Kalpa Imperial, by Angélica Gorodischer, and Trust, by Domenico Starnone

I'm inclined to start this post in the way I think I've started nearly every post this year, with a lament about my reading habits. But I figure I've written enough about that already and I will surely write more about it when I compose my year in review in a few days, so there's no need to dwell on it today. Also, I've finished 2 books in as many days and more than 3 days remain in the year, so I should focus on making up for lost time.

I started Kalpa Imperial: The Greatest Empire that Never Was thanks to Mark Slutsky's Barely a Book Club. I started both the earlier selections for the non-club this year as well, but Kalpa Imperial is the only one I finished. I almost don't know what to say about it. It was fantastic and strange; not at all what I was expecting. Each chapter is its own tale, mostly describing a ruler and how she or he came to power. Sometimes en entire dynasty is included, sometimes an anecdote that gives you a sense of the climate, so to speak, of a particular leader. As a reader it's easy to find yourself lost: Where do these stories take place – are we on earth or somewhere else? Is this the past or the future? How many thousands of years does the book span? There are many gaps – we rarely know what has taken place between the chapters. 

As I was finishing Kalpa Imperial yesterday, Italo Calvino's book Invisible Cities came to mind. It's been two decades since I read it (something I should remedy!), but I remember the basic construct: dozens of cities are described, but each description is, in the end, a description of Venice with all her different facets. I had this sense with Kalpa Imperial – that each of the distinct stories was actually a story about the same thing. I feel I would benefit from rereading it now that I have seen the whole. 

I have a stack of books that I started this year and set aside without finishing, but kept on my side table with the idea that I might yet finish them. After finishing Kalpa Imperial yesterday, I eyed the stack and decided, rather thank going back to any of those books, I'd start something fresh. 

I picked up Domenico Starnone's Trust (not to be confused with the Hernan Diaz book of the same title that came out last year) when I was out gift shopping last week. I've really enjoyed the other two Starnone books I've read – and that it was translated by Jhumpa Lahiri only added to my interest. Starnone's books are pleasantly slim, but not light. It's been nearly 5 years since I read the last one, so it's mostly a vague feeling that I remember. When I started Trust what immediately came to mind was Javier Marías. When the book opens, the narrator is describing a relationship from his early adulthood that has an intensity that I tend to think of as only possible in early adulthood. The relationship comes to an end quite soon, but it continues to hang over the rest of the narrator's life, with unexpected results. In any case, there was something about the character and his relationship with women that reminded me of Marías. I sometimes wonder why I'm so drawn to Marías when he writes from a perspective of what could reasonably be called toxic masculinity. There's something of this in the Starnone character, but also a self-awareness (and also a lack of it, which we the readers are made to see). Trust drew me in immediately, and my reaction on finishing it was that it was very much my thing, but with a lingering question of why these kinds of books are "my thing."

The House of Doors, by Tan Twan Eng

My disappointing reading year continues. Now I'm consoling myself that I'm managing at least one book a month, which is something. The House of Doors is the 16th book I finished this year.

A few weeks ago, I heard Ari Shapiro interview Tan Twan Eng about this book on All Things Considered. I wasn't even paying super close attention, but the talk about Penang sounded interesting to me, and I hadn't read a book from Malaysia. I ordered a copy on the spot and promptly forgot all about it. When a package that was clearly a book arrived a few days later, I thought it was the Bradt guide to Emilia Romagna I had ordered recently, and I was momentarily confused when I opened the package before it all came back to me.

The House of Doors sat on my coffee table while I attempted to read the next book for my Women in Translation book club, The Discomfort of Evening. A week ahead of that meeting, I decided to give up on that book altogether (it turned out several of us did: it's a grim, grim book) and go ahead and start The House of Doors.

The House of Doors is set in Penang, Malaysia in two periods: 1910 and 1921. The later period covers a visit W. Somerset Maugham made to the city, staying with a local couple. The 1910 events are recounted to Maugham by the wife. She tells Maugham the story of Ethel Proudlock, an English woman convicted of murder in Kuala Lumpur, which Maugham takes and turns into his short story, The Letter. She also tells him about her own life during that time, in which she was swept up in the community supporting Sun-yat Sen in his work toward a republic in China. 

Many years ago, I read Anthony Burgess' The Long Day Wanes and that pretty much accounts for what I knew of British-ruled Malaya – the world The House of Doors is set in. Around the same time, I also read The Razor's Edge and later Of Human Bondage and The Painted Veil. Reading The House of Doors left me wanting to see Penang, and wishing that I'd read more Somerset Maugham. There's still time – for both these things, I suppose.

This Census-Taker, by China Miéville

I'm just back from 9 days in upstate New York, where I was dog-sitting. I brought two books with me – one that I had started and one to read if I finished it. I didn't touch either the entire time I was away. Last Friday, I went to the Goodwill in Hudson, NY, where I've had good luck finding books in the past and that's where I found a copy of This Census-Taker, a book I hadn't heard of, though I've read several other books by China Miéville. I started it the next day and read it in small bits for the remainder of my stay. I read the bulk of it on the train back to the city yesterday and the last few pages on the subway home. 

This Census-Taker isn't what I was expecting (I didn't even read the blurb, so I had no idea what I was getting into) and it's quite different from Miéville's other books (though it's fair to say there's a lot of difference among his other books, so maybe this isn't a meaningful assessment). In any case, the mood of This Census-Taker is very dark and reminded me of several other books – most of all, it reminded me of Mercè Rodoreda's Death in Spring, which I had to put aside after I started it last year because it was simply too grim. I was afraid I wouldn't be able to manage This Census-Taker either, and probably if I hadn't had a long train ride with nothing better to do I would have moved through it much more slowly, and perhaps not finished. It is very dark. It's set in this kind of hazy place, disconnected from the outer world. The setting specifically is what reminded me of various other things I've read – there's a post-apocalyptic feeling to it, with just a touch of the supernatural, that felt somehow similar to The Memory Police, among other things. 

I'm glad I did finish This Census-Taker. The end was satisfyingly ambiguous, leaving much still in mystery.

Easy Motion Tourist, by Leye Adenle and Strangers I Know, by Claudia Durastani

After finishing Provenance, I thought perhaps sticking with genre fiction was the right move. I'd had a copy of Easy Motion Tourist for some time, but I can't quite say what made me decide to read it just then. 

Easy Motion Tourist a fast-paced and incredibly violent crime novel set in Lagos. A white male English journalist is sent to Nigeria to cover the presidential election but ends up stumbling on a gruesome crime scene, which gets him taken in by the police. He's rescued by a Nigerian woman who runs a safety organization for prostitutes, and the two of them together get caught up investigating what appears to be a crime ring involved in human sacrifice for ritual. Nothing is quite what it seems, and the resolution of some mysteries is saved for the sequel. 

Given that it's a book by a Nigerian author, I found it somewhat surprising that, while the book contains many different threads, the white male journalist is the book's hero and the only first-person narrator. On the other hand, this did perhaps make it more accessible as a reader who has never visited Lagos – we see it through the eyes of a foreigner. Some things need to be explained to him, which helps the reader understand them too.

While the violence sometimes made it hard for me to read, the pace was just what I needed. I'm not yet sure if I'll seek out the sequel.

I read the latter two-thirds of Easy Motion Tourist while I was in Montreal for an extended Labor Day weekend. I was rushing a little to get through it, because I had a book club meeting less than a week after my return home and I had to start and finish that book as well. I was afraid if I took a break from Easy Motion Tourist it would just join the growing stack of books on my side table that I have started and not finished in 2023. 

The second book I brought with me to Montreal was Strangers I Know by Claudia Durastanti. I did manage to start it while I was there, but only read a very little before coming home, leaving myself with more than 200 pages to get through this weekend. I did finish it in time – just – for my book club meeting, but it's a book that really should be read more slowly. 

Strangers I Know is a work of autofiction, in which Durastanti tells stories of her family and her childhood, and her adulthood eventually, largely in the form of vignettes. The opening is incredible: she recounts, one after the other, the two conflicting stories of how her parents met, and then she tells us each of theirs histories, if briefly. I was immediately reminded of Natalia Ginzburg's Family Lexicon, so of course I was prepared to love it. While it feels like it must have been an influence – the term "family lexicon" actually appears in the book on page 131 – it's not among the (extensive) list of books, movies, and music that she acknowledges as the things that "turn[ed her] into a character or a person."

Indeed, the similarities to Ginzburg diminish after the first section of the book. Durastanti is the child of deaf parents, who separated early in her life. She spent the first decade of her life in Brooklyn and reading about her experience living with her Italian family in Bensonhurst, during a period when I was also growing up in Brooklyn (8 years ahead of her by age) was both familiar and foreign (perhaps heightening the overarching feeling of the book for me, because it's entirely about that particular straddle.) After several years in Brooklyn, her mother moved back to Italy – to a village in Basilicata, where Durastanti spent her youth. The Basilicata connection was, I suppose, the second thing that disposed me to love this book – and she addresses the reader like me, who thinks first and foremost of Christ Stopped at Eboli when this region comes up. The village her mother lives in is evidently only 15 minutes from the Fossa del Bersagliere, which Levi wrote about and painted. But, she tells us, the youth of today's Basilicata live by the same rules as American teens. Of course they do: already in Levi's time there were Italians in Basilicata called "Americans" because they had emigrated and then returned. And that's exactly what Durastanti's family did, her grandmother and her mother both. I was so struck when I read Christ Stopped at Eboli to find that the immigration was not one-way only, and Strangers I Know just reinforced this fact for me. (I'm reminded also of a woman about my age who I know named Cinzia who was born in New Jersey, but has lives since early childhood in a town of less than 10,000 halfway between Matera and the Ioanian Sea.)

Despite (or maybe because of) my expectation to love Strangers I Know, I didn't. There were bits that I did love, but also stretches that felt naive when they seemed to intend to be profound. In the afterword, Durastanti says her intention was for the reader to be able to read this book's chapters (most of which are quite short) in any order, and it might be better consumed that way – picked up, read from a random point for 15 minutes or 30, and set back down until the mood struck again. I definitely would not say it's suited to reading for hours at a stretch, as I forced myself to do so I could finish it by 4pm today.

Provenance, by Ann Leckie

I have about six books in progress at the moment, a few of which I've been "reading" for several months, but I'm still finding reading a challenge this year. A few weeks ago I decided maybe I needed something entirely different and I started Late Victorian Holocausts by Mike Davis, which is actually the book I've made it farthest along in – so maybe I was onto something. But it's dense and, unsurprisingly, grim. So when I had a free afternoon on Sunday, I found after reading it for about 15 minutes, I wanted something different. There had been some recent chatter about Ann Leckie's new book among people I know, which reminded me that I'd had a copy of Provenance for quite a while and not yet read it. I got through 100 pages of it that afternoon and finished it three days later. Apparently it was what I needed. 

On top of the fast-pace and engaging story, I found it physically easier to read than the other books I've been reading lately. The edition I have isn't large print, but the typeface is noticeably larger than that in Late Victorian Holocausts or in the NYRB editions I so often find myself reading. (I know people love the NYRB design, but the print is so small!) I started noticing it was harder for me to read small print sometime in 2020 or 2021. I was always taking off my glasses to read books or look at my phone. A bit over a year ago, I got progressives for the first time and it definitely helped. I can usually read through the lower part of my lenses, but recently I've observed that's become harder too – and taking off my glasses no longer helps. They warned me when I got the progressives that I'd need to keep increasing the strength of the reading part of my lenses. I sort of wish that had scared me off, because now I wonder if progressives were the right choice at all. (Though I suppose the convenience of having a single pair of glasses that works for most uses is a plus.) A few weeks ago, I ordered a couple pairs of reading glasses online. I'm not sure if I just need to get used to them, or if I really ought to go get a proper prescription, but they don't seem to help much. They do magnify, but text doesn't seem clear when I'm using them. In any case, I don't want to blame my degenerating vision for my reading slump – I think there are a lot of other factors and distractions in my life – but I do wonder if it's playing a role. Especially having experienced the relative comfort of reading Provenance. 

As for Provenance itself, as usual I feel out of my depth when talking about science fiction. It was really good! I liked it! It did interesting things with gender and pronouns and relationships - family relationships, romantic relationships, inter-species relationships. It didn't blow my mind the way the Ancillary books – in particular Ancillary Justice – did. (Going back and reading my post about Ancillary Justice I had to laugh; I had no recollection of recommending it to the woman at the insurance call center!) But Provenance exists in the same universe as those books; their events are going on somewhere in the background, in the distance. And that itself was interesting. The characters in Provenance are as in awe of the AI described in the Ancillary books as I was reading about it. Reading Provenance made me want to see more parts of this universe. (Happily, I can. I look forward to reading Translation State before long.)

Eve Out of Her Ruins, by Ananda Devi

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

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

In Concrete, by Anne Garréta

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

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

The Tale of the 1002nd Night, by Joseph Roth

I started The Tale of the 1002nd Night just after finishing Dora Bruder. Something about Dora Bruder put me in mind of Joseph Roth, who was living in a hotel in Paris at the time of his death in 1939 – like Dora Bruder and her parents. A Jew born at the eastern reaches of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Roth spent most of his adult life living in hotels in various cities in an increasingly inhospitable Europe. I took a break from The Tale of the 1002nd Night to read two book club books (one of which I have yet to finish), but I went back to it yesterday. It seems this was his last novel, published a few months after his death. 

The book opens in the court of the Persian Shah sometime in the 19th Century, who in a fit of ennui decides to pay a visit to Vienna. The first several chapters of the book are something of a comedy in which the Shah sees a woman at the ball thrown in his honor and decides he'd like to spend the night with her. She's a married member of the nobility, so this certainly can't be allowed, however a Captain in the army who has been attached to the Shah and his retinue knows of a prostitute whom he believes resembles the desired woman enough that they can trick the Shah. The plan goes off and the Shah goes home, but the book stays with the characters in Vienna, whose lives take turn after unexpected turn. There was a point maybe three quarters of the way in when – taking it all in – I believed I saw the reference to The Thousand and One Nights. The story kept shifting, the central characters were rotating, the book had drifted so far from the Shah's first visit, but it was the event that changed the course of all the character's lives. The book wraps up nearly twenty years later when the Shah makes a return, but everything is different after all that time.

Scattered All Over the Earth, by Yoko Tawada

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

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

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

Dora Bruder, by Patrick Modiano

My reading was going so slowly this year that I decided to slow it down even more by attempting something I've never done before: reading an entire book in French (or in any language besides English for that matter). It turned out to be a very satisfying exercise, so maybe I'll do it again. 

How I got here is a story of its own. I was in Rome for a week at the end of March. One night I went to a language and culture exchange meet-up. It was at this strange cafe in the basement of a large building. When you entered, it seemed like you were going into an underground garage, but when you got down there it was a huge space, with bookshelves all around and the books were free! I wasn't really looking at the books, but at some point in the evening I sat down at an out of the way table to eat my plate of pasta from the buffet (another odd feature of this cafe) and a glanced over and saw Patrick Modiano's name on a cover at the end of a nearby shelf, and then I saw it was a French edition. I read the first page to gauge my ability to read it and it seemed manageable to so I decided to take it. 

When I got home from Rome and unpacked I put the book on my coffee table pending shelving and over the next few days I kept seeing it and feeling drawn to it, so that Saturday I decided to give it a try. I wondered if I was being crazy, or trying to find an excuse for not reading, but actually I found I could read it – albeit very slowly. I think I averaged about 15 pages per hour; it took me 9 days to finish the 145-page book, though only a couple of those days included long, concentrated stretches. The book has nice short chapters, and plenty of stopping places even within chapters, making it ideal for a slow read.

The titular Dora Bruder is a Jewish girl of 15 born in Paris in 1926 to an Austrian father and Hungarian mother. It's hard to know the extent to which this is a work of fiction. The narrator (who seems to be Modiano – he recounts some details of his life that (according to Wikipedia at least) are true to Modiano's and at a couple points he also refers to his own books) comes across a notice in an old newspaper from 1941 stating that Dora Bruder's parents are looking for her and providing an address for any information. He is struck by the notice because the address is familiar to him, and over a period of a few years he seeks to find whatever information he can about Dora Bruder. What he ends up with is very little, but aspects of her experience – being sent to a convent school, then later being arrested and interned in a series of camps in France before her eventual deportation to Auschwitz – are filled in by other materials and accounts that Modiano provides. The gap that he's never able to fill is her 3-month sojourn as a runaway during the winter of 1941-1942 (sa fugue in French, which I really liked – I don't think we have a word for this in English in the noun form). Mixed with what Modiano learns or assumes about Dora Bruder's life, are memories from his own youth (and his own fugue) in very different circumstances – he is 20 years her junior, and observations of the physical changes in Paris between the 1940s, the 1960s, and the 1990s, which is the present day of the book. 

Dora Bruder's family lived in the 18th arrondissement, near the Porte de Clignancourt and the Marché aux Puces de Saint-Ouen. I visited that neighborhood when I was in Paris 2 years ago and went to that flea market. When I was walking back to the Metro, I came across a memorial to the deported Jews of Saint-Ouen. I spent a long time reading these names. When the book mentioned the Marché aux Puces, I immediately remembered this site (as well as a plaque on a nearby building indicating that it had been a depot for explosives and munitions used by the Resistance). Saint-Ouen is actually beyond the 18th, just outside the Boulevard Périphérique that separates central Paris from the banlieues, but it's a short walk away from the address given for Dora Bruder's parents. These would have been her neighbors, people she passed in the street.