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.