Panthers, Bears, and a New Podcast
It’s been a while since I sent out a newsletter, and I want to write about a couple books that have lingered in my mind from the last few weeks. But first, an announcement! I’ve started a podcast with two Twitter friends, Dorian and Frances, and the first two episodes are out. I’m so excited about this new project! It’s called One Bright Book, and in our first episode, we introduce ourselves and the podcast, and in the second we discuss Susan Sontag’s The Volcano Lover: A Romance. We will be recording an episode about once a month and each time we will discuss a book in depth, plus chat informally about our current reading. I’ve been figuring out the technical side of podcasting and want to give extra special thanks to fellow podcasters Paul and Trevor of The and the Gripes podcast for helping us out. They made this job so easy! With their help, I’m now editing and getting comfortable with Zencastr, GarageBand, Libsyn and other websites with strange names, and it’s been so fun to learn a new skill. If you’re on Twitter, you can find us there, and our website will be up soon.
To be totally honest, I’m scared to death of this podcasting business and take refuge in the tech aspect of it as something concrete and (relatively) straightforward I can contribute. You know how there are scary things you’ll never do (go skydiving) and scary things you know you have to do because you totally can, you’re just afraid (teach your first class ever)? Podcasting is the latter. So here I am.
As for what I’ve been reading, first, let me recommend Jen Craig’s Panthers and the Museum of Fire. This is exactly my kind of book! A woman named Jen Craig walks across Sydney, Australia, with a manuscript written by an old friend who recently died. She’s going to meet the friend’s sister to return it to her. The sister first insisted that Jen take the manuscript, and then called her later to ask for it back with instructions not to read it. Of course, that’s the point when Jen picks the manuscript up and starts reading. This reading experience — a shocking one, since she had no idea this former friend was a writer — leads to a breakthrough in her own stalled writing.
The walk across Sydney allows Jen to think through the situation: her childhood friendship with the deceased writer, her feelings about the sister, her father’s failure as a writer, her own stalled attempts at writing, her current breakthrough. She also thinks about a childhood religious conversion, her experiences with anorexia, and a current close friendship and how the two of them describe their lives to each other. All this happens while she’s walking through the streets, so descriptions of street life and of narrowly avoiding getting hit by cars are interspersed throughout the flow of her reflections.
I love reading a document of someone’s thoughts, whether it’s in an essay or in fiction: we get to hear the character’s or the author’s internal monologue as they process what has happened to them. I love the voice Craig has created: her character is as honest as she can be, but circumstances are making her reevaluate so much about herself. She’s in danger of getting lost, not in the city -- the walk is what orients and grounds her and keeps the flow of thoughts going – but in this new sense of herself and her world. It’s exciting because she’s finally writing, but it’s also disorienting and precarious.
I was surprised by how suspenseful the book is: I wanted to know what would happen when she finally meets the sister, and what she would reveal about the manuscript and about her new writing. Craig’s sentences are long, with clause piled on clause, and it creates a sense of movement that mirrors the walk: everything is flowing forward and it’s all a little bit dangerous: who knows what car or what thought will come out of nowhere and change everything. The stakes might seem low, but they don’t feel that way.
I’m just sorry that Craig’s first novel, Since the Accident, is not easily available, and I hope someone reissues it.
I also read In the Eye of the Wild by Nastassja Martin, translated by Sophie R. Lewis. I had mixed feelings about this book; some parts of it were fascinating, others left me puzzled and unsatisfied. Martin is a French anthropologist who studies indigenous peoples in eastern Russia and Alaska. The book begins with a vicious bear attack, or rather the aftermath of the attack, when Martin is barely conscious awaiting rescue. From there, the scene moves to Russian hospitals and then French ones, as Martin gets multiple surgeries, in one case the same surgery completed twice because French doctors felt the Russian doctors had done it badly. She tries to recover as best as she can, but the bear attack was physically and mentally devastating and also transforming, and she feels her life heading in an entirely new direction.
She heads back into Russia — taking some major risks along the way — to try to understand what happened to her. Part of what happened is a breakdown of identity. She is now medka, a word used by the Even people to mean half human, half bear. Her body is no longer fully her own: in their confrontation, she and the bear have somehow changed each other, become each other. Her body is now no longer her own in another sense, a sense that is a possibility for everyone all the time, even though we don’t always realize it: she is subject to invasion in the form of viruses, of surgeries after a disaster, of plates inserted into her face to hold it together. Nurses strap her limbs to the bed so she doesn’t hurt herself and treat her cruelly, just because they can. Surgeons argue over the best way to treat her. She is porous and vulnerable, with a shaky sense of self.
Martin’s writing veers into the mystical, and here is where she lost me; I didn’t always understand what she was saying about humans and nature, about how she was destined to meet the bear, how she made the meeting with the bear happen through her dreams. I found myself getting impatient with her poetic language, which felt too abstract and fanciful to hold meaning.
I kept thinking about Daisy Hildyard’s The Second Body (which I wrote about) as I read Martin, because Hildyard also writes about the interconnectedness and porousness of bodies and identities. I loved encountering these ideas in two very different books, and both writers have shown me how important it is to rethink individualism and the borders between people and other beings in these days where we are rapidly destroying the natural world. It’s just that I prefer Hildyard’s practical, prosy style and manner of thinking to Martin’s more spiritual and lyrical one.
Recently Published
New (mostly) small-press books out this week that I haven’t yet read and am adding to my TBR. All quotations below are from the publisher:
Grey Bees by Andrey Kurkov, translated by Boris Dralyuk (Deep Vellum): If you would like to read about Ukraine by a Ukrainian author, this might be a good choice: “With little food and no electricity, under constant threat of bombardment, Sergeyich's one remaining pleasure is his bees. As spring approaches, he knows he must take them far from the Grey Zone so they can collect their pollen in peace. This simple mission on their behalf introduces him to combatants and civilians on both sides of the battle lines.”
In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing by Elena Ferrante, translated by Ann Goldstein (Europa Editions): Ferrante essays! “Ferrante offers a rare look at the origins of her literary powers. She writes about her influences, her struggles, and her formation as both a reader and a writer.”
When I Sing, Mountains Dance by Irene Solà, translated by Mara Faye Lethem (Graywolf): This one seems nearly impossible to describe. I’m curious about it because I keep hearing people talk about it but I can’t figure out what it’s about. This helps only a little bit: it is “as much about the mountains and the mushrooms as it is about the human dramas that unfold in their midst.”
Fifty Sounds by Polly Barton (Liveright): I wrote about this one here. It’s a wonderful book and absolutely perfect for anyone who loves language and translation.
a Year & Other Poems by Jos Charles (Milkweed Editions): “With acute lyricism, [Charles] documents how a person endures seemingly relentless devastation--California wildfires, despotic legislation, housing insecurity--amid illusions of safety.”
New on the TBR
Recently acquired:
Portrait of an Unknown Lady by Maria Gainza, translated by Thomas Bunstead (Catapult, 2022): I loved Gainza’s earlier book Optic Nerve. This one looks great too: “In the Buenos Aires art world, a master forger has achieved legendary status. Rumored to be a woman, she specializes in canvases by the painter Mariette Lydis, a portraitist of Argentinean high society. But who is this absurdly gifted creator of counterfeits?”
My Volcano by John Elizabeth Stintzi (Two Dollar Radio, 2022): “On June 2, 2016, a protrusion of rock growing from the Central Park Reservoir is spotted by a jogger. Three weeks later, when it finally stops growing, it's nearly two-and-a-half miles tall, and has been determined to be an active volcano.”
A Little Book on Form by Robert Hass (Ecco, 2017): I’ve been wanting to read more about poetic form, and this book looks perfect: Hass “takes up the central tension between poetry as genre and the poetics of the imagination.”
Alphabet by Inger Christensen, translated by Susanna Nied (New Directions, 2001; originally published in 1981): A book of poetry: Christensen’s “award-winning alphabet is based structurally on Fibonacci's sequence (a mathematical sequence in which each number is the sum of the two previous numbers), in combination with the alphabet.”
Currently Reading
Black Paper: Writing in a Dark Time by Teju Cole (University of Chicago Press, 2021): Teju Cole has a new essay collection! I’m just a few essays in, but it’s about the many things art can mean when we’re living through dark times, personally and globally.
Olga Dies Dreaming by Xochitl Gonzalez (Flatiron, 2022): My current audiobook. I’m close to finishing and have enjoyed it thoroughly.
All the Names Given by Raymond Antrobus (Tin House Books, 2021): My current poetry book.
The Cormac Report
This past weekend we visited the Mark Twain House in Hartford for the first time, even though we have lived in Connecticut for 17 years. Whoops! It was fun to see the house, which is relatively big — 25 rooms — and ornate. We saw the desk in the billiards room up on the third floor where Twain wrote Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, and several other books, and we heard lots of stories about his parties, smoking habit, money failures, and love for his daughters. Twain will never be a particularly important writer for me, but it’s still fun to see a bit of literary history.
Cormac did pretty well on our tour. We went to the Connecticut Science Center first, which is much more his thing, so it felt okay to make him tour a house he doesn’t really care about. Poor kid, he’s been dragged through many a museum in his lifetime. He likes art and is interested in history and literature, but a nine-year-old kid has his limits. The hour-long tour dragged a bit for him, but fortunately the tour guide had funny stories to tell, and afterward we bought a Mark Twain doll, and later in the car he staged a battle between it and his new stuffed orca from the science center, and things were mostly fine.
Have a good week everyone!