Asakiyume mita

rachelmanija's great review of Goddess of Yesterday (by Caroline Cooney) made me want to read it too--I did, and I enjoyed it very much. It really truly felt like the story was being told to me by a young girl from Trojan War times. I liked Anaxanadra very much, liked how observant she was, how she learned quickly and worked for her own survival, and that she took a liking to--and then felt loyalty and concern for--the various people she met.

What had absolutely pushed me from "Hmmm, cool book; maybe one day I'll read it" to "I want to read this NOW" was the example Rachel gave of Anaxanadra's wonderment on first encountering a glass container, and I was rewarded with more encounters like that (first time encountering enough of something that you need to use the word "one thousand," first time encountering horses, etc). Even just her ordinary observations had a feel of ancient Greece to them that I loved, as when she describes the sound of water slapping the side of a boat like dogs drinking, or this, describing dolphins:

Dolphins swam alongside. Now and then they would leap out of the water and spin themselves like yarn.

And then radiantfracture posted a poem the other day, "Pahkwêsikan," by the poet Samantha Nock, that made me want to read the rest of the collection, the author's debut collection. It has a gorgeous cover:

( but the image is a little large, so under the cut it goes )

And now I have a copy!

Speaking of images, check out these great dusky swifts (Cypseloides senex), posted by Aves do Brasil, a bot that posts photos of birds of Brazil. Facebook says that the original photo was taken by Frodoaldo Budke.

( great dusky swifts )

With those intense, deep-set eyes, and clinging to the rock face like that, they seem like a pair of heroes: loyal siblings or friends, or intense lovers, out to redress a wrong. I want to write a story with them as the heroes ... maybe in human form--but that intensity!

24 more minutes of Wednesday, so this squeaks in ;-)

I really loved Aster Glenn Gray's World War II retelling of Gawain and the Green Knight. rachelmanija has a great review of it here, which I agree with 100 percent.

So rather than write a review, what I want to do here is call attention to some of the lines and phrases, that, for me, exemplify the wonderful voice AGG uses to tell the tale. It's beautiful language that's not *drenching* (sometimes beautiful language can be like a thunderstorm and leave your clothes heavy and wringing wet). Instead it's beautiful but light: think droplets on a spiderweb. And it's also strong: it does what it sets out to do, effectively.

Squadron leader Art, at the local where all the boys are drinking:

Like a clockwork figure he lifted [his pint] to his lips from time to time, but he did not drink, only sat with his face white and drawn.

The Green Man and Gawain are facing off:

The airmen bunched tighter around Gawain, their anger like a fog ...

There was a wrathful silence

After the Green Man has recovered from what should have been a fatal shot, the squad have to make space in their minds for what has just happened:

They had all seen the green man’s magic, and knew that it was true; yet they had not been raised to believe such things, and it went hard with them.

And then this longer passage which I loved for the graceful, economical way it deals with doing a good thing with an ulterior motive. Of course it would be Perceval who points out the problem with that:

As Gawain left the village he kept an eye out for a dog that might need a thorn removed from its paw, or a hare caught in a trap. But he saw nothing of the kind, and Percy surely would have pointed out that kindness done from conscious motive probably would not help him, anyway.

Here, lovely animals, and lovely interaction of Lord Bertilak with his horse:

The man spoke softly to the beast, with a tenderness in his voice that the horse answered in soft whickers. Gawain smiled, and tried not to drowse in the warmth that rose from the six cows, who regarded Gawain with thoughtful long-lashed eyes.

AGG's Lord and Lady Bertilak are wonderful characters, grand of stature and grand in their affection for each other and for Gawain, whom they call their little pilot--but the story must still play out. There's a library of mystery stories in the Bertilaks' tower, and Lord Bertilak and Gawain talk about them--about what constitutes justice for wrongdoing. “And justice has to be punishment?” Gawain asks. As well he might.

If you like the story of Gawain and the Green Knight, tales of the Round Table generally, or the lingering remains of the fairy realm in the modern world, you will love this retelling.

The problem I have with poems and stories that I like is that I keep wanting to read people good lines or passages for them, and it’s very easy to end up reading them the whole thing. It’s like giving a person a present, except you’re so excited about the present that you start unwrapping it for them, excitedly pointing out all its special features. I will try not to do that with Sonya’s most recent collection (poetry plus a novelette) BUT IT WILL BE HARD.

With Sonya, you’re never far away from the sea, history, or mythology, and those themes flow through the poems (and vice versa—mutual flowing). The first, “Dive,” describes the sea-change that happens in a bar when everyone is deep in their cups, how

the sea-fog
coils in through cigarettes
and the students are crying on each other’s shoulders
like gulls

how

lost ships sail back out of their bottles

and

plankton glimmers as the house lights dim

In the “The Coast Guard,” the narrator feels the presence of a ghost-ship, washed up on the winter sand. Others on the shore include “a dog, two beachcombers… a camera-flash flurry of tourists”—all unaware. This poem came to me aurally: the hish and rattle of marram and beach plum … the haul and hail of voices.

The narrator of “The Parable of the Albatross” feels kinship with that great bird, more so than with the small songbirds of northern fields and forests, and declares:

Only the stranger who can match me dancing
and meet me balanced on the endless arc of air
will hear the deeper breath I take, unfolding
the full span of my ambition.

And then the poems pivot to history: “Firebrands” and “Colonial,” about the burden of ancestry, and “Capta,” an Ozymandias of sorts for Emperor Vespasian, who struck coins to boast of the capture of Judaea.

After those come four that prepare readers for the novelette in that they feature lovers—the groom among the gravestones in “He Should Marry the Daughter of the Angel of Death,” a daydreaming couple in “qe-ra-si-ja” (the title is a transliteration of Linear B script representing an epithet of Artemis) who imagine living a timeless life:

You will learn the weaving of eel-baskets,
swim with the sponge divers and haul out
shaking water thick as bronze from your seal’s hair.

It’s rare to see couples lazing together contentedly in Sonya’s work with no threat on the horizon, and yet here the happiness is rich and concrete. I lingered in this harbor.

In “Σειρήνοιϊν” (the title means “of the two sirens” in Homeric Greek), a siren offers a grief-stricken lover a choice:

Take the fruit from my hand [or] Take the song from my mouth

One choice is sleep and forgetting; the other is truth, shared.

The last poem, “The Secret Language of Water,” has

the drowned and the moonstruck
in the gyre of history
dreaming their shoreward roads
with maps wet as handkerchiefs,

the perfect lead-in to the novelette, “As the Tide Came Flowing In,” in which Ezra, a drowned sailor, finds his way back to his wife Elizabeth not once but twice, pulled to her like the ocean by the moon, prompting her to wonder

if a satellite had ever disowned its ocean, if the great weight and restlessness of waters rejected would go slack.

Pairs of lovers in Sonya Taaffe stories are marked by difference that makes a separation: one is a mortal, another a ghost, a dybbuk, a metamorphosis. The story is in how and when they reach for each other and how and when they turn away, and where in the dance Sonya stops the music. This time it’s with a role-reversing promise, and a counter promise: satisfying.

I’ll leave you with the items Ezra lays out on Lizzie’s bed: atonements, or protective talismans, or maybe a kind of map:

the rough fist of ambergris … then a square-rigged ship soot-inked into a polished tooth, then a seal of black soapstone… a handful of pearls dripping with salt-black mud … a round-bellied bottle streaked green as the plunge of a wave. Silver dollars jumbled with sand dollars, brown-inked logbook pages interleaved with dark plates of baleen. Whale stamps, stick charts, looped strands of pink jade.

You want to touch them, right? You can—just pick up the book ;-)

Null States is the second book in Malka Older’s Centenal cycle, following on Infomocracy and preceding State Tectonics.

( Big fat long entry about this big fat book I loved )

Muse upon it, friends!

The Memory Police
Yoko Ogawa


Japanese title: 密やかな結晶 [The secret/quiet/hidden crystal]
Original Japanese cover


The English title, jacket copy, and advertising totally misrepresent this novel. Yes, the memory police are present and as awful as you’d expect; yes, the protagonist, a novelist, hides her editor away, Anne Frank style. But this isn’t a novel about a dystopia or oppression—those elements are incidental. It’s fundamentally about forgetting, loss, and (because it’s the ultimate loss) death. What does it mean to remember? What does it mean to forget? When people who remember interact with people who can’t, it’s very painful—we know this from real life—but it’s a pain we embrace. If you’re going down by the minute, if you’re being diminished bit by bit, it doesn’t mean you can’t love. There’s an awful lot of resignation in this book, but there’s love too, and some characters stoutly stake out positions of hope.

R, the protagonist’s editor, who needs to be hidden because he can remember the things that have disappeared, says,

A heart has no shape, no limits. That's why you can put almost any kind of thing in it, why it can hold so much ... My memories don't feel as though they've been pulled up by the root. Even if they fade something remains. Like tiny seeds that might germinate again if the rain falls. And even if a memory disappears completely, the heart retains something. A slight tremor or pain, some bit of joy, a tear.

To which the narrator replies, poignantly,

I don't even know what I should be remembering. What's gone is gone completely. I have no seeds inside me, waiting to sprout again. I have to make do with a hollow heart full of holes. That's why I'm jealous of your heart, one that offers some resistance, that is tantalizingly transparent and yet not, that seems to change as the light shines on it at different angles."

The mechanism for the (f)act of disappearing is a little nebulous. People wake up knowing something has “been disappeared,” but in many cases it’s up to them to get rid of the thing—as with photographs, or (unfortunately for the protagonist) novels. They feel a compulsion to dispose of the items—it’s terribly sad:

The new cavities in my heart search for things to burn. They drive me to burn things and I can stop only when everything is in ashes

And when things like birds disappear, people simply stop understanding what birds are. Sometimes they can be made to remember, but it’s an arduous process and it doesn’t stick very well.

Here I need to take a brief digression to talk about fruit. Fruit disappear about a third of the way through the book:

The disappearance of fruit was much simpler. When we woke in the morning, fruit of every sort was falling from trees all over the island. A pattering sound could be heard everywhere, and in the northern hills and the forest part, fruit came down like a hailstorm.

To my intense botherment, the protagonist continues to refer to fruit throughout the whole rest of the novel—when theoretically she should barely be able to articulate the word (we witness examples of this with “hat” and “photograph”). She talks about burning a novel whose cover has a picture of fruit on it, she regrets that she can’t get strawberries for a birthday cake (without acknowledging that this is because they’ve disappeared), she smells something that reminds her of rotten fruit, and finally at one point the characters are actually eating slices of apple. What the heck?

It’s hard to believe that an editor would let this slip past—if I’d been Ogawa’s editor, I definitely would have queried this—so my best way of understanding it is that the disappearances aren’t total—that just as birds continue to exist, so does fruit—but not in a way that is reliably accessible to the characters. It’s like how sometimes you can do some processes unconsciously because they’ve become part of muscle memory, but if you try to do them consciously, you get tangled up.

In that sense, the novel is brilliant in creating in you the ragged, tattered sense that losing memories, losing your sense of the world, produces in people.

In the novel the protagonist is writing, which has some parallels with the life she’s experiencing, there’s an actual malevolent agent, a force behind the diminishment and erasure that’s lacking in the protagonist’s actual life … and in the novel we read, the memory police play a similar role. They do assuredly make existence worse on the nameless island that’s the location for the story—but they’re not the cause of the disappearances. They’re a big problem, but they’re not the central problem, which, I’d argue, is this: if you can see the end coming—your personal end, or the end of the whole world, or both—if it’s coming step by step, ineluctably … How are you going to face it? The answer the novel offers is a moving tribute to pricelessness of personal connections and the strength of weak things.