By excluding what readers might otherwise assume to be a main ingredient, the wordless picture book heightens the flavors of what remains. Whenever I’ve read these books with my kids, I’ve noticed how they (and I) become more attuned to all the other decisions an artist is making about shapes and color palettes, panels and negative space.
Perhaps that’s the bitterest extreme of the irony: the sense in which the ransomware attack violates the very premise of libraries themselves. Libraries exist to connect learners with knowledge. Full stop. That’s what has been destroyed: not the stuff, but the connections, the fascia.
All that changed in 2017, when the alarm sounded twice on 19 September. Once for the memorial and commemorative evacuations, and then again, two hours later, for a devastating magnitude 7.1 earthquake that killed more than 300 people and levelled dozens of buildings. For the survivors, the coincidence begins to create profound temporal disorientation. How, survivors ask each other, could this be happening again? How could the two most devastating earthquakes in Mexico City’s history strike on the same date?
This year I was so happy. I was happy for the main reason that I think people have been happy throughout human history, which is that I fell in love. At least that’s why stories tend to tell us that people are happy—happily ever after, and all that. When people asked how I was, I found myself saying, so happy, almost involuntarily, and then feeling a little ashamed, like maybe I was boring them. The thing is that other people’s happiness is often boring. All happy families are alike, and all that. I read a line in a short story in the recent Fall issue of The Paris Review, in fact: “We were happy on the road, and happiness can’t be narrated.” This felt true to me, and I also wanted to argue with it. Yet whenever I did, the terms seemed to slip away from me—what was happiness, anyway, and what did it mean to narrate it? And was I really so happy, when in fact lots of things in my life were going wrong, when as always there were days when I woke up listless or anxious, despite some undercurrent of feeling like I was terribly, almost frighteningly happy? Could there be such a thing as a narrative of happiness, and—here, I was thinking selfishly—what might it tell me?
Just as the original Oulipians insisted that by tightening the rules, you liberate the literature, so the text is a metaphor for O’s own journey. Speaking from the confines of the words in the play, she finds out who she now is and so, perhaps, becomes free. Griffiths has paved a way out and it’s an open road: “this is not the end, by no means the end. I have a long way to go from here.”
“Should I be allowed to make this said?” Blake Butler writes in his new memoir, “Molly.” By the time he asks, it’s too late. He has already written more than two hundred and seventy pages; no turning back now. The question of allowance, of permission to expose, bubbles beneath so much writing, but it is at the very heart of memoir, where the people are real, and so are the consequences. How to tell the truth about other people, especially people we love—and why? What do we owe to others, and what do we owe to ourselves?
The central ironic insight, ultimately, of a book claiming to explain how fantasy “works” is that fantasy is not one singular thing, and it is certainly not something that one person in a single book can presume to explain the workings of. While Fantasy: Some of the Ways It Works would have made for a less snappy title, it might also have more accurately reflected Attebery’s rather modest ambitions. It may not offer the final word on fantasy, but the great strength of Fantasy: How It Works lies in the way it draws on and showcases a lifetime of careful reading of and thinking about the fantastic, marking another invaluable addition to fantasy studies.
Listen is not an ordinary book about music. Michel Faber makes that clear from the start. “This book will not do for you what other books about music will do for you,” the novelist declares. It “will not help you bond more securely with the artists or genres you’re already bonded with”, and “will not confirm your cleverness or good taste”. Instead, Faber says, he is interested in bringing his readers closer to understanding why they relate to music at all.