I’m in the midst of an online lecture series organized by American Short Fiction, comprising three fiction writers teaching two classes each. Sandwiched between two writers I am familiar with and admire — Lauren Groff and Luis Alberto Urrea — is one I confess I hadn’t heard of, Carmen Maria Machado. (Why yes, I have been living under a rock for a few years, why do you ask?) As it happened, Machado’s talks were the pair that interested me most and persuaded me to sign up. They were jointly titled Every story is a haunted house story, and — breaking news — I’m (allegedly) attempting to write fiction these days, and one of the things I’m working on seems to have a ghost-story aspect to it. Regardless, I was particularly intrigued with the simple implication right there in the class’s title, and couldn’t wait to hear her elaborate on it.
Machado is a prize-winning short-fiction writer, essayist and memoirist — author of the story collection Her Body and Other Parties, the graphic novel The Low, Low Woods, and In the Dream House: A Memoir, among other things — and a lecture she gave during the first of her sessions was so utterly moving and inspiring and mesmerizing that you could sense the entire unseen Zoom room swooning. We weren’t given a copy of the text, and although I cherish an ephemeral experience I’m not-so-secretly hoping it’s because it’s due to be published in some form. (If I ever see that, I will let you know!) But her imagination, vulnerability and storytelling capacity were on full display even in lecture form, and it made me eager to read her work. I started with a short story that was mentioned in class, and it’s so good I wanted to share it with you. It’s called Eight Bites (it also appears in her story collection linked above) and I hope you’ll find it as gripping and moving as I did.
If you’ve already read her, let me know what you think!
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[ IMAGE: Carmen Maria Machado publicity photo by Art Streiber/August ]
“My parents didn’t let us watch much television. Dad has us cover our eyes when the commercials came on. He didn’t want us to nurse any unnecessary desires and succumb to capitalism. Shakespeare’s history plays and ‘The Three Stooges’ were major influences.”
“I can barely speak to a four-year-old in Ojibwe, let alone write in it. But I own the curse and glory of English, a language that has eaten up so many other cultures and become a conglomerate of gorgeous, seedy, supernal, rich, evocative words.”
—Louise Erdrich
When I put those Louise Erdrich interview links at the foot of Monday’s post, I knew they would surely be good reads for anyone who needed one (uh, two). But I’ve since read them and they are FAR TOO GOOD to have been eclipsed like that. So I’m claiming a do-over and giving them today’s full attention! If you’re not familiar with the novelist and her work, there’s a great overview/intro at the top of this first link—
• Louise Erdrich, The Art of Fiction No. 208 (2010, by Lisa Halliday) In this 2010 interview — which is outside the Paris Review paywall for the week — Erdrich talks about everything from her dad’s letter-writing skills to the difficulties of learning the Ojibwe language, to why she changed her name, tied herself to a chair, voted for Richard Nixon, rewrites her work even after it’s published, and so many other things. It is long and wide-ranging! But more than that, every answer is a total wow of a different sort from the one before it.
• A Conversation with Louise Erdrich (2024, by Sterling HolyWhiteMountain) With HolyWhiteMountain, Erdrich talks much more about her bookstore, her influences (Native and non), and the collective fight for Native sovereignty, “joke by joke, book by book, political win by political win.” (I believe this one lives outside the paywall.)
The first Erdrich book I read was Tracks, in a continuing ed class I took with my sister and a friend right after I graduated from college. (I don’t remember what the class was called but I remember we read The Bluest Eye and The House on Mango Street and In the Time of Butterflies … it was a great class.) Now I wish I could read her rewrite. The most recent Erdrich I read was Future Home of the Living God, which I liked many things about, but I didn’t quite love the whole of it. (Now I’m curious if this was the book she was talking about in the 2010 interview — “I suppose I could go back to my eternal science fiction novel …”) Somehow I think I’ve never read Love Medicine, so I’ll rectify that, but these interviews most made me want to read The Night Watchman. And you?
Years after having dramatically downsized my library (which I’ll talk more about some other time), I’m finding myself frequently looking at what remains of it and feeling puzzled by past choices. One of the most puzzling is my lost collection of books by and about Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury group, which I don’t recall consciously deciding to give up. And yet all that remains on my shelves are two of Woolf’s novels — To the Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway (that rare case of my having fallen in love with a book I was assigned in high school), both in stuffy, unread, navy-blue clothbound editions, you know the ones — and a well-thumbed, sun-faded paperback of A Moment’s Liberty: The Shorter Diary (out of print), which according to the post-it bookmark still adhered to page 169, I left off at the entry for 15 October 1923. Probably fifteen or more years ago.
Gone are Virginia’s other novels, the biography, Leonard Woolf’s multi-volume autobiography, various other books of their circle — books I had acquired and been given. Did I ever own the rest of VW’s diary (i.e., the complete five-volume set), or at least Leonard’s edit, A Writer’s Diary? And the letters? I no longer know. But while countless other books have gone unmissed, the Woolfs feel a bit like a phantom limb. A phantom shelf, you might say.
Wandering through Instagram one day last week I saw a mention of a book that’s about to be published in the UK called Rural Hours: The Country Lives of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann, by Harriet Baker. In Baker’s feed there is mention of a piece she had written for the Paris Review last summer called Virginia Woolf’s Forgotten Diary, about the ‘Asheham Diary,’ which I knew nothing about — it’s neither included nor mentioned in the Shorter Diary. Baker’s essay is gorgeous, but also it’s how I learned that Granta has reissued the entire diary in five shiny new hardcover volumes, which contain the full Asheham Diary for the first time. Resisting the urge to eat mac and cheese for the next month and order the full set, I bought Volume 1.
Here’s how Asheham fits in:
The 1915 Diary On 1 January 1915, living at 17 The Green, Richmond (outside London), with her husband Leonard, Virginia started a diary that she kept until 15 February. Each day she wrote a paragraph or two about their day — who they saw or wrote to, or ate with, where they went, what they were working on. In his introduction to the original set, her nephew (and biographer) Quentin Bell sets the stage, like a Masterpiece Theater host:
“Virginia was living in a kind of vacuum and was still barely recovered from her [second] bout of insanity. Since she did appear to be getting well again and was able to work and to enjoy Leonard’s company [they married in 1912] she may be considered happy. But in other ways her state was not enviable; she had reached middle life without any great achievement to her credit [she was 32!], and all around her were younger people rapidly advancing towards fame. She was poorer than she had ever been. She almost certainly knew that her mental health was precarious. She had hardly begun to find the fictional form that suited her, the great literary adventure of her life still lay unseen in the future, and she awaited with dreadful anxiety the publication of her first novel.”
That novel, The Voyage Out, is alluded to only once, in passing, in the diary of the year it was published. As noted, this diary only lasted until mid-February — before the end of that month she had another mental breakdown.
The Asheham Diary (1917-18) Recuperating at her rural Sussex rental, Asheham House, and finding a semblance of normalcy again, she made notes in a pocket-sized notebook from 3 August to 4 October 1917, at which point the Woolfs resumed life in Richmond. That much was always included in the “complete” set of the diaries, but she wrote in it on future visits to Asheham, later in the year and into the next. Those remaining entries are what’s newly included — as Appendix 3 — in the first volume of the Granta reissue.
The entries she made in this smaller diary are generally much shorter and more note-like (pictured above). The war is even more felt, and the notes are often about the price of eggs — literally, she keeps track of how much she paid to whom — as well as the things they can’t get due to rations or scarcity. They walk, bicycle or take the train wherever they go, and frequently forage for mushrooms and blackberries, often coming up empty. She remarks that she couldn’t go to social events if she wanted to because her clothes are all too shabby. She isn’t writing this diary, she (for the most part) is simply recording facts and visitors, weather and expenses, what’s blooming or hatching or molting (and even a laundry list, not published), but it is no less a compelling picture of the time and her state. And as Baker notes, there are anecdotes and imagery that reappear in her later novels.
The Main Diary (1917-1941) Upon their return to Richmond, on 8 October 1917, she opened a new notebook and wrote: “This attempt at a diary is begun on the impulse given by a discovery in a wooden box in my cupboard of an old volume, kept in 1915, & still able to make us laugh at Walter Lamb. This therefore will follow that plan — written after tea, written indiscreetly, & by the way I note here that L. has promised to add his page when he has something to say. His modesty is to be overcome. We planned today to get him an autumn outfit in clothes, & to stock me with paper & pens. This is the happiest day that exists for me.” And then she describes the rest of their day in the remainder of the one paragraph: it rains; they go for an errand-walk around London, with observations about a fellow shopper; they visit Dr. Johnson’s house (by then a museum); and while dropping off a review she’d written for the Times Literary Supplement, they also trade some gossip. She would keep up this diary — which altogether spanned 30 notebooks — until her suicide in 1941.
It is indiscreet and gossipy and occasionally outright horrifying, the things she says. It’s also a remarkable window on a fiercely intelligent couple and their friends and family, many of whom were highly influential, boundary-breaking figures at a key time in European history. It is constantly both ordinary and extraordinary in that way. I think what I had decided all those years ago was that the Shorter Diary would be enough for me and I could always read the longer one if I felt unsatisfied at the end of that, which, as noted, I never got to. Reading them side-by-side now, I’m happy to have both the yearly introductions in the shorter and the extensive footnotes in the longer.
In her preface to the original 1977-84 five-volume set, Anne Olivier Bell (Quentin’s wife, known as Olivier) — whose editing and annotating of the diaries is itself a masterwork that took her ten years — wrote “Virginia Woolf’s interests and observations range over so wide a field — art, literature, politics, people, and her surroundings — that some supporting explanation seems necessary. In deciding how much annotation is appropriate, I have to take into account the probability that — for reasons of cost and copyright — there is not likely to be another edition of these diaries for perhaps half a century.” At that point Leonard had already published his edit (in 1953), and Olivier’s “Shorter” edit would publish in 1989. But she was almost exactly right that it would be 50 years before another complete set would be produced. And here we are. Hopefully there will be a US edition. I could only find the new Granta hardcovers in the US at Amazon, and I hope I can justify buying the next and the next by finishing them one at a time before they go out of print. Meanwhile, perhaps someone will also publish updated hardcovers of the two edited versions. But I’ll be hanging onto my worn copy of A Moment’s Liberty regardless.
As I’m writing this, on Sunday March 24th, I turned to the final page of the shorter diary — and confirmed online that it is indeed the final entry — to see what Virginia’s last sentence was. (You can see it in her handwriting here.) It was four days before she drowned herself in the Ouse. The last sentence: “L. is doing the rhododendrons …” The date: March 24th.
“Ultimately, I’m my best self in the outdoors—curious, brave, and present. That in turn gives me confidence and optimism. All these seem like character traits I should hold on to as I age.”
—Caroline Paul
I’ve chosen this quote from a million possibilities, as it happens to resonate with me, make the point, and continue a theme, but the thing about Oldster Magazine, a Substack-based publication I’m here to rave about today, is that I find myself wanting to save a handful of quotes from every piece I read there. (This one happens to be from a very funny excerpt of Caroline Paul’s new book, Tough Broad.) By way of both introduction and possible disclosure, Oldster is the creation of writer-editor Sari Botton, who I feel like I probably have friends in common with and might have met before?* (If that’s true and you know me and know her, please introduce us!) Or maybe she’s just one of those people you feel a kinship with even though you’ve never met. Anyone who describes themselves as a “late-blooming Gen X weirdo” is ok by me.
She describes Oldster like this: “Oldster Magazine explores what it means to travel through time in a human body—of any gender, at every phase of life. It focuses on the good, the bad, and the ugly we experience with each milestone, starting early in life. It’s about the experience of getting older, and what that means at different junctures. Regardless of age, we’re all the oldest we’ve ever been, which makes every one of us feel, well, old.”
While I recently turned 55, I’m not even anyone’s mother, much less grandmother – I’m still just me — so it’s taken until now for me to accept the term “middle aged.” It just seems mathematically inarguable at this point, right? But while I am by no definition old, I’m increasingly aware that society thinks I am, and feel ever more pressingly the urge both to understand what that means along with people my age and older, and to disabuse younger women, in particular, of the idea that there’s anything wrong with aging. We all age (those of us who get the opportunity), and so for young women to perpetuate harmful and derogatory stereotypes about older women is to literally lay a trap for oneself.
But ultimately, I love Oldster because it is frank and irreverent and entertaining — just like a life well-lived.
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*Also, I’m 100% certain I have friends in common with Caroline Paul, but I don’t think we’ve ever met.
Spring officially starts next week, and with a warm breeze already blowing through the house, the grass greening three weeks earlier than last year (I know! equal parts thrilling and alarming) and tiny blooms beginning to form on the little dogwood we planted in the fall, I’ve got major Spring Fever and trees on the brain. Lots more to say about it next week, but for today I wanted to share these three (or four) gems with you:
• The Trees Saved Me by Alan Burdick with photos by Nicholas J. R. White (New York Times Gift Link) This fairly short but beautifully produced story about the Forest of Immortal Stories, a community effort to document and protect 2,544 beech trees in the Romanian mountains (“a land of fog, fictional vampires and real-life wolves, as well as several thousand brown bears and roughly two-thirds of the remaining virgin forest in Europe”) is deeply moving to me. (See also: Why You Should Plant Oaks. “The oaks in my yard are not just oaks, they are vibrant communities of hundreds of species,” Mr. Tallamy said. …)
• The Architecture of Trees by Cesare Leonardi and Franca Stagi One of the biggest (literally) treasures in my small library — pictured above, hand for scale — this book is indescribably great. Created for landscape designers, it is chiefly an atlas of tree species, rendered in fine pen-and-ink drawings, with and without foliage, and in a scale proportional to each other and to the book itself. It contains a few intro/essays that I found utterly fascinating, despite not being a landscape designer (to my frequent chagrin), and pages of spirographs depicting shade patterns and of ink splots acting out seasonal coloration, along with plant-catalog-style descriptions of each of the trees depicted, plus glossary and index. It’s just incredible.
• The Overstory: A Novel by Richard Powers And if you are a person who loves, or even worships, trees — or is open to learning why we all should! — and you haven’t read Richard Powers’ The Overstory, I highly recommend it. It’s sort of a lesson on trees (magical beings, so vitally important) in novel form, with at least one character and moment I will never forget until the day I die. Patricia, for years a solo soul, “takes his shaking hand in the dark. It feels good, like a root must feel, when it finds, after centuries, another root to pleach to underground.” It’s not a perfect book (or my favorite Powers) but the Patricia chapters, among others, are some of my favorite chapters I’ve ever read.
Have a lovely weekend, thank you for being here, and I’ll see you Monday!
The final 1/3 of The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store is a really good book, but the first 2/3 might be one of my favorite books I’ve read in ages. James McBride can spin a yarn: There’s enough plot and characters in here for a good dozen novels, but they seem to come so easily to him that he doesn’t need to hoard them. It’s 1936, and in the early parts of the book we meet just about everyone in the titular grocery store’s neighborhood (and then some), and even minor characters receive introductions that span years and parentage — the erstwhile parents with their own lively, richly described histories — all within a few paragraphs. Take Bernice Davis, for example, who lives next door to Heaven & Earth and is the estranged best friend of its proprietress, Chona Ludlow:
“She was second cousin to Earl ‘Shug’ Davis, driver for the vice president of Pottstown Bank; second cousin to Bobby Davis, who once worked as an all-around handyman for Buck Weaver, the great Pottstown baseball player who played for the Chicago White Sox; and also, by dint of a twisted, convoluted intermarriage between her grandfather and his son’s stepdaughter, was great-aunt to Mrs. Traffina Davis, the wife of Reverend Sturgess, meaning Bernice was actually twelve years younger than her great-niece. She also served as stepsister to Rusty Davis, the handyman who fixed everything; fourth cousin to Hollis Davis, the Hill’s only locksmith; and polished it off by being niece to Chulo Davis, the legendary jazz drummer who left Chicken Hill to play with the famous Harlem Hamfats in Chicago before he was shot dead over a bowl of butter beans.”
And that’s him just warming up. You get the idea someone could say “tell us a story” at the dinner table, and he’d improvise an entire novel on the spot. In drawing them so vividly, he creates characters you genuinely care about, and while occasionally heart-wrenching, it’s also an incredibly funny book. I was going back and forth between reading and listening — it makes a great audiobook — and so could often be seen walking around my neighborhood by myself in recent days, earbuds buried under my beanie and puffer hood, laughing out loud.
The book is set in the poor, tight-knit, Black and Jewish neighborhood of Chicken Hill, in otherwise WASPy Pottstown PA. It opens with a flash forward to 1972, wherein we’re told a body has been found in a well, setting up a mystery and an eventual reveal. But who winds up dead in the well isn’t ultimately all that important in the grand scheme of the book, so as the narrative builds toward its big dual-track action scenes (leaving some of the main characters and the grocery store behind), it ironically loses some steam. But that’s faint criticism for a fantastic book.
So I was sad when it ended, I’ll miss the characters, and I’m eager to read more McBride. It’s rare for me to have read so much fiction – and especially so much new fiction — in the span of a few months, but as with Sigrid Nunez, McBride is a writer I’ve been wanting to read for years, and I jumped right on their latest. Like Nunez, McBride has left me happily wanting more.
I was in college, studying graphic design and design history under a Cranbrook alum, circa 1990 just as Mid-Century Modern revivalism was at peak fervor. In other words, I was bathed in it both at school and in the home decor magazines I hoarded. But while MCM’s main manifestation — both originally and in the early ’90s — was the bright, spare, mid-century-only look, I’ve always favored the more layered and eclectic Ray Eames approach. You know, the undersung Ray!, wife of Charles Eames, who was his partner in life and design, and whose design style is on full display in their iconic Pacific Palisades home, aka Case Study House No. 8. Their life as a creative couple — and the ways in which that whole group collaborated and influenced each other — is the most interesting thing about them, to me. But I hadn’t known about their friendship and playful collaborations with illustrator Saul Steinberg (and his wife Hedda Sterne) until I ran across this fantastic, magazine-sized book, Steinberg Meets the Eameses*, in an email from one of my all-time favorite bookstores, William Stout Architectural Books in San Francisco.
I love a beautifully designed show catalog or publication that sits right on the line between “book” and “ephemera,” and this one is a true gem, especially in how it incorporates various samples of Steinberg’s editorial work in ways that convey or even mimic the original formats. It’s the catalog for an exhibition organized by the Eames Institute,** also called Steinberg Meets the Eameses, which you can explore online. And there’s another of their online exhibitions, not to be missed, called Ray’s Hand.
*This one is not available through Bookshop so I have happily linked back to Stout for it, but remember you can leave a tip anytime! 😉 **Eames Institute apparently acquired Stout Books in late 2022 when I had my head turned!Wow.
TIP ONE: The most fun a book nerd can have on the Internet
If you ask me what’s the best oddball/grassroots concept the Internet ever made possible, I’ll launch into a rapturous digression about a once-weekly event called Layer Tennis and then say but definitely my idea of the thing that made the Internet worth having is the annual Tournament of Books. And the happy news is that it’s still going strong — in fact, the 20th tournament officially kicks off on Wednesday of next week, which means you have this weekend (if you aren’t already a fan) to dig into the history of the tournament and look over this year’s contenders and judges. I’m 1/3 of the way into James McBride’s incredibleThe Heaven and Earth Grocery Store*, but otherwise have read none of them — it’s ok, that’s part of the fun of it. Mark your bracket if you have read them, maybe order yourself a t-shirt, and get prepared to follow along!
TIP TWO: The hole in the Paris Review paywall
I just bought myself something I’ve wanted for a long time, that I’m not 100% sure why I’ve never indulged in: A subscription to The Paris Review literary journal. In addition to it being reliably great-looking and great-reading, their Art of Fiction author interviews (which date back to the 1950s) are among my all-time favorite things. I have all of the paperback compilations — The Paris Review Interviews: Vol. 1, Vol. 2, Vol. 3 and Vol. 4* (sent to me by the publisher back when I had Readerville) — and love dipping into them, but they only go up to 2009. A fifteen-year gap!
I think I haven’t subscribed to the journal because it robs me of the joy of buying an issue now and then when I find it on the table at some great little shop. But I’ve been hitting the paywall more and more lately, and decided finding the issue in my mailbox has to be just as thrilling as the random encounter, right? Plus, the archive!
With or without a subscription, here’s a hot tip for dipping into the vast archive:
They have a mailing list called ‘The Redux,’ and if you sign up for it you’ll get an email every Sunday linking to a few pieces from the past that they’ve made public for that week. This week happens to have been the three short stories from last year that just won them the ASME Award for short fiction. You can read them via these links if you click today or tomorrow (or anytime if you’re subscribed)—
‘I feel little alienation in museums, full though they are of other people’s ancestors.’
—Teju Cole
Pulling at a thread last week, I found something I hadn’t thought to look for with regard to Teju Cole’s brilliant novel Tremor, which I had just posted my thoughts about. I’d made a comment about wishing the novel’s embedded museum lecture was available somewhere I could link to, but that passage had reminded me of a coincidental (I thought) synergy between two things I had read in 2019 that I could link to: 1) Cole’s 2016 essay collection, Known and Strange Things — specifically the opening essay, ‘Black Body’ (originally published in The New Yorker, 2014, as linked); and 2) the March 2019 obituary of a globally renowned, Nigeria-born art curator named Okwui Enwezor (NYT Gift Link). (‘Black Body’ is a direct response to James Baldwin’s essay ‘Stranger in the Village,’ which is collected in Notes of a Native Son). Both of these pieces touch on ‘worldliness,’ Eurocentrism in the world of art and antiquities, and who gets to be considered an artist — what gets to be considered art. I know very little about the Art World, but there’s a much larger point being made.
Those links are the main event today, and if you stop here and go read them, you will have my full support!
Here’s the side note about what I found in digging them up:
While it was pure happenstance that I’d read the Cole essay so close to Enwezor’s obituary (I’m that person who loves to read obits of interesting people I’ve never heard of), the two pieces seemed to me at the time to be in some sort of unintended dialogue with each other, so I went back to read them with the idea of pairing them here. I was struck again by the overlaps and it dawned on me for the first time that Cole and Enwezor might very well have known each other, given their personal and professional histories. (Duh!) So I went to Google and typed in “okwui enwezor and teju cole,” and found that not only did they know each other, but apparently in the murk of 2021 I missed a whole essay collection from Cole, Black Paper, which contains an elegy for his two art world mentor-friends who died in close proximity, Enwezor and Bisi Silva. (I believe it’s this piece, only given a different title in the book.)
Among the many words I mentioned having written and cut about Tremor were these: There’s the sense that the whole book was written for the sake of a lost friend, by the living one trying to figure out how to make sense of life, tenuous as it is. I’m sure there are Cole readers who knew about this friendship and spotted what seems to be Enwezor’s spirit in Tremor, but that realization made the book even more poignant for me, for whatever reason, and I wanted to share it along with the intended links. Even though it might not really mean anything to you until you READ THE BOOK! 😉
If you’ve read anything by Teju Cole — author, essayist, photographer, critic, teacher — you know that he sees and feels the world with clarity and gravity, and possesses an enviable ability to infuse that into his writing. In addition to bringing a wide and deep experience of the world’s art and music and literature to his work, he sees the literal remnants of slavery, erasure and colonialism all around us (particularly around himself at Harvard, where he teaches) and connects the historical dots — with such short lines.
He also cites his creative influences, in ways both direct and indirect, and there’s a short passage early in his latest novel, Tremor, that feels to me like an apt description of the book itself. This section is written in third person, with the narrator addressing the reader as “you,” assigning you the role of an (as yet unspecified) acquaintance of the main character, Tunde. (Like the author, Tunde also teaches at Harvard and spent his formative years in Lagos, Nigeria.) “You” had recommended a particular recording of Bach’s Cello Suites to Tunde in 2001. “In those days, you were interested in the way Bach’s written scores showed evidence of having originated in improvisation. You described it as ‘embodiment’: the multifocal sensitivity an animal would have in a forest but also the alertness and contained intensity of a hunter in a different part of the same forest. Bach was not merely arranging notes, you said to Tunde at the time. He was conveying a living and intentional search … .”
Tunde, who lives and breathes music, had had his own appreciation for various recordings of Bach’s solo works, in which “he found that quality of personal impersonality that made Bach feel less like a composer and more like a philosopher, a counselor, a scientist, and architect, or a prophet … .” And yet the recording “you” suggested gave him a new level of appreciation.
“You said embodiment was not only the animal in the forest and the tracker following that animal but also the forest as a self-aware system, attentive to the rustle of its own leaves, the shifting colors, the air, the water, the panoptic view of many moving parts, the interactions of light and shade. Collective listening, you called it.”
Improvisation, multifocal sensitivity, alertness, contained intensity, not merely arranging notes, a living and intentional search, personal impersonality, the panoptic view of moving parts, the interactions of light and shade, an author who is a seer and a teacher and an artist — all of this applies to Cole and his novel. It is “a self-aware system” — both in and of itself, and in its seeming anticipation of the reader’s awareness of the overlap between the author and his protagonist. (The book has this awareness in common with the new Sigrid Nunez, along with the bare whisper of a plot, and the tendency toward “essayistic digressiveness.”*)
But the phrase “collective listening” stands out the most. The book’s narration shifts from the third person breaking the fourth wall, above, to a lecture (literally a museum talk) by Tunde — or Cole himself? — on museums and the provenance of their possessions (which I desperately wish lived on its own somewhere that I could link to), to — eventually — Tunde and his wife Sadako taking turns speaking for themselves. Within that “eventually,” at the center of the book, lives an entire short fiction collection: two dozen of the most dazzling, vivid, memorable pieces of flash fiction you could ever hope to read, each one the first-person account of a citizen of Lagos, which (echoing Every Day Is for The Thief) Tunde returns to for a visit decades after having moved to the US. And, before shifting back to Tunde and Sadako, the shorts are followed by a chapter that is a portrait of Lagos itself, a place “that only tolerates cartography on a scale of 1:1.”
I feel the same way about this book: it’s impossible to do it justice in fewer words than are contained in the book itself. So while I could go on and on and on — in fact, I’ve written and discarded twice this many words — I’d much rather you be reading Tremor!
p.s. If someone were to buy the book throughthis linkso I could be sure the affiliate links are actually working, I would really appreciate it!
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*Don’t miss this link to an old Nunez interview at The Paris Review that’s currently unlocked!
Collapse and Delight 