Magnificent Octopus

In the daytime, as I walk down Vancouver's tree-lined streets, where the crocuses are in full bloom, I squint at the bright clear skies, wondering if one day all this, too, will turn into a burning wreckage. Riding the bus, I startle at a caved-in building, reminding myself that unlike every other caved-in building on the news and in my nightmares, this one has simply been bulldozed. My sister, who also lives in Vancouver, tells me that when she passes freshly dug mounds for flower beds, she sees mass graves. Sometimes I wonder if she and I are going insane, living two realities at once — the explosions peppering phone calls from Ukraine alongside the dinner parties in Vancouver with laughing, smiling friends in wrinkle-free fabrics who don't mention the war. Maybe there is no war, as conspiracy theorists whisper online. Maybe it's all in my head?

Endling, by Maria Reva, is postmodernist madcap set in contemporary Ukraine. Initially quirky in its characters and premise, a third of the way through the novel abruptly breaks off to examine its authorship and context. From there, it snowballs into absurdity.

Who peoples the main narrative thread?

Yeva: Malacologist. "Romance tour" work (the Romeo Meets Yulia agency is essentially an in-person mail-order bride service, serving aging, balding Western men) finances her mobile lab, where she documents and preserves snail species, with a fondness for endlings (last of their species). Asexual.

Kevin: Fellow snail conservationist based in Hawaii, in love with Yeva.

Nastia: Another "bride" at the agency, achingly young and beautiful, with major mommy issues. Devises a plot to kidnap a group of bachelors, ostensibly to take down the bridal industry machine, but mostly to get her mother's attention.

Sol: Interpreter in the employ of the romance tour but paired exclusively with her sister Nastia, so she acts as filter, chaperone, unheeded voice of reason.

Iolanta: Nastia and Sol's absent mother. "Pioneer. Performance artist. Crazy. Sextremist." Think: Pussy Riot.

Pasha: Ukrainian-Canadian disappointment to his parents. An engineer, not an artist, pursuing the idea of a homeland he never knew, hoping to find a Ukrainian bride with whom to build a quiet, traditional life. 

While other immigrants steered their offspring into practical careers like medicine and accounting, his parents, from his early days, scrunched their noses at all that. They did not leave everything they knew back in Ukraine, they did not traverse the roiling Atlantic just so their son could suffer the same boring engineering jobs they'd endured, and their own parents had endured. No, Pasha would transcend pragmatism, become a Deep Thinker.

Lefty: A rare snail specimen, C. surculus, not a hermaphrodite, with a shell spiraling left, rendering breeding impossible with 99% of his species. 

The yurt makers: A Greek chorus of sense and wisdom and cryptic truths and allusions appearing in the second half of the book. "The world is a whore," they say.

When we first meet Yeva, she's living out of the same van where she keeps her ever-dwindling collection of specimens; she's still in emotional recovery from losing species due to contaminated lettuce and then a further lab slipup. Yeva agrees to the use of her van in Nastia's scheme, and one night, after the tour's scheduled activities, a select group of bachelors file into the vehicle. It is the early hours of February 24, 2022. Nastia's plan had no contingency for Putin bombing Kyiv that day.

And  then in Part II, the novel ends. The "end matter" includes correspondence between the author and publisher, a grant application, (how can one go on writing fiction in these circumstances?), acknowledgements ("I would also like to thank Russia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs for including my name on their sanctions list of Canadians who are now forbidden from entering their country, one of the biggest honors of my literary career"), and a note on the typography (Serifus Libris, "conceived as a private handkerchief embroidery type" by an entirely fictional engraver, who did not invent Scrabble; this may be my favourite section of the book.)

Part III resumes the main narrative thread, kind of. That is, the author works through some possible scenarios. While I'm not one to dismiss experimental fiction, I found the break from the traditional narrative hugely interrupted the pacing. For the remaining half of the book, the brakes were already on and my interest was grinding to a halt.

The future had been a luxury. The future didn't exist anymore.

Despite its flaws, it's a charming novel. It manages to be funny during wartime. I was rooting for the entire cast. I'm still rooting for Ukraine! Endling is a reader favourite in this year's Tournament of Books.

See also
Article: How One Snail Inspired Two Novels on Two Different Continents  
Podcast: Snail Sex Tape 

And behold! This amazing bit of pâte-sur-pâte porcelain work I came across in an antique shop a couple of months ago. I am in thrall to this late 19th-century piece, not least because of its weird subject matter. Unexpectedly, the aforementioned Snail Sex Tape shed some light on the symbolism that might lie behind it.

We hope time will pass quickly. We have but one single life on this earth, a split second of earthly existence in the endless expanse of time, and yet we don’t feel that it can pass quickly enough. Yes, I get it. It is hard to live your life in a way that matches that knowledge, perhaps it is impossible. I positioned myself so that no one cold see my face, I closed my eyes, took a deep breath and told myself that all was well, I could sense the presence of my irritating, mortal fellow human beings, their breathing and the sounds they made when they moved, when they tried to keep warm by rubbing their arms, shifting their weight from one foot to another, how they moved up the steps as more people arrived, the queue compacted and it grew more crowded around the entrance, their impatience and their fears. There are no people anywhere else, only here on our little planet; there may well be plenty of intelligent life out there, but there are no people, not in any of the billions of galaxies, we are a rare and threatened species, and so wicked towards one another.

What a wallop, this novella, so simple and so beautifully articulated.

Ostensibly about the narrator's loss of virginity when she was sixteen, Repetition, by Vigdis Hjorth, recalls that November night forty-eight years ago when nothing much happened, but something happened, so much happened. 

Unni thought my mother worried about me like most mothers worry about their daughters, they feared they might be raped or attacked by strangers, but what my mother was afraid of was what I might end up doing of my own free will.

I took out my diary and wrote: It will happen tonight. The event that no one ever forgets. I will write about it here, on these blank pages that my fingers are stroking as they write, pages that smell of expectation, that is the smell of white paper, the event you will never forget because no one ever forgets their first time.

Finally we learn that that's not the story the narrator is telling at all. And we never know what she actually wrote in her diary, what upset her father to render him drunk and sobbing. What they never spoke of again.

[The narrator's experience that night in November reminds me a little of the the summer I was eighteen when the boy from the bakery touched me between my legs and asked me if I felt a tingling and I said yes and he said that's an orgasm, my dear, and remarkably I didn't correct him, is it possible I didn't want to hurt his feelings, this boy who didn't think I might, despite my general inexperience and technical virginity, know what an orgasm was, and that this wasn't it, I should feign gratitude that he could educate me better than I could educate myself, how patronizing, I realized, even then, in the moment, the situation was laughable really, I don't remember how it ended between us, did I even see him again, in the end I was still a virgin after all. So the narrator's experience is quite different from mine actually, but she lets people believe what they want to believe. (In some ways she seems more powerful than I ever was, completely orchestrating the situation and empowered by its outcome, at least in front of her peer group, but also, that's just my reading couched in my own experience, we don't really know how that played out. The aftershock of the event that November night is most strongly felt at home, among her family, and the fallout manifests mostly as confusion for the narrator.]

The narrator is, of course, a writer. And this novel is very much about writing as document, as investigation and analysis, as therapy and redemption, as truth. She describes how her writing evolved, how her approach became clinical to excise all traces of her self, in order to ascertain what her heart and mind truly had to say. But then things changed.

I repeat and recall and relive and retell and redress because childhood lasts, youth lasts, our childhood and youth constitute a future that starts over constantly, it is an ongoing process. I home in on it again and again because the body remembers and suffers and thinks, the body knows, it is not just the mind. The mind will hit a wall and when I write, I chip away at is, that is why I write, I work on the wall to discover what parts have substance and significance, yes, I rewrite and I reproduce like Munch painted several versions The Scream, I repeat and I vary the repetition, shamelessly, with my heart on my sleeve and suffering inevitable heartburn in order to process and understand and put it behind me or to reinforce the bitterness and excitement inside me, in order to change myself through repeating and varying patterns. 

I first read Hjorth a few years ago while I was vacationing in Norway (where I saw several versions of The Scream) — A House in Norway, but I thought it might be a fluke, that my reading was coloured by my travel experience, the sting of the air and water, the feel of the land, but then I read If Only, wow, what a book, what a toxic relationship, I think I could never be so blindly hopeful, or drunkenly desperately reckless or accommodating or self-debasing, and also Is Mother Dead, about the narrator's relationships with her sister and her mother. Why didn't I write about those books here? Anyway, Hjorth's writing is insightful and compelling.

In Repetition, the technique of repetition, that haunting echo, is sublime. "Repetition is the reality and the seriousness of life."

Excerpt.

Anything you want to forget will come back to you, it will haunt you so vividly that it feels as if you're going through it all over again, often causing you the same overwhelming and unmanageable feelings as it did the first time; you fear the intensity might kill you and so you fight its return, you resist, but you can't prevent or shield yourself from the pain that follows and so you are forced to relive it. However, when it has been re-experienced and relived yet again, when the paralysing pain subsides, you will often find that you have gained a fresh insight into the significance of that particular memory; it was the reason it came back, in order to tell you something.

"Such a shame that a tough fellow like him could pass away in the blink of an eye," Sister Zhou said, and sighed. "I can't help but to think that sometimes a man can be as frail as a mosquito! One swat might not kill a mosquito, but it can surely kill a man."

Set amid Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution, Qing Yuan's existence is indeed meager, but he seems to hold no resentment against the regime that executed his father for hiding some gold. He is kind and compassionate with his coworkers, his neighbours, the local beggars.

When an identified female corpse, mutilated beyond recognition, comes into the morgue — "a heap of gore and waste" — and no one claims her, he starts asking questions, looking to restore her dignity. This clinging to humanity allows Qing Yuan to rise above his day to day, and even harbour hopes of having a family one day (a neighbouring widow becomes a romantic interest).

One day, Qing Yuan is arrested. He is carted away along with several other employees of the hospital and imprisoned. Then the torture begins.

The charges relate to his family's capitalist past. But it's clear that anyone disgruntled or overzealous might've played a role. This is a state where neighbours denounce neighbours, children denounce their own parents. Struggle sessions, akin to Two Minutes Hate, punish transgressors and strike fear in everyone. This is an intense read, a dystopia that's a direct descendent of 1984, only it's real. It's 1960s China, the squalor and desperation of Worker Villages.

Qing Yuan is ultimately released by the authorities but he is shunned. His actions are scrutinized, his home repeatedly vandalized. He seems broken beyond repair.

He had long since given up on the city. Nothing stirred any connection to his past. In fact, he realized, he was wrong to say he had given up on the city. The city had given up on him, discarded like a dead baby from the hospital the moment he’d been conscripted to the morgue. He existed now in a liminal zone, between a past to which he could never return and a future that would never come. The eternal present, what many a sage declared the one true refuge, had seized him like a spider in its web. He had become a shadow whose life had been bent to a single purpose, the cleaning of humans, dead, on their way to becoming shadows themselves.

But then there's a kitten.

Excerpts 
Chapter 1 
Chapter 9 

Review 
Metropolitan Review: The Exilic Style 
Interviews
Bookish: Quiet Tragedies and Small Acts of Kindness 
Zona Motel: It's Terrible to Be Yourself  

Brunelleschi's discovery of the laws of perspective was like Prometheus stealing fire and giving it to mankind. Thanks to him, we have been able not only illuminate our walls as Giotto once did with his golden fingers, but to reproduce the world as it is, identical in every detail. And so it was the the painter could imagine himself God's equal: because now, we too could create reality. And that was how we came to try, poor fishermen that we are, to surpass Our Lord. We  could copy the world as faithfully as if we had made it ourselves, but that was not enough to quench our thirst for creation, because our ambition as artists, intoxicated by this new power, now knew no limits. We wanted to paint the world in our own style. We didn't merely wish to rival God, but to alter His work by redrawing it to suit our desires. We distorted perspective, we abandoned it. We erased the chequerboard floors of our predecessors and let our figures float in the ether. We played with perspective the way a dog plays with a ball, or a cat with the corpse of a sparrow it has killed. We turned away from it. We scorned it. But we never forgot it.

How could we? Perspective gave us depth. And depth opened the gates of infinity to us. A terrible spectacle. I can never recall without shivering the first time I saw Masaccio's frescoes at the Brancassi Chapel. The wonder of his foreshortened figures! There stood man, life-sized at last, having found his place in space, his substance given weight, cast out of paradise but standing on his own two feet, in all his mortal truth. Far from constricting the imagination of artists, perspective gave us the image of infinity on Earth. The image only ... yes, of course. In reality, we could not claim to equal the Creator of all things, but we could, better than any priest, proclaim His word through mute images or stone statues. Painters, sculptors, architects: the artist is a prophet because, more than any other man, his mind contains the idea of God, which is infinity itself, that unthinkable, inconceivable thing.

Perspective(s), by Laurent Binet, is a historical epistolary novel, some 176 letters involving some twenty correspondents, including the likes of Michelangelo, Catherine de' Medici, Benvenuto Cellini,

I had high hopes for this mystery (artist stabbed dead with a chisel! scandalous painting gone missing!) but mostly it's boring and confusing.

Sadly, with a few exceptions, the voices don't vary. I had trouble keeping the characters straight (it's probably easier to read this on paper vs digitally, to be able to flip back a page or two to identify who is writing to whom and reference the list of characters). There were times it didn't seem worth the effort.

I'm betting Binet is a gamer (hmm, a quick google search confirms the influence of video games on his previous novels), and specifically a fan of Assassin's Creed (and why not? indeed, Ezio's adventures constitute the basis of my knowledge of Borgia-era Italy). In one (rare) action-packed sequence, Cellini's parkour efforts to elude the palace guards seem lifted out of the Brotherhood's playbook:

As I descended from the ramparts, I heard some guards climbing the stairs. Since I had no business being up there, I would have had no excuse to justify my presence if they had seen me. So I hurried back to the roof. But you know the palace better then I, so you know that there are no hiding places up there. I ran to the wall; a leap from that height could be fatal, even to me. But God rewards the brave: at the foot of the wall was a cart loaded with hay, left there by some groom. It all happened in a flash: the decision, then the execution. I climbed onto the parapet, arms outspread like Christ on the cross. I closed my eyes and I dived. During my fall I heard the cry of an eagle. My landing was as soft as on a feather bed, and in a second I was up on my feet again, completely unscathed.

The video game immersion affords a suspension of disbelief; here it feels laughably out of place. (But yeah, I kinda loved this bit.) On the whole, this novel of art theory and politics comes off as dry. 

The novel did make me consider how trends in art are formed by outside forces (it's simply not as obvious me in work predating the twentieth century) and artists throughout history use their work to voice their agreement or dissent. Of course a change in the papacy would dictate whether or not nudes were held in disgrace. "We other Florentines still understand and appreciate the beauty of the human body rather than considering it a diabolical obscenity." 

As Vincenzo Borghini notes to Giorgio Vasari, "You know as well as I that it is not men who change their tastes, but politics that change men." And Michelangelo recognizes, "These are cruel times, my friend, for the defenders of art and beauty." Another action sequence plays out through a Calvinoesque slo-mo lens, the intersection of math and art overlaying reality.

I saw the lines being drawn through space, forming a geometric grid, and I recognised Alberti's diagram, his pyramid of spokes converging on a single point. It was the laws of perspective taking shape before me, as clearly as if I had traced them myself with a ruler; I touched the surface of things, because it was no longer the real world that I could see in all its depth. Or rather, it was the real world, but I saw it as if through the camera obscura devised by Master Brunelleschi — may his name be honoured until the end of time! — and in the space of a second the world appeared to me as a flat surface, adroitly squared, in all the dazzling clarity of the theory that was revealed to us by those supreme geniuses: Brunelleschi, Alberti, Masaccio ... may you all be crowned in glory, you eternal Tuscan heroes! And so, as the killer was about to fire at me, because the fuse, as I told you, had almost completely burnt down (this too, I could perceive with perfect lucidity), I saw — yes, I saw! — the vanishing point drawn on his forehead as if by Alberti himself and (recalling those words of the great master that gave me heart: "It is in vain that you bend your bow, if you do not yet know where to aim your arrow!" — and I knew; in that instant, I knew exactly!) I pulled the trigger, and the bold shot from my crossbow, following the perfect trajectory that my mind had calculated and that an invisible hand had traced through the air, embedding itself exactly midway between his eyes. He fell backwards, his shot missed, and — hearing the detonation — I felt as if I had been woken from a long dream that had lasted no more than a second.

But I hadn't dreamed it. I had remembered perspective. And this is what I want to tell you, Master Michelangelo, my dear Master. In our thirst to find a new style of painting so that we can surpass (or, rather, circumvent) the perfection achieved by our forefathers [...] have we not forgotten what underlay the very essence of that perfection? It is not that we are unaware of it; we all studied Alberti's theory. But, little by little, all of us, [...] we have attempted to free ourselves from it, we have left it behind, we have disdained it. And we have begun to elongate our bodies, to make them float through space, to stretch out where we should foreshorten, to turn our landscapes into dreamscapes, and rather than cutting them up in accordance with mathematical principles that we consider too severe, to twist reality. Order and symmetry have become anathema to us. 

The resolution, if I understand who dun it correctly, is a ridiculous bit of fiction squeezed between verifiable historical facts — it remains historically plausible, but kinda pointlessly so. (And I'm relieved — not for the sake of any historical personage's reputation, but for Truth — that Binet's readership is relatively limited in number and generally smarter than the average bear so that the none of this gets mistaken for historical fact. I fear for humanity not having sufficient general knowledge to accurately recognize dramatizations and artistic license.)

See also 
The French Exception: On Laurent Binet and French Literature. 
For a substantial excerpt of the novel, see the US publisher's publicity page.

I want to shake off a day full of words and meanings. Not that they're superfluous, just that I don't need them anymore.

What if he's right that no one else would have a use for me. Doubt is like a cobweb — very delicate, but when you touch it, it clings to your fingers. Gray and sticky.

I can picture cut lines: wounds from the knife the narrator brandishes in her imagination, against herself or her ex (the epigraph is a line from Ariana Harwicz; for more knives and toxicity see Die, My Love). Or the cut line is how she mows the grass as short as possible. Metaphorically, it's a line between past and future. It's the line Liine draws that delineates her self from others.

We feel the tone shift from despondency toward occasional langour and back again.

The sheet metal that covers the woodpile is rattling the wind. The hooded crow sways on the oak tree and caws. The quiet murmur of the clover and golden silence of the mayweed. They sing inside me as if my innermost being is the center of everything, both living and dead.

The language is beautiful. This is not a plot-driven novel. Liine's mother and sister provide counterpoints, in their living situations, how they process the past, what they value. But Liine is determined to find her own way. She comes across a stash of letters belonging to her great-aunt, which open her eyes to the possibility of other, affirmative ways of being. Liine's evolution over the summer is subtle and authentic. 

And then I'm in a place where nothing moves forward anymore, everything only goes backward, turns back on itself, tells me about the meaninglessness of my existence. Reality is a snake coiling up, but there's no room for me here. I'm excluded from all living things, from all breathing things. Without other people, do I even exist? What happens to a person deep down, right at the bottom, in solitude?

I breathe. I breathe. Is it possible that here in this old house, far from everything, I could turn into something else, into a plant, say? Doesn't that make me like something that's poked its head out of the ground; something pale green that's stretched out, caught some sun, maybe even managed to grow some flowers, but not borne fruit? And is then cut down and trampled to pieces. Don't I have roots, then, somewhere deeper still? I should just go back to bed, curl up under the blanket and cry a bit. I need to stay beneath the soil, in the ground, here in a safe remote place until I find the strength within me to sprout new shoots.

What will always flummox the state is the prospect of the individual — of many individuals — employing negation as a political tactic. What to do with someone who doesn't rush the podium, doesn't spit on the flag, doesn't do anything to ease the state's transition into the comfortable arena of violence? What to do with someone who says: I will have no part of this, when the entire functionality of the system is dependent on active participation? Forced into this kind of space, power becomes enraged, and behaves accordingly. Legislators rush to pass bills outlawing boycotts, not only in obvious violation of the same freedoms those legislators are sworn to protect, but also a practical impossibility, this quest to stop people from not buying something. Terms like "economic terrorism" are tossed around by the same people who are quite happy to pull their donations from universities and literary festivals and anywhere that doesn't sufficiently silence whatever voices they want silenced. University administrators express shock at the utter inappropriateness of students' demands to cut ties with weapons makers and institutes complicity with occupation, and punish those students by withholding their degrees.

The idea that walking away is childish and unproductive is predicated on the inability to imagine anything but a walking away from, never a walking toward — never that there might exist another destination. The walking away is not nihilism, it's not cynicism, it's not doing nothing — it's a form of engagement more honest, more soul-affirming, than anything the system was ever prepared to offer.

I don't know what to do with this book. Sit with it, I guess. Sit with the guilt of my general inaction and inadequacy. 

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, by Omar El Akkad, is a takedown of the West, its hypocrisy and faulty foundations. It's less about Gaza than I thought it would be, more about the inability of anybody (westerners) to do anything about it.

A central privilege of being of this place becomes, then, the ability to hold two contradictory thoughts simultaneously. The first being the belief that one's nation behaves in keeping with the scrappy righteousness of the underdog. The second being an unspoken understanding that, in reality, the most powerful nation in human history is no underdog, cannot possibly be one, but at least the immense violence implicit in the contradiction will always be inflicted on someone else. [...] It's the person who in self-image professes to be a rule-breaker, untamable, wile — and in the next breath sides unquestioningly with every facet of state power. [...] My first impulse is to mock the contradiction, but there's no contradiction, not really, because the bedrock of this particular identity isn't conformity or nonconformity — it's self-interest. Anyone who buys into both the narrative of American rebelliousness and the reality of American authority understands that both have been created to serve them.

Of course, we're against genocide, it's morally deplorable. Of course, we're against apartheid, and Nazism, and racial inequality. Of course, we're against cruelty to animals. Of course, women should have the vote, and we should protect our planet. So why the fuck does it take us so long to do anything about it? (And when we do, it's only because it's become advantageous to do so.)

I expected it to be a difficult book — depressing in its chronicle of the genocide of Palestinians. In fact, it was unputdownable, and not nearly as grim as the barrage of bad news I compulsively seek out daily. I'm not sure who this book is for — it preaches to a choir of leftists. This book it will not convince the fascists who walk among us of the error of their ways; they may hold it up to us as proof, "See what hypocrites you are!" 

The very act of praising this book could be seen as merely performative — that I'm on the right side of history, or so it will be seen some day.

I feel scolded for not doing anything about the state of world. That is, I feel that what I do doesn't make a difference (and I sense that this sentiment is shared by the author). But I do what I can. I read, I educate myself. I engage in discussion with others, even if it's just the girls over drinks on Friday night — it helps me hone my own opinion, occasionally it shifts someone else's. I march, I protest, I show up — at least sometimes, and even if it's only when it's convenient, my being there still counts (numbers matter, optics matter). I don't buy Israeli products. I don't buy US products. Etc. I try. This week I joined the New Democratic Party of Canada, because I want to do more than just vote (radical democracy! "public" shouldn't be a dirty word!). 

Francine Prose says, "There is one story: our country is on the brink of an authoritarian takeover." Everything else is a distraction. Is it? The Epstein files are a distraction from Venezuela. Venezuela is a distraction from Gaza. The weather is a distraction from Ukraine. Tariffs are a distraction from changes to immigration policies. Do you even know what's going on in Cuba? Why is it not bigger news that the NRA is breaking from the GOP? News stories I read one day are buried the next. Two plus two equals five. I long thought I knew which issues should take priority. Today I am surprised to find myself thinking that maybe it's the lasciviously scandalous one that's most important after all — the one where the men in power protect the men in power.

And they just keep killing more Palestinians.

It would be nice to go back to caring about the moon. So many of my favorite authors care about the moon. So much of my favorite literature orients in the direction of beauty. But surely any true appreciation of beauty would admit, exclaim even, that no descriptions of the moon, no matter how stunning, how true, reflects as much beauty back into the world as a missile obliterating a family in their home takes out of it.

[...]

What is this work we do? What are we good for?

The literary critic Northrop Frye once said all art is metaphor, and a metaphor is the grammatical definition of insanity. What art does is meet us at the site of our insanity, our derangement, the plainly irrational mechanics of what it means to be human. There comes from this, then, at least a working definition of a soul: one's capacity to sit with the mysteries of a thing that cannot in any rational way be understood — only felt, only moved through. And sometimes that thing is so grotesque — what we do to one another so grotesque — that sitting with it feels an affront to the notion of art as a conduit of beauty.

Still, sit. Sit.

And then maybe walk away. Use your imagination, and be better.

Jackson was surprised that more women hadn't simply killed their husbands. Maybe they had, maybe women were better at covering up murder than people knew.

What a joy to spend a recent sunny, snowbound day ensconced in my chair with a coffee and my cat, devouring Death at the Sign of the Rook, by Kate Atkinson. Coincidence abounds ("A coincidence is just an explanation waiting to happen"). From "the maw of oblivion" and through "a vague miasma of misery," there is warmth and kindness, and also snow.

Jackson Brodie continues to age, but then, so do I. Thankfully, he has a chorus (jury) of women in his head to keep him in check.

Set in modern day, Atkinson pays homage to Agatha Christie and the detective novels of that era and ilk (fittingly, I spend the evening watching The Seven Dials, which is charming and light while alluding to larger things than our small lives).

You went to bed one night, in a happy daze because you had waltzed all night with eligible young men, and you woke up the next day and found yourself living on a bleak planet inhabited by alien creatures.

The novel's central mystery involves a stolen work of art. Art is not something Brodie knows a lot about, but he won't turn away from a bit of research if it means catching his crook, or at least uncovering the truth.

Brodie's reading leads him to the story of Jerry and Rita Alter, who stole a de Kooning and hung it on the back of their bedroom door. Admirable, no? Crazy. Through Brodie, I learn about Montreal's own 1972 Skylight Caper.

I love me a good art heist as much as the next person. A couple years ago I read Michael Finkel's The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession; for months afterwards I would "case" every museum and gallery I walked into, checking for cameras, exits, sightlines, security guard routines. (I want to steal the art, get away with it, and have it.) Who steals art, anyway? How do you unload a stolen Rembrandt? Who buys it? (I recall reading Trevanian when I was 16, an assassin gazing upon his treasured canvasses in his private quarters.) I recently watched The Mastermind, a unique art heist film that provides a dismal reality check (and an extraordinary soundtrack). I'm thinking I may be better suited to a career in art forgery.