I knew, and even said aloud, by around page five that I would likely not finish Eclipse by Keiichiro Hirano. The premise and history were all there; written in 1991 by an undergraduate, it became a sensation and won the Akutagawa Prize, which I generally find to be presented to interesting writers if not always great ones. The novel tells the story of a fifteenth century Dominican friar attempting, to paraphrase the character's words, to research pagan texts, excise them of their heresy, and bring them into the Godly fold. An alchemist and some sort of witch hunter are promised on the back.
Rays of the Gothic and Weird – of Walpole and Hope Hodgson, specifically – immediately break through the clouded, friarly tone. Images, like that of a wine cask in a venal priest's office, where,
Below the hole could be seen a small stain. Above a dull, copper-brown area of long standing, wine that had just now been drawn lingered, partially dried, like bloody pus. It was just like an incompletely healed abrasion whose scab had come off. (p. 27)or of the "deaf-mute" son of the blacksmith('s wife?) swinging,
Two large trees spread their branches beside it, and there was something ceaselessly coming and going between them. When I looked closer, it was a boy swinging on a swing. For an instant, I was stricken with horror. The boy was laughing noiselessly, his mouth opened as wide as it would go. His hair was flying, his eyes were like saucers, and the sinews stood out on his neck. None of this suggested the slightest pleasure. And it was not only pleasure that was lacking. In some location strangely distant from human emotion, the boy's smiling face was shining cheerfully in splendid isolation like a reflection of the moon in water.are, if not wholly luminous, certainly well written and compelling fodder for theological spiraling.
…After watching for a moment, I could stand it no longer and averted my eyes. The impossible thought that this game could go on for all eternity made me shudder all over again. (pp. 50-1)
So how did I know so quickly I'd likely abandon it? Despite 2024 being something of a personal banner year for historical fiction – from Karen Tei Yamashita's Brazil-maru, which I had somehow not read before, to my introduction to Sacha Naspini with the brilliant The Bishop's Villa, to the more generically dubious examples like the first half of Tommy Orange's Wandering Stars and the playful alternate literary history of Percival Everett's James and Nisi Shawl's The Day and Night Books of Mardou Fox – the genre is not one I tend to stick with. More prosaically, I have something like four books that have been recommended to me by between one and four people that I'm excited about; I mostly picked up Eclipse because it was short and seemed neat after I finished another book unexpectedly early.
The prosaic explanation is, of course, the more common experience. Working in a bookstore puts one in a situation where grazing is almost impossible to avoid, at least if you're the kind of reader(/dilettante) that I am. Used books hove into view; publishers throw sample darts that sometimes find you as their bullseye; advance listener copies pile up; recommendations, heeded and unheeded, linger. Book clubs are born and die.
Eclipse's loosening grasp on me turned out to be more interesting in the where, rather than the why. So I transcribed the specific passage. It's long, so I'll leave it at the bottom of this post where you can reference it now or when my description seems interesting.
To set it up: in this strange village between Lyon and Florence that a priest has advised the narrator to drop by, there is an alchemist. The narrator has seemingly gained an amount of trust with this Pierre Dufay, being allowed to watch his work and occasionally get questions answered; one night he sees Pierre wander off on one of his irregular perambulations and decides to surreptitiously follow. Cutting through the forest and across a stream, they enter a cave, where the narrator sees… skip ahead if you wish.
Thinking again of the comparisons made earlier, to Hope Hodgson and Walpole and the general trajectory of gothic/weird horror: this is the moment, it seems to me, where Truth is revealed. It's the basement of High Place in Mexican Gothic, the crumpled linen face of MR James' "Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad" Admittedly, it's right at the two thirds mark of the novel; eighty pages have passed, about forty remain, whereas those examples are at or much closer to the end. I'll never know, unless I randomly pick the book up again some day. But it certainly feels like that quintessential gothic/weird moment, where the truth of the thing appears and is so fundamentally disconcerting it, in the Gothic tradition, destabilizes the seeming fixity of the moral universe, or in the Weird, the capacity to comprehend the world whatsoever.
Maybe it is the case, further into this novel, that this is not the marker but another piece of the path. I certainly won't be able to tell you. Because, well. It just super doesn't work for me.
It's rich, I know, for a person with aphantasia to complain that they just can't picture whatever the hell is going on with this stalagmite. I sort of definitionally can't picture. I can, and do, read images, though. Like I wrote on my blurb for Claire Keegan's Small Things Like These, "Claire Keegan has two of the greatest gifts a writer could ask for: an impeccable ear for dialogue and the ability to deliver a heartstopping image."
I don't know how to explain this, considering it's only been a couple years since I learned that phrases like Mind's Eye weren't exclusively metaphorical, or that the stereotypical hypnotist's invocation to "close your eyes, now imagine yourself on a beach" wasn't just about evoking feeling, but seeing. Suffice to say I've been reading images, even reading for images, my entire life without the mental aid of, you know, being able to see them.
As an example, let's stick with Keegan. The opening paragraph of Small Things Like These reads:
In October there were yellow trees. Then the clocks went back the hour and the long November winds came in and blew, and stripped the trees bare. In the town of New Ross, chimneys threw out smoke which fell away and drifted off in hairy, drawn-out strings before dispersing along the quays, and soon the River Barrow, dark as stout, swelled up with rain.There's a lot we could unpack here. The subtle and brilliant elision of the clocks and the long November winds; in that same sentence, the use of "went back the hour" to firmly root the reader in the spoken language; the deceptive simplicity of the bouncing rhythm of the first sentence; the cutting specificity of "hairy, drawn-out strings."
None of this helps me to "see" this image. Until not long ago, I was under the impression that this was true of everyone. But reading it, I know that it is right. That there is beauty in the language and that that beauty is, in part, its mellifluousness and diction and intricate syntax, and, in part, because it feels evocative and correct.
To be, maybe, slightly more direct: I cannot picture smoke "which fell away and drifted off in hairy, drawn-out strings before dispersing along the quays" in my head. But reading an image with such a vivid, evocative description, I can know that when I encounter such smoke in my life, I will comprehend it better. I will find beauty where I might have missed it, had I not read this sentence, even if I don't recall the line in all its specificity in that exact moment.
And, it is important to say: this is not always, or even often, a question of "beauty." It is often a question of aesthetics, but not even just that. Language communicates, but not always directly; when language is rendered into an image with dimension, it can alter perceptions more broadly.
Hirano can get there, sometimes. The images I quoted above, especially of "the boy laughing noiselessly," have an element of that quality – except, in the case of that particular image, it is more the feeling of wrongness that permeates. It's not quite as striking as Keegan, but I genuinely believe that there are few writers that can match her.
So what of these three pages that you may or may not have read, below? What about them broke me on Hirano's Eclipse?
The long answer is that it just doesn't work. I don't see it. Not in the mental-visual sense, but in the literal comprehension of what the narrator is describing. It's some rocks that got a hermaphroditic angel in them with an ouroboros and a caduceus or something? And some diamonds and circles. And it goes on forever. The economy of language is shot here, for something that is theoretically cool but ultimately incoherent.
Take the line: "It goes without saying that flowers are the last thing that one would expect to see inside a cave, and these roses were blossoming unaccountably in this one spot only. The buds all looked to be just on the point of bursting forth, and they were the scarlet color of freshly cut meat." The "unexpected roses in a cave" trope is something that certainly can work, especially in the context of a story about a Dominican friar a century before Milton wrote Paradise Lost. But the way the narrator undermines the image from the jump ("it goes without saying") coupled with the also-ran horror of roses the "scarlet color of freshly cut meat" takes what should be a sort of poetic moment of sublime revelation and renders it completely inert. There is no poetry here, in a moment that inherently cannot work in prose alone.
Or, to address the issue of the economy of language, a longer quotation: "At the tip, there was a knob about the size of a hen's egg. On the knob's surface, there was an emblem composed of a circle and diamond shape. The interior of the circle was hollowed out in the shape of a vertically oriented ellipse, and the diamond was positioned therein, in contact with the ellipse at its four corners. Further, the diamond itself was hollowed out in the shape of another diamond with its horizontal diagonal shortened and its corners truncated, so that the remaining wood became wider as it approached the right and left corners of the outer diamond. All these shapes were in contact only at their topmost and bottommost points, and those two points were connected by a line extending from the shaft that ran through them."
To not mince words: this is boring. One can see the arguments that the premise affords this kind of excessive description of minutiae. One might even argue that one of my generic frames (the Weird, with all its Lovecraftian detailed definitions of cyclopean etc and non-Euclidean blah, which I do love) requires this kind of attention to detail to achieve its ultimate ends. I would not just be receptive to these arguments, elaborated, I would hope they would be compelling enough to rush me back into this novel. "Further, the diamond itself was hollowed out in the shape of another diamond with its horizontal diagonal shortened and its corners truncated, so that the remaining wood became wider as it approached the right and left corners of the outer diamond…" though, is a high bar to clear, though. The words have no rhythm. They're inert.
Maybe I'm wrong. I've read it three times; once in the course of things, again when I realized it was likely my off-ramp, and a third when I transcribed it. I'd be happy to be wrong, honestly; and, lacking the context of that which comes after, maybe the structural importance of this bungled image is less than it appears from a genre standpoint. Maybe the genre signifiers themselves that I am reading into the book are the problem! If genre is, among other things, a frame for reading, there are likely things happening here that my frame obscures, excludes.
There are, to paraphrase a paraphrase of what is likely itself a paraphrase, as many reasons to abandon a book as there are books that have been abandoned by readers. But remember: here we are talking about where I quit, not why. There are maybe a thousand books I've read to completion that I could levy the same close readings against; hundreds, I'm sure, I enjoyed. Dozens I've loved.
This long quote below is where I didn't finish this particular book, and how it displays prose where only poetry could suffice. The why, fittingly, is much more prosaic.
...Standing motionless in the background, for a long moment I gazed not at the light's source, but at its penumbra—that is, at the portion of it that managed to escape Pierre's shadow.And this is what I saw.
The stalagmite rose straight up from the floor, and after narrowing slightly three-quarters of the way to its tip, swelled again and then came gradually to a point. Its paired stalactite had almost exactly the same shape. They were each about three times as tall as a man. The two dripstones were just on the point of touching and melting together and were separated by no more than about two fingerbreadths. The gap between them glimmered with a premonition of existence. Approaching its time, it was pregnant with a plenitudinous tension that surpassed even that of existence itself.
The platform supporting the stalagmite, like melted wax, had congealed into an undulating pattern. Its surface, just manifesting itself above the water, was entirely covered in roses, from the stalagmite's root down to water level. It goes without saying that flowers are the last thing that one would expect to see inside a cave, and these roses were blossoming unaccountably in this one spot only. The buds all looked to be just on the point of bursting forth, and they were the scarlet color of freshly cut meat. Fragrance rose from around them, as if to announce the coming instant of efflorescence. And over them, light hung faintly like a veil.
It was an indescribably strange light. After a moment, regaining somewhat my presence of mind, I moved to one side and settled into a place in the rock wall in an attempt to see its source with my own eyes. And then, as my perspective shifted, the source of the light gradually began to come into view. Concerning what I am about to describe, and by extension everything in my account of the cave, if people were to claim that it was nothing but a hallucination, I would be unable to disprove their accusations. There is no question but that I saw it. Yet when all is said and done, if I were to be told, "You only 'saw' it," I would be at a loss for words. Or, given that, as the villagers say, there are demons in the forest, if it were to be alleged that I had been bewitched by one of them, I would have no objections to meekly acknowledging the charge and doing penance before the Lord for my weakness. Indeed, how much more desirable that would be than to believe that what I saw actually existed in this world.
An arm was visible at the top of the giant stalagmite. Breasts could be seen. A downcast face was visible, and, at the loins, a membrum virile. The figure wore not a shred of clothing, but on its head it bore a crown of thorns intertwined with a snake. The thorn flowers, like those underfoot, glowed scarlet and were on the verge of opening; the snake described a circle on the figure's head, and, on its brow, was biting its own tail. From the elbows forward, and from the knees downward, the figure was embedded in the stone, and the same appeared to be true of its back. Looking closely, one could see as well that stone appeared to penetrate the gap between the arms and the belly, and again the gap between the legs.
From behind the scrotum, and presumably entering at the vulva, piercing the flesh and emerging at the nape of the neck, there was a richly decorated staff or pole. Here too could be seen the motif of the snake intertwined with thorns, but on the staff there were two snakes, and they were biting each other's tails. The tip of the staff, after it emerged from the nape, presented the form of a spear, as if a stalagmite had been narrowed and sharpened. At the other end, on the tail of the shaft emerging from the vulva, more detailed craftsmanship was in evidence. At the tip, there was a knob about the size of a hen's egg. On the knob's surface, there was an emblem composed of a circle and diamond shape. The interior of the circle was hollowed out in the shape of a vertically oriented ellipse, and the diamond was positioned therein, in contact with the ellipse at its four corners. Further, the diamond itself was hollowed out in the shape of another diamond with its horizontal diagonal shortened and its corners truncated, so that the remaining wood became wider as it approached the right and left corners of the outer diamond. All these shapes were in contact only at their topmost and bottommost points, and those two points were connected by a line extending from the shaft that ran through them.
The figure's flesh was possessed both of a grace that could be seen most clearly in its ample breasts and of a strength that was most conspicuously apparent in its abdomen and shoulders, and the ever so delicate balance between these two conflicting qualities was maintained and secured only by the staff. The musculature was fiercely tensed. The whole body seemed to be just on the point of being born out of the stone and to be fighting against the forces that threatened to reabsorb it. At the same time, this aspiration toward motion was being restrained by the resistance of the fatty tissue, centered on the breasts. The furious muscle, embraced by the fat, had been brought up short one step away from action,, in accordance with fat's tendency to seek stillness and stasis.
This opposition could be seen in the figure's countenance as well. The eyelids were closed, whether from anguish or from sleep it was impossible to judge. The fine lines that could be seen faintly between the brows hinted both at distress and at pleasure, and they had entrusted that riddle to the region behind the straight line of the prominent nose, hiding it from view forever. The area under the eyes was taut, and the jaw line, like that of an unripe fruit, showed no slack. The hair that threatened to spread out over the face was like a throng of reptiles or like pure water spilling out of a jug.
And all of it was bathed in a golden light. (pp. 81-4)
