Does an author’s work change when he dies? On May 6, 2021, I sent Roberto Calasso my translation of his unusually slim book, La tavoletta dei destini. He was to check through it before I sent it to the publisher. This was the arrangement with all the translations I had done of his work: he liked to stay in control and I liked the reassurance that he would pick up misunderstandings and missed nuances. “You have changed Sindbad to Sinbad,” he immediately objected. I told him this was the name that English and American readers were familiar with. “It has to stay Sindbad,” he said.
On the first of July, I wrote reminding him that my delivery deadline was just a week away. He was being slow even by his standards. “I trust you,” he replied. “Just send it as it is. I’m writing other things.” It was then I guessed that something was up. On July 28 he died. And in November I received the copy edit from the publisher for my comments.
When rain falls and water is plentiful, the sex lives of plains spadefoot toads are pretty, well, plain. Females prowl ponds for the suitor with the most winsome call; they pair off to couple, churning out legions of eggs that will hatch into, as genetics might predict, more plains spadefoot toads.
But when the weather gets drier and deep ponds more scant, as they often do in the North American deserts where spadefoots live, this narrative acquires a twist. Female plains spadefoot toads start seeking out not the duckish quacks of their own species but the baritone trills of the Mexican spadefoot toad. Atop the parched landscape, these odd couples mingle, yielding mixed-breed offspring that turn out stunted in some quite serious ways: Males are sterile, and females produce far fewer eggs. It’s a fate that most animals would take great evolutionary pains to avoid. When Karin Pfennig, a behavioral ecologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, first noticed the behavior some two decades ago, “I thought it had to be a mistake,” she told me.
A doctor with wild grey hair and mutton chops holds a scalpel in his bloodied hand. He has paused for a moment, allowing one of his students to take his place and complete the incision. It’s a remarkably clean cut; the young man with the clamp has barely dirtied his shirt cuffs. Even so, the patient’s mother, if that’s who she is, weeps in the corner. She can see nothing but frock coats and a segment of open flesh.
The 19th-century Philadelphia-based artist Thomas Eakins did not paint surgery as it was, exactly, but he did capture something of its veiled sterility. There may be no gowns or masks in his earlier medical pictures, but the wool coats and shirts worn by the doctors only do so much to soften the atmosphere of the operating theatre. The overriding impression is one of detachment. The doctors may be just an inch from their patients, the scribes not a lot further away, but emotionally, they exist on a different plane entirely.
Venice is cursed. I walked cursed Venice in a cloud of confusion. Why did so many people bring so many roller suitcases? Did they not know they were coming to Venice? Did they not know Venice has a stone-stepped bridge every fifty yards? Sweat soaked beneath the savage sun, they heaved their suitcases — all of which were big enough to hide a dismembered body or two — up and down and huffed and seemed distraught at the amount of heaving required to make headway. I helped one woman carry hers. She had a broken foot, walked on crutches. Her presence in Venice mystified like an apparition of Christ in a New Jersey hedge. As I lifted her substantial luggage, careful to do so only with my legs, not my back, she intoned in German-accented English: Thank you, this broken foot of mine vould not keep me avay, nothing vould keep me avay from my dear Venice.
Her deranged veneration seemed omnipresent and fundamental to the core of the city. I felt surrounded by cult worshipers. But they all disappeared almost instantly when I ippon ura’d (“one street backed” as we call it in my Japan pop-up newsletters) the sinking town. It seemed as if very few were here to explore.
As part of the festivities, there’s a parade, concerts, a 5K run, a golf tournament and a bread baking competition. Thousands of people come out every year to this rural town of about 10,000 people.
But according to former reporter Catherine Strotz Ripley, less than two decades ago, residents of Chillicothe had no idea they even had this claim to fame.
“I don’t know how everybody pretty much forgot about it,” Ripley says.
Traders brought chillies from the New World to Yemen. Spring onions found their way into Ms Yeh’s bread because a mix of drive, luck, opportunity and tragedy brought European Jews and Chinese people into proximity in America. People move, and food reflects the mixing and adaptations that ensue. The world is richer for it, and so is the dinner table.
As I drove down the canyon and out of Sequoia National Park towards a town called Three Rivers in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas, I saw what looked like a painted wall of mountains that nearly brought me and my van over the cliff’s edge. I wanted to reach out and stroke my fingers against the trees on the other side of the canyon, to see if the vista resisted my touch. My favorite scenic Highway, the 178 between Bakersfield and Death Valley, appeared shortly thereafter. Navigating the dynamite-blasted twists and turns in the riverbed at dawn, left me slack-jawed. This is worth it, I said to myself, I am experiencing this, and the van trip is worth it. I had little idea California offered this abundance of beauty outside its cities when I lived in San Francisco during my early 20s, but, back then, I wasn’t seeking it out.
In “Nine-Headed Birds,” a story about halfway through K-Ming Chang’s new collection, “Gods of Want,” the narrator describes how her jiujiu (maternal uncle) took her to amusement parks and lent her coins to put through those penny-flattening machines. “I loved how skin-thin it was in the end, how the penny resembled none of the presidents,” she tells us. “I loved how easy its history was rewritten, forged into fiction.”
Chang has a special talent for forging history into myth and myth into present-day fiction.
Like many successful dystopian novels, “The School for Good Mothers” operates in a world that is unsettlingly similar to our own, offering up scenarios that feel both horrific and inevitable. If it seems like I'm being cagey, it's because I am. To reveal the surprises would only dull the terror Frida endures. To find out what Frida does to lose custody and the specific trials she and her cohort endure at the school, you'll just have to read it.