Mariner Books

“Through its peculiar blend of horror, sci-fi and satire, Friday Black presents America as caught in a funhouse mirror—fear and fury and fully-righteous greed brought into relief and magnified into hideous detail. Still, no matter how exaggerated and distorted the reflection, its eyes are always staring back, as cold and star-spangled as ever. Adjei-Brenyah is undeterred, staring right back with an unflinching gaze, all the while grasping for anything that might represent a human heart that still exists within the monster ahead of him” [Read full review].

Jen Beagin – Pretend I’m Dead

OneWorld (UK) / Simon & Schuster (US)

“A fuller version of Mona soon emerges, one apathetic and emotionally-distant not through some hip disaffection but rather the chaos and distrust of her past. The metaphor of cleaning takes on a whole new slant, a constant movement toward purity that is doomed to perpetual action, just as Mona’s attempts to reconnect with herself and others allows long swept memories to surface.

Unlike [A.M.] Homes’s Novak [from This Book Will Save Your Life], Jen Beagin’s Mona cannot free herself from cynicism long enough to embrace any potential cure, though there is a similarity in how proximity to bizarre beliefs and lifestyles encourage the development of one’s own. Maybe a full embrace of one’s position and life, contrary to any outside expectation or criticism, is a noble and valuable pursuit. Which is to say, for Mona, perhaps cleaning could have a spiritual function? No book, no psychic seeing, no pyjama-clad, lotus-positioned observance of the setting sun can be sure of saving one’s life. But perhaps the idea can trigger something more practical. Something better than pretending to be dead” [Read full review].

Sam Byers – Perfidious Albion

Faber & Faber (UK)

“Far from nebulous abstractions, for Byers, ideas and opinions have effects and consequences. Thoughts, spread widely enough, can change the world. And now, thanks to the internet, they are spread with greater reach and immediacy than ever before. Context is stripped, as is intonation and intention. Irony is mistaken for sincerity and vice versa. The reader decides how to take any given information, and their interpretation can never be incorrect. Their interpretation is the information. Additionally, as communication is gamified into a competition of numbers, the feedback loop is closed. You simply give the readers what they want.

[…]

Byers suggests that if the dualism between on and offline has collapsed, so too has the dualism between true and false. Fake News and Alternative Facts may be presented as an invention of the Trump administration, but mass media is the true pioneer. And, in the same way, the solution is far deeper and more knotty than merely ignoring misinformation from nefarious governments in favour of the truth. Rather, fact and fiction blur, our world now a hyperreality where such distinctions have lost their meaning. In the closing scene, Jess and Deepa listen to an ASMR recording of rainfall, and the soundtrack merges with the sound of actual rain hitting the roof outside. The digital and physical have merged, the fictional and ‘real’ enmeshed as one. But then, such is life in the hysterical present” [Read full review (for 3AM Magazine)].

Elaine Castillo – America is Not the Heart

Atlantic Books (UK) / Viking (US)

“Elaine Castillo’s true triumph is that America Is Not the Heart cannot be faithfully categorized purely as an immigrant saga or LGBT romance. This, aside from being a testament to her writing, serves as a scathing critique of just what those labels entail, and what it says about the white gatekeepers who control them. Hero’s story does not conform to the ideal Western immigrant story of foreigner done well. She is not a plucky underdog making a home against homesickness and long odds, her history not present only to be beaten smooth of its sharp edges. Ultimately, she does not exist to follow the fanciful arc us straight white people like to imagine an immigrant or queer person traversing—the palatable, enriching passage from alienation to total acceptance, and thus, of course, a more realised state of being.

Because America Is Not the Heart is a novel about human experience, about loving and being loved, where every detail—the Filipinx-American setting, historical context, bisexual relationships, class hierarchies, family dramas—is used not to build the characters but the world around them, Great American conditions that must be navigated in order to live” [Read full review].

Evan Dara – Provisional Biography of Mose Eakins

Aurora

One of our favourite novelists returns with what he describes as “a play in progress,” which isn’t that great a leap seeing as Evan Dara’s work has always been entirely dialogue. Available only in electronic formats, Provisional Biography of Mose Eakins tells the story of the titular character’s struggle with a novel medical condition which renders every word that leaves his mouth meaningless. That is, unless he asks to buy something. Dara takes aim at Late capitalism, capturing the crushing confusion and alienation of existence in a world in which even human connection has been commodified.

Sergio De La Pava – Lost Empress

MacLehose Press (UK) / Pantheon Books (US)

Detailing indoor football teams, expert EMTs and Dali paintings on Rikers island, while the tone veers between Pynchonian slapstick and philosophical musings, Lost Empress has an almost improvisational quality that refuses to slow or settle into any one groove. In what is becoming the author’s signature, the book rebels against concision and efficiency in favour of proliferation, the interconnectedness never reaching a neat conclusion but feeling all the more salient as a result. Like A Naked Singluarity before it, the novel situates Sergio De La Pava as a lead figure in the contemporary fight for challenging, ambitious fiction—and proves that the battle is not as hopeless as many would have you believe.

Nick Drnaso – Sabrina

Granta (UK) / Drawn & Quarterly (USA)

Ignore the people that said Sabrina was overhyped, a token placement on prize lists. Nick Drnaso’s graphic novel is a wonderful piece of literature, and one of 2018’s best attempts to get at the fear, paranoia and pervading sadness of the contemporary western world. Although the narrative centres on unspeakable tragedy, the real triumph is how Drnaso’s simple muted illustrations capture quiet loneliness and isolation. Yes, there’s desperation and grief, but equally powerful is the sorrow ingrained in clipped conversations and the walls of empty rooms.

William Gay – The Lost Country

Faber & Faber (UK) / Dzanc Books (US)

A lost William Gay novel, what more do we have to say? One of the masters of Southern Gothic delivers another story full of colourfully downtrodden characters, McCarthy-esque prose and whip-poor-wills. Billy Edgewater hitchhikes home after being discharged from the Navy, and navigates a whole shapeless community of the damned and depraved, drunks, swindlers and evil killers gathering in a tragicomic hellscape of decay and destitution.

Lauren Groff – Florida

William Heinemann (UK) / Riverhead (US)

“The Florida of [Groff]’s world is a canary in the coal mine, a ground zero for the approaching catastrophe. Her anxiety is not concerned with the likelihood of disaster, but rather the scale. Degrees of ruin sorted into a hierarchy—individual, familial, local, regional, national, global—and the question becomes whether a personal calamity will get to the characters before the climate slides into a planetary one. Will they get picked off one by one by a monstrous feline before the sea engulfs the peninsula? Will their house collapse into a sinkhole, killing them before the real trouble begins? Because, while the titular state might be uniquely dangerous, with its cottonheads and gators and mythic black panthers, the real looming threat is more ubiquitous and inescapable. “She had always thought this would be the place to be during the climate wars that she sees looming in the future,” Groff writes, her protagonist finding Paris hotter than she had imagined. “But maybe there is no place to be; maybe all places on a hotter planet will be equally bad, desert and hunger everywhere.”

In the opening story ‘Ghosts and Empties’ we find her wandering the streets after dark, afraid to be in the house because of a propensity to yell, leaving the parenting duties to her husband, who does not yell. However, far from appearing unhinged, the narrator comes across the sane one […] Who wouldn’t yell, knowing what we know, living how we do?” [Read full review].

Denis Johnson – The Largesse of the Sea Maiden

Jonathan Cape (UK) / Random House (US)

To view The Largesse of the Sea Maiden as the parting words of a genius is a fair perspective, though to assume the collection’s primary interest exists in Johnson’s death is to disrespect the stories as valuable additions to his oeuvre. With an epistolary story where the protagonist writes to people as part of his AA program (“Dear Old Dad and Dear Grandma…,” “Dear Pope John Paul…,” “Dear Satan…,” “Dear Rolling Stone and TV Guide…,”), the return of some old faces (or, more accurately, old Heads) and devastating, semi-autobiographical tales of subtle grief, the work might be the last from a master, but it is by no means an end.

Rachel Kushner – The Mars Room

Jonathan Cape (UK) / Scribner (US)

“In The Mars Room, characters are not separated into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ prisoners. Stoicism and sacrifice mean nothing not because a yawning nihilistic meaninglessness consumes all within the cell walls, but rather because meaning persists in all. Even the disobedient have significance, the most troubled and violent. Which goes some way in explaining the cast of characters within Stanville. Spouse killers, baby killers, killers of any witnesses. White supremacists and death row fantasists and women now specialists in playing lonely men over the phone. All are treated with an even gaze, with no hierarchy of morality or self-worth.

In this way, Kushner is following something of a Dostoyevskian theme, her characters capable of committing terrible violence and maintaining some semblance of innocence too. As Jennifer Wilson wrote in a recent article for The New York Times, “Dostoyevsky implored [that] it is not only our task to support the innocent or wrongly convicted but also to recognize the humanity of the guilty and the shared sense of responsibility that we have for one another.” As Romy insists at the end of the novel, “the opposite of nothing is not something. It is everything.” For Rachel Kushner, being human no matter what means just that. No matter what” [Read full review].

Ottessa Moshfegh – My Year of Rest and Relaxation

Jonathan Cape (UK) / Penguin (US)

“In his 2013 book 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, Jonathan Crary argues that, from the perspective of twenty-first century capitalism, sleep is a useless, even deleterious phenomena. After all, we cannot buy anything while unconscious, nor can we work. Our productivity is nil. ‘The stunning, inconceivable reality [of sleep],’ Crary writes, ‘is that nothing of value can be extracted from it.’

[…]

If capitalism denatures our existence into an unbearable state, then the obvious reaction is to rebel against capitalism. Only, Moshfegh’s narrator finds a dead end down that path, with art, protest and even complete withdrawal already co-opted and commodified to become just another version of neoliberal life. The second option, then, is to abstain from life altogether. If the parasite can’t be killed, then what about killing the host? Which means locking your doors, abandoning your friends, doing everything you can to minimise your existence. In this way, Moshfegh offers her own counter-intuitive cure—narcissistic solipsism as the antidote to a culture of narcissistic solipsism. Capitalism will still try to draw from you in this state, yes, but does it matter if one has no memory of its fangs? Perhaps the stunning, inconceivable reality of sleep is not that nothing can be extracted from it, but rather that nothing can get inside” [Read full review (for the Cardiff Review)].

 Sayaka Murata – Convenience Store Woman

Translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori

Portobello Books

“[Keiko’s sister is] far happier thinking [Keiko] is normal, even if she has a lot of problems, than she is having an abnormal sister for whom everything is fine. For her, normality—however messy—is far more comprehensible.” So sums up the position of Sayaka Murata’s Keiko, a woman who finds solace and purpose working in a convenience store, though faces unceasing criticism for her disinterest in ‘proper’ jobs or marriage. Her family and friends, projecting loneliness and depression onto her situation, want her to be ‘cured’, to be normal. But for Keiko, the only source of loneliness and depression is this concern from others. The result is cutting, fearless exploration of what it means to be different in a society that, for all of its talk of diversity, seems hellbent on the total homogenisation of what it means to be human.

Tommy Orange – There There

Harvill Secker (UK) / Knopf (US)

“Orange complicates things by delving into the idea of performance and invented identity. Yes, Orvil finds healing magic within powwow music, but then his brother finds the same within Chance the Rapper and Earl Sweatshirt, and the other in the arrangements of Beethoven. And, when Orvil films himself dancing in traditional clothing, the act is a half-satisfying tug-of-war between holy and phony, an attempt at realisation rather than realisation itself. Still, Orvil perseveres, determined to dance at the upcoming Powwow where the novel’s characters converge, and finds value within his quest. Because a Native search for meaning is much like any other, a process of belief and faith that depends not on some sacred arrangement of sounds and rituals but rather the commitment to the cause. Identity need not be a binary presence or absence, but something to be discovered, nurtured, or dropped.

Gertrude Stein’s passage containing the “there there” quote continues along such lines. “It is a funny thing about addresses where you live.” she writes. “When you live there you know it so well that it is like an identity […] then years after you do not know what the address was and when you say it is not a name anymore but something you cannot remember. That is what makes your identity not a thing that exists but something you do or do not remember.” Which is to say, Indianness is not something inherent and inviolable at the core of all things, nor is it something that can be eradicated forever. Rather, it is the product of what is remembered, and what is not. There can be a there there, Tommy Orange seems to say, and one defined not by white fantasy, but the Natives themselves. It is just a case of remembering” [Read full review].

Chris Power – Mothers

Faber & Faber (UK) / Farrar, Straus and Giroux (US)

“Strong stories will always instigate some sort of reaction or change, but to assume that this alteration will always be good, or to map them on any kind of good-bad binary at all, is to underestimate the power of fiction. Yes, the characters of Chris Power attempt to use stories as an antidote to loneliness, but that’s not to say every effort is redemptive or magically healing. Indeed, sometimes it is actively counterproductive, the stories growing into new, deeper sources of loneliness that grip a soul and refuse to let go. Fiction, it turns out, is not some therapeutic balm. Rather, it is something that can help and hinder, soothe and scorch, and in doing so, be as nuanced and complicated as life itself” [Read full review].

Richard Powers – Overstory

William Heinemann (UK) / W.W. Norton & Company (US)

“Speaking about the environment makes you either a naive idealist or unhinged polemic, and neither belong in the circles of the truly ‘intelligent’ […] Thus, to speak about the environment is to silence yourself.

But Powers refuses to be silenced, which translates to a lot of (intentionally) heavy-handed dendrological metaphors, a lot of (non-ironic) talk of rediscovering the beauty of nature and much (sincere) discussion of how humans are terrible and short-sighted and doomed in the way of a Greek tragedy. Essentially, a lot of trees. However, the fact that such a premise feels tiring, and the metaphors ham-fisted, and the views unsophisticated only confirms Powers’ point. There’s nothing hip or trendy about this message. There is no cultural capital to be earned, no badges of honour to wear, no quick redemption to cash in at the next available opportunity. There’s a slow, grinding process of unpicking ourselves from the prevailing attitudes and expectations, a version of life less comfortable and entertaining and cool. A willingness to appear naive in the short term in the hope of defeating the wider foolishness, a committed attempt to confront what surely lies before us. The Overstory represents a bravery test not only for Richard Powers, but for us all” [Read full review].

Nico Walker – Cherry

Jonathan Cape (UK, forthcoming 2019) / Knopf (US)

Cherry a blistering and breathless novel that confronts post 9/11 America through the lens of just one young man. It’s raw and brutal and hilarious, sad and terrifying and oftentimes intensely uncomfortable. Nico Walker has written a contender for the best Iraq novel and the best opioid epidemic novel in one.

The post Favourite Books of 2018 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

The central conceit is that the Underground Railroad is a literal thing, a subterranean train line which transports escapees across state borders. While its running is unreliable, its boxcars bumpy, its conductors terrified, the track provides a tangible symbol of hope for those fleeing captivity, especially, as is Cora’s case, for those pursued by slave catchers plucked straight from a Cormac McCarthy novel. Unfortunately, the journey is not a complete line to the apparent safety of the North, rather a patchy hop state to state, each new locale representing a different face of America, the flickering light of safety always at the end of a dark tunnel, no matter how far they travel.

Hence the balance between hope and reality becomes as much a part of the narrative as it is Whitehead’s writing. Cora faces a trade off between feeling and surviving, never giving up on knowing and being known, on loving, yet always ready to pitch up and leave, alone. For his part, Whitehead is committed to courage in both directions, possessing the bravery to see the human and the inhuman no matter how extreme the end, and thus preserving belief and reality. The semi-magical railroad for Cora is the semi-magical human spirit for Whitehead, small, important things beneath the surface which persevere in spite of the violence and suffering above.

There’s a scene in the novel where, presuming she’ll be undertaking some sort of behind-the-scenes manual labour, Cora takes a job at a museum, only to find that she’s actually a strange actor/object on display. Splitting her time between three sets – “Scenes from Darkest Africa”, “Life on the Slave Ship” and “Typical Day on the Plantation” – she must pose in costume for the public, who often bang on the glass and make inaudible comments. Of course, the museum scenes are nothing but banal and ignorant simulacra, though small details (birds hung from the ceiling that bring to mind carrion-feeders, wax dummies painted in disturbing hues) hint at the overwhelming horror behind the facade.

This voyeurism signifies a second assault by whites, a disinformation dressed as intellectual curiosity which slowly reworks black history to their own telling, a kind of semi-conscious attempt to attenuate their crimes even while such abuses were (or are) ongoing. Some reviews have touched upon the allegorical links between Whitehead’s writing and contemporary society, though the book is not so much fable of our times but rather the genesis story, the giant, ever-present thing that looms over everything that’s playing out today. As one character puts it in a particularly scathing and relevant piece:

“America, too, is a delusion, the grandest one of all. The white race believes – believes with all its heart – that it is their right to take the land. To kill Indians. Make war. Enslave their brothers. This nation shouldn’t exist, if there is any justice in the world, for its foundations are murder, theft and cruelty.”

Cora’s life almost plays like the museum displays in which she worked, a simplified journey through a decidedly unsimple array of evils and atrocities. She moves from scene to scene with little choice or reason – (Genuine) Typical Day on the Plantation, Run in with Bounty Hunters, Tuskegee-Style Medical Testing, Anne Frank-esque Attic Existence, White Supremacist Lynching – a tale at once unimaginably violent yet fundamentally inauthentic, institutions and systems reduced to recognisable heroes and villains so that they might become a little more fathomable. The result is a kind of game, the author daring us to imagine beyond the fabulism, us readers staring through the glass in a mixture of morbid curiosity and blank horror, plagued by the unshiftable unease unique to guilt.

The Underground Railroad is out now via Fleet (UK) and Doubleday (North America). Colson Whitehead’s Goodreads page is a good place to find out more about his previous work.

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Illustrated by Joe Sumner, the book charts Wyld’s life, from hearing Aussie fishermen stories aged six to her grown adult self. From the moment her brother is brought the jaws of a bronze whaler by Father Christmas, Wyld becomes preoccupied with sharks. The captivation is not helped when she discovers a book on shark attacks and falls in love with Rodney Fox‘s “salty eyes” and look which said “the whole thing was just fine”.

Back in London Wyld finds obsession continuing, scouring the Sydenham library for shark books while plagued by a fear which makes baths difficult and forces her to sit with all appendages safely on-board the sofa. An ill-advised viewing of Jaws cements her mindset before the family return to Australia and encounter more sharks in a variety of situations (imaginary and otherwise).

What this simplification of the plot leaves out are the small details of familial life squeezed into both the writing and illustration, the astute observations and interactions from Wyld’s juvenile viewpoint which reveal what the book is really about. Wyld’s father, the pale Englishman, often cuts a lone figure, isolated in London by work and wine and in Australia by layers of clothing and high-factor sun-cream, while her mother floats with Wyld in the pool at night because “she is awake anyway”. When Wyld’s older brother begins “linger[ing] in doorways with a blank look on his face”, and returning home cut and bruised, the home is loaded with tension yet remains cryptic to Wyld, and by extension, us. Be they adolescent anxieties, genuine enduring depressions or just good old fashioned existential ennui, the emotions of the adults remain alien, unknowable and for the most part hidden, present only as dark, lingering shapes and ominous choppy wake.

Indeed, this sharks-as-emotions allegory can be extended further than sadness. From her father’s well-meaning day trip to ‘Vic Hislop’s Killer Shark Show’, to her encounter with an uncomfortably comic doctor, pretty much all of Wyld’s interactions are surrounded by the unseen forces of love and loss. Sumner’s artwork highlights this paradoxically by adding photo-realistic sharks and wounds to his otherwise simple drawings, beasts which often stalk Wyld when, consciously or otherwise, she is considering losing a loved one. Although she doesn’t quite understand it yet, she is thinking about love through its most illuminating prism – the loss of it. She is thinking about death.

While this morbid idea is true and central to the plot, it would be naive and unfair to dwell on it without noticing that, amongst it all, life not only goes on but flourishes. Wyld is never caught by the shark, nor is her brother or mother or father. She might have felt ill examining the colossal White Pointer at Vic Hislop’s museum but the next day she was braver in the sea. Our relationship with sharks is changing, with The Discovery Channel and National Geographic and the seemingly monthly event of ‘Shark Week’ beaming out pro-shark propaganda in which deep-tanned marine biologists preach education and understanding and love. Similarly, the message from Wyld seems not so much ‘LOOK OUT LIFE WANTS TO EAT YOU!’ but rather ‘life could eat you, sure, but such occurrences are exceedingly rare and even then you can poke it in the eye and escape to the hands of kind strangers who prod your guts back into your body’. In other words, learning to accept the atavistic, bone-level violence and pain as something natural, unaware and worthy of careful respect. Its strikes are few and far between, and even then, it’s nothing personal.

Everything Is Teeth is out now on Jonathan Cape/Random House.

As per usual, we’ve made you a playlist of songs that are related to the book. Nothing too subtle this time, I’m afraid, just plenty of teeth and blood sprinkled with Australians and capped off with the definitive garage-rock  anthem for sharks.

Tracklisting:

1. The Race – Oh Pep
2. Teeth – Bowerbirds
3. Drawn to the Blood – Sufjan Stevens
4. Swim – Surfer Blood
5. I Want Blood – Water Liars
6. Ocean’s Nerves – Songs:Ohia
7. Jaws of Life – Wintersleep
8. Find Me In The Ocean – Will Samson
9. Blood Song – Stupid Loser
10. Everywhere I Go Smells Like Fish – Donovan Woods
11. King Fish – Sun Kil Moon
12. Lurk Underneath – Trouble Books
13. Blood – The Middle East
14. Shark? – Shark?

The post Everything Is Teeth – Evie Wyld & Joe Sumner appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Us Conductors is Michaels’s first novel. Set in both Russia and New York in the first half of the twentieth century, it tells the tale of Lev Sergeyevich Termen, a Russian scientist and inventor, who lived a rather extraordinary life. Just how closely Michaels sticks to the facts is left unclear (at least until an authors note which appears after the postscript), but I would advise anyone looking for a 100% historically accurate account of Termen’s story to look elsewhere (Michaels even points you to the definitive text). Not that Michaels is at all disingenuous about this fact, indeed the book opens with the note, “This book is mostly inventions,” although I suppose that in itself holds more than one truth.

Termen is most famous for his invention of the theremin, one of the very first electronic musical instruments and probably the only instrument that requires no physical contact from its player. The sounds are created as the performer moves his or her hands near the instrument’s two antennae, creating a sound that is quite unlike that of anything else. As Michaels puts it:

“The sound of the theremin is simply pure electric current. It is the hymn of lightning as it hides in its cloud. The song never strains or falters; it persists, stays, keeps, lasts, lingers.”

The novel follows Termen’s rise from a promising young scientist at Petrograd University, to a Manhattan celebrity both in the worlds of science and entertainment. Its important to note that the image of the theremin was (understandably) very different in Termen’s day. While it is now best recognized as something from kitschly creepy Hollywood sci-fi (as well as the soundtrack to the UK’s most violent fictional county), at the time of its inception the instrument was seen as something bordering on the supernatural, these strange shrill sounds seemingly pulled directly from the ether. Listeners react in a multitude of ways. Some are amazed and delighted, while others are less than sure. Take for instance the passage in which Termen demonstrates the instrument to Charlie Chaplin:

But when the sounds started, DZEEEEOOOoo […] Charlie gasped so loudly that [RCA corporation salesman] Len turned off the machine […] Chaplin was as pale as chalk […] the actor was plainly terrified. The best-known phantom in the world, a man who had made his fortune as an illusion projected onto silver screens-he was scared of this box of ghosts

And Chaplin isn’t the only familiar face that Termen’s new-found fame brings him into contact with. He meets Glenn Miller and Gershwin, Ellington and Rachmaninoff, talks science with Rutherford and Einstein and even provides a demonstration for a certain revolutionary in his homeland. But to Termen all of these names pale in comparison to one person he meets in New York, the young violinist and eventual theremin virtuoso Clara Reisenberg, with whom he falls immediately in love. Much of the novel is written in the first person, as a letter from Lev in which Clara is often referred to as “you”, and the entire book (and indeed Termen’s entire life) is preoccupied with thoughts of this girl from Lithuania.

Termen is a budding young Russian exposed to the grand decadence and impossible promises of American life, a collision of innocent romantic ideals and solipsism born out of brilliance. Imagine a combination of Josef from Chabon’s Kavalier and Clay and the all-too-human geniuses from Powers’s Gold Bug Variations and Galatea 2.2, men with intellect, with weaknesses, with the gift of ambition or the curse of obsession. That said, the reader’s sympathies lie with Termen throughout the book, his belief in the impractical and delicate forces of art and love proving naive yet noble in the face of the twin behemoths capitalism and communism.

And it is within the impractical and the delicate that the heart of the book lies. Faced with various systems of order, Termen gives himself to the spontaneous. The random, accidental nature of human connection and the wonder of unseeable, unconquerable forces, something his instrument embodies. The theremin is the perfect subject for Michaels, a man who sees magic in things, but perhaps not the obvious magic. Just like Michaels in his music reviews, Termen finds himself acting upon mystical forces rather than practical details, taking delight in the unexplainable, his knowledge of the component parts creating something that exceeds them in both scope and beauty.

The novel’s style mirrors this idea. Michaels’s prose is clipped and elegant, sentences like little staticky spits and sparks which both descriptively and structurally capture the electricity that lies at the heart of everything Termen does. The scientist’s persona is captured with the utmost subtlety, his sharp, original observations clearly those of a man who think outside the box. The style is a real winner, proving not only immensely readable but prone to moments of true beauty – discrete declarations, although simple when read alone, assembled into intricate, poetic passages, not unlike the components of Termen’s incredible machines. Take, for example, this piece in which Termen describes his incarceration on board a Soviet ship:

Some nights on the Starry Bolshevik, I can hear sounds from outside. I press my ear to the steel and beyond the groans of the ship, the screws loosening and tightening in the walls, I hear gulls. They cry and whistle. Other times I hear whales; I think they are whales; it is a moaning in four colours. My ear is pressed to the steel and I hear this calling like many callings folded together. Ancient blues, greys, scarlets, golds, on top of one another, in a chord. One day I will make a piano that plays the echoes of whales

It should be noted that Us Conductors is not all love and beauty and invention. The volatile politics of Termen’s homeland, alongside his position of influence in America, lure him into very dangerous territory. Business deals and visa arrangements are revealed to have multitudes of connotations as our plucky inventor is drawn into the fog of the dawning Cold War. The second part of the book spirals into nightmare as Termen is forced to endure what proves to be the polar equivalent of hell, and Michaels displays a gift for far more than pretty prose. But even the story’s darkest moments hold a flicker, jolts of pure inspiration, flares of that irrepressible electrical energy that drove Termen forward.

Us Conductors is out now on Bloomsbury here in the UK. Readers from the USA can get it courtesy of Tin House Books, and Canadians from Random House. The novel also won the 2014 Scotiabank Giller Prize, Canada’s most lucrative literary award. It deserved it.

P.S. If you are in Scotland at the end of August, Michaels is crossing the pond to read and you should definitely go. Find the dates and links below, along with some Canadian events too.

Aug 22-23, 2015 • Edinburgh, Scotland – Edinburgh International Book Festival
Aug 25, 2015 • St Andrews, Scotland – Reading with Christopher Jory at Topping Bookshop
Sept 13, 2015 • Eden Mills, ON – Eden Mills Writers Festival
Oct 6, 2015 • Ottawa, ON – Read For The Cure
Oct 15, 2015 • Durham, ON – Free reading at Trent University (Durham campus)
Oct 15, 2015 • Peterborough, ON – Free reading at Trent University (Peterborough campus)
Oct 20, 2015 • Hudson, QC – StoryFest
Oct 23, 2015 • Edmonton, AB – LitFest Non-Fiction Festival
Oct 24, 2015 • St Albert, AB – STARfest Literary Festival

The post Lit Links: Sean Michaels – Us Conductors appeared first on Various Small Flames.

First off, I should say that Byron Easy is not a book about music. There are a few references and lines of songs that the protagonist hears/remembers but other than that it’s a regular literary fiction novel. I don’t want to go into the storyline in any great detail, but I will say that the book is based around the titular character’s recollection of his sorry life, a cash-strapped (poverty stricken may be a better description) failing poet (he’s published one piece at the age of thirty), who’s marriage to a demanding (and sometimes psychotic) wife collapses before ever really existing properly.  

One of the thoughts in my head while reading the book (and one of criticisms I picked up from the few reviews I’ve read) is that for all of his self-pity, his problems were solveable if he just avoided certain people and got a steady job. While this observation has it’s truths, I think Cook put in enough small hints that suggest at the other side of a terrible coin – the conveyor belt of a middle-of-the-road life, where monotony and boredom reign supreme. In one part he writes:

In the distance, beyond the glut of jammed car parks and office-space-to-let, there is a cluster of newly built homes advertising their promise of soul death. This is where your life’s journey ends, they seem to proclaim: under the brown-tiled roof, next to the too-new fences, the unspoilt mica-macadam driveways, the fitted bathrooms and kitchens that must annihilate the soul just to enter them.

For me, this shows that for all of Easy’s woes while trying to live the life of an artist, he is still suitably terrified of a painted-by-numbers ‘regular’ life where all the traditions are followed and clichés fulfilled. He isn’t willing to become another faceless member of the population, at least not at first, before it’s too late, and his existential angst throughout the story (while a traditional cliché itself in young to middle-aged men, but that’s another discussion entirely) supports this notion. Yes there are clear answers to his problems but that doesn’t mean these ‘answers’ would be any more bearable than his current predicament.

It is this sort of no-right-answer dilemma that makes Byron Easy an interesting read. The style is impressively both realistic and intelligent, avoiding the usual ‘realism = short words and swearing’ pitfall, and the protagonist is neither especially nice or inherently nasty. He’s both blameless and the root of all his problems. He’s a victim of circumstance and a destroyer of his own luck. He’s part tragedy, part comedy. He’s real.

I’m not going to say any more than that, other than saying it is well worth your time. Cook’s work has been compared to Saul Bellow, Martin Amis, and John Kennedy Toole, and while I don’t necessarily agree with all of them, he is not out of his depth in such company. Byron Easy is available through William Heinemann at all good book stores (and the big online powerhouses). You can read an excerpt and an essay on the book here.

P.S. This may be the first and last book review on Wake the Deaf. Although, if anyone else wants to send me free books then please don’t hesitate to get in touch. Maybe we should start a sister blog (Wake the Blind?) to deal with literary matters? Let us know. And don’t forget the free books.

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