The Old Man by the Sea, by Domenico Starnone

The week before last I went to a book event at a bookstore in the neighborhood where I lived as a teenager – a neighborhood I was surprised to find had a bookstore now. I already knew I would be buying two books: the one for the event I was attending, and Molly Crabapple's Here Where We Live is Our Country, which I had been meaning to pick up. And besides, I wanted to support this bookstore in my old neighborhood. I browsed the fiction while I was waiting for the event to start and I saw The Old Man By the Sea. Domenico Starnone is a perennial favorite of mine, and so I decided to get a third book while I was there.

I will usually finish a Domenico Starnone book in a day or two. All the ones I've read  – this one included – are quite short. But last week was busy and it ended up taking me a full week. I read about half of it on the train to and from a visit upstate for the holiday weekend. ("Oh, Hemingway!" exclaimed my neighbor on the train ride up. "Actually, no," I said.)

Like (or perhaps even more than) the other Starnone books I've read, The Old Man by the Sea feels like autofiction. The narrator is an 82-year-old author who has rented a condo by the sea in the early autumn in the last warm days. He meets and becomes entangled with some of the locals, two shop owners who turn out to be husband and wife, a shop assistant at the wife's clothing store, and an assortment of other connected friends, lovers, and family members. The narrator is visibly writing the story, breaking the narrative from time to time to comment on his own writing. Meanwhile, he is trying to summon the ghost of his mother, who died young many years earlier. 

I have to admit I didn't like The Old Man by the Sea as well as the other Starnones, but mostly that's to do with the strength of the others. The Old Man by the Sea wasn't quite so captivating. As to the others, mainly what I remember is that they were strong, not why. I read Ties during a period when I was not writing about the books I read, but I've gone back to read what I wrote after reading Trick and Trust because I don't recall much about them. I do remember that I loved Trust especially.  

On the Calculation of Volume IV, by Solvej Balle; Zorba the Greek, by Nikos Kazantzakis

I actually finished On the Calculation of Volume IV a few weeks ago, but I never got around to writing it up. I'm not sure I actually have a lot to say about it, though I continue to love these books. While reading this one, I found myself sort of wishing I had waited to read the whole series until they were all available, perhaps in a single volume. I seem to only have patience for short books these days, but I've read each one of these books faster than the last. I finished IV in 2 days. 

I know I wrote something along these lines when I finished III, but I find it very interesting how each of these books has its own trajectory or theme, inside the larger context of the ever-repeated day. When I read about these books, and after I'd read the first one, I did wonder how Balle could sustain interest in and endless string of November 18ths. it's not a question I have anymore. 

I think when V comes out, or maybe just when the last book arrives, I want to go back and read them all together, and maybe then I'll feel like writing more too.

I started Zorba the Greek more than three years ago, in February 2023. I'd had it in mind to read as my book for Greece in my world books project and then in a happy accident, I found a copy on the sidewalk one day. I'm not sure what led me to start it in 2023, but I read it for a few days that February and then for a few days in April of that year, and after reading about 90 pages, I stopped. I was, around that time, starting and abandoning lots of books; having trouble sticking to anything. (A challenge I still have, though I think I'm just starting fewer books now.) I remember enjoying the writing and ideas in Zorba, but it was a slog. 

I'm going to Greece next month, for the first time, and that's what impelled me to return to Zorba. I thought I remembered enough that I could just pick up where I left off, and so I did. It came back to me quickly. I still found the reading a bit of a slog, but I kept going – mostly reading one chapter at a time – and finished the book in two weeks and change. 

When I first had the idea for my world books reading project, I had already identified some problems with it, one of which I called the problem of White Men. When you set out to read the Great Novel of any place, you're bound to end of reading mostly books my white men of a certain age. In all the books I've read for my project, I think Zorba may be the one where I have felt this the most. While race isn't so much a factor here, Kazantzakis' narrator is a young, wealthy, educated Cretan man, who returns to his homeland after travels around Europe and becomes enamored with the simple, real life he finds among the peasants on the island, and especially with Zorba – whom he meets on his travels and brings along. 

The narrator, who has lived more a life of the mind (and whom Zorba calls a pen-pusher) feels he has become disconnected from the real world and admires Zorba for his simplicity, his wisdom gained without books, his true example of manliness. As a reader, I coudn't understand the narrator's fascination with Zorba. I related with the narrator in certain ways – I really understood his sense of rational detachment, and maybe even his desire to escape that feeling – but not in his feeling that his intellectual life was less real than the physical life Zobra represents. 

I was looking for a passage I wanted to note, but I seem to have forgotten what page it was on. At one point, Zorba and the narrator are climbing up mountain to visit a monastery because they need permission to build on the monks' land. The visit to the religious site reminds the narrator of experiences from his his youth. He describes his enjoyment in the spectacle of religious festivals as a child, while now that he is grown, he only relates to religion aesthetically. I felt this very strongly – I had a real fascination with religion as a teenager, without being a religious person. Teenage emotions are so strong, I think I was hoping for something external to give it all some meaning. Around this time I was studying art and art history. I'm not sure why it spoke to me so deeply, but I developed a real affection for medieval and northern renaissance paintings. I still love art from this period, but if my attraction to it solely aesthetic, so what? Where Zorba's narrator seemed to see it as a weakness, I see it as maturity. I don't feel it as a loss.

In the end, I'm left feeling ambivalent about Zorba the Greek. There were ideas I loved, there were some stunning passages. There was also casual violence, extreme misogyny, and some deeply problematic ideas about humanity. But I'm glad I finished it.

The First Wife: A Tale of Polygamy, by Paulina Chiziane

I don't remember where I first heard about The First Wife, but I did note it down as a book to read from Mozambique. I believe I found this copy at a bookstore in Seattle when I was there in 2021. I seem to remember picking it up along with Our Lady of the Nile. It was reading The Word Tree that finally got me to read this. I wanted to stay in Mozambique. 

I don't quite know where to begin talking about this book. It was not at all what I was expecting. I had assumed it was about traditional polygamy (in some ways it was), but the starting point for The First Wife is a married woman who knows her husband has another lover and after some investigation, learns he actually has four of them. The women become allies, gain strength from each other, and eventually attain a sort of liberation. But in getting there, the story took so many unexpected turns. 

The writing in this book often has the feeling of folklore, full of magical imagery. Though the story itself is mostly grounded in earthly reality, it draws on what I assume are local folk tales. The presence and tensions among traditional religions and the Catholic church and the way they blend in modern life are also a theme. Every extended family has its priest and its witch doctor. The book is often hilarious, even as some of the events within are brutal. 

I found myself rebelling a bit against the gender essentialism at the heart of the book, even as I recognize it is a reflection of (and itself a rebellion against) the traditional gender roles in the culture. In fact, it highlights differences in the gender roles among different ethnic groups in Mozambique. And I kept wondering why these women -- and the first wife, in particular -- stayed loyal to this man, but the wives were asking the same question themselves. This book was written in 2002, and it was also interesting to read in the 2026 context of what I guess you could call mainstream polyamory. A passage in the book about the wives managing their calendars to set up the marital rota reminded me of polycules and their reliance on google calendar. 

The First Wife surprised me and I really liked it.

The Word Tree, by Teolinda Gersão

I have a certain affinity for Mozambique, having spent several months living in neighboring Zimbabwe 30 years ago now. While there, I traveled far to the east of the country, within a couple miles of the Mozambique border, though I never crossed it. I also ate regularly at a Mozambiquan restaurant -- a treat to myself on Fridays. Indeed, reading The Word Tree, Mozambique felt like a familiar place in some ways. Though, as I look at the map now, Maputo (or Lourenço Marques, as it was during the colonial era, and in the book) where the book takes place is far at the other end of the country -- practically in South Africa. 

The Word Tree is about a girl born in Mozambique to Portuguese parents. We don't quite learn the circumstances of her father's emigration, but her mother arrives at age 19 as a personal ad bride and is never happy in Mozambique. The book is divided into three sections, the first and third focused on the daughter, with the middle section showing the mother's perspective. There is a distance between mother and daughter that is is hard to get a grasp on in the book. The daughter is handed off to a Black wet nurse as a baby, whom she grows very attached to, while her mother seems uninterested -- or even repelled by her. The mother is presented very unsympathetically at first, and while I began to understand her and develop a certain feeling for her in the middle section, I never quite understood her distaste for her daughter. It's a complicated relationship. And yet, unexpectedly, it was the middle section with the mother's narrative that I found the most compelling. I found myself wondering if she found what she wanted, in the end. 

What I enjoyed most about this book were the descriptions of Mozambique. I could really picture the city and the baixa and the shanty town. The hotels and the department store. The beaches on the cost of the Indian Ocean. It was wonderfully evocative.

The Disappearing Act, by Maria Stepanova

I'm late in writing this post. I finished The Disappearing Act a week ago, on a miserable Sunday morning when I was both getting sick and off my allergy meds ahead of allergy testing. I almost can't believe I got through it under those conditions. Almost immediately upon finishing, I decided I needed to minimize my suffering and took an allergy pill. It helped, but the rest of the day was still pretty much a wash and then the entire work week happened. So here we are.

The Disappearing Act was another installment in the New Directions book subscription from my dad. I actually got it before Lithium, though I started it after. I was already somewhat familiar with Maria Stepanova because my women in translation book club read another book of hers, In Memory of Memory, but I didn't get to that one. I read the first couple pages and it was long and I just wasn't feeling up to it. But The Disappearing Act I loved from the moment I started it. Sometimes a book just speaks directly to me, and I can't quite say why, but that's what this book did. 

The Disappearing Act is a work of autofiction. (Is that a common thread in all 3 of the New Directions books I've read? At least 2 were.) The narrator is a novelist M from a country unnamed for most of the book, known rather as The Beast, who has left the country and is working through her complicated sense of semi-complicity with its actions. She's now living by a lake in another unnamed country, and in the book she's traveling to other unnamed places, but gets accidentally stuck along the way and decides, for a time, to disappear into this town and life that she fell into accidentally. M makes spontaneous decisions, far different from those she would make in her regular life. She (temporarily?) becomes a new person. 

I think that M in her travels reminds me of myself when I travel, where I sometimes do feel like an entirely different person. When I first started thinking this way, it led me to wonder if I could live permanently as the person I am when I travel. Would it even be possible. This seems to be an idea M is playing with as well. 

Lithium, by Malén Denis

Lithium was the latest installment in the New Directions book subscription my dad got me for Christmas. It arrived a couple days before I was heading out of the country for 9 days and was nice and slim, so I threw it in my backpack to take along on my trip. I'm terrible about reading when traveling, but I did start it on the train from Paris to Antwerp. I didn't get very far along before dozing off – more because of the calming motion on my early morning train than any shortcomings on the part of the book, though I will say it didn't grab me immediately. I put it away on my arrival in Antwerp and didn't get back to it until today, a week after my return home. 

I still wasn't sure how I felt about it when I went back to it, but it's such a short book I figured I should just finish it, and then as I was reading it began to grow on me. By the end, I liked it quite a bit more than I expected to.

Lithium is told largely as a second person running narrative by a narrator who is addressing her internal thoughts to her ex. He's been institutionalized under somewhat unclear circumstances, and the narrator is looking after his apartment and his family of cats (two adults, and some newborn kittens). The narrator seems to be spiraling a bit, but as we read on we learn her situation is quite a bit more complicated than it seemed at first – and also, over the course of the book, she starts to heal. I really liked the way Lithium exposed the events preceding the book. 

The Spectator Bird, by Wallace Stegner

It was The Illogic of Kassel that led me to read The Spectator Bird, but not because it was actually referenced in that book. Toward the end of The Illogic of Kassel, Vila-Matas refers to a poem by Wallace Stevens, and that reference made me remember Wallace Stegner and think that I should read him again. I read Crossing to Safety several years back and loved it and around that time I picked up The Spectator Bird, and then I promptly forgot about it. My interest in Stegner may have been sidelined by my general lack of interest in reading American authors. And then there are just so many books to read. But when I saw the name Wallace Stevens and thought Wallace Stegner I remembered how much I enjoyed his language and his vivid descriptions and I decided this was what I would read next. 

I fell right into it; I read a quarter of the book on Monday and kept up that pace until I finished it this evening. The language was as good as I remembered, the descriptions as vivid. The book opens with an observation of the gusty weather and the dramatic sky and the lively birds on a February day in northern California and I thought, yes: this is what I remember. (I also thought how appropriate that I was reading this in the month during which it's set. I love it when that happens by chance – though it's only the present day of the book that's set in February.) The book jumps back and forth between a few days in February 1974 (or so) in California and a few months in the spring and summer of 1954 in Denmark. Stegner's narrator is the adult son of a Danish immigrant, nearing age 70 in the present day of the book. In the 1950s, he goes with his wife to Denmark to try and connect – more figuratively than actually – with his family history. 

I enjoyed reading this book quite a lot, particularly the elements I mentioned above, but there was one central plot point that turned up near the end that really made me bristle, almost to the point of ruining the book for me. I don't really feel like doing spoilers and focusing on this bit only, so I"ll just say that I'm left uncertain how I feel about the book.

The Illogic of Kassel, by Enrique Vila-Matas

I thought 2026 was off to a great start when I finished my first book of the year within the first 3 days. The Illogic of Kassel arrived at my home around day 3 of the year, courtesy of a New Directions subscription my father got me for Christmas. I thought to myself, I should read these books as they arrive, so I jumped right in. 

I was unfamiliar with Vila-Matas, and I find myself wondering if this book was the best place to start. The Illogic of Kassel is a work of autofiction – the writer was invited to participate in the Documenta art show in Kassel and this book records the experience and his impressions of the works in the show. The book is intensely intertextual – referencing not only the works of art but dozens of works of literature, and a few films to boot. Some of the references – art and literature – were works I was familiar with, but many were not. More than once I wondered to what extent one even can write about the experience of seeing (or interacting with) art, and contemporary art in particular. An observation I'll make about intertextuality is that it rewards the reader who is familiar with the referenced works; but if you as a reader are unfamiliar (and perhaps even if it's just overdone), it can be both opaque and obnoxious. I wouldn't go so far as to say this book was that, but it did remind me a little of a particular moment in my life in the early 2000s when I spent a lot of time with art school students with a proclivity for postmodern theory. 

But I don't want to give a wrong impression. This book felt also like a celebration of art – and of contemporary art, in particular, which I don't think gets much in the way of literary treatment. And to my point about the rewards of intertextuality, well: I certainly felt gratified by the inclusion of some of my personal favorite writers – Joseph Roth and W.G. Sebald figure among the referenced authors. (And William Kentridge and Sophie Calle among the artists.) Overall I enjoyed the book. The reason this felt, as I put it earlier, maybe not the best place to start with Vila-Matas, is that the very context of the book assumes that Vila-Matas is a known entity. There was a reason he was invited to participate in Documenta. For the unfamiliar reader, we must try to piece that together without knowing the work that led him there.

Archipelago, by Natalie Bakopoulos

I was a little bit at a loss when the new year rolled around and I had to decide what to read first. Las year, I finished the only remaining Javier Marías novel available in English that I had not yet read. I do have a handful of other books of his I could have read – two books of essays, one book of short stories, something he wrote about Venice, but I wanted something else. My first impulse was to go for something monumental, so on January 1 I started Elias Canetti's Auto-da-Fé, which I have been meaning to read for some time. About 50 pages in, I realized it was not what I wanted at the moment. Archipelago was sitting on a side table in my living room, where it had been since my dad brought it over a couple months ago. He probably found it at a thrift store and grabbed it because I'm planning a trip (my first) to Greece later this year. And so, without thinking much about it, I grabbed it and started reading it instead. 

I was drawn into it right away. Bakopoulos' writing is clear and contemplative. The book's narrator is a writer and translator. As a person who reads a large volume of literature in translation, her musings on translation were really interesting to me. At one point, another character in the book who is a writer describes the experience of being translated as a kind of violence. Over the course of the book, the narrator is translating another work – from modern Greek into English – and contrary to her usual practice, she begins the translation without reading the book in full first, so she is discovering and creating the story at the same time. It left me thinking a lot about my own experience as a reader, occasionally a reader of works in languages other than my own native tongue. I am not fluent enough in any language to avoid translating as I go, but reading in another language forces you to think very hard about the sense of each word – to notice where translation fails. I think it leaves a deeper impression of the work because you've had to really contemplate it. Whereas when you read in your native language, it's easy to glide right through. 

A dark mood hangs over the whole book, which left me feeling always on the precipice – reading with a sense of dread, but wanting to go on. If I have one complaint about this book, it's that it didn't quite deliver on the mood. There is a constant foreboding in the book, an implication of terrible events to come, which make the actual events of the narrative a bit anticlimactic. And yet, I was also relieved by this. I didn't want whatever terrible violence might lay in wait to happen, and then ... it just didn't. I could see some readers finding this unsatisfactory, but overall I really enjoyed the book. 

2025 in Books

Last year was my worst reading year since 2012. I finished 19 books in 2025, the first of which was a holdover that I started at the end of 2024. This delayed my usual starting the first of the year with a Javier Marías book, but 2025 was also the year I became a Marías completist – well, of his novels available in English at least. 

Last year I finished:

• The World of Yesterday, by Stefan Zweig
• Voyage Along the Horizon, by Jaiver Marías
• Moving Parts, by Magdalena Tulli
• The Night Guest, by Hildur Knútsdóttir
• Testament of Youth, by Vera Brittain
• By the Ionian Sea, by George Gissing
• Amulet, by Roberto Bolaño
• Dance with Snakes, by Horacio Castellanos Moya
• Apocalypse, by Lizzie Wade
• A Gentleman in Moscow, by Amor Towles
• Heart Lamp, by Banu Mushtaq
• Transit, by Anna Seghers 
• Death at the Sign of the Rook, by Kate Atkinson
• March Violets, by Philip Kerr
• Identitti, by Mithu Sanyal
• Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie 
• On the Calculation of Volume I, II, and III, by Solvej Balle

So, for the usual stats: A majority of the books I read this year were by women: 12 out of the 19. That's a big improvement over last year – and unusual for me. Five of these were for my Women in Translation book club, which I have to thank for keeping me reading at least at a slow pace through the year. Also 12 of the books I read this year were books in translation. Apart from Americans, I read authors from Austria, Chile, Denmark, El Salvador, Germany, Iceland, India, Poland, Spain, and the U.K. Iceland and Poland were firsts for me. 

Two of the books I read last year were rereads – the Gissing and the Leckie. Four were works of nonfiction, three of those memoirs. I was really drawn to memoirs at the beginning of last year – continuing a trend from the year before, as I noted in last year's round-up. 

I'm going to allow myself a lot of favorites this year, even though I'm working from a smaller than usual list of books. Stefan Zweig's The World of Yesterday and Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth were both incredible memoirs covering overlapping periods of time, the early 20th century, World War I and its aftermath, though with very different perspectives. I wanted to stay in that pre-war(s) world for a long time, which is what led me back to my beloved Gissing (but rereads can't count toward favorites – I said so last year). I thought I would go from Gissing to a reread of Dostoyevsky's Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, but somehow I ended up on a different track.

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles did bring me back to that world, in the form of fiction, and I really loved it. And Transit brought me through to the other side; to the place (figuratively, though almost literally) where the Zweig book ended up: the exodus from Europe during WWII. I started Anna Seghers' Transit ahead of a trip to Provence in July because of its setting in Marseille. I was loving it, but reading very slowly, so that I only finished it not long before I visited Berlin in September. I was feeling such an affection for Anna Seghers just then, so I was most gratified to be able to visit her grave in Berlin. I ended the year with a consecutive reading of the three books from Solvej Balle's On the Calculation of Volume series that are currently available in English. I enjoyed them all, but the first one especially was profoundly moving for me. 

I'll add one honorable mention that I didn't include in my list because I didn't read the full book. I also read – and was really struck by – Anthony Doerr's story (almost a novella really) Memory Wall.

On the Calculation of Volume II & III, by Solvej Balle

After reading On the Calculation of Volume I for my book club, I immediately went out and got II and III so I could jump right back in. Book one had a real arc and I was wondering where Balle would go with book two. I found it hard to imagine. But sure enough, books two and three go to quite different places (literally) from book one. 

 

Spoilers for both books follow.

 

Craving the expected passage of time through the change of seasons, Tara, the narrator seeks to create them for herself by traveling to various locations in Europe in a sequence that approximates the seasons she thinks should be happening at the time had time continued to progress normally. While I don't think I, personally, would have sought out winter (the first season Tara chases), this book captures much more what I imagined myself doing if I found myself in the circumstances when I read the first book. I thought, I would just go someplace. Start moving. Travel. I travel alone frequently and and I love meeting people on the way and making friendships that only last a day or a week. One thing I kept wondering as I read the first book was if I could do that forever – if that would be enough to stave off loneliness. (Another thing I thought, which has not been addressed in any of the first 3 books and seems unlikely to come up now, was that I would get a pet. You'd have to find one with the right temperament – i.e., a cat like my Little Hans, who loves everyone immediately – but I think that could go a long way when it comes to keeping company.) Anyway, travel seemed like the natural thing to do, and that is what Tara does for much of book two. But eventually she tires of traveling and attempting to recreate the seasons, and she settles down in Dusseldorf, where she begins to study – developing a somewhat bizarre obsession with the Romans and their contemporaries. 

Book 2 ends on a sort of cliffhanger, which becomes the arc of book 3: Tara (and we the readers) discover that she is not the only one stuck in this time loop. Oddly, I found parts of book 3 a bit of a slog. I say oddly, because the introduction of another character seems like it should make things more interesting. On some level it does, but a lot of exposition was required at the beginning, with Tara recording how her new companion spent his stuck time. This changed the quality of the narrative quite a bit compared to the earlier books. The "chapters" (days recorded by Tara) are much longer while we learn about how they met and catch up on the years' worth of days. But then book 3 took a few more twists and recaptured my interest. Now I'm stuck waiting until April when I can read book 4. 

Catching up on Fall Reading

Though it's true that I haven't been reading much these past several months, I have read some books. I'm neglecting this site more than I'm neglecting to read. So, to catch everyone up:

In October, I read Identitti by Mithu Sanyal for my Women in Translation book club. Truly, I have this book club to thank for keeping me reading at least a few books a year. I'm not quite sure what to say about Identitti, which is maybe why I never posted here after reading it. I found it jarring to read at first. It's hard to even explain what I mean by this, but I found the narrator to be somehow loud. The book is also full of social media posts, which I find unpleasant to encounter in book form. But the book ended up being more complex and nuanced than it seemed at first. 

Before I started Identitti, I had been reading (and really enjoying) All for Nothing by Walter Kempowski but somehow I never built up the necessary momentum on that (perhaps I will go back over the holiday break). Later I also started Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson after I found a copy on the sidewalk. I set them both aside to read Identitti, for which I had a deadline. Then one Saturday in November, I was out for a walk and I found a copy of Ancillary Justice in a little free library and I thought it might be fun to reread that, so I grabbed it and over the following 3 days I did read it again. And I loved it again. It's very refreshing to me these days to read something I know I will just tear through. 

After Ancillary Justice I didn't even attempt to read anything else. I was leaving a few days later for a weekend upstate with family and then a few days after that for a trip to Italy. I brought a copy of The Periodic Table (which I read more than 25 years ago and keep meaning to reread) with me to Italy but I never even opened it. 

Just before I left for Italy, I picked up the next book for my Women in Translation book club: On the Calculation of Volume I, by Solvej Balle. The day after I got back from my trip, I started it and I got about halfway through. I picked it up for a second time yesterday evening and finished it. I absolutely loved this book. The premise will be familiar to anyone who knows the movie Groundhog Day, but (no disrespect to the movie) this is no Groundhog Day. Stuck in a never-ending series of November 18ths, the narrator changes her approach to the day gradually in the book. She answers (though she cannot explain or account for) the troubling questions of reliving the same day, such as do the things you consume return to the world or disappear? 

The language in this book is so clear and precise and beautiful, the treatment of the situation so thought out and real. I kept thinking: this is not how I would behave in the circumstance, only to later conclude that, no, the narrator was right to behave this way and what I imagined myself doing would be a mistake. 

The "I" in the title of this book is there because there are, at present, 5 more volumes in the series (with another planned). I'm anxious to read the continuation. 

March Violets, by Philip Kerr

I was on some kind of a kick when I picked up Berlin Noir, though I don't remember now what it was. Had I decided I wanted to read more detective stories? Or was it connected to my interest in interwar Europe? The latter sounds more convincing to me, though for that I tend to go for primary source material, so maybe it was the former. In any case, at some point a few years ago I got this copy of Berlin Noir -- a collection of the first three Bernhard Gunther novels -- and then I shelved it and forgot about it. I remembered it because I am heading to Berlin for the first time at the end of this week. I could have read any number of books in my possession ahead of my trip (more Jenny Erpenbeck, for instance; Nabokov's writing about Berlin; or Joseph Roth's Hotel Years would be a good option), but I decided on this. I figured I could at least get through the first novel before I left, which I did. Having done so, I don't think I'm likely to read the others. It's not that March Violets was bad; it's just not really my thing. 

Bernhard Gunther, the narrator of March Voilets is so much the stereotype hard-boiled private detective that it comes up even in the book when he's brought in by a Gestapo agent who's a fan of American detective fiction. Gunther's tastes - cigarettes, alcohol, curvy women - are exactly what you expect if you've watched any film noir from the postwar era. At times it felt like parody to the point where it was almost distracting. With the central character (and frankly, many of the surrounding characters as well) so much a type, what becomes the distinguishing feature of March Violets is the setting. It essentially plays out the idea, what if you take a classic American noir detective story and drop it in 1936 Berlin. Add in the warring government forces to the usual list of suspects and this is where you end up. Of course the denouement of the story takes place in Dachau. 

I don't read detective stories often, but I do usually enjoy them when I do. And I did enjoy March Violets to a point. It was a bit too violent for my tastes (and not because of the Nazis surprisingly enough). I also found it ultimately unsatisfying, because of a major storyline that was left unresolved. I did wonder if I needed to read the subsequent book(s) to get the resolution I wanted, but I'm not sure it's worth my time.

Death at the Sign of the Rook, by Kate Atkinson

I didn't know Kate Atkinson had a new Jackson Brodie book out until I came across this copy at Housing Works. I bought it on the spot, of course. I wanted to start it right away, but I made myself finish Heart Lamp and Transit before diving in. 

Part of the reason I was so eager to read a new Kate Atkinson Jackson Brodie book was I (correctly) assumed it was the kind of book that would break through the reading slump I've been in for the last few years. I find Kate Atkinson is always reliable for an engaging read, and the Jackson Brodie novels offer the fun predictability I enjoy in mysteries (though I primarily consume them on TV). I've read all the previous Jackson Brodie books in order, but it's been over a span of years and I find my memory of them hazy. I barely remember a thing about the most recent one, Big Sky, but I see looking back now at my post about it that I had a similar challenge reading it, in that the recurring characters (apart from Jackson Brodie himself) were more faint memories. The main thing I remember about Big Sky is that it was grittier than what I had come to expect from the series (there are definitely some darker moments in the books, as I recall, but the overall mood of Big Sky, as I remember it, was unusually dark.) Death at the Sign of the Rook is not that. It is decidedly cozy, and full of call-outs to other cozy mysteries from a fictional peer of Agatha Christie to Grantchester and Midsomer Murders. It even opens at a murder mystery theme weekend at a country house, though (thankfully) it doesn't deliver the predicable outcome of that trope.

It occurs to me that maybe a way out of my reading slump would be to read more books like this, and this morning I found myself considering why I don't. My answer to this is not totally thought out, but I have the beginnings of one. I've been a lifelong devotee of fiction -- for most of my adult life I've read fiction almost exclusively. But over the past several years, I've found myself more and more drawn to nonfiction. Primarily to memoir, though I've read some more straightforward nonfiction as well. Even as I read fiction, I find myself looking for books that provide me with a deeper understanding of a place or a time. If I think about the best books I've read over the years, the ones that come to mind are books like Death and the Dervish, which introduced me to a history and culture of which I was only faintly aware. After reading Death and the Dervish as well as Bosnian Chronicle, I got copies of Misha Glenny's history of the Balkans and Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, because I wanted to know everything about the region and its history. I haven't gotten around to either yet, but what I realize is that the books that I love are the books that make me want to know more. And sometimes they take me forever to read (I believe Death and the Dervish took two months and Bosnian Chronicle was a slog I recall), but they stay with me. When I am in a slump (which I have been since the middle of 2022 by my own assessment), I can read fast and fun books just as well as I did before, but they don't give me the drive make connections, learn more, and immerse myself -- in short, what I love about books.

Transit, by Anna Seghers

As I mentioned in my last post, I picked up Transit to read ahead of a trip I made to Provence in July. I spent a good while scanning my bookshelves for anything I might own that was about Provence. I didn't really know anything about Transit – I found my copy on the sidewalk in Brooklyn a few years ago and pretty much just grabbed it because of my general trust for NYRB classics. I'm not even sure what prompted me to pull it out in my search for a book about Provence, but when I saw it was set in WWII-era Marseille, I figured that was good enough. When I went on to read Anna Seghers' brief bio inside and saw that she left Marseille in 1940 on the same ship as Victor Serge, among others, I knew I had found the right book.

Transit is about the transient life in Marseille in the winter of 1940. As the only port in France still under the flag of France, Marseille was the stopping point for countless refugees from all over Europe looking for a passage out – to anywhere. The book's narrator has escaped a concentration camp and traveled through France mostly on foot as far as Marseille. There, he joins the throngs of people looking to leave, though he himself isn't certain of what he wants to do. Through a series of events, he is mistaken in Marseille for a respected German Jewish writer and he ends up falling in with the writer's wife, who is looking for her husband while also trying to flee. Transit is full of visits to packed bureaucratic offices and appointments with heartless officials who have the power (or are helpless) to determine your fate. the refugees help each other when they are in trouble or resent each other when they have fortune. The narrator runs into the same sad cases over and over in office after office and cafe after cafe. You get lost in the futility of it all.

I read some 60 pages the day I started Transit. It pulled me in immediately and I thought I might finish it before I left for France 5 days later. I got about halfway through before I left and while I did carry it with me to Paris and onward to Avignon, the Luberon region, and even a day trip to Marseille, I didn't get back to reading it until nearly a month after I got back home. When I lose momentum, it can be hard to get it back, but I did immediately take to Transit again when I went back to it. The fact that the bulk of the book could be described as repetitive made it easier to return. It almost didn't matter where I left off; the cycle of events in Transit could have continued on endlessly in my absence until I dropped in on them again. And yet, I really loved this book.

Heart Lamp, by Banu Mushtaq

After finishing A Gentleman in Moscow – ages ago now, it seems – I searched my bookshelves for something to read that might put me in the mindset for my then upcoming trip to Provence. I landed on Anna Seghers' Transit which I tore through at first, but then I lost all momentum when I actually left for my trip. I finally got back to it a couple weeks ago, but I wasn't able to finish it before I needed to start the next book for my Women in Translation book club. So last Friday, after I got the notification that my order of Heart Lamp had arrived at Greenlight Books (just in time – I was starting to get nervous), I went to pick it up and started it on the bus home. 

It had been a long time since I read a book of short stories, and I think it was a nice format for my current style of reading (i.e., barely reading at all). For the most part, I read each story in a single sitting, so there was nothing I had to remember or keep track of. 

While the stories in Heart Lamp are not interconnected in any formal way, they do all inhabit the same world. The stories feature well off families and poor, happy and unhappy, young and old. There is a lot of heartbreak in these stories, but some very funny parts too. Reading the stories as a whole they are greater than the sum of the parts. All together, they give you a colorful, beautiful, detailed picture of Muslim village life in the south of India.

A Gentleman in Moscow, by Amor Towles

What a beautiful book this was. I really didn't know what I was getting into. I first heard of Amor Towles when his subsequent book, The Lincoln Highway, came out and it seemed to get a lot of media attention – I suppose on the strength of this book, though I missed any attention it got when it was published. I'm not sure I would have thought again about Amor Towles except that sometime later a friend of mine posted an instagram story saying that she was reading The Lincoln Highway and that it was "so beautiful." Even then, I probably wouldn't have sought his books out, but a month or two ago, a neighbor around the corner put out a box of free books in front of their house and A Gentleman in Moscow was among them, so I grabbed it and brought it home, where it sat on my coffee table for a few weeks before I decided to pick it up on Memorial Day. I still really knew nothing about it.

From the title I think I was expecting it might be a spy novel, and I was mildly surprised to find it began just after the Russian Revolution. The opening, which takes the form of the official documentation recording the government's decision on what to do about a former aristocrat, who by his social class should be eliminated, but who was the author, several years earlier, of a poem revered by the revolutionaries. His association with the poem spares his life, and Alexander Rostov is placed under permanent house arrest in the hotel where he lives in the center of Moscow. The book follows his life in the hotel and the view it gives him of the changing world outside for the next 30-plus years. Right up to the end, I never knew where the book's events were leading. This is a book with many small twists and turns, rather than one big plot twist. The way that Towles unspools the story is masterful.

Dance with Snakes, by Horacio Castellanos Moya, and Apocalypse, by Lizzie Wade

I had four other books in progress when I finished Amulet (and when I started it for that matter), but I felt like I wanted to stick with the same mood somehow and I pulled out Horacio Castellanos Moya's Dance with Snakes without giving it much thought. I didn't even notice, for example, that Roberto Bolaño blurbed it, saying: 

The acid humor of Horacio Castellanos Moya, resembling that of a Buster Keaton movie or a time-bomb, threatens the hormonal stability of imbeciles, who when they read him feel the irrepressible desire to hang the author in the town square. I can't think of a higher honor for a real writer.

Quite a blurb. I'd read four previous novels by Castellanos Moya – two of them twice – and loved them all. Dance with Snakes is an earlier work than the others I've read. I certainly wasn't expecting literal snakes, which there are in the book. (Though perhaps literal isn't quite the way to put it.) I found the level of violence, which quickly veers into the absurd, a little hard to handle. The narrator commits atrocities in the book, and yet you find yourself pulling for him somehow. It's dark and ridiculous and uncomfortable, and I was relieved when it was over, which I guess doesn't sound like much of a recommendation. Maybe it's best if I borrow a 3-tiered rating system from an acquaintance of mine who, when he reviews books, lists them as either, "Recommended," "Recommended for the Enthusiast," or "Not Recommended." I would put Dance with Snakes in the middle category. If you, like me, hope to be a Horacio Castellanos Moya completist: For sure read it! It's fun (ish). For the general reader, get yourself a copy of Senselessness and read it and then read it again and then read it yet another time, why not?

After finishing Dance with Snakes, instead of going back to one of the books I had already started or starting my next book club book – which is long and which I really should start soon because I have lot going on between now and my next book club meeting – I decided to start Apocalypse: How Catastrophe Transformed Our World and Can Forge New Futures by Lizzie Wade. Lizzie is an online acquaintance of mine, which is what let me to pre-order Apocalypse and to read it at all. As anyone who follows my reading at all will know (I write as if I have a public... as if!), straight nonfiction is rare here. Memoir, sure. But nonfiction, with just a couple exceptions, is limited to books I've been compelled to read for one reason or another. 

I don't know what I was expecting because, again, this is so outside my usual consumption, but Apocalypse was absorbing and beautiful. I cried several times while reading it. A few chapters in, I found myself making an odd comparison: Apocalypse, I thought, reminded me of Kalpa Imperial – a successive account of civilizations that have reached some kind of peak, and then collapse. Each looks different and what comes after changes, but the inevitable end and renewal is always there. The thought passed as I read on, particularly as I got into the second section, but the idea remains compelling to me. 

Since we're doing recommendations in this post, apparently, I'll say that Apocalypse is Recommended. It's  approachable and rigorous, informative and captivating. I'm so glad chance internet communities led me to read it.

Amulet, by Roberto Bolaño

The Savage Detectives was the first book I read by Roberto Bolaño. That was more than 15 years ago. I loved it, but I remember it only vaguely. Almost more as a mood than a text. I went on to read 2666 and then several of the earlier, shorter works – most recently The Spirit of Science Fiction. I had a similar feeling reading Amulet to what I felt reading The Spirit of Science Fiction. While Amulet is more polished, I had the feeling that it was practice for what would become The Savage Detectives. There were those same familiar names and places and events, which have somehow stayed with me over the years. Amulet even had the tiniest hint of 2666. It's just a passing moment, but the book refers to someplace looking like a graveyard, but not a graveyard of the present – a graveyard in the year 2666 (whatever that means).

The central event of Amulet is the occupation of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in 1968. The book's narrator is an undocumented Uruguayan woman who does occasional casual labor for faculty in the department of literature and philosophy. She hides out in a bathroom on campus and remains undetected through the army occupation. She is part of the older generation, but the book – and its narrator – are interested in the youth movements. There's a second character in Amulet who is without doubt a stand-in for Bolaño himself: Chilean, born in the same year (1953), and called in the book Arturo Belano. Like Bolaño is supposed to (but may not) have done, Belano made a trip to Chile in 1973* to participate in the revolution and returned to Mexico City a changed person. Perhaps Bolaño made this fictional version of himself as he wished he had been. 

 * I'll add that Bolaño is in good company if he missed out on being in Chile for the revolution and felt some shame about it. This is a theme in José Donoso's Curfew, whose central character left Chile well before 1973 (as did Donoso himself) but played the part of an exiled person though he never had any official dealings with the Pinochet regime. Of course Donoso is from a different generation: he was over 50 in 1973, when Bolaño was just 20.

By the Ionian Sea, by George Gissing (Again)

By the first time I read By the Ionian Sea, I had already read two other books by George Gissing: The Odd Women, which kicked off a year (2011) which I devoted almost entirely to reading nineteenth century British literature, and New Grub Street, which I read later that same year. I was led to By the Ionian Sea by a self-published study of Calabria, which I must have picked up when I was planning a trip to that part of Italy in 2018. I didn't end up getting By the Ionian Sea until after that trip – though it did influence a trip I took the following year to Puglia. I don't know that I would have made it to Taranto and the wonderful MArTA museum there if I hadn't read this book. I loved The Odd Women, but reading By the Ionian Sea, I developed such an affection for George Gissing – one I never would have had from reading his novels alone. Gissing is far more informed on ancient history than I am, and clearly stronger in languages, but I feel an affinity with him in his travels to these remote places more than 100 years ago. Of course, it's much easier to get to Calabria today, and the conditions there are much improved so I must give Gissing credit where credit is due. 

When I first wrote about this book, I said that Gissing's views about Southern Italy were paternalistic. I maintain that this is true – his accounts of the people are as bad as any British colonial descriptions of the developing world – but on this reading perhaps I had Carlo Levi more in mind than I did the first time around. (Which would be odd – given that I read Carlo Levi much closer to my first reading of By the Ionian Sea.) In any case, when I reflected on the fact that Gissing was visiting Calabria and Basilicata (and even the corner of Puglia) just under 40 years before Levi was exiled there and abject poverty and deeply unhygienic living conditions of people in that region, Gissing's complaints – about his accommodations, the food, the water, the wine – were probably reasonable. He contracted a severe illness during his travels, which may well have been malaria (which, I learned from Levi, was rampant in southern Italy at that time). Most of the water was probably not safe to drink, and the wine was often watered down for economic reasons. So maybe I need to give Gissing a little slack. I mention this because, despite it all, Gissing comes out of this journey joyful. On my first reading, I came away with a lingering feeling of the decrepitude of it all, while this time it's the delight that is staying with me. The worst of Gissing's time is spent at Cotrone, but even of Cotrone he says, 

My own chamber contained merely the barest necessities, and, as the gentleman of Cosenza would have said, "left something to be desired" in point of cleanliness. Conceive the places into which Cotrone's poorest have to crawl when they are stricken with disease. I admit, however, that the thought was worse to me in the moment than it is now. After all, the native of Cotrone has advantages over the native of a city slum; and it is better to die in a hovel by the Ionian Sea than in a cellar in Shoreditch. 

What I relate to in Gissing is his joy in traveling alone and discovering things that have meaning only for him. While I felt this affection for him the first time I read By the Ionian Sea, I'm not sure I could have articulated the reason. It's still a little hard to put into words, but I see myself in him in this book. 

 

P.S. When I started this post, I didn't know where it was going, and I thought I would get to something which now feels off topic. For those unfamiliar with The Odd Women, the title refers to the gender imbalance in Victorian England, where there were evidently more women than men due to war and colonialism I guess? In any case, I found myself thinking about this quite a bit while reading Testament of Youth – presumably there was an even greater gender imbalance in the postwar era. I think this fact of having Gissing in my mind is what led me to reread By the Ionion Sea. I can't imagine why else it would have been top of mind.