The Bookshop, by Penelope Fitzgerald

After finishing Shrines of Gaiety, I briefly went back to Midnight in the Century (I suspect I'll continue to work my way through it slowly), but then I had a rather harrowing Tuesday morning. I woke up around 5am and was vaguely aware of a cat meowing continuously somewhere outside my window. I dozed for another hour or so, then got up, showered and came downstairs just before 7am. The meowing was still going, and seemed to get louder as I walked into my back room, which opens out to my backyard. I decided to investigate. The meows seemed to stop when I went outside, and I looked around my yard and what I could see of my neighbors', but didn't see a cat. Just as I was about to head back inside, I noticed a paw sticking out between two wooden fenceposts in my neighbor's yard. I realized the cat was trapped there, with one of its back legs stuck in the fence. On my side of the fence, there was a second chain link fence, topped with concertina wire. The cat must have tried to climb under the wire and over the fences and gotten its paw caught jumping down. I couldn't get a good look at her from my yard because, except for her paw, she was on the other side of the wood fence. I brought out a ladder and put on a coat, hat, and gloves for protection, and got a towel to try wrap the cat in. I had to lift the concertina wire and duck under (which is why I wore the hat) it to be able to grab her on the other side of the fence. She squirmed and hissed and put up quite a fight even in her state of immobility when I tried to close the towel around her, but I was able to get enough weight off her leg that I could twist it the right way and pull it up out from between the fence posts. I thought I might be able to pull her through to my side wrapped in the towel, but she bolted as soon as she was freed. From what I could tell in the brief moment I could see her running off, she seemed okay so hopefully her leg didn't sustain too much damage, but the whole experience left me quite shaken. I came back inside and had my coffee and breakfast and I decided I wanted a book I could curl up into for comfort and warmth. I looked at my shelves and thought The Bookshop might do the trick.

I'm not sure in retrospect if it was quite the book I was looking for – in fact, the end left me a little gutted – but for the hour or so that I read it on Tuesday morning, it was just the thing. A youngish widow in post war England decides to open a bookshop in an out of the way coastal town in East Anglia. There are forces in the town for her and against her, but things seem to come together for her – until they don't. This is only the second book of Penelope Fitzgerald's that I've read, but her simple, clear voice with beautiful attention to details is just how I remembered it. This was a lovely little book. 

Shrines of Gaiety, by Kate Atkinson

I've become such a slow reader. After finishing the Marías two weeks into January, I started Midnight in the Century by Victor Serge, who has stuck in my mind since I read Unforgiving Years in 2021. But like Unforgiving Years, it was slow going. I would find my mind wandering, so I only read little bits at a time. Last Friday, I settled in to read it and after a few pages decided it just wasn't what I was in the mood for. The weekend prior, I had gone to New Orleans where I found Kate Atkinson's Shrines of Gaiety in a Little Free Library. It was an exciting find, because I'm a fan of Kate Atkinson and yet I hadn't even known she had a new book out last year. It was sitting on my coffee table when I picked up – and put back down – Midnight in the Century. I thought it might be more my speed, and it was.

I enjoy Kate Atkinson both for her historical literary fiction and her Jackson Brodie detective novels. Shrines of Gaiety is sort of a blend of the two. It takes place in the nightclubs of interwar London. There has been a string of missing girls and unsolved murders, police corruption is suspected, and a detective is determined to clean things up. The novel follows a wide cast of characters in the London nightlife scene. I was reminded of Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies, which I read many years ago – though I've seen the film adaptation of it, Bright Young Things, much more recently. Specifically there's a gossip columnist in Shrines of Gaiety who reminded me of Simon Balcairn (played by James MacAvoy in the movie). Shrines of Gaiety takes a similarly dark view of the "bright young things," though they are peripheral figures in the story, which focuses more on the people behind the scenes – the nightclub owners, managers, dance hostesses, the dirty cops. Among the central characters are two resourceful young women (one a girl, really) and they give the book its heart. This was a fun read, and apparently just what I needed.

All Souls, by Javier Marías

Once again, I've started the year with Javier Marías. This marks the eighth year I've done so, but the first time I've read one of his books since his death in September of last year. This made the weight of choosing which book to read seem significant, knowing that the number of books remaining is finite. His most recent book, Tomás Nevinson, still hasn't been released in English. It's due out this March I believe, and there may be some early works still untranslated. There may also have been something left nearly done that could be published posthumously, but basically his collection of works is now complete. 

When Marías died, I took it as an opportunity to order every book of his available in English that I didn't already own. This worked out to be three novels, two books of essays, and a tiny volume about Venice. I considered going right back to the beginning and reading Voyage Along the Horizon, his earliest novel available in English, which he started at age 19 and was published when he was 21. But I didn't think it would give me what I wanted. Last year I started the year with his second earliest book available in English, which was published 15 years after Voyage Along the Horizon. I'll admit to knowing next to nothing about the three other books that predate The Man of Feeling, which have not been translated, but operating on the assumption that it might be considered his first mature work, I decided to proceed chronologically from there and so I started All Souls, which is also notable for being the first book of his to be translated into English. Beginning with All Souls his books have been routinely translated and released in English in the expected two years or so following their Spanish publication.

With All Souls I did feel I was getting the true Marías – in short, it gave me what I wanted. This narrator was never named (though at one point he is given a false name). There's a Luisa (the first Luisa?) although she's not the woman at the center of the book. That woman – to my shock – was named Clare*. (I believe I've read only two** other books that featured Clares: Passing and The Road to Damietta, a book I read in middle school about Saint Francis and Saint Clare.) There's the Oxford don and spy, Toby Rylands, who shows up in several other books. In this one, I think, we get more of an origin story for him than in any of the others. There's Oxford itself, which plays a part in so many of Marías books. All Souls featured the usual long ruminations on what appear to be tangential topics, which of course come back in the most unexpected context. 

If I am to proceed from here chronologically, the next steps would be to reread A Heart So White and Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me, but I think I may jump ahead instead to the next book I haven't read: The Dark Back of Time. Near the end of All Souls that book's title pops up in the text. But once I've read that, I will have read every novel except the early works and the most recent. There's no question in my mind that I want to reread some – perhaps all – of his books, the question is only of order and timing. 

* Evidently, this same Clare shows up in the Your Face Tomorrow books, a detail I'm surprised to have forgotten. 

** A google search has reminded me of another fictional Clare in a book I've read. It's the rarer male usage: Clare Quilty from Lolita

2022 in Books

The last year has not been a great year for reading for me. I finished 41 books in 2022, which is certainly a respectable number of books, but I had many false starts and long spells of no reading. (I didn't finish a single book between October 3 and December 9!)  During the latter half of the year, I blamed my poor reading on my impending move, which happened in mid-December but was in the works since July or August. My problems really began before then, so I can't blame the move for everything. January started off strong. I think the stumbles started in March or April, and they continued throughout the year. I allowed myself to fall out of my daily reading habit and I often found I wasn't in the mood to read. And then I kept feeling that I had selected the wrong book. The end result, though I haven't kept count, is that I believe I read an unusual number of very short books last year, which I read in the space of a day or two while on more days than not I didn't read at all. 

In the order that I finished them, the books I read in 2022 were:

• The Man of Feeling, by Javier Marías
• One Last Stop, by Casey McQuiston
• The Spectre of Alexander Wolf, by Gaito Gazdanov
• My Life as a Fake, by Peter Carey
• Childhood, by Tove Ditlevsen
• My Sister the Serial Killer, by Oyinkan Braithwaite
• Youth, by Tove Ditlevesen
• Dependency, by Tove Ditlevsen
• Affections, by Rodrigo Hasbún
• American Spy, by Lauren Wilkinson
• Last Night in Nuuk, by Niviak Korneliussen
• The Sheltering Sky, by Paul Bowles
• Gods of Jade and Shadow, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
• The Story of My Teeth, by Valeria Luiselli
• In the Distance, by Hernan Diaz
• Big Sky, by Kate Atkinson
• Garden by the Sea, by Mercè Rodoreda
• Home Reading Service, by Fabio Morábito
• Loving Day, by Mat Johnson
• Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows, by Balli Kaur Jaswal
• Justine, by Iben Mondrup
• Persuasion, by Jane Austen
• The Kiss Quotient, by Helen Hoang
• Lucky Breaks, by Yevgenia Belorusets
• The Trees, by Percival Everett
• Tremor of Intent, by Anthony Burgess
• Rattlebone, by Maxine Clair
• The Dutch House, by Ann Patchett
• The Mysterious Affair at Styles, by Agatha Christie
• Breasts and Eggs, by Mieko Kawakami
• Saint Sebastian's Abyss, by Mark Haber
• Oliver VII, by Antal Szerb
• Go, Went, Gone, by Jenny Erpenbeck
• Happiness, as Such, by Natalia Ginzburg
• Not One Day, by Anne Garréta
• Rum Punch, by Elmore Leonard
• The Moon and the Bonfires, by Cesare Pavese
• Minor Detail, by Adania Shibli
• Martha, Jack & Shanco, by Caryl Lewis
• So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighborhood, by Patrick Modiano
• Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in the Piazza Vittorio, by Amara Lakhous

And the stats:

For the second consecutive year (and second year ever), more than half the books I read last year were by women. Apart from the U.S., which only accounts for 8 of the books I read last year, I read books from 18 countries including 5 new ones (marked in bold): Australia, Bolivia, Denmark, England, France, Germany, Greenland, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Nigeria, Palestine, Russia, Singapore, Spain,  Ukraine, and Wales. This is worse than last year on both counts. Two of the books I read (Persuasion and Tremor of Intent) were rereads. The only nonfiction books I read were the three Tove Ditlevsen volumes. 

Some years I just know what my favorite book of the year was. This is not one of those years. I think the honor goes to The Trees. In the Distance would be the other contender. Other notable mentions include Garden by the Sea, which I loved almost as much as A Broken Mirror – one of my favorite books read in 2018; The Spectre of Alexander Wolf and Justine, both of which had twists that have really stayed with me; The Story of My Teeth, which I'm really glad I decided to try after not really enjoying the previous Valeria Luiselli book I read; and Not One Day, which was just unexpectedly beautiful and gave me a new way of thinking about writing. 

Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio, by Amara Lakhous

I've had Class of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio for a few years now. I know I got it before the pandemic because I picked it up at my old favorite thrift store near the office, which I haven't visited since March 2020. It reading was this "Read Your Way through Rome" column that prompted me to finally get around to it, though I read that article a couple months ago – before I visited Rome in November – and I really only got around to it today because I wanted to get one last book in for 2022. It was short and I had read about it somewhat recently. 

I thought I was going to return to Vladimir and just get it done – something I'd been telling myself I'd do since I set it aside after 2 days of reading it voraciously in early April. I did go back and read one more chapter of it, but I couldn't do it. I feel that the intensity of my feelings actually say something positive about the book, so others shouldn't take this as a warning to stay away. I just... I knew where it was going and I couldn't go there.

So after that brief flirtation, and with a free afternoon ahead of me, I decided to find another book I could read in a few hours and feeling nostalgic for my recent trip to Rome and the Times article, I landed on Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio. The story takes place in the wake of the discovery of a body in titular elevator, and the police's assumption that the one resident of the building who is not accounted for – a man named Amedeo – must be the murderer. Each chapter is told from the point of view of one of the other tenants and others in the neighborhood, a mix of immigrants from abroad and Italians who have, for the most part, moved to Rome from other parts of the country. The residents mostly dislike each other, but it turns out that Amedeo is the one person they all have some affection for. They all have prejudices, but he seems to confound them. None believes he can be the murderer. Meanwhile, the murdered man is someone nobody likes. They're all glad to see him gone. These chapters are interspersed with recordings Amedeo himself has made recounting his own interactions with the residents. This was a fun book showing an Italian diversity that's not often represented.

So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighborhood, by Patrick Modiano

I moved a week ago today. I've been living without most of my books since early October when I boxed them up and moved them ahead of the big move. This morning I set up my bookshelves (three of them at least) and unpacked my 18 boxes of fiction. It's wonderful to be reunited with these books. I've spent the bulk of the last week unpacking and organizing, so after lunch I decided to give myself the afternoon off to read one of my newly close-at-hand books. For reasons I can't exactly articulate, or maybe just reasons I don't want to go into at the moment, Patrick Modiano was the clear choice. I had kept out another book of his – a trilogy, in fact, in a single volume – but I decided to pick a book I could read in one sitting. 

So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighborhood is just 150 pages, which was the primary reason I chose it. I hadn't realized it was a relatively recent book (2014) and I was caught off guard when a reference to a mobile phone showed up in the first paragraphs, but true to what I expected from Modiano, the heart of the book is in the past, in those early post War years in Paris. The narrator is an old man who is thrust back into memories of his childhood and early adulthood following an encounter with a pair of mysterious strangers. The book takes place in three distinct times: 1951 when the narrator was a young child; 15 years later when he is unexpectedly reconnected with that childhood year; and 2012 when it all comes back again. Modiano gets to the heart of memory and loss like nobody, and this book is an excellent example of that.

Martha, Jack & Shanco, by Caryl Lewis

It's been so long since I finished a book. I've started books; I've even made significant progress in books; but I haven't finished a book since early October. Goodreads thinks I'm "currently reading" six books, but there are at least a couple more that I've started and not recorded. The vast majority of my books have already been moved to my future home, where I will move myself in a week, but I have a small selection I kept here because I might want to read them and several have a bookmark to note where I abandoned my intentions. I do think my impending move is partly responsible for the fact that I haven't been a good reader these last several months. I've had a lot on my mind. But I also worry that I've lost the discipline I once had. We'll see as I get settled in my new place I guess.

Even in early October I was struggling to finish most of the books I started, but I was determined to read the (fortunately short) book selected for my Women in Translation book club. It's thanks to that book club that I've finished Martha, Jack & Shanco too. (Give me a deadline and a sense of obligation and I can accomplish anything,)

Martha, Jack & Shanco is the second Welsh novel I've read. Several years ago I read a Welsh novel called Mifanwy in a rush at the end of the year to get in one more country and one pre-20th Century book all in one go. Martha, Jack & Shanco is set in present day (or the present day of the book's original publication which was 2005), but the book's titular characters aren't living so differently than they might have a hundred years earlier. The three past middle age siblings live on a farm in rural Wales where they raise sheep, keep dairy cows, grow barley and hay, and speak Welsh. Jack, the oldest, is domineering and bitter; Shanco, the youngest, is intellectually disabled; and Martha takes care of them all. The book spans one year of their lives, measured by the seasonal changes on the farm and marked with the occasional incursion of the world outside. This was a dark but lovely book. 

Minor Detail, by Adania Shibli

Minor Detail had been on my radar since it was published in English. I originally made note of it as something to read for my world books reading project to represent Palestine, and I ordered a copy with that in mind. So, I was happy when my Women in Translation book club selected it as our next book to read. Having now read it, I'm also glad I will have a group of people to talk about it with, because it's a book I feel I need to talk about with people.

The narrative in Minor Detail is divided into roughly two parts, each taking up about half the book. The first part is written in the second person and describes the horrific actions of a group of soldiers in the Negev desert with the charge of clearing the area of Arabs capture over a few days in August 1949. The second half of the book is told in the first person in roughly present day. The narrator is a Palestinian woman living in the West Bank who reads a newspaper article about the actions of these soldiers and wants to learn more, specifically to understand the events from the point of view of their primary victim - a young girl. At great risk to herself, the narrator borrows a colleague's ID card that will allow her cross into Israel and another colleague gives her use of his credit card so she can rent a car, all so she can visit the scene of the crime. As she drives through the desert and among the settlements echoes from the first half of the book start showing up in the second. She briefly experiences a kind of freedom of movement that is novel in her life. 

This book was powerful, and extremely stressful to read. There is a deep tension in both halves. I was relieved that it was only 100 pages because I don't think I could have handled it for longer.

The Moon and the Bonfires, by Cesare Pavese

Cesare Pavese is a name I feel I've been familiar with for a long time, but I don't know why and I didn't really know who he was until I read Natalia Ginzburg's Family Lexicon, which is what led me to The Moon and the Bonfires. I feel like it took me forever to read, but in fact it was only two weeks. It's a slim book; I didn't read on more days than I did during those two weeks. I'm preparing to move, so I've had lots of other things to do around the house when I had a free moment and even when I did want to take a break, my mind was too busy to read something slow and contemplative, which The Moon and the Bonfires was. 

The book takes place on farms and in small villages in the Piedmontese region between Genoa and Turin. The present day of the book is a few years after the end of World War II, but much of the story is set in the past – when the narrator, who is 40 in the present, was a boy and a young man. In the early years of Fascism in Italy, the narrator left for America, where he traveled west to California and made a small fortune making liquor and wine before being interned during the war. We only get bits and pieces of the narrator's time in the U.S. – he's more interested in telling us about his childhood. He was a bastard taken in by a poor family of tenant farmers who wanted the monthly stipend given in return for his care. When that family moved on, he was given room and board in return for light labor on the estate of a wealthy family in the village. He spent his teenage years working for that family and the central story revolves around them: the three daughters, their suitors, the other workers in the household. It's unclear to the reader why the narrator has returned to this village after the war. It seems to be unclear to himself, and to his childhood friend, Nuto, with whom he reunites as well. You sense that he's trying to recapture that time before, but he has become different now from leaving. And the ones who stayed have become different too, from staying – through the war, the Fascist regime, the Partisan resistance, the German occupation. 

Unlike his narrator in The Moon and the Bonfires, Pavese did stay in Italy through the Mussolini era. He was an anti-fascist who, like Carlo Levi and Natalia Ginzburg, was arrested and sent to a village in the south of Italy (Calabria in Pavese's case) for a year of confinement. After his release he worked as an editor for a leftist newspaper and as a translator of English books. It felt strange to be reading this book at the moment when a neo-Fascist regime seems about to take hold in Italy. 

Rum Punch, by Elmore Leonard

After a strong start, by big plans for Women in Translation month blew up. I finished three books and had three more I intended to get to, but the first one I picked up – Death in Spring, by Mercè Rodoreda – just wasn't working for me and I stalled out. I've read three other books by Rodoreda and adored two of them, so I had picked that one on the assumption it would be a delight, but it's incredibly dark and quite different from the other books of hers I've read. I may go back to it yet, but it wasn't for me in the moment. 

I was still waffling on finishing it or starting something new when I headed to Philadelphia last Friday, and then on my way out the door I found a copy of Rum Punch on the free table in my lobby. I hadn't read anything by Elmore Leonard before, but I thought it might be just what I needed for the train trip ahead. Between my trip down, short spurts of reading in my dad's backyard, and my trip home, I got about two-thirds of the way through the book. Tuesday, I had a work trip to Connecticut that involved another several hours on the train and I thought I would finish the book, but when I tried to read on the ride home I found it too stressful – the events in the book were reaching their denouement and I found myself worried about how things would go. Being unfamiliar with Leonard, I didn't know: would he give me the ending I wanted, or would it all go wrong? I started to wonder if I would even finish the book before I had to leave for Texas tomorrow. But last night, after I finished work I found I was in a mental state where I could read. I sat down on the couch and finished Rum Punch in the space of an hour. It did give me what I hoped for, which I suppose was a relief. But I now have no idea what I'll read en route to Houston.