Not a Novel: A Memoir in Pieces, by Jenny Erpenbeck

Not a Novel was another New Directions book I got from my dad by an author I'd never heard of. Jenny Erpenbeck grew up in East Berlin and was 22 years old in 1989 when the wall came down. This book is a collection of essays and talks from her writing career over the last two decades, which come together to create a sort of memoir. It's divided into three sections: Life, Literature & Music, and Society, the middle section being the longest. (In addition to being a writer, Erpenbeck studied to be a director of opera and music plays a big role alongside literature in her work and life.) It is, perhaps, an odd way to start reading Erpenbeck, as she references her own work throughout – particularly in two long essays about two of her books – and I was unfamiliar with all of it. However, Not a Novel left me eager to read Erpenbeck's novels. I loved it. 

There are some themes (and even entire passages, as these writings were prepared for various purposes, rather than for inclusion in the book) that come up repeatedly in the book. In particular, the idea of boundaries in time come up again and again in her description of her experience of the end of the GDR. None of us can go back in time, of course, but Erpenbeck watched the entire world she knew growing up disappear in the space of six months when she was a young adult. This would be a defining experience for anyone, but the way that Erpenbeck explains it and the perspective it gives her on things that are going on in the modern world is profound. The last two essays in the book – those comprising the Society section – address the contemporary refugee situation in Europe, and the empathy she brings to that discussion, drawing parallels with her own experience, was truly moving. 

I've read very little German literature and the section on literature was full of references to works by authors I've heard of but never read, and some I'd never heard of at all. I'm wondering, now, if I should go read Thomas Mann and Goethe. Erpenbeck is also interested in fairy tales and in Ovid. Her entire literary experience is one that's almost completely unfamiliar to me, but the way she writes about it made me want to know it. The comparisons she draws between literature and music were also incredible, especially in one of the longer essays in the book called "Speech and Silence." In it, she says that music is made up of time and air. I'm paraphrasing badly, but the idea is that music (and speech) cannot exist without time, and that time includes both the time when there is music – when notes are being produced (or when words are being said), as well as the time when there is silence. The silence is as powerful as the sound. In another essay, about her book The Book of Words, Erpenbeck writes, "That which is kept silent takes up just as much space as that which is spoken of openly—and it claims that space, one way or another." She goes on to explore how keeping something hidden creates different realities for those who are hiding and those who are left unaware. Again, paraphrasing poorly, the difference between these realities is the space taken up by the concealment.

In any case, this book was incredible. I can't wait to read more of Erpenbeck, and I expect I'll come back to this one again and again as I do.

The Emissary, by Yōko Tawada

Continuing my reading for Women in Translation month, I read The Emissary. My father gave me this and another Yōko Tawada book – Memoirs of a Polar Bear – when I visited him in June. I had not heard of her previously, but the two books were published by New Directions which, as I've written before, is enough of a selling point for me (and for my dad, apparently).

This book bears a certain resemblance to The Memory Police, which I read for my Women in Translation book club earlier this year. It's set in a sort of post-apocalyptic indefinite future, a time when the natural world has become contaminated with poisons and children are sickly and weak. Meanwhile, for reasons that are not fully understood, the elderly have just kept on living. The young are so malnourished and ill-developed, that those who are over 70 (and well into their 100s) must take care of them and perform all physical labor. The book is set in a Japan where cities have been abandoned due to toxicity and where the country has completely cut itself off from the outside world (as have most other countries as far as anyone in the book seems to know). In this isolationist future, foreign words are banned – this is where the similarities to The Memory Police were strongest. The book revolves around 108-year-old Yoshiro and his great-grandson Mumei, whom he cares for. Yoshiro – like the narrator of The Memory Police – is a novelist. At one point Mumei observes (to himself without voicing it) how Yoshiro has saved up all these words that are no longer allowed or that represent things that no longer exist and he wonders why. The book was published a few years after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, and one senses that this recent event must have been the backdrop for readers when it was new, but it also broadly implicates climate change and human impacts on the environment for the disastrous future. It felt very timely.

The Body Snatcher, by Patricia Melo; and Poetics of Work, by Noémie Lefebvre

As I mentioned in my last post, the remainder of the month of August, I am only reading books by women in translation. This morning, because I could think of nothing better to do with my time, I created a new bookshelf for Women in Translation on Goodreads. I went through my whole read list (608 books) and only 30 were books by women in translation. That didn't seem very good. How many books by men in translation had I read, I wondered? So I created another bookshelf for all books in translation, which ended up with 187 books on it, meaning women authors only account for about 15% of all the books I've read in translation. Well, of course, then I had to know how women compared to men in my overall reading, so I created a third new shelf for women writers and went through my whole read list again to populate it. This shelf had 211 books, meaning women writers account for about a third of the books I've read (better than I feared tbh!), so I clearly do have a women in translation problem. Unfortunately, these calculations already included the two books I'm going to write about here, but I have another three I'm hoping to get to before the month is up. 

I selected The Body Snatcher to read last Sunday after I finished The Barefoot Woman because I was planning, this past week, to participate in Jami Attenberg's Mini 1000 Words of Summer writing challenge and I suspected this might limit my mid-week reading time. (It did: on top of the 1000, I did morning pages every day. I saved my evenings for proper writing, and with working, preparing meals, and trying to do yoga now and then, it left not a lot of time for daily reading.) The Body Snatcher is a Brazilian crime novel, of which one blurb said, "You won't put it down until the very last page." Somehow I thought that was the kind of book I needed to be reading while I was also trying to write. I'm pretty sure I was wrong. The book is set in Corumbá, in the interior of Brazil – practically in Bolivia. The narrator is a scumbag who's relocated there to get his life together after things fell apart for him in São Paolo. This starts off as one of those stories where the central character makes one bad decision after another and you just know things are going to go from bad to worse. The narrator, as I said, is a scumbag – he deserves all the bad things that come his way, and worse! But he's the one telling you the story and somehow he managed to attract my sympathy. (The best comparison I can think of is Martin Amis's The Information, which I read so long ago I barely remember it, but I loved it and its dirtbag narrator at the time, though I'm not sure I still would today.) As things got darker and darker through the first half of the book, I found myself not wanting to read it because I was sure the bad news would just keep coming. The chapters were very short, but every one seemed to bring a new, worse development. However, the book was divided into two parts, and things took an unexpected turn in part two. Yesterday, I had the afternoon off (summer Fridays!) and I sat down and read the second half straight through. I wouldn't say I loved it, but I think it does benefit from dedicated reading rather than occasional browsing.

Poetics of Work was the last book we selected to read for my Baltimore-based friends' book club before the book club fell apart. So, I had ordered the book thinking I would read it a few months ago, but as our meeting never got scheduled I shelved it. When I was going through my shelves and pulling out all the unread books by women in translation, I decided to add it to my small to-read stack. It's very short – just over 100 pages long – and quick to read, but I don't feel like I absorbed much while reading it. (Maybe "quick to read" is not how it should be read.) The story is narrated by an out-of-work poet who has anxiety about looking for work, but also anxiety about finding it. She is in constant conversation with her absent father, whom she frequently describes as her superego. Her mother is also absent – dead, in fact – but has a more passive role in the book. The narrator writes about the rise in militarism and fascism in the present day, in the wake of terrorist attacks in France. There is some very interesting language play, but not enough story to keep my interest. Reading this made me feel a bit dense. Then again, I have never had much patience for poetry; maybe I shouldn't be surprised. I do wish I had a book club to talk about it with. I might get more out of it in conversation, or I might find out that my lackluster feelings about it weren't just me. 

The Barefoot Woman, by Scholastique Mukasonga

August is Women in Translation Month. I'm a week behind because I got too absorbed in the Broken Earth trilogy to not continue with it after I finished The Fifth Season on August 2. But I'm devoting the rest of August to reading books by women that have been translated into English. I started with The Barefoot Woman, by Scholastique Mukasonga, translated from the French by Jordan Stump. As well as being a book by a woman in translation, this is also the first book I've read from Rwanda so it counts toward my world books project too.

The Barefoot Woman is a beautiful book, a memoir of the author's childhood as a displaced Tutsi in Rwanda of the 1960s, and a tribute to her mother, Stefania, who was killed along with many family members in the genocide of 1994. The book isn't a continuous narrative; rather it's organized into chapters covering different aspects of refugee life. For instance, there's a beautiful chapter on sorghum, how it's grown and harvested, and all the ways it's used. There's a chapter on medicine, traditional and Western. In a chapter on a topic I don't recall, there's a delightful discussion of the introduction of underwear to the refugee community where Mukasonga grew up. 

In one sense, this book goes about describing traditional life in Rwanda, but it does this largely through absence and contrast. The refugees, who have been displaced to a desert region far from their lush, mountainous homeland, try to maintain their way of life without access to the resources they once had, and under constant threat from violent gangs. A cow-herding people, they were stripped of their livestock in the forced relocation and that absence – the missing milk – comes up again and again. Deprived of their traditional family compounds, they must adapt to the rough structures of the refugee camp. 

The surprising thing I found, as I read The Barefoot Woman, was how full of joy it was. The opening and closing address the tragedy that befell Mukasonga's mother – and so many others she knew – in the most wrenching terms. The devastation is there, lying in wait, throughout the book. You know the fates of the refugees, sometimes (heartbreakingly) specifically. And yet the memories – many of them at least – are happy ones. Stefania was clearly a force. Her determination to raise and protect her children and her way of life is incredible. Knowing the territory it covers, I was surprised how many times this book made me laugh. This was a great start to Women in Translation Month. 

The Broken Earth Trilogy, by N.K. Jemisin

I always feel a little out of my depth when I read science fiction. I am very aware (too aware, probably) that there's an entire literary tradition with which I'm only glancingly familiar. It leaves me doubting my ability to understand everything I'm meant to understand. 

It's not that I don't enjoy reading science fiction. Another factor I struggle with is books like this devote time and language world-building, while at the same time having a plot that draws you in. I'm aware that the world-building is necessary, but the detailed descriptions of places – physical spaces, landscapes, environments – sometimes just go right past me (or more accurately I go right past them) as I follow the plot.

The Broken Earth trilogy would probably benefit from a closer, slower reading where I really devoted time to envisioning the places described, but I didn't read it slowly. The first book, The Fifth Season, took me a week to finish; the second book, The Obelisk Gate, four days; and the final book in the trilogy, The Stone Sky, I read in two days. I read the entire series from beginning to end in less than two weeks. I don't know how to make myself slow down. 

I liked these books a lot, but who didn't? I don't feel like I have anything valuable to add to the conversation.

Sphinx, by Anne Garréta

Sphinx was the next selection for my Women In Translation book club. It is touted as, among other things, the first novel by a woman writer from Oulipo to be translated into English. I've read books by a handful of Oulipo members: Raymond Queneau, Georges Perec, and Italo Calvino, but before this one I'm not sure I'd read a book written specifically with an Oulipian constraint. If on a Winter's Night A Traveler would be the closest, and I can't tell (in a very rushed search at least) whether it's considered "official" Oulipo canon. 

I'm going to be very vague as I write about Sphinx, out of respect for the introduction of my copy, written by Daniel Levin Becker, which advises the reader who does not already know the unspoken constraint in Sphinx "to do everything in your power to stay ignorant for a while longer: sheathe the front and back covers of the book in kraft paper, avoid discussing it with booksellers, and don't read any reviews unless you're confident that they were written by lousy inattentive critics.*" (Fwiw, the front cover of my edition is harmless; the back cover not.) And, with this injunction to say little, I fear I won't be able to say much at all. 

I did like the book quite a bit. I somehow expected it to be a slow or difficult read – it was not, at all. It's a first person narrative about love, and loss, and grief, and coming to terms with loss eventually. It's also about the one-sidedness of relationships, how we can sometimes fail to really see the people we love. This part spoke to me especially. 

The translator's note at the end is a must-read as well. The book was written with a constraint that manifests differently in French than in English. The translator's explanation of how she handled this was fascinating (at least to me).

*This last is a jab at the reviewer who read Perec's La Disparition and failed to notice the complete absence of Es.

The Heat of the Day, by Elizabeth Bowen

I thought the Elizabeth Bowen recommendation came from Molly Young's newsletter, Read Like the Wind, and perhaps it did – but if so it must have been one of the "Why Don't You..." suggestions, because I can't seem to find her mentioned elsewhere. In any case, I picked up The Heat of the Day as well as The Death of the Heart some time ago. Last month, I was in Baltimore for the day with my dad where we met up with one of my oldest friends and drove around looking at different neighborhoods and visiting various bookstores. As we browsed the fiction shelves at Normal's, my friend pulled down a copy of The Heat of the Day. "Hey, I have that book and I keep almost reading it," I said. This friend was part of one of the book clubs that I joined during the pandemic; a book club that recently sort of fizzled out. And so, we thought, why not revive the book club and read this? I heard from my friend that she started the book in late June. Meanwhile, I was traveling for 2 weeks and not reading much. And furthermore, we hadn't actually set a date to read it by or, as far as I know, communicated to anyone else that it was the new book club selection. But, in any case, I went ahead and started it last week and finished it this afternoon. 

It's odd that this book is called The Heat of the Day when nearly all of it seems to take place at night – and in mid- to late Fall at that. There is, I thought, mostly a sense of chill throughout this book. Set in London in the midst of World War II, the book bears witness to the falling away of social norms and constraints as those who remain in the city live through the bombings, the constant fear that a loved one will be killed, the decay of trust. The book mainly centers on Stella, a widow of about 40, who has been told that her lover Robert, a slightly younger former Captain wounded at Dunkirk, has been accused of giving secrets to the enemy. We are with her in her dilemma, unsure what to believe. Other characters, the man who has made the accusation, Stella's son – a young soldier, a young woman named Louie who chances to meet the accuser, float in and out of the book, often on tangents unrelated to the main narrative. Or, perhaps, Stella and her lover are not the main narrative at all. Rather, it's wartime London and these are the characters that inhabit it.

The Fortune of the Rougons, by Émile Zola

It was several years ago now that I decided I wanted to read Émile Zola's 20-book Rougon-Macquart series. I had already read two of them (Au Bonheur des Dames and Nana), but I wanted to start at the beginning and read the whole series in the recommended order. For years, I collected the editions one by one as I found them at bookstores, but there were a handful that never seemed to turn up on shelves. In February of this year, I decided to just order the six books I was still missing directly from Oxford University Press. With all 20 books in hand, it still took me a few months to finally start the whole thing. La Fortune des Rougon was both the first published and the first in Zola's recommended reading order. 

The series follows a split family as it branches out over five generations. This book detailed the origin of the divide: Adélaïde Fouque, a/k/a Aunt Dide, married M. Rougon, had one son with him, and was then widowed. Following Rougon's death, she took up with M. Macquart, without marrying him, and with him had a son and a daughter. Though the three children grow up together, when they reach adulthood Pierre Rougon, who sees himself as the only deserving heir, cheats his siblings out of the wealth they might of inherited and distances himself from his mother. While the entire family history is told in this book, it's not exactly what the book is about. The main subject of the book is one week in December of 1851, as Republicans mobilize in the south of France and the bourgeois reactionaries try to seize power in the fictional village of Plassans. The divide in the family reflects the divide in the country, with some family members supporting and joining up with the Republican cause and others supporting the coup that led to the Second Empire. 

Nearly all the characters in this book are scheming and selfish, particularly Aunt Dide's two sons. A pair of young, idealistic Republican martyrs (one of whom is the grandson of M. Macquart) are the only heroes in this book, with Aunt Dide as practically the only other sympathetic character. Doctor Pascal was also an outlier, which made me look forward to reading the book about him (a long time from now, I'm afraid, as it's book number 20).

While I enjoyed parts of this book, it was also kind of a struggle to read. It's rather disjointed because it seems to be taking on two tasks at once: (1) introducing the entire back story and cast of characters for the 20 book series, and (2) telling the story of this particular struggle during 1951. It does a good job of both, but they don't really blend together. The book starts with a short history of a particular spot in Plassans where two young lovers meet (the martyrs mentioned above), then follows these lovers as they join the Republican uprising. That's chapter one. After that, we meet Pierre Rougon, and from there the book goes on what is, in essence, an extremely long aside on the entire family history and members of the extended family. Then, 100 pages or so later, it picks up the narrative again of the events in 1951. I imagine that the long aside will be helpful to understanding the whole series -- and indeed, it was helpful for understanding the family dynamics in this book -- but it felt largely outside the main narrative. 

Anyway, next up is His Excellency Eugene Rougon. Eugene is the eldest son of Pierre and a supporter of the Empire, and I gather it picks up in the early days of the Second Empire, so I assume it will involve more selfish scheming. I won't be jumping right into it, but hopefully I'll get there before long.

Think Again, by Adam Grant

As anyone who follows my reading at all knows, this is not my usual type of book. Think Again was selected by my company for our work book club. The book club started during the pandemic, and I haven't participated before now. I hadn't intended to participate this time, but two things motivated me to give it a go: (1) this book was selected by a consulting firm we're using to help with our DEI efforts and I do DEI work at my company; and (2) I happened to find an advance reader copy at my local Little Free Library. 

I have to admit I have a bias against this type of book (whatever it is; the back of the review copy categorizes it as "Business & Economics—Motivational), but I enjoyed reading this more than I expected to. The only other time I've read books that I would describe as broadly in this category was in grad school (specifically this book), where I had a similar experience. For one thing, it was easy to read. It served as a surprisingly nice break from the heavy novel I was reading. I'll also confess that while reading this book, I did sometimes reflect on my own willingness (or lack thereof) to rethink my assumptions from time to time. I wouldn't describe myself as the most open-minded person; I'm aware of at least some of my biases, and I'm not always willing to check them. (I do make an active effort to reflect on and explore my biases when it comes to people, but less so my biases when it comes to, say, books like this one. I'm not apologetic when it comes to some of my opinions, and I don't believe I should be.)

The book makes a distinction—one that I actually think is important—about not conflating your values with your opinions or beliefs. You can stay true to your values, but change your opinions and beliefs as you get new information. The idea of reflecting on your values and your beliefs, and understanding that your beliefs may evolve, is a good one. But despite the emphasis on values, the book spent little time talking about them; its focus was on the changeability of opinions and beliefs. The book rankled me when it sometimes seemed to imply a sort of equivalence between various positions on a topic. There's a section devoted to predictions that particularly bugged me. It talked about how predictors improved their predictions by regularly reassessing them and not getting too attached to their original prediction. The predictions in question were mostly about presidential elections. The emphasis of the whole argument was on how to predict better, with the accuracy of the prediction being given more weight than the outcome of the election. (Granted, I do see that with better predictions, perhaps there are actions that could be taken to affect the outcome—it just felt like the whole emphasis was on the wrong thing.) Similarly, a section about getting people with opposing views to reach some level of mutual respect and possibly even agreement, the topics are things where I don't think mutual respect or agreement should be the goal. This reaction of mine is precisely what the book is trying to dismantle, but when Grant came out with a suggestion that, for instance, people on opposite sides of the case for the death penalty might reach some agreement, my own defenses shot up because I don't see this as a place where there is any center that I could move toward: the government should not be in the business of killing people. 

On Father's Day morning, while hanging out with my dad in West Philadelphia, I was telling him about the book. It really wasn't about diversity, I said. I thought it had been recommended to our company with a particular audience in mind: old white guys. We can all get stuck in our beliefs and ways sometimes, but it seemed to me that what the book was counseling: breaking cycles of overconfidence, practicing humility, and even (seriously) the benefits of impostor syndrome, was not a message for the marginalized. When, for instance, lack of humility is a criticism frequently leveled at Black athletes (and Black people celebrating their own greatness generally), this advice can sound dangerously close to the rhetoric white people have been preaching forever. Women and others who have experienced impostor syndrome know that one effect is that might make one work harder (which is, in effect, the supposed benefit touted in the book). It's a truth that's become a cliché that Black people have to be twice as good to do half as well as white people in America. This isn't to say that humble self-reflection couldn't benefit everyone, but the message of this book seems calibrated to people who have not been told their whole lives to know their place.

Sweet & Sour Milk, by Nuruddin Farah; The Great Believers, by Rebecca Makkai

Aside from Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia in the 1930s, I wasn't much aware of Italian colonial presence in Africa. What I remembered from the African history class I took in college was that Italy tried and failed to colonize Ethiopia in the nineteenth century – putting Ethiopia among the only two countries on the continent not to be colonized during the European division of Africa. What I had only faintly remembered was that Italy did have other colonies in East Africa, so I was surprised when reading Sweet & Sour Milk to find signs of a lingering Italian influence in Somalia. In the book, which takes place decades after the end of the Italian control, the central characters were educated in Italy; another is half Italian, half Somali; Italian restaurants populate Mogadishu (which is spelled the Italian way in the book: Mogadiscio).

Sweet & Sour Milk is the first book in a trilogy called Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship. It centers on Loyaan, whose twin brother Soyaan has been murdered; poisoned, he suspects, by the government. Soyaan worked for the dictatorship, but wrote memoranda critical of the General in charge. And yet, on his death, the government claims him as its own and celebrates him as a hero, a martyr who died serving his country. This, it turns out, is the most effective way of neutralizing and undermining everything Soyaan worked for. Loyaan risks his own life and others' to bring out the truth about his brother, how he died and who he really was. He doesn't know whom to trust, while Soyaan's former allies don't know whether their friend in fact betrayed them. This is a beautifully written and heartrending book.

I found The Great Believers in a Little Free Library by my apartment. I knew it had received much acclaim when it came out a couple years ago, but I didn't know anything else about it. I took it with me on a recent trip, thinking I might be in the mood for something different than Sweet & Sour Milk. As I always seem to do when traveling, I carried both books with me and barely touched either. I did start The Great Believers on the flight home and I finished it three days later. (It is, as the cover promises, a page-turner.) The book alternates between events in 1985 in Chicago's gay community just as AIDS is taking root and beginning to kill people off, and Paris in 2015 where the younger sister of one of the young men killed by AIDS back then has come to reconnect with her daughter and finds herself retreading some of her past. This book came out in 2018, but it was interesting to read it with post-pandemic eyes. Now and then during the current pandemic I would come across comparisons to AIDS in the 80s and 90s, and reading this book crystalized some of the parallels I hadn't seen clearly before.