This is not a Hallmark movie. There are plenty of people who want to move on from the past and with good reason. Not everyone is drinking chardonnay around a fire pit with their third-grade bestie. But, for so many, legacy friends know the backstory and the current story; there’s an automatic shorthand that makes reconnection — and ego-bursting — easier.
Cutting irony and whimsical imagination and linguistic acrobatics all have their place, but don’t underestimate the elemental power of a story that takes the reader inside the mind and heart of a good and decent man caught in a helpless situation. It’s valuable to see how Tom gradually comes to terms with how his life went irrevocably askew for reasons that were both under his control and not, which is the anxious balance of how life is really lived.
Happy endings (or beginnings) don’t make for good fiction, as the Indonesian writer Norman Erikson Pasaribu knows well. But Pasaribu doesn’t want to give readers sob stories either, especially about their chosen subject: queer life in Indonesia. Instead, their debut collection, Happy Stories, Mostly, is written in a playful, tragicomic tone. The 12 stories in the book document the difficulty of queer lives, especially of gay men, in modern Indonesia. The plots may be propelled by tragedy, but no one—gay or straight—is reduced to or defined by trauma. Pasaribu treats their characters like friends, to be listened to and laughed at in equal measure. Even when the stories are sad, as they often are, Pasaribu refuses to give readers a front-row seat to gay suffering.
I’ve never set foot on sea ice, but thanks to Dominic Pingushat of Arviat, in Nunavut, Canada, I have a sense of what it feels like. “You can walk on sea ice without falling, although it will be moving like flexible plastic,” Pingushat tells us, explaining that the surface below one’s feet “moves like a wave when you walk on it, like a large plastic fabric.”
Pingushat’s words are found in one of the numerous thumbnail essays accompanying a short but beautiful collection of photographs of Arctic sea ice by Paul Souders in the book “Siku: Life on the Ice.” The images reveal a world of remarkable color, of ice illuminated by the sun, the moon, the sky and the sea. The brief stories accompanying these pictures come from people who have walked on that ice, driven snow machines, hauled sleds, hunted upon it, and sometimes encountered mishaps. For the Inuit who are Indigenous to the region, the seemingly alien frozen seascape that Souders captures so vividly is home.