In the quietly simmering drama of Karolina Waclawiak’s new novel “Life Events,” Evelyn has lost her job, her marriage is flatlining, and she frequently frets about death, especially the eventual passing of her parents. Only when this Silver Lake drifter trains to become a death doula — to have the uncomfortable conversations that help the terminally ill come to terms with the life they lived — does she begin to shift from dreading the future to living in the present.
Evelyn is in a near constant state of “pre-grieving,” or what others call “anticipatory grief,” Waclawiak said during a phone interview last spring. “But we have no control over grief. That’s not how it works at all.”
Swifts are magical in the manner of all things that exist just a little beyond understanding. Once they were called the “Devil’s bird,” perhaps because those screaming flocks of black crosses around churches seemed pulled from darkness, not light. But to me, they are creatures of the upper air, and of their nature unintelligible, which makes them more akin to angels. Unlike all other birds I knew as a child, they never descended to the ground.
It’s about time we all listened to Gaiman. If you’re waiting for new book in a long-running series, from Martin or Rothfuss, “wait”, he says. “Read the original book again. Read something else. Get on with your life. Hope that the author is writing the book you want to read, and not dying, or something equally as dramatic.”
From Gibson to Blade Runner to Akira, set in the future (2019), which is now already the past, the year of Singapore’s “bicentennial,” that odd celebration of 200 years since the British landed on the island, marking our birth as definitively colonial, to highlight “where we are now” (a present unmoored from the past and therefore amnesiac and myopic), it dawns on me that the future has already come to pass. Singapore has always been there for those who remember it, but if a country sets no store by memory, then its very identity is at stake. I find myself sitting in my apartment, quarantined in western Massachusetts, disoriented and lost. Homesick and sick of home.
Among the myriad passionate readers of Austen, who seem to produce dozens of new books about her every year, Cohen occupies a special place. She read only Austen for several years straight. “Some scenes of Emma’s education,” she reports, “I have probably read a hundred times.” She found a role model in Virginia Woolf, who not only read Austen but lived through her intellectually, writing of her in “letters, diaries, essays, in her own first novel. Some nights she immersed herself in Austen, other times she read her in fragments, ‘two words at a time.’”
The book is grounded in inquiry far more often than in certainty, however, and the collection is one that probes, exploring everything from the relationship between privilege and suffering to the nature of isolation and what it means to be confined with the people we love.
I watch him bob across the intersection,
Squat legs bowed in black sweatpants.
I intellectualize the sky
that feels like it’s opening up
but that is just my mind
following a ratty heron