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Scott Walters’s Year in Reading, 2023

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

Excited to once again present reading reviews from some of my favourite readers. Today’s installment, his third, is by Scott Walters. Scott launched a litblog, seraillon, in 2010, and expects to return to it one of these days. He largely follows Primo Levi’s model of “occasional and erratic reading, reading out of curiosity, impulse or vice, and not by profession.” He lives with his partner in San Francisco.

Barring a couple of possible late entries, here ends the 2023 edition of the EMJ Year in Reading series. Thanks to everyone who contributed–and all who read these engaging lists.

Édouard Boubat, Paris, 1949

Year in Reading 2023: 50 Books, Fat and Thin

Like several others who have already posted about 2023, I had a less than stellar reading year, finishing a little over half the number of books I did in 2022. On the other hand, several doubled as barbells for building up my muscles. On the third hand, some were slim. And on the fourth hand, some were slim pickings; I can’t recall ever reading so many works I didn’t especially like. I’m not sure to what to attribute that deflating phenomenon, but I hardly seem to be alone.

Best Quasi-Rereading

Michael Moore’s effervescent new translation marked my fourth time reading Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed (1827/1842). As Moore explained at a reading I attended, he deliberately aimed his translation at an American audience lamentably unfamiliar with this 19th century masterpiece. An ingenious framing story cocoons this long tale of Renzo and Lucia, the affianced young couple whose wedding plans are dashed by the machinations of a lascivious warlord, forcing the couple to separate and flee into spiraling trials that challenge them (and several other characters) into becoming larger than themselves. Starting a beloved book in a new translation requires adjustment, but I was won over by Moore’s energetic, nimble, vivid and playful version, almost certainly the place to start for any American reader approaching this grand work for the first time. [Ed. – This book looks at me reproachfully from the shelf…]

Other Italian Explorations

Giovanni Boccaccio: The Decameron

G. W. McWilliams’ translation of Boccaccio’s 1353 classic accompanied me throughout the year as the perfect post-pandemic [Ed. – sic] companion. You know the framing story: five young women during the Florentine plague of 1348 abandon the city and invite along five male friends to an empty villa in the hills where, each day for ten days, each tells a story to entertain the others. The depiction of the plague in the book’s opening is terrific, and the 100 stories, splendidly diverse, are by turns tender, ribald, moving, pointed. So is the warm banter between the young people as they introduce their stories and encourage one another’s efforts, the whole serving as a kind of instruction manual on storytelling (and as a model for confronting calamity). Boccaccio has become a favorite; I also spent time this year with his Famous Women and Genealogy of the Pagan Gods, the latter especially highlighting Boccaccio’s talent as a great writer of prefaces. [Ed. – Ok, you sold me on this!]

Dominic Starnone: The House on the Via Gemita (2023)

The two short Starnone Neapolitan novels I’d read had impressed me, so I was excited to discover a fat new 500-page work also set in Naples. Starnone’s narrator recounts the history of his father, digging so thoroughly into strained father/son relationship that I can’t imagine The House on the Via Gemita not taking its place as a classic of the genre. To my surprise, the book also turned out to be an excellent novel about painting, in that the son must address both his father’s abusive personality and role as a peripheral figure in mid-century Italian art, a career layered on top of a day job as a railroad worker and the family responsibilities he largely leaves to others. Starnone gives us a brief history of postwar Italian art while exploring the qualities that make paintings great or mediocre and making personal an issue of our time: disentangling (or not) an artist from their art. I also noted the geographical precision employed by Starnone as a quality common to several contemporary Neapolitan novels; one can use a map to follow the narrative’s peregrinations around the city.

Maria Attanasio: Concetta et ses femmes

Concetta et ses femmes, written in 2021 when Attanasio was 80, sets out as a documentary rescue mission to obtain the story of Concetta la Ferla, organizer in the late 1960s, in Caltagirone, Sicily, of the first women’s branch of the Italian Communist Party (then the third largest in the world). Concetta’s grassroots project develops out of frustration with the municipality’s diversion of water to its wealthiest citizens, but runs into predictable obstacles in the form of chauvinistic attitudes in the city administration, in the Party, and at home. The story would be interesting enough simply as historical artifact. But Attanasio’s structuring of her novel, the first part narrated by Maria herself from the perspective of 20 years after the effort to preserve Concetta’s tale, and the second the tale itself in Concetta’s words, plays with questions of authorship and feminist solidarity, and emphasizes the continual nature of the struggle to gain legitimacy, to advance the advances of the past, to never go back.

Other Italian/Italy-related works included an Italian/French collection of short stories (Nouvelles italiennes contemporaines), with Tomas Landolfi, Massimo Bontempelli and especially Elisabetta Rasy’s contributions as standouts. Indian-American-now-Italian writer Jhumpa Lahiri’s Roman Stories (2023) revisits Alberto Moravia’s 1959 Roman Tales (Racconti Romani in the original Italian for both books), exchanging Moravia’s focus on Roman men in recognizable neighborhoods for immigrants, ex-pats, and tourists vaguely on the city’s periphery. Renato Serra’s Examination of Conscience of a Man of Letters (1915) presents a searing treatise on the relationship of literature and war, written three months before Serra perished in battle in World War I (read in French; while the essay has never gone out of print in Italy, it has not been translated into English). I devoured Janet Abramowicz’s monograph, Giorgio Morandi: The Art of Silence (1964), a deep appreciation of the Bolognese artist into whose family Abramowicz was essentially adopted. Despite this proximity, Abramowicz treats her former teacher judiciously and even unsparingly when it comes to Morandi’s blemishes, in particular his tacit involvement with fascism. German writer Esther Kinsky’s Rombo (2022), a polyphonic novel exploring the impact of a series of earthquakes on remote villages in the north of Italy, grew on me during my reading, with its Polaroid-like narrative approach in which the lives of the villagers gradually become more vivid and saturated. Finally, in Etruscan Places (posthumous publication 1932), D. H. Lawrence and a companion identified as “B” voyage through central Italy, exploring sites of the ancient Etruscan “12 cities.” Lawrence’s incisive, infectiously enthusiastic observations about Etruscan art and life turned me into a fan of this fascinating people whose culture was absorbed/obliterated by the Roman Empire. The narrative doubles as a travelogue through Mussolini’s Italy and, adding yet another layer, Lawrence’s views lay out an entire philosophy that has me determined to revisit his fiction this year. [Ed. – I support this plan!]

Stalingrad

I came away from Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate convinced I’d encountered one of the essential literary documents of the 20th century’s experience of fascism. I did not know that the book was but a second volume in Grossman’s monumental effort to write the great World War II novel. The first, Stalingrad (1952), with still no definitive Russian edition, has only recently been translated into English by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler. As highly as I esteem Life and Fate, I believe Stalingrad may well be the superior novel [Ed. — !] in its immediacy and the sheer grandeur of its conception (but as the books were intended to form a whole, one need not set them against one another). Grossman, present at Stalingrad as a journalist, related some of his experiences in Life and Fate, but Stalingrad sets out to capture the whole story of the war’s most decisive battle, from August 23, 1942 to February 2, 1943. Grossman’s acute consciousness of his literary precursor, Leo Tolstoy, leads him to take his main character on two pilgrimages to Tolstoy’s house, Yasnya Polynka, and to muse on Tolstoy’s accomplishments: 

Krymov looked at the wounded who had fallen by the wayside, at their grim, tormented faces, and wondered if these men would ever enter the pages of books. This was not a sight for those who wanted to clothe the war in fine robes. He remembered a night-time conversation with an elderly soldier whose face he had been unable to see. They had been lying in a gully, with only a greatcoat to cover them. The writers of future books had better avoid listening to conversations like that. It was all very well for Tolstoy – he wrote his great and splendid books decades after 1812, when the pain felt in every heart had faded and only what was wise and bright was remembered.

With Life and Fate, Stalingrad now gives us one of the great documents of World War II – and one of the greatest works of fiction about war ever written.

An Essential Holocaust Novel

The Talmudic concept of the Lamed-Vov, the 36 righteous people on whom the continuity of the world depends, fascinated me when first I read about it. Only when I started André Schwarz-Bart’s 1956 Prix Goncourt-winning novel, The Last of the Just, did I realize that the Lamed-Vov were central to the book. Schwartz-Bart takes the reader though a thousand years of Lamed-Vov succession to arrive at Germany in the 1930s, where the narrative pace slows dramatically. His restrained, almost clinically factual language provides devastating testament as much as fiction. Some of its scenes are completely indelible, and Ernie Levy, Schwarz-Bart’s protagonist for this last half of the book, struck me one of the most remarkable characters I’ve encountered in a lifetime of reading. [Ed. – It feels like a professional failing that I have not read this book!]

José Revueltas: The Hole

A tiny but shockingly powerful novella, taut and tight with not a word out of place. [Ed. – Funny, that’s how people usually describe me!] The Mexican writer and activist Revueltas’s 1969 book, based on the author’s own 12-year experience as a political prisoner, resembles a Piranesi prison drawing in narrative form, an intensely concentrated exploration of incarceration. Everything in the narrative is compressed – time, space, hope, even the reader’s attention and the size of the book itself. An absolute masterpiece of prison literature.

Mariana Yampolsky, Estación Martell, 1988

Good King Xavier, Reino de Redonda

Spanish novelist Javier Marías died at age 70 on September 11, 2022. I encountered his work four times this past year, first in his final novel Tomás Nevinson (2022) which appeared last May in Margaret Jull Costa’s translation. I had come to anticipate each new Marías translation as nearly an annual tradition, so knowing that this his last novel made reading it deeply bittersweet. Tomás Nevinson follows up 2018’s Berta Isla, but also resurrects characters from Marías’s Your Face Tomorrow trilogy, most notably Bertram Tupra. Where Your Face Tomorrow engaged Spain’s experience of Franco and of the civil war, Tomás Nevinson takes as its starting point the Basque separatist terrorist attacks of the 1990s. As Nevinson is enlisted by Tupra to come out of retirement to track down a woman involved in the most heinous of these attacks, Marías uses the narrative to explore questions about our responsibility for seeking justice, how we deal with repentance and redemption, what justice seekers owe to their own loved ones, whether there may be some informal statute of limitations on bringing the guilty to account and how long justice should be sought – time being among the most prominent fixtures in Marías’s fiction. We are fortunate to have this novel; Marías’s time having run out seems completely unjust.

When I picked up Tomás Nevinson at Point Reyes Books, the literary mecca cultivated by Molly Parent and Stephen Sparks, Sparks asked if I’d read the new book about Redonda. I must have stared at him blankly, as, having not yet read Marías’s Oxford novels, I knew nothing. Thanks to Michael Hingston’s marvelously strange Try Not to Be Strange (2023), I now know quite a lot, including the fact that Marías had been, up until his untimely death, King Xavier I, monarch of this tiny nation, which, despite having no inhabitants, does have territory, a flag, its own currency and postage stamps, and a plethora of dukes and princesses, counts and ambassadors, and multitudes of other titles held by what seems a who’s-who of 20th century writers. This was by far my most fun book of the year, uncovering a great story, offering up a charming tale of obsession (including Hingston’s own), and digging a dizzying warren of rabbit holes for one to scurry down, which led to my filling quite a bit of empty shelf space with related works. [Ed. – Well, this all seems quite insane!]

One of those works, of course, was All Souls (1992), the Marías Oxford novel in which the author first mentions Redonda. I expect to have more to say about this book after I’ve read its sequel, Dark Back of Time, on deck for 2024.

Another addition, Cuentos únicos (1996), came from Reino de Redonda, Marías’s own Spanish-language imprint.This collection of 22 translated English language short stories selected by Marías presented a way to practice my poor Spanish and get to know some writers I didn’t know. Nugent Barker? Oswell Blakeston? Percival Landon? [Ed. – Are these imaginary???] My Spanish proved inadequate to the task, but I understood enough to have made the effort – to be continued this year – worthwhile.

The Ascent of Rum Doodle Mont Analogue

My next-to-most-fun book of the year, René Daumal’s Mont Analogue (1952), tells the story of Père Solgon’s organization of an expedition aboard the ship “Impossible” to find the rumored tallest peak on earth, mysteriously as yet undiscovered due to its isolation (guesstimated to be in the vast South Pacific) as well as certain tricks of light that keep it invisible except at a certain hour and from a certain approach. With a crew including such luminaries as an American painter of alpine scenes, one Judith Pancake, the voyage is half tongue-in-cheek, half mystical imponderables (Daumal had been a follower of Gurdjieff), half Jules Verne. Yes, I know that’s three halves, but that suggests the shape and character of this delightful novel, one of the rare “unfinished” works that actually ends mid-sent-….

(Note: for French readers: a lovely new hardcover illustrated edition of Mont Analogue comes with an introduction by musician Patti Smith).

Weak in Comparison to Dreams

I got to know art historian/theorist James Elkins’s work some 25 years ago while researching text and image for a conference paper. So it came as quite a shock to discover a 600-page novel by Elkins, especially as I’d recalled his having announced in an Amazon book review his intention to stop adding to an accretion of texts. Presumably Elkins only meant Amazon reviews, because Weak in Comparison to Dreams (2023) is a welcome contribution to contemporary literature and among the most unusual novels I’ve read in a long time.  In the book’s continuation of Elkins’s explorations of text/image interactions, I felt both that I was right back where I’d left off and in a whole new world. Incorporating scores of black and white images and increasingly nutty charts and graphs, the narrative follows its narrator, Samuel Emmer, a bacterial biologist for the city of Guelph, Ontario, on a series of visits to zoos around the world to evaluate mammalian behaviors and health protocols as Guelph plans its own zoo. [Ed. – The Guelph connection is… unexpected.] A dozen interchapters present Emmer’s dreams while on this mission, these too accompanied by images that suggest an intensifying fugue state. By turns sobering and hilarious, thematically touching on everything from animal welfare and incarceration to climate change and bureaucracy, from pseudo-science to contemporary experimental music, and playing in a space similar to that occupied by conceptual artist David Wilson’s Museum of Jurassic Technology, Elkins’s absorbing novel is… not at all what it seems. A 100-page final section entitled “Notes” delivers not so much “notes” as a surprising reframing of the first narrative, much in the way a caption might reframe an image. I can’t get the book out of my head, and shouldn’t, as Elkins has completed four other novels since 2008 that form a quintet of which Weak in Comparison to Dreams, though the first to be published, is volume three. I cannot wait to see what he does in the other four. [Ed. – How the hell do you find this stuff???]

The Queen of L.A. Noir

My familiarity with Dorothy Hughes’s In a Lonely Place (1947) had been limited to Nicholas Ray’s 1950 film starring Humphrey Bogart. Finally reading the novel left me incensed about the movie, a fairly egregious desecration of its source material. Fortunately, I felt no indignation in response to Hughes’s novel, which floored me as not just a masterpiece of Southern California noir, but perhaps the masterpiece of Southern California noir. I fell for it in the first pages, which captures the foggy, seeping chill of the California coast at night in a manner precise and true. She shies away from nothing in this penetrating psychological drama in which [Ed. – SPOILER INCOMING!] the narrator himself is the killer – presumably the quality that kept the studios from allowing Humphrey Bogart to be tarnished by such a role. Hughes covers the postwar L.A. noirscape exquisitely while managing to keep her narrator entirely human, a subtle literary feat that reads like one of Freud’s case studies. Raymond Chandler might be King of L.A. Noir, but if you asked me to pick a monarch, I’d go with Hughes on the basis of this novel alone.

Other mysteries included the marvelous Margaret Millar in Stranger in my Grave, a disappointing end to the Montalbano series in Andrea Camilleri’s Riccardino, and dismay as regards Mignon Eberhart, an author I’ve liked, whose Family Affair, in this year of too many books I did not like, marked the nadir.

Poetry

Aside from individual poems here and there, I read just three books of poetry. Reginald Dwayne Betts in Felon (2019) gives us a powerful collection of poems that go well beyond the experience of incarceration to address convict life beyond prison. I found Argentine poet Alexandra Piznarik’s Removing the Stone of Madness, Poems 1962-72 (Yvette Siegert, translator), relevatory. I did not know Piznarik, who, as the collection’s title suggests, fought a terrible battle with mental illness which she chronicled in short, sui generis poems as hard-edged and clean as crystals, powerful poem-objects one could almost hold in one’s hand. Finally, I loved Greg Hewitt’s intimate, resonant poems in Blindsight, structurally based on composer Olivier Messiaen’s prime-number system and which brought to mind Frank O’Hara’s personal poetic school of “Personism” (a mutual friend sent me Greg’s book).

Odds and Ends

The rest, an unorganized, mostly enjoyable mess, included Willa Cather, more Eve Babitz, Sándor Márai, Tatsuo Hori, Euripides, Chinua Achebe, Raphael Sánchez Ferlosio, more César Aira (an annual need), Daisy Hildyard and others. Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove (1985) gave me exercise, as with Stalingrad in one hand, I built up my other bicep by hefting McMurtry’s 850-page narrative in late-night installments at approximately the same pace as the Texas border to northern Montana cattle drive the story depicts. I found it terrific fun, amplified by my subsequent reading of the story of a poor Texas legislator who made the mistake of trying to ban Texas’s national novel. No one should want to be that guy. A bit further south I ate up Charles Portis’s Gringos (1991), set in the Yucatan where rumpled ex-pat Americans are involved in archeological dealings and mis-dealings. Are all of Portis’s novels his best novel? I think so. I think so.  [Ed. – Well put!] Art historian Alexander Nemerov’s The Forest (2023), a collection of essays and corresponding plates, uses forests of the American frontier to cull idiosyncratic tales of 1830’s American art and culture, rescuing some fascinating figures from historical oblivion. I finally got around to reading Maggie Nelson, in Bluets (2009) and The Argonauts (2015) – respectively, musings on the color blue (with a towel snap at William Gass’s bare cheeks), and raw meditations on sex, gender and motherhood that I sent off to goddaughter pursuing gender studies. I’d been curious for some time about Michael McDowell six-volume Blackwater, and gorgeous and affordable new French paperback editions provided an opportunity to dive in. Blackwater 1: La Crue (1983) proved a Southern Gothic slow drip horror tale peeling away the veneer of Southern gentility. For the first time since high school, I revisited J. D. Salinger, in Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters (1955) and Seymour: An Introduction (1959). Salinger himself may not have aged well, but these two novels were far better than I expected them to be.  I found Tove Jansson’s The True Deceiver (1982) to be a stunningly good novella about truth, trust and deceit, not necessarily in that order, set in a fishing village on the Finnish coast. There seems to have been nothing Jansson couldn’t do right. While somewhat confined in a house in the mountains, I found appropriate companionship in Count Xavier de Maistre’s A Journey Round My Room (1795), a book born of boredom, a curious meditation on escaping it, created when, following a duel, de Maistre was put under house arrest for some six weeks. Alleviating boredom, Roy Lewis’s The Evolution Man, or How I Ate My Father (1960), though clearly dated, was still pretty damned funny as comedies about pre-history go. Finally, a couple of books with which I struggled still held enough of interest for me to get through them. Justin Torres’s Blackouts (2023) relies heavily on photographs, drawings, redacted text, dialogue as film script, and other novelties that I found a bit overcooked (in a way I did not with the Elkins novel). But the story Torres unearths of a 1942 study of homosexuality, and of the lesbian couple who helped drive the project and were betrayed by it, is remarkable. I had a tougher time with Gerald Reve’s The Evenings (1947) acclaimed by some as the great 20th century Dutch novel. A disaffected young man lives with his numbed parents in 1946 Amsterdam and battles his claustrophobic life with dark, acrid humor. I admired Reve’s allowing the war to drip into the narrative bit by bit, the horrors of the recent past seeping into normal life. But I couldn’t wait for the book to end.

Henri Cartier-Bresson, Naples, 1960

I’ll conclude with a dream. In a cluttered bookshop, I found a tattered but astounding volume amended with striking collages, vivid watercolor sketches, and dense margin notes. The (dream) author’s name seemed familiar, so upon waking I looked up James Gould Cozzens and plunged down a trail that led me to Dwight MacDonald’s 1958 review of Cozzens’ late novel, By Love Possessed.  I did not read Cozzens. I’m not sure I will ever read Cozzens. But I’m grateful to odd dreams for having pointed me to MacDonald’s review, which takes to task a generation of critics who, with log-rolling fealty and conformity to one another’s uncritical opinions, lavished praise on the novel. Eviscerating, illuminating, even necessary, his review models close textual analysis with an eye towards criticism’s larger role, relevant today when writer-critics blurb one another’s books and award prizes to mediocre works.  A pretty good way to end the reading year, and a better way to start off a new one which, I am happy to say, as far as books go, is off to a tremendous start. Thank you for reading. [Ed. –Thanks for writing, Scott! A delight as always.]

Ricardo Chavira’s Year in Reading, 2023

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

Excited to once again present reading reviews from some of my favourite readers. Today’s installment, his first, is by Ricardo Chavira (@waryenthusiast). Ricardo is a reader, not a writer, but he thinks writers are cool. When he’s not reading, running, cooking for friends and family, building even more bookcases, or making maple syrup, he makes his living in sunny CT. Having done graduate work in philosophy, he, naturally, works in IT.

Edvard Munch, Kragero in Spring, 1929

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Crook Manifesto, by Colson Whitehead

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

  • Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis

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

  • Milkman, by Anna Burns

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

  • The Netanyahus, by Joshua Cohen

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

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

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

  • Phantoms, by Christian Kiefer

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

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

  • Translating Myself and Others, by Jhumpa Lahiri

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

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

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

  • Ties, by Domenico Starnone, translated by Jhumpa Lahiri

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

  • The Door, by Magda Szabó, translated by Len Rix

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

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

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

  • Fantastic Night, by Stefan Zweig, translated by Anthea Bell

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

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

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

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

  • Hell Bent, by Leigh Bardugo

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

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

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

  • Bloodchild and Other Stories, by Octavia E. Butler

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

  • Lessons in Birdwatching, by Honey Watson

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

  • Small Mercies, by Dennis Lehane

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

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

  • The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood

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

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

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

  • Afterparties, by Anthony Veasna So

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

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

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

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

  • Pure Colour, by Sheila Heti

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Her Whole Bright Life, by Courtney LeBlanc

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

He carried it to a tree at the edge of our

property, gentled it onto a branch

Love the verb “gentled”!

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

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

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

and

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

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

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

  • Hamnet, by Maggie O’Farrell

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

  • Nocturnes, by Kazuo Ishiguro

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

  • I Have Some Questions for You, by Rebecca Makkai

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

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

  • Birnam Wood, by Eleanor Catton

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

  • The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, by James McBride

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

  • The Gathering, by Anne Enright

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

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

  • Daisy Jones and the Six, by Taylor Jenkins Reid

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

  • The Wife of Willesden, by Zadie Smith

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

  • The Fraud, by Zadie Smith

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

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

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

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

Edward Hopper, Barn and Silo, Vermont, 1929

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

Hope Coulter’s Year in Reading, 2023

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

Excited to once again present reading reviews from some of my favourite readers. Today’s installment, her fourth, is by Hope Coulter, (@hopester99), whom I’m lucky to call a colleague. A fiction writer and poet, Hope directs the Hendrix-Murphy Foundation at Hendrix College.

Eveelyn Hofer, Girl with Bicycle, Dublin, 1966

2023 may have been my Year of the Binge. A quarter of the books I read were by a single author, Michael Connelly, as I continued a 2022 obsession and chowed through the rest of his Harry Bosch and Lincoln Lawyer series. Now I’m left with the dregs of the feast and plenty of questions. Has Bosch retired for good? Is cancer going to polish him off? And how am I going to get by without a steady intake of seedy murder scenes, sandwich shop tips, and Bosch’s saturnine musings floating over the lights of L.A. from his cantilevered deck? Sigh. No regrets for this gluttonous spree; I only wish I could find another such homicide cop to devour.

Speaking of, Robert Galbraith’s majorly enjoyable detective novels continued strong for me last year. I read The Ink-Black Heart via audiobook, parceling it to myself morsel by morsel so as not to rip through it too fast. Much of the novel unfolds through tweets, which are hard to follow either by ear or on the page, so that one wasn’t my favorite, but the series is overall terrific. If Strike and Robin settle into domestic tranquility and draw the curtain of privacy over their agency door (please no spoilers; I’m still finishing up Book Seven), I’ll be in a bad way indeed. [Ed. – I loved the first few of these books, but I must confess I had to give up on them, the author’s politics having so soured me…]

I went on a lesser bender with John Boyne, starting with The Heart’s Invisible Furies, which I happened to read while traveling in Dublin and southwest Ireland—moving through some of the very settings of the novel in a pleasurable kind of Binx Bolling-esque rotation. That sent me to a handful of other Boyne books. All the Broken Places, The House of Special Purpose, and The Absolutist were highlights, though none of them surpassed the dark, funny, moving experience of Furies.

Completing previous years’ jags, I knew I had to get hold of Paulette Jiles’s latest, Chenneville, reviewed here by Dorian late last year. All Jiles’s books have won me over. This one wrapped up too fast for my taste, but like her other works, it flares a light onto regional history with convincing detail and taut storytelling. [Ed. – Agree, especially re: the ending.]

Eh, maybe here my conceit ends. Although I regularly teach Zadie Smith’s “The Embassy of Cambodia” and have read several of her novels, I can’t really call that a tear. Even so, I was intrigued to hear that Smith had turned to historical fiction and couldn’t wait to check out The Fraud, which is based on a 19th-century trial, little known now but sensational in its time. The book gripped me in unexpected ways. Every character was so believable, so not-a-type, so idiosyncratically shaped by their history and personality—supremely so in the case of the main character, Eliza Touchet. Mrs Touchet’s epiphanies in the course of the novel involve -isms of race, class, and sex that quietly echo our own era. At the same time her keen intelligence, her self-understanding, her fierceness and restraint, and her willingness to examine the tangles within her own heart are quintessentially Victorian.

As I read I found myself marking passages the way I do in my old copy of Middlemarch, quotes with a similar sage quality. (Even though Dickens and Thackeray feature as characters in the book, the sensibility that saturates it is really Eliot’s.) Here Eliza considers her long, complicated relationship with her cousin: “Theirs was a fellowship in time, and this, in the view of Mrs Touchet, was among the closest relations possible in this fallen world. Bookended by two infinities of nothing, she and William had shared almost identical expanses of being. They had known each other such a long time. She still saw his young face. He still saw hers, thank God.” And here she ponders how women often can’t see their own beauty for what it is at the time, not appreciating their appearance until looking back on a younger stage after a lapse of years: “But it is the perverse business of mirrors never to inform women of their beauty in the present moment, preferring instead to operate on a system of cruel delay.” Introspective moments like these, combined with the unspooling action of the trial plot, place this book at the top of the literary heap for my year’s reading.

Other newish novels that I loved last year were Donal Ryan’s The Queen of Dirt Island—a multigenerational saga of tough Irish women, inspired by the kitchen storytelling of his mother and grandmother—and Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, about a love triangle that arises and devolves in unpredictable ways. I also enjoyed Jeanine Cummins’s American Dirt. I had steered clear after hearing critics call it appropriative, but when a friend told me it held up well for her I gave it a try. I found the story compelling and plausible. Cummins addresses the criticism directly in her afterword, and I’m persuaded by her account of the writing and her authentic connection to the material.

I also read, and loved, Viet Tranh Nguyen’s short story collection The Refugees, tales of Vietnamese migrants resettled in southern California: this is art on a level with Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies and Unaccustomed Earth. And I returned to some old favorites that thankfully not only proved to hold up over time but blew me away all over again: Gabriel García Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera; Willa Cather’s O Pioneers and A Lost Lady; Evan S. Connell’s Mrs. Bridge (which Donal Ryan mentioned as inspiration for the super-short chapters in The Queen of Dirt Island), and Robert Crichton’s The Secret of Santa Vittoria.

Then the nonfiction. Oh, the nonfiction. Fiction is great when it’s great, but it disappoints so often and in so many different ways—by trying too hard, being too earnest, too arch or too tough-guy, or showing something nobody would say or do (on the human level I mean, not that it’s surreal or fantastic), or just plain old getting on my nerves. For some reason nonfiction is less prey to these faults. More and more I find myself turning to nonfiction for that “ah” of relief when I can settle into a writer’s style and voice and relax into the story at hand, losing the awareness that I’m reading. Last year I took in some wonderful memoirs. There was Javier Zamora’s Solito, about his experiences as a nine-year-old traveling solo from El Salvador to the United States (it’s like the nonfiction version of American Dirt). There was Monica Potts’s The Forgotten Girls: A Memoir of Friendship and Lost Promise in Rural America, which looks at the deterioration of American small towns based on her growing-up in Clinton, Arkansas, not many miles from where I teach. [Ed. – Definitely on my list. Heard her read at the Lit Fest last year and I still remember the opening scene.] Tracing the divergent life stories of herself, her sister, and her close friend, Potts narrates a tale of narrowing prospects for many young women in this climate. There was Jane Ferguson’s No Ordinary Assignment, chronicling her life as a reporter in the war zones of the Middle East (no forgotten girl she, determined as she was to get out of Dodge after an emotionally deprived childhood in northern Ireland).

I’m chagrined that I had never read the slender Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave until this year. As many have said, it’s profound: unforgettable not only for its first-person testimony to the horrors of the slave system in its heyday but also the candor, economy, and precision of the writing. Acquiring even baseline literacy was a miracle in that context—and an interesting story within the story—but Douglass’s literary prowess vaults so far beyond that initial limit, and is so supremely suited to relaying his experiences, that it’s humbling to take in his words. 

A mid-year bookshelf cleanout led me to another, far different memoir that I’d somehow missed before, J.R. Moehringer’s The Tender Bar, about the New Jersey barflies who were his surrogate family growing up (and including one of the funniest sexual initiation scenes I’ve ever read). My enjoyment of that book sent me back to current times and a brand-new book that Moehringer ghost-wrote: Prince Harry’s memoir Spare. Come for the royals’ dirty laundry; stay for the Shakespeare allusions that, alas, are probably attributable to Moehringer rather than Harry.

In the realm of general nonfiction, meaning not memoir, there were three standouts this year, two by 30-something Irish writers whom I heard in person at the West Cork Literary Festival last summer (thank you, Hendrix College and the Hendrix-Murphy Foundation). In My Fourth Time, We Drowned: Seeking Refuge on the World’s Deadliest Migration Route, the Irish journalist Sally Hayden details the grim migration sagas happening in the seas north of Libya and makes a case for the EU’s complicity in perpetuating devastating outcomes. Cal Flyn turns to a different crisis, that of environmental havoc and habitat destruction, in Islands of Abandonment: Nature Rebounding in a Post-Human World. The book examines many sites around the globe that toxic damage of various kinds has rendered uninhabitable—or at least not prey to further human disturbance—and where, curiously, plant and animal forms are rapidly speciating. It’s probably too much to call the book hopeful; as Flyn says, it’s not like she’s advocating for toxic damage in order to foster speciation. Still, I can’t think of another environmental book in recent years that has left me with a flicker of optimism. [Ed. – Agreed!]

Edward Burtynsky, Sawmills #1, Lagos, Nigeria, 2016

Poets and poetry fans who have borne with me this far may be wondering, what about verse? I tend to read poetry less systematically and don’t track it as I do prose. With that said, a number of poetry books meant a lot to me as I spent time with them this year, including works by Garrett Hongo, Sharon Olds, Katie Farris, Ilya Kaminsky, A. Van Jordan, Phillip Howerton, and Ada Limón. Dorian’s comments on Wisława Szymborska here, as well as his fellow podcasters’ insights, sent me back to her work with pleasure. Individual poems sometimes linger with me for days.

My final read of 2023 was Claire Dederer’s Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma. In it she takes up the question of what we as readers, moviegoers, concertgoers, and art audiences do with the knowledge that makers of works we love have committed terrible deeds. Starting with Roman Polanski, she touches on artist wrongdoers of many times and places, along the way considering art theory, cancel culture, liberalism, men, childcare, consumerism, celebrity and fandom, asshole-osity, motherhood, beauty, effort, and love. [Ed. – the asshole-osity is really going around these days.] She inventories her own aesthetic and emotional responses and reckons with the old biography-versus-art-alone conundrum. Dederer does not land in a simple place or tie this all up neatly. As much as her conclusion, I like her forthrightness, the searching quality of her mind, her unwillingness to rest with skewed or kneejerk reactions. Worthy of Eliza Touchet, you might say.

Alex Prager, Applause, 2016

Thank you for reading this—I welcome your opinions on any of these books and writers!—and to Dorian for inviting me to share. This virtual alp of books is something I enjoy throughout the year. [Ed. – Thnk you, Hope: always a pleasure to have you here.]

Paul Wilson’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, his second annual contribution, is by Paul Wilson (@bibliopaul). Paul lives in Colorado with his wife, two sons and lots of books. He also co-hosts The Mookse and the Gripes podcast.

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

I’m happy to say that coming up with a list of my favorite books read in 2021 was no easy task. For one thing, I read more books this year than I ever have before. Why? My best guess is a combination of the ongoing impacts of a quieter pandemic life, the fact that my wife and I now share our house with two teenage boys who are often doing their own things, and a conscious effort on my part to simply spend more time reading. 

Creating my list was made even more tricky by countless recommendations from so many wonderful and generous friends on Twitter and elsewhere. It’s like I have a team of top-notch curators sending me a constant stream of great books. I started with a stack of around 30 titles that could have made the list, but here are 10 favorites.  

Tomás González, Difficult Light, translated from the Spanish by Andrea Rosenberg 

This is a mesmerizing and melancholy book about time and memory. The narration often jumps across decades, sometimes within a single paragraph or even sentence, creating fascinating and often somber insights into aging and the far-reaching effects of our pasts. A quiet reflection on art, loss and family that offers yet another example of why Archipelago Books remains one of the most exciting and important publishers out there. 

I am surprised once more by how supple words are—how all by themselves, or practically by themselves, they can express the ambiguity, the changeability, the fickleness of things. And yet I long for the aroma of oils or the powdery feel of charcoal in my fingers, and I miss the pang—like the pang of love—that you feel when you sense you have touched infinity; captured an elusive light, a difficult light, with a bit of oil mixed with ground-up metals or stones.

Nathalie Léger, Suite For Barbara Loden, translated from the French by Natasha Lehrer 

Can it really be true that I hadn’t heard of Nathalie Léger before 2021? In a year filled with wonderful literary discoveries, she was one of my very favorites. I read her triptych of novels all in a row and loved each of them, but, to me, Suite for Barbara Loden was the standout.Ostensibly about the film Wanda, its creator Barbara Loden, and Léger’s attempt to write a short entry for a film encyclopedia, this book becomes a mesmerizing blend of biography, autofiction, film analysis, and Dyer-esque reflections on the slippery process of creation. 

I find myself increasingly drawn to books that are hard to pin down or define and this one certainly fits that description in all the best ways. If you’re looking for a project for 2022, I would highly recommend spending some time with Wanda and Léger. I think about them both often. 

“How difficult can it be to tell a story simply?” my mother asks again. I have to stay calm, slow down and lower my voice: what does it mean, “to tell a story simply”? … You think that you’re dealing with pure formalities, footnotes, short texts, table, prefaces, indexes or annexes—an orderly organized abundance of works that you just need to spend a morning assembling into a few sentences; a straightforward administration of language—and then somehow you end up with endless decisions to make, with abandoned hopes and collapsed hypotheses.

Jhumpa Lahiri, Whereabouts, translated from the Italian by the author

Lahiri has long been one of my very favorite writers, so when I heard she had a new book coming out, I went through the usual blend of anticipation and anxiety that precedes a highly anticipated work by a beloved author. I needn’t have worried. 

The unnamed narrator is a prickly, unmarried writer and lit professor who has lived in the same Italian city for her entire life. Through a series of episodes that take place over the course of a year, she shares her meditative and sometimes melancholy perspectives on isolation, solitude and the movement of time. Although a dramatic departure in many ways from the subject and style of Lahiri’s previous works, Whereabouts is an example of a master at the top of her game. I can’t wait to see what she does next. 

Solitude: it’s become my trade. As it requires a certain discipline, it’s a condition I try to perfect. And yet it plagues me, it weighs on me in spite of my knowing it so well.

Robert Walser, The Tanners, translated from the Swiss German by Susan Bernofsky

After years of sitting unread on my shelves, this book was becoming one of the spines my eyes unconsciously skipped over while I scanned for my next read [Ed. – that is a thing, isn’t it?]. Fortunately, my good friend Trevor (@mookse) saved it from obscurity by sharing his contagious love of Walser during our conversations this year. Tragedy averted! 

This was my first foray into Walser’s work, but it certainly won’t be my last. Reading him is like jumping into a raging river—you can fight it and become overwhelmed, or you can relax, let it carry you along and just enjoy the ride. This was the most exuberant and joyful thing I read this year. 

I must find myself a life, a new life, even if all of life consists only of an endless search for life. What is respect compared to this other thing: being happy and having satisfied the heart’s pride. Even being unhappy is better than being respected. I am unhappy despite the respect I enjoy; and so in my own eyes I don’t deserve this respect; for I consider only happiness worthy of respect. Therefore I must try whether it is possible to be happy without insisting on respect.

T. J. Clark, The Sight Of Death

I never would have discovered this gem if I hadn’t stumbled across a tweet by Lauren Groff: “I’m so broken down by isolation that I can’t get four pages into T.J. Clark’s The Sight of Death without weeping. Just—the patience and persistence and love it takes to visit the same painting day after day and see new things, better things, how the light changes, it’s so moving.”

In 2000, two paintings by Poussin were hung in a room in the Getty Museum. Clark found himself hypnotically drawn to them, returning day after day to sit quietly in the room and record his observations in a series of journals. His subtle blend of passion and patience is fascinating and contagious. I read it back in March and still think about it almost every day. Its laser focus on obsession, solitude, and time haunt me. 

I believe the distance of visual imagery from verbal discourse is the most precious thing about it. It represents one possibility of resistance in a world saturated by slogans, labels, sales pitches, little marketable meaning-motifs.

Olivia Manning, Balkan Levant Trilogies

When I think about the books that gave me the most pleasure in 2021, there’s no way I could leave Olivia Manning off the list. [Ed. – The man speaks truth.] I joined my first ever Twitter reading groups this year while making my way through her two trilogies: I had a blast, connected with many great readers, and had so much fun seeing the various historical images everyone shared and reading their reactions and insights about these wonderful books. The experience was a reminder of how art and literature foster community and conversation. 

On top of all that, Manning’s trilogies are incredibly compelling, masterfully balancing the epic scope and horror of war with the countless ways it impacts the individual lives caught up in its wake. 

For several nights, Simon was worried not only by the lack of cover but the intrusive magnificence of the Egyptian night. The stars were too many and too bright. They were like eyes: waking in mid-sleep, finding them staring down on him, he was unnerved, imagining they questioned what he was doing there. 

David Albahari, Götz and Meyer, translated from the Serbian by Ellen Elias-Bursać

This book came very highly recommended by Mark Haber and, yes, Dorian Stuber. [Ed. – Paul, you seem to have omitted “the one and only” before my name. Imma put that back in.] I’m so grateful to them both for bringing it to my attention. An unnamed narrator seeks information about his extended family, almost all of whom were killed in gas vans near Belgrade back in 1942. During the course of his research, he comes across the names of two drivers of the truck in which his family was likely put to death: Götz and Meyer. 

The narrator becomes increasingly fixated on these men; his obsession is reflected in the convoluted way in which the story is told. The fictional lives he creates for the two men, along with the book’s increasingly unreliable narrative style, create a growing tension and make the reader less certain about which parts are true and which are invented.

How is this book not better known? I will happily join Mark and Dorian in spreading the word about this slim and haunting masterpiece. [Ed. – It really is fantastic; wrote about it a little more here.]

I must say here that it is entirely possible in the case of Götz , or possibly Meyer, that God was more present than one usually thinks, because Götz, or possibly Meyer, survived the explosion of a bomb that killed at least nine soldiers from his company, thanks only, as he often said, to God’s will, somewhere on the Eastern Front. Because of that Götz, or possibly Meyer, thanked God everyday for his goodness, especially while they were jouncing along in the truck on their way to Jajinci, while in the same truck, in the back Jews were screaming at God with their last breath, asking him why why he wasn’t there, why he wasn’t there yet, why he was never there?

William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!

Like Götz and Meyer, this book concerns the fallibility of memory and the impossible task of trying to make sense of horrific and violent events from the past. 

A multigenerational story touching on myth, memory and truth, it features multiple narrators sharing their interpretations of a tragedy. Like much of Faulkner’s work, it reflects the strong cultural ideas of the American South, where the past is still an indelible part of the present that is continually being revised and rewritten through stories told and retold. 

The narrative consists almost entirely of flashbacks that shift in time and between various points of view, creating a fragmented and often disorienting experience. I know many readers have come to think of Faulkner as an academic chore that they’re happy to have left behind, but I would urge anyone who feels that way to reconsider. This is storytelling on a grand scale. A magical book. 

“We have a few old mouth-to-mouth tales, we exhume from old trunks and boxes and drawers letters without salutation or signature, in which men and women who once lived and breathed are now merely initials or nicknames out of some now incomprehensible affection which sound to us like Sanskrit or Chocktaw; we see dimly people, the people in whose living blood and seed we ourselves lay dormant and waiting, in this shadowy attenuation of time possessing now heroic proportions, performing their acts of simple passion and simple violence, impervious to time and inexplicable … They are there, yet something is missing; they are like a chemical formula exhumed along with the letters from that forgotten chest, carefully, the paper old and faded and falling to pieces, the writing faded, almost indecipherable, yet meaningful, familiar in shape and sense, the name and presence of volatile and sentient forces; you bring them together in the proportions called for, but nothing happens; you re-read, tedious and intent, poring, making sure that you have forgotten nothing, made no miscalculation; you bring them together again and again nothing happens: just the words, the symbols, the shapes themselves, shadowy inscrutable and serene, against that turgid background of a horrible and bloody mischancing of human affairs.”

Miguel De Cervantes, Don Quixote, translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman

Last year’s top reads for me were Proust’s In Search Of Lost Time and Joyce’s Ulysses. Both joined a short list of the very best books I’ve ever read. I found it incredibly rewarding to engage with these masterpieces and wanted to keep that momentum going this year by reading Don Quixote. I’m happy to report that Cervantes has now taken his rightful place with Proust and Joyce on my all-time list. [Ed. – In so doing, Paul earned himself the nickname DQ, and I encourage you all to call him that.]

As Harold Bloom puts it, “This great book contains within itself all the novels that have followed in its sublime wake. Like Shakespeare, Cervantes is inescapable for all writers who have come after him. Dickens and Flaubert, Joyce and Proust reflect the narrative procedures of Cervantes, and their glories of characterisation mingle strains of Shakespeare and Cervantes. Don Quixote may not be scripture, but it so contains us that, as with Shakespeare, we cannot get out of it to achieve perspectivism. We are inside the vast book, privileged to hear the superb conversations between the knight and his squire, Sancho Panza. Sometimes we are fused with Cervantes, but more often we are invisible wanderers who accompany the sublime pair in their adventures and debacles.” I couldn’t have put it better myself.

A work I was expecting to require patience and hard work instead turned out to be a hilarious and compelling page turner, and a perfect holiday companion to close out the year. It’s amazing how modern this book is, and Edith Grossman’s stellar translation is a masterpiece of its own. As the pages flew by, I could hardly believe it was written 500 years ago. If you’re on the fence, I would urge you to give it a try. My guess is you’ll quickly find yourself immersed, impatiently awaiting the next time you can pick it up and once again take your place beside Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.

When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams — this may be madness. Too much sanity may be madness — and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be!

Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, translated from the German by H.T. Lowe-Porter

Each year, when I look back over all the titles I’ve read, it’s always fascinating to see which ones stand out. I loved The Magic Mountain when I was reading it, but the intervening months solidified the enormous impression it made on me. I read most of this wintry book in our backyard hammock during the height of summer, creating some of my favorite memories of the entire year in the process. [Ed. – Love it!]

The plot is relatively straightforward: Hans Castorp is about to start a career as a shipbuilder in Hamburg, but first, he plans a short trip to a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps to visit his tubercular cousin. But as he is drawn into the strange insular world of the hospital and its strange patterns and people, he begins to subscribe to the same rituals and treatment as the patients. Meanwhile, time just keeps slipping away. 

I loved the ambiguity and the fact that I never knew exactly how to think or feel. Mann recommended that those who wished to understand it should read it twice. And even though it’s a huge book that took up a significant part of my reading year, I already find myself drawn back to it and ready to be lost again. 

Time drowns in the unmeasured monotony of space. Where uniformity reigns, movement from point to point is no longer movement; and where movement is no longer movement, there is no time.

Short Fiction Week 9: Lahiri

Posted on by under short fiction 2015

It’s been a long two weeks. We’re deep into the semester now: we’re tired and harried but we’ve still a long way to go.

I still can’t figure this group out. It’s one step forward, one step back with them. Some days I feel heartened: the vibe in the room is different, a little looser. The class feels like a group. But then the next time we meet we’re back to silence, hesitancy, the students’ heads down, their expressions silently shouting, “Don’t ask me anything!”

I even took the step of giving out a pop quiz last week to check if they’re reading the stories. Judging from the results almost all of them are. So it’s not that they’re slacking. It’s more that they still don’t seem sure how to do it, how to read a text. Admittedly, it’s not easy. One thing I’ve noticed these past two weeks, however, is that the class has started to stratify: there are those who are really starting to get it, and there are those who aren’t. Usually that separation happens sooner in the semester. I don’t know what it says about this group, or about my teaching of them, that they’ve either stayed together this long or that it’s taken some this long to pull away.

I thought for a while about writing about a bad class. But then I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. So here is a good one instead. In week 9 of the course, we considered three stories. One was Mansfield’s “A Cup of Tea” (a winner every time I’ve taught in, no matter what the context—but not this year). One was Joyce’s “Eveline,” though we hardly said anything about it since at the last minute I substituted a writing exercise that took a long time but that I think was worth it—we went over a strong student paper, highlighting each sentence as either description or analysis: the arrangement of the different colours offered visual learners a way to think about structure. I’d taught both of those stories many times before. But we also considered one I hadn’t: the week’s third story was Jhumpa Lahiri’s “The Treatment of Bibi Haldar.”

I confess that although I’ve read most of Lahiri’s books, I haven’t cared for them much beyond her first collection, The Interpreter of Maladies, which is where “Bibi” can be found. Peparing the class this summer I decided I wanted a story told in the first-person plural—a google search led me to “Bibi.”

Since it was the first day after Fall Break, I started by reminding students of some of the things we’d learned about narrative voice.

We had studied Lawrence’s use of third person narration in “The Last Straw,” noting how he privileged first one character’s point of view and then another’s, and sometimes a point of view attached to no character at all. This served his interest in conflict between individuals.

We had studied Pearlman’s use of first person in “Binocular Vision,” noting how this technique limited our perspective so that we knew only what the narrator knew (which, we learned, was quite different from what her parents knew). First person narration gave us intimacy with the character but consigned us to her blind spots. Only with difficulty could we read “against” her.

Bibi Haldar is a woman, no longer so young, who lives near Calcutta at an unspecified time—I place it in the 70s or 80s but the story doesn’t tell us for sure. She suffers from a mysterious illness that sounds like epilepsy but that has resisted every attempt at a cure. Bibi lives on sufferance with her cousin and his wife in an apartment above their small cosmetics shop, but she is most often found in the storage room on the roof of the building, where she records inventory for the shopkeeper. The narrators are an unspecified group of neighbourhood women, who have known Bibi since she was a child. Unlike her, however, they are married with children.

It seems at first that Bibi wants nothing more than to be like them. As she says, in a voice that “was louder that necessary, as if she were speaking to a deaf person, “‘Is it wrong to envy you, all brides and mothers, busy with lives and cares? Wrong to want to shade my eyes, scent my hair? To raise a child and teach him sweet from sour, good from bad?’”

Everyone seems to want this for her too. An exasperated doctor, finding nothing wrong with Bibi, dismisses her with a classic chauvinist prescription: “a marriage would cure her.” “The Treatment of Bibi Haldar” is an odd story in that not much happens for a long time, and then a lot happens quickly right near the end. For most of the story, Bibi bemoans her fate, suffers debilitating spells of illness, is consoled or advised, more or less, by the narrators. I say more or less because already in that early claim that she “spoke louder than necessary” we see that the narrators might be ambivalent about Bibi. When the cousin’s wife gets pregnant, she becomes convinced that Bibi is bad luck, eventually banishing her to the rooftop. The narrators respond with indignation and take their “only revenge”: they boycott the cousin’s store. This tactic is successful enough that before long the cousin and his wife and child move away, leaving only an envelope with 300 rupees.

The narrators try to look in on Bibi but their attention fades: they send the children by to make sure she hasn’t had a seizure; they leave plates of rice and glasses of tea at her makeshift door. But they no longer see much of her, catching only occasional glimpse of her walking the perimeter of the rooftop. Months pass and not until vomit is found by the cistern several days running do the women search out Bibi: “We found her lying on the camp cot. She was about four months pregnant.” Bibi refuses to explain what happened. She has the baby, a son, and with the money left by her cousin she reopens the shop to great success. The story ends:

In this manner she raised the boy and ran a business in the storage room, and we did what we could to help. For years afterward, we wondered who in our town had disgraced her. A few of our servants were questioned, and in tea stalls and bus stands, possible suspects were debated and dismissed. But there was no point carrying out an investigation. She was, to the best of our knowledge, cured.

I began by asking the class to write for a few minutes about the first-person plural narrator. What is the effect of this choice? How does it ask us to read the story? They had to reference at least one passage from the story in their writing. I gave them five minutes or so to work on this—some time I’ll write an essay about what it feels like in those peaceful but also rather guilt-inducing moments (I always feel like I should be doing something) when I’m wandering the aisles, looking out the window, watching them turn pages and scribble furiously and stare blankly—before making them exchange their writing with a partner. They discussed their writing for a few minutes, an exercise that brought a lot of energy into the room. Hoping to sustain the vibe I decided not to take up the specific questions I’d asked: sometimes students have a hard time returning to a group discussion after talking in small groups, even though they usually have lots to say to each other there, it’s as if they feel they’d said all they had to say already to their partner. Instead I asked something much more general: What is Bibi like?

The first answers—tellingly: this story is all about how women look—were about her appearance. The narrators flatly say she isn’t pretty, and even their ostensibly neutral descriptions feel unpleasantly judgmental: “her shins were hairless, and sprayed with a generous number of pallid freckles.” (“Sprayed” and “pallid” undo the work done by “generous.”) Then came other answers: she’s not like everyone else, she’s not part of the group, she’s an outsider.

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But she wants to be part of the group, someone piped up. She’s conventional, I said, summarizing tendentiously. How do you know? I pursued. The student replied by pointing to this passage: “Like the rest of us, she wanted to serve suppers, and scold servants, and set aside money in her almari to have her eyebrows threaded every three weeks at the Chinese beauty parlor.” (The students could even tell me what an almari is—Hindi for a free-standing wardrobe—which given my earlier struggles in this regard I regarded as a victory.) Notice, though, that the narrators are the ones providing this information. They judge her to be “like the rest of us.” (Incidentally, that phrasing suggests the narrators might themselves want this—that is, they might not have attained the life they think they ought to have.) We are back in Pearlman territory, I said, where people see only what they want to see, only what confirms their world-view: Bibi must want to be like us.

What’s wrong with her? I asked. Why does she need to be treated? No one knows, the students said. She’s sick, they said. She’s tried all kinds of cures and been to all kinds of doctors. Nothing works. Then, something more interesting: she doesn’t know how to be like everyone else. The narrators try to teach her, though: they “began to coach her in wifely ways,” preparing her for a suitor that never comes, not least after her cousin, having been pestered by Bibi and the narrators, puts her on the marriage market, even arranging to have her photo taken, ready to be circulated in the homes of eligible men, a process that culminates in a terse advertisement in the town newspaper designed to repel rather than attract: “GIRL, UNSTABLE, HEIGHT 152 CENTIMETERS, SEEKS HUSBAND.” We didn’t linger over this ad as much as we might have: had we considered the cataloguing function of its absurd specificity about her height we might have been able to connect this moment to a lengthy passage later in the text, which we only came to late in the class period and couldn’t do justice to, a wonderful and enigmatic and disturbing description of Bibi’s late father, a math teacher, who, we learn, had “kept assiduous track of Bibi’s illness in hopes of determining some logic to her condition,” but who is able to find out nothing more than the number of attacks and that they were more likely to happen in summer than in winter: meager conclusions considering his near-constant monitoring. In this he is rather like the narrators, who watch her all the time, it seems, but don’t know her very well.

Needless to say, the ad gets Bibi nowhere, but what I wanted the students to see was the way the story was showing us, here as elsewhere in the story, how being a woman in the world of this story (as, of course, in our own) is learned rather than natural. Bibi’s “unnatural” qualities are not outliers to a norm, but rather evidence of that norm, of behaviour that all women in the story must undergo. In this way, every woman in the story is unnatural.

If Bibi really is the exception that proves a patriarchal rule, then you might be able to guess where I was going with my next question, Do the narrators like Bibi?

This proved to be a good question: easy enough for students to access, but not that easy once we got talking about it. Some students said yes, pointing out how the narrators cared for Bibi when her relatives didn’t, how they took her under their wing, how they worked with her apparently unprepossessing material to shape her into a form some man might find acceptable. Most pertinently, they pointed to the scene of solidarity where the women run the cousin out of town by boycotting his business. These students seized on the text’s use of the word “revenge” to support their belief that the narrators care for Bibi—assuming, of course, that it is Bibi, and not themselves, their status as women, that they are avenging.

But other students disagreed. (How nice to have a disagreement! Hendrix students don’t much like disagreeing with each other.) These students argued that the narrators don’t really like Bibi at all, that they treat her like a kid sister or a doll that they grow tired of, as we see in this sentence: “Some days, after siesta, we combed out her hair, remembering now and then to change the part in her scalp so that it would not grow too broad.” A lot depends on how we read that “now and then”—is it normal to change the part only once in a while or are they giving us a sign that they’ve forgotten or can’t be bothered? Most triumphantly, these students pointed to a passage about the narrators’ relief at not being like Bibi: “We consoled her; when she was convinced a man was giving her the eye, we humored her and agreed. But she was not our responsibility, and in our private moments we were thankful for it.”

“In our private moments we were thankful for it.” I’m interested in this phrasing because it seems contradictory. In what way can a group, a “we,” have private moments? Only by excluding others, of course. One of the paradoxes of the first-person plural narrative, I noted, returning to my opening questions to the class about what effect the story’s narrative voice has on our understanding of its events, is that first-person plural suggests solidarity and unity but often ends up presenting separation and discord. (It’s also not much good at presenting single or individual events—things that happen once; it’s much better at presenting representative or general events—things that happen repeatedly. One of the most brilliant investigations of this tendency is Jeffrey Eugenides’s novel The Virgin Suicides (1993), which makes much of the tension between its first-person plural narration and its detective-like investigation of a series of deaths. I hadn’t really thought this distinction through before class—still haven’t now, in fact, so I didn’t bring it up, and anyway our conversation went in a different direction. But maybe someone here has something smart to say about it.)

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The question of whether the narrators like Bibi is best answered by looking at the end of the story. When her cousin exiles her to the rooftop to keep her away from his child, Bibi tries to reassure the narrators: “‘The world begins at the bottom of the stairs. Now I am free to discover life as I please.’” We’re led to believe—because the narrators do—that this is plaintive, unconvincing bravado. For as soon as she says it, Bibi shuts herself off from the world. All the more shocking, then, to the narrators and to us when Bibi gets pregnant. What they say when they discover the state of things is quite revealing.

I spent a long time close reading this passage with the class:

She said she could not remember what had happened. She would not tell us who had done it. We prepared her semolina with hot milk and raisins; still she would not reveal the man’s identity. In vain we searched for traces of the assault, some sign of the intrusion, but the room was swept and in order. On the floor beside the cot, her inventory ledger, open to a fresh page, contained a list of names.

The first two sentences are presented as near synonyms. But they’re not the same. How are they different? I asked. One is about what she couldn’t do, and the other about what she wouldn’t. What difference does that difference make? The first is about inability, the second about refusal. In both cases, the narrators assume Bibi has been raped, and of course that is a strong, depressing possibility. Yet we mustn’t overlook how much the narrators want that to be the case. They can’t imagine any other possibility: the only suggestion that there might be another way to read the situation lies in how strongly they refuse to countenance that possibility. They simply can’t imagine that a man might have wanted Bibi, and that she might have wanted him. So intent are they on confirming their lurid speculation that they even try to bribe her, preparing her a dish presumably intended to soothe her morning sickness—but “still she would not reveal the man’s identity” (my emphasis).

They want assault, intrusion, violation, but they search for it in vain; they find only cleanliness and order. The ledger, “open to a new page,” offers an image of a fresh start, a new kind of inventory to replace the cosmetics that were so unsatisfying to Bibi.

The doctor, it turns out, was wrong. Bibi didn’t need a man; she just needed some sperm. Or, she did need a man, but a son rather than a lover or husband. The narrators pass over Bibi’s newfound success rather hastily in the story’s final paragraph, preferring to harp on what they admit they will never find: the identity of the man they insist has disgraced her. But in the final sentences they admit defeat: “But there was no point carrying out an investigation. She was, to the best of our knowledge, cured.” The qualifying clause inserted into the last sentence holds out the possibility—the hope, even—that they might be wrong. Not to mention the conviction that something was wrong with Bibi. But to be right, in the world of this story, at least for women like our narrators, is to be reduced to a sameness, to live through the expectations and desires of others.

An interesting thing about this story is that there are almost no men in it. It’s a sign of how insidiously patriarchy works that women can do their own policing. We see, then, I said in the last minute of class, that the story’s title must be read in two ways. The treatment of Bibi Haldar refers to the various medical and cultural and psychological treatments she undergoes, especially, ironically, the “treatment” of becoming pregnant, having a child, and becoming a person for whom there are no other models in this story, and therefore a person decidedly at odds with the “we” who narrates it. But the treatment of Bibi Haldar is also the attitude or disposition of those narrators to Bibi. And the way they treat her is ultimately not very pleasant. It seems, however, that by refusing to be “like the rest of us,” Bibi finds a surprising escape from that treatment.

This wasn’t a story I knew well before I taught it. I’d read it once, years ago, and then skimmed it when I put it on the syllabus. Re-reading it the night before class I was sure I had nothing to say about it. But it proved more surprising than I’d credited. In the end I don’t love this story, it doesn’t have a hold on me the way many of the course texts do. And the reading I came to with the students is perhaps not the most sophisticated. But it worked for them, it hit a kind of interpretive sweet spot: they were left understanding the story in a new way, but that way wasn’t so difficult or abstruse that they couldn’t find a point of entry into it.

Sometimes, on good days, a class period ends with a tangible feeling of appreciation and accomplishment. That’s what happened on that Monday, and not even the let down of the Wednesday that followed can take that feeling away.

Next time: Malamud!