VANISHING MONUMENTS

A nonbinary photographer returns to haunt—and be haunted by—their childhood home in Winnipeg, Canada, after their mother’s dementia worsens.

Stintzi’s debut novel follows Alani Baum, a nonbinary photographer and teacher, as they return from Minneapolis to Winnipeg after a 27-year absence to wrap up their mother’s affairs. The protagonist, who often references Roman literature, tells us that to remember his speeches, the orator Cicero imagined “his rhetorical points pinned onto memorable things in a perfect recreation of his own palace in his mind, which allowed him to picture himself walking through the rooms he knew so well, visualizing things in his home that represented different movements in rhetoric.” The schema of Cicero’s memory palace serves as a blueprint for the novel as Alani moves through their mother’s house and revisits the fraught relationships with family, lovers, and friends that reanimate the rooms: “As soon as you enter the upstairs bathroom you’ve set the sequences of these memories in motion. There’s no getting out now, and there’s no changing the order.” Such lyrical language comes as no surprise from Stintzi, who will also debut a collection of poetry, Junebat, in April. The novel derives its title from the Monument against Fascism in Hamburg-Harburg, Germany, which Alani recalls learning about from a friend’s boyfriend in 1991. The monument was an aluminum column on which, beginning in 1986, visitors inscribed their names to pledge to fight fascism. Once visitors filled part of the monument, people drove it into the ground, which provided more blank space to write. By the time Alani returns to Winnipeg, nothing is left of the monument, or Alani’s relationships, except memories—and the struggle to make meaning from those absences.

A surreal, poetic meditation on the struggle to feel at home with the past, family, and one’s own body.