The Gate of Angels, by Penelope Fitzgerald

Continuing my string of slim novels by English women, I finished The Gate of Angels by Penelope Fitzgerald. I thought this was only the second book of hers I'd read -- I remember The Bookshop clearly, but my records show I also read Offshore about 5 years ago and I do faintly remember it now that I've been reminded. I found The Bookshop quietly devastating. I was afraid The Gate of Angels was going to tend that way as well, but things came together altogether differently here. 

I now remember a certain humor in all her books that I've read, but this one is the funniest. It's rarely laugh out loud funny, but full of funny character portraits. The two central characters are Fred, a scholar at Cambridge, and Daisy, a working class girl from the south of London, who are thrown together when they're involved in a horse-cart and bicycle accident. Fred, of course, falls instantly in love, but the situation is messy.

The book is organized into four parts and while, for the most part, the narrative flows smoothly, each chapter has a descriptive title and is almost a vignette. It's rather magical how these vignettes come together to make the story. Some of them contribute in a direct way, while others (such as the one comprising a ghost story written and told by a college Proctor) are almost asides, which just add entertainment value.

Fitzgerald has a narrative voice that I recognized immediately -- warm, descriptive, and funny. It served this story particularly well. The Gate of Angels is certainly my favorite book of hers that I've read.

First Love, by Gwendoline Riley

I think I originally picked up First Love on the basis of a recommendation for another Gwendoline Riley novel. I heard something good about her and it was the book that was immediately available and so I got it. And then it sat on my shelf for several years. It was similarly a recommendation of a different novel of hers (The Palm House, which came out earlier this year) that inspired me to pull it out and read it in a few sittings yesterday. As it turned out, it was a more apt selection than I even realized. I hadn't previously been aware Riley was from the north of England. I was fresh back from a trip to Manchester and London, so I could just picture – fresh in my mind – many of the locations in the book: Oxford Road or Oldham Street in Manchester; the new developments in Ancoats where the narrator's mother lives; Earl's Court or Euston in London. 

Let me start by saying that I liked First Love. And yet, a few paragraphs in, one of the first thoughts I had while reading it (even as I was already aware that I was enjoying the prose at least) was about how boring I find heterosexual relationships to be. I think coming into this right after reading Hotel du Lac, which is quite different but also very much about heterosexual relationships and power dynamics, is what emphasized the point for me. I don't know that I would have thought independently that these books had much in common, but they are both about (among other things) the ways women sometimes make themselves small in relationships, orbiting the man who remains the center. 

The back cover blurb for First Love says,  

Catastrophically ill-suited for each other, and forever straddling a line between relative calm and explosive confrontation, Neve and her husband, Edwyn, live together in London... Drawing us into the battleground of this marriage, Gwendoline Riley tells a transfixing story of mistakes and misalliances, of helplessness and hostility, in which both husband and wife have played a part. 

It goes on to ask, coyly: "Could this possibly be, nonetheless, a story of love?" And that question, well – it just seems so beside the point to me. The question posed on the back of the book is not, I think, one anyone would be asking if not for the title of the book. The title does make one wonder, of course. What first love are we talking about here? Is it ironic? I suppose this is a mild spoiler, but the conditions of the relationship at the center of this book are so bad, I hardly think it matters if it's love. In any case, this is an issue I take not with the book but with whoever wrote the back cover text, so I guess I should let it go. The book was quite good at exploring this relationship. 

Hotel du Lac, by Anita Brookner

I'm just back from England. I told myself I wouldn't take a book with me. I was hoping to travel light, and I knew I would never read on the red eye over. I did have 2 significant train rides while there, on one of which I might have the energy to read. I thought I'd just pick something up to read in my explorations. Then at the last minute I threw in Dostoyevsky's Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, which I'd been intending to reread and was appropriately slim. Of course that didn't stop me from picking up more books while I was there. At an Oxfam shop I found Hotel du Lac, and I bought it as well as a Penelope Fitzgerald book. I almost bought Lauren Groff's Matrix as well, but it was raining and the only means I had for keeping books dry while I was out was to put them in the front pocket of my hoodie and zip up my rain jacket over them and I didn't think all three books would fit.

I was drawn to the Brookner because I seemed to remember the writer Rumaan Alam posting about her recently. Hers was a name I knew, but that's about it. I didn't even notice until today the "Winner of the Booker Prize" tag on the cover of the book. I started it in my hotel room in Manchester on Saturday didn't get very far. I did read a bit more on the train ride from Manchester to London yesterday. And then I finished on my flight home, reading the last pages just as we were landing. It's a quiet little book and the culture in captures I think must have been a throwback even when it was published in 1984: well-heeled women at a discreet Swiss resort to escape the boredom or the scandal of their lives at home. But it's not set in the past; it's more the tail end of a period. The novel's protagonist is experiencing that end herself. At the start of the book she is thoroughly modern in some ways, but at the same time rather old fashioned. Over the course of the book, she grows up – she says so herself, though she's already 39. Her two weeks at the Swiss resort prove consequential for her coming into herself.

Croatian War Nocturnal, by Spomenka Štimec; Taiwan Travelogue, by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ

I was excited when my book club chose Croatian War Nocturnal to read because I'd never read anything written in Esperanto before. As a lover of languages and utopian projects, I've always liked the idea of Esperanto. I visited the Esperanto Museum in Vienna several years back and loved looking at all the documentation there and the pictures from the Esperanto congresses over the years. It wasn't until I read this book that I discovered Yugoslavia was a hot spot for Esperanto, though on reflection, it made sense. How better to unify the multiethnic multilingual population of a new nation than under the banner of a utopian created language that is foreign to all. You see this sometimes in formerly colonized countries that keep using the language of the colonizer as the official language rather than favoring any ethnic group in particular. And isn't a language with idealistic foundations better than a language associated with empire? Of course, like the languages of the colonizers, Esperanto is a Western construct. And apart from all the brutality that comes with a colonial language, they also come with a certain kind of access. (As becomes clear in Croatian War Nocturnal, Esperanto also comes with a kind of access: to a small but devoted international community of Esperantists. A very narrow power, but an interesting one.) 

The book itself recounts the 1991 war period in Croatia, mostly in vignettes. The author's own experience in Zagreb, that of some members of her cross-border family, and the wartime losses of some of her colleagues in the Esperantist community. She describes very clearly the way Yugoslavia fractured, with fault lines that were barely under the surface suddenly splitting, dividing families and neighbors and communities. It was a slim book and, as someone who has developed a strong interest in the region, I wished there had been more. 

I started Taiwan Travelogue about 3 weeks ago and had to take a short break from it to read Croatian War Nocturnal. It took me nearly all those 3 weeks to read the first half, and I read the second half in just a couple sittings yesterday and early this morning. 

It's clear to see why Taiwan Travelogue won the National Book Award for Translation. Language is such an important part of this book. It demands a translator who knows both Chinese and Japanese, and the translator's notes (mixed in with the author's notes, as well -- occasionally -- as notes from the fictional author in the book) provide quite a lot of context that is helpful to a reader who is unfamiliar with Taiwan and the languages in the book. 

This feat of translation surrounds a conceit in the book that it is itself a translated work. The book claims to the recently rediscovered manuscript of a Japanese writer's book about a year she spent in Taiwan in the 1930s when it was under Japanese rule, recently retranslated into Mandarin in the twenty-teens. I found this frame to be an unnecessary distraction. 

The story at the center of the book is about the relationship between the Japanese writer and her local Taiwanese translator and guide, which turns out also to be a story about empire and power and self-determination. And food. Above all, you could say this book is about food. Each chapter title is a dish, and each chapter recounts how the two women came to eat this dish, as well as often how the dish came to be, with other events seeming almost incidental. I found the food discussions occasionally fascinating and occasionally overlong. I think the best way to read this book would be as part of a culinary experience, because one does truly feel one is missing out by not having the opportunity to taste these foods that are described with so much detail as to their history and preparation.

An African in Greenland, by Tété-Michel Kpomassie

I can't remember where I first heard about An African in Greenland, but I believe I picked up a copy because it was the first book I'd heard of by a Togolese author. It does feel a bit ironic to count this book for Togo in my world books reading project (I already have Greenland covered!), but the book does start out in Togo. The first quarter of the book documents Kpomassie's long (physically and temporally) and circuitous route to get from Togo to Greenland. Honestly, I could have read even more on this period: from his village in Togo, when he was just 16 years old, Kpomassie traveled first to Ivory Coast where he stays with an aunt, then to Ghana where he gets an embassy job and teaches himself English, then to Senegal where he gets another embassy job, then to Mauritania from where he intends to leave, only to find ships don't travel from there anymore, so he must return back to Senegal in order to get a ship to France. After arriving in Marseille, he travels to Paris where he spends a couple of years before traveling to Germany and on to Copenhagen, the point of departure for ships to Greenland. Everywhere he went, Kpomassie had to pause and work for months or even years to save up enough money to fund the next stage of his travels. At the same time, he encountered incredible generosity, including one benefactor in Paris whom he began to think of as a second father. It's astonishing that he undertook this adventure at such a young age and against such challenges, though maybe it was only his youth that made it fathomable.

On arriving in Greenland, Kpomassie was completely reliant on the generosity of others – he was never able to legally work there – and many of the people who helped him get by there were living in poverty themselves. They shared their homes, their limited food, their abundant coffee and booze, and sometimes even their beds with him. He traveled up the west coast from south to north over a period of a year and 3 months, ending up in Upernavik, which is apparently the south of the north of Greenland. 

One gathers that Kpomassie became something of a celebrity while in Greenland as the first African ever to visit the island. Early on, he is a novelty, but as time passes he finds that people have begun to expect his arrival. They have heard about him from friends or family in other villages where he stopped, and when he arrives in Upernavik, at the house where he stops to seek shelter the owner says he heard about him on the radio.  

I must say, after reading this, Greenland sounds utterly unappealing. It's not just because of the food, though that is a big part of it. Food is a major theme of the book because of the general scarcity of it, and because one must constantly find ways to feed oneself through the long, dark winter. Kpomassie's diet on his travels seemed to consist primarily of seal meat, blubber, and organs, eaten raw a lot more often than you'd expect, with occasional fish or reindeer meat. There are also huge quantities of coffee, and pervasive binge drinking. (This last I remember well from Last Night in Nuuk.) 

I also don't think I would manage well in either the polar summer or the polar winter. I never realized before reading this book just how long the sunless days and full sun days lasted. Even today, 6 weeks after the solstice, Upernavik still gets 24 hours of daylight. In about a week, on August 8, the village will get just over an hour of twilight. Then in late September, it will get 2 hours of night and from there the nights will just get longer until November 13, at which point there will be no sun for many months. Living in a place where there is a distinct difference between winter and summer daylight hours, I somehow only noticed a couple years ago that the day to day change happened more quickly around the equinoxes and more slowly at the solstices. Of course, at the poles, this is more pronounced.

Kpomassie, however, loved Greenland. The story, and his telling of it, is really remarkable. He heard of this far off place from a book he found in Togo at age 16, fell in love with it at a distance, and spent 8 years working and traveling with the continuous goal of getting there. At the end of the book, he says he could imagine himself staying there forever, but he feels obliged to leave to get news of his family and share his experiences with the world. After finishing the book, I learned that Kpomassie is evidently still alive at age 85 or so, and that he moved back to Greenland in 2022 to live out his final years.

Run Towards the Danger, by Sarah Polley

I've always liked Sarah Polley in my mind, even though I've only seen a handful of her movies. I believe the first thing I saw her in was The Sweet Hereafter and then Go a couple years later. In 2013, I saw her autobiographical documentary Stories We Tell and I was so impressed by her, though now I don't remember a whole lot about it. My memory is of a mood and a look more than anything. Though I guess I also remember thinking she seemed very smart and thoughtful. In any case, I was placing an order with my neighborhood community goods recycler and they had a copy of her book so I bought it on a whim. I wasn't necessarily intending to start it right away, but it's a collection of essays and last Thursday I thought maybe I'd just read the first essay. It turned out to be a rather long one, about her playing Alice at the Stratford Festival and having scoliosis and developing stage fright and a whole lot of other things, but I guess I was hooked. I was leaving the following day for a work trip to Atlanta and I ended up finishing the book across my flights there and back. 

Run Towards the Danger tackles difficult – even terrifying – events from Polley's own life, from the aforementioned stage fright and scoliosis, to the harrowing experiences she had as a child actor working with Terry Gilliam, and her high risk first pregnancy, among others. While she tells these stories and processes the events on an individual level, she also always has a lens beyond herself to how these stories are part of a larger picture. You can see just how much she understands her own position of privilege, even in the context of some horrific events she herself has experienced. There is a lengthy end note about her decision to seek private medical care in the U.S. for concussion symptoms and the lengths she goes to defend Canadian healthcare and her support for free healthcare for all is almost comical, except that I believe she is in earnest and feeling conflicted about her decision. 

I was impressed by Sarah Polley after seeing Stories We Tell and this book has only deepened my respect for her.

James, by Percival Everett

I'm not sure why it took me so long to get to reading James. I got my copy in March of 2024 when Percival Everett did a reading and signing at P&T Knitwear in New York. It looks like I went out of town a few days later and when I came back, I read other things. Or I didn't read at all, for a while there. It's sat on my shelf ever since. The fact that it's a hardcover edition didn't help – I always prefer to read paperbacks. And I think part of my hesitation was the subject matter itself. I wasn't sure I wanted to retread Huck Finn, even if I did trust Everett to do it well. It's been a very long time since I read Huckleberry Finn – I'm not even sure I've read it in its entirety. But I'm familiar with it in the way anyone who grew up here (at least when I did) must probably be.

I'm also not sure what led me to pull it out to read just over a week ago. I was about to finish Dooneen and was scanning my shelves and I looked at James and wondered, why haven't I read it yet? So I laid it out and a couple days later, I started it. I read nearly 100 pages in that first sitting. 

One of the things I've always marveled at in Everett's books is the way he can meld comedy and tragedy, with a humor that is often ironic and biting, but James has less of that type of comedy than, for instance, The Trees or Erasure. It's a very tender book. I wrote very little about Telephone when I read it, but it's probably closer in mood to James than the other Everett books I've read.

Once I was into it, there were a few times when my anxiety about reading it did make me pause. The middle section in particular, when Jim and Huck were traveling and running into various risky situations was the most stressful. I found I could often read only one chapter at a time. Oddly, the situation gets arguably worse in the latter third of the book, but I didn't find that as hard going. At the conclusion I felt – and I think this is how one must feel – that Percival Everett made Huckleberry Finn make sense. 

Maigret at the Gai-Moulin, by Georges Simenon; Dooneen, by Keith Ridgway

A few weeks ago I was with my dad at a thrift store in Bay Ridge and I found a stack of Georges Simenon Maigret books. I'd never read any Simenon, but I had watched and enjoyed the recent Maigret adaptation, so I bought the lot – eight books in total. I knew there were a lot of Maigret books, but when I went to figure out the order mine belonged in, I was shocked to see just how many – and across what timespan: 75 novels, plus an additional 28 short stories, published over a period of more than 40 years! I started with Maigret at the Gai-Moulin because it was the earliest among the books I bought. Published in 1931, it's the tenth Maigret novel. 

I expected the book to be set in Paris, but in fact this one takes place in Belgium. Maigret almost seems a minor character in the book. He doesn't turn up until well along in the story, when he turns out to have been trailing the murder victim, a wealthy Greek man whose body is found in a basket at the zoo. Of course he interferes with the case, bests the local police, and solves the crime for them. The more central figure in the book is a young man who is suspected of the murder – a good kid who's gotten caught up with a bad crows. When Maigret clears him of the murder, he cleans up his ways and is sent off to do the king's work in the Belgian Congo, so surely everything will have worked out for him in the long run!

Last week, just as I was finishing the Maigret book, the latest installment from my New Directions subscription showed up: Dooneen, by Keith Ridgway and I decided to go right into it. I hadn't heard of the author and the book may not even be officially out yet in the U.S. if Amazon's publication date is to be trusted. I read just the beginning of the blurb on the back and thought it sounded like interesting speculative fiction, and I have to admit I was very drawn to the design of the edition. 

Some minor spoilers follow.  

 

June Books

She Who Remains was the latest choice for my Women in Translation Book Club. It turned out to be a somewhat controversial book in our discussion. I guess we've had differing opinions on books before, but this seemed more contentious than usual. There were questions about whether it was exploitative, about who has the right to tell this story, about the choice to use the Sworn Virgin terminology, about whether some aspects of the storytelling were lazy. Some of these were questions I had while reading the book. And yet, I also have the question of whether it was worth all this discussion in the first place. 

That said, I liked She Who Remains quite a bit more than I expected to. It's disjointed and in fragments with variable formatting and punctuation. When I saw the text visually - without reading it at all, I thought it was going to be an impenetrable slog. I don't have much tolerance for freeform text. But it turned out not to be a slow read. I got through it quite quickly and found it easy to get into. But while it tackles some very serious subjects, I didn't find that it had a lot of substance. I had nothing much to say about it.

It feels a little funny to include it here, but on Saturday I read -- cover-to-cover -- a book my uncle gave me for Christmas in 1983: White Wash and Pink Feathers, the story of Petros the pelican, a celebrity on Mykonos since his arrival there in 1958 until his death in 1985 (which I only just learned of when I searched up Petros). My uncle went to Mykonos annually as far back as I can remember and often brought me back gifts from there, but this book was probably the first. My uncle went into home hospice care on Saturday and passed away in the early hours of Sunday morning. And so on Saturday morning, I went into my jewelry box and put on a necklace he got me from Mykonos a few years ago and a bracelet he got me from I don't know where some 20 years ago, and I found White Wash and Pink Feathers, which I kept among a small selection of books from my childhood and I sat down and read it. I think my parents probably read me parts of the book -- or maybe even the whole thing; it's not very long -- when I was a kid, but I certainly didn't remember much. It recounts Petros' life on Mykonos from when he was a young pelican (supposedly with his parents and an aunt and uncle? I don't know how much truth there is to this story) who survived a storm that killed most of his family. The book recounts Petros' friendship and fame among humans, but also with some other birds on the island (a stork from Russia, a rooster, a few other pelicans). It's also very much about Mykonos and the changes on the island from the 1950s to the 1980s, with the increase in tourism. I imagine the island of the 2020s looks quite different from the one of 1982, the year of the book's publication - let alone when Petros arrived there in 1958.

On Sunday I started Ann Leckie's latest, Radiant Star, and I finished it this morning before work. I was very excited when I heard she had a new book out. I ordered it from the library a few weeks back. Of course my hold came through while I was out of the country, so I sent it back into circulation (or thought I did) and ordered it again and my second hold showed up just before I returned home. When I went to pick it up at my local branch, both copies were there waiting for me in the hold section, which made me feel a little bad but there wasn't a waitlist anymore so not that bad. I had heard mixed to negative reports from several other folks reading it, so my hopes were tempered, but in the end I really liked it. Someone pointed out that it may be playing on a different genre from some of Leckie's earlier books, and I would certainly say it had a different voice. The story is not told as a first person narrative, but the unknown narrator -- maybe the storyteller more accurately, has a very distinctive tone and interjects quite a lot in a way that I don't recall as a feature of the other books. Radiant Star ends up being mostly about power struggles among several factions with unlikeable leadership, but it also felt like a prequel to stories to come. Perhaps I'll need to reread it if a successor arrives. 

Absence, by Andrew Dana Hudson; All Systems Red, by Martha Wells

The author of Absence is an acquaintance from the internet. I'm not sure I would have heard about it otherwise – I'm not very up on new books these days. There was a book event here in Brooklyn, so I went and I got my copy of the book there. This was the same book event where I picked up The Old Man by the Sea and I started Absence just after finishing that book. (I might have read it first, except that it's a somewhat bulky hardcover and with my travel plans I preferred a slim paperback.) I heard the first two chapters at the event, so it was as if I had already started it. 

Absence is about sort of a slow apocalypse. The sudden and unpredictable disappearance of people over a period of years, resulting in an ever-diminishing global population, and everything that might entail. It was fun to read what Hudson imagined might happen in this circumstance: some positive changes, some ambiguous, some predictably bad outcomes. I was also really impressed with the way the book handled the uncertainty of the conflicting potential truths in the story. I feel like the conclusion could have been very unsatisfying, but it wasn't.

Perhaps because I had heard the author in discussion talking about writing this book, I found myself paying a lot of attention to the structure – at least, more than I usually do. I'm more likely to focus on language when it comes to writing craft, but the structure of Absence really impressed me. It has more than 100 chapters, across several sections – most of which encompass one day. Part of the book includes a woven narrative of past and present, which I think is when I first noticed the structure. The narrative about the past was brought in to give the reader some background on the narrator, and when you got everything you needed to know, it ended – but it was so seamless, I couldn't tell you when it returned to being just the single, present narrative. 

Absence is a fast-paced book. I tore through the latter two-thirds of it in just a couple days. I would have finished it much sooner if not for the fact that, on whim inspired by the same Discord group where I'm connected to the author, I decided to experiment with the novelty of requesting holds from the library.

I'm an enthusiastic supporter of libraries in theory – and an annual donor to both the New York and Brooklyn Public Library, but I rarely actually use the library in practice. Several of my online friends were talking about putting a hold on the new Ann Leckie book, Radiant Star and I thought, I should do that! So I did. And while I was at it, I also put a hold on the first Murderbot book, All Systems Red, because I'd been curious about the books. I enjoyed the TV show and people said the books were fun, and fun was what I was in the mood for. My hold came in within just a couple days and – magic! – I could just walk over to my nearest branch and grab it off the shelf and take it home with me. 

I was a little worried the fact that I had watched the TV show would spoil the book. Maybe it did a little (though also the TV show took a turn that wasn't in the book, or at least as I recall it), but I am a completist by nature and I didn't want to start the series anywhere but book one. I also wanted to see if I enjoyed the book as a reading experience. I did! I'm not going to put the next one on hold jut yet because I have some travel over the next few weeks, but I look forward to reading it when I'm back. Libraries: what a concept!