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!