The way we remember events, large and small, can have an impact that lasts a lifetime. It can affect ourselves, the way we look at and go through our lives. It can affect the decisions and lives of others.
Memories and the events that inspired them are central to King Nyx, the intense new novel from Kirsten Bakis. Annie, a married woman in her 40s, is worried about how she and her writer husband, Charlie, will make ends meet early in the last century. Charlie has a compulsive need to find a unifying theory that explains everything. He is especially intrigued by phenomena such as fish falling from the sky.
Annie once was a maid in the house where Charlie grew up as one of three sons of a rich grocery wholesaler and his wife. Charlie's father could be violent and hurt people during his rages. Annie, starting as a maid in her teens, learned how to stay calm and not upset her employer.
What that cost is a core part of her and Charlie's story, as they grow up, marry and spend their lives looking out for each other. As Annie notes in a prologue that takes place years after the events of the novel:
It's an old reflex, to tell myself that what's in my mind is unimportant. It was always easier that way.
In his notes, a writer characterizes Annie as:
This woman cannot think, she feels.
Both ideas are an integral part of what happens in the narrative, and why.
When they married, Charlie's father disinherited him. He's been working on his book to explain strange events for years, collecting evidence and trying to make it all fit, a bit like Casaubon's unending project in George Eliot's Middlemarch. While Annie supports him, and appears meek, she is not Dorothea. She has suffered in overcoming trauma, and Charlie looks out for her as much as she looks out for him.
Just when things are about as desperate as they can get, Charlie gets a surprise invitation from a reclusive millionaire. Mr. Arkel inherited a fortune with his canned fruit company, and became even richer after violently putting down a strike for better working conditions. Arkel lives in a mansion on an upstate New York island, where he can control everything.
Or does he?
Annie and Charlie are housed in a cabin near the mansion, ostensibly to quarantine because of the flu pandemic. Their neighbors, Frank and Stella Bixby, are there because psychologist Bixby treated Arkel after his first wife was killed in a hunting accident. Frank says Arkel is getting worse again.
He's not the only one. An encounter at the dock before boating over to Arkel's island brought back to Annie memories of her only friend. Mary was a new maid after Annie had been employed by her husband's family for nearly a decade. Mary was fiercely independent and had run away once. She won't stay long before leaving again. She asks Annie to go with her, but Annie prefers what she believes is the safety of where she is.
Every woman in the novel is affected by the attempts of a man to control her. It goes beyond societal strictures at the time, although the way society considered women made it easier for the controls. The controlling actions and the ways they are remembered have a great deal to with the plot of this gothic novel.
This controlling attitude also is seen in class structure. Frank is disdainful of the striking factory workers. His attitude may remind readers of a certain political stance:
"Not being able to understand the reality of running a business, thinking they're entitled to things that aren't possible, simply because they want them. The way a young child has no understanding of, or interest in, whether its father can afford to buy the toy it desires -- it simply knows what it wants. But that is the mentality of the common factory worker, after all. If they had more developed minds, they'd be in other lines of work."
One of the few ways in which Annie tried to exert control of her life was as a child. She named a mechanical blackbird King Nyx, a being that looked out for her broken dolls as they took part in journeys during her dreams. King Nyx talked to her for a spell, too, until she banished her childhood guide. That guide will return to play a role in the events on the island.
Charlie in the novel is based on Charles Fort, whose The Book of the Damned was published after it was championed by Theodore Dreiser. Yes, the Sister Carrie Dreiser, and he makes a cameo in this novel. Anna was his wife, but her story here, and their story, is from Bakis.
The story that Bakis has crafted can be densely atmospheric at times. It often has the feel of works by Susannah Clarke, Erin Morgenstern and Donna Tartt. The use of these tropes in a story about women trying to remember the facts of their own stories, without men manipulating them or their memories, is done in an earnest way. It is not an attempt to add contemporary shade.
Twenty-five years ago, Bakis published the incredible, genre-twisting and affecting novel, Lives of the Monster Dogs. Whether a reader approaches the new book because of memories of the debut novel, or finds the older story because of this one, an open mind will be able to enjoy and ponder her writing.
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Also, Happy World Book Day! Read what you like and like what you read, and support the same for everyone.
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Among the fiction scheduled to be published this week, with publisher descriptions and links from @DebtorsPrison’s Literate Lizard bookstore:
Divided Island is the story of a woman with a neurological disorder. The day she goes in for the encephalogram that will lead to her diagnosis, she finds herself splitting in two. One of the two women she becomes decides to travel to an island to take her own life; the other remains behind.
Following a breakup, Kate and Finn decide to keep sharing their house until the lease runs out in twelve weeks’ time, alternating week by week so that they are occupying the same space but never at the same time.
Practically, the plan makes sense, but coming back each Sunday to a home where Finn has been and gone feels far too much like living with a ghost.
David Crader is a has-been. A former child actor from the hit teen drama Rev Beach, he now rotates between his new roles as deadbeat dad, recovering alcoholic, and occasional videogame voice actor. But when David is summoned to Los Angeles by Grace, his ex-wife and former co-star, he suddenly sees an opportunity for a reboot—not just of the show that made him famous, but also of his listless existence.
Hollywood, the Internet, and a fractured nation have other plans, however, and David soon drinks himself to a realization: This seemingly innocuous revival of an old Buffy rip-off could be the spark that sets ablaze a nation gripped by far-right conspiracy, climate catastrophe, and mass violence.
Stella reached for an oyster, tipped her head, and tossed it back. It was cool and slippery, the flavor so briny it was like diving into the ocean. Oysters, she thought. Where have they been all my life?
When her estranged mother dies, Stella is left with an unusual inheritance: a one-way plane ticket and a note reading “Go to Paris.” Stella is hardly cut out for adventure; a traumatic childhood has kept her confined to the strict routines of her comfort zone. But when her boss encourages her to take time off, Stella resigns herself to honoring her mother’s last wishes.
Before Jodie Rattler became a star, she was a girl growing up in St. Louis. One day in 1955, when she was just six years old, her uncle Drew took her to the racetrack, where she got lucky—and that roll of two-dollar bills she won has never since left her side. Jodie thrived in the warmth of her extended family, and then—through a combination of hard work and serendipity—she started a singing career, which catapulted her from St. Louis to New York City, from the English countryside to the tropical beaches of St. Thomas, from Cleveland to Los Angeles, and back again. Jodie comes of age in recording studios, backstage, and on tour, and she tries to hold her own in the wake of Janis Joplin, Joan Baez, Judy Collins, and Joni Mitchell. Yet it feels like something is missing.
The Booker Prize finalist and widely acclaimed author of Real Life and Filthy Animals returns with a deeply involving new novel of young men and women at a crossroads.
In the shared and private spaces of Iowa City, a loose circle of lovers and friends encounter, confront, and provoke one another in a volatile year of self-discovery.
In a Pacific Northwest hospital far from the Rummani family’s ancestral home in Palestine, the heart of a stillborn baby begins to beat and her skin turns vibrantly, permanently cobalt blue. On the same day, the Rummanis’ centuries-old soap factory in Nablus is destroyed in an air strike. The family matriarch and keeper of their lore, Aunt Nuha, believes that the blue girl embodies their sacred history, harkening back to a time when the Rummanis were among the wealthiest soap-makers and their blue soap was a symbol of a legendary love.
As a teenager, for a moment, Ella Fitchburg found love—yearning, breathless love—that consumed both her and her boyfriend, Jude, as they wandered the streets of New York City together. But her glorious life was pulled out from beneath her after she was accused of trying to murder Jude’s father, an imperious superior court judge. When she learns she’s pregnant shortly after receiving a long prison sentence, she reluctantly decides to give up the child.
Ella is released from prison after serving only six years and is desperate to turn the page on a new life, but she can’t seem to let go of her past.
Julian Strickland is seemingly the lone Black man in the hipster dreamland of Portland, Oregon. To his friends, he’s the coolest member of the scene: the soulful drummer from Chicago in an indie rock band that’s just about to break through. But to himself, he’s a sheltered Christian homeschool kid who used to write book reports on Leviticus.
The most recent book by the renowned Haitian novelist, essayist, and poet Ren Depestre, Popa Singer is a semiautobiographical chronicle of Haiti in the late 1950s, the very moment when the country first came under decades of despotic rule.
To celebrate her son's return home after years of exile, Dianira Fontoriol (aka "Popa Singer")--an indomitable mother armed only with her sewing machine and her personal convictions--determines to resist in her own way the infamous Ubu King of the Tropics: Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier.
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