Five Book Friday
by Annabel J., May 12, 2023 9:26 AM
Literary — or alternatively: creative; narrative — nonfiction is more or less what it says on the tin. That is, a self-excavatory, narrativized nonfiction practice enriched by reportage and scaffolded by the trappings of literary fiction (in terms of plot, pace, structure, imagery, tone, and style), emanating from a developed, palpable "I."
The grain of a ubiquitous, felt human subjectivity does more to distinguish literary nonfiction than a penchant for unconventional modes of storytelling and (long and hotly contested) separation of "fact" and "truth" (the latter being more expansive, pliable, individual, and perhaps of somewhat greater value to the genre).
With roots, most recently, in the New Journalism of the 20th century, literary nonfiction isn't new but is proliferating — almost certainly because accepted (heteronormative, empire-ical) forms of knowing and telling have grown too small and stories too vast and varied.
It's a pleasure to present a few of its possibilities.
(2013; tr. 2016)
by Svetlana Alexievich (tr. Bela Shayevich)
I can do without a lot of things, the only thing I can’t do without is the past.
I've long struggled to define and speak to Secondhand Time — I worry, as anyone would, about telling with sufficient heat and feeling something I hold so closely, in such high regard.
Mostly, I worry about how to translate the book's enormity, inventiveness, and contribution to free journalism (in a part of the world, no less, where journalists are brazenly thwarted, terrorized, and killed) and to the chronicling of the late Soviet Union and its peoples, long obscured in — and by — the West.
Secondhand Time is the greatest achievement of the Belorussian journalist and Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich, if not of contemporary Eastern European letters more broadly. Readers may otherwise have encountered her work by way of Voices from Chernobyl, the literary soil that fed the HBO series.
Secondhand Time indexes “Homo sovieticus" — (post-) Soviet personhood — in the aftermath of the USSR. More specifically, a people’s struggle to keep pace with the decline of so-called brotherhood and equity and to acclimate to a free market social order (and with it, the larger, inevitable seep of Western influence). It should be noted that while the Soviet Union held many now-autonomous nations, the book deals primarily with Russia and Russians: the 180-degree pivot from communism to capitalism and ultimately, the conditions that gave rise to Putin(ism).
Just a moment ago, I proposed literary nonfiction was characterized above all else by an idiosyncratic human core, permeating and shaping the events around it.
|
Just a moment ago, I proposed literary nonfiction was characterized above all else by an idiosyncratic human core, permeating and shaping the events around it. Secondhand Time is most exquisite for its expansion of this nucleus, taking the form of oral history (a genre Alexievich admired and studied as a young writer and reinvigorated over the arc of her career). The book is a succession of transcripts largely without disruption or commentary (not including a radiant introduction and periodic reflections): a seamless, narrativized web of the many hundreds of interviews she conducted over some 20 years — between 1991 and 2012 — in ordinary Russian kitchens. Its plurality makes it a text truly of the 19th century Russian literary tradition, of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky — polyphonic in the Bakhtinian sense, in which truth is multiple, dispersed across minds, produced through dialogue. Backward- and forward-looking, old and young, embittered and hopeful, heterogenous (as all places are) in the extreme: the voice of Russia.
I should mention that Alexievich, despite being a nonfiction artist, was awarded the Nobel for literature. Here, as in her other works, she orchestrated a novel without the devices and manipulations of fiction — just time, a tape recorder, a journalist's ear and intuition. Human words and cellular history were bridge enough to the emotional-spiritual center.
(2020)
by Elisa Gabbert
Perusing the essays and criticism section of Seattle’s Elliott Bay Books a few summers ago, I crossed paths with poet-essayist Elisa Gabbert’s essay collection, The Unreality of Memory.
I couldn’t turn away from the cover: an amorphous mass — tumorlike, black, insidiously animate — suspended in gradient space, prelude to the early photo of a man falling from one of the Twin Towers, “unimaginably” hot on 9/11.
The introductory essay dissects Gabbert’s ravenous consumption of 9/11 footage — deluged by what she calls an “overwhelming desire for disaster stories” — immortalizing the people who, “driven to such desperation from the extreme heat and lack of oxygen,” jumped hundreds of stories to their deaths.
It was presumably this impulse — the undeniable lure of apocalypse — that engendered The Unreality of Memory: what Gabbert describes not so much as a book about disaster as a book about how people think about disaster.
That being said, the book moves in and out of this orbit, freely pursuing other strange and morbid “trivia” that, in their darkness, feel affectively and aesthetically proximate to the apocalyptic.
Gabbert speaks in the beginning of a hyper-realistic animation of the sinking Titanic (bizarrely, eerily rendered without passengers), an artifact mined from a YouTube rabbit hole. In another, she treats the Hiroshima and Chernobyl disasters and relatedly, radiation sickness. Elsewhere, she plumbs the subreddit r/submechanophobia, organized around the fear of “submerged, man-made objects,” later shifting to discussion threads of parallel universes and the Mandela Effect. Another essay describes the elusive and contested “Morgellons disease,” a formally unrecognized diagnosis thought to exist “because” of (discourse and communities on) the internet.
Gabbert is especially drawn to questions of selfhood and consciousness and the largely uncharted neural mechanisms that make these phenomena possible (hence how people think about), seeming to relish in their deviations and malfunctions. She speaks, for example, of “negative autoscopy,” a psychological disorder that disrupts a person's ability to see their reflection in a mirror (the dense symbolism of which Gabbert, the poet, consumes like marrow).
That’s really not even half of it.
I call this a work of literary nonfiction because Gabbert tends to define herself primarily as a poet (having, indeed, published several acclaimed books of poetry), a set of sensibilities that pervades the essays, leavening prose that might otherwise buckle under the weight of information. She is, moreover, always the test subject to which she applies her findings. (One essay includes a coy iPhone selfie and pivots the age-old dilemma, Why do I look good in the mirror but bad in photos?)
Gabbert tends to define herself primarily as a poet...a set of sensibilities that pervades the essays, leavening prose that might otherwise buckle under the weight of information.
|
In the end, I felt The Unreality of Memory wasn’t just about disaster but about the internet (because what’s the internet, if not apocalyptic?): the engine of our age, tirelessly commodifying and trafficking tragedy for a morbid, and insatiable, gaze. Put together, the essays most closely resemble a late-night browsing history.
All the while, the experience of reading felt like an explosive, richly generative collision of two kinds of knowledge production: the lofty sphere of institutionalized learning (considering Gabbert’s hefty archive of references, not limited to literary theorists and environmentalists, neurologists and physicists) and the grassroots-level hive mind, say, of Reddit.
Exquisite cover to cover; I can’t sing my praises loudly enough.
(2021)
by Cal Flyn
We tend to think of climate change texts as occupying a projected, (perhaps not so) hypothetical future, fed on gushing tributaries of trends and figures.
Islands of Abandonment inhabits what you might call the future-passed: the sphere of real, organic consequence; a present to which the — feared, apocalyptic — future has already happened.
Cal Flyn visits sites (thirteen in total, the world over) where for different reasons — “war or disaster, disease or economic decay” — human presence has dried up: from the Chernobyl exclusion zone to the trench-pocked hills above Verdun-sur-Meuse, home to the longest battle of World War I; from the blighted "urban prairie" of Detroit to the chemical-choked "Bethlehem" of American capitalism, Paterson, New Jersey. Ecosystems, in other words, that have fallen into ruin or gone largely without human activity or interference for years and decades, “providing invaluable insight into the wisdom of environments in flux.”
Specifically, Flyn is interested in the "ecology and psychology" of abandonment: that is, the improbable flora and fauna that grow — even thrive — despite environmental devastation; the "psychological forces" acting on the few people who remain; and the emotional responses of outsiders (like herself) to scenes of perceived ruin.
No book has better acquainted me with the planet that I change and that changes me in turn.
No book has better acquainted me with the planet that I change and that changes me in turn.
|
One chapter surveys an unlikely phenomenon: the spontaneous nature preserves born of national hostilities, such as the demilitarization zone (DMZ) dividing North and South Korea (a verdant length of “temperate forest, wetlands, and abandoned paddy fields” supporting “thousands of species otherwise extinct or endangered on the Korean peninsula") and the Cold War-era European Green Belt, brought into being on the eve of German reunification:
[T]hree hundred amateur ornithologists from both sides of the border organized an emergency meeting in a tavern, where they hammered out a manifesto for conserving the death strip as a nature reserve.
Their "death strip" was preserved and steadily grew to the Belt as it exists today: a critical wildlife corridor spanning twenty-four countries and some 860 miles, tracing the spectral shadow of the Iron Curtain.
Elsewhere, Flyn treats the ecological concept of "succession," describing "the process by which,” over time, “bare ground...transmute[s] into forest." She anchors this phenomenon in Estonia, where great swaths of abandoned state-run farmland has, in the years since the collapse of the USSR, regenerated to dense forest (a trend that holds true across much of eastern Europe).
One 2015 analysis of satellite images estimated at least forty thousand square miles of forest regrowth in eastern Europe and European Russia alone — noting that only an estimated 14 percent of the abandoned farmland had yet converted, thus raising the prospect of large-scale carbon sequestration well into the future.
Something you don't immediately associate with the collapse of the Soviet Union: that thousands of acres of forest regeneration over the years, in tandem with significant declines in dairy and meat production, resulted in the largest "man-made carbon sink in history" (to the tune of ~7.6 gigatons between 1992 and 2011).
Later, Flyn visits a botanical garden perched high in the Usambara Mountains of northeastern Tanzania to illustrate what she calls the “curatorial impulse,” so integral to Western thought and empire. The garden was founded by German settlers and later subsumed by their British successors. When the British left, the imported plant life eagerly surpassed the grounds and entrenched itself in the neighboring wilderness, suppressing and outcompeting native vegetation. Obvious enough, it seems: that, in some — indeed, many — contexts, invasive species are a living vestige of colonial presence.
Obvious enough, it seems: that, in some — indeed, many — contexts, invasive species are a living vestige of colonial presence.
|
Human efforts to restore landscapes, Flyn shows, frequently do more harm than good, upsetting the myriad relationships that comprise an ecosystem. It becomes necessary, therefore, to ask how we might learn to appreciate the difficult beauty of chemical devastation — of a landscape in transition, in recovery (a kind of beauty she likens to jolie laide, or “pretty-ugly,” a high-fashion term given to those whose so-called imperfections “elevate them from conventional attractiveness to a higher plane of visual interest”).
Fine moments are, in the book, too populous to count, and ripen on lush limbs of prose. Flyn is, moreover, not without her literary interlocutors — as if Ozymandias were critical to unraveling, to fully knowing, how a once-great sea in the California desert reverted, over time and hubris, to sand.
(2021)
by Doireann Ní Ghríofa
Who is haunting who?
A Ghost in the Throat — a prose debut by a lauded Irish poet — is difficult to pinpoint, to contain. “Kaleidoscopic” comes to mind, for its suggestions of gaze, prisms, multiplications, refractions.
The book does many things, but most memorably, threads the relentless corporeality and myriad (social and self-imposed) demands of motherhood with the seemingly irreconcilable desire to be engaged in creative, cerebral, spiritually galvanizing work.
Let me try again: A Ghost in the Throat is about the poet Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s (personal, scholarly, all-consuming) obsession with the late poet Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill: two women who lived, mothered, and wrote in the same dramatic, bluff-hemmed south of Ireland.
A teenaged Ní Ghríofa encounters Ní Chonaill’s eternal poem Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire (The Keen [lament] for Art Ó Laoghaire); the chemistry is immediate if childish, real if fanciful, inevitably falling dormant over the distraction of years. Much later, amid the detritus of breast pumps and domesticity, the poem resurfaces and she tumbles anew into vertiginous obsession with its world and author: an elusive woman scarcely found in archives, triangulated, if at all, primarily in relation to the men around her: “Wife of…, Aunt of…”
The thesis (call it the central conflict) rests at this junction: “When the school-bell rang, my son found me in the rain, my face turned toward the hills where Eibhlín Dubh once lived.”
Of course, archival research and the many hours, weeks, months, and years it takes for thoughts and words to marinate and bind are no small task — certainly not with four young children at home.
|
Of course, archival research and the many hours, weeks, months, and years it takes for thoughts and words to marinate and bind are no small task — certainly not with four young children at home. To say nothing, too, of the difficulty of attempting such study outside the anchoring, legitimizing force of the academy (and its monetary support):
I know how unqualified I am…I hold no doctorate, no professorship, no permission-slip at all — I am merely a woman who loves this poem.
Through dead ends and the specter of doubt, what ensues — rather, what Ní Ghríofa laboriously builds and conducts — is a kind of guerilla scholarship: a scholarly practice distinctly female, domestic, corporeal, noninstitutional; informed, all the while, by a poet's cadence, sensibilities, and inventiveness:
I make myself a life in which whenever I let myself sit, it is to emit pale syllables of milk, while sipping my own dark sustenance from ink.
In this way, Ní Ghríofa’s feels to be of the same literary taxonomy as Maggie Nelson (of The Argonauts) and Darcey Steinke ( Flash Count Diary): theorists who have approached their subjects (among others, childbearing and rearing, gender, the body) via the twin rivers of self-excavation and critical theory — a kind of hybrid criticism I expect we’ll see more of in the coming years.
The book begins with a “female text,” a to-do list, and ends — some years and permutations later — in the same place, and not at all, where it began. For my part, Doireann Ní Ghríofa is one of the finest prose artists and minds I've encountered in years; I left with a heart full of ideas and margins full of stars.
(2013)
by Aleksandar Hemon
Many lives fit into one.
Maybe you know the Bosnian American writer Aleksandar Hemon by way of The Lazarus Project or Nowhere Man; perhaps from The World and All That It Holds or the credits roll of The Matrix Resurrections (which he co-wrote), if that's more your speed. I found him at 22, impossibly naive but eager to know more about the people and place that made my dad — a small-town boy from the hills outside Sarajevo, so out of place here in America.
The Book of My Lives was a Christmas-morning gift (figuratively but also literally — from my parents). I looked suspiciously at the alien, blue and tentative on the cover: I've never been a sci-fi person. And knowing me, I probably recoiled at what felt, from the outside, a stilted, somewhat inflated title.
Some weeks later I opened it in my small New Hampshire bedroom, lamplit and self-contained against an exceptionally bitter winter, tunneling deeper still into riverbeds and bark.
The book — an essay collection and Hemon's first nonfiction work — wends between his lawless Sarajevo boyhood and adolescence (unspooled across street soccer, intermural brawls, razor-edged artist types, remarkably bad decisions, socialist iconography); the circumstances surrounding his (unplanned, emotionally levelling) departure in the early 90s; and his subsequent life in Chicago (where he meets the great love of all his lives).
I reread the book a few days ago, at 26, in anticipation of this post. I’d forgotten just how funny Hemon was, effortlessly so and often (of his university Marxist professor, he reports he "had his hair dyed hell-black, and had spent time in mental institutions"; and of God, if He exists: that he'd make a "solid midfielder") — a texture lost, I suppose, over the intervening years, to deeper cuts of feeling. Most often, I was ruined, demolished, unspeakably so — only to be gutturally chuckling by the next sentence: a collision that left me feeling nauseous, the cafe au lait in my stomach churning, severely hungover from life itself.
Most often, I was ruined, demolished, unspeakably so — only to be gutturally chuckling by the next sentence: a collision that left me feeling nauseous, the cafe au lait in my stomach churning, severely hungover from life itself.
|
Put simply, the essays orbit the violent disintegration of the former Yugoslavia and resultantly, Hemon’s displacement, spatial and spiritual: the before, the after, the logistical limbo, the guilt, the starting over — reflecting, like light across a geometric object, the many facets of a newly complicated self.
Nothing makes acclimating as difficult, he finds, as the uniquely American need for privacy, loneliness:
[T]here is no word for 'privacy' in Bosnian ... your fellow Sarajevans knew you as well as you knew them. The borders between interiority and exteriority were practically nonexistent. If you somehow vanished, your fellow citizens could have collectively reconstructed you from their collective memory and the gossip accrued over the years. ... Chicago, on the other hand, was built not for people to come together but for them to be safely apart.
The essay “My Prisoner" — about Hemon’s closest friend, the Montreal-based artist Velibor "Veba" Božovic, who remained in besieged Sarajevo for the duration of the war — appears roughly halfway through the book and is unequivocally the heart. One image, in particular, demonstrates the ease with which Hemon marries levity and darkness:
Veba and Sanja got married [in Sarajevo] in the summer of 1993. They signed the papers at the municipal government building … and ran under sniper fire to a taxi, which drove them down Sniper Alley [an infamous arterial street lined with Serbian snipers during the siege, where over 200 people, including dozens of children, were killed and many more wounded] at incredible speed to the Holiday Inn, where they had a drink…in lieu of a wedding reception. A passing French journalist was so astonished at Sarajevans still getting married that he gave them a bottle of wine. ‘Have a good life!’ he wrote on it.
As someone who doesn't reread books, I reread The Book of My Lives neurotically, obsessively, all at once, knowing full well I'd be back in the coming years and changes. If you have the great pleasure of being a firstcomer, I envy you and can't recommend the journey ardently enough.
|