Carley Moore
Tinderbox Editions ($16)

by Celia Bland

Buyer beware! Carley Moore warns her readers that “I plan to wallow and wander, to get stuck and linger over painful moments and difficult texts. I am trying to figure something out here and to name it for myself and for you my dear friend.” These essays are close to Montaigne’s Essays—“I withhold judgment” was Montaigne’s motto and his essays are often ideas on around-the-block test drives, personal explorations that don’t always come to a decisive answer. Similarly, Moore’s essays are like quicksilver; they move from pithy pronouncements to TMI moments of confession to acute observations. She is attracted to the quick fixes of self-help manuals and yet explodes their pat positivism with well-placed zingers. Hers aren’t the pristine stylistics of E.B. White. Indeed, the very ambitiousness of Moore’s essays necessitate an almost insistent messiness; they are “an anti-palliative, a recipe for pain, and an invitation to cause trouble.” She asks: “How can we make space for sadness, for bad feelings, and for being unhappy?”

Let’s consider some of the dominant voices of the current essay. Eileen Myles’s writerly voice is confident, quirky, experienced; Leslie Jamison’s is measured and nearly scientific in its accounts; Maggie Nelson’s narratives flex with intellectual swaggering. 16 Pills exhibits elements of each of these and also something different: a dedication to teaching. Let me explain, Moore tells us, what I have tried so hard to learn. Here is what I’ve read, and this is the community where I have chosen to live, where I have found shelter.

At times, Moore’s essays can be baggy as blog postings—topical and diffuse and bright with the hard varnish of political self-consciousness. “The Sick Book,” the collection’s opener, describes a childhood crippled by illness, laying the foundation for Moore’s sense that powers beyond her control have dictated her life. She connects her own congenital illness with the metaphorical malaise of family structures and societal ills. Instances of isolation and frustration are detailed so vividly that we begin to wonder what’s going unstated. Who, by extension, are her readers, her “dear friends”? We too, she suspects, wake up crying. We march against Trump. We medicate for anxiety. We lie with our sleeping child while swiping Tinder for possible hook-ups. Voltaire’s quip in which he compares self-regard to sex—“it is necessary, it is dear to us, it gives us pleasure, and it must be hidden”—comes to mind; Moore sees self-love as a form of resistance, but we must learn to let the act give us pleasure, and it must no longer be hidden. She rejects assumptions about what is sick and what is healthy, even as she searches, essay by essay, for cures for loneliness, frustration, and mortality.

But what if we aren’t who she thinks we are—that is, what if her readers are more than mirroring personas? Moore’s reliance on short sections and weak transitions creates curious linkages between the sexually liberated ex-lovers, the motif of the dating site, and the frequent crying fits. Contemporary life, as Moore astutely asserts, is prone to group-think but lacking in community. Dancing and writing become in these pages far more intimate than sex, although the author’s search for answers is paralleled by a naked desire to be sexy, to be admired, to display risky behaviors like dirty sheets. Determination, intelligence, a need to reveal herself (the collection’s lengthy acknowledgements begin “For Clonazepam, Lexapro, Midol, Sinemet, and Zoloft”) seem linked to her idea of herself as a leader. If she has “used sex to disassociate from my life, as a salve for wounds I couldn’t name, to claim power, and to stop thought,” she has also used narrative for the opposite impulse, promoting rather than stopping thought as she considers nit-picking, breast-feeding, racial transgressions, and Disney movies. “The narcissism of the personal is embarrassing, and still I persist in the belief that I have something to tell myself and maybe you.”

“My Pills,” for instance, uses the occasion of withdrawal from Lexapro to speak about our addicted society. Statistics and anecdotes are quilted together with such quotables as “Pill of weight gain. Pill of constipation. Pill of always full no matter what I ate. Pill of bloat and fat.” But one begins to wonder: if Moore’s essays are pills, how are they altering our perceptions, our digestions, our shapes? She works against the American insistence upon self-help and self-improvement, an easy answer, a cure, at one point quoting Leslie Jamison: “I do believe there is nothing shameful about being in pain, and I do mean for this essay to be a manifesto against the accusation of wallowing. But the essay isn’t a double-negative, a dismissal of a dismissal, so much as a search for possibility.“

“In the end with Lexapro,” she tells us, “it was a contest I called ‘Fat Vs. Sleep.’” Are we to understand that vanity has won over sanity—that the only reason she is going off a drug that helps her sleep, levels off her emotionalism, stops her endless tears, and allows her to enjoy her daughter’s company is that it made her bloat? One hopes not, but Moore’s intentions often remain obscure, buried in details. As she struggles to see, to claim a vision provoked by intense emotion, we too struggle to rise above spiraling identities.

Most vivid are the essays that describe Moore’s classroom. Her students clearly trust her, look to her for answers, and enjoy her company. With them, one sees her brilliance, her struggle against authority, and a kind of iconoclastic gaiety: “What makes me happiest in the classroom is when we manage that kitchen-table feeling . . . Politics, love, laughter, sadness, and schemes—all stewing together on the stove top.” She nurtures, too, her young daughter as she begins her own journey into the wider world: “Eventually that small person can talk about her feelings and is living with her dad half the time in Brooklyn and when she is with you, she treats your big animal body like a rock in the ocean. She washes up onto your shores. She scrambles somehow up the side of you. She hits you like a wave you’ll never stop surfing.”

The child’s growing maturity prompts the mother’s reluctant acceptance of her own pain. In the final and perhaps most powerful essay, “Small Animal, Big Animal,” Moore comes to a tired wisdom that resonates: she’s “been walking around like a wound in search of a bandage or maybe just another wound.” When she tells herself, “You don’t need a map anymore. You know the way,” it is certain that she has traveled far to discover who she is. Perhaps, by extension, her journey allows us to know a bit more about who we, her dear friends, are as well.

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Fayeza Hasanat
illustrations by Chitra Ganesh
Jaded Ibis Press ($17.99)

by Laura Nicoara

Once upon a time there lived a bird catcher. He captured a beautiful bird and adorned her with precious jewels to coax her to sing, but she would only sing if she were free—so he ripped her to shreds with great violence. Long after her death, her song, last sung thirty years before her capture, made its way to a recluse. He had been given the bird’s gifts willingly, but, even more violently than the bird catcher, refused to return them when she asked to have them back. Still, the recluse made good use of them: he finally found freedom from his own needs in the bird’s timeless world of pure thought.

Thus ends Fayeza Hasanat’s collection The Bird Catcher and Other Stories. This eponymous tale is stylistically odd in its allegorical, quasi-mythical tone, coming after the seven starkly realistic stories that precede it. Yet thematically, nothing could be more in keeping with the rest of the volume. The collection presents us with Bangladeshi (and Bangladeshi-American) women (or people who don’t fit comfortably into the male category, as in “The Hyacinth Boy”) who have their lives determined, directly or indirectly, by men and their power to write narratives about what women are and should be.

In many of the stories, Hasanat draws on her expertise as a literature professor to create compelling intertextual layers that add depth to the narrative and help characterize her female protagonists: “The Anomalous Wife,” “When Our Fathers Die,” “Darkling, I Listen,” and “Make Me Your Sitar” all feature main characters who experience literature, both Indian and English, as the locus of their rebellion against the norms that stifle their personhood. For instance, the protagonist of “The Anomalous Wife” is committed to a psychiatric facility because she has attempted suicide by “walking into the ocean.” The villain of the story, if it can be called that, is how American and Bangladeshi cultures both share a love of materialism. Addressing herself to her husband, the wife muses: “You always gave me everything I needed. Safety, security, happiness. A paid-off house and a solid retirement fund. Social Security benefits once we became senior citizens. . . . All we have to do is live the American Dream and die like true Muslims.” She underscores both her intellectual independence and her alienation from this world by speaking to the administrators of her perfunctory treatment mostly in incomprehensible literary references.

Two of the stories, “Bride of the Vanishing Sun” and “Darkling, I Listen,” deal with women who are “defective” in some way: the protagonist of the former is too dark-skinned to be a desirable wife, while that of the latter is infertile. They contrast the possible paths a woman in such a situation might take: reject the tradition that turned her into an outcast, even if this can only end in self-annihilation, or integrate herself within it, perpetuating it alongside the men and coming to resent what it does to women without quite being able to articulate why.

But female resistance is not confined to the creation of subversive identities in the Platonic space of literature. The protagonist of “Make me Your Sitar” is a woman who “firmly believed that women’s contentment depended on the strength of men. She never considered herself strong, nor did she believe in the existence of any such woman who might have the courage to stand up without holding the supporting hands of a man.” She strikes up an unlikely friendship with her rebellious daughter-in-law and eventually turns into the latter’s protectress and mentor. The main character is pushed by empathy alone to go against her values in order to fight back against an injustice entirely consistent with these values. Despite the darkness of the story, this strikes an optimistic chord: change can come slowly, but reliably, from within an oppressive system, without needing to be prompted by the injection of alien elements.

A different kind of power dynamic at work in the background of the stories is that between Bangladeshi immigrants and the American Dream. At home, the U.S. remains a land of promise, while immigrants consider the country as much their home as their place of birth. Hasanat chooses to focus mostly on how protagonists realize communication and reassert their identity despite language barriers (“Mother Immigrant”) and across ages and cultures, via literature and universal human experiences (“When Our Fathers Die”).

Like the recluse in the first story, we are privileged hearers of the women’s voices, situated outside their worlds but able to meet them in thought. The closing fable also contains what I take to be a description of the ideal reader of this collection, a reader who treats the stories not as a product to be consumed, but as a way of life to be understood: “What you feel is the willingness to surrender to whose existence you have never been aware of,” Hasanat writes; “It is your willingness to surrender to this other . . . that drives your heart and makes you different from all the bird catchers of the world. This feeling is therefore not love, but knowledge.”

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Lena Zumas
Back Bay Books ($16.99)

by Julia Stein

Lena Zumas’s Red Clocks brilliantly combines the forms of speculative fiction and thriller to tell the intertwined stories of four women in an Oregon fishing town. Two years previously the United States Congress had banned abortion with the Personhood Amendment, and a second law, Every Child Needs Two, will go into effect in three months banning single people from adopting.

These new laws and the repressive culture they mirror make the four women of Newville desperate. Ro is a 42-year-old single woman and public school teacher who wants a child so much she’s undergoing fertility treatments. Mattie, Ro’s student, finds herself pregnant at fifteen and is desperate for an abortion, but the anti-abortion law says women who try to get abortions should be imprisoned. Susan didn’t finish her final year of law school when she got pregnant; she married and had a second child, but now can’t stand her marriage and life as a stay-at-home mother.

The fourth woman, Gin, is a non-conformist healer who lives alone outside Newville using her herbs to mend people. When the townspeople became frightened of a seaweed plague that harms the marine life on which Newville economically depends, and then of twelve sperm whales that run aground, they blame both events on Gin, whom they call a “witch.” Newville is known as the “whale-watching capital of the American West"; the town depends on tourists who come to see live whales, not dead ones.

The novel brilliantly dramatizes how the four women take heart from the history of rebellious women. Gin’s aunt Temple tells her that in 18th-century Massachusetts, her ancestor Goody Hallett fell in love with a pirate who deserted her when she became pregnant. The villagers called Goody a witch who “rode on the backs of whales” and who suffocated her baby; in reality she gave the baby to a farmer’s wife to raise and lived by herself in the forest, foreshadowing her descendent Gin’s independence and courage. Ro praises Gin’s remedies as “thousands of years in the making, fine-tuned by women in the dark creases of history, helping each other.” Also, Ro is writing a biography of Eivor Minervudottir, a pioneering 19th-century polar explorer; short passages from Ro’s biography come between the chapters, as if to remind the readers of heroic women who stand behind us.

The heroism of the past is needed in the novel’s present when Gin is arrested, jailed, and put on trial for conspiracy to commit murder: she is charged with helping the high school principal’s wife abort. Mrs. Fivey was regularly beaten up by her husband, who threw her down the stairs, but Mr. Fivey told the police that Gin’s abortion potion caused Mrs. Fivey’s fall. Zumas compares the historical bad old days, when they burned witches, to the novel’s present, when the government wants to imprison Gin for the abortion she didn’t do. During the trial, Mattie, Ro, and Susan discover their ability to act courageously as they watch Gin do the same; one by one these women stand up for each other and for themselves.

Red Clocks shows how the women’s rebellion leads to their getting justice for Gin, getting Mr. Fivey fired from his job, and getting freedom for themselves. Gin returns to her forest home, where she feels alive in her closeness to the “bleat of the owl, chirp of the bat, squeak of the ghost of the varying hare.” Mattie touches a whale’s eye on the beach as if she’s touched freedom, and plans to go on to study marine biology. And as Ro comes to the end of writing her biography of Minervudottir, she discovers a wealth of new freedoms in her life: can she become a writer? Or a school principal to replace Mr. Fivey? Or a foster mom? Zumas asks the reader to fight for a world in which women have choices.

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Karl Ove Knausgård
translated by Don Bartlett and Martin Aitken
Archipelago Books ($33)

by Chris Via

“So much in life is unspoken.” The full impact of this assertion hits the reader with the force of 3,600 pages, this book being the capstone of Karl Ove Knausgård’s six-volume cycle of autobiographical novels. Apprehending and articulating the unspoken ephemera of life is this author’s obsession, and the form in which he dredges it out is a unique blend of diary and realist novel. The resulting commitment to telling exactly what happened, using real names for people and places, has presented no end of controversy and prompted a close investigation of the nature of truth.

So why read a book about the minutiae of some guy’s life? Because he has forged a literary representation for the layers that make up conscious experience. What has, in some circles, been panned as boring, plodding, and mundane is, on the contrary, “the shadow on the soul, the ordinary man’s private little hell, so inconsequential as to barely deserve mention, while at the same time engulfing everything”—an observation which perhaps finds an antecedent in Thoreau’s “quiet desperation.” One may wonder at the literary value of extended passages of drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes, but in the end, Knausgård’s aim is to produce writing “not shrouded in literature’s pall . . . but described in full daylight, swathed in reality.” It is precisely because the moments of epiphany are embedded within the quotidian that we readers are brought within and offered the chance to find ourselves.

We have journeyed with Knausgård through his fear- and shame-filled childhood on Tromøya; through his first glimpse of freedom as an eighteen-year-old teacher in Northern Norway; on to Bergen where he attends a writing academy and enters an alcohol-infused downward spiral; from the defining moment of his father’s death; to his friendship with Geir, and meeting Linda. Now the forty-year-old husband and father of three lives in Malmö, Sweden, embroiled in controversy over his emerging novels. These are, of course, the broadest strokes of the chronology. What brings it all out into “full daylight” are the meanderings, the puerile curiosities, the irrational fears, the procession of amorous blunders, the blind egotism, the addiction, and, above all, the shame. Indeed, it is tempting to circumscribe the novel cycle to a chronicle of shame, but this would be to deny the breadth of its scope.

The turmoil with his uncle Gunnar, who views Karl Ove as a quisling set on traducing the Knausgård name, overshadows this volume. The anxiety of the situation sparks an exhaustive investigation of the concept of a name, and, more generally, the nature of truth. Knausgård is stunned to think that his project may, after all his labor, be compromised. (One is reminded of the controversy regarding James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces.) As other reactions begin surfacing from people from his past who appear in the novels, Knausgård realizes that, in his mind, “the places I had left, and the people who populated them, died away after I was gone. For that reason it had not been them I had written about, but my recollections of them.” This leads him to conclude “the truth of any past situation is elusive, it belongs to the moment and cannot be separated from it, but we may ensnare that moment, illuminate it from different angles, weigh the plausibility of one interpretation against another . . .” If this sounds like backpedaling it is not; he goes on conclusively to state his record of the events in an authoritative and resolute dénouement.

The choice to include the exhaustive 450-page essay “The Name and the Number” in the middle of the novel is bold, but rewarding for the patient reader. One way in which to approach the essay is as the author’s commonplace book, included with his self-proclaimed swan song to illuminate all that consumed him and shaped the now notorious novels. Throughout the course of the essay we encounter a multifaceted Knausgård: the literary critic who parses everything from the ancient Greeks to the Bible to Dante, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Goethe, Hamsun, and Joyce; the philosopher who contemplates the concepts of Relevance, Quality, Memory, Truth, Identity, and Culture; the Longinian aesthete with meditations on the sublime; the World War II scholar; and the memoirist recounting his autodidactic education with an exegesis of Celan’s poetry.

Up to this point in the cycle, little has been mentioned of the work’s provocative title, appropriated from a monstrous figure in whom Knausgård finds many affinities. Building on the dialectic framework from his preceding literary criticism, Knausgård analyzes the language of the Third Reich, using August Kubizek’s book The Young Hitler I Knew, Sir Ian Kershaw’s biography, and Mein Kampf itself as his main sources. Many historical accounts present Hitler as a Messiah to a post-World War I German people under the oppressive thumb of the Versailles Treaty, but the drive to discover the locus of what made unthinkable acts such as the Holocaust possible exposes the degree of political indifference and middle-class torpor of the times. The most prescient and provocative line of the entire effort comes toward the end: “At the same time we know, every one of us knows, even though we might not acknowledge it, that we ourselves, had we been a part of that time and place and not of this, would in all probability have marched beneath the banners of Nazism.” The turn of the screw for this argument is Knausgård’s ability to sit through nine hours of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah relatively unmoved in contrast to his unshakable sense of belonging (a sense of “we” as he calls it) and the need to take action in response to the mass shooting at Utøya in 2011.

One cannot imagine the pressure of bringing to a close a project so fraught with anticipation, controversy, and pressure. On the one hand, there is an undeniable readership eager for the next novel. But on the other hand, there is a family member keen on pursuing legal action with a libel suit, a wife grappling with mental stability, and a publisher with a deadline. Certainly Knausgård has achieved his friend Geir’s prophecy: “It would be a statement, something there would be no getting away from, Norway’s longest novel.” But not without significant sacrifice: “This novel has hurt everyone around me, it has hurt me, and in a few years, when they are old enough to read it, it will hurt my children.” Knausgård closes the project with a renunciation of his role as writer, and although he subsequently has produced a Vivaldian quartet of books, it will be My Struggle that defines his career and leaves its mark on world literature.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2018-2019 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2019