Fitting a small stone into a sling made of yak wool, Tsering Stobdan whipped his wrist and let the object fly, sending it soaring across the arid landscape. This, he told me, was how he protects his flock from predators and convinces straggling goats to return — just one of the countless skills he has learned in the last 60 years that allow him to rear his animals in such an unforgiving landscape.
Meanwhile, some 15,000 feet above sea level, I was simply trying to breathe. Here on the Changthang plateau, in a remote region of the Indian Himalayas, the altitude had left me lightheaded and gasping for air.
The Canadian writer Sheila Heti’s 10th book — in a genre-bending career that has included novels, stories, collaborative anthologies, children’s books and a stage play — is part bonkers cosmology and part contemporary parable. In a creation myth viewed through the keyhole-size aperture of a single life, a young would-be critic named Mira spends these pages grappling with the loss of her fiercely adoring father and her unrequited affection for a woman named Annie. A “birdlike” person, Mira finds it difficult to return her bearish father’s enveloping love in kind, or to communicate her feelings to the mysterious and fishlike Annie — whose own particular strain of remoteness is symmetrical to Mira’s but incompatible. These different modalities of love, and all the inexact, invigorating and frustrating ways in which they combine, drive the pathos of the book as well as its most phenomenal moments of exultation, moments where meaning crackles and flares.
There are many easy-to-enjoy novels that I pass on to friends in our Alaska neighborhood, recommend to my well-read grandmother or wrap as birthday gifts to my father. This isn’t one of those books. A reader must enter the Dark Star trilogy of her own volition, with eyes wide open. But the Moon Witch lit my path and showed me how a woman might navigate this dangerous, remarkable world.
Allende’s work is a curious mix of high romanticism and social realism, conventional storytelling against a realistic socio-historical background. Her great strength is to give priority to the matriarchs, the world of women which is so often overlooked by male writers.
A year before my birth, Mother, you wished for a son to grow inside you. You’d call him banyan tree, strangler fig, boy strong as my father. When I came, you knew