Achilles, Powder & Lead

Outside of the academic nonfiction that claims most of my reading time, from January to the present I have been able to read more novels than usual––during my commute or when I am reading with my daughter (since she now likes reading her own books) at bed time. What makes these early 2020 reads remarkable, though, is that all four of the books I started after the new year and have since completed were excellent. And only two of them were new(er) releases.

Dionne Brand: At The Full And Change Of The Moon

In the early fall I read Brand’s most recent (and excellent) novel, Theory, and was reminded, when I looked at her back list, that I hadn’t read this one. So I picked it up in December and really started delving into it in January. I can’t believe I missed it!

The novel is basically a historical study that follows the descendants of Marie Ursule, the leader of a slave revolt, who commits collective suicide with her fellow slaves after a failed rebellion. Her daughter Bola survives, hides out in an abandoned nunnery and succumbs to madness, and the rest of the novel traces a tragic genealogy from the mid 19th century to the end of the 20th century. Moving back and forth from the Caribbean to the US to Europe and to Canada, At The Full And Change Of The Moon records the fault lines of collective trauma. The various interconnections, recursions, and parallels are rendered sublime by Brand’s always compelling poetics. The switches from third to first person, including (in one chapter) the form of a letter, demonstrate how Brand is comfortable switching narrative styles.

Maybe I’m alone in this opinion, but I feel the genealogical novel is difficult to pull off. In fact, I can’t think of another genealogical novel I’ve actually liked. Usually, at least in my experience, they feel like a bunch of short stories that could have existed separately (and may have existed separately) that have been thinly novelized by making the principle characters of each of these short stories related to the principle characters of the other short stories. If the only novelistic coherence is that individual x is somehow related to individual y (and so on, and so on) then it’s not entirely compelling as a whole. But Brand pulls off a genealogical novel that is more coherent than simple lines of descent. The theme of dispersal, of plantation resistance and trauma, marks the genealogical aspect so that it is consistently drawn back to Marie Ursule and her made-made daughter.

Indeed, there is a circular moment where the madness of the original Bola in the first chapter is echoed, in the last chapter by a 20th century descendant who shares the same name. The book moves back to the Caribbean. Just as the first Bola remained in an empty nunnery, growing up insane due to her traumatic escape from a plantation, the second Bola moves into her dead mother’s house, communes with this mother’s ghost, and falls into a similar delirium. The conclusion, which returns us to the original Bola, makes this parallel clear but not in a didactic manner. In fact, I didn’t even notice the parallel of the two Bola’s until after I had some distance from the book. The circularity felt organic.

More to the point, there was an intentional flatness of time the conclusion underscores: despite the dispersal of Ursule’s descendants into the imperialist metropoles, there has not been a rupture in the time of colonialism and imperialism. The return to the scene of subjection, with the latter Bola’s descent into familial madness and obsession with the ghost of her mother, is underscored by a return to the memory that launched the dispersal: the former Bola in the abandoned nunnery at the edge of the sea, yearning to go into the sea, but trapped in the eternal return of that time’s plantation: “It is her own hopelessness and her skill. Her faith doesn’t believe in endings. Marie Ursule moved to light the fire; it is her gibbous back going to its doings that Bola recalls…”

I am not sure how I missed this book of Brand’s. Probably because I started, years ago, with What We All Long For but didn’t read her fiction back list––only her poetry, memoirs, and essays. I’m glad I did go back, though, because not only did I encounter a genealogical novel I actually loved, I was reminded again of why Brand is one of the literary greats of so-called “Canada”.

Teri Vlassopoulos: Escape Plans

This was an unexpected gem since I didn’t know it existed until I got to know the author. And then I found it at a bookstore, delved in, and discovered yet another excellent work of Canadian literature. I was partly worried that I wouldn’t like it, and that I would have to admit to the author I wasn’t a fan, but thankfully my worries were misplaced. Like Brand (and like the authors discussed below), Vlassopoulos writes with a poetic sensibility. There is an elegance to the prose of Escape Plans that in fact reminded me of Brand, though largely because I read the books in close proximity and both authors can write sentences with a facility that, at first glance, seems simple but, in retrospect, is complex and evocative.

Also, this book fulfilled one of my long time superficial novel judgments: read the first sentence and last sentence, if they are evocative together, then it is worth reading as a whole. First sentence: “My father drowned in the Aegean Sea, fifty nautical miles northeast of the port of Piraeus.” Last sentence: “I was sure of that.”

Escape Plans is a controlled narrative and character study of a family told from three different perspectives: the father (Niko), the daughter (Zoe), and the mother (Anna). Despite the fact that all three perspectives are written in first person according to Vlassopoulos’ command of prose, they still felt extremely distinct. I could feel the weight of each character and their differences, the way their thoughts and memories brushed up against each other, their disparate trajectories.

The story, like the prose, is both simple and elegant. The father, Niko, dies at the beginning of the novel, drowning in the Aegean Sea after having left his family in Canada to pursue a dream of working for a shipping company in Greece his family had founded. The narratives of the Zoe and Anna happen after this death, but Niko’s narrative is everything leaving up to this death––from his departure from his family to where he ended up at the point of drowning. The result is a story of familial haunting without a literal ghost, but the ghost of memory and this memory’s narration, and all of the messy events that preceded and succeeded the event that generated this haunting.

What I find mind-boggling––but in a good way––is that the plot elements set you up for despising Niko for abandoning his family to pursue his childhood obsession of the family shipping business, but then you end up understanding him regardless and even sympathizing with him. Even though Niko tries to sell this decision as a temporary one, it doesn’t really feel that temporary; initially it feels like an assault on his family. His decision, soon after settling in Athens, to pursue an affair with a much younger Albanian immigrant who works at a pet shop should read like some annoying midlife crisis bullshit. But then it becomes clear that these events were mediated by previous events generated by Anna’s choices, that Niko’s decision was a way to give into Anna’s choices but avoid confrontation, and that maybe he thought they would be a way (in his own messy understanding of things) to save his family while granting both himself and his wife a temporary reprieve. All of this is hard to explain without spoiling the plot further, but let’s just say that Niko becomes a character that is more sympathetic than he should be, though his decisions are ultimately foolish because they result in his death (which is not a spoiler since he is declared dead in the book’s first sentence), and we feel this death strongly in his daughter’s narrative.

Indeed, the declaration of certainty in the novel’s last sentence (“I was sure of that”) reads as if it intended to be an answer to the statement of fact of the first sentence (“My father drowned…”). Both were made by Zoe and they follow her trajectory which is burdened by the death of the father and, through her long journey of acceptance, her eventual ability to reconcile things in her life and things with her mother.

Also, the evocative descriptions of geography and food made this book a pleasure to read. In any case, I’m definitely looking forward to the author’s next novel.

Tanya Tagaq: Split Tooth

“The farther away you get from the time of death, the less energy meat carries.”

I’ve been a long time fan of Tagaq’s music so I was excited when she released a novel. Took me a while to get to it, though, since I was waiting for it to be released in softcover and because the library holds on the hardcover were overwhelming. It was worth the wait, though, and precisely what I expected. Like her music, her novel is avant garde but not inaccessible.

It’s difficult to explain a book that is so impressionistic, that lapses into poetry, that moves from memoir style to rhapsodic dream sequences, and that vacillates between gritty realism and dream-like surrealism. The elegant illustrations by Jaime Hernandez, scattered throughout the pages, contribute to the novel’s sensibility. Often I’d find myself reading passages and flipping back to pictures, mapping the connections.

There are moments regarding trauma that are extremely upsetting, rendered more upsetting since they are described as banal facts, and then there are moments of seemingly supernatural experience that are truly sublime. And yet you’re never quite sure if the latter aren’t psychic ruptures from the former––coping mechanisms to displace intense trauma––or intended to be factual realities within the novel’s fictional universe. Moments that are greatly disturbing are disrupted by moments of that are entirely alien and it is unclear whether the latter are metaphors of psychological ruptures or literals. Being an avant garde novel, however, the boundaries between the metaphorical and literal are necessarily porous.

Hence the surreal sequence that closes the book: the narrator is impregnated by the Northern Lights, giving birth to twins––one of whom feeds on the life force of others––that are themselves given back to the North. Whether this was intended to be literal or metaphorical or both is difficult to parse, but it is not necessary to parse. Events such as this, which run parallel to realist descriptions of a poor Inuit community, simply wash over the reader.

I was also surprised by the rare but evocative moments of queerness, that I did not expect, but contributed to a sense of melancholy. A relationship missed, a sense of loneliness and loss, lurking outside of the narrator’s heteronormative relationships. This was motivated by a few lines about the crush she has on her friend (“I’ve always loved girls, and our insufferable town sees this love as a deviance”), and then a whole poem sequence about the “buck-toothed girl”. The heteronormative sexual relationships the narrator experiences are largely coercive, the only exception being one that is immediately superseded by animistic wildness. And all of these, except for the annexed elegy to the “buck-toothed girl”, take place in a context of trauma and death.

Reading Split Tooth was an experience of absorption, the feeling of being pulled into a personal literary universe. Since I often read it while listening to Toothsayer––Tagaq’s EP released last March––this experience of absorption felt more visceral. Although I don’t know if the album was intended in any way to be a soundtrack for the novel (one is tempted to think so but mainly because of the word “tooth”), it definitely contributed to the reading experience’s phenomenology.

Benjanun Sriduangkaew: Mirrorstrike 

It should come as no surprise that I was a fan of this book since I’ve long been a fan of Sriduangkaew’s work. I’ve long maintained she is one of the unique and innovative voices in contemporary SFF. Not only have I reviewed it extensively, but I have also become friends with the author and have cowritten a hybrid work of fiction/non-fiction with her (my contribution, obviously, being the latter), Methods Devour Themselves. So what can I say about this novel, the second entry in the Her Pitiless Command trilogy, of which Winterglass was the first entry, that I reviewed here? Middle books in trilogies are hard to gauge, since their job is to function as the transition between the beginning and conclusion of a trilogy, and in many ways we cannot understand them fully until the final book has been concluded.

But of course, as always, Sriduangkaew’s prose is a joy to read. As with everything she produces, a large part of the reading experience is slowing down, rereading sentences, and digesting them slowly. Due to the fact that she packs so much into every paragraph, but does so in a way that is lovely to behold, the reader often runs the risk of missing too much when they get too absorbed by the plot and are tempted to move quickly through phrases and sentences. This is definitely a lovely tension in Mirrorstrike: the desire to read quickly because of the breathlessness of the plot; the necessity to slow down and digest every single word so as to not miss both the quality of the prose and the details densely packed into the prose. An old friend of mine once told me that you needed to read Angela Carter slowly because the beauty of her sentences often hid the fact that every word was chosen intentionally and that you could miss details when you became too absorbed by the flow. So it is with Mirrorstrike. Even the breathless narrative moments demanded rereading; there was so much world-building detail in singular phrases.

In Mirrorstrike we return to the Kemiraj that was introduced in the Winterglass prequel story in Methods Devour Themselves, now devoured by Imperial Winter. Court intrigue, the weight of anti-colonial vengeance, and a character from the Winter Queen’s past further develop the story of Nuawa and Lussadh. Legends about the Winter Queen abound, certain assumptions are overturned, and Nuawa’s attempt is thwarted and transitioned into a moment of collaboration that undermines the celebratory nature of her marriage to Lussadh at the end of the novel.

Early moments of creepiness (like when Nuawa roams the Winter Queen’s cavernous palace and encounters rooms filled with “unused mirror frames” that are “waiting like open mouths”) give way to a bleakness. Moments of extremely disturbing violence are rendered sublime by Sriduangkaew’s prose: “…and there is a burst of geometry where Captain Juhye should be. A tree made of glass has sprouted in his place, branches tipped in yellow teeth, knife-edge leaves draped in guts. In the hyper-focus of this moment, she hears withheld breaths, shuffling feet, and the peculiar, distinct noise of flesh ripping from skeleton, a liberation of fat and ligament.”

And then there is the sense of historical weight, wrought particularly visible since the last time we witnessed Kemiraj in this fictional universe when was it hadn’t been transformed by Winter, when Lussadh was once opposed to the Winter Queen before switching sides. Again Lussadh serves as a sympathetic interlocutor of Empire, but largely because she switched allegiances from one Empire to another, and so her conscious apprehension of justice has always been locked within an imperialist register. From national oppressor to comprador. But still convinced, though dealing with the contradictions, that such a shift is correct.

All in all, a great transitional novel. But a novel that promises a lot for the concluding book that will hopefully be written sooner than later.

This blog takes its name from a quotation in Marx’s Grundrisse that asks “is Achilles possible with powder and lead? Or the Iliad with the printing press, not to mention the printing machine? Do not the song and the saga and the muse necessarily come to an end with the printer’s bar?” Which is to say the Iliad as well as the Odyssey are historically mediated texts that can only be imagined according to their historical circumstances and are in many ways incomprehensible if we try to understand them according to the logic of the contemporary conjuncture.

In the second chapter of Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment we are meant to accept that the ancient epic of Odysseus prefigures bourgeois logic. The reader is exhorted to think Odysseus as a symbol of the bourgeoisie as if the logic of capitalism was already existent in Ancient Greek thought. A generous reading of this chapter might conclude that the authors were merely talking about the way in which the Odyssey was translated and cognized in the European Renaissance and Enlightenment, but such a reading would have to ignore the fact that Horkheimer and Adorno did not make this declaration of distance. They seemed quite convinced that Odysseus was the bourgeois subject. This projection of contemporary conceptions unto the distant past indicates that these two Frankfurt School scholars failed to grasp that the ancient epic was alien to the world of powder, lead, and the printing bar. That they themselves were reading Odysseus according to a conception generated by the very Enlightenment dialectic they sought to critique.

In this context, Emily Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey is notable for its ability to demonstrate that the world of Odysseus is alien to the contemporary conjuncture––is not possible in the world of powder, lead, and the printer’s bar––but that its alienness can be comprehended according to a translation structure that renders it avidly readable. That is, through a translation apparatus that translates the poem into intriguing and elegant English that makes it a joy to read, Wilson simultaneously demonstrates how distant and alien the world of Odysseus is from our present. He is definitely not the paradigm of the bourgeois subject, as Horkheimer and Adorno ludicrously and ahistorically claimed, but the subject of an alien political order. Although there is a case to be made that they were reading the story of Odysseus through the imagination of a translation industry that was isometric to the emergence of the bourgeois subject, they themselves do not establish this distance. They are in fact captured in the early capitalist capture of The Odyssey.

Thus, The Dialectic of Enlightement‘s treatment of Odysseus’ story reads as if these Frankfurt School authors sought to defy Marx’s statement in the Grundrisse when they wrote that chapter, relying on the Renaissance and Enlightenment translations of the ancient text, and were thus absorbed by the kind of thought Marx warned against. Because to claim that Odysseus is the ur-pattern of the bourgeois subject is to project the present upon the past and thus violate historical materialist reasoning. Such a backwards logic is a hallmark of bourgeois reason. But when we reject this reason, as we should, we cannot read it into the past where it never existed in the first place. And Wilson’s translation persistently demonstrates that Odysseus is not this bourgeois subject.

Wilson defamiliarizes the epic while simultaneously trying to draw us closer to its meaning, making it cognizable in our language. The reader is thus struck with a world that is thoroughly alien to the modern conjuncture but that, being an eminently human world, still possesses some form of universal resonance. Odysseus weeps and we understand why he weeps, Telemachus is fatherless and we understand this tragedy, Penelope struggles to assert some level of control in the realm of ancient patriarchy defined by her husband and often enforced by her son. We understand how misogynist and chauvinistic this world is, how its particular type of slave-based class society is different from our own, but we can feel the resonances of contemporary patriarchy and the institution of modern slavery in this ancient text.

In my reread of The Odyssey through the Wilson interpretation I realized how much I had forgotten about my original read (which was decades ago in my undergraduate degree) and how much pop-culture and texts like The Dialectic of Enlightenment mediated my memory of that reading. For example, the fantastic details of Odysseus’ twenty year exile are relayed in only 4 out of the 24 books. Thus the “heroic” events that comprised the focus of the old Kurt Russell adaptation, the two television adaptations, and the main concern of Adorno and Horkheimer, are a minor detail of the source material. Rather, most of the book is about Telemachus’ search for Odysseus, the latter’s escape from Calypso and his final bid to return home, and Odysseus’ many deceits upon returning home as well as his massacre of Penelope’s suitors.

I also forgot that the surviving heroes of The Iliad were scattered and killed in the time-frame of The Odyssey with only three returning home to survive: Nestor, Menelaus, and Odysseus––the last, being the concern of the latter epic, living in exile for two decades. Meanwhile every other surviving victor is dead. Notably, Agamemnon is murdered upon returning home; Ajax is killed in transit for mocking the gods.

Furthermore, Odysseus’ encounter with the dead in that minor part of The Odyssey that concerns his “odyssey” further demonstrates the tragic gulf between this epic and its predecessor. While the shades of the dead gather, vampire like, to become cognizant by drinking the blood of sacrifice, Odysseus’ dead friends inform him of this failure to survive. Agamemnon’s shade speaks of his betrayal at the hand of his wife and her lover (with no guilt regarding the sacrifice of his daughter, which is deleted entirely in The Odyssey). Ajax’s shade refuses to speak with Odysseus because of previous conflict. Achilles’ shade delivers that line that in a previous translation influenced Milton’s Satan declaring it is “better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.” For Achilles, which tells us something about the ancient world of The Odyssey, it is better to live as a slave then reign in Elysium… Which Wilson evocatively translates as “I would prefer to be a workman, hired by a poor man on a peasant farm, than rule as king of all the dead.”

These episodes and my memory of the epic aside, it is worth inquiring about the status of Wilson’s translation. Since I am not an expert on the Homeric epics, and am definitely not a classical studies scholar, I cannot comment on the efficacy of this translation. But other classicists have done so, as well as many literary theorists, and Wilson herself is an important classical scholar. Indeed, those criticisms of Wilson’s translation from other classicists who read Homer in the original Greek say more about the kind of translation those classicists want (i.e. closest literal translation possible while recognizing there is no such thing as a “pure” translation, preservation of epithet repetition, rejection of modernizations of metaphors/descriptions, preservation of dactylic hexameter), because there is no possible way any translation could preserve all of these desires simultaneously. And in any case, when these criticisms are made they are usually minor side points in reviews that are otherwise glowing––such as the Armstrong and Mawr reviews.

Considering that you’re not going to get every scholar of classical Greek poetry to agree on what makes a perfect translation––there is no such thing as a perfect translation––the question about whether Wilson has produced a meaningful translation becomes a decidedly more philosophical one. Philosophical in the sense that I have described in my own work (most notably in my upcoming Demarcation and Demystification) as bringing clarity to meaning and demarcating this clarity. Hence, in some ways, it is not the simply the purview of the classical translation industry (of which Wilson herself belongs so she is arguably as authoritative as anyone else, including her critics) to decide what makes a translation meaningful but it is about the question of translation in general and about what translation means, what particular translations function as, and thus whether or not particular translations accomplish the goals they set out to accomplish as a discrete translation within a general understanding of “translation” as a whole.

The act of translation functions to establish a relation (relation in the sense meant by Glissant) between two languages, and readers of one language to the Other of another language. Within this function, then, every translation of a given text is intentional; translation happens according to a logic that is designed to make a given translation do something particular with this relationship, to establish a particular meaning between two language. In this sense every translation establishes a relationship that other translations do not establish. Even the most banal translation decisions regarding an epic poem––do I stick to the most literal translation possible, do I seek to preserve the meter, do I try to find a compromise––are driven by this choice of relationship. Thus the question of a translation’s efficacy becomes “does translation x make a clear decision on how it wants to establish the relationship of translation and, if so, does it succeed in executing this decision?” Poor translations, then, are not ones that are disagreeable to one or other translators’ personal translating preference (“I wish the translator had chosen to do x instead of y“) but are translations that have no clear approach to the translation, fail to fulfill the demands of the translation decision, and/or are just poor copies of other translations that had clearer decisions that were better accomplished.

So what does this mean for Wilson’s translation. By her own admission in the 91 pages of introductory material she did not set out to do another (but better!) translation in the style of Lattimore or any of the other standard translations. Others had already done the close-to-literal, preservation of the hexameter, thoroughly erudite prose variations, shadow Greek versions, or etc. She felt no reason to reproduce what already existed and her intention to translation was driven by a decision to create something she felt was lacking in the translation industry of The Odyssey. Her translation decision was in fact somewhat unique. Wilson set out to craft a translation of The Odyssey that made it cognizable to modern readers while preserving the distance of the ancient world, that was eminently readable while preserving the line structure of the original, and thus made the epic sing according to modern sensibilities while not giving up on its removal from these sensibilities. The translation decision was thus very clear and, based on its reception and my own read, she largely accomplished the goals set by her decision. Indeed, I challenge anyone to find a translation of The Odyssey that is both accessible and not a pithy summary/reimagination divorced from the poem itself. She has succeeded in making a translation of the actual poem (that is not a summary or retelling but an actual translation) that grips the reader––even the reader untrained in classic literature.

Wilson has accomplished a startlingly singular translation. In doing so she had demonstrated the ways in which a translator can become a second author.

For those who have never read The Odyssey, and for those who read it before in another translation, I invite you to read this version. You won’t be disappointed. As Wilson writes at the end of her second introduction to her translation:

There is a stranger outside your house. He is old, ragged, and dirty. He is tired. He has been wandering, homeless, for a long time, perhaps many years. Invite him inside. You do not know his name. He may be a thief. He may be a murderer. He may be a god. He may remind you of your husband, your father, or yourself. Do not ask questions. Wait. Let him sit on a comfortable chair and warm himself beside your fire. Bring him some food, the best you have, and a cup of wine. Let him eat and drink until he is satisfied. Be patient. When he is finished, he will tell his story. Listen carefully. It may not be as you expect.

And indeed, despite all of the buzz I heard about this translation of Odysseus’ ancient fiction, it was not what I expected.

Prime Meridian‘s fictional universe reminded me of the world of Blade Runner. Not the replicants, action set pieces, and squalid neon environment, but a world that is adjacent to ours, a near future where space exploration and planetary settlement are a reality but are lurking at the peripheries of the narrative. In Blade Runner (both movies in fact) we are told that humanity is spread throughout space, and characters make reference to other worlds but, like the majority of people residing within this fiction, we never see these worlds. Moreover, by the time of Blade Runner 2049 the imaginary of this series became an alternate future history due to the fact that the first film’s setting of 2019 was no longer believable in 2017. Atari and PanAm were still major corporations; the cold war still persisted in some form. Similarly, Prime Meridian seems to be set in an alternate future history where the Soviet Union still persists: it is only several years ahead of our own world, and the development of its social networking technology is believable, but it also possesses a slightly altered past (with different films and filmmakers slotted into its adjacent 1930s) and the fact that there is an established outpost on Mars.

Of course Prime Meridian is not Blade Runner. Or rather, if it is, then it is a Blade Runner told from the perspective of those who comprise the populations through which the latter’s main characters navigate. Anonymous everyday people whose struggles are “common”, represented by extras.

More accurately, the comparison to Blade Runner is mainly relevant if we need to locate a Science Fiction precedent for Prime Meridian. For just as its history is adjacent to our own, Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s novella is adjacent to Science Fiction. The SF elements are scaffolding; the book draws upon them in order to drive its protagonist’s narrative arc but they must necessarily lurk as subtle and normalized elements of the fictional terrain.

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Prime Meridian‘s protagonist, Amelia, is a working class woman trapped within the boundaries of her social class in Mexico City. Passage to the settlement on Mars represents an escape from everyday drudgery, and has for years before the novel starts, but this passage costs. Unless one wants to end up in massive debt and over-exploited, a significant fee is required in order to gain access to Mars and Amelia works to save up enough money for this nearly impossible goal. Her main job is as a “rent-a-friend” through an application called “Friendrr” – where wealthy lonely people, such as the starlet Lucia who is one of Amelia’s clients, are able to pay their way out of loneliness. Another job she eventually takes up is the selling of her blood to rich buyers who, like Peter Thiel, think that blood transfusions from the young will ensure longevity.

Years before the novella starts Amelia’s dream of Mars was more concrete. She possessed a scholarship to a university, that allowed her to hob-nob with wealthier members of society, but she lost this scholarship because her mother’s terminal illness forced her to drop out of school. Her university friends, belonging to a wealthier social class, left her behind; her boyfriend, pressured by his rich father, left her. The escape represented by Mars became more elusive, and this elusiveness is made all the more poignant by her relationship with Lucia who once starred in a film about a fictional Mars, the representations of which are interspersed with Amelia’s story. There is the Mars of Amelia’s world, a white-washed settlement on the periphery of existence. There is also the Mars of Lucia’s film industry past, an adventure pulp from the 1930s.

Amelia’s desire for Mars is reinforced by the successive phases of alienation visited upon her by social circumstances. Her loss of the scholarship. Her relegation to a social embarrassment by her economically privileged university friends. Her failing relationship with her sister. Her reunion with her ex-boyfriend, Elías, which is one in which he hopes to keep her as a mistress. That part where she tries to free a rat from a trap and is bitten for her compassion would be tempting to read as metaphorical of her existence, especially considering how she lashes out at some of her friends, but it is not so bluntly metaphorical: it better represents catalyst of the return of the repressed, the motivation to confront her sister.

In the end it is the imaginary Mars that allows for Amelia’s passage to the real Mars. We never witness the real Mars, despite the clues we are given, though it is the novel’s narrative line of flight. A line of flight that bursts through the boundaries of predatory romance represented by the character of Elías, a wealthy man singularly offended that Amelia will choose Mars over a future of being little more than a mistress where “he might devour her whole and she’d cease to exist, be edited out of existence like they edited scenes in the movies.”

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Recently I’ve read a number of amazing SFF novellas that should, if we lived in a world that wasn’t defined by genre categories, be treated as literary fiction proper. Cassandra Khaw’s Hammers On Bone and A Song For Quiet, Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom, Benjanun Sriduangkaew’s Winterglass – to name a few. Moreno-Garcia’s Prime Meridian joins the ranks of these interventions and, like them, ekes out its own unique space as an elegant novella that deserves to be recognized as more than a genre expression.

I’m still a little confused as to why Prime Meridian was self-published since its author is a rising star within the SFF milieux and, not to be insulting, it possesses a level of literary quality that the vast majority self-published works do not possess and in fact fall far short of possessing. In my mind something must be broken in the world of mainstream publishing when a critically acclaimed author decides to publish something with clear literary qualities outside of the SFF avenues that normally publish her work.

“There are only two plots. You know them well,” Moreno-Garcia concludes Prime Meridian, referencing a claim made by Lucia earlier in the novella: “A person goes on a journey and a stranger comes to town.” This claim is ultimately cynical because neither of these plots are truly borne out in the novella. The journey never happens, though it is desired, until the end but is only promised; Amelia is a stranger interloping on the lives of her privileged friends. In any case, the book was a joy to read and I would like to imagine that its protagonist did go on a journey and this journey provided her with a better life.