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.

Click here to purchase this book
at your local independent bookstore

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

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.

Click here to purchase this book
at your local independent bookstore

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

Claudia Keelan
Barrow Street Press ($24.95)

by Brian Evenson

One of the strengths of Claudia Keelan as a poet—and a strength that is wonderfully showcased in her new and selected poems, We Step into the Sea—is that she remains restless and never predictable. Evincing a great curiosity, she engages in formal variation not to show off, but to see what tinkering with a form until it begins to buckle will reveal. This ends up being coupled, often surprisingly, with Keelan’s abiding interest in faith. But in this too she is hardly predictable, with a meditation on faith or existence opening up into shards of familial moments, the natural world, social justice, or collisions with the words of other writers. Keelan is not monkish in her approach to faith—or if she is, she’s more like a secular worker-priest, living among fellow workers and sharing their day-to-day concerns. Throughout, Keelan is committed to a carefully considered formal exploration which, as she suggests,

must not be experiments interested only in the ‘materiality’ of language but experiments dedicated to finding, at the level of the syllable, what life has been left out or erased in a dominant culture’s acceptance of conventional language modes. Such poetry is made of notes, without hierarchical but strictly relational value, a poetry whose ethos, like music’s, is indiscriminate in the best sense.

That is from “Debts: Before the Afterward,” originally in her book Utopic (Alice James Books, 2000) but relevant, I think, to the poems published both before and after. Often when I read a new and selected volume, I feel that it is something abbreviated, a kind of tasting menu meant to be a sales pitch for the earlier books. We Step into the Sea, however, feels like a carefully crafted volume, with its own considered shape and satisfactions. This is partly because of the way the poems talk to one another—the way a poem from 1994 can find echoes in one from 2009, for instance. Unexpected ligatures appear as Keelan’s concerns surface, submerge, and then reappear torqued in a different way, and this occurs both between sections and within them: Keelan’s assured language, verbal clarity, and her commitment to finding the life that has been left out make this a book more than a sampling.

That’s not to say there isn’t a variety of forms here. There’s a crown of poems, for instance, though the poems’ forms themselves shift even as they take their titles from the poems before. There are poems that begin to use the page as a field, poems that make the most of an irregular furrow running through them, poems that take on the form of plays or the shape of waves, lyrics of all sorts, poems that operate primarily through wordplay, ecstatic poems, poems whose lines stretch long enough to take on many of the strengths of prose, and so on.

The new poems take up almost the first third of the volume, and Keelan arranges them carefully, in four sections. The first section is a crown of linked poems, the second and third are more various formally but are still actively talking to one another. The fourth section consists of the long title poem, a haunting meditation on women known and unknown moving physically and metaphorically into the waves and through life, and this long poem is set against “Such Little Things,” a distilled five-line poem which insists that “I have swum      all my days      a little cold.”

Keelan’s new poems have the heft and the feel of a book in and of themselves, and when I first read them I found myself tempted to stop there, to absorb them as a unit. The poems that follow, taken from six earlier books in chronological order, initially seemed to fray the shape that the new poems create, but as I read more I began to understand it to be a partial rearranging of the initial pattern, an expansion of it, a progressive shifting of the book’s center in a way that shifted the light. That was most evident for me with “Bluff City,” a long poem written in Memphis in 1996 which moves from reflections on being to social issues and human (specifically female) suffering, and does so all in the careful consideration of a particular place and particular injury.

Indeed, by the time I finished the final section of the book, the poems from O, Heart (Barrow Street Press, 2014), which are thematically connected to one another and seem to assert their own sub-orbit, I found myself compelled to return to the beginning and reread the new poems. When I did, I found them even richer and more resonant than they had been on first read—with the “ventricles of a single sound” early in the book calling to the pumping of the heart late in the book and the “Swim swim” from later bringing me back to that moment of the I swimming all her days. It strikes me as a real achievement to choose poems that cover such a span of time in a way that allows them to talk to one another across decades and to still feel alive.

“I      miss the mark      draw bow & try again” says Keelan in “Such Little Things.” In We Step into the Sea, she almost never misses the mark, and she persists in striking the target in vivid and unexpected ways. This strong book distinguishes itself by feeling so much like a living, organic, unique thing rather than a baggy monster made of other beasts, and it is a wonderful introduction to Keelan’s unique voice.

Click here to purchase this book
at your local independent bookstore

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