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.
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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).