Mary Catelli's Erraticly Updated and Exceedingly Ill-Organized Journal

What a Fish Looks Like
by Syr Hayati Beker

Read this thanks to skygiants' excellent review (here).

I loved the style of storytelling--love the way the author's mind works--and enjoyed aspects of the story a lot, but overall, I wasn't the right audience for the book. The right audience would be someone who is as interested in all the ideas as I am, but who is also very invested in portraits of people experiencing all the emotions associated with a breakup. The various narrators are really feeling their feelings about one another, and to enjoy the book fully, you need to be there for that.

It's the climate apocalypse, and some people are fleeing earth and others are staying, and there's conversation about what those decisions mean and what goes into them, but with a very loud undertone about what commitment to a lover means and what abandonment is, and bravery, etc. I was interested in the conversations about commitment to Earth more than the associated subtext (sometimes supertext) about commitment to one another.

So I read about halfway through with deep absorption, then skimmed the rest.

But the language and ideas are great. This quote, about hosting extinct animals' DNA, shows how marvelously the author explores the idea (and also how they nudge you about human relationships).

It's not like sharing a bed, struggling at first and then finding a rhythm. It's not like grafting an apricot branch to a plum tree. It is: your DNA turned into a factory for the DNA of extinct species until the day the world is safe enough that we can let the ghosts out, resurrected. Until then, it's a shorter life, but maybe less lonely. Maybe that's all there ever was.

There's also a great part where a character may or may not be talking to a collective mer-consciousness. The author plays with "A Lone" (a single, noncollective being, alone) and "Re-member" (come back into collectivity, remember). I loved the mer-collective's voice:

We remember what we eat
One Song:
One time a sailor fell off his ship. "Can you swim?" we said
No
So we ate him. Drank his tears
Now he is not
A Lone

And there's also a part about putting on a play (Antigone) that keeps doing "X, but Y" in very funny ways, e.g.,

The Sphinx, but with affirmations instead of riddles. It says, "what you are is fabulous, and that's what you are." It says, "the thing that walks on any number of legs belongs."
...
Your life, but in Thebes. Thebes is nice. It has no laundry, only sand.
...
A break up, but so well lit, you overcome your differences and fall back in love.
...
Romeo and Juliet, but with cell phones. Their elopement succeeds. Nobody dies. They move to a small apartment in Milan. They love and hate one another their whole lives, sheltered from the cold, touching all the old familiar walls.

Those are just some; there were more. The last of those X, but Y examples grated on me a little. I know "they love and hate one another their whole lives" is a thing that really does happen, but it feels very overrepresented in theater and literary fiction, and "touching all the old familiar walls" feels like every single young rebel's blithe certainty that they're going to live life differently.

But maybe they will! And people get to declare what they want for audiences that are thirsting to hear it.

So: good book, great ideas, me: not the target audience, but very glad to have read it.

ETA: I've gone this whole review without acknowledging that this book is queer centered. This book is queer centered! The lovers are nonbinary or trans, most of them. This was neither a plus nor a minus for me, but if you're yearning to spend time in a fully realized queer space, this story provides that--so that would be an added mark in its favor.