Affections, by Rodrigo Hasbún

I can't seem to figure out who it was, but I'm pretty sure somebody had Affections on their 2021 reading list, because I read something on January 1 of this year that led me to order a used copy that day. I searched Twitter and this tweet came up, which does indeed seem like an endorsement, but not one I was likely to have seen a month ago. While I can't remember the particular recommendation, I do know the reason I went ahead and ordered it right away. Rodrigo Hasbún is a Bolivian writer, and Bolivia is a country I was missing in my world books reading project. 

What follows contains spoilers for the book, but the book is based on real events so they're sort of not spoilers. But I include this warning as the real life events were totally unknown to me.

Affections is based on the real life Ertl family. Hans Ertl was a Nazi propagandist and Leni Riefenstahl's cameraman. After the war, he moved his family to Bolivia, where his daughter Monika eventually became a socialist guerrilla fighter with the National Liberation Army. She is famous for having assassinated Roberto Quintanilla Pereira, Bolivian consul to Hamburg, and the person responsible for chopping off Che Guevara's hands. I imagine Monika Ertl is well known in some circles, but this was not a story I was at all familiar with, so I had no idea what was coming, although there were hints as to what Monika's future held early in the narrative. The story is told through the eyes of several different narrators who take turns chapter to chapter. Through snippets of stories told by her two sisters and two former lovers, we start to piece together how she became who she was. The most informative chapters are the two she narrates herself, but what we learn from the others helps fill in the picture. The book is quite short and the story so fascinating, I wished there was more of it.

The Copenhagen Trilogy, by Tove Ditlevsen

I hadn't heard of Tove Ditlevsen at all before The Copenhagen Trilogy started showing up on all these best books of the year lists at the end of last year, and then it was as if everyone was reading her at once. At around the same time I started to take notice, my Women in Translation book club selected it as our next book. I doubt I would have gotten to it so quickly otherwise. I hate reading hardcovers, so I bought the three individual paperbacks even though it cost me an extra $15. It was nice to read them as separate books because I took a break between each to read something else, which I suppose I also could have done even if I had them in a single volume, but it felt totally natural with them being individual books. For some reason, Childhood – the shortest book – took me the longest to read. I spread it over a few days. I read Youth and Dependency each in a single sitting. The books span Ditlevsen's early childhood until she left school at 14 (Childhood), her teenage entry into the workforce, independent living, and early exposure to the literary world (Youth), and her early adulthood, which was punctuated by a series of unhappy relationships and a Demerol addiction, but was also when she started to find literary success (Dependency). 

To me, Youth was the most interesting book. Having grown up in a working class family with a very narrow exposure to the world, Youth is Ditlevsen's coming of age story, when she starts to see different sides of the world, even as she feels an outsider in each. This was the book that also gave me the strongest sense of place among the three, perhaps because it's the book where she is moving around in the city the most. This was the pre-occupation Copenhagen of the early 1930s. War looms right over the border, but Ditlevsen and her friends are teenagers making just a little bit of money and looking for experiences. By the time Dependency picks up, Denmark is occupied by Germany and the freedom of movement that characterized Ditlevsen's youth is gone.

The other event in these books that really resonated for me was in Dependency, when nine months after giving birth to her first child, Ditlevsen became pregnant again and was determined to have an abortion. She asks every woman she knows for advice, she cold calls doctors, she tries home remedies. She eventually lands on a two-step procedure (not a botch, as I've seen it described), whereby one back-alley doctor renders the pregnancy unviable by piercing the amniotic sac (with, of course, no anesthesia). Then she's told to go home and wait. When she starts bleeding and gets a fever, she should rush herself to the legitimate doctor (who referred her to the back alley guy) where she is given condolences that the baby won't make it and the doctor completes the procedure by removing what remains. Similar to what I felt while reading Daddy's Gone A-Hunting, this unnecessary complication of a simple medical procedure seemed particularly relevant today. 

I have a hard time with addiction stories. With everything I'd heard about it, I was nervous about reading Dependency but I think I needn't have been. The discussions of these books seem to focus so much on Ditlevsen's addiction, but when taken from the whole body of the work, this subject amounts to a rather small portion of her life story as told (though we understand at the conclusion it's a dominating force in her life story from the period when the addiction began until the present day – 1971 – when she wrote Dependency). The three books span about 30 years, during the last five of which Ditlevsen was addicted to opioids, mostly administered by her controlling third husband. I find that stories of addiction and recovery (and relapse, and recovery) often seem trite to the person who didn't experience them, and while there were a couple pieces of her story that were alarming, the narrative felt familiar and the end of the book strangely abrupt. (The highlight for me of the addiction section of Dependency was the housekeeper Jabbe, who seems to have been an absolute saint caring for Ditlevsen and her children throughout those five years, and being sole caretaker for her children during the six months Ditlevsen was in rehab.)

The writing in these books, as everyone everywhere has said, is clear and dispassionate even as Ditlevsen describes the most devastating events. It's also told largely in the present tense, and the effect is as if Ditlevsen is picturing these events in her memory and telling them out to us in the moment as she remembers them – like when a movie psychiatrist says to a patient, "Go back in your mind to that time. What do you see?" (Is this a real thing?) For the reader, it makes the places, people, and events in the book almost tangible; you're seeing them with her. It's quite something.

My Sister, The Serial Killer, by Oyinkan Braithwaite

I'm still away from home. Ten days and counting. In addition to My Life as a Fake, which I was already reading when I left, I brought five books with me (three of these were individual copies of the books in Tove Ditlevsen's Copenhagen Trilogy, which are tiny books on their own and so I sort of think of them as three books, but I also sort of think of them as one book). Unusually for me, I have not yet visited a bookstore on this trip, so I'm devoting my energies to what I brought with me. I remember reading about or hearing about My Sister, the Serial Killer a couple years ago when it came out and I got a copy from PaperbackSwap several months ago. It sort of hovered at the edge of my mental to-read list until I was packing for this trip and without too much premeditation decided to throw it in my bag. I think this is something I should do more often: spend less time thinking about what to read and just read something. (I mean, I do read a lot -- it's not like I'm seriously interrupting my own reading time while I deliberate about what to read, but I do maybe think a little too hard about what I should be reading.) I still had a very small amount of deliberation: should I read this, the other non-Ditlevsen book I brought, or continue with Ditlevsen straight through. (I finished Childhood two days ago, but am waiting until I've read all three to write about them.) But I picked up My Sister, the Serial Killer after finishing with work yesterday, sat down on the couch, and promptly read more than 60 pages. I finished it after work today; I read the whole book in two sittings.

Set in Lagos, the narrator is Korede, a clean-freak nurse. When the book opens, her younger, prettier sister has just killed a man -- and not for the first time. Korede is called upon to take charge and clean up the mess, and this, we learn, has been the dynamic between the sisters throughout their lives. The story proceeds in narrative vignettes mostly in the present, but with occasional glimpses of their past life when their abusive father was still alive. Things become complicated when Korede's sister starts a relationship with a doctor from Korede's hospital, whom she also has feelings for. The book takes some unexpected turns, and I found myself surprised by Korede's choices as the drama played out. This was a fun, if dark, read.

My Life as a Fake, by Peter Carey

Peter Carey is someone I think of as an author of my youth. I read True History of the Kelly Gang and Oscar and Lucinda some 20 years ago. In my memory, I read the former after the latter but my records indicate otherwise. I remember I had gotten an ARC of True History of the Kelly Gang and it seems I read it before it was released. In any case, I read them within the space of a year in 2001-2002 and I loved them both. The end of Oscar and Lucinda left me in tears and unable to sleep the night I finished it. Some time later, I started The Tax Inspector but I had to stop because I was afraid things were taking a bad turn and I couldn't handle it. (I seem to recall that the edition I had bore a quote from a reviewer that said simply "Devastating." or something along those lines, and I thought it boded poorly for my mental health.) A few years later, I read The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith and I didn't much like it, and there, for a long time, ended my reading of Peter Carey, though I have held on to several of his books. I'm not sure what exactly prompted me to pick him up again now. A week ago I was looking for a book to read and I had some rather particular qualities in mind. I was leaving soon for a couple weeks away from home, and I wanted something that would be engaging reading for my flight and something I wouldn't mind leaving behind, as I'd packed 5 other books to take on my trip and didn't intend to bring them all back home with me. I had two false starts before I landed on My Life as a Fake. In the end, I didn't read on the plane at all (I never know if I will or not), but I think I chose an appropriate book for my needs.

My Life as a Fake follows the editor of a small poetry journal who, while visiting Kuala Lumpur, encounters an Australian poet who 30 years earlier pulled off a hoax, tricking the editor of an Australian poetry journal into publishing the avant garde poems of an invented outsider poet bike mechanic. This poet proceeds to tell the editor his life story, which took him from Melbourne to Sydney to Southeast Asia chasing his invented poet who, by his own word, he manifested into a living being. The story of the hoax is well-known in the book (and is based on real events), but the book gives the editor -- and the reader -- reason to believe (or at least some reasons not to disbelieve) the story of the poet tormented by his invention. The man he created turns out to have become a remarkable poet, though we're never quite sure he existed. 

The Spectre of Alexander Wolf, by Gaito Gazdanov, and One Last Stop, by Casey McQuiston

I saw a couple people post about it, so I decided to try out The StoryGraph for tracking my books rather than the Amazon-owned Goodreads. (Of course this means that for now, I'm using both while I figure out if I like StoryGraph. My early impressions are mixed.) An interesting feature of StoryGraph is its recommendations. I uploaded my whole Goodreads history and filled out a little form that asked me what I liked in books, and StoryGraph presented me with a list of recommendations, which is supposedly personalized. Topping the list was The Holy Terrors by Jean Cocteau and just below it was The Spectre of Alexander Wolf, a book I already owned but knew little about. (I believe it came to me via a large shopping bag of books – mostly small press, international and translated titles – that my father got from a publishing friend and passed on to me.) So, I thought I'd test out StoryGraph's recommendation quality* by reading it. And the verdict is, the recommendation was good! 

The Spectre of Alexander Wolf opens with the narrator telling us the story of the time he murdered a man many years earlier. It was in the context of war, and he was a teenage soldier, but murder is the word he uses. This killing has weighed on him ever since. Now, all these years later, he is a journalist in Paris. He comes across a book in English by a writer named Alexander Wolf. The book contains three short stories, the last of which is called "The Adventure in the Steppe" and describes, down to every detail, the murder the narrator committed, from the perspective of the killed man. Our narrator realizes his victim is still alive, and seeks to find him. It takes him a while to track down Alexander Wolf, and in the end he finds him almost by accident. In the meantime other events have taken place in the narrators life, and the reader starts to sense an unlikely coincidence, or set of coincidences. Even as I was sure I had "solved" this book, the end still shocked me. There are other flaws in the book, but the end was perfect.

Before I read The Spectre of Alexander Wolf, I read Casey McQuiston's 2021 novel, One Last Stop. When I read their Red, White & Royal Blue last year, I wrote, "There were all kinds of bits in this book that were just a little too far-fetched..." and I can say that if I thought that was far-fetched, I didn't know what I had coming in One Last Stop. The book is batshit. SPOILERS FOLLOW.

One Last Stop is a queer romance about two women who meet on the subway, but one of them is actually from the 1970s having gotten stuck in (or out of??) time on the subway in the great blackout of 1977 and she's just been riding the Q train for 45 years (without aging) until she meets the protagonist and they fall in love and she's able to retrieve some of her memories. Alexander Wolf had some improbable coincidences, but One Last Stop really tests our credulity (beyond whatever credulity we've already allowed for the premise itself) when it (of course) turns out there's a connection between the subway girl and the protagonist's uncle, whom her mother has been searching for (nowhere near New York, and no, he also never lived there) since 1973. This book was easy to read and kind of fun, but I also kind of hated it. However, I don't think I can be bothered to get into my various gripes with it now. If quasi supernatural queer romance is your thing, and you're not too put off by the hyper-contemporary (I suspect lots of references in this book will feel dated by 2023), you might enjoy this. 

* There are some definite flaws in StoryGraph's recommendations. For one, it suggested to me a book that I've already read, which for some reason got imported as an audio book, but nonetheless it had on record as a book I'd read. It also recommends some books in French, which I could maybe manage, and more bizarrely a book by Nicole Krauss translated into Hungarian, which I definitely couldn't (though I do feel they're picking up on something about me in making this recommendation). 

The Man of Feeling, by Javier Marías

I'm almost out of unread Javier Marías books. If they don't translate Tomas Nevinson by January 2023, I don't know what I'll start next year with. The Man of Feeling is the earliest Marías book I've read. Published in Spanish 1986, it's also his earliest novel to be released by New Directions. There are four novels that predate this one, three of which have not been translated. And there are a couple later (though still early) novels I still haven't read, as well as some books of short stories, of which I own one. The Man of Feeling predates A Heart So White by six years. I suppose starting from here, I could go back and read all his books in order as I proposed doing when I read A Heart So White. 

The Man of Feeling shares some themes (infidelity, jealousy, the idea of replacing another person in someone's life) with the later works, but it feels different. There's no one named Luisa. (There is a Berta; perhaps Marías was tired of Luisas when he wrote Berta Isla and decided to repeat a long forgotten name instead?) There were scenes in this book which I think were reused and became fully formed in later works. There's a description of a character dying in her sleep, which occupies just a couple pages of The Man of Feeling, and which was yet so familiar to me. I felt I had read it described in much further detail on a previous occasion. (I am a little alarmed that I can't remember if it was in A Heart So White or Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me. I believe the latter, but can't swear to it – though I remember the scene quite well.)

Javier Marías is maybe my favorite writer, but if I have one complaint about him it is a preoccupation with heterosexual masculinity, with a jealous and proprietary approach to relationships. It's not un-self-aware. In fact, this is often the explicit flaw in his characters, but still – he has a tendency to write jealous, possessive men. The Man of Feeling is about one of these men, though in this instance he's not the one telling the story. Perhaps this gives the reader a little more room to be critical of his possessiveness; we don't sympathize with him one bit. We never find out if our narrator is a jealous lover, if he feels the sense of ownership his predecessor felt. One suspects not, but he doesn't tell us. As the book ended, I was left both unsure what he thinks, and what I think of him. 

2021 in Books

I realize this photo is very similar to the one I posted last year, but it was taken only a couple days ago, so I suppose it's just an accurate representation of my life. The pandemic continues more or less apace, and my reading kept up. I read 55 books in 2021, which is the most I've ever read in a year excepting last year. However, by page count I think this is only my fourth best year. Another fun (?) fact I learned from my Goodreads Year in Books is that 2021 was the first year in many, many years (since 2007 if Goodreads is to be trusted) that I didn't read a single book that was over 500 pages long. Berta Isla, the first book I read in 2021, was 496 pages and the longest book I read. 

I think this started in 2020, but I have noticed a definite change in the cadence of my reading. While I average a book a week or better, my actual reading pace is very different. I'll read some books (several books) in a day or two, while others take me weeks to get through. I think this tendency has grown out of the way I read now, which really has changed since February 2020. Before the pandemic, I did the bulk of my reading on the subway. Sometimes I'd spend a weekend day or a day off reading, but most of my reading was done in 30-40 minute chunks across two daily commutes. This routine I think propelled me forward and kept me moving through books that I might have set aside if I had other options. I've tried, with varying success, to stick to reading before and after work each day, but now I have my whole library available to me every day. If I'm not in the mood to read what I have started, I have many other options to choose from. I don't know that this is either good or bad, but it's a change in how I read. 

Here is the full list of books I read in 2021:

• Berta Isla, by Javier Marías
• Parable of the Sower, by Octavia Butler
• EEG, by Daša Drndić
• Seeing People Off, by Jana Beňová
• Outline, by Rachel Cusk
• Unforgiving Years, by Victor Serge
• The Radetsky March, by Joseph Roth
• Such a Fun Age, by Kiley Reid
• In the Café of Lost Youth, by Patrick Modiano
• Texas: The Great Theft, by Carmen Boullosa
• The Memory Police, by Yōko Ogawa
• Red, White & Royal Blue, by Casey McQuiston
• Dog Symphony, by Sam Munson
• The Dream of My Return, by Horacio Castellanos Moya
• Senselessness, by Horacio Castellanos Moya
• All the Names, by José Saramago
• Ambiguous Adventure, by Cheikh Hamidou Kane
• The Gloaming, by Melanie Finn
• Minor Feelings: An Asian-American Reckoning, by Cathy Park Hong
• Death of an Englishman, by Magdalen Nabb
• Dance of the Jakaranda, by Peter Kimani
• The Great Believers, by Rebecca Makkai
• Sweet and Sour Milk, by Nuruddin Farah
• Think Again, by Adam Grant
• The Fortune of the Rougons, by Émile Zola
• The Heat of the Day, by Elizabeth Bowen
• Sphinx, by Anne Garréta
• The Fifth Season, by N.K. Jemisin
• The Obelisk Gate, by N.K. Jemisin
• The Stone Sky, by N.K. Jemisin
• The Barefoot Woman, by Scholastique Mukasonga
• The Body Snatcher, by Patricia Melo
• Poetics of Work, by Noémi Lefebvre
• The Emissary, by Yōko Tawada
• Not a Novel: A Memoir in Pieces, by Jenny Erpenbeck
• The Appointment, by Herta Müller
• The Spirit of Science Fiction, by Roberto Bolaño
• Murder on the Orient Express, by Agatha Christie
• How to Be an Antiracist, by Ibram X. Kendi
• Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe, by Kapka Kassabova
• Asymmetry, by Lisa Halliday
• Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke
• Two Serious Ladies, by Jane Bowles
• Telephone, by Percival Everett
• Euphoria, by Lily King
• Offshore, by Penelope Fitzgerald
• While We Were Dating, by Jasmine Guillory
• In the Company of Men, by Veronique Tadjo
• Mourning, by Eduardo Halfon
• Daddy's Gone A-Hunting, by Penelope Mortimer
• Fieldwork, by Mischa Berlinski
• The Enchanted April, by Elizabeth von Arnim
• Dummy Boy: Tekashi 6ix9ine and the Nine Trey Gangsta Bloods, by Shawn Setaro
• French Exit, by Patrick DeWitt
• Erasure, by Percival Everett

And now some stats: For the first time ever, the majority of the books I read last year (33 out of 55) were by women, with one more by a non-binary author. Sometime in the late summer – when I accidentally broke the streak – I realized I had read 11 consecutive books by women, which itself is probably a record. I considered reading only women for the remainder of the year, and I almost did but I let a few men slip in. I read books from 23 different countries last year (fewer than in 2020), including books from 6 countries I'd never read previously (the same count as 2020; this year's new countries were: Slovakia, Somalia, Rwanda, Romania, Bulgaria, and Côte d'Ivoire). I read 14 books by Black authors, about the same as last year. For various reasons, I read more non-fiction than I have in a long while: 7 books in total. Two of these were for a work book club. A third – Dummy Boy – I read because it was written (brilliantly!) by a good friend. The others are mostly memoirs and travel journals, which is to say within the scope of non-fiction I usually read. I did two re-reads in 2021: Outline because it was selected for a book club I was in, and The Dream of My Return just because. 

When I read it in May, I declared that The Gloaming was the best book I'd read in 2021 to date. It seems like a distant memory now, but I do think it was my favorite book of the year. It sucked me in and took me to totally unexpected places. I picked up both of Melanie Finn's other books last year and I expect I'll get to reading them this year. Some other favorites from last year include Kapka Kassabova's Border, which took me ages to read, but was wonderful and really made me want to visit Bulgaria; Jenny Erpenbeck's Not a Novel, which gave me such a wonderful sense of East Berlin and the strangeness of having the entire world of your childhood just disappear; Victor Serge's Unforgiving Years, which I found rather slow reading but which has stayed with me – I find myself looking for Serge's memoirs every time I'm at a bookstore now; and there are others: Eduardo Halfon's Mourning (he makes my notables list every year I read him, it seems), Daša Drndić's EEG, Nuruddin Farah's Sweet and Sour Milk; Elizabeth von Arnim's The Enchanted April; Percival Everett's Erasure. I feel like I could go on, but I have to stop somewhere. I already have my first book of 2021 set out, but beyond that who knows what's ahead. Here's hoping for another good year of reading, with better circumstances outside my reading life.