Reviewed by Aline Soules
Apparitions
by Sybil Baker
Signal 8 Press
May 2023, Paperback, 170 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1915531025
This novel is tightly structured, and its images and references are densely woven to ensure that readers’ perceptions shift constantly. What is true? What is not? The protagonist, Simone, arrives in Istanbul with her friend, Agnes. The city, partly European and partly Asian, hints at the dichotomies in Simone’s life and the fusion and confusion she encounters. Readers learn that Simone intends to expose her ex-husband’s cheating ways at his Celebration of Life, which will be held in Cyprus, another country divided between Turkey and Greece. Violence intrudes before the two travelers leave Turkey, when Atatürk Airport is bombed.
After reaching Cyprus, the taxi driver who takes the two women to their hotel is not worried by the news of the bombing. “We are very safe,” he says. “Because no one knows we exist.”
“Safety through erasure,” Simone thinks. That is what has “worked” for her until now. Even though the two women were not involved in the airport bombing, bombs recur through the novel and some are dangerous.
Simone is plagued with repeating dreams and ghosts—her Korean friend, Soo Jung, her brother, Glenn, her ex-husband, Guy. Readers learn that whatever appears will re-appear in a different form or context or meaning or image.
Images and details make this novel sing. She reflects on Guy:
By the time we met, he had remade himself into a man of folded underwear and rolled socks, of drawers with pencils and pens lined up like chopsticks and bathroom cabinets with medicine bottles arranged from tallest to shortest. To me it was if he’d wanted to erase all traces of his old self in order to reinvent a new one, one who was compulsively controlled. Had Guy become neat not to erase his humanness, but to hide any evidence of the secret life he’d been living for the last years of our marriage? What secrets had he kept before his death?
This description also refers to erasure and hints at the many reinventions of the characters in this novel. With each new revelation, Simone and readers must rethink what has come before.
Simone has been invited to Cyprus by Eve, who wants Simone to expose the “truth” about Guy. Eve’s view of him is through the lens of her academic theories and writings, as well as her experiences, but she wants him exposed and she is bitter. Speaking to Simone, she says,
Same old Guy…Pretends he cares about you. But see the way when you talked about your brother, he minimized your pain and turned it back to his? Classical covert narcissist move.
Simone makes a “mental note” to Google ‘covert narcissist’ later.
There is also a notebook that Guy has written, and Simone has kept. Much later in the book, there emerges a second notebook, which Simone uses to bribe Eve to rescue her after an accident.
In Cyprus, Simone’s dreams continue with more warnings from the dead. Her brother, who died in Vietnam, tells her that he “didn’t heed the warnings” she gave him. “But you should, Henny Penny,” he tells her.
Who to trust? Simone finds a scrap of paper inserted in a book with Guy’s handwriting. “Do not trust: Eve, Courtney, Liam, Hasan.” Simone interacts with all these characters. Sometimes, there is trust; sometimes not. It’s a great technique. Readers know this information. Simone knows it. But the rest of the characters do not. Everything is colored by that sentence as the novel unfolds.
So many stories emerge, from Simone’s breast cancer diagnosis through who slept with whom, through the arrival of Marc who says he was saved by Guy, through Simone’s hallucinations, through what actually happened to Guy. Theories abound. He died of natural causes, he was murdered, he was poisoned. In the end, readers learn that he didn’t die, even though he was poisoned (on purpose). Even though Simone exposes him at the celebration, it is she who is not believed or admired. Guy is resurrected.
Literary references abound, from the Odyssey to Shakespeare to Paul Simon, each of them illuminating some aspect of Simone’s perspective. When she views photos of a dead naked body, supposedly Guy’s, she thinks of Odysseus’ nurse recognizing him from a scar on his thigh. Guy had a similar scar, which she traced with her finger after they had sex. Shakespeare is invoked through Othello, as jealousy and trust and revenge are explored, and when Simone visits the castle that was supposedly the inspiration for the play. As for Paul Simon, his “fifty ways to leave your lover” become “fifty ways to kill your lover.” Even Yoko Ono enters the novel in a call and response between Simone and her friend Agnes.
The relationship of Simone and Agnes is not always comfortable, but Agnes is loyal to Simone, in spite of a period of estrangement. But even though Simone starts rumors about Agnes in high school to make Agnes a friend again, Agnes is true to Simone even at times when each woman goes off by herself. Agnes is Simone’s true north. “After my cancer treatment ended,” Simone reflects, “I tracked Agnes down, and she drove across the country to Tim’s house to get me.” Simone ends by telling readers, “I fell in love with her all over again.”
By the end of the novel, Eve is pregnant, Guy is alive and about to resurrect himself through YouTube, and Simone thinks back to the bombing at the Atatürk Airport. She comes to understand what came before, how her life, “this world, even if it ends tonight, has been and will be more than enough.” That realization leads to her awareness that “A space was clearing within me, spreading, allowing something new to begin.” Simone has come through lies, distrust, and apparitions, to a new beginning.
About the reviewer: Aline Soules’ work has appeared in such publications as the Kenyon Review, Houston Literary Review, Poetry Midwest, Galway Review, and Flash Fiction Magazine. Her book reviews have been published by Tupelo Quarterly, Colorado Review, Los Angeles Review, and others. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles. Online: https://alinesoules.com