Vox - Join the Vox Book Club!https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/community_logos/52517/voxv.png2022-06-17T14:00:00-04:00http://www.vox.com/rss/stream/209806002022-06-17T14:00:00-04:002022-06-17T14:00:00-04:00In The Immortal King Rao, a tech billionaire becomes king of the world
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<img alt="" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/VVgXoWU78iFAZTkMuTWqGfoyjNc=/0x699:1838x2078/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/70988393/ImmortalKingRao_9780393541755.0.jpg" />
<figcaption><em>The Immortal King Rao</em> by Vauhini Vara. | W.W. Norton & Company</figcaption>
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<p>A new novel paints a portrait of a world ruled by almighty algorithm.</p> <p id="xuoGoV"><em>The Vox Book Club is linking to </em><a href="https://go.skimresources.com/?xcust=___vx__p_22896526__t_w__r_vox.com/vox-book-club__d&id=66960X1516588&xs=1&url=https://bookshop.org/shop/voxbookclub?"><em>Bookshop.org</em></a><em> to support local and independent booksellers.</em></p>
<p id="yPo0tU">In 1600, Queen Elizabeth I granted a group of London merchants the exclusive right to British trading with the East Indies, along with the right to wage war, if necessary. In 1757, what was now known as the East India Company put the license to use, attacked, and ultimately took control of Mughal Bengal, then one of the wealthiest provinces in one of the world’s wealthiest empires.</p>
<p id="EXvPDI">By winning that battle, the East India Company took for itself the right to tax the citizens of Bengal. Shortly thereafter, the Hindi word for plunder, lut, entered the English language: loot.</p>
<p id="5x4Lqe">As the East India Company took control of India, it gradually transformed itself from an early megacorporation into something closer to a government. It collected taxes, and it enforced their collection through the diligent use of a private army. It appointed governors from within its company’s ranks who were responsible for administering individual provinces.</p>
<p id="IWVZhC">“This would be the equivalent,” <a href="https://www.history.com/news/east-india-company-england-trade">journalist Dave Roos once wrote,</a> “of Exxon Mobil drilling for oil in coastal Mexico, taking over a major Mexican city using private armed guards, and then electing a corporate middle manager as the mayor, judge and executioner.”</p>
<p id="Toig87">It will perhaps not shock you to learn that this system of government was not received well by those forced to live under it. A corporation is accountable only to its shareholders, and its only responsibility is to safeguard their profits. Accordingly, the East India Company used its control of India not to safeguard the people who lived there but to transfer Indian wealth to British pockets at a massive scale. <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/08/23/britains-idyllic-country-houses-reveal-a-darker-history">One economist calculated</a> that India’s share of the global GDP went from 24.4 percent to 4.2 percent during its time under British rule.</p>
<p id="Srd1R6">As the tech giants and oil corporations of our own time continue to steadily amass power, more than one historian has suggested that the East India Company can provide a warning of what their future might look like.</p>
<p id="NhrQu6">“The East India Company — the first great multinational corporation, and the first to run amok — was the ultimate model for many of today’s joint-stock corporations,” <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/04/east-india-company-original-corporate-raiders">wrote William Dalrymple in the Guardian in 2015</a>. “The most powerful among them do not need their own armies: they can rely on governments to protect their interests and bail them out. The East India Company remains history’s most terrifying warning about the potential for the abuse of corporate power — and the insidious means by which the interests of shareholders become those of the state.”</p>
<p id="o7xncz">In Vauhini Vara’s <a href="https://go.skimresources.com?id=66960X1516588&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fbookshop.org%2Fbooks%2Fthe-immortal-king-rao-9781324050308%2F9780393541755&xcust=VoxImmortalKingRao061722"><em>The Immortal King Rao</em></a>, the East India Company provides the historical antecedent for a system of government performed by a corporate entity known only as the Board, a tech megacorporation turned dystopian state. When the Board takes control of the world, “historians later noted that there had been plenty of historical precedent,” Vara writes. “You could go at least as far back, they said, as the British East India Company.”</p>
<p id="AJDf8y">The Board’s first CEO, our titular King Rao, grew up in the vicious aftermath of the East India Company’s rule. He’s born in 1951, three years after the end of British occupation of India, as the country struggles to rebuild its economy after centuries of looting. King’s a member of the Dalit untouchable caste, but his family is on its way up. They own a coconut farm called the Garden, built in a delta made fertile by the East India Company’s irrigation. Now they’re leveraging their way into the middle class through both the farm and the use of the Brahmin surname Rao.</p>
<p id="4bBRZt">In three timelines laid out in alternating chapters, we see King’s childhood in the Garden, from his violent conception through his callow adolescence. We see him arrive in America in the 1960s to work as a software engineer, eventually becoming the Steve Jobs-like visionary at the head of a tech company called Coconut. And, in our frame narrative, we see him grow old with his daughter Athena, who serves as the loving, conflicted, betrayed narrator of her CEO father’s life story.</p>
<p id="G8ZEiv">Under King’s rule, the Board isn’t technically in charge of the world. The almighty Algorithm King programmed is in charge of the world, and the Board merely administers its decisions.</p>
<p id="QIGN3s">“People’s needs — food, water, energy, Internet, roads, shelter, schools, hospitals, protection, detention,” Vara writes, “would be fulfilled not through complex taxation and appropriation, but with an innovative model where, instead of paying taxes, people would have a portion of their Capital extracted monthly, the Algo determining the most efficient investment of funds.”</p>
<p id="2cMa0u">The idea is that the Algorithm is supposed to be less biased than fallible human beings, more fair and just. But the Algo, programmed by fallible human beings, merely institutionalizes their bias. All existing inequalities are exacerbated, all existing poverty deepened, all existing suffering made worse. Meanwhile, climate change has become irreversible, and mankind’s time is running out.</p>
<p id="mgTx6s"><em>The Immortal King Rao</em> is not solely an economic parable. Its emotional core lies in its fraught father-daughter relationship. We see King both cherish Athena and callously use her in a bid for his own immortality, hijacking her mind to upload his own consciousness. We see Athena by turns resentful and tender, cherishing her father and repudiating his works, turning the story of his own life into a weapon against his legacy.</p>
<p id="i7Xg0N">But what frames this novel on either end is commerce, brutal and implacable. </p>
<p id="9dnP7Q">The legacy of the East India Company is that capitalism and colonialism are intertwined, that it may be impossible to fully disentangle them. In <em>The Immortal King Rao</em>, the knot only ever grows tighter.</p>
<p id="23uV00">Share your thoughts on <em>The Immortal King Rao</em> in the comments section below, and be sure to <a href="https://voxbookclubpresentstheimmortal.splashthat.com/">RSVP for our upcoming live discussion event with Vauhini Vara</a>. In the meantime, <a href="https://confirmsubscription.com/h/d/533DCA62F59CA120">subscribe to the Vox Book Club newsletter</a> to make sure you don’t miss anything.</p>
<h3 id="lzSH8H"><strong>Discussion topics</strong></h3>
<ol>
<li id="JRy8Rp">
<a href="https://www.theeastindiacompany.com/finefood/luxury-hampers-gift-boxes/">The East India Company brand name</a> is now owned by Mumbai-born Sanjiv Mehta, who uses it to sell luxury foods and bespoke hampers out of a shop in London. Not a question, just wanted you to know.</li>
<li id="UGgAaN">It’s notable that while King is our protagonist, he’s outworked in every direction by the women in his life: Margie, his wife, who is the political and design force behind Coconut; Elemen, the mother of his child, who builds a rebellion against him; and Athena, his daughter, who tells the story of his life, including all his sins. (There’s also Miss Fit, who destroys his reputation, and Minnu, King’s childhood best friend who he betrays.) How do you see the women in King’s life functioning within this novel?</li>
<li id="UNu3Ku">Is Minnu the most tragic figure in this whole book? It’s a tough competition.</li>
<li id="qiJ4kl">Both King and Athena have doubled mother figures: King is born to Radha but raised by Sita, and Athena is genetically Margie’s but carried by Elemen. What do you make of that parallel?</li>
<li id="zVOzWO">We’ve got a heavily ambiguous ending here, in that it’s not clear who’s coming for Athena: the Shareholders or the Blanklanders. Do you prefer to read it one particular way or another?</li>
<li id="bfvoSs">One of the final questions of this novel is what the point of human existence on earth is. Athena proffers two potential answers: First, that the point might be to make a record of our stories as proof of our existence, and second, that all of it — all of human existence — might simply “mean nothing but itself.” What do you think?</li>
<li id="hLCcHE">A subquestion of sorts to the above: Athena also offers two potential parables regarding whether or not another species might even be able to understand what human life was like if they could somehow read our stories. Do you think they could?</li>
</ol>
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https://www.vox.com/culture/23171264/immortal-king-rao-review-vauhini-varaConstance Grady2022-06-07T16:30:00-04:002022-06-07T16:30:00-04:00Spend June with a novel of colonialism, technological capitalism, and coconuts
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<img alt="" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/AQlx0HSmdwEe0KwylOMxMA6bIJU=/400x0:3600x2400/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/70953111/headshots_1654023623404.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>The Immortal King Rao by Vauhini Vara. | Left: W. W. Norton & Company. Right: Rachel Woolf.</figcaption>
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<p>The next Vox Book Club pick is The Immortal King Rao.</p> <p id="9YaqlJ"><em>The Vox Book Club is linking to Bookshop.org to support local and independent booksellers.</em></p>
<p id="DnSmFJ">This June, the Vox Book Club is reading the playful, provocative, and thoughtful new novel <a href="https://go.skimresources.com?id=66960X1516588&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fbookshop.org%2Fbooks%2Fthe-immortal-king-rao%2F9780393541755&xcust=Vox"><em>The Immortal King Rao</em></a>, by former Wall Street Journal tech reporter and New Yorker business editor Vauhini Vara. Part intimate family drama, part technological allegory, and part alternate history turned dystopia, <em>The Immortal King Rao</em> spans centuries and continents to draw a damning portrait of life under technological capitalism.</p>
<p id="bgV62q">King Rao is born in the 1960s on a South Indian coconut plantation. He dies — his daughter Athena tells us from her jail cell — over a century later, having abolished the nation-state as a system of government and run the world as global CEO. Now, his daughter Athena is passing on his life story. Her hope is that it will become a manifesto that will save the human race on the brink of climate-change-induced extinction. But the world isn’t exactly eager to hear Athena’s tale.</p>
<p id="sy6afa">This is a heady, ambitious novel, dense with ideas. Let’s unpack them together. At the end of the month, we’ll meet Vara live on Zoom, and <a href="https://voxbookclubpresentstheimmortal.splashthat.com/">you can RSVP here</a>. In the meantime, <a href="https://confirmsubscription.com/h/d/533DCA62F59CA120">subscribe to the Vox Book Club newsletter</a> to make sure you don’t miss anything.</p>
<h3 id="xdhfVT">The full <a href="https://www.vox.com/vox-book-club">Vox Book Club</a> schedule for June 2022</h3>
<p id="lu7LNW">Friday, June 17: Discussion post on <em>The Immortal King Rao</em> published to Vox.com.</p>
<p id="R9OcXG">Thursday, June 30, 5 pm ET: <a href="https://voxbookclubpresentstheimmortal.splashthat.com/">Virtual live event with author Vauhini Vara</a>. Reader questions are encouraged!</p>
https://www.vox.com/culture/23141646/immortal-king-rao-vauhini-vara-vox-book-clubConstance Grady2022-05-20T16:50:00-04:002022-05-20T16:50:00-04:00The Fortress of Solitude is a fraught and uneasy love letter to a vanished Brooklyn
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<img alt="The cover of the novel “The Fortress of Solitude” by Jonathan Lethem." src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/fIAlhEQ8YFFC40aJHhH-dcw1vss=/0x143:1552x1307/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/70893676/91n6eeetsuL.0.jpeg" />
<figcaption><em>The Fortress of Solitude</em> by Jonathan Lethem. | Vintage</figcaption>
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<p>In this lovely and heartbroken novel, neither superpowers nor true love can stop systemic racism.</p> <p id="pIKjqe"><em>The Vox Book Club is linking to </em><a href="https://go.skimresources.com/?xcust=___vx__p_22789643__t_w__r_vox.com/vox-book-club__d&id=66960X1516588&xs=1&url=https://bookshop.org/shop/voxbookclub?"><em><strong>Bookshop.org</strong></em></a><em> to support local and independent booksellers.</em></p>
<p id="cpotAZ"><a href="https://go.skimresources.com?id=66960X1516588&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fbookshop.org%2Fbooks%2Fthe-fortress-of-solitude%2F9780375724886&xcust=VoxBookshop052022"><em>The Fortress of Solitude</em></a>, the 2003 novel by Jonathan Lethem that is the Vox Book Club’s pick for May, seems in memory to take place in a single golden childhood summer. It’s a shimmering evocation of a Brooklyn kid’s holiday that feels almost painfully beautiful: the days are eternal, the spaldeens bouncing off the brownstone walls pink and perfect, the water from the fire hydrants shockingly cold — and at certain moments, as you leap in the air to catch a wallball, it almost seems like you can fly.</p>
<p id="b1OPTA">“But the stories you told yourself — which you pretended to recall as if they’d happened every afternoon of an infinite summer — were really a pocketful of days distorted into legend,” thinks Mingus Rude toward the end of <em>Fortress</em>’s tragically adult second half. “How often had that hydrant even been opened? Did you jet water through a car window, what, twice at best? Summer burned just a few afternoons long, in the end.”</p>
<p id="udC4jm">Like that other great American novel of childhood, <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/12/27/21037870/little-women-greta-gerwig-ending-jo-laurie-amy-bhaer"><em>Little Women</em></a>, <em>The Fortress of Solitude</em> is built on a binary: the first half devoted to the lovely, vicious pleasures and pains of a childhood recalled with aching emotional intensity, and the second to mourning that childhood’s death and reckoning with its uneasy ghosts. “My childhood was the only part of my life that wasn’t, uh, overwhelmed by my childhood,” explains 35-year-old Dylan Ebdus to a disenchanted girlfriend who wants to know why he won’t let go of a shrine to his Brooklyn days.</p>
<p id="U8vDxH">Dylan spends his childhood in seedy Gowanus in the 1970s, just as that neighborhood is on the brink of transforming itself into boho Boerum Hill. Dylan’s parents are among the first wave of white gentrifiers, a pair of progressive hippies who shoo nerdy white Dylan off into the majority-Black neighborhood to forge a post-racial utopia, bragging to their friends that he’s one of three white kids in his whole school.</p>
<p id="ufEP38">Dylan, however, doesn’t find utopia in Gowanus. As we learn throughout the section titled “Underberg,” Dylan is soft, and he’s clearly got the racial and class privilege needed to leverage his way out of Brooklyn, given enough time. These facts together mark him as a target for what is locally known as “yoking,” a quasi-mugging performed under the cover of camaraderie that sees Dylan relieved of his pocket money daily.</p>
<p id="Lzpv3r">Dylan’s refuge comes in the form of Mingus Rude, the charismatic mixed-race son of an almost-famous soul singer, and the block’s natural leader. Mingus takes Dylan under his wing, including him in ball games, teaching him to shoplift and tag. Dylan instantly worships Mingus, and their friendship takes on a romantic intensity that transforms Brooklyn’s rough streets into a parent-free paradise.</p>
<p id="1NV8KF">In an early and innocent echo of the cultural appropriation he will cynically continue as an adult, Dylan begins writing Mingus’s tag for him all over the streets. But the team of Dylan and Mingus isn’t built to survive the pressures of Brooklyn in the 1970s. Interlopers intervene, skewed mirror images of both Dylan and Mingus: a nerdy white kid who Dylan despises almost as much as he despises himself; a Black kid who Dylan fears the way he will not let himself fear Mingus. Dylan tests into a heavily segregated magnet school and drifts toward Manhattan and the punk scene, where he is frequently deputized to buy drugs. Mingus stays in Gowanus and starts selling drugs.</p>
<p id="8yEy2A">What keeps Dylan and Mingus linked, for a while, is their shared secret: a magic ring that lets them fly. They use it to try to fight crime.</p>
<p id="WDxUMU">By now it’s a familiar move to include a comic book trope like a magic ring in a literary novel, but when Lethem pulled off this trick in 2003, it was still a daring formal innovation. It functions here as a radiant hope for redemption: After all, if anything can defeat America’s structural racism and allow these two boys to simply love each other, it would have to be something magical.</p>
<p id="qnrTZF">Instead, the ring’s magic fails to accomplish the impossible. Dylan and Mingus drift apart.</p>
<p id="0njJGH">In the novel’s second half, Dylan is an embittered 35-year-old music critic living in Berkeley, cherishing the street cred he gets from his Brooklyn childhood and his Black girlfriend, and fantasizing about cheating on said girlfriend with a blonde cocktail waitress. Mingus is a drug addict who’s been cycling in and out of jail since the age of 18.</p>
<p id="ScdjDw">The critical consensus is that the second half of <em>Fortress</em>, which Dylan narrates in the first person after holding us at a third-person remove all through the first half, is the weaker part of this novel. Titled “Prisonaires,” it lacks the forward drive and the shimmering beauty of the first half, and instead meanders aimlessly through one satirical set piece after another, before Dylan at last makes his way back to Brooklyn and Mingus, and <em>Fortress</em> finds its purpose once again.</p>
<p id="BKPe7k">But it’s that very quiet chaos in “Prisonaires” that makes “Underberg” shine all the more brightly in retrospect, and that makes you feel all the more strongly what Dylan has lost. <em>Fortress of Solitude</em> is a novel of heartbreak, and Dylan without Mingus is a heartbroken man. That’s why <em>Fortress</em> only begins to soar again when at last it enters fully into Mingus’s voice, and we are given the full tragedy of his ruin.</p>
<p id="zmblIM">Share your thoughts on <em>The Fortress of Solitude</em> in the comments section below, and be sure to <a href="https://voxbookclubpresentsthefortress.splashthat.com/">RSVP for our upcoming live discussion event with Jonathan Lethem</a>. In the meantime, <a href="https://confirmsubscription.com/h/d/533DCA62F59CA120">subscribe to the Vox Book Club newsletter</a> to make sure you don’t miss anything. </p>
<h3 id="I1WdiW">Discussion topics</h3>
<ol>
<li id="3TD2xt">The critic James Wood famously gave <em>Fortress </em><a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/67179/spaldeen-dreams">a mixed review in the New Republic</a> upon its release. Eight years later, <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/my-disappointment-critic/">Lethem responded with an essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books</a>, taking issue with the fact that Wood never even mentioned the magic ring at the center of the book. A classic literary fight!</li>
<li id="FftZr5">
<em>The Fortress of Solitude</em> was adapted in the 2010s into a deeply flawed and deeply beautiful musical, with music by the late great Michael Friedman (<em>Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson</em>). It had the misfortune to premiere at the Public Theatre in 2015, the same season as <em>Hamilton</em>, so there was very little oxygen left in the room for anyone else, but it did at least do well enough to earn a cast album. You can listen to the whole thing <a href="https://open.spotify.com/album/4eWrGTqMweJ0Z5M2gchfHd?si=fUJTUtf6Q66ME0bVtsVMLw">here</a>.</li>
<li id="l2a2V9">The Camden College section of <em>Fortress</em> is based on Lethem’s time at Bennington College, which he attended along with Bret Easton Ellis (<em>American Psycho</em>) and Donna Tartt (<a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2020/6/3/21277498/vox-book-club-secret-history-nicole-cliffe-live-event">Vox Book Club pick <em>Secret History</em></a>). Lethem is one of the many figures interviewed in this very good <a href="https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/a27434009/bennington-college-oral-history-bret-easton-ellis/">oral history of the era</a>, as well as this almost-as-good <a href="https://www.vulture.com/2021/11/bennington-college-podcast-interview-bret-easton-ellis-donna-tartt.html">podcast</a> on the same topic.</li>
<li id="dxUOZa">
<a href="https://medium.com/@jonathan.lethem">Lethem is also blogging on Medium</a>! A nice place to check out some of his cultural criticism.</li>
<li id="imk74z">
<a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/my-disappointment-critic/">In his LARB essay</a>, Lethem writes that the ring is a “formal discontinuity,” so that the book “wrenches its own ‘realism’ — <em>mimeticism</em> is the word I prefer — into crisis by insisting on uncanny events.” We could perhaps read a similar crisis of mimeticism in Abraham Ebdus’s rejection of figurative art, which he later embraces with his psychedelic paperback covers. What does this crisis accomplish?</li>
<li id="f14ZED">Why do you think Marvel nerd Dylan uses the DC image of Superman’s Fortress of Solitude as the central metaphor of this novel?</li>
<li id="dnH8mq">The other defining absence in Dylan’s life, outside of Mingus, is the absence of his mother, Rachel, who flees Brooklyn early on and seems never to look back. In the final pages of <em>Fortress</em>, Dylan finally goes after her. How does that plotline work for you?</li>
<li id="gyYcor">In the closing pages of <em>Fortress</em>, Dylan muses on the idea of a “middle space” where the utopia his parents sought in Gowanus might actually exist, where DJs jammed in the schoolyards and “Mingus Rude always grooved fat spaldeen pitches, born home runs.” He seems to suggest that such middle spaces are always fleeting in real life and that they can only exist eternally in art. Agree? Disagree?</li>
</ol>
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https://www.vox.com/culture/23132485/fortress-of-solitude-jonathan-lethem-review-discussion-postConstance Grady2022-04-29T12:30:00-04:002022-04-29T12:30:00-04:00The Vox Book Club is going back to Fortress of Solitude, one of the best novels of the 2000s
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<img alt="" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/pxun7kgCcCfutMycPIuqWTw2gTc=/200x0:3400x2400/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/70810756/headshots_1651247614706.0.jpg" />
<figcaption><em>The Fortress of Solitude</em> by Jonathan Lethem. | Left: Vintage. Right: Lethem.</figcaption>
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<p>Spend May with Jonathan Lethem’s lovely and prescient novel of friendship, race, class, and superheroes.</p> <p id="pIKjqe"><em>The Vox Book Club is linking to </em><a href="https://go.skimresources.com/?xcust=___vx__p_22789643__t_w__r_vox.com/vox-book-club__d&id=66960X1516588&xs=1&url=https://bookshop.org/shop/voxbookclub?"><em><strong>Bookshop.org</strong></em></a><em> to support local and independent booksellers.</em></p>
<p id="SKiWZL">This May, the Vox Book Club is reading Jonathan Lethem’s <a href="https://go.skimresources.com?id=66960X1516588&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fbookshop.org%2Fbooks%2Fthe-fortress-of-solitude%2F9780375724886&xcust=Vox042922"><em>Fortress of Solitude</em></a>, one of the loveliest and most prescient novels of the 2000s. It follows two motherless boys growing up in the Brooklyn of the 1970s, one Black and one white. As Lethem tracks the intimate rise and ugly fall of their friendship, he offers a fraught and painful love letter to New York before the endemic gentrification of the 1990s: the graffiti, the music, the violence. </p>
<p id="k4wcj2"><em>Fortress of Solitude</em> contains multitudes. It is an evocation of a childhood both lawless and idyllic, a portrait of a connection between two boys that runs deeper than friendship, a clear-eyed depiction of America’s repeated de-investment from and then appropriation of Black New York, and a condemnation of the lost dream of the 1970s. The whole book is written in Lethem’s cool, measured prose, the rhythm of every sentence precisely calibrated. Also, there are superheroes.</p>
<p id="Vwsufq">Join the <a href="https://www.vox.com/vox-book-club"><strong>Vox Book Club</strong></a> as we spend May going back in time to explore <em>The Fortress of Solitude</em>. At the end of the month, we’ll meet Lethem live on Zoom, and <a href="https://voxbookclubpresentsthefortress.splashthat.com/"><strong>you can RSVP here</strong></a>. In the meantime, <a href="https://confirmsubscription.com/h/d/533DCA62F59CA120"><strong>subscribe to the Vox Book Club newsletter</strong></a> to make sure you don’t miss anything.</p>
<h3 id="5jw6Ks">The full <a href="https://www.vox.com/vox-book-club">Vox Book Club</a> schedule for May 2022</h3>
<p id="PsGIpk"><strong>Friday, May 20:</strong> Discussion post on <em>Fortress of Solitude</em> published to Vox.com</p>
<p id="xyV53R"><strong>Tuesday, May 31, 5 pm ET:</strong> <a href="https://voxbookclubpresentsthefortress.splashthat.com/"><strong>Virtual live event with author Jonathan Lethem</strong></a><strong>.</strong> Reader questions are encouraged!</p>
https://www.vox.com/culture/23046780/vox-book-club-fortress-of-solitudeConstance Grady2022-04-15T10:25:00-04:002022-04-15T10:25:00-04:00In Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado knows where the bodies are buried
<figure>
<img alt="Her Body and Other Parties" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/3Y3pho3K4ZPtCdjNZhSpBIso1t4=/0x640:1707x1920/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/70753114/herbody.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>Graywolf Press</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The Vox Book Club’s April pick is a tour de force short story collection.</p> <p id="pIKjqe"><em>The Vox Book Club is linking to </em><a href="https://go.skimresources.com/?xcust=___vx__p_22736654__t_w__r_vox.com/vox-book-club__d&id=66960X1516588&xs=1&url=https://bookshop.org/shop/voxbookclub?"><em><strong>Bookshop.org</strong></em></a><em> to support local and independent booksellers.</em></p>
<p id="lZGQGy">In Carmen Maria Machado’s dazzling debut short story collection <a href="https://go.skimresources.com?id=66960X1516588&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fbookshop.org%2Fbooks%2Fher-body-and-other-parties-stories%2F9781555977887&xcust=Vox041522"><em>Her Body and Other Parties</em></a>, the Vox Book Club’s pick for April, everything always comes back to the body.</p>
<p id="V149B8">Specifically, everything always comes back to women’s bodies, and all their attendant neuroses: the shame associated with women’s flesh, with fat; the way the body stores trauma; the physically embodied joy of holding a baby; all the many attacks and encroachments a woman’s body suffers.</p>
<p id="eMiFia">That’s the problem, isn’t it? A woman’s body never exists in isolation. There is always <em>her body</em>, and there are also always all those <em>other parties</em> who believe they are entitled to it.</p>
<p id="wfqzMx">That entitlement is explored to its most sinister effect in “The Husband Stitch,” the strongest and most celebrated story in the collection. It features a woman who always wears a green ribbon around her neck, and who finds herself constantly protecting her ribbon from her husband’s encroachments.</p>
<p id="yrEBjl">“A wife should have no secrets from her husband,” he tells her.</p>
<p id="6Nhzpg">“The ribbon is not a secret; it’s just mine,” she responds. She tells him not to touch it, but during sex he pins her to the bed and takes the ribbon in his hands.</p>
<p id="7z1K3D">Here, Machado is riffing off a heaving, seething mass of tales: not just that old horror story “<a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/lyapalater/for-everyone-thats-still-fucked-up-over-that-stor">The Green Ribbon</a>,” but also an urban legend about a hook-handed man, a folk tale about a feral girl raised by wolves, a fairy tale about a woman who cuts out her own liver to feed her husband. The story that gives “The Husband Stitch” its title, though, <a href="https://www.healthline.com/health-news/husband-stitch-is-not-just-myth">is true</a>: It refers to what happens when an obstetrician adds an extra stitch to his repair of the vaginal opening after an episiotomy, to heighten the pleasure of a male partner during sex. The entitlement Machado is describing, the sense that it is fine to treat women’s bodies primarily as objects for someone else’s gratification, is not confined to the realm of fiction.</p>
<p id="O0QBew">Fiction, though, might offer one of the best ways to look at this ideology: slantwise, so that the full horror and tragedy and humor involved can come seeping out of the corners where they hide. In “Especially Heinous,” the novella that forms the centerpiece of the book, Machado turns her <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/01/angela-carter-far-from-fairytale-edmund-gordon">Angela Carter gaze</a> on <em>Law & Order: Special Victims Unit</em>, the fairy tale that has become our culture’s favorite way to think about women’s bodies and all we are entitled to extract from them.</p>
<p id="EJx08t">In Machado’s version of the story, beautiful teen model after beautiful teen model is raped and murdered, a string of doppelgänger sex crimes that mimics the repetitive structure of <em>SVU</em> itself. The murdered girls become ghosts with bells for eyes who haunt Olivia Benson’s apartment, and the repetitive <em>dun-dun</em> of the show’s theme becomes the breathing of a vast monster on whose sleeping back New York City rests. “Stabler and Benson will never forget the case where solving the crime was so much worse than the crime itself,” goes one of Machado’s deadpan episode descriptions.</p>
<p id="TR5qiR">Benson grows steadily unhinged over the course of “Especially Heinous,” but who could blame her? Isn’t that a logical reaction to a life of watching women get raped and murdered and avenged, in a world where we relax by watching a TV show about women getting raped and murdered and avenged?</p>
<p id="GeyouN">“Do you ever worry about writing the madwoman-in-the-attic trope?” asks the annoying antagonist of “The Resident,” a Victorian-inflected horror story about an artist’s residency in the Catskills. The narrator, a writer we know only as C.M., responds at first by protectively describing her autobiographical protagonist as simply “in her own head a lot.” Later, she signs herself <em>madwoman in her own attic</em>.</p>
<p id="GqASK3">Going mad, Machado seems to suggest, is a perfectly reasonable response to the world we’re living in. But if you’re writing the story, at least you’ll be building yourself your own attic.</p>
<p id="03Tkfy">Machado, at any rate, seems to have managed it. In her follow-up book, a memoir published in 2019, she built a whole <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/11/13/20959957/in-the-dream-house-review-carmen-maria-marchado-memoir">Dream House</a>.</p>
<p id="tOBPEW">Share your thoughts on <em>Her Body and Other Parties</em> in the comments section below, and <a href="https://voxmediaevents.com/voxbookclubpresentsherbodyando">be sure to RSVP for our upcoming live discussion event with Carmen Maria Machado</a>. In the meantime, <a href="https://voxbookclubpresentsthesentence.splashthat.com/">subscribe to the </a><a href="http://vox.com/book-club-newsletter">Vox Book Club newsletter</a> to make sure you don’t miss anything.</p>
<h3 id="d6RyxI">Discussion questions</h3>
<ol>
<li id="DNHDWM">This is the first short story collection we’ve read in the book club! How do you feel about it? Did you like it better than our usual novels?</li>
<li id="uUcx91">Do you prefer short story collections built around a common theme, or do you like to skip around through different ideas?</li>
<li id="Yj7Sco">What’s your favorite story in the collection? Least favorite? I generally think “Difficult at Parties” is the weakest, but I can be convinced otherwise.</li>
<li id="QSIH4K">There’s been some critical debate over whether <em>Her Body</em> is playing more with <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/04/books/review-her-body-and-other-parties-carmen-maria-machado.html">fairy tales</a> or <a href="https://www.npr.org/2017/10/08/553978325/-her-body-and-other-parties-be-your-own-madwoman">urban legends</a>. Do you think the distinction is meaningful? Where do you fall?</li>
<li id="Xcf1uc">When it comes to women’s bodies, what are other parties entitled to? </li>
</ol>
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https://www.vox.com/culture/23025602/her-body-and-other-parties-review-carmen-maria-machadoConstance Grady2022-04-13T13:14:42-04:002022-04-13T13:14:42-04:00The author of When We Cease to Understand the World explains himself
<figure>
<img alt="" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/C9yqvYKNdPvfuw0dVjo9su-DAmE=/200x0:3400x2400/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/70697837/headshots_1648760880546.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>Benjamín Labatut and Constance Grady | Left: Juana Gomez. Right: Constance Grady</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>“We need fiction like we need water.”</p> <p id="bfZms0"><em>The Vox Book Club is linking to </em><a href="https://go.redirectingat.com/?xcust=___vx__p_22030693__t_w__r_vox.com/vox-book-club__d&id=66960X1516588&xs=1&url=https://bookshop.org/shop/voxbookclub&referrer=vox.com&sref=https://www.vox.com/culture/2020/9/2/21406088/brit-bennett-interview-watch-live-vanishing-half-vox-book-club"><em><strong>Bookshop.org</strong></em></a><em> to support local and independent booksellers.</em></p>
<p id="rRa1GC">Benjamín Labatut’s <a href="https://go.skimresources.com?id=66960X1516588&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fbookshop.org%2Fbooks%2Fwhen-we-cease-to-understand-the-world-9781666527827%2F9781681375663&xcust=Vox033122"><em>When We Cease to Understand the World</em></a> is one of the weirdest and most beautiful books I’ve read in a while. It deals with the horror of trying to understand the world, and how as the scientific concepts we use to try to describe reality edge closer and closer to reality, they move further away from the mundane world that we see and live in with our small human senses. </p>
<p id="2tOtZJ">We think that we live in a world where space and time function in predictable and rational ways. But physics tells us that the universe is full of black holes that exist at both sides of time, and that on a quantum level, mass exists not as a concrete fact but as a possibility. How, <em>When We Cease to Understand the World</em> seems to ask, do we just live in a world that functions like this?</p>
<aside id="MLFUAU"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"Have we ceased to understand the world? ","url":"https://www.vox.com/culture/22972613/when-we-cease-to-understand-the-world-review-benjamin-labatut"}]}'></div></aside><p id="Qimx13">These are rich, heady questions, and they’re hard to parse out with any degree of nuance. So I met Labatut live on Zoom to talk them through, and then some. In our full (captioned) conversation above, you can learn why Labatut considers himself an “epiphany junkie,” the limitations he sees in science, and why he hates the novel. </p>
<p id="EY3kCn">A few weeks later, I sat down with <a href="https://www.vox.com/unexplainable"><em>Unexplainable</em></a> host Noam Hassenfeld to further discuss Labutut’s book and the aftershocks of the revelation, asking “What’s real?” Listen to the conversation in the player below or <a href="https://pod.link/unexplainable/episode/36a6adaccaade36337240b3c24e543b3">wherever you get podcasts</a>. </p>
<div id="0TD6oR"><iframe src="https://embed.podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/when-reality-broke/id1554578197?i=1000557450589&itsct=podcast_box_player&itscg=30200&ls=1&theme=auto" height="175px" frameborder="0" sandbox="allow-forms allow-popups allow-same-origin allow-scripts allow-top-navigation-by-user-activation" allow="autoplay *; encrypted-media *;" style="width: 100%; max-width: 660px; overflow: hidden; border-radius: 10px; background: transparent;"></iframe></div>
<p id="WKRpNB"></p>
<p id="3KgPtA">To keep up with what’s next for the Vox Book Club, <a href="http://www.vox.com/book-club-newsletter"><strong>sign up for our newsletter</strong></a>, where we’re getting ready to talk about our April book, Carmen Maria Machado’s <a href="https://go.skimresources.com?id=66960X1516588&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fbookshop.org%2Fbooks%2Fher-body-and-other-parties-stories%2F9781555977887&xcust=Vox033122"><em>Her Body and Other Parties</em></a>. </p>
https://www.vox.com/culture/23005220/benjamin-labatut-interview-when-we-cease-to-understand-the-worldConstance Grady2022-04-01T08:30:00-04:002022-04-01T08:30:00-04:00Spend April with Carmen Maria Machado’s haunting Her Body and Other Parties
<figure>
<img alt="" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/0UzKqfP3qCbsSaISeV8SP5RiYi8=/400x0:3600x2400/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/70697707/headshots_1648672576317.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado | Left, Graywolf. Right, Art Streiber.</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The Vox Book Club’s April pick is a ferociously smart set of short stories that read like fairy tales for the 21st century.</p> <p id="FbAMd3"><em>The Vox Book Club is linking to </em><a href="https://go.skimresources.com/?xcust=___vx__p_22714859__t_w__r_vox.com/vox-book-club__d&id=66960X1516588&xs=1&url=https://bookshop.org/shop/voxbookclub?"><em>Bookshop.org</em></a><em> to support local and independent booksellers.</em></p>
<p id="awil7r">Carmen Maria Machado’s <a href="https://go.skimresources.com?id=66960X1516588&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fbookshop.org%2Fbooks%2Fher-body-and-other-parties-stories%2F9781555977887&xcust=Vox033022"><em>Her Body and Other Parties</em></a> is one of those books you just never stop thinking about. I haven’t been able to get it out of my head since I first picked it up five years ago — which is why it’s the Vox Book Club’s pick for April 2022.</p>
<p id="u4old1">Eerie and unsettling, this short story collection has the dark beauty of an Angela Carter fairy tale and an animating force that’s all Machado’s own. In stories that riff on urban legends, dystopian fiction, and <em>Law & Order: SVU</em>, Machado returns again and again to the fleshy, porous, unbounded bodies of her heroines — and to all the other parties who feel entitled to them. </p>
<p id="Vwsufq">Join the <a href="https://www.vox.com/vox-book-club">Vox Book Club</a> as we spend April exploring <em>Her Body and Other Parties</em>. At the end of the month, we’ll meet Machado live on Zoom, and <a href="http://voxmediaevents.com/voxbookclubpresentsherbodyando">you can RSVP here</a>. In the meantime, <a href="https://confirmsubscription.com/h/d/533DCA62F59CA120">subscribe to the Vox Book Club newsletter</a> to make sure you don’t miss anything.</p>
<h3 id="5jw6Ks">The full <a href="https://www.vox.com/vox-book-club">Vox Book Club schedule</a> for April 2022</h3>
<p id="PsGIpk"><strong>Friday, April 15:</strong> Discussion post on <em>Her Body and Other Parties</em> published to Vox.com</p>
<p id="xyV53R"><strong>Thursday, April 28, 5 pm ET:</strong> <a href="http://voxmediaevents.com/voxbookclubpresentsherbodyando">Virtual live event with author Carmen Maria Machado</a>. Reader questions are encouraged!</p>
https://www.vox.com/culture/23003681/her-body-and-other-parties-carmen-maria-machado-vox-book-clubConstance Grady2022-03-11T16:00:00-05:002022-03-11T16:00:00-05:00Have we ceased to understand the world?
<figure>
<img alt="" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/6zAPU01bC__qD4_itFJpQfLsSAA=/0x1239:1699x2513/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/70610613/When_We_Cease.0.jpg" />
<figcaption><em>When We Cease to Understand the World</em> by Benjamín Labatut. | New York Review of Books</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Benjamín Labatut’s nonfiction novel is haunting and astonishing.</p> <p id="pIKjqe"><em>The Vox Book Club is linking to </em><a href="https://go.skimresources.com/?id=66960X1516588&xs=1&url=https://bookshop.org/shop/voxbookclub?&xcust=___vx__p_22714859__t_w__r_vox.com/vox-book-club__d"><em><strong>Bookshop.org</strong></em></a><em> to support local and independent booksellers.</em></p>
<p id="moJ75q">Benjamín Labatut’s haunting, astonishing <em>When We Cease to Understand the World</em>, the Vox Book Club’s pick for March, is a book of cosmic awe and cosmic horror. Again and again, it spirals around the connections between science and madness, science and beauty, science and war.</p>
<p id="VNpDNR">Labatut establishes his framework in the first of five disconnected chapters, each of which incorporates progressively more fiction into its largely nonfiction narrative. In his opening pages, he teases out the connections between the dye that creates Prussian blue — “a blue of such beauty that [its inventor] thought he had discovered <em>hsbd-iryt</em>, the original color of the sky” — and its lethal byproduct, cyanide. Cyanide would be the basis of Zyklon B, the poisonous gas used in Nazi death camps, and in Auschwitz, Labatut tells us, certain bricks are still stained Prussian blue by the gas. It was as if, he muses, “something in the colour’s chemical structure invoked violence: a fault, a shadow, an existential stain.” Perhaps the stain was left behind by the alchemist whose chemical compounds provided the basis of Prussian blue, Labatut suggests, because the man was infamous for the extreme cruelty of his animal experiments.</p>
<p id="phDrsT">This binary provides the basis for how scientific experiments work in this book. They are profoundly beautiful — and Labatut draws out that beauty in exquisite prose, nicely translated from the original Spanish by Adrian Nathan West — and they are also cruel, even violent. They reshape the world, and human nature itself. They foment war. They push us to the edge of apocalypse. </p>
<p id="4JRa8N">We see that binary recur in the second chapter, when the German astronomer and army lieutenant Karl Schwarzschild uses Einstein’s equations for general relativity to theorize for the first time the existence of a black hole, containing at its center a point he called the singularity. Rendered in Labatut’s hallucinatory sentences, Schwarzschild’s singularity becomes both an object of monstrous beauty — a rip in the fabric of spacetime created when a giant star collapses, resulting in a point where “the equations of general relativity went mad: time froze, space coiled around itself like a serpent” — and a metaphor for the oncoming destruction of the 20th century.</p>
<p id="0khVbK">Schwarzschild, fighting in the trenches of World War I as he develops his theory, is tormented by the “metaphysical delirium” his equations have conjured up. Labatut places him in a military hospital, ranting about the horrors of the singularity. </p>
<p id="opCvuw">“If matter were prone to birthing monsters of this kind,” the fictionalized Schwarzschild asks, “were there correlations with the human psyche? Could a sufficient concentration of human will — millions of people exploited for a single end with their minds compressed into the same psychic space — unleash something comparable to the singularity?” </p>
<p id="uxlyf3">The singularity here is horrifying because it deforms our understanding of the fabric of the universe; it makes plain that the universe contains objects our minds cannot fully comprehend. It is also horrifying because it shows us the way our minds, too, can be deformed, pressed by some enormous and awful will into a monstrosity — which, here, becomes Nazi Germany. </p>
<p id="EOrazB">Scientific discoveries can also, more concretely, become immensely destructive weapons. “The atoms that tore Hiroshima and Nagasaki apart were split not by the greasy fingers of a general, but by a group of physicists armed with a fistful of equations,” warns Grothendieck, one of the characters at the center of the third chapter. He’s a theoretical mathematician who pursues a “strange entity located at the crux of the mathematical universe” and then, having glimpsed it, renounces mathematics as the engine of mankind’s inevitable destruction.</p>
<p id="GhpBRY">The equations that split the atom are at the center of the fourth chapter, where we see Heisenberg and Schrödinger dueling over their understanding of the electron. Schrödinger sees electrons as waves, comprehensible and fully compatible with existing laws of physics. Heisenberg, however, argues that at the subatomic level, Newtonian physics no longer accurately describes the world: matter is both particle and wave, and the very act of measuring it changes it. Heisenberg wins the debate, but not before experiencing a vision of the nuclear bomb his work will birth. And it’s not exactly clear, in this book, that the bomb is any more destructive than the scientific theory that made it possible.</p>
<p id="GFJN69">Labatut gives the last word to a character he calls the night gardener. Like Grothendieck, the night gardener is a former mathematician who renounced his calling. It was because, he declares, of “the sudden realization that it was mathematics — not nuclear weapons, computers, biological warfare or our climate Armageddon — which was changing our world to the point where, in a couple of decades at most, we would simply not be able to grasp what being human really meant.” </p>
<p id="7soSf1">If Heisenberg is right, and there is no stable external reality we can measure objectively, if the world we sense and describe with our small human brains is in some way a collectively agreed-upon fiction, if reality on a fundamental level simply does not exist, if we have entirely ceased to understand the world — well, what does that mean for us as human beings? If we cannot understand the world, can we understand ourselves? </p>
<p id="9HR0aK">Labatut seems to fear that the answer is no. In this book, violence — physical, political, spiritual — is set within the process of scientific discovery, implacable and eternal, like a Prussian blue stain. We have crossed the Schwarzschild radius, and now there is no escape for us.</p>
<p id="0b74Ug">Share your thoughts on <em>When We Cease to Understand the World</em> in the comments section below, and <a href="https://voxmediaevents.com/voxbookclubmarch"><strong>be sure to RSVP for our upcoming live discussion event with Benjamín Labatut</strong></a>. We’ll also be talking about the scientific concepts of this book on <a href="https://www.vox.com/unexplainable"><em>Unexplainable</em></a>, hitting your podcast feeds on April 13. In the meantime, <a href="https://voxbookclubpresentsthesentence.splashthat.com/"><strong>subscribe to the </strong></a><a href="http://vox.com/book-club-newsletter"><strong>Vox Book Club newsletter</strong></a> to make sure you don’t miss anything.</p>
<h3 id="UmOQ3i">Discussion questions</h3>
<ol>
<li id="U9LIdD">It’s hard to avoid noticing that this is a very male and very European cast of scientists. Personally, I would have liked to see Marie Curie featured here. Do you have a good addition to the pantheon?</li>
<li id="bZGYSg">Because of the blurriness between fact and fiction in this book, Labatut gets away with a lot of “that can’t possibly be true!” moments that you can look up later and realize are, in fact, true, even though in a pure novel they could easily feel too gothic to bear. Which one was your favorite? I have a fondness for the image of <a href="https://cretazine.com/en/crete/crete-life/cretan-tales/item/3511-the-story-of-parachute-silk">the silkworm farms all across Germany</a>. </li>
<li id="sy3n8j">Speaking of that fact-and-fiction blurriness: How did it work for you here? I’ve spoken to some readers who found it annoying and smug, and <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/13/a-cautionary-tale-about-science-raises-uncomfortable-questions-about-fiction">the New Yorker frets that it was irresponsible</a>. For me, the mixture was effectively destabilizing, and it helped provide a narrative spine for all these heady philosophical concepts. What about you?</li>
<li id="o6A0Fe">Labatut seems to suggest that mysticism would offer us a more holistic and human way of understanding the world than that offered by mathematics and science. Agree? Disagree?</li>
<li id="WNagmq">Does reality exist?</li>
<li id="JjpLEv">If it doesn’t, what does it mean for us as human beings?</li>
<li id="QmnKSG">Have we ceased to understand the world?</li>
</ol>
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rootURL: 'https://voxbookclub.coral.coralproject.net',
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// options.
// storyID: '${storyID}',
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https://www.vox.com/culture/22972613/when-we-cease-to-understand-the-world-review-benjamin-labatutConstance Grady