by Selva Almada, translated from the Spanish by Annie McDermott ()

Yesterday, on Twitter, I promised that the rest of this month’s posts on new books in translation would be way more positive, but, well, sorry everyone—I momentarily forgot which books I was planning on writing about today (and next week). Let’s kick this off with a page from the “epilogue” to Dead Girls, which also serves as the book’s main thesis:

The new year began a month ago. In that time, at least ten women have been killed for being women. I say at least because these are the names that appeared in the papers, the ones that counted as news.

Mariela Bustos, stabbed twenty-two times, in Las Caleras, Córdoba. Marina Soledad Da Silva, beaten and thrown down a well, inn Nemesio Parma, Misiones. Zulma Brochero, knifed in the forehead, and Arnulfa Ríos, shot, both in Río Segundo, Córdoba. Paola Tomé, strangled, in Junín, Buenos Aires. Priscila Lafuente, beaten to death, half-burned on a barbecue and then thrown in a stream, in Berazategui. Carolina Arcos, killed with a blow to the head, on a building site in Rafaela, Santa Fe. Nanci Molina, stabbed, in Presidencia de la Plaza, Chaco. Luciana Rodríguez, beaten to death, in the capital of Mendoza. Querlinda Vásquez, strangled, in Las Heras, Santa Cruz.

We’re in summer now and it’s hot, almost like the morning of November 16th, 1986, when, in a way, this book began to be written, when the dead girl crossed my path. Now I’m forty and, unlike her and the thousands of women murdered in my country since then, I’m still alive. Purely a matter of luck.

The most frustrating aspect of this book is also its main point: women are murdered, over and over and over, and justice is never served. (All this summer I’ve had the opening line to A Frolic of His Own��stuck in my head: “Justice? —You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law.”) And in Dead Girls, you don’t even get the law.

The book centers around three murders that took place in “the interior” of Argentina in the 1980s, when Selva Almada was a teenager. Andrea Danne was stabbed to death in her own bed, without putting up a struggle. María Luisa Quevedo went missing in December 1983 and was found raped and strangled “on a patch of wasteland on the outskirts of the city. No one was tried for the murder.” And Sarita Mundín disappeared on March 12th, 1988, and declared dead when remains were found nine months later “on the banks of the Tcalamochita river [. . .] Another unresolved case.”

Over the course of the book, Almada talks to living relatives of the three girls, Andrea Danne’s boyfriend at the time of her murder, even a medium, but nothing is ever uncovered, the murderers are never found out, never arrested, never tried, never convicted. She details a number of suspects, of “likely” possibilities, all without resolution. This lack of closure is taken to an extreme with Sarita Mundín. With the advent of DNA testing, her bones were exhumed and tested. The body her sister thought was Sarita’s wasn’t. She could still be alive, although that’s not the consolation for her sister that one might hope for—instead, her sister believes that she was sold into the sex trade.

Bleak and unforgiving,��Dead Girls��draws attention to the secondary horror of violence in society. Not only are woman constantly in physical danger (and not just women—this book could be written about Black Americans or members of the trans community or, god, I can’t finish this list), but their murders are often left unresolved or, way too frequently, uninvestigated.

One other note: In a way,��Dead Girls�����Ի���Mothers Don’t��by Katixa Agirre (available in Basque and Spanish, forthcoming in English) are mirrors of one another. In the case of Dead Girls, it’s billed as fiction, but is almost entirely true. (And reads more like an investigation than an invention.) In the case of��Mothers Don’t, it reads like an autofictional true-crime book about a woman who kills her child, but it’s completely fabricated. Both deal with tough subjects in differing ways, and would be interesting to read in conversation with each other. (In a couple years when Mothers Don’t comes out, that is.)

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��by Alain Mabanckou, translated from the French by Helen Stevenson () is the ninth book of Mabanckou’s to appear in English (although maybe only the eighth to be available in the U.S.? I’m confused by the status of Black Bazaar) and his works generally receive a decent amount of review coverage and buzz. Personally, I still love����the best, but it’s probably because that was the first one I read . . . I haven’t seen this yet, but it totally fits with my “death” theme for this post:

Mabanckou’s riotous new novel, The Death of Comrade President, returns to the 1970s milieu of his awarding-winning novel��Black Moses, telling the story of Michel, a daydreamer whose life is completely overthrown when, in March 1977, just before the arrival of the rainy season, Congo’s Comrade President Marien Ngouabi is brutally murdered. Thanks to his mother’s kinship with the president, not even naive Michel can remain untouched. And if he is to protect his family, Michel must learn to lie.

Moving seamlessly between the small-scale worries of everyday life and the grand tragedy of postcolonial politics, Mabanckou explores the nuances of the human soul through the naive perspective of a boy who learns the realities of life—and how much must change for everything to stay the same.

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��by Davide Sisto, translated from the Italian by Bonnie McClellan-Broussard ()��sounds fascinating:

Facebook is the biggest cemetery in the world, with countless acres of cyberspace occupied by snapshots, videos, thoughts, and memories of people who have shared their last status updates. Modern society usually hides death from sight, as if it were a character flaw and not an ineluctable fact. But on Facebook and elsewhere on the internet, we can’t avoid death; digital ghosts—electronic traces of the dead—appear at our click or touch. On the Internet at least, death has once again become a topic for public discourse. In��Online Afterlives, Davide Sisto considers how digital technology is changing our relationship to death.

Sisto describes the various modes of digital survival after biological death—including Facebook tributes, chatbots programmed to speak in the voice of a dead person, and QR codes on headstones—and discusses their philosophical ramifications. Sisto reports on such phenomena as the Tweet Hereafter, a website that collects people’s last tweets; the intimacy of sending a WhatsApp message to someone who has died; and digital cremation, the deactivation of a dead person’s account. Because we can mingle with the dead online almost as we mingle with the living, he warns, we may find it difficult to distinguish communication at a distance from communication with the dead. The digital afterlife has restored the communal dimension of death, rescuing both mourners and the mourned from social isolation. A society willing to engage with death and mortality, Sisto argues, is a more balanced and mature society.

It also reminds me that a) I need to clear out my browser history more often, and delete my Twitter at least once a mental breakdown, and b) that the��Black Mirror��episode “” is trippy as shit.

But what I really want to write is about . I didn’t know Randall very well, but there are few human beings I think on with as much tenderness and respect and admiration as I do Randall. We met in Marfa in 2016 when we were both on Lannan Fellowships, and, in addition to a few interactions at readings and receptions, all of us who were there at the time (Amitava Kumar and Timothy Donnelly were also there) had the most amazing going away party for him. Aside from him warning me about (first I’d heard of them! but Randall was nervous about being out too late with these things around—and ) and telling me to email him next time I’m in Chapel Hill, I don’t remember any of the specifics of that conversation. Nevertheless, my memory is steeped in a warm glow, a sense of rightness and goodness. (I also very clearly remember his smile. Not just from that day, but from all our encounters. He had a really fantastic smile.)�� In the back of my mind, I’ve assumed for years that I would see him again someday in Chapel Hill and hang out. (And that I would read the giant novel he was working on in Marfa as soon as it was published.) And then, I found out, through John Keene’s social media, that Randall had passed away.

And as much as I want to rail against social media, and am afraid to read this book because of the philosophical issues surrounding death that it inevitably must bring up (my next birthday isn’t too far away, which makes this primetime for mortality thinking), I do have to say that the tributes and photos and memories being shared about Randall are really touching.

(There will be a for Randall on September 20th at 4pm eastern.)

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by Vigdis Hjorth, translated from the Norwegian by Charlotte Barslund ()��is maybe the most timely (?) book in translation to come out this month. I mean, anything about the postal service . . . (Although I wish it was “Long Live the Muted Post Horn! W.A.S.T.E. 4EVA!”)

Ellinor, a thirty-five-year-old media consultant, has not been feeling herself; she’s not been feeling much at all lately. Far beyond jaded, she picks through an old diary and fails to recognise the woman in its pages, seemingly as far away from the world around her as she’s ever been. But when her coworker vanishes overnight, an unusual new task is dropped on her desk. Off she goes to meet the Norwegian Postal Workers Union, setting the ball rolling on a strange and transformative six months.

This is an existential scream of a novel about loneliness (and the postal service!), written in Hjorth’s trademark spare, rhythmic and cutting style.

I wasn’t personally as into����as many others, but this sounds a bit more up my alley . . .

Thanks to quarantine, the unprecedented nature of this situation, Trump, government response to the protests—everything feels like an illusion. Not an illusion in the sense that “nothing is physically realm,” although one could argue that scientists have yet to prove the immutable, primary substance giving rise to reality, and cosmologists never get to the end of the universe—two scientific situations that can really call into question the concept of “reality.” But no, I ��Dz�’t want to argue that we’re all living in some wild constructed world, or, better yet, a Westworld-style simulation of Jean Baudrillard’s final acid trip.

[Disclaimer: I have no idea if Baudrillard dropped acid.]

Instead, I want to talk about how 2020 is the Year of Illusions—both in physical and ideological domains—and that the acknowledgement of how these illusions have propped up various power structures could, theoretically, usher in a time of radical change.

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COVID-19 is the most Baudrillard of all catastrophes I’ve lived through. The 9/11 attacks were the previous high-water mark, given the significance and emotional impact the destruction of the Twin Towers had on people who only saw it on TV—people who maybe have never been to NYC, even now, twenty years later—or heard about it on NPR; experiences that are mediated in one way or another.

On the way to work that particular morning, I didn’t have NPR on at all. Instead I was listening to Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain (not joking), while driving a new employee to the Dalkey Archive offices out in Funks Grove, an extremely remote wooded area surrounded by the largest fields you’ll ever see; a setting that made the approach to John O’Brien’s house—planted at the border of the woods and fields, right where the road curves 90 degrees to the right—feel like you were about to drive off the edge of the world.

It wasn’t until we were out of the car, walking toward the office door that Angela (another employee and John’s wife) yelled to us that the Twin Towers had been attacked.

I can’t remember if we saw the second tower fall “live” on TV, or if we only saw the replays. All the replays. The scroll. That will never, ever go away. The moment that we—the U.S., the Western world, everyone—entered into our current moment of hyper-anxiety, an new sense of dread coupled with an inherent understanding that not matter when, or where, a catastrophe takes place, in a short order of time, we’ll be able to see footage of it online. All catastrophes are now viewable, almost immediately. It was ’63, but with the Internet.

The fact that this was such a video-centric occurrence—both at the Twin Towers and the Pentagon—witnessed in real-life by a tragic number of people, but internalized by so many millions of others who chose to create their own narratives about the how and why of it all only enabled the spread of the suspect conspiracy theories, the over-analysis/doctoring of images, the mobilized hatred against a specific group of people.

And for many, these illusionary beliefs have become real. Have lead them down an increasingly questionable and walled off set of opinions (or straight out falsehoods) masquerading as “fact,” and existing in a miasmic digital world in which “reality” is based on which illusion you prefer.

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All these interactions online, through these mediating properties—sometimes intellectual, such as a predictive algorithm, sometimes mechanical, such as the iPhone, sometimes crowd dynamics, like on Twitter—function off of the illusion that by interacting with these systems, you will be asserting your individuality. You chose to click in that link or open a particular app to see if there’s a new message, a new notification. You chose to do so at that particular moment; it was up to you. You want to watch this Criterion Channel movie tonight, for reasons you can either point to immediately (a trustworthy, in terms of film, friend recommended it when you talked today), or frustratingly opaque (you were reminded of an aunt which reminded you of a moment in which a movie was in the background of the story that reminded you of the ad you saw on the bus which lead you to this decision).

And that’s fine. You can keep your sense of individuality and freedom. It’s not that you’re not an individual, it’s just that there are only so many options. And more people making the same decisions every day. It terms of the digital sphere, you ��Dz�’t matter. What flow of data and choices you’re part of, which trends drive your decisions, what predictions one can make from knowing those two things, and, most crucially, how to monetize these predictive capabilities all result from stripping the choices (data) from the choosing (you).

The illusion the Internet wants you to believe is that your data is unique and not just another notch on a proverbial belt of people who did x, y, z, and then q instead of x, y, z, and then b. Making assumptions about what leads a particular group of users to choose q or choose b helps the algorithms to become more refined, more precise in identifying which choices lead to which data pathways. Your individuality is immediately stripped in order to put your data into a particular bucket.

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The invisibility of COVID—not only the fact that the virus passes among us, unseen, but that you can have it for days and not even know, and that we’re witnessing the deaths it causes via Zoom, saying goodbye to loved ones over an iPad—is extremely dangerous when it comes to public health.

This is where the “illusionary” nature of COVID, emphasized by the fact that we discuss it in terms of numbers (of cases, of death rates, of positive test percentages) separates the true horror of the virus’s impact from the common discourse. It allows Trump to blatantly lie, because a vast majority of his base hasn’t seen anyone die from COVID in person.

Questioning the existence of COVID—and how contagious it is and how it can be contracted—because you can find videos or blog posts “exposing” it as “fake news” is a significant reason in why America destroyed the summer of 2020. And probably the rest of the year as well.

Despite the omnipresence of illusionary beliefs in our lives, a lot of people are really bad at identifying the illusionary component and understanding how the structures-that-be use your belief in one small thing in order to push a larger agenda. There’s a straight line from anti-vaxxers to protestors trying to reopen the economy. Create one false belief—such as Trump saying the virus will just go away—and you can get a massive group of Americans to believe that there’s no reason to keep bars and beaches closed.

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It’s very interesting that podcast listening is down during this pandemic. The most accepted explanation is that people listened to podcasts on their commute, mostly as a way of walling themselves off from other people and other stimuli.

When we ��Dz�’t need to be walled off—because we all are already—we would rather do something asymmetrically communal: stream Tiger King, or play Animal Crossing. The illusionary belief in the communal nature of these experiences—be it Netflix “Top 10” list, or the fractured socio-political geography of social media—makes it much easier for monolithic corporations like Disney or Amazon or Warner Brothers/HBO to keep us engaging with their products. When there’s nothing else to do, the best way to feel like you’re still part of society is to watch what everyone else is watching. And then read about it online. Or talk about it over Zoom.

One of the most interesting perspectives that’s been floating around recently is the idea that these platforms will “run out of content” at some point because filming was shut down. This statement belies our addition to the new. None of these platforms will ever be devoid of content, and in no possible future will every subscriber have watched every minute of programming they currently offer.

If Netflix started targeting specific users with information about more obscure properties that that user hadn’t previously watched, it would take, most likely, a banner ad and an appearance on the Netflix home screen to convince the viewer that this was a new program.

There is simply too much content. A counterintuitive result of the hyper creation of content—to the point where it seems like there are infinite viewing options—is the way in which this instills a desire within viewers to consume as much of it as possible. Guided by whomever your social-cultural guides are. Friends. Celebrities. Algorithms. Websites. Twitter personas. A still.

Now that the fragmentation of culture is total and complete, and we live inside a million different possible influencing attributes, allowing us to see everything, and have no idea why one cultural product becomes the strange attractor for seemingly everyone and another doesn’t. At best, it can be traced back to a few other things that seemed to happen, usually simultaneously—a celebrity endorsement, a Netflix deal, a particular review, buzz about the author—but all of these explanations tend to ring hollow. The illusion is created that the publisher/producer/record company knew what was going to happen, given all these little seedlings of interest, and by believing in that, we feel like the rise of a particular book or movie was inevitable. Planned. That the producer of the cultural item is cognizant of what they’re doing—and definitely worthy of being trusted in the future.

The randomness of crowds has been replaced by the illusion of mass persuasion, aided by the fragmentation of information and narrative.

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One of the more frivolous examples of how COVID-19 has generated a ton of weird illusion-centric statements is MLB. [Note: This will not become a post about baseball. That’s over here, or integrated into the whole, long post here.] The “crowd” noise present at every game is Peak 2020 Illusion.

For the uninitiated, although basebasll is being played, no fans are allowed in the stadiums for the foreseeable future. The visiting broadcasters call the games from their own home studios, watching the game on camera—same as the fans at home. Only a few employees—and the team mascots—are in the stadiums, which, for a professional athlete, must seem hauntingly silent.

To create the illusion that this is a “normal” season—and to allow for players to exchange information and signs—MLB is using 2020 technology to reproduce an imaginary crowd. It’s not at all difficult to blast crowd noise via the PA systems in all 30 parks, but where does one obtain said crowd noise?

This is more problematic than it might seem. Crowd noise is not uniform across stadia—compare crowd attendance at Marlins Park (10,000 a game) to Dodger Stadium (almost 50,000)—nor across game situation. Looking at the second half of that statement: Even if a team happens to have a recording of their fans cheering, and it’s high enough quality to play over a PA system with enough volume to be captured by the broadcast mics, it’s still highly unlikely that the particular volume and breadth of that specific cheer would be a perfect reaction to whatever just occurred in the live game. In this example, the “real” noise has been separated from the event that spawned it, and is an illusion on two fronts: that the crowd actually exists, and that this is what they would be doing in reaction to the play they just witnessed.

Given the near impossibility of finding enough actual clips to make this system work effectively, a video game created by San Diego Studios is piping in the simulated crowd noises into the stadiums so that “stadium sound engineers will have access to around 75 different effects and reactions captured from��MLB The Show.” Presumably, these reactions are site specific—decibel- and enthusiasm-wise—to the stadium where they were originally “captured.” (That word is doing a lot of work in this press release.)

A smart sound engineer might take this a step farther. They might be wary of choosing how much to amplify a crowd’s excitement in relation to a given play. They’ve likely been around baseball for a while and gathered some sort of generalized, difficult to quantify, knowledge about crowds, but when the opposing team hits a single, do you leave the “general crowd murmur” setting at 15 out of 100, or drop it to 5? How will that impact the players on the team that employs you? What if you ��Dz�’t cheer your team’s own batting accomplishments with proper volume and enthusiasm? Having to generate this illusion—that a crowd is present—is really anxiety making. Let’s use an algorithm.

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San Diego Studios already built a simulation of what the crowd noise could/should be in every situation, at every ballpark. Theoretically, given the nature of game and world-building, the algorithm driving the sounds inside the video game could take into consideration all of the following attributes: how large the crowd is given the team’s recent success (or failure); how enthusiastic the crowd is based on what part of the season the game is taking place, and the opponent, and the perceived importance based on who is pitching, a win-loss streak, or some other aspect of the matchup that can be articulated by pundits, fans, and broadcasters. There’s no reason, as a stadium sound engineer, you ����dzܱ����’t use this algorithm. They built it off of the sounds of your fanbase (or, at least, an abstracted “MLB Fanbase” of which your stadium’s fans are represented as a deviation from the norm), and created feedback loops far more robust than yours as a single individual—imagine being the sound operator who pushes “volume” and “excitement” and “joy” all to 100% for a hit that looks like it will be out of the park, one that is easily caught by a defensive player, and then forgets to turn it down for a full ten seconds after the out is made, a situation ripe for social media—one that creates at least a “believable illusion” of how the crowd would be reacting.

Keep in mind that these sounds—artificial, determined by an algorithm that’s getting cues from a system designed to track and record every pitch—are heard both by the players on the field and the fans at home. Fans are hearing, through their TV, artificial sounds from a baseball video game, that are piped into the stadium’s PA, with their texture determined by the same video game’s algorithm, mediated by the broadcast speakers in the stadium designed to pick up the “crowd” noise, in order to relay it back into your home. If you could watch the exact same sequence of pitches and plays on MLB The Show, you would hear the exact same crowd. An illusionary crowd.

COVID-19 can disrupt almost every aspect of our lives, except for marketing, in part because marketing is the process by which companies get users to buy into illusions in order to transmute the belief that product X contains qualities sufficient enough for you to want to spend your money to obtain them. This is one of the roots of capitalism: the pathway from image to ownership.

Without the ability to sell tickets, MLB introduced a different way to market their product to their fan base:

And now we’ve added another level of mediation to the crowd noise algorithm running the PA system at the park that we’re watching on our TV, with our own personal speaker system. We are somehow, in some small way, influencing what the computer knows about human reaction. How many times to cheer, at what rate, for what duration.

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In these times though, that’s merely scratching the surface of what sorts of illusions can be incorporated into broadcast experiences. For the NBA, a limited number of fans will be able to buy “tickets” to a Microsoft Teams “Together mode” hangout, in which the fans can converse with one another, and be seen by players and fans watching at home.

Going back to baseball, FOX has decided to use Unreal Engine (the most Baudrillard name possible) to generate an imaginary crowd for its broadcasts.

Putting aside the more high tech approaches to simulating normality, let’s focus just on MLB crowd noise again. Because the MLB The Show crowd noise is a relatively uniform and non-descript murmur, the illusion will always fall short of verisimilitude. The viewer will never hear a drunken attendee accidentally scream nonsense next to a hot broadcast microphone. Fans will be cheated from hearing that one sole voice from from the bleachers who yells, “YOU’RE A BUM!” at the exact moment in which the rest of the crowd is relatively silent. The individuality that makes up the game’s attendees has been stripped from the broadcast. The same people ��Dz�’t attend every night, but viewers of games this summer will hear the same general thing on every broadcast.

To combat this very specific “tell” that it’s all an illusion, has given the Oakland A’s a soundtrack to use of him playing a stadium vendor.

In the recording that is being incorporated into to the game broadcast, Hanks is heard yelling phrases like “Scorecards, programs, yearbook! Can’t tell the players without a program!” and “Peanuts! Bag of peanuts! Two bagger, two bag o’ peanuts!” And, of course, there’s “Who wants a hot dog?”

Hanks’ voice will be mixed with crowd noise so the faux vendor can sell food to the cardboard fan cutouts in the stands.

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Books discussed in this essay: by Jean Baudrillard.

That said, this isn’t necessarily the place for a long political rant—especially since I’m gleefully unaware of what it might mean that this is hosted on the Ģ����ý server—so I’ll just plant this powerful protest video here and move on to the ideas (not entirely unrelated?) that I’ve been working on for the past few weeks. (And since the rest of Open Letter is on furlough and can’t edit this: ACAB.)

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The original idea for this post came from a line I can half-sort-of-maybe remember from Michel Butor’s Passing Time, which was translated from the French by Jean Stewart back in 1961. (By Simon & Schuster of all presses.) The book is way way out of print, and for the life of me, I can’t remember why we didn’t reissue this at Dalkey Archive when we did�������Ի���. I like all of his books, but there’s something about the tone and “detective story” aspect of��Passing Time��that comes back to me time and again.

“” by Kathleen O’Neill is both very interesting, and an incredible way of jogging my memory, even if the quote I initially was structuring this post around, well, probably doesn’t exist.

The novel is written as a journal—starting in May, but recounting the events from the past October—by Jacques Revel about the year he spends in Bleston (a sort of stand-in for Manchester, England). While he’s in the dark, wet, cold, bleak industrial town, he meets a couple sisters, a potential arsonist, and the author behind the pseudonymously written��The Bleston Murder, who survives an attempt on his life. What makes this book really work is that, as Revel rereads his own diary, he sees inaccuracies in his own account of events and essentially becomes a detective in which he discovers that he himself was the criminal (and kind of the victim). It’s a fascinating book that really melds together form and content, and is essentially, a meditation on the relationship between the writer and the reader—or the criminal and the detective.

What I thought I remembered from this book was a quote about how there’s a contract between the writer of a detective novel and the audience in which the author is responsible for creating a world in which all the clues fit together and the audience receives a “satisfactory” resolution in which the criminal is exposed and justice is served.

Although this isn’t quite the same (at all), here’s what I think the actual quote from��Passing Time��is;

Any detective story, is constructed on two murders of which the first, committed by the criminal, is only the occasion of the second, in which he is the victim of the pure, unpunishable murderer, the detective, who kills him . . . by the explosion of truth.

Both of these quotes (the real and imagined) play nicely off of bits from Franco Moretti’s “Clues” (collected in��) and his analysis of Sherlock Holmes mysteries.

And detective fiction’s characters are inert indeed: they do not grow. In this way, detective fiction is radically anti-novelistic: the aim of the narration is no longer the character’s development into autonomy, or a change from the initial situation, or the presentation of plot as a conflict and an evolutionary spiral, image of a developing world that it is difficult to draw to a close. On the contrary: detective fiction’s object is to��return to the beginning. [. . . ] So it is too with the reader who, attracted��precisely��by the obsessively repetitive scheme, is “unable’ to stop until the cycle has closed and he has returned to the starting point.

He develops this idea in much greater depth—part of which we’ll come back to later—but this got me thinking about the “detective” books I like the most: ones in which the reader has to sort clue from noise, in which the center doesn’t necessarily hold, and the plot never quite congeals in a reassuring, satisfactory, or, in Moretti terms, bourgeoisie fashion. Books like����by Patrik Ourednik.

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Originally written in 2006 and translated from the Czech by Alex Zucker in 2010,�� is, ostensibly, a detective novel. But one in which the clues don’t seem to add up, the resolution is unsatisfying by typical standards, and one of the crimes being investigated is never clearly articulated.

We know from the jump that we’re in for some sort of game, given that chapter 1 is a notated chess game:

1 e4 e5 2. f4 exf4 3. Bc4 d6 4. nf3 Bg4 5. O-O Qd7 6. d4 g5 7. c3 Nc6 [. . .] 27. hxg3 hxg3+ 28. Kg1 rgh8 29. Bf3 Qxg4

(I assume this is all accurate and playable, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was at least partially nonsense.)

Then, in chapter 2, we have two major events that more or less drive the book itself. First off, Viktor Dyk (winning dick as in detective?), a retiree and main player in this novel, gives a young woman inaccurate directions to the Academy of Fine Arts (we find out later that she’s raped as a result) and then we hear about Mrs. Horak’s death. Or at least part of it.

“Have you heard? Mrs. Horak was hit by a car.”

“No! Is it serious?”

“Serious or not, she’s dead from it, dead as a doornail. Supposedly she staggered home, opened the door, and bang! She was gone. She couldn’t breathe, poor thing, and her eyes were wide open.”

To give you a real sense of the whiplash-inducing, playful tone of this book, here’s a bit from the same chapter about Viktor Dyk:

Dyk had a habit of pulling pronouncements out of his noggin and dressing them up with fraudulent, usually biblical, sources. Long ago he had come to realize that repeating what someone else had once said was considered the utmost expression of intelligence in his country. At one time, in the days when he still collected beetles, he used to declare ownership of his pronouncements (“as I always say”), but he never got any response except an awkward smile. Until one day it occurred to him to add “Book of Ruth 6:4″—and lo and behold, eyes lighted up all around, women’s in appreciation, men’s in envy. Since then, he had done so every time.

Fast-forward to chapter 6, and we��maybe��get introduced to the mystery that Inspector Lebeda (introduced in chapter 8) is going to be investigating.

Mrs. Horak’s death wasn’t a result of the accident. The car was innocent. It barely grazed her. Mrs. Horak fell down, banged her knee, tore her stocking. Ranting and limping, she made her way home. Once there, she turned on the gas, opened the oven, and stuck her head in. They say that women, particularly in old age, rarely resort to suicide, and when they do, they think long and hard about their decision and as a rule they choose less radical means than men do. But statistics provide only an imperfect picture of an individual’s life: in this respect Mrs. Horak defied sexual categorization. She’d had enough, she’d had it up to here. [. . .]

We shall see later whether and to what extent these statistical incongruities influence the course of our story and the fates of our other protagonists. In any case it spurred the firemen to call the police without delay. Which they would have done regardless; this, however, enables us to evoke a promising atmosphere of tension, thereby strengthening the dramatic line. The firemen may not give a damn, but our readers certainly do.

One of the difficulties in describing this incredibly fun, somewhat enigmatic book is that it is��like a chess game. There are so many people, so many moves, so many positions on the board. For instance, Lebeda’s main case at the start of the book is called “Damage of Advertising Surfaces in Public Spaces,” in which he’s trying to figure out which groups are defiling the “city’s metro and streetside postering surfaces [. . .] with signs of an active anticapitalist, anti-advertising campaign—whole posters x’d out in black, as well as graffiti both general (Down with advertising, Ads lie, Citizen, don’t be an ass, Pay the unemployed) and specific (Women are not goods, This washer will wash your brain, Bud won’t make you wiser) [. . .]” The interpretation of these “defacings” (and, given the current situation, livI’m ALL FOR some anti-capitalist, anti-racist graffiti) is either a key to untangling the mysteries of this book, or a total red herring.

And suddenly, I’ve returned to the beginning of my take on this book: Detective novels in which the clues are misleading, maybe not actually clues at all, contradictory, and filled with digressions are��exactly��the sort of detective novels I am drawn to. Post-modern puzzle books are totally my jam. But what is the function of these sorts of books versus “traditional” (Sherlock Holmes era) detective novels?

*

I feel like I should be more embarrassed about this next statement than I actually am: I LOVE Riverdale. Especially season four. The show runs at 150% crazy at all moments in time, but season four is the most Lynchian—by way of��The Secret History—show I’ve ever seen. It’s a masterclass in how you’re��not��supposed to write television. Instead of an A-plot that lasts for a few episodes with B-plots moving along secondary characters, every episode of��Riverdale��has A through Z plots for EVERY character, and moves at breakneck speed, changing the overall “game” of the show CONSTANTLY. Every scene either kicks off a whole new plot that would constitute a season on a “normal” show, or ends the plot that was just kicked off. I can only assume that watching Riverdale��is like snorting LSD off of a tab of meth.

Anyway, by the middle of season four, at least half of the characters on this show—and yes, this features all the Archie-Betty-Veronica comic book characters—have either murdered someone or disposed of someone who has been murdered. It’s insane how many crimes go unpunished in this town. A character gets out of jail and is, instantly—in the same episode—elected mayor. The police chief��rehides a body he buried in season 2 (?) with the help of an FBI agent (?). I want to say that this show is off the rails, but it’s a show in which the original “rails” look like a Jackson Pollack painting.

Every season of this show is centered around one mystery (or one hundred), but the resolution of that mystery is irrelevant from the start. For��Riverdale��to work, we have to suspect everyone—easy to do since they’ve all either taken a life or disposed of a dead body or done a shitton of jingle jangle—and know that nothing is permanent. Nothing is off the board.

*

The Moretti idea that this entire post is based around is that the function of detective fiction is to “return to the beginning” in order to ensure that the values of society at large are reconfirmed at the expense of individuality.

The difference between innocence and guilt returns as the opposition between stereotype and individual. Innocence is conformity; individuality, guilt. It is, in fact, something irreducibly personal that betrays the individual: traces, signs that only he could have left behind. The perfect crime—the nightmare of detective fiction—is the featureless, deindividualized crime that anyone could have committed because at this point everyone is the same.

A criminal transgresses, affirming their individuality by violating a social norm; a detective uncovers their identity; they are brought to justice for said transgression. (Unless you’re an American cop . . .) A detective novel, in its purest sense, is a confirmation that what we “all” believe in is preferred with the detective capable of reaffirming the status quo. The core of Moretti’s idea is that by transgressing, you become an individual, and it’s the detective’s purpose to reestablish the order of society as a whole. It’s not OK to murder your co-worker, and by being found out and jailed, we all are reminded what is acceptable.��

Neither Case Closed, nor Riverdale entertain this idea��for a second. In��Case Closed, it’s all about providing too many clues, too many crimes, too many iterations to establish a single, widely accepted, “wrong” thing that deserves to be put back in line. Was the transgression Mrs. Horak’s suicide and what went on in that building? What societal norms need to be restored? The disdain Viktor Dyk has for his countrymen? If anything, this is a detective novel about violence against women, but even that’s not addressed in a satisfactory manner. Case Closed is an incredibly fun book that points out how non-totalizing detective narratives are in real life. There’s no single, simple solution. Such is baseball, such is life.

Riverdale��can’t have agreed upon societal norms. Full stop. If everyone in Riverdale agreed on the same set of principles the world would fall apart. That show only works by knowing that it’s all subjective and wild AF. Instead of sending one character off the edge and exploring that, break the town. Totally. There’s never a resolution to anything because any resolution would kill the very engine of this show, which is the wild individuality each character asserts over and over again. Sure, Archie is always dumb and making the wrong choices, but his bad decisions are what make him a unique character. All resolutions in Riverdale (the arrest of the Black Hood, the discovery of who killed Jason Blossom, Jughead’s death)��is erased immediately in order to allow for the character to transgress again and set off a new storyline. It’s totally daytime soap opera shit run through the mind of David Lynch and Michael Bay.

*

Immediately after reading Moretti’s “Clues,” I picked up ��by Dag Solstad, translated from the Norwegian by Agnes Scott Langeland and published by New Directions. Been meaning to read this for a while, but, given just how perfectly it fit in with Moretti’s ideas, I’m really glad I waited.

This is billed as an “existential mystery” centering around Pål Andersen’s decision��not��to report a murder he thinks he’s witnessed. It’s a novel of inaction and indecision, one that directly responds to Moretti’s ideas about the sociology of detective novels.

Everything’s set in motion on Christmas Eve, when Professor Andersen sees a man strangle a woman in the apartment building directly across from his:

[. . .] he reared back in horror as the man whom he had declared with such immediate certainty to be young put his hands around the woman’s neck and squeezed. She flailed her arms about, Professor Andersen noticed, her body jerked, he observed, before she all at once became completely still beneath the man’s hands and went limp. [. . .]

“I must call the police,” he thought. He went over to the telephone, but did not lift the receiver. “It was murder. I must call the police,” he thought, but still did not lift the receiver. Instead he went back to the window.

Days pass, and he does��nothing until he shows up an hour early for a dinner party with the plan of filling the host in on what he saw and asking his advice. But he doesn’t do that, either. Instead, over the course of the dinner, he thinks about how they all used to be at the cutting edge, the rebellious youth who opposed the system and loved avant-garde poetry, but that now, well, they were the establishment.

They were strongly disinclined to regard themselves as pillars of society. Because they didn’t feel they conformed: not to the authority, or rather duties, which they enacted, nor to the social group to which they belonged. They denied being what they were. [. . .] They continued to be against authority, deep inside they were in opposition, even though they were now, in fact, pillars of society who carried out the State’s orders, and no one besides themselves (and old photographs from the year 2020) could perceive that they were anything other than State officials, part of the State fabric, and the fact that most of them voted in elections for the ruling party would hardly surprise anyone other than themselves, but they, on the other hand, would argue that they didn’t want to throw away their own vote and by so doing bring the right-wingers into power.

His desire to return to some earlier place, where his beliefs and actions were more radical, more “meaningful” actions is the engine of the rest of this book. Through the lens of Moretti, he asserts his individuality by��not��serving the role of the detective, refusing to allow society to reassert its moral viewpoint.

This isn’t to say that what he did was right. I mean, I hope I don’t have to say this, but please report any and all acts of domestic violence (and police violence). And believe women. But, in the context of this novel—in which there are many hints that this “murder” might not have actually taken place—the crime serves as the catalyst to allow Pål to explore the relationship of the individual to society, especially a society that’s built on historical beliefs or rituals that modern people don’t necessarily connect with. This is also reflected in his ambivalence over teaching Ibsen, since he doesn’t feel the same jolt reading him nowadays, and the vast majority of his students don’t feel it either.

His sin of omission couldn’t be defended. Every civilization is built on such actions being indefensible. That goes without saying. In all circumstances. When he didn’t report it, he had become and outcast, along with the murderer. An outcast in his own eyes, along with the murderer. And he deserved this. And behind it all was God. As the ultimate reason why breaking this natural order was a taboo which no living person can explain, touch, or wipe from their memory.

The idea of detective fiction as a conflict between the individual and a monolithic society is fascinating to me in part because I don’t think it holds anymore. It made sense back in Sherlock Holmes times, and into the 1930s, but post-WWII, the idea of a “monolithic set of societal mores” feels . . . naive? We don’t agree on anything anymore. We have a president who won’t protect his citizens, ennobles fascists to be more fascist, and plays a victim role like a sniveling punk in hopes of further fracturing the American people. So, again, please report domestic abuse, but maybe assert your individuality by not reporting fellow protestors and standing up for the values that we should��all agree on. Like justice. And defunding the police.

Elisa Wouk Almino��is a Los Angeles-based writer and literary translator from Portuguese.��She is the translator of��This House(Scrambler Books, 2017), a collection of poetry by Ana Martins Marques. She is currently a senior editor at Hyperallergic and is the editor of��Alice Trumbull Mason: Pioneer of American Abstraction(Rizzoli, May 2020).��She teaches at Catapult and UCLA Extension.

��by Vigdis Hjorth, translated from the Norwegian by Charlotte Barslund (Verso)

It’s not uncommon for women writers and artists to be discussed in terms of their personal lives. Their image becomes as much a fascination, if not at times more, than the work they produce (think of Clarice Lispector, Frida Kahlo). This is what I think about when I look up the English-language articles on two books that made it on to this year’s BTBA longlist: Will and Testament by Vigdis Hjorth (translated from Norwegian by Charlotte Barslund, published by Verso) and Welcome to America by Linda Boström Knausgård (translated from Swedish by Martin Aitken, published by World Editions).

I read both books without knowing anything about them or their authors. I was completely gripped by Will and Testament, a story narrated by a woman who was sexually abused by her father as a child. Estranged from her parents and siblings, she must face them as an older adult to discuss the heated terms of the family inheritance. Welcome to America likewise drew me in with its moving story about a young girl who stops talking after her father dies. Here, too, is a story about a violent father and how familial relationships both construct and disturb your sense of self.

It turns out that both of these stories are based, to an extent, on their authors’ lives. Will and Testament has been described by the media as a “sensation” and “literary scandal” in Norway, causing one of Hjorth’s sisters to write a book in response (not yet translated into English). As for Boström Knausgård, she’s had the unfortunate fate of being consistently discussed in terms of her former husband, Karl Ove Knausgård.

Discovering these intimate ties certainly adds a level of intrigue, but by focusing on them we sort of miss the point of these books: that they have accomplished something spectacular through fiction.

I loved both books and their English translations, and ultimately think that they deserve deeper critical discussion in English-language media. But I’m choosing to spotlight Will and Testament for a few reasons.

First, as is the case with so many international authors, it’s taken too long for the Anglophone world to recognize Hjorth, who’s written thirty-seven books to date and is a household name in Norway. Secondly, the writing in Will and Testament feels fresh and inventive. The book switches between reading like a novel, personal essay, notebook, and art criticism. The form alternates between long, meditative paragraphs and brief ones that are isolated on blank pages like poetry. The writing, which is profoundly suspenseful, keeps you on your toes. (At one point while reading this, my heart actually raced.)

I imagine it wasn’t easy for Charlotte Barslund to translate Will and Testament (she is also the translator of Hjorth’s previous novel, A House in Norway). Reading this book is like being inside someone’s mind as they’re working out a thought, unearthing buried feelings — a messy process where ideas are repeated, and memories are out of order. But the use of repetition isn’t boring or heavy, and the jumbled thoughts aren’t confusing. On the contrary, the effect is clarifying as we come to understand the effects of trauma. It’s impressive how light, clear, and precise Barslund’s English rendition reads, how she places the perfect emphasis on one or two words in long, meandering sentences (there are several of those, strung together only by commas).

Will and Testament is, finally, a very timely book. While it can get a bit irksome to discuss books in terms of their trendiness and relevance, Will and Testament (published in Norway in 2016) is available in English at a time when conversations around sexual abuse are particularly prevalent and public. Readers are bound to confront their own assumptions, biases, prejudices, and questions while reading this book. Hjorth cuts through the noise, the buzz, and the gossip to deliver a story that lays plain the pain and conflict of sexual abuse.

Some critics have questioned Hjorth’s choice to seemingly mask her own story with fiction, implying that she might as well have billed it as a work of autobiography. This, to me, strikes me as a simplistic view of fiction. By presenting itself as a novel, Will and Testament creates space in the reader’s mind that nonfiction could otherwise limit—as long as you ��Dz�’t get caught up in all the “scandal” before setting out to read.

At times it is difficult to wade through the nonchalant, matter-of-fact, thickly piled on descriptions the Nobel Prize-winning author utilizes. His prose is richly colorful, descriptive and frequently verges on shocking without being excessive. It is easy to fall into the trap of reading the same paragraph over and over again, luxuriating in the gorgeous, strange yet precise word choice but without being stuck. Giovanni Pontiero does a laudable job translating Saramago’s discourse from Portuguese to English without sacrificing any of the sly humor or the lush detailed description.

The stream-of-consciousness nature of the prose truly lends itself to the six short stories catalogued in this slim book, immensely complementing the twisting storylines. In some cases, the details constrain the reader, forcing them to look at the story in a very specific way. Saramago makes it very easy to overlook the bigger picture in favor of fixating how tiny actions—a man sitting down in a chair that breaks over the course of 25 pages, freezing midair, within the simply titled “The Chair”—contribute to a larger whole. The descriptions are so matter-of-fact, detached to the point of even sounding callous, that if the narrator’s voice was not so strongly developed and persuasive, it would be difficult to take the his side when he states, “Fall, old man, fall. See how your feet are higher than your head.” But the voice is convincing, and although it is never explicitly described why this “old man” deserves to “fall” the reader gets the sense that this tragedy is deserved.

In other stories, the strangeness of the depictions force the reader to reconstruct their idea of society in favor of the one Saramago presents. Take this excerpt from the story “Things” for example:

There was a time when the manufacturing process had reached such a degree of perfection and faults became so rare that the Government (G) decided there was little point in depriving members of the public (especially those in categories A, B and C) of their civil right and pleasure to lodge complaints: a wise decision which could only benefit the manufacturing industry. So factories were instructed to lower their standards. This decision, however, could not be blamed for the poor quality of the goods which had been flooding the market for the last two months. As someone employed in the Department of Special Requisitions (DSR), he was in a good position to know that the Government had revoked these instructions more than a month ago and imposed new standards to ensure maximum quality. Without receiving any results.

It’s easy to read any of these short stories the first time through, double-take at the end and think, Is that what all those descriptions, all piled up, really were describing? Is that even possible?. And the easy answer is yes. Because, looking at the highly detailed (sometimes neurotic) descriptions, the paragraphs that go on for pages, the dialogue that is separated only with a simple dash, and the circular logic that truly defines these short stories, it is easy to forget that Saramago’s work was largely influenced by the atrocities of his times. As Pontiero details in his foreword to the book, three of the stories—“The Chair”, “Embargo”, and “Things”—are “political allegories evoking the horror and repression which paralyzed Portugal under the harsh regime of Salazar.” And yet, with or without the political context, the book is the kind of read that ensnares you, drawing you into its world and forcing you to see things a particular way—Saramago’s way—while you compulsively turn the pages. Realizing that the worlds that Saramago creates are not huge departures from the world he lived in adds a new dimension of power to the prose, which could easily stand out on its own.

Here’s a bit of my review:

Imagine a world where objects, utensils, machines, or installations (OUMIs) take on lives of their own, independent of their owners. A world where skin grafted to the palms of our hands identifies us as a particular category, A-Z, that grants us absolute power over others (those below us) or renders us perfectly subservient (to those above us). Now imagine a world—perhaps a different world, or maybe the same as before—where cars in effect solder themselves to their drivers, demanding more gas. And then another (or again, perhaps the same), where chairs fall in stop-motion triggering irreparable brain damage in those who sit in them, where the two parts of a centaur’s body (human and horse) are constantly in dispute with one another. Sometimes subtly horrifying and always appropriately absurd and comedic when the situation demands it, José Saramago drops us in to those worlds in The Lives of Things. Or that one world, depending on how you look at it . . . because the settings Saramago creates are not that far of a departure from the world we live in.

At times it is difficult to wade through the nonchalant, matter-of-fact, thickly piled on descriptions the Nobel Prize-winning author utilizes. His prose is richly colorful, descriptive and frequently verges on shocking without being excessive. It is easy to fall into the trap of reading the same paragraph over and over again, luxuriating in the gorgeous, strange yet precise word choice but without being stuck. Giovanni Pontiero does a laudable job translating Saramago’s discourse from Portuguese to English without sacrificing any of the sly humor or the lush detailed description.

Click here to read the entire review.