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.