Characters in a strange and fantastical world

Gwendolyn Paradice describes herself as "hearing impaired, queer, and a member of the Cherokee Nation." She has an MA in nonfiction from the University of North Texas, an MFA from Bennington College, and a PhD from the University of Missouri. She teaches creative writing at Murray State University. More Enduring for Having Been Broken (2021), a collection of short stories, is her first book.

They are . . . original. I cannot do better than lift the book's description from the back cover; "A carnivorous ferris wheel, exploding chickens, a theme park that’s home to a god, and a centuries-old Spanish ship found in the Texas hill country. . . stories of children abandoned, forgotten, and ignored, their trauma and the desperate need to survive it. Whether it’s living in a rusted stingray above a tourist shop in coastal Florida, feeding faces to monstrous catfish in the bayou, maintaining a derelict and fog-shrouded hotel in South America, or escaping through the labyrinthine caves of Crete, the boys and girls in this collection weather their aloneness in a world touched by the strange and fantastical."

At the sentence and paragraph level, the writing is impressive. Where I had a problem with many of the stories were the "strange and fantastical" elements. The children in these stories—and the central characters all tend to be young—live in a world that is more cruel and meaningless than the world I recognize.

Why? 

Why invent an English (not Spanish) sloop-of-war from the 1700s, intact but abandoned, sitting  inexplicably in a Texas pond? Is this the best way to evoke, dramatize the 19-year-old's relationship with her grandfather? Rather than focus on the story Paradice is trying to tell, I focused on the extraordinary ship—where did it come from? What is its name (a record of it must exist somewhere)? Why aren't national news organizations and a maritime museum swarming around to check it out?

I had similar problems with the carnivorous carnival ferris wheel. It apparently lives on the bugs the character catches, but a ferris wheel is big. Would bugs be enough to sustain it? No wonder it began to eat a rider. Won't someone miss the half-eaten rider? Did the ferris wheel have parents? 

It occurs to me that when a story is set in a recognizable universe, the writer doesn't have to even think about such questions. Readers will assume a character—even an orphan—had parents. In some ways it makes the writing easier.

All this is to say that most of the stories in More Enduring for Having Been Broken provoke more questions than they answer, questions that left me unsatisfied. They told me nothing about the world or how it works. One exception to that is the story of Elias, an orphaned pre-teen boy, who finds refuge in the rusted interior of a stingray. What happens to Elias is extreme but believable and the story is accessible for it. Too many other characters function in a world I cannot accept or enjoy. Others may feel differently.

An now, other opinions of Kairos

I do not generally read reviews of a book I intend to review until I've read the book. I would rather present my reaction as uncolored as possible by someone else's opinion. That obviously does not always happen if only because I read a book because I've read a review, although by the time i read the book I've usually forgotten what the review said.

When I do look at Amazon reviews, I look for those by readers who disliked a book I liked very much. If I've given a book five stars, why have others given it one? Why are our opinions of the same text so different?

All this is a preamble to say I've now read the negative comments about Kairos. I thought several were as interesting as the novel. For example, "I grew up in East Germany and was excited about this novel. But I am so disappointed! The love story… well… Hans is a despicable sadistic prick and Katharina too naive… and the interwoven philosophical ideas seem forced. I suffered through the book hoping for a turning point but there is none. It’s an exhausting read."

And: "I agree with the Amazon review titled 'Not Mastering the Past,' of this novel set in East Germany around the opening of the Berlin wall. A romance turned abusive becomes the vehicle for a revisionist perspective on German reunification. I disliked the book on many levels, although it is skillfully written. The character Hans is a familiar, repugnant type of intellectual. His 34 years younger lover Katharina discovers after his death that he was a Stasi informer, and muses in the next-to-last sentence of the novel that she was his 'mirror image.' The parallel, apparently, is that both were psychologically captive, brainwashed into giving up their privacy. This seems a bizarre exculpation of the uniquely pervasive culture of mutual spying that existed in East Germany. The Stasi’s penetration of all levels of society had less to do with communist ideology than with the seamless transition from Nazism to a Stalinist police state. Yet the reunification with the West is framed not as access to democracy but as a victory of capitalism and soulless consumerism over the humanitarian ideals of socialism.

"The tediously obsessive love affair begins with a sexual encounter (on Hans’ marital bed) to the accompaniment of Mozart’s Requiem, a lengthy scene which brought to my mind the German word Edelkitsch, 'noble kitsch.' (Translation note: the word “Slip” in German means panties, not “slip.”) For all its sophistication, this novel has a mushy core. The death throes of the relationship coincide with the fall of the Iron Curtain and German reunification. 'What will history’s verdict be about our time?' the novel asks, stating that 'the question is still open.' In another place Katharina asks why it is that only they, the East Germans, have had to examine their conscience, and not the West Germans. Undoubtedly it was difficult and demeaning for many East Germans to find themselves on the losing side of history. But the fact is that West Germans have been grappling with their Nazi past in a way that East Germans never did. I grew up in West Germany and we studied that era in school nearly every year, with no hint of exculpation."

It's enough to make me want to reread Kairos with these comments in mind. 

An affair in East Germany before the Wall comes down

I should keep track of book recommendations so that I can thank the source after I've finished. I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to whoever recommended Jenny Erpenbeck's Kairos in the extraordinary translation by Michael Hofmann. 

I read no German, but I am confident that The New Republic is correct when it writes that Hofmann's translation "is invaluable—it achieves what translations are supposedly unable to do: it is at once 'loyal' and 'beautiful.'" Kairos won the 2024 International Booker Award and was long-listed for the 2023 National Book Award for Translated Literature. 

Erpenbeck was born and grew up in East Germany. In one sense, the Kairos story is simple: in the late 1980s, Katharina, a 19-year-old student who lives with her mother and brother in East Berlin, meets and falls passionately in love with and begins an affair with Hans, a 58-year-old married writer. Their affair has its ups and downs, the Berlin Wall comes down, the East German state is absorbed into West Germany, and Katharina and Hans split up.

To summarize Kairos so baldly is a travesty and a deception. Erpenbeck is able by shifting from Katharina's to Hans's point of view and back to evoke the ecstasy and passion of new love, which lasts about three weeks but continues anyway. She is able to show the texture of daily East German life of a typography/typesetting apprentice and a working writer/radio performer. It was not all bad and life was better than tolerant for many ordinary individuals.

Hans was born in 1930, so he was 15-years-old when the war ended. Katharina was born in 1969 and knows only life under Communist socialism. Erperbeck manages to convey convincingly the stresses that the age difference (Hans after all is older than her father) and life experiences provoke. She is somehow able to dramatize a lover's paranoia and jealousy while simultaneously managing to retain the reader's—this reader's—sympathy for the characters.

At the beginning of the novel, the reader knows something the characters do not that adds to the book's tension: the Berlin Wall is going to come down. When it does in November 1989 toward the end of the book, it is not so much a cataclysm for Katharina and Hans as a thousand small changes, negative and positive, that demonstrate life will be different from now on. It seems clear that Katharina in her early 20s will adjust; Hans, not so well.

I closed Kairos awed by Erpenbeck's and Hofmann's skill at creating, at evoking Katharina and Hans, their feelings and situations, the time and the place. An extraordinary novel. 

An 1810 quest for the animals that left giant bones

I picked up a copy of Carys Davies's novel West because a British writer whose opinion I respect said it is one of the best books he'd read, a book he returns to from time to time to reread.  I'd never heard of Carys Davies, but with praise like that West sounded like something I should look at.

West (2018) is the author's first novel which she published after two short story collections of short stories, Some New Ambush and The Redemption of Galen Pike, which won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize. She is also the recipient of a Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a 2025/26 Fellow at Columbia University’s Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris. She has now published twi additional novels, The Mission House (2020) and Clear (2024),

Born in Wales, Davies grew up there and in England's Midlands, lived and worked worked as a freelance journalist for twelve years in New York and Chicago, and now lives in Edinburgh.

West is a slim book. You can read it in a couple hours even if you are a slow reader. I'd be tempted to call it an extended short story except that it is exceptionally rich and complex. It takes place shortly after Lewis and Clark return from their trek, so around 1810. The central character is Cy Bellman, a widowed Pennsylvania mule breeder, who reads about and is enraptured by a news story that bones of an unknown giant creature have been discovered in Kentucky. Leaving his pre-teen daughter Bess in the care of his sister, Bellman sets off on a Quixotic quest to discover the living animals that the bones had once supported.

The bulk of the novel is an account of Bellman's adventures and the lives of Bess and her aunt in Pennsylvania. The short chapters sketch the significant incidents that take place in these during the two years the book covers. It is remarkable how much meaning Davies can pack into a few pages without sounding rushed or insufficient. The point of view shifts from character to character. Indeed, I was impressed that Davies would introduce a character in the middle of the book only to write her out three pages later. But why not? She's served her purpose, enriched the narrative, and is no longer relevant.

I agree with the writer. West is a remarkable book and worth rereading from time to time.

My short story has just been published

My story "Kanazawa in the Rain" has been published by Story Sanctum. You can check it out here:

https://www.storysanctum.org/post/kanawaza-in-the-rain

And it would not hurt my feelings if you comment—even if the comment is critical.

It may be all invented but remains true

Because I read and thoroughly enjoyed Hernan Diaz's novel Trust, I picked up and read his first novel In the Distance. It has an interesting publishing history.

It was published in 2017 by Coffee House Press, the well-respected, non-profit, independent, Minneapolis publisher. The press had held an open call for manuscripts and Diaz submitted his the book. He is associate director of the Hispanic Institute at Columbia University, where he edits the journal Revista Hispánica Moderna and his previous book had been a study of Jorge Luis Borges, Borges, Between History and Eternity. He grew up in Argentina and Sweden, studied in London and New York, and lives in Brooklyn. 

In the Distance was headed for a modest, respectable—but not best-seller—history until it was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, which dramatically changed sales projections. Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House, published its own paperback edition in March 2024 and hardback six months later.

A New York Times story about the novel begins: “Håkan Söderström, the hulking hero of Hernán Diaz’s novel, makes a stupendous entrance, ascending onto the first page through a star-shaped void on a featureless plain of white sea ice. Longhaired, white-bearded, gnarled and naked, he pulls himself onto the floe and walks on bow legs to an icebound schooner, carrying a rifle and ax. We are somewhere, nowhere, in the frozen north."

The book evokes Håkan's life as he grows from childhood in Sweden to adulthood on the American western desert between the Gold Rush and the Civil War. "Though many of its elements are familiar to the point of being worn out — saloons and wagon trains, Indians and gold prospectors — the novel is not. Mr. Diaz’s long study of North American literature, much of it steeped in the 19th century, allowed him to expertly plunder an antique genre for parts. The rebuilt mechanism is his own design, and it moves in unexpected directions: west to east, around in circles, down into the earth, and north to Alaska.”

Although Håkan is alone for pages at a time, he travels with and is influenced by an obsessed gold prospector, a scientist looking to prove life rose spontaneously in brine pools, an unexpected good man in a criminal gang who loves to cook, a whore who does not have a heart of gold, an Indian band that his been butchered by whites. He is able to stay alive and ultimately thrive.

One reason (of many) I enjoyed In the Distance thoroughly is because I've spent time hiking in areas in which Håkan traveled: Utah, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico. I could identify real places—the Great Salt Lake, the San Juan River canyon, Grand Gulch—and events—the Mountain Meadows Massacre and more. Because this is not history and we are seeing places and learning of events through Håkan's consciousness these are also hazy.

They are also invented. Diaz never been out west, never hiked the back country or through the desert. “There was something that to me felt corrupt and dishonest about having an air-conditioned experience of the protagonist’s ordeals,” he said. “I defend the idea of reading over researching, which has this whole protocol that I don’t think applies to literature, which has its own relationship to truth.”

In the Distance may be all invented but it rings true.

Whatever you call this, it's amazing

Tezer Özlü, a Turkish author, died in 1986 at age 43. Her second novel to be translated into English (brilliantly by Maureen Freely), Journey to the Edge of Life, was published in 2025. An earlier book, Cold Nights of Childhood, won the 2023 National Book Critics Circle Award.

Journey to the Edge of Life is hard to classify. A novel? Not in conventional terms as "an extended work of fiction." 

A travelog? The narrator reports her travels from Hamburg to Berlin to Vienna to Prague to Zagreb to Trieste. 

A meditation? She is in her early 40s apparently unaware of the cancer that will kill her shortly and writes about her life.

An appreciation? She visits Kafka's grave, comments on Pavese, visits with Svevo's daughter, all Özlü's literary idols.

Because she is such a good writer (or Freely is such a skillful translator) the best way to introduce Journey to the Edge of Life is to allow Özlü to speak: ". . . I look at the wan face in the mirror and see a child in Gerede, dressed in her school smock, black with a white school collar, her hair tied back with taffeta ribbons. I see a pupil who recites heroic poems on holidays, and a young housewife who rushes from city to city, seeking other worlds. I see a woman who is loved and is abused by two husbands, a woman who is deceived by two husbands and who deceives them both. I see a woman who learned to resist, drawing on her own resources . . . ."

I'd never heard of Özlü. I bought the paperback on the strength of the blurbs (a practice I do not recommend) and because Transit Books, which has a thought-provoking backlist, published it. As I read, I was struck repeatedly by Özlü's thoughts which made me think. For example, "Are walls life's cemeteries. Are not the selves we parade in the streets all false. Isn't every self that appears on the city streets a new persona, an alibi assumed. Aren't we most ourselves behind the walls. Is it not behind walls that we can best resist the outside world." (The lack of question marks seems to be her style.)

And her comments on the passing scene can be sharp. She's in Vienna. "Now a horse and carriage passes before me, carrying tourists. They want to live in seventeenth-century Vienna. In the middle of all these exhaust fumes, the traffic . . . . "

The book's cover description says "her journey transmutes passion for literature into desire for meaning." A desire for meaning. Isn't that what we all desire? 

I'm disheartened that Özlü could not have lived on. I'd have followed wherever she led.

If fascinating stories are your utopia, try these

Your Utopia by Bora Chung, skillfully translated from Korean by Anton Hur, is an original and engaging collection of eight stories. Because they are set in the future, the book is probably shelved with science fiction, but it could also fit under the horror and or the fantasy umbrella. 

On the basis of Your Utopia Chung sees a bleak future for humanity. In "The End of the Voyage" a single human remains after a mysterious plague has wiped out every other person. People infected by the plague show no symptoms until, uncontrollably, they start to eat another person. 

(I'm hardly spoiling the story by telling you this because Chung herself tells you this in the first two pages. We enjoy the story by seeing how Chung is able to reach those pages.)

In "The Center for Immorality Research" a low-level employee runs herself ragged planning a gala for donors only to be blamed for the chaos that results during the event in front of the mysterious celebrity benefactors who hope to live forever.

In "A Song for Sleep," an AI elevator in an apartment complex develops a tender, one-sided love for an elderly resident.

And in "Seed" Earth's now-sentient plants who narrate the story have a fraught meeting with some of Earth's corporate workers. As the plants say."The future of our world would depend on this single and first encounter."

A world-wide plague of cannibals . . . an AI elevator . . . sentient, mobile trees—where does Chung get these things? Okay, Tolkin has ambulatory trees, but still. . . .  Several of the stories have an O. Henry twist or revelation at the end, but this does not diminish the story's impact. Indeed, as in O. Henry, the final paragraph can throw the story into perspective. 

She's written three novels and three collections of short stories. Cursed Bunny, her earlier collection of short stories, also translated into English by Anton Hur, was a National Book Award finalist and was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. 

She has an MA in Russian and East European area studies from Yale University and a PhD in Slavic literature from Indiana University. She has taught Russian language and literature and science fiction studies at Yonsei University and translates modern literary works from Russian and Polish into Korean. If you are interested in original ideas, Chung is someone to follow.

You don't have to be able-bodied to write porn

 “I wrote this novel [Hunchback] thinking that it is a problem that there were few authors with disabilities,” says Saou Ichikawa the author. “Why did the first winner not appear until 2023? I want everyone to think about that.”

Ichikawa, 45, was the 181st winner of the Akutagawa Prize, one of Japan’s oldest and most prestigious literary awards. She has congenital myopathy, a muscle disorder that requires her to use a wheelchair for mobility and a ventilator to breathe, and was the first author with a severe physical disability to win.

According to a NY Times article, she was removed from school after being put on the ventilator at age 13. She became an author in her twenties and in 20 years wrote more than 30 pulp romance and fantasy stories for young readers. But publishers rejected all of her manuscripts.

She enrolled in an online degree program at Waseda University, one of Japan’s top schools, in 2019 and began thinking about how people with disabilities are rarely represented in literature, and in my experience, mostly hidden in Japan. She decided to tell the story of a character like herself. The result is the slim novel Hunchback, wonderfully translated by Polly Barton, one of my favorite translators.

Shaka Isawa, who is severely disabled, tells her story which is by turns erotic, funny, horrifying, and poignant. She makes a living writing soft- and (apparently) hard-core porn for an erotic website. One day—as I copy shamelessly from the flap copy—a new male carer reveals that he has read it all: the sex, the provocation, the dirt. Isawa's response? An indecent proposal.

As I said, the book is short, a novella rather than a novel. You can read it in an evening. Nevertheless it is powerful and engaging, a convincing portrait of an original woman, the first-hand evocation of a life most of us—thankfully—have not personally experienced. Which is, of course, a good reason to read it.

A "Best Book" that deserves the title

I read Hernan Diaz's novel Trust because it was on a recent New York Times list of the best books of the 21st Century and if you can't trust the New York Times, who can you trust? It also won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, so there's that too.

Trust's publisher's describes the novel by writing, "Even through the roar and effervescence of the 1920s, everyone in New York has heard of Benjamin and Helen Rask. He is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; she is the daughter of eccentric aristocrats. Together, they have risen to the very top of a world of seemingly endless wealth—all as a decade of excess and speculation draws to an end. But at what cost have they acquired their immense fortune? This is the mystery at the center of Bonds, a successful 1937 novel that all of New York seems to have read."

It's in four sections and I read the first 125-page section and wondered what was wrong with me. It purports to be a—granted—well-written and interesting short novel titled Bonds, but not so special that I thought it a best book of the year. Good, but not best.

The second section is an incomplete. fragmentary 1938 memoir of Andrew Bevel who is really, really pissed at the author and publisher of Bonds because the author fictionalized Bevel's life and marriage and portrayed it all wrong. Andrew wants to publish a memoir that sets the record straight. His wife was not instrumental in his phenomenal success. She died of natural causes not because Andrew allowed some Austrian quack attempt an experimental cure that killed her.

The third section is a contemporary memoir of a writer who, when she was a young woman in the late 1930s, Andrew hired to write the memoir we've just read.

The fourth section, thankfully, does not tie up all the loose ends or answer all the reader's questions. 

Trust "puts these competing narratives into conversation with one another—and in tension with the perspective of one woman bent on disentangling fact from fiction. The result is a novel that spans over a century and becomes more exhilarating with each new revelation." Both "an immersive story and a brilliant literary puzzle, Trust engages the reader in a quest for the truth while confronting the deceptions that often live at the heart of personal relationships, the reality-warping force of capital, and the ease with which power can manipulate facts"—quotes from the publisher with which I agree.

It took me a while to see what Diaz was doing, but once I did my admiration and fascinating grew. Tryst can be read as a "Rashomon" story—four characters describing the same events and their meanings differently. Which one is "true"? I suspect that how you answer when you've finished Trust is how you view wealth, financiers, women, memoir, fiction, and more. 

I don't know if I would call Trust the best novel of the year (I haven't read all the year's novels), but it is right up there with the best I've read.