Tag Archives: Kate Beaton

What I Read, August 2023

Posted on by under book review, month in review, review, Uncategorized

We went east through southern Alberta and Saskatchewan, where the drought is bad, all the sloughs empty and cracked, the occasional cattle herds dazed under unrelenting sun. Farther south they’d had more rain; we crawled for an hour or so through a pelting storm near the South Dakota Iowa line. Towns that depress you from the highway reveal unexpected delights when you stop for a minute. The perfectly preserved 50s downtown of Swift Current. A hipster café in Fargo on market day. The sophistication of Omaha. (Love that town.) And then we were back home, where it hasn’t rained in weeks and the wet bulb readings have been frightening. The trees shed leaves by the minute. We probably lost the plum. I hope the cherry makes it.

Nothing for it but to stay inside and read.

Agnes Martin, Buds ca. 1959

Helen Dunmore, A Spell of Winter (1995)

This Gothic WWI-era novel about a girl and her brother raised in a crumbling manor house by their grandfather after their mother absconds and their father goes mad won the inaugural Orange Prize. As the siblings grow to adulthood, they live in dreamy/nightmarish seclusion, seeing only a governess they hate and eventually get rid of and the housemaid, a young Irish woman whose perspicacity fails only at one crucial moment. Some pretty heavy-duty and salaciously over-the-top things (I said it was Gothic, right?) make for gripping reading, but in the end, I don’t know that it amounts to much. It hasn’t stayed with me the way Dunmore’s Birdcage Walk and The Siege have; it’s not as brilliant as, say, Andrew Miller’s Now We Shall Be Entirely Free. But it’s plenty enjoyable, especially on a hot day when all you want to do is read about drafty English houses.

Elizabeth Jane Howard, Something in Disguise (1969)

Novel about a misguided second marriage and the couple’s adult children who mostly fail to find their way through life. I cannot improve on Jacqui’s deft summary of its busy events: do take a look. Like her, I was unpersuaded by the book, though to be fair the title drops what in retrospect should seem a glaring clue that things aren’t as they first seem. It’s impossible to say anything about this book without spoiling things, so look away friends if that sort of thing bothers you. I was certainly shocked by the ending—props to any reader who isn’t—and admired (but didn’t appreciate) the sudden swerve not just to the macabre but something closer to sadism. Quite the trick to turn a novel of manners into something like Cammell and Roeg’s Performance. Normally that kind of uncanny reversal would be just my thing. But Howard doesn’t play fair. Maybe if I read the book again I’d see the breadcrumbs, but on a first reading, anyway, I felt she’d pulled a bait and switch. Impressively so, maybe, but I still felt duped.

I gather the team at Backlisted likes the book a lot; if anyone can convince me to think better of the book it’s them. (Breaking news: apparently Jacqui reread it and liked it much more…) But for now the jury is out for me on this writer. I enjoyed the first Cazalet, but abandoned the second. Maybe Howard, despite being a midcentury British novelist named Elizabeth, isn’t for me.

Guy Gavriel Kay, The Children of Earth and Sky (2016)

The book that spawned the two prequels I loved so much last month. It won’t surprise you when I tell you I loved it too. Did I mention these books have maps? Goddamn I love maps.

Jessica Johns, Bad Cree (2023)

Mackenzie left her home in northern Alberta a couple of years ago after the sudden death of her beloved sister. She’s made a quiet life in Vancouver: a steady if soul-destroying job at Whole Foods, a close friend who looks out for her, the anonymity of the city after her small-town childhood. But lately she’s been having dreams. Bad dreams. And the boundaries between waking and dreaming are getting harder to parse. Why are all these crows outside her window all the time? Maybe because she woke up one morning with the severed head of a bird in her bed. There’s nothing for it: she’ll have to beg for time off and fly home to come to terms with everything there she ran away from.

The set-up for Johns’s debut novel is actually the weakest part. I almost it down about thirty pages in—despite its extreme events nothing about the book felt urgent. But when Mackenzie comes home the book gets going. I loved its depiction of the northern Alberta bush, the town where a trip to the Seven Eleven is a big deal, the lake where her family picnics, the silent oil rigs, abandoned when crude fell below $100 / barrel. Johns’s depiction of Mackenzie’s extended family is terrific: bring on the cups of tea, the card games, the pots of mac and cheese, the good dogs sighing under the table, I can’t get enough of that shit. And the story’s horror elements—Mackenzie is possessed by a windigo—make so much sense as an allegory for the depredations and violence of a resource extraction economy.

Pair with Kate Beaton’s Ducks, the white settler version of this story, or simply enjoy on its own.

K. Patrick, Mrs. S (2023)

As a dogsbody at a girls’ boarding school in England in the 90s, the narrator of K. Patrick’s smart and sensual debut novel does whatever she’s told. One of her jobs is to supervise prep, the two hours after dinner when the girls work on their homework. Sitting in a classroom, the day’s Latin lesson still on the board, she muses with her customary acuity on the relationship between bodies and language:

On the chalkboard behind, an exercise in a grammar of belonging, he or she or we or they, the types of bodies changing the next word. It looks difficult. Pointless.

That mingling of the staccato and the sinuous is characteristic of the narrator. She is known only as Miss, just as other characters are referred to by their function: the Housemistress, the Art Teacher, the Vicar. Only the headmaster and his wife have names, but even they are known only in abbreviation (Mr. and Mrs. S.), as if they’d stepped from one of Freud’s case studies. The narrator is unimportant to the life of the school—Miss is there only for a year, fresh from the Australian Outback—which means she goes everywhere, sees everything, is seen by no one, bolstered by the freedom of her insignificance.

Patrick pulls off a difficult trick: her narrator is often inarticulate to others, scrubbed and raw, at sea in this foreign place, yet also as nuanced in her observations and interpretations as a character from Henry James.

Maybe it’s this juxtaposition between empty surface and full interior that proves attractive to the woman who gives the book its title. Over the course of a dry, burning summer, the narrator sets herself to seducing Mrs. S. It won’t spoil much to say that she does; it spoils more to say that she does so not in the way Mrs. S does, governed as the older woman is by a love of transgression she is allowed thanks to her privilege, nor in the way of her friend, the Housemistress, a butch lesbian whose bravado must be kept closeted to keep the job she both needs and loves. The narrator instead is a queer Bartleby, though her preferring not to does not extend to her sex life, which is lusciously depicted. (The book is hot.) (Also, Bartleby was already queer.)

Patrick’s strategy of embedding dialogue within the interior monologue without attribution forces us to slow down, to go backward in the light of new information to re-read earlier sentences, to play a detective game: who speaks to whom? As Frances put it in our conversation about the novel on One Bright Book, Mrs. S is fascinated by scripts: what it means to follow one, what it means to live without one.

An impressive debut that can go in the pantheon of great summertime novels (Bear, The Go-Between, A Month in the Country).

Garry Disher, Day’s End (2022)

Regular readers will know that I’m a huge Hirsch fan, my favourite procedural series of the moment. But despite featuring some of the books’ regular pleasures—Hirsch himself of course, his morning walks around his south-central Australian town, and the long drives along fearsome backroads to check in on his far-flung community members—Disher tries to do too much here. True, this is the most effective use of life during covid I’ve seen in a crime novel (the cops actually put on masks!), and believe me I am alive to the dangers of authoritarianism, extremism, and illiberalism that our time is giving rise to, but the last third of the novel is too schematic. It’s a lot to show in just a couple hundred pages how online bullying, drug dealing, and alt-right militarism combine, to say nothing of how some ordinary people, a little bored and frightened and underemployed could be seduced by the new fascism. I’m a Disher fan for life but if you don’t know him yet don’t start here.

Ann Leckie, Translation State (2023)

Having done a little reading around I now realize that Leckie’s latest sf novel is set in a universe she has already detailed in earlier books. Possibly I would have had an even richer experience had I read them first. But I still thought this was terrific. It won me over even though it switches among three narrators (a structure that usually gets on my nerves).

Leckie’s universe is a place of many genders. As this smart review puts it:

Leckie uses both sie/hir/hirs and e/em/eir as pronouns for nonbinary genders in this setting, in contrast to they/them pronouns, which designate agendered or genderless identities.

We meet Enae (sie/hir) after the death of her grandmaman, a fearsome character who made Enae’s life difficult, not least when it is posthumously revealed that the old woman had sold her estate and title to an upstart years ago to save herself from financial ruin. Enae no longer has a home; sie does, however, have a new purpose. The person who displaced hir is required by the terms of the sale to provide for Enae, which she does by sending hir on what she imagines will be a fruitless investigation: to find someone who went missing 200 years ago. But Enae has more guts and abilities than anyone credits hir for; sie finds the offspring of the missing person, a man named Reet who grew up with three adopted parents (two of whom use female pronouns and one nonbinary), a likeable misfit who spends much of his time watching a serial called Pirate Exiles of the Death Moon, which helps him damp down an alarming desire to bite people. Reet, it turns out, is what’s called a Presger Translator, a version of the alien Presger bred to interact with humans. (The backdrop of the book is the re-negotiation of a longstanding peace treaty between humans and the Presger.) When Reet’s background is revealed, he falls prey to political machinations, the gist of which is that he is expected to “match” (biologically and psychologically meld with) another Presger Translator, Qven (they/them), who is recovering from an assault and struggling with their desire, encouraged by Reet, to self-dentify as human. As part of this process, they begin using e/em/eir pronouns: as the LARB essay notes, pronouns are a big deal in this book, misgendering being a form of violence. The plot hinges on whether Reet (who has never known any other life) and Qven will be granted their wish to be accepted as human, with grave consequences for the political situation of Leckie’s universe, and clear analogues to our own cultural moment, where a vicious backlash against trans and nonbinary people teeters on the edge of full-scale murderousness.

My sense is that Leckie is in line with a lot of the coolest stuff going on in sff these days (though she might be a bit brainier than some), but this sure isn’t the kind of thing the genre has historically been associated with. I hope readers who don’t read a lot of sff will give it a try. It’s also quite funny, I don’t think I made that clear!

I listened to the audiobook narrated by British actress Adjoah Andoh (Lady Danbury in Bridgerton), and if the book interests you at all, I recommend her rendition highly. Her accents, ranging from Scottish to gorgeous West African, are a delight.

Yiyun Li, The Vagrants (2009)

Li’s absorbing, despairing novel of post-Maoist China gripped me from the start. The setting is a provincial city hundreds of miles from Beijing, where the Democracy Wall Movement briefly promises change of the sort Li’s characters cannot imagine, caught up as they are in navigating the broken social structures left to them by the Maoist Revolution: families at odds with each other, domestic violence, hunger, fear. The Vagrants of the title are its central characters, more or less loosely connected, in large part because they live in an especially impoverished neighbourhood in the (fictional) city of Muddy River. Many of them are children, perhaps because Li, born in 1972, grew up in the China of the period, and perhaps because children are the ones least able to exert their own agency (under the tyranny of their parents and the indoctrination of their schools) but also the most free from strictures, in the way of a kid who can take the long way home from school without anyone asking where they’ve been.

We meet the schoolboy Tong, who loses his dog, his only companion, and inadvertently ruins his feckless but innocent father’s life. And twelve-year-old Nini, disabled from birth, perhaps because her mother was beaten by an apparatchik while pregnant (that very true believer is the woman who, having fallen from favour, has been condemned and whose execution is the occasion of the public holiday with which the book opens), Nini’s bleak life of toil and punishment seems to change when a privileged young man named Bashi takes an interest in her that is equal parts prurient, exploitative, and touching. The adult characters include Kai, a radio broadcaster who joins an underground movement at enormous cost to everyone around her, and the former teacher Gu, whose daughter is the condemned woman , and who retreats in pain and shame into memories of pre-revolutionary life even as his second wife, his former student, is radicalized by her child’s fate. Wonderful characters all, portrayed with the clarity of Chekov.

I don’t hear Li’s early work talked about much: based on the two of her more recent books I’ve read she now writes in a different vein, less realist, more first-person fabulist a la Lydia Davis or Sigrid Nunez. But when it was published The Vagrants got some thoughtful reviews. True, the framing of Pico Iyer’s New York Times review, for example, is preposterous in its vapid hymn to multiculturalism—” All the world’s stories are America’s stories now, and this is the current glory of our literature”: did we believe that stuff even then?—but he offers some impressive readings of the novel, noting how Li equates the moral failings of the nation with the violation of Gu Shan’s body, which is cut apart for reasons of punishment, graft, and perversion (vocal cords severed before execution so she cannot shout out, kidneys given to an aging military leader, breasts and genitals hacked out by the man hired to bury her). And I’m interested, if not fully convinced, by Iyer’s suggestion that The Vagrants is less a novel than a “counter-document of sorts, a private, unsanctioned portrait of those interiors (in every sense) that are always left out of the grand official picture.” I mean, yes, that’s true, but I don’t see why Iyer’s imagined genre of the “counter-document” would be at odds with the novel.

Anyway, the older I get the more I want fiction to teach me about times and places I don’t know, and The Vagrants succeeded brilliantly on this front. (I’d love to hear if readers who know more about 20th-century China than I do—all of you probably—feel similarly.) Even more than its historical realism, though, I appreciated its evenhandedness about the possibility of solidarity or connection under an oppressive regime. The bonds between society’s vagrants, the refuse left behind by the unrelenting violence of ideology, are built on the sandy foundation of fear but their buildings stand nonetheless. Li has what I take to be the novelist’s quintessential ability to ironize but not demonize. There’s no one to like in this book, but everyone to feel for.

Georges Simenon, The Judge’s House (1942) Trans. Howard Curtis (2015)

Maigret has been exiled to the Vendée because he pissed off his superiors in some unexplained fashion and now he’s bored. The smell of his colleague’s Brillantine is making him crazy and just how many mussels can he eat? (Quite a few, actually.) But then some local busy-bodies, husband and wife, come to him with a story about a dead body in the upper room of the manor house of the local grandee, a former judge, a room the married couple can see from a tree in their garden, a tree they just happened to be climbing.

Sure enough, there’s a body; Maigret catches the judge trying to dispose of it under cover of stormy night. The man claims to have no idea who it is, which preposterous right? turns out to be true. A complicated plot involving the judge’s adult children, his daughter’s lover, the judge’s own criminal past, and his ex-wife ensues. Maigret unravels it all, of course, and presumably gets back to Paris (I can’t even remember). Not my favourite Maigret, but it has its moments. Be warned, though, it’s at least a 6/10 on the misogyny scale.

Agnes Martin, Friendship, 1963

Fun reading month! See anything you like here?

James Morrison’s Year in Reading, 2022

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

I still hope to write up my reflections on my 2022 reading year. (Though look how well that worked last year…) In the meantime, I’ve solicited guest posts from friends and fellow book lovers about their own literary highlights. First up is 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. His novel Gibbons, Or One Bloody Thing After Another will be published later this year by Orbis Tertius Press

Look for more reflections from a wonderful assortment of readers in the days to come. And remember, you can always add your thoughts to the comments.

Woman committing suicide by jumping off of a bridge – George Cruikshank [1848]

First, a bit of throat-clearing. When I started to try to work out what my favourite books that I had read in 2022 were, I had a list 84 books long, out of nearly 300 read. This is obviously insane, possibly even psychopathic, so I have winnowed it down a bit. Secondly, I have now learned that two of my favourite books were also on Barack Obama’s list, which means after this I presumably need to become a boring centrist and do some war crimes. In any case, I’ve tried to force things into various fairly elastic categories in order to give this article the illusion of clarity.

[Audience: Get on with it!]

THE BIG BASTARDS

I finally joined the people-who-have-read-James-Joyce’s-Ulysses club this year, something which was ridiculously overdue. And what can I usefully say about this astonishing, hilarious, brilliant, occasionally tedious (hello, ‘Oxen of the Sun’) and quietly heartbreaking book? “It’s great!” I could tell you, unhelpfully, but you already knew that. It’s also one of the most amazing evocations of being embodied, of living a human fleshy existence with all its joys and ills and excrescences, that has ever been written. I also read Terence Killeen’s Ulysses Unbound, and found it to be a hugely welcoming, informative, and wise companion.

Another massive tome was Jon Fosse’s Septology (translated by Damion Searls), which the publishers and many reviews will tell you is really seven short novels, which is, in turn, a lie (though one which makes tackling such a big book seem much more approachable). It’s more accurately described as seven periods of minutely annotated consciousness, from waking to prayerful drowsiness, full of repetitions and art and small acts of kindness and weirdly commingling parallel universes and a (frankly bonkers) girlfriend. I didn’t find it to be the transformative work of art that many others did, but I did enjoy it tremendously.

The third giant was Osebol: Voices from a Swedish Village, by Marit Kapla (translated by Peter Graves), a polyphonic oral history in prose-poem form of a dying Swedish village, drawn from interviews with every inhabitant. It’s a book that takes a simple idea that somehow has never been had before, and applies it perfectly.

GINZBURG & CO.

More than any other writer, Natalia Ginzburg was the one I kept returning to this year. She is just phenomenal, and I devoured a bunch of her shorter books like popcorn. The Road to the City (translated by Frances Frenaye), Voices in the Evening (translated by DM Low), Valentino and Sagittarius (both translated by Avril Bardoni) are all near-as-damnit perfect novellas, mostly about Italy during or just after World War II, full of frustrating families, political activism and romantic fuck-ups. 

Two other writers I read multiple books by were Maylis de Kerangal and Gwendoline Riley. De Kerangal’s Birth of a Bridge is something like an Arthur Hailey blockbuster condensed to 300 pages and written by a genius [Ed. – sold!]: an exploration of all the people and organisations and objects involved in the construction of a massive bridge project, while Eastbound is a compact novella about a fraught encounter between a Russian fleeing conscription and a French tourist on the Trans-Siberian Railway. Both these books were translated by Jessica Moore. Riley’s most recent novels, First Love and My Phantoms, are perfect, hilarious [Ed. – uh that is uh weird, James] examinations of the awfulness of families and relationships.

Self Portrait on Statue, Gouges – Polly Penrose [2020]

MY BODY BETRAYED ME

Anna Deforest’s A History of the Present Illness is a startling novel about grief and the terrible things that can happen to a human body, told from the point of view of a student doctor. Szilvia Molnar’s The Nursery (due this coming March) is a fine addition to the ‘new mothers who may be losing their minds’ library. What Are You Going Through by Sigrid Nunez is a brilliant, telegraphic novel about helping and failing to help a dying friend have a good death. Imogen Binnie’s Nevada is a simultaneously hilarious and dispiriting book about gender dysphoria and about being a well-meaning but really terrible wise elder trying to help someone else deal with their trans-ness. Abi Palmer’s Sanatorium is a fascinating diary/essay about her experiences dealing with physical rehab in both a Budapest thermal bath and a crappy inflatable pool in London

And then there’s Naben Ruthnum’s Helpmeet. If Edith Wharton had started one of her excellent wintry ghost stories, but then been overcome by the body-horror vibes of a time-travelling David Cronenberg without losing any of her prose style or piercing insights, this is the novella she might have written. [Ed. – Hell to the yeah!] Strange but true.

IMAGINED WORLDS, FUCKED-UP PHYSICS

Writing a high-concept science-fiction airport thriller is not something you expect a President of the Oulipo group to do, but that’s exactly what we have in The Anomaly by Hervé Le Tellier (translated by Adriana Hunter). And it’s really good! A passenger jet survives a storm and lands safely. Then, months later, the exact same jet (and all its passengers) lands safely again, introducing hundreds of duplicate people to the world. The weirdness spirals from there, but Le Tellier plays it dead straight.

Simon (or S. J.) Morden is a British science-fiction writer quietly producing a fascinating body of work. His newest novel, The Flight of the Aphrodite, is an excellent dark tale of an exploratory ship crew going to pieces in the face of the possibility of First Contact, and an older book, Bright Morning Star, is a moving novel about an autonomous alien AI drone landing in the middle of a Ukraine forest as Russians invade [Ed. — !].

I was predisposed to ignore the work of ‘qntm’ because, let’s face it, that pseudonym is extremely irritating. Annoyingly, I have to report that There Is No Antimemetics Division is kind of brilliant: a group of specialists are charged with stopping malignant alien antimemes, which are ideas and concepts and things which by their very nature cannot be communicated or remembered.

Julia Armfield’s Our Wives Under the Sea is a scary, absorbing story of loving someone who is going through a very horrible change after suffering an accident on an exploratory deep-sea dive. Humidly, damply intense. And finally, there’s Audrey Schulman’s The Dolphin House, which is fiction about science being done, rather than science-fiction, and both completely convincing and compelling.

THE TUMOUR AT THE HEART OF HUMAN HISTORY

The Investigation: Oratorio in Eleven Cantos by Peter Weiss (translated by Alexander Gross) is a play based on the testimony Weiss observed at the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials in the mid-1960s. Riveting and horrifying and an excellent one-book summary should you ever need to rustle up evidence for use in damning the entire human race. Ernst Weiss’s The Eyewitness (translated by Ella R. W. McKee) is a posthumous novel about a psychiatrist called in to treat a young Austrian ex-soldier, initials A.H., which seems to have been based on Hitler’s actual psychiatric reports, which Weiss had brief access to.

James Kestrel’s Five Decembers is, despite its pulpy cover, an unexpected and thoughtful crime novel about regret and missed opportunities, through the prism of the attacks by and on Japan during World War Two. Clouds Over Paris by Felix Hartlaub (translated by Simon Beattie) is perhaps the most self-effacing diary ever, as well as being beautifully written. Hartlaub was a reluctant and mildly embarrassed Nazi stationed in newly Occupied Paris. He was still a Nazi, though, despite the prose quality, so let’s shed no tears over his death and disappearance in 1945.

Lacertilia [Lizards] – Ernst Haeckel [1904]

[Audience: He does fucking go on, doesn’t he?]

GRAPHIC!

The fact that several of the best graphic novels I read this year were about adolescents having much more interesting times than I ever did should not be taken as an indicator that I am having a mid-life crisis or am extremely boring. [Ed. – Ah good that you said that, because I was thinking _exactly* that…] Skim by Gillian and Mariko Tamaki is about a Japanese-Canadian Goth failing to fit in at a Catholic School. Giulia Sagramola’s Summer Fires (translated by Brahm Revel) is about a group of teenagers connected to a pair of fractious sisters in a Spanish summer where the landscape keeps bursting into flames. And Andi Watson and Simon Gane’s Sunburn perfectly captures being old enough to be involved in adult’s relationship game-playing, but not old enough to know what the hell you’re doing.

Sara Del Giudice’s Behind the Curtain (translated by M.B. Valente) is a gorgeously rendered story, all pale colours and intricate fabric textures, about Jewish sisters in Paris as the Nazis take over, with a nasty kick in the guts at the end. And last of all there’s Ducks by Kate Beaton, her big, funny and moving memoir of working in the Canadian oil sands, with all the awful sexual pressure and violence that involved.

From ‘A.C.2020’ – Mirko Ilic [2020]

POEMS THAT MOSTLY DON’T RHYME

Verse novels, baby, that’s where it’s at with the cool kids these days! If you want to fit in at the top table, why not read Sickle by Ruth Lillegraven (translated by May-Brit Akerholt), a tiny family saga about inheritance, books and change set in nineteenth-century Norway. Or for something far more depressing [Ed. – pretty rich, given this list so far], let me recommend Greg McLaren’s Camping Underground, in which a former undercover political provocateur gives her fragmented testimony about the terrible things that have reduced a future Australia into a scavenger-economy wasteland. It has some really good jokes!

Lisa Robertson’s The Baudelaire Fractal is a prose-poem-novel-something about a woman who wakes up one day to find she’s the author of Baudelaire’s collected works. Body Braille by Beth Gylys is a beautiful collection about how bloody hard it is to live in a body, with sections for each of the senses.

And then there’s The Lascaux Notebooks, ostensibly by Jean-Luc Champerret and translated by Philip Terry, which claim to be a series of translations of Lascaux cave paintings into poetry. It’s mad and clever and fun and I fell for it for much longer than I should have.

TINY WEE HUNGARIANS [Ed. – That’s nice, isn’t it? They don’t get much, the wee Hungarians.]

The three best books from the literary wonderland that is Hungary that I read this year were all tiny. Agota Kristof’s The Illiterate (translated by Nina Bogin) is a compressed, bleak and reliably brilliant memoir of moving from Hungary to France and trying to learn a new and unrelated language. The Manhattan Project (translated by John Batki) is a slender but oversized thing of beauty, full of photos by Ornan Rotem, in which László Krasznahorkai meanders through the work and worlds of Melville, Lowry, and Lebbeus Woods. And In a Bucolic Land by Szilárd Borbély (translated by Ottilie Mulzet) is a brilliant and autobiographical posthumous collection of poems describing the author’s childhood as part of a despised family, being raised by parents who would later be violently murdered. 

MEDIUMN-SIZED JAPANESE

The book I was looking forward to most in 2022 was Woman Running in the Mountains by Yūko Tsushima (translated by Geraldine Harcourt), which takes the Tsushima constants (young single Japanese mother, awful mother, vanished father, deadbeat ex) and yet again spins them into gold. Her ability to get infinite artistic variety from the same initial ingredients remains amazing.

Mieko Kawakami continues her series of novels about Japanese misfits with All the Lovers in the Night (translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd), which manages the rare feat of making the story of a withdrawn person with an uneventful life absolutely compelling.

[Audience: Sweet fancy Moses, shut up!]

(REACHING DESPERATELY) UM, BOOKS WITH PLANES ON THE COVER [Ed. – Oh come on!]

Gertrude Trevelyan is one of those nearly lost writers I had never read before, but on the basis of Two Thousand Million Man-Power I am now seeking out the rest of her work: this novel is told in an experimental/modernist-yet-highly-readable voice, swooping from the frenetic global to the low-key personal, sometimes multiple times a sentence, with vertiginous ease. And Elleston Trevor’s Squadron Airborne is a quietly impressive and downbeat novel about the RAF in WW2, a spiritual forerunner to the work of the still-alive but still-neglected Derek Robinson. No Churchillian Imperialistic bullshit to be found here.

The Doll Man – Jean Veber [1896]

WON’T FIT INTO ANY ARBITRARY CATEGORY WITH EACH OTHER [Ed. – At least that’s honest.]

Squarely in the Olivia Manning/Elizabeth Jane Howard sweet spot is the Good Daughters trilogy by Mary Hocking (Good Daughters, Indifferent Heroes, Welcome Strangers), following three sisters from the 1930s to the years after WW2. They’re basically Platonic ideal books for people like me who reflexively buy the old green-spined Virago Modern Classics on sight.

The Friendly Young Ladies by Mary Renault was delightful: a wonderful 1930s summery sexy atmosphere, beautifully written, and nobody was punished by the plot for being gay. (In fact, someone wrecked their life by not being gay enough.) [Ed. — *nodding sagely * seen it happen many a time.]

Keith Ridgway’s A Shock is brilliant and sui generis; a sporadically sinister set of linked stories in multiple styles—a worthy follow-up to his Hawthorn & Child, though shooting out in completely different directions.

Awake by Harald Voetmann (translated by Johanne Sorgenfri Ottosen) is fragmented, which I have seen some people complain about, saying it doesn’t add up to a story. I guess that’s true, but I really didn’t care. A novel about Pliny the Elder, his nephew, and his slave, it’s great on the sentence level, and so interesting. And deeply, deeply horrible.

Hagar Olsson’s Chitambo (translated by Sarah Death) deserves to be much better known: a modernist Finnish masterpiece about a young girl whose life is wrecked by a father who is at first her ally in an imaginative world, and who then loses interest in her as he moves on to other, madder utopian schemes.

[Audience: GET HIM OFF! GET HIM OFF!]

The Trouble with Happiness is a collection of short stories by Tove Ditlevsen (translated by Michael Favala Goldman), and is as good as you’d hope from the author of the Copenhagen Trilogy. The Devastation of Silence by João Reis (translated by Adrian Minckley) is an exemplary example of one of my favourite genres of novel—the mildly unhinged monologue from a monomaniacal narrator, in this case a Portuguese POW in a German camp in WW1. Helen DeWitt’s The English Understand Wool is a really funny novella of subverted expectations. And Ed Yong’s An Immense World is a brilliantly and subtly written survey of the latest science in animal perception, including senses that humans cannot even begin to rival. OK, OK, I’m going, what is that thing, a crook, you do know they don’t actually use them to haul people off the stage anym–

[Ed. — Don’t tell James, but I could have read even more from him!]

What I Read, November 2022

Posted on by under book review, month in review, review, Uncategorized

Did you miss me? Been far too long. Tough semester—they’re all tough, but any semester with extra administrative duties is especially gross—and I couldn’t make time for blogging. I hope to catch up; I’ll start with last month since I can still remember a few things about it. The whole family was laid up with a nasty virus (not that one, apparently) for the first couple of weeks; thank goodness Thanksgiving was even more restorative than usual. Here’s what I read, mostly in moments carved out from the press of things.

Paul Cézanne, The Wine Market at Jussieu, 1872
Paul Cézanne, The Wine Market at Jussieu, 1872

Louise Welsh, The Second Cut (2022)

Twenty years ago I chanced on Welsh’s first novel, The Cutting Room. Its hero Rilke (first name, last name, who knows) trawls Glasgow and environs, clearing out houses for an auction house, looking for gold among the dross. The gold in that book was a cache of old pornography, including photos that seemed to show a terrible crime. Half unwittingly, half enthralled (in this regard, a figure for all readers of crime fiction), Rilke plays detective and gets in over his head. He’s saved not only by his eye, but by his equanimity, which takes the form of coldness, as much to himself as others. (This thoughtful Guardian review calls him “alternately steely and compassionate.”)

The Cutting Room could have been the start of a series, but Welsh admirably moved on to other things. Her interest in genre has always been interestingly glancing. (I enjoyed her Plague Trilogy.) But she must have kept Rilke in mind, because here he is, twenty years older, hanging on to the fringes of a city that’s changed a lot (the aging trannies of the first book have been replaced by self-aware, if, to Rilke’s eyes, alarmingly naïve non-binary and trans kids). Unsurprisingly, he stumbles into another crime, pleasingly complicated, almost but not quite preposterous. The Second Cut is a sadder book than its predecessor, especially in its depiction of gay sex in the age of Grindr. Middle-aged, Rilke isn’t as desirable as he was. In one scene, he arrives at a man’s flat, only to be turned away after a moment’s inspection with the heartrending assessment: “No, I don’t think so.”

A sad book, yes, but a good one. I was damn sick the whole time I was reading this book, but that didn’t make a whit of difference. Loved it.

Elmore Leonard, Riding the Rap (1995)

Last month I decided it would be fun to listen to some Elmore Leonard, a writer I’ve somehow never read before. The library didn’t have much to choose from, so I went with Pronto, which concerns Harry Arno, a Miami bookie who decides to retire in Italy, home of his ancestors and site of his WWII service. When I say “decides” I don’t mean he’s settling into his sunset years after long reflection. I mean he has to get the hell out of town because his mobster boss has discovered he’s been skimming for decades. Complications ensure, natch, some of which are centered on US Marshall Raylan Givens, a seeming hayseed who is in fact damn competent, except when it comes to Harry, who gave him the slip twice before. Raylan is still sore about it, and decides he’ll follow Harry to Italy to bring him back, despite having no jurisdiction there. Pronto was enough fun that I continued with the second book, in which the two men, having reached détente, are brought together again when Harry is kidnapped by an addled former client.

Riding the Rap is weaker: misogynist and tonally unstable (the previous book was too, but there Leonard swerved between violence and comedy with flair). Haven’t felt compelled to listen to the last book in what is known as the Raylan Givens trilogy. Leonard fans, what are some actually good books of his?

Julietta Singh, The Breaks (2021)

Dreadful, eye-rolling stuff that I hate-read with grim, perverse satisfaction. Singh, a Canadian academic who came to the US to study Comparative Literature and now teaches in the American South (huh, who does that sound like?), has written one of those essayistic-memoir-hybrid-type things that are so big now, and that I often like, in fact even aspire to write, sort of. My response is at least in part a bad case of envy. Narcissism of small differences much? But Singh is so self-righteousness that she ruins what is objectively interesting material: she grew up a mixed-race brown kid in Winnipeg at a time when that was even harder to do than it is today; her parents were social justice warriors who cared more for others than for kin (not quite Mrs. Jellybelly-level, but you get the idea); and she’s formed a queer family with the father of her child, with whom she lives in a modified duplex, together apart. (The father is white; Singh wrestles with her own ambivalence: as a child she wanted to be white; she doesn’t want that wanting for her daughter, etc.) As I say, lots to think about here. But the child—to whom the book is addressed, in awkward second-person—is too precious, too loving and kind and special. Or maybe she is all of these things, I’m ready to believe it, most six-year-olds are pretty great, but Singh is precious about her. Get a load of her rhapsodizing over a Thanksgiving art project (the kid has sculpted a Powhatan village out of fruit):

The Powhatan people are represented by banana slices, and apple skins make up their shelters. Off to the side of the village, you have crafted colonial ships by slicing kiwis in half, gutting their insides, and attaching the skins to the little fruit boats to serve as sails. You have created rough waters out of banana peels, and a wall of carved-apple manatees that surrounds the kiwi ships on three sides.

Colonial ships? Just wait. After the description comes the analysis:

I am blown away to witness this art-making against the state, this anticolonial fruit installation that is also a fantasy of organically reversing history. What I love most is that in your historical revisioning, you move us beyond the subjugated histories of Indigenous resistance to colonial force. Instead, you turn your attention to the sea, letting it emerge as an actor in the opposition to the colonial mission. Your artwork veers me away from the anthropocentric position, carefully and imaginatively invoking what the earth might itself desire.

Seriously??? I think she is, though. I see no irony here, nor anywhere else in the book. I should have laughed at that last paragraph—sounds like comments on a particularly precious undergraduate thesis—but instead I was infuriated. And that’s on me. Anyway, hard pass.

Minae Mizumura, Inheritance from Mother (2012) Trans. Janet Winters Carpenter (2016)

At the beginning of this wonderful novel, Mitsuki Katsura’s mother, the stylish and dramatic, but irresponsible, even hatefu Noriko, is fading fast. After several falls leading to broken bones she agrees to go into a nursing home. But even so the burden of care falls on Mitsuki, even though her sister, Natsuki, could help, too. The latter, a musician, is kind enough but unwilling or unable to do more than the minimum. Given the book’s title, it won’t spoil much to say that before long Noriko dies, leaving a medium sized inheritance that means nothing to Natsuki, who married into money, but everything to Mitsuki—especially since she discovers her husband has been having an affair, and she needs to make some decisions.

Deciding what her future will be like entails a lot of looking back for Mitsuki. Inheritance is, unsurprisingly, as much metaphorical as literal in this book. There’s a lot of unfaithfulness in the family—it runs through the generations as if it were hereditary. Mitsuki’s grandfather left her grandmother for another woman; her mother, Noriko, fell in love with a man deemed unsuitable and from whom she was separated by her family, only to later separate her own family when she left her husband, Mitsuki’s father, for her dance instructor. To what extent is Mitsuki bound by the tendencies of her family? To what degree is she her own person? Mizumura pursues these big questions through her eventful but never cluttered plot.

The book was published serially, and was written, Mizumura explains in a note at the beginning, in homage to late 19th/early 20th serialized novels, especially Ozaki Koyo’s The Golden Demon (1893), which I do not know at all, other than what I glean from Mizumura’s references. No surprise that Noriko, an Emma Bovary type, identifies strongly with the book. Mitsuki, who had the chance to translate Flaubert’s novel, but was discouraged by her husband, loves novels in more removed fashion, as befits someone who translates for a living. Is being removed the same as being measured? This is another of the book’s questions.

I’ve said this to a few people now, but Inheritance seems to me an extremely middle-aged book. And I don’t mean that as a criticism. Its concerns—how to care for aging parents while recognizing one’s anger, guilt, sadness and fear; how to maintain a standard of living through life changes and dwindling employment opportunities; how to grasp second chances when they arise—are those of many middle-aged people. I might have liked this book twenty-five years ago, but now, well, now I felt seen by it, as they say.

Mizumura’s A True Novel was my favourite book of 2021. Inheritance from Mother might not top this year’s list, which is pretty much sewn up by an earlier Japanese novel, one referenced here, in fact, Tanizaki’s The Makioka Sisters, but it’s up there. Mizumura really does it for me, and I’m a bit sad that I’ve got so little of her left to read.

E. C. R. Lorac, These Names Make Clues (1937)

They like the zany house parties in these golden age crime novels, don’t they? Here a publisher brings together friends and luminaries, gives them false identities and a series of cryptic crossword-type puzzles, and sets them against each other. His coup is getting his friend Inspector MacDonald to attend, despite much grumbling: the idea is to see who is cleverer, the writers (most of whom are mystery novelists) or the policeman. MacDonald knows a set up when he sees it, but good thing he came along, because in the middle of the evening the power cuts out and next thing you know one of the guests is dead. (Gasp!) Turns out plenty of folks had a motive. (Shocking!) The solution is overly-ingenious in that Dorothy Sayers way, but this was still good if forgettable fun.

Alejandro Zambra, The Private Lives of Trees (2007) Trans. Megan McDowell (2010)

Took this off the shelf because I’ve been going through my books, looking to see what I can purge, and I figured it was short enough that if I read a few pages I’d have a pretty good idea if I wanted to keep it. And then I just kept going, forgetting the book even as I was reading it. A man waits for his wife to come home one evening. As the hour gets later he remembers meeting her, tries to ignore his fear that she might be deceiving him, and imagines what life would be like if he had to raise her daughter from her first marriage, whom he has tucked into bed earlier that evening. (The precious title comes from a long-running bedtime story.) The relationship between the man and the little girl is the nicest bit of the book, which otherwise fails to hit either the ominous or whimsical notes it unaccountably aims to swing between. Not for me.

Kate Beaton, Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands (2022)

I chose this graphic memoir of a young woman’s time in the oil fields of northern Alberta in the early 2000s for the November episode of One Bright Books. Check it out, because we had a lot of smart things to say about it. I even added a few thoughts about how it resonated for me personally, as an Albertan who spent formative years in Nova Scotia (the reverse trip to Beaton’s, though I’m ten years older). I’d like my family members and friends who work in the oil patch (mostly in corporate jobs, or adjacent fields) to read this book, though I doubt they will. Beaton is even-handed but damning: the work of extracting resources from the earth on industrial scale destroys people and land equally. Damaged people don’t always hurt others, but they often do. Beaton was certainly hurt. She tells this story with humour, warmth, and matter-of-fact conviction. (She is everything Singh is not.) Fittingly, her artwork is restrained, even sober, but not afraid of being lyrical. Amazing how gorgeous her drawings are despite the absence of colour. It’s on all the end-of-year lists for a reason.

Tabitha Lasley, Sea State (2021)

“Sea state” is the condition of an ocean’s surface (roiling, calm); it creates coastal weather conditions that can ground the men who work the North Sea drilling platforms onshore (or worse, offshore, eating into their leave) for days at a time. In Tabitha Lasley’s memoir, sea state additionally refers to the emotional whiplash those men feel when they come back to their lives, to responsibilities in homes they’re strangers to, to wives and children who barely recognize them. The book started, Lasley explains, as a portrait of these men and the dangerous work they do. She talked to more than a hundred workers, mostly in Aberdeen, where she moved after her life down south went up in flames. Bits of these interviews appear in the book. But mostly the book is about what happened to Lasley shortly after she started the project: she fell into an affair with one of the riggers, a man she calls Caden, a relationship as thrilling and pointless and dreary as all affairs. Reviewers use the world “reckless” to describe Lasley—and she does a lot of things that put her at risk. Yet that she should even be at risk is an indictment of the stunted, even vicious emotional economy of the oil industry, which is primed to create toxic masculinity in its workers.

I’d had Sea State sitting around the house for a while, but wasn’t prompted to read it until finishing Ducks. Beaton’s is the better book—clearer on the work itself, more self-aware of its creator’s feelings—but they pair so interestingly. Even more than the oil sands of Alberta, which at least are surrounded by vast boreal forest, the North Sea rigs are isolated and claustrophobic. As one of Lasley’s interviewees puts it:

A platform, he said, was like a pressure cooker. There were quantities of oil and gas on board, a cache you could never forger, since the fumes hung over the platform, got sucked into the HVAC and pumped into the cabins, so you woke up with a sore head and a churning stomach. The calm, flat days were the worst, since there was no breeze to carry them away.

More than that, the human element felt explosive. A hundred men of varying temperaments, trapped together in a steel box, miles from land … The cabins were small. The bunks were narrow. The rec room was twenty foot by twenty foot. Your quality of life was contingent on everyone observing a few tiny courtesies: wipe your spit off the taps when you clean your teeth; mop your piss off the toilet seat; rinse your stubble away, don’t leave it in a grimy ring around the sink; check with your cellmate whether he wants the late or early shower, then give him an hour alone afterward … Grievances that simmered over two weeks would come to a rolling boil, given three.

I like the parallelism of that sentence describing the courtesies these men must try to observe, pleasing in itself and for the way the man’s voice rises up into Lasley’s. Worth reading.

Georges Simenon, Maigret Goes to School (1954) Trans. Linda Coverdale (2017)

Good one. As in The Saint-Fiacre Affair, the case leads Maigret to recall his childhood, as he descends on a village near La Rochelle not so different from the one he grew up in. The former postmistress has been murdered; she was a piece of work, filled with hate and other people’s secrets. (Shades of Le Corbeau.) Maigret is caught up in the case when the prime suspect, the local school teacher, importantly not a local, flees to Paris and installs himself in Maigret’s office until the detective agrees, despite himself, to help the man avoid the worst. Everything hinges on a schoolboy’s testimony, and as always Maigret is good with the kids.

Alfred Sisley, The Flood at Port-Marley, 1878
Alfred Sisley, The Flood at Port-Marley, 1878

There you have it. When I write about my December reading I can tell you about the big book I spent most of the last week of November reading. Guesses welcome below! More soon.