“You really are a character,” Annie Marantz said. Annie was a wiry woman, barely five feet tall; at thirty, she was only four years older than Rhoda, but she was sinewy all over; she looked as though someone had chewed on her like an orange.
This passage from the beginning of Joan Silber’s debut novel, Household Words (1980), struck me as the kind of thing you don’t see much anymore. Feels like novels rooted in descriptions of the world, and told in third-person past tense (glorious past tense, how I miss it) have become rare, even old-fashioned. Of course, Silber might have had that sense herself: after all, she titled her first novel, as the jacket copy of the first edition puts it, after the magazine published by Charles Dickens.
Rosalyn Drexler, Night Visitors (1988)
Silber, as I am starting to learn, having fallen into a deep dive of her works, is an unshowy and excellent writer. Look at what she does in these two sentences. She knows how to use a semi-colon, for one thing. The three clauses of the second sentence move briskly from description to judgment: “Annie was a wiry woman, barely five feet tall; at thirty, she was only four years older than Rhoda, but she was sinewy all over; she looked as though someone had chewed on her like an orange.” To be wiry is not necessarily to be small, but Silber implies that this is the case by mentioning Annie’s height, a seemingly unnecessary qualifier of the first independent clause. “Wiry” sometimes connotes toughness, but at this point in the sentence, we don’t yet have any indication that the adjective is meant to elucidate personality rather than merely describe physical appearance.
The second clause refines our thinking, though. From size we move to age (indirectly learning Rhoda’s). I kind of love the little storm of numbers in this sentence. Annie is thirty: not old by our lights today but older then than now. And older than Rhoda. But what matters to Silber is how the years show themselves on the body. Annie is “sinewy all over”: tough, indigestible. “Sinewy” made me return to “wiry,” forced me to think about the difference between these near synonyms. In this case, it seems worse to be sinewy than wiry. We’re not talking about Annie’s muscles. This isn’t a description of her fortitude. We’re talking about someone whose vitality has been squeezed out. Annie is pulp. She seems to have taken a licking from life already. This is all made clear in the third clause, the simile that compares the woman to a chewed-on orange. Juicy oranges don’t need much chewing. They go down easy. But when they dry out and their pith thickens, they’re harder to enjoy. I picture Annie with a bad tan: probably a fanciful association sparked by the colour orange.
Annie is a recurrent character, but not an especially important one. Even here she serves mostly to help us see Rhoda more clearly. Let’s not forget what Annie says before she’s described: “You really are a character.” It’s not just Annie who thinks so. The novel thinks about Rhoda this way. While Annie seems to speak half-admiringly, half-condescendingly, something like “Oh, Rhoda, you are just not like any of the women in our circle, and frankly that makes me a little uneasy,” the text offers the claim as a simple statement of fact. Rhoda really is a character—the character. We follow her through twenty eventful years, focusing on her experiences and responses, even as we never get fully inside her head. And yet the novel is being more than matter of fact here. Not just describing, but prescribing. It’s saying that Rhoda is worthy of being a character, of being the main character. Coming at the end of several decades of flourishing Jewish American literature, much of it written by men and famously invested in that point of view, Silber gives us something new. After Herzog and Augie March and Zuckerman and Alexander Portnoy Silber offers Rhoda Taber, a housewife living through the first stages of postwar American Jewish assimilation and suburban living.
Rhoda, who speaks Yiddish with her father and English with her social set and thoroughly Americanized daughters, is fascinatingly contradictory. She leaves her job as a schoolteacher when she has children, but her time as a teacher of French shapes her whole life, symbolizing her difference. [Careful, spoiler incoming!] After her husband’s untimely death, she returns to work, even though she doesn’t need the money. Nor does she remarry, even though friends fall over themselves to set her up, and even though she meets a man she enters a longish relationship with. She won’t sleep with him, though, because he’s not desirable to her. Not physically, but emotionally. She thinks of him as uncouth, even violent when she witnesses him doing business.
But this doesn’t mean Rhoda rejects conventions. She’s not like her friend Harriet, an unmarried no-fucks-to-give woman who encourages Rhoda to take art classes with her, even though she has no illusions about her abilities. (“Let’s face it,” Harriet says flatly, about her efforts to sculpt a dog, “it looks like a turd.”) Harriet and Rhoda vacation in the Catskills. Is Harriet gay? We never get the chance to find out. Despite her homophobia (she worries about her older daughter’s friendships in unpleasant ways) Rhoda feels queer to me. Don’t get me wrong, she’s conformist. But only superficially. In the things that matter, she’s out of step with everyone around her. Rhoda has an ugly side, for sure. She responds with disgust to the rumor that her neighbor has been having it off with a delivery boy: not because of the age discrepancy (though we don’t know how old he is) or the class difference, but because she cannot countenance the woman’s sexual desire. She struggles with her daughters, never abusing them outright, but picking fights or welcoming the fights they pick, despairing at the older one’s inability or unwillingness to follow Rhoda’s own life path and contemptuous of the younger’s need to make others like her. At the same time, she admires their independence, their unwillingness to be forced, by men in particular, into situations they don’t want to be in. The book I thought of most as I read Household Words was Vivian Gornick’s Fierce Attachments, another important Jewish book od the1980s. Silber’s novel feels like the fictional version of Gornick’s memoir of postwar American Jewish female rebellion, but in this case written from the mother’s side.
In the end, it’s not family life or economic success or cultural assimilation that Rhoda struggles most with but her own body: she spends the last years of the 1950s, and thus the last sections of the book, increasingly ill and at the mercy of the medical establishment. We leave her as she is leaving everything she knows. It’s a stark ending—and fitting. Rhoda Taber is not a nice woman. Nor a shrewish or disagreeable one. An interesting one. A real character.
Here is my introduction to Episode 38 of the podcast I co-host with Rebecca Hussey and Frances Evangelista, One Bright Book.
Ignacio Zuloaga y Zabaleta, Preparation for a Bullfight (1903)
Our book today is Miaow, written in 1888 by the great Spanish 19th-century realist Benito Pérez Galdós and recently published by NYRB Classics in a lively new translation by Margaret Jull Costa.
Galdós, whose long and productive life lasted from 1843 – 1920, was born in the Canary Islands, which perhaps gave him an outsider’s perspective on the Madrid society he scrutinized in more than 80 novels.
Miaow has a cast of, well, maybe not thousands but a lot of characters. Ramón Villaamil has served the state his whole life, but he’s lost his job in the tax office due to changing political fortunes just two months short of qualifying for his pension. He solicits possible patrons and haunts his old office, not just to get a job but also to escape his household, where he lives in an uneasy truce with his wife, Doña Pura, their adult daughter, Abelarda, and his sister-in-law Milagros. Completing the ménage is Luis, the son of a second daughter who died young. Luis’s father is a man named Victor, a bad penny who has never been in the picture, indeed whose name is never spoken in the home. The novel kicks into gear when Victor turns up and inveigles his way into the household, eventually sowing great unhappiness. (Victor is a breathtakingly bad guy—I hope we’ll talk about this.)
These are all interesting characters—so why isn’t the book named after any of them? That would be the usual 19th-century thing. (Jane Eyre, Daniel Deronda, Eline Vere, Anna Karenina,l etc., etc.) Why does it have such an odd title? Who or what does “miaow” refer to, anyway? Well, lots of things. It’s the nickname given by the local wags to the women of the Villaamil household, after their supposedly feline features. I think it’s important, though, that the book isn’t called The Miaows. For the title also extends to Ramón, the paterfamilias—not because of how he looks but of what he believes. MIAOW is an acronym for his mantra that Spain can only be saved by Morality, Income Tax, Additional Import Tariffs, Overhaul of the National Debt, and Work. So already “miaow” references both physiognomy and economy. But there’s more. In addition to being a noun, miaow is also a verb, a sound, an onomatopoeia, and a sarcastic, acidic, or bitchy commentary, as when we call someone out for being catty: Mee-ow! It’s this last meaning I thought of most as I considered the harsh disdain so often expressed by the characters toward each other and the gentle satire of the narrative voice toward all of them.
Once we see that “miaow” is something like a mood or attitude or state of mind, we’re able to recognize how unusually Galdós uses characterization. In my description of the book a minute ago, I made it sound like a family story. But it’s not, quite. The critic Fredric Jameson, who really loved Galdós and thought his unfamiliarity in the English-reading world a real travesty, says that Galdós offers “a deterioration of protagonicity,” an admittedly unlovely phrase that he glosses as “the movement of the putative heroes and heroines to the background, whose foreground is increasingly dominated by minor or secondary characters.” As a Marxist, Jameson attributes this not just to Galdós’s predilection or “genius” but to his position as a person living in late 19th century Spain and its strangely non-modern political landscape following the failed “Glorious Revolution” of 1867 (they deposed the monarchy and then brought it back, sort of). To depict the social reality of his society, Galdós had to “strike[ ] an uneasy compromise between the atomized individualism of more fully bourgeois societies with their nuclear families, and the more archaic traces of the older feudal class and castes.” To me, this explains why Galdós feels like an uncanny version or simulacrum of canonical realists like Balzac or Zola, with whom Galdós shares an interest in recurring characters and the desire to explore an entire society. Miaow reminded me of Père Goriot or La Bête Humaine. But also not. Jameson notes that Galdós’s novels are not organized around families, even extended families, but rather around households, an ambiguous term that includes servants, neighbours, and other families who circulate in and out of the story. (In Miaow, Doña Pura is always hosting friends, acquaintances, people who may or may not respect or like; Ramón is always trying to hide from them.) The household thus includes the Mendizábals, a couple who live downstairs and take pity on the much-neglected Luis; the Cabreras, the sister and brother-in-law of that cad Victor, who want to adopt Luis; as well as a whole series of characters at Don Ramón’s former office, some of whom are, to me at least, hard to keep track of, but to whom the novel devotes so much attention, in their various sympathy to or ridicule of Don Ramón, that it doesn’t make sense to just call them “minor.”
All of which is to say that Miaow, though not especially long (it’s like 300 pages) is very busy. To that end I was struck by a word that appears in the first sentence and reappears near the end. Here’s how the novel begins: “At four o’clock in the afternoon, the kids from the school on Plazuela del Limón erupted out of the classroom, making the very devil of a racket.” 250 pages later, a disconsolate, embittered Don Ramón observes a flood of civil servants clattering out of the workplaces at the tax office on payday: “The stairs were almost overwhelmed by this human torrent, which made a tremendous racket as it flowed on down, the sound of heavy footsteps mingling with all the cheerful, sparkling, payday chatter.”
The repetition of racket reminds us that bureaucrats are just overgrown schoolboys. Here we see Galdós’s satirical side. (And by the way, surely the opening scene of the schoolchildren, who, as they pile into the streets, tease little Luis with the nickname of his aunts and grandmother, miaow, miaow, miaow, refers to the opening of Madame Bovary, where a different set of schoolboys taunt a nice enough if also hapless pupil.) But more importantly the repetition of racket speaks to its modus operandi., maybe what we’d now call its vibe. This book too makes a tremendous racket, in the best possible way, with clever dogs, opera singers, officious bureaucrats, raw army recruits, shopkeepers, and a score of others contributing their two cents. Mee-ow indeed.
Have any of you read this book? Or anything else by Galdós? What do you think?
A recent episode of The Mookse and the Gripes podcast got me thinking. Hosts Trevor and Paul were joined by John Williams of the Washington Post (mensches one and all). John had proposed a fascinating topic: starter libraries. The idea was to imagine your response to someone who asked you for ten titles they absolutely had to have in their collection. Probably this person is someone new to literature, a teenager or a student, but maybe they are someone who used to read more than they do now and are looking to get back to that part of their life. What would you recommend?
The important part of the assignment, as I understand it, is that the person is asking you. They know you well enough (parasocially or otherwise) to trust your taste. They respect you enough to be curious about anything you recommend. But they’re not asking for your ten favourite books. Presumably you like the titles on your list. But you’re not just offering them out of personal predilection. You think of them as representative for aspects of literature that matter to you.
Personal but not only personal, might be one way of putting it. Or, in the words of the episode’s subtitle, your choices could be thought of as a shelf full of promises.
Do listen to the episode, it’s terrific. Great lists, fascinating insights into the recommenders. And sure to get you thinking about your own answer. That’s what happened to me: I set aside the laundry I was folding and jotted some notes on my phone, which I’ve now expanded into this list, complete with categories (and alternate choices, because ten books is not many books).
Candida Höfer, Bibliothèque Nationale de France Paris XXI 1998
Books to grow into but also to love when you’re young:
George Eliot, Middlemarch
The only novel in English for adults, Virginia Woolf famously said. Not sure what she meant, but doesn’t it sound good? Having reread it recently, I think you need to be middle aged (and thus an adult… hmm well never mind) to get the most from this story of English provincial life around 1830. But having first read it in college, I can also attest that Middlemarch hits for young people. As with any rich text, what you pay attention to and who you sympathize with shifts each time you read it.
Eliot is known for moral seriousness (maybe that’s why as stylistically different a writer as D. H. Lawrence was a fan), but Middlemarch is also surprisingly funny. Mostly, it’s supremely moving. It covers so much of life, and asks the big questions. What makes a good life? How can we live with purpose? How can we think of ourselves in relation to everyone else? Where do we fit into the web of life?
[Alternate choice: Leo Tolstoy, War & Peace. Never read it until about five years ago, but feel confident it dazzles as much at 20 as at 50. You want novelistic sweep? This one’s as big as Russia… Freemasons and wolf hunts and returns from the dead and slow-burning love affairs lasting across the decades: everything, really.]
Books that master close third-person perspective
Nella Larsen, Passing
Set in Harlem and Chicago in the late 1920s among a set of well-to-do light-skinned Black women who can pass as white, Passing is a great novel of queer frenemies. It hews closely to the perspective of a single character, Irene, whose orderly life as the mother of two boys and wife to a (dissatisfied) doctor falls apart when she runs into a childhood friend, the brave and dangerous Clare. Unless we attend to how events are only offered through Irene’s perspective, we are likely to miss how much the book asks us to question the judgments it only seems to offer.
[Alternate choice: Henry James, What Maisie Knew. In book after book, James wrote about people behaving badly. Yet even among this vast canvas of cruelty, this novel stands out: the people doing the harm are parents who use their young child to hurt each other and, of course, the child. In the preface to the New York Edition James explained that he chose to narrate the book in third person but to limit the perspective to Maisie’s often baffled but also wondering sense of the world in order to offer readers the extra pathos of being able to understand what she could not. It’s quite a trick.]
Books about the Holocaust
Primo Levi, If This Is a Man
If someone is asking me what books they simply must own, they’re absolutely gonna get one about the Holocaust. Hell, I could make them a whole list. But knowing that not everyone shares my fascination, I’ll stick to one of the earliest and most famous instances of Holocaust literature. (Levi composed part of it already while in the camps.) Like all memoirs, If This is a Man (known in the US under the travesty title Survival in Auschwitz) details its author’s particular experience—which took the form it did by his having had “the great good fortune” to have been deported only in 1944, when the turning tide of the war and subsequent internal battle among top Nazis meant that more deportees were selected for slave labour. That phrasing gives you a sense of Levi’s matter-of-fact irony. But something that distinguishes If This Is a Man is Levi’s decision to use “we” even more than “I”: he aims to give a sense of the structure and meaning of the collective victim experience, at least within a subcamp of Auschwitz.
[Alternate choice: Ida Fink, A Scrap of Time and Other Stories. Too little known among English speakers, but, happily, available in a terrific translation by Madeline Levine and Francine Prose, Fink’s heartbreaking stories depict part of the Holocaust most people don’t know about: the mass murder performed by the Einsatzgruppen in Galicia in the summer and fall of 1941. Fink couldn’t find a publisher for these stories until the 1980s; they were deemed of no interest. Another devastating failure on the part of literary opinion. Fink has been called the Chekhov of the Holocaust. Grotesque as this sounds, it’s accurate. Quiet and heartbreaking.]
Members of YIVO New York examine crates of books rescued from the Vilna Ghetto
Books about how to read books:
Roland Barthes, S/Z
Barthes spent a year reading Balzac’s story “Sarrasine” with some students. (Oh to have been in that seminar!) That labour resulted in this extraordinary book, organized around line-by-line readings of the source text, not, as critics usually do, to figure out what it means, but rather how it means. To do so, Barthes offers five “codes”—fundamental elements of realist fiction, of which “Sarrasine” is considered only as a representative example—that readers unconsciously rely on (typically by having imbibed many examples of the genre) in making the text intelligible. The codes are things like references to historical events, people, and places, or attributes and actions that cohere into what we call characters and, in the case of realist literature, think of as if they were people. Barthes Intersperses his step-by-step redescription of the Balzac story with theoretical meditations on the operation of the codes, which readers can extrapolate to other texts.
S/Z is tough. I probably taught it five or six times before I felt I had a real handle on it. But as Barthes says, it’s valuable to be able to distinguish between real and superficial ideas of difference. We might think that the best way to know about books is to read a lot of them. But if we do so without thinking about what underlies their intelligibility (i.e. what we need to be able to read them), then we are mere consumers, doomed to reading the same thing over and over. Only by reading one text over and over can real difference, that is the difference within the text, show itself—which in turn will make our other reading more meaningful. All of which is to say, the effort of tackling Barthes’s analysis offers big rewards.
[No alternate choice. S/Z for everyone.]
Books with pictures:
Alison Bechdel, Fun Home
Comics, graphic novels, whatever you want to call them are important to me, and I think any reader needs at least one example in their library. Such a rich form, so many gorgeous and moving texts to choose from. As with my Holocaust choice, I resisted the temptation to go niche here. Bechdel’s memoir of her relationship with her closeted, self-destructive, talented father deserves its fame. Probably more than any book I regularly taught, Fun Home elicited the strongest positive reactions in the widest range of students. Family disfunction runs deep. A great book about how books can connect people who can’t otherwise open up to each other—and how they can further separate them too. Funny, ominous, bittersweet.
[Alternate choice: Nick Drnaso, Sabrina. Dark, powerful. Reading it gave me a bit of the ick. And yet its subject matter just seems more relevant. I guess this is about the manosphere, except no one was using that hideous term at the time.]
Books of ideas [fiction]
Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
Sometimes I want a book that dramatizes the back and forth of thinking. In The Magic Mountain, Mann literalizes this by surrounding his protagonist, the well-meaning, hearty Hans Castorp, with some of the most indefatigable talkers ever to appear in a novel. The whole intellectual landscape of pre-WWI Europe is here (liberal humanist, communist, militarist, hedonist, you name it), and everyone battles for Hans’s soul, even as the former engineer mostly wants to desire a woman from afar, a woman who reminds him of a boy from his schooldays…
The other great thing about this book is how well it depicts Davos and environs. I’m a sucker for mountains and mountains in books. Bring on the snow!
[Alternate choice: Proust. Honestly, if you can only put one book in your starter library, choose this one. I assume it’s already there, but if not then get stuck into this deeply philosophical book, which has so much to say about perception, time, cruelty, and control over others.]
Books of ideas [nonfiction]
W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk
Every American should read it. But non-Americans should too. The idea of double-consciousness—the way a minority must measure themselves by the tape of the majority, as DuBois so memorably puts it in his first pages—explains so much of our contemporary sense of identity.
In addition to its ideas, Souls is a fascinatingly hybrid book, presumably stranger in 1903 than today. Each chapter is prefaced by a bar of music, often from the sorrow songs. Most chapters are essayistic, but some are fictional. Each is written in resonant cadence. Hasn’t dated much. Alas.
[Alternate choice: Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. Explains how Nazism and Stalinism came to be so accepted and do so much harm. Especially interesting for (1) its “boomerang” theory of imperial violence, in which what the metropole does in the colony comes back to bite it at home, and (2) its argument that modern antisemitism arose from the waning of Empire and the rise of nationalism. Hasn’t dated much. Alas.]
Monomaniac books
The strand from writers like Kafka, Knut Hamsun, or Robert Walser to someone like Lydia Davis, via the high point of Thomas Bernhard, has been enormously influential in the Anglo-American sphere. At this point, annoyingly so. (And weird, too, given that none of the most important precursors wrote in English.) But I get it because literature excels at tracing the vagaries of a mind, especially one spinning through reversals, paradoxes, and hobby-horses. A starter library should have an example of this sort of thing, and Bernhard might be the best. When the only thing that stands between a psyche adrift or worse is the chance that someone might respond to its voice—that’s when you’re in Bernhard territory. I’ve chosen The Voice Imitator because the title says it all. Read these 104 short texts to get a sense of Bernhard’s bitter, misanthropic, and, oddly, funny vibe.
[Alternate choice: I just named like five other writers!]
Funny books
P. G. Wodehouse, The Code of the Woosters
As implied in what I said about Bernhard, voice-driven books don’t have to be grim. They can make us laugh, whether from the gap between what the narrator claims and what we know, or the sheer verve of their style. The fun only increases when those narrators get embroiled in elegant plots. Wodehouse is the master of this terrirtory and everyone’s library is the better for including him. (I feel like he’s fading a bit from memory? Sad.) You can jump in anywhere—my entry point was the distinctly not-famous-but oh-so-representatively-titled Eggs, Beans, and Crumpets which baffled and delighted me at age 12—but if you’re at a loss start with this wonderful episode in the Jeeves and Bertie series, which Tim Waltz would enjoy, since it’s an early example of the “I condemn the fascists by unflinchingly stating how weird they are” school of responding to authoritarianism. (As Bertie says, appalled by the realization that the Saviours of Britain are simply grown men marching in black shorts: “how perfectly foul!”)
[Alternate choice: for an American version of this phenomenon, reach for Charles Portis, especially the marvelous True Grit.]
Books about crime
Dolores Hitchens, Sleep with Strangers & Sleep with Slander
Since at least Oedipus Rex, literature has used crime to understand fundamental concerns like identity, political organization, and moral value. Crime fiction can be smart, is what I’m saying. And it can also carry us away by inciting our desire to have enigmas explained. (Interestingly, it often makes us realize how much more compelling it is to ask a question than to answer it.) Like any genre, then, crime fiction satisfies at both the intellectual and emotional level. Having stayed with well-known titles so far, I’m diving deep for this last category. Not enough readers, even lovers of crime fiction, have read the mid-century American writer Dolores Hitchens. She wrote a lot of books under a lot of names. But only two about a PI named Jim Spader. Which is sad—but also good because they’re even more special. These make for pretty despairing reading, even for noir. So be warned. But you won’t regret seeking them out.
[Alternate choice: Hundreds! Thousands! Sticking with mid-century American women writers, I’ll plump for Dorothy B. Hughes’s The Expendable Man. Don’t read anything about it beforehand!]
I tried not to think too long in coming up with my choices. Next month or next year I’d choose differently. And I’m aware of some big lapses. No poetry?? No plays?? No Torah?? (Everyone should read the Five Books of Moses.) But that’s ok. Gives you all the more room to think about how you’d create a starter library of your own. What would be on your shelf of promises?
Friends, I am here to apologize to Matt Keeley, who wrote this great piece for me many months ago and has waited patiently (or maybe fumed silently) for me to publish it. I have no good excuse: I got busy and forgot. Terrible. Anyway, this really is a case of better late than never.
Matt is a freelance writer living in Boston.
Ilse Bing, East River with Boat, New York (1936)
Being a reader and working with books can, oddly enough, feel like mutually exclusive propositions. I spent most of 2024 underemployed, but what work I had before starting a new full-time job in October was mainly book-related. I copyedited and wrote pitches for a Dutch literary agency; I did brief manuscript reports for a literary scouting firm; I did occasional reviews for Reactor, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe. I spent so much time on “professional” reading, including dozens of titles that I would normally have no interest in, that my personal reading suffered.
E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime was not the book I expected it to be: one somehow doesn’t expect a book this strange to sell a million copies, end up on movie screens, and inspire a Broadway musical. This is an almost essayistic historical novel, with an intrusive and opinionated narrator, major characters who go titled (Father, Mother, Younger Brother) but unnamed, and plot lines that don’t tangle so much as split. Henry Ford and JP Morgan discuss reincarnation in front a stolen Egyptian mummy; Emma Goldman befriends a notorious “kept woman;” in the epilogue, we learn that one character gets killed in the Mexican Civil War, that another sinks with the Lusitania, and that a third creates the Little Rascals franchise. It’s a deeply weird book. [Ed. – Colour me intrigued…]
The movie, incidentally, is quite good, with James Cagney’s final performance, an uncredited appearance by a young Samuel L. Jackson, and Norman Mailer as an ill-fated libidinous architect. I wonder how many New York literati of the 1980s especially enjoyed watching his death scene? [Ed. – Probably still satisfying today.]
Ruth Scurr’s John Aubrey: My Own Life is an unusual biography that repurposes the words of the great antiquarian and his contemporaries to create a sort of hypothetical autobiography. There’s much that remains unknown about Aubrey’s life, and Scurr would rather leave open a gap than speculate. That means, for example, that we get more about the stones of Avebury than we do about Aubrey’s romantic life, more tossed-off preference than deeply felt emotion. This is an eccentric book about an eccentric man; most readers won’t much like it, but a few, like me, will love it. [Ed. – In the immortal slogan of Halifax’s Alexander Keith’s brewery: “Those who like it, like it a lot.”]
Gone: The Last Days of The New Yorker is Renata Adler’s score-settling memoir about the departure of William Shawn, the arrival of Robert Gottlieb, and the eventual appearance of Tina Brown. At one point, Adler compares Adam Gopnik to Anthony Powell’s Widmerpool. If you recognize the names in the last few sentences, you’ll likely enjoy this book, even if you don’t entirely trust it. Otherwise, you’d best avoid.
Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte is the dirtiest book I’ve read in ages. [Ed. — !] It seemed to come out of nowhere: I’d never heard of book or author until an editor asked me to review it. I invoked Philip Roth in my review, and I stand by that comparison:
Its heights, or depths, of exuberant filth reminded me of Philip Roth in Portnoy’s Complaint or Sabbath’s Theater. Like Roth, Tulathimutte knows desire can be as ludicrous as it is urgent; like Roth, he likes a good dirty joke.
Other highlights of 2024’s reading include:
Peter Straub’s Koko, a serial killer story with fine writing, memorable characters, and all too much exoticizing of the mysterious Orient [Ed. – It’s so mysterious tho]
Six of Georges Simenon’s Maigret novels — I really need to get back to the romans durs soon, but there’s something comforting about Maigret even when the plots are, in fact, quite harrowing
Amit Chaudhuri’s A Strange and Sublime Address, his first novel, as elegantly written and absorbingly plotless as later books like Friend of My Youth and Sojourn [Ed. – Read this last year as well: good stuff]
Paolo Bacigalupi’s Navola, the sequel to which cannot come soon enough. (Dorian — There’s a strong Guy Gavriel Kay influence here. I think you’d like) [Ed. – I appreciated this tip enough to check it out of the library—it indeed looks quite my thing—but not, apparently, enough to read it yet…]
M.T. Anderson’s Nicked, a fantastical medieval heist novel and queer romance [Ed. – Octavian Nothing was fantastic.]
Adam Roberts’s Lake of Darkness, a science fiction novel about Satan, post-scarcity, and what happens when you let AI do all your thinking
Howard Norman’s My Darling Detective, a thoroughly charming tale hampered only by the author’s difficulties with continuity and his editor’s failing to notice the innumerable discrepancies and inconsistencies. Read for the vibes, not the details. [Ed. – Yikes!]
Two that got away
One sad effect of all my book work was that I struggled to finish long and complicated books. I got maybe eighty pages into Oakley Hall’s classic Western Warlock before I gave up. The prose so fine, the type so small, the pages so numerous: I enjoyed and admired the book, but it took two weeks to traverse less than a hundred pages. [Ed. – Ha! Nicely put! It’s not easy, that one. Took me a while to fall under its spell.] I felt myself losing the thread, and put the book back on the shelf for a less fraught day.
Something similar happened with Iris Murdoch’s The Black Prince, which I’ve had on my shelves since 2007. In a burst of optimism, I’d bought three Murdoch paperbacks when I was a college student studying abroad in Dublin. I quickly read A Severed Head and hated it, and so The Sea, the Sea and The Black Prince sat unread for more than a decade. I knew, however, the problem was more with Matt than with Murdoch, so every year I vainly promised myself I’d give Murdoch another shot. When I finally took the plunge last June, I was thrilled to find that The Black Prince was smart, funny, and satirical, bursting with memorable images and sparkling with ideas. Except, once again, I found myself losing the thread and regretfully set the book aside.
I ended up reading The Bell, another Murdoch, in January of 2025. Perhaps I’ll get through The Black Prince later this year? [Ed. – Because it took me so damn long to get this up, maybe he has!]
John Constable, Cloud Study
Last year’s books, this year
Finally, there are a few 2024 books that I bought and fully intended to read, but haven’t quite gotten around to. First is Percival Everett’s James, a novel which sold a million copies and made nearly as many end-of-year lists. I’ve enjoyed Everett’s past novels and I’m sure I’ll tear through this one when I get around to it. Incidentally: I wonder when Everett’s next book will be? He usually seems to write about a book a year; I wonder if they’re holding off publication until James sales begin to taper off?
Next is Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford. I pitched it for review, but the pitch was declined. [Ed. – Boo!] I’m reading it now and am impressed: It’s simultaneously a murder mystery, a literary novel, and an alternate history. Spufford dedicates the book to “Prof. Kroeber’s daughter;” I wonder if Prof. Kroeber makes an appearance in the book. The period is right, Kroeber was an anthropologist interested in Native Americans, and there are lots of Native American characters in the book. [Ed. – SO good!]
Last is Ed Park’s Same Bed Different Dreams, which looks to be a polyphonic metafictional conspiratorial genre bender. I’ll probably turn to this once I finish Cahokia Jazz. [Ed. – Also good, with plenty of hockey. Thanks, Matt! Sorry again for dropping the ball!]
Here is my introduction to Episode 35 of the podcast I co-host with Rebecca Hussey and Frances Evangelista, One Bright Book.
Ben Sahm, “Child Labor” 1940 – 42. Part of the four-part mural The Meaning of Social Security (1940 – 42) Cohen Federal Building, Washington, D.C.
Our book today is Willa Cather’s O Pioneers!, first published in 1913.
O Pioneers! was Cather’s second novel, and her first big success. It’s a short book, episodic in structure, centered on Alexandra Bergson, a Swedish immigrant who lives on a struggling farm in southern Nebraska with her ailing father, her stoic mother, and her three brothers. On his deathbed, the father entrusts the farm to Alexandra, not only as the eldest child, but also and more importantly as the only one likely to make a success of it. By blending confidence, daring, and hard work, Alexandra does just that, becoming a successful landowner and a linchpin of the community of European immigrants forging new lives around the town of Hanover. Many of these new Americans are Scandinavian—some of the old timers still only speak Swedish—but others are French or Czech.
The title comes from one of Walt Whitman’s hymns to the glory of the American experiment. As its plural noun suggests, the novel is something of a group portrait. The first half centers on economic struggle and the fantasy of bending landscape and climate to human wishes. The second half foregrounds two love stories: the muted relationship between Alexandra and a childhood friend, Carl, who has gone away to seek his fortune and returns to visit years later., and the passionate, doomed affair between Emil, Alexandra’s youngest brother, and Marie, a married woman who lives on the neighboring farm.
This ending is already prefigured in the beginning, when Cather writes: “The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.” I might not have paid much attention to that sentence were it not for the circumstances in which I came across it. I happened to read the early chapters of O Pioneers! in the Little Rock Social Security office, where I had business earlier this week.
It turns out all kinds of people come to the Social Security office. I sat alongside new immigrants and elderly couples, family members with their adult disabled children and new parents with babies in tow. The room we occupied had the slightly sterile quality of many bureaucratic offices, yet it felt more functional than alienating. Most everyone’s attention was fixed on a large board which told us supplicants which window to visit when our number flashed up. But that didn’t stop us from doing other things too. People chatted with the people sitting next to them, and with the security officers who, despite the sign declaring that they were not to be bothered with official questions, easily and casually dispensed advice. They played on their phones, shuffled nervously through their paperwork, shushed their children, even read 20th century American novels.
I wished that the people who believe government is evil, maybe people like our current President and Vice President, whose photos glared malevolently from the wall of the hallway outside the waiting room, could see the place in action. Is it somewhere you would want to spend a lot of time? Certainly not. But is it a demoralizing vortex of inefficiency aimed at squandering the hard-won gains of “real” Americans? Absolutely not. It’s a place filled with people doing their best, a place dedicated to helping others, no matter how tattered the American social net might be.
I wondered what Willa Cather would think of that room. I thought of the communal spirit expressed by the Nebraska farmers who populate the pages of O Pioneers!, most of them either first or second generation Americans. I thought of the marginalized characters Alexandra protects—a man named Ivar prone to fits and unwilling to wear shoes but good with horses who she keeps on to her brothers’ dismay, a Swedish widow who loves to visit Alexandra’s farm because the younger woman listens to her stories and doesn’t demand that the old woman speak English. Would Cather be willing to shift the onus of care from individual to collective? Would she agree that a dignified life belonged to all citizens regardless of their beliefs or abilities, and that this opportunity should be given by the people to each other through the government rather than through the mercy of an individual? I remembered a counter tendency to Alexandra’s charity and large-mindedness, namely a tendency to judge behaviors deemed deviant or non-normative, as when Alexandra scours her body in the bath after indulging in sexual fantasy or denounces Emil and Marie’s illicit relationship.
Most of all, I looked at the faces in the room, many, perhaps most of which, were not white. I thought about who counts among the pioneers of the title, and which kinds of Americans did not seem to be imagined by the book. (Having finished the book, I’m especially struck by its absolute silence about indigenous people, who are not even present as frightening tales from the time before the frontier was settled.)
I hoped, and this is fanciful I know, that, despite the changes between then and now, Willa Cather would enjoy sitting in that room, would view its goings on with interest, would be curious about if not necessarily approving of the America present among its plastic chairs and scuffed linoleum flooring.
Robert Adams, “North of Keota, Colorado”
I’ll never know, of course, but I will know what my co-hosts thought of it, which is something I am even more curious about.
Friends, what did you make of O Pioneers! ?
Listen to the episode for their answers: but feel free to chime in below. We’re all friends here.
Pleased to once again present reading reviews from some of my favourite readers. Today’s installment, his fourth, is byScott Walters. Scott launched the much-lamented blog seraillon in 2010, and expects to return to it one of these days. He largely follows Primo Levi’s model of “occasional and erratic reading, reading out of curiosity, impulse or vice, and not by profession.” He lives with his partner in San Francisco.
Barring surprises, here ends the 2024 edition of the EMJ Year in Reading series: except, I hope, for my own. (Gotta write that…) Thanks to everyone who contributed–and all who read these engaging lists.
Balthus, The Passage of Commerce Saint-Andre (1954)
Thank you, Dorian, for inviting me again to participate in The Year in Reading. [Ed. – Pleasure all mine, Scott!] Mine meandered mostly pleasurably through some 60 books. I abandoned others, was surprised to have read fewer Italian works than in previous years, and experienced a number of unpremeditated pairings, reading two works each by a dozen authors plus more thematic linkages. I’ll get straight to 2024’s highlights:
The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins (1860)
I nearly lost my head when I interrupted my spouse’s reading of the final pages of The Woman in White, but her abrupt “Ssh!” made total sense as I plunged into the book myself the next day. Abstracted, the “detective-ish” book’s nutty plot—starting with its mysterious woman in white and moving to family secrets, confused identities, unlikely coincidences, shady interlopers, and convoluted inheritances—would hardly seem encouraging. But over 650 pages Collins never lets drop any of the knots of intrigue he has in the air, a master class in plotting with the ending so neatly and satisfyingly resolving the novel’s myriad conflicts that the book should have come tied up with a pretty bow. I found equally impressive his crafting of splendid characters, including the flamboyantly louche and unforgettable Count Fosco and Marian Holcombe, the novel’s moral center, surely one of the great characters in English literature. [Ed. – Now read No Name!]
[Paired with Collins’s The Moonstone].
The Purple Cloud, M. P. Shiel (1901)
If The Woman in White stands at the peak of the Victorian era, Shiel’s The Purple Cloud levels the period to the ground: an apocalyptic horror story, to be sure, with a body count beyond reckoning, but also an existential tale that takes Jules Verne’s brand of adventure in the direction of Lovecraft (and maybe even Kafka and Beckett). Into the tale of the sole-surviving member of a polar expedition returning to find worldwide catastrophe, Shiel mixes dazzling epic catalogues with itinerant wanderings—by dogsled, boat, rail, and on foot—that make Odysseus seem nearly an armchair tourist. A magnificently macabre tour of England unfolds from the coasts to the moors to the mines to the vacant house of Arthur Machen (to pay a literary debt) before the novel’s agonist traverses the infernal hellscape as far as Tokyo and San Francisco. Adding to the panorama of ghastliness is the misogynistic unpleasantness of the narrator himself, though having a murderer inherit such a lonely place is certainly a twist on the “last man” genre. Shiel lightens his grotesqueries by upscaling his inventiveness and gallows humor, even taking a few swipes at the Empire’s Victorian sensibilities. His idiosyncratic, nimble writing prompted me to mark down passages, though left me wondering whether the “purple” in his title may have referenced florid elements infecting his sheer writing bravura. Half-way through I wondered why the book didn’t regularly appear on English literature reading lists. Two-thirds of the way through, an abrupt turn sent the tone spiraling from Brueghel’s Triumph of Death into the schmalz of W. H. Hudson’s Green Mansions, underscoring a built-in problem of last man narratives: how to bring things to a close, what with destruction being so easy and rebuilding such a struggle. Shiel regained his footing towards the end but stumbled again on his way out the door. Maybe some goody-two-shoes editor had stuck their nose in. Still, The Purple Cloud’s grandiose conception and relentlessly ghastly anti-pleasures made it a singular reading experience—and fitting B-side to Collins.
Bel-Ami, Guy de Maupassant (1885)
At age 4, my French goddaughter presented me with a paper “cootie-catcher” featuring appealing green designs on three sides and a frightening mess of scribbled red and black on the fourth. I inquired. “This is a flower, and this is a tree, and this is grass, and this is a vampire.” [Ed. – Reasonable.] Now that she’s 21 I’ve come to expect this kind of thing regularly, but when she insisted that I read Guy de Maupassant’s Bel-Ami, I fell right into her trap. The story of a down-on-his-luck former soldier, Georges Duroy, whose life is transformed by a chance meeting with a war buddy who helps get him into journalism, is a superb depiction of the writing life; an existential examination of class, morality and gender relations; and one of the most sordid narratives I’ve come across. Duroy is a terrific antagonist, an arriviste with attractive qualities tinged by inexperience and raw ambition, not above prevarication and cruelty when it suits him. Maupassant manages the story so skillfully that I naively believed it to be heading towards a treatment of the subject of friendship between men and women, the source of Duroy’s “Bel-Ami” nickname—an ironic one, I was soon to realize, as what Maupassant does with Duroy makes Zola’s take on human debauchery look like a Sunday school picnic. [Ed. — !] The novel contains great set pieces, including a drawn-out death scene where a post-mortem odor drifts off the page like something out of D’Annunzio, and a party in a mansion on the Champs-Elysée that contrasts with the grim lives of Duroy’s rentier parents rotting away in Rennes. Maupassant levels the world of journalism too, its appetite for influencing public opinion, its writers seeking short-cuts to fame—a subject altogether too relevant today. Duroy’s talent, which emerges bit by bit, takes flight in social situations, where during one visit with a group of women he extemporizes on the writing of the French Academy. Maupassant, of course, was writing against the Academy grain, and few writers have woven a French of such sublime beauty from a tissue of such splendid decadence. [Ed. – Well, damn!]
[Paired with Manon Lescaut (1731), by the Abbé de Prevost].
Dark Back of Time, Javier Marías (1998) (Esther Allen, translator)
It would be unjust to pigeonhole Dark Back of Time –“a book of digressions”—as a campus novel, and equally unjust to separate it from its co-joined twin, All Souls (1992). But taken together as a campus novel, these two works, set at Oxford, slay all comers. Someone once quipped that the campus novel was about settling scores. Dark Back of Time seems aimed at undoing any barbs present in All Souls and even any notion of that book’s having been a roman à clef (this too, of course, may be a fiction). While the first part of Dark Back of Time engages weighty questions about fictional representation of real people, the joyousness of the novel’s explorations often had me in stitches, including a scene in which an academic negotiates with the narrator/author how he will be represented in the new novel, and another in which the narrator/author, timidly attempting to clarify for owners of an Oxford bookshop that what he’d written in All Souls was not about them, finds that the couple revel in their fame and petition to be included as themselves in a film version. It seems fitting in these books that Marías, Spain’s late greatest novelist, has evoked echoes of the most iconic of Spanish fictions, for, like the first and second books of Don Quixote, the two novels form an essential unit in which one could read only the first volume and miss out dramatically on what the second volume does with the first. (I’d love one day to see All Souls and Dark Back of Time boxed as a set; Cervantes would approve.) I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to suggest that these volumes, taken together, may be the finest contemporary literary work to address the question, “What is fiction?” Two other elements to recommend the book: The first is Marías’s inclusion of the fascinating story of Redonda, the “literary” nation of which Marías served as most recent and presumably final King (M. P. Shiel had been the first). [Ed. – Wait, that dude you just wrote about?? Is this real? Am I being punked??] The second is that Dark Back of Time contains some of Marías’s most exhilarating writing; I think immediately of a moving passage about the dawn crepuscule and streetlights that persist for a time into the day. Time having ever been one of Marías’s great preoccupations, I also winced at his narrator imagining life at age 85—a full 15 years past the premature end of Marías’s own. Unconscionably, The New York Times left Marías off of its recent list of the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century to date, but it is certain that the lamp of Marías’s work will live on to see its day.
[Paired with Marías’s short travel book, Venice: An Interior (2016)].
The Charwoman’s Shadow, Lord Dunsany (1926)
Fantasy is not among my favorite genres, but I’ve been fond of everything I’ve read by Edward Morton John Dax Plunkett, a.k.a. Lord Dunsany. Dunsany’s stories seem more like a new model of fairy tales, exploring interstices between reality and the imagination and dealing with moral issues without being moralizing. The Charwoman’s Shadow features a young Spaniard sent by his family to learn alchemy from a woodland magician, and exhibits Dunsany qualities in abundance: a deep gratitude for the richness of life, where nothing can be taken for granted; a genial wit and wordplay; a careful attention to nuance. The centerpiece of the novel is the value of one’s own shadow, the disappearance of which, through a Faustian bargain, produces unexpectedly dire consequences. Another Dunsany treasure is the lyrical quality of his writing, for example when he takes on that most magical of hours, l’heure bleue:
bright over the lingering twilight the first star appeared. It was the hour when Earth has most reverence, the hour when her mystery reaches out and touches the hearts of her children at such a time if at all one might guess her strange old story; such a time she might choose at which to show herself, in the splendour that decked her then, to passing comet or spirit, or whatever stranger would travel across the paths of the planets.
And then there is the book’s splendid ending, which I will not spoil other than to say that with no apparent thought of producing endless sequels like some contemporary writers of fantasy fiction, Dunsany gently places his chief protagonist off stage and sweeps into a realm of wistfulness drenched in the glow of a glorious sun setting at the height of Spain’s Golden Age.
[Paired with Dunsany’s The King of Elfland’s Daughter (1924)].
At 163 pages, Aira’s Fulgentius straddles novella and novel, and not simply as matter of length. Aira’s intimate, vividly imagined tale of a Legate of the Roman Empire who also happens to be a playwright expands as it follows the aging Fulgentius and his 6,000 soldiers from Rome to reconquer Pannonia. Along the way, Fulgentius mounts performances of his sole work, a tragedy written when he was an adolescent, starring himself as tragic hero—and most important audience member. As Fulgentius has already written—or thinks he has already written—the tragic outcome of his own story, the plot tension is carried by a familiar Aira conceit around the entwining of fiction and reality. As a prime example one of Aira’s works that graft a fictional character onto history, Fulgentius offers a vivid sense of what such a march must have been like for the soldiers, the general, and the populations in their path. Deviating from the author’s more typical surrealist gymnastics, the language here takes on an unusually elegant lyrical register.
[Paired with Aira’s Alexandra Pizarnik (2001), an appreciation of the Argentine poet].
The Catherine Wheel, Jean Stafford (1952)
I found a copy of Jean Stafford’s The Catherine Wheel when I was 18. Had I read it then, I doubt I would have fully appreciated its adult nature—for it really is an adult book, dealing with adult things, things terrifying enough that I approached the novel’s final pages with a shudder of complete dread (completely vindicated). But in The Catherine Wheel Stafford also reckons with youth, entwining her two main characters, 38-year-old Katherine Congreve and her 12-year-old cousin Andrew Shipley. Devastated in love at an earlier age when Andrew’s father John married her sister Maeve, Katherine now occupies a position as the town’s most prominent unmarried curiosity, but also a magnet to John and Maeve’s children, left behind while the parents “summer” in Europe. Twin betrayals connected to this departure have set both cousins spinning: John’s surprise declaration of love for Katherine and determination to divorce Maeve while abroad, and the disappearance of Andrew’s playmate of previous summers, Victor, now entirely occupied with the post-war return of an older brother. Dually abandoned, the cousins shift focus to one another. Stafford thus sets up an unusual device in which youth attempts to divine the mysteries of adulthood while adulthood frets over the crises of youth, in a marriage story focused on impacts beyond the absent couple’s own strife. [Ed. – This feels like some Henry James-level melodrama!] A kind of third eye—that of the people of Hawthorne, who notice when Katherine’s light stays on into the wee hours—levies its own social pressure on the house’s inhabitants. Stafford’s densely poetic sentences frequently had me reading her aloud, relishing her words, marveling at the perfect limning of some little thing or creation of a resonance that rippled out towards subjects beyond the proximate ones. Though rooted in a realist, formalist literature that prioritized and exalted language, the novel still felt raw and new, bursting out of old molds, totally unsettling. Not a novel for the squeamish, but certainly one for any reader ready to appreciate some of the finest American writing of the period.
[Paired with Stafford’s The Mountain Lion (1947)].
whose names are unknown, Sanora Babb (1936/2004)
Sanora Babb’s novel has been highlighted in recent articles recounting editor Bennett Cerf’s decision that two Dust Bowl novels in a single year would not stand. The other, of course, was The Grapes of Wrath, allegedly constructed in part on notes Babb had collected concerning hardscrabble farmers in her native Oklahoma, and which Cerf provided to Steinbeck. Though Babb published other well-received works, her Dust Bowl novel languished unpublished for nearly 70 years. whose names are unknown borrows its title from an eviction notice served on a family of Oklahoma farmers. What the novel may lack compared to Steinbeck’s elegant structure and majestic sweep, it makes up for in granularity of detail and visceral impact relating the farmers’ desperation and poverty, with particular attention to the lives of women, whose interactions give the work some of its strongest scenes. Babb’s direct, declarative sentences come across as hard as the land worked by her characters. She describes the knife-edge on which her people live, where even small luxuries—such as butter for the biscuits—must be used sparingly “so that it will last until the next churning.” Where Steinbeck set his novel on the back of hope for a better life in California, Babb spends a long time in Oklahoma before heading west, zeroing in on the encroachment of the Dust Bowl, poor farming practices colliding with a change in climate and the shifts within and without people as they try to wrestle with such environmental change. Babb’s powerful novel deserves at least to be taught alongside Steinbeck’s, or rather, as the debt is all his, the other way around. [Ed. – Pretty telling/damning that I’d never heard of it.]
Écoute, Boris Razon (2018)
It’s clear from which chapter of French journalist Boris Razon’s novel Écoute (“Listen”) Jacques Audiard plucked the seed for his film Emilia Perez, but Écoute differs almost entirely from the film. As the book’s title suggests, Razon focuses here on listening, various forms of which coalesce the book’s entwined stories and capture the complex, fraught texture of contemporary communications. Set mostly on a single block near Place d’Italie in Paris (with detours to Mexico City and Lisbon), and with the November 2015 terror attacks continuing to resonate, the novel touches on the surveillance state by encompassing listener, the listened-to, privacy, and identity (here’s where Emilia Perez came in, but so, to my surprise, did Fernando Pessoa). In conveying the rapid-fire chatter and laconic banality of so many electronic communications, Razon employs a good deal of verlan, texts and texting abbreviations, and emoticons, prompting one character to muse on the absence of a dictionary adequate to capture today’s modes of information sharing. Running beneath this surface noise is a current of desire to disappear from a world in which privacy has all but vanished. The stunning first chapter presents a scene of the Paris street that surely ranks among the richest in that city’s literature, an “audioscape” as experienced from the inside of a police surveillance van by an officer quietly being undone by his job of attempting to cull signal from the noise and by the uncanny valley between electronic input and what he perceives with his own senses. [Not yet available in English translation, though that may well change should Emilia Perez win the Oscar for best film].
Edward Hopper, Solitary Figure in a Theater (1903)
Oak Flat: A Fight for Sacred Land (2020) and Thunder and Lightning: Weather Past, Present and Future (2015), Lauren Redniss
2024 was the year I came late to Lauren Redniss’s party, pairing her powerful Oak Flat with her larger format Thunder and Lightning. The former explores the fight around the proposed Resolution mine on tribal lands in Arizona, while the latter treats weather phenomena both straightforwardly (i.e. Rain, Heat, Wind) and in more abstract terms (i.e. Chaos, Dominion, Profit, War). Using an anecdotal approach, Redniss displays in both books a knack for ferreting out the most interesting possible interviewees and unearthing fascinating hidden tales. But what makes the work of this MacArthur award winner stand out is its exploration of text and image. Using full page illustrations, Redniss skillfully advances her story through images of such impact that I found myself gasping at turning a page and being confronted with an image perfectly tuned to the tone she had set. The large format of Thunder and Lightning lends itself particularly well to her subject. In Fog, the text crawls along the bottom of pages of vast gray. Redniss’s deliberateness in matching image to text and letting the image carry the narrative feels like a new form of text/image interaction. In a section about cloud seeding, she describes a proposal to use weather balloons to heft a pipe with multiple nozzles to spray chemicals that could help cool the planet. I could not help see this as a metaphor for the way her illustrations lift her text in air. These images, easily mistaken for colored pencil washes, are in fact mostly acid etchings in black and white that Redniss has hand-colored (Thunder and Lightning includes a description of her processes). I read Redness not long after finishing James Elkins’s novel, Weak in Comparison to Dreams, another work that relies heavily on images, by a leading theorist of text/image interaction, no less, and now find myself dreaming of a Redniss/Elkins collaboration. Come on, you two. Make it so. [Ed. – Either way, I’m tracking down these Redniss books!]
Moonlight Elk, Christie Green (2024)
I know Christie Green but was wholly unprepared for her first book. Each time I put Moonlight Elk aside, I could not waitto get back out into it. That awkward prepositional formulation feels apt, as Moonlight Elk, a book framed around Green’s experiences in across New Mexico hunting wild game, largely for sustenance, takes one to wild spaces in an intensely intimate manner. Exploring the borders between interiority and exteriority, animal and human, life and death, the book’s dozen interlocking pieces, indexed to a hand-drawn map of the state, might well be the New Mexico state book of the year (if such a thing exists). With solid research behind her narrative, Green leverages her experience as hunter, mother, landscape architect, land use expert, designer, naturalist, activist, and writer to traverse territory of essay, short story, meditation, and what one might call an anthropology of relationship. Memoir might also come to mind, but resistant to definability, Moonlight Elk seems more like an exorcism, a courageous self-interrogation in quest of a “free range” existence that refutes facile answers, upends convention, moves into spaces predominantly occupied by men, and attempts to rid the cultural body of a toxic detachment from nature. Hunting—particularly as a woman alone—foregrounds the narrative, but Green is after larger game. She inhabits the lives of animals, their cycles and patterns, how they move, what they sense, how they see her. The mysterious, miraculous complexity of bodies, not least Green’s own, forms the beating heart of the book: details of muscular structure and bone, of blood and feathers and sex, the quickness of eyes, the sharp sense of smell. Her hunts force self-reckoning, as when she discovers a fetus moving within the abdomen of a cow elk she has shot, or when she ends the suffering of another cow that comes to her after being gruesomely wounded by poachers. Green, who grew up in Alaska, integrates into her experiences a wealth of issues impacting the American West, from private vs. public land and water use to tribal and border concerns (in the boot heel of New Mexico, a quail hunt collides with Border Patrol conducting their own kind of hunting). Only at the narrative’s end did I grasp the extent of the subjects Green had covered. More personally affecting, as she moves through forest, desert and chapparal, shadowed by cliffs and trees, illuminated by dreams and the changes of the moon, she offers, with keen animal sense and without escapism, an orthogonal, conscientious response to received ideas, convenient consumerism, and mediated experience. Hyper-alert, alive, intuitively creating her path, Green renders wilderness almost otherworldly. I emerged from Moonlight Elk seeing this world anew, as though a physical alteration had taken place. [Ed. – Sold! Might pair well with Joanna Pocock’s Surrender.]
Gallery of Clouds, Rachel Eisendrath (2024)
The title: irresistible. The cover too, a fresco of clouds at sunrise or sunset from the ceiling of the Rose Main Reading Room in the New York Public Library. And the opening especially, the author recounting a dream of carrying her manuscript through heaven and meeting: Virginia Woolf. Both ostensibly and in fact, the subject of Gallery of Clouds is Sir Philip Sidney’s 16th century, 900-page pastoral romance, Arcadia, about which I knew nothing and which overwhelms even Eisendrath, a Sidney scholar: “I find that my memory of the plot has already started to dim, to blur…I can no longer keep track of the basics…” I say “ostensibly” because Eisendrath uses the obstacle, Arcadia serving here as a nexus to send her fertile mind wandering down winding paths, from observations on the genre of Romance to the use of images, Shakespeare to Little Nemo, Poussin to Walter Benjamin, Montaigne to manicules (!), the marriage of hunting with desire to the cat dozing on Eisendrath’s bed.
But these seemingly inexhaustible spin-offs never seem gratuitous. Eisendrath subtly constructs an Arcadia of our own era, her black & white photos echoing the pastoral romance’s means of advancing its airy infinities through “images in words,” her “clouds” of thought (which she pointedly distinguishes from mere fragments) paralleling the episodic nature of the romance, her grounding her observations on Sidney in a relatable contemporary manner underscoring the genre as a response to grim realities. At the same time, Eisendrath engages proliferating modes in contemporary writing, such as the use of the fragmentary, the merging of the academic and the personal, the punctuation of text with images, the grappling, through a need to say, with an unraveling world. Though she is writing about a 16th century romance, her small, enthralling, sui generis book has volumes to say about how we read and write. And in Eisendrath’s few references to her own teaching, Gallery of Clouds, more than anything I have read in decades, has me wanting to be a student again.
The Waves, Virginia Woolf (1931)
Rereading The Waves 40+ years after I first read it and in the same copy I’d used then, my margin notes served to measure the distance between that young reader and this old one. I experienced pride regarding the young stranger’s underlining of particular lines; I noted too that he’d missed a lot. Passages of time of this sort span The Waves, entwined temporal arcs that longitudinally capture Woolf’s six characters through alternating interior soliloquies as they move from childhood to university [ed. – well, some of them get to go to university…] to the workplace to middle age and beyond, while brief impressionistic pieces preface each chapter and, over the course of the novel, trace the sun’s path across the sky during a single day at the shore. Here as in many of her works, Woolf, the great writer of immediacy, obsesses over capturing sensations, gestures, glances, discreet moments, the wave at the point of breaking, of ebbing. Rafts of glorious sentences ride Woolf’s exquisite phrasing, as she simultaneously questions the inadequacies of language, frustration with these limits reaching a crescendo as mortality nears for her characters, and a voice longs for:
some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on the pavement. I begin to seek some design more in accordance with those moments of humiliation and triumph that come now and then undeniably. Lying in a ditch on a stormy day, when it has been raining, then enormous clouds come marching over the sky, tattered clouds, wisps of cloud. What delights me then is the confusion, the height, the indifference and the fury. Great clouds always changing, and movement; something sulphurous and sinister, bowled up, helter-skelter; towering, trailing, broken off, lost, and I forgotten, minute, in a ditch. Of story, of design I do not see a trace then.
[Ed. – Is this Bernard? Sounds like Bernard.] Woolf described The Waves as a “playpoem,” but its approach to polyphony is unusual. In the first chapter, she goes inside the heads of her characters as young children while at the same time supplying them a vocabulary beyond their years, a device through which they speak both as themselves and as the writer, the latter’s presence made manifest when the children catch a glimpse through a window of a woman writing. Throughout the novel, her six characters’ voices float like spheres governed by gravity, now apart, now coalescing, as waves gather force and crash, exploding in spray and froth. But her characters also serve to question the nature of identity: clearly creations of the writer and facets of her circle (the roman à clef aspects interested me little), they are also beings in whom a “self” is merged inextricably with other selves. For all of its prose-poeminess, The Waves stands as a remarkable and grounded philosophical inquiry into what constitutes a self—and whether it even makes sense to speak of a “self.” [Ed. – Yes, the latter especially!]
In my first reading, I scarcely noticed the centrality to the novel of the death of Percival, a “seventh” character never given a voice. But in Paris shortly after finishing The Waves, I caught director Elise Vigneron’s theatrical adaptation of the novel, an extraordinary work employing both live actors and corresponding marionettes made of ice, such that as the play progressed, these figures melted, with much of the later action occurring in a resulting pool center stage. [Ed. — !] The physical presence of these characters and their doubles rendered Percival’s invisible presence powerful, a black center in Woolf’s “six-sided flower; made of six lives.” As with the shell-shocked Septimus Smith in Mrs. Dalloway, Percival represents a generation of young people damaged or lost to conflict and war. The cumulative effect of Woolf’s meditation on loss, whether through ordinary aging or via the injustice of an early death—and a palpable sense of darkness again descending upon Europe—left me overwhelmed by emotion at the story’s close.
What attracted me to Woolf at age 18 held firm: her sumptuous sentences; the tension between a love of people and aloof solitariness; the desperation of time passing fused with the fever to glean something lasting from the fleeting and ineffable. Also: recognition at last of Woolf’s lament for life lost at an early age, for the unshakable impact on those left behind, pushing The Waves into a work far greater than I’d registered the first time around. I’ve been thrilled, moved, and humbled by revisiting this extraordinary novel while the sun sinks toward a darkening horizon, so many years after I first read it, when the sun still mounted the sky. [Ed. – Beautifully put, Scott.]
[Paired with Woolf’s final novel, Between the Acts (1941)].
Felix Edouard Vallotton,The Sunny Street (1922)
Others works I could have included: D. H. Lawrence’s powerful Sons and Lovers [Ed. – Ph hell yeah]; Italian critic Cristina Campo’s The Unforgiveable; the Strugatsky brothers’ The Snail on the Slope; Georges Simenon’s Arizona noir La Fond de la Bouteille; Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale; a pair of short books by Helen DeWitt (may she please complete her novel-in-progress set in Flin Flon, Manitoba) [Ed. – Wait what now]; Andrés Barba’s Two Small Hands and Andrés Neuman’s The Things We Don’t Do; poet Susan Nguyen’s second gen take on the American South in Dear Diaspora and other of her poems on-line; and, Most Unexpected Literary Object, the first volume of Ahmed Fāris Al-Shidyāq’s Leg Over Leg, a daring four-volume novel completed in 1885 with the modest ambition of catapulting the whole of Arabic language and literature into the modern age. In sum, a Year in Reading that elicited joy, snark, bon courage, resolve, humility, and defiance for challenging times ahead.
[Ed. – To which I can only summon both the raised fist and the thank you hand emojis: this is wonderful, Scott. May we draw on those good emotions in 2025!]
Pleased to once again present reading reviews from some of my favourite readers. Today’s installment, his fourth, is bythat titanic reader, the one and only James Morrison. James lives and works in Adelaide, on unceded Kaurna territory.
John H. Glenn Jr., “Fireflies Outside Friendship 7; First Human-Taken Color Photograph from Space”, 1962
BEST BOOKS READ IN 2024: An Annotated Index of Limited Utility
Books—there’s never any end to them, despite my attempts to read them all. Of the 280-odd I read in 2024 (no, you get a life!), these are the best of those that were new to me. In order to make this as useful(?) as possible, in in the endless quest for cheap novelty, they are presented as annotation to an index of themes. [Ed. – Sorry, missed that last bit. Still thinking about the 280…] Four writers appear twice (Kate Kruimink, Joseph Roth, Percival Everett and Walter Kempowski) and for what I think is the first time, both parties in an extant marriage also make the list (Everett again, with Danzy Senna).
Age, Coming of: Gwendolyn Brooks, Maud Martha & Diane Josefowicz, L’Air du Temps
Two opposing approaches to stories of young girls growing up. Brooks’s 1953 novel is a collage of vignettes stretching over years, the growing up of a Black girl in Chicago, unlucky but resilient, dreaming of a high-class life in the face of her own limited opportunities, Josefowicz’s novella covers just a short period of time in the life of a 13-year-old girl, when the shooting of a neighbour proves to be the catalyst for the peeling back of various local secrets. Brooks was primarily a poet and Josefowicz is a historian, but both of them show themselves to be tremendous fiction writers.
Art, Making of and Prehistory of: Maylis de Kerangal, Painting Time (translated by Jessica Moore)
De Kerangal is a personal favourite, and her best books usually involve a deep dive into some fascinating technical process (organ transplants, restaurant-level cooking, infrastructure engineering, or, in this case, both ancient cave art and trompe-l’œil painting), balanced with beautifully judged explorations of its human pressures and consequences. A compressed, deeply involving history of visual trickery and the impulse to make art.
Art, Making of from Deceased Father’s House: Jen Craig, Wall
In 2023 Craig’s two earlier novels were among my most loved discoveries, and I wasn’t wrong in thinking her third book would also be fantastic. A woman who is and isn’t Craig herself returns home to Australia to empty out her dead father’s house, with an eye to making the contents into an art exhibition. Multiple levels of consciousness rooted in different frames of time, deftly handled so as to be both convincing and presented with clarity, Craig’s prose is a wonder. I was lucky enough to be able to speak with her about one of her earlier books as part of the Wafer-Thin Books discussion series I co-hosted with Brad Bigelow of Neglected Books (neglectedbooks.com) through 2024—video here.
Biracialism, Literature of, Now an Award-Winning TV Series: Danzy Senna, Colored Television
Breezier in style than most of the books here, but far from shallow, Senna’s book features a protagonist obsessed with her own mixed-race nature, author of an undisciplined manuscript that’s becoming “the mulatto War and Peace.” She makes the mistake of getting involved with the Hollywood “prestige TV” world, and complications, as they say, ensue. Race, art, theft, infidelity; it’s all in there, making the sort of book that’s likely to be a big commercial success. Except this time it’s actually a good book. And yes, it does pain me to have to keep spelling the title the (wrong, but in this case “correct”) American way. [Ed. – They’re wrong, the Americans. And they will never admit it, James.]
George Hendrik Breitner, “Marie Jordan Nude, Seen from the Back”, 1889
Black Hole, Haunted by in Silicon Valley: Sarah Rose Etter, Ripe
A Silicon Valley satire—no, wait, come back! It’s well worth your time, and not just because the main character is haunted by her own personal tiny black hole, a physical manifestation of her depression. Things are not improved by her getting pregnant, nor by her various other ill-conceived life choices. A downbeat comedy of unforced errors.
Blitz: Francis Cottam, The Fire Fighter
Look, I have a weakness for Blitz fiction—people trying to go about their ordinary lives each day while having their world hammered each night by bombs is something I’m apparently able to read about endlessly. [Ed. – Same!] Cottam’s 2001 novel about a man given the task of protecting five specific London buildings from firebombs, without knowing why these sites are so important, is vividly convincing about the textures of daily life at the time, as well as exploring duty and treachery under ludicrously extreme circumstances. I’ve not read any of Cottam’s other books, which mostly seem to be supernatural fiction, but if they’re as strong as this they will not disappoint. (For more Blitz fiction, see Norah Hoult under Brains, below)
Boxing, Junior, Internal Thought Processes During: Rita Bullwinkel, Headshot
I enjoyed but didn’t love Bullwinkel’s story collection Belly Up, so if I hadn’t already bought Headshot I might have given it a miss. Yet again, incontinent book purchasing saves the day! [Ed. – As is so often the case!] Basically a series of internal monologues (though in the third person), from each of the teenaged girl contestants in an ill-attended second-rate female boxing tournament in a dusty gym over the course of one weekend, it’s a marvel. Kicks your Hemingway-style boxing crap out the door.
Brains, Decaying: Norah Hoult, There Were No Windows (also Cocktail Bar)
One of the Persephone Books rediscoveries that I can no longer afford due to most British people being dickheads and causing Brexit, thus making it prohibitively expensive to have British books sent to Australia, this 1944 novel by an Irish writer was both depressing and very funny, in the way that you can laugh afterwards about an awful relative, though their physical presence makes you squirm. It’s a pitch-perfect rendering of a deluded snob, hit with encroaching dementia and lowered circumstances, as the German bombs fall on London and servants become scarce. [Ed. – Oof, this sounds like something that might be called “unflinching”!] It was so good I immediately bought her story collection Cocktail Bar, from 1950, and it was similarly full of great things.
British People, Fucking Up Overseas in the Face of Imminent Implied Arachnid Apocalypse: Olivia Manning, The Rain Forest
Olivia Manning, man, such a great writer. Why isn’t all her stuff in print, instead of mainly just the (admittedly brilliant) two Fortunes of War trilogies? The Rain Forest, from 1974, is an intriguing twist on her common theme of a not entirely well-matched married couple doing duty for Britain overseas, in this case in a thinly disguised Madagascar (there are lemurs). Well-meaning ineptness in the face of political intrigue shades into an unexpected hint of global catastrophe to come from humans encroaching into a reservoir of toxic biology deep in an unexplored forest. Wonderful stuff. [Ed. – Wow! Sounds amazing! I, for one, welcome our imminent arachnid overlords.]
Johann August Ephraim Goeze, “Little Water Bear”, 1773
Century, Twentieth, Horrors and Absurdity of: Patrik Ouředník, Europeana (translated by Gerald Turner)
When spellcheck can’t cope with the author name or the title, you’re doing something right. Europeana is a brief but rambling survey of the Twentieth Century in all its ghastliness, where every fact, major or minor, is given equal weight, like a lecture by the most brilliant autistic raconteur in the world. If, like me, you buy the Dalkey Archive Essentials edition, you can also enjoy the brutally trimmed pages that slice off the outer edges of the marginalia.
Convicts, Female, Transcontinental Aquatic Journey of: Kate Kruimink, Astraea
The first of two Kruiminks on this list (see Grief, below), and the inaugural winner of the Weatherglass Novella Prize, this is the entirely shipbound story of a group of women being transported to New South Wales (not Tasmania, as every single review incorrectly states) in the early 1800s, to be servants and breeding stock in the new colony. Plagued by overbearing and/or predatory men in the shape of ship’s captain, crew, and minister, and haunted by their own miseries and guilts, their story is nevertheless a darkly funny one, full of unexpected insights and, for the reader, delights. [Ed. – Yep, getting this one for sure.]
Displacement, Linguistic, Psychological Aftereffects of: Antigone Kefala, The Island
Antigone Kefala is a (deep breath) ethnically Greek Romanian cum Australian via post-WWII refugee resettlement camps, writing in English, her fourth language. This 1984 book, being reprinted in North America this year, is, inevitably, out of print in Australia. It’s a subtle, destabilising, discursive meditation on place and belonging and language; very hard to pin down and quite unusual. [Ed. – Yep, getting this one for sure.]
Domestic Life, Oppressive Atmosphere Within: Fumiko Enchi, The Waiting Years (translated by John Bester)
A wife forced to choose and manage her husband’s concubine, who is still effectively a girl and not an adult, is the core of this disturbing but unsensationalised brief novel from 1957. Enchi was a distinguished, prizewinning novelist, and one of the great female writers of Japan. It’s criminal how little of her work is translated into English. [Ed. – Yep, getting this one for sure.]
Ineko Arima in Tokyo Twilight (Tôkyô boshoku) (Yasujirô Ozu, 1957)
Epics, Tiny and Incomplete: Joseph Roth, Perlefter (translated by Richard Panchyk)
This was the year that, despite pacing myself carefully, I ran out of Joseph Roth fiction. He was one of the greats, a genius and an alcoholic of astonishing powers, and the supreme chronicler of the Habsburg Empire, its collapse, and the darkness that followed. Perlefter is an incomplete novella, found in his papers and published posthumously, yet still substantial enough to hold its own. A wealthy Austrian, observed by an orphaned relative, enthusiastically grapples with the technological and social developments of the early Twentieth Century, all observed with Roth’s characteristically subtle and quirky eye and voice. See also Napoleon, below.
Failure, Artistic, Afterlives of: A. Valliard, The City of Lost Intentions: A Guide for the Artistically Waylaid
I can guarantee you’ve not read anything like this: a consistently inventive tourists’ guide to a netherworld of endless artistic failure and pretension, packed with more ideas per square inch than most books could even dream of, and written with a style recalling the sarcastically decadent fin-de-siècle classics. You’ll probably see yourself in it, and not be happy about it.
Grief, All-Enveloping Nature and Absurdity of: Kate Kruimink, Heartsease
Kruimink’s other novel of 2024 was the longer Heartsease, set in modern Tasmania [Ed. – Sure you don’t mean New South Wales???], and spikily hilarious even though it’s all about loss and grief and neglect. Wryly, unsentimentally Australian in the best way, and including a fine joke about musk sticks. [Ed. – Probably lands better if you know what that is.]
Lesbians, Ancient and Fragmented: Sappho, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (translated by Anne Carson)
As when trying to describe Ulysses in a previous one of these round-ups, sometimes there’s not a lot you can usefully say about a great book; you just have to point at it and marvel. I’ve read other translations of Sappho before, and loved them, but this really must be the ultimate take in English.
Life, Viewed Askew, in Small Portions: Jessica Westhead, And Also Sharks & Percival Everett, Half an Inch of Water
Two wide-ranging short story collections from the back catalogues of writers I deeply admire. Westhead is Canadian and belongs more to the George Saunders school of fiction (though better and more inventive), while Everett is much harder to pin down—if there’s any American writer working today with a broader, less predictable bibliography then I’ll eat any number of hats. Both books are full of gems, and are frequently genuinely funny.
Nanotechnology, Inadvertent Consequences of treating Cancer with: Anton Hur, Toward Eternity
An industrious and talented translator into and out of Korean, Hur’s first novel is cheeringly excellent: a full-on literary science-fiction exploration of nanotechnology, identity, social collapse, cloning, warfare, and the possibility of a human future, no matter how altered that definition of ‘human’ might be. It’s really enjoyable to see someone so talented engage with the genre in such a serious, productive way, though the results are often pretty bleak. [Ed. – Now I’m mad I had to return it to the library before I could read it.]
Napoleon: Joseph Roth, The Hundred Days (translated by Richard Panchyk)
The second Joseph Roth in this list, and something of an outlier in his work, being a fictional patchwork view of Napoleon through minor figures in his orbit, rather than being set in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Roth was always great, though, and stepping outside his usual area doesn’t dim his powers one bit. That I now have no fiction by him left unread is a cause of great psychological pain for me. Financial donations to ease my distress will be accepted. [Ed. – Please contribute to James’s GoFundMe. He asks so little.]
Nazis, Fleeing From in Company of Unreliable Man: Helen Wolff, Background for Love (translated by Tristram Wolff)
How did a book this good end up sitting for decades in a drawer, unpublished? Imagine a lost Jean Rhys novel, only with a female protagonist who has agency (alright, so it’s not an exact match) [Ed. – genuine lol], beginning with a couple fleeing to the Côte d’Azur one hot summer to get away from the growing Nazi power at home in Germany. Wolff wrote this book in 1932, but never tried to publish it, even though she later went on to found Pantheon Books in America with her husband. What other masterpieces like this are out there, sitting unpublished in a world where Haruki Murakami and Dan Browns’ every fart gets the hardcover treatment? Truly we live in a fallen world.
Nazis, Revenge on Collaborators with: Martha Albrand, Remembered Anger
In many ways this is ‘just’ an above-average crime/espionage novel, about an American man imprisoned by the Nazis who gets out at the war’s end and tries to find out who sold him out. But what lifts it above that is the fact it was written just as the events it was describing were happening, in the early months of 1945, as Paris wobbled back to the start of normality, by an author (born Heidi Huberta Freybe Loewengard) who was herself politically active against and then a refugee from the Fascists, and it beautifully captures the numerous little details of its time and place to give it a real kick of verisimilitude. [Yep, I’ll be getting this one, and actually reading it!]
Nazis, Rise and Collapse of: Walter Kempowski, All for Nothing (translated by Anthea Bell) & An Ordinary Youth (translated by Michael Lipkin)
A pair of stone-cold masterpieces, looking at Germans in World War II from opposite ends, geographically and temporally. Youth is about boyhood under growing Fascist power and then war, sneaking jazz records and trying to get out of the Nazi Youth, not for political reasons but because you don’t like enforced physical activity. Nothing, on the other hand, is the tale of the slow destruction of a German household on the Eastern Front as the Russians draw closer and closer. Both are wonderfully written, and attempt no form of exculpation of the author or the characters. These are people who didn’t like the Nazis because they were not their social class of person, not because of any ethical qualms. Youth is apparently part of a whole series of books Kempowski wrote in German, and we need all the rest translated NOW. [Ed. – Amen]
Palestine, Staging Hamlet in: Isabella Hammad, Enter Ghost
Even at the best of times trying to stage Hamlet in with an all-Palestinian cast under Israeli rule seems like a logistical nightmare, and these are not the best of times. A Palestinian-born, London-based actress returns to her birthplace and her sister, and almost involuntarily gets caught up in the theatrical project of a distant acquaintance, as well as attempting to reckon with her family and its history. It made me immediately buy Hammad’s first novel, The Parisian, though I haven’t read it yet because it’s huge. [Ed. – I just bought this too, and it’s so huge!]
Sanatorium, Satire of Male Attitudes Within: Olga Tokarczuk, The Empusium (translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones)
I get the feeling not everyone loved Tokarczuk’s latest book translated into English, but it was very much my kind of thing. A bunch of guys, self-deluded and not as smart as they think they are, discussing the issues of the day and their philosophies, while living in a tuberculosis sanatorium? A strange, supernatural observer/narrator? Sign me up!
Slavery, Literature Of, Remixed: Percival Everett, James
On the other hand, pretty much everyone seems to have loved this, and rightly so. As I mentioned above, Everett is one of the least predictable writers alive, and his take on Huckleberry Finn from Jim’s code-switching point of view is a gripping, funny masterclass in rewriting a classic without redundancy. This is an angry, exciting and surprising book that doesn’t always match the original’s plot. I hope this gets the author the huge audience he deserves, though it’ll also be funny to see this bigger audience attempt to process some of his earlier books.
Unknown photographer, Cat, Year unknown [Ed. — Spooky-ass cat]
Smallpox, Alternative History of World Due to: Francis Spufford, Cahokia Jazz
You know those stories where what begins with a couple of beat cops investigating a crime scene ends up being a whole-of-society-spanning investigation of conspiracy and political intrigue? Well, imagine one of those, written with the perfect mix of style, insight and originality. And it’s set in a version of history where it was the less virulent form of smallpox that was brought to the Americas by Europeans, meaning what has become the United States has done so in the face of much vaster, stronger First Nations. And imagine it’s a huge amount of fun. That’s Cahokia Jazz, baby. [Ed. – Look for this on my year-end list too!]
Troubles, The, Childhood During: Jennifer Johnston, Shadows on OurSkin
Jennifer Johnston is a writer who I idiotically ignored for years because her current UK publisher cursed her with the sort of soft-focus-photo-of-a-woman-in-a-fancy-dress-turned-away-from-the-camera-with-her-head-cropped-off cover photos more commonly found on flimsy commercial fiction. [Ed. – I prefer house-lit-from-within-against-a-nighttime-sky myself.] But then I came across a copy of How Many Miles to Babylon? with a good cover, read it, and was hooked. She’s phenomenally good, a brilliant and unsentimental Irish writer whose particular interest is the way the British occupation of Ireland leaks into and impacts upon the lives of ordinary people. Shadows is one of her best, following the life of a young boy in Derry in the 1970s, half in love with a school teacher who in turn is half in love with the boy’s older brother, who has come back home from England with big ideas and a gun in his back pocket. [Ed. – Damn, I just looked her up and she has so many books!]
Wildfire, Californian: George R Stewart, Fire
A Californian wilderness on fire, with the fire itself as the main character, and telling the story of all the people arrayed against or caught by it. Stewart, who also wrote Earth Abides (a wonderful novel and now a terrible TV series), describes everything with a dispassionate but not cruel eye, and the result, published in 1948, is all too horribly relevant now.
[Ed. — Ladies and gentlemen, give it up for James Morrison, always all too horribly relevant! Seriously, thanks James, this was amazing and budget-busting, as usual.]
Pleased to once again present reading reviews from some of my favourite readers. Today’s installment, her third, is bymy friendAnja Willner. Anja lives and works in Berlin.
Lizzie Borden (no, not that one), Agnes Martin (1970s)
I’ve been logging my reading for seven years now. (A fairy-tale number, seven. I can’t name any other thing I’ve been doing for that long.)
2024 was different because burnout and depression ate up most of my year. [Ed. – So sorry to hear it, Anja. Lots of things to be depressed about and burned out by.] But thank god there’s always a but: And that’s the books that made it through the mind fog (doesn’t that make a great blurb) and stood out for me:
Christoph Ransmayr: The Terrors of Ice and Darkness (Die Schrecken des Eises und der Finsternis, 1984)
A great book about the price of discovery and adventure. The title is accurate, and if after reading it you still feel like starting your day with an icy shower or in a barrel filled with ice, I cannot help you. [Ed. – Ha! No fear there on my part!]
So you have this story about the Austro-Hungarian North Pole expedition going terribly wrong (skip this book if you feel strongly about dogs…) and getting almost no viable results, strung together with the story of a young Italian who goes missing while researching the same expedition more than a hundred years later. Some nice playing around with what is fact and what is fiction included.
(If you read this in winter, and your winters are still cold, make sure your heating works so you don’t get too authentic a reading experience.)
“Quiet” heroes
Something that almost always gets me is what you might call a “third row” hero: The protagonist is, at least on the surface, some ordinary person leading an uneventful life.
Of course, this only works if two requirements are met: First, the protagonist not really being dull (or so dull it’s already entertaining), and second, the writer is skillful enough to carry off this kind of story.
Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These was such a read for me. A quiet hero, a quiet life, but so much going on under the surface it’s almost impossible to lay the book aside. [Ed. – You hear people say „I read this book in one sitting a lot, and I feel like that must mostly be exaggeration, but I actually did that with this one!]
I’m also a sucker for narrators looking back on things not said or done in the right time. For me, J.L. Carr’s A Month in the Country is a gem full of wistfulness and melancholy (without self-pity), and musings about craftsmanship and memory, art and history. (It’s not so widely read here in Germany as it probably is in English-speaking countries.) [Ed. – Just going to leave this here…]
But hey, I don’t want this to sound dull (depression and books with hardly any plot, duh!) or as if I don’t like action-packed novels.
There was also my first Henry James! I had planned that ages ago, but I also wanted to read 300 hundred other things, and then… umm… life. [Ed. – We all know how that goes!]
Anyway, Portrait of a Lady. Wow. So many twisted marriage offers turned down in queer ways. So many plot turns, so many multi-layered characters (and the super creepy girl)! [Ed. – An action-packed novel indeed! So good, so pulpy, in its own way.]
I can’t help thinking James would have been great at scripting reality shows, and he’d also have to be in charge of the casting. Just imagine, a reality dating show written and produced by Henry James! I’d be so addicted I’d hardly get anything else done.
But back to supposedly “dull” books and on to one of my private reading obsessions: Anita Brookner novels. Despite crying for two days after reading my first Brookner in 2022, I’ve been sticking with her strange books.
Strange because often, they read like an abstract summarizing a novel or like a construction plan rather than like a novel in the flesh. Not to speak of her heroines (and occasionally heroes) whose rigidly organized lonely lives are so similar to one another I’m not always sure what happened in which book (not that it would matter very much, it’s not Henry James). Yet somehow, it works out great – at least for me. [Ed. – Amen!]
In 2024, I added three more Brookner novels to my reading log: Lewis Percy, Bay of Angels, and A Friend from England. Of those three, I liked Bay of Angels best (presumably the Brookner with the most sun, but that’s just the weather). Of course not as much as Look at Me, my all-time favourite of hers. [Ed. — Look at Me is hard to top!]
Gwen John, Self Portrait with Letter (1907)
And finally, out of the brain fog emerges Nicole Seifert’s book about the women writers of “Gruppe 47” (group 47), an influential post-war German literary coterie. I already was familiar with some of the female members of “Gruppe 47”, but so many of them I was taught not to take as seriously as the alpha males who were the stars of the group, like Günter Grass.
In my reading log, I wrote down a single word about Seifert’s Einige Herren sagten etwas dazu (“Some gentlemen said something about it”): Brilliant. And I’ll stick with that. And boy, this book has led to some serious running after backlisted books! Meaning that I can never* buy a book again because I’ve still got two packages of literature waiting to be rediscovered standing around in my apartment. [Ed. — Tell us what they are in the comments, Anja!!!!!]
*never = not before the end of February 2025 or something like that [Ed. – That is modest indeed. I mean, it’s almost the end of February now! You can probably start reordering… Thanks for this lovely piece, Anja!]
Pleased to once again present reading reviews from some of my favourite readers. Today’s installment, his third, is bymy longtime friendKeith Bresnahan. He is a self-described harrumphing scrivener who lives and works in Toronto.
Roger Deakins, The Rail to Grants, New Mexico (2014)
2024 was a difficult year, marked by personal loss. In July, an old friend from graduate school, a brilliant and feisty scholar of the Horn of Africa, succumbed to the cancer that she had been living with on and off for the past decade. And then in October, another death. My oldest and closest friend, with whom I’d been friends since kindergarten, died of an aggressive cancer he’d been diagnosed with only 11 months earlier. I’d managed to get down to Atlanta, where he’d recently taken on a new academic position, a few times to see him—the last just weeks before his passing—but it still felt inadequate, and very sad.
Throughout all this, I was working on writing my own book, on architectural destruction and emotion in late-nineteenth century France. Despite spending the last half of the year on sabbatical from teaching, I didn’t manage to finish it, which was also difficult. But: I’m still here, and the work continues amid the usual teaching and service. I’m casting an envious eye on those colleagues leaving academia for greener or at least other pastures. But for now, this is where I’m at.
Apart from the reading I did for my own book project, which was substantial, my extracurricular reading this year was not insignificant: 65 books, if my list is correct.
I read a lot of mysteries, by French, Irish, English, Japanese authors. I read a lot of Georges Simenon, though not the Inspector Maigret series. (I read the last of these—75 novels and three short-story collections—a few years back. Would that there were more.) Unusually for me, I read quite a few Canadian authors, and a couple American ones, and one Sicilian. A bunch of French graphic novels/comics. And I finished my reading, begun many years ago, of Zola’s 20-voume Rougon-Macquart saga.
Here are the ones that stayed with me:
In the first days of 2024 (feels like a lifetime ago), I read Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male, which was as great as everyone says. An Englishman, having attempted to assassinate an unnamed European dictator (Hitler, quite obviously) is now being pursued by agents across the continent. It’s a white-knuckle ride that in its second act switches pace to a two-person détente, in which our hero slowly plays out becoming-animal (the ‘rogue male’) in a kind of homemade burrow. Super-weird, I loved it. My only complaint is with the book’s end, which reveals a deeply personal rationale for the assassination attempt, practically undoing the whole perversely-unmotivated-action-begets-tragic-outcomes schema of all that had come before. Still, highly recommended.
Seicho Matsumoto, Point Zero. I had read his mystery A Quiet Place a couple years back and loved it. [Ed. – Agreed, so good.] Point Zero, like that one, is translated by Louise Heal Kawai for Bitter Lemon Press. As I progressed in the book, I started wondering: had I read this before? It all had a vaguely familiar ring. It turns out I had not; but I had watched Yoshitarō Nomura’s excellent 1961 film adaptation, Zero Focus. It’s an excellent, propulsive tale of a woman whose new husband has gone missing, and her search to find the truth. I figured out (or remembered?) who ‘did it’ about 2/3 of the way through, but it hardly mattered. Great, though A Quiet Place still has the edge for me. More Matsumoto in English, please!! [Ed. – I gather there’s a ton of him. Sort of like Simenon.]
Other Japanese books I read this year: Seishi Yokomizo, The Devil’s Flute Murders and The Little Sparrow Murders (fine, if workmanlike, mysteries); Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, Naomi (a striking tale of manic obsession and cuckoldry, but the main characters aggravated me to no end).
I also read Yoel Hoffmann’s edited anthology Japanese Death Poems, which I received as a tongue-in-cheek birthday gift (although they knew I’d also love it). It’s what it sounds like: a collection of short poems, mostly haiku, written over centuries by monks and poets and ordinary folks on the verge of death, or in anticipation of dying. Fascinating stuff. I read it in the fall, in the midst of grief. Good to meditate on, and dip in and out of.
Also in the mystery vein, I continued to work my way through Magdalen Nabb’s Marshal Guarnaccia books, set in Florence. I like every one of these I’ve read, and this year I went back to the beginning, to read (new to me) the first in the series, Death of an Englishman. Excellent and atmospheric, and I loved that Guarnaccia has the flu and only shows up at the very end for this first book in his own saga. [Ed. – Intriguing!]
My last read of the year was also a mystery (they really do seem to fit the winter holidays in a way I can’t explain): John Banville’s The Lock-Up. This is a late book in his Quirke series (originally published under the pseudonym ‘Benjamin Black’), but the first I’ve read. For whatever reason, I’ve never got on with Banville’s literary fiction (I know, shame on me). [Ed. – I dunno, I’m not sure he’s all that, actually.] But this hit the spot. Quirke, a weary alcoholic pathologist, investigates the murder of a young Jewish woman in 1950s Dublin. All sorts of side-narratives here: former Nazis escaping justice with the help of the Church, arms dealings in Israel, romantic entanglements, struggles with work colleagues. Yes, aspects of it are clichéd and feel dated, despite being published in 2023. What can I say? I liked it enough to immediately reserve four other books in the series at my local library branch, so watch this space for more in my 2025 round-up.
George Simenon: since finishing the Maigrets, I’ve been slowly working through some of his other output: these 300-odd standalone books are often gathered under the rubric of ‘romans durs’ (‘hard novels’). They’re hard looks at human nature, alright, though not always violent or murderous. I read 19 of these this year, including a bunch of the ones he wrote while living in the USA in the 1950s, and set there (for whatever reason these have never struck me with the same truth as his French-set novels). Some leitmotifs: voyeurism, small-town prejudice, frustrated men, philandering men, sensual women, penny-pinching women, family squabbles, and men who suddenly realize that their wives resemble their mothers. Nothing if not Freudian, this guy.
My favourites: The Krull House; The Venice Train; Account Unsettled; Striptease; The Little Saint; The Man with the Little Dog; The Little Man from Arcangel. For me, this last one was the best: A Russian-Jewish bookseller and philatelist, assimilated to France since arriving there as a young boy and living in a small town’s market district, marries a promiscuous younger woman from the town. She leaves one evening and does not return, and suspicion slowly falls on him. It’s a masterful study in the vicious closedness and rumor-mill of a community against a person they had superficially but never deeply accepted, driving to an inevitably sad conclusion. I’d put this up against any literary study of othering and alienation, any day of the week. [Ed. – 100: this one will be on my year in review list, too.]
I also read Pedigree, Simenon’s memoir of his life from birth to age 15 in Belgium (Liège, to be precise), focused mostly on his mother and her family. The basic elements of his other books seem to pretty much have their origins here, except the murders. A note about his mother, whom he felt never sufficiently loved him: from the 1930s to the early 1970s Simenon wrote fiction with compulsive mania, averaging 10-15 books a year. Then his mother died, and he never wrote another novel. Did I already mention Freud?
My Can-Lit year:
I like Canadian literature as much as the next guy, provided the next guy likes it but doesn’t make a habit of it. [Ed. – Handshake emoji.] But, I was a visiting fellow at Massey College at the University of Toronto this past year, where the spirit of Robertson Davies flows through the corridors, and where I had some interesting discussions of Canadian literature with my fellow fellows — including David Chariandy, whose very fine reflection on race and parenthood in Canada, I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You, I also read this year. All of which prompted me to pick up some books:
Helen Humphreys, Coventry: I really enjoyed this short novel set during the burning of Coventry Cathedral in November 1940, with intersecting stories of two women. Canadian author, if not Canadian content. Also a bit of a cheat, since I read it for another academic project on ruins. But everything counts!
Robertson Davies, The Deptford Trilogy. One of the landmarks of Can-Lit. I’d read Fifth Business (the first novel in the series) decades ago, but never the other two, The Manticore and World of Wonders. I read them all in quick succession in the depths of a Toronto winter. Fifth Business, set in small-town Ontario and then Toronto (with a side-swerve to WWI Europe) is seriously great. I would read it again right now. The Manticore: was I surprised that the next book in the series sees our hero undertaking Jungian analysis in Switzerland? Yes. Did I like it? Also yes, but decidedly less than the first book. The third, World of Wonders, picks up threads from the other two, and set in the world of circuses and magic. There is thus a lot here about stagecraft, circus life, and stage magicians, all of which are things that repel me, frankly. [Ed. – We are the same person, Keith.] So, not my bag. But still, a satisfying enough conclusion.
Marian Engel, The Tattooed Woman. Well, we know how we feel about a certain book by Engel, don’t we? [Ed. – We feel grrrrreat about it.] Bear has been featured here on occasion, including the last time I did one of these year-in-reviews. Here we have her last published work (from 1985), a collection of short stories featuring women at middle age, dealing with children and partners and aging. A mixed bag, with some standouts. Not a patch on Bear, but worth a look. [Ed. – Totally agree with this assessment.]
Helen Weinzweig, Basic Black with Pearls. Thanks to the folks at NYRB Classics for bringing this 1980 book back into print. [Ed. – Also available from the good folks at Anansi Press.] An unexpected treat. A woman, estranged from her husband and family, wanders through Toronto, maybe looking for her mysterious lover, who may be a spy (and who also may not exist) and then maybe goes home where another woman maybe now lives in her place. A psychological novel in the best sense. As a local, I loved the street-level view of my city. However, I feel compelled to add an editorial note: you can’t get to Dundas from Queen going south on McCaul, lady.
Following this, I read an earlier Weinzweig, her first: Passing Ceremony. An episodic, fragmentary exercise in which varied voices unfold in non-linear fashion a wedding and its reception. Everyone seems to have a past and beef with the bride, while the gay groom in it for the social beard pines for a lost love. Fine, but I liked it less.
Brian Moore, Catholics. A fine short novel of faith and orders and the world, set in a remote Irish abbey in the wake of Vatican II. The Abbot, no zealot, has in fact has lost his faith, serving as mere manager of a group of working monks. The interactions between him and the young American priest sent from Rome to compel him to conform to the changed rituals are excellent. It compelled me, let me tell you. And it didn’t stay a minute past its welcome. It was one of the last books I discussed with my very Catholic friend—himself a great reader—in his dying months. Again, there’s no mention of Canada in the book, though this was (Irish) Moore’s adopted country, so I’ll count it here.
Zola:
As I’ve mentioned, this was the year I finished in Zola’s monumental Rougon-Macquart series, following two branches of this family through the whole of Second Empire France (1852-1870; the novels themselves were written 1871–1893). The books themselves vary, but I would recommend these to anyone. One of the great reading experiences of my life. Look forward to revisiting it in, oh, 30 years or so. You in, Dorian? [Ed. – Your faith in my longevity is touching, Keith. I still need to finish my first go-round. But, yes, if I’m still here and able in my 80s, you got it.]
Here are the ones I read this year, in the order in which I read them.
Money. Took me a while to finish this: kept putting it down and then coming back to it. The rise and fall of a speculative bank in 1860s Paris and those who are brought up and laid low by it. Beneath it all, Zola’s usual interest in ambition, passion, crisis, and heredity.
Earth. More disagreeable people. Really disagreeable. Maybe the worst people in the whole series. Zola’s great novel of peasant life. The earth is the great character here (the title gives it away), but it’s often obscured by the endless wretched goings-on of these stingy and promiscuous bastards. Wears its King Lear heavily on its sleeve. There’s no redemption here, and I was glad to be done with its characters, but it’s undeniably impressive.
The Dream. An abrupt shift from Earth. [Ed. – Yeah, dreams and earth do not seem to go together, lately.] A childless couple engaged in the family business of embroidery in a northern cathedral town take in an abandoned young girl, eventually adopting her; she is prone to religious passions and flights of fantasy, which eventually coalesce in her idealized love for the rich son of a local lord (and bishop!). The religious background and hagiographic details, as well as the highly detailed particulars of embroidery (hey, you were the one who picked up a naturalist novel) made for an interesting contrast with all the recent scheming bastards. (R-M connection: Angélique, the girl, is the illegitimate daughter of Sidonie Rougon of La Curée, in a plot point not developed except to assert the link to the rest of the series). Brandon Taylor, in his much-discussed recent take on Les Rougon-Macquart, wrote that this was his least favourite, the one on which he got stuck. Not me.
That would be:
The Bright Side of Life. This took me forever, despite being relatively short. My least favorite R-M novel. Technically speaking, there’s nothing wrong with it! All the components of the series are there: the family drama, the scheming and obsession with money, the kind-hearted soul exploited by unscrupulous others, the hint of martyrdom, and the scientific explorations of the age. Lazare’s constant flitting from one new artistic or scientific enterprise to another made me think of Bouvard et Pécuchet. Pauline’s passivity drove me crazy. But overall, this tale of family and striving and love on the Normandy coast left me without a sense of life, bright or dark, that vitality that’s usually there in Zola even in the descriptions of weather or mechanical objects. (R-M connection: Pauline is the orphaned daughter of Lisa Quenu, née Macquart, in Belly of Paris—ironically maybe my favourite of all these books).
Germinal. The last of my years-long reading of the Rougon-Macquart. Did I save the best for last? Almost. I still prefer the Parisian masterpieces Belly of Paris and L’Assommoir, and even Au Bonheur des Dames, but for epic tragic scope you can’t match this tale of cruel life in a northern French mining town. Zola depicts the crushing poverty and squalid forms of barely-human life (there’s a lot of comparing people to animals here), of an uprising and strike and the inevitable(?) ‘retour à la normale’—albeit one that ends with a germ of revolutionary hope, rising from the soil, of a future world in which the workers have their day. Still waiting on that one. Anyway, it speeds the reader along with propulsive force, in which sense it reminded me more of La Bête humaine than its more obvious counterpart, Earth. Zola is at his best here. Déprimant, bien sûr; mais quelle grandeur!
I also read Zola’s standalone Therese Raquin. Enough with the miserableness, Émile! Just unrelenting, goddamn. It’s great, of course, but I would recommend reading it on a day when you can immediately go for a picnic in the sun and pet some kittens and eat a bag of marshmallows. [Ed. – Unrelenting is the word. Grim.]
Other things:
Kent Haruf, Benediction. My first Haruf. An elderly man in a small town dies from cancer. A moving read, especially in this year.
Frank Tuohy, The Ice Saints. Thank the gods for the Head of Apollo imprint: so many great forgotten books in this now-defunct series. In this one, a young English woman, Rose, visits communist Poland in 1964 to see her sister, her sister’s Polish husband, and their teenage son. Lots of sadness and disillusionment to go around, and some nice reflections on the outsider’s pitying gaze and well-meaning help being not without illusions of its own. Rose is not particularly likeable, but neither is anyone else. Highly recommended. [Ed. – Entirely new to me! I’m intrigued.]
Walker Percy, The Moviegoer. Folks online seem preoccupied with the fact that it, and not Catch-22, won the National Book Award in 1961. But I’ve never read Catch-22, and I have now read this, and I liked it a lot. [Ed. – Plus we know by now that the folks online don’t know shit.] A recommendation of my friend when I visited him in Atlanta last summer, I didn’t get around to reading it until after he’d died, but I thought of him the whole time I was in it. I read the Library of America edition, and I am a sucker for that series’ size, typesetting, and lovely thin pages, so perhaps I was already well-disposed to like it. [Ed. – I confess, that font size stresses me out.] At the same time, I was surprised by it. A man who does not feel a great deal of attachment to much, but is on some kind of secret undisclosed ‘quest’ that gives his life meaning, spends a week or so around Mardi Gras flirting with (and maybe sleeping with) women, arguing with his aunt, worrying over (and definitely sleeping with) his cousin-on-the-verge-of-a-breakdown, and spending time with his much younger step-siblings. There’s sex, death, driving, movies watched. And not much else, except that somewhere in there is also the whole of life. It reminded me strangely of memories of reading J.D. Salinger, but also less precious and more mature. Fragments of this one have returned to me often since finishing it.
Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These. An exceptional short read, but you all know that by now.
Henri Alain-Fournier, Le Grand Meaulnes. Finally got around to reading this, which I consumed in a single short burst. A magical fairy-tale of old France, caught just before the old ways gave way to automobiles and telephones. It’s all faintly ridiculous, but somehow also great?
Peter Matthiessen, Nine Headed Dragon River. I’ve had an on-again, mostly off-again, relationship to Zen Buddhism over the years, trying and failing to establish a regular meditation practice, but feeling a real connection to the culture and writings it has produced. I really enjoyed this memoir of the author’s engagements (and struggles) with Zen Buddhism in America, Nepal, and Japan from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s. Ymmv, but it spoke directly to some long-dormant yearnings in me.
Marguerite Duras, The Vice-Consul. A strange, enigmatic, hallucinatory book about foreigners in India. Who knows what is true? What happened in Lahore with the Vice-Consul? The whole thing here is about others’ stories being told by others, telling their own false stories, lies and fabulations replacing whatever might be conceived of as a ‘truth’ — ultimately inaccessible if it exists at all. Annoying, also somehow memorable? [Ed. – Sounds annoying, truth be told.]
Fran Ross, Oreo. First published in 1974 and recently rediscovered. Lots of clever wordplay in this recreation of Theseus’s journey through the eyes of a young Black Jewish woman. If Ulysses were a hip trip through 1970s Philly and NYC instead of 1904 Dublin, it might be something like this.
I read a bunch of French comics/bandes dessinées this year, both in translation and not. Among these, I recommend Riad Sattouf, Esther’s Notebooks. Folks might recall my love for his autobiographical series The Arab of the Future. Here, he follows a young girl, the daughter of his friends, through the vicissitudes of elementary and junior-high school. I laughed out loud, a lot, at a time when I especially needed it. Also recommended are Julie Delporte, This Woman’s Work and Portrait of a Body, autobiographical graphic memoirs of trauma, friendship, sexuality, Tove Jansson, Chantal Ackerman, and much besides. Her pencil-crayon drawings, both lush and hesitant, perfectly match the tone.
Maybe the best book I read this year, though, was a bonafide classic: Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard. Holy shit. As good as everyone says. Better. Every word in this book is covered in a layer of dust. It evokes the overwhelming stillness of a class (the Sicilian aristocracy) in decline, while the world moves around them. The central characters here are as immobile as a daguerreotype or Walter Benjamin’s nineteenth-century inhabitants sunk into their own velvet compass-cases. Deserving of all the praise.
Edward Hopper, Yonkers (1916)
There were lots of other books I read this year: some fine, others bad, others I started but did not finish, that didn’t make this list. One can’t say everything.
Plans for next year: I’ve got an ambitious lineup of French literary classics to boost my woeful education: Flaubert, Stendhal, Hugo, Proust. I’d also like to read more works by 20th-century women writers: luckily, I’ve got a dozen or so Virago editions sitting on the shelf here. Others: Banine’s Parisian Days, Litvinoff’s The Lost Europeans, all those Charco Press books I bought years ago. Those Banville mysteries. More Simenon, probably. And whatever else provides intelligent fodder and distraction as our world continues its shockingly precipitous slide into fascism. [Ed. – We read, we resist, we read as resistance. Thank you, Keith!]
Excited to once again present reading reviews from some of my favourite readers. Today’s installment, his sixth, is bymy longtime friendNat Leach. Nat is a nineteenth-century scholar turned college administrator who has spent the last 7 years reading the books on his shelves in alphabetical order. He lives in Ontario.
Saul Leiter, 1961
After complaining about my reading in 2023 in this space last year, 2024 was, on the surface, a much better year. I read 30 books as opposed to 20 in the previous year, and was on pace for an even higher total before hitting a wall at the end of the year (of which more anon). However, if we get into what the sports statisticians call “advanced metrics,” the numerical advantage is diminished; 6 of those books were either less than 100 pages or only slightly more, and 9 were works of theory, criticism, and/or anthologies that I had been working on for years and just completed this year. So, probably my actual reading for 2024 was not much better than 2023 in terms of quantity, but the quality was high, and that’s what really matters, right? [Ed. – Right!]
As for my overall reading project of working through my unread books alphabetically, now in its 7th year, I once again only progressed by one letter of the alphabet, finishing “L” and making a very small start on “M”. If I’m able to get through “M” in 2025 (a big if- it’s a pretty immense shelf), I will hit the halfway point of the alphabet and surely it’s gotta be downhill after that, right? [Ed. – Surely! Well, probably. Possibly?] The second half of the alphabet has the likes of “Q”, “X” and “Z” so there is hope! [Ed. – Insert Zola side-eye gif here.] In fact, of the 298 books on my list, exactly 200 are “A-M” so I’m actually closing in on the 2/3 mark of my project (although that list keeps growing every year, so who really knows?)
More importantly, for the purposes of this piece, I actually found some time, in the early part of the year at least, to write capsules for each book that I finished as I went along. Which is just as well, because I can scarcely remember what I read last January right now, and as I write this opening, I’m just as curious as you to see what comes next (probably more so).
Larsen, Nella – Passing (1929)
I had seen this book recommended so widely, I couldn’t resist adding it to this project, and it certainly does live up to the hype. The book is about the tensions in racial ideologies in early 20th century America, and seems no less relevant today. Clare Kendry “passes” as white despite a mixed-race bloodline that would see her excluded from white society. The very fact that she is able to do this so successfully mocks the white supremacist ideology that believes that racial differences are fixed and self-evident. The book’s focus also demonstrates the problematic intersection of these racial tensions with similarly oppressive gender expectations. Irene Redfield’s love/hate relationship with Clare is at the core of the book, so that it demonstrates also the ways in which expectations around “racial purity” are particularly focused on women. In this respect, Passing reminds me of another book I wrote about on here some years ago, Morley Callaghan’s The Loved and the Lost; although that book focuses on a white woman who circulates in black society in Montreal, the similarly tragic outcomes both speak to the violence and panic produced in white society by such blurring of racial lines. [Ed. – About to teach this tomorrow for the nth time: it’s an all-timer!]
Laski, Marghanita – The Victorian Chaise-Longue (1953)
When I received this book as a gift (in a lovely Persephone Books edition), I assumed, because of the title, that it was because of my academic interest in the nineteenth century. It didn’t take long for me to realize that it was in fact because of my academic interest in the Gothic. The plot itself smacks of the absurd: a tubercular new mother is transported back in time to the Victorian period while lying on the titular piece of furniture during her recovery. But this does not do justice to the book, which explores (as so many Gothic texts do) the relationship between mind and body, and the nature of identity. A fascinating read. [Ed. – Sounds great!]
Lathom, Francis – Italian Mysteries (1820) and The Midnight Bell (1797)
These days, Francis Lathom is little more than an answer to a literary trivia question (Name the authors of the 7 “horrid novels” on the reading list of Isabella Thorpe and Catherine Morland in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey!) but he was a successful novelist and playwright in his time. The Midnight Bell is the book mentioned in Austen’s novel, while Italian Mysteries was written considerably later. Both make extensive use of the Gothic conventions popularized by Ann Radcliffe in The Mysteries of Udolpho (and spoofed in Northanger Abbey), including apparently supernatural activity explained by natural means, banditti inhabiting abandoned castles [Ed. – They do be inhabiting the abandoned castles, the banditti], and lustful noblemen pursuing innocent heroines, who invariably faint whenever captured (By my count, Lauretta, heroine of The Midnight Bell, faints five times in the course of a single abduction!) [Ed. – Maybe some iron pills for that girl?] Lathom’s use of these conventions is, at least, skillful and coherent, which is more than can be said of many Radcliffe imitators of this period. As David Punter points out in his fascinating introduction to the Valancourt Books edition of The Midnight Bell, Lathom’s works are heavy on events, to the exclusion of character development, and his plots are so extensive and intricate that they invariably require quite elaborate explanations—indeed, the entirety of the 3rd and final volume of Italian Mysteries is essentially an extensive explanation of all the mysteries developed of the first two volumes. While both books owe much to Radcliffe, there are certain predilections of Lathom’s own that show through as well; for example, his books include many siblings who function as doubles of each other, and are usually moral opposites of one another. The books are a pleasure to read, though not, perhaps, especially notable examples of the genre. [Ed. – Look, you’re not getting this kind of content anywhere else, are you?]
Laurence, Margaret – This Side Jordan (1960)
Like every good Canadian of my generation, my literary education was steeped in Margaret Laurence; I read The Stone Angel in high school, and The Diviners in university. [Ed. – Same! I wonder what they read now?] And if that weren’t enough, I now find myself living just 15 minutes away from the small town of Lakefield, Ontario, where Laurence spent the last years of her life, and wrote The Diviners. All that being said, I really didn’t know what to expect from this book, Laurence’s first novel, which is much less recognizable in the canon of CanLit, not least because of its foreign setting. Laurence’s husband was an engineer who worked in Africa in the 1950s, so she spent some years living in what was then called the “Gold Coast” but was soon to become the independent country of Ghana. The book is largely about the difficulties posed by this transition, both for the British colonizers and for the people of Ghana, equally caught between a past they cannot return to and a future in which they cannot yet find their place (hence the biblical allusion of the book’s title; the characters are all looking ahead to a “promised land” they cannot enter). The book focuses on Johnnie Kestoe, a British accountant in a textile company; Miranda Kestoe, his well-meaning but sometimes clueless wife; and Nathaniel Amegbe, a struggling Ghanaian schoolteacher. Johnnie, following Miranda’s advice, tries to get ahead by supporting the company’s “Africanization” of its workforce, which his racist bosses refuse to accept, while Nathaniel tries to modernize his family and move away from the tribal customs that he sees as belonging to the past. The future, though, is not easy for any of them to grasp. It’s a strong debut novel, though it does not entirely show the brilliance that was yet to come from Laurence. As an aside, this book also scores points for having a main character named Nathaniel, a literary feature notable by its absence in all the other books on this list. [Ed. – Ha! Justice for Nathaniels!]
Le Fanu, Sheridan – Carmilla (1872) and “A Chapter in the History of a Tyrone Family” (1839)
There are not many classic Gothic texts of the 19th century that I have not read, so it was time that I finally read Carmilla. All I knew about it was that it was about a lesbian vampire and, yeah, it’s pretty much what it says on the tin, using the familiar conventions of the genre, with that added twist. As for “A Chapter in the History of a Tyrone Family,” my first thought upon reading it was “was this written before or after Jane Eyre?” There are many parallels, including a bigamous marriage and a potentially murderous first wife being kept in concealment. Turns out the answer is “before”. This story apparently influenced Brontë’s novel, and in turn, after the success of Jane Eyre, Le Fanu developed this story into a longer work in order to capitalize on it.
Le Guin, Ursula K. – The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)
Another book that I added because of a large number of recommendations, I must admit that I went back and forth on this one a bit. The author’s preface is one of the smartest things I have read about science fiction (or about fiction full stop!), but then the first chapter seemed so replete with science fiction clichés that I started to question what all the fuss was about. I also wonder if science fiction just isn’t my genre, or if I am just overly picky about the details of world-building; much as I admire the carefully prepared appendix on the “Gethenian Calendar and Clock,” which differ significantly from those of Earth, I also find it slightly off-putting that this entirely foreign world not only measures temperature in degrees (in itself not necessarily natural), but it uses a scale that seems strikingly similar to the Fahrenheit scale (with no additional context or explanation). [Ed. – Fahrenheit sucks!] Nevertheless, the book certainly grew on me as it increasingly developed the more philosophical implications of its sf premise. Le Guin claims not to be attempting to predict the future, but this book from 1969 is quite prescient in exploring the idea of gender fluidity, as the inhabitants of the planet on which the book is set share male and female characteristics and can transform into either. Less prescient than oddly coincidental is the fact that the narrator’s name is Genly Ai; it occurs to me that it would be impossible to include a character of that name in a book written today without readers assuming that he was some kind of embodied form of generative artificial intelligence. [Ed. – AI sucks! Like, a lot more than Fahrenheit. Which sucks, to be clear.]
Levi, Primo – Moments of Reprieve (1981) Trans. Ruth Feldman
Levi’s American publishers have been consistent, at least, in their dogged attempts to make his books sound as optimistic as possible; If This is a Man becomes Survival in Auschwitz, The Truce becomes The Reawakening, and Lilith, and other Stories becomes Moments of Reprieve. While it is true that to a certain extent, the stories recounted in this book have a lighter tone than his earlier memoirs, there is really very little “reprieve” to be had here. [Ed. – Yup. That piece about the Roma inmate he meets? Dark.] The book consists of descriptions of people and incidents from Levi’s time in Auschwitz which had not been included in the two earlier memoirs, as well as narratives that follow up on the post-war experiences of individuals who are mentioned in those books. And certainly, all of the qualities that make the earlier books so great are still on display here, especially Levi’s keen eye for character and his deep understanding of moral complexity. And yet, everybody seems to want more optimism, from the publishers to Chumbawamba, who recorded a song based on one of the most optimistic anecdotes herein, “Rappoport’s Testament” about a man who uses a very philosophical theory of life to endure Auschwitz, arguing that his previous pleasures in life are simply being counter-balanced by the horrors of the camp, and therefore he has nothing to complain about in the grand scheme of things. [Ed. – I did not know this!!!!] An admirable perspective, perhaps, but just one of the many that Levi explores—yet the only one to get a song written about it, with an incessant chorus of “I never gave up” as though this were the only praiseworthy, or even acceptable, attitude. (Having said that, I have to admit that I actually love this song. I mean, how critical can you be about a rousing anti-Nazi anthem? Look it up.)
Lindsay, Joan – Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967)
I was already very familiar with Peter Weir’s 1975 film adaptation of this novel, so I fully expected this book to be as good as it is. I found that Weir adapted the book quite faithfully; in both the book and the film, the plot about the uncanny disappearance of Australian boarding school girls is perhaps secondary to the reflections on the connectedness of people and things that are triggered by this incident. The most significant differences come from the fact that the novel is able to demonstrate more links in this web of inter-connectedness; from my perspective of having seen the film first, I was quite fascinated to see how Lindsay connects some of the more minor characters to each other and to the mysterious themes of the book in ways not shown in the film. Ultimately, what makes both book and film work so well is how expertly they manage the fantastic in Tzvetan Todorov’s sense of the term, hesitating between rational and supernatural responses to the mystery, but never fully embracing either perspective. [Ed. – Now I want to read this and see the movie again.]
Lively, Penelope – Moon Tiger (1987)
I’m at a bit of a loss as to how to describe this fascinating tour through both world history and the personal history of a dying historian, Claudia Hampton. These histories are linked and predictably (and unpredictably!) take many twists and turns along the way. But the most interesting thing about the novel is the way it plays with point of view, emphasizing that history depends on perspective as we move between Claudia’s first-person perspective, a more “objective” narrative voice, and the points of view of other characters. It may defy description, but it really works.
Lodge, David – Changing Places (1975), Small World (1984), Nice Work (1988)
I must admit that I felt that I had missed the cultural moment in which I should have read this trilogy. After all, any satirical work on academia these days would surely have to focus on the absurdities of governmental policies and the excesses of administrative oversight rather than the hijinks of carefree globetrotting academics (seriously, is there even any such thing as a carefree, globetrotting academic any more?) [Ed. – There is not.] Not to mention the fact that cultural values have shifted significantly in ways that make these books somewhat uncomfortable to read at times (thinking especially of the distressingly casual way that the idea of professors sleeping with their students is treated in these books). Despite all this, though, there is something enduring about these books, not only for their humour—based in the first book on the incongruities between Morris Zapp, brilliant but obnoxious American professor, and Philip Swallow, reserved English lecturer, and developed in many different directions from there—but also for their satisfying use of the conventions of comic narrative. Lodge is particularly knowing about this, and all three novels are highly self-referential (or “meta” as the kids say). [Ed. – I fear they do not actually say this anymore, at least judging from the blank stares I get…] Changing Places features a number of quotations from a (fictional) textbook that Swallow wants to use for his course on novel-writing, and which provides rules for writing a good novel—rules that Lodge himself proceeds to break in every instance. Small World (subtitled “an academic romance”) employs the conventions of the grail quest romance, adapted comically to the academic context. And Nice Work is an adaptation of, and contains frequent references to, the genre of the Victorian industrial novel. Moreover, in each book, the threads are pulled together in improbable but highly satisfying ways, as if Lodge is acknowledging both the artificiality of the conventions and the fact that we still desire such conclusions despite our awareness of their artifice. I learned recently that Lodge passed away on New Year’s Day, 2025, so I guess there was indeed some timeliness to my reading of these books. I also learned in the course of my reading that Lodge had been at the University of Birmingham while my parents were graduate students there. It really is a small world, I guess.
MacIntyre, Linden – The Bishop’s Man (2009)
Having lived on Cape Breton Island for 15 years, I found that this book resonated with me, not because of the plot about the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic church, but because of the settings, the feelings of isolation brought about by the landscape and the weather, and the descriptions of tightly-knit but also highly insular communities. All very familiar to me. The plot that unfolds against this backdrop revolves around the titular character, Father Duncan MacAskill, who acts on behalf of his Bishop to address situations involving abuse committed by priests. He initially believes that he is helping to rehabilitate perpetrators and support victims, but struggles with his conscience as he increasingly realizes that he is just the front line of an extensive cover up operation. MacIntyre is a native of Cape Breton, and a prominent journalist so perhaps not surprisingly his fictionalization of these real situations and characters is believable and powerful.
WOMEN IN TRANSLATION MONTH
I always try to set aside two books for Women in Translation month in August (given that 2 is pretty much my monthly average, this makes sense to me). However, since my reading project as a whole has slowed down, I’m finding that I’m reaching further forward on my shelves each year. This year, I read a couple of books from further along the “M” shelf.
Dorian recommended this book a few years ago and of course he is right about what a tremendous book it is. [Ed. – Damn right he is. That guy really knows a thing or two.] Millu recounts the stories of six women whom she encountered in the women’s camps at Auschwitz. In many ways, the content of these tales is not unlike other Holocaust testimonies in the brutality, suffering and impossible moral situations that they depict, but it is also quite different in its specific focus on female experience in the camps. It must also be said that the stories are well crafted as stories. In both respects, the book reminded me in a strange way of the stories of Ida Fink, even though the latter are fictional. [Ed. – Absolutely!] Both writers provide keen observations of the brutality and suffering caused by Nazi oppression, particularly as it affects women. There is probably something more to be said about the relationship between the fictional and the non-fictional here, but that’s more Dorian’s territory. [Ed. – Certainly true that Millu uses an overtly narrative style in these pieces. Maybe Sara Horowitz’s idea about the Fink stories—that we sometimes need fiction to tell us what nonfiction can’t (it’s smarter than that, but that’s the gist)—might be useful here.]
Müller, Herta – The Passport (1986) Trans. Martin Chalmers
I had never read Müller before, so I didn’t really know what to expect, nor do I really know how to describe the experience of reading this book but here goes: it is a series of dark prose poems that build a feeling much more than they build the plot, which is ostensibly about the efforts of a miller to emigrate to West Germany. The images, though, vividly construct a picture of a hostile natural world, and the tensions of living amongst a foreign people. I commented earlier on the changes of Levi’s titles for an English-speaking audience; in this case, the effect of calling the book The Passport seems to be a rather banal attempt to focus on the plot, unlike the original German title, Der Mensch ist ein großer Fasan auf der Welt (“Man is a Great Pheasant in the World”) which better captures the poetic feel and the tension between the human and the natural world developed throughout the book.
IN PROGRESS
So, about that wall I mentioned… things were going swimmingly (yes, for me, the above is what swimmingly looks like) until the end of October/beginning of November. In the space of a fateful week, I began three new books. Little did I know that 2 ½ months later, despite putting almost all of my reading time and energy into them, all three would remain unfinished. Anyway, here’s a brief report on the books I didn’t quite finish in 2024 (with up to date completion percentages as of early 2025)
Lessing, Doris – The Golden Notebook (1962) Completed: 26%
First, not having included Doris Lessing in my original project, I was tempted to join a readalong of The Golden Notebook organized by the ever-encouraging @paperpills10.bsky.social. However, a combination of my usual lack of time, my inability to get my hands on a good physical copy of the book, and my struggles with the book itself led to my dismal failure to keep up. As for the book itself, it seems to me very original in terms of form (3rd person narration combined with 1st person in the form of notebooks kept by one of the characters) while seeming quite mundane (thus far) in terms of content and style. Perhaps that is what I’m struggling with, though I also wonder if it is part of the point (this is what notebooks are like). I will persist with this, but I have quite a way to go yet. [Ed. – Hmm I like this one: not sure you’re going to change your mind if you aren’t into it yet.]
Mann, Thomas – Doctor Faustus (1948) Trans. H.T. Lowe-Porter Completed: 73%
At about the same time, I was starting this book, which I had bought at a time when I was collecting Faust stories, but I had only managed to read the first few chapters at that time. I have done better this time, and what I have learned from this experience is that 1) I need to read more of Mann’s novels and 2) I may not have enough years left in me to read them all. This is a tremendous book, but one that requires much time and focus. I have been making slow but consistent progress, and there is now at least some light at the end of the tunnel. Despite the title, the Faustian theme is more an undercurrent than the book’s focus, which has more to do with reflections on the nature of art and its relation to culture. But what has perhaps most struck me about this book is its descriptions of the rise of Nazism and the psychology behind it, all of which feel chillingly contemporary.
Márai, Sandor – Embers (1942) Trans. Carol Brown Janeway Completed: 67%
Now this wonderful little (at least, comparatively) book is one that I would have finished long ago, had I not been saving it to cleanse my palate after working on the previous two books (gotta respect the alphabetical order after all). It is a much quicker, and highly engaging read. Last year, I commented on how my reading system often provides me with strange and unexpected correlations, and it has been somewhat strange reading this book alongside Doctor Faustus. Both books are written in the 1940’s but make use of a dual time frame split between the narrative present and a past in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Both are set in central Europe and are thus framed against the background of the wars in these time periods, and both focus heavily on the relationship of a pair of male friends, one of whom is musical and artistic, the other more material and practical. But they are of course very different books; Embers tells the story of a friendship broken in youth that comes to a reckoning in old age. I’m still not sure what this reckoning is going to look like, but the suspense is building. So far, this is pretty great.
James Whistler, View across the Lagoon (1879 – 80)
LOOKING AHEAD TO 2025
My one final comment on all of the above is that one of the benefits of writing these entries shortly after finishing the books is that I can look back and see how my immediate response to the book varies from what my memory of it is now. For example, despite the lukewarm write-up, I thought about the Le Guin a lot after I finished it, and despite really loving the Lively, I haven’t really thought about it at all since then. I’m not sure that this is necessarily a measure of a book’s quality, but it is a measure of something. [Ed. – Yes! But what? I think about this a lot too.]
As for next year, I did have a fleeting desire to join a Proust reading group, since that is probably the book that I am most looking forward to on my remaining list, but my recent track record with group reads and the fact that I am probably not in the right head space at the moment has caused me to hold off (it’ll probably be a couple of years before I get to “P”)
So, my goal will be to try to get through “M” this year, although as I said, it’s a pretty formidable letter. I will at least see the benefits of having participated in group reads of some of the chunkier books on this shelf over the past few years (The Balkan Trilogy, The Levant Trilogy, Moby Dick, The Man Without Qualities) but I still have a lot to look forward to, from Gabriel Garcia Marquez to Cormac McCarthy to Brian Moore to Toni Morrison to Iris Murdoch and many more in between. Wish me luck, and let me know if there are any indispensable M authors that you think I need to make sure I read this year. [Ed. – Thank you as always, Nat!]
Eiger, Mönch & Jungfrau 