Tag Archives: Yuko Tsushima

Scott Walters’s Year in Reading, 2022

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

Today‘s reflection on a year in reading, his second for the blog, is by Scott Walters. Scott launched a litblog, seraillon, in 2010, and expects to return to it one of these days. He largely follows Primo Levi’s model of “occasional and erratic reading, reading out of curiosity, impulse or vice, and not by profession” (profession in his own case being academic administration). He lives with his partner in San Francisco and tries to visit family in France as often as possible.

Vincent van Gogh, Wheat Field with a Lark, 1887

Hello everyone. I had a terrific year of reading in 2022. I wrote very little, so I hope you’ll forgive the absurd length of this piece. [Ed. – Already forgiven.] I’m not sure reading without writing is really reading, but with few exceptions I greatly appreciated the 85 books I read. My reading once again followed little discernible pattern. Here are some favorites and some more favorites.

Victor Hugo’s Quatrevingt-trieze (1874) was my book of the year. Hugo’s portrayal of “this bloody date,” “this hemorrhage,” “the great revolutionary year” of the French Revolution, starts off with a bang: a rag-tag group of Parisian revolutionaries, expecting ambush in a forest in Bretagne, instead comes across a young woman breastfeeding an infant while two other children stand nearby. The woman’s feet are bloodied. She is terrified. An older woman responsible for the soldiers’ provisions serves as buffer between the young woman and a commander intent on probing her political loyalties, setting a tone of political tension that runs for 500 pages. An ensuing Dumas-like adventure characterizing this first part of the novel abruptly loses its head when the blade of the second part falls, plunging the reader into a stunning eight-page “cyclorama” of the chaos in the streets of revolutionary Paris. Much of the action, however, focuses on the civil war in the west of France. With a frequent employment of pastiche, 93’s many epic catalogs include an elaborate list of the Convention’s participants paired with their signature bons mots, some so good I copied them for future deployment. The Revolution in 93 is heavily fictionalized, including an improbable discussion between Danton, Marat and Robespierre in the back of a dark café. But Hugo’s astonishing feat of research serves as rock-solid substratum. I found 93 a spectacular model of historical fiction. [Ed. – Sold! Where is the goddamn Penguin edition???]

In the introduction to Eve Babitz’s Eve’s Hollywood (1974), Rolling Stone Records’ Earl McGrath is quoted: “In every young man’s life there is an Eve Babitz. It is usually Eve Babitz.” I wish I’d encountered Babitz as a young man in Los Angeles. To my roaring delight, she limns everything about the city that falls under her gaze; her piercing way of getting to the heart of some L.A. quality might have made Eve’s Hollywood a Bible for managing life there. Babitz labeled the book a novel, but it seems more non-linear memoir, composed in sketches, episodes, observations, wandering across the Southern California landscape for some 300 exhilarating, hilarious, sobering, fascinating pages, filled with lines to savor (even a simple description of the local skating rink: “The shadows of the rafters of the Polar Palace were knocked out by the noonday sun, which fell around us like a moat”). I initially wondered whether the appeal would depend upon one’s familiarity with L.A., but Babitz knows she’s in a bubble, and slyly invites us to look inside. And despite the book’s title, Babitz is less concerned with the movies than with L.A. life. When the book’s eight-page dedication included a nod “to the sand dabs at Musso’s,” I knew I was home. 

In Ismail Kadare’s The File on H, ethnographers travel to Albania to seek out the last practitioners of the Homeric oral tradition. Something similar, a hidden world of the past miraculously vibrant in the present, reveals itself in Romanian novelist Panait Istrati’s Présentation des haïdoucs (1925), a work in which iterative storytelling reaches back to legends hundreds, even thousands of years old:

“What does that signify: haïdouc?”

“You don’t know? Well! It’s one who tolerates neither oppression nor domesticity, who lives in the forest, kills the cruel gospodars and protects the poor.”

Five bandits gathered in hiding in a bear cave take turns relating how they became haïdoucs. What an exquisite pleasure to read Istrati again, to be immersed in his singular universe of outlaw peasant dignity, heroism, pleasure, passion, sense of justice, and vengeance against those who perpetrate injustice, chiefly the gospodars (landowners). Most notable of these accounts is that of Floarea Codrilor, the woman leading the group and whose own startling tale seems organically to rework elements of Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe.  In this volume from Istrati’s 14-novel cycle, “Les recits d’Adrian Zograffi,” Zograffi appears only in the first line, listening to a haïdouc tell the story of this night of tales, continuing a grand, uninterrupted line of storytelling.

Speaking of iterations, Antonio Manetti’s The Fat Woodworker (mid-1400’s, Robert and Valerie Martone, translators) reads like an anecdote out of Benvenuto Cellini’s riotous autobiography from a century later. Florentine luminaries including Brunelleschi, Donatello and Luca della Robia, regular dinner companions, recognize one evening that one of their number, Manetto the Fat Woodworker, is absent. Perceiving a snub, the artists, with Brunelleschi as chief architect [Ed. – Heh], concoct an elaborate prank. Enlisting multiple accomplices, they convince Manetto that he is in fact a certain “Matteo.” A cascade of comical situations follows as Manetto/Matteo questions his identity and seeks to extricate himself from confusion. The introduction identifies The Fat Woodworker as perhaps the literary pinnacle of the beffe, a humorous early modern style found in numerous works of this high age of mischievous wit. The prank itself is hardly innocent fun; poor Manetto spends time in prison and loses his mind for a time. But his existential crisis might be taken for something closer to Ionesco or Beckett than to the designer of Florence’s Duomo. The charming ending, crediting the anonymous originator of the joke and its variations over time, is as generous a recognition of literary precedent as one is likely to find.

A box containing 27 pamphlets ranging from one to 12 pages, B. S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates (1969) invites readers to choose their narrative order, aside from sections marked “First” and “Last.” Conceived when Johnson traveled as a sportswriter, the work finds his narrator covering a football match in a city he suddenly recognizes as that where he’d known his late friend Tony, the jolt setting off recollections of Tony’s terrible death from cancer. The form could seem gimmicky, but I found it devastatingly suited to its subject. The act of reading—trying to keep track of the pamphlets, shuffling them in one’s hands, taking them out of the box (coffer/coffin) and putting them back in—mirrors memory’s unpredictable eruptions: “The mind is confused, was it this visit, or another, the mind has telescoped time here, runs events near to one another in place, into one another in time.” The word “time” tick-tocks across the narrative; the 1 – 12-page sections hint at clock numerals. In one virtuoso section, staccato play-by-play reporting on a match vies with flashbacks to Tony’s suffering. I doubt Johnson’s narrator and I would have gotten along.  He can be self-absorbed, insensitive, annoying even. But these qualities underscore his raw and conflicted anguish in witnessing the demise of a person with whom he had differences, who was distant in many ways: “how the fact of his death influences every memory of everything connected with him.”  The Unfortunates left me shaken for days.  “and I said, it was all I had, what else could I do, I said, I’ll get it all down, mate               It’ll be very little he said, after a while, very slowly, still those eyes                  That’s all anyone has done, very little, I said.”

The east end of Paris’s Rue Ordener, which arcs across the 18th arrondissement, is today largely African, but in 1942 was heavily Jewish. That was the year seven-year-old Sarah Kofman saw her father taken from their home and deported to Auschwitz. Her récit Rue Ordener, Rue Labat (1994) (thanks Dorian!) focuses not on her father’s story, but on her own. The title’s street names represent poles of her existence during the occupation: on one her mother’s home, on the other that of a beloved teacher with whom she hid. Kofman subtly evokes the claustrophobia of this life, the transformation of the neighborhood into a ghetto. She expertly melds normal tensions of childhood with their extreme amplification under threat, retrospectively examining the confusing division of allegiances between mother and teacher, Jew and Non-Jew, disentangling present self from past in tight, analytical prose not dissimilar to Annie Ernaux’s dissections of family. [Ed. – Interesting, had not thought of that comp. Ernaux’s sentences are much more sinuous, though.] The book had personal resonance: my goddaughter, having since an early age taken a deeply serious interest in the Holocaust, has spent her 19 years in the neighborhood, on the same street where Kofman’s family first lived.

Italian critic Roberto Bazlen led me to some terrific works these last two years, including to Jeremias Gotthelf’s The Black Spider (1842, Jolyon Timothy Hughes, translator). Bazlen had proclaimed Goffhelf “the (at least in some respects) GREATEST European novelist of the last century.” Though he wasn’t referring to this book, his pronouncement seemed borne out in The Black Spider’s 150 pages, which begin in a village in the Bernese Oberland, where a baptism is taking place:

Now, every head was exposed, each pair of hands folded and everyone prayed long and solemnly to the provider of every blessing. Then, each slowly grabbed the metal spoon and wiped the same on the beautiful, fine tablecloth and began to eat the soup. And many a wish was expressed out loud that if he were to have such fare every day, he would desire nothing else. Once one had finished with the soup, he again wiped his spoon on the tablecloth. The Zupfe [Ed. — braided soft bread, super delicious] was passed around and each cut himself a piece and watched as the appetizers of saffron soup, brains, mutton, and marinated liver, were served. When they were consumed the beef was brought in, fresh and smoked, whichever one preferred, came with deliberate swiftness stacked high in bowls. Then came the durre Bohnen [Ed. — overcooked green beans, god I ate way too much of that in my childhood], Kannenbiresnschintze, thick bacon and splendid loin roasts from three-hundred weight pigs, so beautifully red, white and juicy.

This richly detailed framing story culminates in a question about an “ugly black center post” in the house, then shifts two centuries past, when a merciless feudal lord orders the villagers to perform an impossible task, which they only achieve by making a deal with the devil. They pay, of course—Gotthelf is as much preacher as novelist—and their punishment comes in the form of plague, “the black spider.” In the tale that follows, reality, superstition, deep religious conviction, and atonement blend together in a micro-study of the village’s people, of the confrontation of the religious mind with hardship.

Giovanni Segantini, Landscape, 1896

Asturian writer Juliàn Ayesta’s Helena, or the Sea in Summer (1952, Margaret Jull Costa, translator), one of the finest short novels I’ve read in years, went straight onto a shelf I keep of cherished paperbacks. Its world swirls with reminiscences of annual seaside vacations its young narrator passed with his cousin Helena. Drenched in sun and sea, filled with family idiosyncrasies and redolent of youthful vulnerability, Helena explores the developing love between these two young people, deliberately evoking Daphnis and Chloe (again!), with a similar sweetness and freshness.

I’d loved Solitude by Victor Català (Catarina Albert i Paradis), so was thrilled to find Peter Bush’s translation of A Film: 3,000 Meters (at a reading in 2015, Bush lamented the book’s unavailability in English). A Film (1920) at first seems to fit the realist mold of Eça de Queiros or Gustave Flaubert, relating the story of Ramon Nonat, an orphan in Girona who sets out to find his parents—or rather, to find his place in the glitzy rich world he imagines they occupied. Apprenticed to a locksmith, the talented, handsome boy quickly gains competence and respect, then shoves off for Barcelona to pursue his fantasy of belonging among the elite. As the unusual title suggests, the narrative takes a cinematic approach; nearly everything occurs at street level, as though the narrator were moving about the city with a camera—a remarkable attempt to adapt an emerging narrative form to literature.

Set just uphill in the Pyrenees, Irene Solà’s When I Sing, Mountains Dance (thanks Stephen Sparks!) features a polyphonic group of narrators, including a cloud and black chanterelle mushrooms. Montage-style, Solà builds a portrait of the region in precise, deeply lyrical, earthy to the taproot prose, everything burning with life, even the geology of the place (given its own narrative). This is no mere novelty; Solà deftly uses signifiers linking characters, generations, and locations, situating passages in time relative to other passages, forming a map of the region, hinting at its history of revolt and suppression of revolt, and confronting shifting tensions between the villagers and outsiders. Among these last are tourists, urban refugees from Barcelona, and a writer—Solà’s stand-in, one might surmise—questioning her place, a subject amply worthy of interest given such arresting, commanding and nuanced writing.

In non-fiction, I put two works above the rest. Gisèle Halimi’s Une Farouche liberté (2020), constructed from interviews just prior to Halimi’s death, traces her trajectory from a Jewish-Berber Tunisian family where life promised little but domestic servitude to her emergence as one of the great judicial and feminist figures of post-war France. The young Halimi’s defense of political prisoner Djamila Boupatcha was instrumental in shifting French attitudes towards the war in Algeria. With Simone de Beauvoir, Halimi persuaded 343 women—including Catherine Deneuve, Ariane Mnouchkine, Françoise Sagan, and Marguerite Duras—to sign a letter admitting to having had an illegal abortion (the group later proudly adopted Charlie Hebdo’s satirical moniker, “Les 343 Salopes”). The letter, along with Halimi’s exoneration of 16-year-old Marie-Claire Chevalier, imprisoned after the classmate who raped her turned her in for having an abortion, led to the 1973 reversal of France’s abortion ban. Halimi served in the French Assemblé Nationale, as UNESCO ambassador, and as an advocate for a united Europe. Her innovative ideas for organizing make Une Farouche liberté an invaluable book – and a timely one – for anyone concerned with justice.

Sebastian Haffner’s Defying Hitler, my non-fiction book of the year, caused a sensation when published in Germany in 2000. Haffner (pseudonym for Raimund Pretzel, whose son Otto here serves as translator) dissects in precise terms the forces that allowed Hitler to come to power. The book begins on August 1, 1914, when the seven-year-old boy’s treasured summer vacation is abruptly cut short by war. He then traces his growth into adulthood with a steady eye attuned to political developments, unpacking the missed opportunities and fatally unwise accommodations; the cultural, economic, social, and psychological weaknesses of his country; the cultural rejection of pleasure, intellectualism and humor; the violence and assassinations (chiefly that of Walter Rathenau) that propelled his country into fascism. Not a word seems out of place in this chilling narrative—a foreboding warning of Europe’s future and of the fascist movements so prevalent today.

When it came to mysteries, I had the most fun re-reading Eric Ambler’s The Light of Day (1962), but I went nuts over Masako Togawa’s The Master Key (1982). Set in the K Apartments for Ladies in an outlying part of Tokyo, the plot involves a missing master key, a buried child, an eerie religious cult, and Japan’s search for stability and rebirth after WWII. But the master key Togawa uses to open a door onto the lives of the building’s unmarried women—the elderly, the young office workers, the building’s staff, all with “secret lives apart from the real world”—makes the “mystery” nearly incidental. I’m on to more from this iconic, revered figure in Japan. [Ed. – Sold!]

I read a lot of plays in 2022. Magical realist Massimo Bontempelli’s Watching the Moon and Other Plays proved the highlight and included a haunting tale of loss of a child; a visit by a surreal, murderous cloud (NOPE!); and a delightful take on Cinderella, who bypasses the prince to run off with a member of the orchestra. Heidi Shreck’s What the Constitution Means to Me should be performed regularly in the U.S. Congress. Other highlights were Franz Wedekind’s Spring’s Awakening and David Murphy’s Conversations on a Homecoming.

As for poetry, I loved Virgil’s The Georgics (“the working of the earth”), a kind of bucolic verse farmers’ almanac on agriculture and animal husbandry that belongs on sustainability reading lists. A. Van Jordan’s M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A brilliantly uses its 50+ poems to recount the life of MacNolia Cox, who at 16 in 1936 would have been the first Black winner of the National Spelling Bee but for machinations of racist judges. I fell deeply into the poems of Frederick Seidel: nimble, coarse, fun, musical, offensive, inoffensive, explosive, moving, provocative, an axe to break up paralyzed discourse, like nothing I’ve encountered in American poetry. Finally, poem-shaped unidentified flying object Deep Wheel Orcadia, by Harry Josephine Giles, wins as most unusual book of the year. Set on a space station whirling beside a gas giant, Giles’s poems, written in Orkney dialect and accompanied by his own peculiar English translations, create a space opera romance that left me entranced, almost literally suspended in indeterminate space, time and language. [Ed. — !]

Wilhelm Kotarbinski, The Setting Sun, date unknown

It was tough whittling down the list to the works above, so I’ll leave off with an incomplete list of those that might have made the cut: Johann von Goethe’s Elective Affinities; Vercors (Jean Bruller)’s Le Silence de la mer; Shirley Hazzard’s The Great Fire; Franz Werfel’s The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, the novel of the Armenian genocide; Yasushi Inoue’s Tun-Huang; Iris Origo’s A Chill in the Air and War in Val d’Orcia; Alberto Moravia’s Roman Stories; Gilbert Adair’s The Dreamers, the novel of May 1968 France (even if it is written by a Brit); James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain; Bora Chung’s Cursed Bunny [Ed. – Paging Frances Evangelista!]; Maria Judite de Carvalho’s Empty Wardrobes; Yuko Tsushima’s Woman Running in the Mountains [Ed. – Boo yeah!]; Nikolai Gogol’s Mirgorod; Gianfranco Baruchello’s How to Imagine: A Narrative of Art, Agriculture and Creativity; Faith Baldwin’s Enchanted Oasis, the romance novel of Palm Springs; and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, my re-read of the year, grand and startling and surprisingly funny three decades past the last time I read it.

Thank you for reading and thank you Dorian for inviting me to do a little writing.

[Ed. – Anytime, Scott. I mean it. seraillon is much missed.]

That’s it, friends—I’m calling a wrap on 2022 year in reading pieces. Except maybe for my own. What’s the over under that I’ll actually write one?

Melanie Nicholls’s Year in Readng, 2022

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

Today’s reflection on a year in reading is by Melanie (Mel) Nicholls. Mel is a bookseller at Barnes and Noble from Georgia. You can follow her on Twitter @nichollsm86 where she often tweets about…books!

Rineke Dijkstra, Self portrait, Marnixbad, Amsterdam, 1991

I was pleased when Dorian asked to do a write up of my 2022 reading, as I enjoyed reading the entries from last year. My reading in 2022 was mainly fiction in translation and short stories. When choosing what to read I mostly pick up books I think I’ll enjoy. And this past year I definitely succeeded! Here are some of the standouts.

January started strong with two books that are new favorites. The haunting Ganbare! Workshops on Dying is by Katarzyna Boni (tr. Mark Ordon). Boni reports on the March 11, 2011 earthquake and tsunami in the Tōhoku region of Japan and its aftermath. She offers accounts of the effects on survivors such as learning to scuba dive to help find bodies, a gripping account of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, and stories of other devastating earthquakes in Japan’s history. A heartbreaking and timely work. I followed this with the NYRB Classics edition of Edith Wharton’s ghost stories, unsettling and eerily quiet hauntings. A book I could read every year. The novel Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson and the stories in Cars on Fire by Mónica Ramón Ríos (tr. Robin Myers), continued my excellent streak of reading for the first month of the year. 

In February I began the readalong of Dorothy Richardson’s thirteen book sequence Pilgrimage. I really started to click with Miriam’s journey with book three and my top reading goal in 2023 is to finish the sequence. Other highlights include the classic Passing by Nella Larsen [Ed. – GOAT!] and the absolute gem Byobu by Ida Vitale (tr. Sean Manning), two books I’m sure I’ll find new meaning in each time I read them. 

In March I read another top book of 2022, Blood Feast: The Complete Short Stories of Malika Moustadraf. These stories about gender and class in society are expertly translated by Alice Guthrie. The outstanding translator’s notes make this a book I hope to study more and highly recommend. April was another strong month with the beautiful novel When I Sing, Mountains Dance by Irene Solà (tr. Mara Faye Lethem) and the terrific History of a Disappearance: The Forgotten Story of a Polish Town by Filip Springer (tr. Sean Gasper Bye). I ended this month with the masterpiece Woman Running in the Mountains by Yūko Tsushima (tr. Geraldine Harcourt) which I often think of with Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner. Both novels portray a woman’s yearning for freedom and Dorian’s podcast One Bright Pod has superb episodes for both books. [Ed. – Thank you! Of course, Frances and Rebecca are the really important members of the team.]

May and June were the months of absolute banger short books: 

Yesterday by Juan Emar (tr. Megan McDowell)

They by Kay Dick

Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au

Spear by Nicola Griffith [Ed. – Curious to check this one out.]

An Ideal Presence by Eduardo Berti (tr. Daniel Levin Becker)

Permafrost by Eva Baltasar (tr. Julia Sanches)

Violets by Kyung-Sook Shin (tr. Anton Hur)

Pollak’s Arm by Hans von Trotha (tr. Elisabeth Lauffer)

The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century by Olga Ravn. (tr. Martin Aitken)

July’s standout is A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr, a perfect novel. [Ed. – Absolutely agree.] August is one I look forward to every year because it is Women in Translation month. I continued this year with four writers whose translated work I am slowly making my way through: Annie Ernaux, Yoko Tawada, Natalia Ginzburg, and Banana Yoshimoto. Another highlight was the collection Panics by Barbara Molinard (tr. Emma Ramada). Molinard was a close friend of Marguerite Duras and would destroy most of her writing. [Ed. – Thanks, uh, “friend”…] These bizarre and grotesque stories are a must read. Two books translated from Croatian, Call Me Esteban by Lejla Kalamujic (tr. Jennifer Zoble) and Divine Child by Tatjana Gromača (tr. Will Firth) from the new small press of translated fiction Sandorf Passage, were also excellent. 

Gerty Simon, Renée Sintenis ca. 1929 – 32

The last few months of the year offered standouts in nonfiction. I love Elaine Castillo’s debut novel America is Not the Heart and she delivers again with the essays in How to Read Now. This book, along with A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa, This Little Art by Kate Briggs, The Missing Pieces by Henri Lefebvre (tr. David L. Sweet), and Voice of the Fish by Lars Horn, left me with a new appreciation for reading, translation, writing, and art. All are books I will come back to often. Other wonders at the end of the year include some short-but-mighty translated novellas: Space Invaders by Nona Fernández (tr. Natasha Wilmer), Baron Bagge by Alexander Lernet-Holenia (trs. Richard and Clara Winston), A Woman’s Battles and Transformation by Édouard Louis (trs. Tash Aw) and Rogomelec by Leonor Fini (trs. William Kulik and Serena Shanken Skwersky). I’ll close with Nettleblack by Nat Reeves, a playful novel of queer awakening among strange crimes in a Victorian rural town.The most fun I had reading in a while, just a joy to read. [Ed. – Sounds great!] My reading has changed over the last couple of years as I have discovered more translated fiction, small press, and Book Twitter. I am excited to see where my 2023 reading will take me and to share the wonders. [Ed. – You’re welcome back next year, Mel!]

James Morrison’s Year in Reading, 2022

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

I still hope to write up my reflections on my 2022 reading year. (Though look how well that worked last year…) In the meantime, I’ve solicited guest posts from friends and fellow book lovers about their own literary highlights. First up is James Morrison, an Australian reader and editor (sadly, not of books) who tweets at @unwise_trousers and blogs (increasingly infrequently) at http://causticcovercritic.blogspot.com. His novel Gibbons, Or One Bloody Thing After Another will be published later this year by Orbis Tertius Press

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

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

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

[Audience: Get on with it!]

THE BIG BASTARDS

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

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

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

GINZBURG & CO.

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

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

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

MY BODY BETRAYED ME

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

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

IMAGINED WORLDS, FUCKED-UP PHYSICS

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

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

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

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

THE TUMOUR AT THE HEART OF HUMAN HISTORY

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

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

Lacertilia [Lizards] – Ernst Haeckel [1904]

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

GRAPHIC!

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

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

From ‘A.C.2020’ – Mirko Ilic [2020]

POEMS THAT MOSTLY DON’T RHYME

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

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

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

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

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

MEDIUMN-SIZED JAPANESE

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

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

[Audience: Sweet fancy Moses, shut up!]

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

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

The Doll Man – Jean Veber [1896]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What I Read, April 2022

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

Ah, April—beloved of American academics everywhere. Not.

I got through it, though, even managing to celebrate Passover and observe Yom HaShoah and embark on an unusual teaching exercise (more on that another day, maybe). Celebrated a big birthday at month’s end with a weekend in Fort Worth, a town full of great art and better steaks.

Making it through he days was the big accomplishment. For reading, there was little time. Here’s what I managed.

Agnes Martin, Friendship, 1963

Georges Simenon, The Saint-Fiacre Affair (1932) Trans. Shaun Whiteside (2014)

In which we learn about Maigret’s childhood. Nothing too revealing, no traumas from the past, nothing dramatic to motivate the man he became, just the incidental irony of investigating a murder at the chateau where he lived as a boy (his father was the estate manager). The ending, well, imagine a Poirot if it had been written by Zola. Pleasing subplot about a village kid, too.

Katherena Vermette, The Break (2016)

I’ve loved this book since first reading it, but now I love it even more because I just taught it for the first time. Always an unpredictable situation, but even more so in this case, as I included it in my course on the afterlife of the Holocaust. On the face of it, Vermette’s novel of three generations of an indigenous family in Winnipeg coming to terms with an act of violence (which resonates with similar events in their lives) has no business on my syllabus. Yet traumatic and genocidal events are more connected than we might like to think—something I’ve written about elsewhere—even setting aside the fact that many indigenous writers and academics have cited second-generation Holocaust memoirs (those by the children of survivors) in referring to the experience of living with elders who suffered in the residential school system.

Happily, my students loved The Break. We had wide-ranging conversations about the possibility of intersectional responses to cultural trauma (using Michael Rothberg’s idea of multidirectional memory), the current culture’s fascination with crime, both real and imagined, and the novel’s shrewd use of point of view to resist the fetishization of violence to women’s bodies. Students who have suffered abuse themselves—sadly, a not negligible number—particularly appreciated Vermette’s intelligence and compassion. Thanks to Liz for talking me through her teaching of the book: she gave me so many ideas that improved my classroom experience.

Becky Chambers, A Psalm for the Wild-Built (2021)

A joy. On Panga, as the earth has become known after the great Crisis, a tumultuous time precipitated by the sudden coming-to-self-awareness of the world’s robots, which led humans to decarbonize and limit themselves to half the earth’s surface, a tea monk—someone who peddles from town to town offering tisanes and words of comfort—lights out for the territory, heading into the Wild with the aim of reaching an abandoned monastery. On the way they meet a robot, something they know only from textbooks. The robot is on a quest of its own, determined to meet humans and learn why they do what they do. Funny, sweet, moving; a road movie, a buddy pic, the intersection of the Venn diagram of Rónán Hession’s Leonard and Hungry Paul and Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future. I know, I know, who would even imagine such a thing?

Yūko Tsushima, Woman Running in the Mountains (1980) Trans. Geraldine Harcourt (1991)

Wonderful. Frances, Rebecca, and I had a lot to say on One Bright Book. Tl; dnl: single mother in 1970s Japan struggles through the first year of her son’s life and half seeks out, half falls into a job at a garden that satisfies her and opens up her life. Smart and satisfying, I liked it even more than Territory of Light, the other Tsushima I’ve read. Don’t sleep on this one.

Garry Disher, Under the Cold Bright Lights (2017)

My fourth Disher; I really like the guy. This one’s a standalone, although the appealing protagonist—a former homicide detective who comes out of early retirement to work cold cases—must have tempted Disher to write more. That would have been a terrible idea. This book barely but deftly circumvents the preposterous—a fate that would be unavoidable in future installments. (Read it, you’ll see what I mean.) Disher excels at keeping several plots running without needing to tie them together. Most interesting is his hero’s domestic situation: he inherited a rambling house in a hipster Melbourne neighbourhood and rents out or lends rooms to a rag-tag set of grad students, the temporarily homeless, his adult daughter, and even his wife, from whom he is sort of separated—she comes and goes as she pleases. All very unusual in the genre, seems to me.

Elisa Shua Dusapin, Winter in Sokcho (2016) Trans. Aneesa Abbas Higgins (2020)

Forgettable. I enjoyed the novella’s setting—the seaside town of the title, cold and forlorn—but I didn’t take to its story, about a young woman of mixed Korean-French ancestry who fixates on a guest at the hotel where she works. Lots of simple sentences, lots of fragments—it’s told from the young woman’s point of view, and the syntactic banality could be, I suppose, a reflection of her mindset, though I think we’re meant to find her enigmatic rather than empty. The best bits are about the fish market—plenty of food in these few pages, almost always offered as an incitement to disgust—but if I’m going to read a book set in Korea about body trouble, I’m going with The Vegetarian every time.

Andrew Miller, The Slowworm’s Song (2022)

Miller takes his unusual title from Basil Bunting—a slow worm’s a legless lizard, turns out—a decision that points to a technical conundrum: the narrator, Stephen Rose, ex-military, recovering alcoholic, failed father looking to make amends, liver of a small life in a small town in Somerset, is a closed man trying to open. Miller struggles to get the voice right, and mostly manages: sometimes flat, sometimes something more, almost poetic. (Sephen’s a bit of a reader, flourished in some open university literature courses, even if a paper on The Mill and the Floss remains unwritten (too tumultuous a book, maybe?), which gives Miller cover for the more high-flown moments.) I think close third person suits Miller better, though. The conceit is that the book is a manuscript addressed to Stephen’s adult daughter, who has cautiously entered his life after years of neglect and mistakes, a labour spurred by the arrival of a letter from Belfast. A commission is investigating events from the early 70s; Stephen’s not compelled to testify, but he is encouraged to, first gently and then much less so. Eventually he reveals the event in question, the one at the center of his life, the one that put it off the rails and forms the backdrop against which the construction of the rickety parallel rail of his life has taken place. (Wow, this metaphor went awry fast). There’s much to be said, no doubt, about the novel’s place in the current landscape of trauma narratives, as recently explored in an essay of Parul Seghal’s I still haven’t read out of a resistance I’ve yet to examine. At one point, a therapist says to Stephen:

We have to be careful not to get trapped by our stories. That’s one of the things we can learn. To tell the story differently, even to let go of it completely. To do that for a single minute and see what’s in the space we free.

Your enjoyment of this book will depend on how much that sentiment resonates with you. (For me, absolutely.) Even if it doesn’t, you might appreciate how Miller ironizes or complicates the possibility. (Remember the title?) A thoroughly satisfying novel, if less earth shattering than Now We Shall Be Entirely Free.

Imogen Reid, Text(ile)

Now that I am firmly middle-aged, well on the way to being old, in fact, I hope for the wisdom to make more time for reading. (The end of the semester should help.) And for the reading to be better. Even in this thin month, though, I can recommend Chambers and Disher for comfort, and Vermette, Tsushima, and Miller for complexity. How was your month? Come at me, BookTwitter, I know you all love the Dusapin…

Keith Bresnahan’s Year in Reading, 2021

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

In the next week or so I’ll be writing up my reflections on my 2021 reading year. In the meantime, I’ve solicited guest posts from friends and fellow book lovers about their own literary highlights. I’m always looking for contributors; let me know here or on Twitter (@ds228) if you have something you want to share.

First up is my old friend Keith Bresnahan (@designhist, follow him, he’s funny and awesome), who’s previously contributed several terrific pieces on Zola. You can read his 2020 reflections here. Keith lives and works in Toronto.

2021, in a nutshell:

This year was strange, obviously. I was lucky, avoiding any serious effects of the pandemic: I kept my job, as did everyone in my family; no one I knew got seriously ill or passed away with Covid. But time and space felt flat. I didn’t go anywhere, and the repetitive sameness of days was best reflected in this popular image I kept seeing re-posted on Twitter. Perhaps this is why when Dorian initially nudged me to look back on my year of reading, I felt like I hadn’t read much at all: there was little to situate my reading in association with specific places or other things that were happening around me while I read them. As it happens, judging by my admittedly imperfect reconstruction (I have sworn to be better at keeping track this year!), I found I actually read 50-odd books for pleasure in 2021, not counting the 15 or so others I read for teaching and academic research. Not bad.

Here are a few of the more memorable ones.

Philip Marsden, The Summer Isles

I read this early in the year; details have faded, but my memory of reading it is of being carried along on gentle sea-waves; it’s that kind of book. A first-person travelogue of Marsden alone in a wooden boat, traversing waters up the west coast of Ireland toward the titular isles in northern Scotland, it also contains a good deal of reflection on historical lore, spiritual journeys, and local geographies. Much of the sailing-vocabulary was lost on me, but it didn’t seem to matter. Both learned and meditative, it was perhaps the most calming book I read this year. I passed it on to a good friend who owns a boat. 

Enrique Vila-Matas, Never Any End to Paris (Trans. Anne McLean)

I found out about Vila-Matas this year, like most of the other authors I come across these days, from people I follow on “Book Twitter” (regular Twitter, just a nice corner of it populated by book-obsessed folks). A wry memoir of Vila-Matas’s youthful days in Paris as an aspiring writer and Ernest Hemingway wannabe. I loved it. He somehow rents a garret from Marguerite Duras, encounters Georges Perec and Roland Barthes, dates a woman who suggests he fling himself off the Eiffel Tower while on an acid trip, fends off parental intervention, and generally fails to write anything of substance. In a year where I couldn’t go anywhere, the descriptions of Paris were more than welcome. Looking forward to reading more by Vila-Matas soon, starting with Dublinesque, a kind of Joycean dream, apparently. Perfect for the centenary of Ulysses this year? (I’m also planning to give that one another shot)

Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove.

An 800-plus-page western. A western? Cowboys? A cattle drive? I left central Alberta for a reason, dude. But many folks who know better than me loved it, so I gave it a shot. Holy shit is this book great. An out-and-out masterpiece. At times it felt like magic realism – did the bull actually fight that bear? Was the cook actually back there banging the same bell with the same crowbar? Did Blue Duck fly? The book’s Indigenous characters are barely fleshed out (although McMurtry does show sympathy for their plight) — but then this is really the story of the others, the damaged settlers moving against a nascent American backcloth, seeking and grasping for any purchase with little to guide or protect them. At its heart is an emotionally blocked friendship between two former Texas rangers, and the women who speak truth to them (and whom they largely fail to understand). Plus an impressive cast of secondary characters, all memorable creations. Did I mention it’s more than 800 pages and somehow feels too short?

Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian (Trans. Grace Fick)

Another masterpiece. The best fictional evocation of the classical world I’ve ever read. Dreamlike and imagistic, with lessons on life and death to spare. I’m waiting to read more Yourcenar until the memory of this one’s brilliance fades a bit.

Ivo Andrić, Bosnian Chronicle (Trans. Celia Hawkesworth in collaboration with Bogdan Rakić)

A newish edition from Apollo Classics (Head of Zeus), this is a very long book, first published in 1945, about a French consul during the Napoleonic era living in a small Bosnian town on the extreme fringes of world events. Not much happens. I adored it.

Dominique Barbéris, A Sunday in Ville-d’Avray (Trans. John Cullen)

This was great — a short, stylish account of two sisters, one recounting to the other a past entanglement with a strange man. Felt to me at times like watching a French film from the 1970s. Enigmatic, and atmospheric as all get-out.

Three books in the “how-did-I-not-know-about-these?” category:

Margaret Kennedy, The Feast

A number of families cram into a seaside hotel in Cornwall for a week in the summer, their conflicts and idiosyncrasies build to a climax, then half of them are killed when a cliff falls on them. We know this part from the outset, though not who dies, so I’m not giving anything away. Apparently there’s a whole structure here about the 7 deadly sins, but I missed this while reading it, and it didn’t matter. Great fun. Made me want to read more Kennedy, and soon.

Elizabeth Taylor, Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont

An older woman moves into a retirement hotel in London. The plot? Not much. But I found it utterly charming, even its descriptions of the depredations of old age, and very funny, too. Others, I’ve since learned, found it bleak. [Ed. – raises hand] Not me. Mrs. Palfrey is a plucky heroine, if a little self-deceiving (aren’t we all), and even the end, coming as it must, didn’t feel sad. I picked up a used Virago copy of this book on a whim, and then coincidentally read it the same week that it came out in a new NYRB classics edition. For once my finger was right on that pulse. More from Taylor in my near reading future.

Shirley Hazzard, The Bay of Noon

A young English woman in Naples in the 1950s falls in with a Neapolitan woman, Giaconda, and her Roman lover, Gianni. This was both evocative and restrained, with a powerful sense of the unspoken and unshown behind the minimal plot. Reminded me a bit of Antonioni, in a good way. Also made me long to revisit Naples (some strong compensatory travel-thrills in my readings this year!). My first Hazzard, won’t be my last.

Yasunari Kawabata, The Sound of the Mountain (Trans. Edward G. Seidensticker)

Junichiro Tanizaki, The Makioka Sisters (Trans. Edward G. Seidensticker)

Akimitsu Takagi, The Informer (Trans. Sadako Mizugushi)

Akimitsu Takagi, Honeymoon to Nowhere (Trans. Sadako Mizugushi)

Yuko Tsushima, Territory of Light (Trans. Geraldine Harcourt)

Kobo Abe, The Woman in the Dunes (Trans. E. Dale Saunders)

I enjoyed all the books translated from Japanese that I read this year, especially The Informer and Territory of Light. But it was Abe’s Woman in the Dunes that was the real revelation. A distressing, tense, fever-dream of a book, I’d put this existentialist fable of bizarre confinement, Sisyphean futility, and struggles of the will up against Camus any day of the week. I won’t be reading it again anytime soon, but I’m glad I did. Haven’t brought myself to watch the movie, but here’s an image from it anyway.

Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

Another existentialist hero, this time Philip Marlowe probing some family funny-business in sunny California. Noir perfection. I realized I’d previously conflated Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, whose hard-boiled shtick I could never really get past [Ed. – I am allowing this heresy on my blog, but I don’t like it], but this is glorious, witty stuff. The film, with Bogart and Bacall, is a deserved classic.

Muriel Spark, The Girls of Slender Means

My first Spark! I loved this small tale of young women living together and negotiating wartime, nascent loves, work, and rooftop escapes. A near-perfect short read.

Sam Selvon, The Housing Lark

Stuart Hall, Familiar Stranger

Two takes on the West Indian experience in 1950s – 60s England. The Housing Lark, by the criminally under-appreciated Sam Selvon, is a sort of sequel to his better-known The Lonely Londoners; if anything, I liked this one better. Hall’s autobiography takes him from Jamaica to Oxford to the founding of cultural studies and the New Left in the 1960s—on the one hand, a world apart from Selvon’s hustling hardscrabble immigrants, and on the other not so different, negotiating displacements and identities among the so-called Windrush generation. Suggest watching Steve McQueen’s remarkable Small Axe series alongside.

Graham Greene, The Quiet American

Ryszard Kapusćiński, Nobody Leaves: Impressions of Poland (Trans. William Brand)

Sergio Pitol, The Journey (Trans. George Henson)

Vivian Gornick, The Romance of American Communism

Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

Purely by accident, I ended up reading a number of books this year highlighting historical communism and Cold War politics seen through individual lives. Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, a scathing indictment of Western intervention in Southeast Asia, with its shockingly amoral conclusion, was among the best books I read this year. Ryszard Kapusćiński’s Nobody Leaves, a collection of short journalistic pieces from his native Poland around 1960, is episodic, strange and beautiful, and generally short on hope. Sergio Pitol’s The Journey, has the Mexican writer traveling around literary circles in Moscow, Leningrad, and Tbilisi during two weeks in 1986, just as glasnost and perestroika were starting to peek through. It was a highly personable travelogue that makes me want to read more by him (I’ve already ordered Pitol’s The Love Parade, out in translation early this year). He writes a lot about Marina Tsvetaeva, which makes me think I should read her. In non-fiction, I was taken with Vivian Gornick’s The Romance of American Communism, recently republished by Verso. Originally from 1977, it’s an oral history of American communists from the 1920s through the 1950s and their breaks with the Party following the revelations of the 1950s. Gornick’s subjects are angry and wounded, prone to self-importance, self-deception, and self-critique, and her book is wonderful at conveying how people form passionate attachments to ideological movements, and what happens when that falls apart. Amor Towles’ A Gentleman in Moscow, a cream-puff fantasy of a hotel-bound aristocrat suffering minor inconveniences during the same decades of Soviet history, which I read at a cottage just after Gornick’s bracing book, felt too tidy and cute by half. I might have enjoyed it more at another time.

James Salter, Light Years

Probably my favourite book of 2021. A couple raises two kids in a country house not far from New York City. They have affairs, they divorce, their kids grow up, they meet artists, actors, go to parties, discuss the theatre, they remarry, get ill, die. It recalled the 1970s cinematic and literary middle-class dramas I was enthralled by as a child (this was what life was, or so I thought then). Now in my own middle age, I’m both less sanguine about this stuff than I used to be, and intuitively drawn to it. Nostalgia for that insular worldview? Dunno. Whatever it was, I found it perfectly, achingly beautiful, and sad. A book I know I’ll revisit. I also read Salter’s A Sport and a Pastime, which I liked but not nearly as much as this one.

In the last days of 2021, I read three quietly resonant books:

Paul Griffiths, The Tomb Guardians

I’m not sure how to classify this short book, which shifts constantly between two conversations: in the first, two figures discuss a series of three (real-life) paintings in a museum showing the sleeping guards charged with protecting Christ’s tomb; in the second, we hear the voices of the Roman guards themselves, having woken up to find one of their party missing and the stone from the tomb entrance moved. It’s clever and light, achieved with erudition and evident skill; as a professional art historian, I wish I’d written it myself.

Louise Glück, Winter Recipes from the Collective

Nobel winner of 2020. Quiet and studious poems. Felt snowy, and cold. Some folks are saying this book shows a diminution of Glück’s energies, which bodes well for her earlier work, I’d say. I’ve just bought her first four books of poems.

Aidan Higgins, Langrishe, Go Down

Another Apollo Classics reprint, first published in 1966. A woman on the cusp of middle age, living with her unmarried sisters in a declining Irish great house, has an ill-fated affair with a German scholar of no means. Just go read it already. One of my books of the year. There’s a film, too, with Jeremy Irons and Judi Dench.

One more, for Dorian:

Marian Engel, Bear. Technically a re-read, since I first read this when I was 18. But that was some time ago, and I was 18, so let’s call it a new book for 2021. Is it the great Canadian novel? Sure. [Ed. — Hmm… this is not the expression of explosive joy I’d hoped for, but I’ll take it.]

Some predictions for 2022:

– Nature-books: I’ve got a bunch of these on the shelf, and this is the year! Birds, mountains, wild swimming, I’m your man.

– More 20th-century reprints, mostly from UK writers: I’ve gathered a small heap of books from Virago Modern Classics, Persephone, Apollo Classics and others, and am eager to dive in.

– Finishing the Penguin Maigret books. I’ve got 10 left to read in this 75-volume set, and the last one has just arrived by post.

– Following a prompt from a Twitter mutual, I’ve signed on to read all the extant plays of classical Greece. Ambitious, but they’re short, right?

May 2019 in Review

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

In contrast to last month, May was a good reading month. No surprise: April is the worst month of the year for my schedule; May is one of the best. Plus, I had a lovely few days at my in-laws’ farm, where there’s nothing for me—a person who avoids bush-hogging (it’s a thing, look it up) as if his life depended on it—to do but sit on the porch swing and read.

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David Downing, Diary of a Man on Leave (2019) The new standalone from Downing is about a German-born Soviet spy who is sent back to Germany in 1938 to see if any of the members of the now-suppressed Communist party can be enticed into sabotage or resistance work. As is often the case with Downing, the historical background is more compelling than the writing or the story. But I also didn’t give this book my best. I bet I would have enjoyed it more if I’d read it in a couple of sittings, instead of in dribs and drabs over the last week of the semester.

Miriam Toews, Women Talking (2018) Lots of people have already written about this excellent novel, including Parul Seghal in this very nice essay about #Metoo in fiction. It’s based on a true story: in a Mennonite community in Bolivia, women of all ages were regularly drugged with animal anesthetic and raped by men they lived among and knew well. In Toews’s novel, the men of the community have gone to the city to bail out the culprits. The women have two days to decide what to do: stay, leave, or fight. The novel consists of their debates, as recorded by August, a man who in his younger years left the community (his parents were expelled) and has now returned. August is an educated man, a man useless at farming, and, as such, in the eyes of the women as well as his own, not really a man at all.

I loved this smart, slippery novel, and I suspect I would get a lot more out of it on a second reading. I don’t think I’ve come close to plumbing its depths. I’ll simply note for now that the use of the male transcriber (the women are illiterate) is brilliant—it lets us see how even an ostensibly “good,” that is, sympathetic man, is complicit in patriarchy. When August describes the underside of a woman’s arm as “very smooth and white, like the keel of a new canoe,” my first response was to admire this simple but effective simile. My second was to wonder over the nature of the comparison. Is it neutral? (And what would that even mean?) Appreciative? Objectifying? Can there be appreciation without objectification? Relatedly, can there be forgiveness without complicity? What is forgiveness even for? By evoking these sorts of questions, Women Talking reminded me of Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas, another rhetorically complex investigation into social structures, gender politics, and the uses and abuses of violence.

I’ve a longstanding aversion to Canadian literature that I perceive to be worthy but dull (i.e. most mainstream English-language Canadian fiction of the past thirty years). I’d never read Toews before because I thought she fit that bill. On the basis of this book, anyway, I was totally wrong, and I look forward to looking into her backlist. Anyone have preferences?

Katherine Marsh, The Night Tourist (2007) This one is special to me because my daughter and I read it together (mostly me to her, but sometimes her to me), and it’s a pretty sophisticated book, probably best suited for middle readers or even teenagers. It reworks the Orpheus myth (and as such gave my daughter her first consistent exposure to Greek myth—another milestone). Jack Perdu is a teenager who experiences mysterious visions that eventually lead him to experience a whole New York underworld full of ghosts. These recently and not-so-recently dead people must come to terms with their past before they can, in the language of the novel, “move on” to Elysium. Befriended by a girl named Euri, Jack learns why he, a mortal, can see ghosts and at what cost. In so doing, he uncovers the truth about his mother’s death, about which his father has always been so tight-lipped. And he reenacts his own version of the Orpheus story. Along the way he travels through all kinds of unusual New York landmarks—it’s a good city novel—and meets all kinds of people, like the poet Dylan Thomas and the psychoanalyst and early translator of Freud Abraham Brill. In other words, The Night Tourist was as much fun for me to read as for my daughter. I’m grateful to a colleague who teaches Classics and Children’s literature for turning me on to this book.

John Warner, Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities (2018) Catnip to me, since I spend much of my professional life decrying the five-paragraph essay, teaching students why it’s boring and awful, and supporting them through the realization that a skill they had to master in order to get to college now means nothing at all.

Warner, who is clear that his teaching discoveries have been possible because he hasn’t had a full-time, secure academic position (which is to say, he is the most common kind of academic there is today), is funny without being cutesy. He’s clear and thoughtful. And best of all, he’s inspiring. I’ll be changing my teaching this Fall based on his suggestions. His practical advice is great—and his sample exercises even better. I could have done without some of the sections demolishing what has passed as educational reform in the last decades—mostly because I already agree with Warner, but also because these sections feel a bit padded—but on the whole this is a book anyone who writes or, especially, teaches others to write should take a look at. It opens with a great bit on the reactions Warner gets when people learn about his job (It’s the phones! It’s that they’re snowflakes!). Warner says, it’s not the phones, and it’s not the snowflakes: it’s that students are doing exactly what we’ve trained them to do.

Andrew Taylor, The Anatomy of Ghosts (2010) My last audiobook of the semester was a good one. I’ve read some of Taylor’s historical fiction before (always crime-ish, sometimes Gothic, a bit pastiche-y), and although some are better than others, he’s always good light reading. This is a story of secrets and corruption in 18th century Cambridge. Some appealing characters, some dastardly ones, some nice twists. Good stuff.

Ben Aaronovitch, Whispers Under Ground (2012) I really liked Midnight Riot, the first book in Aaronovitch’s urban fantasy Rivers of London series. In the first book, PC Peter Grant learns to his surprise that he has an affinity for the supernatural and is assigned to a unit of the Met dealing with all things inexplicable to reason. (I especially like the personification of the various rivers and streams in and under London that gives the series its name.) A while ago, I read the second book, and it was ok. Now I took a flier on the third, and I’m realizing that I like crime a lot more than fantasy. There’s always a climactic bit in these books with some kind of monster or supernatural creature that I find tedious. So maybe these books aren’t really my thing. They’re funny, though. Maybe I’ll pick up the fourth in a year or so.

Nathan Englander, kaddish.com (2019) Englander is the heir to Bernard Malamud, which is some of the highest praise I can offer. My appreciation for his (admittedly a bit uneven) work only grew when I got to host him for a few days several years ago. The man’s a prince.

I liked kaddish.com a lot, but this review in The Nation made me doubt my response. (I respect Nathan Goldman’s taste.) I agree with Goldman that the book (which is really a novella—a form that, happily, seems to be making a comeback: thinking of Moss’s Ghost Wall for example) is more expanded short story than fully-fledged novel. But I don’t think it’s padded or slight or overworked. I appreciated how it used the kind of temporal shifts more common to a story than a novel. There’s a big, and to my mind fascinating, shift about 30 pages in: some readers characterize it as undeserved or ill-explained, but I think it’s important for making sense of the book, which is about persistence or, better, the inexpungable, whether that takes the form of pop up windows or Torah study.

What’s this book about? The eponymous website, of course, which promises to exploit a Talmudic loophole in order for users to hire someone to say kaddish (the prayers for the dead) for a deceased loved one for the year prescribed by Jewish law. Englander’s protagonist, who has taken advantage of this service, spends most of the book trying to meet the shadowy and perhaps unreal person who took on that burden. Like so much of Englander’s work, kaddish.com simultaneously challenges and appreciates Jewish tradition. (Again like Malamud.) It also asks to be read in tandem with his last book, the similarly short The Dinner at the Center of the World: both are about Israel around the turn of the century; the first political, the second religious.

James Sturm, Off Season (2019) Melancholy comic, which I wrote about here.

Judith Kerr, When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit (1971) I’d been thinking about how I first learned about the Holocaust, and I remembered this book, which—along with Anne Holm’s I Am David (does anyone read that anymore? I should track it down)—was one of the first places I got even a hint about the fate of Europe’s Jews under Nazism. (How old was I? 10 maybe?) Re-reading When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit was a revelation. For one thing, I realized it’s not really about the Holocaust: it’s indirectly about the Nazi persecution of Jews, and directly about exile.

Anna, the protagonist, clearly modelled on Kerr herself, is nine when Hitler takes power. Her father is a well-known writer critical of National Socialism. (As was Kerr’s father, Alfred Kerr, nicknamed the Kulturpapst (cultural Pope) of Weimar Germany.) Just before the fateful elections in January 1933, Anna’s father is tipped off that he should leave the country, as he is likely to be arrested should the Nazis win. What he hopes will be a short vacation turns into a life-long exile, in which he is joined by his family, first in Switzerland, then Paris, and finally London.

Kerr writes piercingly of what it means to have no home other than one’s immediate family (“If you haven’t got a home, you’ve got to be with your people”—lucky for her, and her character, that she could). Being a refugee is hard, the book suggests, but it also has its benefits. (Maybe this is the difference between exiles and refugees. Only the former can look on their experiences so philosophically.)

There’s an especially moving subplot about a family friend, a naturalist and a Luftmensch who laughs off the idea that he should leave Germany. (One of his grandparents was Jewish.) When Uncle Julius is forced out of his job and can only find work as a sweeper in a factory, his only pleasure is his daily visit to the Berlin zoo, where, Anna’s father notes sadly, the monkeys recognize him not just for the peanuts he brings but also for his gentleness. If only the people were as perceptive. When the zoo is decreed off-limits to Jews, Julius swallows a bottle of sleeping pills.

Yet despite such stories, the book is very funny. The family’s pluck is heartening, and their dry wit a pleasurable, if necessarily limited, fuck you to fascism. (The title comes from Anna’s decision to leave behind her favourite stuffed animal, a pink rabbit, with all the rest of the family’s possessions, in favour of a new toy that she later recognizes she doesn’t love at all. The family’s things are sent “into storage,” but of course, none of it is ever seen again.) Reading Kerr’s delightful book, I sometimes laughed out loud, which I really didn’t expect.

Kerr wrote two more books about the family’s experiences, taking up Anna’s story after her arrival in England. These are out of print, but I’ve tracked them down in various local libraries. Just a few days after finishing Rabbit, I learned of Kerr’s death at the age of 95. (Judging from the stories circulating on Twitter, she was a delight.) I’ll be reading the rest of the trilogy soon: maybe an essay will come of it.

Chia-Chia Lin, The Unpassing (2019) Contemporary American literary fiction is not my thing, but I like Garth Greenwell, and he’s been saying good things about this book. So I plucked it from the library’s New Book shelf. I almost quit on the first page:

During an uneventful part of my childhood, my mother walked into the room with a plate of loose washed grapes. She collapsed. Grapes thudded dully on the carpet. One rolled under the couch. The plate lay overturned, and my mother’s body was beside it, limbs splayed.

This is just the sort of in medias res, flatly written, and ominously portentous sort of thing I associate with American literary fiction. So annoying. (At least it’s in past tense. Why does everyone feel they have to write in present tense?)

Anyway, I persevered, and I’m glad I did. It turns out the mother is testing her kids, checking to see whether they would call for an ambulance. (They didn’t.) This gives you some idea of the fraught family dynamic at the heart of Lin’s debut novel, which is narrated by a sensitive child, alert to some of the nuances of what’s going on around him, but blind to others, which we glimpse by reading against his limited perspective.

Not a particularly unusual scenario for a literary novel. But who the child is and where he tells his story from is more unusual. Gavin, ten years old in 1986, is the middle child in an immigrant family. His parents are from Taiwan; he grows up in Alaska. His father is a wastewater engineer, but whether from bad luck or incompetence, he makes a mistake and a child dies from a poisoned well. (The motif of poisoning returns at the end of the book, with a reference to the Exxon Valdez disaster/fiasco.) The child who dies barely figures in the book—though the event has consequences for the narrator’s family, which spirals into severe poverty—but that fate echoes in another, significant way: Gavin’s younger sister dies of meningitis, and we see how each member of the family struggles with the repercussions of that terrible event. It’s all made worse in that no one in the family is able or willing to talk about their feelings.

Even though the book’s not especially long I thought it could have been shorter: I think it would have been better as a novella. Especially as Lin is better with set pieces than sustained narration. Two in particular stand out: one in which Gavin and his mother encounter a beached whale (it’s not as crassly symbolic as it sounds), and another in which the family’s youngest child goes missing during a violent storm. (That scene is so suspenseful I could feel my hands clutching the pages.)

As a child of immigrants, I’m captivated by stories of children forced to become the interpreters of a new land for their elders. I was surprised, and interested, to find that racism isn’t central to the story. Gavin’s family is different from most everyone around them, no question, and those differences embarrass and confuse the children, but the white Alaskans in the novel—admittedly few in number: the family is isolated, more by choice than geography—are more puzzled than hostile when they encounter the narrator and his siblings and parents. But then there’s the title, with its ungainly nonce noun, which I can’t quite figure out. Does “unpassing” suggest their inability to fit in? What isn’t being passed? I couldn’t make much of it.

It’s neither here nor there, but I was also surprised by the affinities between Lin’s novel and David Vann’s Legend of a Suicide (2008). Moral of the story: try not to grow up with emotionally distant parents in Alaska.

Daphne Du Maurier, The House on the Strand (1969) A great time travel novel! Richard Young is invited to stay at a house on the Cornish coast owned by his friend Magnus Lane, a scientist who has secretly invented a concoction that takes whoever swallows it back to the fourteenth century. Richard, who agrees to test it, experiences a different moment in the lives of the local gentry on each trip. As befits a novel from the 60s, Du Maurier explicitly plays up the analogy between time travel and drugtaking, not least because the professor’s tincture turns out to be addictive. Richard’s visits to the past are momentary, and he cannot intervene in events. But even mere observation is risky.

I happened to read The House on the Strand as I was writing about Sarah Moss’s recent novel Ghost Wall, which concerns an anthropology study course, in which participants try to live as the Celts of Northumberland did in the years before the Roman invasion of Britain. Both novels investigate the power—and danger—of the desire to inhabit the past. Although Du Maurier’s narrator is more generous in his relationship to the past than most of Moss’s characters, he experiences the fantasy of direct connection to the past just as intensely as they do: “Imagination was not enough, I craved the living experience which had been denied me.”

The drug means Du Maurier’s narrator can experience what Moss’s characters cannot. Yet the opportunity comes at great cost. Madness results when the boundary between past and present dissolves. Which is really not that different from what we see in Moss’s novel. Moreover, both writers are equally convinced that the desire to control and dominate the past, rather than just to know it, is particularly male. The most disagreeable thing about The House on the Strand is the way Richard bullies his wife. (I think Du Maurier is critiquing this behavior, but I’m actually not sure. I find her gender politics hard to figure out.)

Anyway, you can read The House on the Strand without reading Ghost Wall. It’s a great book, a highlight in the Du Maurier canon, in my opinion, one I am steadily exploring with great pleasure (six books so far, and not a dud among them).

I read this for Ali’s #DDMreadingweek, which was a big success: I wish I’d been in time to write about it. But she promises to run it again next year, which gives me the excuse to read more Du Maurier!

Henrik Pantoppidan, Lucky Per (1898 – 1904, rev. 1918) Trans. Naomi Lebowitz (2010) I made a big deal about asking everyone to read this, and some of you even did. What I haven’t done is written anything about the experience yet. Will rectify this week.

Esther Freud, Peerless Flats (1993) I’ve long been a fan of Freud’s first novel, Hideous Kinky, which I gather is closely based on her own childhood experiences in Morocco, where she and her sister were taken by her clever, free-spirited, feckless, Hippie (choose your modifier) mother. But I’ve never read any of her others, even though I’ve collected most of them. I’ve long had the idea to catch up with them, and I think this is the summer for it.

Peerless Flats (you’ve got to admit, she has a way with titles) is, by all accounts, another fairly autobiographical novel, though this time with an older protagonist. In 1979, Lisa is sixteen and newly arrived in London where she’s just started an acting course. She lives with her mother (a version of the mother in Hideous) and much younger (and hilariously anarchic) brother. She’s also trying to keep tabs on her half-sister, who is into punk and drugs and lousy men; Lisa is the sensible one in the family, with all the travails that entails.

Two passages I liked a lot:

In the first, Lisa is in a pub, waiting for an older man she’s not sure she’s in love with. She’s ordered a drink she doesn’t want because she’s convinced ordering a soft drink would be a tip-off that she’s underage. She thinks about how late it’s getting:

Lisa began to worry about her mother. She imagined her waiting up. Listening for every tread on the stairs. She knew from experience that the more she worried about her mother, the less anxious her mother seemed when she did finally appear. But it didn’t stop her. Maybe this was what people meant by sensible.

In the second, she starts a new term to find that Brecht has replaced Stanislavsky on the syllabus:

Lisa felt completely thrown. For her the whole point of acting was the license it gave you to become another person, protected by a stage set and someone else’s words. … ‘What kind of actress are you going to be, Brechtian or Stanislavskian?’ [her friend] Janey asked Lisa in the canteen.

Lisa wasn’t sure. Really she just wanted to be Julie Christie in Doctor Zhivago and wear a fur hat and a tailored coat with buttons down the front.

Right?!?

It seems to me that Freud is the link between a writer like Barbara Comyns and one like Nina Stibbe. All are exemplars of a British tradition of female experience—predominantly realist in expression, but where the Gothic is never far away—in which stoicism is leavened by humour, and competent haplessness is, maybe not a value, but a totally okay way to be. Anita Brookner might fit somewhere here too.

Yuko Tsushima, Territory of Light (1979) Trans. Geraldine Harcourt (2018) Evocative 1970s Japanese novella about a woman who separates from her husband and lives with her small daughter. As the title hints, the book is as much about patterns and sensations as about emotions: or, rather, the latter are mostly evoked through the former. (The particular territory of light is a fourth-floor apartment, but it’s surely also the psyche.) My sense is that single mothers were unusual in Japan at the time, and the narrator deals with a certain amount of animus and hardship. But the book is really about resilience, about making a life which is sometimes exhilarating and sometimes imprisoning. (I especially loved a bit where the mother loses it on her tantrum-y child in a park and wants nothing more than to leave her behind.) Territory of Light was initially published in a newspaper in twelve monthly installments. No doubt that’s why there’s the chapters repeat themselves a bit, but I liked this: it captured that crushing sense of getting though daily life that characterizes life with small children, even as the change in seasons makes the book more fluid than stagnant. The only thing I wondered at was the portrayal of the daughter, who seemed not so much precocious (thank God, that’s the worst) but developmentally older than I expected. She said and did things I don’t associate with three-year-olds. Regardless, Tsushima is an impressive writer, and it’s great to see her in English: I’ve got Child of Fortune and will read that soon.

Helen Dunmore, The Siege (2001) Last year, I read the late Helen Dunmore’s last novel, Birdcage Walk. I liked it a lot, and I think about it often. I liked The Siege even better, mostly because it is set in the period of my intellectual interests/obsessions (the 1930s and 40s in Europe). The title refers to the terrible siege of Leningrad by the Nazis, especially its horrifying first months during the winter of 1941-2.

Dunmore sometimes reminds me of Penelope Fitzgerald in her use of unusual and vivid details to evoke the foreignness of the past. In the end, she’s a less surprising writer than Fitzgerald (I mean, who isn’t?), but still a very good one. Especially memorable here is her depiction of what prolonged hunger does to bodies, both metaphorical (the body politic, which bends and often breaks) and, most interestingly, literal.

Hearts palpitate after the simplest actions (climbing a flight of stairs, to say nothing of chopping a hole in the frozen Neva or dragging a pailful of its water back to an apartment). Legs swell. Teeth fall out. Short-term memory fades. Breath stinks. Sexual desire evaporates. I’d need to think more about whether the book ignores important political and historical distinctions by emphasizing the body (not in itself an ahistorical concept, but presented here as such), but that focus is certainly powerful.

The Siege isn’t a short book. And aside from some important chapters at the beginning set during the summer of 41, when Germany invaded the USSR, it concentrates on the months between September 1941 and April 1942. That level of detail is impressive—and sometimes hard to take. We watch a family’s precious supplies dwindle (we ache when the very last teaspoon of honey is meted out to a little boy; we wonder how many times tea can be made from the same dried nettles) and we wring our hands in anticipation—in a way I have often considered with my students of Holocaust literature—of an end we know, with the benefit of hindsight, is coming. Just hold out a little longer, I silently urged the characters, even as I worried because there were so many more years of the siege to go. How could they survive?  Dunmore’s decision to elide the rest of the war and leap to its end in the final chapters worked for me. Only a different kind of book—and probably not a novel—could cover the whole event in such detail. Plus, although life remained terribly hard for Leningraders, it was never as bad as that first winter, since the authorities were eventually able to fly supplies in—plus every available inch of the city was turned into a vegetable garden.

More Dunmore is in my future, no question. Maybe I’ll start with her sort-of sequel to The Siege, The Betrayal. Anyone have any other suggestions?

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Judith Kerr’s story of exile & Dunmore’s depiction of the siege of Leningrad aside, I deliberately took a break from all things fascism/Holocaust-related this month. In June, though, I’ll be returning to my regular fare. In particular, I’ll be reading and writing about Primo Levi, as a way to commemorate his centenary. More on that in a separate post soon.