Writer, editor, translator
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My round-up of “last year’s books” is coming a bit late as I’ve turned this annual tradition into quite the project, and I was busy writing book reviews. I decided to go ahead and finish it, as I mostly post this for my reader friends, and it doesn’t really matter when I get it up.
I love seeing other people’s book lists, friends and strangers alike, and I’m always so curious to see what someone is reading (on the bus, on their shelves). I started this annual round-up because I wanted to understand what I actually thought about a book, how much of it remained, and what my reading life as a whole amounted to. I decided to post it online (on a defunct anonymous book blog) so that I would complete the thought and actually finish the exercise. Then it became a way of sharing with my bookish friends scattered around the world, who I miss talking to. They’re not quite reviews, as I think a book review actual owes more to both the readers and writer (I hate summarizing plots, for example). Just a few thoughts.
As usual, the ranking is not necessarily based on literary excellence, but on how big an impact the book made on me (sparking new thoughts, feeling things, the lingering image); how likely I am to press it into a friend’s hand; how much of it remains months after reading it.
A note on book lists
Seeing all of the best of the year, best of the decade, best of the 21st century book lists at the end of 2019 wasn’t as fun as I’d anticipated. After these lists came the raft of lists most anticipated books of 2020. All of the lists started to feel like this endless, churning mass, or like a crowded conveyor belt of text that’s impossible to keep up with. Obviously this exclusive focus on what’s new is what keeps the publishing industry viable, but it must also be so disheartening for anyone who published a book 3 years ago, or 7 years ago, or 15 years, this feeling of only having a couple of months to make an impact.
I do love discovering a bold and new voice, who is speaking to our precise moment. But there should also be at least a little room in our shared cultural spaces (book coverage in newspapers, book sites like Electric Lit, etc.) to consider work beyond the months (weeks?) of its big debut… I saw some conversations around this on Twitter, with writers/critics attributing this myopic focus to the loss of dedicated book sections in newspapers, well paid book review gigs, etc. Books coverage being reduced to the “listification” of writing about brought by the internet.
It’s sad to lose some of the excitement around new book lists to this general sense of information overload I’ve been trying to keep my head above for the past few years. On the other hand, it’s less pressure to keep up, and maybe make my reading life more intentional.
On the subject of reading books other than what’s hot now, I’ve noticed that, since I began tracking my reading more closely, beginning in 2009, besides reading newish books I’m excited about, I’ve also kept up a steady parallel stream of books published by women in the 1970s. This wasn’t intentional. I think it’s partly because one writer leads me to another (e.g. Mary McCarthy led me to Elizabeth Hardwick), the fact that there’s been a revival of these writers in recent years who criminally went out of print (Renata Adler, Eve Babitz). I also think it’s because the 1970s were a time of intense, deep-thinking creative production, also in film and music. (The possible reasons why are whole other post.))
Overview
I read 33 fiction, nonfiction and poetry books. This number is higher than usual, I think in part because I broke up with The New Yorker in the spring (it’s an up-and-down relationship) and because I tried to get a grip on my social media addiction.
General trends in my reading life in 2019: Lots more nonfiction, mostly essay collections; lots more poetry read cover-to-cover rather than dipped in and out of; a decline in my reading of books in translation and books written in other languages, which I’m not happy about. I also felt a need to re-read books I’ve loved, so I’ve listed these last, as I’ve written about them at other times.
A few stats on the books I read:
15. Peggy Guggenheim: Mistress of Modernism by Mary Dearborn (Virago Press, 2004)
A sympathetic biography of Peggy Guggenheim, who was certainly smarter and suffered more than anyone gives her credit for. An amazing life filled with giants of the 20th century: she received moral support from Emma Goldman when deciding to leave her abusive first husband, had intense affairs with Samuel Beckett and Max Ernst (etc.), and a deep, complicated friendship with Djuna Barnes, among many others. Dearborn is perhaps too sympathetic at times, glossing over Guggenheim’s difficulties being a mother to her troubled daughter Pegeen, and not delving too deeply into her sexual compulsions. (I think Peggy’s often unfairly derided for her active sex life, when in a figure like Jackson Pollock it’s depicted as a sign of power and vigor, but this did veer into compulsive behavior, by her own admission. Dearborn attributes the bad press to Guggenheim’s own outrageous autobiography, which she sees as a mistake in some ways.) Fair enough, Dearborn is seeking to tip the scales of history more in Guggenheim’s favor, and perhaps felt she had to overcompensate a bit, given the reams of bad press over time…
Provenance: Impulse buy at the gift shop at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao
16. Kiki’s Memoirs by Alice Prin, trans. (Ecco, first published 1929)
I’ve long been intrigued by Kiki of Montparnasse (born Alice Prin), who was muse and model to many artists in 1920s Paris, most notably Man Ray, and generally the life of the party (Queen of Montparnasse). This is a translation of her memoirs, published in 1929 when she was still young. (The original hipster snob Hemingway says in the introduction that it’s a crime not to read them in French, and undoubtedly her voice must be much distinct and charming en francais.) She tells of her poverty-stricken origins in the country, and surviving many difficult jobs in Paris before finding her home in bohemia. She comes off as self-deprecating, resilient, and fun. This edition includes lots of photos and Kiki’s own paintings.
Provenance: Ordered from Better World Books
17. Little Labors by Rivka Galchen (New Directions, 2016)
A slim, sort of uncategorizable book, inspired by Shei Sonagon’s The Pillow Book. Written in snippets, Galchen documents her daughter’s babyhood and new motherhood, mixed with musings on babies in literature, awkward encounters with her neighbor, etc. A fun read. I love an uncategorizable book.
Provenance: Van Stockum bookstore in Leiden (RIP)
18. My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh (Jonathan Cape, 2018)
I was impressed by how Moshfegh pulls off the conceit: a beautiful, wealthy intelligent depressed young woman decides to drop out of life and spend a year in her apartment knocked out by sleeping pills and other drugs. Moshfegh somehow spun an entertaining novel out of this. There are some really funny moments, and sometimes the meanness of this character is a too-brutal sting. Once I finished it, though, and still many months later, I’m left casting around for the larger thoughts or point of the work, for example, the inclusion of 9/11 (and maybe there doesn’t have to be one?), but I feel like I missed something.
Provenance: The American Book Center, The Hague
19. Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill (Vintage, 2014)
I wish I had come across this novel pre-hype. I think I’d read too many giddily besotted endorsements to give it a fair shot. (Offill’s new book, Weather is just out and also receiving big praise.) This book is loved because it explores art-making and its sometimes uncomfortable coexistence with marriage and motherhood, with wit and smarts in a collagey-form (that brings in, for example, facts about astronomy). I loved the first third , as a wonderfully distinct character and voice is established from the start, but I lost this sense by the last third or so, when it devolves into a story of a marriage attempting to survive infidelity, which was less interesting. No fault of the author, but the (white) Brooklyn-ness of it all put me off a little, and I also say this as a former long-time resident of gentrifying Brooklyn.
Provenance: Bought new at The American Book Center, Amsterdam
20. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn (Broadway Books, 2012)
I have a bad habit of taking challenging books with me when I travel, thinking I’ll have uninterrupted time to focus on them on the plane, and in downtimes during family visits, etc. I then often end up avoiding the book because I’m jet-lagged, or overstimulated/tired from exciting travel and time spent with loved ones I don’t see often, etc. and cart them around for nothing, and then end up buying other, easier books on the trip. This December I decided not to take any books with me, but the plan backfired. I ended up casting around for something to read in rural Virginia where we were staying and went searching in the nearby free book library. Gone Girl was perfect – funny, fast-paced, not too cerebral to pick up between activities or before bed. I’d seen and enjoyed the movie and was curious about the full “cool girl” monologue. Aside from the obvious success of the page-turner aspects of the novel, Flynn wrote a believable dude character, and also captured a particular post-recession time.
21. Topics of Conversation by Miranda Popkey (Knopf, 2020)
An impressive and ambitious debut novel, a work exploring ideas about women and power. I said more about it in a review for The Chicago Review of Books. In the review, I didn’t mention some of my lingering questions about its success as a work of fiction, as I wasn’t able to articulate them clearly, and it would have been unfair to include them. Essentially, I wasn’t convinced by the narrative voice, the reality of the narrator, her self-loathing and scorn for kindness. There are works of fiction that grab me from the first line, I’ll go anywhere with the narrator, and other times I don’t trust the fiction and keep my distance, I become skeptical about every claim; this book was right on the cusp of this line, I was never fully won over as a reader. I’d like to get better at identifying, understanding and writing about whatever magic a writer employs to make a voice “real” in this sense (both in works of fiction and nonfiction). Obviously, at some level, this becomes a question of taste, but still…
Provenance: Galley copy from the publisher
22. Hollywood’s Eve: Eve Babitz and the Secret History of L.A.
by Lili Anolik (Scribner, 2019)
This sort-of biography is interesting insofar as Eve Babitz is fascinating, both her wild life and inventive work. Anolik warns in the first chapter that she won’t even feign any distance or objectivity about her subject, and generally approaches her material in her capacity as the fanatical president of the Eve Babitz Fan Club. It’s the maximum expression of the worst possible interpretation of the permission New Journalism gave writers, the centering of the journalist herself in the story.
Anolik was instrumental in reviving interest in Babitz (which eventually led to her work coming back into print) via a feature she wrote for Vanity Fair in 2014 after many years of pursuit, and while she deserves credit for this accomplishment, she sees it as giving her unique ownership over Babitz’ life and work. In the end, she does Babitz a disservice, as an authoritative biography (which she seems more than capable of as a researcher and writer) would have done much more for Babitz’ legacy than a book filled with Anolik’s opinions about key events and figures in Babitz’ life, including Joan Didion and Jim Morrison, whom she trashes. Most surprising, and disappointing, was Anolik’s curt dismissal of Babitz’ novels as essentially not worth reading. This is OK, though, Anolik explains in a digressive lesson on the history of literature, because the novel is dead, anyway… I would recommend this only to established readers of Babitz, otherwise best just to begin with Slow Days, Fast Company and go from there.
Provenance: Bought new at Spoonbill & Sugartown, Brooklyn
23. Summer House with Swimming Pool by Herman Koch (Atlantic, 2015, first published 2011)
A suspense novel by the Netherlands’ best-known fiction writer, featuring a gratuitously unlikable narrator. I could have maybe forgiven the gross views espoused by the protagonist if the novel as a whole had held up plot-wise, but the story kind of collapses in on itself. I will say that Koch is good at writing tension. I wrote more about this novel here.
Provenance: Clearance sale at Van Stockum bookstore, Leiden (RIP)
I found myself re-reading several favorite books last year, especially in the beginning of the year. This wasn’t a deliberate decision; I think was a way to find direction (the direction of my thoughts, writing, way of thinking). It’s also a heartening confirmation that I’m not keeping all of these books, carting them across oceans and to different apartments over the years for nothing – I will get back to many of them…
I haven’t included these in my ranking as it’s not fair to the books read for the first time, and it’s also impossible to determine any sort of preference among these – I value them all, but often for very different reasons. Five re-reads listed below in the order read.
RE-READ
Things I Don’t Want to Know by Deborah Levy (Notting Hill Books, 2013)
Playwright and novelist Levy’s account of her “origin story” as a writer, a response to Orwell’s essay “Why I Write.” It’s short, honest and powerful. This was my second read. I fell in love with this book in 2017.
The Lover by Marguerite Duras (Pantheon, first published 1984)
This was my third or fourth time reading this novella. It’s a guiding light of what can be accomplished in some 120 pages. Incredible compression, a whole life. My first read, I was around 20, and I was impressed by the assurance in the narrative voice and stunned by single paragraphs at a time, which were like incredible poems (the paragraph describing the narrator’s unstable mother attempting to raise chickens, the house falling into ruin, for example). The second time I realized how much it was a devastating love story about her mother, more than about the older man. This time I was more aware of Duras’ autobiography in the work, the kind of strength and defiance it takes to write through pain in this way. Again amazed by the authority in the voice, how I wouldn’t question it despite the drama (melodrama?).
I’ve been thinking about literary works I can’t “recover” from – their initial impact is so great, it’s hard to move beyond them to other works by the author. I just want to re-read the one, swim around in it, never move on. (Rather than happily diving into their whole oeuvre, which happens with other works.) This is one of those books. I own a couple of other novels by Duras but haven’t touched them, but maybe it’s time.
Susan Sontag: The Complete Rolling Stone Interview by John Cott (Yale University Press, 2013)
This book-length interview is bursting with ideas and questions from genius Sontag, it could certainly be read multiple times. The thought that stuck around with me this time is Sontag’s insight into the fragment – why the fragment is so compelling to us. It’s a sign of an old civilization, where so much has accreted that a fragment (whether visual or textual) can resonate with so much meaning… More thoughts on this book when I last read it in 2017.
Speedboat by Renata Adler (NYRB Classics, 2013 reprint, first published 1976)
You could carve at least two completely dazzling prose poetry collections out of this experimental novel. Adler puts some lazy poets to shame by collecting all of this inventive, delicious prose into a single work. And it is indeed a novel, not in an explicit way, but there’s a protagonist, you get a sketch of her biography, her love life. It’s atmospheric – a paranoid, hung-over, sweltering, wayfaring existence in New York in the 1970s.
Anecdotal, minor gossip digression: I was lucky enough to see Adler at the Center for Fiction in 2014, when she had her big comeback and NYRB reprinted her work. She was shy and self-deprecating. Eileen Myles was in the audience and during the Q&A she essentially asked Adler why she was apologizing herself, took issue with her self-effacing manner. I didn’t really think about it till I got home, as I was excited that Eileen Myles was even there, but it dawned on me that Renata Adler should be allowed to talk however she wants, what kind of question is that?…
Also, when I went up to get my books signed, Adler said my name looked like the word “begin,” and signed them “To Begin–” which I love.
My Life in France by Julia Child and Alex Prud’homme (Knopf, 2006)
I think I picked this up to feel better last summer. Julia Child reminds you about everything that’s great about being alive, or maybe she makes everything about being alive seem great — travel, eating, marriage, work. That’s what struck me about this read, her supreme dedication to her work, her gratitude for discovering what she really loved to do. I also realized on this read that maybe classic French food is not for me, either to eat or cook — so rich, so meaty, so many organ meats, so many elaborate preparations…
ABANDONED
The Waves by Virginia Woolf
Woolf’s fiction is a big gap in my reading; I’ve only read Mrs. Dalloway (which was and remains important in to my reading/writing life). I must confess I abandoned The Waves just a few pages in, not because of the stream-of-consciousness style, but because it immediately introduces six characters who alternate speaking on every line. Many names on pages 1-2 immediately puts me off a book. I’ll have to return to this when my mind is calmer, maybe in like 20 years or so…
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)
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)
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)
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
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)
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.
6. Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities by Rebecca Solnit (2004)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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
11. The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine by Alina Bronsky, trans. from German by Tim Mohr (Europa Editions, 2011)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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!
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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.
It’s bold to assert there was something lost in the translation of this memoir without having access to the source text and only basic knowledge of Italian. However, having translated since I could read, basically, and working as a professional translator I know enough to sympathize with the hard translation problems faced by Jenny McPhee, that translator, which don’t have satisfactory solutions. Ginzburg sets up the songs, expressions, and rhymes that characterized her parents and siblings as the framework for her story of growing up in Turin in the 1920s. Schoolyard chants, lyrics from old songs, jokes: texts that have a richness and particularity that are inextricable from the language they’re composed in. McPhee makes a valiant effort, but the results, rather than being charming, or funny or familiar, as is intended, are alienating to an English-speaking reader. They didn’t bring me closer, as a reader, to the people being affectionately, though honestly, recalled. There are also many mentions of Italian political and cultural figures that are obscure to non-Italian readers – for example, intellectuals involved in the anti-Fascist movement who are close friends of the Ginzburg’s parents.
The second half of the memoir, while much more serious and upsetting, is a better read. The kids are all grown up and facing the rise of fascism, anti-Semitism and World Word Two. Ginzburg’s father is arrested, and a brother has to flee the country. Her husband dies in prison, while their brilliant friend, the poet Cesare Pavese, commits suicide. Ginzburg and her young children are exiled to the countryside. The writing becomes more fluid, more direct and more analytical. While Ginzburg’s intention was primarily to draw a family portrait and obscure herself, I found the times she reveals her own thoughts, attitudes and experiences the most compelling.
Regarding the problems inherent in translating texts that rhyme, texts with cultural and historical associations, etc., an imperfect solution is to provide the source text in the end notes. More context concerning the family’s anti-Fascist friends, their place in Italian political history would have also been welcome as end notes, too, as Ginzburg does not reveal any of this background information, only their names and relationship to her family.
On the whole, I wouldn’t dissuade anyone from picking up this book, and I would definitely read other work by Ginzburg. The spare, unflinching descriptions of Turin during the war are powerful, and her portrait of Pavese is haunting. There is also a warm and a full understanding of her mother, an expansive depiction of a positive, kind woman facing hardship and choosing to remain kind.
The postwar period was a time when everyone believed himself to be a poet and a politician. Everyone thought he could, or rather should, write poetry about any and all subjects since for so many years the world had been silenced and paralyzed, reality being something stuck behind glass–vitreous, crystalline, mute, and immobile. Novelists and poets had been starved of words during the fascist years. So many had been forbidden to use words, and the few who’d been able to use them were forced to choose them very carefully from the slim pickings that remained. During fascism, poets found themselves expressing only an arid, shut-off, cryptic dream world. Now, once more, many words were in circulation and reality appeared to be at everyone’s fingertips. So those who had been starved dedicated themselves to harvesting the words with delight. And the harvest was ubiquitous because everyone wanted to take part in it. The result was a confused mixing up of the languages of poetry and politics. Reality revealed itself to be complex and enigmatic, as indecipherable and obscure as the world of dreams. And it revealed itself to still be behind glass–the illusion that the glass had been broken, ephemeral. Dejected and disheartened, many soon retreated, sank back into a bitter starvation and profound silence. The postwar period, then, was very sad and full of dejection after the joyful harvest of its early days. Many pulled away and isolated themselves again, either within their dream worlds or in whatever random job they’d taken in a hurry in order to earn a living, jobs that seemed insignificant and dreary after so much hullabaloo. In any case, everyone soon forgot that brief, illusory moment of shared existence. Certainly, for many years, no one worked at the job he’d planned on and trained for, everyone believing that they could and must do a thousand jobs all at once. And much time passed before everyone took back upon his shoulders his profession and accepted the burden, the exhaustion, and the loneliness of the daily grind, which is the only way we have of participating in each other’s lives, each of us lost and trapped in our own parallel solitude.