EDGE CASE, YZ Chin's wry assessment of how "love and marriage" ≠ security

EDGE CASE
YZ CHIN
Ecco Press
$26.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

A BEST-OF-2021 PICK FROM NPR BOOKS!

The Publisher Says: When her husband suddenly disappears, a young woman must uncover where he went—and who she might be without him—in this striking debut of immigration, identity, and marriage.

After another taxing day as the sole female employee at her New York City tech startup, Edwina comes home to find that her husband, Marlin, has packed up a suitcase and left. The only question now is why. Did he give up on their increasingly hopeless quest to secure their green cards and decide to return to Malaysia? Was it the death of his father that sent him into a tailspin? Or has his strange, sudden change in personality finally made Marlin and Edwina strangers to each other?

As Edwina searches the city for traces of her husband, she simultaneously sifts through memories of their relationship, hoping to discover the moment when something went wrong. All the while, a coworker is making increasingly uncomfortable advances toward her. And she can’t hide the truth about Marlin’s disappearance from her overbearing, eccentric mother for much longer. Soon Edwina will have to decide how much she is willing to sacrifice in order to stay in her marriage and in America.

Poignant and darkly funny, Edge Case is a searing meditation on intimacy, estrangement, and the fractured nature of identity. In this moving debut, YZ Chin explores the imperfect yet enduring relationships we hold to country and family.

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

My Review: First, read this:

Being very polite to train conductors and building security guards for the past decade has made my deferential way of speaking second nature. Though what an odd saying. What is my first nature?
–and–
He stood out, his skin a shade that I had seen compared to food items like chocolate or coffee in American books. Looking at him, I thought not of food, but of a neutral coolness that disguised something else, like an envelope that contained either really good tidings or earth-shattering bad news.

First novelist YZ Chin isn't playing around. She wrote those two passages early in this book. There isn't, this writing informs you, going to be any false modesty in here. I am going to talk about how a Straits Chinese woman married to a Chindian man, a fat woman married to a lean, athletic man who loves her, feels when "America" does its number on them together, separately, and as Symbols. They're two damaged people, they're altogether too small to withstand the pressure of being Symbols, and they're cracking under the strains. Which is why the book is narrated by Edwina in phone-and-internet conversations with her not-quite-licensed (it's just a paperwork thing, nothing important) therapist (see INS form I-693) after Marlin leaves her.

Edwina is an abused daughter of a harridan of a mother (The Banana Tree Spirit Story! OMG!!), a vegetarian to her dark, lean husband's more exacting veganism, a "quality control analyst" in a dudebro startup firm called, fully explanatorily, "AInstein," that lost its VCs a boatload of money by screwing some important code up and still releasing it to a client. Oopsie. Get a girl to handle it...an immigrant who won't dare make much trouble, cause any stress but will fill the role...one who won't be missed when we have to fire her for whatever screw-up she can't make us fix.

The bug was what’s called an integer overflow, which is when a number is too large for its assigned storage capacity and thus can manifest instead as a negative figure. For example, if the number 128 were forced into a signed field that could express only up to 127, the input would ‘overflow’ and be displayed as ˗128. It was mildly gratifying to learn that the human body could also overflow. I idly wondered if, any day now, my pain would grow so great that it converted into happiness.

What a terrific job, no? Not even a company-sponsored green card application, no no, you'll get your H1-C visa and that's it. Why, if she didn't really, really, really want to stay away from the poisonous reach of her mother's awful, barbed "past-life stories." Marlin's job, less pointless it seems, even affords him a few American friends, like best buddy Eamon and the guys he goes to the rock-climbing gym with. But everything changes when Marlin's father suddenly dies back in Malaysia.

At his funeral, the pair of them expensively in attendance as the ceremonies take place, along comes Edwina's mother to tell the Banana Tree Spirit story about betrayal, misery, and hateful ignorance carrying the day. That was bad enough, being about her daughter's "past life," but the many, many echoes this latest piece of cruelty has bids fair to have broken poor Marlin. At this lowest, most grief-ridden moment, the words have twisted themselves into a noose around his logical self so the corpse is all that's left in an ever-darkening relationship to Edwina.

A little detail about the pair returning from Malaysia into Trump's Murruhkuh, how they were treated at Customs, should make your blood boil, your mouth taste sour, and your eyes reflexively leak tears. I half-wondered if Edwina's speculation that "America made Marlin feel unwelcome, and so he left me," wasn't at least half right....

The US government actually monitored immigrants online, and anything I typed might be used against me—that was what internet advice hinted at. Resources for immigrants cautioned that we should "avoid profanity and the use of aggressive or threatening language" while posting online, which really voided the whole purpose of being on Twitter.

Of course, that internet false-identity therapy makes all the sense in the world in that light, doesn't it. Especially since the internet has a random, unidentifiable Crazy Person (or two, or fifty) to tell the suffering how, exactly, not to suffer anymore:

Surely I was better than these people with their loud, false bravado. Yet wasn’t I on the internet precisely because I wanted someone to give me a to-do list? I objected to the content of the lists, found them laughable, but still—I wanted my hand held, didn’t I?

Oh Edwina...that kind of comfort is so, so cold.

I decided the problem was that none of the results mentioned meddling by spirits.

Attagirl!

But when I typed in "spirits told my spouse to leave me," there was a tidal wave of marriages ended by alcoholism.

See? See what I mean, Edwina? Cold comfort...there're people out there a lot more fucked up than you and/or Marlin.

What good is marriage if you can just cancel it like cable?

Well. Now we're gettin' somewhere, Edwina. "Grieving in the form of research, because we believed in productivity above all else," might as well be tattooed on every modern workerbee, don't you think?

Well...she wanted a way to manage her grief at Marlin's weird, sudden abandonment...what about being told you're so unvalued at work that your serious problems with the MVP beta are being ignored? Before one of the dudebros tries to kiss you at a company party? And yes, Edwina, in today's world that IS sexual assault. Her revenge? Condign. (If premature...?)

It was no wonder to me that Edwina ended up doing what she did at the Korean deli. And it was actually a lovely surprise, a way of taking charge of her unhappiness. I can't help but wonder if this isn't, in fact, something that's in fact true and just not being discussed:

I didn't buy that depression was caused by low serotonin levels. No, what I felt was way more aggressive than a simple deficiency of certain neurotransmitters. There had to be another neurotransmitter that carried sadness, that handed out hopelessness like drugged candy. After all, even matter had antimatter.

But when matter and antimatter don't find a safe place to co-exist, what do they do then?

I'd send nail clippers (he was fastidious that way, or at least he used to be when he lived with me), ramen noodles (the fancy, super spicy ones, not the kind that tasted like boiled water that someone had farted in), a throw, maybe even a handheld gaming console.

No one who can write that sentence is done with being A Wife. Edwina, my dear lady, I've spent a grand total of five hours in your company, and they were grand hours! that ramen line!, but your modern-love-immigrant-style story isn't a huge revelation to me. Not once have you startled me, or surprised me, or done anything the least bit out of character.

And do you know what? I wouldn't have it any other way.

PERSECUTION, trial by media and innuendo & how that destroys lives

PERSECUTION
ALESSANDRO PIPERNO (tr. Ann Goldstein)
Europa Editions
$16.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.9* of five

The Publisher Says: In a sprawling villa on the outskirts of Rome, the members of the Pontecorvo family have gathered for dinner. Leo Pontecorvo, an internationally revered pediatric oncologist, is forty-eight. His wife, Rachel, is a physician and the loving mother to Filippo and Samuel, two amiable pre-teens. The evening news is on in the living room but nobody pays it any attention until Dr. Pontecorvo's name surfaces from the background noise and a news item airs that will change the lives of the Pontecorvos forever.

Leo Pontecorvo has been publicly accused of a vile crime. A spotlight is turned on him that reveals the mistakes, regrets, and contradictions of a lifetime. Every detail of his private and professional life is about to come under scrutiny, to be debated by both friends and foes, by ravenous reporters and punctilious prosecutors. But Leo could bear all this if it weren't for the suspicious gazes of his wife and children. Surely they, of all people, believe in his innocence!

Alessandro Piperno is widely acknowledged as one of today's most talented European novelists. His voice is singular and shocking at times, yet always possessed of tenderness and enormous generosity of heart. His vision is broad and encompassing, his psychological insights penetrating and undeniable. In this deeply felt family drama, Alessandro Piperno paints a broad canvas and fills it with psychologically complex characters whom readers will instantly recognize and never forget.

Europa Editions provided this copy in a Goodreads giveaway. Thank you.

My Review: Words can not only hurt, not only damage...they can kill. They can annihilate, destroy utterly the target of the carelessly spoken or maliciously uttered or calculatedly disseminated words. They can blow up a life, a family, a career, a vocation, they can eviscerate the worthy and worthwhile work a person has done.

And what if they're true? What if they're not true? Half true? He said, she said? It doesn't matter at all. Words, when spoken, can only be forgiven but never forgotten.

Piperno's novel of a Jewish pediatric oncologist's fall from the pinnacle of his life-saving profession is profoundly unsettling. It is discursive in style, and it is peculiarly intimate because of that. Very few paragraphs lead directly to the subject allegedly at hand, but all of them, each of them, serves to build the image of the Pontecorvo world, that of Dottore Leo, la signora Rachel, the pre-teen boys, Telma the Filipina maid...all these intersecting, interlocking worlds are completely and finally and irrevocably smashed and cannot be restored, only re-formed. The tracks in the thickets of words Piperno creates are like the game spoor a hunter follows, requiring patience and attention to interpret and encouraging the reader, the hunter, to look around carefully, to attend to the landscape as much as the path.

Ann Goldstein ably translates the Italian text in such a way as to suggest the varying uses made of familiar and formal address. It's a very hard thing to do, and it's impressive to see the job done so well. Part of the job of a translator is to create the mood of the original in a different idiom...never does Goldstein do this better than in the passages where the snobbery and class-consciousness that Leo faces when others refer to or speak to his wife, daughter of an observant Jew who also happens to be a businessman, in contrast to his more assimilated, haute bourgeois background.

I was transported in the reading of this novel, though not to a lovely sweet cotton-candy land of milk and honey. (Frankly, that's always sounded revolting to me. Not to mention sticky.) I was immersed in the life of the disintegrating Pontecorvo family. I emerged after a catharsis feeling, oddly, buoyed up, able to see the shore and feel the water of the sad existence below me support me as I started for solid ground.

FROM THE CAVES, Thea Prieto's Red Hen Press Novella Award-winning cli-fic dystopia

FROM THE CAVES
THEA PRIETO
Red Hen Press
$14.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Environmental catastrophe has driven four people inside the dark throat of a cave: Sky, a child coming of age; Tie, pregnant and grieving; Mark, a young man poised to assume primacy; and Teller, an elder, holder of stories. As the devastating heat of summer grows, so does the poison in Teller's injured leg and the danger of Tie's imminent labor, food and water dwindling while the future becomes increasingly dependent on the words Sky gleans from the dead, stories pieced together from recycled knowledge, fragmented histories, and half-buried creation myths. From the Caves presents the past, present, and future in tandem, reshaping ancient and modern ideas of death and motherhood, grief and hope, endings and beginnings.

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

My Review: As tough as it is to sit in my air-conditioned room, with my instant access to hot and cold clean running water, my adequate...ample...luxuriously lush supply of food and think of the horrors to come for all those I'll leave behind in a decade or so, I am not required (yet) to decide if someone should live or die.

And that is the new standard I'll measure my irks and crotchets against: Did I have to decide whether someone else lived the rest of this day? No? Well then, belt up.

The story we're being told here in this novella is a simple one: How will Humanity sustain itself when the Earth declines to forgive us our trespasses any more? Five people, a remnant of the Los Angeles that once was, are living—eking an existence—on the shores of the Enemy Ocean in what was once Pasadena, near the Observatory. This information is lodged in the simple, basic words that Author Prieto puts in our sad, burning, withering climate-changed humans' mouths, but you need to be familiar with the place to get it.

As we meet Sky, he is doing something mundane until there is a major event: Someone falls from a height onto the shore. And just like that, five become four. It was Green, the group...made up of teenaged Mark (so called for his nasal damage), Teller the story-rememberer, Tie who is very heavily pregnant, and Sky the lad who will be our third person close-camera point of view...leader of sorts, the one who knew the reasons to put up the fog net to catch water only until the summer storms become too violent and how to grow their food-tubers in a dark cave that was once a lower floor, where a removable brick can bring in only enough scorching, sizzling light to enable it to grow...you see how crucial he was. The sun and the ocean grew more menacing with his loss.

As he climbs across the dunes and back into the quiet darkness of the caves, Sky wishes he could see the floating green and sparkling things Green liked to describe, wishes he could imagine people traveling by land and sea, but it's easier to remember sadness, thirst, and hunger when the ocean is an endless expanse of brown waves, a wide desert of seawater broken only by the distant, half-submerged remains of Old City. Out to sea, the torn shell of a single skyscraper and a lone section of a bridge loom out of the white-capped breakers, and the empty windows facing the beach are only sightless squares to Sky. Even though low tide reveals the flat tops of road signs and the hollow heads of street lamps, the only happiness Sky can summon from the past is remote, quiet, and small.

There is so much wrong with this picture...but the story is merely drawing its breath.

When I say "story," I want to be sure you're with me. This is a story. This story is, like every story you and I and all our ancestors have heard, seen, read, invented, based on an established need: Humans need stories to live. And this story, the one I want you to go spend your United States or Canadian or Australian or New Zealand dollars on, is rooted in ancestral stories of its own. I'm sure the repetition of the word "cave" will have its desired effect as a summoning bell for your memory sooner or later....

Maybe it would help to hear the story again. We don't have to sing it like Song or—Tie pauses—or remember all of Green's words. We can tell the story any way we want.

Tie looks at the globe, at the Moth message, and then at Mark.

We will remember and make new memories at the same time, she says.

And there is another story that Author Prieto retells, one that is a favorite of mine, from that same Ancient source. Here it goes by the name of Bear and Moon, and its lovely lineaments should summon you back to a symposium from longer ago than any of these characters can even conceptualize. Tie, heavily pregnant with the future, tells her men that she will accept nothing less than memories to put with the ones she already has.

It is a deeply meaningful moment. It is spoken from a heartbroken place. But it is, like all of Life, a burden she carries alone. In such a small group, each person carries their burdens alone despite the constant demands of survival. Even Sky, all of nine or ten when the story takes place; he's never forgiven for the crime of just Being when it cost his mother her life to make him. The group is in a terrible way. The can just barely pull it together to subsist...scrape by. No wonder the too-young-to-help Sky treasures words, "deep scratches of words" as Author Prieto calls them; although Lonely will always mean more than it probably should for one without blame for the hate he carries from his angry, unforgiving brother Mark. A moment when "Sky asks, what's an apple?" on hearing the word in a story...Poor poor pod of people...what a dry, hateful world they can't escape from is in the unremitting heat.

Because Teller has an accident as he, over angry Mark's objections, gives dead Green a funeral oration. Tie, pregnant with Green's child, has no strength for arguing, just follows doggedly as Teller gives his burning friend a farewell. But that accident...in a world with no food, you can be sure there's no Neosporin, and Teller slowly succumbs to an infection. In his long, wretched death the group comes to a new configuration, one that will have to last them for a long while. The burdens of existence are horrifyingly out of proportion to the endless luxury of those "progeny" who came before enjoyed.

The entire story will take you two, two and a half hours to read. But, if you're at all a sensitive soul, you'll spend that long afterwards thinking about the Code Red IPCC report just issued. If you're reading one of my reviews, you're 99% likely already on board with the "stories = survival" articles I've linked above. Now I want this to be clear to you, in case it isn't already: Author Thea Prieto has told us a fable of the lives our descendants can look forward to living if we don't heed that Code Red. She's done so by harking back to foundational stories Western readers are, or are very likely to be, familiar with. And in doing this she's created a story that, while all her own, owes its life to the unimaginable, incalculable, and unsustainable privilege we're enjoying.

I very deeply and humbly encourage you to buy and read this story as a work of literature that transcends its simple existence as that and offers you a hand held out in hope: We will not die; but we can, and should, and must do better than we are now doing. Our children's children's children need us to.

THE ETERNAL AUDIENCE OF ONE, Rémy Ngamije's debut novel of identity and cultural visibility

THE ETERNAL AUDIENCE OF ONE
RÉMY NGAMIJE
Scout Press
$28.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Reminiscent of Zadie Smith and Michael Chabon, this “gorgeous, wildly funny and, above all, profoundly moving and humane” (Peter Orner, author of Am I Alone Here ) coming-of-age tale follows a young man who is forced to flee his homeland of Rwanda during the Civil War and make sense of his reality.

Nobody ever makes it to the start of a story, not even the people in it. The most one can do is make some sort of start and then work toward some kind of ending.

One might as well start with Séraphin: playlist-maker, nerd-jock hybrid, self-appointed merchant of cool, Rwandan, stifled and living in Windhoek, Namibia. Soon he will leave the confines of his family life for the cosmopolitan city of Cape Town, in South Africa, where loyal friends, hormone-saturated parties, adventurous conquests, and race controversies await. More than that, his long-awaited final year in law school promises to deliver a crucial puzzle piece of the Great Plan immigrant: a degree from a prestigious university.

But a year is more than the sum of its parts, and en route to the future, the present must be lived through and even the past must be survived.

From one of Africa’s emerging literary voices comes a lyrical and piquant tale of family, migration, friendship, war, identity, and race following the intersecting lives of Séraphin and a host of eclectic characters from pre- and post-1994 Rwanda, colonial and post-independence Windhoek, Paris and Brussels in the 70s, Nairobi public schools, and the racially charged streets of Cape Town.

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

READ THIS MEMOIR ARTICLE IN LIT HUB!

My Review: What do you get from a wisecracking young African novelist when you turn him loose with a contract? A novel of the prices exacted by immigration on the emigrated persons, be that emigration voluntary or enforced, cannot help but run into the problem of "why am I here again?" for its fat, complacent first-world-native readers. The usual answer is, "where else would you like to be?" Author Ngamije writes sentences like this:

The only certainty is this: everything that is not the end must be the start of something else.

Séra says that his mother said it first; I believe him. I believe whatever Author Ngamije says, actually. I have already said nice things about Author Ngamije's writing when I discussed The Neighbourhood for last year's Caine Prize reviews. He's deployed a lot more of his snappy humor here (a bed so narrow it should have a singles-site profile, East African parents outdoing the Spanish Inquisition in the barbarity of their interrogation, "FOMO, the acronym of doom," a vile w-bomb at 47% being self-described as a "salacious nictation"...though that didn't prevent him from using it three more times), having so much more room to make the case for laughs. Laughs you'll get, for absolute sure and certain. When Therése and Séra meet at a less-than-opportune moment, for example. If you fail to fall about screaming with laughter at how Author Ngamije structures that scene, then you are deficient.

And there is a great deal of uncertainty in the happiness of the parents in this story. There are no swift and sure answers to the eternal eyeroll of the offspring. A stern reminder, however, that your parents didn't become parents without having some kinda past together is fully served in several chapters. The set-up for them being together, a party attended in Paris, is...incomplete at first telling. It seems there was a lot more to being young in that day and time...well. Usually there was some, um, carnal dimension to their partnering up for parenthood:

His torso occupied every inch of his shirt, and his maroon bell-bottom jeans accentuated a prim pair of buttocks and strong thighs.

He was dressed to pull, for sure! And Therése was very much there to be pulled...well, that is half the story, and the other half was told, so you'll find it when you get to it. But the parenting years came next. A thankless task, that, and made more difficult by the implosion of their country. Several flashbacks to that time are all from Séra's child-vision. It's very effective, and still manages to evoke from the adult reader the fear and the determination of the parents to protect their kids. And then they spent the entire rest of their lives ensuring you'd have it better than they do, Séra. So what does he do with his uni life in Cape Town? What all of us did! Party! Make a group of like-minded friends, find something to rag on the world about...the usual twentysomething life. Author Ngamije says smart, funny things in a smartass way, just like Séraphin himself. He's got a helluva mouth on him, does Séra, and he's not afraid to use it.

...{I}f nobody ever makes it to the start of a story, and if everyone is in the same boat just bailing and steering as best they can, then I guess the whole point of life is to make some sort of a start and then work towards some kind of ending, whenever and wherever it might be. Part plagiarism will permit to agree with Shakespeare: "All the world's a staage..." upon which we perform for the eternal audience of one. ... I guess, then, that the point of life is to dive in, hold on, and hope that a flop...is worth the laugh at the very end.

–and–

"She actually likes black people," Séraphin said. "And it isn't because she's traveled a lot. Slavers traveled too and look where that got us."

–and–

"I have a better chance of being Pablo Escobar than being Pablo Neruda."

"You and drug dealers." {She} laughed. "Not a fan of poetry, then?"

"I approach poetry like other people's dogs. With great caution."

The entire group of friends stay hooked in to their affection for each other, such as it is, and they overlook the usual tensions in any group setting...the odd man out, the tolerated-but-unloved, the group boss with the plans everyone goes along with because it's easier than fighting and better than anyone else's ideas anyway. The flirting, the hookups...the breakups and dumpings...it's all there, exactly where it should be, told in texts instead of long calls and short meetings.

There is, of course, the requisite older woman in Séraphin's résumé, and she speaks a truth to him: "There is a point when actions become promises," that I truly wish I knew how to embroider so I could make a pillow-cover out of. I am also moved by immigrant Séra meditating on forgiveness being meaningless without remembering the thing being forgiven. It is a truth I learned much later in my life than he was forced to, but a severely underrated one in the general conversation we as a society should be having with more seriousness than we seem to be doing.

The lighthearted moments, let me hasten to say now, are quite prevalent in the book. More time laughing is spent than Other Things. Don't mistake this for some gloomy, first-novel-MFA-program navel-gazing! You'll know for sure that you're in good, capable hands, that this is a cocktail party you can't quite imagine how you got invited to and not Thanksgiving with your in-laws.

That is also, of course, apparent in some less joy-giving ways. The function of Séraphin's Great Council of Séraphins is clearly to make you aware that you've shifted to the inner workings of the lad's head; the problem is, for this seasoned reader, it was overused. Two or three times would've been effective...many more and it becomes Ben Stiller's 2013 remake of Danny Kaye's 1947 comedic classic The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. As much fun as recalling the original was for the first twenty minutes, seeing the shots recreated...well...it got old.

The fragmented construction of the story will put some readers off. The flashbacks aren't slowing the story down, I will protest, they are givning it traction! But many will disagree with me, I fear. Structuring a story in an anti-chronological way does indeed allow us to feel, instead of see, the action as the characters do. It does also require of us that we pay attention to what's underlying the surface story of an immigrant leaving home to leave home to learn how to return home to make a home. It's really just that simple...Thomas Wolfe did it, y'all all lapped it up. Ride the waves, don't shove your feet into them. (Have I ever mentioned that my Young Gentleman Caller is a surfer?)

There is a time in a character's arc that the wise mentor offers a personal story that illuminates a Greater Truth that Our Hero needs to hear. That time came, it lingered a bit too long for comfort, and then it was over. That was, actually, a good thing, because the purpose of it was a deeper one than was expected. The way it happens, the moment it comes, are a little bit deceptive, so kudos to Author Ngamije for that misdirection. I like not knowing everything!

But the classic misdirection, well. Remember how you found out your parent was a person before you were born? Remember the moment you learned what they least wanted you to know but you needed to hear? That moment is a beaut in this book, one of those "...I didn't know you had it in you..." times that come to all adult children. I loved it, and if you're the reader I hope you are for reading my reviews, you'll carry on to the very end for the reward you're offered.

"All arguments can be fixed. Circumstances, not so much."

Formerly tall father stood next to tall son.

"You have to decide whether you want to be right or whether you want to be happy. It is a simple choice."

It may be simple...it is simple...but it is never easy.

THE HOUR OF THE STAR, last work by Brazilian superstar novelist

THE HOUR OF THE STAR
CLARICE LISPECTOR (tr. Giovanni Pontiero)
New Directions
$17.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The Hour of the Star, Clarice Lispector's consummate final novel, may well be her masterpiece. Narrated by the cosmopolitan Rodrigo S.M., this brief, strange, and haunting tale is the story of Macabéa, one of life's unfortunates. Living in the slums of Rio de Janeiro and eking out a poor living as a typist, Macabéa loves movies, Coca-Cola, and her rat of a boyfriend; she would like to be like Marilyn Monroe, but she is ugly, underfed, sickly, and unloved. Rodrigo recoils from her wretchedness, and yet he cannot avoid realization that for all her outward misery, Macabéa is inwardly free. She doesn't seem to know how unhappy she should be.

Lispector employs her pathetic heroine against her urbane, empty narrator—edge of despair to edge of despair—and, working them like a pair of scissors, she cuts away the reader's preconceived notions about poverty, identity, love, and the art of fiction. In her last novel she takes readers close to the true mystery of life, and leaves us deep in Lispector territory indeed.

I RECEIVED A REVIEW COPY FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.

My Review: This is billed as Lispector, a Brazilian pyrotechnician of words, writing her last novel. It's about 80pp long, so I am hard pressed to see how it's anything but a novella as defined by length. Its content, the descent and fall of one of life's losers, places it firmly in novella territory as well. Its beauty and grace of language mark it as a poetic novella. But it's not a complex, nuanced, developed story, so not what I'm willing to call a novel. Perhaps, in a weird way, it's a reverse récit, a story all in one person's head; but it isn't the actor, the subject, whose head we're in. The narrative frame is like any other frame, a separation of the viewer from the object viewed. It does make seeing the whole object easier; it also makes becoming invested in the object less possible.

But it's brilliant, and it's beautiful, and it should form a part of your mental furniture. It's fascinating in its presumptive male narrator's chill and malign distance from the heat of life that makes Macabéa, the protagonist, both unfurl and wither seemingly simultaneously.

Things were somehow so good that they were in danger of becoming very bad because what is fully mature is very close to rotting.
–and–
First of all, I must make it clear that this girl does not know herself apart from the fact that she goes on living aimlessly. Were she foolish enough to ask herself "Who am I?", she would fall flat on her face. For the question "Who am I?" creates a need. And how does one satisfy that need? To probe oneself is to recognize that one is incomplete.

The relationships that Macabéa, immigrant to the cold cruel city from the cold cruel countryside, forms are classics of naive toxicity. She's seemingly unable to judge anyone around her...even herself...on any level deeper than the most glistening surface. She's not a bright girl, she's not a pretty girl, and she's got no discernable talent for anything. She's destined to come to a bad end.

She thought she’d incur serious punishment and even risk dying if she took too much pleasure in life. So she protected herself from death by living less, consuming so little of her life that she’d never run out. This savings gave her a little security since you can’t fall farther than the ground. Did she feel she was living for nothing? I’m not sure, but I don’t think so. Only once did she ask a tragic question: who am I? It frightened her so much that she completely stopped thinking.

But Lispector, the creatrix, pulls the Oz-curtain aside periodically, dropping the rudimentary and nugatory male narrator into the bin when she has something important to say:

Will I be condemned to death for discussing a life that contains, like the lives of all of us, an inviolable secret? I am desperately trying to discover in the girl's existence at least one bright topaz.

Could it be, I wonder at the end of the story, that there is no bright topaz in some lives? That the brightest sparkle in some humans is just the mineral potential of bones waiting for death to free it? Macabéa, "female Maccabee" for those interested in looking for some Biblical enrichment of the tale, makes me think...unwillingly, reluctantly, but honestly...that the answer is Yes.

Who has not asked himself at some time or other: am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person?

TWO SPIES IN CARACAS, Moisés Naím's novel of the world-changing coup d'etat in Venezuela, translated by Daniel Hahn

TWO SPIES IN CARACAS
MOISÉS NAÍM (tr. Daniel Hahn)
AmazonCrossing (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$4.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: From the New York Times bestselling author of The End of Power comes an edge-of-your-seat political thriller about rival spies, dangerous love, and one of history’s most devastating revolutions.

Venezuela, 1992. Unknown colonel Hugo Chávez stages an ill-fated coup against a corrupt government, igniting the passions of Venezuela’s poor and catapulting the oil-rich country to international attention. For two rival spies hurriedly dispatched to Caracas—one from Washington, DC, and the other from Fidel Castro’s Cuba—this is a career-defining mission.

Smooth-talking Iván Rincón of Cuba’s Intelligence Directorate needs a rebel ally to secure the future of his own country. His job: support Chávez and the revolution by rallying the militants and neutralizing any opposing agents.

Meanwhile, the CIA’s Cristina Garza will do everything in her power to cut Chávez’s influence short. Her priority: stabilize the greatest oil reserves on the planet by ferreting out and eliminating Cuba’s principal operative.

As Chávez surges to power, Iván’s and Cristina’s paths cross. Soon they’re caught in the fallout of a toxic political time bomb: an intrepid female reporter and unwitting informant, a drug lord and key architect in Chávez’s rise, and Iván and Cristina themselves. With everything at stake, the adversaries find themselves at the center of a game of espionage, seduction, murder, and shifting alliances playing out against the precarious backdrop of a nation in free fall. A thrilling fictional story based on unimaginable real-life events.

I RECEIVED THIS DRC FROM AMAZON PRIME'S FIRST READS PROGRAM. THANK YOU.

My Review: Spying? Romancing? Weeelll...not quite as much as I'd been expecting based on the title. What there was of espionage was centered on the mechanics and motivations for spying on one's neighbors. The Americans have this corporately-coveted giant lake of petrochemicals close to them...the Cubans need the fuel...and the Venezuelans need food, medicine, the basics.

No one gets what they expected to get because Hugo Chávez (quite obviously the author's bête noire) steps in the big, fat middle of things out of nowhere and shits all over the players. He's nobody in the hierarchy's opinion. He comes from nowhere. He's got no family pull. He's got a crap education. The author posits that he's a mentally ill striver. As he's dead, and was considered an enemy by the US Government's right-wing intelligence community, I'm inclined to put that down to politically motivated retrospective diagnosis.

Whatever! I didn't mean to get so bogged down in the material I think surrounds the story. The on-the-page story is heavy on Hugo, light on spies, and still manages to be about the reasons spying happens in a way that was very interesting to read. The role of Pablo Escobar and his money in Chávez's rise, the massive betrayals that are inherent in any leader coming to power and seeing the perspective from inside instead of outside, and the hilarious (if terrifying) reality that "we" know about 5% of what is actually going on when "we" are making our decisions, all made the read worth my time to pursue. I'm afraid the prose wasn't lulling me into turning the pages:

"I'm warning you, the president's ambitions are no longer local or regional. He wants international influence. He already has the oil production in his hands. and he'll spend whatever is necessary to make the world pay attention. This black gold will finance his socialist expansion. Hugo's narcissism is global now!"

A spy reporting to her Washington-based boss wouldn't be terribly likely to use an exclam. Or to be so bluntly undiplomatic. She wouldn't be employed for long.

"The moment is approaching for you to serve the revolution. When {the thing happens}, it's essential for Cuba that you, comrade Nicolás Maduro, {do the thing}."

The future {doer of the thing}, as anointed by Fidel, smiled yet said nothing; both men knew he had nothing to say. And there was no need.

So, does the author think Cuba runs the show or does he think Cuba runs the show. I mean, there was no time at which socialism and Cuba and Fidel and Hugo weren't all presented in the dimmest, dankest dungeon-light.

The world spins on, though, and the focus of the story leaves the international stage to light on the two spies in Caracas. They've met, fallen in love, and begun to weave a tissue of lies that looks like a life together if you squint at it just right. Iván, the Cuban scion of a powerful political family, and Cristina, an illegal Mexican immigrant whose life prepared her for a career in espionage with the CIA, fall *whomp* in love. I don't know why, and the author doesn't tell us. They just do.

While they're reassessing their loyalties to their respective agencies, they watch History take its inevitable course. Crappy people and dreadful deeds and a giant choking cloud of misery finally envelop the two, already unsettled in their minds by Love, and cause them to try to...unoficially retire, let's say.

This does not go well.

Betrayal. Back-stabbing from many angles. Lots of terrible things are about to happen to Iván and Cristina, when she decides that she doesn't want to die screaming. She pulls out her trump card, plays it...and that's when the ugly turns mean. The ending of the book involves the worst, least excusable sort of cruelty to both of them. And it's not like there was no way it could happen. It has already, earlier in the book, in slightly different form.

What? It's a spy story! You were expecting the characters to take Pilates together and Iván to knit a baby blanky for their first-born while Cristina solves the mysteries of sourdough? This book's author might have a lot of right-wing axes to grind, but the book has its head on straight when it comes to Realpolitik! Henry Kissinger got nothin' on Author Naím in that regard.

I've given it three-and-three-quarters stars. In my world, that is quite respectable. I don't keep reading books that aren't rewarding me. There are too few eyeblinks left to waste 'em. So, while I'm not yodeling the praises of this gorgeous artifact of genius, I'm here to tell you that I didn't even once think, "you know what? Pearl-Ruling this bad boy now."

Considering my Pearl-Rule pages-to-read count is down to thirty-eight, that should tell you all you need to know.

THE GLASSY, BURNING FLOOR OF HELL, Brian Evenson's latest collection of literary horror

THE GLASSY, BURNING FLOOR OF HELL: Stories
BRIAN EVENSON
Coffee House Press
$16.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: "Here is how monstrous humans are."

A sentient, murderous prosthetic leg; shadowy creatures lurking behind a shimmering wall; brutal barrow men: of all the terrors that populate The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell, perhaps the most alarming are the beings who decimated the habitable Earth: humans. In this new short story collection, Brian Evenson envisions a chilling future beyond the Anthropocene that forces excruciating decisions about survival and self-sacrifice in the face of toxic air and a natural world torn between revenge and regeneration. Combining psychological and ecological horror, each tale thrums with Evenson's award-winning literary craftsmanship, dark humor, and thrilling suspense.

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

My Review: A collection from Brian Evenson, even one with some pieces that weren't quite as welcome to me as they ordinarily are (see below), will never not be greeted with warbles of delight from me. These tales are all from other homes, but they belong together. They're Family, much as a cult is.... Last Days, a pair of odd and deeply disturbing novellas linked by one hugely upsetting premise...and this premise is the *only* one I've ever encountered whereunder I am simply delighted to be called a "one"...made me think and shiver in 2014, and still does today. His short fiction tends to be very, very short (see my review of Windeye from 2013). This can render me almost mute, considering how very unreasonable the demands of reviewing collections, as opposed to anthologies of multiple writers, of short stories are. What's one meant to say? How to capture the gestalt of the collection? Is there a gestalt? If not, what the heck?! I get all verklempt and deeply verschmeckeled. But this is Brian Evenson. The peace is kept. These stories will take you, quickly, to places you're not at all sure you'd like to go.

I got a bit of a foretaste of the unease Author Evenson had in store for me when I kept thinking I should know that title, such a resonant phrase and so elegantly crafted! Is it a quote? A line from some famous poem by Milton, or permaybehaps Swinburne...turns out the author attributes it to Marguerite Young from Miss Mackintosh, My Darling! That monster hasn't been mined as thoroughly for titles as I'd've expected. I don't have any notion of where in the book it occurs, nor does he vouchsafe the information, but the sense of that exact phrase *belonging* somewhere has been answered and laid to rest. Unlike, it must be said, the science-fictional treatments of Otherness, the spooky treatments of cruelty and neglect, and the other many-sided polygons of storytelling he gets up to here. I agree that the planet's had it with us, and can even understand the more, um, arcane ways Author Evenson's come up with for it to shuffle us off. But they are as one expects from him: Unsettling, open-ended, and prettily told even when they aren't at all pretty.

With my usual éclat, I'll employ the Bryce Method of short impressions but no distinct individual ratings (no need; four fives, the rest but one four-and-a-halfs) for the stories so as to organize my thoughts and feelings, while hopefully allowing you to reach your own conclusions.

Leg is Hekla's, well, leg...only it isn't exactly a leg, and it's only hers until it doesn't want to be anymore. Then, well...you know who wrote it, you know what's likely to happen: Nothing you expect or predict. It's a quick, bitter hit of Evensonism.

In Dreams leads us to the sadly messed-about brain of a man whose very sense of himself is...flat, affectless. Much like, he muses, a psychopath's mind. But he has a familiar, a technological thing in his head, something that uses the parts of his brain that long-ago science said we, that is humanity, do not use...let us have it, they asked him, and he said yes.

That strange, almost fluttering sensation from deep within his mind, a sort of mental arrhythmia. It rose, it rose.

I could simulate dreams for you, it offered.

You've been listening in.

Of course I have, it said. I always am.

You always are, he acknowledged.


I could simulate them for you, it said again. They would be very well done. You wouldn't know the difference.

That was what frightened him, that perhaps he wouldn't know the difference.

I had a roommate when I was in the goofy garage who was schizophrenic. He was eerily like this character. Something else was in him, the C.I.A. was beaming imagery into his mind...it's a frightening thought, to be not-alone in your own head, and one that isn't obviously untrue sometimes....

Myling Kommer explains the unbearable burdens of family when Wrong is done to one of your own by one of your own. It is chilling and unfair; Jussi does not understand, can't possibly, the degree of hatred a child can feel for a selfish and terrible parent. Lucky boy, yet the future he inherits might not be quite so lucky.

Come Up for what, air? What good is air when you can't breathe? Breathing never got you anything good, never rewarded your life-long need to be seen or found to be important...but what do you do about it? You make sure you're never forgotten. Never. Even if it means making sure there isn't time to forget....

There was just a hole, a void where his wife had been. You couldn't feel anything about a void. All you could do was try desperately to keep it from swallowing you.

Good luck with that....

Palisade got built because someone, who remembers who, knew there was something that needed to be kept...in? out? hardly matters...and here you come, galumphing goofball that you are, head near empty and heart chock-full of nasty! Any wonder that the world around you gets angry? It's how angry that counts. One of the most persuasive arguments here for NetPriAppPeaDis to open up their vault and splash eight figures out on an all-Evenson anthology à la LOVE DEATH + ROBOTS.

Curator gives new meaning to the words "Mission Drift":

Here is how monstrous humans are, she felt the record should say. Humans are what they did to this world, their home. Here is why, once humans are extinct, they should never be brought back to life.

The Curator is absolutely correct. Wisdom comes at last, and too late.

To Breathe the Air is a master class in the beauty of launching the reader into a story in medias res. Simply superb science-fictional tale of two cities, and the horrors of Others being in control...exercising dominion over...those that do not consent and cannot benefit from it. Please, NetPriAppPeaDis, please make this an animated film!

The Barrow-Men makes you glad you don't live in Author Evenson's head. When Arnar claims an identity that isn't his, just to save himself, the barrow-men treat him to special, super-deluxe accommodations. Poor bastard.

The Shimmering Wall meditates on the power of love to make a person do what they believe they cannot and act as they swore they would not. It's also a bitter, angry denunciation of greed and selfishness and the disfiguring results of Institutional Superiority. And never once does it sound as strident as my reductive synopsis does.

Grauer in the Snow oh, how very much Grauer wishes he wasn't where he is! There but for the want of the presence of a ticket...he's quite sure his would've been punched; I wonder if anything in liminal space is ever for sure. Angels? An angel? If you like....

Justle makes a strong case for never pursuing family secrets! And Capgras syndrome? Maybe we don't really want to poke too deeply into it. No way to be sure there won't be a can of worms the size of Australia come poppin' up. Earth's revenge for our clever-clever uses and abuses, permaybehaps. Honestly, if this world's headed the way of Justle's Earth (assuming it is Earth), I'm not going to make book against this story coming to literal...life....

The Devil's Hand reminded me of an Aickman story, one about a weather house, that I read some time ago...the cruelty of the deprivations, the sheer indifference to bodily autonomy and integrity...just awful!

It was delicious.

Nameless Citizen or just "Nameless Person" in the end. No one lives through The End. The few clones of whatever is left aren't going to make it much past a few days apiece...by design? Or is this just another knock-on effect of the disaster that ends us?

Did I dream? I would say no—I never dream, at least not dreams I remember. I have not dreamt since the disaster changed me, as if the exchange for surviving the conflagration was to surrender my ability to dream.

Would that be a price you'd be willing to pay? Would there be a point to...continuing...if it cost you your dreams, your soul, along with your future?

The Coldness of His Eye reminds you, the reader, that no crime is perfect. Nothing on this Earth stays hidden forever...just hope that you're not interesting enough to be sought out for the wickedness you do without squaring it with the Universe. Because, rest assured, you will eventually pay the price, and the interest is a killer.

Daylight Come for the Eater of Darkness, the woman who can do what the men who think they need to know the future she might be able to tell them can't; so can it not actually come? The thing about power, true power, is that those who need it can never have enough and those who have it can never give enough.

Elo Havel is a take on that classic tale, The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, crossed with The Lottery, told by a character from an Edwardian Saki story. Short, to the point, not a wasted syllable.

His Haunting left me wondering how, in the end, inheritance works...your father to you, then you (a childless gay man) to...? Props to Author Evenson for mundanely, unspectacularly, introducing a gay guy into his fiction.

Haver brings the brutality of the shrink Haver trying to confine artist Festus to one measly lifetime, one lousy timeline, and to trap them there with chemical cocktails. Can anyone believe this is a full and complete life? I'd say Festus has some ideas about it. Maybe some Other does, and uses Festus? One thing I'll say for Haver: he knows his fate's condign.

The Extrication makes Dr. Mengele seem like your kid's pediatrician!

A Bad Patch recalls the chest-burster scene in Alien all too vividly and revoltingly...and it's not just one...and you're Sigourney Weaver strapped to a Vogon Poetry Appreciation chair.

Hospice is the story that I like the least. Distasteful to me to spend any time with this, this incel or just plain asshole, whatever he's meant to be. Thank goodness it's a short-short.

The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell returns Hekla to us! Yes, Hekla from "Leg" and this is an earlier stage of her, um, partnership? with Leg. A trip to a yoga-ish retreat, where Hekla's just about the least valued and most ignored person there, arriving after everyone's asleep and helping herself to a room. Turns out it's the only room she can have...and the fat man (jarring note, making a villainous person fat) who's guru-ing this jamboree she doesn't want to be at is the Real Deal at Guruing. Only, and this is not particularly subtle, he's doing it out of greed. So, like, big not-cool points for fat-shaming and equating heaviness with greed.

This isn't enough to ruin the read for me, but YMMV of course.