Think back to the last time you walked into the living room and forgot what you came for, or tugged on the car door handle only to realize your keys were on the kitchen counter. Each week, patients in my memory clinic recount similar stories and ask me: Is this normal?
Our hands have always been able to talk. Even without the highly developed nuance of sign languages, the right gesture can invite a lover, repel an enemy and express confusion or excitement. Aside from many universally understood gestures like the middle finger, we also use our hands in vaguer ways to express more complicated concepts while speaking. But how do these gestures affect our speech and communication in general?
Amelia Aurelia, the 28-year-old protagonist of Ella Baxter’s debut novel “New Animal,” knows she cannot outrun death. She spends her days working as a cosmetic mortician at her family’s funeral home in the Northern Rivers region of Australia, making the dead appear alive to comfort mourners. Amelia finds the bodies she works on “beyond beautiful, but only because they are so emptied of worry. Everything tense or unlikeable is gone. Like a shopping center in the middle of the night, they have lost all the chaos and clatter.” She understands that we will all lose that chaos and clatter sooner or later. “Life rests like a layer of chiffon over a body: one puff of wind and you’re dead,” or so Amelia explains to her neighbors at the local pub.
This sense of equanimity reveals itself to be as flimsy a cover as that chiffon, Amelia’s morbid wisdom an illusion of control over life’s impermanence. What follows is by turns a comedy of errors and a profound meditation on how to find mooring in the world when you have lost your anchor.
Kim Stanley Robinson, one of our best living science fiction writers, has compared science fiction to a pair of old-fashioned 3-D glasses; through one lens we see predictions about the future, through the other we recognize metaphors for our own time, and with the two together we get to feel ourselves participating in history. “How High We Go in the Dark,” the debut novel by Sequoia Nagamatsu, a young Japanese-American, presents exactly this kind of complex vision.
Bloom has a talent for mixing the prosaic and profound, the slapstick and the serious, which makes the book, despite its depressing subject matter, a pleasure to read. Rarely has a memoir about death been so full of life.
A hawk perches on the snow-covered roof.
Two smaller birds circle,
come in too close.