SOONER OR LATER EVERYTHING FALLS INTO THE SEA

SOONER OR LATER EVERYTHING FALLS INTO THE SEA BY SARAH PINSKER

Sarah Pinsker’s stories nestle in the cracks of our world with strange concepts that resound emotionally with the reader. Some of the realities found here contain more verisimilitude. In “Talking With Dead People,” a woman constructs replicas of murder houses and, powered by A.I., the houses speak in the voices of the dead. Other realities convey distorted or futuristic visions of Earth. In the title story, “Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea,” cruise ships peopled by the wealthy sail endlessly to avoid the contaminated land. A scavenger finds Gabby, one of the ships’ musicians, washed up on the shore. Gabby relearns the earth and its relics of civilization. “Funny how you don’t realize the last time you see something is going to be the last time,” she says of turtles, now likely extinct.

An atmosphere of nostalgia and doom pervades the collection. The characters act out of deep wells of fear, hope, and longing, as the environment collapses or is transformed unrecognizably. In “A Stretch of Highway Two Lanes Wide,” a man who loses his arm in a farming accident wakes up with a bionic replacement and becomes convinced that he is a road in Colorado. By some glitch in the technology, his self is twinned. The concept is whimsical but the story, like all of Pinsker’s stories, considers what it means to be human when the circumstances we associate with humanity have changed. A longer story, “Wind Will Rove,” considers the value of human history out of context. A history teacher aboard an intergenerational colony ship finds that art, especially music, is meant to thrive with creative synthesis. The defamiliarization of the ship, reminiscent of Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Paradises Lost,” allows Pinsker to explore how the past is lived in the present, and whether humans are resilient enough to secure a future beyond our polluted planet.

Small Beer Press.

—Review by Sara Ramey

THE NEW ORDER

THE NEW ORDER BY KAREN E. BENDER

Karen E. Bender’s new story collection is steeped in the present political moment, with an eye to our future. Our cultural corrosion—especially our denial of sexual assault and gun violence—impacts Bender’s female narrators in quiet, resounding ways. The young protagonist of “This Is Who You Are” develops anxiety as she copes with knowledge of the sexual abuse of a classmate and the bombing of a Jewish school, made personal by her identification with one of the bombing victims. “History always felt like it was breathing softly behind us,” she says.

The New Order delivers deceptively straightforward reflections on the mundane, as the reader is drawn into worlds much like our own. In “On a Scale of One to Ten,” a small family moves to an unnamed Asian city to escape a stalker back home, only for their daughter to be bullied at school: “We stood under the sky, a fragile blue tarp; beneath it, we felt almost invisible. Most people were invisible to other people, except when others saw them and wanted to harm them.” Cruelty is not always immediately evident in Bender’s stories, though its consequences echo. In “The Department of Happiness and Reimbursement,” a government initiative to pay complainants in the workforce for their silence backfires when a woman facing harassment refuses to barter away her pain for monetary compensation. The narrator’s final, plaintive thought captures the essence of the collection’s wist and cynicism, hope and hopelessness. She sits on the discarded couch of a woman whose life has been obliterated because she spoke out, and wonders “what would happen to all of us.”

Counterpoint Press.

— Review by Sara Ramey

AN UNTOUCHED HOUSE

AN UNTOUCHED HOUSE BY WILLEM FREDEIK HERMANS, TRANSLATED BY DAVID COLMER

Willem Frederik Hermans’ An Untouched House provides a wrenching glimpse of a Dutch soldier’s experience several years into World War II. The atmosphere of the novella is surreal in its believable disorientation. The sparse but precise prose captures a sense of desolation, a meaninglessness at the heart of the war that emerges in innumerable casual atrocities, from murder to the destruction of art. The unnamed narrator’s psychological trauma manifests as confusion and resignation layered over his raw and equally unnamable longing. “I no longer knew how tennis was played,” he relates. “I didn’t know what the net, the white lines, the tall white chair, that heavy roller in the corner meant.”

The narrator attempts to reconcile barbarity with the veneer of civilization that he discovers in a remarkably, almost miraculously, untouched house in the middle of a bombarded European town. Inside the house are wonders foreign to the narrator—lush furs, a piano, hot water. How can such a place exist? As the narrator unravels the mysteries of the house, the truths he learns are neither reassuring nor beautiful. The line between war and culture, violence and peace, is indistinct, an illusion ultimately incapable of concealing the interdependence of the two, and the artificiality of our loyalty to either.

Archipelago.

—Review by Sara Ramey

THE ICONOCLAST’S JOURNAL

THE ICONOCLAST’S JOURNAL, BY TERRY GRIGGS

Grif and Avice are newlyweds, but Grif isn’t sure he wants to be. The Iconoclast’s Journal opens with a strange phenomenon, ball lightning, interrupting a very normal occurrence—cold feet. The first half of the novel follows Grif as he stumbles, quite literally, into one adventure after another, treating each with bewilderment and hope. The narrative never clarifies what Grif is searching for, nor what he hopes to find in these odd places, among which are a darkly comical family home, a rocky island in the middle of a lake, and a tilting hotel built by a thirteen-year-old boy. The story is strongly picaresque, in the irreverent manner of Apuleius’ The Golden Ass, although Grif’s muddled emotional motivations require some patience on the part of the reader.

The humor is punctuated by moments as tragic as they are comic, when human vice and natural disasters have dark consequences. The setting is Canada at the end of the nineteenth century but the language is modern, just one of the novel’s challenges to cultural expectations. The novel’s second half brings in the much more complex Avice, a jilted newlywed who, to be fair, doesn’t particularly fit into stereotypes. The same might be said of every character Grif and Avice encounter. One priest nabs rare books from the archbishop’s library while another drinks morning coffee out of a chalice during consecration. This relevant iconoclasm is best indicated by Grif’s wry mental dialogue: “He suspected that God had an unsophisticated sense of humour, roaring at these vaudevillian entertainments, the pratfalls and comic disasters to which humans were given.”

Biblioasis.

—Review by Sara Ramey

THE SCIENCE OF LOST FUTURES

THE SCIENCE OF LOST FUTURES, BY RYAN HABERMEYER

A large severed foot of origins unknown. A woman who becomes a snow leopard, another who catapults into the sky, and a collection of historical torture implements. These are a few of the details of Ryan Habermeyer’s worlds, fabulist spaces in which the absurd is more real than the normal. The questions posed in his collection, The Science of Lost Futures, are weirder but no less complicated than other moral quandaries. What does one do with a dead, racist grandmother brought to life by a flood? In the case of “Valdosta, After the Flood,” the answers are sometimes straightforward—put her back in the water—and sometimes maddeningly elusive. As with the daughter launched into the sky in “The Catapult of Tooele,” few characters get what they want, or what they believe they want.

The collection is fascinated by butterscotch candy, parsnips, and infertile or miscarrying wives, and the dearth of female narrators is remarkable. Often women are the subject of the stories, while perplexed men attempt to understand them. In “Everything You Wanted to Know About Astrophysics but Were Too Afraid to Ask,” a man’s romantic partner literally turns into a black hole. The collection is an assemblage of oddities with deeper, quietly poignant undercurrents. From “The Fertile Yellow,” a man swimming in a grocery store full of egg yolk says, “Nobody believes this is the way their life will turn out.” The humor of Habermeyer’s ironic moments make the collection a worthy read. With characters who worked as a “window display model at a mortuary” and reflect that they are “nothing more than God’s pedicurists,” The Science of Lost Futures keeps its promise that the ridiculous is often the clearest path to the real.

BOA Editions.

—Review by Sara Ramey

MISSIVES FROM THE GREEN CAMPAIGN

MISSIVES FROM THE GREEN CAMPAIGN, BY DAVID ARMSTRONG

Missives from the Green Campaign provides glimpses of a world in which the purpose of war is environmental preservation. While many of the rituals of army life remain the same, from hazing to the power dynamics of an authoritarian hierarchy, the conceptual twist of the chapbook is that each soldier must nurture a plant whose survival is intrinsic to his own. The first-person narrator’s drive to nourish is sometimes more destructive than helpful, leading him to adopt a hapless comrade and amateur philosopher, Hershel, who struggles with the rigidity of military life.

David Armstrong shorts world-building and character development in favor of exclusionary details and inventive language. Lying in their bunks at night, the narrator says of Hershel: “I heard him shift on his cot in the darkness, saw out of the corner of my eye the moon-grown obscurities of his rumpled blanket reforming.” The story’s dialogue and cultural associations best convey the wistfulness of its reflections, while the frequent use of blank space, created by truncated chapters and minimalist scene descriptions, amplifies the somber mood. Subtle moments carry much of the story’s emotional weight, as when one chapter ends, “I kept my lily hidden, safe, in the darkness near my heart.”

Omnidawn.

— Review by Sara Ramey