The Gate of Angels, by Penelope Fitzgerald

Continuing my string of slim novels by English women, I finished The Gate of Angels by Penelope Fitzgerald. I thought this was only the second book of hers I'd read -- I remember The Bookshop clearly, but my records show I also read Offshore about 5 years ago and I do faintly remember it now that I've been reminded. I found The Bookshop quietly devastating. I was afraid The Gate of Angels was going to tend that way as well, but things came together altogether differently here. 

I now remember a certain humor in all her books that I've read, but this one is the funniest. It's rarely laugh out loud funny, but full of funny character portraits. The two central characters are Fred, a scholar at Cambridge, and Daisy, a working class girl from the south of London, who are thrown together when they're involved in a horse-cart and bicycle accident. Fred, of course, falls instantly in love, but the situation is messy.

The book is organized into four parts and while, for the most part, the narrative flows smoothly, each chapter has a descriptive title and is almost a vignette. It's rather magical how these vignettes come together to make the story. Some of them contribute in a direct way, while others (such as the one comprising a ghost story written and told by a college Proctor) are almost asides, which just add entertainment value.

Fitzgerald has a narrative voice that I recognized immediately -- warm, descriptive, and funny. It served this story particularly well. The Gate of Angels is certainly my favorite book of hers that I've read.

First Love, by Gwendoline Riley

I think I originally picked up First Love on the basis of a recommendation for another Gwendoline Riley novel. I heard something good about her and it was the book that was immediately available and so I got it. And then it sat on my shelf for several years. It was similarly a recommendation of a different novel of hers (The Palm House, which came out earlier this year) that inspired me to pull it out and read it in a few sittings yesterday. As it turned out, it was a more apt selection than I even realized. I hadn't previously been aware Riley was from the north of England. I was fresh back from a trip to Manchester and London, so I could just picture – fresh in my mind – many of the locations in the book: Oxford Road or Oldham Street in Manchester; the new developments in Ancoats where the narrator's mother lives; Earl's Court or Euston in London. 

Let me start by saying that I liked First Love. And yet, a few paragraphs in, one of the first thoughts I had while reading it (even as I was already aware that I was enjoying the prose at least) was about how boring I find heterosexual relationships to be. I think coming into this right after reading Hotel du Lac, which is quite different but also very much about heterosexual relationships and power dynamics, is what emphasized the point for me. I don't know that I would have thought independently that these books had much in common, but they are both about (among other things) the ways women sometimes make themselves small in relationships, orbiting the man who remains the center. 

The back cover blurb for First Love says,  

Catastrophically ill-suited for each other, and forever straddling a line between relative calm and explosive confrontation, Neve and her husband, Edwyn, live together in London... Drawing us into the battleground of this marriage, Gwendoline Riley tells a transfixing story of mistakes and misalliances, of helplessness and hostility, in which both husband and wife have played a part. 

It goes on to ask, coyly: "Could this possibly be, nonetheless, a story of love?" And that question, well – it just seems so beside the point to me. The question posed on the back of the book is not, I think, one anyone would be asking if not for the title of the book. The title does make one wonder, of course. What first love are we talking about here? Is it ironic? I suppose this is a mild spoiler, but the conditions of the relationship at the center of this book are so bad, I hardly think it matters if it's love. In any case, this is an issue I take not with the book but with whoever wrote the back cover text, so I guess I should let it go. The book was quite good at exploring this relationship. 

Hotel du Lac, by Anita Brookner

I'm just back from England. I told myself I wouldn't take a book with me. I was hoping to travel light, and I knew I would never read on the red eye over. I did have 2 significant train rides while there, on one of which I might have the energy to read. I thought I'd just pick something up to read in my explorations. Then at the last minute I threw in Dostoyevsky's Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, which I'd been intending to reread and was appropriately slim. Of course that didn't stop me from picking up more books while I was there. At an Oxfam shop I found Hotel du Lac, and I bought it as well as a Penelope Fitzgerald book. I almost bought Lauren Groff's Matrix as well, but it was raining and the only means I had for keeping books dry while I was out was to put them in the front pocket of my hoodie and zip up my rain jacket over them and I didn't think all three books would fit.

I was drawn to the Brookner because I seemed to remember the writer Rumaan Alam posting about her recently. Hers was a name I knew, but that's about it. I didn't even notice until today the "Winner of the Booker Prize" tag on the cover of the book. I started it in my hotel room in Manchester on Saturday didn't get very far. I did read a bit more on the train ride from Manchester to London yesterday. And then I finished on my flight home, reading the last pages just as we were landing. It's a quiet little book and the culture in captures I think must have been a throwback even when it was published in 1984: well-heeled women at a discreet Swiss resort to escape the boredom or the scandal of their lives at home. But it's not set in the past; it's more the tail end of a period. The novel's protagonist is experiencing that end herself. At the start of the book she is thoroughly modern in some ways, but at the same time rather old fashioned. Over the course of the book, she grows up – she says so herself, though she's already 39. Her two weeks at the Swiss resort prove consequential for her coming into herself.

Croatian War Nocturnal, by Spomenka Štimec; Taiwan Travelogue, by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ

I was excited when my book club chose Croatian War Nocturnal to read because I'd never read anything written in Esperanto before. As a lover of languages and utopian projects, I've always liked the idea of Esperanto. I visited the Esperanto Museum in Vienna several years back and loved looking at all the documentation there and the pictures from the Esperanto congresses over the years. It wasn't until I read this book that I discovered Yugoslavia was a hot spot for Esperanto, though on reflection, it made sense. How better to unify the multiethnic multilingual population of a new nation than under the banner of a utopian created language that is foreign to all. You see this sometimes in formerly colonized countries that keep using the language of the colonizer as the official language rather than favoring any ethnic group in particular. And isn't a language with idealistic foundations better than a language associated with empire? Of course, like the languages of the colonizers, Esperanto is a Western construct. And apart from all the brutality that comes with a colonial language, they also come with a certain kind of access. (As becomes clear in Croatian War Nocturnal, Esperanto also comes with a kind of access: to a small but devoted international community of Esperantists. A very narrow power, but an interesting one.) 

The book itself recounts the 1991 war period in Croatia, mostly in vignettes. The author's own experience in Zagreb, that of some members of her cross-border family, and the wartime losses of some of her colleagues in the Esperantist community. She describes very clearly the way Yugoslavia fractured, with fault lines that were barely under the surface suddenly splitting, dividing families and neighbors and communities. It was a slim book and, as someone who has developed a strong interest in the region, I wished there had been more. 

I started Taiwan Travelogue about 3 weeks ago and had to take a short break from it to read Croatian War Nocturnal. It took me nearly all those 3 weeks to read the first half, and I read the second half in just a couple sittings yesterday and early this morning. 

It's clear to see why Taiwan Travelogue won the National Book Award for Translation. Language is such an important part of this book. It demands a translator who knows both Chinese and Japanese, and the translator's notes (mixed in with the author's notes, as well -- occasionally -- as notes from the fictional author in the book) provide quite a lot of context that is helpful to a reader who is unfamiliar with Taiwan and the languages in the book. 

This feat of translation surrounds a conceit in the book that it is itself a translated work. The book claims to the recently rediscovered manuscript of a Japanese writer's book about a year she spent in Taiwan in the 1930s when it was under Japanese rule, recently retranslated into Mandarin in the twenty-teens. I found this frame to be an unnecessary distraction. 

The story at the center of the book is about the relationship between the Japanese writer and her local Taiwanese translator and guide, which turns out also to be a story about empire and power and self-determination. And food. Above all, you could say this book is about food. Each chapter title is a dish, and each chapter recounts how the two women came to eat this dish, as well as often how the dish came to be, with other events seeming almost incidental. I found the food discussions occasionally fascinating and occasionally overlong. I think the best way to read this book would be as part of a culinary experience, because one does truly feel one is missing out by not having the opportunity to taste these foods that are described with so much detail as to their history and preparation.

An African in Greenland, by Tété-Michel Kpomassie

I can't remember where I first heard about An African in Greenland, but I believe I picked up a copy because it was the first book I'd heard of by a Togolese author. It does feel a bit ironic to count this book for Togo in my world books reading project (I already have Greenland covered!), but the book does start out in Togo. The first quarter of the book documents Kpomassie's long (physically and temporally) and circuitous route to get from Togo to Greenland. Honestly, I could have read even more on this period: from his village in Togo, when he was just 16 years old, Kpomassie traveled first to Ivory Coast where he stays with an aunt, then to Ghana where he gets an embassy job and teaches himself English, then to Senegal where he gets another embassy job, then to Mauritania from where he intends to leave, only to find ships don't travel from there anymore, so he must return back to Senegal in order to get a ship to France. After arriving in Marseille, he travels to Paris where he spends a couple of years before traveling to Germany and on to Copenhagen, the point of departure for ships to Greenland. Everywhere he went, Kpomassie had to pause and work for months or even years to save up enough money to fund the next stage of his travels. At the same time, he encountered incredible generosity, including one benefactor in Paris whom he began to think of as a second father. It's astonishing that he undertook this adventure at such a young age and against such challenges, though maybe it was only his youth that made it fathomable.

On arriving in Greenland, Kpomassie was completely reliant on the generosity of others – he was never able to legally work there – and many of the people who helped him get by there were living in poverty themselves. They shared their homes, their limited food, their abundant coffee and booze, and sometimes even their beds with him. He traveled up the west coast from south to north over a period of a year and 3 months, ending up in Upernavik, which is apparently the south of the north of Greenland. 

One gathers that Kpomassie became something of a celebrity while in Greenland as the first African ever to visit the island. Early on, he is a novelty, but as time passes he finds that people have begun to expect his arrival. They have heard about him from friends or family in other villages where he stopped, and when he arrives in Upernavik, at the house where he stops to seek shelter the owner says he heard about him on the radio.  

I must say, after reading this, Greenland sounds utterly unappealing. It's not just because of the food, though that is a big part of it. Food is a major theme of the book because of the general scarcity of it, and because one must constantly find ways to feed oneself through the long, dark winter. Kpomassie's diet on his travels seemed to consist primarily of seal meat, blubber, and organs, eaten raw a lot more often than you'd expect, with occasional fish or reindeer meat. There are also huge quantities of coffee, and pervasive binge drinking. (This last I remember well from Last Night in Nuuk.) 

I also don't think I would manage well in either the polar summer or the polar winter. I never realized before reading this book just how long the sunless days and full sun days lasted. Even today, 6 weeks after the solstice, Upernavik still gets 24 hours of daylight. In about a week, on August 8, the village will get just over an hour of twilight. Then in late September, it will get 2 hours of night and from there the nights will just get longer until November 13, at which point there will be no sun for many months. Living in a place where there is a distinct difference between winter and summer daylight hours, I somehow only noticed a couple years ago that the day to day change happened more quickly around the equinoxes and more slowly at the solstices. Of course, at the poles, this is more pronounced.

Kpomassie, however, loved Greenland. The story, and his telling of it, is really remarkable. He heard of this far off place from a book he found in Togo at age 16, fell in love with it at a distance, and spent 8 years working and traveling with the continuous goal of getting there. At the end of the book, he says he could imagine himself staying there forever, but he feels obliged to leave to get news of his family and share his experiences with the world. After finishing the book, I learned that Kpomassie is evidently still alive at age 85 or so, and that he moved back to Greenland in 2022 to live out his final years.

Run Towards the Danger, by Sarah Polley

I've always liked Sarah Polley in my mind, even though I've only seen a handful of her movies. I believe the first thing I saw her in was The Sweet Hereafter and then Go a couple years later. In 2013, I saw her autobiographical documentary Stories We Tell and I was so impressed by her, though now I don't remember a whole lot about it. My memory is of a mood and a look more than anything. Though I guess I also remember thinking she seemed very smart and thoughtful. In any case, I was placing an order with my neighborhood community goods recycler and they had a copy of her book so I bought it on a whim. I wasn't necessarily intending to start it right away, but it's a collection of essays and last Thursday I thought maybe I'd just read the first essay. It turned out to be a rather long one, about her playing Alice at the Stratford Festival and having scoliosis and developing stage fright and a whole lot of other things, but I guess I was hooked. I was leaving the following day for a work trip to Atlanta and I ended up finishing the book across my flights there and back. 

Run Towards the Danger tackles difficult – even terrifying – events from Polley's own life, from the aforementioned stage fright and scoliosis, to the harrowing experiences she had as a child actor working with Terry Gilliam, and her high risk first pregnancy, among others. While she tells these stories and processes the events on an individual level, she also always has a lens beyond herself to how these stories are part of a larger picture. You can see just how much she understands her own position of privilege, even in the context of some horrific events she herself has experienced. There is a lengthy end note about her decision to seek private medical care in the U.S. for concussion symptoms and the lengths she goes to defend Canadian healthcare and her support for free healthcare for all is almost comical, except that I believe she is in earnest and feeling conflicted about her decision. 

I was impressed by Sarah Polley after seeing Stories We Tell and this book has only deepened my respect for her.

James, by Percival Everett

I'm not sure why it took me so long to get to reading James. I got my copy in March of 2024 when Percival Everett did a reading and signing at P&T Knitwear in New York. It looks like I went out of town a few days later and when I came back, I read other things. Or I didn't read at all, for a while there. It's sat on my shelf ever since. The fact that it's a hardcover edition didn't help – I always prefer to read paperbacks. And I think part of my hesitation was the subject matter itself. I wasn't sure I wanted to retread Huck Finn, even if I did trust Everett to do it well. It's been a very long time since I read Huckleberry Finn – I'm not even sure I've read it in its entirety. But I'm familiar with it in the way anyone who grew up here (at least when I did) must probably be.

I'm also not sure what led me to pull it out to read just over a week ago. I was about to finish Dooneen and was scanning my shelves and I looked at James and wondered, why haven't I read it yet? So I laid it out and a couple days later, I started it. I read nearly 100 pages in that first sitting. 

One of the things I've always marveled at in Everett's books is the way he can meld comedy and tragedy, with a humor that is often ironic and biting, but James has less of that type of comedy than, for instance, The Trees or Erasure. It's a very tender book. I wrote very little about Telephone when I read it, but it's probably closer in mood to James than the other Everett books I've read.

Once I was into it, there were a few times when my anxiety about reading it did make me pause. The middle section in particular, when Jim and Huck were traveling and running into various risky situations was the most stressful. I found I could often read only one chapter at a time. Oddly, the situation gets arguably worse in the latter third of the book, but I didn't find that as hard going. At the conclusion I felt – and I think this is how one must feel – that Percival Everett made Huckleberry Finn make sense. 

Maigret at the Gai-Moulin, by Georges Simenon; Dooneen, by Keith Ridgway

A few weeks ago I was with my dad at a thrift store in Bay Ridge and I found a stack of Georges Simenon Maigret books. I'd never read any Simenon, but I had watched and enjoyed the recent Maigret adaptation, so I bought the lot – eight books in total. I knew there were a lot of Maigret books, but when I went to figure out the order mine belonged in, I was shocked to see just how many – and across what timespan: 75 novels, plus an additional 28 short stories, published over a period of more than 40 years! I started with Maigret at the Gai-Moulin because it was the earliest among the books I bought. Published in 1931, it's the tenth Maigret novel. 

I expected the book to be set in Paris, but in fact this one takes place in Belgium. Maigret almost seems a minor character in the book. He doesn't turn up until well along in the story, when he turns out to have been trailing the murder victim, a wealthy Greek man whose body is found in a basket at the zoo. Of course he interferes with the case, bests the local police, and solves the crime for them. The more central figure in the book is a young man who is suspected of the murder – a good kid who's gotten caught up with a bad crows. When Maigret clears him of the murder, he cleans up his ways and is sent off to do the king's work in the Belgian Congo, so surely everything will have worked out for him in the long run!

Last week, just as I was finishing the Maigret book, the latest installment from my New Directions subscription showed up: Dooneen, by Keith Ridgway and I decided to go right into it. I hadn't heard of the author and the book may not even be officially out yet in the U.S. if Amazon's publication date is to be trusted. I read just the beginning of the blurb on the back and thought it sounded like interesting speculative fiction, and I have to admit I was very drawn to the design of the edition. 

Some minor spoilers follow.  

 

June Books

She Who Remains was the latest choice for my Women in Translation Book Club. It turned out to be a somewhat controversial book in our discussion. I guess we've had differing opinions on books before, but this seemed more contentious than usual. There were questions about whether it was exploitative, about who has the right to tell this story, about the choice to use the Sworn Virgin terminology, about whether some aspects of the storytelling were lazy. Some of these were questions I had while reading the book. And yet, I also have the question of whether it was worth all this discussion in the first place. 

That said, I liked She Who Remains quite a bit more than I expected to. It's disjointed and in fragments with variable formatting and punctuation. When I saw the text visually - without reading it at all, I thought it was going to be an impenetrable slog. I don't have much tolerance for freeform text. But it turned out not to be a slow read. I got through it quite quickly and found it easy to get into. But while it tackles some very serious subjects, I didn't find that it had a lot of substance. I had nothing much to say about it.

It feels a little funny to include it here, but on Saturday I read -- cover-to-cover -- a book my uncle gave me for Christmas in 1983: White Wash and Pink Feathers, the story of Petros the pelican, a celebrity on Mykonos since his arrival there in 1958 until his death in 1985 (which I only just learned of when I searched up Petros). My uncle went to Mykonos annually as far back as I can remember and often brought me back gifts from there, but this book was probably the first. My uncle went into home hospice care on Saturday and passed away in the early hours of Sunday morning. And so on Saturday morning, I went into my jewelry box and put on a necklace he got me from Mykonos a few years ago and a bracelet he got me from I don't know where some 20 years ago, and I found White Wash and Pink Feathers, which I kept among a small selection of books from my childhood and I sat down and read it. I think my parents probably read me parts of the book -- or maybe even the whole thing; it's not very long -- when I was a kid, but I certainly didn't remember much. It recounts Petros' life on Mykonos from when he was a young pelican (supposedly with his parents and an aunt and uncle? I don't know how much truth there is to this story) who survived a storm that killed most of his family. The book recounts Petros' friendship and fame among humans, but also with some other birds on the island (a stork from Russia, a rooster, a few other pelicans). It's also very much about Mykonos and the changes on the island from the 1950s to the 1980s, with the increase in tourism. I imagine the island of the 2020s looks quite different from the one of 1982, the year of the book's publication - let alone when Petros arrived there in 1958.

On Sunday I started Ann Leckie's latest, Radiant Star, and I finished it this morning before work. I was very excited when I heard she had a new book out. I ordered it from the library a few weeks back. Of course my hold came through while I was out of the country, so I sent it back into circulation (or thought I did) and ordered it again and my second hold showed up just before I returned home. When I went to pick it up at my local branch, both copies were there waiting for me in the hold section, which made me feel a little bad but there wasn't a waitlist anymore so not that bad. I had heard mixed to negative reports from several other folks reading it, so my hopes were tempered, but in the end I really liked it. Someone pointed out that it may be playing on a different genre from some of Leckie's earlier books, and I would certainly say it had a different voice. The story is not told as a first person narrative, but the unknown narrator -- maybe the storyteller more accurately, has a very distinctive tone and interjects quite a lot in a way that I don't recall as a feature of the other books. Radiant Star ends up being mostly about power struggles among several factions with unlikeable leadership, but it also felt like a prequel to stories to come. Perhaps I'll need to reread it if a successor arrives. 

Absence, by Andrew Dana Hudson; All Systems Red, by Martha Wells

The author of Absence is an acquaintance from the internet. I'm not sure I would have heard about it otherwise – I'm not very up on new books these days. There was a book event here in Brooklyn, so I went and I got my copy of the book there. This was the same book event where I picked up The Old Man by the Sea and I started Absence just after finishing that book. (I might have read it first, except that it's a somewhat bulky hardcover and with my travel plans I preferred a slim paperback.) I heard the first two chapters at the event, so it was as if I had already started it. 

Absence is about sort of a slow apocalypse. The sudden and unpredictable disappearance of people over a period of years, resulting in an ever-diminishing global population, and everything that might entail. It was fun to read what Hudson imagined might happen in this circumstance: some positive changes, some ambiguous, some predictably bad outcomes. I was also really impressed with the way the book handled the uncertainty of the conflicting potential truths in the story. I feel like the conclusion could have been very unsatisfying, but it wasn't.

Perhaps because I had heard the author in discussion talking about writing this book, I found myself paying a lot of attention to the structure – at least, more than I usually do. I'm more likely to focus on language when it comes to writing craft, but the structure of Absence really impressed me. It has more than 100 chapters, across several sections – most of which encompass one day. Part of the book includes a woven narrative of past and present, which I think is when I first noticed the structure. The narrative about the past was brought in to give the reader some background on the narrator, and when you got everything you needed to know, it ended – but it was so seamless, I couldn't tell you when it returned to being just the single, present narrative. 

Absence is a fast-paced book. I tore through the latter two-thirds of it in just a couple days. I would have finished it much sooner if not for the fact that, on whim inspired by the same Discord group where I'm connected to the author, I decided to experiment with the novelty of requesting holds from the library.

I'm an enthusiastic supporter of libraries in theory – and an annual donor to both the New York and Brooklyn Public Library, but I rarely actually use the library in practice. Several of my online friends were talking about putting a hold on the new Ann Leckie book, Radiant Star and I thought, I should do that! So I did. And while I was at it, I also put a hold on the first Murderbot book, All Systems Red, because I'd been curious about the books. I enjoyed the TV show and people said the books were fun, and fun was what I was in the mood for. My hold came in within just a couple days and – magic! – I could just walk over to my nearest branch and grab it off the shelf and take it home with me. 

I was a little worried the fact that I had watched the TV show would spoil the book. Maybe it did a little (though also the TV show took a turn that wasn't in the book, or at least as I recall it), but I am a completist by nature and I didn't want to start the series anywhere but book one. I also wanted to see if I enjoyed the book as a reading experience. I did! I'm not going to put the next one on hold jut yet because I have some travel over the next few weeks, but I look forward to reading it when I'm back. Libraries: what a concept!

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.