Transit Summer Staff Picks
Ashley Nelson Levy, Publisher
A mother and her grown daughter meet for a trip through Japan; they visit galleries and restaurants, traveling from city to city. They share stories about family, memory, the past, but ultimately the trip is not exactly what the narrator had hoped. Then they go home. This is the premise of Jessica Au’s novel Cold Enough for Snow (New Directions), and in ninety-five short pages she captures something as clear and as mystical as the places, objects, and works of art the narrator encounters on her trip. The prose reads like clear, cold water—the rundown, perhaps, of the snow mentioned in the title—while refusing any answers to the questions it poses or tidy conclusions.
I asked my mother what she believed about the soul and she thought for a moment. Then, not looking at me but at the hard, white light before us, she said that she believed that we were all essentially nothing, just series of sensations and desires, none of it lasting…. The best we could do in this life was to pass through it, like smoke through the branches, suffering, until we either reached a state of nothingness, or else suffered elsewhere.
To wander through a series of sensations and desires—maybe it’s not the sunniest depiction of living, but is there any other reason to read? The book inhabits that strange, tender space where I prefer to spend my time in fiction, where too much goes unsaid between people, despite a sensation akin to love prickling through them, in this case between mother and daughter. As they move from each city and tourist site, the narrator shares parts of her life with her mother: stories about a lecturer whose home she once stayed in; a customer at the Chinese restaurant where she worked; and her partner Laurie, and their conversations about whether or not to have a child. In turn, the narrator pieces together what little she can about the mysteries of her mother: of her childhood and her own desires. Cold Enough for Snow seeks to find a shared language for so much of life that inevitably stays as silent as a winter scene, without understanding.
Order Cold Enough for Snow from Point Reyes Books.
Theadora Walsh, Marketing Manager
Diane di Prima wrote Spring and Autumn Annals (City Lights) one day at a time. From October 26 1965, the evening the dancer Freddie Herko jumped out of a window in the East Village to the first anniversary of his death. She wrote to him, her closest friend, in the wake of his lost presence, writing as a way to “hold still.”
The book is organized by season. She begins with the fall, which seems a poetic homage to Freddie, who fell in the Fall, a doubling di Prima must have turned over. She begins with his voice at her apartment door, calling to be let in, “Di Prima! Open the door. Hey, dipree!!!” Her language is diaristic and casual, a scene report kept for one of its missing members. The names of friends and poets are rattled off, Micheal (McClure), John (Wieners), Alan (Marlowe), Roi (Amiri Baraka), Merce (Cunningham), and you get the sense of how little fame or external audience factored into the lives of these writers. They were mostly writing to each other, di Prima quite explicitly writing this mythology of a friendship for Freddie.
After the Annals I went online and read the drug of (love) / (writing) on Emmalea Russo’s blog Cosmic Edges. Between screenshots from Schroeter’s Malina and portions of Barthes’ The Lover’s Discourse she writes on thinking and eros. She describes both as being about unending approaches, “about ‘getting it’ never ever ‘getting it.’ slow, slow, rare…Both are slow, take time, play out in time.” I don’t know Russo but I feel like I could, her friend group is proximate to mine and the concerns her writing describes resonate easily. When I read her blog, like when I read di Prima’s journal, I sense the author close up against the other side of each shared sentence.
Order Spring and Autumn Annals from City Lights and Read EmmaLea Russo’s Cosmic Edges here.
Tricia Viveros, Editorial Intern
“When you’ve allowed yourself to be controlled for so long by actions you don’t recognize as your own but that also don’t belong to anyone else’s mind, when you’ve loosened the sphincter of your willpower to such an extent that you have no idea what you’ll do from one minute to the next, you’re even less sure whether your actions would qualify as ‘irresponsible,’” writes one of the protagonists in Bezoar and Other Unsettling Stories (Seven Stories), a disquieting collection of short fiction by Guadalupe Nettel (tr. Suzanne Jill Levine).
Told through successive first-person accounts, Nettel’s balanced prose unflinchingly portrays the inner thoughts of an eccentric cast of narrators: a clinical photographer who becomes infatuated with a surgery patient; a voyeur who analyzes the private life of her neighbor living across the way; a self-proclaimed “olfactorist” who falls in love with the smell of a young woman’s urine. Nettel’s narrators are, above all, outsiders, nurturing their clandestine obsessions from the margins. Here, obsession functions not only as an instinctual form of coping, but also as a way of making sense of the world.
I have always been fascinated by what some might call unreliable narrators, fueled by my own skepticism that there can be such a thing as a “reliable” speaker in literature. Where do we draw the line between reliable and not-reliable, and who gets to decide? Nettel’s characters, despite their strangeness, prod the boundaries that separate admiration from obsession, the acceptable from the unacceptable, the sane from the un-sane. And maybe the most unnerving aspect of these stories isn’t really their perturbing content, but their ability to make us self-aware, identifying traces of our own selves in the minds of undesirable misfits.
Order Bezoar and Other Unsettling Stories from Skylight Books.