Tag Archives: Jim Shepard

James Morrison’s Year in Reading, 2021

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

Today’s reflection on a year in reading is by James Morrison, an Australian reader and editor (sadly, not of books) who tweets at @unwise_trousers and blogs (increasingly infrequently) at http://causticcovercritic.blogspot.com.

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

Francesa Woodman, Untitled, Rome, Italy 1977 – 78

2021 was like much of the rest of my life: I didn’t accomplish much, but I did read a shitload of books. If you take as true the dubious proposition that literature makes us better people, then virtue must positively drip from my pores. Sadly, the behaviour of nearly every great writer shows instead that constant contact with great literature makes you absolutely repellent.

Reading a lot can mean that when you look back on what you’ve read over the course of a year there are a number of surprises. I read that this year? It feels like a lifetime ago. What book is that? I have no memory of it at all. I only gave that three stars on Goodreads? It’s really hung around in my brain, more so than some of the obvious winners.

Some people have reading plans they stick to. I have no plans, or at least none that last more than a day or two in the face of the constant deluge of new and old books that keep yelling out for attention. I’m also a sucker for pretty books—I will absolutely fall for a book with a clever or beautiful cover design, knowing nothing else about it. [Ed. – Hard same, I’ll often ignore a book with an ugly cover and then decide I have to have it if it’s released in a better design.] Despite this, I will pretend not to be shallow as I talk about some of the things I read last year, in loosely thematic clumps.

Magyars

One of my favourite literary sources is Hungary. Little Hungarian writing gets translated compared to that from most other European countries, but the main reason I like it is that the general quality of what does get translated into English is astonishingly high. Three books from Hungary particularly struck me this year.

Progressive Transylvanian aristocrat Count Miklós Bánffy is best remembered for his massive They Were Counted/Divided/Found Wanting trilogy, but was also excellent on a small scale; and two collections of his short stories came out at roughly the same time from two different publishers, with some overlap. Probably the better of the two is The Enchanted Night, translated by Len Rix, full of elusive stories that range from brutal military realism to strange and spooky Transylvanian folktales.

The selected short stories of Tibor Déry, who was imprisoned for political reasons both before and during the Communist regime, are collected in Love, translated by George Szirtes. Life in Budapest under the Nazis and the Stalinists is beautifully, if bleakly, rendered.

László Krasznahorkai is easily the best-known Hungarian writer on the world stage today, and his novella-with-music (each chapter has a QR code you can scan to summon the accompanying track) Chasing Homer is a compressed marvel of paranoia, pursuit and weapons-grade bile. Surely one day they’ll run out of overrated Sixties singers and lovers of war criminals and give him the Nobel. [Ed. – Could be a while though; spoilt for choice there.]

Egon Schiele, Seated Woman with Bent Knee, 1917

Poets

Speaking of the Nobel, I finally read Louise Glück for the first time, and her Averno is genuinely wonderful, so I suppose they don’t only give the prize to the undeserving. Even more marvellous and long-neglected by me was Inger Christensen’s Alphabet, translated from the Danish by Susanna Nied, a book in which the poetry really does attain the qualities of music, pure and wise and breathtaking.

Homecoming by Magda Isanos, translated from Romanian by Christina Tudor-Sideri, was another small revelation, full of the fog and ghosts and forests of interwar Central Europe. And then there was Notes on the Sonnets by Luke Kennard: if you’re not intrigued by a collection of funny/sad prose poems, each set at the same deranged house party and each taking as its launching point one of Shakespeare’s sonnets, then I can’t help you.

Novels in verse are one of my many obsessions, and there were two that stood out. Fighting Is Like a Wife by Eloisa Amezcua (due out in April) uses as raw material the life and marriage of a historical boxing champion and his wife in formally clever and emotionally moving ways. And then there is Deep Wheel Orcadia by Harry Josephine Giles. How a major publishing house was persuaded to take a gamble on a hard science-fiction verse novel written in the Scottish-Norse hybrid Orkney dialect is a mystery to me, but that it happened shows this is not yet an entirely fallen world.

Tom Roberts, In a Corner on the Macintyre, 1895

Space

The host of this blog doesn’t give a shit about space [Ed. – correct], because he is Wrong [Ed. – possibly correct], but I’m going to talk about it a bit here anyway because Dorian made the mistake of giving me the microphone [Ed. – absolutely incorrect; no mistake was made]. Continuing the astro-poetry theme we have Ken Hunt’s The Lost Cosmonauts, a collection about the accidents and deaths of the Space Race, much of it constructed from the texts of official reports and radio transcripts. Then there’s Omon Ra by Victor Pelevin, a bleak black comedy about the Soviet space program.

Pushing further into the future was the story collection Terminal Boredom by Izumi Suzuki (multiple translators), a downbeat set of 1970s/1980s Japanese countercultural tales of sexual and pharmaceutical weirdness. Further still takes us to Olga Ravn’s The Employees, translated from Danish by Martin Aitken, a genuine little masterpiece of a “workplace novel” set on a Generation Starship.

Finally, the biggest thing I read in 2021 was XX by Rian Hughes, a 1000-page monster about first contact and artificial intelligence. It’s a beautifully designed book in which the spirit of the 19th Century talks in multi-typeface pamphlets and that of the 20th in Futurist broadsides, which includes an entire pulp SF novella serialised in magazines that never existed, and which is the first book I have ever seen with a reversible dustjacket designed to make it look like a shelf of the fictional publications contained within the text [Ed. — !].

World War Two

Dutch genius Willem Frederik Hermans is having something of a revival, and A Guardian Angel Recalls (translated by David Colmer) is a great book new to English: a public prosecutor, weak and lovelorn, races around Holland as the Nazis invade, wreaking inadvertent havoc as he tries to save himself, protected and frustrated in equal measure by his similarly flawed guardian angel.

The Passenger by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz (translated from German by Philip Boehm) is from 1938: perhaps too late to be called prescient, but even years later people were denying its truths. Otto Silbermann is a Jewish German who fought for his country in World War One, too slow to realise that what is happening to other Jews will happen to him too. Finally he has to go on the run, trying to find a way to escape across the border to safety.

Marga Minco’s The Glass Bridge (translated by Stacey Knecht) is another Dutch novel, a tangential look at the Holocaust in fragments from the life of Stella, a Jewish artist hiding out under a dead woman’s name, moving from safe house to safe house, fending off the advances of a sexually predatory ‘protector’.

David Piper’s Trial by Battle (originally published in 1959 as by Peter Towry) is a deeply anti-triumphalist novel about Britain in Asia during World War Two, outclassed and outfought, living on a faltering diet of nationalistic smugness. Frances Faviell’s A Chelsea Concerto is a fascinating memoir of the first few months of the Blitz in London. Finally, Donald Henderson’s 1943 novel Mister Bowling Buys a Newspaper, despite its religiose ending, is a fine black comedy about a polite serial killer for people who have read all of Patrick Hamilton and now have a sad void in their lives.

Frederick McCubbin, Lost, 1907

Random Others

Marian Engel’s Bear has no greater champion than the management of this blog, so I shall say nothing other than that Dorian is absolutely right about it in every way, despite the ludicrousness of the premise. [Ed. – THANK YOU! Another satisfied customer! You can watch James admit this truth to me here.] Another weirdly charged masterpiece is Denton Welch’s In Youth is Pleasure, a strange and astonishing novel about a boy helpless in the grip of his aesthetic and sensual needs.

I don’t even like boxing, yet Michael Winkler’s Grimmish is the second boxing novel on this list: a wonderful and weird book about masculinity and physical pain, full of great jokes which I have stolen: There are two types of people: those who can extrapolate from incomplete data. [Ed. – But that’s only one… ohhh…] Checkout 19 by Claire-Louise Bennett, which is sort of about the disparity between literature and life but also about everything else, is a genuine marvel. Minae Mizumura’s An I-Novel (translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter) is the story of two Japanese sisters transplanted to New York, a deep and rich and perceptive work enriched by numerous photographs. It’s not quite the equal of her A True Novel, but then what is?

Jeffrey Smart, Cahill Expressway, 1962

[DISTANT, MUFFLED NOISE]

The Surprise Party Complex by Ramona Stewart, criminally out of print for decades, is a beautiful and hilarious bit of work about a group of neglected and eccentric teenagers at a loose end in Hollywood. The deeply weird Mount Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing by René Daumal (translated by Roger Shattuck) was never finished, but what we do have is a surrealist masterpiece. Flesh by Brigid Brophy is a near-as-damnit perfect novel about appetites, both sexual and gastronomic. And everybody who enjoys the atmosphere of a good grotty 1950s London boarding house needs to read Babel Itself by Sam Youd (better known as science-fiction writer John Christopher), another unjustly forgotten bit of comic brilliance about a group of lodgers running spiritualist experiments, having affairs and betraying each other.

[SOUND OF SECURITY FORCES BANGING ON DOOR, YELLS OF ‘YOUR TIME IS UP!’]

Then there’s the Patricia Lockwood’s No One is Talking About This, which really is as good as everyone says, and Jim Shepard’s Phase Six, an unfortunately timed global pandemic novel that’s also a splendidly moving look at female friendship, and Hilma Wolitzer’s career-summary story collection Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket, and…

[DOOR BREAKS DOWN]

..and Nathalie Sarraute’s Tropisms, which I finally read years after everybody else, and Giorgio Bassani’s The Heron, the only book of his I’d never read, and…

[MUFFLED SHOUTING, SOUNDS OF SOMEONE BEING DRAGGED AWAY]

2015 Year in Reading

Posted on by under Uncategorized, year in review

2015 was a good year in reading. Better than 2014, though nowhere near the annus mirabilis of 2013 (pre-blog, alas). I read 80+ books. Here are the ones that most stayed with me:

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A Little Life—Hanya Yanigahara

The reading event of the year for me. Everyone has an opinion about it, and they’re mostly strong opinions. I understand the main objections—it’s too long, it’s indulgent, it gets off on abusing its main character and even maybe its readers, its prose is sometimes clunky, even embarrassing—but I don’t feel them. These days I struggle to keep my attention away from my phone, social media, hockey scores, you name it. Sometimes I worry I don’t have the reading stamina I used to. In this regard, A Little Life was a gift: an intense, immersive reading experience that captivated me not just for the week of the reading but throughout the whole year. I wrote about it here.

Married Life—David Vogel

Written in Hebrew and published in Vienna in 1930, this is an extraordinary book that expands our sense of what European modernism was all about.

If I read Hebrew, I would write Vogel’s biography. Born in the Pale of Settlement, Vogel made his way via Vilnius and a brief stint as a yeshiva student to Vienna just in time to be interned as a Russian citizen during WWI. After the war he loafed, nearly penniless, in Vienna’s cafes, finding a little translation work and writing his first poems and novellas. He immigrated briefly to Palestine in the late 20s but Zionism never held much appeal for him and he returned to Europe, eventually finding his way to Paris in the early 30s. Tragically he was interned in the next war, this time as an Austrian citizen, and was deported via the infamous transit camp at Drancy to Auschwitz where he was murdered in 1944.

In Married Life the poor but promising writer Rudolph Gurweil meets the impoverished and rapacious aristocrat Thea von Takov and falls immediately under her spell even though he’s not sure he likes her very much. The two marry after only kowing each other for a few weeks and things go badly from the start. Thea converts to Judaism to marry Gurweil but among other things she’s a terrible anti-Semite. The novel is a drawn-out depiction of a disastrous marriage, but it’s also a glorious depiction of shabby Jewish Vienna.

I started a review and got sidetracked. I’d really like to finish it. If it got this book even one more reader it would be worth it.

Heartfelt thanks to heroic translator Dalya Bilu and to Australian-based Scribe for publishing this masterpiece, not least in such a gorgeous edition.

The Vet’s Daughter—Barbara Comyns

Wonderful, heartbreaking novel about a young woman who levitates. I wrote about it at length here and my appreciation only increased when I taught it this fall. Happily, my students loved it too; I received several excellent papers about it. I’m about to write more about Comyns myself. More on that soon, I hope.

The Heat of the Day—Elizabeth Bowen

The same students who enjoyed Comyns did magnificently with this marvelous novel of the Blitz and its aftermath. The course is on Experimental 20th-Century British Fiction, and I hadn’t taught Bowen for a while (six years, in fact), after my previous attempt at teaching her failed spectacularly. I finally worked up the courage to try Heat again, and am so glad I did. It helped, of course, that this was a particularly strong group of students. It was really fun helping them work through Bowen’s famously thorny sentences. To the North might still be my favourite Bowen, but this novel about lying to one’s self and to others is one of her best. I often grumble about how teaching gets in the way of reading. But sometimes the chance to return to the same set of books is a joy. As Roland Barthes once said, those who don’t re-read are doomed to read the same text over and over again.

Bernard Malamud

Another one from the teaching files, at least in part. I taught an introductory level course on short fiction this fall. (For a while I blogged about it regularly—the first installment is here, if you’re interested—but eventually I capitulated to the semester’s demands and gave up.) The touchstone text was Malamud’s first collection, The Magic Barrel. I’d taught these marvelous stories before but it had been a while and found I liked them even more this time.

I’ve always loved their enigmatic qualities, and had long been curious whether his novels were like that too. So I read The Assistant over Thanksgiving (I started a post on that too which I also failed to complete). It tells the story of Morris Bober’s struggle to eke out a living from his small grocery store in a poor part of New York, a struggle that only deepens when he takes on a drifter as a de facto assistant. It is also one of the most depressing books I’ve ever read, with a scene that genuinely shocked me. Malamud’s stories are hardly heartwarming, but they have a lightness missing from this novel. Absolutely worth reading, though.

Various short stories

The Penguin Book of the British Short Story—Philip Hensher, Ed.

As I said, I taught a lot of short stories this fall, and in the process I remembered how much I love the form. Edith Pearlman, Katherine Mansfield, and D. H. Lawrence were particular favourites. I also want to tip my hat to this wonderful two-volume edition of short stories edited by Philip Hensher. I’ve got volume 2 (they’re only available in the UK and a bit pricey but the production values are amazing) and I’ve only read a handful of the stories. But the roster is exciting; not just the usual suspects. Hensher plowed through a ton of late-19th and early-20th century magazines and has found some amazing stuff. I especially like one by “Malachi” (Marjorie) Whitaker, called “Courage”: it’s going straight on to the Spring syllabus. Hensher’s introduction makes a fascinating case for why Britain produced such good short fiction in the years 1890-1940 and why economic and structural conditions make it unlikely for the form to flourish in the same way again (which isn’t the same as saying there are no good instances of the form today: volume 2 goes from P. G. Wodehouse to Zadie Smith). Please Penguin, bring this out in the US.

The Book of Aron—Jim Shepard
A Brief Stop on the Road from Auschwitz—Göran Rosenberg

Holocaust literature is central to my teaching, and so also to my reading. These two books impressed me this year, the first a novel of the Warsaw Ghetto that I wrote about at Open Letters Monthly and the second a second-generation memoir that I reviewed at Words without Borders.

Death of a Man—Kay Boyle

Thanks to Tyler Malone of The Scofield I learned a lot about Kay Boyle this year. The best thing I read by her was a heartbreaking early story about failed pedagogy called “Life Being the Best” (read it!), but the book I spent the most time with was this 1936 novel about an American heiress who falls in with fascist sympathizers in pre-Anschluss Austria. I can’t say I liked the book all that much, but I was utterly fascinated by it and I enjoyed wrestling with its slippery politics. You can read my essay, along with many other wonderful pieces, here.

A Wreath of Roses and Blaming—Elizabeth Taylor

These are two of the best books I read this year, but they’re wrapped up in guilt for me because I promised someone a piece about them and never delivered. (Not yet, anyway…. I still want to, though!) I’ve loved everything I’ve read by Taylor, but these are the best of the bunch. Blaming (1976), her last book, is about what happens to a middle-aged woman after the unexpected death of her husband. It manages to be both rueful and acerbic. A Wreath of Roses (1949) is a masterpiece and if it were in print in the US I would have taught it this semester for sure. Less histrionic than Bowen’s Heat of the Day but similarly a novel of what the war did to England, it’s also a story of female friendship that earns its epigraph from Woolf’s The Waves. Genuinely haunting: I read it in June and still think about it regularly.

The Secret Place—Tana French

French doesn’t need me to sing her praises. Everyone already knows she’s the best crime writer today. Some thought this latest book—for some unaccountable reason I held off reading it for almost a year—in the Dublin Murder Squad series a falling off, but I adored it. I especially loved the echoes of Josephine Tey’s Miss Pym Disposes. French is such a genius because she writes super suspenseful books that are ultimately about something quite different: they are fascinated to the point of obsession with the idea of friendship—interestingly, romance or sex features hardly at all—especially how friendship intersects with the partnership between detectives. Yet again French proves she writes vulnerable men better than anyone.

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Other good things: Vivian Gornick’s The Odd Woman and the City is a brilliant essay-memoir and I would have written more about it here but it’s late and I’m tired (the Open Letters piece is good, though); The Hare with Amber Eyes (again, everyone already knows it’s amazing—I most liked a surprising Arkansas connection!); Emma (enjoyed re-reading this and wrote about the experience here and here); bits of Balzac (the last 100 pp of Pere Goriot, which practically had me in tears; the scene in Eugenie Grandet when Eugenie wakes at night to see her father and his servant taking his gold downstairs: hallucinatory); Wilkie Collins (I liked both The Dead Secret and The Law and the Lady). Also, good light reading: Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London (urban fantasy—smart and funny: read the first two this year and mean to finish the series in 2016); Hans Olav Lahlum’s K2 books (engaging Norwegian homage to Golden Age crimes, locked room mysteries and the like); Ellis Peter’s Cadfael books (read the first: surely the beginning of a beautiful friendship).

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Reading is a passionately solitary experience, but also a joyously communal one. That’s true (mostly) in my classroom and, increasingly, on social media and the Internet more generally. Sometimes I find the constant stream of books to read that come through my Twitter feed a little daunting, but mostly I’m thrilled to know that so much reading is going on, so vigorously and passionately.

Thanks to everyone who read this blog in 2015, especially those who encouraged me and prompted me to think harder or differently about the books. It is wonderfully strange for me to speak so much with people I haven’t for the most part even met about something so important to me.

Thanks too to those who published me this year, especially the wonderful people at Open Letters Monthly. Here’s to more writing next year, and of course to more reading.