A great read that I’m not sure I recommend.
 
There are three cases with Deputy Sheriff Ogden as the central character. You get to like Ogden early on and the dialogue and the pacing are as good as it gets. That you get to the end of an investigation with it incompletely resolved makes it more credible, if unsettling.
 
It’s the last one, “The Shift”, that makes you realize that Everett means to undermine the classic detective story. The ending is quite the shock. You might love it. I didn’t see it coming and it didn’t work for me. Ogden deserved better than that.

A Muhammed Ali of a book. Hard-hitting and beautifully done. I feel physically better for having read such writing. I don’t remember ever rooting for a character like I did for Cora, knowing that the truth-witnessing of the author was never going to pull any punches.
 
The one gripe I had was when Cora’s story jumps forward to Indiana. Colson Whitehead has a penchant for introducing a new scene and sketching in the backstory to it later, which is fine, only this time it comes unstuck. I was quite lost, looking around at the new farm and new characters and not knowing where I was, or who they were. I even flipped back several pages to see if I might have accidentally skipped a brief intervening chapter, but nope.
 
That’s by and by. The Underground Railroad is one hell of a story. I guess it’s just me, something I had pending, but for some reason, it feels appropriate to be reading about slavery in America right now.

Is sci fi having some kind of steampunk cyborg moment, or is it simply coincidence that I read Karin Tidbeck just after Ted Chiang?
 
If Chiang’s “Exhalation” playing with the idea of a piston-driven non-organic life form left me cold, Tidbeck’s penchant for amalgamating the organic with the mechanical left me queasy. Human-machine love and engine cables clung to by blubbery flesh tend to creep me out. If you like weird tales, you’ll probably like these, but I found there was too much freakishness for its own sake. All the fat and flab seemed gratuitously excessive to me.
 
Human relationships in these stories with abnormal creatures of unnatural birth would work better if they were more relatable, or exciting. But that is not the Swedish way, I think, and you certainly get a strong feel of Nordic otherness and Sehnsucht.
 
But then there’s “Rebecka”, which knocks the spots off any story I’ve read this year. I occasionally do preliminary judging for a short story contest: I would award this one first prize. It packs something massive into its eight pages.
 
It starts off with a cracking guess-how-things-ended-up-this-way scene and thus we meet Sara, reluctant confidante to the troubled Rebecka, after whose suicide attempts she is always cleaning up: “the worst kind of friendship, held together by pity.”
 
Added to the obvious tension of the scenario are Sara’s impatient, sardonic humour and the sharp minds of both women, but that’s not all.
 
Sara recalls a phone conversation—before her friend’s first attempt to kill herself—in which Rebecka asserts having met the living Lord in a church.
 
The truly wonderful thing that happens in this conversation is a shift that thrusts a huge ambiguity into the reader’s mind. At first, Sara appears to be humouring Rebecka, but then she starts talking as if Christ’s second coming were an established and fairly recent fact.
 
When we learn what torture Rebecka suffered at the hands of her husband, we take her more seriously and her suicidal nature seems more than comprehensible. So that when the strangely level-headed Rebecka tells Sara that “the Lord is fucking with me” and won’t let her die, we don’t know where this could possibly lead.
 
That it does lead somewhere conclusive and unexpected is superbly accomplished by Tidbeck.

I had just given up on time travel.
 
I’d been reading Ted Chiang’s “Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom” and his irrefutable exposition of how nudging just a single atom can impact nearby air molecules, producing a knock-on reaction that extends far and wide, going on to affect the weather and ultimately, with that, people’s decisions and actions. Any retroactive micro-change would thus alter the course of the world, creating another, divergent timeline.
 
So adiós, I thought, to any lingering fictional flirtation of mine with that idea.
 
But then Octavia Butler comes along and does it effortlessly. The trick—if you can call it that—is to have your time-travelled character far too caught up in the danger and drama of what they land in to begin to worry about the physics. And it actually helps that Dana, her protagonist, doesn’t seek to explain it herself. It’s a damnable thing she’d rather be rid of.
 
The real interest is how Dana, a black woman from 1976 Los Angeles, can deal with and survive a 19th century Maryland slave plantation.
 
There are some people whose company you simply enjoy and it doesn’t matter what the hell you talk about. I feel that way reading certain writers, albeit only a very few, and Octavia Butler is becoming one of them. I admire and like the natural storyteller in her that makes the outlandish perfectly believable.
 
What gives the story depth is that Dana is not a one-dimensional black-female-victim cipher, but a complex character whose outrage is susceptible to being tempered by contradictory feelings and understanding — and the fact that she has a vested interest.
 
I imagined while reading—I don’t know—that Butler’s depiction of life on the American plantation has reliable verisimilitude, and seeing that world through the eyes of her time-shifted heroine was that much clearer for not being didactic.
 
Reviving that period in fiction certainly makes for a cautionary tale. Don’t jump back there in time and space if you can avoid it.

Chiang’s “Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom” gave me an insight into what it is about Philip K. Dick’s style that I like so much. It starts off like one of Dick’s novels and I was immediately interested and wanted to figure out why.
 
Nat is working in a store when a man walks in with an advanced prism he wants to sell. Nat’s coworker is late back from lunch, so she has to deal with it on her own, but she knows the technical specs and is able to value the item.
 
What I like here is: the regular person in a regular everyday urban setting is instantly believable. It’s a neighbourhood store and the colleague getting caught up in traffic or whatever tells you this is the everyday, unremarkable world. The employee is knowledgeable in her field and that professional competence gives further clarity to the situation and a sense of order. But enter the prism, and an almost otherworldly element is introduced: one that is scientifically comprehensible, but challenges one’s sense of the possible. Here is Nat powering the prism on, checking it out and giving the customer a quote, as though a household device that sees into another, divergent, timeline was the most normal thing in the world. After a couple of pages, though, the story itself diverges from its initial Dickian quality and accrues intellectual content that makes it feel top-heavy, if you know what I mean.  
 
Of all these pieces, “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” was the only one that worked really well for me, because it reads like a classical Eastern folk tale.
 
Otherwise, what we’ve got here are thought experiments in story form. The challenge is intellectual and abstract. You have to be careful with this sort of writing or your characters, like in “The Lifecycle of Software Objects”, risk ending up as voice boxes for ideas. And present tense narration can be interesting when there’s a good reason for it, but it bombs here. It’s like someone sketching out a speculation ad nauseum.
 
Inorganic life forms are the proposition in “Exhalation”. Expounding it at length as a story didn’t really add anything to the original premise.
 
It’s clever and well-thought-out material, but I want stories that make me care and these just didn’t. So meh!

Nine honest, moving stories about people struggling to negotiate relationships and unprivileged lives.
 
Rebecca Ivory is very good at dissecting and laying bare feelings that often lead her characters nowhere. Young women who see the systemic limits on their ambitions and lack the motivation to work at all, or who expect little in a new relationship with a boy and don’t even get that. The disconnect between people is no more evident than on a first date.
 
Tellingly, being imperfect, neither do her people give much of themselves. In this way, Ivory gives a voice to the voiceless many without making them into victims, neither bitter nor definitively resigned, but certainly lost to insecurities and a general feeling of helplessness in a society that does not know how to support one another.
 
The stories tend to end with situations unresolved, leaving us with a sense of having seen into someone’s life during a brief, real connection.
 
This is Ivory’s first published collection. If the arresting cover attracts attention to her book, it is well deserved.

Franzen is always a good storyteller, but this is the least appealing of his books that I have read. I just found it hard to care. The one character who is likeable, the eponymous Purity, nicknamed Pip, has to disappear for lengthy periods to make way for other stories that will eventually dovetail into her own at the end.
 
There’s some political context to the narrative but it feels like convenient padding rather than anything Franzen is passionate about. Most of the book is taken up with the characters’ feelings and hang-ups and I guess that’s what some readers look for in this kind of unchallenging novel. The emotional wrangling ties in with the plot, enough for it to be justified, but I tire of the lives of the well-off who don’t really have much to complain about and yet still do.

These four first-hand accounts stood out for me:
 
William James (The Varieties of Religious Experience), describing his own transcendent experiences with nitrous oxide:
“Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness, as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the flimsiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different…. Looking back on my own experiences, they all converge towards a kind of insight to which I cannot help ascribing some mystical significance. They keynote of it is invariably a reconciliation. It is as if the opposites of the world, whose contradictoriness and conflict make all our difficulties and troubles were melted into unity…. To me [this sense] only comes in the artificial mystic sense of mind.”
 
Daniel Breslaw, a student volunteer on psylocibin:
“The heavens above me, a night sky spangled with eyes of flame, dissolve into the most overpowering array of colors I have ever seen or imagined; many of the colours are entirely new – areas of the spectrum which I have seem to have hitherto overlooked.
…. Every five eons or so a nurse arrives (in the aspect of a cougar, a differential equation, or a clock radio) and takes my blood pressure.
…. Here is a fire extinguisher in a glass case, evidently an exhibit of some sort. A bit of staring reveals that the beast is alive: it coils its rubber hose around its prey and sucks flesh through the nozzle. The beast and I exchange glares, then the nurse drags me away. I wave goodbye.
A smudge on the wall is an object of limitless fascination, multiplying in size complexity, color. But more than that on sees every relationship it has to the rest of the universe; it possesses, therefore, an endless variety of meanings, and one proceeds to entertain every possible thought  that there is to think about it.”
 
Eric S., ecstatic on LSD, was told by a voice that humans are “love and light”.
 
Dostoevsky talking to two friends about his epilepsy:
“You all, healthy people, he said, can’t imagine the happiness we epileptics feel during the second or so before our fit… I don’t know if this felicity lasts for seconds, hours or months, but believe me, for all the joys that life may bring, I would not exchange this one.” Prince Myshkin in The Idiot: “His spirit and his heart were illuminated by an immense sense of light; all his emotions, all his doubts, all his anxiety calmed together to be changed into a sovereign serenity made up of lighted joy, harmony and hope; and then his reason was raised up to the understanding of the final cause.”
 
Anyone who has had such an experience has no need to have its significance explained. Anyone who has not might wish to take note.

I haven’t posted about books in a while because I was struggling with the ones I had, and unless a book catches me like a resting kite by the wind or just gives me an ornery turn, I don’t see any point in wasting our mutual time opining about them. In fact, I don’t care to opine much at all anymore. I’ll probably just show a book, say this and that, and leave it up to you.
 
Anyhows, I ended up exchanging the duds for this one at a store in Siem Reap and got me a kite with tails. That this celebration of the well-intentioned impecunious and the naturalness of sociability found me in Cambodia was apt, I have to say. On every street in the country and on Cannery Row, a family cohesiveness makes getting on together the thing to do.
 
Personally, I go strongly with this man Steinbeck’s poetry of the ordinary, his giving a voice and pages to the odd and the damaged. When you love like this, you don’t need to romanticize, just let the “cats drip over the fences” at first light and frogs blink on the Carmel river. The tragic, too, has its place and is admitted. It is a world where violence is apportioned without ugliness. When Doc has punched Mack, he pours him a beer, and after the ruckus at the party, the ejected tuna boat crew are welcomed back in, such a good fight it has been.
 
For the ending, Steinbeck pulls out all the stops and lets sound all the music his people deserve.

American culture and alienation are not a natural match, which I think explains what makes this such a strange read. There’s something strange as well as understated about it all the way through.
 
We get to know Binx Bollinger as a law-abiding professional in New Orleans, around 1960, whose casual approach to this, that and everything is gradually shown to indicate a hollowness that most probably has to do with this war experiences in Korea, although the malaise feels constitutional to his being. He suggests a commitment to a personal “search” of some nature, but search me if there is one. He remains directionless, uncomplaining, drifting across the surface layer of life.
 
The plot is quite uneventful and it’s our gradual perception of the narrator’s inability to want anything badly enough, his absence of emotional conviction in any normal sense, that make the impression. He’s no rebel. If he goes along with American social norms, it is simply that he lacks any belief system that might question them. The strongest character is his cousin, Kate, whom trauma really has broken. Binx’s active concern for her, a kindred spirit, seems a deflection from his own existential predicament. We see him playing a part for others, but never get to know who he really is. Maybe there’s just this sad estrangement and that’s the point.
 
I did and I didn’t like it. It left me with the sensation of an oddly unwelcome dream that you can’t make sense of on waking and are glad to put behind you.