There is something solemn about mornings, when the world is quiet and the shop is calm. The books are illuminated by a dim natural light. When empty, the bookstore is filled with community, with our collective memory—with aspiration both communal and individual—and when full, the bookstore often maintains a quiet usually obtainable only in solitude. The arguments and enthusiasms contained in the volumes on the shelves create their own communion with the individual reader, while also providing a mechanism for discourse. It is a public square, no less articulate for most often being mute.
My first reading of Luke Hathaway’s The Affirmations happened on a train stirring eastward through Pennsylvania on a day that was spring by calendar but not in sight, the fields still sere, the sunlight thin. In the quiet car, the living hum of bodies and tasks carried on around me, each of us experiencing a communal kind of solitude, while I sat in the deep winter of the collection’s second poem. Hathaway writes, “Yesterday the river ice, till now page-blank, was annotated / by coyotes. I followed their new year letters down along the / west side of the island[.]” These lines’ playfulness is sheer delight. I was also taken by the impulse toward collaboration in the construction of their image: the speaker stands open to envisioning such a text (in and through the movement of the coyotes) and brings curiosity to it. This feels different from simple visual eavesdropping; the coyotes and the speaker are engaged in an act of creation, even though each is separate from the other.
And now we have arrived — or seem to have arrived — at Emily St. John Mandel’s wildly anticipated novel, “Sea of Tranquility.” It’s a curious thought experiment that borrows from the plague terror she spun in “Station Eleven” and the perception-bending tricks she played in “The Glass Hotel.” (Fans will even catch some characters from that previous novel flickering through this new one.)
“Sea of Tranquility” is an elegant demonstration of Mandel’s facility with a range of tones and historical periods.
A sense of unpredictability mixed with inevitability pervades the novel, with taut, aphoristic observations on everything from the quotidian to the metaphysical. Questioning the nature of selfishness, love, and subjectivity, Julian is reminded that “humans love from themselves. They can’t love from anywhere else.”
You Still Look the Same is a powerful and necessary collection that breaks silences and speaks to the griefs and joys we all experience. Life is a constant process of separation; nevertheless, in Doctor’s poems moments of love and laughter always resurface.
Dense and rich as a black Christmas cake and alternately whimsical, sweet and dark, “Things They Lost” is a complex work, brimming with uncompromisingly African magical realism, about the ambiguity of toxic mother-daughter relationships and the urgently restorative nature of friendship.
Deer Man follows the story of someone who turns his back on society and spends seven years living in a forest among roe deer. We discover very little about the events that preceded this decision. Exclusively home-schooled, the young man was clearly lonely. And there’s something amiss in his relationship with his family. Yet a fleeting encounter with a young buck draws him into the woods around Louviers, France, and off he goes. It’s fairytale stuff, both in its transformational force and its unspoken darkness. The lack of information about his life – the ruthless absence of autobiography – can seem odd to a modern reader. Yet the strength of this book is its singular focus on the deer.
I read somewhere that people don’t mind a long wait for
the elevator as long as there’s a mirror in the lobby.
Across the plain, flat
joy a boat sails.