Chasing Memory: A Review of Walking on the Ceiling by Aysegül Savas

Unreliable narrators abound in literary criticism. They are certainly no stranger to graduate seminars, where suspicious reading approaches interrogate what lies beneath and beyond the text. Yet Aysegül Savas’s Walking on the Ceiling transforms this uncertainty into a novel of longing and self-creation—a subtler tribute to Joan Didion’s insistence that “we tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Nunu, a Turkish woman recounting her experiences in Paris and Istanbul, acknowledges embellishments and failures of memory. Far from a stale device, these distortions offer compelling glimpses into her psyche and motives. Even as Nunu upends the traditional writer/muse dynamic after meeting a British author—described only as M.—in Paris, she confronts her mother’s complex legacy.

The brief chapters that populate Walking on the Ceiling, some only a sentence long, fit well with Nunu’s early warning. Though she will “set down some of the facts” of her friendship with the writer M.,“stories are reckless things…When you tell a story, you set out to leave so much behind.” Large amounts of white space confirm this observation, creating room for what remains unsaid. Nunu’s friendship with M. reveals a similar dynamic; she becomes his de facto guide to Turkish culture. Meeting M. after a bookshop reading, she ingratiates herself with him as they trade impressions of Istanbul.

At first glance, we seem headed for an old story: a well-known male writer becomes fascinated with a younger woman. This initial take proves deceptive, however. M. admires Nunu as a perceived insider, praising her mastery of the Turkish language and intimate knowledge of Istanbul, but she may be the outsider and creator of the two. Though she remembers her mother fondly when speaking with M., she does not share less picturesque aspects of her childhood, including her father’s suicide. Nunu claims she is working on a novel about “Akif amca,” her mother’s former neighbor with western ties. While she assures M. that Akif amca was a great but undiscovered poet, she reveals elsewhere that she finds his writings to be “amateurish” and “didactic.” These fabrications seem typical of her interactions with others, as she convinced one former boyfriend that she was abused. But Nunu grows increasingly uncomfortable with their correspondence, accusing M. of using her as a “jukebox” of ready-made stories. Readers are left with the impression of an intriguing social chameleon, curating her self-image for every person she meets.

As the dynamic between the two unfolds, it becomes clear that this fractured, non-chronological narration is more than an end in itself. Nunu’s brief anecdotes about being a woman adrift in Paris feel especially poignant. Horrified when she orders a hot chocolate with steak tartare, an arrogant waiter mocks her when she dares to ask for a takeout box: “Sure…You can have it for breakfast, with a hot chocolate.” Not since Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight have I read a novel that captures the embarrassment and disorientation of a grieving expatriate so effectively. However uneven these reflections may be, a core emerges quickly: Nunu’s late mother. When her mother dies after an illness, she collects the remembrances, nostalgia, anger, and resentment that defined their relationship, attempting to form a cohesive story. But with each turn of this narrative kaleidoscope, her mother’s image keeps changing. She is alternately an eccentric, according to her sisters; a cold manipulator who ignores her husband’s despair; a distant mother grappling with family tragedy; and a sick woman desperate to reconnect with her daughter. Their failed attempts at connection are stark. As a child after her father’s death, Nunu plays what she calls the “silence game,” finding ways to give her mother space while claiming she is the one who needs solitude. Later, when her mother is eager to become closer, she uses that silence for rejection. Throughout Walking on the Ceiling, Nunu frets about the “damage” words can cause and the loss they incur, but it is clear that she cannot cast off the various lenses that color her memories.

Walking on the Ceiling adopts the well-worn tactic of unreliable narration with empathy and originality. Its elegiac prose confronts loss and emptiness with a deceptively muted tone, inviting readers to face the hollowness, inconsistency, but ultimate necessity of storytelling.

All the Faces Made of Wax: A Review of Edward Carey's Little

Edward Carey’s extraordinary novel Little follows Marie, an abandoned oddity whose small and spare physical presence sparks remarks like “little minor monster in a child’s dress” and “little bold face.” With a haunting cast of peripheral characters and a scattering of unsettling illustrations, Carey brilliantly animates the goings on within the tiny and seemingly inconsequential corners of a very dangerous world, namely Paris during the burgeoning French Revolution.

The book proceeds in decade-long chunks and covers the span of nearly ninety years. The resulting work is both claustrophobic and immense, delving deep and personal into unseen moments in history while never shying away from the darkness of obsession or the sweet sadness of love.

The novel begins as Marie, or “Little,” finds herself learning to become an apprentice to a doctor whose specialty is crafting wax models of human organs for academic purposes. As the doctor begins to set up a business of casting wax heads, Marie learns how to create representations of people through molding likenesses and drawing. She’s the one behind the illustrations within the text, which punctuate her experiences with a startling approach towards reality.

From the very first chapter, every moment that passes is a step further away from security for Marie. She does not live a happy life, nor does she find true kindness from any corner of her mostly miserable existence. Instead, she finds her agency and her power through creating representations of people, representations that refuse to be influenced by anger or vanity or even the ever-growing pressures of political power. Her skill is a dangerous one in a world in which everyone seems to be telling themselves stories about how the world works, while constantly failing to truly understand it.

The peripheral characters of Little can often read as petty and somewhat grubby, but they come to life in their wretched specificity. Because they are presented through the lens of Marie, they are always understood as human and always understood as dangerous. Faithful to her gift, Marie’s perspective never falters. She is singular in the way that she sees people and the world they inhabit. She does not make monsters out of people, though the people around her may behave monstrously.

The crime of seeing only fragments of a person’s humanity is one that is perpetuated by everyone in the book but the protagonist. Whether on the streets of Berne, in a tailor’s house in Paris, the halls of Versailles, or the creaking monstrosity that had once been a monkey hotel, Little documents the slow fading of humanity, both as an interior movement and as a response to exterior forces, featuring wax figures who are treated as if they are something worth seeing and people who are treated as if they are not.

Little asks what it means to capture a person’s image and what a person’s image can represent. It wonders what it means to strip others down to their parts and illustrates the varied behavior that people will justify when they see others as objects or monsters or threats.

In the end, the book itself serves as a solution to the question that it poses. Though Marie maintains a point of view that is ignored by all around her within the story, the text itself delivers her story in a way that makes her humanity impossible to ignore. Because she remains so singular in her perspective, she is, in a strange way, protected from the world’s machinations. Though she is never understood by anyone in the story, she is understood by the reader. Through the clever machinations of Little, Marie’s story is one that has been told in full.

People and How They Live and How They Struggle: On René Steinke's Friendswood

René Steinke’s latest novel Friendswood will have its paperback release on May 26th. Steinke, a National Book Award finalist for Holy Skirts, offers the beautiful story of a small Texas town that has survived a tragedy, but never fully recovered. A number of families living in the same development lost loved ones to the suspicious emergence of rare cancers. The novel’s prelude offers a look at their idyllic life on the verge of disaster:

It was an evening that would melt into the summer, calm, humid, and expansive. The air did not yet smell of dead lemons. The red and blue sores hadn’t yet appeared on anyone’s neck. The black snakes hadn’t wriggled up from the ground. And she had no idea that this world was not without an end.

After being displaced from their homes, the controversy dies down and the town tries to move on. When bad things happen in Friendswood, Texas the town does its best to keep such things quiet. However, not all of the community’s members can abide the culture of silence and acceptance. Years after the tragedy, difficult ecological, religious, cultural, and economic issues percolate to the surface forcing the town’s residence to face what they would prefer to ignore. It is a silence that comes from many places, fear of course, but also the desire to hold onto the town as it once was; a wish from the community to forever live in a time when life was simple and pure.

This is a big book that deals with big issues, but it does not do so on a global plain. Instead, Friendswood is deeply personal, at times completely isolating. The novel’s depictions of struggle, sadness, perseverance, and loss register on a level only the individual can know. Each character’s failures and success happen on a synaptic level, rather than a town hall stage. Steinke calls on four different perspectives to tell the story: Lee is the reluctant activist looking to stop the devastation she experienced from being visited upon anyone else, Willa and Dex are two teens involved with an unreported assault that is quietly dividing the town, and Hal is a deeply religious real estate broker who wants to bring business back to Friendswood. The narrative breath of this braided novel gives the reader a pluralistic view of unilateral thinking. The differing points of view allow for a greater and more complex story. The different ideologies and hard held beliefs challenge the reader to see with another’s eyes. The result is extremely enlightening and very satisfying.

While each character’s perspective is essential to the whole, Lee’s story is the true north. She has lost her daughter to cancer. The diagnosis coincided with the emergence of strange, snake-like, oily protuberances from the ground. The neighborhood, where Lee’s family lived, has been laid low by the toxic soil from an oil refinery with shoddy disposal practices. Although the plant itself has since closed, it was never proven responsible for the cancer cluster. Lee finds herself struggling against the gentry, but is unwilling to let her daughter’s death remain unexplained. She endeavors to restart her quest for proof and justice.

She dug for another hour. She pitched the shovel into the ground…and threw it behind her. She didn’t’ even worry anymore about what the toxic shit might do to her…when the hole was the size of a small bathtub, she heard Jess’s voice in the sound of digging, Mom, Mom, Mom.

Hal on the behalf of other citizens in Friendswood moves forward with plans to build new homes on the site that is responsible for the cancer causing pollution. Seemingly setting up the good guy and bad guy, the novel has all the trappings of a thriller. Instead a much more powerful exploration of human struggle is revealed. It is one that largely plays out in the mind. These interior struggles, like carcinogens, are largely invisible to the casual observer and just as dangerous. “Hal sat down and just breathed for two minutes. He felt the ache in his heart for whiskey, and said a tired prayer. Help. He checked his voicemail…”

The writing held in Friendswood is astonishing; seeming effortless, in that way that only the most thoroughly practiced and equipped writer can pull off. It is style without its pretense; that rare book that is both literary and accessible. Beyond the gorgeous writing, the character work is exceptional. Steinke alternates from teenage voices and adult voices without losing any gravitas, accessibility, or realism. The novel uses a classic protagonist and antagonist dynamic that feels familiar and comfortable at first, but slowly digs into new and significantly richer material as the fight is clearly being fought within each character. This archetypal struggle revealed in the internal conflicts of the characters brings depth and nuance to each point of view. The complexity and richness of the internal lives makes them empathic and accessible. Even through this pluralistic lens, where an individual’s actions can be taken as either deplorable or laudable, their motivations are never left unexplored or misunderstood. When mapping the dramatic landscape of Friendswood the conflicts between people with differing agendas would be cartography, and what Steinke is doing here is spelunking — getting deep below the surface and to the core of things. “Dex knew he had an inside self that was still unfamiliar to him, a shadowy thing he glimpsed while driving straight on the highway.”

Yet, it somehow deals with these larger than life issues that can make heroes or cowards of anyone of us. In its most reductive state, this novel deals with the environment verses commerce, religion verse secularism, and the individual verse the society. However, its main preoccupation is people and how they live and how they struggle and how, every day, they are faced with the choice to move forward through life or be swallowed whole.

Labor of Love: On Ramona Ausubel's A Guide to Being Born

The strange cover — a beautiful, precise, mishmash of subjects – is perfect for the stories it protects. They, too, are a mixed bag surrounding the subject of familial relationships of one kind or another, whether between mothers and children-to-be; fathers and their desire to carry something around, womblike, in a set of drawers; or lovers and their possible futures as seen embodied around them in the elderly couples inhabiting their neighborhood.

From the very start, this book informs the reader that these stories contain elements of the abnormal; consider the opening of “Safe Passage,” the first story in the collection:

The grandmothers — dozens of them — find themselves at sea. They do not know how they got there. It seems to be afternoon, the glare from the sun keeps them squinting. They wander carefully, canes and orthotics… Are we dead? They ask one another. Are we dying?

Call it what you will: the fantastical, the imagined, magical-realism. The truth is, I’m not sure you can categorize it as any of these. The unreal elements, often dreamlike but never cast under the shadow of doubt or suspicious, are part and parcel of the real world, of life, birth and death in these stories. If you have trouble believing something, my advice is to sit back with your favorite soothing beverage; let go, let the story take over, let yourself sink into the deceptively simple language Ausubel uses to tell her stories:

A tiny white spine began to knit itself inside Hazel. Now it was just a matter of growing. [. . .] She dreamed that night, and for all the nights of summer, of a ball of light in her belly. A glowing knot of illuminated strands, heat breaking away from it, warming her from the inside out. Then it grew fur, but still shone. Pretty soon she saw its claws and its teeth, long and yellow. It had no eyes, just blindly scratched around sniffing her warm cave. She did not know if this creature was here to be her friend or to punish her.

Each story is crafted independently, but they fit together in this volume under the headings that Ausubel has given to the four sections, an optimistic backwards version of coming to life: Birth, Gestation, Conception, Love. The writing isn’t pretentious. The metaphors are beautifully simple, sprinkled sparingly enough not to make the careful reader cringe at the literariness:

Laura and I sat on a picnic blanket in the middle of our suburban front yard. Poppy sat there too, only she was in her stroller bed as always. The grass was craning out of the dirt and the birds were going for all our scraps. We lay on our backs like Poppy does, flat down, and looked at the graying blue of the sky. It came at us. Storming us with its color, with its light.

This is a first-rate book of short stories, and in a time when such books are difficult to publish, I have no doubt as to why this one succeeded in the task. It is a labor of love, and I’m glad it has come to light, a quiet baby of a book, crying when it is hungry but not screaming, sleeping through the night so early that you may wake up seeping milk, wondering if something is wrong with it. It will stay with you after you finish the stories, and you will worry about it a little bit, wondering if you understood it as you should have, cared as much as you could. Like an anxious parent, you may never know, but you can always go back and care some more.

An Interview with Roxane Gay

For this series I’m asking writers I love to recommend a book. If I haven’t read it, I read it. Then we talk about it.

In this installment, I’m talking with Roxane Gay about Battleborn by Claire Vaye Watkins.

Roxane Gay’s writing appears or is forthcoming in Best American Short Stories 2012, New Stories From the Midwest 2011 and 2012, Best Sex Writing 2012, NOON, Salon, Indiana Review, Ninth Letter, Brevity, and many others. She is the co-editor of [PANK]. She is also the author of Ayiti. You can find her online at http://www.roxanegay.com

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Colin Winnette: I’m interested in why we read what we read. Why we pick up the particular books that we do, and why we keep at them. What brought you to Battleborn? What led you to read it for the first time, and why did you want to talk with me about it here?

Roxane Gay: This book was sent to me by a publicist at Riverhead. I hadn’t even heard of it, but once I started reading, I couldn’t put the book down. I was excited to discuss the book with you because it has been, by far, my favorite book of the year in a year of great reading.

CW: Most, if not all, of these stories focus on characters who are struggling with the past, and who will likely continue to struggle after the story’s end. In your opinion, what is the function of a book like this? To observe and report? To capture a state, or states, of being? Are there therapeutic efforts here? All/none of the above?

RG: I’m sure writing is therapeutic for many writers but I think there’s a lot more than that going on here. This is a book about how strength is forged and how sometimes, we cannot help but succumb to our weaknesses. The collection’s title really shapes how the stories are read and really helps each story capture this sense of what it means to be battleborn.

CW: Or, more specifically, what did the book offer you?

RG: As I read these stories, I wanted nothing more than to keep these stories near me, always. There is such control and grace in each story. Watkins tackles complex and intense subjects but there’s no melodrama here. Not only did I derive an immense amount of pleasure from reading Battleborn, I learned so much as a writer.

CW: What is a story like “The Diggings” doing in a collection like this? It was one of my favorites, but it’s certainly an outlier.

RG: I don’t really think “The Diggings” is an outlier. On the surface it seems like that because it’s set during the Goldrush and it’s a story about brothers but it’s also a story about desire and desperation and suffering and you can see those themes in most of the stories in this collection. I tend to think of this book as a masterclass. The range of stories is simply amazing and so when I consider Diggings within the context of the rest of the collection, I think, “Of course.” Not only does it fit thematically but it also fits with the diversity of the overall collection.

CW: I recently drove from Texas to California. We passed through Las Vegas on the way and eventually began to see the brothels in the small towns that surround it. It was a peculiar sight: rows of 18-wheelers and compacts alongside a few double-wides marked with a sign that read something like “Shady Ladies Ranch.” Watkins takes on one of these brothels in “The Past Perfect, The Past Continuous.” A lot of us have images of the places written about in the book — Vegas and the surrounding desert are iconic images — but few of us have experienced the intimacy of a life lived there, or even an extended visit. Watkins gives us insight into these intriguing places, or helps us imagine them a little more fully. How did you react to the function of place in this book? In many ways, the book is its setting, and those who populate that setting.

RG: Place is everything in this book, an inescapable gravity for the stories. I felt totally immersed in the stark beauty — both natural and manufactured — of the West and how that starkness shapes the people living within that landscape.

CW: Which story sticks out to you as best exemplifying what this book has to offer? If you could only recommend one story, rather than the collection, which would it be, and why?

RG: My favorite story is “Rondine Al Nido,” but my first instinct was to say that every story is the best in its own way. “Rondine Al Nido,” though is something else. The narrative frame intrigues me because it keeps you sort of off kilter. The story is disturbing but we see these rather unpleasant moments unfolding in really subtle increments. The horror, for lack of a better word, builds so slowly that it becomes almost bearable. The elegance of how this story was told takes my breath away.

For the Depressives, Try Calling it Acedia: A Review of Kathleen Norris's Acedia & me

Why not? Nothing else seems to work. But then again, what writer would give up her depressive muse?

Good literature – not just cathartic scribbling – It has been produced by some of the most lonely people of the last one and a quarter century. I don’t have to supply my own references, for Norris offers a multitude from our common heritage: John Berryman, Plath, Lowell, Kenyon. What writer doesn’t have a downer streak?

Norris calls this depressive trend – from which sometimes genius comes – Acedia & me, taking after a long history rooted out of religious reference. Her book is rife with reference. It is strung through with her own personal history of apathy tied to her husband’s profound depression and eventual death to cancer.

What turns this story on its axis, however, is the poetic condition of despair that Norris entertains. Not that she cultivates ill thoughts for the sake of inspiration. She expressly councils against such narcotics. But Norris advocates for a firm embrace of a condition that most would write off as depression.

On the contrary, this book devotes itself to the finer points of sloth, apathy, and despair, taking a lolling journey through the historical psyche of religious and literary culture. Early on, she clarifies her aim: to go exploring, to circumnavigate the topic by way of her narrative and meditations. Accordingly, please don’t expect a sharpened thesis to drive you through this work.

This is more like hacking at a maple with a pocket knife – the sap will come if one’s persistent. If the delay frustrates, it may equally increase how dear one holds the task at hand. Not all insight comes at first pass. Norris has taken many passes at acedia and, in a nutshell, this is what she has learned:

Acedia & me is not the same thing as depression. Depression involves deep grief, self spite, and anger, often for good reason. “Acedia,” says Norris, “is more marked by absence of emotion.” It is a withering of intent that leaves a deficit of meaning, an inability to participate in what she calls divine life, which a writer might substitute for inspiration.

This is a nuanced point, and if it seems like Norris is splitting hairs, she does at times. What helps is that she delivers her claims with a dose of humility, acknowledging the Sisyphean task at hand. She goes admittedly, “where only a fool would dare to tread.”

Norris’s character is certainly half the intrigue of the game. A successful writer, who moved with her poet husband to North Dakota, she confesses she’s plagued by the beauty and the bareness of the Northern Plains. She enrolls in a monastery as a lay participant almost on a whim it seems. She knows Kierkegaard, Aquinas, and Aldous Huxley all in equal parts.

The time spent reading is worth that mash up alone.