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Summary
Summary
The Washington Post
"[G]randly ambitious... another masterpiece... this genre includes some of the greatest novels of our time, from Pynchon's V. to David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest . That's the troupe Larsen has decided to join, and I Am Radar is a dazzling performance."
The moment just before Radar Radmanovic is born, all of the hospital's electricity mysteriously fails. The delivery takes place in total darkness. Lights back on, the staff sees a healthy baby boy--with pitch-black skin--born to the stunned white parents. No one understands the uncanny electrical event or the unexpected skin color. "A childbirth is an explosion," the ancient physician says by way of explanation. "Some shrapnel is inevitable, isn't it?"
A kaleidoscopic novel both heartbreaking and dazzling, Reif Larsen's I Am Radar begins with Radar's perplexing birth but rapidly explodes outward, carrying readers across the globe and throughout history, as well as to unknown regions where radio waves and subatomic particles dance to their own design. Spanning this extraordinary range with grace and empathy, humor and courage, I Am Radar is the vessel where a century of conflict and art unite in a mesmerizing narrative whole.
Deep in arctic Norway, a cadre of Norwegian schoolteachers is imprisoned during the Second World War. Founding a radical secret society that will hover on the margins of recorded history for decades to come, these schoolteachers steal radioactive material from a hidden Nazi nuclear reactor and use it to stage a surreal art performance on a frozen coastline. This strange society appears again in the aftermath of Cambodia's murderous Khmer Rouge regime, when another secret performance takes place but goes horrifically wrong. Echoes of this disaster can be heard during the Yugoslavian wars, when an avant-garde puppeteer finds himself trapped inside Belgrade while his brother serves in the genocidal militia that attacks Srebrenica. Decades later, in the war-torn Congo, a disfigured literature professor assembles the largest library in the world even as the country around him collapses. All of these stories are linked by Radar--now a gifted radio operator living in the New Jersey Meadowlands--who struggles with love, a set of hapless parents,and a terrible medical affliction that he has only just begun to comprehend.
As I Am Radar accelerates toward its unforgettable conclusion, these divergent strands slowly begin to converge, revealing that beneath our apparent differences, unseen harmonies secretly unite our lives. Drawing on the furthest reaches of quantum physics, forgotten history, and mind-bending art, Larsen's I Am Radar is a triumph of storytelling at its most primal, elegant, and epic: a breathtaking journey through humanity's darkest hours only to arrive at a place of shocking wonder and redemption.
Cleveland Plain-Dealer
"Larsen's is an extraordinarily lush and verdant imagination, blooming wildly on the borders of the absurd and the riotous, the surreal and the ordinary...Quite unlike any [novel] I've read in a long time. One doesn't consume it; one enters it, as part of a literary enactment... Brilliant...The effort is well-rewarded: It is both maddening and marvelous...I can't wait to see what he pulls off next."
Author Notes
Reif Larsen's first novel, The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet , was a New York Times bestseller and has been translated into twenty-seven languages. A Montana Honor book , The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet was a finalist for the IndieBound Award, was short-listed for the Guardian First Book Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and is currently being released as a film in France and the United States.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The gripping story of Radar Radmanovic, born in Elizabeth, N.J., in 1975, begins with his coal-black skin-which came as a total surprise to his white parents. The troubled couple take young Radar to northern Norway for an experimental electric-shock procedure that will alter his skin color. There, they meet a tight-knit group of secretive physicists/puppeteers who call themselves Kirkenesferda. They stage elaborate avant-garde puppet performances in the middle of war zones and recruit Radar's father-an expert radio and TV engineer. With masterly prose, Larsen (The Selected Words of T.S. Spivet) tells the tragic history of how the puppeteers managed to create art while others around them suffered and died, everywhere from New Jersey to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The novel takes a Borgesian turn near the end, when Radar finds himself in Africa, helping Kirkenesferda produce its most ambitious performance yet. Larsen's many vivid imaginings include a spellbinding narrative of a family torn apart by the Bosnian war (complete with photos and drawings), the history of a Cambodian rubber plantation, and a treacherous journey across the Atlantic in a container ship. This is a sprawling, engrossing novel about the ravages of war and the triumph of art. Larsen is an effortless magician, and his performance here is a pure delight. Agent: Denise Shannon, Denise Shannon Literary Agency. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
In Elizabeth, New Jersey, during a power outage in 1975, Radar Radmanovic is born black-skinned to white parents, a genetic anomaly that is of great concern to his mother. Larsen, author of the acclaimed if unconventional novel The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet (2009), offers here a somewhat more straightforward narrative, albeit with illustrations, photographs, charts, and a bibliography that includes Tolstoy, Heidegger, and Pynchon, along with scientific works, or imagined works, in Norwegian and Croatian. Radar's Serbian father, Kermin, is an accomplished electrical engineer. At Kermin's mother's urging, and despite warnings, they take Radar for treatment to a facility in Norway above the Arctic Circle, which turns out to be a community of advanced puppetry (robotics) that fascinates the technician Kermin and leads to his return to Serbia (which he fled with his father). In a parallel narrative, we follow the life of Miroslav Danilovic, who, under an adopted name, encounters Kermin, his hero, during a blackout (caused by Kermin) in East Rutherford, New Jersey. Performances of puppetry in some of the world's troubled areas, including Cambodia and the Congo, hold the cluttered and overly long narrative together.--Levine, Mark Copyright 2015 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
SET ASIDE FOR the moment the black baby born to white parents, the avant-garde puppeteers and the quantum physics that swirl around the whole kit and caboodle. The most interesting facet of Reif Larsen's 600-plus-page novel, "I Am Radar," is that it reads like something far more compact than its bulk might suggest. There are maps, diagrams and pictures (e.g., an elephant plummeting from a bridge, a Cambodian prisoner of the Khmer Rouge) that remind one of the visual arrangements in W.G. Sebald's novels. Then there is a deeply patterned narrative that darts easily from small-bore domestic dramas to sweeping historical catastrophes with just the right fillip of silliness and levity to keep the whole text eminently approachable. The character who gives the book its title is Radar Radmanovic. On the threshold of his birth, in 1975, a blackout plunges a New Jersey hospital into darkness. To the bewilderment of the staff, Radar emerges from his mother's womb with skin "like an eggplant." His father, Kermin, quickly makes peace with this anomaly, but his mother, Charlene, is unnerved. Her disquietude is compounded by a mysterious olfactory phenomenon that leaves her repulsed by the smell of her own child. Charlene struggles valiantly to overcome her aversion. But she grows possessed by the idea of finding a medical explanation for her son's dark pigmentation. This proves elusive. As one would expect, the author squeezes from Charlene's predicament a couple of scenes that gesture toward America's scarred racial legacy. Charlene's hopes are lifted by the arrival of a letter from Norway that serves as her introduction to Kirkenesferda, an avant-garde collective of artists and physicists. According to her correspondent, whom she has never met, the group has performed electrical experiments that have altered skin pigmentation. Though her husband wants nothing to do with these strangers, Charlene responds with alacrity. After they receive free plane tickets, Kermin yields, and the Radmanovics travel to Oslo. At the airport they meet Leif, one of the founders of Kirkenesferda, who drives them to the group's camp on the Finnish-Norwegian border. (Liminal spaces are a major theme of the novel.) There, he tells them how the group was founded at a Nazi labor camp, in Kirkenes, where prisoners got together to discuss ideas. Their first show, which was staged on a remote island in the Arctic, is described later in the book by the son of one of Leif's colleagues: "Two hundred and thirty-five jars, arranged in a perfect circle. The jars were all filled with heavy water.... Inside each jar, three tiny dolls are floating. The dolls are designed to have the exact density of the heavy water, and so they appear essentially weightless. And in the middle of the circle, 235 beautiful puppets ... each with a single shoe cradled in its arms." Supposedly, only two fishermen ever stumbled on the installation, which was mounted as a critique of the manufacture of weapons of mass destruction. Leif gradually undercuts Kermin's distrust by appealing to the engineer in him. He shows Kermin a gigantic mechanical bear - straight out of Heinrich von Kleist's "On the Marionette Theater" - that is capable of parrying any fencing blow, as well as the group's collection of puppets. Buoyed by what he has seen and by Leif's suggestion that they "are not so different," Kermin gives his consent for Radar to have the procedure. The results are not what his mother hoped for. From here, Larsen beautifully interrupts the story of the Radmanovics to tell that of a certain Danilovic family, whose lives are unraveled by the Bosnian war. Then he moves further back in time to tell the story of Raksmey Raksmey, Cambodia's first native-born quantum physicist, and his pushy adoptive father, JeanBaptiste de Broglie, who believes that "all children are experiments, whether they like it or not. Most are just very sloppy experiments." IF THAT SENTIMENT seems to carry a Tolstoyan echo, know that such a reading is vociferously promoted by the text. Larsen goes out of his way to stress his literary allegiances. This means, naturally, that his debt to Pynchon's zany, historically minded, science-laden books is tooted as well. Toward the end of "I Am Radar," however, I grew disenchanted with the author's rolling shout-outs. His extended ode to Borges, which features one Professor Funes cursed with a perfect memory (à la "Funes the Memorious") who builds the world's largest private library along the Congo River, struck me as the literary equivalent of picking low-hanging fruit. "I Am Radar" is as easy to enjoy for its swaggering tragicomic spirit as it is to admire for its celestial ambition. Larsen is so good at fashioning endearingly flawed characters and palpable concepts that one only wishes he would have stepped out of his predecessors' shadows a bit more. CHRISTOPHER BYRD'S work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Guardian, Bookforum and other publications.
Guardian Review
This multi-stranded, globetrotting tale of a boy born with an electric body zips in too many directions for its themes to be properly explored Somewhere in Reif Larsen's sprawling new book is a fine globetrotting Bildungsroman about Radar Radmanovic, a young man from New Jersey. Radar emerges from an odd, cosseted childhood with a preternatural affinity for all things electrical. From this, he becomes the star player in mysterious and dangerous events that involve his father and an obscure troupe of Norwegian scientists-cum-performance artists who stage esoteric events in war zones. In its fullness, however, the book isn't this straightforward or focused; its young US author has greater literary ambitions than that. This will come as no surprise to readers of Larsen's effervescent debut novel, The Collected Works of TS Spivet, which concerned a Montana boy-genius who compulsively documents his entomological experiments and adventures as he makes his way across America, with his assorted maps and diagrams printed alongside the main story as a running commentary and parallel narrative. That book was a charming and cleverly ornamented picaresque. Its successor is also illuminated, with maps, pictures, newspaper clippings and telegrams that give off a heavy Wes Anderson vibe: very well crafted, very knowing, and slightly annoying. Beyond this continuity with his first book, Larsen is trying for a whole different order of formal and narrative complexity. The novel begins with a provocative mystery: in April 1975, a black-skinned boy is born to white parents during a blackout in New Jersey. His emotionally erratic and protective mother convinces the boy's father, a morose electrical engineer who emigrated from Serbia and loves building radios, to subject little Radar to assorted medical and scientific investigations in the hope of understanding the source of his complexion as something other than infidelity. As part of this effort, the family receives an unexpected invitation to visit a group of scientists in remote Norway. They experiment with electricity to enliven robotic animals, including a bear that Radar's father wrestles before his son undergoes an electrotherapy that the scientists call "enveloping". The treatment leaves Radar epileptic, his black skin peels away in patches, and, as per the novel's epigraph from Whitman, the protagonist grows up with nothing less than a "body electric". This brashly chaotic opening offers any number of enigmas and submerged connections concerning character origins, motives and relationships, as well as the settings, themes and ideas at play in Radar's world. The 500 remaining pages would seem to provide ample space for revelation and elaboration; instead, the novel lurches into new directions involving others tangentially connected to Radar -- a Bosnian family and their travails from the mid-1970s through to the wars of the 90s; a Franco-Vietnamese family conducting physics experiments in remote Cambodia from the early 50s through to the mid-70s. Larsen interleaves these novella-sized segments with Radar's life as a young electrical engineer who's dating a pretty girl and dealing with his weird parents and his extraordinary command of electricity. All of this becomes more fraught by 2010, when a second blackout hits New Jersey. Radar learns that this incident involves his father, those Norwegian scientists and individuals connected to the book's Bosnian and Cambodian sections, and he also discovers more about his own black-skinned and electric early life. In turn, Radar replaces his disappeared father on a mission to an isolated village in the Democratic Republic of Congo, for the staging of a performance artwork with hundreds of mechanical birds. "If you ask me," a dyspeptic Belgian living in the DRC observes, after meeting Radar and his crew and hearing of their plans, "it sounds like a lot of bullshit." It's hard to argue otherwise. Each of this novel's segments, and particularly those focused directly on Radar, balance exciting, moving, even tragic stories with clever cerebrations about the mystical and world-changing powers of electricity and political art. But they also introduce lacunae that Larsen accumulates and then ignores by moving on to the next setting. Moreover, the book's overall formal integrity depends on creaky plot hinges, chronological parallels that disclose nothing more than mere coincidence, and breathless invocations of the performance collective's inchoate ideas about why they travel to war zones to stage electro-robotic events: "A happening is not about what we think about before. A happening is about the happen," runs a typically self-important and intellectually flimsy apology. This overwrought, chimerical novel earnestly wants to be profound. To do so, it showily prizes the power of what it calls "narrative transmigration", but it groans with derivative ambitions that recall far more accomplished work by Thomas Pynchon, Tom McCarthy, Aleksandar Hemon and David Mitchell. At one point, the hero comes upon a library burning down along the Congo river, an event that mashes together Conrad, Borges and Ray Bradbury. It's a fitting image for an impressive feat of literary fiction that's driven by little more than a sophomoric desire to bring off an impressive feat of literary fiction. * Randy Boyagoda's latest novel is Beggar's Feast (Penguin). * To order I Am Radar for [pound]15.19 (RRP [pound]18.99) visit bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over [pound]10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of [pound]1.99. - Randy Boyagoda.
Kirkus Review
Strange things happen when Radar Radmanovic is around. For that matter, in Larsen's (The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet, 2009) peripatetic sophomore novel, strange things bring Radar around in the first placeand thereon hangs a tale. Radar"You know, radar. Like bats. And aeroplanes," says his father by way of explanationis notably dark-skinned, though his parents are pale and even pasty. Says the attending doctor, "This will correct itself." It does not, and Radar, the author of many quests, is left to puzzle out a cure, if a cure is in fact wanted, as certainly his mother believes is the case. The search for an answer, until one finally dawns on mom, leads him into the company of a strange congeries of supposed doctors who are really something on the order of performance artists; warns a well-meaning but ineffectual telegram, "They have no idea what they are doing." What they're doing is traveling around performing oddball theatrical pieces in war zones such as Pol Pot's Cambodia and the Bosnia of the early 1990s, but there's a deeper purpose to their wanderings, and in that respect, they seem to have a pretty good idea of what they're up to after all, even if it might not make immediate sense to the reader. Larsen's tale enters into arcane realms indeed, all talk of rolling blackouts, melanin in the substantia nigra, Nikola Tesla, sunspots, probability, Schrdinger's cat, and the etiology of epilepsy told in a sequence of loopily connected tales that all somehow wind up back in the marshes of New Jersey. Radar has moments of epiphany ("There was no such thing as Radar's syndrome. There had never been a syndrome. There was only him"). The connections are not always obvious, and some are more successfully forged than others; indeed, some parts are nearly self-contained and are stronger than the whole. And if the ending strains credulityand a tale about memory that stars a certain Dr. Funes strains patience as wellthen it succeeds in bringing those stories under a single roof. If Larsen's story makes demands of its readers, it also offers plenty of rewards. Imaginative, original, nicely surrealand hyperpigmentarily so. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Starred Review. In 1975 in Elizabeth, NJ, a black child is born to white parents. His mother's obsessive quest to discover the cause of the anomaly brings her into contact with an obscure Norwegian band of scientists/artists who claim they can switch the coloration with a procedure involving electricity. As puppeteers, this reclusive group stages revolutionary "happenings" in war zones around the world, and the novel shifts gears numerous times to provide the backstories of several key members of the group, who come from far-flung nations including Serbia and Cambodia. It isn't clear at first how the various strands will come together, but like the puppeteers' enigmatic "happenings," they make a sort of inexplicable sense in the aggregate. Incorporating real history and literature and a great deal of physics, this second novel from Larsen (after the well-received The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet) contains footnotes and diagrams, many of which derive from genuine sources, making the novel into a kind of historical simulacrum. VERDICT This 656-page postmodern journey across continents and cultures is a delightfully disorienting and immersive experience. [See Prepub Alert, 8/22/14.]-Lauren Gilbert, Sachem P.L., Holbrook, NY (c) Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected proof*** Copyright © 2015 Reif Larsen Elizabeth, New Jersey April 17, 1975 It was just after midnight in birthing room 4C and Dr. Sherman, the mustached obstetrician presiding over the delivery, was sweating lightly into his cotton underwear, holding out his hands like a beggar, ready to receive the imminent cranium. Without warning, the room was plunged into total darkness. Though he had been delivering babies for more than thirty years now, Dr. Sherman was so taken aback by this complete loss of vision that he briefly considered, and then rejected, the possibility of his own death. Desperate to get his bearings, he wheeled around, trying to locate the sans serif glow of the emergency exit sign across the hall, but this too had gone dark. "Doctor?" the nurse called next to him. "The exit!" he hissed into the darkness. All through the hospital, a wash of panic spread over staff and patients alike as life support machines failed and surgeons were left holding beating hearts in pitch-black operating theaters. None of the backup systems--the two generators in the basement, the giant, deep- cycle batteries outside the ICU, usually so reliable in blackouts such as this one-- appeared to be working. It was a catastrophe in the making. Electricity had quite simply vanished. In birthing room 4C, Dr. Sherman was jolted into action by Charlene, the expectant mother, who gave a single, visceral cry that let everyone know, in no uncertain terms, that the baby was still coming. Maybe the baby had already come, under shroud of darkness. Dr. Sherman instinctively reached down and, sure enough, felt the conical crown of the baby's skull emerging from his mother's vagina. He guided this invisible head with the tips of his ten fingers, pulling, gathering, turning so that the head and neck were once again square with the baby's shoulders, which still lingered in Charlene's birth canal. He did this pulling, gathering, turning without seeing, with only the memory infused in the synapses of his cortex, and his blindness was a fragile kind of sleep. As he shepherded the child from its wet, coiled womb into a new kind of darkness, Dr. Sherman heard a distinct clicking sound. At first he thought the sound was coming from the birth canal, but then he located the clicking as coming from just behind him, over his right shoulder. Suddenly his vision was bathed in a syrupy yellow light. The father of the newborn, Kermin Radmanovic, who had earlier brought a transceiver radio and a telegraph key into the birthing room in order to announce his child's arrival to the world, was waving a pocket flashlight wrapped in tinfoil at the space between his wife's legs. "He is okay?" asked Kermin. "He comes now?" His accent was vaguely Slavic, the fins of his words dipping their uvular tips into a smooth lake of water. Everyone looked to where the beam of light had peeled back the darkness. There glistened the torpedo-like head of the child, covered in a white, waxen substance. The sight encouraged Dr. Sherman back into action. He first slipped his finger beneath the child's chin, but when he felt no sign of the umbilical cord wrapped around the neck, he yelled, "Push!" Charlene did her best to comply with the order, her toes curling as she attempted to expel the entire contents of her abdomen, and when the breaking point was most certainly reached, surpassed, and then reached again, there was a soft popping sound and the rest of the baby emerged, the starfish body tumbling out into the dim mustard glow of this world. Kermin leaned in to catch a first glimpse of his new child. Ever since his wife had come hobbling into his tiny electronics closet, staring at her dripping hand as if it were not her own, time had begun to unravel. The labor had come three weeks early. His fingers--so steady as he mended the cathode ruptures and fizzled diodes of his broken radios and televisions-- suddenly became clumsy and numb at their tips, as if they were filled with a thick, viscous sap. In the hospital parking lot, he had taken the old Buick up and over the curb onto a low, half-moon shrubbery, which had not weathered this trespass well at all. As he ushered a blanketed Charlene through the rotating doors, Kermin had looked back at the battered shrubs, lit by the ugly glow of the parking lot's blinking fluorescents, and wondered in that moment if they were prematurely introducing the future into the present. In the final days of World War II, his younger sister Tura had also been born three weeks early. He and his parents had been fleeing the advancing Communist Partisans for the uncertain refuge of Slovenia and the West when she arrived suddenly, like a sneeze, in the mildewed basement of a Bosnian hotel on the River Sana. He remembered her tiny and pink in their mother's arms, sheltered by a horsehair blanket while they rode in the back of a sputtering diesel truck past homes that burned and hissed against a light rain. That is my sister in there , he thought, watching the blanket bounce to the staccato beat of the road's potholes. She was born in the war, but she will not know the war. I will tell her how it was so that we will always have the same memories. Tura would not have the same memories as he, nor any memories at all. On the second day, she opened her eyes to the light of this world, but she would not nurse, and so her body grew soft and light like a bird's. One week later she was dead, from an illness that was never named. They buried her in an abandoned vineyard on the outskirts of Zagreb. After the impromptu ceremony, they were walking back to the truck when they discovered an unexploded German bomb lying only twenty meters from her grave. "Her headstone," his father, Dobroslav, had said, and it was not meant to be a joke, but they all began to laugh, and this felt good until their mother started to weep again. Two days later, she too would be dead, at a checkpoint near Ljubljana. Kermin was too young at the time to understand the particulars, but he knew it was because of something vaguely erotic--something wanted by the trigger-happy Russian private with the moth-eaten beard and something refused by his grieving mother, who was malnourished and weak but who was still and always would be a strong- willed Radmanovic woman. His father had just turned from successfully negotiating their passage with the squat colonel, but it was too late; the young Russian guard had already shot her twice through the chest. It was as if the man had meant to push her backwards with the palm of his hand but had simply used the wrong tool. He began to walk quickly away from the scene so his comrades would not see the terror in his eyes. Instead of falling to the ground like a heavy doll, as Kermin had seen the prisoners do at the Chetnik executions, his mother shrank into herself, a reverse blossoming, coming to rest in a sitting position, like a ruminative Buddha. She was already stiff by the time her husband reached her. He sat down beside her and held her hands as though they were quietly praying together. Later, the colonel apologized to his father and promised that the young guard would be executed before the day was through. Years later, even after he had fled Europe, Kermin's limited sexual encounters--in a Meadowlands parking lot; in a Saigon bordello; behind the vestry of St. Sava's; in the synthetic floral bloom of his dentist's bathroom--these moments of carnal urgency were still inflected with the lingering sense of crossing a hostile border. Until he had met Charlene, his relationships had not gone well. In the darkness of birthing room 4C, Kermin tried to hold his pocket lightsteady on his wife and brand- new baby. All will be fine , he whispered to himself, there is no reason to worry. His own birth had been famously quick and painless. His mother had claimed he leaped out into the world the first chance he got, as if he could not breathe inside her. "I was killing you!" she used to say. Maybe his child would be no different. Kakav otac takav sin. Like father, like son. But even then he could tell something was not right. Under the pocket light's dull beam, the child appeared almost prehistoric. The newborn's skin was covered in a white, gooey plaster, as if he were not a baby but a statue mold of a baby--a golem, complete with tiny plaster penis. Kermin stared. He wanted to press his hand into this creature's clay skin, to test its warmth, but already here were the first signs of life: the statue-child was squirming, clawing for oxygen, expelling the first sticky mew of a cry, his tiny mouth working the air for the solidity of a nipple. "Why is he like this?" Kermin whispered, his pocket light inadvertently dipping before he righted its beam again. "Why does he look like this?" Charlene, completely exhausted but wild with muddied adrenaline, tasted the concern in her husband's voice. She tried to sit up. "What is it? What's wrong? He's a boy? Is he okay?" The words swung and gimballed. "Don't worry, don't worry. He's fine," Dr. Sherman reassured her, gathering the baby and all of his limbs into a pastel blanket. Instinctively, he took the bright white plastic clamp from the tray and snapped it closed at the base of the umbilical cord. "Preterms are often covered in a substance called vernix caseosa. This protects their skin. It will come right off." In truth, he had never quite seen such a thick vernix coating, but then there had been nothing normal about this night, so he tried not to let his concern reveal itself in the contours of his words. Charlene's green eyes burned in the light. "I want him with me . . ." she said. "You will have him, don't you worry," said the nurse. "You'll have him for the rest of your life." Before Charlene could process the ominous undercurrent of this statement, the nurse put a hand on her shoulder and gently eased her backwards onto the bed. She smoothed a wet curl of black hair across Charlene's forehead and then adjusted the flow of her IV, opening the secondary port to allow an influx of opioids. Charlene let out a quiet groan and slumped back into the darkness. "Do we have battery power on the suction?" Dr. Sherman asked. The nurse checked the machine. "No, doctor," she said. "That's all right. I'll do it myself." He took a wet cloth and carefully wiped off the child's mouth and face and then his left arm. The thick layer of vernix came away easily. "You see?" he said to Kermin, but Kermin did not answer. He was holding his pocket light, staring at his son. Where the doctor had wiped away the globular coating, the child's skin appeared very dark-- so dark it shimmered purple in the beam of light, like an eggplant. Dr. Sherman looked down and caught his breath. He wiped away more of the white substance. The jet- black umbra of the skin beneath the bright vernix was disarming, as if beneath his covering the child was made only of more shadows. "He is okay?" Kermin was asking from behind. "He looks . . ." There was not a word for this. And now the first full-force wail from the infant, announcing his own arrival. "Doctor, should we do an Apgar test?" the nurse asked. The doctor hesitated, mystified, holding the baby up to the beam of light. The body squirmed, half white, half black--a negative image of itself. There was a chance this was all still a dream, though the pain in his oblique muscles told him otherwise. He had lived long enough to know that pain never appears in dreams. From somewhere down the hall came the sound of urgent shouting. Dr. Sherman snapped back to life. "It's a boy!" he said, flushing out the obvious. He busied himself with wiping away the rest of the vernix and then snipped the umbilical cord with a precision that calmed his nerves. "I'll get an Apgar. Can we get some more lamps in here?" He was enjoying speaking aloud. The act of speaking was making this world possible again. "And what the hell happened with the electric? Can someone find out? You would think with all of this modern technology . . ." "Can I have him?" Charlene said from the darkness. "We just want to run a few tests to make sure--" Dr. Sherman was in the process of handing the baby off to the nurse when a deep, mechanical moan rose up from somewhere in the building. The central air system shuddered and the ducts began to exhale above their heads and then all of the lights in the room sputtered on, one by one. Those collected in the birthing room blinked as their pupils constricted with this explosion of photons. Everyone stared at the baby wriggling in the doctor's outstretched hands. In the harsh light of the fluorescents, the infant's skin, marked by the last globs of remaining vernix, was as black as the darkness from which he had just emerged. The umbilical cord and its apparatus dangled white and translucent against tiny, pumping legs the color of charcoal. Such monochromatic contrast appeared manufactured; the child looked like a puppet come to life. "Why is he . . . so like this?" Kermin finally blurted out. "I wouldn't worry," Dr. Sherman said reflexively, finishing the handoff to the nurse. "Many newborns have a different skin color when they first come out of the womb. A mark of transition. This will all correct itself." "Is something wrong?" Charlene asked, drunk on her drugs, her pasty skin flush with the exertion of her labor. She reached for her child, but he was already being wheeled out of the room on a special trolley, followed by the doctor, who began yelling at someone down the hall. "Is something wrong?" Charlene asked again. "What is that smell?" "He is . . ." Kermin said, staring at the door, left to wander closed on its hinges. They were suddenly, strangely alone. "He is . . . Radar." "Radar?" "His name: Radar." To her horror, Charlene realized they had never settled on a name. On several occasions they had tentatively circled the topic, but each time, all she could muster was a halfhearted short list of names for girls, and these tended to be lifted directly from famous novels: Anna, Dolores, Hester, Lucie, Edna. Every choice seemed either too obvious or too obscure or both too obvious and too obscure at the same time. How to name someone who existed only in theory? And coming up with a single viable boy name proved next to impossible. You were not just naming the boy-- you were naming the man . Kermin, of course, proved no help at all; all five of his suggestions had been lifted from an electromagnetic textbook. And so Charlene succumbed to the narrative that they would have a girl and that all would become clear later. The decision of the name had been abandoned for simpler, tactile assignments, such as assembling the crib. They had cleared out space for the nursery; they had bought diapers and a kaleidoscope of onesies; they had inherited an outdated perambulator from her parents; but they had chosen no name. Except now that the baby had arrived (and left again), now that the baby had in fact revealed himself to be a he, the absence of a name suddenly took on great significance. He could not exist without a name. "Radar," Kermin said again. "You know, radar . Like bats. And aeroplanes." "I know what radar is," she said. She willed her brain into action. "What about . . . Charles?" Charles had been the name of her preschool boyfriend. He had punched her in the stomach to declare his love. She had not thought of him in at least thirty years, but now his name rose from the depths and became the stand-in for all things male. "Charles?" said Kermin. "Yes, he can be a Charlie . . . or Chuck . . . or Chaz." "Chaz? What is Chaz?" She sighed. She was too tired for this. "Okay, not Charles, then. What about your father's name?" "Dobroslav? This is peasant name." "I'm being serious, Kerm! What about your name?" His own name was not so much a name as a signal of protest. In the small Serbian village in eastern Croatia where he was born, a name was practically all you had. To know your name was to know your history, your present standing, the circumscription of your future. It was the one thing you could never escape. His father, in a feat of madness or brilliance, had bucked their heritage and invented the name Kermin, in service to no tradition, lineage, or culture. Kermin had thus been both blessed and cursed: his singularity established, he could claim to have never met another with his same name, but he had also weathered a lifetime of confused looks when introduced on both sides of the Atlantic. Kermit? Like the frog? "But listen," he said. "I am being serious: Radar is name. Have you seen this television program M*A*S*H?" He articulated each letter, as if they were made out of wood. "Corporal Radar O'Reilly can sense the choppers before they arrive. It is like he has this ESP." "We don't want our child to have ESP," said Charlene, bringing her hands to her face. The hospital bracelet white against her wrist. "I just want to see him . . . Where did they take him? They can't just take him like that . . . I want to see him, Kerm. Bring him back to me." Later, hunkered down in a deserted corner of the hospital, Kermin tapped out a message on his telegraph key, his thumb conjuring signal with the quiver of the smooth brass lever. The clusters of clicks and clats evaporated into the air, invisible pulses slipping out into the Jersey night, to be collected like dew by the radios of those who were listening in the early- morning hours: --* --** -- *-- 4 17 75. MY SON IS BORN. RADAR RADMANOVIC. MOTHER IS FINE. BABY IS FINE. I AM FINE. KAKAV OTAC TAKAV SIN. 73, K2W9 Moments before, the nurse had asked Kermin for the child's name. "I must type it up," she said. "For the certificate." He had glanced through the doorway at his sleeping wife. "Radar," he said, testing the boundaries of truth. "It's Radar." "Radar?" The nurse raised her eyebrows, unsure she had heard the word correctly. "Radar," he confirmed, bouncing and recalling his fingers from an invisible barrier. "Like this: Signal. Echo. Return ." Excerpted from I Am Radar by Reif Larsen All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
