Yes, as my friend Laurel recently reminded me, it’s impossible to get caught up: that’s a beautiful dream. But I still want to get a little closer to the goal of writing about all the books I’ve read, or at least the ones I liked or about which I feel I have something to say. So I’m going to write some brief thoughts about the books I’ve read this summer, as many as I can. No, I still won’t be caught up, but I’ll be closer.
An Inventory of Losses by Judith Schalansky, translated by Jackie Smith (New Directions, 2020)
This book is gorgeous, as an object and in the writing. It’s labeled as fiction — and it was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize (for fiction) — but it reads like a mix of genres, sometimes fiction, but more often history or nature writing or memoir. It’s a collection of short … I’ll call them pieces … about destruction and loss, rebirth and change. She writes about the (lost) writing of Sappho, the (lost) island of Tuanaki, the (extinct) Caspian tiger, the (destroyed) Palace of the Republic in Berlin, and eight other objects or treasures or places that are now gone. The chapters have different styles, sometimes personal, sometimes speaking in other people’s voices or traditions. The range is impressive, and throughout, Schalansky’s writing is beautifully specific, detailed, and evocative. She captures the melancholy of loss, as well as its inevitability and even its promise.
Sweet Days of Discipline by Fleur Jaeggy, translated by Tim Parks (New Directions, 2019, originally published in 1989)
I do love a boarding school novel (or novella in this case), and especially a dark one. This is set in postwar Switzerland with a fourteen-year-old protagonist who is fascinated by the new girl, Fréderique. Not much happens: friendships form and fade, the students observe and judge one another, they gossip about the teachers. The protagonist escapes in the early morning to take walks and then falls asleep in class. I love how suggestive Jaeggy’s writing is: it’s spare with a lot of short, direct sentences, or long sentences made up of short phrases, that hint at depths of feeling and psychological complexity:
In our lives at school, each of us, if we had a little vanity, would establish a facade, a kind of double life, affect a way of speaking, walking, looking.
The novel explores this double life, what the students project onto the world and what lurks underneath, and it’s unsparing in its honesty (and its reference to Robert Walser on the first page inspired me to read the book below).
The Walk by Robert Walser, translated by Susan Bernofsky (New Directions, 2012, originally published in 1917)
I liked this book and found it surprising. I had been meaning to read Walser for ages, and went into the book thinking it would be gloomier and more melancholy than it is. Perhaps overall his writing IS gloomy and melancholy. And this book has a lot of melancholy too. But it’s also playful and silly. The narrator takes a walk around town and the surrounding countryside, runs errands, meets people, has conversations. Often those conversations are wildly unrealistic, with paragraph upon paragraph of the narrator pontificating in an amusing way. He also talks to the reader like this:
Since, dear reader, you give yourself the trouble to march along with the inventor and writer of these lines attentively out forthwith into the bright and good morning air, not hurrying and hastily, but rather quite tidily, at least, with level head, discreetly, smoothly, and calmly, now we both arrive in front of the aforementioned bakery with the boastful gold inscription, where we stop, horrified, because we feel inclined to be exceedingly dismayed as well as honestly astonished at the gross ostentation and at the disfigurement of the sweet rusticity which is intimately connected with it.
Is all of Walser’s writing like this? I enjoyed it, and the lighter tone made the ending all the more powerful, but I’ll confess I’m farther from understanding anything about Walser than I was before. I think I will read Jakob Von Gunten next.
Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri, translated by Jhumpa Lahiri (Knopf, 2021)
Lahiri wrote this in Italian (!) and translated it into English herself. I think I want her life where I move to Italy, become fluent in Italian, and write gorgeous novels. That life sounds good anyway. In Whereabouts, the narrator walks around an unnamed Italian city (probably Rome) and observes and thinks. It’s a similar format to Walser’s The Walk, and maybe this is what I expected The Walk to be like. It’s thoughtful, philosophical, melancholy and about the push and pull of isolation and society. A lot of the book is about encounters with people on the street — neighbors, shop owners — many of them familiar faces who make up an important part of her world and her life. It’s getting deeper into people’s lives that causes problems — there’s a painful dinner party scene and a complicated mother/daughter relationship and ambiguous relationships with male friends.
And there’s also the painful fact that everything changes and the fragile world the narrator has built around her can’t and won’t last. I loved the way Lahiri’s narrator confronts these problems with what can seem like equanimity but contains deep feeling underneath the calm. Lahiri’s writing is unadorned and her chapters are short and somehow this short novel is so, so moving.
Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning by Cathy Park Hong (One World, 2020)
I first read this essay collection in the winter of 2020 as an egalley, and I liked it so much I wanted to experience the print version as well (although my print copy suffered some water damage at the beach!). It held up to a rereading. The book includes seven essays, so there’s room for Hong to get deep into her subjects, which focus on Asian American experiences. She combines personal stories with criticism and research to explore vexed racial hierarchies, language, stereotypes, legacies of immigration, friendship, education, art, politics, and a lot more. I particularly loved her essay on her relationship to English and how that shaped her poetry, and her profile of the writer, director, and artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha is fascinating (and made me want to reread Dictee, which I encountered in grad school). Hong’s intelligence shines through in these essays, as it does in her Twitter feed.
Time is the Thing a Body Moves Through by T Fleischmann (Coffee House Press, 2019)
This book is exactly what I want in nonfiction: it’s personal, intellectual, challenging, and strange. It’s partly about the art of Félix González-Torres, especially a work called “Untitled” (Placebo – Landscape – for Roni) with its endless supply of candy in gold wrappers that viewer/participants can freely take. It’s also about being queer and trans, and about friendship, love, sex, and radical politics. I like how Fleischmann moves back and forth between the present day and an older writing project they were working on, which in part describes an older relationship, and which is included in the text. This creates a sense of time and change; there’s a fluidity to the narrative which meanders while somehow maintaining a sense of urgency. I think I will reread this one.
Recently Published
New small-press books out this month that I haven’t yet read and am adding to my TBR. All quotations below are from the publisher:
Names for Light: A Family History by Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint (Graywolf Press): this book is the winner of the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize. “Names for Light traverses time and memory to weigh three generations of a family's history against a painful inheritance of postcolonial violence and racism.”
Peyakow: Reclaiming Cree Dignity by Darrel McLeod (Milkweed Editions): this is a follow-up to McLeod’s memoir Mamaskatch, which was very good. This book “follows a young man through many seasons of his life, navigating an ever-turbulent personal and political landscape filled with loss, love, addiction, and perseverance.”
Hot Maroc by Yassin Adnan, translated by Alexander E. Elinson (Syracuse University Press): “With an infectious blend of humor, satire, and biting social commentary, Yassin Adnan gives readers a portrait of contemporary Morocco--and the city of Marrakech--told through the eyes of the hapless Rahhal Laâouina, a.k.a. the Squirrel.”
The Skinny by Jonathan Wells (ZE Books): a memoir about bodies and masculinity: “At age fourteen, Jonathan Wells weighs just sixty-seven pounds, triggering a scrutinizing persecution of his body that will follow him into adulthood.”
Occupation by Julian Fuks, translated by Daniel Hahn (Charco Press): “Known and celebrated in Brazil and abroad for his novel Resistance, Julián Fuks returns to his auto-fictional alter ego Sebastián in a narrative alternating between the writer's conversations with refugees occupying a building in downtown São Paulo, his father's sickness, and his wife's pregnancy.”
Little Bird by Claudia Ulloa Donoso, translated by Lily Meyer (Deep Vellum): “After moving from Peru north of the Arctic circle to begin graduate school, Claudia Ulloa Donoso began blogging about insomnia. Not hers, necessarily - the blog was never defined as fact or fiction. Her blog posts became the bones of Little Bird.”
New on the TBR
Recently acquired:
They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us by Hanif Abdurraqib (Two Dollar Radio, 2017): Hanif Abdurraqib is a writer I keep hearing about and wanting to read, so now I’m ready. This is an essay collection that “uses music and culture as a lens through which to view our world, so that we might better understand ourselves.”
If I Had Your Face by Frances Cha (Ballentine, 2020): my husband picked this up for me: it’s a novel “set in contemporary Seoul, Korea, about four young women making their way in a world defined by impossible standards of beauty, after-hours room salons catering to wealthy men, ruthless social hierarchies, and K-pop mania.”
Heaven by Mieko Kawakami, translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd (Europa Editions, 2021, originally published in 2009): I loved Kawakami’s book Breasts and Eggs (and wrote about it here), so I was excited to pick up her most recently translated book.
Added to my wishlist (books that have caught my eye but I don’t yet own):
A Natural History of Transition by Callum Angus (Metonymy Press, 2021): David Naimon from Between the Covers makes me want to read books by every author he interviews. Here is his interview with Callum Angus. This book “is a collection of short stories that disrupts the notion that trans people can only have one transformation.”
Magma by Þóra Hjörleifsdóttir, translated by Meg Matich (Grove Press, 2021): Brandon Taylor’s review is what made me want to read this book. He says, “Magma is profane, funny, and uncomfortably honest about what happens when we substitute someone’s image of us for self-knowledge.”
Currently Reading
Filthy Animals by Brandon Taylor (Riverhead, 2021): I loved Taylor’s novel Real Life. This is a follow-up collection of linked stories.
Assembly by Natasha Brown (Little, Brown, and Company, publishing September 14): my current audiobook (which I got early through a Libro.fm early readers program). I’m loving it so far.
Tokyo Ueno Station by Yu Miri, translated by Morgan Giles (Riverhead, 2020, originally published in 2014): a novel told by a homeless ghost who haunts a Tokyo train station and park.
The Cormac Report
One of Cormac’s favorite things to do is write books based on his favorite books or series, so he has many Dog Man spin-offs, and he’s written his own versions of the encyclopedias he loves. He also has a series called Diary of a Sad Kid based on the Diary of a Wimpy Kid books.
He had great fun the other day coming up with a lengthy list of “Diary” books of various kinds and decided that I should write a book called Diary of an Angsty Mom. I mean … that’s perfect, actually. He thinks my husband’s book should be Diary of a Tired Dad, also very good.
The only problem with this is that he actually wants me to write it. And, I don’t know, maybe I should?
Have a great week everyone!
Overall, Walser's writing is not gloomy and melancholy. All of Walser's writing is not like that; he, like most great writers, has more than one mode.
A total keeper, thank you! xx