After Smilla's Sense of Snow

I gave up reading Scandinavian mysteries a while ago, after the Dragon Tattoo trilogy, after some Kurt Wallender, after some Edward Åke, after opening and closing a Nesbø, after reading a couple more I have very much forgotten; and the reason I stopped was that I could no longer read descriptions of tortured and dismembered women.

At first it seemed to me a tic, a trope, lazy shorthand for this criminal is a real badass, you can see how much of a badass he is from page one, if not paragraph one, and how anything the detective might do in the detecting of him is absolvable because he is such as badass badass.

But the repetition was striking me like a blow.

After assuming that it was an overworked and self-absolving trope, and after ignoring it for several years, I found the news from the news sources beginning to filter through to some other level of my awareness.

In the light of voter suppression, rape culture, fundamentalist patriarchal religions of all theologies (including the armed forces of the first world) becoming more heavily armed, more insistent, and bloodier in their insistence; in the light of global warming and its causes, I came to see that Thomas Harris and Michael Connolly and the Scandinavians are right. The torture and dismemberment of the feminine is the signature crime of the age.

Security

An errand yesterday at the Social Security office downtown. Was very apprehensive about this trip for some reason, expecting squalor and tedium and Byzantine office layouts – I remember the old social Security office in inner NE, near the house we lived in fifteen years ago. It was dismaying in a squalid way: old wooden chairs along the wall in a certain disarray, the waiting people disabled, older, whiter, swollen with diabetes, wrapped in bandages, confined to wheelchairs, or just ill; the minority poor with less obvious ailments, all needing far more than any office was offering. There was an undertone of common suffering, a small, palpable buzz of people who may not have seen each other before or for a while, but who could see & knew each others' conditions.

Yesterday's office was worn but clean, had airport-type security (minus the full-body scanner & taking off your shoes) with surveillance camera & monitor up in the corner of the ceiling. The wall facing the entrance was taken up with a huge TV screen with notices in many languages and a row of call-numbers for those waiting, who, by and large, were younger than I expected, and more of colour than not. Those who sat on the side-bench that ran the length of the waiting area - seats larger & softer, with better-angled backs - tended to be older and whiter; they sat with their backs to the wall, leaving the more obvious minorities under two sets of surveillance. The more obvious minorities sat in the pre-arranged, ordered rows of single plastic chairs facing the big TV, heads down, eyes on phones. The SoSec clerks sat on the other side of the room behind single, separate, (bullet-proof?) glass windows behind a half-glass walkway and wall, occasionally calling the next number. There were three armed guards. The room was silent.

The Bookstore Opens

And Speaking of Asia

I gave up on the CIA just over half-way through, just after Beirut in 1983. It was like dragging myself through dust and barbed wire. The writing was good. But the subject - the criminally insane incompetence, the smugness, the politicrats' projections of their own violent madness - and the prospect of the weeks and weeks I would need to finish the account, were destroying the only heart I have.  

 - Legacy of Ashes, Tim Weiner, Doubleday, New York, c2007. 

"It was early April and a warm rain pattered out of the sky. It polished the avenues to brilliant green, stirred stagnant ponds in the wells of numberless flat-blocks and hatched a swarm of pink umbrellas above the women. Whenever a wind blew, it seeped through the frames of my hotel window.

But little else entered the hotel. It was a parody of the self defeated Soviet world which had built it. It reeled across the sky in a cliff of balconies and porticoes. But inside everything fell to bits."

Who can resist writing like that - simultaneously evocative and incisive, subtle and energetic, open to all the winds that blow - the lovely sharp eyes, the fluent translation of blood and bone awareness? 

 - The Lost Heart of Asia, Colin Thubron, HarperCollins, New York, 1994.

Later:
Some of the book is dry and hard as the land and poverty it describes. And then Thubron realizes the jeep is running along the old bed of the Amu Dariya, cliffs layered and smoothed by the immense flow of old water, and that image stays with you. You run the eyes of your mind along that long striped stone the way you rub the side of your thumb along the small still lake of the glass on your watch-face. It soothes you. And you need soothing; you're afraid again that you're bleeding out into futility in your cubicle.

Later still:
The book ends at the easternmost point of Kyrgzstan with snow-capped peaks “hanging in nothing,” the Tien Shan mountains narrowing, funnelling the traveller to China. Thubron says that Tamerlane came this way. Above the open mouth of a long-pillaged burial mound for some Scythian or Turkic chieftain stands a slope of many thousands of coloured stones, some of ochre, some grey. Local legend has it that on his way to China, Tamerlane had each man of his army place a stone on the slope and, as they retreated, had each man remove one. He describes these remaining stones as a memorial “to waste, by the wasted.”

It's his ability to unite past, present, landscape and emotional perceptiveness into moments of lighting revelation that makes his writing so rewarding.

Siberia next.... I remember the Russia of the Cold War: dark and evil twin to the United States, threat, enemy, enigma; producer of great literature, ballet, music, art; prison empire. So I'm happy enough to follow Thubron to post-Soviet Siberia – the unimaginable weight of the sky – and to find people making sense of rubble, repairing, moving away or failing to outmanoeuvre destruction. (Knowing the shape of reality, needing precise and illuminating description that is also analysis.)

Later again:  

All through Siberia Thubron finds collapse: Communism, the economy, the basis of its past (the landscape, lichen poisoned by acid rain, the retreat of the reindeer, old lives impossible to resume); finds Dostoievskian types, stereotypes, orthodoxy and the Middle Ages ready to rise from the weeds; roses planted in a restored monastery to memorialize the dead and metaphorically represent them, still, in a gentled landscape and new consciousness; Old Believers losing their young to the internet and the cities. He finds the rotting infrastructure of the gulag, the never-ending dimensions of the ruin created by Stalin and his successors. He always, insistently, goes where people tell him he shouldn't or can't.

Everyone asks him why he is there. It seems the only answer is that he has to see, to the furthest the extremity of what can be seen.

He ends the book a stone's throw from the Arctic Circle, at Magadan, a city near one of the most infamous of the camps, Butugychag. He especially has to see this camp: apart from its reputation and history, it will be bulldozed soon. The camp will disappear as surely as its prisoners. Erasure will be erased, as though that will suspend the radioactivity in the area, the ecological ruination of Stalinism, the displacement and destruction of populations, the mechanics of society, chemistry, time.

The iron frame of the camp gates stands redundant in the debris of its towers. Beneath the snow our feet snag on objects we only guess at, and drag up barbed wire. Rusted machinery pokes above the surface. Beyond, we stumble through the wrecks of barracks and prison cells. In the roofless rooms the guards' benches are still in place, with a range of hooks for their coats. The snow lies on platform beds in hard, crystalline piles. A pair of boots is discarded by a stove. Everything emits a hand-to-mouth rusticity and squalor, Skeletal iron doors still swing on isolation cells a few feet square. The slots survive where the prisoners' gruel was pushed through, and the barred windows remain intact, and the stove in the guards' sauna.

It was the same through much of Kolyma. The prisoners lived and died in tents. Despairingly they pressed insulating moss and peat between the thin layers of canvas, sprinkled them with sawdust, and stacked boards outside. Inside was a single cast-iron stove.

And now gently, insistently, the snow is falling. It drifts over the low stumps and covers the buildings with its pale indifference. It floats through the roofless passages, the guard chambers, the rooms of administration, of neglect, of boredom. It fills the valley with a sick translucence.

Yuri goes on kicking at the tent foundations, then looks up at me. “You know, my grandfather was a village postman, who spent years in the camps for making a joke about Stalin.” (pp. 276-277)

In Siberia, Colin Thubron, HarperCollins, New York, 1999.

Here, and in The Lost Heart of Asia, Thubron sees such reduction in the basic possibility of life, in its necessary foundations (soil, water, food, workable occupations) that it's hard to know how he bears it. 

I can only imagine it's the exquisite precision of his writing, and the occasional moment of hope he witnesses, that make it possible. Those, and the fact that he brings them to us for our contemplation, also, and so, perhaps, to a cure.

Evening on the Edge of the Arafura Sea

Where it meets Darwin, and Australia looks out to Asia.

And Now for the Diamonds

The Stars Like Sand, a book of Australian SF alternative history, speculative, or otherwise non-mainstream verse, edited by P. S. Cottier and Tim Jones, is here -

i.e., is now on my bookshelf -

It contains Les Murray, Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Dorothy Porter, John Shaw Neilson, S.K. Kelen, Philip Salom, Les Wicks, Dorothy Hewett, and me

- & I can't help smiling.

& so my thanks to the editors & conceivers & pushers & doers of this project. Nothing like this is easy.

The Legacy of Ashes

I'm up to the Bay of Pigs, or between a quarter and a third of the way through, Legacy of ashes : the history of the CIA.*

The CIA was deeply lunatic from the git-go. (James Jesus Angleton was a champion alcoholic who shared his operational details beforehand with Kim Philby. For example.)

As always, I'm at a loss. Which aspect of the tale renders me speechless? The epic criminality or the epic incompetence? The kabuki nature of the the Cold War or its hundreds of thousands of real murders?

The one thing that comes reeking off the pages is that every one of these CIA planner-motherfuckers - before or after lunch or electroshock - operated with a sense of impunity.

===

*Legacy of ashes : the history of the CIA / Tim Weiner, Doubleday, New York, 2007.