Prophet Song by Paul Lynch

My rating: 2.5 of 5 stars


Paul Lynch‘s Prophet Song, which won the Booker Prize in 2023, follows the general rules of a horror story, with Ireland’s descent into brutal authoritarianism serving as the source of the terror. The plot focuses on Eilish, a molecular biologist at a biotech company whose husband is involved in the teachers’ union. As the country falls under the control of an authoritarian regime, he comes under government scrutiny for a planned protest march. As in a horror novel, the situation keeps getting worse and worse. And Eilish continually makes bad choices that put her and her children at risk.

The prose is dense, with no paragraph breaks and long, winding sentences. I recently finished another book that uses a similar technique, Satantango by the Nobel prize-winning Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai. Whereas Krasznahorkai uses this style to make you feel drenched in the rain and mired in the mud that permeates the landscape, Lynch undermines the claustrophobic effect he’s creating with breathlessly lyrical, propulsive prose that keep driving you forward. The sentences seem to tumble so forcefully at times, you’re almost compelled to skim.

I also found the metaphor-laden writing style distracting. It was vivid and beautiful at times, but often became as numbing as the situation Eilish finds herself in. It also gets too repetitious. Lynch repeatedly describes the darkness that is consuming her. “Dark’ and its variations are used relentlessly. According to my e-reader, it appeared more than 150 times.

What lifts this above a genre novel is the question of why Eilish doesn’t leave when she has clear chances to. In traditional horror, such choices are often left unexplained or excused as someone just making bad choices. This novel challenges the reader to ask what they would do. Eilish herself is presented as something of a void. Her thoughts and feelings are heavily abstracted through the symbolic writing. As the story progresses, you don’t understand why she makes the choices she does. She often seems to be in shock and completely out of it, but then unexpectedly acts decisively. Still, she won’t leave when it’s the obvious choice.

Many people around the world live through such horrors because they have no choice. They’re not able to escape. I’m not sure what Lynch was getting at with Eilish’s story. While the novel was gripping and upsetting, it crucially never addresses the why of the events around them. Why has this society descended into such cruel madness? Even the conflict raging around them is never explained, just accepted. The details were presumably left out to make the situation seem universal, but without filling in such blanks, it’s hard for the reader to seriously consider the question of why people like Eilish choose to stay.

Prophet Song gives no answers, which would be okay, but I’m not even sure what questions it was trying to raise. I also wish the end were better thought out. Without giving anything away, while it was somewhat satisfying emotionally, it grew trite upon reflection and, in a way, was almost as dismissive of the characters as the authoritarian regime was.

Satantango by László Krasznahorkai

My rating: 4.5 of 5 stars


I’ve long been meaning to watch Béla Tarr’s acclaimed film Satantango, which was adapted from László Krasznahorkai‘s novel. Krasznahorkai won the Nobel Prize last year, and I’d not read any of his work before, so when Tarr died recently, it seemed the time to try Krasznahorkai’s first novel and then watch the film.

Satantango takes place on a failed, decaying agricultural collective whose last denizens have seemingly lost any hope for their future. The story centers around Irimiás, who was thought to have died 18 months earlier but is now spotted walking toward the estate. His appearance kindles irrational hopes that he will be their savior. The constantly rain-drenched action moves like a drunken tango, taking steps backward, forward, and circling around. Krasznahorkai drops you into scenes with no framing or context, often giving you a sense of confusion and displacement. When Irimiás is introduced, for example, he’s not named for several pages. By the third chapter, though, I’d learned to trust Krasznahorkai’s approach.

When novels embrace ambiguity as this one does and don’t easily conform to the familiar novel structure, people often call them “meditations on” something. Satantango could be seen as a mediation on hopelessness, the nihilism that can arise from it, and how easily people can be manipulated when they sink into this state. But beneath the deception of Krasznahorkai’s long, convoluted sentences and his utter lack of paragraph breaks, a fairly conventional progression emerges, even if the way it’s told isn’t linear. The plot itself might have made for a short story, but it is the undercurrent of ideas that make this novel succeed. Without giving away any spoilers, the ending is wonderful, bringing the story full circle–the last chapter is called “The Circle Closes.”

Despite its unconventionality, I didn’t find the novel particularly difficult. I think it took me less time than watching Tarr’s beautiful but grinding movie version. It’s best to read through it slowly and thoughtfully, though. To me, it seemed a declaration by this then-emerging artist: for humanity in the face of despair, faith in the face of hopelessness, and creativity in the face of bleakness. Although it’s hard to completely love a book of such cheerlessness, Satantango truly is a great novel.

Unfortunately, I found watching the movie tedious afterward. I’m not sure how I would have felt if I’d seen the movie first and then read the novel. The film very closely follows the novel, but there are inevitably things you understand when reading that the screen just can’t convey.

Monstrilio by Gerardo Sámano Córdova

My rating: 3.5 of 5 stars


Gerardo Sámano Córdova‘s first novel Monstrilio begins as a couple’s young son dies, and his mother, in grief, excavates a piece of his lung to keep. His father, discovering the mutilated body, is horrified.

This brief prologue is told in a third-person voice. The point of view next switches to Magos, the boy’s mother, and the story continues as an allegory of grief: She nurtures the lung until it forms a sentient creature. From here, the novel splits tonally between the theme of grief and the fun of this quirky creature. “Lung,” as Magos calls him at first, is cute and mischievous, like a cat given to extremely violent episodes when it gets hungry.

The book splits further as it progresses, driven by a narrative structure that’s revealed from the beginning. After Magos, it switches to Magos’s old friend Lena, then the boy’s father Joseph, and finally, Monstrilio himself. This splitting allows Córdova to focus on other aspects of the story, but it also dilutes the effectiveness of the themes he’s developed. The voices aren’t very distinct, and the characters are coarsely drawn. In the end, Monstrilio is the only one we understand well. The others make inexplicable choices that serve more to complicate Monstrilio’s life than anything else. This approach would be fine if the book were a silly rollick, but it certainly wasn’t set up that way.

As it progresses, the novel focuses more on homosexuality and otherness than on grief and loss. Much of this aspect seems forced, grafted awkwardly onto the players. I would have liked to have seen the characters and themes that were set up at the beginning developed and played out more thoroughly. In general, though, Monstrilio is an enjoyable read, and Monstrilio himself a remarkable creation. Without the unconvincing detours, it might have been a fantastic short story. I’ll be interested to see what Córdova comes up with next.

My Specific Awe and Wonder: Poems by Reuben Jackson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I first came to know of Reuben Jackson as the host of the radio jazz program “The Sound of Surprise” on WPFW in Washington, D.C. It was my son who encountered him as a poet at the American Poetry Museum, an outreach museum where Jackson worked on weekends giving advice to and mentoring young poets. I met him only a couple of times before he died in February 2024 of a stroke. After his death, I learned of his years in Vermont and discovered that one of my writing colleagues knew him from his life there.

My Specific Awe and Wonder: Poems is a collection that Jackson was working on before his death. His publisher says he called it “a love letter to Vermont…with all the potholes visible.” It’s a consistently excellent collection, opening with a section about Vermont, particularly his experience of being a Black man there. This is followed by a set of witty, incisive persona poems supposedly written by a cranky friend named Kelly Donaldson. Next is a section of travel poems and then copies of handwritten drafts of several more poems paired with typed versions.

The collection holds thoughtful insights into being a Black American, both at home and abroad, but Jackson has too broad a lens to focus on our differences. One poem, “East Barre,” begins with the lines:

The salesclerk claimed that the snow fell
with a Vermont accent.

It seems a good characterization of the collection’s overall vibe.

The fairly small volume also opens with a tribute poem by Rajnii Eddins and ends with a transcription of a voicemail that Jackson left his publisher in December 2023 with a wonderful draft poem, “How to Get There, 11th Grade Mix.” Jackson’s last words on the voicemail are an apt conclusion: “Thanks for listening. Keep on keeping on, okay? These are trying times. Trying AF. Bye-bye.”

Jackson’s poetry has been published in many anthologies. This final collection of warm, wide-ranging poems is a great addition to his body of work.

The Joke by Milan Kundera

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Milan Kundera‘s The Joke is a complicated novel. It takes place against a background of initial enthusiasm over the Communist Party takeover of Czechoslovakia, which is replaced by disillusion as authoritarianism and bureaucratic corruption create a state of decay.

Ludvik, the main character, is a faithful member of the Communist party and a true believer. The “joke” that sparks the novel’s action is a silly, snide comment on a postcard that he writes in frustration to provoke an infuriatingly humorless love interest: “Optimism is the opiate of the people! A healthy atmosphere stinks of stupidity! Long live Trotsky!”

Seeing this as a statement against the party, she hands it over to the authorities. Ludvik’s friends then turn against him, and he is expelled from the party and sent to work in the mines at a military camp. His anger consumes him and years later, once he is out and living comfortably, he sees an opportunity to get revenge on a former friend who betrayed him. He seizes it and commits a cringey, despicable act with disastrous results.

The book’s title works on many levels. Beyond the postcard that serves as the spark for the novel’s action, the bigger joke is on Ludvik, and on greater society for embracing a corrosive, destructive force that crushes their souls. Trotsky advocated for a decentralized form of planning that focused on workers’ control. He criticized the bureaucracy and anti-democratic tendencies of the Soviet state, believing in continuous change driven by workers. Over the course of his life, he was arrested, exiled, and eventually assassinated in 1940 by a Stalinist agent. Trotsky was an idealist crushed by the power of the state, and Ludvik can be seen in much the same way. Despite the novel’s age (it came out in 1967, delayed for two years by the Communist party) and setting, it serves as a chillingly relevant cautionary tale for us today.

The Joke works simultaneously on personal, philosophical, and societal levels. Its critiques about how both capitalism and communism, when used in the wrong ways, can harm the individual, are sobering. But it is a bit clunky and difficult to get through. This was Kundera’s first novel, and it’s told from four different points of view, which can be confusing, as their voices aren’t easy to tell apart. The last section rotates among three perspectives without any of the headers that preceded it, and I had trouble distinguishing two of the voices except from the context of their stories. The fourth perspective, which appears only in one fairly long, solid block, is almost an authorial voice, revealing secrets about Ludvik’s love interest from years ago that Ludvik never had any idea about. How the man came to know about this and then convey it to Ludvik depends on ridiculous coincidences, although it was probably the most entertaining part of the book.

Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


The Venetian explorer Marco Polo met Kublai Khan, the first emperor of the Yuan dynasty of China, in the 1270’s. Kublai Khan was impressed with Marco Polo and made him foreign emissary, after which Marco Polo traveled throughout his empire for years. Italo Calvino‘s quirkly 1972 novel Invisible Cities imagines Marco Polo’s descriptions of the cities he finds and the conversations between the two during their meetings.

Marco Polo’s descriptions of the different cities are fanciful and wildly imaginative. Many of them touch on the themes of how cities change and remake themselves. For example, in Maurilia, the traveler is invited to examine old post cards that show the city as it used to be while they stand in the identical spaces. They are constantly expected to praise the magnificence of the new metropolis while acknowledging that it couldn’t compensate for a certain lost grace. Another of my favorite cities was Fedora, which has at its center a metal building with a crystal globe in each room with a model of Fedora as people imagined at the time it could ideally develop. In the speculative descriptions of all these imaginary cities, this novel reminded me of Einstein’s Dreams (which came later, in 1992), in which Einstein dreams of difference conceptions of time.

The cities are divided into different categories: Cities & Memory, Cities & Desire, Thin Cities, etc. They’re also numbered within these groups. The order in which the categories appear seemed random to me when I was reading it, but on doing some research, I found that Calvino followed a mathematical pattern, designing the book as a geometric shape that the reader can approach in different ways–for example, by reading all the cities in each category together.

While clever, I don’t think this overall design adds anything to the novel, and it potentially detracts. There are key conversations near the end between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan that give insight into the existential questions Calvino is getting at. Reading these earlier would give away the game, so while the city descriptions may be read out of order, I don’t think the conversations should be, which to me undercuts this “mathematical” scheme.

Invisible Cities doesn’t reach the wildly inventive heights of Cosmicomics and didn’t resonate emotionally with me like the wonderful If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. But it’s creative and thought-provoking. In the end, it’s not clear to either the readers or the characters what is real and what isn’t, a common theme in Calvino’s work.

This is a thoughtful read overall. It’s also short and can be picked up, put down, read out of order, and come back to later. It’s worth checking out if you like existential and experimental novels.

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


After reading Barbara Kingsolver‘s Demon Copperhead, I felt the need to revisit the book it was based on, Charles Dickens‘ David Copperfield. I’d first read it during or soon after college, and it’s stood in my mind ever since as one of my favorite novels. It has lovable characters, an expansive plot, and social commentary delivered with a sugar coating.

Reading it again 35+ years later, I found it just as wonderful as the first time. Despite all the trauma David is subjected to as he strives to become the hero of his own life (as he puts it in the first sentence), this manages to be a cozy, comforting read. It’s a tale of optimism, friendship, and love in the face of adversity. Unlike Kingsolver in her play on this story, Dickens never loses his main character in outrage at his circumstances.

Some people see Dickens’ characters as little more than caricatures, but I don’t think that’s true. In our high-pressure society, with TVs and phones and computers fighting for our attention, we’re constantly filing off our rough edges for others. These were different times, when people didn’t follow their favorite celebrities’ every habit. Many lived in isolation and developed particular quirks and habits that Dickens was very attuned to. I’m not sure he exaggerated all that much.

That said, this sprawling, expansive novel doesn’t stand out for its realism. One thing that particularly jars is David’s angelic first love, which is ridiculously over the top, and then too easily resolved. But the intricate plot is excellent overall, and you meet numerous wonderful characters along the way, like Betsy Trotwood, Wilkins Micawber, and Mr. Dick. So while it may not be a perfect novel, it’s still one of the greats for me.

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


My wife can attest to the fact that, ever since reading David Copperfield thirty-five or so years ago, I’ve half-jokingly talked about the novel I intended to write about a poor boy from Brooklyn, David Cooperstein, finding his way in the world. I suppose I could still do it, but Barbara Kingsolver will have already taken the wind out of my sails, as her take on David Copperfield set in Appalachia, Demon Copperhead, has been a huge success, winning the Pulitzer Prize and others.

Like David Copperfield, Demon Copperhead is a gripping read. It follows the general outline of Dickens’s semi-autobiographical classic (his best novel, in my opinion as well as Dickens’s) down to the characters and many events. Even when the parallels became forced, they made me smile, as if I were listening to a jazz group’s version of an old classic. Overall, the book raced along and kept my interest throughout its thousand plus pages on my e-reader.

Kingsolver’s tale is tonally very different than Dickens’s, though. It isn’t nearly as warming, for one. This is partly from necessity, I think. Dickens highlighted poverty, the cruelty of child labor, and other social issues in Victorian life. To do this, he created a cast of memorable characters for readers to love, a sweet coating to deliver a bitter medicine. In Kingsolver’s case, assuming that people generally know about poverty and the opioid crisis, her book slaps you in the face with the reality of it, practically screaming, “Pay attention!” There are harsh, extended segments dealing with the consequences of addiction that reminded me of The Story of Christiane F. more than anything by Dickens. And people often behave despicably, including many who should be helping Demon.

Demon Copperhead is a great achievement, no doubt, and very effective in many ways, but it works more as social criticism than a beloved novel. The main problem is that Demon has little agency. Things happen to him, not because of the choices he makes. David Copperfield famously begins, “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.” Dickens’s novel is about the formation of a complete person. Demon Copperhead, in contrast, is foremost about the societal problems, particularly the oppressive effects of poverty and drug addiction. It begins, “First I got myself born. A decent crowd was on hand to watch, and they’ve always given me that much: the worst of the job was up to me, my mother being let’s just say out of it.” It’s passive, resigned, and cynical.

This tone runs throughout the book. Even though it’s told from Demon’s point of view, his life choices seem imposed on him, as if he’s had no say in the matter. In the end, this makes it a less satisfying book than it could have been. While Demon is saved in the end, he gives little thought as to the consequences of his own actions or why he was lucky enough to be saved.

That all said, if my David Cooperstein turns out half as good as this, I’d be pretty happy with myself. Demon Copperhead is an important book highlighting social problems we should be paying a lot more attention to, and well worth reading.