Category Archives: teaching

Lullaby: Caring for Life and Happiness

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We know from the very outset of Leïla Slimani’s Lullaby (2016) the conclusion of the story it tells: this is the tale of a nanny who murders the two children who are in her charge. The book is therefore in part an investigation into how such a tragic event could come to pass. How does a woman described as “this perfect nanny” (202; also the US title of the English translation) come so dramatically to turn from being the embodiment of care to being the agent of destruction and violence against two young innocents? But the book is equally–and perhaps even more–powerful as an exploration of the ambiguous and ambivalent relationship between employer and employee in domestic service. The murder that caps this story merely plays out the worst fear of a relatively common condition, when well-meaning middle-class parents invite an unknown quantity into the heart of their familial arrangements.

The parents here, Paul and Myriam, are generous and full of good intentions. He is a music producer, and she is a lawyer. She is more interesting than he is, or at least the book is more interested in her, perhaps because she is the mother, traditionally expected to find fulfilment and satisfaction in nurturing her off-spring. Indeed, at first that is her intention: initially she gives up her high-powered job to commit to full-time motherhood but to her “secret shame” (8) she cannot stand the restrictions on her life that this entails. When she runs into her old boss, Pascal, and he hints that the firm would take her back, she becomes a child herself: “She had wanted to hang on to Pascal’s leg, to beg him to take her with him, to give her a chance” (11). This is an early sign of a theme that runs through the book: that everyone needs mothering, but there are just not enough mothers to go around. When Pascal does agree to take her on again, she and Paul decide to hire someone to mother their children, but who will also end up largely mothering them, too.

But the decision to take on paid help is fraught with guilt and uneasiness. Paul comes from a left-wing family–“His parents had raised him to detest money and power” (106); his mother is full of “stories about her youth, her past political commitments, her revolutionary comrades” and once “believed that a revolution led by both sexes would give birth to a very different world, where her grandchildren would grow up. A world where there would be time to live” (115). Myriam’s work as a lawyer focuses on legal aid cases, defending those who cannot afford to pay for representation, “sleazy dealers, halfwits, an exhibitionist, talentless robbers, alcoholics arrested at the wheel” (29). She even finds herself defending men accused of hate crimes or domestic abuse. This despite (or because of?) the fact that she herself, it is implied but not directly stated, is of North African origin. So she is alert to the endemic racism of the agency where she first looks for help, where initially the agent assumes that Myriam is looking to be a nanny, rather than to hire one.

Ironically, perhaps, though most nannies are women of color (later in the book we are given a glimpse to the way they “swarm” with their local charges in the park, murmuring “snatches of Baoule, Dyula, Arabic and Hindi, sweet nothings whispered in Filipino or Russian” [178]), Myriam is set against hiring a North African:

She fears that a tacit complicity and familiarity would grow between her and the nanny. That the woman would start speaking to her in Arabic. Telling Myriam her life story and, soon, asking her all sorts of favours in the name of their shared language and religion. She has always been wary of what she calls immigrant solidarity. (16)

From the outset it is important, in other words, for Myriam to be able to maintain her distance, to establish clear boundaries, to avoid thinking (or letting the nanny think) that she has much in common with the person they hire. She and Paul therefore end up picking one of the few white women on the market, a forty-year-old named Louise. But for all the assertions of distance, one of the first things we hear Paul saying to her is “Make yourself at home” (21). The ambiguous overlap between workplace and home is already built in. 

If anything, Louise starts off with a better sense of the contradictions and struggle inherent in her situation. Shown around Paul and Myriam’s home, “she observes each room with the self-assurance of a general standing before a territory he is about to conquer” (22). And it is not long before the “apartment is completely under her powder, like an enemy begging for forgiveness” (24). This is because she soon establishes her indispensability, as a “miracle worker” (22) who brings order to the chaos, and swiftly breaks down any initial resistance from the children, baby Adam and primary-school-age Mila. Louise can play games and tell stories; she can cook and clean and sew. It is not long before she is not so much commanding general as not-so-secret agent: “she has embedded herself so deeply in their lives that it now seems impossible to remove her” (159). A fellow nanny visiting the apartment one day, when Myriam and Paul are away, sees that they have on display a photo of Louise holding the children. “You’re part of the family,” she tells her (121). By this time, it seems that this has become Louise’s fantasy, too.

Myriam and Paul encourage this fatal confusion, because they do not want either to see themselves as employers or Louise as employee. So they invite her to be guest as well as cook for a dinner party with their friends. Here also we see similar denials of power relations when Myriam introduces Louise to “Pascal, my boss” only for him to reply “‘Your boss? Oh, give me a break! We work together. We’re colleagues” (51, 52). It seems to suite everybody to blur the hierarchies that divide them. Yet at the dinner Louise still feels “nervous as a foreigner, an exile who doesn’t understand the language being spoken around her” (52). It is easier for those who hold the upper hand to deny that fact that for those who are supposedly included within a relationship that goes beyond labour to feel that they truly belong. But at the dinner, fortified by the flowing wine, Paul goes a step further: “This year, we’re going to give ourselves a treat and take our nanny writh us on holiday! You have to enjoy life, right?” (54). To whom is he speaking? Who has to enjoy life here? Is this the nanny’s holiday, too?

The irony is that for many jobs, the requirements for being a good worker involve denying that you are indeed a worker. By refusing to recognize your exploitation by others, you also become willing to exploit yourself, going beyond your contractual duties, working late, thinking about work in your leisure hours, confusing work with life. It is after all precisely their investment in their careers, and their identification with their jobs, that has led Myriam and Paul to turn domestic care into paid labour. But they want and expect from their nanny a similar self-sacrifice, which indeed she provides, going above and beyond expectations at every turn. Myriam and Paul want Louise to care for their children in the double sense of not only performing a service for pay (something a hired baby-sitter begrudgingly does one weekend when Louise is ill), but also being emotionally attached, even perhaps loving them. But not too much, of course, because one day this service will no longer be required. When Adam and Mila no longer need her, Louise’s contract will be terminated.

This is the anxiety that starts to grip Louise: that she will become (literally and figuratively) redundant. She therefore hatches a plan, to encourage Paul and Myriam to have another child: “Her obsession with the child spins endlessly in her mind. She thinks of nothing else. This baby, which she will love madly, is the solution to all her problems. [. . .] It will protect Louise’s place in her kingdom.” The problem, however, is that Louise’s don’t see the need for a new child: after all, they have two already. The children they have block the arrival of the one who is to come, and in more ways than one: 

She feels sure that Paul and Myriam don’t have enough time to themselves. That Mila and Adam are an obstacle to the baby’s arrival. It’s the children’s fault if their parents are never alone together. Paul and Myriam are exhausted by their tantrums; Adam wakes up too often in the night, cutting short their lovemaking. If the children weren’t constantly under their feet––whining, demanding cuddles–Paul and Myriam would be able to forge ahead and make a child for Louise. Her desire for that baby is fanatical, violent, blindly possessive. She wants it in a way she has rarely wanted anything: so badly it hurts, to the point where she is capable of choking, burning, destroying anything that comes between her and the satisfaction of her desire. (183)

For a desperate woman, perhaps touched with madness (and we also get something of Louise’s context and backstory, to which her employers are almost entirely oblivious), all this is no doubt reason enough for the dramatic act of violence that has unfolded as the novel opens (and with which it ends). She kills the children because they can never be enough, because one day they will grow up and pass her on the street without recognizing her; she will become no more than the faintest of memories, like the “ghost” to which she is several times already compared (110, 155). She kills the children for the sake of new life, of continued life, and because “Someone has to die. Someone has to die for us to be happy” (193), although she never realizes that, whatever Myriam and Paul say (“Louise will be so happy” [55], they convince themselves as they invite her to work through their holiday), her happiness is the very least important factor in the labour contract that fleetingly binds her to this bourgeois existence.

The Days of Abandonment: Writing a New Story

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Olga is a writer, a mother of two young children, living in Turin. Her husband, Mario, has just announced that he is leaving her. So begins Elena Ferrante’s The Days of Abandonment (2002). What follows is an exploration of her response to her new situation, which veers from grief to anger, tragedy to something like comedy. Along the way, there is a fair amount of overlap with Annie Ernaux’s The Possession, which covers much the same territory. What distinguishes Ferrante is, first, the materiality of the world she describes, whose very thinginess at times seems to conspire against the novel’s protagonist. Second, the fact that Ferrante’s heroine has children (where Ernaux’s does not) changes almost everything. This is as much the portrait of a mother as it is of a wife. After all, as Olga discovers, the maternal bond has to endure even as the marital relationship breaks down.

At first, Mario offers little in the way of explanation. But soon enough it becomes clear (and despite his initial denials) that he has in fact taken up with another woman. To add insult to injury, it turns out that his new girlfriend, Carla, is significantly younger, the daughter of a woman who had once been the couple’s friend when the two of them had first moved to Turin. Indeed, at the time the young girl’s apparent infatuation with Mario already caused ructions within their marriage, and now Olga concludes that far from cutting off contact with Carla then, 

For almost five years he had secretly enjoyed that body, had cultivated that passion, had transformed it into love, had slept patiently with me abandoning himself to the memory of her, had waited until she became of age, more than of age, to tell me that he was taking her definitively, that he was leaving me. (70)

Olga realizes all of this only when, by mere accident, she comes across Mario and Carla out on the street. Any previous sympathy she may have had for her husband now vanishes. A woman enraged, she attacks him physically, shoving his face against a shop window. “Hold the commas, hold the periods,” she says to herself. “It’s not easy to go from the happy serenity of a romantic stroll to the chaos, to the incoherence of the world” (70). She wants to drag him with her to this unpunctuated experience in which the narratives providing sense and meaning to everyday life suddenly no longer hold. And yet, of course, in their own ways each of the two of them is playing out their part in one of the oldest stories in the book: the cheating husband; the betrayed wife.

There is then a double challenge here. Ferrante’s challenge is to tell this well-worn tale in a new way. And this then echoes or is echoed in Olga’s challenge to reconstruct her sense of self, and perhaps particularly her sense of self as a woman, without falling into familiar traps and stereotypes.

For Olga is now haunted by a story from her childhood, a story that at the time she perhaps did not understand but which now gains new meaning, of “a dark figure of my Neapolitan childhood,” a woman whose husband had abandoned her with her children and becomes the subject of cautionary gossip in the neighbourhood:

My mother talked about it with her workers [. . .] while I played under the table [. . .], repeating to myself what I heard, words between sorrow and warning, when you don’t know how to keep a man you lose everything, female stories of the end of love, what happens when, overflowing with love, you are no longer loved, are left with nothing. The woman lost everything, even her name (perhaps it was Emilia), for everyone she became the “poverella,” that poor woman, when we spoke of her that was what we called her. The poverella was crying, the poverella was screaming, the poverella was suffering, torn to pieces by the absence of the sweaty red-haired man, and his perfidious green eyes. (15–16)

How to avoid becoming the poverella, who lost her name and her individuality, transformed into an archetype? And how, now for Ferrante, to avoid simply writing another poverella’s tale?

Of course, one way to avoid the same old story is to give the scorned woman voice, and this is fundamental to Ferrante’s novel. We may perhaps intuit or (from Olga’s point of view) fear what others may be saying, but here we still rigorously close to Olga’s own perspective, even if it may leave us in the dark about other aspects of the story. We know little to nothing substantial about Carla, for instance: she becomes simply the girlish seducer, childlike in her presumed infatuation. Her perspective will have to be left for others to tell. Olga by this point has no desire to be “fair,” and neither does Ferrante.

And perhaps another way to reiterate the same old tragedy of the helpless victim is to veer into comedy. At times I did wonder if this was intentional, but to me much in the novel approached a dark slapstick humor, especially as Olga comes to be betrayed not only by Mario, but by the physical world around her. Her telephone is broken, for instance. She has to replace the locks to her apartment, and even getting in and out becomes a struggle. Everyday, habitual acts become a mystery:

Maybe I was too tired to maintain the usual order of the world. I shouldn’t have gone out. What had I done? Had I put the coffeepot on the stove? Had I put in the coffee, filled it with water? Had I screwed it tight so that it wouldn’t explode? And the milk for the child? Were they actions that I had completed or had I only suggested to myself that I complete them? (95–96)

There is also a sex scene, in which Olga tries to seduce her downstairs neighbour, a musician she hardly knows, that is also surely funny in its spectacular failure as the musician comes too soon (here the object that betrays her is his penis). Dragging herself up the stairs afterwards, “Crouching in a corner, beside the banister, I saw the poverella of so long ago, who said to me in a weary but very serious tone: “I am clean I am true I play with my cards on the table” (87). But who is that phantom from the past to give Olga her advice?

The novel is entitled Days of Abandonment, though in fact it covers several months: it starts on “one April afternoon” (9) and continues until at least August, because we are told that “the hardest day of the ordeal of my abandonment” is “Saturday August 4th” (88). Indeed, almost a third of the entire book (pages 88 to 151) is devoted to this single day, which proves to be a catalogue of disasters that range from a sick kid to a dead dog (possibly poisoned, she imagines), fights with her children (one of whom stabs her with a paper cutter), and Olga accidentally locking them all into the apartment. To cap it all, by the end her indignity is witnessed by her downstairs neighbour, who has come up with “a rose, a single long-stemmed rose, a ridiculous rose offered with a ridiculous gesture by a man not at his ease” (148). Again, it is hard to know whether to laugh or cry.

No wonder the children periodically add to Olga’s woes by suggesting they might be better off with their father. But she perseveres and by the end, when Mario asks her to take them more often because “Carla is exhausted, she has exams to take, she can’t take care of them, you’re they’re mother” (185), this is truly the last straw for Olga, the point at which she realizes “He wasn’t even a fragment of the past, he was only a stain, like the print made by a hand on the wall” (186). And it is about the same time that she also senses that she has somehow broken from the paths set for her by the stories she has read (Anna Karenina) or been told: “I had even buried somewhere the abandoned wife of my Neapolitan childhood, my heart no longer beat in her chest, the veins were broken. The poverella had become again an old photograph, the petrified past, without blood” (184). The present does not always have to repeat the past. 

She can even return to the site of her earlier embarrassment and clumsiness, looking for someone who “knew how to make meaning stronger, to invent a feeling of fullness and joy” (188). The book ends with the acknowledgement that this is a fiction, but at least it is a new one, and she is prepared to pretend to believe it. She is writing herself into a new story.

The Story of My Teeth: Sometimes a Name is Just a Name

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There really is, in the city of Ecatepec, part of Greater Mexico City and not too far from the Basilica of our Lady of Guadelupe, a street called Disneylandia. Its cross-streets include California, Washington, New Orleans, Massachussets [sic], New York, Cabo Kennedy, and Arlington, collectively making a strange little subdivision that recreates an imaginary map of the United States, which mixes states with cities and counties, and which combines allusions to technology and the Space Race (Cape Kennedy), the Pentagon (Arlington), and mass entertainment. If this were all you knew of the United States, perhaps it would be enough? (Or perhaps it would once have been: surely today we would substitute Silicon Valley for Cabo Kennedy.) A little knowledge may be dangerous, but it is also the kernel around which we can elaborate an entire imaginary of the world. After all, is not that the way that Disneyland itself works, as a factory that produces fantasy out of caricatured snippets from the real world and its history?

I say that there really is a street called Disneylandia, because after reading Valeria Luiselli’s The Story of My Teeth (2013), I felt I had to check. In the book, this is where the narrator, Gustavo Sánchez Sánchez, has his home: “I purchased two plots,” he tells us, “side by side, in the lovely Calle Disneylandia” (24), and here he builds a mansion and a warehouse side by side, with the warehouse to store his collection of, among other things, teeth. But Sánchez Sánchez, also known as Highway, is in this novel quite the fabulist. Moreover, this being a novel, we cannot necessarily expect all the placenames and names it contains to have real world referents. Yet the book seems to claim the truth of this particular reference in that, in a chapter devoted to images, it includes a map that shows the street’s location. 

On the facing page to the map, however, is a photograph with the caption “Highway’s House.” The photo appears to show a suburban house (built right up to the road) that has been built in the image of the Disneyland castle, with half a dozen or more spires and turrets, yet on an ordinary street complete with lamppost, sidewalk, and a couple of pedestrians passing by. The photo’s author, we are told, is Valeria Luiselli. But Highway is a fictional character, surely? In which case, whose house is this? And where was the photograph taken. Google Street View shows no such building on Calle Disneylandia. (In an interview elsewhere, Luiselli tells us that it is in Oaxaca.) The images that purport to validate the story told in the novel are not necessarily to be trusted. Hence I felt I had to check whether or not the street itself exists. It does, but perhaps as no more than one of those snippets of the real around which stories are told.

In some ways, this is common practice. No story, no matter how fantastic, conjures up a world out of nothing. When a novel refers to (say) chairs or tables, or even places such New York or Manchester, for the most part we assume, unless told otherwise, that the meaning of “chair” or “table,” or the geography of “New York” and “Manchester,” are more or less the same in the fictional world as they are in the everyday world. Likewise with the names of historical figures: when a novel references (for instance) “Margaret Thatcher” or “the Pope,” we take it that these are the same figures, with the same characteristics, as those with which we are already familiar from history books or radio and TV etc. But this is not true, or not consistently so, of Luiselli’s novel.

Especially when it comes to proper names, Luiselli repurposes signifiers, snippets of the real, often to put them to radically new use. For instance, Highway’s first job is working for a newspaper-stand owner by the name of Rubén Darío (8). Yet Rubén Darío is also the name of perhaps the most famous of Latin American modernista poets. What is the connection, if any, between that Darío and this one? To add to the confusion, Darío the poet’s most famous book was Azul, and Darío the newsagent’s wife is called Azul. Azul is said to having an affair with a “Mr. Unamuno,” described as “a pigeon-chested old codger who had a program on public radio” (9). Are we here to think of the Spanish writer, Miguel de Unamuno? If so, in what way is that Unamuno like this one? What point, if any, is being made by this correspondence?

Once alert to this system of references that are not quite references, we see or suspect them everywhere. Some are quite obscure. The man who teaches Highway the “art of auctioneering,” for instance, goes by a variety of names, but his Western name is Carlos Yushimoto. Can this be the same Carlos Yushimoto (whatever the “same” would mean) as the Japanese-Peruvian short story writer? The translator’s chapter, entitled “The Chronologic” (because yes, here the translator has her own chapter) would seem to imply as much. Other allusions are more cryptic: is the “Mr. Cortázar” who bequeaths to Highway’s family a “green velvet armchair” the same Julio Cortázar who, in his short story “The Continuity of Parks” describes a man reading in an “armchair covered in green velvet” who (strangely enough) ends up menaced by a character from the book he is reading? “Reader, beware!” it seems that we are being told. But beware of what? Of missing these references, or of catching them, and so of being caught off guard and possibly misled by a web of apparently arbitrary intertextuality? Does it help to know that Alan Pauls (here, a friend of Highway’s) is the name of an Argentine writer, that Emiliano Monge (here, an altar boy) is a Mexican short-story writer, or that Alvaro Enrigue (here, a bus driver) was Luiselli’s husband? And of course what Valeria Luiselli herself (or at least, her name) doing here, incarnated in the person of a “mediocre high school student” (129) taking elocution lessons?

The more famous and easily recognizable names are often Mexicanized. Hence we have Highway’s uncle Marcelo Sánchez-Proust, presumably some relation to the French novelist Marcel Proust, as well as another uncle, Miguel Sánchez Foucault, who invokes the French philosopher, Michel Foucault, not to mention Highway’s cousin, Juan Pablo Sánchez Sartre. Is this then an indication that, throughout, Luiselli’s aim is a Mexicanization of a broader set of literary and cultural references, inserted almost at random (it would seem) in the story she is telling.

One way to understand all this would be to say that these names add value. After all, that is Highway’s own approach, in auctioning off his collection of teeth: to attach a name (and therefore a story) to each item, to give it provenance, history, and worth, even if in the end what is being sold off is just another chunk of enamel. These stories–these stories of his teeth, the teeth he seeks to pawn off on others–drive the price up. They are patter, and perhaps like all patter they do not bear too much examination, but in the moment they dignify and fuel the act of selling.But is this not also then a critique of this mode of valorization, of name-dropping and discursive validation. The Story of My Teeth, we are told, is a novel co-written by factory workers. I am not sure they would have cared much for these allusions, except in so much as they constitute a set of jokes for which the butt is whoever thinks that references and allusions ensure legitimacy and interest. In the end, teeth are just teeth. And a name, infinitely transferable, makes nobody special. You can call a street “Disneyland” all you want, but it is still just a way to get from A to B, a place to put a home.

Bad Girls: Creatures in Travesti Heaven

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The girls whose lives are portrayed in Camila Sosa Villada’s Bad Girls (2019) may be seen as “bad” by outsiders looking on, but this book is written from their perspective and although it admits that at times “We had no idea how to be good or bad” (145), overwhelmingly it shows that they have a code of ethics and empathy that puts the rest of society to shame.

The “girls” in question are travestis, which a preliminary “Author’s Note” seeks to differentiate from trans women, although that is the term that would be the closest equivalent in English. But in Latin America, the word travesti, originally a slur, conjures up an image of marginality and precarity, inflected through class as much as sexuality and gender, and often linked with street sex work. In some ways it shares some of the semantic territory as the British term, “rent boy,” but with the addition of an association with performative femininity. As the “Author’s Note” puts it:

Far below, where the secret rivers of the world flow, appeared a word that stank of death, shit, semen, prostitution, the night, the cold, bribery, blood and jail, of misery and neglect. A word sharp as a knife, grime-encrusted and wounding. A word that spoke not just of the creatures we were and are but also of our poverty, of the acts that made us legendary, of the courage with which we headed out to live among families and communities. We didn’t want to look like women, we didn’t want to hide our struggles in any way, we didn’t feel trapped in the wrong bodies, we didn’t know what we were doing. But in the street, they christened us with that old, buried word, highlighting our beauty, which was like a home. (x–xi)

The novel is dedicated to tracing that beauty–and kindness, and love–even in the abject conditions in which travestis find themselves, which to some extent they also embrace. Specifically, it focuses on a loose group that haunt and ply their trade in a park in the provincial Argentine city of Córdoba. They come to life at night, and give life to the place even at the expense of their own poverty and suffering: “Every night, the travestis drag themselves out of a hell that no one would ever think to write about, to bring spring back to the world” (1). Early on in the book, this notion that the travestis can conjure and nurture new life from such unpropitious circumstances is literalized when one of them, Auntie Encarna, finds “a three-month-old boy abandoned in the Park” (4) and proceeds (informally and illicitly) to adopt him. One strand of the narrative then proceeds to follow the fate of this unlikely pair: the child and his new mother, whose breasts may be formed by backstreet injections of aircraft oil, whose “maternal instincts were theatrical but took control of her character so thoroughly that they felt authentic” (11). All the other travestis regard Encarna as their substitute mother, who welcomes them into her high-walled pink house, “the queerest boardinghouse in the world” (5). Why not also take in this baby who has known no other mother?

Not that Sosa Villada is prone to romanticization. This is not particularly the tale of whores with hearts of gold. They hardly have the space or time for sentimentality. As much as the travestis are in constant danger from their clients–any trick may go wrong at any point–from the police, or simply from the scorn of would-be “respectable” society, they also fight and squabble among themselves, sometimes viciously. Indeed, at times the worst violence is that inflicted on each other, or themselves, whether it be out of bouts of competitiveness or displaced anger that would be better directed at institutions that they feel unable to change.

In fact, it is striking that as much as the book stresses the humanity of these outcasts who are often treated as mere objects for quick and guilty sexual satisfaction (though they also make themselves “into an object, into valuable flesh, to live the only life that was available in that town” [105] and even “embrace[ their] role as slave, as an object” [111]), it is drawn too to their animality. They are described as a “pack,” “a small pack wandering the margins of the world” (54). They have “animal wisdom” (85) or sleep “sweating like animals” (96). More mysteriously still, one of them locks herself in her room once a month as she turns into a “she-wolf,” while another, originally Maria the Mute, starts to grow feathers on her chest, and by the end of the story has entirely transmuted into Maria the Bird, flying down into the narrator’s purse: “I let her settle in there” (191). As the adopted boy grows up, he takes to “whittling figures of all the animals we’d been: bird women, she-wolves, sad women, brave women, a whole mythology carved in figurines the boy created in his isolation” (181). We are all basically beasts, the novel seems to suggest, and women are one animal among others in a world in which the line between species is blurry and can be crossed, whether by accident, thanks to forces beyond our control, or through effort and determination. 

So perhaps the point is that the fellow feeling and support that the travestis (admittedly, intermittently) show each other comes from their recognition of our common status as creatures governed as much by instinct and desire, hunger and the most basic of needs for shelter and, ultimately, love. It is also notable that among the many pen portraits of clients and (less often) boyfriends, one of the most sympathetic is a zookeeper: “My zoo guard gave me tenderness, brought me hot coffee on cold winter nights, and several times dropped me off at home in his car, saying goodbye with a kiss on the mouth” (134). He takes her on midnight jaunts through the zoo, closed to the public, where they have sex among the cages, as she “rub[s] up against him like a horny dog.” “If it was up to me,” the guard tells her, “I’d open up the cages and let it all go to hell” (134). Everyone and everything deserves its freedom. The travestis perhaps lead the way in showing the life that can be lived on the wild side, beyond the cages that most of us do not even realize that we are inhabiting.

Power and its injustices, however, are all too obvious to a travesti. Hence their anger and resentment has a broad range, and is sometimes indiscriminate: “We were forever ready to burn the whole place down: our parents, friends and enemies, the middle classes with their comforts and routines, the posh kids who all looked the same, the patrician cocksuckers who scorned us so” (97). But often they feel powerless to do anything–or to be precise, too exhausted; a travesti ages quickly, we are told, “at an accelerated rate, the way dogs [and] wolves [. . .] do: seven years for every human one” (82). Yet they are also aware that, for all their exclusion and marginality, they are also central to the political and social economy that excludes them. Their clients are students, workers, politicians, supposedly happily married husbands, who may deny their own desire but cannot resist it. “Such is the power of travestis, we attract the gazes of the world. No one can escape the allure of a man dressed as a woman, the faggots who go too far, the degenerates everyone stares at” (149).

Yet they are both confined and cling to the shadows, seeking out invisibility and “transparency” as much as they also revel in their power to “dazzle” (121). Their stories go untold, or told only as cautionary tales by homophobic parents who predict sad ends to their non-conforming children. But for Sosa Villada, they are “there to be written about. To be immortalized” (96). And though their stories may not end well–this is a book haunted by death, which comes to its characters in many different ways, from sickness to suicide to murder–Bad Girls perhaps provides a glimpse of the beauty of “travesti heaven,” where they can “finally be compensated for [their] broken heart[s]” (28).

Ru: Glimmering through Fragments

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Kim Thúy’s Ru (2009) is a lyrical evocation of growing up amid displacement, exile, and migration. It proceeds via a series of very short sections or vignettes, many of which are no more than a dozen lines long, and few of which are more than a page. As each section starts a new page (and so there is abundant white space beneath many of them) and as, in this English translation at least, the text is only left-justified and so the lines are ragged on the right, at first glance upon opening the book it could seem to be a book of poetry.

Moreover, though it is presented as “a novel” on the front cover, it is as much as anything else memoir or meditation, even to some extent a collection of short stories–some humorous, some tragic–that collectively constitute the story of Vietnamese migration and adaptation to Canada.

The narrator’s name is Nguyen An Tinh. On my keyboard, I cannot reproduce the diacritics, which differ only by a single (under the i) from her mother’s name, Nguyen An Tinh. This already suggests how translation (and these are names twice translated: from Vietnamese to French, and now to English) flattens out difference and creates composite subjects. Similarly, there is also an uncertain difference and distance between narrator and author (whose name is, of course, Kim Thúy), whose stories overlap but presumably also differ in ways that can never be fully clear to the reader, least of all to a reader in English.

This is, moreover, a book that is continually in translation, in the various sense of that term. As well as the linguistic translation (usually implicit, but sometimes explicit, between Vietnamese and French; and characteristically invisible between French and English), there are the geographical translations between East Asia and North America, the cultural translations involved in that displacement (and its attendant memories), as well as the drastic change in status between a relatively privileged life in South Vietnam, the trauma of the refugee experience on a flimsy boat or in a Malaysian refugee camp, and the struggles of resettlement in Canada.

As such the book both questions and depends upon the notion that something survives translation. (And each page’s visual resemblance to poetry perhaps reminds us of the quip that it is poetry that is lost in translation.) At one point, the narrator directly addresses this issue:

Just recently in Montreal, I saw a Vietnamese grandmother ask her one-year-old grandson: “Thuang Bà dê dâu?” I can’t translate that phrase, which contains just four words, two of them verbs, to love and to carry. Literally, it means, “Love grandmother carry where?” The child touched his head with his hand. I had completely forgotten that gesture, which I’d performed a thousand times when I was small. I’d forgotten that love comes from the head and not the heart. Of the entire body, only the head matters. Merely touching the head of a Vietnamese person insults not just him but his entire family tree. That is why a shy Vietnamese eight-year-old turned into a raging tiger when his Quebecois teammate rubbed the top of his head to congratulate him for catching his first football.

If a mark of affection can sometimes be taken for an insult, perhaps the gesture of love is not universal: it too must be translated from one language to another, must be learned. In the case of Vietnamese, it is possible to classify, to quantify the meaning of love through specific words: to love by taste (thích); to love without being in love (thuong); to love passionately (yêu); to love ecstatically (mê); to love blindly (mù quáng); to love gratefully (tình nghia). It’s impossible quite simply to love, to love without one’s head. (96)

It’s worth repeating that my keyboard cannot do the Vietnamese orthography justice. But this passage again also suggests that the problem here is not just with (verbal) language, but also with bodily gestures that may seem to be innate or even natural. A well-meaning pat on the head on a Canadian sports field turns a Vietnamese kid into a “raging tiger.” Even love requires translation, or is perhaps untranslatable. Perhaps the narrator’s Vietnamese love, the love withing and surrounding her Vietnamese family, does not translate, and instead has to be invented anew, for her Canadian family and relations.

There is much that is left out of the narrator’s story–surely there is much left out of anyone’s story, but here the structure of brief vignettes, stopping and starting, and the white space surrounding them, makes those narrative absences all the clearer, such that we are not even sure if we are really dealing with narrative at all. One figure, for instance, who is almost entirely omitted is the narrator’s “‘white’ husband” (79), with the quotation marks around “white” adding a further layer of uncertainty, though we can assume he is not Vietnamese. After all, the only other time he is mentioned, it is for a sartorial faux pas when he wears a “red T-shirt with a yellow star,” in other words mimicking the national flag of (Socialist, postwar) Vietnam “in the streets of Montreal.” What is presumably intended as a gesture of affiliation is (again) taken as an insult, such that the narrator’s “parents had him take it off and replaced it with an ill-fitting shirt of my father’s” (95). Taking off the national flag and replacing it with the Vietnamese father’s shirt, does the husband now become more Vietnamese or more (inconspicuously) white? This cross-cultural relationship, between husband and wife, husband and in-laws, remains unexplored, off limits.

As for the love between mothers and children, that also takes on new aspects via displacement. Whereas the narrator has been given a name that is virtually indistinguishable from that of her mother’s, such that she is her “extension,” her “sequel,” whose task is to “continue her story” (2), she has given her own children names that are resolutely French: Pascal and Henri, names of French philosophers and kings. Moreover, Henri, at least, is probably never going to continue his mother’s (the narrator’s) story:

He is one of those children who don’t hear us, don’t speak to us, even though they’re neither deaf nor mute. [. . .] Probably he’ll never call me maman lovingly [. . .]. He won’t know that, thanks to him, every spark of joy has become a blessing and that I will keep waging war against autism, even if I know already that it’s invincible. (7)

This is a book about the obstacles to expression and translation, whether they be the untranslatability of emotion or language, or autism, or the vengeance and re-education camps of the Communist victors in the aftermath of war. But it is also a book about the struggles against those obstacles, and about the “moment[s] of complicity, of communion” (132) that can emerge through the glimpse of a scar, at a family reunion, or in the ritual whereby Henri “curl[s] up in Pascal’s arms, hiding behind him in front of strangers” (50). We “recognize our old selves,” but presumably also others, “only through fragments, through scars, through glimmers of light” (139). In this fragmented prose, it is perhaps the gaps between the vignettes as much as the stories they contain that allow such glimmers to shine through, sparks of joy amid suffering.

The Possession: the Madness of Meaning

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Annie Ernaux’s The Possession (2002) is the briefest of tales, at a mere sixty-two pages barely a novella, if a little more than a short story. It explores, and ultimately exorcises (temporarily at least) what Ernaux describes as possession “in both sense of the word”: property and madness.

The narrator is a woman who feels herself usurped. There is nothing particularly rational about this feeling, not least because it is she who ended the relationship that now so thoroughly disturbs her: “I was the one who had left W., several months earlier, after six years together.” Their parting had been, it seems, relatively amicable: “We continued to talk on the phone; we saw each other from time to time” (8). Yet when he takes up with a new lover, moving in with her, the narrator is seized with a jealousy that practically drives her out of her mind.

One frustration is that W. (with whom she remains in touch) is reticent to give her too many details about the new woman. “He had not,” for instance, “wanted to tell me her name. / This absent name was a hole, a void around which I turned in circles” (21). The narrator therefore turns detective, picking up on such hints as the man does let slip–for instance, that she teaches history at such and such a university–to try to track him down, at times convincing herself that she has indeed identified her putative rival.

But her obsession leads her less to pin down or focus in on a particular spot (though there are now swathes of Paris that she avoids, fearing that she may run into the new woman with her old flame), than to project her fears on her entire environment. Almost any woman could be her: on the metro, on the street, in a seminar room. “This transubstantiation of the bodies of women I encountered into the body of the other woman was in continual operation: I saw her everywhere” (13). Everything becomes a sign, a symbol of the other’s presence, or of the narrator’s own absence, her ejection from her former partner’s life. 

She can no longer watch a movie or listen to a song without projecting herself into it: “Whatever the script, if the heroine was in pain, it was my pain that was being portrayed” (20). If the lover is now to be found everywhere the narrator looks, then the narrator also finds herself dispersed and fragmented, ubiquitous except where she actually wants to be.

None of this is exactly rational–“this is too fucked up” (57), the narrator admits. But it has its logic, and even this admittedly self-imposed pain has its appeal: she recognizes a desire “to hold on to its suffering which, after all, gave meaning to the world” (49). There is something creative, even productive, about the self-abasing and otherwise even paralyzing obsession that has taken over her.

As the narrator puts it, “One could find in this hunt and this frantic assembling of signs an exercise in the abandonment of intelligence. But I see its having a poetic function–the same one that is at work in literature, religion, and paranoia” (34). Finding significance in the smallest details, imbuing the world with meaning, literature, religion, and madness alike all provide purpose and motivation, if sometimes at the expense of self-flagellation and the risk of embarrassment at best, self-abnegation or even self-erasure at worst. There is something in the workings of jealousy that shines a light on representation itself: “Writing, that is, as a jealousy of the real” (34).

Writing, indeed, is the narrator’s way in, way through, and way out of her possession. At one stage she imagines writing as a weapon in her armoury aimed at the unknown (and unknowable) but real woman: told of the idea of “making dolls out of bread dough and pricking them with pins,” she thinks that “The act of writing, here, is perhaps not so different from that of sticking in needles” (29). It is a kind of witchcraft, pursued in the hope that art can be invoked to manage and even influence life: a wound to the imagined image of the other can translate into a real injury to the hated rival.

But writing can also be a kind of cure. After all, the narrator writes instead ofpricking dolls with pins (or worse). More to the point, perhaps, “the image of the Other–the desire that this Other had for him” is not only “equipped with a force great enough to sweep away the boredom and everything that had compelled me to break things off.” It also, no, “makes me write” (44). And writing, in turn, as the fictionalization of what is no doubt a real experience (at least someone’s real experience), allows the expression of jealousy without shame or embarrassment, giving it a form, a beginning as well, most crucially, as an end: “Writing has been a way to save that which is no longer my reality–a sensation seizing me from head to foot, in the street–but has become ‘the possession,’ a period of time, circumscribed and completed” (60–61).

It has also of course become The Possession, a novel or novella, similarly circumscribed and completed, and perhaps admirably (thankfully) brief: a short excursion into madness at the end of which we can turn the page, close the book, put it down, and return to a world in which not everything has meaning, and that is OK.

That Hair: Ornament and Caricature

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Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida’s That Hair (2015) is hardly a conventional novel. It has no obvious plot, for instance, and consists instead of memories (presumably, mostly autobiographical; the narrator’s history seems on the whole to mirror Pereira de Almeida’s biography) and reflections braided around the persistent topic of the narrator’s hair. The hair itself is both the book’s subject and its excuse, its content and in many ways also its form in so far as the narrator’s thought processes curl and crimp, get matted and entangled, despite periodic efforts to brush them straight or give them more recognizable shape. 

Strangely, perhaps, the hair itself is not in fact described at great length. We are merely told that after it was first cut, when the narrator, Mila, was till basically a baby, only six months old, it grew back or was “reborn coiled and dry” (1). Presumably it is dark, curly and, well . . . stereotypically “African.” It is characterized as a “rebellious mane [. . .] a lion’s mane” (5), further reinforcing the notion that her hair is what ties the narrator to the land of her birth, Angola, as well perhaps as indicating a dash of the primitive and the exotic.

But Mila is not exactly what, in Africa at least, would be called Black. She is, rather, a “mulata das pedras, as they say in Angola, not the idealized beauty that mulata conjures for them but a second-rate one, and with bad hair to boot” (6). Her father was “a blond-haired, prematurely bald young man who in past lives had been the blondest kid in the neighborhood, the child-elect to play Baby Jesus for a Beira nativity scene” (60) and she grows up with her paternal grandparents, Grandma Lúcia and Grandpa Manuel, in Portugal, in a town very close to Lisbon, to which she has moved when she was still a young child. She is, in other words, at least as much Portuguese as she is Angolan. Not that it is always so easy to disentangle the two.

After all, her Portuguese relatives have a long-lasting relationship with southern Africa. Grandma Lúcia was born to a Portuguese travelling salesman and his wife in the Congo. Grandpa Manuel was an engineer who moved to Mozambique to help to construct dams for a hydroelectric company. Their family history is evidence of flows and fluxes across Europe (the narrator’s great-grandmother is described as an “unmistakeable Jew” [62] and some distant aunts as “Viennese girls lost in Mozambique” [63]) as well as between colonial center and far-flung periphery. Another great-great- grandmother had been “the spouse of a celebrated colonel in Macau” (64). They are all, in various ways, servants, handmaidens, or children of an Empire that lasted surprisingly

In Africa, the Portuguese colonies (Angola and Mozambique, but also for instance Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau, all first colonized in the sixteenth century) only gained their independence in the 1970s, after years of bloody guerilla warfare (of which, however, Pereira de Almeida makes very little mention). The Portuguese withdrew after a peaceful coup (the “Carnation Revolution”) that in 1974 overthrew the authoritarian regime originally established by António de Oliveira Salazar in the 1930s. It is as though Mila, and her hair, were a displaced remnant of that long colonial enterprise. Or as the narrator puts it: “The truth is that the story of my curly hair intersects with the story of at least two countries and, by extension, the underlying story of the relations among several continents: a geopolitics” (2). 

Yet Pereira de Almeida’s narrator is unwilling to see her hair as simply a symbol or metaphor. It is too stubbornly material to be reduced to mere signifier. This is indeed a history of her hair–or rather “that hair,” which is not entirely part of her, and not entirely not. Over the course of the book “that hair” emerges almost as an entity in its own right, “its own persona, an alter ego there in the room” (38), not so much a part of the narrator as a prefigurement of what she herself might yet become, or could once have become. That hair has a life of its own, a life to which the narrator herself sometimes aspires.

At the start of the book, the narrator worries that this is too frivolous a topic; it seems such “a trivial matter” (51). And of course, we can easily live without our hair: it is surely more ornament than essence. “Are you still talking about your hair, Mila?” someone unknown person (perhaps, Mila herself) is imagined as asking (86). At times it is as though it is an unworthy subject, when so much is going on in the world. At times she “cut [her] hair to forget it even further,” and yet she discovers that “What I can’t do, I would later admit to myself, is forget this hair without also forgetting myself and plowing forward while leaving myself behind, like two people who lose sight of one another at a street market” (83). She has to come to terms with this quasi-alien excrescence, precariously attached to her, and to which she is only precariously attached.

There is a lot in this book about photography and photographs. The narrator leafs through her own, or her family’s, photo albums, real or imaginary, as well as an album given to her by a hairdresser: a catalogue of ideal types of haircuts, “featuring women who’d just had their hair done, their look of pride [. . .]. The album is the antithesis of my own disheveled albums, and, at the same time, it describes the arc of my hair’s drama, showing day one, the best day of each woman’s hair” (115). There is also a discussion of a photograph taken in 1957, amid the civil rights struggles in the USA, of a Black student attending Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, surrounded by a baying mob of white protesters. The narrator sees herself in all the people pictured, Black and white: “little rock, the mulata das pedras. I see now that I am the persecuted and the persecutor, the disfigured, disfiguring myself” (97). Her hair, here, is a gateway to history, allowing (or perhaps forcing) her to take both sides in a visceral clash that is also, of course, based on an appearance mistaken to be essence.

There is something intolerable in the feeling of being split in this way, in being compelled to identify with such discordant positionings, but the narrator’s hair is also an entryway into language and writing, which similarly revolves around what she calls (in the context of a school party in which she “dress[es] up as an African”) “distancing and duplicating” herself. “This was perhaps the only mask that could reveal me, exposing the distance that separates me from what I am as an auspicious and not irretrievable idea” (112). It is by performing or recording (writing) the caricature that she can never quite become that she may also be able to come to terms with who she is. “The hair and the writing would one day need to come together like a couple after a long separation” (124). Yet this resolution never quite arrives in the novel: its last words are (still) “who then is Mila?” (148). 

After all, if this “whole hairy drama” (146) were ever fully unknotted, then it would no longer be her hair; it would no longer be her. The knots, the entanglement (expressed often in language that is equally convoluted), are what make “that hair” what it is, and similarly what make Mila who she is: someone whose identity can never quite be pinned down, caught between her “own particularity” and the “stock black woman” to whom she can only aspire, and who “today deserves [her] deference How to be worthy of her? I don’t know how to do my hair on paper without this story slipping from my grasp” (86). Just as her hair can never fully be “tamed” (95), except through an imaginary encounter with the Little Rock photo taken before she was born, so her story remains unruly, “leaving literature waiting at the door” (124). Hence That Hair never quite takes shape as a novel. How could it?

If reading this book is therefore often frustrating, then that is surely part of the point. As the narrative only comes in and out of focus, without ever settling in one place or time, does that not mirror what the narrator terms her hair’s “cycles” of growth and regrowth punctuated by new cuts and stylings (85)? So long as Mila has hair on her head, old stories are abandoned and cut short as new ones emerge without ever coming to any single conclusion.

When I Sing, Mountains Dance: Songs of Selves and Others

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The subject of the assertion contained in the title of Irene Solà’s When I Sing, Mountains Dance (2019) is, in the first instance, a young man by the name of Hilari who composes poems–though he does not write them down. He comes up with poems mainly for people and animals, and one of them (shades of Walt Whitman) is a song for himself, a “Poem for Me, Hilari”: 

I sing to the moon when it blossoms full, 
Round fang in the kindly night, 
[. . .]

I sing like someone plowing a garden,
Like someone carving a table,
Like someone raising a house,
Like someone climbing a hill,
Like someone eating a walnut,
Like someone lighting a fire.
Like God creating animals and plants.
When I sing, mountains dance. (69)

But throughout this book–a book that is itself surely Whitmanesque in that it, too, “contain[s] multitudes”–we see plenty of others also carving tables, raising houses, climbing hills, and the like. Many sing, and many mountains dance.

The mountains here are the Pyrenees and we are in Catalonia (Solà’s novel is translated from the Catalan), a rural retreat for city-dwellers seeking picturesque “authentic[ity]” (62) or a respite from all the “noise” and the “cars and all the buildings and the pointy corners and the straight lines” of Barcelona (129). Here, one might imagine, is natural peace and age-old tradition, where little changes and perhaps nothing happens.

But we are also on the border between Spain and France, a pathway traipsed by refugees and soldiers fleeing the Nationalist advance of Franco’s forces during the Civil War. This is a countryside strewn with the detritus of war, such that many decades later young children can still come across bullet casings and unexploded grenades half-buried in the earth.

Moreover, this is a landscape of unquiet forces that traverse the boundary between natural and human history, between life and death, between reality and myth. There are the four women, for instance, hanged as witches in some previous century and perhaps not without reason, in that they laugh at authority and “piss upon” the crosses that are “sullying the mountainside” (19). These women are among the many ghosts or revenants that never quite go away (or always come back) as they permeate the stories and songs related and recited by this novel’s many characters.

Almost every chapter, in fact, introduces a new narrator, some of whom are human, usually residents of this precarious existence on the hostile mountainside, and others of whom are more than human. Again, however, these boundaries blur. A bear narrates its violent history with humans and its undying desire for revenge–“Wake up, ye men who hunted us. [. . .] We were here first. Long before men and women” (147). But in the very next chapter, a woman plays the part of a bear in some folk ritual of “the Bear Festival in Prats del Molló” (152), albeit adjusted to the times in answer to the question “When are we going to have a woman bear?” (151). And a little later we hear from Jaume, a man who has escaped the region (but will soon, of course, go back) and who goes by the nickname “the Pyrenees bear” (170).

This is a novel that humanizes great natural forces (even the mountains themselves, or the vast geological pressures that give rise to them, are given a voice, speaking almost sub specie aeternitatis: “Because nothing lasts long. And no one remembers the names of your children” [107]). But it also gives vent to the inhuman fears and desires that both shatter and consolidate the bonds between men and women.

If this novel has a center (and arguably it does not; arguably it is as polycentric as it is polyphonic), it is the story, told in fits and starts, of the family living in the farm or smallholding that goes by the name of Matavaques (“cattle slayer,” as we’re helpfully told [131]. The books opens as a young father, Domenèc, is killed by being struck by lightning, with the weird sisters of course in shadowy attendance. We later pick up on the story of his widow, Sió, his daughter, Mia, and his son, Hilari, he of the oral poems and songs.

Hilari, however, is struck down young, like his father before him, but in his case not by random lightning but in a hunting accident, out with friends. His killer (Jaume, known as the “giants’ son”) is the man who goes by the name of Bear who we meet much later, in self-imposed exile from the mountains after he has spent some time in jail for his crime . . . presumably manslaughter, which goes to show that it is not just cattle that are slayed around here.

It is not clear whether Jaume’s story is one of the “bad stories” that, we are told, are the stories men tell, as opposed to the tales told by the witches and other women, “stories we love because they’re never in the voice or through the eyes of those men who write the bad stories” (112). As a whole, Solà’s novel is a remarkable patchwork of ventriloquy that allows a whole range of entities to speak–and often we hear the same events retold from very diverse viewpoints. 

We do not necessarily have to resolve the differences between these different perspectives, or to know how things will ultimately work out, because we know that this is merely a partial snippet from a much longer history of mountains and the people who live on or near them. Indeed the book ends on something of a cliffhanger: one revenant has returned to Mia’s (Hilari’s sister’s) life, and we do not know what will happen to her relationship with another man who has helped briefly to obscure her loss in the meantime. 

There are still stories to be told. “He’ll say some things,” Mia tells us. “The ones he remembers, the ones that light up like firecrackers when it’s time to say them and you’re able to say them. [. . .] Then I’ll say some things. The ones that I can” (197, 198). And at the end of it all, perhaps “when we’re done, we’ll see who we are” (197). This is a song of their selves, a point-counterpoint of stories of creation and recalibration that is as unending as the tectonic forces that make and unmake the very ground beneath their feet.

Discontent: Calling Out Bullshit

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Marisa, the narrator and protagonist of Beatriz Serrano’s Discontent (2025) has what anthropologist David Graeber calls a “bullshit job,” which he defines as “a form of employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence” (Bullshit Jobs: A Theory 3). In her case, her pointless employment is as a mid-level manager in an advertising agency. In meetings, she comes up with clichés or finds ways to fend off deadlines and decisions–“Let me check a few things” (7)–while she daydreams, scans Twitter (now, of course, X) and doodles tiny penises in her notebook. Later, she will hand off any actual work she has been asked to do to the students she is teaching in a course in “a master’s program at a private university that hired me thanks to the English diploma I listed on LinkedIn” (10), passing off the task as an assignment for academic credit. 

Her students at least are still eager and enthusiasm. Marisa is long past jaded: “I’ve been doing the same thing for eight years, and I know it doesn’t help anyone. I know the world would be a better place if jobs like mine didn’t exist” (8). She once wanted to be an artist or a curator–she studied Art History at university, and still likes to tour the Prado when she takes one of her many midday breaks, playing hooky while still on the agency’s clock. She originally took her job as a temporary thing, staying on in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis because “the advertising world seemed safer and more reliable than the hypothetical and increasingly distant world of art. I guess I made the wrong decision. Or maybe, between the possibility of being happier and buying more things, I chose to buy more things” (17). After all, she has bills to pay. And it is nice to be able to take off at short notice for a week or two to the Canary Islands. Any residual anxiety can be dealt with by popping Lorezapam (Ativan) a few times a day.

Indeed, her life is hardly all dismal. She has enough money, few commitments (no children or partner, but a guy in her building is a regular “friend with benefits”), stable employment, and sufficient distance from the demands of her employment that she is happy to see it as a performance or a game: “Work is just a role you play and I’ve mastered it perfectly. [. . .] I know what to say to make the time flow faster, without actually doing anything, until I can go home at six” (6). She may well be alienated, but she knows it (no illusions), and she is not exactly mining coal or being sent up chimneys. She does not really care whether her agency does well or otherwise, and she knows how to keep up the pretense that she is contributing willingly and productively to whatever success it may have.

The worst she has to endure is the vacuous small talk and naïve sloganeering of her colleagues (“teamwork makes the dream work” [25]). And she has at least one co-worker, Rita, who thinks much the same as herself, and they can entertain themselves by rolling eyes at each other during meetings. At the end of the day, rather than feeling downtrodden or oppressed, Marisa feels that she has “tricked capitalism for one more day” (27). After all, Capital has hardly appropriated much if any of her labor power. And what would she be doing otherwise? She spends most of her spare time (and much of her “work” time, too) watching YouTube videos.

She does recognize, however, that this is a game that is not without victims, even if she is not one herself. She indulges in a measure of hypocrisy that we might call post-post-feminist. She has, after all, (she tells us) read her way through the feminist canon: “Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Virginia Woolf, Kate Millett, Silvia Federici, Angela Davis, Judith Butler, Virginie Despentes. None of that matters” (29). Not only does she still shave her legs and buy expensive face cream, she is called in to shield her company from accusations of sexism, such as when she helps come up with a “sorry not sorry” apology for an ill-advised tweet made by a freelancer on their social media team. She has “been branded the office feminist who needs to be consulted on all gender-equity issues. I’m a token; what I read outside of work and the fundamental beliefs I fight for when I’m not too tired are used by the company to improve their image” (29). “A part of me is disgusted,” she admits, “like I’m betraying my gender” (61).

But (bull)shit gets a bit more real when Rita, who is if anything even more “discontent” than Marisa, stops coming in to work and is found to have died, perhaps by suicide. No longer is Marisa simply “betraying” an abstract concept such as “gender.” Now perhaps a real, flesh and blood person–although hardly a “friend,” as she realizes how little she knows of Rita’s life outside of work–has literalized the daily “dehuman[ization]” (49) that Marisa otherwise keeps at bay through humor and irony. It is a struggle to admit to herself that perhaps humor is not enough, and that maybe she is not “trick[ing] capitalism.” It is almost unimaginable that she might admit this to anyone else, though she fantasizes about telling her mother: 

Mom, I don’t think I’m doing OK. I don’t think anyone is entirely OK, but I think I’m a little worse than the rest. I don’t think I’m as bad as a girl I knew, named Rita, who I never told you about, but who I think killed herself. Or maybe she didn’t. Goes to show you how well I knew her. Mom, I want to escape, I don’t want to be here, I don’t want to live this life. (129–30)

Discontent could, then, be written as tragedy, but though it definitely makes some serious points and lets off some shrewd and cutting barbs, for the most part it is cast as comedy (it is indeed often very funny), and ultimately as farce. It culminates with a company retreat, which is of course the very epitome and culmination of corporate ridiculousness (as also in the magnificent recent TV show Jury Duty Presents: Company Retreat). Here, much bitter fun is made of the fact that Marisa’s boss wants her to help him find a speaker who would be “maybe a woman who can empower other women, but also men.” She considers what to answer:

I think about talks on the wage gap, on why women leave their careers to take care of their children, or on the mental burden of housework. I think about talks on destroying gender, sex, the patriarchy. I think about talks on sexism in the workplace, on the need for better applied policies on equality or on companies’ lack of real commitment to equity. I know that’s not what Ramón is looking for. (61)

In the end, Marisa herself speaks at the retreat, but rather than making the broad social commentary that she briefly envisages for the occasion, instead (spoiler alert) she takes the occasion as an excuse to spike her colleagues’ drinks with MDMA (Molly, Ecstasy). This is all very funny (it briefly reminded me of novels such as Kingsley Amis’s classic satire, Lucky Jim), not least the brief coda to this event which consists of a series of emails around the ensuing “internal investigation team-building retreat” (155), all of which are interspersed with Marisa’s automatic out-of-office reply, as she herself has blithely jetted off to Fuerteventura. But it is not exactly a critique. After all, isn’t the point that her colleagues (and maybe also the people who buy the wares that they all hawk) are already basically drugged, pictured here as zombies enthusiastically embracing the banal rewards of consumer capitalism?

But I guess the idea is that sobriety–or the cynicism and even feminist-informed self-knowledge that Marisa, for instance, instantiates–is no alibi. Surely, most of us do already know that work is shit; Marisa is far less of an outlier than she seems to think she is. We can be knowingly complicit or unknowingly so. Either way, simply knowing (however much disillusion and discontent go with it) is not enough.

Little Eyes: Remote Control and Controlled

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At the very end of Samanta Schweblin’s Little Eyes (2018), there is a mention of a young boy “staring at his own reflection on [a] black screen” (239). The book’s resonance with the TV series, Black Mirror, could hardly be clearer. As with Charlie Brooker’s show, Schewblin’s novel takes technology, especially the screens with which we are in constant interaction, as a point of departure for examining our all too (post)human foibles and frailties.

Also like Black Mirror, the innovation at the center of this book is hardly very far removed from what we already have with us. No jet packs, flying cars, or hyperdrive here. A “kentuki” is a digital pet or toy, not so different from the Tamagotchi that were briefly all the rage just before the turn of the millennium, perhaps crossed with the Furbies that came out around the same time. They are semi-autonomous digital robots dressed up with the accoutrements of an animal (rabbit, owl, crow, dragon. . .), for which their owners feel a sense of responsibility, and with which they can establish rather primitive communication. They can scurry around on built-in wheels but have no limbs and cannot climb, and they make noises such as squeaks or purring sounds, but cannot speak. 

The difference is that with a kentuki, there is a real live human being at the other end, controlling the creature’s movements via an Internet connection. Moreover, via a camera built into the kentuki’s little eyes, they can see you, but you cannot see them. So if you buy a kentuki, you can choose either to purchase the object itself, of which you become a “keeper,” or to buy a code that establishes a connection with and the means to operate someone else’s object, of which you thereby become a “dweller.” 

There is one connection, and one connection only, between dweller and keeper, which is broken if the dweller chooses to break it, or if the keeper either lets the thing run out of battery or otherwise disables or destroys it. Moreover, nobody gets to choose whose dweller or keeper they become: the pairings are randomly established, and could well cross cultures and continents. The dweller has a built-in on-screen translation so that they can understand a keeper’s instructions, or eavesdrop on their conversations with others. It is much harder for a keeper to receive any kind of message from a dweller, and in the book we find characters resorting to various stratagems such as Ouija boards or Morse code to do so. But while keepers tend to want to speak to and hear from the “other side” inhabited by dwellers, a dweller cannot be compelled to respond, and may well take advantage of the fundamental opacity of their role to be simply a silent voyeur of a keeper’s life. One can already imagine some of the ways in which things can go wrong.

The novel interlaces the disconnected stories of a variety of different kentukis, sometimes from the point of view of the dweller, sometimes from that of the keeper. It thereby criss-crosses the globe, establishing parallels or direct connections between cities or city pairs that lend their names to chapter titles: Lima, Barcelona, Zagreb, Beijing, Lyon, Umbertide (Italy), Antigua (Guatemala), even Vancouver (Canada). Some cities are the setting merely for brief vignettes that either break off or do not go anywhere in particular. In other cities, longer narrations develop with a number of twists and turns as either keeper or dweller develops new perspectives on their experience, but suffice it to say that they rarely end well. 

Again as in Black Mirror, a gadget initially envisaged as improving people’s lives (by providing companionship to the lonely, for instance, or allowing people to travel the world from their bedrooms) ends up complicating and even ruining them in unforeseen (if not entirely unpredictable) ways. We soon run into issues of ethics (can a keeper be accused of “abusing” their dweller? What if anything does a dweller “owe” their keeper?) and also politics (should the kentukis be “liberated” from their keepers?). Questions of epistemology (what can we “know” of what is behind the screen) and perhaps above all affect also abound. People may after all know that these are mere toys, whichever side of the screen they find ourselves on, but they soon become subject to or provoke love, desire, jealousy, suspicion, fear, anxiety, and so on. Even though dwellers cannot “feel,” the kentukis’ tactility comes to the fore, both when keepers are drawn to pet (rub, scratch, caress) their creatures, and when, for instance, a dweller from the tropics sets his kentuki on a mission to touch and even plunge into Arctic snow.

Through these little machines, subjects and selves become fragmented and globally dispersed in technological proxies and prostheses, re-embodiments that feel as real (or realer) than the sites where what one character calls the “brutish hunk[s] of meat” (92) that are our biological bodies actually reside. But all this is hardly science fiction. As with Black Mirror, we quickly grasp that Little Eyes is a reflection of a current condition that has been with us for some time.