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. 

The Story of My Teeth, by Valeria Luiselli; Gods of Jade and Shadow, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

I spent the week before last in Mexico. Specifically, I did a road trip through Yucatán and Campeche states with my father, with overnight stays in Valladolid, Mérida, and San Francisco de Campeche. A week before I was due to travel it was time for me to start a new book. I wanted to read something Mexican, ideally something from the Yucatán peninsula, but my (admittedly limited) research didn't turn up anything I could find easily in English. I looked to books I already owned, and narrowed the options to three: The Story of My Teeth, Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor, and One Out of Two by Daniel Sada, and then I put the question of which I should read on Twitter and Instagram. I got four votes for The Story of My Teeth and one for Hurricane Season (I'm hardly a social media star), so I decided to take the majority's advice and I started the former. 

I only managed to read one chapter of The Story of My Teeth before I left for my travels. I read the second chapter on the plane to Cancun. (With my plans to visit Campeche, I was thrilled, when reading on the plane, to come across this sentence: "In my opinion, outside my native land, only Paris is worth a mention, but even so, we all know that the city of Campeche beats Paris hands down.") And then, as is so common when I travel, I didn't pick up the book again for the duration of my trip. I thought I might resume my reading on my flight home, but I was so exhausted I just listened to music and did crossword puzzles for the length of the flight. I read the remainder of The Story of My Teeth today. This was an interesting book about a fictional auctioneer who creates a practice of allegorical auctions, where the value of the objects being auctioned off is enhanced by the story the auctioneer relates about the objects' sourcing. The book is full of intertextual references to centuries of philosophy, contemporary art, and literature (largely, but not entirely, Mexican). More interesting than the book itself is the story of its creation, which Luiselli explains in an Afterword. The book was created to accompany an art exhibit at a gallery in Ecatepec, just outside Mexico City, run by the Mexican juice company Jumex. She serialized the book and worked with Jumex to arrange that the installments be read in a reading group made up of workers in the Jumex factory. She heard their reactions after each installment and used these, as well as some of their own stories and ideas, as she developed the subsequent installments. I found her explanation of this process really beautiful, and when she reported that two of these workers showed up for her book launch in Mexico City, it brought tears to my eyes. 

While we were in Mexico, I talked with my dad about my struggle to find books by authors from the Yucatán. I said it seemed there were none available in English. My father wondered if there were any at all. I believed there had to be. My dad, a native of Wichita, KS, argued that maybe some places didn't produce writers, using his childhood hometown as an example. I found an entire Wikipedia page listing authors from Wichita, but it's true most of them weren't literary authors. (The only people I'd heard of on the list were former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, the journalist Jim Lehrer, and member of the Eagles, Joe Walsh; however, there were also some novelists among those listed.) My father then suggested that perhaps there were no great writers from Dallas, TX, and it seems this may in fact be the case (my dad is the one who did the additional searching here, and I'm too lazy to do more, so we'll have to trust him on that one). Meanwhile, I went on to argue that the Yucatán wasn't like Dallas, that Mérida at least was an important city (but so is Dallas, I guess), that there must be writers from there, and I switched my Google searches to google.mx, where indeed I found several lists of writers from the Yucatán, though I turned up nothing (with my still admittedly brief research) that was available in English.

In Mérida, my father and I stopped in at Between the Lines, an English language bookstore. The owner is an ex-pat who has been living in Mérida for 19 years. She opened the store two years ago, just before the onset of the pandemic. My father, who works in publishing, was curious about how the owner sourced her books, so they got to chatting. Then he raised my question: who were the great writers from Yucatán? And did she have any of their books? She didn't believe there were any novels by Yucatecan authors available in English, but she did direct me to some works of fiction that related to the Yucatán, and I decided to buy one of these, Gods of Jade and Shadow, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, from her shop. This book had in fact come up when I was looking for books about the Yucatán before I left for Mexico. I even went to Greenlight Books on President's Day, thinking I might buy a copy if they had it. They had several of Moreno-Garcia's other novels, but not this one. Silvia Moreno-Garcia has been on my radar since the release of Mexican Gothic, which seemed to be everywhere for a bit. Based on what I'd heard, I wasn't particularly interested in Mexican Gothic, but an NPR recommendation of her more recent book – Velvet Was the Night – did leave me interested. 

Gods of Jade and Shadow starts off in a village in Yucatán in 1925, where a young woman who is a poor relation in a rich family accidentally unearths a Maya god of the underworld. It turns out her grandfather helped this god's brother betray and kill him, and he's been stuck in a chest in their family home ever since. The girl and the god travel to Veracruz, Mexico City, El Paso, and Tijuana as they try to return the god to his rightful place. The book is a mix of fantasy and romance, loosely rooted in the Popol Vuh, a Maya mythological text. With its references to Maya mythology and Maya practices, it was fun to read this just after my trip, where we visited several Maya archaeological sites, drove through villages that even today are predominantly Maya and where Maya languages are still spoken, and where – in Mérida – we saw a reenactment of the Maya ballgame pok ta pok, which comes up a couple times in the book. 

This feels like a good time to mention again that it was a planned trip to Mexico that really started my whole world books reading project in 2016. At the time, the only Mexican novel I'd read was Like Water for Chocolate. Since then, I've read at least half a dozen more Mexican novels by several different writers, but I still feel this as a gap in my reading. I think this has less to do with Mexican literature per se and more to do with the fact that, as I expressed it in that original post, it's a big country, right next door, with a lot of shared history with the U.S. In Mérida, I also visited the Librería Dante, a Spanish-language bookstore, and I looked at their shelf of books by Mexican authors (I was very glad they had such a thing). There were the authors I'd read: Carmen Boullosa, Paco Ignacio Taibo II, Laura Esquivel. There were the authors I hadn't read, but had heard of: Carlos Fuentes (I've tried reading him 3 times now, but never gotten past page 50), Guadalupe Nettel, Jorge Ibargüengoitia. And then there were the ones I'd never heard of. Maybe one of them was the great writer from the Yucatán I'm looking for.