Book Review

Boulder

Eva Baltasar
Translated by Julia Sanches
And Other Stories ($17.95)

by Abby Walthausen

New arguments are always popping up these days for the dubious title of the “first globalization”—phenomena as disparate as the spice trade, the crusades, the whaling industry. Catalan novelist Eva Baltasar (or perhaps the wry galley cook who narrates her newly translated novel) might get a kick out of extending the rebrand to boulders, which were, after all, dragged unwittingly around the globe and deposited haphazardly before the first sea shanty was ever sung. Boulders have a way of making landscapes both formidable and absurd—and Balthasar delves into this uneasy balance in Boulder, her idiosyncratic portrait of displacement across cultures and across dispositions.

The novel’s eponymous narrator, so named by her geologist girlfriend for her alien toughness, starts the book as a galley cook off the coast of Chile and winds up stunned and displaced in Iceland. “For a geologist like Samsa,” Boulder says, “Iceland is a paradise, and she shows me around as if it had come out of her own body.” Boulder is pushed across the world by love and the slow march of age, though nothing about her sharp-tongued, profanity-spouting demeanor is passive. In fact, Boulder sees herself more in the image of the proverbial rolling stone that gathers no moss, professing her discomfort with houses and her love of the “short term.” Like the narrator of Baltasar’s previous book, Permafrost, Boulder is repulsed by domestic life—but in this book she is faced with actually becoming a mother when Samsa insists on having children of their own.

Baltasar, a poet skilled in compression, moves swiftly from the initial heady encounters between Boulder and Samsa, first eliding five years, then another three, to arrive at the moment when Samsa decides that she needs to have a child. In this moment, Samsa is unrecognizable to Boulder, who attributes the unfamiliarity to this decision which “kicks into gear right away, without any warning. . . . razes everything to the ground, like an earthquake. You’d have to be an animal with a tiny brain and impeccable survival instincts to see it coming.”

Boulder is an engaging narrator—funny, tough, and as sympathetic as a line cook out of Anthony Bourdain’s kitchen—but the accumulation of her personality creeps up. About halfway through the book, when arguing against attending a prenatal water aerobics class, Boulder complains, “Samsa spat out her special brand of poison—the kind that doesn’t kill but leaves you blind, that erases your best memories and replaces them with a chasm for you to trip into and leave behind the skin of your knuckles and knees.” At first it feels a blessed reprieve to hear these venomous words described rather than repeated. A moment later, it sinks in that neither Samsa nor any other character had ever uttered any actual dialogue. The Samsa that the narrator’s voice has brought to vivid life has been muted by the same precise and knowing language.

Boulder’s carefully knapped facade is sometimes sharp and self-sufficient, sometimes blunt and desperate, but it engages from every angle. Again drawing on her skills as a poet, Baltasar has her narrator rarely utter an observation, whether cynical or mystical, that isn’t grounded hard in the physical world: “When I undress in the evening, the turtleneck snags at my head and reminds me that birth is nothing at all—the danger lies in being reborn.” She is a poet of the body, telling us, when postpartum Samsa loses interest in sex, that “Desire cannot be killed, it can only be fermented and rocked to sleep.” The link that she draws between physicality and the deep need for love echoes the attention she lavishes on food, which is prepared and described with the nuance she seems unable to deliver to her relationships.

“Blood respects nothing,” Boulder says when reflecting on the testing Samsa receives early in her pregnancy. “It creeps around like a shrewd domestic who has access to every room and knows everything there is to know about you.” On one level, she feels surveilled by medical intervention. On another, these lines hint at the latent anxiety of the gay family unit, in which one party is written out of the bloodline. Blood is indeed unfaithful—or at least, it tends to omit part of the story. The quiet, visceral joys of being are what Boulder discovers in the child, and they are what keep her tethered to her—and in the end, tethered to the long term. Still, she retains an absurd but steadfast resistance against time, trade winds, and small talk that is “more reckless than adopting a pet rat during a plague.” Boulder may have sailed across the world, but something deep in her rails against a life that can be reduced to vector.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore:

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2022-2023 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2023

Telluria

Vladimir Sorokin
Translated by Max Lawton
New York Review Books ($18.95)

by Garin Cycholl

They say that those who live by the nail will probably die by the nail—that is, unless the nail is made of tellurium, set by a member of a guild of highly skilled technicians, and driven into one’s skull in a ritual that identifies the exact fold of the brain where the sharp, rare metal can awaken insight. That insight is the rub of Max Lawton’s newly released translation of Vladimir Sorokin’s 2013 novel, Telluria. What rough consciousness is emerging along our frontlines and glowing screens? How do we rescale our existence along these spaces in more human terms? These questions establish Telluria’s time and terrain.

Sorokin’s novel is told in fifty chapters. It explores the speculative, post-holy war geography of a dismembered Europe, in which a range of post-Putin Russian states has emerged on a redrawn map. Among these states, a nostalgia-tinged (i.e., ultra-Stalinist) post-Soviet Republic has reopened, and Telluria itself has developed as a 21st-century narco-state that traffics in rare metal nails that promise sudden revelation. A Great Wall of Russia, “one final imperial illusion,” re-marks the territory.

In this world, enlightenment is a commodity attained by having a nail made from tellurium driven into one’s head by a “carpenter” who uses a clothy, computer-like tablet (translated by Lawton as a “smartypants”) to map the nail’s precise target. The nail releases one from ordinary consciousness, a process that devotees ecstatically describe as having “rent asunder the chains of Time . . . the white-eyed executioner of hopes and expectations.”

The beauty of Telluria rises from the jagged music of our own expectations of this future world. Sorokin’s fifty chapters are widely divergent in tone and focus; they disarrange our dispositions to time. As history roughly unfolds around her, a distraught mother laments, “It’s unbearable . . . insanity growing up all around us like a crust of ice.” The human imagination of time itself is stretched out across this cold reality in Sorokin’s writing. Telluria offers a glimpse through our own moment into a distinctly medieval world that continues to work itself out along a shredded map of city-states and capital-driven fiefdoms. In doing so, the novel exposes busily disintegrating empires and their attendant exploitation, suffering, and flight. Against that chaos though, Sorokin pushes his readers to cease looking for signs in everything but themselves.

In an interview about the novel published at The Untranslated, Lawton posits, “Sorokin seems to almost long for the kind of ‘return to human scale’ offered by a collapse into medievaldom…There’s a thread of nostalgia for the long-past that runs through much of Sorokin’s work, always deconstructing itself even as it looks back wistfully.” This “thread of nostalgia” is evident in the translation’s tone; Lawton playfully “sounds” the range of centuries and prose styles in Telluria, whose medieval world unfolds through language. The land is mapped by belief and a new feudalism drawn from the remains of modernity. Simple things call human beings back into presence. Nomadic poets sing to endless steppes and dildoes speak of “peckerish labor.” All these alternative presents exist at once in Telluria.

In what could be an addendum to Brecht’s Mother Courage, two dog-men discuss poetry and the disposition of rational animals while stewing a pot of battlefield corpses. To eat or not to eat? One laments that “man is losing his nature.” They cannot eat without talk. In Beckett-like stasis, their conversation looks back on their journey as one plucks a bullet from his mouth. They dwell on skulls’ fragility. A tellurium nail boils up from the skull in the pot. One reflects, “Two metals met in the head of this warrior. . . . A sublime tragedy.” Anticipating the road ahead, they feast. One reminds the other, “You shall read your great poems to the Ocean!”

Does Telluria traffic in “hope”? Not really, but perhaps it deals in something equally essential in this historical moment. A military officer longs for psychic transport “back into the blessed and enlightened Middle Ages. The world returned to human scale.” How does one find that scale amidst battlefield corpses and humming smartphones? Maybe not through “hope,” though perhaps through its medieval cousin: a state of mind capable of fusing our present states of persistent dread and wonder. In provoking the reader to consider this possibility, Sorokin’s novel is a nail to the head.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore:

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2022-2023 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2023

Metaphysical Animals

How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life

Clare Mac Cumhaill & Rachael Wiseman
Doubleday ($32.50)

by Scott F. Parker

Joining the burgeoning genre of collective philosophical biography, Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life, by Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman, puts Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch at the center of a story of friendship and of analytic philosophy’s renewed interest in metaphysics and morals.

Cumhaill and Wiseman came to their subject thanks to a letter Midgley published “in the Guardian, under the heading ‘The Golden Age of Female Philosophy’” in 2013. Soon after, they visited Midgley to learn the story their book would eventually tell.

Anscombe, Foot, Midgley, and Murdoch converged at Oxford during tumultuous times. Many of the men—professors as well as students—were summoned to World War II; among them was A. J. Ayer, the influential logical positivist and Metaphysical Animals’ bête noire. In his absence, philosophy’s preoccupation with linguistics and its rejection of metaphysics loosened. During the war, the women found themselves at the center of the philosophical scene: “Had it not been for the interruption of war, Mary, Iris, Elizabeth and Philippa may well have joined the men in the effort to usher in the brave new world of a philosophy divested of poetry, mystery, spirit and metaphysics. Or, more likely, they would have finished their degrees and left philosophy behind them, convinced . . . that the subject was not for them.” These were, in other words, bleak philosophical times.

Taking advantage of the opportunity only accidentally available to them, the four were able to pursue philosophy with a more person-centric approach than had been prominent at Oxford. But what the four philosophers had in common beyond their circumstances is where Metaphysical Animals begins to break down. Cumhaill and Wiseman present Anscombe, Foot, Midgley, and Murdoch as members of a movement grounded in gender. Yet, by giving short shrift to the philosophical work in question and opting instead to focus on the day-to-day lives of the philosophers, they fail to draw connections in any but the most general terms—those terms being their opposition to Ayer and logical positivism, which scores of other philosophers shared.

This substantive lightness is only emphasized by the book’s historical frame, which concludes with Anscombe’s opposition to the honorary doctorate Oxford would bestow upon Harry Truman in 1956, thereby relegating all four women’s greatest professional achievements to a brief afterword. This is a missed opportunity to affirm the legacies of four great philosophers, who deserve greater prominence. Consider that the famous Trolley Problem was originated by Philippa Foot. Besides making serious contributions to the philosophy of animals, in her nineties Mary Midgley wrote a defense of philosophy, What Is Philosophy For?, the culmination of a lifetime of thought, that became a surprise mainstream hit. Cumhaill and Wiseman are most thorough in their disquisition of Elizabeth Anscombe, probably the most influential philosopher of the four. They write that “it is thanks to her translation that Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations is recognised as a literary, as well as a philosophical, masterpiece” and call her book Intention “the most important treatment of action since Aristotle.” Murdoch is the best known of the four, though primarily for her novels and for having been portrayed by Kate Winslet and Judi Dench in the film Iris, an impression Metaphysical Animals is unlikely to alter.

Cumhaill and Wiseman say they were “bored of listening to men talk about books by men about men” when they set out on their book. Fair enough. But shoehorning four women who happened to be friends into an ill-defined school only serves to obscure each woman’s unique contributions to philosophy.

Still, though, seeing their early shared lives is not without its pleasures. Metaphysical Animals is a period piece, replete with dress codes, cigarettes, and ubiquitous casual misogyny. It is a portrait of four philosophers as young women. Here they are, for example, sitting down together for conversation: “Philippa explained her idea over the clatter of the busy café, the Nippy serving up a pot of hot tea for Mary and Philippa, black coffee for Iris and Elizabeth.” And so, rather than learning what they thought in their maturity, we will settle for what they drank in their youth.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore:

Transfixed by Prehistory

An Inquiry into Modern Art and Time

Maria Stavrinaki
Translated by Jane Marie Todd
Zone Books ($35)

by W. C. Bamberger

In the first sentence of Transfixed by Prehistory, Maria Stavrinaki declares that prehistory is an invention of the nineteenth century; the subtitle of the book refers to her assertion that early moderns were "transfixed by prehistory, initially in the sense of being petrified by shock." Throughout, she demonstrates how the revelation of the existence of prehistory drastically changed the science, the art, the metaphors, and even the concept of time in the modern world. The invention of prehistory moved outward from geology and paleontology to the arts and sciences that have humankind as their objects, including linguistics, ethnology, psychology, and literature. New metaphors arose; geological erosion came to represent human mortality.

Stavrinaki considers a wide range of prehistory's effects. She looks at the extent of the influence of discoveries by Lascaux on modern art, of geology on Cezanne and Max Ernst, and of prehistory's philosophical implications for Paul Klee, among others. Klee, for example, thought these discoveries revealed "the present state of outward appearances in his own world as accidentally fixed in time and space," "a simple stage in an evolution . . ." Stavrinaki points out prehistory’s influence in more recent art as well, looking at the work of Robert Morris and at Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, for example. While some of these attempts to identify parallels between more recent artists' works and the prehistorical can seem less than convincing, she offers insights from a great variety of sources, ranging from historical records to the science fiction of J. G. Ballard; especially interesting is an excerpt from a letter written by Claude Lévi-Strauss to Georges Bataille, disagreeing with Bataille's view of Lascaux.

As the book proceeds, it becomes clear that Stavrinaki's points could be supported by looking at nearly everything around us—we are, in many ways, a continuation of prehistory. The invention of prehistory affected not only our views of the past and understanding of the present, but also, for some, the conception of the future. That is, "the tendency to improvement" over such spans of time suggested that the process would continue indefinitely: "Assurances about the future were thus to be found, quite simply, in the past: time formed an uninterrupted line." To some, however, the same discoveries suggested the opposite—that there might come an end to human time. The invention of prehistory introduced the idea of that we might one day have successors.

Stavrinaki's reasoning proceeds speedily, and there are places where slow, careful reading is required to follow what is being said. This is partly due to some unfamiliar terms: "mobilary art" for small objects that can be moved from place to place, and "parietal art” for what we usually call cave art—though technical terms are usually introduced smoothly. The larger reason for the need for slow reading is the serious and sober approach Stavrinaki takes to her subject. This flies in the face of the recent leaning of many scholarly books toward popularization; rather than taking time to reassure readers that she likes some of the same rock bands she assumes we must like, Stavrinaki takes up detailed analysis of her subject from page one.

There are metaphysical speculations here, but there are simple human anecdotes, too. Stavrinaki includes the well-known story of the explorer who was so fixated on a cave's floor that he didn't notice the drawings above; his eight-year-old daughter looked up, saw them, and pointed them out to him. Another discoverer she cites wrote that he couldn't really "see" engravings that were visible on the wall until he also traced them with his fingers.

Stavrinaki employs some rhetorical flourishes in the interest of making interesting points; for example, she asserts that explorers' and researchers' presentations of the facts of prehistory meant that "science now ranked alongside fiction, because it proved the reality of the impossible." At another point, she posits that because there are no written records, nor any named individual creators, prehistory can't be "done," can't be tied up neatly, can't be consolidated in the past. Rather, she argues, it remains to be done, inexhaustibly so—it remains "as an enigma from the past to be interpreted in terms of the present's needs." In her concluding paragraph, she writes, "Prehistory is no doubt the only land that remains for us to discover." This thoughtful, no-nonsense book would be a useful guide for anyone setting out on such an ambitious expedition.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore: