Author: Tyran Grillo

Brian Evenson: The Open Curtain (Book Review)

| Tyran Grillo

For every one that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light,
lest his deeds should be reproved.
–John 3:20

Rudd is a fractured boy. Like a mirror thrown to the ground and glued back together, he splits the reckoning of anyone who looks into his eyes beyond the comfort of recognition. To the other kids at school, he is a non-entity. To his mother, he is a “vague and lifeless avatar of Mormon ideals.” To himself, he is someone else, a candle flickering at the lips of a force he struggles to define. While some of this dissociation may be attributable to the angst and ennui any teenager might experience after years of ostracization, much of it links to dark corner pieces in the greater puzzle of who he may or may not be.

Words and phrases run circles in his head, each a temporary fixation leaving a permanent scar in the body envelope of his upbringing. “Everything was humiliating but desperately needed,” the narrator observes, thus framing Rudd as a soul whose identity is necessarily suspect by default. It’s as if the religious life promised by the local community were not so much a lie as an alternative truth by which the stitches of his coming of age are constantly pulled out and retied, pulled out and retied. Over time, this cycle of disinterest in the things of faith leaves him wandering in cold denial.

Rudd’s father is dead—suicide, we learn—and the legacy of that inherited family trauma is just now beginning to undress itself in the glare of young adulthood. This is perhaps why, one day, he finds himself rummaging through the deceased parent’s effects. Among them is a letter from his mistress, whose handwriting is barely legible in its faded state (a sign, perhaps, of its need for resolution). Cryptic phrases like “duty in your flesh” and other information hint at a half-brother named Lael, whose existence comes as a quiet shock.

Rudd’s mother is disinterested in digging up the past. “We know the truth,” she avers; case closed. And yet, Rudd demands to know about this extramarital son, to which she replies: “The only bastard around here is you, and you weren’t born that way. You had to grow into it.” And with that, his quest for family leads him to Lael, who shares his apathy. 

In the midst of developing a connection with the sibling he never knew, Rudd becomes aware of his power. “Lael could leak into him,” we are told, “but not he into Lael,” setting a precedent for a dynamic that only intensifies with time. While working on a research project for school, Rudd peels away a layer of resistance from the onion that is Lael. He learns about William Hooper Young, the grandson of Brigham Young convicted of murdering a young woman in the name of “blood atonement,” an obscure and recanted Mormon tradition that provided soul retribution through the killing of those who had sinned so egregiously that the redemption of Christ was deemed insufficient. The deeper he gets into this history, the more he feels it to be inchoate in his connection with Lael. Even the latter knows school projects are vanity metrics designed to keep students busy and instructors feeling self-righteous: “Teaching’s not about truth. It’s about comfort.”

Curtains appear throughout the novel. Whether Rudd is looking through them at an inner part of himself in moments of reflection or being told to reach through them in a secret temple ritual, described in painful detail in the book’s second section, they are omnipresent. At their whim, Rudd catches only glimpses of events in which he may or may not have participated, including exhuming his father’s corpse, flirting with the identity of William Hooper Young, and beginning to see value in the blood sacrifice. (“God has drawn a curtain between myself and heaven,” he admits, “and there is no parting it.”) But the more he falls into bouts of missing time to the point of surviving a crime so heinous that his memory of it is as indefinite as his possible involvement in it, the more holes acquire an intimate significance. Holes in memory, space, and time speak in chorus of the porosity of lived reality.

In a bravado third act, do-overs and attempts at refashioning memory, space, and time serve as a baseline for getting away with abuse and possibly worse. And yet, we get the feeling that in a town of such limited means (as attested by the upside-down “L” that serves as a “7” in the elementary school’s marquee), the only thing one can hope for is to slip through the fingers of accountability.

Ultimately, it is violence that connects these characters (some of whom I am at pains to reveal without spoiling the plot) and the religion that holds their lives together on the shakiest of outstretched palms. Only when they come to themselves do they realize just how far the feet of their self-justification have traveled in search of asylum. Any hope we might pine for is tempered by the novel’s mission statement: “These painful moments of lucidity, an affliction. What can we do but wait for them to pass?” And so, we stand in the shadow of our allegiances, but whether or not we question our complicity in what we’ve just read is another question entirely. Only you can answer that for yourself.

The Open Curtain is available from Coffee House Press and fine booksellers.

Al Andalus: For the Skin Within

| Tyran Grillo

It is often said that fragrances transport us. Indeed, some of my favorites—including Parfum d’Empire’s Wazamba, Jazeel’s Heyam, and the Incense Series by Commes des Garçons—have more than a resinous quality in common. Each is also intimately connected to the spirit of a place, whether in the regional specificity of its note profile (such as Wazamba’s Afrocentric symphony of ingredients from Somalia, Kenya, Ethiopia, and Morocco) or by force of suggestion in the name. Al Andalus checks off those boxes and then some. What puts this masterpiece from the Italian house of Moresque and the nose of Andrea “Thero” Casotti on its own pedestal is the inwardness it affords the moment I apply it. Never have I beheld a scent that pulls such a vivid constellation of time and place into me rather than me into it.

As the opening release of ginger embraces my nostrils like an old friend, it bears saffron and black pepper as gifts from afar. Despite the connotations of distances traveled, “exotic” and other outdated descriptors must go straight into the kitsch bin, making way for the more accurate word pictures of “bitingly warm” and “darkly gold-flecked.” The brocade of light and shadow that plays about its introduction is extraordinary. It changes during every inhalation—so much so that I wish I didn’t have to exhale in between.

As the hands on the clock go obtuse, then acute, a quiet comfort takes over. A heart of oud from Kalimantan Island shines like a candle in a blackout—which is to say, with unadulterated vitality. The slightest breaths of wind remind me of where this reunion began, hinting at slumber. Memories and stories lure my attention from the present while enhancing bodily awareness.

Tendrils of Haitian vetiver, French labdanum, and birch braid themselves until two become one, leaving a bed of wonder that smells of the soul. Only then do I realize I’ve been speaking to myself the whole time, curling inside out.

How appropriate, then, that Al Andalus should last 12 hours. Its diurnal character shifts from golds to greens throughout the day, foreshadowing the night with its sunlit opening. What begins with the excitement of an open-air market gradually turns dusky, becoming a scent for the skin within. Such an experience is rare in perfumery, and yet, here it awaits, a sky without a cloud but for the wisp of smoke in whose name it settles.

BIRD by Christina Rauh Fishburne (Book Review)

| Tyran Grillo

Between the covers of BIRD, Christina Rauh Fishburne offers a chapbook of moving images and emotional tableaux using words as her pigment and a keen sense of observation as her brush. Her prose poems are stories just beginning to petal open in the light of a reader’s eyes, each as fragrant with densely packed information as a human cell.

The scenes are as distinct as the verses describing them. While there are plenty of aerial views to take in, Fishburne dives ever inward as the pages flip by. From a scarecrow-stuck field and private garden to a dressing room and mollusk’s shell, she combines just enough ingredients to make a meal of the lesson at hand and consume it before moving on to the next.

Personalities plant their stakes along the way. Whether in the crow’s stark altruism, the albatross’s maritime legacy, or the barn owl’s untranslatable scream, the indifference of bare life to examined life renders our concerns at once universal and meaningless. This doesn’t mean we are always looking through nonhuman eyes; it does mean we are asked to consider how that gnaws at the ego.

Whereas impossibilities feel organic (“The sun was still and straight as a cowboy”), renderings of the quotidian and the agricultural (there is, for example, repeated mention of barley) feel starkly out of place, as if nature were only a construction of those who infringe upon it with the cutting of blades, the striking of matches, and the pulling of roots.

While the mood is generally retrospective, sometimes regretful, a certain resilience shines through with mounting clarity. Even darker passages like “Pheasant” embalm a youthful wonder that never seems to burnish. “Oyster Catcher” is a masterstroke of parental anxieties (“My child will be born quite soon. I receive her messages in sudden desperate grasping. She must be like me. She doesn’t like to be inside”) and confinement. In it, the pearl—for us, a sign of beauty and value—is a natural irritant, a bauble of sacrifice and forced honor that never quite reflects the visage of its wearer. 

Signposting our journey are four “takes” on the gull. Their encounters with wounded yet resilient souls court the temptation to exaggerate or revise personal narratives. Fishburne continually seeks such hypocrisies, throwing intimate spotlights on them to ward us away. Elemental touchpoints also throw the occasional roof over our heads. Of these, “Water” gets at the heart of the collection’s worship of transfiguration. We take a lot of turns together yet come out the other end with scars to show for our survival.

The animal, insofar as it reflects the human, has more self-awareness and investment in the world than we might think. The human, insofar as it reflects the animal, loses itself in rote survival. “There’s nothing worse than a flightless bird,” Fishburne tells us, giving us hope to build wings of our own from the scraps of lived experience.

Bird is available directly from Kattywompus Press here.

Brian Evenson: Father of Lies (Book Review)

| Tyran Grillo

In chapter 3 of Genesis, Satan makes his first cameo. By that point, God has commanded Adam to eat freely of every tree in the garden, with one proviso: “But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” Appearing as a serpent, Satan approaches Eve instead, echoing those fateful words on his forked tongue, “Yea, hath God said, ‘Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?’” So begins a chain of doubts and deceptions, tethering itself eventually to Father of Lies, the first novel by Brian Evenson.

Eldon Fochs is base but not basic. As a provost representing the local “Bloodite” Mormons, he commands respect, trust, and honor within his community. Yet the serpent’s voice rings in his ears like the vibrations of an empty skull. Empty is the operative word to describe Fochs, who serves as a willing vessel for that most ancient of mariners, steering the flesh into one fatal port of call before the winds of protection fluff his sails onward to the next.

Monitoring his disembodied crew of “loud thoughts”—not voices, he insists—is therapist Alexander Feshtig, at whose urging he unravels some of the fray of his childhood, passing off acts of violence as “dreams” and lightening his dark load in the face of uncertain accountability. Feshtig’s notes and battle of letters with his superiors (all of whom have a stake in keeping allegations of child abuse and murder under wraps), along with Fochs’s self-indulgent accounts in the first person, make for a morbid compass, the magnetic north of which points directly to the alter ego Fochs calls “Bloody-Head.” The latter’s interventions guide him into territories so wicked that he cannot help but come full circle into correction—or so he tells himself whenever the quotidian world seems poised to catch up with his perversions. Bloody-Head is neither a consequence of dissociative disturbances nor a projection of internal desires. He is, instead, the great tempter whose name and visage have been rendered for millennia on rock walls, stretched canvases, and human skin. And once he’s settled, no one dictates how long he can stay.

As a character study, Evenson’s narrative is a half-step removed from lived experience. His debut short story collection, Altmann’s Tongue (1994), prompted a critical response from his own Mormon leaders, who felt its frank sexual and thematic material went against the grain of doctrinal propriety. Refusing to succumb to their pressure to stop writing, he left a teaching job at Brigham Young University and the religious organization it represented. Although the seed of Father of Lies was already planted, this turn of events seems to have provided the increase. Here, he returns to those broken pieces, scrutinizing them in the light of retrospection and fashioning a catharsis of fiercely intimate proportion.

Seeing how far the church will gladly protect Fochs, lying to avoid soiling the undergarments of the Faith, hits close to home for me, too, as a survivor of spiritual abuse. When Fochs insists, “I know sin inside and out,” I believe him, if only because he is able to engage in that most horrific of illusions whereby he simultaneously swerves the wheels of innocent lives into oncoming traffic and sits behind the headlights that blind them moments before death.

Turning the secret into the sacred—or, if you prefer, treating the wrong as if it were right—is the only method of forgiveness by which Fochs can operate. Every killing is a “favor” to save a wandering sheep from reprobation, an act of such profound sacrifice that only a man of his supposed courage can bury the conscience so deep that its voice is muffled beyond recognition. And even when flowers of truth begin to bud from the rot, they are robbed of their fragrance before being given a chance to bloom. Thus, Fochs’s place on Earth is assured by the dint of a metaphysical contract. He knows his destination. Might as well destroy as many lives as possible on his way down. Feshtig puts it best: “Hell is crammed full of godly men.”

There’s no surprise in the ending, if only because we’ve seen it play out too many times in reality. The only spoiler here is Fochs, whose actions touch upon a sobering truth of the human experience: our addiction to crisis. Ignoring all the little (and not so little) signs that something is off gives us an excuse to swoop in as the savior when our complicity hits the proverbial fan. Therefore, what on the surface appears to be a slow burn of Mormonism soon forges a mirror in which we are asked to regard ourselves accordingly. Killing the body is one thing, killing the soul quite another—and how often we deny our readiness to flirt with that second sin!

The end effect of our time with Fochs is a scar. Whether in the anger one feels over the shuffling of apostolic cards or a child’s cry for salvation finding only the ears of her perpetrating father, the royal flush of revelation will abrade your heart as the conclusion lays its winning hand. After all, at the betting table of life, there’s nothing more frightening than a dealer who thinks himself righteous beyond reproach.

Paul Griffiths: Mr. Beethoven (Book Review)

| Tyran Grillo

If fiction is the art of revivification, then let Mr. Beethoven be one of the most self-aware products of its wonders. The 2021 novel from Paul Griffiths grafts archival leaves to branches of nourishing speculation to imagine a journey the German composer might have taken in 1833 (six years after his death) to America to finish an oratorio on the Biblical figure of Job.

Although the Handel and Haydn Society of Boston indeed considered commissioning such a work, the only motif of it we will ever know may be articulated in the mind’s ear as we read of its stumbling fruition and premiere. Written in a narratively and stylistically episodic style and using only statements recorded as having been uttered by Der Spagnol, it unfolds not unlike his Ninth Symphony, building a dome’s worth of clouds one wisp at a time until the light of something divine pushes its way through to illuminate the ground at our feet anew.

If any of this sounds too good to be true, that’s because it’s too true to be good. Whereas the “real” Beethoven—as if the persona of that name weren’t already enigmatized by our constant recapitulations—reads to us today like the quintessential poète maudit, he marks the zoetrope of this book in moments of pandering frustration but also, more importantly, cadenzas of openheartedness, interpersonal profundity, and sheer delight.

Hints of a holistic portrait shade the opening act, wherein we encounter Beethoven as an enigma aboard a ship in the Atlantic bound for New England. He is a figure rendered by charcoal in intercontinental candlelight rather than oil in the Roman sun. “A stare, from a stranger,” we are told, “can be a flooding of humanity through whatever dams of difference.” Thus, we see and feel through the eyes of characters as fleeting as their target’s evergreen status. Such moments point to one of the novel’s most brilliant aggregations of historical impulse in Griffiths’s ability to articulate Beethoven before his place in the canon, itself in flux at this point, was assured by the validation of hindsight. By the same token, it emphasizes the unique disjointedness of place one experiences at sea before making landfall in realms of emotional economy. Says the muse of takeaways: Recognition is never universal.

By the time he gets to Boston, Beethoven’s dishevelment reads not like a caricature of the man but as the ravages of a harrowing journey. When encountering subsequent dramatis personae, we view them as he does: in his polite disinterest in Lowell Mason (responsible for the commission), in his enjoyment of Quincy under the auspices of hostess Mrs. Hannah Hill (a widow in whose company the bee legs of his heart collect no small amount of pollen), in his disappointment with the Reverend Ballou (a dismal librettist whose failures end up provoking a textual revival), and in his enchantment with Thankful (a sign language teacher and interpreter variously dubbed his “ear” and “amanuensis”). Every instance in which Herr Beethoven shakes a hand, exchanges words, or consumes a morsel of food reinforces the illusion that the music is imminent.

Each chapter is a composition unto itself. Whether in his iridescent vignette on the Fourth of July or in the careful construction of possible yet unprovable interactions, Griffiths sews his story with a leitmotif of concerns that make it clear he is wrestling as much as we are with the implications of his reality. While Chapter 32 is almost entirely footnotes, 33 only dialogue with dynamic markings, and 38 a single run-on sentence, these artifices never feel out of place or contrived. Each is a libretto unto itself for a musical work yet to be written.

From the selection of voices to travails with the local punditry, the story arc is pulled like a shuttle through looms marked by clefs instead of wooden frames, culminating in a virtuoso performance from musicians and Griffiths alike, as the author provides a full text for the oratorio, interleaved with reflections such as:

“To this Boston audience, the music is untoward, beyond familiar reference points, and yet at the same time wondrous, perhaps most of all in its successions of harmonies, how they float, swerve or dive while also proceeding forward inexorably, how they keep their sights on that one sure path while sometimes veering to the side or soaring high above, carrying their first listeners into new air.”

The book’s constant fourth-wall breaking may be its greatest pleasure. At one point, Griffiths even invites us to call him out on his conceit, only to retreat further into its fascinating depths. Hanging on what-might-have-beens (“it could all so easily have gone a different way,” “Scraps of paper might have survived,” etc.), he is content to vary his approach to the theme at hand as a seasoned improviser at the keyboard.

Among the many things to adore about Mr. Beethoven is that it sidesteps the trap of forcing a creative swoon. Unlike The Agony and the Ecstasy, whose Michelangelo rhapsodizes in the presence of unhewn marble, itself a cipher for escape, we get none of the romantic privilege of the artist at work. Hints of influences, witting or not, also make this a joyful effort. Top notes of James Cowan’s A Mapmaker’s Dream and Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon and a splash of Umberto Eco in the middle make way for a powerful dry down that leaves plenty of room for Griffiths’s base notes to settle in the nose for the long haul. In the latter vein, nods to his own work (“Let me tell you,” says Mrs. Hill at one point, naming his Ophelia novel) remind us of who is telling the story. Setting aside such comparisons leaves us with a three-dimensional object to regard in the light of our hopeful imaginations. The more we turn the key, the more it can sing when we let go. 

Like the composer, we hear nothing yet feel every note.

Mr. Beethoven is available from New York Review Books (pictured below) for those in the U.S. or from Henningham Family Press (pictured above) for those in Europe.

Shibui: Quint

| Tyran Grillo

Although Quint is the second album from Boston-based Shibui, it is also the first in what one hopes will be a longstanding relationship with Ronin Rhythm Records, the label of Nik Bärtsch, whose influence on bandleader Tim Doherty is as obvious as the stars at night (and just as beautiful to regard through the telescope of the ear). The core trio of Doherty on bass and percussion, Curtis Hartshorn on drums, and Céline Ferro on clarinets opens through the inclusion of Bradley Goff on keys, Derek Hayden on marimba (a key timekeeper throughout), and violinist Chris Baum. The latter makes his only appearance on “2.1,” which opens the first of five submarine doors. Through gradual appearances of percussion and bass clarinet, it travels from pianistic sediment to a glittering epipelagic zone. The final five minutes offer a glorious conspectus of the band’s relativity, offering plenty of opportunities for intake.

“2.2” is a chunkier groove, made all the more worthy of our mastication by the savory bass snaking its way throughout, while “2.3” offers a more pleasurable spectrum of delights, especially in the transfigurations of clarinet and piano between solids, liquids, and gases. The resulting states lean more in the direction of ineffability than concretism. Smoother textures await in “2.4,” where arid sands and moist breaths intertwine as equals. The bass is especially present, each note a trunk from which pianistic branches are given room to sprout. The marimba’s echoes tread like creatures too light to sink on water yet too heavy to be carried away by a breeze. Lastly, fluidity is the modus operandi of “2.5.” Here, the impulse to sing is never more than a step out of reach. Gritty electric keys give us a sense of inward focus and emanations of heat, weaving delicate cymbalism through shafts of shadow.

While fans of Bärtsch and other masterless musical samurai will surely rejoice over the rudimentarily numbered set list and modular approach, the uniqueness of vision rendered on Quint urges relistening. Doherty’s compositions are proof that instrumental discourse operates differently from speech. Whereas saying the same word over and over strips that word of meaning, Shibui’s aesthetic enhances clarity with every cycle. It also proves there is no such thing as truly identical reiteration in a world of constantly moving molecules and energies between them.

In an enchanting bit of coincidence, the album’s cover artist, Sevcan Yuksel Henshall, came up with the five circular gestures before even knowing its title. Such confluences are part and parcel of music that lifts the spirit with the same weight so that both appear to float in unison, forever suspended between firmament and fundament.

Quint is available from Bandcamp here.

Trio Tapestry: Our Daily Bread (ECM 2777)

| Tyran Grillo

Trio Tapestry
Our Daily Bread

Joe Lovano tenor saxophone, tarogato, gongs
Marilyn Crispell piano
Carmen Castaldi drums, gong, temple bells
Recorded May 2022, Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI, Lugano
Engineer: Stefano Amerio
Cover photo: Thomas Wunsch
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: May 5, 2023

Joe Lovano’s Trio Tapestry is one of the profoundest projects to grace ECM records in recent years, and for this, the group’s third round, we are welcomed into a chamber within a chamber within a chamber. This set of eight Lovano originals, each written exclusively for the project, draws from the wells of pianist Marilyn Crispell and drummer Carmen Castaldi, whose gifts of abundance unwrap themselves to reveal one grace after another.

“All Twelve” takes a 12-tone approach to the proverbial welcome mat, greeting us with open arms and closed eyes. Lovano takes liminal account of Crispell’s architecture, rendering an experience that takes two steps inward for every step outward. The ghosts of albums past linger with a loose developmental feel. Every motif, as much a child of atmosphere as of melody, works a speech-like filigree into every wall, sconce, and pew. Like “The Power Of Three” and “Crystal Ball” that come later, its introspections have the presence of someone who has absorbed the world to squeeze out only its most inclusive drops.

Despite an overarching solace, there is variety to be found. Where “Rhythm Spirit” is a heartfelt duet for tenor and drums highlighting breathy lows and delicate highs, “Grace Notes” floats the tarogato on a seascape of dreamy complexion, Castaldi’s cymbals hinting at a groove that never catches, buried instead in the crashing brine. On “One For Charlie,” Lovano returns to tenor with a monologue dedicated to the late Charlie Haden.

At the heart of this session are two balladic verses. The snaking indeterminacy of “Le Petit Opportun” and the title track’s potent lyricism give us plenty to savor even as they savor us. This is chaos theory in slow motion and proof that if this album is a match between day and night, the latter has surely won.

(This article originally appeared in the August 2023 issue of The New York City Jazz Record, a full PDF of which is available here.)

Ana Reyes: The House in the Pines (Book Review)

| Tyran Grillo

It was as if they had opened a valve and all the pain, fear, and anger of those days had issued from their chests and rolled onto the street, rising into a terrible shout to the thick black clouds above.
–Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits

Trauma wears a coat of iron. It trips into the body when one least expects it, wrapping itself on the way down in a protective layer so soundproof that it becomes unknowable even to the self. With time, however, its minor key drifts within earshot, begging for the major strains of a token anthem known as “Moving On.” Such prefab resolutions to the pain we carry inside feel intensely tailored to individual circumstances until we realize they bear the scars of ancestors whose breath still hangs heavy in the air. Although their voices are lost to the burial ground of history, we continue to exhume them in the hopes of putting their bones back together. But without the flesh to connect them, they fall into piles of dust the moment we let go.

When destruction befalls an entire race of people, even before the word “genocide” enters our collective vocabulary, its wickedness thrives in the shadow of our unwillingness to accept it. And yet, something lingers, a sundial’s shadow following the same slow arc across a stone marked by the positions of celestial bodies. Except now the stone is a page, its shadow the ink it has absorbed to convey stories of ourselves. This is the essence of literature. And so, let us begin to imagine that one page becomes ten, that ten becomes hundreds, and that a cover and a name whorl into shape. The leaves part, and the light angles itself just so, hinting at what is to transpire.

An Outward Look

“Deep in the woods, there is a house that’s easy to miss.” So begins The House in the Pines, the debut novel from Ana Reyes. Like the titular house, itself a major character whose lungs inhale the emotions of her protagonists and antagonists and exhale the distillations of their overlapping traumas with the depth of a fireplace in its capacity for memory, she holds the key. Thus, Reyes points to a core construction not only of her conceit but also of fiction as a contract between author and reader. In building these things one element at a time, she clues us in on her piecing together of personalities and the world they inhabit.

Our guide, once removed from omniscience, is Maya, a 25-year-old graduate of BU who works at a gardening center while her partner, Dan, pushes his way through law school. As a couple, they are typical and atypical. The former in the sense that they want what most people in love want (to make a home together, find meaning in each other, and build a future to replace the past), the latter insofar as Dan’s unabashed honesty—a rarity in her lived experience—is a mirror she has yet to find elsewhere. Its reflection at once repels and attracts her, illuminating vices that may or may not be within her control. For the time being, things are relatively stable—that is, until she encounters a mysterious piece of security camera footage online in which a young woman drops dead inexplicably. Disturbing in and of itself, if not unusual in viral fare, what grabs Maya’s attention is the man in the video, Frank Bellamy, an ex whose face might have remained subconscious had not its unmistakable features courted her memories from the screen.

Even before this interruption, Maya has been papering over the cracks. Like an eggshell, the structural integrity of her life relies on equal pressure applied to opposite ends. Any maldistribution thereof means she is at risk of breaking. Wracked by sleepless nights, she “could easily draw from memory the shape of every water stain on the ceiling,” indicating a dichotomy of comfort and monotony stemming from the same source. Through flashbacks, we witness her friendship with Aubrey, who also happened to die in Frank’s presence seven years ago.

A further scan of the surface of things reveals other details amiss. Maya’s struggle with antidepressants is clarified early on, as is her insistence that Frank is somehow responsible for the death of Aubrey and the girl in the video. That no one believes her encourages a cycle of doubt that keeps one foot on the hamster wheel of justification. If we are going to trust Maya, we must first seek the evidence cobwebbed in the darkest recesses of her mind.

She returns to her hometown hoping to learn more about this second death and the enigmatic Frank, whose involvement, she maintains, is more than coincidental. She has set herself on a path toward a truth that even she might not be prepared to wield as her own. The rest is for you to discover.

An Inward Look

One sign of any honest work of literature is not how well you understand it but how well it understands you. In this respect, The House in the Pines succeeds with hard-won beauty through two disparate yet intertwined internal mechanisms.

The first is an unfinished novel by Maya’s father, a latter-day victim of Guatemala’s Silent Holocaust, whose typed manuscript is a leitmotif in her life. It also brings her and Frank together, as her intent reading of it pings his interest. After striking up a conversation, they embark on a relationship as intense as it is cut short by Aubrey’s untimely death. Beyond this nominal mystery, the violence of Maya’s family history looms as the central horror of this novel, the outer skin of which serves as a canvas for the tattoos of its denouement.

Here, storytelling is a catalyst and repository for struggle. Through regular references to children’s books, literary classics, and Greek mythology (over which Maya and Dan bond after her skip in the record of life with Frank), Reyes gives us at least two out of three combination lock numbers for the emotional baggage Maya carries at any given moment. Suffice it to say that death has always been her stage set, whether in the aunt she never knew or the grandmother whose funeral brings her to Guatemala and puts the father’s pages in her hands.

The other psychological trigger is the cabin itself, which Frank has lovingly crafted as a haven away from a troubled (and troubling) childhood, which becomes clearer as Maya’s current investigation unfolds. In this respect, the cabin is a storehouse of memory, if only because it is the missing link in the emotional evolutions of those its presence has affected.

The centrality of its forested location further confirms the thriller narrative as a coping strategy. As Reyes puts it, “Maya’s life was divided into a Before and After” the turning point of her best friend’s sudden expiration. Any subsequent grief opens a void to be filled by words other than hers. All the while, Maya struggles with the dilemma that many victims face: to protect her own words by holding them all inside or risk others’ perversions by turning them into a story.

Either way, writing fixes memories in time, reminding us that things happened. This is why, for me, The House in the Pines is ultimately about books as objects of intimacy and vulnerability. Read it that way, and it may just hand you a key far more liberating than the one its title cross-hatches. 

The Fragrance of Fiction

It’s not often a novel gets its own fragrance, but that’s precisely what Gold & Palms Atelier set out to change with Deep Woods. Directly inspired by The House in the Pines, it combines the innocence and foreboding of the forest in a robust pyramid that will surely immerse the multisensory reader.

In its top notes of smoke and fir needle, one feels the vestiges of human activity as if encountering a once-inhabited place long since abandoned. The whiff of ashes is a sign of life, while the greenery gives us a sense of nature’s quiet indifference. The middle notes of sandalwood and cardamom lend a sense of distant times and places, perhaps even of an unrequited love. One can easily read Maya and Frank into their dance, vacillating between harmony and separation. Finally, the base notes of oud, vanilla amber, and (most prominently) tree sap indicate a mystery among the trunks and their receding lines.

While pine is no stranger to the world of perfumery, among the bottles I’ve put a nose on, Deep Woods reminds me most of Mriga from the niche brand Prin (a pungent blend of conifer resins, sandalwood, and oud), minus the animalic edge of deer musk. The softer tones of Gold & Palms Atelier’s take on this constellation make for a more wearable experience, such that you can almost feel yourself blending into the wood, losing all sense of time…

Not only is this the fragrance of fiction; it is also the fiction of fragrance to transport us to places that exist only in our minds. The overlap here is profound enough to add layers to a novel intent on peeling them. Still, there is hope because we have an anchor to hold on to. Scents may fade, but the memories of which they are spun continue to flex until we drop from view.

Muriel Louveau: Vocalscapes

| Tyran Grillo

French vocalist Muriel Louveau understands the human voice is never a solo instrument. It is comprised of flesh and bone, but also of vibration and forces beyond what the body can immediately contain and make sense of. It is simultaneously worldly and divine yet exists without contradiction (save for the words it may force against the grain of truth). Louveau’s voice is, of course, very much her own, but it is also ours the moment she shapes it to fit the contours of poetry. In this case, the words are a soul unto themselves, housed by artist Elizabeth Hayes Christopher, whose imagistic renderings give credence to the side paths we ignore in linear everyday wanderings. Once offered as a sound installation at Five Myles gallery in Brooklyn, these multitracked pieces now live on as five standalone experiences, presented both individually and as an unbroken mix.

In “Rose Light,” a brief speech song that opens the sky like a folding fan, Louveau draws a vocal line through clouds described with tearful honesty. We meet each element of daybreak as if it were a person in need of an embrace. Whether or not we open our arms is ever the challenge of language and sound, in the middle of which we must choose who to serve: the heart or the dust of which it is formed.

Through careful alterations, Louveau reveals hidden layers in her singing, as in the spiritual blues of “Soulhandlips” and the prayerful contours of “Blue Refraction.” In each, she expresses the materiality of things we cannot touch and the ephemerality of things we can. In partnership with Christopher’s insightful realism, she lends folklike qualities to “I meditate wings.” Splashed against a throaty backdrop and tickling the nape of our consciousness, memories of nights that will never be recaptured rush like blood to a head spun in unexpected directions—only here, that feeling is evoked in slow motion. As in “Salamander,” Louveau and Christopher’s hybridization births a third voice of internal flow. Thus, the self expands until every trauma glimmers as a crack in the eggshell of our contentment with the way things are.

Vocalscapes is available on bandcamp here.