Category Archives: month in review

What I Read, May 2026

Posted on by under book review, close reading, lists, month in review, review

In May I puttered along, running my runs, doing my little jobs, seeing a movie or two. And drinking my coffees. I haven’t said this yet, it’s so hopelessly dad-coded, but in January I bought a Mokka pot and I’m not sure any object has ever given me such joy. Once I’ve fussily brewed my very small, very strong coffee I make it a rule to sit somewhere without music or phone or book and drink it mindfully. Ridiculous, right??? Anyway, I also read these books.

Edward Hopper, Le Bistro aka The Wine Shop, 1909

Artem Chapeye, The Weathering (2021) Trans. Daisy Gibbons (2026)

Written the year before Russia’s full-scale invasion, The Weathering references the occupation of the Donetsk, the gangsterism of the 1990s, and other events in recent Ukrainian history. But Chapeye’s engrossing novel mostly concerns an imagined future. A young couple escape their jobs in Kyiv for a well-earned holiday off-grid in the Carpathians. Weeks pass: first blissful, then ominous. Why haven’t they seen any locals? Why can’t they bring themselves to come off the mountain? And once they do, where the hell is everyone? In the seemingly abandoned capital, they are met by men with guns, guys from the neighborhood whose militia cosplaying soon turns deadly. As philosophical as it is action-packed, The Weathering asks what it means to live with violence: “How should you act when facing an armed man and still preserve your dignity? And the dignity of others? How?” Many of the novel’s pleasures stem from its being so Ukrainian, but those anguished questions pertain to us all.

James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room (1956)

I read this with an eye to assigning it to my future 11th graders. Well, I abandoned that idea quickly. Its sentences—so gorgeous, so thorny—too hard. Its sexual politics too complex. Now that I’m almost finished Another Country (more on that in next month’s installment) and planning to get through as much of his work as I can this summer, I see that widespread self-loathing is a part of Baldwin’s work more generally. I don’t mean his own self-loathing; I don’t know enough to diagnose him that way. I mean something like cultural self-loathing, the ways minorities are hated such that they internalize that hatred.

Once I gave up hoping it would be suitable for my classroom, I sunk into the novel, amazed at how it could be so lovely and so ugly. (It’s about David, an American in 1950s Paris, who falls into a passionate affair with Giovanni, an Italian immigrant. Neither man is willing to admit he is gay in the way present day readers might demand. David and Giovanni are able to be together only in the confines of Giovanni’s shabby rented room, less bower than foxhole. There’s one glorious scene in which the pair, going home together for the first time, walk along the Seine through early-morning Paris. (Giovanni works nights at a bar owned by a miserable queen.) Otherwise, though, the book is a litany of hatred, shame, and disgust. Its depictions of homosexuality are so regressive. And yet the book is so good. What gives? Thank god Garth Greenwell pointed me to his essay about just this problem. As you would expect from Greenwell, it’s as gorgeously written as Baldwin’s novel. And smart and helpful about what one can take from works of art that don’t align with our sensibilities the way we might want them to.

Sally Carson, The Prisoner (1936)

Sequel to Crooked Cross, which Persephone has reissued in the UK to general acclaim, and which Vintage will publish in the US this fall. Carson spent some time in Bavaria in the early 30s—exactly how much and whether it was more than a holiday I don’t know for sure—and used that experience to write a trilogy about an ordinary German family in the first months of Nazi rule. The Prisoner is the second book in the series; I went into it with excitement and trepidation, the latter after Rohan’s post got me wondering if whether I liked Crooked Cross as something more than a historical document. You can read my comment if you’re so inclined.

In comparison to Crooked Cross, The Prisoner is heavy weather. The first book ended dramatically; the second picks up just weeks after those events. It would be wrong to say nothing happens: the family moves to Munich, for example, to literally distance itself from the tragedy of the first book, but, perhaps unsurprisingly, the strategy doesn’t work. But The Prisoner is more about emotional fallout than anything else. It’s an interior book, and Carson, not always the nimblest writer, relentlessly keeps her characters turning over their emotions. Sometimes I felt the influence of Lawrence, but without the latter’s regular ability to astonish and make language strange.

The best part of the book comes near the end when a subplot from the previous novel returns in surprising, eventful, and heartbreaking form. Here Carson dramatizes both the appeal and the horror of Nazism in a manner that feels fresh because it’s written from the moment, without hindsight to govern the presentation of events. There’s no ominous foreshadowing—Dachau exists, but Sobibor is as yet unimagined—and few of the clichés that structure our depictions of Nazi rule. I won’t say Carson is more accurate historically than a writer today would be. In some ways, she is more blinded, less aware of the scope of things. She has the freedom and helplessness of anyone writing about their own moment.

It would be wrong to say that I loved this book. And yet I powered through it in a long weekend, and I’ll be first in line when the third volume is reissued. I suspect that one will be more like the first.

Mahmud El Sayed, The Republic of Memory (2026)

Engrossing multigenerational starship novel from British Egyptian writer El Sayed, clearly a talent to watch. Halfway through its 400-year-long journey to a new world, the city-ship Safina sails on amid rising discontent from its citizens, even as the ship’s “ancestors”—scientists and military leaders from Earth frozen until they can guide the settlement of the new world—slumber on in one of the lower decks. A revolt thirty years into the voyage disabled the ship’s AI and replaced its autocratic government with a republic. Generations later, the promise of that revolution has stalled. Upward mobility is a thing of the past, the ship’s resources can barely satisfy the increased population, and the attempt to replace ethnic and religious differences with language has been foiled by a self-interested translator caste.

After a dangerous power outage, a long-awaited revolution (modelled in part on the Arab Spring) promises to change everything. But while the ship limped along on minimal power, the decision was made to awaken the ancestors. And they want to quell the uprising. This book has it all: terrific world-building, well-developed ensemble cast, and even an invented language. The only problem is that we’ll have to wait a year to find out what happens in the last part of this promised duology.

Tim Sullivan, The Dentist (2020)

A bad book I couldn’t stop reading.

The protagonist, DS Cross, is autistic: his neuroatypicality makes him both an excellent detective and a trying colleague. He spends a lot of time deciphering the equivocations, half-lies, and body language that comprise so much of daily life for neurotypical folks. The book doesn’t make fun of or fetishize Cross, but it also acknowledges that his condition can exasperate those who know him and bewilder those who don’t. It seems, in other words, even handed. I had assumed that Sullivan must be autistic himself, but turns out he’s not. And that changed my feelings about the book. I wouldn’t call it exploitative, but I also don’t understand why Sullivan felt emboldened to write from this perspective. Surely there are autistic writers who could tell a story like this themselves.

Before writing the Cross novels—apparently a big hit in the UK—Sullivan wrote and directed films and television. (Surely a series is in development.) The prose is accordingly serviceable and pacey. At least it’s not overwritten. The mystery was solid enough, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the plots get better further into the series. (Each installment is named after the profession of the victim.) The supporting characters are good, especially Cross’s father, a retired engineer who helped build the Concord. His willingness to take his son in stride is heartwarming, and I imagine Sullivan might do a lot with the character.

I dunno, I got the second book from the library. We’ll see if I read it.

Edith Wharton, Twilight Sleep (1927)

Read this with the group organized by Sean Breathes Books. (Six books into what has turned into a project to discuss all of her books, we now have a name, The Edith Wharthogs, and a spiffy logo, designed by James.) Regular readers will recall that I was underwhelmed by her memoir, A Backward Glance, our previous text, but our latest was a tremendous surprise. I hadn’t heard of it until Smith & Taylor included it in their first batch of reissues. In the afterword, Brendon Taylor rightly calls this a more compelling Gatsby. (I’m talking through my hat a bit, not having read Fitzgerald in over 30 years, but boy I sure will be familiar with his most famous novel soon: it’s a set text at my new job.) Wharton’s novel is uncannily attuned to our present moment: it features addiction, self-actualization, influencer culture, and the joyless pursuit of rest.

Pauline Manford, the character at the heart of this investigation of life in the previous century’s Twenties, has a lot on her plate, so much that her day is scheduled in fifteen-minute increments. There’s her philanthropic and charitable work. (No matter if the causes are at odds: she chairs both a league in support of birth control and a society for the furtherance of motherhood.) There’s her support of—some would say victimization at the hands of—a rotating series of gurus, healers, and self-proclaimed wise men who help her lose weight, worry less, and find inner fulfillment. And there’s her family: two husbands (current: accomplished lawyer; former: neurasthenic invalid) and two children (Jim, son by first marriage, doggedly pursuing a career in the law that he doesn’t much care for; Nona, daughter by the second, something of a younger, female Newland Archer, amused at the society in which she has been raised but more dedicated to its mores than she might like, having renounced her chance at happiness in allegiance to ideals she doesn’t believe in). The husbands and siblings all get along, especially now that their collective concern is focused on Jim’s wife, Lita, as ruthlessly devoted to pleasure and rejecting societal expectations as she is beautiful. Lita matter-of-factly wants to leave Jim (and poor Baby, never named and largely ignored) to be in the movies. And the movies want her. A producer (Jewish, grasping, natch), terrifically named Klawhammer, has his eye on her. How could Pauline and the family ever survive such shame? Can they keep Lita and Jim together? More troublingly, what designs does Arthur Manford have on his step-daughter-in-law? How many nervous breakdowns will feature before the end of the book?

A busy novel, as you can see. (A mere 230 pages in the Smith & Taylor edition.) And a tremendously entertaining and thoughtful one. The title comes from a much-touted new anesthetic given to mothers in the delivery room. But it refers more generally to the fugue state of modern life: those regular hits of excitement that are as necessary to our ability to make it through the day as they are enervating. For me, it’s as though Wharton had described, already a century ago, that helpless fugue state I fall into when I just can’t stop scrolling.

In case you can’t tell, I loved this book. It’s filled with Wharton’s terrific prose too. Let me end by sharing the opening:

Miss Bruss, the perfect secretary, received Nona Manford at the door of her mother’s boudoir (“the office,” Mrs. Manford’s children called it) with a gesture of the kindliest denial.

There’s a sentence doing some work! So much information yet so little action. Three characters are introduced (four, really, though we don’t yet know how many children Mrs. Manford has). Two qualifying clauses impede our syntactical progress even as they grant us a lot of information. Will Miss Bruss’s (the brusqueness hinted at in her name is forced on her by her employer) epithet prove to be accurate or ironic? Where does the description of the qualifying phrase come from? Is “the perfect secretary” an instance of omniscience or of free indirect discourse? Speaking of irony, do we hear grudging admiration along with the gentle dismissal of their mother’s work in that description of boudoir as office? What would “a gesture of kindliest denial” look like? However we picture it, we’ll encounter it a lot in the novel: resolve softened by good manners, but no less steely for that.

This is a beginning that has me raring to keep reading. Hope it entices you as well.

Garry Disher, Mischance Creek (2025)

I’ve written before about how much I enjoy Disher’s Hirsch books, about a cop in rural far western Australia. By his own admission, Hirsch is as much social worker as policeman, and most of the time he’s checking in on people, some of whom go days, even weeks without seeing anyone outside their household.

This installment begins with him doing the rounds of his annual firearms audit. Everyone in this district has a gun or two. Are they locked up? Are the bullets stored separately? These questions are important, but they’re also a pretext for a more pressing one: How are you doing? (Are you going to use that gun on someone else or yourself?) The answers are mostly a resounding no. A brutal drought has pushed farmers and ranchers to the brink. Starving sheep are being shot en masse. Banks are repossessing farms. People are angrier with each other than ever, eager to vent grievances. These bad feelings are the kind of thing that led to the resounding failure of the Australian Indigenous Voices referendum, referenced more than once. Nominally, Mischance Creek centers on a cold case (the deaths of a husband and wife, found separately in the bush, where they liked to go rockhounding; seven years later their adult daughter thinks she has found new evidence.) But that’s not especially important. Disher succeeds, as usual, in keeping many balls in the air: some of these plot elements are satisfyingly minor. I appreciate his refusal to tie everything to the main case the way most crime writers do.

But really the book is about the question of how good liberals can respond to contemporary authoritarianism. The previous book in the series, concerning the aftermath of Covid restrictions, was the weakest so far because it seemed completely at a loss in this regard. Mischance Creek does better, not because it has a solution, but because it’s at least aware of the cluelessness of the institutions it’s centered on (not least the institution of the procedural). In the past, Disher skated past the chasm between cops and social workers (sometimes their roles overlap, but fundamentally their philosophies are totally different). Now he’s got a larger problem: a lot of characters—and people in the world this book represents—don’t believe in either of the roles, or the philosophies for that matter.

Mischance Creek taught me about the sovereign citizen movement, which I didn’t realize was a thing. (We’d have a lot more of that kind of thing in the US if “sovereign citizens” hadn’t coopted the government and other institutions of the state.) “Sovereign citizens” blithely deny that they are members of a larger politic (they aren’t Australians, say); they answer to no one but themselves. Hard to see how this doesn’t eventually lead to fascism. Hirsch and his colleagues in the district, along with the teachers and doctors who make up the social system of this vast, remote area, are, in Disher’s view, tragic figures, emblematic of a lost world—but, and this is what Disher doesn’t seem to get, that very world did nothing to stop its loss.

Philip Clarkson Elliott, Shelocta, PA, 1943

Good month! Aside from the Sullivan, I have no regrets. What about you? How was your reading month?

What I Read, April 2026

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

I really buried the lede in my description of March. Forgot to mention the most important thing. I got a job! I’ll be teaching 8th and 11th grade English at an independent school just ten minutes from home. (This seems to be St Louis-speak for what I always knew as “a private school.”) I’m excited for the opportunity—though also quite anxious, never having taught anyone younger than a college freshman.

I spent April beavering away at various jobs: consulting, editing, working my shifts at the bookstore, and, this month, working with two theater productions. I served as the dramaturgue for the New Jewish Theater’s excellent production of Joshua Harmon’s Prayer for the French Republic and participated in a panel on Upstream Theater’s delightful production, in Phillip Boehm’s translation and adaption, of Jura Soyfer’s End of the World Cabaret. Maybe you know as little about Soyfer as I did. Check out the link to his Wikipedia entry. A fascinating but all-too-short life. It was genuinely thrilling to watch a production from its very first table reading to final performance. Theater people are truly amazing! And St Louis seems to be a great theater town.

I was busy and didn’t read as much as usual, but here’s what I did make time for.

Max Ginsburg, The Friends (1981)

Gloria Naylor, The Women of Brewster Place (1982)

The subject of Episode 44 of One Bright Book.

Rebecca chose this novel-in-linked-stories about seven women living in a tenement building in an unnamed American city, and I’m glad she did. It has all the things. Struggle, resilience, community as sustenance and as suffocation. Joy, despair, sex, death. The use of real estate and domestic spaces to tell the story of 20th Century American racial uplift. Tellingly, doesn’t feel dated. Would pair well with Ann Petry’s The Street, though Brewster is slightly less committed to realism. Reminded me too of Bryan Washington’s story “Alif,” which is also about a neighbourhood where everyone is all up in each other’s business. This book was around a fair bit in my 1990s bookselling days, but I’d never read it or indeed anything by Naylor. I’m glad I did, and I plan to read more.

Francis Spufford, Nonesuch (2026)

Iris Hawkins wants to be rich. Not for the comfort that money can buy, though that’s nice too. But because she wants “to be part of the way the world works… to be in the room where decisions are taken… to make things happen… to see the angles.” She wants men to have to see her and not be able to ignore her.

At first this is difficult because she’s a secretary at a financial firm in the City in 1939. But with the advent of the war she’s able to take on more responsibility. Men are deployed. Her boss has checked out from worry about his son, a POW of the Germans. He distractedly acquiesces to her plan to short the market, a plan that pays dividends. She even impresses John Maynard Keynes when she unknowingly meets him at a country house party.

It’s impressive that Iris can do all this, because the rest of her life is more than a little busy. A one-night stand with an engineer in the still-fledgling industry of television turns serious, not least when the man’s father, a charming, helpless old coot in thrall to the study of the occult, turns out to know what he’s talking about. Iris is soon being pursued by magical creatures and in a race with another young woman, the aristocratic golden child of the British fascist movement, to unlock angels that have been entombed in London sculptures. Oh yeah, she also needs to foil a plot to assassinate Churchill and replace him the pro-German Lord Halifax.

This is all as busy as it sounds, and frankly I can’t work out how Spufford wants to connect the secret systems of finance and the occult. Maybe this will become clearer before long. Turns out that Nonesuch is the first of the duology. On Bluesky, Spufford said the second book is due next summer. Better be because Nonesuch ends on a real cliffhanger!

Christoffer Carlsson, The Living and the Dead (2023) Trans. Rachel Wilson-Broyles (2025)

Crime novel set in the same region of western Sweden and featuring some of the same characters as Blaze Me a Sun, which I enjoyed a couple of years ago. Less interesting than its predecessor, unfortunately. Similar structure (a crime in the past, hitherto unsolved, leads to a new crime in the present), similar themes (young people become middle-aged people who find their lives haven’t had as much in store for them as they expected). All done just a little less compellingly. Diverting enough—the audio got me through a long drive—but nothing special.

Tana French, The Keeper (2026)

Wrote about this here. An ongoing conversation with Elle has me wondering if it’s more pro-vigilante than I had credited. I loved the book, though: what does this say about me?

Penelope Fitzgerald, Human Voices (1980)

The second selection for Leviathan’s Women of a Certain Age book club. Another rousing discussion of another terrific book. Hadn’t read it in more than ten years: happily, a joy to revisit. We considered the novel’s structure, its cast of characters, the difficulty of discerning a protagonist, the relation of these obliquities to the historical period in which it is set, namely, the period in 1940 from Dunkirk to the beginnings of the Blitz when the war, as far as Britain was concerned, was both all-consuming and distant. We thought about the novel as a portrait of an institution—someone mentioned Shirley Hazzard’s book about the UN as a comparison—in this case, the BBC, and the flattening of any distinction between the employees’ personal and professional lives. The higher-ups, in particular, basically live in Broadcast House, but eventually the building’s theater, previously used for orchestral recordings, is turned into a dormitory for all employees. Convenient and safe, but also frustrating in that the room’s excellent acoustics make every snore, sigh, or groan crisply audible. This is an example of Fitzgerald’s inimical tone, which veers suddenly from humor to heartbreak. The ever-present possibility of death turns monomania from a joke to a noble enterprise: I’m thinking of the example Dr. Vogel, a German émigré and expert in recorded sound, whose perfectionist tendencies see him record several hours’ worth of church doors squeaking, only a few seconds of which will feature in a planned “Sounds of Britain” program. We might find Vogel’s obsession annoying or even irresponsible in the face of larger dangers. But we are bound to feel differently when he is killed by a piece of flying drainpipe in the aftermath of a raid, as he is patiently explaining to an air raid warden on behalf of a stranger that English law allowed the man to enter his bombed-out building twice, once to get his mattress and once to take any other personal effects. Suddenly pedantry seems less persnickety and more the foundation of the rule of law.

Dozens of moments like this fill the pages of this terrific short book.

I didn’t plan to read two Blitz novels in such short order, and I don’t have anything smart to say about the differences. I can only note that when memory becomes history—as it has in the 45 years between the publication of these two novels—then literary modes other than realism seem reasonable in a way they might not have before.

Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs (2014)

First novel in Bennett’s first fantasy trilogy, which I bought because it’s been reissued in a spiffy new edition. I’d have never looked twice at the old one. I’m shallow that way. Which would have been bad, since the premise is good. Bulikov (vaguely Russian or Eastern European) was once the continent of gods. Magic ruled the day. The place was wealthy and powerful. It colonized the rest of the world, all the places the gods did not favour. That was especially true of the island of Saypur, whose people suffered greatly at Bulikov’s hands. But then everything changed. New technology allowed little Saypur (vaguely Islamic or Mughal Indian) to kill and/or sequester the gods and now once-mighty Bulikov is an impoverished vassal state of the highly militarized Saypur. When a famous Saypuri academic, a specialist in the old gods, is found murdered in Bulikov’s former capital, a city whose geography has been rearranged by the technology that killed the gods (an event known as The Blink), a Saypuri diplomat is sent to investigate. It’s not long before she, along with her very cool sidekick, finds that those murdered gods might not be so dead.

City of Stairs is often great (premise, world-building, characterization) and sometimes not great (too long, slow start). But I got so into it that even before I finished I’d bought the other two. I moved on to the second book right away, but before long I got stuck. It has a bad case of “middle novel” syndrome. I’ll get back to it, though.

There is a thing about Bennett, whose Ana and Din books I so much enjoyed earlier this year, that I should mention because some of you might find it disqualifying. The guy has a mania for the solecism “hence why”: it’s appeared at least once in each of the three books I’ve read, and it’s like fingernails of the chalkboard. What are the editors even doing???

Daniel Greene, Naked Maja, 2009

Not much of a reading month, really. All that theater stuff kept me pretty busy. Fear not, May brought a better assortment.

What I Read, March 2026

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

Springtime all right. Sometimes too hot, but then suddenly too cold. The fruit trees did their best, but the New Climate was too much for them, and they weren’t as glorious as they might have been. A friend visited from Germany and we drank many cappuccinos. I experienced the St Louis church hall Lenten fish fry: a beautiful thing. I read these books.

William George Scott, Flowers and a Jug, 1946

Virginia Woolf, Orlando (1928)

The subject of episode 43 of One Bright Book.

I hadn’t read this since graduate school; I guess I’d say it’s my least favourite Woolf. (Keeping in mind I’ve yet to read The Years or Night and Day.) She clearly had a lot of fun with it, and good on her. Her idea of fun is not mine, is all. The jokes about how writers have been a pain across the centuries are well and good, and the pastiches of former literary styles impressive, but I just don’t care much for writing about writing. Still, as I said in our conversation, I was glad to have read it again. There are some marvelous moments—I especially loved the opening Elizabethan sequence: the impromptu fair on the frozen Thames is unforgettable—and it’s interesting to see Woolf’s fascination with the dialectic of continuity and discontinuity play out in another register from her most famous works.

Robin Hobb, Assassin’s Quest (1997)

Final book in a fantasy trilogy that probably felt more innovative at the time than now, but which absolutely holds up. (I read volumes 1 and 2 last fall, when I couldn’t be bothered to blog.) The books get progressively longer, especially this one, which is almost 900 pages of pretty small print. I gather their length has been held against them, and I guess this last book, especially, could have been shortened, but I was absorbed, especially because female characters become much more important in this last volume. I recommend these highly, especially to readers like me, who used to read a lot in the genre but moved away for a while, or to those curious to give the genre a try—the first book is only about 300 pages, so you aren’t making a huge initial commitment; plus the covers of the reissues won’t scare or embarrass the fantasy-averse.

As to what they’re about, I direct you to Elle’s unimprovable post. Her points about Hobb’s representation of disability and the long-term effects of physical and psychological abuse are especially good.

A couple of final thought for those who have already read these: Nighteyes is the best—imagine a whole novel centered on him! The idea of Old Blood is one I would have liked to see further developed. Maybe that happens in one of her other trilogies? And, finally, Molly and Burrich: I approve!

Thi Bui, The Best We Could Do (2017)

Bui trained herself to draw comics in order to create this graphic memoir, which took her twelve years to finish—and that’s not including the time it took her to compile the oral histories on which it’s based. The book traces her parents’ lives in Vietnam under French colonization, during the Vietnam War, and their departure, with their children, including Bui herself, who was three years old at the time, as “Boat People” on the way to an eventual new life in the US. The back-and-forth structure—Bui toggles between interviewing her parents in the present (a project given further poignancy by the birth of her own child) and depicting their past experiences—is taken from Maus, as she freely admits. The similarities between the books are uncanny, especially in their shared depiction of cross-generational trauma. Yet for whatever reason, The Best We Could Do has left little mark in my memory. I don’t regret reading it, but I thought Thien Pham’s Family Style, which covers similar territory, has a more powerful visual style.

Yosha Gunasekera, The Midnight Taxi (2026)

Novel about two South Asian women in NYC, one a taxi driver and the other a public defender, who band together when a fare turns up dead in the first woman’s cab. Fine premise, but weak writing and poor plotting make this thin gruel.

Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower (1993)

I’m the last person to read this, which means you already know it’s great. And you’ve heard what others have rightly said about it: Butler predicted our present all too well. (The book is set mostly in 2027.) The collapse of public services, the shrinking of the United States into a set of semi-autonomous armed conclaves, the violence and despair that comes from extreme income inequality, the terrible release of powerful opiates, the climate change: it all hits. President Donner and his oligarchic-fascism is uncannily reminiscent of Trump and his coterie.

N. K. Jemisin must have been inspired when writing her Broken Earth trilogy by Butler’s creation of a condition she calls “hyper-empathy” or “sharing,” a double-edged experience that shapes the lives of some of the characters, including the protagonist. Parable of the Sower is a violent, desperate book, but not despairing. It ends with another quintessentially American phenomenon: the founding of a utopian community.

As soon as I finished, I started on Parable of the Talents, which I was also enjoying, but then I unaccountably stopped, because I’m like that.

Vivek Shanbhag, Sakina’s Kiss (2021) Trans. Srinath Perur (2023)

You know how every family has its catchphrases? Things like nonsense words (your kid’s adorable mispronunciations.) Or lines from a tv show (ours is “Bags must be properly folded!”—real ones know.) As he did in his brilliant debut, Ghachar Ghochar, Vivek Shanbhag puts this kind of language at the heart of his new book. The two examples in Sakina’s Kiss couldn’t be more different. One is cute: a father’s magical incantation to his child. The other is tragic: a misunderstood phrase with terrible consequences. But gradually they reveal themselves to be versions of the same thing. After all, they come from the mouth of the same character, the novel’s narrator, a middlingly successful professional in the tech hub of Bengaluru. This man, we learn, is a master at using language to conceal truth. And Shanbhag is even more adept at helping us to see things his narrator cannot. He crams as much incident—violence, rebellion, stolen inheritances—into his two hundred pages as a 19th century doorstopper. Don’t miss this one.

Kim Fay, Kate and Frida (2025)

Another from the “James recommends books to me” file. In the 1990s, two women become best friends when one, living the American in Paris gap year dream, writes to a bookstore back home requesting a copy of Martha Gelhorn’s The Face of War. The other suggests she might also like Penelope Lively’s Moon Tiger, and so begins an epistolary relationship filled with recommendations of books, music, and food. The pair form a mutual hype club, encouraging each other re: work and love lives. At first I found Fay’s writing too earnest and twee, even for me, and almost stopped reading. But I kept on because I remember those days fondly, and next thing you know I was up after midnight finishing the thing. Every time the book threatens to go wrong—one character finagles her way to Sarajevo during the siege with a woefully underprepared idea of becoming a stringer—it surprises by handling the moment more interestingly than you’d expect. Not an all-timer, but a charmer, especially for my fellow Gen Xers.

Gwendoline Riley, The Palm House (2026)

When I paged through the opening of the copy that NYRB kindly sent me, as I like to do, I soon found myself engrossed and before you know it I’d read pretty much the whole thing. (It’s a quick read.) I wouldn’t mind reading it again; I’ve a hunch it would repay that attention. I loved that this is an oblique, slightly peculiar novel that, happily, is about stuff, not least the London housing market, without ever aiming to report on “the state of the nation.”

It’s mostly about the narrator’s friendship with the editor of a highbrow publication for which she has freelanced in the past. The editor has been pushed out, replaced by a bro who talks big but knows nothing (his “philosophy” is to move fast and break things) and indeed does not last long in this new job. The former editor claims to be taking it in stride, but really he’s not. He and the narrator have drinks and meals and walk along the river. They never sleep with each other or fall in love or anything. It’s a real friendship. They are careful with each other. Close but not too close. Riley does this thing where she presents successive pieces of dialogue as separate when they are actually from the same character, and it has a pleasingly slippery effect. I dunno, it’s good.

Miklós Bánffy, They Were Divided [The Transylvanian Trilogy: Volume III] (1940) Trans. Patrick Thursfield and Katalin Bánffy-Jelen (2000)

Most of the time I’m so haunted by the enormity of everything I want to read that I race through books, often starting another one the minute I’ve finished. (I’m aware this is no way to live, thank you very much.) But once in a while I get so immersed in the world of a book that I’m sad rather than glad about the shrinking number of pages. Such was the case with the third volume of Bánffy’s trilogy.

Things become even more sour and unhappy in this final volume—and why not: the reader has known from the beginning that WWI is coming to destroy the marvelous, terrible Hapsburg Empire. But by the end of They Were Divided, even the characters know it, though of course they do not yet know what that will mean. (It ends as our hero, the would-be progressive landowner Bálint Abády, drives to the mustering point for his regiment.) The sadness within the book became tangled with my own feelings as a reader. I started most mornings over the past months reading my daily pages of Bánffy, and that will be a reading memory I cherish for years.

One last thought, neither here nor there: I don’t think I’ve read a novel from this time and place in which Jews feature so infrequently. Striking!

Irene N Watts and Kathryn E. Shoemaker, Good-bye Marianne (2008)

Illustrated adaptation of Watts’s middle grade novel of the same name. The latter is the first in a trilogy modeled on the author’s own experiences: loving childhood in Berlin in a middle-class German Jewish home; increasing persecution, most painfully being expelled from school in the days after Kristallnacht; a fortunate but difficult escape on a Kindertransport, leading to a new life in England and, later, Canada. I plan to track the novels down at some point, not least because I’m curious how they compare to Judith Kerr’s similar novels.

At the heart of the book is Marianne’s friendship, in the weeks between being forced out of school and leaving the country, with a non-Jewish boy who is visiting his aunt, the landlady of the building in which Marianne lives with her mother. (Her father has had to go into hiding.) Ernest is good fun. Like Marianne, he loves Erich Kästner’s Emil and the Detectives, and inventing games inspired by its scenarios. He’s always up for exploring the city. But he belongs to the Hitler Youth and is matter of fact about Jewish inferiority. He says something hateful—but also has the wherewithal to consider what that means. Shoemaker’s lovely pencil drawings soften the harshness of the story, without every downplaying anything, making this book suitable for readers from 5th grade on up.

Funny story: my wife spells her name the same way as the character, and when she saw this on the dining table she said, “Anything you want to tell me???”

Bernhard Dörries, Breakfast Still Life, 1927

Back soon with tales from April’s reading.

What I Read, February 2026

Posted on by under book review, lists, month in review, review, self-promotion

February in St Louis was warmish but not dismayingly so. We could still pretend winter is a thing. Lots of good running weather. I beavered away at my various gigs. I probably saw some movies but now I can’t remember. I should start writing those down. My review of Gabriele Tergit’s Effingers was published in The Wall Street Journal. Canada lost both gold medal Olympic hockey games, and that really hurt. I also read some books.

Leo Lesser Ury, Cafe König at Night, 1925

Qntm, There is no Antimemetics Division (2025)

We live in a world of memes. Internet jokes, catch phrases, bits of culture that spread with the persistence of an earworm. But what if there were such things as antimemes? Ideas, cultish beliefs, even malevolent forces that circulate with similar force except that they have the power of being forgotten, such that we are unable to recall their effect on us. And what if a governmental organization had been set up to protect us from these antimemes, which seek to crush us with their own dark virality?

That’s the premise of this brilliant novel, which broke my brain in all the best ways. The scientists and operatives in the Antimemtic Division routinely forget everything they’ve done, requiring elaborate protocols and dangerous actions to make sure that the world is kept safe from REDACTED and REDACTED. Author qntm, pronounced “quantum,” the pen name of British writer Sam Hughes, concludes that the human ability to forget anything is both what keeps us going and our greatest vulnerability.

Robert Jackson Bennett, A Drop of Corruption (2024)

Ana and Din are back! This time they venture into the most forbidding and dangerous place in the Empire: the Shroud. In this floating station off the coast (part oil derrick, part Pequod), a handful of Alchemists process leviathan corpses, harvesting the raw material from which all-powerful bodily modifications stem. In addition to avoiding the dreaded “middle volume sag” and offering another satisfying tale of detection, A Drop of Corruption picks up the hints in the first volume about stakes larger than this one case, which will presumably be developed in the third book in the series, due later this year.

Lea Ypi, Indignity: A Life Reimagined (2025)

It starts with a photo.

A young couple enjoy the snow and sunshine of the Italian Dolomites. They look at the camera with quite different expressions. He seems wary: eyes narrowed, perhaps against the glare, two furrows etched on his forehead; she, nestled in a fur, smiles broadly. It’s early 1941. These newlyweds are on their honeymoon. How could they be enjoying themselves while the war rages and the Balkans, including Albania, where they have made their home, has been plunged into factionalism? And why hadn’t Yea Lpi, professor of philosophy and the subjects’ granddaughter, ever seen this picture before? As the photo circulates online, people make all sorts of claims. Her grandmother was a communist spy; she was a fascist collaborator. Is any of this true?

The photo turns out to be a red herring—Ypi doesn’t even reproduce it in the book, save in highly cropped form on the (beautiful) cover of the US edition. (It’s easy to find online, though.) Instead, her book reconstructs her grandmother Leman’s life, from her childhood in an Albanian family long devoted to the Ottoman Empire in Greek Salonica, through her decision, as a young woman of 18, to move to Tirana, where she found a career and, briefly, a husband, a man recently returned from studying law in Paris where he knew, though did not particularly like, another expatriate, a young striver named Enver Hoxha. Ypi’s grandfather’s decency and reformist leftist tendencies put him at odds with the postwar Communist government. He was branded an enemy of the state and imprisoned for 15 years, during which time Leman and their young son (Ypi’s father) were forced to work at manual labour far from their home in the capital

Central to the story are the documents in Leman’s secret service file at the formidably named Authority for Information Concerning Documentation of the Former State Security Service. As always, documents turn out to be fundamentally inconclusive, especially when a late revelation prompts Ypi to wonder if anything in them is at all trustworthy. It doesn’t help that Ypi is researching her grandmother (as opposed to her grandfather or any other male relative). As a fellow scholar puts it, women and archives don’t go together: when woman appear at all, it is almost always with their husband’s name. Better, the man tells Ypi, to write a novel.

Which Ypi has done, sort of. Her treatment of Leman’s life is novelistic: filled with thoughts and feelings she could have had no access to, even though Leman was a beloved figure in her upbringing in Communist Albania in the 1980s and 90s. Most impressive is her glorious evocation of the multicultural world of early 20th century Thrace, tragically destroyed by successive waves of ethnic cleansing, from forced population transfers between Greece and Turkey in the wake of WWI to the Nazi eradication of Jewish Salonica.

Beneath this personal and political history is a philosophical investigation. From its epigraphs, citing Kant and Schiller, to its closing pages, the book considers the idea of dignity and its titular opposite. Dignity is the drive to “rule over adversity with moral force,” a tendency that Ypi argues, following Schiller, is fundamentally human. Dignity is what allows a person to decide to suffer, rather than instinctively to seek to free themselves from pain. And people most suffer, Ypi concludes, when they want to acknowledge both that the meaning of their lives both incorporates and exceeds the larger identities of family and nation and gender and religion of which they are part. (Ypi is a modern day Kanitian.) In this way, Ypi has given us a way to think not just about her grandmother but all the ordinary people who live through history, as she puts it, the first time as tragedy and the second time as even greater tragedy.

Ray Nayler, Palaces of the Crows (2026)

After enjoying Where the Axe is Buried last month, I was excited to get my hands on an advanced copy of Nayler’s forthcoming novel. And when I learned it was set in the forests of Lithuania (or perhaps Belarus) in WWII I was even more intrigued. Why had the sff writer Nayler chosen to write historical fiction? The answer is that he has found another way to investigate the animating question of his fiction: what kinds of relationships can exist between human and non-human animal societies? His first book considered octopuses. His second, elephants and mastodons. Here it’s crows.

Four teenagers—one Jewish, one Roma, one a Pole who has enlisted in the Red Army to help his family survive their forced exile in Siberia, and one a mute boy whose origins are uncertain—find each other in the chaos of the German advance into the Soviet Union in summer 1941. The Jewish girl, Neriya, whose family has always, in the years before he war, left their home in Vilnius each summer to vacation in a country village, and whose doctor parents have encouraged her to read Darwin and von Uexhüll, has over the years befriended a crow she names Buster. Buster is smart, even for a crow. He remembers Neriya from year to year, and masters the various games and puzzles she sets for him. He introduces her to other crows, each of whom has their own personalities. When she hides from the Germans in the forest, the birds appear at times of trouble, helping her and the other teens survive. For although the forest is vast, it is peopled with all sorts of threats: partisans, Germans, Russians who have gone AWOL, and others who, like our protagonists, are simply trying to survive. These other people are dangerous—though not as much as the terrible winters. The teens need all the help they can get.

The crows have created an avian city in the heart of the forest—more than a city, a real society, in which they look out for the most vulnerable members, much more than humans do. Chapters set during the war are interspersed with others from the 1970s, when the teens, now adults, each of whom has navigated life in the USSR in a different way, return to the forest. How can they protect the descendants of the crows who once protected them? Palace of the Crows might wrongfoot or disappoint some of Nayler’s earlier readers, especially those expecting a book a set in the future, but those who persist will see that this book, too, is about how we tell the stories of who we are, both within and between species. I hope Nayler keeps up his current writing pace!

Beryl Bainbridge, An Awfully Big Adventure (1989)

Stella Bradshaw is a working-class teenager in Liverpool in 1950. Her dream is to be in the theater, so she’s pleased in her closemouthed way when she is hired as an assistant stage manager in a regional playhouse. As the troupe prepares for a production of Peter Pan (the novel’s title comes from that play’s description of what death is sure to be), Stella becomes embroiled in its complicated relationships. She falls for the director, oblivious to what is obvious to readers: he’s gay. What at least this reader was oblivious to—surprising, because I’d seen the film, though admittedly not since it was in theaters in the late 90s—was the novel’s turn from comedy to tragedy. That ending! (And, yes, it’s all explained on the first page, Toni Morrison-style, but I’m slow.) Excellent stuff. Could have taken the Booker from A. S. Byatt if you ask me.

I’ll be reading this again soon: it’s the June title for the Leviathan book club. If you’re in St Louis, please join!

Miklós Bánffy, They Were Found Wanting [The Transylvanian Trilogy: Volume II] (1937) Trans. Patrick Thursfield and Katalin Bánffy-Jelen (2000)

See my thoughts on volume I. This continued to be excellent. Plenty of heartbreak, though. Things not going great for Laszlo.

Barbara Pym, The Sweet Dove Died (1977)

A moment ago, I mentioned a forthcoming meeting of the Leviathan book club. Pym’s late, great novel was our first selection. And what a terrific choice that turned out to be! I was thrilled to lead a discussion with such a smart and energetic group. I’d actually read this last August (one of those months I never got around to writing about) when NYRB released its beautiful edition. My first Pym, and from what I gather not the most representative, but absolutely terrific. I would say it even improved on re-reading. A woman coming up on 50—cool, elegant, manipulative, as Jacqui puts it in her review—meets an antique dealer and his 24-year-old nephew, who he’s training in the business. The antique dealer imagines a future with the woman, but she has designs (of what sort is never quite clear, even to herself) on the younger man. People behave badly—but, also, everyone has their reasons. The title, from Keats, is about the anguish—or is it the thrill?—of loving something to death. I would call The Sweet Dove Died Jamesian in the sense of being a study in cruelty. And an object lesson for any of us obsessed with the idea that the surroundings and events of our lives must be just so.

Isabel Cañas, Vampires of El Norte (2023)

Historical romance and vampire story set in the early part of the Mexican – American War (aka the US invasion of Mexico). As children, Nena and Néstor are inseparable, even though she’s the daughter of the patrón of a hacienda and he’s the son of a vaquero. Everything changes one night, when their expedition in search of buried Spanish silver coins goes terribly awry. Something, some creature, eyeless, all teeth and silent destruction, attacks Nena. The boy fights off the beast and carries the girl to the main house, but convinced he is responsible for her death he runs away never to be seen again. Until ten years later, that is, when he returns to join the forces the local ranchers are putting together to fight the Yanquis. When he sets eyes on Nena—who eventually recovered from her mysterious wounds—he freaks out. As does she, but for a different reason. She’s furious that he never wrote and can’t understand that he thought she was dead. This sets off an enemies-to-lovers story during a desperate mission in the wilds of northern Mexico: conveniently, the two become separated from the rest of the auxiliary cavalry during a battle. (Nena is there because in the intervening years and under the tutelage of Néstor’s grandmother she has become a curandera or healer.) Can the two overcome their differences to admit their love for each other? If so, what will happen when they return to the rigidly stratified world of the hacienda? And what are the terrible creatures the Yanquis have captured and forced to fight for them? You can probably guess the answers to all these questions. Vampires of El Norte doesn’t ever surprise, but it’s plenty satisfying. I do think Cańas needed to get a better handle on her allegory: those damn Yanquis are indeed vampiric but in the book’s most interesting moments the vampires are literal creatures, not just symbols. Just where did these vampires come from, anyway? It’s all a bit fast and loose. Still, I enjoyed this enough to seek out Cańas’s other books. Thanks to Hope for putting this on my radar.

Cy Twombly, Lepanto Part IV (2001)

March roundup coming soon!

What I Read, January 2026

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

Gonna knock out some posts on this year’s reading before we hit the half-way mark of 2026. Here’s what I remember about January in St Louis. A snow storm came through near the end of the month. It was cold for a while. That was great. I ran as often as the street cleaning allowed. I spent some time applying for a job that I would later get. That was very good. And I read these books.

Childe Hassam, Messenger Boy (1902)

Georges Simenon, The Two-Penny Bar (1932) Trans. David Watson (2014)

What, you expect me to remember the plot of a Simenon I read five months ago? What I do remember is that this is one of the atmospheric-outskirts-of-Paris Maigrets. The search for the killer of a moneylender (Jewish, natch, boo) whose body has been seen being dumped in the river leads Maigret to a group of friends who spend weekends and holidays at an inn (the bar of the title) near Morsang, a village on the Seine about 40 km from the capital. They fish, paddle about, play cards, chase children, eat fulsomely, drink a hell of a lot, and sleep with each other. Maigret insinuates himself into the group, which is no trouble for him since he loves all those things too. (Except the adultery part. Maigret could never.) The vibes are immaculate, and the crime gets solved too.

Seichō Matsumoto, Tokyo Express (1958) Trans. Jesse Kirkwood (2022)

Born in 1909 in Japan’s Fukoka prefecture, Seichō Matsumoto did not publish until 1950. But then he made up for lost time, publishing over 450 books in the next four decades. These range from procedurals to psychological slow-burns in the vein of Patricia Highsmith or Celia Dale. Until recently, Matsumoto was hard to find in English. Happily, Modern Library (following on the heels of Penguin UK) has launched a program of reissues and they’ve started with one of his best. Tokyo Express (1958) begins with the discovery of the bodies of a man and a woman on a remote beach. Investigators rule the deaths a lovers’ suicide. But two detectives—one local to the scene, older, out of fashion; the other from the city, young, full of new ideas—aren’t buying it. Before long, they think they know who did it—but not how. Part odd-couple buddy story, part oblique criticism of a society desperate to repress its wartime past, the novel is famous for its plot, which centers on the detailed scrutiny of train time-tables. Trust me, this is a lot more exciting than it sounds. Tokyo Express is so clever you’ll be left shaking your head in appreciation at Matsumoto’s skill—and counting down the days until the next reissue appears.

Ray Nayler, Where the Axe is Buried (2025)

Nayler’s second full-length novel—after the excellent The Mountain in the Sea, about octopus intelligence—offers what are coming to seem his trademark elements: compelling characters; clear explanations of how systems function, whether these be ecological, political, or technological; and deep knowledge of political organizations and local customs gained from his other career in the foreign service. Set in an unspecified future in which many parts of the world are run by AI systems designed to maximize resources and human flourishing whereas others rely on more old-fashioned methods of coercion and surveillance, Where the Axe is Buried is a compendium of authoritarian strategies—and the resistances they inevitably provoke. Whether you read for the heart or the head, you’ll find much to appreciate here.

Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now (1875)

The subject of Episode 42 of One Bright Book. In my introduction to the episode, I said:

The central concepts of this terrific novel are cowardice and cruelty. Which is not to say it is a cruel or cowardly novel. How could it be, given Trollope’s amused interest in even the worst of the rogue’s gallery that makes up its cast of characters? But there sure is a lot of cruelty in its pages. Maybe we should be glad that even its worst characters don’t seem to take pleasure in their cruelty. (They are not Stephen Miller cruel.) But they are cowards, and in their desire to have things go their own way they will say or do anything, especially if it means they can avoid making a hard choice. Saying enough’s enough to someone else’s bad behaviour; taking responsibility for one’s own actions: these are things almost no one in this novel will do. That cowardice is what leads to cruelty. Something to think about re: our own day. Turns out The Way We Live Now is also about the way we live now.

Anne Youngson, Meet Me at the Museum (2018)

Anne Youngson was unknown to me when I noticed her two novels on the shelves of Leviathan. I figured James had a good reason for stocking them, so I asked him to tell me more. His response: “Light reading that doesn’t insult your intelligence.” Since that is my favourite kind of reading, I immediately moved them to the top of the TBR pile.

I started with Meet Me at the Museum because I love epistolary novels. As a teenager, Tina Hopgood wrote a letter to Professor P. V. Glob at the Silkeborg Museum in Denmark about the Tollund Man, which he had recently gained fame for identifying after the 2500-year-old body was found, perfectly preserved, by two peat-cutters in a bog. Glob—a real guy: his book was reissued by NYRB a while ago—wrote back, prompting the young woman to promise herself that she would visit the museum one day. Since then forty years have passed. Tina, now a middle-aged English farmwife with grown children, writes the professor again, this time because the friend she had planned to take the trip with all those years ago has just died. A reply to her lament for lost time arrives—but not from Glob, because he too is dead.

The letter writer is a curator named Anders Larson, who expresses mild interest in her past encounter with his famous predecessor and condolences on her recent loss. From this kind but detached beginning stems a lengthy correspondence in which two modest and decent people open up to each other about their shared puzzlement at how they came to have more life behind than ahead of them. The obvious comparison to Meet Me at the Museum is 84 Charing Cross Road and if you liked that one you’ll like this too. Like its more famous forbearer, Meet Me is gentle and modest in its ambitions and prose—but thrilling precisely because it doesn’t try to do too much. Its sincerity becomes it. As usual, James is right: it never insults your intelligence.

Youngson was in her 70s when she published this, her first book, written after her retirement from a career as an executive in the car industry. I’ve written before about how much the idea of the late bloomer means to me. (Maybe I’ll still do something with my life!) Learning about the author’s circumstances made me enjoy this lovely book all the more. I think a number of you would dig it, too.

Robert Jackson Bennett, The Tainted Cup (2024)

Rex Stout with monsters. The most dangerous place in Khanum is its sea-walls, where soldiers and engineers must constantly guard the empire from malevolent leviathans that inflict terrible damage any time they manage to breach the defenses. Yet these monsters don’t just threaten Khanum. They are also the source of its most powerful technologies. Alchemists have figured out how to synthesize the beasts’ blood and organs into bodily modifications that grant supernatural abilities and are thus coveted by the Empire’s citizens even though they are so powerful they often cause early death.

The narrator, Dinios “Din” Kol, has chosen to be modified as an Engraver: he remembers everything he ever hears, sees, smells, tastes, and touches. For obvious reasons, Engravers serve in law enforcement, typically serving as assistants to Investigators. At the beginning of The Tainted Cup, Din meets Anagosa “Ana” Dolraba. She is brilliant, idiosyncratic, vaguely disreputable. And she has asked for Din by name. Ana needs an Engraver more than most Investigators, because her agoraphobia and neurodivergence (she is so easily sensorily overstimulated she needs to wear a blindfold) generally keep her inside and away from crime scenes. (See what I mean about Nero Wolfe? And Sherlock Holmes for that matter.)

The pair have been tasked with solving the murder of a prominent Engineer. The man was found dead while visiting the home of a powerful oligarch, killed by dapplegrass, a modified plant that explodes from the inside anything that inhales or consumes it. Shortly thereafter, a section of seawall is breached and several of the Engineers responsible for protecting it are found dead in the same way.

I loved The Tainted Cup from start (a wonderful map) to finish (a teaser for the next volume). The solution to the crime is as good as the world-building: an impressive feat. A lot of books that try to do just one of those things don’t succeed. This is Bennett’s third series. I’ll be getting to them all.

Hans Peter Richter, Friedrich (1961) Trans. Edite Kroll (1970)

Postwar German children’s classic about the persecution of a Jewish child in 1930s Germany. The unnamed narrator has a best friend named Friedrich: the boys, born one week apart in 1925, grow up in the same apartment building, in an out of each other’s lives. At times, the narrator wishes he were part of Friedrich’s family. He looks up to his friend’s parents, warmer and wiser than his own. But the boys diverge as they age and Nazism takes hold on German life. For a time, the narrator manages—like his father, who remains friendly to Friedrich’s parents even after throwing in his lot with the Nazis, thanks to whom he has found work after long-term unemployment—to reconcile his friendship with the new norms of public life. But the contradiction can’t hold: the best part of the book concerns Kristallnacht, when Friedrich finds himself, in a moment of genuine ecstasy, that is, of being thrown outside himself, joining in with the destruction of Jewish property and life, starting with Friedrich’s home.

Richter served in the German army (he lost an arm on the Eastern front); after the war he studied psychology and sociology, but found his calling as a writer for children. Friedrich, the best known of his books, was for years a classroom staple in Germany. It’s easy to see why: it exemplifies the universalist school of representing Jewish life in the Nazi period: that is, it believes German Jews were as ordinary and as German as anyone else; their Jewishness was contingent and incidental to their lives. (In the guise of openness and acceptance, this view manages to reject the idea of Jewishness as meaningful in its own right.) It is also frank about German culpability. Which makes sense, given the audience it was written for. For the same reason, though, it’s not the book contemporary readers, especially non-German ones, are likely to most want on the subject. We might expect a book on the Holocaust to foreground Jewish experience, for example. We might want such a novel to have a Jewish main character. But that doesn’t mean the book isn’t worth reading. It is a document of its time, and carries its own interest, especially its willingness to suggest that there might be a thrilling element to destruction and persecution. A middle-grade book today probably wouldn’t do that, either. And that might be a loss.

Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance (1934)

The past couple of years I’ve been part of a group, headed by Shawn of the Shawn Breathes Books YouTube channel, reading Edith Wharton’s collected works. Regular readers will know I think she’s a genius. I was excited to learn more about where that brilliance came from, and enthusiastically agreed when someone suggested we tackle her autobiography. By the end of the book, I wasn’t so enthusiastic anymore. I didn’t quite expect a tell-all, but I certainly thought it would be more personal than it is. Which makes sense: A Backward Glance predates the era of personal writing. Wharton is discrete to the point of obliquity about her failed marriage to the Boston Brahmin Teddy Wharton and silent about her lengthy love affair with the journalist Morton Fuller. Her look into the past is glancing indeed.

Still, I remember a number of moments, including:

Wharton’s claim that she was taught only two things as a child (she had, to put it mildly, erratic schooling): modern languages and good manners.

Her further claim—which you can see motivating a book like Age of Innocence—that her childhood was worth remembering only because the New York of that time is as vanished a world as Atlantis.

What William Dean Howells told her when the dramatization of The House of Mirth flopped: “What the American public always wants is a tragedy with a happy ending.”

Little Edith, carrying around a book and making up stories from it even before she could read.

A nearly silent visit with Henry James to the aged George Meredith, in the grip of locomotor ataxia and deafness.

Countless drives in an open car through the English countryside with a profusely sweating Henry James, who adored motoring, though of course never drove himself.

What I took most from the book is that Edith Wharton was an excellent, devoted friend. Her shyness and social anxiety caused many to ignore or be disappointed by her. But those who got to know her were richly rewarded. Readers of this book, however, can only glimpse that person. A Backward Glance is interesting but underwhelming. Certainly not the place to start with Wharton, who just looms larger and larger for me as a great 20th century writer.

Alex Katz, Winter Branch (1993)

More soon on February’s reading!

What I Read, December 2025

Posted on by under month in review, review, Uncategorized

I came down from the high of my first months as a former professor. Not because I longed for my old job (though I do miss being around students and in the classroom), but because I had to face the uncertainty of how to keep body and soul together going forward. I kept hustling, buckled down to my various gigs, including, this month, a number of hours at a local bookstore. It felt so good to be back in that environment again. That excitement buoyed me as the days grew short; psychologically, I kept my head above water, which has not always been the case in Decembers past. And I read a few books, some of them excellent.

Andrew Wyeth, Dusk (1978)

Sarah Campion, Makeshift (1940)

Now this is interesting. A novel from the early part of WWII set in desperate early Weimar Germany; racially-divided South Africa; and puritan New Zealand, about a German Jewish woman who escapes the Nazis in body but not in mind, written by a non-Jewish British writer. Campion (the pen name of Mary Rose Alpers; no relation, as I briefly hoped, to Jane Campion) spent most of the 1930s teaching English in Berlin, where many of her students were Jews. She was forced out of the country in 1937 when she refused to identify those students—part of a long life of progressive political activism, including later protesting the Vietnam War.

Charlotte Herz, her protagonist—smart, funny, neurotic, judgmental, flinty when she needs to be—is not an easy character to like. (The novel is bracingly uninterested in this idea.) Charlotte does some things—one thing in particular—that are pretty terrible, but also maybe the things that needed to be done to survive. She casts aspersions on most of the people she meets. She is an ungrateful exile. These facts, combined with the disconnect between author and character, have led some to dismiss the book as appropriative. One such reader is Sarah Shieff, who wrote the afterword to this new reissue. I have to say, as a Jew, I don’t find this to be the case. In fact, I have beef with Shieff, who misreads the book badly, in my opinion, showing herself to be unable to distinguish Herz’s voicing of antisemitic views from her belief in them. And having read a lot about German Jews in the 1920s and 30s I found Makeshift thoroughly compelling and plausible, including its first-person voice. That said, the writer Campion most reminds me of is also non-Jewish, another woman who had a lot to say about the treatment of minorities in the British Empire: Doris Lessing. Campion shares Lessing’s frankness about female sexual desire and how psychologically damaging it was to express in a period when male domination was even more overt than today.

Brad Bigelow, of the Neglected Books account on Bluesky, rescued Makeshift from near-total oblivion (I think there were only a handful of copies left in the world when he found it), and has published it in his invaluable Recovered Books series. I’m grateful to him for sending me a copy. May it not sink without a trace this time around.

Rosalyn Drexler, To Smithereens (1972)

“I shout, ‘I’d do anything for you, you Glamazon!’ And she says, ‘Anything? Well then, suck my pussy.’ And I’d have to do it, because she’s the champ, the winner, the goddess, the diva who makes me dive.”

Do you want to read this 1970s novel about women wrestlers and the men who love them, written by the painter, sculptor, playwright, novelist, nightclub singer, and yes, wrestler Rosalyn Drexler, gloriously resurrected by the new reprint press Hagfish Books? Hell yeah you do!

Daniel Elkind, Dr Chizhevsky’s Chandelier: The Decline of the USSR and other Heresies of the Twentieth Century (2025)

My friend James, owner of the mighty Leviathan Books here in St Louis, lent me his copy of this Sebaldesque mediation on some of, in the author’s words, “the undesirables” of 20th century history. It’s a short book, sometimes funny, always engrossing. Yet ultimately a little thin. Maybe I read it too quickly, but sitting here now, just a few weeks later, I can’t remember what Elkind concludes about his cast of characters. The strongest parts of the book are the autobiographical sections on his coming of age as a newly arrived immigrant to the US after the collapse of the Soviet Union and, especially, his memories of his parents and grandparents. Like so many in his generation who grew up in the aftermath of the disappearance of a seemingly unshakable social, political, and cultural world—will this be my daughter???—Elkind has a keen sense for history’s inescapable contingency. There are always so many paths not taken.

Alexander Chizhevsky, by the way, was born in what is now Poland in the Russian Empire and died in the USSR. A biophysicist, he founded a discipline he called “heliobiology,” the study of the effect of the sun’s cycles on plant life and human activity alike. For example, he linked the ebb and flow of battle that he experienced on the Eastern Front in WWI to solar flares. Much later, in 1940, Stalin got wind of this theory (never a good thing) and demanded Chizhevsky recant (it being inimical to Marxist-Leninist theories of history). When Chizhevksy refused, he was sent to the gulag and, after eight terrible years, to a “rehabilitation” program in Kazakhstan. His “chandelier” is an ionizer—a tool still in use, even though no one can agree whether it promotes health.

Undesirables, it seems, stick around in unexpected ways—especially when they have someone like Elkind to memorialize them.

Joan Silber, Secrets of Happiness (2021)

Came home from the library; sat down to read the first page or two, as one does; next looked up to find that an hour had passed; realized I would have to set other reading aside until I finished, which I did the next morning. Like most of Silber’s recent work, Secrets of Happiness uses ring structure: each chapter follows a character referenced, however fleetingly, in the previous. It begins with a middle-aged woman who learns that her husband has children with a woman he met on his travels in Asia and that he’s helped bring them all to the US. She kicks him out, files for divorce, travels overseas, sends cryptic messages to her grown children, who reluctantly meet their half-siblings. Lots of drama, but no melodrama. Laurie Colwin vibes. I liked this a lot.

Martin Lemelman, Mendel’s Daughter: A Memoir (2006)

Illustration of the author’s mother’s experiences during the Nazi occupation of eastern Poland (today Ukraine), compiled from a video testimony he had her make when she suffered a broken foot in the late 1980s and needed to be occupied. It’s hard to compete with Art Spiegelman’s MAUS, and Lemelman doesn’t try. He keeps his interactions with his mother to a minimum, and draws in a beautiful, almost gentle pen and ink style that is decidedly not cartoonish or abstract. Despite these differences, Mendel’s Daughter had to have been overshadowed by the earlier book, since I hadn’t heard of it until recently, and I’ve read a lot of Holocaust graphic novels. That is a shame, because it’s absolutely worth reading. The story of how Gusta Lemelman (née Schaechter) survived the war is, as so often in such stories, remarkable, harrowing, miraculous. Together with three of her siblings, Gusta hid in “graves,” deep pits dug into the forests near their hometown of Germakivka. Of great interest is her description of prewar life, especially the mingling of Jews and non-Jews, and how this diversity both fell apart but also persisted during the Nazi occupation, as some of the locals were instrumental in keeping Gusta and her siblings alive during their time in hiding.

Joan Silber, Household Words (1980)

Wrote about this here. A blend of Vivian Gornick and Elaine Kraf. Satisfying and interesting. I want to write about Silber at length. (Like, for money and with the help of an editor.) Anyone interested? Where should I pitch?

Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz, Berlin Shuffle (1937/2019) Trans. Philip Boehm (2025)

If you haven’t read Boschwitz’s Passenger, start there. If you have, then you’ll also enjoy this, his first novel. I had more to say about it here. Tl; dr: solid end-of-Weimar novel, if at times unsure quite what it wants to do. Considering the conditions under which it was written, an accomplishment.

Mason Coile, Exiles (2025)

A locked-room mystery set on Mars, Exiles has the pacing of a thriller and the uncanniness of a horror novel alongside the fascination with otherness that characterizes sff. The first three humans to make it to Mars arrive to find their mission compromised from the start. The bots who have been sent ahead to build a research station have taken human names, genders, and personalities. Plus, they changed the door entry codes. Oh, and one of them is missing, and might have destroyed the station’s lab. Unless someone—or something—creepier did it… Coile’s absorbing novella proves that humans might be able to leave Earth, but they can never escape themselves.

Nicola Griffith, Stay (2002)

Earlier last year, I read The Blue Place (1998), the first of Griffith’s Aud Torvingen crime trilogy, recently reissued in attractive new editions. Aud (rhymes with “crowd”) was born in Norway, grew up at various embassy posts with her ice queen diplomat mother, and now lives in Atlanta. She was a cop for a while, but now she’s independently wealthy (seems good, why don’t more people do this?) and a sometime PI. Lee Child himself said that if Reacher had a sister, she’d by Aud. She is indeed utterly competent, both in creating (she renovates houses, builds furniture, cooks like a pro) and destroying (she beats up a lot of bad guys and enjoys it).

The Blue Place is terrific, despite its heartbreaking ending. Stay finds Aud licking her wounds in the mountains of North Carolina, able to get out of her head only because an old friend begs her to find his missing girlfriend. Aud reluctantly heads to New York, on what she assumes will be a day-long mission. And she does in fact find the girlfriend. But turns out there’s more at stake, which leads Aud on a chase that ends, much to my surprise, in Arkansas. The scenes there are pretty well handled. (I doubt Griffith has spent much time there.) Stay is baggier than its predecessor, and a final plot development suggests a new turn for the third and final book, the library copy of which is sitting on the desk beside me. As best I can tell, disability will factor in that book (Griffith has MS and is a prominent disability rights activist). I didn’t even mention that Aud is queer, a fact central to the series. Today she would probably overtly identify as neurodivergent, too. All of which makes me curious to see what will happen to Aud.

These books seem to have made no impact on first release, as judged by the fact that each book was published by a different press. It would be nice if these reissues brought more them more readers.

Vasily Surikov, Minusinsk steppe (1873)

Ken Liu, All That We See or Seem (2025)

Got this from the library after seeing it on some sort of best sff list. Maybe one by Lisa Tuttle? Could that be right? Anyway, this is the beginning of a new series about a hacker named Julia Z, whose back story is interesting. Her mother, an immigrant from China, was a famous activist determined to hold America to its ideals. But her parenting was a disaster—imagine a razor-focused Mrs. Jellyby—leading her daughter, our protagonist, into the hands of an anarchist group with its own ideas of keeping America accountable. That’s where Julia learned her tech prowess—but also experienced bitter disappointment when the group’s idea of retributive justice turns out to be a sham. At the beginning of All That We See or Seem, she’s been in hiding for a long time, until a lawyer digs her out and begs her to find his wife, a famous “oneirofex” or dream weaver who has gone missing. As best I understand it, these artists use AI to tap into and personalize mass longings to create updated 60s-type “happenings” that cater to people’s hunger to be together in person while still being isolated.

I didn’t know there was a genre called “tech-thriller” but all the reviews I looked at online use it, so I guess that’s a thing. Seems like readers are divided on the book—fair bit of love but also a lot of hate—which doesn’t surprise me, given the book’s inconsistencies, and supports my view that this is an interesting and flawed work. Liu apparently is or has been a lawyer and a software engineer in addition to a writer and translator, and these experiences are brought to bear in the confidence of the story’s tech and legal aspects. Too bad that much of this material—reflections on identity politics, political resistance, surveillance culture, and the ethics of AI—are awkwardly dumped into the text.  Even more obviously than most sf, this is a book about America today, and I’m not convinced a novel was the best way for Liu to say what he wanted to say. Still, I’ll give the next one a try. I hope that someone has sent a copy to David Cronenberg: he could do a lot with this material.

Paul Cornell, Witches of Lychford (2015)

Novella about a flyspeck English village that, unknown to most of its inhabitants, sits at the fault-lines of the ordinary world and magical realms, both good and evil. Even if the good people of Lychford knew the truth, they probably wouldn’t pay attention anyway, preoccupied as they are with a big decision. Should they allow a Walmart-type supermarket to open in town? Opinions are split; feelings run high. No matter what side they take, though, everyone admits there’s something about the guy the company has sent to convince the locals. He’s kind of… demonic. The joke being, of course, that he really is. Only an unlikely trio—a grumpy old woman who is in fact a witch; the new priest, posted to her childhood home, where no one knows that she’s lost her faith; and the priest’s former best friend, an atheist who has started a shop selling wiccan paraphernalia—can save the day.

Cornell has written several sequels, and I get the feeling the series might amount to something. And yet I haven’t checked them out of the library yet. Has anyone read these? Should I carry on?

Georges Simenon, The Dancer at the Gai-Moulin (1931) Trans. Siân Reynolds (2014)

Two kids in provincial Belgium—one spoiled and rich, one poor and susceptible—scheme to knock over the bar where they spend evenings pretending they’re adults and trying to make it with a female employee, the dancer of the title. But when they break in after closing time, they find a body on the floor. They freak out, do all the wrong things, eventually get arrested. But surely they’re not guilty. Right? And where is Maigret? This is the one where he doesn’t show up until about 2/3 of the way through, and the way Simenon pulls it off is ingenuous.

Miklós Bánffy, They Were Counted [The Transylvanian Trilogy: Volume I] (1934) Trans. Patrick Thursfield and Katalin Bánffy-Jelen (1999)

In my past life I lived on an estate at the foot of the Carpathians, shooting, attending balls, shaking my head at hotheaded fellows who love nothing more than a duel, checking in at the casino when in town during the winter season, watching the woman of my dreams ice-skating with a hated rival, tending to my peasants (sometimes assiduously, sometimes with dereliction), etc., etc. For this reason, I couldn’t get enough of Banffy’s novel, the first part of a trilogy that has been giving me the most reading pleasure I’ve had in a long while.

Although Bánffy wrote the books in the 1930s and 40s, in increasingly perilous financial and bodily straits, he set them in the first decade of the 20th century, the end days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. (I’m taking part in a year-long reading of Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, and it is almost comical how different in style and ideology these texts are, even as both consider, one with regret, one with irony, the dissolution of the same state.)

There are many books about this time and place. In my experience, most focus on the Austrian part of the Dual Monarchy. One of the many interests of this book, then, is that it shows English-language readers a lesser-known world. Yet it is similar to other late 19th century novels. Like War and Peace, They Were Counted toggles between the personal and the political. The two main characters are cousins. One, having recently been elected to parliament, takes on the difficult task of reforming the family estates (bringing new scientific theories to the harvesting of timber, founding an agricultural cooperative), in part to distract himself from his seemingly hopeless love affair with a married woman. The other, a promising composer, slides into dissipation when he is unable to marry the woman of his dreams (another cousin—which sounds weird, but tbh pretty much all of the characters are related in some way). Some readers seem to find the details about the Hungarian parliament’s bitter, uneasy relationship to Vienna dull, but those people probably don’t like the historical excurses in Tolstoy either. As best I can tell—and I ought to know, given my past life, but, you know, details get hazy with the transmigration of a soul—Transylvania was at once the hinterland of Hungary and its beating, symbolic heart. Losing it to Romania in the Treaty of Trianon was a loss Hungarians never got over. Anyway, the novel is much interested in what it means to be part of a ruling elite that is both dominant (over the Romanian-speaking majority) and subordinate (to the Austrians) and part of a large, precarious multiethnic political entity. Its politics are as hard to pin down as you might expect from that description. (Imagine if the Anglo-Irish were part of the European Union, maybe.)

Did I mention there are also a lot of balls, duels, hunts, and love affairs in this book? SO GOOD.

BTW, this is neither here nor there, but I am reading these in the Everyman Library editions, which are lovely and even have that charming though in my opinion fairly useless sewn ribbon, but which include the most useless map I’ve ever encountered. Regular readers know that I love a map, and wish for them in every novel, regardless of subject matter. But this one includes none of the estates that form most of the locations and almost none of the towns. So frustrating!

There are many ways in which America under T***p II echoes 1930s Germany, but more and more I think that the self-immolation of Austro-Hungary is the better comparison. Which is to say that you can read these books (or at least this one: I’m not finished volume 2 yet) to get perspective on the present—and to escape it altogether.

Monastery in Radna, Transylvania circa 1900

How about you? Where did you live in a past life? And have you read any of these books?

What I Read, June 2024

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

Dropping this as something to keep you busy—and maybe even entertained—while I carve out the time to write my Year in Review piece. I won’t be catching up on the last half of the year—in fact, not sure I’m going to continue with the monthly pieces, might be time to try something new—but I’d already written most of this one and it seemed a shame to let it go to waste.

Joaquin Sorolla, San Sebastian Landscape (1911)

Shelley Parker-Chan, She Who Became the Sun (2021)

Fantasy novel set in 14th Century China (with the smallest bit of magic) about a young girl who fulfills the destiny foretold for her brother, who dies, along with the rest of her family and everyone else in her village, from a harrowingly described famine. Zhu Chomngba drags herself, starving and mute with fear, to the nearest monastery, where she is taken in because she has disguised herself as a boy, a deception she never disabuses anyone of, going to great lengths to keep the secret. Her bunkmate, and best friend, learns the truth, leading to an unexpectedly progressive outcome. The meat of the book concerns Zhu’s long, slow rise to power, as she consolidates the Han and prepares to do battle against the Mongols. I liked the idea of this book more than the actual reading experience. By the end, I was keen to learn what happens next, but I was also relieved to have finished the book. (It’s long.) Jury’s out whether I’ll read the sequel.  

William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980)

Seems like everybody knows this book, but if you don’t, do yourself a favor and read it. But make sure you’re in a good head space first. So Long, See You Tomorrow, a novella about things people can’t bear, isn’t easy. A woman can’t bear to tell her son her estranged husband has ordered her to forbid the boy from visiting the farmstead where he, the former husband, is quietly cracking up, and, even more heartbreakingly, the boy’s dog is tearing itself apart in grief. Years later, another man, the story’s narrator, sits in a New York City analyst’s office and means to say that he “couldn’t bear” his mother’s decades-ago untimely death, but says, instead, he “can’t bear it,” a realization that sends him out of the office and into the streets, for only in the streets of NYC can one cry freely.

As these examples might suggest, the book consists of two strands. Interestingly, they intersect only glancingly. In one the first-person narrator, who seems an awful lot like Maxwell—today, the book might be marketed as autofiction—describes his mother’s death in the little town of Lincoln, Illinois in the 1918 flu pandemic. (The story that took up the whole of They Came Like Swallows is here compressed into a handful of anguished pages.) When the boy’s father remarries the couple decide to build a new house. The work-site, the house framed but without walls, and as such a metaphor for the book’s fascination with unfinished, maybe unfinishable structures, becomes the boy’s refuge after school. He bring his friend Cletus, and as the boys play amid the unfinished space, the narrator believes he “had found a way to get around the way things were.” But nothing gets around the way things are: that’s why life is so unbearable.

Cletus, whose experiences comprise the book’s other strand, also has much to mourn. His family, tenant farmers scrapping a life together, has fallen apart. He now lives in town with his mother, who has left her husband to be with the husband of the couple’s best friends, who work the next farm over. Cletus soon has even more to deal with: his father shoots his wife’s lover, his former best friend. (Not a spoiler: the novella opens with the rifle shot.) The boys drift apart. The narrator next sees Cletus years later in a high school hallway. The narrator sees Cletus, sees that Cletus sees him seeing—and ignores him. This unkindness haunts him all his life, getting tangled with the earlier loss of his mother. The book’s premise is that the narrator, now an old man in New York, the kind of person who visits MOMA regularly, where he is much taken with a Giacometti sculpture that reminds me of his father’s half-built house, a man, as I said earlier, like William Maxwell, excavates, through a mixture of research and imaginative reconstruction, what happened on those farms between those people.

Death, adultery, murder, cruelty: these are the things that can’t be borne in So Long, See You Tomorrow. Which makes the book sound lurid when in fact it’s heartbreakingly restrained. Or, more accurately, a strange blend of the two. The writer Antonya Nelson gets it exactly right:

I don’t know how William Maxwell manages to balance those two stories, one plotted like a melodrama, replete with murder and mayhem, and the other a quiet meditation that hinges on the tiniest non-gesture of passing strangers many years in the past. It’s a combination that oughtn’t work. And yet it does.

Even a three-page swerve into the mind of the abandoned dog works. Which it absolutely should not. Anyway, like I said, read it. It’ll tear your heart out, but in a good way.

I read a lot of Maxwell in my mid-twenties (somehow never this one, though). Now that I am old enough I want to revisit them all. And that’s just the novels. I haven’t even cracked the stories yet.

Manjula Martin, The Last Fire Season: A Personal and Pyronatural History (2024)

Manjula Martin lives in Sonoma County. She is not a winemaker (although she drives past the fields full of seasonal workers, most of them Latino/Latina, working through the night to pick the grapes at the time when they are at their most succulent). Nor is she especially wealthy (though she and her partner have jobs that pay enough and make a difference (union organizing, writing), plus the proceeds from an apartment she sold in San Francisco).

They live in a redwood cottage in the WUI, the wildland-urban interface, as do so many in the paradise of northern California. A paradise threatened by fire. As it always was. But now more than ever. The relentless impingement of human habitation into the forest, plus a century’s worth of misguided fire prevention strategy, plus climate change means the wildfire season is ever longer and ever more dangerous.

Martin’s memoir begins in July 2020, when terrible lightning storms set off hundreds of fires that burned hundreds of thousands of acres. It ends in November, with the delayed end of the season, though with the tendency of fires to smolder underground through the increasingly dry winters, every season is now fire season. In between, she, like everyone in California, learns to prepare a go bag, to speak knowledgeably about AQI levels, and, like many, to evacuate for a time when the fire comes within a couple of miles of the house.

She breaks up her descriptions of those months of the fire by looking back to her childhood growing up on a commune with hippie parents who left that life to become a master gardener and a professor in nearby Santa Cruz and forward to the actions she has taken since to prepare to live with fire.

Martin is an expert at living with hard things; she suffers chronic pain from the operations required to free her from a broken IUD. As a woman who cannot and never wanted to bear children, Martin resists the tendency to think of nature in terms of fecundity and rebirth, even as she finds herself unwillingly returning to that language. Martin impressively blends the experience of living in a damaged body with that of living on a damaged planet.

Martin learns the key distinction between good fire and bad fire. Without the former we have no hope of combatting the latter, though we may have left things too late. She argues that there is no natural world outside its encounter with the human (just as there is no definition of the human that isn’t dependent on our reliance on nature, especially plants). Our fantasy of pristine or untouched nature is just the flip side of our rapacious consumption of natural resources. Thus she returns again and again to her garden, which not only distracts her from her pain but teaches her about the power of pruning, grafting, and weeding. “An intervention,” she writes, “was not inherently good or bad; it was part of a dialogue. The tending of a natural body required constant attention: the giving and receiving of nurture and discipline. Extraction and tourism were types of attention. So was gardening. It mattered how the relationship was structured, not just that there was one.”

At her best, Martin rejects easy thinking. The tendency to just get through to the end of the next fire season, for example, is strong, but Martin rejects this as blindness. We need, she argues, to think of ourselves as in a relationship with the world, to refuse to separate human from non-human life.

The Last Fire Season annoyed me sometimes: it’s too long, and its author is pretty self-righteous. I’m sympathetic to her politics and indeed her world view, but even I had to roll my eyes at her holier-than-thou attitudes. But even though I strongly suspect Martin and I would hate each other, I learned a lot from her book (not least the wonderful word “duff”), and I bet I’ll think about it for a long time to come.

Caleb Carr, The Alienist (1994)

In the Sherwood branch of the Central Arkansas Library System’s copy of Carr’s The Alienist, someone has written alongside a passage referring to the draft riots of 1863, “Oh Please! Too much B.S.” Telling that out of this entire 400+ page novel, only the passage describing the backstory of its sole African American character is singled out for such contempt. Who knows when some anonymous member of my community expressed this frustration. It looks like the book hasn’t been checked out for a while—but it also looks like it was checked out a lot, back in the day. And of course, The Alienst was a huge hit. I remember selling more than a few copies of it in my bookseller days. For whatever reason, I never thought of reading it then. But Carr’s recent death, and the story of his life as revealed in the Times obit, piqued my interest. And I knew the book has its fans. When I wondered on Bluesky about reading it, Anne Trubek said she’d spent years chasing the high of her first encounter with the book. How could I not see what the fuss was about?

In New York in 1898 someone is killing young boys. Not just killing them: maiming them horribly and leaving them on grisly display. These boys are orphans and runaways. They work in brothels, servicing a particular clientele: men who like boys dressed up as women. In the first chapter, the narrator, John Schuyler Moore, a crime reporter for the Times is summoned to the latest corpse by his former Harvard classmate, Laślo Kreisler. Kreisler is the alienist of the title, as psychologists were then known: they cared for or studied people “alienated” from society and their own, “true” natures. Under the guise of then police commissioner Theodore Roosevelt (another old pal), whose attempt to clean the force of corruption (same as it ever was…) threatens to founder if the killer isn’t caught, the pair methodically stalk the fiendish killer. They are joined by the first female police officer in NY, two Jewish cops ostracized for their identity and their passion for scientific methods of detection, and some devoted former cast-offs from Kreisler’s life’s work helping orphans. The band gets together, they make painstaking progress, but they’re always behind the killer. As the death toll rises, and nefarious elements seek to use the killings to foment reactionary unrest in the city, the case becomes a race against time…

The short verdict: it’s good! Not, in my opinion, great. But worth reading. I got a Name of the Rose vibe from it: a smart non-crime writer writing an investigation in a historical period they have researched to bits.

The long verdict: maybe what Carr was doing—spotlighting together historically marginalized figures and using historical figures like Jabob Riis and Teddy Roosevelt as more than just bit players—was more unusual at the time than now. Maybe the book is in that awkward in-between stage: a bit dated, not yet so old that it feels like a glimpse into another world.

What does feel of its time—the 1990s, not the 1890s—is the passionate defense of children, and the abhorrence of the violence (physical, psychological, sexual) done to them by adults. Based on what I read about him, this element seems to come pretty closely from Carr’s own life, with the desperate, authentic, slightly incoherent quality of not-fully-worked-through experience. In this, The Alienist reminded me of some otherwise completely different books, the crime novels of Andrew Vachss, all of which centered on the sexual abuse of children. Anyone remember those? Vintage published them in the 90s, they were kind of a thing, but I never see them anymore. Wonder what happened to him.

Ignore that anonymous Arkansas reader: no BS here. There’s plenty of fiction being written today that will look, if we are lucky, a little creaky in 30 years in its efforts to include marginalized experience. Worth a little awkwardness to kick open some doors.

Laurie Colwin, Shine On, Bright and Dangerous Object (1975)

Colwin’s first novel, which I think I maybe found a bit slight on my initial deep-dive thirty years ago and which I haven’t read since, but which impressed me greatly as a middle-aged reader. Crazy to think Colwin was only about 30 herself when she wrote it.

A Jewish woman marries into an old WASP family. He husband, a charismatic ne’er-do-well, dies in a sailing accident. In the grieving process, she must come to terms not only with her loss but her recognition of how little her husband had ever been able to know about himself. In the process, she becomes close to her husband’s brother, as serious as her husband was carefree. I won’t tell you what happens, but Colwin does something so interesting at the end: her book takes an unexpected swerve that makes everything so much more complex. Man, it sucks she died so young.

Francis Spufford, Cahokia Jazz (2023)

God, what a book! I’ll say more about it in my Year in Reading piece.

Elisa Gabbert, Any Person is the Only Self (2024)

Essays on mostly bookish topics written by the poet Elisa Gabbert. I was happy to start in on the first one, because I remembered it from its first appearance in the New York Times: a lovely piece on the “recently returned” shelf at the Denver Public Library, where no algorithm or even individual taste holds sway. Gabbert has revised the piece so that it has a wider focus, and I actually missed the minor-key aspect of the original. But I swallowed these pieces one after another, unable to give them the time they, like all good essays, deserve. I ought to revisit them from time to time. Here’s what stuck with me, though: the to-me breathtaking abruptness of their endings. Gabbert does this thing where she meanders in classic essayistic fashion, and then simply declares herself done. I experienced this as an attack on my sense that the ending of an essay should call back to its earlier moments, allowing readers to see in a new light something they’ve have already been told. But they really are more ways to do things than you’d think.

Jamel Brinkley, Witness (2023)

Strong collection of stories of unhappiness. I still think about “Blessed Deliverance,” about a group of friends coming up in a gentrifying neighbourhood (one sign of which is that some white folks set up a bunny rescue) who drift apart as they enter high school. And I was blown away by “Barstow Station,” the story of a UPS driver whose adult relationships founder because he’s too busy preserving himself from the memory of something bad that happened when he was a teenager. I immediately decided to teach it this fall—along with this lovely close reading by my secret boyfriend Garth Greenwell. (Secret to him, not all of you.) In the months since first writing this, I did indeed teach the story, and even though most days in that class were hard slogging, the story was a hit. Or at least what counted for one in one of the least curious groups of students I’ve ever taught.

Colin Walsh, Kala (2023)

Debut Irish crime novel that seems to have made basically no impact in the US market. Friends who were teenagers when one of their gang disappeared are brought back together when the body is found. As the crime is investigated, these now-adults learn how much they’ve lost over the years. I’m grateful to the friend who sent me a copy: I read Kala with pleasure over a summer weekend. Walsh reminds me a lot of Tana French: they’re both Irish, obviously, and dab hands at dialogue. Above all, Walsh concentrates as much on character as his more famous (and, let’s be real, talented) confederate.

Linda Kinstler, Come to this Court and Cry: How the Holocaust Ends (2022)

In her brilliant first book, Linda Kinstler asks this vexing question: what counts as proof that the Holocaust happened? She begins in Argentina in 1965 and the Mossad’s assassination of Herbert Cukurs, the Latvian Lindbergh (in politics and aviation alike), known during the Holocaust as the “butcher of Riga.” Next to the body, the killers left this text from a closing speech at the Nuremberg Trials: “Mankind itself… comes to this Court and cries: ‘These are our laws—let them prevail!” A strange choice, at least for anyone uncomfortable with the idea of taking the law into one’s own hands.

From this historical event—prompted by unwillingness on Israel’s part to have a sequel to the Eichmann trial and fear that the statute of limitations for perpetrators was about the expire in Germany—Kinstler’s text becomes at once more theoretical and personal. Theoretical because her main interest is in parsing the difference between law, history, and story, and how the evidentiary claims for the latter two are different than those affecting the first. And personal because in the background of Cukurs’s story—a member of the Arājs Kommando, Latvian auxiliaries who competed with the Germans for cruelty and zeal in murdering their Jewish former neighbors—was one Boris Kinstler, the author’s grandfather, who disappeared or died in mysterious circumstances in the late 1940s and may have been a KGB spy and thus acting as a mole within the fascist-aligned organization.

Central to Kinstler’s argument is a historical situation that was new to me. In 1958 a German jurist named Erwin Schüle, the lead prosecutor on a trial of perpetrators who had been stationed in Lithuania, made a consequential decision. Initially faced with only a single defendant—a man named Fischer-Schweder who had white-washed his SS record and, perversely, even ran a displaced persons camp after the war—Schüle ran up against the problem that German law required him to prove that defendants had initiated murder (in this case, mass shootings), rather than doing them on the orders of others. Witness testimony was inconclusive. So Schüle ordered his detectives to expand their investigation to uncover what he called “the crime complex” of the area on the German-Lithuanian border where Fischer-Schweder had served. As Kinstler explains, by crime complex Schüle meant “the entire constellation of actors and actions that allowed mass executions to take place.” In so doing, the prosecution charged nine more men. All ten were convicted.

The idea of the “crime complex” considered Holocaust crimes as structural rather than individual:

it treated entire swathes of the Nazi administration as criminal organizations and presumed the complicity of everyone involved, including secretaries and radio operators and cooks. It required investigators to begin with a place, or a name, or a date, and comb through vast amounts of information to fill in the blanks: who had been killed, and how, and by whom?  How many ‘Aktions’ were there, and on whose orders? How many Nazi personnel had been involved? Were they still alive and in Germany? If they were able to answer all these questions with certainty, then they could initiate criminal proceedings.

Perhaps because of its status as both victim and perpetrator, Latvia never pursued the “crime complex” idea. Which, Kinstler argues, made it hard for the country to come to terms with its responsibility in the miserable fate of its Jewish population. And then, more recently, to refuse to take up a case against (the memory of) Cukurs, despite the pleas of the remnants of its Jewish community. For in these same years, Cukurs has again become a folk hero in Latvia, a devoted patriot, a fighter of the Soviets, a victim of Israeli aggression, who not only didn’t kill Jews but helped several members of that community, even rescuing one young woman and taking her to safety in South America after the war. (Kinstler meets the woman’s daughter to learn more, though mostly what she learns is that the woman’s mother never talked about her wartime experiences, leaving her and Kinstler companions in confusion.) Kinstler tells us about a musical that, like something out of Mel Brooks, white-washed Cukurs’s reputation; she even reads a spy novel (recommended to her by the local prosecutor) in which her own grandfather figures as a Soviet spy and thus a traitor to the Latvian people.

Historically, it’s clear that Cukurs both saved a handful of people and was present at many deportations, requisitions, beatings, and mass shootings, notoriously in the Rumbula massacre, in which 25,000 Jews were murdered on two days in late November and early December 1941 in a forest near Riga. Eyewitnesses report him taking part in such events. But no one alive can testify to it.

In this sense, Come to this Court and Cry is a fascinating expansion of what Dan Stone argues in his new history, regarding the reactionary backlash that has shaped the latest iteration of Holocaust memory wars. At the annual Holocaust remembrance events, local politicians downplay the Arājs Kommando’s responsibility, saying that no simple conclusion can be made regarding its activities. Too hard to acknowledge complicity.

As Kinstler concludes, in the 21st century, to expand the reach of justice in reopening cases from the era of WWII is a double-edged sword: “a crime that can still be tried can also still be pardoned.” Her book explores how “remembering went from being an injunction to a knotted, nearly impossible question.”

And what about Boris Kinstler, the author’s grandfather? Was he a spy? At the end of her book, which I recommend unreservedly, Kinstler tells us about the report she requested from the Russian government. Did they have a file on her grandfather? A one-page letter returns: no information or materials pertaining to Boris Kinstler exists in the archive. No answers there either. Kinstler’s subtitle, she tells us, is a warning, not a prediction. The fight against the Holocaust’s misuses never ends; as the forces who propagate those varied distortions grow in number and power, it seems a fight less likely than ever that we will win.

Helen Garner, This House of Grief (2014)

September 4, 2005 was Father’s Day in Australia. A man named Robert Farquharson was driving his three children home to their mother, who had initiated divorce proceedings against him earlier that year. Father and sons had spent the day watching the football, visiting family, making a KFC run for dinner, even doing a little shopping. Night had fallen; Farquharson was on the highway, five minutes from home. He headed up a railway overpass, then down the other side. Suddenly, his car veered off the road and plunged into a reservoir. Farquharson survived; the boys drowned.

Garner’s work of narrative nonfiction tells the story of the aftermath of this terrible event. Although he was charged by the Crown with three counts of murder, his soon-to-be ex-wife supported him, saying he could not have set out to kill his beloved children. But Farquharson’s behaviour after the crash was odd, to say the least. Splashing out of the water into the spring evening, soaking wet, he flagged down a car and ordered its drivers to take him to his ex-wife’s house. Only there did he mention the children were still in the water. And only then were the authorities informed. When Farquharson and the boys’ mother were taken back to the site, by her new lover, Farquharson stood silently, asking only for a cigarette. It was the new man in Cindy’s life who went into the water to try to rescue the boys. That first night, when police questioned him, he insisted he hadn’t done anything wrong, asking only, over and over again, what would happen to him.

Who acts that way? Well, anyone maybe.

What is the right way to respond to a terrible situation? Is some grief more acceptable than others? Could Farquharson’s confused story—that he had blacked out during a violent coughing fit—have been true? Is cough syncope a thing? Some experts said no. Others said yes. What about the physical evidence, tire tracks and the like? According to the police, the signs pointed to voluntary movements on the slope, inconsistent with an out of control car. Farquharson, they allege, steered the car into the water. But they messed up some of the evidence, and failed to account for the road’s camber. What about the explosive testimony of one of Farquharson’s mates, who said he’d had a conversation with the man a few months before the event, outside the local fish and chippie on a Friday night: Farquharson was not just low and helpless, as others had testified he had been, but angry and vengeful. He said he was going to kill the boys, and he would do it on a day everyone would remember, Father’s Day. Did Farquharson really say such a thing? Why didn’t the mate come forward at the time?

Was this an accident or an act of vengeance? Garner followed the trial for months, attending court every day, and her book records the efforts of the Australian legal system to come to terms with this baffling case. She gets friendly with the other regulars—reporters, gawkers, court officials—and one day runs into the defense counsel, to whom she says, “Only one man knows what happened, and he’s not saying.” This seemingly benign statement of perplexity incenses the lawyer (he threatens to ban from the courtroom): the whole point, he thunders, is that Farquharson doesn’t know what happened. What is knowing? What is an act? Can we entangle our conscious decisions from our unconscious drives? These are the big questions Garner probes in this riveting book.

Garner doesn’t like Farquharson—her take seems to be that the only thing more impossible than his having killed the boys is the possibility that he didn’t—and her descriptions of the man are pitiless, though, I wouldn’t say, unfair. In one especially merciless moment, she calls him a “small stump of a man, with his low brow and puffy eyes, his slumped spine and man-boobs, his silent-movie grimaces and spasms of tears, his big clean ironed handkerchief.” It doesn’t help, from her perspective, nor, I suspect, from that of either the law or public opinion, that Farquharson is profoundly inarticulate. He responds with baffled indignation to his plight; he turns to sentimental clichés and watered-down therapy-speak. Behind the story of the crime is an argument about a certain kind of Australian masculinity and its helpless, toxic loneliness. As a North American reader, I no doubt don’t understand the full context but Farquharson is legible beyond his corner of Victoria.

I’ll let you look up the outcome for yourself: if you like Janet Malcolm (name-checked here in one of the epigraphs) you’ll enjoy This House of Grief. I read with avidity, but I also never quite get on with true crime. Throughout, Garner projects herself on to the jury, imagining her own responses (boredom, confusion, indignation, you name it) reflected in their posture and expression. By the end, I felt like Garner was trying to reason out her own compulsion. It can’t be good for you, attending to a sensational trial this closely when you don’t have to. I found her final pages, where she mediates on her grief for children she never knew—ending in a sanctimonious aria: “They are ours to mourn. They belong to all of us now”—mawkish and unconvincing.

Read this, sure, but read her fiction first.

Dorothy West, The Wedding (1995)

Set in 1953 in a black enclave on Martha’s Vineyard called The Oval, West’s novel—only her second, written over decades in collaboration with her editor, Jacqui Kennedy Onassis, and published when the author was 88—is set on the day leading up the wedding of the youngest daughter of the community’s richest and most prestigious family. This economy of space and time is contrasted with flashbacks that go back four generations on both sides of the family. Over and over, these family stories show whites and blacks mixing, often intimately. The characters, obsessed with color, police racial distinctions that can’t hold. Seemingly impermeable ways of living and thinking prove to be all too permeable. Most interesting to me as a (remembered) record of the last moments of legally segregated America—a world Henry Louis Gates, Jr. wrote about in his underappreciated memoir Colored People. Had I read it on my own, I would probably have forgotten it soon after reading. But I read it for One Bright Book, and Frances and Rebecca helped me think about it more carefully. They didn’t quite convince me the novel is as smart about class as it is about race, but they made me see it as more carefully composed then I’d thought. Give the episode a listen and see if you are enticed.

Georges Seurat, The Hollow Way (1882)

Tell me—have you read any of these? If I could only recommend one, it would be the Spufford. And then the Colwin. And don’t sleep on Brinkley. But a good month all round. Doesn’t last summer seem a lifetime ago?

What I Read, May 2024

Posted on by under book review, lists, month in review, review, Zola

What a terrific month! Yes, the first ten days were busy: bringing the semester to a close; dealing with the fallout of the lousy previous months; celebrating with our graduates. But then the pace shifted entirely. Amazing how much better I feel when I exercise regularly, eat better, sleep well, and sit on the back deck with a fantasy novel for an hour just because.

It occurred to me recently that in my moaning about last month I forgot something amazing. The eclipse! Little Rock in the totality for something like two and a half minutes, and the experience was as incredible as everyone said it would be. How lucky to simply walk down the block to an open space for an incredible view of the thing. How amazing that people in our neighbourhood (who normally never have anything to say to each other) were out and about, portable lawn chairs and to go cups in hand. Strong school’s out for summer vibes. 10/10, absolutely recommend.

Here are the books I read:

Franz Marc, Two Women on the Hillside, 1906

Arnaldur Indridason, The Darkness Knows (2017) Trans. Victoria Cribb (2021)

In wintery Iceland, retired cop Konrad is pulled into an ongoing investigation that to his surprise helps him learn more about the mysterious death of his father.

Arnaldur Indridason, The Girl by the Bridge (2018) Trans. Philip Roughton (2023)

In summery Iceland, retired cop Konrad is pulled into an ongoing investigation that to his surprise helps him learn more about the mysterious death of his father.

Look, sometimes you need to read something as undemanding as possible.

Guy Gavriel Kay, Lord of Emperors (2000)

Longer and even more satisfying sequel to Sailing to Sarantium, which I read a few months ago. This will sound weird, but I get the same feeling reading Kay as I do watching David Simon shows: intense investment on my part in the characters, sighs of bittersweet pleasure when things come to a close. Like its predecessor, Lord of Emperors is modelled on Byzantium under Justinian and Theodora. The mosaicist hero of the first volume—summoned to Sarantium to tile a version of the Hagia Sophia—is joined in this book by a doctor from lands to the east. Political upheaval leads to changing religious and artistic standards; the eventual fall of the Empire is hinted at. (Kay develops this unthinkable outcome in his more recent books.) There’s an exciting chariot race, too.

Christine Lai, Landscapes (2023)

Matt Keeley calls this the Sebaldian country house novel you didn’t know you needed. Which is a good description. Set in England in the near-future in an isolated house among desiccated fields and dead woods, Landscapes centers on an art historian who is first brought to the house by one of a pair of wealthy brothers only to flee from his violence into the arms of the other. Lai’s world-building won’t win any awards—it’s clearly not what she’s most interested in, though her description of literal zones of climate-controlled safety around city centers and other wealthy enclaves feels all-too plausible—and her characterization is uneven. (The only vivid character is the empty, preening, vain cruel brother.) But the book had me thinking anew about the role of art in an era of climate catastrophe and the Benjaminian claim that every document of culture is also a document of barbarism.

Megan Abbott, Beware the Woman (2023)

My first Abbott, unaccountably. But not my last.

Thriller with a side of body horror about a pregnant woman who accompanies her husband to his family’s summer place in Michigan’s upper peninsula for the first time. Plenty of Gothic accoutrements: kindly father, a former doctor still grieving his wife’s death decades ago, who might not be what he seems; mysterious housekeeper; isolated home. Abbott excels at creating menace, unease, and doubt. A story about what men will do to control women’s bodies: very much of our time.

Perfect reading for the first hot Sunday of the summer.

Émile Zola, La Bête Humaine (1890) Trans. Roger Pearson (1996)

“Too many trains, too many murders,” an early critic wrote, preposterously, of this terrific late novel in Zola’s Rougon-Macquart cycle. As if a book could have too much of either!

Although I still have plenty of Zola ahead of me—I’ve read about half of the RMs now—I’m willing to say that this is the most Zola-esque Zola of all. The train system, with its switches, branches, tunnels, wheelhouses, and miles of track, is the perfect metaphor for the books’ obsession with the interconnected systems and institutions of Second Empire France, especially because it affords new expressions of crime, sexual desire, and violence.

Reading La Bête Humaine, I was reminded of the opening of Peter Brooks’s argument that sight is the realist sense par excellence; of the many descriptive set pieces in this novel, Zola’s favourites seem to be the ones depicting the railyards of the Gare St Lazare as seen from the balcony of an apartment building inhabited by railway workers. In the opening scene a railyard supervisor named Roubaud awaits the return of his wife, Séverine, in a borrowed apartment in that building. She’s been shopping while he’s been getting a dressing down from his superior, a pickle he escapes thanks to the influence of a man named Grandmorin, a former judge who is on the board of the railway and has taken Roubaud on as a protégé because of his fondness for/guilt toward Séverine, whom he knew as a child. What promises to be a cozy tête-à-tête between newlyweds turns ugly, when a change remark by Séverine’s reveals that the judge had sexually abused her for years. Roubaud sees red and after nearly throttling his wife immediately plots to kill the judge, forcing Séverine to send the man a note asking him to meet her in a private car on the evening train to Rouen. This violence unfolds against a backdrop of gaiety and hilarity rising from the apartment below, where two sisters run a non-stop party of singing, dancing, and drinking.

Over the course of four-hundred increasingly intense pages—filled with one sensational, over-the-top scene after another—Zola builds to an indelible ending in which the strains of violence, misogyny, wounded male pride, hilarity, and excess that are already present in the beginning return in reconfigured form: a runaway train, its driver and fireman thrown off after a terrible fight, filled with drunken, bawling recruits headed to the front of what will be the disastrous Franco-Prussian War, hurtles unchecked and to certain disaster under a full head of steam.

I couldn’t get enough of the novel’s proto-Freudian and phrenological-criminological-eugenicist ways of thinking about human behavior. The other main character—the connection to the Rougon-Mcquart family—is the train driver Jacques Lantier (whose mother and brothers appear in The Assommoir, The Masterpiece, and Germinal, respectively), who literally sees red when he is aroused by a woman, wanting only to dismember her. (A long time ago I saw the Renoir film—though I remembered almost nothing; it must be so different from the book—and I could only picture Lantier as Jean Gabin, which is unfortunate because he’s much more like Peter Lorre.) And lest I make it sound like this is a book about men, that’s only partly true. In addition to Séverine, there are two other terrific female characters. The one who broke my heart was Flore, an operator at an isolated railway crossing, and whose unrequited love for her cousin Lantier leads to a disastrous outcome.

I could say a lot more about this book. Check out our conversation at One Bright Book to hear more. And speaking of more, I feel compelled to read more Rougon-Maquart before long. Summer of Zola, anyone?

Karl Ove Knausgaard, The Morning Star (2020) Trans. Martin Aitken (2021)

The reason I so seldom follow through on reading plans like the one I just suggested is that I just cannot stop from being distracted by unexpected things that come my way. I’d been paying even more attention than usual to Brandon Taylor’s reading because he’s been championing Zola lately. So when he tweeted repeatedly about this latest series from Knausgaard, I thought maybe I should investigate. I hadn’t paid any attention to this, other than to vaguely note Jeez, that Norwegian guy has another set of books. If I expected anything it was that the books would be autofiction in the vein of My Struggle. (I read the first two of those with great pleasure a long time ago and then… just didn’t keep up: now I want to close that loop, too.) But The Morning Star is a proper novel, in the sense that it is composed of long sections narrated by different first-person narrators, most of whom link up in sometimes unexpected ways. The action takes place in a hot summer in and around Bergen, in something like 2016. There is plenty of the deep ordinariness of middle-class Norwegian life that I found compelling in My Struggle (cabins to close for the season, impromptu dinner parties to arrange, elderly parents to look after, marriages to keep on life-support). But there’s also a lot of weird stuff: a priest conducts a funeral for a man who turns out to look identical to the one who asked her an impertinent question in the airport the night before; a creature, whether human or not is unclear, roams the forest, possibly in connection to the disappearance of a man from a mental institution and a shocking satanic cult murder; and, most powerfully of all, a dazzlingly bright star suddenly appears in the sky.

The novel seems to be about the relation between the mundane and the extraordinary: I say seems because for me Knausgaard incites a delicious reading fugue state, where undistinguished sentences roll on into compelling blocks of text and the pages keep turning as if by themselves. As soon as I reached the end of its 600+ pages I ordered the 800+-page sequel…

Berthe Morisot, In England (Eugène Manet on the Isle of Wight), 1875

Honestly I enjoyed all these books, even those Indridasons. See anything you fancy here?

What I Read, April 2024

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

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

Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Peonies, ca. 1920

Edith Wharton, Summer (1917)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amy Pease, Northwoods (2024)

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

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

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

Willard Metcalf, May Pastoral, 1907

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

What I Read, March 2024

Posted on by under month in review, review

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

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

Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice (2013)

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

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

David Downing, Union Station (2024)

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

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

Tana French, The Hunter (2024)

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

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

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

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

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

Louise Glück, The Wild Iris (1992)

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

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

Guy Gavriel Kay, Sailing to Sarantium (1998)

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

Henri Matisse, Olga Merson (1911)

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