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https://medium.com/springboard-thought/the-ten-thousand-things-a-dialogue-with-those-people-taken-from-us-too-soon-48704b5447b4
“we all die…and we receive nothing for nothing.”
A Danish-Indonesian author, Maria Dermoût’s 1955 Danish classic is unlike most anything in the Western canon — which is exactly what makes it so valuable.
Felicia embarks from Holland to return home to the Spice Islands of Indonesia with her infant son after her husband abandons them because the money from the family sugar business dries up.
“Past the three graves, the path suddenly went steeply up into the hills, hills without many high trees, open and sunny, overgrown with thick yellowish grass that smelled of herbs, and full of wild rosebushes. And from there, over the tops of the trees, over the house and the outbuildings, she could see the inner bay — like a round blue lake, with here and there light-green discolorings where the water was shallow and dark-green ones where it was very deep, around it the white ridge of the surf and all the luxuriant green of the coast.”
The masterful introduction of the island to the reader with an entire chapter of prose dedicated to the physical features and locations and nature of the place is staggering. Then Felecia’s return, her memories, the growth of her son (and his story), random stories of the few murders that have occurred, and the subsequent tying together of all these disparate threads.
Her homecoming brings with it an unexpected flood of memories from her childhood — specifically her grandmother — which are interwoven into the narrative of her return such that it is sometimes unclear when the events are taken place.
‘“Are you listening to the bay? You are so silent, granddaughter — three waves behind each other — the father, the mother, the child, they say here, can you hear it?” and the old woman repeated it once more with the waves.’
It then shifts to focus on the process of Felecia reintegrating with the culture of the islands and her grandmother and the garden and home of her childhood; eventually, she is shown to grow as old and as consolidated into the island as her grandmother. Uncannily, to the point where she almost becomes her grandmother, as far as the island is concerned.
The prose is as vivid as I’ve ever read. Playful and flighty, and a bit strange, especially in cadence. Even when it meanders it is still has a wonderful flow to it and baroque prose that make consumption easy. Later it becomes apparent that these wanderings are not as listless as they appear.
“A day in the radiant sunlight and the sky’s blue, in the shadow of a proud dark sail, over rustling waves, along new coastlines, wouldn’t that help to get past sadness? for a while, for that one day at least.”
In just 206 pages The Ten Thousand Things has a structure that tricks the reader into getting a complete, complex picture of the island, as it pertains to Felecia. Her feelings about her garden and home and the island itself informs how she interacts with those people who have been killed on it.
Grief, to her, is externalized in an interesting way.
Though still an internal process, depending on what you assume is ‘real’ or not, the people who have died become specters that visit her garden. She senses them, sometimes interacts with them. Each may be a dialogue Felecia expounds upon as she talks to them and remembers them. This lends the fiction a magical realism quality.
“Felicia had never seen such beads before, neither of glass nor of metal, not of jade either, she thought; of stone or baked clay, rather, opaque, in mysteriously tender and quenched colors: orange ocher, golden brown, some touched with black; so subdued of hue — melancholy almost, as if there was something of autumn in that little box woven from leaves, something of passing and dying.”
What would be deemed as superstition in Western culture is instead shown as to be both an internal and external force that is symbiotic with the island and the inhabitants, legitimizing it; to the point where distinguishing something that might appear strange from any other social contract or ritual that has credence in other cultures is impossible, and decoupling it from any other facet of a person’s lived experience would delegitimize the entirety of the life.
Even as Dermoût writes about prejudice and racism and death and murder she also provides a framework and scaffolding for humanizing a culture and person so they cannot be legitimately minimized and dismissed. A pretty astounding achievement.
…they weren’t a hundred things but much more than a hundred, and now only hers, a hundred times “a hundred things,” next to each other, separate from each other, touching, here and there flowing into each other, without any link anywhere, and at the same time linked forever…a link which she did not quite understand, understanding it was not needed, wasn’t possible, she had seen it — for one moment over the moonlit water.
“we all die…and we receive nothing for nothing.”
A Danish-Indonesian author, Maria Dermoût’s 1955 Danish classic is unlike most anything in the Western canon — which is exactly what makes it so valuable.
Felicia embarks from Holland to return home to the Spice Islands of Indonesia with her infant son after her husband abandons them because the money from the family sugar business dries up.
“Past the three graves, the path suddenly went steeply up into the hills, hills without many high trees, open and sunny, overgrown with thick yellowish grass that smelled of herbs, and full of wild rosebushes. And from there, over the tops of the trees, over the house and the outbuildings, she could see the inner bay — like a round blue lake, with here and there light-green discolorings where the water was shallow and dark-green ones where it was very deep, around it the white ridge of the surf and all the luxuriant green of the coast.”
The masterful introduction of the island to the reader with an entire chapter of prose dedicated to the physical features and locations and nature of the place is staggering. Then Felecia’s return, her memories, the growth of her son (and his story), random stories of the few murders that have occurred, and the subsequent tying together of all these disparate threads.
Her homecoming brings with it an unexpected flood of memories from her childhood — specifically her grandmother — which are interwoven into the narrative of her return such that it is sometimes unclear when the events are taken place.
‘“Are you listening to the bay? You are so silent, granddaughter — three waves behind each other — the father, the mother, the child, they say here, can you hear it?” and the old woman repeated it once more with the waves.’
It then shifts to focus on the process of Felecia reintegrating with the culture of the islands and her grandmother and the garden and home of her childhood; eventually, she is shown to grow as old and as consolidated into the island as her grandmother. Uncannily, to the point where she almost becomes her grandmother, as far as the island is concerned.
The prose is as vivid as I’ve ever read. Playful and flighty, and a bit strange, especially in cadence. Even when it meanders it is still has a wonderful flow to it and baroque prose that make consumption easy. Later it becomes apparent that these wanderings are not as listless as they appear.
“A day in the radiant sunlight and the sky’s blue, in the shadow of a proud dark sail, over rustling waves, along new coastlines, wouldn’t that help to get past sadness? for a while, for that one day at least.”
In just 206 pages The Ten Thousand Things has a structure that tricks the reader into getting a complete, complex picture of the island, as it pertains to Felecia. Her feelings about her garden and home and the island itself informs how she interacts with those people who have been killed on it.
Grief, to her, is externalized in an interesting way.
Though still an internal process, depending on what you assume is ‘real’ or not, the people who have died become specters that visit her garden. She senses them, sometimes interacts with them. Each may be a dialogue Felecia expounds upon as she talks to them and remembers them. This lends the fiction a magical realism quality.
“Felicia had never seen such beads before, neither of glass nor of metal, not of jade either, she thought; of stone or baked clay, rather, opaque, in mysteriously tender and quenched colors: orange ocher, golden brown, some touched with black; so subdued of hue — melancholy almost, as if there was something of autumn in that little box woven from leaves, something of passing and dying.”
What would be deemed as superstition in Western culture is instead shown as to be both an internal and external force that is symbiotic with the island and the inhabitants, legitimizing it; to the point where distinguishing something that might appear strange from any other social contract or ritual that has credence in other cultures is impossible, and decoupling it from any other facet of a person’s lived experience would delegitimize the entirety of the life.
Even as Dermoût writes about prejudice and racism and death and murder she also provides a framework and scaffolding for humanizing a culture and person so they cannot be legitimately minimized and dismissed. A pretty astounding achievement.
…they weren’t a hundred things but much more than a hundred, and now only hers, a hundred times “a hundred things,” next to each other, separate from each other, touching, here and there flowing into each other, without any link anywhere, and at the same time linked forever…a link which she did not quite understand, understanding it was not needed, wasn’t possible, she had seen it — for one moment over the moonlit water.
https://medium.com/springboard-thought/sleepwalking-sometimes-the-cure-is-as-anomalous-as-the-affliction-835c8b8e3cc2
“Until there is no longer the possibility of sadness, of isolation, there can be no gravity. We all float by, rootless, taking clumsy astronaut steps and calling it progress.”
The ‘death girls’ of Swarthmore are a notorious trio of women on the Swarthmore campus. They are utterly consumed with the work of particular poets. They dress in black, hold seance-like rituals where they read from Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and a fictional poet: Lucy Asher.
They each go so far as to take steps to look like their chosen poet.
But unlike her friends, ostensibly, Claire Danziger has experienced the loss of her younger brother and that loss has molded her in ways she hasn’t yet unpacked. As she falls headlong into a relationship with Julien, she starts to question her death girl identity, distancing herself from her friends, though she has considered it vital to her being — until now.
“She had seen that look on the faces of lovers in restaurants, on the secret: a secret, meaningful glance exchanged between two people. There seemed to be a conspiracy of passion in the world.”
This internal schism only gets worse and Julien, though well-meaning, doesn’t have the tools to help Claire.
When her friend suggests a restorative cure she had tried herself when away from her friends, where she, for a short time, abandoned her life to connect with her poet by trying to encroach, however slightly, into the real life of her chosen poet, Claire, desperate to try anything, goes to the house where Lucy Asher’s parents live.
Amazingly, seeing something of their daughter in Claire, the pair hire her as a cleaner, and the new trio proceeds to reflect on their grief via the interactions with one another. These can be on a subtle, micro-scale; observing the ways in which each is different from the people in their own lives with the same roll: wife, father, mother, daughter, etc.
“It was too easy. Letting go also meant other things, things people never discussed. There were restrictions; everything always had to be cathartic these days.”
Undoubtedly, it’s a strange concept for a book, but it ends up working.
While dwelling in the Ashers' grief, Claire seems able to achieve a kind of catharsis in that environment, where she is simply accepted by a family, in contrast to her own, which are described as having been ‘hardened’ by the death of their child. In a symbiotic way, the parents, too, being to process their grief — something which neither party realizes they were unable to do previously, and why they were shades of their former selves.
Sleepwalking is about empathy.
“It did not make Helen feel worse, though, as she had thought it might. It occupied her; it gave her a project to work on. She and Ray had shared almost nothing in years. Grief didn’t count, because in a way it was nothing; there wasn’t anything in it to hold on to, just wide-open empty space.”
Even when the actual actions of the characters are opaque, the description of what a character is feeling in regards to the action manages to resonate and inform the scene.
Sometimes what a person needs in order to fully realize the complexities of internalized trauma and grief, is just not something the majority of people around us provide — unintentionally stymying whatever it is a person needs to move on, and grow.
I imagine most people are familiar with the feeling of being inadequate to the task of giving what a person needs in situations regarding grief and loss. But framing it is as something as odd as this while contrasting it with the easy acceptance between Claire and the parents, ushers this notion into a more realized, more complete perspective.
It is more compelling for people who can remember what it’s like to be young and to think there is no one else who could feel like you do. Or to be in that place yourself. Surely everyone has felt that their pain or fear or terror or sadness is keener than anyone else; that your cup runneth over. And nobody could possibly understand.
Sleepwalking’s concept, then, becomes no more peculiar than the impenetrable nature of a person’s subjective inner workings. Why should it be so wild that the cure is any less atypical?
“Without company, misery turns to sorrow, and sorrow turns inward, curling up in some dark, damp corner.”
“Until there is no longer the possibility of sadness, of isolation, there can be no gravity. We all float by, rootless, taking clumsy astronaut steps and calling it progress.”
The ‘death girls’ of Swarthmore are a notorious trio of women on the Swarthmore campus. They are utterly consumed with the work of particular poets. They dress in black, hold seance-like rituals where they read from Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and a fictional poet: Lucy Asher.
They each go so far as to take steps to look like their chosen poet.
But unlike her friends, ostensibly, Claire Danziger has experienced the loss of her younger brother and that loss has molded her in ways she hasn’t yet unpacked. As she falls headlong into a relationship with Julien, she starts to question her death girl identity, distancing herself from her friends, though she has considered it vital to her being — until now.
“She had seen that look on the faces of lovers in restaurants, on the secret: a secret, meaningful glance exchanged between two people. There seemed to be a conspiracy of passion in the world.”
This internal schism only gets worse and Julien, though well-meaning, doesn’t have the tools to help Claire.
When her friend suggests a restorative cure she had tried herself when away from her friends, where she, for a short time, abandoned her life to connect with her poet by trying to encroach, however slightly, into the real life of her chosen poet, Claire, desperate to try anything, goes to the house where Lucy Asher’s parents live.
Amazingly, seeing something of their daughter in Claire, the pair hire her as a cleaner, and the new trio proceeds to reflect on their grief via the interactions with one another. These can be on a subtle, micro-scale; observing the ways in which each is different from the people in their own lives with the same roll: wife, father, mother, daughter, etc.
“It was too easy. Letting go also meant other things, things people never discussed. There were restrictions; everything always had to be cathartic these days.”
Undoubtedly, it’s a strange concept for a book, but it ends up working.
While dwelling in the Ashers' grief, Claire seems able to achieve a kind of catharsis in that environment, where she is simply accepted by a family, in contrast to her own, which are described as having been ‘hardened’ by the death of their child. In a symbiotic way, the parents, too, being to process their grief — something which neither party realizes they were unable to do previously, and why they were shades of their former selves.
Sleepwalking is about empathy.
“It did not make Helen feel worse, though, as she had thought it might. It occupied her; it gave her a project to work on. She and Ray had shared almost nothing in years. Grief didn’t count, because in a way it was nothing; there wasn’t anything in it to hold on to, just wide-open empty space.”
Even when the actual actions of the characters are opaque, the description of what a character is feeling in regards to the action manages to resonate and inform the scene.
Sometimes what a person needs in order to fully realize the complexities of internalized trauma and grief, is just not something the majority of people around us provide — unintentionally stymying whatever it is a person needs to move on, and grow.
I imagine most people are familiar with the feeling of being inadequate to the task of giving what a person needs in situations regarding grief and loss. But framing it is as something as odd as this while contrasting it with the easy acceptance between Claire and the parents, ushers this notion into a more realized, more complete perspective.
It is more compelling for people who can remember what it’s like to be young and to think there is no one else who could feel like you do. Or to be in that place yourself. Surely everyone has felt that their pain or fear or terror or sadness is keener than anyone else; that your cup runneth over. And nobody could possibly understand.
Sleepwalking’s concept, then, becomes no more peculiar than the impenetrable nature of a person’s subjective inner workings. Why should it be so wild that the cure is any less atypical?
“Without company, misery turns to sorrow, and sorrow turns inward, curling up in some dark, damp corner.”
https://medium.com/springboard-thought/whiskey-when-were-dry-a-masterclass-in-subverting-genre-8f2880674cee
“It went on in increments not tallied by any earthly measure. For centuries we wander that snow with their blood running from our elbows.”
Whiskey When We’re Dry is (another) proof positive that subversion of any genre is integral to its growth and value. The tropes, and what we have come to expect from our shaped preferences, is all very well and good from time to time. But the old, when pitted against inclusive and intersectional fiction like this illustrates just how stagnant it is, even if it’s comforting to know where that specific body of water is, so we can avoid it.
Jess’s voice and her story would be reason enough to read this book. Her voice is unique yet retains the same qualities of the familiar. She is the complex “anti-hero” bred akin to most all western protagonists. But unlike those men, she is not made privy in any real way to the world and its workings.
For as long as we’ve been the Good, we’ve invented histories to so convince our children. We heed preachers upon tilted altars. We let them spin this world.
So long as we remain at its center.
The only education Jess receives is a passing familiarity with the Bible, circa 1885. She has no mother to teach her to be a woman and her Pa excels at nothing much at all.
Her dad and her older brother never actually make an effort to see her and relegate her to women's work, stymying her every interest. When her brother Noah grows up some, he collides with the siblings’ father once and for all in about the only way a boy can: a physical confrontation that goes too far. The father is left broken in both face and will, Noah leaves for good, and Jess is left to pick up the pieces of a shattered life.
“…they think a man is made real by the violence he wields.””
It takes the death of a man — her father — to set her free.
Though obviously an unwelcome turn of events, and she tries to make due alone on their spread of land alone, she eventually strikes out to seek out Noah; years behind her sibling though she may be.
To make her way through a man’s world, she must dress the part. Granting her the privilege of passing as a man while growing up a woman places the fiction into a sort of blurred gender perspective. In studying to pass and spending time with men, she is able to feel out where she feels she belongs.
“I held the money in my hand. I couldn’t reckon its weight against the man left behind.”
This lens makes the reader feel like they are also discovering the west for the first time while also sets them slightly on edge, as anything is possible and all bets appear to be off. And no, I do not mean in a typical female protagonist fashion, either: ie, a male writer threatening the female protagonist with rape to illustrate how dark and bad the world and the antagonist are. Thankfully, this fiction is far more substantial. Jess knows the world is hard and the stakes are high, all without the threat of rape, shockingly.
“How could you kill as you have?
The same logic lies dormant within all fairy tales and histories, it is fundamental as our origins, as urgent as our breaths. And yet I will confess the choice was ours.
The choice is always ours.”
When experiencing the world on her own terms, Jess outgrows her past intentions and goals quite quickly. At long last Jess begins to find out all the things she didn’t know. And can then begin her formative years, delayed though they may be.
Her story subverts some tropes and plays into others. But it is made to intersect other characters who are also a little left of center; straight and queer; White, Mexican, Black; masculine and feminine.
“A problem with prosperity is that it makes a place long on crowds and short on people.”
They are all of them constructed as Jessilyn herself, neither hero nor villain; capable of heroic and villainous deeds but skirting the typical labels (even as those labels are sometimes thrown in their face by the people of the world).
Like all great fiction, in its attempt to tell a meaningful story — one which is obviously well researched and steeped in at least some lived experience when it comes to the area of America in which it takes place —it also manages to handily tap a literary vein.
“What started the war, Pa?”
His eyes settled on me. “Stories, Jessilyn, We tell ourselves the wrong stories.”
The prose gradually becomes more complex and, later on, often even profound, a thoroughly enjoyable device.
As Jess’s accrues experience, she becomes wiser. The human condition is tied directly to complex themes. Religion; the responsibility and ethics we have as a culture and people to history; the erasure of people of color and queer people; capitalism; consent; love, in all its forms and shapes.
In doing this Whiskey When We’re Dry illustrates that while this is Jess’s story, it is also the story of many others who have come before, whether history chooses to record them or not.
And what a rich story it is.
“Do you believe sin is handed down, one generation to the next?”
“I reckon it piles like snow.”
“It went on in increments not tallied by any earthly measure. For centuries we wander that snow with their blood running from our elbows.”
Whiskey When We’re Dry is (another) proof positive that subversion of any genre is integral to its growth and value. The tropes, and what we have come to expect from our shaped preferences, is all very well and good from time to time. But the old, when pitted against inclusive and intersectional fiction like this illustrates just how stagnant it is, even if it’s comforting to know where that specific body of water is, so we can avoid it.
Jess’s voice and her story would be reason enough to read this book. Her voice is unique yet retains the same qualities of the familiar. She is the complex “anti-hero” bred akin to most all western protagonists. But unlike those men, she is not made privy in any real way to the world and its workings.
For as long as we’ve been the Good, we’ve invented histories to so convince our children. We heed preachers upon tilted altars. We let them spin this world.
So long as we remain at its center.
The only education Jess receives is a passing familiarity with the Bible, circa 1885. She has no mother to teach her to be a woman and her Pa excels at nothing much at all.
Her dad and her older brother never actually make an effort to see her and relegate her to women's work, stymying her every interest. When her brother Noah grows up some, he collides with the siblings’ father once and for all in about the only way a boy can: a physical confrontation that goes too far. The father is left broken in both face and will, Noah leaves for good, and Jess is left to pick up the pieces of a shattered life.
“…they think a man is made real by the violence he wields.””
It takes the death of a man — her father — to set her free.
Though obviously an unwelcome turn of events, and she tries to make due alone on their spread of land alone, she eventually strikes out to seek out Noah; years behind her sibling though she may be.
To make her way through a man’s world, she must dress the part. Granting her the privilege of passing as a man while growing up a woman places the fiction into a sort of blurred gender perspective. In studying to pass and spending time with men, she is able to feel out where she feels she belongs.
“I held the money in my hand. I couldn’t reckon its weight against the man left behind.”
This lens makes the reader feel like they are also discovering the west for the first time while also sets them slightly on edge, as anything is possible and all bets appear to be off. And no, I do not mean in a typical female protagonist fashion, either: ie, a male writer threatening the female protagonist with rape to illustrate how dark and bad the world and the antagonist are. Thankfully, this fiction is far more substantial. Jess knows the world is hard and the stakes are high, all without the threat of rape, shockingly.
“How could you kill as you have?
The same logic lies dormant within all fairy tales and histories, it is fundamental as our origins, as urgent as our breaths. And yet I will confess the choice was ours.
The choice is always ours.”
When experiencing the world on her own terms, Jess outgrows her past intentions and goals quite quickly. At long last Jess begins to find out all the things she didn’t know. And can then begin her formative years, delayed though they may be.
Her story subverts some tropes and plays into others. But it is made to intersect other characters who are also a little left of center; straight and queer; White, Mexican, Black; masculine and feminine.
“A problem with prosperity is that it makes a place long on crowds and short on people.”
They are all of them constructed as Jessilyn herself, neither hero nor villain; capable of heroic and villainous deeds but skirting the typical labels (even as those labels are sometimes thrown in their face by the people of the world).
Like all great fiction, in its attempt to tell a meaningful story — one which is obviously well researched and steeped in at least some lived experience when it comes to the area of America in which it takes place —it also manages to handily tap a literary vein.
“What started the war, Pa?”
His eyes settled on me. “Stories, Jessilyn, We tell ourselves the wrong stories.”
The prose gradually becomes more complex and, later on, often even profound, a thoroughly enjoyable device.
As Jess’s accrues experience, she becomes wiser. The human condition is tied directly to complex themes. Religion; the responsibility and ethics we have as a culture and people to history; the erasure of people of color and queer people; capitalism; consent; love, in all its forms and shapes.
In doing this Whiskey When We’re Dry illustrates that while this is Jess’s story, it is also the story of many others who have come before, whether history chooses to record them or not.
And what a rich story it is.
“Do you believe sin is handed down, one generation to the next?”
“I reckon it piles like snow.”
Fantastic concept very well executed. Beautiful prose. Meryl Streep reads it aloud, one of the best narrations I’ve ever listened to.
Satisfying conclusion with even more cool mythology and magic and the fruition of plotting from the start. It’s quite the beast of a book at 750 pages but it doesn’t feel like a slog and if you’re on book 3, you’re probably invested already. Team Sobek amiright?
Only thing that annoyed me is repetition on certain things. Do yourself a favour and never notice how often people flinch as a reaction to something they dislike. These people flinch wildly. And whenever anyone is knocked out, ‘And then X saw nothing at all,’ is pretty patented. However, it’s very accessible and good at bringing earnest emotion to the forefront. Mostly here for the magic and mythology; so many cool things happen in each book in that respect. A Lot to like.
Only thing that annoyed me is repetition on certain things. Do yourself a favour and never notice how often people flinch as a reaction to something they dislike. These people flinch wildly. And whenever anyone is knocked out, ‘And then X saw nothing at all,’ is pretty patented. However, it’s very accessible and good at bringing earnest emotion to the forefront. Mostly here for the magic and mythology; so many cool things happen in each book in that respect. A Lot to like.
I just can’t get into this. Might be in part due to narration on the audiobook, which is extremely wooden and monotone. Mat revisit with a library book, we will see. But I just didn’t care at all about the characters and at 20% there was not a hint of a plot unraveling when I forced myself to pay attention. So DNF it is.
