The Night Guest, by Hildur Knútsdóttir

I have three other books that I've been moving through slowly these last two months, but I set them all aside to read the next book for my book club, The Night Guest by Hildur Knútsdóttir. I was a little terrified to read it. At McNally Jackson, where I got my copy, it was shelved in the Horror section. The headline on Bookshop.org says, "Hildur Knútsdóttir's The Night Guest is an eerie and ensnaring story set in contemporary Reykjavík that’s sure to keep you awake at night," and all the blurbs seemed to express a similar feeling. I don't enjoy being scared. My tolerance for horror movies is pretty much nonexistent. I get nightmares. I spent a long time last night in conversation with a friend trying to remember any scary book I had read. For a while, the only thing I could come up with that might fit the horror genre was Frankenstein, but scrolling through my StoryGraph read books I got to China Miéville's The Scar and remembered reading Perdido Street Station, without a doubt the scariest book I've ever read (though I did like it, actually).  

So, with a sense of dread, I waited until I had a free day when I could start it in the morning and finish it well before bedtime. As it turned out, it only took about 2 hours to read. It's 194 pages divided into about 100 chapters, several of which are one short sentence long. There's a lot of blank space in this book. Which, now that I think about it, correlates nicely with the story. The Night Guest is narrated by a woman find herself waking up bruised and exhausted each morning after what she believes to have been a full night's sleep, and seeks to uncover the mystery of her nighttime activities. I realized quite early that the horror in The Night Guest is not the kind of horror that scares me. I've given a fair amount of thought to what type of horror most scares me, though I've never quite pinpointed it. Having thought about it a little more today, I can confidently say that I find external horror a lot scarier than internal horror, a distinction I'd never particularly thought about before.

The book I found myself thinking about as I read The Night Guest was Justine, which now that I think about it, is something of a horror (internal horror) novel itself. In fact, Justine left me feeling quite shaken, in a good – or at least a powerful – way. I breezed through The Night Guest. It's a compelling read, if a bit slight. Maybe I should be relieved.

Moving Parts, by Magdalena Tulli

I've had Moving Parts as well as a second Magdalena Tulli book on my shelves for some time and I'd considered reading each before but never actually settled on reading them until Moving Parts was selected for my Women in Translation book club. Finally, I have read a Polish book. This has long felt like a gap in my world reading project that I should be able to fill easily.

Moving Parts is hard to pin down, appropriately, I suppose, given its title. It's a work of meta fiction that operates on a dream logic, observing a narrator trying to follow the characters and in a struggle with the creator. I found it to be a slog at first, but it picked up about midway through and I ended up quite liking it, though without a whole lot to say about it. It's taken me 2 weeks to get around to finishing this post. I almost feel the need to reread it to understand it better.

Voyage Along the Horizon, by Javier Marías

Yesterday evening, I finished Voyage Along the Horizon, which Javier Marías wrote between ages 19 and 21. With it done, I have now read every Javier Marías novel available in English. I believe George Eliot is the only other writer (at least among those with a significant output of work) by whom I have read every novel written. For Marías, this amounts to 13 books and 3500 pages of his writing (most of it translated by Margaret Jull Costa, whom I also developed an affection for through all this reading). I read my first book by Marías almost exactly 9 years ago, so I've averaged a little under 1.5 books by him per year since then. In the last couple years, I've found myself a little troubled by his books (their deep heteronormativity and reliance on old fashioned gender roles, the sexual jealousy, the, for lack of a better word, perviness) in a way that I don't think I was previously, but still: I love his writing. It feels like Marías writes the way I think.

With that out of the way (I probably ought to, but am not going to take the opportunity of finishing my last Marías novel to write a treatise on him), Voyage Along the Horizon was an odd way to finish. I read his final book last year, and that probably would have been a more appropriate last book to read, but instead I was left with Voyage Along the Horizon, his oldest book available in English -- published in 1973, a full 13 years before the next oldest book I've read (The Man of Feeling). There was barely a trace of the Marías I knew in Voyage Along the Horizon. At the most -- and this is an odd thing to say about a translated work -- there were words here and there that I associate with him. There was also a certain round-aboutness to the book. Often with Marías you might be two-thirds of the way into a book before you finally see where it's headed.

This edition of Voyage Along the Horizon was published in 2006 by Believer Books, an imprint associated with Believer magazine, which at the time was translating and publishing his regular columns from El País. At the back of the book there are "Eight Questions for Javier Marías," which he responded to for inclusion with the publication. I can't say they provided a whole lot of elucidation with regard to the text, but it was interesting to hear him reflect on his early influences. 

 Apart from that, I hardly know what to say. Voyage Along the Horizon is not a bad book, but I never would have read it (and it most likely never would have been translated into English) if it weren't by Javier Marías. It's totally unlike his other books in terms of setting (it's historical fiction, about a group of mostly English creative types on a cruise in the Mediterranean, which is eventually headed for Antarctica) and narrative style (it's a book within a book and lacks much of the internal monologue I usually associate with Marías). But, as a completist, I'm happy to have read it.

The World of Yesterday, by Stefan Zweig

I started Stefan Zweig's 1942 memoir The World of Yesterday with 3 days left in 2024 and I thought I might finish it in time for the new year. I always read right up until evening on December 31, but I like to start the year with a clean slate so I try to pick books I can finish in time. Then on January 1, for the last several years, it has been my tradition to start the day and the year by reading a book by Javier Marías. I should have known better than to start a book that was nearly 500 pages long, though I guess it doesn't matter all that much. As it happened, I was feeling very unwell on January 1 this year and not up for reading at all. On the following days, I kept going with The World of Yesterday, and this morning I finished it. Later today or tomorrow I will start the last remaining Javier Marías novel that I have not read. The tradition was going to end anyway, and it's not that important to me in fact. As much as anything, it may just be a way to save myself too much decision-making first thing in the year.

In an unintended coincidence, the last book I read in 2023 was also a Stefan Zweig book. Maybe I have the beginnings of a new tradition.

As I wrote after reading Zweig'g Chess Story, I only became aware of Zweig in 2013. I remarked then about my surprise that I hadn't heard of him before, and after reading The World of Yesterday I only feel more surprised. If anything, Zweig is modest in his memoir but one does get a sense of his wide fame when reading it. I half joked to friends that I was reading a celebrity memoir, because the book is full of anecdotes about his meetings and friendships with other celebrities of the time, from Freud to Richard Strauss to Dalí to Gide to Rodin and so many others. Zweig traveled the world, both before World War I and between the wars, visiting the United States, Central and South America, and India, as well as the expected places in Europe. He led a remarkable life, which his memoir – even with his personal perspective – describes within the context of the history and events as they were happening around him. There is an almost incredible clarity to this book that is hard to imagine achieving without some distance. (I think he must have written it after leaving Europe for Brazil, though his life in Brazil is never mentioned, so perhaps that was the distance.)

I expected to learn more about his personal life, but while his friendships with celebrated authors, artists, and musicians are covered, his intimate relationships are almost completely left out. We learn only a little about his immediate family at the beginning and then hear briefly about the fate of his mother toward the end. We learn virtually nothing at all of his spouses and home life. Even more surprising, the book is very limited in its discussion of his work. While a few particular works are discussed in some detail, most that come up are mentioned only in passing, and many don't come up at all. At one point he alludes to his plans to write a novel – which I think must have been Beware of Pity – which got sidetracked when he developed an interest in Mary Stuart. And he references his biography of Marie Antoinette only briefly in the context of Mary Stuart. He mentions Burning Secret only in the context of the film adaptation of it being banned in Germany. Most of his other novels are not mentioned at all. One knows when reading the book that he is a prolific writer across many different forms, but the creation of those works play a small part in the memoir.

What The World of Yesterday does capture extremely well is exactly what its title promises: the life, the feeling, the experience of being in Europe at the turn of the 20th century, on the eve of World War I, in the wake of that war, the interwar period and in the last years before World War II. Zweig does incredible work at helping the reader understand what it was to live through all of it. I think I had hoped the book would also help me understand why he took his own life in 1942, shortly after finishing his memoir, but I can't say that it did – it only made me the more sad for his loss.

2024 in Books

I thought 2024 might have been my worst reading year in a decade, but with 24 books read I'm actually one book ahead of where I finished 2023. I had a good run over the summer and thought I might get back into the reading habit, but I fell off again in the fall. I could blame my failure to read more on any number of things – excessive scrolling and too much time spent on Spelling Bee are surely among the culprits – but one factor for which I feel less personal responsibility is that I had two longterm houseguests this year. I wasn't living alone for 8 months of last year, meaning there were people who I talked to in the mornings and who interrupted (even if they didn't intend to) my solitary reading time. I'm happy to have my space to myself again and I'm not expecting any longterm guests any time soon, so I hope I can get back to some of my old habits. 

The books I read last year, in the order in which I finished them, were:

• Family Lexicon, by Natalia Ginzburg
• Dark Back of Time, by Javier Marías
• Senselessness, by Horacio Castellanos Moya
• Mockingbird, by Walter Tevis
• A Time of Gifts, by Patrick Leigh Fermor
• What Have You Left Behind? by Bushra Al-Maqtari
• War, So Much War, by Mercè Rodoreda
• Our Lady of the Nile, by Scholastique Mukasonga
• Tomás Nevinson, by Javier Marías
• Translation State, by Ann Leckie
• Canción, by Eduardo Halfon
• Trust, by Hernan Diaz
• Tyrant Memory, by Horacio Castellanos Moya
• City of Laughter, by Temim Fruchter
• Vertigo, by W.G. Sebald
• The Rings of Saturn, by W.G. Sebald
• The Emigrants, by W.G. Sebald
• Near to the Wild Heart, by Clarice Lispector
• Journey by Moonlight, by Antal Szerb
• The Third Tower: Journeys in Italy, by Antal Szerb
• Four Seasons in Rome, by Anthony Doerr
• On Lighthouses, by Jazmina Barrera
• Such Fine Boys, by Patrick Modiano
• The Word is Murder, by Anthony Horowitz

The stats: I read 7 books by women and another by a nonbinary author, meaning two thirds of the books I read were by cis men. Not great. Seventeen of the books I read last year were in translation, which I think is a high proportion, even for me. The countries, apart from the U.S., from which I read books were: Brazil, El Salvador, France, Germany (maybe needs an asterisk because it's Sebald, but maybe it doesn't), Guatemala, Hungary, Italy, Mexico, Rwanda, Spain (note: one of the three books I read was written in Catalan), the U.K., and Yemen. Only Yemen is a country from which I hadn't previously read a book.

The most surprising stat in here to me is that this list includes six rereads. Two of them were for my book club: Family Lexicon and Near to the Wild Heart. Two of them were different translations than the versions I had read previously: Journey by Moonlight and, again, Near to the Wild Heart. I found myself wanting to reread beloved books this year – I considered even more rereads than I completed. There's also an unusually high proportion of non-fiction (nearly all of it memoir) in here: six books in total (and I'm not even counting Sebald). Both these stats are extra notable because in 2023 I had zero rereads and zero works of nonfiction in my read list. 

And now we are at the part of the post where I declare my favorite book of the year. Sometimes there is a clear winner; not this time. Journey By Moonlight was an easy favorite when I read it in 2019. I still loved it when I read it last year, but surprisingly (or not), it wasn't a stand-out. If anything, Szerb's memoir The Third Tower (also a reread) hit harder this time around. Senselessness, too, felt more powerful on rereading. 

I feel I should limit my favorites to books I had not read previously, and if forced to choose (which I am, by my own authority), I can narrow it down to three. A Time of Gifts was an enchanting book that captured a moment in time so vividly, and Leigh Fermor himself is such a compelling storyteller. Reading this book was simultaneously a joyful experience, and heartbreaking for the lost world it exposes. I read three Sebald books, which I've always thought were a loose trilogy, consecutively (though out of order, it turned out), and while I loved them all, The Rings of Saturn was the standout among them. The wide-ranging stories it told, the history and observations Sebald makes over the course of this unusual book come together so unexpectedly into a magical whole. It's a book that defies explanation, and it's wonderful. Finally, Anthony Doerr's Four Seasons in Rome so perfectly and beautifully captures Rome, one of my favorite places in the world. It was especially rewarding to read it before, during, and just after I paid a visit to the city, but I've since passed my copy on to my father who's never been to Rome and he is also loving the book. (My intention there was to make him want to visit Rome; I think it's working.) I'll make a closing observation about all three of these books: Two of them are straight memoir and a case could be made to describe the third that way as well. All of them are about journeys and history. As someone who has mostly stuck strictly to fiction, this makes me wonder if what I'm looking for from books may be shifting. 

On Lighthouses, Such Fine Boys, The Word is Murder

I could have sworn I'd taken a picture of Jazmina Barrera's On Lighthouses, but I don't seem to have. I also could have sworn I still had it, but I can't seem to find it anywhere. I'm sure it will turn up in an hour or so, when I no longer need it. 

On Lighthouses was the December selection for my women in translation book club. It's a bit different for us – we mostly read fiction. On Lighthouses would, I suppose, best be described as a collection of connected personal essays. Jazmina Berrara visits a handful of lighthouses and we get a little bit of history, a little bit of literary analysis, a little bit of personal anecdote while she writes vaguely about each one and the context of her visit. It's a small book, and the collection of lighthouses she visits feels haphazard: 3 are in New York (2 in the city, one on Long Island) presumably because she lived here when she was writing it. The others are in the pacific northwest and Spain. Perhaps I'm forgetting one? I found the bits about the history of lighthouses most interesting, while some of the meaning and metaphor she ascribed to lighthouses felt forced. But now and then it was beautiful. I did immediately order a copy for a friend of mine who just completed work on a 2-hour special for PBS about the lighthouses of Wisconsin. 

After finishing On Lighthouses, I started and then set aside two other long books (I think I was getting ahead of myself with the upcoming holiday break) before turning to the always reliable Patrick Modiano. Another five star book from Modiano! This one actually took me more than a week to read, but that's because I didn't read on several days. Covering the usual Modiano territory, Such Fine Boys is an account of the students and faculty from the Valvert School, a private boarding school for wealthy children, who you come to suspect have ended up there for some particular reason. Each chapter focuses on a different student. Some are narrated in the first person by one Patrick Modiano, while sometimes he is in conversation with another former student or faculty member who takes over the storytelling for a chapter. The stories span from the era of occupied France to the present-day of the book (published in France in 1982). There is a near complete absence of parenting, a surprising intermingling of wealth and seediness, a dark current running under it all. In these vignettes, there are echoes of stories told more completely in other Modiano books. I was reminded particularly of Villa Triste. Then there's a story of a student getting caught up in a roundup in occupied Paris, "one of the roundups that, in the past few months, had routinely preceded convoys to the east." Modiano's own father was picked up this way, and these roundups are described in detail in Dora Bruder. I was, of course, delighted to find some of the usual Modiano places turning up: Parc Monceau with its merry-go-round. Modiano's Paris is a place that may only exist in memory and books, at this point, but I haven't stopped trying to find it. I'll be in Paris again in a few months. Perhaps I'll devote a day to visiting the locations that turn up again and again in his books. 

My father was here for Christmas and brought with him The Word is Murder by Anthony Horowitz. He finished it while here and left it behind for me to read. I previously read Horowitz's Magpie Murders, but I mainly know Horowitz as the creator of one of my favorite TV programs: Foyle's War. This made The Word is Murder rather a fun read, because Horowitz narrates the novel as himself: creator of the popular TV program Foyle's War (and of Midsomer Murders, and writer of a few episodes of Poirot, and author of a popular children's book series). The premise is that he has been brought on by a former detective who advised him on some TV programs to write a book about him as he investigates a the case of a woman who was murdered on the very day she arranged her own funeral. The book is full of references to real programs and people, and it's difficult to know what aspects of the book are fiction (was Horowitz hired by Spielberg to write the Tintin sequel?) and what is based on reality (an especially intriguing note in the acknowledgements suggests that at least one aspect of the mystery may be based on a real event). This was a fun mystery, which I finished in 24 hours. It was just the kind of book I needed on my holiday break. 

Four Seasons in Rome, by Anthony Doerr

After finishing my Szerb re-reads, I decided to continue with the Italian theme with Four Seasons in Rome by Anthony Doerr. A few weeks back I was looking at my shelves for something else, when I noticed it and pulled it out to potentially read ahead of my planned trip to Rome over Thanksgiving. I had forgotten I had this book, or why exactly I had gotten it. I can only assume it was on a books to read about Italy list. 

I was already feeling very primed for my visit to Rome from the Rome section of Journey By Moonlight, but just a few pages into Four Seasons in Rome I had the feeling that I had really chosen well. Doerr's book is not just about Rome, but about a year he spent living in Monteverde on the Janiculum (or Gianicolense) hill Rome, which is precisely where I would be staying on my trip. I was looking forward to staying on that side of the Tiber and getting to know the Trastevere end of Rome (Janiculum and Trastevere also feature in Journey By Moonlight as it happens), and here was a book about precisely that. 

Quite early on in Four Seasons in Rome, Doerr mentions the Porta di San Pancrazio and the Fontana dell'Acqua Paola (il fontanone) and I made those among my first stops on the day I arrived in Rome. To reach il fontanone from my Roman apartment, I had to walk up to the very top of the Janiculum hill and then a little bit back down to the point where the fountain faces out over the entire city. The fountain had also been recommended to me by the women in whose apartment I was staying. They expressed their surprise that it was not a site prominently featured in most guidebooks to Rome, comparing it favorably to the Trevi Fountain. As I approached the fountain from behind, with the view out to Rome ahead of me, I realized I had actually been there before. I discovered the fountain and the adjacent overlook after a visit to the Orto Botanico (Botanic Garden) di Roma, which occupies a hillside in Trastevere, on my previous to Rome in March of last year. The main entrance of the botanic garden is near the bottom of the hill, but you can take a winding path through the garden up to the top of the hill and if you exit through the gate there you will find yourself right beside il fontanone. 

When you turn your back to the fountain and look out at the city from the viewpoint on Via Garibaldi, you are just above the courtyard of some sort of academic institution and on that day in March of 2023 when I visited, down in that courtyard a woman who appeared to be cleaner or worker of some sort was taking a cigarette break. The light was so good and the shadows so stark. In the months between then and now, I had forgotten all about the monumental fountain and the dramatic view of the city, but I remembered very clearly looking down from above at this woman having a cigarette and feeling that I was peering in on something very private. There were a dozen or more people standing along the fence just above her, but she seemed completely unaware of any of us. It's one of my favorite photos from that trip. 

As the title suggests, Four Seasons in Rome is an account of a year in Rome and it's divided into a section for each season. I read the first section, Autumn, and part of Winter before I left for Rome. Again, the timing felt very apt, as I would be going to Rome just as autumn was coming to an end. I finished Winter and read some of Spring while there. I read the last of Spring on the plane home, and then I read summer here on my couch in Brooklyn, where it currently feels very wintry. I have only been to Rome in winter and the very winter-adjacent parts of fall and spring. I've experienced mild temperatures in Rome, but never what would be described as real heat. I've experienced Rome in torrential rain, in a sudden and intense hail storm, and in a freak snow storm that shut down the entire city for a day. Reading Doerr made me want to experience Rome in the springtime, and reaffirmed my feeling that I'd prefer not to be there in summer. Seasons aside, Doerr's observations about Rome beautifully articulate what I love about the city – its history, its lifestyle and pace, its beauty (and occasional ugliness). I can't imagine reading this book and not falling in love with Rome, even if you'd never been there. 

Journey by Moonlight (new translation), and The Third Tower, by Antal Szerb

I heard from a friend online that there was a new translation by — Peter V. Czipott — of Journey By Moonlight and I had to get it. It was a UK publisher, but conveniently I had a scheduled trip to Scotland and I was able to get it (though I did have to have it special ordered) from the wonderful Topping & Co. bookshop in Edinburgh.

I read the earlier Len Rix translation in 2019 and promptly declared Journey By Moonlight one of my all time favorite books. In the five years that transpired between my reading of the two translations, I can't remember things clearly enough to state that one is better than the other. What did happen in those intervening years is I visited Italy four additional times, including my first (and second) visit to Venice, my first visit to Siena, and return trips to Florence, Ravenna, and Rome (twice) — each of which plays a part in the book, and each of which I had visited once before (the former two more than 20 years ago). In other words, I was much more familiar with the territory of the book than the first time around. (Though I do still need to follow Mihály's path through Umbria, which I have mapped out thoroughly.) 

It was a real pleasure to revisit Journey by Moonlight, though it was much slower going this time. Sometimes I wonder what happened to my capacity for reading, and while I think it's partly due to spending too much time scrolling, I've also had a houseguest these last couple months who frequently talks to me in the mornings right when I might otherwise be reading. (Hell is other people.) I still identified so strongly with Mihály's struggle between the attractions of the bourgeois life that is expected of him and his belief that deep inside, in his true self, he is not meant for that life. I'm articulating this poorly, but I occasionally joke that I am the token normie among my friend group. My job and my home and my lifestyle feel in conflict with my inner self. Not all the time — only when I stop to think about it, or when I read something like Journey By Moonlight that brings it to the front of my mind.

The most striking thing for me on this reading of Journey By Moonlight was Szerb's description of Rome — a city I am much more familiar with now than I was when I read the book five years ago. He spends a good deal of time talking about the Etruscans and the museum devoted to them at Villa Giulia — a museum I visited on my 2022 trip to Rome. I now think it's quite likely that it was on my to-see list because of Szerb, but if it that's true, I had forgotten. Mihály also visits the non-Catholic cemetery, a place I tried to go on my first visit to Rome (it was closed due to snow), but which I have now visited several times and count as one of my favorite places in the city. Szerb's accounts of Rome ring so true to my own experiences of visiting the city 90 years later. Of course, 90 years is no time at all in the history of Rome.

On finishing Journey By Moonlight, I decided to go right into a reread of Szerb's travel memoir, The Third Tower. Once again, it had me in tears on the second page, but it was so great to read it with Journey By Moonlight fresh in my mind. Reading The Third Tower, I I feel such a strong connection with Szerb. Like me, he was obsessed with San Vitale as a teenager (who the hell is obsessed with San Vitale as a teenager?!). On my first visit to Italy, in 2001, Ravenna was the only place that was a must-visit for me. (I found Italy disappointing on the whole on that visit and it took me 14 years to return.) I revisited Ravenna and San Vitale about a year ago, and when I read Szerb's chapters on the city and the mosaics they described perfectly my own feelings. There's a chapter of The Third Tower I had forgotten, in which Szerb talks about his own internal conflict that is parallel to Mihály's, called "The Confession of the Bourgeios." He puts it more plainly in his memoir than in the novel. He rebels against it, but he doesn't feel at home without the bourgeois comforts which he is accustomed to — and yet, at the same time, he is not really at home in the bourgeois world either. 

I will be in Rome in a few days.  This time, I'll be staying near Trastevere, a neighborhood that features prominently in Journey By Moonlight, and where I have not spent a lot of time on my previous visits to the city. I'm looking forward to seeing it with Szerb's words at the front of my mind.

Near to the Wild Heart, by Clarice Lispector

I first became aware of Clarice Lispector and her book, Near to the Wild Heart, a little more than 20 years ago. I was working as an administrative assistant at Harvard and taking Literature classes with my employee benefit. I took two classes with a professor who I thought was just brilliant and in my memory she told me Near to the Wild Heart was her favorite book. We didn't read it for either of the classes I took with her, but I decided to read it on my own at the time. I found it pretty impenetrable, but I finished it. I didn't remember much more than a mood.

A decade or so later, it seemed like Clarice Lispector was having a real moment. New translations of all her works were released, and it felt like suddenly she was a favorite of the social media literati. I had this vague memory of a book I struggled through in the back of my mind, but between her sudden popularity and the remembered admiration of my professor, I thought I must have missed something. Over the years, I considered rereading it, or trying the book of short stories I had by her to see if those were more my speed. I finally got around to it because Near to the Wild Heart was selected for my Women in Translation book club. 

But before I get there, let me share a funny (to me, at least) aside about my old copy of Near to the Wild Heart. It was a book we had at home, I remembered, long before I new anything about it. I think because my father worked with the publisher, but alternatively it was maybe because my mother had an interest in Brazil. Or maybe it was both. In any case, the 1991 translation published by New Directions was a book I knew by name. I thought that when I read it in the early 2000s, I must have gotten the copy from my parents house to read. And maybe I did, no one will know at this point. I thought I had held on to it after reading it, but I wasn't positive. I moved several times. Books came and went. In the fall of 2022, I packed up the bulk of my library without documenting it and it went into storage. Also that fall I was clearing out my mom's old house, where she had left a bookshelf of books she didn't want to move to her new home. I found Near to the Wild Heart and I thought it must have been the family copy I had read, so I set it aside to keep when I got rid of most of her other books. Of course when I unpacked my own library, I found my copy there – apparently I had gotten my own, or my mom had. In my mom's copy, I found Varig airline boarding passes from one of my mom's trips to Brazil. How like my mom – and how like me – to pick Clarice Lispector to read on the plane to Brazil.

So, in the last week, I returned to Near to the Wild Heart after more than 20 years. I was hopeful that between the new translation and the 20+ years of life I had lived, I would find it more approachable, but I can't say I did. Parts of it became familiar as I read it again. The mood I remembered came back instantly. There were paragraphs here and there that leapt out at me in their beauty, but overall the book left me cold. It's brimming with metaphors that I couldn't parse; where they should have provided a feeling, they left me confused. I felt rather dumb reading the book, and I occasionally had to remind myself that I am capable of reading – and enjoying – challenging books that lack plot. I guess Near to the Wild Heart just isn't for me. 

The Rings of Saturn and The Emigrants, by W.G. Sebald

As of this afternoon, I have completed the loose trilogy (if they even are that) that is Vertigo, The Emigrants, and The Rings of Saturn, but it turns out I read them out of order. The Emigrants was the first of Sebald's books to be published in English, in 1996, four years after it came out in the German original. The translation of The Rings of Saturn came two years later, in 1998, three years after it came out in German, and Vertigo came last in 1999, but it is the oldest of the three, having been published in German in 1990. I knew the English language publications didn't track the German originals, but I had somehow gotten it in my head that the proceeded backwards, and so I read The Rings of Saturn ahead of The Emigrants, which was a reread for me after nearly 20 years. I don't think the order particularly matters, though having read them all now back to back I do believe I see a progression in Sebald's style. 

The Rings of Saturn is the longest of the three books, and it covers the broadest set of material. Each of its ten (if memory serves) chapters covers a range of semi-connected topics that are outlined in the table of contents, but the writing itself moves seamlessly among these topics, while the table of contents itself seems almost nonsensical. The overarching framework for the book is a walking trip Sebald took along the depressed coast of East Anglia, but his meandering thoughts on this trip provide a history of the region then proceed to take him far from the shores of England. 

The conditions in which I read The Rings of Saturn were less ideal than when I read Vertigo immediately before. My life somehow got much fuller in those days and lacked long stretches for dedicated reading. These conditions worsened even more by the time I got to The Emigrants, the day after Labor Day. There was construction going on in my house, and then I had a 3 day work trip to DC taking up a whole weekend with extra long workdays. When I came back home, there were still two more days of construction and the following day I had a long term houseguest arriving. I couldn't read The Emigrants the way I would have liked to.

Like Vertigo, The Emigrants is divided into four sections. The sections are unequal in length. I was able to read the first one in a single sitting, which I think is the ideal way to do it. The second I also read all at once, or almost so. The third and fourth sections are longer, and my arrival at them coincided with the increased constraints on my time. Perhaps I should have waited altogether rather than read them in little pieces as I did. I only started the book nine days ago, but already my memory of the first two sections is faint. Still, the reread was helpful because about all I remembered from my first reading all those years ago was a sort of mood. 

When I typed up my post about Vertigo, I wrote, 

I think some other things put me off reading Sebald for a while: (1) I started to associate him with my youth, and (2) As I read other things over the years, I saw a mix of similar work and imitations (or, to be more kind, works likely inspired by him), and where once he had felt quite unique, my sense of his singularity diminished.

I've been thinking about both these points more as I've continued to read Sebald. The former particularly as I was reading The Emigrants, because I had read it in my (relative) youth. Reading it this time around and recognizing references here and there, I kept finding myself wondering what I knew when I read it in 2003, and what I had learned since, (and also, very occasionally, what I might have forgotten since then). But it's actually the latter point I wanted to talk about more: the books that have reminded me of Sebald.

The first book I remember reading and thinking, "this is doing what Sebald was doing," is the beautiful Belgian novel War and Turpentine by Stefan Hertmans. (I see the Times noticed the similarities too.) It made my "also good" list from my 2018 year in review. Javier Marías' Dark Back of Time also has a similar construction (semi-autobiographical, includes pictures), and when I read it I did wonder if he had read Sebald, but Dark Back of Time (published in 1998) is nearly contemporaneous with Sebald's books, and so I also wondered if this was a micro trend in literature in the 1990s. With 25+ years of perspective, this explanation feels plausible. It's a very postmodern approach. But I was surprised to realize that Marías reminds me of Sebald in some ways I might not have thought about if reading Dark Back of Time hadn't juxtaposed them for comparison in my mind. The way Marías follows tangents and tells history is not unlike Sebald. As I was reading The Rings of Saturn, the book that most came to mind was Daša Drndić's EEG, which made quite an impression on me. I don't recall there being any pictures in EEG, but that book similarly winds through history pulling out detailed, possibly forgotten fragments that tell a larger story. None of this is meant to diminish Sebald's writing – I was incredibly moved reading these three books. If anything, I probably appreciated them more at this stage of my life, when I have read these other books and bring more to my reading of Sebald.