Winner of the 2023 Award for Book That Most Exceeded My Expectations

Weird year. I’ve read 39 books so far this year, nearly 10K pages, but it feels like I read fewer/less than that, maybe because most of the most memorable reading experiences, especially from summer on, all looked and felt the same, in that I read them on my iPad, the screen black, the text white and enlarged to a reasonable size, the font the same, never influenced by peculiarities and particularities related to the text-conveyance device. For my entire life text had come packaged in paperback (some with French flaps) or hardcover form, the crispness and quality of which widely varied. When reading longer books particularly, when I think of reading The Recognitions in my twenties or War and Peace in the two different new editions/translations I’ve read, I picture the physical book, pulpiness, girth (excuse me), covers bent or bumped once I reached the end, multiple pages dogeared. I’d always walked and read with bound physical objects in my hands, the pages coffee-stained, whipped by wind, their texture affected by mist in the air. But 2023 was the year I converted to someone totally comfortable reading on an iPad.

There’s something democratic about the way the iPad screen levels the superficial aspects of reading so the emphasis is totally on the prose. If the format is always the same, the only thing that changes is the text’s texture, its inherent nature, character and swerve. The way the blind’s other senses are supposedly accentuated, something similar may happen in terms of sensitivity to differentiation in language when reading on an electronic device with a uniform format.

Also I now have a literal virtual library of 19th-century British fiction downloaded nearly for free, at most a dollar or two for the complete novels of the Brontes, Eliot, Trollope, Dickens, Hardy, Austen, a few others. For some reason I stayed away from 19th-century England, maybe because I wasn’t all that into Sense and Sensibility in high school? Now, on the other side of the previously off-putting marriage question that so often comes up in these books, I may be more willing to engage with it? Or maybe it’s just that the few I’ve read so far in the modern era, starting with Middlemarch this summer, have been without a doubt deserving of their long-standing reputation as flat-out classics (Wuthering Heights, not so much). It’s humbling in a way to have considered myself a reader and a writer while ignorant of these books. I’m only about a hundred pages into Great Expectations as I write this, with Bleak House on deck, Villette, Gaskell’s North and South (also Cranford) ready to go, my reading list exploded, all of them concealed in an app, ready for revelation on an elegant iPad screen.

Below, the top three are really tied for the “best” book I read in 2023, but I’ll give it to Dracula because I really didn’t expect to appreciate it nearly to the degree I did.

Dracula by Bram Stoker

Blows expectations out of the Danube. Started reading this because it’s 19th-century English-language fiction and The Wolves of Eternity didn’t provide the supernatural caloric content I was looking for as we entered spooky season this year. I read this and Wuthering Heights simultaneously, a chapter of one and then a chapter of the other, for a few days but then committed to Dracula, which seemed to me super-superior.

The first chapters when Jonathan Harker travels to Transylvania and the world becomes weirder, all the descriptions of how the natives dress, with their wide belts etc, the paprika on the food, the villagers warding off evil, gifting Harker with a crucifix, the first appearance of the wolves, the disorientation as Harker rode in the carriage, the feeling of going in circles, the weird blue flames and some odd optic deviance, all that was about as good an entryway into a novel as I’ve ever read. The first few chapters were tremendously teleportive, atmospheric, wonderful fun, knowing what Harker was getting into, too.

And then the Count was wonderfully depicted, charming, creepy, suspiciously unwilling to eat, with that grip of twenty men, the house apparently unoccupied by anyone else, the count freaking out when Harker nicks himself shaving, not appearing in the mirror, crawling down the side of the castle, the crazy scene with the mother of the stolen baby wailing in the courtyard before she’s devoured by wolves, the trio of sexy succubus-style vampires pushed off their prey by the Count. All so good. And then when it shifts to London, with multiple perspectives introduced, mostly first-person accounts, letters, diaries, memos, that crazy news report about the arrival of the Demeter from the Black Sea, the huge black dog that jumped to shore, the account of the crew, all so so so good.

The writing style, compared to Eliot and Emily Bronte, seemed so clear, the sentences flowing without continual intercession of clauses set off by commas. The style feels comparatively modern and seems almost to read itself, to flow across and down the pages, attaining total immersive transparency at its most active/best moments. And then the images are so strong, the winged beast biting the neck of the young woman at the edge of a cliff or something backed by moonlight, the Count slicing open his chest so Mina can feed on his blood like a sicko mother feeding its child milk, the scene in the graveyard confronting Lucy Westerna in full-on vampire form, when they stuff her decapitated head with garlic, the final scene at sunset in craggy mountains while it’s snowing, all so picturesque and evocative with the language flowing beautifully while disappearing to reveal the off-the-hook, totally fulfilling finale. And that’s just the surface level appreciation.

The novel is an interpretative goldmine, abounding with theme and conflict and characterization and potential readings from every analytical angle. Race, class, gender, sexuality, otherness, good vs evil, light vs darkness, the old ways vs modernity, Christianity vs paganism, selfishness vs selflessness/sacrifice, Victorian buttoned-up goodie-goodie society versus drink the blood from an open wound on my chest perversity. And then there’s science vs the supernatural of course, there’s the multiple perspectives, the inclusion of various media including very early phonograph recordings, taking the faster modern train across land to Transylvania than the old-fashioned ship on water route the Count takes when he flees London. Could really just go on and on forever with all this, even before discussing how Stoker started writing this soon after his friend Oscar Wilde was imprisoned for sodomy, how the whole thing’s a metaphor for homosexuality in the Victorian era, society-wide fear of being converted to a covert taboo cult that exclusively takes place after dark.

Van Helsing often philosophizes and interprets but the novel for the most part is consistently dramatized and always pushing forward, or when static it’s increasing suspense. Some parts toward the end seemed to delay the finale almost to excess but that anticipation that was being built was necessary to make the finale that much more satisfying.

All in all, wish I had read this many years ago — my mother claims that she read it to me when I was little or that she tried to read it to me when I was six or seven and really into vampires but I was too scared to let her go on. I remember getting vampire books from the library and placing them at the bottom of the stack because I was worried that the pictures in them would come to life and get me if they weren’t weighed down by other books.

Generally, vampires have such great attraction, are such complicated villains, immortal yet essentially dead, so powerful yet so vulnerable to crucifixes, the host, and garlic for some reason. Why garlic? (Possibly it relates to porphyria?!) Otherwise, reading this in the week before Halloween, with yards decorated with skeletons and fake cobwebs etc, a full moon lighting the nights like there’d been a dusting of snow, I often thought of the book during the day when I couldn’t stop myself from taking a few more pieces of Halloween candy from the stash reserved for the 31st. Uncontrollable urges for sugar, for forbidden unhealthy food and drinks, wanting to overindulge and sleep the sleep of the fully sated, or my child’s OCD related to an upcoming SplatFest in the game Splatoon 3, any of those modern mediated/engineered desires the novel made more apparent.

Anyway, throughout I just enjoyed this way more than I expected and look forward to reading it again in print (first time through I read on my iPad, which does allow for reading at night in bed in darkness, which doesn’t hurt when reading something like this).

Middlemarch by George Eliot

In college, a respected English Lit professor (Pat Day) mentioned at one point that we like when it’s about 65 degrees, not too cold, not too hot, and he associated this preference with Middlemarch, the literary embodiment of 65 degrees, which I didn’t read in college because I didn’t take 19th-century fiction somehow, despite having majored in English Lit. About eight years after graduation, 20+ years ago, I first tried and failed Middlemarch — got a decent paperback at Avenue Victor Hugo bookstore in Boston but didn’t make it beyond the preface. Text was too small, hardly any margins. Never read that copy and donated it at one point. A few years ago got a lovely “clothbound classics” edition, read the first few pages, but didn’t have it in me to continue at the time. Decided to try again this summer and felt like the text was just a little too small for me, so I downloaded a 99-cent Kindle “Dover Thrift” edition and read it on my iPad, with the text enlarged to a comfortable size. The page numbering made no sense (368 pages, but each “page” required three or four swipes to achieve a new number). I liked tapping archaic words I didn’t quite know (“durance“) and seeing the definition pop-up immediately, and I highlighted in yellow hundreds of comely, graceful phrases, the first being “vague labyrinthine extension,” referring to Casaubon’s consciousness but also seeming to have some metafictional content too.

Early on, it interested me that Casaubon’s project is called “The Key to All Mythologies,” the subtitle to Franzen’s recent Crossroads, so it felt like reading Middlemarch would unlock an understanding of Franzen’s project in a way I looked forward to — and it turns out that for a grand-sounding, apparently grand-standing subtitle, it’s actually self-deprecatory and humbled, knowing that Casaubon’s project is incomplete, beyond his capabilities, and sort of DOA or at least outdated because he doesn’t know German, the language in which all recent related research has been written in. So there’s that intertextuality that kept me interested at first, as well as the image of Casaubon as a sort of leaden John Kerry-looking academic who attained dimensionality early on and helped bring the book to life.

Also of course Dorothea and Rosamond, a pair of dissimilar lovely ladies that echoed in advance similar dissimilar pairs in War and Peace, Natasha and Helene. Also of course Tertius Lydgate and Will Ladislaw. And to a lesser extent Fred Vincy and Mary Garth. And all their parents and intermediaries, particularly Bulstrode, whose name suggested to me “balustrade,” an ornamental railing that to a degree connects or extends and supports the novel’s primary columns.

Loved generally the phrasal fabric of the novel, the language that elevates what otherwise often seemed if reduced to its plot points like a romance, “unfortunate” marriages, thwarted longing and love, difficulties with financial issues, petty local politics, long-concealed impurities of the past coming to light in the present. Loved also the chaotic intrusion of Raffles, who sort of reminded me of Barney from The Simpsons albeit in period dress.

Beyond interest in its form and phrasing, I suppose I was interested in the presentation of the casual, nearly universal bigotry of the era, how the townspeople were aghast that Ladislaw’s relative had been a Polish musician — not even purely English! And someone, maybe Lydgate, had a Jewish ancestory, I think?! Sir James Chettam, Celia’s husband, objects to Ladislaw on the grounds of not having good blood. “Peerage” is another word I learned in this — as history, it suggests how far we’ve come but also the sort of classification and stratification that’s always been a core feature of human idiocy. Such stratification does serve as an effective restraint in novels, the obstacles of propriety that the characters cannot overcome without sacrifice after hundreds of pages of handwringing until climatic scenes underscored by a serious weather event as though the atmosphere itself objects to their actions.

Generally, though, after a point maybe two hundred pages in, once the primary players cohered, reading Middlemarch was all I really wanted to do, settling down on the porch after work in the afternoon or later in bed or on the weekends spending as much time as possible on my iPad.

Downloaded the complete George Eliot, the complete Brontes (and purchased a lovely “clothbound classics” box set), plus North and South, and will now start filling the sizeable gap in my 19th-century reading knowledge.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

Comely, upstanding prose. Its clarity next to godliness, exemplary moral integrity. Oh, there will be spoilers ahead, so many spoilers, if you’re considering reading this and know nothing about it, same way I knew nothing about it, somehow — avoid all reviews and anything about Charlotte Bronte or else key plot points will be spoiled. I learned that Jane and Mr. Rochester would become an item the day before he so wonderfully appeared and fell from his horse. Before I read the related pages, I learned that this is the book responsible for “the madwoman in the attic” I had read an excerpt of in college. But otherwise I shaded my eyes from reviews like these that have no choice really but to reveal some serious plot points. And unlike when reading 20th century lit, modernist or postmodern, the revelation of what happens really would make a difference to a reading experience.

The storytelling is so wonderfully compelling, patient, conventional, especially the meting out of the mystery of the lunatic Creole Bertha in the attic, but also bits like when Mr. Rochester impersonates a traveling soothsaying gypsy or the revelation of the deal post-intervention at the altar. A lot happens in this, and if taken out of context, if removed from the world of the novel and its sensibility, not considered as a construction of these comely and upstanding phrases, most of it is pretty far-fetched, fictional, wishfullfillmental if not quite feelgoodish, and most certainly superproblematic from a contemporary perspective: the 39 to 19 age difference between Mr. Rochester and Jane, Mr. Rochester’s illegitimate child he cares for as guardian only and otherwise delegates to governesses, the madwoman in the attic from the West Indies of course, and St. John’s great white crusade to bring the Hindus to Christ (not to mention proposing to his cousin who he considers a sister).

All this was problematic from Jane’s perspective, too, and from Charlotte’s perspective was surely presented as an exaggerated moral obstacle course for Jane to run and come out the winner thanks to unwavering committed virtue, including her early-feminist sense of independence and self-assurance in her equality with men (more so: men are not granted superiority by nature; they must prove themselves her equal).

But really I just found the novel enjoyable, comfortable, appreciating the clarifying attention to secondary/tertiary characters (eg, Blanche Ingram or Mr. Mason or the wealthy Mr. Oliver and his beautiful daughter Rosamund, even Pilot the dog — unlike in, say, her sister Emily’s novel, wherein really only Heathcliff seemed indisputably defined and even the primary Catherine was diluted with a secondary Cathy), the consistent stability of its narrative orientation, a lofting comforter of a story I suspected would turn out well in the end, functioning almost like a comedy with the main character beginning low and ending high, albeit scarred and wizened by the experience.

Jane, as a narrator, with her famous occasional direct address to the reader (“reader, I married him” I knew as a famous line in a novel but never knew it came from this one or who “him” was), is beyond reliable — she’s a representative of moral responsibility, identifying the old verities and virtues as they arise in drama. Her argumentation is always so righteous and always on the side of right, in a way I rooted for — the underdog who rises up.

The whole novel reminded me of Louis CK’s bit about Good Will Hunting, sort of, how Matt Damon wrote and directed it and starred in it and made his character a handsome super-genius who gets to make out with Minny Driver. In this, Charlotte Bronte seems to run her narrator through a similar sort of wish-fulfillment gauntlet, the orphan with an innate moral sense, judge of all around her, weighing per an understanding of Scripture and always acting according to her calculations, receiving for good behavior a massive inheritance from a distant relation also related to the family who saved her toward the beginning of the third section. Even the naughty narrative obstacle of the first wife is cleaned up neatly by the fire and Bertha leaping to her death from the roof. Voila!

Looking forward to read Wide Sargasso Sea at one point — and some of the essays in the back of a critical edition I acquired at a library book sale this fall (“Oh, Jane Eyre,” sighed the woman at the check-out table who took my dollar bill, and now I know why she may have said it like that). Would’ve loved to have read this in college with a great professor but maybe I wasn’t ready for it at that time in my life? I read on an iPad, white text on black screen, often in the dim light of a Christmas tree that we put up way too early this year, strung with red lights, moving the little red bookmark string to chart my progress on the comely, upstanding Penguin Classics hardcover I laid out on a table but didn’t actually read.

Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe by George Eliot

Such a great, simple, straightforward, moralistic, enjoyable fable of a story — the first two chapters, a few through the middle, and the last few are as good as reading gets, or, well, at least for 19th Century fiction are flowing and riveting, easy enough to follow, with such a sympathetic central character.

Loved the urgency of his initial unfair ostracization, resettling far from his home area and establishing himself through committed labor, weaving with “the unquestioning activity of a spinning insect.”Related to a degree to the solace he found in this, in the repetition of days and melting of hours at his loom (“Every man’s work, pursued steadily, tends in this way to become an end in itself, and so to bridge over the loveless chasms of his life”), as well as the accumulation of guineas he reveled in every night, Scrooge McDuckishly.

Loved also when he tried to engage his new community, earnestly trying to help someone in need by preparing an herbal concoction he’d learned from his mother, only for the community to become suspicious, as though he knows some sort of witchcraft. The temporal setting, generally, seems balanced between the old vaguely pagan folkways and the rising powers of manufacturing modernity, especially early on in the novel before Silas commits to weaving and then raising his foundling.

Secondary and tertiary characters other than the florid-faced self-indulgent dissolute piece-of-shit Dunsey aren’t as clearly drawn or didn’t come to life for me the way Mr. Marner did, and the the phrases aren’t as consistently rich as in Middlemarch, but I very much enjoyed reading this and should have read it thirty or more years ago.

I did love this bit about beer drinkers: “the beer-drinkers, chiefly men in fustian jackets and smock-frocks, kept their eyelids down and rubbed their hands across their mouths, as if their draughts of beer were a funereal duty attended with embarrassing sadness.”

And this: “In old days there were angels who came and took men by the hand and led them away from the city of destruction. We see no white-winged angels now. But yet men are led away from threatening destruction: a hand is put into theirs, which leads them forth gently towards a calm and bright land, so that they look no more backward; and the hand may be a little child’s.”

I could imagine reading again, knowing how Godfrey Cass, Nancy Lammeter, and Dolly Winthrop emerge from the community character slurry, for example. Lots of local color, rustic stratification, life of the poor and the somewhat higher ups, old pagan folkloric herbology giving way to good Christian living, karma, Providence, the story complicated through its middle sections by interludes consisting of old-timey dialect-ridden dialogue that, for me, dropped things down a bit, although I see how these scenes round out the community perspective on the central players and situation.

Comparisons to A Christmas Carol are valid, although this doesn’t seem as taut and simple. Silas also seems like a much more complicated/rounded character than Scrooge — both are misers, superficially, but there doesn’t seem to be much ill-will in Silas. His hoarding emerges from not being able to trust others, based on how he’d been treated in the past, whereas Scrooge, from what I remember, is just a domineering boss/bastard. That is, I don’t remember much humanizing backstory. Can’t remember if the ghost of Xmas past showed something that made Scrooge into a “Scrooge”? Probably did. Need to re-read . . .

OK. Re-read the Ghost of Christmas Past section and the “humanizing backstory” bit really feels kinda lame, a lonely boy, not feeling part of things, Fezziweg dancing, a love interest ending things since Scrooge seems too interested in “Gain,” and then seeing her family with another man frolicking at Christmastime, mentioning Scrooge as a cold lonely taskmaster etc. Feels insufficient and rushed compared to the opening chapters of Silas Marner.

Anyway, a wonderful short novel that intermittently achieves flat-out transportative instructive greatness.

Travels with Charley: In Search of America by John Steinbeck

Loved 85% of this. About as good as a travelogue through the US in 1960 could be. Famous author (received Nobel two years after these travels) of some of the greatest American novels of the mid-20th century on the road in a decked-out truck named for Don Quixote’s horse, loaded with fishing gear and hunting rifles (as alibi when asked what he’s up to) and some booze and books and bedding, accompanied by a blue French-speaking poodle.

Right from the beginning, it takes off as he saves his boat as a hurricane hits the Long Island Sound. Totally active, engaging, flowing, propelled writing. And then he’s off, complaining of traffic and cities always-encroaching outward until he finds what he’s searching for, a glimpse of endangered, usually rural, regionally peculiar (in the sense of a representative of the particular) scenic America, first to the north, Vermont, to Maine, then across to New York state to Michigan to Chicago for an undescribed respite with the wife (incredible stretch forensically reconstructing the previous occupant’s activities in a hotel room), up to Wisconsin and then west to the Badlands. As he moves west it really takes off when encountering bears at or near Yellowstone (Charley goes nuts), and then rapturous description of California sequoias, melancholic recognition of changes around his hometown of Salinas, which we know from East of Eden, and down to Monterrey, which we know from Cannery Row, and then across the Mojave, where he decides not to kill a coyote and then believes he’s responsible for its life (great moment). Some time with rich rancher friends in Texas all wearing worn denim and then to New Orleans to observe protestors against desegregation, the so-called “Cheerleaders,” middle-aged women screaming obscenities at a little black girl escorted by police into a formerly all-white school. More than twenty times someone in the South makes a joke about misperceiving Charley as a [racial epithet redacted] — these scenes and the related analysis are so affecting and ethically presented, insightful, empathetic all around yet angered, and self-questioning, the sort of thing that might sit like a cherry atop a lifetime of work deserving the Nobel. He had thought all Americans of all races in all regions shared something more common in their American-ness with one another than culturally disparate citizens of other countries, but by the end he’s not so sure, sensing divisions still so apparent seventy-three years later.

Loved 85% of it but there’s maybe 15% worth of dialogue with randos encountered on the road, little visits and chats, also some bits about for example trailer parks/mobile homes wherein the significance seemed to me less apparent and my interest waned and my reading pace accelerated accordingly.

But generally I’m comfortable calling myself a huge Steinbeck fan — formally, in terms of the posture of his prose and clarity and choices of his perception, he seems right down the middle, totally accessible, yet somewhat skewed or surprising at times, as expected of an artist of his caliber. Probably the writer against whom other writers can be gauged as more or less conventional or experimental. Content-wise, he’s a natural champion of the underdog, the underclass, as long as they have a functioning moral compass and some dignity and something particular about them and try to be good.

Ultimately, the sort of book I feel like my conservative, midwestern, nevertheless New Yorker-reading father-in-law may have read and loved, or would love if I gave my copy to him — we’ll see when the in-laws visit in a few weeks. Wish I’d read this long ago.

Zuckerman Unbound by Philip Roth

Mostly thoroughly enjoyed settling down with this, especially the scenes with Caesara O’Shea, a sort of Irish version of Brigitte Bardot or maybe Ava Gardner, who the author apparently once knew? A famous movie star who takes a fancy to Nathan and asks him to show her where all the writers hang out. To which Nathan responds The New York Public Library? (The loudest LOL in a book with plentiful silent amusement/smiles and maybe three audible laughs.) Alvin Pepler, with his photographic memory and former game show glory, who relieves himself on Nathan’s handkerchief, foreshadowing Sabbath on a grave a few books later, is an entertaining character. And the whole conceit of persecution anxiety/assassination fears works well, considering the era it describes post-RFK/MLK.

The last stretch corresponded with a breakout section to Miami for Nathan’s father’s death and funeral, which seemed grafted on or appeared as though events in Roth’s contemporary late-‘70s life compelled this turn in his fictional account of his life a dozen years earlier when Portnoy/Carnovsky took off. I see how the ending with his brother and the armed-guard limo ride through transformed Newark syncs and closes the book down but for what’s essentially a comedy it has the progression of tragedy (starts high, ends low). As in the end of The Facts, written around the same period, there’s a relentless quality to the self-analytical questioning, the hocking, this time from Nathan’s brother, although it doesn’t really feel like anyone other than the author animating the character to critique the alter-ego.

But overall seems to demonstrate exactly why Roth has the reputation he has — highly regarded for humor, energetic language, characterization, and cultural insight, albeit with reservations maybe thanks to a sort of automatic excessive relentless lack of restraint that makes it what it is but also detracts from it at the same time?

Generally enjoying, however, my recent immersion in the lesser — or at least, for me, the previously unread — Roth.

Patrimony by Philip Roth

About as good as this could be — not a place I really wanted to spend time, or so I thought early on, but by the end I didn’t really want it to end, or at least I was in no hurry for the elder Roth to move on. Not quite excruciating but in that ballpark, or maybe too filled with life and dark humor, although not at the expense by the end of the emotional heft. Roth’s relentlessness I critiqued in The Facts is his true patrimony. He hocks because he cares.

Happening by Annie Ernaux

“Maybe the true purpose of my life is for my body, my sensations, and my thoughts to become writing, in other words something intelligible and universal, causing my existence to merge into the lives and heads of other people.”

That’s the last line of this, a variation on a purpose statement like at the end of Portrait of the Artist (“I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race”) or the beginning of Paradise Lost (“assert eternal providence and justify the ways of God to men”).

Formally, it’s unadorned but not degraded, “working class” like the author’s roots, but with parenthetical paragraphs, meta-interjections conveying the “intellectual” artist consciousness/awareness of the tendencies and needs of the text she’s creating. The story proceeds linearly, exemplary rising drama centered around the trials of a student finding an abortionist and having an abortion in early ’60s, in and around Paris. Also incorporates and analyzes old journal entries. It’s categorized as “essay” by Fitzcarraldo Editions but reads more like a novella, like fiction, meta-fiction, memoir, autofiction, ultimately like literature, like individual experience conveyed in text to the variegated readership of the world.

Thematically, it’s required topical reading on the subject of abortion, a document of what it was like before women had the right to control their fate and secure safe and effective treatment for unwanted pregnancies. Easy to see why she won the Nobel Prize when she did (2022), with abortion rights in the U.S. after fifty years revoked in some states (banned in Texas in most cases on August 25, 2022, for example) and generally threatened. The author is not conflicted about her pregnancy, even when she and a friend essentially remove the alien-like fetus from her body, despite it almost seeming like dream imagery, surrealist imagery (she’s working on a paper about the role of women in surrealism), they go through the motions by instinct and necessity.

Will read as many of Ernaux’s short books as I can over the next few years — the delay between ordering from the UK and receiving the package in the mail makes them almost seem free, like gifts — whatever could this be that’s come all the way from London?

Ordered this at the exact moment the wife on the couch pressed play on the trailer of a cinematic adaptation on one of the fancy streaming services. We watched it after I finished reading and I’d recommend it for sure.

*

Otherwise, I’ve recently posted about a few other novels that surely also make the cut for best books I read in 2023:

See also Love, Tramp, and The Year by Tomas Espedal, previously posted here.

See also I Served the King of England by Bohumil Hrabal, The Belan Deck by Matt Bucher, All of Us Together in the End by Matthew Vollmer, and Bang Bang Crash by Nic Brown, all previously posted here.

See also The Magus by John Fowles, previously posted here.

+

To support the kind publishers who have taken a chance on my writing, please acquire a copy of Chaotic Good, Neutral Evil ))), and/or JRZDVLZ (all from Sagging Meniscus). Or my translation of Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador. Or Thanks + Sorry + Good Luck: Rejection Letters From the Eyeshot Outbox directly from the publisher. Or even a copy of The Shimmering Go-Between directly from me (the publisher is kaput).

Official Short List for Best Book Read Award 2021 Edition Extraordinaire

In which we put the list in literary fundamentalist

Among the many hundred books I read this year, I’ve selected those that strike me as indisputably meretricious, which I realize isn’t the correct adjective at all. Let’s just say that the books below I hereby deem worth airing on my extraordinarily well-trafficked online weblog platform, with an eye out for reducing this exclusive list to the One Book to Rule Them All, that is, the singular publication deserving coveted online acknowledgment as the “Best” Book I Read in 2021.

The long list includes The Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen (included on the NYT’s top 10 of the year), The Moviegoer by Walker Percy, Absolute Daytripper by Gabriel Ba and Fabio Moon, Against Art by Tomas Espedal, Fireflies by Luis Sagasti, Inherited Disorders by Adam Erlich Sachs, Leave Society by Tao Lin, Well by Matthew McIntosh, and Death in Rome by Wolfgang Koeppen, but the short list is below, presented in no particular order, with books by friends (apologies to The Apology by Christian TeBordo) and other potential conflicts of interest excluded. Unless too lazy or forgetful or otherwise engaged, I’ll announce the winner toward the end of the year, most likely atop a post presenting my 2011 short list and winner, which seems like a semi-interesting exercise. (Jan 20, 2022 update: too lazy / otherwise engaged / not interested / bored with lists / sick of it all — and by “it” in this context I mean anything other than reading and writing — to select a “winner” and update with memorable books read in 2011.)

The City of Belgium by Brecht Evens
Drawn & Quarterly

As with Night Animals, a short romp I read before this also by Evens, this is a wild rumpus involving young adults out on the town, at first at a surreal urbane cafe and then, at different times in the night, all taking the same taxi, driven by a confabulatory driver, to various clubs. The colors are intense, flowing, liquid, without conventional frames although sometimes the pages are stripped to simple colorful figures conversing. Lots of small text. Inexhaustible in its details, for example the spread with all the interlocking names of bars and nightclubs. Impossible to see it all, a quality I’ve only really registered a few times (Chris Ware). The primary characters aren’t particularly sympathetic but they’re sufficient as buoys in the polychromatic whitewater of the pages. Felt like it was maybe a little long but appreciated its midsection by the end. Will probably acquire everything else available by Brecht Evens.

A Musical Offering by Luis Sagasti (translated by Fionn Petch)
Charco Press

Loved this — came to it with low/no expectations other than a short book/essay about music and came away very much in love with the mode of expression/approach, the associative talent, the unpredictable turns, the willingness to cross-reference The Beatles, The Stones, The Who with Bach, Glenn Gould, Jackson Pollock, Rothko, John Cage, Terry Riley, introducing me to a composition for metronomes for example and an organ so powerful it compelled an avalanche that destroyed it (the only part of this that read like fiction). Like Markson to a degree, a major reference work, with slips of first-person, but more so a mystical spiritual ineffable unfuckwithable perfusion of enthusiasm for all human efforts to translate the tsunamis of the sun known as the music of the spheres. Flawlessly translated — the prose seemed absolutely audio-visually aware and worthy of the subject matter.

The Birds by Tarjei Vesaas (Translated by Torbjørn Støverud and Michael Barnes)
Archipelago Books

A masterpiece, among the best short novels I’ve read. Essentially three stories, classically constructed or at least perfectly so: an introduction (the woodcock story, clearing out turnip rows), a highpoint (Anna and Inger and the boat on the lake), a fall (Jorgen/the resolution). Other than the first few short chapters introducing the brother and sister and their world, I was entirely engaged and engrossed. Had a similar experience with The Ice Palace, probably the last pre-pandemic novel I read — I had trouble acclimating to the language, the translation, the world, poetic bursts, but it ultimately took off and came to life. This one too — once the woodcock appeared and Mathis set out looking for work, it was on. Reminded me somewhat of Hamsun’s Pan, the same sort of psychic charge but without lurking unreliable mysticism. The author seems absent but fully inhabits the few characters and the world, which again is supported in my imagination by Hamsun, particularly Growth of the Soil, although this is probably one of the best short novels focused on what today would be called an autistic or neurodivergent character — in the novel Mathis is called Simple Simon. Anyone with experience of autism will recognize his behavior. But it’s not all pathological difficulty with interpersonal interactions and a preference for the world of his imagination. His experience of nature, particularly his love for the woodcock or time rowing on the lake, his extreme sensitivity to the natural world and his innocent curiosity and desire to connect, infects the reader, or at least I’ve felt like the novel has sharpened my perception, pretty much the highest possible accolade for a work of art.

The Gentle Barbarian by Bohumil Hrabal (translated by Paul Wilson)
New Directions

Loved most of this idealized eulogy for Vladimir Boudnik, an artist friend presented as almost superhuman, Christ-like, totally mad, able to coax art from anything, particularly cracks and smudges on walls. Really came to life early on when Vladimir throws his wedding ring out the window of a moving train, when they smear beer all over themselves, anointing themselves barons of the beerhall, or toward the end when the author and Vladimir take two rides down a rushing flooded river. It’s sort of like the Czech ’50s version of Keroauc with Cassady and Ginsberg, although as the translator’s afterword notes, Hrabal aerates the water of life to achieve effervescence, which after a while naturally goes a little flat but for most of this Hrabal’s signature vibe was very much apparent. Tremendous translation (and afterword that puts the politics of the time in perspective). A paperback edition I looked forward to holding and running my eyes across its clean clear design. With All My Cats, liking these recent Hrabal publications.

October Child by Linda Boström Knausgaard (translated by Saskia Vogel)
World Editions

Could probably be read in a single sitting but I read it in multiple pre-sleep sessions on iPad, lights out, the screen black, the author’s voice and living situation familiar from her former husband’s My Struggle and Spring but the perspective shifted, KOK directly addressed intermittently in a way that really brings this authentic, urgent, painful, frazzled, off-kilter, improvised, moving, honest memoir to life. When she switches to the second person “you,” addressing Karl Ove, it’s like she also directly addresses readers who’ve absorbed her husband’s writing and experience and general physical and psychological setting to the point that they’re right there with her and the kids as the family fractures. This is also about receiving electroshock therapy, institutional life, relations with nurses, “balancing” madness with familial responsibilities, reminiscences of a privileged youth, early experiences writing, but its climax is the moment she wants a good cry and suggests she and Karl Ove divorce and he meets her eyes and steadily agrees. As a reading experience, it’s unusual since it’s so loose, makes My Struggle seem like Flaubert, with quick transitions or more so jumps in time and theme without transition, plus of course there’s its interaction with KOK’s writing. But there’s also something about that rural Sweden setting, their house and garden near the sea, that’s familiar and good to visit no matter who’s writing about it. Overall, I’d say this is worth reading for KOK completists or those especially intrigued by Linda as she appears in My Struggle and Spring. If you haven’t read her husband, the portrait of the writer surrounded by books, awards, and jars of cigarette butts, the man who doesn’t drink but blooms when he does, the energetic father, the restrained husband who takes an interest in the countryside, who essentially has had enough of the author (understandably), should probably suffice as an interesting introduction.

The Other Jack by Charles Boyle
CB Editions

Sort of like a British version of David Markson, with a Stendhal fixation, a metafictional dialogue (not presented as dialogue) between a pair of readers, an older male pseudonymous author/publisher and a young female aspiring writer waiter (the same words save the second letter), sitting in a cafe, a very loose framework for a collection of literary quotations and anecdotes, book/reading impressions and experiences, the participants’ privacy settings pretty firmly set against revealing much (author reveals that he’s married, has a child older than the woman he sits with, went to Cambridge, used to write poems, never “dropped acid,” worked on the Collins Dictionary and a sort of encyclopedia, lives five minutes from west London, had a stable childhood, but not much more). Although Boyle has self-published this under his own name instead of Jack Robinson, the man arranging the quotations, as in the Markson books, is at best only suggested — an abstract, acutely angled autobiography, to be generous. Read this in less than a day, in two summertime weekend sittings while sick for first time since just before Pandemia. I’d recently read the author’s book on Stendhal published under one of his pseudonyms, enjoyed it well enough, so ordered this one, always up for a book about books. This didn’t disappoint. Served its purpose. Covered some of the same ground as the Stendhal book. (Updating this review after reading Jack Robinson’s by the same author from 2016, which is like this book’s shadow book, its first draft, unless there’s another book that came before that one — Robyn is a man named Eric and the book they meet over is not Jack Robinson’s Recessional but XXX by T.S. Nyman. If “by the same author” is XXX, “The Other Jack” is YYY, and I look forward to ZZZ in five years.) Easy, self-aware reading (eg, twenty pages to the end there’s a bit about quitting a book twenty pages to the end). Suitable bathroom reading, although I read it reclining on the front porch, super-congested. Interesting in terms of an older literary fellow who grew up pre-critical theory, when white male literary professors smoked pipes, coming to terms or acknowledging or addressing contemporary woke twittersphere theory. But before too long it’s back to another Stendhal quotation. Admitted self-loathing related to self-publicizing on social media makes me want to write a better version of this little impression and do some publicity work for him. Will continue to keep an eye out for books under this author’s real name or any other.

Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri
Penguin Random House

Listened to the author read an excerpt on the New Yorker’s podcast and I’m glad I read the rest. A short novel made of short, simply titled chapters, I read it on my iPad as dusk turned to night, no lights on in the bedroom, and something about the dim and then black glossy glassy page works with the transparent, careful, polished prose. Toward the end the narrator compares her sunglasses to a young boisterous traveler’s scuffed plastic lenses, saying hers are costly and polished lenses, and the prose, like the solitudinous middle-aged narrator, like the Italian urban setting, is elegant, tasteful, clean, artful, tending toward dark with bursts of color, like a festive scarf on a crisp fall weekend. Sentences tend to end in a string of modifiers of deepening significance, expressing for example appreciation of fine bakery goods, or finding some minor fault. Plentiful comma splices, too, give things a Euro skating sense. In the New Yorker story there’s no sense that the narrator is Italian. In the novel, over time, it’s revealed that the narrator is not the author, is presumably not Indian-American, grew up and mainly stayed in the same Italian city, but that never really feels real. The narrator feels more worldly and more of an outsider. Her employment as some sort of scholar also lacks specificity and seemed like a demerit for me — it seemed more so based on the author’s experiences in Italy, writing this for example in Italian and then translating it to English. At first I found it interesting that the author was writing about her life without involving her family, and I welcomed the lack of family pressures etc based on the few stories of hers I’ve read, but that’s not really the case. I don’t often use “devastating” to describe fiction but it aptly describes the chapter about her father. (The chapter with her mother is much more mild.) Anyway, I enjoyed reading this, seeing how it was condensed to a New Yorker story, particularly, but the main takeaway is the steady glossy glassy prose, warm water cut with a dark twisting beautiful destabilizing filament of blood or ink. Shelve under “journal of a solitude.”

Against Nature: The Notebooks by Tomas Espedal (translated by James Anderson)
The University of Chicago Press

Loved this. Unlike the previous complementary volume Against Art, this one read like it had been written in a burst, the sentences strong and perfect, with an overall sense of solidity, steel to the other volume’s wax (felt like the POV in Against Art was often too diffuse as he imagined scenes with predecessors). This one focuses on the relationship between an older male lover (the writer, essentially, is his late 40s) and a lovely young woman half his age. Some explicit sex scenes that seemed surprising and well-done, the chiaroscuro of the older male’s rough skin and the younger woman’s perfect smooth skin et cetera, the urgency and insanity of falling in love perfectly/realistically rendered, even if it’s the oldest story in the book of old stories older male writers aren’t really allowed to write anymore. There’s a section about the author’s first factory job, how working was against his nature although he worked well. He recognized immediately that factory work wasn’t for him. And then it switches to a retelling of an old story (The Letters of Abélard and Héloïse) that parallels his own, albeit not quite with the same ending. All this is crossed by a gripping story about the author’s first wife and mother of his daughter, an actress who takes the family to a mountain town in Nicaragua, Matagalpa, a town I visited in 1995 while traveling in Central America and left after about three hours walking around after getting an overwhelming sense of bad vibes, as though I could sense the bloodshed there from the ’80s. They stayed there for a few months before bailing as militia rolled through town. But generally this felt like it read itself, not easy reading but the story and the sentences had a sense of inevitability, like they had to be written as they were and had a sort of perfection, even or especially when the writing seemed casual, open, effortless. Awesome too that he and his girlfriend read Knausgaard in bed and toward the end as he’s in full dissolution mode he goes to a record store and buys the new Lampchop (not sure when the events took place but maybe it was “Nixon”?). Anyway, highly recommended. Will definitely read more Espedal. Also, possibly of interest, here’s a video of an interview with Espedal and Knausgaard.

No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood
Penguin Random House

Fantastic phrases, compulsively readable, almost always amusing if rarely literally LOL, the account of a privileged insider view to the cool kidz on “the portal,” told by a narrator who feels like she belongs there, the writing she finds there reflects what’s written inside her brain. A novel that makes the most vile site on earth (IMHO) seem golden, mass-composed text in need of this narrator to write its essence into existence, and I think Lockwood achieves this at times, like Renata Alder’s Speedboat updated with memes. Or at least that’s the first half, the fun innocent part. The second half unexpectedly relates the wrenching story about her doomed newborn niece. The prose that propels this throughout felt like it couldn’t quite deal with something really real and seemed to fizzle or unravel a bit toward the end, but still — the first half includes some of the most surprising, swervy, often insightful, funny, accelerated language I’ve read in a while. Also I read this in ebook form on an iPad so could flip to her Twitter and scroll through the profiles she followed, following some of the stranger names, wanting to have a better idea of the looking glass she’d stepped through since my experience of the site is, well, rarely positive or fun. Also, the fragmentary format (short bits maybe a dozen or so characters longer than a long tweet separated by three +’s compiled into short chapters) made it easy to read a bit and then check e-mail and then check something else and then talk to wife or child or cat and then read a little, that is, the format integrates into contemporary distracted consciousness really well. I expect to get to her memoir soon and will surely read whatever she writes next. Listed as a NYT top 10 of the year too.

Seven Samurai Swept Away in a River by Young-moon Jung (translated by Jung Yewon)
Deep Vellum

Loved this, overall — the approach, the stability (for such an associative stretch of writing it’s not all over the place), the flow, the imaginative foundation in reality, the degree to which it made me want to write something like it, or read aloud from it to the wife, child, and cats, just generally its comfortable peculiarity, its totally acceptable avant-garde-ness not at all interested in shocking the bougie. Recommended to me a few months ago as something I might really like (thanks again, Tom!), got to it this week. For the first thirty-pages or so, I wondered if the translation was maybe a little off (could use like two dozen more commas throughout to clarify phrases I had to read three times to figure out what was meant). But then there was a page about writing this intentionally irrelevant book that reminded me of when I edited Eyeshot.net and in the summer would post “nothing” for a few weeks, updating the “nothing” page every other day or so with more text about “nothing,” although of course producing something: http://eyeshot.net/nothing.html or http://www.eyeshot.net/nothing1.html. After that page, from then on, it was on.

The Morning Star by Karl Ove Knausgaard (translated by Martin Aitken)
Penguin Random House

Theological thriller, philosophical pulp, an extraordinarily well-characterized, dramatized elaboration of the internal/external worlds thematic focus of The Seasons Quartet, perfect for the longer nights and dark mornings of autumn, as neighbors decorate yards with plastic representations of skeletons and ghouls. Through the first two-hundred pages I wasn’t sure about it, doubted its page count (666), thought it contrived and manipulated with prevalent one-sentence paragraphs like in a Blake Crouch novel. But then it started to take off, thanks in part to cliffhangers at the end of each section either for the new star or minor natural and some major supernatural oddities that began to proliferate, yet never in such a way as to overwhelm the emphasis on character and interiority — and I was in it to win it and very much recommend it, not just to Knausgaard fans. Structured as a series of first-person stories, each titled by the narrator’s first name, many of which repeat, two of which (Arne, Egil) resemble Knausgaard, but also a few are women, a middle-aged priest of Norway, a young convenience-store clerk, a night shift worker at a mental hospital married to Jostein, a hideous man-type journalist whose idfulness and general hatefulness charge the pages through the middle and end like booster rockets whenever he appears. There are also two sections — one about a young rocker named Emil and the other about a 33-year-old curator mother married to a 60-year-old famous architect — that don’t repeat and seem almost like teases for future installments of what seems like it will definitely continue as a series. Knausgaard proved himself a master of suspense during the rising waters in the Noah section in A Time for Everything, and here it’s really the same dynamic on a book-length level. Rising drama threatening everything we take for granted, all the little movements of the day, the common conversations and perceptions we barely register, especially all the time we spend trying to connect with loved ones but also find some time alone. In this there’s a bit about a car accident and how the seriously injured family members will never sit around the kitchen again in the same way as they ready themselves for school — extended over the course of the novel is the same dynamic, which infects the reader (me at least) with a sense of gratitude and amplifies perception of the everyday surrounding world, including thoughts and feelings and dreams, ie, the internal world. But also this achieved simple straightforward spookiness. Yes, I was spooked one night as I put down the book and turned off the light, listening to insects, animals (owls, foxes, our cat), and distant thunder. Only criticism is the Emil section where he talks about a band called Ohia (presumably it’s Songs:Ohia), but I did love when Emil talks about the warmth and effortless licks in David Crosby’s “If I Could Only Remember My Name” (cool to see a suggested Garcia reference in a Knausgaard novel). Also liked that it ends with an essay, a la War & Peace, although the similarities end there. I had hopes for this and looked forward to its arrival, thought it maybe a little hokey and underdone through the first two-hundred pages, but then couldn’t put it down until the end, reading 100+ pages a day. For a book in part about belief, let’s just say I remain a believer in this author — I’m actually low-key astounded by his ability to meld “high” and “low” literature in a convincing, moving, intellectually satisfying or at least intriguing fashion, all while evoking the world around Bergen, Norway, as well as believably describing worlds of the mind, imagination, and the beyond.

Crossroads: The Key to All Mythologies #1 by Jonathan Franzen
Macmillan

So well-done, engaging, unpredictable, likeable, at times profound, moving at times, extraordinarily well-characterized, dramatic (plot-propelling conflict ever-arising), with stretches of believable, often religious/morality-related interiority, steady third-person focused on a Hildebrandt family member per chapter, dealing with all the vices and virtues of life, patient narrative pace that’s nevertheless always revved up in veering, vervy language, sentences so often starting with some clause creating anticipation for subject and verb, with the locations and psychiatric concerns and some thematics (dynamics of generosity as in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men) related to DFW grafted into the novel’s structure and skin, especially with Perry (160 IQ, drug problem, so smart he’s essentially stupid, ultimately tragic). Really enjoyed reading nearly 100 pages a day, could see the world and these people and care for them, appreciated and admired the novel, but also so often everything seemed to reflect on the author, the characters’ insecurities the author’s (Russ’s envy of the cooler Ambrose?), and the world so vividly evoked and realistic seemed mechanized if never false, arranged exactly this way by the author lord of that world, each part orchestrated and intentional, rarely inadvertent or intuitive. The single lingering impression is that Franzen is a masterful author whose mastery is the single lingering impression — I don’t come away from the book thinking about its themes while otherwise doing dishes etc or with an image imprinted forever in my imagination (no matter how vivid the scenes are) or a sense of wonder or mystery or elevated perception of the inexhaustible abundance of life — I come away thinking Franzen has defended his status as a major American writer. Which is weird. It’s like he gets an A+, like he knows the contemporary literary fiction novel production game and plays it so wonderfully well, but there’s a grade beyond grades that’s unattainable for him, in part because he’s too in control, there’s not enough room for the reader to co-create the text? Laughed aloud twice although most of the book is written with a sense of humor, veer and verve — the humor is more in the implausibility of every family member undergoing a major life crisis at the exact time. Will definitely read Crossroads 2 and will probably even watch the related series on Netflix or HBO. Of note, the guitar guy on the cover is playing a blues shuffle in A, like Johnny B. Goode more than Crossroads Blues, but at least it’s a blues rhythm form — a meaningless superficial cover detail I liked.

ELADATL: A History of the East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines by Sesshu Foster and Arturo Romo
City Lights

Consider the dirigible, the airship, the zeppelin. High hopes for luxurious travel in graceful ghostly style high above the churning ocean. Airborne behemoths, leviathans of the deep superimposed on the sky as a form of transportation, these sky-traversing vessels ran on super-flammable gas or something like that, the Hindenburg had some issues coming in for a landing in Lakehurst, NJ, 1937, immortalized on the cover of Led Zeppelin’s first album, a black and white photo I saw in color one evening in my mid-teens, amazed the next morning to see it returned to its traditional state. Like Moby Dick crossed with Icarus, the gorgeous doomed airship seems like a top-notch symbol for ye olde American Dream of the melting pot raising all races up and up as co-equal citizens. Sesshu Foster — an (east) LA poet and author of Atomik Aztek, first published 19 years ago, winner of the Believer Book Award, and one of the most memorable, enjoyable, hyperkinetic, quantum-reality performances in American prose so far of the 21st century — returns with another all-over-the-place crazy soaring and ultimately exploded false history, deploying every possible postmodern/Laurence Sterne approach, of a sort of gypsy cab/alternate secret underground airship transportation line featuring obscurely located, beautifully illuminated stations outfitted with crappy plastic chairs, not following precise schedules at all, linking destinations all over California, extending maybe to the southeastern US and Mexico and Central America and maybe even Croatia? Through the first 165 pages I was thinking how funny it was that the author’s surname is Foster when the only author who approaches this sort of associative thematic play and delight in language was Foster Wallace, comparing it to Paul Betty’s The Sellout or at times Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer, all set to essentially jump up and down about it, but then came twenty pages of false random quotations attributed to famous names, a riveting fight scene, and then scenes that were really dreams involving characters with names (Mel, Sergio, etc) who didn’t seem characterized at all or enough or certainly didn’t exist in my mind as any sort of human construct. It then exploded into a flaming cascade of ephemera, an imaginative and creative use of old photographs and forged old documents and letters etc, a display of detritus, a cyclone of trash from the ashes of the doomed transportation line high above east LA and thereabouts that may or may not have ever existed, a dream that’s real that’s unreal that in its unreal reality is nevertheless the dream we’ve lived, or something like that — maybe something conceptually extended to relate to the indigenous experience post-conquest in the southeastern American diaspora, or how the bloated flying whale of the American Dream explodes to reveal a perpetual underclass oppressed by corporations and the state? As an idea, conceptually, the book sort of needs to go down in flames — and the diffuse creative cascade of photos and texts and whatever in the book’s last third felt more extraneous than significant, poignant, beautiful, politically insightful etc. Worth it alone however for the chapter about the Poet of the Universe. And overall highly highly recommended to anyone interested in the possibilities of the novel and unconcerned with plot and character etc or at least willing and able to read a novel like a poem.

*

To support the kind publishers who have taken a chance on my writing, please acquire a copy of Neutral Evil ))) and/or JRZDVLZ. Or my translation of Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador. Or Thanks + Sorry + Good Luck: Rejection Letters From the Eyeshot Outbox directly from the publisher. Or even a copy of The Shimmering Go-Between directly from me (the publisher is kaput).

Winner of the Award for Best Novel I Read in 2018 (A Time to Love and a Time to Die), Plus A Bit About Three Other Novels by Erich Maria Remarque (All Quiet on the Western Front, The Road Back, and A Night in Lisbon)

A funny thing happened in the kitchen at work a few years ago. A colleague mentioned that she had been an intern at Archipelago Books, a Brooklyn-based publisher of translated lit that I deem highly, to put it lightly. The fact that she had interned there floored me since, up until that time and as far as I knew, it seemed like very few people at work — most likely no one — had heard of Archipelago, let alone owned/read any of their books or spent time in their offices etc.

Talking with this colleague in the kitchen one day, she asked for book recommendations after recommending an Archipelago publication she had worked on, Stone Upon Stone by Wiesław Myśliwski.

I can’t exactly remember what I recommended but I probably said that I tend to like to read translated lit by German and Austrians (Bernhard, Mann, Zweig, et al.), often from the peri-WWII period. I may have recommended Garden, Ashes by Danilo Kis (not German or Austrian, I know).

She asked if I’d read Erich Maria Remarque? I’d never heard the name and couldn’t even seem to wrap my head around it. Who? It really didn’t sound familiar. A few times I asked her to repeat it. Was it really possible that someone at work had recommended a heralded German writer from early/mid-20th century who I hadn’t even heard of, let alone read?! Was I one of those people who don’t even know how much they don’t even know?! (Yes, everyone is one of those people, ideally, right?)

Anyway, she said his A Night in Lisbon was one of her favorite novels but that I’d probably heard of All Quiet on the Western Front?

Yeah, sure, I’d heard of that one, knew it more as the title of an old movie, but honestly I think I sort of thought it was a western, a cowboy flick, set in some dusty plain, cacti and plateaus and gunslingers all around. I guess my attention had always stopped at the word “western” and never made it to “front” or thought of “front” as a weather pattern, a cold front, and not the front lines . . .

Soon after, I read AQOTWF, astounded by its intensity, its images, and in general its fractured narrative. A Night in Lisbon was OK — I was distracted by its POV — but, based on recommendations online, I then acquired A Time to Love and a Time to Die, despite its ponderous James Bond-ian title, and midway through I essentially impulsively ordered everything else EMR had written, although I haven’t yet made my way through it all.

I’ll update this as I read more EMR but for now, below I include my immediate impressions of four EMR novels, one of which I award the extraordinarily irrelevant prestigious Best Book I Read in 2018 Award, although TBH it’s actually probably definitely a tie with My Struggle: Book Six and my second time through War and Peace, this time in Constance Garnett’s translation.

A Time to Love and a Time to Die (1954)
Translated by Denver Lindley

WINNER OF THE AWARD FOR BEST NOVEL I READ IN 2018

Teleportive WWII novel, top-notch dramatization of the complexity of humanity, formal and thematic excellence throughout. It’s about a German soldier who leaves the Russian front during WWII as the tide is turning for the Nazis and goes on furlough to his home city for a few weeks. He can’t find his parents in the bombed-out ruins and runs into an old classmate, a comely young woman, and falls in love as, every few days, air raid sirens sound and buildings rise into the air as all hell breaks loose. A completely absorbing reading experience, couldn’t put it down, woke up early to read with coffee, that sort of book. Few reviews on Goodreads in English — many in Arabic, Russian, and maybe Romanian. My third novel by this author and I have another coming tomorrow.

Super-conventional form perfectly done, always patiently pushing ahead, therefore it feels like an organic/natural/real (ie, not imposed by the author) plot, the procession of days as a soldier’s on leave for a few weeks “between death and death,” the first bloom of love as everything around the lovers not so much withers as it explodes and incinerates; everything super-charged by the potential arrival of devastation from above, the inevitability of horror (“a howl arose, increasing until it became maddening and unbearable, as though a huge steel planet were plunging straight at the cellar”) and gruesome scenes of, for example, a five-year-old girl impaled on a shattered staircase. Streaks of gnarly description, always utilitarian and accessible prose, never clipped or degraded or showy — the tone is perfectly centrist, flowing, poetic at times, but best of all it disappears and yields to visions of this shattered German city, its inhabitants trying to survive, everyone living not so much under the thumb of the Nazis but more so under the rule of Luck. As with his famous WWI novel and every other WWII- and Holocaust-related novel or memoir I’ve read, survival always depends on luck.

But this earns my highest praise more so because it so naturally detonates Literature’s primary payload: it dramatizes the complexity of humanity more clearly than most novels I’ve read. Not all Germans are anti-Semitic monsters intent on taking over the world and eradicating their racial inferiors. The novel depicts arch-evil types, superhuman thoughtless automaton murderers in the S.S., as well as devastated, philosophical citizens who hide Jews — and other well-characterized characters most concerned with self-preservation during the worst of times. Toward the end, it’s impossible not to root for the hero Ernst even though he’s fighting with the Nazis — he’s an absolutely 3D sympathetic free-thinking human being in an extraordinarily difficult situation trying to stay focused and survive even as the guts of a new recruit splatter all over him after catching a flung grenade in the stomach.

Everyone’s read All Quiet on the Western Front (see below) but it seems like few have read the author’s other novels, most of which were semi-recently re-published in attractive modern paperback form. The title of this one probably in part accounts for it being previously totally unknown to me — it seems like an Ian Fleming/James Bond ripoff by way of The Byrds’ appropriation of biblical verses. Alternate titles could have been “Switzerland” (not reduced to rubble and therefore often mentioned as an ideal place to escape to, although it seems impossible to get to), “An Eden in Hell” (good assonance, bad pun — suggests a few of the spots where Ernst and Elisabeth take mental, spiritual, physical refuge and just live a normal life for a few moments), “Shelter from the Storm” (novel was published in 1957, pre-dates Dylan’s song by almost two decades) — the actual title seems a little too sentimental and monumental, a little too B-movie?

Here’s a fantastic passage where our hero Ernst and his future wife Elisabeth are sitting on a hill in a wooded area where the trees are covered in strips of tin foil that fall before air raids to jam and distort radio transmissions:

“The trees around the clearing were covered with strips that fluttered from their twigs, twisting and sparkling in the breeze. The sun broke through the mountainous clouds and transformed the woods into a glittering fairyland. What once had fluttered down in the midst of ravening death and the shrill noise of destruction now hung silent and shiny on the trees and had become silver and a shimmering and the memory of childhood stories and the great festival of peace.”

“Oh man” I said as I finished it, but I don’t want to spoil the end for anyone.

Also, I haven’t seen the old cinemascope rendition, “photographed where it happened,” but this trailer makes it all seem pretty cheesy.

All Quiet on the Western Front (1929)
Translated by A.W. Wheen

What a novel — required reading for anyone with even a sliver of a glimmer of a warm feeling in their loins for warfare. Soldiers running on stumps, scorched lungs from gas, hands hanging on barbed wire separated from the body, an extra-active accelerated masterpiece of a scene involving a bombarded cemetery with no clear distinction between the body parts of comrades or the upturned occupants of caskets — totally gnarly and maybe alluded to in the fifth part of 2666. Or at least it felt familiar. Also moments of respite, cigars, R&R, brotherhood, barbecuing suckling pigs and idiotically attracting bombs with the smoke (this comes a few pages after the narrator derides black — probably American — enemy soldiers for smoking cigarettes and providing such easy targets), a great conjugal visit scene set in a room with eight injured soldiers. For most of the book I thought it occurred during WWII and therefore thought thematically it was about humanizing the Nazi, but then they’re inspected by the Kaiser and I checked the 1929 pub date and realized it’s really just probably the best “war is hell” novel I’ve ever read. Let the politicians slug it out in a ring and let the kids live their damn lives. 4.5 stars — the translation could use an upgrade, lots of weird outdated UKisms and wonky phrases that don’t quite make sense. But generally a kinetic, poetic, tense novel that feels absolutely real and everyone should read. Will read a lot more of this Erich Maria Remarque guy, who I’d never heard of until recently — I’ve generally been familiar with the title forever but associated it with a movie I haven’t seen and honestly probably thought was a western . . .

The Road Back (1931)
Translated by A.W. Wheen

PTSD in post-WWI Germany, the sequel to All Quiet on the Western Front. Episodic, not always linear, first-person narrator although it sometimes feels more like a close third, or even a sort of omniscient first-person when, thanks to Ernst’s deep connection with his troubled former comrades, scenes are dramatized that the narrator couldn’t know about (friend returning to the trenches alone at night and then shooting himself; how a room feels after another friend cuts open an artery and bleeds out). Teenagers taught to fight and survive, to kill and make it through, dreaming of home and returning alive, holding-up their return as their hope, have trouble reacclimating of course when they finally return and sit with loved ones and see the familiar landscape of their youth as a potential battlefield, have no patience for “fine phrases” about heroism or The Fatherland or anything along those lines, find their studies total bullshit, can’t sit in a classroom and teach penmanship to 7 to 10 year olds when the horror they’ve experienced, the sense of betrayal, solely occupies their mind — each of a handful of comrades not-so-deeply characterized (stage II case of Disembodied Proper Noun Syndrome) try to make their way back to a semblance of sustainable existence, some sort of coming to terms (Ernst ultimately finds a sort of peace via mindful/mystical communion with nature, lying down in the grass alone, just looking, listening, being), some not at all. Lacks the drive and blatant high stakes of the other EMR novels I’ve read (I’m on a completist quest, FYI, and have five or six others on a shelf in order of publication ready to go this year). Almost started skimming midway but right when I started to think three-stars could devolve to two it picked-up and ended tremendously. As always with EMR, what’s triggered completism, there are moments of extreme vividness, up there with Prince Andrei on his back looking at blue sky, Proust’s elevating airplane, Leopold Bloom’s kidney sliding in his frying pan, Bartlebooth’s watercolors returning to the ocean, etc: in this, it’s a war veteran sheep dog named Wolf fighting with the farmer’s bulldog Pluto and then later doing what he’s been bred to do, excelling at herding sheep although he was raised on the battlefield (Wolf’s road back is hard-wired); or when the comrades run to the square with their “faces of the trench” as the military led by a former comrade threatens to turn a machine gun on a crowd of labor protestors led by a former Jewish comrade; or a scene at an official military-sanctioned brothel when Ernst the narrator loses his virginity; the classroom scene when the young veteran students revolt against the principal’s fine phrases of heroism and again at the end the courtroom scene when the comrades rise up against the judge and lawyer in defense of their friend’s murder of a man who’d been macking on a woman who’d been his only beacon through it all.

Was worried about this one and a little disappointed until page 180 or so but from now on I’ll be completely confident that EMR will deliver. He was dramatizing boredom and dissatisfaction, which always makes what follows all the better, although in this it felt like it went on a few dozen pages too long and wasn’t sufficiently concentrated?

But generally this is another great EMR novel — since it’s about PTSD (well before the term was coined), it lacks the sense that death could visit with every turned page, but a worthwhile way to spend two long sittings today at jury duty. Always stretches of top-notch translated prose, although in this the translation, especially in dialogue, occasionally seemed wonky thanks most likely to old German slang rendered as old British slang. Also interesting in that it was published in 1931, so before the rise of the forces that would wreck everything hundreds of times over in a decade or so (no lessons in this learned at all) — those young students of Ernst’s would grow up to be in their 30s during WWII and the teens at the end gleefully performing military exercises and calling WWI veterans cowards and traitors to The Fatherland foreshadow what’s to come. Hunger and inflation are only touched on.

Generally, I think I’m interested in this era for reasons related to rising fascism worldwide and Trumpism, seeing our own times through the perspective of 80 to 100 years ago in Europe, the general sense of HEFT that runs through these novels that always elevates the prose (translated German is probably my favorite flavor in the English language), but also because I’m searching for Bolano’s sources for the Hans Reiter section in 2666.

Here’s a quotation representative of theme and translation (although the language in this bit is a little elevated since Ernst is waxing significantly) from right before he decides he can’t be a schoolteacher:

“What am I able to teach you then? Should I tell you how to pull the string on a hand grenade, how best to throw it at a human being? . . . Should I mimic how a man with a stomach wound will groan, how one with a lung wound gurgles and one with a head wound whistles? More I do not know. More I have not learned.

Should I take you to the brown-and-green map there, move my finger across it and tell you that here love was murdered? Should I explain to you that the books you hold in your hands are but nets with which men design to snare your simple souls, to entangle you in the undergrowth of fine phrases, and in the barbed wire of falsified ideas?

I stand here before you, a polluted, a guilty man and can only implore you ever to remain as you are, never to suffer the bright light of your childhood to be misused as a blow flame of hate. About your brows still blows the breath of innocence. How then should I presume to teach you? Behind me, still pursuing, are the bloody years — How then can I venture among you? Must I not first become a man again myself?”

The Night in Lisbon (1962)
Translated by Ralph Manheim

Nazis, refugees, love worth risking it all for, fatal diseases, intense moments of sudden violence, mystical reflection, lyrical description, insight into the nature of humanity in general and humanity alternately debased and elevated by the pressure of war. As with All Quiet on the Western Front, I finished this and said something like whoa, great book, how the hell hadn’t I heard of this guy before — like Zwieg, he sold a million copies before WWII and then had his books banned. Really accessible story-telling, finely drawn characters, serious thematic heft, and a sense of relevance to the contemporary refugee crisis in Europe. A reason I love reading novels from the WWII era: it serves as a reminder of what went on not so long ago (right around the time my parents were born) and it serves as a warning that the gathering buds of fascism/state-sponsored intolerance need to be nipped real quick before they flower into thorny storms of blood.

Docked a so-called star because of the structure — a refugee tells most of the story to another refugee (the narrator) he’s just met, who he offers to help escape from Lisbon to the United States toward the beginning of WWII. For the most part I managed to distinguish between the present dialogue (double quotation marks – ie, “) and past dialogue (single quotation marks — ie ‘) but it tripped me up more than enough. Zweig and later Bernhard — and surely everyone else 80–100 years ago — relied on the same conceit of a stranger relaying an intense story, but usually things aren’t nearly as dramatized and scenes from the past therefore aren’t nearly as immediate — there’s usually way more exposition, with dialogue summarized instead of rendered with traditional quotations and descriptive attributions. Otherwise, thanks in part to the reliance on past dramatized scenes replete with dialogue, the past bits seem urgent and intense but of course the action’s also very much propelled by serious life/death significance.

*

To support the kind publishers who have taken a chance on my writing, please acquire a copy of Neutral Evil ))) and/or JRZDVLZ. Or my translation of Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador. Or Thanks + Sorry + Good Luck: Rejection Letters From the Eyeshot Outbox directly from the publisher. Or even a copy of The Shimmering Go-Between directly from me (the publisher is kaput).

Winner of the Award for the Most Admirable or Most Memorable or Most “Best” Novel I Read in 2017: The Sellout by Paul Beatty

Audacity, execution, authority, oomph, heft, humor — the most enjoyable, truly enlightened, contemporary novel originally written in the English language I’ve read in a long, long time.

I read some of the author’s first novel after it came out back when I lived in Brooklyn and a friend recommended it but I didn’t make my way too far through it, thinking it too derivative of Ishmael Reed, whose Flight to Canada and Mumbo Jumbo I read in college and loved.

Now, the influence still seems there, the hyperbolic po-mo humor, at times like Mark Leyner walking the satirical high wire of serious sociological significance, but the overall world of the novel, delineated by Dickens LA with a DC frame, plus the wholly characterized characters and the inside jokes and the little pokes at Dave Eggers, Bret Easton Ellis, and the like, the obscure side-references loaded up in the last slot of a sentence’s comic series, the clarity of every sentence and paragraph and the macro-level audacity, the old-fashioned yet not at all sentimental father/son story, it’s safe to say that he’s successfully integrated the Ishmael Reed, who’s name-checked at one point, and individuated.

Reading this every day on the Philly subway, wondering what the primarily black passengers think of this white guy reading a book with lawn jockeys on the cover, and wondering more so what someone might think when they read over my shoulder, was probably one of the best possible places to read this, especially when the story gave way to racism-related essayistic stretches.

Nothing is necessarily unknown that he says but the total package delivered with such humor, energy, authentic intelligence (no Wittgenstein quotations!), with such alacrity and pizzazz (as an old prep-school football coach I had used to say about how we should execute drills), with insider info on the LA surf scene to boot and references to Sun Ra and Lee Morgan, and Adam Youch I guess, the total package hangs together so well and articulates the complexity of everything in the most effective possible way.

The writing, the language, always guns it, veering around corners to find unexpected obstacles it blows right through — one of the most exciting, refreshing, funny novels I’ve read, as soon as I’m done writing this I’ll find a home for it on the bookshelf I reserve for major favorites.