Permanent Earthquake

by Evan Dara

On an island perhaps in the Caribbean, a young man - abandoned, resilient - contends with nonstop instability. His island is being thrashed by an earthquake that has gone on for months and shows no sign of shaking anything free...

Genres: Fiction, Dystopia, Novels

261 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2021

About the author

Evan Dara is an American postmodern novelist. In 1995, his first novel The Lost Scrapbook won the 12th Annual FC/2 Illinois State University National Fiction Competition judged by William T. Vollmann. Evan Dara currently lives in Paris.

Dara's second novel, The Easy Chain, was published by Aurora Publishers in 2008.

A third novel, Flee, was published by Aurora, Inc. in late summer 2013.

Reviews

[karen · Rating 5 out of 5]

He gets up, starts off in a direction that gives comfort because he can claim it as his. It will lead to something, eventually, even if that is a revised definition of nothing. He tells himself that telling himself these things does not help. Except for the many times that it does.

when i bought this book—about twenty minutes after learning of its existence—the entire synopsis was:

Your book. Right now.

there's a bit more posted now, but those four words were four more than necessary to guarantee my purchase, 'cuz i'm already an evan dara superfan and it's been too long since his last novel.

i'm glad i didn't know more going into it—i'm actually sorta itching to delete that user-posted synopsis, because it's near-impossible to distill an evan dara plot into a tidy summary, and part of the joy of his books is the dislocation you feel as you try to find your way through the convoluted glory of his prose—his books are puzzles, journeys, challenges. the pleasure is not in "understanding all the things," but in knowing that each time you revisit it, you might understand a little more, or you might interpret something differently.

i went in knowing nothing, i ended knowing some things, but certain that i wanted to reread it, in the hopes of knowing more somethings.

in a way, it's the most straightforward of his books, but it isn't straightforward by any other metric; you're not going to just be handed the name or age of the protagonist, the setting, or the specific set of circumstances that have led to his situation.

the appeal of a journey to daraland is the way he builds atmosphere and that—even if you don't know what the heck's going on, you are hooked into finding out more. it's a fully immersive experience—you become surrounded by his story, and even now—a week after reading it—a part of me is still back there, trembling alongside our hero.

it's also about his unique voice, his word-choices; these perfect descriptors that are unexpected and striking without being strained. it's such a rare quality—so many writers try to force what comes naturally to him—cramming their prose with unusual words to give their writing a poetical flair, but if it's not done well, it clunks everything up. dara's aren't...expensive words, but they're perfect for evoking the situation. whatever that is.

Four is the manse with three gables, one on every side I've seen. The building has three stories, standing unswaying under a punk cut of angled rooflets and steep pediments. Walls made of heavy limestone, mullioned windows dark and depthless. Halfway up a girding of half-timbering, uncrumbled.

They're working the manse's east side. The buttress-stones already reach to just below the windows of the third floor and extend in a French curve twelve, fourteen feet from the exterior wall. One stone bears, worndown, blurred, the oval insignia that once hung next to our post office's entrance door.

The buttresser, hauling my stone, works his way up the slope. Sometimes he places my stone down on the terraced stack and uses it as a prop for his next step. Not once does he grunt. In less than a minute the buttresser stops, lifts my stone above his head and compresses like a spring beneath it. He shudders back to vertical, raises his arms, his sleeves slip below his elbows and he slides the stone onto the slope's top. Then, with both hands, he pushes the stone snug. No mortar or cement. The existing structuring of stones and rocks makes my stone stay put.

The buttresser monkeys back down to earth. He runs off and jumps over a shirtless man squirted on the ground and approaches a distributor at the next manse's north facade. My distributor continues to look up at my stone. I tell myself he is perhaps now surveying for aesthetic purposes. He nods and turns towards me. Hmphs and blinks his eyes to say: Done. He flips open his strongbox and stirs in two fingers. Fishes out and hands me fourteen florins, muddy dark coins. Then he turns to receive the next drop, from a man who must be seventy. Beneath a white mist of hair the man moves agilely, in short scurries. His back, under loose, sodden clothes, is rippling bone and lumped muscle. He tilts and I see he's carrying two stones. Two large stones.

I disappear for the distributor. He stands with his hand curved above his stability rail and watches another buttresser scale the heap. The buttresser's shoes, soleless beige cloths, grab edges of stones as he clambers up. The hard hill rises. Pebbles sprinkle down. Fourteen florins.

whoever he is, he's a star, and if you've never read him before, it's time.

sincerely,

a karen you can trust

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EVAN DARA IS A PERFECT THING.

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update: i just started this book on the subway in, and it's already in the running for best book of 2021. for me. probably not for the new york times, but only because the world's broken all the way down. it should be on all the lists.

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my copy is ON ITS WAY!



come to my blog!

[George]

'“He is not the impotent puppet of a conscienceless earth. […] He can be his own stillspot. If temporarily.”

First J. G. Ballard blew the world in 1961 (not up, just blew it), then he drowned it in 1962, then he dried it in 1964, and as if that wasn’t enough telluric torture, he encrusted it with crystals in 1966. And now, in the time of COVID-19, Evan Dara has literally taken up the mantle of apocalyptic natural disasters by shaking the world in Permanent Earthquake, his first novel in 8 years.'

Read the full review for free here: https://thecollidescope.com/2021/06/2...

[Christopher Robinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m generally not one to read books as soon as they come out, but the arrival of Permanent Earthquake in my mailbox was perfectly timed. I had finished another book the night before, and considering how hard I fell for Dara’s other three novels last summer, it seemed like a no-brainer: I opened the package, extracted the book, put on some good reading music and dug in.

From the outset, I noticed that the title is very literal. This novel takes place on an island where the ground is constantly shaking; the intensity of the shaking is subject to change, but never ceases during the course of the story. The narrator (who is not named until quite late in the book, so therefore I won’t state his name here) makes his way around the island, doing menial work for small sums of money, exchanging said money for food and supplies, avoiding contact with law enforcement for reasons we can only guess at (until very late in the book, and so again I’ll spare any further details), sometimes encountering strangers, exploring, seeking a “stillspot” that may or may not exist, which is exactly what it sounds like: a part of the island that doesn’t shake.

It’s a simple but interesting premise, and very well executed at that. Dara uses his considerable literary powers to make the reader FEEL what the narrator feels. And I sincerely mean it when I say I felt like the narrator feels: Dara put me in his shoes and I felt every fall, every semi-sleepless night, every hunger pang, nausea bout, water craving; every moment of self-revulsion, fear, dread, awe, confusion. Dara uses repetition to amazing effect. Indeed, the first 100 or so pages were kind of a slog as a result of all the repetition and dead-end questing. But that’s clearly the point: the narrator’s journey is a slow and difficult one, and so will ours, the readers’, be.

(That all being said, the book does actually “go somewhere,” “get someplace.” It isn’t all for nothing in the end. But that’s all I’ll say on the subject.)

Permanent Earthquake is a pretty major stylistic departure for Dara, in that the story is fairly simple and linear in comparison to his earlier works and the individual sentences are quite short, but I absolutely loved it. It is streamlined without sacrificing any of the qualities that made me fall in love with Dara’s work in the first place. The language is stylish and highly poetic in places despite the abbreviated sentence length, and I found it intense and conventionally compelling, shockingly readable throughout, even with all the repetition and resultant frequent sensations of something resembling boredom.

Think McCarthy’s The Road as a weirder solo journey, and somehow even more hopeless, bleak, devoid of comfort. It’s an imperfect comparison, but it’ll have to do because it’s the only novel I could really think to compare it to.

If you’re new to Dara, this would be just as good a place as any to start, as it is significantly more conventionally accessible than his earlier works. But if you’re like me and already a Dara convert, you’ll find much to love here as well.

Dara is a wonder, one of our most exciting living writers, and Permanent Earthquake is an incredible piece of work, quite an accomplishment. It’s very effective and very affecting and I definitely plan on reading it again (along with everything he’s written).

Highly recommended.

[cycads and ferns · Rating 5 out of 5]

On a Caribbean island experiencing constant seismic eruptions, an unnamed protagonist, finding standing and walking difficult, dons a mouthguard and knee guards to protect his body from falls. Everyday he and the other island inhabitants collect stones for the owners of the manses. One day the protagonist decides to search for a place on the island without the quakes.
“He tells himself a stillspot must exist….Can every square inch of every corner of the creation be at odds with tranquility? Can all truly be flux? Even if he cannot here hope for a true absence of agitation, it is certainly possible, probable, even, that somewhere the island’s myriad tensions and flexions would somehow act against one another, cancel each other out….But if all is flux, how can he- his situation- be unchanging? It cannot be, he tells himself. It cannot be unchanging.”

A novel about the consequences of climate change, the constant earthquakes; or the cruelty of capitalism, the back breaking work of collecting stones; or even a metaphor for psychological distress.
“Grievances….They’re the only thing to invest in. The only investment that won’t fall….There’s always a bull market in human suffering. Put every florin you have into it.”
DON’T HAVE MANY FLORINS.
“There you go….The market is working well.”

[Kevin Adams · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every once in a while you get a surprise. And a new Evan Dara book is just that. If you haven’t read him before then stop reading this and get thee to the internet (normally I would say an Independent Bookstore) and pick up all of his books. Ok, you can start with this one but please don’t call this Evan Dara light. Even though it is his shortest novel. It have all the makings and best things of an Evan Dara novel. Literate without the condescension. Funny without the silliness. Just sentence after sentence of intelligent and inventive writing. If you like that sort of thing, this is the book and author for you.

[Iryna Chernyshova · Rating 5 out of 5]

Піранезі вийшов на Дорогу, тільки сильно трусило.

[Ian Scuffling · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'll come back to this, but suffice to say, I did not really find much to praise or value in this novel, which wallows in stasis until it tries to create a plot in the last 30 pages. A damn shame and a mess of a book, but a good reminder to celebrate the brilliance of Dara's other novels.

[Sean · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible.

Video review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWr0o...

[Marc Nash · Rating 5 out of 5]

Video review https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpL5H...

[Jeff Falzone · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'll have a lot to say about this incredible novel once enough of the early readers have finished. This surprised me in so many great ways. More soon.

[Eric · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m going to need some time to process this beautifully horrifying and confoundingly moving novel; it made me believe that fiction still has an ongoing mission beyond constructing archly masturbatory metafictional irony-puzzles and genre-bending crowd pleasers, that the novel of social critique and psychological High Modernism are not mutually exclusive and can still make a jaded reader of contemporary literature weep. I’m looking forward to reading Evan Dara’s back catalogue. Please read this one.

[Phillip Sheppard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dara is a creative monster. I only wish this book was longer, it was getting most interesting near the end. Why is this 50% as long as his others? A brilliant writer

[Harris]

It’s been a minute since reading 100 pages in a sitting felt like 15 minutes

[Stewart Mitchell · Rating 3 out of 5]

I loved Evan Dara’s first 2 books but have not been as impressed with the others. Flee took a very interesting concept and then seemingly abandoned it just when things were getting good; in contrast, Permanent Earthquake is a much easier and more consistent book, but it’s not all that compelling as a story. It hits a lot of Dara’s usual thematic beats - environmental collapse, breakdown of language, societal shifts in the face of ecological change - but it doesn’t do anything new or exciting with these ideas, and the plot plays out in a way that feels much too predictable for an author who has never taken the easy way out in the past. I’m hoping Dara eventually returns with something that lives up to the extremely high bar he set with The Lost Scrapbook and The Easy Chain at the start of his career, but this one is not the comeback I wanted it to be.

[Ezra James · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book so much I bought the rest of Evan Dara’s bibliography in one compulsive bundle. Taking place in a post-apocalyptic landscape, Dara captures the inner and outer chaos such environments could provide in such a bleak and creative matter you just can’t help but follow along. His prose is a strange mixture of Hemingway’s and David Foster Wallace’s, with a little bit of Cormac McCarthy on the side. It was melodically and fascinating to a fault and was every bit a reason for why this novel works so well. Ultimately these kind of book deals with the act of survival and what needs to be done to ensure it, and these themes are riveting when given to a skilled author, which Dara most certainly is.

[Geoffrey · Rating 3 out of 5]

A new Dara novel is always a big deal, but I am really unsure about how to evaluate this. It certainly has a lot of interesting stuff, but does it ever cohere? Is the ending...anything? Will Dara ever write anything else to rival the one-two punch of The Lost Scrapbook and The Easy Chain? Not that it's fair to criticize anyone for "only" writing two of the most groundbreaking novels I can think of, but I DON'T KNOW!

[Justin Fraxi]

What even is this book? No idea, but there was one copy available for sale on the entire internet, so I grabbed it. Guess I'll find out.

[D · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first fifty pages were a difficult trek, but that's kind of just Dara, so I knew it would be rewarding if I pressed on. It was, though nothing like the payoff in The Lost Scrapbook. Good luck. You're gonna need it.

[Sam · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fun read. Not quite sure I got everything out of it that I could have. As others have said before me: a much more straightforward Dara book, but still not “easy”

[javor · Rating 5 out of 5]

No words. Cannot praise this high enough. Somewhere between Pynchon and McCarthy, Dara is an absolute visionary in reworking the English language. Reading this felt like a five-year old being read Finnegans Wake as a bedtime story, or waking up in a dream where the rules of everything are different and everyone knows what’s going on except you. Dara has created a language that responds to disaster already naturalized as everyday occurrence, much in the same way COVID-19 saw a whole new lexicon enter public discourse. His writing very well demonstrates that ordinary language is meant for ordinary situations, and when a calamity rapidly transforms the entirety of daily life, a kind of poetry is required to account for it. As climate change accelerates, the state of exception will become the norm; this liminal state Dara has captured masterfully in this novel. Those who appear normal in this world are themselves just as messed up. Interpersonal stability, bodily control, mastery over language, control over one's own narrative are all upset by the constant earthshake. Bodies are fractured into separate limbs, sentences into individual words and fragments, possible futures into immediate presents, hopes into needs for survival. Amid this, a very quiet critique of capital, of colonial exploitation, of standard signifying strategies, and the universal climate denialism that seems to ground all liberal politics. Again, nothing I can say can praise this book enough. Absolutely phenomenal.

[Downward · Rating 4 out of 5]

this is probably Dara's most straightforward narrative: a man who we eventually come to know as sam, who moves between third and first person perspective, lives on an island that is undergoing a perpetual, "permanent" earthquake. he traverses the island in his gear - kneepads, mouthguard - searching for a still spot, falling over every couple of steps and banging himself up, before he comes in contact with a juggler who seems to be completely unaffected by the always-in-motion island. there's a deeper metaphor here that sam might be physically playing out related to trauma and as you read the island's uneasiness becomes more and more your own, as sam can never sleep, pukes regularly, and sustains significant physical damage over and over again while he just looks for peace of mind (while also, being haunted by a flashback of his family life that resolves in a pretty BRUTAL way toward the text's end). bless Evan Dara cos he keeps doing it.

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

A story more scenario than stuff, about jittering constant change and unstable mind in unstable world. I don’t like that nearly everything is ambiguously unreal, but I do like that the story stumbles from nothing to nothing with just a bit of juggling between.