Staff Picks: The Age of Skin

The Age of Skin by Dubravka Ugresic
by JP Poole

My copy of Dubravka Ugresic’s The Age of Skin is highlighted, underlined, and peppered throughout with asterisks, exclamation marks, and messy notes. Why? Because Ugresic might just be one of the best essayists on the planet; her praises are sung by the likes of Susan Sontag, Joseph Brodsky, and Charles Simic. The New Criterion stated, “As long as some, like Ugresic, who can write well, do, there will be hope for the future.” Indeed, the future is critical to her work. As long as there are those who threaten to erase history, deny genocide, the Holocaust, mass executions, the rape and murder of innocents, as long as war criminals roam free and lead carefree lives, and as long as nationalism rears its monstrous head all over the globe, then the future remains a distant dream unless we are able to reconcile our past. Documentation, writing itself, resists that ever-pressing historical erasure, and is charged with the moral purpose of setting humanity back on some sort of sane and rational course.

Ugresic takes on the heavy baggage of the world by seesawing between humor and horror. In the title essay The Age of Skin, she talks about the tricky process of embalming Lenin’s body, noting that Lenin’s Mausoleum also sells caskets, including a pricey special edition made out of crystal called the “Al Capone,” so named after the casket pictured in The Godfather. In a single paragraph she might mention the author of Fifty Shades of Grey, Maxim Gorky, and Shakespeare.

In meticulously documenting and cataloging modern life, her essays are like packed storage units, stuffed to the gills with the artifacts of arts and culture. Like a museum tour guide, she leads us through the bleak detritus, capitalist’s junk, and beautiful polished antiques of lost eras, forging a path through her material in a way that readers can comprehend. To the left, we see a flag from a war-torn nation, to the right, we see refugees bonding over baklava.

In a Nexus Institute lecture, she talks about deprofessionalization—when education, qualifications, and even basic levels of competence are no longer required for key political positions and important leadership roles. Just this week, I read Anne Applebaum’s incredible essay “The Collaborators,” published in The Atlantic. She states that loyalty is the main ingredient any corrupt regime seeks out in order to maintain power. Applebaum offers the example of when Trump appointed Sonny Perdue, a businessman with an array of conflicts, a devotion to lobbyists and special interest groups, and zero objectivity, to Secretary of Agriculture. Perdue then hired his own team of individuals who also lacked qualifications, including a long-haul truck driver, whose resume boasted experience in “hauling and shipping agricultural commodities.” A domino effect of incompetence ensures that an entire political cabinet resembles a scene out of Dumb and Dumber, but with real-life consequences and drastic risks to public health and welfare. Ugresic makes a similar point in her book: tyrants don’t like being disagreed with, advised, educated, or told what to do—they like yes-men; they like to be in charge of their own rose-tinted legacy.

Ugresic left the former Yugoslavia in 1991 when the war began. In American Fictionary she writes about living in the cellar of her apartment building in Zagreb, with a bag of essentials ready and waiting at the door: “[a]t the sound of the air-raid warning siren we would run down to our cellars, improvised shelters, carrying the bags with us. In their bags many women brought along knitting needles and wool.” She was invited to the safe harbor of Amsterdam and has lived there ever since. “What saved a life,” she writes, “is a daily routine: feeding paper into the typewriter, writing an article…” As I read through her books, which largely home in on the tumult created by the Yugoslav war, I can’t help but see similarities with the rise of fascism in the U.S. My comparisons are inept and elementary, but I’m keen enough to understand that Ugresic possesses key insights into American politics; she saw the signs long ago. In fact, anytime a government begins to clamp down on (or discredit) scientists, artist, thinkers, professors, and doctors, you know there’s a problem.

Her essay “Good Morning, Losers!” is a loving ode to her highly educated friends, who’ve found themselves wondering where they’ve gone wrong in life. Their university degrees can’t compete with what today’s culture wants, self-fixated life-style bloggers, who seem to have found the elixir for eternal happiness. No one, no matter how intelligent, is completely free from pining after the perfect life. She writes: “Under Communism, a person could always blame the system, Communism itself; under capitalism we are all to blame for our own shortcomings.” Thus, her friend becomes fixated on the life of Jenn J., a beautiful woman with a beautiful family, who spends her time making eco-friendly cloth gift bags, bouncing between her Upper West Side home and cottage getaway.

Another friend, an astrophysicist, is out of a job. He’s left scrolling the internet for anything to keep himself afloat. A few clicks swerve off course. “There before him on the computer screen loomed Kim Kardashian’s large, oiled butt. The butt wasn’t moving, it watched my friend like a meteorite, a glacier, a star… Kim Kardashian’s butt came jumping off every website, the world over, wherever he clicked.” In this telling passage, a highly educated man is mocked by popular culture. The butt has achieved unrivaled success, where the astrophysicist is asking himself “where have I gone wrong, oh, how did I end up here?”

In the same essay, Ugresic shares her friend’s anxieties. People don’t seem to want cogent sentences anymore. “In the forty years I’ve been writing, we’ve reached a point where hardly anyone buys serious books anymore…” Instead, the publishing marketplace is clotted with influencers, such as the young British beauty expert Zoella, whose YouTube channel has over ten-million subscribers. Seeing the potential for teen-girl cat nip, Penguin snapped Zoella right up, publishing her book Girl Online, which she penned very little of, stating, “Of course I was going to have help from Penguin’s editorial team in telling my story.” Her “story” is one of wealth, privilege, bouts of anxiety, and plenty of hair products. When culture no longer maintains artistic, intellectual, and moral standards the reward is plump booties and advice on how to do hair. Just today, I was reading an article on a trusted news site when Google placed an ad for the company of hot available redheads.

One of the elements I appreciated most about The Age of Skin is Ugresic’s claim that many of the political problems we see today hold deep roots in misogyny—a hatred of women is key in maintaining any dictator’s control. “Misogyny” she writes, “functions like radiation. It is invisible and not a single person is spared by it.” A very visible reminder of long-standing efforts to silence women shows up in her essay “The Scold’s Bridle.” If you google the term, you’ll discover a frightening torture device straight out of The Handmaid’s Tale, designed to suppress women with loose tongues. Eventually the iron cage with a metal bit to prevent speech is no longer needed because women mute themselves. They internalize the belief that their thoughts have no place in the spheres of religion, politics, or academia. Want proof? Ugresic asks us to picture a “public intellectual” in our minds. A male figure, perhaps wearing a tie and spectacles, is bound to materialize first and foremost. Indeed, I had trouble thinking of someone who might be considered an important female intellectual on par with the no-longer-living Susan Sontag. (Ugresic is one of the few that came to mind.) Then again, I had difficulty conjuring a contemporary public intellectual at all. Knowledge isn’t exactly revered these days. Ugresic understands this, which might be why she juxtaposes carbohydrate-heavy popular culture—La La Land, Nutella, and Bill Clinton/James Patterson—with the nourishing art of Bohumil Hrabal, Mary Beard, and the sculptures of Bakic; she isn’t asking us to choose sides, to make only “healthy choices,” but to notice, observe, and discover our own path out of the darkness and into the light.

Staff Picks: The Factory and The Hole

Down the Rabbit Hole: The Strange and Wonderful World of Hiroko Oyamada
by JP Poole

Reading the novels of Hiroko Oyamada is a bit like walking into a test kitchen. Amidst the hustle and bustle, you watch flames leap six feet high, inhale mysterious aromas, taste flavors you never knew existed, and observe someone singe the top of a cake with a blowtorch. For a book under a hundred pages, The Hole especially is filled with food: mugicha tea, pickled cucumber, miso soup, rice, omelets, dried squid, Kameda Crisps, a spindly herb-like plant called myoga (Japanese ginger). Frankly, it’s nice to see characters eat, it’s a reminder that while they might be a bunch of symbols on a page, we still relate to them because they share our appetites—they get hungry after a long day’s work just like we do.

More so than character, the main ingredient in Oyamada’s work is place. Place is the bed of rice that plot is built around. Place is what tricks readers into believing they’re encountering something static, and recognizable, that is until Oyamada begins to shift the ground and cracks and fissures form, revealing strange and unsettling entities that were lurking all along. Her first book, The Factory, is set at a sprawling live/work campus akin to the likes of Microsoft, Amazon, or Google—a mini-city, complete with different colored badges, corporate lingo, and a company “ecosystem” that one must work to become a part of, or risk exclusion. Within the factory are species of animals that seem to be taking over—they arrive like a flock of birds outside of a fast food joint waiting for French fries to drop. There are Grayback Coypu (aka Nutria) that seem to be growing larger each year; Washer Lizards, reptiles that have learned to live off of lint fibers; and Factory Shags, black birds (think Cormorant) that have no fear of people and whose numbers are ballooning out of control. It’s a bit Hitchcock, a bit George Bernard Shaw. Animal invasion meets industrial sprawl, unchecked commercial growth and expansion, a threat that one senses could swallow humanity whole.

The setting in her newest book, The Hole, is a remote suburb along a river—with the nearest grocery store a long walk away and buses that run every hour. Not the liveliest setting; but then all you have to do is wait a few pages before the predictable turns intriguing. Asa’s husband Muneaki has been transferred to a new office a few miles from where he grew up. The timing happens to be perfect. Asa’s mother-in-law, Tomiko, offers the young couple the house she owns next door rent free. Asa’s comforted by the fact that they are moving next door to Tomiko, not in with her; it’s a chance for the couple to get their footing, and save, save, save. Asa gladly quits her job in the city and becomes a housewife for the summer, spending long hours alone, cooking meals for her husband, running errands, finding that, without a full-time job, the days are endless. Of her new mind-numbing unemployed life, Asa says:

In theory, I could watch TV, use the computer, read a book, bake like I used to when I was single—but it seemed like everything cost money. I had to spend money to pass the time. People say housewives get free room and board and even time to nap, but the truth is napping was the most economical way to make it through the day.

What you should also know is that it’s summer in the suburb and oppressively hot. The cicadas are cranked up loud. Asa states: “To my human ear, they sounded like a bunch of machines, a spray of emotionless noise.” She has to do her grocery shopping early in the morning; her husband needs the car, so she’s essentially housebound. (A familiar feeling, right?) Things turn strange when Asa’s sent on an errand. Tomiko needs some money deposited, so Asa must walk to the nearest 7-Eleven to deposit the cash. (That, too, is a bit strange.) On her way to the store, she sees an animal she can’t identify: it’s not a dog, or a raccoon, but a large black furry animal with stick legs, round ears, and a long tail. Instinct propels her to follow it to the river. It’s then that she falls into a deep hole. While this hole doesn’t lead to another world, everything thereafter takes on a hallucinatory air as thick as summer’s humidity. After falling into the hole, Asa is not the same, and the suburb and its occupants aren’t either.

Oyamada balances the recognizable boredom of modern life—a life where one must think about savings plans, benefits, permanent positions, home loans, and taxes—with ecological strangeness: plants, insects, and animals growing up around us as we exist. People, too, are strange creatures. After seeing the animal, Asa can’t forget it. She realizes that it isn’t something she can Google. Her description is too generic and would produce “millions of hits.” The more she learns about the animal, the more she questions reality. Like Alice in Wonderland, which Oyamada references in the book, Asa falls down a rabbit hole. Her brother-in-law, an outsider, who lives in a shack, doesn’t work, and is a shut-in, leads her closer to the animal, her white rabbit. He wisely states: “People always fail to notice things. Animals, cicadas, puddles of melted ice cream on the ground, the neighborhood shut-in. But what do you expect? It seems like most folks don’t see what they don’t want to see.”

He’s right. Think about all the strange things we choose to ignore (perhaps because we have to): creepy crawling insects in the sink, an odd-colored mushroom, invisible-to-the-eye microbes that feast on our human skin, without which we’d be in deep trouble. Writers, artists, thinkers—these are the outsiders, who help us to remove the horse blinders and see what surrounds us. Oyamada’s fiction is refreshing for how much it defamiliarizes everyday existence. There are things in life that are deeply familiar—punching the clock, shopping at the co-op, watching reality TV—but there are also mysteries, wonders, oddities that we cannot name. The natural world is especially intriguing and a bit suspicious because, like Asa, we can sense changes a-brewin’. Oyamada’s work begs the question: What happens when creatures know more about us than we know about them? Read more of her novels and perhaps we shall find out.

Staff Picks: Poetic Remedies for Troubled Times from Ask Baba Yaga

JP Poole recommends Poetic Remedies for Troubled Times from Ask Baba Yaga by Taisia Kitaiskaia

Taisia Kitaiskaia has been channeling the voice of a witch for seven years. Beginning with an advice column in the Hairpin (a defunct website co-edited by Jia Tolentino), then morphing into a collection titled Ask Baba Yaga: Otherworldly Advice for Everyday Troubles, Kitaiskaia’s Baba now returns at a critical time, when many of us are aching for comfort, amidst isolation and a world on fire.

Who exactly is Baba Yaga? She’s a figure from Slavic folklore, an ageless witch, both hideous and hunched, who lives in a magical house set atop chicken legs. Unlike witches eager to turn children into stew, Baba Yaga’s interests lie elsewhere, deep in the forest where she lives. An off-the-grid naturalist of sorts, she offers advice when she feels like it and only to humans she senses are truly in need.

This is one of the many elements that sets Kitaiskaia’s advice apart. Unlike with a Dear Abby or a Dear Sugar variety wisdom-giver, those seeking advice can’t be certain what Baba will say, which, in a sense, makes their letters of appeal more vulnerable and real. Here’s an excerpt:

It would be all too easy to pull out a response that evokes an armchair psychologist. Baba does no such thing.

Using a poet’s sensibility, Kitaiskaia crafts a medicinal balm to set the advice-seeker’s mind and heart at ease. Nonce words such as “raggly,” “rumply,” and “tricklings” serve as a means of describing what’s difficult to say: that we all have dark thoughts sometimes but to be self-punishing only isolates us more. Baba might make singular words plural (feets) but she doesn’t make mistakes or mince words when something is important. She states upfront that if these dark thoughts stem from abuse “that is another matter.”

It’s easy to see how a book of this variety might fall into a trap of being cartoonish and overly-cute. Katy Horan’s dark and beautiful illustrations instantly bulldoze this potential pitfall. Horan’s bold images form a perfect companionship with the strong and independent voice of Baba—and together they fashion a protective talisman against the things that hurt.

Never childish, readers can trust that, even while embodying the voice of a crone, Kitaiskaia listens closely, she doesn’t forget the importance of what she’s doing, and, as a skilled poet, each word, each punctuation mark, each typographic spacing is fat with meaning. What echoes back is wonderfully dissonant—alive with Beasts and Trees (capitalized)—and her responses are always carefully curated to each individual’s needs, offering, in a sense, the gift of a personalized poem.

Poetic Remedies for Troubled Times is filled to the brim with people looking for answers: is it possible to find a “good guy” in the era of #MeToo, how do you handle a handsy father-in-law, how do you get your family to accept your gender identity, how do you tell your children things will be okay when you also share their fears.

Readers will connect to this cacophony of voices, speaking out of the void, and find solace in Baba’s idiosyncratic word-spells. When she says, “I have watched the Earth turn over many times… the Changing brings fear & sorrow, but wonder lurks in the same field,” it’s easy to believe. She’s attuned to something ancient, primal, and uniquely wise. What poetic remedies offer that practical advice cannot is a path to self-discovery through the forest of the imagination. In sum, perhaps it takes a witch to remind us that, as long as the world contains plants, animals, and human-ly creatures, we are never truly alone.

Revisiting ArmadilloCon 42

At the end of August we set up a virtual booth for ArmadilloCon 42, an annual Austin-based sci-fi/fantasy convention known for its emphasis on literary science fiction. We thought that those of you who couldn’t “attend” during the online convention might still enjoy taking a tour of our booth…

Staff Recommendations

Joe, Becky, and Kelsey share their top picks from our impressive selection of sci-fi and fantasy titles. We have many of these books in stock—call us on 512-322-2097 for curbside pick up or make an appointment to come check ’em out in person!

Featured Titles

Here’s a selection of our current titles that might appeal to fans of sci-fi and fantasy.

Featured Videos

A selection of fantastical footage from past events at Malvern Books. For more, check out our Fantastical Fictions playlist.

 

Staff Picks: The Book of X

Kelsey recommends The Book of X by Sarah Rose Etter:

Sarah Rose Etter’s debut novel, The Book of X, is set in an experience that seems like a typical “nuclear” domestic life—a mother, a father, a daughter, a son, living in a house on the edge of town. Father and son work in a family business, mother and daughter, cleaning house. The novel focuses on the perspective of Cassie, the daughter, the sister, and the latest woman in her family to be born with a knot in her torso.

The beauty in The Book of X is that sprinkled in with the descriptions of the mechanical efficiency of reality and this domestic life are a few surreal touches—father and son work at a literal meat farm, a deep, throbbing cavern of red, bloody meat to be cut and sold to the town. Mother and daughter have a coiled middle, the knot in their stomach twitching, real, true, and plump with pain.

Poetic structure helps to add to the surreal tone of the novel, descriptions of everyday life sliced with “Visions”—poetic asides, where Cassie is floating in dream space, processing the traumas of her waking life—the effects that her mother, always in pain and self-deprecation, had on Cassie’s self-image—her friendships and traumatic dating experiences, the push and pull of her hometown. The effect of the poetic splicing helps create an interesting flow in the novel, leaving the reader in a strange and powerful emotional mood scape throughout the reading experience.

Etter’s raw and unyielding descriptions of the pain of living in the world as a woman are beautiful. I felt sadness and tenderness for Cassie, because I can relate to living in a body you want to change, but also because the visceral seems to be comforting during a time when there is a global pandemic and things are uncertain and ethereal. If you need a book to read to escape the stress of the current time, but you want a safe place to process those deep and dark feelings that might be bubbling up, I would highly recommend picking up The Book of X.

Staff Picks: Stalingrad

Celia recommends Vassily Grossman’s Stalingrad, in numbered segments:

  1. During the Battle of Stalingrad, where he was a war reporter for Krasnaya Zvevda, Vassily Grossman wrote a letter to his daughter, telling her that it was impossible to read anything above the hellish thunder of bombs, except for War and Peace.
  2. For a while Grossman was called the Soviet Tolstoy. Grossman rejected this designation by writing his sequel to Stalingrad, called Life and Fate, in which the protagonists of Stalingrad slowly realize that they are trapped in a struggle, not between a good global power and an evil one, but between two brutal totalitarian ideologies, Stalinism and Nazism, equally indifferent to life. A lot of English-language critics have tended to dismiss Stalingrad and praise Life and Fate, lauding the one as a mammoth act of dissent, and remembering the other as a sort of literary pretzel worked over and over again by the censors, until it turned into nothing much.
  3. I think the truth is more complicated. What Stalingrad is really about is the promise of the Russian Revolution, the hope of equality and justice and enough for everyone, coming repeatedly into contact with the corruption and indifference of the actual regime. There’s not always much daylight between the Nazi soldiers raiding houses for clothing and furs to send back to their families, and the Soviet generals retreating from them, who scold their staff when their fine china is mislaid and are sure that what’s happening to the country at large—the soldiers, the refugees, the villagers stuck behind German lines—won’t ever happen to them. Where the heroism of the novel happens is with the small people. Grossman’s interest is in the people doing what they can in a system that perceives them only with vast indifference. As I read, I wondered how the Soviet censors nitpicked chapters on the heroic miners supporting the war effort, but somehow missed the force of Grossman’s anger against everyone in charge of the war.
  4. “Evil is stronger than good,” says Sofia Osipovna, near the beginning of the novel. I love Sofia Osipovna. She’s a surgeon in her fifties or sixties, middle-aged, butch (Grossman writes: “mannish,” but without the negativity that that description sometimes encodes). When her house is bombed to rubble in the first air strike on Stalingrad, she jumps out of her bath and saves her cigarettes and her best friend’s letters, and then she walks through the fires to her hospital to see what she can do there. Evil is not stronger than good within her. But, in the whole world, perhaps it is.
  5. I am writing this in segments because I’m not sure what a singular review of this book would look like. Or rather, because I’m not sure how to review a book that is so deeply concerned with the selfishness and incompetence of power and the small, private strengths of individuals, and not leave some kind of crack in the writing, through which the present day might get in.
  6. How do people act, under the fear of death? It’s a central question of Stalingrad, and, for many of the main characters, delayed long into the novel, which begins in a Stalingrad still full of civilians, engineers and nurses and functionaries who know that the war is approaching, but hope against all odds that it won’t actually reach them. They’re decent, mostly, if imperfect, but the question hanging over them is how long can their little decencies last? Some of them will become the ones who hoard their food and water and threaten to throw strangers out of their bomb shelters. And others will rush into burning buildings to save the dying. There’s a strange disconnect between past action and present, and so the central suspense of the novel is not how the battle of Stalingrad will end, or how the war will end, but who each person will become when confronted with the measure of their bravery.
  7. To that end, this is a novel almost without structure. It hares off after a Russian officer escaping from encirclement, after a grandmother boarding a refugee boat with her daughter and grandson, after a miner providing coal for the Russian tank factories. The main set of characters largely evacuate Stalingrad two-thirds of the way through the novel and then appear only in letters and by word-of-mouth. One soldier gets a chapter in the novel’s opening and then disappears for eight-hundred pages. Sometimes there’s an interlude of wild comedy, as when one officer, trying to fight his fear of death, can’t resist stopping on a bridge that’s being bombed to dashingly smoke a cigarette. Sometimes the novel feels over-ambitious, and sometimes like the confusion of war, and sometimes like Grossman is going through his own memories, trying to put a life to each face, and asking us to remember, with him.
  8. “They go to their death as if to a holiday,” says a young war reporter to General Yeromenko, halfway through the novel, describing the Russian troops. Grossman doesn’t have much affection for generals, and most of their portrayals are deeply unflattering. Yeromenko is the exception. And I wonder how much of Grossman himself might be in the tactless war reporter, who Yeromenko rebukes: “[No], comrade writer, we do not want to die, we do not see death as a holiday, and we will not surrender Stalingrad.”
  9. Nevertheless, they do die. Simone Weil, writing about the Iliad, argued that its endless depictions of violence on the human body are born from a bitterness founded on love and sorrow. So it is too with Grossman, who believes in heroism, and yet is constantly pushing against it, asking that we remember not just the glory but the confusion and terror. He gives one of his heroes, the nuclear physicist Victor Shtrum, the name and biography of a Jewish scientist murdered during Stalin’s purges, and so thoroughly wiped from the record that no censor seems to have noticed. He sends Shtrum a letter, written by his mother, who is trapped behind German lines and soon to die in the Holocaust (as Grossman’s own mother was, and did). The text of the letter goes unprinted. Traveling across front lines and borders, it is like a stone thrown into a deep well, a wish that arrives from out of the jaws of death, bearing witness to the dead.
  10. Then there is the last battle of the book, which takes place in an abandoned train station, where a Russian battalion, attempting to retake Stalingrad, has advanced too far, and left itself flanked by German troops. They hold the station, for hours, then days, knowing that no help will come for them. How do you remember them? By their names and by their stories, what you know of them. And, in the novel’s last pages, by the last visible traces of battle, seen from a distance: “There on the dark blue tracing papers of the night sky,” Grossman writes, “was a living, breathing sketch of the war; dotted lines of tracer fire, bursts from machine guns and the flames of explosions marked out the strongholds and force fields of a huge battle.” And that they did not go to death as to a holiday.