Tag Archives: Vladimir Nabokov

Brad Bigelow’s Year in Reading, 2022

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

Today’s reflection on a year in reading is by Brad Bigelow. Brad writes http://NeglectedBooks.com and edits the Recovered Books series for Boiler House Press.

Charlotte Salomon, No. 134 from Life? Or Theater? (1941 – 42)

When I finished college forty-some years ago, I started writing down every book I read in a little spiral notebook. I kept up this habit for over twenty years and then stopped for some forgotten reason. Since starting The Neglected Books Page, most of my reading has been of long-forgotten books and most of these I’ve recorded by writing about them on the site. But as time goes on, I’m falling ever further behind in this writing. And to make matters worse for the purposes of this piece, I keep no record of my non-neglected reading. So, this is a fairly unreliable review of my reading in 2022, but I hope it’s worth your time nonetheless.

(It’s a good thing I never went into marketing.) [Ed. – No kidding!]

Among my neglected reads, easily the most memorable was Charlotte Salomon’s Life or Theater? Although Salomon told her life through paintings, it operates at an unforgettable level of intensity. There are at least three narratives winding through the hundreds of paintings in this book: the psychological breakdown of her family; her own troubled emotional development; and the trauma of Germany, and of German Jews in particular, with the rise of Nazism and Hitler. As I wrote back in April, “the book is presented as an art book – large and very heavy with its hundreds of pages of full-color images. But I think this does the book as a book some disservice. For it can also be seen as a graphic novel.” And I think it would benefit from being repackaged as a graphic novel, since today’s readers are now so accustomed not just to the language of graphic novels but to the very idea of considering them as literature. [Ed. – Absolutely. Her drawings look like they come from a graphic novel, too, as your post with its generous illustrations suggests.]

Easily the most enjoyable was Madeleine Masson’s memoir, I Never Kissed Paris Goodbye.Though we know from its opening line—“It was a beautiful day in June 1940”—that this story will have a sad ending, most of Masson’s account of Paris in the 1930s is as frothy and delightful as a glass of champagne. It’s full of the infidelity, excess, and manic energy of Jean Renoir’s classic film The Rules of the Game, and highly recommended to anyone who loves that film. [Ed. – You’re trying to tell me there are people who don’t love that film? Nonsense! This book sounds excellent, BTW.]

My deepest archaeological dig of the year was locating a copy of Carola Ernst’s Silhouettes crèpusclaires, and then dusting off my French to read it, based on nothing more than a brief reference in a magazine from 1921. This modest account of the journey Ernst took in the Fall of 1914 to return a French officer blinded in an early battle of the First World War to his family is a touching portrait of a world in the midst of a radical transformation. The pair are able to travel via Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, and France thanks more than anything to a spirit of chivalry that had not yet been destroyed in the industrial machinery of the war.

Another highlight was the chance to spend several weeks with some of the many volumes of poetry penned by Raymond Souster, the bard of Toronto. Souster’s longevity and disciplined dedication to his art enabled him to amass an account of one city’s life that may be unparalleled in the 20th century. Souster lived and wrote to the age of 91, worked in the same bank for over 40 years, was married to the same woman for over 60 years, and, as their only child, cared for his parents until they died in their late nineties. Though Souster claims he never wrote any great work (“I’m not sure I’m ready for epics/there are far too many little songs/the rest have left unsung”), the body of his work is sort of an epic in itself. [Ed. – Fascinating! I’ve even lived in Toronto and have never heard of Souster.] Someone needs to go through the thousands of pages of Souster’s poetry and distill it into an autobiography along the lines of what Ruth Limmer did with Louise Bogan’s work in Journey Around My Room.  

Finally, I must mention Nina Warner Hooke’s Biff and Netta trilogy: Striplings (1934); Close of Play (1936); and Own Wilderness (1938). These novels follow a half-brother and sister, Biff and Netta, from their early to mid-teens, as their already unconventional and decaying family collapses completely. The first volume received tremendous critical praise and was most commonly compared to the work of P. G. Wodehouse. Warner Hooke said she had no plans for further books at first, but when you finish the trilogy, its narrative arc seems almost predestined. She could no more leave off her story than you could get off a rollercoaster after the first drop. It is deeply strange, not solely because of its theme of incest, and deserves much closer examination than I was able to give it in my post. At 900-some pages, it’s far too long to expect anyone to ever reissue it unless some editor finds the courage to do some substantial posthumous abridgement, but it’s a work that I continue to process months after finishing it.

I tend to rely on audiobooks for my non-neglected reading. For years, I had a daily commute of over an hour each way and I racked up thousands of hours of listening, which enabled me to catch up on many classics I’d skipped. Now, my commute is just a staircase [Ed. – Bliss!], but I still get in an hour or so of listening each day. One of my projects was to go back through the works of Thornton Wilder, who is arguably both recognized and neglected. Aside from “Our Town”, most folks have only a vague notion of what he did, and even the once-ubiquitous The Bridge of San Luis Rey is not a familiar title. Wilder is the only writer to have received a Pulitzer in two genres, fiction and drama, has several volumes in the Library of America, and most of his work never falls out of print for long. I wrote about The Eighth Day, his most ambitious—and, to be honest, most flawed—novel years ago, and loved Heaven’s My Destination and Theophilus North when I first read them. This year, I went back and listened to all his novels in chronological order (an exercise I highly recommend for novelists who particularly interest you), starting with The Cabala.

The experience was both a revelation and a disappointment. I found several of the books suffered from an earnestness that became particularly apparent when considered back-to-back. On the other hand, I was astonished at the innovation of The Ides of March, his novel of Caesar’s last months. It’s a collage of fictional letters, excerpts from actual Latin texts, and even graffiti from the streets of Rome in the first century BC. Why is this book not acclaimed as a milestone in the fictional form? [Ed. – Sounds like time for a reissue?]

Aside from Wilder, most of my listening has been focused on Russian history and literature. I’ve long been fascinated by Russia, even though I’ve deliberately avoided my few opportunities to visit there. There’s something about the darkness of so much of the Russian experience that seems to reassure me that my own life really isn’t all that bad. This might be one of the reasons that I read so many books about Stalin when I was working for the two worst bosses I’ve had to suffer. I listened to two historical surveys by Orlando Figes: A People’s Tragedy, about the Russian Revolution, which occasionally bogged down in the minutiae of political infighting, and Natasha’s Dance, which I would recommend to anyone looking for a historical context to much of the Russian art, literature, and music of the last 200+ years. There were also several biographies—Alex Christofi’s Dostoevsky in Love, Alexandra Popoff’s book on Vasily Grossman, Donald Rayfield’s Chekhov—all richly illuminating. But by far the most enjoyable and impressive listen was Nabokov’s The Gift, which managed to weave so many of the threads from these other books together and remind me yet again of the fact that Nabokov worked at a level miles above so many of the 20th century’s greats.

Of the more recently-published books I’ve read, few really stand out. I found a number of the more acclaimed ones forgettable and will skip over them. Although I’ve read that it’s not the place to start, I loved Annie Ernaux’s The Years, in part because it described a world very familiar to me after 18 years of living in Belgium and working closely with many French men and women. And Gwendolyn Riley’s My Phantoms could have described some of our neighbors on the little street in Norwich where my wife and I lived for two years. [Ed. – Yikes!] I wish I could say that the books I’ve read by American writers were half as evocative, but I guess I’m still getting used to a country that’s so different from the one we left just before 9-11.

Dod Procter, Lydia, ca. 1926

And it would be remiss of me not to mention the brightest highlight of 2022, which was the #PilgrimageTogether reading group. Starting in January, a group of us worked our way through the thirteen “chapter-volumes” of Dorothy Richardson’s masterpiece, Pilgrimage, aided by a wonderful cast of Richardson scholars who agreed to take part in our monthly discussions. I first read Pilgrimage in 2016 as part of a two-year project of reading only the work of neglected women writers (complemented by two years of only listening to audiobooks by women) and ever since have been an evangelist on its behalf. Not to denigrate Proust, but I find it astonishing that thousands of people read Remembrance of Things Past each year while Pilgrimage, which speaks directly to so many aspects of life that are still part of our everyday world today, is barely known and even less read. Like others in the group, I found Pilgrimage both so challenging and so rewarding that other books seem somehow diminished in comparison. It’s a novel I know I’ll be returning to again — and, I hope, with another group of readers. [Ed. – This is good to hear, since I regret not joining in. It would be great if you could time it with my next sabbatical, thanks.] Until then, I encourage folks to take up Pilgrimage and spend some months with Dorothy Richardson’s insistently individualistic Miriam Henderson, aided by the Reading Pilgrimage website. [Ed. – Thanks for the post, Brad, and congratulations on that site. What a resource!]

Nicie Panetta’s Year in Reading, 2021

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

Today‘s reflection on a year in reading is by Nicie Panetta (@nicie_panetta). Nicie lives north of Boston with her husband, their frisky orange cat, and her lazy but lovable paint pony. She used to have some empty space on her bookshelves. That is no longer the case.

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

Richard Diebenkorn, Ocean from a Window, 1959

The Anthropocene

Almost a year ago, I started a weekly newsletter called Frugal Chariot. I write about books that I believe have something special to say about the troubled role of humans in the non-human world. I guess you could say that the fate of the earth and all that dwell within its embrace is my subject, but that books written by humans are my vehicle. “How frugal is the Chariot/ that bears a Human soul.” Thank you, Dorian for a chance to reflect here on my reading as a whole in 2021. [Ed – The pleasure is all mine!]

From the standpoint of literary merit and depth of meaning, my favorite book on the Anthropocene, which I haven’t yet written about for the newsletter, is Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez. I ardently recommend it for the magisterial precision of his writing, for the prophetic nature of his insights, and for the great fighting heart that you can feel beating within the rather strict container of his style and tone. I did write about Lopez’s Horizon here.

From the standpoint of environmental news you can use, I would press into your hands Silent Earth: Averting the Insect Apocalypse by Dave Goulson. The author, a leading entomologist, explains carefully and without histrionics why bugs are vitally important to all life on earth, and what we do know and don’t yet know about the extent and causes of insect population declines. He also has practical suggestions for individuals and for industry and government. This is an indispensable guide for the general reader to the way that the climate and biodiversity interrelate, and it’s also full of delight and discovery.

A quick request, if I may. I would be very grateful for any suggestions that EMJ readers might have for nature, place, and climate writing (does not have to be in book form) from underrepresented geographies, marginalized communities, and Indigenous writers. [Ed. – Cherie Dimaline, The Marrow Thieves and Waubgeshig’s Moon of Crusted Snow: two novels by Indigenous Canadians, dystopian clifi that foreground indigenous ways of knowing.] I am concerned that there are not enough voices from outside the Anglosphere and outside the OECD countries getting heard. My DMs are open and my email is nicie.panetta@gmail.com. Thanks in advance.

The Thing Is . . .

Because I am starting work on a climate-related place writing project [Ed. – Ooh, tease!], I have devoted much attention over the past year to treatments of the non-human, across my reading. The books that resonated most deeply for me often had a commitment to the thing-ness of things, to quiddity, to description. What follows are just a few examples of writings that I felt were exceptional on this score. Many if not most of these books came from recommendations provided by Learned Book Folks (LBFs) on Twitter, and I am so grateful. 

Two Writers’ Memoirs

Last year I read nearly forty memoirs. [Ed. — !] Deborah Levy’s Autobiographical Trilogy truly knocked my socks off. How could I never have heard of this writer! Thank you to Rebecca Hussey, for sending her my way. In the first volume, Levy makes highly effective use of narrative shear: a simple question from a stranger causes the floor of the present to buckle and give way to the past. In the two subsequent volumes, she uses totems of the everyday to represent the new phase of her life that begins after the end of her long marriage: a shed for writing, a heater for the shed, an electric bike to get around, a green pair of shoes for walking in Paris. 

It’s the basics: food, shelter, clothing, transportation. These objects, as they appear and reappear, create a syncopated rhythm that feels so true to the way we pass through time. Levy writes well about many things, including the closeness and strangeness of friendship, the commitments of motherhood (including the commitment to let go), the practicalities of being a writer, and most of all, what it is to be awake to life. Utterly captivating is this voyage on the inland sea of her mind: 

To walk towards danger, to strike on something that might just open its mouth and roar and tip the writer over the edge was part of the adventure of language.

Another writer’s memoir that is much less well known is Blue Remembered Hills by Rosemary Sutcliff, the author of classics of historical fiction for children (including The Eagle of the Ninth). [Ed. – Just taking a moment here to remember how much that book meant to me.] Her account of growing up as an only child with chronic illness and disability is both sharp and glowing. Sutcliff’s portrait of her intense relationship with her mother is one of the best I’ve read, and the village communities of her childhood are brilliantly evoked. Heartbreak finds her, and she finds her way to a writing life. Aces. [Ed. – Sold to the man with too many books already!]

A Poet’s Playlist

Reading poetry has been a central preoccupation of my adult life. Because of my current interests and commitments, I am actually reading less poetry than I have in the past. But I did just finish Rita Dove’s Playlist for the Apocalypse, her first collection in over a decade. The book is made up of distinct groupings of poems, including an ars poetica with the poet as spring cricket, a group about American history that serves as the text for a new song cycle, A Standing Witness, and eight very flashy “angry odes.” Here’s a poem from the final, quietly personal section, Dove’s translation of perhaps the most famous German poem:

Wayfarer’s Night Song

Above the mountaintops

all is still.

Among the treetops

you can feel

barely a breath—

birds in the forest, stripped of song.

Just wait: before long

you, too, shall rest.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1776

The World Wars

A surprise. After toting things up, literature in translation accounted for nearly 40% of the books I read in 2021. I think this was due to a combustion reaction between my obsession with the period that encompasses the two world wars and the constant stream of relevant book ideas from the LBFs. [Ed. – Vowing to make this acronym take off.] Those years set the courses of my parents’ lives. My parents were born in the 1920s and died when I was young. Reading about this era keeps me in touch with them. Each of these books changed me in some small or larger way.

In poetry, I read a lot of Rilke thanks to an epistolary seminar offered by Mark Wunderlich (look for his forthcoming book on Rilke). I keep returning to Rilke’s work, in which the non-human vibrates without cease, and the moment of the poem zaps into the eternal. Prosodic whiz Don Paterson dresses the Orpheus sonnets in a new formal fabric in Orpheus: A Version of Rilke.

Enthroned one: in the ancient understanding,

You were no more than a cup with a plain rim.

But for us you are the full-blown, infinite bloom,

The wholly indefatigable thing

From “Rose” 

My parents loved the word “indefatigable.” They were activists, and it was a mark of highest esteem if they used it to characterize someone. It’s a good word to keep in your pocket. See also, “staunch.”

In fiction, Visitation by Jenny Erpenbeck (translated by Susan Bernofsky) tells the story of the strange life and dumpster-filling death of a German lake house near Berlin, across the entire twentieth century. Erpenbeck is very good with lists of ordinary stuff (building materials, bath towels, regulations), inventories that are transformed into incantantions of frightening power. As we grapple with our direction as a species, stories with non-human protagonists and with plots that extend beyond the human lifespan have much to offer. Visitation is a notable example. There is also a brilliant novel about a medieval convent in East Anglia, but I read that in 2020. [Ed. – The editor cannot help but feel attacked by this reference to That Book He is Unable to Finish. YMMV.]

Natalia Ginzburg’s essays about her family’s tragic experiences in Fascist and postwar Italy, The Little Virtues (translated by Dick Davis) was also a revelation of style for me. Her tonal restraint and the apparent simplicity of her sentences make the heavy chords truly plangent when she strikes them. “And perhaps even for learning to walk in worn-out shoes, it is as well to have dry, warm feet when we are children.” 

Salt Water by Josep Pla (translated by Peter Bush) is a travelogue of his adventures on the Spanish and French coasts in the early 20th century. This book features shipwrights, bandits, taverns, sardines, and bracing quaffs that mingle caffeine with alcohol. The book, written under house arrest and a censorship regime, might be an instruction manual for those writing in a time of rising authoritarianism. There is something to be said for going rogue, or at least knowing a few rogues. Pla says it.

Most of all, the discovery of Joseph Roth thanks to the crew at the Backlisted podcast truly made my reading year. Many EMJ readers (and certainly the editor) know his work far better than I do. [Ed. – The editor is overestimated.] But What I Saw (translated by Michael Hofman), The Hotel Years (ditto), and On the End of the World (translated by Will Stone) have set a high-water mark for me as to what is possible from a journalist writing in a short form to deadline. Roth was a Galician Jew who made it to Vienna for university, served in the Austrian army in WWI, and then moved to Berlin to write for newspapers. He also wrote fiction, including Job and The Radetsky March.

What I Saw, which collects his feuilletons about Weimar Berlin, is a book not so much of vignettes, but of micro-sagas. He makes fun of skyscrapers (“We will make ourselves comfortable among the clouds . . . They will hear the clatter of typewriters and the ringing of telephones”), visits Berlin’s refugees (“Their garments were a weird and wonderful hodgepodge of uniforms. In their eyes I saw millennial sorrow”), makes regular forays to the demimonde (“Albert’s Cellar has regulars of such fixed habits that they even have their mail sent there”), and charts the collapse of the Republic with rising alarm and grief (“It is not true that a murder is just a murder”). His farewell column of 1933, written fresh from his flight into exile in Paris, is almost unbearable reading. So many observers were blind to what Roth saw, or failed to report what they saw. All the books I have mentioned here make the case for the necessity of style, and how style gives writing access to power. Roth’s work is exemplary in this regard. I read in awe, and salute his legacy:

Month on month, week on week, day by day, hour by hour, it becomes ever more impossible to give expression to the inexpressible nature of this world. The circle of lies that the miscreants draw around their crimes paralyses the word and the writers who employ it. Yet a common obligation makes you persist to the last moment: that is to say to the last drop of ink . . .

Earbuds 

I’m gradually working my way through Juliet Stevenson’s catalog (N.B. she reads the Levy trilogy brilliantly), and she never fails to bring clarity and spirit to a text. Other major delights have been Thandiwe Newton reading Jane Eyre (I’m excited for her War and Peace), Doc Brown reading Zadie Smith’s Grand Union (underrated, I aver), Chiwetel Ljiofor’s performance of Piranesi, and Prunella Scales’ reading of The Railway Children by E. Nesbit.

Campus Duds

I read two campus novels that were cruel about women. Lucky Jim (despite one of the great hangover scenes in 20th-century literature) was chalk on a blackboard with its hatchet job on Monica Jones. Pictures of an Institution is also extravagantly mean about Mary McCarthy, who, to be fair, probably gave as good as she got. But who needs it? I’m with Pnin all day long. [Ed. – Amen!] Haven’t read Stoner yet. [Ed. – Don’t do it.]

Unclassifiable Wisdom

Alice Oswald’s Oxford Poetry Lectures on YouTube have been landmark events for me. Water, a pebble, Ainu epics: whatever the topic, she is riveting, incisively lyrical, somehow in touch with worlds beyond our ken. 

August Macke, Promenade II, 1913

2022

This year I will be paying special attention to structure, so if you have books that you think are brilliantly structured, please do be in touch.

In addition to reading for Frugal Chariot, and I have the following projects on deck:

  • Re-reads of The Iliad, The Odyssey and a few other classical texts
  • Fiction of Joseph Roth and the forthcoming biography by Keiron Pim [Ed. — Can’t wait for that one.]
  • Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage (I have to admit that I’m not wowed by Pointed Roofs so far, but I am giving it a fair hearing)
  • The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois
  • Lonesome Dove (you rave, I read!) [Ed. – Thumbs up emoji]
  • Moby Dick with #APSTogether
  • Louise Erdrich
  • Teju Cole
  • More poetry! 

I wish you all wonderful years of reading in 2022, and look forward to ongoing fellowship. May we be wholly indefatigable!

Yelena Furman’s Year in Reading, 2021

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

Today‘s reflection on a year in reading is by Yelena Furman, her first for the blog. Yelena (@YelenaFurman) lives in Los Angeles and teaches Russian literature at UCLA. She has published academic articles, book reviews in the Los Angeles Review of Books and The Baffler, and fiction in Narrative. She and Olga Zilberbourg (@bowlga) co-run Punctured Lines, a feminist blog on post-Soviet and diaspora literatures.

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

Alexander Deineka, Textile Workers, 1927

When Dorian asked me to compile my reading list for 2021, I was honored and it sounded like a lot of fun, but I did point out that everyone was going to make fun of me for how little I’d read in a year compared to how much other BookTwitter folks read in a month (including Dorian). [Ed. –Only a jerk would do this. There are jerks on Twitter, it is true. But they should at least know what they are.] I’ve always been a slow reader, and between technology, exhaustion, life in general, and now the pandemic, my concentration is shot. But as this post gives me a chance to promote works by contemporary Russian women writers that I taught this fall, the ridicule will be worth it. This list references a number of Twitter group reads in which I participated, and my sincere thanks go to their organizers, whom I hope I’ve credited correctly, and all the group members; your comments and camaraderie were wonderful parts of my reading year. Finally, there may be something I’ve left off or misremembered as having read last year, but what follows is as accurate a summary as my fried brain, and Goodreads evidence, suggest. 

Marie Benedict, The Mystery of Mrs. Christie

A gift from my mom, who knows and shares my love of detective fiction and its foremost practitioner. No one would accuse it of being an intellectual work, but this fictional account of Agatha Christie’s real-life temporary disappearance was a page-turner and good escapist fun, and who couldn’t use that in an endless pandemic. [Ed. – Amen.]

Vladimir Nabokov, Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle

On the opposite end, this one’s beyond intellectual. I could never include Ada in my Nabokov course, not because of its theme of brother-sister incest but rather because its length and complexity make it impossible to fit into an already reading-intensive syllabus. For those not dealing with syllabi restrictions, this homage to eternal love and of course literature will give your brain a definite workout (this work’s meant to be reread) and is gorgeously written and often humorous to boot. I can’t say I love it, but as always with Nabokov’s English-language novels, I am in absolute awe of his dexterity as a writer for whom English wasn’t a native tongue.

Narine Abgaryan, S neba upali tri iabloka (Three Apples Fell from the Sky, trans. Lisa Hayden)

I read this novel as part of a Twitter group read, which was, like so many others, organized by the queen of collective Twitter readings, @ReemK10. [Ed. – All hail the Queen!] I read this in Russian, while the rest of the group had @LizoksBooks’ marvelous translation. Abgaryan is a contemporary Russian-language Armenian writer, and the novel takes place in a fictionalized remote Armenian village in an unspecified historical moment. The few villagers who are left should be dying out, but as this charming and poignant novel shows, one is never too old or too isolated for life and hope. Everyone in the group loved it, and I gifted it to one of my closest friends for her birthday.

Seishi Yokomizo, The Honjin Murders (trans. Louise Heal Kawai)

My thanks to @kaggsy59 for the review of this title on her wonderful book blog, which is where I think I first heard about it. I was dying (I know) to read it, and then it arrived as a birthday gift from the same friend to whom I gifted the Abgaryan. A locked-room mystery, The Honjin Murders is the first in Yokomizo’s series with the brilliant detective Kosuke Kindaichi, who figures things out when it seems impossible to. The murders are gruesome, the story suspenseful, and the solution fantastically done. I don’t know Japanese literature and was very glad to enter this world at least a little bit. Really looking forward to reading the other books in this series that have been translated into English.  

Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past (trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin)

Fair warning: most of you will hate what you’re about to read; unfollow me if you have to. I started this before the pandemic and eventually found the #ProustTogether group spearheaded by @literatureSC. [Ed. – How nice!] This wonderful group was hands down the best thing about reading Proust (I’m easing everyone in slowly for what’s coming). [Ed. – Wait what?] What can be said about this book that hasn’t been said before? How about: I was bored to tears reading it? [Ed. — *sputters*] (Actually, that has been said before. By my dad, who years ago also slogged through every word. It must be genetic.) Of course, there were some strikingly beautiful images, several things the narrator said about human beings rang true, and this work’s importance in terms of literary development is undeniable. But the unbearably neurotic narrator kept saying things for thousands of pages with precious few paragraph breaks [Ed. – She seems to be saying this like it’s a bad thing??] in the amount of excruciating detail that had me screaming in my head that I don’t care what French high society wears, while wishing badly for a recognizable plot. [Ed. – But but…] The screaming was loudest with the Albertine volumes, where if I had to hear about his narcissistic obsession one more time … oh, wait. His sleep-assaulting her with his tongue didn’t help matters. [Ed. – Okay, that is genuinely awful.] Also the lack of editing, whereby characters kept dying and coming back to life in subsequent volumes. Proust’s own death before final edits is a cautionary tale for all who write. I could go on, but that would just be taking a page, or several hundred, out of Proust. During the group read, I managed to royally piss off one (several?) of the group members with my comments, as I’m sure I’m pissing off most people reading this now, but since everyone knows I have no qualms about verbalizing distaste for major male writers, so be it. [Ed. – I’m not angry, Yelena, just… need to have a quiet sit for a minute…]

Jaroslav Hašek, Pokhozhdeniia bravogo soldata Shveika (The Good Soldier Švejk; Russian translation by Petr Bogatyrev)

Another group Twitter read, also headed by @literatureSC; reading this alongside Proust provided the best antidote! Czech was my second Slavic literature in grad school [Ed. – Let’s all just pause and savour how awesome that is], and I’m so grateful for the several Twitter group reads that led me back to this rich body of work. The most popular Czech novel and one of my dad’s favorite books, Švejk is a hilarious and poignant indictment of the brutality of war that never resolves the question whether the screwball protagonist is a simpleton or someone much more profound. The novel is illustrated by Josef Lada, and the Russian-language edition, which came with us from the Soviet Union, has his color illustrations; I had to post them in a Twitter thread because they are so wonderful. I’d started this book twice before, in both Russian and English, so I’m happy to be able to say it is finally finished, even if the book itself remains unfinished due to its author’s death, which in this case, makes it no less fantastic for that. [Ed. – Oh now it’s ok for an author to die…]

Bohumil Hrabal, I Served the King of England (trans. Paul Wilson); Too Loud a Solitude (trans. Michael Henry Heim); Closely Watched Trains (trans. Edith Pargeter)

These were all rereads, the first two with a Twitter group led by @ReemK10, the third because I had it on my bookshelf along with the other two and went for the trifecta. All feature ordinary protagonists doing not so ordinary things, in Hrabal’s blend of absurd humor and deeply human emotions. Too Loud a Solitude, a love letter to books that uses imagery from the Holocaust, is one of my favorite novels, translated by my very much missed graduate advisor, who I think would be thrilled about all the Czech group reads and BookTwitter in general.

Zdena Salivarová, Ashes, Ashes, All Fall Down (trans. Jan Drábek)

Another reread, this one on my shelf next to the Hrabals. I think I picked it both because it was written by a woman and because I needed something as physically compact as this edition to bring on my only and very short trip during the pandemic to beautiful central California. Ashes, Ashes is the doomed love story of the Czech female protagonist and a Latvian basketball player whose team comes to play in communist Czechoslovakia. A straightforward, quick read that shows how the communist system devastated people’s personal lives. Salivarová immigrated to Canada after Prague Spring, where she and her husband, writer Josef Škvorecký, founded 68 Publishers, which was instrumental in publishing Czech writers banned in their own country.

Frances Burney, Evelina

Another Twitter group read, led by @Christina5004, and a reread of a novel that threw me back to my fantastic eighteenth-century British women writers class in college. Even though Burney squarely divides characters into good and bad with no shades of gray, this epistolary novel about Evelina coming of age and learning how to be in the world is engrossing and often hilarious. Reading the notes my twenty-one-year-old self left in the margins in a bright purple pen made me nostalgic: no one will be surprised to hear that feminism has been a constant throughout my life.

J.L. Carr, A Month in the Country

I’d never heard of this novel (I know, I know) until several people talked about it on Twitter. I was especially intrigued because it has the same title as Turgenev’s play, but it actually reminded me of Chekhov’s “House with a Mezzanine.” I loved the setting of post-WWI England and the wistfulness of the writing, but most of all, I loved that I was reading a novel outside of my usual material. BookTwitter was right about how good it was. BookTwitter is fabulous. [Ed. – Amen!]

Zinaida Serebriakova, House of Cards, 1916

The rest of the titles come from the syllabus of my class on contemporary Russian women writers and writing the body; I read them in Russian alongside the students, who read the translations below. The class is based on my dissertation, which discusses the explosion of women’s writing in the late Soviet/early post-Soviet periods, writing that went radically against the patriarchy and puritanism of Soviet and Russian literature. For the first time, women writers were producing works in which female bodies burdened and engendered by sexuality, violence, disease, abortion, miscarriage, etc. were at the center of the texts. I can talk everyone’s ear off about this topic, so I’ll stop, but if anyone is interested, I’d be happy to send the syllabus and/or the pdfs of some of the harder to find titles. We also read essays by the feminist theorists associated with the theory of writing the body: Hélène Cixous’s “The Laugh of the Medusa” (trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen), selections from Luce Irigaray’s This Sex Which Is Not One (trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke), and an excerpt from Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism; those are readily available.

Liudmila Petrushevskaia, The Time: Night and “Our Circle” (both trans. Sally Laird)

During Soviet times, Petrushevskaia could get very little published, not because of politics but because her texts revel in exposing the dark, awful side of human beings, which went squarely against Soviet ideology. When she started getting published after the Soviet Union’s collapse, many readers and critics were dismayed by her frankness. Things have fortunately changed, and she is now one of Russia’s most famous and critically acclaimed writers. The Time: Night is her Russian Booker-nominated masterpiece of familial dysfunction, and “Our Circle” is one of her most well-known short stories showcasing the same, but this time with alcohol. [Ed. – I refuse to believe there is no alcohol in the novel. I mean, it’s Russian, right?]  One of the many things I appreciate about her is that her work goes radically against the idea, propagated by both Soviet and post-Soviet culture and literature, that women are naturally maternal. Rather, maternal bodies are prime perpetrators of abuse. In general, bodies suffer all manner of abuse and violence in Petrushevskaia. In her hands, it makes for phenomenal literature.

It wasn’t on my syllabus, but I also read Petrushevskaia’s The New Adventures of Helen (trans. Jane Bugaeva) and the collection from which this new translation comes, Nastoiashchie skazki (Real Fairy Tales), but as this was for a forthcoming review, I’ll save the discussion for then.

Marina Palei, “The Losers’ Division” (trans. Jehanne Gheith)

From St. Petersburg, Palei now lives in the Netherlands and writes in Russian. “The Losers’ Division,” an early work, is part of a four-story cycle that has a hospital setting; like Chekhov, Palei is a writer with a medical degree. This story is set in an obgyn ward handling both pregnancy and abortion in a Soviet backwater town, which should give an idea about what happens to women’s bodies in this story.

Yelena Tarasova, “She Who Bears No Ill” (trans. Masha Gessen)

At the center of Tarasova’s text is a woman whose body and mind are being ravaged by a debilitating illness. The story approaches the body/mind divide in a non-traditional way, while breaking stereotypes surrounding femininity and female attractiveness. Gruesome and powerful.

Svetlana Vasilenko, Shamara (trans. Daria A. Kirjanov and Benjamin Sutcliffe) and “Going after Goat-Antelopes” (trans. Elisabeth Jezierski)

I got to interview Vasilenko when I was doing dissertation research in Moscow; in addition to her own writing, she also spearheaded the publication of two all-women anthologies in the early 1990s when male editors wouldn’t publish these writers, thus helping to institutionalize contemporary Russian women’s literature. Shamara is the story of a woman living under unrelentingly brutal conditions with her rapist/husband who finds a way to endure, while “Going after Goat-Antelopes” starts out as a story of a married woman’s attempted tryst and then plays a complicated game with the reader about what’s actually going on. Sexuality and violence are very present in Vasilenko’s work, but hers is a unique approach in that female bodies also sometimes navigate both the physical and non-material realms.

Iuliia Voznesenskaia, excerpts from The Women’s Decameron (trans. W.B. Linton)

I’ve written both an academic article and a Punctured Lines blog post on this novel I love beyond words, so anything I say here would be repeating myself, but at the risk of repeating myself: this novel in which ten women find themselves quarantined (ahem) for ten days in a Leningrad maternity ward and tell each other stories to pass the time looks unflinchingly at violence against women and celebrates female sexuality and female friendship. It is heart-wrenching, hysterical, raunchy, and consistently beloved by students in this class. A feminist riff on Boccaccio, The Women’s Decameron is writing the body in all its glory, Soviet-style. Read it, read it, read it.

Liudmila Ulitskaia, “Gulia” (trans. Helena Goscilo)

Like Petrushevskaia, Ulitskaia is one of Russia’s most famous writers, who’s incredibly prolific; this very short story is a small but wonderful part of her oeuvre. The protagonist, Gulia, is a woman of advanced age with a body that shows it, which in no way prevents her from seducing and having a one-night stand with her best friend’s much younger son. Unique for its celebration of older women’s sexuality, this story is a delightful illustration that age is no barrier and women definitely want it.

Valeria Narbikova, In the Here and There (trans. Masha Gessen)

In the Here and There is the first part of a short three-part novel, but stands on its own. Narbikova was the other writer I interviewed during my dissertation research trip, and it was such a pleasure to meet this unique, in-her-own-world individual, even if I had my wallet stolen in the Moscow metro on the way to her apartment. When Narbikova came onto the literary scene in the late Soviet period, some called her a writer of erotica (she isn’t), and all took notice, often with dismay, of her highly experimental, stream-of-consciousness style. There’s definitely a lot of open depictions of female sexuality in her work, including In the Here and There, which has a (brief) orgasm scene, but Narbikova’s real flirtation is with the Russian language, which she twists and shapes into her own medium that’s happy to disregard the rules of orthography and punctuation. Her works often eschew chronology, traditional structure, etc. in an effort to find new ways of saying things and therefore of living, and loving, differently. I’m not usually a fan of experimental writing, but I really love her.

Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body

There are other choices for the “token Westerner on the syllabus to show that writing the body is something women writers from many literary traditions do,” but how could I notinclude this title? The novel, which recounts the narrator’s frantic search for their cancer-stricken lover who has gone away, does not specify the narrator’s gender, thereby challenging readers’ assumptions and making them confront their own stereotypes. It’s exuberantly written, with a sharp sense of humor. A good way to end the class and this list.

What I Read, January 2020

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

Although everything else in the world was pretty much shit, January was a good reading month. I was still on break the first two weeks, which certainly helped. I’ve realized that all I need to be happy is to cut out sugar, run twice as much as usual, and not work. Simple! Here’s what the Happy Man read:

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Vladimir Nabokov, Mary (1926) Trans. Michael Glenny in collaboration with the author (1970) Nabokov’s first novel, really more a novella, is predictably good. His strengths are evident: moments of intense lyricism, typically invoking sensory experience, and ironic reversals of conventional thinking, specifically, here, what it means to be an exile. In his introduction to the English translation (if he didn’t have such tiresome animosity toward Freud his introductions might be on par with James’s), Nabokov notes with possibly genuine surprise that the depiction of exile in this early work aligns closely with the one in the much later and more famous Speak, Memory. As is typical for Nabokov, though, his interest in social-political-material experience is more abstract than concrete. If you want to know details about émigré life in western Europe in the 20s and 30s you would be better to read Berberova, Gazdanov (I’m guessing—haven’t yet actually read him) or the wonderful and too-little known David Vogel. Still, I appreciated the ending’s sly reversal, which suggests that Nabokov was from the beginning a comic writer (not as in funny but as in a writer of texts that end happily, or with their losses repaired or made good, as opposed to tragedy).

I planned to read all of Nabokov’s Russian novels this month, but I didn’t.

Tim Maughan, Infinite Detail (2019) Novel toggling between a Before (plausible and only slightly extrapolated version of life today) and an After (post-apocalyptic), the pivot event being a sudden and seemingly irrevocable loss of the internet, and networks more generally. The story focuses on a group of hackers and activists, whose protests against nonstop surveillance and late capitalism is initially confined to a vibrant, boisterous neighbourhood in Bristol, but who, we slowly learn, become instrumental in the crash, with results none of them expected. This essayaccurately criticizes the novel’s romantic/individualistic ideology (for a book about systems and networks it spends a lot of time thinking about the power of individuals to change the world), but it ignores what I thought was the best part of the book: its nuanced portrayal of the new kinds of intimacy that online life has enabled. These aren’t just feeble versions of “real” face-to-face relationships. Infinite Detail is also optimistic about the kinds of art that survivors of a collapse of capitalism as we know it might engage in (aligning it with something like Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140). The result was too much (if not quite infinite) detail about future pop music for my taste, but I appreciated the idiosyncrasy. (Also, making Bristol the center of things, that’s pretty cool.) I also wondered if Maugham was writing with J. G. Ballard in mind. Consider this passage, describing a character’s return to Bristol several years after the collapse:

She’s strangely embarrassed that part of her had imagined walking out into some huge abandoned space: a bourgeois science-fiction fantasy of a long-lost civilization where she’s the special one, the only survivor that could see past the crass commercialism of the masses and got out in time, the intrepid, educated explorer unearthing this forgotten, archaic relic of barbaric capitalism, an empty cave filled with unfamiliar, alien branding.

Andrew Miller, Now We Shall Be Entirely Free (2018) This is going to be on the end of the year list, I know it already. Now We Shall Be Entirely Free (wasn’t crazy about this title until the very end of the novel, when it became so interesting, so poignant) gave me the kind of reading experience I had more often as a child than I do now. I was enthralled, I was moved, I was anxious (for the fate of the characters), I couldn’t wait to find out what happened next, but I feared leaving the world of the book. It’s that last quality that’s so rare—mostly I’m eager to get on to the next book, but this time I wanted to linger. I would like to read this book again, even though it’s unlikely I would ever teach it, and that too is something I rarely say.

The novel follows John Lacroix, who returns, badly wounded, to England from the war against Napoleon. Something happened to him in Spain—he saw something, did something, knew something—that has damaged his mind as much as illness has damaged his body. Tentatively, almost unwillingly, he returns to life and eventually gets it into his head that he will travel to the Hebrides to gather folk music (he is a violinist in addition to having been a soldier and an aimless son of landed gentry). Two men are sent after him: I won’t say too much about it, since the plot is genuinely suspenseful, but it has been decided that Lacroix must be punished for the events in Spain. One of the men is a bad man. And bad things happen. In the Hebrides, Lacroix stumbles across a small utopian community which he sinks into with, to him, unexpected gratitude. But he is unknowingly bringing danger to those he is becoming close to.

Now We Shall Be Entirely Free concerns violence, trauma, early 19th century politics, and early 19th century medicine without ever being plodding or padded. It’s gorgeously written without striving for “poetic-ness.” In its ability to manifest the foreignness of the past, Miller’s novel reminded me of Penelope Fitzgerald. And that’s pretty much the highest praise I can offer.

Please read Rohan’s review—she says it better than I do.

Dorothy B. Hughes, Dread Journey (1945) I admire Hughes a lot, especially The Expendable Man, but she was an uneven writer. The recently reissued Dread Journey is one of her weaker ones. Set on a transcontinental train (very cool), it has a locked room vibe (less cool), but Hughes is always more interested in the why than the who. But I found the characters mostly uninteresting, even the Canadian (!) ingenue. What Hughes always excels at is creating and exploring terror, dread, fear. So many of her female characters are in a continual state of near-panic. That’s what makes her work still feel timely.

Helen Garner, The Spare Room (2008) I read this in a few hours, loving it from beginning to end. Then I spent the rest of the day following a fascinating conversation about it on Twitter. Garner, it turns out, is a polarizing writer. (Though I sometimes got the sense that the Australians, in particular, who dislike her do so because she takes up too much space in the country’s literary discourse, and that the bien pensant media has anointed her as their literary/national standard bearer. Not Garner’s fault that she’s so great, though!) Anyway, I’ll definitely read more; I’m particularly curious about her nonfiction. (Her true crime writing really divides readers.) The Spare Room reminded me of Doris Lessing, though it’s much more interesting at the sentence level. Two old friends reunite when one comes down to Melbourne from Sydney to stay with the other while she pursues what her friend at first privately and then not so privately deems a dubious (read: completely bullshit) alternative treatment for her advanced cancer. A smart and beautiful book about fear and anger.

Sandra Newman, The Heavens (2019) The strange tale of a woman who is drawn from an alternate version of the present or near-future to 16th Century England, I enjoyed this novel as I was reading it but now I can barely remember it. The more she travels between times the more the present alters, and for the worse. Eventually the world that has banded together to mitigate, even circumvent climate change becomes our own. Each time she visits the past she becomes more intimate with a young man who, in the first iterations of the past, occasionally scribbles verses and, in later ones, becomes William Shakespeare, Famous Playwright. The price of his fame is the brutalization of the world. In retrospect, this premise seems nonsensical, an odd way of asking readers to consider what it means to value individuals over collectives. All I can say is at the time I was under the book’s spell—dreamy and oblique—but now, well, the spell is broken. This review is too harsh, in my opinion, but also on to something. In the end, The Heavens is less interesting than Du Maurier’s The House on the Strand.

Nina Berberova, The Book of Happiness (1996?) Trans. Marian Schwartz (1999) A Russian novel about happiness? Surely not. It’s true, though, and although I was pitting Berberova against Nabokov a moment ago, they share a sense that exile, although enormously destructive in many ways, isn’t just about loss. The Book of Happiness begins with the suicide of Sam Adler, a Russian violinist, in a Paris hotel. He leaves behind a note addressed to a woman he hasn’t seen in years, who herself lives in Paris, and turns out to have been his best friend in childhood. After identifying the body, Vera reflects on their long acquaintance, especially their years as childhood playmates and confidantes. This is the best part of the novel—I found it magical, though it might be a bit Wes Anderson for some tastes (“I’m a violinist. What are you?” Vera replied mechanically, “I’m just me.”). The middle section, describing Vera’s ill-fated marriage and departure from Russia in the wake of the Revolution, flags a bit, but the ending, which is indeed happy, though in a low-key way, worked for me. (Berberova seems to be speaking of herself, or at least her style, when she writes that “Vera regarded everything excessively emotional with embarrassment.”) Berberova doesn’t shy from presenting the recued circumstances of exile, but to say, as a blurb on the edition I read does, that Berberova “rivals Jean Rhys in detailing the sights and smells and despairs of trying to exist as a stranger” in Paris tells me only that the reviewer has never actually read Rhys. Anyway, I read elsewhere that the translator, Marian Schwartz, finds The Book of Happiness ultimately unsuccessful, but I have to disagree.

PS I don’t know when this book was written. 1996 is the date of its publication in France, but Berberova wrote it, I believe, in the 1930s, in Russian, which is the language Schwartz has translated it from. I’m unclear if it was never published at all until the 90s or if with some small exile press or what. Anyone know?

Nate Leipciger, The Weight of Freedom (2015) This is part of the Azrieli Foundation’s extraordinary effort to collect and publish in excellent and pedagogically useful editions (good introductions, glossary of terms students might be unfamiliar with) memoirs by Holocaust survivors who settled in Canada. Leipciger’s book is perhaps best known for his frank description of his experience as a pipel (a messenger boy in the camps—typically, this role, which came with privileges like better rations, also required providing sexual favours). The sexual violence Leipciger experienced naturally left its mark on him, but exactly how is hard to say, as it’s not easy to get a read on his tone. (He is not a professional writer: the flatness of the telling sometimes seems a function of inexperience, and sometimes of (perhaps unconscious) reticence.) Yet as one of the students with whom I read the text pointed out, to single out this aspect (the sexual abuse takes up about 2 or 3 pages in a 350-page book) is to sensationalize the experience, risking further victimizing the victim. Yet sexual violence against both men and women was common during the Holocaust; this fact is not often enough acknowledged. Just as interesting for me, as a Canadian, was Leipciger’s ability to think about his suffering in relation to that experienced by indigenous people.

The Weight of Freedom covers Leipciger’s truncated childhood in Chorzów, Poland; his internment in various ghettos, including a period in hiding; his deportation to Auschwitz-Birkenau, Fünfteichen, Gross-Rosen, Flossenbürg, and eventually a sub-camp of Dachau, from where he was liberated; his time as a DP in post-war Germany (in which he pursued an active sex life that he freely admits involved an element of revenge); his eventual emigration to Canada; and the long years building up a life there, which, as the title of the memoir suggests, was by no means easy, not so much economically as psychologically. Throughout he is accompanied by his father, a man with whom he has a difficult and intense relationship (those who have read Wiesel’s Night will find similarities). In later life, Leipciger settles into a role as a Holocaust educator; one of the things I like best about him is that he loves young people, he has no scorn or distaste for them. Always a good sign if you ask me.

Omer Bartov, Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz (2018) Today Buczacz is a nondescript town in western Ukraine. In the past 150 years it’s also been part of the Hapsburg Empire (specifically Galicia), independent Poland, the Nazi Reich, and the Soviet Union. In the first half of the 20th century it was home to Jews, Poles, and Ukrainians (perhaps better called Ruthenians—my one criticism of this book is that Bartov sometimes uses Ruthenian as a synonym for Ukrainian, and sometimes suggests there’s a difference, and I’m still confused about the distinction, which Wikipedia has failed to clear up for me. If you can, please do!). During WWI the front passed through Buczacz several times; during WWII it was similarly occupied by different armies at different times. In this fascinating book, Bartov, whose mother’s family hailed from the town, uses the history of Buczacz to show the intimacy of violence in the so-called Bloodlands of Eastern Europe in the 20th century. In his telling there was a seemingly ineluctable drive on the part of almost every group to reduce the region’s cultural diversity, and that much of the violence required to do so was perpetrated by one neighbour against another. During the Hapsburg times, Poles and Ruthenians agitated for independence. In the wake of WWI Ukrainians chafed under Polish rule, which led them to welcome the Nazis. After WWII the Soviets upheld Ukrainian claims to the area; in one of history’s ironies, that decision furthered the Ukrainian nationalism that Russia is now contesting in its dirty war in the Donbass.

Bartov shows how everyone was at one time both a victim and a perpetrator—everyone except the Jews, who suffered no matter who was in charge (they had it best under the Hapsburgs, leading many of them to defend the Empire ardently—cf Joseph Roth; they had it worst, of course, under the Nazis). Anatomy of a Genocide is at once granular and theoretical—an amazing accomplishment; it had me asking myself why I don’t read more history.

Nina Berberova, The Ladies from St. Petersburg: Three Novellas (1995?) Trans. Marian Schwartz (1998) Uneven but mostly engaging collection, once again detailing life before, during, and after the Russian revolution. The first and second stories (to me they are too slight to be novellas) are the best—the first, set at the very beginning of what people are not yet calling a revolution, depicts a vacation in the country during which a young woman is abruptly forced out of the comforts, and limits, of the life she’d known. The second centers on a woman who has challenged the norms of her culture by leaving her husband and is trying to keep ahead of the conflict between Whites and Reds; as the translator Marian Schwartz notes in her admirable introduction, the irony is that the women of the provincial boarding house she washes up at are much less accepting of the woman’s perceived transgressions than their political sympathies would suggest. The third, an uninteresting failure, is set in what is clearly New York though it is never named. Berberova spent much of her life in the US, but maybe she was never able to write about it convincingly. Probably not the best introduction to Berberova, but worth checking out once you’ve read some of her other stuff.

Carys Davies, West (2018) Many online book friends (and a real life one, the writer Kevin Brockmeier) have extolled this novella, and I decided to make it the first audiobook of the new semester (back to the commute…). Davies is a Welsh writer, but she lived in the US for quite a while, which must have helped her with some of the book’s settings. Cy Bellman is a mule breeder in Pennsylvania in the first part of the 19th century; this reviewsays 1815; I don’t know where that date comes from, nothing in the book says so, though it’s true my knowledge of US history is shamefully hazy so I probably missed something; certainly, events take place after the Lewis & Clark expedition (1804 – 06). In the newspaper Bellman learns that giant bones have been found in Kentucky (presumably from mammoths, or maybe dinosaurs, this was also unclear to me) and becomes obsessed with the idea that the creatures must still be alive, out west, and that it is his destiny to find them. To the disdain of his sister, whom he asks to look after his ten-year-old daughter, Bess, Bellman sets off for the frontier (St. Louis) and beyond. In Missouri, a trader sets him up with a Shawnee teenager, named Old Woman, who guides Bellman as far west as the Rockies. In the meantime—two years pass, then three—Bess fends off the local librarian and the increasingly unwelcome attentions of a neighbour, all of which leads to a dramatic, slightly preposterous happy ending, in which Old Woman plays hero. I admired some things about the novel: it’s spare, and enigmatic in a pleasing enough way, and the descriptions of the landscape are lovely without being overwritten. But I couldn’t get on fully on board, because I found the Shawnee character so troubling. As one might expect of a revisionist Western (I sometimes feel all Westerns are described as revisionist), the book critiques white settler attitudes to indigenous people. And yet it also embraces those attitudes: it’s not just that Bellman and others say that Indians can be bought off with a few shiny beads, but that Old Woman indeed loves shiny beads. Towards the end of the book, Davies shifts focalization from Bellman to Old Woman. Her attempt to inhabit a different way of looking at the world goes awry—Old Woman thinks in a way that seems not foreign but reduced, childlike, naïve. I just didn’t get what she was trying to do here. Maybe an interesting failure, but a failure nonetheless.

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There you have it. Miller and Bartov were the standouts. Berberova a great discovery (for me; I know others have been reading her for a while). February has already begun promisingly, reading-wise, but I know the pace will slow down as the semester hits full-force.

I was so happy this month to post my friend Nat’s reflections on his year in reading. I know we’re well into 2020 now and maybe nobody cares about 2019 anymore, but I’m happy to post reflections and lists from anyone. (I’ve asked a few folks; no takers so far.) In general, I’d love for EMJ to become more of a salon, so if you have something bookish you want to say, hit me up.

 

“Peddle your philanthropic bullshit to someone else”: Luce D’Eramo’s Deviation

Posted on by under book review, readalong, Uncategorized

As Hannah Arendt tells it, Adolf Eichmann, on trial in Jerusalem for his role in organizing the Final Solution, was given a copy of Lolita by one of his jailers. The gift did not go over well. Two days later, Eichmann, “visibly indignant,” returned it, unfinished. His verdict? “‘Quite an unwholesome book’—‘ Das ist aber ein sehr unerfreuliches Buch.”

I’m baffled by this story. What motivated the Israeli official? Was he making a joke? Setting a test? Teaching a lesson? (Lolita is framed as a jailhouse confession, after all.) Why did Eichmann reject the book? Did he take Humbert Humbert’s tale at face value—that is, did he fail to see the book’s critique of pedophilia? Or on the contrary did he see his own evasions in the narrator’s? Was he rejecting the joke, test or lesson? Above all, why “unwholesome”? (Unerfreulich can also mean unpleasant.)

Arendt offers no explanation for her inclusion of the anecdote. (It’s literally a parenthesis.) But she places it in a discussion of what she calls Eichmann’s aphasia—his inability to wield language without resorting to cliché. The man himself apologized for his inarticulateness to the court, saying that his only language was Amtsprache, bureaucratese. According to Arendt, anyway, Eichmann had no critical faculties. He saw the world through ready-made phrases and shopworn ideas. No wonder wholesomeness was his recourse. He knew what he liked because he liked what he knew.

But maybe in this case he was on to something. Lolita is disreputable. It relishes that designation, of course, asking us to decide what we mean when we reject something as immoral. The point of that challenge isn’t to expand what counts as acceptable behavior but to make us realize how easily we accept, even condone abuse. The novel’s glittering language—the fancy prose style Humbert warns us about in its first pages—only exacerbates the sordidness of its subject matter, so that even our pity and horror for what happens to twelve-year-old Dolores Haze comes to seem tainted by having to be earned from reading against the grain.

I thought about Eichmann and Lolita as I wondered how to respond to Luce D’Eramo’s Deviation (1979), certainly the most unpleasant and maybe the most unwholesome book I’ve read in a long time.

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It’s all the publisher’s fault. When I read the promotional copy—which also appears on the dust jacket—describing Deviation as “a seminal work in Holocaust literature” I was immediately intrigued. (“Seminal” should have tipped me off—I thought we retired that word.) I even managed to convince Scott—who knows Italian literature much better than I do—to read it with me. (Sorry, Scott!)

But Deviation is not about the Holocaust. About fascism, yes, about forced labour camps, definitely, about the relationship between industry and Nazi expansionism, quite interestingly, and about moral equivocation most definitely. But not about the Holocaust, and to suggest this is, frankly, disgusting and disrespectful.

The publisher’s bait and switch has certainly coloured my view of the book, but even without that aggravation I think I’d be hard-pressed to know what to make of Deviation. I’ll let D’Eramo—in the guise of her narrator, basically a version of D’Eramo herself—explain what the book is about. Lucia, like her author born and partially raised in France before returning to Italy as a teenager, is an ardent Fascist. With the establishment of the Republic of Salò in September 1943 and the rise of partisan resistance to fascism, believers like Lucia were left “feeling as though their earlier ideals were crimes” (they were!). Eighteen-year-old Lucia comes to a decision:

I realized that the only way to learn the truth for myself about Fascists and anti-Fascists—many said that they could no longer figure it out [note the resemblance to Trump’s pet expression “People are saying”]—was to ascertain it firsthand. Understanding this, I had to go to the places about which the most outrageous stories were told: the Nazi concentration camps. That’s why I ran away from home on February 8, 1944, and went to Germany as a simple volunteer worker, with pictures of Mussolini and Hitler in my backpack, sure about what I was doing. But after spending a few months in a labor camp near Frankfurt am Main, my comrades organized a strike at the factory, the IG Farben, where I worked in the Ch 89, the chemical division. As a result, I was jailed, then later transferred and detained in Dachau. In order to survive, I escaped from there in October, and for a couple of months I remained hidden in Munich. Then I left, following the death of the friends who were helping me … I headed back to my first Lager [the IG Farben camp at Frankfurt-Höchst], travelling partway by train without a ticket, crouched in the toilets of the cars, partway on foot, spending the night in bomb shelters, in abandoned cattle cars, in foreigners’ barracks … in mid-February [1945] I arrived in Mainz.

Basically, the book is about Lucia’s attempt to come to terms with the evasions and lies in this story. What she first tells us is that on December 4, 1945 she finally returned to Italy, and did so as a paraplegic, her legs having been paralyzed when a wall fell on her as she was helping to dig survivors out of the rubble of a bombed-out building. But this first return was in fact her second.

It’s true, Lucia was involved in the brief and ultimately unsuccessful strike led by both volunteer and forced labourers at the IG Farben camp. And it’s also true that she was arrested. But after a failed suicide attempt—she took rat poison, and only survived because she took too much too quickly, and vomited it up: a nice metaphor for her life, where excess always turns in her favour—she was repatriated by the Italian consul and sent back to Italy.

As far as Lucia is concerned, the only good thing about this outrageous bit of good fortune is that her father, a bigshot in Fascist Italy whom she hates, had nothing to do with it. In fact, he refused to pull any strings for her. But in Verona, waiting for the train that will take her to Como, and home, she rebels. (That’s not the right word. She does something remarkably stupid.) She throws away her papers and arranges to get arrested by some SS men taking a convoy of political prisoners to the station. In this way, she is sent to Dachau, from which she eventually escapes after she volunteers to be part of the shit commando—a work detail sent around Munich to unclog sewage pipes (there are some memorable descriptions of this work in the book’s first pages). When the work detail is caught in an air raid, she slips off into the pandemonium, eventually ending up at a makeshift transit camp for displaced foreigners located in an old brewery. And from there she makes her way, in the manner described in the long quote above, to IG Farben and later to Mainz, where she has her accident.

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The novel—it’s really autofiction avant la lettre—was written over a period of about 25 years, and its distinct sections are dated to show us this progress. D’Eramo usually tells the story in first person, but sometimes switches to third person, suggesting, as translator Anne Milano Appel suggests in her introduction, how foreign to D’Eramo that person now seems to her. (I’m using author and narrator interchangeably in a way I normally never would, but D’Eramo invites the equivalence.)

In the second half of the book, D’Eramo asks why she repressed the memory of returning voluntarily to Germany. But what she presents as an attempt at self-understanding reads as delusory exculpation. Even her big theory about Nazism and its camp system (she regularly distinguishes between Fascism, by which she means Italian Fascism, and Nazism; this distinction is her most interesting idea) fails to make us think better of her. In D’Eramo’s view, the camp system was a form of class warfare, in which only the working classes were made to suffer. Her evidence is that she never met any rich people in her various forms of voluntary incarceration. (Leading her to offer an anti-Semitic canard about Jewish wealth: “The big financiers, the truly wealthy were sheltered abroad.” Bollocks.)

Here and indeed everywhere in the book, D’Eramo comes across as a terrible person, describing “defenseless masses [that] huddle like sheep,” remembering concentration camp inmates as “a swarm of horrible, wonderful insects” (what the hell is “wonderful” translating here?), and criticizing an old woman’s desperate grief at the realization of her impending death as “a kind of greediness that was more irritating than moving.”  She is revolted by the coarseness of her fellow inmates, repulsed by their way of eating, and eventually driven to exclaim, “I despise victims.”

Readers will surely agree with Martine, one of the narrator’s co-conspirators in fomenting the IG Farben strike, who sees through D’Eramo’s political awakening: “So shut your mouth and peddle your philanthropic bullshit to someone else. Why do you try to excuse yourself? You are who you are.” Specifically, she’s someone who, Martine adds, wants the privileges of being a fascist student in the camp (better food and living conditions) without any of the drawbacks (D’Eramo is hurt that others hate her so much).

The most generous reading of Deviance I can muster is that at least D’Eramo is honest enough to show herself in a bad light. But that honesty feels so self-serving. She’s proud of it, like the student who thinks that his honesty in admitting he hasn’t done the reading for class is enough for him to be excused from any consequences. After all, at least he hasn’t tried to bullshit the instructor. But the fact is he’s merely swallowed his own bullshit. So too D’Eramo, whose great struggle in life—the thing she wrestles with for decades—is the lie she tells anyone who will listen, mostly herself, that she was sent to Dachau for her part in organizing the IG Farben strike, when in fact she chose to be sent there. Finally acknowledging that lie, she seems to think, is a courageous thing to do. (Amazingly, she never refers to her real courage, which consists of living with constant pain from her injury, and refusing to use her disability as an excuse for not doing what she wants to do—having a child, writing her books, etc. Except maybe that doesn’t take courage, just determination.)

Admittedly, D’Eramo does wrestle with the hold that the concept of willpower has over her—she sees this as a legacy of her upbringing and she believes more than anything in the need to overcome the prejudices of her bourgeois milieu. Not because she regrets her commitment to fascism. Nor even because she sees the terrible ends to which a belief in willpower can be put (demonizing anyone unlucky in any way or lacking the advantages of her class position as weak and second-rate). Only, as far as I can tell, because she hates her family so much.  And even that rejection relies on the attributes of her middle-class childhood: she wills herself to overcome the idea of willpower. This is akin to the fetishization of toughness that the philosopher Theodor Adorno called one of the most damaging attributes of the fascist mindset. Even if D’Eramo regrets her past beliefs (and I’m not clear she ever does), she maintains the very attitudes that undergirded that belief.

One of the prisoners in the train taking her to Dachau, a partisan (that is, someone brave enough to resist the regime), tells her, after he finds out how D’Eramo came to be in the freight car with the rest of them, “The performance is over. You can go home.” As much as I sympathize with the man, he’s wrong. D’Eramo’s performance, aimed at much at herself as us, is never over, even when she later acknowledges her own act. Because in the end the acknowledgement is the performance.

And I don’t know what we’re supposed to make of that performance. When she calls herself “an inveterately elite worm,” should we applaud her self-awareness? When she describes how she failed in turning what she thinks could have been the most socially aware moment of her life (choosing to be sent to Dachau) into a mere moral act, adding that, even if she can be excused for what she did at the time, given her youth, her upbringing, etc., can she be excused now, are we supposed to admire the question?

No way. After all, she never gets beyond asking it. D’Eramo regularly points out her mistakes—yet she keeps making them. She offers what she knows is a false analogy between her own experience in the hospital after her accident, waiting for the paperwork to come through so she can leave Germany, to the travails of deportees in the cattle cars. But saying it’s a shitty analogy doesn’t make it less shitty.

Nor is she winning me over when, writing in the mid 1970s, she explains that she “agonized retroactively for the children of the Osten [Slavic prisoners of war, both military and civilian, mostly Russian, whom she encountered in the IG Farben camp] and Jews whom I could see clustered behind the barbed wire when I skirted the transit camps in search of shelter, and who, in my distorted memory, stared at me with the dark eyes of my son.” Thanks for nothing, lady. It’s almost as bad as the anti-Semitism and historical inaccuracy in her description of a gold necklace she continues to wear for decades after the war, which she “snatched from a body, like the Jewish Sonderkommando [the prisoners forced to operate the crematoria] did at Auschwitz.”

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Really, the only thing that didn’t make my gorge rise while reading Deviation is D’Eramo’s use of scabrous details: she tells us of men aroused in the disinfection shower; of the chest burns she suffers when she’s assigned to carry blocks of sulfuric acid in the IG Farben camp, as punishment for demanding equal food for Eastern and Western prisoners; of the aftermath of her injury, when her buttock splits open, “emitting copious putrid matter with an unbearable stench”; and of a nurse in the hospital where recovers from that injury who, receiving a letter from a man asking for money to start up a toilet paper factory, since it is sure to be in short supply in post-war Germany, uses the letter to wipe herself.

These details are the only things in this book that don’t stink. They’re gross, but honestly so. They’re not bullshit. The unwholesomeness of the book lies in D’Eramo’s mental gymnastics not her bodily suffering. Adolf Eichmann was wrong about Lolita: the unpleasantness of its events is not something readers are invited to pat themselves on the back for navigating. But his judgment wouldn’t be inappropriate for Deviation. Who do I give my copy back to?