What I Read, January 2024

Posted on March 23, 2024 by banff1972 under book review, month in review, review, Uncategorized

Chava Rosenfarb was born in Lodz in 1923 to parents enmeshed in the life of the Bund, a political and social justice movement that flourished in interwar Poland. In contrast to Zionists, Bundists believed that Europe could and should remain central to the future of Jewish life. Economically, they embraced socialism. (Bundism thrived in the highly Jewish, highly urbanized cities of Poland, especially Lodz, a center of textile manufacturing regularly compared to Manchester.) Linguistically, they championed Yiddish over Polish or the Hebrew that Zionists, aimed to resurrect. Spiritually, they turned Judaism’s emphasis on reparation (the messiah will not arrive until we have perfected the world) to social justice ends in their own community.

Like every other Jew her age in Poland, Rosenfarb’s education was interrupted when Germany invaded in September 1939. A few months later, she was interned with her family in Lodz’s sealed ghetto. Amazingly, she, her sister, and her parents remained together until the final liquidation of the ghetto in the late summer of 1944. Along with some friends, the family had prepared a hidden space in their apartment building; more than 20 people crammed into it in those final days. Although they escaped notice for more than three days, their luck eventually ran out and they were deported to Auschwitz. Rosenfarb’s father was separated from them at the ramp: they never saw him again; she would later learn that he died in an allied bombing raid in Germany in the last days of the war. The Rosenfarb women were sent to Sasel, a work site in a Hamburg suburb, where they rebuilt roads for several hard and cold months. Early in 1945 they were deported again, this time to Bergen-Belsen, where Rosenfarb, sick from the typhus infestation that swept that notoriously chaotic place (all camps were disaster zones in the last weeks of the war: the situation in Belsen was perhaps the most terrible of all), clung to life, more dead than alive, when the camp was liberated in April.

Remarkable experiences as a DP and an illegal alien in Belgium followed; by 1950 the Rosenfarbs, along with a man Chava had known in Lodz, reencountered in the ruins of postwar Germany, and later married, secured visas to Canada. (That man, Henry Morgenthaler would later champion the cause of legal abortion in Canada, becoming, in my 1980s childhood, a figure equally reviled and admired. My mind exploded when I learned this connection.) The refugees settled in Montreal, where Rosenfarb would spend most of the rest of her life. In this new world, along with caring for her mother and raising her children, Rosenfarb continued the writing she had begun in the Lodz ghetto. After poems came novels and short stories, her efforts culminating in her three-volume fictional chronicle of the Lodz Ghettto, The Tree of Life (1972, translated into English by her daughter, Goldie Morgenthaler).

I learned all this and more in a wonderful course offered by the Yiddish Book Center, spurred by the publication of her collected short stories (excellent, especially the dramatic “Edgia’s Revenge,” which I immediately added to my syllabus). The Center offers courses and talks regularly; check them out if you have any interest in all things Yiddish.

Rebecca Donner, All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days (2021)

Mildred Harnack née Fish grew up in Milwaukee to an intermittently employed father and a mother who was a stenographer. In the 1920s she attended the University of Wisconsin, where she met Arvid Harnack, an economist and jurist from Germany who could, unlike any man she had met before, match her as much in the seminar room as on the dance floor. By 1929 the young couple—they had married three years earlier—was living together in Berlin. Mildred would return home only a handful more times. Berlin was exciting, even for a poor couple like the Harnacks. All kinds of change seemed possible. But the rise of the Nazi party threatened all that. Mildred was fired from her position teaching American literature in 1932 because of her opposition to the party, even though it would not come to power until the following year. Needing to find work, Mildred took a job teaching working class students at night school. She loved her students, believed in their ability to transform their lives, and eventually recruited some of them as central figures in a resistance movement that she and her husband began building in the early years of the regime. The circle, as she called it, met to share ideas, often over book discussions, and distributed leaflets denouncing Nazi policies. It was loosely aligned with other resistance movements, including the one that included the pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a cousin of Arvid’s, and the one led by Harro Schulze-Boysen and Libertas Haas-Heye, which eventually led Arvid to pass on military secrets he gained from his work in the Reich Ministry of Economics. Rebecca Donner, who happens to be Mildred’s great-great-nice, tells the story with flair and sympathy.

I found it fascinating to compare Donner’s book to Norman Ohler’s Bohemians, in which Mildred is a bit player. Donner has much less sympathy with Haas-Heye than Ohler does—which makes sense since Haas-Heye ratted Harnack and the others in the so-called Red Chapel group out. It seems she was duped by a supposedly sympathetic secretary in the jail where she was held in custody—but duped rather easily, Donner implies.

Earlier in the 1930s, Mildred befriended Martha Dodd, daughter of the US ambassador. When Dodd was replaced, she became close to the wife of the new First Secretary, whose son, nine-year-old Don Heath, Jr., acted as a courier, carrying clips of paper in his backpack from his English lessons with Mildred (whom he adored) to his father. Typically, those messages consisted only of a time and place where Mildred or Arvid could meet with Heath to pass on information in person.

This work was dangerous, of course, and it some sense it was only a matter of time before she and Arvid were found out. Had the group’s Soviet handler not been so clumsy, they may have escaped detection. When they realized their cover had been blown in September 1942, the couple tried to get to Sweden, but they were arrested in East Prussia the day before they were to set sail. Mildred’s initial six-year prison sentence was overturned by Hitler himself. A new trial sentenced her to death; she was executed by guillotine in February 1943.

As its title implies, nothing is comforting about the subject matter of All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days. It’s a sad book. In her final days Harnack was miserable: eaten by lice, beaten by guards, almost unable to speak to the fellow prisoners who admired her. But grief and despair shadowed her long before her arrest; I was moved by the cost of Harnack’s convictions. Her commitment—compounded by her inability to say anything, lest it further endanger her—destroyed her relationships with almost everyone, especially her American family. By the end, Harnack has the remarkable but unenviable distance from the world of someone like Simone Weil. Donner admires her great-great-aunt, and makes us admire her, too. But she has the guts to admit that principled resistance to injustice can lead to the calcification of so much that is human. How painful to see the erosion of that Wisconsin college girl, wide-eyed and full of the desire to teach and to learn, in love with a man and the world. How loving and patient of Donner to have resurrected her.

[An aside: Donner relies heavily on William Shirer’s diaries. That surprised me: he seems so old-fashioned. Who reads The Rise and Fall of the Nazis anymore? But Donner knows what she’s doing: based these excerpts, he was a hell of a writer.]

Emily Tesh, Some Desperate Glory (2023)

The always reliable Adam Roberts tipped me on to this in his annual sff recap in The Guardian. Then Ian Mond praised it too. The Venn diagram of their tastes is close to being a circle, but everything in it is top-notch. Roberts calls Some Desperate Glory “a blend of space opera and military SF that refreshes both modes,” which sounds exactly right to me, even if I still don’t quite know what those terms mean.

Kyr has come of age on Gaea Station, the last redoubt of humanity after earth is destroyed by alien species who have decided that humans are irredeemably violent. (I mean, not wrong.) Her seventeen years have been marked by submission, dedication, and toughness, to others but above all to one’s self. Food is fuel; rest mandated so the machinery of the body and the station can keep going; families are split apart, the children, bred to emphasize traits necessary for survival, are raised in same-sex age cohorts after they leave the nursey.

Gaea, it becomes clear, is Sparta.

And Kyr loves it.

Along with her twin brother, she is the best of the best: fast, strong, smart, zealous, loyal to the cause. Yes, her “siblings” hate her—she’s always ratting them out and pushing them to exhausted, shameful tears—but such toughness is needed for humanity to enact its revenge. As the date of her cohort’s graduation approaches, Kyr can’t wait for her assignment. She knows she’ll be named to the warrior caste. And then she’ll be able to throw off her only black mark: a family history of treachery. Ten years earlier, her older sister fled the station with her infant child, probably for a planet where the aliens let humans live on sufferance, symbolically neutered, as pathetic as lap dogs. When Kyr’s assignment comes back all wrong—her shock compounded by the news that her brother has been selected for an even more prestigious, albeit suicidal mission—she hatches a plot to follow him. The journey will eventually revise her entire sense of the universe.

I admired Tesh’s accomplishment here: she lets us to read against Kyr (we know she’s more than insufferable: the perfect fascist, really) even as we can understand her zeal for her embattled mission. (I say “we” but a quick glance at Goodreads—I remembered why I never do that—shows me that Tesh’s skill with POV is lost on some readers…) In a brief afterword, Tesh lists some of the works she consulted in writing Some Desperate Glory: books on North Korea, Paxton’s classic study of fascism, and Lawrence’s Wright expose of the handful of people who have escaped scientology. All of which allows her to pull off her greatest trick: like Kyr, readers too are deprogrammed, the “facts” of the novel’s world cast into new light as we proceed. An unpredictable quest story follows, with plenty of plot twists and heart-in-mouth moments. (I was on the verge of tears by the end.) Queer love stories, found families, alternate realities: all the things contemporary sff is known for come into play. Good stuff.

Walter Kempowski, Marrow and Bone (1992) Trans. Charlotte Collins (2018)

I raved about this writer last month.

Marrow and Bone might be the least terrific of the three Kempowskis I’ve now read, but it’s still very good. (Don’t start here, though.) Jonathan Fabrizius is a freelance writer who, thanks to a small stipend from an uncle, lives in charming modesty in 1980s Hamburg, sharing one of those impossible German apartments (carved up willy-nilly from a grander space, bathrooms in the hall, no kitchen to speak of) with a girlfriend who has given up on him. Out of the blue, an invitation comes from, of all things, the organizers of a road rally across the former East Prussia: they want Jonathan to write about the sights attendees might enjoy as they follow the racers from east to west. Jonathan accepts with alacrity: he needs the money, but he also has ties to the region. His companions are a former racecar driver and a representative of the event organizers. Like all picaresques, Marrow and Bone shambles from one incident to another, most of which at first seem consequential, even dire, but prove to be irritants at worst, spurs to further discoveries at best. (When their car and luggage is stolen, for example, the company immediately sends another car, and the protagonists later find the luggage abandoned by the side of the road.) Jonathan, a bit of a schlemiel, need never worry about the consequences of his failures: in one moving scene, he promises to mail form the West some anxiety medication to the mother of a suffering young woman. Tragically, absurdly, he loses the address: he feels bad there’s no way to reach them, but he’s content to throw up his hands.

It’s clear that Kempowski is diagnosing the post-communist situation in this tale of the last days of divided Germany. How so and to what end are harder to say. Maybe that comes from the newness of the events (published only three years after the fall of the wall). Or maybe from Kempowski’s haziness, which can be hard to disentangle from Jonathan’s. Importantly, though, Kempowski does not think it would have been better had the Germans not lost East Prussia. He acknowledges that Poles have had opportunities and made a go of things—even if those things are sometimes muddled in the ordinary way of the world—that they might not have had under German hegemony. But he also laments a lost world—especially the mix of cultures that East Prussia, like all borderlands, once had. He’s similarly gentle with the 1980s leftist intellectual milieu to which Jonathan belongs. He pokes fun at their belief in the power of petitions and protests, but admires their conviction.

I guess I am writing myself into the position that it is not easy to tell what is mild (and therefore, possibly, generous) in the book and what is fuzzy (and therefore, possibly, lazy).

Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (2021)

If we’re lucky and live into our seventies, we spend about four thousand weeks in this life. To my numerically-hazy mind that seems lot, but it’s not. And when you’re in your 50s, you can’t help but conclude that you have hardly any weeks left at all. Burkeman’s self-help book for people who cringe at the idea of self-help gently asks us to recognize the fact that we all want to deny, the inescapable reality quantified in his title. Burkeman, a self-professed failed productivity expert, exhorts us to make those weeks count—but not by being more productive. (Some of the most amusing parts of the book concern the various productivity regimes to which he has pled fealty. As he wryly notes, work tends to beget work. Answering email is shit!) The point isn’t that we should spend our time only doing what we want—none of us have that freedom, especially those of us who aren’t independently wealthy. Rather, it’s simply that we should be intentional about our time. But what a huge “simply” that is! It means recognizing our mortality—something that I, for one, have had no interest in doing.

A short, well-written, often funny, and always accessible book (Burkeman makes even Heidegger intelligible), Four Thousand Weeks has kept its hold on me in the weeks since I read it. He demolishes the belief so many of us have that our real life will begin at some indefinite future time: as soon as I do x or figure out y, I’ll finally do z (clean the closets, commit to a relationship, write that book), when in fact our lives are nothing but the cluttered, half-hearted, scattered series of moments that we wrongly think of as garbage time before real meaning will arrive. He argues that our impatience, our “it would be funny if it weren’t so sad” drive to hurry through life, is really a sign of how strongly we deny our mortality. We feel time is wasted because we are reluctant to embrace discomfort and resistance. We don’t have to like traffic jams, checkout lines, or toddler games. But until we learn to experience them as time we will find them even more painful than they are.

Some of you might remember Emma Townsend from Twitter (I miss her). I raised an eye at her when she raved about Four Thousand Weeks; she gently encouraged me not to be so hasty. It took me a while to try the book for myself, but I’m so glad I did. Sorry for doubting you, Emma.

Rebecca West, Harriet Hume (1929)

A witchy book; I must confess, I am not much for witchy things.

West’s strange fantasia of a (non)-relationship over several decades is the subject of Episode 22 of One Bright Book—worth your time, in my opinion, especially if you want to hear smart readers wrestle with a book they don’t quite know what to make of. Fascinating for the contrast between West’s mode here and that of her gigantic Balkan travelogue, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, which I spent some time with each day this month.

László Moholy-Nagy, 7 A.M. (New Year’s Morning) ca. 1930

I still have a few Rosenfarb stories to read, so I’ll save further comment on the collection for later other than to say how wonderful it is that these are now available in English. If I had more time—and, you know, didn’t spend my days teaching—I’d take classes like this one all the time.

And you? How did you spend January?

What I Read, December 2023

Posted on January 16, 2024 by banff1972 under book review, month in review, review

A great semester in the classroom; an even more irritating than usual semester for committee work. I am lucky to have a long winter break. Over the last years I’ve found that I either thrive in these short, dark weeks or succumb to bad anxiety. Happily, this was one of the good years. El Niño means colder weather in Arkansas, which makes me happy, not least because it’s so good for running. And for sitting on the couch reading.

Laurits Andersen Ring, Foggy Winter Day. To the Left a Yellow House. Deep Snow., 1910

Toni Morrison, A Mercy (2008)

An extraordinary book, maybe my favourite of the five or so by Morrison I’ve read. (Beloved is titanic, of course, but it’s been so long since I’ve read it that my memory of it has dimmed. Maybe I’ll redress that in 2024.) I chose A Mercy for One Bright Book; I thought we had a lot of interesting things to say. Fifteen years after its publication, the book only seems more pertinent to the task of understanding America. Which makes this review by Wyatt Mason, a critic I usually admire, feel badly dated.

Katherena Vermette, The Circle (2023)

Longtime readers will know of my love for Vermette. The Break is fast becoming canonical; I extolled its sequel, The Strangers, not long ago. And now we have a third volume featuring the same characters, with the addition of a few new ones, especially in the younger generation. My wife noted how much faster this book reads than the others. Partly that’s because of the knowledge we bring to the book (if you haven’t read Vermette yet, don’t start here): we’re mostly catching up, not getting to know. And partly it’s because of the short chapters that shift the point of view. But mostly, that sense of speed is a function of how much happens. Whereas The Break considered the repercussions of a single event (ripples from a stone sunk into a lake), and The Strangers thought about the pull of family (oceanic, seemingly inescapable, full of ebbs and flows), The Circle focuses on the pull to change, to get away, to break from the past (this book is a river, and one full of rapids at that.)

That compulsion sometimes—maybe even often—fails. But not always. Trauma never lets go, but change is possible. But always from collective bonds, not individual willpower. Yes, individuals make choices that affect their fate. But grit isn’t enough in the face of systemic inequalities and generations of abuse. Maybe that explains why Vermette has replaced the family trees of the earlier volumes with a diagram of overlapping circles, each with a character’s name. The closer the circles to each other, the closer the relationship. The bigger the circle, the more people that individual affects.

If Vermette decides she’s finished with these characters, she has ended her now-trilogy on a satisfying ambiguous, tentatively hopeful note. But I thought the endings of the previous volumes were just right, too. Who knows, maybe more is in store. I kind of feel like Vermette is as caught up by these characters as readers like me are.

Abdulrazek Gurnah, By the Sea (2001)

My third Gurnah: not a misfire yet. I’m a fan.

In his 60s, Omer Saleh leaves his world behind him and claims begrudgingly granted asylum in the UK. A harried lawyer assigned to his case tracks down the only person she can find who knows anything about Zanzibar, Saleh’s homeland. That man, now an academic who has himself made the journey to England, turns out to have known Saleh: he was a boy when the older man became entwined with his family, to complicated and in some ways ruinous ends.

Gurnah reminds me of Conrad not just because his novels also consider the relationship of England to parts of the world where people have “different complexion[s] and slightly flatter noses” but more so because they are similarly constructed through nested stories told at length in the quiet of evening between a teller and a silent audience. These stories concern all manner of things: the age-old trade routes between the Persian Gulf and the East African coast; the furniture business as practiced in a culture that prizes barter; the experience of African students during the Cold War in East Germany, where it turns out that not all communists were equal brothers; and the pain of incarceration at the whims of despotic regimes.

Of the latter, Saleh says:

I have taught myself not to speak of the years which followed, although I have forgotten little of them. The years were written in the language of the body, and it is not a language I can speak with words. Sometimes I see photographs of people in distress, and the image of their misery and pain echoes in my body and makes me ache with them. And the same image teaches me to suppress the memory of my oppression, because, after all, I am here and well while only God knows where some of them are.

The last line is the characteristic Gurnah touch: a passage that had been moving, even stately, if perhaps a little pat, turns more complex. We are so attuned to the suggestion that testimony is an unalloyed good, a force, even, for change, that we might be surprised to think of quiescence and repression as responses to past injustice and trauma.

By the Sea was longlisted for the Booker Prize. I’ve no beef with Peter Carey’s The True History of the Kelly Gang (haven’t read it), but it would have been nice to see Gurnah on the shortlist at least. No matter, he won another big prize and the novels are back in print and I still have five or six ahead of me, so it’s all good.

Roy Jacobsen, Eyes of the Rigel (2017) Trans. Don Bartlett and Don Shaw (2020)

Third in Jacobsen’s Barrøy series, which since the last part of the first has focused on Ingrid Barrøy, now the chatelaine of the Norwegian island that has given the family its name. Eyes of the Rigel follows hard on the events of its predecessor, The White Shadow, which I read in the spring but never wrote about. I like this summary from The Guardian:

The second installment, White Shadow, is set during the last year of the second world war: refugees from the northern province of Finnmark arrive, collaborators abuse their power, and Russian prisoner of war Alexander, having survived the sinking of the MS Rigel, lands on Barrøy. Ingrid falls in love with the young man and hides him from Nazis and collaborators until he is strong enough to embark on a trek to neutral Sweden. In Eyes of the Rigel Ingrid sets out across a postwar country in search of the father of her 10-month-old daughter. Ingrid’s only mementos of her lover are her daughter’s eyes, as black as Alexander’s, and a note in Russian, which a neighbour helps her decipher: it says, “I love you” nine times.

Ingrid’s epic quest—after hitching a boat ride up the coast, she makes the rest of the journey on foot with the world’s most saintly baby—is preposterous. Everyone she meets feels that way too. But with the determination and implacable work ethic that characterizes her family she follows a trail made fainter by the reluctance of many in the immediate postwar era to remember or cop to the events of the recent past.

Spoiler alert: her quest ends in frustration and heartbreak. She doesn’t find Alexander, and, maybe worse, she learns things about him she doesn’t want to. (In a brief passage, readers learn his tragic fate.) I wouldn’t say she’s happy to return home, but she does so with few regrets and no complaints. (Barrøyers don’t complain.) There’s that baby to raise, after all. And another fishing season to prepare for. And heaven knows what’s happened to the sheep over the summer.

I sensed Jacobsen enjoyed the wider canvas of this story (it’s not really any longer than the others, but it has much more narrative drive), but not as much as he enjoyed returning to the island in the final pages. That’s how I felt as a reader, anyway. As is characteristic of these books, we encounter much that is unhappy (a former Nazi concentration turned POW camp, for example). But much that is joyful, too, though always in a bittersweet way. I especially loved an idyll on a farm where Ingrid thinks about taking up with the owner, a member of the resistance, who had hidden Alexander for several months.

Ronán Hession thinks it’s the weakest of the series, but even though he wrote Leonard and Hungry Paul so definitely knows what’s what I can’t agree. Loved this one just as much as the others.

Roy Jacobsen, Just a Mother (2020) Trans. Don Bartlett and Don Shaw (2022)

I picked Jacobsen’s fourth Barrøy novel up the minute I finished the third. It feels as though the writer did the same: Ingrid’s story picks up where she left off, with her return home to the island. The novel covers the 1950s, and, as Tony puts it in his excellent post, it reworks some of the preoccupations and themes of The Unseen, the first book in the series. But Jacobsen isn’t treading the same ground. Yes, his characters continue to wrestle with the competing claims of isolation and community, but now they do so in the context of new technologies and ideologies. What happens when it’s not profitable to run the mail boat to the island? Would it be best to give up this almost laughably hand-to-mouth existence for life on the mainland? (Friends and family report on the pleasures and tribulations of life in centrally planned communities. It’s nice to have a machine to wash the linens, but of course you can only use it in your allocated hours.)

For Ingrid, Jacobsen’s main character, the matriarch of the island, the question of whether it will still be possible to live on Barrøy is practical, not abstract. Who will do all the work? Her great-aunt is aging. The girl she has brought up as her own daughter has grown up and moved away. The few menfolk who are left have bought a bigger boat so that their annual fishing expeditions take them away from the island longer than before. But new life arrives, in the form of a boy, the child of the skipper of the mail boat. The man asks Ingrid to watch his son while he goes on his weekly run, because his wife, the boy’s mother, has up and left. With foreboding in her heart, Ingrid accepts the charge; weeks pass, the skipper fails to return. Eventually his boat is found drifting aimlessly and unmanned. This trauma is met with resourcefulness and care, and the boy flourishes under the auspices of Ingrid and the other islanders, not least her daughter Kaja, the infant in the previous book, who is now five or six. The pair grow up as something more than siblings. Perhaps their relationship will be at the center of another book, should we be lucky enough to get one.

As always, Jacobsen pushes our emotional buttons, in the most satisfying way. One scene in particular hits like a blow. As Tony puts it, “One thing I can promise you is that anyone who has read the rest of the series will at some point feel the pain almost physically…”

Jim Thompson, A Hell of a Woman (1954)

Hadn’t read one of Thompson’s sordid, riveting noirs in a while. I’ll need to wait awhile before trying another, so dark was this one. Although it can’t top The Killer Inside Me (what can?), A Hell of a Woman also turns on the author’s masterly use of first-person narration. If you liked In a Lonely Place but found it a little decorous, this is the book for you.

Stephen Spotswood, Murder Crossed Her Mind (2023)

The latest Pentecost & Parker mystery ends on a dramatic note. (Cliffhanger alert!) Despite a solid enough mystery, the point of the book is to set up a longer narrative arc. I look forward to volume 5, and encourage you to read these books, but whatever you do, don’t start here.

Walter Kempowski, An Ordinary Youth (1971) Trans. Michael Lipkin (2023)

I once heard Parul Sehgal describe Svetlana Alexievich’s The Unwomanly Face of War as having “big first book energy,” which, she explained, is what happens when writers feel the need to stuff everything that matters to them into that first book, because who knows if there will ever be another. The result is undisciplined, maybe, but also exuberant and true.

I thought of Sehgal when reading An Ordinary Youth, the first book by Walter Kempowski, a phenomenon of (mostly West) German literature. (My friend Till Raether tells me he had something like a Warholian factory going to help him compose an epic series of collage texts, perhaps in the Dos Passos mode, I’m not sure, of German 20^th century history; that’s in addition to his many novels.) The debut is patently autobiographical—its hero, Walter Kempowski, is nine years old when his family moves to a new apartment in the old Hanseatic port of Rostock in 1938. As the title suggests, he’s an ordinary kid who like movies and jazz music and this one girl in particular and school not so much. He gets used to bombing raids; he doesn’t mind that his father has been deployed (away from the front, luckily); he misses his older brother, Robert, who brought home all the good new records. As he becomes a teenager, Walter distinguishes himself mostly for being a bit of a badass: rowdy, impious, a petty troublemaker. He could seem to incarnate some of the worst attributes of his country at that time, but interestingly his natural nonconformity puts him at odds with the Party and all it stands for. He has little interest in the Hitler Youth, for example, ready to shirk its obligations as often as he can. (He forges a lot of sick notes.) But he’s no resister, no young version of that postwar chimera, “the good German.”

The genius of the book is the way it lets us read against Walter’s vision of the world, and indeed that of German society writ large. Here’s an example, which I chose by opening the book to one of the pages I’d dog-eared. The man Walter’s sister has married, a Dane, takes Walter’s side in an argument between the boy and his sister. Walter has said that in England people never open their windows and they drive on the left—something his friend has told him—which is all basically true and presented only as the mildest criticism. (An earlier conversation in which Walter’s mother has told her son-in-law to stop using English words feels much more freighted.) But Anna, Walter’s sister, takes offense at her younger sibling. Her husband, Sörenson, mildly objects. Germans, he says, forget that everyone should be able to express their own opinion:

And as an example of tolerance he mentioned modern music, the kind where the notes were all in a jumble, the kind we didn’t have any more in Germany. In Denmark, people did often laugh when they heard that kind of modern music, but they also clapped. He’d seen it happen many, many times.

We see conversation between adults presented through the view of the child protagonist, without judgment or comment or perhaps even full understanding of the stakes. But we learn more about the adults than the child here. For what kind of an example is this? Certainly not a full-throated defense of the art the Nazis deemed degenerate (those notes “all in a jumble”). His description of audiences laughing suggests his opinion is shared among his countrymen. But maybe laughing and clapping is the best kind of tolerance: amused, bemused, generous. Yet that last sentence, with its repeated, unnecessary, special pleading “many,” makes me question his attitude still further. Is he making it up? On every page, Kempowski plays tricks like this with tone.

An Ordinary Youth was a huge bestseller at the time. What were those first audiences responding to? It’s hard to imagine. Maybe it’s that Kempowski so straddles the line between nostalgia for and critique of the Nazi era that readers can take whatever they want from the book. My hunch is that many German readers responded to its depiction of the Volksgemeinschaft, that community “we” all shared and where we had some good old times, no matter what they want us to say now, a response that of course ignores the book’s challenge to that community, structured as it is around absences like the burned-out synagogue Walter passes on the way to school or that store old Herr so-and-so (I can’t find the reference) left behind when he disappeared. (It makes me wonder who lived in that new apartment before them.) The characters are basically uninterested in these absences—in this sense the novel accurately represents its time.

Kempowski’s debut has long been taken to be untranslatable. Its original title, Tadellöser & Wolff, refers to a Kempowski family saying, one of those weird family things, the kind of thing you repeat because everyone in the family says it and sometimes no one even knows why. In this case, Löser & Wolff is a cigar manufacturer (Aryanized by the regime in 1937, incidentally), a brand beloved of the father, who plays with the name. If something is tadellos it is perfect, without flaws, or blameless. (I’m reminded of an indelible moment in Vasily Grossman’s “The Hell of Treblinka” where he quotes an SS man who called the “grilling” system of the layering and burning of bodies in mass graves tadellos.) Walter takes up the phrase: on a visit to the country he trots it out to some country-bumpkin kids, blithely telling them that’s how everyone talks in the city.

The nonsensical phrase (which takes on a life of its own: Walter adapts other words so that they are also “löser & Wolff”ed) exists alongside dozens, even hundreds of lyrics interpolated into the text, almost all of them from popular songs or Lieder in the Schubert sense, and a few from poems. Translator Michael Lipkin has done something amazing in bringing the book into English. (I’m not sure I needed him to cite the source of every song lyric, though.) The publisher refers to this collage as the novel’s “echo chamber of voices,” without which Kempowski could not investigate the meaning of subjectivity in a mass popular society. I bet some smart folks have written about how An Ordinary Youth at once instantiates and challenges the very idea of the Bildungsroman.

Hats off to NYRB for making this translation happen. I hope more Kempowski is in their plans. (See below for more on the one they released first. They have a third title, which I have since read, too.)

Jenny Offill, Weather (2020)

Fragments from the life of an overeducated, underemployed New Yorker with the requisite terrific child and corresponding fears of climate change. A lot of it rang true—even the precious bits—but if I want to mourn the loss of the world as we know it in the company of a neurotic, bien pensant book lover, I’ll just have a little me time, you know?

Walter Kempowski, All for Nothing (2006) Trans. Anthea Bell (2015)

Some of my most memorable reading experiences have taken place in winter. Fallada’s Every Man Dies Alone, devoured over an unusually cold Arkansas Christmas just before our daughter was born. The never-to-be-matched-in-impact double-whammy of Absalom, Absalom and Barthes’s S/Z, in the snowiest Halifax January I can remember. And now, in another colder than average Arkansas winter (yes, it’s still climate change), Walter Kempowski’s magisterial late work, All for Nothing. Which is a bitterly cold book, in setting and to some extent tone. It’s late January 1945 in East Prussia and everyone knows the Russians are coming. But in a once-grand, now mostly shut-up manor house, life continues in a semblance of cultured normality. It’s like that scene with the French family in Indochina from the long cut of Apocalypse Now.

There’s the dreamy, beautiful woman of the house, who shuts herself in her quarters with tea and cigarettes and desultory reading, like a heroine from Turgenev; the absent husband, an officer in charge of requisitioning foodstuffs for the Reich, currently stationed in Italy; his aunt, who wishes she were still in the Silesia of her childhood but who keeps the place going and has no interest in taking down the portrait of Hitler in her room, despite suggestions from others that this might be wise; three Ostarbeiter, a Pole who tends the horses and does the heavy work, and two Ukrainian girls who cook and clean; and Peter, a mild, quiet, inquisitive boy whose regular illnesses keep him from Hitler Youth roughhousing, and who loves nothing more than examining bits of the world (a snowflake, a drop of blood, a crumb) under his new microscope, and who sometimes goes into the room that belonged to his younger sister, left as it was on the day she died of scarlet fever. Across from the manor is a working-class settlement built by the Party in the late 30s: its most officious inhabitant stares in grim resentment over at the manor house while he tends to his wife, lost in depression after their son was killed at the front.

To these wonderfully drawn characters come a series of visitors, all of them only too happy to share the warmth and food on offer in the manor house: a one-legged opportunist convinced that by buying up rare stamps on the cheap he is ensuring his future security; a young violinist, fanatically devoted to the Party; a Jew the woman of the house agrees to hide for an evening, seemingly for no other reason than her desire to have something happen.

The tone is quiet and anxious. How much can this episodic aimlessness last? (The question asked by characters and readers alike.) A convoy of refugees has been streaming west for days now. The carriage is packed, the horses fed and watered. But where are all those people going, this is their home, is there any need to leave now, just how close are those weapons booming now day and night? The family delays and then, abruptly, leaves. And the book becomes more eventful: the roving point of view centers on Peter, the tone becomes more muted, almost shell-shocked, a little naïve even as its events become extravagant and terrifying.

I kept waiting for the violence of the Red Army to erupt and overwhelm the characters. And, yes, this does happen. But so stealthily it’s hard to know how we got from the warmth of the manor house to overturned carts, dead animals, and bombed out refugees on the side of an icy road. Fascinatingly, the Soviets almost never appear in the book. (I was reminded of how seldom Germans factor in depictions of the camps, etc.) For me, All for Nothing is most brilliant in his suggestion that the apocalypse arrives gradually, almost banally.

I encourage you to read R. Nicht’s brilliant take on the book. (Just one clarification: although Kempowski often returns in his writing to the history of East Prussian, he did not grow up there (he was born in Hamburg and grew up in Rostock); All for Nothing is not strictly speaking autobiographical.)

The consensus seems to be that All for Nothing is Kempowski’s greatest work. (He wrote a ton, though, hardly any of it yet in English, so who knows.) Anthea Bell’s translation is gorgeous, somber and elegiac; I wonder how much of that is Kempowski’s “late style” and how much is Bell’s predilection. (I’m thinking of the way some of Sebald is more melancholy in English than in German.) It’s true though that the quotes in this book come mostly from Goethe and Schiller, unlike the pop music of An Ordinary Youth. It feels wise and resonant the way the classics do at their best. I once heard Edwin Frank, NYRB’s publisher, say he always read the last line of a novel first. (Insane!) I bet he nodded in satisfaction when he paged to the end of this book.

Tremendous stuff.

Margot Douaihy, Scorched Grace (2023)

Before Sister Holiday ran away to New Orleans and became a nun she played in an all-girl punk band, carried on a torrid, doomed affair with her married best friend (and bandmate), and made a bunch of other bad decisions. Now she’s teaching music to mostly disaffected kids in the Catholic school attached to her convent, covering her ink with gloves and a scarf, sparring with a sister who can’t stand her, and taking succor from the Mother Superior, the only woman in the country who would accept her when she came calling. But when a maintenance worker dies in a suspicious fire that also injures two of the students—and other fires follow thick on the first—Sister Holliday turns detective, (implausibly) tagging along with a painkiller-addicted fire investigator. Can you believe it—she solves the crime!!!

I heard about Scorched Grace from several UK readers, and I can see why the novel, heavy on atmospherics, might be popular with non-Americans. (As far as I can tell, the author isn’t from NOLA; to me it feels like she tries too hard to set the scene just so.) Just wait until it’s translated into German. They’re gonna eat this shit up. The subtitle (“A Sister Holiday Mystery”) implies Douaihy has plans for a series. More power to her, but I think this would have been better as a standalone.

Willem de Kooning, Door to the River, 1960

A find end to my reading year. Morrison, Vermette, Jacobsen, and, above all, Kempowski. See anything here to strike your fancy?

What I Read, September 2023

Posted on December 23, 2023 by banff1972 under book review, month in review, review, Uncategorized

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

Dwyer Murphy, The Stolen Coast (2023)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yiyun Li, The Book of Goose (2022)

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

Christine Mangan, The Continental Affair (2023)

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

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

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

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

Simon Jimenez, The Vanished Birds (2020)

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

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

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

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

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

Garth Greenwell, Cleanness (2020)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joseph Hansen, Troublemaker (1975)

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

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

David Brintzenhofe Applying Makeup (II) (1982)

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

What I Read, October 2023

Posted on December 19, 2023 by banff1972 under book review, month in review, review, Uncategorized

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

Tom Thompson, Silver Birches (1915 – 16)

Paulette Jiles, Chenneville (2023)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A miracle that’s lost on us:

the hand actually has fewer than six fingers

but still it’s got more than four.

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

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

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

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

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

Allison Montclair, The Right Sort of Man (2019)

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

Prime light reading.

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

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

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

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

Billy-Ray Belcourt, A Minor Chorus (2022)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Holly Watt, To the Lions (2019)

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

Mary McCarthy, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957)

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

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

What I Read, August 2023

Posted on September 7, 2023 by banff1972 under book review, month in review, review, Uncategorized

We went east through southern Alberta and Saskatchewan, where the drought is bad, all the sloughs empty and cracked, the occasional cattle herds dazed under unrelenting sun. Farther south they’d had more rain; we crawled for an hour or so through a pelting storm near the South Dakota Iowa line. Towns that depress you from the highway reveal unexpected delights when you stop for a minute. The perfectly preserved 50s downtown of Swift Current. A hipster café in Fargo on market day. The sophistication of Omaha. (Love that town.) And then we were back home, where it hasn’t rained in weeks and the wet bulb readings have been frightening. The trees shed leaves by the minute. We probably lost the plum. I hope the cherry makes it.

Nothing for it but to stay inside and read.

Helen Dunmore, A Spell of Winter (1995)

This Gothic WWI-era novel about a girl and her brother raised in a crumbling manor house by their grandfather after their mother absconds and their father goes mad won the inaugural Orange Prize. As the siblings grow to adulthood, they live in dreamy/nightmarish seclusion, seeing only a governess they hate and eventually get rid of and the housemaid, a young Irish woman whose perspicacity fails only at one crucial moment. Some pretty heavy-duty and salaciously over-the-top things (I said it was Gothic, right?) make for gripping reading, but in the end, I don’t know that it amounts to much. It hasn’t stayed with me the way Dunmore’s Birdcage Walk and The Siege have; it’s not as brilliant as, say, Andrew Miller’s Now We Shall Be Entirely Free. But it’s plenty enjoyable, especially on a hot day when all you want to do is read about drafty English houses.

Elizabeth Jane Howard, Something in Disguise (1969)

Novel about a misguided second marriage and the couple’s adult children who mostly fail to find their way through life. I cannot improve on Jacqui’s deft summary of its busy events: do take a look. Like her, I was unpersuaded by the book, though to be fair the title drops what in retrospect should seem a glaring clue that things aren’t as they first seem. It’s impossible to say anything about this book without spoiling things, so look away friends if that sort of thing bothers you. I was certainly shocked by the ending—props to any reader who isn’t—and admired (but didn’t appreciate) the sudden swerve not just to the macabre but something closer to sadism. Quite the trick to turn a novel of manners into something like Cammell and Roeg’s Performance. Normally that kind of uncanny reversal would be just my thing. But Howard doesn’t play fair. Maybe if I read the book again I’d see the breadcrumbs, but on a first reading, anyway, I felt she’d pulled a bait and switch. Impressively so, maybe, but I still felt duped.

I gather the team at Backlisted likes the book a lot; if anyone can convince me to think better of the book it’s them. (Breaking news: apparently Jacqui reread it and liked it much more…) But for now the jury is out for me on this writer. I enjoyed the first Cazalet, but abandoned the second. Maybe Howard, despite being a midcentury British novelist named Elizabeth, isn’t for me.

Guy Gavriel Kay, The Children of Earth and Sky (2016)

The book that spawned the two prequels I loved so much last month. It won’t surprise you when I tell you I loved it too. Did I mention these books have maps? Goddamn I love maps.

Jessica Johns, Bad Cree (2023)

Mackenzie left her home in northern Alberta a couple of years ago after the sudden death of her beloved sister. She’s made a quiet life in Vancouver: a steady if soul-destroying job at Whole Foods, a close friend who looks out for her, the anonymity of the city after her small-town childhood. But lately she’s been having dreams. Bad dreams. And the boundaries between waking and dreaming are getting harder to parse. Why are all these crows outside her window all the time? Maybe because she woke up one morning with the severed head of a bird in her bed. There’s nothing for it: she’ll have to beg for time off and fly home to come to terms with everything there she ran away from.

The set-up for Johns’s debut novel is actually the weakest part. I almost it down about thirty pages in—despite its extreme events nothing about the book felt urgent. But when Mackenzie comes home the book gets going. I loved its depiction of the northern Alberta bush, the town where a trip to the Seven Eleven is a big deal, the lake where her family picnics, the silent oil rigs, abandoned when crude fell below $100 / barrel. Johns’s depiction of Mackenzie’s extended family is terrific: bring on the cups of tea, the card games, the pots of mac and cheese, the good dogs sighing under the table, I can’t get enough of that shit. And the story’s horror elements—Mackenzie is possessed by a windigo—make so much sense as an allegory for the depredations and violence of a resource extraction economy.

Pair with Kate Beaton’s Ducks, the white settler version of this story, or simply enjoy on its own.

K. Patrick, Mrs. S (2023)

As a dogsbody at a girls’ boarding school in England in the 90s, the narrator of K. Patrick’s smart and sensual debut novel does whatever she’s told. One of her jobs is to supervise prep, the two hours after dinner when the girls work on their homework. Sitting in a classroom, the day’s Latin lesson still on the board, she muses with her customary acuity on the relationship between bodies and language:

On the chalkboard behind, an exercise in a grammar of belonging, he or she or we or they, the types of bodies changing the next word. It looks difficult. Pointless.

That mingling of the staccato and the sinuous is characteristic of the narrator. She is known only as Miss, just as other characters are referred to by their function: the Housemistress, the Art Teacher, the Vicar. Only the headmaster and his wife have names, but even they are known only in abbreviation (Mr. and Mrs. S.), as if they’d stepped from one of Freud’s case studies. The narrator is unimportant to the life of the school—Miss is there only for a year, fresh from the Australian Outback—which means she goes everywhere, sees everything, is seen by no one, bolstered by the freedom of her insignificance.

Patrick pulls off a difficult trick: her narrator is often inarticulate to others, scrubbed and raw, at sea in this foreign place, yet also as nuanced in her observations and interpretations as a character from Henry James.

Maybe it’s this juxtaposition between empty surface and full interior that proves attractive to the woman who gives the book its title. Over the course of a dry, burning summer, the narrator sets herself to seducing Mrs. S. It won’t spoil much to say that she does; it spoils more to say that she does so not in the way Mrs. S does, governed as the older woman is by a love of transgression she is allowed thanks to her privilege, nor in the way of her friend, the Housemistress, a butch lesbian whose bravado must be kept closeted to keep the job she both needs and loves. The narrator instead is a queer Bartleby, though her preferring not to does not extend to her sex life, which is lusciously depicted. (The book is hot.) (Also, Bartleby was already queer.)

Patrick’s strategy of embedding dialogue within the interior monologue without attribution forces us to slow down, to go backward in the light of new information to re-read earlier sentences, to play a detective game: who speaks to whom? As Frances put it in our conversation about the novel on One Bright Book, Mrs. S is fascinated by scripts: what it means to follow one, what it means to live without one.

An impressive debut that can go in the pantheon of great summertime novels (Bear, The Go-Between, A Month in the Country).

Garry Disher, Day’s End (2022)

Regular readers will know that I’m a huge Hirsch fan, my favourite procedural series of the moment. But despite featuring some of the books’ regular pleasures—Hirsch himself of course, his morning walks around his south-central Australian town, and the long drives along fearsome backroads to check in on his far-flung community members—Disher tries to do too much here. True, this is the most effective use of life during covid I’ve seen in a crime novel (the cops actually put on masks!), and believe me I am alive to the dangers of authoritarianism, extremism, and illiberalism that our time is giving rise to, but the last third of the novel is too schematic. It’s a lot to show in just a couple hundred pages how online bullying, drug dealing, and alt-right militarism combine, to say nothing of how some ordinary people, a little bored and frightened and underemployed could be seduced by the new fascism. I’m a Disher fan for life but if you don’t know him yet don’t start here.

Ann Leckie, Translation State (2023)

Having done a little reading around I now realize that Leckie’s latest sf novel is set in a universe she has already detailed in earlier books. Possibly I would have had an even richer experience had I read them first. But I still thought this was terrific. It won me over even though it switches among three narrators (a structure that usually gets on my nerves).

Leckie’s universe is a place of many genders. As this smart review puts it:

Leckie uses both sie/hir/hirs and e/em/eir as pronouns for nonbinary genders in this setting, in contrast to they/them pronouns, which designate agendered or genderless identities.

We meet Enae (sie/hir) after the death of her grandmaman, a fearsome character who made Enae’s life difficult, not least when it is posthumously revealed that the old woman had sold her estate and title to an upstart years ago to save herself from financial ruin. Enae no longer has a home; sie does, however, have a new purpose. The person who displaced hir is required by the terms of the sale to provide for Enae, which she does by sending hir on what she imagines will be a fruitless investigation: to find someone who went missing 200 years ago. But Enae has more guts and abilities than anyone credits hir for; sie finds the offspring of the missing person, a man named Reet who grew up with three adopted parents (two of whom use female pronouns and one nonbinary), a likeable misfit who spends much of his time watching a serial called Pirate Exiles of the Death Moon, which helps him damp down an alarming desire to bite people. Reet, it turns out, is what’s called a Presger Translator, a version of the alien Presger bred to interact with humans. (The backdrop of the book is the re-negotiation of a longstanding peace treaty between humans and the Presger.) When Reet’s background is revealed, he falls prey to political machinations, the gist of which is that he is expected to “match” (biologically and psychologically meld with) another Presger Translator, Qven (they/them), who is recovering from an assault and struggling with their desire, encouraged by Reet, to self-dentify as human. As part of this process, they begin using e/em/eir pronouns: as the LARB essay notes, pronouns are a big deal in this book, misgendering being a form of violence. The plot hinges on whether Reet (who has never known any other life) and Qven will be granted their wish to be accepted as human, with grave consequences for the political situation of Leckie’s universe, and clear analogues to our own cultural moment, where a vicious backlash against trans and nonbinary people teeters on the edge of full-scale murderousness.

My sense is that Leckie is in line with a lot of the coolest stuff going on in sff these days (though she might be a bit brainier than some), but this sure isn’t the kind of thing the genre has historically been associated with. I hope readers who don’t read a lot of sff will give it a try. It’s also quite funny, I don’t think I made that clear!

I listened to the audiobook narrated by British actress Adjoah Andoh (Lady Danbury in Bridgerton), and if the book interests you at all, I recommend her rendition highly. Her accents, ranging from Scottish to gorgeous West African, are a delight.

Yiyun Li, The Vagrants (2009)

Li’s absorbing, despairing novel of post-Maoist China gripped me from the start. The setting is a provincial city hundreds of miles from Beijing, where the Democracy Wall Movement briefly promises change of the sort Li’s characters cannot imagine, caught up as they are in navigating the broken social structures left to them by the Maoist Revolution: families at odds with each other, domestic violence, hunger, fear. The Vagrants of the title are its central characters, more or less loosely connected, in large part because they live in an especially impoverished neighbourhood in the (fictional) city of Muddy River. Many of them are children, perhaps because Li, born in 1972, grew up in the China of the period, and perhaps because children are the ones least able to exert their own agency (under the tyranny of their parents and the indoctrination of their schools) but also the most free from strictures, in the way of a kid who can take the long way home from school without anyone asking where they’ve been.

We meet the schoolboy Tong, who loses his dog, his only companion, and inadvertently ruins his feckless but innocent father’s life. And twelve-year-old Nini, disabled from birth, perhaps because her mother was beaten by an apparatchik while pregnant (that very true believer is the woman who, having fallen from favour, has been condemned and whose execution is the occasion of the public holiday with which the book opens), Nini’s bleak life of toil and punishment seems to change when a privileged young man named Bashi takes an interest in her that is equal parts prurient, exploitative, and touching. The adult characters include Kai, a radio broadcaster who joins an underground movement at enormous cost to everyone around her, and the former teacher Gu, whose daughter is the condemned woman , and who retreats in pain and shame into memories of pre-revolutionary life even as his second wife, his former student, is radicalized by her child’s fate. Wonderful characters all, portrayed with the clarity of Chekov.

I don’t hear Li’s early work talked about much: based on the two of her more recent books I’ve read she now writes in a different vein, less realist, more first-person fabulist a la Lydia Davis or Sigrid Nunez. But when it was published The Vagrants got some thoughtful reviews. True, the framing of Pico Iyer’s New York Times review, for example, is preposterous in its vapid hymn to multiculturalism—” All the world’s stories are America’s stories now, and this is the current glory of our literature”: did we believe that stuff even then?—but he offers some impressive readings of the novel, noting how Li equates the moral failings of the nation with the violation of Gu Shan’s body, which is cut apart for reasons of punishment, graft, and perversion (vocal cords severed before execution so she cannot shout out, kidneys given to an aging military leader, breasts and genitals hacked out by the man hired to bury her). And I’m interested, if not fully convinced, by Iyer’s suggestion that The Vagrants is less a novel than a “counter-document of sorts, a private, unsanctioned portrait of those interiors (in every sense) that are always left out of the grand official picture.” I mean, yes, that’s true, but I don’t see why Iyer’s imagined genre of the “counter-document” would be at odds with the novel.

Anyway, the older I get the more I want fiction to teach me about times and places I don’t know, and The Vagrants succeeded brilliantly on this front. (I’d love to hear if readers who know more about 20^th-century China than I do—all of you probably—feel similarly.) Even more than its historical realism, though, I appreciated its evenhandedness about the possibility of solidarity or connection under an oppressive regime. The bonds between society’s vagrants, the refuse left behind by the unrelenting violence of ideology, are built on the sandy foundation of fear but their buildings stand nonetheless. Li has what I take to be the novelist’s quintessential ability to ironize but not demonize. There’s no one to like in this book, but everyone to feel for.

Georges Simenon, The Judge’s House (1942) Trans. Howard Curtis (2015)

Maigret has been exiled to the Vendée because he pissed off his superiors in some unexplained fashion and now he’s bored. The smell of his colleague’s Brillantine is making him crazy and just how many mussels can he eat? (Quite a few, actually.) But then some local busy-bodies, husband and wife, come to him with a story about a dead body in the upper room of the manor house of the local grandee, a former judge, a room the married couple can see from a tree in their garden, a tree they just happened to be climbing.

Sure enough, there’s a body; Maigret catches the judge trying to dispose of it under cover of stormy night. The man claims to have no idea who it is, which preposterous right? turns out to be true. A complicated plot involving the judge’s adult children, his daughter’s lover, the judge’s own criminal past, and his ex-wife ensues. Maigret unravels it all, of course, and presumably gets back to Paris (I can’t even remember). Not my favourite Maigret, but it has its moments. Be warned, though, it’s at least a 6/10 on the misogyny scale.

Fun reading month! See anything you like here?

What I Read, July 2023

Posted on September 3, 2023 by banff1972 under book review, month in review, review, Uncategorized

How good to escape summer in the South! How good for the soul to be back in the mountains! How good for the body to be somewhere with paths and trails and sidewalks! About halfway through July I realized I’d been in a reading slump for a long time, most of the year really. I’d been reading, but from compulsion not joy. Books were like ash in my mouth. What I needed was to do the opposite of what I’d been doing—slow down the reading, do some other things, occupy my body more than my mind. And then a chance encounter gave me my reading mojo back.

Peter Whyte, Mount Rundle from Vermilion Lakes, n.d.

Hideo Yokoyama, Six Four (2012) Trans. Jonathan Lloyd-Davies (2017)

The second terrific long novel about the failure of Japanese political and social institutions disguised as a procedural I’ve read in the past year. For a while I thought Yokoyama was more despairing, even more cynical than Takamura in Lady Joker about the possibility that institutions like the press, the police, and the political system could be reformed. But by the end of the Six Four I’d changed my mind. In the end, I think Takamura’s is the more coruscating and thorough-going treatment. But Six Four is the more conventionally suspenseful book.

Named after the last year of the Shōwa era (1989), when, in the first days of January, coincidentally the last of Hirohito’s life, a seven-year-old girl is kidnapped and murdered when the ransom drop goes haywire. Fourteen years later the case remains unsolved. Mikami, one of the detectives on the original team and the novel’s protagonist, has become his department’s press officer. As a result of some truly complicated inter-organizational machinations, he reinvestigates the case in secret. These efforts take on extra resonance because his own (much older) daughter has disappeared. Among other things, this is a novel about shame: national, cultural, and personal, the latter exhibited in Mikami’s painful near-inability to open up to his wife, a former cop. (One of the indirect lessons of this book, even more than in Lady Joker is to not be a woman in Japan.) If you like intricate and satisfying plots and/or the minutiae of bureaucratic politics, you’ll love this chunky boi.

I read it under a canopy in a friend’s backyard in Salt Lake City, and that was very nice.

Margaret Drabble, The Millstone (1965)

When I chose The Millstone from among three or four orange-spined Penguin Drabbles at a used bookstore I wasn’t thinking of the scene in which a toddler eats several pages of her mother’s novelist roommate’s typescript, which Ursula LeGuin quotes to memorable effect in one of the essays I’d read the month before. Nor was I thinking ahead to the decision I’d have to make a week later about what book to schlep with me on the ten-mile-hike to Shadow Lake Lodge for a glorious hiking vacation, though it turned out that this slender book—made possible by some truly excruciatingly tiny type—was perfect.

No, what I was thinking at the time was that I’d been meaning to read Drabble for a while and the Nic Roeg-Don’t Look Now-psychosexual-horror vibe of the cover was calling to my 1970s soul. No sooner had I returned to cell range from the mountains than I learned that Backlisted had just released an episode on this very book. So the whole thing was clearly Bashert. (This was not my favourite episode of the podcast, to be honest, even though my secret celebrity crush Lucy Scholes is a guest, but I did appreciate the panel’s thoughts on how important the NHS is to the novel—not an angle I’d have considered.)

Besides, how could I not have bought a book that starts with a line of positively Brooknerian perfection:

My career has always been marked by a strange mixture of confidence and cowardice: almost, one might say, made by it.

I do love me a nice hedge—that “strange mixture,” that “almost,” the circumlocutionary “one might say.” Funnily enough, the character making this statement is anything but cowardly or unconfident in her professional life, where she moves through an academic career with unflagging industry. Her personal life, though, is another story. There she is hapless and diffident—but also, in the end, in her way, satisfyingly triumphant. As Rosamund Stacey tells us on the final page, she has “lost the taste for half-knowledge.” Gone is the woman who carries on uninspiring and unconsummated relationships with two men at the same time, neither of whom she likes as more than a friend, if that, and who, with seemingly the worst luck in the world, falls pregnant after an absurd one-night stand with a gay man. Gone too is the woman whose hapless attempt at a bathtub abortion is foiled when some friends descend on her flat, drink most of the gin she’d bought for the deed, and then traipse off to a Fellini film. That woman is replaced by one who decides to have the child, who navigates a patronizing and patriarchal medical system, and who falls deeply in love with her baby, all the while balancing mothering and working. She’s no super-woman: she has the luxury of a flat left her by parents who are pursuing mildly Fabian-inspired good works abroad, a lodger (the writer whose pages get eaten and who is a pretty good sport about it: how differently Doris Lessing would have written that scene!) to help make ends meet, and, when the baby gets badly ill, a specialist who takes a special interest in the case thanks to family connections. But Rosamund stands up for herself and finds all the affection she needs from her child; we aren’t meant to think she is deluded or lacking.

A pleasant surprise—more Drabble is in my future.

Guy Gavriel Kay, A Brightness Long Ago (2019)

Guy Gavriel Kay has flitted along the edges of my reading life. Back in the 80s I had a copy of his first fantasy novel but I couldn’t make much headway: it was too sophisticated for the boy who was deeply into Dragonlance and Piers Anthony and David Eddings. (Pretty sure these were all in fact terrible books.) Later as a bookseller I worked with people who counted Kay a friend and raved about each new book. But I was disavowing fantasy then and even though I respected my friends as readers I felt the need to define myself by other kinds of books. I was older then, though; I’m younger than that now. I’ve been coming back to sff lately, convinced it’s the most vital genre of the moment. Plus I remember Levi Stahl repping this book and that’s usually all the recommendation I need.

So when I saw A Brightness Long Ago on the shelf of a Calgary bookstore I knew now was the time. What I didn’t know was how much joy I’d take from it; how much pleasure of the “leave me alone I’m reading I just gotta finish these last 200 pages” variety I’d set myself up for.

If you tuned out when you heard the word “fantasy” maybe I can get you back by admitting that I don’t actually understand why Kay’s books are categorized this way. To me they feel more like historical fiction, only the history is of an invented world, albeit one similar to the early modern period in Europe and the Near East. Specifically, the events of Brightness are modelled on the Italian Wars of the 15the century. (I think I read Kay say somewhere, or maybe someone saying it about him, I can’t remember now, that Dorothy Dunnett is a model. As I’ve yet to read Dunnett I can’t say.) Anyway, Kay has two great strengths: complex world building that reveals itself gradually and organically, and dramatic set-pieces that carry you away. Together they make him compelling conceptually and exciting narratively. Plus, his general mode seems to be rueful—in full awareness of the sadness of mortal life. And boy am I a sucker for rue. From the first scene—an assassination that I can only describe by the cliché “fiendishly clever”—I was enchanted. And feeling all the feels: sorrow, fear, exhilaration, and genuine surprise. (Good ending.)

Turns out this book (and the one that followed it, which of course I immediately read) is a prequel to his previous novel, but that didn’t make any difference.

Guy Gavriel Kay, All the Seas of the World (2022)

Features the same world and some of the same characters as A Brightness Long Ago. Also, pirates!

Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum, Ms. Hempel Chronicles (2008)

Many of Ms. Hempel’s students were performing in the show that evening, but to her own secret disappointment, she would not be appearing.

The opening sentence of Shun-Lien Bynum’s collection of linked stories tugged at me when I picked it off the half-price shelf at the bookstore in Canmore, AB. (Check it out, very cute!). I identify with that feeling of wanting to be seen (even as I also fear it), so that was part of the appeal. But what really drew me in was that second comma. Technically speaking unnecessary, right? To me, the effect is to create a greater sense of privacy (one of course open to readers), as if Ms. Hempel’s desires are kept from everyone but herself. A comma of self-knowledge. And these tales of a young middle-school teacher’s experiences in and around the classroom do contain a matter-of-fact wisdom. In this regard, Shun-Lien Bynum’s stories reminded me a little of Laurie Colwin’s descriptions of young New Yorkers in love, but I’m having a hard time articulating why: I mean more than the shared setting, more the way big events—breaking up with a fiancée, say—happen almost without comment while minor ones prompt lengthy reflection.

I’ll admit I wasn’t always equally engaged by Ms. Hempel’s travails. (The first and last pieces are the strongest.) But I loved the book’s depiction of teaching, of the mixture of pleasure and pain and gentle dismissal that teachers feel toward their students. Shun-Lien Bynum gets it. Ms. Hempel’s students are never cute or worldly wise or bleak ciphers symbolizing anomie. She cares for them in a free-floating, genuine, but distanced way that felt right to me; all the more striking for her, and for readers, when years later a chance encounter gives her a vertiginous glimpse into what that relationship had felt like from the other side.

The book’s all heart, without being cheaply heartfelt. Take this passage, again from the first page, a description of Adelaide Burr, “an avid appreciator of dance,” whose excitement about her upcoming performance in the school talent show burns in her so wildly she has to corner her teacher to tell her about it:

[Adelaide’s] first book report had celebrated in a collage (dismembered limbs; blue glitter) the life and contributions of Martha Graham, and her second, a dramatic monologue, was based on a bestseller written by a ballerina who had suffered through several disastrous affairs and then developed a serious cocaine habit. Adelaide seemed excited by the lurid possibilities. “Just imagine!” she said to Ms. Hempel, and clapped her hands rapturously against her thighs, as though her shorts had caught fire. The bodies of Ms. Hempel’s students often did that: fly off in strange directions, seemingly of their own accord. Now Adelaide told her that she had choreographed a solo piece to Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. Balancing precariously, she said, on a kitchen footstool, she had peeled the glow-in-the-dark stars off the ceiling above her bed. “I have incorporated them into my dance,” she said mysteriously.

Isn’t that great? That parenthesis! Gotta be a nod to Lolita, right? Except from the point of view of someone who actually cares for children.

I read The Ms. Hempel Chronicles fast, on my mother’s back deck, but I suspect that the book would repay re-reading. I might teach it someday.

Catharine Robb Whyte, Bow Peak, Bow Lake, ca. 1945

A small but not slim reading month if you know what I mean. I was glad to have read all of these books. And I owe Guy Gavriel Kay for making me fall back in love with the whole enterprise. More anon!

What I Read, June 2023

Posted on August 31, 2023 by banff1972 under book review, month in review, review, Uncategorized

I know, I wasn’t sure if I’d be back either! The first half of the year kind of sucked. Writing here would have helped my mood, but I didn’t have the energy. The classic conundrum. Here’s hoping for better things in the fall semester. As to June, well, it feels like a long time ago, but here’s what I’ve reconstructed. Not my most enjoyable reading month ever, but considering that I spent almost two weeks in Newfoundland (it’s amazing, go if you can, take sweaters) I’m impressed I got through as much as I did.

Robert Longo, Study of Greenland Iceberg, 2020

Ursula K. LeGuin, The Space Crone Eds. So Meyer and Sarah Shin (2023)

Can you believe I’ve never read LeGuin? She must be pretty terrific, because I enjoyed this collection of essays, addresses, and stories even though I doubt it’s the best way into her work. Ranging from the 1970s to the mid 2010s, these pieces cover a lot of ground, but they return to the topic of women’s writing. LeGuin surprised me by writing about Woolf, Mrs. Oliphant, and Margaret Drabble rather than female sf or fantasy writers; I bet she’d say that realism, modernism, and fantasy are equally relevant modes of representing experience. Which isn’t to say that she ignores the fantastic: there’s a fun Borgesian story about an all-female polar expedition, and the title piece convincingly argues that the person best suited to head off into space to represent humanity would be an older woman (crones have seen and done it all, are (too) modest, and, because they best represent the experience of change, represent the best of us). As she writes in the essay’s immortal closing line, “Into the space ship, Granny.”

LeGuin wrote that when she was only 47—hardly a crone, except perhaps by temperament, and of course that’s what counts. But maybe she knew she was on her way to being one. This volume shows her to be wise, witty, and angry. Definitely a “no fucks to give” vibe to this collection. I haven’t even mentioned the piece I liked best, “What It was Like”, about the need to protect the right to abortion. How painful to read this memoir of life before Roe post Dobbs.

You can hear more on episode 15 of One Bright Book.

This book is published by Silver Press out of the UK and they do make a fine-looking book.

Susanna Moore, The Lost Wife (2023)

Moore’s novel concerns Sarah Brinton, who abandons her abusive husband in Rhode Island in 1855 and heads west in search of a childhood friend. In a matter of pages, Moore sketches out a long and unpleasant journey to Minnesota by train, line-boat (a barge pulled by mules), steamboat, wagon train, and riverboat. The opening of this novella is brief but not cursory; Moore’s descriptions of deprivation are sharp and evocative. Here’s Sarah describing her passage along the Galena River to the Mississippi:

The boat is meant for stock rather than passengers, and freight rather than stock. I sleep in a slatted chair in the bow, the hem of my dress stiff with dried mud, which has the advantage of keeping my legs warm at night. My cape covers the rest of me, including my head. Even so, my face and hands are swollen with mosquito bites. There are rats too, and I keep my feet tucked under me. The cattle, trapped in their sodden pens, moan through the night.

Unpleasantness, even misery all around, not least in those moaning cows. And things get worse before they get better: Sarah’s friend has died, likely of cholera. The man from the riverboat authority speculates she was buried in a sandbank; with malicious pleasure, he warns Sarah, “You won’t want the river to drop too low this summer.”

She must find a way to pull herself out of her grief and make a new life, always in fear that her husband might arrive to take her home. Before long meets a Yale-educated, laudanum-addicted doctor, John Brinton. Keeping her bigamy to herself, she marries the doctor and has two more children. The family moves west to the settlement of Yellow Medicine, where John has been hired by the Indian Agency to serve the adjoining Sioux (Dakota) reservation. Unlike the handful of other white women in Yellow Medicine, Sarah invites indigenous women into her home, befriends them, learns Dakota, even smokes a pipe. In this way, Sarah is like the protagonist of Moore’s otherwise totally different best-known novel, the sort-of-terrible but also fascinating quasi-noir In the Cut: a woman who is always “too much.”

You can imagine how she is looked at askance, especially as tensions rise between the Sioux and the settlers. By the summer of 1862, the Sioux are starving, increased hunting having reduced the available game. Then comes word that the annuity promised by the US government has failed to arrive. (The money only enriches the white settlers, from whom the natives were forced to buy food.) Thousands of Dakota descend on the settlement, demanding provisions, but the Major in charge releases only the bare minimum. Several weeks later, Dakota attack settlers throughout the region, ultimately killing more than 350 and taking a similar number hostage. Some months later, the uprising is stopped by government troops, who kill an unknown number of Sioux and arrest hundreds more, mostly non-combatants. A military commission sentences 300 to death; 38 are hanged after Lincoln himself reviews the charges.

Sarah’s experience is the vehicle for this history lesson: she is briefly taken hostage but then rescued by a warrior whose mother had been treated by her husband. Chaksa, the warrior, hides Sarah and her children; Sarah, although terrified much of the time, rather likes living with Dakota. She especially likes Chaksa himself, not only for his kindness but for his strong, beautiful body. The exact nature of their relationship remains opaque, but at the end of the book, after so many of the people who cared for her have been killed or arrested, when she has been released and reunited with John, and nothing is as it was before, Sarah says that she has three husbands.

Moore handles this terrible historical moment with grace, sorrow, and irony. (For example, in his abolitionist zeal, John longs to join the Union Army, even as he is unable to see the oppression around him; and all of this despite his appreciation for indigenous medicine, which he even incorporates into his own practice.) I learned a lot from the book without feeling lectured to. Moore describes the landscape, especially its birds and plants, with pleasure and anguish at its increasing destruction. And she sympathizes with the Dakotas’ situation without taking on their perspective. It’s about as deft a story of settler-indigenous conflict that one could imagine being written by a white person. But I can’t say that we really need this particular story, told from this particular point of view.

The Lost Wife is based on Sarah F. Wakefield’s account of her abduction by Mdewakanton warriors in 1862, Six Weeks in the Sioux Teepees: A Narrative of Indian Captivity. Anyone read it?

Katherena Vermette, The Strangers (2021)

Vermette’s follow-up to her brilliant first novel, The Break (a book I loved when I first read it and which I love even more now that I’ve started teaching it), is named after an extended Indigenous family, one of whose characters plays a central role in the earlier book. The Strangers are aptly-named: strangers to white settler society, to each other, and to themselves, estrangement compounded by the neglect, disregard, and abuse they’ve suffered from the institutions that have forced themselves upon their lives.

People don’t seem to like The Strangers much—if they’re even reading it. I haven’t heard it discussed much (I don’t think it’s had US or UK release, which doesn’t help). The most compelling response I’ve read is this one by Rohan. I always appreciate her interpretations, but my experience of this book was so different to hers. It’s tough reading, no question—from its opening white-knuckle description of a female prisoner transferred to hospital where she gives birth to a child must immediately give into custody (where nurses and prison guards negotiate whether she should be handcuffed) to its repeated depiction of women whose anger and pain make them unable to keep hurting themselves. In that sense, it’s relentless. The Strangers is bleaker than The Break: whereas the members of its central family had the emotional resources to look out for each other, despite everything the world threw at them, here the characters have been so damaged by hurt, shame, and pain that their emotional ties are terribly frayed. And the institutions meant to help them (peopled in the book by social workers, guidance counsellors, law professors, and others) mostly hurt them more. Not everything is awful: a man reaches out to a woman in prison, bringing her a little out of herself; a girl reconnects with her birth father and finds a new, imperfect, but stable family which leads to a grace note in the final pages, where she begins a new chapter in life by going off to university where her roommate is someone readers of The Break will remember. But damage far outweighs repair.

And yet I was captivated by the book. As I thought about Rohan’s criticism that the book “just plods unhappily along,” I wondered if that was the point: after all, it was one of Freud’s early insights that trauma destroys narrative; victims of trauma can’t tell the story of their lives because trauma, as compulsive repetition and reliving, is the antithesis of narrative ordering. The Strangers is full of incident, but not much change. I found this sad and enraging, but not artless. I’m so curious to see what Vermette does next. I’m not done with these characters; I hope she isn’t either.

Richard Osman, The Thursday Murder Club (2020)

When I first learned the premise of British television personality Osman’s foray into crime fiction I rolled my eyes: four friends in a posh retirement complex meet on Thursdays to put skills honed in their past professional lives (psychiatrist, labour leader, nurse, and, it would seem, spy) to use in solving cold cases. How could that possibly be any good? Well, when the writing is tight, the jokes actually funny, and the plots both twisty and suspenseful anything works. But as the four characters move from cold cases to a very live one, Osman does something surprising: he makes us feel the pathos of regret, loss, and increasing debility, even as he shows his characters to be unstoppable.

I’m grateful to my daughter for tipping me off to this book. Since then both my wife and I have devoured it. I enjoyed the book even more because we all enjoyed it so much. Highly recommended!

Richard Osman, The Man Who Died Twice (2021)

Just as good as the first. Ibrahim forever!

Minae Mizumura, An I-Novel (1995) Trans Juliet Winters Carpenter (2021)

I love Mizumura and even though this early work isn’t as memorable as Inheritance from Mother or A True Novel I still liked it a lot. If you listen to our discussion on One Bright Book you’ll see that Frances and Rebecca agreed. As English-speaking readers we lost some of the force of the book (famous in Japan for its liberal inclusion of English words and horizontal typesetting, as well as its renovation of the confessional form of the I-Novel, a kind of precursor to today’s autofiction), but we appreciated its reflections on loneliness, nationality, and identity.

A great novel of the pleasures of old-school telephone conversations.

S. A. Cosby, All the Sinners Bleed (2023)

Less extravagant than its two immediate predecessors, but still plenty violent and gory, Cosby’s most recent novel blends horror tropes with contemporary race politics. This is the first of his books that I’ve read that focus on law enforcement—surprising, perhaps, for someone who’s been drawn to ordinary guys led by circumstance to become outlaws. Titus Crown, the first Black Sheriff in his rural Virginia County, is a strong character: committed to his home but despairing of its ability to change. All the Sinners Bleed joins other recent crime novels that challenge the genre’s tendency to value law and order. In other words, this is mature Cosby, and I liked the book just fine. But I missed the humour and orneriness of Razorblade Tears and Blacktop Wasteland. More a sideways step than a leap forward.

Larry McMurtry, Horseman, Pass By (1961)

A grave disappointment. How could the author of that warm and wise wonder, Lonesome Dove, have started with this bitter, disagreeable work? A teenage boy, Lonnie, works his grandfather’s ranch in 1950s Texas: he fantasizes unpleasantly about the family’s Black maid, and looks on with fear and fascination at his step-uncle, who’d rather race around in his roadster than help with the cattle. This short book is filled with terrible things, most notably two extended scenes of violence: a rape described at excruciating length and with too much covert interest to make its overt disapproval convincing, and the liquidation of the ranch’s herd due to an epidemic of Foot and Mouth disease, described at even greater length. The cattle are herded into a series of pits before being shot:

The biggest old cows fell like they had been sledge-hammered; they kicked a time or two, belched blood into the dust, lay still. Not one in my pit got up. A calf dashed toward us and the man swung the gun and knocked it back on the body of a horned cow, its hind legs jerking. The old cows rolled their eyes and spun around and around. Not for a minute did the dust or the noise settle. Finally the last animal in the pit stood facing us, a big heifer. She was half hemmed in by the sprawled carcasses. She took one step toward us, head up, and the man fired, slamming her backward like a telephone pole had bashed her between the eyes. She lay on her side, one foreleg high in the air. The man took out his clip and went quickly to another pit, to help. I was as tight as my horse; I was sick of the heat, and of the dust smells and gunpowder and thin manure. I tried to spit the putrid taste out of my mouth, and couldn’t.

The first-person narration might explain that clumsy metaphor (the telephone pole), but I’m not buying it: a lot of it is just not that well written. Which is fine, most books aren’t. But what I really didn’t like is how its pretense at telling the hard facts of life is a cover for lurid excess.

In the end villainy disguised as grim reality carries the day. Lonnie, distraught, lights out of the territory. Demystifying the West is well and good, but the pleasure this novel takes in hurt made me feel sullied. Is all early McMurtry like this?

Robert Longo, Untitled (The Crown), 2021

Despite Vermette and Mizumura and some top-quality light reading in the Osmans, I wouldn’t call this a banner reading month. Tune in to find out if I got out of the slump in July!

What I Read, October 2022

Posted on February 25, 2023 by banff1972 under book review, month in review, review

October 2022 was months ago, I just remember we headed into the heart of semester, and it was still too hot a lot of the time, except at the end. I had a lot going on, but I managed to read quite a lot somehow. (A few of these had been on the go for a long time, though.) This is the last of these 2022 months I’ll complete. I’m missing July and August, which were good reading months, but some of those titles will appear on my Year in Review piece, which I’ll finally turn to now…

Larry McMurtry, Streets of Laredo (1993)

After finishing Lonesome Dove a couple of years ago, I asked Twitter if the book McMurtry later wrote with many of the same characters were as purely enjoyable. The answer was a resounding no, with a few even warning me not to read them, as their joylessness would retrospectively taint my feelings about LD. That was a flag to a bull, of course, and a friend and I decided to start with the book McMurtry wrote as a sequel.

It is, predictably, grimmer and more valedictory. The mythic West, already shown to be faded and false at the end of Dove, is really no more in The Streets of Laredo. And any book without Gus McCrae is going to be more a downer than one with him in it. The former heroes are old and failing, the new young’uns are clueless or vicious. But characters who didn’t shine in that earlier world get their due here: who knew that Pea Eye would grow to have so much self-knowledge? And women are important in this book, Lorena in particular is magnificent. The primary indigenous character, though, well, less two-dimensional than in Dove, and intended, I suspect, as a tribute, is an embarrassment, there’s no way around it.

Laredo is a violent book, much more so than Dove, verging even at times on Blood Meridian levels. It’s not a nihilistic book, though, unlike McCarthy’s, and indeed in the end a peaceable, fallible one. I loved it, and didn’t regret reading it for a second, and will give the two prequels a try soon enough.

Keum Suk Gendry-Kim, The Waiting (2021) Trans. Janet Hong (2021)

Every year on Yom Kippur, in the hours between morning services and ne’ila, when I’m too hungry and headache-y to sleep, I pick up a book that has nothing to do with work. Bonus points if it’s not too taxing, but also on the somber side. The Waiting fit the bill: a beautifully drawn and told comic about a family separated during the Korean War, and the aftermath of that trauma. Every year hundreds of people in South Korea—all of them now old, most frail—apply to meet relatives who found themselves in what became North Korea after the freezing of hostilities in the 1950s. The exchange is tightly controlled by both sides; only a handful who apply are chosen. The meetings happen at special facilities on the border: people who haven’t seen loved ones in decades are given a few hours together, an opportunity that can be almost as painful as not being selected. I knew nothing of this, and would, I’m sure, have been overwhelmed by sadness even without the somberness of the day.

Michael Frank, One Hundred Saturdays: Stella Levi and the Search for a Lost World (2022) Illus. Maira Kalman

A wonderful book, that rare thing, a Holocaust text that is as much about the world that was destroyed as the events of the destruction. In Stella Levi’s case that world was fragile to begin with, though absolutely vibrant. Only two thousand Jews lived on the island of Rhodes in 1939, and, since the island had been controlled by Italy since the end of the last war, life for the community did not change much until the Germans took over in September 1943. (Which isn’t to say the Italians leveled no strictures on the Jewish population: in 1938, for example, Jews were expelled from the universities.) Almost the entire population, save a handful who could claim Turkish citizenship, were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944. Only 150 returned. And most of those were unwilling to live in Rhodes again: a community that had flourished for over 2000 years, and in its final, Sephardic incarnation since the 16^th century, was gone.

Stella Levi, born in 1923 as the youngest of seven children to a merchant family, is one of the last people alive who experienced life in the Juderia, the Jewish quarter of Rhodes, a place where people knew their Greek and Turkish neighbours, did business with them, lived in harmony, but mostly ignored them; it was inward-focused life, and, until the arrival of the Italians, resistant to modernity.

Michael Frank met Levi one evening in 2015 when, arriving late for a talk at the Italian cultural center in New York, he dropped into the only available seat. The elegant woman next to him asked him where he was coming from in such a rush. His weekly French lesson, Frank replied, to which Levi replied, Would you like to know how French saved my life?

The short answer was that in Auschwitz, where she and her entire family and community had been deported, no one had ever met Judaeo-Spanish speakers. They were met with consternation, from the perpetrators and other victims alike. Did she know Yiddish? Polish? German? No, no, no. French? Yes, French she knew—which meant that she was placed with women from France and Belgium, women who knew enough of those other languages to help themselves, and by extension, Levi, get by.

The full answer took longer to uncover. Over six years, Frank would arrive with pastries at Levi’s apartment most Saturday mornings and listen, with occasional questions, as Levi felt her way into telling her life story. Her many reservations about doing so are at the heart of the book: Levi, who had kept these experiences to herself, rightly feared being reduced to an Auschwitz survivor. In Frank she found the right teller: careful, receptive, deferential, but no pushover. Their pas-de-deux is a lovely love story. Levi herself, you might already have guessed, is a remarkable person, with plenty of wisdom but no life lessons, if you know what I mean.

As if this book weren’t awesome enough, it also has illustrations by the great Maira Kalman. They are of course stunning. I read this book from the library, and I may need to get my own copy, and I never say that. An end-of-year title, for sure.

Jessica Au, Cold Enough for Snow (2022)

Disquieting, beautiful novella about an Australian woman who takes her mother on a trip to Japan. They walk around Tokyo, have dinner, visit a bookshop, attend an art exhibition. It all sounds nice enough, and the narrator’s attentiveness makes the journey vivid but not fetishistic. Yet the more I read, the more uneasy I became. In the guise of being helpful, the narrator in fact bullies her mother, insists upon having things her own way, force-marches the old woman through a series of sites and visits she has no particular interest in. Riley’s My Phantoms is getting all the love, but in the Bad-Daughter sweepstakes, Au takes the crown. Her control is impressive and I’m excited for her next book. [Attention, spoiler alert! I know some readers say the mother has in fact already died, that the narrator is accompanying a ghost, and I see where they’re coming from. I suppose I just don’t want this reading to be true: it seems less interesting to me.]

Namwali Serpell, Stranger Faces (2020)

I read the first pages of Serpell’s book-length essay online last spring and impulsively ordered it for my composition class this fall, since I planned to do a unit on writing about photographs. Those pages were so good! Serpell brilliantly close-reads the sentence “Look at me”; I imagined working through these pages with my class, using it to confirm the practice we’d already have done in learning to paying attention. I couldn’t wait to read the rest of the book, which was bound to be just as good.

Well.

It’s fine. A little labored. I appreciate Serpell’s insistence that we value so-called strange or other faces—those faces, the ones we are inclined to turn away from, have more to tell us about what it means to be human than any others. She’s good on the various writers and filmmakers she writes about (Joseph Merrick, Hannah Crafts, Alfred Hitchcock, and Werner Herzog), though too inclined to use puns and riffs structure her analyses. She’s most interesting in her final chapter on non-artistic practices, especially emojis and gifs (which prompted a class discussion in which I learned that only olds use gifs). Stranger Faces is like one of those restaurants where only the appetizers and desserts are any good.

Less good, in fact, not at all good, was the class I read it with. Probably the most challenging group I’ve ever taught. The book, I realized, wasn’t really pitched right for the class (that’s on me): not enough about photography per se, and too difficult, despite its reasonably straightforward prose, for the group. Pretty sure some of them didn’t read it, or read it quickly (that’s on them).

In a different context I might feel differently about the book, but I still think I’d find it underwhelming.

Andrea Barrett, The Air We Breathe (2007)

Old-fashioned novel about a tuberculosis sanitarium in the Adirondacks during WWI. Wealthy patients live in what are called cure cottages run by private families. Poor patients, mostly recent immigrants from Europe, are sent as wards of the state to a public facility. Written mostly in the months after 9/11 (Barrett apparently started a fellowship at the NYPL on September 10^th), the novel compares the war against tuberculosis with the patriotic fever whipped up as America prepared to enter the war, concerns that became newly relevant as she sat down to write. In each case, a “pure,” “healthy” body politic defined itself by ejecting an “impure” “unhealthy” other.

A wealthy man, manager of a munition factory, decides he will bring culture to the sanitarium’s residents by starting a weekly conversation group. What starts as a way for him to dilate on his passion for paleontology becomes something more inspiring—and dangerous. As the patients, many of whom have skills and knowledge unsuspected by the officials and orderlies who see them as unwashed immigrants, share the most important parts of themselves, larger passions intrude. All of this occurs against a backdrop of wartime jingoism, industrial production, and labour unrest. And of course, people fall in (almost always unrequited) love. The rich man loves a nurse who loves a patient who loves another nurse who is taken under the wing of a female scientist, the facility’s x-ray technician. The political and emotional tensions amp up; terrible things happen.

I loved this book. Sitting outside on the back steps in the mild weather on my Fall Break when I should have been doing other things, I delighted in its novelistic sweep, its warmth, its intelligence, and its deft use of narrative voice (Barrett’s choice to swerve between close third person and the first-person plural in which the patients speak as one impresses). I started by saying this is an old-fashioned book, but like a lot of old-fashioned books it offers a lot of surprises.

My first Barrett, but not my last.

Kate Zambreno, To Write as if Already Dead (2021)

Rebecca selected this for the October episode of One Bright Book. Not something I would have read otherwise; that’s one of the pleasures of the podcast. To Write as if Already Dead is Zambreno’s effort to write about Hervé Guibert’s To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, a roman-à-clef about the narrator’s AIDS diagnosis and friendship with Michel Foucault. My halfhearted plan to read the Guibert first came to naught, but I didn’t sense (and my cohosts confirmed) that having done so would have made much difference. Zambreno tells us enough of what we need to know about the writer and his most famous work, the one she circles around in her own book. She’s supposed to be writing an appreciation of Friend, but she struggles with the task, asking herself why she isn’t writing about David Wojnarowicz, whom she actually likes more than Guibert, but the bulk of the book, fortunately, isn’t about her inability to write her book. Instead it’s composed in two sections: one a “novella” about a first-person narrator who is surely Zambreno and the complicated, envious relationship she had with another female writer back in the days when blogging was a going concern (and not just something a few us old heads persist in doing), the other a set of notes written in response to (usually in the widest sense of the term) Guibert’s text. I could discern no tonal or stylistic differences between the two parts—which maybe is the point?—and in general rubbed against the book at every turn.

Reading Zambreno, hearing my cohosts’ quite different response to the book, feeling puzzled at my resistance to this book and others like it, I wondered not for the first time what it is about autofiction that doesn’t do much for me. I worry that I’m missing out—if this is the defining literature of the day, what would it mean to be, at best, ambivalent about it? My uncertainty sent me back to one of the passages that stayed with me, in which Zambreno writes, in the voice of a friend, a friend she can name, to whom she in fact dedicates the book, a friend different than the complicated, bad friend of the first part of the book, a friend who has indeed saved her (intellectual) life. The friend writes that

she has been reading contemporary autofiction in translation, Knausgaard, Éduoard Louis, Annie Ernaux. I’m making a study of coherence, she writes me. The extreme confidence of these writers, in the status of their art form, she writes. I’m obsessed with cracking the code of this security.

The cracked mirror of this passage feels like a key to Zambreno’s book, which enacts a struggle with coherence, offers itself as modest, the opposite of confident, unsure what her art form even is, or if it is art. Can a set of notes be art? Maybe the only time I cracked a smile while reading this book was when Zambreno, writing, I think, to the same friend, worries that Guibert and his coterie (Foucault in particular, who, after all, couldn’t stand Susan Sontag) would despise her. Who is she anyway? “I’m just a mom on a couch!” she wails, in not quite mock despair.

But that mom on the couch writes books that many of the best readers I know thrill to. Like other writers of autofiction, she seems to have taken up Barthes’s cry for books that offer “the novelistic without the novel” (throwing away the supposedly ungainly crutches of character and plot). Perhaps I am hopelessly devoted to what he calls “the readerly,” the classic text, replete to the point of self-satisfaction with meaning. (Viz my thoughts on Barrett.) Yet I can’t for the life of me see what the relation between the two parts of Zambreno’s book is supposed to be, or if it would matter if their order was reversed. The passage about autofiction seems implies that Zambreno, if her friend speaks for her, is similarly unsure. Or maybe the point is that it’s not Zambreno, but her friend, who feels this way. Is coherence—here a stand-in for the idea of aesthetic form—a plausible or laudable goal anymore? Or is it one of those things you can’t escape, in the way that Barthes, who haunts Zambreno’s book as much as he did Guibert’s life, put it in Writing Degree Zero: even the absence of style is a style?

The big questions might be insoluble, but thank god there’s always gossip, bitchiness, being catty. Guibert loved all of those things, and Zambreno traffics in them too, a little. Yet I found her anger more convincing than her snark. That anger is directed at economic life in America today: shitty insurance plans; he risks of pregnancy that are made more dangerous than they have to be by the forced precarity of so much work, like her adjunct teaching; the struggle for childcare and the way being a parent, especially a mother, in a society that pays lip-service to that labour without doing anything to make it bearable, saps the self and makes you hate everything and everyone. [As I revise these words, I read of a GoFundMe campaign to help Zambreno and her family escape an apartment where illegal levels of lead paint have harmed her young children. Heartbreaking. Infuriating.]

As much as I wish it were otherwise, I must confess that To Write as if Already Dead left me cold. Coming back to the book six weeks after reading it [when I first drafted this piece], I find I have things to say. But I’ve barely thought about it once since we recorded the podcast. Do you ever find yourself out of synch with other readers, including ones you respect a lot? What do you do then?

Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (1814)

The greatest books are the hardest to write about, especially months after the fact. What can I say? It’s Mansfield Park, it’s incredible! Honestly, despite the autumnal pleasures of Persuasion, I have to plump for MP as the Austen MVP. True, I’ve yet to read Northanger Abby but surely that’s not taking the award. I think it was Jenny Davidson who said that Mansfield is the great novel of graduate school, or the one that graduate students are most likely to identify with, being as it is about someone who lives on the sufferance of more powerful people. Fanny Price, c’est moi. (I’m no grad student anymore, but it’s taking me a lifetime to get out from under that mindset.)

Let me just rhapsodize/free associate a little. I’ll start with the characters. Tom Bertram, what a scoundrel, what else could he come to but a bad end? Maria and Julia, ugh. Edmund, oof, tough one, I mean he’s kindly, he really is, even when he can’t see what’s in front of him—but how can that relationship work? (Austen is nicely ambivalent about this in the last chapter.) Lady Bertram, greatest of all time. She leant Fanny Chapman! Pretty damn nice of her! Pug! Wonderful Pug! Sir Thomas, I kind of dug him even though I don’t think that shows me in much of a good light. Aunt Norris, what a piece of work, hiss boo! The Prices, bad fucking news, I knew it the moment they came on the scene.

The chapters in Portsmouth, in the crowded, absentmindedly loving, all at sixes-and-sevens house, such good stuff! The scene in the ha ha, tremendous suspense, perfect allegory for the perils of interpretation! All the stuff about theatre, preposterous and yet compelling: sometimes we get so into something that our passion becomes a problem. And Fanny, oh Fanny! What’s not to love?

Georges Simenon, Maigret and the Ghost (1964) Trans. Ros Schwartz (2018)

One of Maigret’s colleagues is shot dead. Turns out he’d been doing some off-the-books stakeout work. He’d been acting like a man who was on to something big. He’d never been a great cop, was always looking for a case that could really make him. Looks like he found it—but then it found him, as it were. Maigret investigates—as does Madame Maigret, who’s quite a presence here (they have a memorable lunch together), for she must console the dead cop’s widow, whom she doesn’t much like. There’s a lot more by-the-book police work than usual in a Maigret. Which I liked. I managed to sneak a few hours in the backyard with this book on a work day. I liked that even more.

Mark Haber, Saint Sebastian’s Abyss (2022)

Having had the chance to hang out with Mark a couple of times in the last months, I’d like to think of him as a friend, and so I can’t be objective here. But I’ll say that this story of two art historians, who start as comrades and end as enemies, after falling out over how to interpret the masterpiece of a (fictive) Flemish master, and indeed how to interpret at all, seems to start as a Bernhard or Albahari pastiche, but rises to become a moving depiction of mortality.

Lan Samantha Chang, The Family Chao (2022)

I don’t read much American literary fiction, a lot of it seems worthy and labored. And long! Takes ages to read those books, who has time for that? And who could be more at the center of American literary fiction today than Lan Samantha Chang? She directs the Iowa Writer’ Workshop, ferchissake! But this book, this book I loved. The Chaos have ended up in small town Wisconsin, where their restaurant has been embraced by all. Big success: hard work, enough money, three sons, what could be better? Well, a few things. The sons have been given expensive educations that they have variously squandered or made good on or are just setting out on. Dagou has become a chef and come back home. He’s a good chef, maybe a great chef, but that’s not what this restaurant needs. Ming works in finance in New York, cutting himself to the bone to be perfect. Baby James is a floundering pre-med who wants to make everyone happy. Winnie, the matriarch, has left her husband and moved into a monastery. And Leo, the patriarch, continues to dangle the prize of inheritance in front of his sons, especially his eldest, while relentlessly mocking them. He’s a shit, is Leo. When he gets locked into the old walk-in freezer that he has refused to get up to code and dies a cold, lonely death, everyone is shocked, but maybe also a little relieved. Except then Dagou is charged with murder. The family rallies around him even as the community recoils. A lot of secrets get spilled, especially a last-minute one that I didn’t see coming.

The Family Chao riffs on The Brothers Karamazov. I read the Dostoyevsky too long ago and with too little attention to be sure. But the comparison comes up in the novel itself, through salacious media interest, Chang thereby signaling that this shared structure shouldn’t be taken too seriously.

A fine novel about belonging with plenty of melodrama and narrative drive and some really mouthwatering dinner scenes—and one that is… not.

I had the pleasure of meeting Chang at the Six Bridges Literary Festival—she is brisk, smart, a little uninterested in others; this, her third novel, deserves its plaudits and more.

Elmore Leonard, Pronto (1993)

Since I’m doing this all out of order, check out my November review of its sequel to get a sense of what Pronto is like. This wasn’t bad—I most enjoyed how the main character shifts from likeable rogue to pain-in-the-ass loafer. Unusual.

Oscar Hokeah, Calling for a Blanket Dance (2022)

At a powwow in Oklahoma, the emcee calls for a blanket dance for his nephew, Ever, a single parent of three young children who has recently lost his job. Ever’s great-aunt watches with pride:

I’ve seen many blanket dances in my day, growing up Gkoi, but there was something especially heartbreaking about a single parent down on their luck. Many of us, most of us, could see ourselves in Ever, like we had either been where he was or feared we’d end up there. We were taught to give or else more would be taken. Streams of people walked into the arena, while drumbeats and voices filled Red Buffalo Hall. We crumpled bills in our hands and tossed them on to the blanket. We stood next to Ever and has three kids and danced alongside. Must have been a good thirty people out there. The line of people made a half circle around the drum. Ever and his kids stood to one side with the Pendleton blanket spread in front of them. Some gourd dancers moved through the arena, while the singers’ heavy and low voices carried through our bodies. We danced, the way Kiowas danced, when called by our people, by our ancestors, to help each other heal.

To help each other heal. That’s what Oscar Hokeah wrote in my copy of his book when he signed it for me, after the panel I moderated at the local literary festival. As with The Family Chao—Chang shared the bill with Hokeah—I wouldn’t have read Calling for a Blanket Dance if I hadn’t agreed to run the session. And that would have been a loss. This linked-story-collection-cum-novel is equally funny and full of hurt. Set in two towns in eastern Oklahoma, the book concerns the Geimausaddle family, part Cherokee, part Kiowa, part Mexican (all aspects of the writer’s own background). Hokeah, a real mensch, works for Indian Child Welfare in Oklahoma, experience that surely informed some of the most moving parts of the book. “Sometimes a blanket dance can fill up your spirit, and this was one of those moments,” the great-aunt concludes. I felt the same way about this debut.

Frédéric Dard, The Gravediggers’ Bread (1956) Trans. Melanie Florence (2018)

My memory of this is that it nods to Lost Illusions by way of Simenon, but I’ve basically forgotten all about it.

Good reading month, eh? McMurtry, Frank, Au, Barrett, Austen. And a bunch of others that were also worth reading. Talk me down on the autofiction thing, friends. Or do you agree?

What I Read, January 2023

Posted on February 12, 2023 by banff1972 under book review, month in review, review

Thought I might read some longer books this year. And in fact I have three on the go, all promising. (Which means I’m not making much progress on any of them: more on all that later, maybe.) But I clearly need the feeling of accomplishment that comes from finishing something, because I reached for shorter things on the side.

Stephen Spotswood, Secrets Typed in Blood (2022)

The most recent Pentecost & Parker novel might be the best. A serial killer is plagiarizing crimes from a pulp magazine and staging them in real life. Friction arises between the duo as Parker chafes at an undercover assignment as a pencil-skirted secretary in an advertising agency that is the only lead they have on their long-time adversary. Plus Parker has gotten in deep with the writer of the pulp stories. As Sarah Weinman put it—the NYT crime column has improved greatly since she took over—this delightful series is as much about the present as the 40s. A couple of lines from Pentecost hit home especially hard:

“Once you start picking and choosing what is relevant in a life, you edge closer too picking and choosing which lives are relevant.”

“The world often defines women by the worst thing that’s ever happened to us. … It won’t let us be otherwise.”

Eduardo Halfon, The Polish Boxer (2008) Trans. Daniel Hahn, Ollie Brock, Lisa Dillman, Thomas Bunstead & Anne McLean (2012)

Here’s one that’s been sitting on my shelf for a long time. I’d heard it was a third-generation Holocaust story by a Guatemalan writer, which of course piqued me. That’s not quite what I got, but also not not what I got… The book is about a Guatemalan writer named Eduardo Halfon, frustrated with his students but devoted enough to one who made an impression on him that he tracks him back to his indigenous village when he drops out; enamoured with his girlfriend, who seems equally enamoured with him; captivate by a Serbian pianist who layers Thelonious Monk into his Rachmaninov, and who sends Halfon mysterious postcards practically begging him, Halfon, to search him out, which he does, among the Roma community in Belgrade. And yeah there’s a story about a Polish boxer, told to Halfon by his grandfather, an Auschwitz survivor, who owes his survivor to whispered advice, which the old man no longer remembers, from the eponymous boxer, though, in a late twist, this story may have been entirely made up.

A meandering book that for a while seems aimless but gains coherency: I liked it. And I think the story of the grandfather continues in later books, so maybe I’ll get my wish in the end. But I won’t mind even if I don’t.

Ludwig Bemelmans, Hotel Splendide (1941)

A splendid bauble.

Ludwig Bemelmans was just a teenager when he immigrated to New York from his native Austria, where he had already worked in a hotel in the Tirol owned by his uncle. He got on at a luxury hotel in Manhattan, which in this delightful memoir of sorts, he calls The Splendide—a good choice given that everyone who works there seems to be European. At first, he’s busboy to a waiter named Mespoulets, “probably the worst waiter in the world,” whose three tables aren’t even in the main dining room. Instead they form “a kind of penal colony” to which the maître d’ exiles undesirable customers (cranks, lingerers, bad tippers, that sort of thing). Guests seated at Mespoulet’s tables rarely return. For one thing, service is slow. But that’s just the start of it:

When the food finally came, it was cold and often not what had been ordered. While Mespoulets explained what the unordered food was, telling in detail how it was made and what the ingredients were, and offered hollow excuses, he dribbled mayonnaise, soup, or mint sauce over the guests, upset the coffee, and sometimes even managed to break a plate or two. I helped him as best I could.

What a joy, that last line! I imagine the similarly clumsy Bemelmans just making everything worse. Po-faced but sly, Bemelmans reminded me at times of Robert Walser. In the end, though, he’s both lighter and more attuned to the realities of a career in service than his Swiss literary forbearer. Hotel Splendide is episodic—imagine the New Yorker’s Talk of the Town if it weren’t WASPy and pleased with itself—but there is something of a larger arc, which consists of the author’s climb up the hotel ladder. (He is in fact far more competent than Mespoulets.) Yet for all his success—he eventually gets a good deal on a fast car, and is even able to return to his home town for a visit in style—Bemelans is seldom at the center of events; like the artist he wanted to be—and eventually was, to even greater success; this is the Bemelmans of Madeleine fame, after all, and his spidery drawings grace this text as well, he prefers to observe the foibles of others, whether clients (some jovial, some sympathetic, some downright mean) or fellow employees, all of whom get worked off their feet.

Moving stuff, serious stuff, but best of all funny stuff. I liked this bit, where a guest, an analyst, is enthralled by a medium, nicknamed the Professor, who is regularly hired by the hotel to entertain banquets and other large gatherings. The analyst tracks the medium down after the show, keen to find out what makes the man tick. What, for example, is he thinking about right now?

‘Horses.’

‘Horses? A lot of horses or just one horse, a particular horse?’

‘A horse, a very particular horse.’

‘You’re fond of horses?’

‘No. I hate horses—that is, I dislike them.’

‘Have you had trouble with a horse?’

‘No.’

‘Where is this horse you are thinking about?’

‘The horse is nowhere. This isn’t a real horse. This horse is in a dream.’

‘Oh,’ said Dr Munkaczi, and then, ‘Go on.’

‘I dream of this horse—’

‘You dream of this horse frequently?’

‘Yes. Every night, almost I dream of this horse, and I am very tired the next day.’

‘Ah,’ said Dr Munkaczi, ‘zoologica erotica’

Can’t you just see the doctor’s satisfaction, the confirmation of his monomania?

Do yourself a favour and track Hotel Spendide down. It’s out in perfect new livery from Pushkin Press.

Shola von Reinhold, Lote (2020)

Stunning novel about black queer modernism, reinvention, escaping one’s origins and what it would mean for a book to be trans not just in content but also in style. We talked about Lote on the most recent One Bright Book episode, and had a hell of a discussion. Check it out.

Jamil Jan Kochai, The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories (2022)

Stories set in Afghanistan and the Afghani American community concerning the back-and-forth between these worlds. Not for me the masterpiece it is for Wyatt Mason, but unquestionably impressive. The clever stories seem to get the most attention—one told in second person about an Afghani American teen playing a video game that puts him in the position of American servicemen in his father’s homeland, and another structured as a resumé, with the character’s jobs and duties from shepherd in Logar province to company-winning lawn technician in California (until a car wreck leaves him in pain and unemployable). But as good as these are (neither cute nor clever) the ones that tread the line between realism and fantasy impressed me most. The title story, say, in which someone or something (maybe a CIA or NSA operative, but I prefer to think of the narrator as a different kind of spook) falls in love with an Afghani family in exile he has been assigned to haunt. Or “Return to Sender,” an aching tale in which something terrible happens to a married couple, both doctors, who learn that not even their American passports can protect them in Kabul. That’s the one I’ve decided to assign in my class on the short story this semester. Here I felt most strongly the influence not just of someone like Jhumpa Lahiri but the writer she has cited as one of her most important influences: Bernard Malamud.

Lawrence Osborne, On Java Road (2022)

Blotto after the first week of the semester, I needed something that would go down smooth, and neither tax nor insult me. This was just the ticket. Java Road is where English journalist Adrian Gyle lives in Hong Kong. It’s also the site of regular clashes between police and protesters resisting Beijing’s eefforts to crush the place. The novel’s take on current events is refracted through a triangle of sorts between Gyle; his school friend Jimmy Tang, part of one of the island’s richest families; and Tang’s latest love interest, a university student turned full-time protester. Narrated by the outsider Gyle—in full Gatsby mode, complete with knowing allusions—the novel concerns the disintegration of a middle-aged male friendship. Anthony Domestico, from whom I learned about this book in his year-end piece in Commonweal, has it right: more than suspense, more than place, this book has atmosphere: “an introduction to, rather than a clarification of, the frightening haziness of the world.” Recommended for sad middle-aged men (are there any other kinds?), but maybe others too.

Warning: oh my god there’s a lot of drinking in this book. My drinking-less-in-2023 liver throbbed, but in sympathy or envy I couldn’t tell.

Elif Batuman, Either/Or (2022)

Maybe not as funny as The Idiot but still pretty funny:

Of course, you couldn’t have a party without alcohol; I understood that now. I understood the reason. The reason was that people were intolerable. But wasn’t there any way around that? Juho was talking about different research into alcoholism that people were doing in Finland. Why was nobody researching the more direct issue of how to make people less intolerable?

Or this:

All through my childhood, everyone had been yelling, “You’ll hurt your back!” and wrenching suitcases out of each other’s hands, in an effort personally to be the one who hurt their back.

But smart too:

A daunting thought… how would I eventually root out from my mind all the beliefs that I hated?

Either/Or is deeper than the previous novel, more regularly pulling off its signature balance of the naïve and the thoughtful. Batuman has a schtick, but it’s a schtick I like.

Frank Stella, Double Gray Scramble, 1973

In sum: plenty of good light reading. (A consummation not to be underestimated.) But only Lote and maybe The Polish Boxer are likely to be in my memory a few months from now. How about you all? How was your reading January?

What I Read, September 2022

Posted on January 12, 2023 by banff1972 under book review, month in review, review, Uncategorized

September was so long ago, I can’t remember what was going on, except a tough semester that began as it meant to go on, and the beginning of the High Holidays. I was back and forth between Little Rock and St Louis a couple of times. Squeezed some of these in as audio books.

Lilliam Rivera, Never Look Back (2020)

Audacious and entertaining YA retelling of Orpheus and Eurydice, set in the Bronx with a mostly Puerto Rican cast. Rivera melds the Greek story with Taino mythology (the goddess Guabancek features prominently), adding Catholicism and the musical tradition/genre of bachata as significant elements. Pheus, a bit of a playa but at heart a good kid, and (natch) a brilliant musician, has come to spend the summer with his father in the Bronx. A friend lives downstairs—she introduces him to her cousin, who has been sent to the city from Florida to recuperate. Something bad happened to Eury, which started even before they left PR in the wake of hurricane Maria. Only Pheus believes her when she finally explains about Ato, a demon who insinuated himself into her life after her father left the family when she was a baby. Ato claims to love her but he is jealous, and wants to take her away to what initially seems like a paradise. Only Pheus has the ability to try to win her back.

I read this for a faculty-staff book group, and I’m so glad I did: I’d never have come across it otherwise. Rivera manages to hold her blend of cultures together; similarly, she balances psychological explanations (Eury has PTSD) with magical ones (she has been captured by a demon). And she plays with our knowledge of the classical myth, following it closely but upending it in important ways. With the exception perhaps of Pheus’s mother—almost entirely offstage, but unsympathetic nonetheless—the characters are presented with kindness, rising above types. (Pheus’s on-again, off-again girlfriend is a great example.) Neve Look Back is a generous novel about terrible things (climate change, sexual abuse, gaslighting, racism). Worth your time.

Hanif Abdurraqib, A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance (2021)

Like all great nonfiction writers, Abdurraqib makes me care for things I thought I had no interest in: his essay on Whitney Houston in this collection on Black performance is a revelation. The book’s range is impressive. Even more so is its cohesion. These aren’t just a bunch of disconnected riffs on a topic. The book itself is a performance, linked by the writer’s reflection on his own abilities and inabilities. And it taught me so much. I knew nothing about Depression-era dance marathons, Buster Douglas’s upset of Mike Tyson, Merry Clayton’s essential but tragic part in “Gimme Shelter,” or Beyoncé’s Super Bowl performance. (What can I say, I’m pretty clueless.) And without this book I’d never have discovered Aretha Franklin’s Amazing Grace—for that alone I would be grateful.

I listened to this one; no surprise that a book about performance is great on audio?. My only regret is that I wasn’t able to underline the author’s many aphorisms; I really ought to buy a copy. Abdurraqib read at my college this fall: so smart, so funny.

Nadine Fresco, On the Death of Jews: Photographs and History (2008) Trans. Sarah Clift (2021)

Fresco close-reads the Liepaja photos (eight images of Jewish women and children being shot by a Nazi death squad and local collaborators on a beach in Latvia in December 1941), explains the erratic journey of these images in the postwar era, and reflects on atrocity photography more generally. Since I’d spent part of the summer studying Holocaust photography, I wasn’t as overwhelmed by the book as I might have otherwise been. (Cursory research suggests this book was taken from a larger collection published in France: maybe it’s more impressive in context.) But things take a surprising and moving turn in the last pages, when Fresco reveals a familial connection to the photos (a relative interned in a nearby ghetto helped preserve the negatives). In the end, though, it falls between two stools: perhaps too specialized for general readers, but too cursory for specialists.

Jane Austen, Persuasion (1818)

What can I say? It’s terrific! Anne Elliot is a champ. Jane Austen dug the Navy and makes it seem A-OK. The Musgroves are a delight. Lyme Regis can be dangerous. The Crofts anticipate Dickens, every scene with them is a joy. Sir Walter is a pain in the ass. Penelope Clay does what she has to do. You’ve probably read this book, but if not, get on it. Who doesn’t love a second chance?

Marcie R. Rendon, Sinister Graves (2022)

Regular readers will know how much I like the Cash Blackbear series. Now with a larger publisher, Rendon is back with the third installment of this terrific series set in North Dakota and Minnesota in the early 1970s. As usual, Cash stumbles on a crime—literally (?) demonic, a turn I initially resisted until I realized how apt that metaphor is for white settler actions towards indigenous children—but mostly she drives around in her truck, drinks beer, and shoots pool. I can’t get enough of that lonely aimlessness—though Cash makes two friends I suspect we’ll hear more about in future. I was lucky enough to meet Rendon this fall—she’s lovely—and she confirmed there’ll be at least two more books in the series. Woot!

Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth (1961) Illus. Jules Feiffer

When he was in school he longed to be out, and when he was out he longed to be in. On the way he thought about coming home, and coming home he thought about going. Wherever he was he wished he were somewhere else, and when he got there he wondered why he’d bothered. Nothing really interested him — least of all the things that should have. …
As he and his unhappy thoughts hurried along (for while he was never anxious to be where he was going, he liked to get there as quickly as possible) it seemed a great wonder that the world, which was so large, could sometimes feel so small and empty.

Can you believe I’d never read this before? Grateful to Frances for choosing it for One Bright Book. Listen to the episode for more, including my undigested thoughts about how Jewish this book is. I mean, how neurotic is Milo? Never anxious to be where he’s going but wanting to get there as quickly as possible: I feel you, kid, I feel you.

Dwyer Murphy, An Honest Living (2022)

Satisfying quasi-crime novel about a lawyer who has left corporate law (in the most satisfying way) and become the legal version of a PI, to supplement his shifts at night court. Murphy apparently was a lawyer, he knows that world, and I could have used even more detail about it. The main story, though, is about a book dealer and his much younger wife, a reclusive but renowned novelist. She hires the narrator to help her divorce him, which he does, but then a strange woman shows up at his door, claiming to be the novelist and wanting to know what the hell he’s done. The plot is capably done—with plenty of references to how he has stumbled into a low-rent Chinatown—but the real thing about the book is it’s hymn to pre-financial crisis New York.

An Honest Living is like Paul Auster if he were actually as good as I thought he was in my early 20s, or, better, like the first novel of his second wife (the man has good taste in wives, I’ll give him that), Siri Hustvedt’s The Blindfold. Grateful to Levi Stahl for the rec—this one doesn’t seem to be getting the attention it deserves. (But just today I read Marisa Greizenko’s take—you subscribe to her newsletter, right?—and it is spot on. I love how she compares it to mumblecore.)

Nan Goldin, Seascape at sunset, Camogli, Italy, 2000

A light month, but not a bad one. Don’t sleep on that Austen lady. I think she could be big.

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