Glory, by Vladimir Nabokov

In 2002, when I was working at Harvard, I took a graduate seminar in the Comparative Literature department called "Memory and Modernity," taught by Svetlana Boym. I believe that class may be the last time I read Nabokov before picking up Glory (on the recommendation of someone I know only from Twitter!). We read Speak, Memory as well as some of his short stories. I also seem to remember re-reading The Real Life of Sebastian Knight in connection with this class, but I don't think it was assigned. I had read quite a bit of Nabokov at that point - 7 or 8 of his books I believe. I'm not sure quite why I stopped reading him - it wasn't a conscious decision at first. But as more time passed and I continued not reading him, I started to think of Nabokov as a writer of my youth.

Reading Glory brought me right back to that class with Professor Boym. In fact, I found myself wondering why we hadn't read Glory for that class. We did read Chekhov's The Lady with the Dog, which the book's hero picks up to read on p. 91. We also read Nabokov's short story, A Guide to Berlin, which covers some of the same geography as Glory does. Then there is the fact that Glory starts out in Crimea, The Lady with the Dog takes place there as well, and Professor Boym talked so affectionately of Yalta - a place I previously only knew of by name from whatever I had learned in history class about the Yalta Conference - that I've wanted to go there since.  Professor Boym had a particular interest in nostalgia, and the whole of Glory is a study in nostalgia. Nearly every character is trying to recapture some half-imagined past or place. And then, the hero's constant invention and reinvention of himself also seems like it would be familiar to Professor Boym. Of course, she was certainly familiar with the book, it just didn't come to my attention until recently (though I had owned it for years).

I learned of Professor Boym's untimely 2015 death by chance from a passing tweet and it took me completely by surprise. When I'd had her as a professor, she had been young (43, the same age I am now). Though several years had passed, it seemed impossible that she could have died. I can't say I thought about her often between 2002 and 2015, nor really between learning of her death and the present, but reading Glory brought back some details I had forgotten, and also reminded me how much of what I know about Nabokov I learned from Professor Boym.

In actual fact, I read Glory in just 4 or 5 days, but it felt like an eternity because I took a 9-day vacation at about 80 pages in and didn't touch the book (except to move it from bag to bag) the whole time I was away. (Of course, I also packed and lugged all over the Azores a second book just in case I finished Glory on vacation. Will I never learn? Good thing I'm a light packer in all other respects.)

State of Wonder, by Ann Patchett

A friend recommended this book to me years ago and I ordered a copy and put it on my shelf and did not read it. Then, a few weeks ago it was suggested for summer reading in a newsletter I subscribe to, which just happened to arrive on a day I needed a new book to start, and so I decided to pick it up based on these two recommendations, but not actually knowing anything about the book. I really enjoyed it, but I made the mistake of going on vacation between finishing it and actually sitting down to write about it. Or maybe I didn't sit down and write about it right away because I didn't have a whole lot to say about it, even though I enjoyed* it. In any case, this was a good book. I'd recommend it to a lot of different types of readers. It's accessible, without being dumb; exciting, and also intelligent.

*Can we talk briefly about the word enjoy? I use the word enjoy rather a lot. Years ago some British person - I have zero recollection who it was - pointed out to me that the British use "enjoy" completely differently than Americans, and that it is usually used in the context of something unpleasant. This made a big impression and has fascinated me since. I've kept an eye/ear out for this British usage, and yet have never come across it, though I believe I kind of do understand the sense. One might say, "We are enjoying our third straight week of this heatwave," for instance. There's a touch of irony in the enjoy, but it's almost just a synonym for experience.

I Capture the Castle, by Dodie Smith

I had intended to go back to my Chinese book after the short break I took to read Postcards from the Edge, but then I finished that book on my commute to work and I needed something to read on my way home that day. I keep a small stash of books at the office for just this scenario, and so from that stack I selected I Capture the Castle, which I finished yesterday. Today, I'm not sure whether or not I will return to my Chinese novel next or read something else.

I had seen the movie of I Capture the Castle before picking up the book, but thankfully I didn't remember it at all. I also think the book must have a very different feeling from the movie just because I don't know how the movie can have gotten into the journal-keeping narrator Cassandra's head the way the book does. (I similarly remember wondering how the movie adaptation of Call Me By Your Name would handle a story that relied so heavily on first person introspection, but it succeeded well enough so maybe I should watch I Capture the Castle again -- and also give myself the opportunity to see a young Henry Cavill in action, which seems like it would be a pleasant thing to do.) In any case, this book was a delight. Cassandra has such feeling; it read very true to the late teenage experience. One of the things I truly loved was her warmth and empathy for everyone. I was sort of surprised (though also not) to come across a whole thread of people on Goodreads who found her tiresome. I think Dodie Smith has captured so well the way the young may take themselves over-seriously and a kind of pretension that comes with being that age, while also making Cassandra articulate and interesting (to me, at least). I mean, she is criticized by another character in the book for being consciously naïve -- clearly Smith was aware that she created the character thus. Anyway, I guess it's not for everyone, but I loved this book. I looked forward to reading it every day. I was happy and sad to finish it.

Postcards from the Edge, by Carrie Fisher

You might think I've been neglecting to updates this blog, but in fact I had not finished another book until yesterday. I'm in the midst of my third attempt at a Chinese novel and I do intend to go back to this one, but it's a slow read. I went on a 5-day work trip and didn't pick up a book the whole time, and when I got back, I decided I wanted to read something a little breezier. Postcards from the Edge turned out to be just what I needed.

I don't think I really registered that Carrie Fisher was a writer until she died and I read all these tributes to her writing. I remember the existence of the movie Postcards from the Edge, but I never saw it and I didn't realize she had written the book until I saw it hailed again and again in the days after her death. So, when I saw Postcards from the Edge on the shelves at my local thrift store where books are $1, I grabbed it. It was even better than I expected - touching and funny and brilliant all at once. I laughed out loud on the subway more than once. The narrator, Suzanne Vale, makes being a celebrity sound boring and normal, while also demonstrating self-awareness about her privilege. The descriptions of rehab and recovery were so perceptive. This book was really a delight!

The She-Devil in the Mirror, by Horacio Castellanos Moya

Horacio Castellanos Moya's The Dream of My Return was one of my two favorite books of the year when I read it a couple years ago and I've been wanting to read more of his work ever since. So, I was thrilled when I found two of his books at Dog Eared Books in San Francisco last month. (Then less thrilled when I realized, after buying it, that one of them - Senselessness - was actually all marked up, but oh well.)

I strongly identified with the narrator in The Dream of My Return, something I can't say (thankfully!) of the narrator in The She-Devil in the Mirror. She narrates the whole book in the second person, and as the reader you get to listen in on her intimate and occasionally unhinged prattle as she gossips and theorizes about who was behind her best friend's murder. It's an incredible portrait of wealth, privilege, corruption, and hypocrisy, and it's told so brilliantly.

Distant Star, by Roberto Bolaño

Even though I had only read 4 of his books (now 5), I thought of myself as someone who had read "a lot" of Bolaño, so I was a little alarmed yesterday -- after I finished Distant Star -- to find that I had 7 books of his on my shelves that I have not read, and these don't include his latest book that just came out in February and at least a couple others. I read his two big books first, The Savage Detectives in 2009 and 2666 a couple years later. I adored them both. I guess because so many of the others are slim volumes, I thought what I had read was the bulk of it and what remained were minor works. (Yes, I am aware of my own bias toward tomes thank you.) Later, when I was in a short-story-reading phase, I read Last Evenings on Earth. Later still, immediately after finishing José Donoso's Curfew, I read By Night in Chile, which absolutely stunned me (definitely not a minor work!), but which melds a bit with Curfew in my memory. The books are actually good complements: the main events in By Night in Chile take place roughly a decade before the main events of Curfew, and there is a sort of salon of intellectuals in the former who could easily be characters in the latter (assuming they survived the first decade of the Pinochet regime), but having read them in quick succession occasionally makes it hard for me to distinguish them.

Distant Star too reminded me of these books, though it also reminded me a little of Donoso's The Garden Next Door, about a Chilean ex-pat who lives outside Barcelona. The Garden Next Door was the book that really opened my eyes to the Latin American diaspora in Europe, people who fled the totalitarian regimes in Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay, among others. If I had been a closer reader of Savage Detectives, I would have seen it there too; it's just more explicitly explained in The Garden Next Door. When I was in Barcelona in 2014, I stopped for a glass of wine at a small bar in El Born and met a woman there from Argentina, who told me the whole neighborhood used to be full of Argentinians. It was a whole wave of migration that I'd never been aware of. (And I find it very interesting that so many people left the dictatorships of Latin America to settle in Franco's Spain, though I guess he died right around that time.)

But the book Distant Star reminded me of most was Savage Detectives. The young people mixing poetry and revolution. (Or the idea of revolution.) The beautiful sisters. The idea of a new poetry for the future. The events (and locations) of the books are different, but the themes overlap quite a bit. Of course, I haven't yet read Nazi Literature in the Americas, which is explicitly referenced in Distant Star. Reading Bolaño can feel like piecing together a story the way his characters often do.

In translation

Some of this will retread what I covered in my post about Tristana, but that's my own fault for not getting around to finishing this sooner.

I read a lot of books in translation. My world books project necessitates it, and I suspect the proportion of books written in English that I read versus those not has gotten smaller since I started the project, but even before I started the project it's fair to say I read a lot in translation. Of the books I've read so far this year, half were written in English, and exactly half of the 34 books I read in 2018 were written in English.

Though I read a lot in translation, what that meant or how it affected my experience of the books I read wasn't something I gave much thought to probably until I read The Count of Monte Cristo in an edition whose translator is not even listed on the publisher's website. (If this Amazon reviewer is to be trusted, I should have read the version translated by Robin Buss.) Reading this edition of The Count of Monte Cristo was the first time I recall where the writing really got in the way of my enjoyment of the book. The story was still exciting, I still wanted to know what would happen, but the language was so stilted. It read like it was a literal, word-for-word translation from the French (perhaps it was) and it kept dragging me back to the act of reading (which is something an author might do intentionally with language, but was certainly not the case here).

Around the same time that I read The Count of Monte Cristo, the new translations of Proust started coming out, beginning with Lydia Davis' rendition of Swann's Way and followed up by the more-correctly-translated second volume title, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (which was previously translated as Within a Budding Grove), translated by James Grieve. I had recently finished the Moncrieff-revised-by-Kilmartin translations of In Search of Lost Time and I had the idea that I had to start reading the books all over again in the "right" translations. (Big thanks to Margaret Jull Costa for letting me off the hook on that one!) A couple years after that, Pevear and Volokhonsky's new translation of War and Peace was getting all sorts of media attention and it seemed like maybe translation was having a moment. (I eventually read their War and Peace and also their translation of The Idiot. Now when I search for them it sounds as though there has been a Pevear and Volokhonsky backlash, and perhaps a backlash to the backlash, but in 2007 they were all the rage.)

Of course, the big news translations are always the new translations of old classics; the translations that render old books in modern vernacular; those that reinstate the sex and other taboo subjects excised in older translations. I was working in a bookstore when the Robert Fagles translation of The Odyssey was released to much acclaim. (Here Penguin Random House doesn't fail to mention the translator on the book's webpage.) Maybe if that had been the version I'd been given in school when I was assigned The Odyssey a few years earlier, I would have actually read it. Then again, maybe not. But the translation of contemporary authors rarely gets so much attention. It's simply viewed as part of the publishing process. I was in Buenos Aires a couple years ago and saw a Javier Marías book on the new release table at a bookstore. I hadn't heard he had a new book, but I knew I could look forward to an English edition in the not-too-distant future. (Meanwhile, on the same trip, but in Santiago, I came across some José Donoso books that I'm not sure have been translated into English; or if they have, are not widely available.)

Recently, I was reading something about José Saramago that mentioned his English translator, Margaret Jull Costa. I knew I knew that name, but I didn't think it was from Saramago's books, so I googled her and realized she's also Javier Marías' translator. I've read thousands of pages of her work. She has a part - and not a small one! - in making some of my favorite books accessible to me. I loved this interview with her from 2011 that I found when I tried to learn more about her. Now I want to read more of her translations. So in February, I picked up Tristana, a book I knew nothing about, simply because it was translated by Margaret Jull Costa. She didn't translate either of the Saramago books I've already read, but I have some that she did and I'll get around to them soon.

Learning about the translator's process and relation to the work they translate has become a new fascination of mine. Just a couple weeks prior to reading the Margaret Jull Costa interview I mentionend above, I heard an interview, this one with Roberto Bolaño's English translator, Natasha Wimmer. And also this interview with Megan McDowell is full of interesting insights.

Missing Person, by Patrick Modiano

After  a very busy April, I took a much-needed day off work yesterday. It was a perfect kind of day to read a book cover to cover. I did't actually read Missing Person in one sitting. I read it in bits, in bed in the morning, after my coffee, on the subway when I went downtown to run errands, on the subway back home, on the couch for an hour, on the subway on my way to the gym (which was seriously delayed and gave me more than an hour of reading time!), and I finished it while walking down Nostrand Avenue from the subway to my home.

I was reading while standing on the platform at Union Square waiting for the 4 train at around 7:15 last night when I had a profound sense of deja vu. The book mentioned a woman in the Place Malesherbes who might buy jewels from the narrator and I was sure I knew this street from something else. Earlier, the book mentioned the Parc Monceau, which I knew I had visited in Paris, and it came up in this passage again. I pulled up my map of Paris and suddenly I could picture it all. The park I remember clearly -- it was an unseasonably warm March day and the park was full of people. Apparently I only took one photo in the park.

After visiting the Parc Monceau, I also remember walking around the block of what had been Place Malesherbes (it is no longer called by that name), looking for a particular building only to find it was completely covered in scaffolding and tarp. The building I was looking for was built for the banker and art collector Émile Gaillard by the architect Jules Février. My whole excursion to this section of Paris was apparently inspired by an article on Émile Zola’s Paris.

Missing Person gives off the most intense sense of nostalgia. Not only because it is set a decade or so after WWII, but certainly that is a factor, it reminded me frequently of French new wave films. The French have again and again borrowed American noir story tropes and complicated them, and this book is an excellent example of that. The book takes place some 10 years after the end of the war and the narrator, who has been employed by a private detective, suffers from amnesia and doesn't know who he is. After the retirement of his employer, he decides to use the tools he has learned through his trade to try and discover his own past. The mystery unfolds in a beautiful and wholly unexpected way.

Beauty Is A Wound, by Eka Kurniawan

I finished Beauty Is A Wound this afternoon, and I have to say I'm relieved. I've spent the last three weeks with this book, and it has occasionally felt like a burden. It's a beautifully-written and engaging book... but it's so incredibly violent. There is every type of violence. Really gratuitous violence. Quite a lot of sexual violence. And violence towards animals, which is one of my personal triggers. And other types of violence. When I was about 2 weeks, and 250 pages into the book, I told a friend I wasn't sure I could read another 200 pages of it. The violence was hard, but the writing style makes it almost bearable. The story told in a matter-of-fact and occasionally funny voice, and it has a fairy tale aspect that I suppose lends a touch of unreality to the violence. I'm almost surprised at myself that I mostly liked this book, but there were a few days in the last three weeks when I had to mete it out in little doses, or when I couldn't bear to read it on my commute at all.

Beauty Is A Wound was my book for Indonesia, and as the representative book, it felt relevant. The story spans the period from the end of Dutch colonization to almost present day and the history and events in the country (of which I have very limited knowledge) inserted themselves frequently in the story.

Homegoing, by Yaa Gyasi

I had been meaning to read Homegoing for so long. I should have just bought a copy ages ago. Then a couple weeks ago I was in DC and had finished the book I brought with me on the plane. (Clearly, this was poor planning on my part, as the flight to DC is only ~45 minutes long. In my defense, this was a short work trip and I didn't expect to have much -- if any -- reading time.) The day I arrived in DC, I had a few hours before my meeting and I had planned ahead and finally booked a timed entry to the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which I've been a member of since before it opened, but had never yet managed to visit. Unfortunately, I was rushed and tired and anxious about my events, so I wasn't able to commit the mental energy I should have to it. (I will make it back one day.) Anyway, on my way out I stopped at the gift shop, which has a small selection of fiction and I saw Homegoing and so finally I got around to it. I started it on the plane home. The next day, I turned around and flew to San Francisco and I finished it there a couple days later. It's as good as everyone says.

A couple weeks before my trip to DC, I was in Detroit for another meeting but I found time one morning to visit the Wright Museum of African American History. Unlike my visit to the NMAAHC, I was well-rested and I think I was the first visitor of the day (it was a weekday and I went right when they opened), so I had entire rooms to myself. I saw two exhibits on my visit the Wright: one about slavery at Monticello and the permanent exhibit called "And Still We Rise," that charts African and African American history from the earliest time until roughly the present. I found myself thinking back to elements both these exhibits while reading Homegoing.

First, the And Still We Rise exhibit. In 1993, I visited Senegal. While there, we went to the House of Slaves, a prison and port on an island off the coast of Dakar from which slave ships left Africa. It's a truly haunting place; one I still remember clearly these 26 years later. In the exhibit at the Wright, they've recreated the holding cells of an African slave port and the "Door of No Return," which, in the museum, leads you onto the upper deck of a slave ship. You can then descend to the lower level where they've tried to capture the conditions below deck. It's quite affecting. In any case, when, a few weeks later, I started Homegoing and the book's events turned up at Cape Coast Castle in Ghana, this all felt very fresh in my memory -- both my recent visit to the Wright, but also my long ago visit to Senegal.

The exhibit on slavery at Monticello, Paradox of Liberty, does a pretty incredible job of centering the experience of the enslaved people in the history of Monticello. It focuses pretty heavily on the Hemings family, mainly because theirs is the most well-documented, but it actually features the family trees and histories of four enslaved families from Monticello. I took a picture of the Hemings family tree. What struck me was that family trees from the era of slavery are largely matrilineal. Between a culture of rape, the routine break-up of families, and an intentional or benign lack of record-keeping, often only mothers are known. This stands out particularly in the context of the ruling class's patriarchal structure. Homegoing also starts with a family tree that centers the mother. The book follows two branches of a family; one that remains in Africa and one that is enslaved and brought to the U.S. While there is hardship on both sides of the ocean, the family that remained in Ghana can trace their history back through the generations to the mother at the top of the family tree. Meanwhile, from the very beginning, the branch of the family that is enslaved is in a continuous state of disconnection and loss. Through the subsequent generations in the book, unknown or absent parents are a recurring theme. It was sometimes heartbreaking as a reader to know the history of each character, when often they didn't know it themselves.


This disconnect is one of the legacies of slavery, and it's one reason the work of the NMAAHC, the Wright, and similar institutions is so important. The family trees in the exhibit on slavery at Monticello were constructed through oral histories. The artifacts in the exhibit are mostly the result of archaeological excavation, because while the Jefferson family's heirlooms have been meticulously preserved over the generations, the possessions of the enslaved people at Monticello were not thought to be historically significant until recently. One of the wonderful things about the NMAAHC is the several recording booths that are scattered throughout the museum where people can record their own family's history. These institutions are trying to recreate the connections that were forcibly severed. The most powerful thing I saw at the Wright was this statue of Thomas Jefferson in front of a wall that lists all ~600 people he owned. For most, only a first name is known. For a handful, no name is known, but they are still listed. The museum can't tell all their stories, but to say their names is a start.