Tomb of Sand by Geetanjali Shree

Source of book: Borrowed from the library

 

Tomb of Sand won the International Booker Prize in 2022. The author has been writing in Hindi for decades, but this book is, incredibly, the first one of hers published in the United States. It was also the first book in any Indian language to win the Booker.

 

Astute readers might notice that “Geetanjali/Gitanjali” is the name of a delicious poetry collection by Rabindranath Tagore (reviewed here). The name means “song offerings” and is derived from Sanskrit. It is a rather popular feminine name, much like, say, Faith, here in the United States.

 

Tomb of Sand is not a short book. It is long, rambling, digressive, poetic, and a bit odd at times. I was struck often at how much it resembles Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie - another Booker winner - although it is very different in other ways. Both look at personal stories in light of national events, although Tomb of Sand is more “domestic,” while also about adults throughout, rather than children. But both are divided into three parts, both center on the Partition of India, both are filled with digressions and political and philosophical rabbit trails, and both apologize for the digressions. Yes, there are definitely differences, and the plots are completely unrelated. Still, the style has so much in common that reading both in the same year felt very much like reading two books from a common literary tradition. 

 

While not as obviously in the Magical Realism genre, Tomb of Sand does have those elements, most notably the magic cane and the sentient birds. A crow and a chukar (a partridge-like bird that has become an invasive species here in California) play roles throughout the book. 

 

At its heart, the book is about a family, and particularly about the relationship between the mother and her daughter, in the old age of the mother. 

 

Although it isn’t obvious in the English translation, most of the characters do not have actual names. Instead, they get titles. “Ma” is easy enough - although she is called various things by other characters, most notably the Hindi word for “older sister.” Likewise, there is Beti (daughter), Bade (eldest [son]), his wife Bahu (daughter in law), their kids “Serious Son” and Sidhartha - one of the few characters with an actual name. 

 

In addition to the family, there is another central character, namely the Hijra, Rosie Bua, whose connection to Ma remains obscure for most of the book. 

 

The book is divided into three sections. In the first, Ma’s husband has died, and she falls into a deep depression. Literally nothing happens for many pages. The family tries to get her to get up. She refuses. 

 

It isn’t until Serious Son gives her a cane with butterflies on it that she rouses herself. But then, she gives away most of her possessions, and wanders away, confused as to where she is. 

 

This leads to Beti taking her in. Beti is a divorced feminist, who finds her life turned upside down in the second part, with Ma practically inviting Rosie to live with them, starting a small business reusing and reimagining items. 

 

The third part takes place after (spoiler) Rosie’s violent death. Ma decides to travel to Pakistan, and as part of this journey, we finally discover her past, the trauma of Partition, and her connection to Rosie. 

 

It didn’t become clear to me until near the end, but looking back, the central theme of the book is borders - the artificiality of borders and the way that they blur. Borders between India and Pakistan, of course. But also between the genders, between generations, between external life and the inner world, between family members, between identities. 

 

The book is also thoroughly female-oriented. I mention this mostly because so many books - even books by women - are male-oriented. For this book, men are mostly marginal. Bade is struggling to find himself after retiring from his civil service career, and is completely ineffectual in dealing with Ma, or even getting her to return to his home. KK, Beti’s boyfriend, finds himself increasingly peripheral to Beti’s life. Sid and Serious Son appear sporadically but are clearly busy with their own lives. It is the women who matter in this story, and everything centers around them. 

 

The style of the book isn’t quite Stream of Consciousness, but it isn’t that far off, particularly in the chapters that go off on philosophical tangents. The plot of the book can be a bit hard to follow at times, but I found that simply letting the words wash over me until the thread of the story came back helped. The book isn’t something you read so much as something you experience. 

 

Be patient. Enjoy the journey. It’s worth it. 

 

I should also mention that the translated version is definitely different than the original. (The translator’s note is fascinating - how to translate a book that depends on wordplay? How to bring idioms and jokes into a new language?) The translated version is also longer than the original. Apparently, Daisy Rockwell and the author spent a lot of time on the translation, and Shree was a driving force behind a lot of the decisions. It was a true collaboration. 

 

So what were my favorite lines from the book? I wrote down a few to share. The opening is great. 

 

A tale tells itself. It can be complete, but also incomplete, the way all tales are. This particular tale has a border and women who come and go as they please. Once you’ve got women and a border, a story can write itself. Even women on their own are enough. Women are stories in themselves, full of stirrings and whisperings that float on the wind, that bend with each blade of grass. The setting sun gathers fragments of tales and fashions them into glowing lanterns that hang suspended from clouds. These too will join our story. The story’s path unfurls, not knowing where it will stop, tacking to the right and left, twisting and turning, allowing anything and everything to join in the narration. It will emerge from within a volcano, swelling silently as the past boils forth into the present, bringing steam, embers, and smoke. 

 

So much of what is to come is foreshadowed in that short paragraph. 

 

I also liked this digression on characters. 

 

Oh, tell me, what makes a character important? In the tale of a poor home, wealth is an important character, whereas it’s beauty in the lives of the ugly; for India, it is Pakistan and American that play the characters of villain and hero, respectively; the most important character in the tale of a blind man is an eye, it’s a leg for the lame, a home for the homeless, employment for the unemployed, sleep for the sleepless, and if you’ve had enough of this, look: the most important character in every person’s life is the thing that they lack. 

 

There is another line, about Serious Son, that caught my eye.

 

He’d had a bit of free time after a meeting, so he’d walked out of his hotel and gone to sit on the beach, where he felt happy, more or less. More or less, because there wasn’t much left in the world to make one feel truly happy. Wherever you look ,the same hideousness, the same consumerist greed, the same fake culture, and the same flittering flimsy frivolous ineffectual people who only know how to imitate and ape, so they belong neither here nor there nor anywhere. 

 

A few of the chapters are narrated (after a fashion) by someone who is not an actual character, just a friend or acquaintance who happened to be there. They don’t get names, and it isn’t easy (or even possible in some cases) to have any real idea who they are. Here is one bit from a typical chapter. 

 

But I’m not here to talk about myself. This isn’t my story, there’s no need for me here; I’m not even a character. 

 

I also made a note about a particularly brutal takedown of white foreigners. 

 

Foreigners have been purposefully overlooked so far. They are white people. The West. If you have them around it becomes all about them, because the world is their oyster. They are the ones who are creating it, and destroying it, but everyone sees them as the Creators; the Rest are perceived as the Destroyers, because they, the West, are the Center, and the origin story is set by the Center. The Rest are the rest. The kite, the decimal point, tea, the zero, typing, gunpowder, all come from over here, but only when they reached the West did they make their debut in the world. All the hues come from the Rest - black, brown, yellow - but the uncolored, not the colored, came to be considered the One True Color, the West and the Rest: the former are reality, the latter, dull, drab, worthless. 

 

Ouch. 

 

Allow me a shameless plug for one of my favorite books about math here, The Nothing That Is - the very basis of our mathematical thinking was not an invention of white people. 

 

Another great line takes on the myth that there was a past when everyone “knew their place.” A myth created by the powerful, of course, without consulting those who didn’t appreciate the system. 

 

There was a time, they say, when all was fixed, and there was no zig, no zag. At least that’s what they say; it’s up to you and me to decide whether or not to believe it. That each human was safely ensconced in his or her own role in society and knew how to behave with whom. 

 

As if that were ever fully true. Or even mostly true. 

 

Family relationships also are examined with a critical eye. Here is one that I noted as being relevant to my own family of origin. 

 

Bahu did not envy this zesty lifestyle. Sisters-in-law do not desire the sort of life another leads. But they are pleased to see another deprived of the life they themselves wish to lead. 

 

There is a line from Rosie that made me smile as well. As a marginalized person, she notes the hypocrisy of “respectability.” 

 

“Good-for-nothings are the best. They always stick with you. It’s the good-for-somethings that leave you high and dry.” 

 

Part of the interior conflict in the book is within Beti, who finds herself changing as she ages - is she becoming like her mother, even as her mother casts off the trappings of conservative married life? 

 

But in the bathroom when she washed her face and was about to look up into the mirror, she felt a rush of fear: What if Amma’s face stares back at me? She’d hear you begin to resemble the person you live with, husband like wife, dog like master, mistress like cow parrot cat, so Beti like Ma? 

 

Perhaps the central statement of the theme of the book comes near the end. 

 

And listen here, there have never been borders in human relationships and there never will be. There were conventions then too, yes, but also people who broke them and moved forward. 

 

Just like transgender people have always existed – Hijra’s date back thousands of years – interracial and interfaith marriages have always existed and defied attempts to outlaw them. Human relationships – and indeed all borders – are illusory in the end.

 

I’ll end with a line which is part of a touching reconciliation scene, between Ma and the man she was brutally separated from during Partition. 

 

Forgiveness. What happened was not our fault, but we must take responsibility. Forgiveness. The entirety of history and a personal experience all suffused in one word. 

 

Tomb of Sand is the first book I have read translated from Hindi. It was definitely an interesting and worthwhile read. I am curious to see if the success of this book will make it easier to find Shree’s other books? So far, they are difficult to find for sale. 

Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar

Source of book: Borrowed from the library

 

This was this month’s selection for The Literary Lush Book Club. In this case, this was a book I already had on my list to read, and it was great to get to discuss it with my bookworm friends. 

 

The book sparked an unusually spirited discussion, even by the high standards of our club. In particular, the ending was discussed at length - more about that later.

 

Kaveh Akbar is primarily known as a poet, having published a couple collections as well as a “chapbook,” which I had to look up, as the term isn’t commonly used here in the US. Martyr! is his first novel. Even then, it is liberally sprinkled with poetry. 

 

Akbar also is the head of the creative writing department at University of Iowa, and is considered one of the most vocal advocates for poetry in our time. In other words, he’s my kind of a guy. Like his protagonist, he was born in Iran, and came here as a toddler. 

 

The poetry connection is, in my opinion, important to understanding this book. Most obviously, the writing, even when prose, is strongly poetic and beautiful. But also, many scenes are multivalent, having multiple meanings and potential interpretations. This particularly applies to the ending. 

 

Also important to understanding the story, in my opinion, is the author’s complicated sexuality. He has described himself as bisexual, but leaning towards attraction to males. He is married to fellow poet and professor Paige Lewis, who is non-binary. Since the protagonist is not entirely unlike the author, and the protagonist’s wrestling with his sexuality is part of the plot, this is an important fact. 

 

We first meet Cyrus as he is trying to get clean and sober, after a college experience that included far too much in the way of mind-altering substances. It is no mystery why he turned to drugs and alcohol. 

 

When he was an infant, his mother left to visit her mentally ill brother, who has PTSD after fighting in the Iraq/Iran war. The aircraft she is on is the doomed Iran Air Flight 655, which was shot down by US forces - an incident for which the US response was morally appalling. (I was a kid at the time, and even I was horrified.) 

 

Soon after, Cyrus and his father emigrate to the United States, where his educated father ends up working in a chicken processing plant. After devoting his life to getting Cyrus into college, his dad dies suddenly of a stroke, leaving Cyrus alone in the world except for his uncle back in Iran who he has never met. 

 

Eventually, after getting into AA, Cyrus cleans up, but finds that he struggles to feel anything. 

 

He becomes fixated on the idea of becoming a “Martyr,” someone whose death means something - and thus his life will mean something. 

 

To this end, he plans to write a book about the martyrs of the past, and eventually commit suicide to become a martyr himself. He finds himself with writers block, not knowing exactly where to start, but a growing obsession with death.

 

Then, about halfway through the book, he hears of a performance artist, in the vein of Marina Abramovic, who goes by the name of Orkideh, who will be a part of her final art installation, “Death-Speak.” Diagnosed with terminal cancer, Orkideh will take time to speak with visitors about death, until she is unable. 

 

Just to be clear, there is a real-life artist with that name, Orkideh Torabi, also Iranian-American. Her art is pretty interesting, and definitely worth checking out. How much Akbar based his fictional artist on her as well as Abramovic is unclear, as Torabi is very much alive and not particularly morbid. 

 

I will stop there with the plot - there is a huge twist, which you may or may not find plausible. The plausibility is not the point, of course - the book is meant to be ambiguous, ambivalent, and have multiple interpretations. 

 

Now, about the ending. [Potential spoilers.]

 

The ending is clearly dream-like, poetic, and capable of multiple interpretations. A quick google search will take you down a huge rabbit hole of speculation, discussion, and competing viewpoints all supported by the text. 

 

This is pretty much what happened at our club too. There were, shall we say, strong opinions about what happened, and whether the ending was good, bad; satisfying or unsatisfying; positive or depressing. 

 

I think the options break down into three possibilities: either Cyrus dies at the end, he is high as a kite and may or may not survive, or he is in one of his dream sequences which are mixed throughout the book and has some sort of epiphany. 

 

In all of the options, some element of Cyrus has died, of course. He will never be the same after he has to some degree embraced his love for his quasi-partner Zee, come to terms with the truth about his mother, and given up on demanding meaning from his life. Whether this happens as he dies is open to interpretation. 

 

I myself (and another member of our club who is very much into poetry) lean in the direction of a dream and epiphany. I won’t get into all my reasons, but I do think they are supported by the text. That said, I do not think the author intended a clear resolution. This is part of his poetic sense: a multivalent ending, and perhaps all the possibilities at once.

 

How one feels about that ending may depend on how comfortable you are with ambiguity. As I have gotten older, I have increasingly embraced this idea of not knowing, of having to be okay with not knowing, of embracing doubt and releasing my need for certainty. About so many things. 

 

I ended up taking quite a few notes about the book, although not the several pages of another member. 

 

Let’s start with what I see as the central theme of the book, the desire for one’s life to mean something. 

 

Along with my embrace of the reality that I am a mediocre white guy whose ceiling is being good (but not great) at a number of things I care about has come the acceptance that I do not and will never have an exceptional life. I’m just a guy. 

 

True, I am a guy who has been tremendously blessed: I get to make the greatest music on earth with friends that I love. I have access to great literature and am able to read it. I have a wife who is my best friend and an incredible person. I have five children who have greatly enriched my life. I am not rich, but I am reasonably comfortable, which is more than a lot of people have. 

 

But, realistically, after the people who have known me have died, my memory will fade from the earth. And I am okay with that. As the existentialists might say, I have made my own meaning - my life is meaningful to me, and that is enough. 

 

Early in the book, there is an exchange between Cyrus and his AA sponsor, Gabe (who is a great character, by the way) that is a statement of what the book will ultimately be about. 

 

“I want to matter,” Cyrus whispered. 

“You and everyone else. Deeper.”

“I want to make great art. Art people think matters.”

“Good. Keep going.”

“Isn’t that enough?” Cyrus was exasperated.

“Cyrus, everyone and their mailman believes they’re an unacknowledged genius artist. What do you, specifically, want from your unprecedented, never-to-be-repeated existence? What mayes you actually different from everyone else?”

Cyrus paused, then said, finally:

“I want to die. I think I always have….My mom died for nothing. A rounding error. She had to share her death with three hundred other people. My dad died anonymous after spending decades cleaning chicken shit on some corporate farm. I want my life - my death - to matter more than that.”

 

There is a lot in that to unpack, from the definition of “matters” as “what other people think matters” - which is not the same thing - to the idea that one can guarantee one’s life matters by how one dies. 

 

In a later passage, Cyrus notes that not all suicides are equal. 

 

When a sad-sack who hated life killed themselves, what were they really giving up? The life they hated? Far more meaningful, thought Cyrus, to lift yourself out of a life you enjoyed - the tea still warm, the honey still sweet. That was real sacrifice. That meant something. 

 

Another relevant passage early in the book is one where Cyrus finally feels that God speaks to him. Sort of. The incident is too ambiguous for him. Why can’t he have the grand revelation of Muhammad or Saint Paul? 

 

Of course it would be easy to establish bedrock faith after such clear-cut revelation? How was it fair to celebrate those guys for faith that wasn’t faith at all, that was just obedience to what they plainly observed to be true? And what sense did it make to punish the rest of humanity who had never been privy to such explicit revelation? To make everyone else lurch from crisis to crisis, desperately alone?

 

No shit, eh? 

 

Throughout the book, perspectives shift. While Cyrus is the main protagonist, we get chapters from the perspective of his parents, his uncle, and Zee. Many of these are flashbacks to the past, slowly explaining and revealing what has gone before. 

 

In one chapter, from Zee’s perspective, there is a really weird episode, where Zee and Cyrus, looking to make a few bucks and feed themselves, end up working for this creepy old guy who sits in his underwear and watches them do odd jobs around the yard for him. Mostly, they get groceries out of the arrangement. 

 

“Like volunteering in a co-op,” he’d said once on our way to Jude’s house. 

“Except sexier,” I added.

“Oh my god,” said Cyrus.” Yeah. Are we doing sex work? Is this sex work? Are we selling our bodies?”

“Angela Davis would say we’re all selling our bodies,” I said, smiling. “That the only difference between a coal miner and a prostitute is our retrograde puritan values about sex. And misogyny.” 

Cyrus rolled his eyes, and asked, “And what would Zee Novak say?”

I laughed: “Zee Novak says free groceries are free groceries.”

 

For a book with heavy themes, there is a lot of humor to lighten things up. So much philosophy too, but I really enjoy that sort of thing. One humorous line:

 

Zee had joked that a hotel’s fanciness was directly proportional to how long it took you to figure out how to turn on the showerhead.

 

Here is another question that has haunted me since childhood - and is one reason I rejected the concept of eternal conscious torment in Jr. High. 

 

Cyrus worried that the whole idea of gratitude was possibly classist or worse. Did a poor Syrian child, whose living and dying had been indelibly shaped by the murderous whims of evil men, qualify for grace only if she possessed a superhuman ability to look beyond her hardship and notice the beauty of a single flower growing through a pile of rubble. And would the gratitude for that flower be contaminated by the awareness, or ignorance, of the bodies turning to soil beneath it?

 

Akbar also explores the experience of being a Middle Eastern man in post-9-11 America. Some of Cyrus’ experiences sure seem drawn from Akbar’s own. 

 

It was like Americans had another organ for it, that hate-fear. It pulsed out of their chests like a second heart. 

 

At one point, he dates a Republican woman. The experience is hilarious, but in a horrifying way. She comes from money, and doesn’t seem to understand those who, like Cyrus, live day to day. 

 

Money meant nothing to her. She’d borrow Cyrus’s jacket, his hoodie, and never return them, not realizing he had no replacements. She knew the name of the guy who flew her father’s helicopter, of her nanny’s kid, which she’d bring up frequently as evidence of her magnanimity. She was Christian, but American Christian, the kind that believed Jesus had just needed a bigger gun. 

 

Man, that last line. I wish it were satire, but I have literally heard that. MAGA “Christianity” is such a joke, so far from anything Christ ever taught. 

 

In one of the flashbacks, from the point of view of Cyrus’s mother, there is what turns out to be the huge turning point in her life. Her husband’s loser friend, Gilgamesh, picks up Ali so the two of them can go on a guy fishing trip - with plenty of illicit booze. He just drops his wife, Leila, off, like “making a bank deposit.” 

 

Gilgamesh barely even looked at me, waddling around inside our house inside his muscles, inside a body grown two sizes too large for his brain.

 

Cyrus is one of those people who feel emotions strongly. There is a scene where he is talking to Orkideh and we get a glimpse into his mind. I very much resonate with his experience here. 

 

He felt a flash of familiar shame - his whole life had been a steady procession of him passionately loving what other people merely liked, and struggling, mostly failing, to translate to anyone else how and why everything mattered so much. 

 

I’m that kind of guy myself. I have come to embrace my own emotionality, and accept that very often I will passionately love things that will never be that meaningful to others. I recognize it as a gift: that I can feel this strongly, that things can matter that much to me. It is why I get such joy from making music, why reading - and writing about it - feel so meaningful, even if only a few dozen ever read my posts. I can fully understand Cyrus’s desire to write his book, even if I don’t feel the drive for it to “mean something” the way he does. 

 

Since the book is set during the first Trump regime, it would be unrealistic if the horror and stupidity that we are still undergoing were not mentioned. I love that Cyrus and Zee refer to the Orange Fascist as “President Invective. Throughout the book, there are so many perceptive lines about the phenomenon of MAGA and the almost inexplicable foolishness of those who worship him. I will quote a few. 

 

Cyrus thought about President Invective, a cartoon ghoul of a man for whom Dantean ideas of Hell seemed specifically conceived. The sort of man whose unwavering assertions of his own genius competence had, to the American public, apparently overwhelmed all observable evidence to the contrary. 

 

And this:

 

Only in a culture that privileged infallibility above all else could a man like President Invective rise to power - a man insulated since birth from any sense of accountability, raised in a pristine cocoon of inherited wealth to emerge pristine, dewy, wholly unsullied by those irksome mortal foibles, grief and doubt. 

 

And:

 

Cyrus thought about what an aggressively human leader on earth might look like. One who, instead of defending decades-old obviously wrong positions, said, “Well, of course I changed my mind, I was presented with new information, that’s the definition of critical thinking.” That it seemed impossible to conceive of a political leader making such a statement made Cyrus mad, then said.

 

Me too, Cyrus, me too. I have lived my life aspiring to be that critical thinker, and it has led to me changing my mind about a great many things. (One reason I have preserved my past posts on this blog without edits - except for typographical errors - is to show the evolution of my thinking. Over the course of 15 years, I have definitely changed. I hope for the better, as the result of receiving better information.) 

 

Here is another:

 

The performance of certainty seemed to be at the root of so much grief. Everyone in America seemed to be afraid and hurting and angry, starving for a fight they could win. And more than that even, they seemed certain their natural state was to be happy, contented, and rich. The genesis of everyone’s pain had to be external, such was their certainty. And so legislators legislated, building border walls, barring citizens of there from entering here. “The pain we feel comes from them, not ourselves,” said the banners, and people cheered, certain of all the certainty. But the next day they’d wake up and find that what had hurt in them still hurt. 

 

Toward the end, there are a lot of great lines about the human condition. For example, this one:

 

“You’re a human being, Cyrus. So was your mother. So am I. Not cartoon characters. There’s no pressure for us to be ethically pure, noble. Or, God forbid, aspirational. We’re people. We get mad, we get cowardly. Ugly. We self-obsess.”

 

And this one:

 

“All those severe poets talking big about the wages of sin all the time, but nobody ever brought up the wages of virtue. The toll of trying really really hard to be good in a game that's totally rigged against goodness.” 

 

And this:

 

“It’s just. Where does all our effort go? It’s hard not to envy the monsters when you see how good they have it. And how unbothered they are at being monsters.”

“That’s why heaven and hell, right? Why people talk about that stuff?”

“Nah, fuck hell. Hell is a prison. All we do is build those on earth. No need to imagine more. And fuck heaven too! Like goodness is a place you can arrive at, a destination. Where you’re either standing in it or you’re not. It fucks you up.”

 

Again, questions I have had since childhood. It is so good to see them articulated so beautifully. 

 

I’ll end with a quote that purports to be from the MSWord doc that contains Cyrus’s draft of his book:

 

If the moral sin of the suicide is greed, to hoard stillness and calm for yourself while dispersing your riotous internal pain among all those who survive you, then the moral sin of the martyr must be pride, the vanity, the hubris to believe not only that your death could mean more than your living, but that your death, could mean more than death itself - which, because it is inevitable, means nothing.

 

I think ultimately, that is the conclusion of the book. Death is meaningless, but life doesn’t have to be. And that meaning need not be validated by other people thinking it means something. Our lives have meaning to us, and that, simply put, is enough. Live your life. Make connections with others. Don’t obsess about virtue or goodness as if it were that simple. 

 

For me, this is why I found the ending to be incredibly positive. I highly recommend this book.

 

***

 

One note I couldn’t figure out exactly where to fit it in: there is a point of bonding between Cyrus and his uncle, over the Allegri Miserere. The uncle recounts the anecdote (or urban legend perhaps) surrounding Mozart and the secrecy the Vatican held for centuries about the specifics of its performance. Whatever the truth about the incident, the work itself is transcendant, a masterpiece of Renaissance music. 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcWo1hKHu40

 

***

 

I also want to mention another work of existential questioning of the meaning of life and death, the excellent and haunting short story, “Forlesen,” by Gene Wolfe. At the end of the protagonist’s life, he is being measured for his coffin, and the following exchange occurs:

 

“Now have you decided about the explainer?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Didn’t you read your orientation? Everyone’s entitled to an Explainer - in whatever form he chooses - at the end of his life. He-”

“It seems to me,” Forlesen interrupted, “that it would be more useful at the beginning.”

“---may be a novelist, aged loremaster, National Hero, warlock, or actor.”

“None of those sounds quite right for me,” Forlesen said.

“Or a theologian, philosopher, priest, or doctor.”

“I don’t think I like those either.”

“Well, that’s the end of the menu as far as I know…”

“I want to know if it’s meant anything,” Forelsen said. “If what I suffered - if it’s been worth it.”

“No,” the little man said. “Yes. No. Yes. Yes. No. Yes. Yes. Maybe.”

 

Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, adapted by Ron Warren (Empty Space 2025)

A Christmas Carol may be the most told story in the English-speaking world these days, better known even than the well-known stories of the Bible or Greek mythology. Charles Dickens had, shall we say, a timeless classic on his hands when he wrote it. 

 

One reason why, of course, is that there is an unfulfilled need for ghosts to go abroad and scare the bejeezus out of rich and stingy people. 

 

But if A Christmas Carol were just about the rich getting a scare and changing their ways, it probably would have had its moment in the sun and then faded into obscurity. 

 

The reason it endures is that it is about all of us. It is about the ways we casually dehumanize others - particularly the impoverished. Think about our own actions when it comes to the unhoused, or refugees from “shithole countries,” or addicts, or other marginalized and all too often invisible people on the fringes of our society. 

 

Scrooge, after all, was no billionaire. He was just a landlord and above-average rich guy. There is no indication that he had any significant political pull, and it is not mentioned that he used it. He went one better than today’s Republicans by dutifully paying his taxes for the support of the poor without trying to end the safety need that existed at the time. 

 

Rather, the problem was that he refused human connection, refused generosity, refused even to accept the love of others. The story is…complicated. 

 

If all we saw was the equivalent of Elon Musk, or the Orange Fascist, we would likely feel furious at Scrooge’s redemption. Instead, we recognize ourselves in him, and have our hearts warmed by the idea that even a hardened, bitter, lonely old man can be redeemed - and so can we. 

 

I have read the book many times, both for myself and with my kids. Every year, we watch The Muppet Christmas Carol together. It is a story that never grows old. 

 

Thus, I was intrigued to see what Ron Warren would do to tell the story. Plus, The Empty Space tends to do good work with a limited budget, and just seeing the creativity would be worth the modest cost. 

 

Warren made some interesting decisions in telling the story. First, he did not use a narrator. Many stage adaptations do, which, as Warren said in our discussion after the play, adds an extra layer of insulation between the story and the audience. It is a story about other people, not a portrayal that might implicate all of us. 

 

I loved this particular approach. The other thing that I really loved was that Warren preserved much of Dickens’ actual dialogue word for word, rather than “update” it. One of the reasons I love reading Dickens is that his language is delicious, perfectly chosen, and almost as musical as that of Shakespeare. Also, there are some wonderful pointed lines in the play that are all too often omitted. Warren respected his audience enough to give us the real thing, not a watered down version. 

 

The cast included some of the usual suspects, but also a number of children, and a large ensemble covering various parts, real and metaphorical. 

 

As for the main ones, here are my thoughts. 

 

I hadn’t seen Luis Velez in anything since before the pandemic. Everyone’s take on Scrooge is different, and his was both comical and human. Sure, he was an old sourpuss at first, but there was more softness in his character from the beginning, in its own way making the transformation less jarring. 

 

This character is the most difficult to play in the entire story, not just because we all imagine our own Scrooge in our minds, but because there have been so very many movies made, with actors famous and otherwise playing the iconic part. To take the character and make it your own is a challenge, and I will give props to Velez for a very personal take that was convincing and sympathetic. 

Alex Mitts, always reliable as an Everyman, was the natural choice for Bob Cratchit, down-to-earth, loving to his family, and eternally patient. Victoria Olmos played the Missus. 

David Guillen played Fred, and Sophia Bertram, his wife. 

Nick Ono channelled Jack Sparrow as Jacob Marley - one of the most humorous performances, with proper mastication of the scenery. 

 

Most interesting from the staging point of view was how the ghosts were handled. Matthew Brown was the Ghost of Christmas Present - and I found his interpretation to be more nuanced than some. Sure, he is jovial and full of good will. But he also has an edge of menace. This version included the child characters of “Ignorance” and “Want” - with which the ghost mocks Scrooge for his dawning realization that he bears responsibility. 

 

This is where it is clear that Dickens isn’t just talking about individual greed. The very systems that we live in create ignorance and want, create poverty and inequality. It takes more than “workhouses” and prisons - it takes genuine reform, something Dickens preached about throughout his career. 

 

For the other ghosts, Matt Borton was the puppeteer. The Ghost of Christmas Past was an ethereal spirit, complete with pocket fog machine. Kelsey Morrow provided the voice for the character. 

 

For the Ghost of Christmas Future, Borton wore a rather terrifying costume. I am not sure if it was an actual character mask, or just a rodent-inspired horror. Whatever it was, it was creepy. Particularly delicious were the long skeleton fingers, which the ghost clicked at key moments. 

 

Considering the small stage, limited budget, and the need to do everything using real people and things, not CGI, the ghosts were superb. Great vision and execution. 

 

Unfortunately, the holiday is upon us, and the theater is dark for this week. More interesting productions are on schedule for next year, though, starting with Radium Girls, the directorial debut of our longtime family friend, Marina Gradowitz, which we are definitely planning to see. 

 

esonline.org for more information and tickets. 

 

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

Source of book: Audiobook from the library

 

Could the future of the world turn on whether a time traveler from the 19th Century finds out about Auschwitz early in his orientation rather than 9/11? 

 

What would it be like to meet your future self and find you have turned into a Nazi? 

 

Is a relationship between a native-born white person and a refugee from the third world inherently exploitative? 

 

How much compromise with Empire is morally justifiable? And does this change depending on your status within that Empire? 

 

Is there anyone in this book who isn’t morally compromised? Is there anyone in the actual real world who isn’t? 

 

And, perhaps as important, “what genre IS this book anyway?”

 

The Ministry of Time is difficult to define. It is, in one way or another, historical fiction, time-travel science fiction, an office drama, a romance, and a spy thriller. And also a surprisingly deep exploration of all of the questions I listed above. 

 

It is dark - particularly at the end - but not entirely tragic - there is hope for the future. It is also laugh-out-loud funny at times. It has a sweet, if doomed, romance. It has a surprisingly good sex scene. (Women write them better than men - let’s be honest about that.) It has the most awkward and hilarious courtship scene I have read in years. Maybe ever. 

 

I also found the not-subtle metaphor of time travel for immigration to be powerful - the past is a foreign country, after all. The author’s exploration of this idea is really good, and thought provoking in the way that the best science fiction should be.

 

With all of that said, how do I even write this without spoilers? It is probably impossible, although I will try not to reveal too much. 

 

I will say that this is an excellent book. No surprise, since it made President Obama’s summer reading list in 2024. I found it compelling throughout, and a fascinating premise. 

 

As with many books in our modern times that became unexpected hits, this one wasn’t exactly planned. (I have to mention Space Opera by Catherynne Valente, which originated in a Twitter dare.) 

 

Kaliane Bradley (pronounced “Collie-Ann,” I believe, from the afterword in the book, read by the author, and her instragram account) worked as an editorial assistant for Granta (a British literary magazine), and wrote reviews and interviews for a variety of publications, including The Guardian, for a decade before turning to fiction. (Interestingly, this earlier career is that of the narrator’s sister in the book.) 

 

During the pandemic lockdown, she started thinking about writing this story after watching The Terror, which took supernatural liberties with one of the doomed polar expeditions of the 1840s. She didn’t actually intend to write a novel for publication, but wrote for her own amusement and to share with a handful of friends. After they read the first version of the story, they encouraged her to share it with the world. 

 

I should mention, as a lawyer, that this resulted in a lawsuit. Apparently, there is a Spanish TV series, El Ministerio el Tiempo, which shares the name, and, some basic ideas. I mean, the title is enough, right? If there is an actual government agency, the Ministry of Time, it presumably has something to do with time travel. And time travel has causality issues, which have been explored for over a century in science fiction. 

 

Bradley, for her part, says she had never seen the Spanish series and had no idea it existed, and that her work is original. I have no idea how things were resolved - if they are. But reading a summary of the show doesn’t show any significant similarities other than the name and common time travel themes. 

 

Here is the basic premise: the book is set in our own time, but one where a time travel device has been captured from time travelers from the future, who have come back to try and prevent climate catastrophe and mass pollution caused by weapons that would be created in the future, but whose roots are in the present. 

 

Having captured this device, the contemporary British government decides to use it for experiments in time travel. Since it would be, in their view, unethical to experiment on living people, they come up with an interesting plan. 

 

They would use the device to bring people from the past forward in time, and see how it affected them. In order to at least reduce the ethical concerns, the people chosen are those who would have died soon afterward in their own time. That way, if things go wrong, they wouldn’t lose any life, and if things went right, they got an unexpected benefit. 

 

Ostensibly, the goal for those they bring forward, is to “bridge” them to their new time, enabling them to assimilate and function in 21st century culture. The ones chosen are a soldier from the 17th century, one from World War I, a woman who would have died in the French Revolution, and a woman who would have died of the plague in the 17th century. 

 

And also, a real historical figure, Graham Gore, who died in the doomed Sir John Franklin search for the Northwest Passage in 1847. As the afterword details, we have some information about him, although not that much. He was a respected officer who everyone liked. He was a crack shot hunter. He played the flute and drew well. And not that much else. 

 

Oh, and the surviving daguerreotype of him reveals him to be quite good looking. (I mean, I’m a cishet guy, and even I can tell he is a looker.) 

 

The narrator (who, interestingly, is the one character who never gets a name), is an agent for the Ministry of Time, assigned to be the “bridge” - the handler and educator - for Graham. 

 

Two of the other “time ex-pats” are major characters in the book: Arthur Reginald-Smyth, the World War One soldier, who turns out to be gay, and have a huge, maybe unrequited crush on Graham; and Maggie Kemble, who would have died of the plague along with the rest of her household. She is a lesbian spinster who is, like Graham, quite good looking. 

 

I might mention at this point that pretty much nobody in this book is entirely straight. The author, in interviews, has mentioned that she never envisioned the characters as fully heterosexual. This makes for plenty of interesting triangles, but also interesting contrasts between the cultures of the different eras. Not least of which is the fact that homosexual liaisons have always been common, and the active suppression was not as universal as we were taught. Public attitudes towards sexuality in general have varied, of course, and that too provides interesting material for the book. 

 

So what to say about the rest of it? Particularly without too many spoilers? I guess it should be expected that any government in possession of a powerful device is likely to turn it to nefarious use. Pretty much every technology ever developed found its way into weaponry really damn fast. (See: nuclear power) In any system with a somewhat secret agency, there will be skullduggery. Issues of race and gender haven’t gone away in our time, to put it mildly. 

 

To go back to the questions I asked at the beginning, perhaps the one that is the most difficult to answer is that of whether an equal relationship is possible between a refugee and a native-born person. 

 

This is particularly interesting given the author’s own family. Like the narrator, she is the child of a British father and a Cambodian refugee mother. 

 

So….I have questions about how she sees her parents’ marriage. The book certainly makes the argument that such a relationship cannot be equal, mutual, and meet the needs of both parties. (Can any marriage entirely? Probably not, in my opinion.) Hence, (spoiler alert) the book looks at two possible futures of such a relationship. 

 

I find it an interesting parallel that Andrea Dworkin argued that, in practice, heterosexual relationships have the same problem: there is an inherent power imbalance imposed by the culture, and it is rare that any one relationship finds a way to transcend it. 

 

The other fascinating connection to Bradley’s own life is a scene where the narrator and Simellia (a black woman) discuss the fact that the narrator is able (sometimes) to pass as white. Looking at Bradley’s picture, I can see where, in certain situations, she might pass. Although not always. Plus, at least here in the US, Asians of lighter skin tend to be considered “model minorities,” and having a white father is often enough to get one accepted into white society. 

 

There is a lot more in this book, of course, and I could discuss it for pages. I am thinking maybe of nominating it for our book club. 

 

I guess I will end with a few of the most humorous lines. 

 

First, when Graham complains about television, and how it seems to be the airing of the worst of human behavior, the narrator responds: 

 

“Nobody made you watch East Enders.”

 

The narrator also describes Guinness as “Angry Marmite,” which isn’t entirely wrong. 

 

Finally, in trying to navigate a cross-century courtship, Graham confesses to asking Maggie for advice. 

 

“You asked the lesbian from the 17th century about modern day dating?”

 

Yeah, that’s pretty funny. Which is good, because the humor is needed to balance the darker and more serious themes. 

 

In summary, I have found lately that a lot of the best science fiction I have read lately comes from female authors, including authors of color. For too long, SciFi was a boy’s club, and it is refreshing to see where new voices and perspectives go with the basic ideas. There is a lot of creativity, thoughtfulness, and imagination. 

 

The audiobook had two narrators. Katie Leung handled the main narrative, and did a fabulous job. Her use of voices for the different characters was really helpful in following the dialogue, and she has great range. George Weightman narrated the fictionalized historical interludes of the John Franklin expedition in between each chapter. He does these in his best early Victorian style, just like the actual documents related to the various polar expeditions. Both are very good, so I give a high rating to this audiobook on all counts. 

 

I will also recommend the NPR interview of the author, which is fascinating.