Best of 2013: Three Books That Weren't Able to be Read in Time for Consideration

It is always inevitable, that no matter how much I try to plan reads ahead of time or how fast I can read, that there are always books that fly under my radar until it is too late in the year to read them or that something comes up in the way of me getting around to reading it before the rush of the holidays and the year-end posts (and the last-minute reads that I do manage to cram in, sometimes minutes before I do write-ups on various categories).

I just finished reading my 400th and last book for the year and have met or surpassed every single reading goal that I set for 2013.  That reading list will be posted later today if I have time or (more likely) on Wednesday afternoon before I go to work.  But here are three books (one I purchased last week, the other is arriving by UPS today, and the third I've had on my shelf for two months, awaiting the time that I can go through it carefully to see which elements I can lift and alter in case I have to teach English as well as ESL in the upcoming semester) that likely would have garnered at least some consideration for the category shortlists, if not the Top 25 itself:

3.  Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, The Mirror of Beauty

I had this book recommended to me on Twitter on Christmas night by Musharraf Ali Farooqi (2012 Man Asian Prize finalist; review here) and the premise is very promising for this novel that was only just recently released in the US in English translation from Urdu.  Hardcover copy should arrive today.

2.  Michael Cisco, Member

I think Cisco is one of the finest writers writing in the English language today, so it was to my great chagrin that it wasn't until a week or so ago (I believe it was on a Facebook post by Jeff VanderMeer) that I learned that Member had been out since mid-October.  Just not enough time to read it before the new year, alas, as I wouldn't have been surprised if it would crack my Top 25 list if I had somehow had the time to read it.

1.  Jeff VanderMeer, Wonderbook

I have been very curious about this "fully illustrated writing book" ever since Jeff started talking about it around two years ago.  A casual thumbing through has revealed quite a few interesting lines of thought when it comes to the art and craft of writing, but this book deserves much more time from me than I have been able to manage during the past two months.  It will be read in small segments during the early months of 2014 and I might just take a few notes to see how I could apply it in the classroom if I were to teach English/writing full-time again.

More thoughts on Michael Cisco's The Narrator

As a coda to the three-pronged review of Michael Cisco's The Narrator that went live back on December 18, Jeff VanderMeer has posted his own take, both on his personal blog and on Omnivoracious.  It is a fitting way to honor such a writer as Cisco, I do believe...

Michael Cisco, The Narrator

Michael Cisco's 2010 novel, The Narrator, is the third book to be reviewed by a weird troika of lit critics (and authors and translators).  This time, we have secretly replaced Jeff VanderMeer's review space with that of J.M. McDermott's.  Paul Smith now has his review up as well.

An army is a horror.  It's a horrible thing.  They say you might change your mind about that when the country is invaded and your people are suffering wrong, but for me this is all just more horror, more army-horror.

It's through rags of fast-moving smoke that I first catch sight of Tref.  I'm standing in the pass, to one side of the pumice road, looking down from my perch on the massed roots of some dusty old cork oaks.  The city below me is like a shining, smoking lake, thrusting its troubled glints into my eyes and make them smart.  Overhead, the sun is lost in a white sky without circumference, above the flashing waters of the city. (p. 5)

For the past ten years or so, Michael Cisco has been one of "those" authors, writers whose talents are recognized by those in the know, but who have never enjoyed a mass readership.  His most recent novel, The Narrator, is perhaps simultaneously his most "accessible" (if such an execrable adjective might be employed here) and his most accomplished and sophisticated work to date.  Cisco is a master stylist, who creates dark, twisted, imaginative vistas from the juxtaposition of adjectives.  Take for instance the opening paragraphs quoted above.  We learn that the narrator, whose name incidentally is Low, is narrating a war.  However, we quickly move away from the clichéd "war is hell/horror" motif and into a setting that is strange, full of "fast-moving smoke," with a city being akin to a "shining, smoking lake" while the sky is white.  Wherever this setting might be, we're no longer in Kansas, Toto.

Cisco's stories tend to be quite atmospheric, going beyond lush, descriptive landscapes.  People too make up an environment and in one early scene, he foreshadows certain thematic (and plot) elements by his portrayal of two segregated and yet complementary religious orders:

A carefully ramified division of labor regulates the operation of the life and death priests.  Life priests, urbane, serene, dressed in satiny white and cream gowns, preside at weddings, tend the sick and perform healings when they can; death priests, subdolous and mordant, dressed in shabby subfusc, officiate at funerals, conduct autopsies and embalm bodies, attend to the dying and insane, and cast our even imbibe possessing demons.  Life priests are permitted and encouraged to marry; death priests, while not enjoined to celibacy, are forbidden to marry or to bear children... There is no enmity between these two groups of priests, although they are compelled to avoid each other as a rule in order to maintain a pure distinction.  When they do meet, a complicated protocol governs the exchange of formalities.  In fact, since no one is ever born in the death precincts, all death priests are delivered into this life by life priests of the previous generation.  Naturally, all life priests are ushered into whatever dream comes after by the generation of death priests who will bury them in the death district.  (pp. 13-14)

In his previous works, Cisco tended to rely more on elements such as this to create the "weirdness" that served as a thematic staple in his stories.  Here in The Narrator, at 307 pages his longest work to date, he goes further.  Through the character of the Narrator Low, he explores not just the weirdness of the locale and the strangeness (and hell) of war, but the very semantics that underlie our conceptualizations of the world and the medium of language used to express it.  Several authors utilize the "unreliable narrator" trope to underscore the hidden undercurrents of the narrative, but Cisco is one of the few authors I have encountered who have attempted to undermine the very narrative structure itself through the creation of a character whose purpose is to tell and retell events until the events are forgotten and what is left becomes Story.

As someone whose original field of study was cultural history, I quickly became intrigued by Cisco's plumbing of the semantic depths that bind together the two main strands of historia, History and Story alike.  At first, the war Story took some getting used to; frequently, events felt disjointed and out of sequence.  Then a little over halfway into the novel, things become crystallized in an encounter between Low and another narrator:

Makemin is a good narrator.  He has his own story, a revenge story, and its power has revived in the men the will to fight.  He will get his way.  They will fight.  They believe him.  I failed.  I failed as a narrator, because I didn't tell them that I had had to get my pack from where it fell and was tangled in the bracken by the path, and that Makemin was wrong to believe himself alone in the moments after he struck me. (p. 195)

From this point, The Narrator begins to come into its own as a narrative about narratives and the weird interstices that underlie memory, communication, and the symbols embedded in the actions of which we partake and the words we speak.  What becomes apparent by the novel's end is not the paramount value of "Truth," but that "truths" can emerge that have little in common with the events that engendered them.  I hesitate to say this is the "point" of the story, as I believe Cisco is exploring (and deconstructing) several other points in addition to this one, but certainly this is a key element that I took from The Narrator. 

The Narrator is Cisco's most engaging work, as the reader has the trappings of a war/army narrative to grasp as an entry portal.  Prior knowledge of his earlier writings is not necessary, although there are a few glimpses here and there that hint at some deeper connection with his earlier tales, although these never intrude upon the narrative core.  As stated above, Cisco's descriptive, evocative prose signals the alienation felt by the characters and it is this sense of estrangement that makes this novel a captivating read even for those readers who are not fain to read such narratives.  Highly recommended.

Best of 2007: Anthologies and Story Collections

I made it my goal this year to read more anthologies and short story collections by particular authors. Although I still have a few stories here and there to finish in some of these, I have read enough of the following to justify splitting this into two separate categories, one for anthologies and one for collections by one or two authors. I'll announce my Top 3 picks in each category on Monday in my Best of 2007 writeup.

Anthologies:

Ann and Jeff VanderMeer (eds.), Best American Fantasy

George Mann (ed.), The Solaris Book of New Fantasy

Delia Sherman and Theodora Goss (eds.), Interfictions: An Anthology of Interstitial Writing

John Klima (ed.), Logorrhea

Keith Brooke and Nick Gevers (eds.), Infinity Plus: The Anthology

Kelly Link and Gavin Grant (eds.), The Best of Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet

Peter Wild (ed.), The Flash


Story Collections:

Margo Lanagan, Red Spikes

Sarah Monette, The Bone Key

Richard Parks, Worshipping Small Gods

Michael Cisco, Secret Hours

Cat Rambo and Jeff VanderMeer, The Surgeon's Tale and Other Tales

Tim Pratt, Hart & Boot & Other Stories

I have some very tough decisions ahead. Oh, and in the coming days, do expect some reviews of some of those works above that I have yet to review here.

Best of 2007 Countdown: Michael Cisco, The Traitor

I will write down now who I am and some of my story, not so that you who read this, if there is anyone there, may understand me, since, in any case, you can't understand me; there is no way my story could make you understand me. I'm writing my story to prove that I understand it, and I can't help repeating it over and over to myself simply because that is all there is left of me. I favor it more for the useless details that remind me of how I used to be, not that I miss anything. Now I am nothing at all like I was, although I believe I am now what I had originally intended to be.

I write this first so I may arrive at my testament through these memories, as I arrived at where I am now through these times I'm remembering. If I don't write beautifully, it's because I'm trying to be honest, and because the taste of blood in my mouth reminds me how little time remains for me, how litle time there is to polish words.

Nophtha, the first-person narrator of Michael Cisco's The Traitor, is a spirit eater, charged with bringing spirits into himself, preventing malady and madness while allowing people to let go of the spirits of the past. He was commissioned by his government to hunt down a soul burner (one who consumed the spirits for personal aggrandizement rather than for the social good) named Wite. However, as Nophtha's fevered and deranged journal will show, Nophtha ends up betraying his commission, instead seeking to become like Wite (now like a force of nature), but failing rather miserably at the end.

While the paragraph above gives a skeleton outline of the novel, one has to read this with a mindset similar to what one would need for reading and appreciating Dostoyevsky's Notes from the Underground. Like Dostoyevsky's nameless narrator, Nophtha is a spirit being consumed from within. The passages contained within this short 149 page novel are full of sentiments such as the one I quoted above and this one:

I will die and die and die but I am ready, I'm going stronger than I came, I will die spitting the saliva of my outrage at them, moreover coughing the bloody pieces of my testament at them, my gentle guards and the soldiers down below, the city all around and the palace out of my sight and their brainless music-box of a King. I won't die cowering I have my Wite and Tzdze Tamt and "blunder" Illan and Voy, Xchte and uncle Heckler and tired dying imaginary Nophtha on the floor writing in his cell and seizing you at the last moment, I'm rising for the last time to seize you for one more moment, the gleam of Wite's spectacles is hovering over your shoulder! No one will be spared, whatever so-called good deeds you've done, your tepidity and every so-called evil soul in the world will be devastated all the same.

In the end, this "traitor" has performed so many acts of betrayal on so many levels, that a close reading of this fevered narrative will almost certainly inspire reactions ranging from empathy to outright disgust in the reader. The Traitor stands out among the 2007 releases that I have read due to its vivid imagery and the masterful way that Cisco uses the deranged first-person narrative to create a world that is full of shadows (light as well as darkness), hinting at a profoundness that goes deeper than the narrator's own twisted pathway to a personal hell of his own making.

Four Fictions

Occasionally, I read a handful of books in rapid succession that while I believe they merit a consideration from readers, I just do not know if I can say much more than "Book X is one of those you had to experience it stories that you really ought to read!" The first two of the four I want to discuss today are the third and fourth volumes in the Leviathan series that Jeff VanderMeer (and continued later by Forrest Aguirre) began as a way of collecting stories that had a bit of this and a dash of that, making it in the end neither the fish of "mainstream" nor the fowl of "traditional" fantasy. Those who have read much of the "modern surrealistic fantasy" or "New Weird" styles of storytelling will recognize authors such as K.J. Bishop, Jay Lake, Michael Moorcock, Zoran Živković, and many others whose commonalities are not as much an inner congruence of motifs between their works as much as a shared sense of wonder and exploration that has led to an increasing estrangement from the prior models for fantasy and "mainstream" short fiction.

Leviathan Three is the larger (almost 500 pages) of the two and its stories are not as thematically obvious as the fourth (which deals with cities of various forms). This collection of tales of madness and of the seeking of other experiences has as its cornerstone the various "library" stories of Živković that comprise his WFA-winning novella, "The Library." Although I shall not explore the ways in which these stories interact to form a larger and very imaginative whole, suffice to say that I consider this anthology to be one of the "must read" books of the past generation. The stories are impressive and the contributors' list will serve curious readers as a touch stone for the more surrealistic (or "New Weird") stories being lauded today by many readers.

Leviathan 4, on the other hand, is not quite nearly as sprawling or attention-grabbing as its immediate predecessor. However, there are quite a few stories contained within (Lake's story makes up the germ of his latter 2006 release, Trial of Flowers, if I'm not mistaken) that ought to appeal to fans of authors such as Lake and Bishop, not to mention newer and more obscure authors such as Ben Peek. There is a greater sense of story unity, as an urban setting is the central theme of the collection and most of the stories use this setting in various ways to drive their stories forward. In many cases, the authors here manage to imbue their urban surroundings with a sense of alienness that makes the cities as much of a "living" character as the sentient beings transversing them.

One author from this series that I purposely neglected to mention until now is Michael Cisco. In the past month, I have read two 2007 releases of his, the short story collection Secret Hours and the just-released novel called The Traitor. In each of them, Cisco displays a fascination with using words to create a stunning visual image, depending upon often-fragile 1st person narrators to capture the reader's attention and to force them to confront the odd and sometimes terrifying world in which his stories take place. Secret Hours contains 14 stories that purportedly were written as an homage of sorts to H.P. Lovecraft and in some of them, this influence (especially in the establishment of a spooky atmospheric setting) is quite evident. While I personally enjoyed many of these stories, I don't know if they would be straightforward enough for many readers who might prefer a more gradual amping of the action than Cisco's stutter-step approach here.

Cisco's recent novel, The Traitor, however is not only more "accessible," but it also contains one of the most powerful stories I've read of the 2007 releases. The title references quite a few layers of possible "betrayals," and the main character (again a 1st person narrator whose reliability can be called into question) seems to have as much in common with a sort of "criminal" associate of his as he does with those around him. While not strictly an allegory, the way that Cisco constructs the story lends itself to being viewed in that way as much as being taken in for a story of struggle, of human identity, and a whole host of other issues that I shall not discuss here due to the nature of this posting. However, those who do consider reading this work are in for an experience that I believe will move many much more than what they might expect when confronted with a 150 page paperback.

So here they are: four fictions, two of them related anthologies, two of them recent releases by a single author who appears in one of the prior anthologies. Each contains at least traces of surrealist influence on how setting is warped, each contains stories that deal with the fractured natures of that pesky thing called "identity." Each are well worth the effort involved in reading them.