All the Names, by José Saramago

I started All the Names in early March and read it for about 2 weeks before I had to stop and read some book club books and then decided to read other books for various reasons. Between setting it aside on March 14 and today, I probably read from it on 4 days. This is the third Saramago book I've read (the fourth I've attempted) and I've found them all slow going. The other two Saramago books I finished, I loved in the end. I can't quite say that's true of All the Names. As always with Saramago, the language is gorgeous. There's a sly humor that I love. But this book didn't affect me in quite the way the others have. 

All the Names follows Senhor José, a clerk at the Central Registry in an unnamed city. His workplace is where the records of all births, marriages, and deaths are held. The records of the dead enter what is essentially a bureaucratic black hole, a dark space in the rear of the office, which must continually be extended to accommodate the additional dead. Senhor José collects tidbits about certain famous people and in the course of his research, he chances on the record of an ordinary woman, who becomes an obsession for him. Her record serves as a revelation to him, showing how little the Central Registry actually "knows" about the people in its records. His desire to discover the real woman takes him out of the routine of his life and makes him do things he never would have considered previously.

The most moving part of the book for me was when Senhor José visits the Central Cemetery, a sort of sister bureaucracy to the Central Registry. Like the Registry, the Cemetery is continually expanding to accommodate the new dead, and yet remains largely unvisited by the living. In a miles-long walk through the cemetery, Senhor José walks through the history of humanity in his city. 

I wouldn't say that I didn't like All the Names, but the entire book felt like a metaphor for something that I wasn't quite able to grasp.

Senselessness, by Horacio Castellanos Moya

On the heels of rereading The Dream of My Return last week, I pulled out the copy of Senselessness I picked up at a used bookstore in San Francisco shortly after I read The Dream of My Return for the first time. I noticed too late – after buying it – that it was a heavily marked up copy. I hate reading books with writing and highlighting in them; I find it distracting. I kept intending to get a new copy, but held on to the marked up one in the interim. Today, I decided to read it despite the annotations. 

I'm glad I read Senselessness in close proximity to The Dream of My Return. In many ways, it's similar. It's a first-person narrative by a Salvadoran writer who has been forced to flee El Salvador after having written critically about the government. He's come to an unnamed country – probably Guatemala – on a 3-month contract to copy-edit an 1100-page report of testimonials to the atrocities perpetuated by that country's military against various indigenous populations. Day after day, he reads accounts of the most horrific scenes. In a notebook, he writes down the sentences and phrases from these accounts that he finds most affecting – and they are truly affecting. But they begin to haunt him. As a reader, we suspect he's going mad (as do many of his acquaintances in the book). He suffers from crippling paranoia – but is it paranoid? 

Returning to The Dream of My Return, by Horacio Castellanos Moya

My father was visiting last weekend and somehow we got to talking about Central America. I reminded my father about Eduardo Halfon, whose book The Polish Boxer I had loaned him after I read it a few years ago. Reading it, as well as his Monastery, made me curious to visit Guatemala. By contrast, the two books I've read by Horacio Castellanos Moya have left me with no urge to visit El Salvador. As my dad and I were conversing I started pulling books off my shelves. I tried to send him home with The She-Devil in the Mirror with the explanation that it might give him some sense of life in San Salvador, but he asked me to give it to him at a later date. And while I was there, I also pulled out The Dream of My Return, my favorite book from 2016.

I didn't have much to say about it when I wrote about it at the time, apart from that I loved it. I'm glad I went back to it. I saw more in it this time. It also provided an interesting contrast to The She-Devil in the Mirror: I saw parallels to it when rereading The Dream of My Return that I hadn't seen before. There's a similar unearthing of a complex truth through a series of what seem to be offhand remarks or remembrances. The book covers four weeks or so, during which the narrator starts seeing a doctor, who also practices homeopathy, acupuncture, and hypnotherapy. What the reader learns about the narrator – and what he learns about himself – takes almost the form of analysis. (In fact, he attributes his own state of mind to the hypnotherapy he's undergoing.) What at first reads as the (hilarious) addled rants and reckless behavior of an alcoholic takes on more depth as we learn of the trauma after trauma the narrator experienced in his youth in El Salvador in the period leading up to and during the civil war. These memories reemerge as he's on the verge of returning to El Salvador to start a new life, and is asking himself whether he's paving the way for his own death.

Red, White, and Royal Blue, by Casey McQuiston; Dog Symphony, by Sam Munson

Red, White, and Royal Blue showed up in my mail last Thursday. I had intended to go back to the Saramago book I started before The Memory Police when I finished the latter book, but thought I could use a fun break – and it was just that. The book exists in an alternate reality where a woman (not Clinton) won the 2016 election and the events of the book all take place in a completely unrecognizable 2020. It imagines a romance between the half-Mexican-American son of the sitting U.S. President and an English prince. The British royalty in the book exist in an even more altered reality, I suppose to avoid using any existing members of the royal family; so, while Obama was the last US president in this book, Queen Elizabeth has never existed. Instead, there is a Queen Mary, who's about Elizabeth's age; to be followed in line by a Princess Catherine, who married a film star; she, in turn has three adult children the youngest of whom is the love interest in the book. (He is the Prince of Wales despite being the youngest, a detail that confused me for a long time -- we meet him at his brother's wedding but the relative ages of the royal kids is not totally clear early on in the book, and I kept assuming as Prince of Wales he must be first in line for the throne, but no. I hardly consider myself to be informed on the Royals, and perhaps this wasn't so much an oversight as something else to clarify that these aren't the real Royals? Who knows.) There were all kinds of bits in this book that were just a little too far-fetched and I didn't particularly believe in the characters, but it was a quick enough and fun enough read to overlook all that for the most part. 

I think I've written before about how I wasn't much of a reader growing up, but perhaps what I haven't written about is the fact that I grew up surrounded by books. My father worked in bookstores when I was a small child, and when I was about seven he moved over to publishing. Our apartments were full of books. When I was little I remember stacks of books on the floor inside our bay window. Later, we moved into a bigger apartment and my dad built shelves that covered one full wall and went all the way up to our high ceilings. Most of our collection – at least what I remember – was art books and fiction. My mom had books of her own too. She was a French major in college, and she always had a small collection of French language books. In publishing, my dad worked in trade sales, so he visited bookstores constantly and attended Book Expo America (ABA back then) every year. The publisher my dad worked for was one of the larger independent houses, and he distributed a bunch of smaller independent publishers, among them New Directions. This is why a lot of the books we had around our house were New Directions publications. I think I believed, even as a child, that they were somehow different and important. Here I am as a tween, proudly wearing my New Directions t-shirt. (I wish I still had it! And I wish I could tell what cassette I'm holding too. Can you?) 

I was thinking about all this on Sunday,* when I went to the Little Free Library by my apartment to drop off Red, White, and Royal Blue and, while there, grabbed Sam Munson's Dog Symphony. I'd never heard of the book or its author. The little New Directions logo on the spine – an image that's been familiar to me my whole life – was enough of a selling point for me. I started it as soon as I got home (despite the fact the stack of other books I was ostensibly already reading). It's a slim book and I thought I would be done with it the following day, but events took an unexpected turn and I didn't read at all between Sunday and yesterday, so I finally finished Dog Symphony this evening. It's a very strange book, set in a post-epidemic Buenos Aires, a city haunted by packs of dogs roaming the streets each night. There's a sinister pseudo-police force; competing factions of humans, some of whom believe the dogs are the reincarnated dead; a belligerent narrator who gets progressively more bruised and beaten as the novel goes on; and an odd assortment of characters who are just trying to live normal lives in far from normal circumstances. The book was bizarre, short, and satisfying.

* Funnily enough, the day after I wrote the first part of this I heard John Darnielle being interviewed on All Of It. The conversation was partly about books and at one point Darnielle was talking about a New Directions book from the 1950s, where there was a list of other books published by New Directions. He said interspersed with familiar names like Sartre, were authors and books that were completely unfamiliar to him and then he said something like, "If it was good enough for New Directions in 1951, it's probably good enough for me." I'm not alone in trusting them implicitly.

The Memory Police, by Yoko Ogawa

Yoko Ogawa first came to my attention as someone whose books I might want to read a couple years ago and I picked up her book The Diving Pool, but I didn't get around to reading it right away. When The Memory Police was selected for my Women in Translation book club, it became the book that introduced me to her instead. 

The Memory Police is a haunting book. I enjoyed it, and yet I don't feel I have a lot to say about it. (Which, in itself, feels like a sort of reflection of the book.) The narrator is a novelist, living alone in the house she grew up in after the long-ago death of her parents. She lives on an unnamed island where things entire concepts and categories of things – disappear with some regularity. Most people move on and forget immediately; at the moment an item is disappeared, they are instantly cut off from it – they no longer relate to the item it once was. But a few people remember, and those people are the targets of the Memory Police. The narrator is a regular person, who forgets, but her mother remembered. This is perhaps what gives her added sympathy for the people who remember and leads to her decision to protect and hide her editor, another rememberer. It's hard, as a reader, to bear with her as she goes about complacently accepting each new disappearance; in this, we relate to the editor, who can't fathom the extent to which the loss is meaningless for those who don't remember. He tries and tries to re-stir memories in her. Now and then they do come back in the tiniest flickers. 

The book really does leave you wondering who is worse off: the narrator who forgets, and only feels a vague emptiness or deadening, or the editor, who remembers everything, but must live hidden away, forever outside the world for his own safety.