Thus Bad Begins, by Javier Marías

I realized just this morning that 2019 marked the third consecutive year that I've chosen to start the year reading Javier Marías. Last year, I was reading volume III of Your Face Tomorrow and in 2017 I was reading volume I. I thought maybe I had also started 2016 with Marías, but my records show that The Infatuations was the fourth book I read that year. I remember that I read it start to finish on my couch one winter weekend, but that was already a week and change into January.

The Infatuations was the first book I read by Marías, and after finishing it, I knew I needed to read his epic Your Face Tomorrow trilogy. I waited nearly a year to start it, but as soon as I read the first paragraph of the first book, Fever, I had the feeling I was back in familiar place. I remembered how much I had liked The Infatuations but I had forgotten the very specific voice Marías writes in. It's a voice that feels very much like my own mind. I read the entire Your Face Tomorrow trilogy over approximately 12 months, spacing the books out and saving volume III to close out and begin a year. I had one other book of Marías' on my shelves at home, Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me, the title of which comes from Richard III, but is also a refrain in the Your Face Tomorrow books. I considered starting Tomorrow in the Battle... several times last year, but I kept not picking it up because I wanted to save it. I didn't want to not have another Marías book at home to read. Then last month, I was reading An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alemeddine – a book for book-lovers if there ever was one – and Marías came up in the text. The narrator of An Unnecessary Woman had translated Marías' A Heart So White into Arabic. I'd had A Heart So White sitting on my PaperbackSwap wishlist for a long time and An Unnecessary Woman provided the nudge I needed to just finally buy it. So one Tuesday after work, I went down to the Strand and I bought A Heart So White and Thus Bad Begins (and a book by Antonio Muñoz Molina, who was also mentioned in An Unnecessary Woman, 3 books by José Saramago – I was just back from visiting his foundation in Lisbon and determined to read more of his books, and a book by Mercè Rodoreda). 

After finishing the Alameddine, I was determined to finish two more books from countries I hadn't read before 2018 was up (which I did: I read Nathacha Appanah's The Last Brother (Mauritius) and Ousmane Sembène's God's Bits of Wood (Senegal)) to get to a nice round, but also completely arbitrary, 60 countries on my world reading project. So, I set aside the Marías books as a treat for myself when I had hit that goal. I had to choose between them when I was heading upstate to visit my mother the weekend after Christmas and was fairly sure I would finish God's Bits of Wood while there. I think I grabbed Thus Bad Begins because it was longer and newer. It wasn't quite Gift of the Magi, but it turned out that my mother – with whom I'd never talked about Marías – had come across A Heart So White at the library, read it, and thought I would like it, so she got it for me for Christmas. So, briefly, I had two copies.

I started Thus Bad Begins on the train home from Hudson. Maybe I had built Marías up too much in my mind. I wasn't immediately captivated. Or maybe it was just that I'd had a few drinks before getting on the train. I just read one chapter. It took me 60 pages or so to get back into his rhythm. But I got there. I got lost a couple times. I went back. I reread. In the end, I loved it. I gasped when I read the first line of the last chapter. I almost wanted to go back and start again. But I don't need to right now. I have two more Marías books at home to read.

2018 in Books

I finished 34 books in 2018, which is better than I did in 2017, but still nowhere near the 51 books (and more than 17,000 pages) I read in 2016. I do love the annual stats you get from Goodreads, though I always need to add some additional stats. I read books from 18 countries besides the US last year (Senegal, Mauritius, Spain, Lebanon, Belgium, Equatorial Guinea, Australia, Italy, Portugal, England, the Netherlands, Chile, the Dominican Republic, Sudan, Scotland, Korea, Canada, and Japan), as well as two books that are sort of nationless: a Catalan novel and a novel set on the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana. I read 16 books written by women, which is quite possibly the closest I've come to a 50/50 ratio in my reading life. With that, here is the list:

Your Face Tomorrow, Volume III, by Javier Marías
Eileen, by Ottessa Moshfegg
Ties, by Domenico Starnone
The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin
Sweetbitter, by Stephanie Danler
A Broken Mirror, by Mercè Rodoreda
Crossing to Safety, by Wallace Stegner
The Wedding Date, by Jasmine Guillory
About Grace, by Anthony Doerr
Perma Red, by Debra Magpie Earling
Pachinko, by Min Jin Lee
Spring Snow, by Yukio Mishima
Please Look After Mom, by Kyung-Sook Shin
Still Life, by Louise Penny
Season of Migration to the North, by Tayeb Salih
The Player of Games, by Iain M. Banks
In the Time of the Butterflies, by Julia Alvarez
Loquela, by Carlos Labbé
The Consequences, by Niña Weijers
The Golden Spur, by Dawn Powell
Sepharad, by Antonio Muñoz Molina
The Uninvited Guests, by Sadie Jones
Loving, by Henry Green
Siracusa, by Delia Ephron
The Stone Raft, by José Saramago
Christ Stopped at Eboli, by Carlo Levi
Involuntary Witness, by Gianrico Carofiglio
City of Crows, by Chris Womersly
By Night the Mountain Burns, by Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel
War and Turpentine, by Stefan Hertmans
An Unnecessary Woman, by Rabih Alameddine
The Last Brother, by Nathacha Appanah
God's Bits of Wood, by Ousmane Sembène

As longtime readers (ha) know, I always pick a favorite. For 2018, I'm not sure I can settle on just one. I read A Broken Mirror early in the year and when I had finished it, I thought: "That was the one; I won't read a better book this year." But then, over the summer, I picked up a copy of Sepharad at a thrift store in LA. I had never heard of it or its author, but I read the first paragraph (my usual method of deciding whether to read a book) and it passed the test. I read it soon after and it was so beautiful, and comprehensive, and it moved me to tears on the subway more than once.

The third contender for my favorite book of 2018 is Christ Stopped at Eboli. I bought and read this in preparation for a trip I took to Calabria and Basilicata in October. I wrote about it here after reading it, but before taking my trip. I had no idea then how glad I would be that I had read it when I got to Basilicata. The morning after I arrived in Lamezia Terme, I plugged Aliano into the GPS in my car and drove straight to the town where Carlo Levi was a prisoner of the fascist government in 1935. I visited Levi's tomb and the many sights in the town dedicated to him and had a wonderful lunch. After lunch, assuming the Carlo Levi tourism portion of my trip was over, I drove on to Matera, where I had booked a room for two nights. As it turned out, Carlo Levi was all over Matera. It started when I checked into my hotel and mentioned to the woman at reception that I had read his book. She was surprised and delighted, and directed me to the Palazzo Lanfranchi, where she told me they had a painting of Levi's. I visited the museum that evening and, as it turned out, it is home to a very large painting he did called Lucania '61, as well as the photos of the people in Matera that were used as source material. In addition, the museum had a whole room of Levi's paintings some from before his captivity and several from his time as a prisoner in Aliano, and which he described painting in Christ Stopped at Eboli. There were paintings of children from the village and of his housekeeper and of the Fossa del Bersagliere, the canyon in Aliano I had visited that same morning. The next day, I went to the Casa Noha, a cave home that was turned into a center for the history of Matera. The exhibit at Casa Noha consists of a series of films and after the film covered the ancient history of the town and conditions in the early 20th century, it said something to the effect of, "Everything changed for Matera when Carlo Levi published Christ Stopped at Eboli..." and went on to talk about him and the book at length. It turns out that Levi's book is what initially draw widespread attention to the poor living conditions of the people in Matera and he has since become something of a local hero. (There is also a major street named after him in town.) Seeing how Levi was turning out not to be one small stop but rather a recurring theme of my trip, I decided to take a detour on the day I was leaving Matera and visit Grassano, the other town where he was held captive. Grassano is bigger than Aliano, and less quaint, and it has none of the magic of Matera (few places do). It felt like a regular, somewhat run down and not very prosperous, town. They have a small center devoted to Levi (which was unfortunately closed when I arrived) and a plaque in a nearby square dedicated to him. After stopping to see these two sights, I asked some friendly locals for directions to the post office (I was happy that some of my friends received postcards postmarked from Grassano), stopped in at the town's indoor market, and then proceeded on my drive to the stunning twin villages of Castelmezzano and Pietrapertosa. Grassano was unremarkable, but I was actually all the more glad I went there for that reason.

If three favorite books are not enough, I also recommend By Night the Mountain Burns (which probably performed best on the "first paragraph test" of any book I read this year and which really made me want to visit the remote Annobón island of Equatorial Guinea), The Consequences (maybe not for everyone, but a particular must-read for any fans of Bas Jan Ader), The Stone Raft, War and Turpentine, In the Time of the Butterflies, and Pachinko.

Christ Stopped at Eboli, by Carlo Levi

I love a book that starts with a map. In this case, the map covers nearly the southern half of Italy, even though the vast majority of the book takes place in the small town of Gagliano (Aliano in reality) in what is today Basilicata. I picked up Christ Stopped at Eboli because I was researching Basilicata and Calabria (where I am going on vacation next week) and came across this list of reasons to visit Basilicata. Frequently, I'm inspired to visit a place after reading about it in a book, but this time it went backwards. However, having now read Christ Stopped at Eboli, I am very glad to be going there in just a few days.

Beyond the map, there were so many things I loved about this book. Carlo Levi is a sensitive and descriptive writer. Reading this book, I developed such an affection for Levi's dog, Barone. And for all the children, pigs, and goats in the village. One of the most wonderful things in this book is how Levi writes about the magic and folklore of the peasants, never casting doubt on their existence or truth.

The nature of Levi's captivity seems so strange today. He was arrested by the Mussolini government for his involvement in an anti-fascist organization. Following 3 months of solitary confinement in Rome, he was exiled to a remote village in the South, where he was allowed to live with some amount of freedom, provided he had his own means of support, checked in daily, stayed within the village walls, and didn't talk to any of the other political prisoners exiled in the same village. Yet in the book, Levi rarely discusses his own political positions until near the very end when he makes some remarkable diagnoses about the problem of the State:

The problem, in all of its three aspects, existed before the advent of Fascism. But Fascism, while hushing it up and denying its existence, aggravated it to the breaking point, because under Fascism the middle class took over and identified itself with the State. We cannot foresee the political forms of the future, but in a middle-class country like Italy, where middle-class ideology has infected the masses of workers in the city, it is probable, alas, that the new institutions arising after Fascism, through either gradual evolution or violence, no matter how extreme and revolutionary, will maintain the same ideology under different forms and create a new State equally far removed from real life, equally idolatrous and abstract, a perpetuation under new slogans and new flags of the worst features of the eternal tendency toward Fascism. Unless there is a peasant revolution, we shall never have a true Italian revolution, for the two are identical. 

The other thing that I found fascinating when reading this book is the class of people Levi refers to as "Americans." The book spans the years 1935-1936 and in the south of Italy at that time, there is a whole class of men who had emigrated to the United States and then returned to Italy after the crash of 1929. I was, of course, aware of the mass movement of Italians to America in the early part of the last century, but I had no idea of the number who had returned. In Levi's description, the people of the very south of Italy feel themselves more connected to New York than to Rome -- many of their number have moved there, and some smaller number have returned.

Anyway, this book was wonderful. I'm so glad I read it.

The Stone Raft, by José Saramago

Now and then, I'll find a book lovely and also a slog. The prose is beautiful, but my mind will drift as I read. I'll have to go back and reread sentences, or paragraphs. I can only read a few pages at a time. My abandoned shelf on Goodreads has a fair number of these: Chromos and The Unconsoled for instance. (Note that there's a Saramago book lingering there too.) I was still on a break from Wolf Totem, which I guess now I have set aside indefinitely. I decided to read The Stone Raft -- which was loaned to me by a friend ages ago; I think before my last trip to Portugal -- ostensibly because I am going to Spain and Portugal in November and I thought it would put me in the mood. Or something. I had also recently reread my short post about The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, though maybe not closely enough. (If you read that, you'll see there's something of a trend with finding Saramago slow-going, and also going to Portugal in November I guess.) In any case, in the end I did love The Stone Raft. It did get me in the mood to go to Spain and Portugal. Saramago requires a patience that I don't always have, but when I devote the necessary attention, it's so worth it.

What I miss

This morning, Tanzina Vega posted a tweet asking "What NYC places do you miss?"

There are so many places that I once went to that are now gone. Looking through various responses I recognize lots of places I used to frequent. Life Cafe, for instance. There was a time in my life when Life Cafe was where I always proposed to meet friends for dinner. But I didn't even know it was gone, because I stopped going long before it closed. (Am I part of the problem?) French Roast, too, I have fond memories of, going back many, many years. But in the last 10 years that it was open, I probably only went there two or three times. Tower Records, Unique, Antique Boutique, and Canal Jeans were all places I visited in middle school and probably into high school, but they all outlived my regular visits by years (decades?). It's hard to say I miss these places when I know, if they were still around, I probably wouldn't be going to them.

If I think about places that are gone that I would still go if they were here, there are a few to be sure: Hope & Anchor, St. Mark's Bookstore, Franny's. But at least as much as I miss places that are gone, there are also places I "miss" that are still here:

I miss Washington Square Park and the Astor Place cube, where I always knew I would find friends after (or during) school.
I miss the Waverly Diner, where I would order a broccoli and cream cheese omelet (!!!) with fries instead of home fries, and a Sprite.
I miss Odessa, where I drank cosmos and went through so much relationship drama (including my ex-husband's and my first kiss -- definitely the most consequential kiss of my life) in the late 90s.
I miss Barcade when it was brand new in 2004, huge and empty, so we could take over an entire corner and camp out for hours.
I miss Pete's Candy Store trivia night from roughly 2004-2007.
I miss Sharlene's, where we all decamped after old Freddy's closed before new Freddy's opened.
I miss Fulton Grand, the only bar I have ever called my local.
I miss 2010, when I could walk into any bar in a certain part of Brooklyn certain I would run into friends.

I could go on, but I'm sure you get the gist: it's the times I miss; not the places.

Siracusa, by Delia Ephron

After finishing Loving, I briefly went back to Wolf Totem (which presumably I'll write about someday when I finish it) and then on my lunch break last Thursday, I found Siracusa at a thrift store (how many books do I find at thrift stores? A lot. Most books I read, perhaps.) and picked it up entirely because of my love of Sicily. When I got on the subway home that evening, I pulled Siracusa out and decided to start it rather than reading Wolf Totem (have I mentioned it's very bloody? Very.). Anyway, Siracusa is not the first book I've read solely because it was set in Sicily. That honor belongs probably to Blood Rain (which, now that I think about it, I picked up at the same thrift store where I found Siracusa!), though debatably to The Leopard. I also have a whole collection of Andrea Camilleri novels - I buy them every time I come across them! - but I haven't actually read any of them yet. And while we're on the topic of literature set in Sicily, I should mention the first piece I read in this category: Sun by D.H. Lawrence, which I believe I first read in middle school and which has really stayed with me these last 30-ish years.

I haven't actually been to Siracusa. I was supposed to go there on my first, aborted trip to Sicily in December 2014 when I ended up having to drastically alter my plans and go to Spain at the last minute due to a national strike in Italy that would have left me stranded at Malpensa. When I planned my actual first trip to Sicily in April 2015, I realized (very correctly in retrospect) that I had been far too ambitious in the amount of ground I thought I could cover when I'd made my itinerary for the 2014 trip. Sicily is a sizable island, train routes are limited, the autostrade connect the bigger cities, but much of the island is covered only by winding mountain roads, so travel is slow. On that first trip, I did my traveling by train and bus (and a couple extremely long taxi rides) and managed to cover really only the western tip of the island: Palermo, Trapani, Marsala, and Agrigento. On my second trip to Sicily, in 2017, I went back to Palermo for a couple days and then rented a car stationed myself for a week in the Nebrodi mountains, from where I made day trips to Taormina, Enna, Cefalù, among other places. The southeastern corner of the island, where Siracusa is, remains the part I have not visited. I have (at present only theoretical) plans to go back in 2019 and visit that corner, including Siracusa -- though I must say this book certainly did not increase my interest in going there.

Siracusa is about two couples who go on vacation together to Rome and Syracuse, a trip whose events end up destroying the relationships among nearly all of them. (This is why I always travel alone.) The story is told in alternating chapters from the perspective of the 4 central characters and only the reader really gets the full picture (and even that requires some conjecture). The overlapping narratives were really effective, and I found they gave me sympathy for all the characters, even as I didn't really like any of them. This was a tense, but fun read. And even as Siracusa comes off as quite unappealing, it captures very well the crumbling old and cheap new that I've seen elsewhere on the island. Places that have been in decline since the Baroque era is my aesthetic ideal.

Loving, by Henry Green

I wasn't sure if I'd go back to Loving after I set it aside for The Uninvited Guests and then started another book -- Wolf Totem, by Jiang Rong -- but then last week I found myself wanting to read something a little less bloody than Wolf Totem (which is incredibly bloody) and rather than starting something new, I decided to finish Loving. It's such a short book it felt a shame to abandon it, so I finished it in an afternoon and then sent it on its way (via PaperbackSwap, to someone to wanted it). I don't really have much to say about this book. It follows the affairs of the staff of an English estate in Ireland over the period of a few months during World War II. The war is in the background, as is the potential threat to the estate from the IRA, but none of it seems quite to penetrate the reality of the household staff. There were pieces of this book that I enjoyed and that were funny, but overall I didn't felt like it had much to give.

The Uninvited Guests, by Sadie Jones

I started reading Loving by Henry Green a little more than a week ago -- just after finishing Sepharad. I always find it particularly hard to pick a book to read after I finish something I've really loved. Sepharad left me in a mood and I didn't want to break it. I had read a few pages of Loving a month or so ago and found it wasn't what I was in the mood for at the time, so set it aside. After Sepharad I thought maybe it was the time, but in a week I labored through 100 pages and decided to set it aside again. Meanwhile, I picked up a copy of The Uninvited Guests at Housing Works and I decided to switch from one manor house drama to another. While I didn't totally love The Uninvited Guests, it was a fun read and the break I needed. I'm not sure whether I'll go back to Loving.

Sepharad, by Antonio Muñoz Molina

Sepharad can hardly be called a novel, though it says "A Novel" right on the cover under the title. But as Muñoz Molina notes in the Author's Note, "I have invented very little in the stories and voices that wave through this book." But, of course, novels can be based on true events -- so that's not really the reason I say it can hardly be called a novel. It's almost like a book of short stories, with occasional recurring characters. Almost a book of essays. Almost a memoir? Whatever it is, it's lovely. It's about memory and identity and being away from the place you call home. Muñoz Molina connects centuries of forced and voluntary emigration and demands that the reader identify with emigrants and refugees. The writing and stories are poignant and warm. I really loved this book.

A very belated 2017 year in books

In 2016, I declared I would write something brief about every book I read -- resulting in my most prolific year of blogging by far. In 2017, I gave myself a break from writing about every book and, as it turns out, that turned into a break from posting basically at all. Now we're more than halfway into 2018 and I haven't posted in 18 months. Looking back over my brief notes on books I read, I think it was a good habit and I'm going to try to get back to it - though not retroactively. But I will retroactively post about my 2017 reading material. It wasn't quite as good a year as 2016, or even 2015, but I read 25 books (I've listed 26 below - I started Your Face Tomorrow vol. 3 in 2017 and didn't finish it until a couple weeks into 2018, but felt it should be included on the list with the other Your Face Tomorrow books):

• Your Face Tomorrow Vol. 1: Fever and Spear, by Javier Marías
• The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead
• The Polish Boxer, by Eduardo Halfon
• Your Face Tomorrow Vol. 2: Dance and Dream, by Javier Marías
• The Magicians, by Lev Grossman
• Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison
• Embassytown, by China Miéville
• A Gate at the Stairs, by Lorrie Moore
• Curfew, by José Donoso
• By Night in Chile, by Roberto Bolaño
• The Buried Giant, by Kazuo Ishiguro
• The Sympathizer, by Viet Thanh Nguyen
• Kintu, by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi
• The Scar, by China Miéville
• We Are Never Meeting in Real Life, by Samantha Irby
• A Perfect Spy, by John Le Carré
• Jakob Von Gunten, by Robert Wallser
• The Queen of the Night, by Alexander Chee
• Fathers and Sons, by Ivan Turgenev
• The Turner House, by Angela Flournoy
• Rich and Pretty, by Rumaan Alam
• Beware of Pity, by Stefan Zweig
• A God in Ruins, by Kate Atkinson
• The Group, by Mary McCarthy
• Call Me By Your Name, by Andre Aciman
• Your Face Tomorrow Vol. 3: Poison, Shadow, and Farewell, by Javier Marías

For my favorite book of the year, I'd say it's a tie (isn't it always!) between Your Face Tomorrow Vol. 1 and Curfew.

I've recommended Curfew to several people and I decided to take a trip to Chile last November, largely because of Donoso. I visited La Chascona, Pablo Neruda's home in Santiago, which plays a major part in the book (visiting this place I had read about in a book I loved so much was a rather strange and amazing experience) and also the island of Chiloé, which I only knew of because of the book. So... you could say Curfew had a pretty significant effect on my year.

Your Face Tomorrow was different. As I felt when I read The Infatuations (the first Marías book I read), the writing just spoke to me-- it felt like me. I loved all 3 books in the trilogy, but the first book especially. A huge chunk of the first book consists of the narrator getting very drunk and going through an Oxford don's library chasing down tangential details of the Spanish Civil War and it's just incredible. I haven't recommended Your Face Tomorrow to anyone because I honestly have no idea who else might enjoy it, but the whole time I was reading the books I really wished I knew someone else who had read them because I would love to talk about them. (I have recommended The Infatuations to a couple people always with the caveat that you will know within a couple pages whether you'll enjoy the book. Marías' writing is so specific, has such a distinct voice -- I imagine it's not for everyone, but it is definitely for me. The one star reviews of book 3 crack me up... like how do you get to book 3 before you decide you don't like these books?)

Other books I really enjoyed: The Polish Boxer, Kintu, The Group, Beware of Pity. (And also The Underground Railroad and The Sympathizer, but as those each won multiple prestigious awards, I hardly feel I need to recommend them.)