Far From Brooklyn

Reader’s log, November 2024

In November, I read three unrelated works, two new and one old (although the old title only relatively recently became available in the English). It’s an international mix, in its way: One was composed in Danish; another was composed in English by a first generation Bosnian; the third was also composed in English, this time by a child of Thai immigrants. The only quality that all three shared was a focus on human need and, to an extent, addiction — to drugs, to alcohol, or to the internet.

The Copenhagen Trio, by Tove Ditlefsen

This is a deceptively simple work, a trio of short novels, or memoirs, about growing up in Copenhagen in the years leading up to World War II. “Deceptive” because the first volume is purposefully childlike, with simple sentences and wide-eyed acceptance of the the world as seen by the narrator, a child of five living in a two-room apartment with her parents and brother. 

That first volume, with the plainspoken title of “Childhood,” sketches, in the simplest of language, Tove’s family: her mother’s harsh and unpredictable moods, her father’s dreaminess and the difficulty he faces in holding a job, and generally the dreariness of working class life in Denmark in the 1920s. For me, the simplicity of the prose and the general grey-scale depiction of family’s impoverished life was not terribly interesting to read. The child Tove is an indistinct creature (after all, she’s far from fully formed), and because we see her parents and the world through her still not-fully-formed eyes, they too are somewhat indistinct.

Still, “Childhood” has interesting moments, particularly its observations of the challenges faced by a simple workingman in early 20th Century Denmark. Tove’s father, Ditlev, worked as a shepherd as a child and then, having moved to the city, was a baker’s assistant and later a coal stoker, but we really only understand him in his helplessness — when he loses his job, the whole family is gripped with fear. It’s worth noting, too, that the author doesn’t fetishize her family’s poverty. They are poor; their neighbors are poor; it’s the Depression era; that’s that. 

Almost from the first, young Tove wants to be a poet. (The ambition does not arise from nowhere; her father is a reader, and an opinionated one.) In “Youth,” the second volume of the memoir, in her early teens, she composes poems with oddly adult themes, such as the pain of a mother after losing a child in birth, but she hides her work from her family. When her older brother discovers her stash of poems, he laughs at her at first, but then encourages her to publish them.

Amazingly enough, Tove almost immediately finds interested readers — editors at local newspapers, literary journals, and publishers.  And it is this world, the peculiar literary circle of Copenhagen under Nazi rule in the early 1940s, that the third volume, “Dependency,” takes place. I don’t know why, but the focus of this final volume caught me by surprise, even though it’s right in the title: As a young mother, Tove becomes addicted to painkillers, and by extension to her grotesque husband, a doctor who seems to take a perverse pleasure in zonking her out on morphine.

And so, what begins as a seemingly standard memoir of girlhood gradually becomes a ghoulish portrait of drug-addiction, casual sex, and artistic ambition, all in the seemingly colorless world of Copenhagen in the 1930s (the Depression) and 1940s (World War II, Nazi occupation). 

This book, or trio of books, came to my attention thanks to the NYT’s list of best books of the century, and will certainly rank on my own top 100 list once I update it. 

Unspeakable Home by Ismet Prcic

Here we have yet another book that falls into the widening chasm of fiction/autobiography/memoir, but I guess you might call “Unspeakable Home” gonzo metafiction for the way it blitzes together fact, history, memory, and fictional parallel lives.

The author, Ismet Prcic, like his narrator, Izzy, is a Bosnian refugee. Displaced by the savage attacks on his homeland by Serbia, Izzy is ridden with guilt for having escaped the brutality of the war, haunted by the death and suffering he witnessed before he left the country, and often addled by drugs and alcohol, not to mention punk rock. 

The story follows Izzy from war-torn Bosnia to candy-colored Californian suburbia, through college and grad school, through courtship of his unnamed “Beloved” to marriage to separation and divorce, from drunkenness to sobriety. But, notably, Izzy never progresses from chaos to control, from yearning to satisfaction, from ignorance to understanding. He is striving and struggling to the end, although a reader can at least take heart from the fact that, if nothing else, the shadow behind Izzy, the author Ismet, at least has managed to publish this book. As with “A Fan’s Notes,” which followed a talented but alcohol-addled narrator from nowhere to pretty much nowhere else, “Unspeakable Home” is itself the endpoint of its own narrative, the accomplishment that the narrator of the enclosed work has strived and seemingly failed to achieve. 

Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte

It’s hard to describe the sheer gruesomeness of the lives of the characters in this book —  they are sexless, uncomprehending, scorned, confused, or angry, and all of them, to a man or woman, are lonely. Tulathimutte is pitiless in his focus on the staggering weight of his characters’ loneliness. He’s not being cruel; he’s not making fun. These are people he knows; for all I know they may be self projections of himself, at least of a sort. But he doesn’t shy away from the embarrassing, even horrifying details of their pain, whether its a lonely gay man approaching a stranger’s house for a dreadful assignation, or a woman who allows a “friend” to take a picture of her giving him oral sex.

Tulathimutte’s insistence on describing the indescribably degrading details of his characters lives reminded me, oddly, of “Ulysses.” That’s because Joyce, too, insisted on dwelling on the grossest aspects of human life — shitting, pissing, farting, hemorrhoids, etc etc etc, and of course the occasional sex act. It was the relentless attention to the uncomfortable realities of human life that early readers objected to in Ulysses. And Tulathimutte is following a similar path here in “Rejection.” He refuses to look away, no matter how abased his creations are.

That’s not to suggest that I’m putting “Rejection” on the same shelf as “Ulysses.” It’s a notable book but there’s probably not enough value in it to counteract the shock. For one thing, many of the stories dig so far down in the horror of loneliness and rejection that they read as satire, not as narratives of actual suffering humans. The first and most widely commented-on story, “The Feminist,” features a character who twists himself in knots in order to be sympathetic to women, using all the right, politically-correct lingo, forgiving every rejection from every woman as reflective of the unfair burden society places on women. Their lives are so difficult, he thinks, or rationalizes, surely that is why they are mean and dismissive of him. But Tulathimutte lays it on so thick, it gets a bit cartoonishly gloppy, and the character’s transformation from pathetic loner to murderous incel registers not as a fiction but satire.

Another book that came to mind, for very different reasons, was Honor Levy’s “My First Book,” because both authors are working with similar raw material: wretched young people overcome by social media and bound up in worries about saying the wrong thing, or just saying something the wrong way (although Levy’s characters sometimes delight in flouting political correctness). In fact, both Levy and Tulathimutte drop the same word, “haplogroup,” which I (an older reader!) had not come across before.  I suppose the closest synonym would be “ethnicity,” but that word carries some sneaky undertones, hence the more radically scientific “haplogroup.”

Tulathimutte uses a lot of science-y, or science-adjacent language — “allopreening,” “ortholexic,” “haplogroup,” “neoteny.” It reflects his characters’ lack of human connection. Unable to communicate with friends and lovers, they have to fall back on scientific terms to explain the world, which otherwise makes very little sense to them.

Obviously Tulathimutte’s stories are unpleasant to read, but they do seem to reflect on some aspects of the world we live in today.  

Photo credit: Vyacheslav Argenberg, via Wikimedia Commons