The Lost Civilization of Women

Image source (Rome)

The scales have tipped. The glass is overflowing. I’m not sure when the drop that caused the overflow happened, but it feels different now, the fact of women’s writing, women’s words in the world. As a child, a teenager in school, I felt the general tokenization of women. I received by osmosis (from textbooks, from teachers), the sense that “women writers” needed to be included in curricula to fill a quota, but that they weren’t quite as good as the writers that didn’t require a modifier (male writers).

Then, when trying to write, learning to write, there was the sense, also transmitted by teachers, anthologies, peers, that I should try to write to fit in with the men, to impress the men in the room, in the canon, at the publishers. Gradually, this fueled a rebellion and I wanted to read only women, discover women’s writing that wasn’t anthologized or talked about in institutions, and write like a woman (whatever that means, if anything). But this felt like a kind of isolation, marginalization in my reading and writing life. [The usual disclaimer: I’m writing from a mostly English-language, mostly American perspective…]

But the chauvinism isn’t a given now. The rejection of it is palpable! Women writers are becoming just writers, no modifier required. Joan Didion is the aspiration, not Norman Mailer. Women, who comprise the majority of fiction readers, now number among the critics. So many more varied women’s voices are being published, on a large scale, by major publishers, from mass market to literary. That’s not to say there’s still not a way to go, of course. This is the beginning and it feels great.

What’s struck me recently is that not only are new voices being published, but women writers from the past are being resurrected and appreciated. In the U.S., Eve Babitz, Lucia Berlin, Clarice Lispector, Elizabeth Hardwick, Penelope Fitzgerald, Renata Adler have all had a recent renaissance as major literary figures of the 20th century. (Parul Sehgal of the New York Times wrote an interesting piece about this phenomenon and paying attention to what caused the vanishing in the first place.) Not only was Zora Neale Hurston’s book on a former slave published in 2018, 90 years after it was written, it got a surprising amount of ink when it did (History.com, NPR, The Huffington Post, The New Yorker, The Daily Mail!).

I took this in Arco, Italy. This fresco was inside the ruins of a medieval castle. I loved that it depicted, of all things (and after seeing so many sad Christs and saints and naked goddesses), clothed ladies playing a dice game and having fun in the 1300s.

I’ve been thinking of all of the Modernist women I skipped over in my education, whose work I still haven’t read. I was reading T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound hungrily, but skipped over Mina Loy, H.D. I didn’t know about Djuna Barnes, Kay Boyle, who were there all along, drinking and smoking with the dudes, and writing, too.

As someone with an interest but no particular expertise on visual art, I’ve been peripherally aware of a similar tendency in that realm, as well. I was delighted by Peter Schjeldahl decrying the title “Woman Impressionist” of the big 2018 Berthe Morisot show at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia (“a great artist who is not so much underrated in standard art history as not rated at all”). There was the recent astounding Hilma Af Klint show at the Guggenheim. She was painting abstract forms in the early 20th century on her own, as part of a spiritual search, long before Kandinsky, and didn’t want to be shown in her time for fear of being misunderstood. There was Yayoi Kusama’s triumphant, late-career world domination, beginning with the blockbuster show at the Hirshhorn in 2017. A big Frida Kahlo show now at the Brooklyn Museum. Joan Mitchell’s work setting auction records. (I’d never heard of her before last year, but of course had heard of de Kooning and Pollock.) I’ve seen lots of Artemisia Gentileschi’s images pop up all over the Internet. Hopefully the art history books are being rewritten. These people, their work, have been there the whole time.

I don’t have the same evidence, but a sense or hope that this transformation–the recognition of women who were there all along, making history and culture–is happening in other areas, too, ones that I track less, like comedy, film, food, and science.

This resurrection of women from the past makes me think of an ancient civilization that’s discovered beneath the living city. It was there all along. We are excavating, removing the layers of dirt that was dumped on women’s work. We’re carefully lifting it up, dusting it, examining it, valuing it, attempting to connect it to other fragments. We’re realizing, too, what’s been lost and can’t be recovered.

Evidence of this past civilization goes even further back. I don’t know why we’ve assumed it was only men drafting illuminated manuscripts, sculpting goddess figures, painting on cave walls, but we do, I do. We need scientific proof that it was possible women were doing these things, otherwise we don’t believe it, can’t picture it. I saw several articles making the rounds recently about flecks of blue lapis lazuli being found in the teeth of a 1,000 skull of a nun in a German monastery. It’s evidence that women, too, created beautiful illuminated manuscripts. There’s scientific proof that most cave paintings were done by women. And there’s the theory that “the first images
of the human figure [fertility goddesses] were made from the point of view of self rather than other” and “Paleolithic ‘Venus’ figurines represent ordinary women’s views of their own bodies.”

Image source

The uncovering of women’s part in our civilization and culture isn’t a physical discovering. It’s been there all along. We covered it up and made ourselves blind to it. We have to remove the layers of dirt from history books, museums, our own minds and consciousness…

Feeding the Machine

Source: This Reddit thread

When I read On Photography a few years ago, I was blown away by Susan Sontag’s prescience about how central the image has become in our culture (over the word): an object of constant consumption, a form of communication, a signal of ownership or status, etc… Via photography, and also advertising, TV, and now, Instagram, Facebook, etc. I was longing for her to still be around to philosophize about the Internet, memes, social media. (Like I wished Andy Warhol had been alive to see RuPaul’s Drag Race when it launched in 2009.) She would have had such fascinating insights into this new common consciousness.

In this interview she gave in 1977, she touches on this contemporary consciousness, which at the time she identified as an “electronic, multimedia, multi-tracked McLuhanite world,” the embryo of our 2019 way of being. This sounds like an insightful description of our social media lives. It really sounds like the Internet, it’s amazing:

“You can say anything in any context–the nature of modern communication systems is that anything can be said, any context is equivalent to any other context so that things can be placed in many different contexts at the same time, like photography. But there’s something profoundly compromising about that situation. Of course, there’s also a great advantage to it because it allows for a liberty of action and consciousness that people have never had before. But it means that you can’t keep original or profound meanings intact because inevitably they’re disappointed, adulterated, transformed and transmuted–it’s a world in which everything is being recycled and recombined and things are being reduced to a common denominator. So when you launch an idea for a fantasy or a theme or an image to the world, it has this tremendous career that you can’t possibly control or limit. And that’s perhaps another more immediate reason why one is tempted to be silent sometimes. You want to share things with other people, but on the other hand you don’t want to just feed the machine that needs millions of fantasies and objects and products and opinions to be fed into it every day in order to keep going.

From Susan Sontag: The Complete Rolling Stone Interview by Jonathan Cott (Yale University Press, 2013).

To read in 2019

Books I’m excited to read this year:

My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh
This was one of last year’s big fiction books I kept hearing about.

Outline by Rachel Cusk
Rachel Cusk also keeps coming up as someone I should read, both for her themes and style. This is the first in a trilogy, the third of which was published last year.

A Time to Be Born by Dawn Powell
I read a fragment of Powell’s diaries (excerpted in The New Yorker and was intrigued). She seems to have fallen into obscurity, though was a friend of Hemingway’s and Edmund White’s and published several novels. This one is about NYC before and during WWII.

Ninth Street Women by Mary Gabriel
A non-fiction account of five New York School women painters (Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell) and their time. Published last year, big and fat, which is exciting in a biography, sounds really good.

Hourglass: Time, Memory, Marriage by Dani Shapiro
A memoir/meditation on marriage, recommended by a friend whose taste I trust.

I just noticed I don’t actually own any of these, which means there is still a big pile of unread books at home I should put on this list, as well…

2018 Reading Round-up!

In 2018, I read 21 fiction and non-fiction books. (Poetry to be dealt with separately.) I probably spent the equivalent of 10 books’ worth of time on stupid Twitter, though. I don’t know what the sum of these tweets have contributed to my life or understanding of the world yet. I can’t even remember the funny memes at the moment. OH WELL. I also tried to keep up with a New Yorker subscription, which cut into book-reading time. I’m discontinuing this in 2019 and have subscribed to Granta, which is quarterly, instead. I’m also engaging in periodic social media fasts to break addictive patterns. We’ll see how that goes!

Reading trends in 2018: more European fiction, more novels and fewer short story collections than I usually read. Each year, there’s been a single author I become obsessed with and seek out (Anais Nin, Deborah Levy, Elena Ferrante, Joan Didion), but that didn’t really happen in 2018.  The list is rather eclectic and there was nothing that made me rave and buy multiple copies and press into friends’ hands, which is my favorite thing that happens. I do want to read more by Elizabeth Strout, Rebecca Solnit and Virginie Despentes, but the desire isn’t at obsession level.

Some stats:

•  52% fiction (mostly novels), 48% non-fiction (interviews, memoir, politics, feminist theory, art theory)

• 64% by women, 36% by men (out of 22 total writers)

• Authors were from the U.S.A. (11), United Kingdom (3), France (2), Italy (2), Canada, Colombia, Germany, and Greece (1 each). I read 19 books in English, 5 of these were in translation, and 1 book in Spanish and 1 in French.

• Original dates of publication span 1946-2018. About half of what I read was published within the past ten years.

The list, ranked in order of how much I enjoyed the book, its scope of impact on the life of the mind and imagination, and how likely I am to re-read and recommend it.

1. The Cost of Living: A Working Autobiography by Deborah Levy (Hamish Hamilton, 2018)

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This is the second volume in what Levy herself has termed a “working autobiography”. The first volume, Things I Don’t Want to Know, was probably one of my favorite books I’ve read, ever, so I was excited for this one. The second volume doesn’t dive as deep as the first, but that deep dive is also something that can’t be done twice. (The first book contended with her childhood in South Africa and her first graspings of injustice as a fact of life). In this volume, she recounts starting over at age 50, post-divorce, making a new life with her daughters, losing her mother, writing through it. She does it her way, which is in a Modernist spirit, understatedly, through metaphor, and weaving in objects (a bird clock,  a necklace, a heavy e-bike), recurring phrases, and other pieces of writing (in this one, Beauvoir’s, Duras’) as way of coming at the narrative elliptically and lyrically. Her piercing analysis and sense of humor make her writing about anything a pleasure.

Provenance: Van Stockum bookstore in Leiden (RIP)
Fate: On the keeper shelf

2. My Name Is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout (Viking, 2016)

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A slim, absorbing, funny, affecting novel. Lucy Barton starts by remembering a period she spent hospitalized in New York and her mother came to visit. Her mother, who had never been on a plane before, who she hadn’t seen in years. The story weaves around like memory itself, making lateral, associative leaps between different episodes about growing up in poverty and becoming a writer. The narrative also mimics the writing process itself, now that I think of it. My only quibble is that this is a piece of fiction where the narrator is a writer, writing about writing, writing about writing workshops and writing about another writer. It all gets too much into itself – the premise would somehow be more acceptable to me if it were a piece of non-fiction.

Provenance: Gift from my sweet mother-in-law
Fate: Passed on to a friend

3. Fellini on Fellini, various translators (1976)

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This was a re-read. Essays by and interviews with Federico Fellini. Things I take away from Fellini: his (Jungian) trust in dreams, the image as a source of creation; appreciation of artifice (the film set above reality, hyper-real characters); improvisation and a sense of humor as requisite for survival; not doing it for the money. There’s a beautiful essay about Rimini, the place he grew up, in the 1930s (essentially an essay version of Amarcord). There’s an interesting coda, when he goes back to the town in the late 60s and barely recognizes the place. He is older than the revolutionary youth, but he admires their ideas and bravery, recognizes the limitations religion and fascism placed on his own youth and how their freedom from those strictures will take them into new, unknown discoveries. Curiously, he view his own time as producing outsized artists, and the post-60s times as producing more, but smaller figures, a society of small artists. Is this true?

Provenance: a used bookstore in New York
Fate: On the keeper shelf

4. Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis (1946), translated by Carl Wildman

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If you can set aside a feminist perspective and pretend you’re a pre-1970s dude while reading this, then it’s a classic. I don’t mean that facetiously – the character of Zorba is a useful point of reference in life. I think about him a lot, and the wimpy narrator, too. We all have a bit of both in us. (I am OK with reading like a pre-1970s dude at the moment, maybe because there are so many interesting women’s voices out there, it’s almost like assumed patriarchal views are historical, like feudalism, and not annoyingly ubiquitous. Almost. I also have times of only wanting to read women, insisting on our personhood, etc. With Zorba, beyond even issues with the female characters and what happens to them, there’s the basic world view it departs from, that women are like nature, religion, war, learning: one of those things in life men must contend with, rather than heroes of their own stories, too.)

So, Zorba versus the narrator: eating up life all has to offer vs. ascetic withdrawal; a life of experiences over a life of contemplation; choosing experience over morality. The spiritual life? Monks reveal themselves to be as depraved and greedy as anyone else. The simple country life? Apparently innocent villagers can transform into a killer, misogynist mob. Zen withdrawal? When a beautiful woman offers herself to you, you take her! You might as well be honest and not buy into any of those rigid life paths. But then there are the sacrifices you make if you choose to be a Zorba, too, going all the way, doing it all, leaving everyone behind at some point or another…

5. Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House by Michael Wolff (Henry Holt, 2018)

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I couldn’t put this book down. I’ve figured out why it was comforting: It was a confirmation of reality, of a timeline of events in objective reality, in this awful moment when we’re spun in circles by media, social media, fake news, real news, bad news, until we’re dizzy, can’t see straight, think straight. Particularly notable was Wolff’s account of election night and the weeks that followed. I wanted it to go on and on, up through the present day. Wolff writes vividly and entertainingly. He also has a nuanced grasp of the media landscape, which shaped Trump and the people around him more than politics did, and isn’t afraid to be critical of Democrats and figures on the left, either. I wrote more about this book here. (God, it seems like this was published years ago, the scandal it caused, but it was only a year ago.)

Provenance: Purchased by Dan from a Dutch bookstore, he ordered it as soon as it came out.

Fate: Holding onto it for now.

POETRY INTERLUDE

I complain about the New York Times marginalizing poetry in their books coverage (e.g., they mention only 1-2 poetry books in their 100 Notable Books of the year feature), but I realized I sort of do that myself. I don’t recommend poetry books much to friends (unless they ask) and I don’t keep up with the constant flood of new books as well as I do with fiction and non-fiction. But probably for different reasons than the New York Times doesn’t recommend or keep up. 

There’s the fact that bookstores generally don’t keep a stock of contemporary poetry – you usually have to make a conscious effort to order and buy new volumes (and there are so many I’m behind on ordering, I’m genuinely sorry, poets!) I also find writing about poetry incredibly difficult, because of the demands I make on it. And there is, too, I must confess, the sad desire to limit my exposure because people feel so free and happy to disparage poetry and poets (and I’ve faced this down for years). It’s like we’re members of some marginalized religion, and I only want to talk to the initiated about it, not put my appreciation on display on the internet.

Anyhow, that’s not to say there isn’t a lot of poetry in my life. Sometimes it’s the only thing that will do and I dig through piles of poetry books trying to find something I can’t define until I’ve found it. There were lots of poems in my sphere in 2018, but not systematically cover-to-cover via books. However, in the interest of giving poets and poetry some of their due, here are a few poetry books that got me through 2018, linked directly for purchase!

Certain Manoeuvres by Lydia Unsworth (Knives Forks Spoons Press, 2018)

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This prose poem collection is by my now-friend, but let it be known that I swooned at Lydia’s writing before I met her. Playful, at times acidic, philosophical, linked prose poetry pieces. Questions of what it means to travel, to migrate, to be in a self in body, to be a stranger, to be a city-dweller… Just some really good sentences and paragraphs, too.

Forged by Fanny Howe (The Post Apollo Press, 1999)

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I have lots of books by Fanny Howe, and I’m often drawn back to this little one, I think partly because it’s little, it feels good to hold. Fanny Howe’s work contains that paradoxical mystery-plus-fulfillment I need from poetry. Faith that this is still possible with language. A short line will suddenly shine out with clarity and meaning where it didn’t before. They’re like prayers, incantantions, or that language-based thought before it slips off into the ether.

The Dream of a Common Language by Adrienne Rich (W.W. Norton, 1978)

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Adrienne Rich is the poet we need in this time, right now. Her poems are the opposite of provincial, they’re global in scope; poems that wrestle with gender, with power dynamics, with being a woman in history and in the world; poems that don’t let anyone off easily. And she’s been here this whole time, you dummies! In this collection, I kept coming back to “Hunger” and “Paula Becker to Clara Westoff.” I’m angry that the Harold Bloom-influenced literary snobbery kept me away from her for so long. (In his stint as the editor of the “Best of the Best American Poetry, 1988-1997,”, he refused to include anything from the 1996 volume selected by Rich, because of her political engagement.) Fuck off, Harold Bloom.

2018 Books, #6-10

6. Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities by Rebecca Solnit (2004)

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A politics of hope. As Solnit so eloquently proposes, this doesn’t mean naive optimism about the future,  which allows for inaction, but rather acting with faith in the unexpected, unrecognized and surprising ways change for the better happens. Eruptions of the people taking power are never predictable, but they certainly weren’t born of doomsayers and “what-abouters” (e.g, the left eating itself). Her philosophy will be important to hold onto as action in the face of climate change becomes imperative.

Provenance: A bookstore, not sure which.
Fate: On the keeper shelf.

7. King Kong Théorie by Virginie Despentes (2006)

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This is a manifesto. A declaration of war. A punk text. Despentes on living in a patriarchy, on prostitution and rape, based on her experiences with all of the above. In one essay she delves deep into the psychology and psyche of surviving rape, not the rape itself. It’s profound. I read several interviews with her, and she discusses how getting this book out of her body changed her life. You can feel this in the language itself, how it’s a life-transforming kind of text. There were a few assertions I took issue with, and would be curious to discuss with Despentes herself. For example, her disparagement of anything feminine (with the exception of figure skating and dressage!); her defense of prostitution based on practicing it from the position of being in control of the experience, as a white, educated woman, etc. But you don’t have a balanced discussion with a punk text, you let it stand on its own terms.

Provenance: A bookstore, I don’t remember which one.
Fate: On my keeper shelf.

8. Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive and Creative Self by Manoush Zamarodi (St. Martin’s Press, 2017)

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I picked up this book because I was a fan of the “Note to Self” podcast it’s based on. I think it suffers from a marketing problem – I wouldn’t recommend it as a “how-to” on inspiring creativity, but more as a guidebook on taking control of the smart phone in your life and living with it consciously and productively. Lots of interesting summaries of research on how smart phones affect social dynamics, deep thinking and deep reading, childhood development etc.

Provenance: Bargain bookshelf at the American Book Center in The Hague.
Fate: Kicking around the apartment

9. The Light of Other Days by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter (Tor Books, 2000)

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I read this at Dan’s urging (I don’t read a lot of science fiction) as it’s a book he often thinks about and wanted discuss. The various sci-fi premises are definitely juicy: a scientist discovers a way to traverse space and time to create peepholes into any point in the past or present (the past can be viewed, but not interfered with), and, simultaneously, it emerges that a giant asteroid is on a  fatal collision course with the earth, though the impact is not for several years. Oh and there’s also stuff about a clone. (These aren’t spoilers.) So humanity is fatalistic, nihilistic, hedonistic in the face of its likely end, while also contending with a real view of its history, and a total loss of privacy. Some of this sounds familiar, doesn’t it. There are a lot of prescient points, and some daring conjectures on the real life of Christ, and the relative poverty of great performances of the past.  There’s also a mind-blowing passage that goes back all the way back through the history of life on the planet. I have to say I would have preferred the amazing passages in an essay form, without having to bear through clunky descriptions of characters, wooden dialogue and the slog of a plot (though I guess a lot of other people wouldn’t want to read it then), which I suppose is why I avoid a lot of science fiction. It’s hard for me to choke down bad writing. I can’t drop the critical eye, snob!

Provenance: From Dan
Fate: Kicking around the apartment

10. Motherhood by Sheila Heti (Henry Holt, 2018)

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I was just reading up on autofiction and came across Christian Lorentzen’s take on this book in NY Magazine, so I’m presently confusing his insightful, original thinking for my own. To paraphrase his take: the central question of this book—the Sheila character’s agonizing over whether or not to have a child—is a MacGuffin. It’s a way in for Heti the author to explore other issues, like her relationship with her partner, her family history, her mother. Not to say that the question of motherhood isn’t interesting or important (and I’d say it’s more than MacGuffin-level in this novel), but it was perhaps too exclusively the focus of reviews of the book and interviews with Heti. It makes me think it was too narrowly my own focus while reading the book, as I was also ambivalent about motherhood for many years and grateful to hear Heti’s thoughts about this. And then I was ultimately disappointed with how the novel resolved that ambivalence. Lorentzen also makes the important point that autofiction is deceptively simple. It makes you think you’re reading a kind of journal by the author, when really there’s an art and structure underneath. This book therefore merits a second reading from me, where I look at it as a novel with a structure and spanning many subjects rather than a long personal essay on ambivalence about motherhood…

Provenance: Ordered from the American Book Center in The Hague.
Fate: On the keeper shelf

2018 Books, #11-15

11. The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine by Alina Bronsky, trans. from German by Tim Mohr (Europa Editions, 2011)

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Bronsky, who is German by way of Russia (former USSR), pulls off that very difficult task of creating a convincing, totally unlikeable narrator, who is also compelling, often funny, and eventually even elicits sympathy from the reader. I read several reviews of this book after I finished to see what others thought, and no reviewer contends with the novel as a whole, most are focused on the first half, which is comic and fairly light. The last third or so takes a different turn in tone, and even in writing style. This book illuminated for me the problem with endings, how the right ending isn’t always apparent.  (And how readers are forgiving of inadequate endings if the first half makes enough of an impact. I felt this way about Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, which won the Booker and got a lot of love a couple of years ago: it was powerful but incomplete. A masterpiece for me is when the ending shines a spotlight on the narrative as a whole. The ending feels absolutely right and is unforgettable.) I still haven’t made up my mind about this book as a whole, the ending seems more appropriate the longer I’ve ruminated on it.

Provenance: I received it as part of my Kickstarter prize for helping fund the awesome Bookselling Without Borders project that promotes fiction in translation in the U.S.
Fate: Passed on to a friend.

12. La perra by Pilar Quintana (Random House, 2018)

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A slim, tense little novella. I think this is the only Latin American novel I’ve read that’s set in a poverty-stricken environment (in Colombia). Quintana handles issues of race and class subtly and deftly. Heartbreaking and difficult to read.

Provenance: Borrowed from my friend Lydia, who works at World Editions, the small press that will be publishing a version in English!

13. Family Lexicon by Natalia Ginzburg, translated from Italian by Jenny McPhee (NYRB Classics, 2017, original in 1963)

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This memoir is a slightly awkward blend of Ginzburg’s affectionate memories of her eccentric family, particularly her father, and then the terrible ways fascism and World War II split everything apart in Italy, particularly in her Jewish, highly political household. Although it was grimmer, I enjoyed the second half more, where Ginzburg herself emerges a bit more (though she’s trying to hide throughout it). The premise of the “family lexicon” – the songs and funny sayings that characterized her parents and siblings – are also a major translation challenge, which wasn’t always met. (I wrote more about this here.)

Provenance: Van Stockum bookstore in Leiden (R.I.P.)
Fate: Can’t remember. Possibly still kicking around the apartment, or maybe passed on to a friend.

14. Viviane by Julia Deck, translated from the French by Linda Coverdale (The New Press, 2014)

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Another slim, tense little novella, like a pen-and-ink drawing. In another writer’s hands, there could have been much more back story, but the spare approach works. Merges psychological drama with the traditional murder mystery, almost ironically, I think. It was a good read, but I have to say I didn’t think much about it afterwards.

Provenance: I received it as part of my Kickstarter prize for helping fund the awesome Bookselling Without Borders project that promotes fiction in translation in the U.S.
Fate: Passed on to a friend.

15. The Everything Wine Book: A Complete Guide to the World of Wine by David White (Everything, 2014)

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I suppose this sort of book doesn’t really belong on a literary-type book list, but the completist in me wants “credit” for having read it all, and also I would recommend it! (I’m not counting cookbooks, btw.) I got it because I wanted to understand those complicated French wine labels, which kept me from ever choosing a French wine as I never knew what I was getting into. This is a friendly, not-at-all snobby guide to wine regions, the history of wine, types of grapes, etc. It made me both appreciative and more adventurous with my wine choices.

Provenance: Bought at the clearance sale when the Van Stockum bookstore in Leiden closed (RIP)
Fate: On the keeper shelf!

2018 Books, #16-21

My annual reading round-up of fiction and non-fiction, in my personal ranking, based on how much I enjoyed it, scope of impact on the life of the mind and imagination, and how likely I am to re-read and recommend it. Here’s the tail-end.

16. The Pisces by Melissa Broder (Hogarth, 2018)

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Broder is a fantastic, inventive poet, so I was looking forward to seeing what she would do with the novel form, language-wise. It is fantastically smutty, disgusting and really funny at times – all things I appreciated. At its core, this is a story about the despair of compulsion and sex addiction.

Provenance: American Book Center in Amsterdam
Fate: Passed on to a friend

17. Minor Robberies by Deb Olin Unferth and 18. Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape by Sarah Manguso (McSweeney’s, 2007)

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I’m pairing these two short collections of flash fiction together as they came in a lovely little boxed set published by McSweeney’s (together with a third book of flash fiction by Dave Eggers, and no, I didn’t read his!). The Manguso pieces captured small ignoble moments of childhood – lies, envy, mean deeds. The form leads her to a flat, matter-of-factness in the prose, which works some of the time. My favorites in the Olin Unferth collections were her longer stories, which made me think her style is more suited to longer forms.

Provenance: I won this box set at a poetry reading in Bushwick in 2010 on a second date with Dan.
Fate: Unsentimentally donated it to the Boekenzolder; Dan said it was OK, he prefers to be a minimalist.

19. The Godfather by Mario Puzo (1969)

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I picked this up during the Kavanaugh hearings and it was a good way to disappear from this world for a while, an absorbing distraction. I would recommend this book only to serious fans of the films. It proves the hypothesis that mediocre books make great films. It’s a pulpy, sometimes clumsily written book that was cut and shaped into elegant, visually rich cinema masterpiece. At its best it feels like novelized DVD extras of cut scenes. Like for example, Tom Hagen’s back story. At its worst there were what I can only guess were attempts to be modern and racy through multiple descriptions of Sonny’s giant schlong; gratuitous side stories of Johny Fontaine’s Hollywood debauchery; and a truly weird extended description of Sonny’s bereaved mistress’s vaginal reduction surgery, including medical terms (the implication being that her vagina was irreparably stretched out by Sonny’s giant schlong??). However, I will give Puzo due credit for putting his finger directly on what fascinates about the mob: the elaborate rituals and code of honor, the will of some men to achieve power and status despite being born to a marginalized class, coupled with the straight-up murderous violence and crime (and misogyny and racism).

Provenance: A gift from Dan to encourage me to read more fun and lighter stuff.
Fate: In the “to donate” pile

20. Art Theory: A Very Short Introduction by Cynthia Freeland (Oxford, 2001)

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Admittedly, art theory is a really hard topic to distill into “a very short introduction,” but this book didn’t quite do it. The writing was labored despite attempts to simplify ideas, and I want to say it’s almost outdated given its focus on art controversies of the 80s and 90s. (It was published in 2001).

Provenance: Purchased at Van Stockum bookstore in Leiden (R.I.P.)
Fate: Donated to Boekenzolder

21. The Risen by Ron Rash (HarperCollins, 2016)

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I have mixed feelings about saying harsh things about living writers, but this guy seems to be doing fine, while here I toil in obscurity. So: this book was terrible. I suspect some of his other novels are better – my mom recommended him because she lives in Western North Carolina and he captures life there. (That wasn’t the focus of this particular narrative.) Paper-thin characters, unearned pathos. An alcoholic protagonist – we know he’s an alcoholic because he refer to the fatal clinking of ice in a glass no less than three times in the course of the novel. A fucked-up hippie girl who initiates him into sex, drugs and alcohol and ends up a dead girl. That kind of thing.

Provenance: Lent by my mom, who got it from the library
Fate: Back to the library

Books I abandoned

Vernon Subutex by Virginie Despentes: A clever cross-section of contemporary Parisian society. I think I fell off because it’s rather bleak, and also includes a lot of French slang, so was slow-going as my French lexicon withered over the years as I mostly just use it for work. This is the first in a celebrated trilogy by Despentes and I hope to get back to it at some point.

Little Fires Everywhere Celeste Ng: I saw this book everywhere and only read good things about it, but I couldn’t get into it, I only made it about 80 pages in. The 90s references were a little too on-the-nose, the teenagers didn’t sound like teenagers, and there was a kind of emotional distance in the voice that didn’t convince me. I saw some readers on Goodreads compare this to young adult fiction in terms of its style – something to think about (what does this mean?), and maybe that’s what bothered me, the kind of psychological flattening at the expense of the narrative.

The Question

[…]

Why didn’t you just stay home?
         Once you were a carrier of both child and soul
         But when you became a self
                  You bundled them up
         And took them out of the city limits.
You lacked the capacity for carrying so much.

Still, you wanted to rebuild your village
          Out of the pieces that shine and remind you
How safe and happy you were on its park benches
On days of no school.
          Why did you leave your native country
          To become a different kind of being:
          A realist
Who can recognize and classify the pieces of the lost.
          To be the only one!

It’s true they sparkle as they vanish
And finding them lets you know you are credible,
          At home in the world.

Fanny Howe, excerpt from the poem “The Question,” from her book The Lyrics

An acerbic, difficult poem. Why did you leave childhood? Why did you go to the city to participate in its plunder?