On the windswept, wild, and foggy Farallon Islands, off the coast of San Francisco, a group of scientists live in a cabin, where they research the life of the landscape: birds, sharks, whales. The Lightkeepers tells the story of Miranda, a traveling photographer who makes her way to the islands and finds her place amongst the socially-distant scientists. The novel is framed as a journal, written by Miranda to her long-dead mother, chronicling the events on the islands over the course of about a year.
Miranda, quiet and thoughtful, observes her cabin mates as they might observe the birds. The six other characters on the island—including the grizzly Galen, the scrawny Forest, the big friendly Mick, the sharp and manic Lucy—are all richly detailed and brought to life, believable in their quirks and fragility. However, Miranda, as the narrator, is painted unreliably, with her journal omitting information and leaving the reader guessing at her true nature. Just as one often fails to understand oneself, the reader cannot quite grasp who Miranda really is, for her letters reveal only who she thinks she is, and perhaps not who she really is.
Even Miranda’s name is rarely spoken, as from the get-go her cabin mates get it wrong—believing her name to be Melissa—and she opts not to correct them, eventually being called anything from Melissa to Mel to Mouse Girl.
Miranda accompanies the scientists around the islands, capturing photographs of wildlife and landscapes while contemplating loss, grief, and life. She assimilates to the solitary lifestyle on the islands, and she finds her niche within the community of seven. Yet, as we see through her writing, she never quite connects with her co-inhabitants, always remaining distant. As much as she learns the ways of life on the islands, she pushes away, seeking a solitude even from limited human contact.
During her time on the islands, a mystery arises, made murky by Miranda’s uncertain, incomplete accounts. Effectively paced, Abby Geni reveals details of the truth as if revealing distant peaks behind fading fog. While the plot lines may be guessed—as they come logically, eventually—Geni’s evocations of the islands and its inhabitants are enough to carry the reader through the novel. The reader wonders not just what truth lies behind a mysterious death, but also what lies behind each character. What type of person chooses solitude on the Farallon Islands, preferring the company of jagged rocks, birds, and marine life over the company of people? What are the motives behind these individuals?
At first, the characters might feel like lab specimens, interesting in their quirks and differences. However, as Geni enriches them with detail, they become relatable, and before long, one wonders if one might enjoy the rugged solitude of the islands oneself. One might come to think that the rapid rush of cities and suburbs are just a different kind of rugged, solitary, and unforgiving life.
As The Lightkeepers unravels, and Miranda glimpses the reality of her time on the islands, the reader is left with the novel’s name to ponder. The lightkeepers, the story in the novel goes, were those on the island that lived there to keep the light going in the lighthouse, to prevent ships from crashing ashore. The lightkeepers, as Geni seems to imply, are those that observe the loss, love, and tragedy of life, and yet keep a light of stewardship going, so that we might keep learning, keep experiencing, and keep living.
Geni writes:
“There are two kinds of people in the world. There are eggers and lightkeepers. The former are driven by acquisition and avarice. The latter are driven by curiosity and caution. Eggers take what they can, consequences be damned. Lightkeepers take what they need, nothing more. Eggers want to have. Lightkeepers want to be.”
Despite the tragedies of life, some must keep the lights on, must keep us from falling into darkness. Those are the lightkeepers.
I’m not a crier. Not necessarily by choice—I’d say it’s healthy to cry—but I’m just not brought to tears often.
This book just about brought me to tears, which is something no other book I’ve read has done (and yes, maybe that just means I need to let my emotions out more, but that’s a topic for another post).
Pachinko is a multi-generational family saga of Korean immigrants moving to Japan, spanning from 1910 to 1989. Such a premise will surely drive away many readers—and it nearly drove me away too, as I’ve never been drawn to historical fiction. However, on a whim, I picked up Pachinko, and oh boy am I glad I did.
Pachinko starts with Yangjin, a Korean woman in a small fishing village who gives birth to Sunja, the life of much of the novel.
Sunja grows up to be a hardworking daughter, but she is drawn to a wealthy man she spies at the fishing docks. This man slowly encroaches upon her life, until she is in youthful, misguided love. She is still just a girl when the wealthy man, Hansu (who is decades older than Sunja), impregnates her on a hidden away beach near the village.
Hansu promises Sunja everything she might ever need, with his wealth apparently endless. However, when Sunja realizes she is pregnant, and that Hansu wishes to marry her and take her far away, she refuses. Sunja feels deceived, and her unwed pregnancy, Sunja and her mother know, will bring immense shame to the family. So instead, Sunja marries an ill minister visiting the village who hears Sunja’s plight and wishes to help. Together, Sunja and the minister set off for Japan, with Sunja leaving behind all she has ever known, including her home and her mother.
Thus kick off the events of a family saga filled to the brim with devastating loss, enraging struggle, and empowering perseverance. Sunja and her family’s story encompass historical details from Korean immigration to Japan and the associated prejudices to the Second World War from an underrepresented perspective.
Min Jin Lee has captured themes of just about every kind in Pachinko, ranging from the immigrant experience and the struggles to make it in a foreign land, to love, death, sacrifice, and parenthood.
Lee paints the histories and landscapes of her novel with a detailed brush, and both her characters and settings bustle with life. Pachinko reads quickly and simply, but carries a profound heft in meaning with its words.
In the end, Pachinko is about the struggle to eek out an existence in a society blind to individual sorrows. Pachinko is about a search for meaning in a murky world, amidst arcs of history that seem to play out around oneself, in separation from oneself.
Pachinko’s name refers to a mechanical gambling game called pachinko, which is popular in Japan. This name smartly sums up the essence of the novel:
“There could only be a few winners,” Lee writes, “and a lot of losers. And yet we played on, because we had hope that we might be the lucky ones.”
Pachinko is the kind of book I search for, hope for, and read for.
A brief note: I don’t claim to be an expert on any of the things I write about here. I encourage you to do your own research and form your own opinions. However, on the topics of colonialism and the historical erasure of indigenous knowledge, I think it’s important for anyone from a colonizing country to discuss and face the true basis of their society. With that in mind, read on!
As humans, we don’t know everything. We will never know everything. But perhaps we don’t know as much as we should, because we have forgotten things, and we have ignored things.
The first human cultures of North America, or Turtle Island, as it more accurately may have been known by the natives of the continent, knew much about its environments. There is a tendency to portray the indigenous of North America as noble savages and romantic spiritualists in touch with the land. This is a stereotype, and it’s unsurprisingly incomplete. The “noble savage” narrative only worsens the tendency to put indigenous cultures into a box of people that existed only in the past, in the days of hunter-gatherers.
The native people who inhabited Turtle Island still exist, and still live throughout the continent. They live in all sorts of places, including cities, suburbs, and reservations. They are not one people or one thing. They are not primitive, or people of the past. They are modern human beings.
This map shows the modern distribution of indigenous peoples in the Americas. Courtesy of Locoluis from the Wikimedia Commons.
Of course, those of European descent have historically marginalized these people, and disregarded all the things they knew and still know. We (I speak as someone with entirely European heritage) assumed we were right, and that we knew everything, and that we were superior. We were wrong.
Take, for example, the disastrous state of the environment today. The tons of greenhouse gas emissions that we’ve emitted into the atmosphere, by way of vehicles, agriculture, manufacturing, and conveniences. We obviously don’t have things under control. Wildfires, in the past several years, have wreaked havoc on drought-ridden lands across the west coast, and they’re only expected to get worse. These fires have been so disastrous at least in part because of decades of fire suppression, which has led to buildups of fire-fueling material on forest floors. Only now are firefighters regularly attempting to reduce the amount of fuel on forest floors with prescribed burns.
Smoke billows west from the Northern California fires of October 2017. Known as the Northern California firestorm, around 250 fires burned at least 250,000 acres and killed at least 44 people. Image courtesy of Copernicus Sentinel Satellite.
However, it was not always this way. Before the invasion of the continent, the indigenous people did not fight fires, and according to M. Kat Anderson’s 2005 book, Tending the Wild, many natives used prescribed burns to clear areas for crops, which may have helped reduce fire fuel buildup. Interestingly, Anderson writes, “California Indians have never advocated leaving nature alone.” Instead, Anderson suggests, the indigenous peoples tended towards intimate interactions and coexistence with the land around them, seeking to balance their appropriation of nature with its ability to renew—though she admits that not all indigenous interactions with nature were perfectly balanced, leading to the degradation of some species.
The cover of M. Kat Anderson’s 2005 book, Tending the Wild. Image courtesy of Goodreads.
The ultimate point is that the indigenous people of today’s Americas understood things about the ecological functions of the environment. This was not just some religious, spiritual connection to the land that made them understand these things intuitively. Rather, these methods of land management were the result of thousands of years of observation and experimentation. To put it another way, these methods were the result of science. While modern science is understood as an institution for those with degrees, science, or at least the scientific method of understanding the world, has effectively existed since the beginning of humanity.
Thus, it should be clear that indigenous cultures have known, and do know, much about the world that we still fail to see. As Cutcha Risling-Baldy, Native American Studies professor at Humboldt State University, has repeatedly told me and her Introduction to Native American Studies class, she likes to keep a folder for “all the things natives have been telling white people for years that they haven’t figured out yet.”
This kind of knowledge has a name: traditional ecological knowledge, or TEK. The name is fairly self-explanatory, but there is much to learn about it online and elsewhere. However, the name isn’t without its critics. As Cutcha says, the word “traditional” signals a primitive knowledge that may or may not have some relevance in the modern world. However, in Cutcha’s opinion, TEK is science, plain and simple. TEK is based on centuries of observation and experimentation, making it just as valid as any modern science. Labeling this knowledge as traditional undermines its potential to help all modern humans establish a sustainable, smart society.
TEK thankfully brings me to the book I am ostensibly reviewing: Peter Høeg’s (pronounced like “who”) Smilla’s Sense of Snow. Smilla’s Sense of Snow is a 1992 Danish novel that digs deep beneath its cover as a detective thriller and delves into a cultural examination of the colonial relationship between Denmark and Greenland. Historically, Greenland has been colonized (or at least attempted to be colonized) and claimed as Danish land. Importantly, while most of Greenland’s population is Inuit, the country still exists as a part of the Kingdom of Denmark. Needless to say, this has created a longstanding tension between the Greenlandic Inuit and the Danish.
Peter Høeg’s 1992 novel, Smilla’s Sense of Snow. Image courtesy of Goodreads.
Smilla, the protagonist of the novel, stands with one foot in both Greenlandic and Danish worlds. Her mother was a Greenlandic Inuit, and her father is a wealthy Danish doctor. Growing up from a young age in Denmark, Smilla never quite fit in, instead living a mostly alienated life as she tries to understand her place in Denmark with her mixed heritage.
The novel kicks off with the death of a young Greenlandic child, Isaiah, whom Smilla had befriended. The Danish police quickly conclude that Isaiah fell off a snowy roof while playing, but Smilla is suspicious. Smilla knows snow, and she believes Isaiah’s footprints show that he was chased off the roof. Troubled, Smilla seeks answers, but the police ignore her and obstruct her investigations.
From there, the novel spirals down into an ambiguous Danish conspiracy. Despite facing constant discrimination and sexism, Smilla struggles, sneaks, and manipulates her way to the truth, at which point the novel ends.
Smilla repeatedly relies on her intuitive environmental knowledge and senses—things she learned from her Greenlandic mother as a child—to uncover the cause of Isaiah’s death. The truth, as Smilla eventually realizes, lies within a certain colonial impulse to constantly grow, objectify people, and relentlessly dig into the earth. Thus, the conspiracy behind the murder mystery serves as a metaphor for the destructive mentality behind colonial imperialism and ideas like manifest destiny.
As Peter Høeg and his novel suggest, colonial claims to other lands have destroyed environments and cultures, leaving behind centuries of accumulated wisdom while devastating future environments. Peter Høeg himself is Danish, so the novel, I imagine, is very much an exploration and attempt at reconciliation with his own culture’s history of colonialism over Greenland.
While Høeg promotes some fairly radical views for a novel from 1992, he also fails to provide any concrete solutions. The novel ends ambiguously, with the reader unsure of how the story resolves. The ending feels purposeful, and perhaps it’s a glance at our own modern setting, in which the repercussions of colonialism and its companion ideologies still reverberate throughout the world. While colonialism as an active process may be over, the effects are still seen in lost cultures, marginalized minorities, and wasteland environments.
The novel, unsurprisingly, leaves you feeling cold. However, as one of my peers stated in the class I read the novel for, “reading Smilla’s Sense of Snow is kind of like watching a horror movie—you know you’re going to get scared and hate it in the moment, but by the end, you’ll be glad you watched it.” (I’m sure my memory is distorting those words, but that’s the essence of what the classmate said.) Høeg’s story is not particularly enjoyable as you read it—it’s gloomy, dark, and uncomfortable—but it keeps pulling you along, both with its mystery and its underlying cultural conflict. Much like reading about an atrocity in a history book, you hate to discover the details, but you know it’s something you ought to do. Høeg makes you think about some rather disturbing possibilities—for example, I found myself wondering if colonialism is simply a result of a natural human impulse toward exploration, exploitation, and domination. If so, can we trust our selves to explore in ways that do not destroy?
In any case, in 1992 Høeg wrote an important novel that still contains relevant critiques. While there are certainly other ways to look into the repercussions of colonialism—including reading indigenous authors, rather than authors of the dominating culture, like Peter Høeg—Smilla’s Sense of Snow makes a necessarily harsh critique of colonialism and all that it has stood for. In the context of the modern aftermath of colonialism, and the ways in which imperialist societies have trampled upon centuries of legitimate knowledge and understanding, Smilla’s Sense of Snow is simply a book you ought to read.
Imagine you’re standing in a thick fog. Imagine that what you can see around of you—just a few feet in circumference—is your perception. Everything else, all that is hidden by the fog, is the rest of reality that you can never know. Now take a step back, and recognize that this is the case for all of us.
Yes, there is much to the world that we can never know. And yet, we must live our lives and assign meaning to our actions, just hoping that we make the right decisions. Perhaps, with this in mind, we shouldn’t take ourselves so seriously.
Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel, The Buried Giant, makes this argument, in its own way. The Buried Giant tells the story of the elderly couple Axl and Beatrice, living in a medieval time of Saxons and Britons and monsters roaming the land. Axl and Beatrice set off at the novel’s opening to find their son, who they have not seen in years—and whose reasons for leaving they can’t quite remember.
That’s the thing about the land of The Buried Giant—nobody seems able to remember much at all of their past. A thick mist has enveloped the villages and hills for years, and it seems the mist has clouded over not just the mountains in the distance but the memories in everyone’s minds.
With little to guide them but a few uncertain details remembered here and there, Axl and Beatrice embark on a quest probably too strenuous for their years. Over the course of the novel’s numerous encounters with knights, monks, and monsters, a twisting thread of love, loss, conflict, and clouded motivations unravels. Through it all, the fickle nature of the characters’ memories throws uncertainty onto the very things the characters have built their lives around:
Axl and Beatrice are lifelong lovers. But are they forgetting things they’ve done to each other, and said to each other?
Axl and Beatrice loved their son, and they believe he left after some sort of argument. But where did he go, and why?
All around them, the Britons and the Saxons grit their teeth on the edge of war. But why are they fighting, for what are they fighting, and who is on whose side?
The Buried Giant dumps cold water over our notions of integrity and having a strong moral compass. Instead, Ishiguro colors the whole world with shades of grey, with everybody conflicted and nobody faultless. Meanwhile, those capable of doing so manipulate flamboyant and fragile feelings, throwing characters into doubt, anger, and war. As Ishiguro writes, “Who knows what will come when quick-tempered men make ancient grievances rhyme with their fresh desire for land and conquest?”
Such a question resonates rather deeply today.
The story of Axl and Beatrice, at the story’s core, will surely wrench your heart out by the novel’s end. Ishiguro, if you’ve never read his work, is a master of subtly unwinding a story that you only appreciate by its end. By The Buried Giant’s end, Ishiguro has broken down the fictions his characters have told themselves, and they only have each other to try to hold on to.
The Buried Giant certainly takes its time—possibly to a fault—but Ishiguro makes it worth your while. Compared to his other novels, The Buried Giant sways more definitely into a specific genre than any other—in this case, fantasy. Yet, at its core, The Buried Giant carries itself as essential Ishiguro material, filled with his signatures themes of love, loss, muddied memory, and understated profundity.
I’ll start with a book I recently read and loved: Borne, by Jeff VanderMeer (whose other novel, Annihilation, just enjoyed a movie adaptation).
Borne paints pictures of a strange, bleak world that captivates with bizarre creatures and desperate humans. VanderMeer creates characters of depth torn apart by the mysteries and terrors of their world.
More specifically, Borne tells the story of a woman named Rachel, who finds a strange, shapeshifting creature she names Borne. In this world, where a giant flying bear named Mord roams the skies and dominates the wastes, Rachel and her companion Wick scavenge and survive. They wander the land, sticking to the shadows to avoid other dangerous scavengers. Meanwhile, the Company, the alleged source of Mord and the chemical waste, looms in the distance. Inside the Company, perhaps Rachel, who remembers little of her life before the waste, can find answers.
The story pins Rachel as a bleak investigator of her world, trying to understand the growing, childlike Borne and her relationship with it. She tries also to understand the Company and its functions, Wick and his strange conditions, and the Magician, the mysterious woman who roams the wastes and encroaches upon Rachel and Wick’s hideout. Where the story ultimately goes from this premise, I did not expect.
I read Borne in less than a week. VanderMeer’s writing captivated me throughout. Reading Borne was like traveling to a foreign country, in which nothing was familiar and everything was a question mark. Every page felt like the unraveling of just the most basicof answers, tethered together by the beautiful burgeoning relationship between Rachel and Borne.
As the conflicts between Rachel, Borne, Wick, Mord, the Company, and the Magician arise and resolve, the novel asks cutting questions about the future of humanity, especially concerning our current environmental woes: if the world devolves into barren wastelands, what will we hold on to? Who will we turn to, and how will we cope? Will we grow to accept the strange and unfamiliar, keeping together our kindness and love? Or will we give in to savagery?
As VanderMeer writes, “We all just want to be people, and none of us really know what that means.”
While Borne sounds bleak–is bleak–I felt surprisingly optimistic about the world after reading it. Even if the world gets much worse (which it often seems to be doing), there will still be things worth living for. As I think Borne reveals, it’s just a matter of climbing out of your hole of despair, reframing your perspective to encompass the larger context of the planet, and finding new forms of solidarity and community. The world will change, maybe even collapse, but so long as there are humans, we will find things to live for, and likely find ways to thrive.
With that said, Borne also serves as a warning against complicity in our own collapse:
“Once, it was different,” Rachel reflects at one point. “Once, people had homes and parents and went to schools. Cities existed within countries and those countries had leaders. Travel could be for adventure or recreation, not survival. But by the time I was grown up, the wider context was a sick joke. Incredible, how a slip could become a freefall and a freefall could become a hell where we lived on as ghosts in a haunted world.”
The world of Borne continues to nag at me–despite it’s improbable beings, it feels too close, too possible. We don’t want that world.
Now, is this novel flawless? No.
There was a slight lull in pace in the middle of the book. It lacks fast-paced action. It can feel morbid, although it somehow remains vigilant.
However, nobody should expect a perfect book, and with that in mind, this is one that I wholeheartedly recommend. Even if you might step away feeling briefly dejected, it’s worth your time.
On the windswept, wild, and foggy Farallon Islands, off the coast of San Francisco, a group of scientists live in a cabin, where they research the life of the landscape: birds, sharks, whales. The Lightkeepers tells the story of Miranda, a traveling photographer who makes her way to the islands and finds her place amongst the socially-distant scientists. The novel is framed as a journal, written by Miranda to her long-dead mother, chronicling the events on the islands over the course of about a year.
I’m not a crier. Not necessarily by choice—I’d say it’s healthy to cry—but I’m just not brought to tears often.
Imagine you’re standing in a thick fog. Imagine that what you can see around of you—just a few feet in circumference—is your perception. Everything else, all that is hidden by the fog, is the rest of reality that you can never know. Now take a step back, and recognize that this is the case for all of us.
I’ll start with a book I recently read and loved: Borne, by Jeff VanderMeer (whose other novel, Annihilation, just enjoyed a movie adaptation).
Wilde About Books 