Pig Earth, by John Berger

I haven't actually read all that much John Berger, but I've long felt an affinity for him that I have a hard time explaining. Before Pig Earth, I'd read Corker's Freedom, which I adored, and G. and To the Wedding, both of which left me a little cold. And yet I maintained my love for Berger. I'd also read what believe is an excerpt from Here is Where We Meet that appeared in the New Yorker. It's years since I read it, but I remember being floored by it. The book wasn't published until a few years after the New Yorker piece, but I was thrilled when I realized there was a whole book. I started it, but abandoned it. I should probably go back and try again. As I try to figure out the order of all this, I'm a little stunned. The New Yorker piece was published in 2001, so that's probably when I read it. I had a subscription in those days. According to my Goodreads record-keeping, I read To the Wedding in 2005, Corker's Freedom in 2006, and G. in 2008. Was I maintaining my love for John Berger for all those years based on the New Yorker piece alone, until 2006 when I read Corker's Freedom? I suppose that's possible. I'm fairly certain I've also read one or two essays of his, though I don't remember any specifics, and I haven't read his most famous non-fiction work (certainly his most famous work of any genre in fact), Ways of Seeing. In any case, my love for Berger lasted, despite having read little and not even having liked all I read. It must also have been influenced by what I knew about him -- his politics, his principles, his adopted life in a peasant community in the French Alps.

The Into Their Labours trilogy is Berger's record of peasant life as it becomes increasingly rare and draws near its likely end. Pig Earth documents that life in vignettes and poems, describing the cycle of the seasons, the birthing and slaughtering of animals, the making of hay and gnôle, the departure of young men from the countryside to war and to the city. He writes with tenderness and affection about this life, but he doesn't glorify it. Hardship and untimely death are characteristic of the peasant experience, as the book makes clear. The last vignette in Pig Earth brought me right back to the New Yorker piece that I barely remember (and is the reason I decided I need to revisit Here is Where We Meet). The living narrator has a series of encounters with a recently-dead former lover. He follows her and finds a place in the wood where the dead have come together to build her a house. It's told in the most natural way, just like the narrator in the New Yorker piece who runs into his dead mother in Lisbon and has a conversation with her. The living do converse with the dead, and Berger turns that into real conversation. There is no element of the supernatural, these aren't even quite ghosts. They are the dead with whom the living continue to have a relationship that death only partly interrupts.

The Proposal, by Jasmine Guillory

When I finished what I was reading on Saturday morning and had to select a new book to read on my way out the door to Italian class, I thought maybe it was the moment for me to finally start John Berger's Into Their Labors trilogy. I brought Pig Earth with me and over my commute to and from Italian and yoga classes that day, I read the (excellent!) introduction. Then when I woke up yesterday morning realizing I had no plans and could devote most of my day to a book if I so chose, it turned out Pig Earth was not what I wanted to be reading.* So, at around 10:00 a.m. I started Jasmine Guillory's The Proposal and just after dinner last night, I finished it. Last March, I spent a Sunday reading its predecessor, The Wedding Date, from start to finish. Before reading The Wedding Date, I'd never really read a romance novel -- certainly not contemporary romance -- but I follow Jasmine Guillory on Twitter, so I kept hearing about the book, and it sounded fun. Plus, I do love rom-com movies, so why not try one in book form? It was a delight, and I think The Proposal might have been even more delightful. I was literally beaming through the first few chapters, and I cracked up while reading a particularly satisfying passage, in which the main character decks her ex, while on the bus home from yoga last night. It was especially fun to read The Proposal, which is set in LA, having just gotten back from there. Everything felt freshly familiar. Completely by chance, I was using one of the Skylight Books bookmarks I was given when I bought two books there a couple weeks ago and -- wouldn't you know it! -- the romantic leads, Nik and Carlos, run into each other at Skylight early on in the book. Carlos lives in the same neighborhood where my friends in LA live, and the first restaurant where Nik and Carlos have dinner together is around the corner from where these same friends lived previously. And this is another thing that makes these books so fun: the characters feel like people I know; like they could be my friends. I don't read a lot of books where that's the case (for instance, Pig Earth centers around peasants in the French countryside) and this was a refreshing change.


* I returned to Pig Earth this morning on the subway, in which context I found it to be a fine book to be reading.

By a Slow River, by Philippe Claudel

I didn't know when I picked up By a Slow River that I would be reading a second consecutive unresolved mystery novel, but here we are. And now that we are here, it's a little hard not to compare. (Also, while we are here, let me say that The Infatuations is the perfect unresolved mystery.) In To Each His Own, the reader is left understanding what has happened, even as the mystery remains unresolved in the book. In By a Slow River, both reader and narrator are left uncertain. (The same is true for The Infatuations, but the feeling that book left me with was quite different.) It feels a bit strange to say, but the mechanism that creates the uncertainty is a little too neat. Where To Each His Own jolts the reader to a comprehension, By a Slow River does almost the opposite -- jolting the reader from mild uncertainty to puzzled doubt.

The way By a Slow River unfolds is very beautiful. The narrator, toward the beginning, is fairly anonymous -- almost an omniscient storyteller. In fact, it takes quite some time reading the book before you even know who he is. But as the book goes on, he inserts himself more and more into the narrative and his own story becomes a subject alongside what seemed to be the central events of the book. At first, you think him just a witness, but by the end you understand he is a player.

To Each His Own, by Leonardo Sciascia

Last week I was in LA and I paid a visit to Skylight Books, a shop I last visited more than 5 years ago and remembered liking. Skylight has an impressive selection of fiction in translation, including a little shelf of new releases in translation, something I haven't seen elsewhere. They had 3 books by Leonardo Sciascia on the fiction shelves in handsome little NYRB editions -- I'm such a sucker for the NYRB classics, though I feel like they have often disappointed me. I'm also a sucker for books set in Sicily, so these Sciascia volumes were basically a perfect little trap for me. I hadn't heard of Sciascia and I bought To Each His Own partly so I wouldn't forget his name (I almost bought two of his books!). It's a slim mystery that I finished in just a few hours, and yet it packs in digressions on literature, indictments of fascism and the Catholic church, a little bit of heartbreak, and a bigger sense of unease into that small space.

Augustus, by John Williams

Nearly everything I know about the Roman Empire comes from passing references or popular culture. I had to read Julius Caesar in high school, though I don't think I actually did read it. Later on in my teens, I, Claudius was broadcast on Masterpiece Theater and I loved it so much. I remember trying to map out the complex and incestuous connections among the emperors. (This was before the modern internet, so it's not like I could just google Roman Empire Family Tree and find this.) Since that time, I can't say I've given much thought to the intrigues of the Roman imperial family. I will say, my interest in the Roman Empire was somewhat raised recently, when I visited the Museum of Roman Art in Mérida, Spain.

In any case, my initial interest in reading Augustus had little to do with any interest in Roman history. I read John Williams' Stoner a few years back and loved it. When I subsequently learned he'd written a National Book Award winning novel called Augustus, I thought I should read it too. I had no idea what it was about. It was only last September, when I was visiting my dad and found it among his collection of NYRB Classics that I discovered it was about the Emperor Augustus (not really a topic I would have expected based solely on having read Stoner).

Augustus is an epistolary novel covering the period from the death of Julius Caesar to the death of Augustus. It features (nearly entirely fabricated) letters and diaries from all sorts of figures from the period whose names I knew, without knowing much about them -- Cicero, Livy, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Antony and Cleopatra... among many others. The book does a truly beautiful job of telling the history of Augustus' reign (with I have no idea what level of accuracy) from many different angles. Reading it made me want to read Virgil and Horace and Ovid. There are two things I really wish Augustus included: a map and a dramatis personae. As I've written before, I love a book with a map, but a map would have been especially helpful in this book as a lot of the Roman place names referenced are not the modern names I'm familiar with. And a dramatis personae would have really helped both with some of the complex family relationships, but also with the wider cast of characters, who shared a lot of common names. However, both of these things are small quibbles (that can easily be remedied with online searches) with what was really a wonderful book. If I have a larger concern, it's the sympathetic picture it paints of Augustus. It reminded me a bit of Wolf Hall in its successful humanization of a clearly problematic figure -- though that is also what is so remarkable about both books. Augustus served as an introduction to the early Roman Empire to me, and will no doubt bias my understanding of it for years to come (as I, Claudius has done these last 25 years).

Life & Times of Michael K, by J.M. Coetzee

You know that advice for writing that tells you to strip everything away and get rid of all the unnecessary words, all the adjectives and adverbs? Reading Life & Times of Michael K, I understood what good advice that is. The writing was so spare, so clean, but evocative and beautiful at once. Life & Times of Michael K felt like a post-apocalyptic novel, but in this case the apocalyptic event is a civil war that is senseless to all the characters in the book, but yet they must live through it (or try to). Why invent an apocalypse when there are conditions such as these in the world?

I've had Life & Times of Michael K on my shelf for quite a while. I think I originally picked it up years ago when I was collecting Booker Prize winners. I thought I might read it for my South Africa selection, but then I read Cry, the Beloved Country instead, and Life & Times of Michael K continued to sit on my shelf, next to Nadine Gordimer (whom I've also never read) since my recent geographic reorganization of my books. There's no point in saying I wish I had read it sooner, but I'm glad I got around to it.

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.