Probability Moon, by Nancy Kress, and The White, by Deborah Larsen

I've been traveling a bunch and reading a bunch, so I'm three books behind now, but I want to save the book I just finished, Homegoing, for a separate post.

For the past few years, I've read at least a couple sci-fi books each year, but I still feel I'm a newcomer to the genre. I read some sci-fi or sci-fi adjacent books as a kid (Douglas Adams and Madeleine L'Engle, mainly), but for most of my adulthood I didn't think it was for me, so I didn't read any. I'm not sure when exactly that changed. The first sci-fi book I read as an adult might have been Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which I had to read for a class I took at Harvard in 2002. I had seen Bladerunner dozens of times, and yet I was surprised at how much I enjoyed the book. Around the same time, I also read his A Scanner Darkly. But I always thought Philip K. Dick was a special case and not like other sci-fi. Aside from Dick, the first sci-fi book I read was The Last Castle by Jack Vance, and my decision to read that can be attributed entirely to this article, which appeared in the New York Times Magazine in 2009. I'll admit that I thought of reading the Vance as sort of an experiment, a wading into genre, which I felt I read at a remove. I still have this feeling reading some sci-fi. A few months after reading the Vance, I read Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, and I subsequently went on to read nearly all his other books, starting with the Baroque Cycle. Which is to say, the first of Stephenson's books I read were not so much sci-fi either, but I do think reading Stephenson was probably a significant factor in me changing my mind about whether sci-fi was for me. So, in the intervening decade, I've read a dozen or maybe a bit more sci-fi books, and it's part of my regular rotation, but still sort of new to me and I guess I'm still trying to figure out what I like, so when I come across recommendations, I note them and that is how I ended up reading Probability Moon. I don't actually have anything profound to say about it, but I enjoyed it.

I finished reading Probability Moon on my commute to work one morning last week, and so on my lunch break that day, I did what I do in that situation: I visited the thrift store by my office that sells paperbacks for $1 to find something to start on my way home. (This despite the fact that I also keep about 8 books at the office for precisely this scenario. I said to myself, if I don't find something to read a the thrift store, then I'll read one of my office books.) I picked up The White by Deborah Larsen, which I'd never heard of, as well as All That Is, by James Salter (and two Lidia Bastianich cookbooks!) and almost started the Salter, but then wasn't sure it was what I was in the mood for, so started The White instead. I wasn't sure it was what I was in the mood for, but I got through more than 40 pages on the subway home and finished the whole book 2 days later (it's very spare). The White is based on the true historical figure Mary Jemison, the daughter of Irish immigrants to the colonies, who was captured by the Shawnee in 1758 and ended up making a life among the Seneca. Toward the end of her life, Mary Jemison narrated her life story to a doctor who recorded it for posterity, but she reportedly said she hadn't told him the half of it, so this book imagines the other half. The book was violent and quite troubling in parts, but of course the times that Mary Jemison lived in were violent and troubling. One of the things that I found troubling about this book, though, is that it focused (very effectively) on the personal struggles of Mary and her families, but the larger historical context feels vague in the book. This may, in fact, be true to Mary's experience, but to tell in the 21st century, a story about a white woman living among Native Americans that spans the period of American independence, knowing what we know is to come seems like leaving a lot out.

Fludd, by Hilary Mantel

My plan to read only women during Women's History Month really brought home to me how many more books I have by men than women. It might be 2:1, and the ratio of men to women authors is probably even worse, because there are a handful of women writers whose books make up large chunks of my collection. I own every or nearly every book written A.S. Byatt, George Eliot, Jane Austen, and Kate Atkinson. I suspect Hilary Mantel belongs on this list of women. At present, I have -- and have read -- 3 of her books. I adored Wolf Hall. I went right out and bought Bring Up the Bodies upon finishing it, and then got so mad that the third volume was not yet out. (And this was 2015! Where is The Mirror and the Light Hilary Mantel?!) I never really looked beyond the Cromwell books but a few months back when I found a copy of Fludd at a thrift store, so I bought it for $1 and shelved it next to Bring Up the Bodies and forgot all about it until I was scanning my shelves for books by women. It's a slim book and doesn't get into the depth of its characters thoughts quite the way Wolf Hall does, but there is a familiar tenderness toward them. The book starts out rather bleakly, but the story was wholly unexpected and delightful.

The Rules of Magic, by Alice Hoffman and The Fifth Child, by Doris Lessing

Two months into this year, I was well ahead of my usual reading schedule, but had hardly read any books by women.* I had read 11 books in 2019, but only one by a woman when I started The Time of the Doves on February 27. So, with Women's History Month around the corner, I decided to observe it by reading only books by women in March. I have now finished two, in addition to The Time of the Doves.

I can't remember who recommended The Rules of Magic, but I think it came some time ago from someone on Twitter (as a general recommendation, not for me personally). For some reason that's hard to pinpoint, I feel like this book isn't my usual fare, but I found it thoroughly enjoyable and totally absorbing on my subway commute - always a good thing. I even found myself looking to see if "Practical Magic" was streaming on any of my services (it was not). Maybe I should read the book?

Next I read The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing, which is really almost a novella rather than a novel in length. I had not read Doris Lessing before and I picked up this book at some point because it was slim and seemed more approachable than The Golden Notebook. The Fifth Child is a strange book. In some ways it feels dated - the central characters are already anachronistic in the book's own present, which spans from the mid 1960s to the 1980s (coincidentally, roughly the same time-frame spanned in The Rules of Magic). In other ways, some of the issues it confronts seem very relevant still today. Something about the pressure we put on mothers and the way they are held responsible for their children felt present and urgent to me, particularly the interactions between the book's mother and the medical establishment. The Fifth Child made me uncomfortable, and I suppose that's what it intended to do.


*With the caveat, which I started a post on some time ago but have not yet finished writing, that I've read several books that were translated by women this year.

The Time of the Doves, by Mercè Rodoreda

Based solely on the merits of Mercè Rodoreda's A Broken Mirror, I went out and got 4 additional books by her. It's my understanding that The Time of the Doves is her most well-known work, which I suppose is why I went to it first when I was deciding what next to read by Rodoreda. I read this book in bursts, which was an unfortunate way to read it. I started it just before leaving on one trip and finished it while I was away on a second trip, and I was home for basically two days in between. So, I was in the process of reading The Time of the Doves for 11 days, but I probably only actually read it on 4 or 5 of those days, with stretches in between. I read the last 70 pages in one sitting, and if I had started reading it at a less disrupted time of my life, I probably would have read the whole thing in 3 days. As I said, my reading conditions were not ideal.

War stories are usually men's stories, but The Time of the Doves is a woman's war story. It follows its narrator from the day she meets her husband before the Spanish Civil War, through the trials of her life and their relationship, which intensify as he becomes involved in the war, and later into the post-war period. While the war is central to the story of The Time of the Doves, it also remains partly at remove while the book follows the domestic life of a woman in Barcelona during the war. Yesterday, completely by chance, I happened across this Robert Capa photo, "Running for shelter when the air raid siren sounds, Barcelona, Spain, January 1936." It could be a scene straight from The Time of the Doves. The war is there, sometimes in the background, sometimes forcefully in the foreground, but these women must still go about their daily lives. They must care for their children and take their dogs out for walks. These struggles feel more tangible and relatable than many battlefield stories.

The Time of the Doves is written in a stream of consciousness style, but is quite accessible. It reads almost as if the narrator is recounting her experiences on a therapist's couch, reflecting on her life, and it's really quite beautiful.

Tristana, by Benito Pérez Galdós

I have the beginnings of a post on reading in translation in my drafts, which I hope I will get around to finishing soon, but I have to get ahead of myself a little because I picked up Tristana entirely on the merits of its translator, Margaret Jull Costa. I'd read thousands of pages of Margaret Jull Costa's writing before I ever registered who she was. The moment of clarity occurred when I noticed her name on the José Saramago Wikipedia page. I knew it was a name I recognized, but I didn't think it was from reading Saramago: I'd only read two of his books -- The Gospel According to Jesus Christ and The Stone Raft -- neither of which, it turns out, was translated by her. So I clicked through to her page and remembered -- of course! -- that she was Javier Marías' translator. I'd read five of her translations; three of them veritable tomes. I'd seen her name day after day while reading those books, but I'd never investigated who she was. So, I did some investigating... but that's a topic for my as yet unfinished post. In any case, I thought it would be interesting to read other of her translations and when I found Tristana at Books Are Magic, I decided to start with it. I'd never heard of Benito Pérez Galdós, though evidently he's well known in Spain. Tristana was originally published in 1892 (and was adapted by Luis Buñuel for the screen in 1970). I've read a ton of 19th Century books from France and England and Russia, but I wasn't at all familiar with non-contemporary Spanish literature (aside, of course, from Don Quixote, which I've resolved I'll finally get around to reading soon). I had no idea what I was in for. Every time I thought I knew where the story would take me, it went somewhere different. While the overall framework felt familiar: a young woman is orphaned and left in the protection of her father's friend, who seduces her and takes away her "honor," and then becomes jealous when she falls in love with a man more her own age; the execution and turn of events were totally unexpected. Tristana is a brilliant young woman who is trying find freedom of a kind that was unavailable to women in her time. I did something I almost never do while reading Tristana: I got out a pencil and marked the passages I wanted to remember. (What I usually do when I want to return to a passage later is memorize the page number, but in Tristana there were too many to keep in my head!) Tristana is such a compelling character; you sense in her this great potential, and desire that you know is out of her reach. But you also think, if anyone can rise above her circumstance, certainly Tristana would be the one do to so. Of course, things don't end well for her, but they also don't end quite where you think they might.

As a side not, Tristana is the 11th book I've finished in 2019, and the 10th by a male author. However, I've read 5 books translated by women (3 of them by Margaret Jull Costa), so that's something, right? It's something, but it's not enough.

A Heart So White, by Javier Marías

When deciding what to read next last week, I finally asked myself, "What am I waiting for?" and picked up A Heart So White. (I still have Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me set aside to read eventually.) I felt like I had been reading around A Heart So White, putting it off, for no particular reason. I do sort of wish I had read it sooner, but not sooner as in a few months ago; sooner as in before I read Your Face Tomorrow. Reading A Heart So White has given me the urge to go back and read all Marías' novels, in order.

Some Marías fan or scholar must have put together a dramatis personae from across his novels. Some recur: Peter Wheeler, who I first encountered in Your Face Tomorrow also showed up in Thus Bad Begins. Custardoy, from A Heart So White, was also a figure in Your Face Tomorrow, and I believe Villalobos from A Heart So White also made an appearance elsewhere. Others recur but with a difference: wives named Luisa, for instance. A Heart So White takes place approximately a year into the marriage between the narrator and his Luisa. Your Face Tomorrow takes place approximately a year after the dissolution of the marriage between the narrator and his Luisa (some 10-15 years after its start, if I recall). Which makes me want to go back and reread The Infatuations, which also features a wife named Luisa. Though, in that case, it's not the narrator's wife -- the narrator is a woman who has a certain fascination with the Luisa from that book.

Well into A Heart So White, I was still puzzling over whether the narrator and his Luisa were the same narrator and Luisa from Your Face Tomorrow. In fact, I would have had to wait until page 239 to know for certain that it was not -- that's when the book first reveals the narrator's first name, Juan (the narrator of Your Face Tomorrow is named Jacques or Jacobo or Jaime) -- if I hadn't accidentally glanced at the back blurb on the subway, which starts, "Juan knows almost nothing of his father Ranz's interior life...." (This is why I never read back-cover blurbs.) But there were other clues, the main one bing his father. I didn't remember the father's name from Your Face Tomorrow (if indeed you ever learn it), but I couldn't square the Nationalist father from Your Face Tomorrow, who never fully recovered professionally, or psychologically for that matter, from being on the losing side in the Spanish Civil War and the horrors he witnessed during it, with the dapper, affable, opportunist father in A Heart So White. I'm sure a side-by-side reading, or at least one closer in time would bring up more obvious differences, but the evidently different fathers was the reveal for me.

It's not just characters that recur in Marías. It's also words and themes, whole sentences sometimes. The use of the word contract in the sense of contracting an illness, for instance, but also in the sense of a marriage contract, shows up again and again in his books. Marías' books do stand on their own, of course, but they become even greater as a body of work. In Fever, the first book of Your Face Tomorrow, the narrator stays up a whole night getting progressively more drunk and furiously cross-referencing books in his friend's library, looking for clues to confirm a suspicion he has developed. I feel like I could have this sort of a feverish night with just the works of Marías.

The Accident, by Ismail Kadare

The Accident was my first 2019 contribution to my world books project. I had long ago noted that I should read something by Ismail Kadare for Albania, and I found The Accident at Idlewild Books (one of the best stores I know of for international literature). The book is about an Albanian couple killed in a mysterious traffic accident (in an unnamed location, but probably outside Vienna) and it's told in three parts: part one is a description of the accident and various authorities' investigations into its cause; part two -- the longest part -- ostensibly covers the last 40 days of the couple's lives before the accident, and in fact covers much more than the last 40 days -- it is essentially a history of their relationship; part three returns to the investigation of the accident by one unnamed researcher who has continued look into it obsessively, believing he can solve the mystery. I mention the structure because the book starts out seeming like a very different book than it is.

At the risk of being gender essentialist, one thing that particularly irks me in some men's writing is a failure to explore the motivations behind the behavior of women characters. I can't help but believe that this relates to a failure to explore the motivations behind women's behavior in life. There is a cliché that women behave inexplicably, and this gives men a pass to create women characters who behave inexplicably -- particularly in their relationships with men. Toward the beginning of part two of The Accident, I was afraid the book was veering into this territory, but to my relief it later on mostly skirted around it. The relationship between the couple at the center of the book is hard to understand. There's an uneven power dynamic -- the man is distant, the woman is needy -- and at first I thought, "here we go again." But the dynamic subtly shifts here and there over the course of the relationship, and in fact it's much more complex than it seems at first. There's also a fascinating overlay of the relationship between the couple and the political events in the Balkans, and some links to Albanian folklore that I wish I understood better.

Trick, by Domenico Starnone

I came to Domenico Starnone unbiased. I found a copy of his book Ties at a thrift store and I read it last year completely unaware of the rumors connecting him to Elena Ferrante. I had read My Brilliant Friend in 2016, well into or in fact a little past the Ferrante fever that seemed to sweep across my social media feeds, but I never got to any of the other books. The news of her "unmasking," neatly coinciding with the publication of a book of her letters and journals (which I recall getting a rather meh reception) dominated my twitter feed for a couple days and then I mostly forgot about it. I thought her identity had in fact been confirmed subsequent to the exposé. In fact, before googling her today, I had no idea Elena Ferrante was still anonymous. But after reading Ties -- from reading about Ties -- I did learn about the (or more accurately a) posited connection between her and Starnone. (If I had gone ahead and read Days of Abandonment on that day I started My Brilliant Friend instead, would I have noticed the connection when I got to Ties?) In any case, I liked Ties a lot, so when I saw Trick on the staff recommendations shelf at Skylight Books, I bought it. It hardly matters, particularly given that I've only read the one Ferrante book, but unlike when I started Ties, I went into Trick fully believing I was reading the work of Elena Ferrante's husband. Only when I started looking around today did I come across the theories that Starnone is Ferrante or that Ferrante is not a single author but a collaborative effort between Starnone and his wife, Anita Raja. (I find the latter argument rather convincing, without, of course, having myself read much of the material that led to this conclusion.) But leaving all that aside, does it really matter who Starnone is vis-à-vis Ferrante? Perhaps if I'd read more Ferrante, it would matter to me.

So, Trick. The central character of Trick is a 75-year-old man who has managed to escape his poor and violent childhood in Naples to become a successful illustrator, living in Milan. He returns to Naples -- to the apartment he grew up in -- reluctantly, to take care of his 4-year-old grandson while his daughter and son-in-law attend a conference in Cagliari. While he narrates his internal grappling with his own past, with his work, with his health, and with a growing sense of his own mediocrity, he -- and the narrative itself -- are constantly interrupted by the demands and complaints of his grandson. This was so well done as to be stressful to read. I wanted so badly for him to have some peace to complete a thought. The three chapters that make up the book are told in first person narration by the grandfather, but there is also an appendix which is his journal covering the same period, including some illustrations. It's an odd construct. There's a certain amount of redundancy, but the journal doesn't have the depth of the internal monologue that makes up the narrative. I actually felt it detracted from the book appearing at the end, as it did, but only a little.

Pig Earth, by John Berger

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

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

The Proposal, by Jasmine Guillory

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


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