Death at the Sign of the Rook, by Kate Atkinson

I didn't know Kate Atkinson had a new Jackson Brodie book out until I came across this copy at Housing Works. I bought it on the spot, of course. I wanted to start it right away, but I made myself finish Heart Lamp and Transit before diving in. 

Part of the reason I was so eager to read a new Kate Atkinson Jackson Brodie book was I (correctly) assumed it was the kind of book that would break through the reading slump I've been in for the last few years. I find Kate Atkinson is always reliable for an engaging read, and the Jackson Brodie novels offer the fun predictability I enjoy in mysteries (though I primarily consume them on TV). I've read all the previous Jackson Brodie books in order, but it's been over a span of years and I find my memory of them hazy. I barely remember a thing about the most recent one, Big Sky, but I see looking back now at my post about it that I had a similar challenge reading it, in that the recurring characters (apart from Jackson Brodie himself) were more faint memories. The main thing I remember about Big Sky is that it was grittier than what I had come to expect from the series (there are definitely some darker moments in the books, as I recall, but the overall mood of Big Sky, as I remember it, was unusually dark.) Death at the Sign of the Rook is not that. It is decidedly cozy, and full of call-outs to other cozy mysteries from a fictional peer of Agatha Christie to Grantchester and Midsomer Murders. It even opens at a murder mystery theme weekend at a country house, though (thankfully) it doesn't deliver the predicable outcome of that trope.

It occurs to me that maybe a way out of my reading slump would be to read more books like this, and this morning I found myself considering why I don't. My answer to this is not totally thought out, but I have the beginnings of one. I've been a lifelong devotee of fiction -- for most of my adult life I've read fiction almost exclusively. But over the past several years, I've found myself more and more drawn to nonfiction. Primarily to memoir, though I've read some more straightforward nonfiction as well. Even as I read fiction, I find myself looking for books that provide me with a deeper understanding of a place or a time. If I think about the best books I've read over the years, the ones that come to mind are books like Death and the Dervish, which introduced me to a history and culture of which I was only faintly aware. After reading Death and the Dervish as well as Bosnian Chronicle, I got copies of Misha Glenny's history of the Balkans and Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, because I wanted to know everything about the region and its history. I haven't gotten around to either yet, but what I realize is that the books that I love are the books that make me want to know more. And sometimes they take me forever to read (I believe Death and the Dervish took two months and Bosnian Chronicle was a slog I recall), but they stay with me. When I am in a slump (which I have been since the middle of 2022 by my own assessment), I can read fast and fun books just as well as I did before, but they don't give me the drive make connections, learn more, and immerse myself -- in short, what I love about books.

Transit, by Anna Seghers

As I mentioned in my last post, I picked up Transit to read ahead of a trip I made to Provence in July. I spent a good while scanning my bookshelves for anything I might own that was about Provence. I didn't really know anything about Transit – I found my copy on the sidewalk in Brooklyn a few years ago and pretty much just grabbed it because of my general trust for NYRB classics. I'm not even sure what prompted me to pull it out in my search for a book about Provence, but when I saw it was set in WWII-era Marseille, I figured that was good enough. When I went on to read Anna Seghers' brief bio inside and saw that she left Marseille in 1940 on the same ship as Victor Serge, among others, I knew I had found the right book.

Transit is about the transient life in Marseille in the winter of 1940. As the only port in France still under the flag of France, Marseille was the stopping point for countless refugees from all over Europe looking for a passage out – to anywhere. The book's narrator has escaped a concentration camp and traveled through France mostly on foot as far as Marseille. There, he joins the throngs of people looking to leave, though he himself isn't certain of what he wants to do. Through a series of events, he is mistaken in Marseille for a respected German Jewish writer and he ends up falling in with the writer's wife, who is looking for her husband while also trying to flee. Transit is full of visits to packed bureaucratic offices and appointments with heartless officials who have the power (or are helpless) to determine your fate. the refugees help each other when they are in trouble or resent each other when they have fortune. The narrator runs into the same sad cases over and over in office after office and cafe after cafe. You get lost in the futility of it all.

I read some 60 pages the day I started Transit. It pulled me in immediately and I thought I might finish it before I left for France 5 days later. I got about halfway through before I left and while I did carry it with me to Paris and onward to Avignon, the Luberon region, and even a day trip to Marseille, I didn't get back to reading it until nearly a month after I got back home. When I lose momentum, it can be hard to get it back, but I did immediately take to Transit again when I went back to it. The fact that the bulk of the book could be described as repetitive made it easier to return. It almost didn't matter where I left off; the cycle of events in Transit could have continued on endlessly in my absence until I dropped in on them again. And yet, I really loved this book.

Heart Lamp, by Banu Mushtaq

After finishing A Gentleman in Moscow – ages ago now, it seems – I searched my bookshelves for something to read that might put me in the mindset for my then upcoming trip to Provence. I landed on Anna Seghers' Transit which I tore through at first, but then I lost all momentum when I actually left for my trip. I finally got back to it a couple weeks ago, but I wasn't able to finish it before I needed to start the next book for my Women in Translation book club. So last Friday, after I got the notification that my order of Heart Lamp had arrived at Greenlight Books (just in time – I was starting to get nervous), I went to pick it up and started it on the bus home. 

It had been a long time since I read a book of short stories, and I think it was a nice format for my current style of reading (i.e., barely reading at all). For the most part, I read each story in a single sitting, so there was nothing I had to remember or keep track of. 

While the stories in Heart Lamp are not interconnected in any formal way, they do all inhabit the same world. The stories feature well off families and poor, happy and unhappy, young and old. There is a lot of heartbreak in these stories, but some very funny parts too. Reading the stories as a whole they are greater than the sum of the parts. All together, they give you a colorful, beautiful, detailed picture of Muslim village life in the south of India.

A Gentleman in Moscow, by Amor Towles

What a beautiful book this was. I really didn't know what I was getting into. I first heard of Amor Towles when his subsequent book, The Lincoln Highway, came out and it seemed to get a lot of media attention – I suppose on the strength of this book, though I missed any attention it got when it was published. I'm not sure I would have thought again about Amor Towles except that sometime later a friend of mine posted an instagram story saying that she was reading The Lincoln Highway and that it was "so beautiful." Even then, I probably wouldn't have sought his books out, but a month or two ago, a neighbor around the corner put out a box of free books in front of their house and A Gentleman in Moscow was among them, so I grabbed it and brought it home, where it sat on my coffee table for a few weeks before I decided to pick it up on Memorial Day. I still really knew nothing about it.

From the title I think I was expecting it might be a spy novel, and I was mildly surprised to find it began just after the Russian Revolution. The opening, which takes the form of the official documentation recording the government's decision on what to do about a former aristocrat, who by his social class should be eliminated, but who was the author, several years earlier, of a poem revered by the revolutionaries. His association with the poem spares his life, and Alexander Rostov is placed under permanent house arrest in the hotel where he lives in the center of Moscow. The book follows his life in the hotel and the view it gives him of the changing world outside for the next 30-plus years. Right up to the end, I never knew where the book's events were leading. This is a book with many small twists and turns, rather than one big plot twist. The way that Towles unspools the story is masterful.

Dance with Snakes, by Horacio Castellanos Moya, and Apocalypse, by Lizzie Wade

I had four other books in progress when I finished Amulet (and when I started it for that matter), but I felt like I wanted to stick with the same mood somehow and I pulled out Horacio Castellanos Moya's Dance with Snakes without giving it much thought. I didn't even notice, for example, that Roberto Bolaño blurbed it, saying: 

The acid humor of Horacio Castellanos Moya, resembling that of a Buster Keaton movie or a time-bomb, threatens the hormonal stability of imbeciles, who when they read him feel the irrepressible desire to hang the author in the town square. I can't think of a higher honor for a real writer.

Quite a blurb. I'd read four previous novels by Castellanos Moya – two of them twice – and loved them all. Dance with Snakes is an earlier work than the others I've read. I certainly wasn't expecting literal snakes, which there are in the book. (Though perhaps literal isn't quite the way to put it.) I found the level of violence, which quickly veers into the absurd, a little hard to handle. The narrator commits atrocities in the book, and yet you find yourself pulling for him somehow. It's dark and ridiculous and uncomfortable, and I was relieved when it was over, which I guess doesn't sound like much of a recommendation. Maybe it's best if I borrow a 3-tiered rating system from an acquaintance of mine who, when he reviews books, lists them as either, "Recommended," "Recommended for the Enthusiast," or "Not Recommended." I would put Dance with Snakes in the middle category. If you, like me, hope to be a Horacio Castellanos Moya completist: For sure read it! It's fun (ish). For the general reader, get yourself a copy of Senselessness and read it and then read it again and then read it yet another time, why not?

After finishing Dance with Snakes, instead of going back to one of the books I had already started or starting my next book club book – which is long and which I really should start soon because I have lot going on between now and my next book club meeting – I decided to start Apocalypse: How Catastrophe Transformed Our World and Can Forge New Futures by Lizzie Wade. Lizzie is an online acquaintance of mine, which is what let me to pre-order Apocalypse and to read it at all. As anyone who follows my reading at all will know (I write as if I have a public... as if!), straight nonfiction is rare here. Memoir, sure. But nonfiction, with just a couple exceptions, is limited to books I've been compelled to read for one reason or another. 

I don't know what I was expecting because, again, this is so outside my usual consumption, but Apocalypse was absorbing and beautiful. I cried several times while reading it. A few chapters in, I found myself making an odd comparison: Apocalypse, I thought, reminded me of Kalpa Imperial – a successive account of civilizations that have reached some kind of peak, and then collapse. Each looks different and what comes after changes, but the inevitable end and renewal is always there. The thought passed as I read on, particularly as I got into the second section, but the idea remains compelling to me. 

Since we're doing recommendations in this post, apparently, I'll say that Apocalypse is Recommended. It's  approachable and rigorous, informative and captivating. I'm so glad chance internet communities led me to read it.

Amulet, by Roberto Bolaño

The Savage Detectives was the first book I read by Roberto Bolaño. That was more than 15 years ago. I loved it, but I remember it only vaguely. Almost more as a mood than a text. I went on to read 2666 and then several of the earlier, shorter works – most recently The Spirit of Science Fiction. I had a similar feeling reading Amulet to what I felt reading The Spirit of Science Fiction. While Amulet is more polished, I had the feeling that it was practice for what would become The Savage Detectives. There were those same familiar names and places and events, which have somehow stayed with me over the years. Amulet even had the tiniest hint of 2666. It's just a passing moment, but the book refers to someplace looking like a graveyard, but not a graveyard of the present – a graveyard in the year 2666 (whatever that means).

The central event of Amulet is the occupation of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in 1968. The book's narrator is an undocumented Uruguayan woman who does occasional casual labor for faculty in the department of literature and philosophy. She hides out in a bathroom on campus and remains undetected through the army occupation. She is part of the older generation, but the book – and its narrator – are interested in the youth movements. There's a second character in Amulet who is without doubt a stand-in for Bolaño himself: Chilean, born in the same year (1953), and called in the book Arturo Belano. Like Bolaño is supposed to (but may not) have done, Belano made a trip to Chile in 1973* to participate in the revolution and returned to Mexico City a changed person. Perhaps Bolaño made this fictional version of himself as he wished he had been. 

 * I'll add that Bolaño is in good company if he missed out on being in Chile for the revolution and felt some shame about it. This is a theme in José Donoso's Curfew, whose central character left Chile well before 1973 (as did Donoso himself) but played the part of an exiled person though he never had any official dealings with the Pinochet regime. Of course Donoso is from a different generation: he was over 50 in 1973, when Bolaño was just 20.

By the Ionian Sea, by George Gissing (Again)

By the first time I read By the Ionian Sea, I had already read two other books by George Gissing: The Odd Women, which kicked off a year (2011) which I devoted almost entirely to reading nineteenth century British literature, and New Grub Street, which I read later that same year. I was led to By the Ionian Sea by a self-published study of Calabria, which I must have picked up when I was planning a trip to that part of Italy in 2018. I didn't end up getting By the Ionian Sea until after that trip – though it did influence a trip I took the following year to Puglia. I don't know that I would have made it to Taranto and the wonderful MArTA museum there if I hadn't read this book. I loved The Odd Women, but reading By the Ionian Sea, I developed such an affection for George Gissing – one I never would have had from reading his novels alone. Gissing is far more informed on ancient history than I am, and clearly stronger in languages, but I feel an affinity with him in his travels to these remote places more than 100 years ago. Of course, it's much easier to get to Calabria today, and the conditions there are much improved so I must give Gissing credit where credit is due. 

When I first wrote about this book, I said that Gissing's views about Southern Italy were paternalistic. I maintain that this is true – his accounts of the people are as bad as any British colonial descriptions of the developing world – but on this reading perhaps I had Carlo Levi more in mind than I did the first time around. (Which would be odd – given that I read Carlo Levi much closer to my first reading of By the Ionian Sea.) In any case, when I reflected on the fact that Gissing was visiting Calabria and Basilicata (and even the corner of Puglia) just under 40 years before Levi was exiled there and abject poverty and deeply unhygienic living conditions of people in that region, Gissing's complaints – about his accommodations, the food, the water, the wine – were probably reasonable. He contracted a severe illness during his travels, which may well have been malaria (which, I learned from Levi, was rampant in southern Italy at that time). Most of the water was probably not safe to drink, and the wine was often watered down for economic reasons. So maybe I need to give Gissing a little slack. I mention this because, despite it all, Gissing comes out of this journey joyful. On my first reading, I came away with a lingering feeling of the decrepitude of it all, while this time it's the delight that is staying with me. The worst of Gissing's time is spent at Cotrone, but even of Cotrone he says, 

My own chamber contained merely the barest necessities, and, as the gentleman of Cosenza would have said, "left something to be desired" in point of cleanliness. Conceive the places into which Cotrone's poorest have to crawl when they are stricken with disease. I admit, however, that the thought was worse to me in the moment than it is now. After all, the native of Cotrone has advantages over the native of a city slum; and it is better to die in a hovel by the Ionian Sea than in a cellar in Shoreditch. 

What I relate to in Gissing is his joy in traveling alone and discovering things that have meaning only for him. While I felt this affection for him the first time I read By the Ionian Sea, I'm not sure I could have articulated the reason. It's still a little hard to put into words, but I see myself in him in this book. 

 

P.S. When I started this post, I didn't know where it was going, and I thought I would get to something which now feels off topic. For those unfamiliar with The Odd Women, the title refers to the gender imbalance in Victorian England, where there were evidently more women than men due to war and colonialism I guess? In any case, I found myself thinking about this quite a bit while reading Testament of Youth – presumably there was an even greater gender imbalance in the postwar era. I think this fact of having Gissing in my mind is what led me to reread By the Ionion Sea. I can't imagine why else it would have been top of mind.

Testament of Youth, by Vera Brittain

I started Testament of Youth back in January, just after I finished Voyage Along the Horizon. I tore through nearly 200 pages of in a few days but then I lost momentum and ended up not reading it at all for long stretches and starting various other books, a couple of which I've since finished. I finally went back to Testament of Youth about a week ago with more than 200 pages left to go and I tore through those last 200 pages almost as quickly as I did the first. 

I think it was reading Stefan Zweig's memior that inspired me to read Vera Brittain's. I wanted to read more about the World War I era from the perspective of someone who lived through it. I realized also that – for some time now – I've been more interested in memoirs that fiction.

Testament of Youth is largely a memoir of Brittain's experience as a V.A.D. nurse during World War I, but the book covers a much longer period of time than I expected. Brittain spends some time on her youth and relationships before the war, and the post war section goes on for more than a couple hundred pages and covers her life all the way up to 1925. Roughly, the book covers five eras of Brittain's life (1) Childhood; (2) Oxford; (3) V.A.D. work; (4) Return to Oxford; (5) After Oxford, though the V.A.D. work  could certainly be subdivided between time in the U.K., time in Malta, time in France, and time back in the U.K. In any case, the last section – Brittain's life after graduating from Oxford – is freshest in my mind, that being the part I read in the last few days. It almost feels like it should be a separate book. I found the work that Brittain was doing after Oxford very interesting. In this period, she became active with the League of Nations Union and in politics. She was a frequent public speaker and a journalist. She made a few trips to the continent, of which the book had fascinating but rather brief accounts. (I loved reading about her time in Italy and would have read even more!) But the narrative in the book, when it got to this stage, started to feel quite messy. It jumped around in time, making the sequence of events hard to follow. In a way, this end – drawn out as it was – seemed an afterthought to the great narrative of the wartime. 

This book must have taken quite a lot of effort to compose. Throughout, Brittain quotes and cites letters and communications she sent and received, which must have been recovered and compiled in a great work of indexing. I was put truly in awe of the wartime postal service. Some time ago I read or heard somewhere that in the early days of postal service, mail deliveries might come as often as four times per day. I realize modern times don't demand such frequent mail service (when I look at the physical mail I receive, I could do without nearly all of it), but it's hard not to feel we've taken a step backward in this regard. (The feeling is like when you see a train map from a century ago and realize how much better served the world was by trains then compared to now.) In any case, as person who travels to Italy once or twice a year and sends several postcards from there when I go, I get a certain pleasure in observing how hilariously long it takes for those cards to reach their destinations. What a marvel, then, to read about Vera Brittain and her brother, stationed in the mountains outside Bassano, sending and receiving mail and packages in the midst of the war. But now I have veered off topic.

I'm so glad I went back and finished Testament of Youth. I'm not sure why I stopped to begin with. I thought, after reading this, I might double down in a way and go right into reading Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, a book twice as long covering a somewhat later period in Eastern Europe, because Rebecca West comes up in the background of Testament of Youth now and then. But I think I'll wait a moment. In the meantime, I've started a reread of George Gissing's By the Ionian Sea because Gissing too was somehow ringing in the back of my mind while reading Testament of Youth. 

The Night Guest, by Hildur Knútsdóttir

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

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

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

Moving Parts, by Magdalena Tulli

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

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