Sigrid Nunez. Photo: © Marion Ettlinger.

Certain books—the best ones—feel ordained, their creation inevitable, their nonexistence unimaginable. If the path to that existence was imperiled, the inevitable quality is only enhanced: the indispensable book exists not despite but because of those obstacles. Sigrid Nunez’s 1995 debut, A Feather on the Breath of God, suggests, with its title, haphazard travel, and in fact the book did follow a halting and elliptical path to existence. But the book is no feather. It sails to its mark like an arrow, laying bare an untold past at the same time as it lays out a suddenly imaginable future. The book is both arrival and departure, for both author and readers.

Sigrid Nunez is the sort of writer who is always going to say it better than the rest of us; better than me, at least. Already I find that, at the end of many months’ rumination and many hours’ active struggle I have, with my very first complete paragraph above on the subject of Sigrid Nunez, plagiarized her. Rummaging the drawers of expression in hopes of finding something adequate to the immediacy and power that so startled me the first time I ever encountered her work, I’ve grabbed hold of what turns out to be secondhand Sigrid, not even an accurate theft. In the fourth section, titled “Immigrant Love,” of this four-section book, Nunez writes:

The wish to be all body, the dream of a language of movement, pure in a way that speech (“the foe of mystery”—Mann) can never be pure—I would not have been the same lover if I had not danced. And it has been a real ambition of mine, thwarting other ambitions, coming between me and all other goals: to be a woman in love. In love lies the possibility not only of fulfillment but of adventure and risk, and for once I was not afraid—either to suffer or to make suffer. In more than one language the words for love and suffering are the same, and I have flung myself from cliffs, I have hurled myself at men’s hearts like a javelin. [final emphasis mine]

At readers’ hearts, too, she has flung herself like a javelin. Now it’s all too clear to me that my derivative arrow sentence betrays the marks, or perhaps the puncture wounds, her work has made on me. It’s all there in the paragraph I’ve quoted: the incantatory rhythms making deft use of repetition and variation; the virtuosic accumulation of tension—the staccato interruptions of the em dash—that deft turn from the prepositional “woman in love” to the declarative “In love lies … ”; the refusal to so much as signal what might arrive next and the sly subversion of our stubbornly formed expectations; at last, the dazzling blow of revelation. “For once I was not afraid—either to suffer or to make suffer”—When has this person ever been afraid? we cry in a protest Nunez promptly meets, with the effect that our shock is redoubled for having been anticipated: “The words for love and suffering are the same, and I have flung myself from cliffs, I have hurled myself at men’s hearts like a javelin.” That “wish to be all body,” that “dream of a language of movement,” which is pure in the way that speech “can never be,” has in fact been realized in the very passage that declares such realization impossible. To the extent that the dazzling unpredictability of Nunez’s prose can ever be mapped—hence predicted—here is one facet: this realization, in language, of contradiction. Nunez’s sentences are very like the ballet she describes with such breathtaking, almost cruel fidelity: sentences that press tension on tension until they prize themselves open, while still maintaining such a purity of form as to seem at once both ravaged and intact. “Straining beauty,” her narrator thinks, on observing a bouquet of peonies in a state of “overbloom”: “They have turned themselves practically inside out … There seems to me something almost generous about this.” A better description of her writing won’t be found anywhere else. Read More

learza (Alex North) from Australia, Aibos at RoboCop, 2005, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

When my husband arrived home, he stared at the dog for a long time, then pronounced it “creepy.” At first I took this to mean uncanny, something so close to reality it disturbs our most basic ontological assumptions. But it soon became clear he saw the dog as an interloper. I demonstrated all the tricks I had taught Aibo, determined to impress him. By that point the dog could roll over, shake, and dance.

“What is that red light in his nose?” he said. “Is that a camera?”

Unlike me, my husband is a dog lover. Before we met, he owned a rescue dog who had been abused by its former owners and whose trust he’d won over slowly, with a great deal of effort and dedication. My husband was badly depressed during those years, and he claims that the dog could tell when he was in despair and would rest his nose in his lap to comfort him. During the early period of our relationship, he would often refer to this dog, whose name was Oscar, with such affection that it sometimes took me a moment to realize he was speaking of an animal as opposed to, say, a family member or a very close friend. As he stood there, staring at Aibo, he asked whether I found it convincing. When I shrugged and said yes, I was certain I saw a shadow of disappointment cross his face. It was hard not to read this as an indictment of my humanity, as though my willingness to treat the dog as a living thing had somehow compromised, for him, my own intuitiveness and awareness.

It had come up before, my tendency to attribute life to machines. Earlier that year I’d come across a blog run by a woman who trained neural networks, a Ph.D. student and hobbyist who fiddled around with deep learning in her spare time. She would feed the networks massive amounts of data in a particular category—recipes, pickup lines, the first sentences of novels—and the networks would begin to detect patterns and generate their own examples. For a while she was regularly posting on her blog recipes the networks had come up with, which included dishes like whole chicken cookies, artichoke gelatin dogs, and Crock-Pot cold water. The pickup lines were similarly charming (“Are you a candle? Because you’re so hot of the looks with you”), as were the first sentences of novels (“This is the story of a man in the morning”). Their responses did get better over time. The woman who ran the blog was always eager to point out the progress the networks were making. Notice, she’d say, that they’ve got the vocabulary and the structure worked out. It’s just that they don’t yet understand the concepts. When speaking of her networks, she was patient, even tender, such that she often seemed to me like Snow White with a cohort of little dwarves whom she was lovingly trying to civilize. Their logic was so similar to the logic of children that it was impossible not to mistake their responses as evidence of human innocence. “They are learning,” I’d think. “They are trying so hard!” Sometimes when I came across a particularly good one, I’d read it aloud to my husband. I perhaps used the word “adorable” once. He’d chastised me for anthropomorphizing them, but in doing so fell prey to the error himself. “They’re playing on your human sympathies,” he said, “so they can better take over everything.” Read More