László Krasznahorkai, _The Melancholy of Resistance_, trans. George Szirtes

 I HAVE OWNED this for years, maybe ten, but I only started it last August. I was only a hundred pages in or so when I saw the announcement that Krasznahorkai had won the Nobel. The sweet part of that was my being able honestly to answer "yes" when asked whether I had read anything by him.

A magnificent novel, I would say. It took me a few months to read, however.  It is not long (just 314 pages in the New Directions paperback I read), although it is dense (some paragraphs are a few pages long), but I found myself needing to takes some weeks-long breaks from it because it is terrifying. It probably did not help that I tended to be reading it between 11:00 p.m. and one o'clock in the morning.

The Melancholy of Resistance is not a thriller nor a horror novel. The terror lies in the novel's depiction of a crypto-fascist authoritarian seizing control of a modest-sized city in Hungary, and the not-at-all-distant similarities between what is happening in this fictional town and what is happening in the U.S.A. right now.

Krasznahorkai's portrait of the seizure of power does not seem historically specific; no dates are mentioned, nor is the Arrow Cross or Ferenc Szálasi. We are definitely in Hungary and might be in the 1930s or 1940s, although there are no references to historical events that might pin the story down (much as The Trial seems set in Prague before the outbreak of World War I, but we get no certain indications that it is). Krasznahorkai seems to be about drawing archetypes rather than writing historical fiction.

The key archetype is Mrs. Eszter, whose attributes coincide frequently with those of President Trump and his team: a sense that her will is a law unto itself, a willingness to exploit common fears and resentments to gain power, the whipping up of hatred against outsiders, the promptness in erecting Horst Wessel-like "martyrs," a readiness to resort to violence. No armbands, banners, or slogans, but the psychological architecture of right-wing authoritarianism is all there.

The novel takes place over just a couple of days, but in that brief time Mrs. Eszter stages a kind of coup, helped at first by the police chief (who turns out to be an unreliable drunk) then by a state official making a visit, somehow collecting the reins of power into her hands. The opportunity she is looking for arrives in the form of a traveling company with an unusual exhibit, a preserved whale (Leviathan?), a departure from the familiar that she uses to provoke the town's suspicion of outsiders and fear of the unknown to the point of violence.

Can anyone stop her? Perhaps her estranged husband, Mr. Eszter, person of letters and musicologist (he is particularly interested in the keyboard tuning systems of Andreas Werckmeister--as with the possible allusion to Hobbes's Leviathan, there may be thematic implications here). But Mr. Eszter can't get it together, quite, can't protect his eccentric friend Valuska or the town from Mrs. Eszter's machinations. He succumbs to the idea "that there was one law and one law only, that of the strong which dictated that 'the stronger power was absolute'." Shades of Stephen Miller! The town "cannot be governed in the old way anymore!" insists Mrs. Eszter, and it turns out she knows exactly what the new way should like. Shades of Miller again, not to mention the whole administration to which he belongs.

Kim Hyesoon, _Phantom Pain Wings_, trans. Don Mee Choi

 I WAS READING somewhere recently about South Korea's low fertility rate, which has been <1 for a few years now (replacement level is 2.1). The writer's take was that the education level of South Korean women has risen dramatically in recent generations, but the society's patriarchal culture has scarcely budged, with the consequence that younger South Korean women are intentionally avoiding marriage and motherhood, even boyfriends and sex (you can read up on the "4B movement" in a good many places).

Reading Han Kang's novel The Vegetarian and this collection by Korean poet Kim Hyesoon has made me a well-wisher to the 4B movement. The male entitlement on view in both books induces shudders. HUNTR/X wouldn't stand for it, I'm sure (come to think of it, they don't have boyfriends, do they?).

The collection's (English) title refers to the pain someone who has had (for example) a leg amputated can still experience in the now-absent leg, although the missing limbs in this instance are wings, as though Kim were a bird who had lost her wings. The poems seem to be working out this loss or working towards recovering birdness while at the same time grieving another loss, the deaths of her parents. As Kim writes in the essay that New Directions have appended to this translation, "I came to write Phantom Pain Wings after Daddy passed away. I called out for birds endlessly. I wanted to become a translator of bird language."

Being a bird, for Kim, seems to involve getting up and out, leaving the cage, breaking into a new dimension (that I was also reading Cartarescu's Solenoid as I was reading her poems might have reinforced this theme for me). For instance:

I fly then stop

I fly then chirp

Inside my made-up world, I can go very far

Not a song

Not an echo

but a faraway place where there's only freedom

I'm bird, bird flying in that place

That is not exactly a typical passage, though, as Kim is usually wilder, stranger, more surreal. Try this:

You died faraway and returned

Daddy, like an owl,

you perch on the dining table

and see night during the day

night during the night

Daddy, when you're too embarrassed, 

you swear every other word

like I swear at myself in the third person

Everybody says it's my fault

and not my brother's fault

Daddy, your flesh-colored head

spews white hair like a white trumpet

I wondered a bit at translator Don Mee Choi's decision to go with "Daddy" throughout the book, since the word will certainly remind English-speaking readers of Sylvia Plath, but it turned out Kim is conversant with Plath (see p. 127), and the intertextual echo came to seem, as in the quoted passage, uncannily  resonant.

Kim may not attract an audience the size of those for K-Pop, or South Korean film, or even Han Kang's novels, but if you were wondering whether South Korea's cultural explosion is also happening in poetry, the answer is yes.

Mircea Cartarescu, _Solenoid_, trans. Sean Cotter (2 of 2)

SEVERAL CHAPTERS ARE set in the narrator's childhood, and I was taken by surprise by how familiar the world of these chapters seemed. I say "by surprise" because even though Cartarescu and I are in the same age cohort--I am two years older--Romania in the late 1950s and early 1960s must have been a very different place than the American Midwest during the same period. Or so one would think. But the atmosphere of the institutions, the slightly stricken look of the streets, the lingering traces of life as it was before the Second World War, were apparently similar enough that the landscapes of Solenoid, physical and spiritual, seemed eerily recognizable to me.

The young Cartarescu and the young me were growing up under very different kinds of government, of course. Soviet troops only left Romania when Cartarescu was two years old, and Nicolae Ceaușescu came to power when the novelist was nine. The novel only occasionally glances at the political, however, and perhaps the Cold War era as lived in in the lower-profile regions of the East was somehow comparable to the same historical experience in the lower-profile regions of the West.

Ceaușescu is never mentioned by name in the novel, but we still get a sense of a lowering sky, of a grayness, of painfully circumscribed opportunities, of a vaguely oppressive something or other that gets in the way of any kind of flourishing or renewal. All this may be Cartarescu's way of  rendering life in a totalitarian society. And the novel's recurring sense that there is another possibility, a fourth dimension, mysterious but possibly accessible, may have a political aspect: it may represent, among other things, the feeling that there is another way to live, that Communism might come to an end. The tesseracts, Klein bottles, and unreadable manuscripts may all be pointing to the idea that the unrealizable may be realized after all, in some other realm, some other time, some barely imaginable transfigured future.

The end of the book, when Bucharest seems to emerge out of a state of suspended animation into some kind of transformation, both devastated and remade, perhaps renders the cataclysm of 1989. There are no specific references to those events, which in Romania were particularly terrible. But the sense that we have emerged into a different world, unfamiliar but alive with potential, make for a hopeful ending.

Mircea Cartarescu, _Solenoid_, trans. Sean Cotter (1 of 2)

 IT TOOK ME quite a while to finish this, taking a few breaks, but my admiration for it is limitless. Deep thanks to Deep Vellum for bringing it out in the U.S. and to Sean Cotter for a graceful, compelling translation.

My genre designation would be "alternative autofiction." That would be "alternative" as in "alternative history," e.g. Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle or Philip Roth's The Plot Against America, historical fiction that imagines how history might have unfolded had one event or another fallen out differently. Solenoid, I think, is (to some extent) about one of the lives Cartarescu might have led had some episodes in his earl life gone differently. The only comparable novel I have read is Paul Auster's 4 3 2 1, which actually gives four alternative lives to a characters whose starting circumstances closely match Auster's own.

The (unnamed) narrator has literary ambitions as a young man, but a poetry reading that might have been his big breakout moment goes terribly wrong, and he instead becomes a teacher of Romanian at a secondary school in Bucharest. Cartarescu's own youthful literary ambitions bore fruit: he got published, won prizes, became famous. But what if they hadn't? He might easily have ended up teaching Romanian literature in Bucharest, in just such a school as this, with a group of students, administrators, and fellow teachers as idiosyncratic as the cast of a Wes Anderson film.

The building itself has its idiosyncracies, for that matter, subterranean passages and outbuildings that house unlikely objects (e.g., a kind of demonic, David Cronenberg dentist's chair) and contain mysterious portals. The world of Solenoid is somewhat comparable to that in Alasdair Gray's Lanark, a grimy urban setting that somehow exists alongside, or parallel to, or behind a weirder, more fantastical one. A kind of European magical realism, maybe, as in Bruno Schulz or Gunter Grass? 

The novel's mysterious parallel other world may be the one in which Cartarescu is a celebrated novelist. Is that world better? Maybe, maybe not. The crucial notion is that it is there. The novel persuades you that the world you know in its three familiar dimensions is not the only world there is--that fourth and fifth dimensions are out there, to be fleetingly glimpsed in dreams, or in the visionary theories of Nikola Tesla, or the inscrutable language of the Voynich Manuscript, or in the humming power of the giant solenoid buried under the narrator's house, which enable him and his girlfriend Irina to levitate during sex.

Jane DeLynn, _In Thrall_

PUBLISHED IN 1982, but I had never heard/read of it until I saw Malin Hay's London Review of Books piece on the 2024 Semiotexte reprint. Hay explains (as does Colm Tóibín in this volume's introduction) that the novel has long had the standing of a classic among lesbian readers, and it's easy to see why. It's brilliant.

The narrator, Lynn, is a senior in an all-girls high school in New York City, circa the mid-1960s. She is Jewish and middle-class, belongs to a circle of girlfriends who reminded me a bit of the girls in Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye, is dating a handsome, athletic but profoundly uninteresting boy named Wolf, and has fallen helplessly in love with her English teacher, Miss Maxfeld.

Miss Maxfeld notices how seriously smitten Lynn is, starts inviting Lynn to her apartment for tea, and eventually, a sexual affair commences. Miss Maxfeld is taking advantage of the situation, one could say, but it's hard not to sympathize with her. She is lonely, but would never have seduced Lynn, I felt, had Lynn not been wholly receptive to being seduced. Miss Maxfeld is painfully clear-eyed about both Lynn and herself. She never flatters and always tries to be honest with herself and Lynn about how short-lived the affair is likely to be. She entertains no illusions and tries to dispel Lynn's illusions, without much success.

I found myself admiring Miss Maxfeld, actually, while Lynn...well, let's say Jane DeLynn has few rivals in the category of writers making adolescent characters based on the writers themselves seem vain, foolish, and maddeningly self-centered. James Joyce, perhaps. Joyce in the fifth chapter of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man perhaps makes Stephen Dedalus as little likable as DeLynn makes Lynn--a performance of artistic self-abnegation so complete one can only salute and admire.

An early chapter features Lynn's English essay on the tragic hero, in which she argues that she herself is the perfect example of a tragic hero (see above, "maddeningly self-centered").  As the book approached its close, I began to fear that the novel's denouement would turn on the irony that, by getting fired, Miss Maxfeld would be the character with the tragic ending. Inevitably Lynn's parents are going to find out what is going on, and inevitably are going to pursue some form of punishment for Miss Maxfeld, and I was sure Miss Maxfeld was going to be fired if only to fulfill narrative symmetry.  However (spoiler alert), Lynn prevents that outcome in an unexpected flash of quick thinking and unselfish action. Whew. 

In an alternate world, this might be assigned in high school to be read alongside Catcher in the Rye. It would make a nice counterbalance.

 

Tommi Parrish, _Men I Trust_

 PARRISH'S GRAPHIC NOVEL deftly reconciles seemingly divergent modes. 

The "graphic" part feels expressionist. The human figures, for instance, are highly stylized, with small, sometimes tiny heads and enormous legs, their torsos stretched and elongated. (The effect is a little like the figures of Fernand Léger.) The color palette changes from episode to episode, looking a  little like Matisse here, a little like Emil Nolde there, darkening or brightening with the tone of the episode.

The "novel" part, however, is unvarnished realism. Eliza is a single mom with one son and an ex-husband who tends to be delinquent with child support payments. She has a job and is trying to establish herself as a spoken word poet. (Parrish uses an Anne Boyer poem as a sample of Eliza's work, so we know she's good.) Sasha is slightly younger and has yet to get much of anything going for herself; she has just moved back in with her parents, an arrangement that pleases no one. 

Sasha hears Eliza read and develops a powerful crush. Most of the novel is Sasha doing her damnedest to get as close as she can to Eliza, hoping to become her lover. Eliza appreciates Sasha's friendship but is not ready to reciprocate Sasha's feelings.

The reader assumes...well, this reader assumed that we were headed for some nice rom-com ending, but actually, no we are not. We get the tale of a relationship that might have gone in one direction but instead goes in another, alongside all the up-and-down stress of living in families and trying to make a living. 

Straight contemporary urban realism, then--but taking place in a visual world all its own. Maybe a little like what you might get if Georg Grosz turned Berlin Alexanderplatz into a graphic novel.

I'm baffled by the title. A few men make brief appearances in the story, but not a one of them seems trustworthy. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Matthew D. Taylor, _The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Democracy_

 I HAVE RECENTLY been reading several books that try to map out ideological configurations of Trumpism. This one covers the Christian nationalist angle. On the whole, I found it not quite as illuminating as Jesus and John Wayne by Kristin Kobes de Mez (who provides a dust jacket blurb here), but it adds some valuable detail to that portrait.

Taylor focuses on what he calls the independent charismatics. Charismatics are Christians who believe that the miraculous powers bestowed on the apostles on Pentecost--speaking in unknown languages, healing, prophecy, handling snakes without getting bitten--can still be obtained by those open to the Holy Spirit. Some charismatics belong to traditional denominations (e.g., Roman Catholicism), and some belong to denominations explicitly dedicated to tapping into the Pentecostal powers (e.g., Assemblies of God). Other charismatics, however, find the whole institutionalized structure of a denomination--creeds, polities, seminaries, ordination, and so on--an obstacle to the flow of the Holy Spirit, so they just set up shop for themselves, so to speak. These are Taylor's independent charismatics, and there are a lot of them out there.

These are not your familiar run-of-the-mill evangelicals, by the way. Those folks tend to support Trump, but find his style a little off-putting. The  independent charismatics, however, are truly on board, and were much in evidence on January 6, 2021...yea, even on the very ground of the Capitol Mall itself.

The main body of Taylor's book looks at several of the leading personalities of this tendency. The "independent charismatics" are not formally organized, of course, but they are highly networked and do sometimes coordinate activities. The late Peter Wagner, at one time of the evangelical-but-not-necessarily-charismatic Fuller Theological Seminary, was particularly effective at networking and coordinating. Dutch Sheets worked up the "ekklesia" movement, based on the idea that the Greek word "ekklesia," usually translated "church" when it occurs in the New Testament, should really be translated "assembly," hence the church and the government ought to be one and the same. Lance Wallnau came up with the "Seven Mountains Mandate" metaphor, a version of "dominion theology" (i.e., again, fusing church and state) asserting that (charismatic) Christians should aspire to control the seven crucial dimensions of a society: family, religion, education, media, arts and entertainment, business, and government. We also meet Paula White, Cindy Jacobs, Ché Ahn, and Sean Feucht, all of whom Taylor deftly evokes. (Not sure what his own theological orientation is, but he almost sounds like an insider at times.)

The main idea seems to be that the United States ought to be guided by the Holy Spirit, which practically means it ought to be guided, perhaps ruled, by independent charismatics. Bringing this about may require battling demons--that is, it may require violence. "We will not take dominion by remaining passive. We will only take dominion if the Body of Christ [= Christians, the church, the ekklesia] becomes violent and declares war on the enemy!" That's Peter Wagner, from his book Dominion!, p. 118 (Taylor is scrupulous about his sources). 

The saying of Jesus that gives Taylor's book its title--"From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven has suffered violence, and the violent take it by force" (Matthew 11: 12)--was quoted by some of those storming the Capitol five years ago today, and according to Taylor, it has become a watchword among Christian nationalists.

What in the world do they see in Trump, though? Does he ever seem to have been seized by the Holy Spirit? (His babbling could sound like talking in tongues, I suppose.) The answer to this puzzle is the "Cyrus Anointing," another Lance Wallnau trope. Just as King Cyrus of Persia, not himself an Israelite, delivered God's Chosen People from bondage in Babylon, so Donald Trump, not himself one of the saved, will deliver God's Chosen People from bondage in a secularized, multicultural, woke USA.