Natasha Alvarez, Liminal

"We are here to say that either the world burns or the cities do": that's on the landing page of Black and Green Press, publisher of Natasha Alvarez' 2014 novella Liminal. Black and Green's website describes itself as "the largest and longest standing publisher of anti-civilization and primal anarchist work," all of which means that Liminal comes from a particular politics and with a particular DIY-looking aesthetic.

In essence, Liminal is the story of a young mother, who has already committed long ago to take catastrophic action on a specific date. Before Koweenasee ever met her beloved partner Ronin, long before the birth of their beloved Magda, she had been present at the formation of a loose, growing collective aiming toward a mammoth, multi-site action that would lead to all their deaths in an attempt to disrupt civilization irrevocably. It's just that now, she's consumed with love for her daughter, even though she won't waver in her commitment.

Liminal is narrated in first-person by this young mother, making this a journal of her daughter's second year, at the end of which time will come the mother's own chosen, predestined death. Liminal  is therefore meant to be a painful blend of overwhelming love for a good man and a delightful child, and overwhelming commitment for undoing what the collective recognizes as the wrongs committed against the earth by corporations, governments, and the wealthy.

Is it a good book? I don't think the question is relevant, not to Natasha Alvarez and not to Black and Green Press, and it's not exactly relevant to most of its readers, either. I found its emotions painful, and recognizable, and I credit the author for evoking them, so for me that's the definition of a good book, but Liminal is meant to be taken politically rather than literarily.

Goodreads is often chaos, with unreasonable takes from all sides in amongst the more generous ones. Still, Liminal's page stands out as remarkable, even with only nine comments: "I didn't give a fuck about the narrator's boring-ass hetero nuclear family," and "a pretty good example of ableist privilege from the left," along with "The unnamed narrator is in a transitional state, knowing full well that her death and a cleansing apocalypse await yet mourning the deep love and idyllic life she has with her family in the present." Kind of amazingly (to me, at least), that longer comment of praise was made by the author of one of those first two attacks, so.

The whole anti-civilization discourse is difficult to parse, for all kinds of reasons. I've found the article "Feral Insurgents and Wild Reactions" useful as a means of grasping the rhetoric of it all, but like many such pieces, "Feral Insurgents" is a thorny, prickly, deliberately unpleasant read. It's far from clear whether all such things are meant as provocations, traps set by government, or instructions, but I would say that even if I don't know any of them myself, there really are accelerationist anti-civ folks out there.

Long story short, this novel will give you a gentler insight into that kind of mindset, without having to deal with the rhetoric or with what's often a deeply masculinist, ableist perspective on nature. I appreciated it, right to its second-last page, but I wouldn't say I enjoyed it: that's just not the point of the book, its author, or its publisher.