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. 

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.

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.

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. 

Our Lady of the Nile, by Scholastique Mukasonga, and Tomás Nevinson, by Javier Marías

After a long dry spell, I finished 2 books in the last week (and they have unexpectedly similar color schemes). I debated whether to start this post with Our Lady of the Nile or Tomás Nevinson because while I started the latter first, I finished the former a few days earlier. 

Since reading Mukasonga's memoir The Barefoot Woman three years ago and learning her first novel had become available in English, I was eager to read it. So I was pleased when it was selected by my Women in Translation book club. Informed by Mukasonga's own youth, we are told, Our Lady of the Nile is set in a prestigious Catholic boarding school for girls in the Rwandan mountains, near the source of the Nile. There is a small clutch of schoolgirls whose lives we learn a little about – some in more depth than others – as well as the Father and nuns around them, a white man with an obsession with ancient Egypt who lives nearby, and assorted other characters. We start to grasp the ethnic distinctions among the girls indirectly, in how they relate to or talk about one another. The book is set at a moment when the power in Rwanda has started to shift, in the wake of Rwandan independence when the Hutu majority population was solidifying its power. The narrative in Our Lady of the Nile consists mostly of vignettes focusing in on one or two of the girls, and together they give us a picture of life at the school and the situation of Rwanda's elite class. This was an interesting book and I'm glad I read it, but I didn't find it as lovely or as moving as The Barefoot Woman.

I had been waiting for Tomás Nevinson to come out in paperback before picking it up with the intention of starting it on January 1, 2025, but then a thoughtful houseguest got me the hardcover in early spring of this year and it sat there on my coffee table staring at me for a couple weeks until finally I decided not to wait. I started in on or around April 9. I got a few hundred pages into it – with Marías it always takes a few hundred pages for things to really get going anyway – but it's a long book, even for Marías, and after two weeks I had to set it aside to read my Women In Translation book club's May selection, There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job. I didn't quite manage to finish that in time for my book club meeting on May 5 (though I got most of the way) and then these two unfinished books, both of which I'd read more than 200 pages of, were sitting waiting to be finished and instead I read nothing at all. For months. I took Tomás Nevinson to Paris and back in June and never opened it. When I got home from Paris, I knew I had to start Our Lady of the Nile right away to read it in time for my July book club meeting, so Tomás Nevinson went back to the coffee table. Finally, last Friday I returned to it.

I had chosen a good stopping point back in April. The book is divided into large numbered sections with several short un-numbered chapters in each. I paused at one of the numbered sections, just as there was a shift in the narrative, the focus transferred from one character to another. What can I say about Tomás Nevinson? It's about what I expected – not in content, precisely. I assumed it would cover, from Nevinson's perspective, the same period as Berta Isla, but in fact it picks up after the events of that book. I can't even imagine reading Tomás Nevinson without having read Berta Isla – would it hold up at all? There's some interplay between Marías' novels, you could almost ask of any one of them if it would stand up on its own, but Tomás Nevinson seems especially tied to Berta Isla – Marías described it as a companion book. 

I don't think I've lost any affection for Marías, but over years of reading him I've sometimes (and more and more as time goes on) felt forced to confront some, to put it kindly, outdated attitudes about gender that show up in his books. It always takes, as I have said, a while to get around to the point, but Tomás Nevinson opens with the character confessing his own old fashioned sense of ... perhaps chivalry is the way to put it? Although he is an agent who has killed before, Nevinson could never imaging killing a woman – even in the line of duty. So of course we know this must be where the book is headed. [Spoilers follow.]

What Have You Left Behind? by Bushra al-Maqtari

Let me start by saying I had only half finished What Have You Left Behind? by Bushra al-Maqtari when I started writing this as part of a longer essay on memorials that I'm still working through in my head. 

I believe there is power in the telling and the naming of things. This is the heart of Bushra al-Maqtari’s project in What Have You Left Behind? To name the victims of the ongoing civil war in Yemen and to provide the survivors the chance to bear witness to the horrors they were subjected to. As might be expected, this book is devastating and hard to read. The individual testimonies are short – mostly about 3 pages, give or take – but each one captures succinctly and plainly the worst moments in the storytellers' lives. I found I needed to stop frequently to maintain my focus on each individual story. 

I keep a mental running list of books that attempt to show the reader the scope of tragedy or evil through a simple accounting. In no particular order, they include: The Trees by Percival Everett, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ by José Saramago, 2666 by Roberto Bolaño. EEG by Daša Drndić does it too. On some level, the whole of EEG is an accounting of atrocities, but it includes enumerated lists as well: the catalog of books taken from deported Jews; the list of disappeared chess players. Reading Drndić turned me into a person who pauses to study any metal plaques I may come across on the sides of buildings, or paving stones, or memorial sites. It's my own way of counting and honoring the dead. 

It occurs to me now that Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Senselessness is sort of a meta version of this type of book. The narrator of that book is reading and editing accounts – not unlike the ones Bushra al-Maqtari collected – of testimonials from the surviving victims of the military regime in Guatemala (though the country is not named in the book). The witness accounts are mostly from indigenous people, who in some cases watched their entire communities get slaughtered. The reader of Senselessness gets the accounts only second hand, as the narrator filters them for us, pulling out phrases that he finds particularly resonant and stories that exemplify the horror. This book doesn’t read like the others, as a literal accounting, but we see the effects that reading such a enumeration of horrors has on the narrator. 

In What Have You Left Behind? the listing is the whole book. After 200 pages of individual accounts, there is "A List of Victims in Brief," going beyond those accounted for in the main text. It covers the period between March 26, 2015 and September 29, 2017 and goes on for some 40 pages. I must also add that reading this in the context of the current situation in Gaza was rough. The stories told in this book sound strikingly similar to those in the news every day from Gaza. 

I had the sense almost as soon as I started What Have You Left Behind? that al-Maqtari undertook the project both to document the horrors that have been brought upon the civilians of Yemen indiscriminately by both sides in the civil war, but also as a way of doing something that might put her at a remove, even as she is collecting the most devastating stories out of what seems like an infinite supply of them. I thought about my father who, when he found himself in lower Manhattan on September 11, 2001 in the moments before the collapse of the twin towers, bought a camera and took pictures until he was able to be evacuated. The camera creates a distance. It takes you from being a participant to being a spectator, a documentarian. I think doing reportage may have a similar effect. However, at the very end of the book, al-Maqtari includes her own testimony: a remembrance of a friend, a fellow activist and founder of a humanitarian relief organization, who was killed by a militia shell in 2018. This serves to remind us that while she is reporting on the war, she is also living through it, with all its devastating effects.

Family Lexicon, by Nalatia Ginzburg (again)

I did start the year with Javier Marías, as is my tradition, but I had to pause that book in progress to reread Natalia Ginzburg's Family Lexicon because it was selected (partially at my suggestion) for my Women in Translation book club, which meets today. I enjoyed it the first time – I mainly remembered Ginzburg's descriptions of her overbearing but hilarious father, and a snippet about her time in exile in Abruzzo – but I liked it even more the second time around. In the intervening years, I've learned a lot more about Ginzburg's life and read another book of hers, as well as a book by Cesare Pavese, who is a significant figure in Family Lexicon. Last March, I visited the graves of Natalia Ginzburg and her husband Leone Ginzburg in Rome. 

What's most striking to me about this book is that Ginzburg manages to maintain a light and humorous tone almost throughout, despite the difficult and tragic times she lived through. Only a couple times do you get a hint of the terror and deep sorrow she must have experienced living through the German occupation of Italy during World War II, the many arrests of her husband – during the last of which he was killed in prison, the risk of deportation to German concentration camps, and so much more. The number of times in this book that members of her family and close circle are in hiding, in prison, exiled, or living under an assumed name or traveling with false papers is astonishing, and yet is treated as the normal course of life – because for young Natalia Ginzburg, it already was. (Natalia Ginzburg was still a child when her family hid the Italian Socialist Filippo Turati in their home for a period of time before his escape to France.)

The other thing that really comes out in this book, which I find it very hard to wrap my head around, is how young Natalia Ginzburg was during all these events. She married Leone at age 22, had 3 children with him, and was a widow at 27. Her youth and inexperience show when she talks about developing a sudden awareness of money after her marriage when she's put in a position of managing a household. I found her lack of certainty when it came to knowing whether her home was being adequately cleaned by her housekeeper completely charming. Later, when she realizes she must take her 3 children and escape the village in Abruzzo where she'd been living in exile, you see for a moment her total vulnerability: when she comes to realize that the maternal protection she took for granted can't be ever present, and she must fend for herself in a truly life or death situation. Even this, she narrates as if the solution came together very simply, never dwelling on what must have been a terrifying journey.

I was struck, on my first reading of Family Lexicon, by Ginzburg's family's internal exile, a Mussolini policy I first learned about from reading Carlo Levi. Natalia and Leone Ginzburg were sent to a village called Pizzoli in Abruzzo. Her brother Alberto and his wife were sent to a town a little father south, Rocca di Mezzo. I found myself wondering, on this reading, about how effective (if at all) this practice of internal exile was. Prior to the German occupation, life in the Abruzzi villages sounded almost idyllic. After the war, Alberto and his wife reflect on how happy they were in Rocco di Mezzo. Carlo Levi's ongoing attachment to Aliano and his decision to be buried there after his death say a lot about his experience there. (To say nothing of the larger effect Carlo Levi's memoir about his exile had on the entire region.) I don't know where I'm going with this, I just find it ironic that all these people who were sent to remote parts of Italy as punishment, were like, actually it was nice.

I'm really glad I ended up reading Family Lexicon again. Parts of it had really stayed with me, but I feel like I got so much more out of it this time and I'm really excited to have influenced my book club to read it so I have more people to talk to about Natalia Ginzburg.

Eve Out of Her Ruins, by Ananda Devi

I've had Eve Out of Her Ruins on my to-read list for quite a while, so I was happy that my Women in Translation Book Club selected it. I originally picked it up to count for Mauritius in my world books reading project, but then I ended up reading another book from Mauritius: The Last Brother by Nathacha Appanah, which I read in 2018 -- the year I didn't write about the books I read. I don't remember a lot about The Last Brother but I do remember thinking it gave me a real sense of the island and its geography. The same cannot be said at all for Eve Out of Her Ruins. Perhaps it's a good thing I'd already read something that did give me that sense. In some way, Eve feels like it could take place in any impoverished community where people feel trapped in poverty and cycles of violence. 

The titular Eve is a girl from a poor and abusive family who at a young age finds she can use her body as currency, not to lift her out of poverty but to bring her small advantages where she had none. She believes she has control of the situations she puts herself in, but from the perspective of the reader, as we learn more about them, it's hard to accept her claims of control. The book follows Eve and a few of her peers, who take turns telling us the story, in the events leading up to and after a brutal murder that's pinned on a repeat-offender youth from Eve's community. It's a dark book, but circumstances being as they are, things could be darker still. There is something that could almost be described as hope at the end.

In Concrete, by Anne Garréta

I'm in Paris at the moment, and I finished In Concrete a week ago before I left. I didn't like it nearly as much as the other two Anne Garréta books I've read, but it put her in my mind to the point that I spent my first few days here checking every bookstore I came across for her books — with nearly no luck. On my second day of searching, I went to a shop specializing in LGBTQ books and they had one book of hers: this one. I didn't really consider buying it. Having read it in English, I'm fairly certain the French would be beyond my abilities. The book is full of word play: it must have been quite an undertaking to translate. I wondered, as I read it, how it was done. (There is an afterword by the translator, which I read in part.) I assume much of it wasn't so much literal as thematic. In Concrete is a strange book about a pair of sisters who, as girls, help their father with his mad home improvement (muddernization) schemes until one of them gets trapped in concrete. While their father is out seeking help, the free sister (who is also the book's narrator) recounts stories of their wild childhood to entertain her sister and pass the time, and this makes up about half the book. 

Eventually, I found a bookstore here where they offered to order me some Anne Garréta books, so if all works out I'll be heading home with French editions of Pas un jour and Sphinx.

Scattered All Over the Earth, by Yoko Tawada

My reading continues to be irregular, but at least I have my Women In Translation book club to motivate me from time to time. Scattered All Over the Earth was our selection for this month. I previously read Tawada's book The Emissary, and this could almost be a companion book – one could imagine the events from The Emissary describing the situation in Japan as the events of Scattered All Over the Earth take place. 

In Scattered All Over the Earth, Japan (without ever being named) has disappeared from the map, though it's not entirely clear what has happened to it. Hiruko, a Japanese woman living in Europe – and stranded there now that her home country doesn't exist – sets off from Denmark to Germany to find one of her compatriots to she can speak Japanese again. This turns into an unexpected adventure with an accumulating number of traveling companions of various nationalities, and accompanying native tongues. 

While I think of Hiruko as the center of the book, we hear from all the characters who join in her travels, and the character who begins and ends the book is a Danish linguist named Knut, who hears Hiruko speaking a language of her own invention, which she uses to communicate across Scandinavia. Other characters speak German as a native or second language, or Danish as a first or second language. One character no longer speaks at all. English is used as a common language, but also avoided because of its associations with imperialism and domination. Much of this book is about language and communication, making it a particularly interesting choice for a book club about books in translation. 

Her Mother's Mother's Mother and Her Daughters, by Maria José Silveira, and Drunk on Love, by Jasmine Guillory

I started Her Mother's Mother's Mother and Her Daughters back in late October. I read it for a week or two and I was enjoying it, but this was during the period when I was about six weeks out from my move with a vacation to Italy right in the middle and I was just terrible about reading. As readers of this blog will know, I measure my reading in years. I suppose many people do. I have a sort of tradition at the end of the year, when I allow myself to give up on books that I started at some point during the year and never got around to finishing. Some books don't even make it to this stage, I'll just abandon them outright, but this annual reset keeps me from feeling the weight of unfinished books hanging over me indefinitely. The process for me formally abandoning a book was to mark it abandoned in Goodreads (I've stopped using Goodreads this year and moved things over to The Story Graph, so I guess now it will happen there) and to either get rid of the book or, in some cases, to return it to my shelf (usually with the bookmark still in place, so I guess these cases aren't really total abandonments). Her Mother's Mother's Mother and Her Daughters would have been destined for this fate except that, surprisingly enough, my Women In Translation book club selected it as our next book. (I was the person who added it to the list we voted on, but I didn't really expect it to win.) And so I kept it out, knowing I needed to return to it in time for our next meeting in early March. Last Thursday I did return to it and I finished it this past Wednesday.

Her Mother's Mother's Mother and Her Daughters is the second Brazilian novel I've read, but in many ways it felt like the first. (The actual first was Clarice Lispector's Near to the Wild Heart, which I read some 20 years ago.) It spans 500 years of Brazilian history told, as the title suggests, matrilineally. Each chapter picks up the story of a new mother/daughter, following them down through the generations, and through their lives and experiences we get a full history of Brazil since the arrival of Europeans. But along with the story of the country, we get intimate portraits of these women some with wonderfully long lives, some with tragically short; some wealthy, some poor, some enslaved; some urban, some rural. I believe Silveira attempted to capture every angle of Brazilian life, every corner of the country as much as could possibly be done in under 400 pages. It's an impressive feat. 

Before my return to Her Mother's Mother's Mother and Her Daughters, and while also in the midst of reading two other books, I took a little break and read Jasmine Guillory's latest book, Drunk on Love. It delivered in all the ways I expected it to – funny, relaxing, with a satisfying end. Jasmine Guillory's books always include plenty of food, and this one – set in Napa – left me craving arancini and wine. Her books are escapist for me, not just because of the romance but every character is out there doing their best. Friends are supportive in exactly the ways they should be. Family dramas exist, but are resolved or turn out to be one big misunderstanding. The conflicts that arise loom large for the characters, but are on some level trivial and you know they'll be worked out. I never knew this was something I was looking for in books – and, to be honest, most of the time it's not. But now and then it can be pure pleasure to read something that's comforting, that you know will resolve in the way that you want it to, and that will make you laugh along the way. 

Martha, Jack & Shanco, by Caryl Lewis

It's been so long since I finished a book. I've started books; I've even made significant progress in books; but I haven't finished a book since early October. Goodreads thinks I'm "currently reading" six books, but there are at least a couple more that I've started and not recorded. The vast majority of my books have already been moved to my future home, where I will move myself in a week, but I have a small selection I kept here because I might want to read them and several have a bookmark to note where I abandoned my intentions. I do think my impending move is partly responsible for the fact that I haven't been a good reader these last several months. I've had a lot on my mind. But I also worry that I've lost the discipline I once had. We'll see as I get settled in my new place I guess.

Even in early October I was struggling to finish most of the books I started, but I was determined to read the (fortunately short) book selected for my Women in Translation book club. It's thanks to that book club that I've finished Martha, Jack & Shanco too. (Give me a deadline and a sense of obligation and I can accomplish anything,)

Martha, Jack & Shanco is the second Welsh novel I've read. Several years ago I read a Welsh novel called Mifanwy in a rush at the end of the year to get in one more country and one pre-20th Century book all in one go. Martha, Jack & Shanco is set in present day (or the present day of the book's original publication which was 2005), but the book's titular characters aren't living so differently than they might have a hundred years earlier. The three past middle age siblings live on a farm in rural Wales where they raise sheep, keep dairy cows, grow barley and hay, and speak Welsh. Jack, the oldest, is domineering and bitter; Shanco, the youngest, is intellectually disabled; and Martha takes care of them all. The book spans one year of their lives, measured by the seasonal changes on the farm and marked with the occasional incursion of the world outside. This was a dark but lovely book. 

Minor Detail, by Adania Shibli

Minor Detail had been on my radar since it was published in English. I originally made note of it as something to read for my world books reading project to represent Palestine, and I ordered a copy with that in mind. So, I was happy when my Women in Translation book club selected it as our next book to read. Having now read it, I'm also glad I will have a group of people to talk about it with, because it's a book I feel I need to talk about with people.

The narrative in Minor Detail is divided into roughly two parts, each taking up about half the book. The first part is written in the second person and describes the horrific actions of a group of soldiers in the Negev desert with the charge of clearing the area of Arabs capture over a few days in August 1949. The second half of the book is told in the first person in roughly present day. The narrator is a Palestinian woman living in the West Bank who reads a newspaper article about the actions of these soldiers and wants to learn more, specifically to understand the events from the point of view of their primary victim - a young girl. At great risk to herself, the narrator borrows a colleague's ID card that will allow her cross into Israel and another colleague gives her use of his credit card so she can rent a car, all so she can visit the scene of the crime. As she drives through the desert and among the settlements echoes from the first half of the book start showing up in the second. She briefly experiences a kind of freedom of movement that is novel in her life. 

This book was powerful, and extremely stressful to read. There is a deep tension in both halves. I was relieved that it was only 100 pages because I don't think I could have handled it for longer.

Not One Day, by Anne Garréta

I choose short books to read for Women in Translation month in the hope that I can get through more books than I do in the average month. So now, although it took me a week and a half to read Go, Went, Gone, we are at the mid-point in August and I've finished my third book. Not One Day is just under 100 pages, but it's not an especially fast read. I found myself rereading paragraphs regularly, even sometimes going back a page or two because I found my mind wandering. But then on the second, or sometimes third (one chapter, Y, required even more) reread, the force of what Garréta had written would finally hit and I would find myself awestruck, and then perhaps I would reread it once more to feel it again. 

But let me back up. Not One Day is a book (a memoir? a confession?) that states at the outset what it intends to do: Each day for one month, the author will write from memory about a woman she has desired, or who has desired her. She will spend five hours each day on one woman, making a full-time job of it. Garréta is a member of Oulipo who regularly writes with constraints, and these are the constraints she has laid out for herself for this book. Right away, however, you (the reader) realize that something is off. Opposite the dedication (TO NONE!!), there is a table of contents. At a glance, you can tell it's not 30 chapters long. And besides, there is simply the length of the book: could five hours a day for 30 days produce a scant 100 pages? The post script reveals all (well, some). Garréta bored of the project after a week, she became distracted, she procrastinated, she got caught up in reading Chateaubriand, sixteen months later she had 12 accounts of desire (one of which is a fiction), and those are what we find in the book, organized alphabetically after the the first initials of the women have been reshuffled according to some cypher. 

I wrote a little about my experience with Oulipo last year when I read Garréta's first book, Sphinx. The Oulipo books I was familiar with by reputation – A Void most notably – always seemed to have constraints that I believed would make the writing more difficult (both to compose and to read – how could a novel with no Es not be clunky? – let alone to translate). Sphinx and to a greater extent Not One Day – as well as my own writing practice – really changed my perspective on constraints. The constraints that Garréta sets out for herself for Not One Day are not so different from the conditions I've set for myself during my most productive periods of writing. (I only wish I could devote five hours in a day.) I regularly participate in the novelist Jami Attenberg's 1000 Words of Summer, a writing accountability project where participants strive and mutually encourage each other to write 1000 words a day for 2 weeks (or one week in the mini versions). The pomodoro technique is also a type of constraint that encourages productivity. (Personally, I find that word count goals work better for me than time goals.) When I did 1000 Words of Summer in 2020, the project I set up for myself was in one way quite similar to Garréta's constraints for Not One Day. Every day, I wrote 1000 words, relying solely on my memory (or such was the intention), about a place I had visited. In parts of Not One Day where Garréta talks about memory – about the limits and fallibility of memory, something I both struggled with and wanted to represent in my writing about places and travel. So, where I always imagined the constraints would make writing harder, I think they often do the opposite. The trick, of course, is – within the constraints – to make a book that's still interesting or beautiful or profound (or to throw away the constraints when they stop serving you). Not One Day does all of this.

Happiness, as Such, by Natalia Ginzburg

Continuing with Women in Translation Month, I read Natalia Ginzburg's Happiness, as Such, which I picked up after reading and loving her book Family Lexicon. Happiness, as Such is an epistolary novel about Michele (the Italian title is Caro Michele or Dear Michele, as many of the letters open), a young Italian emigré to England, and the family and friends he has left behind in Italy. While Michele is the character who ties the story together, he's actually a small part in the book and only a few of the letters that comprise it are from him. We barely know him. But the same could be said for several of his correspondents. Or perhaps it's that each knows a different Michele. 

Michele's mother writes long, complaining letters expressing her dissatisfaction with her home life, with his departure, with the way she is treated by her family and friends. Michele's ex-lover, mother to a baby who might be his, writes funny, occasionally bitter letters revealing her own ineptitude. His sister is called upon to handle his affairs in Italy and her correspondence with him is mostly practical. The person who seems likely to have been Michele's closest friend, as well as possibly his lover, who probably could have best represented Michele to us, we mostly get to know through the what the others write about him. Instead, the Michele we know is incomplete. He is more of an absence than a presence – because that's what he was to the people he left behind.

Go, Went, Gone, by Jenny Erpenbeck

After I read Jenny Erpenbeck's memoir, Not a Novel last year, I loved it and I knew I needed to read her fiction. Go, Went, Gone met my expectations. I went into it solely on the basis of how much I enjoyed the memoir not knowing at all what it was about*. I shouldn't have been surprised, but I was a little to find the extent to which the themes from the memoir were present in the novel. 

The central character in Go, Went, Gone is Richard, a recently retired widower professor of classical philology who grew up in East Berlin then went on to have a comfortable middle class life in unified Germany. For reasons that aren't quite clear, he becomes interested in the African refugees in Berlin and ends up befriending a group of them. His acquaintance with the refugees begins to alter (to broaden really) his worldview and give his life  – which seemed to be drifting toward purposelessness on his retirement – a new vitality. While the book addresses the tragic histories and frustrating realities of the refugees, it does so in a very quiet way. These stories – Richard's and the refugees'  – could have been told very differently. They could have been action rather than memory (a two-star review on Goodreads describes the prose as "communist grey") – but the way they were told worked for me. I loved the quiet, meditative feeling of this book.

*I realize I say something like this often in these posts. I prefer to read books knowing as little as possible about them ahead of time. I almost never read the plot summaries on the back covers of books. If I do, I try to just read the first sentence. Instead, I'll read the first page to get a sense of the writing. 

Breasts and Eggs, by Mieko Kawakami

A couple months ago my mom told me she was reading a Japanese novel called Breasts and Eggs. I couldn't remember where, but I had heard of it before and then – voilà! – it turned out it was the next selection for my Women in Translation book club. Maybe I should invite my mom to our meeting. I picked up my copy at Collected Works in Santa Fe. It was a much bigger book than I had imagined. I usually give myself a week to read book club books, but given the pace of my reading recently and the fact that it was over 400 pages, I decided I should allow some extra time. So now here I am, finished a week before my book club meeting. 

I didn't know a single thing about Breasts and Eggs before I started it. I believe my mom described it as a little strange but good, but gave me no clue to what it was about. When I opened it, I had no idea what I was getting into. The first thing that struck me was the narrator's voice or tone. It felt casual and familiar. It felt, to me, un-Japanese. Early on in the book, when the narrator is describing her impoverished childhood outside Osaka, I kept thinking of the movie Shoplifters – a fantastic film about a family of grifters living on the margin, which exploded the Japan of my imagination. 

Breasts and Eggs is divided into two parts. In the first part, which was evidently published independently as a novella, Natsuko – the narrator – describes a short visit her sister and niece make to her apartment in Tokyo. Natsuko's sister, who is significantly older and works as a hostess in Osaka, is considering breast enlargement. In Natsuko's struggle to understand her sister's motivation, she also tells their whole life story. The second part picks up the same characters' stories about ten years later, when Natsuko, who has been single for her whole adult life, is contemplating having a baby via sperm donation – something that's not legal in Japan for single women. Between the first and second parts, Natsuko's circumstances have changed dramatically. In the first part, she is working a low wage job while struggling to be a writer. In the second part, she has published her first book, which achieved some success and is able to support herself comfortably as a writer. What the two parts have in common, besides their narrator, is an ongoing meditation on the body and the sense of remove or alienation that a person can feel toward their own body. 

I was somewhat ambivalent about the first part of the book, but I found the second part totally compelling. Much of the story, inasmuch as there is one, is moved along through long conversations Natsuko has with other people in her life: an editor, a fellow author, and old work friend, a man her own age who was conceived with donated sperm but only learned the truth as an adult, and a woman with a similar story to the man but a very different personal experience. In her investigation into sperm donation, Natsuko and her interlocutors consider at length the ethics of birthing a child, what it means to create a new human who never asked to be created, the selfishness of parents. This is something I've thought about a lot, but rarely discussed with anyone. It's true that when I was younger I thought I wanted children, but these days mostly I'm relieved to have never had any. Even when I did still want kids, what I don't think I ever had was a specific need or longing to birth children or to raise children who were genetically my own. What I loved about this book is that it explored all these complexities. More than once, it addresses the violence of bringing a baby into the world. If you are a person who has contemplated children and decided not to have them, this book can provide the affirmation you may crave. I honestly found myself feeling thankful that someone had articulated these thoughts. And yet, at the same time, the book can also affirm entirely the opposite decision: the choice to have a child in spite of it all. 

The Kiss Quotient, by Helen Hoang, and Lucky Breaks, by Yevgenia Belorusets

I've been in a reading slump for a couple months now. I've started some books I really wanted to read but have found it hard to stick with them. May was a really busy month for me at work and outside of it, and I just didn't feel like reading much. To close out the month, I added a couple days to my Memorial Day weekend and planned a trip to Montreal. I packed two books to take with me: Hamnet, which falls into the above mentioned category of books I really wanted to read but haven't stuck with; and Lucky Breaks, the next selection for my Women in Translation book club, which I had to finish by today.

Events took an unexpected turn last Saturday: my early morning flight was overbooked and I decided to volunteer (in exchange for rather a lot of money) to delay my departure by 12 hours. I could have gone home. I could have gone out and done something in Queens. Instead, exhausted, I checked into the Delta Sky Club and spent the entire day there. I read a few chapters of Hamnet, did some crosswords on my phone, ate the free snacks, and then somewhere in the early afternoon a friend texted me to say he was tearing through The Trees by Percival Everett and to remind me of the existence of e-books that can be checked out of the library. I promptly downloaded the SimplyE app and after first checking out Trust by Hernan Diaz, I realized I would need a different kind of book if my intention was to read on my phone for several hours at the Delta Sky Club. I remembered having heard good things about Helen Hoang's The Kiss Quotient when it came out a couple years ago and found it was available. I read two-thirds of it there at the airport, until the news came in that my replacement flight was delayed until the following morning. Then I went back home, set my alarm for 5am, and did it all over again. I read some more on my flight – though not much, since it's only an hour – and I finished reading  about an hour after checking into my B&B not quite 24 hours after I had expected to arrive there. I wouldn't say I loved The Kiss Quotient, a romance novel about a professionally successful and very rich woman with autism who hires a male escort to learn about sex and relationships, but it was exactly the right book for the circumstances. 

Unsurprisingly, I got no reading done during my actual vacation but on my flight home, I knew I had to start Lucky Breaks if I was going to finish it in time for my book club. It's a very short book – just about 100 pages – made up of several very short chapters/stories. The book seems to sit somewhere on the edge of fiction and non. Most of the stories recount the almost invisible narrator's encounters with women in various parts of Ukraine. Our book club decided to read a Ukrainian book because of current events, but I must say reading it with everything that's in the news was a strange sensation. Much of the book deals with the aftermath of the 2014 Russian incursion into Crimea and the Donbas region, including stories of women who live in those regions and those who have been displaced from them. Obviously, the book predates the current war, but it came out just as it was starting and reading it one feels the war was really no surprise at all. 

It is with good reason that people are criticized for writing about global events in a way that makes them "about me," but I think to do so is also the most natural thing in the world. So, I hope you will indulge me for a moment. For most of my young life, Ukraine wasn't a place I was independently aware of. I knew it as a region of the Soviet Union, I'd heard of Kyiv (though spelled Kiev and mostly just its eponymous preparation of chicken). When the Soviet Union broke apart, I can't say I was ever particularly aware of Ukraine as an independent nation. (The Baltic states are the ones I really remember becoming independent, and while I was certainly more aware of Ukraine as a place than, say, the Central Asian SSRs, it wasn't a place I knew much about at all.) I can place the moment when Ukraine gained some sort of distinction in my mind. Around 2002, I took a literature class with Svetlana Boym. One of the readings for the class was Chekhov's The Lady with the Dog, which takes place in Yalta. Professor Boym had a home in Yalta and the way she talked about it—well, I've wanted to go there ever since. When Russia invaded Crimea in 2014, I'll admit I was selfishly disappointed as well as being appalled generally. Something similar happened with the war this year. While Yalta still seemed out of bounds, I had started thinking about visiting Ukraine in the last couple years – inspired by some combination of things: some friends I made from Kamianets-Podilskyi several years back; Olia Hercules' cookbook, Summer Kitchens; reading about Joseph Roth's childhood outside Lviv; and most immediately this article by Rosa Lyster from the September 2021 NY Times Magazine "Voyages" issue. How could I know that war was right around the corner? And yet now, as I read Lucky Breaks, I realize I could have known. Maybe not specifically, but it wouldn't have come as such a shock of dissonance.