Skull Water
Heinz Insu Fenkl
Spiegel and Grau, 2023, $28
I look forward to seeing the film version of Hudson Valley resident Heinz Insu Fenkl’s Skull Water. Will there be one? Who knows, but his writing is so textured and vivid that I could easily visualize his scenes, especially the gut-wrenching ones. The main story, apparently largely autobiographical, follows Insu, a teenage son of a Korean mother and German father in the US Army. Insu’s nickname is Seven (from 57, as in Heinz varieties). As the novel begins, the family returns to Pupyong, South Korea, after a post in Germany in 1974. His mom, sister, and he sleep in the room where he was born; his father is stationed near the DMZ.
A sense of the supernatural pervades, imbued even in the banal. In the house where Insu is staying, neighbors scrape up and mix the black dirt with herbs to make medicine. Such tenets of faith are braided with pungent descriptions of the visceral—a rooster is prepared and outfitted for a cockfight, which ends with gushing blood, its odor mixing with tobacco and sweat.
Insu’s anecdotes alternate with chapters recounting his Big Uncle’s attempts to escape capture by the North Korean People’s Army, advancing toward Seoul, in the 1950s. His bad foot hobbles him, but also offers reprieve by allowing him to scramble solo. He catches a train to Busan, squeezing beside Nari, a woman unknown to him whose life he saves by warming her freezing body. She navigates smoothly among American GIs, entertaining man after man. They become companions, but when Big Uncle finds a North Korean uniform planted in his knapsack, he realizes he is in danger and departs.
Back in the 1970s, illness and death envelop Seven. His father is sick, his cousin Gannan killed herself after finding out she was pregnant with a GI’s baby, and Big Uncle has been exiled because his rotting foot stinks. Seven tracks down his uncle in Skull Cave. He has heard that the water saturating a dead human’s skull has great healing properties, and he and his friends decide to attempt to help Big Uncle heal his foot with this macabre method, coincident with the death of a local, Old Man Heaven.
Despite some Coen Brothers-worthy hilarity at Old Man Heaven’s burial site, the gang fails at the task, succumbing to the stench of death. Sulking, they go to a dogfight, and learn about the black market for dog meat. Mortality lurks constantly. The dog Seven’s friend Miklos knew as a puppy fights to the death. “There was no blood at first—it was odd—just coils of glistening pink and gray intestine bulging out and then spilling on the newspaper, steaming even in the warm air.” Life is a transitory state between the violence of death and afterlife. Ghosts are constant presences.
Big Uncle dies, unhealed, and during the elaborate funeral ceremony, Seven makes a last-ditch attempt at carrying out his uncle’s final wish—to retrieve an arrow shot by his uncle. With time running out, he grabs a leaky boat which sinks just as he reaches the far shore. He scrambles through the jungle, finally spying the arrow in the crux of a tree, and wrangles it free but also wounds himself.
He manages to swim most of the way back across the river, passing out, but is rescued before the final ritual in which a white sheet must be torn in half. “I touched the stretched white fabric with the tip of the arrow, the slightest touch, as if the arrow were a flame and the fabric a fuse, and after a momentary interruption—everything seemed to stop—there came a loud tearing sound as the fabric split neatly down the middle, like a huge zipper opening.” It frees his uncle’s soul, which seems to have occupied Seven’s body at that moment, manifesting in a strange voice.
In between scenes spanning daily life—hanging with pals, family obligations and baggage, and loyalty to the bonds of kin, Seven stealthily dons the figurative mantle of a superhero. Not only does he soothe the restless soul of his uncle, he settles age-old debts. Fenkl addresses the complexities of postwar Korea and being mixed race, and walks a tightrope between the magical and quotidian. He reminds us that despite the inexorable wear and tear of the aging process, all of us were once youthful, each carving out individual lives and profound relationships.
In cultural, linguistic, and ritualistic references, the Korean side of Insu occupies great prominence. We are barely aware of his German heritage other than references to how his father looks stereotypically Caucasian, like a character on a novel’s cover. Perhaps that’s fodder for another book.
—Susan Yung
Bannerman Island: Recollections from a Time Gone By
As told to Neil Caplan with Barbara and Wes Gotlock
Bannerman Castle Trust, 2023, $25
Growing up in the Mid-Hudson Valley in the late 20th century meant being mystified by the ruined, Scottish-style castle in the middle of the river. Caplan, founder of the Bannerman Castle Trust, has pushed the veil aside with a charming book full of historical facts, vivid anecdotes from people who lived and worked there, and artwork. It’s a very Hudson Valley tale peopled by nonconformists, courageous children, and a ghost or two. A book signing and island tour takes place on June 3.
Silver Dollar Girls
Margaret DiBenedetto
Full Court Press, 2023, $10.95
At the very beginning of the Covid siege, when the big-city bar where Mae is slinging drinks shuts down, she ditches her borrowed apartment and hops on a northbound Amtrak with the last of her pay. She has a labor-intensive, emotionally fraught ace in the hole: the family farm out west of Woodstock, where she makes life-altering discoveries about herself and her family history. Catskills author DiBenedetto weaves her own mother’s adventures as one of Ulster County’s first female aviators into the satisfying tale of Mae’s empowerment.
Marfa’s River
Marina Antropow Cramer
Apprentice House Press, 2023, $19.99
It’s 1956 in Brussels, and Europe is still reeling from World War II. Marfa, having survived war and Stalin’s Terror Famine in Ukraine, is determined to do whatever it takes to carve out a life despite suffering from crippling PTSD. She moves through the city haunted by horrors she can’t shake and realities she can’t erase, weighing the proven folly of trust against the crushing isolation of its absence. Hudson Valley writer Cramer seasons her narrative with Marfa’s inner voice in a powerful novel both universal and intimate.
Reading Old Books: A Farce in Two Novellas
Tom Tolnay
Atmosphere Press, 2022, $19.99
In a dystopian time, of what actual use is a literary classic? In the age of the Kindle, is there anything more stubbornly, gorgeously analog than an old hardcover book? In these novellas—How Herman Melville Saved My Life and The Iambic Pentameter of Intimacy—prolific Catskills author Tolnay explores reading, books, and their roles in human connection through the eyes of his two protagonists, one a library aide who gets caught concealing himself in the library overnight, the other a Long Island schoolteacher amid a nasty divorce, both serious book junkies replete with sardonic observations.
Unspoken Word
Mitch Ditkoff
Independent, 2022, $18
There is an infinity of ways to describe the great paradox of being, that which truly cannot be described. In these 100 poems, Ditkoff throws open the windows and beckons the powerful pull of love, hope, and curiosity that draws us into communion with the All That Is, finding clues to share in unexpected places: milkweed pods, unexpected jazz, a Cuban trumpet player and a “Slightly Overweight Museum Security Guard,” among many more. The metaphors flow like water: now pellucid calm, now crashing surf splashing us awake.
—Anne Pyburn Craig
This article appears in May 2023.
