On Lighthouses, Such Fine Boys, The Word is Murder

I could have sworn I'd taken a picture of Jazmina Barrera's On Lighthouses, but I don't seem to have. I also could have sworn I still had it, but I can't seem to find it anywhere. I'm sure it will turn up in an hour or so, when I no longer need it. 

On Lighthouses was the December selection for my women in translation book club. It's a bit different for us – we mostly read fiction. On Lighthouses would, I suppose, best be described as a collection of connected personal essays. Jazmina Berrara visits a handful of lighthouses and we get a little bit of history, a little bit of literary analysis, a little bit of personal anecdote while she writes vaguely about each one and the context of her visit. It's a small book, and the collection of lighthouses she visits feels haphazard: 3 are in New York (2 in the city, one on Long Island) presumably because she lived here when she was writing it. The others are in the pacific northwest and Spain. Perhaps I'm forgetting one? I found the bits about the history of lighthouses most interesting, while some of the meaning and metaphor she ascribed to lighthouses felt forced. But now and then it was beautiful. I did immediately order a copy for a friend of mine who just completed work on a 2-hour special for PBS about the lighthouses of Wisconsin. 

After finishing On Lighthouses, I started and then set aside two other long books (I think I was getting ahead of myself with the upcoming holiday break) before turning to the always reliable Patrick Modiano. Another five star book from Modiano! This one actually took me more than a week to read, but that's because I didn't read on several days. Covering the usual Modiano territory, Such Fine Boys is an account of the students and faculty from the Valvert School, a private boarding school for wealthy children, who you come to suspect have ended up there for some particular reason. Each chapter focuses on a different student. Some are narrated in the first person by one Patrick Modiano, while sometimes he is in conversation with another former student or faculty member who takes over the storytelling for a chapter. The stories span from the era of occupied France to the present-day of the book (published in France in 1982). There is a near complete absence of parenting, a surprising intermingling of wealth and seediness, a dark current running under it all. In these vignettes, there are echoes of stories told more completely in other Modiano books. I was reminded particularly of Villa Triste. Then there's a story of a student getting caught up in a roundup in occupied Paris, "one of the roundups that, in the past few months, had routinely preceded convoys to the east." Modiano's own father was picked up this way, and these roundups are described in detail in Dora Bruder. I was, of course, delighted to find some of the usual Modiano places turning up: Parc Monceau with its merry-go-round. Modiano's Paris is a place that may only exist in memory and books, at this point, but I haven't stopped trying to find it. I'll be in Paris again in a few months. Perhaps I'll devote a day to visiting the locations that turn up again and again in his books. 

My father was here for Christmas and brought with him The Word is Murder by Anthony Horowitz. He finished it while here and left it behind for me to read. I previously read Horowitz's Magpie Murders, but I mainly know Horowitz as the creator of one of my favorite TV programs: Foyle's War. This made The Word is Murder rather a fun read, because Horowitz narrates the novel as himself: creator of the popular TV program Foyle's War (and of Midsomer Murders, and writer of a few episodes of Poirot, and author of a popular children's book series). The premise is that he has been brought on by a former detective who advised him on some TV programs to write a book about him as he investigates a the case of a woman who was murdered on the very day she arranged her own funeral. The book is full of references to real programs and people, and it's difficult to know what aspects of the book are fiction (was Horowitz hired by Spielberg to write the Tintin sequel?) and what is based on reality (an especially intriguing note in the acknowledgements suggests that at least one aspect of the mystery may be based on a real event). This was a fun mystery, which I finished in 24 hours. It was just the kind of book I needed on my holiday break. 

Four Seasons in Rome, by Anthony Doerr

After finishing my Szerb re-reads, I decided to continue with the Italian theme with Four Seasons in Rome by Anthony Doerr. A few weeks back I was looking at my shelves for something else, when I noticed it and pulled it out to potentially read ahead of my planned trip to Rome over Thanksgiving. I had forgotten I had this book, or why exactly I had gotten it. I can only assume it was on a books to read about Italy list. 

I was already feeling very primed for my visit to Rome from the Rome section of Journey By Moonlight, but just a few pages into Four Seasons in Rome I had the feeling that I had really chosen well. Doerr's book is not just about Rome, but about a year he spent living in Monteverde on the Janiculum (or Gianicolense) hill Rome, which is precisely where I would be staying on my trip. I was looking forward to staying on that side of the Tiber and getting to know the Trastevere end of Rome (Janiculum and Trastevere also feature in Journey By Moonlight as it happens), and here was a book about precisely that. 

Quite early on in Four Seasons in Rome, Doerr mentions the Porta di San Pancrazio and the Fontana dell'Acqua Paola (il fontanone) and I made those among my first stops on the day I arrived in Rome. To reach il fontanone from my Roman apartment, I had to walk up to the very top of the Janiculum hill and then a little bit back down to the point where the fountain faces out over the entire city. The fountain had also been recommended to me by the women in whose apartment I was staying. They expressed their surprise that it was not a site prominently featured in most guidebooks to Rome, comparing it favorably to the Trevi Fountain. As I approached the fountain from behind, with the view out to Rome ahead of me, I realized I had actually been there before. I discovered the fountain and the adjacent overlook after a visit to the Orto Botanico (Botanic Garden) di Roma, which occupies a hillside in Trastevere, on my previous to Rome in March of last year. The main entrance of the botanic garden is near the bottom of the hill, but you can take a winding path through the garden up to the top of the hill and if you exit through the gate there you will find yourself right beside il fontanone. 

When you turn your back to the fountain and look out at the city from the viewpoint on Via Garibaldi, you are just above the courtyard of some sort of academic institution and on that day in March of 2023 when I visited, down in that courtyard a woman who appeared to be cleaner or worker of some sort was taking a cigarette break. The light was so good and the shadows so stark. In the months between then and now, I had forgotten all about the monumental fountain and the dramatic view of the city, but I remembered very clearly looking down from above at this woman having a cigarette and feeling that I was peering in on something very private. There were a dozen or more people standing along the fence just above her, but she seemed completely unaware of any of us. It's one of my favorite photos from that trip. 

As the title suggests, Four Seasons in Rome is an account of a year in Rome and it's divided into a section for each season. I read the first section, Autumn, and part of Winter before I left for Rome. Again, the timing felt very apt, as I would be going to Rome just as autumn was coming to an end. I finished Winter and read some of Spring while there. I read the last of Spring on the plane home, and then I read summer here on my couch in Brooklyn, where it currently feels very wintry. I have only been to Rome in winter and the very winter-adjacent parts of fall and spring. I've experienced mild temperatures in Rome, but never what would be described as real heat. I've experienced Rome in torrential rain, in a sudden and intense hail storm, and in a freak snow storm that shut down the entire city for a day. Reading Doerr made me want to experience Rome in the springtime, and reaffirmed my feeling that I'd prefer not to be there in summer. Seasons aside, Doerr's observations about Rome beautifully articulate what I love about the city – its history, its lifestyle and pace, its beauty (and occasional ugliness). I can't imagine reading this book and not falling in love with Rome, even if you'd never been there. 

Journey by Moonlight (new translation), and The Third Tower, by Antal Szerb

I heard from a friend online that there was a new translation by — Peter V. Czipott — of Journey By Moonlight and I had to get it. It was a UK publisher, but conveniently I had a scheduled trip to Scotland and I was able to get it (though I did have to have it special ordered) from the wonderful Topping & Co. bookshop in Edinburgh.

I read the earlier Len Rix translation in 2019 and promptly declared Journey By Moonlight one of my all time favorite books. In the five years that transpired between my reading of the two translations, I can't remember things clearly enough to state that one is better than the other. What did happen in those intervening years is I visited Italy four additional times, including my first (and second) visit to Venice, my first visit to Siena, and return trips to Florence, Ravenna, and Rome (twice) — each of which plays a part in the book, and each of which I had visited once before (the former two more than 20 years ago). In other words, I was much more familiar with the territory of the book than the first time around. (Though I do still need to follow Mihály's path through Umbria, which I have mapped out thoroughly.) 

It was a real pleasure to revisit Journey by Moonlight, though it was much slower going this time. Sometimes I wonder what happened to my capacity for reading, and while I think it's partly due to spending too much time scrolling, I've also had a houseguest these last couple months who frequently talks to me in the mornings right when I might otherwise be reading. (Hell is other people.) I still identified so strongly with Mihály's struggle between the attractions of the bourgeois life that is expected of him and his belief that deep inside, in his true self, he is not meant for that life. I'm articulating this poorly, but I occasionally joke that I am the token normie among my friend group. My job and my home and my lifestyle feel in conflict with my inner self. Not all the time — only when I stop to think about it, or when I read something like Journey By Moonlight that brings it to the front of my mind.

The most striking thing for me on this reading of Journey By Moonlight was Szerb's description of Rome — a city I am much more familiar with now than I was when I read the book five years ago. He spends a good deal of time talking about the Etruscans and the museum devoted to them at Villa Giulia — a museum I visited on my 2022 trip to Rome. I now think it's quite likely that it was on my to-see list because of Szerb, but if it that's true, I had forgotten. Mihály also visits the non-Catholic cemetery, a place I tried to go on my first visit to Rome (it was closed due to snow), but which I have now visited several times and count as one of my favorite places in the city. Szerb's accounts of Rome ring so true to my own experiences of visiting the city 90 years later. Of course, 90 years is no time at all in the history of Rome.

On finishing Journey By Moonlight, I decided to go right into a reread of Szerb's travel memoir, The Third Tower. Once again, it had me in tears on the second page, but it was so great to read it with Journey By Moonlight fresh in my mind. Reading The Third Tower, I I feel such a strong connection with Szerb. Like me, he was obsessed with San Vitale as a teenager (who the hell is obsessed with San Vitale as a teenager?!). On my first visit to Italy, in 2001, Ravenna was the only place that was a must-visit for me. (I found Italy disappointing on the whole on that visit and it took me 14 years to return.) I revisited Ravenna and San Vitale about a year ago, and when I read Szerb's chapters on the city and the mosaics they described perfectly my own feelings. There's a chapter of The Third Tower I had forgotten, in which Szerb talks about his own internal conflict that is parallel to Mihály's, called "The Confession of the Bourgeios." He puts it more plainly in his memoir than in the novel. He rebels against it, but he doesn't feel at home without the bourgeois comforts which he is accustomed to — and yet, at the same time, he is not really at home in the bourgeois world either. 

I will be in Rome in a few days.  This time, I'll be staying near Trastevere, a neighborhood that features prominently in Journey By Moonlight, and where I have not spent a lot of time on my previous visits to the city. I'm looking forward to seeing it with Szerb's words at the front of my mind.

Near to the Wild Heart, by Clarice Lispector

I first became aware of Clarice Lispector and her book, Near to the Wild Heart, a little more than 20 years ago. I was working as an administrative assistant at Harvard and taking Literature classes with my employee benefit. I took two classes with a professor who I thought was just brilliant and in my memory she told me Near to the Wild Heart was her favorite book. We didn't read it for either of the classes I took with her, but I decided to read it on my own at the time. I found it pretty impenetrable, but I finished it. I didn't remember much more than a mood.

A decade or so later, it seemed like Clarice Lispector was having a real moment. New translations of all her works were released, and it felt like suddenly she was a favorite of the social media literati. I had this vague memory of a book I struggled through in the back of my mind, but between her sudden popularity and the remembered admiration of my professor, I thought I must have missed something. Over the years, I considered rereading it, or trying the book of short stories I had by her to see if those were more my speed. I finally got around to it because Near to the Wild Heart was selected for my Women in Translation book club. 

But before I get there, let me share a funny (to me, at least) aside about my old copy of Near to the Wild Heart. It was a book we had at home, I remembered, long before I new anything about it. I think because my father worked with the publisher, but alternatively it was maybe because my mother had an interest in Brazil. Or maybe it was both. In any case, the 1991 translation published by New Directions was a book I knew by name. I thought that when I read it in the early 2000s, I must have gotten the copy from my parents house to read. And maybe I did, no one will know at this point. I thought I had held on to it after reading it, but I wasn't positive. I moved several times. Books came and went. In the fall of 2022, I packed up the bulk of my library without documenting it and it went into storage. Also that fall I was clearing out my mom's old house, where she had left a bookshelf of books she didn't want to move to her new home. I found Near to the Wild Heart and I thought it must have been the family copy I had read, so I set it aside to keep when I got rid of most of her other books. Of course when I unpacked my own library, I found my copy there – apparently I had gotten my own, or my mom had. In my mom's copy, I found Varig airline boarding passes from one of my mom's trips to Brazil. How like my mom – and how like me – to pick Clarice Lispector to read on the plane to Brazil.

So, in the last week, I returned to Near to the Wild Heart after more than 20 years. I was hopeful that between the new translation and the 20+ years of life I had lived, I would find it more approachable, but I can't say I did. Parts of it became familiar as I read it again. The mood I remembered came back instantly. There were paragraphs here and there that leapt out at me in their beauty, but overall the book left me cold. It's brimming with metaphors that I couldn't parse; where they should have provided a feeling, they left me confused. I felt rather dumb reading the book, and I occasionally had to remind myself that I am capable of reading – and enjoying – challenging books that lack plot. I guess Near to the Wild Heart just isn't for me. 

The Rings of Saturn and The Emigrants, by W.G. Sebald

As of this afternoon, I have completed the loose trilogy (if they even are that) that is Vertigo, The Emigrants, and The Rings of Saturn, but it turns out I read them out of order. The Emigrants was the first of Sebald's books to be published in English, in 1996, four years after it came out in the German original. The translation of The Rings of Saturn came two years later, in 1998, three years after it came out in German, and Vertigo came last in 1999, but it is the oldest of the three, having been published in German in 1990. I knew the English language publications didn't track the German originals, but I had somehow gotten it in my head that the proceeded backwards, and so I read The Rings of Saturn ahead of The Emigrants, which was a reread for me after nearly 20 years. I don't think the order particularly matters, though having read them all now back to back I do believe I see a progression in Sebald's style. 

The Rings of Saturn is the longest of the three books, and it covers the broadest set of material. Each of its ten (if memory serves) chapters covers a range of semi-connected topics that are outlined in the table of contents, but the writing itself moves seamlessly among these topics, while the table of contents itself seems almost nonsensical. The overarching framework for the book is a walking trip Sebald took along the depressed coast of East Anglia, but his meandering thoughts on this trip provide a history of the region then proceed to take him far from the shores of England. 

The conditions in which I read The Rings of Saturn were less ideal than when I read Vertigo immediately before. My life somehow got much fuller in those days and lacked long stretches for dedicated reading. These conditions worsened even more by the time I got to The Emigrants, the day after Labor Day. There was construction going on in my house, and then I had a 3 day work trip to DC taking up a whole weekend with extra long workdays. When I came back home, there were still two more days of construction and the following day I had a long term houseguest arriving. I couldn't read The Emigrants the way I would have liked to.

Like Vertigo, The Emigrants is divided into four sections. The sections are unequal in length. I was able to read the first one in a single sitting, which I think is the ideal way to do it. The second I also read all at once, or almost so. The third and fourth sections are longer, and my arrival at them coincided with the increased constraints on my time. Perhaps I should have waited altogether rather than read them in little pieces as I did. I only started the book nine days ago, but already my memory of the first two sections is faint. Still, the reread was helpful because about all I remembered from my first reading all those years ago was a sort of mood. 

When I typed up my post about Vertigo, I wrote, 

I think some other things put me off reading Sebald for a while: (1) I started to associate him with my youth, and (2) As I read other things over the years, I saw a mix of similar work and imitations (or, to be more kind, works likely inspired by him), and where once he had felt quite unique, my sense of his singularity diminished.

I've been thinking about both these points more as I've continued to read Sebald. The former particularly as I was reading The Emigrants, because I had read it in my (relative) youth. Reading it this time around and recognizing references here and there, I kept finding myself wondering what I knew when I read it in 2003, and what I had learned since, (and also, very occasionally, what I might have forgotten since then). But it's actually the latter point I wanted to talk about more: the books that have reminded me of Sebald.

The first book I remember reading and thinking, "this is doing what Sebald was doing," is the beautiful Belgian novel War and Turpentine by Stefan Hertmans. (I see the Times noticed the similarities too.) It made my "also good" list from my 2018 year in review. Javier Marías' Dark Back of Time also has a similar construction (semi-autobiographical, includes pictures), and when I read it I did wonder if he had read Sebald, but Dark Back of Time (published in 1998) is nearly contemporaneous with Sebald's books, and so I also wondered if this was a micro trend in literature in the 1990s. With 25+ years of perspective, this explanation feels plausible. It's a very postmodern approach. But I was surprised to realize that Marías reminds me of Sebald in some ways I might not have thought about if reading Dark Back of Time hadn't juxtaposed them for comparison in my mind. The way Marías follows tangents and tells history is not unlike Sebald. As I was reading The Rings of Saturn, the book that most came to mind was Daša Drndić's EEG, which made quite an impression on me. I don't recall there being any pictures in EEG, but that book similarly winds through history pulling out detailed, possibly forgotten fragments that tell a larger story. None of this is meant to diminish Sebald's writing – I was incredibly moved reading these three books. If anything, I probably appreciated them more at this stage of my life, when I have read these other books and bring more to my reading of Sebald.

Vertigo, by W.G. Sebald

I read Austerlitz and The Emigrants around the time the former came out – in the early 2000s. If memory serves, my father read The Emigrants first and gave a copy to me and my then husband. I think my ex read it before I did. At that time, Sebald was having a sudden burst of popularity, and all my ex's art school colleagues became obsessed with him. And then, just at the point when everyone around me seemed to be talking about him, he died. This is the way I remember the order of events, but my own records suggest I didn't read Sebald until 2003 – more than a year after his death. I suppose both things can be true: my father and my ex and his friends may have been reading and obsessing about Sebald a year and a half or two before I got around to him. I have recorded the dates I read Austerlitz and The Emigrants in Goodreads as March 2003 and August 2003 respectively, but these are estimates. Back in 2003 I kept a hand-written list of every book I read on a scrap of paper, which I duly typed up at the end of the year and recorded on my Livejournal. A few years ago, I deleted my Livejournal, but before doing that I reproduced all my year-end book posts in this blog for posterity (because this has become above all a record of my reading). My 2003 in books post is the oldest on there is; it is here. The fact that it says "Not in order" confounds me. In any case, you will see that Austerlitz is not on this list, so I guess I must have read it before 2003. I started using Goodreads around 2007 or 2008 and at some point I went back and tried to add every book I'd read before that with estimated read dates, and I guess I got Austerlitz wrong. Things are starting to make more sense.

After reading The Emigrants more than 20 years ago, I decided I had done it all backwards. It was my understanding that Vertigo, The Rings of Saturn, and The Emigrants were a loose trilogy and I wanted to read them in order. Clearly, it wasn't a priority. I'm honestly confused because I'm sure my ex and I must have had all four books, but for a long time I only had the two I had read, or so I seem to remember. Maybe he got them all in the breakup and I started over collecting them? That seems plausible. Vertigo was the last one I got my hands on, but that was still several years ago. I think some other things put me off reading Sebald for a while: (1) I started to associate him with my youth, and (2) As I read other things over the years, I saw a mix of similar work and imitations (or, to be more kind, works likely inspired by him), and where once he had felt quite unique, my sense of his singularity diminished.

It's hard to pinpoint quite what inspired me to pick Vertigo off my shelf after finishing City of Laughter on Saturday, but I somehow felt it would be just the thing – and it was. I was only a few pages into Vertigo when I got the sense I was reading it at the "right time" – a sense that grew as I read on and absolutely peaked when I got to page 231 while reading last night and came across a reference to Fellini's Amarcord, a movie I had watched for the first time the night before. It was a coincidence that felt like magic, reminding me of the beautiful and uncanny sensation I had reading The Garden Next Door. 

The first thing that made me glad I was reading Vertigo now rather than 20 years ago is that it's full of snippets in Italian, and now I understand them (and also have a phone with a translation app where I can easily look up the meaning of any words I don't know). This was a small thing, but then in the second section, when Sebald or the narrator is recounting his own travels to Venice and later, in the following section, Kafka's travels to Venice, I found myself so thankful that I had my own mental images of Venice to overlay these stories upon. Often, my reading and traveling go in the other direction: I read about a place and it makes me want to visit. My own first visit to Venice must have been inspired by reading Antal Szerb's Journey By Moonlight. I don't remember precisely when I decided to go there as part of my 2019 Thanksgiving trip to Italy, but I see that I booked my hotel there in August 2019, exactly 2 weeks after finishing Journey By Moonlight. Venice plays a rather small part in the book, but it was just enough to make me need to see it. 

Sebald, and Kafka, whose tracks he is following, went from Venice onward to Verona and beyond to Desenzano and Riva on Lake Garda and with those movements, my personal connection to the landscape ended, but it didn't matter: I was already caught up in the magic. The final section of the book is set in Sebald's childhood home town in Bavaria, just across the Austrian border, and here I had no mental image at all, but Sebald's description of the landscape and the village and the houses he visits are so detailed and precise I could build my own.

City of Laughter, by Temim Fruchter

Temim Fruchter is an old acquaintance of mine. Someone I haven't seen in several years, but have followed with interest from a distance on social media or through word from mutual friends. When her book came out earlier this year, I looked forward to reading it. She did a book event at Books Are Magic with Mara Wilson that I put in my calendar, only to discover a couple days before that it was sold out. "Congratulations, Temim!" I thought. I kept meaning to pick up a copy of City of Laughter from one of my local bookshops, but eventually ended up buying my copy from bookshop.org when I was ordering some other books just to finally get it because I'd been intending to for months. I started it last Sunday.

It's strange to read a novel by someone you know. It's hard not to overlay everything you know about the person onto the characters, maybe even more when it's someone you don't know well because there are more gaps in your knowledge of the person to fill in with the fictional version. I found myself doing this for the first several chapters of City of Laughter especially – the parts where the central character, Shiva, was in Brooklyn. But gradually as the book went on, Shiva went to Warsaw, and other characters became more centered, I was finally able to break free of my preconceptions and just get into the world of the book. The story jumps around across time and generations, with some beautiful tangents to recount a folk story or a study of park benches or some other disconnected line of thought. At times it was hard to see how these fragments all fit together, but they were told so beautifully (the prose in this book is wonderful) that I almost didn't care. And then in the end, it sort of did make sense, because rather than providing resolution – a thing Shiva expects to appear and make sense of everything – the book chooses a different path. That finding needn't be the goal; the act of seeking can be and end in itself. 

Tyrant Memory, by Horacio Castellanos Moya

I don't remember what specifically put Horacio Castellanos Moya in my mind last month, but I had the urge to read something of his and having already read The Dream of My Return and Senselessness twice each, plus The She-Devil in the Mirror, I figured I should just buy copies of the books of his that I didn't already own. I brought Tyrant Memory with me on vacation to Maine as a back-up in case I finished Trust, which I did the day before I left to come back home. I only got about 15 pages in while in Maine – I found it a bit slower to read than his other books, but I kept going with it when I got home and finished it this afternoon.

Tyrant Memory is the fourth book I've read by Castellanos Moya, but only the second set in his home country of El Salvador. It covers a period of about one month in 1944 when a coup attempt followed by a popular nonviolent protest resulted in the resignation of the country's fascist-leaning President, Maximiliano Hernández Martínez. The bulk of the book's narrative is told through the daily journal entries of an upper class Salvadoran woman, Haydée, whose husband, a former secretary to the president and diplomat, is imprisoned after becoming an outspoken critic of the president. A few days into Haydée's journaling, the coup attempt takes place. Her son, a radio broadcaster, voiced support for the coup over the air and is forced to flee when the coup turns out to have failed. The son's period in hiding makes up the other major part of the narrative. The book closes with an epilogue nearly 30 years after the main events of the book, where we learn a little more about what's become of the protagonists in the intervening years.

It's Haydée's story – and her transformation – that was most interesting in Tyrant Memory. While her husband has always been active in politics – both in service to the President, and later in opposition to him – we understand that she has stayed out of those things. It is the realm of men. But with her husband imprisoned and her adult son in hiding and sentenced to death, she develops a determination and will that seems to be a surprise even to herself. She is initially inspired by the mothers of two young political prisoners who she meets when they are all trying to visit their imprisoned family members. The women are organizing the wives and mothers of the political prisoners and of the people who have been executed for participating in the coup. Haydée takes up the cause enthusiastically, using her own connections to raise funds, support student activists, reach out to the press, and communicate with the diplomatic corps. 

It's been a while since I read The She-Devil in the Mirror, but I found myself thinking about it now and then while reading Tyrant Memory. Inasmuch as I had formed a mental image of San Salvador, it came from The She-Devil in the Mirror. But that book is set in a modern San Salvador that comes across very differently from the 1944 version presented in Tyrant Memory. As I was reading, I found myself forming a new imaginary San Salvador that feels much more tangible and, frankly, interesting than the one in The She-Devil in the Mirror. It's also striking that the two books are told from the perspective of women (though they are very different women). In the way that she recorded events, both the mundane and the momentous, Haydée felt very real to me. 

I'm glad I was moved to get copies of Castellanos Moya's remaining books, and also glad to see he has several others that haven't yet been translated into English. I hope someone is working on that. 

Trust, by Hernan Diaz

I almost started Trust back in 2022 when it was the WNYC Get Lit book club selection. I was stuck in an airport, unhappy with the books I had with me in hard copy and remembered I could borrow it as an e-book from the New York Public Library thanks to the book club. I think I read half a page before I realized it was not going to be the book that got me through a 12-hour wait at the airport. In remained on my theoretical to-read list though, and its inclusion in the New York Times list of the best 100 books of the 21st Century was the reminder I needed to get around to getting a copy and reading it.

I heard enough about Trust when it was out that I knew loosely what to expect from the structure and the broad strokes of the central character, a wildly rich depression-era financier, but little else. When I opened the book to start reading, I think I missed the first section title page, because I didn't realize until I got to the second section that the first had been a novel within the novel. As I read the first section without that context, I accepted it as the "truth" (as opposed to a fiction), while still knowing it would be undermined by the subsequent sections. But the book plays out in a more complicated way than I expected. (Not that I expected it to be simple. I'd read Diaz's earlier book and I could never expect something simple after that.) Each section, with its new frame of reference and new narrator, gives the reader a new perspective on the sections that preceded it. I enjoyed the first section well enough. The second was odd and stilted (the text in the text is rough and unfinished). It was the third section, told from the point of view of the private secretary to the financier, that really drew me in. It was as if suddenly the book was in full color. The final section is short and disjointed, but occasionally brilliant -- finally offering the reader a clear glimpse of the contradictory figures presented in the other three sections.

Translation State, by Ann Leckie, and Canción, by Eduardo Halfon

After finishing two books in the space of a week (which, to be clear, it took me a lot longer than a week to read... one of them I had been reading for months!), I felt suddenly freed and like I could dive into anything. This coincided with the New York Times publishing its much discussed (for approximately 3 days) list of 100 best books of the 21st century [to date]*, so I had that list fresh in my mind – particularly the handful of books from the list that I owned but had not read. Two weeks ago now, I was headed off to eastern Long Island for a weekend, facing a weekend of relaxation with a long train ride at the end of it. The perfect time, I thought, to dive into something long and serious. I selected The Line of Beauty. I spent a pleasant afternoon reading The Line of Beauty in the garden of the house where I was staying. The other parts of the weekend flew by. I was tired by the time I got on my 3-hour train home, and minutes after I boarded I saw the news that President Biden had decided not to seek reelection after all. (I can hardly believe that was just two weeks ago today.) Of course, I spent the entire train trip on social media and group texts rather than reading my book. 36 hours later, I left for Toronto. I brought The Line of Beauty with me, and didn't read at all during the 5 days I was there. They were long days of attending a work conference, followed by long days of visiting friends. There was never enough sleep. And then I flew home again. I got home last Sunday and amazingly managed to motivate myself to work out and then there were still hours left in the day and I thought I should get back to reading – keep up the momentum I'd built before my travels. I read a few pages of The Line of Beauty, but it was slow and I wanted fast and I had just gotten a copy of Translation State, so I changed my plans and started it. 48 hours later I finished it. 

I wrote this long explanation of how I came to be reading Translation State perhaps to avoid having to write much about it at all. As with every Leckie book I've read, I feel unable or somehow unqualified to speak to it at any length. I enjoyed it. I realized after finishing it that there were links to the Ancillary books that I hadn't totally picked up on. Maybe I need to go back to those. Maybe if I did, I'd have more to say.

After finishing Translation State I did, of course, briefly think I'd return to The Line of Beauty, but a few pages in, I decided to set it down again and embark on another book I'd recently acquired (I took advantage of bookshop.org's free shipping day): Eduardo Halfon's Canción. I didn't even know Halfon had a new (if 2022 counts as new) book out. I searched his name on a whim and saw there was one I hadn't read, so I ordered it. This book centers on the story of Halfon's Lebanese grandfather, who emigrated to Guatemala sometime before WWII and who was kidnapped there in 1967 during the Civil War. I always enjoy the meandering way Halfon tells stories, where the significance of various characters or anecdotes only becomes clear later (if it becomes clear). Reading Canción, I was again fascinated by the unexpected world Halfon's books open up. Just his own family history begins to dismantle things that I thought I knew or unconsciously assumed about Guatemala, about interwar immigration, about – in this case – Lebanon, which I discovered I knew even less about that I thought I did. 

I first read Halfon because he was Guatemalan and I hadn't read any books from Guatemala, but reading his books has opened my understanding about other parts of the world as well. In the very first pages of Canción, Halfon writes,

I had come to Japan to participate in a Lebanese writers' conference. After receiving the invitation a few weeks earlier, and after reading it and rereading it until I was sure it wasn't a mistake or a joke, I'd opened the closet to find my Lebanese disguise – among my many disguises – inherited from my paternal grandfather, born in Beirut. I'd never been to Japan before. And I had never been asked to be a Lebanese writer. A Jewish writer, yes. A Guatemalan writer, obviously. A Latin American writer, of course. A Central American writer, less and less. A U.S. writer, more and more. A Spanish writer, when traveling on that passport was desirable. A Polish writer, on one occasion, at a Barcelona bookstore that insisted – insists – on shelving my books in the Polish literature section. A French writer, since I lived for a time in Paris and some people assume I'm still there. 

Is this a distillation of the absurdity of my world books project? It could be. But I've known it was flawed from the start and if I hadn't "needed" to read a Guatemalan writer, I might never have found my way to Halfon. Maybe this is the whole reason for the project.

*I could nitpick a few things about this list, but I'll limit myself to two: (1) It was really lacking in literature in translation, and (2) I find it weird that it included (at number 71) The Copenhagen Trilogy, a collection of books that were written in the 1960s/70s. Even the translations of the first two books in the trilogy date to the 1980s. This is not a 21st century book!

Our Lady of the Nile, by Scholastique Mukasonga, and Tomás Nevinson, by Javier Marías

After a long dry spell, I finished 2 books in the last week (and they have unexpectedly similar color schemes). I debated whether to start this post with Our Lady of the Nile or Tomás Nevinson because while I started the latter first, I finished the former a few days earlier. 

Since reading Mukasonga's memoir The Barefoot Woman three years ago and learning her first novel had become available in English, I was eager to read it. So I was pleased when it was selected by my Women in Translation book club. Informed by Mukasonga's own youth, we are told, Our Lady of the Nile is set in a prestigious Catholic boarding school for girls in the Rwandan mountains, near the source of the Nile. There is a small clutch of schoolgirls whose lives we learn a little about – some in more depth than others – as well as the Father and nuns around them, a white man with an obsession with ancient Egypt who lives nearby, and assorted other characters. We start to grasp the ethnic distinctions among the girls indirectly, in how they relate to or talk about one another. The book is set at a moment when the power in Rwanda has started to shift, in the wake of Rwandan independence when the Hutu majority population was solidifying its power. The narrative in Our Lady of the Nile consists mostly of vignettes focusing in on one or two of the girls, and together they give us a picture of life at the school and the situation of Rwanda's elite class. This was an interesting book and I'm glad I read it, but I didn't find it as lovely or as moving as The Barefoot Woman.

I had been waiting for Tomás Nevinson to come out in paperback before picking it up with the intention of starting it on January 1, 2025, but then a thoughtful houseguest got me the hardcover in early spring of this year and it sat there on my coffee table staring at me for a couple weeks until finally I decided not to wait. I started in on or around April 9. I got a few hundred pages into it – with Marías it always takes a few hundred pages for things to really get going anyway – but it's a long book, even for Marías, and after two weeks I had to set it aside to read my Women In Translation book club's May selection, There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job. I didn't quite manage to finish that in time for my book club meeting on May 5 (though I got most of the way) and then these two unfinished books, both of which I'd read more than 200 pages of, were sitting waiting to be finished and instead I read nothing at all. For months. I took Tomás Nevinson to Paris and back in June and never opened it. When I got home from Paris, I knew I had to start Our Lady of the Nile right away to read it in time for my July book club meeting, so Tomás Nevinson went back to the coffee table. Finally, last Friday I returned to it.

I had chosen a good stopping point back in April. The book is divided into large numbered sections with several short un-numbered chapters in each. I paused at one of the numbered sections, just as there was a shift in the narrative, the focus transferred from one character to another. What can I say about Tomás Nevinson? It's about what I expected – not in content, precisely. I assumed it would cover, from Nevinson's perspective, the same period as Berta Isla, but in fact it picks up after the events of that book. I can't even imagine reading Tomás Nevinson without having read Berta Isla – would it hold up at all? There's some interplay between Marías' novels, you could almost ask of any one of them if it would stand up on its own, but Tomás Nevinson seems especially tied to Berta Isla – Marías described it as a companion book. 

I don't think I've lost any affection for Marías, but over years of reading him I've sometimes (and more and more as time goes on) felt forced to confront some, to put it kindly, outdated attitudes about gender that show up in his books. It always takes, as I have said, a while to get around to the point, but Tomás Nevinson opens with the character confessing his own old fashioned sense of ... perhaps chivalry is the way to put it? Although he is an agent who has killed before, Nevinson could never imaging killing a woman – even in the line of duty. So of course we know this must be where the book is headed. [Spoilers follow.]

War, So Much War, by Mercè Rodoreda

I'm going to Barcelona in a week and so I wanted to read something by Mercè Rodoreda, but I've been a little frightened off from her since I started and had to abandon Death in Spring a couple years ago. It was so, so grim. The other books of hers I had not read were War, So Much War, which didn't sound like an upbeat book based on the title alone, and Camellia Street, which I've seen described as her starkest book. I thought about rereading A Broken Mirror, but I had already done two rereads in the first 2 months of 2024, so I thought I really should read something new to me. Last week, as I was reading about Rodoreda and her oeuvre, I read something that said there wasn't actually all that much war in War, So Much War, and I decided I would give it a try. 

The book is a sort of picaresque, following 15-year-old Adrià Guinart, who has left his home in Barcelona to fight in the Spanish Civil War. He's given a job doing kitchen work, but doesn't last long among the militia. He spends the remainder of the book wandering the Spanish countryside from village to village, where he is by turns beaten up and shunned or taken in and cared for by the people he comes across. Death, destruction, and brutality are everywhere, but occasionally there is kindness. Adrià is hungry, injured, and traumatized. His nightmares blend into his reality, and sometimes reality is the nightmare. 

I would respectfully disagree with the statement that there's not much war in this book, though I can see what led the publisher to say it. The war is more in the background than in the foreground of the book, but at the same time, it is everywhere. As in The Time of the Doves, War, So Much War tells the experience of war from the perspective of the civilians who are living through it. (I think it's fair to call Adrià a civilian, even if he did try and join up; he is a child.) The war permeates every aspect of their lives, but they still need to find food to eat, tend their land, bury their dead. This is the reality for most people living through war. The stories of war aren't just the ones about soldiers on the front line. 

What Have You Left Behind? by Bushra al-Maqtari

Let me start by saying I had only half finished What Have You Left Behind? by Bushra al-Maqtari when I started writing this as part of a longer essay on memorials that I'm still working through in my head. 

I believe there is power in the telling and the naming of things. This is the heart of Bushra al-Maqtari’s project in What Have You Left Behind? To name the victims of the ongoing civil war in Yemen and to provide the survivors the chance to bear witness to the horrors they were subjected to. As might be expected, this book is devastating and hard to read. The individual testimonies are short – mostly about 3 pages, give or take – but each one captures succinctly and plainly the worst moments in the storytellers' lives. I found I needed to stop frequently to maintain my focus on each individual story. 

I keep a mental running list of books that attempt to show the reader the scope of tragedy or evil through a simple accounting. In no particular order, they include: The Trees by Percival Everett, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ by José Saramago, 2666 by Roberto Bolaño. EEG by Daša Drndić does it too. On some level, the whole of EEG is an accounting of atrocities, but it includes enumerated lists as well: the catalog of books taken from deported Jews; the list of disappeared chess players. Reading Drndić turned me into a person who pauses to study any metal plaques I may come across on the sides of buildings, or paving stones, or memorial sites. It's my own way of counting and honoring the dead. 

It occurs to me now that Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Senselessness is sort of a meta version of this type of book. The narrator of that book is reading and editing accounts – not unlike the ones Bushra al-Maqtari collected – of testimonials from the surviving victims of the military regime in Guatemala (though the country is not named in the book). The witness accounts are mostly from indigenous people, who in some cases watched their entire communities get slaughtered. The reader of Senselessness gets the accounts only second hand, as the narrator filters them for us, pulling out phrases that he finds particularly resonant and stories that exemplify the horror. This book doesn’t read like the others, as a literal accounting, but we see the effects that reading such a enumeration of horrors has on the narrator. 

In What Have You Left Behind? the listing is the whole book. After 200 pages of individual accounts, there is "A List of Victims in Brief," going beyond those accounted for in the main text. It covers the period between March 26, 2015 and September 29, 2017 and goes on for some 40 pages. I must also add that reading this in the context of the current situation in Gaza was rough. The stories told in this book sound strikingly similar to those in the news every day from Gaza. 

I had the sense almost as soon as I started What Have You Left Behind? that al-Maqtari undertook the project both to document the horrors that have been brought upon the civilians of Yemen indiscriminately by both sides in the civil war, but also as a way of doing something that might put her at a remove, even as she is collecting the most devastating stories out of what seems like an infinite supply of them. I thought about my father who, when he found himself in lower Manhattan on September 11, 2001 in the moments before the collapse of the twin towers, bought a camera and took pictures until he was able to be evacuated. The camera creates a distance. It takes you from being a participant to being a spectator, a documentarian. I think doing reportage may have a similar effect. However, at the very end of the book, al-Maqtari includes her own testimony: a remembrance of a friend, a fellow activist and founder of a humanitarian relief organization, who was killed by a militia shell in 2018. This serves to remind us that while she is reporting on the war, she is also living through it, with all its devastating effects.

A Time of Gifts, by Patrick Leigh Fermor

I started Patrick Leigh Fermor's A Time of Gifts back in January and finished it this morning, making it the second book I've actually finished for Mark Slutsky's "Barely a Book Club" – despite starting them all. It is the first of a three-part memoir of Leigh Fermor's journey on foot from Holland to Constantinople, begun in 1933. This book covers his setting out from England in December 1933 just up to his arrival in Hungary at Easter in 1934. His travels took him through the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, modern-day Slovakia, with a backtrack to visit Prague, and then just to the border of Hungary at Esztergom. Leigh Fermor, who was just 18 when he started his journey, wandered through a Europe just before the onset of World War II, and because he did not write this book until the 1970s, he manages to capture both what he saw then without the advantage of retrospect, and also to bring the experience of the war and the decades that followed it to bear as well. 

I read the first half of A Time of Gifts rather slowly over a couple weeks in January. I decided it was not the right book to take with me on vacation to Mexico, so I set it aside while I read the two books I did take with me, and then I read the second half quite quickly - the bulk of it just in the last couple days. There were a few stretches of the book that I found a tad tedious – at times, Leigh Fermor goes on at considerable length about stretches of history that were mostly unfamiliar to me, where just a name here and there rang a bell from my high school European history class. He gets caught up, too, in some descriptions that I found made the places harder to imagine rather than easier. But when he comes across people, the force of his personality shines through and you wish you could have known him. Leigh Fermor made fast friends every place he stopped along the road, sometimes with minimal shared language. He communes with peasants and aristocrats, and everything between. He's not above sleeping in the town jail (an option that was evidently available to poor travelers) or in barns or in Salvation Army hostels where every inmate is checked for parasites, when on other nights he sleeps in palaces owned by friends of friends he's made along the way. The number of people who gave him a free bed and a meal along the road is astonishing. This must have been a more common practice 100 years ago, but one feels (and sees) that there must have been something, too, about Leigh Fermor himself that warmed people to him and led them to open their homes and share their food.

I think I found the second half the book more engaging than the first in part because it covered ground I was more familiar with. I've never been to Germany apart from a few hours in Trier, which I drove to after noticing how close I was to Germany on a visit to Luxembourg. But I have visited Vienna, Bratislava, and Budapest, traveling between the three cities by train, very close to what must have been Leigh Fermor's route on foot. 

Leigh Fermor's time in Vienna was of particular interest to me, coinciding as it did with a moment in Vienna that already interested me. The Vienna of my imagination comes from Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth, was home to Freud and Elias Canetti. 1934, the year Leigh Fermor arrived in Vienna, was the same year Stefan Zweig left it. Freud stayed on another 4 years, but he should have left earlier: Marie Bonaparte essentially paid a ransom for him to allow him to escape. During his time in Vienna, Leigh Fermor observes,

The high proportion of foreign names demonstrated the inheritance of the Hapsburg Empire at its widest expansion. Many subjects of alien race, finding their regional capitals too narrow for them, streamed to the glittering Kaiserstadt: Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians, Rumanians, Poles, Italians, Jews from the whole of Central and Eastern Europe and every variety of Southern Slav. 

Reading this, I think of Joseph Roth coming to Vienna for his education after a childhood in what is now Western Ukraine, or the Ladino-speaking Elias Canetti, born in present-day Bulgaria, who spent part of his childhood in Vienna and returned there to go to university, staying – like Freud – until 1938. The chapter in A Time of Gifts about Vienna is infused with everything he didn't understand when he was there, but which the Leigh Fermor who was writing the book 40 years later knew lay just beneath the surface. 

Leigh Fermor's observation on arriving in Bratislava was surprisingly similar to one I had when I arrived there: "Listening to the unfamiliar hubbub of Slovak and Magyar the other side, I realized I was at last in a country where the indigenous sounds meant nothing at all." It seems obvious in retrospect, but when I planned my trip that included Bratislava and Budapest, I gave no thought at all to the potential language barrier. I studied German in college, not that I needed it at all in Vienna (or that I remembered much for that matter), but when I arrived in Bratislava, I realized I didn't know the most basic things: I couldn't say hello, or thank you. I couldn't read a menu. I had never felt so at sea. (The only place I'd been before where I truly didn't know any of the language was Tokyo - but Tokyo is quite easy to navigate as an English speaker, and even then I did know the words for Good Morning and Thank You.) When I traveled onward to Budapest, Hungrian was equally mysterious, but English was in much wider use. I wish I had read A Time of Gifts before that trip. 

On finishing A Time of Gifts I immediately went out and ordered the second volume of Leigh Fermor's memoir. I look forward to reading about the next leg of his journey. 

Mockingbird, by Walter Tevis

Mockingbird was the second book I brought with me to Mexico. Like Senselessness, I selected it primarily because it was a book I wouldn't mind leaving behind if I did finish it. I do kind of love the cover, but it's a beat up mass market edition that I didn't think I'd feel attached to. As usual, I didn't get any reading at all done while I was on the ground, but I started Mockingbird on the flight home. I was too tired to read much on the plane, but the first few pages did capture my attention, so I kept going with it after I got home. 

I seem to remember my father went on a Walter Tevis kick a few years ago and I got this on his recommendation. I'd never heard of Tevis, though of course I'd heard of the movie adaptations of his books. This was before The Queen's Gambit TV adaptation, which brought him a whole new round of attention. 

Mockingbird is set in a distant future when humanity is in decline, suicide is rampant, children have ceased to be born, and people live isolated from one another in a drugged state that respects the supreme rule of privacy. I suppose it's a bit different from many other books in the post-apocalyptic genre, because it seems to take place amid a long, slow decline, not in the aftermath of a single event. (I claim no expertise on the genre, so maybe this isn't as uncommon as I imagine.) I really had no idea what I was getting into when I started Mockingbird. In retrospect, I'm not surprised my dad was a fan because he enjoys post-apocalyptic fiction as a rule. I'm not so crazy about it usually, but I did love Mockingbird.

Senselessness, by Horacio Castellanos Moya (again)

I'm on a plane from New York to Cancun. I decided at the last moment to bring my copy of Horacio Castellanos Moya's Senselessness with me, because (as I'm sure I mentioned when I wrote about it before -- assuming I read it in a year when I was writing a about all the books I read) the edition I have is terribly marked up, with not very astute marginalia. "This guy is weird," for example. I recently came into another copy, so I decided i could bring my marked up copy to Mexico, read it, and leave it behind. It took me about three quarters of my flight to read it cover to cover. 

I didn't remember many details about Senselessness beyond that it was about a guy who gets a job copyediting 1100 pages of firsthand testimonies by indigenous people and activists who survived the brutal massacres of countless people at the hands of the military in an unnamed country. Our narrator is not always sympathetic, but he slips into a state of madness from reading -- absorbing -- these horrors day in and out. "I am not complete in the mind," is the opening passage of the book, a quote from one of these indigenous survivors, but a reflection as well of the narrator's own state. The reader must wonder if his growing paranoia is justified, or if it's only that he is not complete in the mind.

On this reading, I read Senselessness as a sort of sequel to Castellanos Moya's book, The Dream of My Return, which I've also read twice, but it seems to me in the wrong order. I should go back and read it now with this fresh in my mind. In The Dream of My Return, the narrator is on the verge of leaving Mexico City for his home country, where his life may be in danger, but where he feels a compulsion to return, risking his own life. This potentially dangerous copyediting job could be the thing that awaits him there.

Dark Back of Time, by Javier Marías

I started Dark Back of Time on New Year's Day, continuing my tradition of now nearly a decade of starting the year with Javier Marías. Dark Back of Time is a strange book – a memoir of sorts, written as a response to the attention he received following the publication of All Souls, the novel which first brought him some level of celebrity. Even before his death in 2022, but especially since it I've been dreading the inevitable New Year's Day when I've run out of new Javier Marías books to read. I suppose at that point, I'll just start over. I've always thought he would benefit from rereading, and I feel this even more after reading Dark Back of Time. 

Evidently, on the publication of All Souls many readers assumed it was a roman à clef (today we'd probably be more likely to say autofiction), taking the characters in the book as stand-ins for real individuals on faculty at Oxford. This was an assumption made by readers who knew only a little about Marías (he recalls his students assuming he had a small child because that book's narrator is father to a baby), but also by some of his own colleagues at Oxford – one of whom went so far as to make assumptions about who was the married professor with whom the narrator had an affair. (Marías for his part claims he doesn't know who this colleague might be imagining he had an affair with.) 

Correcting these false assumptions is where the book starts out – and goes on for quite a few chapters. (I laughed out loud early in the book when Marías forcefully states that there has never been a significant Luisa in his life. I felt I was beginning to understand his continual reuse of that name for the women in his books.) Ironically, as the book goes on enumerating apparently true events from the real life and family history of Marías, I recognized more and more instances that show up in his later books. He uses names and addresses from his own family and life (the ones that jumped out at me were Custardoy - the last name of a grand or great-grandfather, and Calle de Covarrubias a street in Madrid) as characters and settings in his novels, which bear the same relationship to the narrator as to the author. 

But as with many Marías books, it takes a while before you see where things are going and understand what the book is actually about. After several chapters spent addressing these false assumptions, Dark Back of Time changes course and goes in depth into the one part of All Souls that was based in reality: the story of John Gawsworth, writer, poet, and King Juan I of Redonda. Marías – along with the narrator of All Souls – discovered Gawsworth by accident and became fascinated with his life, which took many unexpected turns, ending in poverty. Following the publication of All Souls, through a series of loose connections, Marías found several more coincidences related to Gawsworth and his circle, and recounting these unbelievable real stories (as opposed to the believable fictions) takes up the remainder of the book.

Marías is especially interested in the small events or even accidents, without which he the author, you the reader, any person in fact, might never have come to be. Or might have been instead a different person. The "dark back of time" is the (borrowed) language Marías uses to talk about the things that didn't happen, but might have. The alternate version of the world where by some accident (or the lack of it), things turn out differently. These two realities – the actual world and the alternate possibility coexist, we are always aware of the way things could have been different. 

I think Marías would have been amused by the headline of his New York Times obituary, which includes both the world in which he is living, and that in which he has died.

Family Lexicon, by Nalatia Ginzburg (again)

I did start the year with Javier Marías, as is my tradition, but I had to pause that book in progress to reread Natalia Ginzburg's Family Lexicon because it was selected (partially at my suggestion) for my Women in Translation book club, which meets today. I enjoyed it the first time – I mainly remembered Ginzburg's descriptions of her overbearing but hilarious father, and a snippet about her time in exile in Abruzzo – but I liked it even more the second time around. In the intervening years, I've learned a lot more about Ginzburg's life and read another book of hers, as well as a book by Cesare Pavese, who is a significant figure in Family Lexicon. Last March, I visited the graves of Natalia Ginzburg and her husband Leone Ginzburg in Rome. 

What's most striking to me about this book is that Ginzburg manages to maintain a light and humorous tone almost throughout, despite the difficult and tragic times she lived through. Only a couple times do you get a hint of the terror and deep sorrow she must have experienced living through the German occupation of Italy during World War II, the many arrests of her husband – during the last of which he was killed in prison, the risk of deportation to German concentration camps, and so much more. The number of times in this book that members of her family and close circle are in hiding, in prison, exiled, or living under an assumed name or traveling with false papers is astonishing, and yet is treated as the normal course of life – because for young Natalia Ginzburg, it already was. (Natalia Ginzburg was still a child when her family hid the Italian Socialist Filippo Turati in their home for a period of time before his escape to France.)

The other thing that really comes out in this book, which I find it very hard to wrap my head around, is how young Natalia Ginzburg was during all these events. She married Leone at age 22, had 3 children with him, and was a widow at 27. Her youth and inexperience show when she talks about developing a sudden awareness of money after her marriage when she's put in a position of managing a household. I found her lack of certainty when it came to knowing whether her home was being adequately cleaned by her housekeeper completely charming. Later, when she realizes she must take her 3 children and escape the village in Abruzzo where she'd been living in exile, you see for a moment her total vulnerability: when she comes to realize that the maternal protection she took for granted can't be ever present, and she must fend for herself in a truly life or death situation. Even this, she narrates as if the solution came together very simply, never dwelling on what must have been a terrifying journey.

I was struck, on my first reading of Family Lexicon, by Ginzburg's family's internal exile, a Mussolini policy I first learned about from reading Carlo Levi. Natalia and Leone Ginzburg were sent to a village called Pizzoli in Abruzzo. Her brother Alberto and his wife were sent to a town a little father south, Rocca di Mezzo. I found myself wondering, on this reading, about how effective (if at all) this practice of internal exile was. Prior to the German occupation, life in the Abruzzi villages sounded almost idyllic. After the war, Alberto and his wife reflect on how happy they were in Rocco di Mezzo. Carlo Levi's ongoing attachment to Aliano and his decision to be buried there after his death say a lot about his experience there. (To say nothing of the larger effect Carlo Levi's memoir about his exile had on the entire region.) I don't know where I'm going with this, I just find it ironic that all these people who were sent to remote parts of Italy as punishment, were like, actually it was nice.

I'm really glad I ended up reading Family Lexicon again. Parts of it had really stayed with me, but I feel like I got so much more out of it this time and I'm really excited to have influenced my book club to read it so I have more people to talk to about Natalia Ginzburg.

2023 in Books

Last year was my worst reading year since 2013 and 2014, in each of which I read 22 books (but in one of those years I read War and Peace and in the other I read Infinite Jest, so my page count was surely higher). Actually, 2023 would have counted as a pretty good reading year for me if it weren't for my reading habits of the last decade. It's been hard not to feel down about it, but when I reflect on all the other things that have happened in the last 12 months, even as I do feel I spent too much time on my phone when I could have been reading, I start to understand why maybe that's what my mind needed. 

I moved at the very end of 2022, so 2023 was a year of setting up my new home. I undertook two major home renovation projects: a new kitchen and a new HVAC system, both of which had me displaced in my home for a period of weeks, first in March and then in October; and countless minor home renovation projects. (Among these, I had solar panels installed on my roof, which could be counted as a major renovation, but honestly it required very little effort or discomfort on my part.) My last home improvement project of 2023, completed on Christmas and Boxing Day, was the installation of the bookshelves pictured here, and finally getting my fiction back to its proper organization. Last year was also an exceptionally busy year for me professionally, which was both exhausting and rewarding. (Not incidentally, I got a promotion in September.) I traveled quite a bit in 2023 – not quite at pre-pandemic levels, but approaching it. And, most miserably, I had extremely unpleasant major dental work done in November and December (which, sadly, is only half done). 

So, when I think back on the last year (or year and a half in truth, because the physical and mental energy associated with my move date back to then), it's not surprising that at the end of my days I didn't often feel motivated to pick up a book and read, though it might have been good for my mental health. I also barely wrote in the last year, and I know the two are connected. This last week and change, I've been off work with few obligations and I finally got back into a reading groove. My favorite way to spend the last days of the year is reading on the couch with my feel up, occasionally interrupted by some baking project or a walk in the winter sun. This year – rather unexpectedly – gave me that desired break. I hope I can keep up into the new year some of what I felt I got back to in the last week.

And so, the books: I read 23 books in 2023 (finishing 7 of those in the last week). In chronological order, they were:

• All Souls, by Javier Marías
• Shrines of Gaiety, by Kate Atkinson
• The Bookshop, by Penelope Fitzgerald
• Drunk on Love, by Jasmine Guillory
• Her Mother's Mother's Mother and Her Daughters, by Maria José Silveira
• Carte Blanche, by Carlo Lucarelli
• Dora Bruder, by Patrick Modiano
• Scattered All Over the Earth, by Yōko Tawada
• The Tale of the 1002nd Night, by Joseph Roth
• In Concrete, by Anne Garréta
• Eve Out of Her Ruins, by Ananda Devi
• Provenance, by Ann Leckie
• Easy Motion Tourist, by Leye Adenle
• Strangers I Know, by Claudia Durastanti
• This Census Taker, by China Miéville
• The House of Doors, by Tan Twan Eng
• Kalpa Imperial: The Greatest Empire that Never Was, by Angélica Gorodischer
• Trust, by Domenico Starnone
• The Sense of an Ending, by Julian Barnes
• The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, by Muriel Spark
• Where Angels Fear to Tread, by E.M. Forster
• Devotion, by Howard Norman
• Burning Secret, by Stefan Zweig

A thing that kept happening to me last year was I would select a book that I thought would be just the thing to get me out of my reading rut, and then the book would turn out to be not at all what I thought it was. I finished some of these (In Concrete and This Census Taker are a couple examples from the list above), but I also started a lot of books I did not finish. Among these were Midnight in the Century; Zorba the Greek; Hav; Beautiful World, Where Are You; The Bridge on the Drina; The Discomfort of Evening; and several others that I've since forgotten. I hope to get back to some of these (Zorba, Hav, and Drina in particular.) My decision over the summer to start Late Victorian Holocausts by Mike Davis was an attempt to try something totally different. I read 185 depressing but informative pages of it, and may yet return. It felt startlingly relevant.

And on to the stats: 

I read 11 books by women last year, or just under 50% (which is better than I feared). Apart from the U.S., which accounts for just 3 books I read last year, I read books from 11-ish countries. I'm counting Joseph Roth and Stefan Zweig as compatriots, though I'm unsure what to call the country. For the sake of simplicity we can go with Roth's preferred fatherland, the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary. The others were: Argentina, Brazil, France, Italy, Japan/Germany (whichever is more proper to assign for Tawada), Malaysia, Mauritius, Nigeria, Spain, and the United Kingdom (my most read country, with 6 books, though perhaps I should have separated out Scotland, from where I read one book). Only Malaysia was new to me. I read 11 books in translation and one book in its original French. I didn't reread any books or finish a single work of nonfiction in 2023. 

I'm finding it very hard to name a favorite book from 2023. It may be recency bias, but The Sense of an Ending and Kalpa Imperial stand out. From the earlier clutch, Scattered All Over the Earth might be my favorite. I believe reading Dora Bruder had the greatest effect on me of any book I read this year, and it stands apart such that I'm unable to rate it alongside everything else. It was my first time reading a whole book in a language other than English, and I still marvel a bit at having done it. It felt something like magic, especially as I got on and understood more and more without having to refer to Google Translate. It was also a beautiful and affecting book. Other notable books from the year include Her Mother's Mother's Mother and Her Daughters, which felt like an education in Brazilian history; Provenance, which succeeded in getting me out of a rut where all those other books failed; The House of Doors, which made me really want to visit Penang; and Trust, which had this intriguing concept of mutual trust and mutual destruction at the center that I can't get over.