This Week in Books: “Rather Die Than Be Sad”
“Simon & Schuster’s chief executive testified that a ‘mid-list writer’ is a term employed by publishers so as not to call people ‘low-list’ authors.”
Dear Reader,
“What if things are precisely as they appear? What if we saw what we saw?” asks Jarrod Shanahan as a way of rhetorically distilling to its essence Travis Linnemann’s argument in The Horror of Police, which is that our collective experience of police brutality is rooted in the clichés of the horror genre. (The real horror isn’t just that there’s a monster; it’s that without proof, without the footage, no one believes you really saw the monster. No one believes the truth.)
Truth and horror have a strong relationship, of course; revelation is often disturbing. “I realized that a certain part of myself would rather die than be sad, because being sad reveals that you’re entwined with people,” says Ross Gay when relating a revelatory moment that served as inspiration for his latest book. “That can be horrifying.”
Alain Badiou goes to bat for truth, even though it seems to be caught up in this sick little game with horror. Reviewing Badiou’s The Immanence of Truths, Christian P. Haines writes,
Badiou has dedicated his life to “the knowledge of the existential possibility of truth,” to the painstaking demonstration not only that humans are capable of truth but also that this capacity promises another way of living — a “true life.”
However, Badiou warns in his introduction:
“When you avoid making the utmost effort of the intellect, it is not entirely clear whether, as Plato showed, truths alone can bestow the true life. If we forgo [mathematical] proofs, we will not be completely able to experience that we are eternal. And that is a shame.”
Truths alone are not enough for a true life; you need to show your work. Okay, okay.
But of course there are dissidents. As Reed McConnell writes regarding Yoko Tawada, who switches periodically between Japanese and German when she writes:
Defamiliarized, words become objects that Tawada plays with, always simultaneously laden with present and past, connotation and denotation, intended and unintended signification. For there is no one way of speaking a language that is singularly true and pure.
…Tawada is immune to the seduction of ideal worlds. Even when speculative, her fiction still manages to operate in the world that we actually inhabit: one characterized by slippages, ambiguity, and a history of territorial entanglements that began long before twentieth-century globalism—entanglements that, in fact, go back so far that they might be one of the few things coterminous with being human.
Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi’s twelfth-century complaint feels hyper-relevant here—he’s talking about people misinterpreting ancient monuments, but he might as well be talking about the imminent Tár backlash on Twitter:
Confronted by great monuments, such people are awestruck at first sight—but then go on to view their implications in the worst light.
Is truth possible, in a world where Richard Brody and I watched the same exact film? I kind of doubt it. But I like that Badiou thinks there’s, like, a mathematical way to reconcile our views, besides the Twitter ratio. I mean, I certainly hope so, because I think we’re probably going to lose that one soon.
—Dana
1. “Orlam by P. J. Harvey” by Dan Hartland, Strange Horizons
Dan Hartland reviews P.J. Harvey’s Orlam (Picador).
I refrain from terming it a “poetry collection” because this would entirely obscure what is more properly a novel parcelled out in poems, or a lyric-sheet for a putative musical, or a themed anthology that revolves around the early life experiences of a nine-year-old girl, Ira-Abel Rawles.
If this seems to imply that Orlam is an odd sort of book, then you catch my drift exactly. It is a kind of folk-horror of rural childhood… Ira’s favourite lamb, Sonny-Mallory, is eaten by rooks at the age of just forty days and her eyeball finds its way to the local Gore Woods, where it somehow becomes—somehow always was—the earthly embodiment of the eponymous folk-god, a vaguely vengeful, obscurely benevolent entity…
2. “Yoko Tawada’s Enchanted World” by Reed McConnell, The Baffler
Reed McConnell reviews new books by Yoko Tawada: Scattered All Over the Earth and Three Streets, both translated by Margaret Mitsutani for New Directions.
Tawada produces original work in both Japanese, her native language, and German, a language that she did not learn until her early twenties, which she claims finally allowed her to see her mother tongue from without. This experience of defamiliarization has shaped her writing practice ever since; she now forces herself to switch between writing in German and in Japanese every few weeks in order to “prevent her[self] from taking things for granted.” At times she has taken this even further—while writing her novel The Naked Eye, Tawada switched between German and Japanese every few minutes, writing a few sentences in one language, translating them into the other, and then repeating this process ad infinitum, such that her prose in each language ended up molded by the thought-forms of the other. The result is a book full of sentences that may be grammatically perfect but still somehow feel like urgent missives from a dream, or like someone pressing a hand to a clouded pane of glass.
3. “Ross Gay on the Labor of ‘Inciting Joy’” by Sara Franklin, The Nation
Sara Franklin interviews Ross Gay about Inciting Joy (Algonquin).
I was in this mindfulness class, and we had an exercise. The teacher asked, “How was it?” Everyone said it was fine except this one woman who said, “I didn’t like it.” And the teacher said, “Is it okay if we think about this?” This was a foreign language to me, this checking in. The woman said yes, and it came out that she was sad. The teacher was taking care of it, but as it was going on, it felt, to me, like a brutality. And, I realized it felt precisely like what it felt like when I would go visit my mother, like something was compressing my chest. I was having the same exact feeling in this class. I realized my refusal to engage with other people’s sorrow is my refusal to engage with my own sorrow. I realized that a certain part of myself would rather die than be sad, because being sad reveals that you’re entwined with people. That can be horrifying.
4. “Beauty in Recluse” by Terry Nguyen, The Los Angeles Review of Books
Terry Nguyen reviews Katherine Dunn’s Toad (MCD), which was previously unpublished.
Written over four decades ago, between Dunn’s second novel Truck (1971) and her magnum opus Geek Love (1989), Toad’s modern sensibilities are revealed through its narrator. Dunn crafts an unsparing portrait of a woman who, while softened by isolation, was once more vicious and violent than pure victim: caring in one instance, cruelly dismissive the next. This is where Toad feels ahead of its time…
It’s not hard to imagine why publishers might’ve panned the novel, a decision that, according to her son, devastated Dunn for years. Even the editor who published Dunn’s first two novels, Attic (1969) and Truck, rejected it “in a very ferocious fashion.” An ugly antiheroine who finds peace in her pitiful recluse might prove a hard sell in the 1970s. Fortunately, not so much today.
5. “Vast and Innumerable Throngs of the Ancient Dead” by Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi, Lapham’s Quarterly
An excerpt from Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi’s twelfth-century memoir A Physician on the Nile: A Description of Egypt and Journal of the Famine Years (NYU), translated for the Library of Arabic Literature series by Tim Mackintosh-Smith.
A trustworthy and truthful informant also told me how some treasure hunters had come to him when he was in Qus and explained that a sinkhole had suddenly opened up beneath their feet, leading them to suspect that there was something buried in it. My informant went out with them to the spot, accompanied by a group of armed men, and they began digging. They eventually found a large jar, its top firmly sealed with gypsum plaster. They eventually opened it, with some difficulty, and discovered some objects like fingers, wrapped in strips of cloth. When they unwound the wrappings, they found them to contain sprats—that is to say, small fish—which had as good as turned to dust, and would fly away at a puff of breath.
Nevertheless, the men carried the jar to the town of Qus and placed it before the governor. About a hundred men gathered around it, and set about unwrapping the rest of its contents. At last, they got to the bottom of it—and it was all wrapped sprats, and nothing but.
6. “Reading ‘Lote’” by Ren Ellis Neyra, Juno Jill Richards, Dixa Ramírez-D’Oleo, & Marina Bilbija, Public Books
An ecstatic group review of Shola Von Reinhold’s Lote (Duke).
This past June, a US edition of Shola von Reinhold’s novel Lote was published by Duke University Press. It is about time. Some of us have been passing around the British version for two years now, like a Shola stan secret society.
“Have you read Lote yet??!!” we asked each other, with increasing urgency, on text threads and social media. “Did you hear about Lote?” we queried, unprompted, at pandemic-friendly outdoor social functions. In a manner sometimes annoying to our nearest and dearest, we found ourselves made over into Lote hype people, insisting that everyone drop what they are doing and order a copy right now.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The End of the World Review to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.