Witold Gombrowicz is a novelist of psychological entanglements, and Pornografia is a novel of erotic entanglement. It is often cruel and sometimes cruelly funny. It is a novel by a man certain that language in some profound way determines ontology, that what we hear and say sculpts the way we are.

Set in a country idyll with the war roaring dully in the background, two refugee intellectuals conspire to contrive a liaison between a pair of kids who have grown up together there in the Polish countryside. Pornografia is an unholy little novel, chillingly dark, at times dripping with cynicism, but at its best beset by bracing, high-brow hilarity and jaded, deeply sublimated hysteria. First published in 1966, it’s only recently that readers have begun to talk about Gombrowicz as a Latin American writer rather than a Polish one. The question of influence is good, if ultimately divisive. Division is precisely Gombrowicz’s strength; you imagine he not only enjoys taking the frog apart with a tiny knife, he begins to split the world apart as if it were empirically just an intimately interbleeding network of heartbeats.

In 1939, Gombrowicz left Poland, escaping to Argentina, where he lived for the rest of his life. I think, as best he could, he 86ed the invasion of Poland by Germany in the fall of ’39 from his life while embracing it as an element in his biography. He wasn’t so much guilty as alive and smart. And that hurt, in that way that surviving disaster sometimes does. So he kept that quiet, at first, then, later, leaked it as attitude, insolence and fiction.

Above the street in Buenos Aires, Gombrowicz wrote a career of large intellectual appetites. His opus includes a major dent in the history of Argentinean theatre – but, in the 20th century, Argentina was so intellectually close to (some would say preoccupied with) French, Spanish and Italian thought that it is easy to see why Gombrowicz was mistaken for a European writer.

To my mind, Gombrowicz is in fictional league with the likes of John le Carré, who also writes as if he thinks that people can be made by the words shared by two or more people. Usually two. When a third is introduced, per Charles Sanders Peirce, randomness, sway and betrayal wag people’s tails (money and sex are the typical thirds played upon in the Gombrowiczian personality trade). Made here means made real: made to act in a certain way; to command; to be taken under the confidence or control of another.

The difference between the crypto-modernist spy novelist, whose philosophical imperatives and narrative interests significantly overlap those of Gombrowicz, is that Gombrowicz practiced point of view from the terrorist’s self-explosion while le Carré at the last minute rips the point of view from the victim to the perpetrator so that, at the wall, we witness the shooting of children, animals and, at his most wrenching, the beloved. With Gombrowicz, though, things are always kept at a distance.

And that’s the rip-off with most of modernism, and post-modernism, too: you never get to love the characters. You’re minimally or otherwise challenged to recognize them as antecedents, precedents and portents, without ever being rationed the responsibility of response in the dialogical sense of the word.

Like 1970’s-era J.G. Ballard (especially The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash), Gombrowicz’s novels make for a fascinating read, but don’t expect to be more than intellectually engaged.

Originally published on Curled Up With A Good Book at www.curledup.com. © Brian Charles Clark, 2010

It’s something completely different and it’s Thomas Pynchon’s best novel ever. Inherent Vice is Pynchon’s second novel to feature cannabis as a more or less primary character (the earlier being Vineland, which locale, being a mythical Humbolt County, more or less, gets a passing mention here). In Inherent Vice a joint (pinners, fatties, “that new Thai stick,” Humbolt sinsemilla, PCP-laced boiler makers) gets lit at least once in every chapter. (If memory serves. Which it may not. Who really knows these things?)

Doc Sportello and Inherent Vice represents a major breakthrough — for Pynchon who, now in his 70s, comes out of the closet as a comic novelist (rather than a deeply literary writer with comic spurs on his boots), but for crime writing as well. Welcome to stoner noir (it’s “gumsandal,” not gumshoe), where paranoia as a way of knowing could be the result of humping the hemp plant too early in the morning or maybe, just maybe, because the bastards really are after you. How else to explain Nixon’s visage on fat bundles of twenty-dollar bills? The game is afoot, Watson!

The code of the noir PI genre is both honored and lampooned in Pynchon’s most accessible novel yet. Doc is in the mystery for himself, as Louis Menand points out by way of Raymond Chandler, not because he’s a hired gun:

He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common man, or he could not go among common people. He has a sense of character, or he would not know his job. He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him… The story is his adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure.

But never was Chandler very funny, much less side-splittingly so. Men get away with murder because who could pick them out of a lineup? “Everything I really did, I got away with,” says one character, “because the only description they had was Caucasian male, long hair, beard, multicolored clothing, bare feet, so forth.” You seen one Jesus on acid, you seen ‘em all. “Thing about hippie getups,” Doc says, “is you can almost fit a Heckler & Koch under here if you want.” Tip o’ the hat to Chekhov’s gun in the first act, there: it’s gonna be used in the third.

Not that there’s no depth. This is Pynchon, after all, so there’s a conspiracy twisting the plot tighter than a virgin’s knickers, and one that makes anything Chandler dabbled in — or Manson, for that matter — look like a Maurice Sendak production. Who, then, or what, is the Golden Fang?

A ship, a gang, a tooth that, vampire-like, punctuates the jugular so the author can juggle the plot. All that and more but, then too, a motif that suddenly vanishes like a fish story or, SoCal beach town-like, is gone from GNASH, “the Global Network of Anecdotal Surfer Horseshit.”

Contra Missing Persons (but in danger of becoming one), Doc is a peripatetic in L.A. On a stroll, he muses, in re the Golden Fang:

Let’s see–it’s a schooner that smuggles in goods. It’s a shadowy holding company. Now it’s a Southeast Asian heroin cartel…. Wow, this Golden Fang, man–what they call many things to many folks…

In the end, things maybe don’t line up perfectly. So what; neither does life; get used to it. It’s a funny book, a ripping yarn, and it unambiguously has a happy ending. It breathes new life into (or smokes the old ghosts out of) crime fiction, which has gone maddeningly formulaic and down market, catering to the short-attention-span theater crowd. And Inherent Vice resonates with so many rock ‘n’ roll cultural references it’s a wonder the ink doesn’t vibrate off the page: “I’m lower than a groupie,” someone says to Doc on one of his investigative outings, “fetching weed, opening beers, making sure there’s only aqua jelly beans in the big punch bowl in the parlor.”

And the writing is, as ever with Pynchon, scintillating. Even the smog is gorgeous, “the traffic reduced to streams of reflective trim, twinkling ghostly along the nearer boulevards, soon vanishing into brown bright distance.”

It’s a big, beautiful romp of a novel, maybe the best of the first decade of the 21st century, sexy and side-splitting–and sobering, too. Cut to the last pages, no spoiler alert needed, for this line, a flash-forward from the end of an era: “even the infrared and night vision they’re using in Vietnam is still a long way from X-Ray Specs,” but time “moves exponentially, and someday everybody’s gonna wake up to find they’re under surveillance they can’t escape.”

Originally published on Curled Up With A Good Book

The Merry Misogynist is Cotterill’s sixth novel featuring Dr. Siri, national coroner, 73, libidinously alive and well, and married to Daeng the noodle shopkeeper. It’s 1978, the Khmer Rouge have taken over Laos, having ousted the 600 year-old monarchy, and the “novice socialist administration is starting to realize its resume didn’t match the job.”

Siri is on the case, along with the local Vientiane detective, but Laos is impossible: what clues the bureaucracy doesn’t ingest the jungle does. The cantonized villages of Laos, further alienated and isolated by a ridiculous but deeply ingrained bias of hill vs. low-land peoples (ridiculous because they’re the same people speaking the same language, but would we be human without racists drawing arbitrary lines between us?), prevents any sort of record sharing — so who knows if similar crimes have been previously committed?

Undeterred by — or, rather, inured to — such impediments to investigation, Siri and crew can rely on the Lao people themselves, hill and dale, on the oral culture that grounds this novel with its exotic setting and tongue-twisting names. It’s the grapevine, or jungle line, that communicates the clues in this novel, at least until we realize at the very end that we’ve been misdirected, suckered by a wonderful bait-and-switch plot that leaves us nodding in bemused agreement and admiration.

No spoilers here, though: Cotterill spins a vivid yarn that is worth reading just for the color and authenticity of the characters and their setting. Bo ben nyang, we go with the flow (to loosely translate the Lao phrase that means just about everything anyway), and are willingly misled by the author, following Siri on hands and knees as he and wife Daeng machete through the underbrush in pursuit of a clue. Here, she says, I’ll go first; that way you can look at my bottom.

To an aging Boomer, that’s perhaps the most charming thing about Cotterill’s novel: the erotic plentitude of the elderly couple at the center of this tale. Close behind, though — no pun intended — is Siri’s burning intelligence and his biting humor borne of brutal experience, all communicated by Cotterill’s lucid and compact prose. That we’re pursuing a dastardly serial killer is all well and good and, when justice in the end is served, we’re satisfied, but it’s the characters we’ve come to love and that will addict us to the series.

James Stark, AKA Sandman Slim, the only human to survive Hell – much less live to tell the tale and eek out revenge for his tribulations – has come through the Darkness with special powers. He always was good at magic – not the hokey legerdemain that passes for entertainment among those with too much time on their hands – and that landed him with a bad crowd. Now he’s amped up with secrets from The Man (if man the devil be) himself. Ice-picked Trotsky’s friends were true-blue compared to Stark’s comrades. And power struggles among the demon-allied take on epic proportions.

Like Gilgamesh or a hero from the Bhagavad Gita, Sandman Stark is out to settle an old score and achieve personal satisfaction. But his quest goes quantum when his prime adversary turns out to be shooting the moon in an attempt at world domination. This theme also gives rise to the novel’s folkloric structure, in as much as it’s one damn thing followed by another. Stark fucks up one nemesis only to be laid low by another — and so on, page turn for turn.

Sandman Slim is a fun read, thick if not deep, and Kadrey, as ever, has a wicked tongue that aims to activate the social-sneer reflex among all good wise-guy and -gal hipsters. As a noir thriller of the dark arts, it’s a kick in the pants, but I wish Kadrey had paid more attention to his characters.

The most fun relationship in the book is between Stark and Allegra, a hip and cute video store clerk. Stark needs her — he’s been in Hell for 15 years and doesn’t know, for instance, what a cell phone is. Allegra helps him out, instructing him in the finer things in life, and, in return, is dropped some three-quarters of the way through the book after being developed as a potential… something.

Grad students will no doubt soon write dissertations arguing that this sort of forgetful sloppiness is, in fact, an aesthetic choice. And maybe it is, as the ragged plot arguably backs up the devil-may-care, slap-dash, self-deprecating attitude of James Stark the Sandman. He’s the one, after all, who says, I fucked up my life and now I’ve fucked up death. C’est la vie — et le mort.\

Originally published on Curled Up With a Good Book.

A Hu-Li is at least 40,000 thousand years old. She’s also a fox in both the literal and the vernacular sense of the word—a fox who happens to be a member of a species who morphologically resemble human women. And live a long time without growing old—or even, necessarily, mature.

A Hu-Li and her sisters are sexual predators. They are, in other words, a top-level crypto-predator species that happens to feed on human sexual energy. Obviously, then, a fox’s perfect disguise is as a high-class prostitute. What better character to skewer the norms of society than the prostitute who pops the bubble of every hypocritical prick along her journey to enlightenment? A Hu-Li and her sisters are not human and don’t care about our values. A Hu-Li has her own. She’s not a liberated sex worker, she’s a predator.

An enticing one, too: she wears her years of experience with cunning wit, style, pragmatic grace and imperial wisdom—most of the time. The narrative sweet spot Pelevin has found in The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, and the one that powers this character-driven novel, lies in the friction between A Hu-Li’s human enculturation and her animal instincts, a friction awash in a superseding assumption: all beings are searching for the levels of their souls. A Hu-Li manages to remain a haughty bitch while purporting a profoundly leveling philosophy.A Hu-Li is a Buddhist with Taoist inclinations. In previous Pelevin novels (Buddha’s Little Finger, obviously among others) religion has played an important role, even to the extent of becoming a character but in The Sacred Book we get a close up look at a Pelevin messiah, and she’s working hard to convert us, often by quoting ancient Buddhist scripture. Her yearning for enlightenment, her desire to enter the “Rainbow River,” tempers the animal magic of her tail, the tool of her predatory trade. This yearning is not what makes her human; Pelevin presses her foxy difference. Instead, A Hu-Li’s yearning is the mark that signs us all as beings seeking the levels of our souls. Here she is talking to Alexander, a general in love with her, about his choice of reading material:

Speaking in very simple terms, I can say this. Reading is human contact, and the range of our human contacts is what makes us what we are. Just imagine you live the life of a long-distance truck driver. The books that you read are like the travelers you take into your cab. If you give lifts to people who are cultured and profound, you’ll learn a lot from them. If you pick up fools, you’ll turn into a fool yourself. Wasting time on detective novels is… it’s like giving an illiterate prostitute a ride for the sake of a blowjob.”

A Hu-Li dissembles, feigns, passes as human. Unlike her lover Alexander, it’s not her web of human contacts that make her who she is. She’s a were-fox, a mistress of deception. Furthermore, she doesn’t give blowjobs. Foxes have a secret weapon: they have telepathic tails, instruments productive of supreme human sexual bliss. But to learn how that works, you’ll need to read the novel.

Ikkyu, the great Japanese poet and Zen master of the 15th century, said: If you want me, look for me in the whorehouse. Soul searching, in other words, is classless—or should be, according to a fox’s sense of judgment:

It is usually assumed that were-creatures are not concerned about spiritual problems. People think you turn into a fox or a wolf, howl at the moon, tear someone’s throat out, and all the great questions of life are instantly answered, and it’s clear who you are, what you’re doing in this world, where you came from and where you’re going… But that’s not the way it is at all. We are far more tormented by the riddles of existence than modern humans. But the cinema continues to depict us as complacent, earth-bound gluttons, nonentities who are indistinguishable from each other, cruel and squalid consumers of the blood of others.”

It’s true: vampires get all the good press. With the were-fox A Hu-Li, what we get is a 40,000-year-old cynic philosopher, one who remembers inscriptions and conversations across thousands of years of human history, a philosopher dancing madly across all barriers of sociopolitical correctness, and one who takes her Buddhism pretty damn seriously. A Hu-Li is a babe, a bodhisattva, she’s a cruel mirror, and she’s very, very funny. This fox has bite.

review by Brian Charles Clark

Shawl’s exquisitely rendered debut collection weaves threads of folklore, religion, family and the search for a cohesive self through a panorama of race, magic and the body.

Yes. Here’s my review of Filter House. Here’s an article in the WSU student newspaper about Nisi’s reading at BookPeople of Moscow.

Also, Nisi and I may play one of my songs together at her reading. She’s got a great singing voice and I’ve written an SF carpe diem love song we like to do.

This is a brown-bag affair, so hit the farmer’s market to score some lunch to munch while Nisi reads to you. Bring questions and ideas, too, on anything about writing, life, the universe and everything, as we’re hoping for a lively postprandial discussion.

My review of Filter House is here. Nisi’s Science Fiction Writers of America page is here.

Filter House, said writer and critic Samuel R. Delany, “is just amazing. What a pleasure and privilege it was to read it!”

The eminent novelist and critic Ursula K. Le Guin wrote of Filter House: “From the exotic, baroque complexities of ‘At the Huts of Ajala’ to the stark, folktale purity of ‘The Beads of Ku,’ these fourteen superbly written stories will weave around you a ring of dark, dark magic.”
Matt Ruff, author of Set This House In Order and Bad Monkeys calls Filter House “A travelling story-bazaar, offering treasures and curios from diverse lands of wonder.”

Karen Joy Fowler declares, “Sometimes enigmatic, often surprising, always marvelous. This lovely collection will take you, like a magic carpet, to some strange and wonderful places.”

Eileen Gunn, author of Stable Strategies, concurs that these are “Remarkably involving stories that pull you along a path of wonder, word by word, in worlds where everything is a bit different.”

Engine Summer is set in post-apocalyptic distant future, hundreds of years, at least, after a series of anthropogenic catastrophes, known collectively as the Storm, have reduced human populations to a fraction of their former billions. The teller of Engine Summer is Rush (as in reed), a member of the Little Belaire community, all of whom are “truth speakers.” Truth speakers attempt to communicate in such a way that “they mean what they say, and say what they mean.” One of the ways they do this is by telling lots of stories. As a boy, Rush — Rush that Speaks is his full name — spends time with a “gossip,” a wise woman, named Painted Red.

Storytelling allows for the creation of communal meaning; but by what cognitive means is that accomplished? In as much as Crowley’s novel is a meditation on this question, he seems to argue that the means is through perception. For instance, the young Rush is being counseled by Painted Red while they are both in a heightened state of consciousness thanks to the use of a “rose-colored substance” dabbed on the lips:

What I did notice was that Painted Red’s questions, and then my answers, began to take on bodies somehow. When she talked about something, it wasn’t only being talked about but called into being. When she asked about my mother, my mother was there, or I was with her, on the roofs where the beehives are, and she was telling me to put my ear against the hive and hear the low constant murmur of the wintering bees inside. When Painted Red asked my about my dreams, I seemed to dream them all over again, to fly again and cry out in terror and vertigo when I fell. I never stopped knowing that Painted Red was beside me talking, or that I was answering; but — it was the rose-colored stuff that did, of course, but I wasn’t aware even of that — though I knew that I hadn’t left her side and that her hand was still on mine, still I went journeying up and down my life. (359; references, unfortunately, to an oddball 3-in-1 edition.)

To go “journeying up and down” one’s life is, of course, precisely the novelist’s (that vendor of rose-colored stuffs) goal. And novelists get us to journey so by hewing close to the perceptual. Indeed, it is hard to find a better example of this than in this metaphor of Crowley’s that bridges from the aural to the oral, those perceptual domains, via the textual skills of the people of the List, who maintain literacy of that now lost language, English. Rush is in a large building, perhaps the remains of an office building:

…she took me up the wide flight of stairs that led to the big platform which covered the back part of the place — the mezzanine, they called it (the List knew such words, words that rang like ancient coins flung down [on] angelstone–mezzaine). (469)

As a reader, I’ve always been skeptical of the idea that I was somehow “suspending disbelief” when I engaged with fiction. Rather, it’s been my experience that, by hewing close to the perceptual, writers gain our trust as we perceive the veracity of their observational skills. Although fiction is a textual art, its success depends on taking advantage of the brain’s ability to mirror experience through a wide variety of domains and media. And so there has developed among writers a kind of cognitive folk science — something that could probably be fairly said of most areas of creative service (design, commercial arts, musical performance, etc.) — about what “works.”

Rush’s distant future remembers our civilization as that of “angels.” When, in his wanderings outside Little Belaire, he first experiences a pictorial calendar (other than the seasonal one he lived by growing up), it’s at a month-changing ritual among the people of the List. As the tribal elder turns the old, June picture down and the new July picture up, the people “all made a satisfied sound, like aaaah.” Rush tells us:

That picture let me know, and laugh to know, that however strange and old the angels were, still they were men, and knew what men know, if they could make this. The same two children… lay on green grass darker than June’s…. But what really made me laugh: the grass and they were at the top of the picture, and looked down into the clouds which floated below: and that’s how it feels, in summer, to watch clouds. (472)

In other words, we know who we are, and are able to identify one another through perceptual experience.
When Rush first meets Painted Red, she tells him he is not a truth speaker. He acknowledges that this is so, and endeavors to learn to speak truly, for it is an acquired art. Later in life, Painted Red asks Rush, now a practice truth speaker, how speaking truly is accomplished. He thinks, then admits that he can’t say. She laughs and whispers a secret: neither does she. The metaphysical quotient of truth speaking is heightened when we learn of saints in the folk culture of Little Belaire. Saints “learned to make speech — transparent, like glass, so that through the words the face is seen truly” (376). And later, as Rush sets out to learn how to be a saint: “Transparent: that’s what Painted Red said the saints were, or tied to be….” (410). He remembers what Painted Red said to him more fully:

She said: “The saints found that truthful speaking was more than just being understood; the important thing was that the better you spoke, the more other people saw themselves in you, as in a mirror. Or better: the more they saw themselves through you, as though you had become transparent.” (410)

The gossips, including Painted Red, have copies of an ancient psychological text, called the File System — a vast database of traits, apparently, and the original intent of which has been lost — that they interpret, having discovered knew knowledge in the text that it’s creators, the angels, were not aware of. In the following, “Palm cord” may be read as “Palm tribe”:

From the long box that was Palm cord, she drew out a second square of glass and out it in with the other. The board changed; colors mixed and become other colors; masses changed shape, became newly related to other masses.

“Do you see?” she said. “The saints are like the slide of the System. Their interpenetration is what reveals, not the slides themselves.”

“It’s like the saints,” I said, “because they made their lives transparent, like the slides; and their lives can be placed before our own, in our remembering their stories, and reveal things to us about ourselves. Not the stories or the lives themselves, but their–”

“Interpenetration, yes,” Painted Red said. “They’re saints not because of what they did, especially, but because in the telling of it, what they did became transparent, and your own life could be seen through it, illuminated…. And in transparent life, the saints hoped that one day we might be free from death: not immortal, as the angels tried to become, but free from death, our lives transparent even as we live them: not through a means, you see, like the Filing System or even truthful speaking, but transparent in their circumstances: so that instead of telling a story that makes a life transparent, we will ourselves be transparent, and not hear or remember a saint’s life, but live it….” (412)

Call Nisi Shawl’s marvelous first collection of stories slipstream, call it speculative, call it curvy fiction for the straight-ahead twists that bend her fiction — they’re all grounded in experience. In Shawl’s stories, calling upon an African goddess is no more speculative than hailing a taxi, and following a bird to enlightenment is as normal as talking to your mother on Sunday. In Shawl’s realities, imagination is a force to be reckoned with, and the universe teems with life and spirit and desire.

Filter House is aptly named. A filter house is the structure secreted by a minuscule sea creature (an appendicularian, for the curious) that filters the sea for the wee beastie’s food. Food, dwelling, the implied hearth and heart that is fed – all these describe Shawl’s stories. Her characters are closely observed and gain quick traction in the friction of the real.

The real, here, is animated, alive, and Shawl’s sentences weave a rhythm that gives voice to (secret?) desires: for divine intervention, for allies and challengers in rocks and trees and dragons, for love and imagination to be made simple, practical and transcendental. Her stories’ trajectories are wonderfully entertaining, but her sentences are magical. Through dialogue and observation, Shawl frequently pierces the veil separating reader and writer, bringing her characters delightfully to life.

“Wallamelon” is a coming-of-age story with a twist: instead of letting go of childhood fantasies, in this case of the Blue Lady, an American incarnation of the Yoruba goddess Yemaya, Oneida discovers the protective certainty of the Lady as she grows older. Shawl captures the changes of two adolescent girls, Oneida and her friend Mercy, through deft use of a Detroit-flavored black English and the quotidian details of girlhood. In “Momi Wattu,” a mother resists shaving her daughter’s head even though hair harbors lice infected with a virulent plague. Set in a post-apocalyptic near future, water is precious and fathers have gone missing. Staying close to the details of the mother-daughter relationship, Shawl injects pieces of a bigger picture that chill and unnerve and leave us with an uncertain hope as the narrator says, “I felt the waters of relief pool up and over me.”

Shawl is obviously a voracious reader of science fiction and seems to have the many facets of this most capacious of genres at her fingertips. She writes a multi-light-year space odyssey, “Deep End,” but again with twists: the characters aren’t heroic explorers but rather prisoners; they aren’t in cryogenic sleep but rather cycle through periods of consciousness. Shawl’s keen sense of justice and her adamant anti-colonialism always ride just beneath the surface of her stories. Never didactic, Shawl possesses the gift of a true storyteller: the ability to let the warp and weft of plot and character do her moral work for her.

Filter House is published by Seattle’s Aqueduct Press, one of several independent publishers leading a renaissance in science fiction publishing after the unethical trade practices of big-box bookstores bankrupted many small publishers in the 1990s. Most of the stories in Filter House were previously published in magazines (Asimov’s notably among them) as well as anthologies (including Dark Matter, which I reviewed on Curled Up With a Good Book). This resurgence in the science fiction publishing field has opened the door to many fine writers who might not otherwise see print, especially short fiction writers. Shawl is a leader in this new wave, and we owe Aqueduct a tip of the hat for gathering these stories and getting them between two covers.

Paperback; August 2008; 288 pages. 5/5 stars.

Originally published on Curled Up With A Good Book.