When I travelled to London, England earlier this year, I visited many bookstores, as I am wont to do whenever I explore an unfamiliar city. On many of the shelves, something immediately caught my eye: the minimalist white and blue covers of the British publisher Fitzcarraldo Editions. I had only heard of them from a podcast, and their reputation for publishing award-winning books, but I’ve never seen them in North American bookstores, and so I made it a mission to get a few. The Observable Universe was one of my selections.
The author, Heather McCalden, lost both of her parents to AIDS when she was a child, and was raised by her grandmother. Because she was so young, she hardly knew her parents, and they’re defined more by their absence than by the scarce memories that she has of them. This memoir is her attempt to process the loss, and is made up of many “chapters,” many of which are only a few sentences long. Rarely are they more than two pages.
Each page of this graphic novel is formatted like a Sunday comic strip: landscape orientation, with the title appearing in the first panel, followed by three rows of illustrations. It follows the mishaps of a suburban family, kind of like For Better or For Worse or Adam@home, where the kids get into trouble and the parents get flustered. Isn’t it hilarious how the father keeps forgetting the kid’s name? Or how the mom is always sleeping in too late? Some strips have a punchline, but other times, it relies on awkwardness and cringe comedy.
But then, a darker story arc develops beyond the individual jokes. It becomes clear that the mother is suffering from depression and alcoholism, and that the father’s bumbling absent-mindedness is not just a lovable quirk: he’s genuinely disoriented and confused about the world around him.
I’ll discuss spoilers further down, but before I do, I’ll just say that I recommend reading this book. Something strange is going with this family, and the mystery box opens gradually and has a fun solution. It also gives the characters a satisfying emotional arc. Once you find out what happens, you can’t blame them for their earlier flaws.
After watching the recent and presumably ongoing TV series, I felt the urge to revisit the classic sci-fi Foundation novels by Isaac Asimov. I had read the original trilogy for a course in undergrad, and remember enjoying it back then. I don’t think the TV show is great, but I’m still fascinated by the core idea of “psychohistory.”
Briefly, and without spoiling too much, psychohistory refers to a mathematical theory, created by a man named Hari Seldon, which can predict the path of human societies into future centuries.
Prelude to Foundation is a prequel to the original trilogy. I’ve chosen to read the series in chronological order (as opposed to publication order), because Asimov himself recommended it this way. As the novel starts, a young Hari Seldon has just presented his ideas at a conference—kind of like a TED Talk, I imagine—and it has caused quite a stir. But, as Seldon repeats many times throughout the book, he doesn’t know how to practically apply psychohistory yet to make actual predictions.
During my time with this novel, I experienced a few mornings where I woke up with a feeling of purposelessness1, like there was no point in the work that I do day in, day out. While I’m not saying that I’m immune to negative feelings, darkness is not my default mode, and I’m usually able to motivate myself just fine. That is to say, I do believe that the despondent mood of The Bell Jar rubbed off on me.
I mean this as a compliment to Plath’s vivid description of her protagonist’s spiral into depression. It’s a harrowing journey which is accentuated by the fact that it sneaks up on you. When Esther’s story begins, the narrative reads like a fish-out-of-water story, of a suburban girl who’s slightly overwhelmed by the big city, but who has enough wit and intelligence to float above and see through the bullshit. Over time, it becomes more and more clear that her detachment is a sign of her struggle to belong in the world. Mental illness can’t always be explained, and the book doesn’t try to do it: it simply lets us experience it through Esther’s eyes.
I can’t believe I used this word. It’s a joke from an old Rowan Atkinson bit. I’m sorry to make light while discussing a serious topic, but that’s what footnotes are for! ↩
When I started reading this book, I was surprised by its breezy tone. I had expected it to be more serious, given the grandiose subtitle and premise (not to mention the hyperbolic blurbs on the back cover): the author would tell the stories of ordinary people during a single day in history (December 28, 1986), and these tales would add up to show us the universal truths of human experience. But the way Gene Weingarten tells it in the introduction, the whole project was in fact kind of a fun lark that he and his editor came up with over drinks at the bar.
I was quite impressed with this short story by Tomas Hachard that appears in the Summer Reading issue of The Walrus. As the title indicates, it takes place in the future, and features a young girl named Clarissa who dives into an online historical archive, where she finds a journal of a girl living in our present day.
The future society that Clarissa lives in is rebuilding after a climate catastrophe called “the Deluge,” and the journal gives her a glimpse of life before the disaster: the people of that time didn’t know what would soon befall them, and they existed in a mentality split between fear and denial. Sound familiar?
But all is not well in Clarissa’s future either; as the story progresses, she starts to see the same signs of impending doom that she’s reading in the journal, and the two narratives kind of blend together in a way that I started to be confused about which was which, in a good way.
This story really triggered my climate anxiety, especially as I was reading it at around the same time as some horrendous flooding in Toronto.
The cyclical nature of the story is really effective in creating an ambivalent sense of the future. On the one hand, humanity has persisted, after the Deluge, and life seems to be relatively normal. But on the other hand, they don’t seem to have learned enough lessons from the disaster to prevent it from happening again.
I recently tore through this fantasy series, which consists of the novels The Poppy War, The Dragon Republic, and The Burning God. It tells the epic story of a young woman who discovers her magical ability to control fire, and uses it to rise to military power. It’s set in a fictionalized version of Asia, with parallels to China, Japan, Taiwan, and a vaguely European colonial power.
The series kicks off with the protagonist Rin entering an elite military school. It’s a fun way to get introduced to the world, and feels reminiscent of Harry Potter, with her making alliances and rivalries with her fellow students as well as the faculty. But then the stakes escalate very suddenly when war breaks out with a neighbouring country.
I got a kick out of the magic system in this fantasy world. Rin and the other “shamans” harness the power of gods; or rather, they act as conduits for the gods, and are never fully in control. The ability to wield magic is as much a curse as anything, and eventually, all shamans go insane because they’re constantly fighting to keep the gods from taking over their minds. It’s also cool how the interplay between magic and warfare is depicted: geography and natural resources play a big role in how they form military strategies, but as soon as a superpowered soldier enters the fray, it completely turns the tide.
I must confess that I didn’t quite finish the final book. I got a bit fatigued by the relentless violence, but even more than that, the character of Rin is motivated by such anger and hatred that it kind of wore me down. I think the story suffers a bit from being limited to only showing her perspective. As the series progresses, Rin shifts allegiances between the various political factions that are involved in the war, but she’s not driven by any ideology, only by rage against whoever happens to be her enemy at the time. I didn’t get a sense of what she was fighting for.
My read was probably hampered by reading the whole series back to back to back, and within the limited timeframe of library loans. If you want the best experience, I would suggest pacing yourself and letting it breathe.
It’s hard to review this book without mentioning its structure, including what happens in the story. I don’t think it’s the kind of book that hinges on plot points, but I’ll still put a spoiler warning here.
The prose is structured in short fragments, usually no longer than a few sentences each. It’s reminiscent of Dept. of Speculation and Weather by Jenny Offill, both of which I enjoyed. There are no real “scenes,” just glimpses into the mind of the main character, an unnamed woman who spends a lot of time on the Internet, and becomes famous for a single tweet. Ultimately, I think I prefer Lockwood’s novel to Offill’s, because of how the style changes meaning over the course of the book.
For the first half of this book, the style obviously evokes the flood of unrelated content that you experience when scrolling through social media. It’s filled with references to memes and jokes, and would probably not even make sense for the first dozen or so pages if you hadn’t read the jacket copy.
But then, in the second half, the book shifts focus to a medical emergency involving the protagonist’s infant niece. The protagonist is no longer constantly online, but the style remains fragmentary, taking on a lyrical quality. I came to appreciate that even without the distraction of the Internet, the mind still works this way: when you’re supposedly only thinking about one thing—in this case, love towards an ailing child—you still jump from idea to idea, emotion to emotion. I found it very powerful, and I was brought close to tears by many passages.
Recently, by sheer coincidence, I read a couple of books whose titles both started with the words how to. What’s more, the reading of one informed and influenced my reading of the other.
(My only regret is that I was unable to complete the trifecta by also watching How To with John Wilson at the same time.)
The setup of this novel reminded me of Past Lives: the life of a married couple is disrupted by a visitor from one of the partners’ past.
From the start, I found the couple’s behaviour to be not entirely believable: why was one partner so secretive about her past, and why was her wife so jealous about it? I kept thinking that an honest, open conversation would have diffused all of the tension between them. But, through a somewhat repetitive and long-winded exploration of their thoughts and memories, I came to a reluctant understanding: this book is a portrait of a failing relationship.
I commend the novel for presenting a perspective that I don’t see often: that of a queer person living openly in a same-sex relationship, while at the same time staying closeted about her bisexuality.
However, there were enough flaws in the story that I can’t say I recommend it. In particular, there are a couple of “plot twists” near the end that seem to serve no purpose other than to underscore a point that was already clear, and then to punish the main character. There’s also an extended exposition about the plight of Ugandan Indians under Idi Amin, and how it compares with the Syrian refugee crisis. It’s a bit discomfiting to measure traumas against each other, and I wasn’t sure what the author was getting at.
