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!]

Ricardo Chavira’s Year in Reading, 2023

Posted on February 15, 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 first, is by Ricardo Chavira (@waryenthusiast). Ricardo is a reader, not a writer, but he thinks writers are cool. When he’s not reading, running, cooking for friends and family, building even more bookcases, or making maple syrup, he makes his living in sunny CT. Having done graduate work in philosophy, he, naturally, works in IT.

A few years ago, I started keeping track of my reading with a detailed list. I wanted a handy list I could consult (likely on my phone) if and when a friend would ask what I’d been reading lately. Too often, my mind would freeze and I’d maybe utter one title from 3 months ago, only later kicking myself for not recalling the wonderful books I’d just read in the last few weeks. [Ed. – Relieved to know I’m not the only one. “Uh… books… I read some books.”] What started as a mental crutch has evolved into a comprehensive spreadsheet, tracking title, author name & gender, genre (fiction, non-fiction, poetry), date I finished the book (which also gets written on the last page of the book), where I finished the book (city, but often on a plane or train), whether it was an audio book, library book, read by my book group, etc.

In my non-book-reading profession, there is an adage that “what gets measured gets improved.” [Ed. – Hmm.] Perhaps that applies here as well. In recent years, I’ve sought to diversify my reading palate, reading more books written by women and persons of color, reading more non-fiction (left to my devices, it’s overwhelmingly fiction), borrowing more books from my local library, reading more from “the backlist” (as I tend to get excited by recent releases). Being aware of what I’m reading allows me to be more deliberate about what I read. It’s also fun to run the numbers each January, look for trends, chastise myself (for not reading enough poetry), feel good about myself (for reading more works in translation), and make plans for the coming year (which are never followed through completely).

My other book tradition is the annual reshelving that takes place shortly after New Year’s. Every year, I put the books I read on their own shelf. Audiobooks, library books, and books on loan are not there, of course, but it’s fun to watch that empty shelf slowly fill up and, eventually, spill over to the next. [Ed. – Wait, what did you say?? I drifted away when you said “empty shelf.”] And after the new year, the year’s reads get shelved into the general mix of the library. It’s an opportunity to reflect again on these books, but really an excuse to muck around with my library. For whatever reason, it’s a very satisfying activity and one I’ve come to look forward to. [Ed. – What a lovely tradition!]

<insert obligatory comment about how awful the year was> Yes, 2023 was a dumpster fire of a year in so many ways, but not a bad year for books and reading. The year began with anticipated titles from many of my favorite contemporary writers*, some of which are mentioned below.

(*a partial list of authors with 2023 releases that had me worked up: Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Colson Whitehead, Rebecca Makkai, Luis Alberto Urrea, Hilary Leichter, Matthew Desmond, Rebecca Solnit, Zadie Smith, Lauren Groff, Emily Wilson (trans.), Jesmyn Ward, Jhumpa Lahiri – whew!)

So let’s get on with it. Herewith, some rambling thoughts on many of the books I read. Enjoy and happy reading.

Some highlights – Loved these books, here’s why.

Chain-gang All-Stars, by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

A highlight of the year for me was Adjei-Brenyah’s follow up to Friday Black, his fantastic debut of short stories. Chain-gang is set in a near future where prisoners are given the option of joining “chain gangs,” teams that fight in gladiatorial hand-to-hand combat in exchange for a shot at freedom. These so-called “hard sports” have corporate sponsors, stadiums full of shrieking fans, and lucrative online steaming shows. Despite all this, we’re somehow given a story of love and humanity amidst the chaos. Calling it satire or dystopia only hints at Adjei-Brenyah’s brilliance, as he approaches his set-up as more than just a sendup of current society and the role of the carceral state. At a public reading, I asked him how he threads the line between plausibility and seemingly improbable exaggeration (a televised reality show with prisoners fighting to the death? no, but I can kinda see that …). [Ed. – Alas, I can totally see it.] As I recall, he said the trick is not just coming up with a dramatic story, it’s having a twist that makes it work. He’s not just stepping on the gas, exaggerating the status quo. Rather, he takes something away or adds to make the story stick. Here, the conceit is not that prisoners are being violently exploited for public/private profit. The conceit of the novel is that it’s happening out in the open, and we not only don’t care, we consume it. As terrifying as that sounds, there’s an urgency to this novel that can’t be ignored.

Crook Manifesto, by Colson Whitehead

We’re living in the age of Colson Whitehead, in case you’re wondering. A follow up to Harlem Shuffle, we get to revisit Ray Carney, the furniture store owner and erstwhile fence of stolen goods. Unable to score Jackson 5 tickets for his daughter, Ray calls in a few favors and one thing leads to another… The depiction of Harlem in the 70s is spot on; and Whitehead has such an ear for the rhythms of speech, music, and street noise that do so much to convey the bygone era. Whitehead is deft as ever in exploring matters of race and society. Musing on a performance in which a young Michael Jackson wants to talk about the blues, “Carney chuckled – the kid was ten.” But after a moment’s reflection, “Carney shouldn’t have laughed. What ten-year-old black child didn’t know about the blues?” This is the second in a projected trilogy and my arrangement with Whitehead is simple – you keep writing them, I’ll keep reading them. [Ed. – Ha, love that! Loved Shuffle; look forward to this one; excited to hear about the third.]

Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis

I love the campus novel and this is one of the best. I recently came across a copy of the NYRB edition, so took it as a sign to revisit an old favorite. Happily, it mostly holds up. The old school misogyny felt tired and dated (as it should). Margaret may be a manipulative drama queen (says so right there in the margins of my old copy), but it hardly justifies her treatment. Still, Amis is such a good writer, tossing off lines such as: “It was from this very bottle that Welch had, the previous evening, poured Dixon the smallest drink he’d ever been seriously offered.” On the whole, the novel still works and neither characters nor readers emerge unscathed. Coda: Happily, I received another copy for Christmas, as Hatchard’s, the venerable London bookseller, has issued a gorgeous limited edition of Lucky Jim. Anyone want an old paperback copy? [Ed. – Good offer, friends!]

Milkman, by Anna Burns

I was excited to read this book when it came out and finally got around to it (only 6 years later). I knew it was going to be good, but it’s always a thrill when a book so wildly exceeds your expectations. The psychological depth, the suffocating closeness of the tight-knit community, the deadly gossip, and the rapid-fire language make for a heady combination. So many passages were chock full twists, descriptors, and fulsome lists that I feared she’d run out of words. But she never did. So grateful.

The Netanyahus, by Joshua Cohen

On one level it’s a campus novel (and you know how I love a good campus novel), but also an incisive depiction of antisemitism, and a scathing indictment of the powers that be. It’s also a riot. Cohen guides us with such a steady hand through the myriad offenses endured by our humble protagonist, Ruben Blum, the only Jewish professor on a small upstate New York campus. Describing a note from Blum’s obtuse department chair: “’Rube,’ it read, in his characteristic mélange of the casual and turgid.” [Ed. – Heh] But Cohen also doesn’t hold back in depicting the flaws and hubris of his characters. The Jewish professor, and titular patriarch, whom Blum is asked to host is none other than the father of the current Israeli prime minister. This book should be read and appreciated despite, and because of, its association with current affairs.

The Monsters of Templeton, by Lauren Groff
The Vaster Wilds, by Lauren Groff

This is also the age of Lauren Groff. This year I read her first and latest novels to achieve my Groff completist status. [Ed. – Ooh, did you get the button??] I love how varied her writing is; she never writes the same book twice. A grad student trying to make her way in the world and learning you can’t come home again (except when you do). A young woman fleeing an early American colonial settlement and trying to survive in the wilderness. As with Whitehead, I will read everything she writes. Keep em coming. She’s also opening a bookstore! [Ed. — !]

Phantoms, by Christian Kiefer

By all accounts (viz., a scroll through his Twitter feed), Kiefer is a busy man, juggling teaching, a large family, and crazy rock & ice climbing expeditions. [Ed. – No joke, that climbing stuff is insane.] He also manages to write some wonderful novels. Phantoms tells the story of Japanese and American families torn apart by WWII and the shameful internment camps. Years later, the story is refracted by the memory of a young writer who is slowly uncovering the truth, while dealing with his own trauma as a Vietnam veteran. A story of secrets, lies, bigotry, war, and other American values, Phantoms is truthful without being cynical, and just hopeful enough without giving in to sentimentality. And Kiefer gets bonus points for having joined our book group discussion via zoom!

Found in Translation – I don’t know why translated literature is such a hard sell in this country. It’s the literary equivalent of yelling at children “eat your vegetables, they’re good for you!” With publishers such as NYRB, Europa, Charco (and many other wonderful indie presses), it’s so easy to find good translated lit. Try it, you’ll like it.

Translating Myself and Others, by Jhumpa Lahiri

I just can’t say enough good things about Lahiri, she’s the bee’s knees, the cat’s pajamas. I get giddy thinking about her work. [Ed. – Paging @bibliopaul!] Long story short for those not keeping track at home: In recent years, Jhumpa Lahiri has been writing in Italian and translating (herself and others). Never fully at home in English (the language of her upbringing) or Bengali (the language of her parents), she learns Italian in college. Years later, she returns to it by packing up the family and moving to Rome (as one does), where she immerses herself in language study. Before long, she’s hanging out with Italian writers and translating their work. And she stops writing in English as her primary language. These essays are both critical (such an ear for how other writers work) and personal (artfully exploring her technique and motivations behind her writing and translations).

Roman Stories, by Jhumpa Lahiri, translated by Jhumpa Lahiri and Todd Portnowitz

New short stories from Lahiri (her best form, in my opinion) is cause for celebration. These don’t disappoint. Set in a contemporary Rome and populated by people who look and speak differently from the locals, these stories remind us the beauty and coarseness of the human condition. And yes, she wrote them in Italian and later translated (all but two of them) into English.

Ties, by Domenico Starnone, translated by Jhumpa Lahiri

Starnone is a luminary in the Italian literary scene and not known well enough here in the States. And is translated by Lahiri. And published by Europa. What’s not to like?

The Door, by Magda Szabó, translated by Len Rix

I often saw this book cited as a favorite NYRB, so was thrilled when I found a used copy. And even more thrilled when I began to read it. Szabó gives us Emerence, a housekeeper, street sweeper, and eminence grise of a small Hungarian community. At first, Emerence seems aloof, secretive, even arrogant. She’s all of these things, but also insecure and vulnerable, as slowly emerges from her complicated relationship with Magda, her employer (and enabler). The depth of the characters and complexity of their relationships carries on to the end, giving us a stunning portrayal of people at their best, worst, and most human. [Ed. – Incredible book, now I want to read it all over again.]

A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East, by László Krasznahorkai, translated by Ottilie Mulzet

Krasznahorkai is a wizard. It would be too easy to say this story is like a dream. But there is an ethereal quality to this book that evokes so much thought and feeling, and yet remains just out of one’s grasp. Long, wonderful discursive passages on weather, architecture, and math that evoke sheer longing. There’s a short chapter on the wind and air that has passed through this temple that’s just a joy to read. A great way to end the year for me.

Fantastic Night, by Stefan Zweig, translated by Anthea Bell

These stories of reversals, betrayals, misunderstandings, and moral discoveries are a delight. To contemporary readers, he has a certain Old World charm, and it’s not surprising he’s come back into vogue recently as both literary and pleasure reading. I’ve been told that with Zweig’s unique voice, you’re either in or you’re out. Count me in.

At Night All Blood is Black, by David Diop, translated by Anna Moschovakis

Diop does so much in this short novel. In the trenches of World War I, our protagonist takes revenge on enemy troops after his best friend is killed. A grisly descent into madness ensues that terrifies even his fellow soldiers, making him an outcast in every way. The narrative feels like something out of Camus, but darker, and stayed with this reader for a long time.

Good Genre – Another absurdity of the reading community which I cannot abide are the knee-jerk slights often directed towards so-called genre fiction. [Ed. – We do not allow that sort of thing here at EMJ.] Here are some standouts in fantasy, sci-fi, and crime fiction.

Hell Bent, by Leigh Bardugo

In Bardugo’s world, magic is real and practiced by students at Yale University’s secret societies, such as Skull and Bones. (Campus novel alert!) A sequel to her blockbuster Ninth House, Hell Bent picks right up where the action left off and doesn’t stop. I’ll admit to a local bias that adds to my enjoyment of these books as I studied there, live nearby, and my wife is friends with the author (read the acknowledgments!). [Ed. – What?!?!?!] But even without any extraneous connections, it’s great fun. Alex Stern is part of an organization that is supposed to keep the secret societies in check, but she has a way of making things worse and/or better and pretty soon things are literally going to hell. Along the way, Bardugo gives us more esoteric history (some it speculative) and plenty of her trademark creativity in the magic, spells, and monsters that populate this world (demons and vampires, yes, but not exactly like what you’ve seen before). I always love the second part of a trilogy (what can I say, I’m a middle child), but I am eager for the next installment.

Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution, by R. F. Kuang

Another Yalie (along with Bardugo), Kuang has written 5 novels, is working on a PhD (to complement her Oxford and Cambridge degrees), and hasn’t bothered to turn 30 yet. Wunderkind bio aside, Babel is a lot of fun. We’re at Oxford in the 1830s, but in this version, magic is real and harnessed by scholars at the Royal Institute of Translation who manipulate silver bars inscribed with translation. The effects of this magic power the British empire and are the source of its global domination. Not all sits well with a group of young students, most of whom are foreign-born and recruited for their language skills. Plenty of action, intrigue, and wrestling with moral and political dilemmas make for an engaging read. And did I mention it’s a campus novel? [Ed. – I’m gonna give this one another try. I abandoned ship, but I think I missed something good.]

Bloodchild and Other Stories, by Octavia E. Butler

Who knew Butler also wrote short stories? Not many (stories, that is), but those collected in this volume are bangers. [Ed. – Such bangers.] Part of the fun of short stories is delivering a punch, a great insight, or deep emotion in just a few pages. And sci-fi is great at creating alternate worlds where the rules are different and you get to decode those new norms. Doing both of those things well at the same time is no small feat. Happily, Butler doesn’t skimp on her trademark thought-provoking imagination. More than once I felt equal parts excited and unsettled as I figured out the premise of each story. “Ah, so that’s what’s going on. Yikes, that’s what’s going on.” [Ed. – Well put, R]

Lessons in Birdwatching, by Honey Watson

I hadn’t read a solid sci-fi novel in a while and this one really satisfied that itch. At first, I felt out of practice, trying to decipher which way was up in this new world. “That can’t be right, is that really happening? I often said to myself. And oh, yes, it was happening. Whether it’s right or not is up to you, dear reader, to decide. In the meantime, Watson has a ball with political intrigue, war, sex, drugs, violence, resurrecting an ancient god, and giving us some really manipulative characters you can’t help feel guilty rooting for. A sequel is necessary, as I have a feeling it’s going to get worse before it gets better. And I can’t wait.

Small Mercies, by Dennis Lehane

Solid storytelling, plenty of violence, salty characters, and local color keep the pages turning. Is this a screenplay masquerading as a novel? Given Lehane’s novels’ track record, the adaptation can’t be far behind.

A Family Affair – Few things in life are more satisfying than enjoying books with your family, especially children. Scratch that, there’s nothing better.

The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood

This was at the top of ~~my wife’s~~ Leigh Bardugo’s friend’s “books I love that I can’t believe you haven’t read” list. Feel lucky to have such a great reading partner. [Ed. – Aww, love this.]

Slaughterhouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut, Ryan North, Albert Monteys (graphic novel)

As my son continues to develop his literary tastes, his current go-to list includes Steinbeck, Murakami, and Vonnegut. He recently acquired this lovely graphic novel version of Slaughterhouse Five, one of his favorites. It’s a wonderful version with fantastic artwork, remains true to the novel, and made for great conversation.

Afterparties, by Anthony Veasna So

So was a wonderful writer whose life sadly ended far too soon. My niece loved these interconnected short stories of Cambodian Americans in California and wouldn’t rest until I read them. Loved the book and love having such passionate and discerning readers in the family. [Ed. – Lucky man!]

Kinda wacky, but good! – A very ad hoc collection of books that were unconventional in form and/or content.

The Memory Police, by Yoko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder

Ogawa gives us a world where words are gradually erased from society, forbidden from use, after which their referents disappear from the world and, eventually, from memory. Birds are erased from language, then trees, then collective memory. Gradually, more and more of the world is removed from experience and memory, making even the most modest forms of resistance heroic. Haunting and imaginative in its use of language, I couldn’t stop thinking about it when I was done. It brought to mind the parts I most loved about Orwell’s 1984. More frightening than an oppressive, totalitarian government is the devious control and manipulation of language. If someone controls the words people can use, they’ve already won. Excited to hear there’s a movie adaptation in the works!

Pure Colour, by Sheila Heti

Heti gives us a world that is just a first draft, in which Mira’s love for Annie and her father give her different experiences and perspectives on being in the world. When her father dies, his spirit goes into Mira and they live as a leaf on a tree, until Mira remembers her other modes of existence. None of that really explains the novel, but that doesn’t matter, because Heti is not encumbered by conventional expectations of what a novel should do or be about. That alone is reason enough to read it. [Ed. – Plus, she spells “colour” correctly.]

Gibbons, or One Bloody Thing After Another, by James Morrison

Morrison, that irascible voice of reason on #BookTwitter, has given us a splendid book that hops across centuries and generations of a family, giving us one bloody thing after another. Such is life. Each chapter is a separate short story, all loosely interconnected and featuring glass eyes, a fake mermaid, and culminates in a Sydney Opera House set aflame. [Ed. – Indeed. So good!]

Memoirs of a Polar Bear, by Yoko Tawada, translated by Susan Bernofsky

Three generations of polar bears who are heroes of the revolution, dissidents, expats, and celebrities. These are their stories. As original as it is improbable, it was fun to let go and go along for the ride.

Make Way For Poets – Never enough poetry, but here are two I enjoyed.

Her Whole Bright Life, by Courtney LeBlanc

LeBlanc brings joy, anger, sorrow, and love into her work in ways that make you want to read, reflect, and read again. That is to say, she’s a wonderful poet. When she curses North Dakota for the difficult life it inflicted on her hard-working, dying father, her rage is palpable and as beautiful and terrifying as anything the Greeks knew. But she’s equally adept giving us tenderness, as when she describes her husband rescuing an injured bird:

He carried it to a tree at the edge of our

property, gentled it onto a branch

Love the verb “gentled”!

Poems [For, About, Because] My Friends, by Hattie Hayes

Hayes’ first collection of poems is, as the title suggests, centered around her friendships and is a wonderful evocation of the time of life when friends serve as a chosen family and are deeply pivotal to one’s life. Hayes matches those emotions with some lovely turns of phrase:

You sign every letter “yours,” as though I needed a reminder

and

I have all this faith I’d never dream of cashing in

I’m also grateful to her for introducing me to Hilary Leichter. Will keep an eye on Hayes’s work to come.

Good, But Didn’t Change My Life – These books were fine, well-written, and loved my many. I enjoyed them, but I wasn’t as overwhelmed as I’d hope to be.

Hamnet, by Maggie O’Farrell

Love the subject, the writing was great, but I somehow didn’t connect with the story for much of the book. It seemed too distant and diffuse, somehow. But the ending had such beauty and moral clarity, it seemed to make up for it.

Nocturnes, by Kazuo Ishiguro

Am working my way through Ishiguro. I enjoyed these short stories, but they didn’t bowl me over, as much of his work has done. Bonus points for the interconnected short stories. Always love that.

I Have Some Questions for You, by Rebecca Makkai

I loved The Great Believers, so was ready for more Makkai. And while it was a pleasant and enjoyable read, it just didn’t have the same depth as her previous work. To be fair, not every novel can (or should) be The Great Believers, but I was left wanting more. And yes, bonus points are awarded for another campus novel.

Didn’t Quite Work For Me – Some books that left me cold and a bit disappointed; didn’t hate them, they just didn’t work for me. These are three great writers who will continue to do just fine without my approbation, so let’s not lose any sleep here.

Birnam Wood, by Eleanor Catton

Catton is a great writer and weaves a wonderful story setting up a conflict between a scrappy, left-wing, environmental collective and a billionaire tycoon with shifty motives. The dialogue is tight and snappy, with some great bits on the shortcomings of liberalism, failures of capitalism, and dismal state of the environment. Loved those passages. The problem (ok, my problem) is that the villain is so rich and powerful, with unlimited resources, weapons, and technology, and utterly devoid of scruples, that it makes for an uneven conflict. Wait, maybe that’s the way of the world! Even so, it makes for a lopsided novel, and ultimately detracts from its enjoyment.

The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, by James McBride

Love McBride. And there’s much to love in this novel. But it feels like three different stories, which ultimately don’t come together as a cohesive whole. The many colorful characters, the fascinating slices of history, and the clever plot twists are fun, but they seem more anecdotal and don’t really add up. Much preferred Deacon King Kong.

The Gathering, by Anne Enright

I’ve enjoyed other Enright books (esp. Yesterday’s Weather), so was glad when our book group chose this. Unfortunately, this book never took off for me. We’re introduced to a large Irish family mourning the loss of their son/brother by suicide, mostly from the perspective of a close sister. It made me feel a bit churlish, but I kept waiting for something to happen. And when the revelations were disclosed, they were late in coming and seemed so predictable as to have lost some of their moral weight. But hey, it won the Booker, so what do I know.

Quick, Fun Reads – Because sometimes you just want an easy, fun read.

Daisy Jones and the Six, by Taylor Jenkins Reid

The rise and fall of a fictional band (Fleetwood Mac, basically) is told as a series of interviews years after they collapsed at the peak of their fame and success. It’s a good rock and roll story, with the requisite amount of sex and drugs. The story breezes through the haze of the 70s and makes you care about the main characters without getting too nostalgic. The tv adaptation was also good fun, but as always, read the book first.

The Wife of Willesden, by Zadie Smith

Zadie Smith taking on a modern adaption of Chaucer’s The Wife of Bath? Yes, please! A raunchy playfulness comes through (how could it not?) and you know Smith is having fun updating the material to modern sensibilities while keep true to the source material. And the account she gives in the introduction about haphazardly falling into the assignment of writing a play is equally hilarious.

The Fraud, by Zadie Smith

OK, not quick (pretty long, actually), but since we’re talking about Smith, it was fun to read her 19th Century novel (she also narrates the audiobook). Her take on a sensational trial and its ensuing wild publicity was enjoyable. And I know she’s also making some comments on the state of the novel, but I don’t have the energy right now to unpack all that, let alone be upset by it.

Glad I Finally Got Around to Reading Them – I had heard so much about how great these books were (especially from some very ardent fans of Light) that I finally caved in and read them. Glad I did.

All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr
Cloud Cuckoo Land, by Anthony Doerr

OK, I see what the fuss is all about. Doerr is a wonderful storyteller, especially adept at slowly weaving together seemingly disparate strands across time and place. So much fun to see him work. Also, I stupidly avoided Cloud Cuckoo Land because of the goofy title. Joke’s on me, because a novel featuring a long lost Greek story name-checked by Aristophanes is right up my alley!

Edward Hopper, Barn and Silo, Vermont, 1929

So that’s what I got. Not everything I read and not everything there is to say about what I read. But enough for now. And you? [Ed. – Thanks, Ricardo! Quite a year.]

Benita Berthman’s Year in Reading, 2023

Posted on February 11, 2024 by Dorian Stuber under book review, Guest post, lists, Uncategorized, year in review

Excited to once again present reading reviews from some of my favourite readers. Today’s installment, her third, is by Benita Berthman (@moodboardultra). Benita studies literature in Marburg, Germany, where she is a full-time book enthusiast, part-time smoker, and occasional existentialist.

Enikő Katalin Eged (b. 1992) – Black Cat White Cat

Anyone who knows me knows that there is nothing I love more than talking everyone’s ear off about books, reading, my favorite authors and how I never find enough time for literature because I’m too busy doomscrolling. [Ed. – Benita, we are the same person.] Nonetheless, I did read quite a lot last year and I’m so thankful to Dorian for once again letting my write about some of the stuff I’ve read in 2023. [Ed. – It’s my pleasure!]

First things first, the statistics (I just love diagrams and numbers, I’m sorry): I managed to read a whopping 160 books with 51,299 pages in total (which is, coincidentally, almost exactly the same as the year before lol). I’ve read three quarters of these books in German, the remaining quarter in English. Storygraph, the app I use for tracking, also tells me that an overwhelming number of books I’ve read are set in a reflective mood, whatever that means. [Ed. – It means, Holy shit that’s a lot of books, I need to sit and process that.]

Enough of the numbers, most of you find them boring, I’m sure, so I’ll bore you no longer and move on to the interesting stuff.

I’m currently writing my master’s thesis on Bob Dylan and the Nobel Prize and in preparation I’ve read quite a few texts that are considered ‘canonical’ among literary scholars and, believe it or not, I’ve actually discovered I like pushing through texts that seem enigmatic, impenetrable at first and require you to really work through and with them to get even the semblance of having an idea what the authors are talking about. Enduring difficult sections, slowly getting the gist, and being able to connect the dots just a little bit better—all of this is incredibly rewarding to me.

One of the most important texts of the 20th century, I believe, is Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams (different translations available, I read it in the original German): I am interested in psychoanalysis not just as a therapeutic approach but also with regards to the interpretation of literature. Freud, by relying heavily on classical literature, synthesizes the conscious, the unconscious, dreams and their symbolism and both medical/psychoanalytical as well as literary aspects of dreams and how to work with them, dreaming, and interpretation. Even though this might not have been what Freud intended with his seminal work, I do feel like reading it can help you understand yourself and all that might be hidden in your mind and soul just a bit better. Just as an afterthought: of course there are certain thoughts and opinions given by Freud that have long been overruled by now, but I personally believe it is more fruitful to actually engage with these (especially patriarchal) thoughts and work with them, confront them with more accurate and more modern research than to flat out refuse to even read about them. [Ed. – Amen, sister. You’ll get no complaints from this card-carrying Freudian!]

I also started delving into Foucault’s work. The Archaeology of Knowledge (English translation by A.M. Sheridan Smith; I read the German version by Ulrich Köppen) was the first of his seminal works that I read last year. For me, it was the perfect starting point to get into Foucault’s way of thinking, to understand what he is referring to when he is speaking of a discourse or a discursive meaning and how and why knowledge and language are important when it comes to understanding concepts of power. And, not to forget, I simply like how Foucault writes – to me, it seems way more literary than,
say, Pierre Bourdieu whom I have come to know as a very sterile writer (sorry, Pierre!). I’m looking forward to exploring more of his work in 2024. [Ed. – Just wait for The History of Sexuality! I also agree re: Foucault’s style.]

As a Herta Müller stan I need to feature one of her books in my review, that much is for sure, and how lucky was I that I got to read a new essay collection of hers in the summer! Eine Fliege kam durch einen halben Wald [Ed. – A Fly Came Through Half a Forest?] has not yet been translated into English, unfortunately, but a number of Müller’s essays have been published by Granta under the title Cristina and Her Double, translated by Geoffrey Mulligan, and I highly suggest you check them out if you’re interested in getting a deeper understanding of Müller’s works. She writes mainly about the traumatic experiences of having grown up in communist Romania and being oppressed by the Government and the Secret Service, all in a highly metaphorical and touching poetic language. Sometimes her novels are a bit enigmatic for those who, thankfully, haven’t had her experiences, but her essays offer a more straightforward glimpse into her life, her way of thinking, and how she understands her own writing and literature. I do hope these essays will be translated into English as well, also because they highlight
Müller’s commitment to the planned Museum of Exile in Berlin (and, on a personal note, I get to give a presentation on said commitment at a conference in London in April, woohoo).

I share my aforementioned interest in psychoanalysis with Siri Hustvedt whose book The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves investigates a seizure the author experiences at a memorial service for her father. Essentially, she can’t stop shaking; her seizures become a more or less recurring phenomenon. She starts looking into reasons why and how she loses control and fearlessly questions both her own psyche as well as the status quo of psychoanalytical and neurological research. What made the book so very gripping for me was that Hustvedt is relentlessly honest with herself, not afraid to look into the abyss that a human being can be, honest and precise in her writing, sharp-witted with every sentence. I’m glad there are still quite a few of her books to explore. [Ed. – I liked her debut, The Blindfold way back in the day.]

Last but not least, a few honorable mentions:

Asako Yuzuki – Butter (German translation by Ursula Gräfe, no English translation yet afaik) [Ed. – Insert that eye emoji thing I’m still not sure I’m using right.]

Taylor Jenkins Reid – The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo (a true page turner if there ever was one, the TikTok kids were right for once) [Ed. — They’re always right]

Ellie Eaton – The Divines (teenagers scare me) [Ed. – So scary]

Yasmina Reza – Serge (German translation by Frank Heibert and Hinrich Schmidt-Henkel, apparently, there’s no English translation yet, which seems weird to me, considering Reza’s critical acclaim)

Dorothy L. Sayers – Gaudy Night (love me a good campus novel)

Helene Schjerfbeck, Lukevat tytöt (Reading Girls), 1907

I could probably name at least twenty more books, but I don’t want to be responsible if y’all break your book buying ban or you never finish your TBR stacks. [Ed. – You clearly do not understand the demographic of this blog’s readership, B…] My reading year 2024 has been off to a good start already and I am excited to tell you about it in a year! [Ed. – Imma hold you to it! Thanks, Benita!]

Nat Leach’s Year in Reading, 2023

Posted on February 3, 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 fifth, is by my longtime friend Nat Leach. Nat is a nineteenth-century scholar turned college administrator who has spent the last 6 years reading the books on his shelves in alphabetical order. He has recently doubled his social media presence by becoming mostly inactive on not one but two platforms, posting occasionally as @gnatleech on Twitter and @gnatleech.bsky.social on Blue Sky.

For reasons not worth going into, 2023 was actually a pretty rotten reading year for me. I read sporadically, finished only 20 books, and only progressed through one letter in my alphabetical reading project, finishing K, and making a brief start on L (so, after 6 years, I’m not even halfway through the alphabet; my 10-year plan, which was originally a 5-year plan, is looking like it will become a 15-year plan). [Ed. – Very Stalinist of you, Nat.] I wasn’t even able to write entries for each book as I went along, as I’ve done in the past, and was considering foregoing my annual post, but Dorian threatened to sue for breach of contract, so here we are. [Ed. – Look, a deal’s a deal. You want the glory, you gotta write the post.]

One meaningful reflection I was able to draw from my year’s reading is a better understanding of why I enjoy reading the way that I do, progressing alphabetically through my shelves rather than making conscious decisions about where my reading should take me. Thomas de Quincey, in a wonderful essay on “Sortilege and Astrology,” explains that he believes in astrology, but not in astrologers; there is indeed a pattern connecting all events in the world, but anyone who claims to know it is a charlatan. And yet, practices such as sortilege (the opening of a book at random and putting one’s finger on a passage as a means of divining the future) entail putting ourselves in the hands of this unknowable force of fate. [Ed. – Ah, finally I have a name for what my students do when I throw out a question in class.] My reading practice is then a kind of sortilege in which I trust that fate will put in my hands the right book at the right time. And very often, as I discovered this year, I’m able to trace out patterns and connections that I may not have been exposed to had I more rigorously organized my reading.

I often found myself reading two books at the same time—books that offered unexpected congruences, and paths leading from one to the other. And thus, since I did not manage to write entries for individual books this year, I present my reading by category, which often means: by categories I would not always have chosen to adopt in advance, but discovered while reading.

Books Written in 1989 that Challenge Canonical Western Conventions of Storytelling: Thomas King – Medicine River and Maxine Hong Kingston – Tripmaster Monkey

A super-specific first category, but these are two very different books. For many years, my office was just around the corner from a poster with a quotation from Thomas King: “the truth about stories is that that’s all we are.” The narrative structure of Medicine River seems to be an illustration of that axiom. Each chapter cuts (in a way that feels very cinematic) between an action in the narrative present and one in the past. We thus gradually learn how the past of the protagonist, Will, shapes the person he’s become in the present. The book also suggests how this is true at a deeper cultural level, referring to significant events in Indigenous history such as the battle of Little Bighorn and the occupation of Wounded Knee, but for the most part the focus is personal and the tone is lightly comic, but also somewhat melancholic.

Kingston’s novel, on the other hand, is much more explicitly disruptive of literary expectations in its use of Chinese legends and stories to revise American literary and cultural norms. The novel’s protagonist is a Chinese-American hippie whose hybrid status is reflected in his name, Wittman Ah Sing (geddit?) and whose life in 1960s San Francisco is inflected with wild imaginings that superimpose figures of Chinese legend onto the American present, culminating with the performance of an extravagant play that ends with a chaotic collapse of the distinction between actor and audience. [Ed. — !] Like King’s novel, we see how stories create, and do not simply reflect, identities.

Kingston’s book segued nicely into the next book I read, Rudyard Kipling’s Kim. At one point, Kingston includes an extensive quotation from Kipling’s narrative of his visit to the United States. In that book, Kipling becomes a spokesperson for a racist past whose perspective persists in the present, a tendency that can certainly be seen in Kim, the story of a boy who gets caught up in the political intrigue of maintaining English power in the Indian sub-continent. It still works as an adventure story, though Kipling’s colonial perspective on India is consistent with the account of the Chinese inhabitants of San Francisco that Kingston critiques.

Holocaust Memoirs and Diaries: Gerda Weissman Klein – All But My Life, Victor Klemperer – I Will Bear Witness 1942-1945, Ruth Kluger – Still Alive

These were sitting next to each other on my alphabetically ordered shelves. I have much less experience with Holocaust texts than Dorian, so I will not pretend to any expertise here, but in the small teaching experience I have had, my approach has been to encourage students to notice differences—the atrocities of the Nazis took many forms, and were experienced differently based on a whole range of factors including location, age, gender et cet.—but also to notice significant similarities and patterns. [Ed. – Nat is too modest: I still use a terrific assignment he designed on the topic of Holocaust diarists.] Each of these texts describes some distinctive aspect of Nazi terror: Klein was part of one of the infamous “death marches,” which she describes more thoroughly than any account I had previously read [Ed. – absolutely agree], Klemperer describes the everyday psychological tortures endured by Jews living in Germany, as well as the horrors of the fire-bombing of Dresden, while Kluger’s account spans a range of locations and forms of violence from Vienna to Theresienstadt to Auschwitz. Looking for patterns, it is evident that each also benefits from a number of timely pieces of good fortune that contribute to their survival: for example, Klein was able to live through most of the war in the relatively protected confines of a weaving factory, Klemperer avoided deportation because his wife was Aryan, and the bombing of Dresden in fact provided him with an opportunity to remove the yellow star from his clothing and escape from the city, and Kluger benefited from timely advice to lie about her age at Auschwitz, and a well-timed decision to escape from a death march. A somewhat more curious parallel is that both Klemperer and Kluger fled to Bavaria, and both would have been in fairly close proximity when the war ended. [Ed. – Good point! A function of how the regime decided to compress this remaining pool of slave labour into a central, contiguous section of the Reich: the Sudetenland, x, y, and Bavaria.] In short, three very different books, with some similar lessons, including an awareness of the very narrow line between survival and destruction.

Classic postmodern novels from when it was still OK to use the word “postmodern”: Robert Kroetsch – The Words of My Roaring, Milan Kundera – The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Yeah, I know it’s cool to dump on the word “postmodern” in our enlightened 21^st century, but I still find it a useful way to speak about texts that reflect on, and engage critically with, their own status as text. Both books use postmodern strategies to explore the construction of individual identity and that of a national past. Kroetsch’s book experiments with the genre of the folk tale, and is narrated by Johnny Backstrom, a political candidate in Alberta during the Depression who promises the voters—all farmers struggling with drought conditions—that it will rain. Kundera’s novel reflects more philosophically on the nature of chance and coincidence (coincidentally all the stuff I wrote about in my introduction) against the backdrop of Czechoslovakia in the Communist era. As with King and Kingston, these are books that think about how stories create identities.

Books set in the 1970’s (but written later): Hanif Kureishi- The Buddha of Suburbia and Rachel Kushner – The Flamethrowers

I was reading these at the same time, and all the ‘70s cultural references kept getting me confused as to which one I was reading. But the easy way to tell the difference was that one of these books harnesses that cultural anxiety/nostalgia in an interesting way, and the other… not so much. Kureishi’s book is great, exploring his familiar territory of cosmopolitan London and the racial and political tensions of the period. It moves deliberately from the idealism of the hippies to the backlash of punk, and ends with the election of “the new Prime Minister,” unnamed but obviously Thatcher, as represented in the striking images at the conclusion of the BBC miniseries. Things would never be the same again…

As for The Flamethrowers, if I were being charitable, I would say that the book wasn’t for me, as I simply didn’t find the subject matter interesting. If I were being uncharitable, I would say that the book cobbles together a whole bunch of supposedly “cool” images and events of the ‘70s just because they are cool, not because they serve any narrative logic. And the author’s Afterword kind of confirms that hypothesis in describing her process of starting with striking images.

Books set against the backdrop of 17^th/18^th century nationalist revolutions: Lady Caroline Lamb – Glenarvon and Giuseppe di Lampedusa – The Leopard

Again, a category that features one very good book, and one very bad book. Lamb’s novel was really written only as an attempt to avenge herself on Lord Byron, with whom she had a scandalous affair before he unceremoniously dumped her. The structure of the novel is bizarre, as the description of the affair between Glenarvon (Byron) and Calantha (Lamb) is sandwiched between a Gothic narrative that seems to make very little sense (the explanation provided at the end doesn’t seem to match with the beginning, but I have no desire to try to figure it all out). And, oh yeah, Glenarvon is made into an Irish patriot leader in the 1798 rebellion. For some reason. [Ed. – Very moody, the Irish. Just like Byron.]

The Leopard, on the other hand, is a fantastic book, often hailed as one of the great historical novels of the 20^th century. What makes it great, I would argue, is that it represents a moment of critical historical change from a multivalent perspective that shows just how complex change is. Don Fabrizio is essentially the last in a long line of Sicilian nobility. His time is coming to an end, he knows that it is coming to an end, and he even recognizes that in some ways it is right that it is coming to an end. But we also see that good things are being lost along with the bad, and that a different form of badness is ascending. In short, Lampedusa shows historical change in all its ambivalence, as well as the conflicting emotions that it gives rise to. [Ed. – I gotta read this again: been far too long.]

Books read for Women in Translation month: Svenja Leiber- The Last Country and Clarice Lispector – Agua Viva

Well, in my case it was Women in Translation two and a half months, but that’s OK. I was hoping that the Leiber book would be the one to break me out of my slump of disliking 21^st century novels, but it was not to be. It hooked me at first, but this is a book with an epic scope (the life of a musician through the vicissitudes of 20^th century Germany) but an episodic structure, which I grew to find infuriating more than anything. The prose also felt very abstract—there were many moments when I honestly couldn’t tell whether a sentence was meant to be literal or metaphorical—but I’m not sure if this was a translation effect or inherent in the original. As for the Lispector, it was my first experience with her, and seemed to me an interesting cross between literary and theoretical prose; she reminded me of nobody more than Maurice Blanchot. Which, if you know me, is a compliment. [Ed. – He’s understating things. That’s like his highest compliment. Well, maybe if he’d said it reminded him of Levinas.]

Books read with the #NYRBWomen23 Group: Eleanor Perenyi – More Was Lost, Elizabeth Taylor – A View of the Harbour

I wish I’d had more time to participate in this wonderful series choreographed by @joiedevivre9 but these were the two that were on my shelves already (and hey, I’m going to get to “P” and “T” eventually, right?). Two very different books, Perenyi’s a non-fictional account of her life and marriage to a Hungarian nobleman before and during World War II, and Taylor’s an account of lives of quiet desperation in an English seaside town. Both excellent. [Ed. – So excellent]

A few classics: Honoré de Balzac – Le Père Goriot, Heinrich von Kleist – The Prince of Homburg, D. H. Lawrence – Sons and Lovers

Kleist’s play (like much of his work) is ahead of his time, a proto-Freudian reflection on dreams, reality, desire and death. This was a re-read for me, and confirmed its greatness.

OK, I haven’t actually finished the Lawrence yet (2 chapters left), but I figured mentioning it would score me points with Dorian. [Ed. – It does. You now have 7,967.] Lawrence’s prose is utterly compelling, and even though I find that most of the characters fall into the literary-critical category of “big idiots,” I am absolutely glued to the book. [Ed. – Ha! Accurate!] I’m also enamored of the fact that the book is set in the area of Derbyshire/Nottinghamshire that my grandparents used to live in, and I recognize many of the places mentioned from visits in my youth. When the characters go to Alfreton or Crich Tower, I internally cheer as if a rock band has just casually mentioned how great it is to be in <insert your city here>.

Saving the best for last, I started the Balzac shortly after joining Twitter some 6 years ago, and read it in French, which made it slow going for me. Appropriate then, that I finally finished it in 2023, the year of Twitter’s demise (or whatever you want to call the transformation it has undergone). In any case, this is such a wonderful book about the perils and temptations of society and money, and the challenges of maintaining a moral compass in the face of them. Apparently, I now have a whole lot of Balzac that I’m going to need to read. [Ed. – Hell yeah lfg!!!!!]

That’s about it. Will 2024 be a better year? Who knows how far I’ll get through the L shelf, and who knows how long it’ll take to get through that monstrously large stack of M’s (now is the time that joining those recent group reads of The Balkan Trilogy, The Levant Trilogy, Moby Dick, and The Man Without Qualities is really going to pay off!). But with Nella Larsen, Margaret Laurence and Ursula Le Guin among the next authors on my list, I am guaranteed some treats in the coming year. [Ed. – You sure are. Thanks as always, Nat.]

James Morrison’s Year in Reading, 2023

Posted on January 27, 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. Kicking things off is the one and only James Morrison, back for his third installment. James lives and works in Adelaide, Australia, on unceded Kaurna Country. For many years he has written about book design as the Caustic Cover Critic. He has too many books. He’s online at @Unwise_Trousers (Twitter) or @causticcovercritic.bsky.social (Bluesky). His first novel, Gibbons, or One Bloody Thing After Another, was published in 2023 by Orbis Tertius Press.

***‘Tonight too / does my woman’s pitch-black hair / trail upon the floor / where she sleeps without me?’***
***Masayuki Miyata***

[We push through the crowded train station and step up into the carriage, compulsively checking you have your ticket several times in the process. You find a seat and open your mouth to speak, but I suddenly launch into a monologue.]

So, yes, it was a tremendously crappy year, both personally and globally, but at least I got some books read. Indeed, that’s pretty much all I did. I scythed through 296 books, and only a few of them were terrible, so that’s some sort of achievement right there. Right? Right??? [Ed. – Holy shit yes.]

DENSE SLICES OF TIME

Two of the most fascinating non-fiction books I read this year both took the same approach—densely researched group portraits of the lives of interconnected writers and artists over the period of a month or so—applied to two very different eras. Alethea Hayter’s A Sultry Month (1965) covers the world of literary London in June 1846, from Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett planning their elopement to Jane and Thomas Carlyle driving each other round the bend, all joined together by the last acts of now-forgotten artist Benjamin Robert Haydon as he prepares his suicide. Uwe Wittstock’s February 1933: The Winter of Literature, translated by Daniel Bowles (2021/23), uses the same close focus on the writers, filmmakers, dancers and actors of Germany in the first month of Hitler’s power, from Joseph Roth wisely fleeing, via Thomas Mann being unbelievably naïve, to Gottfried Benn enthusiastically Nazifying himself. It’s chilling and depressing in equal measures, what with [points helplessly at everything]. [Ed. – *nods glumly *]

As a pendant to the Wittstock, Lion Feuchtwanger’s The Oppermanns (1933), translated by James Cleugh, is hard to beat, detailing the rise of the Nazis through the story of a successful Jewish Berlin family. Written when the events it details were still ongoing, and with much worse to come, it is a perceptive and still timely book. [Ed. – Amen]

***From ‘The adventures of Sindbad’***
***Leon Carre***

AUSTRALIANS

It’s wonderful to have been one of the many readers who finally got hold of the books of Jen Craig this year, and fell in love with them. Intensely, almost claustrophobically, looping narratives of communication breakdowns, troublesome families, injuries, art, eating disorders, and the irritation of being named Jenny Craig when that’s the name of the country’s most famous dieting pyramid scheme. The experience of reading each book—Since the Accident (2013) and Panthers and the Museum of Fire (2015)—is something like peering closely at the back of an incredibly detailed tapestry, trying to guess at the structure, and then with the last few pages suddenly flipping it over to discover a masterpiece. I also read her third novel, Wall (2023), but that was earlier this month so just imagine me saying something similar in 12 months about that.

Susan McCreery’s All the Unloved (2023) is a wonderful novella about the inhabitants of a block of flats in 1990s beachside Sydney, centred on a teenaged girl’s coming of age. Amanda Lohrey’s Vertigo (2009) is another small gem, the story of a traumatised couple fleeing to a new home on the rural coast, and ending in bushfire and terror, told in an engagingly odd way. The two most recent collections of Greg Egan’s short stories, Instantiation (2020) and Sleep and the Soul (2023), demonstrate with impressive depth just why he is widely regarded as one of the world’s best science-fiction writers, especially at this length—story after story will use an amazing idea that a lesser writer would spend a 1200p trilogy on, and then move on to something else even more mind-boggling in just a couple of dozen pages.

Adam Ouston’s Waypoints (2022) is a splendid example of one of my favourite genres of book—an obsessive monologue by an unreliable narrator, in this case somewhat pinned to reality through the disappearance of airliner MH370 in 2014 and Harry Houdini’s attempts to be the first person to fly an airplane over Australia in 1910. Finally, Tommi Parrish’s newest graphic novel, Men I Trust (2023), is a drably beautiful exploration of parasitic friendship, and I really am trying to get over the fact that they mistakenly include a Walmart in an Australian setting. [Ed. – Oh I just picked this up—had no idea it was Australian!]

[The conductor passes down the corridor, bellowing in a monotone. “This train is about to depart, all visitors please leave! Ticketholders only!” A small, relieved smile passes over your face as I step down from the carriage onto the platform, still talking.]

HUNGARIANS

Anyone who has read one of my year-in-readings before knows how I go on about the Hungarians. And here I am doing it again. The best Hungarian literature I read this year was Magda Szabó’s The Fawn (1959/2023), translated by Len Rix, the story of the career and personal life of increasingly enraged actress through Hungary’s tumultuous mid-twentieth Century. Spadework for a Palace by László Krasznahorkai (2018/2022), translated by John Batki, is another tremendous example of the obsessive monologue/unreliable narrator mentioned above. And Ágota Kristóf’s Yesterday (1995/2019), translated by David Watson, was sadly the last book of hers I had left unread: an illegitimate small-town child flees his past by moving to the city, but the reappearance of his now-married childhood love throws everything into chaos.

OUTER SPACE, INNER SPACE

Samantha Harvey’s Orbital was just my cup of tea, a quiet and thoughtful 24-hour slice of the lives of six people at work, where said work is in the International Space Station in its final days. In Ascension by Martin MacInnes goes further afield, from the ocean depths to the Oort Cloud, in search of First Contact, strange dreams, and the dawn of life. I loved it, but not unreservedly—there were occasional weird glitches, like MacInnes’s childlike idea that as you travel through the Solar System you pass the planets one by one in a neat line, the way they are drawn in a kids’ encyclopaedia. [Ed. – Wait, that’s not what they’re like???]

The This (2022) by the always interesting, and ludicrously underrated, Adam Roberts, is a hugely entertaining extrapolation from the near into the far future, taking us from the Next Big Thing in social media to humanity as a hive mind. And an end-of-year treat was the new collection Selected Nonfiction 1962-2007 (2023) by J. G. Ballard, a chunky and tremendously entertaining mix of reviews, articles, memoirs, lists and rants.

[The train begins to move, very slowly at first. I’m standing at your carriage window, still talking, and I begin to walk along the platform, keeping pace with the train. You glance at your fellow passengers, blushing.] [Ed. – Ugh shit like this is sooo embarrassing… What a weirdo right I don’t even know that guy!]

ENDS

There were lots of excellent cataclysms in this year’s reading. How I’d taken this long to read David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress is both mysterious and an indictment on me, but this beautiful book from the point of view of possibly the last woman on Earth is full of gorgeous writing and vivid images. [Ed. – Is she thrilled to be free of bros at long last?] I absolutely loved it. I also loved Oana Aristide’s Under the Blue, a particularly well-done plague-and-after novel, so I was very sad to get in a fight and end up blocking the author online because of her being an anti-trans bigot. Why are authors all so unpleasant?

Pink Slime (2020/2023) is an Uruguayan novel of toxic miasma and slow societal collapse by Fernanda Trías, translated by Heather Cleary, another weird case of a book being written pre-COVID that foreshadows and refracts the weirdness we all then went through. Rebecca Campbell’s Arboreality (2022) is a Canadian novel in stories that takes us further and further into our future of rising waters and collapsing ecosystems, offering no cheap false hope but still providing a glimpse of something worth being alive for. [Ed. – I keep hearing about this book. Gotta check that out.]

And turning from global to personal cataclysm, there was Lorrie Moore’s I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home (2023), where one of the two main characters is very, very dead. But readers of Anagrams will know well that a character doesn’t have to exist for them to be vividly, hilariously rendered by Moore.

STORIES

There were so many resurrections and collections of great short story writers this year. Among the best were Rattlebone (1994) by Maxine Clair and Lover Man (1959) by Alston Anderson, both beautifully observed interconnected collections about Black American communities. No Love Lost (2023) collects the incredible novellas of Rachel Ingalls, and if there’s a richer, stranger book than this out there, send it to me now!

Jean Stafford’s Children Are Bored on Sunday (1945) is as brilliant as the title promises. [Ed. – Great fucking title.] I also read her novel The Mountain Lion (1947), and fucking hell could she write. Weird misfit children, unhappy loves, badly behaved artists. Have at it!

Tessa Yang’s The Runaway Restaurant (2022) and Madeline Cash’s Earth Angel (2023) were two of the best new story collections I came across this year. Both are peculiar and fizzing with ideas, completely happy to depart reality for the depths of weirdness at the drop of a hat, and very moving—imagine George Saunders if he was actually as good as everyone thinks he is. [Ed. – Heh, you’re not wrong, James…]

And then there was The Collected Works of Jo Ann Beard (2023), which was an absolute revelation. Stories, autofiction, memoir, reportage, not of it conventional, all of it astonishing in its quality and death-haunted eccentric brilliance.

[The train accelerates. You try to pretend the man running along at the window, now bellowing, has nothing to do with you. Not paying attention to where I’m going, I run full-tilt into a metal bin with a resounding clang.] [Ed. — *snort *]

***‘Nature Takes Over’***
***Thomas Strogalski***

RANDOM OTHERS

Some books you just can’t shoehorn awkwardly into a category, and there are still too many good ones left to mention. In brief:

Elspeth Barker’s O Caledonia (1991) pairs perfectly with The Mountain Lion, a black comedy about a strange and unloved daughter.

James Hannaham’s Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta (2022) is a delicious exercise in capturing a voice, in which a trans woman gets out of prison and tries to reconnect with her family and normal life.

Szilvia Molnar’s The Nursery (2023) is an unnerving and convincing novel of fear-of-everything from the point-of-view of a new mother.

Nigel Balchin’s Simple Life (1935) starts off like a mild comedy mocking get-back-to-the-land types, but quickly turns into a fascinating and alarming study of a fraught ménage à trois in a cottage in the middle of nowhere.

And finally, the complete Diaries of Franz Kafka, translated by Ross Benjamin (2023): a monolith of a book, a treasure trove, a heartbreaking testament.

***From ‘L’Ange’***
***Patrick Bokanowski***

[You glance back, caught between relief and embarrassment, as I leap to my feet and charge like a maniac after the repeating train, still yelling. Then I reach the end of the platform and plunge into the shrubbery, vanishing from sight. You exhale, and pull out your book to start reading in blessed peace.] [Ed. – Not true, I’d do almost anything to spend a train ride talking books with you, James!]

My Year in Reading, 2023

Posted on January 22, 2024 by Dorian Stuber under book review, lists, review, Uncategorized, year in review

I wouldn’t say I had a great reading year. I was on my phone too much, I was being anguished or avoiding being anguished about the myriad injustices of the world, which I knew too much and could do too little about. I travelled—maybe not too much but an awful lot, for me—which was often energizing and enjoyable, but also got in the way of reading.

I felt, in other words, that I had frittered away my one wild and precious reading life. I bottomed out in the middle of the year, regularly tossing aside books unfinished after having spent more time with them than they deserved or that I could find patience for. A querulous reading year, you could say.

And yet some things stood out. Links to previous posts, if I managed to write about it.

Henri Fantin-Latour, Le coin de la table (1872)

Dwyer Murphy, The Stolen Coast

A rare heist novel where the heist, though satisfying, isn’t the main attraction. I loved this stylish, smart, funny tale of a man who has put his Ivy League law degree to use in taking over the family business: giving new identities to guys on the run and getting them the hell over the border. A great book of off-season resort towns.

Simon Jimenez, The Vanished Birds

I’m still getting my bearing in contemporary sff so take these comments for what they’re worth, but it seems rare to me that a book takes as many swerves as this one: the narrative moves back and forward in time and all over the place, from a near-future nearly uninhabitable earth to a galaxy far-away in space and time. You get invested in a storyline and then it ends but sometimes it comes back. But even more than the structure I loved this book for its emotional seriousness: its many relationships are doomed to fail because of their constitutive circumstances. For example: a man ages fifteen years between each meeting with his beloved, while she, thanks to intricacies of stellar time travel, has only aged a few months. The emotions might be bigger than the ideas, but I was totally okay with that.

Two novels by Katherena Vermette

One of the greatest working Canadian writers. This year, fresh off the thrill of teaching The Break to smart, appreciative students, I read The Strangers and The Circle, a bleak and beautiful trilogy of indigenous life in the aftermath of the cultural trauma of the residential school system.

Four novels by Kent Haruf

It should tell you something that in early April, one of the worst times in the academic year, I read four novels by Kent Haruf in just over a week. I loved Plainsong the most but enjoyed Eventide, Benediction, and Ours Souls at Night almost as much. Easy reading, sure: plain syntax rising to gentle arias, nothing fancy, maybe a little sentimental. But these books are so warm and kind. Each is set in Holt, Colorado, out on the eastern plains, where the mountains are a smudge on the western horizon and it’s sometimes hot and sometimes cold but always dry. The people are ranchers and school teachers and social workers and hardware store owners and ne’er-do-wells and retirees. Everyone is white and no one thinks that’s worth noticing. The time is hard to pin down. Sometimes I thought the 70s or early 80s but we’re probably talking the 90s. Things were different before the internet. The characters’ lives are modest and they seem fine with that. They go about their business, do their work, make good choices and bad ones. People look out for each other, but they judge each other, too. Little kids get lost biking, but they come home again. It’s not all roses, though. High school boys bully girls into having sex, over in that abandoned house just down from where the math teacher lives. People get sick, go hungry, lose jobs. Some characters get what the preacher will call a good death, some die unreconciled to their kin, some without warning, too soon. Life just keeps happening, you know?

Some readers will call this hokum, but I ate it up. Haruf won my heart. I thought him especially good on second chances and unexpected turns of fate. Of all the stories that weave through these loosely connected novels, the best concerns two brothers, old bachelors, ranchers, who agree to take in a pregnant teenage girl and who, to everyone’s surprise, not least their own, form a new family with her. That scene where they take into the next town over to get things for the baby and insist on buying the best crib in the store? Magic.

Garth Greenwell, Cleanness

Smart, sexy, stylish books about how we relate to bodies privately and publically, and whether we can recast the narratives that have shaped aka deformed our understanding of what it is to live in those bodies. Greenwell’s Substack is worth subscribing too; he makes me curious about whatever he’s curious about. Can’t wait for the essay collection he’s writing.

Emeric Pressburger, The Glass Pearls

Yep, that Pressburger. Closer to Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom than any of the (indelible) films they made together. Karl Braun, a German émigré, arrives at a boarding house in Pimlico on a summer morning in 1965. A piano tuner who never misses a concert, a cultured man, a fine suitor for the English girl he meets through work. I’m not spoiling anything to say that Karl isn’t just quiet: he’s haunted—and hunted. For Karl Braun is really Otto Reitmüller, a former Nazi doctor who performed terrible experiments, a past he does not regret even as he mourns the death of his wife and child in the Hamburg air raids. Now the noose is tightening and Otto/Karl goes on the run… Suspenseful stuff; most interesting in this play with our sympathies. Not that we cheer for the man. But his present raises our blood pressure as much as his past.

Toni Morrison, A Mercy

A short book that covers as much ground as an epic; a historical novel that feels true to the differences of the past but that is clearly about the present; a classic modernist Morrison text, where the first page tells you everything that’s going to happen except that it makes no sense at the time and the rest of the reading experience clarifies, expands, revises. Such beauty and mystery in so few pages.

Roy Jacobsen’s Barrøy series (Translated by Don Bartlett and Don Shaw)

Cheating a bit since I read the first one in December 2022. I’m a huge fan of these novels about a family and the remote Norwegian island they call home from 1900 to 1950. I like books where people do things with their hands, maybe because I can’t do much with mine. The characters bring sheep into the upper field, fish with nets and line, salt cod, keep the stove burning all through the year, row through a storm, carry an unconscious man through sleet. It’s all a little nostalgic, a little sentimental, but not too much. Just how I like it.

Two Books by Walter Kempowski (Translated, respectively, by Michael Lipkin and Anthea Bell)

Fresh on my mind so it’s possible I’ve overvalued them but I don’t think so. All for Nothing, especially, is something special.

George Eliot, Middlemarch

Last read in college—under the expert tutelage of Rohan Maitzen, this can only be called one of the highlights of my undergraduate experience. This time I listened to Juliet Stevenson’s recording, which perfectly filled a semester’s commuting. True, Arkansas traffic is not the ideal venue for some of Eliot’s more complex formulations, but Stevenson (as much a genius as everyone says, she do the police in different voices, etc.) clarifies the novel’s elegant syntax and famous images. The book’s the same, but I’m not; a whole new experience this time around. Much funnier, especially its early sections. (Celia is a triumph.) More filled with surprising events: that whole Laure episode (a Wilkie Collins novel in miniature), it was as if I’d never read it. And more heartbreaking: in 1997, I hated Rosamond, and I admit I still felt for Lydgate this time around, but I had so much sympathy for her, a character I’d only been able to see as grasping and venal. Speaking of sympathy, one of the glories of English literature lies in watching Dorothea as she matures from excitable near-prig to wiser and sadder philanthropist. Amidst all this change, though, some things stayed the same. Mary Garth still won my heart; the suspense at the reading of Featherstone’s will gripped me just as much.

It’s good to read Middlemarch in college. It’s better to re-read Middlemarch in middle age. It’s best to read Middlemarch early and often.

Konstantin Paustovsky, The Story of a Life (translated by Douglas Smith)

Six-volume autobiography of Soviet writer and war correspondent Paustovsky, a Moscow-born, Ukrainian-raised enthusiast of the Revolution who somehow made it through Stalinism to become a feted figure of the 1960s. The new edition from NYRB Classics contains the first three volumes. I only read the first two, not because I didn’t enjoy them (I loved them) but because I set the book down to read something else and the next thing I knew it was a year later. Paustovsky had something of a charmed life. His childhood was largely downwardly mobile, and he lived through so much terror and upheaval. And yet he always seems to have landed on his feet. Maybe as a result—of maybe as a cause—he looks at the world with appreciation. He can sketch a memorable character in a few lines. He writes as well about ephemera (lilacs in bloom) as about terror (I won’t soon forget his time as an orderly on an undersupplied hospital train in WWI). He can do old-world extravagance (the opening scene is about a desperate carriage ride across a river raging in spate to the otherwise inaccessible island where his grandfather lies dying) and the brittle glamour of the modern (for a while he drives a tram in Moscow). Trevor Barrett, of Mookse & Gripes fame, said it best: Paustovsky is good company. I really ought to read that third book.

Félix Vallotton, Still Life with Flowers, 1925

A few other categories:

Didn’t quite make the top, but such pleasurable reading experiences: Adania Shibli, Minor Detail; Paulette Jiles, Chenneville; Abdulrazek Gurnah, By the Sea; Jamil Jan Kochai, The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories (teaching “Return to Sender” was a revelation: fascinating how even students who had seemed immune to literature shook themselves awake for this one).

Read with dread and mounting desperation, don’t get me wrong it’s a banger, but couldn’t in good conscience call it a pleasure to read: Ann Petry, The Street. Barry Jenkins adaptation when?

Maybe not standouts, but totally enjoyable: Margaret Drabble, The Millstone; K Patrick, Mrs. S; Yiyun Li, The Vagrants; Elif Batuman, Either/Or

Best dip into the Can-con vaults: Margaret Laurence, The Stone Angel. Got more about of this now than I did in high school, lemme tell you.

Best book by a friend: James Morrison, Gibbons or One Bloody Thing After Another: Not damning by faint praise. It’s terrific!

Book the excellence of which is confirmed by having taught it: Bryan Washington, Lot. Maybe the great Houston book. I get that novels sell but I wish he’d write more stories.

Grim, do not recommend: Larry McMurtry, Horseman, Pass By; Girogio Bassani, The Heron

Not for me: Jenny Offill, Weather; Annie Ernaux, Happening; Yiyun Li, The Book of Goose

Planned on loving it, but couldn’t quite get there: Julia Armfield, Our Wives Under the Sea. Sold as metaphysical body horror, this novel about a woman who goes to pieces when her wife returns from an undersea voyage gone catastrophically wrong as a kind of sea creature didn’t give me enough of the metaphysics or the horror. I figured it would be perfect for my course Bodies in Trouble but I couldn’t find my way to assigning it. Possibly a mistake: teaching it might have revealed the things I’d missed. Gonna trust my instincts on this one, tho.

The year in crime (or adjacent) fiction:

Disappointments: new ones from Garry Disher, Walter Mosley, and S. A. Cosby (this last was decent, but not IMO the triumph so many others deemed it; he’s a force, but I prefer his earlier stuff).

Standouts: Celia Dale, A Helping Hand: evil and delightful, can’t wait to read more Dale; Lawrence Osborne, On Java Road: moody, underappreciated; Christine Mangan, The Continental Affair: moody, underappreciated; Allison Montclair, The Right Sort of Man: fun; Joseph Hansen: wonderful to have the Dave Brandsetter books back in print, hope to get to more in 2024; Richard Osman: as charming, funny, and moving as everyone says.

Maigrets: Of the six I read this year, I liked Maigret and the Tramp best. Unexpectedly humane.

Giants: Two Japanese crime novels towered above the rest this year. I didn’t write about volume 2 of Kaoru Takamura’s Lady Joker (translated by Marie Iida and Allison Markin Powell) but maybe my thoughts on volume 1 will give you a sense. Do you need a 1000+ page book in which a strip of tape on a telephone poll plays a key role? Yes, yes you do. (Also, it has one of the most satisfying endings of any crime novel I’ve ever read.) More on Hideo Yokoyama’s Six Four (translated by Jonathan Lloyd-Davies) here. Do you need an 800+ page book in which phone booths play a key role? Yes, yes you do.

The year in horror:

Victor LaValle, Lone Woman: horror Western with a Black female lead and not-so-metaphorical demon, enjoyable if a bit forgettable; Jessica Johns, Bad Cree: standout Indigenous tale, also with demons; Leigh Bardugo, Hell Bent: serious middle-volume-of-trilogy syndrome. Many demons, tho.

The year in sff:

In addition to Simon Jimenez, I liked Ann Leckie’s Translation State, Nick Harkaway’s Titanium Noir, and, above all, the three novels by Guy Gavriel Kay I read this summer, which gave me so much joy and which I still think about all the time.

The year in poetry:

Well, I read some, so that’s already a change. Only two collections, but both great: Wisława Szymborska’s Map: Collected and Last Poems (Translated by Clare Cavanaugh and Stanislaw Baranczak), filled with joy and sadness and wit, these poems made a big impression, and Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic (fortunate to have met him, a mensch; even more fortunate to have heard his indelible performance).

The year in German books: I read two, liked them both. Helga Schubert, Vom Aufstehen: Ein Leben in Geschichten (On Getting Up: A Life in Stories), vignettes by an octogenarian former East German psychotherapist who had fallen into oblivion until this book hit a nerve, most impressive for the depiction of her relationship to her mother, which reminded me of the one shared by Ruth Kluger in her memoir; Dana Vowinckel, Gewässer im Ziplock (Liquids go in a Ziplock Bag): buzzy novel from a young Jewish writer that flits between Berlin, Jerusalem, and Chicago. The American scenes failed to convince me, and the whole thing now feels like an artefact from another time, given November 7 and its aftermath. I gulped it down on the plan ride home, though. Could imagine it getting translated.

Everyone loved it; what’s wrong with me? (literary fiction edition):

Made it about 200 pages into Elsa Morante’s 800-page Lies and Sorcery, newly translated by Jenny McPhee. Some of those pages I read raptly. Others I pushed through exhaustedly. And then I just… stopped. The publisher says it’s a book “in the grand tradition of Stendhal, Tolstoy, and Proust,” and I love those writers. (Well, I’ve yet to read Stendahl, but based on my feelings for the other two I’m sure I’ll love him too.) Seemed like my social media feeds were filled with people losing it over this book. Increasingly, I see that—for me, no universal judgment here—such arias of praise do more harm than good; I experience them as exhortations, even demands that just make me feel bad or inadequate. Increasingly, too, I realize how little mental energy I have for even mildly demanding books during the semester. (A problem, since that’s ¾ of the year…) I might love this book in other circumstances —I plan to find out.

Everyone loved it; what’s wrong with me? (genre edition):

Billed as True Grit set on Mars in alternate version of the 1930s, Nathan Ballingrud’s The Strange indeed features a young female protagonist on a quest to avenge the destruction of her family, but Ballingrud is no Portis when it comes to voice. True, I was in the deepest, grumpiest depths of my slough of despondent reading when I gave this a try, so I wasn’t doing it any favours. But that’s a nope from me.

Other failures:

Mine, not the books. Once again, I read the first hundred or so pages of Anniversaries. It’s terrific. Why can’t I stick with it? I read even more hundreds of pages of Joseph and His Brothers, as part of a wonderful group of smart readers, most of whom made it to the end of Thomas Mann’s 1500-page tetralogy. I loved the beginning: fascinating to see Mann’s take on the stories of Genesis; interesting to speculate on why Mann would write about this subject at that time. (For me, Mann is in dialogue with Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, another oblique response to fascism through stories from Torah.) My friends tell me it got a lot more boring shortly after I left off (the end of volume 2), but that’s not why I gave up. Turns out, I don’t do well if I’m supposed to read something in regular, little bits. I need to tear into books—and I wasn’t willing to make the time for this chunkster. Sorry, guys.

Odds & Ends:

A few albums that stood out: Roy Brooks, Understanding (reissued in 2022, but I’m not over it: this quintet, man, unfuckingbelievable); Taylor Swift, Midnights (I love her, haters go away); Sitkovetsky Trio, Beethoven’s Piano Trios [volume 2] (a late addition, but pretty much listened to it nonstop in December and now January).

After a decade hiatus, I started watching movies again. Might do more of that this year!

I was lucky enough to travel to Germany in late spring with a wonderful set of students. While there, I met so many people from German Book Twitter who have become important to me, including the group chat that got me through covid and beyond. (Anja and Jules, y’all are the best.) All these folks were lovely and generous, but I want to give special thanks to Till Raether and his (extremely tolerant) family, who took me in and showed me around Hamburg. (Great town!) Have you ever met someone you hardly know only to realize they are in fact a soulmate? That’s Till for me. What a mensch. Cross fingers his books make it into English soon. In the meantime, follow him on the socials!

Reading plans for 2024? None! I need fewer plans. I can’t read that way, turns out, and maybe I’ll avoid disappointment by committing less. Gonna be plenty of other disappointments this year, I figure. No need to add any self-inflicted ones. At the end of last year, I joined a bunch of groups and readalongs, because I want to hang with all the cool kids, but I can already see I need to extricate myself from most of them. One good thing I did for myself in 2023, though, was to stop counting how many books I read. I was paying too much attention to that number. Fewer statistics in 2024!

Piet Mondrian, Oranges and Decorated Plate, 1900

Finally, to everyone who’s read the blog, left a comment or a like, and generally supported my little enterprise (which turns 10 in a week or two…), my heartfelt. I do not know many readers in real life. You all are a lifeline.

What I Read, September 2023

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

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

Dwyer Murphy, The Stolen Coast (2023)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yiyun Li, The Book of Goose (2022)

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

Christine Mangan, The Continental Affair (2023)

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

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

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

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

Simon Jimenez, The Vanished Birds (2020)

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

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

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

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

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

Garth Greenwell, Cleanness (2020)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joseph Hansen, Troublemaker (1975)

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

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

David Brintzenhofe Applying Makeup (II) (1982)

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

What I Read, October 2023

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

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

Tom Thompson, Silver Birches (1915 – 16)

Paulette Jiles, Chenneville (2023)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A miracle that’s lost on us:

the hand actually has fewer than six fingers

but still it’s got more than four.

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

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

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

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

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

Allison Montclair, The Right Sort of Man (2019)

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

Prime light reading.

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

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

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

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

Billy-Ray Belcourt, A Minor Chorus (2022)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Holly Watt, To the Lions (2019)

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

Mary McCarthy, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957)

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

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

	Dorian Stuber on On Miaow
	Elle on On Miaow
	Tredynas Days on On Miaow
	On Miaow \| Eiger, Mö… on What I Read, May 2024
	banff1972 on A Shelf of Promises: My Starte…

	Dorian Stuber on On Miaow
	Elle on On Miaow
	Tredynas Days on On Miaow
	On Miaow \| Eiger, Mö… on What I Read, May 2024
	banff1972 on A Shelf of Promises: My Starte…

Eiger, Mönch & Jungfrau

Mountains of Books

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