Richard Flanagan, _The Narrow Road to the Deep North_

ALSO A PICK by our book club, like the Setterfield novel, but as though to underline the folly of generalizing about book club selections, this one was astonishingly good. 

The only other Flanagan novel I had read before this one was, coincidentally, also largely set in a penal colony in the tropics. Gould's Book of Fish vividly presents a 19th century British penal camp in Tasmania, and The Narrow Road to the North even more vividly presents an even grimmer place: one of the Japanese prisoner of war camps whose inmates were charged with constructing the Burma Railroad.

A lot of men my age will remember this setting from the Pierre Boulle novel and David Lean film Bridge on the River Kwai, both of which struck me as shockingly realistic and de-romanticized when I was twelve, but are a Disneyland ride compared to The Narrow Road to the Deep North. If you are looking for a shockingly realistic and de-romanticized WW II novel, Flanagan is your man.

Beyond that, though, the novel is burningly memorable. The main character, Australian doctor Dorrigo Evans, is all-but-engaged when he goes off to war, but the great passion of his life is a woman who happens to be married to his uncle. When he comes back, he does what seems the obvious thing and marries his might-as-well-be fiancée. And so two great silences are imposed upon him. While he is celebrated as a hero and an accomplished surgeon over the remaining course of a long life, he can never really speak of what the camp was like--it is just too grisly and terrible, shows everyone in too ugly a light, is just unspeakable. Nor can he ever acknowledge his most intense, transformative experience of love. The great defining experiences of his life simply may not be uttered. What does that do to a person? That also is what this novel is about.

And then there is the wholly unexpected turn that the novel, unsparing in its depiction of the brutality of the prison camp, also honors the beauty and depth of Japanese culture--the title, for instance, is also that of Basho's great poetic travel journal, and allusions to other great moments of Japanese culture are scattered throughout. The commander of the camp, a decent enough man made monstrous by circumstances, like Dorrigo survives the war and like Dorrigo has to live the remainder of his life with a shadow self he can neither acknowledge nor purge.

All that, and the prose is both supple and steely, its sentences landscapes of feeling and perception. 

Damn. What a good novel.

Diane Setterfield, _Once Upon a River_

 I READ THE Thirteenth Tale a few years ago because our book club selected it. I wound up not liking it much—mainly, I think, because of the way the plot was resolved. In The Thirteenth Tale, a famous novelist at the end of her career tells her last tale, apparently autobiographical, about two sisters in a complicated family. The novelist is one of the sisters, one guesses...but which one? The reader weighs this  question for a few hundred pages, at the end of which we find out...that neither sister is the novelist. A character we knew nothing about, living secretly in the same house as the sisters, is the novelist. 

What? Is that playing the game? In my mind, no. 

The rest of the club enjoyed The Thirteenth Tale, though, so I suppose it was just a matter of time before we chose Once Upon a River. In the opening chapters, a girl about four years old is rescued from the River Thames—she seems drowned, but revives, miraculously. But she cannot speak. Whose child is she? Two different local families have recently lost a child and think she may be theirs. For a few hundred pages, we are invited to speculate: is she the lost daughter of the Vaughns, or the lost granddaughter of the Armstrongs?

Guess what?

She is neither!

Ha! Same trick. I did not like it any better this time.

I wouldn’t mind this so much if the writing and overall texture of the novel were more up my alley. They just aren’t. The novel is an over-decorated Victorian parlor, loaded with bric-à-brac, embroidery, padding, and ornamentation. It’s like sinking into a plush, over-stuffed sofa. 

But the rest of the book club loved Once Upon a River, though, so I may be in for more Diane Setterfield.

Arthur Frank, _The Wounded Storyteller_

 FRANK IS A sociologist, but one with serious humanities chops—among the touchstones here are Walter Benjamin, Emmanuel Levinas, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.

Spivak’s famous question “can the subaltern speak?” is recast by Frank as “can the patient speak?” The definitive narratives about illnesses are case studies, written by expert observers aiming at the perfect objectivity. What if, Frank asks, we complemented this with more narratives by the ill themselves, relying on experience rather than expertise and explicitly subjective?

This strikes me as obviously a good idea. When the book originally appeared in 1995, it probably was quite a curveball, but over the last 25 years it seems the trend has been exactly as Frank prescribed. I sought out the book when it was cited as particularly influential in a review I read of Anne Boyer’s The Undying.

The core of the book is Frank’s description of three large classes of illness narratives: the Restitution Narrative, in which modern science triumphs over the disease and the sufferer’s old life is regained; the Chaos Narrative, in which the sufferer’s world and selfhood just get dismantled and stop making any kind of sense; and the Quest Narrative, in which the illness is a journey the sufferer takes that transforms them, perhaps giving them some wisdom or gift that the sufferer can then share with others.

Frank is most interested in Quest Narratives. Medical professionals can learn from them what expertise can never teach them about the illness; the community learns something, too, since the sufferer has become a witness giving testimony. Audre Lorde’s Cancer Journals and Anatole Broyard’s Intoxicated by My Illness are Frank’s main examples.

I read the second edition (2013) edition that includes a new afterword that is definitely worthwhile—that is where Benjamin and Levinas (and a little Aristotle) particularly come into play, with powerful effect. It’s a profoundly moral book, and not at all in the Power-of-Positive-Thinking vein Boyer so sharply critiques.

Joanna Klink, _The Nightfields_

WRAPPING UP ANOTHER Poetry Week here at Loads of Learned Lumber, and it was a good one. Every volume was good, and two might be masterpieces: Timothy Donnelly's The Problem of the Many and this one. I am moving Joanna Klink up into my contemporary American poetry pantheon.

Briefly described, the book is about loss (a painful breakup, a 90-year-old blue spruce uprooted by a windstorm, the death of her father) and looking at the night sky. That is, the book is about two of poetry's most ancient and foundational themes. So why does it seem so fresh and original? 

Mainly because of Klink's always surprising language, I think. "Motors carry you, / or feet pull you forward / in cool dispersals of color." Or: "the ground doves in their murmuring feathers." Or: "Devotion is full of arrows." 

Perhaps also because of her idiosyncratic spirituality, which might show up as a strange prayer:

Please. Give us birds.

A light unto the world. An undistorted,

ancient ornament--some swift way

out of the earth.

Where the stones are laid.

Where we are laid.

Or that she would wrote a poem called "New Year" that includes the statement "it was already too late"--and then the poem (I think) turns out to be an update of that classic of belatedness, Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach."

Or just the ambition of "Night Sky," a long poem (or sequence, I'm not sure) about looking at the night sky that slowly becomes a poem about everything.

The republic may be going to hell, but our poetry remains worthwhile. It's something.

Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, _The Boys of Bluehill_

 FOR A FEW months late in the 1990s I was immersed in Ní Chuilleanáin’s The Magdalene Sermon (1989) and The Brazen Serpent (1994) because I was writing an article about her. I was living in those poems.

 I read The Girl Who Married the Reindeer (2001) and The Sun-fish (2009) when they came out and liked them— Ní Chuilleanáin is amazingly consistent—but not with the same obsessive attention, I have to admit, since I had said what I had to say and was not planning on writing more about her.

I bought this one, The Boys of Bluehill, when it came out in 2015 but did not get around to it right away...and now it’s been five years, and I learn Ní Chuilleanáin had new book out in 2019 (The Mother House) that I did not even know about.

There was something in those two books, Magdalene Sermon and Brazen Serpent, that I just absolutely had to figure out, explain to myself, and then try to describe for other people. I felt no such urgency with the subsequent books, though. And now Ní Chuilleanáin has had a new book out for going on two years without my knowing it. And I have, if anything, been reading more poetry than I was in the 1990s, by no means less. I feel disappointed in myself.

Her poetry has not changed, or not a great deal, and certainly not for the worse. The Boys of Bluehill may be a little more sombre, a little grayer than the earlier books, but her distinctive notes are all there. Ní Chuilleanáin poems work by holding a lot back, the details of the poem suggesting a narrative of which the bigger and more grievous facts remain unstated, but still have all their weight. One poem ends, “he can see the chair, and the red rug, the coloured // covers of the magazine, and everything that followed.” We do not know what followed—but you feel all of what happened, even without knowing what it was.  Or try this: “while the child you forgot to fetch from school / goes alone on dark bus journeys along the boulevards.” Feel that. And we don’t even know what was going on that led to the forgetting.

Ní Chuilleanáin‘s manner is very much what it was, then, maybe stronger and leaner, and her concerns have been consistent as well: art, music, religion, the church, loyalty and betrayal, the work of women and men’s ways of ignoring it. I wonder if the catastrophic hits the authority of the Irish Catholic Church has taken in the last ten years have something to do with the dry-ice anger under the surface of some of these poems.

Ní Chuilleanáin has not changed so very much—she remains a powerful poet, and either Muldoon or she is the greatest living Irish poet. I’m different, somehow. But not in any way I understand.

Timothy Donnelly, _The Problem of the Many_

 BOOKS SUCH AS this give me hope, not because The Problem of the Many is in tone hopeful or optimistic or uplifting—its score on any such scale would be modest, at best—but because the mere fact that anyone will take poetry seriously enough to write this well and construct a book this carefully and take the pains that have here been taken...well, that such things happen gives me hope. 

Seven years between Donnelly’s first book and his second, and then another nine for this one, his third, so as I finish Part 1 of The Problem of the Many, I am thinking, “Hmm, Mr. Donnelly, you know that would have made a nice slender volume all on its own.” Part 1 has intriguing formal variety, the ancient world as a leitmotif, and a corker long poem with which to close. Moreover, it sketches an expansively fertile theme: the relation of individual units (of matter, of time) to the collectivities they form, how one cannot necessarily guess the nature of the collectivity from the nature of the individuals composing it. That was excellent, I thought. Why not publish that, I thought, and not make us wait so long? 

But then Part 2 also seemed capable of being its own volume, for much the same reasons, and then Part 3 seemed like its own volume, a more satiric one, as did Part 4, a more elegiac and contemplative one, so I was compelled to acknowledge, okay, Mr. Donnelly, I see why you wanted to have all these in the same book.

The long poem that concludes Part 4, “Hymn to Life” (Donnelly notes Lou Andreas Salomé’s poem of the same title, not Longfellow’s, but I suspect Longfellow is in the mix somehow), shows a nice array of his gifts. Much of it is about extinct species, presented in the unscrolling syntax Donnelly has employed to good effect in his earlier books, but it also shows deftness of form in its 6-line stanzas and makes juxtapositions so jaw-dropping, of such different yet still complementary registers, that talk about mere montage or Pound’s ideogrammatic method seems inadequate. The problem of the many (that is, the relationship of the nature of the individual to the nature of the collectivity) reasserts itself, especially its temporal dimension and what it means for the collectivity that individuals die out and disappear.

And the last poem—the very last, coming even after the notes and acknowledgements—somehow does an even more persuasive job of closing the book than “Hymn of Life.”  

So, I hope I am still on the planet for Donnelly’s fourth book.

Mathias Svalina, Dream Delivery Service

YOU CAN FIND out the main public facts about Mathias Svalina's Dream Delivery Service here--http://www.dreamdeliveryservice.com--and while you are there, you should go ahead and subscribe, because it is definitely worth it.

A subscription provides you with a month of dreams written by Svalina, delivered by him to your very door if you live in the city he happens to be residing in that month, or by the U.S. Postal Service if you live elsewhere. (I have subscribed twice, both times receiving my dreams by mail.)

The dreams are prose poems in a quite small font (9 point, I guess?) on a small (five-and-a-half inches by four-and-a-quarter inches) sheet of white paper, and I would place them among the best work Svalina has done (and I am a long-time admirer). They occasionally remind me of James Tate by their ability to sweep you off in a surprising new direction before you even notice it. More remarkable, though, is Svalina's sheer power of invention: the extraordinary variety of scenarios, landscapes, characters, and events compassed in the dreams.

And most remarkable, I would say, is that in a literary landscape where the "dreamlike" has become a tired old mill horse ceaselessly wearing a path around the same old tropes, Svalina's poems really do evoke the oneiric--better than anything I have read since Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled, certainly. 

Svalina's dreams accept the most fantastical premises--e.g. that you are being chased by a giant in a supermarket, the center of which is a volcano--with a deadpan matter-of-factness that extraordinarily mimics the tone of my own dreams, and like my dreams Svalina's are not exactly light, not exactly dark, but oddly serene with a gentle but chilly undercurrent of disquiet. His dreams are uncannily like my dreams, save that they do not vanish like smoke while I am trudging to the bathroom to brush my teeth in the morning. No. They may be read slowly, savored, and re-read, as often as I like. Bless the Dream Delivery service.

Bhanu Kapil, _Schizophrene_

 IN A PREFATORY note, Kapil writes of trying to write an epic on the Partition of India and Pakistan and its "trans-generational effects," including "high incidence of schizophrenia in diaspora Indian and Pakistani communities [...]" (her emphasis). She threw the unfinished epic in her backyard one Christmas Eve, recovered it the following spring, and began to rewrite it, using words or phrases that remained decipherable.

Unusual work methods, certainly, but memorable results. Schizophrene is not on an epic scale so far as length goes--69 pages, some of which bear only a few words--and only in a few passages hints at the terrible events of the Partition. Somehow, it does convey a sense of what this rupture meant to someone not born until 21 years after it had occurred. 

Kapil does not make any explicit, sequential argument about how historical trauma can be inherited by those who did not in their own persons experience it, but the text does succeed in testifying to how that inheritance can take place and make itself felt. Accordingly, the ramifications of this very short, fragmentary book are vast--think only of what it suggests about slavery and the United States, for instance.

Karen Solie, _The Caiplie Caves_

SOLIE IS CANADIAN, but the poems in the book are mainly set in Scotland; the Caiplie Caves are on Scotland's east coast and are associated with St. Ethernan, a 7th century CE missionary, probably a bishop, possibly a martyr, possibly a hermit--a figure of indistinct outline, then, thus well-suited for poetic inhabitation.

Both Part I and Part II contain a group of poems in Ethernan's voice, which I was interested to see have  the right-hand justification used in several poems in the new book by Jorie Graham, which I wrote about yesterday. Solie does not conure up quite the against-the-grain feeling that Graham does with this device, but her Ethernan is certainly an against-the-grain character, disillusioned with humanity and with the church. (Ethernan on the proliferation of relics: "our dear  saints possessed, in addition to divine attributes / more than the usual number of working parts".)

I read Parts I and II not sure what interested Solie in this setting or in Ethernan, but there is a surprising swerve in Part III--a group of poems in the form of Ethernan's (right justification, double-spaced), but in the voice of (it seems) Solie herself.

the solitude

there are no two ways about it 

you can live here but don't expect it to entertain you

like a can on a fence it will set you up

test on you its experimental drugs

dress you in its homemade clothes

hunger breaking you in two to make you last

Solie's desire for relief, refuge, a place apart, would be eloquent on its own--but in the context of her seeing the relics of and then re-imagining the hermits and martyrs of the early church, that desire rings a little differently and a little more poignantly. It's not, we realize, a modern complaint, but an ancient one, and no remedy, then or now, be it spiritual or pharmaceutical, is going to do all that we hope it will. "I want to see the end of / it does not end."

Jorie Graham, _Runaway_

 LET'S START THE new year right, with a Poetry Week.

Graham may be rounding the turn into her late manner. Overlord, Sea Change, and PLACE, it seemed to me, had Graham in a holding pattern, doing good work but in a familiar vein--Graham-like without being Graham at her exploratory, audacious best.

Fast did seem different, though. Graham was always interested in the immediate and the urgent, but in Fast she seemed interested in immediacy and urgency in a new, stripped-down way. She seemed willing to abandon her usual toolkit. 

That willingness continues in Runaway. The five poems with right-side justification, for instance, which I don't recall her using to this extent before.

 I do not understand why this relatively simple device has an effect, but it does, and somehow Graham is very deft at it. The tiny skip this technique puts into the rhythm of reading may be the key. Whatever it is, I found going back to re-read these immediately after finishing, trying to see why they were landing as they did, and I'm still not sure.

A larger group uses quatrains with unusually long lines--I wonder if the book's design, with its unusually wide, almost square pages, was a way to keep these long lines all in one line of print. Here too something happens in the rhythm of the reading that feels...different. So even when Graham is doing basically what she has been doing since The End of Beauty--unpacking phenomena, self-correcting, suddenly getting feverish, hallucinatory--her doing it in these long-lined quatrains makes it all register in an unfamiliar, oddly stately way.

And what about the two "Sam" poems, "Sam's Dream" and "Sam's Standing," in ten-line stanzas, the one seeming to be about an embryo, the other about the same embryo once he or she is born? Why the nod to Dylan Thomas's "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower"? Why the recasting of Edward Thomas's "As the Team's Head Brass" as though it were filmed by Alain Resnais?

Graham is back at the old cauldron, but she has some new spells.