ARSON

Two people struggle to come to terms with the world burning around them.

Austrian writer Freudenthaler’s new novel follows the inner lives of two obsessive people as they face an Earth being ravaged by climate change. One is an unnamed journalist who’s struggling with her inability to dream (“Maybe there’s just no place for dreams anymore”)—and beginning to isolate herself from her friends, family, and an increasingly unrecognizable world. The other is her friend Ulrich, a scientist suffering from insomnia who spends his days poring over wildfire data and his nights cataloging his own sleep data. While discussing a potential career change with his sleep doctor, Ulrich says he can neither live with or without the flames: “We became pyrophytes long ago. We can’t live without fire and it will destroy us.” Though his job—like the fires—is ruining him, he can’t tear himself away. When the narrator leaves the city for the countryside, she becomes increasingly lost in her own thoughts and drawn to nature—which is rapidly shifting and changing before her eyes. At times, the interiority of the characters feels strange and oppressive—though this serves as an apt metaphor for the impending and all-consuming climate crisis. Freudenthaler’s fragmented and poetic prose can make it hard for the reader to get their bearings. Once they plant their feet, the tense or perspective shifts—or the vignette suddenly ends—and a new, seemingly unconnected one takes its place. The novel blurs dreams, reality, and time in a way that feels like wading through smoke. Near the end of the novel, Ulrich says: “Everything now is in a state we never knew.” The data and models and warnings will be of no use in this new world; there is nothing to be done but to watch what burns—and hope something, anything, can grow in its wake.

A challenging, sometimes alienating, slow burn of a novel.