Dear Friends,
I wonder if there is a space to write about books you love that isn’t quite reviewing but something more like telling a tale or entering into the poem of a novel.
— Sal
Every story should have an animal, I think, after reading Hiroko Oyamada’s novel, The Hole. A woman, Asa, is walking in the extreme heat of a cicada-sung Japanese summer, making her way to a 7-11 to take care of a banal but urgent errand for her mother-in-law, when she sees a creature. Not a dog, not a raccoon, not a rabbit, not a weasel. It has black fur and proportions that don’t make sense. Asa follows as the animal turns towards a nearby river (river of strange smells). She doesn’t quite know why she keeps going, but she does. The animal seems, perhaps, like a guide. Suddenly, Asa has fallen into a hole. She lands on her feet, unhurt, but temporarily trapped. Maybe the animal is in there with her, down by her shoes. It’s not a rabbit, but she’s an Alice. After the day when she followed the animal, nothing in the story is ever quite itself. There are relatives, neighbors, jobs, meals, a death. Is this one a dream? Is that one a ghost? The animal she followed, like any animal, is a mystery. The creature itself is a kind of hole to fall into, the way life is.
The Hole by Hiroko Oyamada, translated by David Boyd, was published by New Directions in 2020.
Friend, this letter is a letter to you. Write back! Have you followed any mysterious animals lately, or fallen into any holes?
Further adventures and new ways of seeing can be found in my book, The Uses of Art.
Artist Sal Randolph’s THE USES OF ART is a memoir of transformative encounters with works of art, inviting readers into new methods of looking that are both liberating and emboldening.
Dazzlingly original, ferociously intelligent.
— Michael Cunningham
A joyful, dazzling treasure-box of a book.
— Bonnie Friedman
Here’s a guide, to waking up, over and over again.
— Roshi Pat Enkyo O’Hara
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