Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe, by Kapka Kassabova

I don't know where I first heard about Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe but I made note of it because I didn't have a Bulgarian on my to-read list (though I have occasionally pondered whether Elias Canetti could count for this purpose). Kapka Kassabova grew up in communist Bulgaria until she was 17, when the Cold War ended and her family emigrated to New Zealand. She subsequently relocated to Scotland and she writes in English. Border is an account of two years she spent traveling and talking to locals along the border between Bulgaria, Greece, and Turkey. It's part memoir, part travel journal, part history, part folklore. It took me more than a month to finish, but I absolutely loved this book. I started reading it after finishing Jenny Erpenbeck and Herta Müller thinking, perhaps, that I would stick with the theme of women writers from Eastern Europe writing about the communist era and its aftermath. But Border covers much more than that. It did have some themes in common with Erpenbeck's Not a Novel. In particular, coming of age at a moment when your world also changed entirely is something both books talk about. They were also written at about the same moment, and Kassabova's time spent on the Turkish/Bulgarian border was also the height of Syrian refugee movement toward Europe. Both saw parallels to the Cold War experience, but where Erpenbeck was writing about the refugee situation from some distance, Kassabova encounters refugees in villages and at camps all along her journey. She notes the change in direction, where in her childhood people tried to cross out of Bulgaria, now they tried to cross in. I was also glad to have the background on the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans that I got from reading Ivo Andrić and Meša Selimović, because the Ottoman history in the region comes up quite a bit in Border. The ancient history, too, gets covered. Thrace, for instance, was a place I vaguely recall hearing of probably in an art history survey course (I can't imagine any other course I took where it might have come up, but who knows?), but I certainly didn't know anything about it or that it still exists as a region spanning the border areas of these three countries. Bulgaria was a country I knew virtually nothing about, and I was not much better informed about Greece or Turkey. Kassabova provided a great introduction to the region, as well as a more general exploration into what borders mean and what it is to live on a border. I'm so glad I found this book.

How to Be an Antiracist, by Ibram X. Kendi

After my work book club's first selection for a discussion about diversity, equity, and inclusion was a book by a white man that was not at all about diversity, equity, and inclusion, they gave it another shot. I was honestly – pleasantly – surprised that How to Be an Antiracist was chosen and I'm very curious to see how our discussion goes tomorrow.

I was an African-American/Africana Studies major in college, studying first at Oberlin in 1994-95; then at Syracuse in Harare, Zimbabwe in 1996; and finally at Rutgers, where I earned my degree, in 2003-2004. I mention this to say that I've read a lot of literature on this topic, but also that my reading in this area is at least a little outdated. 

It probably shouldn't have been, but the concept of structural racism was eye-opening to me when I read Black Power as an 19-year-old. I've long believed that structural racism is the central problem in the U.S., and if anything my belief has only gotten firmer in recent years. Relatedly, I also tend to think it's not that useful to label individual people as racists (it's not that I think it's a taboo word, but that I don't think it's very productive). In saying that I believe using the term "racist" isn't productive, it's not that I give credence to the racists and accept that calling someone racist is a step too far, it's that I've generally thought it's not individual people who needed to be fixed; but rather it's the structures that perpetrate and perpetuate racism that need to be repaired.

I will admit: this book changed my thinking. Kendi's ideas aren't a radical departure from the ideas of structural racism, but he deliberately chooses to use different words and – critically – he implicates the people behind those structures for the racist policies they uphold. Kendi's focus on changing policies first and trusting that racist beliefs will fall away later strikes me as absolutely the only answer. And honestly, the idea that change needs to come before everyone is ready for it first isn't exactly new (something in this book put the line, "You keep on saying 'Go slow'" from Nina Simon's "Mississippi Goddam" in my mind), but Kendi's understanding of the role of power – and who has it – was very new to me. He says, "The most effective protests create and environment whereby changing the racist policy becomes in power's self-interest." 

It was in the second half of the chapter called "Black," about halfway through the book, that I really felt I started to understand the definition of racism that Kendi was using. In this chapter, he addresses the idea that Black people can't be racist. This formulation, he suggests, says that Black people have no power; that no Black people have power. But some Black people (and plenty of non-Black people) do have power – some have a small degree of power, and some have a great degree – and choose to use it in ways that perpetuate racism rather than equity. He goes into his reassessment of structural racism at even greater length in the second from the last chapter, "Success," and those two sections really made the book for me.

The other thing that this book does that is new is the way it defines racism and antiracism as, essentially, situational. They are action-related I don't feel the need to expand on this, because it's the thing that's mentioned in basically every review and I recalled it from when I heard Kendi interviewed on Morning Edition when the book was released, but I will say it's a good frame. It puts us on the hook for our actions and our words, but also big chunks of this book are personal anecdotes where Kendi shares his own wrong, sometimes racist, thinking. The reader who is probably occasionally cringing at their own past thinking, actions, and words, may feel a sense of empathy from the author.

There are a couple things I didn't love about this book, but I don't think they're worth dwelling on. I honestly don't think I would have read this if it hadn't been selected for my office book club, so I'm very glad they chose it and put me in the position of feeling like I had to read it.

Murder on the Orient Express, by Agatha Christie

I found this copy of Murder on the Orient Express in a little free library. I've always enjoyed reading Agatha Christie, but I wondered whether I should read this one because I already knew who did the murder. I've seen at least two adaptations of it, the one from the Poirot TV series, which I've watched in its entirety, and the Kenneth Branagh movie from 2017. It turned out, while I remembered the main outcome, there was a lot I didn't remember (and judging from the cast list of the Branagh movie, it seems they must have made some alterations to the story). Spoilers follow. 

Murder on the Orient Express is two mystery tropes in one: (1) there's a common trope where you have a group of people in a confined space with no means of escape for the murderer and a murder that must have occurred during a small window of time, meaning that everybody is a suspect.  and (2) there's also a trope – one that I tend to this of this book as the original example, or at least what it is famous for – in which everybody did it. But a key detail – and a third trope – in Murder on the Orient Express that somehow, to my surprise, I didn't remember is that Poirot lets them get away with it. Perhaps this is common in the "everybody did it" genre of murder mysteries, because I think in these stories – as is the case in Murder on the Orient Express – the group of people has come together to exact justice on a bad guy, a baby killer in this instance, whom the formal justice system has let go free. Poirot rarely allows the perpetrator to escape justice. In the TV show, the closing scene of many episodes is the moment the murderer is hanged.* (These hangings always seem violent in the context of the show and I've always assumed this was a comment on capital punishment.) So, the message of this book is that the real perpetrator isn't the 12 murderers in the book, but the murderer they murdered. 

I watch a lot of murder mysteries and I'm always fascinated by the ones where the murderers are allowed to get away with it. I think probably this happens more in the stories centered around gentlemen detectives rather than police. Father Brown, for instance, lets an alarming number of people get away with murder – after they've made their peace with God, of course. But Poirot, as a former policeman, seems to usually share the bias of the police that murderers should be formally punished. So perhaps Murder on the Orient Express is a bit of an outlier in this way. 

In any case, I'm pleased to report that this was an enjoyable read – even already knowing who did it. 

The Spirit of Science Fiction, by Roberto Bolaño

I am just back from a short visit to Seattle. As usual, I brought with me more reading material than I could possibly get through in the four full days I was there. Also as usual, I visited a local bookstore and came home with more books than I started out with. I just brought two books with me, which is honestly not bad given my track record, but both books were rather long. I had already started one of the books and I doubted I would actually finish it while away, but I brought the second in case I wanted to read a different kind of book. After finishing the first section of the book I had underway I did, in fact, want to read a different kind of book. But by that time I had already visited Third Place Books and added five additional books to my collection, so I hardly needed the back up book I brought with me. Among the books I picked was The Spirit of Science Fiction, of which there was a stack of remaindered hardcovers on the bargain books tables. It was one of the few Bolaño books I didn't already own. 

After Bolaño's death, I remember being surprised at the seemingly bottomless supply of his works that had not yet been published in English. I'm not positive, but I believe that I learned about Bolaño in the same moment I learned about his early death, in a review of one of his books on NPR. (Googling leads me to believe it was probably this story about The Savage Detectives; I have a weirdly specific memory of driving on the BQE or possibly the Whitestone Expressway when I heard the story.) Then I remember clearly when 2666 came out and I was under the impression that he had just the two books. I got around to reading The Savage Detectives in 2009 and read 2666 a couple years later, and then at some point — I have no idea where in the timeline of all this exactly, though it must have been after I had read at least one of his books — my dad gave me a whole stack of Bolaño books, mostly those published by New Directions. After reading the big two, I read some of the smaller books here and there. I didn't pay too much attention as the posthumous works came out. But when I saw or heard reports that there was a new Bolaño book, I would marvel and rejoice that he'd left so much behind, that there was so much still untranslated. 

I may be mistaken, but I seem to remember hearing that The Spirit of Science Fiction is the last of his books to be published, suggesting they have finally reached the bottom of the volumes he left behind, though perhaps it is just the latest to be published. (Is it even that? I actually don't know for sure.) I had somehow assumed it was something he wrote late in his life, though on reflection given the timing of the publication of 2666 vis-à-vis his death, there's probably not much at all that came later in his life than that. In any case, I was surprised as I was reading The Spirit of Science Fiction to come across characters who were familiar to me from The Savage Detectives. When I looked into it and found it was written well before The Savage Detectives and published posthumously both in Spanish and English, things made much more sense. I enjoyed The Spirit of Science Fiction well enough, but it has nothing on the later works, including Bolaño's other short fiction. As someone with completist tendencies, this wouldn't have changed my decision to buy it or read it, though perhaps I would have chosen a different option from among the books I picked up in Seattle to read at just this moment. But I did manage to start and finish it over the course of my short vacation, so there's that. I read an entire book and a good chunk of another on a four-day trip, which definitely counts as rare for me. 

The Appointment, by Herta Müller

The Appointment wasn't in the original stack of six books that I pulled out to read during Women in Translation Month, but after getting through the first five, I started the last book I had intended to read and found it just wasn't what I wanted to read in that moment. So I went back to the shelves (conveniently, I had slightly pulled out all the books by women in translation that I had not read) and looked for another option. I'd been meaning to read Herta Müller for a while; she was the writer I'd selected to read for Romania for my world books project.

I found The Appointment slow going at times, but I really liked it. The narrator is a young woman who has been summoned to an appointment for questioning by the secret police. In the present of the book, we don't know how many times the narrator has been summoned before, but we know it has happened several times. The book spans the slow, frequently disrupted tram ride she takes from her apartment to the government building where she will be interrogated. As she rides the tram, her observations of the passengers around her are interspersed with her memories: from childhood, her first marriage, her relationship with her current lover, Paul, her friend Lilli, who was killed trying to flee their home country, and memories of previous interrogations with the secret police – always with the same creepy captain. The story that unfolds is beautiful and grim. 

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.