Most authors want their readers to feel safe enough to turn the next page.

But for some authors, ‘safe’ just won’t do. There are a few brave authors who write books where you will feel more assaulted than nurtured. Books where the view of humanity is bleak, and where the characters don’t care what you think of them.

It’s amazing how often I end up really hating this kind of book and everything about it, only to turn around days or sometimes years later and realize I have never stopped thinking about them.  Reading these books was a transformative experience. They changed my mind and my heart. There are probably gentler ways to wrest readers out of their complacent ways of thinking but just now it feels like authors must make a choice–they must either support a reader’s current ways of thinking, or the must risk losing readers in order to shake them out of their complacency.

Here are some books that shook me. I recommend them all. But maybe not all at once.

ALMANAC FOR THE DEAD by Leslie Marmon Silko

This novel is exorbitantly, lavishly violent. It’s a sordid kind of violence, violence done to and by characters with a pathological level of cruelty. It was impossible to not feel assaulted by it as I read. It jolts me right out of my complacency about the past. This is a novel about Native American genocide, about American genocide. It’s about a holocaust that has been more or less lost to history in terms of its overwhelming magnitude, and where what is remembered has been kitsched over and transformed into popular entertainment. Silko set out to shatter the past as it has been preserved in our collective culture and to replace it with something far more damning and sad.

Much of the writing is staccato, scattered, shattered, and at times nearly incoherent. Silko tells a story of lives brutalized. It’s a story where proper sentences would prettify and thus lie. The stylistic punches built up a level of dread in me as I read. There are scenes of such brutality and lack of humanity that they left me sick. I also frequently felt lost, and irritated by a prose style that felt deliberately blunted and ugly. ANd then I would think: this is right, this is the right way to tell such an ugly history.

Now and then would come chapters of soaring lyricism, interstitially spaced between the chapters of violence and cruelty. They fortified me. They allowed me to keep reading.

It’s maybe my highest praise of a book when I can honestly say “I’ve never read anything like this book before.” And I admire how ruthless Silko is, even though there are passages I wish I could un-read.

 

CULT-X by Fujinori Nakamura

This is a story where human agency is helpless before the crushing weight of history and propaganda. The entire notion of free will is revealed as a sham. I was repulsed by the ugliness of this novel, and by the sexual violence, and by the passivity of the female characters, and by the hopelessness of the story itself.  Some scenes read like infantile sadistic male fantasies. I kept trying to frame these scenes in a literary light. I kept trying to believe these scenes had literary value beyond their face value. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t find a scrap of redemptive value in them.

And then I read John Nathan’s review of The Rise and Fall of Modern Japanese Literature by John Whittier Treat, published in the August 16 2018 New York Review of Books. Even though Nathan never mentions Cult-X, Nathan does mention other popular Japanese novels, some of which are still to be translated, and all of which seem as disturbing as Cult-X, or even more so. Nathan’s essay reminded me that Japanese writers are working from inside the horror of their recent history: the madness of unquestioned nationalism, the razing of whole cities by firebombs, the horror of two nuclear attacks, the death tolls from earthquake and tsunami; and then add to these the way any hope for the future has been crushed by the crash of a bubble economy, the rapid aging of the population, and an economy that continues to stagnate and to offer little opportunity for the next generation. Reminded of these things, I discovered that my first reaction to this novel, to reject its nihilism, began to feel like a privileged person’s naive understandings. I could see this novel anew. It’s still not a fun read, but it is a thought-provoking one.

Goat Mountain by David Vann

Goat Mountain by David Vann is the second most ruthless book I’ve ever read. Number 1 in the most-ruthless category is Dirt by David Vann. Numbers 3,4, and 5 on my ruthless books list would also be novels by David Vann.

There is no other author who is so skilled at combining poetry with viscera. The combination is Homeric. It commands your attention. Vann’s novels remind you that life-and-death stories are actually, literally about life and death. Each of Vann’s novels invokes the heightened tension of the best genre thriller, but goes so far beyond that genre-level dread, because the stakes in these books are real, and they are enormous. Vann books make me gasp with their audacity. In my head as I read Vann’s books I hear these questions: Is he really going to write that? And: Did he really write that? and with each of his novels I feel the same wrenching understanding, as I read, that I’m going to be brought to a level of primal violence, a level that I hadn’t been able to imagine being inscribed in language before then.

Goat Mountain is my favorite of Vann’s books because the story is so fundamental and pure. There is absolutely nothing extraneous in its pages. It’s like the last few seconds of a Greek play, in novel form. It’s Oedipus gouging his eyes out. It’s Agamemnon cutting his own daughter’s throat.

It does not surprise me at all that Vann’s latest book, Bright Air Black, is a retelling of the Medea myth. It is a lovely visceral rendition that you should also read, both for its fierce feminism and for the unbeatable scene of Medea scraping her brother’s putrid remains off the deck of Jason’s ship with a wooden spoon.

And it also does not surprise me that in the acknowledgments of Bright Air Black Vann writes “my novels are all Greek tragedies.”

For me it is in Goat Mountain where Vann’s love of Greek tragedy is displayed at its primal and perfect best.

(buy the book of dog by lark benobi)

Downdrift by Johanna Drucker is a book that amazed and delighted me, even though as a cohesive narrative it fails completely. Fail is the wrong word, though, for a goal that is never attempted. This novel doesn’t want to be judged for its storytelling, and it is not so much a novel as it is a sometimes-whimsical, sometimes-serious thought collage.

As the novel begins, organisms in every ecological niche on Earth have begun to experience the intrusion of human-like characteristics into their behaviors. This change is presented as the opposite of evolutionary progress: to behave in a human way is instead categorized as “downdrift.” 

The story is narrated throughout by “Archaeon,” a unicellular organism that belongs to the Kingdom Archaea, a creature that has (through contact with others of its kind) absolute knowledge of events the whole world over, but that has almost no sense of narrative suspense.

Archeaon explains its sense of narrative timing this way:

Our time scales–yours and mine–are as different as our size and complexity. To me, all of the follies of the animal kingdom are the trivial business of a few seconds of my historical memory. Nearly three-quarters of the earth’s existence has passed in my presence, billions of years. Compare that to the mere millions in which primitive arthropods and other organisms came into being. And you? A blip on the screen, a tweak in the evolutionary chain, a phenomenon of rapid acceleration. I will long outlive you and the changes wrought on this world by your machinations.

What forward narrative momentum there is in Downdrift (and it barely registered with me as I read along) hangs on the stories of a lost cat and a peripatetic lion, creatures that re-appear at intervals in the story, and that seem destined to meet at some point. And they do meet. But that meeting seems beside the point when it happens, because the real delight of Downdrift is not in narrative at all, but in an accumulation of detail, sentence after sentence, that by the end paints a picture of vast ecological disruption.

Another round of salamander antics is taking place in the autumn woods. A big group outing, comprised of extended families and pseudo-families, is underway at the edges of a pool. They have collected food bright as their red bellies or the stark yellow of their spots. The older ones are picking at a few, very few, highly colored bits of fungus and mixing them with all manner of beetles and flies, worms and larvae, spiders and moths and grasshoppers to make a banquet from an ancient recipe. These traditions may also soon be at risk, but not yet.

In a brave choice on the author’s part Homo sapiens barely signifies in this novel at all. At one point coyotes are stealing human babies; at another point Archaeon wryly observes “an outbreak of human shoaling, seepage into the homo sapiens from the minnows and sardines,” an image that carries with it both the idea of humans under stress, as well as the lack of significance that humans and their problems have to this story.

Because this is not the human’s story. The subtitle to Downdrift is “an eco-fiction,” and the novel fulfills the goals of this relatively new genre in a significant way. The novel is a metaphor for the way we value convenience over preservation; the way we prioritize the artificial over the natural; the way we focus on our daily worries rather than the long-term problem of potential ecological collapse. For those who have the willingness to let the a story flow past at its own pace, the novel offers a unique and thought-provoking take on the world and our place in it.

– Lark Benobi

(The Book of Dog by Lark Benobi)

Oneiron by Laura Lindstedt
(English Translation by Owen F Witesman, Oneworld:2018)

Some books leave me speechless at the end. I mean this quite literally. I’m not making a metaphorical “there are no words” comment about the quality of what I have just read. I am instead trying to report a physical phenomenon, a feeling in my throat and lungs that comes only rarely, just after a last sentence is read, and a book is closed, when I’m left with a dazzling void of complicated feeling that renders me mute. After a while the words come back, and my feelings about the book begin to shape themselves into language.

So here is this novel, Oneiron*. In it seven dead women find themselves together in a placeless place, a white void with only the clothes on their backs. At some point they notice they aren’t breathing. Not long after, they realize they are dead. They share their stories. They help one another. They bear witness to the one another’s final moments. These seven women are remarkable only in the way that every human being is remarkable. The stories of their final moments before death are haphazard and sometimes violent and always meaningless. The women have nothing in common, not even a common language. But even so these women make themselves into a caring community, in this strange afterlife, where nothing is ever explained, either to these seven characters, or to the reader. As in real life, the characters, and through them the reader, need to take it on faith that their experiences have purpose.

Oneiron is one of those books that stunned me into silence at the end, and when words did come back, they were from I. Corinthians:

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. 

Oneiron is not a religious book. God has no place in the afterlife Lindstedt creates. I’m not a religious person. Yet somehow this novel embraces a life philosophy that reminded me of Paul’s teaching. The novel suggests that caring for others–even in the flawed ways these strangers reach out and care for one another after death–is the most vital motivating impulse that gives meaning to our lives.

*from Greek ὄνειρον, oneiron, “dream”

 

(Children of Our Age by A.M. Bakalar, Jantar:2018)

A while ago I wrote about three novels  that I called “the most truthful, most political novels I’ve read” for some time: “Preparation for the Next Life by Atticus Lish, The Sarah Book by Scott McLachlan, and Blood of the Dawn by  Claudia Salazar Jiménez.

To that list of highly recommended reads I’d like to add Children of Our Age by A.M. Bakalar. What a book. Where Lish in Preparation for the Next Life wrote about the way undocumented workers are ruthlessly exploited by others, Bakalar’s focus is on those who would exploit them. Her characters are Polish immigrants to London who have just barely managed to scrabble up to a precarious but undeniably middle-class way of life. Their success has many times come at the cost of their humanity: those who have learned to traffic humans, and to treat human beings with the same level of detachment as they would livestock, are the ones who, at least at the beginning of this harrowing novel, are most likely to succeed.

What makes this novel great is the way Bakalar manages to create empathy for all of her characters, even the most ruthless and damaged of them. For example Bakalar writes a scene in which a thuggish violent man stalks, rapes, and strangles a sixteen year old girl. It’s a scene every bit as harrowing as Joyce Carol Oates at her disturbing best, but then, in a surprising coda, Bakalar lifted me out of a knee-jerk repulsion for this character, and left me instead with a feeling of empathy and sadness for what this man had endured in life. Time after time I was plunged into a sense of compassionate understanding for characters that behave in selfish and disturbing ways. It’s quite a ride. The novel offers no easy answers. A lot of bad things happen. And yet somehow I finished feeling compassionate and hopeful.

Some novels perform the important work of shedding light on the ways economic inequality corrodes human endeavor, even in relatively well-off societies. Politically-oriented social realism, with a focus on the working poor, has not been a wildly trendy type of novel for some time, and that’s too bad, because this kind of fiction provides a way into the lives of others, and it’s the kind of understanding we can use more of just now.

– Lark Benobi

(buy The Book of Dog by Lark Benobi)

 

Sometimes you just gotta rage.

Lately I’ve read novels where the narrator seems ready to bust off the page and stab me in the eye. Or hurl herself off a high building to meet a messy end, right in front of me. In these novels the narrators behave badly. They don’t watch their language and violence is never far from their thoughts. It’s because they are furious: About their circumstances. About their lives. About their men. They don’t care what I think of them. What a gift. It’s like the friend who finally stops trying to please you. One day, instead of telling you what she thinks you want to hear, she tells you the truth, and the real conversation can begin at last.

Here for instance is the first sentence of Die, My Love by Ariana Harwicz, as translated by Sarah Moses and Carolina Orloff: I lay back on the grass among fallen trees and the sun on my palm felt like a knife I could use to bleed myself dry with one swift cut to the jugular. 

What follows is a visceral and primal rendering of a woman who can’t pretend any longer that her life is happy — even though she lives the definition of a perfect life. If life has ever felt like a horrifying nightmare to you — if you have ever thought, however fleetingly, ‘wow, these people all around me actually think they are behaving rationally, when really they are trapped in a nightmare inside their own skulls, and they are living a script in which they never question their values or beliefs, and I’m trapped along with them’ — then you’ll experience your own alienation, and recognize your own thoughts, while reading this brief testimony of a woman who refuses to look away.

After that, I invite you to read Three Plastic Rooms by by Petra Hůlová, the story of an aging prostitute and her relationship with her own body, a novel rendered from Czech into hauntingly poetic English by Alex Zucker. Oh, my goodness. How can there exist a novel that is at once so open to beauty and yet in which every sentence is some new shocker? Here you go. This is that book. It’s the kind of book that nineteen out of twenty readers will say is too upsetting to love, or maybe even finish, and the twentieth person will say this book changed my life or this book convinces me that we are nowhere near the end as a species of exploring all the ways human language can be called upon to express new things.

As I write this, there has not been a single review of the novel on Amazon, which is surprising. It seems the book that would make people angry enough to write about it. Let’s see. It’s the kind of book that you can open on any page and be unbelievably disturbed. Let me try now:

the true mumsyfuckers have enough of that little drama at home, and the fuckshop, a quiet backwater of kissed knees, offers a gulf of solace, because what an orgasm means to these men’s wives was drilled into their heads by all those sex scene disasters you see at the multiplex, which whenever they happen my sticker-inner farts with laughter in my seat, and I would only be willing to moan during them, as I said, for the enjoyment of a man all my very own, so that sitting there in the seat next to me, in the dark, he would get an urge to stroke himself, or maybe just enjoy my sights, or maybe all of me, or, sigh, even love me.

Then consider Heartland by Ana Simo. The novel is the the most genteel of the three, but it’s just as relentless — it’s only that the diction is more elevated. I was inclined to love it if only because it’s 75-year-old Simo’s debut novel but then it performed the amazing feat of surprising me on every page — for its truthfulness, and for its humor.

The mule was the only one of the four departing beasts she could not imagine killing. The other three she stabbed, quartered, and disemboweled with her knife, throwing their livers to the feral pigs that roamed the cemetery at night, and burning the rest until only their teeth and bones remained.

These novels are for the times when you long for a book that does more than provide a catharsis so familiar that it bores you, or when you’re tired of books that end with hard-won yet valuable lessons. These novels disturbed me. These novels exhilarated me.