We know life is finite.Why should we believe death lasts forever?
Zhang’s novel is ostensibly a work of speculative fiction, but scenarios like these, of course, are no longer strictly speculative—the slow-moving catastrophe of climate change has brought into sharp relief how close we are to the brink. The conditions that underlie Land of Milk and Honey are uncomfortably close to our own, not so much located somewhere in the future as in a parallel present, one or two lateral moves away from where we are now. In this way, Zhang builds a dystopian world so similar to ours that it does not transport so much as it unnerves, disconcerts.
Two years into recovery from a bad romance with booze and other drugs, an Iranian American poet makes a half-hearted attempt to redeem his misspent youth. He decides to write a book about people whose deaths retroactively imbued their lives with meaning: Joan of Arc, the early Muslim leader Hussain, the Irish Republican Army militant Bobby Sands, and, though he’s still alive, himself. Such is the premise of Kaveh Akbar’s first novel, Martyr!, an existential comedy about the difficulty of finding beauty in banality and sense in suffering.
His exploration of the world of sound/noise is a catalogue of curiosities that ranges across the sounds of space, of the northern lights, volcanoes and thunder, birdsong, insects, plants (yes, roots make noises as they push through the soil, though you’ll need some technology to hear them), musical instruments, song, bells and much more.
Rather than following a beginning-to-end approach, A Book of Noises is very much a collection for dipping into, starting wherever takes your fancy. Many of the sounds will be familiar: the aforementioned birds, bees, whales and humans, for example. Many others are beyond the realm of direct human experience, such as the sounds of deep space.