What a terrific month! Yes, the first ten days were busy: bringing the semester to a close; dealing with the fallout of the lousy previous months; celebrating with our graduates. But then the pace shifted entirely. Amazing how much better I feel when I exercise regularly, eat better, sleep well, and sit on the back deck with a fantasy novel for an hour just because.
It occurred to me recently that in my moaning about last month I forgot something amazing. The eclipse! Little Rock in the totality for something like two and a half minutes, and the experience was as incredible as everyone said it would be. How lucky to simply walk down the block to an open space for an incredible view of the thing. How amazing that people in our neighbourhood (who normally never have anything to say to each other) were out and about, portable lawn chairs and to go cups in hand. Strong school’s out for summer vibes. 10/10, absolutely recommend.
Here are the books I read:
Franz Marc, Two Women on the Hillside, 1906
Arnaldur Indridason, The Darkness Knows (2017) Trans. Victoria Cribb (2021)
In wintery Iceland, retired cop Konrad is pulled into an ongoing investigation that to his surprise helps him learn more about the mysterious death of his father.
Arnaldur Indridason, The Girl by the Bridge (2018) Trans. Philip Roughton (2023)
In summery Iceland, retired cop Konrad is pulled into an ongoing investigation that to his surprise helps him learn more about the mysterious death of his father.
Look, sometimes you need to read something as undemanding as possible.
Guy Gavriel Kay, Lord of Emperors (2000)
Longer and even more satisfying sequel to Sailing to Sarantium, which I read a few months ago. This will sound weird, but I get the same feeling reading Kay as I do watching David Simon shows: intense investment on my part in the characters, sighs of bittersweet pleasure when things come to a close. Like its predecessor, Lord of Emperors is modelled on Byzantium under Justinian and Theodora. The mosaicist hero of the first volume—summoned to Sarantium to tile a version of the Hagia Sophia—is joined in this book by a doctor from lands to the east. Political upheaval leads to changing religious and artistic standards; the eventual fall of the Empire is hinted at. (Kay develops this unthinkable outcome in his more recent books.) There’s an exciting chariot race, too.
Christine Lai, Landscapes (2023)
Matt Keeley calls this the Sebaldian country house novel you didn’t know you needed. Which is a good description. Set in England in the near-future in an isolated house among desiccated fields and dead woods, Landscapes centers on an art historian who is first brought to the house by one of a pair of wealthy brothers only to flee from his violence into the arms of the other. Lai’s world-building won’t win any awards—it’s clearly not what she’s most interested in, though her description of literal zones of climate-controlled safety around city centers and other wealthy enclaves feels all-too plausible—and her characterization is uneven. (The only vivid character is the empty, preening, vain cruel brother.) But the book had me thinking anew about the role of art in an era of climate catastrophe and the Benjaminian claim that every document of culture is also a document of barbarism.
Megan Abbott, Beware the Woman (2023)
My first Abbott, unaccountably. But not my last.
Thriller with a side of body horror about a pregnant woman who accompanies her husband to his family’s summer place in Michigan’s upper peninsula for the first time. Plenty of Gothic accoutrements: kindly father, a former doctor still grieving his wife’s death decades ago, who might not be what he seems; mysterious housekeeper; isolated home. Abbott excels at creating menace, unease, and doubt. A story about what men will do to control women’s bodies: very much of our time.
Perfect reading for the first hot Sunday of the summer.
Émile Zola, La Bête Humaine (1890) Trans. Roger Pearson (1996)
“Too many trains, too many murders,” an early critic wrote, preposterously, of this terrific late novel in Zola’s Rougon-Macquart cycle. As if a book could have too much of either!
Although I still have plenty of Zola ahead of me—I’ve read about half of the RMs now—I’m willing to say that this is the most Zola-esque Zola of all. The train system, with its switches, branches, tunnels, wheelhouses, and miles of track, is the perfect metaphor for the books’ obsession with the interconnected systems and institutions of Second Empire France, especially because it affords new expressions of crime, sexual desire, and violence.
Reading La Bête Humaine, I was reminded of the opening of Peter Brooks’s argument that sight is the realist sense par excellence; of the many descriptive set pieces in this novel, Zola’s favourites seem to be the ones depicting the railyards of the Gare St Lazare as seen from the balcony of an apartment building inhabited by railway workers. In the opening scene a railyard supervisor named Roubaud awaits the return of his wife, Séverine, in a borrowed apartment in that building. She’s been shopping while he’s been getting a dressing down from his superior, a pickle he escapes thanks to the influence of a man named Grandmorin, a former judge who is on the board of the railway and has taken Roubaud on as a protégé because of his fondness for/guilt toward Séverine, whom he knew as a child. What promises to be a cozy tête-à-tête between newlyweds turns ugly, when a change remark by Séverine’s reveals that the judge had sexually abused her for years. Roubaud sees red and after nearly throttling his wife immediately plots to kill the judge, forcing Séverine to send the man a note asking him to meet her in a private car on the evening train to Rouen. This violence unfolds against a backdrop of gaiety and hilarity rising from the apartment below, where two sisters run a non-stop party of singing, dancing, and drinking.
Over the course of four-hundred increasingly intense pages—filled with one sensational, over-the-top scene after another—Zola builds to an indelible ending in which the strains of violence, misogyny, wounded male pride, hilarity, and excess that are already present in the beginning return in reconfigured form: a runaway train, its driver and fireman thrown off after a terrible fight, filled with drunken, bawling recruits headed to the front of what will be the disastrous Franco-Prussian War, hurtles unchecked and to certain disaster under a full head of steam.
I couldn’t get enough of the novel’s proto-Freudian and phrenological-criminological-eugenicist ways of thinking about human behavior. The other main character—the connection to the Rougon-Mcquart family—is the train driver Jacques Lantier (whose mother and brothers appear in The Assommoir, The Masterpiece, and Germinal, respectively), who literally sees red when he is aroused by a woman, wanting only to dismember her. (A long time ago I saw the Renoir film—though I remembered almost nothing; it must be so different from the book—and I could only picture Lantier as Jean Gabin, which is unfortunate because he’s much more like Peter Lorre.) And lest I make it sound like this is a book about men, that’s only partly true. In addition to Séverine, there are two other terrific female characters. The one who broke my heart was Flore, an operator at an isolated railway crossing, and whose unrequited love for her cousin Lantier leads to a disastrous outcome.
I could say a lot more about this book. Check out our conversation at One Bright Book to hear more. And speaking of more, I feel compelled to read more Rougon-Maquart before long. Summer of Zola, anyone?
Karl Ove Knausgaard, The Morning Star (2020) Trans. Martin Aitken (2021)
The reason I so seldom follow through on reading plans like the one I just suggested is that I just cannot stop from being distracted by unexpected things that come my way. I’d been paying even more attention than usual to Brandon Taylor’s reading because he’s been championing Zola lately. So when he tweeted repeatedly about this latest series from Knausgaard, I thought maybe I should investigate. I hadn’t paid any attention to this, other than to vaguely note Jeez, that Norwegian guy has another set of books. If I expected anything it was that the books would be autofiction in the vein of My Struggle. (I read the first two of those with great pleasure a long time ago and then… just didn’t keep up: now I want to close that loop, too.) But The Morning Star is a proper novel, in the sense that it is composed of long sections narrated by different first-person narrators, most of whom link up in sometimes unexpected ways. The action takes place in a hot summer in and around Bergen, in something like 2016. There is plenty of the deep ordinariness of middle-class Norwegian life that I found compelling in My Struggle (cabins to close for the season, impromptu dinner parties to arrange, elderly parents to look after, marriages to keep on life-support). But there’s also a lot of weird stuff: a priest conducts a funeral for a man who turns out to look identical to the one who asked her an impertinent question in the airport the night before; a creature, whether human or not is unclear, roams the forest, possibly in connection to the disappearance of a man from a mental institution and a shocking satanic cult murder; and, most powerfully of all, a dazzlingly bright star suddenly appears in the sky.
The novel seems to be about the relation between the mundane and the extraordinary: I say seems because for me Knausgaard incites a delicious reading fugue state, where undistinguished sentences roll on into compelling blocks of text and the pages keep turning as if by themselves. As soon as I reached the end of its 600+ pages I ordered the 800+-page sequel…
Berthe Morisot, In England (Eugène Manet on the Isle of Wight), 1875
Honestly I enjoyed all these books, even those Indridasons. See anything you fancy here?
March 2024 was a big month in our family: my daughter became a bat mitzvah on the 29th of Adar I. She worked hard for months beforehand to prepare, and even though the process wasn’t always easy, she did great. Like, better than great. Services were moving, lunch was a whirlwind (no time to eat much but we had delicious leftovers for days), and the party at our beloved local indie bookstore was a blast. (Including a Haftorah Smackdown, where guests who had ben bnai mitzvahed were encouraged to show off how much of their portion they could remember.) Celebrating with friends and family—including one of my oldest friends, who came all the way down from Ottawa, how about that??—was incredible. Suffice it to say, Marianne and I were kvelling big time. We were also very tired. For a couple of weeks afterward, the energy level in this house was low. Like, come home from work, lie down on the couch, wake up two hours later with a crease down your cheek kind of low. All the reading took place around the edges.
Henri Matisse, The Ballet Dancer, Harmony in Grey (1927)
Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice (2013)
First volume in the already canonical space opera set in the Radch Empire (expansionist, like all empires). Breq is an ancillary, a human body that acts as an extension of the hive mind AI that controls the empire, or a bit of the consciousness of a starship (these amount to the same thing, I think: it’s confusing), and the only survivor of a starship destroyed twenty years earlier. The Wikipedia entry helpfully explains the plot; I found the reading experience pleasurably disorienting. Basically, the action moves between the present, in which Breq seeks revenge for the destruction of her ship, and the past, in which the treacherous circumstances of that destruction become clear.
James told me to read the next one right away so I didn’t forget everything, but I didn’t. Uh oh.
David Downing, Union Station (2024)
Downing knows his readers can’t get enough of his John Russell books, even though he wrote his way to the end of WWII. He first solved the problem by writing a prequel. Now he’s taken a page from Philip Kerr and continued the adventures of journalist and former reluctant spy Russell and his actress wife Effie Koenen into the postwar period. Union Station finds the couple in Los Angeles, where Effie is making a go in an American sitcom while Russell grits his teeth and interviews movie stars. One day he realizes he’s being tailed and life gets more interesting. (Downing has great fun taking Russell on routes all over the metropolis.) But who’s after him? The Soviets, reneging on the deal that released him from their services? The Americans, suspicious of his thinly-disguised hostility to McCarthyism? As in all spy novels, the answer can only be found by returning to Berlin. (The occasion is the third annual Berlin Film Festival, where Effie is honoured with a retrospective.) A bittersweet return for both husband and wife: a new war has spring up on what aren’t even the ashes of the old.
The John Russell books are often great and never less than serviceable. This isn’t the best of the bunch, but if Downing keeps writing them I’ll keep reading.
Tana French, The Hunter (2024)
As a helpless Tan French simp I had the release date for her latest circled on my calendar months ago. The Hunter came out the week of the bat mitzvah—perfect timing: I demolished it on my spring break the week after. A sequel to The Searcher, which I wrote about at length here, it offers more of that French good stuff. Pitch-perfect command of voice, slow burn, delicious uncertainty about who is playing what game and whether they know that others think they’re on to them. (Lotta pronouns there, I admit.) Honestly, the book could have been longer: the last 75 pages or so were too hurried for my taste. French is good with dogs. Gamboling across the fields after a scent, huffing the occasional dramatic sigh while lolling on the wood floor, barking at a strange car juddering down the drive. Gimme more!
Dan Stone, The Holocaust: An Unfinished History (2023)
I reviewed this for On the Seawall. What a terrific, impressive book. If you only have the appetite for one history of the Holocaust, this is the one. I especially loved how Stone shows the Holocaust to be an ongoing phenomenon, the meaning of which continues to be contested in the most unlikely ways.
Tessa Hadley, After the Funeral and Other Stories (2023)
Push comes to shove I prefer Hadley’s novels to her stories, but I like her stories a lot too. (I once wrote about one of my favourite early ones.) I read these in a rush, one after the other, which is a terrible way to read a collection. I’d read a couple before, in The New Yorker. They were still good on a second reading. Not quite Alice Munro-levels of shifting-narrative-times-to-narrate-striking-events-in-otherwise-ordinary-middle-class-lives, but close.
Louise Glück, The Wild Iris (1992)
Another book I wouldn’t have read were it not for One Bright Book. Huge thanks to Rebecca for choosing this terrific collection of poems addressed to and spoken by flowers and gardens and times of day. Listen to the pod for the details of our reactions, but I’ll just reiterate here that what delighted me most in these poems is their syntax. Glück’s punctuation is an arresting joy.
Turns out I’ll be teaching our intro to the English major course next year, and I’m thinking hard about assigning these.
Guy Gavriel Kay, Sailing to Sarantium (1998)
Kay is the homme moyen sensuel of fantasy writers, which makes him catnip to me.
Fell behind on these updates during the semester, as usual. Hard to remember that month beyond the usual—the semester taking hold, mostly warm days from the ever-earlier Arkansas spring—but I do know that mostly we were busy getting ready for my daughter’s bat mitzvah in early March. Along the way I squeezed in these books.
Richard Serra (2001)
Thien Pham, Family Style: Memories of an American fromVietnam (2023)
Autobiographical comic about Pham’s family’s journey from Vietnam to the US in the early 1980s via a Thai refugee camp. Each chapter is named after an important dish, ranging from the ball of rice and fish his mother saves for him on their flight from Vietnam to the baffling Salisbury steak of the school cafeteria to the co’m tâm dac biêt (a combo plate, as best I can tell) that he eats with his high school friends.
The palette is somber, mostly browns and greens, but the tone is lively: this is the classic story of American immigrant success, a story none of us can take for granted, which explains, I’d say, why the final chapter concerns the then-41-year-old author’s decision, in 2016, to finally take citizenship, prompted by Trump’s increasingly hostile anti-immigrant rhetoric. Thien and his family go through a lot of hard things: bureaucratic delays, poverty, language barriers, exhausting work that nearly tears the parents apart, and, most of all, at the very beginning of their journey, a harrowing attack by pirates on the way to Thailand, starkly presented by Pham in a series of black pages containing only the sentences his mother whispered into his ears, “It will be ok,” “I’m here,” “I’m right here with you.” But the Phams do more than survive; they thrive. I was delighted to see the haggard, exhausted, frightened yet determined young parents of the opening chapters settle into the gently bickering, food-pushing older couple of the last ones. Pham finishes with “end notes,” in which he answers questions readers are likely to have, like “What do you parents think of this story?”. In his answer, Pham draws his mother popping her head from another room into his studio and shouting (accurately) “I am the hero!”
Samantha Shannon, The Priory of the Orange Tree (2019)
Epic fantasy of two worlds, one based on medieval Europe, one on ancient China and Japan. In the former, dragons are abhorred; in the latter, they are venerated. Those dragons are beautiful and wise creatures of air and sea, nothing like the monsters that nearly destroyed civilization centuries ago before being bound into an endless chasm. The spell that cast the bad dragons there, however, is reaching its thousand-year-end, and they’re determined not to be defeated this time. Can our heroes convince the leaders of the kingdoms and free states and empires to band together to defeat the enemy? (Yes.)
Priory has a satisfying heft. The first 2/3 especially move with satisfying deliberateness; the end, alas, is rushed. I loved falling into the world of the book, though, and was grumpy any time I had to set it aside for anything else.
Herta Müller, The Passport (1986) Trans. Martin Chalmers (1989)
I enjoyed this angular little book about the German-speaking minority in Romanian under Ceausescu, but I hardly remember a thing about it. Does this happen to you? What I remember: 80s rural Romania is grim; men are bad to women; people who leave come home to lord it over those left behind, to compensate for how hard it is in the new land.
Jesse Q. Sutanto, Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers (2023)
Vera Wong gets up early. Really early. She takes a brisk long walk, being sure to protect her skin from that harmful sun. She makes breakfast and texts her son to ask why he’s still in bed. (Tilly is a layer, very accomplished, but he doesn’t seem to understand how fast life passes you by.) Then, the day well advanced (it must be almost 8), she walks downstairs to open her business, Vera Wang’s World-Famous Teahouse. (She named it after the designer because people love a famous name—Vera is smart like that.) She tends to her sole regular customer, a man whose wife has Alzheimer’s, meaning he can never stay as long as Vera would like, and then settles into long, quiet hours that weigh on her, almost forcing her to recognize that the shop is failing.
Then one morning she comes down to find a man dead on the shop floor. He’s clutching a flash drive, which she takes (for safekeeping, what you think???) before outlining the body, just like on CSI. She uses a sharpie so it will be nice and clear. The police are oddly unhappy about this. Misadventure, the police declare. But Vera knows: this is murder. In the next days four people come by the tea house—very suspicious. Vera slyly gets into conversation with them and learns they all knew the victim, Marshall Chan, who turns out to have been a bad man. Through a combination of bullying, passive-aggressiveness, sheer chutzpah, and plying them with food, Vera gathers what she insists on calling her suspects, forming them into an unlikely friend group and insinuating herself into their lives. She hasn’t had so much fun in years. They are all so nice—but they really need her help getting their lives together. Still, that doesn’t stop Vera from being clear-sighted: one of them is killer!
Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers is funny, sweet, moving, and even a bit suspenseful. Vera is your classic delightful piece of parental work. Sutanto lets her share her wisdom while also admitting she could be a bit less… intense. I loved this book. My daughter loved this book. Maybe my wife will love this book (she is reading it next). The audio, read by Eunice Wong, is a delight. Don’t sleep on this perfect piece of light reading.
The temptation for a series must be immense. Sutanto should resist, but I hope she doesn’t.
Elana K. Arnold, The Blood Years (2023)
Impressive YA Holocaust novel for young adults that I would recommend to readers of all ages.
What happened to the Jews of Romania is one of the most significant stories of the Holocaust, sadly still too seldom told. The Blood Years, based on the life of the author’s grandmother, begins to rectify that. This is a novel of Czernowitz, that former Austro-Hungarian center of Jewish life in Bukovina. Frederike Teitler and her older sister Astra live a cossetted life: yes, their father left them, plunging their mother into a deep depression that led their grandfather to take the women into his apartment, but things have since settled down. Although Astra increasingly gets up to things her sister knows nothing about, life for the young women still revolves around daily ballet lessons and evocatively rendered summer vacations in the Carpathians. But then comes the war. The antisemitism that had been mostly a hurtful annoyance turns virulent, especially after the interregnum of Soviet rule in 1940 – 41, when Jews were briefly given full rights. When the Germans take over the city in the first wave of Hitler’s war in the east, with the enthusiastic support of most of the locals, Jews suffer pogroms and dispossession. The family is briefly forced into a ghetto and narrowly avoids deportation to Transnistria—a territory across the Dniester that was a hellhole for Jews even by the standards of the Holocaust—only because Astra’s doctor husband, whom she has married against everyone’s will, is deemed an essential worker. Arnold vividly evokes the hunger, illness, and terror of the following years. She organizes the book, as her title implies, around differing instances of blood, from a first period to violence in the streets to tubercular coughing.
I read The Blood Years in a day: it’s well-written, dramatic, sensitive, and, perhaps most importantly, unwilling to sugarcoat its story of survival. The iconography of the Holocaust, which mostly comes from a reductive idea of what happened to the Jews of Poland and western Europe, doesn’t apply to the Romanian story. For this reason alone, I hope lots of people read this book. High school teachers, please consider assigning it!
Binjamin Wilkomirski, Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood (1995) Trans. Carol Brown Janeway (1996)
Infamous text, unsurprisingly now out of print, purporting to be a memoir of the author’s experiences as a very young child during the Holocaust, primarily in Majdenk. Except that Binjamin Wilkomirski is really Bruno Grosjean, whose unwed mother was forced to give up her child to the Swiss foster system in the 1940s. Wilkomirski—that’s the name he’s taken, so I’ll use it too: we are dealing with something other than a pseudonym here—is not Jewish, never lived in Poland, did not survive the Holocaust. When the book was first published—by an imprint of the prestigious Suhrkamp Verlag and by Schocken, the most prominent Jewish American publisher—it received notices that can only be called rapturous. The NYT rave is typical: Wilkomirski “recalls the Holocaust with the powerful immediacy of innocence, injecting well-documented events with fresh terror and poignancy.”
A year or two after its release, Daniel Ganzfried, a Swiss journalist, read Fragments and felt something was amiss. Ganzfried interviewed friends and family of the author, trawled through Holocaust repositories and Swiss archives. He published his findings—a (self) righteous condemnation of Wilkomirski as a fraud—in a prominent Swiss weekly. The German publisher responded by hiring a researcher, Stefan Maechler, to follow up on Ganzfried’s discoveries. Two years later, Maechler, agreed with the allegations, adding even more proof to that already collected. The book was withdrawn; scholars and ordinary readers felt shame and disappointment; no one talked about it anymore.
I was one of those early readers. This was before my interest in the Holocaust turned into my livelihood. I followed the ruckus with interest—I read the flurry of pieces (an especially good one by Elena Lappin ran in Granta) that speculated on why someone would do such a thing—but I was perfectly willing to put the book out of my mind.
Come twenty-five years later to find one of my best students wanting to write her senior thesis on the book, after having read it in a class she took while studying abroad. The student was fascinated by the text, intrigued by the silence surrounding it, and curious about what we might learn from that silence and from reading the text, even knowing it to be fake. I knew I would be teaching a course on the afterlife of the Holocaust this semester, and we decided she should take the opportunity to teach the text. Abroad, her instructor had prefaced the reading by explaining the background. After much discussion, my student and I decided not to tell the students in my class the truth beforehand. This experiment proved fruitful, even if some of the students were rightly un-thrilled by our decision. (We explained the rationale, which allayed most concerns.) Fascinating to see how strongly the text resonated with students, and, concomitantly, how betrayed they felt when they learned the truth. The first day’s conversation about how Wilkomirski represented trauma pivoted, the second day, to an impassioned discussion of whether anyone should ever read this book, and, most importantly, to my mind, how neatly the text matches our expectations of what trauma means.
(On the course feedback forms I asked whether I should teach this again, and, if so, whether I should spill the beans beforehand. They all said I should and no I shouldn’t. Not what I expected.)
Jona Oberski, Childhood (1978) Trans. Ralph Mannheim (1983)
Moving and angry Holocaust story, presented as fiction but closely modeled on the author’s life. (I wrote about it here.) I was interested to compare Wilkomirski’s grotesque exaggerations of Oberski’s reality, and assigned it this semester for the first time, but less obsessed readers can appreciate it all on its own.
James Buchan, Heart’s Journey in Winter (1995)
Baffling, weird spy novel set in West Germany in 1983 amid the furor and fear incited by the decision to place Pershing missiles on German soil.
Buchan’s novel is as thorny in its syntax and structure as a poem. The interlingual pun of the title references Goethe’s “Harzreise im Winter” (A Journey through the Harz Mountains in Winter), playing on the near euphony of Harz and Herz, meaning heart. Readers who struggle to understand what’s going on are just following the lead of the characters. Secret meetings in secluded hunting lodges, cryptic conversations where people tell each other things without saying anything outright, lovers on the run, adultery as a metaphor for spycraft: Buchan uses many of the tropes of the genre, but slantwise, ruthlessly excising exposition. No heroes or resolution here. Imagine a Len Deighton novel, with its sympathy for cold war German seediness, but stripped of the belief that the rules of the game must be followed, however exhaustedly or ironically, and instead replaced with the feverishness of a lieder cycle.
I often forget plots soon after reading; in the case of Heart’s Journey in Winter I forgot it while reading. Like, I mostly had no clue what was going on. I remember instead the descriptions of trout fishing, and evenings at a country inn, where couples drive up from Bonn to sit in mismatched chairs in a newly mown field drinking cold local Riesling. Is this a good book? No idea! Should you read it? No clue!
Svetlana Alexievich, Last Witnesses: An Oral History of the Children of World War II (1985) Trans. Richard Peaver and Larissa Volokhonsky (2019)
Y’all, this book! Finally read Alexievich, and I get the hype. Last Witnesses is a series of vignettes: each chapter the story, told from the position of middle or late age and in their own words with only the lightest editorial commentary, of what the tellers experienced as children during the German invasion of the Soviet Union in WWII. Most begin with that quiet unassuming day in late June 1941 when the country found itself under attack. They begin with the essentials of their family: how many siblings, maybe their ages, sometimes a father (though these are often already away or soon to be called up), and almost always a mother. The mothers leave too, more often than not, whether through death or the choice to join the war effort. Last Witnesses is about loss: families broken apart, loved ones murdered by tank, by gun-shot, by bombs from the air, by hanging. To a lesser degree it’s about resilience: roles and responsibilities taken on much earlier than anyone would ever have expected. But above all it’s about trauma. Decades later, the story-tellers break down, or trail off, or acknowledge how much they suffered from the rupture of their world. The cumulative effect feels important to the project, but it’s not easy on the reader. So much heartbreak. For that reason, it would be weird to say I loved this book, but I sure was impressed. And I was fascinated by a recurring subplot, if you will: the events here narrated are also the story of the Holocaust in Belarus, but in the best Soviet tradition that’s never acknowledged.
Cristoffer Carlsson, Blaze Me a Sun (2021) Trans. Rachel Wilson-Broyles (2023)
Superior Swedish crime fiction. Time was I couldn’t get enough of that stuff: I remember some pleasant weeks in graduate school plowing through Mankell. (A few of those Wallander books are hard to beat for suspense.) But eventually the Scandi-noir boom became a glut: most things are mediocre, after all, and with seemingly every crime writer from Rejkavik to Helsinki available in English I oughtn’t to have been surprised that a lot of it wasn’t that great. But this one made Sarah Weinman’s best of 2023 list and the audiobook was available at the library, so I gave it a try. And I’m glad I did. The structure, pacing, and ambition of the book quickly won me over, and I looked forward to my commute each day. (The narrator seems to know Swedish—judging from his pronunciation of names and places anyway—which compensated for his decision to voice female characters in falsetto. That always makes me crazy.)
The still-unsolved assassination of Olaf Palme seems a trauma from which Sweden has not recovered, so often does it figure in the country’s crime fiction. Carlsson’s novel, set in rural western Sweden, far from Stockholm, concerns a violent crime that takes place on the night of the Palme killings. To his credit, Carlsson keeps the “what has happened to our decent country” hand-wringing/sociological soul searching to a minimum, emphasizing instead how the drive to understand can cascade through generations. Using three narrative levels, the outermost one about a writer who returns from the capital to his hometown in midlife and finds himself drawn to that unsolved crime from the mid 80s, Carlsson pays as much attention to the narration as the discourse. And I didn’t figure out who did it until right before the big reveal. Win all round.
Georgia O’Keeffe, Light Coming Over the Plains, No. II (1917)
Good month, right? (Wilkomirski aside—that’s a special case.) That Buchan tho. What the hell? Anyone ever read that? Other than John Self, I mean.
Excited to once again present reading reviews from some of my favourite readers. Today’s installment, his third, is by Scott Lambridis (@slambridis). Before completing his MFA, Scott earned a degree in neurobiology, and co-founded Omnibucket.com, through which he co-hosts the Action Fiction! performance series. Read more at scottlambridis.com.
Each year I have a reading goal of at least 52 books. This year I read 151, including 37 new countries. Out of those, here’s the top ten, in the order in which they were read.
Edward Hopper, Tramp Steamer, 1908
1. Still No Word from You / Peter Orner (US, non-fiction)
A mix of short (often very short) stories, many centered on growing up in Chicago in a Jewish family, but Orner’s biggest gift is his ever-present love of books and reading. His soliloquys on books he loves, and his skill at tying life memories to the books and stories that resonate with him still are the most captivating and infectious. At the prose level, Orner can shatter you in a sentence. [Ed. – Sounds painful!] And yet if you listen to him talk about stories (his or others’), you’ll notice he’s laughing the entire time. How can you deny that delight?
2. The Ice Palace / Tarjei Vesaas(Norway, fiction)
A Norwegian child takes a walk in the woods after school to see a frozen waterfall, and never returns. Seems simple, but no book has immediately filled me with a sense of coldness and vague menace, and kept it going like this one. The prose is sparse and spare, the story distilled to the very essence of wonder, mystery, and heartbreak. In memory, the book feels like an ice crystal itself. [Ed. – I hear so many wonderful things about this book: keen to read it!]
3. The Summer Book / Tove Jansson(Finland, fiction)
A girl spends a summer with her grandmother, sharing little moments of wonder and delight, in this collection of interconnected stories (technically a novel, but each story is self-contained). It’s hard to explain why I love Jansson so much, but everything she touches is strange and delightful. She’s most known as the creator of the Moomins, that blob-like cast of characters for children, first appearing as a comic strip that swept through Europe and inspired not just a series of wonderful children’s novels, but the Disney-like Moominland (which I must visit some day). There’s also a great documentary on her as a “failed” artist called, simply, Tove. Her magical children’s stories can surprise you with their adult-ish realism, and her “realistic” adult stories read like fairy tales. Start anywhere: you may fall in love.
4. People from Bloomington / Budi Darma(Indonesia, fiction)
A collection of short stories based on the author’s time at Indiana University for grad school. Ho hum, you say? They’re absolutely crazy though! The utter strangeness of them, the people, the absurd human interactions, the grotesque portrayals of common human nature — I’ve never read anything like it. A simple mundane event sets off a series of events leading to completely unpredictable endings. The narrators in particular (or maybe “the” narrator, since they have similar voices) observe and make note of the most unusual things. The narrator in one story falls and smashes a cake and when he opens the box he says “it looked worse than Mrs Ellison’s face,” a face never mentioned before or after. In another: “Good thing her big ears didn’t fall off.” Hilarious and bizarre! The friend who recommended it said it best: “The book is described as a realistic world portrayed through an absurdist frame, but I would add that even the way he achieves this is unique.” This is a weird book where weird things happen to weird people, revealing the deep strangeness waiting beneath seemingly tranquil suburban life. Beware though: you’ll probably never want to visit Bloomington.
5. Treasures of The Thunder Dragon: A Portrait of Bhutan / Ashi Dorji Wangmo Wangchuck (Bhutan, non-fiction)
Written by the current Queen Mother of Bhutan! [Ed. – Probably the only book from Bhutan ever mentioned on this site—and absolutely the only book from Bhutanese royalty.] Bhutan is fascinating in its own right, as a mostly isolated piece of protected land in the Himalayas most notable for prioritizing Gross National Happiness over Gross National Product. Why is this important to them, how did they come to it, how do they legislate and realize this drive towards happiness day to day, and what does that mean for the rest of us? The Queen Mother weaves the answers to these questions as takes you along her own tour of the country, its villages, its wonders, and its people. Her love of this unique country, at once more primitive and further evolved than our own (and a great many others) is so gently omnipresent that you’ll start looking for flights before you finish.
6. Death and the Penguin / Andrey Kurkov(Ukraine, fiction)
I picked this up on the recommendation of a Russian friend just after the war in the Ukraine began. I normally don’t rank my top 10s, but I will dub this one my favorite of the year without hesitation. An aspiring writer is offered a job writing obituaries for a newspaper, for people whom it turns out aren’t dead yet. Oh and he also lives with a melancholic penguin named Misha he’s adopted from the local zoo. It’s a noir mystery in flavor, full of dark humor as the two of them are thrown into a mafia intrigue the protagonist never fully understands or even appreciates. There’s a sequel too, but this one was so good I’m scared to read it. [Ed. – Agree, terrific book. I too have had the sequel sitting here for years, unread…]
7. The English Understand Wool / Helen DeWitt(US, fiction)
What was this book? Who is this author? [Ed. – A genius!] A novella from my favorite publisher, New Directions, coming in at barely 70 pages, and dubbed a fairy tale by Google (it is not a fairy tale), it’s the story of a sassy 17-year-old girl obsessed with extreme taste and avoiding mauvais ton in all situations, who loses her family, and all her money, and must weigh her wits single-handedly against the sharks of the New York publishing world who want to sign a deal with her and sell her story. Brutal, savage, artfully heartless, absolutely precise, and with an ending that’s pure genius.
8. The Royal Game / Stefan Zweig(Austria, fiction)
RIYL The Queen’s Gambit, Zweig’s classic chess story written 80 years earlier tells the tale of an unnamed narrator who discovers a Russian chess master is traveling in the same boat from New York to Buenos Aires in the midst of WWII, and attempts to lure him into a casual game the narrator is sure to lose. He begins receiving whispered advice from a watching businessman, and what unfolds over the course of three matches that challenge the pompous Russian master’s assumptions and abilities is the parallel tale of this Austrian’s businessman’s arrest, imprisonment, and torture by the Gestapo. Memorizing chess moves in solitary confinement is his only means of survival and, as Zweig deftly describes in only 100 pages, both his triumph and undoing.
9. Every Man For Himself and God Against All / Werner Herzog(Germany, non-fiction)
The south German drawl of this prolific director of both documentaries (Grizzly Man) and features (Aguirre the Wrath of God) is legendary, narrating his films with metered precision the wondrous horror of existence (“Even the stars up here in the sky look like a mess; there is no harmony in the universe” is a classic, but my fav is the YouTube of an interview with him in which he’s shot and when asked about it simply waves the question away and remarks, “It was not a significant bullet”), so I highly recommend listening to this autobiography with Herzog reading it. [Ed. – Agreed that’s a classic, but don’t sleep on his retellings of Curious George, also on YouTube.] His films are renowned for the unique point of view of his protagonists, and the singularity of his images, but it’s challenging to have a conversation about him without addressing or succumbing to the mystique of his deeds as a filmmaker. The shit this guy puts himself through for a shot! For “truth”! So when he describes episodes from his life (filming or not), you start to wonder how much he’s nurturing his own myth. My favorite moments: nearly killing himself on skis on a dare, reading dead letters sent to the town of Northpole (it exists), and meeting a pair of identical twin diagnosed nymphomaniacs who finish each other’s sentences and stare into each other’s eyes instead of a mirror to fix their hair and makeup. The book will make you want to see every film, and imagine the ones he hasn’t gotten to make, but even more you might just find yourself envying (kinda) such a superhuman life. Enjoy it as an autobiography of an artist with a singular vision, or as a larger-than-life caricature of a man who is probably fully aware of his own mythology and how to keep it alive.
Edward Burtynsky, Shipyard #12, Qili Port, Zhejiang Province, China (2005)
10. Maniac / Benjamín Labatut(Chile, non-fiction) [Ed. – Listed by many as a novel, FWIW]
Last year, this science-loving essayist made my top 10 with When We Cease To Understand the World, his series of vignettes on famous physicists and mathematicians staring into the abyss in the act of or as a consequence of their insights and creations, each which reads more like dramatization than documentary. In Maniac, he narrows his focus and dives into one of the most singularly brilliant minds of all time, Hungarian John von Neumann, the one-man think tank behind everything from the atomic bomb to the invention of computing, game theory, genetics, and artificial intelligence, a genius coveted by the US government for his necessity in national security even more than Oppenheimer, and a guy many have heard of (including myself; there are math constants named after him), but couldn’t say much about. Heavily researched, and told through a chorus of voices, Maniac recreates a man everyone should know of, and captures with propulsive momentum the ascent of modernity alongside the decline of a mind too ineffable to endure. The last section leaps away from von Neumann and dramatizes the moment when AI categorically shifts its capabilities from chessmaster to confounding the masters of the world’s most esoteric ancient game, Go, and becomes something beyond a simple calculating machine, something new, and beyond our comprehension. Whether you believe the hype and horror of those who believed a computer could never a master the art of a game so complex as Go, it’s Labatut’s primary interest in and his ability to render our human fear of science and technology that makes this book stand out [Ed. – Thanks, Scott!]
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.
Edvard Munch, Kragero in Spring, 1929
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.]
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 thirdinstallment. 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.
‘Hare 2’ Jan Pypers
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!]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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).
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.
Don’t ask me what happened in September, it was a long time ago. I’m amazed I’m even writing this post.
Alex Katz, Lake Light (1992)
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.
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…
Thanksgiving is the best time at the farm. You can walk without fear of ticks. Down to the creek—entirely dry at the end of a year of terrible drought—then up Acorn Hill and along the ridge. Contour down past the old and new ponds to the cornfield and take the long flat path back to the creek. At Thanksgiving, you can see the bones of the land: the rolling hills, the sharp edges between scrub forest and fields, everything clear now that the leaves have fallen. This year a big pin oak was down over the Acorn Hill trail; my father- and brother-in-law cleared it, happily messing about with chainsaws. The days were more cold than warm with a sharp northwest wind: good weather for running the gravel road to the blacktop and back. At night you can see a heap of stars. If you leave the cozy house to crane your neck at the sky the barn cat sometimes comes out of his little house to check on you. He is a meeower, a winder through the legs; one day he’s going to kill someone. You can stay inside and read too. That’s what I did.
Lowell Birge Harrison, A Wintry Walk (undated)
Marian Engel, The Tattooed Woman (1985)
Even more of a mixed bag than most story collections. Engel’s stories do not hit me the way her novels The Honeyman Festival and of course Bear do. But even though the latter is much the most interesting thing she ever wrote, I don’t think she’s a one-hit wonder.
I read The Tattooed Woman because I was meant to talk about it with James and Shawn in our continuing series of Engel conversations, but then we collectively decided we weren’t sure how much we liked the book and I was too exhausted from the semester to find out. I regret that now, though; I suspect we would have talked our way into liking it more than we did on our individual readings.
Engel died young of cancer (this collection was published shortly after her death) and some of the best stories here feature characters with that illness—or, in “Two Rosemary Road, Toronto,” the one I liked best, a man whose wife has died from it. The narrator writes a letter responding to one he’s recently received from a neighbor, a screed insisting that the narrator’s wife must have brought the illness on herself. The narrator reacts to this vitriol with understandable scorn but as he fulminates he gives in to his own loneliness and the suggestion of sexual intimacy hinted at by the letter writer, a possibility he is willing to explore, despite, or perhaps because of, the aggression he imagines such a relationship would involve.
Unsettling stuff.
I shivered pleasantly at “The Country Doctor,” a ghost story about a woman sent by a Toronto-based magazine to an unnamed but easily recognizable St John’s, Newfoundland, who is taken up by a doctor who might a Bluebeard. I liked “The Smell of Sulphur,” about a woman who returns to a faded resort on Lake Huron where she spent a summer as a solitary teenager.
What struck me most about the book is how foreign the 60s, 70s, and 80s Canadian settings felt to me, even though I lived through much of them. A function, I suppose, of Engel’s enmeshment in an adult world I wasn’t yet part of.
I’m not saying you need to run out and find this collection. Nor that Mavis Gallant or Alice Munro need worry about being dethroned as the champions of Canadian short fiction. I’m guessing Engel wrote these stories for money, writers could still do that back then, and too many feel, well, maybe not listless but a little pat. But when she gets her strange on, she’s good.
Celia Dale, A Helping Hand (1966)
Disquieting and gripping novel à la Highsmith or Rendell and just as good. A married couple holiday in Italy as a reward after the rigors of taking care of an elderly aunt. Josh ogles every woman he meets, especially one of the chambermaids at their pensione; Maisie ignores this, as she has other fish to fry and knows how to turn her husband’s roving eye to advantage. The pair fall in with a young woman and her elderly aunt by marriage, two more Brits squabbling their way through a holiday of piazzas, frescoes, and, to their sensitive tummies, too-greasy food. (Bowel movements and bedpans feature prominently.) I say “fall in” but “latch on” would be more accurate. The couple has its routine down: Josh courts the old woman with little attentions that remind her of her late husband, while Maisie commiserates with the niece, who feels her life wasting away with nights spent pouring out tea. Working together as ruthlessly as a pair of collies with a flock, they separate the women, leading to their final move: they offer to take in the old woman as a PG, a paying guest. It’s enough to make you wonder what happened to that other woman, the aunt who turns out to have been an “aunt”…
Dale wrote a lot of books, seems like, but went forgotten until Daunt started reissuing her books. (The valiant folks at Valancourt have brought some back into print in the US, but I’m ashamed to say I plumped for the Daunt because I liked the cover better.) If A Helping Hand, with its brilliantly ominous title, is any guide, that neglect is a scandal. Dale mixes a palpable atmosphere of menace—she savages suburban England even more than Rendell in, say, One Across, Two Down—with a hint of decency, just enough to keep our gorge down. But then comes a stunning ending, a real stinger, that reverses much of what we thought we knew.
A perfect book for a November weekend.
Ann Petry, The Street (1946)
The title of Petry’s debut—the first novel by an African-American woman to sell a million copies—refers to 116th Street in Harlem. The beautiful Lutie Johnson, separated from her husband after a job as maid to a rich couple in Connecticut put too much distance between them, moves into a dingy tenement with her young son, Bub. She hates the place, no amount of scrubbing ever gets anything clean. but it’s all she can afford, and she’ll do anything to save enough to move somewhere better.
Well, not anything. She rejects with frosty contempt the offer of a woman on the main floor—stocky, bewigged, inscrutable Mrs. Hedges, always at the window—to work at her brothel. But her desperate economies never get her ahead, and before long she’s spending too much of her energy fending off the incoherent, animalistic advances of the building’s super, Jones. (I wonder what Richard Wright made of that guy—did he see an homage to his own work there?) Meanwhile, Min, the woman who lives with Jones (I don’t know what to call her: not his lover: kept woman maybe; she is more a slave than anything else), seeks out a rootworker to keep her man. The cross and powder work on Jones, but even more on Min, who finds the strength to leave. She is the most fascinating character in what, as I hope my summary suggests, is a novel filled with vivid characters.
At the only bar on the street, run by an enigmatic white man named Junto who has a history with Mrs. Hedges, Lutie meets a jazz musician who offers her the chance to sing with his band. Finally, a different life lies within reach, the life promised by Lutie’s to-me surprising guiding star, Benjamin Franklin, in which hard work and talent will be rewarded. That’s good, because Bub is spending too much time with Jones. Trouble looms. And then things get a whole lot worse.
The Street is one of the more exciting works of social realism I’ve read. Picture the milieu of Bernard Malamud’s early stories—I’m thinking the likes of “The Bill” or “The Mourners”—but with more hopelessness and even less upward mobility and you’ll have a sense of this depressing, riveting novel.
I started Petry’s other well-known novel, The Narrows, a year or two back, but it wasn’t the right time and I couldn’t get on with it. Seems like it’s time to try again.
Nick Harkaway, Titanium Noir (2023)
Sf/noir mashup in which our dogged PI protagonist, Cal Sounder, is called in to investigate a murder. (He plumbs the depths, like.) The victim seems to have been a mild-mannered academic but two things suggest otherwise: he’s over seven feet tall and doesn’t look a day over 30, even though he’s actually 90.
That means he’s a Titan, and Titans don’t get murdered. These genetically modified humans basically live forever and grow each time they take one of the patented T7 infusions, operations that send their bodies into such paroxysms that are incapacitated for months afterward. To undergo more than two or three such procedures is beyond risky. Too bad that a side effect is a corresponding change in personality. Titan appetites are typically as gargantuan as their bodies. There are only a thousand or so Titans; the technology is carefully guarded by its developer. (Titanium Noir allegorizes the predations of our own global oligarchy.) Cal is a Titan expert: his ex is the developer’s daughter. Ex because he refused the chance to get the shot
Like Marlow, Spade, Archer, and dozens before him, Cal stirs up some shit: gigantic, immortal shit, to be precise. Good fun.
I’d tried Harkaway once before and it didn’t stick. But I might have to revise that opinion. Quality non-taxing stuff.
Ed Park, Same Bed Different Dreams (2023)
I devoured this epic, Pynchonesque novel over Thanksgiving. I can’t even remember all the multitudes it contains, but its central conceit imagines that the Korean Provisional Government (KPG), a real-life group founded in 1919 by exiles in China to protest Korea’s occupation by Japan, continued past the Japanese surrender in 1945. Its goal? A free, independent, reunited Korea. The KPG’s machinations—some real, many invented—are revealed in a series of enigmatic manuscripts that fall into the hands of a Korean American writer named Soon Sheen who works for a tech behemoth, half-Amazon, half-Google, known by its “acronym” GLOAT. The letters don’t stand for anything; much of Soon’s job is to create similar acronyms for company practices and products.
As in early Pynchon, the idea of meaning—something we need and will do anything to create even though doing so often leads us astray—lies at the heart of Park’s novel. Fascinatingly, many of the strands woven into the shape of this novel feature Park’s home town of Buffalo: the assassination of President McKinley at the Pan-American Exhibition at the hand of an anarchist in love with Emma Goldman; an African American fighter pilot who returns to the city after being shot down in MIG alley and imprisoned by the Communists, whereupon he works the family appliance repair shop and writes paranoia-infused science fiction that goes unnoticed in the mainstream but gains a cult following, not least by the KPG which sees in the lurid texts secrets to political change; the history of board games and how they contributed to the early development of AI; the downing of Korean Airlines flight 007 by the Soviets in 1983, an event I was sure would launch nuclear war; and, most delightful to me, the history of the Buffalo Sabres, including a close reading of the notorious Brett Hull goal that cost that often-luckless team the Stanley Cup in 1999. (He was in the blue paint!)
Who knows if this book will stay with me long term—but I relished its exuberant ride through painful 20th century history. The title refers to a Korean maxim about the projections foisted by foreigners on that peninsula for centuries. But it also reminds us that everything can be different than it is: we never dream in the same bed twice, that sort of thing.
Maybe that paean to dreaming and imaged futures is the reason the novel is filled with fathers who, no matter how feckless or absent, dote on their precocious daughters. (The number of precocious daughters in contemporary American fiction is all out of proportion, it seems to me. But as a father who dotes on a precocious daughter, I’m hardly one to complain.)
Thanks to Levi Stahl for repping this.
Adania Shibli, Minor Detail (2017) Trans. Elisabeth Jaquette (2020)
Many of you will know that Adania Shibli was due to receive a prize for this novel at this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair when organizers postponed it indefinitely due to the situation in Gaza. (If it walks like cancellation, talks like cancellation etc., etc.) Don’t get me started on the upside-down world of “memory culture” in Germany today, of which this ignominious decision is part. The only good news is that a lot of people went out and read the book (or bought it, anyway). I’d had it sitting on the shelf for a couple of years and was glad when a new book club I’m part of made it our first selection. Several in the group had read it before: I benefited enormously from their familiarity with the text and thoughtful interpretations. I’m grateful to them all. As the title suggests, in Minor Detail every little thing counts; it’s a book that invites re-reading—even as it points out the dangers of definitive interpretations (obsession, paranoia, the fantasy that constant vigilance can make ideology come true).
Precisely divided into two obliquely-connected halves, the novel tells two stories. The first, set in August 1949, concerns a squad of Israeli soldiers who happen upon a Bedouin family in a “mopping up” mission in the Negev. The encounter ends disastrously: the entire family is murdered, even its camels, except for a teenage girl, who is brought back to the soldiers’ camp, where she is raped and eventually murdered. The second centers on a woman in near-present day Ramallah whose obsession with the crime has everything to do with its having happened exactly 25 years before her birth. Her quest to uncover the details (which as readers we already know) leads her to undertake a dangerous journey outside the West Bank, one that ends in failure and tragedy.
Shibli’s book might be short, but the questions it provokes are not. Are representations of traumatic history (including this very novel) fundamentally different from official representations of a violently conquered space (maps and archives)? Can the past be told in a way that evades representation’s tendency toward reduction, circumscription, and closure? When we read can we avoid the fantasy of conclusiveness? (No accident that this so carefully shaped text opens and closes with references to the atmospheric phenomenon of the mirage.)
It’s too late for next semester, but I’ll teach this important book in my Literature after Auschwitz class going forward.
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).
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!).
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.
Gabriele Münter, Green House (1912)
A wide-ranging reading month, with plenty to appreciate. Only Map really stood out for me, though. Any takes on these selections?
Eiger, Mönch & Jungfrau 