Imagine if Scooby-Doo just wasn’t that good and Butterfly by Crazy Town was the theme song. That’s the succinct version of my thoughts on Kurosagi CorImagine if Scooby-Doo just wasn’t that good and Butterfly by Crazy Town was the theme song. That’s the succinct version of my thoughts on Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service, a manga from Eiji Otsuks with lots of promise and lively premise but delivers…well a corpse of a story. Does anyone remember that weird early aughts Scooby Doo reboot where Scooby spoke full ass paragraphs but the need to keep up his classic speech patterns made it unbearable and Freddy runs off to be homeless and “find himself” and returns to find Shaggy in his military recruit buzzcut and Daphne dating the werewolf guy from Twilight? Imagine that but like, if the main character looked like Ang from Avatar with a cigarette addiction instead of blue tattoos but hey don’t worry, they still have the Mystery Machine. Kind of.
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Okay I’m being harsh but like, this just felt really clunky. It’s the start of a fairly lengthy series so maybe it finds it’s footing but I must admit I’m not invested enough to find out. The premise is pretty cool though. These volunteer students each with their own unique paranormal skills&mdash:talking to the dead, being a medium through an eerie frog hand puppet, being the unsettling Lolita-esque girl, having cool hair, that sort of thing—team up to solve some death mysteries. The dead don’t like to stay dead though and hijinks ensue. It’s alright, it just had a rather jumpy delivery and never really came together that well. But ghost talker Ang is cool and haunted and shit so that’s fun.
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I did really like the art a lot, I will give it that. The landscapes are crisp, the characters have a lot of expression and the ghastly stuff really pops off. I love the corpse violence, it’s just real good.
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There are also a ton of pretty badass group photo shots. But each one just seems to assert a repeat of the theme song should play over the frame as cool hair guy puts on sunglasses but instead of Roger Daltrey shouting “yeaaaaaaaAAAAHH!” over windmill guitar it’s just “come my lady / come come my lady / You're my butterfly / shu-gah bay-bay.” Why would I put that in you’re head? I heartily apologize.
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YeaaaaaAAAAH!
Okay fine, this was kind of fun. But like the kind of fun you don’t want to admit. Don’t look at my Hoopla downloads in the coming weeks ...more
Each year, when the trees begin to disrobe from their vibrant, autumnal glory to stand naked and unabashed of their gnarled limbs, I take a moment to Each year, when the trees begin to disrobe from their vibrant, autumnal glory to stand naked and unabashed of their gnarled limbs, I take a moment to sit down to reread Virginia Woolf’s A Haunted House. A seasonal favorite that captures the Halloween season in a brief burst of only three pages, it always leaves me shot through with spooky sentimentality as her prose haunts the decaying mansion of my body for days after like a wailing ghost beyond the grave. Subverting the gothic traditions that preceded her of narratives lurking in decrepit castles and old ruins, Woolf places us in a story of the present nestled in our own bedroom as the floorboards creek and doors shriek from the goings on of ghosts. The real twist, however, is that Woolf’s story is more tender than terrifying, depicting spirits of the dead engaged in reminiscence of romance in a place that held their ‘kisses without number’ rather than raging against unfinished business or sorrow. Short and sweet in its spooky fun, A Haunted House never fails to satisfy and tug the heart’s emotional strings.
‘Wandering through the house, opening the windows, whispering not to wake us, the ghostly couple seek their joy.’
Originally published in Virginia Woolf’s short story collection Monday or Tuesday and later collected by Leonard Woolf along with her unpublished stories in a collection bearing the story’s name after her death, A Haunted House is a brilliant little gem of a story (you can also read it for free HERE). A ghostly couple move through a house looking for their lost “treasure,” which is understood to be the love they shared together during their life in the house, but it is the framing of the story that really makes this one hum with haunted excellence. Opening with the line ‘Whatever hour you woke there was a door shutting,’ we find the story addressed to you, the reader, in a past progressive tense that grants a universality of time and place to be wherever you at the time of reading. To enter the story is to enter a fascinating liminal space where the occupants of the house—the non-ghosts ones—is and isn’t the reader alongside a narrator somehow cozied inside as well. It makes for a rather lovely abstraction that blurs the boundaries of reality to make us question if it is a creative fiction or a waking reality where we are, in fact, being haunted by these ghostly lovers. It is a space where ‘the wind roars up the avenue,’ in all its seasonal glory as ‘rees stoop and bend this way and that. Moonbeams splash and spill wildly in the rain,’ with other rather hauntingly charming descriptions such as ‘the trees spun darkness for a wandering beam of sun.’ Woolf never fails to strike a chord of poetic brilliance.
‘And tired of reading, one might rise and see for oneself, the house all empty, the doors standing open, only the wood pigeons bubbling with content and the hum of the threshing machine sounding from the farm.’
With the reader an active character within this story, even in the act of reading as the above quote denotes, Woolf side-steps the question if these ghosts are real or imagined in order to drive home the greater message that our actions of love reverberate beyond time and space. The reality of the ghosts are beside the point, it is that we perceive them still in their nocturnal quest through the spaces that held their love that truly matters. And, as death awaits us all, it is also a spookily delivered optimism that death is not final but merely a translucent barrier that cannot block out, disperse or decompose the loves that are meaningful in life.
‘Death was the glass; death was between us; coming to the woman first, hundreds of years ago, leaving the house, sealing all the windows; The rooms were darkened. He left it, left her, went North, went East. ‘Safe safe safe,’ the pulse of the house beat gladly, ‘The treasure yours.’’
I am particularly charmed by the ‘pulse of the house’ beating out the word ‘safe, safe, safe,’ as it nudges us to consider it is our own heartbeat we are hearing reverberating through the house, heard in our heads as the word ‘safe’ instead of its usual thudding beat because we are confronted with ghosts that remind us that love lasts beyond death, beyond time, beyond space. Love is greater than death and in that we can find a sense of safety that life was worth it and will linger long beyond our bodies the way we can still see stars shining in the night sky long after they have been snuffed out.
‘Again you found me.’
So as the autumn season marches forward through decay, take a moment to read Virginia Woolf’s A Haunted House and take comfort in life and love reverberating beyond the grave. Love is the real treasure. A favorite to reread and I hope it will also warm ‘the light in your heart.’
For those looking for a eye-popping dose of pure nightmare fuel this spooky season, look no further than the nightmarish artwork of Danish illustratorFor those looking for a eye-popping dose of pure nightmare fuel this spooky season, look no further than the nightmarish artwork of Danish illustrator John Kenn Mortensen. Night Terror presents a collection of frightening yet frightfully impressive artistic depictions of monsters and ghouls run amok through gnarled forests, dark rivers and childhood bedrooms. These hair-raising images, often depicting a child beleaguered by such beasts, are so full of eerie whimsicality and is perfect for fans of artists such as Edward Gorey. Look at these:
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Its pages and pages of terror and delight, from haunted houses:
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To haunted bridges:
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And perhaps haunted dreams as these images linger in the mind late into the evening:
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These are both chilling and charming and packed with wild imagination and wonder with many of the images depicting a sort of travel with both children and creatures marching headlong into the growing dark.
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Over the Garden Wall, anyone?
I really enjoyed the artwork and this makes for a perfect halloween excursion of art. There isn’t a plot but you’ll pick up on overarching themes and it is certainly worth checking out.
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So take a look into Night Terror if you dare and have yourself a wonderful spooky season!
Stories can be a house into which we are welcomed inside. We lounge upon the finery of prose that decorate‘Some desires are only legible in the dark.’
Stories can be a house into which we are welcomed inside. We lounge upon the finery of prose that decorates and dazzles each room and hallway of emotion. Later as we peer back through the windows of the narrative, we find the world changed through its beveled glass, the landscape awash in the creeping shadow of the house. Such fresh perspectives have long been said to be found in Emily Brontë’s classic novel Wuthering Heights, a story which, interestingly enough, was once described by author David Markson as being mostly about people are ‘continually looking in and out of windows.’ Not content to merely gaze in and out of the Heathcliff home, K-Ming Chang throws open the shutters to climb inside and remake the novel as her own in Bone House. Renovating the Brontë’s story with a toolbelt of exquisite prose, this modern day queer retelling features Taiwanese-Americans caught in a cycle of deep desires, both of passionate yearnings and a ‘desire to be disintegrated’ intertwined so tightly one can hardly find the seams. Fresh yet familiar, Bone House brings its guests and ghosts through a fraught history and towards a conclusion that will clench your heart in Chang’s brilliant vision.
‘Its the way she says Cathy that makes me listen, the way a woman pleads to any deity that has dammed all her prayers, redirected them to death. A woman deboned of hope.’
I cannot in good conscience say anything further without ranting about how absolutely astonishing the prose that pours from K-Ming Chang is in this retelling. It weaves before the readers eyes as if to hypnotize you in its beauty, arriving so assured yet haunted as it delivers such delightfully visceral imagery such as ‘water foaming in the pipes like a mouthful of rabies,’ or a ‘silver sky so bright he sutured his eyes.’ Each page is drips pure gems of poetic expression and it is no surprise to learn that Chang is also an accomplished poet as well as an author (you can read her poetry here). While this is only a short story, the power of the prose builds a structure far greater than its page length and readers will come away feeling as fulfilled and overcome by its narrative as they would a full length novel.
‘Another word for lesbian is: devourer of the dark.’
I adored the queer retelling aspects as well as the cultural shift from Brontë’s original and while Chang uses the bones of the classic she bestows a flesh and life that is all her own. Here Heathcliff is transformed as Millet, a baby girl abandoned above international waters between Taiwan and the US, and her rival for Cathy’s affections is not Edgar but Edie, a woman with a ‘star-spangled surname’ from the Arizona desert.
‘Millet is the field beneath my feet, is how I walk the world, she is the hinge in my knee when I lower myself for prayer, but Edie is the thing I pray up to.’
Chang brings us through a history of relationships flowing with self-destructive impulses—Edie ‘disturbed by this part of Cathy, the quills in her, the part that wanted Millet to strangle her so that she could shingle herself with stars’—while the present spirals through visions of ghosts in garments of modern gothic. It grips you as tightly as Millet’s hands around Cathy’s neck.
‘Cathy believed that the more she and Edie thirsted, the deeper their roots would snare inside each other. They would find inside each other’s bodies all the water they wanted.’
Chang’s Bone House is far more than a retelling as much as it reads as far more than a simple short story. There is a freshness here that speaks to immigrant family culture, lesbian desires, and a ghostly hope that brings us to a new ending that plays the reader’s heartstrings like a violin. There is excellent thematic motifs with water—water that is life giving but also ‘can raft my bones and colonize them with rot’—or its absence. The desert drains, the people have fake flowers, the people ‘don’t want anything that dies for real.’ However, death cannot be escaped, though in dodging it we often wonder ‘what have I lost to live?’ Brilliantly told and as haunting as the home in which the ghosts inhabit, Bone House is an impeccable tale.
5/5
‘Come tether us together, come flood us a future.’...more
*Cue Ghostbusters theme song* I ain’t afraid of no ghosts… Especially when they are this cute and heartwarming*Cue Ghostbusters theme song* I ain’t afraid of no ghosts… Especially when they are this cute and heartwarming...more
I love lighthouses and I love a good ghost story and I especially love how well the two go together. So when I ran across the picture book Ghost Cat bI love lighthouses and I love a good ghost story and I especially love how well the two go together. So when I ran across the picture book Ghost Cat by Eve Bunting with illustrations by Kevin M. Barry while doing some shelving in our children’s department (shoutout to libraries), I couldn’t resist.
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Set off the coast of Ireland, Miss Maggie McCullen keeps the lighthouse shining every night. The people in town worry she is lonely but what they don’t know is that after her cat, Sailor Boy, passed away he returned as a ghost out of his love for Miss Maggie and the lighthouse. It is a cute story of their life together in the lighthouse with the cat frightening tourists and keeping the light lit, but when Maggie breaks her leg on the steps one night during a storm it is up to Sailor Boy to save the day.
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There is a fascinating history behind women Lighthouse keepers. In the US it was one of the first non-clerical government jobs for which women were allowed to hold the post. While the head keeper was often listed as a man, it was typically the wives who actually did the labor (yep…) and would often remain solitary in the post after the man had passed. I like how this book pays tribute to women Lighthouse keepers and does so in a fun way with a ghost cat to appeal to young readers. Perhaps having the cat be a girl would have been better to highlight that it was women doing work that men were often credited for but whatever.
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I like the art in this one too. It’s nice and eerie and moody for the ghostly lighthouse theme. The giant round eyes on all the people is occasionally a big unsettling but it’s a ghost story so I suppose that fits (the people are rather creepy though). It’s a cute little story and a nice little tribute to the hard, lonely, but important work of lighthouse keepers....more
‘You do not rest. You cannot forgive. You are not safe—you never were.’
You’ve likely heard of the Trolley Problem, a thought experiment that asks us t‘You do not rest. You cannot forgive. You are not safe—you never were.’
You’ve likely heard of the Trolley Problem, a thought experiment that asks us to consider the ethical dilemma of sacrificing one person in order to save a large group of people. French author Aliette de Bodard constructs an apocalyptic world where such a choice has been made in her short story Lullaby for a Lost World (you can read it HERE), a story she calls her ‘answer to Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.’ Told from the perspective of the last girl who was sent to her death in order to uphold the safety of a giant mansion in which The Master is said to keep the numerous residents cared for, our ghostly narrator is stirred to revenge upon watching the next girl being sentenced to death. Knowing the Le Guin connection was almost detrimental despite it being what made me eager to read this as where Le Guin achieves a staple of short fiction through the way her tale confronts the reader with an ethical quandery, this falls short by being merely a narrative without enough grounding in its own trolley problem set up to feel like anything more than a cheap, violent revenge story. That said, Aliette de Bodard excels at creating an unnerving atmosphere and delivers some gorgeous writing that make this story, which can be read in about five minutes, still worth a glance.
There is a line in the poem Questionnaire by Wendell Berry that asks ‘For the sake of goodness, how much / evil are you willing to do?’ If one thinks about it, one must question at what point does any horrible deed make any “good” result no longer “good.” Le Guin probes this quite well in her story, Omelas, and I feel like that question is part of what gives the story its grit: the people are aware and complicit and because some have walked away we can really set up ethical boundaries to test our our opinions against. The problem with Lullaby for a Lost World is the level of complicity is very uncertain, just that once the narrator has gone to her death she realizes ‘it’s too high a price,’ in order to uphold ‘the tapestry of lies that made your old, careless life possible.’ Not that ignorance of the horrors can wash your hands of complicity—and we can certainly understand why the end paints with broad strokes of rage and survivorless rampage—but when positioning this as an answer to Omelas it feels cheap without the awareness that people have recognized they are choosing the sacrifice and have walked away. Without that it loses the spark that made Omelas so cutting.
I can enjoy a good gory action scene, which this story certainly delivers, and I even think the random and completely unexplained unicorn transformation (YEP) is kind of awesome, but it also felt like way too much without really earning it. If that makes sense? Was it just wish fulfillment? Also (view spoiler)[if the entire rampage was trigger by her anger that yet another girl was to be killed to protect the mansion, why did she first brutally maul and then stomp upon that girl giving her just as painful and violent a death as the villain? It felt super unnecessary. (hide spoiler)] But also aside from the one conversation that we see The Master is grifting off their deaths, theres just not enough explanation of how anything is working to really make any of the punches land. The sudden violence being very graphic just comes across like explosions in a Michael Bay film at this point. Still, I have to say it was worth the read and I wonder if I would have enjoyed it more had I not known the Le Guin connection (or even picked up on the intended connection, which is pretty loose). Eerie, violent, and not a bad way to spend 5 minutes but also not a great way either. Definitely read the Le Guin story if you haven't, but for another take on Omelas, I think I'd still recommend N.K. Jemisin, The Ones Who Stay and Fight (read it here) over this one.
2.5/5
‘There is no rest. There is no forgiveness. And never, ever, any safety.’...more
When I was a kid I was certain our basement was a place of horror. I’d never go down there and assume every odd noise I’d hear at night was a sure sigWhen I was a kid I was certain our basement was a place of horror. I’d never go down there and assume every odd noise I’d hear at night was a sure sign my assumptions were accurate. But eventually I faced my fears and fought…I don’t know, some cobwebs and shadows? and by the time I was a teen I had converted the basement into my bedroom. Fortunately I never had to share the space with anything like this…
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Ben Hatke (Julia’s House for Lost Creatures and Zita the Spacegirl) and has mastered the perfect mix of cute and creepy creatures and it certainly shines bright in his newest middle grade graphic novel, The Things in the Basement. Milo is tasked with retrieving his baby sibling’s missing sock from his creepy basement—tia Maria made it so it is important!—and what begins as chasing a rat who has stolen the sock turns into an epic adventure through mysterious hidden room after room and deep into the earth where all the lost socks of the world end up. Along the way Milo must face his fears of eerie spaces and spooky creatures but finds that a little kindness goes a long way and he begins to make friends. Though not everyone in this creepy labyrinth is friendly…some want to devour you whole! Will Milo ever get the sock back or will he, too, become another resident eternally haunting the basement?
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I really love Hatke’s signature artwork and it makes this such an enjoyable experience (a lot of the creature designs will look vaguely familiar and the little musician mushroom buddies have appeared in other picture books). I also loved the whole variety of rooms opening into vastly different rooms like it was a haunted Meow Wolf, with a bootleggers hideout, an artist studio and some super amazing Piranesi-esque caverns:
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And the character designs are great, like this…nun with a bell for a face in a mysterious underground monastery:
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Things in the Basement is super cute and fun and a lovely lesson on facing fears, especially to help and protect your friends. This is just as fun and magical for adults as it surely will be for the younger readers it is aimed at (it may be a bit frightening for real young readers but in more a cute way than a traumatic way). Ben Hatke is a joy and this is a perfect book to kick off Spooky Season which is just around the corner!
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...more
‘I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three ‘I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach.’
Perhaps the ultimate Christmas story, Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol has captivated hearts and minds each holiday season since it’s release in 1843. And what says Christmas quite like using the fear of death to sway a wicked, rich man into opening his eyes to the need for community, for sharing burdens, for using our brief time amongst the living to uplift one another instead of shackling others to debt and misery in order to enrich ourselves at the cost of all that is good and beautiful. Though it is not his death that shakes him up most, but seeing the effects of his actions and learning that empathy is the best path forward. This story is as festive as a tree freshly adorned with lights and has canonized itself as a holiday tradition in the great collage of seasonal influences. Dickens harnesses the joyful mystery of the Christmas season as a searing message of kindness, empathy and rebirth, placing a damned soul on the precipice of his legacy of ruin and causing an introspective trauma with enough blunt force to shatter the ice around his heart and open the possibilities of shared love. We all have our ghosts that haunt us—usually they don’t kidnap us from bed on Christmas Eve to rub our noses in the filth of our making to wash ourselves clean, but this does remind us maybe it could happen to you—and Dickens reminds us all to live better, live for each other as well as ourselves, and to give in to the spirit of the holidays.
‘There is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humor.’
I have to thank my good friend Kenny for inspiring this read as it is his holiday tradition to have a Dickens December. Which gets me thinking about tradition, especially as I’ve been reading impressing upon the bliss of tradition. The holidays are a magical time because it is a season where it is socially acceptable across all fronts to emote. Sure it has become mired in capitalist steroids of expensive gifts, flashy displays, and all that jazz that pissed the Grinch off enough to rob everyone bare, but underneath it all is a tender heart of compassion and expressions of love that we can return to in our hearts. Traditions are like the shortcut to that passion. This story, for one, is a tradition in my family as I am quite fond of The Muppet’s Christmas Carol, and the power of this narrative to have the pulse of the holidays is part of the reason it has become a tradition for many and has been widely adapted. I grew up on the Alastair Sim version as well, finding it a bit dusty for my childhood tastes but now watching it is a quick route to warm memories. Same with It’s A Wonderful Life, a movie I couldn’t stand as a kid because it was SO long but now I can’t go a December without watching (while usually getting good and wine drunk and shouting along with every line, sorry everyone). It isn’t Christmas for me until my sister and I shout “Merry Christmas Bedford Falls!” to each other in bad Jimmy Stewart impressions and then retort “And a happy new years! In jail!” But enough about Christmas traditions.
This book is a pretty awesome punching up at society. Dickens shows the poor as downtrodden and oppressed, but captures the whole “salt of the earth” elements to show that their resilience and love shines bright enough in the darkness to make this whole tragicomedy of living worth the endeavor. Tiny Tim is a symbol of purity, like a Job unquestioning in his faith of goodness despite the hardships of his reality. And then we have Scrooge. The bad boss, the guy you cross the street to avoid, the man with nothing good to say and only greedy hands that will take your very soul if they can grasp you. Sweet Bob Cratchet labors away for him in the dimly lit office because ‘darkness was cheap, and Scrooge liked it,’ a line that makes me chuckle having worked in a factory where ‘being cold in winter is cheaper’ was a legit response to asking if we can get some heat. Dickens takes dead aim at the ruling elites and, through the help of three ghosts, shows that their money loving ways is a crash course to spiritual ruin and a legacy of shame.
Not to make this sound bleak, because Dickens is quite funny in fact. Also this book still feels wildly relevant in theme and message all these decades later.
I love that this is a ghost story. I love the infusion of horror with Christmas, I think it puts us closer to life by remembering death is part of the deal. I like the theory that the lamp gasses in the Victorian era lead to the telling of ghost stories because everyone was high as shit, which isn’t that different from my own Christmas Eve’s with friends. So carry on that tradition. But it also gets into how rather frightening a lot of religious messaging on hellfire and damned souls can be. Which has never been something I’ve enjoyed about religion but when you mix it with Christmas and tell a story like this, the holiday acts like sugar to sweeten it all into a pretty charming festive treat. Dickens story lives on, and understandably so, because it grabs our primal fears of death and public opinion and asks us to be the better version of ourselves. Because in doing so we can uplift those around us. Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy Holidays to all my friends. Thanks, Dickens, this was a magical read that put me in some high holiday spirits. Now to go listen to Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings, my traditional favorite holiday album....more
Jon Fosse, dubbed ‘the Becektt of the 21st Century’ by French newspaper Le Monde, has a staggeringly impressive career and output. The Norwegian novelJon Fosse, dubbed ‘the Becektt of the 21st Century’ by French newspaper Le Monde, has a staggeringly impressive career and output. The Norwegian novelist, poet, Ibsen Award-winning playwright has published over thirty books and twenty-eight plays, been named Chevalier to the French Ordre national du Mérite, been granted a lifetime stipend by the Norwegian government to pursue his craft, been published in over 40 languages and is the most produced living playwright in the world. Oh and he is also a recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2023. Fosse is an international success yet, here in America from which I am writing, he is all but unheard of. His novels are often abstract and ethereal, which may point towards the lack of commercial acceptance in an American culture and the limited English translations of his work available, but anyone who sails the river of his ever-flowing prose can’t deny the somber beauty carrying them forth. Morning and Evening (Morgen og Kveld), first released in the original Norwegian in 2000, has finally been beautifully rendered into English by translator Damion Searls. With this new edition from Dalkey Archive, who has previously published Melancholy I & II as well as Aliss at the Fire, alongside a collection of Fosse’s essays, we are granted a greater glimpse into a brilliant and celebrated mind regrettably underappreciated by an English speaking audience.
There is a very theatrical feel to Fosse’s novels as if they could easily be converted to dramatic form. Despite being a rather internal novel, Morning and Evening is actually quite visual. Sparse and with few changes of setting, much of the book involves characters coming and going as if on a stage, and it is not a great stretch to imagine the novel performed by a theatre group. What would be lost, however, is the marvelous stream-of-conscious puzzlement and repetitious prose that take us into the human soul in a way that would be inaccessible through visuals alone.
Morning and Evening is simple on the surface. A man, Johannes, is born, and years later, the same man dies. Not much actually happens in the novel, yet somehow the entirety of a life lived crawls out from the small crack of novelistic space. Fosse has a unique style that creates quiet novels with a roaring fluidity marked by repetition and unhindered by traditional, or virtually any, punctuation. The lack of periods and new paragraphs beginning without capitalization emphasizes the way life moves in a continuous flow, and it is the bare, natural and quotidian aspects of life that Fosse best mines for universal understanding.
Morning and Evening shines by compressing a lifespan down to an utterly basic and mundane essence. Divided into two major sections, the first being the father witnessing Johannes’s birth and the second letting the reader walk hand-in-hand with Johannes on a seemingly normal day where everything around him feels intangibly different. As the second section unfolds, we are given fleeting glimpses at the key elements of Johannes’ life as they spiral together down a drain toward death. This compressed essence is like the thesis statement of a life’s ‘meaning’, and over the short novel Fosse examines the way we ascribe meaning on a world lacking inherent meaning. 'and everything is in a way heavy in itself, everything in a way announces itself and announces everything you do with it,' he writes. When we see objects, we understand them through our perception of what they mean to us through their use, their name, or even through association with past events containing the object. An object is forever drenched in the residue of our experiences with it, becoming a part of us whereas it would be meaningless without our perspective ruling over it.
Nietzsche wrote that ‘God is dead,' inviting us into a world of possibility with no objective morality. How weightless the set-pieces of our existence would be with no defined purpose to validate their being. Fosse employs frequent repetition of statements and ideas which function like a refrain in the melody of his prose to insert his messages in our heads like a musical hook. There are frequent moments when characters assert the belief that there is a 'lower god' which rules the world and not an 'all-powerful' God which would have created the world. Perhaps in a world where God has turned away, as Fosse reminds us time and again, we ourselves become the lesser gods. An individual gives meaning to the surrounding world in ways which spell out a personal story, giving individualized substance to the weightlessness of experience when assessing one’s own existence.
ll the things are normal things but they have become somehow dignified, and golden, and heavy as though they weighed much much more than themselves and at the same time had no weight
We read the tremors of a self-authored set of purpose and meaning as they wane to reveal a weightless reality upon which they were built. Fosse’s tone is not one of sorrow or fear but of simple freedom. 'he has a feeling that he will never see all of this again,' Fosse writes, 'but that it will stay in him, as what he is, as a sound…' Death takes the world from Johannes, but he also takes the world with him by carrying it in his eternal memories. It creates a comforting vision of death and Johannes revisits the standardly expected places, friends and family that is most dear to him before venturing from this world.
The image of death presented in the novel is especially reassuring considering the depiction of the world with all it’s 'darkness and all the terrible evil...' Olai considers the implications of bringing forth a child into this world 'starting out on his own life, out in the hard world, already you are connected to both God’s goodness and a lower god or devil…' If not for the lowly goodness we decide to find in the world, all we would be left with is fear and a void and death would be 'to be dissolved and turn back into nothing...from nothing to nothing, that’s the path of life…' It is this fear of the nothing and the evils of the world which makes us believe there must be meaning and a god of some sorts, something to pacify us into continuing in the dark, continuing our species. Most importantly, this belief embraces us into accepting the inevitable oblivion at the end of all our timelines.
Peter, best friend to Johannes, is the comforting face sent to usher him down the path of acceptance. A fisherman with long, unkempt hair and a calm demeanor, his character is sure to invoke Christ-like comparisons. A pivotal scene finds Johannes and Peter out fishing and Johannes' bait is unable to sink below the surface.
The sea doesn’t want you, he says and Peter wipes the tears away Now all that’s left is earth, Peter says
The scene recalls the biblical moment of fishermen John and Simon Peter being called by Jesus as he walks across the water and reflects Peter’s calling Johannes into death. The unknown beneath the surface is gone, all that’s left is the earth and it’s previously known wonders locked in Johannes’ memory.
While Morning and Evening has an obvious biblical undercurrent, the book benefits from Fosse’s message which may be read as a non-denominational, philosophical inquiry into meaning that uses biblical principles as pre-existing guideposts rather than religious dogma. 'God does exist,' insists Johannes’ father, Olai, 'but far far away and very very close...he shows himself, both in the individual person and in the world.' While the book can be read at face value as individuals being agents of God in an evil world, the novel also works metaphorically as a solipsistic investigation of the inescapable, internal consciousness making us each gods of our own realm of reality within the void of shared reality. Fosse’s works are open to interpretation, and this is as much their source joy as their attempts at universality. The novel’s stream-of-conscious style is only broken up by a period in one particular place:
[Olai] will be the father of a little fellow who will also be named Johannes, after his father. There is a God, yet, Olai thinks. But he is far away, and he is very close. And he is not all-knowing and not all-powerful. And it is not this God who rules over the world and humankind…
From here the novel progresses uninterrupted. Fosse stops the flow to punctuate the importance of the Father, both God and human fathers. Life stops at God and only begins from him. Similarly, Olai and his wife Marta are also creationary forces, the lesser gods that rule not from on high but from within the world. Beginning the novel with Olai witnessing the birth of the character who dominates the rest of the novel shows the endless flow of life from one being into another.
Fosse slowly and steadily twists the screws in his work, increasing tension and awe so gradually that it is hardly noticeable until the reader is practically overcome by it at the conclusion. The novel progresses down a path which is, admittedly, predictable though Fosse’s goal is not to shock readers with a cheap trick dropping the floor from under them. The effect is there, however the novel does slog and feel flat from all the humdrum ideas and predictability. He shows his authorial hand throughout so readers may focus on the internal human tragedy rather than the plot, and the novel is all the better for it. Fosse’s prose lives up to his message and is imbued with a heavy weightlessness. Morning and Evening is a brief work in a minor key sung in hushed tones and is certainly one worth experiencing despite feeling like an overused chord progression. With the help of Dalkey Archive and Damion Searls’ crisp translation, Fosse’s voice will reverberate within a new audience. 3.5/5...more
s.penkevich
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