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?

What I Read, August 2023

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

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

Nothing for it but to stay inside and read.

Helen Dunmore, A Spell of Winter (1995)

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

Elizabeth Jane Howard, Something in Disguise (1969)

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

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

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

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

Jessica Johns, Bad Cree (2023)

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

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

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

K. Patrick, Mrs. S (2023)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Garry Disher, Day’s End (2022)

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

Ann Leckie, Translation State (2023)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yiyun Li, The Vagrants (2009)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fun reading month! See anything you like here?

What I Read, July 2023

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Margaret Drabble, The Millstone (1965)

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

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

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

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

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

A pleasant surprise—more Drabble is in my future.

Guy Gavriel Kay, A Brightness Long Ago (2019)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What I Read, June 2023

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

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

Robert Longo, Study of Greenland Iceberg, 2020

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

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

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

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

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

Susanna Moore, The Lost Wife (2023)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Katherena Vermette, The Strangers (2021)

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

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

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

Richard Osman, The Thursday Murder Club (2020)

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

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

Richard Osman, The Man Who Died Twice (2021)

Just as good as the first. Ibrahim forever!

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

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

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

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

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

Larry McMurtry, Horseman, Pass By (1961)

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

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

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

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

Robert Longo, Untitled (The Crown), 2021

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

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