Uncountry: A Mythology

Friedland’s unclassifiable hybrid debut, winner of the 2015 Noemi Press Fiction Award, balances the fantasy of myth and the linguistic grace of poetry in works of prose. Subtitled “A Mythology,” the book gathers myths, origin stories, and fairy tales to weave a narrative of humans’ dreams and endless wanderings. Most evocative are the condensed Biblical stories, which Friedland summarizes and reinterprets in clipped lines. In “Abraham,” “A man is absurd/ A man becomes a tribe.” In “Lilith,” “A woman leads men astray/ A woman becomes a morbid cliché.” Friedland juxtaposes these compressions with richly expanded stories that harness original elements—prophecies and pilgrimages, wives betrayed, witches burned in stoves—and ties them to modernity, as when Hansel and Gretel mingle with Ulrike Meinhof. In a late section, Friedland writes, “You have to know that this story came to me in images, not in words. So this is translation.” Therein she captures the book’s spirit of imprecise knowledge. Dreams are also a common thread, as almost every character experiences some surreal but potent reverie. Beyond the dreams themselves, characters obsess over the hazy, and possibly false, distinction between wakefulness and dream states. Friedland crafts with grace and care a book like a translated dream: messy but familiar, brimming with something just beyond one’s grasp. (Dec.)