The Haar
By David Sodergren
Fun, bloody horror novel with an unconventional premise that you can finish in an evening. Commits fully to it's sentimental side, the melancholy of being an aging widow, stoically resigned to the end coming around, suffering the frequent mortal aches of feeling around for the phantom limb of an expired loved one, commits to it enough that you'll be shocked everytime that the novel swings to the complete opposite end of the pendulum and reminds you that it's in the horror genre, disintegrating into gruesome gore and brutal monster horror. There's even a touch of 'Our Wives Under the Sea'-style oceanic hijinks.
Like the obligatory short, sweet, un-selfconscious slasher that comes out every october, wouldn't be surprised if this gets A24ed in the next few years.
3.5/5
The Elsewhereans: A Documentary Novel
By Jeet Thayil
This was actually a little hard to get through, very sombre, dry prose, but overall I found it to be quite beautiful. A novel about that it means to be the watery, ephemeral thing that is a human being enmeshed within a constantly shifting and dissolving matrix of newborn nationalities and identities, strange chimeras born and cobbled out of alchemies of colonialism and globalization, living in an age where identity is constantly melted down and reformed violently into new and alien shapes, one more illusionary manmade eternity in a long line of eternities in a planet that turns entire continents from blue to brown in an indifferent cosmic blink. We think the world and all it's divisions, are all fact, truth, sharp delineations, but they are as much waterware as we are, and in a hundred years all will become unrecognisable again - it is just the cycle of things. As the woman in the boat says - this is not a geographical journey, but a mental one.
A passage I liked:
At the metal staircase, half a dozen people cluster around some sort of tour guide, a white-haired woman with a cane whose eyes are hidden behind impenetrable dark glasses.
She is like no guide Chachiamma has ever heard.
‘… that we’re all different,’ she says. ‘But are we really? And if so, how so? I hear a question these days, people asking: Where are you from? The reply is always one or two words, always inaccurate. Nobody is from one place. Where we are really from is where we’re going now. This body of water wasn’t always here. It appeared after Europe broke off from the mother continent. By this, I mean a very simple thing. This journey is a return, and it might be the single most important journey you will make.'
Here the woman pauses, and the people listening look at each other, at the sky, at the brilliant water. Some wander away to take pictures.
She says, ‘Like the Suez Canal, this is a mental waterbody more than a physical one. It separates Africa from Asia and Europe and underlines the fact that we’re connected.'
No rating.
Narcopolis
By Jeet Thayil
An uncontrolled, manic odyssey through a subaltern Bombay in the throes of a violent metamorphosis, jumping from person to person who drift through a world where all is melted into something fluid, fused, and incorporeal in a narcotic fugue. Grimy, nasty, and apocalyptic, for what is metamorphosis but a series of apocalypses? A chemical apocalypse, a social apocalypse, an internal apocalypse. Entire histories fade in and out like short-lived insects, nonsensical histories that leave you not with a truth, but only a feeling, an imprint of what it meant to exist in a place and a time. It feels like you yourself are a substance in a pipe, a fullness that is boiled and juiced until all there is left is a trembling, ghostly residue, and vapour, smoky and nonsensical.
Extremely surprised that people did not take to this - maybe it is something that can only be understood, made sense of by an Indian sensory palate, so used to excess, so used to ephemera, and privy to all the historical, cultural shorthands, the kind of creature who is tuned to the manic velocity of this novel.
No highlights; this entire book is a hot and furious trance.
5/5
A Beast Slinks Towards Beijing
By Alice Evelyn Yang
A powerful, visceral epic weaving together three generations of a family from occupied Manchuria to 70s China to present-day New York, fractured and misshapen by war, upheaval, abandonment. Generational trauma is something that the novel sublimates into a fleshy, vicious characters of it's own, breaking into the world of mortals and shaping them with disturbing premonitions, otherwordly visions, even stepping into physical forms to inflict bodily pain upon them. A vision of a world violently disintegrating, first at the hands of wartime cruelty, second in the vast tidal waves of bloodletting that come afterwards, sparing nothing, not even your own kin, the horrors you become capable of when caught up in the throes of mass hysteria, and then, a child relentlessly haunted by all of it, harangued by spectres and omens. What it feels like to live through the terrifying breakdown of the world you knew, and the horrible things you must do to survive it. Metamorphoses, described not with the resigned detachment of Narcopolis, but like a violent, demonic transformation of werewolves, blurring the line between the real and the numinous, ripping up one from the inside. This book is really all about metamorphosis, the violence of people, and the violence of time. How, in spite of these horrors, people had to live their lives, fall in love, raise children, survive the ire of their in-laws, dare to hope for a better life. The prose is dark, mean, angry, haunting, otherwordly (a mild case of excessive description, i have to admit, but that is hardly an artistic failing).
Surprised this isn't more popular. Great piece of magical realism and looking forward to more from this author.
Lines I liked:
The war began six years ago in 1937. Back then, the stories from farther south – ferried to their village by migrants, letters, rickshaws, trains, and boats – were thought to be tall tales. But in the spring of 1938, the birds that'd flown south in the winter returned to make their nests, carrying their scavenged southern treasures. Rather than their usual loot of feathers, lichen, and spider silk, they carried human hair, skin, and bones. Gory bundles of soft intestines and hard twigs spun together decorated the trees. Later, they would rot, leaving dark streaks of decomposition like sap down the bark.
Mouse's absence developed a physicality. Her vacancy grew its own body – spindly, long phantom legs of grief that nudged against Ming when she was hemming or laundering.
Weihong opened his mouth and found, for a second, that no sound would come out. He would not be able to take his next words back. But his body was no longer his body. It was a mollusc shell, hollowed out for a creature of fate that had burrowed inside. It was possessing him, pressing itself outwards against the underside of his skin, against his eardrums, his vocal cords. It whispered that he had been here before, had been here time and time again, and then it went through the same actions and words that it had always done – Weihong unable to do anything but watch as fortune played itself out.
Our violence was not literate. There were no words to describe what we did. Atrocity. Massacre. Bloodbath. They approached but did not capture. They missed the essence of our savagery – which was that we enjoyed it. The lawlessness. The godliness. The Chairman had dug out a dark seed within us and given it permission to bloom.
And once, in a drunken stupor – when the veil between reality and dream grew filmy and sheer like cellophane – he went inside and found his wife and daughter sitting at this make-believe kitchen table, waiting for him. They were not angry. They welcomed him back from his travels. He was home.
A lesson he had learned: his past resisted chronology. It looped. It wound. It spiralled like a Fibonacci sequence. Some ages felt closer to him than others. Multiples of seven, he'd noticed, consumed him, felt uncomfortably, inexplicably real. Fourteen. Twenty-one. Thirty-five. He did not know why. What he also knew: his mind coiled, serpentine, suffocating those memories he most wanted to forget – the same ones he now needed.
Fei was a spoiled, sensitive boy, but Ming still felt a pang at his expression. In these early, amorphous years – when memory had just begun to stick – Ming thought of her and Fei as One Being: a two-headed snake. Perhaps age would split them into separate entities, but Ming believed they would still echo and enfold each other, like stacked soup spoons.
5/5
Our Wives Under The Sea
By Julia Armfield
An entire oceanic world sublimated out of the dark, abyssal texture of a mind, a memory befogged by grief, murky, nebulous, suspended in a directionless darkness while the sounds of the earth come loud and distorted as though from a great distance. Everything is a pale ghost of itself, half-seen, blurred. Sepulchral, but also teeming with life, with warm, bursting flesh. Reality is a thin, watery veil, through which ghosts slip in and out at will. The uncontainable anger at watching someone you love and adore waste away before you, the strange and irrational mental gymnastics we engage in to try to make sense of it. All the while, you are haunted by what they had been, what they could've been. If the absolutely gorgeous prose does not do it for you, then maybe at least the fun scientific facts will. Did you know that the Pacific might have been formed by a chunk of the earth ripping away from itself and forming into the moon? I didn't till I read this, and the imagery of it sends chills down my spine.
Lines I liked:
August in the city is always strange, wet, scuttled through with insects freshly burst from shells.
“Some people," she says, "think the granite floor of the Pacific was torn away to make the moon. Darwin's son, actually. He said that. That when the earth was young it rotated very quickly – it went so fast that part of it flew off into space and the Pacific is the scar it left behind."
It was very easy to offend my mother. Rather in the way that it's very easy to kill an orchid, it often seemed little short of inevitable.
On occasion, I would look in the mirror and consider the briskly diminishing fact of myself, hold my hands to the sides of my face as if preventing collapse.
Summer slunk into the brickwork, bloating the building outwards, pressure in the walls. The space above the oven swelled and leaked some viscous substance like a body pierced between its ribs.
Certainly we were trapped but in retrospect it's still hard to imagine the kind of lethargy that seemed to grip us. I can't explain it, except to say that inaction felt obvious, a decision already made by someone else. The basic truth of the situation occurred to me only as if shouted across some great distance and barely heard.
4.5/5
Stuff i read in July:
https://kingoflimbs.substack.com/p/shit-i-read-in-july
Stuff I read in June:
https://kingoflimbs.substack.com/p/shit-i-read-in-june
