We are Otherland
"I drink and I know things"- Tyrion Lannister
It's so hot that we're all starting to show symptoms of a special condition. A silly grin adorns our facial features, The thoughts are slower than usual and we can’t seem to get out of a horizontal position (preferably in the shade or at a pool). Furthermore, there is a barely concealed aggression palpable on every crowded regional train. Does this ring a bell? Aren’t there some parallels to videos of monkeys eating fermented fruit and starting to stagger slightly? Hands down, temperatures over 30 degrees trigger states of collective intoxication in Berlin and that's what today's introduction will be about!
Let’s start with the most famous mind altering substances from fiction:
"Dune" by Frank Herbert would have no content without "spice", the Harkonnens would be jobless and Arrakis just a worm-infested place with happy Fremen.
Anyway. What the actual hell are the contents of the milk in "Clockwork Orange" by Anthony Burgess? Definitely the opposite of Soma, which makes everyone happy in "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley. And in "Roxy" by Neal and Jarod Shusterman, the drug comes in the form of a fatal woman.
Philip K Dick's "A Scanner Darkly" contains Substance D, which triggers euphoria on the one hand but also has a much darker backside. Incidentally, Dick drew on his own experiences with massive LSD use, which threw him into spirals of paranoia towards the end of his life. If you are interested about this time, you should read the epilogue in "Ubik", which also contains its fair share of drugs.
William Burroughs shared similar problems, writing "Naked Lunch" entirely on heroin and conjuring up a dark, ugly world that the normal reader usually doesn’t want to get lost in. The drug in question "Black Meat" gets a medal for being the nastiest I’ve ever heard of. The "Illuminatus!" trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson is definitely funnier.
Enough of nasty shit, there is also no shortage of states of ecstasy or absolut intoxication in our beloved fiction literature. In the middle of Brian Catling's "The Vorrh", a raucous party is the pivotal point of the story. And Shirley Jackson has her poor protagonist undergo dental treatment in the short story "The Tooth", after which she rumbles through town in a state beyond dazend and confused.
Samanta Schweblin's short story collection "Fever Dream" transports us to a rather similar feverish state as the title suggests and Mariana Enriquez also likes to have her protagonists wade up to their necks through drug-induced, metaphorical swamps (take "The Intoxicated Years" for example). Finally, James Tiptree Jr. must be mentioned as well, who once again defies all conventions by getting his (her!) characters addicted to aliens in "And I Awoke And Found Me Here On The Cold Hill's Side". Groovy!
Pangalactic Gargleblaster recipe on allrecipes.com by silvermoondragon
1 tablespoon gin
1 tablespoon light rum
1 tablespoon vodka
1 tablespoon tequila
2 tablespoons creme de menthe liqueur
2 tablespoons Galliano
1 cup ice cubes
1 slice of lemon
Mix the gin, rum, vodka, tequila, crème de menthe, Galliano an the ice in the container of a blender. Cover, and blend until slushy. Pour into a glass and garnish with a slice of lemon.
Alrighty I’m crawling back into the shadows with a cold beer in my one hand and a good book in the other, see you there!
yours dazed and confused Esther from the Otherland
Disclaimer:
Please use all intoxicants (including books!) responsibly
Science Fiction
Best of World SF#3
Best of World SF
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC: €16
For those of you who have been enjoying Lavie Tidhar’s monumental editing work in The Best of World SF 1 and 2, I don’t even need to write anything here, but for anyone who hasn’t poked their noses, prehensile trunks, or antennae into these tales yet, it’s not too late.
Volume three continues the spirit of international science-fiction with a bright and beautiful collection of stimulating stories from 28 writers across 21 different countries. Think you have been through all that English-language sci-fi has to offer? Why not do some scouting forays into the otherworlds of Austria, Bulgaria (via Norway), China, Finland, Ghana, Greece, India, Malysia, Mexico, the Netherlands, Nigeria, Pakistan, Palestine, the Philippines, Portugal, Russia, Singapore, South Africa, or South Korea?
Let’s start with some euphoria. Many of these tales are simply peddling joy. Take Fadzlishah Johanabas’ "Act of Faith", where an old man teaches his personal android how to read the Quran, with unexpected consequences for the whole community. "Symbiosis Theory" tells a tale of beautiful world-building, but where are the artist’s ideas coming from? Choyeop Kim keeps us guessing. The positives of technology are under the ‘scope in "Godmother", too, where Cheryl S. Ntumy gives us a country worshipping their loveable healthcare AI as a god. Other tales just revel in alien biology, like Elena Pavlova’s sweet "Two Moons".
As expected in a Sci-Fi anthology, these tales tell you a lot about the dystopic futures that we might be trying to avoid, realistic or otherwise. "Behind Her, Trailing Like Butterfly Wings" by Daniela Tomova depicts a nomadic people traipsing an endless road, hunted by disembodied mouths that suck stragglers away like crocodiles picking off gazelles from a riverside. The tale has serious Mad Max vibes to it, as does Christine Lucas’ "Echoes of a Broken Mind", where cyber-punkey scavengers have their troubles doubled by glitches in their neural implants. (This one has a twist and a half.) Mandisi Nkomo’s "The EMO Hunter", on the other hand, channels Fahrenheit 451 in a society where thoughts are policed by iron-scaled authoritarian police-knights. M. J. Ayinde’s "Walls of Benin City" asks who gets left behind after planetary disaster, and if they deserve it. Fargo Tbakki’s "Root Rot" takes the horrors of the Israel-Palestine conflict and imagines them in space, as a way of underlining the brutality of our own version. And what to say of Efe Tokunbo’s "Proposition 23"? If the collection only had space for one, this might be it. A The Machine Stops for the modern age, with important questions for all of us.
The breadth of imagination in these tales bowls you over. Tim Odueso’s "Cloudgazer" asks how much you would sacrifice for a single cloud. Indrapramit Das’ "The Wordless" has a line of work Phillip K Dick would be proud of: a memory-rewriter specialising in guilt. Dmitry Glukhovsky, currently exiled for speaking out against Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine, gives us a very strange interview between a police officer and a woman who murdered her husband in "Sulfur". (Apparently ghosts told her to do it…) "An Excerpt" from Dean Francis Alfar seems like a dull passage ripped from a history textbook, but look at the footnotes and there is a tale worthy of Westeros. "My Country is a Ghost" and "Old People’s Folly" (Eugenia Triantafyllou and Nora Schinnerl respectively) both play with the idea of ghosts, but in very different ways.
Some of these tales are just giggle-inducingly funny. As in Mexican Lovecraftian horror writer Nelly Geraldine Garcia-Rois’ "Tloque Nahuaque", where there is just enough time for particle scientists to make sacrificial tamales before the Old Ones come a’ visiting. I couldn’t help smiling at "Have Your #HuVida Cruz-Borga’s got Harvested at this Diwati-Owned Café", which tells of a restaurant whose chief ingredient is heartache, and where the food induces bereavement, sadness, and anger. (It’s a hit!) "Catching the K Beast" from Chen Quien has a bungling group of intergalactic hunters trying to catch aliens which can see 12 minutes into the future. It goes predictably wrong. Like a trippy mashup of the science and philosophy from Ray Bradbury and Ted Chiang.
Finally, there is just the plain weird. In Diana Rahim’s curious and haunting "A Minor Kalahari", a dystopian waste-world is thrown into disarray when a gigantic watermelon appears in Mr Tan’s garden. Not weird enough? What about Luo Longxiang’s belter "The Foodie Federation’s Dinosaur Farm", which manages an Orwellian uprising at a dinosaur meat-packing plant? Or Thomas Olde Heuvelt’s Hugo Award-winning "The Day the World Turned Upside Down"? What about a man who wakes up with cockroaches for teeth? (Take that, Gregor Samsa.) Mario Coelho offers up just that in "Ootheca", like something from Perdido Street Station – touching, grotesque and fun. Or try Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläien’s "Where the Train Turns", a creepy surreal novella about runaway trains that gobble people up. And then there is Vraiux Dorós’ "Dark Star". This is a weirdly experimental piece of literature. An obscure and expanding list of bullet points which questions everything from the nature of good and evil to folk heroics and deep-sea poetry. Oh… and the existence (or otherwise) of rabbits.
Half a sentence obviously doesn’t do justice to any of these gems. This is 642 pages of the unexpected. And I mean "Hey, Alice, how many rabbit holes can you fall down in one day?" unexpected. Tidhar’s personal introductions and tips for further reading demonstrate the depth of passion with which the book was crafted. I think if you read it in one your dream diary won’t know what hit it, but taken in small doses, this is food for philosophers, artists, and good-old plain entertainment-lovers alike.
[Tom]
Fantasy
Christopher Buehlman
Blacktongue #0
The Daughters' War
Gollancz: €24
Everyone is waiting for the second part in Buehlman‘s Blacktongue-series and what does the author do?! He writes a prequel… What a great idea, is what I think. Can‘t wait to see what happens in the ,so far only tangentially touched on, Goblin Wars. Buehlman‘s fresh take on the the old folks – goblins, giants, magicians is a real feast! And the war birds, oh the war birds...
The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun
HarperCollins Publishers: €13.5
"But we shall meet again one day,
And rich reward then you shall pay,
What e’er I ask: it may be gold,
It may be other wealth you hold."
This has already been out for a few years, but I was just at a great talk on Tolkien and Celtic influences and was encouraged to give it a go. I guess most of us are familiar with Tolkien’s sources from Old English (riddles…), Old Norse (runes…), and Middle English (roaming knights…), not to mention his strong love of Finnish, but the Celtic and Breton side of things is a little more obscure. The author often comes across as dismissive, like in On Fairies… where he writes, "anything is possible in the fabulous Celtic twilight, which is not so much a twilight of the gods as of the reason". (Some have said he was just sore because he never mastered Old Irish, but that’s another tale.)
Whatever the background, Aotrau & Itroun is an interesting outlier – first published back in 1945 (we are nothing if not up-to-date) but reissued in this slim, attractive volume in 2019. It is a poem in the tradition of a Breton lay, all about a lord who visits a witch to help him with his love life. He receives a powerful phial of love potion in exchange for some future trade, whatever that may be. The moral of the story: Don’t be trustin’ them fairies. Included are also two early poems, both titled "Corrigan", which play with this figure of the Breton fey creature, a sort of feminine dwarf or water-fairy with baby-stealing as her chief pastime. You also get some early drafts and partial manuscript fragments, though I think these will only interest the very fiercest of Tolkienites.
This is not part of the Middle Earth mythos, rather a standalone like Kullervo or Sigurd and Gudrun, but clearly some ideas from the "Corrigan" myth – the terrible and beautiful faerie queen with a magic fountain and magical glass phial – are behind Galadriel. I think if you enjoyed Tolkien’s Sir Gawain and the Green Knight or like reading about the Celtic Otherworld in general then this would make an entertaining afternoon’s reading. As editor Verlyn Flieger notes, "No work of Tolkien’s says more about his concept of the dark side of faerie." And it certainly is a fun stroll in the woods for anyone as enamoured with elves as Sam Gamgee.
[Tom]
Scotland the Strange
British Library Publishing: €23
Angus looked the old man in the eye. "Forgive my disbelief," he said, "but I am not from the islands. On the mainland we do not accept superstition."
As editor Johnny Mains remarks, there is a weird(!) gap in literary history where Scottish weird fiction is concerned. We know for a fact that writers like Scott, Burns, and Stevenson were monumentally important for the forms that came after – where is the short story (and therefore Poe) without Scott? Where is modern horror without Dr. Jekyll (or Mr. Hyde)? Where is the thriller without James Hogg’s Confessions…? This beautiful collection gathers names familiar and lost from the British Library’s vaults and tries to plug the gap.
Many of the names here will be known. We have Robert Louis Stevenson’s "Ticonderoga", a poem on blood-feud between the Camerons and the Stewarts, an underhanded plea for aid, and vengeance from beyond the grave. James Hogg’s "The Hunt of Eildon" has everything a good weird folktale needs: baby-eating dogs from the other side; old men who melt into nothing; women stolen by fairies; witches; plots against the king; and one really unlucky fellow who gets turned into a giant boar. John Buchan, author of The Thirty-Nine Steps, brings us the creepy tale "The Outgoing of the Tide", about supernatural going-ons in Sker Bay – the chief oddity being Alison, who dances barefoot over the sands and brings bonnie souls to Satan. My favourite of the known authors was Neil M. Gunn’s "The Moor". I am not sure what happens in it at all, but it is a love story, maybe a tragedy, with aging and madness and folk-horror elements. It is like David Lynch wanted to write a Gaelic folk tale.
A lot of the tales are exactly what we would expect from a collection of strange Scottishness. John Mackay Wilson’s "The Doom of Souls" gives us a dark sorcerer, Lord Soulis, sort of a Scottish Sauron, who does a deal with the devil to win might and maiden. It is all going swimmingly until a walking forest makes its way towards his keep. Macbeth (and Two Towers) imagery abounds. Elicia Lynn Linton’s "The Devil of Glenluce" takes a simple tale of a young lad possessed by a demon and uses it as a commentary for her own time. Elizabeth W. Grierson’s "Assipattle and the Master Stoorworm" is a dark fairy tale woven through with Celtic and Norse elements about a lazy youth who must stand up to his bullying brothers, a court wizard, and a legendary sea monster. Angus Wolfe Murray, responsible for the publication of Alasdair Gray’s Lanark, gives us a typical Scottish society and then drops in a dream sequence worthy of a body horror film. You can find that and more in "The Curse of Malthair Nan Uisgeachan". And what about Catherine Sinclair’s "The Murder Hole"? (Great name.) This mean little folk horror story is told from the eyes of a small boy lost on the moors, who is sure that the old woman he remembers hearing about will give him a warm welcome…
That said, it is not all tartan kilts and IRN BRU. There is room for the unexpected here too. I had my legs taken out from under me by Dorothy K. Haynes’ "Good Bairns", which is a solid horror story with all child characters – a combination of sweet and brutal. "Death to the Head that Wears no Hair!" from David Grant is a superb little play on rural horror. It is about a schools inspector who takes a long trip to Shetland with Wicker Man vibes following in tow – though this is much more light-hearted and with no toasted police officers. And German writer Wilhelm Hauff offers an (unintentionally?) amusing foreigner’s view of Alba in "The Cavern of Steenfell", which Mains rightly describes as: "bonkers".
Hands down my absolute favourite was Simon Pilkington’s "The Inheritance". It tells of young Angus, who travels to the Hebrides to meet estranged Uncle Cole on Dracken Rock. Cole is a notorious figure in the local community. Some say he is dead. Some that he has grown horns and runs on all fours with the goats. Some that he has sold his soul to the sea. This is my definition of a perfect wee horror story. Not a word wasted.
[Tom]
Horror
Myrrh
Titan Books Ltd: €21
Can insanity be shared? Is there something like bad karma which won’t leave involved persons alone until it is cleared, spoken of? And is the baby-crazy childless woman trope still a thing? These are all questions which occupy my mind having finished Polly Hall’s extremely enthralling latest novel Myrrh.
Schrader's Chord
Titan Books Ltd: €14.5
"After his estranged father’s mysterious death, Charlie Remick returns to Seattle to help with the funeral. There, he discovers his father left him two parting the keys to the family record store and a strange black case containing four antique records that, according to legend, can open a gate to the land of the dead."
Also I'd say this is YA or NA horror, even though it's tagged Adult; the characters are fairly young and act it – It has that American obsession with older people and any book that features a sentence beginning with "Like every baby boomer…" isn’t really as adult as it thinks.
What I did like were the depictions of the dead people appearing here and there, because they weren't the Zombie kind of “returned from the dead” but rather ghosts, but ghosts who reminded me of Pascow from King's Pet Sematary, one of my all-time favorite characters, like mostly friendly but not always.
When a certain point in the story is reached, it is really hard to put down and the author can rock a good ending, so this was in the end a worthwhile read. Considering it's a debut, I think I wouldn't be averse to reading more by the author.
[Inci]
Best Horror of the Year#15
Best Horror of the Year, Volume Fifteen
Night Shade Books: €21
Unfortunately, I don't see that reflected in this book and in consequence, this year is one of those years in which the Datlow Best of Anthology does not quite strike my fancy. It happens.
It is worth noticing that this year many selected writings are bordering on noir or crime fiction – for instance "The Zoo" by Gemma Amor which features a medium investigating in an outrageous case where all animals in a zoo have been replaced by human corpses positioned to represent the respective animal or "The Collection" by Charlie Hughes in which police investigations focus on some tapes and abnormal occurrences taking place in a church. It's interesting to contemplate what scares people in certain times, and a need for solving of mysteries or the tying of loose ends seems to strike a chord nowadays.
Well, as usual, I have favorites and highlights, some of which I had already read in the respective anthologies they were originally published in;
"Incident at Bear Creek Lodge" by Tananarive Due is the story of a young boy who is sent to spend a few days with his grandma who used to work as an actress, but she's very scary and there's a reason for it.
In my childhood I had one grandma I adored above all, and one I was frightened of, so the use of the fear of the grandma is something I can understand to certain degree but it's not my favorite trope. I like that here, through the grandma's own seemingly glamorous past and of course her Blackness, there are many additional layers of horror laid upon each other combined with a winter setting which is always claustrophobic for me. Love this story.
"The Last Box" by Luigi Musolino was already one of my favorite stories in his collection "A Different Darkness", so I can only approve its presence among the best of the year. Who isn't fascinated by circus life and performances? The unique skill of Musolino's protagonist coupled with the author's delicate writing style makes this story all the more fascinating.
"New Fox Smell" by Livia Llewellyn is probably one of the strangest things I have ever read. Following the car ride of a young girl with her friend's mother to their summer residence pulls you gradually but firmly into a solid nightmare from which there's no escape, little foxes.
"Lifelike" by Gary McMahon is set in a home for older people and that is totally up my alley as it revolves around lovely older women, who witness something quite … I don't really have words for what happens, as weird and strange aren't sufficient to describe what happens. Read for yourself. There's a creepy puppet involved in any case.
[Inci]
Although the relish of sinking into a good old tome by King is undeniable, for me, there’s no doubt his short stories are his strong suit and every new short story collection by him makes my heart sing. So it was with You Like It Darker too – And yes! Yes, we do like it darker and find plenty of that darkness here.
That being said, nothing will ever scare me like King stories in my teenage years, not even King himself. That’s a fact I have to accept. I’m not the scared child anymore but still, some of these stories here were able to remind me of that past fear and came close to unsettling me in a way I forgot – especially the unexpected, potent chills in body snatch horror "Willie the Weirdo", or "The Dreamers" which revolves around human experiments and of course "Rattlesnakes" (My god, how creepy was that?) were to die for! Rattlesnakes ties to a very old King story and you’ll be delighted to find the connection here!
But, if you prefer his slightly melancholy, slightly hopeful “feel-good” stories, you can still find your heart’s desire in stories like the nicely emotional "Two Talented Bastids", "The Answer Man" or "Laurie", the story of an old man and his dog. I’m very sure Laurie the dog is based on King’s real-life dog Molly, aka The Thing of Evil, lol.
There’s human depravity in "The Fifth Step", "On Slide In Road" and especially "Danny Coughlin's Bad Dream", an almost novella reminiscent of The Outsider, which shows how some horrors are just hidden in the way people treat each other.
As you see, there’s something for everyone in this new King collection, and even though it will never be like reading King for the first time, he knows that we actually do like it darker and he delivers.
[Inci]
Private Rites
HarperCollins Publishers: €20
(Audiobook from libro.fm)
Private Rites follows the story of three queer sisters after their father's death, a strange architect who helped re-shape the world after constant rains started eroding geography.
In what I assume (concluding from her debut, Our Wives, Under the Sea) is her signature style of beautiful prose, a focus on character study and water as a literary motif, Armfield delicately handles themes such as estrangement, coping with grief and the complexity of family dynamics, especially between siblings. As a background for her characters, who are all quite distanced, not very likable and really complex, the author chose an interesting setting – a quasi apocalyptic world about to go under water, about to drown. An apt analogy for the three sisters', or their whole family's, state, described in little interlude-chapters titled “City”.
The horror, the disturbing in this story is nothing explicit, it merely creeps in and out of the maybe a little monotonous story, but not being able to hide at the very harrowing ending, plops out of the water. I can't say the ending makes up for the lengthy but gorgeous writing from the point of view of a horror enthusiast, it probably does not to the extend this was the case in her previous book, where the foreboding, the uncanny was much more present and resulted in a horrific explosion. This was similar but different. Still, for the reader who can put those expectations aside, a very worthwhile read nevertheless.
[Inci]
Stolen Tongues
€22.5
(Audiobook from libro.fm)
This book is currently the hot stuff in the small but nerdy horror scene and everyone’s talking about it. It originally started as a Reddit thread, which then had so many fans that Felix Blackwell turned the story into a book. Good for him but maybe he should’ve stayed with the short story.
We follow Felix and his girlfriend Faye on a romantic vacation to a small cabin in the mountains...where, of course, an otherworldly creature from Native American mythology creeping around the landscape, obviously up to no good.
Reading it felt a lot like reading a classic Goosebumps book, but with more developed characters. A classic horror story, with a few very successful elements, but also some flaws.
If you don't want any spoilers, you should stop reading here.
I particularly liked the prologue, which made me shiver, and the moment when I realized that the sleeping Faye wasn't just talking...she was answering something. The description of the Hollow One/Skincrawler was pleasantly spooky and it had some parallels to the trendy Wendigo, which seems to be all over social media lately!
The genuinely creepy atmosphere in the snow-covered forest, something stirring in the shadows, something watching and standing at the window uaaaahhhhh those are literary cherries that usually guarantee that I have to sleep with the lights on, which actually DID happen after the first chapters. It was especially eerie when the creature changed its shape but still retained a sense of "wrongness". I was disturbed and my friend forbade me more reading after 4 pm.
However, the book lost most of its pacing after the first third and events became repetitive. The first time children's songs tinge from the forest was really spine-chilling but the fourth time mentioned it induced eye rolling and boredom.
I usually really like the plot twist of main characters having common sense and leaving the place of terror…just so they realize that the abomination in question followed them home. However, this is really dragged out here and what first seemed to me like a sweet cherry turned out to be a mouthful of Hubba Bubba Gum. There were also some points, that really grinded my gears, like the unresolved plot hole of the cellar (Blackwell could have used a better editor here!), the random killing of two of the three Native American characters by the entity - even though they've been living on the supernatural mountain forever and knew how to protect themselves from it (that just seemed so unnecessary, especially because the author had a whole chapter about Native Americans in fiction) and the ending that felt a bit thin to me.
In summary this is an easy read, with some scary moments and well written characters but for me personally It didn’t deliver a long-term impact. Anyway the summer vacation is right around the corner and this book is a great addition to a lazy day at the beach!
[Esther]
Changes in the Land
Lethe Press: €16.5
Nothing short of amazing.
Cheney starts off with a plot conventional enough: a family and its land, the search for a long lost successor, and him coming back to this land which is almost a character on its own; angry, selfish and mean. The story, consists of the rotation between the journal entries of lost son Dr. Steven Baird and the recounting of the story of the land and its owners, the Adams Family, from the point of view of Elias Thornton, whose family has been in the service of the Adams for many years. Slowly do these two storylines merge into each other, madness and evil only slowly creeping in, leading to an absolutely terrifying finale.
Love this, love the afterword.
[Inci]
Non-Fiction
Ernest Hemingway beat his partners. Roman Polanski drugged and raped a 13-year-old girl. Richard Wagner was so antisemitic that his work is still taboo in some countries. Yet many of us still love A Farewell to Arms, Rosemary’s Baby and the Ring cycle.
Michael Jackson, David Bowie, Sylvia Plath, J. K. Rowling… What do we do with all of these great works of art by people whose lifestyles were morally questionable, or even monstrous? As SciFi, Fantasy and Horror readers we all have to face this question. How do we feel about reading H. P. Lovecraft in the knowledge of his deep, open racism? How do we feel about Rowling’s anti-trans social media tirades? Ask your reading group what they think of Robert E. Howard.
The question is not as easy as it might appear. Some advocate totally separating artist and art. Some say immoral acts should demand censure, boycotting, or removal of works from the public sphere. But Claire Dederer’s book Monsters argues that neither response is particularly satisfying. Or perhaps they both are. What would be great would be to have some expert to run to, Dederer muses. Or maybe a moral calculator, so we could punch in Annie Hall, balance it with sleeping with your girlfriend’s daughter, and it would tell us what to do with Woody Allen films.
Monsters claims no authority and offers no easy answers (although it does challenge some, such as the notion that boycotting is always the best solution). The book does not claim to have any right answer. Nor is it prescriptive. Dederer is not here to tell us what we can or cannot read. As Melissa Febos has noted in the New Yorker, the overall message is go ahead and love what you love: “It excuses no one.” What she does give us is a very personal essay on moral ambiguity, a biography of the betrayed reader. I think this last point was what sold it for me – there are plenty of books about how abhorrent (or not) various writers are. But this is a book about the readers of those writers, what we are meant to do when we still like their "stained" work. As Dederer writes elsewhere: "Beauty is a fragile principle. It looks silly when it is brought up against utility – or morality." It is something that happens to us. And we are the ones who have to deal with it.
[Tom]
"There did not have to be an answer to the question why; everything important started out mysterious and this mystery was like a great sea you have to be brave enough to cross. How many times had I turned back at the first ripple of self-doubt? You had to withstand a profound sense of wrongness if you ever wanted to get somewhere new."
Where do I start. I adored all the previous works by Miranda July, and this one lived up to my (high) expectations as well. To specify how much I loved this book, the following example: I read it from evening to midnight, then fell asleep, woke up at 6:30, read the book, fell asleep, had some weird dreams about the book, awoke and continued reading. Language-wise it‘s an easy read, the sentences (though packed with information) are short and simple. But emotionally speaking, this book makes you uncomfortable and by that I mean a strange feeling in your stomach. Like watching a car crash kind of thing. At the same time it’s outrageously hilarious because July‘s comical timing punches you in the throat.
I don’t want to give away too much about the adventure of the story, but in the first chapter the main protagonist, a semi-famous artist, married with a child, living the perfect life (on paper) decides to go on a cross country road-trip from LA to NY, just to o change her mind after 20 minutes and take lodgings in a cheap motel. Then she pays a semi-professional decorator to change the whole room. In moments like this I caught myself wanting to step into the story, and give unasked advice to the unnamed narrator, but immediately called myself out for acting patronizingly. Because I realized that the person does a lot of weird things, which actually make her really happy (maybe even for the first time in ages).
This book is a pondering about Intimacy, and yes, there are a lot of very explicit scenes in it, which might not be up everyone’s alley. Do you still remember Wetlands, by Charlotte Roche? „All fours“ oozes out similar vibes. Imagine Helen Memel, but grown up now (and way more hygienic). July's novel gives us a forceful lesson in how WEIRD seemingly normal people can be..and that comes hand in hand with a form of relief and reassurance for one’s own everyday struggles. It is deeply human, and turns a loving eye to the multilayered personas of humans. Sometimes it made me wonder, what a good person is like. The main character is a loving mother and a good friend but then again, she also lies a lot. Which makes you guess, if she’s a reliable narrator. This book is intricate and sensitive, I had the feeling, that Miranda July read the existentialists.
George Saunders called this book a "tour-de-force" and when you’re open to taking a deep dive into your own private secrets and thoughts - the ones you wouldn’t even tell your therapist, so profound do they seem - open this book.
[Esther]
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