Bedouin Salt: A Review of Abdelrahman Munif's Cities of Salt

Books with more than six-hundred pages have always scared me worse than monsters under my bed. Gnashing teeth and claws always seemed less dangerous. On one hand, long books have room for development of feelings, of movement, they can approach the velocity of epiphany and return — but they also have room for digression, for boredom, for too much inclusion of too little important stuff.  I dread the long novel for these reasons.

Yet there comes a time when walking through a secondhand bookstore when fate lunges forward and a book literally lands on your head. Abdelrahman Munif’s Cities of Salt struck me. Its book cover was dark colored, its main design looked like more of a smudge rather than a thought out or stylized drawing, and it exceeded six-hundred pages — but I ended up buying it anyway.

It began as some kind of folk tale of Bedouin in the desert of Saudi Arabia, yet somewhere in the shifting of characters emerging and disappearing, mirage like, Cities of Salt lays down an entire history of a people and a region coming into contact with Western Modernization. How is it that for so many pages I remain held in rapture?

For a novel imbued with modernity coming to a region, particularly with oil politics, it doesn’t let on about it. Rather, the narrator behind the storytelling is never revealed, it haunts the reader’s mind to think of where this real feeling and overwhelming voice fits into the tale.  It lulls the reader into the world of those thousand or so Arabian night tales — the politics being present, but happening as part of a larger telling.

Salt is an old seasoning, one we turn to for its power to amplify sweetness or contrast sourness. It has been integral to the way of food preservation, and is needed by the human body for adequate fluid regulation.

But sowing salt into the earth kills it. The edenic scene rich with water and life where this story begins is not the same prosperous industrialized city with which it ends.

In terms of novels and storytelling about oil and oil culture, Paul Thomas Anderson’s movie There Will Be Blood comes to mind, as well as its inspiration Upton Sinclair’s Oil!. These oil epochs shed light on the happenings in the United States in driven narrative form, yet Cities of Salt take the perspectives of a mass of people as threads of different lives woven together in loose knit fashion give the shape of what has passed.

It is not a single kind of protagonist which drives this story — actually, on close inspection Cities of Salt may not have a protagonist at all — as this unwinding and unspooling detail of change by modernity’s implementation and construction in the Arabian Peninsula falls into place. This story is very much invested in the politics and culture surrounding the advent of oil, and the coming of foreigners to collect it.

The people begin to believe that the depths of the earth are better than its face, when oil is worth more than life giving water. The people give up their old selves in the coming age. Beginning in the desert oasis of Wadi al-Uyoun, the family of Miteb al-Hathal cracks the porcelain perfection of gold and oil, and scatters the remains as Miteb rides away into legend and myth.

The Wadi is destroyed and disappears forever.

It is not a single kind of antagonist which drives this story, because the unbraiding plot powerfully captures the spirit of the people—their flaws and evils being integral parts of who they are.  Modernity is not the enemy here, it is rather a vehicle of change.

Days pass slowly, the heat grows, and the people caravan to Harran, the new industrialized city for work and for trade.  But it isn’t the same as the same as the Wadi, and the people know it. There are two parts to Harran, American Harran and Arab Harran, each constructed with its own problems. The story takes flight there and catalogues the series of misfires and abuses on both sides of Harran, until the sandstorm rises, and the tempest arrives.

Conflict rises and falls, people rise and fall—no clear rising action gives way to climax — yet, there is a feeling of inevitability in the tempest. All that remains is the sand of the desert and the crystalline structures of cities, fashioned of salt.

Abdelrahman Munif was of Saudi Arabian heritage, and spent the majority of his professional career within the but his Saudi citizenship was revoked for political reasons — brought to a front in his writing as it critiques the way in which modernity came to the region. Hypnotically, I became the little kid listening to this story unfold from the narrator’s lips, waiting to see how it ended. What is certain is that the changing world of globalization and multicultural exchange confirms that the vistas of a thousand Arabian nights had to meet modernity at some point, but Munif’s novel carefully analyzes how they may have met under different circumstances with different ends.

They Lived Unofficially in Vacant Dormitory Rooms

In the title story of The Cucumber King of Kėdainiai (pronounced keh-die-nay), a Lithuanian mafia boss who seeks to conquer the world through black market cucumbers takes two Americans on a strange tour of his castle, a former Soviet storage house. In a similar way, author Wendell Mayo takes readers on a strange tour to the other side of the Iron Curtain, to a post-Soviet Lithuania that is simultaneously real and surreal, playfully comic and deeply tragic. Each story in this collection is quite different from the next, but they are tied together by the exploration of the new realities of Eastern Europe, and also by precise prose and characters who continue to haunt you long after you turn the page. Wendell Mayo was nice enough to chat with me about his process of writing The Cucumber King of Kėdainiai, his own experience of traveling to Lithuania, and where he’s headed next.

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SU: Your first collection, Centaur of the North, was published in 1996, and you’ve released other two books between that and this one.  Was there anything different about the process of writing The Cucumber King of Kėdainiai? What has changed about the way you approach storytelling since your writing career began?

WM: The stories I collected in Centaur of the North were actually written after most stories in my third published book, B. Horror and Other Stories. I think that’s because, when I first started writing, I gave little thought to “collecting” fiction. It was only after I had a scattering of stories in literary magazines that I began to wonder about collecting them. It was a little like those Rorschach inkblot tests. I would stare at what seemed dozens of random stories. After a long time, some of my little ink spots looked like “Centaur.” Then, after another long time, I’d cock my head at another area of ink and see “B. Horror.” That’s how I used to work. But my process did change when I wrote stories in In Lithuanian Wood, my third collection, and now in The Cucumber King of Kėdainiai. I found I could not just write stories as they mysteriously presented themselves to me. I had to make a concerted effort, year after year, to commit my experiences in Lithuania to journals, scrapbooks, anything I could get my hands on to inspire fictions.

I first traveled and worked in Lithuania in 1993; the very first appearance of stories inspired by my work there wasn’t until two years later. My journaling resulted in a concentrated effort to write. I wrote story after story set in the Baltics. How could I not? Experiences I collected are so rich, with a special blend of Baltic humor and pragmatism. I remember coming back from Klaipėda to Vilnius via an old Soviet bus with a group of American teachers. It was a long haul on a hot summer day, no a/c of course. About half way along, the entire front windshield fell out of the bus and shattered on the pavement. The driver immediately turned onto dirt roads, wending his way through the countryside. When someone asked him where we were going, he turned to his busload of Americans and said, “Window shopping, of course!”

So, unlike my earlier days, when writing stories in The Cucumber King of Kėdainiai, I found that one story suggested another, and so on. It was a little like coming to a creek dotted with stepping stones. You get a sense that there may be enough stones in the creek (or possible stories in a collection) to get you across, but you’re not sure which stone will be the next one until you actually step onto the first stone and see where it gets you. This is how Cucumber came about—“Gōda” somehow suggesting “Cucumber” suggesting “Brezhnev’s Eyebrows,” and on. I suppose, in terms of process, it makes me seem a little more like a novelist, but I’m not, really. I live to write stories.

SU: When I told people I was going to Lithuania for the Summer Literary Seminars last July, I got a lot of blank stares and responses like, “Where is that?” All the Baltic countries have fascinating cultures and rich histories, but to many they are invisible histories.  The stories in The Cucumber King of Kėdainiai are contemporary, but they are intricately tied to Baltic history. What can American readers gain from experiencing stories of post-Soviet Eastern Europe?

WM: You can’t have a Cold War without at least two sides. I grew up in the 1950s and 60s, and knew quite well the American side the Cold War. My father was a NASA scientist working at the Lewis Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio. His job, so much as he could tell us without getting into trouble with the government, was to design small nuclear power plants for deep space exploration. He was in the space race in those days; we were all in the race. I saw every liftoff at Cape Canaveral (now Kennedy Space Center) from Mercury through Apollo, no matter what hour, day or night. I remember duck-and-cover drills in grade school and junior high, in case of a Soviet nuclear attack. I was “volunteered” by my father to join the (Boy Scouts’) Space Explorers unit. Communists were always on the “other side” of the Iron Curtain—and when they weren’t, look out! It was an incredibly fearful, stupid game that no could win—or dared to try.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, how could I not venture into the Baltics? How could I not be interested in a writerly way, but also personal way, in the truth—in the bigger picture after fifty years of Soviet occupation and American fear-mongering? I think American readers of stories in The Cucumber King of Kėdainiai can gain a deeper, richer picture of the Cold War, a kind of correction to the monolithic way Americans may have seen what is actually an historically rich and diverse region of former-Soviet annexed countries. It’s that curiosity I count on in myself as a writer, and in readers. I want curious readers. But I don’t pretend to know what most readers want these days. I guess if I did I’d feel pretty uneasy about it. I remember Jane Smiley saying that if you go to the beach and chase waves breaking on the sand, you’ll never precisely match them coming in and out, step for step—so, like reading trends, why try? As a writer, you stand your ground and, eventually, a wave or two will come in and meet you on your terms. Given so much aggression in other parts of the world these days, and the US’s involvement, I think that the history and folly of occupation, assimilation, and displacement of people in countries like Lithuania must be of interest.

Sometimes the whole matter of globalization and assimilation hits home, even in free Lithuania. I’m proud to say that my novel-in-stories, In Lithuanian Wood, has been translated into Lithuanian language and published by Mintis Press in Vilnius, under the title Vilko Valanda (English: Hour of the Wolf). But before that, when I was seeking a translator and publisher for the book, I contacted the American Center in Vilnius, part if the US Embassy. It was an information resource center that I understood had funded publication of some poetry collections by Americans translated into Lithuanian language. I met with folks at the American Center. I was halfway through discussing how to apply for funding when I was told I was required to write an essay justifying how the translation and publication of In Lithuanian Wood in Lithuania would contribute to “a more civil society” in Lithuania. I did not write that essay.

SU: There are many memorable characters in The Cucumber King, but one of my favorites is Vyt from “Spider Story.” Could you talk about the creation of this character?

WM: It’s probably a bit cliché these days, but Vyt really is a composite of several real characters I got to know in Lithuania. The first is a young man, a student in my ESL class I taught in Birštonas; outwardly, he’s pretty much the Vyt I write, in-scene, in “Spider Story.” He had ambitions to be “top cop” in Lithuania and figured he needed English to make it happen. I liked him a lot. But for the story, he needed a duplicitous side, so I drew on a fellow, bald as a cue ball, who would trail me many days across Rotušės (Town Hall) Square in Old Town Vilnius, begging for money. He spoke in broken English, something like, “Mister American. You rich. May I have dollar?” A couple times I helped him out, until one afternoon, sitting on the steps of Town Hall, I overheard him speaking with a group of young Lithuanian men in perfect English! They were laughing and joking at how effective their feigning broken English was in extracting money from foolish Americans. Next time I saw this fellow I let him know what I had heard! The third part of Vyt’s character is his being an orphan, someone not accounted for by society, his being “off the grid.” I drew this aspect of Vyt’s character from orphans I met teaching in Alanta, Lithuania. They were in their teens. Summer months, they lived “unofficially” in vacant dormitory rooms. So moved by these young people, I also wrote an essay, “First Things First: The Orphans of Alanta.” It was published in Advocating for Children and Families in an Emerging Democracy: The Post-Soviet Experience in Lithuania.

Anyway, the result is a Vyt who fascinates me—he’s alone in the world, has a keen sense of humor, survives by his wits, is extremely smart—and suspicious of American presence in Lithuania.

SU: You teach in the BFA and MFA programs at Bowling Green State University. What is the literary landscape of BGSU like?

WM: Having both the BFA and MFA all wrapped up in one place is pretty cool. MFAs in our small, intensive program get teaching experience and, in fact, teach most of the sophomore-level creative writing classes. BFAs have the advantage of learning from talented, inspiring, up-and-coming writers as well as faculty. Thursday nights we get together for readings, a concoction of presentations by BFAs, MFAs, visiting writers—you name it. We get around 100 attending these each week; it’s become a kind of happening, I think, because we include everyone in the program. I know the notion of “community” gets thrown around a lot these days, but I think it’s true for us. Like most MFA programs, we have a community of writers at all stages of their careers learning from one another and for one another. We tend to root for one another.

SU: What’s happening right now in the literary world that you’re excited about? Authors, presses, journals?

WM: I mentioned earlier that I try not be a wave-chaser. Seriously, it’s probably a flaw in my personality. I have started reading stories by Haruki Murakami (and in that regard, I wonder if I’m already behind the times?). Still, I’m interested in his fusion of the fantastic and real, for instance, in story like “The Second Bakery Attack.” I’ve only just started reading him but imagine myself following him a long way.

SU: What are you working on now?

WM: What’s the point of exploring lingering contemporary effects of the Cold War years on people in the east without doing the same for people in the west? So I’m working on a series of stories that explore the effects of those good old duck-and-cover days on people today in the US—the nuclear legacy. I’ve a good deal to draw on from my own experiences, but I’m also having a great time looking into history. This past summer I visited the Nevada Nuclear Test Site, a place where thousands of nuclear weapons were tested in the 1950s and 60s, long before the real aftereffects were known, resulting in nuclear test ban treaties. It was megatons more fun than the casinos in Las Vegas. Hundreds of bomb craters dotted our route through the test site. We were only permitted to exit our vehicle at certain safe, low-radiation areas and had to be sure to wear long-sleeves and long pants. At one point, I stood on the lip of a bomb crater affectionately known as the “The Sedan,” the result of an underground nuclear blast in 1962. This single crater was 330 feet deep and 1,280 feet (about a quarter of a mile) across—big enough, I’m thinking, to fill with new stories.

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.

Speak of Fondly: A Review of Colin Winnette's Fondly

To say that the two novellas in Colin Winnette’s Fondly are unrelated would be an understatement, as each is wholly different from the other in style, tone, substance, voice, character, plot – pretty much any identifiable feature.  In the current fiction marketplace, this type of range is rare.  Story collections are looked upon with more favor if the pieces are “linked” by some ostensible trait like setting or character or theme, or otherwise cobbled into an illusory whole that will be more satisfying to the reader (at least that’s what I suspect is the motive).

This is why Fondly is such a breath of fresh air.  The disparate novellas display a writer unafraid of diversity and capable of honing the unique voice that each story dictates.

The first novella, titled In One Story, the Two Sisters, is singular in its scope and presentation.  Dispensing with plot, the tale consists of a series of vignettes that are by turns surreal, hilarious, and heartbreaking.  The tie that binds is the presence of the titular two sisters, who morph into an array of shapes, people, and situations, each foregrounded by the vignette titles, which are meant to be taken literally:  For instance, in “In one story, the two sisters are Olympic swimmers,” the sisters spend their time swimming literally across an ocean as part of their training.  Among their crew are a writer, a Navigator, and a nefarious young man who introduces them to the gustatory joys of raw Orca meat.

The situations range from the mundane (“In one story, the two sisters decided to take a trip together”) to the absurd (“In one story, the two sisters were an olive at the bottom of a dirty martini and were clipped in two by a set of large teeth”) to the comically specific (“In one story, the two sisters were reasonably well-behaved nuns”).

Many of the vignettes bear the sheen of folk tales, set in forests or farms or old homes, with characters only referred to as “the old man” or “the younger sister” and so on.  And yet even this folk tale aspect doesn’t remain predictable, as some of the pieces feature trappings of the modern world such as computers, Mickey Mouse, and country music played on tape deck of a kidnapper’s car.  The result is a pleasantly strange experience for the reader, perhaps not for folks who desire easy connections and conventional narrative arcs.  But the novella will surprise and challenge, and Winnette’s prose is restrained yet artful:

She let her nails grow until they were tools.  Her hair’s gone wild.  She’s thin as a rake, holding out day after day for that smack of warm pumpkin, of spiced apple.  The sound of the wind is her asking kindly, plaintively, for the treat.  The scratching sound is her losing her patience.  The shatter comes when it’s already too late. (57)

The second novella, Gainsville, is more conventional, although it also takes risks:  most notably, the story is structured like a chain.  For example, we begin with Sonny and his unnamed brother, who progress quickly through adolescence until the brother has a child named Jiminy.  Then the story moves on to Jiminy; after eight pages, he has become an adult.  The focus shifts to Jiminy’s ex-girlfriend, who bears Jiminy’s child Osiris but raises him with a different father.  We follow Osiris’s sister Magdelene for a while, and so on.  Once we leave behind a character, we never encounter them again.

What connects the characters, and what propels the story forward, are the trappings of growing up – primarily the hormonal, sexual, and social pressures of adolescence – but also of finding one’s way through the world.  The home lives are grim and unsentimental, and the people in Gainsville’s universe constantly suffer in the wake of their parents’ (and their own) mistakes.  They get hooked on meth; they vandalize neighbors’ houses; they impregnate their teenage babysitters.  Whether or not they are redeemed is beside the point.  They are flawed and human, and therefore they are worth inhabiting.

In contrast to the first novella, Winnette’s prose is sparse:

The phone call was an update on the cat’s behavior.  She was moodier than usual.  She wasn’t eating much.  He was worried.  The next was an automated voice.  He let it play out while he scrubbed the cups and the bowls in the sink.  He pried the dried food loose with his fingernails.  The voicemail ended.  His girlfriend clicked on.  She was feeling better.  The whole thing was terrifying.  She’d thought she was going to die.  She could have died.  You don’t get many second chances in life. (174)

The universe of Gainsville is one in which humanity is displayed not through grand gestures or investment in individual failure or success, but rather through each new generation’s stubborn, irrevocable drive to simply exist, and to find in the smallest moments of affection the threads that tie us to everyone who lives in the shadows of our failures.

Ekphrasis Becomes Distant Confessional: On Janice Lee's Damnation

Hell isn’t just other people. Janice Lee’s gift is lyricizing the intersection between the cerebral and emotional, and in Damnation, the fourth book by her I’ve read, the canvas of her metaphysical exploration shifts in bursts. Told from multiple perspectives, ekphrasis becomes distant confessional inspired by the broody films of Bela Tarr. There’s a cinematic scope to the narrative and the viewpoints range from the wide panorama to the close-ups zooming in on love, obsession, and time in a ménage a trois of existential longing. Life is absorbed through a controlled aperture, the negatives highlighting the inverses of normalcy. Tarr is known for his long, lingering camera takes that paint the tortured souls in deliberation. Though many of the chapters in Lee’s Damnation are short, their effect is similar, forcing a closer inspection of the subject, relativity stretching time as in the context of making love:

If sparked by passion or love or other sad, comparable urges, there is not enough time. But once it’s done, after the climax for one or preferably both, there is the silence and waiting that comes from a union that can only occur in very certain circumstances.

Circumstances stand as background props to the internal inquisition that rages within the characters. Spurred by the arrival of a “strange looking copy of the Holy Bible,” madness rivets in an unending shower and the film reel shakes with longing. Lights expose scenes that drip with yearning and regret, boosting the contrast like a stark black-and-white film. Even in the shortest pieces, Lee makes us feel the onerous weight of time burdened by doubt as graphically startling imagery is punctuated by questions and the ephemeral is flanked by the visceral:

Sometimes one willingly enters a dark and empty space, the creaking of the loose boards below, the phantom moonlight above. I had a dream that I was carrying a wounded deer in my arms. He lay there limp, depending on me completely and solely for the permission to go on living. Then I dropped him into the river. How can you forgive an act like that? Why were we only made to die?

And in another instance where the question is presented first to a butcher:

He is calm with the exception of the lingering savagery that thwarts his soft grey eyes. Why do men kill each other? He has often asked himself, yet today, he thinks he understands. From the depths of the earth, he thinks he can hear the dead stirring, then screaming, such horrible screaming that originates from below the ground.

It’s a controlled presentation, an auteur not just pulling the strings, but tearing them asunder and seamlessly stitching them back together again. Lee is a visualist that paints with her words the way a cinematographer paints with light. But she’s also switching brushstrokes to fully articulate the psychological diffusion of human ambivalence. Themise-en-scène varies in that pursuit of damnation at the outskirts of society and her choice of film stock in terms of diction bounces from physical bombast to meditational ruminations that alter the visual lexicon.

With no future nostalgia for rain or lost love, the young couples in the dance are careless tonight… Outside, the music is faint and spilling out onto the empty streets, protracted and muffled by the sound of falling water. The next time it rains, it will remind him of loss, it will sting like needles, and he will only see her face.

And:

There is an unreality that splits us apart from another reality beneath.

Sometimes we eat others to affirm our own existence.

Sometimes we forget what we see the moment we’ve seen it.

Memory is tricky that way.

I’m not sure if I love God the way I’m supposed to.

It’ll come in time.

No, I don’t think it will.

The problem is, even sight can be deceiving and perception skews with changes in the lighting. The graphic menagerie scours for implicit weaknesses, shortcomings of any attempt to capture a moment authentically. There is a tension between the subject who wants to remain elusive and the observer, a juxtaposition emphasized by the synthesis of form and content:

Seeing is often just about forgetting.

This, probably, is an abomination.

Whose abomination? God’s?

Storyboards from the two Bela Tarr movies, Santanago and Damnation, serve as an appendix and the imagery is like a lifetime flashing in front of the reader:

His conception of his childhood was a series of connections he had drawn between all the coexisting elements of that scene.

Damnation isn’t just about hellfire as misery can take on millions of different permutations. Nor is it about a single place or perspective. It’s bound up in the loss of time and the urges that impel us into the futile attempt at thwarting age. The film, Damnation, is about a hapless wreck named Karrer who is in love with a married cabaret singer. Every scene is filmed so that non-speaking extras orbit with as much personality as the protagonist, their faces wracked by inexplicable feeling. You can literally screenshot every scene and marvel at the framing. In the same way, the segments in Lee’s Damnation are frames stratified in desolation, sorrow, and misbegotten aspiration, teeming with as many questions as unspoken answers. Their hope is what damns them:

All stories eventually are stories about disintegration. If the hero didn’t disintegrate, it would be resurrection. And that doesn’t happen in our world. Yet, the hero continues on his path to ruin, because he knows nothing else outside of that purview.

An Unnatural Obsession with Freak Show Performers: A Review of Jon Konrath's Thunderbird

In talking about Thunderbird by Jon Konrath, I’m going to assume that my readers aren’t familiar with Konrath’s wild fiction (such as Rumored to Exist, Fistful of Pizza, Sleep Has No Master, or The Earworm Inception). After all, those already familiar probably bought a copy of Thunderbird the moment they heard it was available. Either that, or they’re one of the odd people who swore a blood vendetta against Konrath after becoming familiar with his work and are busy in their basements plotting his untimely demise. One or the other.

For those who aren’t already Konrath addicts like I am, let’s just take a look at the opening section from “Hate-Fucking Shrimp Platters on Groundhog Day” (one of the stories in Thunderbird):

I hate-fucked a Long John Silver shrimp platter for Groundhog Day last year, slow and sexy, while a busload of Japanese tourist cheered me on, thinking this was some kind of American tradition like that thing where they run around with giant wooden penises and get an octopus to rape a schoolgirl. I never remember if the groundhog is supposed to see his shadow or not, but I now know you don’t want to get that cocktail sauce in your peehole.

I guarantee that when most people read those opening sentences, they are paying attention.

Regardless, this is exactly the kind of wildness that I’ve come to hope for from Konrath, and Thunderbird certainly delivers. Konrath’s style in his absurdist work (keep in mind that not everything he writes is bizarre–such as Summer Rain, an extremely soulful work of coming of age realism) effortlessly blends the normal with the profane, the mundane with the shocking and grotesque, the current state of the world with an exaggerated version that we hope could never be. Best of all, Konrath is damn good at it. I can’t guarantee what someone will feel when they read Konrath’s bizarre works, but I know they’ll feel something . . . and they won’t be able to look away.

Let’s consider another example. This one, from another story in Thunderbird titled “Ralph Ravel and the Giant Hooves of Prophecy,” shows that blending I’m talking about particularly well:

Like most Mensa members, totalitarian dictators, and Dominican left-handed National League relief pitchers, I had an unnatural obsession with freak show performers as a child.

When my brain reads the above sentence, it does flips. It seems like a rational list at the same time that it doesn’t. Reasonableness is mixed with almost subconscious-based free association, yielding something that is neither sense nor nonsense. As I see it, the mind reacts to such a thing similarly to how it smacked by a Zen koan.

What is it about writing like that in Thunderbird that interests me so much? I keep coming back to the idea that the things we can see least clearly are the ones that are right in front of us. In order to truly consider the world that we’ve stopped paying attention to out of over familiarity, we have to twist it – exaggerate how absurd or shocking or disgusting it is. Only then can we accurately perceive it, and realize that our normal world is far more absurd and shocking and disgusting than we ever consciously realized.

I think it’s obvious at this point that I’m pretty pleased with the stories I found in Thunderbird. They aren’t exactly a revolutionary step in Konrath’s writing, but they are fresh, new, and a hell of a lot of fun to read. If you haven’t checked out Konrath’s absurd work as of yet, then you really should – and Thunderbird is an excellent place to start. Frankly, one of the stories in the collection (“And So It Goes, Motherfucker”) says it best:

The convenience store was actually a North Korean deli, covered with pictures of the three Kims and propaganda are hung over the bags of pork rinds and ring-dings. The food and drink, luckily, were not North Korean. They did have some pretty kick-ass cigarette lighters in the shape of Kim Jong Il, the ones where you click his arm and a butane flame shoots out of the top of his giant head. A fatbody Il lookalike, complete with dead Elvis hairdo and wraparound old lady sunglasses worked the register, reading a copy of Vibe and listening to Slayer’s album Christ Illusion on a shitty jambox.

“What’s the word?” I yelled to the cashier.

“Thunderbird!” he yelled back, pointing to a fridge case filled with malt liquor. Finally, a man of taste.

In Any Case, I Am No Longer Counting the Days: A Review of Maggie Nelson's Bluets

From the moment I began reading Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, I knew I had found a very important book. Or perhaps that a very important book had found me:

1. Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color. Suppose I were to speak this as though it were a confession; suppose I shredded my napkin as we spoke. It began slowly. An appreciation, an affinity. Then, one day, it became more serious. Then (looking into an empty teacup, its bottom stained with thin brown excrement coiled into the shape of a sea horse) it became somehow personal.

The mention of excrement brought me up short and I read that sentence several times before I could move on. We are so grounded in the body from these opening lines. There will be little, this passage makes clear, that will be held back.

Bluets is composed of 240 numbered passages. Some are longer than a page; some as few as four words:

46. Disavowal, says the silence.

Maggie Nelson is as concerned with the body and its limitations as she is with loss and with the limitations of love in its many forms. Bluets is a meditation on love. This love of the color blue, introduced in the first line, becomes the vehicle by which she can examine many times of love. Erotic:

18. A warm afternoon in early spring, New York City. We went to the Chelsea Hotel to fuck. Afterward, from the window of our room, I watched a blue tarp on a roof across the way flap in the wind. You slept, so it was my secret. It was a smear of the quotidian, a bright blue flake amidst all the dank providence. It was the only time I came. It was essentially our lives. It was shaking.

Devotional love. Following a passage that discusses women, who were later canonized as saints, who blinded themselves or plucked out their own eyes to maintain their chastity, she explains:

57. In religious accounts, these women are announcing, via their amputations, their fidelity to God. But other accounts wonder whether they were in fact punishing themselves, as they knew that they had looked upon men with lust, and felt the need to employ extreme measures to avert any further temptation.

She also examines the love between friends. A friend is in a terrible accident that leaves her confined to a wheelchair in constant pain. Nelson considers love through the lens of this pain:

104. I do not feel my friend’s pain, but when I unintentionally cause her pain I wince as I hurt somewhere, and I do. Often in exhaustion I lay my head down on her lap in her wheelchair and tell her how much I love her, that I’m so sorry she is in so much pain, pain I can witness and imagine but that I do not know. She says, if anyone knows this pain besides me, it is you (and J, her lover). This is generous, for to be close to her pain has always felt like a privilege to me, even though pain could be defined as that which we typically aim to avoid. Perhaps this is because she remains so generous within hers, and because she has never held any hierarchy of grief, either before her accident or after, which seems to me nothing less than a form of enlightenment.

There is love here too of ideas, of abstractions. Nelson calls on philosophers and intellectuals to shed light on her state of grief and pain and obsession. She invokes Wittgenstein and Goethe. Emerson, Thoreau. Jacques Derrida. She calls on the writers and artists: William Gass and Gertrude Stein. Marguerite Duras. Stephen Mallarme. Cezanne and Cornell and Warhol. She turns to science. Isaac Newton.

She inquires of her colleague, whom she refers to as the “expert on guppy menopause,” whether biologists consider the question of the existence of color. His response proves as insufficient and as limited as all others. “In the face of some questions, he says, biologists can only vacate the field.”

Throughout, the pulsing heart of this book is the obsessive quality with which she approaches the color blue – her collections of blue objects, the travels she takes to sites of blue, the time spent in contemplation of it – and with which she attempts to grieve the loss of her lover.

I suspect that Maggie Nelson might flinch to hear me say “the loss of her lover.” I think she might consider that too sentimental an expression. Here is her piercing assessment of what others might consider to be romantic love:

20. Fucking leaves everything as it is. Fucking may in no way interfere with the actual use of language. For it cannot give it any foundation either. It leaves everything as it is.

And yet, in one passage, she defines a “blue rush” as when lapis miners use dynamite to bleed a vein, and then in the next she says:

81. What I know: when I met you, a blue rush began.

It is hard to see this as anything but an admission of a profound falling into love, whatever limitations it – the love, the falling – might have.

Bluets is an urgent book. It is alive in its pain and its struggle. It pulses with vitality. It provides a kind of antidote to the toxic conditioning of the cult of happiness. To the dominant exhortation to “fake it till you make it.” To “get over it,” to “move on,” to “self-help” our way into recovery from the condition of human struggle. As if we could set ourselves free from what it means to be human: to feel profound pain and sadness, to experience unspeakable loss, to feel isolation and loneliness. To despair. And to be compelled to continue in the face of that despair.

Here’s what Maggie Nelson has to say about moving on:

100. It often happens that we count our days, as if the act of measurement made us some kind of promise. But really this is like hoisting a harness onto an invisible horse. “There is simple no way that a year from now you’re going to feel the way you feel today,” a different therapist said to me last year at this time. But though I have learned to act as if I feel differently, the truth is that my feelings haven’t really changed.

As a reader, I am always looking for redemption. Redemption in Bluets is quiet and beautiful, but stunning in its power:

237. In any case, I am no longer counting the days

and then:

239. But now you are talking as if love were a consolation. Simone Weil warned otherwise. “Love is not a consolation,” she wrote. “It is light.”

What we are left with is only this: Perhaps the beauty we find in our struggles, in our grief is not so much consolation as it is light.

Maggie Nelson’s Bluets is a bright and shining light.