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Reading

The Coin by Yasmin Zaher

A young Palestinian heiress to many million dollars moves to New York. Whilst her trust fund is controlled by her brother, she still receives a monthly allowance of 10000-ish USD. She occasionally spends this money on designer garments, but more often on vast quantities of cleaning supplies at CVS (the American Boots). These supplies are required for what she calls ‘CVS retreats,’ during which she obsessively cleans both herself and her apartment. There is a square of skin on her upper back which she cannot clean, in the middle of which, she believes, rests a shekel (the eponymous coin) which she swallowed the day her parents died.

She works as a school teacher and gives her students unhinged and inappropriate assignments. She dates a rich Russian guy but doesn’t love him. At the same time, she putatively dates a homeless guy (‘Trench Coat’) who dresses in designer suits (he turns out to be gay). She travels with Trench Coat to Paris and aids him in his scheme of reselling Birkin bags. After she returns, she covers the floor of her apartment with soil and plants, the windows with barbed wire, stops wearing clothes, and does not leave said apartment.

If your feeling on reading the above is ‘I don’t know what the hell to make of that,’ then I tend to agree. One of the most frustrating parts about The Coin is how many subplots it collects and discards – the above covers only a fraction of them – for example, the Birkin plot line features prominently in descriptions of the novel but it only lasts for perhaps two chapters in the middle.

Zaher builds up glittering surface after glittering surface, but it is unclear what, precisely, all this is in service of. Some reviewers have argued that this is basically is the point – it is a story about the vacuousness of contemporary life, the pointlessness of wealth. Still, I found it unsatisfying, if interesting.

The biggest problem I had was Zaher’s method of rendering scenes. The chapters are very short, vignettes, really, and all dramatisation and dialogue reads essentially as reported. This creates the feeling, at times, that you are reading a treatment rather than a novel.

On the other hand, The Coin has a great sense of humour. Zaher is very very funny. This makes it easy to forgive the unevenness. And there is something to be said for the newness, perhaps, that this is a story about an immigrant which is not the story you are supposed to tell about an immigrant.

But I think what attracts readers to The Coin – it does have quite a lot of hype; it won the Dylan Thomas Prize, and, even here, in Cape Town, it occupies a prominent position on bookstore table displays – is the idea of seeing materialism taken seriously and written about from the inside.

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Reflection

The YouTube channel: Zaza in China.

I’m not sure how I first ended up watching this, except that the algorithm gods recommended one of Zaza’s videos to me and I found the viewing experience strangely addictive.

Zaza is a thirty-six-year old bloke who lives alone in China, currently in Shenzen, and makes videos, mostly, about living alone.

He self identifies as part of China’s growing ‘Solo Youth’ population, who, as he explains in one of his videos, choose living alone and subsisting simply as an alternative to forced competitiveness in schools and workplaces. Comments on his videos typically brand his content as either peaceful or depressing.

The appeal of his videos is in their seeming authenticity. He films himself sitting at his desk, cooking dinner, eating dinner, going grocery shopping, making tea.

It’s easy, in hindsight, to see why this sort of thing could rack up millions of views. We are confronted with inauthenticity absolutely everywhere, and most obviously on platforms like YouTube. If there is a zeitgeist, (in)authenticity may well be it, or very close to it, as has been argued in many contemporary books and essays, perhaps most importantly in David Shields’ Reality Hunger.

And yet, the essential problem with Zaza’s videos is that he can never achieve perfect authenticity.

The very act of filming himself negates it. We can never see him as he actually is, only as he performs the way he actually is. There are always inauthenticities in his videos – for example, the fact that he must set up a camera on the fruit display to show himself rolling a trolley past.

By the nature of his content, he must perform himself. But he does a fantastic job of it. I think he is as close to showing himself naturally as anyone – or, at least, showing himself in a way that, when not knowing him personally, we perceive to be natural – presumably because he is talented at remaining non-self conscious.

Nevertheless, unavoidably, he is performing himself.

Much like in Proust, when Marcel laments that he can never see the true, unobserved Gilberte Swann, as the fact of his own presence negates it – we can never see the real Zaza.

But this isn’t a criticism, or the failing of an expectation. It’s impossible that it could be another way. Knausgaard’s My Struggle , for example, gets close to authenticity too, in large part because he does not hide the fact that he is writing My Struggle. And yet there are still falsities – when Knausgaard tells us what the weather was like one day in 1976, he cannot possibly remember that level of detail, we presume, and yet, it doesn’t matter, because he accurately captures the kind of details there would’ve been on a random day in 1976.

In anything that attempts to capture life, there is always the question of selection. We can’t have true authenticity in art because that would be the thing itself, the experience itself, identical to it.

Even if life could be rendered one-to-one into language, then the perfectly authentic novel would have to be an almost infinite number of pages.

And so writers and vloggers and anyone else trying to represent life, have to select.

Zaza can’t show us the entirety of his life, only the representative parts of it. But as per Henry James’s debate with H.G. Wells, this is the point, the whole game. Art attempts to reproduce the effect of life, not life itself.

Question

How do we ask more frequent and better questions?

This section of the newsletter is usually the most difficult for me to write, and I think this is because most questions we encounter are either too big or too small to say anything interesting about.

On the one hand, we have: what is the meaning of life? What happens after we die? What is the nature of consciousness? What does one do with themselves today, next week, for the rest of their lives? According to Joseph Campbell’s Primitive Mythology, children begin to ask the first two questions before the age of four. What does a parent say to those children?

These kind of questions are too abstract, and the answers we might give are typically too unfalsifiable or too idiosyncratic to make for straightforward discussion.

On the other hand, we have the questions which typically dominate our minds from the time we wake up to the time we go to bed: what should I make for dinner? Did I remember to buy electricity yet? Do I have time to go to gym before my next meeting? These questions are much like dreams, in the sense that we only care about listening to them if we care deeply for the person talking about them.

My sense is that the questions we should optimise for are the medium questions.

These are usually technical questions – capable of being answered, if with a degree of subjectivity, that have a relevance beyond the purely personal or trivial. When we say that children are good at asking questions, I think this is usually what we mean: where does wind come from? Why is it wrong to tell lies?

One of the reasons I love novels is that they are uniquely good at producing medium questions.

In large part, questions about the meaning of life are too difficult because the dataset of life is too broad. There is too much of the stuff of experience to make sense of it. There is already too much in my immediate sensory experience of sitting at my desk and looking out the window to ever fully analyse – trees and birds and insects and the sky and my desk and the wetness of my hair having gotten out of the shower. But what a novel does, is a provide a limited dataset of experience, a kind of contained miniature life – and so it is possible to ask what the meaning of the whale is in Moby Dick, and what the status of the American Dream is in The Great Gatsby.

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See you in two weeks,

Blake