I clearly remember the vivid colors of the two books—one red, the other green—that a high school classmate of mine was reading between periods. It was 1987 or 1988, and my new school was in a provincial city in Oita, Japan. This quiet, introspective classmate was one of the first handful of students from the city to be kind enough to talk to me. I was from a small fishing village that didn’t even have a bookstore, and having come from a junior high school with fewer than forty students, I was intimidated by how he already had clear taste in music and literature. I can’t remember if he mentioned—in his always nearly inaudible voice—the title of the two-volume novel or the author’s name. What I do remember is that he seemed engrossed in the book, and that less than a year later, his life was taken: his mother’s partner killed her before turning to the boy.
The next time I encountered those books was after I moved to Tokyo for university. I came across a large stack of them right by the entrance of one of the city’s largest bookstores. They were the two parts of Haruki Murakami’s novel Noruwei no mori (Norwegian Wood). I was already familiar with him as a master of short essays. My landlady had the bad (or good?) habit of reading books in the bathroom, and Murakami’s essays were among her favorites. One day, she handed me a collection she had finished. In these essays, he writes about literature and music and even cooking in such a natural way that it feels as though he’s addressing the reader personally. Something delightful and friendly in his style fascinated me (it’s a shame that those early essays of his haven’t been published in English). I couldn’t say how exactly, but I immediately felt that his style was different from other contemporary Japanese writers I had read. Probably because one of my professors (who was from Belgium) had translated it into French, A Wild Sheep Chase was the first of Murakami’s novels I read. And I soon found myself reading through them all.
Dodie Bellamy is the kind of writer one knows all or nothing about. When friends asked what I was working on and I said, “Reviewing a collection of essays about Dodie Bellamy’s work,” they responded with either a blank stare or sudden, excited recognition. Tempestuous conversations about Chris Kraus and Kathy Acker arose, along with nostalgic memories of the poet Kevin Killian, Bellamy’s late husband, and the archive-like San Francisco apartment they shared. We discussed the beginnings of New Narrative, a literary movement started in San Francisco in the late 1970s in which Bellamy, Killian, and Acker were key figures. Pornography was a common topic, as was queer identity, transgression, cults, gentrification, and New Age. If someone didn’t know Bellamy, then it was up to me to explain how she strings such topics together and to impress upon them why her writing is still so influential.
By now you’ve noticed that plant-based burgers are a thing. We’re not talking an upgrade to the veggie burger, which has been around since 1982. Today’s plant-based burgers are designed to cook, taste, and “bleed” like real beef. Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods are just the largest and most visible brands of this emergent food phenomenon.
After having first tackled perhaps the most iconic, quintessentially American food, Impossible Foods—and others—have vowed to take on other varieties of meat, including seafood. This is an even bigger challenge on two fronts: price and replicating the nutritional profile and subtle flavor of fish. Should they succeed, could alt (alternative) fish help make the world more food secure and save marine environments?
“Death in Her Hands” is the work of writer who is, like Henry James or Vladimir Nabokov, touched by both genius and cruelty. Cruelty, so deplorable in life, is for novelists a seriously underrated virtue. Like a surgeon, or a serial killer, Moshfegh flenses her characters, and her readers, until all that’s left is a void. It’s the amused contemplation of that void that gives rise to the dark exhilaration of her work—its wayward beauty, its comedy, and its horror.
As we face another economic downturn likely to eclipse the severity of the Great Recession, I wonder how literature will reflect the lived reality, the daily horror of contemplating infinity. What new language will writers have to invent so that tedium can come alive on the page, so that the insanity of performing the same task again and again finds its own story shape? We all write to communicate the deepest parts of ourselves to another person. How will we rise to the task of communicating what comes next to the people who need to hear it? I hope Temporary is only the first in a new decade of novels reflecting the true formlessness and weightlessness of modern life. It may be grim, but it will also be true, and no monster may be confronted but that we see it first.
I feel for any author who has a work of literary fiction or non-fiction coming out these days. The world's focus is, naturally, on the pandemic and the protests against racism and police violence. The news seems to change hour-by-hour; no wonder that imaginative literature, a product of silence and slow time, can seem a bit out of step.
Which is all to say that Mary Morris' new memoir, All the Way to the Tigers may not be just what you need to read right now, but it may well be something you'll reach for eventually. Rich and unsparing, Morris' slim memoir is a keeper.
The defensive beauty of the desert
At dawn hadn’t unnerved us, but
It was all a bit much
By midday. Barrel cacti shadowless
With their honeybee buds. Torches