Monthly Archives: December 2023

What I Read, September 2023

Posted on by under book review, month in review, review, Uncategorized

Don’t ask me what happened in September, it was a long time ago. I’m amazed I’m even writing this post.

Alex Katz, Lake Light (1992)

Dwyer Murphy, The Stolen Coast (2023)

I liked Murphy’s debut, An Honest Living. But I liked the follow-up even more. So much so that I’d have to call this my most enjoyable reading experience of the year. Murphy seems to know stuff: how to use the law to do things that aren’t really kosher, how to order in a dive bar, how to post in a pickup game. Jack, our narrator, has a pedigreed law degree, but he lives in his hometown, an appealingly ramshackle Massachusetts coastal town that is for sure not the Cape. He works with his father in the family business: helping people shed their identities and giving them new ones so they can start over. People on the run from criminal outfits, companies they’ve stolen intellectual property from, pasts that got too hot. I loved this premise and wanted even more of it.

Here’s Jack reflecting on how you can’t start totally from scratch in creating a new identity—everyone’s been damaged and that’s important:

You want to preserve a little trace of that damage. From parents, boyfriends, husbands, estranged siblings, jilted nobodies, pissed-off bosses who put a credit check on you ten years back for no good reason except you were leaving with two weeks’ notice. A past is a string of resentments and grievances. Grudges that never amounted to anything but were felt for a time. I paid a kid in Iceland to handle the digital traces. It might have been a pack of kids for all I knew. Healthy wind-kissed boys in front of computers, Viking aggression moving through their blood and no lands left to pillage, but they wanted money to walk around with and this was the work they had chosen.

That old-fashioned reference to “walking around money” turns those wind-kissed boys into something from the Rat Pack. Love it.

The quote gives you get a sense of Jack’s voice (Murphy keeps on like he started, he’s gonna be our next Portis.) And he’s not the only great character, either. Jack’s father is a delight, a man who knows how to eat, and chat up the ladies, and perform spycraft: he may be suffering from an incurable illness, though, and maybe things are going to change in Jack’s life.

When an old flame/best friend/absolute pistol, herself a lawyer working at the edge of the law, comes home for the summer, things definitely change. Jack gets involved in an elaborate heist, the machinations of which are pure pleasure. Speaking of pleasure, the main appeal of the book is Dwyer’s prose, which snaps with epigrams (“sincerity unmans me”) and jokes that don’t try too hard:

I went inside for a while and sat at the bar. It was a long block of wood nailed into legs and looked like something you might build in your basement and then forget about for several years.

I read this book over Labour Day weekend and that was a nice thing I did for myself.

Yiyun Li, The Book of Goose (2022)

After getting along with Li’s first novel, I turned to her most recent. I disliked it! Rohan’s take mirrors mine. I really didn’t understand why this novel had to be set in France. On the one hand, Frenchness seems to matter to it a lot. On the other hand, not at all. Feels like Emperor’s New Clothes to me.

Christine Mangan, The Continental Affair (2023)

If “atmospheric” as a term of literary praise means “set in European locales, especially those off the beaten track,” then this is a highly atmospheric novel.

In other words, we get Paris, yes, but we get more of Belgrade. Still more unexpected are Grenada and the peripherally European spaces of Istanbul and Algiers. But Mangan’s latest is more Hitchcock than Bourne. The best literary comp might be Highsmith.

A woman enters a train compartment otherwise occupied only by a ruggedly handsome man. They exchange pleasantries, watch the countryside of 1960s Europe flash by from the windows of the dining car, and warily seek to move past each other’s defenses. Part meet cute, part slow burn. But they’re acting. They know each other already. In fact, the man has been following the woman across the continent, tasked with retrieving some stolen money—something he could have done ten times over already, but can’t find it in him to do.

Brainy thrillers with nice locales are catnip to me, even though Mangan freights her characters a little heavily: they share a dramatic past neither can let go of. But she nails the ending, and even if The Continental Affair is a mere diversion—the title is so generic it’s like a parody—it’s adeptly done. Can’t wait for Cate Blanchett to star in the inevitable adaptation. Get this for the dad in your life who fancies himself a man of taste: he won’t be able to resist.

Simon Jimenez, The Vanished Birds (2020)

I can’t remember who put me on to this remarkable space opera. Adam Roberts? (Google search drew a blank.) I do remember where I bought it: a little shop in Missoula a couple of years ago. (Not the Shakespeare one. The other one.) I don’t remember what made me take it off the shelf. (I went back and forth between the audio and the paper book. Good narrator.)

I can say that The Vanished Birds will be on my end of year list. It’s that moving, that smart, that surprising.

It’s a long, complicated book. (Though not a patch on his most recent, The Spear Cuts Through Water, which I had to give up listening to, it was just too hard for my commute, but that book too astonishes right from its kickass dedication, “This one’s for me.”) My summary won’t do it justice. But here goes. In a galaxy owned by a single company, a spaceship arrives every five years on a small “resource planet” to take the accumulated harvest to the galaxy’s central planet. At the festival celebrating the ship’s arrival, the captain, Nia, hooks up with a local. They meet each time she returns, but the thing is that, thanks to time manipulation technology, what’s five years to him is only 15 months to her. She barely changes while he leaps forward in age.

But this poignant story is only the beginning of Jimenez’s tale. One year, in between spaceship arrivals, an unknown ship crashes into the fields. The man who loves Nia takes in the only survivor, a mute young boy, before passing him on to her on her next visit (the last one the now elderly man will live to see). Nia names the boy Ahro. It takes years before he speaks, but his musical abilities suggest there’s something special about him. That quality is recognized by Fumiko Nakajima, the lead designer/engineer/physicist of the company that runs the galaxy. Thanks to cryogenic technology, Fumiko is thousands of years old; Jimenez diverts us to her story, which begins on a near-future earth that she escapes just before it collapses due to climate change, but not without leaving behind her lover, a woman determined to see the place through to its end. Fumiko suspects that Ahro has a talent that could undo her past mistakes—but she knows the company that owns everything, even her, would subject him to vivisectionist experiments if it knew what the boy is capable of. She hires Nia on a mission to keep the boy, now a young man, on the fringes of the galaxy, away from company patrols. In the process, Nia becomes his parent. When Ahro is captured despite her efforts, only she can save him…

That’s a lot, right? The Vanished Birds is a novel of found family, colonialism, ecological change, time the revelator. Big stuff. It’s bold and beautiful (the prose is a cut above) and too carefully constructed to be called sprawling. I think about it a lot, several months after having read it, not least the section set on a planet that has bought by the company and stripped of its people, populated now by dozens of feral dogs and one last man, left behind to man the radio tower. I shed a tear at the end, I tell ya.

Garth Greenwell, Cleanness (2020)

I first read Cleanness in March—I never wrote up that month, and I probably never will. I’m glad of the chance to say something here, because I love this book. I already thought it was great the first time, but having had the chance to teach it, I’m convinced it’s brilliant. Like “we will read this in a hundred years” brilliant.

A companion piece to his wonderful debut, What Belongs to You, Cleanness is also narrated by an American teaching in Bulgaria. But the new novel is richer, its power coming from the montage of its seemingly disparate, almost stand-alone sections. To my mind, it is also better in that its references to the narrator’s childhood are cut to the bone. The handful of references hit that much harder than the extended section in the previous book.

I read Cleanness as a novel about different ways bodies can come together. Readers are most often drawn to the scenes of anonymous BDSM sex, but several chapters feature the narrator’s more placid relationship with another foreigner, a student from the Azores. Others describe a writing retreat, two describe encounters with current and former students in which the narrator wrestles with what it means to be a gay role model in a country where LGBTQ life is harshly penalized. A particularly fascinating chapter describes a series of spontaneous street protests that convulse Sofia, and the narrator’s admiration and fear of the unpredictable power of masses of bodies in public space. Even when we try to reduce ourselves to pure flesh, Greenwell implies, we can’t escape identity. But identity isn’t fixed; the roles we’ve been given are just that, roles. They can change, we can push against them even when their forms are ossified and seemingly inescapable. (That’s what politics is for.) This idea comes across most clearly in a chapter called “The Little Saint,” whose titular character, a bottom who lets men bareback him, gently explains to the narrator that the violence he begs the narrator to unleash upon him, which brings the narrator to tears, since the sounds of the whipping he lays on the young man seem to have turned him into a version of his father, who was never shy with his belt, the violence that is demanded by one person of another, can never be the same as violence enacted in hate or rage.

The book ends with a beautiful scene involving an elderly dog who wanders the campus of the international school where the narrator teaches. The narrator, drunk and alone, having narrowly avoided making a mess of some important things, takes the dog into his rooms even though it’s strictly forbidden to bring her inside because she’s meant to have fleas. He makes up a bed for her and then lies down next to her. An indelible scene. Here I take Greenwell to be saying that we can’t take the cleanness granted by the Little Saint and wished for by the protestors who want to sweep a corrupt government out of power too seriously. Cleanness but not too much: it’s good to lie down with beings, human or not, that others think of as dirty.

Seriously, this book is something else. Greenwell has such intelligence and such beautiful prose. Thrilling.

Sadly, most of my students did not feel the same way, though some of them were big enough to admit that they were kink shaming. No matter, Imma teach it again!

Georges Simenon, Cécile is Dead (1942) Trans. Anthea Bell (2015)

Day after day Cécile Pardon waits for Maigret at police headquarters, unwilling to see anyone but the great man, and when she does she has nothing more definitive to report than a suspicion that someone has been in the apartment she shares with an elderly aunt. When he sees her in the waiting room (the lads call it “the aquarium”) on a day when he’s just not feeling it, he slips out the back. She’s gone when he gets back to the office. But then the aunt is reported dead, and Cécile is nowhere to be found. (You can guess the rest; the title is not a metaphor.) Plottier than the average Maigret, this early-ish installment is further enlivened by the presence of an American detective who comes to see how the big man does his thing. (Simenon liked this idea: there’s one where someone from Scotland Yard does the same thing.)

The investigation centers on the apartment building where Cécile lived with her aunt. You could read Cécile is Dead, with its depiction of the space and the people who inhabit it, as a slantwise homage to Zola’s Pot Luck.

Annie Ernaux, Happening (2000) Trans. Tanya Leslie (2001)

Having taught Happening this semester in a class called Bodies in Trouble, I was interested to go back and read what I had to say about it three years ago. I see that I was damning with faint praise already then; spending a lot more time with the book didn’t make me care for it more. As for my students, they seemed to like it well enough. Understandably they couldn’t help but read it in terms of their post Dobbs American life; more surprisingly, they were mostly worked up by what they perceived as Ernaux’s class striving: they saw her as both a victim of and complicit in the denigration of working class lives. Their end of semester feedback revealed that they could take it or leave it as a course text. Good to hear, since I’d already decided not to repeat the experiment. I get that Ernaux is doing a thing; I just don’t care much for the thing. And her prose, as shaped by her various no doubt able translators (here Tanya Leslie), does not lend itself to the kind of close reading that is my pedagogical bread-and-butter. Whatever, Ernaux will get along just fine without my reservations.

Joseph Hansen, Troublemaker (1975)

I thought I wrote about the first novel in the Dave Brandstetter series, Fade Out, when I read it a couple of years ago but now I can’t find it in the perhaps-not-reliable index of this blog. In this, the third book (they’re all being reissued but the store didn’t have the second one in stock), the owner of a local gay bar is found naked and dead. A local hustler is found next to him. An open and shut case. Not to insurance agent Brandstetter. Surprise, surprise, he’s right, and soon he’s neck-deep in a twisty plot that once again makes the 70s seem both shitty and terrific.

These books are great above and beyond any talk of “pioneering representation” (tho that matters), it’s great that they’re back in print, it sucks that my local library does not have them.

David Brintzenhofe Applying Makeup (II) (1982)

There you have it, friends. Have at me, Ernaux lovers, The Book of Goose partisans, and anyone who thinks all the books I liked are overrated…

What I Read, November 2023

Posted on by under book review, lists, review

Thanksgiving is the best time at the farm. You can walk without fear of ticks. Down to the creek—entirely dry at the end of a year of terrible drought—then up Acorn Hill and along the ridge. Contour down past the old and new ponds to the cornfield and take the long flat path back to the creek. At Thanksgiving, you can see the bones of the land: the rolling hills, the sharp edges between scrub forest and fields, everything clear now that the leaves have fallen. This year a big pin oak was down over the Acorn Hill trail; my father- and brother-in-law cleared it, happily messing about with chainsaws. The days were more cold than warm with a sharp northwest wind: good weather for running the gravel road to the blacktop and back. At night you can see a heap of stars. If you leave the cozy house to crane your neck at the sky the barn cat sometimes comes out of his little house to check on you. He is a meeower, a winder through the legs; one day he’s going to kill someone. You can stay inside and read too. That’s what I did.

Lowell Birge Harrison, A Wintry Walk (undated)

Marian Engel, The Tattooed Woman (1985) 

Even more of a mixed bag than most story collections. Engel’s stories do not hit me the way her novels The Honeyman Festival and of course Bear do. But even though the latter is much the most interesting thing she ever wrote, I don’t think she’s a one-hit wonder.

I read The Tattooed Woman because I was meant to talk about it with James and Shawn in our continuing series of Engel conversations, but then we collectively decided we weren’t sure how much we liked the book and I was too exhausted from the semester to find out. I regret that now, though; I suspect we would have talked our way into liking it more than we did on our individual readings.

Engel died young of cancer (this collection was published shortly after her death) and some of the best stories here feature characters with that illness—or, in “Two Rosemary Road, Toronto,” the one I liked best, a man whose wife has died from it. The narrator writes a letter responding to one he’s recently received from a neighbor, a screed insisting that the narrator’s wife must have brought the illness on herself. The narrator reacts to this vitriol with understandable scorn but as he fulminates he gives in to his own loneliness and the suggestion of sexual intimacy hinted at by the letter writer, a possibility he is willing to explore, despite, or perhaps because of, the aggression he imagines such a relationship would involve.

Unsettling stuff.

I shivered pleasantly at “The Country Doctor,” a ghost story about a woman sent by a Toronto-based magazine to an unnamed but easily recognizable St John’s, Newfoundland, who is taken up by a doctor who might a Bluebeard. I liked “The Smell of Sulphur,” about a woman who returns to a faded resort on Lake Huron where she spent a summer as a solitary teenager.

What struck me most about the book is how foreign the 60s, 70s, and 80s Canadian settings felt to me, even though I lived through much of them. A function, I suppose, of Engel’s enmeshment in an adult world I wasn’t yet part of.

I’m not saying you need to run out and find this collection. Nor that Mavis Gallant or Alice Munro need worry about being dethroned as the champions of Canadian short fiction. I’m guessing Engel wrote these stories for money, writers could still do that back then, and too many feel, well, maybe not listless but a little pat. But when she gets her strange on, she’s good.

Celia Dale, A Helping Hand (1966) 

Disquieting and gripping novel à la Highsmith or Rendell and just as good. A married couple holiday in Italy as a reward after the rigors of taking care of an elderly aunt. Josh ogles every woman he meets, especially one of the chambermaids at their pensione; Maisie ignores this, as she has other fish to fry and knows how to turn her husband’s roving eye to advantage. The pair fall in with a young woman and her elderly aunt by marriage, two more Brits squabbling their way through a holiday of piazzas, frescoes, and, to their sensitive tummies, too-greasy food. (Bowel movements and bedpans feature prominently.) I say “fall in” but “latch on” would be more accurate. The couple has its routine down: Josh courts the old woman with little attentions that remind her of her late husband, while Maisie commiserates with the niece, who feels her life wasting away with nights spent pouring out tea. Working together as ruthlessly as a pair of collies with a flock, they separate the women, leading to their final move: they offer to take in the old woman as a PG, a paying guest. It’s enough to make you wonder what happened to that other woman, the aunt who turns out to have been an “aunt”…

Dale wrote a lot of books, seems like, but went forgotten until Daunt started reissuing her books. (The valiant folks at Valancourt have brought some back into print in the US, but I’m ashamed to say I plumped for the Daunt because I liked the cover better.) If A Helping Hand, with its brilliantly ominous title, is any guide, that neglect is a scandal. Dale mixes a palpable atmosphere of menace—she savages suburban England even more than Rendell in, say, One Across, Two Down—with a hint of decency, just enough to keep our gorge down. But then comes a stunning ending, a real stinger, that reverses much of what we thought we knew.

A perfect book for a November weekend.

Ann Petry, The Street (1946) 

The title of Petry’s debut—the first novel by an African-American woman to sell a million copies—refers to 116th Street in Harlem. The beautiful Lutie Johnson, separated from her husband after a job as maid to a rich couple in Connecticut put too much distance between them, moves into a dingy tenement with her young son, Bub. She hates the place, no amount of scrubbing ever gets anything clean. but it’s all she can afford, and she’ll do anything to save enough to move somewhere better.

Well, not anything. She rejects with frosty contempt the offer of a woman on the main floor—stocky, bewigged, inscrutable Mrs. Hedges, always at the window—to work at her brothel. But her desperate economies never get her ahead, and before long she’s spending too much of her energy fending off the incoherent, animalistic advances of the building’s super, Jones. (I wonder what Richard Wright made of that guy—did he see an homage to his own work there?) Meanwhile, Min, the woman who lives with Jones (I don’t know what to call her: not his lover: kept woman maybe; she is more a slave than anything else), seeks out a rootworker to keep her man. The cross and powder work on Jones, but even more on Min, who finds the strength to leave. She is the most fascinating character in what, as I hope my summary suggests, is a novel filled with vivid characters.

At the only bar on the street, run by an enigmatic white man named Junto who has a history with Mrs. Hedges, Lutie meets a jazz musician who offers her the chance to sing with his band. Finally, a different life lies within reach, the life promised by Lutie’s to-me surprising guiding star, Benjamin Franklin, in which hard work and talent will be rewarded. That’s good, because Bub is spending too much time with Jones. Trouble looms. And then things get a whole lot worse.

The Street is one of the more exciting works of social realism I’ve read. Picture the milieu of Bernard Malamud’s early stories—I’m thinking the likes of “The Bill” or “The Mourners”—but with more hopelessness and even less upward mobility and you’ll have a sense of this depressing, riveting novel.

I started Petry’s other well-known novel, The Narrows, a year or two back, but it wasn’t the right time and I couldn’t get on with it. Seems like it’s time to try again.

Nick Harkaway, Titanium Noir (2023) 

Sf/noir mashup in which our dogged PI protagonist, Cal Sounder, is called in to investigate a murder. (He plumbs the depths, like.) The victim seems to have been a mild-mannered academic but two things suggest otherwise: he’s over seven feet tall and doesn’t look a day over 30, even though he’s actually 90.

That means he’s a Titan, and Titans don’t get murdered. These genetically modified humans basically live forever and grow each time they take one of the patented T7 infusions, operations that send their bodies into such paroxysms that are incapacitated for months afterward. To undergo more than two or three such procedures is beyond risky. Too bad that a side effect is a corresponding change in personality. Titan appetites are typically as gargantuan as their bodies. There are only a thousand or so Titans; the technology is carefully guarded by its developer. (Titanium Noir allegorizes the predations of our own global oligarchy.) Cal is a Titan expert: his ex is the developer’s daughter. Ex because he refused the chance to get the shot

Like Marlow, Spade, Archer, and dozens before him, Cal stirs up some shit: gigantic, immortal shit, to be precise. Good fun.

I’d tried Harkaway once before and it didn’t stick. But I might have to revise that opinion. Quality non-taxing stuff.

Ed Park, Same Bed Different Dreams (2023) 

I devoured this epic, Pynchonesque novel over Thanksgiving. I can’t even remember all the multitudes it contains, but its central conceit imagines that the Korean Provisional Government (KPG), a real-life group founded in 1919 by exiles in China to protest Korea’s occupation by Japan, continued past the Japanese surrender in 1945. Its goal? A free, independent, reunited Korea. The KPG’s machinations—some real, many invented—are revealed in a series of enigmatic manuscripts that fall into the hands of a Korean American writer named Soon Sheen who works for a tech behemoth, half-Amazon, half-Google, known by its “acronym” GLOAT. The letters don’t stand for anything; much of Soon’s job is to create similar acronyms for company practices and products.

As in early Pynchon, the idea of meaning—something we need and will do anything to create even though doing so often leads us astray—lies at the heart of Park’s novel. Fascinatingly, many of the strands woven into the shape of this novel feature Park’s home town of Buffalo: the assassination of President McKinley at the Pan-American Exhibition at the hand of an anarchist in love with Emma Goldman; an African American fighter pilot who returns to the city after being shot down in MIG alley and imprisoned by the Communists, whereupon he works the family appliance repair shop and writes paranoia-infused science fiction that goes unnoticed in the mainstream but gains a cult following, not least by the KPG which sees in the lurid texts secrets to political change; the history of board games and how they contributed to the early development of AI; the downing of Korean Airlines flight 007 by the Soviets in 1983, an event I was sure would launch nuclear war; and, most delightful to me, the history of the Buffalo Sabres, including a close reading of the notorious Brett Hull goal that cost that often-luckless team the Stanley Cup in 1999. (He was in the blue paint!)

Who knows if this book will stay with me long term—but I relished its exuberant ride through painful 20th century history. The title refers to a Korean maxim about the projections foisted by foreigners on that peninsula for centuries. But it also reminds us that everything can be different than it is: we never dream in the same bed twice, that sort of thing.

Maybe that paean to dreaming and imaged futures is the reason the novel is filled with fathers who, no matter how feckless or absent, dote on their precocious daughters. (The number of precocious daughters in contemporary American fiction is all out of proportion, it seems to me. But as a father who dotes on a precocious daughter, I’m hardly one to complain.)

Thanks to Levi Stahl for repping this.

Adania Shibli, Minor Detail (2017) Trans. Elisabeth Jaquette (2020) 

Many of you will know that Adania Shibli was due to receive a prize for this novel at this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair when organizers postponed it indefinitely due to the situation in Gaza. (If it walks like cancellation, talks like cancellation etc., etc.) Don’t get me started on the upside-down world of “memory culture” in Germany today, of which this ignominious decision is part. The only good news is that a lot of people went out and read the book (or bought it, anyway). I’d had it sitting on the shelf for a couple of years and was glad when a new book club I’m part of made it our first selection. Several in the group had read it before: I benefited enormously from their familiarity with the text and thoughtful interpretations. I’m grateful to them all. As the title suggests, in Minor Detail every little thing counts; it’s a book that invites re-reading—even as it points out the dangers of definitive interpretations (obsession, paranoia, the fantasy that constant vigilance can make ideology come true).

Precisely divided into two obliquely-connected halves, the novel tells two stories. The first, set in August 1949, concerns a squad of Israeli soldiers who happen upon a Bedouin family in a “mopping up” mission in the Negev. The encounter ends disastrously: the entire family is murdered, even its camels, except for a teenage girl, who is brought back to the soldiers’ camp, where she is raped and eventually murdered. The second centers on a woman in near-present day Ramallah whose obsession with the crime has everything to do with its having happened exactly 25 years before her birth. Her quest to uncover the details (which as readers we already know) leads her to undertake a dangerous journey outside the West Bank, one that ends in failure and tragedy.

Shibli’s book might be short, but the questions it provokes are not. Are representations of traumatic history (including this very novel) fundamentally different from official representations of a violently conquered space (maps and archives)? Can the past be told in a way that evades representation’s tendency toward reduction, circumscription, and closure? When we read can we avoid the fantasy of conclusiveness? (No accident that this so carefully shaped text opens and closes with references to the atmospheric phenomenon of the mirage.)

It’s too late for next semester, but I’ll teach this important book in my Literature after Auschwitz class going forward.

Isaac Levitan, Landscape (1892)

That was November. More on December soon.

What I Read, October 2023

Posted on by under book review, month in review, review, Uncategorized

It might have been in the first week of October, after another spirited conversation in my Holocaust Literature class, that I had to marvel at how far along we were in the semester for the students to still be bringing it like that every day. A special group. Good thing the classroom was giving me joy, because not much else was. The horrific terrorist attack by Hamas, the nightmarish Israeli response. Nothing but suffering, rage, self-righteousness, and apologetics. I found myself alienated from many of my communities. And then embroiled in a frustrating situation on campus (triggered by events in the Middle East but ultimately having nothing to do with it). Given all the bullshit it’s a wonder I got anything read at all.

Tom Thompson, Silver Birches (1915 – 16)

Paulette Jiles, Chenneville (2023)

John Chenneville—scion of old French family whose estate, Temps Clair, lies north of St Louis in the fertile lands where the Missouri meets the Mississippi—returns from the Civil War after having spent nearly a year in hospital recovering from a terrible head wound. He finds his home in disarray: fields unplanted, animals untended, rooms empty. The only remaining servant gravely explains that Chenneville’s sister has been murdered along with her husband and their infant child at their home downriver at St Genevieve. From that moment, Chenneville devotes his life to avenging this loss (the subtitle states the case plainly: “A Novel of Murder, Loss, and Vengeance”).

The hero visits the scene of the crime (the bloodlands of the Missouri Ozarks that formed the setting of her novel Enemy Women), quickly learns who did it, and then chases the man, a sociopathic former sheriff named Dodd, across Arkansas, the Indian Territory, and into Texas. I know a lot of these landscapes, which was part of the book’s appeal for me, but I think Jiles’s descriptions are objectively lovely: evocative but spare. Nothing fancy, but clear as the sky on a frosty morning. Here’s Chenneville making camp after almost 24 hours on the go: 

The wind was becoming sharp and hard; it bit at his lips and ears, his hands. It was bringing rain. To the south of the road he saw a motte of post oaks, great thick-trunked trees, and what looked like a declination of the earth toward a streambed. On that side he could build a fire and the smoke would blow away south and not alert any traveler coming down the road. 

Remembering the advice of a sergeant, an older Mainer, he strips himself almost naked, putting the clothes under the blankets to keep them warm. Then come this lovely reflection: 

For a few moments he felt again that suspended, almost magical feeling of being out in the wilderness and the weather and yet safe against it. Here was rest and a respite against bereavement because the world was going on without him in its deep rhythms, deeper than he could see. 

I love this kind of thing. Chenneville has it all: a love story, a key subplot involving telegraphy, and a satisfyingly minor-key ending. (A final flurry of events, almost comically bathetic, renders vengeance unnecessary, and you can almost hear the protagonist sigh in relief.) The physical book is gorgeous, too, especially the stately maps on its endpapers. I almost regretted having checked it out of the library.

Wisława Szymborska, Map: Collected and Last Poems Trans. Claire Cavanaugh & Stanislaw Barańczak (2015)

So pleased I chose this as a selection for One Bright Book. I need to be encouraged to read poetry (too enslaved to the demon narrative); being accountable to Frances and Rebecca ensured I made my way through this collection of the Polish writer and Nobel laureate Wisława Syzmborska. To think what I would have missed out on otherwise!

Here’s some of what I said in my introduction to the episode:

Szymborska’s first poems were in the accepted socialist realist style; she later repudiated most of them, just as she rejected the doctrinaire communism she had espoused when younger. (From the 1960s on she was part of the Polish dissident movement.) Repudiation more generally was central to her artistic process: her published work runs only to about 350 poems. Asked about this, she said “It’s because I have a trash can.”

That dry, self-deprecating response seems typical of Szymborska’s personality—and indeed her poetry. A Polish friend tells me that her letters “fizz with joie de vivre” and I can see that quality in the poems too, even though they are often plenty melancholy. Despite that sadness, her poems are often funny, which makes me wonder what it’s like to read her work in Polish, since slyness or jokiness can be so hard to translate.

It’s said that the writer Czeslaw Miloz, himself a Nobel laureate (1980), was anxious when Szymborska won the prize, fearing she would experience it as a terrible burden, given her shy and retiring nature. Indeed, she didn’t publish any poetry for several years after the award. To me her later work is as strong as her middle period, so I certainly didn’t feel any loss in quality after the Nobel; I’m curious if you both agree.

Whether she felt the burden or not, I can’t say, but I can say that Szymborska’s Nobel Prize address is terrific: modest, humourous, but also totally on point. She writes, among other things, about how poets, like all people fortunate enough to do work they care about, are propelled by the phrase “I don’t know.” She adds, “I sometimes dream of situations that can’t possibly come true.” That made me laugh because she’s always doing that in her poems. Some of them even start with the word “if: if angels exist, would they care about human culture (she concludes they would only like early Hollywood slapstick). Some of them see the remarkable in ordinary situations, as in these lines:

A miracle that’s lost on us:

the hand actually has fewer than six fingers

but still it’s got more than four.

Or how with “a few minor changes” her parents might have married other people and then where would she be?

Other poems consider scenarios we don’t usually dwell upon—one imagines a baby photo of Hitler (“And who’s this little fellow in his itty-bitty robe?”); another speculates how many in a hundred people do or feel one thing or another, in the process humanizing the field of statistics; a third poem, called “Cat in an Empty Apartment,” concerns a cat whose owner has died. (Apparently, she told her partner, the writer Kornel Filipowicz, that “no living being has as good a life as the life your cat lives”—I suspect she wrote the poem in the aftermath of Filipowicz’s death in 1990. Heartbreaking lines: “someone was always, always here,/then suddenly disappeared/and stubbornly stays disappeared.”) The phrase “I don’t know” matters so much because it propels us to think and do more—specifically, to ask more questions. Szymborska adds, “any knowledge that doesn’t lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life.”

This phrasing too seems quintessential Szymborska. She was fascinated by life in its literal, biological sense: she writes about the specks of dust that make up meteors, about foraminifera, which, it turns out, are microscopic single celled organisms that build shells around themselves from the minerals in sea water, and about what she calls “our one-sided acquaintance” with plants: we think we know about them: our monologue with them is essential for us but never reciprocated; they don’t care about us.

We each chose a poem to close read. Here are some of my notes on my choice, “Allegro ma Non Troppo” (1972).

Anyway, listen to our conversation here. Our best, IMO.

Allison Montclair, The Right Sort of Man (2019) 

Kay recommended this to me, and I can’t improve on her review, which chimes perfectly with my experience of the book. In brief: two women, Iris Sparks and Gwendolyn Bainbridge, set up a marriage agency in London in the immediate aftermath of WWII. They know each other only slightly, it turns out, and as Kay notes, Montclair uses the opposites-attract and slow-burn tropes of romance fiction to explore their growing friendship and business partnership. The book begins with the eventual victim arriving at their office in search of a husband. Next thing you know, the woman turns up dead and suspicion falls on the client Sparks and Bainbridge have set her up with. (It doesn’t help that the murder weapon is found under his mattress.) The women set out to prove his innocence—and save their suddenly cratering business. The actual mystery is a little slight; I bet Montclair gets better at suspense as the series goes on. (I plan to find out.) Besides, as Kay also explains, the real interest here lies in the book’s melding of crime and romance. In addition to the leads, Montclair fills her book with strong minor characters: a heavy who just wants to be a playwright, a mobster who falls for Sparks, and a working-class guy who upper-crust Bainbridge meets while undercover. Part of me really wants these guys to come back, but part of me worries the series might fall risk to the whole “it takes 300 pages just to keep up with the antics of the growing cast of recurring characters” problem. 

Prime light reading.

Giorgio Bassani, The Heron (1968) Trans. William Weaver (1970) 

Dour novel of postwar Italian life, centering on Edgardo Limentani, a Jewish landowner who, having married out of the tradition, finds himself alienated by a political landscape comprised of communists that threaten his privileges and old fascists that respond to his continued existence with servility that fails to conceal their hatred of his continued existence.

On a damp day in late fall, Limentani goes hunting for waterfowl in the Po marshes. He dithers about going at all, finds himself waylaid, arriving too late for any good shooting, even, in the final account, unable to shoot at all, leaving it to his guide to bring down a trunkful of birds, which he later passes off as his own. On the way back he stops for coffees in a bar where he wrestles with whether to call the cousin he’s been estranged from for years, eats a meal in the restaurant of a hotel owned by one of those unctuous fascists, sleeps heavily and unsoundly in one of the upstairs rooms, and puts off returning home until his wife, whom he can no longer stand, will be sure to have gone to bed. From the time he starts awake in the pre-dawn dark until the time he returns to the study he uses as a makeshift bedroom, the protagonist thinks dark thoughts that give him no satisfaction. He sees no good way out of this life.

Having only read The Garden of the Finzi-Continis—a sad book, yes, but not a despairing one—I was shocked by this novel’s grimness. I’ve no idea about Bassani’s state of mind at this stage in his life, but The Heron (the title refers to a bird shot along with the ducks, no good for eating, pure waste) reads like the book of an unhappy and discouraged man. Maybe Weaver’s translation, getting on now in years, contributes to the novel’s heaviness. There’s a newish translation: anyone read it?

Billy-Ray Belcourt, A Minor Chorus (2022) 

Score one for the “don’t give up on a book too soon” camp: I almost ditched poet and essayist Belcourt’s first novel after about twenty pages, annoyed at the clunky dialogue and risible self-righteousness (similar vibes to a book I really hated), but once the narrator leaves his graduate program in Edmonton and returns to his home community in way northern Alberta I started picking up what Belcourt was putting down. The narrator (an obvious stand-in for the writer) mines his community for stories to weave into the novel he’s writing: we hear from an older gay man, who unlike the narrator has chosen (or been made to choose) to stay closeted and both admires and disparages the narrator’s different decisions; an old friend who has disentangled herself from an abusive relationship; and his great-aunt, who worries over the fate of the boy she raised as her own, the narrator’s cousin, two boys who were once inseparable, but whose paths diverged (the cousin is in jail).  In other words, when the narrator stops wringing his hands over whether his academic work can be meaningful in a world where so much injustice needs to be redressed and starts telling the stories of others as his way of doing that work, the book becomes moving and interesting.

I loved Belcourt’s descriptions of my home province, even though the part he’s from is about as far away from mine as Little Rock is from St Louis). This bit hit home:

The farther one veered from Main Street, a single stretch of highway on which sat most of the town’s businesses, schools, and amenities, the older the infrastructure became. Behind the dilapidated building ran train tracks that were less like sutures and more like wounds. It all looked so ordinary and Canadian and, because of this, haunted.

That passage gets better—more pointed—as it goes along. The workmanlike first sentence, as unvarnished as the buildings it references, gives way to a metaphor that asks us to return to the seemingly bland and official term at the end of the previous one. Who is the infrastructure that makes this place possible—improbable that people could live anywhere, but especially so in that northern clime—for? The things that link some people might separate others. (Who lives on the other side of the tracks?) The things that give some people meaning might just hurt others. Everything here leads to that last sentence: the ordinariness that many Canadians take pride in (unspectacular, solid, self-avowedly decent) is built on a foundation of dispossession and expropriation. And what of those who don’t see themselves in the mirror of that self-description? Those who are showy, marginalized, far from the main drag, maybe queer or nonbinary or indigenous. Is their only role to haunt Main Street?

James Morrison, Gibbons or One Bloody Thing After Another (2023)

I’m always nervous reading books by friends, but here I needn’t have feared: the debut novel by James “Caustic Cover Critic” Morrison is smart and engaging. It tracks the history of the Gibbons family from the late 1800s to an apocalyptic near-future in a series of chapters that work as stand-alone stories but gain in heft when the lines of familial affiliation come through.

Along the way, Gibbons serves as an alternative history of Australia in the modern era, referencing institutions and events ranging from the Native Police Force to the Snapshots from Home program to the devastating 1974 cyclone that nearly destroyed Darwin. I say “alternative” not because these things are made up but because the novel demands that we consider fabulation and creation necessary to any attempt to document the past. The first line, “A shelf of eyes, polished and unblinking,” alludes to the ability to see and record, even as it undermines these faculties: these eyes are fake, made of glass. Throughout the novel. James values the power of artificiality: not only are the pages filled with photographers and pulp writers and pornographers, but the chapters are separated by his own charming illustrations (and one by his daughter!).

It’s a good book, is what I’m saying. Shawn Mooney and I interviewed James to launch the book.

Holly Watt, To the Lions (2019) 

The title of this engaging debut crime novel refers to the place journalists are willing to send anyone who comes in the path of a good story—and to the place they themselves are thrown when they go undercover. Cassie and her friend Miranda cover a specialized beat: the nexus of moral impropriety, tech bro/financial CEO untouchability, and third world suffering. Which makes a rumour that falls into their laps irresistible: somewhere someone is taking rich men to hunt people. Where? Like everything in the story, the location is obscure. A preserve, maybe. A prison. Or, as turns out to be the case, refugee camp. Through investigative reporting that Watt, a journalist herself, depicts plausibly and compellingly, the pair learn that the shadowy operation, though based in London, centers on a camp in lawless Libya, not too far across the border from a remote part of Algeria, where a private jet drops off the financiers, titled sons, and adventurers willing to pay a hell of a lot of money to do something whose repulsiveness makes them feel alive. To get the full story, though, the women need to catch someone in the act. A complicated undercover operation ensues, filled with menace (I’ve rarely been so scared for a character.) Watt plays with readers’ fascination with the lurid, which sometimes makes the book preachy, but mostly it’s just exciting. Not quite the usual thing, then, though it’s hard for me to see how Watt sustains her premise through the other books of the series. Just how many stories of this ilk can Cassie uncover?

Mary McCarthy, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957) 

Rebecca’s choice for One Bright Book; you can hear our conversation here. I was glad to have read this once-but-perhaps-no-longer-famous memoir, though I can’t say I loved it. I found it a desperately sad book about a family filled with people unable to communicate with each other. So many silences, so much heartache, so much harmful propriety. To my surprise, Rebecca and Frances found it funny and biting, a book filled with readerly pleasures. We didn’t convince each other, but I appreciated the chance to articulate my response. Many readers have admired the sections between chapters in which McCarthy explains what she later learned about the family stories she tells, pointing out inconsistences or outright falsehoods. Such self-awareness might have felt innovative at the time, but to me they didn’t add much. I think none of us expects memoir to be complete truth. Anyway, I will never forget the story of an uncle by marriage who sets out to show nine or ten-year-old McCarthy in the worst possible light, just so he and his wife could beat her black and blue with a hairbrush. Terrible, terrible stuff.

Gabriele Münter, Green House (1912)

A wide-ranging reading month, with plenty to appreciate. Only Map really stood out for me, though. Any takes on these selections?