Fiction/Poetry Archives - Writeside.com

Life, Death and the Hidden Light

This year’s winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Jon Fosse of Norway, is a prolific writer who should now become better known in the West. His work certainly merits this. Septology, a 7-book novel comprised of three individual titles (The Other Name, I Is Another, A New Name) in just one sentence, more or less, is widely—and justly—regarded as a masterpiece. The work has been hailed as both a new form of fiction and a completely unique reading experience.

In the United States, Septology is published by Transit Books, a small, recently founded publisher based in the Bay Area. The brilliant, incantatory English translation is by Damion Searls. Publishing Fosse is quite a coup for the new imprint.

Septology is a different kind of reading experience. While the seven-book, one-sentence description above may sound daunting, the work itself is anything but. It might best be described as a kind of spiritual journey, one keenly felt by the reader as well as the principal protagonist, a painter named Asle.

Asle’s St. Andrews Cross, generated by DALL-E.

Asle believes in God, though not merely in the conventional ways. For him, God resides in everything, as a sort of hidden light. Early on, he has worked on a painting which his neighbor dubs St. Andrews Cross—two thick lines forming an X-shaped cross on a black background, one line brown, the other purple. Asle believes a dark light shines from this painting.

That light somehow reflects the inexplicable mysteries of life, death and God, Asle believes. As he says, “…it’s definitely true that it’s just when things are darkest, blackest, that you see the light, that’s when this light can be seen, when the darkness is shining, yes, and it has always been like that in my life at least, when it’s darkest is when the light appears, when the darkness starts to shine, and maybe it’s the same way in the pictures I paint, anyway I hope it is….”

Fosse’s writings about the ineffable somehow seem deeply real, and intensely engaging. Lauren Groff, reviewing his more recent novella A Shining in the Guardian, writes that his fiction “somehow dissolves the border between the material and the spiritual worlds,” and this is true. Yet Fosse’s work is amazingly accessible and compelling, nowhere more so than in Septology (though A Shining will provide you with a brief, stripped-down example).

These works will not resolve the great issues of life, death or God; no straightforward explanations are offered, nor could they be. But in reading Fosse, you will feel the grip and importance of these issues and the questions they raise as never before.

ChatGPT Looks at the Coming Year

Last year around this time we offered a quasi-optimistic take on 2022. This time, as a corrective, we turned to two outside sources for guidance on what 2023 (and beyond) might look like: Cormac McCarthy and OpenAI.

McCarthy’s year-end pair of novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris, were the literary event of the year for us, George Saunders notwithstanding. Quite dark, though. To counter McCarthy’s (and our own) innate pessimism, we enlisted the help of Open AI’s ChatGPT and DALL·E 2.

Despite his bleak outlook (or perhaps because of it), McCarthy is eminently quotable. Here is a line from The Passenger that we used to generate OpenAI’s year-end outlook: “The horrors of the past lose their edge, and in the doing they blind us to a world careening toward a darkness beyond the bitterest speculation.”

A Dark Future?

It is difficult to predict the future with certainty, but it is possible to imagine a future in which the horrors of the past are remembered and acknowledged, but no longer have the power to haunt and dominate the present. This could be a world in which people have learned from the mistakes and atrocities of the past, and have made a concerted effort to prevent them from happening again.

In this future, the horrors of the past may have lost their edge because they have been widely recognized, acknowledged, and addressed. People may have developed a deeper understanding of the causes of these horrors, and may have implemented measures to prevent them from occurring in the future.

However, it is also possible that this focus on the past could have the unintended consequence of blinding people to the present and future. People may become so focused on preventing past horrors from repeating themselves that they overlook other pressing issues and problems that are unfolding in the present.

Furthermore, it is important to recognize that the future is not predetermined, and that the actions and choices of individuals and societies can shape the direction in which the world moves. If people are not careful and vigilant, it is possible that the horrors of the past could be repeated, or that new horrors could emerge. It is crucial that people stay aware and engaged in the present and the future, in order to prevent darkness and suffering from taking hold.

Happy New Year, everyone.

Loving What Was Lost

This blog recently addressed the pervasive sense of political unease in the United States, an unease which is only growing as the midterm elections approach. Everyone acknowledges how important the election results will be for the country’s future. At the same time, many of us believe we’ve already embarked on a dark path which cannot be stopped or altered, no matter how we vote.

But is this true? Are we really powerless to change the direction of our country?

Liberation Day, by George Saunders. Cover photo: randomhousebooks.com.

Well, the empirical evidence does not look good. Election deniers already hold offices in many states and are in a position to tilt the results. The January 6 Committee is likely to be shut down in just a few months, assuming Republicans take back the House as expected. And ex-President Trump is likely to run for reelection, although by law he should not be permitted to run for any office whatsoever.

One of our best writers, the Booker Prize-winning George Saunders, has just published a new collection of short stories—Liberation Day—which takes our current situation as a starting point and imagines what life will be like in the near future.

Perhaps the most direct of these stories is “Love Letter.” It takes the form of a letter written by a grandfather to his grandson after dark times have descended, a letter which tries to address the issue of injustice and whether or not anything can still be done to rectify it. It is also a love letter to that which has been lost, namely the democracy we once took for granted. Plausibly (and chillingly), the letter is dated February 22, 202_.

The grandson challenges his grandfather, asking why he didn’t do more to stop the nation’s descent. The grandfather replies reasonably, noting all the things he and his wife did do. They voted. They called their elected representatives, they signed petitions. They wrote letters to the editor. After the third such letter, the grandfather notes, he was stopped by the police and told to stay off his computer.

Both generations are aware of people who have been wrongfully imprisoned. Indeed, the grandson has written to his grandfather seeking assistance in freeing someone from prison. Neither knows whether the person in question, named only as “J.” for safety’s sake, is in a state facility or a federal prison. J. refused to identify someone who lacked the proper papers. And J. appears to be romantically involved with the grandson, who wants to expedite her release.

The grandfather replies: I advise and implore you to stay out of this business with J. Your involvement will not help (especially if you don’t know where they have taken her, fed or state) and may, in fact, hurt. I hope I do not offend if I here use the phrase “empty gesture.”

Yet the grandfather cannot help but offer his grandson monetary assistance, even though he believes it is pointless and fervently hopes his grandson will keep a low profile.

He—the grandfather—is full of regret for what was lost. And for how it was lost, so gradually and imperceptibly. There was a certain critical period, he says. I see that now.

We have entered that critical period. Is there anything we can do?

New Fiction on the American Divide

The following story was accepted two years ago by Gargoyle, a literary magazine based in Washington, D.C. It has just been published this summer, due to pandemic delays. (Check it out: you’re looking for issue #75, the one with the traffic cone on the cover. Because of the editorial delays this issue is much thicker than usual and chock full of good stuff.)

“Sparks” is written from the point of view of an economically disadvantaged young person in upstate New York on the eve of the 2020 presidential election. I believe it remains relevant today.

Trump on TV. He lost, but how did he reach so many people? Photo source: washingtonpost.com.

“Sparks”
by Thomas Pletcher

It’s early November, Monday I think, and I’m driving my beat-up bike around Winwood feeling chilly in my thin denim jacket and trying to figure out what to do next. I’m going to need to find work at some point but that becomes harder to do when the weather turns cold. There are some construction jobs going on—there are plenty of new houses being built—but the crews are usually locked in by this time of year. And I don’t feel like doing scut work on someone’s fancy-ass house project anyway, especially once it starts snowing. Plus there’s the masks and the distancing and all.

This is an election year, not that that means anything.

I’m thinking I could really use some oxy, or at the very least a six-pack, but I’m strapped as usual. I’ve only got one pill left and I don’t want to use it until I know I can get more. I don’t have a lot of money left, either. Then it occurs to me that Carl Stolz, my hard-hearted dealer, might take something other than cash if I can come up with the right something—some nice jewelry, maybe, or a big chunky watch. At this point I’m rounding the steep wide curve going up Circus Road when I see a white Tesla SUV with some smug-looking fuck behind the wheel turn out of his long driveway and head down the hill.

Well, well, I ask myself, who’s this? Probably the guy who owns that big new house. I throw a quick glance at the driver as the Tesla slides by but the stuck-up bastard just keeps his eyes on the curving road. I slow slightly and my piece-of-shit Kawasaki starts belching even louder but as far as Mr. Tesla is concerned I simply don’t exist. Once he rounds the curve and disappears down the hill I cut my engine and pull the bike into the short driveway of a smaller house across the way.

Continue reading “New Fiction on the American Divide”

Recent Reads

One of the abiding benefits serious readers derive from literature, whether well-made fiction or poetry, is the ability to participate in other worlds. Indeed, the mind-meld between a good writer and his/her ideal reader is deeper and richer than any Metaverse could hope to be.

The reader not only gains new understanding and perspectives from a successful novel, but also a vacation of sorts from the “real” world. I don’t mean a relaxing beach resort getaway, but a vacation from one’s usual preoccupations and concerns. In dangerous, stressful times like these, such a respite is invaluable in its own right and also conducive to a more balanced outlook.

Here, in the order in which I read them, are three engrossing ways to take a break.

Kim Stanley Robinson is an acclaimed science fiction writer, noted especially for his Mars trilogy. His latest book is something different—a fictional account, drawing on real-life scientific scenarios, of how we might save ourselves from the ravages of climate change.

The Ministry for the Future has been criticized on a few counts: it can be a bit didactic in places, the plot is somewhat thin and its conclusions could be viewed as overly optimistic. It is a gripping read nonetheless—here is an intelligent, engaged writer offering carefully researched solutions for mankind’s salvation. Even though accelerating climate change is anxiety-provoking in real life, reading this book will expand your horizons and possibly offer some comfort as well.

Hervé Le Tellier’s The Anomaly was a breakout success in Europe and has enjoyed good sales in the U.S. as well. It is extremely well-written; the translation by Adriana Hunter is outstanding. The book deftly blends a number of individual stories in a narrative that mixes crime, sci-fi and thriller—the result is a real page-turner.

The anomaly in the book’s title is the arrival of more than one Paris-New York flight, months apart, in which the plane, its crew and its passengers are identical. The idea of “the double,” an individual who is exactly like you but whom you have never meant, is not new in literature, but Le Tellier makes exceptionally good use of it here: The Anomaly won France’s Prix Goncourt. This is a novel that will engross you and also set you to pondering.

Dana Spiotta should be better-known than she is; she is a truly excellent writer, accurate, funny and insightful—a very distinctive voice. Wayward is her fifth novel and like the previous four it has received very strong reviews (it was one of the New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2021). In many ways this is the most traditional novel on my mini list, and it operates on a smaller and more intimate scale than the other two. But I believe it is also wider and deeper, and further removed from the headlines, despite its heroine’s revulsion at the election of Donald Trump (the novel is set in 2017).

Samantha Raymond is confronting the changes of middle age (perimenopause) and the shifting mental and emotional ground that comes with them. On impulse, she buys a ramshackle house, once beautiful, on a hill above Syracuse, NY. She moves there without her husband or teenage daughter to try to come to terms with things, including her ailing mother, her willful daughter and how she herself should live. In the process she offers piercing observations on American life, its inequality and brutality as well as its promise, and on mortality and the cycle of life. Highly recommended.

Two Gripping Thrillers

A great deal of attention has been paid to the need to escape from the constant anxiety of each day’s news, especially during this past year of the pandemic. You can turn off notifications on your phone and avoid reading the news online but it will still find you, somehow.

Streaming TV has been the most widespread diversion for most, but these days one has to dig deeper into Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu et al. to find something truly engaging. And even at its best, TV has a hard time matching the kind of transcendent escape provided by a really engrossing book.

I’m going to recommend two such books, each of which provides a wonderful diversion from daily tasks and worries. Both generate plenty of tension but it’s good tension—the kind that keeps you turning pages and temporarily rising above whatever happened in the wider world today. Both books are thrillers (though they’re quite different), and both are very well-written, and featured on last year’s New York Times “100 Notable Books” list.

A new twist on noir. Image: us.macmillan.com.

S. A. Cosby’s Blacktop Wasteland is a thoroughgoing delight—if you like classic noir, you’ll love this book. Set in Virginia, its depiction of criminals and criminal life in the South reads as completely authentic. The novel’s protagonist, Beauregard “Bug” Montage, is torn between his past life as a getaway driver extraordinaire and his current desire to live as a good citizen, husband and father. The tension between these two roles helps fuel a fast-moving plot that grabs you tight and won’t let go. Full review here.

A nasty piece of work. Image: penguinrandomhouse.com.

Lawrence Osborne’s The Glass Kingdom is an altogether different kind of thriller, and a nasty piece of work it is (I mean that as high praise). This novel’s setting is bustling, shadowy, dangerous Bangkok, where 30-something Sarah Mullins winds up after scamming $200K using the reputation of a famous American author. Sarah gravitates to a high-end collection of high-rises known as the Kingdom, supposedly secure from the chaos and growing civil unrest on the streets of Bangkok below. There she mingles with other expats from around the world, all of whom have sketchy backgrounds of their own. The book’s tension builds steadily and becomes almost unbearable toward the end. Full review here.

Read either or both of these novels and enjoy a well-deserved vacation from the news cycle. Have a good trip!

Criminal

As this incredibly dysfunctional and deadly year nears its end, I’ll close 2020’s posts on a personal note: it was a tough year for writing, at least for me.

Many wonderful novels, stories, poems and non-fiction works were published this year, to be sure. Yet I know I’m not alone in feeling the effects of distraction and isolation on my writing. When every day is “Blursday,” it’s tough to focus. Not to make excuses—one must try, and I did. I published a grand total of one poem and one story this year. (Actually, the story won’t appear in Gargoyle until next summer.)

So, not a productive year. I can’t blame it all on the pandemic. Part of the responsibility is mine—I should have found more and better, more consistent, ways to focus, and I didn’t. Part of the responsibility lies with a fundamentally flawed literary marketplace, especially the minor leagues of literary magazines and chapbooks. There are myriad problems here which will likely be the subject of a future post.

The one poem I published, “Criminal,” appeared in the Spring 2020 edition of Poetry Quarterly. I’ll reproduce it below, since its subject matter and especially its title seem relevant to the horrific year we’ve just experienced.

CRIMINAL

I know it was a crime
at least as cold as
the fluorescent light that
bore down on my father’s deathbed.

But I still can’t grasp the
betrayal, or the indifference
that enabled it. No
conscious thought was involved.

Dad had been declining for a year,
dropping faster toward the end,
life’s last, careless insult
a needless broken hip.

It was the fall that did me in, he
told me when I flew out to
see him in San Jose.
When I first arrived his head was thrown back

and his mouth gaped. It was awkward.
He was propped up in the hospital
bed, and later that
day I spooned out soup.

He slurped happily, as though life
hadn’t changed all that much.
But then he knew again
it had—his time was nearly gone.

You’ll stay with me? he asked, eyebrows raised.
I can’t, Dad, I told him.
I have to get back.

He died the next evening,
after I’d returned home.
Distance helped blunt the news.

—Thomas Pletcher

Here’s hoping for a better new year.

Time to Vote

Well, here we are again—on the eve of The Most Important Election Ever. This time, it may be true.

However, if (like me) you’re not convinced that a Biden victory on November 3 will fix everything, then I offer you the following. I published a slightly different version of this poem four years ago, and I believe its message remains useful today.

“A Villanelle for Election Day”

When the world begins to disintegrate
And the country begins to fall apart
Just breathe in deep and steer your own thoughts straight.

Every campaign lie is defined by hate
And every campaign is a lie at heart
When the world begins to disintegrate.

If fear expands and gathers too much weight
And you fear carnage is about to start
Just breathe in deep and steer your own thoughts straight.

Some will tell you it’s really fucking great
And it’s time to upset the apple cart
When the world begins to disintegrate

The darker it grows, the more it grows late
And you know compassion won’t play a part
Just breathe in deep and steer your own thoughts straight.

Perhaps the end is really up to fate
Perhaps it’s finally time to grow smart
When the world begins to disintegrate
Just breathe in deep and steer your own thoughts straight.

To a new beginning.

A Burning

My intent this time out was to forgo the increasingly bleak political and societal scene in the US and examine a compelling work of fiction instead. The book under review here is A Burning, by Megda Majumdar, and it is a debut novel. Don’t let the word “debut” put you off, though—this is one of the most powerful and accomplished works I have read in quite some time.

A stunning debut and a savage indictment.

However, if you sometimes read fiction to “escape” the cascadingly unpleasant realities of day-to-day American life, I cannot in good conscience recommend A Burning, even though it is set in and intimately concerned with India instead. While the societal particulars are quite different (and in some ways, as bad as ours have ever been), and while there is no pandemic underlying the action, this novel is a razor-sharp examination of basic aspiration in a capitalist society of grotesque inequality, and the ways in which universal human nature can be twisted in such circumstances. Indian setting or not, this book will not let you escape life in the United States.

The plot is streamlined and increases in intensity throughout the novel. A Burning will in fact grip you like a thriller. A poor young woman whose principal ambition is to achieve a middle-class existence is unjustly accused of a horrendous crime. The lives of two other Indians striving to make their way upward in a fundamentally flawed society—a physical education teacher who falls in with a right-wing political party and an engaging Hijra who is determined to achieve film stardom—intersect with hers in ways that seem inconsequential at first, and then increasingly heartbreaking.

If calling a novel “the book of the summer” once conjured up beach reads like Jaws, this novel will instead make you freshly aware of just how much we all have left to achieve. It truly is the one novel you should read this summer, and experiencing Majumdar’s brilliant and savage dissection of Indian society will help fortify you to face the enormous challenges remaining in this country.

This is a stunning and immensely rewarding book.

A Divided Nobel Prize: One Questionable Choice, One Great One

Earlier this month, the Nobel Committee awarded two Nobel Prizes in Literature, one for 2018 and one for this year. The double award was necessitated by a scandal involving the husband of an academy member, which resulted in no prize for literature being awarded last year.

The double award proved to be controversial for other reasons as well. One of the winners (Peter Handke of Austria, who received the 2019 award) was denounced by PEN America for his far-right views.

“We are dumbfounded by the selection of a writer who has used his public voice to undercut historical truth and offer public succor to perpetrators of genocide….” said novelist Jennifer Egan, PEN America’s president. “At a moment of rising nationalism, autocratic leadership, and widespread disinformation around the world, the literary community deserves better than this. We deeply regret the Nobel Committee on Literature’s choice.”

However, I am writing this post not to call your attention to the controversy per se, nor to Peter Handke, whom I admit I have not read. Instead, I would like to direct your attention to the other winner, Poland’s Olga Tokarczuk, who was belatedly awarded the 2018 prize.

Olga Tokarczuk. Photo: Maciek Nabrdalik for The New York Times.

As it happens, I had read the most recent translation of Tokarczuk’s work, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, a couple of months before the prize was announced. It instantly became one of my all-time favorite books. I won’t try to summarize the plot; suffice it to say the book is utterly unique. If you believe humankind is capable of doing better (and if you’re at all fond of animals), I totally recommend the wonderful
Antonia Lloyd-Jones translation. The book’s title, BTW, is drawn from William Blake’s poem “Proverbs of Hell.”

The novel, which was originally published in 2009 but did not appear in English until August of this year, has drawn universal raves. Here are some samples:

“Tokarczuk’s novel is a riot of quirkiness and eccentricity, and the mood of the book, which shifts from droll humor to melancholy to gentle vulnerability, is unclassifiable—and just right. Tokarczuk’s mercurial prose seems capable of just about anything.”—Kirkus Reviews.
“[It] succeeds as both a suspenseful murder mystery and a powerful and profound meditation on human existence and how a life fits into the world around it.”—Publishers Weekly.
“It is an astonishing amalgam of thriller, comedy and political treatise, written by a woman who combines an extraordinary intellect with an anarchic sensibility.”—Sarah Perry, in The Guardian.

Only three other Tokarczuk works are currently available in English:

Flights (translated by Jennifer Croft), which won the Man Booker International Prize in 2018 (though the book was originally published in 2007), and which I also recommend,
Primeval and Other Times (translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, originally published in 1996), and
House of Day, House of Night (translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, originally published in 1998).

The latter two titles are on my reading list, as is the book often cited as her masterpiece, The Books of Jacob (2014), which has apparently been translated by Jennifer Croft but is not yet available in English.

Like Handke, Tokarczuk is also somewhat political, but she is his complete opposite, liberal and humanitarian—she has needed to hire bodyguards at times in right-leaning Poland. She has received the German-Polish International Bridge Prize, a recognition extended to persons especially accomplished in the promotion of peace, democratic development and mutual understanding among the people and nations of Europe.

If you’re a questing reader (and if you’re here, you almost certainly are), and you haven’t yet discovered Olga Tokarczuk, now’s the time.