Literary Wonderlands

by Laura Miller

  BERNARDO ATXAGA

  OBABAKOAK (1988)

  A collection of interrelated stories about life and the stories people tell, including that of the narrator’s childhood in an imaginary Basque-speaking town, featuring a whirlwind of sleuthing, storytelling, and dialogue about literature and myth-making in “big” and “small” cultures.

  Critics have referred to Bernardo Atxaga (b.1951) not just as a Basque novelist, but as the Basque novelist, and his writing seeks to evoke his heritage without taking refuge in rose-tinted nostalgia. He was born in the small Basque-speaking village of Asteasu, near San Sebastian, at a time when Basque areas were still reeling from Franco’s attempts to eradicate the culture.

  In Obabakoak—a collection of interrelated stories based in the fictional village of Obaba—Atxaga has transformed the then-rigid borders of Basque identity into an elastic new space, both solid and transient, recognizable and unrecognizable, dark and bright, tempting, appealing, and beckoning to the traveler. “Obabakoak” means both “of the people and things from Obaba” and “Stories from Obaba,” and the village is depicted in the stories as experienced by someone: thus, for the young or Romantic it is a “toy valley” or locus amoenus; for the marginalized characters, including writers (who take shelter in primordial spaces such as woods, jungles, mountains, or the outskirts), it is violent, full of threats and dark secrets.

  Obaba is a small, insignificant place to most people: letters from the big city often do not reach it. Yet, Atxaga does not connect power to size. In his view, like that of a naive painter, everything exists on the same plane and has the same value. Most of the action does not take place in the town center, but at scenic overlooks because, rather than a site to be looked upon, Obaba is a perspective from which the world is perceived. Furthermore, Obaba’s borders are extremely permeable, as in a dream—a concept befitting a town whose name stems from the first words of a Basque lullaby (“oba, oba” means “hush, hush”)—and readers are constantly carried to unknown and unlikely places such as the Amazon jungle.

  Furthermore, Atxaga establishes an unbreakable connection between landscape and storytelling. The protagonist of the first story is a geographer who recollects his childhood in Obaba. This image of geographer-writer not only promotes credibility (à la Macondo for Gabriel García Márquez, here, Comala for Juan Rulfo, here, or Yoknapatawpha County for William Faulkner) but also calls attention to the process of fiction-making, which is omnipresent in the tales. Obabakoak is full of stories and rewritings (“plagiarisms,” as the narrator calls them) from the works of many authors such as Borges, Kafka, Celan, Calvino, Perec, Stevenson, Dante, Axular, and Cervantes.

  And above everything, Obabakoak maps the creative process of Bernardo Atxaga. Obaba is a pool into which he dives in order to explore the childhood experiences and mysteries that constituted the humus of his creativity. Thus, his exploration in “Childhoods” (the first section of the book) of the rich tradition of Basque beliefs from Asteasu precedes the series of narratives inspired by writers who influenced the author. The map of Atxaga’s creative interior, his inner-life, shows an author who jumps over frontiers between literature and orality, Basque and non-Basque, different audiences and aesthetics—pre-, post-, and modern.

  NEIL GAIMAN et al.

  THE SANDMAN (1988–2015)

  In the groundbreaking comic book saga, the personification of dreams must deal with various challenges and challengers, while approaching his own inevitable fate.

  The Sandman was originally a minor DC Comics superhero, the alter ego of two crime fighters, Wesley Dodds and Hector Hall. In the late 1980s DC turned to British author Neil Gaiman (b.1960) to reimagine the character as part of DC’s Vertigo imprint, focusing on more mature themes and stories.

  The Sandman is a story about stories, but, more importantly, it is a story in which stories shape reality, in which there is, in fact, no difference between stories and reality. In this world, cosmology (forget about geography) is shaped by personality. Though there are several fixed settings in The Sandman, it’s quickly made clear to us that how they appear and operate is a function of the whims of people at their heart. The central character, Dream (the titular Sandman who is known by many other names including Morpheus, Oneiros, and Kai’cul), is the third of seven siblings known as the “Endless,” who represent immutable powers that govern the life of every living thing in the universe. But these powers have been given bodies and personalities, which in turn shapes how they present themselves and their realms. So, for example, the oldest Endless sibling, Destiny, is always shown walking through a garden of forking paths, carrying a book from which he reads what is to come. One of Dream’s younger siblings, Desire (who is both male and female), meanwhile, lives in a castle shaped like a giant image of her/himself, because Desire is a narcissist. Dream, meanwhile, is the only Endless who plays the role of ruler of his realm properly, complete with a castle, attendants, and even a throne room, because Dream is obsessed with rules and propriety, with the supposed responsibility and demands of his office. But as several of his siblings point out to him, what he perceives as immutable laws are merely his choices. If Dream wanted it, the world of dreams—and thus the world as a whole—could look very different.

  Furthermore, Dream—usually appearing as a pale, gangly young man with a mop of unruly dark hair—is only one manifestation of himself. In Overture (2015), which acts as a prequel to the events of The Sandman, Dream encounters many other aspects of himself, the Dreams of alien races, of animals, or plants, of sentient machines, and of far stranger creatures. Perhaps the only fixed point in the series is his older sister, Death, who nearly always appears as a cheerful, friendly young woman dressed in black jeans and a tank-top. But this, too, is in service of the story’s tangled family drama. Death’s role is to be the no-nonsense big sister who punctured Dream’s self-importance and self-pity. The fact that she is also the calm, friendly face one sees at the end of it all has often been called one of the most striking and compelling aspects of Gaiman’s world-building.

  It’s questionable whether Gaiman could have told a story in which the world is so mutable, so subject to the whims and mood-swings of fractious personalities, in any other medium but comics. The existence of pictures grounds the reader in reality where the written word alone might have left us scrambling for a foothold. The graphic medium also gives Gaiman a freedom that film or television could not have done. The Sandman shifts from multi-issue story arcs involving its main characters, to one-off stories whose heroes are sometimes never seen again, in which the Endless play only a supporting role; it also shifts genres, from horror to high fantasy to mythology to realist drama, in a way that only the comic-book medium can accommodate, and that is reflected in the shift in artwork styles. The more artistically ambitious Sandman stories, such as Overture or “The Kindly Ones” (issues 57–69, 1994–95), use nonrealist styles to convey the strangeness and alienness of their characters and settings. The former (illustrated by J. H. Williams III) breaks free of the restrictions of panels, and even the orientation of the page, to convey the chaos that Dream has unwittingly unleashed on the universe by allowing a “dream vortex” to go unchecked. The latter (illustrated by Marc Hempel, Kein Nowlan, D’Israeli, and others) uses the restriction of a 3x3 grid to illustrate how Dream, despite all his power, has trapped himself in the very rules he holds so dear.

  If The Sandman is a story in which the characters shape their own world (and thus write their own fate), this is not, in the end, a power reserved only for the Endless, or for stars and other cosmic beings. One of the series’ recurring characters is Hob Gadling, an ordinary fourteenth-century Englishman who simply decides not to die, and continues living to the twenty-first century and perhaps even beyond. When Hob asks why Death has spared him, he is told that the choice is ultimately up to him. In the world of The Sandman, as in the dreams that he sends to every living creature, it is we who shape and give meaning, we who tell the story.

&
nbsp; NEAL STEPHENSON

  SNOW CRASH (1992)

  In a hyper-Balkanized, ultra-franchised near future California an African-American-Korean hacker, Hiro Protagonist, and a fifteen-year-old skateboard Kourier, Y. T., battle the ultimate cyber-conspiracy.

  Published in 1992, a decade after William Gibson’s Burning Chrome and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner laid the ground rules for cyberpunk and U.S. president Ronald Reagan established the conditions for a stratospheric rise of unfettered neoliberal capitalism, Neal Stephenson’s (b. 1959) third novel, Snow Crash, appeared as a state-of-the-union interrogation of both cultural vectors. Stephenson graduated from Boston University with a B.A. in geography and a minor in physics, making his publishing debut in 1984. From his home in Seattle he continues to publish epic, complex novels that bring a geographer’s holistic perception to entire societies and worlds.

  It is the second decade of the twenty-first century, and the political impulse toward small government has reduced the U.S. to Fedland, where loyal citizens work for a bureaucracy obsessed with micromanaging what little U.S. territory remains. Citizens don’t actually live in the U.S., but in L.A.’s Burbclaves, franchised housing developments—micro-nations—protected by MetaCops Unlimited. Or else, like Snow Crash’s Hiro Protagonist, officially the greatest swordsman in the world, they reside in a converted container unit by the airport with Vitaly Chernobyl, leader singer of The Meltdowns.

  Hiro was a cofounder of the Black Sun, the coolest place in the Metaverse, a 2K-HD-3D virtual reality world he co-coded. Now he freelances, uploading data for the Central Intelligence Corporation, an organization formed from a merger of the CIA and the Library of Congress, for which he gets paid per view, and he delivers pizza for Uncle Enzo’s CosaNostra Pizza, Incorporated, through which he forms a working partnership with skate-boarding Kourier, Y. T., aka Yours Truly—age fifteen, hip, sarcastic, sexually active, and eager to further herself in a place where divisions between country and company, micro-nation and franchise are even less meaningful than the hyper-inflated dollar.

  Stephenson’s world flicks between a broken L.A. and the Metaverse, a domain of computer avatars foreshadowing Oculus Rift virtual reality and Google Earth, referencing the lightcycle races of Tron and anticipating the physics-defying combat of The Matrix. Later the action moves to The Raft, a vast floating refugee city based around a U.S. navy aircraft carrier under the control of megalomaniacal Texan billionaire L. Bob Rife.

  Rife controls the infrastructure on which the Internet runs, and forms a distaff alliance with the psychopathic Raven, Fedland, and the Reverend Wayne Bedford’s Pearly Gates Pentecostal Church franchise. Variously lined against these forces are Hiro, Y. T., Uncle Enzo’s Mafia, Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong (“the granddaddy of all FOQNEs” [Franchise-Organized Quasi-National Entities]), and a cybernetic, nuclear-powered dog called Fido.

  At the heart of Stephenson’s satirical landscape is the duel between a status quo of individuals as free thinking agents in a free market and a vision of mind-controlled human drones created by a virus that crosses the line between biology and programming. The author explores complex theories about the neuro-linguistic origins of civilization and organized religion, extrapolating history as a struggle between rational religions—Judaism, Christianity, Islam, all codified in a Book—and ideas as linguistic viruses capable of physically rewriting the deep structures of the brain. All this is packaged between cartoonishly violent set pieces and knowingly smart dialogue, as befits a world where anyone with their own nuke can be a sovereign state.

  Infected by a baroque whirlwind of often surreally prescient ideas, protracted info dumping, and James Cameron-esque cinematic spectacle, Snow Crash is, in its intertwining of cutting-edge technological and theological speculation as tools to interrogate the state of contemporary America, cool as snow, confrontational as crashing steel. Ironically, while Stephenson’s comedic apotheosis of cyberpunk’s first wave went culturally viral, his narrative has itself defeated all attempts to assimilate as the latest L.A. Hollywood franchise.

  LOIS LOWRY

  THE GIVER (1993)

  Lowry’s dystopian novel explores individuality, emotion, memory, and morality in a world of “Sameness,” which assigns every person and action a time and place.

  Aimed mainly at a young audience, The Giver by Lois Lowry (b.1937) explores serious themes in complex ways. The author was in part inspired to write the story when her elderly father began to suffer dementia, and her thoughts turned to the idea of manipulating memory to avoid recalling distressing thoughts and emotions. Since its publication in 1993, the book has had a controversial reception: celebrated in some quarters for its perceptive exploration of the nature of authority, parents have also repeatedly demanded its removal from school libraries. Lowry herself has noted that she never thought of The Giver as dystopian; rather, “it was just a story about a kid making sense of a complicated world.”

  Nevertheless, the very landscape of the novel lays out the rigid values, culture, and expectations of its “Community.” Told from the viewpoint of eleven-year-old Jonas, who will become at the forthcoming “Ceremony of Twelve” the next “Receiver of Memories,” we see his world as he has been raised to see it. Every building in the idealized, ordered Community is named according to an obvious function—Birthing Unit, Dwelling Areas, School—except one, the Annex, a small building beside the House of the Old, where Jonas will soon live. The multi-talented Jonas, unquestioningly humble in this world that eschews individuality, initially deeply approves of the order built into his landscape.

  Four factors awaken Jonas. First, for reasons never explained, and thus more like fairy-tale arbitrariness than science-fiction extrapolation, Jonas comes to see things “change,” first for an instant, then more persistently. Only later does he learn that the visual oddity is color, the absence of which we, seeing through his eyes, had not noticed. Second, and less arbitrarily, Jonas has a slightly erotic dream that leads his parents, smilingly, to initiate him into the life-long regime of a pill a day to suppress “Stirrings.” Third, through the hands-on transfer of memories from the older Receiver, now the Giver, Jonas receives knowledge of a world full not only of color but music, joy, weather, pain, dread, agony, loss, and even hills. Only then do we realize that the Community is not only gray and climate-controlled but relentlessly flat. Fourth, the Community punishes non-conformity—whether intentional, as in disobedience, or accidental, through incapacity—with “Release.” The Giver allows Jonas to see a tape of Jonas’s father, a “Nurturer,” giving Release to the less robust of identical twins, to avoid confusion in the Community. Release, Jonas finally sees, is death by injection. Everything in his perfect world reveals itself as potentially false and cruel.

  The Receiver holds all cultural memory, no matter how painful, so that others need not; however, in the rare event that the Community needs venerable wisdom to confront an unanticipated situation, the Receiver can be consulted. Keeping those memories, he lives—in the Annex—alone. When the Receiver begins to “train” Jonas by memory transfer, the Receiver becomes the Giver. But Jonas, too, to soothe a difficult infant “newchild” to sleep, transfers pleasant memories to him. One can be a Giver in more than one way. One can use wisdom in more than one way.

  Together, the old and the young Giver devise a disruptive plan to allow Jonas individuality in “Elsewhere,” with its hills and weather, and the Community to suffer enough—from the memories that will be released by Jonas’s absence—to transcend stultifying perfection. What will happen? Although the book was conceived as freestanding, Lowry later created three companion novels (Gathering Blue, 2000, Messenger, 2004, and Son, 2012) that let that let us know of Jonas’s ultimate development and include the wider landscape that the Community seeks to ignore.

  PHILIP PULLMAN

  HIS DARK MATERIALS (1995–2000)

  Pullman’s multiverse-spanning trilogy is the story of Lyra Bellaqua, a young girl who is fated to be a second Eve, and
the choices she makes that will save or doom the worlds.

  Philip Pullman’s (b.1946) His Dark Materials trilogy (Northern Lights, published in 1995 and entitled The Golden Compass in the U.S.; The Subtle Knife, 1997; and The Amber Spyglass, 2000) has been a publishing phenomenon, selling more than seventeen million copies worldwide and translated into more than forty languages. The series is loved by many—both young and old—for its rich characters and the subtle complexities of its plot, as well as for its engaging re-readability. Although marketed for children and young adults, His Dark Materials can be read on many levels. For younger readers, it is a compelling adventure story full of new and beautiful worlds, while older readers will observe a treatise on free will and a sharp critique of religion.

  Pullman worked as a teacher for many years and had minor success with his early novels before writing his award-winning series. Inspired by the works of William Blake and John Milton, the trilogy is in many ways a retelling of Paradise Lost. In Pullman’s own words, “My books are about killing God.”

  The series begins in Oxford. It is not the Oxford University of our own, less obviously magical, world—for one thing, people in this alternate world are accompanied by daemons, physical manifestations of their souls in animal form—but one that is close enough that we can almost recognize it. It is this feeling of being somewhere that is almost recognizable—almost known, yet not quite home—that characterizes the worlds of this series.

  The Golden Compass opens with Lyra hiding in a room that is forbidden to her. She creeps into a wardrobe that is “bigger than she’d thought”—echoing the wardrobe that leads to C. S. Lewis’s Narnia (see here)—but Lyra’s wardrobe doesn’t open to a new world. Instead, it is Lyra’s own curiosity and quest for knowledge that broadens her world.