Scott Walters’s Year in Reading, 2022

Posted on February 28, 2023 by banff1972 under book review, Guest post, lists, review, Uncategorized, year in review

Today‘s reflection on a year in reading, his second for the blog, is by Scott Walters. Scott launched a litblog, seraillon, in 2010, and expects to return to it one of these days. He largely follows Primo Levi’s model of “occasional and erratic reading, reading out of curiosity, impulse or vice, and not by profession” (profession in his own case being academic administration). He lives with his partner in San Francisco and tries to visit family in France as often as possible.

Vincent van Gogh, Wheat Field with a Lark, 1887

Hello everyone. I had a terrific year of reading in 2022. I wrote very little, so I hope you’ll forgive the absurd length of this piece. [Ed. – Already forgiven.] I’m not sure reading without writing is really reading, but with few exceptions I greatly appreciated the 85 books I read. My reading once again followed little discernible pattern. Here are some favorites and some more favorites.

Victor Hugo’s Quatrevingt-trieze (1874) was my book of the year. Hugo’s portrayal of “this bloody date,” “this hemorrhage,” “the great revolutionary year” of the French Revolution, starts off with a bang: a rag-tag group of Parisian revolutionaries, expecting ambush in a forest in Bretagne, instead comes across a young woman breastfeeding an infant while two other children stand nearby. The woman’s feet are bloodied. She is terrified. An older woman responsible for the soldiers’ provisions serves as buffer between the young woman and a commander intent on probing her political loyalties, setting a tone of political tension that runs for 500 pages. An ensuing Dumas-like adventure characterizing this first part of the novel abruptly loses its head when the blade of the second part falls, plunging the reader into a stunning eight-page “cyclorama” of the chaos in the streets of revolutionary Paris. Much of the action, however, focuses on the civil war in the west of France. With a frequent employment of pastiche, 93’s many epic catalogs include an elaborate list of the Convention’s participants paired with their signature bons mots, some so good I copied them for future deployment. The Revolution in 93 is heavily fictionalized, including an improbable discussion between Danton, Marat and Robespierre in the back of a dark café. But Hugo’s astonishing feat of research serves as rock-solid substratum. I found 93 a spectacular model of historical fiction. [Ed. – Sold! Where is the goddamn Penguin edition???]

In the introduction to Eve Babitz’s Eve’s Hollywood (1974), Rolling Stone Records’ Earl McGrath is quoted: “In every young man’s life there is an Eve Babitz. It is usually Eve Babitz.” I wish I’d encountered Babitz as a young man in Los Angeles. To my roaring delight, she limns everything about the city that falls under her gaze; her piercing way of getting to the heart of some L.A. quality might have made Eve’s Hollywood a Bible for managing life there. Babitz labeled the book a novel, but it seems more non-linear memoir, composed in sketches, episodes, observations, wandering across the Southern California landscape for some 300 exhilarating, hilarious, sobering, fascinating pages, filled with lines to savor (even a simple description of the local skating rink: “The shadows of the rafters of the Polar Palace were knocked out by the noonday sun, which fell around us like a moat”). I initially wondered whether the appeal would depend upon one’s familiarity with L.A., but Babitz knows she’s in a bubble, and slyly invites us to look inside. And despite the book’s title, Babitz is less concerned with the movies than with L.A. life. When the book’s eight-page dedication included a nod “to the sand dabs at Musso’s,” I knew I was home.

In Ismail Kadare’s The File on H, ethnographers travel to Albania to seek out the last practitioners of the Homeric oral tradition. Something similar, a hidden world of the past miraculously vibrant in the present, reveals itself in Romanian novelist Panait Istrati’s Présentation des haïdoucs (1925), a work in which iterative storytelling reaches back to legends hundreds, even thousands of years old:

“What does that signify: haïdouc?”

“You don’t know? Well! It’s one who tolerates neither oppression nor domesticity, who lives in the forest, kills the cruel gospodars and protects the poor.”

Five bandits gathered in hiding in a bear cave take turns relating how they became haïdoucs. What an exquisite pleasure to read Istrati again, to be immersed in his singular universe of outlaw peasant dignity, heroism, pleasure, passion, sense of justice, and vengeance against those who perpetrate injustice, chiefly the gospodars (landowners). Most notable of these accounts is that of Floarea Codrilor, the woman leading the group and whose own startling tale seems organically to rework elements of Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe. In this volume from Istrati’s 14-novel cycle, “Les recits d’Adrian Zograffi,” Zograffi appears only in the first line, listening to a haïdouc tell the story of this night of tales, continuing a grand, uninterrupted line of storytelling.

Speaking of iterations, Antonio Manetti’s The Fat Woodworker (mid-1400’s, Robert and Valerie Martone, translators) reads like an anecdote out of Benvenuto Cellini’s riotous autobiography from a century later. Florentine luminaries including Brunelleschi, Donatello and Luca della Robia, regular dinner companions, recognize one evening that one of their number, Manetto the Fat Woodworker, is absent. Perceiving a snub, the artists, with Brunelleschi as chief architect [Ed. – Heh], concoct an elaborate prank. Enlisting multiple accomplices, they convince Manetto that he is in fact a certain “Matteo.” A cascade of comical situations follows as Manetto/Matteo questions his identity and seeks to extricate himself from confusion. The introduction identifies The Fat Woodworker as perhaps the literary pinnacle of the beffe, a humorous early modern style found in numerous works of this high age of mischievous wit. The prank itself is hardly innocent fun; poor Manetto spends time in prison and loses his mind for a time. But his existential crisis might be taken for something closer to Ionesco or Beckett than to the designer of Florence’s Duomo. The charming ending, crediting the anonymous originator of the joke and its variations over time, is as generous a recognition of literary precedent as one is likely to find.

A box containing 27 pamphlets ranging from one to 12 pages, B. S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates (1969) invites readers to choose their narrative order, aside from sections marked “First” and “Last.” Conceived when Johnson traveled as a sportswriter, the work finds his narrator covering a football match in a city he suddenly recognizes as that where he’d known his late friend Tony, the jolt setting off recollections of Tony’s terrible death from cancer. The form could seem gimmicky, but I found it devastatingly suited to its subject. The act of reading—trying to keep track of the pamphlets, shuffling them in one’s hands, taking them out of the box (coffer/coffin) and putting them back in—mirrors memory’s unpredictable eruptions: “The mind is confused, was it this visit, or another, the mind has telescoped time here, runs events near to one another in place, into one another in time.” The word “time” tick-tocks across the narrative; the 1 – 12-page sections hint at clock numerals. In one virtuoso section, staccato play-by-play reporting on a match vies with flashbacks to Tony’s suffering. I doubt Johnson’s narrator and I would have gotten along. He can be self-absorbed, insensitive, annoying even. But these qualities underscore his raw and conflicted anguish in witnessing the demise of a person with whom he had differences, who was distant in many ways: “how the fact of his death influences every memory of everything connected with him.” The Unfortunates left me shaken for days. “and I said, it was all I had, what else could I do, I said, I’ll get it all down, mate It’ll be very little he said, after a while, very slowly, still those eyes That’s all anyone has done, very little, I said.”

The east end of Paris’s Rue Ordener, which arcs across the 18^th arrondissement, is today largely African, but in 1942 was heavily Jewish. That was the year seven-year-old Sarah Kofman saw her father taken from their home and deported to Auschwitz. Her récit Rue Ordener, Rue Labat (1994) (thanks Dorian!) focuses not on her father’s story, but on her own. The title’s street names represent poles of her existence during the occupation: on one her mother’s home, on the other that of a beloved teacher with whom she hid. Kofman subtly evokes the claustrophobia of this life, the transformation of the neighborhood into a ghetto. She expertly melds normal tensions of childhood with their extreme amplification under threat, retrospectively examining the confusing division of allegiances between mother and teacher, Jew and Non-Jew, disentangling present self from past in tight, analytical prose not dissimilar to Annie Ernaux’s dissections of family. [Ed. – Interesting, had not thought of that comp. Ernaux’s sentences are much more sinuous, though.] The book had personal resonance: my goddaughter, having since an early age taken a deeply serious interest in the Holocaust, has spent her 19 years in the neighborhood, on the same street where Kofman’s family first lived.

Italian critic Roberto Bazlen led me to some terrific works these last two years, including to Jeremias Gotthelf’s The Black Spider (1842, Jolyon Timothy Hughes, translator). Bazlen had proclaimed Goffhelf “the (at least in some respects) GREATEST European novelist of the last century.” Though he wasn’t referring to this book, his pronouncement seemed borne out in The Black Spider’s 150 pages, which begin in a village in the Bernese Oberland, where a baptism is taking place:

Now, every head was exposed, each pair of hands folded and everyone prayed long and solemnly to the provider of every blessing. Then, each slowly grabbed the metal spoon and wiped the same on the beautiful, fine tablecloth and began to eat the soup. And many a wish was expressed out loud that if he were to have such fare every day, he would desire nothing else. Once one had finished with the soup, he again wiped his spoon on the tablecloth. The Zupfe [Ed. — braided soft bread, super delicious] was passed around and each cut himself a piece and watched as the appetizers of saffron soup, brains, mutton, and marinated liver, were served. When they were consumed the beef was brought in, fresh and smoked, whichever one preferred, came with deliberate swiftness stacked high in bowls. Then came the durre Bohnen [Ed. — overcooked green beans, god I ate way too much of that in my childhood], Kannenbiresnschintze, thick bacon and splendid loin roasts from three-hundred weight pigs, so beautifully red, white and juicy.

This richly detailed framing story culminates in a question about an “ugly black center post” in the house, then shifts two centuries past, when a merciless feudal lord orders the villagers to perform an impossible task, which they only achieve by making a deal with the devil. They pay, of course—Gotthelf is as much preacher as novelist—and their punishment comes in the form of plague, “the black spider.” In the tale that follows, reality, superstition, deep religious conviction, and atonement blend together in a micro-study of the village’s people, of the confrontation of the religious mind with hardship.

Asturian writer Juliàn Ayesta’s Helena, or the Sea in Summer (1952, Margaret Jull Costa, translator), one of the finest short novels I’ve read in years, went straight onto a shelf I keep of cherished paperbacks. Its world swirls with reminiscences of annual seaside vacations its young narrator passed with his cousin Helena. Drenched in sun and sea, filled with family idiosyncrasies and redolent of youthful vulnerability, Helena explores the developing love between these two young people, deliberately evoking Daphnis and Chloe (again!), with a similar sweetness and freshness.

I’d loved Solitude by Victor Català (Catarina Albert i Paradis), so was thrilled to find Peter Bush’s translation of A Film: 3,000 Meters (at a reading in 2015, Bush lamented the book’s unavailability in English). A Film (1920) at first seems to fit the realist mold of Eça de Queiros or Gustave Flaubert, relating the story of Ramon Nonat, an orphan in Girona who sets out to find his parents—or rather, to find his place in the glitzy rich world he imagines they occupied. Apprenticed to a locksmith, the talented, handsome boy quickly gains competence and respect, then shoves off for Barcelona to pursue his fantasy of belonging among the elite. As the unusual title suggests, the narrative takes a cinematic approach; nearly everything occurs at street level, as though the narrator were moving about the city with a camera—a remarkable attempt to adapt an emerging narrative form to literature.

Set just uphill in the Pyrenees, Irene Solà’s When I Sing, Mountains Dance (thanks Stephen Sparks!) features a polyphonic group of narrators, including a cloud and black chanterelle mushrooms. Montage-style, Solà builds a portrait of the region in precise, deeply lyrical, earthy to the taproot prose, everything burning with life, even the geology of the place (given its own narrative). This is no mere novelty; Solà deftly uses signifiers linking characters, generations, and locations, situating passages in time relative to other passages, forming a map of the region, hinting at its history of revolt and suppression of revolt, and confronting shifting tensions between the villagers and outsiders. Among these last are tourists, urban refugees from Barcelona, and a writer—Solà’s stand-in, one might surmise—questioning her place, a subject amply worthy of interest given such arresting, commanding and nuanced writing.

In non-fiction, I put two works above the rest. Gisèle Halimi’s Une Farouche liberté (2020), constructed from interviews just prior to Halimi’s death, traces her trajectory from a Jewish-Berber Tunisian family where life promised little but domestic servitude to her emergence as one of the great judicial and feminist figures of post-war France. The young Halimi’s defense of political prisoner Djamila Boupatcha was instrumental in shifting French attitudes towards the war in Algeria. With Simone de Beauvoir, Halimi persuaded 343 women—including Catherine Deneuve, Ariane Mnouchkine, Françoise Sagan, and Marguerite Duras—to sign a letter admitting to having had an illegal abortion (the group later proudly adopted Charlie Hebdo’s satirical moniker, “Les 343 Salopes”). The letter, along with Halimi’s exoneration of 16-year-old Marie-Claire Chevalier, imprisoned after the classmate who raped her turned her in for having an abortion, led to the 1973 reversal of France’s abortion ban. Halimi served in the French Assemblé Nationale, as UNESCO ambassador, and as an advocate for a united Europe. Her innovative ideas for organizing make Une Farouche liberté an invaluable book – and a timely one – for anyone concerned with justice.

Sebastian Haffner’s Defying Hitler, my non-fiction book of the year, caused a sensation when published in Germany in 2000. Haffner (pseudonym for Raimund Pretzel, whose son Otto here serves as translator) dissects in precise terms the forces that allowed Hitler to come to power. The book begins on August 1, 1914, when the seven-year-old boy’s treasured summer vacation is abruptly cut short by war. He then traces his growth into adulthood with a steady eye attuned to political developments, unpacking the missed opportunities and fatally unwise accommodations; the cultural, economic, social, and psychological weaknesses of his country; the cultural rejection of pleasure, intellectualism and humor; the violence and assassinations (chiefly that of Walter Rathenau) that propelled his country into fascism. Not a word seems out of place in this chilling narrative—a foreboding warning of Europe’s future and of the fascist movements so prevalent today.

When it came to mysteries, I had the most fun re-reading Eric Ambler’s The Light of Day (1962), but I went nuts over Masako Togawa’s The Master Key (1982). Set in the K Apartments for Ladies in an outlying part of Tokyo, the plot involves a missing master key, a buried child, an eerie religious cult, and Japan’s search for stability and rebirth after WWII. But the master key Togawa uses to open a door onto the lives of the building’s unmarried women—the elderly, the young office workers, the building’s staff, all with “secret lives apart from the real world”—makes the “mystery” nearly incidental. I’m on to more from this iconic, revered figure in Japan. [Ed. – Sold!]

I read a lot of plays in 2022. Magical realist Massimo Bontempelli’s Watching the Moon and Other Plays proved the highlight and included a haunting tale of loss of a child; a visit by a surreal, murderous cloud (NOPE!); and a delightful take on Cinderella, who bypasses the prince to run off with a member of the orchestra. Heidi Shreck’s What the Constitution Means to Me should be performed regularly in the U.S. Congress. Other highlights were Franz Wedekind’s Spring’s Awakening and David Murphy’s Conversations on a Homecoming.

As for poetry, I loved Virgil’s The Georgics (“the working of the earth”), a kind of bucolic verse farmers’ almanac on agriculture and animal husbandry that belongs on sustainability reading lists. A. Van Jordan’s M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A brilliantly uses its 50+ poems to recount the life of MacNolia Cox, who at 16 in 1936 would have been the first Black winner of the National Spelling Bee but for machinations of racist judges. I fell deeply into the poems of Frederick Seidel: nimble, coarse, fun, musical, offensive, inoffensive, explosive, moving, provocative, an axe to break up paralyzed discourse, like nothing I’ve encountered in American poetry. Finally, poem-shaped unidentified flying object Deep Wheel Orcadia, by Harry Josephine Giles, wins as most unusual book of the year. Set on a space station whirling beside a gas giant, Giles’s poems, written in Orkney dialect and accompanied by his own peculiar English translations, create a space opera romance that left me entranced, almost literally suspended in indeterminate space, time and language. [Ed. — !]

Wilhelm Kotarbinski, The Setting Sun, date unknown

It was tough whittling down the list to the works above, so I’ll leave off with an incomplete list of those that might have made the cut: Johann von Goethe’s Elective Affinities; Vercors (Jean Bruller)’s Le Silence de la mer; Shirley Hazzard’s The Great Fire; Franz Werfel’s The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, the novel of the Armenian genocide; Yasushi Inoue’s Tun-Huang; Iris Origo’s A Chill in the Air and War in Val d’Orcia; Alberto Moravia’s Roman Stories; Gilbert Adair’s The Dreamers, the novel of May 1968 France (even if it is written by a Brit); James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain; Bora Chung’s Cursed Bunny [Ed. – Paging Frances Evangelista!]; Maria Judite de Carvalho’s Empty Wardrobes; Yuko Tsushima’s Woman Running in the Mountains [Ed. – Boo yeah!]; Nikolai Gogol’s Mirgorod; Gianfranco Baruchello’s How to Imagine: A Narrative of Art, Agriculture and Creativity; Faith Baldwin’s Enchanted Oasis, the romance novel of Palm Springs; and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, my re-read of the year, grand and startling and surprisingly funny three decades past the last time I read it.

Thank you for reading and thank you Dorian for inviting me to do a little writing.

[Ed. – Anytime, Scott. I mean it. seraillon is much missed.]

That’s it, friends—I’m calling a wrap on 2022 year in reading pieces. Except maybe for my own. What’s the over under that I’ll actually write one?

Alina Stefanescu’s Year in Reading, 2022

Posted on February 24, 2023 by banff1972 under book review, Guest post, lists, review, Uncategorized, year in review

Today’s reflection on a year in reading, her second for the blog, is by the inimitable Alina Stefanescu (@aliner). Alina was born in Romania and lives in Birmingham, Alabama with her partner and several intense mammals. Recent books include a creative nonfiction chapbook, Ribald (Bull City Press Inch Series, Nov. 2020) and Dor, which won the Wandering Aengus Press Prize (September, 2021). She is currently working on a novel-like creature. More at www.alinastefanescuwriter.com.

Hervé Guibert, Self-portrait, in front of the Christ mirror

Maurice Blanchot: The Thought From Outside and Michel Foucault as I Imagine Him by Michel Foucault and Maurice Blanchot, trans. Brian Massumi and Jeffrey Mehlman (Zone Books, 1987)

Imagine Michel Foucault and Maurice Blanchot sitting down to portrait the silences in each other’s texts. [Ed. – Lowly editor finds “portrait” an… odd verb here; writer prefers to be a “terrible poet” and keep it. Editor concedes that she’s the artist. P.S. terrible poet as in poete terrible…] Imagine Foucault smoothing his plaid pants and typing:

In ancient times, this simple assertion was enough to shake the foundations of Greek truth: “I lie.” “I speak,” on the other hand, puts the whole of modern fiction to the test.

Speech about speech, or speaking, leads us to what Foucault calls “the outside in which the speaking subject disappears.” In trying to explain why Blanchot’s fiction is indiscernible from his essays and reviews, Foucault also probes what exactly it is that fiction does differently. He locates the “peril” of fiction’s vocabulary in its reliance on familiarity, or its evocation of meanings that “stitch the old fabric of interiority back together in the form of an imagined outside.”

The window is the problem here. Like his description of Blanchot, it is language that speaks around its frame. Although Monoskop gives us Foucault’s part of the book, Blanchot’s is hidden. One could mine this for metaphors or resort to buying the print version, as I did. Either way, this book gives us both thinkers at their best—at their most exposed, visceral, and dangerous.

Kate Colby’s Reverse Engineer (Ornithopeter Press, 2022)

This poetry collection felt like riding an abandoned rollercoaster in a desert haunted by Edmond Jabes’s silences and Rosmarie Waldrop’s close attention to language. I lingered over it, and marked how it circles the question of silence as in the Foucault-Blanchot book, where Foucault wrote: “Literature is not language approaching itself until it reaches the point of its fiery manifestation; it is rather language getting as far away from itself as possible.”

To “reverse engineer” is to study by deconstructing, or to take apart a finished object in order to build it back and understand how it is made. Is the book the reverse engineer – or is it the poet?

The title poem, “Reverse Engineer,” rubs the definition, or the act of defining, in order to draw closer to meaning and language. Borrowing apophatic strategies from mystical theology, Kate Colby approaches the real by negation, by speaking only of what cannot be said. Each word is a mystery, and attempting to speak of the human condition leads to this sort of repetitive negation. The mode of defining by undoing is visible in “Integer,” for example, where an asterisk in the poem (“*a thing complete in itself “) doesn’t designate a note at the bottom of the page. Here, the asterisk is the thing complete in itself, rather than serving its usual referential role. The asterisk signals something, but gives us nothing. I still can’t get over it.

“I Want to Keep Smashing Myself Until I Am Whole”: An Elias Canetti Reader by Elias Canetti, as edited by Joshua Cohen (Macmillan, 2022)

Joshua Cohen’s acuity finally gives us a compilation of Elias Canetti’s extensive opus in small form. His introduction to Canetti’s work is wickedly well-written and engaging. To quote, to note, to invoke:

I might take counsel from Canetti’s wife Veza, herself a novelist of high accomplishment, who once wrote in a letter to Canetti’s brother Georg: “No document that gives access to Canetti’s inmost being must be allowed to survive.”

Or I might take counsel from Georg, who, when Veza asked him to destroy that letter—to destroy all her letters—did not.

And that, I’m realizing, is the best approach: to address myself to the destructions that did happen, to address myself to the burnings.

Included are various excerpts from Canetti’s memoirs, his meditations on family, friends and frenemies—Hermann Broch, Karl Kraus (“a master of accusing people with their own words”), Thomas Mann, Robert Musil—as well as his previously untranslated aphorisms addressed to death.

At one point, Canetti describes his growing awareness of what he called the “acoustic masks” of each person’s voice and way of seeing, particularly their repetitions, intonation, relationship to language. He sits in a bar with his face to a wall and listened as voices moved around him, as they withdrew and returned and misunderstood each other. [Ed. – Sounds like Henry Green, who might have been in the same pub. They were in London at the same time, right?] The solipsism of subjectivity surrounds us at high volume. “It all depends on this: with whom we confuse ourselves,” Canetti whispers.

It’s the End of the World, My Love by Alla Gorbunova, trans. Elina Alter(Deep Vellum, 2023)

“The world cannot be captured by a net,” Alla Gorbunova told Alexandra Tkacheva in an interview in Punctured Lines. Like the world, Gorbunova’s recent book and its surreal St. Petersburg, refuses to be classified or captured. Haunted by folklore, baba-energy, apparatchiks, nomenbratura [ed. – Had to look that one up!], and freshly-minted billionaires, the speakers lose the thread of their thoughts only to find them in the mouth of another. Humor, malice, and agony are indistinguishably betrothed in these linked tales. One senses the chaos of the postsocialist period in Russia in the sheer opportunism and magical thinking of the female speakers. There is no distance between the past and present, Gorbunova seems to insist, the costumes have changed but the lies are the same, as in “Treasures in Heaven: A Tale of God and the Billionaire,” where God drops by to ask the billionaire for a loan. “A story unfolds, often retold,” Gorbunova writes:

“Like this,” said the billionaire, “in my heart there is a needle, it has an eye, in the eye is the gate to heaven.” As soon as the billionaire’s wife heard this, she decided that she wanted to live in heaven, thinking that everything is expensive there, they have all kinds of things, and she climbed into the billionaire’s heart, found the needle, and tried to pass through, but she couldn’t.

Narrative tension builds from the impossible hope to escape the past. One is struck by the eternal pageant of misogyny, and the extent to which no ideology has managed to improve life for Russian women. Elina Alter’s translation brings these defamiliarized scenes to life.

I could see Daniil Kharms grinning at what Gorbunova has wrought, for, as it is written in the final paragraph of “Lord of the Hurricane”:

We don’t know what goes on in the apartment upstairs. We’ve never known. We walk around our apartment in little tin-foil hats. There’s a tornado in Moscow. Our neighbor is a bastard.

Nothing is clarified or explained. We paint our bodies blue to protect ourselves from the curse of whatever comes next in the ashes of failed religion and ideologies. We are all mad, somehow. What does it mean to survive or thrive under such circumstances? What sort of human can be successful as the world ends?

Foucault in Warsaw by Remigiusz Ryziński, trans. Sean Gasper Bye (Open Letter Books, 2021)

Obsession authors extraordinary literature. In 1959, French theorist Michel Foucault was mysteriously expelled from Poland. The archival silence, the absence of documents explaining Foucault’s Polish chapter, so obsessed Remigiusz Ryziński that he wrote a book about it. Foucault in Warsaw is driven by this search for what, if anything, the Polish government had on Foucault. [Eed. – He was ordered to leave Poland in 1958 after possibly having been entrapped by a Polish secret agent; homosexuality was technically legal in Poland at the time, but much condemned.] Shifting between intellectual history and descriptions of his search on the ground, Ryziński chases the mystery of Foucault’s secrecy regarding the Warsaw chapter, when he wrote most of his doctoral dissertation (though it was published in France in 1961). In the preface to the first French edition of The History of Madness, Foucault described the dissertation as beginning on a “a Swedish night” and being “finished in the stubborn bright sun of Polish liberty.” Like Ryziński, Foucault was doing archival research for this book which developed into his first poststructuralist work. To know, for Foucault, is to study, to subject to rigorous, microscopic examination. “Madness is the lack of knowledge,” writes Ryziński, which he takes as central to understanding why Foucault’s dissertation doesn’t provide a history of madness or knowledge—since neither really exists—but focuses instead on “the archaeology of silence,” the articulation of the unspeakable. Gaining knowledge of that which defies knowledge (or unreason) exposes the tension between reason and madness, which is to say, the “normal” cannot “know madness, and so madness remains unthinkable, and light shed on it cannot dispel ignorance.” [Ed. – He had a big fight about Derrida over what the latter took as Foucault’s romantic idea of madness. Anyway, this book sounds great!]

Ryziński knows that Foucault was gay. And he knows that homosexuality was not welcomed by the Polish communist state. Although he suspects that this is the reason for Foucault’s disgrace, he wants evidence—the sort of knowledge that enables the past to become part of what we call history. He finds that homosexuality wasn’t technically a criminal offense, but sex work and prostitution were crimes punishable by law. The writer’s education transpires in this intellectual kinship which leads a reader to hide the archives for a missing history (I don’t want to give away the ending). Foucault’s attention to “conspicuous silences” troubled the balance between binaries—madness or sanity, female or male, heterosexual or gay—and the ontology of freedom, I think, which can only exist alongside prisons, slavery, and repression. The theorist deconstructs and builds nothing to replace what has been ruined, but there is no prescriptive menu, the normative states as the handmaiden of power.

“Knowledge about madness is the illusion of knowledge about anything,” Ryziński argues. This reflects on Foucault’s amoral and limited idea of freedom. At some point, Foucault went to Gdańsk and Krakow to lecture on Apollinaire. The handwritten draft of this lecture, currently housed in Foucault’s archives, is one of the few things he brought back from Poland. It has never been published. Ryziński’s relentless fascination becomes one’s own.

Jósef Czapski, Self-portrait with Lightbulb, 1958

Inhuman Land: Searching for the Truth in Soviet Russia, 1941-1942 by Jozef Czapski, trans. Antonia Lloyd-Jones (NYRB Classics, 2018)

Only the sky can save us, I thought after reading Inhuman Land: Searching for the Truth in Soviet Russia, 1941-1942 byJozef Czapski, a Polish painter, committed pacifist, and involuntary witness who survived incarceration in a Soviet prison camp and lived long enough to look back on a life between prisons, borders, and 20th century horrors. With Proust in one hand and Gide in another, Czapski details the kindness of strangers, the friendships that bloomed in carceral spaces, the devastation of war. While fighting to defend Poland, Czapski was captured by the Soviets. He was one of the few officers to survive the Katyn massacre of 1940. To forget would be a crime against those whose mouths had been frozen shut by death.

The Inhuman Land was translated into English in 1951 because, to quote the dread wiki, this “first-hand account of contemporaneous negotiations with the Soviets over the missing Polish officers . . . became an important document until Russian guilt for the massacres was acknowledged.” Czapski also testified before the US Congress on what Soviet troops had done. This documentary record traces his journey through Soviet Russia trying to find out what happened to the officers of his former regiment. The faces of the living and dead torment Czapski. He remembers; he looks for documents; he takes notes; he gets sick. There is a part where his recollections pause near the hospital window, in the room where he almost died, roiled by fevers and excruciating pain—there, in that room, lacking a metaphysic, he longs for nothing except to exist at less agonized pitch. How is it, Czapski wondered, that respected humans are capable of egotism and self-protection? What does it mean to exist without feeling for others?

One can teach oneself self protective egoism by being standoffish for years on end, and if not egoism, then perhaps to be more detached toward fragile personal affections, more abstract. But what use is that, if I have never been able to see things other than through people. Even Poland has always been embodied for me by a few faces of the living and the dead.

As Czapski convalesced in that hospital room, “the cream white window frame against a pure blue, almost always cloudless sky, very bright in the mornings, then gradually darker, then brightening again, taking on a greenish hue.” [Ed. – I’m reminded of Sebald’s description of the sky outside his hospital window at the beginning of The Rings of Saturn.] This “evocation of a pure blue sky with objects set against it” segues to a recollection of Matisse’s paintings of southern Morocco, and then Gordi’s Piazza San Marco, a sort of mental gallery exhibit provoked by memories of colors and hues. There is a gallery in his mind. Czapski thought about “how a painter could pick out the “sound of that perfect blue, the shout of the white window frame against the azure sky.” From there, in that hospital bed, the remembered world appeared “totally unattainable,” yet it is these moments, gathered into vignettes and vistas, that form the material of the writer’s mind. It was the painter’s eye that saved him, the words on the brush, and the window with a view of the sky. [Ed. – OMG you put this so well; I gotta move this up Mount TBR.]

Although Czapski was intensely Catholic, his commitment to living in conscience was complicated by his religious affiliation. He doesn’t mention, for example, his love affair with Vladimir Nabokov’s younger brother, the poet Sergey Nabokov, from 1924 to 1926, which ended when Czapski went to London seeking medical assistance with his typhoid fever. (One wonders how hospital windows coincide in reverie, in silence, in commemoration.) [Ed. – Sergey died in Neuengammen in 1945, murdered by the Nazis.] When World War II began, Czapski was living in Józefów with the writer Ludwik Hering. The war separated them, and then Czapski moved to Paris, but their love affair continued by correspondence, and one wishes that this epistolary existence would be translated as well.

The Mirador: Dreamed Memories of Irene Nemirovsky By Her Daughter by Elisabeth Gille, trans. Marina Harss (NYRB Classics, 2011)

Irene Nemirovsky’s novel, David Golder, came out in 1929. She had left Russia to live in France with her husband. While living in France, Nemirovsky was arrested by the Gestapo when her daughter was five. She was deported to her death at Auschwitz in July 1942. (Her husband, Michael Epstein, died on the same Nazi transit in November of that year.)

The orphaned daughter, Elisabeth Gille, published The Mirador: Dreamed Memoirs of Irene Nemirovsky By Her Daughter as a biography of her mother, narrated by the mother in first-person, as dreamt or imagined by Gille. In recording her mother’s memoirs as she imagined them, the daughter creates the child, Irene, raised in Kyiv who becomes a writer that refuses to identify as Jewish. There is a direct correspondence between Nemirovsky’s own letters and writings and the character “created” by Gille’s assiduous study of her mother.

Central to these imaginings is the tension between Nemirovsky’s literary dreams and her own mother’s lavish lifestyle-hunger. Nemirovsky’s mother (who is technically Gille’s grandmother) pouted when she wasn’t gifted jewels. [Ed. — I mean, same…] In her daughter’s imagined memoirs, the young Nemirovsky scorns the Russian exiles of 1924 who gather in Paris like nihilistic, pleasure-seeking teenagers living for the moment, refusing to imagine the future. The Whites don’t believe the worst can happen—reality hovers, over-aerated, somewhere in the motion between floating and fleeting. The exiles ignore “the monuments, columns, steles, cenotaphs, each more pompous than the last, that were being erected everywhere, even in the smallest village.” Her glamorous mother, the status-seeking socialite, represents the world of the exiled elite to her; whose extravagant displays of luxury could not read the room. Nostrodamus prophesied that the end of the diaspora’s troubles would come in 1944, but the troubles continue.

World War I taught the young that their elders had died for nothing: “There was nothing left of them but the path of extremism,” according to Gille’s Nemirovsky. The bourgeoisie had nothing to believe in apart from war, domination, and fear. One hears the auspices of Canetti’s later work on crowds when Gille writes that the schoolboy “prefers to be oppressed by a single bully rather than have complete freedom” and be abandoned to the unclear hierarchy of “the crowd.” The dreams written from the author’s longing to know her mother have not aged; the syntax skips across space and time seamlessly. One senses a “lever of love” (Vladimir Nabokov’s neologism for “the diabolical method of tying a rebel to his wretched country by his own twisted heartstrings”) wrestling within the portrayal of Nemirovsky. The heart aches for—and admires—the portrait a daughter creates of her defiant mother, in dialogue with her mother’s rejection of 19th-century high-status femininity which we consume in the present via Hollywood’s latest glam.

The Mirador was published in French in 1992, several years before Irene Nemirovsky’s own Suite Française (which existed in manuscript form) was finally published posthumously in 2004. Unfortunately, Gille did not live to see her mother’s literary reputation secured. But she left a portrait that testifies to love’s studious imaginings and faithfulness.

Wonderlands: Essays on the Life of Literature by Charles Baxter (Graywolf Press, 2022)

Baxter’s Wonderlands is a craft book that doesn’t read like a craft book. The range is profound and immediate, as in the section where Baxter discusses how the lies of politicians affect us when they become narratives which guide lives. The concept of deniability is political but also functions to normalize ignorance or subterfuge. (Gertrude Stein’s references to the thrill of unsubstantiated generalities apply.)

Baxter takes the absence of accountability in fiction as a contribution to conspiracy theory (I’d bracket this with an insistence on religion’s role in privileging belief as a form of knowledge that eschews evidence). Defining the “dysfunctional narrative” as a sort of key to the psyche in the novel where everything is caused by past trauma, Baxter observes that the story isn’t about the story but about the therapy that didn’t happen. The “political culture of disavowals” leads to the “fiction of finger-pointing.” Thus, the responsibility for therapy becomes part of the narrative task, and some of us feel this is too much to ask.

Why is the character unhappy? This matters to us because today happiness is an expectation. Since we can’t blame the abstract corporation, we blame the family who lived and labored under the myth of consumerism. We laugh at them as we consume ourselves. To Baxter, fictions which lack an antagonist “tend to formally mirror the protagonist’s unhappiness and confusion.” Daytime television, particularly talk-shows, make it seem as if family can carry the burden of individual unhappiness, Baxter observes. In their “therapeutic narration… no verdict ever comes in “and no one has the right to judge.” But what about the “poetry of a mistake,” the action’s meaning in time, “its sordid origin, its obscenity,” Baxter wonders. Not for him the glib shrug of Shit happens. Not for him the evasive structural gesture or the “moralizing” which has replaced ethics and self-reflexivity. The therapeutic narrative (or the “already moralized story”) steps in to relieve us from thinking while simultaneously depriving the characters’ actions of meaning. “The injury takes for itself all the meaning”; the injury claims the centerfold. Are we interested in victimization because we are ambivalent about our own desires for power and unequipped to acknowledge them? Error. Baxter suggests, is as true as success.

I relished Baxter’s discussion of performance anxiety in modern life, and how the pressure to perform an appropriate grief, joy, gratitude, etc., corrugates the scene of family reunions, weddings, funerals, etc. Is everyone at the reunion taking notes for their therapist? How do we navigate the extraordinary anxiety of being alive at a time when so much media and language purports to deliver variations on the correct script, the right thing to say when someone dies, the best, the ideal? Is one playing a role on a stage rather than living—is one waiting for the clap or the thunderous clap-back? Nothing anyone says can kill my mother more, but it’s easier for me to be furious at you for saying the wrong thing than to rage against the anonymity and haphazard injustice of loss. What Romanian writer Norman Manaea called “compulsory happiness” is similar to what Charles Baxter calls “compulsory sincerity,” the requirement that one feel a certain way and display it physically and verbally. Maybe even the interpreters are exhausted. Certainly, the literature could use a cold shower and a refresh.

In conclusion, a few books I found to be profoundly intriguing— and which I feel compelled to mention because critical attention often leapfrogs the intriguing in order to focus on the historically significant, the aesthetically attractive, or the well-marketed.

My Manservant and Me by Hervé Guibert, trans. by Jeffrey Zuckerman (Nightboat Books, 2022) for Zuckerman’s splendid translation of Guibert’s controversial book, and for the controversy that Guibert made of writing, personhood, and literary genre.

Disembodied by Christina Tudor-Sideri (Sublunary Editions, 2022) for the unique forests of Tudor-Sideri’s language, and the radical, interstitial resonances of her disembodied writing at a time when embodiment seems to be trending.

Chimeras by Daniella Cascella (Sublunary Editions, 2022) for reasons I’ve given elsewhere. [Ed. – I dunno, google it.]

Dead Souls by Sam Riviere (Catapult, 2021) for its Bernhardian self-implication and provocations, and for its thorough dethroning of the poet’s heroic self-mythos. “A fever of commemoration activity ensued,” the protagonist says— and the poets posed for selfies. For who is more commemorated in contemporary poetics than the poets, themselves? I appreciate being dragged through the mud by Riviere.

Death by Landscape: Essays by Elvia Elk (Soft Skull Press, 2019) for its rigorous interrogation of trauma and self-help bootstraps in the contemporary landscape.

Suicide by Édouard Levé, trans. by Jan Steyn (Dalkey Archive, 2011) because I cannot stop thinking about how epistolarity tangles with fiction, or how the last book we write before dying may be our suicide note. Levé is formidable, heart-breaking, and deeply beloved by this human.

Paradiso by Gillian Rose (Shearsman, 2015) for its vigorous beauty and painstaking attention to mortality, or what it means to live a thinking life.

Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp by Józef Czapski, trans. by Eric Karpeles (NYRB Classics, 2018) for the tenderness of encountering Proust in a carceral environment, and for the reminder that carceral systems remain spaces in which literature has the potential to save lives.

Falling Hour by Geoffrey Morrison (Coach House, 2023) [Ed. — Imma let a 2023 title on a 2022 year in review because it’s Alina and because this book is Canadian.] This was one of the most luscious, immersive, and mind-blowing literary journeys of my adult life. Morrison begins with poetry and wanders through globalization’s alienations in this lyrical, disembodied novel to which I return often, in a somewhat futile though diligent effort to uncover its multiple mysteries.

Scott Lambridis’s Year in Reading, 2022

Posted on February 21, 2023 by banff1972 under Guest post, lists, review, Uncategorized, year in review

Today‘s reflection on a year in reading, his second for the blog, is by Scott Lambridis (@slambridis). Scott’s story “Blind Sticks” was nominated for a 2021 Pushcart award. Before completing his MFA, he earned a degree in neurobiology, and co-founded Omnibucket.com, through which he co-hosts the Action Fiction! performance series. Read more at scottlambridis.com.

Every year I have a goal of reading 52 books. This year I read 111. Here’s the top 10, in the order I finished them.

1. Civilizations, by Laurent Binet (trans. Sam Taylor)

I finished Civilizations in the first week of 2022, on the heels of last year’s top 10 winner, HHhH, by the same author, wondering if his narrative magic would translate from a true story about an architect of the Holocaust to the boundlessness of invented history. Civilizations focuses on five key moments in Western civilization, and in particular the Spanish defeat of the Inca, and turns them on their heads. The Inca survive then defeat the Spanish, come to Europe, usurp the Holy Roman Empire and strip power from the Habsburgs, and became the dominant force of the Western world. The Incan leader Atahualpa worships Machiavelli, dismisses the Christian god as “not a serious being” (compared to the Incan sun god), bans the Inquisition, and leads Europe towards a more tolerant and agrarian society, only to be ultimately thwarted by the Aztec, who’ve made their way across the Atlantic too. In a coda tale, Quixote tilts at Aztec pyramids.

My favorite falsely remembered (as usual) moment is the Inca rejecting Luther’s nailed treatises; the actual scene is of Thomas More and Erasmus exchanging letters about the nailing of the “Ninety-Five Theses of the Sun” to the wooden doors of a German Incan temple instead of Luther’s. In either case, the Reformation is canceled, and Henry’s VIII decides to become a sun worshipper. It’s hilarious, deadly serious, and riveting. There’s something special about a well-done historical reimagining, like watching your favorite books turned into films that match the artistry. There’s a joy enough in recognition; but a secondary joy in watching a new artwork created before your eyes from the pieces of the old. I’m not great at retaining history, so it was hard for me to tell what was based on fact and what was made up, but it didn’t matter. It’s on the list because, like a friend once said of the timeless Borges, Binet’s non-fiction reads like a great tale, while the more implausible the fiction the more true it seems.

2. When We Cease To Understand the World, by Benjamín Labatut (trans. Adrian Nathan West)

In writing these reviews I discovered a theme: reimaginings! Lives, events, artworks reimagined, sometimes attempting to stick close to “fact,” sometimes not at all. When We Cease To Understand the World is the former (mostly), in which Labatut imagines critical scientific discoveries of the 20th century that had tragic effects on either society, or the discoverer. The opening essay/story (the line is blurry here) is the hook, a breakneck tracking of the invention of Prussian blue as a novel paint color prized by Van Gogh and a host of luminaries to the deaths wracked by industrialization of nitrogen-based fertilizers, and ultimately to the cyanide pills hoarded by Nazi soldiers. The remaining stories are more portraits than compressed timeline, but no less impressive, in particular the trials of Heisenberger (uncertainty!) and Schrödinger (the cat!), and the conflict of each’s mad grandeur at having faced, in their own way, the terrible ambiguity of the quantum lying at the void upon which all reality is said to stand. We stare, with these poor trifling geniuses, into the void not above, but within. There’s a Lovecraftian effect of the seers describing the indescribable horrors of mathematical infinity, but, as with W.G. Sebald, it is less these abstractions and more the nuts-and-bolts details of the mundane that captivate and disturb. Labatut takes his time to add flesh and blood to characters known principally through textbooks, and it doesn’t matter what is real or invented (as I’ve argued to my other book club members): truth remains.

3. Parable of the Blind, by Gert Hofmann (trans. Chritopher Middleton)

Some books shine just by making you giggle from start to finish. Here Hofmann dramatizes the famous painting of the blind leading the blind, following a group of sightless paupers who must make their way to the site where a mysterious artist awaits to paint them in the act of tumbling, one after another, into a ditch.

I read this on a ski trip with my dad and 7-year-old daughter, right at the point of maximum friction between my desire to make him proud of the daughter he rarely saw, and my desire to be free of needing his approval for how I was raising her. I welcomed Parable as pure absurdist comedy, which is all it would be in anyone’s else’s hands. In Hofmann’s hands though, our empathy is not so easily incited; we must wrestle, page after excruciating page, between pity and desire, with the question of whether we actually want this senseless gaggle to fulfill their humiliation, and only now do I see that it offered far more to me in those few days with my scowling father and crying child than simply escape—an exercise in compassion for all of us who walk the line between our pride and our shame. [Ed. – Nicely put!]

4. The Employees, by Olga Ravn (trans. Martin Aitken)

This, this is just what I want from science fiction—and yet it’s hard to explain why, or even what it is. Let’s list the facts. Novella-thin, tiny chapters, a collection of interviews, not necessarily in the correct order, with workers (both human and android) on a spaceship. Each chapter is such a strange jewel, it’s almost like a collection of connected flash fiction. The narrative thread that holds them together is as inscrutable as the objects the employees describe, those they’ve collected in their travels and are attempting to study. The objects are never described directly, only in relief, and mostly by their effects, creating a creeping unease as the objects begin to inspire profound emotional reactions. Everyone seems to slowly go mad, though why is unclear, particularly without even chronology to rely on. A lesser book would lose its way without clear trajectory, but The Employees creeps ever forward to existential disaster, held taut by the hope of uncovering the nature of its mysteries (objects, events, participants, interviewers). The sensation is of being an alien observer looking down through a microscope on a world we know we’ll never understand, without being able to look away. Is that enough to get you to read it? [Ed. – Yep.]

5. In the Time of the Butterflies, by Julia Álvarez

The first entry on this year’s list that’s part of my three-year literary globetrotting trek in which I’m reading a book by an author from every country of the world [Ed. – Hmm born in NY tho…], this dramatization of true events during Trujillo’s dictatorship in the Dominican Republic tells the story of the Mirabal Sisters, whose murders helped strengthen the resistance. The story is told through the Mirabals’ points of view: activist Minerva who joins the resistance, naive Maria Therese who follows without really knowing what she’s doing, tragically devout Patria who can’t escape her fate, and anxious homebody Dedé who ultimately carries the guilt of survival and the hollow responsibility of her prescience. Butterflies offers what I expected to find when setting off to read authors from countries whose voices I don’t usually hear: a glimpse into the mundane particulars of a culture’s life, and an authentic account of its myths and histories. What I should probably also have expected is that the literature beyond the US/European borders centers on the effects of colonialism, dictatorships, or both. Butterflies is no exception, but it is an exemplar. The narrative gives voice to each of the Mirabals as it advances across their lives, shifting deftly at moments of tension between their perspectives as they negotiate their obligations to survival, family, resistance, and each other. It is a rich telling of a heartbreaking story of a fascinating family suffering in the attempt to thrive under oppression: a story we seem to need to hear again and again. And the cherry on top is a film version with Salma Hayek and Edward James Olmos, which sticks to just one butterfly’s perspective, but is lovely and at least faithful enough to let you relive their story one more time.

6. Temporary People, by Deepak Unnikrishnan

In the inscription I wrote on the inside flap of this book, a Christmas gift to my dad’s girlfriend Valerie, a Jewish French-Moroccan who first won me over years ago by giving me the gift of a t-shirt featuring Camus’s The Stranger, I described this collection of linked short stories as what Kafka might have written if he’d been a blue-collar immigrant in the United Arab Emirates, and had a bit more humor. [Ed. – More humour?!?]

Unnikrishnan’s temporary people are the gig workers of the Arabian peninsula, making up the majority of the UAE’s population, imported with oil wealth to build the infrastructure of nouveau royal white-collar civilization, though without any hope of citizenship or reprieve from the fear of deportation, and Unnikrishnan explores their temporariness in all its literal forms and magical transmogrifications.

Observe: workers are literal tools tossed from construction sites when broken or unneeded or just by accident, while a young woman attempts to put what she can back together. A sultan harvests crops of perfect laborers, only to have them die off twelve years in. A tongue flees its body and verbs flee their sentences into lives of their own. There’s a sexually abusive elevator. My greedy dad must’ve stolen Valerie’s book since he texted me one night: “life of cockroaches, one decides 2 walk on 2 legs and talk… while boy sprays bug killer” and a string of ROTFLs. The invention never tapers: no clunkers here. Each story is a world of its own, full of sarcasm, playfulness, satire, anger, and love.

7. An African in Greenland, by Tete-Michel Kpomassie (trans. James Kirkup)

In April we sold our 40-acre olive farm in California [Ed. — !] and spent the summer homeless and traveling in the US and Europe, finally landing further north in the PNW in September. I read this bizarre memoir at the start of those travels, snapping pics of passages highlighting the delightfully absurd but endearing travels of the first African to arrive in Greenland and experience Inuit culture. As a child in Togo, Kpomassie encounters in a library a book on Greenland, and the idea of such a stark icy landscape so fascinates him in contrast with the oppressive heat and dust of his native Africa that he begins a lifelong mission to travel there, no matter how long or by what means it takes, and after making his way, year by year, from Northern Africa to Scandinavia, one odd job at a time, he finally steps off the boat on its shores, much to the shock of the locals.

What follows is not just a fascinating account of local culture, and history of (no surprise here) Arctic colonialism, or a collection of small town conflicts, hilariously endearing personalities, and environmental trials as Kpomassie floor-surfs from family to family while learning to ice fish, dogsled, navigate a featureless landscape, cook ice, survive on raw skin and fat, and avoid death by freezing in a much wider variety of forms than I expected (snapping a frozen spinal cord?!), but also a tense existential journey of an unlikely and joyful narrator absolutely in love with all of it and needing more, needing more cold (!!), even more cold, desiring nothing but to move ever northward, into deeper and deeper desolation, without any clear explanation of why. And all the while Kpomassie’s natural sense of rhythm and movement keeps the pages turning.

I enjoyed this book so much that after I turned its last page and tucked it into my suitcase I felt a growing longing to return to it that grew stronger with each temporary destination—not necessarily to the hilarious little social hierarchies enacted by the Danes and native Greenlanders, or to the phantasmagoria of ice survival techniques—but perhaps just to get a little bit closer to that single-minded calling of where home is, so that it might rub off and guide me too.

8. Saint Sebastian’s Abyss, by Mark Haber

“My job as a critic was to lay waste to the work and when the work survived, when the work was resurrected despite my attacks, when the work prevailed despite my many attempts on its life, then I had succeeded as a critic.”

I loved this book the moment I received that text-messaged quote from my friend who always discovers books before me. Abyss is at the nexus of two of my favorite micro-genres—hate lit, in which characters unleash a torrent of lushly articulated venom; and art fictions, in which we’re thoroughly convinced of the merits (or lack) of artworks that don’t exist.

The plot is simple: two academics are obsessed with a marginally famous painting, claiming it is the greatest artwork ever completed or conceived, only they differ—grossly—in their reasons why. What follows is a 200-page argument, tracking the divergence of their careers through an escalating rivalry, culminating in a deathbed scene that does everything you want it to, without offering even a little bit of what you wanted from it. [Ed. – Good way to put it.] The telling of it, though, is half the fun, a rhythmically hypnotic repetitive syntax that aids in the forgetting that this brilliantly divisive painting and its painter do not actually exist. It’s so convincing that I was fooled yet again when I started writing these reviews, thinking it was yet another historical reimagining, like the feuds in Janet Malcolm’s In the Freud Archives instead of a novel.

Their feud’s finale is, like all great endings, unexpected but inevitable, mysterious but complete. Haber strips away all semblance of dramatic irony, leaving the reading wondering alongside the narrator what was actually true in the life of his rival, and more importantly, what that truth means for his own hate, his love, his career, his entire life. By the end we’re as spun as that tragic narrator, but at least we can close the book. And in my case at least, instigate an argument with my own literary rival [Ed. – You… have a literary rival??] about its greatest merits that continues to this day.

9. Trust, by Domenico Starnone (trans. Jhumpa Lahiri)

Trust tracks a pair of relationships: a couple make a pact to keep each other’s darkest secret, only to break up soon after; then he marries another, has a family, a career, etc., all while wondering if his secret has been kept and whether he should ask his ex-girlfriend about it.

I didn’t think Trust would make the top ten. It was the last one in, edging past new books by two favorite authors, Samanta Schweblin and Werner Herzog. How? Why?! There’s no literary fireworks here, and it’s not particularly weird or even unique. Yes, I couldn’t stop reading it, gobbling it down in 3 days, and was sad to finish, and yes, there’s plenty of narrative tension in finding out what our protagonist’s terrible secret is (spoiler: you don’t), wondering if he’ll confront her and potentially cause their agreement to unravel, and sure, there are a couple interesting shifts of point of view towards the end, but that’s not it.

It’s tempting to invoke relatability, that terrible term I try so hard to reject in fiction. I couldn’t help but recognize familiar patterns of dialogue, invocations and accusations that were eerily familiar in the long dark journey to reestablish harmony in my own marriage this past year, and I admit I wondered throughout whether I was only really enthralled because of how crisply he tracked the nuances of growing resentment in the relationships, and the erosion of, well, trust. It is not the relatability though, I promise (partially to myself), but the precision. Relatability is an excuse for liking something for the ease in which you can enter into the world. What’s rare and astonishing for books like Trust is how they unexpectedly linger in your mind, long after you finish them, and even enlarge. You can’t stop thinking about them because, as Peter Orner once described the best of fiction, these characters have so much flesh and blood it hurts to even call them characters, and when they’re gone it feels like something died.

10. Death of Somoza, by Claribel Alegría (trans. Darwin J. Flakoll)

Native Nicaraguan Alegría does the unthinkable in this thin volume by connecting (via fav Cortazar!) with a group of real-life assassins in order to tell a behind-the-scenes account of political revolt. Through interviews with the anonymized assassins, we’re handed a vivid thriller about the year-long planning and executing of the murder of brutal Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle after he flees to Asunción, Paraguay in 1980.

The group moves across South and Central American borders coordinating, training, supplying, surveilling, establishing temporary identities, and eventually, after bazooka-ing Somoza, escaping. It’s an insider view of the socio-political climate of the time, connecting the countries, dictatorships, revolutions and counter-revolutions, which also managed to enrich the effect of related South/Central American books on my around-the-world tour, adding context to all (special shout-out to the bizarrely accomplished Stroessner regime in Paraguay).

Reading Death of Somoza feels taboo, as if the CIA is about to knock on your door for possessing a how-to on political assassination. During the opening pages, moral questions arise of what rights this group had to “bring Somoza to justice,” acting, as they did, as judge, jury, and executioner, but as commando members’ personalities emerge alongside their humanity, those questions become insignificant. Instead, you take your place alongside Ramón and the rest of his crew feeling the same inescapable need to wipe Somoza off the earth, and the terrible anxiety of responsibility—each burdened to care more for success than survival.

Bryce Sears’s Year in Reading, 2022

Posted on February 7, 2023 by banff1972 under Guest post, lists, review, Uncategorized, year in review

Today’s reflection on a year in reading, his second for the blog, is by Bryce Sears (@BryceSears5). Bryce, one of the nicest people on Book Twitter (which is saying something), is an avid reader and writer who lives in Oakland.

It looks like I read about a book a week in 2022. Notable also that about four books in every five or so I read last year were by women. I favored women writers by about the same margin the year before last, too. I’m not sure why I’ve been reading mostly women. I haven’t planned to do so – not as a habit. Like anyone else, I’m just following my own interests in reading. Years ago, I spent a lot more time reading men, perhaps favoring them by as lopsided a ratio. Months of reading Nabokov, Bellow, Naipaul, Coetzee. So, maybe I’m bringing things back into balance? I wonder too, as I think about reading Fosse and Knausgaard in 2023, if I might be going back to reading more men. We’ll see. It has been exciting reading more women. I think that, not being the primary beneficiaries of a patriarchy, the women I’ve been reading have tended to see the world as more dangerous than did the men I used to read more of.

The Book of Goose, and some other works by Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li and Shirley Jackson top the list of writers I read the most of last year. I had previously read only a little of both. With Li, I had read her second story collection, Gold Boy, Emerald Girl. Then, last year, I read the first collection, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers. [Ed. – I feel like those early collections don’t get enough love these days.] With that, I had a feeling something had clicked for me with her writing. I read her third novel, Where Reasons End, as well as her collection of memoir essays, Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life. These are both pretty somber books. Li has spoken in interviews about her own attempts to commit suicide and she wrote, in Dear Friend, about these attempts. In 2017 her son, at 16, took his own life. She writes, in Where Reasons End, a work of fiction, about a mother’s grieving following the suicide of her son. Toward the end of last year, I read The Book of Goose, Li’s most recent novel and my favorite of hers. More recently, finishing in January of 2023 (I’d like to call this part of a “long 2022”), I read The Vagrants, her first novel, which is very good and very bleak.

I realize this may all make Li sound like a writer of mostly bleak stories. And her work is often quite somber, at least in these books I’ve read. But it isn’t always. The Vagrants, which deals, among other things, with the oppression of free speech in China, struck me as bleak mostly for political reasons. Dear Friend has chapters about suicide, as mentioned, but is mostly about reading (Maxim Gorky, Elizabeth Bowen, Ivan Turgenev, Thomas McGahern, William Trevor, Marianne Moore, among others). The stories are terrific and varied. The Book of Goose is dark and delightful.

I like how Li describes the human predicament. She doesn’t go in much for metaphor. She uses short sentences and short paragraphs. She has written about reading Tolstoy, and her writing can remind me of his in moments when humanity seems to shine out of her paragraphs. I had that sense while reading The Vagrants, especially, but also while reading The Book of Goose. The latter has the feel of a fable. I wouldn’t describe it as a funny book. But it did, like The Vagrants, strike me as having deep wells of humor. Consider its narrator, 13-year-old Agnès, thinking here about her friend Fabienne, and questioning her own belief in god:

Fabienne loved making nonsense about god. She claimed she believed in god, though what she meant, I thought, was that she believed in a god that was always available for her to mock. I did not know if I believed in god – my father was an atheist and my mother was the opposite of an atheist. If I had been closer to one or the other, it would be easier for me to choose. But I was close only to Fabienne. Perturbatrice of god, she called herself, and said I was one, too, because I was always on her side. In that sense we were not atheists. You had to believe that god existed so you could make mischief and upend his plans.

What I love here, especially, is that “If I had…” bit. Yes, it is a little bleak how casually Li has her narrator put her religious belief up for grabs. It is as if Li is saying, Yes, that is how we build our identities. But isn’t that mostly true? And isn’t it funny that we are like that?

We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and some other works by Shirley Jackson

I can’t believe I waited so long to read Shirley Jackson. [Ed. – You’re ahead of me! I know, it’s a scandal.] But here, at last, I’ve made a start. My summer last year was the summer of Shirley Jackson. It wasn’t planned, not (again) as a habit. On a whim, I read We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Jackson’s last novel. I had always assumed it was a kind of haunted house story, like The Haunting of Hill House. Somehow – very likely from the Backlisted podcast, as Castle is the subject of their 52nd episode – I wised up. A house figures prominently in Castle, as in much of Jackson’s work. But Castle is about siblinghood and mass hysteria, not to mention the anxieties of adolescence. It has Gothic elements. It resembles a haunted house story. But it isn’t supernatural. Not in the least. Just a tale about the remnants of your average family getting by after one of them has murdered the others with some arsenic in the fruit salad.

If you haven’t read Castle, don’t wait. I wish I hadn’t. I followed it with a binge. I reread The Lottery, which I hadn’t read in decades. It’s still a knockout. I read The Haunting of Hill House, then The Road Through the Wall, then Hangsaman. Haunting struck me as a little dull, perhaps because its approach has been used so often elsewhere since its publication. I should have read it when I was younger. I liked Road a lot, but Hangsaman came closest for me to the thrill of Castle, which is still my favorite Jackson. I read Dark Tales, another story collection (“The Summer People” is a stunner in that one). I read The Sundial, too, in which Jackson turns her knack for foreboding tension into comedic gold. (Pitch-black comedic gold, if that makes sense.) Another Do as I Say Not as I Did? Don’t sleep on The Sundial.

Somewhere along the way, I read A Rather Haunted Life, the Ruth Franklin biography. It is a sad thing about our time with Jackson, who died in 1965 at age 49, only a few years after Castle was published. Her most popular book in her lifetime – her biggest seller by some margin – wasn’t Castle, or any of the world-famous books mentioned above. It was a book called Life Among the Savages, the best, I gather, of the comical chronicles of everyday family life Jackson wrote for the women’s magazines of her day (another collection of these chronicles is called Raising Demons). I’m not here to speak ill of comical family chronicles. I have copies of both of these books and look forward to reading them. Still, new to her work as I am, aware I’m only the latest of many to have this thought, I can’t help but wish we’d gotten more time with Jackson. I can’t help but wish she had seen her reputation rise based on the books we celebrate her for now, or other books she might have written. Had she lived even into her 80s, she would have been alive and presumably writing in the 1990s. Crazy-making, thinking of what she might have come up with in those years.

The Dominant Animal and Kick the Latch, by Kathryn Scanlan

I read two books by Kathryn Scanlan last year. Earlier in the year, after loving a story of hers (called “As the Dick Would Have It”) in Southwest Review [Ed. – Ok that is a a good title], I picked up The Dominant Animal, a collection of very short stories. I read it quickly and liked it a lot. I’d recommend it anyone who doesn’t need a story to convey a meaning of some sort that is especially clear. Some of the stories in this collection were published, I believe, in Noon, the journal Diane Williams founded. Probably everyone knows this, but Williams is famous for writing very short stories. People write of her stories that they skirt meaning in interesting ways. I find her stories interesting. Her narrators often strike me as shocking, even horrifying. Most of them I find comical. I experience the people in her stories speaking and behaving in ways I think, at first, people never speak or behave in real life. Then, sometimes, I start to think people do sometimes talk and act like that. In any case, even as I think now that Scanlan is portraying characters in a somewhat more realistic way than I read Williams as doing, or intending to do, my read of The Dominant Animal at the time (a somewhat shallow read, I hope I’m making clear, though I hope it may help readers new to her work) was along these lines – that Scanlan was doing a similar sort of thing to what Williams is doing.

Kick the Latch, which I read in September, is a quite different sort of book from The Dominant Animal. It is a kind of novel. A single, first person narrative of the life of a horse trainer named Sonia, a woman Scanlan interviewed whose voice (I’m quoting here from the afterward and the French flaps) she transcribed and amplified and “used to write the book, which is a work of fiction.” In some ways, the book reads like a memoir written by Sonia. It would feel very much like a memoir, I think, if it had included more details that identify her, like her last name. As it is, Sonia can feel at times like an everywoman. That isn’t a bad thing, to my thinking. The book is terrific. Moving, at times harrowing, odd, above all interesting. Scanlan has a wonderfully taught prose style. Producing a book in this way raises ethical questions. I can imagine someone trying this technique – producing a novel based on interviews with a working-class person who doesn’t want credit as a cowriter – in a way I’d consider exploitative. The hosts of the Literary Friction podcast interviewed Scanlan and wondered, as a kind of thought experiment, how our reaction to the book might change if Sonia were suing Scanlan over some kind of misrepresentation. That would change things for me, certainly. So, I count myself lucky nothing of the sort seems to be happening. The book is so good. Just thinking of it again now, I want to reread it. All the while I was reading it, I wished my grandparents – my grandparents! – were alive so that I might convince them to read it. If you knew them you’d get the emphasis. They were open-minded about literature, but weren’t great readers. My grandmother was a big Danielle Steel fan. But they were Texans who retired to a horse-racing life in New Mexico. They could sound at times like Sonia does in Kick the Latch. And the storytelling in the book is so naturally done. My grandparents would have loved it. I bet you would too. [Ed. – Been hearing a lot about this, but this has sold me! Thanks, Bryce.]

In Memory of Memory, by Maria Stepanova (tr. Sasha Dugdale)

I’m a sucker for the “meditation on” label in book marketing. Give me Fernando Pessoa journaling for five hundred pages about nostalgia, and his daily life at the office. Give me Claudio Magris, traveling the Danube, letting its scenery take his thinking where it will. Give me Nathalie Léger, on a three-book quest to understand herself through the lives of other artists. If the feeling of a mind letting itself wander a bit aimlessly thrills you too, you may love In Memory of Memory as I did. The book is a kind of tribute Stepanova is writing to her family. The digressive nature of this tribute may make it difficult to track what exactly is happening to her family. I could find myself losing threads. Still, I didn’t mind. The digressions are wonderful. They’re most of the book. The family history, in some sense, is a frame to support them. Stepanova writes about Sebald and Joseph Cornell, Tsvetaeva, Walter Benjamin, Francesca Woodman, among other writers and artists. She writes about history. Her family had better luck than many other Jewish families did in Russia during the 19th and 20th centuries. [Ed. – Low bar…] In Memory of Memory isn’t about the worst human suffering of those years. It’s about some people who escaped it. This is a source of some tension for Stepanova. She writes with some regret that she had no heroes in her family, that they all “appeared to live utterly apart from grinding mills of the era.” In this sense, the book strikes me a tribute to ordinary people, too, as well as to art and literature.

How can I only have read a book a week last year and I’m still running out of space for this piece? (Because I’m longwinded, that’s how.) [Ed. – Haha I’ll see you and raise you…]

I don’t want to miss saying that I read and loved J.A. Baker’s The Peregrine last year, too – a somber book of perfect sentences. You won’t read it without planning to reread it. It is that good.

I loved Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet, one of the funniest books I read last year. Did you know she was friends with Jodorowsky? I didn’t until a few months ago, when someone said so on Twitter (so it must be true). I want to read everything by her now. I want to learn all about her life, too.

I loved Elif Batuman’s The Possessed. Another book that had me laughing. It was one a very few non-fiction books I read last year. I loved Jenny Erpenbeck’s Visitation (tr. Susan Bernofsky), and Magda Szabó’s The Door (tr. Len Rix). I hope to read a lot more of both writers. I read, spread out over most of the year, the seasonal quartet of Ali Smith. I want to read more of her work. And Sleepless Nights – I can’t not mention Sleepless Nights! My first Elizabeth Hardwick. I see a lot more of her work in my future. [Ed. – Thanks, Bryce. So many writers, right???]

Isaac Zisman’s Year in Reading, 2022

Posted on February 4, 2023 by banff1972 under Guest post, lists, Uncategorized, year in review

Today’s reflection on a year in reading, poetic and stormy, is by Isaac Zisman. Isaac is a writer and editor based in Oakland, CA. Find him on all socials @octopus_grigori and at http://isaaczisman.com.

I confess to having a reticent memory. I keep few records. I should be more organized. Twenty-twenty-two was a year of reading—haven’t they all been? as well as I can recall—and yet I’m not sure it was a year of overmuch finishing. The year began in an overheated apartment in Manhattan. It could’ve been storming. Maybe lightning struck the tall building that everyone knows, everyone sees, the most witnessed building in history, perhaps, but whose name I here elide. A website I’ve never come across before says it was 55 degrees and raining at noon. It says nothing about thunder. I had Covid then, which meant I was on the couch under an old blanket. My partner prepared a small bite of caviar on toast the night before and I remember it only as texture.

I type in “books” into my phone’s camera roll and 534 images pop up. I add “2022” and the number drops to 136. Tapping “see all” brings them up in chronological order and so I can see I began the year with a small stack, my hand gripping the three books together above the sloping parquet of the apartment’s floor.

The first is I am writing ~~you~~ from afar: a novel graphic, by moyna pam dick, a gift from my friend Jared Fagen, a writer and the publisher of Black Sun Lit, the press who released the novel. My favorite page was one of four artful squiggles that appear to have been drawn with a weak Bic pen. Next in my hand is the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation of The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky. I don’t think I made it past Father Zosima this go around. My copy of Crime and Punishment, ibid. trans. etc., sits next to it on the shelf now and I recall that in high school I thought it was a minor victory to take to the cover with a sharpie in order to change FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY into ODOR TOE. [Ed. – Big D would have been proud.] Thank god I left the spine clean. The third book is Janet Malcolm’s In the Freud Archives, in which a post-it note roughly lodged suggests I didn’t progress very far at all. [Ed. – Shame, it’s terrific!] I have the faint impression of a war between critics for mantle of Freud’s inheritance. I remember laughing at that.

Scrolling forward, my phone offers up mostly domestic scenes in which books appear. My partner eating soup at our little table next to the bookcase; the dog sprawled out beneath the same, his toys arranged on top of him in what was probably my idea of a joke; a giant pile of nachos at a friend’s apartment next to an edition of the Hokusai Manga, the astonishing book of figuration, expression, and Edo period garments by the painter of “The Great Wave Off Kanagawa.” In the background, the Los Angeles Rams square off against the Cincinnati Bengals, projected to nearly life size on the far wall. [Ed. – Ah, sportsball!]

On Feburary 2^nd, I took a photo of single page of Ulysses (p. 489 in the Gabler edition, I discover, pulling down the book now from a high shelf). I’ve highlighted a name: “Isaac Butt.” [Ed. – Heh.]

Two weeks later I took a picture of String of Beginnings, the memoir of Michael Hamburger, translator of Paul Celan and basis of the character Michael Hamburger in Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn—for no representation can claim more than resemblance. I strikes me that I could steal the title for this little essay.

In March, friends online directed me to Guy Davenport—I’m sure you know these friends, perhaps you can count yourself among them. I picked up a copy of the guy davenport reader, primarily for the story “The Aeroplanes at Bescia,” a glorious assemblage of the fictional lives of Franz Kafka, the brothers Otto and Max Brod, and an atmospherically distant Ludwig Wittgenstein. For some reason, my hardback copy came wrapped in four identical dust jackets. I read around in Questioning Minds, Davenport’s lifetime of correspondence with the critic Hugh Kenner. My used edition of Apples and Pears, purchased later,contains a clipping—the author’s obituary in the Washington Post.

Late May found me in a strange version of a doctor’s office, a sort of wellness situation that goes beyond the purview of this text that I am writing now. The walls are adorned in a garish wallpaper and in my hand is a copy of the Zohar, though I can’t read Hebrew beyond sounding out the letters. I remember we spoke of being and becoming and that the doctor gave an impression of someone coming to poetry for the first time, his mind rigid with math and chemistry suddenly loosened at the core by the concept of metaphor. He liked to imagine beneficent angels, he told me.

On June 5^th I bought another bookcase and took the stacks off the floor.

On June 10^th I received a copy of Gordon Lish’s Peru from a seller on eBay. It smelled so rank I couldn’t bear to open it.

On June 16^th I took a photo of an epigraph. “The first memory is of memory itself” –GIORGIO AGAMBEN. I have no idea to which book this quote attends.

In late June, we spent a week at a rental, a house on the New York State historic registry as it was once the home of Lincoln Barnett, a science journalist and editor for Life Magazine and the first to write a popular account of Einstein’s relativity for an American audience. It is possible that the great man, Einstein himself may have sat in this house, I thought as I leaned, head in hands at the old desk with its view of Lake Champlain and the sweet mildew smell of old books. Next to me sat my stack of Romanians—Mihail Sebastian, Dumitru Tsepeneag, Norman Manea, translations by Philip Ó Ceallaigh, Alistair Ian Blyth, Linda Coverdale. I composed half a chapter of my own book, adrift down a Dâmbovița of the mind.

By August I was reading Fosse again, this time Morning and Evening, trans. Damion Searls. I could not yet return to the Septology, also via Searls, the first volume of which had been my companion in the first weeks of the pandemic. If for Merve Emre reading Jon Fosse’s Septology was “the closest I have come to feeling the presence of God here on earth,” for me it was something different. The particular had exploded into the particulate. I have only been able to open it again now, but that is a reflection for next year. I am reminded, too, of the great Jewish mystic painter Ori Sherman and his series The Creation which depicts the seven days of Genesis. The last image is of the verdancy of the world, fecundity in potentia. God is at rest and emerging from the algal depths, from the swirling mass of green and blue signifying life and growth and wildness and all that is to come, ascends a radiant sphere. But it is neither the sun, nor the light of the world, nor of God, nor the gnostic light of secret knowledge. It is a crowned sphere inchoate, a virus. [Ed. — !]

Finding myself one of the few remaining residents at the end of a writing conference later that month, I laid claim to a stack of books abandoned by the side of a path. One of the novels was The Hundred Year House by Rebecca Makkai, who taught at the conference. At that moment, I saw her boarding a van to the airport and rushed over to greet her. I asked for an inscription, something I’ve rarely done. “To Isaac,” she obliged, “who stole this book!”

I returned to Lincoln Barnett’s house on the lake where I read Samantha Hunt’s mysterious essay collection, The Unwritten Book: An Investigation. Two days later, a cyclone descended, its epicenter the little spit of rock and soil on which the house perches above the lake. The windows blew in off their frames. Trees fell. Power lines draped across the road. The event lasted less than a minute, but we were trapped for days. We played scrabble and drank whisky and ate grilled hot dogs, the dented Weber, which the storm had flung across the yard and tipped to the edge of the small cliff at the far edge of the property, being our only method for cooking. I read Amit Chaudhuri’s Sojurn and dreamed of Berlin.

September was spent reading apartment listings. The Covid deals were gone. Rents had doubled, tripled. Our building had sold and was to become condos. We left Manhattan under a brilliant sky and headed back to California. In my backpack came a copy of Javier Marías’s A Heart So White, trans. Margaret Jull Costa, and as we drove toward the west, the smell of wildfire and dry grass, terrible and familiar, returned.

We arrived back in Oakland at the beginning of October, to the place where we’d lived before moving to New York, to the plague house of the first of the Covid years, and, before that, to nearly a decade of our lives. I returned to Bolaño and he carried me through the fall.

There were other things read, I’m sure, though the question of when exactly eludes me. I know, for instance, that I loved Emily Hall’s The Longcut, Jessica Au’s Cold Enough for Snow, Sublunary Edition’s magisterial edition of Marguerite Young’s Collected Poems. That I reread swaths of Hans Magnus Enzenberger’s Tumult, trans. Mike Mitchell, after his passing. That I read a long-travelled copy of Grimmish by Michael Winkler, sat enthralled by Sergio Chejfec’s My Two Worlds, trans. Margaret B. Carson, inhaled December by Alexander Kluge and Gerhard Richter, translation by Martin Chalmers. That I read the fictions of friends, sworn to secrecy until their much deserving publication. That I read essays and poems, criticism, lists of albums, cookbooks, articles, manuals, comics, menus, books of photography, road signs. The work of my new, online companions—how good it feels to have such talented peers. [Ed. – heart emoji] I see the silvered spines of the New Directions Storybook editions on the shelf beside me, I see the bookmark wedged somewhere in the first third of Mircea Cărtărescu’s Solenoid, trans. Sean Cotter—the image of twine emerging from the narrator’s belly button producing a shudder once again. On my desk the piles begin to grow once more—the books I pulled off the shelf to remember, the two translations of Clarice Lispector’s The Hour of the Star, Giovanni Pontiero and Benjamin Moser, respectively, the copy of Annie Ernaux’s Happening, trans. Tanye Leslie, that I read breathless in a single sitting as December closed. And the Septology, arriving again to start anew. It was a messy year, but edifying. What emerges next, I’m not sure.

Hope Coulter’s Year in Reading, 2022

Posted on January 31, 2023 by banff1972 under Guest post, lists, review, Uncategorized, year in review

Today’s reflection on a year in reading, her third, 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.

David Hockney, Nathan Swimming Los Angeles, 1982

2022 turned out to be a good reading year. I got a wider shot at e-book availability by joining a second public library in the adjacent city. [Ed. – “city.”] Then, by pecking through recommendation lists and hopping from screen to screen, I was able to keep my library hold shelves reassuringly filled—staving off that dire malady known as Running Out of Something Good To Read. [Ed. – Extremely bad. Jenny Davidson writes about some psychological studies done on this phenomenon in Reading Style.] Along the way I ran across some new obsessions.

Starting with nonfiction, I enjoyed and was moved by Suleika Jaouad’s Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted. It’s a cancer narrative that stands out on account of Jaouad’s youth, frankness, and writing chops, as well as the fact that the second half becomes a road-trip book. Jaouad discovered her cancer right after graduating from Princeton. In the flash of an eye the promising, carefree prospect of her twenties became a hellish ordeal. She’s still fighting cancer, and I wish her all the best for recovery. This book is a gift.

Thinking of memoirs by feisty young women, Crying in H-Mart, by Michelle Zauner got a lot of attention this year. For me it was an okay read, but not as memorable as Jaouad’s book. On the other hand, I recommend Lynne Cox’s Swimming to Antarctica: Tales of a Long-Distance Swimmer not for any particular magic in the telling but for the extraordinary nature of Cox herself—her athletic prowess, her ability to connect with people around the world, the cheerful way she greets challenges of all kinds.

Another thoroughly satisfying memoir was Marcus Samuelsson’s Yes, Chef, ghostwritten by Veronica Chambers. Samuelsson is the Ethiopian-born, Swedish-raised culinary phenom who co-founded the Red Rooster restaurant in Harlem. His account of his Scandinavian upbringing; his rise through some of the most demanding restaurant kitchens in Europe, under despotic chefs; and his lifelong love affair with food and culture make this a book to relish on many levels. [Ed. – I see what you did there!]

George Saunders’s A Swim in the Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life is a terrific read for anyone who wants to dive deep into the craft minutiae of great short fiction. What questions does a story ask, and how do they pull us along? Is it what’s left in or what’s left out that makes a masterpiece? Of the analyses Saunders offers, his take on three of Chekhov’s stories were my favorite. On the other hand, if you’re not minutely interested in the technical and creative decisions behind a narrative—the tied-off loops on the back of the tapestry—you might as well just read the stories themelves.

Last but not least in nonfiction, fans of Skyfaring: A Journey with a Pilot by Mark Vanhoenacker, won’t want to miss his latest, Imagine a City: A Pilot’s Journey across an Urban World. Imagine a City includes lots of the lyrical, novel description that makes Skyfaring wonderful, this time swirled into memoir and a flâneur’s takes on cities around the world. By the nature of his work as a long-distance commercial pilot, Vanhoenacker often finds himself with two days to spend near any metropolitan destination that he flies. He bides the mandatory rests in exploration and writing. This book not only features slices of such urban-scapes, but recurring takes on the author’s growing-up in Pittsfield, Massachusetts: the town, his family, his coming-out, and the globe-spinning reveries that led to his vocation.

Now to fiction. One novel that blew me away this year was Julie Otsuka’s The Swimmers. As someone who loves pools and water I was initially attracted to the title and cover (I know, I know, like buying wine for the label; I confess). [Ed. – I strongly support buying books for their covers.] Then when I started to read, I fell hard for the voice. Exactly who is speaking with such quiet authority, unspooling list after list about the lap swimmers with such close, cool knowledge? A crack appears in the bottom of their pool, and it’s like Jane Alison’s Nine Island meets Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried… The novel suddenly widens into a more familiar and pain-steeped story that I won’t spoil; sprint [Ed. – missed metaphor opportunity!] to your nearest book source and see for yourself.

My enthusiasm for The Swimmers sent me to Otsuka’s earlier novels, When the Emperor Was Divine and Buddha in the Attic, which in different ways chronicle the experiences of Japanese American immigrants. They’re well worth the read, though to me not consummate in their artistry like The Swimmers.

Way different stylistically from The Swimmers was a book at least as magnificent: Anna Burns’s Milkman, the densest and strangest novel I read last year. A student in my Irish short stories tutorial recommended it, and I’m so glad she did: this book made me understand as never before what it was like to live in the middle of the Troubles, no, to live the Troubles, to contain their gaslighting and violence in one’s marrow. The narrator has one of those unforgettable voices—drenched in idiom, funny, idiosyncratic—that at first seems impossible to understand. There are few paragraph changes, and few characters are called by actual names. All these might put you off, might seem like obstructions to grasping the story… and yet. Somehow it galvanizes a world as you read, a world that tumbles around you and into you, changing you.

Another surprise and pleasure was Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont, by Elizabeth Taylor, first published in 1971.It opens on a rainy Sunday in January (is there anything more depressing?) in a London lodging hotel just affordable and respectable enough for old folks not yet decrepit or destitute. You might judge this an unpromising start—till you find yourself immersed, riveted by Mrs. Palfrey and her fortunes: the aches, yearnings, miscues, and irritations of ordinary human life, rendered with nothing less than mastery.

Also of seventies vintage was Marian Engel’s Bear (1976), which Dorian has touted for years. I loved it: the boreal setting, the understated tone, a fusion of real with surreal that’s so seamless I question “surreal” even as I type it. The book is alluring and disconcerting at once—shoving me into uncomfortable encounters with my own relationships to sex, animals, and self—and resists interpretation at every turn. In fact, it’s highly entertaining to browse through reader takes on this book anywhere from Amazon to scholarly platforms. What is this thing: feminist text, postcolonial critique, an ursine-Canadian Lady Chatterley’s Lover, or a portrait of a “phallic mother”? Don’t miss Dorian’s delightful conversation with Shawn and James on Shawn the Book Maniac, which includes a clip from an interview with Engel herself. Mind you, as the interviewer admonishes, “This is no kinky, porno Pooh-Bear!” so prepare yourself for . . . something else thereof. [Ed. – Music to my ears, natch. But really 70s books are the best books…]

Thanks again to Dorian I reread Lonesome Dove, by Larry McMurtry, and was relieved to find that it still has its magic: it had been so long (or my memory so bad) that the plot twists surprised me all over again. This big novel is good for what ails you, a bracing tonic, just like the big skies and open roads out West. [Ed. – So glad it held up! Every time I see it on my shelf I brighten up a little.]

Jonathan Evison’s Lawn Boy is about Mike Muñoz, a southern California guy who can’t seem to catch the brass ring. His voice is canny, believable, often funny, and a little hoarse with pain, and there’s never a false note or a missed beat narrating his adventures through emotional and economic labyrinths. This is a fresh take on the American dream, as broken down for disillusioned 21^st century folks, and it deserves to endure. Highly recommend.

Mercy Street by Jennifer Haigh is a gritty novel that revolves around a Boston abortion clinic where the protagonist works and various other characters who intersect there. I read it before the mid-year overturn of Roe, but it’s at least as relevant now: it remains on my mind for its multidimensional treatment of people on different sides of the abortion issue. Creepy, scary, and all too credible, in the case of a couple of anti-abortionist characters; but as I said, granting a multidimensionality that at least seeks to understand the sources of the venom that animates them. As Mohsin Hamid says, one thing literature does is “recomplicate what has been oversimplified,” and a novelist’s nuance is too often missing from the violent discord around this issue.

Elizabeth Strout’s Lucy by the Sea brings her Oh William! characters forward through the first year of the coronavirus pandemic—moving those inveterate New Yorkers up to Maine. Anyone who has liked Strout’s earlier novels won’t be disappointed.

Speaking of disappointments, even though Emily St. John Mandel’s Sea of Tranquillity made a lot of people’s best-of lists last year, for me it was pretty forgettable—way less gripping than Station Eleven, the post-pandemic novel she wrote a few years before Covid struck. I was likewise underwhelmed by The Flight of Gemma Hardy, Margot Livesy’s attempt at a modern retelling of Jane Eyre. I did finish it, but it annoyingly lacked a couple of key plot underpinnings as well as some of the major elements that make Bronte’s novel so great.

Last, and monumentally, I come to a series that dominated the last half of my reading year—and which I’m still devouring as we move into 2023: Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch novels, which chronicle the LAPD detective’s cases across more than twenty years in L.A. Formerly a reporter, including a last stint on the crime beat at the Los Angeles Times, Connelly is steeped in knowledge of the criminal legal system, LAPD culture, and police-reporter relations—not to mention southern California history and culture in general. So the books take place against a backdrop studded not only with physical landmarks but landmark events, O.J. to Rodney King to Robert Blake to COVID. Oh, and there’s also the iconic food of the greater L.A. area—specific BLTs and tacos and martinis that may have you keeping notes for the next time you make it out to the Golden State with an appetite.

In Heironymous (yes, named after the painter by his mother) Bosch, Connelly has created a laconic, jazz-listening, relationship-tending-to-screw-up hero in the best noir tradition: a SoCal Don Quixote perpetually battling the forces of darkness on his quest to put the bad guys (and women) behind bars. Fortunately, uh, but only for us as readers I mean, in the sweep of the sprawling metropolis there’s no shortage of evil out there for him to take on—from its crumbling bungalows to its gated MCM mansions, from seaside to outlying deserts, and sometimes within the halls of justice and press rooms and inter-warring police precinct headquarters themselves. The writing is spot-on: tough, perfectly paced, with lots of plot and action, of course, and salted just right with description and character. I’ve consumed these books the way I used to read beloved series as a kid, binge-reading with abandon, and now I see with dread that I’m closing in on the end of even the prolific Connelly’s output. [Ed. – Ah, that feeling! It’s really a thing, isn’t it?] He’s written several spinoff books involving sometime partners of Bosch, and a shorter series about a criminal defense lawyer who works from the back seat of his Lincoln, and those are good as well—but alas, they too are finite.

For what it’s worth, I read the series completely out of order, and it wasn’t a problem. When I did make my way back to the first couple of Bosch books, I found them a little stilted and trying too hard on the tough-guy front, in contrast to the grace and understatement of the later ones. In a way, though, the fact that the writing wasn’t impeccable was heartening: it showed that not even Connelly came to fiction-writing already with his skill set complete, but built his command over time. [Ed. — Glad to hear this, because I was underwhelmed by the first when I read it many years ago. Maybe I’ll grab one from later in the series.]

No, I haven’t watched the TV version of the Bosch books, and I doubt that I will; my mind’s-eye picture of the characters is too strong for me to want to sully it with a screen version, even though the author did consult on set. But next time I’m in L.A. I do plan to drive Mulholland Drive, and I’ll be looking for #7203, the modest cantilevered house with the deck on the back, where Bosch gazes down on the lights of the city in pensive moments. I have more to say on this topic, but excuse me, I’d rather go read now. We’re about to find out where the bodies are buried.

Benita Berthmann’s Year in Reading, 2022

Posted on January 30, 2023 by banff1972 under Guest post, lists, Uncategorized, year in review

Today’s post is from Benita Berthmann (@moodboardultra). Benita studies literature in Marburg, Germany, where she is a full time book enthusiast, part time smoker and occasional existentialist.

Once again, Dorian was gracious enough to allow me to write about My Year in Reading 2022, thank you, Dorian, nothing I love more than talking about books!

First of all, the hard facts: In the past year, I’ve managed to read 158 books, which is a bit less than the year before, but in terms of pages, I’ve gone up a bit, having read a whopping 51,308 pages over the course of 365 days. [Ed. – JFC, B!] I’m glad I was able to spend that much time on my favorite hobby and thankful for always being able to find distraction, solace, amusement and everything else I need in books. That is a great gift, methinks. [Ed. – Amen.]

Enough of the boring statistics, which I track via TheStorygraph by the way, on to the more interesting stuff. It is impossible to talk about all the books I’ve read, so I’ve selected a handful of extraordinary texts to talk about.

Dorian and Magda, you are chiefly responsible for this one: BEAR by Marian Engel, which, apart from being a story about loneliness, nature, and Canadian history, features a female archivist having intercourse with, you might have guessed it, a bear. No, that’s not a metaphor. Consequently, Magda (@theruraljuror) coined the hashtag #bärensexbuch on German twitter which means, literally, book about having sex with a bear. God bless German compound words. [Ed. – I only wish English had a handy noun for this important concept.] Apart from our protagonist having sex with a bear, I enjoyed the atmosphere that I’d deem far more important than the plot. It is calm, yet unhinged, something is lurking in the dark, but for now, we’re lingering on a remote island, pleasantly detached from normalcy. Thank you, D and M, for being so adamant about BEAR, it was the perfect read for a hot and hazy afternoon in late July. [Ed. – I love to hear it.]

In 2022, I have also discovered an author that is right on track to become a new favorite of mine: Haruki Murakami. Yeah, I know, totally basic of me, but from the very first page of KILLING COMMENDATORE (German translation by Ursula Gräfe, English by Philipp Gabriel and Ted Goosen), I was hooked. The story about an unnamed painter trying to figure out what to do with his life after having been left by his wife has everything I love: magical realism, mystery and suspense, obscurity, art and culture. The title refers to a painting that plays a major role in the novel and I physically couldn’t stop reading until I knew what would happen. A novel to fall in love with reading and the magic of storytelling if there ever was one.

At university, I took part in a seminar dealing with literature that has been subject to judicial conflict. One of the books we talked about was ESRA by Maxim Biller, which deals with the relationship and subsequent breakup of Adam, a Jewish writer, and Esra, a German-Turkish actress, troubled and traumatized. None of the characters are particularly likeable, nor is the story itself innovative. [Ed. – Really selling this…] What makes the novel interesting, though, is that one can easily draw parallels between Maxim Biller and his alter ego Adam, not least because of the court case following a lawsuit filed by the woman who was clearly the model for Esra and her mother, both of whom claimed that Biller had violated their privacy rights. In the seminar, we talked about to what degree literature can take inspiration from real life, how German courts have decided these questions, and how they came to their decisions, the discrepancy between scholars of literature and of law and, of course, the question whether it was the lawsuit itself that drew attention to an otherwise rather mediocre novel, whether it is – Streisand effect – at least partly the plaintiffs’ fault that they found themselves subject to public scrutiny. To this day, the novel remains forbidden in Germany, a decision made by the highest German court, and it is nearly impossible to get one’s hand on a copy – except if you’re reading it “for scientific reasons” as we did in class. Unfortunately, I am not allowed to pass on the text, sorry, folks. [Ed. – Fascinating!]

One of the authors I revere most is Simone de Beauvoir, ever since I read The Mandarins almost five years ago. This year, I finally managed to read the second part of her autobiography, THE PRIME OF LIFE (German translation by Rolf Soellner, English by Peter Green). The story begins right where the previous volume, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, left us: It’s the late 1920s, de Beauvoir studies philosophy, hangs out with Sartre, they become the founders of existentialism and important public figures in France after having made their respective debuts as writers. They survive the war; the book ends in 1944. I loved reading about the extraordinary life of an absolute fucking legend, an intelligent woman; her philosophy and clever wit allowed my thoughts to flourish while reading and I felt incredibly enriched afterwards. Not just from an intellectual perspective, either. Fun and the absurd aren’t neglected either. For example, the book involves an incident where Beauvoir and Sartre encounter a woman smoking a cigarette with her vagina during their travels. [Ed. – But how is that…] Oh, how I long to be THAT cool. [Ed. – Still struggling with this one, B.] In 2023, I really need to read the two remaining volumes of her autobiography.

Even though I’m too lazy to write about them in detail, a couple of books and authors that deserve at least an honorable mention:

First and foremost, Thomas Bernhard, my most-read author 2022, and also my favorite rage-mode Austrian. [Ed. – Hell yeah!] If you need the healing powers of incandescent rage, Bernhard is your man. I’d especially recommend the drama HELDENPLATZ (English translation by Gitta Honneger) that talks about the Austrian Nazi past kept secret.

ON EARTH WE’RE BRIEFLY GORGEOUS by Ocean Vuong. Has queer prose ever been more thoughtful, more touching, more well-written? I doubt it.

LAPVONA by Ottessa Moshfeg wins the prize for the most disgusting book in 2022. Not much else to say except steer clear of it if gore, organs and cannibalism upset your stomach.

EMPIRE OF PAIN: THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE SACKLER DYNASTY. I am pretty sure that Patrick Radden Keefe is the best contemporary non-fiction writer there is.

Marlene Streeruwitz, an Austrian feminist writer. When will her work finally be translated? Looks like I need to take care of that. [Ed. – Yes you do! That would be a real service.]

The PERCY JACKSON series by Rick Riordan, he is sort of an unproblematic JKR.

Last but not least, Julia Kristeva’s REVOLUTION IN POETIC LANGUAGE (English translation by Margaret Waller, German by Reinhold Werner) deserves the final spot on my list, even though I have not fully finished it in 2022, just because she made me lose my mind. [Ed. – Do Powers of Horror next!]

For 2023, I hope we will all make enough time for reading and find new favorites. Never stop reading. Let’s hope Dorian continues this series for many more years to come so that we have an excuse to create never ending TBR stacks. [Ed. I don’t think anyone reading this needs my say-so to create a giant TBR… Thank you, Benita!]

James Morrison’s Year in Reading, 2022

Posted on January 23, 2023 by banff1972 under Guest post, lists, year in review

I still hope to write up my reflections on my 2022 reading year. (Though look how well that worked last year…) In the meantime, I’ve solicited guest posts from friends and fellow book lovers about their own literary highlights. First up is James Morrison, an Australian reader and editor (sadly, not of books) who tweets at @unwise_trousers and blogs (increasingly infrequently) at http://causticcovercritic.blogspot.com. His novel Gibbons, Or One Bloody Thing After Another will be published later this year by Orbis Tertius Press

Look for more reflections from a wonderful assortment of readers in the days to come. And remember, you can always add your thoughts to the comments.

Woman committing suicide by jumping off of a bridge – George Cruikshank [1848]

First, a bit of throat-clearing. When I started to try to work out what my favourite books that I had read in 2022 were, I had a list 84 books long, out of nearly 300 read. This is obviously insane, possibly even psychopathic, so I have winnowed it down a bit. Secondly, I have now learned that two of my favourite books were also on Barack Obama’s list, which means after this I presumably need to become a boring centrist and do some war crimes. In any case, I’ve tried to force things into various fairly elastic categories in order to give this article the illusion of clarity.

[Audience: Get on with it!]

THE BIG BASTARDS

I finally joined the people-who-have-read-James-Joyce’s-Ulysses club this year, something which was ridiculously overdue. And what can I usefully say about this astonishing, hilarious, brilliant, occasionally tedious (hello, ‘Oxen of the Sun’) and quietly heartbreaking book? “It’s great!” I could tell you, unhelpfully, but you already knew that. It’s also one of the most amazing evocations of being embodied, of living a human fleshy existence with all its joys and ills and excrescences, that has ever been written. I also read Terence Killeen’s Ulysses Unbound, and found it to be a hugely welcoming, informative, and wise companion.

Another massive tome was Jon Fosse’s Septology (translated by Damion Searls), which the publishers and many reviews will tell you is really seven short novels, which is, in turn, a lie (though one which makes tackling such a big book seem much more approachable). It’s more accurately described as seven periods of minutely annotated consciousness, from waking to prayerful drowsiness, full of repetitions and art and small acts of kindness and weirdly commingling parallel universes and a (frankly bonkers) girlfriend. I didn’t find it to be the transformative work of art that many others did, but I did enjoy it tremendously.

The third giant was Osebol: Voices from a Swedish Village, by Marit Kapla (translated by Peter Graves), a polyphonic oral history in prose-poem form of a dying Swedish village, drawn from interviews with every inhabitant. It’s a book that takes a simple idea that somehow has never been had before, and applies it perfectly.

GINZBURG & CO.

More than any other writer, Natalia Ginzburg was the one I kept returning to this year. She is just phenomenal, and I devoured a bunch of her shorter books like popcorn. The Road to the City (translated by Frances Frenaye), Voices in the Evening (translated by DM Low), Valentino and Sagittarius (both translated by Avril Bardoni) are all near-as-damnit perfect novellas, mostly about Italy during or just after World War II, full of frustrating families, political activism and romantic fuck-ups.

Two other writers I read multiple books by were Maylis de Kerangal and Gwendoline Riley. De Kerangal’s Birth of a Bridge is something like an Arthur Hailey blockbuster condensed to 300 pages and written by a genius [Ed. – sold!]: an exploration of all the people and organisations and objects involved in the construction of a massive bridge project, while Eastbound is a compact novella about a fraught encounter between a Russian fleeing conscription and a French tourist on the Trans-Siberian Railway. Both these books were translated by Jessica Moore. Riley’s most recent novels, First Love and My Phantoms, are perfect, hilarious [Ed. – uh that is uh weird, James] examinations of the awfulness of families and relationships.

Self Portrait on Statue, Gouges – Polly Penrose [2020]

MY BODY BETRAYED ME

Anna Deforest’s A History of the Present Illness is a startling novel about grief and the terrible things that can happen to a human body, told from the point of view of a student doctor. Szilvia Molnar’s The Nursery (due this coming March) is a fine addition to the ‘new mothers who may be losing their minds’ library. What Are You Going Through by Sigrid Nunez is a brilliant, telegraphic novel about helping and failing to help a dying friend have a good death. Imogen Binnie’s Nevada is a simultaneously hilarious and dispiriting book about gender dysphoria and about being a well-meaning but really terrible wise elder trying to help someone else deal with their trans-ness. Abi Palmer’s Sanatorium is a fascinating diary/essay about her experiences dealing with physical rehab in both a Budapest thermal bath and a crappy inflatable pool in London

And then there’s Naben Ruthnum’s Helpmeet. If Edith Wharton had started one of her excellent wintry ghost stories, but then been overcome by the body-horror vibes of a time-travelling David Cronenberg without losing any of her prose style or piercing insights, this is the novella she might have written. [Ed. – Hell to the yeah!] Strange but true.

IMAGINED WORLDS, FUCKED-UP PHYSICS

Writing a high-concept science-fiction airport thriller is not something you expect a President of the Oulipo group to do, but that’s exactly what we have in The Anomaly by Hervé Le Tellier (translated by Adriana Hunter). And it’s really good! A passenger jet survives a storm and lands safely. Then, months later, the exact same jet (and all its passengers) lands safely again, introducing hundreds of duplicate people to the world. The weirdness spirals from there, but Le Tellier plays it dead straight.

Simon (or S. J.) Morden is a British science-fiction writer quietly producing a fascinating body of work. His newest novel, The Flight of the Aphrodite, is an excellent dark tale of an exploratory ship crew going to pieces in the face of the possibility of First Contact, and an older book, Bright Morning Star, is a moving novel about an autonomous alien AI drone landing in the middle of a Ukraine forest as Russians invade [Ed. — !].

I was predisposed to ignore the work of ‘qntm’ because, let’s face it, that pseudonym is extremely irritating. Annoyingly, I have to report that There Is No Antimemetics Division is kind of brilliant: a group of specialists are charged with stopping malignant alien antimemes, which are ideas and concepts and things which by their very nature cannot be communicated or remembered.

Julia Armfield’s Our Wives Under the Sea is a scary, absorbing story of loving someone who is going through a very horrible change after suffering an accident on an exploratory deep-sea dive. Humidly, damply intense. And finally, there’s Audrey Schulman’s The Dolphin House, which is fiction about science being done, rather than science-fiction, and both completely convincing and compelling.

THE TUMOUR AT THE HEART OF HUMAN HISTORY

The Investigation: Oratorio in Eleven Cantos by Peter Weiss (translated by Alexander Gross) is a play based on the testimony Weiss observed at the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials in the mid-1960s. Riveting and horrifying and an excellent one-book summary should you ever need to rustle up evidence for use in damning the entire human race. Ernst Weiss’s The Eyewitness (translated by Ella R. W. McKee) is a posthumous novel about a psychiatrist called in to treat a young Austrian ex-soldier, initials A.H., which seems to have been based on Hitler’s actual psychiatric reports, which Weiss had brief access to.

James Kestrel’s Five Decembers is, despite its pulpy cover, an unexpected and thoughtful crime novel about regret and missed opportunities, through the prism of the attacks by and on Japan during World War Two. Clouds Over Paris by Felix Hartlaub (translated by Simon Beattie) is perhaps the most self-effacing diary ever, as well as being beautifully written. Hartlaub was a reluctant and mildly embarrassed Nazi stationed in newly Occupied Paris. He was still a Nazi, though, despite the prose quality, so let’s shed no tears over his death and disappearance in 1945.

Lacertilia [Lizards] – Ernst Haeckel [1904]

[Audience: He does fucking go on, doesn’t he?]

GRAPHIC!

The fact that several of the best graphic novels I read this year were about adolescents having much more interesting times than I ever did should not be taken as an indicator that I am having a mid-life crisis or am extremely boring. [Ed. – Ah good that you said that, because I was thinking _exactly* that…] Skim by Gillian and Mariko Tamaki is about a Japanese-Canadian Goth failing to fit in at a Catholic School. Giulia Sagramola’s Summer Fires (translated by Brahm Revel) is about a group of teenagers connected to a pair of fractious sisters in a Spanish summer where the landscape keeps bursting into flames. And Andi Watson and Simon Gane’s Sunburn perfectly captures being old enough to be involved in adult’s relationship game-playing, but not old enough to know what the hell you’re doing.

Sara Del Giudice’s Behind the Curtain (translated by M.B. Valente) is a gorgeously rendered story, all pale colours and intricate fabric textures, about Jewish sisters in Paris as the Nazis take over, with a nasty kick in the guts at the end. And last of all there’s Ducks by Kate Beaton, her big, funny and moving memoir of working in the Canadian oil sands, with all the awful sexual pressure and violence that involved.

POEMS THAT MOSTLY DON’T RHYME

Verse novels, baby, that’s where it’s at with the cool kids these days! If you want to fit in at the top table, why not read Sickle by Ruth Lillegraven (translated by May-Brit Akerholt), a tiny family saga about inheritance, books and change set in nineteenth-century Norway. Or for something far more depressing [Ed. – pretty rich, given this list so far], let me recommend Greg McLaren’s Camping Underground, in which a former undercover political provocateur gives her fragmented testimony about the terrible things that have reduced a future Australia into a scavenger-economy wasteland. It has some really good jokes!

Lisa Robertson’s The Baudelaire Fractal is a prose-poem-novel-something about a woman who wakes up one day to find she’s the author of Baudelaire’s collected works. Body Braille by Beth Gylys is a beautiful collection about how bloody hard it is to live in a body, with sections for each of the senses.

And then there’s The Lascaux Notebooks, ostensibly by Jean-Luc Champerret and translated by Philip Terry, which claim to be a series of translations of Lascaux cave paintings into poetry. It’s mad and clever and fun and I fell for it for much longer than I should have.

TINY WEE HUNGARIANS [Ed. – That’s nice, isn’t it? They don’t get much, the wee Hungarians.]

The three best books from the literary wonderland that is Hungary that I read this year were all tiny. Agota Kristof’s The Illiterate (translated by Nina Bogin) is a compressed, bleak and reliably brilliant memoir of moving from Hungary to France and trying to learn a new and unrelated language. The Manhattan Project (translated by John Batki) is a slender but oversized thing of beauty, full of photos by Ornan Rotem, in which László Krasznahorkai meanders through the work and worlds of Melville, Lowry, and Lebbeus Woods. And In a Bucolic Land by Szilárd Borbély (translated by Ottilie Mulzet) is a brilliant and autobiographical posthumous collection of poems describing the author’s childhood as part of a despised family, being raised by parents who would later be violently murdered.

MEDIUMN-SIZED JAPANESE

The book I was looking forward to most in 2022 was Woman Running in the Mountains by Yūko Tsushima (translated by Geraldine Harcourt), which takes the Tsushima constants (young single Japanese mother, awful mother, vanished father, deadbeat ex) and yet again spins them into gold. Her ability to get infinite artistic variety from the same initial ingredients remains amazing.

Mieko Kawakami continues her series of novels about Japanese misfits with All the Lovers in the Night (translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd), which manages the rare feat of making the story of a withdrawn person with an uneventful life absolutely compelling.

[Audience: Sweet fancy Moses, shut up!]

(REACHING DESPERATELY) UM, BOOKS WITH PLANES ON THE COVER [Ed. – Oh come on!]

Gertrude Trevelyan is one of those nearly lost writers I had never read before, but on the basis of Two Thousand Million Man-Power I am now seeking out the rest of her work: this novel is told in an experimental/modernist-yet-highly-readable voice, swooping from the frenetic global to the low-key personal, sometimes multiple times a sentence, with vertiginous ease. And Elleston Trevor’s Squadron Airborne is a quietly impressive and downbeat novel about the RAF in WW2, a spiritual forerunner to the work of the still-alive but still-neglected Derek Robinson. No Churchillian Imperialistic bullshit to be found here.

WON’T FIT INTO ANY ARBITRARY CATEGORY WITH EACH OTHER [Ed. – At least that’s honest.]

Squarely in the Olivia Manning/Elizabeth Jane Howard sweet spot is the Good Daughters trilogy by Mary Hocking (Good Daughters, Indifferent Heroes, Welcome Strangers), following three sisters from the 1930s to the years after WW2. They’re basically Platonic ideal books for people like me who reflexively buy the old green-spined Virago Modern Classics on sight.

The Friendly Young Ladies by Mary Renault was delightful: a wonderful 1930s summery sexy atmosphere, beautifully written, and nobody was punished by the plot for being gay. (In fact, someone wrecked their life by not being gay enough.) [Ed. — *nodding sagely * seen it happen many a time.]

Keith Ridgway’s A Shock is brilliant and sui generis; a sporadically sinister set of linked stories in multiple styles—a worthy follow-up to his Hawthorn & Child, though shooting out in completely different directions.

Awake by Harald Voetmann (translated by Johanne Sorgenfri Ottosen) is fragmented, which I have seen some people complain about, saying it doesn’t add up to a story. I guess that’s true, but I really didn’t care. A novel about Pliny the Elder, his nephew, and his slave, it’s great on the sentence level, and so interesting. And deeply, deeply horrible.

Hagar Olsson’s Chitambo (translated by Sarah Death) deserves to be much better known: a modernist Finnish masterpiece about a young girl whose life is wrecked by a father who is at first her ally in an imaginative world, and who then loses interest in her as he moves on to other, madder utopian schemes.

[Audience: GET HIM OFF! GET HIM OFF!]

The Trouble with Happiness is a collection of short stories by Tove Ditlevsen (translated by Michael Favala Goldman), and is as good as you’d hope from the author of the Copenhagen Trilogy. The Devastation of Silence by João Reis (translated by Adrian Minckley) is an exemplary example of one of my favourite genres of novel—the mildly unhinged monologue from a monomaniacal narrator, in this case a Portuguese POW in a German camp in WW1. Helen DeWitt’s The English Understand Wool is a really funny novella of subverted expectations. And Ed Yong’s An Immense World is a brilliantly and subtly written survey of the latest science in animal perception, including senses that humans cannot even begin to rival. OK, OK, I’m going, what is that thing, a crook, you do know they don’t actually use them to haul people off the stage anym–

[Ed. — Don’t tell James, but I could have read even more from him!]

Scott Walters’s Year in Reading, 2021

Posted on February 9, 2022 by banff1972 under Guest post, lists, review, year in review

Today‘s reflection on a year in reading, I’m delighted to say, is by Scott Walters. Scott launched a litblog, seraillon, in 2010, and expects to return to it one of these days. He largely follows Primo Levi’s model of “occasional and erratic reading, reading out of curiosity, impulse or vice, and not by profession” (profession in his own case being academic administration). He lives with his partner in San Francisco and tries to visit family in France as often as possible.

seraillon has long been a favourite blog: in the past year or so I’ve checked in regularly, half disconsolate, half hopeful, looking for new content. You can imagine, then, how happy I am to feature Scott here in his return to blogging. I hear rumours that more may be afoot at the site!

With Scott’s post, this run of Year in Reading posts comes to an end–except, of course, for my own, which I hope to write soon… The project grew into something bigger than I’d ever imagined; it’s been a delight to showcase the work of so many thoughtful readers. Thanks to everyone who wrote, read, and commented on these pieces. (If you’d talked with me about writing a piece but haven’t sent it to me yet, it’s not too late. Just be in touch and we’ll make a plan.)

How gracious of Dorian to invite me to submit an end-of-year post! I have been avidly following the others he’s posted, which now have my to-be-read list runnething over. So thank you Dorian, and everyone, and hello. [Ed. – Such a pleasure!]

I’ve written nothing on the seraillon blog for more than two years—”hellacious times and I’ve slipped between the cracks,” as a character says in David Greenberg’s play, The Assembled Parties. But I have been reading, finishing 42 books in 2021. Though about half my typical yearly volume, I also read much more in books, most of which I intend to finish: The astounding Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini. Milton’s “Paradise Lost.” Chateaubriand’s Mémoires d’outre tombe (to be continued in the original French, no knock on Anka Muhlstein’s translation). A re-read of Wuthering Heights. Franz Werfel’s monumental novel of resistance against the Armenian genocide, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh. Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, following an interest in Henri Bosco. Henri Bosco himself, in his novels Le Mas Théotime and Sabinus. A book about book designer Robert Massin, who designed these French Bosco editions. There are others, down other rabbit holes.

Here are ten highlights of works I did finish in 2021, plus honorable mentions:

The Ministry for the Future, by Kim Stanley Robinson

Hugo and Nebula Award winner Robinson has shouldered a massive responsibility: digesting everything we know about climate change as well as everything we know about how we might address it, then packing it into a stunningly wide-ranging geopolitical thriller interspersed with chapters that concretize climate change’s multivarious, cascading impacts. The novel is also one of few I’ve encountered (Vincent McHugh’s 1943 pandemic novel I Am Thinking of My Darling being another) that explore competent administration of a crisis. [Ed. – Yes! This is a book about competency. Maybe that’s why it feels so comforting.] Robinson’s book appeared in October 2020, a date to fix precisely given the furious pace of change as regards the book’s subject. In fact, the novel seemed a kind of sundial around which shadows spun and deepened rapidly as I read, some elements already obsolete as others swam into view. This is no criticism; I marveled at the real-time context while reading as well as at Robinson’s courage in being able to place a period on his final sentence, and I’ve been pushing the work on everyone for its articulation of the enormity of the challenges facing us, some lovely conceits such as the return of airships, and a bracing radicalism that makes Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang seem like a Sunday School picnic. Despite offering a path forward, Robinson eschews easy answers and offers little in the way of reassurance, seeming to have taken as the novel’s departure point Greta Thunberg’s memorable warning: “I don’t want you to feel hopeful. I want you to panic.” [Ed. – On my 2020 list; still think about it daily.]

Last Summer in the City, by Gianfranco Calligarich (translation by Howard Curtis)

The cover blurbs’ promise of a resurrected 20^th century Italian classic certainly delivered; Calligarich’s short, tight, engaging 1973 novel of dissolution in 1960’s Rome seems to pick up where Alberto Moravia left off in depicting modern Italian existential malaise. The story follows the peripatetic wanderings around Rome of Leo Gazzara, an impecunious, alcoholic, bookish young Roman who becomes embroiled in a tumultuous on-again/off-again love affair. The energy of Calligarich’s automobile-driven narrative and the drifting yet fascinating tour he offers of Rome—the city itself a “particular intoxication that wipes out memory”—help balance out the novel’s bleakness, and a frequent invocation of books provides both literary diversion and dark warning of Bovary-esque entrapment in fictions. One might easily envision a film version by an Italian neo-realist director such as Dino Rossi or Antonio Pietrangeli.

Norwood, by Charles Portis

Considerably brightening a dark year, Norwood (1966) edged out Portis’s True Grit and The Dog of the South as the funniest book I read all year [Ed. – Arkansas, represent!], and even topped W. E. Bow’s The Ascent of Rum Doodle and Patrick Dennis’s Genius. A howling road trip and love story that begins when Norwood Pratt of Ralph, Arkansas gets a job tandem-towing a couple of hot cars to Brooklyn, Norwood limns the seedy, grifty, free-wheeling side of American life with caustic, irreverent humor; splendid dialogue; and unforgettable characters. I have Jacqui to thank for this introduction to Portis and will certainly read his remaining two novels and collection of short pieces, a literary cornucopia inversely proportional to the author’s small output, and no doubt as delicious as a biscuit and Bre’r Rabbit Syrup sandwich.

Stories With Pictures, by Antonio Tabucchi (translation by Elizabeth Harris)

“From image to voice, the way is brief, if the senses respond,” writes Antonio Tabucchi in his preface to 2011’s Stories with Pictures, a collection of 30-some short pieces sparked by a particular painting or drawing. Inspired by his having spent an entire day in the Prado (I did the same thing on the one day I spent in Madrid), Tabucchi writes at an angle about the pictures, riffing on them in a dazzling range of ways, from mediations to letters to what seem at times multi-page, arabesque-like captions. As in much of Tabucchi’s work, motifs connected to Fernando Pessoa abound. Most of the artworks come from 20^th century Italian or Portuguese artists, all but a few new to me. As if the posthumous appearance in English of a Tabucchi work wasn’t reason enough to celebrate, the Archipelago Books edition, featuring color plates of each picture, make this a volume with a presentation as lovely as the author’s concept.

Bear, by Marion Engel

“Is a life that can now be considered an absence a life?” Marion Engel’s Bear (1976) has made so many end-of-year lists here and elsewhere that Dorian should get a medal for this revival of interest. [Ed. – Aw shucks. No medal, though. I want cash.] Thanks to a new edition from London’s Daunt Books, I finally got in on Engel’s singularly odd tale of Lou, an archivist cataloging the contents of a deceased eccentric’s isolated mansion in Ontario’s remote north—and falling maw over claws for its resident bear. [Ed. – Ha! Maw over claws! That’s good! Gonna steal that.] Literally going wild in shaking herself loose of “the flaws in her plodding private world” and the various civilized confines that have entrapped her, Lou exults in a rebirth as liberating as it is perturbing. Bear’s atmosphere of isolation made it seem readymade for pandemic reading; I suspect that most of us are more than ready to go a little wild ourselves. [Ed. – Sounds pretty good to me!]

Dissipation H. G., by Guido Morselli (translation by Frederika Randall)

My terrific excitement at seeing another Morselli novel appear in English received an abrupt check upon my learning that Frederika Randall, one of the finest of Italian to English translators, had died shortly after finishing the translation. Readers of seraillon may know of my interest in Morselli; this short novel, his last, takes a common theme in which a person suddenly discovers that they are alone on earth. Morselli spins the conceit into a bittersweet, moving and darkly humorous exploration of isolation and the need for human contact. The “H. G.” in the title refers to humani generis and the dissipation “not in the moral sense” but rather from “the third and fourth century Latin dissipatio,” meaning “evaporation, nebulization, some physical process like that.” In other words, Dissipation H. G. turned out to be another work suited for pandemic reading—if perhaps in the manner of providing solace through affirmation of one’s sense of reality.

Malacarne, by Giosué Caliciura (French translation by Lise Chapuis)

Sicilian writer Giosué Caliciura has yet to be translated into English, a pity, as his fierce, inventive, densely baroque novels, delving into the lives of those on society’s margins, are among the most original and powerful I’ve found in contemporary Italian literature. Malacarne (1999) presents a ferocious testimonial from a Sicilian malacarne (literally “bad flesh”), one of the young hoods employed to do the Mafia’s dirty work. Palermo—and at the same time a vaguely defined post-mortem space—provide the setting(s) for the malacarne’s reckoning, before a judge, with the brutal details of a violent, savage life. Caliciura’s use of a deliberately impossible narrative voice, an articulation both belonging to and channeled through the late malacarne, adds to the novel’s otherworldly, underworld atmosphere. But the story the malacarne relates is as worldly, gripping and linguistically spectacular as a story could be, a profound exploration of the forces that perpetuate organized crime and engulf the youth it attracts, manipulates, and destroys.

Giorgio Morandi. Paesaggio Levico, 1957.

Okla Hannali, by R. A. Lafferty

I did not know of R. A. Lafferty (apparently revered in science fiction circles), nor had I heard of this novel (not a work of science fiction), and so little suspected what I was about to get into. I found Okla Hannali (1972) astonishing. The author called its initial appearance “a torturous undertaking even though it wasn’t much more than an overflowing of crammed notebooks.” Something of the “crammed notebooks” quality seems to remain in this revised, shaggy final version, but small matter: why this vastly-larger-than-life legend of fictional Choctaw “mingo” (king) Hannali Innominee isn’t a standard feature of the American literary canon is beyond me. Lafferty turns the historical telescope around, viewing early 19^th century frontier history from the Choctaw perspective. We know we’re in the realm of legend when the novel begins with a creation myth, which swiftly moves to the early life of Hannali, a “big man who would fill almost a century” and who, during one of the several forced resettlements of the Choctaw, abruptly picks out a plot of land in what is today eastern Oklahoma, “a place less no damn good than other land.” At this nexus where many elements of 19^th century American history converged, the reader witnesses, through Hannali, the westward European expansion, the enactment of genocidal policies towards indigenous populations, the flight of escaped slaves (some of whom become slaves of the Choctaw and/or members of the tribe), the lingering resonances of the Louisiana Purchase, the inauguration of new states, the misunderstood “Jacksonian Revolution” that amounted to little more than “a war of the rich against the poor,” and finally the American Civil War and the grim destruction of the Choctaw republic. Hannali is a magnificent character: defiant, stubborn, courageous, wise, irreverent, a folk hero of magnitudes. Big, boisterous, hilarious, indignant, heart-breaking tales like this don’t come along often; one mourns the unrealized project Lafferty intended to call “Chapters in American History,” of which Okla Hannli, his “Indian [sic] chapter,” is the only one he completed. [Ed. – Wow! Sounds amazing!]

The Transit of Venus, by Shirley Hazzard

“The calculations were hopelessly out…Calculations about Venus often are.” Australian writer Shirley Hazzard and Graham Greene were close friends, and I thrilled to find Greene-like elements in this exceptional, elegant, psychologically penetrating work. But The Transit of Venus (1980) is something all its own, a dense, intimate, furiously compelling narrative tracing the life trajectories and romantic entanglements of two Australian sisters orphaned at a young age. Tracking the sisters’ moves to England (and one to New York), with events of the tumultuous 20^th century backgrounding their stories, Hazzard describes, in exacting prose, the psychological nuances of human interactions. Henry James, another obvious influence here, seems constricted by comparison [Ed. – hmm]; The Transit of Venus did more to put in perspective James’s limitations with regard to women characters than any other work I’ve read [Ed. – hmm]. Hazzard’s antecedents range from Greek tragedies to Goethe to 19^th century Realism, resulting in a story almost classical in form and style, yet palpably burning with a sense of lived experience—from a writer who led an utterly improbable life. I’ll be reading more.

A True Novel, by Minae Mizumura (translation by Juliet Winters Carpenter)

“…I still could not feel at home, either in the new country or in the new language,” states the narrator on the first page of Mizumura’s 2002 novel (to which I was steered by Dorian – thank you, Dorian!). [Ed. – So welcome! Delighted to see this here.] This might be a line from any work addressing displacement, but it scarcely begins to hint at the extraordinary directions Mizumura will take over the ensuing 853 pages. I harbored some doubts about descriptions of the novel as a Japanese Wuthering Heights, but Mizumura evinces little interest in simply grafting Emily Bronte’s work onto a Japanese setting. Instead, her ambitions aim broadly and deeply. Taking the coinciding of the 19^th century western novel’s golden age with Japan’s opening to western influence as her beginning, Mizumura then uses her own transnational experience (with formative years spent in the US before a permanent return to Japan) to explore, through both western and Japanese literary and linguistic lenses, multiple questions of transnational identity, cultural cross-pollination, Japanese post-war history, and – through her mysterious character Taro, a kind of Japanese Heathcliff/Gatsby amalgam – issues of class and otherness. A True Novel takes its title from a prevailing style of Japanese literature in which works like Wuthering Heights were held up as an ideal form, “where the author sought to create an independent fictional world outside his own life.” But meta-fictional elements in Mizumura’s narrative also link it to the later Japanese style of the “I-Novel” (also the title of another, more personal Mizumura work), close to memoir and hewing to the author’s personal experience. Through concatenations of narrative (the prologue alone to A True Novel goes on for 165 pages) and using black and white photographs to heighten sense of place in the mountainous Karuizawa area where much of the story unfolds, Mizumura aligns the substrate of the Japanese literary enzyme with that of its Western counterpart, sparking a catalysis that creates something strikingly original. While it’s rare enough to find something that seems new in fiction, it’s more unusual still to find a work also incorporating something old and familiar and—by means of steady, crystalline, superbly atmospheric prose—so completely absorbing. Re-reading this true novel, my favorite book of 2021, will be a goal for 2022.

Honorable mentions:

Isak Dinesen’s Winter’s Tales;

Miklós Bánffy’s The Enchanted Night, an excellent collection of short stories that aligned surprisingly with Dinesen (great to see more of Bánffy’s work emerging in translation);

Federico Fellini’s The Journey of G. Mastorna, the director’s screenplay for what many consider to be the greatest film never made;

N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn, an American classic, gorgeous and heartbreaking;

Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These, a marvel of concision concerning Ireland’s Magdalen laundries;

Henri Bosco’s Le Trestoulas, affirming Bosco as a writer I will certainly keep reading;

Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March.

(And in the noir/polar/mystery realm):

Georges Simenon’s Chez Krull [Ed. – So good!];

Eric Ambler’s Journey into Fear and A Coffin for Demetrios;

Seishi Yokomizo’s The Inagumi Curse, terrific to read directly after Mizumura so as to linger a bit in a Japanese mountain atmosphere.

Thanks for reading, and felicitous reading to all in 2022!

Sarah Raich’s Year in Reading, 2021

Posted on February 7, 2022 by banff1972 under Guest post, lists, review, year in review

Today‘s reflection on a year in reading is by Sarah Raich (@geraeuschbar). Sarah is a writer who studied comparative literature, North American studies, and criminal law. A volume of short stories, dieses makellose Blau, was published by mikrotext and the dystopian YA novel All that’s left by Piper. Two of her stories have appeared in English translation by Eilidh Johnstone in https://no-mans-land.org/article/that-i. She lives in Munich.

Look for more reflections from a wonderful assortment of readers every day this week. Remember, you can always add your thoughts to the mix. Just let me know, either in the comments or on Twitter (@ds228).

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Street Scene at Night, 1926-7

2021 was a special year for me as a reader, because it was the first year my own books—ones I’d written and published–were being read. Not just by my doting husband and proud parents – but by real readers. [Ed. – Ouch! Tough on that “fake reader” husband!] And, yes, that changed things for my reading. I became gentler in my judgement. And yes, sometimes I was envious while reading as a published writer.

2021 also was the year I tried to read more diversely, meaning less white, and that is how I came across my favorite book of the year: Tsitsi Dangarembga’s This Mournable Body. I don’t know if I would have read this if I hadn’t made the conscious decision to diversify my reading. I remember buying the book in Cologne at the event Insert Female Artist, a little reluctantly because I found the cover so unappealing (yeah, I’m superficial). [Ed. – Same!] And then I started reading it and couldn’t stop because it was like being severely punched and gently caressed at the same time. And to me those are the very best books. The story is set in Zimbabwe and has in Tambudzai one absolutely loathsome protagonist. [Ed. – So interesting! I’ve only read Nervous Conditions, where Tambu is not loathsome, IMO, but certainly hard to like…] And Dangarembga manages the magic trick of showing the very many dark sides of her character—and still making the reader feel for her. Suffering didn’t make Tambudzai good. It made her selfish and greedy and needy. And the story doesn’t end well: how could it? Dangarembga tells this story in such fierce language in an unusual second person account that my brain got rattled in a way only brilliant books can do. (That her work appears in Germany from a niche publishing house speaks volumes by the way.)

What This Mournable Body shared with many books I read this year is its dark humor. And maybe that was just the right thing for the sobering and dragging experience of living through a second year of a global pandemic. Take for example Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall, which I read in the supreme translation by Nicole Seifert, which describes severe physical and psychological abuse – and yet I laughed so hard. Because the most brutal things contain humor and patriarchs are clowns with bloody swords and dirty underwear they need to have washed. [Ed. – Ah to be a patriarch! Seriously, though, this really gets at an important aspect of the book.]

For me, Bear by Marian Engel also falls in this category. [Ed. – Hell to the yeah!] A book that was wildly discussed and promoted on Twitter—to a considerable extent by the owner of this blog. [Ed. – “To a considerable extent” = German for “What a fucking nut that guy is, always banging on about that book!] I liked the unforgiving yet loving eye Engel casts on the protagonist which also leads to weirdly comical passages while the librarian stumbles through her life in a “molelike existence”, a phrasing I will never forget. In a way this librarian has a lot in common with the heroine in Ghost Wall. They both live a life they haven’t chosen, pushed around and overseen—and view this miserable situation with an acidic view on themselves and the world, and then one of them (Silvie in Ghost Wall) finds friends, the other one (the librarian in Bear) finds, well, Bear.

And yes, while writing this down, I realize my taste for this kind of book grew strong during this year of reading. Books that intertwine the horrible with the comical. One of those books was Adas Raum by Sharon Dodua Otoo who has the admirable audacity to throw her mostly German readers into a whirlwind of perspectives, places, and times. Ranging from rebirth and gods and eternal entities that hope for liberation from earthly existence while quarreling with God, into the overburdened subjects of the Shoah, racism, and colonialism, Otoo blasts established narrative boundaries and writes down the shiny pieces. Which left many German critics profoundly confused. I enjoyed the ride very much and I am very curious how the English-speaking audience will respond to this text.

The book contains my favorite quote of the year 2021:

Gott rollte als Steppenpflanze an mir vorbei.
(Einfach so.)
(Als wäre ich gar nicht da.)
(Eine Frechheit.)

Ich ließ alles – no fee no [im Original in phonetischen Alphabet] – auf mich einwirken, in der Hoffnung, dass diese Sensation aller abendländlichen Farben zeitnah nachlassen würde. Hinter meiner Hoffnung steckte ein Hauch Erwartung. Ich gestand es mir aber selbst nicht ein. Ich wollte solchen banalen Gefühle längst hinter mir gelassen haben. Ich wartete.

God rolled past me as a tumbleweed.
(Just like that.)
(As if I was not even there.)
(The nerve.)

I allowed myself to be moved by everything—nɔ fɛɛ nɔ—hoping that the sensation of these occidental colors would soon wane. A breath of expectation cowered behind my hope. But I could not admit it to myself. I had wanted to leave such banal feelings far behind me. I waited.
(Translated by Jon Cho-Polizzi; translation forthcoming)

One more theme flows through my 2021 reading year, now that I look at it: the difference between serious and entertaining literature, as we put it in German. A difference which part of the cultural establishment in Germany seems obsessed by.

It affects my own writing, as I‘ve published one book of short stories, which some consider one of the intellectual forms of writing, and a second book that’s a dystopian YA novel, which the same people consider a rather grimy genre (unless Margaret Atwood writes it—then it’s different). As a very nice and slightly drunk person from the literary establishment told me once: the problem is, your book doesn’t really fit in anywhere.

Maybe being in this position has made me more sensitive to writers writing books that are misfits. But this feeling was also influenced by the work of Nicole Seifert, especially as expressed in her book ~~Frauen~~ Literatur, published in 2021. In it she describes so many books by female writers being belittled and shoved aside. Seifert’s book was eye-opening, even though I had already read so much of her blog posts, articles, and tweets. And the most important thing I learned from this superb work is how systemic the degradation of female writing is.

One of my most precious serendipities of books being labeled pure entertainment was the writing of Shirley Jackson, starting with Hangsaman. In Germany, Jackson has been considered a horror genre writer, which she is, but through this genre she writes pure literature. [Ed. – Hmm this does seem to uphold that literature/entertainment binary…] Jackson died without experiencing the literary appreciation she should have received. I don’t know why, but this realization really got to me. That a woman of her abilities got overlooked so brutally during her life time. (I rejoiced at the Wikipedia article describing how her otherwise shitty husband fought for her recognition and ranted ferociously against the literary establishment unwilling to give Jackson credit for her genius.)

But the list of undervalued writers goes on, leading to the books of Vicki Baum, whom I had always considered easy entertainment. But when I read them they proved to be epic. I cherished Hotel Shanghai: the vastness of the tableau she created leaves me awestruck.

So this is what I will carry into my year of reading 2022: a thirst for misfits and dark humor. Very dark.

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