implausible.

It does not take much to realize that Rum is a surrogate for a constituency of Tipu’s legacy that Loot, until this point, has largely ignored: the mainly Hindu and Christian peoples of South India who bore the brunt (and who, if one reads the screeds of present-day right-wing Hindus, still bear scars) of Tipu’s self-aggrandizement. Haider Ali and Tipu Sultan were ferocious conquerors; many of the regions they conquered had grown increasingly fragmented under effete rulers; and the English were sneaking around everywhere, playing one against the other. The balance James is able to strike with her characterization of Tipu and his era in the first part of Loot proves elusive in the novel’s post-Tipu world. Rum is an attempt to restore that balance, but he seems like an afterthought, a band-aid.

Though set in an entirely different context, James’s previous novel, The Tusk That Did the Damage (Knopf, 2015), tackled a parallel predicament with greater success. The central themes of Tusk are elephant poaching and conservation, and one of its principal narrators is a tribal member from whose ranks most elephant poachers come. For centuries, those poachers derived their livelihoods from a forest which is now a “Wildlife Park,” where picking up a “finger length of firewood” is suddenly a serious offense; an equally crucial second narrator is a filmmaker who is sympathetic to conservation. Loot, however, has a single narrator, and its post-Tipu pages are devoted only to the perspectives of Tipu loyalists, an imbalance in the world James has created.

Unfortunately, Loot does not recover from Rum’s unconvincing rise to prominence, although it does hint at the possibility of happy endings. Mrs. Selwyn, who has artistic aspirations of her own, has written a romantic novel and by showing sympathy for it, Jehane is able to win the widow’s confidence; although she and Abbas return to Rouen without Tipu’s tiger, they start an aspirational boutique in a Brooklynesque setting, and even hire Rum as their bookkeeper. “People are so opinionated about endings,” Mrs. Selwyn had worried after giving Jehane her manuscript. In this ending to Loot, in the rapprochement between Rum and the Tipu loyalists, there is perhaps the wishful and wistful hope of Hindu-Muslim reconciliation in a foreign land.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2023-2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024

The House on Via Gemito

Domenico Starnone
Translated by Oonagh Stransky
Europa Editions ($27)

by William Braun

Domenico Starnone’s previously translated novels are psychological studies of repressed father-figures that move at thriller-like speed. In Trust (Europa Editions, 2021), for example, Pietro plays a model father and husband, but only because an ex-girlfriend threatens to reveal an incriminating secret. Trick (Europa Editions, 2018), alternatively, is about a grandfather who is the antithesis of grandfatherly: Daniele, a self-obsessed artist who resents his grandson.

The House on Via Gemito covers similar material, though it is longer and looser than those previous books, and its structure is more triptych than thriller. Supposedly fiction, the novel focuses on a writer named Dominico who is haunted by the “energetic cascade” of his father Federico’s lies, tall tales, and misogynistic slurs. Federico works for the railroad but believes he’s an artistic genius whose “destiny” is continually sabotaged by various “shitheads” and “ball busters”; these include other painters, art critics, and, most significantly, Domenico’s mother, Rusinè. (Starnone’s real-life father, also named Federico, was a minor post-war Italian painter.)

In the first section, “The Peacock,” Domenico follows his younger self, aged four or five, as he walks down a hallway to get his father’s cigarettes. Behind him, his father abuses his mother, “accusing her about the money” and “offending [her] relatives.” This recollection, however, is far from linear; Domenico remembers other incidents at almost every step. In one, his father outsmarts railroad officials to secure company housing for his family. In another, his father boasts about the “great talents” that made him a successful set designer after World War II, praised by American GIs and Hollywood starlets. Yet Domenico keeps returning to that hallway, a memory so urgent and painful that some fifty years later, he still slips into the present tense: “I just heard [my father] yell … and it gave me a start; he’s yelling now; he’s about to yell.”

The centerpiece of Via Gemito is its second section, “The Boy Pouring Water.” Domenico—aged maybe ten—poses for his father, kneeling “in pain” and pretending to pour water into a construction worker’s cup. Meanwhile, his father continues “to paint and talk about himself.” (A detail from the author’s real-life father’s painting, “The Drinkers,” appears on the novel’s dust jacket.) Federico’s family, in other words, pays the price for Federico’s artistic narcissism. Domenico certainly does: In this memory, as in many others, he would rather suffer than “give [his father] any reasons for blaming” him. But also Rusinè: Federico makes her “live … without any great expressions of joy,” and as the novel’s third and final section shows, she downplays a major illness until it’s too late.

Bitterness and futility, not fame and glory, become Federico’s legacies. In one of his frequent asides, Domenico looks at some of his father’s paintings of Rusinè and her family and thinks:

While my memories of them may have been dull, they were still more intense than what the reliable seismograph of art had been able to register … Much more sensitive tools and sophisticated techniques are needed to capture that cluster of voices, gestures, pulsations, instance of illness and health, hiccups, belly laughs, and groans of pain that we conventionally refer to as individual.

Here Domenico doesn’t just question whether his father’s achievements are worth the damage he caused, he questions the very idea of mimetic art—that it captures the reality of physical presence. “I was trying to understand how life decays when we’re overpowered by an obsession for results,” Domenico concludes.

Of course, Starnone does not reject art or craft; anyone who has read his previous novels knows they’re a testament to plot and sentence. Still, as translated by Oonagh Stransky (who has translated Italian works by authors ranging from Eugenio Montale to Pope Francis), The House on Via Gemito serves to show his English readership how much broader his talent is. A memento mori of sorts, the book is a reminder that most of us will only be remembered by how we treated those near to us, and that “living and thinking matter [are] the only set design worth loving.”

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2023-2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024