Such a Fun Age, by Kiley Reid

I don't spend much time with children. I never have. I'm an only child, so there were no other children in my home. I babysat a little bit as a teenager, once for an actual baby, which I remember as awful, and several times for a brother and sister who were 2 and 4 years old, which mostly went ok. When I was home the summer after my freshman year in college I babysat an older kid — he was maybe 10 — and I remember that being ... fine? While I enjoy seeing my friends' children, the time I spend with them is minimal. I'll do it when circumstances demand, but I have never been a person who wants to hold a baby. I'm not afraid of dropping them or hurting them or anything. Children, small children in particular, have just never really interested me. Reading books about parenting, or in the case of Such a Fun Age, about caring for a child leave me feeling a little like an alien.* 

This wasn't the only element of the book that was hard for me to connect to. I had this sense (one I've had before when reading contemporary novels) that I was looking in on contemporary culture from a real remove. Both the protagonist and her boss (the mom) have these tight groups of girlfriends, something that feels to me, from observation — this is maybe going to sound a bit weird — to be a feature of modern life for people younger than me. I do have women friends and some active group texts, but the tight-knit groups described in this book feel like something I only know about from social media. (The mom in the book is 12 years or so younger than I am now, and the protagonist another 7 years younger than her.) Or maybe if I were a mother myself I would have a group of mom friends — who knows. 

To be fair to Such a Fun Age — which I actually found engaging, smart, and nuanced — it's about a lot more than the problematic white mom. What it's really about is the protagonist, Emira, finding her own agency. She's surrounded by people — some of them older, richer, white people — who think they know better than her what's best for her, and no one is really paying attention to what Emira wants for herself. She doesn't seem to know herself, so in the end she still ends up acting at someone else's direction, but in this case it's one of her girlfriends, who does have her best interests in mind, and isn't acting out of some white guilt/white savior complex. But I guess what I'm saying is that she really doesn't find her own agency.

*The irony is not lost on me that when I read Death and the Dervish — my favorite book from last year — I was like, "Wow, I can really relate to this 18th century Bosnian dervish who is having an existential crisis," but books about white women who are my contemporaries and from my own social class leave me feeling bemused. (This isn't uniformly true: see, for instance Outline.)

The Radetsky March, by Joseph Roth

Joseph Roth is someone I feel I should have heard of earlier. He was a contemporary and a friend of other writers whose work I admire. Perhaps I had heard of him in passing, but not in a way that stuck. It was Daša Drndić's EEG that brought him to my attention and, on finishing it, I promptly ordered two of his books: The Radetzky March, his most celebrated novel, and The Hotel Years: Wanderings in Europe Between the Wars, a collection of his short works. The title of the latter jumped out at me, with the description from In the Night of Time of all the stateless Eastern Europeans in Paris hotels still fresh in my mind. 

The Radetzky March is the story of three generations of men over the last several decades of the Habsburg Monarchy, living at the cusp of modernity. The grandfather of the story, the eldest Trotta, is the son of Slovenian peasants, but he saves the life of the young Franz Josef I at the Battle of Solferino in 1859. For this, he's rewarded with a title and finds himself the recipient of the Emperor's favor, a fortune that passes down to his son and grandson. (The Emperor lived a long life.) Each generation of Trottas is alien to the one before it. The eldest Trotta becomes disillusioned with the military life, and moves to his in-laws' country estate to farm. He doesn't imagine his son a farmer, but he also refuses a military life for him. The second Trotta is groomed by his father for a life in civil service, eventually becoming a district leader in Moravia, where he lives a life of strict routine. His own son, the youngest Trotta, he decides will have the military career that he was denied by his father. He's not cut out for it, but like his father before him, he doesn't dare to disobey his father. But where the second Trotta seems to accept the life his father dictated for him with equanimity, the youngest seems destined for misery and feels it. The latter two Trottas dominate the book after the death of the eldest, and they inhabit a world that is crumbling around them. The signs are everywhere, but the father is mostly oblivious to them, and the son is stationed at a garrison in the eastern reaches of the empire, where he drinks his life away. 

While the story arc is rather grim, The Radetzky March is filled with beautiful, funny, and clear observations of life at the end of an era. The rush into modernity and the looming Great War are palpable. The description of the night the news of Franz Ferdinand's assassination arrived in the remote Ukrainian outpost where the youngest Trotta was stationed was stunning. The regiment has organized a festival to celebrate its 99th anniversary. A raging summer storm moves events indoors. The bands play and the guests dance while a few senior military officers discuss the rumored assassination in another room. Immediately on receipt of the news, nationalist and ethnic divisions rise up between the officers of the same military. Word gets out and the bands play a requiem as guests keep dancing. I do this chapter no justice in describing it; it's just incredible.

While part of me wishes I had known about Joseph Roth earlier, I'm very glad to have found him now. 

Unforgiving Years, by Victor Serge

Unforgiving Years follows a Soviet spy of the first generation -- someone who was part of and believed in the revolution -- in the period leading up to and during World War II. We first meet Daria in Paris in 1937 where she has been tasked with bringing back D., a friend and comrade who is about to slip away to America. Her failure gets her sent to remote Kazakhstan for four years, and it's on the day of her departure from there that the book picks her up again. Germany has invaded Russia and she's brought in as a translator to gather information from captured German soldiers. The descriptions of life in Leningrad in winter during the war was bleak. I got cold reading it. When the book begins again for the third time, we are in Berlin in the last weeks before and leading up to the Allied arrival there. Daria is working undercover as a Latvian nurse committed to Nazi cause. This was the longest section and the hardest to follow. In the confusion of the war's end, Daria decides not to go back to Russia and with her last false passport and last money boards a Swedish ship bound for New York. She looks for D. in Brooklyn and then Virginia and finally finds him in Mexico where he's been living quietly on a coffee plantation for close to a decade. But Stalin's reach is wide.

It always interests me when I find echoes of things I've read recently in unrelated books. I suppose proximity is the key. Similar themes and ideas and concepts must come up across tons of books, and only when I read them in close proximity do I notice the unexpected resonance. So, in Unforgiving Years, I was surprised to find a passage that contained echoes of Outline. (I was less surprised to find passages that reminded me of In the Night of Time, which I am still in the midst of reading. These two books inhabit the same world for a brief period in 1937 Paris. D. from Unforgiving Years and Ignacio Abel from In the Night of Time could have left for New York on the same boat from France.) Anyway, Outline...

Daria is a good operative, but she keeps a journal:

A curious document, this journal, whose carefully chosen words sketched out only the outer shapes [OUTLINES, hm??] of people, events, and ideas: a poem constructed of gaps cut from the lived material, because -- since it could be seized -- it could not contain a single name, a single recognizable face, a single unmistakable strand of the past.... 

The construction of this featureless record, similar to a thought puzzle in three dimensions turned entirely toward some undefinable fourth dimension, had furnished her with an exhilarating occupation.

This journal comes up a few times over the course of the book and what it described reminded me so much of Outline, a book defined by what's absent from it. 

Outline, by Rachel Cusk (again)

To accommodate me with my other reading obligations, my book club decided to read a book I had already read as our next book. We were scheduled to meet 2 days after my Women In Translation book club, for which I read EEG and I also had In the Night of Time looming over me when we were discussing our selection. But when I finished EEG with a week to spare, I knew I was going to reread Outline. Actually, I knew it when we chose it that I'd reread it. I loved Outline and even when I was reading it I had the sense I wanted to go back to it. I read Transit and Kudos, and the urge to go back only grew as time passed. In October, I talked with someone who was reading Outline for the first time and I couldn't help gushing, even as I felt I had lost some of the sense of awe I had while reading it, and really only remembered fragments -- though only six months had passed. Now, at not quite eleven months since I read it the first time, I've read it again and I'm able to look at it with some remove, almost to look at it as someone else -- someone to whom it was not awe-inspiring -- might see it. I read the mixed to negative reviews on Goodreads. I read this article in The Guardian, in which the author ponders why Rachel Cusk annoys her so much (and goes on to add that "It is only in England she is pilloried. Elsewhere, she is respected – Paris Review is publishing Outline in extracts. And the Poles love her, too."). My feelings about the book are unchanged, but it's been interesting to attempt to understand what people who don't like it are reading in it.

On this second reading (and probably on the first reading too) I recognized that I identify strongly with some of the themes in the book. I think the way they're presented -- as a series of conversations with other people and about other people, there are stories within stories -- particularly drew me in. The narrator has a sequence of interactions, in which she appears nearly completely passive. Yes people tell or confess these intimate parts of their lives, and the meaning or moral is often ambiguous (or absent). 

When I got to page 105, the bottom corner of the page was turned up and I instinctively flattened it out. But then as I turned to the next page, I wondered if I'd creased it myself as a placeholder. This wouldn't be my usual style -- I'm partial to using small scraps of paper to bookmark key passages or the occasional pencilled in brace, but folding a page is very out of character for me. However, I was traveling when I read Outline and maybe pencils and scraps of paper weren't close at hand. I could just imagine myself turning up the page corner at the bottom of the page, where it would be least offensive. In fact that page did contain a line that really resonated with me. The narrator is relating a conversation, and she says, "I replied that I wasn't sure it was possible, in marriage, to know what you actually were from what you had become through the other person." I had read it and been struck by it after flattening the turned up corner, and still didn't make the connection right away. It was only when I got to the next page that I wondered, "Was that a particular something I wanted to note?" I turned the page back and read it once more, and then folded the corner in again to save it, though I still couldn't remember or even quite imagine myself folding up the page corner. This itself started to take on a quality of ambiguity that felt like a perfect reflection of the book. Later, I found a second and then a third turned up page corner, at which point I became sure this had been my own doing.

Cusk comes back to this idea of losing the self in a relationship toward the very end of Outline, the second time through the mouth of another character. The bulk of this book and the conversations and stories within in could be said to be about the changing nature of the self in relation to others. The narrator's last interlocutor is sort of a mirror of the narrator. The book covers the space of a week during which the narrator has come to Athens to teach writing. Just as she is leaving, another English writer, Anne, arrives to take over the apartment where the narrator has stayed and to teach for the following week. They overlap for a few hours in the apartment. Anne relates the recent upheaval that has taken place in her life, which included the dissolution of her marriage, and then she describes a conversation she had with her neighbor on the plane to Athens. This too is part of the mirroring -- the first chapter includes a long conversation the narrator has with her neighbor on her flight to Athens. Anne's neighbor was a polyglot diplomat, whose life and experiences were completely opposite to her own. The more they talked, the more she saw herself in contrast to her neighbor, 

This anti-description, for want of a better way of putting it, had made something clear to her by a reverse kind of exposition: while he talked she began to see herself as a shape, an outline with all the detail filled in around it while the shape itself remained blank. Yet this shape, even while its content remained unknown, gave her for the first time since the incident a sense of who she now was.

This excerpt could serve as a description of Outline and its narrator. We see very little into her life, but through the conversations she has with friends, strangers, and her students over the course of the book, we start to see an outline.

Seeing People Off, by Jana Beňová

I came upon Seeing People Off in a very roundabout way. Last month, I was reading Molly Young's newsletter, "Read Like the Wind" (I highly recommend this monthly newsletter! Scroll down to the newsletters under Vulture.) and she included a recommendation for a book called The Hare by Melanie Finn. In her review, she included this tidbit, "It is published by Two Dollar Radio, a small press out of Columbus, Ohio, which I think of as the Barry Bonds of small presses: They hit an astonishing number of home runs." I had never heard of the Two Dollar Radio, so I went over to their website to see what else they had to offer. I'm always keeping an eye out for authors from countries I haven't read, and I found they published two books by Jana Beňová, one of the most acclaimed writers from Slovakia. I've read a handful of Czech books (most published when it was part of the larger Czechoslovakia), but I'd never read a Slovak book. (Oddly enough, I've actually been to Slovakia, but I've never been to the Czech Republic.) So, in any case, I decided to order Seeing People Off  (and along with it I ordered Melanie Finn's book The Gloaming because at the time I was making these purchase The Hare had not yet been published, but I decided to try another book by the same author). 

Seeing People Off is a slim book -- 126 pages -- with little in the way of a plot, but it's quite entertaining. It follows four aimless young adults ("The Quartet" -- the book is subtitled, "A Manifest of the Quartet") in Bratislava as they drink too much and eat too little. Their social life centers on a cafe called the Hyena, where they spend much of their days. They take turns getting jobs, and the one who works provides a stipend for the others, who shop and write at the cafe and drink heavily. The book veers off here and there into surreal dream states, or brief glimpses into the past. 

Besides the cafe, the other main location in the novel is a large communist-era apartment complex in Petržalka, on the south side of the Danube from the historic center of Bratislava. This is where my having been there actually came in handy: I could picture it. In fact, I have taken pictures of it. Petržalka is on the far side of the bridge in the photo at right. Unsurprisingly, I never visited that part of the city when I was in Bratislava -- it's a dense residential area of large apartment blocks. According to Wikipedia, it's the most densely populated residential district in Central Europe, once known for its high crime rate. This remove from the city's historic center is another of the books themes: seeing the bridge, but never crossing it. One of the most hilarious moments in the book is when one member of the Quartet runs into an acquaintance in central Bratislava who tells her that he's being paid by the government to just walk around and hang out in Bratislava, to encourage tourism, to make it look as if Slovaks walk around and hang out in the old city. After this encounter, she looks around her and can't help wondering if everyone else is getting paid to live the life she's living.

It was a strange book, but I really enjoyed Seeing People Off. I wish I had read it -- or anything about Bratislava at all -- before I went there. I stopped there for a day and a night on my way from Vienna to Budapest, basically because it was right there and it felt like it would have been a shame not to. On arriving, I realized I didn't know the first thing about Bratislava. I had booked a place to stay, but beyond that hadn't really done any research. I also just hadn't really processed ahead of time that I would be going to a place where the language was completely foreign to me. I've studied 3 Romance languages plus German and Shona, and am used to fumbling by, even in languages I don't know, but I was completely unprepared for Slovak. That said, I'm glad I did go. As it happens, Bratislava is also the source of the banner image I use on this blog: It's a photo I took of a mosaic at the Bratislava train station.