Nat Leach’s Year in Reading, 2024

Posted on February 18, 2025 by Dorian Stuber under Guest post, lists, review, year in review

Excited to once again present reading reviews from some of my favourite readers. Today’s installment, his sixth, is by my longtime friend Nat Leach. Nat is a nineteenth-century scholar turned college administrator who has spent the last 7 years reading the books on his shelves in alphabetical order. He lives in Ontario.

After complaining about my reading in 2023 in this space last year, 2024 was, on the surface, a much better year. I read 30 books as opposed to 20 in the previous year, and was on pace for an even higher total before hitting a wall at the end of the year (of which more anon). However, if we get into what the sports statisticians call “advanced metrics,” the numerical advantage is diminished; 6 of those books were either less than 100 pages or only slightly more, and 9 were works of theory, criticism, and/or anthologies that I had been working on for years and just completed this year. So, probably my actual reading for 2024 was not much better than 2023 in terms of quantity, but the quality was high, and that’s what really matters, right? [Ed. – Right!]

As for my overall reading project of working through my unread books alphabetically, now in its 7^th year, I once again only progressed by one letter of the alphabet, finishing “L” and making a very small start on “M”. If I’m able to get through “M” in 2025 (a big if- it’s a pretty immense shelf), I will hit the halfway point of the alphabet and surely it’s gotta be downhill after that, right? [Ed. – Surely! Well, probably. Possibly?] The second half of the alphabet has the likes of “Q”, “X” and “Z” so there is hope! [Ed. – Insert Zola side-eye gif here.] In fact, of the 298 books on my list, exactly 200 are “A-M” so I’m actually closing in on the 2/3 mark of my project (although that list keeps growing every year, so who really knows?)

More importantly, for the purposes of this piece, I actually found some time, in the early part of the year at least, to write capsules for each book that I finished as I went along. Which is just as well, because I can scarcely remember what I read last January right now, and as I write this opening, I’m just as curious as you to see what comes next (probably more so).

Larsen, Nella – Passing (1929)

I had seen this book recommended so widely, I couldn’t resist adding it to this project, and it certainly does live up to the hype. The book is about the tensions in racial ideologies in early 20^th century America, and seems no less relevant today. Clare Kendry “passes” as white despite a mixed-race bloodline that would see her excluded from white society. The very fact that she is able to do this so successfully mocks the white supremacist ideology that believes that racial differences are fixed and self-evident. The book’s focus also demonstrates the problematic intersection of these racial tensions with similarly oppressive gender expectations. Irene Redfield’s love/hate relationship with Clare is at the core of the book, so that it demonstrates also the ways in which expectations around “racial purity” are particularly focused on women. In this respect, Passing reminds me of another book I wrote about on here some years ago, Morley Callaghan’s The Loved and the Lost; although that book focuses on a white woman who circulates in black society in Montreal, the similarly tragic outcomes both speak to the violence and panic produced in white society by such blurring of racial lines. [Ed. – About to teach this tomorrow for the nth time: it’s an all-timer!]

Laski, Marghanita – The Victorian Chaise-Longue (1953)

When I received this book as a gift (in a lovely Persephone Books edition), I assumed, because of the title, that it was because of my academic interest in the nineteenth century. It didn’t take long for me to realize that it was in fact because of my academic interest in the Gothic. The plot itself smacks of the absurd: a tubercular new mother is transported back in time to the Victorian period while lying on the titular piece of furniture during her recovery. But this does not do justice to the book, which explores (as so many Gothic texts do) the relationship between mind and body, and the nature of identity. A fascinating read. [Ed. – Sounds great!]

Lathom, Francis – Italian Mysteries (1820) and The Midnight Bell (1797)

These days, Francis Lathom is little more than an answer to a literary trivia question (Name the authors of the 7 “horrid novels” on the reading list of Isabella Thorpe and Catherine Morland in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey!) but he was a successful novelist and playwright in his time. The Midnight Bell is the book mentioned in Austen’s novel, while Italian Mysteries was written considerably later. Both make extensive use of the Gothic conventions popularized by Ann Radcliffe in The Mysteries of Udolpho (and spoofed in Northanger Abbey), including apparently supernatural activity explained by natural means, banditti inhabiting abandoned castles [Ed. – They do be inhabiting the abandoned castles, the banditti], and lustful noblemen pursuing innocent heroines, who invariably faint whenever captured (By my count, Lauretta, heroine of The Midnight Bell, faints five times in the course of a single abduction!) [Ed. – Maybe some iron pills for that girl?] Lathom’s use of these conventions is, at least, skillful and coherent, which is more than can be said of many Radcliffe imitators of this period. As David Punter points out in his fascinating introduction to the Valancourt Books edition of The Midnight Bell, Lathom’s works are heavy on events, to the exclusion of character development, and his plots are so extensive and intricate that they invariably require quite elaborate explanations—indeed, the entirety of the 3^rd and final volume of Italian Mysteries is essentially an extensive explanation of all the mysteries developed of the first two volumes. While both books owe much to Radcliffe, there are certain predilections of Lathom’s own that show through as well; for example, his books include many siblings who function as doubles of each other, and are usually moral opposites of one another. The books are a pleasure to read, though not, perhaps, especially notable examples of the genre. [Ed. – Look, you’re not getting this kind of content anywhere else, are you?]

Laurence, Margaret – This Side Jordan (1960)

Like every good Canadian of my generation, my literary education was steeped in Margaret Laurence; I read The Stone Angel in high school, and The Diviners in university. [Ed. – Same! I wonder what they read now?] And if that weren’t enough, I now find myself living just 15 minutes away from the small town of Lakefield, Ontario, where Laurence spent the last years of her life, and wrote The Diviners. All that being said, I really didn’t know what to expect from this book, Laurence’s first novel, which is much less recognizable in the canon of CanLit, not least because of its foreign setting. Laurence’s husband was an engineer who worked in Africa in the 1950s, so she spent some years living in what was then called the “Gold Coast” but was soon to become the independent country of Ghana. The book is largely about the difficulties posed by this transition, both for the British colonizers and for the people of Ghana, equally caught between a past they cannot return to and a future in which they cannot yet find their place (hence the biblical allusion of the book’s title; the characters are all looking ahead to a “promised land” they cannot enter). The book focuses on Johnnie Kestoe, a British accountant in a textile company; Miranda Kestoe, his well-meaning but sometimes clueless wife; and Nathaniel Amegbe, a struggling Ghanaian schoolteacher. Johnnie, following Miranda’s advice, tries to get ahead by supporting the company’s “Africanization” of its workforce, which his racist bosses refuse to accept, while Nathaniel tries to modernize his family and move away from the tribal customs that he sees as belonging to the past. The future, though, is not easy for any of them to grasp. It’s a strong debut novel, though it does not entirely show the brilliance that was yet to come from Laurence. As an aside, this book also scores points for having a main character named Nathaniel, a literary feature notable by its absence in all the other books on this list. [Ed. – Ha! Justice for Nathaniels!]

Le Fanu, Sheridan – Carmilla (1872) and “A Chapter in the History of a Tyrone Family” (1839)

There are not many classic Gothic texts of the 19^th century that I have not read, so it was time that I finally read Carmilla. All I knew about it was that it was about a lesbian vampire and, yeah, it’s pretty much what it says on the tin, using the familiar conventions of the genre, with that added twist. As for “A Chapter in the History of a Tyrone Family,” my first thought upon reading it was “was this written before or after Jane Eyre?” There are many parallels, including a bigamous marriage and a potentially murderous first wife being kept in concealment. Turns out the answer is “before”. This story apparently influenced Brontë’s novel, and in turn, after the success of Jane Eyre, Le Fanu developed this story into a longer work in order to capitalize on it.

Le Guin, Ursula K. – The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)

Another book that I added because of a large number of recommendations, I must admit that I went back and forth on this one a bit. The author’s preface is one of the smartest things I have read about science fiction (or about fiction full stop!), but then the first chapter seemed so replete with science fiction clichés that I started to question what all the fuss was about. I also wonder if science fiction just isn’t my genre, or if I am just overly picky about the details of world-building; much as I admire the carefully prepared appendix on the “Gethenian Calendar and Clock,” which differ significantly from those of Earth, I also find it slightly off-putting that this entirely foreign world not only measures temperature in degrees (in itself not necessarily natural), but it uses a scale that seems strikingly similar to the Fahrenheit scale (with no additional context or explanation). [Ed. – Fahrenheit sucks!] Nevertheless, the book certainly grew on me as it increasingly developed the more philosophical implications of its sf premise. Le Guin claims not to be attempting to predict the future, but this book from 1969 is quite prescient in exploring the idea of gender fluidity, as the inhabitants of the planet on which the book is set share male and female characteristics and can transform into either. Less prescient than oddly coincidental is the fact that the narrator’s name is Genly Ai; it occurs to me that it would be impossible to include a character of that name in a book written today without readers assuming that he was some kind of embodied form of generative artificial intelligence. [Ed. – AI sucks! Like, a lot more than Fahrenheit. Which sucks, to be clear.]

Levi, Primo – Moments of Reprieve (1981) Trans. Ruth Feldman

Levi’s American publishers have been consistent, at least, in their dogged attempts to make his books sound as optimistic as possible; If This is a Man becomes Survival in Auschwitz, The Truce becomes The Reawakening, and Lilith, and other Stories becomes Moments of Reprieve. While it is true that to a certain extent, the stories recounted in this book have a lighter tone than his earlier memoirs, there is really very little “reprieve” to be had here. [Ed. – Yup. That piece about the Roma inmate he meets? Dark.] The book consists of descriptions of people and incidents from Levi’s time in Auschwitz which had not been included in the two earlier memoirs, as well as narratives that follow up on the post-war experiences of individuals who are mentioned in those books. And certainly, all of the qualities that make the earlier books so great are still on display here, especially Levi’s keen eye for character and his deep understanding of moral complexity. And yet, everybody seems to want more optimism, from the publishers to Chumbawamba, who recorded a song based on one of the most optimistic anecdotes herein, “Rappoport’s Testament” about a man who uses a very philosophical theory of life to endure Auschwitz, arguing that his previous pleasures in life are simply being counter-balanced by the horrors of the camp, and therefore he has nothing to complain about in the grand scheme of things. [Ed. – I did not know this!!!!] An admirable perspective, perhaps, but just one of the many that Levi explores—yet the only one to get a song written about it, with an incessant chorus of “I never gave up” as though this were the only praiseworthy, or even acceptable, attitude. (Having said that, I have to admit that I actually love this song. I mean, how critical can you be about a rousing anti-Nazi anthem? Look it up.)

Lindsay, Joan – Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967)

I was already very familiar with Peter Weir’s 1975 film adaptation of this novel, so I fully expected this book to be as good as it is. I found that Weir adapted the book quite faithfully; in both the book and the film, the plot about the uncanny disappearance of Australian boarding school girls is perhaps secondary to the reflections on the connectedness of people and things that are triggered by this incident. The most significant differences come from the fact that the novel is able to demonstrate more links in this web of inter-connectedness; from my perspective of having seen the film first, I was quite fascinated to see how Lindsay connects some of the more minor characters to each other and to the mysterious themes of the book in ways not shown in the film. Ultimately, what makes both book and film work so well is how expertly they manage the fantastic in Tzvetan Todorov’s sense of the term, hesitating between rational and supernatural responses to the mystery, but never fully embracing either perspective. [Ed. – Now I want to read this and see the movie again.]

Lively, Penelope – Moon Tiger (1987)

I’m at a bit of a loss as to how to describe this fascinating tour through both world history and the personal history of a dying historian, Claudia Hampton. These histories are linked and predictably (and unpredictably!) take many twists and turns along the way. But the most interesting thing about the novel is the way it plays with point of view, emphasizing that history depends on perspective as we move between Claudia’s first-person perspective, a more “objective” narrative voice, and the points of view of other characters. It may defy description, but it really works.

Lodge, David – Changing Places (1975), Small World (1984), Nice Work (1988)

I must admit that I felt that I had missed the cultural moment in which I should have read this trilogy. After all, any satirical work on academia these days would surely have to focus on the absurdities of governmental policies and the excesses of administrative oversight rather than the hijinks of carefree globetrotting academics (seriously, is there even any such thing as a carefree, globetrotting academic any more?) [Ed. – There is not.] Not to mention the fact that cultural values have shifted significantly in ways that make these books somewhat uncomfortable to read at times (thinking especially of the distressingly casual way that the idea of professors sleeping with their students is treated in these books). Despite all this, though, there is something enduring about these books, not only for their humour—based in the first book on the incongruities between Morris Zapp, brilliant but obnoxious American professor, and Philip Swallow, reserved English lecturer, and developed in many different directions from there—but also for their satisfying use of the conventions of comic narrative. Lodge is particularly knowing about this, and all three novels are highly self-referential (or “meta” as the kids say). [Ed. – I fear they do not actually say this anymore, at least judging from the blank stares I get…] Changing Places features a number of quotations from a (fictional) textbook that Swallow wants to use for his course on novel-writing, and which provides rules for writing a good novel—rules that Lodge himself proceeds to break in every instance. Small World (subtitled “an academic romance”) employs the conventions of the grail quest romance, adapted comically to the academic context. And Nice Work is an adaptation of, and contains frequent references to, the genre of the Victorian industrial novel. Moreover, in each book, the threads are pulled together in improbable but highly satisfying ways, as if Lodge is acknowledging both the artificiality of the conventions and the fact that we still desire such conclusions despite our awareness of their artifice. I learned recently that Lodge passed away on New Year’s Day, 2025, so I guess there was indeed some timeliness to my reading of these books. I also learned in the course of my reading that Lodge had been at the University of Birmingham while my parents were graduate students there. It really is a small world, I guess.

MacIntyre, Linden – The Bishop’s Man (2009)

Having lived on Cape Breton Island for 15 years, I found that this book resonated with me, not because of the plot about the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic church, but because of the settings, the feelings of isolation brought about by the landscape and the weather, and the descriptions of tightly-knit but also highly insular communities. All very familiar to me. The plot that unfolds against this backdrop revolves around the titular character, Father Duncan MacAskill, who acts on behalf of his Bishop to address situations involving abuse committed by priests. He initially believes that he is helping to rehabilitate perpetrators and support victims, but struggles with his conscience as he increasingly realizes that he is just the front line of an extensive cover up operation. MacIntyre is a native of Cape Breton, and a prominent journalist so perhaps not surprisingly his fictionalization of these real situations and characters is believable and powerful.

WOMEN IN TRANSLATION MONTH

I always try to set aside two books for Women in Translation month in August (given that 2 is pretty much my monthly average, this makes sense to me). However, since my reading project as a whole has slowed down, I’m finding that I’m reaching further forward on my shelves each year. This year, I read a couple of books from further along the “M” shelf.

Millu, Liana – Smoke Over Birkenau (1947) Trans. Lynne Sharon Schwartz

Dorian recommended this book a few years ago and of course he is right about what a tremendous book it is. [Ed. – Damn right he is. That guy really knows a thing or two.] Millu recounts the stories of six women whom she encountered in the women’s camps at Auschwitz. In many ways, the content of these tales is not unlike other Holocaust testimonies in the brutality, suffering and impossible moral situations that they depict, but it is also quite different in its specific focus on female experience in the camps. It must also be said that the stories are well crafted as stories. In both respects, the book reminded me in a strange way of the stories of Ida Fink, even though the latter are fictional. [Ed. – Absolutely!] Both writers provide keen observations of the brutality and suffering caused by Nazi oppression, particularly as it affects women. There is probably something more to be said about the relationship between the fictional and the non-fictional here, but that’s more Dorian’s territory. [Ed. – Certainly true that Millu uses an overtly narrative style in these pieces. Maybe Sara Horowitz’s idea about the Fink stories—that we sometimes need fiction to tell us what nonfiction can’t (it’s smarter than that, but that’s the gist)—might be useful here.]

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

I had never read Müller before, so I didn’t really know what to expect, nor do I really know how to describe the experience of reading this book but here goes: it is a series of dark prose poems that build a feeling much more than they build the plot, which is ostensibly about the efforts of a miller to emigrate to West Germany. The images, though, vividly construct a picture of a hostile natural world, and the tensions of living amongst a foreign people. I commented earlier on the changes of Levi’s titles for an English-speaking audience; in this case, the effect of calling the book The Passport seems to be a rather banal attempt to focus on the plot, unlike the original German title, Der Mensch ist ein großer Fasan auf der Welt (“Man is a Great Pheasant in the World”) which better captures the poetic feel and the tension between the human and the natural world developed throughout the book.

IN PROGRESS

So, about that wall I mentioned… things were going swimmingly (yes, for me, the above is what swimmingly looks like) until the end of October/beginning of November. In the space of a fateful week, I began three new books. Little did I know that 2 ½ months later, despite putting almost all of my reading time and energy into them, all three would remain unfinished. Anyway, here’s a brief report on the books I didn’t quite finish in 2024 (with up to date completion percentages as of early 2025)

Lessing, Doris – The Golden Notebook (1962) Completed: 26%

First, not having included Doris Lessing in my original project, I was tempted to join a readalong of The Golden Notebook organized by the ever-encouraging @paperpills10.bsky.social. However, a combination of my usual lack of time, my inability to get my hands on a good physical copy of the book, and my struggles with the book itself led to my dismal failure to keep up. As for the book itself, it seems to me very original in terms of form (3^rd person narration combined with 1^st person in the form of notebooks kept by one of the characters) while seeming quite mundane (thus far) in terms of content and style. Perhaps that is what I’m struggling with, though I also wonder if it is part of the point (this is what notebooks are like). I will persist with this, but I have quite a way to go yet. [Ed. – Hmm I like this one: not sure you’re going to change your mind if you aren’t into it yet.]

Mann, Thomas – Doctor Faustus (1948) Trans. H.T. Lowe-Porter Completed: 73%

At about the same time, I was starting this book, which I had bought at a time when I was collecting Faust stories, but I had only managed to read the first few chapters at that time. I have done better this time, and what I have learned from this experience is that 1) I need to read more of Mann’s novels and 2) I may not have enough years left in me to read them all. This is a tremendous book, but one that requires much time and focus. I have been making slow but consistent progress, and there is now at least some light at the end of the tunnel. Despite the title, the Faustian theme is more an undercurrent than the book’s focus, which has more to do with reflections on the nature of art and its relation to culture. But what has perhaps most struck me about this book is its descriptions of the rise of Nazism and the psychology behind it, all of which feel chillingly contemporary.

Márai, Sandor – Embers (1942) Trans. Carol Brown Janeway Completed: 67%

Now this wonderful little (at least, comparatively) book is one that I would have finished long ago, had I not been saving it to cleanse my palate after working on the previous two books (gotta respect the alphabetical order after all). It is a much quicker, and highly engaging read. Last year, I commented on how my reading system often provides me with strange and unexpected correlations, and it has been somewhat strange reading this book alongside Doctor Faustus. Both books are written in the 1940’s but make use of a dual time frame split between the narrative present and a past in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. Both are set in central Europe and are thus framed against the background of the wars in these time periods, and both focus heavily on the relationship of a pair of male friends, one of whom is musical and artistic, the other more material and practical. But they are of course very different books; Embers tells the story of a friendship broken in youth that comes to a reckoning in old age. I’m still not sure what this reckoning is going to look like, but the suspense is building. So far, this is pretty great.

James Whistler, View across the Lagoon (1879 – 80)

LOOKING AHEAD TO 2025

My one final comment on all of the above is that one of the benefits of writing these entries shortly after finishing the books is that I can look back and see how my immediate response to the book varies from what my memory of it is now. For example, despite the lukewarm write-up, I thought about the Le Guin a lot after I finished it, and despite really loving the Lively, I haven’t really thought about it at all since then. I’m not sure that this is necessarily a measure of a book’s quality, but it is a measure of something. [Ed. – Yes! But what? I think about this a lot too.]

As for next year, I did have a fleeting desire to join a Proust reading group, since that is probably the book that I am most looking forward to on my remaining list, but my recent track record with group reads and the fact that I am probably not in the right head space at the moment has caused me to hold off (it’ll probably be a couple of years before I get to “P”)

So, my goal will be to try to get through “M” this year, although as I said, it’s a pretty formidable letter. I will at least see the benefits of having participated in group reads of some of the chunkier books on this shelf over the past few years (The Balkan Trilogy, The Levant Trilogy, Moby Dick, The Man Without Qualities) but I still have a lot to look forward to, from Gabriel Garcia Marquez to Cormac McCarthy to Brian Moore to Toni Morrison to Iris Murdoch and many more in between. Wish me luck, and let me know if there are any indispensable M authors that you think I need to make sure I read this year. [Ed. – Thank you as always, Nat!]

Time Passes

Posted on June 14, 2024 by Dorian Stuber under book review, lists, personal, review, self-promotion, Uncategorized

A few months, when I was too busy to do anything about it, WordPress told me I’ve been writing this blog for ten years.

I’ve not always been the most diligent blogger, sometimes falling silent for months at a time, but I’ve always returned to it, and that’s not nothing. In fact, since I started keeping monthly logs in January 2019 (halfway through the blog’s life, which bewilders me, since surely that was just a couple of years ago) I’ve written a little something about almost every book I’ve read.

(In case you are new, or forgot, or never bothered to think about it before now: a few words on why I gave this place its unlikely—and from a branding point of view utterly self-defeating—name.)

It is quite likely that some things will change in my life next year. Fear not, though, I’ve no plans to shutter the blog. I’ll probably be happy for the continuity. But I do wonder if there are other kinds of writing I might do here. Like many writers, I write best when I’m working on more than one project. I’m using part of my summer to craft a proposal for a book on teaching Holocaust literature at this moment in US history: I recently finished a course from the wonderful Anne Trubek of Belt Publishing that has given me a good start. (Agents and publishers, all my forms of communication are open lol.)

[My daughter says using lol is cringe. Sorry. But how else am I supposed to indicate “I know that is preposterous and I am kidding except that I would really love for it to happen”? Hahahahaha or something?]

I’ve been wondering how I might bring some of that writing variety to this space. When I first started EMJ, I wrote about one book at a time. No surprise to anyone who reads me, these posts were long. Often really long. They really helped me figure out what I thought of a book, though I’m not sure people wanted to read them as much as they did my still-long but shorter responses to a month’s worth of reading. I’m still fond of those early pieces, especially the first one, on a book I still think about a lot, Caleb Crain’s Necessary Errors. Here are a few more that hardly anyone read, but might be worth dusting off. On Irmgard Keun’s After Midnight. On Philip Marsden’s The Bronski House. And, way long, on A Little Life. There’s a ton more in the archives.

I have to admit, though, that the rhythm of the last five years has worked well. The monthly reviews offer a balance between breadth and depth, but would you prefer more pieces about just one book? And what about non-book topics? I’ve always shared writing created for other occasions (like becoming Jewish or reflecting to new students on old friendships). For a while I wrote regularly about my teaching, which I loved doing: I’m basing the book project on some of that stuff. Honestly, I don’t know how I wrote all that stuff, though. My daughter was young then and needed a lot more from me and my wife. Where did the time come from? I guess I was younger too. And that was all pre-covid. I think people overstate the changes between then and now (rather: they overstate the wrong things and ignore the main thing: we still live in a pandemic, we still don’t value the most important kinds of work, our way of life is killing us and the world). But I feel my working life has changed a lot. I don’t think I’m just being middle-aged when I say that it’s harder to be in a helping profession than it used to be. Anyway, I don’t know that I’ll have enough to say about teaching for me to write about it here and in the book. But who knows? Maybe writing about other kinds of art might be fun. The obvious example is film, which used to be a huge part of my life but fell away in the press of family life and career pressures. I’m returning to movies, though: slowly but ever more surely. I might write more about what I’ve been watching. (I think this is the only film-related post at the blog?) Another idea is to invite others to contribute. I’ve had many guests over the years, whether through readalongs (remember those?), shared reading projects, or year in review lists. I love hosting other views, voices, and perspectives. Maybe I could do more in that vein.

What else? Obviously, the look needs refreshing. And yet I am so lazy about that kind of thing. Is it actively off-putting? I admire M. A. Orthofer for many reasons, one being his indifference to graphic design. His site looks the way it looks, the content is what matters, and now it’s so iconic I for one would be crushed if he changed things. This place is no Literary Saloon, but maybe I am inching toward “so old-fashioned it’s actually cool” status. Thoughts?

As you can see, this post is a mixture of questions and ideas: what I wonder about and what I might do. But really what I’m writing here is both a plea for feedback and an expression of gratitude. What do you want to see here? More of the same? Something new? Like what? Whatever your answer, I want to thank you for reading. Blogs are so out of date; social media had made other kinds of communities, other forms of interaction; so many platforms share the thinking of so many smart readers and writers. That you’ve taken an interest in what I think means so much to me. As I’ve written before, I don’t know many passionate readers in real life; this community of readers around the world has meant the world to me. Thank you for everything you’ve taught me, the reading suggestions you’ve made, and the support you’ve offered. I’m filled with gratitude.

Onwards! Still many book mountains to climb.

What I Read, May 2024

Posted on June 5, 2024 by Dorian Stuber under book review, lists, month in review, review, Zola

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

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

Here are the books I read:

Franz Marc, Two Women on the Hillside, 1906

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

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

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

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

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

Guy Gavriel Kay, Lord of Emperors (2000)

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

Christine Lai, Landscapes (2023)

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

Megan Abbott, Beware the Woman (2023)

My first Abbott, unaccountably. But not my last.

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

Perfect reading for the first hot Sunday of the summer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What I Read, April 2024

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

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

Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Peonies, ca. 1920

Edith Wharton, Summer (1917)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amy Pease, Northwoods (2024)

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

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

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

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

What I Read, March 2024

Posted on May 28, 2024 by Dorian Stuber under month in review, review

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

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

Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice (2013)

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

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

David Downing, Union Station (2024)

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

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

Tana French, The Hunter (2024)

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

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

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

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

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

Louise Glück, The Wild Iris (1992)

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

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

Guy Gavriel Kay, Sailing to Sarantium (1998)

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

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

What I Read, February 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elana K. Arnold, The Blood Years (2023)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shinjini Dey’s Year in Reading, 2023

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So there was a litany of murders.

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

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

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

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

What I Read, January 2024

Posted on March 23, 2024 by Dorian Stuber 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?

Scott Walters’s Year in Reading, 2023

Posted on March 22, 2024 by Dorian Stuber under book review, Guest post, lists, review, Uncategorized, year in review

Excited to once again present reading reviews from some of my favourite readers. Today’s installment, his third, is by Scott Walters. Scott launched a litblog, seraillon, in 2010, and expects to return to it one of these days. He largely follows Primo Levi’s model of “occasional and erratic reading, reading out of curiosity, impulse or vice, and not by profession.” He lives with his partner in San Francisco.

Barring a couple of possible late entries, here ends the 2023 edition of the EMJ Year in Reading series. Thanks to everyone who contributed–and all who read these engaging lists.

Year in Reading 2023: 50 Books, Fat and Thin

Like several others who have already posted about 2023, I had a less than stellar reading year, finishing a little over half the number of books I did in 2022. On the other hand, several doubled as barbells for building up my muscles. On the third hand, some were slim. And on the fourth hand, some were slim pickings; I can’t recall ever reading so many works I didn’t especially like. I’m not sure to what to attribute that deflating phenomenon, but I hardly seem to be alone.

Best Quasi-Rereading

Michael Moore’s effervescent new translation marked my fourth time reading Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed (1827/1842). As Moore explained at a reading I attended, he deliberately aimed his translation at an American audience lamentably unfamiliar with this 19^th century masterpiece. An ingenious framing story cocoons this long tale of Renzo and Lucia, the affianced young couple whose wedding plans are dashed by the machinations of a lascivious warlord, forcing the couple to separate and flee into spiraling trials that challenge them (and several other characters) into becoming larger than themselves. Starting a beloved book in a new translation requires adjustment, but I was won over by Moore’s energetic, nimble, vivid and playful version, almost certainly the place to start for any American reader approaching this grand work for the first time. [Ed. – This book looks at me reproachfully from the shelf…]

Other Italian Explorations

Giovanni Boccaccio: The Decameron

G. W. McWilliams’ translation of Boccaccio’s 1353 classic accompanied me throughout the year as the perfect post-pandemic [Ed. – sic] companion. You know the framing story: five young women during the Florentine plague of 1348 abandon the city and invite along five male friends to an empty villa in the hills where, each day for ten days, each tells a story to entertain the others. The depiction of the plague in the book’s opening is terrific, and the 100 stories, splendidly diverse, are by turns tender, ribald, moving, pointed. So is the warm banter between the young people as they introduce their stories and encourage one another’s efforts, the whole serving as a kind of instruction manual on storytelling (and as a model for confronting calamity). Boccaccio has become a favorite; I also spent time this year with his Famous Women and Genealogy of the Pagan Gods, the latter especially highlighting Boccaccio’s talent as a great writer of prefaces. [Ed. – Ok, you sold me on this!]

Dominic Starnone: The House on the Via Gemita (2023)

The two short Starnone Neapolitan novels I’d read had impressed me, so I was excited to discover a fat new 500-page work also set in Naples. Starnone’s narrator recounts the history of his father, digging so thoroughly into strained father/son relationship that I can’t imagine The House on the Via Gemita not taking its place as a classic of the genre. To my surprise, the book also turned out to be an excellent novel about painting, in that the son must address both his father’s abusive personality and role as a peripheral figure in mid-century Italian art, a career layered on top of a day job as a railroad worker and the family responsibilities he largely leaves to others. Starnone gives us a brief history of postwar Italian art while exploring the qualities that make paintings great or mediocre and making personal an issue of our time: disentangling (or not) an artist from their art. I also noted the geographical precision employed by Starnone as a quality common to several contemporary Neapolitan novels; one can use a map to follow the narrative’s peregrinations around the city.

Maria Attanasio: Concetta et ses femmes

Concetta et ses femmes, written in 2021 when Attanasio was 80, sets out as a documentary rescue mission to obtain the story of Concetta la Ferla, organizer in the late 1960s, in Caltagirone, Sicily, of the first women’s branch of the Italian Communist Party (then the third largest in the world). Concetta’s grassroots project develops out of frustration with the municipality’s diversion of water to its wealthiest citizens, but runs into predictable obstacles in the form of chauvinistic attitudes in the city administration, in the Party, and at home. The story would be interesting enough simply as historical artifact. But Attanasio’s structuring of her novel, the first part narrated by Maria herself from the perspective of 20 years after the effort to preserve Concetta’s tale, and the second the tale itself in Concetta’s words, plays with questions of authorship and feminist solidarity, and emphasizes the continual nature of the struggle to gain legitimacy, to advance the advances of the past, to never go back.

Other Italian/Italy-related works included an Italian/French collection of short stories (Nouvelles italiennes contemporaines), with Tomas Landolfi, Massimo Bontempelli and especially Elisabetta Rasy’s contributions as standouts. Indian-American-now-Italian writer Jhumpa Lahiri’s Roman Stories (2023) revisits Alberto Moravia’s 1959 Roman Tales (Racconti Romani in the original Italian for both books), exchanging Moravia’s focus on Roman men in recognizable neighborhoods for immigrants, ex-pats, and tourists vaguely on the city’s periphery. Renato Serra’s Examination of Conscience of a Man of Letters (1915) presents a searing treatise on the relationship of literature and war, written three months before Serra perished in battle in World War I (read in French; while the essay has never gone out of print in Italy, it has not been translated into English). I devoured Janet Abramowicz’s monograph, Giorgio Morandi: The Art of Silence (1964), a deep appreciation of the Bolognese artist into whose family Abramowicz was essentially adopted. Despite this proximity, Abramowicz treats her former teacher judiciously and even unsparingly when it comes to Morandi’s blemishes, in particular his tacit involvement with fascism. German writer Esther Kinsky’s Rombo (2022), a polyphonic novel exploring the impact of a series of earthquakes on remote villages in the north of Italy, grew on me during my reading, with its Polaroid-like narrative approach in which the lives of the villagers gradually become more vivid and saturated. Finally, in Etruscan Places (posthumous publication 1932), D. H. Lawrence and a companion identified as “B” voyage through central Italy, exploring sites of the ancient Etruscan “12 cities.” Lawrence’s incisive, infectiously enthusiastic observations about Etruscan art and life turned me into a fan of this fascinating people whose culture was absorbed/obliterated by the Roman Empire. The narrative doubles as a travelogue through Mussolini’s Italy and, adding yet another layer, Lawrence’s views lay out an entire philosophy that has me determined to revisit his fiction this year. [Ed. – I support this plan!]

Stalingrad

I came away from Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate convinced I’d encountered one of the essential literary documents of the 20^th century’s experience of fascism. I did not know that the book was but a second volume in Grossman’s monumental effort to write the great World War II novel. The first, Stalingrad (1952), with still no definitive Russian edition, has only recently been translated into English by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler. As highly as I esteem Life and Fate, I believe Stalingrad may well be the superior novel [Ed. — !] in its immediacy and the sheer grandeur of its conception (but as the books were intended to form a whole, one need not set them against one another). Grossman, present at Stalingrad as a journalist, related some of his experiences in Life and Fate, but Stalingrad sets out to capture the whole story of the war’s most decisive battle, from August 23, 1942 to February 2, 1943. Grossman’s acute consciousness of his literary precursor, Leo Tolstoy, leads him to take his main character on two pilgrimages to Tolstoy’s house, Yasnya Polynka, and to muse on Tolstoy’s accomplishments:

Krymov looked at the wounded who had fallen by the wayside, at their grim, tormented faces, and wondered if these men would ever enter the pages of books. This was not a sight for those who wanted to clothe the war in fine robes. He remembered a night-time conversation with an elderly soldier whose face he had been unable to see. They had been lying in a gully, with only a greatcoat to cover them. The writers of future books had better avoid listening to conversations like that. It was all very well for Tolstoy – he wrote his great and splendid books decades after 1812, when the pain felt in every heart had faded and only what was wise and bright was remembered.

With Life and Fate, Stalingrad now gives us one of the great documents of World War II – and one of the greatest works of fiction about war ever written.

An Essential Holocaust Novel

The Talmudic concept of the Lamed-Vov, the 36 righteous people on whom the continuity of the world depends, fascinated me when first I read about it. Only when I started André Schwarz-Bart’s 1956 Prix Goncourt-winning novel, The Last of the Just, did I realize that the Lamed-Vov were central to the book. Schwartz-Bart takes the reader though a thousand years of Lamed-Vov succession to arrive at Germany in the 1930s, where the narrative pace slows dramatically. His restrained, almost clinically factual language provides devastating testament as much as fiction. Some of its scenes are completely indelible, and Ernie Levy, Schwarz-Bart’s protagonist for this last half of the book, struck me one of the most remarkable characters I’ve encountered in a lifetime of reading. [Ed. – It feels like a professional failing that I have not read this book!]

José Revueltas: The Hole

A tiny but shockingly powerful novella, taut and tight with not a word out of place. [Ed. – Funny, that’s how people usually describe me!] The Mexican writer and activist Revueltas’s 1969 book, based on the author’s own 12-year experience as a political prisoner, resembles a Piranesi prison drawing in narrative form, an intensely concentrated exploration of incarceration. Everything in the narrative is compressed – time, space, hope, even the reader’s attention and the size of the book itself. An absolute masterpiece of prison literature.

Mariana Yampolsky, Estación Martell, 1988

Good King Xavier, Reino de Redonda

Spanish novelist Javier Marías died at age 70 on September 11, 2022. I encountered his work four times this past year, first in his final novel Tomás Nevinson (2022) which appeared last May in Margaret Jull Costa’s translation. I had come to anticipate each new Marías translation as nearly an annual tradition, so knowing that this his last novel made reading it deeply bittersweet. Tomás Nevinson follows up 2018’s Berta Isla, but also resurrects characters from Marías’s Your Face Tomorrow trilogy, most notably Bertram Tupra. Where Your Face Tomorrow engaged Spain’s experience of Franco and of the civil war, Tomás Nevinson takes as its starting point the Basque separatist terrorist attacks of the 1990s. As Nevinson is enlisted by Tupra to come out of retirement to track down a woman involved in the most heinous of these attacks, Marías uses the narrative to explore questions about our responsibility for seeking justice, how we deal with repentance and redemption, what justice seekers owe to their own loved ones, whether there may be some informal statute of limitations on bringing the guilty to account and how long justice should be sought – time being among the most prominent fixtures in Marías’s fiction. We are fortunate to have this novel; Marías’s time having run out seems completely unjust.

When I picked up Tomás Nevinson at Point Reyes Books, the literary mecca cultivated by Molly Parent and Stephen Sparks, Sparks asked if I’d read the new book about Redonda. I must have stared at him blankly, as, having not yet read Marías’s Oxford novels, I knew nothing. Thanks to Michael Hingston’s marvelously strange Try Not to Be Strange (2023), I now know quite a lot, including the fact that Marías had been, up until his untimely death, King Xavier I, monarch of this tiny nation, which, despite having no inhabitants, does have territory, a flag, its own currency and postage stamps, and a plethora of dukes and princesses, counts and ambassadors, and multitudes of other titles held by what seems a who’s-who of 20^th century writers. This was by far my most fun book of the year, uncovering a great story, offering up a charming tale of obsession (including Hingston’s own), and digging a dizzying warren of rabbit holes for one to scurry down, which led to my filling quite a bit of empty shelf space with related works. [Ed. – Well, this all seems quite insane!]

One of those works, of course, was All Souls (1992), the Marías Oxford novel in which the author first mentions Redonda. I expect to have more to say about this book after I’ve read its sequel, Dark Back of Time, on deck for 2024.

Another addition, Cuentos únicos (1996), came from Reino de Redonda, Marías’s own Spanish-language imprint.This collection of 22 translated English language short stories selected by Marías presented a way to practice my poor Spanish and get to know some writers I didn’t know. Nugent Barker? Oswell Blakeston? Percival Landon? [Ed. – Are these imaginary???] My Spanish proved inadequate to the task, but I understood enough to have made the effort – to be continued this year – worthwhile.

The Ascent of ~~Rum Doodle~~ Mont Analogue

My next-to-most-fun book of the year, René Daumal’s Mont Analogue (1952), tells the story of Père Solgon’s organization of an expedition aboard the ship “Impossible” to find the rumored tallest peak on earth, mysteriously as yet undiscovered due to its isolation (guesstimated to be in the vast South Pacific) as well as certain tricks of light that keep it invisible except at a certain hour and from a certain approach. With a crew including such luminaries as an American painter of alpine scenes, one Judith Pancake, the voyage is half tongue-in-cheek, half mystical imponderables (Daumal had been a follower of Gurdjieff), half Jules Verne. Yes, I know that’s three halves, but that suggests the shape and character of this delightful novel, one of the rare “unfinished” works that actually ends mid-sent-….

(Note: for French readers: a lovely new hardcover illustrated edition of Mont Analogue comes with an introduction by musician Patti Smith).

Weak in Comparison to Dreams

I got to know art historian/theorist James Elkins’s work some 25 years ago while researching text and image for a conference paper. So it came as quite a shock to discover a 600-page novel by Elkins, especially as I’d recalled his having announced in an Amazon book review his intention to stop adding to an accretion of texts. Presumably Elkins only meant Amazon reviews, because Weak in Comparison to Dreams (2023) is a welcome contribution to contemporary literature and among the most unusual novels I’ve read in a long time. In the book’s continuation of Elkins’s explorations of text/image interactions, I felt both that I was right back where I’d left off and in a whole new world. Incorporating scores of black and white images and increasingly nutty charts and graphs, the narrative follows its narrator, Samuel Emmer, a bacterial biologist for the city of Guelph, Ontario, on a series of visits to zoos around the world to evaluate mammalian behaviors and health protocols as Guelph plans its own zoo. [Ed. – The Guelph connection is… unexpected.] A dozen interchapters present Emmer’s dreams while on this mission, these too accompanied by images that suggest an intensifying fugue state. By turns sobering and hilarious, thematically touching on everything from animal welfare and incarceration to climate change and bureaucracy, from pseudo-science to contemporary experimental music, and playing in a space similar to that occupied by conceptual artist David Wilson’s Museum of Jurassic Technology, Elkins’s absorbing novel is… not at all what it seems. A 100-page final section entitled “Notes” delivers not so much “notes” as a surprising reframing of the first narrative, much in the way a caption might reframe an image. I can’t get the book out of my head, and shouldn’t, as Elkins has completed four other novels since 2008 that form a quintet of which Weak in Comparison to Dreams, though the first to be published, is volume three. I cannot wait to see what he does in the other four. [Ed. – How the hell do you find this stuff???]

The Queen of L.A. Noir

My familiarity with Dorothy Hughes’s In a Lonely Place (1947) had been limited to Nicholas Ray’s 1950 film starring Humphrey Bogart. Finally reading the novel left me incensed about the movie, a fairly egregious desecration of its source material. Fortunately, I felt no indignation in response to Hughes’s novel, which floored me as not just a masterpiece of Southern California noir, but perhaps the masterpiece of Southern California noir. I fell for it in the first pages, which captures the foggy, seeping chill of the California coast at night in a manner precise and true. She shies away from nothing in this penetrating psychological drama in which [Ed. – SPOILER INCOMING!] the narrator himself is the killer – presumably the quality that kept the studios from allowing Humphrey Bogart to be tarnished by such a role. Hughes covers the postwar L.A. noirscape exquisitely while managing to keep her narrator entirely human, a subtle literary feat that reads like one of Freud’s case studies. Raymond Chandler might be King of L.A. Noir, but if you asked me to pick a monarch, I’d go with Hughes on the basis of this novel alone.

Other mysteries included the marvelous Margaret Millar in Stranger in my Grave, a disappointing end to the Montalbano series in Andrea Camilleri’s Riccardino, and dismay as regards Mignon Eberhart, an author I’ve liked, whose Family Affair, in this year of too many books I did not like, marked the nadir.

Poetry

Aside from individual poems here and there, I read just three books of poetry. Reginald Dwayne Betts in Felon (2019) gives us a powerful collection of poems that go well beyond the experience of incarceration to address convict life beyond prison. I found Argentine poet Alexandra Piznarik’s Removing the Stone of Madness, Poems 1962-72 (Yvette Siegert, translator), relevatory. I did not know Piznarik, who, as the collection’s title suggests, fought a terrible battle with mental illness which she chronicled in short, sui generis poems as hard-edged and clean as crystals, powerful poem-objects one could almost hold in one’s hand. Finally, I loved Greg Hewitt’s intimate, resonant poems in Blindsight, structurally based on composer Olivier Messiaen’s prime-number system and which brought to mind Frank O’Hara’s personal poetic school of “Personism” (a mutual friend sent me Greg’s book).

Odds and Ends

The rest, an unorganized, mostly enjoyable mess, included Willa Cather, more Eve Babitz, Sándor Márai, Tatsuo Hori, Euripides, Chinua Achebe, Raphael Sánchez Ferlosio, more César Aira (an annual need), Daisy Hildyard and others. Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove (1985) gave me exercise, as with Stalingrad in one hand, I built up my other bicep by hefting McMurtry’s 850-page narrative in late-night installments at approximately the same pace as the Texas border to northern Montana cattle drive the story depicts. I found it terrific fun, amplified by my subsequent reading of the story of a poor Texas legislator who made the mistake of trying to ban Texas’s national novel. No one should want to be that guy. A bit further south I ate up Charles Portis’s Gringos (1991), set in the Yucatan where rumpled ex-pat Americans are involved in archeological dealings and mis-dealings. Are all of Portis’s novels his best novel? I think so. I think so. [Ed. – Well put!] Art historian Alexander Nemerov’s The Forest (2023), a collection of essays and corresponding plates, uses forests of the American frontier to cull idiosyncratic tales of 1830’s American art and culture, rescuing some fascinating figures from historical oblivion. I finally got around to reading Maggie Nelson, in Bluets (2009) and The Argonauts (2015) – respectively, musings on the color blue (with a towel snap at William Gass’s bare cheeks), and raw meditations on sex, gender and motherhood that I sent off to goddaughter pursuing gender studies. I’d been curious for some time about Michael McDowell six-volume Blackwater, and gorgeous and affordable new French paperback editions provided an opportunity to dive in. Blackwater 1: La Crue (1983) proved a Southern Gothic slow drip horror tale peeling away the veneer of Southern gentility. For the first time since high school, I revisited J. D. Salinger, in Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters (1955) and Seymour: An Introduction (1959). Salinger himself may not have aged well, but these two novels were far better than I expected them to be. I found Tove Jansson’s The True Deceiver (1982) to be a stunningly good novella about truth, trust and deceit, not necessarily in that order, set in a fishing village on the Finnish coast. There seems to have been nothing Jansson couldn’t do right. While somewhat confined in a house in the mountains, I found appropriate companionship in Count Xavier de Maistre’s A Journey Round My Room (1795), a book born of boredom, a curious meditation on escaping it, created when, following a duel, de Maistre was put under house arrest for some six weeks. Alleviating boredom, Roy Lewis’s The Evolution Man, or How I Ate My Father (1960), though clearly dated, was still pretty damned funny as comedies about pre-history go. Finally, a couple of books with which I struggled still held enough of interest for me to get through them. Justin Torres’s Blackouts (2023) relies heavily on photographs, drawings, redacted text, dialogue as film script, and other novelties that I found a bit overcooked (in a way I did not with the Elkins novel). But the story Torres unearths of a 1942 study of homosexuality, and of the lesbian couple who helped drive the project and were betrayed by it, is remarkable. I had a tougher time with Gerald Reve’s The Evenings (1947) acclaimed by some as the great 20^th century Dutch novel. A disaffected young man lives with his numbed parents in 1946 Amsterdam and battles his claustrophobic life with dark, acrid humor. I admired Reve’s allowing the war to drip into the narrative bit by bit, the horrors of the recent past seeping into normal life. But I couldn’t wait for the book to end.

I’ll conclude with a dream. In a cluttered bookshop, I found a tattered but astounding volume amended with striking collages, vivid watercolor sketches, and dense margin notes. The (dream) author’s name seemed familiar, so upon waking I looked up James Gould Cozzens and plunged down a trail that led me to Dwight MacDonald’s 1958 review of Cozzens’ late novel, By Love Possessed. I did not read Cozzens. I’m not sure I will ever read Cozzens. But I’m grateful to odd dreams for having pointed me to MacDonald’s review, which takes to task a generation of critics who, with log-rolling fealty and conformity to one another’s uncritical opinions, lavished praise on the novel. Eviscerating, illuminating, even necessary, his review models close textual analysis with an eye towards criticism’s larger role, relevant today when writer-critics blurb one another’s books and award prizes to mediocre works. A pretty good way to end the reading year, and a better way to start off a new one which, I am happy to say, as far as books go, is off to a tremendous start. Thank you for reading. [Ed. –Thanks for writing, Scott! A delight as always.]

Scott Lambridis’s Year in Reading, 2023

Posted on March 21, 2024 by Dorian Stuber under book review, Guest post, lists, review, Uncategorized, year in review

Excited to once again present reading reviews from some of my favourite readers. Today’s installment, his third, is by Scott Lambridis (@slambridis). Before completing his MFA, Scott earned a degree in neurobiology, and co-founded Omnibucket.com, through which he co-hosts the Action Fiction! performance series. Read more at scottlambridis.com.

Each year I have a reading goal of at least 52 books. This year I read 151, including 37 new countries. Out of those, here’s the top ten, in the order in which they were read.

1. Still No Word from You / Peter Orner (US, non-fiction)

A mix of short (often very short) stories, many centered on growing up in Chicago in a Jewish family, but Orner’s biggest gift is his ever-present love of books and reading. His soliloquys on books he loves, and his skill at tying life memories to the books and stories that resonate with him still are the most captivating and infectious. At the prose level, Orner can shatter you in a sentence. [Ed. – Sounds painful!] And yet if you listen to him talk about stories (his or others’), you’ll notice he’s laughing the entire time. How can you deny that delight?

2. The Ice Palace / Tarjei Vesaas (Norway, fiction)

A Norwegian child takes a walk in the woods after school to see a frozen waterfall, and never returns. Seems simple, but no book has immediately filled me with a sense of coldness and vague menace, and kept it going like this one. The prose is sparse and spare, the story distilled to the very essence of wonder, mystery, and heartbreak. In memory, the book feels like an ice crystal itself. [Ed. – I hear so many wonderful things about this book: keen to read it!]

3. The Summer Book / Tove Jansson (Finland, fiction)

A girl spends a summer with her grandmother, sharing little moments of wonder and delight, in this collection of interconnected stories (technically a novel, but each story is self-contained). It’s hard to explain why I love Jansson so much, but everything she touches is strange and delightful. She’s most known as the creator of the Moomins, that blob-like cast of characters for children, first appearing as a comic strip that swept through Europe and inspired not just a series of wonderful children’s novels, but the Disney-like Moominland (which I must visit some day). There’s also a great documentary on her as a “failed” artist called, simply, Tove. Her magical children’s stories can surprise you with their adult-ish realism, and her “realistic” adult stories read like fairy tales. Start anywhere: you may fall in love.

4. People from Bloomington / Budi Darma (Indonesia, fiction)

A collection of short stories based on the author’s time at Indiana University for grad school. Ho hum, you say? They’re absolutely crazy though! The utter strangeness of them, the people, the absurd human interactions, the grotesque portrayals of common human nature — I’ve never read anything like it. A simple mundane event sets off a series of events leading to completely unpredictable endings. The narrators in particular (or maybe “the” narrator, since they have similar voices) observe and make note of the most unusual things. The narrator in one story falls and smashes a cake and when he opens the box he says “it looked worse than Mrs Ellison’s face,” a face never mentioned before or after. In another: “Good thing her big ears didn’t fall off.” Hilarious and bizarre! The friend who recommended it said it best: “The book is described as a realistic world portrayed through an absurdist frame, but I would add that even the way he achieves this is unique.” This is a weird book where weird things happen to weird people, revealing the deep strangeness waiting beneath seemingly tranquil suburban life. Beware though: you’ll probably never want to visit Bloomington.

5. Treasures of The Thunder Dragon: A Portrait of Bhutan / Ashi Dorji Wangmo Wangchuck (Bhutan, non-fiction)

Written by the current Queen Mother of Bhutan! [Ed. – Probably the only book from Bhutan ever mentioned on this site—and absolutely the only book from Bhutanese royalty.] Bhutan is fascinating in its own right, as a mostly isolated piece of protected land in the Himalayas most notable for prioritizing Gross National Happiness over Gross National Product. Why is this important to them, how did they come to it, how do they legislate and realize this drive towards happiness day to day, and what does that mean for the rest of us? The Queen Mother weaves the answers to these questions as takes you along her own tour of the country, its villages, its wonders, and its people. Her love of this unique country, at once more primitive and further evolved than our own (and a great many others) is so gently omnipresent that you’ll start looking for flights before you finish.

6. Death and the Penguin / Andrey Kurkov (Ukraine, fiction)

I picked this up on the recommendation of a Russian friend just after the war in the Ukraine began. I normally don’t rank my top 10s, but I will dub this one my favorite of the year without hesitation. An aspiring writer is offered a job writing obituaries for a newspaper, for people whom it turns out aren’t dead yet. Oh and he also lives with a melancholic penguin named Misha he’s adopted from the local zoo. It’s a noir mystery in flavor, full of dark humor as the two of them are thrown into a mafia intrigue the protagonist never fully understands or even appreciates. There’s a sequel too, but this one was so good I’m scared to read it. [Ed. – Agree, terrific book. I too have had the sequel sitting here for years, unread…]

7. The English Understand Wool / Helen DeWitt (US, fiction)

What was this book? Who is this author? [Ed. – A genius!] A novella from my favorite publisher, New Directions, coming in at barely 70 pages, and dubbed a fairy tale by Google (it is not a fairy tale), it’s the story of a sassy 17-year-old girl obsessed with extreme taste and avoiding mauvais ton in all situations, who loses her family, and all her money, and must weigh her wits single-handedly against the sharks of the New York publishing world who want to sign a deal with her and sell her story. Brutal, savage, artfully heartless, absolutely precise, and with an ending that’s pure genius.

8. The Royal Game / Stefan Zweig (Austria, fiction)

RIYL The Queen’s Gambit, Zweig’s classic chess story written 80 years earlier tells the tale of an unnamed narrator who discovers a Russian chess master is traveling in the same boat from New York to Buenos Aires in the midst of WWII, and attempts to lure him into a casual game the narrator is sure to lose. He begins receiving whispered advice from a watching businessman, and what unfolds over the course of three matches that challenge the pompous Russian master’s assumptions and abilities is the parallel tale of this Austrian’s businessman’s arrest, imprisonment, and torture by the Gestapo. Memorizing chess moves in solitary confinement is his only means of survival and, as Zweig deftly describes in only 100 pages, both his triumph and undoing.

9. Every Man For Himself and God Against All / Werner Herzog (Germany, non-fiction)

The south German drawl of this prolific director of both documentaries (Grizzly Man) and features (Aguirre the Wrath of God) is legendary, narrating his films with metered precision the wondrous horror of existence (“Even the stars up here in the sky look like a mess; there is no harmony in the universe” is a classic, but my fav is the YouTube of an interview with him in which he’s shot and when asked about it simply waves the question away and remarks, “It was not a significant bullet”), so I highly recommend listening to this autobiography with Herzog reading it. [Ed. – Agreed that’s a classic, but don’t sleep on his retellings of Curious George, also on YouTube.] His films are renowned for the unique point of view of his protagonists, and the singularity of his images, but it’s challenging to have a conversation about him without addressing or succumbing to the mystique of his deeds as a filmmaker. The shit this guy puts himself through for a shot! For “truth”! So when he describes episodes from his life (filming or not), you start to wonder how much he’s nurturing his own myth. My favorite moments: nearly killing himself on skis on a dare, reading dead letters sent to the town of Northpole (it exists), and meeting a pair of identical twin diagnosed nymphomaniacs who finish each other’s sentences and stare into each other’s eyes instead of a mirror to fix their hair and makeup. The book will make you want to see every film, and imagine the ones he hasn’t gotten to make, but even more you might just find yourself envying (kinda) such a superhuman life. Enjoy it as an autobiography of an artist with a singular vision, or as a larger-than-life caricature of a man who is probably fully aware of his own mythology and how to keep it alive.

Edward Burtynsky, Shipyard #12, Qili Port, Zhejiang Province, China (2005)

10. Maniac / Benjamín Labatut (Chile, non-fiction) [Ed. – Listed by many as a novel, FWIW]

Last year, this science-loving essayist made my top 10 with When We Cease To Understand the World, his series of vignettes on famous physicists and mathematicians staring into the abyss in the act of or as a consequence of their insights and creations, each which reads more like dramatization than documentary. In Maniac, he narrows his focus and dives into one of the most singularly brilliant minds of all time, Hungarian John von Neumann, the one-man think tank behind everything from the atomic bomb to the invention of computing, game theory, genetics, and artificial intelligence, a genius coveted by the US government for his necessity in national security even more than Oppenheimer, and a guy many have heard of (including myself; there are math constants named after him), but couldn’t say much about. Heavily researched, and told through a chorus of voices, Maniac recreates a man everyone should know of, and captures with propulsive momentum the ascent of modernity alongside the decline of a mind too ineffable to endure. The last section leaps away from von Neumann and dramatizes the moment when AI categorically shifts its capabilities from chessmaster to confounding the masters of the world’s most esoteric ancient game, Go, and becomes something beyond a simple calculating machine, something new, and beyond our comprehension. Whether you believe the hype and horror of those who believed a computer could never a master the art of a game so complex as Go, it’s Labatut’s primary interest in and his ability to render our human fear of science and technology that makes this book stand out [Ed. – Thanks, Scott!]

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	Dorian Stuber on On Miaow
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