June Books

She Who Remains was the latest choice for my Women in Translation Book Club. It turned out to be a somewhat controversial book in our discussion. I guess we've had differing opinions on books before, but this seemed more contentious than usual. There were questions about whether it was exploitative, about who has the right to tell this story, about the choice to use the Sworn Virgin terminology, about whether some aspects of the storytelling were lazy. Some of these were questions I had while reading the book. And yet, I also have the question of whether it was worth all this discussion in the first place. 

That said, I liked She Who Remains quite a bit more than I expected to. It's disjointed and in fragments with variable formatting and punctuation. When I saw the text visually - without reading it at all, I thought it was going to be an impenetrable slog. I don't have much tolerance for freeform text. But it turned out not to be a slow read. I got through it quite quickly and found it easy to get into. But while it tackles some very serious subjects, I didn't find that it had a lot of substance. I had nothing much to say about it.

It feels a little funny to include it here, but on Saturday I read -- cover-to-cover -- a book my uncle gave me for Christmas in 1983: White Wash and Pink Feathers, the story of Petros the pelican, a celebrity on Mykonos since his arrival there in 1958 until his death in 1985 (which I only just learned of when I searched up Petros). My uncle went to Mykonos annually as far back as I can remember and often brought me back gifts from there, but this book was probably the first. My uncle went into home hospice care on Saturday and passed away in the early hours of Sunday morning. And so on Saturday morning, I went into my jewelry box and put on a necklace he got me from Mykonos a few years ago and a bracelet he got me from I don't know where some 20 years ago, and I found White Wash and Pink Feathers, which I kept among a small selection of books from my childhood and I sat down and read it. I think my parents probably read me parts of the book -- or maybe even the whole thing; it's not very long -- when I was a kid, but I certainly didn't remember much. It recounts Petros' life on Mykonos from when he was a young pelican (supposedly with his parents and an aunt and uncle? I don't know how much truth there is to this story) who survived a storm that killed most of his family. The book recounts Petros' friendship and fame among humans, but also with some other birds on the island (a stork from Russia, a rooster, a few other pelicans). It's also very much about Mykonos and the changes on the island from the 1950s to the 1980s, with the increase in tourism. I imagine the island of the 2020s looks quite different from the one of 1982, the year of the book's publication - let alone when Petros arrived there in 1958.

On Sunday I started Ann Leckie's latest, Radiant Star, and I finished it this morning before work. I was very excited when I heard she had a new book out. I ordered it from the library a few weeks back. Of course my hold came through while I was out of the country, so I sent it back into circulation (or thought I did) and ordered it again and my second hold showed up just before I returned home. When I went to pick it up at my local branch, both copies were there waiting for me in the hold section, which made me feel a little bad but there wasn't a waitlist anymore so not that bad. I had heard mixed to negative reports from several other folks reading it, so my hopes were tempered, but in the end I really liked it. Someone pointed out that it may be playing on a different genre from some of Leckie's earlier books, and I would certainly say it had a different voice. The story is not told as a first person narrative, but the unknown narrator -- maybe the storyteller more accurately, has a very distinctive tone and interjects quite a lot in a way that I don't recall as a feature of the other books. Radiant Star ends up being mostly about power struggles among several factions with unlikeable leadership, but it also felt like a prequel to stories to come. Perhaps I'll need to reread it if a successor arrives. 

Absence, by Andrew Dana Hudson; All Systems Red, by Martha Wells

The author of Absence is an acquaintance from the internet. I'm not sure I would have heard about it otherwise – I'm not very up on new books these days. There was a book event here in Brooklyn, so I went and I got my copy of the book there. This was the same book event where I picked up The Old Man by the Sea and I started Absence just after finishing that book. (I might have read it first, except that it's a somewhat bulky hardcover and with my travel plans I preferred a slim paperback.) I heard the first two chapters at the event, so it was as if I had already started it. 

Absence is about sort of a slow apocalypse. The sudden and unpredictable disappearance of people over a period of years, resulting in an ever-diminishing global population, and everything that might entail. It was fun to read what Hudson imagined might happen in this circumstance: some positive changes, some ambiguous, some predictably bad outcomes. I was also really impressed with the way the book handled the uncertainty of the conflicting potential truths in the story. I feel like the conclusion could have been very unsatisfying, but it wasn't.

Perhaps because I had heard the author in discussion talking about writing this book, I found myself paying a lot of attention to the structure – at least, more than I usually do. I'm more likely to focus on language when it comes to writing craft, but the structure of Absence really impressed me. It has more than 100 chapters, across several sections – most of which encompass one day. Part of the book includes a woven narrative of past and present, which I think is when I first noticed the structure. The narrative about the past was brought in to give the reader some background on the narrator, and when you got everything you needed to know, it ended – but it was so seamless, I couldn't tell you when it returned to being just the single, present narrative. 

Absence is a fast-paced book. I tore through the latter two-thirds of it in just a couple days. I would have finished it much sooner if not for the fact that, on whim inspired by the same Discord group where I'm connected to the author, I decided to experiment with the novelty of requesting holds from the library.

I'm an enthusiastic supporter of libraries in theory – and an annual donor to both the New York and Brooklyn Public Library, but I rarely actually use the library in practice. Several of my online friends were talking about putting a hold on the new Ann Leckie book, Radiant Star and I thought, I should do that! So I did. And while I was at it, I also put a hold on the first Murderbot book, All Systems Red, because I'd been curious about the books. I enjoyed the TV show and people said the books were fun, and fun was what I was in the mood for. My hold came in within just a couple days and – magic! – I could just walk over to my nearest branch and grab it off the shelf and take it home with me. 

I was a little worried the fact that I had watched the TV show would spoil the book. Maybe it did a little (though also the TV show took a turn that wasn't in the book, or at least as I recall it), but I am a completist by nature and I didn't want to start the series anywhere but book one. I also wanted to see if I enjoyed the book as a reading experience. I did! I'm not going to put the next one on hold jut yet because I have some travel over the next few weeks, but I look forward to reading it when I'm back. Libraries: what a concept!

The Old Man by the Sea, by Domenico Starnone

The week before last I went to a book event at a bookstore in the neighborhood where I lived as a teenager – a neighborhood I was surprised to find had a bookstore now. I already knew I would be buying two books: the one for the event I was attending, and Molly Crabapple's Here Where We Live is Our Country, which I had been meaning to pick up. And besides, I wanted to support this bookstore in my old neighborhood. I browsed the fiction while I was waiting for the event to start and I saw The Old Man By the Sea. Domenico Starnone is a perennial favorite of mine, and so I decided to get a third book while I was there.

I will usually finish a Domenico Starnone book in a day or two. All the ones I've read  – this one included – are quite short. But last week was busy and it ended up taking me a full week. I read about half of it on the train to and from a visit upstate for the holiday weekend. ("Oh, Hemingway!" exclaimed my neighbor on the train ride up. "Actually, no," I said.)

Like (or perhaps even more than) the other Starnone books I've read, The Old Man by the Sea feels like autofiction. The narrator is an 82-year-old author who has rented a condo by the sea in the early autumn in the last warm days. He meets and becomes entangled with some of the locals, two shop owners who turn out to be husband and wife, a shop assistant at the wife's clothing store, and an assortment of other connected friends, lovers, and family members. The narrator is visibly writing the story, breaking the narrative from time to time to comment on his own writing. Meanwhile, he is trying to summon the ghost of his mother, who died young many years earlier. 

I have to admit I didn't like The Old Man by the Sea as well as the other Starnones, but mostly that's to do with the strength of the others. The Old Man by the Sea wasn't quite so captivating. As to the others, mainly what I remember is that they were strong, not why. I read Ties during a period when I was not writing about the books I read, but I've gone back to read what I wrote after reading Trick and Trust because I don't recall much about them. I do remember that I loved Trust especially.  

On the Calculation of Volume IV, by Solvej Balle; Zorba the Greek, by Nikos Kazantzakis

I actually finished On the Calculation of Volume IV a few weeks ago, but I never got around to writing it up. I'm not sure I actually have a lot to say about it, though I continue to love these books. While reading this one, I found myself sort of wishing I had waited to read the whole series until they were all available, perhaps in a single volume. I seem to only have patience for short books these days, but I've read each one of these books faster than the last. I finished IV in 2 days. 

I know I wrote something along these lines when I finished III, but I find it very interesting how each of these books has its own trajectory or theme, inside the larger context of the ever-repeated day. When I read about these books, and after I'd read the first one, I did wonder how Balle could sustain interest in and endless string of November 18ths. it's not a question I have anymore. 

I think when V comes out, or maybe just when the last book arrives, I want to go back and read them all together, and maybe then I'll feel like writing more too.

I started Zorba the Greek more than three years ago, in February 2023. I'd had it in mind to read as my book for Greece in my world books project and then in a happy accident, I found a copy on the sidewalk one day. I'm not sure what led me to start it in 2023, but I read it for a few days that February and then for a few days in April of that year, and after reading about 90 pages, I stopped. I was, around that time, starting and abandoning lots of books; having trouble sticking to anything. (A challenge I still have, though I think I'm just starting fewer books now.) I remember enjoying the writing and ideas in Zorba, but it was a slog. 

I'm going to Greece next month, for the first time, and that's what impelled me to return to Zorba. I thought I remembered enough that I could just pick up where I left off, and so I did. It came back to me quickly. I still found the reading a bit of a slog, but I kept going – mostly reading one chapter at a time – and finished the book in two weeks and change. 

When I first had the idea for my world books reading project, I had already identified some problems with it, one of which I called the problem of White Men. When you set out to read the Great Novel of any place, you're bound to end of reading mostly books my white men of a certain age. In all the books I've read for my project, I think Zorba may be the one where I have felt this the most. While race isn't so much a factor here, Kazantzakis' narrator is a young, wealthy, educated Cretan man, who returns to his homeland after travels around Europe and becomes enamored with the simple, real life he finds among the peasants on the island, and especially with Zorba – whom he meets on his travels and brings along. 

The narrator, who has lived more a life of the mind (and whom Zorba calls a pen-pusher) feels he has become disconnected from the real world and admires Zorba for his simplicity, his wisdom gained without books, his true example of manliness. As a reader, I coudn't understand the narrator's fascination with Zorba. I related with the narrator in certain ways – I really understood his sense of rational detachment, and maybe even his desire to escape that feeling – but not in his feeling that his intellectual life was less real than the physical life Zobra represents. 

I was looking for a passage I wanted to note, but I seem to have forgotten what page it was on. At one point, Zorba and the narrator are climbing up mountain to visit a monastery because they need permission to build on the monks' land. The visit to the religious site reminds the narrator of experiences from his his youth. He describes his enjoyment in the spectacle of religious festivals as a child, while now that he is grown, he only relates to religion aesthetically. I felt this very strongly – I had a real fascination with religion as a teenager, without being a religious person. Teenage emotions are so strong, I think I was hoping for something external to give it all some meaning. Around this time I was studying art and art history. I'm not sure why it spoke to me so deeply, but I developed a real affection for medieval and northern renaissance paintings. I still love art from this period, but if my attraction to it solely aesthetic, so what? Where Zorba's narrator seemed to see it as a weakness, I see it as maturity. I don't feel it as a loss.

In the end, I'm left feeling ambivalent about Zorba the Greek. There were ideas I loved, there were some stunning passages. There was also casual violence, extreme misogyny, and some deeply problematic ideas about humanity. But I'm glad I finished it.

The First Wife: A Tale of Polygamy, by Paulina Chiziane

I don't remember where I first heard about The First Wife, but I did note it down as a book to read from Mozambique. I believe I found this copy at a bookstore in Seattle when I was there in 2021. I seem to remember picking it up along with Our Lady of the Nile. It was reading The Word Tree that finally got me to read this. I wanted to stay in Mozambique. 

I don't quite know where to begin talking about this book. It was not at all what I was expecting. I had assumed it was about traditional polygamy (in some ways it was), but the starting point for The First Wife is a married woman who knows her husband has another lover and after some investigation, learns he actually has four of them. The women become allies, gain strength from each other, and eventually attain a sort of liberation. But in getting there, the story took so many unexpected turns. 

The writing in this book often has the feeling of folklore, full of magical imagery. Though the story itself is mostly grounded in earthly reality, it draws on what I assume are local folk tales. The presence and tensions among traditional religions and the Catholic church and the way they blend in modern life are also a theme. Every extended family has its priest and its witch doctor. The book is often hilarious, even as some of the events within are brutal. 

I found myself rebelling a bit against the gender essentialism at the heart of the book, even as I recognize it is a reflection of (and itself a rebellion against) the traditional gender roles in the culture. In fact, it highlights differences in the gender roles among different ethnic groups in Mozambique. And I kept wondering why these women -- and the first wife, in particular -- stayed loyal to this man, but the wives were asking the same question themselves. This book was written in 2002, and it was also interesting to read in the 2026 context of what I guess you could call mainstream polyamory. A passage in the book about the wives managing their calendars to set up the marital rota reminded me of polycules and their reliance on google calendar. 

The First Wife surprised me and I really liked it.

The Word Tree, by Teolinda Gersão

I have a certain affinity for Mozambique, having spent several months living in neighboring Zimbabwe 30 years ago now. While there, I traveled far to the east of the country, within a couple miles of the Mozambique border, though I never crossed it. I also ate regularly at a Mozambiquan restaurant -- a treat to myself on Fridays. Indeed, reading The Word Tree, Mozambique felt like a familiar place in some ways. Though, as I look at the map now, Maputo (or Lourenço Marques, as it was during the colonial era, and in the book) where the book takes place is far at the other end of the country -- practically in South Africa. 

The Word Tree is about a girl born in Mozambique to Portuguese parents. We don't quite learn the circumstances of her father's emigration, but her mother arrives at age 19 as a personal ad bride and is never happy in Mozambique. The book is divided into three sections, the first and third focused on the daughter, with the middle section showing the mother's perspective. There is a distance between mother and daughter that is is hard to get a grasp on in the book. The daughter is handed off to a Black wet nurse as a baby, whom she grows very attached to, while her mother seems uninterested -- or even repelled by her. The mother is presented very unsympathetically at first, and while I began to understand her and develop a certain feeling for her in the middle section, I never quite understood her distaste for her daughter. It's a complicated relationship. And yet, unexpectedly, it was the middle section with the mother's narrative that I found the most compelling. I found myself wondering if she found what she wanted, in the end. 

What I enjoyed most about this book were the descriptions of Mozambique. I could really picture the city and the baixa and the shanty town. The hotels and the department store. The beaches on the cost of the Indian Ocean. It was wonderfully evocative.

The Disappearing Act, by Maria Stepanova

I'm late in writing this post. I finished The Disappearing Act a week ago, on a miserable Sunday morning when I was both getting sick and off my allergy meds ahead of allergy testing. I almost can't believe I got through it under those conditions. Almost immediately upon finishing, I decided I needed to minimize my suffering and took an allergy pill. It helped, but the rest of the day was still pretty much a wash and then the entire work week happened. So here we are.

The Disappearing Act was another installment in the New Directions book subscription from my dad. I actually got it before Lithium, though I started it after. I was already somewhat familiar with Maria Stepanova because my women in translation book club read another book of hers, In Memory of Memory, but I didn't get to that one. I read the first couple pages and it was long and I just wasn't feeling up to it. But The Disappearing Act I loved from the moment I started it. Sometimes a book just speaks directly to me, and I can't quite say why, but that's what this book did. 

The Disappearing Act is a work of autofiction. (Is that a common thread in all 3 of the New Directions books I've read? At least 2 were.) The narrator is a novelist M from a country unnamed for most of the book, known rather as The Beast, who has left the country and is working through her complicated sense of semi-complicity with its actions. She's now living by a lake in another unnamed country, and in the book she's traveling to other unnamed places, but gets accidentally stuck along the way and decides, for a time, to disappear into this town and life that she fell into accidentally. M makes spontaneous decisions, far different from those she would make in her regular life. She (temporarily?) becomes a new person. 

I think that M in her travels reminds me of myself when I travel, where I sometimes do feel like an entirely different person. When I first started thinking this way, it led me to wonder if I could live permanently as the person I am when I travel. Would it even be possible. This seems to be an idea M is playing with as well. 

Lithium, by Malén Denis

Lithium was the latest installment in the New Directions book subscription my dad got me for Christmas. It arrived a couple days before I was heading out of the country for 9 days and was nice and slim, so I threw it in my backpack to take along on my trip. I'm terrible about reading when traveling, but I did start it on the train from Paris to Antwerp. I didn't get very far along before dozing off – more because of the calming motion on my early morning train than any shortcomings on the part of the book, though I will say it didn't grab me immediately. I put it away on my arrival in Antwerp and didn't get back to it until today, a week after my return home. 

I still wasn't sure how I felt about it when I went back to it, but it's such a short book I figured I should just finish it, and then as I was reading it began to grow on me. By the end, I liked it quite a bit more than I expected to.

Lithium is told largely as a second person running narrative by a narrator who is addressing her internal thoughts to her ex. He's been institutionalized under somewhat unclear circumstances, and the narrator is looking after his apartment and his family of cats (two adults, and some newborn kittens). The narrator seems to be spiraling a bit, but as we read on we learn her situation is quite a bit more complicated than it seemed at first – and also, over the course of the book, she starts to heal. I really liked the way Lithium exposed the events preceding the book. 

The Spectator Bird, by Wallace Stegner

It was The Illogic of Kassel that led me to read The Spectator Bird, but not because it was actually referenced in that book. Toward the end of The Illogic of Kassel, Vila-Matas refers to a poem by Wallace Stevens, and that reference made me remember Wallace Stegner and think that I should read him again. I read Crossing to Safety several years back and loved it and around that time I picked up The Spectator Bird, and then I promptly forgot about it. My interest in Stegner may have been sidelined by my general lack of interest in reading American authors. And then there are just so many books to read. But when I saw the name Wallace Stevens and thought Wallace Stegner I remembered how much I enjoyed his language and his vivid descriptions and I decided this was what I would read next. 

I fell right into it; I read a quarter of the book on Monday and kept up that pace until I finished it this evening. The language was as good as I remembered, the descriptions as vivid. The book opens with an observation of the gusty weather and the dramatic sky and the lively birds on a February day in northern California and I thought, yes: this is what I remember. (I also thought how appropriate that I was reading this in the month during which it's set. I love it when that happens by chance – though it's only the present day of the book that's set in February.) The book jumps back and forth between a few days in February 1974 (or so) in California and a few months in the spring and summer of 1954 in Denmark. Stegner's narrator is the adult son of a Danish immigrant, nearing age 70 in the present day of the book. In the 1950s, he goes with his wife to Denmark to try and connect – more figuratively than actually – with his family history. 

I enjoyed reading this book quite a lot, particularly the elements I mentioned above, but there was one central plot point that turned up near the end that really made me bristle, almost to the point of ruining the book for me. I don't really feel like doing spoilers and focusing on this bit only, so I"ll just say that I'm left uncertain how I feel about the book.

The Illogic of Kassel, by Enrique Vila-Matas

I thought 2026 was off to a great start when I finished my first book of the year within the first 3 days. The Illogic of Kassel arrived at my home around day 3 of the year, courtesy of a New Directions subscription my father got me for Christmas. I thought to myself, I should read these books as they arrive, so I jumped right in. 

I was unfamiliar with Vila-Matas, and I find myself wondering if this book was the best place to start. The Illogic of Kassel is a work of autofiction – the writer was invited to participate in the Documenta art show in Kassel and this book records the experience and his impressions of the works in the show. The book is intensely intertextual – referencing not only the works of art but dozens of works of literature, and a few films to boot. Some of the references – art and literature – were works I was familiar with, but many were not. More than once I wondered to what extent one even can write about the experience of seeing (or interacting with) art, and contemporary art in particular. An observation I'll make about intertextuality is that it rewards the reader who is familiar with the referenced works; but if you as a reader are unfamiliar (and perhaps even if it's just overdone), it can be both opaque and obnoxious. I wouldn't go so far as to say this book was that, but it did remind me a little of a particular moment in my life in the early 2000s when I spent a lot of time with art school students with a proclivity for postmodern theory. 

But I don't want to give a wrong impression. This book felt also like a celebration of art – and of contemporary art, in particular, which I don't think gets much in the way of literary treatment. And to my point about the rewards of intertextuality, well: I certainly felt gratified by the inclusion of some of my personal favorite writers – Joseph Roth and W.G. Sebald figure among the referenced authors. (And William Kentridge and Sophie Calle among the artists.) Overall I enjoyed the book. The reason this felt, as I put it earlier, maybe not the best place to start with Vila-Matas, is that the very context of the book assumes that Vila-Matas is a known entity. There was a reason he was invited to participate in Documenta. For the unfamiliar reader, we must try to piece that together without knowing the work that led him there.