The Days of Abandonment, by Elena Ferrante

Elena Ferrante, it seems, won't go away. My reaction to My Brilliant Friend was lukewarm, so I haven't bothered to read the remaining books in the Neapolitan series, despite owning all of them. On top of my ambivalence about the book, I find I have a more generalized recoiling in response to Ferrante. Some of it, I think, was the ubiquitous awe in which she was held so suddenly — it seemed to me out of nowhere — about five years ago. And then, I can't place quite why, but her anonymity annoys me. I didn't find out her identity was unknown right away; in fact, not until well after I read My Brilliant Friend. When I did find out, it just felt like one more thing not to like. As it is sometimes hard to separate the persona of work's creator from the work, this fact of her anonymity, which seems itself to have become something of a persona — quite the opposite of what you expect anonymity to offer — kept needling its way in as I read, leaving me with a faint distaste. I acknowledge that this is on me, not her — whoever she is. Back when I read Trick I went down something of a Ferrante rabbit hole and I'm afraid maybe Domenico Starnone — whose books I've really liked — is ruined for me too, now. By some reckonings, the first book of Starnone's that I read, Ties, is in fact a sort of companion book to The Days of Abandonment telling the same story from the husband's perspective. This nugget, of course, also remained in the back of my mind as I was reading: were these stories the same, I asked myself.

I've had The Days of Abandonment for as long as I've had the Neapolitan books, and had considered reading it a few times, but always found the blurb a bit off-putting: did I really want to read about a woman driven to madness when her husband leaves her? (Turns out I probably didn't.) It was this Lit Hub list of The 50 Best Contemporary Novels Under 200 Pages that provided the nudge that got me to read it now. I still haven't felt myself to be in the right place to go back to The Famished Road, so I thought a short, distracting read might be in order. I thought I'd read it in a day or two; I read it in five. What I felt I needed at this moment was a book that I wanted to pick up, or that I didn't want to put down. The Days of Abandonment was not this. I would read a few pages — it has conveniently short chapters — and then not want to go on. I might pick it up again an hour or two later, and do the same thing again. That's how most of the reading went until yesterday morning, when I still had 100 pages (i.e., more than half the book) to go, and I decided to just get it done. Get it done by lunch, or abandon it, were basically the options I gave myself and — I realize this is a little ridiculous, but the fact that I had another book I was avoiding definitely played into my decision to go through with reading this one. I'm not sure how well I can articulate my complaints about the book. I will say I wish I had checked doesthedogdie.com before starting this; I probably would have skipped it if I had. (How was I to know there would be a dog?) But, mostly, I just didn't find the narrator all that sympathetic or relatable or compelling. (I realize sympathetic and relatable, perhaps, ought not to be disqualifiers, but I had trouble bringing myself to care.) 

Toward the end, as the narrator starts to come out of her mania, I did finally find some points to connect to. As she accepts facing the future without her husband, she finds she must differentiate herself from him, to strip away the traces of him that have become part of herself. She experiences some fear about what will be left when this is done. This was a feeling that was very familiar to me. I often say I grew up with my husband. Not literally: I was 21 when we met — but I spent nearly my entire 20s with him. I became an adult with him. (And he with me: we're the same age; I wouldn't be at all surprised if some of what I've experienced is mutually experienced by him.) We split up well over a decade ago, but even today I'm sometimes (though quite rarely now) aware of his influence. Sometimes it's his taste that dictates mine. Sometimes it's the opposite: I find I'm still rebelling against him to assert my own preferences. Ferrante captured some of this experience, which went a small way toward saving the book for me. 

Celestial Bodies, by Jokha Alharthi

I don't really know anything about Oman. In fact, I had to look it up on a map to be certain of where it was. (I knew it was on the Arabian peninsula, but not the particular geography.) I certainly don't know anything about its history. I wouldn't say this was a handicap exactly when reading Celestial Bodies, more that reading it made me aware of how completely outside my knowledge base Oman and its history are. I don't think I've ever read a book from a country I knew so little about, with the possible exceptions of Mauritius and Equatorial Guinea. Those, at least, I didn't have to look up on a map. (Though I did have to look up Annobón, the island province of Equatorial Guinea where By Night the Mountain Burns takes place.) In any case, somewhere I heard about Celestial Bodies. I added it to my World Books List and forgot about it. And then it kept reasserting itself. I bought it - I thought! - on a whim one evening when I decided to order a bunch of books I'd never heard of on bookshop.org. Then when it arrived, I realized I had heard of it: it was already on my World Books List! Then, a couple days later, I saw that Idlewild Books, which this year has been hosting a Women In Translation book club had selected it as the June book for their club. Clearly, this book had been in the periphery of my vision for a little while and I just failed to make the connections. In any case, after finishing This Is How It Always Is, I took a day off from reading. (I know: a day. But for me a day off is unusual, especially these days.) I was on the fence as to whether to go back to The Famished Road right away (spoiler: after finishing Celestial Bodies, I was again on the fence as to whether to go back to The Famished Road right away; I did not). I decided it would be a good moment to start Celestial Bodies and get it read in time for the Idlewild Book Club, should I decide to join.

The book feels very disjointed. It's a family drama spanning a bit over a hundred year period, told in short chapters focusing on various characters. One narrative recurs, is written in the first person and takes place in the present, while the rest are second person snippets from various points in the past, and yet that first person narrator somehow doesn't feel like the central character. Toward the end, I did understand a certain cohesion, and as I write this I see it almost more clearly. The celestial bodies of the book are the characters, the way they orbit and move around one another, sometimes drawing near, other times very remote. When I got this conceit (which is laid out pretty explicitly somewhere in the last 50 pages), I loved the idea. I saw, in retrospect, that there had been hints earlier, but I wish they had been a little stronger. Now, as I think about it, is the first person narrator like the sun? with all the other characters orbiting around him? I don't think that's quite it. It's not meant to be so heavy-handed, I think. More, it's an a way of understanding how human relationships actually work -- one I find very appealing. 

This Is How It Always Is, by Laurie Frankel

This Is How It Always Is was the third book I read for my book club. I thought I would manage reading 2:1 personal books to book club books, but I keep mucking up the timing. So, a week ago, I started another book (The Famished Road) which, like two weeks ago, I had to set aside to read my book club book this weekend. Perhaps part of the problem is I keep selecting somewhat challenging books for my personal reading (well, except for The Dark Child, which I read in a day - though maybe that was part of the problem too). The next book club book is a book I've already read, so I guess I don't have to worry about this situation happening again for a little while at least. 

I recognize that This Is How It Always Is is an important book, on some level. As one reviewer on Goodreads wrote, "we need LGBTQIAP+ stories that don't end in tragedy." I agree entirely, and this is a start at that. But this book felt, to me, a bit like an after school special. It tackled a hard topic in an instructive manner. It felt like its purpose was to give parents and families tools to navigate raising a transgender child (or really any child today, who is part of a generation whose experience of gender is different from the one I and my generation had growing up). I won't go so far as to claim I don't need help navigating this myself. I know I'm still biased by the binary understanding of gender that I grew up with. I do training on diversity and inclusion in my professional life, and one of the things I tell people is to listen, learn, and take cues from younger generations to understand what gender means to them, because that is their reality and we're living in it too. That's something I strive to do in my own life, and this was one of the major lessons of the book: the children (and not just the trans child) understood things the parents couldn't. My big complaint, really, is that I'm not looking for heavy-handed lessons in my literature. In fact, reading this was almost like work. (I'm actually contemplating recommending this book to my boss.) 

I have some other complaints too. I was a little resistant to this book before I even started it. The thought I kept having was, "I don't want to read a book about parenting." (This very much IS a book about parenting.) Now, as someone who does try to reflect on and poke at my own biases, I have to admit there's something going on here that's probably worth exploring. I especially don't want to read a book about an upper middle class white parents with five kids that is explicitly about raising those kids. This is just not something that interests me. This feeling didn't go away, even as I was reading the book. It's engaging, it's easy to read, and I want to participate in my book club ... so I just kept going, but I found some of it very tiresome. The portion of the book where the mom and kid up and move to Thailand for a few weeks (months?) was much more interesting to me than, like, the daily parenting and schooling and feeding in the rest of the book. This is my own bias, and I recognize it. The other thing that bugged me about the book, which I guess I've sort of alluded to above, was just the straight up privilege. I say this as an upper middle class white person, but it was just so unrealistic. An ER and later family practice doctor supporting her family of 7 (seven!!) on a single salary? In Seattle? The struggling writer husband, struggling to write a book for close to 20 years, and like, it's no big deal? The weird pressure from her fellow family practice doctor to go to Thailand (and/or run their practice's social media??)? The book was tackling one challenging aspect of this family's life, and to do that every other challenge they faced was essentially elided.

The Dark Child, by Camara Laye

I have had this copy of The Dark Child (sometimes translated as The African Child, titled L'Enfant Noir in the original French) for 25 years. It was assigned reading (which I did not read) for an African Religion class I took at Oberlin College. I think I was on page 2 of the book when I first asked myself, "why did it take me so long to get around to reading this?" Although I've had this book for 25 years, have moved it who knows how many times, and I don't know why it took me so long to get to it, I can tell you why I decided to pick it up just now: it was the reference to it in the recent NY Times "By the Book" interview with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. (I love the "By the Book" interviews, regardless of who is being interviewed.)

The Dark Child is a memoir of Camara Laye's childhood and youth in Kouroussa in Guinea, and his later schooling in Conakry leading up to his departure for France to continue his studies. The whole book is suffused with nostalgia, particularly the early chapters, describing Camara's early childhood, which have the almost dreamlike quality of drawing up very distant memories. (You would think he was older than 25 - that is, that he was further removed from his childhood - when he wrote this!)

The book describes the rituals and magic of everyday life in Upper Guinea, and though he has taken part in or experienced them, Camara treats them with a bit of wonder that must have come from his own remove. You can sense his own lament at not having striven to understand more when he was fully immersed in that world. The book is also full of love: it's dedicated to his mother, and the love between her and him is so palpable in the text that I'm tearing up now just thinking about it. But the love in the book extends also to his father, his uncles on both sides of the family, his friends, and even to the places of his youth. You can feel a warm affection throughout.

This was truly a stunning book. I'm sort of sorry I waited so long to read it, but maybe now was just the right moment. I'm not sure I would have appreciated it 25 years ago the way I did today.

The Conservationist, by Nadine Gordimer

It took me two weeks to finish The Conservationist, which is not terribly long, and I even paused to read another book in the middle. And yet, two weeks just now feels like an eternity. This book dragged for me, though it was occasionally quite moving. Like The Sea, which was the book I finished immediately before starting this, I picked up The Conservationist during one of the periods in which I was actively collecting Booker prize winners (in fact I think I picked them up right around the same time). This shared the 1974 prize with Stanley Middleton's Holiday, a work and author totally unfamiliar to me. Nadine Gordimer, meanwhile, has been a familiar name to me for several decades. In addition to The Conservationist, I also have a copy of her book July's People, which I believe belonged to my parents, but this is the first book of hers I've read.

The book centers on Mehring, a wealthy, white, anglophone South African businessman. He's part of the problem, stuck in the past (or more accurately in the perpetuation of the present, because it's true that apartheid lasted for another 20 years after this book was written). He's purchased a farm 30 miles outside Johannesburg, and over the course of the book he develops a strong attachment to the land, while moving further and further from his human connections.

Much of the book consists of Mehring's internal running monologue, memories of conversations, and things he wants to say but doesn't. Among his recurring thought trains are memories of conversations with an ex lover. He had an affair with a married activist who has been forced to leave the country, and he has not gotten over it. We only ever get his perspective, but I found the dynamic of mutual disrespect very interesting. She, an anti-apartheid leftist and he, a willing beneficiary of apartheid. Each dismissive of the other as simplistic. Yet, clearly his feelings for her are stronger than he lets on, or even accepts to himself.

He has a troubled relationship with his teenage son, a liberal who sympathizes with Namibian independence, and has a friendly relationship with the farm workers and local shopkeepers. He has imaginary running conversations with his son, as he tries to understand him, but he's never able to vocalize his thoughts when he's actually face-to-face with him.

Occasionally the book picks up the narrative outside Mehring's head: amidst the goings on among the African workers on his farm; recounting the conversations among the Indian family who run the local shop. These interludes give the reader a glimpse of how Mehring is really seen by others. They also show the insider/outsider dynamic of language. Mehring doesn't seem to see his own exclusion when others are speaking their own language, or to even be able to imagine that anything said in those languages might be of interest to him.