This year marks the centenary of modernism’s annus mirabilis. For many, that means T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and James Joyce’s Ulysses—both first published in book form in 1922—perhaps along with the first English language translation of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. These books are in different genres and disciplines—poetry, fiction, philosophy—but all of them wed experimental literary aesthetics with highly abstract intellectual projects. All invoke myths to represent immense aesthetic and intellectual challenges: each tells of an arduous journey, that could, if successful, be redemptive, even transformative. Each text has its hero, but in each case the hero is also—or really—you. You, the reader, are challenged to find your way through these depths and heights and broad, rough seas. The journey is perilous, filled with traps as well as marvels. Should you succeed, your home may look different by the end; you will be changed too.
You walk into your favorite coffee shop. You greet the familiar barista, who knows your daily order. You say “Hi, I’ll have the”—wait, I can’t figure out how to write the next word. You know, “the usual,” but shorter. Hip! Casual! I’ll have the … uzhe. I mean, the yoozh. The youj?!
Why does this shortened form of usual, which rolls off the tongue when it’s spoken, cause so much confusion when we try to write it down? When I offered my Twitter followers 32 different options for spelling the word, nobody was fully satisfied with any of them. Youge to rhyme with rouge? Yusz as if it’s Polish? Usjhe in a desperate hope that some letter, somewhere, would cue the appropriate sound? The only thing everyone could agree on was that all of them felt weird.
Outside the walls of The New York Times, making a book into a best seller can become quite a convoluted endeavor. And despite The New York Times’ claim that the paper doesn’t make its data sources public “to circumvent potential pressure on the booksellers and prevent people from trying to game their way onto the lists,” everyone I spoke to argued that attempts to game the list are as frequent in book publishing as new Danielle Steel novels.
Child’s effort now seems almost old-fashioned. Over the past few years, the “no-recipe” recipe has flourished, assuring home cooks that there is no ghost of an exacting chef lurking behind them, forcing them to follow the rules. These instructions, and schools like Held’s, instead emphasize imprecise measurements, cooking things until they feel right, and trusting your own tastes. Which is great. But as I’ve cooked more of these not-recipes, I’ve realized they have left me feeling like I haven’t learned anything, and have started returning to more precise, researched recipes. I’ve found that it’s through recipes that I’ve become a better cook. And that rather than erode my sovereignty, they give me the power to improve my own.
Drawing from Korean folktale and Chung’s expertise as a Slavic literature professor, the narratives here shamble and ooze across a porous divide between highbrow absurdism and lowbrow jump scare. The balance changes from story to story, and sometimes the genre conventions feel too pat, as genre conventions will. But the more predictable moments set you up to miss a crucial step and fall right into the abyss when Chung gets weird.
It’s a delicate little song and dance it’s performing, saving all the punchlines for the absurdity of living a life where we are all hyper-aware of the bad things happening, but none of us has outlets for creating change. It would be easy to make jokes about naïve idealism and wokeism as a religion, or turn his character into a right-wing crank. Instead, Repila charms and amuses, giving us all a moment to laugh at ourselves for thinking we could bring down centuries-old systems of control with a tweet. There are no easy answers in The Ally, but there are some good jokes.
Conveyed to English-language readers in the seamlessly poetical renditions of the author’s regular translator Megan McDowell, these curiously addictive, tightly wound stories are as compelling as they are alienating. Schweblin’s tendency to understatement, forever flirting with entropic decline yet never entirely capitulating to it, makes her latest work an original and provoking contribution to the literature of unease.
and it’s nice this way, talking food, health, our various educations.
You’re quick they grin, lift full trays. Their approval
is nectar to me.
Maybe everyone is walking around thinking something abstract & ontological
like The existence of others as a freedom defines my situation