The Pleasures of Dagobert (detail), 1945 by Leonora Carrington (1917–2011)
Month: June 2024
Biblioklept Does Seattle (Books acquired, some time last week)
We visited Seattle over the fourth week of June 2024, our first time there.
We met up with some old friends and took our son to see his favorite band play at the Woodland Park Zoo. Unlike my last getaway (to Atlanta) I was carless and a bit more encumbered (kids, friends, friends’ kids, etc.), so I wasn’t able to get to as many bookstores as I would have liked to—but I still got to quite a few.
We stayed in the Belltown neighborhood. Full of restaurants, bars, and independent shops, Belltown’s about a ten or fifteen minute walk to the famous and touristy Pike Place Market, which, despite being famous and touristy also boasts some really cool little shops—including Left Bank Books which features “anti-authoritarian, anarchist, independent, radical and small-press titles.” They also have a section devoted to “Transgressive Literature/Weird Shit.”
Left Bank’s collection of used stuff is impressive, as are the myriad and diverse offering of zines. My son picked up a bunch of art zines and comix and I left with anarcho-surrealist Ron Sakolsky’s prose mixtape Scratching the Tiger’s Belly.
Also impressive at Pike Place is BLMF Literary Saloon, brimming with towers of reasonably-priced used books. Lionheart Bookstore is a bit less chaotic than BLMF and sells newer titles, with fewer used books. (Less chaotic is not a knock on BLMF, by the way.) I didn’t succumb to picking up a first-(US)-edition of J.G. Ballard’s The Day of Creation there, maybe because I was already carrying around some LPs my son bought at Holy Cow Records. We also stopped by Chin Music Press. They make some beautiful books.
I think my favorite spot at Pike Place though was Lamplight Books. There was a nice collection of used literature (including a lot of so-called weird shit). The proprietor patiently let me handle first editions of Ballard, Barthelme, Borges, and Burroughs books (among other non-B titles). They were happy when I picked up Jacob Siefring’s translation of Rabelais’s Doughnuts by Pierre Senges, proudly letting me know that I was supporting not just a local indie bookshop but a local indie press, Sublunary Editions.
Despite the crowds of tourists in Pike Place lining up to go into the world’s oldest Starbucks (which, as my pal pointed out, is no different than lining up to gawk at the first CVS or first Harbor Freight), Pike Place has some nice niche shops. (Our lunch at the terrace of The Pink Door was lovely, too.)
While thrifting and record shopping in the so-called “hipster” Capitol Hill neighborhood, my crew indulged me in a too-long browse at The Elliot Bay Book Company. I’m generally a used-bookstore guy–I tend to order new titles from my local used bookshop, and I’m mostly out looking for the weird shit–but I’m always impressed by stores like Elliot Bay, which features the kind of odd and out of the way stuff you won’t find at a Barnes & Noble. I have silly little “tests” I like to do in stores that sell new books, checking to see if they stock certain authors, and, if so, which titles, and Elliot Bay excelled. (No Antoine Volodine, though, but I assume someone picked up the last copy of Radiant Terminus.) There, I picked up Lord Jim at Home by Dinah Brooke. The lovely evocative cover was facing outward and appended with a bookseller’s note. The flap copy notes that when “Lord Jim at Home, was first published in 1973, it was described as ‘squalid and startling,’ ‘nastily horrific,’ and a ‘monstrous parody’ of upper-middle class English life” so I figured I could get down with that.
I suppose I could remark more on Seattle itself.
We were there for six days and seven nights, which is clearly not long enough to take the measure of any major city. The weather was wonderful—sunny with maximum temps of around 80 degrees Fahrenheit, a relief after weeks of a Florida heatwave mired in a humid and insufferable drought. Even a day hiking on Mt. Ranier was warmer than we expected. (We had a nice early dinner in Enumclaw that day; a charming town, we all agreed. Curious about this quaint hamlet, I read the Enumclaw Wikipedia page aloud to my crew as we drove back to our Belltown digs before stopping, aghast, thinking of the children.) Seattle itself was more touristy than I expected, and perhaps a bit more depressing. In both Belltown and Capitol Hill we witnessed far more addicts nodding than I might have expected, although no one bothered us. Most of the patrons in the bars, restaurants, and shops we visited in these neighborhoods seemed like they were from Some Other Place, transplants to this big city who might also move at any time to Some Other Place. Even in the warm weather it was a bit cold.
We did some of the touristy things, too: The Museum of Pop Culture (the Nirvana exhibit was depressing; I loved looking at their guitar collection and jamming with my wife and son in their Sound Lab space. The stop-motion-animation exhibit was cool); the Chihuly Garden and Glass museum was unexpectedly beautiful and curated in a way that made me appreciate the glass anew (we saw a baby rabbit, wholly unafraid, snacking in the garden); the Space Needle views were amazing (its history, an optimistic ideal of American progression, brought me down before I got on the fast elevator up). I’m not sure if any of it really cohered for me into the kernel of angst I get when I fall in love with a city—a city like Mexico City or New Orleans or Tokyo or Los Angeles—but that’s fine. We shouldn’t be falling in love all the time.
The show at the zoo provides a nice addendum to what I’ve written (even if it happened in the middle of the week). My son loved seeing the band with the awful name that I am Too Old to really get and I loved seeing him get to see them and loving them. What I loved was seeing the crowd of freaks and weirdos and nerds and normies, all so unconcerned, it seemed to me, with being hip or being seen as hip, so unconcerned with doing anything aside from taking the sensual summer solstice air. Everyone seemed so chill, so unuptight.
Maybe it was the overpriced zoo beers coursing in my ugly veins, but I loved the city a little bit right then, forgiving it for any of the ways it had failed to live up to the imaginary picture of Seattle that my twelve-year-old brain had manifested over three decades ago. Maybe I was seeing the fruition of the dream I’d latched onto, so so long ago, a dream for a place where people didn’t have to struggle so hard just to like, be who they are. I think I remember, for maybe a good half hour or so then, loving Seattle.
“The Mirror of Ink,” a short tale from Jorge Luis Borges
“The Mirror of Ink”
by
Jorge Luis Borges
Translated by Norman Thomas di Giovanni
All history knows that the cruelest of the rulers of the Sudan was Yaqub the Ailing, who delivered his country to the rapacity of Egyptian tax collectors and died in a palace chamber on the fourteenth day of the moon of Barmahat, in the year 1842. There are those who hold that the wizard Abd-er-Rahman al-Masmudi (whose name may be translated as the ‘Servant of the All-Merciful) slew him by means of a dagger or poison. That he died a natural death is more likely, however, since he was called the Ailing. Captain Richard F. Burton spoke to the wizard in 1853, and recounts the tale I quote here:
It is true that as a consequence of the conspiracy woven by my brother Ibrahim, with the treacherous and useless support of the black chiefs of Kordofan, who betrayed him, I suffered captivity in the castle of Yaqub the Ailing. My brother perished by the sword, on the blood-red skin of Justice, but I flung myself at the hated feet of the Ailing, telling him that I was a wizard, and that if he spared my life I would show him shapes and appearances still more wonderful than those of the magic lantern. The tyrant demanded an immediate proof. I asked for a reed pen, a pair of scissors, a large leaf of Venetian paper, an inkhorn, a chafing dish with some live coals in it, some coriander seeds, and an ounce of benzoin. I cut up the paper into six strips, wrote charms and invocation on the first five, and on the remaining one wrote the following words, taken from the glorious Koran: ‘And we have removed from thee thy veil; and thy sight today is piercing.’ Then I drew a magic square in the palm of Yaqub’s right hand, told him to make a hollow of it, and into the centre I poured a pool of ink. I asked him if he saw himself clearly reflected in it, and he answered that he did. I told him not to raise his head. I dropped the benzoin and coriander seeds into the chafing dish, and I burned the invocations upon the glowing coals. I next asked him to name the image he desired to see.
He thought a moment and said, ‘A wild horse, the finest of those that graze along the borders of the desert.’ Looking, he saw a quiet, green pasture, and a minute later a horse drawing near, lithe as a leopard, with a white spot on its face. He asked me for a drove of horses as handsome as the first one, and on the horizon he saw a cloud of dust, and then the drove. It was at this point that I knew my life was spared.
From that day on, with the first streak of light in the eastern sky, two soldiers would enter my cell and lead me to the Ailing’s bedchamber, where the incense, the chafing dish, and the ink were already laid out. So it was that he demanded of me, and I showed him, all the visible things of this world. This man, whom I still hate, had in his palm everything seen by men now dead and everything seen by the living: the cities, the climates, the kingdoms into which the earth is divided; the treasures hidden in its bowels; the ships that ply its seas; the many instruments of war, of music, of surgery; fair women; the fixed stars and the planets; the colours used by the ungodly to paint their odious pictures; minerals and plants, with the secrets and properties they hold locked up in them; the silvery angels, whose only food is the praise and worship of the Lord; the awarding of prizes in schools; the idols of birds and kings buried in the heart of the pyramids; the shadow cast by the bull that holds up the world and by the fish that lies under the bull; the sandy wastes of Allah the All-Merciful. He saw things impossible to tell, like gaslit streets and the whale that dies on hearing the cry of a man. Once, he ordered me to show him the city called Europe. I let him see its main thoroughfare, and it was there, I believe, in that great stream of men all wearing black and many using spectacles that he first set eyes on the Man with the Mask.
This figure, at times in Sudanese garments and at times in uniform, but always with a veil over his face, from then on haunted the things we saw. He was never absent, and we dared not divine who he was. The images in the mirror of ink, at first fleeting or fixed, were more intricate now; they obeyed my commands without delay, and the tyrant saw them quite plainly. Of course, the growing cruelty of the scenes left us both in a state of exhaustion. We witnessed nothing but punishments, garrottings, mutilations, the pleasures of the executioner and of the merciless.
In this way, we came to the dawn of the fourteenth day of the moon of Barmahat. The circle of ink had been poured into the tyrant’s hand, the benzoin and coriander cast into the chafing dish, the invocations burned. The two of us were alone. The Ailing ordered me to show him a punishment both lawful and unappealable, for that day his heart hungered to view an execution. I let him see the soldiers with their drums, the spread calfskin, the persons lucky enough to be onlookers, the executioner wielding the sword of Justice. Marveling at the sight of him, Yaqub told me, ‘That’s Abu Kir, he who dealt justice to your brother Ibrahim, he who will seal your fate when it’s given me to know the science of bringing together these images without your aid.’
He asked me to have the doomed man brought forward. When this was done, seeing that the man to be executed was the mysterious man of the veil, the tyrant paled. I was ordered to have the veil removed before justice was carried out. At this, I threw myself at his feet, beseeching, ‘O king of time and sum and substance of the age, this figure is not like any of the others, for we do not know his name or the name of his fathers or the name of the city where he was born. I dare not tamper with the image, for fear of incurring a sin for which I shall be held to account.’
The Ailing laughed, and when he finished he swore that he would take the guilt on his own head if guilt there were. He swore this by his sword and by the Koran. I then commanded that the prisoner be stripped and that he be bound on the calfskin, and that the mask be torn from his face. These things were done. At last, Yaqub’s stricken eyes could see the face it was his own. He was filled with fear and madness. I gripped his trembling hand in mine, which was steady, and I ordered him to go on witnessing the ceremony of his death. He was possessed by the mirror, so much so that he attempted neither to avert his eyes nor to spill the ink. When in the vision the sword fell on the guilty head, Yaqub moaned with a sound that left my pity untouched, and he tumbled to the floor, dead. Glory be to Him, who endureth forever, and in whose hand are the keys of unlimited Pardon and unending Punishment.
From The Lake Regions of Central Africa (1860) by Richard F. Burton
The Pleasures of Dagobert (Detail) — Leonora Carrington
The Pleasures of Dagobert (detail), 1945 by Leonora Carrington (1917–2011)
Plagiarism
an archivist
ripple effects
cursed history
perimenopause
estranged friend
small-town Texas
thirst for revenge
Gatsbyish parties
vampire geneticist
pregnant girlfriend
locked-room thriller
globe-trotting romp
magical realist romp
decades of instability
long-held class issues
moment of transition
deep into his own past
teenager goes missing
a torrent of memories
religious-zealot husband
wealthy summer resident
Adirondack summer camp
personal assistant disappears
across Italy, France and Spain
crumbling Victorian mansion
missing father officially dead
the beloved private detective
dreams of becoming a sommelier
turning all of their lives upside down
hellbent on reliving his very dark past
latest in this best-selling mystery series
who can rack up more sexual conquests
a new historical novel with an artistic bent
where sex, power and corruption intersect
young lovers try to forge a future together
the life-changing epiphany of a hydrologist
a fellow émigré with whom he had an affair
stymied by the responsibilities of motherhood
reshaping American science fiction and fantasy
the family fortune has dwindled to almost nothing
more interested in luxury wellness than social justice
a kid full of promise whose life changed one summer night
must reckon with how to build a future for their young twins
a wealthy family grappling with the aftershocks of its patriarch’s kidnapping
must put his retirement plans on hold and find the missing girl
must join forces with one of the unknowable robots
the sisters take it as a sign to change their lives
embarking on a search for his missing brother
expelled from Maine’s Penobscot Reservation
embroiled in some murky business dealings
following a family of Murano glassblowers
the world careens toward global conflict
a narrative that comments on ambition
he crosses paths with two sex workers
idyllic but aging house on Cape Cod
a New England mill town in decline
a gangster who works in nightlife
comfort in a 14th-century poem
her own mother’s ambivalence
crucible of domestic pressure
grappling with the intensities
cult-favorite art house film
industrial dynasty grapples
cookie-cutter McMansion
working-class community
caused a stir on the island
ghosts of a different kind
life’s pivotal moments
lesser-known players
two forbidden lovers
wealthy tourist island
off-grid hunting trip
into the underworld
hyperbaric chamber
family’s revelations
impending baptism
rags-to-riches story
tech-free getaway
murderous youth
home burns down
Maine hometown
dystopian reality
emotional needs
worrisome ways
ultimate fates
tragedy struck
scholar-witch
refugees fled
middle-aged
old-money
epic
Mass-market Monday | David R. Bunch’s Moderan
Moderan, David R. Bunch. Avon Books, first edition (1971). No cover artist credited. 240 pages.
The uncredited Boschian cover for this 1971 mass-market paperback edition of Moderan is by Norman Adams. (Adams did a similar cover in 1972 for Jack Williamson’s novel The Humanoids.)
I think copies of this volume were expensive and hard to find previous to NYRB’s 2018 release of a new edition of Moderan (which included eleven new tales). That’s the version I read—although I was happy to snap this old paperback up for three bucks at a used bookstore. I wrote of the novel in my 2018 reading round-up:
Moderan works as a post-nuke dystopian satire on toxic masculinity. The tropes here might seem familiar—cyborgs and dome homes, caste systems and ultraviolence, a world of made and not born ruled by manunkind (to steal from E.E. Cummings)—it’s the way that Bunch conveys this world that is so astounding. Moderan is told in its own idiom; the voice of our narrator Stronghold-10 booms with a bravado that’s ultimately undercut by the authorial irony that lurks under its surface. The book seems equal to the task of satirizing the trajectory of our zeitgeist in a way that some contemporary satirists have failed to.
The Pleasures of Dagobert (Detail) — Leonora Carrington
The Pleasures of Dagobert (detail), 1945 by Leonora Carrington (1917–2011)
Untitled — Wolfgang Paalen
Untitled, c. 1955 by Wolfgang Paalen (1905-1959)
Heaven — Hilary Harkness
Heaven, 2020 by Hilary Harkness (b. 1971)
“Intercourse,” a very short story by Diane Williams
“Intercourse”
by
Diane Williams
At the post office the woman finally got a good long look at the monster, a stare. She was breathing the same air, not as before, deprived.
When she had first sighted the monster, this woman had not been sure whether or not to trust her instinct.
Was it a monster?
What it was was a monstrous posture she had seen, and the hair on top of the head was heaped so that it appeared as a bulge of hair, with far too much hair coming down at the side, so as to be an abnormal amount. Otherwise, the form of the monster was spindly. It was a small-sized monster.
The eyes were pale turquoise. The facial skin was milky milky white. The nose was a short, finely shaped nose. The mouth was full-lipped, painted coral. The hair was the woman’s favorite color hair—cinnamon color. The voice was girl-like when the woman heard it. The black-inked handwriting on the brown-paper-wrapped package was indecipherable from the distance it was observed from, but it was a curvaceous handwriting. The high-heeled shoes with ankle straps were made of metallic gold leather. The purse was like bronze.
Okay, the emergence of this bombshell has gone on long enough for me. Occasionally I select a man, but my preference is for women who could easily steal away my beloved husband who is not taboo.
Carnality is common in rude society. The incarnation is temporary or permanent.
Enigmatic Variation II — Enrico Pinardi
Enigmatic Variation II by Enrico Pinardi (1934-2021)
Mass-market Monday | Herman Melville’s Redburn
Redburn, Herman Melville. Doubleday Anchor Books (1957). Cover art by Edward Gorey. 301 pages.
Redburn is as good a place as any to start with Melville, I suppose. From Elizabeth Hardwick’s essay “Melville in Love,” which prompted me to finally read Redburn:
Melville’s state of mind is revealed…with a purity of expressiveness in the novel Redburn, one of his most appealing and certainly the most personal of his works. He is said to have more or less disowned the book, more rather than less, since he claimed it was only written for tobacco. Whether this is a serious misjudgment of his own work or a withdrawal, after the fact, from having shown his early experience of life without his notable reserve and distance is, of course, not clear. For a contemporary reader, Redburn, the grief-stricken youth, cast among the vicious, ruined men on the ship, walking the streets of Liverpool in the late 1830s, even meeting with the homosexual hustler Harry Bolton might have more interest than Typee’s breadfruit and coconut island and the nymph, Fayaway. But it is only pertinent to think of Redburn on its own: a novel written after Typee, Omoo, and Mardi in the year 1849, ten years after he left Lansingburgh to go on his first voyage.
A father is a necessary evil (From James Joyce’s Ulysses)
—A father, Stephen said, battling against hopelessness, is a necessary evil. He wrote the play in the months that followed his father’s death. If you hold that he, a greying man with two marriageable daughters, with thirtyfive years of life, nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita, with fifty of experience, is the beardless undergraduate from Wittenberg then you must hold that his seventyyear old mother is the lustful queen. No. The corpse of John Shakespeare does not walk the night. From hour to hour it rots and rots. He rests, disarmed of fatherhood, having devised that mystical estate upon his son. Boccaccio’s Calandrino was the first and last man who felt himself with child. Fatherhood, in the sense of conscious begetting, is unknown to man. It is a mystical estate, an apostolic succession, from only begetter to only begotten. On that mystery and not on the madonna which the cunning Italian intellect flung to the mob of Europe the church is founded and founded irremovably because founded, like the world, macro and microcosm, upon the void. Upon incertitude, upon unlikelihood. Amor matris, subjective and objective genitive, may be the only true thing in life. Paternity may be a legal fiction. Who is the father of any son that any son should love him or he any son?
What the hell are you driving at?
I know. Shut up. Blast you. I have reasons.
Amplius. Adhuc. Iterum. Postea.
Are you condemned to do this?
—They are sundered by a bodily shame so steadfast that the criminal annals of the world, stained with all other incests and bestialities, hardly record its breach. Sons with mothers, sires with daughters, lesbic sisters, loves that dare not speak their name, nephews with grandmothers, jailbirds with keyholes, queens with prize bulls. The son unborn mars beauty: born, he brings pain, divides affection, increases care. He is a new male: his growth is his father’s decline, his youth his father’s envy, his friend his father’s enemy.
In rue Monsieur-le-Prince I thought it.
—What links them in nature? An instant of blind rut.
Am I a father? If I were?
Shrunken uncertain hand.
—Sabellius, the African, subtlest heresiarch of all the beasts of the field, held that the Father was Himself His Own Son. The bulldog of Aquin, with whom no word shall be impossible, refutes him. Well: if the father who has not a son be not a father can the son who has not a father be a son? When Rutlandbaconsouthamptonshakespeare or another poet of the same name in the comedy of errors wrote Hamlet he was not the father of his own son merely but, being no more a son, he was and felt himself the father of all his race, the father of his own grandfather, the father of his unborn grandson who, by the same token, never was born, for nature, as Mr Magee understands her, abhors perfection.
Stephen Dedalus, holding forth in Ulysses. (Context, if necessary: The referent of He in the second paragraph is William Shakespeare; the play is of course Hamlet).
The 16 Types of Dads (Life in Hell)
“Ulysses” — Denis Johnson
“Ulysses”
by
Denis Johnson
The hull of the knife and the surf
of our hurting
The outrigger of the bullet and the whitecaps
of our mistakes
The Commander of Suicide
and the archipelago
of the mirror
Ariane Koch’s Overstaying (Book acquired, 13 June 2024)
Ariane Koch’s Overstaying is forthcoming this fall from Dorothy, in translation by Damion Searls. Dorothy’s blurb:
Winner of the aspekte Prize, the most prestigious German prize for debut fiction, Swiss playwright and visual artist Ariane Koch’s Overstaying is an absurdist tour de force.
“I don’t see my writing as chronological or classically narrative, but as spatial—a kind of architecture. I keep adding rooms, and readers can take different paths through the rooms,” writes Ariane Koch of Overstaying, her anarchically comic debut. Koch’s narrator is an impudent young woman, a contemporary Bartleby living alone in her parents’ old house in the small hometown she hates but can’t bring herself to leave. When a visitor turns up, promisingly new, she takes him in, and instantly her life revolves around him. Yet it is hard to tell what, exactly, this visitor is. A mooch, a lover, an absence, a presence—possibly a pet? Mostly, he is a set of contradictions, an occasion for Koch’s wild imagination to take readers in brilliant and unexpected directions.
A review of Jesse Ball’s novel How to Set a Fire and Why
Jesse Ball’s 2016 novel How to Set a Fire and Why covers a few tumultuous months in the life of Lucia Stanton, anarchist daughter of anarchist parents, now living with her aging anarchist aunt after the death of her (anarchist) father and subsequent mental breakdown and institutionalization of her (anarchist) mother.
The narrative begins with the aftermath of Lucia’s expulsion from school for stabbing a classmate with a pencil. The classmate’s crime? Touching Lucia’s lighter, a capital offense. I wrote Lucia’s lighter, but she—Lucia, the first-person narrator of Jesse Ball’s 2016 novel How to Set a Fire and Why—she always refers to it as her father’s lighter: “His corpse is actually on it—I mean, not his death corpse, but his regular one, the body that falls off us all the time. It’s what I have left of him, and I treasure it.”
So Lucia’s off to a new school, trailed by rumors of graphite-based violence that don’t help her win new friends. Her poverty doesn’t help her popularity either (did I mention that she and her aunt are practicing anarchists?) But she’s in luck, sorta, because she hears that this school has a “Sonar Club”:
I’m sure that doesn’t mean anything to you. You’re wondering, why is she happy about some Sonar Club. That doesn’t sound even remotely fun. Well, I have a friend—I do—who told me about something he heard about from someone else—and what it is, is this:
Right now, there are clubs forming up all over the country. They call themselves sonar clubs, or even radio clubs—but what they are is clubs for people who want to set fires, for people who are fed up with wealth and property, and want to burn everything down.
S – O – N – A – R = A – R – S – O – N
And there’s the essential surface conflict of How to Set a Fire and Why: will Lucia, like, shift her collectivist-anarchist ideals toward something more, uh, destructive? Will she burn it all down?
The real plot of the book though is about a teenage girl going through some shit. Lucia is sharp, witty, but caustic and clearly depressed. She is also incredibly observant and very, very intelligent. Ball’s greatest strength in the novel is harnessing Lucia’s spiky but vulnerable intellect; we ride her first-person narration persuaded by her maybe-genius, but also aware of all of her blind spots. Teens know the Truth, but the Truth often blinds them to reality. Not that Lucia isn’t self-aware; consider her take on her own intellect:
My aunt says that I am naturally curious. That means that I don’t need to be taught how to learn. Some people have a disadvantage at the beginning, and they are not curious. These people have trouble learning. It seems like not being curious is the worst thing of all. Curious people aren’t necessarily good at learning what you want them to learn, though. They are too busy learning about other things.
The best bits of How to Set a Fire let Lucia riff on her observations. There’s a poignant detailed description of her father’s lighter (“My father’s is matte black and has a white dot in the center. I haven’t seen another like it”). There’s an explanation and analysis of the rules of cee-lo, which Lucia decides exploits outsiders. She praises both My Dinner with Andre and the music of Erik Satie. She makes predictions and shares their outcomes. She has sex and takes drugs. She visits her mother at the institution. She’s afraid a lot, and probably with good reason: “When I think about what my future holds, it is a bit like looking into the sun. I flinch away, or I don’t and my eyes get burned down a bit, like candles, and then I can’t see for a while.”
Most of Lucia’s observations are about people: I did not count the nouns in the novel, but I imagine people would have to be up there as one of its most common words. A representative sample might be this early simple nugget: “History is just people behaving badly.” Lucia is cynical, sure, and with good reason. How to Start a Fire often echoes the coming-of-age cynicism of The Catcher in the Rye, whose narrator was also flawed and intelligent and blind to what he could not see. (We are all of course blind to what we cannot see.) But Lucia’s not entirely unforgiving. “People aren’t all horrible. They aren’t. Sometimes you find a good one, at least for a while—even if it’s just for twenty minutes or so,” she concedes.
Lucia’s voice is the reason to read How to Start a Fire. It’s compelling and funny and persuasive and hurt. It seems authentic, and I admire the risk Ball has taken—it’s not easy to write a teenage girl who is also maybe-genius-would-be-arsonist. The plot proper of How to Start a Fire never really commits to anarchism or revolution however—sure, things happen—but we never really find out why Sonar Clubs might be taking off around the nation, let alone, like, how Lucia fits into all that. But I don’t think that’s really what Ball is doing here—I think he’s marking off a measure of time in a character’s life:
When people write books about childhood, and about being a kid—they always talk about how endless it is, and about how there is no thought of time. Everything just stretches and stretches. I think the opposite is the case. When you’re young, you feel like things are constantly ending. As soon as you get used to something, it goes away.
Biblioklept 
