A devil who deals in fire, brimstone, and fine print. The only weapon against ancient evil is close reading.
In 2009, Carina is a Cuban American copyeditor of Catholic school curricula she doesn't believe a word of, and she has traded her shadow to Mephisto for a credit card with no limit. Her friend Gaspar signed with the same devil and gave up his true voice. To reach him she walks the gas veins of the earth in seven-league boots, surfacing at a German bath palace. In a Tokyo cosplay bar we find Fumi, a Faulkner-reading friend from a decade earlier Carina never stopped loving, who no longer appears in mirrors. Their path to salvation follows translation, diaspora, and human connection. One with no shadow, one in no mirror, and one without real language, the three of them do the only thing they were ever good at. They overthink. They read closely. They work together before the terms come due to break the contracts that unmade them.
A devil who deals in fire, brimstone, and fine print. The only weapon against ancient evil is close reading.
In 2009, Carina is a Cuban American copyeditor of Catholic school curricula she doesn't believe a word of, and she has traded her shadow to Mephisto for a credit card with no limit. Her friend Gaspar signed with the same devil and gave up his true voice. To reach him she walks the gas veins of the earth in seven-league boots, surfacing at a German bath palace. In a Tokyo cosplay bar we find Fumi, a Faulkner-reading friend from a decade earlier Carina never stopped loving, who no longer appears in mirrors. Their path to salvation follows translation, diaspora, and human connection. One with no shadow, one in no mirror, and one without real language, the three of them do the only thing they were ever good at. They overthink. They read closely. They work together before the terms come due to break the contracts that unmade them.
At the front desk, I tried to explain to whoever would listen that someone should have phoned my room when the V-Bird passengers gathered in the lobby for the shuttle, but my German was insufficient and their English wasn’t far behind. I had woken up two hours after it left, my alarm unset, the day already blazing through the curtains. Fuming with anger at myself, I quickly washed my face and changed my clothes while cleaning staff vacuumed the hallway outside my door.
I tried to recall her name, Ute something? But realized I never got it. “Have all the airport guests checked out?” I asked. “Are there any remaining passengers here at all?”
“Wie bitte?” The woman at the front desk with burgundy-dyed hair didn’t look up from her paperwork. “English colleague later.”
She pulled a sheet of paper from a printer and plopped it down on the counter.
“When is the next shuttle?” I still harbored hope about catching the next flight to Berlin, but I remember the budget carriers had at most two flights a day into the capital. For all I knew the airport in Weeze probably even shut down in the middle of the day. “Wann gibt es Wagen? Flughafen?”
My attempt at German before that morning’s coffee was as awful as her attempt to respond slowly. She rattled off a slew of words, which may have been one excessively long compound noun or a cuss out; either possibility would have sounded no different to me. “English colleague at later,” she repeated. She grabbed a pen and made a signing gesture, “Unterschreiben. Hier. Signer vous, içi!”
“Oui, madame,” I said, to which she actually rolled her eyes, making no attempt to hide it. Usually, I found the lack of friendly pretenses in European customer service refreshing compared to the forced smiles back home, but this was excessive. It was dumb on my part to sleep in and miss the shuttle back to the airport, but I wasn’t sure my presence at the front desk warranted this hostility.
I didn’t have a clue what the signature page was for, some of the interspersed lines of text were written in that Gothic-looking blackletter typeface, Fraktur, that makes me uncomfortable whenever I see it. Perhaps some guests found it quaint. But since the burgundy-haired jerk behind the desk didn’t ask for payment, I was only too glad to scribble my name and be on my way.
The clerk gestured at the front door. “Bye, bye,” she said. “Wiedersehen.”
Outside of das Sporthotel, I stopped and turned my face up to the sun and immediately caught a raised cobblestone with the tip of my shoe. My bag tugged me off balance and I tripped, planting my face squarely on the hard ground. I got up quickly and looked around, embarrassed. I could imagine my editor typing, The protagonist tripping and falling is a common, slightly slapstick trope for showing a character is having a bad day. Consider revising.
One of the hotel’s vested personnel was looking at me from the doorway and, without acknowledging my fall, flung the door shut.
With no chance of catching my flight and no desire to deal with V-Bird Airlines or more perplexingly rude customer service, I decided to find the fastest connection out of there at the nearest station. I just wanted to pick my destination on the screen of an automated ticket kiosk, board a train, and not talk to anyone for the rest of the day.
After taking a southbound bus for an hour to its terminus and then a local commuter train for another half hour, I was finally able to board an intercity train at the station in Neuss, across the Rhine from Düsseldorf.
I'd heard that you could get to Berlin in five hours by rail, though it costs more than a flight on a budget airline. No matter. The walk-up price was punishing, but I’d already lost enough of the day.
Through the windows of each coach rolling past before the train stopped, I could see every seat was taken, the dining car included. So much for a peaceful trip left to my thoughts. It would come down to crouching room for myself and my bag on the entrance steps in one of the vestibules at the bookend of each carriage.
Crouching like that, knees drawn to my chest, weight balanced on the balls of my feet, called up an old discomfort. I didn’t speak much before the age of ten, a fact my mother put down to shyness and my abuela to arrested mental development. I might have had plenty to say. But I spent those years occupied instead with listening to the radio novelas bleeding through the wall from Doña Mason's apartment, and to the Spanish my mother used with her sisters, which dropped half its consonants the moment no one outside the family was in the room.
My abuela would find me standing very still in a doorway for the better part of an hour, tracking everything with my eyes half closed, and she concluded, in the voice she otherwise reserved for tabloid headlines and diagnoses, that something in me had failed to cuajar, had not set the way a flan sets. She told my mother so more than once, calling me bobo as often as other grandmothers dispensed vitamins, out of love and worry in roughly equal parts.
It didn't help that my physical dwarfism started to become more noticeable as I grew. The more apparent it became, the more justified she felt in classifying me as differently abled.
Soon the train was rolling past rows of asparagus fields punctuated by plastic frost blankets. Across the horizon, warehouses covered in solar panels drifted slowly by. An old man also crouching across from me on the same step struck up a conversation. “Signal Corps, stationed in Panama during the Cold War,” he said. “Served with your American brethren for a bit.”
He was from the UK, traveling alone for a conference. His knees were at the same awkward angle as mine, one hand braced against the carriage door, a leather valise wedged between his feet.
I asked if he knew about the abandoned base in Weeze. When he spoke his eyes had the patient, thoughtful look of someone long accustomed to waiting on platforms. “Oh, there are dozens like it all over western Germany,” he said. “But it’s art restoration in Coblenz that keeps bringing me back.”
He said, “My conference has never taken place during carnival before. Pure debauchery. A marvelous spectacle all along the Rhine.” Indeed it was carnival here and around the world, and today was Shrove Monday, what they called Rose Monday in Germany, when celebrations would reach their peak. The places celebrating carnival most intensely are known as the three Hochburgen, the high fortresses or strongholds, he explained. Our train was pulling up to Dormagen, only one stop away from easily the most raucous and highly attended carnival parade in Cologne.
Through the doors, the platform had disappeared entirely beneath costumed bodies pressing toward the train, their faces painted or masked. Before the train doors had stood a grim collection of stereotypes: half a dozen American Indians, several Arab sheikhs, their costumes as cheap as they were offensive.
I braced myself against a partition as the doors opened, hit by a wall of noise and the stench of schnapps. Cheap anise and fermented fruit was baked into fabric and body heat. They smelled like a dive bar the morning after.
A sea of revelers surged forward, not in a line, but as a single, chaotic mass. It was a behavior I’d seen throughout the country, an absolute refusal to queue, a preference for the sharpest elbows. It’s a surprising fact to many that Germans are not accustomed to waiting in lines. In fact, cashiers and other counter workers get annoyed if you hang back and wait to be called on in turn order.
They charged. Faces reddened and wills hardened by midday liquor, the throng was set on fitting onto the train. No one was disembarking here. Every inch of standing room had already been claimed well before we pulled into Dormagen, and now we were expected to compress ourselves further still, to find space where there was none, to make room with our bodies and leave no atom unpressed for drunks who had started their rounds with breakfast.
The new passengers began a chorus of “We’re going to Muelheim!” It was a tune I’ve heard soccer fans chant when their team is in the lead, but this time with an ironically plain destination inserted in place of the championship stadium. “Muelheim, Muelheim, wir fahren nach Muelheim!” Carnival parades occur on Rose Monday in different locations at different times throughout the day. Evidently the next stop for these trashy revelers was a trashy suburb whose name could literally be translated as Trash Home.
We heard the automated warning of the doors about to close. The final press ensued.
The doors shut and the whole vestibule buckled inward at once, throwing me down. A fart tore loose somewhere in the pile and “Helau!” went up from the other side of the car. While from somewhere deeper in the crush came nothing at all, just the troubling silence of people too compressed to make noise. My neck had been wrenched to one side and an elbow had found the hinge of my jaw and was working it open. I could feel the sharp knobs of a spine and the soft give of a stomach beneath me.
By torquing my head up against the pressure I could just locate the old man through a wall of synthetic fabric. Chin, then mouth, then the deep creases of his face gone red at the ridges, his upper lip pulled back from his teeth by the force of a suitcase pressing his head, his skull driven down hard into the luggage rack.
David de Aja's Careful Readers is an impressive and, quite possibly, perfect debut novel. A stunning work of magical realism, the book sets three masterfully crafted and complex characters in conflict with a familiar supernatural foe, one whose dealmaking and contract-binding has set the timer for their undoing.
Carina, a brilliant copyeditor of dull curriculum materials with ambitions for her own first novel, receives a strange letter from her ex, Gaspar. An author himself, Gaspar is riding trains across Europe without a clear destination as he uses a recently acquired "spark" to develop his masterpiece. Meanwhile, Carina's old friend and love Fumi meets with clients in a bar in Tokyo though she has her own immense literary talents as a sharp reader of Faulkner. All three lives intermingle again and are bound to deals struck with a historically infamous, shapeshifting visitor. They each lose a piece of themselves—a reflection, a shadow, a voice. But, all savvy book nerds, they deduce the stakes and scope of these otherworldly deals. And through their powers as creative, critical, and close readers, they hope to stand a chance against their devilish adversary.
To say that de Aja's writing is genius would be an understatement. Careful Readers is a sharp, smart, formally innovative story that folds in multidimensional folkloric elements as well as clever, rewarding metafiction gestures. The movement between perspectives, especially the shift from third-person narration to Gaspar's first-person letters, makes for a dynamic read. The frequent references to writerly, readerly, and editorial work are fun, often humorous, earned, and careful to avoid the pretension of lesser meta-conscious fiction. For an American reader (though presumably, the feeling will apply internationally), a well-crafted novel that upholds close reading as a superpower in an era of literacy crisis is a welcome, validating thing, indeed.
Careful Readers is a book-lover's book. Readers of intelligent, sophisticated, form-conscious fiction will appreciate de Aja's craftsmanship and characters as well as the gorgeous movement of his plot. Fans of Borges and Calvino will revel in the decisions this author has made. And it will be no surprise if the novel ends up on lists of upcoming award nominations. Careful Readers is a must-read literary triumph.