Dietmar Rabich, “Kreta (GR), Rethymno, Fortezza, Theater,” Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

In recent months I have been listening to Benjamin Britten’s String Quartet No. 2 (1945) and trying to describe something, anything, about it. Describe seems too weak a word when there exist long formal analyses of the piece: nevertheless, analysis seems easy, and description much more difficult.

It might be a vocabulary and grammar and syntax issue: I’m not sure we have any of those for music like this. Mervyn Cooke says of the first movement: “The overall effect … is highly unusual.” This is the reassuring resignation of a music writer.

***

Roland Barthes: “Music, by natural bent, is that which at once receives an adjective.”

Yes, the Britten quartet is highly unusual. Its key is C major. The rare moments when we in fact get this chord feel like a brief truce, a favor granted to us to snatch a breath of familiar air. Otherwise it moves relentlessly through accidentals and harmonies. Through time signatures, too: but the beat is constant, almost innocuously present and obvious: you could do a spin class to the propulsive beat of the scherzo. It defies us to find anything else amiss: here is a pulse, what more could you want?

***

The piece is illegible, I think. Britten seems to be reading aloud, quite fluently, from something we did not recognize could be read at all. It is—if not untranslatable—at least untranslated.

***

Leonard Bernstein said of Britten’s music: “There are gears that are grinding and not quite meshing, and they make a great pain.”

(Insert compulsory mention here of Britten’s homosexuality and pacifism, and resulting social alienation. Insert compulsory countermention of his enduring, loving, mutually supportive thirty-nine-year relationship with the tenor Peter Pears.)

***

Britten composed the quartet a few months after visiting Bergen-Belsen and playing with Yehudi Menuhin for liberated prisoners of the Nazi camps. He had spent the first part of World War II in the United States, and upon returning to the UK registered as a conscientious objector. He spoke little about the trip to Germany, but Peter Pears said much later that it colored everything Britten wrote afterwards. When the quartet premiered, the proceeds were donated to a fund for survivors of the 1943 Bengal famine, a humanitarian disaster caused by the criminally exploitative and neglectful British colonial government, with Winston Churchill at its head.

The quartet is also described as robust.

***

Other adjectives employed by music writers for the quartet: austere, uncanny, misty, magnificent, sly, dark, tantalizing, restless. I have to admit it sounds particularly good played on these days of frantic autumn wind.

***

There are dry disgusted bits and straining tender bits. Sometimes the quartet seems to forget about beauty for minutes at a time—gets taken over by defiant cruelty and cheerful dread—and then suddenly remembers it in a shaft of damp sunlight. (In this way it is faintly recognizable as “English.”)

There are bizarre bits and frenetic bits and grinding determined bits. It feels something like trying to outrun a migraine, which I can do sometimes with caffeine and a cold shower and keeping busy but which is always a set of blind tactics against my body’s favorite mystery. Hard to hear the sharp C major chords as anything but the migraine’s triumphant stabs of pain.

***

The quartet was officially composed as a tribute to Henry Purcell: the last movement is a set of variations called a chacony (or chaconne), an old dance form. Variations demand a specific attention, each time: find the theme, then find the variety. After the theme is stated, there are twenty-one variations. Try counting them!

One variation has a cello line like a man turning over in his sleep. Another sounds like a methodical sorting, arraying, and cataloguing of our souls in all their various parts. Another is a jolly death train chugging out of a station.

At the end of the final variation it rolls back into C major and declares, I told you I knew the way. All the passengers are green and shivery with motion sickness, but nevertheless, we are home.

—Rosalind Brown, author of “A Narrow Room”

Partly legible notes scribbled while engrossed in the dance performance choreographed by Moriah Evans at Performance Space New York in the winter of 2022 are my only documentation of Remains Persist. This was a durational affair lasting four hours in which nine performers, acting as either research subjects or examiners, carried out a series of timed, highly structured tasks. These tasks corresponded to two types of research, which Evans, in the show text, refers to as “remains studies” and “resignation studies.” Both happen through movement in real time: the former consists of “excavating the body” to locate the remains of something lodged within, and the latter results from accepting “something inevitably present but invisibilized in the body.”

Before being assigned a type of study to conduct, each performer was queried by others playing the role of examiners, who asked the “subject” questions centered primarily on their body’s relationship to memory, control, and narrative of the self, among them:

Is the body disciplined?
How did the self educate the body?
Is part of your flesh in someone else’s flesh?
Would you describe the self as chaotic or well-maintained?
Does the body feel happy?
What does the body have to say right now?
What stuff are you always carrying with you?

While answering these questions, the subject performed movements that seemed to radiate from the inner organ or body part being targeted by the study. Throughout the performance, various commands were repeated, with variations, by alternating performers: Initiate speech. Resume your organ work! Dance with and from the remains! After each round of tasks, the performers would swap roles and start over again.

Rapt as I was for the show’s entire duration, I’ve never been more aware of my expendable condition as an audience member. Performers were actually at work, plumbing their physical and psychic interiors, and they seemed concerned with being witnessed by the audience only circumstantially. Poet that I am, I tend to be skeptical of seductively vague catchphrases concerning “writing from the body.” Here, this happened to be exactly what was unfolding before me. The deliriously vivid speech that the performers produced on the spot as part of these studies stunned me. This was unrepeatable language opening up their bodies, transforming them before our eyes, bestowing on them an obdurate, unique, all-too-human dimension. This was ecstatic writing produced by bodies in a trance whose defenses were pulverized, revealing the terrifying truth of an innermost language—proof that the self is as much written and underwritten by the body as the other way around.

Of course, Evans didn’t seek to control the audience’s comings and goings. People could move around, leave the theater and come back later, but in the program notes, she warned: “The longer you stay, the closer you get to theater.” By the end of the show, the performers had become characters in a play with whom I’d experienced a wide range of emotions instead of virtuosic figures whose stamina and mastery over their bodies in motion I couldn’t but admire. (Although there was that, too.) What they offered was catharsis—the spectacle of the body healing itself through the process of ejecting the stories and verbiage bodies tend to hold. Who said this type of verbal outpouring has to remain relegated to drama or poetry?

Dance with and from the remains! It’s all we can ever do if we let the body celebrate the exuberance of its own ability to move itself and others.

As it happens, if you’re on the West Coast, you can catch the show today or tomorrow at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

—Mónica de la Torre, author of “Flip Side”

The Pepsi-Cola Sign in Gantry Plaza State Park. Kidfly182, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The Pepsi-Cola Addict, written in 1981 by the cryptophasic teenager June-Alison Gibbons—who refused most communication with anyone other than her twin sister, Jennifer—is as idiosyncratic as one would expect. Preston Wildey-King—the Pepsi-Cola addict of the book’s title—lives in a tenement with his mother and his sister in Malibu, California. How Preston developed an addiction to Pepsi is unknown. This omission begs interpretation—readers must make their own projections onto Pepsi-Cola. Is it a sweet elixir that dulls the bitter taste of Preston’s fleeting childhood? Or a symbol of American overconsumption and excess? Gibbons doesn’t provide an answer, leaving us with a plot point as perplexing as the addictions we see every day. Sometimes a can of Pepsi is just a can of Pepsi. 

—Troy Schipdam, reader

Éric Rohmer’s 1986 film The Green Ray centers on a difficult person. We know that she’s difficult because, during a conversation midway through, she insists, multiple times, “I haven’t been difficult at all.” Her name is Delphine, and she’s a Parisian secretary who broke up with her fiancé two years earlier. While she craves human connection, she flees, sometimes literally, whenever it seems it might appear. In one of the film’s best scenes, she runs away from people who have the gall to invite her to a nightclub. In another scene, she stops to read a sign on a lamppost that says, “Retrouver le contact avec soi-même et avec les autres. Groupes et séances individuelles.” (“Reconnect with others and yourself. Groups and private sessions.”) She walks on.

When a friend tells her she’s sad, Delphine says, “I’m not sad.” She sublimates her loneliness into an obsession with having a good summer vacation. As the film opens, Delphine learns that her holiday plans have been upended: she’s been ditched by a friend who wants to travel with a new lover instead. “The three of us could go together,” Delphine suggests. She’s rebuffed. We soon see why: even when she’s not a third wheel, she’s hard to be around. A complainer who doesn’t enjoy much of anything, she’s resistant to offers of help and advice. When she learns that her sister and brother-in-law are going camping in Ireland, she asks her young niece, “It’s very rainy. Does that scare you?” At a dinner party, when the host has just served pork chops, she extols the virtues of vegetarianism.

An acquaintance takes pity on Delphine and invites her along on a family vacation to Cherbourg, but that goes badly. She then goes on an increasingly disastrous series of trips and spends much of the film in tears. In North America, the film was first released as Summer, but maybe it’s more appropriate to watch it in fall. The story concludes as Delphine is finally heading home after her miserable peregrinations. As she arrives at the train station, there’s a sense that she’s getting older, that not only summer but also her best years have passed, that maybe the sun will set without her finding love again.

But there’s a chance something different will happen. The green ray of the title—and of an eponymous Jules Verne novel that served as Rohmer’s inspiration—refers to an almost mystically elusive optical phenomenon. Under certain atmospheric conditions, in the last moments before it dips below the horizon, the setting sun can flash green. On one of her trips, Delphine overhears some older people discussing the plot of Verne’s book. Its heroine never sees the green ray, but she “manages to understand her own feelings.” Throughout the film, Delphine claims to know her feelings. She may believe that she’s being vulnerable; she even cries in front of other people. But her self-pity prevents her from accessing true vulnerability. It’s not until the very end of the film that she risks sharing her real feelings with another person.

For years, I also confused self-pity with vulnerability, and I relate to the film. I love it not, though, for its relatability but because I find it so strikingly naturalistic. Rohmer purportedly encouraged his actors—many of whom were friends and even family—to improvise their dialogue. That authenticity, which I strive for in fiction, is what I think gives the film its luminosity. Even the green ray captured in the film’s last shot is genuine; rather than create it in the studio, as producers wanted, Rohmer brought a photographer to the Canary Islands to capture the real thing.

—Alena Graedon, author of “No Changing”

I discovered the American Museum of Paramusicology through attempts to find more information about the American composer and choreographer Julius Eastman, perhaps the most important artist of the late twentieth century in the United States, although people outside the art world don’t know who he is. The site/journal/publishing concern/archive is run by the musicologist and artist Matt Marble and hosts a range of materials—books, recordings, scores, histories—relating to music by composers whose work is inflected by esoteric spiritual or philosophical practice, among them Alice Coltrane, David Lynch, and Constance Demby. The site and its associated podcast, Secret Sound, recently went subscription-only—but I recommend the five dollars per month. Everything there is totally brilliant and humbling.

—Lucy Ives, Robert Glück’s interviewer for The Art of Fiction No. 260

Yidingmu Police Station, Taipei, the morning of February 28, 1947. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Hou Hsiao-hsien’s A City of Sadness (1989) was digitally restored and rereleased in theaters across Taiwan earlier this year. Running two hours and thirty-seven minutes, the melancholic art-house film shows in painstaking detail the dissolution of a Taiwanese family prompted by political regime change following World War II. In 1945, the Japanese surrendered Taiwan; soon after, Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang party (KMT) would retreat from China to the island, violently suppress native uprisings, and officially claim the island as its own in 1949.

“This island is so pitiful. First the Japanese and then the Chinese. They all rule us but none take care of us,” one of the film’s protagonists says in Taiwanese, a language that the KMT banned from schools. The English subtitles were less subtle: “They all exploit us and no one gives a damn.”

I attended a sold-out showing on opening weekend. In a somewhat surreal coincidence, the rerelease date coincided with the one-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Just hours before I saw the film, I’d biked to a public square where a crowd of mostly Taiwanese people waved Ukraine’s blue-yellow striped flag. When Ukraine’s anthem was played, everyone put their hands on their hearts. One Ukrainian mother said to me, “Taiwanese people know what it’s like to have a crazy neighbor.”

Today China claims it will take Taiwan by force; the threat of regime change is never far. In Hong Kong, where the film was also rereleased this year, protesters, among them high schoolers, have been imprisoned and sentenced for subversion. But to be fair, in Taiwan—a country ruled by six successive colonial powers—it would be difficult to find a release date that didn’t take on a deep sense of resonance and foreboding. The year City was released, 1989, the Chinese Communist Party killed thousands of nonviolent protesters in Tiananmen Square. In contrast, Taiwan was on the cusp of freedom. It burst with national awakening. Soon, activists who read Mandela in prison would be released and run for election—and win.

City was the first film in Taiwan to represent the events of 2/28—a sequence of numbers known to every Taiwanese person today, though for decades it could barely be whispered. On February 27, 1947, a state agent beat a Taiwanese woman selling contraband cigarettes. When a crowd formed to defend her, a policeman fired into it, killing a man. People across the island began to revolt on the twenty-eighth, and in the days following, an estimated eighteen to twenty-eight thousand people were killed by the KMT. For nearly four decades, in a period now known as the White Terror, Taiwan would be ruled by a one-party dictatorship—the second longest time any country has been subjected to uninterrupted martial law. (Syria has recently surpassed Taiwan.)

In the years following City’s release, Taiwan has become a democracy. It’s considered the freest country in Asia and among the freest in the world. Just this week Freedom House released a report measuring people’s access to political rights and civil liberties. Taiwan is ranked sixth in the world, above both France and the United States. China is listed among the bottom ten nations. Whereas “6/4” is scrubbed from the internet in China—even the candle and ribbon emojis disappear from the available pool on phones and computers on June 4—the Taiwanese government has made 2/28 a national holiday. Schoolkids get that day off.

City views the trauma of regime change through the stories of two fictional Taiwanese families. In the first, the oldest of four sons leads a local gang whose territory is stolen by mainland Chinese rivals. At the start of the film, he wonders at the misfortune that has befallen his brothers—one has become a lunatic, another went missing in the Philippines while serving as a war medic for Japan, and the youngest is deaf. “Maybe my mother’s grave is not in the right spot,” he muses in Taiwanese.

The other family is a brother–sister pair, Hiroe and Hiromi; even their names nod to their cultural affinity with the now-ousted Japanese. Hiromi is a nurse; Hiroe is an intellectual-revolutionary with Marx on his bookshelf. He’d lobbied for Taiwanese rights under Japanese colonialism and, under his new anticommunist Chinese overlords, ramps up his activism.

The intersection of these families, and the heart of the film, is the tender love between Hiromi (played by Xin Shufen), whose diary provides the voice-over, and the deaf-mute photographer Lin Wen-ching (a strapping young Tony Leung), the youngest of the four sons. Lin’s deafness literally and metaphorically reflects the silence enforced by the KMT. Lin meets Hiromi through Hiroe, who is his best friend. The young couple sends money to support Hiroe’s dissident work. By the end of the film—it’s implied but never shown—both men are executed by the regime. Hiromi will raise her and Lin’s child alone.

In City, scenes unfold in Shanghainese, Taiwanese, Japanese, Mandarin—undermining the official narrative of a single national language. For that reason, too, diary entries, songs, notes, and diverse legends permeate the film. Like currents flowing against the tide, these are counterforces to the language of heads of state—what Orwell called the enemy of sincerity.

For survivors of state violence, Hou suggests, there are few resources, little information, and often only official lies. In one scene, a woman and her three children receive a piece of cloth from Wen-ching, who has just been released from prison on charges of collaboration against the regime. We don’t know who this woman is; she appears just this once. We see a close-up of her face and, less clearly, her children standing behind her as she unfurls the cloth, sobbing when she reads the following words, written in dried blood:

LIVE WITH DIGNITY,

YOUR FATHER IS INNOCENT

Who wrote this? Why was their father arrested? Was he executed? On each of these questions, Hou leaves us in the dark, though I believe he does so to make a point about the confounding, fragmenting force of state violence. Within this void the cloth tells the truth.

Hou is interested in the private pains of upheaval. Prisoners write poems before they die. Hiromi writes in her diary. Wen-ching writes notes. The two lovers write to each other, having no other way to communicate. These texts appear in large block print that occupy the entire screen in a way that recalls old silent films.

Why so much text? The film’s screenwriters, Hou, Chu T’ien-wen, and Wu Nien-jen, were born after the violent uprisings and grew up during a time when it was forbidden to talk about them. To write City, they sifted through diaries, letters, and private archives. The film thus stands as a reflection on what remembering feels like: sifting through text. That activity is soundless. You must imagine the lives of people who have dared to leave a trace.

Consider, in contrast, the simple yet poignant narratives of the White Terror that have emerged in the mainstream news since government archives opened in the early 2000s. The BBC reported one such story. “My most beloved Chun-lan,” a father wrote on the night before he was executed, to his five-month-old daughter, “I was arrested when you were still in your mother’s womb. Father and child cannot meet. Alas, there’s nothing more tragic than this in the world.” He wrote that in 1953. The government confiscated it and never delivered to his family. His daughter would receive it fifty-six years later, at age fifty-six. She cried when she read it. “I finally had a connection with my father,” she told BBC. “I realized not only do I have a father, but this father loved me very much.”

Narratives like these have a beginning (arrest, execution), middle (prolonged, multidecade separation between father and child; suspended wondering), and end (cathartic reception of the letter; connection established). One of the central precepts of trauma healing holds that we reclaim events of loss through narrative. Hou refuses a narrative, thus refusing reclamation, suspending us in the psychic trauma of his generation.

For this reason, perhaps, in Hou’s films we don’t always realize when a scene has ended. One moment which I love most is sensual and innocent: Wen-ching and Hiromi sit close together on the floor, looking at each other, delighted and full of longing: two shy, sensitive people finding their way to love. In the background, the old-timey German lied “Lorelei” plays on a phonograph. Steps away, their male friends sit around a table, eating zongzi (a sticky rice dish eaten in the summer). They complain bitterly of the bribery and corruption that marked and followed 2/28, which has included nepotism; the KMT has fired locals—calling them slaves to the Japanese—and awarded those coveted government positions to family members.

But the two gorgeous young lovers are in their own world, talking about the music. Hiromi explains to Wen-ching—in a letter, written in her notebook—the legend of Lorelei. He writes back, telling her he knew the song before became deaf, then recounts how it happened. He was eight when he fell from a tree. A happy kid who lived in his own world, he at first didn’t even realize he had lost his hearing; his father had to tell him by writing it down. Hiromi looks surprised, and the camera cuts to a flashback, a child imitating a Beijing opera singer. This almost montage-like scene has no argument, no dramatic tension, no climax. It is all private logic. The effect is such that even the present moment of rapturous love has the feel of memory, recovered too late, useless yet still dazzlingly vivid.

***

When City was first released, an estimated 50 percent of the country’s population flocked to theaters to see it, resulting in the improbable box-office upset of a kung fu movie starring Jackie Chan. Early international acclaim for A City of Sadness included the Venice Film Festival’s Golden Lion Prize: City was the first Chinese-language film to receive this honor. (In September, Tony Leung received a lifetime achievement award at Venice, where three of his films have won the Golden Lion, City being his first.) Meanwhile, in China, City was banned until 2012, when it received a small showing at a film institute in Beijing. This year, the digital restoration was shown at film festivals and in Beijing and Shanghai, marking the first time that ticket-buying audiences could see the film. The few showings available were immediately sold out.

Yet, despite City’s canonical status in Taiwan, domestic critical reception was, and continues to be, uneven. Critics have argued that City fails to show the scale or barbarity of the killings of 2/28. It doesn’t show, for instance, how masses of Taiwanese people on the streets were bundled into burlap sacks and tossed into the harbor. It doesn’t show ordinary citizens getting stabbed by Chinese soldiers. It doesn’t show the Butcher of Kaohsiung, as he was named, a Chinese general who sprayed machine-gun fire into a crowd. When Hou does show street violence, it is enacted by local gangs and not by the KMT government: a band of vengeful Taiwanese randomly beat up people while shouting “Death to mainlanders!” This is a reference to the two million migrants from China to Taiwan after 1945, some of whom faced discrimination.

Were critics right? Partially. For me, the harshest thing I can say about A City of Sadness is also the most unfair: it’s no The Battle of Algiers, a film that confronted with lucidity the totalizing character of violence. Violence cleanses: that’s the ideology of its perpetrators, from the agents of the state to insurgent terrorists. Like City, Battle dealt with colonial occupation; like City, Battle dealt with its own country’s watershed moment of the twentieth century. But Battle, which premiered twenty-three years at Venice before City, exposed with complexity the levers of power, portraying a French general and his rationale for torture with care. In contrast, you won’t find in City anything about Chiang Kai-shek, who famously said, “I’d rather kill a hundred innocent people than let one communist escape.” The name of his campaign in China to exterminate leftists quite literally translates to “cleansing social movement.” Neither Chiang nor any high-ranking Chinese soldier appears in the film, much less articulates his strategy or beliefs; on occasion, a policeman or soldier rounds up dissidents or hauls someone off to get executed. In City, the human origins of power appear shadowy, opaque, without substance.

In Hou’s defense, City would never have been released had it featured a Chinese general describing a program of cleansing and torture. Besides, Hou’s style is elliptical and indirect—which also happens to be useful to evade censorship. “Nothing is worse than having something there for the sake of exposition or explanation,” he has said.

What, then, are the politics of the film? Above all, I think, Hou describes the inherent worth of preserving a free mind amid totalitarian conditions. Though many of the women in City are seen performing traditional roles—preparing vegetables in the kitchen, raising children—Hiromi’s diary provides the story of her inner life as well as the written narration of her family’s story. The seasons change, from winter to summer to winter again, but she keeps writing. Similarly, despite Wen-ching’s inability to speak and hear, he never stops observing his surroundings. The quiet takes in which we watch Wen-ching developing photos is a metacommentary on the patience required to witness the world with open eyes. For these two idealists, the mind triumphs in spite of physical and social stumbling blocks.

They also both continue to contribute to Hiroe’s doomed resistance movement. Three quarters into the film, Hiroe escapes prison and creates a little socialist utopia in the hills. When he’s not harvesting rice—trousers rolled up, stepping gingerly behind a water buffalo plowing a rice paddy—he’s writing pamphlets. These will spell his demise when he is eventually located, arrested, and executed by the KMT. But for now he has created a free world. When Wen-ching visits, he replies, “In prison I vowed to live for friends who have died.” A few beats later: “The only thing that matters is your beliefs.”

Michelle Kuo is a writer and professor based in Taipei. She teaches at National Chengchi University, and her book Reading with Patrick was the runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.

Photograph courtesy of the author.

In an office-building lobby in San Francisco, there is a wall where about one hundred lava lamps simultaneously flow. They are not just decorating the wall; they are helping to encrypt the internet. 

The lava wall is owned by a software company called Cloudflare. A camera photographs the lava lamps, whose patterns are constantly shifting. Each image is then digitized and stored as a series of numbers. This analog process produces sequences that, in their organic variance, are more unpredictable than anything a computer could generate on its own. With the help of its lava lamps, Cloudflare encrypts at least 10 percent of global web traffic.

As the owner of fifty lava lamps, I felt validated when I found out about Cloudflare’s wall. I bought all the lamps within a six-month span I now refer to as my “lava period.” It started when I broke my lava lamp of eight years by leaving it on for two weeks. The lamp had survived the dumpster I found it in, and two cross-country moves, but it couldn’t endure its own heat. Many things went wrong at once: the wax (the “lava,” the substance that moves) started sticking to the glass, the liquid lost its color, and the spring that sat at the base of the globe broke into pieces. Little bits of metal bobbed at the surface, as though drowning and reaching up for help.

Bereft, I went on the internet, where I quickly learned that we were in the midst of a lava lamp shortage. It was 2022 and Schylling, the leading U.S. manufacturer of lava lamps, had temporarily shut down the LAVA® online store, citing supply chain issues. I turned to eBay, where price gouging meant that most of the available lava lamps were going for hundreds of dollars. In a panic, I made lowball offers on the only three listed for under thirty. I didn’t expect to, but I won them all. 

After that, I couldn’t stop. I ordered a lava lamp shaped like a crayon, a lava lamp from 1971 still in its box, a lava lamp embedded in a six-foot-tall standing lamp. I was always looking for good deals. Once, I met a woman in a gas station parking lot off the interstate to buy a vintage glitter lamp for ten dollars.

My partner wanted me to stop buying lava lamps. It was an expensive hobby, and we were running out of room in our apartment. But like the web encryptors at Cloudflare, I cared about the differences between each lava lamp: the way some produce slow, luminous pillars while others look like bottled weather. Governed by heat and by fluid dynamics, no lamp will flow the same way twice. Every detail matters: the temperature of the room, the balance of chemicals and wax. Despite its simple design, a lava lamp’s contents are as permutable as an alphabet. Together, a group of lamps felt like a series of symbols written in wax that I could never quite read: blue column, crimson circle, yellow ribbon. I kept buying lava lamps because I wanted to build a kind of language with them. 

I started using the lamps as a teaching tool, showing them to high school students as a way to talk about form and content in poetry. The form was the lamp’s external shape: the silver base like an hourglass, the bottle resting atop it. The content was everything in the lamp that could move: the water, the chemicals, the wax. A student once asked how the heat from the light bulb that made the lamp function would be categorized: Form, or content? I didn’t have a good answer—it felt like a secret third thing. 

The lava lamp’s origins are the stuff of internet folklore. The story goes that the first one ever made was intended to serve as an egg timer. Modeled after an hourglass, it was filled with oil and water that would separate with heat. If sand in a bottle could measure time, the inventor Donald Dunnet had asked, why not liquid? In 1963, a nudist experimental filmmaker named Edward Craven Walker began selling what we now know as the lava lamp. He had been inspired by seeing one of Dunnet’s egg timers in a pub. The lava lamp was originally marketed as a high-end decoration for sophisticates. Its rocket-like design, a reflection of the iconography of the space age, soon became emblematic of the psychedelic culture of the period. Walker used the money he made selling lava lamps to help fund his nudist resort. 

Teaching over webcam in the glow of a lava lamp, I tell my students that poems—like jokes—hinge on surprise. Patterns established and then altered. A lava lamp, then, is a perfect poem. A liquid hourglass of light, it measures out time in stanzaic blobs. People need poems and lava lamps for the same reasons. We need light that feels familiar in all its shifting. 

Nora Claire Miller is the author of the chapbook LULL. Their poem “Rumor” appears in our new Fall issue, no. 246. 

Shuets Udono, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Putting Ballard on a master’s course list, as I’ve done a couple of times, provokes a reaction that’s both funny and illuminating. Asked to read Crash or The Atrocity Exhibition, the more vociferous students invariably express their revulsion, while the more reflective ones voice their frustration that, although the ideas might be compelling, the prose “isn’t good.” This is especially the case with students who’ve been exposed to creative writing classes: they complain that the books are so full of repetition they become machinic or monotonous; also that they lack solid, integrated characters with whom they can identify, instead endlessly breaking open any given plot or mise-en-scène to other external or even unconnected scenes, contexts, and histories, resulting in a kind of schizoid narrative space that’s full of everyone and no one.

This second group, of course, is absolutely right in its analysis; what’s funny (and, if I can teach them anything, reversible) about their judgment is that it is these very elements (repetition, machinism, schizoid hypermnesia) that make Ballard’s work so brilliant. Not only are his rhythmic cycles, in which phrases and images return in orders and arrangements that mutate and reconfigure themselves as though following some algorithm that remains beyond our grasp, at once incantatory, hallucinatory, and the very model and essence of poetry; but, mirroring the way that information, advertising, propaganda, public (and private) dialogue, and even consciousness itself run in reiterative loops and circuits, constitute a realism far exceeding that of the misnamed literary genre. If his personae are split, multiplied, dispersed, this is because they are true subjects of a networked and fragmented hypermodernity—ones for whom identification, if it is to amount to anything more than a consoling fiction, must come through man’s recognition of himself (as Georges Bataille put it) not in the degrading chains of logic but instead, with rage and ecstatic torment, in the virulence of his own phantasms.

While Ballard’s more outwardly conventional books may give us solider, more stable realities, what these realities often present—in, for example, Empire of the Sun, which is digestible enough for a blockbuster Spielberg adaptation—is a child (or childlike figure) frolicking against a backdrop provided by the destruction of an older order of reality that the world previously took for granted. It’s a cipher for his oeuvre as a whole: endlessly playing among the ruins, reassembling the broken or “found” pieces (styles, genres, codes, histories) with a passion rendered all the more intense and focused by the knowledge that it’s all—culture, the social order, the beliefs that underpin civilization—constructed, and can just as easily be unconstructed, reverse engineered back down to the barbaric shards from which it was cobbled together in the first place. To put it in Dorothean: In every context and at every level, Ballard’s gaze is fixed, fixated, on the man behind the curtain, not the wizard.

Ballard’s novels are radical in the true sense, in that they reach back to and reanimate the novel’s very roots. The presence of Robinson Crusoe in Concrete Island is glaring, as (I’d say) is that in Crash of Tristram Shandy, with its fascination for speeding mechanized land yachts and the springs of broken carriages, for the geometry of ramparts, trenches, culverts, all superimposed on Uncle Toby’s genital mutilation, his obsession with restaging assorted topologies of conflict. Or, for that matter, Don Quixote, with its hero’s obsessive reenactments on the public highways of iconic moments from popular entertainment, the triumphs and tragedies of those late-medieval movie stars, knights-errant. And doesn’t the same propensity for modulating and monotonously lullabying list-making run through Joyce, the Sinbad the Sailors and Tinbad the Tailors and Jinbad the Jailers parading through Bloom’s mind as he drifts into sleep? Doesn’t the same technoapocalyptic imaginary characterize Conrad’s bomb-carrying Professor, whose “thoughts caressed the images of ruin and destruction”? We could drag the literary cursor forward, through Ingeborg Bachmann, William S. Burroughs, Kathy Acker—or, indeed, all the way back to Homer and Aeschylus, to wheel-mounted wooden horses, flashing beacons, falling towers.

Ballard’s intelligence (and I use that term in its dual sense of intellectual capacity and source/input feed or “intel”) is expanded, encompassing a field comprising not just literature but also visual art (most notably the work of the Surrealists), cinema, psychoanalysis, sociology, and technological invention. Given his much-repeated claim that facts, real-world events, and ever-more-pervasive media are taking over from fiction, it seems high time that his own copious nonfiction output should be gathered together and laid bare to the same scrutiny—even if he would have rejected the distinction. Here, no less than in the novels, we’re treated, on repeat, to the forging of connections that, utterly counterintuitive though they may be, leap out like lightning flashes in their ineluctable lucidity: from the Wright brothers to the contraceptive pill via “the social and sexual philosophy of the ejector seat”; or from Hitler to the aforementioned Bloom via their common diet of the half-digested reference library, “vague artistic yearnings and clap-trap picked up from popular magazines.” And here, no less than in the novels, Ballard cements his place as one of English prose’s finest lyricists, conjuring from “the plane of intersection of the body of this woman in my room with the cleavage of Elizabeth Taylor” an image of “the glazed eyes of Chiang Kai Shek, an invasion plan of the offshore islands”; sounding the desolate immensity of Spain’s Río Seco, “the great deck of the drained river running inland, crossed by the white span of a modern motor bridge” beyond which extend “secret basins of cracked mud the size of ballrooms, models of a state of mind, a curvilinear labyrinth” while “juke-boxes play in the bars of Benidorm” and “the molten sea swallows the shadow of the Guardia Civil helicopter”; or (most haunting of all) affirming in a credo that, should I ever become supreme spiritual leader of a postrevolutionary Britain, I will institute as the prime text of national liturgy, replacing the defunct Lord’s Prayer:

I believe in the mysterious beauty of Margaret Thatcher, in the arch of her nostrils and the sheen on her lower lip; in the melancholy of wounded Argentine conscripts; in the haunted smiles of filling station personnel; in my dream of Margaret Thatcher caressed by that young Argentine soldier in a forgotten motel watched by a tubercular filling station attendant.

Adapted from the foreword to J. G. Ballard’s Selected Nonfiction, 1962–2007, edited by Mark Blacklock, to be published by MIT Press in October.

Tom McCarthy’s latest novel, The Making of Incarnation, was published in 2021. 

Work Projects Administration Poster Collection, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Pick up Chloe Aridjis’s Dialogue with a Somnambulist and open it somewhere shy of halfway and find a piece of writing called “Nail – Poem – Suit.” It is only one page long. Read it. Ask yourself what it is that you just read. A story? A prose poem? An essay? A portrait? When is the last time you couldn’t quite answer that question when confronted with a piece of contemporary writing? In our world of literary hyperprofessionalization it is not a question that comes up very often, and you may have to reach back into literary history to remember the writers who once provoked a similar uncertainty in you. Writers like Borges, writers like Kafka. Or even further back, to the undefinable and uncontainable prose of Thomas Browne’s Urn Burial, or those slivers of Sappho. Writers who thought of language as painters think of paint: not as means to an end but as the precious thing in itself.

Within this single page of Chloe’s three things collide—that nail, a poem, a suit—and all within one man’s consciousness, although this consciousness is rendered externally, by a voice that comes from who knows where. But describing Chloe is hard: Why not read the whole thing for yourself, right now?

A man walks down the street trying to recollect the final lines of an unfinished poem he had been composing two nights ago when the phone rang. It was his seventy-four-year-old mother calling to remind him of the suit she’d ordered for his birthday, now ready for collection at the tailor’s, although it was likely alterations would have to be made. He reaches the corner and treads on a large corrugated nail that goes rolling off the pavement and into the street. The man’s first thought is that this nail has fallen out from somewhere inside him; his second thought is that it dropped out of the woman wheeling a bicycle a few metres ahead. His third thought is that the nail fell out of the teenager with the pierced lip who delivers the post each morning. Unable to draw any conclusions, the man casts one final glance at the nail now lying parallel to the tire of a parked car and returns to the matter of the unfinished poem, which, should he ever complete it, will surely fit him better than the tailor-made suit.

What I love about Chloe’s work is the way it stages a series of rejections. It is not especially psychological. (The man does not think the nail has fallen out from inside him.) Nor is it overly obsessed with what we might call the relational. (The man does not think that the woman dropped the nail.) It rejects sociological generalizations. (The man does not think that the nail is the fault of this generation, or the internet, or “the way we live now.”) It is also beautiful. It sits like a jewel in your mind. It is not in the business of offering the reader prefabricated conclusions about the nature of social reality presented in the overfamiliar language of journalism, activism, or advertising. It is refreshingly unbound to any temporal sense of necessity. Chloe’s writing matters not because its topics are ripped from today’s headlines but because she is trying to illuminate this world using only words. The politics of her prose is existential rather than anecdotal, as it was with Kafka’s. In what way can a human being be made to feel like a bug? asks Kafka. What’s more significant in a person’s life? asks Chloe. Events, ideas or things? Nails, poems, or suits? And the single-minded search for words that “will surely fit”—better than any template or tailored suit—is what animates every page of this wonderful book.

—Zadie Smith

A friend in London handed me a copy of Kate Briggs’s The Long Form as I was about to board a plane, and I quickly read a hundred and fifty pages in the air. Over the next week or so the book bled into my dreams and my consciousness; I could think of almost nothing else but this story of a young single mother and her newborn, both in a desperate quest for sleep. There is a fly-on-the-wall quality to the prose, which sustains a quasi-verité account of the derangement (and joy) of new motherhood, whereby we imagine a story composed in real time, its author holding the baby in one arm and writing with the other. The Long Form is also an exhilarating experiment in form, an examination of the function of time in the novel, which includes an irresistible graphic element that punctuates the narrative and helps to conjure the stagelike setting occupied by the maternal dyad. Briggs invokes E. M. Forster—“Every novel needs a clock”—and indeed her novel’s timepiece has us on the edge of our seat, turning the pages in anticipation. I finished The Long Form and started again from the beginning; I wanted to understand how this miracle of a book had come to be; I was not ready to let go.

—Moyra Davey

Last month, I picked up Grand Tour by Elisa Gonzalez, a debut poetry collection out next week. Together, the poems have the quality of a diary whose pages have been scrambled. Time moves according to its own logic, sometimes conflicting with the body moving through it. Someone is always leaving, arriving. The poems stake out beginnings and endings almost obsessively, but then fail to oblige them. Mother, father, sister, brother: the relations are cyclical, slippery, each person moving in and out of the thing they represent. In “The Night Before I Leave Home,” Gonzalez writes:

My brother turns to me near sunrise
to ask, What do you think he’s doing? Right now?

And I spin a story of a father
waking to polish his teeth, spit blood
into the eye of a porcelain bowl, wash a face like my brother’s.

That was a game, yes, us seeking the man
he was when not hurting us one and then the other,
and then the game ended

It’s so easy to read poems too quickly. But I’ve been trying to return to these periodically, spontaneously, when I’m not so desperately seeking plot—though they contain that, too, and more.

—Maya Binyam, advisory editor

Bonner Springs City Library, Bonner Springs, Kentucky, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY 2.0,

A passage about LA (“ellay”) from Henry Hoke’s Open Throat, a novel narrated by a mountain lion:

the bright world below the park at night is a blur to me when I try to look out over it

but if I get close enough to a creature’s eye I can see what it sees and in the owl’s eye I see ellay clearly

more lights than I could ever count stretch out into the darkness and don’t stop stretching

I’m scared of how far they go

—Spencer Quong, business manager

From the fifties travel book The Crying of the Wind: Ireland, by Ithell Colquhoun:

Slender-legged colts stepped down the opposite bank to drink; they pawed the water nervously, seeming to want it muddy before tasting it. Perhaps they were not thoroughbreds, but they had a wild grace now seldom seen in English fields. None the less, I was thankful that the wide expanse of the current divided me from them, for I regard any horse as a psychotic with homicidal tendencies and prefer to avoid close quarters.

—Jane Breakell, development director

From the rollicklingly pleasurable Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy, which genuinely had me laughing out loud:

Looking back, I don’t know anyone he’d actually been wrong about—except of course me, but then as we know I am totally incomprehensible to everyone including myself.

—Sophie Haigney, web editor

The fourth sentence of Jack Skelley’s stoned-but-hyperactive The Complete Fear of Kathy Acker:

Anyway, I’m hearing this music in my head as I’m walking down the Mallway, and I see this paraplegic in a wheelchair, and he’s glaring at me with all the hatred he has, and the wheelchair motor is making this horrible screeching grinding sound, like some dentist drill piercing my skull, and I’m walking past this table set up by these right-to-lifers with all these pictures of unborn babies staring out at you utterly forlorn, and I’m just absorbing all this kind of stuff, and I’m thinking this is America and it doesn’t really feel too safe or good or anything anymore, because these Mall walls could come crashing down any minute in the slightest California earthquake—not to mention the inevitable nuclear holocaust, which I dreamed about again last night—the blast so loud it woke me up.

—Olivia Kan-Sperling, assistant editor

Two sentences from Robert Glück’s Jack the Modernist:

My childhood needed many secrets and secret places to lend depth to my loneliness but at heart I was totally prosaic about my suffering and its attendant strategies of goodness and solitude; it was like standing in line at the bank for x number of years.

My misfortune was that I lacked Jack’s love; Jack’s cock was the toothpick that stabilized my club sandwich of being and nothingness.

—Amanda Gersten, associate editor

From Crapalachia by Scott McClanahan, a coming-of-age memoir and a portrait of rural West Virginia:

The people worked in restaurants so that tourists could laugh at their accents. They were paying for something that was given for free. The people from here didn’t have to run a river to prove that it existed. They didn’t have to climb a mountain just to climb it. It was enough that the river was a river and the mountain was a mountain and inside of them were mountains too.

—Anna Rahkonen, intern

From Geoff Dyer’s Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, the type of book that heightens your sense that it is summer, and you’re living it:

You came to Venice, you saw a ton of art, you went to parties, you drank up a storm, you talked bollocks for hours on end and went back to London with a cumulative hangover, liver damage, a notebook almost devoid of notes and the first tingle of a cold sore.

—Camille Jacobson, engagement editor

From Gayl Jones’s The Birdcatcher, about a love triangle featuring a murderous artist:

He was silent, observing me.

“There’s almost nothing I wouldn’t do for you; you know that,” he said.

I heard the “almost.” Does every woman hear the “almost”?

—Izzy Ampil, intern

From Note-Book of Anton Chekhov, translated by S. S. Koteliansky and Leonard Woolf, found in a lovely used bookstore in Great Barrington, Massachusetts:

The most intolerable people are provincial celebrities.

—Andrew Martin, editor at large

Sharon Olds at left, with a GIrl Scout camp friend at Lake Tahoe, California, ca. 1956. Courtesy of Sharon Olds.

Who is Sharon Olds? Sharon Olds is an American poet, born in San Francisco in 1942. She has a Ph.D. in English from Columbia University and made her debut as a writer in 1980 with the poetry collection Satan Says. Since then, she has established herself as one of the most read, most decorated, and most controversial North American contemporary poets. “Sharon Olds’s poems are pure fire in the hands,” Michael Ondaatje has said. She became particularly well known after she refused to take part in a National Book Festival dinner organized by Laura Bush, then First Lady, in 2005, and wrote in an open letter: “So many Americans who had felt pride in our country now feel anguish and shame, for the current regime of blood, wounds and fire. I thought of the clean linens at your table, the shining knives and the flames of the candles, and I could not stomach it.”

The way I discovered her was through a poem on a particular penis, which came as a recommendation from a Finnish Swedish colleague: “Read Sharon Olds’s ‘The Pope’s Penis’!” How reading this little poem about the Pope’s sexual organ became contagious, I don’t know, but the fact is that at almost the same time, I got a text message from another colleague, who wrote that she was sitting in a waiting room somewhere reading Sharon Olds’s “The Pope’s Penis.” And here I must grab hold of you, reader, and shout, as though by international chain letter: Read Sharon Olds’s “The Pope’s Penis”! Let’s quote it in its entirety:

It hangs deep in his robes, a delicate
clapper at the center of a bell.
It moves when he moves, a ghostly fish in a
halo of silver seaweed, the hair
swaying in the dark and the heat—and at night
while his eyes sleep, it stands up
in praise of God.

The poem is an introduction to certain motifs—the body, darkness, the desire to confront, imagery, et cetera—which often appear in other equally unsettling, gripping variations and combinations elsewhere in her poetry. For example, here, in this extract from “Self-Portrait, Rear View,” in which the poem’s narrator is standing in a hotel room and, in another mirror and another light, catches sight of her fifty-four-year-old backside, “once a tight end”:

                                                 I flutter
the wing of my ass again, and see,
in a clutch of eggs, each egg,
on its own, as if shell-less, shudder, I wonder
if anyone has ever died,
looking in a mirror, of horror.

It is in part the directness and mercilessness of her texts that have made her controversial. Does she exploit her own family for poetic purposes? Does she unjustly expose her parents and children? Perhaps it is the heartbreaking quality of her poems that has both won her so many prizes and afforded her poems the opportunity to appear in Oprah Winfrey’s magazine, alongside articles with titles such as “5 (Doable) Ways to Increase the Love in Your Life.” She herself says in an interview with Salon that the reason she is able to touch so many people is that she is not an “abstract thinker.” She is concerned with the day-to-day, with life, with looking at it, with letting observations and feelings flow down her arm and out through her pen, onto the paper. It’s life that is important, and these poems help you to see that.

It’s also true that life would not have been the same without these poems. Sharon Olds is one of the most powerful examples to show that cautious writers who don’t dare to write what they really want to, for fear of reprisals, are not what we need. In “The Sisters of Sexual Treasure,” she writes:

As soon as my sister and I got out of our
mother’s house, all we wanted to
do was fuck, obliterate
her tiny, sparrow body and narrow
grasshopper legs.

Personal, offensive poems? She says herself, in interviews, that she prefers the description “apparently personal.” “I have never said that the poems don’t draw on personal experience,” she says. “But I’ve never said that they do.” It’s a paradox: the words apparently and personal are obviously contradictory: personal indicates that we are being drawn into someone’s intimate sphere, having secrets whispered in our ear; apparently in this context suggests “false, not genuine, pretend”—something looks personal, but do we have proof? Does it annoy us, to feel that it’s only “apparent” that Olds’s poems are personal—that is to say, coming from a real person? Does not the word also have something magical about it—”to make something appear, become visible”? Is that how it can be read? That the personal appears? I would like to say yes! But we can’t be certain that what we discover is Sharon Olds’s personal. It could just as easily be our own. Perhaps we will never know. We only feel it, as a slight pressure on the solar plexus, as a boom in our heart, as a sudden lift out of our own good skin.

Translated from the Norwegian by Kari Dickson.

Gunnhild Øyehaug is an award-winning Norwegian poet, essayist, and fiction writer. Her most recent book is Evil Flowers. Øyehaug lives in Bergen, where she teaches creative writing.

Kari Dickson is an award-winning literary translator from Norwegian into English.

Alejo Carpentier, 1979. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

I like to think of literature as a second language—especially the second language of the monolingual. I’m thinking, naturally, about those of us who never systematically studied a foreign language, but who had access, thanks to translation—a miracle we take for granted all too easily—to distant cultures that at times came to seem close to us, or even like they belonged to us. We didn’t read Marguerite Duras or Yasunari Kawabata because we were interested in the French or the Japanese language per se, but because we wanted to learn—to continue learning that foreign language called literature, as broadly international as it is profoundly local. Because this foreign language functions, of course, inside of our own language; in other words, our language comes to seem, thanks to literature, foreign, without ever ceasing to be ours.

It’s within that blend of strangeness and familiarity that I want to recall my first encounter with the literature of Alejo Carpentier, which occurred, as I’m sure it did for so many Spanish speakers of my generation and after, inside a classroom. “In this story, everything happens backward,” said a teacher whose name I don’t want to remember, before launching into a reading of “Viaje a la semilla” (“Journey to the seed”), Carpentier’s most famous short story, which we would later find in almost every anthology of Latin American stories, but which at the time, when we were thirteen or fourteen years old, we had never read. The teacher’s solemn, perhaps exaggerated reading allowed us, however, to feel or to sense the beauty of prose that was strange and different. It was our language, but converted into an unknown music that could nonetheless, like all music, especially good music, be danced to. Many of us thought it was a dazzling story, surprising and crazy, but I don’t know if any of us would have been able to explain why. Because of the odd delicacy of some of the sentences, perhaps. Maybe this one: “For the first time, the rooms slept without window-blinds, open onto a landscape of ruins.” Or this one: “The chandeliers of the great drawing room now sparkled very brightly.”

Although our teacher had already told us that everything in the story happened backward, from the future to the past, back toward the seed, knowing the trick did not cancel out the magic. The magic did come to an end, though, when the teacher ordered us to list all the words we didn’t know and look them up—each of our backpacks always contained a small dictionary, which, we soon found, was not big enough to contain Carpentier’s splendid, abundant lexicon.

Was that how people in Cuba spoke? Or was it, rather, the writer’s language? Or were we the ones who, quite simply, were ignorant of our own language? But was that our language? We discussed something like this, dictionaries in hand, while the teacher—I don’t know why I remember this—plugged some numbers into a calculator laboriously, perhaps struggling with his farsightedness.

I reread “Journey to the seed” just now, and I again find it extraordinary, for reasons I presume are different. But I get distracted by the melancholic attempt to guess which of those words I didn’t know back then: embrasure, denticle, entablature, scapulary, daguerreotype, psaltery, doublet, gnomon, balustrades, licentious, gunwads, matchstaff, epaulet, sentient, décolleté, tricorne, taper, tassel, calash, sorrel, benzoin, sophist, crinoline, ruff, octander …

To read Carpentier entailed, first of all, listening to him—listening to him the way we listen to a song in a language very like our own but that we don’t understand entirely, enjoying the echoes and contrasts, and then translating him. Translating before we knew how to translate, or even that we were translating. Translating him into our own language. For someone who grew up with the Spanish of Chile, reading Carpentier was, of course, to travel to the island of Cuba, but above all it was to travel to the island of Carpentier.

***

The foreignness of his own language was clear to Carpentier from the start, as the son of a French father and a Russian mother. Throughout his life, he affirmed the official story that he had been born in Havana, but a few years after Carpentier’s death, Guillermo Cabrera Infante leaked the juicy tidbit that he had actually been born in Lausanne, Switzerland (a bit of gossip that was never disproven, perhaps because it was supported by a birth certificate).

The hypotheses about this lie—or, to put it more kindly, this slight displacement of the truth—are numerous, of course. Carpentier probably wanted to minimize his foreignness, for reasons unknown, though it’s fascinating to contemplate the possibilities. Listening to him in interviews on YouTube, any Spanish speaker would agree that this is a person who speaks the language with unusual dexterity and mastery, with his guttural pronunciation of the r as the sole, though conclusive, mark of his foreignness—and so it wasn’t hard to believe this new version of his biography, which presented him to us as a Cuban whose mother tongue was not Spanish, though he mastered the language very quickly, with extraordinary proficiency, when he arrived in Cuba with his parents at four or five years old.

There is no disputing that Carpentier was born on December 26, 1904, which is not relevant in and of itself, of course, except for readers who are interested in astrology. But I mention it because that is also the birthday of Esteban, one of the protagonists of Explosion in a Cathedral, who in fact becomes a translator—significant, since the book is often understood as a novel about the “translation” of the ideals of the French Revolution to the Caribbean. Although we later come to realize that the beautiful and terrible initial section foreshadows Esteban’s importance, the figure of that orphaned, sickly boy seems, in the first chapter, less relevant than his cousins, Carlos and Sofía, with whom he lives as one more brother in a big house in Havana.

The novel opens with these three teenagers in mourning after the death of their father, a well-to-do plantation owner who had been widowed years before. Instead of returning to the convent where she has been educated so far, Sofía chooses to stay home with her brother, Carlos—who is destined, or more like condemned, to take over the family business—and her cousin, whom she tries to care for and protect. The three young people cope with their pain even as they discover the joys of this shared life, “absorbed in interminable readings, discovering the universe through books.” Grief becomes, as well, “a fitting pretext to stay aloof from all commitments or obligations, ignoring a society whose provincial intolerance tried to bind existence to ordinary norms—to appearing in certain places at certain times, dining in the same modish pastry shops, spending Christmas on the sugar plantations or on estates in Artemisa, where rich landholders vied with each other over the number of mythological statues they could place on the verges of their tobacco fields.”

They are distracted from this intense and entertaining life of seclusion by Victor Hugues, a trader from Marseilles of indeterminate age (“thirty or forty perhaps, or maybe much younger”), whose seductive irruption on the scene opens up a promising space attuned to revolutionary idealism and enthusiasm. Rounding out the group is Doctor Ogé, a mestizo physician and Freemason and a friend of Hugues’s, who tries to help Esteban as he is in the throes of an asthma attack. There is a crucial scene in which Sofía refuses to give her hand to the doctor, betraying racial prejudices that are typical of her class and time (“No one would trust a negro to build a palace, defend a prisoner, arbitrate a theological dispute, or govern a country”). But Victor Hugues replies categorically, “All men are born equal”—and it turns out that Ogé not only treats Esteban’s asthma attack, but also cures him completely. This miracle leaves an indelible mark on the characters’ values and prospects, especially Sofía’s and Esteban’s; the latter, now free of illness and faced with the racing speed of history, dares to embark on a different life.

I don’t want to give anything away here about the fate of certain characters who go on to engage directly with the changing and bloody era in which they live. Perhaps it will suffice to say that Victor Hugues and Esteban set out for France, from where Hugues—a historical character adapted by Carpentier from diverse and elusive sources—returns to the Caribbean in a position of power, on his way to becoming the “Robespierre of the Islands,” while Esteban, after discovering Paris and feeling “more French than the French, more rebellious than the rebels, clamoring for peremptory measures, draconian punishments, exemplary retribution,” and moving to Bayonne to translate ineffective revolutionary pamphlets, also returns to the Caribbean, having now become the narrator whom, almost without realizing, we met in the novel’s preamble. Increasingly disillusioned and guilt-ridden, Esteban finds the appreciative contemplation of nature to be practically his only consolation. As for Sofía, her marriage seems to set her up for riches and insignificance, but widowhood and her later reunion with Hugues turn her into the surprise protagonist of the novel’s last stretch; her decisions, motivations, and fate have for decades fed an interpretive debate that is today perhaps more urgent than ever.

***

“I think I am one of the few Cubans who can boast of having visited almost all of the islands in the Caribbean,” said Carpentier in an interview in which he emphasizes that none of those islands is like any other. That cult of the specific inundates each of the minute and vivid descriptions that abound in his work. The beauty of Carpentier’s prose can never be emphasized enough, and in this novel it rises to incredible levels, especially in the descriptions of marine landscapes: “Esteban saw in the coral forests a tangible image, an intimate yet ungraspable figuration of Paradise Lost, where the trees, still badly named, with the clumsy and quavering tongue of a Man-Child, were endowed with the apparent immortality of this luxurious flora—this monstrance, this burning bush—for which the sole sign of autumn or springtime was a variation in tone or a soft migration of shadows …”

This exuberant prose, which is proudly and decidedly baroque, still manages not to compete with the story. We are carried forward, it seems to me, at a fluctuating speed, and we even, at times, laboriously change ships; the pace is remarkable, as are the pauses, the tricky overall tardiness that opens up emotional spaces and unsuspected storylines. The narrative inhabits us, so to speak. At times, we don’t really know what we are reading, and, more importantly, for long stretches we forget that we are reading. Carpentier works his style in such a way that it is still possible to read this book as a historical novel, even as an adventure tale, although of course he problematizes the idea of adventure (“Esteban knew well the tedium the word adventure could conceal,” the narrator says at one point).

It’s possible that a pessimistic reading of the novel, one that is grounded in the brutality it relates so bluntly, might be more persuasive than one that fully validates the idea of progress. The world of this novel is—much like our own, in fact—complex, protean, ambivalent, filled with characters who fluctuate between feeling fascinated and repulsed by the present, between heroism and mediocrity, between opportunistic conformity and radical idealism. It occurs to me that, as much for Spanish-speaking readers as for English-speaking ones, the shift in the English title is useful. The original title, El siglo de las luces—which would be “The Age of Enlightenment” in English—is ironic in a way that hangs over the book like a disturbing shadow, while the actual English title highlights the crucial recurrence in the novel of a painting called Explosion in a Cathedral, inspired by a work by François de Nomé, which depicts a halted movement, an “endless falling without falling,” and, along with the repeated references to Goya’s The Disasters of War, gives the novel a constant and powerful visual counterpoint.

Because it was first published in 1962, the novel was initially read, naturally, in light of the Cuban Revolution, with Carpentier already en route to becoming an emblem of a successful revolution, as he was until his death. I don’t think that the novel, in and of itself, allows for some of the unequivocal expert readings it was subjected to: there are critical commentaries that seem to understand it as a collection of the author’s badly disguised opinions, which is particularly unfair given its complexity, ambition, and reach. Does this novel express a real hope in revolutionary processes, or rather a radical skepticism? “Esteban’s journey is not circular but spiral,” notes Roberto González Echevarría in his stupendous book Alejo Carpentier: The Pilgrim at Home, a particularly illuminating reading that attends to the nuances of Explosion in a Cathedral’s striking monumentality.

***

Italo Calvino once stated that classic works of literature are those that have never finished saying what they have to say. Explosion in a Cathedral is one such novel. Especially to us, who in a way inhabit the future that it foresees or prefigures. Read today, some sixty years since its original publication, at the end of a pandemic, amid wars and totalitarian governments and a radical climate crisis, a novel like Explosion in a Cathedral continues to accompany us, to question us, to challenge and move us, and ultimately to help us in the arduous and terrible exercise of reading the world.

Contrasting the world of the novel with the present could open many a debate, and I imagine them all as vibrant and impassioned. What happens to us when we realize that there are others for whom we are the others? Do we ever truly become aware of such a thing? Is it possible to change history without violence, without thousands of innocent dead? What does this novel have to tell us about colonialism, globalization, feminism, human rights, the rights of nature, transculturation, migration, war?

Perhaps the irrational wish that Spanish were his mother tongue led Carpentier to build his astonishing version of that language, which takes on, even for Spanish speakers, a music that is old and new at the same time, one that allows past, present, and future to coexist. Literature, at the end of the day, is a complex form of consciousness that allows us to imagine what we would be like if only we spoke more languages. And, of course, that includes imagining what we would be like had we learned the languages that were wiped out in our own lands and in the territories of neighboring countries, the languages that were savaged and erased to create the illusion of monolingualism. Perhaps if we respond to the challenges raised by this novel, if we undertake the countless discussions it permits and induces, it will help us become more humble, less dumb, less deaf.

Translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell.

From the foreword to Alejo Carpentier’s Explosion in a Cathedral, to be published in a new translation by Adrian Nathan West by Penguin Classics next month.

Alejandro Zambra’s latest novel, Chilean Poet, was a New Yorker Best Book of the Year in 2022. He is the author of Multiple Choice; My Documents, a finalist for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award; and three previous novels: Ways of Going Home, The Private Lives of Trees, and Bonsai. He lives in Mexico City.

Megan McDowell is the recipient of a 2020 Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among other awards, and has been short- or long-listed for the Booker International prize four times. She lives in Santiago, Chile.

Friendship bracelets, Ra’ike, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

I’m interested in stories that gently erase the boundaries between love and friendship, featuring characters who shuffle the two feelings in unexpected ways. I like narratives that navigate contradictions and do away with false binaries, illustrating the complexity of what we humans call intimacy. Who is really capable of drawing a hard boundary between feelings? My story in the Summer issue of the Review, “My Good Friend,” follows two elderly friends who have shared a lifetime of friendship right in the neighborhood of romance. For these two old folks, friendship is the mountain one climbs to reach a deeper viewpoint on love.

Simone de Beauvoir’s novel The Inseparables, about the friendship between two young girls, Sylvie and Andrée, is one of the many gems I’ve encountered. Based on de Beauvoir’s own passionate friendship that began in youth, with a girl named Zaza, the book was written five years after she published The Second Sex, and it’s clear how the feelings born from that friendship structured her personality and helped to shape even her philosophical interests. “Nothing so interesting had ever happened to me,” Sylvie says of the first time she met Andrée. “It suddenly seemed as if nothing had ever happened to me at all.”

Young Sylvie wants to express this feeling somehow, to tell her friend about the transformation that has happened inside her. On Andrée’s thirteenth birthday, Sylvie carefully and anxiously sews a silk purse by hand as a gift, hoping it will tell her friend something that words can’t quite. Sylvie hands the bag to Andrée and, seeing her astonishment, she has the impression that something would have happened between them, maybe a tender kiss, had it not been for the presence of their mothers.

Together they become teenagers, and Andrée, the more extroverted of the pair, begins a little romance with a boy against her mother’s wishes. Sylvie starts to feel jealous before she even knows the name of the feeling. Andrée is forced to admit to her mother that, yes, she had kissed the boy, she had kissed him because she loved him. She later tells Sylvie, who is overcome by complete shock: “I lowered my head. Andrée was unhappy and the idea of it was unbearable. But her unhappiness was so foreign to me; the kind of love where you kiss had no truth for me.” After a few pages we realize that a kiss is something of a metric of passion for the two young girls, the naive way in which they measure the beginnings of love even as they wrestle with the ambiguity of their own relationship.

Simone and Zaza eventually left home for their studies—literature for Zaza, philosophy for Simone—and they reported life’s many novelties, love stories, and discoveries in careful letters to each other. In one of her letters to Zaza, de Beauvoir wrote, “Every page is always bliss, happiness in bigger and bigger lettering. And I love you more than ever at this moment, dear past, dear present, my inseparable darling.” This was the last letter between the two. Zaza died prematurely of an illness, and de Beauvoir would always carry with her the gift of this precious love for a friend. Like a silent river flowing beneath the papers and theories that would influence all Western thinking, there Zaza was with Simone. Zaza and a friendship’s love.

—Juliana Leite, author of “My Good Friend”

On a recent drive home from Knoxville to Nashville, I started listening to Sadurn’s album from last year, Radiator. It was very exciting because I liked it a lot, and I listened to a lot of Sadurn over the next few months. The band’s main singer and songwriter, g, can make their voice take very casual steps up and down in pitch, like on the song “dirt may,” specifically the version on the EP Sadurn / Ther Split. The song contains a moment in which g sings the word hear with at least six syllables, which is one of the most beautiful things I’ve heard, and which is responsible for the many times I’ve listened to it on repeat. 

According to the EP’s bandcamp page, Sadurn / Ther Split was “recorded on a 50 year old tape machine in a basement in West Philadelphia, Winter Solstice of 2018.” Sadurn shares the EP with a producer and musician named Heather Jones, who sometimes records as Ther. I did not initially like Ther’s songs on the EP. But later on I tried again, and found two things: that two of these songs (“advil” and “april in paris”) have some of the sweetest lyrics I’ve heard, even if I don’t totally understand them—are they about siblings? childhood friends?—and also, though the songs are attributed only to Ther, g’s voice is in the background, taking those steps that mean so much to me. The unnamed almost-duet feels very personal, very friendly, and again strikingly beautiful, even though at first I found the whole thing grating, maybe unpleasant, and potentially terrible. The internet says their friend Jon Cox was also present on guitar for many of the songs, though I didn’t know to recognize him.

All this reminded me of my friend Gwen, who always reads my writing. Recently I sent her something longish, and she sent me a picture of it printed out, most likely from the printer-fax-copier at the office where I used to work and where she still does. Although she might not be formally credited in any final version of the long thing, if there is a final version, she will be very much present within it, the same way she is in many things I have written, as are Anya, Nicole, Oliver, Sophie, and others. I feel like my creative ambitions shifted about two years ago, when I figured out or decided that my greatest artistic joy would most likely always be emailing my writing to people I like a lot, receiving their writing in return, and later talking about our drafts, or at least communicating via Google Docs comments. I like to think that all the people whose art I love are really just messing around with their friends, and sometimes a product emerges later, really like a postmortem on “one time we hung out and did this together,” and likely by now we’re all doing other things. 

—Devon Geyelin