Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy

I’ve read a few books by Arundhati Roy over the years, including her debut novel The God of Small Things and her more recent non-fiction book on Gandhi, and I was keen to read her new memoir. It’s a beautiful story about Roy’s complex relationship with her mother, who is abusive, manipulating and narcissistic but also a guide and inspiration to her. And despite it all, she loves her intensely.

A Guardian and a Thief by Megha Majumdar

I enjoyed this novel set in a near-future Kolkata that’s collapsing under the stress of climate change. A family snags sought-after climate visas to escape to the USA, but then their passports get stolen, and their lives intersect with that of Boomba, a young man whose struggles to survive in the city make him into a thief. There were a few plot points that felt unbelievable to me, but overall it was a good read.

A Very Short History of the Israel–Palestine Conflict by Ilan Pappe

This seems like an impossible assignment, to summarize such a complex history in just 160 pages. Yet Israeli historian Ilan Pappe absolutely nails it, giving a full and fair history of the Israel–Palestine conflict going back to its origins and British and Ottoman colonial times. It brings true clarity to what’s happening today, and I’d recommend it to anyone who wants to step outside of the present-day horror and get the full context of how we got here.

The Violence of Britishness by Nadya Ali

I’ve written on the blog about the UK’s insidious “Prevent” system and how it has tried to police the thoughts of British Muslims since 9/11. Nadya Ali’s book goes into a lot more detail and shows the damaging impact of counterterrorism policies and the UK’s hostile immigration policies more generally.

Natives of My Person by George Lamming

Barbadian writer George Lamming gives us a complex allegory of colonialism in this tale about a ship carrying a crew of settlers to a tropical island. Full review coming soon.

The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

I originally read this so long ago that this rereading was almost like discovering the book anew. Hemingway packs so many themes into a short, simple tale about a man trying to catch a fish.

Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl

Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl draws lessons from his own horrific memories of Auschwitz to tell us how to live. He says that those who survived the death camps were those who found meaning and had something to live for, while others who lost their sense of meaning didn’t last long. Then we get ideas on how to find meaning in our own, much more fortunate lives. It’s a beautiful book that I read years ago and would like to return to regularly, both for its distillation of the essence of human meaning and for its reminder that however bad things in the world seem right now, they are not even close to the horrors that Frankl lived through.

How was your reading month?

As usual, please let me know your thoughts on any of these books, or tell me what you’ve been reading and hopefully enjoying lately.

The post Books I read in May 2026 appeared first on Andrew Blackman.

The first is a tale of heroic betrayal, based on a real historical figure called Droctulf, a Lombard warrior who switched sides and fought for the dying Roman Empire that his people were besieging. As usual, Borges takes liberties with the facts—he calls attention to this by saying he doesn’t even know when the events took place: “Let us imagine (this is not a work of history) that it was the mid-sixth century.” This turns out to be one of the few parts of the story that’s accurate.

Droctulf was indeed a Lombard warrior who switched sides, but the details of how that happened are invented. Borges imagines him emerging from the forests and being struck by the sight of “daylight and cypresses and marble”. He can’t understand most of the artifices that he sees in the city of Ravenna, but they affect him profoundly:

“They strike him as we would be struck today by a complex machine whose purpose we know not but in whose design we sense an immortal intelligence at work.”

He fights against his own people to defend Ravenna, and when he dies, the people of the city erect a gravestone with a moving epitaph. Borges describes Droctulft not as a traitor but as a convert. In fact, he was merely the first of many, as the descendants of the people who’d invaded Italy gradually became Italians, giving their name to a region that still exists today. He imagines one as the father of Dante.

Reading this story makes Borges think of a story his grandmother once told him about feeling uprooted living in Argentina, so far from where she had grown up in England. She soon discovered that there was another Englishwoman in the town, although she was dressed in Indigenous clothes and had a painted face. The woman had emigrated from Yorkshire with her parents, but they were later killed in a raid by the Indigenous Pampas people, who took her captive. She was now the wife of a minor chieftain and had two sons; she had been living with them so long that she struggled now to speak English.

His grandmother imagined her “savage and uncouth life” and was outraged at the thought of “an Englishwoman, reduced to such barbarism!” But when she offered to rescue her and her children, the woman said she was happy and returned to her husband in the desert.

Borges acknowledges that the stories may seem unconnected, separate as they are by thirteen centuries and an ocean. But I think the parallels are quite clear. Both the warrior and the captive maiden choose humanity over the group. They find a new life in a new place with new people, even if that means cutting themselves off from their roots. It’s a story that’s as old as humanity itself and as integral to our evolution, no matter how much today’s politicians may try to split us into groups and convince us to resent the other.

I think this story is also a rejection of articial divides, such as that between civilisation and barbarism. Droctulf’s people were seen as barbarians destroying the civilisation of Rome, and Borges’s grandmother sees the Englishwoman as leaving behind civilisation for barbarism. But Borges seems to reject these divisions in his final paragraph:

Let me know your thoughts in the comments, and please check out other posts in my Borges Marathon, a project to read and review all 100+ stories in the Collected Fictions of Jorge Luis Borges.

The post Story of the Warrior and the Captive Maiden: Borges Marathon, Part 30 appeared first on Andrew Blackman.

In my lifetime, I’ve read thousands of books. Some have been duds, and some mediocre or quickly forgettable, but that still leaves a huge number of excellent books, all with completely different merits. How do I begin to choose between them?

Regular readers of this blog will know that I love the Collected Fictions of Jorge Luis Borges—you have to love a book to embark on a years-long project of reviewing all 100+ Borges stories. But is it my favourite? If I’m in the mood for genre-bending intellectual explorations in a literary cloak, absolutely. But sometimes I’m in the mood for a classic novel or a book of history, philosophy, contemporary literary fiction, politics, or something completely different. How can I discount all the wonderful books I’ve read in those categories?

I can make a case for several dozen books being my favourite book, and even as I do so, I’m thinking of other books I’ve loved and wondering how I can leave them out. It’s not indecisiveness—it’s something else.

Let me try to illustrate it with another example from the world of colours. Again, my “favourite colour” changes every time I answer the question. I can spend hours staring at the beautiful shades of green in the fields surrounding my little cottage in rural Serbia, but I have also been dazzled by the brilliant blues of various seas around the world.

And then there’s orange—that can be quite a beautiful colour.

Is orange a better colour than blue? The question doesn’t make any sense to me. I can think of different situations in which I’d choose any colour in the rainbow. How can I limit myself to one colour, when it’s the kaleidoscope that I value?

Ask any of the standard “getting to know you” questions, and I find myself similarly stuck. Favourite music? I love both Jimi Hendrix and Puccini, for entirely different reasons. Favourite season? I’m with the Chinese poet Wu Men:

Ten thousand flowers in spring, the moon in autumn,
a cool breeze in summer, snow in winter.
If your mind isn’t clouded by unnecessary things,
this is the best season of your life.

This is the problem I face when asked to choose my favourite book. Just when I’m thinking about the ten thousand flowers, I remember the cool breeze.

I suppose I’m overthinking things. The point of these questions is not so much the book itself as what it says about you. People simply want to know if you’re the kind of person who likes an uplifting romance novel or a challenging piece of literary fiction.

But then again, that raises problems for me too, because I reject the notion that there is a particular kind of person who likes a particular type of book. I think this way of labelling people according to their preferences is a lazy shorthand, a way of putting people into boxes. Getting to know a new person is a complex and fascinating process, and I don’t want to shortcircuit it by reducing those complexities into “red or green”, “Libra or Pisces”, “Dostoevsky or Woolf”.

So perhaps that’s at the root of my difficulty in choosing a favourite book. I know that any choice I make will not only be merely one of my many favourite books, but it will also immediately introduce a whole lot of assumptions that may or may not be accurate. So if you want to get to know me, don’t ask me my favourite book. Set aside a bit more time, and let’s have a proper conversation instead.

The post Why I Don’t Know What My Favourite Book Is appeared first on Andrew Blackman.

Judged by the usual criteria of short stories, “The Theologians” doesn’t work at all. The main character, Aurelian, has no real characteristics except his grudge against his rival, John of Pannonia, whose personality is sketched even more roughly—he only really exists as an object of Aurelian’s envy. The plot moves slowly through the explication of scholarly treatises, and there are few scenes of note, with no dialogue.

But we’ve already established in this series that Borges isn’t very interested in following the rules. “The Theologians” is a story of ideas, and it’s the ideas that propel it forward. Who are we, and what makes us unique? Borges uses invented medieval heresies as a way of exploring these questions. It’s in the same vein as “Three Versions of Judas“, a story I wrote about last year.

As Borges wrote in the afterword to The Aleph, the collection in which this story was published in 1949:

About “The Theologians,” suffice it to say that they are a dream—a somewhat melancholy dream—of personal identity.

The first concept of personal identity is represented by a sect called the Monotoni, who claimed that “history is a circle, and that all things that exist have existed before and will exist again.”

Symbols play a big part in this story, and in this case Aurelian is scared by the sight of the wheel supplanting the cross. He prepares a denunciation but is outdone by his rival, John of Pannonia:

The act of a single man, he said, weighs more than the nine concentric heavens, and to think, erroneously, that it can be lost and then return again is naught but spectacular foolishness. Time does not restore what we lose; eternity holds it for glory, and also for the fire. John’s treatise was limpid, universal; it seemed written not by a particular person, but by any man—or perhaps all men.

The Monotoni are vanquished and their adherents burned at the stake, claiming as they die that this is just one of many fires, that this has happened before and will do so again.

Years later, a new sect arrives: the Histrioni. Their symbols are the mirror and the obolus (a Greek coin). They claimed that every person has a double (another recurrent Borges theme), and that the real one is in heaven while we on earth are just the reflection. Whatever we do, they said, the other man does the opposite, and when we die, we join him and become one.

From this it follows that we should do horrible deeds so that our double in heaven will do good. Other members of the sect also believed that “the world would end when the number of its possibilities was exhausted; since there can be no repetitions, the righteous are duty-bound to eliminate (commit) the most abominable acts so that those acts will not sully the future and so that the coming of the kingdom of Jesus may be hastened.”

In condemning this heresy, Aurelian falls into a trap. He comes up with the perfect argument, but then realises that if he uses it, he will be condemning John of Pannonia as a heretic in the process. Despite their rivalry, he doesn’t want to do this, so he tries to obscure the source of his words. It doesn’t work—John is identified, condemned as a heretic, and burned at the stake.

Aurelian spends years wandering through distant realms, trying to justify his actions, until he is struck by lightning and killed. In heaven:

Aurelian discovered that in the eyes of the unfathomable deity, he and John of Pannonia (the orthodox and the heretic, the abominator and the abominated, the accuser and the victim) were a single person.

The Histrioni, it seems, were correct. But the ending also vindicates the Monotoni, who died at the stake claiming that the fires burning them were part of an infinite cycle of fires. Aurelian and John, who condemned them, end up being killed in the same way, as part of the infinite circle of history and time.

“The Theologians”, then, offers plenty to chew on in terms of the nature of identity, the transmigration of the soul, the circularity of history, and so on. I think it also calls into question a lot of the categories by which we define ourselves. It’s no coincidence that Aurelian turns out to be the same as his biggest rival, and they are both part of the same infinite cycle as the men they condemned to death. As we split into increasingly hostile groups based on party allegiance, race, religion and ideology, this story is a timely reminder that what we see in our enemies is not so different from what we see in the mirror.

The post The Theologians: Borges Marathon, Part 29 appeared first on Andrew Blackman.

The setting is the “inexhaustible plains” of the Brazilian frontier. Benjamin Otalora, a “sad sort of hoodlum whose only recommendation was his infatuation with courage”, is forced to leave Buenos Aires after killing a man in a knife fight, and he finds his way to Uruguay where he joins a gang run by the scar-faced, black-moustached Azevedo Bandeira.

Otalora gets sent up north to begin “a life of vast sunrises and days that smell of horses.” He gradually proves himself, rises in the ranks, and begins to covet his boss’s wealth and power, as well as his beautiful redheaded girlfriend. He sees Bandeira when he’s ill and old, and he senses his weakness.

One thrust, he thinks, would be enough to settle that matter.

The redheaded woman enters the room and interrupts his thoughts of murder, but Otalora devises a more patient plan, based on using Bandeira’s own strategies against him.

Azevedo Bandeira is accomplished in the art of progressive humiliation, the satanic ability to humiliate his interlocutor little by little, step by step, with a combination of truths and evasions; Otalora decides to employ that same ambiguous method for the hard task he has set himself.

He gradually starts to push Bandeira out of the picture, working to build alliances within the group and take power for himself. He proves his mettle in battle, and soon he begins to alter Bandeira’s orders and take power for himself. He even sleeps with Bandeira’s girlfriend. The old man is now head of the group in name only, and it seems a matter of time before Otalora finishes him off with that single thrust he imagined earlier.

But, as happens so often in Borges, there’s a sudden twist in the very last paragraph of “The Dead Man”. The men who Otalora believes are on his side have in fact remained loyal to Bandeira. Just as Otalora thinks he is triumphing, he is abruptly executed.

Otalora realizes, before he dies, that he has been betrayed from the beginning, that he has been sentenced to death, that he has been allowed to love, to command, and win because he was already as good as dead, because so far as Bandeira was concerned, he was already a dead man.

When we look back over the story, we remember details like Bandeira’s “satanic ability to humiliate his interlocutor little by little, step by step, with a combination of truths and evasions”, and we see what he has done to the upstart who thought he was taking over. It’s a satisfying ending: it takes you by surprise, but then it makes perfect sense when you think about it.

Throughout “The Dead Man”, Borges evokes a strong sense of the dangers of pride and hubris. Otalora is brought low just when he thinks he has reached the very height of his ambition. It reminds me of other Borges stories where the hero is abruptly brought down to earth, such as “Hakim, the Masked Dyer of Merv” and “Death and the Compass“. It’s a useful reminder of the futility of striving after things that can be so easily snatched away. Borges often uses gangsters and knife fighters as his protagonists, but life is fragile for all of us and can be taken away in a heartbeat, even if we don’t try to double-cross a violent gang leader. Perhaps that’s why hubris is such a recurrent theme in Borges stories.

The post The Dead Man: Borges Marathon, Part 28 appeared first on Andrew Blackman.

The world of Sublimation is mostly like our world, but with one key difference: the phenomenon of “instancing”. When people leave one country to go to another, they often leave behind another version of themselves. They are doubled, in other words, with one person living in the new country and an identical person staying behind at home.

“An instancing captures a static moment. A feeling in a specific time and place. The heart at the moment of stepping over a border. The mind when it knows it is leaving.”

Of course, they may be identical at the moment of the instancing, but the two versions of the same person then have very different experiences and become different people over time, which is where a lot of the plot development comes from.

What I found fascinating about instancing is how it’s a sci-fi device that sheds very interesting light on the reality of migration. When people leave their home and move to another country, they often talk about leaving a piece of themselves behind. You could easily read Sublimation as a kind of extended metaphor to capture that feeling of duality, the fracturing that can result from being ripped out of one reality and starting a new life in a foreign land.

Soyoung left Korea with her mother at the age of ten and moved to America, where she became Rose. The American instance, Rose, has never met or even spoken with her Korean instance, Soyoung—the one who stayed behind. The death of her/their grandfather prompts her to go back to Korea for the first time, where she encounters not just her own instance but also the Korean instance of her mother.

I won’t spoil the entire plot for you, but I will introduce one more concept: reintegration. It’s possible for the splitting to be reversed, for the two people to become one again when they meet in person and share physical contact. It’s possible for that to happen even if one of them wants it and the other doesn’t.

The result is a new person with the experiences and memories and desires of each individual, but no separate individual consciousness any more—they’re a single person, with all those conflicts tainting every memory, every relationship. They’re a different person, and friends and loved ones of the individual instances are now part-intimate, part-stranger.

“Every bit of the past feels fake from the dissonance, the sheer divorce of her past selves from her present decisions coloring even the combined memories. Her prior emotions are dead things in her chest. Like the stickers she saved as a kid, pretty little scraps of paper that meant something a long time ago, but have no meaning now.”

Plenty more happens after that, and after a fairly slow, thoughtful start, the novel picks up to a thriller-like pace towards the end. It’s all quite enjoyable and is resolved in a satisfying ending, but what I liked most about Sublimation was its exploration of the concept of identity.

We tend to think of ourselves as solid, stable entities, but of course we change all the time based on the decisions we make. If I’d never left England, I would be a very different person from the one who left at 22 and has been bouncing around the world ever since. If I met that Andrew who’d stayed behind, how much of him would be recognisable? And if we reintegrated and I suddenly had to deal with his/our wife, his/our children, his/our life, how would I cope?

On the other hand, how much of that other Andrew would be the same as this one? That sameness that exists beyond the divergent memories and relationships is probably my core identity. But it’s interesting to think about how much of who we are is changeable and shifting, dependent not just on big events like migration but on every decision we make from day to day, the large and small ways in which we step into new realities and leave others behind.

Thanks to NetGalley for an advance review copy of Sublimation, which will be published by Tor Books in June 2026.

The post Sublimation by Isabel J. Kim appeared first on Andrew Blackman.

For decades, the story goes, the world was a stable system based on cooperation and rising prosperity, until Donald Trump came along out of nowhere and took a wrecking ball to the whole thing. Now, we are entering a new, dangerous era of constant competition and conflict. As Carney put it, with a nod to Thucydides:

“It seems that every day we’re reminded that we live in an era of great power rivalry, that the rules based order is fading, that the strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must.”

There’s just one problem with that story: the rules-based international order never existed.

Carney and others often pause briefly to acknowledge that the story of the rules-based international order was “partially false,” before going on to continue their argument about its merits and how disastrous its demise is. That is akin to sweeping some very large items of furniture under a very small rug. The hypocrisy and lies cannot be relegated to a footnote when they were so central to how the system operated.

First of all, let’s talk about the phrase itself. The rules-based international order is usually presented to us as a benign gift from Western leaders who, appalled by the violence and barbarity of World War II, set about to construct a system that would prevent such a catastrophe from happening again.

But nobody in that period ever talked about a rules-based international order. This graph from Google Ngram shows how often the phrase is mentioned in books published in each year. It’s a flat line for most of the 20th century, before surfacing in the late 1990s and spiking in the late 2010s.

That’s because the foreign-policy priorities of Western leaders had little to do with rules and order, and a lot to do with preserving their colonies in the case of Europe and defeating the scourge of communism in the case of the USA. They didn’t want to be constrained by rules in either case, and they weren’t. The USA conducted regime change, installed and supported violent dictators, fought violent wars, assassinated opponents, etc. Britain tortured and castrated Mao Mao rebels in Kenya. France fought bitterly to hold onto Algeria, with a cost of more than a million Algerian lives.

These are just a handful of examples among many, many others. The great powers were never constrained by rules. The zenith of the rules-based international order looks a lot like a world in which the strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must.

So why the spike in usage of the term in recent decades? It’s simple: after the end of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet menace, the West needed a new organizing principle to justify American hegemony. There was some talk in the 1990s of the end of history, peace and prosperity and that kind of thing, but that wouldn’t support massive spending on the military-industrial complex.

So the rules-based international order was born, with America as “the world’s policeman”, fairly but firmly enforcing those rules. As we’ve seen, though, that was never the case. Based on the historical evidence, America looks a lot less like the world’s policeman and a lot more like the world’s mob boss.

And there, perhaps, is a hint at the true meaning of all this worry over the decline of a fictional order. Mob bosses, after all, unleash violence on outsiders while being fiercely protective of their clan. As long as you’re part of the famiglia, you can enjoy the riches and just look the other way when someone else ends up at the bottom of a river in concrete shoes.

A few things have changed under Donald Trump, and one of them is that American aggression is no longer directed solely at the Global South. Now, Canada is threatened with Anschluss, Denmark is threatened with the seizing of Greenland, and Europe is very bluntly told that the U.S. is no longer its protector. Then there are the trade wars, the tariffs, the barrage of ideological warfare. Imagine a mob boss telling his most trusted lieutenants that he’s going it alone and doesn’t need them any more. That’s more or less where trans-Atlantic relations are right now.

Another thing that’s changed under Donald Trump is the abandonment of pretences. A war of aggression is a crime under international law: it’s what many Nazis were prosecuted for at the Nuremberg trials. Previous leaders of the U.S. and other war-mongering nations have gone to great lengths to justify their wars of aggression by painting them as acts of self-defence or ensuring that they were sanctioned by the UN Security Council. So we had to live through absurdities like invading Afghanistan in support of women’s liberation and searching every inch of Iraq for weapons of mass destruction that nobody really expected to find.

Trump doesn’t care about any of that. He just unleashes air strikes, abducts or kills foreign leaders, lets the civilian casualties mount, and he doesn’t even try to make it anything other than what it is: a war of aggression, aka a war crime. He doesn’t even bother to consult Congress, let alone the UN.

That puts his allies in a very difficult position. Even the most invertebrate politicians like Sir Keir Starmer have been forced to issue mild rebukes and carefully worded prevarications. Tony Blair stood proudly behind George W. Bush throughout all of his war crimes, and he could do so because he had plausible deniability. Who could possibly have known that the WMD were fake? He and other Western leaders could support mass violence while plausibly claiming to uphold the rules-based international order. Now, that line is impossible to walk.

I’ve been focusing on war and violence, perhaps because the destruction in Iran is so fresh in my mind right now, but the other much-praised elements of the rules-based international order were a fraud too.

In his speech, Carney talked about things like “a stable financial system” and “frameworks for resolving disputes.” He means institutions like the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund, which, in the liberal Western imagination, set fair rules and boundaries to support free trade around the world and enhance prosperity.

Here’s what Harvard International Review has to say about the IMF’s record in that regard:

“After West African countries were forced to follow the IMF’s structural adjustment programs in the 1980s and 1990s, spending on education decreased by 25 percent and spending on healthcare decreased by 50 percent. This reduction in important social services spending caused an estimated 500,000 deaths of children in Africa.”

Meanwhile, the WTO was used by rich nations to open markets in poor nations. The rules only applied one way: poor countries had to remove subsidies for their domestic industries in the name of free trade, while the EU continued to subsidize its agriculture, the USA continued to subsidize its cotton, etc. For some reason, this article about Burkina Faso cotton farmers going out of business due to US cotton subsidies stuck with me so much that I found it again 20 years later. Then there’s the case of Chiquita lobbying Washington to use trade rules to cripple the Caribbean banana industry, devastating the economies of small islands, and a thousand more examples. (And, as an aside, people often forget that the WTO, despite often being presented as a foundation of post-war prosperity, was only created in 1995.)

Despite my bashing of the rules-based international order, I desperately want it to exist. A true rules-based international order is our only hope of securing a future with any measure of peace, justice and shared prosperity. Here are what I see as the minimum requirements of such an order:

• Abolition of the UN Security Council. Why should a handful of former colonial powers have veto power over the rest of the planet?
• A democratic, transparent United Nations that represents the interests of all people in all countries and has genuine power to resolve disputes.
• A global agreement to place very low caps on military spending and drastically reduce current arsenals—comparable to the nuclear disarmament of the 1980s but for all kinds of weapons.
• Divert former military spending to investment in ending poverty and improving people’s lives. It would take just 4% of current global military spending to end global hunger by 2030, according to the UN. Imagine what we could do with the other 96%.
• Immediate agreements to end fossil fuel dependency and avoid the worst effects of climate change. If a rules-based international order can’t create and enforce rules to make the planet liveable for the next generation, then what good is it?
• Acknowledgement of historic injustices and a genuine effort to make amends through concerted policies to reduce inequality, both within and between nations.
• Prosecute all war crimes equally—no exemptions for powerful nations or leaders. If anyone does what Trump and Netanyahu just did, they should be arrested and tried in court, like any other law-breaker.

What we had from Truman to Biden was nowhere close to that. What we have under Trump is undoubtedly worse, undoubtedly more dangerous, but please stop lamenting the demise of a system that never existed. Instead, let’s focus our energies on building a genuinely rules-based, genuinely international order while there’s still time.

Sure, I know it’s impractical. Even seeing just one of those bullet points come true in my lifetime would be a miracle. But without it, we only have increasing barbarism on a burning planet to look forward to, so I think it’s probably worth a shot.

The post What is this “rules-based international order” you speak of? appeared first on Andrew Blackman.

The story concerns a Roman military tribune who goes on a quest to discover the fabled City of the Immortals, bounded by a “secret river that purifies men of death.” It seems like a doomed quest, but by an unlikely series of circumstances he does find himself in the city and drinks from the river, achieving immortality.

Far from being the end of his quest, however, this is only the beginning. The City of the Immortals turns out to be a nightmarish place full of grand but incoherent and meaningless architecture:

“There were corridors that led nowhere, unreachably high windows, grandly dramatic doors that opened onto monklike cells or empty shafts, incredible upside-down staircases with upside-down treads and balustrades. Other staircases, clinging airily to the side of a monumental wall, petered out after two or three landings, in the high gloom of the cupolas, arriving nowhere.”

The architecture of the city prefigures the narrator’s disappointing discovery that immortality makes life meaningless. It is the prospect of death, the fleetingness of life, that gives it value. For the immortals, “every act (every thought) is the echo of others that preceded it in the past, with no visible beginning, and the faithful presage of others that will repeat it in the future.”

For that reason, the Immortals chose to destroy their original city, replace it with the crazy labyrinth the narrator discovered, and live nearby in complete abnegation of the world. They don’t even speak, causing the narrator to presume that they are uncivilised “Troglodytes”. He treats one of them like a pet, naming him Argos and trying to teach him basic words. One day, he hears him quoting from the Odyssey. He asks how much of it the man knows.

“Very little, he replied. Less than the meagerest rhapsode. It has been eleven hundred years since last I wrote it.“

The attainment of immortality, then, has turned Homer into an unspeaking cave-dweller. The only thing that eventually gives him and the other Immortals a sense of purpose is the realisation that since everything in the world is in balance, there must be a river somewhere that takes away immortality, just as this river bestows it. They go off in search of the river for thousands of years, until the narrator chances upon it in Eritrea in 1921 and feels himself becoming mortal again, able for the first time in thousands of years to feel pain and, eventually, to die.

The infinite is a major theme for Borges, and in “The Immortal” I found echoes of other stories from my Borges Marathon—especially “The Library of Babel” in which an infinite library turns out to be similarly nightmarish. We need limits, it seems—an infinite life, like an infinite library, makes individual existence meaningless.

If you’re a billionaire who’s invested heavily in immortality research, you’ll probably be disappointed. For the rest of us, though, I think it will probably come as less of a surprise to learn that immortality is not the ideal solution. As much as we fear death and want to keep it at bay for as long as we can, we also know that if you take away the possibility of death, of feeling pain, then you also take away much of what makes us feel alive.

And although human life can be quite wonderful on an individual level, it can also be quite hard collectively. It’s difficult enough to live through what we’re seeing today, but imagine if you’d also lived through Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Ivan, Vlad, Caligula and a thousand others. Perhaps it would be as nightmarish as the City of the Immortals, or perhaps you’d simply stop caring, seeing everything as part of a long and meaningless procession of events. I don’t know which is worse.

We tend to think that taking the long view, seeing ourselves as part of something bigger, is a positive thing. To an extent, I think that’s true. But what “The Immortal” reminds us is that if you step back too far and become too distanced and equanimous, then everything dissolves. So by all means eat well, take care of yourself, and try to prolong your life by a few years. But immortality is probably best left to the gods.

The post The Immortal: Borges Marathon, Part 27 appeared first on Andrew Blackman.

The novel is narrated by Hana, a thirty-something woman now looking back on her teenage years. She’s prompted by a news story about a criminal case against 60-year-old Kimiko Yoshikawa, who kept a vulnerable young woman locked in her apartment for two years. Hana also lived with Kimiko for a couple of years when she was young and vulnerable, and someone died. She seems to have blocked out the details, and the novel is her attempt to piece it all together.

We then jump back twenty years, from the early days of Covid-19 to the early days of the millennium, which is where most of the action in Sisters in Yellow takes place. Hana is just 15 years old and living under the absent-minded care of a mother who works in late-night dive bars and lives entirely in the present. When her mother disappears and asks her friend Kimiko to look after her for a summer, Hana starts to see for the first time in her life what it’s like to be taken care of.

So, when she gets a chance to move in with Kimiko later on, she jumps at it. They start a bar together, called Lemon, and it does well. Hana becomes the opposite of her mother, living entirely in the future, working hard and saving every yen she earns. But something always seems to thwart her plans: someone steals her box of cash, her mother needs to be bailed out after getting in debt and falling for a scam, the bar burns down. No matter how hard she tries to build a future, she’s always starting from scratch.

Hana then starts working at a low level within a crime organisation: taking a stack of fake cards that the organisation has created using stolen data, and withdrawing cash from ATMs around Tokyo. She then passes the cash on to her handler, Viv, in exchange for a cut of the proceeds. It’s easy money, and Hana works hard and accumulates more savings to reopen the bar. She brings in two friends, also young and vulnerable in different ways, to work with her and live with Kimiko.

As the money builds up, however, Hana loses sight of the goal of reopening the bar and just wants to accumulate more. She becomes controlling and abusive, creating strict house rules that she claims are necessary to keep them all safe, but her friends become increasingly resentful and the tension in the house builds.

The title “Sisters in Yellow” refers to a superstition Hana has about the colour yellow attracting money. She heard Kimiko mention it in passing, and then she went to a bookshop and looked it up, and she holds onto that fact tenaciously. It’s why the bar is called “Lemon”, and why she clings to Kimiko, who has the character for “yellow” in her name, and why she builds a kind of shrine in their house, packed with yellow objects that she’s collected from around the city.

I found this a powerful reminder of just how young Hana is and how little she knows about the world. As the narrator, she presents herself as being in charge of her life, making decisions and pursuing goals, but she is childlike in her absolute faith in this superstition. When the shrine gets dusty, she panics and lashes out at her friends who didn’t clean it. Her life is so fragile that she fears any change to the routine she’s established will destroy it.

It doesn’t occur to Hana that money has come to her not from the colour yellow but from her own agency. She doesn’t realise that she doesn’t need the shrine, and she doesn’t need Kimiko. She never really did.

And that leads us to the conclusion, which I won’t spoil except to say that it brings us back to the start of the book and raises questions over who really was in charge all along. The questions are not clearly answered, and although I have my own view, I think different readers will have different opinions about the identity of the perpetrators and the extent of the victimhood in this story, which also affects how you read the present-day criminal case against Kimiko.

Looking back over this post, I realise it may sound odd to have started it by talking about Mieko Kawakami’s understated style and the accumulation of everyday details, when actually quite a lot happens in the book: death, crime, manipulative relationships, etc. But that was my experience of Sisters in Yellow: a lot of it was bland and everyday.

A lot of the real action takes place off-stage, and what we see are the conversations, the aftermath, Hana’s thoughts and worries. Even the crime is dull: we get pages and pages of info dump about how card scams work, and then Hana and her friends go out and take out money from ATMs, again and again and again. It’s a bit like reading a description of a DoorDash driver’s routine.

It’s a tough book to quote from because there isn’t really any beautiful prose to speak of. So why did it work? It really shouldn’t, based on what I just wrote. I think it’s because of the characters and the relationships, the constant questions over what’s really happening and how much we can rely on this narrator, the confusion over how it relates to Kimiko’s criminal case in the present day. There’s so much to think about, and the bland, repetitive prose and everyday events and conversations have a lulling effect from which occasional lines like “How did people go on living?” give you a sharp jolt.

I’m still not entirely convinced by my reasons for liking Sisters in Yellow, but I did like it, and it will stay with me. Make of that what you will. I’d love to hear other opinions to help me make better sense of it. Leave a comment down below.

I wrote this post for Japanese Literature Challenge 19, hosted by Dolce Bellezza, so head over there for more reviews and discussion of Japanese books. You can also read my reviews of a couple of Kawakami’s previous novels, Ms Ice Sandwich and Breasts and Eggs.

The post Sisters in Yellow by Mieko Kawakami appeared first on Andrew Blackman.