Tag Archives: Italo Calvino

Scott Lambridis’s Year in Reading, 2021

Posted on by under Guest post, lists, review, Uncategorized, year in review

Today‘s reflection on a year in reading is by Scott Lambridis (@slambridis). Scott’s story “Blind Sticks” is nominated for a 2021 Pushcart award. Before completing his MFA, he earned a degree in neurobiology, and co-founded Omnibucket.com, through which he co-hosts the Action Fiction! performance series. Read more at scottlambridis.com.

Look for more reflections from a wonderful assortment of readers every day this week. Remember, you can always add your thoughts to the mix. Just let me know, either in the comments or on Twitter (@ds228).

Helen Frankenthaler, Radius, 1993

Each year I have a goal of reading 52 books. In 2021, I read 87. Here are the top ten! 

The Organs of Sense by Adam Ehrlich Sachs

This book was on the top ten after the very first chapter. In 1666, the philosopher/mathematician Leibniz tracks down a blind astronomer who’s predicted an eclipse that will darken Europe for exactly 4 seconds. A blind astronomer? Naturally Leibniz attempts to decide whether he’s a brilliant soothsayer or just an absurd quack, and the astronomer indulges him in a long and meandering tale of how he came to his prediction while they wait for the eclipse itself to make the final determination. Along the way we hear of the astronomer’s life, arguments over the composition of art (one scene about a bunch of faces made up of fishes especially sticks in my mind), the utility of science, the way to gauge truth, all of which unveil the mysteries and absurdities of philosophical searches, while revealing the narrative’s own. The story keeps you guessing if it’s going to actually go anywhere, and then it does, beautifully and surprisingly. The true delight, though, the part that affixed it in the top ten immediately, is the tone. As my dear friend Ben put it, “It has something rare these days, and from this country: a terrific sense of play, a lightness as Italo Calvino would say [in his Memos for the New Millenium]. There’s always playfulness even in his most serious subjects.” Calvino would be proud, amused, and maybe a bit enlightened too. [Ed. – Sold!]

At Night all Blood is Black by David Diop (Translated by Anna Moschovakis)

This short novel from Senegal about a “chocolat” soldier fighting with the French in the trenches of WWI gripped me and wouldn’t let go. The narrator battles with the guilt of being unable to put his dying friend out of his misery, which transmutes into the hunt for forgiveness through atrocity: he becomes a “soul-eater” who hunts down Germans so that he can retain and collect their severed hands. Diop uses shocking violence and horror to unfold the narrator’s humanity, even as the character doubts it himself. The narration is a fever dream: at once intense, lyrical, dark, violent, tender, visceral, and poetic. That dream picks up in the second half in a hospital amidst delusions and confusions of identity. This half has less visceral presence, but the questions are still interesting, and the prose’s rhythm of repetition carries it forward to an ending both mysteriously dissonant and triumphant.

The End of the Alphabet by C. S. Richardson

This is the sweetest and saddest love story I’ve ever read, all wrapped up in under 100 pages. In his fiftieth year, a devoted husband finds out he has just a month to live, then whisks his wife off on a world tour of cities in alphabetical order, from Amsterdam to Zanzibar—but they never make it past F (I believe it’s F, but can’t be sure, since I don’t own the book anymore; you’ll see why). The prose is spare, the story sweet, the characters adorable and tragic, the ending heartbreaking and beautiful. It’s both straightforward in its telling and slippery in its tone, and I’ve been compelled to give it at least three times now to other friend-couples. How could it not make the top ten? 

Lifespan of a Fact by John D’Agata and Jim Ringal

This year was chock full of non-fiction books about the challenges of writing non-fiction (how to accurately tell the truth, how much the writer plays a part) and this was the crowning jewel, a totally metafictional narrative. On the surface, it’s a long-form article about a boy’s suicide in Las Vegas, and the socioeconomic factors of the city that contributed to and were revealed by that event. The portrait of Las Vegas is fascinating on its own, but the heart and delight is in the marginalia—the fact checker’s feedback to the editor and author about the draft article, and the author’s responses. What arises is a frustrated argument between the two over what counts as truth and where the journalist’s obligations lie in relation to capturing it. The personalities of both author and fact-checker are wonderfully revealed. You’ll never think of non-fiction as innocent again. 

The Old Woman and the River by Ismail Fahd Ismail (Translated by Sophia Vasalou)

Some books get to the top ten not by wowing me in the moment, but by sticking with me for months and months. [Ed. – Yep, and sometimes those are the best ones.] This short novel from Kuwait follows a feisty old lady and her faithful and equally feisty mule on a critical errand: to carry her husband’s unearthed bones back to his hometown for a proper burial. Unfortunately she arrives to find the town in a war zone (the Iran-Iraq War), governed by an outpost of soldiers who neither let her accomplish her errand nor leave. During her stay, she manages to sabotage a military operation by bombing a dam, and restoring fertility to barren lands on the fringes of the desert. It was an enjoyable read at the time, in particular the tough-but-tender old lady’s conversations with her mule, her husband’s ghost, and her captors, but the lingering effect of the old woman’s righteous persistence has persisted long enough to elevate it into the top ten. I just can’t stop thinking about it.

97,196 Words by Emannuel Carrèrre (Translated by John Lambert)

I love a good essay, no matter the subject, and this collection is as varied as they come; I loved every one. There are so many I can’t even recall them all. A lengthy, poignant study of an AIDS victim. An obscure but shocking suburban murderer of a man’s entire family (which referenced and later caused me to read Janet Malcolm’s fantastic The Journalist and the Murderer). A day on the town with the French president Macron. A visit to the secretive Davos conference. Russia’s anti-Putin youth. The enduring spell of H.P. Lovecraft. Tracking down the pseudonym of a subversive writer who popularized a chance-based way of living that became a cult lifestyle. Some obscure Russian writer. Sex columns Carrèrre was forced to write. Oh, and the homecoming of the last prisoner to be released from the Gulag, how could I forget that one? This is what happens. I start remembering one, and then they just pop back into place: Oh and that one, that was great, Oh, and that one, that was great too. Each is captivating, which probably hasn’t happened since I read Weinberger. Hence: top ten

Earth and Ashes by Atiq Rahimi (Translated by Erdag M. Göknar)

A fantastic novella from Afghanistan! After his village is bombed and most of his family killed, an old man goes on a journey to the remote mine where his son works to tell him the awful news. In tow is his grandson, who has been deafened by the bomb but is too young to understand yet what’s happened to him. [Ed. – Uh this is exactly what Ben said… not sure who’s paying homage to whom here, but, anyway…] Much of the book is spent sitting and waiting for a ride at a gas station in the middle of the desert where a bus will supposedly arrive, a waiting characterized by drifts in and out of time and place, fantasies into the mind of his grandson, and playing out versions of how he’ll share the terrible news with his son, all punctuated by the feisty but concerned station agent waking the old man to check on him. Taut and dreamy, concise and spare, heartbreaking and yet not without humor. But it’s really the final twenty pages that dazzle, the ultimate meeting of father and son and what follows. These pages are such a rollercoaster of heartbreaking twists and turns, dashed expectations and unfathomably complex emotions—they left me breathless.

Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari

Sapiens is a fascinating reexamination of what makes humans tick, and how the major tides of history and society have been shaped and driven by our unique ability to organize ourselves through invented stories. Harari’s thesis is that there’s a pretty small limit (about a hundred or so if I recall) to how large a society can be based purely on cooperation within the material world; it’s the ability to create fictional entities and shared beliefs about them that allowed us to surge to great collective numbers. (And subsequently wreak the havoc we’ve wreaked, first on other human species, then on the world’s fauna, and ever since on each other). Religion, agriculture, currency, language, politics and government, social structures in general—shared agreements in invented fictions, all. Though the book is not that long, it took me nearly a full year to read because each chapter is so juicy and rich I needed a break after each. Rarely has non-narrative non-fiction left so strong an impression of the delightful flimsiness of all we take for granted in daily life. The interview with the author at the end also inspired me to start a daily practice of Vapassana meditation (he said he couldn’t have written the book without it). I’ve kept with the practice ever since (4-5 months). You never know what a book will bring to you! 

HhHH by Laurent Binet (Translated by Sam Taylor)

HhHH stands for “Himmlers Hirn heisst Heydrich,” or “Himmler’s brain is called Heydrich.” This gem of historical fiction tells the story of Reinhard Heydrich, the most ruthless Nazi you’ve never heard of, and of the two parachuting Czechs, Jozef Gabcík and Jan Kubiš, who assassinated him in broad daylight, in arguably the bravest and singularly practical act of the war. Who was Heydrich? Himmler’s right-hand man. The one who first recognized a young Eichmann as a “man of talents.” The man Hitler called “the perfect Nazi,” the man he feared and therefore valued most for his extensive information networks. The real brains behind the nuts and bolts of the Anschluss, the forming of the Czech protectorate, the subjugation of Prague, the meticulous architect of the Holocaust. [Ed. – That last statement overstates things, overlooks Himmler, etc.] Heydrich’s rise is fascinating and terrifying, paralleled with the tension of the two Czech parachutists planning and pulling off their secret mission, then going on the run, holding out for days against a battalion of hundreds of Gestapo in a church before finally meeting their brutal demise. It’s a riveting story, but what elevates the book is the meta-narrative struggle of the author to divine truth from his tale, to determine what to put in and how to stay focused, given all the astonishing horror he could include. This struggle adds an extra personality, an intellectual struggle beyond the body of an already striking historical account. It gave the book just enough extra oomph to edge out Èric Vuillard’s Order of the Day, another terrifying account of the rise of the Third Reich.  

Ice by Anna Kavan

An unnamed narrator chases a vaguely beautiful girl across crumbling apocalyptic landscapes of crumbling ice and snow, under the menacing shadow of her entitled protector. This strange novel made the list not for the actual enjoyment of the reading but for the totally mysterious and otherworldly atmosphere it creates. Moment to moment, the writing is so rich and tense and unique, and whenever the chapter changes it zooms out a bit to an even more unsettling sense of aimlessness, a glimpse into a wider eternity that saps it of momentum, round and round and never going anywhere. Ice can be frustrating. [Ed. – Indeed.] But it sticks with you. It’s absolutely chillingly gorgeous and perplexing. There’s nothing else like it, and I immediately purchased all her short stories. ‘Nuff said. [Ed. – My dissenting, admittedly minority, take is here.]

Helen Frankenthaler, Skywriting, 1996

Some honorable mentions. Great books that didn’t quite make the cut!

  • The Order of the Day, by Éric Vuillard
  • The Weight of Temptation, by Ana María Shua
  • H is for Hawk, by Helen Macdonald
  • Vano and Niko, by Erlom Akhvlediani
  • Ghost Soldiers, by James Tate
  • The Journalist and the Murderer, by Janet Malcolm 

Ivan Kenneally’s Year in Reading, 2021

Posted on by under Guest post, Holocaust, lists, review, year in review

Today’s reflection on a year in reading is by Ivan Kenneally (@IvanKeneally). Ivan is a writer who lives in California. He taught philosophy for many years at several universities, and his articles have appeared in the LA Review of Books, Open Letters Monthly, and The New Atlantis.

Look for more reflections from a wonderful assortment of readers every day this week. Remember, you can always add your thoughts to the mix. Just let me know, either in the comments or on Twitter (@ds228).

Alberto Giacometti, Five Heads of Men, One Face and One Woman Face on, One Woman in Profile, 1965

The first time I read Primo Levi’s If This is a Man, I was a high school senior encountering a memoir of a concentration-camp survivor for the first time; I lacked the context, historical and literary, to appreciate the uncommon power of the work, its peculiar alloy of moral indictment and scientific objectivity. I had that experience so common in adolescence—I was profoundly affected, but unable to adequately articulate the sources of my response, an untidy tangle of excitement and distemper.

This year I couldn’t resist the enthusiastic endorsement issued by Tina (@theesteemedfox) of Levi’s sequel to his remembrance of Auschwitz, The Truce—Tina is an infinitely cheerful advocate of infinitely sepulcher literature. [Ed. – And thank God for that!] I saw this as an opportunity to revisit If This is a Man, and after finishing both books I was so besotted by Levi’s writing, I ordered an edition of his complete works in English, a mammoth collection, three thousand words delivered in three hefty volumes, published by Liveright in 2015. [Ed. – Appreciate you giving the correct/accurate titles: American readers might know them as Survival in Auschwitz and The Reawakening, respectively.]

Before finally pausing, I read the two memoirs in quick succession, and then The Periodic Table, The Monkey’s Wrench, Other People’s Trades, If Not Now, When?, The Drowned and the Saved, and Natural Histories. I was immersed in Levi’s work for the better part of two months, simultaneously invigorated by his indefatigable clarity and exhausted by his increasingly disheartened worldview. [Ed. – It’s true. He was so depressed, angry, and suffering at the end of his life.] Two uncharacteristic works served as reprieves of a sort—Other People’s Trades is a collection of newspaper articles that peripatetically meander from discussions of butterflies to Italian etymology: it displays both the range of Levi’s intellectual curiosity and his inclination toward an exacting pedantry. [Ed. – Interesting. And well put.] In Natural Histories one finds a series of sci-fi short stories at least partly inspired Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics—for a time, Calvino was Levi’s editor. Both books are a departure from Levi’s more familiar work not only for the subject matter, but also the tenor of the prose—absent is his signature moral urgency, the tensile cord of fury and descriptive restraint that typifies the memoirs.

The last book Levi ever wrote is a collection of essays, The Drowned and the Saved, a return to the subject of the Holocaust. It is the angriest of his works, the one in which his livid indignation comes closest to overwhelming his heroic attempts at philosophical discipline. One can see this especially in the last essay, “Letters from Germans,” a reflection on the correspondence he received from German readers after If This is a Man was translated into their language. One epistle from a doctor from Hamburg infuriated Levi—it featured a rehearsal of increasingly familiar exculpations focusing on how little the Germans understood of Hitler’s mad depravity. Levi’s response is as devastating as it is “irate,” as he called it, but one detects no sense of triumphalism in it, no smirk of victory. The doctor’s arguments were defeated, but not the general attitude Levi believed they represented, an inclination to erase a morbid history through mealy-mouthed self-acquittal.

In The Periodic Table, Levi tells another story of a German doctor incapable of countenancing his own guilt—this time one he had first encountered while at Auschwitz working in a laboratory. In 1967, Levi stumbled upon the man’s name again in the course of his work as a chemist at an industrial paint-manufacturing plant: Dr. Muller, once the manager of slave labor at Auschwitz, now returned decades later to the responsibilities of quotidian life. Levi sends him a letter and a copy of If This is a Man, and in return receives yet another manifesto of blinkered self-absolution. He writes a rejoinder, but before he can send it he discovers Dr. Muller has suddenly died. Here, Levi recounts a portion of the letter he never sent, which can be counted as a precis of his understanding of German guilt:

As to the specific judgment on his behavior, which Muller implicitly asked of me, I tactfully cited two cases known to me of his German colleagues who in their actions toward us had done something much more courageous than what he claimed to have done. I admitted that we are not all born heroes, and that a world in which everyone would be like him, that is honest and unarmed, would be tolerable, but this is an unreal world. In the real world, the armed exist, they build Auschwitz, and the honest and unarmed clear the road for them; therefore every German must answer for Auschwitz, indeed every man, and after Auschwitz it is no longer permissible to be unarmed.

Levi’s one and only conventionally structured novel—If Not Now, When?—is a literary elaboration of this declaration; a band of Jewish partisans in Russia, armed and brimful of vengeance, roam the countryside in search of opportunities to sabotage German forces. Levi had no penchant for violence—he makes this clear in an essay on Jean Amery in The Drowned and the Saved. “I demand justice, but I am not able, personally, to trade punches or blows.” However, he didn’t aggrandize his personal distaste into a universal prohibition—he believed that after Auschwitz, physical vulnerability could no longer be suffered.

Levi killed himself shortly after writing The Drowned and the Saved, joining a grim club of writers who survived the Holocaust only to die at their own hand, a membership which includes Paul Celan, Jean Améry, and Tadeusz Borowski. [Ed. – Well, it’s complicated. In Levi’s case—though the evidence suggests similar ambiguity about Borowski’s death—it’s unclear if it was suicide or accident.] Like Améry, he despaired of the possibility that as the generation of witnesses perished so would the vivid memory and meaning of their torment; Amery believed that in some nontrivial sense this would constitute the final vindication of the Nazi guards who taunted him with the reminder that the stories of the victims would never be told. Levi might be obliquely referencing this possibility in The Monkey’s Wrench when discussing the art of listening to stories:

In fact, just as there is an art of story-telling, strictly codified through a thousand trials and errors, so there is an art of listening, equally ancient and noble, but as far as I know, it has never been given any norm.

Levi experimented with a broad spectrum of writing forms, but his life’s work was bearing witness to what he considered a historically unique catastrophe. However, one cannot bear witness without a receptive audience, and he worried that the same will to oblivion that made Auschwitz possible would make equally possible the evaporation of its memory, rending his work futile. Levi’s exasperation at this prospect crackles thoughout The Drowned and the Saved, which Cynthia Ozick considered a suicide note. “The composition of the last Lager manuscript was complete, the heart burned out; there was no more to tell.” [Ed. – Ozick’s is a compelling formulation, though I bristle at its retrospection. Had Levi found a medication that worked for him, for example, (admittedly difficult at the time) he might have lived to write many other works.]

The Hungarian novelist Imre Kertész didn’t share this particular anxiety of Levi, a point he makes in The Holocaust as Culture, a book that collects a lecture he delivered of the same name with a lengthy interview, published by Seagull Books: “Auschwitz casts a long shadow over European civilization and is still the vital question of our culture.” Moreover, he believes a full reckoning of the Holocaust transcends the question of German guilt:

But this is not something peculiar to German history. We speak of collective guilt, the collective guilt of the German nation. But Auschwitz is the collective crime of the entire world, not just of the German nation. If we think of the Holocaust as a war between Germans and Jews then we will never understand it. [Ed. – True.]

Levi sometimes expresses hope in the rational lucidity of science, and the possibility that the scientific extension of human knowledge can redound to the moral and cultural improvement of mankind. In fact, he refuses to brook any polarity between science and the humanities. As he puts it in Other People’s Trades: “I have frequently set foot on bridges that join (or ought to join) scientific culture with literary culture, crossing a crevasse that has always struck me as absurd.” In the same book, he conveys an idealism so unbounded it inspires credulity: “I believe that what is being discovered about the infinitely large and infinitely small is enough to absolve this end of the century and the millennium.”

Cartography 1976 Antoni Tapies 1923-2012 Purchased 1981 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/P07571

By contrast, Kertész places his own hopes in the birth of a new literary culture that can potentially shake the Western world out of a decadent slumber:

If preserved, the tragic insight into the world of the morality that survived the Holocaust may yet enrich European consciousness, now best with crisis, much as the Greek genius, faced with barbarism and fighting the Persian War, created the antique tragedies that serve as an eternal model. If the Holocaust today has created a culture, and it undeniably has and continues to do, its literature may draw inspiration from the two sources of European culture, the Bible and Greek tragedy, so that irredeemable reality may give rise to redemption: the spirit, catharsis.

I think Levi was attempting to contribute to something like this, though in his version the result would be a matrimony of literature and science, a rational elucidation of the soul. One despairs to think he lost faith in his work, which would seem to entail losing faith in the world. I couldn’t help thinking of Levi when I read the last line of Kertész’s lecture:

As I said in the beginning, we live in the context of a culture, and in this context the dead body of Jean Améry is to be found in the monument—still under construction—to the Holocaust, where he himself laid it down, like a blood-soaked flower.