Tree of Smoke - Denis Johnson

Denis Johnson (1949-)

This book is not on the list, but since I'm in love with Denis Johnson, and it's November...I decided to take a short break from the list and read actual good books for a change and as always Denis Johnson does not disappoint.

Tree of Smoke encompasses 20 years around the aftermath of the Vietnam war, beginning with the assassination of JFK and ending in 1983 where the casualties of the war still limp from place to place, soul searching for a sense of meaning in a wanderlust that leads his characters to be forever pilgrims in a heartbreaking world of chaos.

The book focuses on the the elusive and shattering experience of a war without meaning on the many lives it engulfs, heroes that begin their trek with a sense of purpose and order only to come up against a world impervious to order and hostile to meaning.

Skip Sands, an officer of sorts for the CIA has become the renegade operative following orders from his strange and erratic uncle, a Kurtz type from Conrad's Heart of Darkness, creating his own rules and running his own missions. Tree of Smoke is his mission of disinformation that he intends to unleash on the VC, but in a land where all information is suspect, where there are no rules nor understanding of protocol, his disinformation only serves to make the murky haze of any sort of substantial truth even harder to find as the swirling disinformation traps them all in a quagmire of uncertainty.

James Houston and his brother Bill both enlist. Both anticipating the glory that still resonates from the last great war, both finding instead a world that crushes them stripping them of their souls. Bill gets out as soon as possible only to find himself aimless, lost in the do-nothing streets of Arizona, while James becomes addicted to Vietnam signing up for one tour after another, requesting assignment with the more fringe battalions where there are even less rules and where they operate in a system of cowboy survival.

Kathy Jones is a nurse in a small Vietnamese village, struggling with her faith, struggling with the hopelessness of loss, struggling with the stench that invades everything the smell of blood and offal and the inescapable pain and heartache of an endlessly torched world without a savior.  After Tet, she makes her way to a veterinary clinic in hopes of finding medication for the now many displaced and orphaned children only to find the proprietors overcome with grief over the loss of their monkeys. As they sit surrounded by devastation the scientists reminisce about their monkeys while children in the streets are dying. Kathy, a stoic, a survivor continues to nurse men, women and children in one Vietnamese hamlet after another, waiting for the end of the war.

By 1983, not one of the many characters has remained fully intact. The shrapnel of Vietnam has penetrated their souls and bones to the very marrow, leaving empty shadow people to make sense of their lives and pick up the pieces over and over again. Just as there was no definitive winner to the war, there is also no definitive end; the war is carried with the survivors, ruminated like cud, never to be fully digested.

"She sat in the audience thinking - someone here has cancer, someone has a broken heart, someone's soul is lost, someone feels naked and foreign, thinks they once knew the way but can't remember the way, feels stripped of armor and alone, there are people in this audience with broken bones, others whose bones will break sooner or later, people who've ruined their health, worshiped their own lies, spat on their dreams, turned their backs on their true beliefs, yes, yes, and all will be saved. All will be saved. All will be saved."

Ethan Frome - Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton (1862-1937)

So the other day I was going through my Western Canon list, lovingly looking at all the crossed off books, fondly rereading or attempting to read my notes in my almost indecipherably small handwriting (which I use to compensate for my abysmal spelling) when I came across a blank spot...how had I managed to not actually read Ethan Frome? So I grabbed a copy from the library and sat down to what would be an anticipated horrible time.

I guess I have avoided Ethan Frome because the spoiler is bandied about by just about everyone. Why would I want to read a book about a botched suicide that takes place in the silent snowdrifts of New England? Well I wouldn't really, but it's on the list so here it goes.

This book, as expected, was my least favorite of Wharton's novels, although her novels tend to be depressing, fraught with the societal restrictions and conventions that must always keep her heroes and heroines struggling against insurmountable odds,  impoverished and hopelessly misunderstood...this novel or "nouvelle" as she called it was her attempt to teach herself French...and that is sort of the vibe you get while reading it. Something that begins as an exercise in French with a simplistic plot line that lends itself to easy translation into a foreign language doesn't bode well.

I was rereading my review of the Custom of the Country  and found this little gem: " I even found myself whispering under my breath "please Edith Wharton....just make a huge rock fall out of the sky and land on her...not killing her but leaving her horribly maimed and crippled and yet alive enough to live out her endless years in the anguish of being truly hideous..." That is basically the plot of Ethan From...minus the rock...so what's not to love?"

1) The story of  Ethan Frome is pieced together by a young engineer, temporarily trapped first by a strike and then by inclement weather in a small town in western Massachusetts.  The engineer after noticing this strange crippled man shuffling about his business one day finds himself sitting next to him in Frome's wagon hearing his life story. Plot lines like this always feel forced, although Isak Dinesen could pull off the story within a story trope pretty well...Wharton tends to need 300 pages to warm up...so shrinking everything down to 140 pages and having an unnamed Engineer do most of the work seems slightly  unjust and unsatisfying...

2) Most Wharton characters are established individuals, very rarely did I come across a Dickensian type characterture bumbling through the story line...but one of the things I like least about this book is the way Zeenia's character is treated. First she's the buxom cousin that has come to help Ethan tend to his dying mother...and then in a nanosecond she's a toothless hag of a women, constantly sucking her false teeth and clutching around in her least attractive garb, a histrionic personality that suffers constant aches and pains that can never be cured or even identified...  But because she is so grotesque and horrible...does it justify Ethan's actions? Being caught between an aging wife that isn't what she used to be and a younger more beautiful cousin Mattie  isn't really an interesting story it feels more like a painful rom-com that centers around justifiable infidelity.

3) The big idea is that they are going to sled themselves into a tree (Ethan and Mattie) rather than face being apart, which is being imminently forced on them by evil heinous Zeenia...hitting the tree is supposed to kill them instantly while they leave this world held in a perpetual embrace...and yet they botch it. It's not really they're fault though...sledding into a tree is probably the least quantitatively effective way of dying. I have sled into many a tree and street lamp for that matter...and while there where moments when I wish I had died as I crawled home praying there would be no residual scarring or injuries and that my legs would continue to grow at an even rate...I never even came close to the euphoric death scene they have pictured...which makes me wonder if Wharton had ever been sledding herself or if this was just one of those things somewhat unruly people did for fun somewhere west of Massachusetts...

As a treatise on the stunted lives filled with flaccid hope and perpetual regret that the people of small impoverished towns must face and attempt to absolve in their day to day lives, Ethan Frome does create a world where there is no escape, where one is forced into one life altering course after another, there is no individual power to rise above the elements of fate. Like most Wharton characters Ethan is caught between what he sees as a potential future of happiness and the perpetually bleak reality of his life, tantalizingly close enough to foster hope and yet always just slightly beyond reach.  The desire for change and freedom are constantly undermined as the gravestones around his house seem mockingly to say "we never got away - how should you..."

Fiskadoro - Denis Johnson

Denis Johnson (1949-)

Once again, reading Denis Johnson makes me happy to be alive. His writing is like something I have never come across before; it is free and unique and creates worlds that are easily inhabitable. His characters are presented in ways that make them not only familiar, no matter how marginal and foreign they actually are, but they become people you know, people you empathize with, even if they are drug addicted peeping toms. Somehow you find yourself relating to his characters in an almost intimate way.

Fiskadoro is a post-apocalyptic tale about a world left ravaged by World War III, or some form of nuclear catastrophe, wiping out most of civilization and leaving the little that remains to live in a primitive world absolved of memory. The people that remain try to create some form of order to their lives. In a world now devoid of rules and regulations, they suffer loss, anguish and alienation and try to pick up the pieces of who they are and where they've come from, while the memories of their past life slowly dissolve leaving them existing in a state of tabula rasa; their memories left to entropy in the hot sand of the Florida Keys.

The Florida Keys, are now called "Twicetown" because twice atomic bombs were dropped that somehow never detonated, and now these bombs provide the backdrop for all societal gatherings, weddings and funerals that take place in the "town center" which has slowly grown around the bombs. The town is really an evolving barrios, created from anything scavenged the locals can find; the detritus of a foreign world and past life. Old car seats make couches in the roughly constructed huts and abandoned xerox copiers become podiums, while occasionally old radios spit out bits of Bob Marley and Jimi Hendrix, men now seen as prophets or potential messiahs.

The book follows three main characters, Fiskadoro, a 14 year old boy, that like any young boy is trying to find a place for himself in a world with a strange mercurial order. He is slightly embarrassed of his name, which translated can mean fisherman, but which he wishes was translated as harpooner. He is shy, infatuated with women, but too embarrassed to avidly pursue them, instead he decides to take up clarinet playing, being the sole proprietor of one of the only two clarinets possibly to survive the Armageddon.

Fiskadoro asks the manager of the Miami Symphony Orchestra, which is comprised of about 4 people, to teach him to play the clarinet. The manager, Mr. Cheung, agrees and although the lessons seem to go nowhere, Fiskadoro being more enthusiastic than talented, Mr. Cheung slowly becomes a pillar of stability in the boys life. As Fiskadoro's life, built on the sandy dunes of vapid understanding, slowly crumbles around him, one day he walks farther along the beach than ever before, following a swamp girl into the unknown.

"Below the level of the dune the wind was stuck. It was like being swallowed alive. The air choked him, and he recognized the odor - it was hers; she smelled like the swamps, like her birthplace and her home. To follow her over the dunes and out of earshot and eyesight of his people, his head spinning and his throat blocked with the honey of tears, was not to know whether he would live or die. Don't look what I'm doing! he begged the dark sea."

Mr. Cheung is the only protagonist who can tangibly feel that there's something missing. An answer, always out of reach, to the question of why and how. He remembers burning copies of the constitution as a young boy to try and stay warm. His family each took two paragraphs to memorize, and now to soothe himself he repeats the constitution, or names the 50 states, places that no longer exist and terms that are now utterly meaningless. He constantly searches for an answer, his mind racing to make sense of the incompleteness and longing for a past he can't recover. His efforts to find something that will explain the End of the World are perpetually thwarted only leaving him more confused and lost, floating without a lifeline in the detritus of a ravaged history.

The last protagonist is Mr. Cheung's impossibly old grandmother who although has survived through the catastrophe can no longer communicate her thoughts. Mr. Cheung constantly regrets that she never told him the story of her life before it was too late and she only uttered strange guttural noises or sat with her lips moving, producing no sound as if no longer able to remember how to communicate.

"...her leathery old Chinese monkey face collapsing into her secret deliberations, her jaw slack, her smokey breath audible in the silences between Sydney Bechet exercises, and her black eyes so totally opaque he couldn't tell if they were sightless, dead, or coldly burning."

 His grandmother had fallen asleep one night in Key West in a world fraught with conspicuous consumption and politics, only to awake the next morning in a world that had ended and "thenceforth to live her life in the southernmost region of the Quarantine, in a time between civilization and a place ignored by authority."

But the grandmother hadn't always been a "sucked-out old woman with the face of a monkey and the skin of someone who had drowned," she had once been a beautiful girl named Marie, and while she sits in her chair chewing on the wrong end of a cigarette  she slowly ruminates about the past and how she's managed to survive. Her memories are disjointed vignettes, cryptically describing her survival; yet leaving so many questions forever unanswered. Unable to articulate her memories or even distinguish between the real and the imagined, the past and present are a blur of consciousness, she knows only that she survived. She knows only that survival cost her everything, and that she abandoned her family, her will and her past in order to continue living.

What I found to be really terrific about this book was Johnson's ability to create a post-apocalyptic world that rather than being dominated by fear, looting and a "Wild Wild West" mentality, instead is dominated by confusion. The people that survive are left to pick up the pieces while language slowly blends into a pigeon English, a poorly constructed patois of English and Spanish telling of the societal decay that has kept them locked in a dreamless void of understanding. His characters exist in a disembodied dream state, but rather than the apathy of post modernism and the angst of existential nihilism they embody a new way of living embracing the only philosophy that makes sense: survive.

According to the May 1, 1985 New York Times review of this book: "Fiskadoro is not the easiest novel to describe. It's the sort of book that a young Herman Melville might have written had he lived today and studied such disparate works as the Bible, "The Waste Land," "Fahrenheit 451" and "Dog Soldiers," screened "Star Wars" and "Apocalypse Now" several times, dropped a lot of acid and listened to hours of Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones. It's a wildly ambitious book, full of mythology and philosophical speculation about the nature of time and memory and the endurance of language and art. At times it's beautifully poetic, at times insanely rhetorical, but its strange, hallucinatory vision of America and modern history is never less than compelling."

The Moviegoer - Walker Percy

Walker Percy (1916-1990)

So before I go any further, let me quickly address the Knopf 1988, 16th edition cover as seen on the left. The caption says:

"Why is the hero of this novel a moviegoer? Why does an intelligent, successful, young New Orleans businessman go to the movies avidly, fiercely - even to silly movies? The answer.."

When I finally picked up my copy from the library, after waiting for it to come in on loan from a different branch, I felt a slight tremor of worry. This is perhaps the worst book cover I have ever seen and makes me hate the protagonist and the graphic designer all before even opening the book. After I finally worked up enough gumption to hesitantly open the book and worryingly peer into its abyss...I was confronted with breathtaking prose and perhaps the best book I have read in a while. Percy is a brilliant author, his writing drips with elegiac prose, some of my favorite being:

 "The earth has memories of winter and lies cold and sopping wet from dew..."

 "...dragging his Saskatchewan sleeping bag like the corpse of his dead hope.."

"We were free, moreover to that or anything else, but instead on we rushed, a little vortex of despair moving through the world like the still eye of a hurricane."

The cover misses the point of the book entirely. This is not a book about going to the movies. It's a book about surviving, about combating the malaise that comes from living endlessly, purposelessly, alone and disconnected and the triumph of surviving day after day in a world that often doesn't make sense, filled with heartache and pointless suffering.

The epigram is taken from Kierkegaard's The Sickness Unto Death and says "...the specific character of despair is precisely this: it is unaware of being despair."

Our protagonist is Binx Bolling, a young New Orleander who currently works for his uncle as a stock-broker. After returning from the Korean War, Binx tries to make sense of the world, while feeling alienated from his own life. Although he is good at making money, his life is sepia colored and he desperately seeks the vibrancy and order he sees in films or reads of in books. He is on a search for something beyond the everyday monotony and as he works and wanders aimlessly his quest for meaning follows strict guidelines and requires rigorous study.

"What is the nature of the search? you ask? Really it is very simple, at least for a fellow like me; so simple that it is easily overlooked. The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everdayness of his own life...To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair."

Although hesitant to discuss the true object of his search, it is evident that what Binx is looking for are the little moments that rise above the brume of the mundane. Although Binx spends hours lost in the otherness of the silver screen, searching for a sense of place, a sense of self; he never does so without first tethering himself to the here and now by having at least one conversation with the movie house staff. Relationship precedes understanding.

"Nowadays when a person lives somewhere, in a neighborhood, the place is not certified for him. More than likely he will live there sadly and the emptiness inside him will expand until it evacuates the entire neighborhood. But if he sees a movie which shows his very neighborhood, it becomes possible for him to live, for a time at least, as a person who is Somewhere and not Anywhere."

While he somewhat aimlessly searches for meaning, his interactions with his family leave him often further away from his objective. Each family member assesses Binx's life and finds it wanting. At the brink of his 30th birthday they still continue to find new goals and job opportunities for him, unsatisfied with his choice of work, thinking he has more to offer than merely deciphering stocks and bonds. But what does that mean? How is his value assessed?

Rather than search for comprehensive understanding, meaning, instead can be found in little pockets of place buttressed by the truthfulness of its identity, if any one of us can simply find the right place, "a shuttered place of brick and vine and flowing water, ...life can be lived."

 In contrast to the existential nihilism that permeates the postmodern era, Binx although caught in the introductory weightlessness, the precursor to despair, is not hopeless. He has a plan for combating the soul-sucking malaise, the angst and disillusionment; he is a remarkable protagonist finding moments of hope in the never ending vapidity of life.

Binx accepts the moments for what they are, rather than fighting sleeplessness, rather than obeying societal conventions and having appropriate hobbies, Binx could care less. Hobbies are for people that suffer from the most noxious despair by simply tranquilizing it.  "I muse along as quietly as a ghost. Instead of trying to sleep I try to fathom the mystery of this suburb at dawn." He combats hopelessness through what he calls rotations, which he defines as the "experience of the new beyond the expectation of the experience of the new. For example, taking one's first trip to Taxco would not be a rotation, or no more than a very ordinary rotation; but getting lost on the way and discovering a hidden valley would be."

As Binx's search culminates in a sleepy attempt to prove or disprove God he makes a note for himself for the next day's search:

"It no longer avails to start with creatures and prove God. Yet it is impossible to rule God out. The only possible starting point: the strange fact of one's own invincible apathy - that is the proofs were proved and God presented himself, nothing would be changed. Here is the strangest fact of all. Abraham saw signs of God and believed. Now the only sign is that all the signs in the world make no difference. Is this god's ironic revenge? But I am onto him..."

Them - Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates (1938-)

Out of the few Joyce Carol Oates books I have read I would not say this was my favorite. It seems like there are only two states her characters can occupy, being vibrantly awake or sleep-walking, which results in a lot of the book feeling somewhat aimless and dreamy.

The book centers around three members of a family, each trying to find their way, each battling the ogres of fate and buttressing their dreams against the chaos of reality. Each of them can see where they would like to be, who they would like to become, but the journey of getting there is one fraught with pain and heartache, yet they survive, because it's not that easy to die; even death is something that must be worked at, fought for and often remains illusive.

The protagonists, Loretta and her two children Jules and Maureen all try to rise above the poverty and trauma of life amidst the chaos and turbulence of the 1960's. Loretta begins life with a crazy, alcoholic father and a murderous brother. Loretta's life is irrevocable changed by circumstances outside her control and in an instant she becomes a different sort of person than she ever dreamed possible, slowly transforming into the belligerent housewife she previously despised. Loretta evolves from a thankful mousy young wife, to a loud, sweaty, perpetually housecoat wearing woman as she passes the baton of hope for a new life to her children.

Jules, the oldest son, knows from childhood that he is destined for greatness; that he belongs somewhere else other than the slovenly shanty he occupies with his family. He spends his childhood dreaming of escape. Lost in a world of fantasy, aloof from his family, unable to believe he shares anything in common with them. As he navigates the shifting world, his life is filled with false starts and broken dreams, always searching for love beneath the rubble, until he becomes obsessed with a woman fated to kill his love or kill him. But death is chimerical and instead Jules remains alive, lost in a dream, floating through the chaos of the Detroit riots, unseeing and unseen.

"He himself was a man inside a piece of rotten fruit - it kept getting in his mouth. The sky had a melony, overdone, orange-brown cast, a rotten cast to it, unmistakably...Jules walked along, he was like the invisible child he had tried to imagine himself years ago. But now he had become truly invisible..."

Jules searches endlessly for love, obsessed with an undefinable idea, a tangible thing, this always illusory love. He passionately devours those that find their way onto his path, always striving to obtain a certain something, a certain finality, a mutual understanding. At one point after finding a woman he believes to encompass all that he has searched for, to define what it is that for so long has been lost behind a myopic and dreamy world...they embark together for a new life. But his passion for her is too great, it terrifies her and as he physically becomes ill overcome by desire and eventually the flu, it leaves him lying in his own excrement in a putrid hotel room, while his dream girl vanishes and he lays there wondering if she ever truly existed.

Maureen has the most potential. She is quiet and studious, treating her scholastic duties as part of a sacrosanct ritual. She has been given the blessing of education and despite the chaos of her family, the dirty squalid apartment; her mother running around with different men, each having the potential to become a new father; despite he brother's constant disappearances and her sisters wild and raucous lifestyle always bordering of petty crime of some sort or another, Maureen studies. She dutifully makes dinner when her mother is comatose. She nurses her grandmother who is too sick and melancholy to look after herself. Her only fault is that she is too good. That she doesn't stand up for herself. That she doesn't escape soon enough like Jules.

When she does finally develop a plan of escape it catastrophically backfires and leaves her for a time split in two. Her hopes and dreams packing their bags and leaving for better pasture, while she sits in bed, no longer motivated to escape, no longer motivated to live. Waiting. Waiting for life to call her back, waiting for a hope or a dream to flutter its way back into her lifeless soul.

"The woman by the radiator gets to her feet. She is heavy, she seems pained when she stands: thick cream-colored fat-marbled old legs, veins cracking and rising to the surface, a woman of middle age. Oh, we women know things you don't know, you teachers, you writers, you readers of books, we are the ones who wait around libraries when it's time to leave, or sit drinking coffee alone in the kitchen; we make crazy plans for marriage but have no man, we dream of stealing men, we get off a bus and can't even find what we are looking for, can't quite remember how we got there, we are always wondering what will come next..."

Jesus' Son - Denis Johnson

Denis Johnson (1945-)

Jesus' Son is a collection of short stories, each focusing on the hallucinatory experiences of an unnamed protagonists living on the west coast in the 70's consumed by addiction, trying to describe the psychedelic dream world that oscillates between reality. Unlike most addiction memoirs I have read, there isn't a sense of trying to understand why or how he arrives at some of his low points, but rather each day of survival is somehow a surprising gift, which he does his best to describe judiciously.

In "Dirty Wedding" the protagonist describes bringing his girlfriend to an abortion clinic, on their way being sprinkled by holy water by the protesters which is unable to penetrate them. As he waits in the lobby he watches a video on vasectomies and tells the man sitting next to him this is the last time he's ever going to get a girl pregnant. When the nurse comes in to tell him the procedure is over and his girlfriend is fine, he asks if she is dead, telling the nurse he kind of wishes she was...someone else, an innocent bystander has been made to suffer for their mistakes. They can destroy their lives as much as they want, but the reality of destroying another's life is almost too much to bear. As he waits for her to recover he wanders around town looking for drugs, stopping at an old hotel turned drug den where black pimps in fur coats protect women that were "blank, shining areas with photographs of sad girls floating in them." 

"When we were arguing on my twenty-fourth birthday, she left the kitchen, came back with a pistol, and fired it at me five times from right across the table. But she missed. It wasn't my life she was after. It was more. She wanted to eat my heart and be lost in the desert with what she'd done, she wanted to fall on her knees and give birth from it, she wanted to hurt me as only a child can be hurt by its mother.

I know they argue about whether or not it's right, whether or not the baby is alive at this point or that point in its growth inside the womb. This wasn't about that. It wasn't about what the lawyers did. It wasn't about what the doctors did, it wasn't about what the woman did. It was about what the mother and father did together."

Throughout the narrative he is an accomplice in the murder of baby bunnies, robs houses of copper wiring, pays for pills the size of eggs comprised of unspecified substances, becomes a peeping tom on a Mennonite family and mixes reality with the lucidity of his dreams so that the two become indistinguishable as he teeters on the edge of his destruction.

At one point in his narrative about his scheduled peeping on the Mennonites, he realizes this is pretty debase even for a drug addicted morally ambivalent drifter, and asks himself "How could I do it, how could a person go that low? And I understand your question, to which I reply, Are you kidding? That's nothing. I'd been much lower than that. And I expected to see myself do worse."

In a way, the common theme among all these stories is the lack of shame he feels. Just like the crippled and debilitated, his life is a complete and objective wreck and he makes no excuses for it.  He eventually takes a part time job at a Home for the disabled, and there meets a young man crippled with multiple sclerosis, only 33 but already unable to talk, beyond clamping his lips repeatedly around his protruding tongue while groaning...

"No more pretending for him! He was a completely and openly mess. Meanwhile the rest of us go on trying to fool each other..."

As he begins a tentative road to recovery for perhaps the millionth time, he sits with his girlfriend and describes his new approach to life, trying to fit in at work, trying not to steal, trying to see each task through to completion. His goal is simply to try, not necessarily succeed and as he slowly gets better each day, although still ramped up on Antabuse, which apparently doesn't count he finds solace in the disabled home.

"All these weirdos  and me getting a little better every day right in the midst of them. I had never known, never imagined for a heartbeat, that there might be a place for people like us."

Part of his job is to simply walk through the hall and touch people... because ultimately surviving can be a lonely journey. When a muscular grey haired man routinely takes him by the shirt front and admonishes him for dreaming, the protagonist covers his fingers with his own. When a woman, debilitated by a muscular disease, who is perpetually falling out of her chair, cries "Lord! Lord" he walks by and runs his fingers through her hair. Although their souls are untethered as they wander in and out of reality, it is this moment of touch, like a universal truth or a panacea that they all crave, a reminder that no matter who you are, we are all the same. We are all lost human beings trying survive and clinging to the shards of humanity to remind us why we go on living.

The Sheltering Sky - Paul Bowles

Paul Bowles (1910-1999)

It is sometime recently after the ending of World War II and Port and Kit Moresby in an attempt to put their lives back together, in the aftermath of a now atomic world order, decide to travel through Africa. Their marriage is in chaos, like everything else around them, and they believe spending time in the solitude of the Sahara will ground them in a reality that can one day begin to make sense. Yet as if afraid to truly confront their intrinsic existence, their failing marriage and the ever widening chasm of utter meaninglessness, they bring along a friend, Tunner, who neither seem particularly inclined to interact with and rather spend most of their time trying to avoid. Yet Tunner serves his purpose as being the foil that keeps them from stepping out into the clarity of their meaningless lives.

The book is comprised of three parts and within the first part the reader is given a taste of the despair that comes with existential nihilism, while retaining a modicum of hope. This is a love story between two people suffering to be seen, or heard or prove they exist. They are constantly within reach of each other's grasp, only to find the canyon wider than they expected. Their conversations are peppered with false starts, while each tries to bridge the gap of their intimacy and yet both stop on the edge of the precipice, realizing the canyon is insurmountable. Yet with each passing day, as they share the agony of the heat and the constant discomfort of Saharan living it seems like the canyon, although still infinitely depthless could be leapt, if one of them would take the initiative.

Yet both seem caught in the hopeless of life, the never ending monotony of it all, unpressed for time, they wait exchanging little more than pleasantries.

"Before I was twenty, I mean, I used to think that life was a thing that kept gaining impetus. It would get richer and deeper each year. You kept learning more, getting wiser, having more insight, going further into the truth-" She hesitated.

"Port laughed abruptly. 'And now you know it's not like that. Right? It's more like smoking a cigarette. The first few puffs it tastes wonderful, and you don't even think of it ever being used up. Then you begin taking it for granted. Suddenly you realize it's nearly burned down to the end. And then's when you're conscious of the bitter taste."

In part two Port and Kit have successfully evaded Tunner and exchanged one scorching desert town for another. Port's passport has disappeared and with it a sense of his identity, as he is preoccupied with the unsettling feeling that without a piece of paper proving his existence he is a walking shadow he  continues to weave an intricate web of resolution between himself and Kit. One day he realizes Tunner has found them and is on his way to their little town, Port's plan of an unhurried resolution with Kit seem to be foiled until he realizes there is a bus out of town at the end of the day. He convinces the bus driver Kit is ill and must leave the city and spend time convalescing in the country to improve her health, and after expensive bribery, the bus driver is convinced to find two seats among the already filled bus for them. Port tells Kit she must feign illness, which she does begrudgingly, annoyed at having to participate is such a ruse only hours later to realize Port is suffering from the onset of Typhoid.

The last part of the book they are forced to come to terms with the finality of life and the cruelty and heartache of their existence.  Kit, unable to confront reality, becomes lost deeper and deeper in the expanse of the Sahara which becomes an antidote to the ever poisoning of her soul, which she acknowledges is the weariest part of the body. Soul-sick and broken, she refuses to return to society and chooses to rather hide inside herself, joining an Arab caravan, despondent to her fate.

"Before her eyes was the violent blue sky- nothing else. For an endless moment she looked into it. Like a great overpowering sound it destroyed everything in her mind, paralyzed her. Someone once said to her that the sky hides the night behind it, shelters the person beneath from the horror that lies above."

While this book was perhaps one of the saddest and at times physiologically horrifying books I have read, it was also the best book I have read in a long time. The reader is instantly gripped in the tragedy of their lives, the fruitlessness of it, the meaninglessness of it and is kept almost in a constant state of panic that time is running out, and the unease of not entirely understanding what it all means.