Reviews
THE AFTER-DEATH ROOM: JOURNEY INTO SPIRITUAL ACTIVISM by MICHAEL MCCOLLY
Nonfiction Review for Bookslut by Jessie Tierney
Some may cringe at the thought of reading a long memoir about one man’s journey into the heart of the AIDS pandemic, but The After-Death Room is more than that. HIV-positive journalist Michael McColly travels through South Africa, India, Thailand, Vietnam, Chicago, and Senegal to document the lives of activists, sex workers, and people living with the virus. He also tells his own story, humanizing the disease and making it accessible in an intimate and compassionate way.
Unaware that his trip will eventually spur him to travel through five different countries, Michael packs a box of yoga mats and lands in South Africa, where he teaches yoga at the International AIDS Conference. After an intense encounter with an HIV-positive woman from one of his sessions, McColly decides that he needs to travel around the world to tell the stories of people involved with the AIDS struggle. Along the way, he deals with his own spirituality and sexuality (he is a bisexual man), as he, too, experiences life with HIV. “When I got rid of my belongings,” McColly writes, speaking of his decision to travel against his doctor’s advice, “it wasn’t the things themselves I released, it was me.”
McColly’s involvement in the book sets it apart from other AIDS documentaries, and the fact that he is HIV positive — and struggling with whether to reveal this to the people he encounters — brings the reader deep into the story. His honesty inspires trust in those he speaks with, giving each a distinct voice, instead of presenting them as one block of nameless sufferers. As the story unfolds, the reader begins to realize how important it is to relate to others in order to both heal and live. McColly evokes a strong sense of intuitive connections, mindfulness of the body, and awareness of the implications of touch—or lack thereof. “I am drawn to her body: the deep eye sockets, the black needle stains down her arms, but mostly it is the deep mechanical rise and fall of her breath that upstages the drama of her husband’s account of their life. Each time her chest collapses in its exhale, I wait in sympathetic terror, holding my own breath, thinking that it will be her last ….”
McColly’s careful crafting blends scene and internal observations in a way that moves the vantage point from a feeling in the body to the exterior world, then out to a global perspective, taking the reader with him. Imagery and perception combine to make this not only an important sociological study of multiple struggles (sexuality, AIDS, poverty, healing), but also a literary work. He incorporates facts so that they become a part of the story without losing momentum, allowing the reader to step away from this book with a greater understanding of the scope of the AIDS pandemic. “[Doctor Tuong] tells us that Vietnam is struggling to come to grips with its growing AIDS epidemic. Each month they have more cases, but he has no antiretrovirals to dispense; only those with money and power have access to antiretroviral treatment. Remarkably, he admits that as far as he knows only seven people in the entire country are using the combination therapy I take. I can’t believe it when Tuong tells me. I have to ask him to repeat it. ‘Seven,’ he says.”
Posing poignant and at times painful questions throughout his memoir, McColly challenges the reader to confront complex issues. In an interview of AIDS sufferers in Ho Chi Minh City, he writes, “Ever since sitting down in this café, I’ve found myself trying to hide my health by contracting my body, hunching over, crawling into the black ink scribbles in my notebook. I have to ask myself again and again: Why did you come? Why do this to them? Why show them a future they aren’t allowed to have?”
The book is both disheartening and inspiring as McColly’s journey deepens. In Chennai, India, he interviews a man heading AIDS education for sex workers who says, “We are trying to make the young men … into a cohesive, self-sustaining community. It’s the only way they are going to survive not only this disease but this life.” This becomes a subtle theme through the book: those who become active in helping others find that reaching out gives them a way to cope with the disease. At times, the story is devastating. Multiple viewpoints and approaches toward the treatment of AIDS help to put the struggles of various countries into a very real perspective.
The After-Death Room is a modern portrait of the diverse spectrum of the AIDS landscape. But the ultimate message does not just apply to AIDS. It is universal: the importance of connecting, understanding, loving, and helping others—which, in this world, is harder than ever to realize, is certainly a thing worth living for. In McColly’s words, “[O]ne question came to represent the request that animated this odyssey: for your sake as well as ours, please, we don’t need you to talk about the importance of acting or healing, we need you to act and to heal.”
SHYNESS AND DIGNITY by DAG SOLSTAD
Fiction Review for Bookslut by Jessie Tierney
Similar in theme to Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Dag Solstad’s Shyness and Dignity confronts ideas of identity and the understanding of self. However, Solstad does this in a more isolated manner as we follow the main character, Elias Rukla, during the course of one day through his long, almost obsessive internal deliberation over his life.
In the school courtyard where he teaches, Elias Rukla’s umbrella fails to open, and in a fit he smashes it over and over against a fountain. Then, to the surprise and horror of on-looking students, he verbally berates a tall blond who “was looking at him in amazement.” Rukla knows that his career is finished: “This was his ultimate downfall. He knew that now he was leaving the Fagerborg school behind him for good and that he would never teach again.” He wanders downtown, brooding over how he will ever tell his wife, Eva, “whom had spread out a bit too much and with whom he had breakfast every morning,” that he has surely lost his job and means of supporting them. It is with this pondering that the novel embarks on a careful, meditative analysis through Rukla’s introspective perception of his world.
Shyness and Dignity relates to the present human condition, using Rukla as a means of accessing the possibility that we are more isolated and alone than we may wish to perceive. An intimate third person storyteller allows us to be very close to Rukla, sharing his meditations while still seeing him from the outside. “‘But I imagine that he [Thomas Mann, a German author whom Rukla admires] might have derived a certain pleasure from describing my wanderings across the floor tonight, in my apartment in Jacob Allas gate, where I’m walking back and forth, plagued by the fact that I am a socially aware individual who no longer has anything to say’, Elias Rukla thought.” This proximity draws the reader nearer to his personal analysis, causing us to ask some of the same existential questions of ourselves.
Part of what draws the reader in is the rhythm of the prose. “It must have been because his love had died. His love had died, and even though he cherished the child they had together more than anything in the world, it did not suffice to make him decide to take the child with him to the USA because then he would also have to take along the child’s mother, and his love was dead. How long had his love been dead? Johan Corneliussen’s love, which had died. How long ago?” Repetitious language creates the methodical pace for the novel, having an almost meditative effect on the reader.
The prose has an elegant simplicity, surprising, considering this is a translation. Dag Solstad is a prominent Norwegian author who has earned such honors as the Nordic Prize for Literature and is the only three-time recipient of the Norwegian Literary Critics’ Award. Shyness and Dignity, translated by Sverre Lyngstad, is his first English-language work, and this translation surely does him justice.
Shyness and Dignity works on a universal level; it is not pigeonholed into Norwegian culture. Its simplicity may feel a bit patronizing at first (Okay, Dag, we get that his love was dead), but as the repeated images play out, the reader experiences a building effect, slowly gaining insight to Elias Rukla’s world through the methodical pattern of his thoughts. Throughout the novel, we begin to gradually realize that in some ways his world is not much unlike our own.
Elias Rukla comes to no ground-breaking conclusions, he simply notes of his current state of affairs “it is dreadful, but there is no going back,” which seems to be no different from the rest of his lonely life. Solstad has touched on a theme that resonates, and has succeeded in publishing a worthwhile read for anyone interested in themes like isolation and who appreciates subtle yet strong prose.