REPETITION, recursion...refashioning...recasting....

REPETITION
VIGDIS HJORTH (tr. Charlotte Barslund)
Verso Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

One of Maris Kreizman’s Best of Books of 2026 So Far

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Prize-winning novel by one of the foremost writers of her generation, explores the horror and beauty of being sixteen-years-old.

In a Norwegian November, when it is dark at waking and dark at sleeping, a novelist in her sixties sits next to a teenaged girl at the opera, and through their padded jackets feels a dreadfully familiar tension conducted from the parents seated on her far side. She thinks back to her sixteenth year. The year she first got drunk and the year she first had sex with a boy. A year of being circled by an anxious, hawkish mother and, at a notable distance, her silent father.

The year her family made an unspoken decision, and an unspeakable sacrifice.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: "Repetition" and "repetitive" have pretty negative connotations in literary discourse. We'll generally reach for "recursion" (the older term by nearly two centuries) and "recursive" to move the affect into a more positive light. Most of this very short read I was leaning towards grousing about repetitive prose making me feel kinda seasick, like Invisible Man always has; I've never managed to finish the read because of it. This being a novella there was no time for me to get really, really tired of it.

Hope is like a new garment—stiff, tight and glittering—but until you try it on, you won't know if it fits or suits you, while memory is like an old garment: no matter how pretty it is, it no longer suits you, you've outgrown it.

Repetition, however, is like a durable garment that hugs you tenderly, but never constricts or swamps you. I was glad that I hoped for nothing, but why then this feeling of dread?

Early on, we're told there will be repetition, and it's the bloody title of the story; I cannot whinge that I was blindsided or misled. As I said in my review of Is Mother Dead?, "'Do I confront my deepest self?' asks Johanna, our narrator, in a passage that honestly sums up the entire experience of reading Author Hjorth's writing," an assessment I equally happily apply to this read.

But that repetitive prose...it was not until the Big Reveal about three-quarters into the read that I realized we were in recursive territory, we were shading there all along, as every iteration of the memories our narrator, a woman of my age, recalls her sixteenth year's events and feelings, alive now to their emotional and practical freight in a way impossible to a sixteen-year-old.

She was suspicious and she had cause to be, but I didn’t know that at the time—though I had an inkling that not everything was as it should be with me—that something lived deep within me, was working away in me, and if it led to confirmation, then what? She was looking for signs of something she simultaneously suspected and feared, desperately hoping not to find anything in order to be reassured and so far she hadn’t found anything, but still she didn’t feel safe, because she didn’t know what she was looking for. She wanted to get rid of her unnerving, intrusive suspicion of what might have happened to me by finding evidence that would prove her suspicion was baseless, but seeing as that was impossible, she sought instead to prevent the potential consequences of what she suspected and feared but didn’t actually want to deal with, from a twisted belief that it was possible to do so by smothering me, by forcing me, by nudging me into acting and behaving like a healthy, normal teenager. Only she didn’t realise that her hysteria and fear ultimately suggested and homed in on the very thing she didn’t want to know.

Knowing what you don't want to know is corrosive. It destroys happiness, safety, even selfhood dissolves in its caustic bath. I should know, it's been my reality since 1982.

I was not primed to feel the shock of this story's revelation, then, but rather to bear witness with the narrator. The very best gift to give her is to be with her on her level, in her time, without drama that draws the focus away from her.

I rewrite and I reproduce like Munch painted several versions of The Scream, I repeat and I vary the repetition, shamelessly, with my heart on my sleeve and suffering inevitable heartburn in order to process and understand and put it behind me or to reinforce the bitterness and excitement inside me, in order to change myself through repeating and varying patterns . . .

Recursion, in other words. That's a word mostly used in math or computer science, occasionally someone trots out Chomsky's no-longest-sentence reasoning; but mostly this word is treated like it's wearing a starched white lab coat and a pocket protector (is my age showing or what?) in my opinion quite unfairly. This story is the most recursive thing I've read this year and proudly so. It's the zoomed-in fractal of trauma. It's the infinite capacity of language to iterate until the reader's eyes bleed. In under 150pp.

Truth is always hard to endure. This novel is truthtelling, degrading and repugnant truths told like it or not. The reason I think you should read it is simple: You can put it down. You can take some time to get your head around it. You can, in a pinch, apply the Pearl Rule.

Unlike life.

Facing truth as it's told is hard and it costs you many hard-to-lose things, like illusions and the warm loving comfort of being lied to. Practice in a novel; think about how the second person works as a narrative device; put your chest in the narrator's poking finger's path.

Imagine if there is no choice afforded you.

Welcome to the ugly side.

THE FERRYMAN AND HIS WIFE, short and sentimental

THE FERRYMAN AND HIS WIFE
FRODE GRYTTEN (tr. Alison McCullough)
Algonquin Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.99 paperback, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In the spirit of Amor Towles and George Saunders, the renowned, bestselling Norwegian author Frode Grytten takes readers on a quietly epic journey: ferry driver Nils Vik's last route along the fjord, on what he knows will be his last day alive.

Nils Vik wakes up on November the 18th and knows it will be the day he dies. He follows his morning routine as voices from his past echo in his mind, and looks around the empty house one last time, before stepping onto his beloved boat.

His dog, dead these many years, leaps aboard with him, and then the other dead begin to emerge—from the woods along the fjord, from each of the ferry stops along the route, from his logbook full of memories and quotations and jotted-down notes about the weather conditions. The people from the past accompany him now, prodding him, showing him what he might have missed before, as he waits for his Marta, his late, remarkable wife, to finally join him on the boat again.

Winner of the prestigious Brage Prize, and considered to be Grytten's long-awaited masterpiece, The Ferryman and His Wife is the story of a quiet, yet utterly profound, life told in reverse. Timeless and absorbing, this is a novel about what we take with us—those moments that might seem insignificant as they happen but prove to be the most meaningful, in the end.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Wisdom comes late in life, if it bothers to stop by your place at all.

To be born was to live long enough to discover what air and sea and earth and hate and love are, then to say thank you and goodbye.

Nils Vik, the ferryman of the title, has a good store of wisdom built up, and uses his last day of life to put it in order.

This life is like an item of clothing, the beauty exists on the outside but the warmth is found within.

Aper&çu after aphorism following quotable line, this is a lovely sentimental ruminative summing-up of a small life lived well.

"He loved his wife. I always said they lived like two clapping hands, she was the left hand, he the right."

If the need for a warm toddy on a cold day is upon you, read this book. It is lovey; it is short; it answers that need we all share for feeling seen and valued for ourselves, for our gifts and how we've given them.

"And don’t think I’m about to ask you. About what? Whether or not you were happy – because I know exactly what you’ll say. You’re one of those people who thinks you’re happy where you are, somebody who wants no more than what you already have."

I found the one discordant note, some people traveling in Nils' ferry to exterminate feral dogs, sufficiently off-putting to skip over any possible details I might be offended by and ding a star off the rating.

Its impact was warming overall, and the prose went down well; will I remember it in a week? Not likely; it was an afternoon's pleasant entertainment.

MY MEN, #WITMonth translation of Norwegian novel about first known US female serial killer

MY MEN
VICTORIA KIELLAND (tr. Damion Searls)
Astra House
$25.00 hardcover, available now
Trade paper AVAILABLE 13 AUGUST 2024 for $16.00
Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Based on the true story of Norwegian maid turned Midwestern farmwife Belle Gunness, the first female serial killer in American history. My Men is a fictional account of one broken woman's descent into inescapable madness.

Among thousands of other Norwegian immigrants seeking freedom, Brynhild Størset emigrated to the American Upper Midwest in the late nineteenth century, changing her name and her life. As Bella, later Belle Gunness, she came in search of not only fortune and true faith but, most of all, love.

From Victoria Kielland, a rising star of Norwegian literature, comes My Men , a literary reimagining of the harrowing true story of Belle Gunness, who slowly but irreversibly turned to senseless murder for release from her pain, becoming America’s first known female serial killer. In pursuit of her American Dream, Kielland’s Belle grows increasingly alienated, ruthless, and perversely compelling.

Raw, visceral, and altogether hypnotic, My Men is a brutal yet radically empathetic glimpse into the world of a woman consumed by desire.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: When a writer sets their talent to the task of fictionalizing evil, there are choices to make that will determine the level of suspension of disbelief the reader's being asked to invest. Is the evil inherent (readily believable), evoked (sympathetically believable), or situational (tough to justify or invest in)? Is the perpetrator the victim lashing out, taking power back, or simply looking to survive in hard conditions? All of these ask us, as readers, to put aside our judgments of the bad actor to some extent and to come to a fuller understanding of what really happened (in the cases where evil is factually based, as this one is).

I'll say that I understood Belle Gunness a lot differently after this read than before it.

A more-or-less stream of consciousness, loosely structured narrative style suits the apparent purpose of humanizing a murdering, remorseless killer of many people. What the author seems to want me to do is to think of Belle as a person, in hard circumstances, not as just a killing machine. That didn't happen. As I followed her increasingly disordered thoughts and feelings, as I saw what she saw and worked back from there to her probable outside stimulus, I felt sympathy drain away from me. This is the situationally evil character, one who just does what she (in this case) does because she can. This person was a killer who liked killing for the power it conferred on her. The inner thoughts of such a person, as ficionalized, left me thinking how very easy it seemed to be for her to untether her blunted, stunted moral sense from anything that was outside her own mind. I'd assumed Gunness was existentially threatened herself and then enacted that on others. Before this read, what I saw was a need to redress her powerless victim state. After, she came through these pages as a narcissistic bundle of insecurities with a grossly overblown sense of what the world owed her.

If, like me, you thought we'd get a retelling of the life Belle Gunness led that made her what she was, get that out of your head. We're inside Belle's mind, arguably a more interesting place to be. It's going to put some readers off, because it's 100% conjecture. You're not tethered to the facts of Belle's life. You're asked to put aside that readerly need. Your disbelief buys you, however, the strange and deeply interesting view of a murdering sociopath's thought processes.

I hope like hell someone at the publisher's end made more than a cursory check on the author's background because she's very, very good...chillingly good...at making this horrifying person's inner life accessible to a casual reader.

I don't think everyone will appreciate this read. I know I expected something other than what I got. I liked the actual book better than the one I thought I'd be reading in the end.

THE VIKING HISTORY PAGE: THE WOLF AGE, first Scandinavian-authored Viking history in English & CHILDREN OF ASH AND ELM, distinguished archaeologist writes

THE WOLF AGE: The Vikings, the Anglo-Saxons and the Battle for the North Sea Empire
TORE SKEIE (tr. Alison McCullough)
Pushkin Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$19.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Thrilling history provides a new perspective on the Viking-Anglo Saxon conflicts and brings the bloody period vividly to life, perfect for fans of Dan Jones

The first major book on Vikings by a Scandinavian author to be published in English, The Wolf Age reframes the struggle for a North Sea empire and puts readers in the mindset of Vikings, providing new insight into their goals, values, and what they chose to live and die for.

Tore Skeie ("Norway's Most Important Young Historian") takes readers on a thrilling journey through the bloody shared history of England and Scandinavia, and on across early medieval Europe, from the wild Norwegian fjords to the wealthy cities of Muslim Andalusia.

Warfare, plotting, backstabbing and bribery abound as Skeie skillfully weaves sagas and skaldic poetry with breathless dramatization as he entertainingly brings the world of the Vikings and Anglo-Saxons to vivid life.

In the eleventh century, the rulers of the lands surrounding the North Sea are all hungry for power. To get power they need soldiers, to get soldiers they need silver, and to get silver there is no better way than war and plunder.

This vicious cycle draws all the lands of the north into a brutal struggle for supremacy and survival that will shatter kingdoms and forge an empire…

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: This Norwegian historian's viewpoint on the rise and spread of the late-Viking-era North Sea empire. The seeds of this immense stretch of territory coming under one ruler were set in the attacks of Harald Gormsson, King of Denmark, (whom we call "Bluetooth" and yes, he's the source of the name of the wireless connectivity protocol on your phone) on the rich and peaceful (therefore ripe for robbery) Anglo-Saxon Kingdom(s). His wars against the neighboring Saxon Kingdom along the Baltic Sea coast were costly, and even resulted in his loss of control over Norway; much money for rearming and hiring mercenaries was needed and, well, Anglaland ho! Alas, his death came before he could finish a war of conquest in what is today a coastal region of Poland.

Aethelred the Redeless, who fought Harald and Sweyn his whole life, on his coinage
We don't see much of Harald in English-language histories, but he was more than the raiding monarch seeking silver to pay for his wars. He was also the one who introduced a centralized coinage for Denmark, guaranteeing its value would always be the same wherever one was paid in it. And one means of assuring that? Go get silver from someone else. The English have lots! And so it came to pass that the immensity of the North Sea became the middle ground between two halves of one empire...in fact, for a brief time, and in imagination for a longer one.

Harald's son Sweyn (opponent of "Saint" Olaf Haraldsson for the title of King of Norway, who is pictured above), after successfully rebelling against him, continued his father's efforts to unite the coasts of the North Sea under his family. A period of uncertainty in his rule before his first reported raid on the murderers of his kinsfolk in their midst (the appalling St Brice's Day massacre!) beginning a long campaign of looting and terror against the English. This campaign turned into occupation; the occupation turned into becoming the King of the English in 1013. Leaving England in the hands of his second son, he hurried off to fight another war...and died before 1015.

He was thus not as successful as was his own son, King Canute as he is known in English and Cnut the Great at home (his coin portrait is at the right). He ruled all three kingdoms, Norway from 1028, Denmark from 1018, and England from 1015, for twenty years and made a decent fist of it. What happened, as happened to most all territorially great empires, was just the reality of physics. In an era without motorized transport, the chances of maintaining control over a huge swath of territory are not great. Cnut did not overcome the odds, dying in 1035 with England still barely under his control. His descendants continued to cherish hopes of reacquiring England until Edward the Confessor died in 1066, when Harald Hardrada was killed with his army at the Battle of Stamford Bridge defending his, um, very (very) extended family's claim on the wealthy English realm. This was the last gasp of the North Sea Empire as envisioned by Harald Gormsson a century before.

The territorial drive of the father, son, and grandsons wasn't out of character; wasn't unusually violently for the era; and is ripe for reconsideration by English-language readers to account for our lamentable tendency to simply unsee the viewpoints of others on our shared histories. This volume is the first translated, for the most part skilfully, into English. I'd say the one concerning lacuna in this rendering into English of a popular history written in Norwegian is the use of colloquially still prevalent "Anglo-Saxon" in reference to the people, not the culture, of England from the 6th through 11th centuries. It's established through the use of genomics that the people of England are still largely Britons. It's a minor cavil in a work of popular history.

More frustrating to me is the lack of maps in the DRC. There are (see above) very nice black-and-white illustrations at the chapter opens but in my DRC, there weren't maps and, in any history text that discusses battles, that is a serious omission. I am aware that there are indeed maps in your final copies, I hasten to say, but I haven't seen them and can't comment on their effectiveness at conveying information they're meant to. I left off only a half-star in my rating, however, because that lack was both unique to the DRC and somewhat compensated for by the sheer pleasure of reading the skillfully translated text. Alison McCullough deserves much praise. While there is a sense of the original text's depth of scholarship, the primary affect of this book is one of absorbing, intelligent conversation overheard by the reader...not all the references or historical figures will stay in one's mind, available for instant recall, but even at lazier moments when I didn't feel like chasing a reference or an actor in the endnotes, or the "Overview of Persons" as this text charmingly calls the Dramatis Personae, I was carried along by what felt to me like very readable, accessible prose. Enough explanation was offered to my non-specialist brain to enable me to move forward with a real sense of the ethos in which events transpired.

Overall, the point of a book such as this...a lovely illustrated trade-paper edition of popular history about the pre-Norman Conquest world of England...is to please and intrigue the history buff on your gifting list. (Or you, of course.) I feel confident that it will serve that purpose.

Pushkin Press continues its streak of fascinating, unusual in the US, points of view presented in beautiful and pleasurable format.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

CHILDREN OF ASH AND ELM: A History of the Vikings
NEIL PRICE
Basic Books
$35.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The definitive history of the Vikings—from arts and culture to politics and cosmology—by a distinguished archaeologist with decades of expertise

The Viking Age—from 750 to 1050—saw an unprecedented expansion of the Scandinavian peoples into the wider world. As traders and raiders, explorers and colonists, they ranged from eastern North America to the Asian steppe. But for centuries, the Vikings have been seen through the eyes of others, distorted to suit the tastes of medieval clerics and Elizabethan playwrights, Victorian imperialists, Nazis, and more. None of these appropriations capture the real Vikings, or the richness and sophistication of their culture.

Based on the latest archaeological and textual evidence, Children of Ash and Elm tells the story of the Vikings on their own terms: their politics, their cosmology and religion, their material world. Known today for a stereotype of maritime violence, the Vikings exported new ideas, technologies, beliefs, and practices to the lands they discovered and the peoples they encountered, and in the process were themselves changed.

From Eirík Bloodaxe, who fought his way to a kingdom, to Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir, the most traveled woman in the world, Children of Ash and Elm is the definitive history of the Vikings and their time.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Far broader in scope than The Wolf Age reviewed above, this is the most compact (at under 650 pages) and the most comprehensive overview I've ever read of the "Viking Age" Norse as we here to their South call the multiple groups of Scandinavian traders, slavers, warriors, and rapists who burst the seams of their colossally cold homeland in search of new lands and lots of money. Spoiler alert: they got them.

If the data from the Continental written sources is combined, the protection money paid to the Vikingsduring the ninth century totalled about thirty thousand pounds' weight of silver, most of it in cash: a sum equivalent to seven million silver pennies over a period when the estimated total output of the Frankish mints was in the region of fifty million coins. This equates to approximately 14 percent of the entire monetary output of the Frankish empire—for a century—evaporated in the payment of extortion demands that produced no tangible positive gain, and, in many cases, failed to appease the Vikings anyway.

(italics in the original)

There is so much to unpack in that passage...it's shockingly obvious that appeasement is seldom a worthwhile strategy, and is always an expensive one; the reputation of the Norse people as warriors was such that they merely needed to show up to be given boatloads of money to go away again; and the tribute in kind, not just the cash they brought home, kept the balance of hunger on the rightful owners of the land and food not the invaders. The Frankish kingdom, then, was more changed by its experience of Viking invasion than was even England, though both countries saw significant influxes of Norse population, arriving to make the country their home...with variable amounts of success. (See above for St. Brice's Massacre.)

That is all part of the middle, or "Viking" era that this volume is divided into. The first part of the text is called the "Migration" era. It is the time that saw huge cultural and climatic changes in Europe. There was pressure to find land to farm and patches of sea to exploit during this time, as well as the successor states to the Roman Empire arising and contending with each other for influence and territory. And ending the book is a kind of summation of the influence this phenomenally active and successful force in the world.

I was delighted to have the maps to help me interpret the movements and stations of Norse cultural expansion. I was also impressed wt the copiousness of the in-line illustrations. It is expensive to make a book this attractive and it's not a terribly pricey purchase at $35 for a hardcover. Basic Books has done a creditable job of this without making it a coffee-table book or a category-gift book.

Author Neil Price is a professional archaeologist. It is evident from the tone and tenor of his writing that his primary interest is in making you aware of the facts; he doesn't make the same amount of effort with the storytelling aspects of his writing. I've excerpted one of the typical passages where he's clearly making the effort to show the reader how phenomenally effective the Vikings were at their chosen task of redistributing others' wealth back to themselves. It's a fact, presented factually, that conveys a gigantic emotive affect of the Viking warriors. It is laudably clear; it is admirably placed for effect within the text (you'll have to trust me on that one); but it doesn't rise as high into the rhetorical clouds as Author Tore's book does.

It is, as a gift item, a good value; as a gift received, a real pleasure on all levels. It's a hefty tome, though, so for your friends whose needs are more for thinner reads, the ebook is a dead cheap choice!

Either way anyone wanting an accessible, enjoyable, and thoroughgoing overview of the Vikings as historical actors is in luck this Yule.

IS MOTHER DEAD, Norwegian author's toxic tale of mothering & EARTHLINGS, Japanese author's horror story of abused, delusional daughter

IS MOTHER DEAD
VIGDIS HJORTH (tr. Charlotte Barslund)
Verso Books
$26.95 hardcover, available now

Definitely read this Astra Magazine interview with Author Hjorth.

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A cat and mouse game of surveillance and psychological torment develops between a middle-aged artist and her aging mother, as Vigdis Hjorth returns to the themes of her controversial modern classic, Will and Testament.

'To mother is to murder, or close enough', thinks Johanna, as she looks at the spelling of the two words in Norwegian. She's recently widowed and back in Oslo after a long absence as she prepares for a retrospective of her art. The subject of her work is motherhood and some of her more controversial paintings have brought about a dramatic rift between parent and child. This new proximity, after decades of acrimonious absence, set both women on edge, and before too long Johanna finds her mother stalking her thoughts, and Johanna starts stalking her mother's house.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Twenty-ish books is a damned fine career. Author Hjorth and Translator Barslund are quite a team of creators, bringing this still-expanding storyverse from Norway to the US English-language market. They do it skillfully...and they do it, thankfully, quite often.

"Do I confront my deepest self?" asks Johanna, our narrator, in a passage that honestly sums up the entire experience of reading Author Hjorth's writing. She is in a deep personal crisis, reaching out to her long-estranged mother after decades of ill will that she caused with her art. Paintings Johanna created caused her mother, as well as her sister, to see things that family amnesia demanded be kept silent. Johanna was, and still is, unwilling to be silent. She has reached her sixties, though, a time in life when time itself looks and feels very, very different than it does even five or six years prior. Building bridges between ourselves and those responsible for our present-day being can, in many families, present challenges that feel insurmountable.

Johanna, as a visual person, sees her aging self as partly her mother "...on whose model my body is being shaped, as if I were clay contained in a form." She is facing mortality, and seeing how morality is molded within our relatively short-term bodily accommodation. She is finally reckoning with her mother's and her sister's deep sense of betrayal at her hands...while never believing she was wrong, she recognizes at last that they are hurt. As Johanna thinks through her complicated life, she muses on the natural surroundings her Norwegian home is in; any time she says, in that context, anything about "Mother" I wonder if she's talking about her mother, or OUR Mother-the-Earth...and these moment of being Mothered in nature are so sharply contrasted to her family-mother's unhappiness-making unmotherly ways.

But at such a cost to her own mental health...she obsesses about the family she broke, and did that deliberately, then ran away from the consequences for half her life. The author's formatting, daunting looking as it is, actually serves as a strong support for the story. Johanna is in the throes of a crisis. She doesn't think like a normal person. She is quite simply disintegrating into the pieces she reassembled through her art. The pages are designed to make concrete what could be lost in any other design choice.

But if the daughter sees her future in looking into the mirror of her mother, that mother sees a past that failed her in important ways, and sees herself and her failures writ live and large. Johanna's mother's rancor and rage aren't going to go away, and she (and her other daughter) have had decades to "get their story straight" as it were. The entrenched narratives of hurt on both sides bode ill for a meeting of the minds....

This beautifully written and translated book serves as a reminder to us all that we don't get to be victims all by ourselves. All damage done is reciprocal, and there is no escape from retribution. Self-delivered retribution, most commonly of all.

It's not a perfect book, as none ever can be. I rate it four of five stars because it's not a long book but it is a repetitive one. We hear the entire story in Johanna's internal voice. It's an excellent way to convey the dark night of the soul, the anger and hurt of betrayal...from one side. It takes a bit of work to contextualize the non-standard layout. It is worth the effort, in my never-humble opinion, but be prepared for it.

I recommend this latest salvo from Vigdis Hjorth's seemingly bottomless well of personal fiction to you, all the daughters and all the mothers and all the siblings whose home lives weren't always the happy-clappy-sappy greeting-card kind. Accept Vigdis Hjorth's gift of seeing yourself in her mixed, complicated feelings in this storyverse.

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EARTHLINGS
SAYAKA MURATA (tr. Ginny Tapley Takemori)
Grove Press
$17.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From the beloved author of cult sensation Convenience Store Woman, which has now sold more than a million copies worldwide, comes a spellbinding and otherworldly novel about a young girl who believes she is an alien

As a child, Natsuki doesn’t fit into her family. Her parents favor her sister, and her best friend is a plush toy hedgehog named Piyyut who has explained to her that he has come from the planet Popinpobopia on a special quest to help her save the Earth. Each summer, Natsuki counts down the days until her family drives into the mountains of Nagano to visit her grandparents in their wooden house in the forest, a place that couldn’t be more different from her grey commuter town. One summer, her cousin Yuu confides to Natsuki that he is an extraterrestrial and that every night he searches the sky for the spaceship that might take him back to his home planet. Natsuki wonders if she might be an alien too.

Back in her city home, Natsuki is scolded or ignored and even preyed upon by a young teacher at her cram school. As she grows up in a hostile, violent world, she consoles herself with memories of her time with Yuu and discovers a surprisingly potent inner power. Natsuki seems forced to fit into a society she deems a “baby factory” but even as a married woman she wonders if there is more to this world than the mundane reality everyone else seems to accept. The answers are out there, and Natsuki has the power to find them.

Dreamlike, sometimes shocking, and always strange and wonderful, Earthlings asks what it means to be happy in a stifling world, and cements Sayaka Murata’s status as a master chronicler of the outsider experience and our own uncanny universe.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: If you go read my 2019 review of Convenience Store Woman, you will probably wonder why I asked for this DRC. I was impressed by Author Murata's very pointed prose and her determined, dogged almost, pursuit of delineating characters who violate every.single.standard. of maleness and femaleness in Japanese society. I think of that as the most successful part of both Murata's earlier, and this, novel.

"I must use my magical powers to stay alive," she thinks, "I must become empty. I must obey."

–and–

Grown ups had it tough, too, I thought. Miss Shinozuka functioned well enough as one of society’s tools, but maybe wasn’t functioning properly as one of society’s reproductive organs.

She was in the position of educating me and ruled over me, but at the same time she herself was also being judged as a tool of society.

This time, a female character isn't simply alienated, unable to find Woman inside herself. This time, Natsuki is actually a vessel for an alien. (Or so she's decided after her cousin Yuu tells her he's from another planet...in playful terms that she does not get.) She then decides that her role is as an emissary from that planet, and reports to her handler via Piyyut, one of her stuffed toys. It's another level of weird, y'all. It's disturbing, it's startling, it's just damned strange.

I hadn’t told my family, but I was a magician, a real one with actual magical powers. I’d met Piyyut in the supermarket by the station when I was six and had just started elementary school. He was right on the edge of the soft toy display and looked as though he was about to be thrown out. I bought him with the money I’d received at New Year’s. Piyyut was the one who’d given me my magical objects and powers. He was from Planet Popinpobopia. The Magic Police had found out that Earth was facing a crisis and had sent him on a mission to save our planet. Since then I’d been using the powers he’d given me to protect the Earth.

–and–

I hugged my backpack to me. Inside it was my origami magic wand and my magical transformation mirror. At the very top of the backpack was my best friend, Piyyut, who gave me these magical objects. Piyyut can’t speak human since the evil forces put a spell on him, but he’s looking after me so I won’t get carsick.

So of course, this is where I buy in and get ready for the ride. Translator Tapley Takemori is gonna let off the verbal incediaries!

Love is a drug made in the brain to enable humans to mate. It’s simply an anesthetic. In other words, it’s an illusion made to prettify the painful mating act, to reduce the suffering and disgust of the sexual act. We might be able to use this anesthetic if we’re ever in pain. But for now I don’t think it’s necessary.

–and–

The Baby Factory produces humans connected by flesh and blood… Once shipped out, male and female humans are trained how to take food back to their own nests. They become society’s tools, receive money from other humans and purchase food. Eventually these young humans aso form breeding pairs, coop themselves up in new nests, and manufacture more babies.

The fact is I don't entirely disagree with Natsuki...society, as presently constituted, is a Baby Factory. She lives through a dreadful, abusive childhood and the blighting horror of an unloving mother. She still manages to make herself get married to a man, a boring, ordinary man, whose mother is clear-sighted and indifferent to her husband, a loutish and judgmental lump we'd call a redneck in the US.

"Look, Tomoya. Do it a lot and make a family, then once the relationship has cooled, you play around outside of marriage. That's the way it is for lots of couples, isn't it? Playing around is a man's reward. Your father has had his fair share, haven't you dear?"

–and–

"I hate people who insist on their rights while neglecting their duty."

Tomoya, their son, is what these days we'd identify as a demisexual. Here in the US he'd find increasing support for that variant identity. Not in Japan. Tomoya and Natsuki find each other on an anti-dating site and enter into a consensually sexless marriage. At least, if they're married, they reason the families will finally stop making their lives hell about it. Of course, then comes baby talk. Predictable, no? Well...that is how Author Murata rolls. She does the expected, the predictable, and lards it into the weird and the uncomfortable. At the end of the story, things have happened to Natsuki and things have passed her by; it's really not obvious to me that her world is not, in fact, reality seen from an unexpected angle. Some of the most uncomfortable scenes and subplots...can one have subplots in this kind of narrative, digressive and discursive but more or less chronological?...are clear and honest bashings of the patriarchal society we have allowed to rule over us for far too long. There is violence and there is horror, but it is nothing you haven't read before and is probably more powerful for that. Because, in this story, those sharp blades of rage are all rising from a garlic-flavored custard, a durian-marmalade slathered slice of toast, a radish you find inside your cupcake.

What a way to spend a day. Immersed in a soup of very, very maladjusted people. People whose full strangeness isn't even dented by what I've said so far, what I've quoted. There are some shocks to your system headed your way when you choose to read a Sayaka Murata novel, that's part of the reason one does it. This time, I give the read more stars than Convenience Store Woman because Natsuki's struggles with overcoming her deeply unhappy childhood and her maladaptive attempts to "fit in" are so reminiscent of Vigdis Hjorth's Johanna in the review above. They aren't in any cosmetic or surface way alike...Johanna's mental illness is from a similar source but is NOT dealt with internally through the fantastical inventions of Natsuki...but these women, betrayed by those whose job it was to protect them and abused for daring to try to be their authentic selves, deal with it all internally. Outward signs aren't visible to the people who don't look at them properly. We, the readers, are privy to things we want to believe would make a happier outcome for these women.

But I will bet you money that, given access to our point of view, no one in these two women's ambit would change their damaging behavior in any significant way. Nor would the women themselves. Ultimately that led what was for reader-me an almost-five-star review to drop to a solid four stars of five. I wasn't put off by Author Murata's weirdness. It was the helpless and hopeless ethos of the story that, in the end, dimmed the anarchic luster of the prose.

Tragedies are so much more interesting than comedies, no?