Vanishing Monuments

March 2, 2020
In Stintzi’s ambitious debut novel (after the poetry collection Junebat) a nonbinary photographer based in Minneapolis struggles to break through the barriers of their past. The photographer, Alani Baum, navigates their “memory palace” after their mother’s dementia takes a turn for the worse and they return to their childhood home in Winnipeg for the first time in 30 years. The components of the palace guide the narrative through collaged passages that examine the space’s fixed points. Chapters titled “The Living Room” and “The Stairs” open on scenes narrated in the second person, bringing the reader into rooms where walls are “covered in memories.” Stintzi ties Alani’s troubled history with their mother to readings of Ovid, descriptions of photographs, and past travels from the narrator’s life that reach as far as Hamburg, where Alani worked as a model for photographer Erwin Egger. Certain moments stand out vividly—a description of Alani navigating their nonbinary identity through the metaphor of a labyrinth and a Minotaur, the detailed construction of Erwin’s photographic compositions—but they don’t all cohere in the long run. Still, Stintzi’s skill shines through in well-crafted sentences and narratives. Despite its weaknesses, Stintzi’s first foray into the novel form displays a visionary approach with the refreshing touch of a poet.

March 1, 2020
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.

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May 1, 2020
The novel's narrator answers, under certain circumstances, to Alani, Al, Allie, Annie, Sofia, even Hedwig or Hedy, although the latter two are names belonging to the narrator's mother. For the last 27 years, parent and child have been estranged, since a 17-year-old Alani ran away from Winnipeg with girlfriend Genny to Minneapolis, never intending to go back. In middle age, Alani is comfortable (enough), settled in a little house across the street from Genny, teaching as a local visiting professor who has never left, hired despite having nothing more than a GED, and currently enjoying national recognition as an unconventional photographer. Now, mother lies in a care facility, her dementia having erased her past and, recently, even her voice. Alani is pulled to return, to confront the memory palace, their home before the schism, a house that still holds within its walls too much dysfunction, dislocation, and loss. Ontario-born, Missouri-based nonbinary poet Stintzi makes their fiction debut, leading Alani room by room through a stifling labyrinth, surviving madness and memory to somehow, maybe, emerge, finally, whole.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)