I have never felt so inside the head of a writer as I did while reading this book. In fact I was so confused by the blurring of autobiography and fiction, (a confusion I found somewhat pleasurable, I might add) that I wanted to write this entry before reading any of the reviews about the author or book so I could preserve the immediacy of my impressions. Even seeing the author’s picture at the end of the novel was somehow a distraction.

Nunez deliberately lays out this path of blurred boundaries with clues along the way. In Part Eleven, an extra-diagetic chapter where she describes her fantasy ending to the novel, and gives us another version of the “true story”, she comments: “She tells the man about a new course she’s teaching. Life and Story. Fiction as autobiography, autobiography as fiction.” This course is the novel. The novel is the course.

The book does have a plot. The narrator, a writer, has learned that her good friend and mentor has committed suicide. His wife has asked if she will take in his Great Dane. The dog is also grieving the death of his owner, and makes terrible sobbing sounds when left alone. The narrator lives in a rent-controlled small apartment where dogs are not allowed. But she cannot say no, and takes the dog in. He soon takes over her bed and her heart and her life. The only character in the novel with a name is the dog, Apollo.

The narrator-writer sees literary references in all her thoughts and experiences, and beautifully interweaves these references in the story in a way that seems utterly relevant and not heavy handed. From Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet: “‘Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.’ Words often quoted, or paraphrased, including recently in an epigraph to the film White God: Everything terrible is something that needs our love.”

I am not a writer and it is not my sole passion to make sense of my experiences by committing them to words. The act of writing this blog is the closest I come to that struggle, which gives you some idea of how far away I really am. But Nunez brings the reader along in her struggle. Every moment is a literary moment; expansive, considered, connected through language to other stories. What is the truth and what is fiction becomes irrelevant to the larger project of observing and writing and trying to find meaning in life and art.

Sorry for the lag in my book reviews but I went on a binge, reading all 8 books of the Expanse series. (Unfortunately I have to wait another year for the final book 9.)

The Expanse is set in the future, in a time when speculative new technologies, combined with our continued environmental degradation of Earth, have lead mankind to explore habitation on Mars and the outer planet moons and asteroid belt. Corey explores the biological and social implications of the cultures which would emerge from low gravity living. Tensions between the residents of the outer planets “the Belters” and the inner planets sparks the initial conflict of the book. The Canterbury, an Ice freighter which harvests ice from asteroids and brings it to the Belt to use for water, is blown up by ships which appear to be Martian military vessels. Four crew members survive and broadcast their suspicions of Mars’ involvement to the universe, just before they are picked up by a Mars military vessel. The crew members – James Holden, Naomi Nagada, Alex Kamal, and Amos Burton – form the central cast around which the series is based.

Like any epic fiction, the narrative is pretty complex, exponentially more so in this series due to the imagined technologies, life forms from other planets, and the changing laws of physics. Like many speculative fictional novels, new technologies influence not only how we relate to people on other planets, but also how we relate to each other. New reproductive technologies radically alter the concept and function of family. For example Holden grew up with 8 parents (all somehow biologically involved); families are mixes of gender and genetics, families are constructed, not predetermined. In many ways the future is dark and frightening, but the social fabric is progressive and liberating.

Syfy channel made a series based on the books that is dark and gritty and moves at the same slow mysterious pace as the novels. I’ve only watched a few episodes but they are intriguing. The complex imagined worlds are kept visually minimal – like the novels you don’t fully understand what you are looking at and the world gradually reveals itself to you as the story evolves.

But the books are really what I could not put down, and look forward to the final chapter due to come out next year