Tag Archives: Mark Haber

My Year in Reading, 2024

Posted on by under book review, lists, personal, review, Uncategorized, year in review

If you’re reading this, you are faithful indeed. And I am grateful. Long silence here, I know. As my adopted country tumbles into authoritarianism, things have also been changing, though more positively, chez EMJ.

Igor Razdrogin, Book Bazar (1975)

My wife, daughter, and I are moving to St Louis in a month’s time! We’ve spent quite a bit of time there these past few years, and we like it a lot. We’ll have a little more space in our new home (which, combined with some collective efforts to tame my unruly library, might mean that our house will at least briefly not be overflowing with books), and, best of all, we’ll be living in a walkable neighbourhood with sidewalks, which is something we’ve been missing these past 18 years in Little Rock.

The other big transition concerns my career. I’m leaving my job at Hendrix, of course, but I’m also leaving academia in general. People keep asking how I’m feeling about this and I keep saying: Terrific! I was pretty burned out and starting to get a little Old Man Yells at Clouds about All the Changes that affected the classroom experience: the pervasiveness of AI and LLMs (something no one, as far as I know, ever asked for), and, more distressingly, the difficulty even the best-prepared students are having reading sustained works of literature, by which I mean, an entire book, no matter how straightforward the prose. This isn’t about their intelligence, or even their phones. It’s about the strictures placed on secondary school teachers. As instruction moves ever more toward preparing for testing centered on multiple choice reading comprehension questions about utterly decontextualized chunks of texts, teachers aren’t assigning much reading, which means students simply don’t have much practice at it.

(I also have a pet theory that for all its flaws Harry Potter (to be clear: it sucks) helped Millennials think of reading as both exciting and habitual, and Gen Z hasn’t had anything like that. The Harry Potter to Jane Austen to English Major pipeline kept our department afloat for a lot of years. These days, students dislike both Rowling and Austen…)

I still love many things about teaching, and it’s possible I’ll miss it so much that I’ll return to it in some fashion. (I’m never getting another job like this one, though. Those don’t exist anymore.) But for now, I feel relief, and curiosity—along with a lot of trepidation—about the chance to try something new. For now, it feels a bit unreal. Because the academic year is cyclical—summer is always a time of collapse and, if lucky, regeneration—I don’t yet feel as a though I’ve made much of a change. Talk to me in the fall, or next spring, or five years from now.

Luckily—and this is another reason for the silence around here—I’ve been working as a consultant for the Educator Programs arm of the William Levine Family Institute of Holocaust Education at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in DC. The people I work with are absolutely fabulous: smart, funny, kind, devoted to their work without having delusions of grandeur about it. It’s eye-opening—and fun—to work as part of a team, after decades of the isolation of academic life. I’ve helped them create resources for K – 12 English Language Arts classrooms, and have taken great satisfaction in the work.

I’ll need full-time work sooner rather than later, though, so if you have any ideas or leads, hit me up! Like, what are some jobs people do? What do y’all do all day? I need advice!

What I’m saying is, I had a lot going on these last months. But I did manage to keep reading. Maybe not as much as usual, but whenever I could make time. I get that it’s ridiculous to offer a 2024 reflection halfway through 2025, but FWIW here are the things that stuck with me last year.

Eight standouts

Francis Spufford, Cahokia Jazz (2023)

So much to love in this novel about an alternate 1920s in which a sizeable indigenous population thrives in a nation called Deseret centered on the bustling city of Cahokia. Spufford weaves his world-building throughout a procedural, in which our hero, a cop who moonlights as a jazz pianist, investigates a murder with vast political implications, to the point of threatening Deseret’s independence.

Cahokia Jazz is the most referenced title in the Year in 2024 Reading pieces I posted earlier this year, which means either that everybody loves this book, or that people like me love this book. Anyway, given my upcoming move to Missouri, it won’t surprise you to hear that the scene that most sticks in my mind is when Barrow pursues a lead in a village at the end of the Cahokia streetcar line, a fly-swept place he can’t wait to leave. Its name? St Louis…

I look forward to visiting the ruins of the actual Cahokia, once the biggest city north of Mexico City.

Katrina Carrasco, The Best Bad Things (2019)

Fabulous and underrated crime novel set in 1880s Port Townsend, where the most valuable commodity passing through the busy port is opium smuggled in from north of the border. Alma Rosales, who once worked for the now-shuttered Woman’s Bureau of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, has left San Francisco for Washington Territory to work for the seductive, brilliant, coolly calculating Delphine Beaumond, who runs most of the drug smuggling on the west coast.

When product goes missing, Delphine puts Alma on the case. Alma goes undercover as a dockworker—not a problem, because Alma is also Jack Camp, a slight yet wiry man who can hold their liquor and likes ladies and men equally. Did I mention that Alma and Delphine are lovers? Or that Jack starts a torrid affair with the man they’re investigating? Or that they’re also still working as a Pinkerton agent—in a desperate attempt to get their old job back?

Cue double-, triple-, even quadruple-crossing; witty repartee; and some pretty hot sex. Most crime novels are let down by their endings, but this one… let me tell you, friends, I literally gasped. A brilliant debut. I want everyone to read it.

Émile Zola, La Bête Humaine (1890, translated by Roger Pearson) and The Assommoir (1877) Trans Brian Nelson (2021)

Even by Zola’s lofty standards, these two are bangers. Push comes to shove, I guess I’d choose Bête over Assommoir, just because I love the crime story trappings, but the latter might be the more impressive accomplishment, especially if you could read it in French to see what Zola does with the argot of his lumpenprotelariat characters. They’re equally—which is to say, tremendously—depressing, but also viciously alive. Zola’s naturalist doom is regularly leavened by his prose, which zips from one brilliant set-piece to another. I’m talking about stuff like the bruising fight between two laundresses in front of an audience of delighted, shouting onlookers in the opening scene of The Assommoir, or the berserk vision of a driverless train, filled with drunk soldiers in full war frenzy heading to their doom at the hands of the Prussians, in the last pages of La Bête Humaine. Feels like a good time to study Zola’s fascinated descriptions of all things irrational.

Hernán Diaz, In the Distance (2017)

Quasi-Western in which the protagonist—a hulking, nearly mute Swede named Håkan whose only goal is to find the brother he was separated from on the voyage to the New World, and whose body and psyche seem to be able to take any amount of suffering—travels east, south, and north as much as west. This is a brainy book: Diaz riffs on Frankenstein, and probably a lot of other stuff I missed. But its allegories are always concrete. In this novel of a man stubbornly going against the westward direction of Manifest Destiny, I most remember the section in which, after suffering a terrible loss, Håkan literally burrows into the ground, eventually building a maze-like underground shelter where he lives in ambivalent isolation for years.

I read Diaz’s Trust last year too: also great. Probably not telling you anything you don’t know. But if like me you are late to Diaz, move him up your list. Smart guy and beautiful writer.

Leah Hagar Cohen, To & Fro (2024)

Last year I served as a judge for the US Republic of Consciousness Prize, which honors literature published by small presses. Yes, I tossed aside some duds and waded through many competent but unexceptional novels, but I also discovered some terrific stuff I wouldn’t have otherwise read. My favourite was this delightful and thoughtful literary experiment, a novel written in two halves that can be read in either order. You can start with “To” and flip the book over halfway through to read “Fro,” or do the reverse. You could call this a Jewish Alice in Wonderland (I love how deeply and unapologetically Jewish the book is: it takes such pleasure in asking questions), but that wouldn’t give you the sense of how the book is both realist and fantastic, a genre-bender that sometimes reads like a middle-grade book and sometimes like a historical “what if” novel, if those were written by someone whose lodestar was Maimonides. Magic!

Thanks to Lori Feathers, the genius behind this award, and to my fellow judges, who always brought it. Serving on this panel was time well spent.

Elizabeth Bowen, The House in Paris (1935)

A book of arrivals and departures, whether longed-for, dreaded, or uncertain. It feels both constricted and expansive: a neat trick. Bowen often gets called Jamesian. That is true not in style but only in a shared preoccupation with cruelty. Hard to say which fictional universe is meaner. Another thing I liked about The House in Paris is that it offers further evidence for my theory that British modernism is just another name for Gothic literature about children.  

Martin MacInnes, In Ascension (2023)

Here we have two sisters. One becomes a scientist who explores the depths of the ocean floor and the vastness of space (she develops nutrition-dense and fast-growing algae for interstellar travel); the other sets aside her career as an international lawyer to find out what happened to the first. I can’t remember everything that happened in the book, but I do remember being enthralled from start to finish. (This is another long book that never felt slow.) The final scene, set in the remotest place on earth, Ascension Island, foregrounds another kind of foreign place: our memories. “A family”, MacInnes writes, showcasing his epigrammatic mode, “is a group of strangers with a destructive desire for common nostalgia.” MacInnes’s big question, asked as much of a sibling relationship as of humanity’s ability to inhabit the stars, is whether the only way to get beyond the destructiveness of the human species is to destroy the individual self Beejay Silcox, one of my favourite critics, gets it right when she calls the book “a primer to marvel.”

Sally Michel Avery, Father and Daughter, 1963

Thoughts on the rest

Ones I keep thinking about: Manjula Martin’s The Last Fire Season (2024): I still haven’t prepped a go-bag—how foolish is that? Catherine Leroux’s The Future (2020, translated by Susan Ouriou): What if the French had never lost Detroit? What if climate change and resultant socioeconomic crises meant that most of the trappings of a functioning state had fallen away? And what if bands of roving children built hardscrabble lives in overgrown parks? Peter Heller’s The Last Ranger (2023): Conventional but satisfying novel about a ranger in Yellowstone, filled with scenes in which the hero drinks early morning coffee on the porch of his cabin: Heller knows the landscape and describes it beautifully. (Given what the chuckleheads at DOGE did, this title resonates differently now…) Jill Ciment’s Consent (2024): Revelatory memoir in which the author reassesses her decades-long marriage to her now deceased husband, with whom she took a painting class when she was 17 and he was 47. Can the relationship really have been good given that they met when she was a child?

Best study of xenophobia, told in an atmosphere of creeping dread: Georges Simenon’s The Little Man from Archangel (1956, translated by Sian Reynolds).

A Russian Jew, brought to rural France as a child, French in every way, has his life turned upside down because of a casual remark. Chilling. Best Simenon I’ve read.

Best study of deprogramming: Emily Tesh, Some Desperate Glory (2023).

Maybe useful these days.

Best case of “it’s not you, it’s me”: Nisi Shawl’s Everfair (2016)

Steampunk set in an alternate late 19th century in which the Fabians buy tracts of land from King Leopold to protect refugees fleeting the horrors of Belgium’s rule in the Congo. At first, this new nation—Everfair—prospers. European benefactors and missionaries work with Africans to create trade networks based on clean airship technology. They develop intelligence networks to navigate the region’s politics. They promote or at least allow social experiments concerning family structure, marriage, and sexual politics. But the internal tensions become too much, and the utopia falls apart. Even as I’m writing this I’m thinking, Honestly this sounds pretty good, maybe I’ve misjudged the book. And at the level of idea it’s intriguing. The execution, though: that’s the problem. The prose is leaden, the relation between action and exposition awkward. Maybe the book actually needed to be longer? A strange thing to say since I felt like it was never going to end. This book is a darling to many (Jo Walton loves it, for example). Probably just the wrong time for me. Can’t imagine giving it another try, though.

Best (and most) coffee: Mark Haber’s Lesser Ruins (2024).

Things are not going well for the narrator of this Bernhardian novel, ever since his wife died and he lost his job. That’s a tough spot. And he tries to do the right thing, sometimes. He reaches out to his son, whose passion for house music means he will dilate on the perfect set list for as long as his father will hold the phone near his ear. Like so many of us (me, anyway), he struggles to surmount the gap between idea and execution, endlessly trying to write something good. You’d think we might like the guy. But… He’s a terrible snob. He lambastes his students, neglecting his work to the point of installing an espresso machine under the desk in classroom. (That an instructor at a community college would have a dedicated classroom is the book’s only false note.) His unfinished, maybe unfinshable, book on Montaigne is probably not really going to be all that. So he ain’t easy to like.

All of this is beside the point, though, because this novel is about the way sentences can mimic the swerves and circles of a mind endlessly thinking. One of the things our narrator thinks about most is coffee. He drinks a lot of coffee. Long sections concern the various roasts, the preparation, the anticipation, the enjoyment. I’m not a coffee snob on his level, but I found nothing to ironize or criticize in the man’s love for the perfectly pulled shot. Lesser Ruins is great for other reasons, too (it’s Haber’s best IMO), but if you like coffee at all, you gotta read this.

Most ingenious conceit: Kenneth Fearing’s The Big Clock (1946)

A drudge at a magazine publisher modelled on Time-Life is tasked with finding—for purposes of eliminating—a witness to a crime. Only thing is, he is that witness…

Dark and boozy. This is the good stuff.

Best crime fiction: Carrasco, obviously. Also obviously, the latest Tana French. (At least I can say I was alive while Tana French was writing novels that will be read in a hundred years…) The latest Garry Disher, Sanctuary (2023), is a satisfying standalone about theft and friendship. I read a couple of Gary Phillips’s books about a Black Korean-war vet turned crime-scene photographer: good stuff. (I learned a lot about Watts.) Start with One-Shot Harry (2022). Years ago I devoured Scandinavian crime novels: seemed like the most exciting thing in the genre. Bloom’s been off that rose for a while, but Cristoffer Carlsson’s Blaze Me a Sun (2021, translated by Rachel Wilson-Broyles) took me back. Marcie R. Rendon’s Where They Last Saw Her (2024) is her first book set in the present, and much as I love the Cash Blackbear series, probably her best. How nice to read a book about an indigenous woman who has a good man in her life. I regularly think about the scenes of women jogging through the snowy Minnesota woods.

Best sff: In addition to MacInnes and Tesh, I most enjoyed Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice (2013), Shelley Parker-Chan’s She Who Became the Sun (2021), and various works by Guy Gavriel Kay, who continues to be a source of reliable pleasure, even if no one would call his books cutting edge. (So humane, though! I need that right now.) Alas, I am not yet a dedicated enough sff reader to have figured out how to overcome the “stalling out in a series because I didn’t get to the next one right away and then forgetting what happened” problem.

Best poetry: Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris (1992). Ok, the only poetry collection I read, but I liked it enough to assign it this past semester and the students loved it. Teaching it made me both appreciate it more and notice its limitations (it hoes rather a narrow furrow). I ought to read some of her later stuff: I bet it’s even better.

Best book of the kind I could imagine myself writing and yet am mostly allergic to reading: A tie between Jakuta Alikavazovic’s Like a Sky Inside (published 2021 and translated by Daniel Levin Becker) and Chris Bachelder & Jennifer Habel’s Dayswork (2023).

The whole quasi-essay, quasi-memoir with novelistic elements thrown in for good measure—mostly that stuff leaves me cold. But these two won my heart. Alikavozovic describes a night she spent in the Louvre, a place that she often visited with her father, a ne’er-do-well from the former Yugoslavia. After each excursion, her father would ask, How would you go about stealing the Mona Lisa? This question, and the reflections on her father’s life of petty crime and her own experience growing up in a culture and language that he never perfected, lies at the heart of this beautiful little book.

Bachelder and Habel have done something remarkable: written a book together, about themselves as a couple, that feels written in a single voice. The text centers on the Habel character’s fascination with Herman Melville: it’s about his life, and their lives, and what it means to write a life, with copious references to the man they call The Biographer, Herschel Parker, who seems to have been really something. And by that I mean kind of a dogged genius, but also a pain in the ass.

Best literary fiction:

Laurie Colwin’s Shine On, Bright and Dangerous Object (1975) is sad and delightful, filled with loving anger. A splendid beginning to a marvelous though much too short career. William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980) is famous for good reason. Audacious structure and play with time, heartbreaking story, even a section told from the point of view of a dog. Joan Chase’s During the Reign of the Queen of Persia (1983) deserves its resurrection thanks to the good people at NYRB. Another story of childhood in the American Heartland, at once bucolic and traumatic.

You can see I am deep into the “my favourite artworks are the ones created while I was a child and too young to experience at the time” years. I read new things too, though, and the best of these was Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time (2024), which I finished in a cabin at the Grand Canyon during a thunderstorm that had the rain pounding on the metal roof. The book is as memorable as the setting of my reading: an experiment in time travel, in which a 19th century Arctic explorer is brought to a near-future UK and given to a handler from the titular government agency whose background happens to be Cambodian. In addition to its speculative elements, and a terrific love story, the novel considers differing cultural responses to trauma. More Bradley soon, please!  

Henri Matisse, Woman Reading in a Violet Dress, 1898

Short story collection: Only read one, but it was a good one. I liked all the stories in Jamel Brinkley’s Witness (2023), but “At Barstow Station” is an all-timer. Even a class full of students who did not care much for reading agreed.

Most unexpected page-turner: Karl Ove Knausgaard’s The Morning Star (2020, translated by Martin Aitken) blends his signature interest in mundane middle-class life with some weird shit (a blazing star that no one can explain, a ritual murder, shenanigans at a mental institution). I raced through it and bee-lined for the bookstore to but the next one (in an expensive and gigantic hardcover edition), only to ignore it for the rest of the year. Honestly, the hardcover might be the problem. Most of the time I’m a “give me the paperback” guy. Anyway, will read the others in this series.

Most fun: The audiobook of Jesse Q. Sutanto’s Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers (2023), read with obvious affection by Eunice Wong, made me laugh aloud. As I feared, the strains of keeping the conceit going already show in the second book, which I listened to a couple of months ago. But I’ll stick with Vera a while longer; she’s a treat.

Best sequel: Waubgeshig Rice’s Moon of the Turning Leaves (2023) is a big advance over its predecessor, Moon of the Crusted Snow. A rare case of a longer book being better. It’s ten years since the mysterious event down south that sent the grid down. The small indigenous community at the heart of the first book has been thriving, but its inhabitants realize they have reached the limit of the resources in their immediate area. After painful debate, they send a search party to find out if anyone else is out there—specifically, anyone indigenous. Exciting, well-drawn, and smart about the cost of giving up part of your identity to gain the benefits of joining something. (a community, a culture) larger.

Grimmest ending: Edith Wharton’s Summer (1917), really a hell of a book. Even if you haven’t read Wharton before you know things aren’t going to end well. But I at least did not anticipate them to end quite that dispiritingly. Thanks to Shawn Mooney and the rest of the Wharton gang for the invitation to read.

Hurts so good: Elliott Chaze, Black Wings Has My Angel (1953)

Liked at the time, but has now faded from memory:

Jean Giono’s Fragments of a Paradise (1944/48 and newly translated by Paul Éprile); Suzumi Suzuki’s Gifted (2022, translated by Allison Markham Powell); Ariane Koch’s Overstaying (2021, translated by Damion Searls);and Jón Kalman Stefansson’s Your Absence is Darkness (2020, translated by Philip Roughton). Don’t get me wrong: these are all good books (especially the Giono). I don’t regret reading any of them. Just not top-notch, for me.

Meh:

These did nothing for me, and even left me a little grumpy. Ari Richter’s Never Again Will I Visit Auschwitz: A Graphic Family Memoir of Trauma & Inheritance (2024): you’d think I’d be the perfect reader for this, but honestly I did not think this book was very smart. Dorothy West’s The Wedding (1995): I get it, she was old when she wrote this. Plus, the existence of a Black elite on Martha’s Vineyard was news to me: interesting stuff. But this felt wispy, and not in that good Belle and Sebastian way. Two crime novels by Arnaldur Indridason: sometimes you just want to turn pages and remember your Iceland vacation but at the same time you know you’ll never get these hours back.

Most ambivalent toward:

Tried to explain why I felt this way about Lily Tuck’s The Rest is Memory in The Washington Post.

It wouldn’t be an end-of-year list from me without some thoughts on Holocaust-related books, which I’ve divided into categories:

History: Dan Stone’s The Holocaust: An Unfinished History (2023). All due respect to Doris Bergen, this is the best single-volume history of the event I know, and it’s pretty short too. I went long on it for On the Seawall. Honorable mentions: Linda Kinstler’s Come to this Court and Cry: How the Holocaust Ends (2022), and Rebecca Donner’s All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days (2021). The latter admittedly not a Holocaust book, but rather a resistance to the Third Reich book. Pretty damn good tho.

Memoir: József Debreczeni’s Cold Crematorium: Reporting from the Land of Auschwitz (1950, translated by Paul Olchváry). If I could legislate that people had to read one Holocaust book, I’d choose this one. Indelible. You think the Holocaust was bad? You don’t know from. Honorable mention: Michael Frank’s One Hundred Saturdays: Stella Levi and the Search for a Lost World (2022), which I wrote about in 2023 but read again for a book group last fall. If anything, it was even better the second time. To read about Stella is to love her.

YA: Elana K. Arnold’s The Blood Years (2023). Gonna do what I can to see that this one gets more traction.

Comic: Emil Ferris’s My Favorite Thing is Monsters [Vol 1] (2017). What an accomplishment! Your heart will hurt but you won’t be able to stop turning the pages. Ten-year-old Karen Reyes lives in Chicago in the late 1960s. She adores her brother, who is sometimes a gentle artistic soul but sometimes a man pushed to violence by racism and poverty, almost as much as she loves monsters. (She draws herself as a werewolf.) She’s fallen in love with her best friend, Missy, who now shuns her at school while being drawn to her in private. Her mother is diagnosed with cancer, leaving the family’s fortunes ever more precarious. When Karen’s upstairs neighbour, Anka Silverberg, a married Holocaust survivor with whom her brother had been having an affair, is found dead under mysterious circumstances, Karen takes it upon herself to investigate. She stumbles on some cassette tapes, in which the woman tells her life story, a lurid and painful one: Anka was brought up in a brothel by her abusive mother, a sex worker, and then sold into a child prostitution ring from which she is “rescued” by a client who later abandons her when she gets too old for him. After the fall of the Weimar Republic and the rise to power of the Nazis, Anka is persecuted for her Jewishness and eventually deported to the camps. How she survived, how she made her way to America, and what led to her death—these questions are presumably answered in volume 2, which was released last fall. Volume 1 is 400 pages, with plenty of tiny lettering. It would be an effort to read it even without its distressing subject matter. But it’s damn good and deserves more attention than it’s got. Ferris uses dense cross-hatching to give her images texture: I don’t how else to say it other than the images seem tense. Amazingly the book is drawn almost entirely with Bic ballpoints. The whole story of its creation, which took six years, is remarkable, starting with Ferris’s partial paralysis after contracting West Nile disease.

Holocaust-adjacent text: Svetlana Alexievich”s Last Witnesses: An Oral History of the Children of World War II (1985, translated by Richard Peaver and Larissa Volokhonsky) impressed me with the pathos of its subject matter (children, many orphaned either permanently or temporarily when Germany invaded the USSR in 1941) and the success of its method (her now well-known quasi-anthropological style, in which witnesses speak for themselves, with seemingly little input or shaping from Alexievich herself, other than the ordering and structuring, not to mention the selecting of excerpts from what are presumably much longer testimonies: which is to say, thoroughly shaped…)

Book I Never Expected to Spend This Much Time With:

Lois Lowry’s Number the Stars (1989), the classic middle-grade novel about the (anomalous) experience of Danish Jews during the Holocaust. I created a lot of materials about this book for teachers. Yes, it has certain limitations, but I’m honestly impressed by how much richness I’ve found in this text. It seems to be fading a bit from the classroom—but not anymore, if I can help it!

Edouard Vuillard, Madame Losse Hessel in Vuillard’s Studio (1915)

There you have it. I don’t know what my life is going to look like going forward—but I hope at least in the short term to have more time for this poor little blog. Thanks as always for reading! I would love to hear your thoughts on anything I wrote about here.

What I Read, October 2022

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

October 2022 was months ago, I just remember we headed into the heart of semester, and it was still too hot a lot of the time, except at the end. I had a lot going on, but I managed to read quite a lot somehow. (A few of these had been on the go for a long time, though.) This is the last of these 2022 months I’ll complete. I’m missing July and August, which were good reading months, but some of those titles will appear on my Year in Review piece, which I’ll finally turn to now…

Robert Houle, Sandy Bay, 2007

Larry McMurtry, Streets of Laredo (1993)

After finishing Lonesome Dove a couple of years ago, I asked Twitter if the book McMurtry later wrote with many of the same characters were as purely enjoyable. The answer was a resounding no, with a few even warning me not to read them, as their joylessness would retrospectively taint my feelings about LD. That was a flag to a bull, of course, and a friend and I decided to start with the book McMurtry wrote as a sequel.

It is, predictably, grimmer and more valedictory. The mythic West, already shown to be faded and false at the end of Dove, is really no more in The Streets of Laredo. And any book without Gus McCrae is going to be more a downer than one with him in it. The former heroes are old and failing, the new young’uns are clueless or vicious. But characters who didn’t shine in that earlier world get their due here: who knew that Pea Eye would grow to have so much self-knowledge? And women are important in this book, Lorena in particular is magnificent. The primary indigenous character, though, well, less two-dimensional than in Dove, and intended, I suspect, as a tribute, is an embarrassment, there’s no way around it.

Laredo is a violent book, much more so than Dove, verging even at times on Blood Meridian levels. It’s not a nihilistic book, though, unlike McCarthy’s, and indeed in the end a peaceable, fallible one. I loved it, and didn’t regret reading it for a second, and will give the two prequels a try soon enough.

Keum Suk Gendry-Kim, The Waiting (2021) Trans. Janet Hong (2021)

Every year on Yom Kippur, in the hours between morning services and ne’ila, when I’m too hungry and headache-y to sleep, I pick up a book that has nothing to do with work. Bonus points if it’s not too taxing, but also on the somber side. The Waiting fit the bill: a beautifully drawn and told comic about a family separated during the Korean War, and the aftermath of that trauma. Every year hundreds of people in South Korea—all of them now old, most frail—apply to meet relatives who found themselves in what became North Korea after the freezing of hostilities in the 1950s. The exchange is tightly controlled by both sides; only a handful who apply are chosen. The meetings happen at special facilities on the border: people who haven’t seen loved ones in decades are given a few hours together, an opportunity that can be almost as painful as not being selected. I knew nothing of this, and would, I’m sure, have been overwhelmed by sadness even without the somberness of the day.

Michael Frank, One Hundred Saturdays: Stella Levi and the Search for a Lost World (2022) Illus. Maira Kalman

A wonderful book, that rare thing, a Holocaust text that is as much about the world that was destroyed as the events of the destruction. In Stella Levi’s case that world was fragile to begin with, though absolutely vibrant. Only two thousand Jews lived on the island of Rhodes in 1939, and, since the island had been controlled by Italy since the end of the last war, life for the community did not change much until the Germans took over in September 1943. (Which isn’t to say the Italians leveled no strictures on the Jewish population: in 1938, for example, Jews were expelled from the universities.) Almost the entire population, save a handful who could claim Turkish citizenship, were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944. Only 150 returned. And most of those were unwilling to live in Rhodes again: a community that had flourished for over 2000 years, and in its final, Sephardic incarnation since the 16th century, was gone.

Stella Levi, born in 1923 as the youngest of seven children to a merchant family, is one of the last people alive who experienced life in the Juderia, the Jewish quarter of Rhodes, a place where people knew their Greek and Turkish neighbours, did business with them, lived in harmony, but mostly ignored them; it was inward-focused life, and, until the arrival of the Italians, resistant to modernity.

Michael Frank met Levi one evening in 2015 when, arriving late for a talk at the Italian cultural center in New York, he dropped into the only available seat. The elegant woman next to him asked him where he was coming from in such a rush. His weekly French lesson, Frank replied, to which Levi replied, Would you like to know how French saved my life?

The short answer was that in Auschwitz, where she and her entire family and community had been deported, no one had ever met Judaeo-Spanish speakers. They were met with consternation, from the perpetrators and other victims alike. Did she know Yiddish? Polish? German? No, no, no. French? Yes, French she knew—which meant that she was placed with women from France and Belgium, women who knew enough of those other languages to help themselves, and by extension, Levi, get by.

The full answer took longer to uncover. Over six years, Frank would arrive with pastries at Levi’s apartment most Saturday mornings and listen, with occasional questions, as Levi felt her way into telling her life story. Her many reservations about doing so are at the heart of the book: Levi, who had kept these experiences to herself, rightly feared being reduced to an Auschwitz survivor. In Frank she found the right teller: careful, receptive, deferential, but no pushover. Their pas-de-deux is a lovely love story. Levi herself, you might already have guessed, is a remarkable person, with plenty of wisdom but no life lessons, if you know what I mean.

As if this book weren’t awesome enough, it also has illustrations by the great Maira Kalman. They are of course stunning. I read this book from the library, and I may need to get my own copy, and I never say that. An end-of-year title, for sure.

Jessica Au, Cold Enough for Snow (2022)

Disquieting, beautiful novella about an Australian woman who takes her mother on a trip to Japan. They walk around Tokyo, have dinner, visit a bookshop, attend an art exhibition. It all sounds nice enough, and the narrator’s attentiveness makes the journey vivid but not fetishistic. Yet the more I read, the more uneasy I became. In the guise of being helpful, the narrator in fact bullies her mother, insists upon having things her own way, force-marches the old woman through a series of sites and visits she has no particular interest in. Riley’s My Phantoms is getting all the love, but in the Bad-Daughter sweepstakes, Au takes the crown. Her control is impressive and I’m excited for her next book. [Attention, spoiler alert! I know some readers say the mother has in fact already died, that the narrator is accompanying a ghost, and I see where they’re coming from. I suppose I just don’t want this reading to be true: it seems less interesting to me.]

Namwali Serpell, Stranger Faces (2020)

I read the first pages of Serpell’s book-length essay online last spring and impulsively ordered it for my composition class this fall, since I planned to do a unit on writing about photographs. Those pages were so good! Serpell brilliantly close-reads the sentence “Look at me”; I imagined working through these pages with my class, using it to confirm the practice we’d already have done in learning to paying attention. I couldn’t wait to read the rest of the book, which was bound to be just as good.

Well.

It’s fine. A little labored. I appreciate Serpell’s insistence that we value so-called strange or other faces—those faces, the ones we are inclined to turn away from, have more to tell us about what it means to be human than any others. She’s good on the various writers and filmmakers she writes about (Joseph Merrick, Hannah Crafts, Alfred Hitchcock, and Werner Herzog), though too inclined to use puns and riffs structure her analyses. She’s most interesting in her final chapter on non-artistic practices, especially emojis and gifs (which prompted a class discussion in which I learned that only olds use gifs). Stranger Faces is like one of those restaurants where only the appetizers and desserts are any good.

Less good, in fact, not at all good, was the class I read it with. Probably the most challenging group I’ve ever taught. The book, I realized, wasn’t really pitched right for the class (that’s on me): not enough about photography per se, and too difficult, despite its reasonably straightforward prose, for the group. Pretty sure some of them didn’t read it, or read it quickly (that’s on them).

In a different context I might feel differently about the book, but I still think I’d find it underwhelming.

Andrea Barrett, The Air We Breathe (2007)

Old-fashioned novel about a tuberculosis sanitarium in the Adirondacks during WWI. Wealthy patients live in what are called cure cottages run by private families. Poor patients, mostly recent immigrants from Europe, are sent as wards of the state to a public facility. Written mostly in the months after 9/11 (Barrett apparently started a fellowship at the NYPL on September 10th), the novel compares the war against tuberculosis with the patriotic fever whipped up as America prepared to enter the war, concerns that became newly relevant as she sat down to write. In each case, a “pure,” “healthy” body politic defined itself by ejecting an “impure” “unhealthy” other.

A wealthy man, manager of a munition factory, decides he will bring culture to the sanitarium’s residents by starting a weekly conversation group. What starts as a way for him to dilate on his passion for paleontology becomes something more inspiring—and dangerous. As the patients, many of whom have skills and knowledge unsuspected by the officials and orderlies who see them as unwashed immigrants, share the most important parts of themselves, larger passions intrude. All of this occurs against a backdrop of wartime jingoism, industrial production, and labour unrest. And of course, people fall in (almost always unrequited) love. The rich man loves a nurse who loves a patient who loves another nurse who is taken under the wing of a female scientist, the facility’s x-ray technician. The political and emotional tensions amp up; terrible things happen.

I loved this book. Sitting outside on the back steps in the mild weather on my Fall Break when I should have been doing other things, I delighted in its novelistic sweep, its warmth, its intelligence, and its deft use of narrative voice (Barrett’s choice to swerve between close third person and the first-person plural in which the patients speak as one impresses). I started by saying this is an old-fashioned book, but like a lot of old-fashioned books it offers a lot of surprises.

My first Barrett, but not my last.

Kate Zambreno, To Write as if Already Dead (2021)

Rebecca selected this for the October episode of One Bright Book. Not something I would have read otherwise; that’s one of the pleasures of the podcast. To Write as if Already Dead is Zambreno’s effort to write about Hervé Guibert’s To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, a roman-à-clef about the narrator’s AIDS diagnosis and friendship with Michel Foucault. My halfhearted plan to read the Guibert first came to naught, but I didn’t sense (and my cohosts confirmed) that having done so would have made much difference. Zambreno tells us enough of what we need to know about the writer and his most famous work, the one she circles around in her own book. She’s supposed to be writing an appreciation of Friend, but she struggles with the task, asking herself why she isn’t writing about David Wojnarowicz, whom she actually likes more than Guibert, but the bulk of the book, fortunately, isn’t about her inability to write her book. Instead it’s composed in two sections: one a “novella” about a first-person narrator who is surely Zambreno and the complicated, envious relationship she had with another female writer back in the days when blogging was a going concern (and not just something a few us old heads persist in doing), the other a set of notes written in response to (usually in the widest sense of the term) Guibert’s text. I could discern no tonal or stylistic differences between the two parts—which maybe is the point?—and in general rubbed against the book at every turn.

Reading Zambreno, hearing my cohosts’ quite different response to the book, feeling puzzled at my resistance to this book and others like it, I wondered not for the first time what it is about autofiction that doesn’t do much for me. I worry that I’m missing out—if this is the defining literature of the day, what would it mean to be, at best, ambivalent about it? My uncertainty sent me back to one of the passages that stayed with me, in which Zambreno writes, in the voice of a friend, a friend she can name, to whom she in fact dedicates the book, a friend different than the complicated, bad friend of the first part of the book, a friend who has indeed saved her (intellectual) life. The friend writes that

she has been reading contemporary autofiction in translation, Knausgaard, Éduoard Louis, Annie Ernaux. I’m making a study of coherence, she writes me. The extreme confidence of these writers, in the status of their art form, she writes. I’m obsessed with cracking the code of this security.

The cracked mirror of this passage feels like a key to Zambreno’s book, which enacts a struggle with coherence, offers itself as modest, the opposite of confident, unsure what her art form even is, or if it is art. Can a set of notes be art? Maybe the only time I cracked a smile while reading this book was when Zambreno, writing, I think, to the same friend, worries that Guibert and his coterie (Foucault in particular, who, after all, couldn’t stand Susan Sontag) would despise her. Who is she anyway? “I’m just a mom on a couch!” she wails, in not quite mock despair.

But that mom on the couch writes books that many of the best readers I know thrill to. Like other writers of autofiction, she seems to have taken up Barthes’s cry for books that offer “the novelistic without the novel” (throwing away the supposedly ungainly crutches of character and plot). Perhaps I am hopelessly devoted to what he calls “the readerly,” the classic text, replete to the point of self-satisfaction with meaning. (Viz my thoughts on Barrett.) Yet I can’t for the life of me see what the relation between the two parts of Zambreno’s book is supposed to be, or if it would matter if their order was reversed. The passage about autofiction seems implies that Zambreno, if her friend speaks for her, is similarly unsure. Or maybe the point is that it’s not Zambreno, but her friend, who feels this way. Is coherence—here a stand-in for the idea of aesthetic form—a plausible or laudable goal anymore? Or is it one of those things you can’t escape, in the way that Barthes, who haunts Zambreno’s book as much as he did Guibert’s life, put it in Writing Degree Zero: even the absence of style is a style?

The big questions might be insoluble, but thank god there’s always gossip, bitchiness, being catty. Guibert loved all of those things, and Zambreno traffics in them too, a little. Yet I found her anger more convincing than her snark. That anger is directed at economic life in America today: shitty insurance plans; he risks of pregnancy that are made more dangerous than they have to be by the forced precarity of so much work, like her adjunct teaching; the struggle for childcare and the way being a parent, especially a mother, in a society that pays lip-service to that labour without doing anything to make it bearable, saps the self and makes you hate everything and everyone. [As I revise these words, I read of a GoFundMe campaign to help Zambreno and her family escape an apartment where illegal levels of lead paint have harmed her young children. Heartbreaking. Infuriating.]

As much as I wish it were otherwise, I must confess that To Write as if Already Dead left me cold. Coming back to the book six weeks after reading it [when I first drafted this piece], I find I have things to say. But I’ve barely thought about it once since we recorded the podcast. Do you ever find yourself out of synch with other readers, including ones you respect a lot? What do you do then?

Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (1814)

The greatest books are the hardest to write about, especially months after the fact. What can I say? It’s Mansfield Park, it’s incredible! Honestly, despite the autumnal pleasures of Persuasion, I have to plump for MP as the Austen MVP. True, I’ve yet to read Northanger Abby but surely that’s not taking the award. I think it was Jenny Davidson who said that Mansfield is the great novel of graduate school, or the one that graduate students are most likely to identify with, being as it is about someone who lives on the sufferance of more powerful people. Fanny Price, c’est moi. (I’m no grad student anymore, but it’s taking me a lifetime to get out from under that mindset.)

Let me just rhapsodize/free associate a little. I’ll start with the characters. Tom Bertram, what a scoundrel, what else could he come to but a bad end? Maria and Julia, ugh. Edmund, oof, tough one, I mean he’s kindly, he really is, even when he can’t see what’s in front of him—but how can that relationship work? (Austen is nicely ambivalent about this in the last chapter.) Lady Bertram, greatest of all time. She leant Fanny Chapman! Pretty damn nice of her! Pug! Wonderful Pug! Sir Thomas, I kind of dug him even though I don’t think that shows me in much of a good light. Aunt Norris, what a piece of work, hiss boo! The Prices, bad fucking news, I knew it the moment they came on the scene.

The chapters in Portsmouth, in the crowded, absentmindedly loving, all at sixes-and-sevens house, such good stuff! The scene in the ha ha, tremendous suspense, perfect allegory for the perils of interpretation! All the stuff about theatre, preposterous and yet compelling: sometimes we get so into something that our passion becomes a problem. And Fanny, oh Fanny! What’s not to love?

Georges Simenon, Maigret and the Ghost (1964) Trans. Ros Schwartz (2018)

One of Maigret’s colleagues is shot dead. Turns out he’d been doing some off-the-books stakeout work. He’d been acting like a man who was on to something big. He’d never been a great cop, was always looking for a case that could really make him. Looks like he found it—but then it found him, as it were. Maigret investigates—as does Madame Maigret, who’s quite a presence here (they have a memorable lunch together), for she must console the dead cop’s widow, whom she doesn’t much like. There’s a lot more by-the-book police work than usual in a Maigret. Which I liked. I managed to sneak a few hours in the backyard with this book on a work day. I liked that even more.

Mark Haber, Saint Sebastian’s Abyss (2022)

Having had the chance to hang out with Mark a couple of times in the last months, I’d like to think of him as a friend, and so I can’t be objective here. But I’ll say that this story of two art historians, who start as comrades and end as enemies, after falling out over how to interpret the masterpiece of a (fictive) Flemish master, and indeed how to interpret at all, seems to start as a Bernhard or Albahari pastiche, but rises to become a moving depiction of mortality.

Lan Samantha Chang, The Family Chao (2022)

I don’t read much American literary fiction, a lot of it seems worthy and labored. And long! Takes ages to read those books, who has time for that? And who could be more at the center of American literary fiction today than Lan Samantha Chang? She directs the Iowa Writer’ Workshop, ferchissake! But this book, this book I loved. The Chaos have ended up in small town Wisconsin, where their restaurant has been embraced by all. Big success: hard work, enough money, three sons, what could be better? Well, a few things. The sons have been given expensive educations that they have variously squandered or made good on or are just setting out on. Dagou has become a chef and come back home. He’s a good chef, maybe a great chef, but that’s not what this restaurant needs. Ming works in finance in New York, cutting himself to the bone to be perfect. Baby James is a floundering pre-med who wants to make everyone happy. Winnie, the matriarch, has left her husband and moved into a monastery. And Leo, the patriarch, continues to dangle the prize of inheritance in front of his sons, especially his eldest, while relentlessly mocking them. He’s a shit, is Leo. When he gets locked into the old walk-in freezer that he has refused to get up to code and dies a cold, lonely death, everyone is shocked, but maybe also a little relieved. Except then Dagou is charged with murder. The family rallies around him even as the community recoils. A lot of secrets get spilled, especially a last-minute one that I didn’t see coming.

The Family Chao riffs on The Brothers Karamazov. I read the Dostoyevsky too long ago and with too little attention to be sure. But the comparison comes up in the novel itself, through salacious media interest, Chang thereby signaling that this shared structure shouldn’t be taken too seriously.

A fine novel about belonging with plenty of melodrama and narrative drive and some really mouthwatering dinner scenes—and one that is… not.

I had the pleasure of meeting Chang at the Six Bridges Literary Festival—she is brisk, smart, a little uninterested in others; this, her third novel, deserves its plaudits and more.

Elmore Leonard, Pronto (1993)

Since I’m doing this all out of order, check out my November review of its sequel to get a sense of what Pronto is like. This wasn’t bad—I most enjoyed how the main character shifts from likeable rogue to pain-in-the-ass loafer. Unusual.

Robert Houle, Red is Beautiful, 1970

Oscar Hokeah, Calling for a Blanket Dance (2022)

At a powwow in Oklahoma, the emcee calls for a blanket dance for his nephew, Ever, a single parent of three young children who has recently lost his job. Ever’s great-aunt watches with pride:

I’ve seen many blanket dances in my day, growing up Gkoi, but there was something especially heartbreaking about a single parent down on their luck. Many of us, most of us, could see ourselves in Ever, like we had either been where he was or feared we’d end up there. We were taught to give or else more would be taken. Streams of people walked into the arena, while drumbeats and voices filled Red Buffalo Hall. We crumpled bills in our hands and tossed them on to the blanket. We stood next to Ever and has three kids and danced alongside. Must have been a good thirty people out there. The line of people made a half circle around the drum. Ever and his kids stood to one side with the Pendleton blanket spread in front of them. Some gourd dancers moved through the arena, while the singers’ heavy and low voices carried through our bodies. We danced, the way Kiowas danced, when called by our people, by our ancestors, to help each other heal.

To help each other heal. That’s what Oscar Hokeah wrote in my copy of his book when he signed it for me, after the panel I moderated at the local literary festival. As with The Family Chao—Chang shared the bill with Hokeah—I wouldn’t have read Calling for a Blanket Dance if I hadn’t agreed to run the session. And that would have been a loss. This linked-story-collection-cum-novel is equally funny and full of hurt. Set in two towns in eastern Oklahoma, the book concerns the Geimausaddle family, part Cherokee, part Kiowa, part Mexican (all aspects of the writer’s own background). Hokeah, a real mensch, works for Indian Child Welfare in Oklahoma, experience that surely informed some of the most moving parts of the book. “Sometimes a blanket dance can fill up your spirit, and this was one of those moments,” the great-aunt concludes. I felt the same way about this debut.

Frédéric Dard, The Gravediggers’ Bread (1956) Trans. Melanie Florence (2018)

My memory of this is that it nods to Lost Illusions by way of Simenon, but I’ve basically forgotten all about it.

Good reading month, eh? McMurtry, Frank, Au, Barrett, Austen. And a bunch of others that were also worth reading. Talk me down on the autofiction thing, friends. Or do you agree?

Scott Lambridis’s Year in Reading, 2022

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

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

Fantišek Kupka, The Guy, 1910

Every year I have a goal of reading 52 books. This year I read 111. Here’s the top 10, in the order I finished them. 

1. Civilizations, by Laurent Binet (trans. Sam Taylor)

I finished Civilizations in the first week of 2022, on the heels of last year’s top 10 winner, HHhH, by the same author, wondering if his narrative magic would translate from a true story about an architect of the Holocaust to the boundlessness of invented history. Civilizations focuses on five key moments in Western civilization, and in particular the Spanish defeat of the Inca, and turns them on their heads. The Inca survive then defeat the Spanish, come to Europe, usurp the Holy Roman Empire and strip power from the Habsburgs, and became the dominant force of the Western world. The Incan leader Atahualpa worships Machiavelli, dismisses the Christian god as “not a serious being” (compared to the Incan sun god), bans the Inquisition, and leads Europe towards a more tolerant and agrarian society, only to be ultimately thwarted by the Aztec, who’ve made their way across the Atlantic too. In a coda tale, Quixote tilts at Aztec pyramids. 

My favorite falsely remembered (as usual) moment is the Inca rejecting Luther’s nailed treatises; the actual scene is of Thomas More and Erasmus exchanging letters about the nailing of the “Ninety-Five Theses of the Sun” to the wooden doors of a German Incan temple instead of Luther’s. In either case, the Reformation is canceled, and Henry’s VIII decides to become a sun worshipper. It’s hilarious, deadly serious, and riveting. There’s something special about a well-done historical reimagining, like watching your favorite books turned into films that match the artistry. There’s a joy enough in recognition; but a secondary joy in watching a new artwork created before your eyes from the pieces of the old. I’m not great at retaining history, so it was hard for me to tell what was based on fact and what was made up, but it didn’t matter. It’s on the list because, like a friend once said of the timeless Borges, Binet’s non-fiction reads like a great tale, while the more implausible the fiction the more true it seems.  

2. When We Cease To Understand the World, by Benjamín Labatut (trans. Adrian Nathan West)

In writing these reviews I discovered a theme: reimaginings! Lives, events, artworks reimagined, sometimes attempting to stick close to “fact,” sometimes not at all. When We Cease To Understand the World is the former (mostly), in which Labatut imagines critical scientific discoveries of the 20th century that had tragic effects on either society, or the discoverer. The opening essay/story (the line is blurry here) is the hook, a breakneck tracking of the invention of Prussian blue as a novel paint color prized by Van Gogh and a host of luminaries to the deaths wracked by industrialization of nitrogen-based fertilizers, and ultimately to the cyanide pills hoarded by Nazi soldiers. The remaining stories are more portraits than compressed timeline, but no less impressive, in particular the trials of Heisenberger (uncertainty!) and Schrödinger (the cat!), and the conflict of each’s mad grandeur at having faced, in their own way, the terrible ambiguity of the quantum lying at the void upon which all reality is said to stand. We stare, with these poor trifling geniuses, into the void not above, but within. There’s a Lovecraftian effect of the seers describing the indescribable horrors of mathematical infinity, but, as with W.G. Sebald, it is less these abstractions and more the nuts-and-bolts details of the mundane that captivate and disturb. Labatut takes his time to add flesh and blood to characters known principally through textbooks, and it doesn’t matter what is real or invented (as I’ve argued to my other book club members): truth remains. 

3. Parable of the Blind, by Gert Hofmann (trans. Chritopher Middleton)

Some books shine just by making you giggle from start to finish. Here Hofmann dramatizes the famous painting of the blind leading the blind, following a group of sightless paupers who must make their way to the site where a mysterious artist awaits to paint them in the act of tumbling, one after another, into a ditch. 

I read this on a ski trip with my dad and 7-year-old daughter, right at the point of maximum friction between my desire to make him proud of the daughter he rarely saw, and my desire to be free of needing his approval for how I was raising her. I welcomed Parable as pure absurdist comedy, which is all it would be in anyone’s else’s hands. In Hofmann’s hands though, our empathy is not so easily incited; we must wrestle, page after excruciating page, between pity and desire, with the question of whether we actually want this senseless gaggle to fulfill their humiliation, and only now do I see that it offered far more to me in those few days with my scowling father and crying child than simply escape—an exercise in compassion for all of us who walk the line between our pride and our shame. [Ed. – Nicely put!]

4. The Employees, by Olga Ravn (trans. Martin Aitken)

This, this is just what I want from science fiction—and yet it’s hard to explain why, or even what it is. Let’s list the facts. Novella-thin, tiny chapters, a collection of interviews, not necessarily in the correct order, with workers (both human and android) on a spaceship. Each chapter is such a strange jewel, it’s almost like a collection of connected flash fiction. The narrative thread that holds them together is as inscrutable as the objects the employees describe, those they’ve collected in their travels and are attempting to study. The objects are never described directly, only in relief, and mostly by their effects, creating a creeping unease as the objects begin to inspire profound emotional reactions. Everyone seems to slowly go mad, though why is unclear, particularly without even chronology to rely on. A lesser book would lose its way without clear trajectory, but The Employees creeps ever forward to existential disaster, held taut by the hope of uncovering the nature of its mysteries (objects, events, participants, interviewers). The sensation is of being an alien observer looking down through a microscope on a world we know we’ll never understand, without being able to look away. Is that enough to get you to read it? [Ed. – Yep.]

5. In the Time of the Butterflies, by Julia Álvarez

The first entry on this year’s list that’s part of my three-year literary globetrotting trek in which I’m reading a book by an author from every country of the world [Ed. – Hmm born in NY tho…], this dramatization of true events during Trujillo’s dictatorship in the Dominican Republic tells the story of the Mirabal Sisters, whose murders helped strengthen the resistance. The story is told through the Mirabals’ points of view: activist Minerva who joins the resistance, naive Maria Therese who follows without really knowing what she’s doing, tragically devout Patria who can’t escape her fate, and anxious homebody Dedé who ultimately carries the guilt of survival and the hollow responsibility of her prescience. Butterflies offers what I expected to find when setting off to read authors from countries whose voices I don’t usually hear: a glimpse into the mundane particulars of a culture’s life, and an authentic account of its myths and histories. What I should probably also have expected is that the literature beyond the US/European borders centers on the effects of colonialism, dictatorships, or both. Butterflies is no exception, but it is an exemplar. The narrative gives voice to each of the Mirabals as it advances across their lives, shifting deftly at moments of tension between their perspectives as they negotiate their obligations to survival, family, resistance, and each other. It is a rich telling of a heartbreaking story of a fascinating family suffering in the attempt to thrive under oppression: a story we seem to need to hear again and again. And the cherry on top is a film version with Salma Hayek and Edward James Olmos, which sticks to just one butterfly’s perspective, but is lovely and at least faithful enough to let you relive their story one more time. 

6. Temporary People, by Deepak Unnikrishnan

In the inscription I wrote on the inside flap of this book, a Christmas gift to my dad’s girlfriend Valerie, a Jewish French-Moroccan who first won me over years ago by giving me the gift of a t-shirt featuring Camus’s The Stranger, I described this collection of linked short stories as what Kafka might have written if he’d been a blue-collar immigrant in the United Arab Emirates, and had a bit more humor. [Ed. – More humour?!?]

Unnikrishnan’s temporary people are the gig workers of the Arabian peninsula, making up the majority of the UAE’s population, imported with oil wealth to build the infrastructure of nouveau royal white-collar civilization, though without any hope of citizenship or reprieve from the fear of deportation, and Unnikrishnan explores their temporariness in all its literal forms and magical transmogrifications. 

Observe: workers are literal tools tossed from construction sites when broken or unneeded or just by accident, while a young woman attempts to put what she can back together. A sultan harvests crops of perfect laborers, only to have them die off twelve years in. A tongue flees its body and verbs flee their sentences into lives of their own. There’s a sexually abusive elevator. My greedy dad must’ve stolen Valerie’s book since he texted me one night: “life of cockroaches, one decides 2 walk on 2 legs and talk… while boy sprays bug killer” and a string of ROTFLs. The invention never tapers: no clunkers here. Each story is a world of its own, full of sarcasm, playfulness, satire, anger, and love. 

7. An African in Greenland, by Tete-Michel Kpomassie (trans. James Kirkup)

In April we sold our 40-acre olive farm in California [Ed. — !] and spent the summer homeless and traveling in the US and Europe, finally landing further north in the PNW in September. I read this bizarre memoir at the start of those travels, snapping pics of passages highlighting the delightfully absurd but endearing travels of the first African to arrive in Greenland and experience Inuit culture. As a child in Togo, Kpomassie encounters in a library a book on Greenland, and the idea of such a stark icy landscape so fascinates him in contrast with the oppressive heat and dust of his native Africa that he begins a lifelong mission to travel there, no matter how long or by what means it takes, and after making his way, year by year, from Northern Africa to Scandinavia, one odd job at a time, he finally steps off the boat on its shores, much to the shock of the locals.  

What follows is not just a fascinating account of local culture, and history of (no surprise here) Arctic colonialism, or a collection of small town conflicts, hilariously endearing personalities, and environmental trials as Kpomassie floor-surfs from family to family while learning to ice fish, dogsled, navigate a featureless landscape, cook ice, survive on raw skin and fat, and avoid death by freezing in a much wider variety of forms than I expected (snapping a frozen spinal cord?!), but also a tense existential journey of an unlikely and joyful narrator absolutely in love with all of it and needing more, needing more cold (!!), even more cold, desiring nothing but to move ever northward, into deeper and deeper desolation, without any clear explanation of why. And all the while Kpomassie’s natural sense of rhythm and movement keeps the pages turning. 

I enjoyed this book so much that after I turned its last page and tucked it into my suitcase I felt a growing longing to return to it that grew stronger with each temporary destination—not necessarily to the hilarious little social hierarchies enacted by the Danes and native Greenlanders, or to the phantasmagoria of ice survival techniques—but perhaps just to get a little bit closer to that single-minded calling of where home is, so that it might rub off and guide me too.  

8. Saint Sebastian’s Abyss, by Mark Haber 

“My job as a critic was to lay waste to the work and when the work survived, when the work was resurrected despite my attacks, when the work prevailed despite my many attempts on its life, then I had succeeded as a critic.”

I loved this book the moment I received that text-messaged quote from my friend who always discovers books before me. Abyss is at the nexus of two of my favorite micro-genres—hate lit, in which characters unleash a torrent of lushly articulated venom; and art fictions, in which we’re thoroughly convinced of the merits (or lack) of artworks that don’t exist. 

The plot is simple: two academics are obsessed with a marginally famous painting, claiming it is the greatest artwork ever completed or conceived, only they differ—grossly—in their reasons why. What follows is a 200-page argument, tracking the divergence of their careers through an escalating rivalry, culminating in a deathbed scene that does everything you want it to, without offering even a little bit of what you wanted from it. [Ed. – Good way to put it.] The telling of it, though, is half the fun, a rhythmically hypnotic repetitive syntax that aids in the forgetting that this brilliantly divisive painting and its painter do not actually exist. It’s so convincing that I was fooled yet again when I started writing these reviews, thinking it was yet another historical reimagining, like the feuds in Janet Malcolm’s In the Freud Archives instead of a novel.  

Their feud’s finale is, like all great endings, unexpected but inevitable, mysterious but complete. Haber strips away all semblance of dramatic irony, leaving the reading wondering alongside the narrator what was actually true in the life of his rival, and more importantly, what that truth means for his own hate, his love, his career, his entire life. By the end we’re as spun as that tragic narrator, but at least we can close the book. And in my case at least, instigate an argument with my own literary rival [Ed. – You… have a literary rival??] about its greatest merits that continues to this day.  

Alla Horska, Taras Shevchenko, 1960

9. Trust, by Domenico Starnone (trans. Jhumpa Lahiri)

Trust tracks a pair of relationships: a couple make a pact to keep each other’s darkest secret, only to break up soon after; then he marries another, has a family, a career, etc., all while wondering if his secret has been kept and whether he should ask his ex-girlfriend about it. 

I didn’t think Trust would make the top ten. It was the last one in, edging past new books by two favorite authors, Samanta Schweblin and Werner Herzog. How? Why?! There’s no literary fireworks here, and it’s not particularly weird or even unique. Yes, I couldn’t stop reading it, gobbling it down in 3 days, and was sad to finish, and yes, there’s plenty of narrative tension in finding out what our protagonist’s terrible secret is (spoiler: you don’t), wondering if he’ll confront her and potentially cause their agreement to unravel, and sure, there are a couple interesting shifts of point of view towards the end, but that’s not it.  

It’s tempting to invoke relatability, that terrible term I try so hard to reject in fiction. I couldn’t help but recognize familiar patterns of dialogue, invocations and accusations that were eerily familiar in the long dark journey to reestablish harmony in my own marriage this past year, and I admit I wondered throughout whether I was only really enthralled because of how crisply he tracked the nuances of growing resentment in the relationships, and the erosion of, well, trust. It is not the relatability though, I promise (partially to myself), but the precision. Relatability is an excuse for liking something for the ease in which you can enter into the world. What’s rare and astonishing for books like Trust is how they unexpectedly linger in your mind, long after you finish them, and even enlarge. You can’t stop thinking about them because, as Peter Orner once described the best of fiction, these characters have so much flesh and blood it hurts to even call them characters, and when they’re gone it feels like something died. 

10. Death of Somoza, by Claribel Alegría (trans. Darwin J. Flakoll)

Native Nicaraguan Alegría does the unthinkable in this thin volume by connecting (via fav Cortazar!) with a group of real-life assassins in order to tell a behind-the-scenes account of political revolt. Through interviews with the anonymized assassins, we’re handed a vivid thriller about the year-long planning and executing of the murder of brutal Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle after he flees to Asunción, Paraguay in 1980. 

The group moves across South and Central American borders coordinating, training, supplying, surveilling, establishing temporary identities, and eventually, after bazooka-ing Somoza, escaping. It’s an insider view of the socio-political climate of the time, connecting the countries, dictatorships, revolutions and counter-revolutions, which also managed to enrich the effect of related South/Central American books on my around-the-world tour, adding context to all (special shout-out to the bizarrely accomplished Stroessner regime in Paraguay). 

Reading Death of Somoza feels taboo, as if the CIA is about to knock on your door for possessing a how-to on political assassination. During the opening pages, moral questions arise of what rights this group had to “bring Somoza to justice,” acting, as they did, as judge, jury, and executioner, but as commando members’ personalities emerge alongside their humanity, those questions become insignificant. Instead, you take your place alongside Ramón and the rest of his crew feeling the same inescapable need to wipe Somoza off the earth, and the terrible anxiety of responsibility—each burdened to care more for success than survival.