Excited to once again present reading reviews from some of my favourite readers. Today’s installment, her fourth, is by Hope Coulter, (@hopester99), whom I’m lucky to call a colleague. A fiction writer and poet, Hope directs the Hendrix-Murphy Foundation at Hendrix College.
Eveelyn Hofer, Girl with Bicycle, Dublin, 1966
2023 may have been my Year of the Binge. A quarter of the books I read were by a single author, Michael Connelly, as I continued a 2022 obsession and chowed through the rest of his Harry Bosch and Lincoln Lawyer series. Now I’m left with the dregs of the feast and plenty of questions. Has Bosch retired for good? Is cancer going to polish him off? And how am I going to get by without a steady intake of seedy murder scenes, sandwich shop tips, and Bosch’s saturnine musings floating over the lights of L.A. from his cantilevered deck? Sigh. No regrets for this gluttonous spree; I only wish I could find another such homicide cop to devour.
Speaking of, Robert Galbraith’s majorly enjoyable detective novels continued strong for me last year. I read The Ink-Black Heart via audiobook, parceling it to myself morsel by morsel so as not to rip through it too fast. Much of the novel unfolds through tweets, which are hard to follow either by ear or on the page, so that one wasn’t my favorite, but the series is overall terrific. If Strike and Robin settle into domestic tranquility and draw the curtain of privacy over their agency door (please no spoilers; I’m still finishing up Book Seven), I’ll be in a bad way indeed. [Ed. – I loved the first few of these books, but I must confess I had to give up on them, the author’s politics having so soured me…]
I went on a lesser bender with John Boyne, starting with The Heart’s Invisible Furies, which I happened to read while traveling in Dublin and southwest Ireland—moving through some of the very settings of the novel in a pleasurable kind of Binx Bolling-esque rotation. That sent me to a handful of other Boyne books. All the Broken Places, The House of Special Purpose, and The Absolutist were highlights, though none of them surpassed the dark, funny, moving experience of Furies.
Completing previous years’ jags, I knew I had to get hold of Paulette Jiles’s latest, Chenneville, reviewed here by Dorian late last year. All Jiles’s books have won me over. This one wrapped up too fast for my taste, but like her other works, it flares a light onto regional history with convincing detail and taut storytelling. [Ed. – Agree, especially re: the ending.]
Eh, maybe here my conceit ends. Although I regularly teach Zadie Smith’s “The Embassy of Cambodia” and have read several of her novels, I can’t really call that a tear. Even so, I was intrigued to hear that Smith had turned to historical fiction and couldn’t wait to check out The Fraud, which is based on a 19th-century trial, little known now but sensational in its time. The book gripped me in unexpected ways. Every character was so believable, so not-a-type, so idiosyncratically shaped by their history and personality—supremely so in the case of the main character, Eliza Touchet. Mrs Touchet’s epiphanies in the course of the novel involve -isms of race, class, and sex that quietly echo our own era. At the same time her keen intelligence, her self-understanding, her fierceness and restraint, and her willingness to examine the tangles within her own heart are quintessentially Victorian.
As I read I found myself marking passages the way I do in my old copy of Middlemarch, quotes with a similar sage quality. (Even though Dickens and Thackeray feature as characters in the book, the sensibility that saturates it is really Eliot’s.) Here Eliza considers her long, complicated relationship with her cousin: “Theirs was a fellowship in time, and this, in the view of Mrs Touchet, was among the closest relations possible in this fallen world. Bookended by two infinities of nothing, she and William had shared almost identical expanses of being. They had known each other such a long time. She still saw his young face. He still saw hers, thank God.” And here she ponders how women often can’t see their own beauty for what it is at the time, not appreciating their appearance until looking back on a younger stage after a lapse of years: “But it is the perverse business of mirrors never to inform women of their beauty in the present moment, preferring instead to operate on a system of cruel delay.” Introspective moments like these, combined with the unspooling action of the trial plot, place this book at the top of the literary heap for my year’s reading.
Other newish novels that I loved last year were Donal Ryan’s The Queen of Dirt Island—a multigenerational saga of tough Irish women, inspired by the kitchen storytelling of his mother and grandmother—and Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, about a love triangle that arises and devolves in unpredictable ways. I also enjoyed Jeanine Cummins’s American Dirt. I had steered clear after hearing critics call it appropriative, but when a friend told me it held up well for her I gave it a try. I found the story compelling and plausible. Cummins addresses the criticism directly in her afterword, and I’m persuaded by her account of the writing and her authentic connection to the material.
I also read, and loved, Viet Tranh Nguyen’s short story collection The Refugees, tales of Vietnamese migrants resettled in southern California: this is art on a level with Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies and Unaccustomed Earth. And I returned to some old favorites that thankfully not only proved to hold up over time but blew me away all over again: Gabriel García Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera; Willa Cather’s O Pioneers and A Lost Lady; Evan S. Connell’s Mrs. Bridge (which Donal Ryan mentioned as inspiration for the super-short chapters in The Queen of Dirt Island), and Robert Crichton’s The Secret of Santa Vittoria.
Then the nonfiction. Oh, the nonfiction. Fiction is great when it’s great, but it disappoints so often and in so many different ways—by trying too hard, being too earnest, too arch or too tough-guy, or showing something nobody would say or do (on the human level I mean, not that it’s surreal or fantastic), or just plain old getting on my nerves. For some reason nonfiction is less prey to these faults. More and more I find myself turning to nonfiction for that “ah” of relief when I can settle into a writer’s style and voice and relax into the story at hand, losing the awareness that I’m reading. Last year I took in some wonderful memoirs. There was Javier Zamora’s Solito, about his experiences as a nine-year-old traveling solo from El Salvador to the United States (it’s like the nonfiction version of American Dirt). There was Monica Potts’s The Forgotten Girls: A Memoir of Friendship and Lost Promise in Rural America, which looks at the deterioration of American small towns based on her growing-up in Clinton, Arkansas, not many miles from where I teach. [Ed. – Definitely on my list. Heard her read at the Lit Fest last year and I still remember the opening scene.] Tracing the divergent life stories of herself, her sister, and her close friend, Potts narrates a tale of narrowing prospects for many young women in this climate. There was Jane Ferguson’s No Ordinary Assignment, chronicling her life as a reporter in the war zones of the Middle East (no forgotten girl she, determined as she was to get out of Dodge after an emotionally deprived childhood in northern Ireland).
I’m chagrined that I had never read the slender Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave until this year. As many have said, it’s profound: unforgettable not only for its first-person testimony to the horrors of the slave system in its heyday but also the candor, economy, and precision of the writing. Acquiring even baseline literacy was a miracle in that context—and an interesting story within the story—but Douglass’s literary prowess vaults so far beyond that initial limit, and is so supremely suited to relaying his experiences, that it’s humbling to take in his words.
A mid-year bookshelf cleanout led me to another, far different memoir that I’d somehow missed before, J.R. Moehringer’s The Tender Bar, about the New Jersey barflies who were his surrogate family growing up (and including one of the funniest sexual initiation scenes I’ve ever read). My enjoyment of that book sent me back to current times and a brand-new book that Moehringer ghost-wrote: Prince Harry’s memoir Spare. Come for the royals’ dirty laundry; stay for the Shakespeare allusions that, alas, are probably attributable to Moehringer rather than Harry.
In the realm of general nonfiction, meaning not memoir, there were three standouts this year, two by 30-something Irish writers whom I heard in person at the West Cork Literary Festival last summer (thank you, Hendrix College and the Hendrix-Murphy Foundation). In My Fourth Time, We Drowned: Seeking Refuge on the World’s Deadliest Migration Route, the Irish journalist Sally Hayden details the grim migration sagas happening in the seas north of Libya and makes a case for the EU’s complicity in perpetuating devastating outcomes. Cal Flyn turns to a different crisis, that of environmental havoc and habitat destruction, in Islands of Abandonment: Nature Rebounding in a Post-Human World. The book examines many sites around the globe that toxic damage of various kinds has rendered uninhabitable—or at least not prey to further human disturbance—and where, curiously, plant and animal forms are rapidly speciating. It’s probably too much to call the book hopeful; as Flyn says, it’s not like she’s advocating for toxic damage in order to foster speciation. Still, I can’t think of another environmental book in recent years that has left me with a flicker of optimism. [Ed. – Agreed!]
Edward Burtynsky, Sawmills #1, Lagos, Nigeria, 2016
Poets and poetry fans who have borne with me this far may be wondering, what about verse? I tend to read poetry less systematically and don’t track it as I do prose. With that said, a number of poetry books meant a lot to me as I spent time with them this year, including works by Garrett Hongo, Sharon Olds, Katie Farris, Ilya Kaminsky, A. Van Jordan, Phillip Howerton, and Ada Limón. Dorian’s comments on Wisława Szymborska here, as well as his fellow podcasters’ insights, sent me back to her work with pleasure. Individual poems sometimes linger with me for days.
My final read of 2023 was Claire Dederer’s Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma. In it she takes up the question of what we as readers, moviegoers, concertgoers, and art audiences do with the knowledge that makers of works we love have committed terrible deeds. Starting with Roman Polanski, she touches on artist wrongdoers of many times and places, along the way considering art theory, cancel culture, liberalism, men, childcare, consumerism, celebrity and fandom, asshole-osity, motherhood, beauty, effort, and love. [Ed. – the asshole-osity is really going around these days.] She inventories her own aesthetic and emotional responses and reckons with the old biography-versus-art-alone conundrum. Dederer does not land in a simple place or tie this all up neatly. As much as her conclusion, I like her forthrightness, the searching quality of her mind, her unwillingness to rest with skewed or kneejerk reactions. Worthy of Eliza Touchet, you might say.
Alex Prager, Applause, 2016
Thank you for reading this—I welcome your opinions on any of these books and writers!—and to Dorian for inviting me to share. This virtual alp of books is something I enjoy throughout the year. [Ed. – Thnk you, Hope: always a pleasure to have you here.]
Excited to once again present reading reviews from some of my favourite readers. Kicking things off is the one and only James Morrison, back for his thirdinstallment. James lives and works in Adelaide, Australia, on unceded Kaurna Country. For many years he has written about book design as the Caustic Cover Critic. He has too many books. He’s online at @Unwise_Trousers (Twitter) or @causticcovercritic.bsky.social (Bluesky). His first novel, Gibbons, or One Bloody Thing After Another, was published in 2023 by Orbis Tertius Press.
‘Tonight too / does my woman’s pitch-black hair / trail upon the floor / where she sleeps without me?’ Masayuki Miyata
[We push through the crowded train station and step up into the carriage, compulsively checking you have your ticket several times in the process. You find a seat and open your mouth to speak, but I suddenly launch into a monologue.]
So, yes, it was a tremendously crappy year, both personally and globally, but at least I got some books read. Indeed, that’s pretty much all I did. I scythed through 296 books, and only a few of them were terrible, so that’s some sort of achievement right there. Right? Right??? [Ed. – Holy shit yes.]
DENSE SLICES OF TIME
Two of the most fascinating non-fiction books I read this year both took the same approach—densely researched group portraits of the lives of interconnected writers and artists over the period of a month or so—applied to two very different eras. Alethea Hayter’s A Sultry Month (1965) covers the world of literary London in June 1846, from Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett planning their elopement to Jane and Thomas Carlyle driving each other round the bend, all joined together by the last acts of now-forgotten artist Benjamin Robert Haydon as he prepares his suicide. Uwe Wittstock’s February 1933: The Winter of Literature, translated by Daniel Bowles (2021/23), uses the same close focus on the writers, filmmakers, dancers and actors of Germany in the first month of Hitler’s power, from Joseph Roth wisely fleeing, via Thomas Mann being unbelievably naïve, to Gottfried Benn enthusiastically Nazifying himself. It’s chilling and depressing in equal measures, what with [points helplessly at everything]. [Ed. – *nods glumly *]
As a pendant to the Wittstock, Lion Feuchtwanger’s The Oppermanns (1933), translated by James Cleugh, is hard to beat, detailing the rise of the Nazis through the story of a successful Jewish Berlin family. Written when the events it details were still ongoing, and with much worse to come, it is a perceptive and still timely book. [Ed. – Amen]
From ‘The adventures of Sindbad’ Leon Carre
AUSTRALIANS
It’s wonderful to have been one of the many readers who finally got hold of the books of Jen Craig this year, and fell in love with them. Intensely, almost claustrophobically, looping narratives of communication breakdowns, troublesome families, injuries, art, eating disorders, and the irritation of being named Jenny Craig when that’s the name of the country’s most famous dieting pyramid scheme. The experience of reading each book—Since the Accident (2013) and Panthers and the Museum of Fire (2015)—is something like peering closely at the back of an incredibly detailed tapestry, trying to guess at the structure, and then with the last few pages suddenly flipping it over to discover a masterpiece. I also read her third novel, Wall (2023), but that was earlier this month so just imagine me saying something similar in 12 months about that.
Susan McCreery’s All the Unloved (2023) is a wonderful novella about the inhabitants of a block of flats in 1990s beachside Sydney, centred on a teenaged girl’s coming of age. Amanda Lohrey’s Vertigo (2009) is another small gem, the story of a traumatised couple fleeing to a new home on the rural coast, and ending in bushfire and terror, told in an engagingly odd way. The two most recent collections of Greg Egan’s short stories, Instantiation (2020) and Sleep and the Soul (2023), demonstrate with impressive depth just why he is widely regarded as one of the world’s best science-fiction writers, especially at this length—story after story will use an amazing idea that a lesser writer would spend a 1200p trilogy on, and then move on to something else even more mind-boggling in just a couple of dozen pages.
Adam Ouston’s Waypoints (2022) is a splendid example of one of my favourite genres of book—an obsessive monologue by an unreliable narrator, in this case somewhat pinned to reality through the disappearance of airliner MH370 in 2014 and Harry Houdini’s attempts to be the first person to fly an airplane over Australia in 1910. Finally, Tommi Parrish’s newest graphic novel, Men I Trust (2023), is a drably beautiful exploration of parasitic friendship, and I really am trying to get over the fact that they mistakenly include a Walmart in an Australian setting. [Ed. – Oh I just picked this up—had no idea it was Australian!]
[The conductor passes down the corridor, bellowing in a monotone. “This train is about to depart, all visitors please leave! Ticketholders only!” A small, relieved smile passes over your face as I step down from the carriage onto the platform, still talking.]
HUNGARIANS
Anyone who has read one of my year-in-readings before knows how I go on about the Hungarians. And here I am doing it again. The best Hungarian literature I read this year was Magda Szabó’s The Fawn (1959/2023), translated by Len Rix, the story of the career and personal life of increasingly enraged actress through Hungary’s tumultuous mid-twentieth Century. Spadework for a Palace by László Krasznahorkai (2018/2022), translated by John Batki, is another tremendous example of the obsessive monologue/unreliable narrator mentioned above. And Ágota Kristóf’s Yesterday (1995/2019), translated by David Watson, was sadly the last book of hers I had left unread: an illegitimate small-town child flees his past by moving to the city, but the reappearance of his now-married childhood love throws everything into chaos.
‘Hare 2’ Jan Pypers
OUTER SPACE, INNER SPACE
Samantha Harvey’s Orbital was just my cup of tea, a quiet and thoughtful 24-hour slice of the lives of six people at work, where said work is in the International Space Station in its final days. In Ascension by Martin MacInnes goes further afield, from the ocean depths to the Oort Cloud, in search of First Contact, strange dreams, and the dawn of life. I loved it, but not unreservedly—there were occasional weird glitches, like MacInnes’s childlike idea that as you travel through the Solar System you pass the planets one by one in a neat line, the way they are drawn in a kids’ encyclopaedia. [Ed. – Wait, that’s not what they’re like???]
The This (2022) by the always interesting, and ludicrously underrated, Adam Roberts, is a hugely entertaining extrapolation from the near into the far future, taking us from the Next Big Thing in social media to humanity as a hive mind. And an end-of-year treat was the new collection Selected Nonfiction 1962-2007 (2023) by J. G. Ballard, a chunky and tremendously entertaining mix of reviews, articles, memoirs, lists and rants.
[The train begins to move, very slowly at first. I’m standing at your carriage window, still talking, and I begin to walk along the platform, keeping pace with the train. You glance at your fellow passengers, blushing.] [Ed. – Ugh shit like this is sooo embarrassing… What a weirdo right I don’t even know that guy!]
ENDS
There were lots of excellent cataclysms in this year’s reading. How I’d taken this long to read David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress is both mysterious and an indictment on me, but this beautiful book from the point of view of possibly the last woman on Earth is full of gorgeous writing and vivid images. [Ed. – Is she thrilled to be free of bros at long last?] I absolutely loved it. I also loved Oana Aristide’s Under the Blue, a particularly well-done plague-and-after novel, so I was very sad to get in a fight and end up blocking the author online because of her being an anti-trans bigot. Why are authors all so unpleasant?
Pink Slime (2020/2023) is an Uruguayan novel of toxic miasma and slow societal collapse by Fernanda Trías, translated by Heather Cleary, another weird case of a book being written pre-COVID that foreshadows and refracts the weirdness we all then went through. Rebecca Campbell’s Arboreality (2022) is a Canadian novel in stories that takes us further and further into our future of rising waters and collapsing ecosystems, offering no cheap false hope but still providing a glimpse of something worth being alive for. [Ed. – I keep hearing about this book. Gotta check that out.]
And turning from global to personal cataclysm, there was Lorrie Moore’s I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home (2023), where one of the two main characters is very, very dead. But readers of Anagrams will know well that a character doesn’t have to exist for them to be vividly, hilariously rendered by Moore.
STORIES
There were so many resurrections and collections of great short story writers this year. Among the best were Rattlebone (1994) by Maxine Clair and Lover Man (1959) by Alston Anderson, both beautifully observed interconnected collections about Black American communities. No Love Lost (2023) collects the incredible novellas of Rachel Ingalls, and if there’s a richer, stranger book than this out there, send it to me now!
Jean Stafford’s Children Are Bored on Sunday (1945) is as brilliant as the title promises. [Ed. – Great fucking title.] I also read her novel The Mountain Lion (1947), and fucking hell could she write. Weird misfit children, unhappy loves, badly behaved artists. Have at it!
Tessa Yang’s The Runaway Restaurant (2022) and Madeline Cash’s Earth Angel (2023) were two of the best new story collections I came across this year. Both are peculiar and fizzing with ideas, completely happy to depart reality for the depths of weirdness at the drop of a hat, and very moving—imagine George Saunders if he was actually as good as everyone thinks he is. [Ed. – Heh, you’re not wrong, James…]
And then there was The Collected Works of Jo Ann Beard (2023), which was an absolute revelation. Stories, autofiction, memoir, reportage, not of it conventional, all of it astonishing in its quality and death-haunted eccentric brilliance.
[The train accelerates. You try to pretend the man running along at the window, now bellowing, has nothing to do with you. Not paying attention to where I’m going, I run full-tilt into a metal bin with a resounding clang.] [Ed. — *snort *]
‘Nature Takes Over’ Thomas Strogalski
RANDOM OTHERS
Some books you just can’t shoehorn awkwardly into a category, and there are still too many good ones left to mention. In brief:
Elspeth Barker’s O Caledonia (1991) pairs perfectly with The Mountain Lion, a black comedy about a strange and unloved daughter.
James Hannaham’s Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta (2022) is a delicious exercise in capturing a voice, in which a trans woman gets out of prison and tries to reconnect with her family and normal life.
Szilvia Molnar’s The Nursery (2023) is an unnerving and convincing novel of fear-of-everything from the point-of-view of a new mother.
Nigel Balchin’s Simple Life (1935) starts off like a mild comedy mocking get-back-to-the-land types, but quickly turns into a fascinating and alarming study of a fraught ménage à trois in a cottage in the middle of nowhere.
And finally, the complete Diaries of Franz Kafka, translated by Ross Benjamin (2023): a monolith of a book, a treasure trove, a heartbreaking testament.
From ‘L’Ange’ Patrick Bokanowski
[You glance back, caught between relief and embarrassment, as I leap to my feet and charge like a maniac after the repeating train, still yelling. Then I reach the end of the platform and plunge into the shrubbery, vanishing from sight. You exhale, and pull out your book to start reading in blessed peace.] [Ed. – Not true, I’d do almost anything to spend a train ride talking books with you, James!]
I wouldn’t say I had a great reading year. I was on my phone too much, I was being anguished or avoiding being anguished about the myriad injustices of the world, which I knew too much and could do too little about. I travelled—maybe not too much but an awful lot, for me—which was often energizing and enjoyable, but also got in the way of reading.
I felt, in other words, that I had frittered away my one wild and precious reading life. I bottomed out in the middle of the year, regularly tossing aside books unfinished after having spent more time with them than they deserved or that I could find patience for. A querulous reading year, you could say.
And yet some things stood out. Links to previous posts, if I managed to write about it.
A rare heist novel where the heist, though satisfying, isn’t the main attraction. I loved this stylish, smart, funny tale of a man who has put his Ivy League law degree to use in taking over the family business: giving new identities to guys on the run and getting them the hell over the border. A great book of off-season resort towns.
I’m still getting my bearing in contemporary sff so take these comments for what they’re worth, but it seems rare to me that a book takes as many swerves as this one: the narrative moves back and forward in time and all over the place, from a near-future nearly uninhabitable earth to a galaxy far-away in space and time. You get invested in a storyline and then it ends but sometimes it comes back. But even more than the structure I loved this book for its emotional seriousness: its many relationships are doomed to fail because of their constitutive circumstances. For example: a man ages fifteen years between each meeting with his beloved, while she, thanks to intricacies of stellar time travel, has only aged a few months. The emotions might be bigger than the ideas, but I was totally okay with that.
One of the greatest working Canadian writers. This year, fresh off the thrill of teaching The Break to smart, appreciative students, I read The Strangers and The Circle, a bleak and beautiful trilogy of indigenous life in the aftermath of the cultural trauma of the residential school system.
Four novels by Kent Haruf
It should tell you something that in early April, one of the worst times in the academic year, I read four novels by Kent Haruf in just over a week. I loved Plainsong the most but enjoyed Eventide, Benediction, and Ours Souls at Night almost as much. Easy reading, sure: plain syntax rising to gentle arias, nothing fancy, maybe a little sentimental. But these books are so warm and kind. Each is set in Holt, Colorado, out on the eastern plains, where the mountains are a smudge on the western horizon and it’s sometimes hot and sometimes cold but always dry. The people are ranchers and school teachers and social workers and hardware store owners and ne’er-do-wells and retirees. Everyone is white and no one thinks that’s worth noticing. The time is hard to pin down. Sometimes I thought the 70s or early 80s but we’re probably talking the 90s. Things were different before the internet. The characters’ lives are modest and they seem fine with that. They go about their business, do their work, make good choices and bad ones. People look out for each other, but they judge each other, too. Little kids get lost biking, but they come home again. It’s not all roses, though. High school boys bully girls into having sex, over in that abandoned house just down from where the math teacher lives. People get sick, go hungry, lose jobs. Some characters get what the preacher will call a good death, some die unreconciled to their kin, some without warning, too soon. Life just keeps happening, you know?
Some readers will call this hokum, but I ate it up. Haruf won my heart. I thought him especially good on second chances and unexpected turns of fate. Of all the stories that weave through these loosely connected novels, the best concerns two brothers, old bachelors, ranchers, who agree to take in a pregnant teenage girl and who, to everyone’s surprise, not least their own, form a new family with her. That scene where they take into the next town over to get things for the baby and insist on buying the best crib in the store? Magic.
Smart, sexy, stylish books about how we relate to bodies privately and publically, and whether we can recast the narratives that have shaped aka deformed our understanding of what it is to live in those bodies. Greenwell’s Substack is worth subscribing too; he makes me curious about whatever he’s curious about. Can’t wait for the essay collection he’s writing.
Emeric Pressburger, The Glass Pearls
Yep, that Pressburger. Closer to Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom than any of the (indelible) films they made together. Karl Braun, a German émigré, arrives at a boarding house in Pimlico on a summer morning in 1965. A piano tuner who never misses a concert, a cultured man, a fine suitor for the English girl he meets through work. I’m not spoiling anything to say that Karl isn’t just quiet: he’s haunted—and hunted. For Karl Braun is really Otto Reitmüller, a former Nazi doctor who performed terrible experiments, a past he does not regret even as he mourns the death of his wife and child in the Hamburg air raids. Now the noose is tightening and Otto/Karl goes on the run… Suspenseful stuff; most interesting in this play with our sympathies. Not that we cheer for the man. But his present raises our blood pressure as much as his past.
A short book that covers as much ground as an epic; a historical novel that feels true to the differences of the past but that is clearly about the present; a classic modernist Morrison text, where the first page tells you everything that’s going to happen except that it makes no sense at the time and the rest of the reading experience clarifies, expands, revises. Such beauty and mystery in so few pages.
Cheating a bit since I read the first one in December 2022. I’m a huge fan of these novels about a family and the remote Norwegian island they call home from 1900 to 1950. I like books where people do things with their hands, maybe because I can’t do much with mine. The characters bring sheep into the upper field, fish with nets and line, salt cod, keep the stove burning all through the year, row through a storm, carry an unconscious man through sleet. It’s all a little nostalgic, a little sentimental, but not too much. Just how I like it.
Fresh on my mind so it’s possible I’ve overvalued them but I don’t think so. All for Nothing, especially, is something special.
George Eliot, Middlemarch
Last read in college—under the expert tutelage of Rohan Maitzen, this can only be called one of the highlights of my undergraduate experience. This time I listened to Juliet Stevenson’s recording, which perfectly filled a semester’s commuting. True, Arkansas traffic is not the ideal venue for some of Eliot’s more complex formulations, but Stevenson (as much a genius as everyone says, she do the police in different voices, etc.) clarifies the novel’s elegant syntax and famous images. The book’s the same, but I’m not; a whole new experience this time around. Much funnier, especially its early sections. (Celia is a triumph.) More filled with surprising events: that whole Laure episode (a Wilkie Collins novel in miniature), it was as if I’d never read it. And more heartbreaking: in 1997, I hated Rosamond, and I admit I still felt for Lydgate this time around, but I had so much sympathy for her, a character I’d only been able to see as grasping and venal. Speaking of sympathy, one of the glories of English literature lies in watching Dorothea as she matures from excitable near-prig to wiser and sadder philanthropist. Amidst all this change, though, some things stayed the same. Mary Garth still won my heart; the suspense at the reading of Featherstone’s will gripped me just as much.
It’s good to read Middlemarch in college. It’s better to re-read Middlemarch in middle age. It’s best to read Middlemarch early and often.
Konstantin Paustovsky, The Story of a Life (translated by Douglas Smith)
Six-volume autobiography of Soviet writer and war correspondent Paustovsky, a Moscow-born, Ukrainian-raised enthusiast of the Revolution who somehow made it through Stalinism to become a feted figure of the 1960s. The new edition from NYRB Classics contains the first three volumes. I only read the first two, not because I didn’t enjoy them (I loved them) but because I set the book down to read something else and the next thing I knew it was a year later. Paustovsky had something of a charmed life. His childhood was largely downwardly mobile, and he lived through so much terror and upheaval. And yet he always seems to have landed on his feet. Maybe as a result—of maybe as a cause—he looks at the world with appreciation. He can sketch a memorable character in a few lines. He writes as well about ephemera (lilacs in bloom) as about terror (I won’t soon forget his time as an orderly on an undersupplied hospital train in WWI). He can do old-world extravagance (the opening scene is about a desperate carriage ride across a river raging in spate to the otherwise inaccessible island where his grandfather lies dying) and the brittle glamour of the modern (for a while he drives a tram in Moscow). Trevor Barrett, of Mookse & Gripes fame, said it best: Paustovsky is good company. I really ought to read that third book.
Read with dread and mounting desperation, don’t get me wrong it’s a banger, but couldn’t in good conscience call it a pleasure to read:Ann Petry, The Street. Barry Jenkins adaptation when?
Book the excellence of which is confirmed by having taught it: Bryan Washington, Lot. Maybe the great Houston book. I get that novels sell but I wish he’d write more stories.
Planned on loving it, but couldn’t quite get there: Julia Armfield, Our Wives Under the Sea. Sold as metaphysical body horror, this novel about a woman who goes to pieces when her wife returns from an undersea voyage gone catastrophically wrong as a kind of sea creature didn’t give me enough of the metaphysics or the horror. I figured it would be perfect for my course Bodies in Trouble but I couldn’t find my way to assigning it. Possibly a mistake: teaching it might have revealed the things I’d missed. Gonna trust my instincts on this one, tho.
The year in crime (or adjacent) fiction:
Disappointments: new ones from Garry Disher, Walter Mosley, and S. A. Cosby (this last was decent, but not IMO the triumph so many others deemed it; he’s a force, but I prefer his earlier stuff).
Maigrets: Of the six I read this year, I liked Maigret and the Tramp best. Unexpectedly humane.
Giants: Two Japanese crime novels towered above the rest this year. I didn’t write about volume 2 of Kaoru Takamura’s Lady Joker (translated by Marie Iida and Allison Markin Powell) but maybe my thoughts on volume 1 will give you a sense. Do you need a 1000+ page book in which a strip of tape on a telephone poll plays a key role? Yes, yes you do. (Also, it has one of the most satisfying endings of any crime novel I’ve ever read.) More on Hideo Yokoyama’s Six Four (translated by Jonathan Lloyd-Davies) here. Do you need an 800+ page book in which phone booths play a key role? Yes, yes you do.
The year in horror:
Victor LaValle, Lone Woman: horror Western with a Black female lead and not-so-metaphorical demon, enjoyable if a bit forgettable; Jessica Johns, Bad Cree: standout Indigenous tale, also with demons; Leigh Bardugo, Hell Bent: serious middle-volume-of-trilogy syndrome. Many demons, tho.
The year in sff:
In addition to Simon Jimenez, I liked Ann Leckie’s Translation State, Nick Harkaway’s Titanium Noir, and, above all, the three novels by Guy Gavriel Kay I read this summer, which gave me so much joy and which I still think about all the time.
The year in poetry:
Well, I read some, so that’s already a change. Only two collections, but both great: Wisława Szymborska’s Map: Collected and Last Poems (Translated by Clare Cavanaugh and Stanislaw Baranczak), filled with joy and sadness and wit, these poems made a big impression, and Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic (fortunate to have met him, a mensch; even more fortunate to have heard his indelible performance).
The year in German books: I read two, liked them both. Helga Schubert, Vom Aufstehen: Ein Leben in Geschichten (On Getting Up: A Life in Stories), vignettes by an octogenarian former East German psychotherapist who had fallen into oblivion until this book hit a nerve, most impressive for the depiction of her relationship to her mother, which reminded me of the one shared by Ruth Kluger in her memoir; Dana Vowinckel, Gewässer im Ziplock (Liquids go in a Ziplock Bag): buzzy novel from a young Jewish writer that flits between Berlin, Jerusalem, and Chicago. The American scenes failed to convince me, and the whole thing now feels like an artefact from another time, given November 7 and its aftermath. I gulped it down on the plan ride home, though. Could imagine it getting translated.
Everyone loved it; what’s wrong with me? (literary fiction edition):
Made it about 200 pages into Elsa Morante’s 800-page Lies and Sorcery, newly translated by Jenny McPhee. Some of those pages I read raptly. Others I pushed through exhaustedly. And then I just… stopped. The publisher says it’s a book “in the grand tradition of Stendhal, Tolstoy, and Proust,” and I love those writers. (Well, I’ve yet to read Stendahl, but based on my feelings for the other two I’m sure I’ll love him too.) Seemed like my social media feeds were filled with people losing it over this book. Increasingly, I see that—for me, no universal judgment here—such arias of praise do more harm than good; I experience them as exhortations, even demands that just make me feel bad or inadequate. Increasingly, too, I realize how little mental energy I have for even mildly demanding books during the semester. (A problem, since that’s ¾ of the year…) I might love this book in other circumstances —I plan to find out.
Everyone loved it; what’s wrong with me? (genre edition):
Billed as True Grit set on Mars in alternate version of the 1930s, Nathan Ballingrud’s The Strange indeed features a young female protagonist on a quest to avenge the destruction of her family, but Ballingrud is no Portis when it comes to voice. True, I was in the deepest, grumpiest depths of my slough of despondent reading when I gave this a try, so I wasn’t doing it any favours. But that’s a nope from me.
Other failures:
Mine, not the books. Once again, I read the first hundred or so pages of Anniversaries. It’s terrific. Why can’t I stick with it? I read even more hundreds of pages of Joseph and His Brothers, as part of a wonderful group of smart readers, most of whom made it to the end of Thomas Mann’s 1500-page tetralogy. I loved the beginning: fascinating to see Mann’s take on the stories of Genesis; interesting to speculate on why Mann would write about this subject at that time. (For me, Mann is in dialogue with Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, another oblique response to fascism through stories from Torah.) My friends tell me it got a lot more boring shortly after I left off (the end of volume 2), but that’s not why I gave up. Turns out, I don’t do well if I’m supposed to read something in regular, little bits. I need to tear into books—and I wasn’t willing to make the time for this chunkster. Sorry, guys.
Odds & Ends:
A few albums that stood out: Roy Brooks, Understanding (reissued in 2022, but I’m not over it: this quintet, man, unfuckingbelievable); Taylor Swift, Midnights (I love her, haters go away); Sitkovetsky Trio, Beethoven’s Piano Trios [volume 2] (a late addition, but pretty much listened to it nonstop in December and now January).
After a decade hiatus, I started watching movies again. Might do more of that this year!
I was lucky enough to travel to Germany in late spring with a wonderful set of students. While there, I met so many people from German Book Twitter who have become important to me, including the group chat that got me through covid and beyond. (Anja and Jules, y’all are the best.) All these folks were lovely and generous, but I want to give special thanks to Till Raether and his (extremely tolerant) family, who took me in and showed me around Hamburg. (Great town!) Have you ever met someone you hardly know only to realize they are in fact a soulmate? That’s Till for me. What a mensch. Cross fingers his books make it into English soon. In the meantime, follow him on the socials!
Reading plans for 2024? None! I need fewer plans. I can’t read that way, turns out, and maybe I’ll avoid disappointment by committing less. Gonna be plenty of other disappointments this year, I figure. No need to add any self-inflicted ones. At the end of last year, I joined a bunch of groups and readalongs, because I want to hang with all the cool kids, but I can already see I need to extricate myself from most of them. One good thing I did for myself in 2023, though, was to stop counting how many books I read. I was paying too much attention to that number. Fewer statistics in 2024!
Piet Mondrian, Oranges and Decorated Plate, 1900
Finally, to everyone who’s read the blog, left a comment or a like, and generally supported my little enterprise (which turns 10 in a week or two…), my heartfelt. I do not know many readers in real life. You all are a lifeline.
A great semester in the classroom; an even more irritating than usual semester for committee work. I am lucky to have a long winter break. Over the last years I’ve found that I either thrive in these short, dark weeks or succumb to bad anxiety. Happily, this was one of the good years. El Niño means colder weather in Arkansas, which makes me happy, not least because it’s so good for running. And for sitting on the couch reading.
Laurits Andersen Ring, Foggy Winter Day. To the Left a Yellow House. Deep Snow., 1910
Toni Morrison, A Mercy (2008)
An extraordinary book, maybe my favourite of the five or so by Morrison I’ve read. (Beloved is titanic, of course, but it’s been so long since I’ve read it that my memory of it has dimmed. Maybe I’ll redress that in 2024.) I chose A Mercy for One Bright Book; I thought we had a lot of interesting things to say. Fifteen years after its publication, the book only seems more pertinent to the task of understanding America. Which makes this review by Wyatt Mason, a critic I usually admire, feel badly dated.
Katherena Vermette, The Circle (2023)
Longtime readers will know of my love for Vermette. The Break is fast becoming canonical; I extolled its sequel, The Strangers, not long ago. And now we have a third volume featuring the same characters, with the addition of a few new ones, especially in the younger generation. My wife noted how much faster this book reads than the others. Partly that’s because of the knowledge we bring to the book (if you haven’t read Vermette yet, don’t start here): we’re mostly catching up, not getting to know. And partly it’s because of the short chapters that shift the point of view. But mostly, that sense of speed is a function of how much happens. Whereas The Break considered the repercussions of a single event (ripples from a stone sunk into a lake), and The Strangers thought about the pull of family (oceanic, seemingly inescapable, full of ebbs and flows), The Circle focuses on the pull to change, to get away, to break from the past (this book is a river, and one full of rapids at that.)
That compulsion sometimes—maybe even often—fails. But not always. Trauma never lets go, but change is possible. But always from collective bonds, not individual willpower. Yes, individuals make choices that affect their fate. But grit isn’t enough in the face of systemic inequalities and generations of abuse. Maybe that explains why Vermette has replaced the family trees of the earlier volumes with a diagram of overlapping circles, each with a character’s name. The closer the circles to each other, the closer the relationship. The bigger the circle, the more people that individual affects.
If Vermette decides she’s finished with these characters, she has ended her now-trilogy on a satisfying ambiguous, tentatively hopeful note. But I thought the endings of the previous volumes were just right, too. Who knows, maybe more is in store. I kind of feel like Vermette is as caught up by these characters as readers like me are.
Abdulrazek Gurnah, By the Sea (2001)
My third Gurnah: not a misfire yet. I’m a fan.
In his 60s, Omer Saleh leaves his world behind him and claims begrudgingly granted asylum in the UK. A harried lawyer assigned to his case tracks down the only person she can find who knows anything about Zanzibar, Saleh’s homeland. That man, now an academic who has himself made the journey to England, turns out to have known Saleh: he was a boy when the older man became entwined with his family, to complicated and in some ways ruinous ends.
Gurnah reminds me of Conrad not just because his novels also consider the relationship of England to parts of the world where people have “different complexion[s] and slightly flatter noses” but more so because they are similarly constructed through nested stories told at length in the quiet of evening between a teller and a silent audience. These stories concern all manner of things: the age-old trade routes between the Persian Gulf and the East African coast; the furniture business as practiced in a culture that prizes barter; the experience of African students during the Cold War in East Germany, where it turns out that not all communists were equal brothers; and the pain of incarceration at the whims of despotic regimes.
Of the latter, Saleh says:
I have taught myself not to speak of the years which followed, although I have forgotten little of them. The years were written in the language of the body, and it is not a language I can speak with words. Sometimes I see photographs of people in distress, and the image of their misery and pain echoes in my body and makes me ache with them. And the same image teaches me to suppress the memory of my oppression, because, after all, I am here and well while only God knows where some of them are.
The last line is the characteristic Gurnah touch: a passage that had been moving, even stately, if perhaps a little pat, turns more complex. We are so attuned to the suggestion that testimony is an unalloyed good, a force, even, for change, that we might be surprised to think of quiescence and repression as responses to past injustice and trauma.
By the Sea was longlisted for the Booker Prize. I’ve no beef with Peter Carey’s The True History of the Kelly Gang (haven’t read it), but it would have been nice to see Gurnah on the shortlist at least. No matter, he won another big prize and the novels are back in print and I still have five or six ahead of me, so it’s all good.
Roy Jacobsen, Eyes of the Rigel (2017) Trans. Don Bartlett and Don Shaw (2020)
Third in Jacobsen’s Barrøy series, which since the last part of the first has focused on Ingrid Barrøy, now the chatelaine of the Norwegian island that has given the family its name. Eyes of the Rigel follows hard on the events of its predecessor, The White Shadow, which I read in the spring but never wrote about. I like this summary from The Guardian:
The second installment, White Shadow, is set during the last year of the second world war: refugees from the northern province of Finnmark arrive, collaborators abuse their power, and Russian prisoner of war Alexander, having survived the sinking of the MS Rigel, lands on Barrøy. Ingrid falls in love with the young man and hides him from Nazis and collaborators until he is strong enough to embark on a trek to neutral Sweden. In Eyes of the Rigel Ingrid sets out across a postwar country in search of the father of her 10-month-old daughter. Ingrid’s only mementos of her lover are her daughter’s eyes, as black as Alexander’s, and a note in Russian, which a neighbour helps her decipher: it says, “I love you” nine times.
Ingrid’s epic quest—after hitching a boat ride up the coast, she makes the rest of the journey on foot with the world’s most saintly baby—is preposterous. Everyone she meets feels that way too. But with the determination and implacable work ethic that characterizes her family she follows a trail made fainter by the reluctance of many in the immediate postwar era to remember or cop to the events of the recent past.
Spoiler alert: her quest ends in frustration and heartbreak. She doesn’t find Alexander, and, maybe worse, she learns things about him she doesn’t want to. (In a brief passage, readers learn his tragic fate.) I wouldn’t say she’s happy to return home, but she does so with few regrets and no complaints. (Barrøyers don’t complain.) There’s that baby to raise, after all. And another fishing season to prepare for. And heaven knows what’s happened to the sheep over the summer.
I sensed Jacobsen enjoyed the wider canvas of this story (it’s not really any longer than the others, but it has much more narrative drive), but not as much as he enjoyed returning to the island in the final pages. That’s how I felt as a reader, anyway. As is characteristic of these books, we encounter much that is unhappy (a former Nazi concentration turned POW camp, for example). But much that is joyful, too, though always in a bittersweet way. I especially loved an idyll on a farm where Ingrid thinks about taking up with the owner, a member of the resistance, who had hidden Alexander for several months.
Ronán Hession thinks it’s the weakest of the series, but even though he wrote Leonard and Hungry Paul so definitely knows what’s what I can’t agree. Loved this one just as much as the others.
Roy Jacobsen, Just a Mother (2020) Trans. Don Bartlett and Don Shaw (2022)
I picked Jacobsen’s fourth Barrøy novel up the minute I finished the third. It feels as though the writer did the same: Ingrid’s story picks up where she left off, with her return home to the island. The novel covers the 1950s, and, as Tony puts it in his excellent post, it reworks some of the preoccupations and themes of The Unseen, the first book in the series. But Jacobsen isn’t treading the same ground. Yes, his characters continue to wrestle with the competing claims of isolation and community, but now they do so in the context of new technologies and ideologies. What happens when it’s not profitable to run the mail boat to the island? Would it be best to give up this almost laughably hand-to-mouth existence for life on the mainland? (Friends and family report on the pleasures and tribulations of life in centrally planned communities. It’s nice to have a machine to wash the linens, but of course you can only use it in your allocated hours.)
For Ingrid, Jacobsen’s main character, the matriarch of the island, the question of whether it will still be possible to live on Barrøy is practical, not abstract. Who will do all the work? Her great-aunt is aging. The girl she has brought up as her own daughter has grown up and moved away. The few menfolk who are left have bought a bigger boat so that their annual fishing expeditions take them away from the island longer than before. But new life arrives, in the form of a boy, the child of the skipper of the mail boat. The man asks Ingrid to watch his son while he goes on his weekly run, because his wife, the boy’s mother, has up and left. With foreboding in her heart, Ingrid accepts the charge; weeks pass, the skipper fails to return. Eventually his boat is found drifting aimlessly and unmanned. This trauma is met with resourcefulness and care, and the boy flourishes under the auspices of Ingrid and the other islanders, not least her daughter Kaja, the infant in the previous book, who is now five or six. The pair grow up as something more than siblings. Perhaps their relationship will be at the center of another book, should we be lucky enough to get one.
As always, Jacobsen pushes our emotional buttons, in the most satisfying way. One scene in particular hits like a blow. As Tony puts it, “One thing I can promise you is that anyone who has read the rest of the series will at some point feel the pain almost physically…”
Jim Thompson, A Hell of a Woman (1954)
Hadn’t read one of Thompson’s sordid, riveting noirs in a while. I’ll need to wait awhile before trying another, so dark was this one. Although it can’t top The Killer Inside Me (what can?), A Hell of a Woman also turns on the author’s masterly use of first-person narration. If you liked In a Lonely Place but found it a little decorous, this is the book for you.
Stephen Spotswood, Murder Crossed Her Mind (2023)
The latest Pentecost & Parker mystery ends on a dramatic note. (Cliffhanger alert!) Despite a solid enough mystery, the point of the book is to set up a longer narrative arc. I look forward to volume 5, and encourage you to read these books, but whatever you do, don’t start here.
Walter Kempowski, An Ordinary Youth (1971) Trans. Michael Lipkin (2023)
I once heard Parul Sehgal describe Svetlana Alexievich’s The Unwomanly Face of War as having “big first book energy,” which, she explained, is what happens when writers feel the need to stuff everything that matters to them into that first book, because who knows if there will ever be another. The result is undisciplined, maybe, but also exuberant and true.
I thought of Sehgal when reading An Ordinary Youth, the first book by Walter Kempowski, a phenomenon of (mostly West) German literature. (My friend Till Raether tells me he had something like a Warholian factory going to help him compose an epic series of collage texts, perhaps in the Dos Passos mode, I’m not sure, of German 20th century history; that’s in addition to his many novels.) The debut is patently autobiographical—its hero, Walter Kempowski, is nine years old when his family moves to a new apartment in the old Hanseatic port of Rostock in 1938. As the title suggests, he’s an ordinary kid who like movies and jazz music and this one girl in particular and school not so much. He gets used to bombing raids; he doesn’t mind that his father has been deployed (away from the front, luckily); he misses his older brother, Robert, who brought home all the good new records. As he becomes a teenager, Walter distinguishes himself mostly for being a bit of a badass: rowdy, impious, a petty troublemaker. He could seem to incarnate some of the worst attributes of his country at that time, but interestingly his natural nonconformity puts him at odds with the Party and all it stands for. He has little interest in the Hitler Youth, for example, ready to shirk its obligations as often as he can. (He forges a lot of sick notes.) But he’s no resister, no young version of that postwar chimera, “the good German.”
The genius of the book is the way it lets us read against Walter’s vision of the world, and indeed that of German society writ large. Here’s an example, which I chose by opening the book to one of the pages I’d dog-eared. The man Walter’s sister has married, a Dane, takes Walter’s side in an argument between the boy and his sister. Walter has said that in England people never open their windows and they drive on the left—something his friend has told him—which is all basically true and presented only as the mildest criticism. (An earlier conversation in which Walter’s mother has told her son-in-law to stop using English words feels much more freighted.) But Anna, Walter’s sister, takes offense at her younger sibling. Her husband, Sörenson, mildly objects. Germans, he says, forget that everyone should be able to express their own opinion:
And as an example of tolerance he mentioned modern music, the kind where the notes were all in a jumble, the kind we didn’t have any more in Germany. In Denmark, people did often laugh when they heard that kind of modern music, but they also clapped. He’d seen it happen many, many times.
We see conversation between adults presented through the view of the child protagonist, without judgment or comment or perhaps even full understanding of the stakes. But we learn more about the adults than the child here. For what kind of an example is this? Certainly not a full-throated defense of the art the Nazis deemed degenerate (those notes “all in a jumble”). His description of audiences laughing suggests his opinion is shared among his countrymen. But maybe laughing and clapping is the best kind of tolerance: amused, bemused, generous. Yet that last sentence, with its repeated, unnecessary, special pleading “many,” makes me question his attitude still further. Is he making it up? On every page, Kempowski plays tricks like this with tone.
An Ordinary Youth was a huge bestseller at the time. What were those first audiences responding to? It’s hard to imagine. Maybe it’s that Kempowski so straddles the line between nostalgia for and critique of the Nazi era that readers can take whatever they want from the book. My hunch is that many German readers responded to its depiction of the Volksgemeinschaft, that community “we” all shared and where we had some good old times, no matter what they want us to say now, a response that of course ignores the book’s challenge to that community, structured as it is around absences like the burned-out synagogue Walter passes on the way to school or that store old Herr so-and-so (I can’t find the reference) left behind when he disappeared. (It makes me wonder who lived in that new apartment before them.) The characters are basically uninterested in these absences—in this sense the novel accurately represents its time.
Kempowski’s debut has long been taken to be untranslatable. Its original title, Tadellöser & Wolff, refers to a Kempowski family saying, one of those weird family things, the kind of thing you repeat because everyone in the family says it and sometimes no one even knows why. In this case, Löser & Wolff is a cigar manufacturer (Aryanized by the regime in 1937, incidentally), a brand beloved of the father, who plays with the name. If something is tadellos it is perfect, without flaws, or blameless. (I’m reminded of an indelible moment in Vasily Grossman’s “The Hell of Treblinka” where he quotes an SS man who called the “grilling” system of the layering and burning of bodies in mass graves tadellos.) Walter takes up the phrase: on a visit to the country he trots it out to some country-bumpkin kids, blithely telling them that’s how everyone talks in the city.
The nonsensical phrase (which takes on a life of its own: Walter adapts other words so that they are also “löser & Wolff”ed) exists alongside dozens, even hundreds of lyrics interpolated into the text, almost all of them from popular songs or Lieder in the Schubert sense, and a few from poems. Translator Michael Lipkin has done something amazing in bringing the book into English. (I’m not sure I needed him to cite the source of every song lyric, though.) The publisher refers to this collage as the novel’s “echo chamber of voices,” without which Kempowski could not investigate the meaning of subjectivity in a mass popular society. I bet some smart folks have written about how An Ordinary Youth at once instantiates and challenges the very idea of the Bildungsroman.
Hats off to NYRB for making this translation happen. I hope more Kempowski is in their plans. (See below for more on the one they released first. They have a third title, which I have since read, too.)
Jenny Offill, Weather (2020)
Fragments from the life of an overeducated, underemployed New Yorker with the requisite terrific child and corresponding fears of climate change. A lot of it rang true—even the precious bits—but if I want to mourn the loss of the world as we know it in the company of a neurotic, bien pensant book lover, I’ll just have a little me time, you know?
Walter Kempowski, All for Nothing (2006) Trans. Anthea Bell (2015)
Some of my most memorable reading experiences have taken place in winter. Fallada’s Every Man Dies Alone, devoured over an unusually cold Arkansas Christmas just before our daughter was born. The never-to-be-matched-in-impact double-whammy of Absalom, Absalom and Barthes’s S/Z, in the snowiest Halifax January I can remember. And now, in another colder than average Arkansas winter (yes, it’s still climate change), Walter Kempowski’s magisterial late work, All for Nothing. Which is a bitterly cold book, in setting and to some extent tone. It’s late January 1945 in East Prussia and everyone knows the Russians are coming. But in a once-grand, now mostly shut-up manor house, life continues in a semblance of cultured normality. It’s like that scene with the French family in Indochina from the long cut of Apocalypse Now.
There’s the dreamy, beautiful woman of the house, who shuts herself in her quarters with tea and cigarettes and desultory reading, like a heroine from Turgenev; the absent husband, an officer in charge of requisitioning foodstuffs for the Reich, currently stationed in Italy; his aunt, who wishes she were still in the Silesia of her childhood but who keeps the place going and has no interest in taking down the portrait of Hitler in her room, despite suggestions from others that this might be wise; three Ostarbeiter, a Pole who tends the horses and does the heavy work, and two Ukrainian girls who cook and clean; and Peter, a mild, quiet, inquisitive boy whose regular illnesses keep him from Hitler Youth roughhousing, and who loves nothing more than examining bits of the world (a snowflake, a drop of blood, a crumb) under his new microscope, and who sometimes goes into the room that belonged to his younger sister, left as it was on the day she died of scarlet fever. Across from the manor is a working-class settlement built by the Party in the late 30s: its most officious inhabitant stares in grim resentment over at the manor house while he tends to his wife, lost in depression after their son was killed at the front.
To these wonderfully drawn characters come a series of visitors, all of them only too happy to share the warmth and food on offer in the manor house: a one-legged opportunist convinced that by buying up rare stamps on the cheap he is ensuring his future security; a young violinist, fanatically devoted to the Party; a Jew the woman of the house agrees to hide for an evening, seemingly for no other reason than her desire to have something happen.
The tone is quiet and anxious. How much can this episodic aimlessness last? (The question asked by characters and readers alike.) A convoy of refugees has been streaming west for days now. The carriage is packed, the horses fed and watered. But where are all those people going, this is their home, is there any need to leave now, just how close are those weapons booming now day and night? The family delays and then, abruptly, leaves. And the book becomes more eventful: the roving point of view centers on Peter, the tone becomes more muted, almost shell-shocked, a little naïve even as its events become extravagant and terrifying.
I kept waiting for the violence of the Red Army to erupt and overwhelm the characters. And, yes, this does happen. But so stealthily it’s hard to know how we got from the warmth of the manor house to overturned carts, dead animals, and bombed out refugees on the side of an icy road. Fascinatingly, the Soviets almost never appear in the book. (I was reminded of how seldom Germans factor in depictions of the camps, etc.) For me, All for Nothing is most brilliant in his suggestion that the apocalypse arrives gradually, almost banally.
I encourage you to read R. Nicht’s brilliant take on the book. (Just one clarification: although Kempowski often returns in his writing to the history of East Prussian, he did not grow up there (he was born in Hamburg and grew up in Rostock); All for Nothing is not strictly speaking autobiographical.)
The consensus seems to be that All for Nothing is Kempowski’s greatest work. (He wrote a ton, though, hardly any of it yet in English, so who knows.) Anthea Bell’s translation is gorgeous, somber and elegiac; I wonder how much of that is Kempowski’s “late style” and how much is Bell’s predilection. (I’m thinking of the way some of Sebald is more melancholy in English than in German.) It’s true though that the quotes in this book come mostly from Goethe and Schiller, unlike the pop music of An Ordinary Youth. It feels wise and resonant the way the classics do at their best. I once heard Edwin Frank, NYRB’s publisher, say he always read the last line of a novel first. (Insane!) I bet he nodded in satisfaction when he paged to the end of this book.
Tremendous stuff.
Margot Douaihy, Scorched Grace (2023)
Before Sister Holiday ran away to New Orleans and became a nun she played in an all-girl punk band, carried on a torrid, doomed affair with her married best friend (and bandmate), and made a bunch of other bad decisions. Now she’s teaching music to mostly disaffected kids in the Catholic school attached to her convent, covering her ink with gloves and a scarf, sparring with a sister who can’t stand her, and taking succor from the Mother Superior, the only woman in the country who would accept her when she came calling. But when a maintenance worker dies in a suspicious fire that also injures two of the students—and other fires follow thick on the first—Sister Holliday turns detective, (implausibly) tagging along with a painkiller-addicted fire investigator. Can you believe it—she solves the crime!!!
I heard about Scorched Grace from several UK readers, and I can see why the novel, heavy on atmospherics, might be popular with non-Americans. (As far as I can tell, the author isn’t from NOLA; to me it feels like she tries too hard to set the scene just so.) Just wait until it’s translated into German. They’re gonna eat this shit up. The subtitle (“A Sister Holiday Mystery”) implies Douaihy has plans for a series. More power to her, but I think this would have been better as a standalone.
Willem de Kooning, Door to the River, 1960
A find end to my reading year. Morrison, Vermette, Jacobsen, and, above all, Kempowski. See anything here to strike your fancy?
Eiger, Mönch & Jungfrau 