Emma, by Jane Austen

I very rarely reread books. I like the idea of rereading, but with limited time and unlimited books, the previously unread always seems to get priority of place for me. I first read Emma in 2005. I was something of a latecomer to Jane Austen, as I wrote when I reread Pride and Prejudice in 2016. I first read that book in November of 2004 when I was subletting an apartment and ran out of my own reading material. About a year after that I went back and read the remainder of her novels in the space of just a few weeks (pausing somewhere in the middle to also read The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling). If my record-keeping is accurate, I read Emma right in the middle of the pack: Sense and Sensibility and Mansfield Park before; Northanger Abbey, (Tom Jones), Lady Susan, and Persuasion after. Reading them all in such quick succession was, I think, not such a good idea in the end. They all kind of blended together. For reasons that probably don't have much to do with merit, Mansfield Park and Northanger Abbey are the ones that stood out for me. (And Tom Jones, which I adored, and was, I have to say, a refreshing break from Jane Austen.)

I started rereading Emma back in February to refresh my memory ahead of the new film adaptation. But this was during that period this year when I was sick and none of my reading was going well and I set it aside after about 25 pages. I didn't think I'd go back any time soon, but then my friend group who have been watching movies together (that is to say, simultaneously in our own homes) throughout quarantine selected Clueless as our film for last week. I had just finished Romance in Marseille and Emma seemed like it would be a fun change from what I'd been reading lately. 

My experience going back to Emma was similar to my experience going back to Pride and Prejudice. In the period since I first read the book, I've seen multiple TV and film adaptations, multiple times. The story and its twists are now quite familiar to me; perhaps too familiar. In fact, the moment when Emma offends Miss Bates and is lectured by Mr. Knightley is, I think, one of the reasons I stopped reading it in February: I dreaded that moment. (Today, I read it without too much pain.) I think it took me a hundred pages or more to really get beyond the anticipation of everything and fall into the text, but once I did, it was a delight. 

Romance in Marseille, by Claude McKay

Romance in Marseille was published for the first time this year -- nearly a century after it was written. It's the story of Lafala, a ship-worker from an unnamed locale in colonized West Africa, who stows away on a boat heading to New York out of Marseille. After being discovered, he's locked in a freezing bathroom on the boat for the bulk of the crossing. On his arrival in New York, he finds he has lost the use of his legs, and he is taken to a hospital where they are amputated. Things take an unexpected turn when a fellow patient -- a Black man from Harlem -- puts Lafala in touch with a lawyer who sues the shipping company, which settles for a large payment. The company is made to provide Lafala with high quality artificial limbs and he's shipped back to Marseille first class and finds a new quality of life there with his money, though without his legs. 

The most interesting part of this book is the portrait of 1920s Marseille itself. In the bars and brothels in Quayside, sailors and workers of different races from all over the world mingle. Lafala's circle includes other Africans, African-Americans, West Indians, among others. The common thread of the African Diaspora and life at sea binds them together. Lafala's love interest is Sudanese, by way of Morocco. The Marseille of this book is a global city, a port connected to the whole world. It made me curious about Marseille, and also left me wondering if anyplace like this exists in the present day.

The Third Tower: Journeys in Italy, by Antal Szerb

Have you ever read just one book by an author and felt prepared to claim that author among your favorites? I wrote about it rather poorly, but that was how I felt after reading Antal Szerb's Journey By Moonlight. That book, which I read just about a year ago, went right to my heart, my mind, my inside. After reading it I started searching out Szerb's other works in a passive way; when I found myself in a bookshop, I'd usually remember to see if they had anything. They never did. Journey By Moonlight is his most well known work by a long shot. I'm not even sure there is a U.S. publisher for his other works. Early on in quarantine, remembering my luck ordering used books from the UK in the fall, I thought what the hell, and ordered 3 of his books in these pretty Pushkin Press editions.* 

I'm not sure what precisely drove me to pull out The Third Tower: Journeys in Italy this morning. I certainly didn't expect I would finish it by this evening (though it is a small book: just 105 pages and smaller than standard trade paperback size). The book is an account, told in small, episodic observations, of a trip Szerb made to Italy in August of 1936. The Spanish Civil War hangs in the background (in the first chapter, Szerb tells us he wanted to go to Spain but settled on Italy due to current events, and the situation in Spain pops up here and there). Fascism in Italy is more in the foreground; he bears witness to it in his accounts of the newspapers he reads, the people he sees on trains and along his travels. The tensions elsewhere in Europe are palpable. In Venice, he notes that hotels where French is spoken are expensive, while those where German is spoken are cheap. While I know something of the history of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, I don't have a great sense of Hungarian history or culture specifically. It's hard for me to wrap my head around what a vacation in Italy would be like for a Hungarian of Jewish heritage in 1936, even as I was reading an account of just that. (He does touch on the reaction he receives when he tells people he's from Hungary, which seems to be a mild fascination.) Szerb's passing references to Hungarian writers before him whose names meant nothing to me left me feeling rather ignorant. (Besides Szerb, the only Hungarian writer I've read is Sandor Marai and Imre Kertész is the only other I can name off the top of my head.)

Tracing parts of the route covered in Journey by Moonlight, in 1936 Szerb visited Venice, Vicenza, Lake Garda, Bologna, Ravenna, San Marino, Ferrara, and Trieste. Venice gets the most attention, and several of the other cities get just one short chapter. There are odd chapters on other topics too, on the heat, on the Fascist populous, on traveling alone. Unsurprisingly, that last chapter - called Solitude - struck a chord with me. 

When I started The Third Tower this morning, I tweeted, "I read the first two pages of this book and I already know I'm about to have my heart broken" with the photo at right. This journal turned out indeed to be an account of Szerb's farewell visit to Italy. War arrived in earnest not long after this. Szerb was put in a concentration camp in 1944 and was killed there in 1945. He was not even as old as I am now. 

*While you're there, I encourage you to peruse the author pictures on the Pushkin Press authors page, which I find unaccountably amusing. I was surprised to stumble across a photo of the previous author I read, Eduardo Halfon, while I was scrolling down to Szerb.

Monastery, by Eduardo Halfon

I picked up Eduardo Halfon's first book (or rather, the first that was translated into English), The Polish Boxer after finding it sitting on the display table at Idlewild Books, and I read it in early 2017. (It made my notable books of the year list.) After finishing it, I immediately put it in the mail to my father. Reading it had somehow reminded me of him, though I'd be hard pressed to articulate why. Some months ago, to my surprise and delight, I found Monastery at the thrift store near my office. I hadn't even known Halfon had a second book in English. (And now that I look, I see he has a third!) 

Both books are collections of stories, told in the first person, by a narrator who, when he's named, is named Eduardo Halfon. They read as episodes in the life of the author -- some threads weave through the narratives continuously, others pop out only in a couple places. The interconnectedness, I think, makes these stories mean more together than they would individually -- and all together, they're quite beautiful. (It's notable that neither book presents itself as a book of short stories, though that's really what they are.)

Halfon the narrator (and I think we can presume the author) has an unusual background. Born in Guatemala and raised partly there and partly in the U.S., his grandparents were Jews. Three of the four were Lebanese, but the one we hear most about is his Polish grandfather, who was interned in a succession of concentration camps starting in 1939 at the age of 16, and who moved to Guatemala after the war. This family history and multiplicity of identity is one of the recurring themes in both books. There are at least two moments in Monastery as the narrator is traveling through smaller towns in Guatemala and, on being asked where he's from, attests that he's Guatemalan -- from here! but he doubts it himself, and wonders why.* Halfon travels not just in Guatemala, but to Europe and to Israel (and in The Polish Boxer to the U.S. and some other places too), never quite feeling that he belongs, although he has ties to all these places. This feeling creates the perspective, and the distance to observe, that sets the mood in both these books.

* This reminded me of one of my favorite moments in There There which I didn't write about because I was so exhausted on the day (week, weeks?) that I wrote about it. Self-doubt about identity and being "truly" Native is something that several characters in the book experience. The teenage Orvil Red Feather is one of these characters, but when he gets to the Powwow and goes into the locker room to put on his regalia, he finds himself surrounded by other Native men, who are also putting on their regalia, dressing up as Indians like he is, and in that moment he realizes he is one of them. They're not putting on a costume and pretending to be something they're not, and neither is he.

Behold the Dreamers, by Imbolo Mbue

I bought a copy of Behold the Dreamers several months back, and I can picture exactly where it's sitting on the small bookshelf at the end of my desk ... at my office, which I walked out of at around 3pm on March 9 and have not returned to since. It's hard to remember all the random things I have waiting for me in the office. A stack of books, an assortment of clothes and shoes, some tupperware, 8 half-pound micro-plates, I think some Oreos? I'm not actually sure if I would have brought anything else home with me had I known I'd be out for so long, but I have wished I had that tupperware (especially as I've been cooking so much). So when, a couple weeks ago, my book club selected Behold the Dreamers as our next book, I laughed at myself. Buying a copy of a book I already owned seemed a little ridiculous — though believe me, I considered it. I also considered trying to get my copy from the office somehow, but nothing made sense. Fortunately, I was able to check out a copy of the e-book from the Brooklyn Public Library. I much prefer to read paper books, but this seemed the best solution all things considered. 

The book follows a Cameroonian couple who emigrate to New York to try and make a better life for themselves and their children. The husband, Jende, gets a job as the chauffeur for an executive at Lehman Brothers, not long before everything came crashing down in 2008. His wife, Neni, is a student at BMCC who hopes to get a Pharmacy degree. They live meagerly in Harlem, while working for this incredibly wealthy family (mainly it's Jende who works for them, but Neni scores a job as a housekeeper at their home in the Hamptons while their regular housekeeper is on vacation). All the while, they are waiting on a decision on the Jende's status after his asylum application. The juxtaposition of the two families makes for some interesting parallels and contrasts, if they're sometimes a bit heavy-handed. The collapse of Lehman and of the economy affects both families deeply, and the book does a good job of showing the ripple effects. And yet it was a little strange to read right now, in this moment, this book about really quite recent history. The events of 2008 seem so far away, and not so significant today.

Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone, by James Baldwin

I didn't realize it until I started this, but it had been too long since I'd read Baldwin. I forgot a little, with the passage of years, how absolutely gorgeous his writing is; how critically and with what perception he describes human relationships, world conditions. I go around telling everyone and their mother that they should read Just Above My Head (I even got my own mom a copy for Christmas last year; she loved it), but I go seven years without reading Baldwin. And to read Baldwin right now, of course, is as urgent as ever. In fact, while reading Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone, which was published in 1968, I wavered between anger and sorrow (but not surprise) because it still felt so relevant, so urgent. But it also felt like a tool, a weapon. As I've considered the events of the last couple months, of people who think the protesters are demanding too much -- again and again I keep hearing a line from Nina Simone in my head: "They keep on saying 'go slow!". She wrote Mississippi Goddam in 1964. Sixty years should be slow enough for anyone, but we all know it was never about incrementalism, it was about preserving the status quo. So, when while reading this book, I found myself in discussions where generational differences were used as a justification for caution around voicing support for Black Lives Matter, I could say, "James Baldwin was born in 1924 and was writing about this stuff more than 50 years ago. Don't talk to me about generational differences. The older generations have had time to learn." (Not that it got me anywhere, really, but I did actually wave the book around on a zoom meeting at one point. It was sitting right there.)

As it happens, there are some interesting generational dynamics in Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone. The narrator, Leo Proudhammer, is around Baldwin's own age. When the book picks up, it's present day, he's 39 years old, a successful actor, a celebrity. The narrative follows his life from early childhood up to the present. He came of age in Harlem before the Civil Rights movement, during war years (though he didn't go to war), and found his way into a sort of bohemian existence spent largely in downtown Manhattan and among white people, eventually finding success as an actor. As a young man, this gives him an outsider/outsider perspective, and Baldwin articulates this so well. In any case, later on in the book, closer to the present day, Leo starts a relationship with "Black Christopher," who's probably 20 years his junior. Christopher comes from a generation that expects things to be different, that wants to fight to make things different. You can see Leo's admiration and fear as he recognizes this. Leo has learned to live in and navigate a mostly white world, and Christopher has no interest in protecting that world. 

I made the mistake, when I was about two-thirds of the way through reading this, of googling the book, and I came across the New York Times review of the book, written by (pre-Godfather!) Mario Puzo in 1968. He did not like it. Puzo says, suggests Baldwin should stick to nonfiction. "It becomes clearer with each book he publishes that Baldwin's reputation is justified by his essays rather than his fiction," he says. I am deeply offended on behalf of Another Country, the book that sealed my love for Baldwin (and the novel he wrote before this one), and I thought Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone was truly beautiful.