Suicide Woods, by Benjamin Percy

9781644450062
Graywolf Press, 2019
193 pp

paperback


"No one would a done a thing like that on purpose. It's against nature." 



Another of my most anticipated books for this year, I'm happy to say that Benjamin Percy's Suicide Woods didn't let me down.  I worry sometimes that something I'm really looking forward to reading is going to just tank, but any fear on that score was swept aside once I started reading this book.   It is a collection of ten short stories, well, actually, nine short stories and one nearly novella-length tale at the end; it's also a book that actually lives up to the blurb by author Luis Alberto Urrea, who  says right there on the front cover for all to see that it

"deals in a shivery fear, a dreamlike unease, a sense of eldritch hallucinations creeping toward us."

Never a truer word spoken.    Word of warning: if you're not inclined toward the weird, eerie, or sometimes downright creepy,  pass. This is not the book for you.  On with the show.

It's always a good sign, I think, when a collection of stories like this opens with one that sets the tone and acts a sort of teaser for what to expect throughout the rest of the book; this one certainly passes that test with flying colors.  The first story, "The Cold Boy" begins with a description of the forest as "hardwood," where the sycamore and oak trees would be completely bare if not for the hundreds of crows, "huddled like little men in black jackets."  The sounds they make create "rusty voices" that are audible a quarter of a mile away where a man named Ray stands on a frozen pond in the middle of a Minnesota cornfield, where there are "two sets of footprints, yet he is alone on the ice." First of all, when crows make an early appearance in a story, things rarely turn out for the best since everyone knows that the crow is a harbinger of doom; then, of course,  there's the immediate question of why there are two sets of footprints if Ray is out there by himself.    At this point, which is just two paragraphs in, the sense of something ominous starts making itself known in my blood, creeping under my skin as if to mirror the feeling of cold that rises and creeps up Ray's legs and into his chest, where his "heart feels frosted with tiny white crystals."  And after we realize what's going on here (which I won't divulge), Percy makes a shift into the realm of the unexpected, throwing his readers (well, me anyway) completely into off-kilter mode, where, quite honestly, I stayed throughout the entire book.   At the same time, there's more to this collection opener than just the eeriness and the unsettling creep factor; for me it begins a clear line of thought running from this first story through the last, in which attempts to alter or conquer nature, both human and otherwise, turn into the stuff of nightmares.

I don't want to go through each story in the book;   while there were only a few that left me with what I call FTG (Failure to Grab) syndrome, only natural for me in the case of an anthology of stories, for the most part I was beyond impressed.  The best stories for me included "The Cold Boy," "Heart of a Bear," and "The Balloon," while the absolute chart toppers were the titular and breathtaking "Suicide Woods," which made me put the book down for a few hours before returning to it and "The Uncharted," a story I visualized while reading much more than any of the others in the collection.  Both of these were superb, and not only because of their eerieness and the fact that they both completely messed with my head.   "The Dummy," "Dial Tone" and most especially "Writs of Possession" all resonate in our current social/political/economic climate, with the latter being one of the saddest stories I've ever read in my life while certainly one of the best written of the bunch.  The blogger at Minnesota Monthly reviewing this book quotes Percy as saying about the writing of this story that "It's like I took this larger portrait of America and dropped it, and it shattered," and after I read that statement, I realized how perfectly it describes what he's done here.

If you are a reader who prefers uplifting, follow-the-dotted-line sort of stories or  stories full of nice nice and happy endings, or who demands fully fleshed-out characters in your reading, move along.  That sort of thing you just won't find here.  It's going to appeal more to those people who enjoy books along the lines of what I call "strange with purpose," where thinking is required,  which is pretty much the bread and butter of my fiction reading these days.  It is unforgettable, really, and I can certainly recommend it.

The Memory Police, by Yoko Ogawa

9781101870600
Pantheon, 2019
274 pp
translated by Stephen Snyder

hardcover

It wasn't too long after starting this book before I noticed something strange about it.  By page 98, it hit me that for a story  labeled as "Orwellian,"  it was written in a surprisingly quiet tone.  Without discounting the bizarre events recounted in this book, the understated style alone was actually disturbing in its own right, and I experienced a sort of weird off-kilteredness throughout the story.

As the novel opens, the narrator finds herself wondering

"what was disappeared first -- among all the things that have vanished from the island."

A curious beginning, and by the time you reach the ending, it becomes all that much more curious given the fact that the novel is written in the first person.  (Cryptic I know, but cryptic in terms of this novel seems par for the course.)    I said somewhere that the book has a surreal feel to it, and I don't use the term lightly here.

Our narrator also recalls a conversation she had with her mother as a child, in which she was told that

"...that's just the way it is on this island. Things go disappearing, one by one..."

Continuing, her mother tells her that losing a memory "doesn't hurt," that

"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 disappeared from the island."

As just one example of things that were "disappeared from the island" among many,  her mother explains to her about perfume:

"In those days, everyone could smell perfume. Everyone knew how wonderful it was. But no more. It's not sold anywhere, and no one wants it. It was disappeared the autumn of the year that your father and I were married. We gathered on the banks of the river with our perfume. Then we opened the bottles and poured out their contents, watching the perfume dissolve in the water like some worthless liquid. Some girls held the bottles up to their noses one last time -- but the ability to smell the perfume had already faded, along with all memory of what it had meant.  The river reeked for two or three days afterward, and some fish died. But no one seemed to notice. You see, the very idea of 'perfume' had been disappeared from their heads." 

At some point things get "back to normal, as though nothing has happened, and no one can even recall what it is that disappeared." 

One never knows what will disappear next -- various types of food, birds, hats, roses, photos, etc., --  but not all people lose the memories of what was, however, and to ensure that their dictates are followed, the Memory Police try to round up these people and take them away to some unknown location, the fate of the narrator's mother.   They are "men who are determined to see things disappear,"  and

"from their point of view, anything that fails to vanish when they say it should is inconceivable.  So they force it to disappear with their own hands."

 The narrator is a novelist, despite the fact that on the island, few people seem to have need for novels; interspersed throughout her story are pieces of the unsettling but telling story she is currently writing.  She works closely with her editor known only as R, and as the blurb notes, she discovers that because he is one of the people whose memories haven't disappeared, he is at risk of being taken away by the Memory Police.  She hits on a plan to hide him, and builds a secret space in her home where he can live in relative safety.  In the meantime, things on the island continue to disappear ...

  As author Silvia Moreno-Garcia says in her NPR review of this novel,

"If you view The Memory Police as one big, fat metaphor for state control -- and I'm sure many people will see it as that -- you'll probably find more pleasure in it than if you attempt to consider it in other terms."

While the Orwellian tag is beyond appropriate (I was downright haunted by the thought of what the Memory Police might cause to disappear next, and also by the matter of  complicity) there is most certainly much more going on here in terms of  isolation, memory, loss, and the self.  In this world, to forget is to survive,  but at what cost?


While I was at first curious about the island's backstory, hoping it would be explained, eventually  it just became easier to  accept that things are the way they are here, making the reading of this book much more of an experience in the long run.   I finished it well over a week ago one morning about 2 a.m., laid there thinking about it for another two hours, and it hasn't left my head yet.   It is one of the strangest books I've read, but honestly, for me, that's part of the appeal.

Recommended with the caveat that this is a novel that will likely leave readers with more questions than answers;  there is no explanation as to the why of things, described here as "the laws of the island;"  they just are.  It also has an ending that  might just leave people scratching their heads with a big WHAT? standing out in their minds, as so many readers have noted.   While it may not be everyone's cup of tea, I loved this book; then again, I'm very much drawn to novels that I've labeled "strange with purpose," so I'm not surprised.

****

real reviews
Silvia Moreno-Garcia,  NPR
Michael A. Morrison, World Literature Today