Fiction Reviews

Brotherless Night

V. V. Ganeshananthan
Random House ($18)

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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Book Review, Fiction Reviews

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

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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Book Review, Fiction Reviews

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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Book Review, Fiction Reviews

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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Book Review, Fiction Reviews

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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Book Review, Fiction Reviews

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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Fiction Reviews

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

Shy

Max Porter
Graywolf Press ($25)

by Sam Downs

As the teenage protagonist of Max Porter’s latest novel sneaks out of his boarding school and into the night, he recalls an admissions official’s admonishment. “Is this you? The whole of you?” the administrator remarks, presumably brandishing a stiff finger to the eponymous Shy’s impressive juvenile record: “Failed 11+. Expelled from two schools. First caution in 1992 aged thirteen. First arrest aged fifteen.” By sixteen, he has “sprayed, snorted, smoked, sworn, stolen, cut, punched, run, jumped, crashed an Escort, smashed up a shop, trashed a house, broken a nose, stabbed his stepdad’s finger” and, as consequence, been sent for amendment at the Last Chance home for “very disturbed young men.” Recognizable to those who have suffered under the yoke of misdirected adults in administrative positions, the educator’s ironic advice is that Shy ought not to let his past offenses define him—while emphasizing the very idea that they do.

A teenager in mid-nineties England dealing with issues the adults in his life are unable to define, Shy doesn’t have the benefit of hindsight. Not having wanted to attend the school in the first place, and not seeming to agree with descriptions of him as a “ghost,” mad, and a “Jekyll and Hyde,” he has nonetheless taken to heart the message of Last Chance—that is, it’s his, and he’d better not screw it up. On his midnight mission, Shy heads in the direction of a nearby pond carrying a backpack heavy with rocks.

As reviews have noted, Porter’s work often attempts to fill the silences that characterize male hardship. In Grief is the Thing with Feathers (Graywolf, 2016), a widower and his sons reckon with woe transfigured into a clever, protective crow; in The Death of Francis Bacon (Faber & Faber, 2021), the final fuses of a painter’s intellect ignite as he lays dying; and in 2019’s Booker Prize Long-Listed Lanny (Faber & Faber), the anthropomorphic socioenvironmental history of a village bears down on an uncannily talented young boy. All three novels are like fifteen-minute funerals: communal, convention-busting, and packing far more emotional weight than their brevity suggests. With its tender and big-hearted story, Shy marks another development in Porter’s singular, polyphonic style, distinguishing itself as his most urgent book yet.

The late aughts saw social and political discussions about men begin to reflect scholarship about the relationship between long-celebrated masculine tenets (hyper-independence, emotional invulnerability) and violent or otherwise antisocial behavior. If the laundry list is still being written, the major garments are worth airing out: worldwide, boys fight more frequently than girls at school; men commit virtually all sexual violence; and teenage boys are between two and four times as likely as their female peers to die by suicide—a statistic made darkly ironic by the American Right’s eagerness to foist liability for gun violence upon the mentally-ill, since the actual demographic uniting some 98% of mass shooters of gun violence is their maleness. Meanwhile, anti-intellectual opposition seems to have stalled the necessary turn from diagnosis to remedy, as can be seen in how useful terms like “toxic masculinity” and “mansplaining” have been hollowed of their original intent by offhand, uncritical usage.

A 2023 New Yorker article title emphasizes the extraordinary breadth of The Problem: “What’s the Matter with Men?” This could rightly serve as the slogan for Last Chance, but as well-meaning as the staff may be, their laser focus on obliquely diagnosing the boys’ troubles without providing sensible solutions leaves the likes of Shy unmoored. Faulting him for that would be like faulting a lost hiker whose guide had only shouted, “Don’t get lost!” As Porter portrays Shy’s vast, dynamic individuality in stark contrast to the reductive thinking that persists to this day, the conclusion settles in that neither Shy the book nor Shy the boy are so strange after all, however much they may defy our initial expectations. Who, after all, hasn’t spent a few youthful hours feeling lost, searching, considering escape? Who hasn’t thought, graspingly, “the night is huge and it hurts”?

Like Porter’s previous work, Shy offers a message about the human risk of minimizing the unknown by viewing it through the lens of the known. As Carmen Maria Machado states in her masterful memoir In the Dream House (Graywolf, 2019), “Putting language to something for which you have no language is no easy feat.” Perhaps the same can be said of putting language to something, or someone, for which you have too much language, and too much of it inexact.

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Book Review, Fiction Reviews

The Liar

Martin A. Hansen
Introduction by Morten Høi Jensen
Translated by Paul Larkin
New York Review Books ($16.95)

by Poul Houe

In his introduction to the newest English translation of The Liar, Morten Høi Jensen notes that Martin A. Hansen’s short novel, originally published in 1950, was “routinely ranked as one of the greatest Danish novels of the twentieth century,” and that “regrettably, it was also the last novel Hansen lived to publish” before “he died in 1955 from chronic kidney failure at the age of just forty-six.” To these factual epithets let me add a more subjective one: It is a book that will lead readers to marvel at how intricate storytelling and human life can be, and how subtly their intricacies can be linked.

The novel is composed of notes by Johannes Lye, a schoolteacher and parish clerk—and also, as his name suggests, the narrative’s Liar—who interacts with Nathan, an honest Biblical Nathanael. By the introduction’s account, Johannes is a torn character who “lives at a distance from other people and just as much from himself,” and who responds to life’s constant battle between conflicting forces by “telling tall tales and blurring truth and fiction” while not “getting too close to anyone, thereby failing to live.” Sort of a nihilist, he considers death a relief and homelessness his home.

Minor characters and the harsh environment play roles too: The ice breaking up around Sand Island compels Harry, Annemari’s new lover, to leave and Olaf, her son’s father, to return. Spring troubles are in the air and minds are mixed-up. Isolated from all but his dog Pigro and “forgotten by all he once knew,” Johannes, the itinerant incarnate, questions his own identity, his gift for tall tales, and the nature of humanity. Yet life’s secrets are “sometimes hidden until wonder is aroused.” Immune to fame and fortune, Johannes remains vain, he confesses to Nathan, while admitting that Harry’s secular religiosity is “stealing into him.” While Johannes is practicing the next day’s hymns in a cold and damp church, Pigro makes him sob “heavily . . . without shame.”

Although a non-believer, Johannes believes in a kind of uncompromising youth that demands “purity and truth.” Part of his duplicity involves indulgence in “passionate certainties,” while also being “death’s great confidant,” “flung from deeply enriching, coruscating moments to dark meaninglessness and despair. Only to be flung back again.” Conversely, an older person is “blind to life’s greatest contradictions,” full of “small deceits and minor untruths,” yet of “good conscience because he has become blind to the fact he’s a liar.” Embracing the role of street performer, Johannes faces a congregation of doubters and believers to whom he is a stranger; as this community gathers, he senses himself as “nothing,” “a divided self,” “a double”—all the while trolling his “ghostly pale specters” to lure them into his traps. Feigning to serve the Divine, he instead helps The Devil bewitch the faithful.

Later, he truthfully tells Nathan that his performance was but one aspect of tackling old-world values—another being his controlled scheme of ambushing himself, either because he was less detached from his deceit than he thought, or because the faith he tried to deceive was not entirely outside him but rather a part of his makeup that he could only realize after seeking to undercut it.

Going back and forth, Johannes needs Nathan’s help. Rarely is his duplicity more obvious than when he hesitantly decides to attend a ball with “many trolls, dwarves, elves, and fairies assembled.” Facing both the self-deprecating hostess Rigmor and her antagonist Annemari, he admits to being a liar, while later telling Annemari of his wish to elope with her. Realizing it’s a lost cause, he gives her a necklace as a “parting gift” instead, with this verbal kiss of death: “Hang it around your neck, Annemari.”

When Rigmor, who feels Johannes might alleviate her despair, suspects he was never “really serious” about love, she is puzzled by what became of the uplifting experience he once aroused in her. He now says it was a “cooked up . . . theory” about how to live life with a troubled heart, or “a fool’s folly,” suited “to cause wrack and ruin”; he further opines that “life is one huge battleground in which two powers are locked in eternal combat. No-man’s-land doesn’t exist.” Only by taking ownership of one’s life does it come to fruition, and since a fruitful life rests on nature, Johannes begs Rigmor join him outdoors to observe and reflect—and to share the experience of meaning and community they both hoped for, or at least a less troubling world than often imagined.

By “mid-April,” Pigro is no longer. Actually, his ‘departure’ was a year earlier, but like the rest of this narrative’s notes, the event was recorded “only very recently” to stress the Liar’s truth-telling. On their walk the day after Rigmor’s ball, Johannes discovers a “sacrificial stone” that puts his existential experiences in context. As an outsider, “words, events, and feelings have a liberating effect” upon him. Strangers don’t conquer or pass their legacy by default, for their part of human history and memory is but a speck against endless island time. As loneliness engulfs him “like some latter-day Job,” Johannes recalls the day he and Rigmor parted ways. Remembering her potentials while acknowledging his own failures, our Liar embraces his wounded self, ready to resign but also to move on: “And now we won’t speak of that anymore, Nathan.”

Far from timeless, less so from timely, The Liar puts a late, rather than light, twist on the traditional Bildungsroman. Paul Larkin’s translation, though slightly overwrought and not always factually correct, reads well, making this new edition of a Danish classic a welcome publication overall.

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Book Review, Fiction Reviews

The Nightmare Man

J.H. Markert
Crooked Lane Books ($19.99)

by Ryan Tan

In J.H. Markert’s The Nightmare Man, a serial killer called The Scarecrow terrorizes the fictional town of Crooked Tree. He is so called because of his habit of posing as a scarecrow in his victims’ cornfields. When they approach to investigate, he runs away. This continues for the next two days, until he catches them as they approach. His modus operandi derives entirely from a horror novel written by the protagonist, Ben Bookman, a citizen of Crooked Tree. The lead police investigator, Detective Mills, suspects Ben of being The Scarecrow; his distrust of Ben is strengthened by the disappearance of Ben’s brother thirteen years ago, which Mills also investigated. It remains an unsolved case.

Engaging vignettes end each chapter; each one is narrated from the point-of-view of one character, giving us a glimpse into their life. Compared to the main story, the vignettes contain less dialogue and more exposition; without conversations to break up description, the writing flows more smoothly, and Markert’s talent for character building shines.

Markert also successfully imbues each character with a distinctive manner of speech. We become so familiar with each of the character’s voices that if their names were omitted from a conversation, we would still be able to identify them by their unique diction. One character who shines in dialogue is Ben’s nine-year-old daughter, Bri, who expresses innocence and astuteness at the same time. When she converses with another character, she defines herself against them, developing not only her own individuality, but also theirs. And since dialogue dominates The Nightmare Man, this refinement of their personalities occurs over and over, such that by the end of the novel, each character is fully fleshed out.

With powerful characterization surrounding a central mystery, The Nightmare Man is an entertaining read for horror and suspense fans.

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Book Review, Fiction Reviews

The Illuminated Burrow

A Sanatorium Journal

Max Blecher
Translated by Gabi Reigh
Twisted Spoon Press ($23)

Book Review, Fiction Reviews

by Rick Henry

The heart of reality is so unfathomable and of such great magnitude and grandiose diversity that our imagination is only able to extract a tiny fraction, enough to glean a few lights and interpretations to weave its “thread of life.”
—Max Blecher, The Illuminated Burrow

Max Blecher was born in Moldavia, raised in Romania, and began studying medicine in Paris until, at eighteen, he developed spinal tuberculosis. For the ten years that followed, he published fiction and poetry (much of it written from various institutional beds where his condition was treated) and corresponded with writers ranging from André Breton to Martin Heidegger. His two published novels, which have been translated into English as Adventures in Immediate Irreality and Scarred Hearts, secured his international reputation.

This biographical sketch, of course, says little about the “thread of life” Blecher sorted through in his writing; to address that, we now have an English version of his sanitorium journal Vizuina luminată, here translated from the Romanian by Gabi Reigh as The Illuminated Burrow. The book is a meditation on the nature of significant moments, written as Blecher approached his own death in 1938 at the age of twenty-eight. In the afterword, Gabriela Glăvan suggests that this final prose work and Blecher’s two novels “comprise a vast narrative of physical suffering.” Yes—but his work covers so much more of the world as he navigates his suffering, his body, and his imagination.

In one particularly striking moment, a man is dying in the adjacent room while Blecher, post-surgery, is desperate for a sip of water that is forbidden and just out of reach. Death and thirst: “Every minute the momentous and the banal happen simultaneously,” he writes. This disconnection reappears in a moment of excruciating pain as his bandages are changed; the doctor is amazed that he didn’t “scream the whole sanatorium down.” Blecher could have, but he had been conducting an experiment based upon the observation that “while one particular nerve is assailed by pain, the rest of the body, including the brain, continues to function normally.” However excruciating it might be, pain is a highly localized “nuisance,” but ignoring it only makes the suffering worse. To attain even the semblance of control, pain must be given “unadulterated ‘attention’.”

The beauty of Blecher’s prose and the focus of his observations often pull the reader away from the depth of suffering, as does the variety of events he experiences as he grapples with the unfathomable. Some appear to be ordinary—he dines with other patients and goes to the cinema—but in the end, his experience is foreign and isolating. The dining hall is “where the patients ate their meals while lying on gurneys wheeled to the table by porters in this vast and seemingly ordinary room.” In the cinema, a row of gurneys occupied by patients lines the back wall. Amid these experiences are descriptions of hanging dogs, a “petite Parisian girl” smoking “a cork-tipped Craven A cigarette,” a gentleman checking his watch on his daily walk, and how what he sees morphs into light and shapes, colors and planes, such that “such episodes deeply shook my faith in a stable, coherent reality . . . as well as revealing the essential dreamlike quality of all our everyday actions.” Other moments examine those dream states, thoughts, reveries, and memories.

Blecher’s situation is also marked by dissociation: language, images, story, and ‘reality’ have little to which they can affix themselves. Unlike the surrealist project of making the world strange, Blecher finds the world is strange. At best, we are in a state of irreality: “we create our lives each moment through our imagination, and in that instant life makes sense, but only in that moment and only in the way our imagination contrives it.”

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