Sylvie

It is five months into the year, and I am finishing my first book of 2024. I have taken an extended vacation from reading. Well, less a vacation, and more a tailspin into sustained but variable crisis, wherein I reserve reading for my visits to the depressive hospitalizations. The manic ones tend to not leave much room for literature. Against the Day and Earthlings were exceptional experiences, I savored both, perfect novels, but upon discharge, I did not re-engage my longstanding love for reading, because life proved consistently to overwhelm. But here I am, sitting in a crisis center, having just finished this book, and about to read Smoke and Mirrors by Gaiman, with my return to University to finish an English Literature degree three years abandoned impending, and I think I have finally struck it, the passion, the fervor, for literature. I am tumbling headlong after a long dormancy, a long but fitful sleep, into embracing words as my future, the future for which I have pined but which I have avoided for two decades. Thank you, Ottessa, for helping me wake up.

The problem with collections of this sort is how uneven they tend to be, but there are moments when Gaiman's talent shines; moments, even, of brilliance. Still, it is largely merely “pretty good” with the occasional outright misfire. I loved Neverwhere and Coraline when I was young, and this collection, while it did not bowl me over, has convinced me that I should revisit Gaiman as a novelist now, in my 30s.

This reminded me of the much more recent novel by Sayaka Murata, Earthlings, a personal favorite and likewise pronouncedly Japanese novel on pining for a sincere expression of being. The agents of desire repression, desire for an authenticity precluded by society, are described in both via mechanistic terms, machines and factories, accompanied by a sense of such profound alienation that the narrators declare themselves inhuman. There's a Deluzian analysis of the two waiting to be exercised that I might some day undertake. There is so much to process here-I'll be sifting through the memory of many passages for months to come, I'm sure. Exceptional, and an essential read for the queer and the deviant.

Here, in grief, things tumble into their constituents, into inanimacy, an unknowing, or in some instances a knowing too well that supercedes reductive language. Pride and vanity bear through carrying out a woman's revenge, one metted towards all but the man upon whom it was fixed. While it is not allotted so much direct pronouncement as other concerns, the tragedy and sorrow of womanhood is perhaps the most pronounced theme, everpresent as undercurrent, rising occasionally to wash away the bridge or drive a rushing log through the ford. After some chapters I had to set it aside and go for a walk. Impeccably written, at times genuinely visceral.