Burning Secret, by Stefan Zweig

I have these little Stefan Zweig editions from Pushkin Press that are just perfect for when it's New Year's Eve and you're trying to fit one more book in before midnight. (I even considered starting another, but I think I've read enough these past few days.)

As I wrote two days ago, I thought about reading Zweig right after I finished The Sense of an Ending and at that time I pulled Burning Secret off the shelf, but eventually decided to wait – a little afraid, if I'm honest, that reading Zweig might push the nostalgic melancholic feeling a little too close to despair. Having now finished Burning Secret, I can't decide if my fear was warranted.

Reading Zweig, as with many of his contemporaries who were similarly displaced and killed by the rise of Nazism, I sometimes find it hard to read the story without constantly remembering the fate of the author. A tragedy hangs around the work, even when – as in the case of Burning Secret, originally published in 1913 – that tragedy lies far in the future. The woman and her son who are at the center of this story are well-to-do Austrian Jews. (How many Jews lived in Vienna in 1913, I find myself wondering while I'm reading. Roughly 175,000 apparently, and just 4,000 in 1946.)

Zweig is a masterful storyteller. At the outset, Burning Secret promises the story of a holiday affair. A young man sets out to seduce a married woman who is staying with her son in at the same hotel in the Austrian Alps. The seducer attempts to befriend the mother through the son, and this leads to a unexpected turn in the story, wherein in becomes the child's story, rather than that of the adults. Twelve-year-old Edgar is on the precipice of understanding the adult world and its secrets. He longs to be admitted into it, but is faced with the recognition of how shielded he has been as a child. By the end he wants only a resumption of his childhood simplicity. It was a wonderful little book to end the year with.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie; Where Angels Fear to Tread; Devotion

Continuing my rush to the end of 2023, I've gone on a tear pulling short books off my shelf without giving a lot of thought to my selections. After finishing The Sense of an Ending, I thought I would read something by Stefan Zweig, but I didn't think I had the heart for it just then, so I settled instead on The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. I believe I first heard of this book by way of the movie, which I remember my friend Andrea trying to describe to me many years ago. I could have sworn the second time I heard of it was from Molly Young's newsletter, Read Like the Wind. Unfortunately, a quick search for various combinations of Molly Young Read Like the Wind and Jean Brodie, lead only to another edition of that newsletter, written by someone else while Molly Young was away, and recommending a different book by Muriel Spark. I'll retain the belief in my heart that that's where it came from. Perhaps an earlier iteration of the newsletter that's not so well archived online.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is a delightful little book. At once hilarious, with a touch of darkness hanging around the edges. The titular Miss Brodie is a girls' teacher with unconventional methods, that are simultaneously admirable and disturbing. Miss Brodie is onto something in her critiques of traditional education for girls. This is interwar England. Miss Brodie is modern, and trying to prepare her girls for a modern world. She lived through the Great War, the aftermath of which changed her course and that of many women. But the modernity that attracts Miss Brodie is Italian and German fascism. This along with her involving her girls in her own sexual intrigues, makes her a troubling figure, even while she's so attractive to her girls – and the reader.

I could have sworn I'd seen the movie adaptation of E.M. Forster's Where Angels Fear to Tread, but nothing in the story was familiar beyond two English women traveling to Italy, and a man coming after them later. The one image I have in my mind when I try to picture the film is in Venice, which plays no part at all in the book, so I have to wonder if I'm thinking of a different film entirely. I can just picture Helena Bonham Carter and another woman sitting in a boat on a canal. (If you know what I might be thinking of that is not Where Angels Fear to Tread, do let me know.) 

This book was surprising at every turn, and not only because it wasn't what I thought I remembered (which was very little to begin with). It makes a terrible caricature of Italians, while also expressing a certain admiration for them. It isn't much kinder to the English for the most part. There are a lot of other things going on, but the interesting point of the book to me was its investigation of parenting. It makes a clear condemnation of what I think of as Victorian child-rearing, of which all the English characters are a product. They were all raised on some level at a distance by their parents, but are also stifled by them. By contrast, when these English young adults witness the the love between and Italian father and his baby, they are simultaneously disgusted and moved. The question the book asks is whether it's better to be brought up well (English) without love or badly (Italian) but loved, and it definitely settles on the latter (without completely accepting that being brought up this way could be to be brought up well). 

As I said at the beginning of this post, my method of selecting what books to read during these last few days has been fast an impulsive. It perhaps helps that over the holiday break I installed a new set of bookshelves for my fiction and finally got around to fully organizing them for the first time since I moved a year ago. (I never bothered before, knowing I was going to be replacing my shelves.) What that means is that I have handled every book in my collection (a bit over 800 books) in the last few days. I think it was this that reminded me about Howard Norman, though he is an author that comes to my mind from time to time. I read and really liked The Bird Artist about 25 years ago, then I read two subsequent books – The Museum Guard, which I liked somewhat less enthusiastically, and The Haunting of L, which I remember loving but don't remember a single thing about. Somewhere along the line, I acquired a couple other books by him and as I was sitting yesterday afternoon close to finishing Where Angels Fear to Tread, I thought: I should read Howard Norman. Devotion seemed suitably short (I had the intention of finishing it by today), so I settled on it. 

It's a strange sort of love story, about a swift romance followed by a swift betrayal, and a long, slow return – perhaps – to trust. It's also in some way about how hard it is – how long it takes – to know another person. It's a really lovely book about imperfect people, which I always appreciate.

And now, with more than 12 hours left in 2023, maybe I can finish even one more book. I have my eye on Stefan Zweig again.

The Sense of an Ending, by Julian Barnes

There was a line in Trust that struck me as something I might want to refer back to, so I committed the page number to memory. "We do so many stupid things when we're young. No trace should remain of youth, not even memory." This phrase was still ringing in my head and felt very apt as I was reading The Sense of and Ending. Like Trust, The Sense of an Ending is about an older man looking back on a relationship from his youth, reflecting on how he has changed as a person. At one point in the book, the narrator is confronted with an actual artifact from his youth – a letter he wrote, but only remembered in broad strokes – and he's forced to confront his past self, in a way we can often avoid when we rely only on memories.

If I remember correctly, it was on the basis that a friend of mine who is a professor was teaching this book as part of a class that appealed to me that I got this book in the first place. Also on her syllabus was J.M Coetzee's Disgrace, which I briefly considered reading as a follow up. It is perhaps in the spirit of this book, that I've searched my email history and am now scrolling through years of her Facebook posts looking for confirmation of this. I seem to remember her putting out a general call, of some sort, for recommendations for this course – but what exactly was the topic? I can't recall. What I do remember, is the books that came to mind for me in response to her prompt were The Good Soldier and The Age of Innocence*. 

I have a list in my notebook under the heading, 'Books with "That Mood,"' and the list includes those two books, along with Mercè Rodoreda's A Broken Mirror* and Garden By the Sea (I believe it was the occasion of finish the latter that led me to start this list); "everything by Patrick Modiano, but especially Villa Triste;" Antonio Muñoz Molina's Winter in Lisbon; Stefan Zweig's Beware of Pity**; and a handful of others. I have just added The Sense of an Ending to the list. 

"That Mood," if I had to describe it, would be a melancholic nostalgia. (Is that redundant? Doesn't nostalgia always imply melancholy, sadness, loss?) What many of these books have in common are a first person narrator recalling events from a more or less distant past, often when the things that were going on around them were somewhat beyond their comprehension, while now – with age and time and memory – the pieces from the past seem to fit together differently. Maybe I'm making generalizations in trying to force all these books together, but I know there is a common feeling they left me with.

*As an aside, I read The Age of Innocence, A Broken Mirror, and Beware of Pity during periods when I didn't write about every book I read, but the former two both made my "Best Books I Read This Decade" post from the end of 2019. Beware of Pity I addressed when writing about another book I read by Stefan Zweig, so that's what I've linked there.

**Stefan Zweig even comes up in The Sense of an Ending: when the narrator meets up, some 40 years later, with the woman he dated in college she's reading a Stefan Zweig book and he confesses – to us, not to her – that he has never read Zweig.

Kalpa Imperial, by Angélica Gorodischer, and Trust, by Domenico Starnone

I'm inclined to start this post in the way I think I've started nearly every post this year, with a lament about my reading habits. But I figure I've written enough about that already and I will surely write more about it when I compose my year in review in a few days, so there's no need to dwell on it today. Also, I've finished 2 books in as many days and more than 3 days remain in the year, so I should focus on making up for lost time.

I started Kalpa Imperial: The Greatest Empire that Never Was thanks to Mark Slutsky's Barely a Book Club. I started both the earlier selections for the non-club this year as well, but Kalpa Imperial is the only one I finished. I almost don't know what to say about it. It was fantastic and strange; not at all what I was expecting. Each chapter is its own tale, mostly describing a ruler and how she or he came to power. Sometimes en entire dynasty is included, sometimes an anecdote that gives you a sense of the climate, so to speak, of a particular leader. As a reader it's easy to find yourself lost: Where do these stories take place – are we on earth or somewhere else? Is this the past or the future? How many thousands of years does the book span? There are many gaps – we rarely know what has taken place between the chapters. 

As I was finishing Kalpa Imperial yesterday, Italo Calvino's book Invisible Cities came to mind. It's been two decades since I read it (something I should remedy!), but I remember the basic construct: dozens of cities are described, but each description is, in the end, a description of Venice with all her different facets. I had this sense with Kalpa Imperial – that each of the distinct stories was actually a story about the same thing. I feel I would benefit from rereading it now that I have seen the whole. 

I have a stack of books that I started this year and set aside without finishing, but kept on my side table with the idea that I might yet finish them. After finishing Kalpa Imperial yesterday, I eyed the stack and decided, rather thank going back to any of those books, I'd start something fresh. 

I picked up Domenico Starnone's Trust (not to be confused with the Hernan Diaz book of the same title that came out last year) when I was out gift shopping last week. I've really enjoyed the other two Starnone books I've read – and that it was translated by Jhumpa Lahiri only added to my interest. Starnone's books are pleasantly slim, but not light. It's been nearly 5 years since I read the last one, so it's mostly a vague feeling that I remember. When I started Trust what immediately came to mind was Javier Marías. When the book opens, the narrator is describing a relationship from his early adulthood that has an intensity that I tend to think of as only possible in early adulthood. The relationship comes to an end quite soon, but it continues to hang over the rest of the narrator's life, with unexpected results. In any case, there was something about the character and his relationship with women that reminded me of Marías. I sometimes wonder why I'm so drawn to Marías when he writes from a perspective of what could reasonably be called toxic masculinity. There's something of this in the Starnone character, but also a self-awareness (and also a lack of it, which we the readers are made to see). Trust drew me in immediately, and my reaction on finishing it was that it was very much my thing, but with a lingering question of why these kinds of books are "my thing."

The House of Doors, by Tan Twan Eng

My disappointing reading year continues. Now I'm consoling myself that I'm managing at least one book a month, which is something. The House of Doors is the 16th book I finished this year.

A few weeks ago, I heard Ari Shapiro interview Tan Twan Eng about this book on All Things Considered. I wasn't even paying super close attention, but the talk about Penang sounded interesting to me, and I hadn't read a book from Malaysia. I ordered a copy on the spot and promptly forgot all about it. When a package that was clearly a book arrived a few days later, I thought it was the Bradt guide to Emilia Romagna I had ordered recently, and I was momentarily confused when I opened the package before it all came back to me.

The House of Doors sat on my coffee table while I attempted to read the next book for my Women in Translation book club, The Discomfort of Evening. A week ahead of that meeting, I decided to give up on that book altogether (it turned out several of us did: it's a grim, grim book) and go ahead and start The House of Doors.

The House of Doors is set in Penang, Malaysia in two periods: 1910 and 1921. The later period covers a visit W. Somerset Maugham made to the city, staying with a local couple. The 1910 events are recounted to Maugham by the wife. She tells Maugham the story of Ethel Proudlock, an English woman convicted of murder in Kuala Lumpur, which Maugham takes and turns into his short story, The Letter. She also tells him about her own life during that time, in which she was swept up in the community supporting Sun-yat Sen in his work toward a republic in China. 

Many years ago, I read Anthony Burgess' The Long Day Wanes and that pretty much accounts for what I knew of British-ruled Malaya – the world The House of Doors is set in. Around the same time, I also read The Razor's Edge and later Of Human Bondage and The Painted Veil. Reading The House of Doors left me wanting to see Penang, and wishing that I'd read more Somerset Maugham. There's still time – for both these things, I suppose.

This Census-Taker, by China Miéville

I'm just back from 9 days in upstate New York, where I was dog-sitting. I brought two books with me – one that I had started and one to read if I finished it. I didn't touch either the entire time I was away. Last Friday, I went to the Goodwill in Hudson, NY, where I've had good luck finding books in the past and that's where I found a copy of This Census-Taker, a book I hadn't heard of, though I've read several other books by China Miéville. I started it the next day and read it in small bits for the remainder of my stay. I read the bulk of it on the train back to the city yesterday and the last few pages on the subway home. 

This Census-Taker isn't what I was expecting (I didn't even read the blurb, so I had no idea what I was getting into) and it's quite different from Miéville's other books (though it's fair to say there's a lot of difference among his other books, so maybe this isn't a meaningful assessment). In any case, the mood of This Census-Taker is very dark and reminded me of several other books – most of all, it reminded me of Mercè Rodoreda's Death in Spring, which I had to put aside after I started it last year because it was simply too grim. I was afraid I wouldn't be able to manage This Census-Taker either, and probably if I hadn't had a long train ride with nothing better to do I would have moved through it much more slowly, and perhaps not finished. It is very dark. It's set in this kind of hazy place, disconnected from the outer world. The setting specifically is what reminded me of various other things I've read – there's a post-apocalyptic feeling to it, with just a touch of the supernatural, that felt somehow similar to The Memory Police, among other things. 

I'm glad I did finish This Census-Taker. The end was satisfyingly ambiguous, leaving much still in mystery.

Easy Motion Tourist, by Leye Adenle and Strangers I Know, by Claudia Durastani

After finishing Provenance, I thought perhaps sticking with genre fiction was the right move. I'd had a copy of Easy Motion Tourist for some time, but I can't quite say what made me decide to read it just then. 

Easy Motion Tourist a fast-paced and incredibly violent crime novel set in Lagos. A white male English journalist is sent to Nigeria to cover the presidential election but ends up stumbling on a gruesome crime scene, which gets him taken in by the police. He's rescued by a Nigerian woman who runs a safety organization for prostitutes, and the two of them together get caught up investigating what appears to be a crime ring involved in human sacrifice for ritual. Nothing is quite what it seems, and the resolution of some mysteries is saved for the sequel. 

Given that it's a book by a Nigerian author, I found it somewhat surprising that, while the book contains many different threads, the white male journalist is the book's hero and the only first-person narrator. On the other hand, this did perhaps make it more accessible as a reader who has never visited Lagos – we see it through the eyes of a foreigner. Some things need to be explained to him, which helps the reader understand them too.

While the violence sometimes made it hard for me to read, the pace was just what I needed. I'm not yet sure if I'll seek out the sequel.

I read the latter two-thirds of Easy Motion Tourist while I was in Montreal for an extended Labor Day weekend. I was rushing a little to get through it, because I had a book club meeting less than a week after my return home and I had to start and finish that book as well. I was afraid if I took a break from Easy Motion Tourist it would just join the growing stack of books on my side table that I have started and not finished in 2023. 

The second book I brought with me to Montreal was Strangers I Know by Claudia Durastanti. I did manage to start it while I was there, but only read a very little before coming home, leaving myself with more than 200 pages to get through this weekend. I did finish it in time – just – for my book club meeting, but it's a book that really should be read more slowly. 

Strangers I Know is a work of autofiction, in which Durastanti tells stories of her family and her childhood, and her adulthood eventually, largely in the form of vignettes. The opening is incredible: she recounts, one after the other, the two conflicting stories of how her parents met, and then she tells us each of theirs histories, if briefly. I was immediately reminded of Natalia Ginzburg's Family Lexicon, so of course I was prepared to love it. While it feels like it must have been an influence – the term "family lexicon" actually appears in the book on page 131 – it's not among the (extensive) list of books, movies, and music that she acknowledges as the things that "turn[ed her] into a character or a person."

Indeed, the similarities to Ginzburg diminish after the first section of the book. Durastanti is the child of deaf parents, who separated early in her life. She spent the first decade of her life in Brooklyn and reading about her experience living with her Italian family in Bensonhurst, during a period when I was also growing up in Brooklyn (8 years ahead of her by age) was both familiar and foreign (perhaps heightening the overarching feeling of the book for me, because it's entirely about that particular straddle.) After several years in Brooklyn, her mother moved back to Italy – to a village in Basilicata, where Durastanti spent her youth. The Basilicata connection was, I suppose, the second thing that disposed me to love this book – and she addresses the reader like me, who thinks first and foremost of Christ Stopped at Eboli when this region comes up. The village her mother lives in is evidently only 15 minutes from the Fossa del Bersagliere, which Levi wrote about and painted. But, she tells us, the youth of today's Basilicata live by the same rules as American teens. Of course they do: already in Levi's time there were Italians in Basilicata called "Americans" because they had emigrated and then returned. And that's exactly what Durastanti's family did, her grandmother and her mother both. I was so struck when I read Christ Stopped at Eboli to find that the immigration was not one-way only, and Strangers I Know just reinforced this fact for me. (I'm reminded also of a woman about my age who I know named Cinzia who was born in New Jersey, but has lives since early childhood in a town of less than 10,000 halfway between Matera and the Ioanian Sea.)

Despite (or maybe because of) my expectation to love Strangers I Know, I didn't. There were bits that I did love, but also stretches that felt naive when they seemed to intend to be profound. In the afterword, Durastanti says her intention was for the reader to be able to read this book's chapters (most of which are quite short) in any order, and it might be better consumed that way – picked up, read from a random point for 15 minutes or 30, and set back down until the mood struck again. I definitely would not say it's suited to reading for hours at a stretch, as I forced myself to do so I could finish it by 4pm today.

Provenance, by Ann Leckie

I have about six books in progress at the moment, a few of which I've been "reading" for several months, but I'm still finding reading a challenge this year. A few weeks ago I decided maybe I needed something entirely different and I started Late Victorian Holocausts by Mike Davis, which is actually the book I've made it farthest along in – so maybe I was onto something. But it's dense and, unsurprisingly, grim. So when I had a free afternoon on Sunday, I found after reading it for about 15 minutes, I wanted something different. There had been some recent chatter about Ann Leckie's new book among people I know, which reminded me that I'd had a copy of Provenance for quite a while and not yet read it. I got through 100 pages of it that afternoon and finished it three days later. Apparently it was what I needed. 

On top of the fast-pace and engaging story, I found it physically easier to read than the other books I've been reading lately. The edition I have isn't large print, but the typeface is noticeably larger than that in Late Victorian Holocausts or in the NYRB editions I so often find myself reading. (I know people love the NYRB design, but the print is so small!) I started noticing it was harder for me to read small print sometime in 2020 or 2021. I was always taking off my glasses to read books or look at my phone. A bit over a year ago, I got progressives for the first time and it definitely helped. I can usually read through the lower part of my lenses, but recently I've observed that's become harder too – and taking off my glasses no longer helps. They warned me when I got the progressives that I'd need to keep increasing the strength of the reading part of my lenses. I sort of wish that had scared me off, because now I wonder if progressives were the right choice at all. (Though I suppose the convenience of having a single pair of glasses that works for most uses is a plus.) A few weeks ago, I ordered a couple pairs of reading glasses online. I'm not sure if I just need to get used to them, or if I really ought to go get a proper prescription, but they don't seem to help much. They do magnify, but text doesn't seem clear when I'm using them. In any case, I don't want to blame my degenerating vision for my reading slump – I think there are a lot of other factors and distractions in my life – but I do wonder if it's playing a role. Especially having experienced the relative comfort of reading Provenance. 

As for Provenance itself, as usual I feel out of my depth when talking about science fiction. It was really good! I liked it! It did interesting things with gender and pronouns and relationships - family relationships, romantic relationships, inter-species relationships. It didn't blow my mind the way the Ancillary books – in particular Ancillary Justice – did. (Going back and reading my post about Ancillary Justice I had to laugh; I had no recollection of recommending it to the woman at the insurance call center!) But Provenance exists in the same universe as those books; their events are going on somewhere in the background, in the distance. And that itself was interesting. The characters in Provenance are as in awe of the AI described in the Ancillary books as I was reading about it. Reading Provenance made me want to see more parts of this universe. (Happily, I can. I look forward to reading Translation State before long.)

Eve Out of Her Ruins, by Ananda Devi

I've had Eve Out of Her Ruins on my to-read list for quite a while, so I was happy that my Women in Translation Book Club selected it. I originally picked it up to count for Mauritius in my world books reading project, but then I ended up reading another book from Mauritius: The Last Brother by Nathacha Appanah, which I read in 2018 -- the year I didn't write about the books I read. I don't remember a lot about The Last Brother but I do remember thinking it gave me a real sense of the island and its geography. The same cannot be said at all for Eve Out of Her Ruins. Perhaps it's a good thing I'd already read something that did give me that sense. In some way, Eve feels like it could take place in any impoverished community where people feel trapped in poverty and cycles of violence. 

The titular Eve is a girl from a poor and abusive family who at a young age finds she can use her body as currency, not to lift her out of poverty but to bring her small advantages where she had none. She believes she has control of the situations she puts herself in, but from the perspective of the reader, as we learn more about them, it's hard to accept her claims of control. The book follows Eve and a few of her peers, who take turns telling us the story, in the events leading up to and after a brutal murder that's pinned on a repeat-offender youth from Eve's community. It's a dark book, but circumstances being as they are, things could be darker still. There is something that could almost be described as hope at the end.

In Concrete, by Anne Garréta

I'm in Paris at the moment, and I finished In Concrete a week ago before I left. I didn't like it nearly as much as the other two Anne Garréta books I've read, but it put her in my mind to the point that I spent my first few days here checking every bookstore I came across for her books — with nearly no luck. On my second day of searching, I went to a shop specializing in LGBTQ books and they had one book of hers: this one. I didn't really consider buying it. Having read it in English, I'm fairly certain the French would be beyond my abilities. The book is full of word play: it must have been quite an undertaking to translate. I wondered, as I read it, how it was done. (There is an afterword by the translator, which I read in part.) I assume much of it wasn't so much literal as thematic. In Concrete is a strange book about a pair of sisters who, as girls, help their father with his mad home improvement (muddernization) schemes until one of them gets trapped in concrete. While their father is out seeking help, the free sister (who is also the book's narrator) recounts stories of their wild childhood to entertain her sister and pass the time, and this makes up about half the book. 

Eventually, I found a bookstore here where they offered to order me some Anne Garréta books, so if all works out I'll be heading home with French editions of Pas un jour and Sphinx.

The Tale of the 1002nd Night, by Joseph Roth

I started The Tale of the 1002nd Night just after finishing Dora Bruder. Something about Dora Bruder put me in mind of Joseph Roth, who was living in a hotel in Paris at the time of his death in 1939 – like Dora Bruder and her parents. A Jew born at the eastern reaches of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Roth spent most of his adult life living in hotels in various cities in an increasingly inhospitable Europe. I took a break from The Tale of the 1002nd Night to read two book club books (one of which I have yet to finish), but I went back to it yesterday. It seems this was his last novel, published a few months after his death. 

The book opens in the court of the Persian Shah sometime in the 19th Century, who in a fit of ennui decides to pay a visit to Vienna. The first several chapters of the book are something of a comedy in which the Shah sees a woman at the ball thrown in his honor and decides he'd like to spend the night with her. She's a married member of the nobility, so this certainly can't be allowed, however a Captain in the army who has been attached to the Shah and his retinue knows of a prostitute whom he believes resembles the desired woman enough that they can trick the Shah. The plan goes off and the Shah goes home, but the book stays with the characters in Vienna, whose lives take turn after unexpected turn. There was a point maybe three quarters of the way in when – taking it all in – I believed I saw the reference to The Thousand and One Nights. The story kept shifting, the central characters were rotating, the book had drifted so far from the Shah's first visit, but it was the event that changed the course of all the character's lives. The book wraps up nearly twenty years later when the Shah makes a return, but everything is different after all that time.

Scattered All Over the Earth, by Yoko Tawada

My reading continues to be irregular, but at least I have my Women In Translation book club to motivate me from time to time. Scattered All Over the Earth was our selection for this month. I previously read Tawada's book The Emissary, and this could almost be a companion book – one could imagine the events from The Emissary describing the situation in Japan as the events of Scattered All Over the Earth take place. 

In Scattered All Over the Earth, Japan (without ever being named) has disappeared from the map, though it's not entirely clear what has happened to it. Hiruko, a Japanese woman living in Europe – and stranded there now that her home country doesn't exist – sets off from Denmark to Germany to find one of her compatriots to she can speak Japanese again. This turns into an unexpected adventure with an accumulating number of traveling companions of various nationalities, and accompanying native tongues. 

While I think of Hiruko as the center of the book, we hear from all the characters who join in her travels, and the character who begins and ends the book is a Danish linguist named Knut, who hears Hiruko speaking a language of her own invention, which she uses to communicate across Scandinavia. Other characters speak German as a native or second language, or Danish as a first or second language. One character no longer speaks at all. English is used as a common language, but also avoided because of its associations with imperialism and domination. Much of this book is about language and communication, making it a particularly interesting choice for a book club about books in translation. 

Dora Bruder, by Patrick Modiano

My reading was going so slowly this year that I decided to slow it down even more by attempting something I've never done before: reading an entire book in French (or in any language besides English for that matter). It turned out to be a very satisfying exercise, so maybe I'll do it again. 

How I got here is a story of its own. I was in Rome for a week at the end of March. One night I went to a language and culture exchange meet-up. It was at this strange cafe in the basement of a large building. When you entered, it seemed like you were going into an underground garage, but when you got down there it was a huge space, with bookshelves all around and the books were free! I wasn't really looking at the books, but at some point in the evening I sat down at an out of the way table to eat my plate of pasta from the buffet (another odd feature of this cafe) and a glanced over and saw Patrick Modiano's name on a cover at the end of a nearby shelf, and then I saw it was a French edition. I read the first page to gauge my ability to read it and it seemed manageable to so I decided to take it. 

When I got home from Rome and unpacked I put the book on my coffee table pending shelving and over the next few days I kept seeing it and feeling drawn to it, so that Saturday I decided to give it a try. I wondered if I was being crazy, or trying to find an excuse for not reading, but actually I found I could read it – albeit very slowly. I think I averaged about 15 pages per hour; it took me 9 days to finish the 145-page book, though only a couple of those days included long, concentrated stretches. The book has nice short chapters, and plenty of stopping places even within chapters, making it ideal for a slow read.

The titular Dora Bruder is a Jewish girl of 15 born in Paris in 1926 to an Austrian father and Hungarian mother. It's hard to know the extent to which this is a work of fiction. The narrator (who seems to be Modiano – he recounts some details of his life that (according to Wikipedia at least) are true to Modiano's and at a couple points he also refers to his own books) comes across a notice in an old newspaper from 1941 stating that Dora Bruder's parents are looking for her and providing an address for any information. He is struck by the notice because the address is familiar to him, and over a period of a few years he seeks to find whatever information he can about Dora Bruder. What he ends up with is very little, but aspects of her experience – being sent to a convent school, then later being arrested and interned in a series of camps in France before her eventual deportation to Auschwitz – are filled in by other materials and accounts that Modiano provides. The gap that he's never able to fill is her 3-month sojourn as a runaway during the winter of 1941-1942 (sa fugue in French, which I really liked – I don't think we have a word for this in English in the noun form). Mixed with what Modiano learns or assumes about Dora Bruder's life, are memories from his own youth (and his own fugue) in very different circumstances – he is 20 years her junior, and observations of the physical changes in Paris between the 1940s, the 1960s, and the 1990s, which is the present day of the book. 

Dora Bruder's family lived in the 18th arrondissement, near the Porte de Clignancourt and the Marché aux Puces de Saint-Ouen. I visited that neighborhood when I was in Paris 2 years ago and went to that flea market. When I was walking back to the Metro, I came across a memorial to the deported Jews of Saint-Ouen. I spent a long time reading these names. When the book mentioned the Marché aux Puces, I immediately remembered this site (as well as a plaque on a nearby building indicating that it had been a depot for explosives and munitions used by the Resistance). Saint-Ouen is actually beyond the 18th, just outside the Boulevard Périphérique that separates central Paris from the banlieues, but it's a short walk away from the address given for Dora Bruder's parents. These would have been her neighbors, people she passed in the street. 

Carte Blanche, by Carlo Lucarelli

Facing a quiet evening ahead early last week, I decided to pick up something new to read rather than one of the two books I was already in the midst of. With an upcoming trip to Italy in mind, I pulled out the appealingly short Carte Blanche by Carlo Lucarelli, which I picked up a few years ago at my old favorite thrift shop on Third Avenue. I read about half the book that very evening. The next morning, I read a few more pages before work. I had contractors in my house that week doing work on my kitchen and they arrived that morning half an hour before my workday. I got out of their way and brought the book with me to the office to get some reading done there, and that was the start of the whole mess. 

When I'm reading a book, it lives on the coffee table across from my couch, or in my purse if I'm taking it out with me, but once I'm back home it returns to the coffee table before long. I don't read in bed, so I don't have bedside table books. My books are in the living room. The kitchen work had compacted my living room. The coffee table where the book should go was pushed away in a corner. In any case, I brought the book upstairs to my office. I remember bringing it to my bedroom at one point and then, I thought, back to my office. And then I lost track of it. I hadn't been loving the book, but it was so short I was determined to finish it. I couldn't understand how I might have lost it. Every couple days I would puzzle over it briefly, then forget about it. It seemed bound to turn up, but I was fairly certain it wasn't in my office or bedroom, the last places I remembered having had it. There just wasn't a place for it to hide in either room. 

Two days ago, I decided to just give up. Some people I knew were starting up a new book as part of an ongoing book club and I decided it was a good enough excuse to consider Carte Blanche abandoned. After work on Wednesday, I sat down on the couch and read one chapter of the new book. Later that evening, as I was having dinner at my dining table, which was still pushed close to my couch for the kitchen work (though it had finished a week earlier), I noticed a little blue-green corner sticking out from between two pillows on the couch. My missing book showed up just when I was ready to move on. This evening after work I finished it. 

Carte Blanche is a crime novel set toward the end of WWII in Italy, when the many competing military and political powers each had its own police force, muddying authority and politicizing crimes. When an influential, womanizing friend to the fascists is killed, the policeman at the center of the book simply wants to do his job without being part of a larger agenda, but this proves impossible. In a long foreword, the author explains how his inspiration for the novel resulted from his own academic research into the many competing police forces during that period of Italian history, and a particular policeman who ended up serving in many of them – even those from regimes at opposite ends of the political spectrum. He believed himself beyond the political, that being a policeman he could stand outside those forces. While on the one hand, this book showed that to be impossible, on the other, it didn't question that as an ideal itself. As an avid watcher and occasional reader of mysteries, this is something I grapple with not infrequently – I'm familiar with the concept of copaganda. I don't intend to entirely defend the genre, but the cozy murder mysteries I consume are practically in the realm of fantasy. Whereas Carte Blanche wanted to portray an honorable cop in a flawed system. (This is a whole genre of its own, I know, but not one I consume typically.) But I can't accept the idea of an honorable cop serving a fascist regime. 

Her Mother's Mother's Mother and Her Daughters, by Maria José Silveira, and Drunk on Love, by Jasmine Guillory

I started Her Mother's Mother's Mother and Her Daughters back in late October. I read it for a week or two and I was enjoying it, but this was during the period when I was about six weeks out from my move with a vacation to Italy right in the middle and I was just terrible about reading. As readers of this blog will know, I measure my reading in years. I suppose many people do. I have a sort of tradition at the end of the year, when I allow myself to give up on books that I started at some point during the year and never got around to finishing. Some books don't even make it to this stage, I'll just abandon them outright, but this annual reset keeps me from feeling the weight of unfinished books hanging over me indefinitely. The process for me formally abandoning a book was to mark it abandoned in Goodreads (I've stopped using Goodreads this year and moved things over to The Story Graph, so I guess now it will happen there) and to either get rid of the book or, in some cases, to return it to my shelf (usually with the bookmark still in place, so I guess these cases aren't really total abandonments). Her Mother's Mother's Mother and Her Daughters would have been destined for this fate except that, surprisingly enough, my Women In Translation book club selected it as our next book. (I was the person who added it to the list we voted on, but I didn't really expect it to win.) And so I kept it out, knowing I needed to return to it in time for our next meeting in early March. Last Thursday I did return to it and I finished it this past Wednesday.

Her Mother's Mother's Mother and Her Daughters is the second Brazilian novel I've read, but in many ways it felt like the first. (The actual first was Clarice Lispector's Near to the Wild Heart, which I read some 20 years ago.) It spans 500 years of Brazilian history told, as the title suggests, matrilineally. Each chapter picks up the story of a new mother/daughter, following them down through the generations, and through their lives and experiences we get a full history of Brazil since the arrival of Europeans. But along with the story of the country, we get intimate portraits of these women some with wonderfully long lives, some with tragically short; some wealthy, some poor, some enslaved; some urban, some rural. I believe Silveira attempted to capture every angle of Brazilian life, every corner of the country as much as could possibly be done in under 400 pages. It's an impressive feat. 

Before my return to Her Mother's Mother's Mother and Her Daughters, and while also in the midst of reading two other books, I took a little break and read Jasmine Guillory's latest book, Drunk on Love. It delivered in all the ways I expected it to – funny, relaxing, with a satisfying end. Jasmine Guillory's books always include plenty of food, and this one – set in Napa – left me craving arancini and wine. Her books are escapist for me, not just because of the romance but every character is out there doing their best. Friends are supportive in exactly the ways they should be. Family dramas exist, but are resolved or turn out to be one big misunderstanding. The conflicts that arise loom large for the characters, but are on some level trivial and you know they'll be worked out. I never knew this was something I was looking for in books – and, to be honest, most of the time it's not. But now and then it can be pure pleasure to read something that's comforting, that you know will resolve in the way that you want it to, and that will make you laugh along the way. 

The Bookshop, by Penelope Fitzgerald

After finishing Shrines of Gaiety, I briefly went back to Midnight in the Century (I suspect I'll continue to work my way through it slowly), but then I had a rather harrowing Tuesday morning. I woke up around 5am and was vaguely aware of a cat meowing continuously somewhere outside my window. I dozed for another hour or so, then got up, showered and came downstairs just before 7am. The meowing was still going, and seemed to get louder as I walked into my back room, which opens out to my backyard. I decided to investigate. The meows seemed to stop when I went outside, and I looked around my yard and what I could see of my neighbors', but didn't see a cat. Just as I was about to head back inside, I noticed a paw sticking out between two wooden fenceposts in my neighbor's yard. I realized the cat was trapped there, with one of its back legs stuck in the fence. On my side of the fence, there was a second chain link fence, topped with concertina wire. The cat must have tried to climb under the wire and over the fences and gotten its paw caught jumping down. I couldn't get a good look at her from my yard because, except for her paw, she was on the other side of the wood fence. I brought out a ladder and put on a coat, hat, and gloves for protection, and got a towel to try wrap the cat in. I had to lift the concertina wire and duck under (which is why I wore the hat) it to be able to grab her on the other side of the fence. She squirmed and hissed and put up quite a fight even in her state of immobility when I tried to close the towel around her, but I was able to get enough weight off her leg that I could twist it the right way and pull it up out from between the fence posts. I thought I might be able to pull her through to my side wrapped in the towel, but she bolted as soon as she was freed. From what I could tell in the brief moment I could see her running off, she seemed okay so hopefully her leg didn't sustain too much damage, but the whole experience left me quite shaken. I came back inside and had my coffee and breakfast and I decided I wanted a book I could curl up into for comfort and warmth. I looked at my shelves and thought The Bookshop might do the trick.

I'm not sure in retrospect if it was quite the book I was looking for – in fact, the end left me a little gutted – but for the hour or so that I read it on Tuesday morning, it was just the thing. A youngish widow in post war England decides to open a bookshop in an out of the way coastal town in East Anglia. There are forces in the town for her and against her, but things seem to come together for her – until they don't. This is only the second book of Penelope Fitzgerald's that I've read, but her simple, clear voice with beautiful attention to details is just how I remembered it. This was a lovely little book. 

Shrines of Gaiety, by Kate Atkinson

I've become such a slow reader. After finishing the Marías two weeks into January, I started Midnight in the Century by Victor Serge, who has stuck in my mind since I read Unforgiving Years in 2021. But like Unforgiving Years, it was slow going. I would find my mind wandering, so I only read little bits at a time. Last Friday, I settled in to read it and after a few pages decided it just wasn't what I was in the mood for. The weekend prior, I had gone to New Orleans where I found Kate Atkinson's Shrines of Gaiety in a Little Free Library. It was an exciting find, because I'm a fan of Kate Atkinson and yet I hadn't even known she had a new book out last year. It was sitting on my coffee table when I picked up – and put back down – Midnight in the Century. I thought it might be more my speed, and it was.

I enjoy Kate Atkinson both for her historical literary fiction and her Jackson Brodie detective novels. Shrines of Gaiety is sort of a blend of the two. It takes place in the nightclubs of interwar London. There has been a string of missing girls and unsolved murders, police corruption is suspected, and a detective is determined to clean things up. The novel follows a wide cast of characters in the London nightlife scene. I was reminded of Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies, which I read many years ago – though I've seen the film adaptation of it, Bright Young Things, much more recently. Specifically there's a gossip columnist in Shrines of Gaiety who reminded me of Simon Balcairn (played by James MacAvoy in the movie). Shrines of Gaiety takes a similarly dark view of the "bright young things," though they are peripheral figures in the story, which focuses more on the people behind the scenes – the nightclub owners, managers, dance hostesses, the dirty cops. Among the central characters are two resourceful young women (one a girl, really) and they give the book its heart. This was a fun read, and apparently just what I needed.

All Souls, by Javier Marías

Once again, I've started the year with Javier Marías. This marks the eighth year I've done so, but the first time I've read one of his books since his death in September of last year. This made the weight of choosing which book to read seem significant, knowing that the number of books remaining is finite. His most recent book, Tomás Nevinson, still hasn't been released in English. It's due out this March I believe, and there may be some early works still untranslated. There may also have been something left nearly done that could be published posthumously, but basically his collection of works is now complete. 

When Marías died, I took it as an opportunity to order every book of his available in English that I didn't already own. This worked out to be three novels, two books of essays, and a tiny volume about Venice. I considered going right back to the beginning and reading Voyage Along the Horizon, his earliest novel available in English, which he started at age 19 and was published when he was 21. But I didn't think it would give me what I wanted. Last year I started the year with his second earliest book available in English, which was published 15 years after Voyage Along the Horizon. I'll admit to knowing next to nothing about the three other books that predate The Man of Feeling, which have not been translated, but operating on the assumption that it might be considered his first mature work, I decided to proceed chronologically from there and so I started All Souls, which is also notable for being the first book of his to be translated into English. Beginning with All Souls his books have been routinely translated and released in English in the expected two years or so following their Spanish publication.

With All Souls I did feel I was getting the true Marías – in short, it gave me what I wanted. This narrator was never named (though at one point he is given a false name). There's a Luisa (the first Luisa?) although she's not the woman at the center of the book. That woman – to my shock – was named Clare*. (I believe I've read only two** other books that featured Clares: Passing and The Road to Damietta, a book I read in middle school about Saint Francis and Saint Clare.) There's the Oxford don and spy, Toby Rylands, who shows up in several other books. In this one, I think, we get more of an origin story for him than in any of the others. There's Oxford itself, which plays a part in so many of Marías books. All Souls featured the usual long ruminations on what appear to be tangential topics, which of course come back in the most unexpected context. 

If I am to proceed from here chronologically, the next steps would be to reread A Heart So White and Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me, but I think I may jump ahead instead to the next book I haven't read: The Dark Back of Time. Near the end of All Souls that book's title pops up in the text. But once I've read that, I will have read every novel except the early works and the most recent. There's no question in my mind that I want to reread some – perhaps all – of his books, the question is only of order and timing. 

* Evidently, this same Clare shows up in the Your Face Tomorrow books, a detail I'm surprised to have forgotten. 

** A google search has reminded me of another fictional Clare in a book I've read. It's the rarer male usage: Clare Quilty from Lolita

2022 in Books

The last year has not been a great year for reading for me. I finished 41 books in 2022, which is certainly a respectable number of books, but I had many false starts and long spells of no reading. (I didn't finish a single book between October 3 and December 9!)  During the latter half of the year, I blamed my poor reading on my impending move, which happened in mid-December but was in the works since July or August. My problems really began before then, so I can't blame the move for everything. January started off strong. I think the stumbles started in March or April, and they continued throughout the year. I allowed myself to fall out of my daily reading habit and I often found I wasn't in the mood to read. And then I kept feeling that I had selected the wrong book. The end result, though I haven't kept count, is that I believe I read an unusual number of very short books last year, which I read in the space of a day or two while on more days than not I didn't read at all. 

In the order that I finished them, the books I read in 2022 were:

• The Man of Feeling, by Javier Marías
• One Last Stop, by Casey McQuiston
• The Spectre of Alexander Wolf, by Gaito Gazdanov
• My Life as a Fake, by Peter Carey
• Childhood, by Tove Ditlevsen
• My Sister the Serial Killer, by Oyinkan Braithwaite
• Youth, by Tove Ditlevesen
• Dependency, by Tove Ditlevsen
• Affections, by Rodrigo Hasbún
• American Spy, by Lauren Wilkinson
• Last Night in Nuuk, by Niviak Korneliussen
• The Sheltering Sky, by Paul Bowles
• Gods of Jade and Shadow, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
• The Story of My Teeth, by Valeria Luiselli
• In the Distance, by Hernan Diaz
• Big Sky, by Kate Atkinson
• Garden by the Sea, by Mercè Rodoreda
• Home Reading Service, by Fabio Morábito
• Loving Day, by Mat Johnson
• Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows, by Balli Kaur Jaswal
• Justine, by Iben Mondrup
• Persuasion, by Jane Austen
• The Kiss Quotient, by Helen Hoang
• Lucky Breaks, by Yevgenia Belorusets
• The Trees, by Percival Everett
• Tremor of Intent, by Anthony Burgess
• Rattlebone, by Maxine Clair
• The Dutch House, by Ann Patchett
• The Mysterious Affair at Styles, by Agatha Christie
• Breasts and Eggs, by Mieko Kawakami
• Saint Sebastian's Abyss, by Mark Haber
• Oliver VII, by Antal Szerb
• Go, Went, Gone, by Jenny Erpenbeck
• Happiness, as Such, by Natalia Ginzburg
• Not One Day, by Anne Garréta
• Rum Punch, by Elmore Leonard
• The Moon and the Bonfires, by Cesare Pavese
• Minor Detail, by Adania Shibli
• Martha, Jack & Shanco, by Caryl Lewis
• So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighborhood, by Patrick Modiano
• Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in the Piazza Vittorio, by Amara Lakhous

And the stats:

For the second consecutive year (and second year ever), more than half the books I read last year were by women. Apart from the U.S., which only accounts for 8 of the books I read last year, I read books from 18 countries including 5 new ones (marked in bold): Australia, Bolivia, Denmark, England, France, Germany, Greenland, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Nigeria, Palestine, Russia, Singapore, Spain,  Ukraine, and Wales. This is worse than last year on both counts. Two of the books I read (Persuasion and Tremor of Intent) were rereads. The only nonfiction books I read were the three Tove Ditlevsen volumes. 

Some years I just know what my favorite book of the year was. This is not one of those years. I think the honor goes to The Trees. In the Distance would be the other contender. Other notable mentions include Garden by the Sea, which I loved almost as much as A Broken Mirror – one of my favorite books read in 2018; The Spectre of Alexander Wolf and Justine, both of which had twists that have really stayed with me; The Story of My Teeth, which I'm really glad I decided to try after not really enjoying the previous Valeria Luiselli book I read; and Not One Day, which was just unexpectedly beautiful and gave me a new way of thinking about writing.