No Holes The old woman in Catherynne M. Valente’s novel, Deathless, has no name, yet she still suffers. Her soldier son, Vitaliy, died when a bullet pierced him through. Even so, when Ivan Tsarevich wanders by, a stranger to the woman as she is a stranger to him, she invites him into her home. She shows him the food on the plates and tells him to eat. He should eat, he should get fat, he should live. “Be alive,” she tells him. She says this because she knows about holes. Her son died because of the hole inside him, and she, too, has a hole “like a bullet” in her…