Milkman, by Anna Burns

I first heard of Milkman from my mother, who must have read it when it was pretty new. I remember her trying to explain it to me and it was a little hard to wrap my head around her description, but having now read it, I understand why. The description went something like, "It's about the troubles in Northern Ireland, and you don't know any of the characters' names, and there's a mysterious guy called 'Milkman' who everyone thinks is involved with the main character, but really she doesn't know him," which is completely accurate, but didn't give me much of a sense of the book. Though, my mother also said she thought I would like it, and she's usually good at knowing my taste in books, so it stuck with me in the back of my mind. Earlier this summer someone suggested we read it for our book club and I remembered my mom's recommendation, so I seconded the suggestion and eventually we selected it. 

I originally thought I was going to have to read it on my iPad -- I was able to get the ebook from the library -- but when I was in Ithaca a couple weeks ago browsing at bookshops (something that seemed so novel after all these months!), I saw a copy at The Odyssey Bookstore when I hadn't even thought to be looking for it, but I bought it on the spot and I'm so glad I did. I don't think I would have liked to read this as an ebook. The paragraphs are dense and long and I think that would have felt compounded on the screen. It took me two weeks to the day to finish Milkman, which somehow felt like an eternity. I had originally budgeted myself a week to read it ahead of our book club meeting, but thankfully others also found it slow going so we pushed it back a week and I finished in time. I don't know if it's that I've gotten used to finishing books in just a few days or if it's somehow compounded by being at home nearly all the time, but I don't think two weeks used to feel like a long time to be reading one book. There may have been a day or two where I didn't read it at all and there were definitely days where I only read 10-15 pages, but my pace did pick up for the last 100 pages or so. All this talk of how slow it felt is not to say I didn't enjoy it; quite the opposite. The narrator's voice is unique. I felt I could hear her and get inside her head. There was also something really beautiful that came through here and there: her latter years care for her young self. She was 18 years old, the middle of 10 or 11 children, living in the midst of this political and social situation that made her life and her options very narrow. You have the sense that she emerged from it into a wider world, and that the narrator is telling her young self: it's ok; you did ok; you could not have done differently.

One small reason I was interested in reading Milkman is that I had yet to read a book from Northern Ireland for my World Books Project -- I've read books from the Republic of Ireland and from the other 3 countries of the United Kingdom, so Northern Ireland seemed like a particular gap I needed to fill. And Milkman is very much about Northern Ireland. The political situation of Catholics in the North is not so much the backdrop for the events of the book as the milieu. Reading this book was pretty eye-opening for me. On the one hand, I did know things had been bad, but I guess I never quite internalized how bad. I visited Northern Ireland with my parents twice before the border opened; we had family friends in Belfast. The first time was in 1987 and we went by ferry I believe from Scotland, and I can't say I remember much about that crossing or visit. The second time was around Easter in 1989 or 1990 and we drove up from the Republic of Ireland and I will never forget that crossing. I was stretched out in the back seat of the car. As we stopped at the border, two soldiers were positioned on either side of our car, each pointing a gun at one of the four car windows. As we got to Belfast, there were bonfires burning all over. My mother tells me people were burning the pope in effigy. The city center was closed to traffic and there were checkpoints everywhere. It made a big impression, and yet somehow, perhaps because I was 13 and didn't comprehend the significance of what I saw (I had never had a gun pointed at me at a border crossing before, but then again neither had I crossed many borders), perhaps because I was just there a few days, I really didn't understand the scope of the Troubles. Milkman drove it home: the divided communities; the isolation; the mistrust; the dead or fled members of every family. 

How To Travel without Seeing, by Andrés Neuman

Reading How To Travel without Seeing at this moment -- when one can't travel at all -- was an interesting experience. I think I mentioned in my last post that I've been writing about travel in the absence of being able to travel. My project is almost the inverse of Neuman's in this book: what I've been recording are memories of travel, sometimes digging far into the past; this book is an in-the-moment record of Neuman's observations on a book tour (in two parts) through Latin America. 

The familiar and now absent (from my life at least) rhythm of airports, immigration, and travel pulses through this book, but that wasn't the only jarring aspect of reading this book. Neuman wrote this book in 2009, though it wasn't published in English until 2016. I would not have recalled, but 2009 was the year the world was on alert for swine flu. Particularly during the first legs of Neuman's journey, there was an odd ring of the present -- or of travel during those last weeks before the present. (I managed to take ten flights (and also to get off an eleventh after boarding, when the restrictions on European travel were announced in March) in the first few weeks of 2020, and I watched as the number of masks and the general tension at airports increased over that space of time.) Neuman crosses checkpoints where temperatures are taken, where health forms must be completed, where masks are worn. I think if I had read this a year ago, I would have found this surprising. What I found surprising reading it now was that I had missed it before. I did travel some in 2009, but I guess not to places where the swine flu was. 

In fact, my reaction to the book's treatment of swine flu was just one example of an experience I had again and again while reading How To Travel without Seeing. The year 2009 is not so long ago, but (undoubtedly with some exceptions I can't think of right now) I am hard pressed to name an event that happened in 2009. Ok: I know there was Obama's inauguration at the beginning of the year. In fact, it was rather an eventful year in my personal life, but larger global events -- aside from the Obama presidency, and all that goes along with it -- there's nothing I could swear happened in 2009, and not a year earlier, a year later. But this book, written as it was as a (more or less) pure reflection of the present in 2009, had all kinds of references to current events that struck me: was that in 2009? and was that also in 2009? Much of this was related to Latin American politics, which I can't say I've ever followed closely. So, at the time of the book's writing, Lula was president of Brazil and was an established popular leader in South America; Evo Morales was just completing his first term as president of Bolivia; Chávez was still alive and Nicolás Maduro was an ambassador of some sort (he comes up!); FARC was still active in Colombia, but things were changing fast there; and -- the event that was most notable in the book, in part because it coincided perfectly with the author's time in Latin America, as well as preventing his planned stop in Tegucigalpa -- the coup was taking place in Honduras, which unlike everything else I've mentioned, I don't even remember as an event.

As well as following local politics, Neuman makes a point to seek out local writers, and a good portion of the book is devoted to excerpted pieces or reflections he's had on reading poems, essays, and stories by authors from the countries he visited. Most were not writers with whom I was familiar, though of course the big names come up (again and again): Borges, Cortázar, Vargas Llosa, García Márquez, Bolaño. I was gratified to find Eduardo Halfon's writing come up when Neuman visited Guatemala (and slightly disappointed that Horacio Castellanos Moya's did not come up when he visited El Salvador). I looked up a couple of the writers whose names I didn't know and didn't find anything in English, though I'd like to do a more thorough investigation.

A couple chapters in, I was trying to figure out what this book reminded me of and I came to an unexpected conclusion: Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project. It's not just that it's similarly fragmented, though obviously that's part of it. It's definitely more of a personal piece, and also very rooted in the present. But the mixture of observations and fragments of other writing, the sense of a thesis behind it all, some thoughts just one sentence (e.g., "The sharp Paraguayan sigh."), it all had a feeling that reminded me of the Arcades Project. I can tell you the line where it hit me, from page 74: "Here the cars are like cable cars." (Though I can't tell you why that was the line where it hit me.)