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.

Testament of Youth, by Vera Brittain

I started Testament of Youth back in January, just after I finished Voyage Along the Horizon. I tore through nearly 200 pages of in a few days but then I lost momentum and ended up not reading it at all for long stretches and starting various other books, a couple of which I've since finished. I finally went back to Testament of Youth about a week ago with more than 200 pages left to go and I tore through those last 200 pages almost as quickly as I did the first. 

I think it was reading Stefan Zweig's memior that inspired me to read Vera Brittain's. I wanted to read more about the World War I era from the perspective of someone who lived through it. I realized also that – for some time now – I've been more interested in memoirs that fiction.

Testament of Youth is largely a memoir of Brittain's experience as a V.A.D. nurse during World War I, but the book covers a much longer period of time than I expected. Brittain spends some time on her youth and relationships before the war, and the post war section goes on for more than a couple hundred pages and covers her life all the way up to 1925. Roughly, the book covers five eras of Brittain's life (1) Childhood; (2) Oxford; (3) V.A.D. work; (4) Return to Oxford; (5) After Oxford, though the V.A.D. work  could certainly be subdivided between time in the U.K., time in Malta, time in France, and time back in the U.K. In any case, the last section – Brittain's life after graduating from Oxford – is freshest in my mind, that being the part I read in the last few days. It almost feels like it should be a separate book. I found the work that Brittain was doing after Oxford very interesting. In this period, she became active with the League of Nations Union and in politics. She was a frequent public speaker and a journalist. She made a few trips to the continent, of which the book had fascinating but rather brief accounts. (I loved reading about her time in Italy and would have read even more!) But the narrative in the book, when it got to this stage, started to feel quite messy. It jumped around in time, making the sequence of events hard to follow. In a way, this end – drawn out as it was – seemed an afterthought to the great narrative of the wartime. 

This book must have taken quite a lot of effort to compose. Throughout, Brittain quotes and cites letters and communications she sent and received, which must have been recovered and compiled in a great work of indexing. I was put truly in awe of the wartime postal service. Some time ago I read or heard somewhere that in the early days of postal service, mail deliveries might come as often as four times per day. I realize modern times don't demand such frequent mail service (when I look at the physical mail I receive, I could do without nearly all of it), but it's hard not to feel we've taken a step backward in this regard. (The feeling is like when you see a train map from a century ago and realize how much better served the world was by trains then compared to now.) In any case, as person who travels to Italy once or twice a year and sends several postcards from there when I go, I get a certain pleasure in observing how hilariously long it takes for those cards to reach their destinations. What a marvel, then, to read about Vera Brittain and her brother, stationed in the mountains outside Bassano, sending and receiving mail and packages in the midst of the war. But now I have veered off topic.

I'm so glad I went back and finished Testament of Youth. I'm not sure why I stopped to begin with. I thought, after reading this, I might double down in a way and go right into reading Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, a book twice as long covering a somewhat later period in Eastern Europe, because Rebecca West comes up in the background of Testament of Youth now and then. But I think I'll wait a moment. In the meantime, I've started a reread of George Gissing's By the Ionian Sea because Gissing too was somehow ringing in the back of my mind while reading Testament of Youth. 

The Night Guest, by Hildur Knútsdóttir

I have three other books that I've been moving through slowly these last two months, but I set them all aside to read the next book for my book club, The Night Guest by Hildur Knútsdóttir. I was a little terrified to read it. At McNally Jackson, where I got my copy, it was shelved in the Horror section. The headline on Bookshop.org says, "Hildur Knútsdóttir's The Night Guest is an eerie and ensnaring story set in contemporary Reykjavík that’s sure to keep you awake at night," and all the blurbs seemed to express a similar feeling. I don't enjoy being scared. My tolerance for horror movies is pretty much nonexistent. I get nightmares. I spent a long time last night in conversation with a friend trying to remember any scary book I had read. For a while, the only thing I could come up with that might fit the horror genre was Frankenstein, but scrolling through my StoryGraph read books I got to China Miéville's The Scar and remembered reading Perdido Street Station, without a doubt the scariest book I've ever read (though I did like it, actually).  

So, with a sense of dread, I waited until I had a free day when I could start it in the morning and finish it well before bedtime. As it turned out, it only took about 2 hours to read. It's 194 pages divided into about 100 chapters, several of which are one short sentence long. There's a lot of blank space in this book. Which, now that I think about it, correlates nicely with the story. The Night Guest is narrated by a woman find herself waking up bruised and exhausted each morning after what she believes to have been a full night's sleep, and seeks to uncover the mystery of her nighttime activities. I realized quite early that the horror in The Night Guest is not the kind of horror that scares me. I've given a fair amount of thought to what type of horror most scares me, though I've never quite pinpointed it. Having thought about it a little more today, I can confidently say that I find external horror a lot scarier than internal horror, a distinction I'd never particularly thought about before.

The book I found myself thinking about as I read The Night Guest was Justine, which now that I think about it, is something of a horror (internal horror) novel itself. In fact, Justine left me feeling quite shaken, in a good – or at least a powerful – way. I breezed through The Night Guest. It's a compelling read, if a bit slight. Maybe I should be relieved.

Moving Parts, by Magdalena Tulli

I've had Moving Parts as well as a second Magdalena Tulli book on my shelves for some time and I'd considered reading each before but never actually settled on reading them until Moving Parts was selected for my Women in Translation book club. Finally, I have read a Polish book. This has long felt like a gap in my world reading project that I should be able to fill easily.

Moving Parts is hard to pin down, appropriately, I suppose, given its title. It's a work of meta fiction that operates on a dream logic, observing a narrator trying to follow the characters and in a struggle with the creator. I found it to be a slog at first, but it picked up about midway through and I ended up quite liking it, though without a whole lot to say about it. It's taken me 2 weeks to get around to finishing this post. I almost feel the need to reread it to understand it better.

Voyage Along the Horizon, by Javier Marías

Yesterday evening, I finished Voyage Along the Horizon, which Javier Marías wrote between ages 19 and 21. With it done, I have now read every Javier Marías novel available in English. I believe George Eliot is the only other writer (at least among those with a significant output of work) by whom I have read every novel written. For Marías, this amounts to 13 books and 3500 pages of his writing (most of it translated by Margaret Jull Costa, whom I also developed an affection for through all this reading). I read my first book by Marías almost exactly 9 years ago, so I've averaged a little under 1.5 books by him per year since then. In the last couple years, I've found myself a little troubled by his books (their deep heteronormativity and reliance on old fashioned gender roles, the sexual jealousy, the, for lack of a better word, perviness) in a way that I don't think I was previously, but still: I love his writing. It feels like Marías writes the way I think.

With that out of the way (I probably ought to, but am not going to take the opportunity of finishing my last Marías novel to write a treatise on him), Voyage Along the Horizon was an odd way to finish. I read his final book last year, and that probably would have been a more appropriate last book to read, but instead I was left with Voyage Along the Horizon, his oldest book available in English -- published in 1973, a full 13 years before the next oldest book I've read (The Man of Feeling). There was barely a trace of the Marías I knew in Voyage Along the Horizon. At the most -- and this is an odd thing to say about a translated work -- there were words here and there that I associate with him. There was also a certain round-aboutness to the book. Often with Marías you might be two-thirds of the way into a book before you finally see where it's headed.

This edition of Voyage Along the Horizon was published in 2006 by Believer Books, an imprint associated with Believer magazine, which at the time was translating and publishing his regular columns from El País. At the back of the book there are "Eight Questions for Javier Marías," which he responded to for inclusion with the publication. I can't say they provided a whole lot of elucidation with regard to the text, but it was interesting to hear him reflect on his early influences. 

 Apart from that, I hardly know what to say. Voyage Along the Horizon is not a bad book, but I never would have read it (and it most likely never would have been translated into English) if it weren't by Javier Marías. It's totally unlike his other books in terms of setting (it's historical fiction, about a group of mostly English creative types on a cruise in the Mediterranean, which is eventually headed for Antarctica) and narrative style (it's a book within a book and lacks much of the internal monologue I usually associate with Marías). But, as a completist, I'm happy to have read it.

The World of Yesterday, by Stefan Zweig

I started Stefan Zweig's 1942 memoir The World of Yesterday with 3 days left in 2024 and I thought I might finish it in time for the new year. I always read right up until evening on December 31, but I like to start the year with a clean slate so I try to pick books I can finish in time. Then on January 1, for the last several years, it has been my tradition to start the day and the year by reading a book by Javier Marías. I should have known better than to start a book that was nearly 500 pages long, though I guess it doesn't matter all that much. As it happened, I was feeling very unwell on January 1 this year and not up for reading at all. On the following days, I kept going with The World of Yesterday, and this morning I finished it. Later today or tomorrow I will start the last remaining Javier Marías novel that I have not read. The tradition was going to end anyway, and it's not that important to me in fact. As much as anything, it may just be a way to save myself too much decision-making first thing in the year.

In an unintended coincidence, the last book I read in 2023 was also a Stefan Zweig book. Maybe I have the beginnings of a new tradition.

As I wrote after reading Zweig'g Chess Story, I only became aware of Zweig in 2013. I remarked then about my surprise that I hadn't heard of him before, and after reading The World of Yesterday I only feel more surprised. If anything, Zweig is modest in his memoir but one does get a sense of his wide fame when reading it. I half joked to friends that I was reading a celebrity memoir, because the book is full of anecdotes about his meetings and friendships with other celebrities of the time, from Freud to Richard Strauss to Dalí to Gide to Rodin and so many others. Zweig traveled the world, both before World War I and between the wars, visiting the United States, Central and South America, and India, as well as the expected places in Europe. He led a remarkable life, which his memoir – even with his personal perspective – describes within the context of the history and events as they were happening around him. There is an almost incredible clarity to this book that is hard to imagine achieving without some distance. (I think he must have written it after leaving Europe for Brazil, though his life in Brazil is never mentioned, so perhaps that was the distance.)

I expected to learn more about his personal life, but while his friendships with celebrated authors, artists, and musicians are covered, his intimate relationships are almost completely left out. We learn only a little about his immediate family at the beginning and then hear briefly about the fate of his mother toward the end. We learn virtually nothing at all of his spouses and home life. Even more surprising, the book is very limited in its discussion of his work. While a few particular works are discussed in some detail, most that come up are mentioned only in passing, and many don't come up at all. At one point he alludes to his plans to write a novel – which I think must have been Beware of Pity – which got sidetracked when he developed an interest in Mary Stuart. And he references his biography of Marie Antoinette only briefly in the context of Mary Stuart. He mentions Burning Secret only in the context of the film adaptation of it being banned in Germany. Most of his other novels are not mentioned at all. One knows when reading the book that he is a prolific writer across many different forms, but the creation of those works play a small part in the memoir.

What The World of Yesterday does capture extremely well is exactly what its title promises: the life, the feeling, the experience of being in Europe at the turn of the 20th century, on the eve of World War I, in the wake of that war, the interwar period and in the last years before World War II. Zweig does incredible work at helping the reader understand what it was to live through all of it. I think I had hoped the book would also help me understand why he took his own life in 1942, shortly after finishing his memoir, but I can't say that it did – it only made me the more sad for his loss.

On Lighthouses, Such Fine Boys, The Word is Murder

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

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

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

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

Four Seasons in Rome, by Anthony Doerr

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Near to the Wild Heart, by Clarice Lispector

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vertigo, by W.G. Sebald

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

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

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

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

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

City of Laughter, by Temim Fruchter

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

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

Tyrant Memory, by Horacio Castellanos Moya

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

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

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

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

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