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When history buff Eric Roper buys an old house in Minneapolis, he wants to know everything he can about the people who lived there before him. But one couple become his obsession, and as he pieces together their lives through genealogy records and old recordings, he realizes they're showing him a side of his city he never knew existed. This is Ghost of a Chance from the Minnesota Star Tribune. Subscribe now, wherever you get your podcasts.
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Lemonada there's nothing like a good old fashioned spy story. And I'm sure when I say good old fashioned spy story, you're picturing the Maltese Falcon or the Big Sleep. You know, hard boiled detective in a fedora and trench coat pursuing a femme fatale sipping a glass of whiskey or chomping on a cigar. Lots of stories written by men, mostly about men. In Creation Lake, a 2024 New York Times bestseller that had the literati talking about it when it came out in September, Rachel Kushner turns these conventions on their head while still honoring those who came before her in the world of spy noir. Her main character, who goes by the name Sadie smith, is a 34 year old American woman working as a special agent in France. Her mission is to infiltrate an anarchist collective and of course, absolutely nothing is what it seems. The layers of meaning are what I found most intriguing about this book. We jump right into the story and we know very little about Sadie. As the short chapters progress, it's like turning a kaleidoscope where more and more things come into focus, but at the same time so much of what she says is subterfuge and deception, so we wonder how reliable she really is as a narrator. Her boyfriend Lucien thinks they met by accident, but she describes their initial contact through a cold bump. When she describes their first meeting, she has all her best assets on display to catch his eye, but muses in her narration, are my breasts real? Doesn't matter. A great example of just how shifty and hard to pin down the truth is in this story. We don't really know what she's up to, and it keeps getting revealed bit by bit. The book has been a bit of a critical sensation, landing on a short list for the Booker Prize and the long list for the National Book Award. Kushner is, of course, no stranger to these awards. Her previous book, the Mars Room, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and her previous two novels, Telex From Cuba and the Flamethrowers, were both finalists for the National Book Award. Let that sink in for a minute. She has never written a novel that wasn't a finalist for the Booker Prize, the National Book Award or so. We are really in the hands of one of the best living writers out there. The audiobook is narrated by Kushna herself, a rare treat for fiction books, which often employ a third party narrator. There's something special about hearing the words spoken as the author intended them. And to make the recording even more personal, the opening music is played by her son Remy. Today you'll be hearing that music, as well as the first five chapters of Creation Lake, where we jump right into the action and meet Sadie, Bruno, Pascal and Lucien. Starting with some fascinating emails about Neanderthals, I promise it'll all make sense eventually.
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Part 1 the delights of Solitude Neanderthals were prone to depression, he said. He said they were prone to addiction too, and especially smoking. Although it was likely, he said, that these noble and mysterious tals, as he sometimes referred to the Neanderthals, extracted nicotine from the tobacco plant by a cruder method, such as by chewing its leaves before that critical point of inflection in the history of the world when the first man touched the first tobacco leaf to the first fire. Reading this part of Bruno's email, scanning from man to touch to leaf to fire, I pictured a 1950s greaser in a white T shirt and a black leather jacket as he touches a lit match to the tip of his Camel cigarette and inhales. The greaser leans against a wall because that is what greasers do. They lean and loiter and then he exhales. Bruno Lacombe told Pascal in these emails I was secretly reading that the Neanderthals had very large brains, or at least their skulls were very large. And we can safely infer that their skulls were likely filled, Bruno said, with brains. He talked about the impressive size of a tall's brain case using modern metaphors, comparing them to motorcycle engines which were also measured. He noted for their displacement of all the human like species who stood upon two feet who roamed the earth for the last 1 million years. Bruno said that the Neanderthals braincase was way out in front at a whopping 1800 cubic centimeters. I pictured a king of the road way out in front. I saw his leather vest, his big gut legs extended, engineer's boots resting on roomy and chromed forward mounted foot pegs. His chopper is fitted with ape hangers that he can barely reach and which he pretends are not making his arms tired, are not causing terrible shooting pains to his lumbar region. We know from their skulls, Bruno said, that Neanderthals had enormous faces. I pictured Joan Crawford, that scale of face, dramatic, brutal, compelling. And thereafter, in the Natural History Museum, in my mind, the one I was creating as I read Bruno's emails. Its dioramas populated by figures in loincloths with yellow teeth and matted hair. All these ancient people Bruno described. The men too. They all had Joan Crawford's face. They had her fair skin and her flaming red hair. A propensity for red hair, Bruno said, had been identified as a genetic trait of the Tall. As scientific advancements in gene mapping were made, and beyond such work, such proof, Bruno said, we might employ our natural intuition to suppose that like typical redheads, the Neanderthals emotions were strong and acute, spanning the heights and depths. A few more things, Bruno wrote to Pascal that we now know about Neanderthals. They were good at math. They did not enjoy crowds. They had strong stomachs and were not especially prone to ulcers. But their diet of constant barbecue did its damage as it would to anyone's gut. They were extra vulnerable to tooth decay and gum disease. And they had overdeveloped jaws, wonderfully capable of chewing gristle and cartilage, but inefficient for softer fare. A jaw that was overkill. Bruno described the jaw of the Neanderthal as a feature of pathos for its overdevelopment, the burden of a square jaw. He talked about sunk costs, as if the body were a capital investment, a fixed investment, the parts of the body like machines bolted to a factory floor, equipment that had been purchased and could not be resold. The Neanderthal jaw was a sunk cost. Still, the tall's heavy bones and sturdy heat conserving build were to be admired, Bruno said, especially compared to the breadstick limbs of modern man, Homo sapiens sapiens. Bruno did not say breadstick, but since I was translating as he was writing these emails in French, I drew from the full breadth of English, a wildly superior language and my native tongue. The Talls survived cold very well, he said, if not the aeons or so the story about them goes. A story that we must complicate, he said, if we are to know the truth about the ancient past, if we are to glimpse the truth about this world now and how to live in it, how to occupy the present and where to go tomorrow, My own tomorrow was thoroughly planned out. I would be meeting Pascal Balmy, leader of Le Moulin, to whom these emails from Bruno Lacombe were written. And I didn't need the Neanderthals help on where to go. Pascal Balmy said to go to the Cafe de la Route on the main square in the little village of ven temps at 1pm and that was where I would be, because Bruno Lacombe had been positioned in the briefings I was given as a teacher and mentor to Pascal Balmy and Le Moulin. I was looking for references in his emails to what Pascal and his group had done and what they were planning. Six months ago, earthmoving equipment was sabotaged at the site of a massive industrial reservoir being built near the village of Tay Sac, not far from Le Moulins. Five huge excavators, costing hundreds of thousands of euros each, were set on fire under cover of night. Pascal and his group were suspected, but so far there was no proof. Bruno's emails to Pascal covered a lot of ground, but I had encountered nothing incriminating beyond Bruno's assertion to that water belongs in the water table and not in industrial holding bays. Bruno lamented that the state had decided it would be a good idea to siphon groundwater from subterranean caverns and lakes and rivers and to capture this water in huge, plastic lined mega basins where it would absorb leached toxins and be evaporated by the sun. This was a tragic idea, he said, with a destructive power that perhaps only someone who had spent considerable time underground might understand. Water, Bruno said, was already captured in nature's own ingenious filtration and storage facilities inside the earth. I was aware that Bruno Lacombe was against civilization, an anti siver in activist slang, and that the rural southwestern department Guienne, and this remote corner of it, to which I'd just arrived, was known for caves that held evidence of early humans. But I had assumed Bruno would be guiding Pascal's strategies for stopping the state's industrial projects here. It had not occurred to me that this mentor of Pascal's would have a fanatical belief in a failed species. We can all agree, Bruno said, that it was the Homo sapiens who drove humanity headlong into agriculture, money and industry. But the mystery of what happened to the Neanderthal and his humbler life is unresolved. Humans and Neanderthals might have overlapped for a good 10,000 years, Bruno wrote, but no one yet understood whether and how these two species had interacted. If, for instance, they knew of each other but kept apart, or if there were so few people in Europe in the era when they overlapped that amid rugged and impassable stretches of forest and mountain and river and snow, they weren't aware the other was there. Then again, Bruno said Geneticists have established that they mixed and had offspring together, a sure indication that they knew the other was there. Were these unions love or were they rape? The spoils of war? We will never know, Bruno said. At first I wondered if these emails about the Neanderthal were a prank, as if Bruno had planted them for whoever had gained access to his account to divert them from his actual correspondence with Pascal and the Moulinards. He covered a lot of ground, but included nothing about sabotage. And he kept circling back to the Neanderthal, a species who, let's face it, could not hack it or they'd be here still. And they weren't. They had vanished thousands of years ago and no one seemed to know why. And no Neanderthal had come forward to explain. Bruno pushed back against assumptions that Homo sapiens were simply cleverer and more adaptable, stronger, more indefatigable than the Neanderthals. In his treatment of these two species as opponents, I started to see them not in the diorama, but in Ultimate Fighting Championship with Homo sapiens, a fighter who either gradually or all at once, blazed into the ring on a winning streak. It's tempting to picture the Neanderthal as a weak competitor, Bruno said, who was trounced by Homo sapiens. It was like he had access to my mental image of the two species facing off on fight night. But this was a cheap solution to the mystery, he said. If there had been a war between them, it had been a soft war, a competition for resources. Slow and relentless. The Neanderthals were skilled hunters. But as Europe warmed the the standards of excellence changed. The ice was gone and a different body style was needed. Lighter and built for endurance, along with new tracking methods involving large groups and coordination and different weapons and tools. While the Neanderthal bravely risked his life with a short range thrusting spear, the Homo sapiens opted for a long range throwing javelin. To kill from a distance was less valiant. It was killing without engaging in an intimate commitment to mortal danger. An embrace of gore, which Tal's weapon required. And yet, Bruno said the concept of an air propelled spear, a far more clinical approach to targeting game, was surely a winning method. Another advantage would have been Homo sapiens lighter frame, which required less food. And he, or rather she, was a more frequent propagator. Not by a lot. It was suspected that female Homo sapiens produced just ever so slightly higher numbers of offspring than female tall. But after long stretches, thousands of years, these numbers would compound into huge population differences. And yet many people carry Neanderthal traces, he said. 2%, 4%. This measure of ancient life was stunning, given that there have been no living communities of full Neanderthals actively contributing to the gene pool for 40,000 years. It's as if our chromosomes cling to this old share, he said, as if it were a precious keepsake, an heirloom, the remnant of a person deep inside us who knew our world before the fall, before the collapse of humanity into a cruel society of classes and domination. There are some who might say 2% tall, 4% tall. Why, that's not much. A rounding error. It leaves a whopping 98% sapiens. Indeed, Bruno wrote. Let us have a look at that majority share. Let us not deny that we are occupied by the Homo sapiens and that we are, like it or not, ourselves. Sapiens, a figure who we can all agree has found himself in crisis, a man whose death drive is in the driver's seat. H. Sapiens needs help, but he doesn't want help. We have endured a long 20th century and its defeats, its failures and counter revolutions. Now, more than a decade into the 21st, it is time to reform consciousness, Bruno said, not through isms, not with dogma, but by summoning the most mystical secrets we have kept from ourselves, those concerning our past. A psychoanalyst looks for clues of repression, of what a patient has hidden from others and more importantly, hidden from himself. The deepest repression of all is the story of those who came first before we did, long before the written down. We must unpack what these earlier lives might mean for us and for our future. No, I'm not a primitivist, Bruno said, as if in swift answer to an accusation. I face forward, he said, and any discussion of ancient history is only in regard to what is to come. Look up, he commanded in this email to Pascal Balmy and the group. The roof of the world is open. Let us count stars and live in their luminous gaze. Which is to say these stars deep past, which is to say our future bright as Polaris. The roof of this place was not open, thank God, but it leaked in two of the upstairs rooms. All of the roofing, which consisted of flat hand chiseled tiles of slate, needed to be replaced. And there was a dispute between Lucien Dubois and his aunt Agathe over whether to pump money into the house and restore it or cut losses and sell it. The house was 300 years old. Lucien had inherited it from his father, who inherited it from his father. I had asked him when his father's father's family had had acquired the place, and he'd Looked unsure how to answer, as if the question itself betrayed a confusion on my part. It was our family house in beginning. Lucien's aunt Agathe was from the other side, his mother's family. Agathe was not a Dubois. She lived not too far from the Dubois place and had been looking after it. When Lucien was making arrangements for me to come here, he and Agat argued on the phone about the roof and the future of the house. I didn't care what Lucien decided. I was a temporary resident. The house was a perfect headquarters for my purposes here in the Guillen Valley. Despite the leaking roof, the location was convenient to Le Moulin, the group of people on whom I needed to keep tabs. It was protected with a long private driveway. Any car turning onto the gravel from the little road far below would announce itself to me through the upstairs windows, which I kept open alert to sounds. And it had a hilltop vantage from the room I'd chosen on account of the fact it did not leak. On this side of the house I could see the entire valley. It helped that I had high powered binoculars with US military grade night vision. The road to the house led through dense forest canopy, discouraging anyone who didn't already know the place was here from investigating the turnoff, which I myself had missed while traveling the tiny and rural D43. Upon my initial arrival, there was no sign, no gate, no mailbox indicating I'd reached Lucien's family estate, just a narrow tunnel into the woods. As I turned up it, a large rust brown raptor sailed low between trees in the half lit under canopy. I sensed it was accustomed to having this place to itself. Get used to me, I thought at it. At the top of the road I turned left, following Lucien's instructions. There was a row of tall poplars tapered into points like feathers. I like poplars. A straight line of them makes me think of driving, of going fast into low western sun, its rays illuminating their rippling leaves. Poplars remind me of Priest Valley, a beautiful non place that I drove past with that boy who took the wrap for Nancy. They are trees that remind me of a time when I felt invincible. I passed the poplars and continued left, crossing through a walnut orchard, untended and ancient, which stretched out on both sides of the little gravel lane, just as Lucien had described. I parked beyond the orchard in front of the Dubois family manor, built of yellow limestone, large blocks of it that radiated daytime heat, although it was evening when I arrived, and cool. The garden beyond the gates, now weeds, was where Lucien had thrown knives as a boy, where he'd sifted the dirt for prehistoric tools while the adults drank eau de vie, water of life, a clear brandy distilled of this property's summer plums and autumn pears. Eau de vie tastes the same, like gasoline, no matter what fruit it's made from. I didn't point out to Lucien. I'd had to hear all about his boyhood memories. Our report cards came in five pink excellent, blue good, green satisfactory, yellow, unsatisfactory, and red failing. My teacher at Maternelle had beautiful long brown hair and a soft voice, and she wore white sandals with little heels. Her name was Pauline. If I got all pinks, we could stay an extra week in the country. It's the same whether you're in a relationship with a man or pretending to be in one. They want you to listen when they tell you about their precious youth. And if they are my age, which Lucien is, we are both 34, their younger boyhood, the innocent years are the 1980s and their teendom, the goodbye to innocence is is the 1990s. And whether in Europe or the US it's similar music and more or less the same movies that they want to trot out and reminisce over from an era I personally consider culturally stagnant. I prefer to hear about the fixations of the oldest generation of European men, the ones whose youth involved encounters with war and killing and death, traitors and fascists and whores, collaboration and national shame, rites of passage into manhood, a true and real loss of innocence. Everyone has their type, and I'm okay with the generation just under them, the ones now in their 60s because they at least know compulsory military service, or they know elective, extra legal refuge in the French Foreign Legion. With Lucien and boys like him who will forever remain mere boys, there is no war, nor suffering nor valor. There is only some bland girl, some banal pop song, a romantic comedy, an August vacation. August was around the corner, but no family was set to arrive. Lucien was grown, and those trips were long over. The trees from which fruit was made into liquor were still in the yard, gnarled, unpruned, their heavy limbs bending into the chest high weeds. Lucien had experienced his first romantic tryst here with a much older girl, a university student from Toulouse whose family had a place in the area. She wore a cashmere sweater and a heady Guerlain perfume. She had taken Lucien's virginity, he said, in an empty pigstall of an abandoned farm. I suppressed my laughter, laughed only inwardly, bearing witness to his adolescent memories, and as if they were not a cliche and instead, as if they mattered, Agathe had left the keys behind a dead geranium in a stone cubby next to the front entrance. I fitted a key into the lock in the heavy iron crossbar on the front door. The crossbar slid to one side. I opened both doors. The air inside was damp and cold, like air in a cave. I walked the broad, uneven floor planks, my steps voluble, as if the weight of me was waking the floor from a long dormancy. I peered into rooms filled with furniture covered in sheets. Cobwebs wafted along the hallways, soft and dirty. I went upstairs and inspected bedrooms, opened shutters and windows to get a look at things and to dilute the smell of mold. The ceiling plaster in half the rooms under the leaking roof was puckered and stained. Strips of wallpaper hung down like old movie posters dangling from Attack. On the floor of one of the rooms lay a rat trap, bottom up, a tail peeking from its wooden base. I picked up the trap with the rat strapped to it like it was his backpack and threw it out the window. Each room was less inviting than the one before. They were crammed full of storage boxes and stacks of old magazines. Paris Match, the young faces on its covers. Water ruined. The largest bedroom featured neither leaks nor clutter, but had been vandalized with children's stickers. Cartoon babies. Lay Babies was the logo pasted onto the furniture and the walls. I chose my room for its strategic view of the road, its working electricity, a lack of water stains, and a minimum of Lay Babies stickers. There was one on the bedside table, but I could cover it. The sun had set, and from the windows next to the bed I could see a few stars initiating their night watch through the haze of dusk downstairs. The kitchen had an ancient stone sink. The oven appeared to be fired by wood or coal. Next to it was a hot plate from the 1970s, its crooked burners caked white from use. The Dubois family had given up on ancient traditions and embraced this hot plate. Whatever. I was fine with a hot plate. After surveying rooms, I ate a ham and butter sandwich that I had picked up in Boliere. Light on ham and light on butter, and mostly bad baguette, the kind that turns to crumbly powder when it goes stale. Realizing I wasn't hungry, I left the rest of the sandwich for the rats. There were a couple bars of Orange Point Eff Air Cell Service, so I texted Lucien that I had made it to the house. I Didn't say that his family's beloved ancestral Manoir looked like a scene from a horror movie. I said it was lovely here, if rustic, and that I was meeting Pascal Balmy tomorrow. Lucien had arranged this meeting. He had expressed concern that I didn't have a career. He believed I was a former grad student who had lost her way. I was a former grad student, but I had found my way instead of losing it. Lucien's idea of connecting me to Pascal, he believed it was his own idea to connect me to Pascal, was that I could translate into English the book that Pascal and his comrades at Le Moulin had written anonymously. Since I had a facility with languages and a lot of free time. I mean, I will be meeting Pascal. If he shows up. I texted he'll show up. Lucien texted back for you. He'll show he's curious about you. He's keen to work together. I talked to him about it, but I should warn you, he's charismatic. Charisma does not originate inside the person called charismatic. It comes from the need of others to believe that special people exist. Without having met him, I was certain that Pascal Balmy's charisma, like anyone's Joan of Arcs, let's say, resided only in the will of other people to believe. Charismatic people understand this will to believe best of all, they exploit it. That is their so called charisma. Are you jealous? I asked in reply. Pascal was Lucien's old friend and I'd be meeting him without Lucien there to mediate. It's not that he gets the upper hand. Look at all these people who followed him down there from Paris. It's pretty weird, but that's how he is. I mean, I've known him forever and I still try to impress him. It's pathetic. I was already attuned to what in Lucien was pathetic. He won't get the upper hand with me. I texted back. And for once I was being completely and totally honest. Bruno Lacombe received emails from only one account, from an address that was used I knew by multiple people at Le Moulin, among them Pascal Balmy, certainly the main correspondent. Although the queries sent to Bruno were never signed, they were always just a short question, open ended, which Bruno answered in depth, such as the one they sent as a follow up to Bruno's discussion of Neanderthals, depression and their smoking habits. Their question was about plant origins in tobacco. Was tobacco not a New World plant? They asked. Given how stringent we've been with our own farming techniques, they wrote, and our approach to rewilding what might be native to this part of France. We are confused at the idea that tobacco, which we regard as invasive, could have always been here. Bruno said in reply that without making direct accusations of anyone asking such a question, he could attack that person's conditioning and the external forces that had shaped their attitudes, leading to a profound misunderstanding of migration patterns and an abuse of the concepts native and new. No, he said, tobacco is not a New World plant, and in any case, people have been in the Americas for tens of thousands of years. The spread of people over the face of the planet was not a simple three act play structure of up and out of Africa one into Europe two and across a land bridge three, Bruno said it was far more diffuse and mysterious how people had settled various corners of the earth. The idea that they flowed in a single direction, for instance, had to be false. Do you walk in only one direction? He asked rhetorically. Of course you don't, he answered. Over the parts of a day, a season, a year, a life. People move in many directions as locust points with their own free will, though he put free here into scare quotes. The more education a person has, the more scare quotes they seem to use, and Bruno was no exception. And neither am I, even as I deplore this habit in others. The less education, the more accidental quotes whose purpose is the opposite of scaring and simply to declare that a thing has a name but is being named by someone without a high level of literacy. Corn muffins, handwritten by a minimum wage employee on a sign in a bakery case sale. Also handwritten. The not so literate and the hyper literate both love quotation marks, while most people use them only to indicate in written form when someone is speaking. In my life before this life as a graduate student, there were know it all women in my department who held their hands up and curved their pointer and middle fingers to frame a word or phrase they were voicing with irony as a critique. They were fake tough girls who were not tough at all, with their fashion choices veering to chunky shoes and a leather jacket from a department store. They were getting PhDs in rhetoric at Berkeley, as I had planned to before I abandoned that plan and spared myself their fate, which was to subject themselves to academic job interviews in Doubletree hotel rooms at a Modern Language association conference, listening to them prattle on and bend their fingers to air quote a craven substitution of cynicism for knowledge, I sometimes used to imagine a sharp blade cutting across the room at a certain height, lopping off the fingers of these scare quoting women.
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Ready to hear the Full story? Visit YourNextListen.com Copyright 2024 by Rachel Kushner. Audio excerpt courtesy of Simon and Schuster Audio from the audiobook Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner, read by the author, published by Simon and Schuster Audio, a division of Simon and Schuster, Inc. Used with permission from Simon and Schuster, Inc. Your next listen is a production of Lemonada Media and Simon and Schuster Audio. I'm your host, Jackie Danziger. I produce this series with Lizzie Breyer Bowman. Isara Acevez is our associate producer. Bobby Woody is our audio engineer. Music by apm. Executive producers are Jessica Cordova Kramer and Stephanie Whittles Wax. Production support from Lara Blackman, Tom Spain, Sarah Lieberman and Lauren Piers. Help others find our show by leaving us a rating and writing a review. Thanks for listening. See you next time.