Paul Kingsnorth - Written in what the author describes as “a shadow tongue”—a version of Old English updated so as to be understandable to the modern reader—The Wake renders the inner life of an Anglo-Saxon man with an accuracy and immediacy rare in historical fiction

Paul Kingsnorth, The Wake, Graywolf, 2015.
excerpt

www.paulkingsnorth.net/books/the-wake
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In the aftermath of the Norman Invasion of 1066, William the Conqueror was uncompromising and brutal. English society was broken apart, its systems turned on their head. What is little known is that a fractured network of guerrilla fighters took up arms against the French occupiers.
In The Wake, a postapocalyptic novel set one thousand years in the past, Paul Kingsnorth brings this dire scenario back to us through the eyes of the unforgettable Buccmaster, a proud landowner bearing witness to the end of his world. Accompanied by a band of like-minded men, Buccmaster is determined to seek revenge on the invaders. But as the men travel across the scorched English landscape, Buccmaster becomes increasingly unhinged by the immensity of his loss, and their path forward becomes increasingly unclear.
Written in what the author describes as “a shadow tongue”—a version of Old English updated so as to be understandable to the modern reader—The Wake renders the inner life of an Anglo-Saxon man with an accuracy and immediacy rare in historical fiction. To enter Buccmaster’s world is to feel powerfully the sheer strangeness of the past. A tale of lost gods and haunted visions, The Wake is both a sensational, gripping story and a major literary achievement.

“Kingsnorth does not simply tell history: He invites the reader to inhabit it. . . . At once invigorating and terrifying. History almost a thousand years old feels intense and immediate, as close as the blood in one’s veins and the memories one can’t escape.”—Star Tribune (Minneapolis)

“Kingsnorth’s captivating first novel is thought provoking, multi-faceted and intriguingly rendered. . . . [The Wake] will satisfy motivated readers of history, ecology and the persistent pull of the old gods.”—Shelf Awareness

“Earthy, rude, rough-hewn lyricism. . . . A war epic, psychological thriller, and brooding meditation on the past’s foreignness all in one.”—The Globe and Mail

“Kingsnorth’s debut novel re-creates the mysterious joy that accompanies first learning how to read. Composed in a seductive Anglo-Saxon dialect, the narrative is disorienting yet familiar and brilliantly unreliable. Buccmaster’s astonishing voice will haunt readers long after they finish this bold book.”—Library Journal, starred review

“The Wake is an astonishing accomplishment. The events in it are chronicled by Buccmaster, a brutally unreliable narrator, in an adapted version of Old English. At first the prospect seems unreadably off-putting; within twenty pages you get the hang of it; by thirty the suddenly fluent reader is immersed entirely in the mental and geographical contours of the era. But it works the other way too: we are seeing—and feeling and hearing—the living roots of Englishness.”—Geoff Dyer

“The Wake is a masterpiece. My top book of the year.”—Eleanor Catton, Winner of the 2013 Man Booker Prize

"It takes a few moments to learn to parse the language of The Wake; it is written in a simplified version of Old English, after all. The effort is richly repaid, however, by an engrossing and immersive reading experience unlike any other historical novel. Kingsnorth's vividly imagined medieval tale is an ancient story that throbs with life."—David Enyeart, Common Good Books (St. Paul, MN)

“[A] dark and disturbing tale. . . . Readers will be absorbed. . . . Masterfully wrought historical fiction turning epoch-making events into a harrowing nightmare.”—Booklist, starred review

"The Wake is one of the most inventive, immersive, and indelible novels I've read all year. A Story of the Norman invasion of England told by the proud, vengeful, and unstable Buccmaster of Holland (a socman of three oxgangs!) that is terribly difficult to put down."—Mark Schultz, Carmichael's Bookstore

“Powerful eloquence, a brusque beauty, that moves and convinces. More than a mere novel, The Wake is really a medieval epic poem to an English way of life that would be erased forever.”—The Arts Fuse

“A book unlike any other, brilliant in its rarity and brutal, ugly truth. . . . Kingsnorth has brought forth a remarkable narrator through whom we can see (and smell and taste) the burnt fields and bodies, the skeletal trees and smoldering fires—a world sickly similar to so many lesser visions of destruction, but given fresh and horrifying weight here by a mad experiment in language that has become a raw and powerful masterpiece.”—NPR

“Like Tolkien’s and Martin’s books, The Wake presents the reader with an immersive experience. . . . What sharply distinguishes it is its disorienting use of high literary experiment and its insistence on uncertainty. . . . The Wake reminds us that we can’t find our way out of our crisis as easily as many think.”—Bookforum

In western England, an isolated hill that makes for a good observation point is a toot, and in East Anglia, shakes refer to cracks in drying wood. These terms—gathered from Landmarks, Robert Macfarlane’s recent collection of regional landscape terminology—may strike one as curiosities, yet their homegrown specificity brings these places to life in all of their particulars and peculiarities. The richness of such dialect is, in a world growing linguistically poorer, a remnant of an abiding sense of locality and identity. That language alters and adjusts our perceptions, expectations, and even our identity has more or less become a given. As such, a strange word become familiar has the ability to deepen our experiences, to limn a hitherto unspeakable feeling, and to more firmly situate us in place.

It is partly to shore these beautiful fragments up against the sort of linguistic streamlining of toots into hills and shakes into cracks in drying wood that Robert Macfarlane assembled his fascinating glossary. And I suspect that it was in the same spirit of preservation that Paul Kingsnorth chose to write The Wake, his debut novel, set in England during the eleventh century Norman Conquest, in what he calls a “ghost language.” If this is his sentiment, he has imposed it on our twenty-first century vernacular to create a language which, against all odds, works. This language, an adapted version of Old English as it was spoken prior to the introduction of French words and influences that arrived on England’s shores along with William the Conqueror, has been made legible to modern readers by the removal of its most foreign elements. Much as the Scots dialect might at first bewilder a lifelong resident of the American South, the ghost English of The Wake will appear opaque to the unversed reader. The novel is initially disorienting, as this early descriptive passage reveals:

…i is a socman of holland a part of the scir of lincylene where the ground was blaec and good and deop. our ham was an eoland in the fenns on all sides the wilde on all sides dabcic the water wuf the lesch and the doerc waters. our folc cnawan this place lic we cnawan our wifmen and our cildren.

Taken on its own, the above may as well be a cipher, and the first twenty pages of the novel left me feeling stymied. As I slogged through the early part of the book (set, appropriately enough, in the fens, the boggy marshlands of eastern England), acquiring vocabulary, deciphering pronunciation, and situating myself in this distant world, I found myself more easily entering into the mental universe of Buccmaster of Holland, a deeply flawed antihero whose consciousness we inhabit throughout The Wake. His vocabulary, because it is sparse and rhythmically halting, becomes at times profoundly striking:

under the boat under the water and not so deop was the stocc of a great blaec treow torn to its roots lic a tooth in the mouth of an eald wif. a great treow it was wid and blaec as the fyrs aesc blaec as the deorcness beyond the hall on a night when the mona sleeps and as i was locan i seen another and another and i colde see that under this mere was a great holt a great eald holt of treows bigger than any i had seen efer in holland and ealdor i was sure ealder efen than my grandfather.

It is a sublime passage, I think, and Kingsnorth delights in the articulation of this haunted language. Delight provides sufficient justification for employing this device, but Kingsnorth offers other reasons as well. In his afterward, he insists that he has difficulty accepting historical novels written in contemporary language: “The way we speak is specific to our time and place. Our assumptions, our politics, our worldview, our attitudes—all are implicit in our words, and what we do with them.” So bird becomes fugol and nebb, we learn, is a face. These hard, abrupt Anglo-Saxon words sound harsher and less forgiving than the pliable French imports that have since supplanted them, and to prove Kingsnorth’s point, the men and woman who speak these words are no gentler, least of all the intractable Buccmaster. Theirs is a brutal world, one subject to drastic and sudden changes in the balance of power, full of warring tribes descending like locusts upon the land. The book opens with an omen—a strange fugol wings across the sky, auguring ill—that establishes a mental universe full of mystery, terror, wonder, and contingency. The forbidding language, alien to us, puts us in a mental state of uncertainty similar to that of Kingsnorth’s characters.

This language, filtered through Buccmaster’s idiosyncratic voice, also summons a deeply troubled mind, one that for its supposed antiquity is recognizably modern. Buccmaster is a conservative man, a braggart and a fool and a zealot who rails against anything he deems not sufficiently English, a category Kingsnorth is keen to dismantle throughout The Wake. This idea is even at Buccmaster’s time a thing of the past: the venerable myth of Old England recedes ever into the distance until, we realize, it never existed in the first place. His is an England preceding Christianity, full of staunch men, obedient women, and indentured peasants who know their place; it is a land of virile Norse gods who, unlike that weak import Christ, are inseparable from the landscape, not grafted onto it. Even now, during their long decline as new traditions take hold, they ghost through the land, whispering to the last true believers. Weland (or Wayland) the Smith figures prominently in the narrative: Buccmaster, as the bearer of a sword he believes forged by the Smith himself, converses mentally with the god through the novel. These passages, rendered with acute tension, reveal man’s inadequacies when faced with a force greater than himself:

            i cnawan he was not triewe

drincan laughan smercan lic a wifman

            the first daeg of litha

thus is no ealdor no cyng not lic the other

            i was ceosan i

always thu is weac

Buccmaster stands fragile before his god, just as he stands fragile before history. This is a frightening fragility, a weakness that is masked by the kind of violent outrage that spurs on mass murderers like Dylan Klebold. As such, Kingsnorth’s decision to use the Norman Conquest is only a pretext, one of any number of possible scenarios capable of shattering a man’s world. As far as pretexts go, this one is particularly momentous. Buccmaster loses his home and his family—due largely to his refusal to pay tax to the new overlords—and takes to the woods, where he joins a small band of bewildered survivors. Despite his claims of being the obvious leader, as a bearer of Weland’s sword, Buccmaster is unable in the months following the devastation of his country to come to any firm resolution or definite action. What he does manage is clumsy and poorly arranged. He is not a profound thinker or a great strategist. He vacillates, yet in his insecurity lashes out at anyone who dares question his increasingly mysterious plans or self-proclaimed destiny. It sounds uncomfortably familiar: a harsh, angry man lamenting the decline of his way of life, not unlike many politicians jousting for the presidency. And yet, in these clumsy and often tragic moments, I find him most sympathetic and terrifying: this is a man so firmly rooted that he is unable to bend without breaking.

As may be obvious from the above, The Wake is, despite its linguistic experimentation, a rather conventional psychological novel that follows fairly well-established and standard conventions—an unreliable narrator whose consciousness foregrounds all action, revelatory flashbacks, and irony—to tell the story of a man and the end of a way of life. To characterize the book as such is not to criticize it. Kingsnorth’s decision to write a traditional novel helps ground the alienness of his language in something relatable and emotionally moving. The situation Buccmaster finds himself in is, after all, something we can identify with, even if, unlike him, we assume we would respond differently.

In Uncivilisation, their recent eco-manifesto, Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine write of the collapse of civilization. Our twenty-first-century civilization specifically, groaning in its death throes under the burden of rampant consumption. “What remains after the fall,” they write, “is a wild mixture of cultural debris, confused and angry people whose certainties have betrayed them, and those forces which were always there, deeper than the foundations of city walls: the desire to survive and the desire for meaning.” Although the authors are referring to our precarious situation, Buccmaster becomes the voice through which Kingsnorth explores what it’s like to live through the end of a world. His tenacious grip on a version of the past that is out of step with the reality of England even before the radical change brought on by the conquest is one of a desperate man. Yet he cannot see this desperation for what it is; instead he sees a world in all parts arrayed against him. Kingsnorth provides the requisite psychological padding for Buccmaster’s paranoia in a slowly unfolding and slowly mounting backstory about his father, whom he despises even in death, and his grandfather, who provided him with his grounding in what he considers his true home.

The story of Buccmaster’s family runs parallel to the main narrative arc and provides clues as to what drives a man to such lengths. It also reminds us that those who live through the destruction of a civilization, whether literal or metaphorical, whether real or imagined, are motivated by forces that long precede the end. Unlike many of the characters who populate the current crop of post-apocalyptic novels, Kingsnorth’s creation lives through the apocalypse, which I find a more compelling and messy—and more relevant to our situation. There is no new world, only an altered one, and the injustice that preoccupies Buccmaster, whether of the invaders against the English or his father’s against him, bears the weight of all that we or a generation soon to follow will bring with them through the violent alteration of civilization.

The Wake is the first of a projected trilogy spanning 3,000 years, with the subsequent volume set in our era and the last a thousand years in the future. How will Kingsnorth, a writer as adept at linguistic innovation as he is with rendering psychological ambiguity, convey language in those novels? How will it reflect the assumptions and attitudes of their respective eras? It remains to be seen, though if Buccmaster of Holland’s fate is any indication, Kingsnorth has little faith in our ability to shake free of the old ways in order to accept what looms on the horizon. To look back on our civilization, teetering on the brink of social and environmental catastrophe, from the vantage of a thousand years will, perhaps, reveal that it may not the end that defines cultures, but how we respond and adapt to it. With The Wake, Paul Kingsnorth has provided us with an alarming and hard to shake sense that unless we are able to break free of the past, we’re doomed to repeat it. - Stephen Sparks

efusing to use the past as mere picturesque setting, the best historical fiction doesn't so much give us a glimpse into that foreign country as let us look out from it. Language is the key. In my novel Ulverton, set in a village over 300 years, I used strict imitations of period language to find my way into the folds of each century, while Hodd, set in the 13th century, purported to be a translation of a Latin manuscript. For The Wake, a novel set in 11th-century Lincolnshire during and after the Norman invasion, Paul Kingsnorth has adopted another solution: he writes in what he calls "a shadow tongue", a language "intended to convey the feeling" of Old English through borrowed vocabulary and syntax – much as Russell Hoban did with modern English to conjure a devastated future in his post-apocalyptic Riddley Walker.
As The Wake's first-person narrator revisits the trauma of an invasion by "ingenga" (foreigners) that changed our islands for ever (and mostly for the worse), we leave history on the desk and wade through muddy experience by dint of our exercised imaginations. Hastings might have gone the other way, but it didn't, and for three centuries the elite talked another language. Kingsnorth is a green activist, author of an attack on corporate control and blandness called Real England, and his first novel has a fierceness about it that gives it real heft.

Apart from a subdued sense that the novel intends a modern parallel with our own dispossessed times, the narrative keeps us firmly within its very particular universe: we are linguistically belted in for the entire ride. The small effort it demands of the reader triggers a greater engagement, and the effort lessens as the pages turn. More importantly, Kingsnorth has a sensitivity that lifts what might have been a clever exercise into a literary triumph. "Loc it is well cnawan there is those wolde be tellan lies and those with only them selfs in mynd," runs an early sentence. Lies and truth, self-belief and self-delusion, these are the key themes as the narrator, "buccmaster of holland" – a proudly independent free-tenant farmer in the Lincolnshire fens, given to wife-beating and foul-mouthed fits of rage – turns to guerrilla warfare after the "frenc" occupiers destroy his farm and family.

Part of the appeal of the story lies in its revelation of a profoundly damaged man. Influenced by his grandfather and an inherited rune-scribbled sword, Buccmaster is a worshipper of the old pagan gods who talks to trees and hates the priests and their hypocrisy – a proto-Robin Hood furious at being treated like "fuccan swine in our own land".
This big-talking leader of men lacks both compassion and tolerance, however, and it proves his undoing. Like the Roman mercenaries in Alan Garner's Red Shift (another linguistically uncompromising historical novel), his resistance movement is no more than courageous bluff and a gaggle of unkempt blokes living wild, one of many scattered pockets of "green men". He has no intention of joining the other bands, however: his jealousy of Hereward the Wake's resistance movement adds an almost comic touch to his character, but also reveals his monomaniac tendencies.

Set pieces full of suspense and a vivid sense of a much emptier landscape prove that, when it comes to description, less is more. With equal economy, particularly in the clipped dialogue, Kingsnorth keeps up the pace: the killing of a shaven-headed Norman thegn – "with my scramasax i saws up until his throta is cut and blaec blud then cums roarin out lic gathran wind" – leads to dreadful reprisals for an innocent hamlet. This troubles the men but not, alarmingly, their leader, an increasingly amoral force of nature whose ancient beliefs are now yesterday's news, and whose grandfather's idea of what is "triewe" – kings "of wodens blud" buried in great ships and so forth – leaves the grandson fatally out of touch. He is less a Christ figure than a man increasingly absurd in his paranoid self-delusion, picking up hints of doubt from his fellow guerrillas yet incapable of adjusting except through violence.
Repeated treacheries, however, suggest his caustic view of people is not so awry. The word "smercan" – "smiling" but also "smirking" – tolls eerily throughout, as does "cwelled" ("killed") and "fuccan", the latter making him sound like a beer-swilling yob, yelling at the world as it talks nothing but the proverbial "scit". His vision of a great black bird with human fingers and his hearing of voices make him either mad or a prophet, and this ambiguity troubles the tale's often lyrical surface until the surprising close. Like a redneck recluse stocking up his arsenal against apocalypse, Buccmaster is both utterly believable and quietly tragic – a man of limited intelligence faced with a monstrous change against which sheer bravado, driven by the earth gods though it is, can only shatter. - Adam Thorpe

Paul Kingsnorth's new novel, The Wake — a grim tale of medieval conquest and revenge — became a hit against all odds in the U.K. last year, and it's about to be released in the U.S.
I met Kingsnorth at his home in the countryside of far western Ireland. He and his wife grow their own food and home-school their two young kids. "I think we'll get bees and chickens, we hope, maybe something else," he told me, calling out to his daughter. "Lela, you want an alpaca, don't you? Lela wants an alpaca or a donkey or anything fluffy, really."
Kingsnorth's novel is definitely not soft and fluffy. The Wake is set during the Norman conquest, when armies from France swept across England, crushing Anglo-Saxon civilization. It's sort of a post-apocalyptic tale, set in the 11th century. And it's also written in a slightly made-up language (more about that in a bit).
Before the book came out in Britain last year, Kingsnorth assumed it would be a flop.
"I suppose I was probably halfway through it when I thought: There's no way anybody's going to publish this," he said. "I'm writing a book about a period in history no one knows about, in a language no one can understand, with a central character who's horrible. There's absolutely no way anyone's going to touch this with a bargepole, but I don't care!"
Kingsnorth used a crowdfunding platform called Unbound to fund the book because he couldn't get any mainstream publishers to bite. Then something strange happened: "The first inkling I got that it might be successful was when the first review came out, which was in The Guardian, which said it was a literary triumph. Which, I thought, 'Blimey, no one's ever said that about my writing before!' "
Then one day he was working in the garden when he got a phone call with some news: "It's just been long-listed for the Booker Prize. And I thought, bloody hell, what? This is ridiculous!"
To top it all off, the great Shakespearean actor Mark Rylance bought the film rights. Rylance was recorded for The Telegraph newspaper reading passages from the book, like this one:
"when i woc in the mergen all was blaec though the night had gan and all wolde be blaec after and for all time. a great wind had cum in the night and all was blown then and broc. none had thought a wind lic this colde cum for all was blithe lifan as they always had and who will hiere the gleoman when the tales he tells is blaec who locs at the heofon if it brings him regn who locs in the mere when there seems no end to its deopness."
If that doesn't sound like modern English, well, it's not. The Wake is not written in modern English. At first, Kingsnorth tried writing the book in the language you and I speak today.
"I didn't get too far, and I just thought this isn't working," he said. "It seemed strange. It made me realize why some historical novels I've read didn't work for me. I thought, I just can't have this guy doing 300 pages of contemporary English idiom, and what's the alternative to that?"
So he began by sprinkling a few Old English words into the text. Then, he went all the way until it was nearly incomprehensible. Finally, he pulled back on the throttle to create what he calls a "shadow tongue," a mashup of old and new.
The main character is a rebel — an insurgent who tries to fight back against the invading French. As a reader, I found that the language starts as an obstacle but quickly pulls you deep into the world of the novel. Kingsnorth said this is because the words we use to describe our world shape our perception of it.
"So, there might be 10 different names in 10 different languages for that willow tree over there. And they may give the people who use those names a subtly different way of understanding the tree, a subtly different relationship to it," he said.

I asked Kingsnorth whether he began to see the land around him differently because of the language he was using to describe it.
"Yes, I think I probably did," he told me. "I think what you find when you start to look at Old English and you start to look at the kind of Anglo-Saxon relationship with the land is that it's a starker thing. Because it's possible to just pass over landscapes in the world today, you don't have to really have any relationship with the land at all; you can drive through them. And if you're living the kind of life that these people lived in the Fens 1,000 years ago, you have to have a relationship with every single thing that's there."

The Anglo-Saxon relationship to the swampy land known as the Fens is similar to Kingsnorth's relationship with his land in western Ireland. The house is disconnected from the water grid; he and his wife plan to put up solar panels and wind turbines to get off the electrical grid, too.

There are clear parallels between Kingsnorth's writing and his lifestyle: the closeness to the land; the sense that civilization as we know it may not last; the longing for a simpler time, a longing that permeates The Wake, even though it's set 1,000 years in the past.
"This is one of the other things I was exploring in the book, actually, is the idea of nostalgia, that there's always a time before your time when things were better," Kingsnorth said. "Because I can be prone to that myself, so I wanted to explore what that was like. And I don't doubt that 1,000 years ago there were men in England saying, oh, it was better when our fathers came, it was better when their fathers came. Of course there would've been. And maybe it would've been. But there's always a temptation to see this time before a fall when everything came apart."

Those echoes between the 11th century and the present day resonated with English readers; the U.K. booksellers' industry crowned The Wake "Book of the Year." The novel will be released in the U.S. next week. - Ari Shapiro

• Kidland
• Uncivilisation
• Real England
• One No, Many Yeses

Paolo Volponi - an almost impressionistic recovery of magma in which a man incapable of relations with the world moves, and here emerges the extraordinary quality of Volponi as a writer

Paolo Volponi, Corporale, Einaudi, 2014.

I bought Paolo Volponi’s novel in Rome as a souvenir during my brief stay in that incredibly beautiful city this July. I gave it preference over the selfie sticks, cheap Colosseum replicas, and t-shirts with provocative slogans. Corporal has a reputation of a difficult book, and when it is mentioned in different overviews of modern Italian literature the word “experimental” is invariably attached to it. Alberto Moravia held this work in high regard, writing that “Corporal is an almost impressionistic recovery of magma in which a man incapable of relations with the world moves, and here emerges the extraordinary quality of Volponi as a writer”. These words have become the staple blurb for the novel which is rarely read, has not been widely translated (there is only French translation to the best of my knowledge), and has a nasty habit of regularly going out of print. Now that I’ve read it, I can confidently say that we’re dealing with a literary treasure that is due to various reasons is not treasured at all these days. Corporal is a stylistic gem, a profound exploration of an anxiety-ridden consciousness in the atomic age as well as a skilfully designed and orchestrated narrative that rewards a patient and attentive reader.
The general mood is set from the outset by the epigraph, which is taken from Elsa Morante’s essay Pro o contro la bomba atomica (For or Against the Atomic Bomb):
Our bomb is the flower, or rather the natural expression of our contemporary society, just like Plato’s dialogues are of the Greek city; the Colosseum – of the Imperial Romans; Raphael’s Madonnas – of Italian Humanism; gondolas – of Venetian nobility; tarantella – of some southern rural populaces;  and the extermination camps – of petit-bourgeois bureaucratic culture already infected with a rage of atomic suicide.
That is a very powerful passage, but, if the reader expects Volponi’s novel to be just one of the numerous post-Cuban-Missile-Crisis nuclear-holocaust ephemera, they couldn’t be wider off the mark. Although the topic of nuclear destruction is prominent in this book, it is just one of the several motifs which are explored in painstaking detail via the disturbed and distorted consciousness of the main character Gerolamo Aspri.
Aspri’s stream of consciousness to which we are exposed from the very first page is bound to disorient and exasperate even the most seasoned readers of experimental fiction. My personal impression when reading the book  was akin to watching a David Lynch movie: extremely preposterous actions were carried out and utterly absurd and illogical statements were made with such an air as if all the violations of common sense were the most mundane occurrences not worth any second thought. The main character of Corporal most probably suffers from a mental disorder.  His narration is erratic, jumpy and volatile. He tends to fuse reality and hallucinations to such a degree that it is almost impossible to tell which is which. He splits the language the way scientists split the atom to create the nuclear weapons he is so paranoid about. On many occasions  his rants and diatribes transform into something reminiscent of automatic writing or William Burroughs’ cut-ups: incompatible concepts are put together, familiar phrases are divested of their usual meanings, syntactic relations are disrupted, all this to create an alienating effect. That being said, it is not that difficult to follow the general plot of the novel, and although some of the reasons for the characters’ actions remain vague, we are never completely in the dark as to what happens.
The first part of the novel is narrated in the first person by Gerolamo Aspri. When we first meet him, he is on vacation in Rimini with his wife and two kids. As we learn later, he is currently employed as a school teacher with an Italian Communist Party membership and a managerial post at a factory left forever behind. He takes long walks along the beach, inspecting the place where a murder has been recently committed. He is morbidly obsessed with the unknown perpetrator. This fascination is as strong as his another obsession: an erotic longing for a teenage girl called Ivana whom he meets on the same beach. Eros and Thanatos are Aspri’s faithful companions wherever he goes, and their most sublime embodiment seems to be the hydrogen bomb whose explosion he expects with a mixture of horror and excitement.
Aspri’s infatuation with Ivana is never destined consummate because of a devastating tornado that strikes the beach. She and her boyfriend are riding in a paddle boat when this happens. The drowned boy’s body is recovered later, whereas Ivana is never found. Distraught and heartbroken, Aspri moves on. He will be meeting more people, and doing things one hardly expects from a school teacher. An overheard conversation about a lawyer and art seller from Urbino who is rumoured to have killed his son refuels Aspri’s obsession with the mysterious murderer: he superimposes his image with that of the man mentioned  by the speakers. Equipped with the knowledge that the possible perpetrator’s last name ends with “ati”, Gerolamo travels to Urbino where he soon enough finds a certain attorney called Trasmanati. The attorney’s collection of paintings is likely to interest Aspri’s German friend with whom he maintains a long-lasting correspondence. Without hesitation, he telegraphs Overath to come to Urbino. This Overath is a very strange and elusive person. I’m tempted to view him as some kind of Mephistophelian presence in Aspri’s life. Art collection is just one of many activities pursued by Overath, and only few of those seem to be legal. Their visit to Trasmanati’s house ends up in a scuffle as Aspri suddenly attacks Overath, intending to bludgeon him to death with the host’s cane. The teacher goes haywire when the German, overwhelmed by the dark beauty of Trasmanati’s Renaissance paintings, utters a pompous disquisition on the immortality of the soul. Nobody is seriously injured and the friends part their ways, but only for a while, as they are to be reunited again under very specific circumstances.
The second part is narrated in the third person, which does not prevent it from being as confusing as the first one. We come to know the Mr. Hyde side of Aspri’s personality as we encounter him in Milan actively involved in drug trafficking and prostitution under the alias Joaquin Murieta, which is the name of the notorious 19th century Mexican outlaw. Aspri’s alter ego keeps a diary and some of its entries  appear in the narrative. Murieta keeps a colourful company consisting of smugglers, pimps, drug dealers, whores and hustlers of any stripe. There is also an Ivana, but this time she’s anything but the nymphet from Rimini: she is a prostitute married to her own john who is simply referred to as Ivana’s husband. There is a competition between Murieta and the omnipresent Overath for Ivana’s attention, and her husband doesn’t seem to mind. When we come to think of it, why should he, with as many as forty street walkers under his control? Besides the forty prostitutes, we are also introduced to the same number of greyhounds whose names are abstract nouns like Equality, Liberty, Fraternity, Mendacity, Death, Wickedness: Murieta and his associates decide to expand their business by opening a dog race track. The accounts of these nefarious characters’ wheeling and dealing  often include lengthy political and philosophical discussions which are tinged with the sense of the grotesque, not the least due to the way the main character perceives and interprets reality.
For some time, the shadowy existence as Joaquin Murieta is everything Aspri the teacher, constrained by societal norms, could wish for. However, the protagonist’s stint in the criminal underworld, despite all the adventures, dangers and passions, can neither stop his growing alienation from the surrounding world  nor curb his terror of nuclear war. Eventually, he casts the adopted gangster persona aside to become a mere teacher again. The catalyst for Aspri’s decision to leave Milan is his son’s tragic death in a boating accident.
The third part, again narrated in the first person, is set in the magnificent city of Urbino. Aspri has moved there to work at a local school. His main mission, however, is scouting the nearby foothills of the Apennines in search of the most appropriate place for an atomic shelter. Aspri also enters in a relationship with Trasmanati’s housekeeper Imelde who, after the lawyer commits suicide, is left in charge of his home and the numerous art pieces pending the auction. But when Gerolamo finally rents an estate that satisfies his goals both geographically and meteorologically (he is very meticulous about the direction of the winds that are likely to carry radioactive fallout), he does not even conceive the possibility of sharing his ark with anyone else. In fact, fully aware of the Biblical undertones of his project, Aspri calls the shelter Arcatana (literally arklair or arkburrow). Exhibiting enviable capacity for work,  he manages to construct the facility single-handedly in less than two years.  Aspri is portrayed as a kind of Anti-Noah whose primary goal is not to preserve the seed of humanity for the future regeneration, but rather to create conditions for his complete detachment from mankind and its history, reaching the state of ultimate solipsism that he is going to maintain until and beyond the atomic annihilation of life on the planet.  Rather than pondering on conservation of the human race, Aspri fantasises about a new species that will evolve out of his mutating organism:
[…] man-animal-emerald prepared to get resurrected (this word is so ugly, religious, and so papally filled with lead that it won’t bring back to the surface even a cork, not even a turd) to re-emerge different, encrusted, made thinner, split in half, discoloured, one-eyed, rendered bat-like by darkness, lizard-like by earth, eel-like by mud, monoped, coelenterate, with or without fur, mute, feathered, carnivorous, omnivorous, virus, bacterium, blue alga, moss, sponge, fungus, mould, jellyfish, disflagellated (here we go again, religious thoughts), flagellated (but has nothing to do with some column of Hellenistic imitation, and Palestinian portico, centurion’s red tunic), multi-cellular, capable or incapable of photosynthesis, provided that it is alive, alive, alive, and therefore able in its own way to think, to grow, to reproduce, and different, different, different from the present fearful creature, naked and covered in sticking plaster (not me, dear Imelde of the blue little nose, not me) sedentary and stercoraceous, with the brain, the nose, the prick chasing after services to give and to receive.
While Aspri is building the fallout shelter, he begins studying his new scripture,  a sacred text that will prepare him for the world to come: an issue of a medical journal dedicated to the survival during and after nuclear war.
The fourth and final part is very short. Just like the second, it is narrated in the third person. The main setting is the hospital where Aspri is admitted after sustaining a pelvis injury at the farm. Confined to his ward, he nevertheless tries to manage various issues related to the up-keeping of the rented property by employing a waiter from the billiards bar he used to frequent. The waiter is happy to run errands for him, but gradually it becomes apparent that he is hiding something from his employer, as well as that Overath, unbeknownst to Aspri, might be interfering with his grand project of resurrection from the nuclear ashes. But there is no way to be sure if any of Gerolamo’s suspicions are true, as his dreams, hallucinations and reveries keep re-inventing the drab reality he is incapable of escaping.  Straddling a rocking horse on his bed, brought to him so he could look through the window, he cuts a solitary and grotesque figure. The waiter reports to him that some unknown vandals have started raiding the estate, and the dismantling of the fallout shelter is just a matter of time. Where will Aspri go when he is dismissed from hospital? What will he do? How much of what has been seen or told by him is true? I am afraid that the burden of answering these questions has been laid on the readers, provided that they have managed to reach the novel’s end.
Corporal was written between 1966 and 1974, the period which corresponds to the heyday of Italian auteur cinema. Fellini’s 8 1/2, Pasolini’s Il teorema, and Antonioni’s L’avventura were made during that time. There is a certain affinity between Volponi’s novel and those groundbreaking films. Corporal manages to encompass the existential void of Antonioni, the eroticism of Pasolini, and the carnivalesque dreamscapes of Fellini. It is in many ways a product of its time with its hysteria around the atomic bomb and the preoccupation with leftist politics. But, just like those great cinematic works, Volponi’s novel succeeds in transcending its topicality, which is now a mere curiosity, a bizarre insect in the amber of the Cold War era. After all, the main concern of this astonishing monument to the Italian language is neither nuclear war nor the split personality, although these topics are most likely to attract the attention of the reader. In this unusual, uncomfortable, often frustrating novel Paolo Volponi, like nobody else, makes us aware of the two grand complexities that we cannot avoid, no matter how we try, no matter what kind of shelter we try to build around us: those of the world we are born into and of the language we use to make sense of it. That sounds hopelessly trite, I know. But it takes a genius to express this idea in such a grandiose, multi-layered verbal symphony that is Corporal – yet another great unknown patiently waiting for us to catch up with it.
- theuntranslated.wordpress.com/2015/10/06/corporal-corporale-by-paolo-volponi/

A Thousand Forests in One Acorn: An Anthology of Spanish-Language Fiction - brings together twenty-eight of the most important Spanish-language writers of the twentieth century

A Thousand Forests in One Acorn: An Anthology of Spanish-Language Fiction, Valerie Miles, ed., Open Letters, 2015.




Included in this volume are pieces by Horacio Castellanos Moya, Rafael Chirbes, José de la Colina, Edgardo Cozarinsky, Cristina Fernández Cubas, Alfredo Bryce Echenique, Jorge Edwards, Abilio Estévez, Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio, Carlos Fuentes, Elvio Gandolfo, Juan Goytisolo, Javier Marías, Juan Marsé, Ana María Matute, Eduardo Mendoza, José María Merino, Antonio Muñoz Molina, Ricardo Piglia, Ramiro Pinilla, Sergio Pitol, Evelio Rosero, Alberto Ruy Sánchez, Esther Tusquets, Hebe Uhart, Mario Vargas Llosa, Aurora Venturini, and Enrique Vila-Matas.




A Thousand Forests in One Acorn: An Anthology of Spanish-Language Fiction brings together twenty-eight of the most important Spanish-language writers of the twentieth century—several of which will be familiar to English-language readers, like Carlos Fuentes, Javier Marías, and Mario Vargas Llosa, and many who will be new revelations, such as Aurora Venturini, Sergio Pitol, and Elvio Gandolfo—and provides them with a chance to discuss their careers and explain the aesthetic influences behind the pieces they chose to include in this volume. Unlike other anthologies, the stories and excerpts collected here were selected by the authors themselves and represent the “high point” of their writing career.
Valerie Miles—translator, editor, and co-founder of Granta en español—not only curated perhaps the greatest cross-section of contemporary Spanish-language literature to be anthologized, but also brings to this collection original interviews with every author, along with biographic prefaces before each, in order to best introduce the reader to the author’s entire oeuvre and his or her literary impact.
Breathtaking in scope and historical detail, this anthology will no doubt become a fixture in personal literary collections, as well as a go-to resource for classrooms and libraries alike.


From the Prologue:
 
One breezy August afternoon in the village of Cashiers, North Carolina, I accompanied my mother to the local library. Despite a population of some 200 souls, the library is impressive and well-sponsored by the families who spend their summers in the mountains. They had received donations of estate books as part of the civic tradition of raising funds for community projects and we went to browse through what was available. A book edited by Whit Burnett—idea by John Pen—caught my eye, titled This is My Best. Over 150 self-chosen and complete masterpieces, and the reasons for their selection. As I flipped through the pages, I began to realize what an extraordinary piece of literary history it was. Published by Dial Press in 1942, the editor had asked the influential writers of the time to “edit their entire lifetime output to select the one unit which in their own, uninfluenced opinion represents their best creative moment. A book composed over many years, the focusing of many lifetime viewpoints, a public revelation of the private opinions of our best authors on how they look upon themselves, and what, in their writings, they most value.” 
[. . .]
Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his essay on History that there is one mind common to all individual men and therefore the whole of history exists in one man, all of history lies folded into a single individual experience. “The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.” He also wrote that “The fact narrated must correspond to something in me to be credible or intelligible. As we read, we must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner, must fasten these images to some reality in our secret experience.” A little bit like taking a walk through Baudelaire’s forest of symbols that nod to all men in understanding. 
As an American who has spent half a life in Spain working in publishing, I had long specialized in providing authors in translation for a Spanish language audience. So I found the idea of putting together a Spanish language version of this anthology a fascinating proposal for a literary adventure through some of the most celebrated writing in the language during the second half of the 20th century. To root out the acorn, the kernel, the driving obsession of a writer, of knowing what he or she, in the quiet of their study, considers the best representation of that obsession. To listen to the individual voices and fasten the images to some reality in my secret experience, walk among the nodding symbols; to be a lonely child growing up in Peru, a young man in Madrid whose lover dies in bed before they can consummate the act, a painter in Tahiti who finds inspiration on a stormy night or a mother who chooses power over love for her son’s future in a world of magical creatures. Perhaps, by living out these secret experiences, I might discover some occult map of the forest by its trees.
A Thousand Forests in One Acorn is much less ambitious in size and scope than Whit Burnett’s original. I suppose it is fitting for the new century and much could be and is being written on the current state of attention spans. Here there are 28 writers and they are all narrators of fiction. It’s worth noting that should in no way be considered a canon, not even a personal one, but simply a selection of some of the important writers of the 20th century who have been awarded prizes and widely acclaimed and celebrated in their countries. Space would never allow me to include all the writers whose work I admire and there are writers who would be considered more or less canonical who are not here, many of whom were invited but who were not able to participate—Gabriel García Márquez, Fernando del Paso, Fernando Vallejo, César Aira, José Emilio Pacheco and William Opsina, among others. Sadly, others were invited whom we have lost before the process could begin, namely Guillermo Cabrera Infante and Daniel Sada. The late Carlos Fuentes was one of the last writers with whom I had the opportunity to work, his words having now passed into literary history. 
[. . .]
Organized chronologically by age beginning with the Argentine writer Aurora Ventur-ini, who received a prize from Borges as a girl and from young readers just recently, the anthology gathers the work of some of the best writers in the Spanish language of the second half of the 20th century. The youngest writer included, Evelio Rosero, was born in 1953. The premise is that the younger the writer, the more difficult it is to think that they have already written their best pages. If the anthology is to comply with a function of being an historical document, at least the bulk of the writers should be able to choose something that might be considered the best writing of their entire career.




I don’t review a lot of anthologies on this site, but when one like A Thousand Forests in One Acorn (2014; excerpts translated from the Spanish by many (see below)) comes around, I really cannot wait to introduce others to it. Subtitled An Anthology of Spanish-Language Fiction, this 715-page book is the product of four years of work, particularly on the part of its editor, Valerie Miles. Time well spent, I say.
In her prologue, Miles tells of going to a local library with her mother some years ago. There she found “an extraordinary piece of literary history”: Whit Burnett’s 1942 anthology This Is My Best: Over 150 Self-Chosen and Complete Masterpieces, Together with Their Reasons for Their Selection, featuring work by William Faulkner, Pearl Buck, Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, Willa Cather, Theodore Dreiser, Wallace Stevens, Langston Hughes, among many others. In this book, these writers selected their favorite pieces of their own writing and explained why they felt that way. Miles carried this valuable resource and piece of history around for years, many of which have been spent in Spain experiencing and promoting Spanish-language fiction. One day, she decided to take the premise of This Is My Best and apply it to her beloved corner of the literary world.
Not quite as ambitious as the English-language predecessor, A Thousand Forests in One Acorn highlights 28 authors (and Miles notes that readers should not consider this a canon, “not even a personal one,” as several authors, for several reasons, were unable to participate). I’m thrilled with what we do have here, especially since many of the authors are relatively unknown in the English-speaking world — some have not even been translated before! There are a lot of new perspectives to explore here.
The book is set up in this way.
First, Miles has written a biographical preface to each authors section (beginning with the oldest author in the group and going to the youngest — I’ll list them all below).
Second, each author answers questions based on three different themes: “The Torture of Doctor Johnson,” in which the author is asked what his or her selected piece is and why they chose it; “In Conversation with the Dead,” in which the author discusses influences and traditions and friends that have affected their work; then “Coda” digs into some of the authors’ peculiarities, which are not always limited to their literary work but can, for example, move to their political careers, as with Mario Vargas Llosa.
Third, we get the selection, often an excerpt (or two — or four) from one of the author’s novels. While excerpts often annoy me, here they served their purpose, allowing the author to examine what they consider to be the best few pages of their work.
Lastly, each section ends with a list of the author’s work in Spanish, a list of their English translations (as I mentioned above, often few, as in the case of Alfredo Bryce Echenique, who has been publishing regularly since 1968 and yet has only two English translations to his name, and sometimes nonexistent, as is the case with Cristina Fernández Cubas, who has been publishing regularly since 1980), and a list of awards and recognitions.
It’s a great book, one I’ve been carrying around for a few months, now, and that I’ve loved diving into. - Trevor Berrett


Miles compiles an impressive anthology of Spanish-language authors' self-submissions. The result, titled after an Emerson quote, is less of a definitive canon than an attempt to "root out the acorn, […] the driving obsession of a writer." Nevertheless, the 28 participating fiction writers represent some of the best of their respective literatures: including Carlos Fuentes (Mexican), Aurora Venturini (Argentinian), Mario Vargas Llosa (Peruvian), and Ramiro Pinilla (Spanish), among many others. Each section consists of a short biography (conveniently marked off by inked page edges), an interview, a selection of the author's choosing, and finally a bibliography of works and awards. Almost all of the selections are literary works of rare, remarkable quality, but the real pleasure is reading them in the context of the interviews. Here, authors explain their submission choice (Alberto Ruy Sánchez calls it "the pain of choosing"); they recount influences (Faulkner makes frequent appearances, as do family members—says Fuentes, "[W]rite […] for your grandmothers wherever they are"); and they discuss everything from writing techniques to fiction's "obligation" to politics. Ordered chronologically by authors' dates of birth, the collection begins with the rich works of the most mature authors, and ends slightly less impressively with younger authors who, though worthwhile, may have yet to write their best pages. With its myriad themes, including class conflict (Esther Tusquets), disillusionment with utopian ideals (Juan Marsé), and instability of identity (Antonio Muñoz Molina), the collection amply rewards both the casual reader and the scholar seeking insight into authors' thought processes. - Publishers Weekly

Alex Chaves - Abigail Adams is reluctant, rebellious, bored and better looking; a poetic voice for the queerly acute in a post-everything world. At times, Abigail Adams resembles a shrine to a muse or a raison d’etre; at others, a hard-edged declaration of independence – an act of grave resistance against political fatigue and complacency.

Alex Chaves, Abigail Adams,  Penny-Ante Editions, 2015.




We’ll call it poetry. “I’m not fucking anne carson,” Abigail Adams retorts.
Abigail Adams is reluctant, rebellious, bored and better looking; a poetic voice for the queerly acute in a post-everything world. At times, Abigail Adams resembles a shrine to a muse or a raison d’etre; at others, a hard-edged declaration of independence – an act of grave resistance against political fatigue and complacency. Led by a judicious eye for diversion, poems like “Fashion” dress-up ennui in pop fabrics and read like an afternoon spent vaping with the Brontë sisters. More searching and sinister are lush passages like “Nut Cracker”, or “Baby Father”, which offer longing in the image of God or a revolver.
Raw and personal, Chaves proves another medium evocative, and much like his paintings, yields yet another colorful work of distinct genius.




Dear Alex,

I don’t want to give away too much, since this private letter might be a public announcement, but do you remember what you said on the beach in Coney Island, eating hot dogs with those brats? It was something like, “But I have to prove to myself that I’m an artist.”
Some people wear their hearts on their sleeves; others paint their hearts on their canvases. You put paint on the canvas with rigor, affection, and confidence. I also see generosity, and a touch of anger. But your heart? I wonder if it’s in New Jersey, or inside your tummy, or scattered around in sacred, banal places, buried like treasure.
I’m not exactly sure who makes your paintings, when the door to your hovel closes. It would be easy to say that it’s the girl inside you, but you paint those beautiful, splayed men like only a lonely boy could. All those colors—they’re so delightful. Sometimes I feel like you’re pretending to be normal. Like you’re setting the table for a dinner party you’re not sure you want to host, but feel obligated to. Maybe you really are a woman (divorced, with kids) who only feels like herself when she paints flowers under the sun.




Having an identity can start to feel like a litany—this, that, and the other thing. Not to mention, other people decide who we are for us. Power traces our bodies’ contours with its all-seeing eyes. Even rebelling is claustrophobic. So I get why you paint: it’s an altogether different language, with its own signifiers (color, mark, stroke, wash). It’s another dimension. It’s expansive and safe.
But some of the people you’re painting: am I supposed to believe that they are young, white, gay, and whole? And the men—have you ever met one who is “virtuous, simple, clean, light, and kind,” as you say in Abigail Adams? You’re either dreaming of that virtuosity, or that dream has disappointed you.
So what the hell are you dreaming about? The cure for AIDS? A merger between the Green Party and the Red Cross? A time before AIDS? Before the bees overdosed on maraschino run-off and died? Before marriage and your cousin’s expectation that you would find love? It seems like you want to let your audience be happy. But even in 1969 we would have been unhappy. It still would not have been our fault.
I mean, come on, Alex. Look at the world. It’s so twisted. Last night on the subway I saw a person with no hair whatsoever riding back and forth on a pink tricycle, wearing a tutu that looked like it was made out of your leftover canvases. Like, it literally looked as if they’d ripped up Mon Cheri and made it into a leotard with pleats. The person was holding a sign that said, “I’m deaf: please donate,” and howling at a pink teddy bear they were cradling like a dead baby.
I wish that when your audience saw purple they had to think about that unbelievably anorexic old woman walking down sunset boulevard (wearing a purple sequin gown and pushing a shopping cart), or that vain trans icon in West Hollywood who won’t take visitors but accepts purple gifts left on her doorstep. I wish your audience knew that all the flowers in your house growing up were plastic. I wish all this not because I want them to be sad, but because I want them to know that joy is not separate from the weight of this world. You know that.
I love your paintings, but I don’t always believe you. Alex, I like your paintings because I don’t always believe you.
Love, Grace

Jeff Wood - A spellbinding work in the spirit of Tarkovsky or Jodorowsky that reimagines the American frontier at the turn of the millennium, a time when suburban development was metastasizing and the Social was about to implode

Jeff Wood, The Glacier, Two Dollar Radio, 2015. 
excerpt


A spellbinding work in the spirit of Tarkovsky or Jodorowsky that reimagines the American frontier at the turn of the millennium, a time when suburban development was metastasizing and the Social was about to implode. Following a caterer at a convention center, a surveyor residing in a storage unit, and the masses lining up for an Event on the horizon, The Glacier is a poetic rendering of the pre-apocalypse and a requiem for the passing of one world into another.


"Call Jeff Wood's The Glacier what you will—a novel-in-screenplay-form; a prose poem on the themes of death, suburbia, and the cruel symmetries of cosmic time; a surreal prophecy from America's anguished heartland—it will remain what it was always aiming to be, and that's one of the most indelible and visionary movies you've ever seen."—Jon Raymond


The blend between novels and other mediums is not new. Prose poems, poetic novels, fictional histories … there is constant flux to reach the boundaries of the novel, to escape and run rampant in the minds of their readers. Jeff Wood’s The Glacier continues, and in many ways builds off, that tradition by recreating the sense of time and place, of playing the illusion the best authors tend to do. One could flip through the pages and see a script for a movie, and one would be mistaken to do so; this is more. There is a sense of authority here that readers rarely see. In a story set on the outskirts of expansion, the continuing tidal wave of boredom Americana rips through the serene countryside. Characters survive the pre-apocalypse the way we expect characters to survive a nuclear war. Places come and go, relics of the past, and wrecks of the future. The Glacier is altogether new and incredibly familiar at the same time. It’s the story of what was and what can be, simultaneously.
This script format that Wood uses may be initially disruptive but incredibly necessary. We are painted scenes, characters, moments. Our feelings for them are neutral. We are not being swayed intentionally like a street side card dealer; we are shown the ways things are from a more powerful and narratively pleasing point of view. In this way, Wood really presses the boundaries of narrator and author relationship. The novel begins with the surveying of a new development, planning the dreams and futures of hypothetical families. Three characters, Jonah, Sue, and Gunner, are doing their part in creating a new world, one with “condominiums, duplexes, and house after house, lined up like tombstones across the countryside.” There is the mysterious and alluring Mr. Stevens, who is a joker among wild cards, someone who’s pulling the strings of everyone around him, and those around him almost completely unaware. There is Simone and Robert and Samson, survivors of the daily life that many can sympathize with. But this book is about Jonah, about his dreams, about what he thinks is a prophecy. This novel is about Mr. Stevens, about the Event Horizon, about the future. At the same time, it’s about the symptoms one develops as they continue forward their vision of what they think the American Dream should be: “Chronic boredom. A pervading sense of uselessness. Loneliness, isolation, malaise. Textbook depression. Anxiety. General physical nervousness. Circadian inversion characterized diametrically by compulsive napping and insomnia. Regret. Remorse… Repressed anger resulting in self-deprecation, passive aggression.” A significant piece of this novel is about dealing with the lull between large events, whether we think them as such or not.
Wood excels in creating space, in creating tension among the ordinary. This is a novel that doesn’t shy away from form. It may turn off readers simply because of that; however, it would be foolish to do so. Early on, Jonah has a vision, or at least we initially think it is a vision of the beginning of the end: “The windshields of cars shatter like fine crystal as the shock wave rolls down the highway, an aria of glass exploding across the legion of commuter cars. / On the side of the road, Jonah watches the sonic wave rolling toward him. / And he is consumed.” Suddenly, he asks for it to stop, and “the Apocalypse pauses.” Jonah is a narrative mutation, the cause for action in ways many protagonists attempt to be, in a new and imaginative way. Mr. Stevens is an antithesis of this effort. He is mysterious in action and in intention, unlike the fairly forward Jonah. Whereas Jonah is exploring the world and his own character, Mr. Stevens has a set idea about it all. He has an answer for everything:
It just doesn’t matter. You see— Everything you’re feeling is an illusion. It’s just patterns, patterns and chemicals, coming and going. It feels like feelings, but it’s not. If we stay focused on the tasks at hand it all works itself out. We’re so much better off when we realize that there just isn’t anywhere else to go. This is it! Why cause ourselves more headache and heartache. And, from experience I can tell you, once you leave the ship you are really out there in deep space, all alone.
There is a sense of trickery about him, the way he molds thoughts and sentences, the way he can spin those around him. And the reader quickly understand the relationship between hope and despair, something that we can all empathize on very raw and powerful levels. They are characters, avatars of the future and of the past, a common undercurrent for the entire novel. Wood manages to hit this point in many ways, from character interactions to scene setting. But Mr. Stevens and Jonah are exactly what we need, they are the two trains driving at seventy mils an hour towards each other and the reader sits patiently waiting for the eventual impact.
The Glacier is the novel that asks the good questions. It seduces you slowly, the reader hypnotized from the first page, from the first rumblings of the great “could be.” Jonah and Mr. Stevens spar with the world in the balance. Late in the going, our mysterious joker and power player gives advice to one of those beneath him: “But it’s such good fiction, isn’t it? Otherwise what else is there? The good news is that if God is finally just a figment of the imagination, then anyone is free to play him.” Reality is what we make it, the good and the bad. The eventual and otherwise. We have the power ourselves to survive the beginning and the end, we have the power to better ourselves. The Glacier stays the course, it makes the reader work for its enjoyment. Like Jonah, the reader must learn and adapt. And it’s all worthwhile. - Heavy Feather


The early pages of Jeff Wood’s cinematic novel The Glacier depict a landscape rearranged through a series of instantaneous and radical changes. Jonah, the character who comes closest to serving as a protagonist, works hundreds of yards away from his fellow surveyors, plotting more houses for a cookie-cutter suburban neighborhood that already spreads as far as the eye can see. The narrative lens then pans across multiple characters for brief 1-2 sentence snapshots that resemble a series of jump-cuts in a film, building suspense while disorienting the reader until, in a “ferocious and beautiful…spectacle,” everything disintegrates, evaporates: the world is abruptly destroyed. The viewpoint comes back to Jonah just before he is consumed by the wall of atomic fire. He calmly watches the destruction spread until it reaches him. He simply utters the word “Wait,” and “The Apocalypse pauses.” For the duration of an entire paragraph, the reader is trapped with Jonah “radiating between two worlds,” a pause just long enough to ponder the beauty of the moment, before he becomes a charred skeleton like the rest. But then something peculiar happens. The mushroom cloud implodes, the fiery wave flows backwards, bodies and atoms reassemble. The world reconstructs itself, leaving its inhabitants dazed by the lost moment, by “what may or may not have just happened”—the Event has occurred.
What it means to “occur” in this book is hard to pin down, however. Rather than proceeding along a linear chronology, The Glacier takes the reader on a journey through and around time. (“It is coming,” the Radiation Man tells Jonah, “But it has also already happened. And it is happening all the time now.”) In this non-post-apocalyptic world, time works differently (or not at all), and the world feels like a different color on the page. What happens to space, too, is both warped and consequential. Before the Event, a small child runs out of his house to play in green field only to find his way blocked by “the monolithic wall of vinyl siding” from a subdivision that has seemingly appeared out of nowhere, the same subdivision Jonah stands in during the Event. This housing project, the rows and rows of houses, “the gray, suburban expanse…sprawl[s] endlessly toward the horizon of gauze and ozone,” ultimately filling a vacancy that the Event exposes in a flash like a camera in a dark room. With such patterning—expansion, destruction, expansion—Wood utilizes a fantastical depiction of the unceasing encroachment of suburbanization to explore what it means to be human in a world that has lost sight of itself as a result of constant development.
One method Wood uses to emphasize this lost sense of self is the very structure of the novel. The Glacier is written in the format of a screenplay—what its publisher, Two Dollar Radio, calls “a cinematic novel.” The form allows Wood to blend the seamless and fluid movement of film with the creative flexibility and intimacy of prose. With its blocks of dialogue surrounded by swaths of blank space, the format can invoke disorientation. For setting, readers are given stage directions, and beyond the dialogue the only gateways inside the characters are brief facial expressions or a few parenthetical descriptions (“whispering frantically”). But despite having the look, feel, and pace of a script, The Glacier reads very much like a novel, even as it leverages the screenplay format to allow for abrupt jump cuts and shifting angles, producing a 360-degree view of a world that might otherwise appear flat on the pages of a traditional work of prose fiction.
If, in the normal process of reading a novel, the reader is a co-creator of the story (by merging the author’s vision with his own), the cinematic novel only accentuates this process. It assumes an even greater level of co-creation, or co-imagination, on the part of the reader, just as a script assumes a greater level of co-creation on the part of the director and crew. In short, the reader has to (or depending on your outlook, gets to) do a little more work to fill in the spaces Wood leaves blank. Much like a blueprint gives only a certain understanding of what a building really looks like, Wood’s cinematic novel provides all the necessary pieces but leaves the assembly up to the reader.
In addition to this phenomenon of readerly co-construction, The Glacier highlights a seemingly opposite theme of self-destruction. Near the end of the novel, Jonah describes the “something” that has happened/is happening/looms in the future, as a situation where “We’re conspiring to engineer the annihilation of ourselves.” But, for both characters and readers, these two processes—co-creation and self-annihilation—are in many ways related. One of the primordial pleasures for many readers is the sensation of the self disappearing during the reading process—the feeling that when we’re really, truly immersed in a book, a type of annihilation of self naturally occurs. In this sense, Wood’s book may suggest that losing sight of ourselves might not always be a bad thing. - Joe Seale

Dorothy Tse tells of women who transform into fish, lovers who sever their own limbs in a battle of affection, and a twisted chess-like narrative of incestuous emperors—a tale that seems to mock the very ridiculousness of the stories we tell our own children.

Dorothy Tse, Snow and Shadow, East Slope Publishing, 2014.
www.snowandshadow.com/
excerpts
Woman Fish
Apartment Block
January: Bridges
Hong Kong literature inside and outside of the Umbrella Movement, an essay by Dorothy Tse


Dorothy Tse’s stories often start on a note of innocence, but an abrupt twist invariably brings us up short: dreamscapes descend and the pages become populated with ever-weirder characters. Strange occurrences are juxtaposed in ways that confound logical expectations. These stories are not for the faint-hearted—violence and sensuality abound. Limbs, even heads, are lopped off with regularity. Yet scenes can be so outrageous that we find ourselves laughing. Dorothy’s bold narrative experiments leave us alternately beguiled and deeply unsettled.


Dorothy Tse's stories sometimes start in a vein of innocent realism, but she invariably brings us up short with an abrupt twist: dreamscapes descend and the pages become populated with ever weirder characters. Not only do strange things happen, they are juxtaposed in ways that confound all logical expectations. This collection of 13 short stories is not for the faint-hearted--violent and sensual elements abound and limbs, even heads, are lopped off with alarming regularity. Yet scenes are sometimes so outrageous that they make us laugh, and Dorothy's bold thematic and narrative experiments yield results that are alternately beguiling and deeply disturbing.


Snow and Shadow challenges the boundaries and limitations of our narrow, conventional realities and forces us to re-examine our perspective of the world. It is a book that requires bravery and an open mind. But, armed with these tools, many will find that this enchanting collection of transformative tales will, like a shadow, follow them long after the final page. -Amy Russell

A threat or unbelievable angst is always hiding. Acid Free Pulp
Uncomfortable, weird and disturbing…thought-provoking. - Peter Gordon      


By turns playful and melancholy, Dorothy Tse's tales never fail to mesmerize: they are wonderfully assured, and genuinely strange. - Sarah Shun-lien Bynum


Dorothy Tse's fictional world is haunted by shadows of death and violence. Yet it is hauntingly beautiful. An indelible reading experience. - Leo Ou-fan Lee


I'm stunned by the resolve, accomplishment, and strangeness of this vision. Tse joins the ranks of artists currently remaking the world. - Joyelle McSweeney


Dorothy Tse’s third book, Snow and Shadow, is a collection of surreal stories set in a fantastical version of Hong Kong. According to Tse, Western readers don’t need extensive knowledge about her native city in order to appreciate her writing. “A person’s moods or dreams,” Tse explains in an interview, “may have just as much, if not more, influence on how someone may read my work.” It’s fitting that Tse mentions dreams, since her narrative style is trancelike. This is a book that is hard to put down, but that also requires readers to keep an open mind. Nicky Harman, the translator of Snow and Shadow and the first to translate Tse into English, explains in her introduction, “not only do weird things happen, but they are juxtaposed in ways that confound all logical explanations. The results are alternately beguiling and deeply disturbing.”
Snow and Shadow’s tales are filled with some uncomfortable topics: graphic violence, incest, amputations, abortion. The violence in the stories is reminiscent of pre-Disney, Grimm’s fairy tales, as characters’ limbs fall or are cut off with surprising regularity.
In “The Love Between Leaf and Knife,” a husband and wife compete to outdo each other’s love by engaging in a series of indulgent displays of affection: long-ignored house chores are accomplished, Valentine’s Day gifts are exchanged, and past sacrifices are displayed like trophies. When Leaf accepts her husband's unexpected request for a dance, the couple finally appears to have reached a truce, but they are so physically and emotionally out of sync, that Knife accidently steps on the hem of Leaf's skirt and she falls. Leaf expects Knife to help her up, but instead, he slaps himself on the cheek. When Leaf remains on the floor, and doesn't "jump to her feet and sympathetically rub his jaw for him," Knife is disappointed, but the couple's battle must continue and Leaf also hits herself on the cheek, turning their game increasingly violent. “‘If you hit yourself again,’” Knife warns his wife, “‘I’ll . . . I’ll knock my head against the wall.’ Then he walked to the wall and banged and banged until his forehead went red.”
Plots for the stories in Snow and Shadow are often downright peculiar, yet it's almost impossible not to yield to Tse's confident and exact prose. If the johns in “Blessed Bodies” run out of money, limbs are also acceptable currency among the prostitutes of Y-land, a country famous for its sex industry. The limbs are stored in warehouses and sold to the developed countries nearby. Readers will flinch at some of Tse’s descriptions, which shine in Harman’s meticulous translation. Here’s what happens when a bored, cruel princess from the collection’s title story decides to turn her idle hours more interesting:
Shadow wanted to learn this magic that Snow called “medicine.” So every day she ordered a serving woman’s arm to be cut off, after which she would clumsily sew a pig’s trotter onto the shoulder in its place. But her implants either dropped off as soon as the thread came loose, or caused gangrene. The women gave off a nauseating stink as they walked around the palace, and eventually had to be thrown out by the ministers.
Experimental fiction such as Tse’s is a driving force in Hong Kong’s literary scene. This former British Colony was only handed over to mainland China in 1997, after having been under British rule for 156 years. It is common for an average person in Hong Kong to navigate between languages: Cantonese, Mandarin, other Chinese dialects, and English. In a recent essay for the University of Iowa's International Writing Program Panel Series, Tse explains that in the 1950s, authors from mainland China would often mimic the languages “from the working class and the farmers as a way to reach the general public, yet Hong Kong’s literature has a tradition of resistance to the language of daily life. Its highly experimental language is a strategy to distinguish a literary work from an entertaining and commercial one.” Hong Kong writers not only aim to have their work escape the city’s commercial influences, but they also want to break free from traditional mainland culture. “In Hong Kong,” Tse continues, “writing is never an act that naturally brings one to the theme of nationality or cultural tradition.”
Western influences are keenly felt in this book. “Woman Fish,” which was first published in English in the Guardian, gives a nod to Kafka, as the protagonist’s wife morphs into a fish.
One morning, he realized that his wife’s sleek, pale head was completely without hair. Her mouth was huge, protruding like a ship cleaving the still waters of the sea. Her eyes had slipped to the sides of her face. Her breasts were two melting glaciers, slowly sinking into her body. When she walked naked towards him, all that was left of the woman were her smooth, muscular legs. Apart from that, she had transformed completely into a fish
Like the magical realists, Tse's writing interweaves the magical and the mundane. Universal laws, familiar logic, or a linear construct of time will not help readers interpret the events in Snow and Shadow. In the story “A Street in the Wind,” Mr. Lam, a widower living with his teen-age daughter and young son, is a fan of detective shows. As the story unfolds, he can no longer distinguish between the fiction of the TV program and his daily life, much like the nameless character in Julio Cortázar’s “Continuity of Parks” who confuses his reality with the world in a novel.
It is easy to let reality melt away with writing this elegant and sparse. Tse’s stories are carefully crafted. The language in Snow and Shadow is precise, matter-of-fact and carries no hint of sentimentality. In most stories, readers will find themselves in a world very similar to their own, until an unexpected plot twist transports them to fantastical settings and situations. There is Wood, the protagonist in “Head” who, while visiting his headless son at the hospital, suddenly decides to donate his own head so that his son won’t lead a headless life. The only reaction to Wood’s sacrifice which readers are allowed to witness, is from the point of view of the least invested character in the story, the son’s doctor: “The doctor raised his eyebrow slightly at Wood, but gave a tired smile. ‘The law states that you can agree to donate any organ to a close family member.’” There is also the young boy in “The Travelling Family” who marvels at a performing troupe whose magical tears turn into “bees and centipedes, flowers and grass.” The actors weep and the audience laughs as tears merge into objects, transforming “the street into a brilliantly colored and bustling scene.”
The situations that the characters in Snow and Shadow face do not make them any less human or complex. Whether by donating a head, chopping off an arm, leg, or losing an eye in exchange for sexual favors, turning into a fish, taking refuge in a block of ice or in a department store bed, Tse’s characters rarely grant readers access to their thoughts. Rather than lingering on backstory or motivation, Tse forces the reader to imagine her characters' inner world, driving the stories forward by exploring how they respond to each other. In the face of loss, pain, and helplessness, the characters in Snow and Shadow work with their memories in a kaleidoscopic fashion, constantly reshuffling events in their minds, often walking a fine line between reality and fantasy. “Like many people,” explains a character suffering from amnesia, “I can only remember a part of reality.” Reading Snow and Shadow is akin to being lost in a snowstorm: dizzying, terrifying, but nevertheless thrilling. - Camila Santos


There are a few short story collections floating around the BTBA longlist discussion, but for my money Dorothy Tse’s collection is by far one of the most captivating, original, and intriguing that I’ve read this year or in the past few years. Tse is a Hong Kong writer who writes mostly in Chinese and readily admits that her writing is never an act “that naturally brings one to the theme of nationality or cultural tradition.” Yet without Nicky Harman’s superb translation, Tse’s style of measured detachment and meticulous prose might be lost. Yet the reader is skillfully led into her surreal worlds, steeped in magical realism and tinged with fabulism. Whether it’s a woman turning into a fish in “Woman Fish,” the ultimate story of psychological gaslighting between wife and husband (“Black Cat City”), or “The Mute Door” about a building where the tenants are in constant search for their own front doors, it’s Tse’s confidence that lures the reader forward, introducing the grotesque, the absurd, and the scatological with such a deft hand and direct style that the reader never feels deceived or that the writer is using any of the surreal twists as a mere conceit.
There’s the feeling of crowded urbanity in most of her stories, the lingering impermanence of reality, and phantasmagorical imagery that offsets the emotionally charged topics of abortion, loss and incest. In “Bed,” a sleep-deprived young girl shares a bed with her father and her older sister and expresses her feelings in a nightmare:“She pulled back the mound of bedding and discovered her father and her big sister had taken up the whole bed. But they seemed not to need those brightly colored pajamas anymore. They were completely naked and tightly embraced, their fingernails dug deeply into the skin of each other’s back. They seemed fast asleep, curled together like a pair of fetuses. No matter how hard the girl tried, she could not pull them apart, and they were too heavy to push out of bed. The girl just had to sit on the floor, listening all night long to her father and sister emitting low groans like an insect makes just before it pupates and the sound is cut off midstream. The air seemed full of butter about to precipitate, stiflingly hot.”
Many of Tse’s stories seem horrific, but her character’s responses are relatable and often touching. The environment and parameters of each story may appear eerie and bleak, but there is always an empathic underpinning that simmers below the surface. The characters are not intentionally evil; they are the damaged creating their own worlds to inhabit. As in the opening of “Mute Door,” Tse offers an allegorical answer for the reader and her characters:“Among all the doors I have come across, it is only the invisible doors of the mime artists that capture the essence of the door. Whether in streets occupied by the language of colonizers or in a red square in the month of June, mime artists can always silently create a house that is theirs alone. All that is needed is a pair of hands and a posture that implies the actor walking close to a wall, and an enclosure instantaneously appears and spins. No groundwork is necessary for a house like that, no foundation on rock—this house is built from the poetry of the body and the mystery of bones and flesh in motion. The room has no boundaries, nor does it have cracks to let anyone in. It dawns on the audience that a door is no more than a fish slipping constantly out of their grasp. One of the sayings of mime artists is, ‘A door is not outside of you.’”
In Snow and Shadow, Tse opens a door for the reader to experience worlds she doesn’t know, but the emotions Tse elicits are familiar. Each story raises provocative questions. Many short story collections can dazzle and amuse, but it is the mark of a quality collection that it also makes one think. - Monica Carter


Fabulous, surreal, absurd. Had this collection been published when Robin Hemley and Michael Martone were gathering their selections for Extreme Fiction (Longman, 2003), a collection of the best nontraditional stories of the modern age, Dorothy Tse, one of Hong Kong’s most acclaimed young writers, might well have been among the authors included. Her accolades include the Hong Kong Biennial Award for Chinese Literature, the Hong Kong Book Award, Taiwan’s Unitas New Fiction Writers’ Award, and many others. Her latest collection of short stories, Snow and Shadow, translated from Chinese by Nicky Harman, is a restrained—bordering on disinterested—dreamscape that spends much of its time in the realm of nightmare. Tse tells of women who transform into fish, lovers who sever their own limbs in a battle of affection, and a twisted chess-like narrative of incestuous emperors—a tale that seems to mock the very ridiculousness of the stories we tell our own children.
Reading Tse is like wandering aimlessly through a dystopian world. In “Woman Fish” we experience the steady transformation of a man’s wife into a fish and his fear that she will slip into the lawless backstreets and end up auctioned off at a seafood market. And yet, life continues on in its usual manner, such as when they go out to their favorite Japanese restaurant:
The chef throws a chunk down onto the white counter. His eyes fix on the gleaming silver knife in his hand, then flicks towards her. He presses the blade down into flesh. There is an odd, sharp hiss as he slits it open. Her lips part, but no sound comes out from between her sharply pointed teeth. Her round eyes pop wide, revealing black centers buried in the silver surround.
In the title story “Snow and Shadow” Tse reinvents the tale of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, outpacing the absurdity of the original with unequaled precision in her attention to warped detail. The complexity of her storytelling will leave the reader tracing the characters out on paper to confirm suspicions of incest and inbreeding in a land where corpses pile in the road waiting to be burned by a man named Dumbo. And Snow is no ordinary princess:
Snow held the corpse of a young girl in her arms, and a pair of scissors in her hand. She had sliced open the skin from the corner of the girl’s eye to her neck, revealing the tissue—scarlet like raw beef—that lay underneath.
“It’s wounded,” said Snow, lifting her blood-smeared face and indicating an animal behind her. It took the serving woman a few moments to make out what it was: a deer with half the skin of its face removed. The woman watched as the princess, with astonishing skill, grafted onto the deer’s neck the resected skin she had just cut from the girl.
When dwarves discover Snow in the forest, they have no idea what to do with her. So they pile animal heads near her bed as offerings. Snow is a vegetarian, though, and nearly starves in their care. When she falls unconscious, they string her up naked in a tree where she is encased in ice until her prince arrives. The parallels to Snow White and the glass casket are obvious, as are the inclusion of a stepmother obsessed with the image of a young woman in a mirror. But the familiar is only sparingly laced into this story of two kingdoms. The rest is a puzzle for which there might be no true answers.
For all the confusion her work invokes, there is something mesmerizing that holds the reader captive. Her confidence in conveying the absurd, as if it is not only reasonable, but understandable that, in “Blessed Bodies,” the men of Y-land would willingly sacrifice body parts for sex until there is nothing left of them, or that birds representing aborted fetuses flood the city in “Monthly Matters,” is enough to propel the reader through her disturbing world.
The hallmark of fabulist fiction is its departure from the expected, and Tse’s work embodies this tradition in every aspect. There are similarities in her writing to Donald Barthelme and his representations of God and religion in “At the End of the Mechanical Age,” which was included in Extreme Fiction. Readers who crave the bizarre—the difficult to make sense of—will find a richness in these nontraditional stories that will bring them back again and again to reread and reimagine Tse’s glorious imagery and subtle references. Our appetite for incomprehension and nightmare is aptly fulfilled here. - Heather Sharfeddin


The opening story in Hong Kong writer Dorothy Tse's new collection of short stories is starkly Kafkaesque. In Woman Fish, instead of a giant beetle, the metamorphosis that takes place is of a piscatorial nature. A man wakes up next to his wife to find she has turned into a fish. And this is not the only strange awakening of the book - in Head, a mother awakes to find that her son's head has disappeared overnight.
But the surrealism in Tse's collection is far from macabre. Instead, the bizarre tales of sexual exploitation, family dynamics and intimate relationships present a charming and vividly magical world. A dreamlike quality pervades these pages, as we accept such strange and disturbing imagery in each story, then slip into another alternate reality that is just as odd.
As translator Nicky Harman writes in the book's introduction: "These surreal tales - fantastic in parts - are made the more effective for being grounded firmly in reality at the same time."
It is this juxtaposition that makes Tse's writing so effective, and its themes all the more frightening, yet captivating.
Familiar glimpses of Hong Kong sit within the book's tales of twisted realities (where the logical solution to a missing limb is to replace it or match it with one of your own), adding to the paradoxical feeling of simultaneous discomfort and enticement.
A winner of multiple literary awards in Hong Kong and Taiwan, Tse envelops her readers in obscurity through bold, imaginative and artfully spare prose. Taut and unsentimental it may be, but the reader will find it hard not to be intrigued by the characters and their circumstances - even if we only know them as "K" or "J". This just adds to their elusive appeal.
Tse's stories are both "beguiling and deeply disturbing", writes Harman, who plays no small part in contributing to their mesmerising quality through her fluid translation. Harman captures the cadence and nuances of Tse's writing, imbued with dark humour and violence.
Snow and Shadow challenges the boundaries and limitations of our narrow, conventional realities and forces us to re-examine our perspective of the world.
It is a book that requires bravery and an open mind. But, armed with these tools, many will find that this enchanting collection of transformative tales will, like a shadow, follow them long after the final page. - Amy Russell



For surreal fiction to work, the writer must have confidence. No matter how fantastic the images and situations, it always comes back to confidence. The reader should not sense the author’s doubt in either prose or content. The best works of magical realism flood forward on the page like an endless ribbon being pulled, and this is so apparent in Hong Kong writer Dorothy Tse’s newest short story collection, Snow and Shadow.
Each story is constructed out of “cool sentences,” as translator Nicky Harman notes in her introduction to the collection. Tse is not concerned with ornamental language, and the reader is lulled forward with prose free of stuffy word choices, leaving an exactness that evokes a world sometimes similar to our own, which then becomes a world populated with often nightmarish scenarios.
Almost all of the stories are set in some sort of urban space: tightly packed apartment buildings, hospitals, busy streets. It is only the final and titular story, “Snow and Shadow,” that finds itself apart resting in a world concerned with emperors, imperial guards and the like. But the story still feels consistent with the other stories, for it does not escape Tse’s fantastic eye.
Instead of expected and ordinary names, Tse calls her characters Tree, Leaf, Knife, Wood, Recall, Memoria, or the more Kafkaesque, K and J, shifting focus from the specificity of names. They are all individuals, but it is often less about them and more about how they relate to other characters, with many of them offered as dichotomies or reactions to others. In “Head,” a family awakens to the mysterious disappearance of the son’s head. Like all good magical realism, the story is not about the explanation of the circumstances, but how the world operates within these fantastic terms. The images are stark right from the beginning as the son, Tree, is led to an ambulance, headless, not at all an unusual predicament in Tse’s stories.
Hospital beds and wheelchairs whizzed back and forth, many of them occupied by patients who had lost noses, limbs, hearts, and other organs…he came to a decision: he would donate his own head to his twenty-five-year-old only son.
The father, Wood, donates his own head, transforming the story into an examination of a father’s passion for his son without abandoning the more surreal elements. What we get is a pseudo-family history going back before the birth of Tree in 1977. Wood becomes obsessed with his unborn child, often drawing his wife with the shape of a fetus growing inside her. When asked who he is drawing, he pulls out a photograph of himself and says, “I’m using this. That kid’s going to be the spitting image of me.” This statement is a familiar one between parents and children, but it becomes bizarre in the capable hands of the author. The transplanted head still retains the face of the father. It is not quite grotesque, because it is encapsulated in a magical realistic world, but it could be argued that it is toeing the line.
Not all thirteen stories of Snow and Shadow are composed of lopped off heads and transformed bodies. Some are dreamlike and give the feeling of a hand running through water leaving swirls and ripples around it. “The Mute Door” recalls non-existing doors that mimes construct out of waves of their hands in the air: The door is constructed in such a way as to conceal the fact that it does not exist. The idea is introduced so aptly and can be applied not only to the story, but to the collection as a whole. Smells, emotions, and occurrences are identifiable in Snow and Shadow, yet they reside in a dream—or nightmare, in some cases. A pizza delivery man is labelled a stranger when he comes to the Displacement Apartments in “The Mute Door,” but like the residents, once he enters the building, he can’t quite find the right door. Reminiscent of Kafka’s unbreached castle, the apartment building is so perfectly name Displacement and no matter how hard they try, the residents just can’t find their way to the correct front doors. Many even pack suitcases to take with them whenever they leave home, so upon their return when predictably they are unable to find the correct door, they have novels and laptops to keep them company in the bustling corridors.
[F]or the residents, the apartments are like face-down playing cards on a table top, moving around, taking their doors with them, in a completely random way. That is to say, when the residents leave their apartments, they have to go through the process of finding them once more, with no rules to follow.
Like the residents of the Displacement Apartments, there are no rules to Snow and Shadow. The unexpected is king and explanations are uncalled for. Turning into a fish or actors’ tears becoming bees and centipedes are par for the course. Lovers might hack off their own limbs for each other, but I would have it no other way. Their wounds linger on the reader’s mind like thick brush strokes.
Nicky Harman does an excellent job translating Tse’s stories. They stand alone, but together build a hypnotic trance, each sentence rendered with a sense of grace and sparseness. The images and actions are left on their own, not muddied by a heavy hand.
The stories within Snow and Shadow build on each other with every new page. They are blunt, stark, and nightmarish, and this is what makes them all so exquisite. Through Harman, Dorothy Tse’s collection manifests an individual voice in a world overflowing with the unexpected. - Ariell Cacciola

Q&A with Dorothy

Can you envision the ideal reader of your fiction—in terms of background, education level, tolerance for gruesome imagery, or any other traits you think matter? Stated otherwise, what attributes does a reader need to have to fully appreciate and understand what you are communicating in Snow and Shadow?
One of the privileges of being a writer is that you don’t have an audience in front of you as you write. I don’t want to sacrifice this freedom by imagining an actual reader. Plus, any reader that I can imagine will never be as creative and complex as the actual readers I may have. 
Which eastern and western authors do you consider to be your primary influences?  
I do not distinguish between Eastern and Western authors. When I was young, I liked reading fairy tales from anywhere—sometimes stories in the Bible gave me a similar kind of enjoyment. But my formal consciousness came from reading mainland fiction writers who exploded on the scene in the 1980s. After mainland China had had a closed-door policy for decades, these Chinese writers were influenced suddenly by writers from around the world, such as Kawabata, Márquez, and Kafka. The subsequent formal experiments by these Chinese writers felt like looking into a kaleidoscope. 
When you write plots or scenes that seem to depart from conventionally-understood reality—for example, the woman who turns into a fish in “Woman Fish”—are you envisioning these fantastic events as literally occurring, symbolizing a general concept, or both?  
I don’t regard my stories as departing from conventionally-understood reality. I think humans are adapting and transforming themselves in radical ways. If we can eat meat made in a science lab, then it’s possible for a woman to change into a fish.  
Which of the stories did you have the most difficulty writing and why?  
Each story was difficult to write in its own way. If I find a story is “easy” to write, I would think it’s probably because I am following some kind of established convention, or a convention that I’ve developed myself. It’s a signal that I am going down a dangerous path. 
What are one or two essential things Western readers should understand about modern life in Hong Kong that will help them to appreciate your writing?  
I don’t think that having an experience of living in Hong Kong means that one would understand a writer from Hong Kong. Most of the time, a writer is an outsider in his or her own culture. There are qualities that are more important than nationality or identity that inform how a reader understands literature. I think a person’s moods or dreams may have just as much, if not more, influence on how someone may read my work.  
Now that you have written two collections of short stories, do you have any plans to write longer-form fiction like a novel? What do you like and dislike about the short story format?  
I am working on a novel right now. I think of a short story like a puzzle with a lot of small pieces, so you can play with the structure by looking at the entire picture. But the novel is too big to visualize—it’s more like digging deeper and deeper into a tunnel.                          



Dorothy Tse is one of Hong Kong’s most acclaimed young writers. Her short story collection So Black (好黑) won the Hong Kong Biennial Award for Chinese Literature in 2005 and A Dictionary of Two Cities (雙城辭典), which she co-authored with Hon Lai-chu, won the 2013 Hong Kong Book Prize. Her literary prizes also include Taiwan’s Unitas New Fiction Writers’ Award and the Hong Kong Award for Creative Writing in Chinese. She was a resident at the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program in 2011. A co-founder of Hong Kong’s preeminent literary magazine, Fleurs des Lettres, she currently teaches creative writing at Hong Kong Baptist University.