Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio, by Amara Lakhous

I've had Class of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio for a few years now. I know I got it before the pandemic because I picked it up at my old favorite thrift store near the office, which I haven't visited since March 2020. It reading was this "Read Your Way through Rome" column that prompted me to finally get around to it, though I read that article a couple months ago – before I visited Rome in November – and I really only got around to it today because I wanted to get one last book in for 2022. It was short and I had read about it somewhat recently. 

I thought I was going to return to Vladimir and just get it done – something I'd been telling myself I'd do since I set it aside after 2 days of reading it voraciously in early April. I did go back and read one more chapter of it, but I couldn't do it. I feel that the intensity of my feelings actually say something positive about the book, so others shouldn't take this as a warning to stay away. I just... I knew where it was going and I couldn't go there.

So after that brief flirtation, and with a free afternoon ahead of me, I decided to find another book I could read in a few hours and feeling nostalgic for my recent trip to Rome and the Times article, I landed on Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio. The story takes place in the wake of the discovery of a body in titular elevator, and the police's assumption that the one resident of the building who is not accounted for – a man named Amedeo – must be the murderer. Each chapter is told from the point of view of one of the other tenants and others in the neighborhood, a mix of immigrants from abroad and Italians who have, for the most part, moved to Rome from other parts of the country. The residents mostly dislike each other, but it turns out that Amedeo is the one person they all have some affection for. They all have prejudices, but he seems to confound them. None believes he can be the murderer. Meanwhile, the murdered man is someone nobody likes. They're all glad to see him gone. These chapters are interspersed with recordings Amedeo himself has made recounting his own interactions with the residents. This was a fun book showing an Italian diversity that's not often represented.

So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighborhood, by Patrick Modiano

I moved a week ago today. I've been living without most of my books since early October when I boxed them up and moved them ahead of the big move. This morning I set up my bookshelves (three of them at least) and unpacked my 18 boxes of fiction. It's wonderful to be reunited with these books. I've spent the bulk of the last week unpacking and organizing, so after lunch I decided to give myself the afternoon off to read one of my newly close-at-hand books. For reasons I can't exactly articulate, or maybe just reasons I don't want to go into at the moment, Patrick Modiano was the clear choice. I had kept out another book of his – a trilogy, in fact, in a single volume – but I decided to pick a book I could read in one sitting. 

So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighborhood is just 150 pages, which was the primary reason I chose it. I hadn't realized it was a relatively recent book (2014) and I was caught off guard when a reference to a mobile phone showed up in the first paragraphs, but true to what I expected from Modiano, the heart of the book is in the past, in those early post War years in Paris. The narrator is an old man who is thrust back into memories of his childhood and early adulthood following an encounter with a pair of mysterious strangers. The book takes place in three distinct times: 1951 when the narrator was a young child; 15 years later when he is unexpectedly reconnected with that childhood year; and 2012 when it all comes back again. Modiano gets to the heart of memory and loss like nobody, and this book is an excellent example of that.

Martha, Jack & Shanco, by Caryl Lewis

It's been so long since I finished a book. I've started books; I've even made significant progress in books; but I haven't finished a book since early October. Goodreads thinks I'm "currently reading" six books, but there are at least a couple more that I've started and not recorded. The vast majority of my books have already been moved to my future home, where I will move myself in a week, but I have a small selection I kept here because I might want to read them and several have a bookmark to note where I abandoned my intentions. I do think my impending move is partly responsible for the fact that I haven't been a good reader these last several months. I've had a lot on my mind. But I also worry that I've lost the discipline I once had. We'll see as I get settled in my new place I guess.

Even in early October I was struggling to finish most of the books I started, but I was determined to read the (fortunately short) book selected for my Women in Translation book club. It's thanks to that book club that I've finished Martha, Jack & Shanco too. (Give me a deadline and a sense of obligation and I can accomplish anything,)

Martha, Jack & Shanco is the second Welsh novel I've read. Several years ago I read a Welsh novel called Mifanwy in a rush at the end of the year to get in one more country and one pre-20th Century book all in one go. Martha, Jack & Shanco is set in present day (or the present day of the book's original publication which was 2005), but the book's titular characters aren't living so differently than they might have a hundred years earlier. The three past middle age siblings live on a farm in rural Wales where they raise sheep, keep dairy cows, grow barley and hay, and speak Welsh. Jack, the oldest, is domineering and bitter; Shanco, the youngest, is intellectually disabled; and Martha takes care of them all. The book spans one year of their lives, measured by the seasonal changes on the farm and marked with the occasional incursion of the world outside. This was a dark but lovely book. 

Minor Detail, by Adania Shibli

Minor Detail had been on my radar since it was published in English. I originally made note of it as something to read for my world books reading project to represent Palestine, and I ordered a copy with that in mind. So, I was happy when my Women in Translation book club selected it as our next book to read. Having now read it, I'm also glad I will have a group of people to talk about it with, because it's a book I feel I need to talk about with people.

The narrative in Minor Detail is divided into roughly two parts, each taking up about half the book. The first part is written in the second person and describes the horrific actions of a group of soldiers in the Negev desert with the charge of clearing the area of Arabs capture over a few days in August 1949. The second half of the book is told in the first person in roughly present day. The narrator is a Palestinian woman living in the West Bank who reads a newspaper article about the actions of these soldiers and wants to learn more, specifically to understand the events from the point of view of their primary victim - a young girl. At great risk to herself, the narrator borrows a colleague's ID card that will allow her cross into Israel and another colleague gives her use of his credit card so she can rent a car, all so she can visit the scene of the crime. As she drives through the desert and among the settlements echoes from the first half of the book start showing up in the second. She briefly experiences a kind of freedom of movement that is novel in her life. 

This book was powerful, and extremely stressful to read. There is a deep tension in both halves. I was relieved that it was only 100 pages because I don't think I could have handled it for longer.

The Moon and the Bonfires, by Cesare Pavese

Cesare Pavese is a name I feel I've been familiar with for a long time, but I don't know why and I didn't really know who he was until I read Natalia Ginzburg's Family Lexicon, which is what led me to The Moon and the Bonfires. I feel like it took me forever to read, but in fact it was only two weeks. It's a slim book; I didn't read on more days than I did during those two weeks. I'm preparing to move, so I've had lots of other things to do around the house when I had a free moment and even when I did want to take a break, my mind was too busy to read something slow and contemplative, which The Moon and the Bonfires was. 

The book takes place on farms and in small villages in the Piedmontese region between Genoa and Turin. The present day of the book is a few years after the end of World War II, but much of the story is set in the past – when the narrator, who is 40 in the present, was a boy and a young man. In the early years of Fascism in Italy, the narrator left for America, where he traveled west to California and made a small fortune making liquor and wine before being interned during the war. We only get bits and pieces of the narrator's time in the U.S. – he's more interested in telling us about his childhood. He was a bastard taken in by a poor family of tenant farmers who wanted the monthly stipend given in return for his care. When that family moved on, he was given room and board in return for light labor on the estate of a wealthy family in the village. He spent his teenage years working for that family and the central story revolves around them: the three daughters, their suitors, the other workers in the household. It's unclear to the reader why the narrator has returned to this village after the war. It seems to be unclear to himself, and to his childhood friend, Nuto, with whom he reunites as well. You sense that he's trying to recapture that time before, but he has become different now from leaving. And the ones who stayed have become different too, from staying – through the war, the Fascist regime, the Partisan resistance, the German occupation. 

Unlike his narrator in The Moon and the Bonfires, Pavese did stay in Italy through the Mussolini era. He was an anti-fascist who, like Carlo Levi and Natalia Ginzburg, was arrested and sent to a village in the south of Italy (Calabria in Pavese's case) for a year of confinement. After his release he worked as an editor for a leftist newspaper and as a translator of English books. It felt strange to be reading this book at the moment when a neo-Fascist regime seems about to take hold in Italy. 

Rum Punch, by Elmore Leonard

After a strong start, by big plans for Women in Translation month blew up. I finished three books and had three more I intended to get to, but the first one I picked up – Death in Spring, by Mercè Rodoreda – just wasn't working for me and I stalled out. I've read three other books by Rodoreda and adored two of them, so I had picked that one on the assumption it would be a delight, but it's incredibly dark and quite different from the other books of hers I've read. I may go back to it yet, but it wasn't for me in the moment. 

I was still waffling on finishing it or starting something new when I headed to Philadelphia last Friday, and then on my way out the door I found a copy of Rum Punch on the free table in my lobby. I hadn't read anything by Elmore Leonard before, but I thought it might be just what I needed for the train trip ahead. Between my trip down, short spurts of reading in my dad's backyard, and my trip home, I got about two-thirds of the way through the book. Tuesday, I had a work trip to Connecticut that involved another several hours on the train and I thought I would finish the book, but when I tried to read on the ride home I found it too stressful – the events in the book were reaching their denouement and I found myself worried about how things would go. Being unfamiliar with Leonard, I didn't know: would he give me the ending I wanted, or would it all go wrong? I started to wonder if I would even finish the book before I had to leave for Texas tomorrow. But last night, after I finished work I found I was in a mental state where I could read. I sat down on the couch and finished Rum Punch in the space of an hour. It did give me what I hoped for, which I suppose was a relief. But I now have no idea what I'll read en route to Houston.

Not One Day, by Anne Garréta

I choose short books to read for Women in Translation month in the hope that I can get through more books than I do in the average month. So now, although it took me a week and a half to read Go, Went, Gone, we are at the mid-point in August and I've finished my third book. Not One Day is just under 100 pages, but it's not an especially fast read. I found myself rereading paragraphs regularly, even sometimes going back a page or two because I found my mind wandering. But then on the second, or sometimes third (one chapter, Y, required even more) reread, the force of what Garréta had written would finally hit and I would find myself awestruck, and then perhaps I would reread it once more to feel it again. 

But let me back up. Not One Day is a book (a memoir? a confession?) that states at the outset what it intends to do: Each day for one month, the author will write from memory about a woman she has desired, or who has desired her. She will spend five hours each day on one woman, making a full-time job of it. Garréta is a member of Oulipo who regularly writes with constraints, and these are the constraints she has laid out for herself for this book. Right away, however, you (the reader) realize that something is off. Opposite the dedication (TO NONE!!), there is a table of contents. At a glance, you can tell it's not 30 chapters long. And besides, there is simply the length of the book: could five hours a day for 30 days produce a scant 100 pages? The post script reveals all (well, some). Garréta bored of the project after a week, she became distracted, she procrastinated, she got caught up in reading Chateaubriand, sixteen months later she had 12 accounts of desire (one of which is a fiction), and those are what we find in the book, organized alphabetically after the the first initials of the women have been reshuffled according to some cypher. 

I wrote a little about my experience with Oulipo last year when I read Garréta's first book, Sphinx. The Oulipo books I was familiar with by reputation – A Void most notably – always seemed to have constraints that I believed would make the writing more difficult (both to compose and to read – how could a novel with no Es not be clunky? – let alone to translate). Sphinx and to a greater extent Not One Day – as well as my own writing practice – really changed my perspective on constraints. The constraints that Garréta sets out for herself for Not One Day are not so different from the conditions I've set for myself during my most productive periods of writing. (I only wish I could devote five hours in a day.) I regularly participate in the novelist Jami Attenberg's 1000 Words of Summer, a writing accountability project where participants strive and mutually encourage each other to write 1000 words a day for 2 weeks (or one week in the mini versions). The pomodoro technique is also a type of constraint that encourages productivity. (Personally, I find that word count goals work better for me than time goals.) When I did 1000 Words of Summer in 2020, the project I set up for myself was in one way quite similar to Garréta's constraints for Not One Day. Every day, I wrote 1000 words, relying solely on my memory (or such was the intention), about a place I had visited. In parts of Not One Day where Garréta talks about memory – about the limits and fallibility of memory, something I both struggled with and wanted to represent in my writing about places and travel. So, where I always imagined the constraints would make writing harder, I think they often do the opposite. The trick, of course, is – within the constraints – to make a book that's still interesting or beautiful or profound (or to throw away the constraints when they stop serving you). Not One Day does all of this.

Happiness, as Such, by Natalia Ginzburg

Continuing with Women in Translation Month, I read Natalia Ginzburg's Happiness, as Such, which I picked up after reading and loving her book Family Lexicon. Happiness, as Such is an epistolary novel about Michele (the Italian title is Caro Michele or Dear Michele, as many of the letters open), a young Italian emigré to England, and the family and friends he has left behind in Italy. While Michele is the character who ties the story together, he's actually a small part in the book and only a few of the letters that comprise it are from him. We barely know him. But the same could be said for several of his correspondents. Or perhaps it's that each knows a different Michele. 

Michele's mother writes long, complaining letters expressing her dissatisfaction with her home life, with his departure, with the way she is treated by her family and friends. Michele's ex-lover, mother to a baby who might be his, writes funny, occasionally bitter letters revealing her own ineptitude. His sister is called upon to handle his affairs in Italy and her correspondence with him is mostly practical. The person who seems likely to have been Michele's closest friend, as well as possibly his lover, who probably could have best represented Michele to us, we mostly get to know through the what the others write about him. Instead, the Michele we know is incomplete. He is more of an absence than a presence – because that's what he was to the people he left behind.

Go, Went, Gone, by Jenny Erpenbeck

After I read Jenny Erpenbeck's memoir, Not a Novel last year, I loved it and I knew I needed to read her fiction. Go, Went, Gone met my expectations. I went into it solely on the basis of how much I enjoyed the memoir not knowing at all what it was about*. I shouldn't have been surprised, but I was a little to find the extent to which the themes from the memoir were present in the novel. 

The central character in Go, Went, Gone is Richard, a recently retired widower professor of classical philology who grew up in East Berlin then went on to have a comfortable middle class life in unified Germany. For reasons that aren't quite clear, he becomes interested in the African refugees in Berlin and ends up befriending a group of them. His acquaintance with the refugees begins to alter (to broaden really) his worldview and give his life  – which seemed to be drifting toward purposelessness on his retirement – a new vitality. While the book addresses the tragic histories and frustrating realities of the refugees, it does so in a very quiet way. These stories – Richard's and the refugees'  – could have been told very differently. They could have been action rather than memory (a two-star review on Goodreads describes the prose as "communist grey") – but the way they were told worked for me. I loved the quiet, meditative feeling of this book.

*I realize I say something like this often in these posts. I prefer to read books knowing as little as possible about them ahead of time. I almost never read the plot summaries on the back covers of books. If I do, I try to just read the first sentence. Instead, I'll read the first page to get a sense of the writing. 

Oliver VII, by Antal Szerb

I read Antal Szerb's Journey by Moonlight in 2019 and declared it my favorite book I read that year. With it still very much on my mind early in the pandemic, I ordered a bunch of his other books and I read two of them in 2020. That left me with two novels, a book of short stories, and a book of essays yet to read. Last week, when I decided to start on one of the novels, I realized I had been saving them. Now, having finished Oliver VII, Szerb's last novel, I have only his first left, plus the essays and stories. Plus I'm sure I'll return to Journey by Moonlight and probably to The Third Tower too. Like both of those books (the first a novel, the second a memoir), Oliver VII takes place mainly in Italy – clearly Szerb had an affection for the country, and for Venice in particular. It was published in 1942, while war was well underway throughout Europe. The book takes place before the war when, as the reader is reminded several times by the otherwise distant third person narrator, things were quite different. 

The titular Oliver VII is the young king of a fictional country whose entire economy is based on sardines and wine (the flag, which I would love to see, is two gold sardines on a silver ground). Bored and wishing to escape his duties, while also saving his country from being sold to a financier who markets innovations*, he stages a coup and escapes to Venice, where he falls in with a group of swindlers. Through a series of unexpected events, Oliver ends up impersonating himself in what is intended to be a quick money-making scam, but turns into something else entirely. 

I find Szerb's story so heartbreaking, and the fact that his writing is so lively and funny somehow makes it more heartbreaking still. When I first opened Oliver VII and saw the full page author photo facing the title page, I was gripped with sadness. I said something similar when I wrote about The Queen's Necklace, but I wonder how it could be that Szerb spent the war years writing – and not just writing, but writing this. His world was ending, and I wish I could know what he was thinking.

* The day I started Oliver VII was also the day this much ridiculed twitter thread on Web3 was posted and of course I saw parallels. Szerb's financier would certainly be a crypto bro in 2022.

Saint Sebastian's Abyss, by Mark Haber

I have no idea where I heard of Saint Sebastian's Abyss, though I suspect it was probably via the author Matt Bell, who is thanked in the acknowledgements and appears to have done at least one event with Mark Haber when the book was released a couple months ago. I was undecided on what to read immediately after finishing Breasts and Eggs but I had just acquired a copy of Saint Sebastian's Abyss and it was appealingly short. (A short book appeals after finishing a long one, until I finish reading the short book in 24 hours and have to write about another book already. Maybe short books are better as breaks in the middle of long books.) 

Knowing nothing about Saint Sebastian's Abyss aside from what I assume was a recommendation from an author I admire but have never actually read (it's Matt Bell's newsletter, which I've mentioned before, that brought him to my attention, though I now own two of his books), I believe it was the figure of Saint Sebastian himself on the cover that was the real attraction for me. I enjoy saints and their iconography, and Saint Sebastian has long been a particular favorite of mine.  I probably have dozens of photos of Saint Sebastians I've encountered at museums. (I just tested Google Photos to see if it recognizes "Saint Sebastian" like it does "cat," for instance, and sadly it does not, but a quick search through a couple of my photo albums from Italy and Portugal yielded results.) My favorite Saint Sebastians are the ones who are shot through all over with arrows but seem not to suffer at all and I always take pictures of these when I find them.

The eponymous Saint Sebastian's Abyss, a painting by the fictional painter Count Hugo Beckenbauer, would not be one of these, I think, though despite discussing the painting at length, the figure of Saint Sebastian himself is hardly mentioned, if at all. We know that the background of the painting is an abyss; that a donkey stands perilously close to the precipice and that the reflection of a burning Jerusalem can be made out in reflection in the donkey's eye; that five apostles are also present. Saint Sebastian's Abyss chronicles the remnants of a friendship between two art critics, which was formed and destroyed over their mutual admiration for the painting. Over the course of a transatlantic flight, the narrator recounts his early discovery of the painting alongside a schoolmate called Schmidt. The pair built separate but intertwined careers writing about the painting and its creator (and to a lesser extent two other paintings by him, vastly inferior in the narrator and Schmidt's opinions, but his only other surviving works). The narrator's explanation for his and, in particular Schmidt's, strong – bombastic – opinions about art and the odd and repetitive way he has of relating facts and events make for a darkly comic portrait of their friendship.

Breasts and Eggs, by Mieko Kawakami

A couple months ago my mom told me she was reading a Japanese novel called Breasts and Eggs. I couldn't remember where, but I had heard of it before and then – voilà! – it turned out it was the next selection for my Women in Translation book club. Maybe I should invite my mom to our meeting. I picked up my copy at Collected Works in Santa Fe. It was a much bigger book than I had imagined. I usually give myself a week to read book club books, but given the pace of my reading recently and the fact that it was over 400 pages, I decided I should allow some extra time. So now here I am, finished a week before my book club meeting. 

I didn't know a single thing about Breasts and Eggs before I started it. I believe my mom described it as a little strange but good, but gave me no clue to what it was about. When I opened it, I had no idea what I was getting into. The first thing that struck me was the narrator's voice or tone. It felt casual and familiar. It felt, to me, un-Japanese. Early on in the book, when the narrator is describing her impoverished childhood outside Osaka, I kept thinking of the movie Shoplifters – a fantastic film about a family of grifters living on the margin, which exploded the Japan of my imagination. 

Breasts and Eggs is divided into two parts. In the first part, which was evidently published independently as a novella, Natsuko – the narrator – describes a short visit her sister and niece make to her apartment in Tokyo. Natsuko's sister, who is significantly older and works as a hostess in Osaka, is considering breast enlargement. In Natsuko's struggle to understand her sister's motivation, she also tells their whole life story. The second part picks up the same characters' stories about ten years later, when Natsuko, who has been single for her whole adult life, is contemplating having a baby via sperm donation – something that's not legal in Japan for single women. Between the first and second parts, Natsuko's circumstances have changed dramatically. In the first part, she is working a low wage job while struggling to be a writer. In the second part, she has published her first book, which achieved some success and is able to support herself comfortably as a writer. What the two parts have in common, besides their narrator, is an ongoing meditation on the body and the sense of remove or alienation that a person can feel toward their own body. 

I was somewhat ambivalent about the first part of the book, but I found the second part totally compelling. Much of the story, inasmuch as there is one, is moved along through long conversations Natsuko has with other people in her life: an editor, a fellow author, and old work friend, a man her own age who was conceived with donated sperm but only learned the truth as an adult, and a woman with a similar story to the man but a very different personal experience. In her investigation into sperm donation, Natsuko and her interlocutors consider at length the ethics of birthing a child, what it means to create a new human who never asked to be created, the selfishness of parents. This is something I've thought about a lot, but rarely discussed with anyone. It's true that when I was younger I thought I wanted children, but these days mostly I'm relieved to have never had any. Even when I did still want kids, what I don't think I ever had was a specific need or longing to birth children or to raise children who were genetically my own. What I loved about this book is that it explored all these complexities. More than once, it addresses the violence of bringing a baby into the world. If you are a person who has contemplated children and decided not to have them, this book can provide the affirmation you may crave. I honestly found myself feeling thankful that someone had articulated these thoughts. And yet, at the same time, the book can also affirm entirely the opposite decision: the choice to have a child in spite of it all. 

The Mysterious Affair at Styles, by Agatha Christie

I continue to struggle with my reading. I'm finding it hard to stick with books. Last week I started the next book for my Women in Translation book club, Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami. I am enjoying it, but when I got to the end of part one yesterday, I wanted to take a break and read something different. I had time: my book club meeting isn't for two weeks. I picked up this little edition of The Mysterious Affair at Styles with its beautiful cover art from a tiny free library in Poncha Springs, Colorado. My father and I pulled over there briefly and took a spin through town as a small break on our long drive from La Puebla, New Mexico to Manitou Springs, Colorado. 

I'm not sure I have an entire post's worth of things to say about The Mysterious Affair at Styles. It's Agatha Christie's first novel, but I don't know that I've read enough of her to compare it to her later works in any meaningful way. I've watched the entirety of the Poirot TV series, but I believe this is only the third Poirot book I've read (Murder on the Orient Express and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd being the others). Captain Hastings, a character familiar to me from the TV show, doesn't appear in either of the Poirot books I'd read, so this was my first introduction to him as the Poirot narrator. Christie is very clever in making the reader aware of Hastings' shortcomings as a detective even as he is the one telling us the story. I haven't read Arthur Conan Doyle, but I imagine Christie was inspired by his Dr. Watson's function as a narrator and the somewhat thick sidekick to a brilliant mind. 

I read The Mysterious Affair at Styles in the space of an afternoon and now I must decide if I go right back to Breasts and Eggs or start something new. Maybe short stories are the answer for this moment in my life.

The Dutch House, by Ann Patchett

I didn't know anything about The Dutch House when I decided to read it. A friend gave me her copy after she finished it several months ago. I was leaving for a weeklong trip to New Mexico and Colorado and looked at my shelves for something that I thought would make for good travel reading and somehow settled on this. I've read two other books by Ann Patchett: State of Wonder, which I enjoyed, and Truth and Beauty, which I didn't. I finished it yesterday afternoon, but I'm not entirely sure how I feel about The Dutch House. On one level, it satisfied what I was looking for: it was the kind of book I could read on the plane and on the back porch of our house in Angel Fire, New Mexico. I was about halfway through it when I got home on Monday and I read the second half before work, at lunch, after work, and after dinner yesterday. It captured my attention. But I also felt it was missing something. It seemed to hover on the brink of profundity but never quite get there. 

The book centers on a brother and sister whose mother abandons them as children. Their father remarries and their step-mother wants to be rid of them. Eventually she succeeds. They go from being rich to getting by. And then the son manages to get rich again. There's more to it than that, of course, but I honestly couldn't believe this book was asking me to feel sympathy for a young man (the brother, who is the narrator) who despite a troubled home life for a few years of his adolescence, goes on to make a killing in New York real estate while he's completing med school. Or perhaps I wasn't meant to feel too much sympathy for him; perhaps the book is about something else. 

Rattlebone, by Maxine Clair

I've kept up my subscription to McNally Editions, so now I have nine of the books but I've only just gotten around to reading a second one. Rattlebone arrived, along with two other books, in late June just before I was heading to Arizona for my first work trip since March of 2020. After reading the first paragraph, I chose it from among the three to take with me on my trip. Of course, I didn't read at all while I was away, but I started it a few days after I got home and finished it this afternoon. 

Rattlebone is an interconnected set of stories set in a Black neighborhood of mid-20th-century Kansas City, Kansas. The setting was part of the attraction for me: my mother grew up in the Kansas suburbs of Kansas City at around this time (she's a bit more than a decade younger than Maxine Clair), and it's a place I made regular visits to in my childhood. However, the Black history of Kansas City is largely unknown to me. It was not until 2011, on a road trip to Kansas I took with my dad, that I first visited the part of Kansas City, Missouri that's home to the Negro League Hall of Fame, the Jazz Museum, and Arthur Bryant's BBQ. Kansas City, Kansas was a place I was familiar with only as a distinction from the other Kansas City and a couple exits off the highway. And yet Rattlebone was full of familiar place names. 

The way Rattlebone is organized is a little confusing. At first I thought it was a novel – the first couple stories have the same narrator (Irene Wilson, who is definitely the central character of the book, though there are a few stories in which she doesn't feature at all) and seemed to continue one into the next. And then suddenly there was a different voice for one story, and things seemed to jump around in time bit. The final product takes the form of sort of excerpts from lives in the neighborhood. In the main, the book documents Irene's coming of age in a segregated school in a segregated city, but hovering around that center are the changes underway in the wider world. The book captures this very precise moment in time as we know it is about to end.

Tremor of Intent, by Anthony Burgess

Sometimes I underestimate my younger self. I think back to myself at age 23 and all I can think is how little I knew, how young I was, how underdeveloped as an adult. When I was 23, on the other hand, I believe I thought myself mature for my age. Maybe both things can be true. I first read Tremor of Intent at age 23 – in the fall of 1999, a window of time that has always, in retrospect, felt specific and significant to my early adulthood. 

I lived in Philadelphia for roughly the calendar year of 1999 and I always say I can remember the things that happened in 1999 with more specificity because if they happened while I lived in Philly, it must have been 1999. I remember the movies of 1999 because I saw them in Philly theaters: Eyes Wide Shut, The Thin Red Line, Magnolia, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Cruel Intentions, American Beauty, Go, Shakespeare in Love (which I have actually never seen, but my father and boyfriend went to see it in Philly while I was at work one evening).

Most of the books I read in 1999 were for school, and I remember some of those well too. I took my first college English class – a course called "The Twentieth Century" (a course name that seemed more profound in the final year of that century), in which I read a mix of poetry, short and long fiction, and theory. T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Hemingway, Alfred Jarry, Samuel Beckett, Zora Neale Hurston, Norman Mailer, David Foster Wallace, and Salman Rushdie. That was in the spring semester. In the fall semester my course load was in German and Linguistics. Also in the fall semester, things changed a lot for me, personally: my boyfriend who had been living with me in Philly moved to Boston to go back to school himself. I found myself alone in a city I didn't know very well. I also found myself taking frequent trips to Boston or to meet my boyfriend (who soon became my fiancé) halfway in New York. And so, even though I was still in school and also working, I had some time to read for pleasure. 

I think Tremor of Intent must have been the second Anthony Burgess book I read. A few years earlier, I had read his first book, The Long Day Wanes, which took me forever to finish, but I liked in the long run. I have no idea why I decided to start with that one. I think I may have started Napoleon Symphony sometime after that, but I'm pretty sure I never finished it, and I'm almost sure I started The Doctor is Sick in 1998, but also didn't finish that. After Tremor of Intent I read The Right to An Answer and perhaps Honey for the Bees, but I never liked anything as well as Tremor of Intent or The Long Day Wanes. I was very determined to read Anthony Burgess it seems (but not A Clockwork Orange, which I still haven't read). In any case, in the fall of 1999 I read – and loved – Tremor of Intent. Over the years, I've continued to remember it fondly, while the plot faded to the barest outline in my memory. I've given it as a gift at least once, I believe more than once.  

The decision to reread Tremor of Intent was partly to see if it held up, and partly to see if my 23-year-old self did. I'd say both of us came out mostly okay. What I remembered about Tremor of Intent was that it was a hilarious and suspenseful spy novel set on a cruise. I think I found it less funny this time. There were some troubling bits I didn't remember being troubled by before: the general condoning of a sexual relationship between a teen girl and the middle-aged protagonist, the perhaps too light treatment of actual pedophilia in another character, some uncomfortable stereotypes. It also had some wonderful bits that I didn't remember from before: mainly the incredible descriptions of the food served on the cruise (which was a gastronomic trip, a fact I hadn't remembered). Then there was the pleasure of reading again what I did remember in a general sense, but not in the specific – what must have made me love the book the first time around: Anthony Burgess' incredible facility with language, the wordplay, the double (and more, I'm sure) meanings. And this is where I get back to where I started this post. Reading Tremor of Intent now I found myself wondering, Did I really get this when I was 23? How much of it went over my head? Does it matter if it did, when I still loved it? I don't have answers for any of these questions. Myself at 23 – half my life ago – is hardly a person I remember anymore. 

The Trees, by Percival Everett

It is a rare writer who could write a comic novel about the history of lynching in America, but Percival Everett has done it. 

To be fair, some parts of The Trees are not comic. The underlying message of the book is that we should remember those who were killed by white supremacy. That we should remember that the history of lynching is American history, and that it represents a massacre spread out over years. This book is an act of remembering. 

About two thirds of the way in there is a chapter that goes on for several pages and consists almost entirely of a list of names. Early on, I found myself wondering, Were these actual people? They can't be. They must be. Emmet Till's name shows up on the 7th page, but even then I wasn't really sure. The first name I recognized after that was Matthew Shepard, and I can't even say that's when I was sure. It was on the page after that where suddenly there were so many names I recognized, starting with Ramarley Graham. I assume the list is chronological or approximately so, but even in the last couple pages there will still many names I'd never heard. It's powerful. (Incredibly, I didn't notice until after finishing the book that this list of names is right there on the cover.)

Of course the list brought me back to two books I've talked about together before: 2666 with its list of murdered women in Mexico and The Gospel According to Jesus Christ with its list of martyrs. I felt sure I had seen this done somewhere else more recently, but I'm not sure where. Perhaps I'm thinking of EEG, which I described when I read it as "a catalogue of under-reported atrocities," and which, like The Trees, is very much a command to remember.

To return to the comic part of the novel: maybe we need humor in the face of trauma. This book certainly offers it. There is a dark comedy to the whole story, but there are also individual lines that are laugh-out-loud funny. (Maybe you had to be there, but the appearance for one page of a "Detective Wesley Snipes, no relation and White" had me screaming laughing. He could have had any name. He's never mentioned again.) To quote Lynn Steger Strong, the judge who selected The Trees as the winner in the first round of the 2022 Tournament of Books, "There’s so much sad and shitty in the world; so many books are so earnestly enmeshed in their own certainty and self-seriousness. The winner is The Trees, because in addition to all its many other accomplishments, it also made me laugh."

The Kiss Quotient, by Helen Hoang, and Lucky Breaks, by Yevgenia Belorusets

I've been in a reading slump for a couple months now. I've started some books I really wanted to read but have found it hard to stick with them. May was a really busy month for me at work and outside of it, and I just didn't feel like reading much. To close out the month, I added a couple days to my Memorial Day weekend and planned a trip to Montreal. I packed two books to take with me: Hamnet, which falls into the above mentioned category of books I really wanted to read but haven't stuck with; and Lucky Breaks, the next selection for my Women in Translation book club, which I had to finish by today.

Events took an unexpected turn last Saturday: my early morning flight was overbooked and I decided to volunteer (in exchange for rather a lot of money) to delay my departure by 12 hours. I could have gone home. I could have gone out and done something in Queens. Instead, exhausted, I checked into the Delta Sky Club and spent the entire day there. I read a few chapters of Hamnet, did some crosswords on my phone, ate the free snacks, and then somewhere in the early afternoon a friend texted me to say he was tearing through The Trees by Percival Everett and to remind me of the existence of e-books that can be checked out of the library. I promptly downloaded the SimplyE app and after first checking out Trust by Hernan Diaz, I realized I would need a different kind of book if my intention was to read on my phone for several hours at the Delta Sky Club. I remembered having heard good things about Helen Hoang's The Kiss Quotient when it came out a couple years ago and found it was available. I read two-thirds of it there at the airport, until the news came in that my replacement flight was delayed until the following morning. Then I went back home, set my alarm for 5am, and did it all over again. I read some more on my flight – though not much, since it's only an hour – and I finished reading  about an hour after checking into my B&B not quite 24 hours after I had expected to arrive there. I wouldn't say I loved The Kiss Quotient, a romance novel about a professionally successful and very rich woman with autism who hires a male escort to learn about sex and relationships, but it was exactly the right book for the circumstances. 

Unsurprisingly, I got no reading done during my actual vacation but on my flight home, I knew I had to start Lucky Breaks if I was going to finish it in time for my book club. It's a very short book – just about 100 pages – made up of several very short chapters/stories. The book seems to sit somewhere on the edge of fiction and non. Most of the stories recount the almost invisible narrator's encounters with women in various parts of Ukraine. Our book club decided to read a Ukrainian book because of current events, but I must say reading it with everything that's in the news was a strange sensation. Much of the book deals with the aftermath of the 2014 Russian incursion into Crimea and the Donbas region, including stories of women who live in those regions and those who have been displaced from them. Obviously, the book predates the current war, but it came out just as it was starting and reading it one feels the war was really no surprise at all. 

It is with good reason that people are criticized for writing about global events in a way that makes them "about me," but I think to do so is also the most natural thing in the world. So, I hope you will indulge me for a moment. For most of my young life, Ukraine wasn't a place I was independently aware of. I knew it as a region of the Soviet Union, I'd heard of Kyiv (though spelled Kiev and mostly just its eponymous preparation of chicken). When the Soviet Union broke apart, I can't say I was ever particularly aware of Ukraine as an independent nation. (The Baltic states are the ones I really remember becoming independent, and while I was certainly more aware of Ukraine as a place than, say, the Central Asian SSRs, it wasn't a place I knew much about at all.) I can place the moment when Ukraine gained some sort of distinction in my mind. Around 2002, I took a literature class with Svetlana Boym. One of the readings for the class was Chekhov's The Lady with the Dog, which takes place in Yalta. Professor Boym had a home in Yalta and the way she talked about it—well, I've wanted to go there ever since. When Russia invaded Crimea in 2014, I'll admit I was selfishly disappointed as well as being appalled generally. Something similar happened with the war this year. While Yalta still seemed out of bounds, I had started thinking about visiting Ukraine in the last couple years – inspired by some combination of things: some friends I made from Kamianets-Podilskyi several years back; Olia Hercules' cookbook, Summer Kitchens; reading about Joseph Roth's childhood outside Lviv; and most immediately this article by Rosa Lyster from the September 2021 NY Times Magazine "Voyages" issue. How could I know that war was right around the corner? And yet now, as I read Lucky Breaks, I realize I could have known. Maybe not specifically, but it wouldn't have come as such a shock of dissonance.

Persuasion, by Jane Austen

I know I've mentioned this before, but aside from Pride & Prejudice, which I first read in 2004, I read all of Jane Austen's novels back to back in the space of a few weeks in the winter of 2005-2006. I enjoyed each one so much that I always wanted to keep going, but in retrospect, this was not a good way to go about it. The books blended together and didn't get the individual attention they deserved. I read Persuasion at the end of this streak and as the years passed I found it to be the one I least remembered, except maybe Lady Susan (which I read second from last). It may be that my memory fails most of them, because I have in the years between 2006 and today watched and rewatched several adaptations – mainly Pride and Prejudice, Emma, and Sense and Sensibility. Those stories and characters are all so intimately familiar to me now from the movies and miniseries, and eventually from having reread the first two more recently. I don't believe I've ever seen an adaptation of Northanger Abbey, but I think it's the book I remember most distinctly from that spree. I have bits of memories of Mansfield Park too. But Persuasion was a total blank. Apparently when I went back in 2009 and retroactively added and rated every book I'd read in Goodreads, I either didn't remember Persuasion at all, or remembered not liking it, because I gave it only 2 stars. I think by the time I got to it, I was done with Jane Austen.* I should have taken a breather. 

I've been intending to get back to Persuasion for years after seeing some people whose tastes I trust rank is as a favorite by Austen. I would see it mentioned admiringly, or see references to its characters, and strain and fail to remember a single thing about it. Clearly it deserved a reread. I won't list it as my new favorite Jane Austen book or anything, but I'm prepared to say I was very unfair to it the first time around. Perhaps I found Anne dull on my earlier reading? I still did; being about the only reasonable, level-headed character in the story makes her sympathetic, but not very interesting. But this time I enjoyed the story; I enjoyed portrayals of the unreasonable non-level-headed characters; I enjoyed the scenery. 

And while the story itself felt novel (because I remembered nothing of it), the book felt familiar because I'm so much more familiar with Jane Austen now than I was when I first read it. A few weeks ago I watched the recent Andrew Davies adaptation of Sanditon on Masterpiece. Davies is also responsible for the 1996 BBC Pride and Prejudice, and watching Sanditon I noticed him borrowing from himself. (I've seen that Pride and Prejudice enough times that every line is familiar.) What I noticed in reading Persuasion was that Jane Austen also borrows from herself. I saw reflections of so many of her other works in this one. 

* I used to have a rule, which I clearly broke for Jane Austen, about not reading books by the same author back to back. I created this rule some 25 years ago when, immediately after reading Beloved I started Sula and found it unreadable. A couple years later I went back and read Sula and loved it. I decided it was a mistake to immediately pick up another book by the author of a book you read and loved, because what you would really be looking for was a continuation of the earlier book. (Obviously, this rule didn't apply to sequels and series that were in fact continuations of the earlier books.)

Justine, by Iben Mondrup

I grabbed Justine out of the Little Free Library on my way to the airport a week ago Friday, even though I already had two books with me for the 3 night trip ahead. I'd never heard of it or its author; it was the publisher that caught my eye: Open Letter. They publish only books in translation, including some by authors I love (Mercè Rodoreda, most notably). I started reading it poolside at my hotel in Austin, but didn't get very far. It's not exactly poolside material, plus I didn't get enough sleep any of the nights I was away, so my reading energy was limited. When I took my seat for my flight home, I pulled it out to and put it in the seat pocked in front of me to potentially read en route, although I was still overtired. I was seated next to a flight attendant who must have recognized Iben Mondrup as a Danish name because she asked me about it. It turned out she was married to a Dane and spoke Danish. I told her what I wrote above: that I didn't know anything about the book or author, but had chosen it because of the publisher. This was a novel concept to her and she went on to look for other Open Letter books in her library app and asked me about other publishers I would recommend. In the moment, I could only think of New Directions, but I also recommended The Copenhagen Trilogy to her, which she immediately went and put on hold at the library. (I did warn her that it was a bit dark. Not as dark, it turns out, as Justine.)

Justine centers on a young woman artist (the eponymous Justine) who, as the book opens, has just lost her home – and with it all her work – to a fire. The home had belonged to her grandfather, a painter, and his work was also destroyed. For Justine, the fire represents the loss of her whole past – and then some. The story unfolds disjointedly, jumping in time to before the fire and back to the present. When the fire occurred, Justine was a short time away from staging an exhibit of her work at the National Gallery, and she has lost everything she prepared for it. So she must create a body of work to show (backing out isn't an option she's willing to consider), with no home, no studio, and no materials. She proceeds to get very drunk, frequently. She crashes at friends' houses, in a factory, in studios, borrows materials, charms and alienates the people around her who want to help. Even as Justine puts together a body of photographs and videos that will be her triumph, the reader is slowly made aware of a horrible, dark secret, the full effect of which is never seen in this book. (There is, evidently, a sequel.) 

I subscribe to Matt Bell's Writing Exercises (which I highly recommend to anyone who is at all interested in writing). This month's newsletter (The Novel-Shaped Story II) has stayed very much on my mind for some reason. Since reading it, I've found myself mentally applying the three-act framework retroactively to all kinds of books I've read, and it's been an eye-opening exercise. In Justine the inciting incident – the fire – is the first thing we know. It's happens before any exposition, and description of the characters, anything else in the book. And yet, even in that moment, there are clues to what we will later learn, and deceptions as well. The unclarity around time in the narrative slows the reader's comprehension of the central event of the book, even as it's there for us right on the first page. I didn't totally love this book, but its exposition is brilliant.

Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows, Balli Kaur Jaswal

The last month has been a lot. Work has been busy and I haven't had much mental energy outside of it. After finishing Loving Day, I started a long book I'd been intending to read for quite a while, but reading it was rarely what I wanted to do at the end of the day or in the morning. Instead, I watched Sanditon and Bridgerton and played Spelling Bee on my phone. And then I had some weekends away, so I did less reading then than I might have. Last Wednesday, after finishing a full rewatch of both seasons of Bridgerton, I decided maybe I should just start a new book. I mention Bridgerton only because I think it influenced my selection – I wanted to read something romantic. I didn't know much about Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows but the title at least suggested it might fit the bill. I picked it up a few years ago thinking it might represent Singapore in my world books project, because the author lives there, however the book is entirely about the Sikh community in London so I'm not sure that's fair. (Then again, my New Zealand book was entirely about a winemaker in nineteenth century France, so maybe it's ok? Or maybe I have to read a new book from New Zealand too.) In any case, I started Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows on Wednesday and finished it on a plane on Friday.  

At the center of the book is Nikki, a second generation Punjabi Londoner in her early 20s who signs up to teach what she believes will be a creative writing class for Sikh women. It turns out what was expected was a literacy class, but what the class in fact turns into is an erotic story-telling class filled with mostly older, widowed women, who most of society treats as invisible. Expected antics ensue, the women gain mutual respect, an unsolved murder is solved, and of course there is a love story for Nikki. This was a fun read that turned out to be just what I was looking for at the moment. 

On Film Adaptations and Atonement

A mistake I am known to make is rushing to read a book before the movie comes out. I say this is a mistake, because inevitably what ends up happening is the book is then too fresh in my mind when I see the movie, and all I can see are the differences. I know this is something that's happened to me several times, but the example I remember most clearly is Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. The beginning or very nearly the beginning of the movie is set somewhere toward the middle of the events in the book and features a character whom, in the book, we believe – at that point in time – may be dead. This infuriated me on first watching the film, on Christmas Day of 2011, five months after finishing the book. I've since watched the movie several more times. The book has grown more and more distant in my memory, and the movie I quite like. I almost never do it on purpose, but I honestly think the better order of things is to watch a movie before reading the book it was adapted from. You will almost always get more out of the book, so it's unlikely to disappoint. 

Last night, I watched the 2007 film Atonement, based on the Ian McEwan novel, which I read in 2003. In cases like this, when that much time has passed (or even half as much), between my reading of a book and the release of a movie, I find myself thinking I should re-read the book so it's fresh in my memory. I think I'm afraid seeing the movie will cancel out the book in my mind. But my experience watching Atonement suggests something else. 

I really liked the book Atonement when I read it. I went on to read three other Ian McEwan books on the strength of my feelings about Atonement, none of which I liked as well. Nearly 20 years on, I remembered very little. I wasn't particularly interested in the movie when it came out. I remember being aware that it came out, but I don't remember hearing much about it. I imagine I thought it couldn't stand up to the book. It was only much more recently that I heard anything at all about the movie that made me curious. Specifically, it was something about the green dress Keira Knightly wears in the film. I'm not sure if it was this article or another, but I remember being surprised to learn the film featured any costume that was now considered iconic, given how little I'd heard about it at the time. Anyway, I can't say I thought about it much again until I was scrolling on HBO last night, saw that it was streaming, and rather impulsively decided to watch it. I really enjoyed it. I felt like I remembered just enough of the story – or perhaps more accurately that I'd forgotten just enough of the story. 

I see on Goodreads I only gave Atonement 4 stars, but I suspect if I had rated it at the time I read it I would have given it 5. (In 2009, I went back and retroactively added and rated every book I'd read as far back as I kept records, so all ratings for books I read before 2009 are based on how much I remembered liking them in 2009.) I think my high opinion of the book faded a bit as acclaim for it grew. The other thing I see when I look up Atonement on Goodreads is a review by my ex-husband, written in 2007 – a year after we split up – though I am nearly certain he actually read the book while we were together. That this review exists is a surprise to me. I can only imagine that he meant to offend (maybe just to kid – maybe I'm thinking too badly of him) when he, apparently, suggested that Harry Potter fans would enjoy it. In any case, his middling opinion undoubtedly negatively affected my own feelings about the book (an unfortunate theme in our relationship). In any case, seeing the movie actually reminded me how much I once liked the book. Maybe I should watch more movies of books I read decades ago. 

Loving Day, by Mat Johnson

Mat Johnson is a writer I know of because of Twitter. I've followed him there for years, though I can't remember how I initially found my way to him. Several years ago, I found a copy of his book Pym at the thrift shop I used to frequent on my lunch break back when I worked in Murray Hill. I didn't buy it, a decision I found myself soon after when I read (again, I have no idea where, though likely also on Twitter) something that made me curious to read it. It has stayed in the back of my mind. Last year, when I was visiting the Bay Area over Thanksgiving, I found Loving Day at a San Francisco thrift shop and I saw it as an opportunity to correct my mistake. I came very close to starting it that week. I think I had in mind that if I finished it while I was there, I could leave it behind with the friend I was visiting, who is biracial. Knowing nothing about it besides the title, I thought it might be of particular interest to her (and indeed, while I was reading it, I thought that several times again). I'm having a hard time remembering any off the top of my head, though I'm sure I've read other books that center mixed race characters. But Loving Day is surely the only book I've read that is specifically about being mixed race. What's odd is that this is so remarkable. Loving Day is about a biracial man, recently divorced, who moves back home to Philadelphia where he discovers he has a teenaged daughter, whom he was previously unaware of. His daughter, the product of a relationship he had as a teenager with a Jewish girl, has been raised as a white Jew, though we eventually learn she had suspicions that she was part Black. This was a funny and sweet book.

Home Reading Service, by Fabio Morábito

Last Friday evening, I started Vladimir by Julia May Jonas, a book I found recently in the Little Free Library near my apartment. (At the same time, I also found a copy of Lolita, which I read some 25 years ago and grabbed anyway because I own nearly every other book by Nabokov and I figured I should round out my collection. I wondered if the two books may have been left there by the same person, at the same time.) I found myself really enjoying it. I was drawn in by the narrator's voice, by a familiar self-loathing heterosexuality and disgust with the physical body. Over the next couple days, I read 150 pages and then on Sunday around 5pm I had to stop reading abruptly as I saw what was about to come (which should have been quite clear to me from the beginning, and yet hadn't stopped me then). Around 2am that night, I woke up feeling anxious about the book and fretted about it for an hour or so before I could fall asleep again. Monday morning, I stared at it on my coffee table. I was only about 80 pages from finishing it, but I couldn't face it. 

Instead I picked up another book from my coffee table, which I had found in that same Little Free Library just two days earlier: Home Reading Service by Fabio Morábito. I didn't know anything about this book or its author before I found it. It seems not much has been translated into English, but this book was the recipient of Mexico's 2018 Premio Xavier Villarrutia and was released in English* last year. Set in Cuernavaca, the book is narrated by Eduardo who — in the wake of a never-described driving accident — has been mandated to perform community service. A priest friend of his sister's arranges for him to do this in the form of serving as a reader in the homes of the old and infirm. He has five clients: a pair of elderly brothers, a retired military man, a deaf family who read lips, a partly paralyzed aspiring opera singer, and a couple who appear to be in perfect health and of means, so that he has no idea why they've been offered his services. The book follows a trail of funny, unexpected events, intrigues, and tragedies among these characters and others in his life as Eduardo comes to terms with himself. This was a really fun read.

* Here's a fun interview with the book's translator. 

Garden by the Sea, by Mercè Rodoreda

Garden by the Sea is the third book I've read by Mercè Rodoreda. I read A Broken Mirror in 2018, which is unfortunately a year I took off from writing about the books I read. I say "unfortunately" because today I find it hard to remember much about it. I have images in my mind (it must have been a very visual book!) of the house in Barcelona where the story takes place, the garden with its fountain, the wall outside the house, the foyer, the staircase, the bedrooms; images of a jeweler's shop, a brooch, a carriage, a street. I do remember bits of the story, but more I remember the general mood: aching, melancholic, nostalgic. I loved it. I named it one of my favorite books I read that year. 

About a year later, I read Rodoreda's most famous book, The Time of the Doves. I have a lot of lingering mental images from this book too— most distinctly, a room on the top of a building filled with pigeons— and the memory of a mood: poverty, privation, war in the distance. But I didn't love The Time of the Doves the way I did A Broken Mirror. I found the story sometimes hard to follow and the narrative style — sort of stream of consciousness — a bit disengaging. Most of all, there was something about the relationship between the narrator and her husband that never quite clicked for me. I couldn't understand why she loved him, why she put up with him, why she let him fill that room at the top of their house with pigeons! It never felt like he loved her in return. And, I mean, I know such relationships exist; I was just unconvinced by this one. 

So I guess you could say that going into Garden by the Sea, I was hopeful that I would find another A Broken Mirror and a little wary that I might find instead another The Time of the Doves. I'm pleased to report it was the former. I knew within just a few pages that I would love this book. Garden by the Sea is narrated by the aging gardener at the seaside estate that serves as the summer home for a wealthy young couple from Barcelona. The reader develops an affection for the gardener and we do learn a little about his story and quite a lot about his lifestyle, but the main story he tells us is of a love triangle between the Senyora of the house, her husband, and her childhood sweetheart, who shows up, suddenly a wealthy, married man, on the neighboring seaside estate. The book has an upstairs/downstairs quality, where the reader gets to listen in on the gossip of the gardener, cooks, and housekeepers. It's been a very long time since I read The Remains of the Day — and the gardener is a very different kind of narrator (a different kind of person) from that book's butler — but I found myself thinking of it as I read Garden by the Sea with its secondhand plot. 

Like the other two Rodoreda books I've read, Garden by the Sea is also an intensely visual book. Flowers are ever-present, defining each moment of the season as they bloom and die, or are picked for a bouquet or trampled at a party or under attack by aphids or unearthed and repotted. But there are so many other visual details as well: the specific color of the dresses the gardener's long-dead wife wore; the rowboat, with its red paint peeling over the years, and then repainted; the old eucalyptus tree; the little beach at the bottom of the stairs below the garden; the swimming pool on the neighboring estate that is lit from inside(!); the sunflower wallpaper at the local inn that the gardener buys to repaper his own kitchen; the handmade envelopes where the gardener stores his seeds. I can picture all these things. I have such a strong, tangible image of this lovely seaside villa and the Catalonian town where it stood, and it's stunning. 

Big Sky, by Kate Atkinson

I spent last week in upstate New York dog-sitting and I thought that between the train rides up and back and the quiet of the country I would get a lot of reading done. Instead, I watched a Mission Impossible movie every night for five consecutive nights and I couldn't tell you what happened to any other downtime I had while I was away. I cooked. I walked the dog. I did some crossword puzzles. I worked some long days. I read a few chapters of a book I had high hopes for but wasn't feeling at the moment. I did not trade it for either of the other two books I had brought with me. When I arrived back home on Saturday night, Big Sky was waiting for me, having been delivered while I was away. I've read and enjoyed all the previous Jackson Brodie novels, and I loved the three non-Jackson Brodie novels by Kate Atkinson that I've read, so yesterday - with the prospect of a lazy day at home after a week away - I decided to start Big Sky. 

This book satisfied in the ways that I expected it to. I read more than 200 pages yesterday and nearly as many today. The book has a sometimes confusing jumble of characters circling around a sex trafficking ring, the unraveling of which happens partly by accident. The reader gets the full story, but most of the characters never do. The closure sates. What was lost on me this time were all the callbacks to the earlier books, which I only remember faintly now. I read them all in the space of a year in 2015-2016. I remember some rough plot outlines and a few details, but not much really. There were characters in this book who figured in the earlier novels, but I didn't remember them at all. I don't know that it would be worth going back and re-reading all four prior books, but I think I would have enjoyed Big Sky more if I had.

In the Distance, by Hernan Diaz

I became aware of In the Distance soon after it came out in 2017, I believe, though I don't remember how I became aware of it. I was surprised and thrilled to find a copy at the Goodwill in Greenwich Village not long after it had been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. I picked it up and contemplated reading it several times between then and now. I would read the blurb and it just never felt like the thing I wanted to be reading at whatever particular moment I found myself in. It was this tweet from last September that nudged me closer to reading it. I decided to read it "soon," and soon finally became now last Sunday. 

Let me start by saying this book was stunning. It was sometimes hard to read, one troubling event piles on top of another, again and again as the book goes on. There's hardly a break from the trouble. And yet, it's beautiful. 

Early on while reading In the Distance I thought it was like a picaresque. The book is episodic as Håkan, a Swedish immigrant who arrives in San Francisco in the early 19th century as a boy, picks up with – or is picked up by – different characters. Some are benefactors, some are using him. Each chapter presented a new adventure or circumstance in his travels. But then other characters largely disappear from the book after one particularly bad episode. Håkan spends months and years in deep solitude. Though, with a couple exceptions, the time he spends with people is no less lonely than his time alone. People in this book are terrifying for the harm they are prepared to do to one another. Håkan begins the book as a total innocent, and some element of that innocence stays with him throughout. Meanwhile his notoriety  grows as he unwittingly becomes a figure of myth across the West. In the public imagination he is a person dramatically different from the real Håkan, but the real Håkan – filled with shame over his own actions – seems partly to believe that he deserves this public censure. He avoids other humans because he fears what they will do to him, but also because he fears what they will think of him. He is afraid to face them. The book itself represents the first time he tells his own story to anyone. (It's told in the third person, but it's framed as a narrative he gives of his own life to fellow passengers on an iced-in boat near Alaska.)

Unless I'm forgetting something, this is only the second Western novel I've read, the other being Butcher's Crossing, which I also found hard to read yet beautiful. The two books do inhabit the same moment for a stretch – the events of Butcher's Crossing take place in the space of a year, while In the Distance spans decades. In the Distance imagines a person inhabiting a long period of American history and westward expansion, and yet so removed from the world of humans that the external events of history are almost invisible to him.