Dark Back of Time, by Javier Marías

I started Dark Back of Time on New Year's Day, continuing my tradition of now nearly a decade of starting the year with Javier Marías. Dark Back of Time is a strange book – a memoir of sorts, written as a response to the attention he received following the publication of All Souls, the novel which first brought him some level of celebrity. Even before his death in 2022, but especially since it I've been dreading the inevitable New Year's Day when I've run out of new Javier Marías books to read. I suppose at that point, I'll just start over. I've always thought he would benefit from rereading, and I feel this even more after reading Dark Back of Time. 

Evidently, on the publication of All Souls many readers assumed it was a roman à clef (today we'd probably be more likely to say autofiction), taking the characters in the book as stand-ins for real individuals on faculty at Oxford. This was an assumption made by readers who knew only a little about Marías (he recalls his students assuming he had a small child because that book's narrator is father to a baby), but also by some of his own colleagues at Oxford – one of whom went so far as to make assumptions about who was the married professor with whom the narrator had an affair. (Marías for his part claims he doesn't know who this colleague might be imagining he had an affair with.) 

Correcting these false assumptions is where the book starts out – and goes on for quite a few chapters. (I laughed out loud early in the book when Marías forcefully states that there has never been a significant Luisa in his life. I felt I was beginning to understand his continual reuse of that name for the women in his books.) Ironically, as the book goes on enumerating apparently true events from the real life and family history of Marías, I recognized more and more instances that show up in his later books. He uses names and addresses from his own family and life (the ones that jumped out at me were Custardoy - the last name of a grand or great-grandfather, and Calle de Covarrubias a street in Madrid) as characters and settings in his novels, which bear the same relationship to the narrator as to the author. 

But as with many Marías books, it takes a while before you see where things are going and understand what the book is actually about. After several chapters spent addressing these false assumptions, Dark Back of Time changes course and goes in depth into the one part of All Souls that was based in reality: the story of John Gawsworth, writer, poet, and King Juan I of Redonda. Marías – along with the narrator of All Souls – discovered Gawsworth by accident and became fascinated with his life, which took many unexpected turns, ending in poverty. Following the publication of All Souls, through a series of loose connections, Marías found several more coincidences related to Gawsworth and his circle, and recounting these unbelievable real stories (as opposed to the believable fictions) takes up the remainder of the book.

Marías is especially interested in the small events or even accidents, without which he the author, you the reader, any person in fact, might never have come to be. Or might have been instead a different person. The "dark back of time" is the (borrowed) language Marías uses to talk about the things that didn't happen, but might have. The alternate version of the world where by some accident (or the lack of it), things turn out differently. These two realities – the actual world and the alternate possibility coexist, we are always aware of the way things could have been different. 

I think Marías would have been amused by the headline of his New York Times obituary, which includes both the world in which he is living, and that in which he has died.

Family Lexicon, by Nalatia Ginzburg (again)

I did start the year with Javier Marías, as is my tradition, but I had to pause that book in progress to reread Natalia Ginzburg's Family Lexicon because it was selected (partially at my suggestion) for my Women in Translation book club, which meets today. I enjoyed it the first time – I mainly remembered Ginzburg's descriptions of her overbearing but hilarious father, and a snippet about her time in exile in Abruzzo – but I liked it even more the second time around. In the intervening years, I've learned a lot more about Ginzburg's life and read another book of hers, as well as a book by Cesare Pavese, who is a significant figure in Family Lexicon. Last March, I visited the graves of Natalia Ginzburg and her husband Leone Ginzburg in Rome. 

What's most striking to me about this book is that Ginzburg manages to maintain a light and humorous tone almost throughout, despite the difficult and tragic times she lived through. Only a couple times do you get a hint of the terror and deep sorrow she must have experienced living through the German occupation of Italy during World War II, the many arrests of her husband – during the last of which he was killed in prison, the risk of deportation to German concentration camps, and so much more. The number of times in this book that members of her family and close circle are in hiding, in prison, exiled, or living under an assumed name or traveling with false papers is astonishing, and yet is treated as the normal course of life – because for young Natalia Ginzburg, it already was. (Natalia Ginzburg was still a child when her family hid the Italian Socialist Filippo Turati in their home for a period of time before his escape to France.)

The other thing that really comes out in this book, which I find it very hard to wrap my head around, is how young Natalia Ginzburg was during all these events. She married Leone at age 22, had 3 children with him, and was a widow at 27. Her youth and inexperience show when she talks about developing a sudden awareness of money after her marriage when she's put in a position of managing a household. I found her lack of certainty when it came to knowing whether her home was being adequately cleaned by her housekeeper completely charming. Later, when she realizes she must take her 3 children and escape the village in Abruzzo where she'd been living in exile, you see for a moment her total vulnerability: when she comes to realize that the maternal protection she took for granted can't be ever present, and she must fend for herself in a truly life or death situation. Even this, she narrates as if the solution came together very simply, never dwelling on what must have been a terrifying journey.

I was struck, on my first reading of Family Lexicon, by Ginzburg's family's internal exile, a Mussolini policy I first learned about from reading Carlo Levi. Natalia and Leone Ginzburg were sent to a village called Pizzoli in Abruzzo. Her brother Alberto and his wife were sent to a town a little father south, Rocca di Mezzo. I found myself wondering, on this reading, about how effective (if at all) this practice of internal exile was. Prior to the German occupation, life in the Abruzzi villages sounded almost idyllic. After the war, Alberto and his wife reflect on how happy they were in Rocco di Mezzo. Carlo Levi's ongoing attachment to Aliano and his decision to be buried there after his death say a lot about his experience there. (To say nothing of the larger effect Carlo Levi's memoir about his exile had on the entire region.) I don't know where I'm going with this, I just find it ironic that all these people who were sent to remote parts of Italy as punishment, were like, actually it was nice.

I'm really glad I ended up reading Family Lexicon again. Parts of it had really stayed with me, but I feel like I got so much more out of it this time and I'm really excited to have influenced my book club to read it so I have more people to talk to about Natalia Ginzburg.

2023 in Books

Last year was my worst reading year since 2013 and 2014, in each of which I read 22 books (but in one of those years I read War and Peace and in the other I read Infinite Jest, so my page count was surely higher). Actually, 2023 would have counted as a pretty good reading year for me if it weren't for my reading habits of the last decade. It's been hard not to feel down about it, but when I reflect on all the other things that have happened in the last 12 months, even as I do feel I spent too much time on my phone when I could have been reading, I start to understand why maybe that's what my mind needed. 

I moved at the very end of 2022, so 2023 was a year of setting up my new home. I undertook two major home renovation projects: a new kitchen and a new HVAC system, both of which had me displaced in my home for a period of weeks, first in March and then in October; and countless minor home renovation projects. (Among these, I had solar panels installed on my roof, which could be counted as a major renovation, but honestly it required very little effort or discomfort on my part.) My last home improvement project of 2023, completed on Christmas and Boxing Day, was the installation of the bookshelves pictured here, and finally getting my fiction back to its proper organization. Last year was also an exceptionally busy year for me professionally, which was both exhausting and rewarding. (Not incidentally, I got a promotion in September.) I traveled quite a bit in 2023 – not quite at pre-pandemic levels, but approaching it. And, most miserably, I had extremely unpleasant major dental work done in November and December (which, sadly, is only half done). 

So, when I think back on the last year (or year and a half in truth, because the physical and mental energy associated with my move date back to then), it's not surprising that at the end of my days I didn't often feel motivated to pick up a book and read, though it might have been good for my mental health. I also barely wrote in the last year, and I know the two are connected. This last week and change, I've been off work with few obligations and I finally got back into a reading groove. My favorite way to spend the last days of the year is reading on the couch with my feel up, occasionally interrupted by some baking project or a walk in the winter sun. This year – rather unexpectedly – gave me that desired break. I hope I can keep up into the new year some of what I felt I got back to in the last week.

And so, the books: I read 23 books in 2023 (finishing 7 of those in the last week). In chronological order, they were:

• All Souls, by Javier Marías
• Shrines of Gaiety, by Kate Atkinson
• The Bookshop, by Penelope Fitzgerald
• Drunk on Love, by Jasmine Guillory
• Her Mother's Mother's Mother and Her Daughters, by Maria José Silveira
• Carte Blanche, by Carlo Lucarelli
• Dora Bruder, by Patrick Modiano
• Scattered All Over the Earth, by Yōko Tawada
• The Tale of the 1002nd Night, by Joseph Roth
• In Concrete, by Anne Garréta
• Eve Out of Her Ruins, by Ananda Devi
• Provenance, by Ann Leckie
• Easy Motion Tourist, by Leye Adenle
• Strangers I Know, by Claudia Durastanti
• This Census Taker, by China Miéville
• The House of Doors, by Tan Twan Eng
• Kalpa Imperial: The Greatest Empire that Never Was, by Angélica Gorodischer
• Trust, by Domenico Starnone
• The Sense of an Ending, by Julian Barnes
• The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, by Muriel Spark
• Where Angels Fear to Tread, by E.M. Forster
• Devotion, by Howard Norman
• Burning Secret, by Stefan Zweig

A thing that kept happening to me last year was I would select a book that I thought would be just the thing to get me out of my reading rut, and then the book would turn out to be not at all what I thought it was. I finished some of these (In Concrete and This Census Taker are a couple examples from the list above), but I also started a lot of books I did not finish. Among these were Midnight in the Century; Zorba the Greek; Hav; Beautiful World, Where Are You; The Bridge on the Drina; The Discomfort of Evening; and several others that I've since forgotten. I hope to get back to some of these (Zorba, Hav, and Drina in particular.) My decision over the summer to start Late Victorian Holocausts by Mike Davis was an attempt to try something totally different. I read 185 depressing but informative pages of it, and may yet return. It felt startlingly relevant.

And on to the stats: 

I read 11 books by women last year, or just under 50% (which is better than I feared). Apart from the U.S., which accounts for just 3 books I read last year, I read books from 11-ish countries. I'm counting Joseph Roth and Stefan Zweig as compatriots, though I'm unsure what to call the country. For the sake of simplicity we can go with Roth's preferred fatherland, the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary. The others were: Argentina, Brazil, France, Italy, Japan/Germany (whichever is more proper to assign for Tawada), Malaysia, Mauritius, Nigeria, Spain, and the United Kingdom (my most read country, with 6 books, though perhaps I should have separated out Scotland, from where I read one book). Only Malaysia was new to me. I read 11 books in translation and one book in its original French. I didn't reread any books or finish a single work of nonfiction in 2023. 

I'm finding it very hard to name a favorite book from 2023. It may be recency bias, but The Sense of an Ending and Kalpa Imperial stand out. From the earlier clutch, Scattered All Over the Earth might be my favorite. I believe reading Dora Bruder had the greatest effect on me of any book I read this year, and it stands apart such that I'm unable to rate it alongside everything else. It was my first time reading a whole book in a language other than English, and I still marvel a bit at having done it. It felt something like magic, especially as I got on and understood more and more without having to refer to Google Translate. It was also a beautiful and affecting book. Other notable books from the year include Her Mother's Mother's Mother and Her Daughters, which felt like an education in Brazilian history; Provenance, which succeeded in getting me out of a rut where all those other books failed; The House of Doors, which made me really want to visit Penang; and Trust, which had this intriguing concept of mutual trust and mutual destruction at the center that I can't get over.

Burning Secret, by Stefan Zweig

I have these little Stefan Zweig editions from Pushkin Press that are just perfect for when it's New Year's Eve and you're trying to fit one more book in before midnight. (I even considered starting another, but I think I've read enough these past few days.)

As I wrote two days ago, I thought about reading Zweig right after I finished The Sense of an Ending and at that time I pulled Burning Secret off the shelf, but eventually decided to wait – a little afraid, if I'm honest, that reading Zweig might push the nostalgic melancholic feeling a little too close to despair. Having now finished Burning Secret, I can't decide if my fear was warranted.

Reading Zweig, as with many of his contemporaries who were similarly displaced and killed by the rise of Nazism, I sometimes find it hard to read the story without constantly remembering the fate of the author. A tragedy hangs around the work, even when – as in the case of Burning Secret, originally published in 1913 – that tragedy lies far in the future. The woman and her son who are at the center of this story are well-to-do Austrian Jews. (How many Jews lived in Vienna in 1913, I find myself wondering while I'm reading. Roughly 175,000 apparently, and just 4,000 in 1946.)

Zweig is a masterful storyteller. At the outset, Burning Secret promises the story of a holiday affair. A young man sets out to seduce a married woman who is staying with her son in at the same hotel in the Austrian Alps. The seducer attempts to befriend the mother through the son, and this leads to a unexpected turn in the story, wherein in becomes the child's story, rather than that of the adults. Twelve-year-old Edgar is on the precipice of understanding the adult world and its secrets. He longs to be admitted into it, but is faced with the recognition of how shielded he has been as a child. By the end he wants only a resumption of his childhood simplicity. It was a wonderful little book to end the year with.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie; Where Angels Fear to Tread; Devotion

Continuing my rush to the end of 2023, I've gone on a tear pulling short books off my shelf without giving a lot of thought to my selections. After finishing The Sense of an Ending, I thought I would read something by Stefan Zweig, but I didn't think I had the heart for it just then, so I settled instead on The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. I believe I first heard of this book by way of the movie, which I remember my friend Andrea trying to describe to me many years ago. I could have sworn the second time I heard of it was from Molly Young's newsletter, Read Like the Wind. Unfortunately, a quick search for various combinations of Molly Young Read Like the Wind and Jean Brodie, lead only to another edition of that newsletter, written by someone else while Molly Young was away, and recommending a different book by Muriel Spark. I'll retain the belief in my heart that that's where it came from. Perhaps an earlier iteration of the newsletter that's not so well archived online.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is a delightful little book. At once hilarious, with a touch of darkness hanging around the edges. The titular Miss Brodie is a girls' teacher with unconventional methods, that are simultaneously admirable and disturbing. Miss Brodie is onto something in her critiques of traditional education for girls. This is interwar England. Miss Brodie is modern, and trying to prepare her girls for a modern world. She lived through the Great War, the aftermath of which changed her course and that of many women. But the modernity that attracts Miss Brodie is Italian and German fascism. This along with her involving her girls in her own sexual intrigues, makes her a troubling figure, even while she's so attractive to her girls – and the reader.

I could have sworn I'd seen the movie adaptation of E.M. Forster's Where Angels Fear to Tread, but nothing in the story was familiar beyond two English women traveling to Italy, and a man coming after them later. The one image I have in my mind when I try to picture the film is in Venice, which plays no part at all in the book, so I have to wonder if I'm thinking of a different film entirely. I can just picture Helena Bonham Carter and another woman sitting in a boat on a canal. (If you know what I might be thinking of that is not Where Angels Fear to Tread, do let me know.) 

This book was surprising at every turn, and not only because it wasn't what I thought I remembered (which was very little to begin with). It makes a terrible caricature of Italians, while also expressing a certain admiration for them. It isn't much kinder to the English for the most part. There are a lot of other things going on, but the interesting point of the book to me was its investigation of parenting. It makes a clear condemnation of what I think of as Victorian child-rearing, of which all the English characters are a product. They were all raised on some level at a distance by their parents, but are also stifled by them. By contrast, when these English young adults witness the the love between and Italian father and his baby, they are simultaneously disgusted and moved. The question the book asks is whether it's better to be brought up well (English) without love or badly (Italian) but loved, and it definitely settles on the latter (without completely accepting that being brought up this way could be to be brought up well). 

As I said at the beginning of this post, my method of selecting what books to read during these last few days has been fast an impulsive. It perhaps helps that over the holiday break I installed a new set of bookshelves for my fiction and finally got around to fully organizing them for the first time since I moved a year ago. (I never bothered before, knowing I was going to be replacing my shelves.) What that means is that I have handled every book in my collection (a bit over 800 books) in the last few days. I think it was this that reminded me about Howard Norman, though he is an author that comes to my mind from time to time. I read and really liked The Bird Artist about 25 years ago, then I read two subsequent books – The Museum Guard, which I liked somewhat less enthusiastically, and The Haunting of L, which I remember loving but don't remember a single thing about. Somewhere along the line, I acquired a couple other books by him and as I was sitting yesterday afternoon close to finishing Where Angels Fear to Tread, I thought: I should read Howard Norman. Devotion seemed suitably short (I had the intention of finishing it by today), so I settled on it. 

It's a strange sort of love story, about a swift romance followed by a swift betrayal, and a long, slow return – perhaps – to trust. It's also in some way about how hard it is – how long it takes – to know another person. It's a really lovely book about imperfect people, which I always appreciate.

And now, with more than 12 hours left in 2023, maybe I can finish even one more book. I have my eye on Stefan Zweig again.

The Sense of an Ending, by Julian Barnes

There was a line in Trust that struck me as something I might want to refer back to, so I committed the page number to memory. "We do so many stupid things when we're young. No trace should remain of youth, not even memory." This phrase was still ringing in my head and felt very apt as I was reading The Sense of and Ending. Like Trust, The Sense of an Ending is about an older man looking back on a relationship from his youth, reflecting on how he has changed as a person. At one point in the book, the narrator is confronted with an actual artifact from his youth – a letter he wrote, but only remembered in broad strokes – and he's forced to confront his past self, in a way we can often avoid when we rely only on memories.

If I remember correctly, it was on the basis that a friend of mine who is a professor was teaching this book as part of a class that appealed to me that I got this book in the first place. Also on her syllabus was J.M Coetzee's Disgrace, which I briefly considered reading as a follow up. It is perhaps in the spirit of this book, that I've searched my email history and am now scrolling through years of her Facebook posts looking for confirmation of this. I seem to remember her putting out a general call, of some sort, for recommendations for this course – but what exactly was the topic? I can't recall. What I do remember, is the books that came to mind for me in response to her prompt were The Good Soldier and The Age of Innocence*. 

I have a list in my notebook under the heading, 'Books with "That Mood,"' and the list includes those two books, along with Mercè Rodoreda's A Broken Mirror* and Garden By the Sea (I believe it was the occasion of finish the latter that led me to start this list); "everything by Patrick Modiano, but especially Villa Triste;" Antonio Muñoz Molina's Winter in Lisbon; Stefan Zweig's Beware of Pity**; and a handful of others. I have just added The Sense of an Ending to the list. 

"That Mood," if I had to describe it, would be a melancholic nostalgia. (Is that redundant? Doesn't nostalgia always imply melancholy, sadness, loss?) What many of these books have in common are a first person narrator recalling events from a more or less distant past, often when the things that were going on around them were somewhat beyond their comprehension, while now – with age and time and memory – the pieces from the past seem to fit together differently. Maybe I'm making generalizations in trying to force all these books together, but I know there is a common feeling they left me with.

*As an aside, I read The Age of Innocence, A Broken Mirror, and Beware of Pity during periods when I didn't write about every book I read, but the former two both made my "Best Books I Read This Decade" post from the end of 2019. Beware of Pity I addressed when writing about another book I read by Stefan Zweig, so that's what I've linked there.

**Stefan Zweig even comes up in The Sense of an Ending: when the narrator meets up, some 40 years later, with the woman he dated in college she's reading a Stefan Zweig book and he confesses – to us, not to her – that he has never read Zweig.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The House of Doors, by Tan Twan Eng

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

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

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

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

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

This Census-Taker, by China Miéville

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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