This week, a new novel, Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police. This story was originally published in 1994 in Japanese and then translated to English and re-published in English in 2019. The book’s title was re-done; the Japanese original translates to Secret Crystallization or Quiet Crystallization which, as we will see, has meaning (so does The Memory Police). The novel was nominated for a 2020 Booker International Prize and a 2019 National Book Award for Translated Literature. We live in a time when all books must be “like” something else for marketing purposes. For the same reason, they must also fit into one- or two-word genre description. The Memory Police is slotted into Science Fiction, Dystopian Fiction, and Psychological Fiction, and the publicity notes claim, "Ogawa's fable echoes the themes of George Orwell's 1984, Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's 100 Years of Solitude…” More scholarly folks compare its style and themes with the work of Franz Kafka and The Diary of Anne Frank—a favorite book of Ms. Ogawa’s youth. ‘Kay. “A fable is a short fictional story that teaches a moral lesson, usually featuring animals that act and speak like humans.” I don’t believe there are any talking animals in Memory Police, but it does teach a moral lesson, although very subtly. It is not simple. More on this later, best B. Memory Police is told in first person and simple past tense. The narrator is a young woman (twenties?) who is never named and lives on what she refers to as “The Island,” which could be Japan (which is an island) but this is never stated. The time in which the book occurs is also never stated; it could be the future or it could be some alternate reality. Rather than present a summary of the plot and premise for The Memory Police, let’s rely on the author herself. Here’s the first page of the story: “I sometimes wonder what was disappeared first—among all the things that have vanished from the island. ‘Long ago, before you were born, there were many more things here,’ my mother used to tell me when I was a child. ‘Transparent things, fragrant things, fluttery ones…bright ones…wonderful things you can’t possibly imagine. ‘It’s a shame that the people who live here haven’t been able to hold such marvelous things in their hearts and minds, but that’s just the way it is on this island. Things go on disappearing, one by one. It won’t be long now,’ she added. ‘You’ll see for yourself. Something will disappear from your life. ‘Is it scary?’ I asked her, suddenly anxious. ‘No don’t worry. It doesn’t hurt, and you won’t be particularly sad. One morning you’ll simply wake up and it will be over, before you’ve even realized. Lying still, eyes closed, ears pricked, trying to sense the flow of the morning air, you’ll feel that something has changed from the night before, and you’ll know that you’ve lost something, that something has been disappeared from the island.’” Yes, this is a story about life in a mysterious society where classes of objects and beings—like books and birds—are suddenly disappeared, meaning they are not only confiscated by the Memory Police, who, in their uniforms and tactics, refer to real historical secret police groups, but all memory of them is also erased in people’s minds, and here, we certainly see a science fiction, non-realist slant. Certain citizens are immune to this “brainwashing” and stubbornly retain the memory of disappeared things. The Memory Police attempt to identify and arrest them, sending them to camps from which they never return. As a result, these people are sometimes sheltered by the people in the community, hidden from arrest. It is never explained why this disappearance is done, and there is no explanation of what mechanism is used. The story’s first chapter is in largely imperfect time and has to do with the protagonist’s mother telling her about the disappearances. Her mother is someone who is able to remember what’s been lost. She says: “The island is stirred up after a disappearance. People gather in little groups out in the street to talk about their memories of the thing that’s been lost. There are regrets and a certain sadness, and we try to comfort each other…Soon enough, things are back to normal, as though nothing has happened, and no one can even recall what it was that disappeared.” The protagonist’s mother dies when the protagonist is young, and in Chapter Two, her father is described. He was an ornithologist but also dies young. After his death, birds are disappeared, as are hats. The disappearances seem terribly arbitrary. The things disappeared are often objects of beauty and/or human delight so that their erasure creates a tragic sense of grimness and loss. “The disappearance of the birds, as with so many other things, happened suddenly one morning. When I opened my eyes, I could sense something strange, almost rough, about the quality of the air. The sign of a disappearance…I spotted a small brown creature flying high up in the sky; I had just begun to wonder if it was one of the creatures I had seen with my father when I realized that everything I knew about them had disappeared from inside me; my memories of them, my feelings about them, the very meaning of the word ‘bird’ —everything” There is no point in this story of exposition, and some readers will grow frustrated. At no time is there a section saying, for instance, “After an apocalyptic event, world governments became strictly authoritarian, and in an effort to retain order, the leaders discovered a technology where people’s minds could be controlled.” The disappearances of things, who is behind them, and how they are accomplished remain a mystery. As we can see from the above quoted passages, the story is presented through the perspective of the protagonist in a sort of memoir/diary style. As we get going, the novel largely consists of dramatic scenes that give us limited information as they are limited to the perspectives of the characters in them. Is the story an allegory of what a society can be like under a totalitarian regime? Sure, and we will get into this. Citizens who forget the way things used to be are much easier to control. I think too the novel can also be read as a haunting depiction of dementia. I do not know if Ms. Ogawa was thinking of this as she wrote the book, but the idea of people losing portions of their memory strongly makes one think of old age—although in the book it’s not just the elderly who are afflicted. Let’s stop there. Till next time. #TheMemoryPolice #YokoOgawa #AlanBray

After the end of Transcription—the point when Max relates the story of his father’s holding his hands and says “For fear of vibrations, low voices in their presence…” —there is more. It is a quoted letter by the man who created the glass flowers, Leopold Blaschka. He is writing about the process of creating the flowers and says, “We (he and his son) have the touch…the touch increases in every generation. The only way to become a glass modeler of skill…is to get a good great-grandfather who loved glass…” He then describes how this touch is passed down from generation to generation, from father to son. (I know, this excludes half of humans—don’t shoot the messenger). Taken literally, this is a statement (along with the story about the glass flowers and creativity) about artistic talent being not so much a learned skill but a genetic trait that is inherited or not in a process beyond human control. In the story, we have a father, Thomas, who is intensely creative but has seemingly not passed on this trait to his son, Max, who is an attorney. (apologies to attorneys). The protagonist, however, who is Thomas’ mentee, is shown as being creative. He is a writer, but has no genetic connection with Thomas, although I think the point here is not to think of genetics so literally but of a relationship of a father-like figure and a son-like figure. The end note is significant; it represents the implied author’s work of shaping the narrative in a particular way. It’s not technically an epilogue, as it doesn’t present the future of the characters or story after the last page. It’s more of a comment on the story, on the process of making art. Of course, Transcription itself is a work of art, so this whole business is extremely self-referential, commenting on itself. We can infer that the implied author has created the story by the process he described earlier. “I kept seeing the flowers as organic one instant and as artificial the next, a kind of duck-rabbit effect, not between things the object might represent, but between nature and culture, the given and constructed…I could will myself to see the rose and pink of a sunset as applied in touches or stains and then revert to seeing it as natural…” Mr. Lerner also says that art is making a copy of nature, which is Aristotle’s idealization of mimesis, a sort of transcription from one thing to another. The glass flowers are a copy of “real” flowers. Transcription is a copy of “real” events (in a realist book). It’s also based on transcriptions of recorded conversations. What is “real?” The story is not “real” though, it’s a constructed fiction. That is, it’s possible that Mr. Lerner actually has a daughter with an eating disorder—I don’t know, it’s none of my business. He may be using this personal experience to create a fiction. He may have a mentor/mentee relationship with an older artist (Alexander Kluge, perhaps?). Again, I don’t know. He may or he may be making it all up. I think what’s likely is that Mr. Lerner takes something real from nature and applies “touches and stains” to it in order to create Transcription. And part of this creation is to discuss the process of how it was made. Is there a traditional story structure here—a beginning, middle, and end with the protagonist transforming in an arc over the course of things? It’s a tale about a writer—the protagonist—who travels to two different cities, staying at two different hotels because of Thomas, his mentor whom he met some twenty years before. Then, in a third section (and from a third hotel) the mentor’s son, Max, tells the protagonist a story which seems to echo the protagonist’s own experience as a father, a husband, and a son. Let’s say there are story elements. Both the protagonist and his “doppelganger” Max describe a story of their daughters’ struggle with eating disorders and there is movement. Both girls go from near death to recovery. And both fathers go from not knowing how to be a parent to someone so ill to becoming a “better” parent. Max describes a harrowing tale of being separated from whom he believes to be a dying father and going through a process of emotional resolution and acceptance—not only of a parent’s death but of the end of the possibility of reconciliation. Of course, then that process is almost comically interrupted when Max’s father miraculously recovers. But only for a time, and both men must go through a grieving process after Thomas’ “real” death. And there’s a transformational process lurking in the protagonist’s relationship with his phone, a process of grief. He goes from utter dependence on it, to, after its loss, denial, anger, and acceptance, finally emerging as consciously less dependent on its presence. So there is plenty of transformation here, but it’s not neatly presented as a smooth arc. What of the beginning, middle, and end stuff? “Kay, the story begins with a protagonist traveling to see a mentor. He is befuddled and not so competent as a father. He struggles through the middle, engaged in a long interview with Thomas and then having to accept the anger of others like Rosa at his reaction to Thomas’ death. Then, at the end, he—his doppleganger, Max—learns how to be a more competent adult as a father and as the son of a deceased parent. So, is Transcription a fiction? “…it is ourselves we are encountering whenever we invent fictions…Fictions are for finding things out, and they change as the needs of sense-making change…fictions…make sense of the here and now.” -Frank Kermode Ooh! Let’s stop there. Till next time. #Transcription #BenLerner #AlanBray

The third and final section of Ben Lerner’s Transcription differs from the first two in that it appears to be one long scene of dialogue. The characters are the protagonist—who actually has a small role—and Max, Thomas’ son, who is shown telling the protagonist a long story about his daughter Emmie and then his father. So, the narrator changes between sections two and three, going from the protagonist to Max; the protagonist becomes a character, no longer an “I” but an entity who witnesses Max’s story. Unusual, no? More on this later. The section is entitled Hotel Arbez (without brackets). Let’s keep in mind that each section of Transcription is named after a hotel: Providence, Villa Real, and now Arbez. Is the implication that Max is staying at the Hotel Arbez Yes, best B, I believe so although the residency is not as explicit as in the first two. “The Hôtel Arbez Franco-Suisse, also known as L'Arbézie, is a unique hotel that directly straddles the international border between France and Switzerland in the village of La Cure. The border line runs right through the building, splitting the kitchen, dining room, and several guest rooms in two.” What does this mean? Hotels are transitory, temporary places, divorced from one’s usual abode. One is not “oneself” in a hotel; one is different, taken out of one’s habitat. Characters in fiction often confront themselves in hotel rooms. This final hotel, the Arbez, is certainly unique in that it straddles two countries, perhaps symbolizing an erasure of boundaries? Of identity? The boundaries between the protagonist and Max are certainly relaxed. The two men, old-time acquaintances, both are married with a daughter who suffers from mental health and physical issues, and both relate to the now deceased Thomas as a father although there is no mention in the text about the narrator’s publishing the interview with Thomas before his death. In fact, it is difficult to know when the events in this section occurred—before Thomas’ death, I think, so before Section Two if not One. Their speech is not marked with “he said” or “Max said” comments; it is almost like someone talking to themself, having a conversation with an imaginary friend. A doppleganger? More on this later too. Max first relates the story of how he and his wife deal with their daughter’s eating disorder—anorexia. As she refuses to eat, they accommodate, despairing privately but trying to be supportive and not angry with her. Then, Max becomes angry, and sternly tells his daughter she must start eating more. She does but counters his escalation by vomiting. The parents take her to a specialist who counsels a return to loving support and no attempts at control. After Max tells the story of his father visiting and of some tension arising between them, Emmie begins eating more normally. This section has the feel of an interview, one in which the interviewer—the protagonist—struggles to get a word in. Max talks on and on, as mentioned, this section is almost entirely him talking, telling a story. The narrator fades far away; there is no exposition. Then, after a line break, we have a new story. It is still Max who is talking to the protagonist, but now, he is talking about his father, Thomas,’ brush with death during the pandemic. As we know, Thomas lives in Providence, Rhode Island, and I’m not completely sure where Max lives during the time his father was ill—in California, I believe. “He was on a call with Emmie when we heard him coughing.” Max and his wife are concerned he has Covid, but Thomas denies it. Finally when he doesn’t answer Max’s phone calls, Max calls 911 and asks them to break into Thomas’ house. Sure enough, he has Covid and is taken to the hospital. Max can’t visit him in person because of the quarantine but does a Zoom call with him, using a nurse’s phone (please note the relentless mention of technology in the book). In an emotional monologue, as Thomas can’t respond, being blocked by a respirator, Max tells his father he loves him and forgives him for all his transgressions—chiefly being unavailable when Max was a child. But Thomas is unconscious and apparently has no memory of these words. Much to Max’s surprise, his father recovers and is discharged from the hospital. Max travels to Providence to see him. Max describes this visit: “And on that last night of the Covid trip, when I finally walked back to Governor Street, I felt—perhaps as intensely as ever—the unheimlich (uncanny). Maybe the real son would just come downstairs, maybe you were the real son, maybe I was the clone or robot or doppelganger. I felt eight and eighteen and forty all at once, my grasp on reality was tentative, an extreme form of the effect his (father) presence always had on me…” Here, Max reprises many of the feelings the protagonist described in Section One, essentially a loss or fluidity of identity. Along the same line, he then describes making a recording of his conversation with Thomas. He doesn’t tell his father he is recording but says: “I did hear in my own voice that tiny alteration, that trace of self-consciousness, that always occurs in the presence of some recording technology.” Thomas covers many subjects in this conversation, including his wish to suicide with his son present. Max puts him off, arguing about a trip he took with his father as a child. At the end of the story, Max reminds Thomas about the father and son who made the glass flowers: “…about art and life, the hinge between them.” This represents another blurring of identity as it was the protagonist who saw and wrote about the glass flowers in Section One. The book ends with Thomas taking both of Max’s hands and saying, “For fear of vibrations, low voices in their presence. (the glassblowers) Did you not teach me this beautiful rule?” Let’s stop here and discuss this ending more next time. Till then. #Transcription #BenLerner #AlanBray

As I mentioned in my first post about Ben Lerner’s Transcription, the novel has three sections. Today, let’s consider the second. It’s shorter than the others and is entitled [Hotel Villa Real]. Yes, it does have those brackets Best B, and no, I don’t know what they mean. Maybe that it’s in the middle? Could it be that simple? It begins: “After my talk at the museum I walked back to the Hotel Villa Real and wrote a few emails in the business center. Then I opened a new browser and entered Andres’s full name…” “The Hotel Villa Real is a 5-star luxury hotel located at Plaza de las Cortes 10 in central Madrid, directly facing the Spanish Congress of Deputies. It sits within walking distance of the famous Prado, Thyssen-Bornemisza, and Reina Sofía art museums.” So the protagonist is in Madrid at a “real” hotel and googles his wife’s old lover. The book’s last section ended with the protagonist in Providence, Rhode Island, speaking from his mentor Thomas’ house to his daughter after dropping his own cell phone in the bathroom sink. He has just had a long talk with Thomas, who believes the talk is an interview being recorded on this water-logged phone and that it will be published Somehow, he was in Providence and now is in Spain and that has some meaning we don’t immediately understand. Because his daughter’s age is referenced, we can infer that the trip to Spain occurred very close in time to his visit with Thomas. Throughout this section, the protagonist is shown with some humor trying to avoid relying on his phone, so we can also infer that he took some lesson from wrecking it, that he is attempting to be less dependent on it. It is revealed over three pages that Thomas has died and that the protagonist is in Madrid to deliver some remarks at a memorial to his old mentor. The protagonist has published the interview he conducted with Thomas, and this has become famous as the famous academic’s last words. So, to learn this, we must read—the information about Thomas’ death and what the protagonist is doing in Madrid is not neatly explained. However, the death comes as no surprise as Thomas is ninety in the first section. After his talk, the protagonist goes to dinner with other attendees, including Rosa, an old friend. After the dinner, he and Rosa take a walk. The protagonist asks her what she meant by saying at the dinner that his talk about Thomas was “unsettling.” She responds: “’That it was more in his spirit to be real, to take a risk, than to deliver an encomium.’” Again, we must read on to get some understanding of the protagonist’s talk—there is no explanation. When he presses her, she continues: “’You more or less confessed that you falsified a big part of what many of us thought of as his last…testament. A deepfake.’ She said the last word in English. So Rosa is accusing the protagonist of callously using Thomas and misleading all his devoted followers by publishing an interview that was falsified after the fact—the interview was not a verbatim transcription of a conversation. We the readers have access to the scene wherein the interview takes place and know that the protagonist was mostly trying to cover up his dropping his phone and had no hidden agenda. But we don’t know what occurred afterwords, and if the protagonist did “make-up” the published interview, perhaps in a way that was flattering to him. The protagonist is defensive. …’That’s ridiculous,’ I said.…’I told the story of—I told the embarrassingly personal story about breaking my phone, and, yes, I explained how part of the interview was therefore reconstructed…that is entirely typical of interviews, like journalists often take some notes and write them up or condense…And in all the interview in that magazine, the editors move stuff around, make composites. I was not at all confessing—‘” (Rosa) “’…And you made it clear that you never showed it to him.’ ‘I didn’t have the chance.’ (Rosa) ‘More than one person quoted that interview in their talk. His first interview in decades, his last interview ever…So people were suddenly wondering what they’d reproduced.’ ‘It wasn’t the most important part, what I had to reconstruct—’ (Rosa) ‘Reconstruct from what, exactly? You presumably weren’t taking notes while pretending to record.’ ‘A section of the interview was based on memory…’ (Rosa) ‘It was conducted under false pretenses.’” The conversation continues, and Rosa reveals that Thomas’ son, Max, is furious at what the protagonist did, saying he’ll have to work it out with Max later. In a story called Transcription, we have a protagonist who is made ill by regarding the past. Because of accidental damage to his phone, he is forced to rely on methods from the past—including memory—to reconstruct an interview he conducts with his mentor, a conversation he subsequently publishes. Of course, this is a “story” about how a story is published, the story we are reading in a book, a vehicle from the past. We are reading a story composed in the past. Hall of mirrors. Rabbit Hole stuff (Alice in Wonderland reference). It is a feature of post-modern fiction to be self-referential. This section ends without much resolution. Rosa confronts the protagonist with more anger, saying he lied and betrayed the others. The protagonist offers no defense. He imagines that Thomas will appear in the protagonist’s hotel room, holding the printout of his talk at the memorial, that the text is re-arranging itself so that it will become a confession by the protagonist that the things Rosa accused him of are true. As I said, there is no resolution—everything is not made somehow “okay.” The protagonist says he is “fine,” but I don’t think he is. He is ill (I think). Let’s stop there. We need to examine the story’s final section to see how this one fits in. Till next time. #Transcription #BenLerner #AlanBray

Last time, we considered some aspects of Ben Lerner’s Transcription. Today, let’s continue, best B. Is Transcription a realist novel? “A realist novel is a work of fiction that portrays everyday life, ordinary people, and familiar social environments in an accurate, truthful way. Rising to prominence in the mid-19th century, this movement rejected romantic idealism, grandiose plots, and the supernatural in favor of psychological depth, moral ambiguity, and meticulous social critique.” Key Characteristics: Ordinary Characters: Focuses on middle- and lower-class individuals rather than heroes, monarchs, or exceptional figures. Mundane Settings: Explores everyday routines, local dialects, and contemporary social structures. Plausible Plots: Deals with realistic ethical dilemmas and personal conflicts without tidy, miraculous resolutions. Objective Tone: Uses detailed descriptions and a detached narrative perspective to reflect actual human experiences.” Yes, I suppose the story does fit all these parameters. Maybe a better question would be: is Transcription merely a realist novel? What I’m thinking about here, and what I think applies to Transcription, is a different conceptualization of the novel. Transcription is not strict realism; there are references made from a different highly subjective plane of meaning about the surface level of things, and metaphor is sometimes used to show this. There are even hints of romanticism in the story’s focus on artists—both for the protagonist and Thomas—and the way they talk about and perform art (a fine example is the scene I highlighted last time about the glass flowers). But let’s stick with the original idea. The showing of another plane of subjective meaning is a hallmark of fiction—not just in the post-modernist and modernist eras but even earlier. Everyday reality grinds along, but in a story, and sometimes in “real” life, meaning is made. Our friends the ancient Greeks interpreted omens in the commonplace actions of birds and clouds; we reflect on something said by one person and apply it to another in a meaningful way. Mr. Lerner does this often. (So do most humans—that’s why fiction has such appeal). Again, let’s consider the scene where the protagonist recalls seeing the display of glass flowers and how this leads him to a theory of fiction. Yes, my friends, the flowers are metaphor. The fragility and beauty of these human-made objects is used to represent the process of creating stories. Many of the scenes that are shown between the protagonist and Thomas (and in the other sections as well) consist of dialogue, marked by few beats that might contextualize what’s occurring. (The quoted speech must do this and does it well). However, in the scene that begins, “I retrieved my phone from the table…” we have some of what I’m talking about—a level of description in the prose, and then a level of meaning-making about what’s described. “I retrieved my phone from the table, did some tapping and swiping, the way Eva (daughter) used to pretend to send text messages from one of her wooden blocks or magnet tiles.” Here, the protagonist is actually pretending to use his broken phone. The text presents him thinking of his daughter pretending in play by sending a text message using her toys. This play is (or could be) a metaphor for actually sending a text which the protagonist is pretending to do. His daughter pretends to text, and he thinks of this while pretending to text. Rabbit hole stuff. The protagonist maneuvers to Thomas’ kitchen and calls home, reaching his daughter Eva. “’Hello.’ the voice repeated; it was Eva’s. But the voice was also mine—my voice at the age of six, when it resembled hers in pitch, saying hello to my father…for a second, I wasn’t only in Providence but also in the kitchen on Douglas Street, wrapping the white plastic cord around my arm… ‘Hello,’ I said to her, my father said to me, speaking to the boy I was… And now I felt that Thomas had arranged the exchange he was listening in on (but surely he wasn’t listening), that my mentor was conducting this electronic opera, orchestrating these interferences, crossing wires, worlds. Impossibly thin glass filaments, underground, underwater, in the lungs, in the cochlea, vibrating when the small waves hit them—you call this fiction, but it is more.” ‘Kay. Our friends the psychiatrists might see mental illness here. But doggone it, this is a great showing of how reality can be expanded and amplified by sensitive types. It is more. The protagonist experiences himself as a parent and a child—which is the multiple role thing we’ve been talking about. Then he goes on to imagine his mentor (father-figure) listening in on something he himself has created, listening in the way an imagined omniscient father-figure might do. The protagonist refers to the glass flower scene and idea, and winds up by speaking to himself, the reader, the child—I’m not sure who—and making a meta-comment on the text, saying it is more than fiction. If we consider the definition of realism above, this passage fits. It features an ordinary character in a mundane setting. The plot—a father calling a daughter—is presented in an objective tone. But he has an unusual experience and then comments on what’s written as if he’s an editor or something (maybe the implied author?). A further layer is added to the realistic portrayal of telephone communication. Fiction is weaving a real sensory level together with a level of meaning-making which is intensely personal—and it’s created. We all see, hear, taste, touch and smell the same things (well, some philosophers disagree) but we make meaning of these things in unique ways based on our memories. If fiction is supposed to capture human experience, Transcription does this well. Let’s stop here. Till next time. #Transcription #BenLerner #AlanBray

Last time, I threatened to examine the passage in Ben Lerner’s book Transcription concerning the unnamed protagonist/narrator’s visit to his mentor Thomas, but there’s something else I’d like to address first, best B. In the section just prior to the visit, when the narrative goes into the past, showing him remembering his university days twenty years prior, he and his friend Anisa go to the Natural History Museum on the Harvard campus in Cambridge. There, they see an exhibition of glass flowers—“botanical models made by glass artists—a father and son—from Dresden a century ago.” “I was astonished by what I saw. I couldn’t quite believe that…these objects had been blown and shaped and painted, that these impossibly delicate things were the result of a thousand rapid choices and adjustments, movements of the hand…I joked with Anisa that these must be actual plants that some conceptual artist was claiming were glass…but the joke masked the flowering of a new sense: I kept seeing the things as organic one instant and as artificial the next, a kind of duck-rabbit effect, not between things the object might represent, but between nature and culture, the given and the constructed. And I carried this new way of looking, or this new hinge in my looking, outside the museum: when my sister dragged me camping, for instance, I was typically unmoved by “unspoiled” mountain views; after the glass flowers, I could see cracks in the rock face as penciled, as a history of small decisions, and then experience the view as beautiful. I could will myself to see the rose and pink of a sunset as applied in touches or stains and then revert to seeing it as natural; and so on. It was with Anisa that I first became conscious of this quiet but crucial technique, somewhere between a child’s game, a CBT exercise, and a religion. Eventually, I’d call this “fiction.” ‘Kay This passage seems to be Mr. Lerner writing about the construction of art and, specifically, fiction. It is a process of “small decisions,” one that involves a double-sided process of being aware of technique and its effect, and of the reality a created object assumes. Well. It’s also a comment on the fragile boundary in the novel between fiction and reality—for want of a better word. The real author of Transcription, Ben Lerner, has written a novel about an unnamed author thrown into crisis when he accidently scuttles his phone. We happy few know too that there is the mysterious implied author entity whom Mr. Lerner calls upon to construct Transcription. But this passage that culminates with the statement “Eventually, I’d call this “fiction,” seems to be Mr. Lerner himself describing an insight. Of course, it’s also the character in the novel, looking back on the events of twenty years past. And, yes, it’s also the implied author commenting on the process of creating the story. A lot of blurring of boundaries, my friends. Transcription states clearly its purpose and theme in the very first paragraph. The narrator faces the past—even though it upsets his stomach to do so. The entire story is a series of events that involve the narrator facing the past. He travels to Providence, Rhode Island, where he attended school to interview his old professor and mentor, Thomas. Being in Providence seems to trigger a recollection of his student days, when he had a mental health crisis and when he saw the glass flowers mentioned above. Later, we will see that interviewing Thomas is very much a confrontation with his past and his life so far. And an incident in Madrid is presented when he encounters another figure from his past, Rosa. Finally, we will have a long section which seems to be Thomas’ son telling the narrator about his father’s Covid crisis and his own struggles with his daughter’s eating problems—all past events. There is throughout the book, considerable blending and mixing of the two men—the narrator and Thomas’ son. The narrator is a kind of son to Thomas. Last time, I mentioned how the narrator exists in versions of himself—father, son, husband, mentee—and has trouble integrating them, which is a distinctly post-modern dilemma. “The postmodern self is a decentralized, fragmented, and fluid identity that rejects the traditional notion of a fixed, inner core or universal human essence. Instead of a single unified "I," it views the person as a shifting collage of multiple, context-dependent roles and social constructs.” We might note that Thomas has a number of art works displayed in his house that are collages. This postmodern self portrayed in the book can be contrasted with a modern self—"an inward-focused identity defined by internal psychological feelings rather than external social roles.” Transcription is a story where the surface events of the plot form a surface through which the protagonist occasionally falls, a present structure that has a depth of memory and other events and people that provide context. It is much like dropping one’s phone into a pool of water and discovering things there, things that support the present. Stop it! Here’s a definition of collage from our AI friends: A collage is an art technique where you stick different materials like paper, photos, fabric, or text onto a flat surface to make a new single image. The word comes from a French term meaning "to glue". Transcription is a flat surface, best B. Let’s pause here and pick up next time. Till then. #Transcription #BenLerner #AlanBray

Let’s pick up on our plunge into Ben Lerner’s excellent Transcription. In this first section of the story (first of three), the as yet unnamed protagonist arrives in Providence, Rhode Island where he went to school some twenty years before and where he met his wife, Mia, and studied with Thomas, his mentor. As I mentioned, he’s returning to Providence, a place redolent with memory, to interview an elderly Thomas. The night of his arrival, he intends to go to Thomas’ house and at the hotel, calls Thomas to make plans and then calls home to talk to his daughter. There’s a sense of the protagonist inhabiting multiple roles which don’t integrate. He’s trying to function as a father (fatherhood/sonhood becomes a strong theme), a husband, a mentee, a journalist intent on getting an interview, a man re-visiting his university but feels awkward. Talking with his daughter, trying to talk to his wife, and talking to Thomas—all on the phone—he feels disconnected and alienated. Looking out the hotel window, he remembers attending a play long ago in the adjacent building. “I was distracted by the idea that a version of myself was still watching the play…” He exists in versions of himself—an intensely post-modern idea. He is a different person in different contexts, lacking a unique, stable identity—which is a modernist idea. We will see that his mentor, Thomas, does indeed possess a single, stable identity—not that this necessarily makes him happy. He’s a different sort of human than the protagonist, somewhat mysterious. Then, the protagonist drops his phone in the bathroom sink—a contemporary disaster. The phone dies, and for him, it’s like losing the key to reality. (Thomas has no phone). In a comic scene of desperation, the protagonist tries to get a new phone, but the Apple store is closed till the morning. He tries, unsuccessfully, to borrow a phone. He realizes he’d intended to record that evening’s conversation with Thomas on his phone and now will have to rely on memory or note-taking. He sets out for Thomas’ house, phone-less. “I would typically start walking directions on the map—even though I knew the way. And I checked my phone whenever a transition presented itself, whenever I left one space for another, or changed from a standing to a sitting position (or vice versa) or stopped or started walking. “I was experiencing a withdrawal indistinguishable from mild intoxication, the landscape made strange, the stones stonier, by my being suddenly offline, incapable of taking pictures, sending or receiving data packets, sharing my location, getting a MyCheck alert or a work email or a small toxic hit of news or shitposting; I was having an unusual experience of presence—more aware of silicates glittering in the asphalt, the little plumes of vapor that were my breath, the articulation of branches and their shadows on the sidewalk—but I was also walking into my past…because only in the past would I be deviceless.” I hope what comes across here is that Transcription is not a sort of diatribe against technology, an absolute condemnation and desire to return to the “olden days.” It is a showing of a contemporary person who is bewildered by the sudden loss of a way to experience the world. There is no value-judgment. The protagonist walks through the campus area where he had been a student twenty years previously. He muses that, if he had a phone, he could take a picture of the building that his wife had stood in front of twenty years ago and send it to her, instead he must remember the way she looked. He encounters a woman known from the past, Chloe, who knew he and a woman, Anisa, whom he was involved with after a breakup with Mia, “the fall of our junior year.” So, there’s a nice narrative flow here: he walks through an area full of memory, encounters a real person from that time, and then seemingly remembers a story from that time. That story is presented in the same verb tense—simple past—and set off by paragraph breaks. A more conventional way to do this would be to change the tense of the memory section. Thus, the first sentence might be: “The fall of our junior year, Mia had spent a semester in Granada…” vs. “The fall of our junior year, Mia spent a semester in Granda…” After this initial marking, verb tenses could revert to simple past. But Mr. Lerner does not do this; he relies on that first clause—The fall of our junior year—to indicate the past and then continues with the same verb tenses used to indicate the story’s present. The effect is seamless, as if a consciousness is moving through time and space, sensing the present (a few instants behind, as we humans do) and having it trigger recollection. Another stylistic feature in this section describing the past is that the protagonist states that after a break-up with Mia, he attempted suicide. “It was conventional undergraduate stuff…” ‘Kay, a suicide attempt, even if it’s a gesture, is no laughing matter, bro. Mr. Lerner doesn’t exactly make light of it but he does treat it dispassionately, and this is a feature of the story—that mortal matters are rendered cooly. There is little shouting or table-pounding, and that contributes to the story’s tone—reserved and unemotional. The narrative returns to the present with Chloe’s comment: “We’re not in touch, Chloe said. but I know from Instagram she’s in Atlanta.” The protagonist moves on and arrives at Thomas’ house, but I think we should postpone our look at this till next time. Till then. #Transcription #BenLerner #AlanBray

Today, let’s examine a new book, Ben Lerner’s 2026 novel, Transcription. Mr. Lerner is the acclaimed author of three previous novels and several books of poetry. Transcription is written in first person, simple past tense although the first person narrator is a different character in the story’s third section which indicates the work of the implied author. There are three distinct sections to the book. I’ll say more about this but today I want to compare the story’s beginning to a story written more than fifty years earlier, Alistair MacLeod’s very fine offering from 1974 The Lost Salt Gift of Blood. Hopefully, this exercise will reveal something about Mr. Lerner’s style. Blood begins: “Now in the early evening the sun is flashing everything in gold. It bathes the blunt grey rocks that loom yearningly out toward Europe and it touches upon the stunted spruce and the low-lying lichens and the delicate hardy ferns and the ganglia-rooted moss and the tiny tough rock cranberries. The grey and slanting rain squalls have swept in from the sea and then departed with all the suddenness of surprise marauders. Everything before them and beneath them has been rapidly, briefly and thoroughly drenched and now the clear droplets catch and hold the sun’s infusion in a myriad of rainbow colours. Far beyond the harbor’s mouth more tiny squalls seem to be forming, moving rapidly across the surface of the sea out there beyond land’s end where the blue ocean turns to grey in rain and distance and the strain of eyes. Even farther out, somewhere beyond Cape Spear lies Dublin and the Irish coast; far away but still the nearest land, and closer now than is Toronto or Detroit, to say nothing of North America’s more western cities; seeming almost hazily visible now in imagination’s mist.” This story is written in first person, present tense, and is about a man who returns to Canada’s coastal area where he has a strong connection. Here’s the beginning of Transcription: “I was falling asleep on the train. I was going to interview Thomas, who had just turned ninety. My seat was facing opposite the direction of travel, making it difficult to read his latest book, which I was holding in my hand. It upsets my stomach if I try to read while I’m looking the wrong way—or as my ten-year-old Eva put it on a train to Lublin last summer, if I’m “facing the past.” ‘Kay. These stories represent very different styles. The beginning of Blood is formed of an intense amount of description. It’s beautifully written but gives little clue as to what the story is about. If we think of the basic questions that fiction should answer, Blood answers When—in the early evening, although this has an imperfect, timeless sense as if it could occur in any year. The last sentence references imagination’s mist, which suggests a consciousness perhaps looking out and imagining the sea. This may answer, or begin to answer, Who. And Where is answered, although again, to mention the seacoast facing east toward Ireland, is pretty imperfect and un-specific. So this passage is very timeless and open. And it asks the reader to be patient and appreciate the prose and the beauty. There’s no mention of technology which might place things more in time. What we learn going forward is that this relates to a story about a character who has a strong connection to this beauty. If Blood is un-specific, Transcription is more particular, although still open. But not imperfect. We are reading a scene that occurs at one particular point in time. A character, an “I,” is on a train, trying to read while facing the rear of the moving train, a position which upsets his stomach. And “I” is trying to read something by “Thomas” whom “I” is going to interview. “I” has a ten-year-old daughter, Eva, who was traveling with “I” last summer to Lublin, which is in Poland, and she made a remark which can be taken literally—facing the past—and also more philosophically, that when the “I” is facing backward, “I” is facing the past, which is exactly what “I” is doing in this story by going to interview Thomas, an important figure from the past. The question Where is partially answered. The “I” character (and we don’t know the gender or age yet, although we might infer that it is a man, naively, because the real author, Ben Lerner is a man) is on a train but we don’t actually know where the train is. There is a mention of a city in Poland, although it is separated in time from the moving train. The question Who is answered—a person who gets nauseous sitting backwards on a train and who has a ten-year-old daughter. Whereas the beginning of Blood tells us little about the protagonist of the story, Transcription has many references to an “I” who experiences. The “I” was falling asleep, was going to interview Thomas, was holding a book in its hand, etc. Technically these are called filters or filtering comments. Instead of showing what it’s like for a character to fall asleep, the writer uses “I was falling asleep.” It’s a reminder that the reader is reading about another character; the filter stands between the reader and the experience. It creates distance. There is considerably less distance in Blood, where the reader is put within a consciousness experiencing the seacoast. Are these stylistic differences somewhat driven by the stories being written fifty years apart? Yes. In fact, in you wanted to write something that suggested the seventies, perhaps a character in the seventies, you could emulate the style of Blood and use long, lyrical sentences deeply embedded within a character’s perspective. And, if you wanted something contemporary, you could use filters to create distance. In either case, readers would be cued by the form. If we look beyond the first paragraph of Transcription, we learn more about the story. The train is going to Providence, Rhode Island. The “I” is masked, a pandemic reference which places things in time. The “I” writes, “My main concern was that I would somehow fail to record us on my phone…” This is foreshadowing; this fear is realized. He texts his wife and mentions a hard morning getting their daughter to school (here we have a clear sense of the protagonist’s gender; he is male. He refers to “Eckert,” an unfamiliar entity who will become important later on. The conductor comes by and scans tickets that are on the protagonist’s phone—there are many references to technology, which is one of the book’s themes. He uses earbuds to listen to Thomas giving a talk in 1973. He apparently falls asleep and dreams. “I was in Paris…I was getting Eva from what must have been her school. The gates swung open, but a woman—dark, beautiful, familiar…stopped me and said ‘Impossible.’ He realizes he’s about to cut into a line of other parents waiting and is embarrassed. The other parents are disgusted by him. He walks back to find the distant end of the line and realizes he’s walking away from his daughter. There are a lot of unanswered questions: What is he doing the interview for? Why Providence and the train? What is his relationship with Thomas? (there are hints that it is more than professional). Why was the morning hard? Who is Eckert? The dream seems to be about obstacles the protagonist must deal with in completing an important task—picking his daughter up from school. This process of working through obstacles is central to the story. What also comes across in the beginning to Transcription is that many questions are raised because neither the protagonist nor the implied author explains everything. The reader is asked to be patient and wait for answers—which is a similar request that Blood makes. Let’s stop there. Till next time. #Transcription #BenLerner #AlanBray

Today, let’s look at the conclusion of Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight and make our own meaning of this fine story. In the chapter entitled “The Astral Plough,” we return to Nathaniel’s narration, along with a time leap to 1949, when he was working at the Archives. This short chapter ends with two italicized sentences, the first a question addressed to his mother: “What did you do that was so terrible?” and an apparent answer from his deceased mother: “My sins are various.” I believe his question comes out of the knowledge that Rose, his mother, was murdered—so, he is posing the question of why were you killed. The next chapter begins to explain this question, a question that shapes the whole story. Nathaniel, in the Archives, is asked to translate a recording made just after the war made in Italian (he speaks Italian). It is, he quickly realizes, a recording of the interrogation of an Englishman who is adept at not giving away any secrets. By way of obfuscation (a meaty word) the Englishman offers the story of a parrot in the far East that survived the extinction of all the human members of a tribe. The bird knew the tribe’s language—no one else did—and the Englishman and a translator had tried to reconstruct the language from that lone parrot. This diverting story (which I believe I mentioned earlier) is a wonderful metaphor for Warlight as a whole, in that like the Englishman, Nathaniel tries to reconstruct an entire world from fragments. On the tape, the Englishman goes on to describe a woman who had an “air of solitude” and a pattern of birthmarks on her neck and upper arms, a pattern which he refers to as resembling The Astral Plough (a formation of stars). Nathaniel makes an intuitive leap here, deciding that this woman being talked about was his mother. The Englishman is Marsh Felon. Then the storyteller tells us the fuller tale of Rose and Felon’s love affair and Rose’s espionage activities which resulted in her scars. Of course, this answers Nathaniel’s question about why she was killed. And we have the story of Rose’s death, again through the storyteller’s perspective. In many ways, this is the climax of the story, and what follows shows Nathaniel’s reaction over time. The final section is entitled “A Walled Garden,” and brings us back to the story's present. Nathaniel is living in the house that used to belong to his guardians, the Malakites who are long departed. The title implies a private and protected sanctuary, something Nathaniel appears to need. However, he is shown, after his mother’s death, reaching out to others who might help him remember his past. He describes watching a television program about Olive Lawrence and reading her book. Then he recounts the story of reconnecting with the Darter and with his old paramour, Agnes Street. Nathaniel has learned through the Archives that the Darter’s smuggling of greyhounds was a cover for his real job of delivering nitroglycerin to the military, a dangerous task. Nathaniel says: “Our heroes do not usually, after a certain age, teach or guide us anymore. They choose instead to protect the last territory where they find themselves.” Nathaniel locates the Darter, whose name is Norman Marshall, and visits him. Norman is surprised to see Nathaniel but invites him in and tells him that he, Norman, now has a wife and daughter who are not at home. Norman is unwilling to talk about their past and Nathaniel prepares to leave. In the hallway, he sees a framed piece of embroidery with words. After he leaves, he reveals what is written on this piece of embroidery: I used often to lie awake Through the whole night And wish for a large pearl. And this, he remembers, is something Agnes often said long ago. He concludes she and the Darter are together. Now the story slips back into a tale imagined by Nathaniel/told by the storyteller. Agnes became pregnant by Nathaniel shortly before he leaves her, (an abandonment, as his mother abandoned him) and went to the Darter for help. They married and raised the baby as Norman’s own. The ending of the story has Nathaniel at his home in his solitary existence except for a greyhound dog. (a fragment from the past). At the end of his day, he describes, in imperfect time, how the dog will come to him. “He comes to me even with all my separateness and uncertainties…As if he might wish to tell me about his haphazard life, a past I do not know. All the unrevealed neediness that must be in him.” Surely, Nathaniel is talking about himself. “We order our lives with barely held stories. As if we have been lost in a confusing landscape, gathering what was invisible and unspoken…sewing it all together in order to survive, incomplete, ignored like the sea pea on those mined beaches during the war.” (The sea pea was an aquatic plant that flourished during the war because humans withdrew from it due to the war’s dangers, a story that picks up on the book’s themes—Rose is a sea pea, best B.). At the end, Nathaniel recounts a day from the time just after his mother’s murder. He went to her house and washed some of her clothes, then put them away. Then he leaves “forever.” Warlight is a beautiful book. My posts have largely focused on just telling the story with some digressions into the leaps in time and the nature of the story’s narrator. Ultimately, Warlight is about a man making sense of his youth and his mother, but it is also a story of his mother and the choices she made. Is Nathaniel just like her? Perhaps he needs confirmation of that—or disconfirmation. He is solitary and reserved as she was—is this nature or nurture? You decide, best B. Warlight is a story of a man who is obsessed with his peculiar upbringing and desperate to determine whether or not it damaged him. It seems, in the end, he concludes that it doesn’t matter, that he must live his life, giving up on an attempt to find “order.” Till next time. #Warlight #MichaelOndaatje #AlanBray

As promised, let’s look at the penultimate section of Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight, entitled “The Boy on the Roof.” Up to this point, the story has been churning along in fine fashion, using the perspective of Nathaniel Williams to carry us to Nathaniel’s mother, Rose’s death. Nathaniel asks his deceased mother to tell him about the man “you lied to me about.” (and this implies that he’s aware and has accepted that she did lie to him about her past). The new section begins with “He would look down from that sloped straw roof whenever one of Rose’s family emerged from the house to collect eggs or get into the car.” This perspective belongs to “sixteen-year-old Marsh Felon” (interesting name) who is a younger member of a family of roof thatchers engaged to repair the thatched roof of an adolescent Rose’s parents. So this is a kind of embedded story—Nathaniel is telling we the readers a story that took place before he was born (1930 perhaps?) and one that he couldn’t possibly know as far as the other characters’ innerness. Is it his imagination? Perhaps, Best B. More on this. Marsh falls off the roof and due to his injuries, it’s decided he’d be best off staying at the William’s house till he mends. The young Rose visits him as he convalesces in the back kitchen, and there is an attraction between the two youngsters. He heals enough to leave and returns to his family. However, in the Williams’ house, he’s had a taste of a more refined and literate life. More educated. “It was the hour with that tense new light that Marsh Felon now began searching for in books whenever the writer strayed from a plot to attempt a description of that special hour, perhaps remembered from the author’s youth too. The boy began reading every evening. It allowed him a deafness while his brothers talked.” “Plenitude. What does that mean exactly? A surfeit of things? Replenishment? A complete state? A wished-for thing? The person named Marsh Felon wished to study and inhale the room around him.” These are interesting passages. Beautifully written, of course, but also in the storyteller’s voice—not in the characters. Is this omniscience or is it Nathaniel looking back? Is Nathaniel the storyteller in Warlight? Or is there an entity telling the story through the character Nathaniel? These passages, in my opinion, don’t read as if they’re in Nathaniel’s voice. But it’s ambiguous. Felon (as the story calls him) is taken in by the William’s family and his educational ambitions are encouraged. Next we see him as an adult, getting involved in British espionage in the years before WWII. (Again my friends, internal feelings/thoughts are depicted that the character Nathaniel couldn’t know). He interacts with Olive Lawrence (a character who later is the Darter’s paramour) and reunites with Rose who now is married and has a daughter, Rachel. ‘Kay. In any case, Felon involves Rose in British espionage. “Is it Felon who chooses her, or is this something Rose always wished for? Do we eventually become what we are originally meant to be? …Perhaps such a life was what she always wanted, the journey she knew she would at some time leap towards.” To me, this reads again more like a storyteller distinct from Nathaniel. A storyteller who is not embodied but is helping Nathaniel make sense of things. A new chapter “The Night of the Bombers” is in Rose’s perspective—are we being asked to believe that Nathaniel imagines his mother’s consciousness? It’s possible. I read this as more like the future Nathaniel is imaging being told a story that explains his mother’s abandonment. “On weekends, Rose drives up to Suffolk to visit her children who are living with her mother, safe from the Blitz that is terrorizing London.” So, we are in the war years, and Rose has children—not just Rachel but also Nathaniel. The next chapter shows Felon and Rose the spies. Rose has left her children and husband (or he’s left her) to be with Felon—apparently not just as a spy colleague. “He desired her. All those inches of her. Her mouth, her ear, the blue eyes, the quiver at her thigh, her skirt lifted and bunched: was it to satisfy him? His hand wishing to be there. Everything left his mind but that tremor.” Yikes! “And she? My mother? What did she feel? And was it he or she who had persuaded the other into this adventure? I still don’t know. I like to believe they entered this tremendous universe as teacher and student…Alongside his wish that for a moment she might awaken as if there were Morse between them in the darkness. Or the place she perhaps wished to be kissed. How she would turn onto her stomach.” ‘Kay. I’m getting kind of overheated here. Let’s remember in the logic of the book, this is Nathaniel reporting these eroticisms of his mother—it’s possible, I suppose but more likely it’s the storyteller making its case. Rose left her children to be a spy and to be Felon’s lover—was she wrong? Selfish? I don’t know, my friends. By the way, the text contains a lot of questions (so does my commentary?). This is part of Mr. Ondaatje’s style that appears in other books, but in Warlight, it adds to a sense of Nathaniel’s openness and reluctance to judge his mother’s behavior. Well, the clock on the clubhouse wall says it’s time to go. Let’s pick it up nest time. Till then. #Warlight #MichaelOndaatje #AlanBray

Hello. I have returned from NYC where I attended a conference focused on marketing rather than writing a novel. I learned a lot and am happy to be back. Let’s jump into Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight. The next chapter of the book is entitled “In the Archives” and has to do with Nathaniel’s work in the Foreign Office in 1959. He continues to look for information regarding his now-deceased mother and her wartime activities but finds little. Although he describes being estranged from his sister Rachel, he runs into her and learns she has a daughter and husband. But Rachel confronts him about their past: “You had no idea what was happening (during their teen years when the Moth was living with them). He was the one protecting us…You managed to ignore what our parents had done to us…We were damaged, Nathaniel. Recognize that.” With this, Nathaniel must accept—at least—that his sister is extremely angry at their parents for abandoning them, and that the Moth was their guardian. Nathaniel uncovers evidence in the archives about his mother’s activities after the war, activities that linked her with British espionage during the time she was away from the family. Then, at the archives, Nathaniel encounters a figure from those times, Arthur McCash. The two have lunch together, and Arthur says: “When your mother left the Service, she did so eliminating every trail behind her for one reason only. It was so that no one could come after you and Rachel again. And there were guardians around you, always…She stayed away from the two of you because she was fearful you might be linked to her.” Essentially Arthur confirms much of what Nathaniel has been learning on his own—and what Rachel told him: their mother, Rose, was a British intelligence agent during and after the war, involved in secret and violent deeds. She chose this life over that of being a mother and wife. The next section is entitled “A Working Mother,” and goes back in time to the point during Nathaniel’s late teens when Rose reappeared and they lived together in rural England, watched over by the Malakites. In Warlight, time goes forward, jumps ahead, backs up, and moves forward again. This is the way the story is told. Of course, it is told through Nathaniel as he looks back from a future point, full of the knowledge he’s amassed. The style, like much of the novel is faux memoir, by which I mean we the readers are presented with a story presented by an “I” who writes from a future vantage point. But of course, this “I” is not a real person, but a fictional device for the “real” author. An interesting digression occurs in this section when Rose and Nathaniel learn that a stranger has moved into the neighborhood. Rose is suspicious of strangers and spends some time investigating, learning that the stranger is “some sort of writer, apparently quite well known, even in other parts of the world.” This is the only mention made of this person, and it appears to be another instance of Mr. Ondaatje rather slyly inserting himself into one of his novels—I believe he does this in The English Patient too. Why do this, you ask? I think it’s just for fun. Nathaniel describes his time spent with his mother and that she never revealed much about her spying. Then, she is murdered, shot to death by someone bent on revenge. Nathaniel describes the funeral, and how he returned to the house that evening and spent time in his mother’s room, unable to sleep. Then he writes: “My last night at White Paint, two nights after the funeral, I went to my mother’s room, got into her narrow, sheetless bed and lay there in the dark, the way she must have done, looking up at the ceiling. ‘Tell me about him,’ I said. ‘Who?’ ‘The person you lied to me about. The man whose name you said you couldn’t remember. The man who spoke to me at your funeral’” ‘Kay. So, he’s apparently imagining this conversation with his deceased mother. But the next section leaps back in time before Nathaniel’s birth, into the consciousness of another character. We’ll get into that next time. Till then. #Warlight #MichaelOndaatje #AlanBray

Hello. My apologies but I am not posting this week. I am in New York City at a writer's conference, trying to get my new novel published. I'm learning a lot but it's taken up my time for other things. I'll return next week with more on Warlight. I hope everyone is well. Till then.