What I Read, April 2024

Posted on May 30, 2024 by banff1972 under book review, lists, month in review, review, Uncategorized

April sucked shit. I’d had it with everything: the semester grind, how hard it’s become to teach these last few years, and a lot of my colleagues, especially the administrators of my place of employment. I didn’t sleep enough, saw the height of the Arkansas spring blooms only through windows, and drank too much coffee. Gotta make some changes in my life.

Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Peonies, ca. 1920

Edith Wharton, Summer (1917)

Wharton continues to be one of my happiest discoveries of the last few years. (A personal discovery: I know everybody else already knows her.) Shawn Mooney, host of the Shawn Breathes Books YouTube channel, asked a few of his many bookish friends to read this novella from the middle of Wharton’s career. What a terrific book! Charity Royall, the adopted daughter of a lawyer and his now-late wife, might be in the upper echelon of her New England village’s society, but that doesn’t mean much. She’s bored to death. When a young architect comes up from New York to summer with a relative—to sketch the local country houses, ostensibly, but mostly to loaf—Charity is smitten by the glimpse of another world he offers. And by him, too: the book is impressively sexually frank for its time. Before long, Charity and Lucius have made a love-nest out of an abandoned house halfway up a nearby mountain. When Charity gets pregnant, a lot of troubling and surprising things happen in a short time. I won’t spoil the ending, but oof what a gut punch. Recommended!

Folks who have read this novel (others, look away): do you think Royall might be Charity’s father? Am I crazy to think so??? The circumstances around Charity’s coming to the Royalls seem… murky.

Andrey Kurkov, The Silver Bone (2020) Trans. Boris Dralyuk (2024)

Kurkov, whose delightful Death and the Penguin I laboriously read in German way back in the day and whose subsequent many, many books I have failed to keep up with, has written the first of a series set in Kyiv in 1919. The Great War might be over, but peace is nowhere to be found in Ukraine. Various factions vie for control: unaffiliated war lords, the Bolsheviks, the Whites, and the embattled Ukrainian People’s Republic, one of the first nations in Eastern Europe to deem Jews a protected minority, which didn’t stop it from countenancing a wave of pogroms under its brief rule. (I’m slowly making my way through Jeffrey Veidlinger’s history of these events, In the Midst of Civilized Europe, which is retrospectively clearing up a lot of the context.)

On the novel’s first pages, Kurkov’s protagonist, Samson Kolechko, a would-be engineer, loses his ear in an attack by Cossacks. (His father, alas, is murdered.) Samson, an upside-down low-rent version of his biblical namesake, manages to keep the ear, which turns out to have fantastical powers, allowing him to hear things he otherwise couldn’t. This comes in handy when the two Red Army soldiers who have usurped his apartment plot to kill him. He goes to police to turn them in and in a pleasingly preposterous turn of events is taken on as a detective himself. Along the way, he relies on the help of a young woman employed by the newly-established department of statistics. Kurkov vividly evokes the danger, scarcity, and uncertainty of Kyiv in this period: atmosphere is the book’s strong suit.

As for the crime element, well, let’s say it’s on the shambolic side. Perhaps more generously: it’s about what it means to investigate crime in a place where the political situation is changing so fast that the law threatens to be even more nakedly a fig leaf for power than usual.

In Boris Dralyuk, Kurkov has found a translator who gets his goofy side—and, I suspect, has even improved the book a little. He tells me the second Samson novel will be out in English next year. Count me in.

József Debreczeni, Cold Crematorium: Reporting from the Land of Auschwitz (1950) Trans. Paul Olchváry (2023)

Extraordinary. I do read a fair few Holocaust memoirs, and even though I’m interested to see how similar they are, how much they trade in the same tropes, I’m usually caught short in horrified wonder by at least one scene or detail. Cold Crematorium—now translated into English for the first time, more than 70 years after its publication in communist Yugoslavia—gave me that feeling from start to finish.

Debreczeni, the penname of József Bruner, was born in Budapest but moved to the Vojvodina, the largely Hungarian-speaking part of what is now Serbia, after WWI, where he worked as a journalist and newspaper editor. Like most Hungarian Jews he was deported to Auschwitz in 1944. Having survived the initial selection, he volunteered to be transported further west in Silesia to a camp that was then under construction. Falkenberg, as the Germans named it, was part of the vast Gross-Rosen camp system. Conditions in that archipelago of suffering were so bad that far fewer victims survived its array of satellite camps than did Auschwitz; it is much less well known today than its role in the Holocaust would demand. (Menachem Kaiser’s excellent third-generation memoir Plunder also considers this lacunae.) From there he was sent to the work camp at Fürstenberg, and finally to Dörnhau, the “hospital” ward of which was known to inmates as the cold crematorium because so many died within its frigid walls. He was liberated in May 1945, barely alive. After a lengthy recuperation, he returned to Belgrade, where he lived and worked until his death in 1978.

Indulge me as I share some of this remarkable book with you. It is the most visceral, corporeal description of the Holocaust that I know:

Here’s a passage from Fürstenberg, where Debreczeni labored, under dire conditions, to build an underground tunnel system (the so-called Project Riese, the eventual purpose of which remains a source of debate among historians):

Dysentery takes hold me of me yet again. Swelling spreads frighteningly over my entire body. Over the course of these days I am lugging sacks of cement to the mixers, and I become hopelessly dirty. The cement dust swirling nonstop in the air forms a thick layer of sediment upon my clean-shaved head. It collects on my gums and seeps into my nose, my eyes, my ears. Not even Sani Róth [former mobster who takes Debreczeni under his wing] can get his hands on soap. I hang my rags on the nail above me. The pants and tunic are literally moving from the thousands of squirming lice. Destroying them is hopeless to begin with, so lately we haven’t even been trying.

Here’s one from the “hospital” unit at Dörnhau, where Debreczeni spent eight miserable months:

The November cold pours in through the broken windows, and yet the stench is unbearable all the same. A suffocating stink oozes from the walls. Rising between the rows of bunks, several centimeters high, is an odious yellow slurry of dung. Naked skeletons are sloshing through the putrid river.

At one point, that slurry was knee height (for the few who could still walk). I will never get that detail out of my mind. This is the kind of thing I mean when I say Cold Crematorium makes other Holocaust memoirs seem tame.

And here’s another one from Dörnhau, about a man named Miklós Nagy, who scrabbled to the position of chief functionary of the medics who “treated” the patients, some with good will and others with pure cynicism, in an environment completely lacking medical supplies that was also, as we have seen, utterly unhygienic.

I once saw this lightweight man jump up and down on a patient’s chest like a rubber ball, stomping on him with bloodshot eyes until he was worn out. The victim’s crime: he’d tried conniving his way to a second helping of soup.

Remember, Nagy was a prisoner of the Nazis, too. The pitiless depiction of camp functionaries is just one of the things that makes this book such a valuable testimonial document.

I am seriously thinking about assigning this book instead of Primo Levi in my intro Holocaust Lit course. (Shouldn’t be one or the other, but syllabi are zero-sum games…) If you think you have the fortitude, I urge you to read this book.

Joan Chase, During the Reign of the Queen of Persia (1983)

I chose this novel by the hitherto unknown-to-me Joan Chase for the April episode of One Bright Book simply because it was reissued by NYRB in 2014 and I’ve had it on my shelf ever since. (I’m trying to use the podcast to get to some of the hundreds of unread books around here…) Reading it was a happy surprise: it’s excellent, although, in my opinion, awfully sad. Somehow Chase tells the well-worn story of a vanished childhood—shot through with depictions of women’s limited lives in this time and place—in a way that feels new.

During the Reign of the Queen of Persia tells the story of three generations of the Krauss family, who mostly live on a farm near an unnamed county seat in northern Ohio probably modelled on Wooster, where Chase was born. The family is made up almost entirely of women: its matriarch, Lil, known as Gram (the titular Queen, so named as a joke about her similarity to a family pony who loves to run wild), has five daughters, two of whom have two daughters each. These girls, all born within two years of each other, and now in their mid to late teens, think of themselves as a collective: their responses to the vicissitudes that life throws the family’s way make up the core of the novel’s events.

Listen to the episode for more about this terrific book. For now, I’ll just say that if you’re intrigued by a first-person plural narrator that never feels gimmicky, and you like domestic fiction that also dabbles in the Gothic, you’re going to love this.

Amy Pease, Northwoods (2024)

(Not to be confused with Daniel Mason’s North Woods; that must have annoyed Pease and her publisher…)

Set in Shaky Lake, WI (which the internet suggests is a real place???), Pease’s debut crime novel concerns a former fish and wildlife investigator, Eli North, who returns from Afghanistan with PTSD and is taken on as a charity case by his mother, the local sheriff. Eli is at the end of his rope: drinking too much, losing contact with his son (his wife threw him out of the house), scared and ashamed most of the time. When a teenage boy is found dead and the girl he’s been seeing disappears, Eli fights for the right to take on the case and maybe regain his footing. The most interesting thing about this book is that Pease has chosen to put the exasperated, anguished, loving relation between Eli and his mother at its center. How things work out between them is ultimately more compelling than the whodunit.

All told, Northwoods is totally satisfactory debut; I’ll keep an eye on Pease. I listened to the audio, and I was excited each day to catch the next installment, sometimes even forsaking my hockey podcasts. So that tells you something.

All I can say is: IT’S SUMMER BITCHES. A fuller reading slate returns in May.

What I Read, March 2024

Posted on May 28, 2024 by banff1972 under month in review, review

March 2024 was a big month in our family: my daughter became a bat mitzvah on the 29^th of Adar I. She worked hard for months beforehand to prepare, and even though the process wasn’t always easy, she did great. Like, better than great. Services were moving, lunch was a whirlwind (no time to eat much but we had delicious leftovers for days), and the party at our beloved local indie bookstore was a blast. (Including a Haftorah Smackdown, where guests who had ben bnai mitzvahed were encouraged to show off how much of their portion they could remember.) Celebrating with friends and family—including one of my oldest friends, who came all the way down from Ottawa, how about that??—was incredible. Suffice it to say, Marianne and I were kvelling big time. We were also very tired. For a couple of weeks afterward, the energy level in this house was low. Like, come home from work, lie down on the couch, wake up two hours later with a crease down your cheek kind of low. All the reading took place around the edges.

Henri Matisse, The Ballet Dancer, Harmony in Grey (1927)

Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice (2013)

First volume in the already canonical space opera set in the Radch Empire (expansionist, like all empires). Breq is an ancillary, a human body that acts as an extension of the hive mind AI that controls the empire, or a bit of the consciousness of a starship (these amount to the same thing, I think: it’s confusing), and the only survivor of a starship destroyed twenty years earlier. The Wikipedia entry helpfully explains the plot; I found the reading experience pleasurably disorienting. Basically, the action moves between the present, in which Breq seeks revenge for the destruction of her ship, and the past, in which the treacherous circumstances of that destruction become clear.

James told me to read the next one right away so I didn’t forget everything, but I didn’t. Uh oh.

David Downing, Union Station (2024)

Downing knows his readers can’t get enough of his John Russell books, even though he wrote his way to the end of WWII. He first solved the problem by writing a prequel. Now he’s taken a page from Philip Kerr and continued the adventures of journalist and former reluctant spy Russell and his actress wife Effie Koenen into the postwar period. Union Station finds the couple in Los Angeles, where Effie is making a go in an American sitcom while Russell grits his teeth and interviews movie stars. One day he realizes he’s being tailed and life gets more interesting. (Downing has great fun taking Russell on routes all over the metropolis.) But who’s after him? The Soviets, reneging on the deal that released him from their services? The Americans, suspicious of his thinly-disguised hostility to McCarthyism? As in all spy novels, the answer can only be found by returning to Berlin. (The occasion is the third annual Berlin Film Festival, where Effie is honoured with a retrospective.) A bittersweet return for both husband and wife: a new war has spring up on what aren’t even the ashes of the old.

The John Russell books are often great and never less than serviceable. This isn’t the best of the bunch, but if Downing keeps writing them I’ll keep reading.

Tana French, The Hunter (2024)

As a helpless Tan French simp I had the release date for her latest circled on my calendar months ago. The Hunter came out the week of the bat mitzvah—perfect timing: I demolished it on my spring break the week after. A sequel to The Searcher, which I wrote about at length here, it offers more of that French good stuff. Pitch-perfect command of voice, slow burn, delicious uncertainty about who is playing what game and whether they know that others think they’re on to them. (Lotta pronouns there, I admit.) Honestly, the book could have been longer: the last 75 pages or so were too hurried for my taste. French is good with dogs. Gamboling across the fields after a scent, huffing the occasional dramatic sigh while lolling on the wood floor, barking at a strange car juddering down the drive. Gimme more!

Dan Stone, The Holocaust: An Unfinished History (2023)

I reviewed this for On the Seawall. What a terrific, impressive book. If you only have the appetite for one history of the Holocaust, this is the one. I especially loved how Stone shows the Holocaust to be an ongoing phenomenon, the meaning of which continues to be contested in the most unlikely ways.

Tessa Hadley, After the Funeral and Other Stories (2023)

Push comes to shove I prefer Hadley’s novels to her stories, but I like her stories a lot too. (I once wrote about one of my favourite early ones.) I read these in a rush, one after the other, which is a terrible way to read a collection. I’d read a couple before, in The New Yorker. They were still good on a second reading. Not quite Alice Munro-levels of shifting-narrative-times-to-narrate-striking-events-in-otherwise-ordinary-middle-class-lives, but close.

Louise Glück, The Wild Iris (1992)

Another book I wouldn’t have read were it not for One Bright Book. Huge thanks to Rebecca for choosing this terrific collection of poems addressed to and spoken by flowers and gardens and times of day. Listen to the pod for the details of our reactions, but I’ll just reiterate here that what delighted me most in these poems is their syntax. Glück’s punctuation is an arresting joy.

Turns out I’ll be teaching our intro to the English major course next year, and I’m thinking hard about assigning these.

Guy Gavriel Kay, Sailing to Sarantium (1998)

Kay is the homme moyen sensuel of fantasy writers, which makes him catnip to me.

That’s it for now. See anything you like here?

What I Read, February 2024

Posted on May 24, 2024 by banff1972 under lists, month in review, review, Uncategorized

Fell behind on these updates during the semester, as usual. Hard to remember that month beyond the usual—the semester taking hold, mostly warm days from the ever-earlier Arkansas spring—but I do know that mostly we were busy getting ready for my daughter’s bat mitzvah in early March. Along the way I squeezed in these books.

Thien Pham, Family Style: Memories of an American from Vietnam (2023)

Autobiographical comic about Pham’s family’s journey from Vietnam to the US in the early 1980s via a Thai refugee camp. Each chapter is named after an important dish, ranging from the ball of rice and fish his mother saves for him on their flight from Vietnam to the baffling Salisbury steak of the school cafeteria to the co’m tâm dac biêt (a combo plate, as best I can tell) that he eats with his high school friends.

The palette is somber, mostly browns and greens, but the tone is lively: this is the classic story of American immigrant success, a story none of us can take for granted, which explains, I’d say, why the final chapter concerns the then-41-year-old author’s decision, in 2016, to finally take citizenship, prompted by Trump’s increasingly hostile anti-immigrant rhetoric. Thien and his family go through a lot of hard things: bureaucratic delays, poverty, language barriers, exhausting work that nearly tears the parents apart, and, most of all, at the very beginning of their journey, a harrowing attack by pirates on the way to Thailand, starkly presented by Pham in a series of black pages containing only the sentences his mother whispered into his ears, “It will be ok,” “I’m here,” “I’m right here with you.” But the Phams do more than survive; they thrive. I was delighted to see the haggard, exhausted, frightened yet determined young parents of the opening chapters settle into the gently bickering, food-pushing older couple of the last ones. Pham finishes with “end notes,” in which he answers questions readers are likely to have, like “What do you parents think of this story?”. In his answer, Pham draws his mother popping her head from another room into his studio and shouting (accurately) “I am the hero!”

Samantha Shannon, The Priory of the Orange Tree (2019)

Epic fantasy of two worlds, one based on medieval Europe, one on ancient China and Japan. In the former, dragons are abhorred; in the latter, they are venerated. Those dragons are beautiful and wise creatures of air and sea, nothing like the monsters that nearly destroyed civilization centuries ago before being bound into an endless chasm. The spell that cast the bad dragons there, however, is reaching its thousand-year-end, and they’re determined not to be defeated this time. Can our heroes convince the leaders of the kingdoms and free states and empires to band together to defeat the enemy? (Yes.)

Priory has a satisfying heft. The first 2/3 especially move with satisfying deliberateness; the end, alas, is rushed. I loved falling into the world of the book, though, and was grumpy any time I had to set it aside for anything else.

Herta Müller, The Passport (1986) Trans. Martin Chalmers (1989)

I enjoyed this angular little book about the German-speaking minority in Romanian under Ceausescu, but I hardly remember a thing about it. Does this happen to you? What I remember: 80s rural Romania is grim; men are bad to women; people who leave come home to lord it over those left behind, to compensate for how hard it is in the new land.

Jesse Q. Sutanto, Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers (2023)

Vera Wong gets up early. Really early. She takes a brisk long walk, being sure to protect her skin from that harmful sun. She makes breakfast and texts her son to ask why he’s still in bed. (Tilly is a layer, very accomplished, but he doesn’t seem to understand how fast life passes you by.) Then, the day well advanced (it must be almost 8), she walks downstairs to open her business, Vera Wang’s World-Famous Teahouse. (She named it after the designer because people love a famous name—Vera is smart like that.) She tends to her sole regular customer, a man whose wife has Alzheimer’s, meaning he can never stay as long as Vera would like, and then settles into long, quiet hours that weigh on her, almost forcing her to recognize that the shop is failing.

Then one morning she comes down to find a man dead on the shop floor. He’s clutching a flash drive, which she takes (for safekeeping, what you think???) before outlining the body, just like on CSI. She uses a sharpie so it will be nice and clear. The police are oddly unhappy about this. Misadventure, the police declare. But Vera knows: this is murder. In the next days four people come by the tea house—very suspicious. Vera slyly gets into conversation with them and learns they all knew the victim, Marshall Chan, who turns out to have been a bad man. Through a combination of bullying, passive-aggressiveness, sheer chutzpah, and plying them with food, Vera gathers what she insists on calling her suspects, forming them into an unlikely friend group and insinuating herself into their lives. She hasn’t had so much fun in years. They are all so nice—but they really need her help getting their lives together. Still, that doesn’t stop Vera from being clear-sighted: one of them is killer!

Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers is funny, sweet, moving, and even a bit suspenseful. Vera is your classic delightful piece of parental work. Sutanto lets her share her wisdom while also admitting she could be a bit less… intense. I loved this book. My daughter loved this book. Maybe my wife will love this book (she is reading it next). The audio, read by Eunice Wong, is a delight. Don’t sleep on this perfect piece of light reading.

The temptation for a series must be immense. Sutanto should resist, but I hope she doesn’t.

Elana K. Arnold, The Blood Years (2023)

Impressive YA Holocaust novel for young adults that I would recommend to readers of all ages.

What happened to the Jews of Romania is one of the most significant stories of the Holocaust, sadly still too seldom told. The Blood Years, based on the life of the author’s grandmother, begins to rectify that. This is a novel of Czernowitz, that former Austro-Hungarian center of Jewish life in Bukovina. Frederike Teitler and her older sister Astra live a cossetted life: yes, their father left them, plunging their mother into a deep depression that led their grandfather to take the women into his apartment, but things have since settled down. Although Astra increasingly gets up to things her sister knows nothing about, life for the young women still revolves around daily ballet lessons and evocatively rendered summer vacations in the Carpathians. But then comes the war. The antisemitism that had been mostly a hurtful annoyance turns virulent, especially after the interregnum of Soviet rule in 1940 – 41, when Jews were briefly given full rights. When the Germans take over the city in the first wave of Hitler’s war in the east, with the enthusiastic support of most of the locals, Jews suffer pogroms and dispossession. The family is briefly forced into a ghetto and narrowly avoids deportation to Transnistria—a territory across the Dniester that was a hellhole for Jews even by the standards of the Holocaust—only because Astra’s doctor husband, whom she has married against everyone’s will, is deemed an essential worker. Arnold vividly evokes the hunger, illness, and terror of the following years. She organizes the book, as her title implies, around differing instances of blood, from a first period to violence in the streets to tubercular coughing.

I read The Blood Years in a day: it’s well-written, dramatic, sensitive, and, perhaps most importantly, unwilling to sugarcoat its story of survival. The iconography of the Holocaust, which mostly comes from a reductive idea of what happened to the Jews of Poland and western Europe, doesn’t apply to the Romanian story. For this reason alone, I hope lots of people read this book. High school teachers, please consider assigning it!

Binjamin Wilkomirski, Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood (1995) Trans. Carol Brown Janeway (1996)

Infamous text, unsurprisingly now out of print, purporting to be a memoir of the author’s experiences as a very young child during the Holocaust, primarily in Majdenk. Except that Binjamin Wilkomirski is really Bruno Grosjean, whose unwed mother was forced to give up her child to the Swiss foster system in the 1940s. Wilkomirski—that’s the name he’s taken, so I’ll use it too: we are dealing with something other than a pseudonym here—is not Jewish, never lived in Poland, did not survive the Holocaust. When the book was first published—by an imprint of the prestigious Suhrkamp Verlag and by Schocken, the most prominent Jewish American publisher—it received notices that can only be called rapturous. The NYT rave is typical: Wilkomirski “recalls the Holocaust with the powerful immediacy of innocence, injecting well-documented events with fresh terror and poignancy.”

A year or two after its release, Daniel Ganzfried, a Swiss journalist, read Fragments and felt something was amiss. Ganzfried interviewed friends and family of the author, trawled through Holocaust repositories and Swiss archives. He published his findings—a (self) righteous condemnation of Wilkomirski as a fraud—in a prominent Swiss weekly. The German publisher responded by hiring a researcher, Stefan Maechler, to follow up on Ganzfried’s discoveries. Two years later, Maechler, agreed with the allegations, adding even more proof to that already collected. The book was withdrawn; scholars and ordinary readers felt shame and disappointment; no one talked about it anymore.

I was one of those early readers. This was before my interest in the Holocaust turned into my livelihood. I followed the ruckus with interest—I read the flurry of pieces (an especially good one by Elena Lappin ran in Granta) that speculated on why someone would do such a thing—but I was perfectly willing to put the book out of my mind.

Come twenty-five years later to find one of my best students wanting to write her senior thesis on the book, after having read it in a class she took while studying abroad. The student was fascinated by the text, intrigued by the silence surrounding it, and curious about what we might learn from that silence and from reading the text, even knowing it to be fake. I knew I would be teaching a course on the afterlife of the Holocaust this semester, and we decided she should take the opportunity to teach the text. Abroad, her instructor had prefaced the reading by explaining the background. After much discussion, my student and I decided not to tell the students in my class the truth beforehand. This experiment proved fruitful, even if some of the students were rightly un-thrilled by our decision. (We explained the rationale, which allayed most concerns.) Fascinating to see how strongly the text resonated with students, and, concomitantly, how betrayed they felt when they learned the truth. The first day’s conversation about how Wilkomirski represented trauma pivoted, the second day, to an impassioned discussion of whether anyone should ever read this book, and, most importantly, to my mind, how neatly the text matches our expectations of what trauma means.

(On the course feedback forms I asked whether I should teach this again, and, if so, whether I should spill the beans beforehand. They all said I should and no I shouldn’t. Not what I expected.)

Jona Oberski, Childhood (1978) Trans. Ralph Mannheim (1983)

Moving and angry Holocaust story, presented as fiction but closely modeled on the author’s life. (I wrote about it here.) I was interested to compare Wilkomirski’s grotesque exaggerations of Oberski’s reality, and assigned it this semester for the first time, but less obsessed readers can appreciate it all on its own.

James Buchan, Heart’s Journey in Winter (1995)

Baffling, weird spy novel set in West Germany in 1983 amid the furor and fear incited by the decision to place Pershing missiles on German soil.

Buchan’s novel is as thorny in its syntax and structure as a poem. The interlingual pun of the title references Goethe’s “Harzreise im Winter” (A Journey through the Harz Mountains in Winter), playing on the near euphony of Harz and Herz, meaning heart. Readers who struggle to understand what’s going on are just following the lead of the characters. Secret meetings in secluded hunting lodges, cryptic conversations where people tell each other things without saying anything outright, lovers on the run, adultery as a metaphor for spycraft: Buchan uses many of the tropes of the genre, but slantwise, ruthlessly excising exposition. No heroes or resolution here. Imagine a Len Deighton novel, with its sympathy for cold war German seediness, but stripped of the belief that the rules of the game must be followed, however exhaustedly or ironically, and instead replaced with the feverishness of a lieder cycle.

I often forget plots soon after reading; in the case of Heart’s Journey in Winter I forgot it while reading. Like, I mostly had no clue what was going on. I remember instead the descriptions of trout fishing, and evenings at a country inn, where couples drive up from Bonn to sit in mismatched chairs in a newly mown field drinking cold local Riesling. Is this a good book? No idea! Should you read it? No clue!

Svetlana Alexievich, Last Witnesses: An Oral History of the Children of World War II (1985) Trans. Richard Peaver and Larissa Volokhonsky (2019)

Y’all, this book! Finally read Alexievich, and I get the hype. Last Witnesses is a series of vignettes: each chapter the story, told from the position of middle or late age and in their own words with only the lightest editorial commentary, of what the tellers experienced as children during the German invasion of the Soviet Union in WWII. Most begin with that quiet unassuming day in late June 1941 when the country found itself under attack. They begin with the essentials of their family: how many siblings, maybe their ages, sometimes a father (though these are often already away or soon to be called up), and almost always a mother. The mothers leave too, more often than not, whether through death or the choice to join the war effort. Last Witnesses is about loss: families broken apart, loved ones murdered by tank, by gun-shot, by bombs from the air, by hanging. To a lesser degree it’s about resilience: roles and responsibilities taken on much earlier than anyone would ever have expected. But above all it’s about trauma. Decades later, the story-tellers break down, or trail off, or acknowledge how much they suffered from the rupture of their world. The cumulative effect feels important to the project, but it’s not easy on the reader. So much heartbreak. For that reason, it would be weird to say I loved this book, but I sure was impressed. And I was fascinated by a recurring subplot, if you will: the events here narrated are also the story of the Holocaust in Belarus, but in the best Soviet tradition that’s never acknowledged.

Cristoffer Carlsson, Blaze Me a Sun (2021) Trans. Rachel Wilson-Broyles (2023)

Superior Swedish crime fiction. Time was I couldn’t get enough of that stuff: I remember some pleasant weeks in graduate school plowing through Mankell. (A few of those Wallander books are hard to beat for suspense.) But eventually the Scandi-noir boom became a glut: most things are mediocre, after all, and with seemingly every crime writer from Rejkavik to Helsinki available in English I oughtn’t to have been surprised that a lot of it wasn’t that great. But this one made Sarah Weinman’s best of 2023 list and the audiobook was available at the library, so I gave it a try. And I’m glad I did. The structure, pacing, and ambition of the book quickly won me over, and I looked forward to my commute each day. (The narrator seems to know Swedish—judging from his pronunciation of names and places anyway—which compensated for his decision to voice female characters in falsetto. That always makes me crazy.)

The still-unsolved assassination of Olaf Palme seems a trauma from which Sweden has not recovered, so often does it figure in the country’s crime fiction. Carlsson’s novel, set in rural western Sweden, far from Stockholm, concerns a violent crime that takes place on the night of the Palme killings. To his credit, Carlsson keeps the “what has happened to our decent country” hand-wringing/sociological soul searching to a minimum, emphasizing instead how the drive to understand can cascade through generations. Using three narrative levels, the outermost one about a writer who returns from the capital to his hometown in midlife and finds himself drawn to that unsolved crime from the mid 80s, Carlsson pays as much attention to the narration as the discourse. And I didn’t figure out who did it until right before the big reveal. Win all round.

Georgia O’Keeffe, Light Coming Over the Plains, No. II (1917)

Good month, right? (Wilkomirski aside—that’s a special case.) That Buchan tho. What the hell? Anyone ever read that? Other than John Self, I mean.

Shinjini Dey’s Year in Reading, 2023

Posted on May 22, 2024 by banff1972 under book review, Guest post, lists, review, year in review

Why yes we are hurtling to the middle of 2024, but I’m popping in with one last take on 2023. And I’m thrilled that it’s by a writer whose intellect and fearlessness I admire a lot. Shinjini Dey is a writer of criticism and essays. She has written for the Cleveland Review of Books, Los Angeles Review of Books, Contemporaries of Post 45 and others. She can be found @shinjini_dey.

I’ve always had projects and reading lists—organized by author, by zeitgeist, by theme—but I couldn’t stick with it in 2023. I wish it had been a dilettante-ish year, with a range as wide as its corners, but instead I kept falling out of love. My reading has been distracted, unintentional, mawkish in its inattentive flailing. There have been writing blocks followed by reading blocks and its strained reversal. Late in January, Dorian asked me to write something, anything, for this blog. And I wondered whether retroaction could salvage a shape from the romance. [Ed. – Yes, I’ve wanted to feature you here for a while! And let me say to everyone, Shinjini turned this piece in almost three months ago. It’s me, the problem is me.]

Despite this, I was surprised. I read about a hundred books during the year (a hundred-and-six to be precise). Some of these I read for review/essays, and some to discover myself anew, and others just to anchor me. All rather bland held against the high drama of my assumptions. Does a life spent reading always feel incongruous to the readings? [Ed. – Yes.] In April I read Mick Herron’s Slow Horses, all six of them, because I wanted to feel invisible, hidden in the shadow of large institutions. This British spy series encapsulates a closed world—one where the spies create the conditions for their own stature and relevance by fucking up, creating problems for the next cog in the wheel. It’s high workplace drama about bosses never cleaning their own spilt guts, ideologues, and semen; something pedantic about their missions and something bumbling about their failures. What better way to feel comforted about your own rootlessness by digging through Empire’s anxieties and paranoias? [Ed. — best description of these books ever.]

The other series (and every series when read in one long sighing week produces the effect of binging, and binging always feels slightly abject) [Ed. – Did Lauren Berlant write about binging? Because binging feels like a real cruel optimism situation…] harkened back to a time when SFF was intricately reimagining science through science’s own conceits. I dwelt in a time when scientific progress did not mean approaching singularity through hyperrealism. I read Nancy Kress’ Sleepless series about the utopic possibility of eugenics and post-scarcity: a tragic, generational epic. Connie Willis’s Doomsday trilogy and quite a few of Kage Baker’s Company books, where time travel is the occupational labour of history/historiography departments. Both series possessed this affective irony towards the workplace and bureaucracy—and one may call this class consciousness, but I read it as a national culture emerging out of unions and well-paying blue-collar jobs. But, because of it, the genre negotiates with political economy, and speculative utopianism was always its plumed stage. Was Jameson right? More likely accurate about then than now. [Ed. – That seems right. Surprising to me how important he seems now; in my day he was treated as a bit of a one-hit Vegas hotel wonder.]

In a nostalgic mode, I also read the Avidly series of short monographs (Avidly reads Poetry, Avidly reads Theory, Avidly reads Screen Time, etc.) imagining either being a young student in the academy, or someone handing over introductory texts to young students. I gave to myself the gift of (potential) responsibility. So much of literature is tempered by the academic institution, so much personhood is granted through the production of a self within that institution (does dark academia then seem simulated, sublimated?). I, too, keep oscillating between the academy and the paraphernalia of that world—wary of getting too close, bothered when its it gets too far out. I keep the academy at arms’ length [Ed. – smart], and these simple, fast-paced books, which offer the vicarious experience of a passionate hunger for knowledge, have become part of my tumultuous pattern. I read a few every year. I also read Glitch Feminisms by Legacy Russell, which was blurbed by Lil Micquela (the fictional influencer), and though it is a manifesto, I disliked how repetitive it was, how much it relied on new idioms.

Nonetheless, there was specificity. There were campus novels too (Brandon Taylor’s Real Life, Elaine Hseih Chou’s Disorientation) and those that aren’t campus novels but skirt around that polyphonic experience of camaraderie and community, which couple the grind with the sexual, romantic, intellectual or even self-mythologizing pursuit, whose narrative world is small, even incestuous. [Ed. – Great description!] I sought out The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano (trans. Natascha Wimmer) to read again after being bowled over by Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers, a novel that was truly political, that captured so much about the relationship between art and politics. Kushner posed (and answered differently) the question that animated Savage Detectives as well, the question about an attractive young woman who circulates within an artistic economy as either symbol or commodity, and why there is no political economy without sexual politics. The difference between Real Life or Disorientation and these novels is not that Taylor and Chou’s work is devoid of sex—there’s enough sex, beautiful sex—and not that the community forms without the sexual charge—it’s there, homosocially, homosexually—but for Kushner or Bolano, the art doesn’t exist without sexual politics. And so, I turned to Lauren Berlant (I often turn to Berlant). And I read novels that mimicked this charged atmosphere: I read all of Nona Fernandez’s memoiristic narratives (Space Invaders and Voyager, both translated by Natascha Wimmer) set during the Chilean dictatorship that took me into communities congealed through terror (and what happens when terror becomes mundane, leaving fantasy to paper over the sinister boredom that persists). [Ed. – You sold me on these!] I also became impatient alongside Natascha Wimmer, devouring what she translated, placing her at the center of my explorations into literature. I read other Bolanos. I swam through Kushner’s other novels and decided, no, The Flamethrowers reigns supreme.

I read two other novels with an academy at the center of a character’s moral crisis: Anjum Hassan’s History’s Angel and Dorothy Tse’s Owlish. Hassan’s book is about pedagogy in crisis because of right-wing nationalist politics. It picks up with a middle-aged teacher of history having to reconcile himself to being made historical and read against the grain, to being revised as a Muslim man in contemporary India. How does one negotiate everyday life within fascism, when ebb and tide all conspire to erase you? Hassan’s protagonist turns outward as a witness, following its Benjaminian namesake—but in Owlish, the professor, at odds with an island under occupation, turns to fantasy, to dolls, to magic; he relieves himself of the burden of public life. Read together, these novels depict intellectual thought in the public sphere as a lost creature, howling, crying, playing pretend. [Ed. – Such an enticing comparison of two books I am now keen to read!]

I read Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These because of its deceptively short length but the novella made me delight in quiet and steadfast prose, prose that keeps up with its characters, that makes room and board for them; I read Foster to prolong with Keegan’s tight sentences. I developed a taste for surfaces, writings that reflects off water or other surfaces, rippling through each page—and the way I am sometimes, impulsive yet able to sustain that impulsiveness, I turned to read narrative theory (Surface Relations by Vivian L. Huang, then Narrative Discourse by Gerard Genette, as one does). The more I thought about flatness, as an important part of the surfaces, the more I wondered about disaffectation as a minor affect. I taught a few students about flatness in Sofia Samatar’s Monster Portraits as an exercise in narrativizing personhood. But by then I had already hit financial crisis and it sought to narrate all other crises through debt and management and I could do nothing. I read poetry: Sharon Old’s Odes, Franny Choi’s Soft Science and The World Keeps Ending and the World Goes On, Tishani Doshi’s A God at the Door, Amelia Rosseli’s Hospital Series, Diane Ward’s TROP-I-DOM, Jenny Zhang’s My Baby First Birthday, Yi Lei’s My Name Will Grow Wide Like a Tree, Solmaz Sharif’s Customs and more Sean Bonney. [Ed.—Well, I know Olds, anyway. This litany of names unknown to me makes me feel… old.] In abstraction and particularity, I got through a bad week and then I read, voraciously, novels about workplaces, one in between each new gig I applied for.

There are a few glib things I can say about workplace narratives (I can also say a few thought-out things), but I’ll limit myself to the glib and pithy since the rest is work.

There were once too many workplace narratives set in a publishing house/bookstore—but the content farm is the new publishing house (Emma Healey’s The Best Woman Job Book or Hana Bervoets’ We Had to Remove This Post). Corollary, the workplace novel that is set inside the content farm and the tech industry is about a cog in a wheel, but the cog is unable to narrate the wheel. Its precarity is homelessness (Sarah Rose Etter’s Ripe, Satoshi Yagisawa’s Days at the Morisaki Bookshop, Sarah Thankam Matthews’ All This Could Be Different)and its dystopic imagination is noir homelessness (Jinwoo Chong’s Flux, Victor Manibo’s The Sleepless, Molly McGhee’s Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind). There are few workplace novels about unobviated homelessness.
The best workplace narratives are about artists (Emily Hall’s The Longcut, Tade Thompson’s Jackdaw) and the outstanding ones are about sex work and reproductive labour (Eliza Clark’s Boy Parts, Olga Ravn’s My Work translated by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell, Melissa Febos’s Whip Smart, Gillian Rose’s Love’s Work, Polly Barton’s Porn: An Oral History). It is impossible to be an artist without being a whore or a mother, which is to say, only a whore or a mother understands the conditions of the economy where you have to labour past the point of love (Eva Balthasar’s Boulder). [Ed. – I want to read the longer version of this little essay you’ve just given us!]

Alongside these books I read some Eva Ilouz (Cold Intimacies, What is Sexual Capital written with Dana Kaplan); I also read histories of candy—but none of those texts are worth mentioning here. But after the saccharine, it makes sense that I turned to novels where love was an abjection, an ejection from the real, the narrative of erotomaniacs—Evelio Rosario’s Strangers to the Moon translated by Victor Meadowcroft and Anne Mclean, Charlie Markbreiter’s Gossip Girl Fanfic Novella, Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes, Sheena Patel’s I’m a Fan, Anna DeNiro’s OkPsyche, and Lena Andersson’s Wilful Disregard.

Does my movement make sense? This movement from precarity to practice? There’s certainly something searching about it, an example not of how we write about crisis but about what we read through crisis. Self-identification and self-abnegation in equal measure, with a little treat. If after, or in between these, I read some horror, something murderous, somethings with a mystery to suspend this accounting, would it be unforgivable? [Ed. – It would not.]

So there was a litany of murders.

A mystery, Raza Mir’s Murder at the Mushaira, which plays that trick of the narrator withholding information of the murder till it end; the trick makes me experience the detective as fascist. Imagine making Ghalib fascist!
Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo, translated by Margaret Sayers, which carries kinship like a haunting. Perhaps here the diversion took me to read all of Yuri Herrera (Signs at the End of the World, Transmigration of Bodies, Kingdom Cons, Silent Fury), all the bodies that moved or need to be moved, and the corporeality of language in the fold. Babak Lakghomi’s South proceeded from Pedro Paramo into the wind and the desert.
Tom Lee’s The Alarming Palsy of James Orr waited to be killed because he needed care in a staid, boring, unnecessary stasis.
Michael Cisco’s The Divinity Student killed language and taxidermied the remainder. So did Hwang Yeo Jung’s The Spectres of Algeria, translated by Yewon Jung, and then made a community of writers rewrite it from memory.
Sigrid Nunez’s The Last of Her Kind has a murder that is about the conviction of law and conviction of spirit—where the scandal of murder is always less than the scandal of biographical detail. [Ed. – My fave Nunez: nobody ever mentions it.] Norman Patridge’s Dark Harvest is also murder by institution, a novel that is aware of how much the ritualized depends on cinema. Eugene Lim’s oeuvre, which has a suicide at its heart, is aware of this scandal too.

So, in the litany of murder there was language, form, genre, a litany of gestures of remembering and remaindering.

Is there a shape to these readings? There certainly appears an attempt to escape the form of the institution. At the end, plus or minus a dozen other books, it appears that there is still a romance of maladjustment, scabbing, survival, and complaint. [Ed. – Without the romance, scabbing is hard.]

In any case, these are the best and most indulgent shapes I can make. If I were to practice restraint, I’d say “the reader tried to change” and this would become an essay of self-fashioning—this is more, merely, a year in review. [Ed. – Thanks, Shinjini. One of the headiest of these reviews yet to appear here. Here’s to more institution-busting in 2024…]