Tag Archives: Keith Bresnahan

Keith Bresnahan’s Year in Reading, 2024

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

Pleased to once again present reading reviews from some of my favourite readers. Today’s installment, his third, is by my longtime friend Keith Bresnahan. He is a self-described harrumphing scrivener who lives and works in Toronto.

Roger Deakins, The Rail to Grants, New Mexico (2014)

2024 was a difficult year, marked by personal loss. In July, an old friend from graduate school, a brilliant and feisty scholar of the Horn of Africa, succumbed to the cancer that she had been living with on and off for the past decade. And then in October, another death. My oldest and closest friend, with whom I’d been friends since kindergarten, died of an aggressive cancer he’d been diagnosed with only 11 months earlier. I’d managed to get down to Atlanta, where he’d recently taken on a new academic position, a few times to see him—the last just weeks before his passing—but it still felt inadequate, and very sad.

Throughout all this, I was working on writing my own book, on architectural destruction and emotion in late-nineteenth century France. Despite spending the last half of the year on sabbatical from teaching, I didn’t manage to finish it, which was also difficult. But: I’m still here, and the work continues amid the usual teaching and service. I’m casting an envious eye on those colleagues leaving academia for greener or at least other pastures. But for now, this is where I’m at.

Apart from the reading I did for my own book project, which was substantial, my extracurricular reading this year was not insignificant: 65 books, if my list is correct.

I read a lot of mysteries, by French, Irish, English, Japanese authors. I read a lot of Georges Simenon, though not the Inspector Maigret series. (I read the last of these—75 novels and three short-story collections—a few years back. Would that there were more.) Unusually for me, I read quite a few Canadian authors, and a couple American ones, and one Sicilian. A bunch of French graphic novels/comics. And I finished my reading, begun many years ago, of Zola’s 20-voume Rougon-Macquart saga.

Here are the ones that stayed with me:

In the first days of 2024 (feels like a lifetime ago), I read Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male, which was as great as everyone says. An Englishman, having attempted to assassinate an unnamed European dictator (Hitler, quite obviously) is now being pursued by agents across the continent. It’s a white-knuckle ride that in its second act switches pace to a two-person détente, in which our hero slowly plays out becoming-animal (the ‘rogue male’) in a kind of homemade burrow. Super-weird, I loved it. My only complaint is with the book’s end, which reveals a deeply personal rationale for the assassination attempt, practically undoing the whole perversely-unmotivated-action-begets-tragic-outcomes schema of all that had come before. Still, highly recommended.

Seicho Matsumoto, Point Zero. I had read his mystery A Quiet Place a couple years back and loved it. [Ed. – Agreed, so good.] Point Zero, like that one, is translated by Louise Heal Kawai for Bitter Lemon Press. As I progressed in the book, I started wondering: had I read this before? It all had a vaguely familiar ring. It turns out I had not; but I had watched Yoshitarō Nomura’s excellent 1961 film adaptation, Zero Focus. It’s an excellent, propulsive tale of a woman whose new husband has gone missing, and her search to find the truth. I figured out (or remembered?) who ‘did it’ about 2/3 of the way through, but it hardly mattered. Great, though A Quiet Place still has the edge for me. More Matsumoto in English, please!! [Ed. – I gather there’s a ton of him. Sort of like Simenon.]

Other Japanese books I read this year: Seishi Yokomizo, The Devil’s Flute Murders and The Little Sparrow Murders (fine, if workmanlike, mysteries); Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, Naomi (a striking tale of manic obsession and cuckoldry, but the main characters aggravated me to no end).

I also read Yoel Hoffmann’s edited anthology Japanese Death Poems, which I received as a tongue-in-cheek birthday gift (although they knew I’d also love it). It’s what it sounds like: a collection of short poems, mostly haiku, written over centuries by monks and poets and ordinary folks on the verge of death, or in anticipation of dying. Fascinating stuff. I read it in the fall, in the midst of grief. Good to meditate on, and dip in and out of.

Also in the mystery vein, I continued to work my way through Magdalen Nabb’s Marshal Guarnaccia books, set in Florence. I like every one of these I’ve read, and this year I went back to the beginning, to read (new to me) the first in the series, Death of an Englishman. Excellent and atmospheric, and I loved that Guarnaccia has the flu and only shows up at the very end for this first book in his own saga. [Ed. – Intriguing!]

My last read of the year was also a mystery (they really do seem to fit the winter holidays in a way I can’t explain): John Banville’s The Lock-Up. This is a late book in his Quirke series (originally published under the pseudonym ‘Benjamin Black’), but the first I’ve read. For whatever reason, I’ve never got on with Banville’s literary fiction (I know, shame on me). [Ed. – I dunno, I’m not sure he’s all that, actually.] But this hit the spot. Quirke, a weary alcoholic pathologist, investigates the murder of a young Jewish woman in 1950s Dublin. All sorts of side-narratives here: former Nazis escaping justice with the help of the Church, arms dealings in Israel, romantic entanglements, struggles with work colleagues. Yes, aspects of it are clichéd and feel dated, despite being published in 2023. What can I say? I liked it enough to immediately reserve four other books in the series at my local library branch, so watch this space for more in my 2025 round-up.

George Simenon: since finishing the Maigrets, I’ve been slowly working through some of his other output: these 300-odd standalone books are often gathered under the rubric of ‘romans durs’ (‘hard novels’). They’re hard looks at human nature, alright, though not always violent or murderous. I read 19 of these this year, including a bunch of the ones he wrote while living in the USA in the 1950s, and set there (for whatever reason these have never struck me with the same truth as his French-set novels). Some leitmotifs: voyeurism, small-town prejudice, frustrated men, philandering men, sensual women, penny-pinching women, family squabbles, and men who suddenly realize that their wives resemble their mothers. Nothing if not Freudian, this guy.

My favourites: The Krull House; The Venice Train; Account Unsettled; Striptease; The Little Saint; The Man with the Little Dog; The Little Man from Arcangel. For me, this last one was the best: A Russian-Jewish bookseller and philatelist, assimilated to France since arriving there as a young boy and living in a small town’s market district, marries a promiscuous younger woman from the town. She leaves one evening and does not return, and suspicion slowly falls on him. It’s a masterful study in the vicious closedness and rumor-mill of a community against a person they had superficially but never deeply accepted, driving to an inevitably sad conclusion. I’d put this up against any literary study of othering and alienation, any day of the week. [Ed. – 100: this one will be on my year in review list, too.]

I also read Pedigree, Simenon’s memoir of his life from birth to age 15 in Belgium (Liège, to be precise), focused mostly on his mother and her family. The basic elements of his other books seem to pretty much have their origins here, except the murders. A note about his mother, whom he felt never sufficiently loved him: from the 1930s to the early 1970s Simenon wrote fiction with compulsive mania, averaging 10-15 books a year. Then his mother died, and he never wrote another novel. Did I already mention Freud?

My Can-Lit year:

I like Canadian literature as much as the next guy, provided the next guy likes it but doesn’t make a habit of it. [Ed. – Handshake emoji.] But, I was a visiting fellow at Massey College at the University of Toronto this past year, where the spirit of Robertson Davies flows through the corridors, and where I had some interesting discussions of Canadian literature with my fellow fellows — including David Chariandy, whose very fine reflection on race and parenthood in Canada, I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You, I also read this year. All of which prompted me to pick up some books:

Helen Humphreys, Coventry: I really enjoyed this short novel set during the burning of Coventry Cathedral in November 1940, with intersecting stories of two women. Canadian author, if not Canadian content. Also a bit of a cheat, since I read it for another academic project on ruins. But everything counts!

Robertson Davies, The Deptford Trilogy. One of the landmarks of Can-Lit. I’d read Fifth Business (the first novel in the series) decades ago, but never the other two, The Manticore and World of Wonders. I read them all in quick succession in the depths of a Toronto winter. Fifth Business, set in small-town Ontario and then Toronto (with a side-swerve to WWI Europe) is seriously great. I would read it again right now. The Manticore: was I surprised that the next book in the series sees our hero undertaking Jungian analysis in Switzerland? Yes. Did I like it? Also yes, but decidedly less than the first book. The third, World of Wonders, picks up threads from the other two, and set in the world of circuses and magic. There is thus a lot here about stagecraft, circus life, and stage magicians, all of which are things that repel me, frankly. [Ed. – We are the same person, Keith.] So, not my bag. But still, a satisfying enough conclusion.

Marian Engel, The Tattooed Woman. Well, we know how we feel about a certain book by Engel, don’t we? [Ed. – We feel grrrrreat about it.] Bear has been featured here on occasion, including the last time I did one of these year-in-reviews. Here we have her last published work (from 1985), a collection of short stories featuring women at middle age, dealing with children and partners and aging. A mixed bag, with some standouts. Not a patch on Bear, but worth a look. [Ed. – Totally agree with this assessment.]

Helen Weinzweig, Basic Black with Pearls. Thanks to the folks at NYRB Classics for bringing this 1980 book back into print. [Ed. – Also available from the good folks at Anansi Press.] An unexpected treat. A woman, estranged from her husband and family, wanders through Toronto, maybe looking for her mysterious lover, who may be a spy (and who also may not exist) and then maybe goes home where another woman maybe now lives in her place. A psychological novel in the best sense. As a local, I loved the street-level view of my city. However, I feel compelled to add an editorial note: you can’t get to Dundas from Queen going south on McCaul, lady.

Following this, I read an earlier Weinzweig, her first: Passing Ceremony. An episodic, fragmentary exercise in which varied voices unfold in non-linear fashion a wedding and its reception. Everyone seems to have a past and beef with the bride, while the gay groom in it for the social beard pines for a lost love. Fine, but I liked it less.

Brian Moore, Catholics. A fine short novel of faith and orders and the world, set in a remote Irish abbey in the wake of Vatican II. The Abbot, no zealot, has in fact has lost his faith, serving as mere manager of a group of working monks. The interactions between him and the young American priest sent from Rome to compel him to conform to the changed rituals are excellent. It compelled me, let me tell you. And it didn’t stay a minute past its welcome. It was one of the last books I discussed with my very Catholic friend—himself a great reader—in his dying months. Again, there’s no mention of Canada in the book, though this was (Irish) Moore’s adopted country, so I’ll count it here.

Zola:

As I’ve mentioned, this was the year I finished in Zola’s monumental Rougon-Macquart series, following two branches of this family through the whole of Second Empire France (1852-1870; the novels themselves were written 1871–1893). The books themselves vary, but I would recommend these to anyone. One of the great reading experiences of my life. Look forward to revisiting it in, oh, 30 years or so. You in, Dorian? [Ed. – Your faith in my longevity is touching, Keith. I still need to finish my first go-round. But, yes, if I’m still here and able in my 80s, you got it.]

Here are the ones I read this year, in the order in which I read them.

Money. Took me a while to finish this: kept putting it down and then coming back to it. The rise and fall of a speculative bank in 1860s Paris and those who are brought up and laid low by it. Beneath it all, Zola’s usual interest in ambition, passion, crisis, and heredity.

Earth. More disagreeable people. Really disagreeable. Maybe the worst people in the whole series. Zola’s great novel of peasant life. The earth is the great character here (the title gives it away), but it’s often obscured by the endless wretched goings-on of these stingy and promiscuous bastards. Wears its King Lear heavily on its sleeve. There’s no redemption here, and I was glad to be done with its characters, but it’s undeniably impressive.

The Dream. An abrupt shift from Earth. [Ed. – Yeah, dreams and earth do not seem to go together, lately.] A childless couple engaged in the family business of embroidery in a northern cathedral town take in an abandoned young girl, eventually adopting her; she is prone to religious passions and flights of fantasy, which eventually coalesce in her idealized love for the rich son of a local lord (and bishop!). The religious background and hagiographic details, as well as the highly detailed particulars of embroidery (hey, you were the one who picked up a naturalist novel) made for an interesting contrast with all the recent scheming bastards. (R-M connection: Angélique, the girl, is the illegitimate daughter of Sidonie Rougon of La Curée, in a plot point not developed except to assert the link to the rest of the series). Brandon Taylor, in his much-discussed recent take on Les Rougon-Macquart, wrote that this was his least favourite, the one on which he got stuck. Not me.

That would be:

The Bright Side of Life. This took me forever, despite being relatively short. My least favorite R-M novel. Technically speaking, there’s nothing wrong with it! All the components of the series are there: the family drama, the scheming and obsession with money, the kind-hearted soul exploited by unscrupulous others, the hint of martyrdom, and the scientific explorations of the age. Lazare’s constant flitting from one new artistic or scientific enterprise to another made me think of Bouvard et Pécuchet. Pauline’s passivity drove me crazy. But overall, this tale of family and striving and love on the Normandy coast left me without a sense of life, bright or dark, that vitality that’s usually there in Zola even in the descriptions of weather or mechanical objects. (R-M connection: Pauline is the orphaned daughter of Lisa Quenu, née Macquart, in Belly of Paris—ironically maybe my favourite of all these books).

Germinal. The last of my years-long reading of the Rougon-Macquart. Did I save the best for last? Almost. I still prefer the Parisian masterpieces Belly of Paris and L’Assommoir, and even Au Bonheur des Dames, but for epic tragic scope you can’t match this tale of cruel life in a northern French mining town. Zola depicts the crushing poverty and squalid forms of barely-human life (there’s a lot of comparing people to animals here), of an uprising and strike and the inevitable(?) ‘retour à la normale’—albeit one that ends with a germ of revolutionary hope, rising from the soil, of a future world in which the workers have their day. Still waiting on that one. Anyway, it speeds the reader along with propulsive force, in which sense it reminded me more of La Bête humaine than its more obvious counterpart, Earth. Zola is at his best here. Déprimant, bien sûr; mais quelle grandeur!

I also read Zola’s standalone Therese Raquin. Enough with the miserableness, Émile! Just unrelenting, goddamn. It’s great, of course, but I would recommend reading it on a day when you can immediately go for a picnic in the sun and pet some kittens and eat a bag of marshmallows. [Ed. – Unrelenting is the word. Grim.]

Other things:

Kent Haruf, Benediction. My first Haruf. An elderly man in a small town dies from cancer. A moving read, especially in this year.

Frank Tuohy, The Ice Saints. Thank the gods for the Head of Apollo imprint: so many great forgotten books in this now-defunct series. In this one, a young English woman, Rose, visits communist Poland in 1964 to see her sister, her sister’s Polish husband, and their teenage son. Lots of sadness and disillusionment to go around, and some nice reflections on the outsider’s pitying gaze and well-meaning help being not without illusions of its own. Rose is not particularly likeable, but neither is anyone else. Highly recommended. [Ed. – Entirely new to me! I’m intrigued.]

Walker Percy, The Moviegoer. Folks online seem preoccupied with the fact that it, and not Catch-22, won the National Book Award in 1961. But I’ve never read Catch-22, and I have now read this, and I liked it a lot. [Ed. – Plus we know by now that the folks online don’t know shit.] A recommendation of my friend when I visited him in Atlanta last summer, I didn’t get around to reading it until after he’d died, but I thought of him the whole time I was in it. I read the Library of America edition, and I am a sucker for that series’ size, typesetting, and lovely thin pages, so perhaps I was already well-disposed to like it. [Ed. – I confess, that font size stresses me out.] At the same time, I was surprised by it. A man who does not feel a great deal of attachment to much, but is on some kind of secret undisclosed ‘quest’ that gives his life meaning, spends a week or so around Mardi Gras flirting with (and maybe sleeping with) women, arguing with his aunt, worrying over (and definitely sleeping with) his cousin-on-the-verge-of-a-breakdown, and spending time with his much younger step-siblings. There’s sex, death, driving, movies watched. And not much else, except that somewhere in there is also the whole of life. It reminded me strangely of memories of reading J.D. Salinger, but also less precious and more mature. Fragments of this one have returned to me often since finishing it.

Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These. An exceptional short read, but you all know that by now.

Henri Alain-Fournier, Le Grand Meaulnes. Finally got around to reading this, which I consumed in a single short burst. A magical fairy-tale of old France, caught just before the old ways gave way to automobiles and telephones. It’s all faintly ridiculous, but somehow also great?

Peter Matthiessen, Nine Headed Dragon River. I’ve had an on-again, mostly off-again, relationship to Zen Buddhism over the years, trying and failing to establish a regular meditation practice, but feeling a real connection to the culture and writings it has produced. I really enjoyed this memoir of the author’s engagements (and struggles) with Zen Buddhism in America, Nepal, and Japan from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s. Ymmv, but it spoke directly to some long-dormant yearnings in me.

Marguerite Duras, The Vice-Consul. A strange, enigmatic, hallucinatory book about foreigners in India. Who knows what is true? What happened in Lahore with the Vice-Consul? The whole thing here is about others’ stories being told by others, telling their own false stories, lies and fabulations replacing whatever might be conceived of as a ‘truth’ — ultimately inaccessible if it exists at all. Annoying, also somehow memorable? [Ed. – Sounds annoying, truth be told.]

Fran Ross, Oreo. First published in 1974 and recently rediscovered. Lots of clever wordplay in this recreation of Theseus’s journey through the eyes of a young Black Jewish woman. If Ulysses were a hip trip through 1970s Philly and NYC instead of 1904 Dublin, it might be something like this.

I read a bunch of French comics/bandes dessinées this year, both in translation and not. Among these, I recommend Riad Sattouf, Esther’s Notebooks. Folks might recall my love for his autobiographical series The Arab of the Future. Here, he follows a young girl, the daughter of his friends, through the vicissitudes of elementary and junior-high school. I laughed out loud, a lot, at a time when I especially needed it. Also recommended are Julie Delporte, This Woman’s Work and Portrait of a Body, autobiographical graphic memoirs of trauma, friendship, sexuality, Tove Jansson, Chantal Ackerman, and much besides. Her pencil-crayon drawings, both lush and hesitant, perfectly match the tone.

Maybe the best book I read this year, though, was a bonafide classic: Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard. Holy shit. As good as everyone says. Better. Every word in this book is covered in a layer of dust. It evokes the overwhelming stillness of a class (the Sicilian aristocracy) in decline, while the world moves around them. The central characters here are as immobile as a daguerreotype or Walter Benjamin’s nineteenth-century inhabitants sunk into their own velvet compass-cases. Deserving of all the praise.

Edward Hopper, Yonkers (1916)

There were lots of other books I read this year: some fine, others bad, others I started but did not finish, that didn’t make this list. One can’t say everything.

Plans for next year: I’ve got an ambitious lineup of French literary classics to boost my woeful education: Flaubert, Stendhal, Hugo, Proust. I’d also like to read more works by 20th-century women writers: luckily, I’ve got a dozen or so Virago editions sitting on the shelf here. Others: Banine’s Parisian Days, Litvinoff’s The Lost Europeans, all those Charco Press books I bought years ago. Those Banville mysteries. More Simenon, probably. And whatever else provides intelligent fodder and distraction as our world continues its shockingly precipitous slide into fascism. [Ed. – We read, we resist, we read as resistance. Thank you, Keith!]

Keith Bresnahan’s Year in Reading, 2020

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

In the next week or so I’ll be writing up my reflections on my 2020 reading year. In the meantime, I’ve solicited guest posts from friends and fellow book lovers about their own literary highlights. I’m always looking for new contributors; let me know here or on Twitter (@ds228) if you have something you want to share.

First up is my old friend Keith Bresnahan (@designhist), who’s previously contributed several terrific pieces on Zola. He’s thoughtfully included a drink pairing with each of his memorable reads. Keith lives and works in Toronto.

I read a lot this year, for me. At least, it felt that way (I didn’t keep a strict count). Perhaps it was being shut in for much of the year, due to the extenuating circumstances of COVID-19; but I also suspect I was filling in the gap opened by my near-total lack of ‘work’ reading (academic history and the like). For now, I regret nothing.

Here are my most memorable reads of the past year (thanks, Dorian, for the prompt!):

Tove Ditlevsen, The Copenhagen Trilogy

I read this during the summer as part of #WomenInTranslation month, having become aware of these books, like much else on this list, via the fine book-folks I follow on Twitter. Thematically, this trilogy had much in common with other things I read this year: childhood, adolescence, unhappy marriages, substance abuse, obsession. And yet it was also unlike anything else I read in 2020. Maybe unlike anything else I’ve ever read, at least in its calm power to unnerve. Ditlevsen’s matter-of-fact prose (in translation, at least) placed everything—from her premature and unhappy marriage to a much older man, to her early publishing successes, to motherhood, and her eventual and lifelong addiction to prescription opioids—under the same merciless light. Cumulatively devastating, and stupendous.

Drink pairing: eschewing the obvious (Demerol), I’m opting for a shot of Aalborg Akvavit. Christ, make it two.

Irmgard Keun, Gilgi / The Artificial Silk Girl

Joan Wyndham, Love Lessons: A Wartime Diary

Young women come of age, find and lose love, and carve out a tentative place for themselves among intriguing characters in Weimar Germany (Keun) and WWII London (Wyndham). The Wyndham is apparently a verbatim diary of these years, the Keun a thinly-veiled autobiography. Both are wonderful. I also read Keun’s first novel, Gilgi, which was likewise great. Going to get around to After Midnight in the new year.

Drink pairing: gin fizz, with a bottle of inexpensive claret stashed under the sofa cushions for later (because you never know).

Etienne Davodeau, The Initiates

Edmund de Waal, The White Road

John Berger, Pig Earth / Once in Europa

In Initiates (original French title: Les Ignorants), the highly-regarded French cartoonist Davodeau and his close friend Anjou vigneron Richard Leroy, spend a year ‘shadowing’ each other in their respective jobs. Davodeau captures the journey in monochromatic images and text. Although the book contains interesting tidbits about the lives of cartoonists and wine-makers, its lesson is ultimately less about these specific jobs than the meaning and depths of what the French call a métier: the intimacies and intricacies of a particular craft, and the love it holds for those who make a life of it (also, the difficulty of conveying this to others!). What fills the space between the person who sets out to make a thing, and the final product we (the audience) engage with? Some answers here. Lovely, and fully human.

A few years back, I read de Waal’s breakthrough book The Hare with Amber Eyes, about the imbrication of his family’s history with a collection of Japanese netsuke figures: a rich archive of family lore, the broader tale of early 20th-century European Jewry, and the lure of obsessive objects. This book is both more personal and more expansive, chronicling on the one hand de Waal’s travels to locations including China, Venice, Germany, France, and his native England, in search of porcelain (he’s a world-renowned ceramic artist), and a much longer history of a 500-year-long European obsession with porcelain. I found it uneven (I could have used less of the alchemical/princely whodunit, for instance, and found the writing overwrought at times), but at its best we see de Waal working this search for porcelain into his own intimate relationships with this material, which has given form to his own life.

Berger’s books give us the lives of French peasants in an alpine village during the first half of the 20th century, their manner and means of life resist, and only partly give way to, changes taking place in the rest of the world (the first, and then the second, World Wars impinge, but do not essentially change things). It’s all here, and biblical in scope: births, deaths, dancing, sex, sorrows, outsiders, jealousy, theft, and—always—the animals who are the constant companions of daily life. In their own ways, these books are also essentially about craft and the intimacies of material knowledge: “At home, in the village, it is you who do everything, and the way you do it gives you a certain authority. There are accidents and many things are beyond your control, but it is you who have to deal with the consequences even of these.” This, from Pig Earth, could easily work as well for the Davodeau or the de Waal.

Drink pairing: for the Davodeau, the obvious choice is one of Richard Leroy’s own wines. Due to limits of my local market, not to mention my bank balance, I haven’t tried any of them. But let’s say the 2017 Les Noëls de Montbenault Chenin Blanc, which is supposed to be excellent. For the Berger, a glass of good rustic cider, not too sweet, slightly foaming, or, better yet, an alpine wine –a Savagnin vin de paille. And for the de Waal, a Chinese gunpowder tea, with a good dose of milk to obtain that translucent porcelain grey-green-whiteness. Or maybe just another glass of the Leroy.

Riad Sattouf, The Arab of the Future, vol. 4

Mieko Kawakami, Ms. Ice Sandwich

I discovered the first volume of Riad Sattouf’s graphic memoir The Arab of the Future a few years ago and have been keeping up with them as they come out in translation (they’re originally written in French). I love Sattouf’s cartoony style, and his reminiscences of a childhood spent traipsing around the Middle East and France in the 1980s with his French-born mother and Syrian father have made me laugh out loud more often than any other books in recent memory. The scenes of him discovering Conan the Barbarian on VHS, his fights with his troglodytic cousins, his difficult relationships with cute girls, teachers, and his overbearing father (whose outbursts and never-ending scheming are on full display), make for self-deprecating comic gold. There is family trauma here too – Sattouf’s father absconds with his younger brother, and his parents fight constantly – but it’s handled lightly. I can’t wait for vol. 5, scheduled to come out later this year.

Ms. Ice Sandwich, a novella by Mieko Kawakami, better known for Breasts and Eggs (on my to-read list), is another depiction of the inner life of a young boy — in this case, one who develops a short-lived obsession with the woman working the sandwich-counter at the local supermarket. Kawakami gets how children think, and conveys it in a book in which every sentence rang true. I loved the boy’s friend Tutti, too, and his friendship with his grandmother. A book to read in a single joy-filled burst.

Drink pairing: Given the childhood theme here, I’m going with a Japanese “Ramune” soda, original flavour. Seems right for Ms. Ice Sandwich boy, and I think Riad would enjoy the rattle of the marble in the empty glass bottle afterward.

Alan Booth, The Roads to Sata

Matsuo Bashō, The Narrow Road to the Deep North

In the last month of 2020, I spent a couple weeks on and off reading Alan Booth’s The Roads to Sata, his account of a walking trip he made in 1977 from the northern tip to the southernmost point of Japan. Booth, a transplanted Englishman who had been living in Japan for 7 years at that point and had a Japanese wife and daughter in Tokyo, is both the strange foreigner and the invested outsider, surveying a nation and its people through his daily encounters and struggles on the road. He is routinely refused lodging, gawked at, his feet hurt, and he drinks a lot. It seems that Booth’s generally good-natured English grumpiness and daily drunkenness are off-putting to the Goodreads reviewers of this book, but I found him a wholly amiable companion.

On the first day of 2021, I read Matsuo Bashō’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North during a single snowy morning. Bashō’s account of his own travels on foot through Japan, some 300 years before Booth’s, is interspersed liberally with haiku (Bashō is one of the best-known practitioners of this art). This book was slow to work its magic on me, but once it got going, I couldn’t put it down. Bashō climbs mountains, fears for his life on narrow passes, goes out of his way to see a pine tree mentioned in a poem, and takes unadulterated joy in seeing birds and fish and old friends as he goes.

Reading these books back-to-back in a year when travel was all but impossible, and being rewarded with the joys and pains of journeying, especially in a country I long to see more of, was all I could ask for.

Drink pairing: although Booth drinks mostly beer, and Bashō doesn’t specify, I’m going to go with a sake, something earthy, full of umami and mountain tastes. The Yamada brewery’s “Everlasting Roots” Tokubetsu Junmai, from Gifu Prefecture, should do just fine.

Books lined-up on my shelves for reading in early 2021:

Rónán Hession, Leonard and Hungry Paul

Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony

David Gange, The Frayed Atlantic Edge

Philip Marsden, The Summer Isles

Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

Irmgard Keun, After Midnight

Bohumil Hrabal, All My Cats

Jean Giono, A King Alone

Vigdis Hjorth, Will and Testament / Long Live the Post Horn!

“Political Fanatics Get Nothing to Eat”: Émile Zola’s The Belly of Paris (Guest Post by Keith Bresnahan)

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Keith Bresnahan is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences at OCAD University in Toronto, where he also directs the Graduate program in Contemporary Art, Design and New Media Art Histories. He is also an all-around good human being and a friend of mine from way back. At the end of last year, we talked about reading something together, with the idea of each writing about it for the blog. We settled on Émile Zola’s The Belly of Paris, and I’m pleased to share Keith’s wonderful essay below. I’ll offer some thoughts of my own in a day or two.

Émile Zola, Belly of Paris [Le Ventre de Paris] (1873)

Translated by Mark Kurlansky (Modern Library, 2009)

the-fish-hall-at-the-central-market-victor-gabriel-gilbert

‘What bastards respectable people are!’

This seems like as good a place as any to start, at the very end of Zola’s book, with the painter Claude Lantier’s exasperated cri de coeur at the good health and happiness of the bourgeois denizens of the Parisian district of Les Halles —their round bellies, ample breasts, and well-fed smiles.

The novel tells the story of Florent Quenu, who has escaped to Paris after some seven years of wrongful imprisonment in French Guiana, for his presumed participation in street riots of 1851. When the book opens, we see him lying in the road, emaciated and exhausted, his body blocking the passage of a midnight train of farm-carts and wagons loaded with produce destined for the central market of Les Halles. Rescued by the widowed farmer Mme François (she throws him in back, on top of the vegetables, in the first of the novel’s equations of bodies with food), Florent makes his way into the city and into the lives of his half-brother Quenu and sister-in-law the ‘Beautiful Lisa’, who run a bustling charcuterie near Les Halles.

Embroiling himself both in neighborhood spats and a disastrous radical politics, by the novel’s end Florent has once more been arrested and deported back to Guiana in what is essentially a death sentence. The novel’s final scene, providing the context for Lantier’s declamation, shows us the morning after Florent’s deportation; it is late summer, and Les Halles is bustling with happy activity, a return to order after this temporary shake-up:

The day had risen like a white fountain from the depth of rue Rambuteau. The sun was spreading its rosy light above the rooftops, bright expanses washing the pavement even at this early hour. And Claude sensed a cheerful mood awakening in these vast echoing marketplaces filled with their piles of food. It was like the pleasure of recovered health, the brightening sound of people at last relieved of a heavy burden weighing on their stomachs… All around him he could see nothing but Fats, growing, bursting with health, saluting a new day of lovely digestion.

Les halles

The Belly of Paris is the third novel in Zola’s Rougon-Macquart series, and incidentally the third I’ve read (after La Bête humaine and Au bonheur des dames). It was my favorite to date, maybe the first in which the characters felt less like ciphers of some Second Empire social type, and more like people in whose lives I could immerse myself.

Its historical setting, like those of the other Rougon-Macquart novels, is the Second Empire (1852-70), as played out through the lives of a few generations of the Rougon-Macquart family (here, Lisa is née Macquart). The temporal distance between the novel’s setting in 1858 and Zola’s writing of it in 1872 feels significant; he’s writing from the other side of the Empire, which concluded with the abdication of Napoleon III during the Franco-Prussian war, but also of the 1871 Commune and its brutal repression by Versaillais forces. While these more recent historical events come after the events depicted in the novel, of course, I couldn’t help but see echoes of them here, in Florent’s fantasies of a people’s revolution and his deportation to a penal colony (in 1871, it was New Caledonia), and in smaller details peppered throughout the novel: cabbages piled like cannonballs, vegetables and market-carts forming ‘barricades,’ and so on.

The book is, of course, centered on food: its transport, display, production, and sale; the sights and smells and sounds of Paris’s central market; the overflowing displays of food in shop windows; and, somewhat hidden behind all this, hunger and privation. Zola always tells us whether a character is fat, or thin: Mme François’ donkey, Balthazar (shades of Bresson?) is ‘an overweight beast’, while Mme François herself has ‘thick arms’; Florent is thin, a beanpole (a fact that makes him immediately suspicious in the eyes of Lisa and others in the market). Lisa and Quenu’s charcuterie window, which displays “a world of good things, mouthwatering things, rich things,” is reflected in Quenu’s clean-shaven ‘pig-like’ face and Lisa’s ‘ample bosom’, her “wonderful freshness…her plump neck and rosy cheeks…echoing the pastel of the hams,” and when the childlike orphan Marjolin covets Lisa, he imagines himself taking her into his arms “as though plunging his hands into an olive barrel or a cask of dried apples.”

And then there are Zola’s lapidary descriptions of fish, meats, vegetables, fruits, and cheeses, which are one of the great pleasures of the novel: fins of skates, “cinnabar red striped with Florentine bronze, in the somber palette of toads and poisonous flowers,” salmon “gleaming like well-buffed silver…etched by a burin on a polished metal plate,” “shiny carp from the Rhine, all bronzed in beautiful rust-colored metallic, each scale like a piece of cloisonné enamel,” not to mention the Roquefort cheeses like aristocratic faces marred by disgraceful disease, or the frankly sensual description of La Sarriette’s fruit-stand, her wares and her person merging in a singular, heady sensuality:

The strawberries exhaled a scent of youth…while the baskets of grapes in weighty bunches, heavy with drunkenness, swooned over the edge of the trellis, their colors deepening in spots where they were touched by the sun’s voluptuous warmth. This was where La Sarriette lived, in an orchard of intoxicating perfumes. The less expensive fruits—cherries, plums, strawberries—were piled in a flat, paper-lined basket in front of her. They bruised one another, staining the stand with juice, a strong juice that vaporized in the heat. On those sweltering July afternoons her head would spin with the powerful, musky odor of the melons. Then, slightly inebriated and showing some more flesh under her shawl, barely ripe and still fresh from springtime, her lips pouted: many had the urge to plunder those lips.

If Zola’s novel provides an encomium to the visual and olfactory pleasures of food, the pure sensuality of ripe fruit or jewel-like fish, the book strangely has almost nothing to say about taste, or eating. I’ve tried, and failed, to remember a single extended description of taste in the whole of the book; we see people eating, but that’s all. A starving Florent muses that it had not occurred to Lantier “that all those beautiful objects were there for people to eat. He loved them for their colors.” It’s hard not to think of Zola himself. Or, indeed, of our own ‘foodie’ age, where Instagrammable plates and an obsession with artisanal production so often seems to displace the actual pleasures of eating.

In this sense, I think food is not so much the theme, but the alibi for Zola’s real interest in order (and its opposite): the characters mostly yearn for it, in the form of good profits, stable politics, marriages and family, while Zola seems to harbor a clear affection for disorder, in the overwhelming mountains of food in Les Halles, the noise of the fish auction, the innocent pleasures of the market-urchin Muche, who fills Lisa and Quenu’s daughter’s pockets with dirt and soaks himself in fountains, or the free sensuality of the orphaned lovers Marjolin and Cadine.

Zola doesn’t seem to side with Florent’s radicalism, exactly (his revolution remains a delusional adolescent fantasy) but he also turns a critical eye onto the bourgeois obsession with order and calm that manifests itself in the speech and behavior of the denizens of Les Halles. As Lisa puts it, ‘I support a government that’s good for business. If they commit acts of evil, I don’t want to know.’ When she goes to the prefecture of police to turn in her brother-in-law, she finds that half the neighborhood has beat her to the punch, assuaging whatever guilt she might have had. And when Marjolin attempts to rape Lisa, what might have been the basis for melodrama (she strikes him, causing him to hit his head on a stone table and reducing him to a permanent state of idiocy) is defused, all simply seems to be for the best: Marjolin has entirely forgotten what happened, and if anything is happier than before.

E-J_Dambourgez - Une_boutique_de_charcuterie (1873)

There’s a message here: the comfortable morality of the bourgeois shop-keepers, their support for whatever is ‘good for business’, is equated with the ready availability of food, which acts as a political soporific. And it’s seductive: in one of the novel’s best passages, when Florent accepts (at Lisa’s urging) a job as inspector of the fish market, he feels himself giving in not only to this single request, but to a great wave of contentment:

It was as though he were permeated by the smell of the kitchen, the nourishment of all the food that had been loaded into the air. He slid into the happy lethargy that is brought on by eating well and living in fat…He felt a tingling on his skin, the seduction of fat slowly invading his entire being, rendering him soft and easy like a contented shopkeeper. At this late hour of night, in this overheated room, all his bitterness and determination melted away… he found himself wishing for more, for an endless succession of such evenings, slowly fattening him.

It is above all Les Halles, that ‘gluttonous beast’, the beating heart of a Paris wallowing in fat, which props up a grotesque Empire by rendering all, like fat itself, soft and easy: “it was the belly of shopkeepers, the belly of ordinary people puffing themselves up, celebrating in the sunshine, declaring that everything was for the best, since passive people had never been so well fattened.” Those who are full, forget their complaints. And political fanatics, Lisa notes, get nothing to eat.