Barefoot Gen by Nakazawa Keiji, translated by staff of Project Gen (1987) Published by New Society Publishers, 285 pages.
I like this book because it’s strange in so many ways. It’s a Japanese comic book that was written in the 1970s and translated at the end of the 1980s into various languages by a group of academics and antinuclear activists who saw in this story of a family living in Hiroshima at the end of World War II. The Japan of this autobiographical story has become exceedingly militant—Japanese civilians have been so entrained to believe American soldiers are marauding devils that they commit suicide en mass in Okinawa rather than face surrender; military cadets who can’t handle basic training are hounded to the point of committing suicide—and yet one father, a humble farmer and artisan, is convinced that the war is a stupid idea, and is not afraid to say so publicly, even though it means that his whole family—including the two youngest boys, Gen and Shinji—will be ostracized.
Even for someone well versed in both Western and Japanese comic books, the conventions of this story are unsettling and a little creepy. Any time the characters are upset, huge rivulets of tears stream from their eyes. When Gen and Shinji are happy they do the same weird dance. And whenever anyone is angry, they start slapping and punching each other. Parents punch children, children punch their teachers, the leaders of a work camp sticks at the children they look after. In the first part of the book, young Gen bites off part of the finger of a young boy who antagonizes him. For a book so prized by pacifists, this is immensely violent. Even the most heartwarming parts of the book (such as the story of Gen saving a poor glass merchant who can’t pay his debts) are punctuated by acts of sadism and brutality.
This story is filled with shadows cast by the light of the atomic bomb that’s dropped at the end of the book. It’s a story of childhood memories that can never be clearly recovered because they’ll always be seen through the filter of a mushroom cloud. Even the illustration style in which Nakazawa renders city scenes, wheat fields, train engines and bombing raids gives you a sense of unnaturally acute lighting, a world being recreated in painstaking detail only with the knowledge that at the end all of it will be ripped apart. The early scenes of flowing tears are weirdly conjured up again at the end of the story when we see the horrifying images of Hiroshima’s citizens wandering about zombie-like with the flesh melting from their faces. I’m not sure that any of this was intentional on the author’s part, but perhaps intention doesn’t matter that much, as he’s told a story about people in situations so extreme as to challenge even the strongest of human wills.
Time Immemorial
A production created and performed by Jack Dalton and Allison Warden; directed by Pincess Lucaj; produced at Cyrano’s Theater
More people HAVE to see this play. It’s a supurb trip through the history of Alaska from the point of view of two Alaska Natives, Tulu and Miti, who are present at the beginning of time, alone together in the midst of infinite darkness with a single glowing ember of light between them, which the bumbling Tulu keeps trying to steal. As the play unfolds, Tulu and Miti pass through eight different relationships: brothers; husband and wife; elder and child; mother and son; sisters; brother and sister; father and daughter; grandmother and grandson. They tell stories together of Alaska Native history—for instance, the husband and wife argue about the coming of white missionaries. “Their God only asks us for one day out of seven,” the husband says, arguing that things can’t be that bad. But of course, they are. The play is wonderfully rich in well-researched historical detail. As an audience, we bear witness to the way that Alaska Native families have been torn apart by plagues and assimilationist boarding schools, by oil company contracts and alcohol. The material is often gut wrenching, but the warm, effervescent, and masterful performances of Dalton and Warden keep the audience engaged and laughing. The only weak point is a prolonged final scene where Tulu and Miti meet again in the void where they began. I got a feeling that two performer–authors kept drawing the scene out because they weren’t quite ready to let go of the rich and meaningful piece of theater they’d created. They can’t be blamed for wanting to dwell a little longer in the light they’ve shone on history in all its tragic glory, but the stronger choice would be to end things a little sooner and leave the audience to deal on its own with the magnitude of the work presented.
More people HAVE to see this play. It’s a supurb trip through the history of Alaska from the point of view of two Alaska Natives, Tulu and Miti, who are present at the beginning of time, alone together in the midst of infinite darkness with a single glowing ember of light between them, which the bumbling Tulu keeps trying to steal. As the play unfolds, Tulu and Miti pass through eight different relationships: brothers; husband and wife; elder and child; mother and son; sisters; brother and sister; father and daughter; grandmother and grandson. They tell stories together of Alaska Native history—for instance, the husband and wife argue about the coming of white missionaries. “Their God only asks us for one day out of seven,” the husband says, arguing that things can’t be that bad. But of course, they are. The play is wonderfully rich in well-researched historical detail. As an audience, we bear witness to the way that Alaska Native families have been torn apart by plagues and assimilationist boarding schools, by oil company contracts and alcohol. The material is often gut wrenching, but the warm, effervescent, and masterful performances of Dalton and Warden keep the audience engaged and laughing. The only weak point is a prolonged final scene where Tulu and Miti meet again in the void where they began. I got a feeling that two performer–authors kept drawing the scene out because they weren’t quite ready to let go of the rich and meaningful piece of theater they’d created. They can’t be blamed for wanting to dwell a little longer in the light they’ve shone on history in all its tragic glory, but the stronger choice would be to end things a little sooner and leave the audience to deal on its own with the magnitude of the work presented.
Everything is Illuminated
By Jonathan Safran Foer (2002) Published by Perennial, 276.
This is the best book I’ve read so far this year. It starts out with some truly funny passages written by Alex, a young Ukranian man who’s paid to give a tour to an equally young Jewish American (named Johnathan Safran Foer) who’s come to Ukraine in search of a woman he believes rescued his father from the Holocaust. Alex’s narrative is filled with hilarious thesaurial blunders: he uses the word “rigid” for “difficult”, “flaccid” for “easy”, “manufacture Z’s” for “get some sleep.”
In between sections told by Alex we have stories of the shtetl of Trachimbrod where once a baby girl appeared in the river among an enigmatic cloud of floating detritus: string, clothes, maps, books. The official story is that a wagon crashed into the river, jettisoning the baby and the odd items, but the wagon is never found, and as we watch the baby mature into the beautiful and ingenious Brod we are left to wonder if perhaps her origins are more magical than we were first led to believe: was her coming somehow an omen of the future destruction of the shtetl at the hand of the Nazis exactly 151 years later.
A huge cast of characters is brought into play, the narrative breaks off and starts again at various stages of history, and the story is told at turns through rabbinical diaries of a communities dreams, through songs and wedding invitations, through encyclopedia entries and stage directions, but all of it is a beautiful accretion of mythic speculations built around the sand kernel of a man searching for the lost origins of his family.
It’s interesting: at the start of the book the sections told from the point of view of Alex are by far the strongest, whereas the sections that take place in Trachimbrod read like shoddy ripoffs of Sholem Aleichem. But the novel starts plunging into new depths as soon as the author begins to focus on the recurrent dreams that plague the residents of Trachimbrod, and it just never stops. By the end of the novel Trachimbrod has become as rich, grotesque and weirdly sad as Garbriel Márquez’s Macondo or the post-war Zone of occupied Germany in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow.
I get a sense that Foer set out to write a rather silly novel and found himself writing something magnificently more profound. While overall the results are incredible. The only big flub, I think, is that as Foer grows as a writer he begins to take the character of Alex a little too seriously, allowing him to morph from a good natured clown into a troubled existential antihero in a way that doesn’t quite ring true. I really liked the choice to add depth to the character: over the course of the book Alex, like the other characters, is confronted with the horrors of the history of the Nazi invasion, the Holocaust, and the possibilities of a godless and meaningless world—it’s natural that the character should change and grow in response to this, but the fact that his joyous, manic temperament disappears altogether is just about the only graceless touch to this otherwise supremely elegant story.
This is the best book I’ve read so far this year. It starts out with some truly funny passages written by Alex, a young Ukranian man who’s paid to give a tour to an equally young Jewish American (named Johnathan Safran Foer) who’s come to Ukraine in search of a woman he believes rescued his father from the Holocaust. Alex’s narrative is filled with hilarious thesaurial blunders: he uses the word “rigid” for “difficult”, “flaccid” for “easy”, “manufacture Z’s” for “get some sleep.”
In between sections told by Alex we have stories of the shtetl of Trachimbrod where once a baby girl appeared in the river among an enigmatic cloud of floating detritus: string, clothes, maps, books. The official story is that a wagon crashed into the river, jettisoning the baby and the odd items, but the wagon is never found, and as we watch the baby mature into the beautiful and ingenious Brod we are left to wonder if perhaps her origins are more magical than we were first led to believe: was her coming somehow an omen of the future destruction of the shtetl at the hand of the Nazis exactly 151 years later.
A huge cast of characters is brought into play, the narrative breaks off and starts again at various stages of history, and the story is told at turns through rabbinical diaries of a communities dreams, through songs and wedding invitations, through encyclopedia entries and stage directions, but all of it is a beautiful accretion of mythic speculations built around the sand kernel of a man searching for the lost origins of his family.
It’s interesting: at the start of the book the sections told from the point of view of Alex are by far the strongest, whereas the sections that take place in Trachimbrod read like shoddy ripoffs of Sholem Aleichem. But the novel starts plunging into new depths as soon as the author begins to focus on the recurrent dreams that plague the residents of Trachimbrod, and it just never stops. By the end of the novel Trachimbrod has become as rich, grotesque and weirdly sad as Garbriel Márquez’s Macondo or the post-war Zone of occupied Germany in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow.
I get a sense that Foer set out to write a rather silly novel and found himself writing something magnificently more profound. While overall the results are incredible. The only big flub, I think, is that as Foer grows as a writer he begins to take the character of Alex a little too seriously, allowing him to morph from a good natured clown into a troubled existential antihero in a way that doesn’t quite ring true. I really liked the choice to add depth to the character: over the course of the book Alex, like the other characters, is confronted with the horrors of the history of the Nazi invasion, the Holocaust, and the possibilities of a godless and meaningless world—it’s natural that the character should change and grow in response to this, but the fact that his joyous, manic temperament disappears altogether is just about the only graceless touch to this otherwise supremely elegant story.
Fallen
A theatrical production created by the cast and Aerial Angels and directed by Allison Williams and Zay Weaver
This is a show going on for one more weekend at University of Alaska Anchorage, and it really knocked me off my feet. The show draws from several Bible stories, all of them troublesome because of their depiction of women: The Garden of Eden, the stories of Samson and Delilah, Esther, Jezebel and Lot’s Wife. The dialogues and monologues leave something to be desired; clearly this is a play that was written by committee. But the devices used to showcase the stories are often display the sort of brilliance that can come only from a well-tooled ensemble that enjoys working together. The story of Samson and Delilah begins with a gossipy choral telling set in a hair salon, and progresses to an absolutely stunning trapeze routine carried out by Anthony Oliva and Rachael Donaldson at some frightening altitudes. The death-defying (or at least concussion-defying) nature of their work made me feel I was witnessing a primal and carnal liaison of mythic proportions. Later on Kelli Brown and Elizabeth Daniel face each other on either side of a hoop suspended from the catwalks above the stage that serves as a mirror through which Jezebel contemplates the reflection in the moments just prior to her death. The ensuing trapeze routine where the queen and the reflection she worships balance together on their mirror is a subdued and elegant moment, one of the most beautiful in the whole show.
Great kudos have to go out to the whole cast as well as to the Aerial Angels, a touring ensemble of circus-skill performers who have come through Anchorage several times now and who have done a great service to our community by passing on their skills to some of the talented up-and-comers studying at University of Alaska Anchorage.
This is a show going on for one more weekend at University of Alaska Anchorage, and it really knocked me off my feet. The show draws from several Bible stories, all of them troublesome because of their depiction of women: The Garden of Eden, the stories of Samson and Delilah, Esther, Jezebel and Lot’s Wife. The dialogues and monologues leave something to be desired; clearly this is a play that was written by committee. But the devices used to showcase the stories are often display the sort of brilliance that can come only from a well-tooled ensemble that enjoys working together. The story of Samson and Delilah begins with a gossipy choral telling set in a hair salon, and progresses to an absolutely stunning trapeze routine carried out by Anthony Oliva and Rachael Donaldson at some frightening altitudes. The death-defying (or at least concussion-defying) nature of their work made me feel I was witnessing a primal and carnal liaison of mythic proportions. Later on Kelli Brown and Elizabeth Daniel face each other on either side of a hoop suspended from the catwalks above the stage that serves as a mirror through which Jezebel contemplates the reflection in the moments just prior to her death. The ensuing trapeze routine where the queen and the reflection she worships balance together on their mirror is a subdued and elegant moment, one of the most beautiful in the whole show.
Great kudos have to go out to the whole cast as well as to the Aerial Angels, a touring ensemble of circus-skill performers who have come through Anchorage several times now and who have done a great service to our community by passing on their skills to some of the talented up-and-comers studying at University of Alaska Anchorage.
Ruminator III—This Time It's Personal
Review of author Denis Bostock's work in progress
It’s now been about two weeks since I finished my close reading of the manuscript of Ruminator III, and I can honestly say that the delightful and anarchic world created by author (and my friend) Denis Bostock continues to shimmer in my mind for several reasons: Bostock’s amazing ability to riff comically on simple absurdities of life and language; the loveable ensemble of characters; and the freewheeling storyline, which satirizes the conventions of social fiction and epic war, while at the same time profiting from the dramatic tensions vital to these spheres of fiction. All this is quite an achievement, especially considering that this is a novel told entirely from the perspective of a band of revolutionary dairy cows who decide one day to throw off the mantle of oppression and stand up—as it were—on their own four hooves.
Bostock’s comic style is readily apparent in the first section of book, which is probably an unrivaled compendium of bovine jokes and puns in the history of western literature. Bostock’s rare and splendid ability to play with words shows itself in the delightful coining of such phrases as “workcowship” for “workmanship,” “bovinity,” for “divinity,” and the phrase, “I felt as if I had butterflies in my stomachs.” At times, the author seems to be channeling the cartoony and conceptual humor of Eddie Izzard, such as when a cow pauses in her conversation to consider the light bulb that has just appeared above her head as an indication that she’s just had an idea. At other times, Bostock’s comedy is like that of Dave Barry during the prime of his Miami Herald humor column: the jokes are unrelenting and shamelessly silly, and half the fun comes from watching the author continue to outdo himself in search of mischievous nonsense.
But for all this silliness, the humor also serves the important purpose of giving the reader a welcome into the story of the dairy farm revolution. The message to the reader is, “I know this is ludicrous, and you know it’s ludicrous, so let’s sit down together and have as much fun as we can with it.” Again and again, we’re invited to laugh as the cows—guided by their leader Daisy a.k.a. Moo See Dung—are torn when forced to choose between overthrowing the unjust power structure of the ruling regime or just eating some grass and taking a nap. The wit and playfulness grows as thick and dense as grass in the first section of the book, and as a reader I was having so much fun a part of me wanted to stay forever in the meadow of absurdity and postpone the action of the plot indefinitely.
But the action does commence. Shortly after taking over the dairy farm, the farmhouse catches fire, and Moo See Dung has to rally her troops to action in a section that gives evidence to Bostock is able to weave humor into a fast-paced scene where a lot is going on. The cows are just barely able to avert the fire, but it still proves to be a pretty simple adversary compared to the problem of their mounting social and sexual frustration. You see, there’s only one bull in their pasture, Angus, and he happens to be a self-absorbed, useless oaf who throws all his energy into perfecting his James Bond impersonation and grooming himself as the world’s first bovine gangster rap star. Driven to despair, the cows send out a single scout, the impetuous Doris, into the world to search for more recruits to their band, and especially for bulls of a higher caliber.
This second section of the book centers on the family history of Moo See Dung née Daisy, her mother Florence, and her daughter Doris. As with any family drama, issues of character take center stage. We see all sorts of little subplots developing, romances between the cows and bulls who are brought in to visit, constant bickering between Moo See Dung and her mother, and Doris’ discovery of her long lost grandfather.
This section of the book ends with the great big wedding festival of Florence and her long lost love, who (a little confusingly) is also named Angus—Angus Senior. The story of the wedding festivities are enjoyable because by the time they occur I felt as a reader that I’d been drawn into the community on the dairy farm, that I cared about who they were and what happened to them. I would very much like to see this aspect of the book fleshed out even more: I’d like get a better idea of the differences between the cows, see more subplots, and be treated to more of the sort of idiosyncratic, slice-of-life humor that is at the heart of all romantic comedy from Jane Austen’s Emma to Forgetting Sarah Marshall. There’s already a lot there: we see the cows worrying about whether they look fat; we see the delight of the sexually frustrated cows when they discover that the washing machine can function as a huge vibrator. I think that Bostock has made a good start here, but has not quite realized the incredible comedic blank check he has written himself in the form of the first great bovine wedding comedy.
Still, by the time that the world of the dairy farm is threatened from the outside, we have a sense that there really is something at stake. The threat comes from the expansionist and imperialist despotism of the pig Bonaparte, a sort of update of Orwell’s despotic swine Napoleon from Animal Farm. Like the cows, Bonaparte has led a barnyard revolution, but he has turned his farm into a massive military-agricultural complex. He is surrounded by a tight coterie of animals, all of whom are not-so-subtle caricatures of despotic figures ranging from Pol Pot and Robert Mugabe to George W Bush and Tony Blair. Bonaparte and his gang has cast a covetous colonial eye on the rich (vegetable) oil reserves owned by Moo See Dung’s revolutionary collective. We’re introduced to Bonaparte’s farm by way of the intrepid cow Buttercup, who volunteers to infiltrate the encampment on the eve of Bonaparte’s impending invasion.
The narrative of Buttercup’s reconnaissance mission is probably the best piece of descriptive prose in the book. The innocent Buttercup is initiated into a nasty and brutish barnyard Gitmo where torture and wanton execution is the order of the day. Buttercup’s horror at what she sees helps to raise the stakes in preparation for the climactic battle scene wherein Bonaparte’s pigs bombard Moo See Dung’s dairy farm with rocks, bullets, flaming catapults and the corpses of conservative British politicians. The story of the battle is told at a fast clip that held my attention, and there are quite a few surprises, especially the transformation of Angus Junior from a useless wanker into a sort of bovine Achilles, putting his life on the line at the height of this barnyard Armageddon.
The story of Bonaparte’s invasion is clearly modeled on the 2003 invasion of Iraq and George W Bush’s “War on Terror,” and so it’s unfortunate that Bostock cheats himself of a fair bit of satiric sting by making the figures of George the bush kangaroo and Tony the toad relatively minor characters in Bonaparte’s army.
But the most important thing is that Bostock has presented in this manuscript the main ingredients of a story that, from start to finish, only he could create. The three main elements of conceptual comedy, ensemble family drama and satiric war epic all fit together in a novel and satisfying way. I think Bostock still needs to do some revision, blend the elements together a little more gracefully—for instance, there’s very little foreshadowing of the pigs’ invasion until the final third of the book—but he’s reached the crucial stage where the roadmap to such revision lies mostly in exploring and augmenting the strengths of the manuscript he’s already developed. I wish him luck in this endeavor, and very much look forward to seeing how the novel develops.
It’s now been about two weeks since I finished my close reading of the manuscript of Ruminator III, and I can honestly say that the delightful and anarchic world created by author (and my friend) Denis Bostock continues to shimmer in my mind for several reasons: Bostock’s amazing ability to riff comically on simple absurdities of life and language; the loveable ensemble of characters; and the freewheeling storyline, which satirizes the conventions of social fiction and epic war, while at the same time profiting from the dramatic tensions vital to these spheres of fiction. All this is quite an achievement, especially considering that this is a novel told entirely from the perspective of a band of revolutionary dairy cows who decide one day to throw off the mantle of oppression and stand up—as it were—on their own four hooves.
Bostock’s comic style is readily apparent in the first section of book, which is probably an unrivaled compendium of bovine jokes and puns in the history of western literature. Bostock’s rare and splendid ability to play with words shows itself in the delightful coining of such phrases as “workcowship” for “workmanship,” “bovinity,” for “divinity,” and the phrase, “I felt as if I had butterflies in my stomachs.” At times, the author seems to be channeling the cartoony and conceptual humor of Eddie Izzard, such as when a cow pauses in her conversation to consider the light bulb that has just appeared above her head as an indication that she’s just had an idea. At other times, Bostock’s comedy is like that of Dave Barry during the prime of his Miami Herald humor column: the jokes are unrelenting and shamelessly silly, and half the fun comes from watching the author continue to outdo himself in search of mischievous nonsense.
But for all this silliness, the humor also serves the important purpose of giving the reader a welcome into the story of the dairy farm revolution. The message to the reader is, “I know this is ludicrous, and you know it’s ludicrous, so let’s sit down together and have as much fun as we can with it.” Again and again, we’re invited to laugh as the cows—guided by their leader Daisy a.k.a. Moo See Dung—are torn when forced to choose between overthrowing the unjust power structure of the ruling regime or just eating some grass and taking a nap. The wit and playfulness grows as thick and dense as grass in the first section of the book, and as a reader I was having so much fun a part of me wanted to stay forever in the meadow of absurdity and postpone the action of the plot indefinitely.
But the action does commence. Shortly after taking over the dairy farm, the farmhouse catches fire, and Moo See Dung has to rally her troops to action in a section that gives evidence to Bostock is able to weave humor into a fast-paced scene where a lot is going on. The cows are just barely able to avert the fire, but it still proves to be a pretty simple adversary compared to the problem of their mounting social and sexual frustration. You see, there’s only one bull in their pasture, Angus, and he happens to be a self-absorbed, useless oaf who throws all his energy into perfecting his James Bond impersonation and grooming himself as the world’s first bovine gangster rap star. Driven to despair, the cows send out a single scout, the impetuous Doris, into the world to search for more recruits to their band, and especially for bulls of a higher caliber.
This second section of the book centers on the family history of Moo See Dung née Daisy, her mother Florence, and her daughter Doris. As with any family drama, issues of character take center stage. We see all sorts of little subplots developing, romances between the cows and bulls who are brought in to visit, constant bickering between Moo See Dung and her mother, and Doris’ discovery of her long lost grandfather.
This section of the book ends with the great big wedding festival of Florence and her long lost love, who (a little confusingly) is also named Angus—Angus Senior. The story of the wedding festivities are enjoyable because by the time they occur I felt as a reader that I’d been drawn into the community on the dairy farm, that I cared about who they were and what happened to them. I would very much like to see this aspect of the book fleshed out even more: I’d like get a better idea of the differences between the cows, see more subplots, and be treated to more of the sort of idiosyncratic, slice-of-life humor that is at the heart of all romantic comedy from Jane Austen’s Emma to Forgetting Sarah Marshall. There’s already a lot there: we see the cows worrying about whether they look fat; we see the delight of the sexually frustrated cows when they discover that the washing machine can function as a huge vibrator. I think that Bostock has made a good start here, but has not quite realized the incredible comedic blank check he has written himself in the form of the first great bovine wedding comedy.
Still, by the time that the world of the dairy farm is threatened from the outside, we have a sense that there really is something at stake. The threat comes from the expansionist and imperialist despotism of the pig Bonaparte, a sort of update of Orwell’s despotic swine Napoleon from Animal Farm. Like the cows, Bonaparte has led a barnyard revolution, but he has turned his farm into a massive military-agricultural complex. He is surrounded by a tight coterie of animals, all of whom are not-so-subtle caricatures of despotic figures ranging from Pol Pot and Robert Mugabe to George W Bush and Tony Blair. Bonaparte and his gang has cast a covetous colonial eye on the rich (vegetable) oil reserves owned by Moo See Dung’s revolutionary collective. We’re introduced to Bonaparte’s farm by way of the intrepid cow Buttercup, who volunteers to infiltrate the encampment on the eve of Bonaparte’s impending invasion.
The narrative of Buttercup’s reconnaissance mission is probably the best piece of descriptive prose in the book. The innocent Buttercup is initiated into a nasty and brutish barnyard Gitmo where torture and wanton execution is the order of the day. Buttercup’s horror at what she sees helps to raise the stakes in preparation for the climactic battle scene wherein Bonaparte’s pigs bombard Moo See Dung’s dairy farm with rocks, bullets, flaming catapults and the corpses of conservative British politicians. The story of the battle is told at a fast clip that held my attention, and there are quite a few surprises, especially the transformation of Angus Junior from a useless wanker into a sort of bovine Achilles, putting his life on the line at the height of this barnyard Armageddon.
The story of Bonaparte’s invasion is clearly modeled on the 2003 invasion of Iraq and George W Bush’s “War on Terror,” and so it’s unfortunate that Bostock cheats himself of a fair bit of satiric sting by making the figures of George the bush kangaroo and Tony the toad relatively minor characters in Bonaparte’s army.
But the most important thing is that Bostock has presented in this manuscript the main ingredients of a story that, from start to finish, only he could create. The three main elements of conceptual comedy, ensemble family drama and satiric war epic all fit together in a novel and satisfying way. I think Bostock still needs to do some revision, blend the elements together a little more gracefully—for instance, there’s very little foreshadowing of the pigs’ invasion until the final third of the book—but he’s reached the crucial stage where the roadmap to such revision lies mostly in exploring and augmenting the strengths of the manuscript he’s already developed. I wish him luck in this endeavor, and very much look forward to seeing how the novel develops.
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