June 24
Italian affairs • Fosse lite • High-altitude husbandry • Mother overshares • Hiberno-fascism steals sleep • A pile of dead doppelgangers
Books read (where & when got):
As a Man Grows Older, Italo Svevo trans. Beryl de Zoete (Daedalus Used Books, Charlottesville, VA, 2/23/2024)
Aliss at the Fire, Jon Fosse trans. Damion Searls (Dalkey Archive order, 6/3/2024)
The Alp, Arno Camenisch trans. Donal McLaughlin (Dalkey Archive order, 6/3/2024)
Feebleminded, Ariana Harwicz trans. Annie McDermott & Carolina Orloff (Books Upstairs, Dublin, IRL, 12/15/2021)
Prophet Song, Paul Lynch (Gift from Helen, 12/24/2023)
The Novices of Lerna, Ángel Bonomini trans. Jordan Landeman (Transit Books subscription, 5/20/2024)
Books got:
Aliss at the Fire, Jon Fosse trans. Damion Searls (Dalkey Archive order, 6/3/2024)
The Alp, Arno Camenisch trans. Donal McLaughlin (Dalkey Archive order, 6/3/2024)
Morning and Evening, Jon Fosse trans. Damion Searls (Dalkey Archive order, 6/3/2024)
Card Catalogue, Alistair Ian Blyth (Dalkey Archive order, 6/3/2024)
A Question of Belonging: Crónicas, Hebe Uhart trans. Mariana Enríquez (Archipelago Books subscription, 6/7/2024)
The Joyful Song of the Patridge, Paulina Chiziane trans. David Brookshaw (Archipelago Books subscription, 6/7/2024)
The Cheffe, Marie Ndiaye trans. Jordan Stump (Blue Whale Books, Charlottesville, VA, 6/7/2024)
An Ordinary Youth, Walter Kempowski trans. Michael Lipkin (New Dominion, Charlottesville, VA, 6/28/2024)
The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers' Guild, Mathias Énard trans. Frank Wynne (New Dominion, 6/28/2024)
Vengeance is Mine, Marie Ndiaye trans. Jordan Stump (New Dominion, 6/28/2024)
The most I’ll dare to say about June is that June had a rhythm. I blew through a lot of short books without necessarily devoting any extra time to reading, though Prophet Song kept me up later than my usual bedtime. Treated myself to an order from Dalkey Archive with some real winners, including two Fosse books, and Helen got me a gift certificate for Father’s Day, which I used to get new books by Ndiaye, Enard, and a Kempowski translation. I find myself doing that more and more, just buying writers I have read before, exploring less, though I gambled on a couple of things in the Dalkey order that paid off. Also spent more time writing than I had in any month in years, though only about what I’d do in three or four days during my MFA. I continue to tread water creatively, never threatening to finish anything.
As a Man Grows Older
Italo Svevo
trans. Beryl de Zoete
New York Review Books
Jacket copy on this claims Joyce admired this book. No idea why. Sometimes I stand in front of all the books I haven’t read yet, completely unable to decide what to choose next, and then remind myself that it doesn’t fucking matter and just grab something. So it was the night I started this, which I read out of a lazy trust in New York Review Books and, I guess, an “interest” in Italian literature. Anyway. I kind of liked it. A washed-up novelist is obsessed with his mistress. His furious jealousy consumes him, he concocts all kinds of plans to be with and sometimes be rid of her. He lives with his homely sister, who’s in love with his strapping sculptor best friend. Like any addiction, the cycles of the novelist’s desperate need for his charming, mendacious lover and his subsequent frenzied suspicion of and distaste for her gets repetitive, and the translation seemed a little stiff or old-fashioned (it’s from 1932). There’s lots of exclamation points and characters thinking to themselves in quotes to, y’know, develop character. In a way the novelist and his lady-friend are the least interesting characters in there–the ending opens up the sister’s life, a fascinating neighbor is introduced, the sculptor shows his loyalty–I’ll add it to the nai-robb shelf and leave it there.
Get it at bookshop.org (affiliate link: when you buy using these links, I get a percentage)
Aliss at the Fire
Jon Fosse
trans. Damion Searls
Dalkey Archive
What comfort there was in opening a Jon Fosse book and slipping into his meditative rhythms again. I don’t know how accurate or reliable Damion Searls is as a a translator, and I don’t care, because whatever he’s doing he should just keep going. This is a short little book but bears some hallmarks of Fosse, or at least the Fosse I’ve read: long, recursive sentences, a child in danger, porous temporality, mythic woven with the modern, four people with more or less the same name, everyday dialogue rendered enigmatic through stiffness and repetition but then someone says something colloquial or funny to remind you that these are, in fact, people talking, lots of looking at the ocean, a giant flaming head, a well-built rowboat. This one makes a lot of similar moves to Septology, and it feels like a warm-up to that tome, both for Fosse and for a reader, so if you want to get a sense of what he’s all about before you tackle the big one, try this. I bought another Fosse this month but I’m saving it for later.
Get it at bookshop.org (affiliate link)
The Alp
Arno Camenisch
trans. Donal McLaughlin
Dalkey Archive
This was so, so unexpectedly good. It’s one of those books that’s about work, a space, a way of living–four men on an Alp with a bunch of animals, no real “plot” per say, just a bunch of guys doing their job, looking at mountains, looking at trees, looking at cows, noticing the shit out of things, sometimes noticing literal shit, talking, messing with hikers and tourists, getting drunk, disappearing and fucking up. Work frames their whole lives, to the point that they are known solely by their roles: dairyman, farmhand, cowherd, swineherd.Other characters are the policeman, the milk inspector, the tourist, etc. Airily told in loosely associative crots, giving it an otherworldly feel, even though it’s clear we’re in an earthy, off-grid present, albeit one that feels like the past. I fear I’m making this book sound boring as hell when it’s actually entrancing. Reminds me, in a way, of The Corner That Held Them, which I am forever recommending. Read it.
Get it at bookshop.org (affiliate link)
Feebleminded
Ariana Harwicz
trans. Annie McDermott & Carolina Orloff
Charco Press
This one, wow, ok. So: we have a narrator, a young woman who lives with her mother. Sexuality is woven into their relationship: as in, they have access to each other’s sex lives in a :cough: unexpected way, though we’re not talking about incest–it’s far more uncomfortably nuanced than that. Our narrator, in explaining how this sexuality was woven into this relationship by her mother, explains how she came to be so very messed up. She’s been taught that sex is also the tool to find a protector, a provider. Mother and daughter are intense, insatiable people, and prose is delivered in good old square-page paragraphs that go on for anywhere from a half to a handful of pages before they end, and that little white space is the breathing room you need before you dive back in. A taut and squirmy read worth checking out.
Get it at bookshop.org (affiliate link)
Prophet Song
Paul Lynch
Atlantic Monthly Press
Like I said, I lost sleep reading this. Absolutely could not put it down. Throughout, it maintains a demanding tension much like The Birthday Party by Laurent Marvignier, in that you have to keep reading, and read every word without skimming, capture every nugget that gets stuck in your throat [wtf?]. We’re focused on a woman named Eilish, an accomplished scientist, mother of four, wife, living in Dublin as a new regime has risen in Ireland. Drip by drip, the country tips towards totalitarianism, then calamitous civil war. Eilish holds on, determined. The fact that she is in her home, that she has her family, is enough for her to stay through all of it–no matter how many times she is offered a way out. It’s neither heroic nor idiotically stubborn, but through the delicate buildup of her internal deliberations, made to feel right and human, the only real choice, even as you’re willing her to flee; the latter parts of the book borrow from the sieges of Sarajevo and Damascus, and things get bad.This is a richly described world, made to feel immediately real: a rebel soldier gives her a lift and she hears the private schools and rugby in his voice; a friendly neighbor whose naive confusion is somehow stuck in my mind. This is a riveting, claustrophobic ride of a book. I read it, then pushed it on Helen, who experienced it similarly to me, and I’d be down here on the couch, typing or reading, and every few hours she’d gchat something like No! No! Oh god no! and I’d know exactly what page she’d just turned.
Get it at bookshop.org (affiliate link)
The Novices of Lerna
Ángel Bonomini
trans. Jordan Landeman
Transit Books
There’s nothing better than the scholar-in-a-fix plotline. From the jacket copy: “unambitious scholar Ramon Beira receives a mysterious invitation…” Yes please, I’m down, giddyup. What will he discover? Will he finish his work? Scholars in novels do all the normal stuff people in novels do, like go to the store and emote and wonder about the moon, but they’re also just like, working in the background. Trying to get enough published so they can get tenure. Anyway, this little novella and the stories tacked on to the back of it are good and strange. Reality is often a little off, something uncanny’s going on, but Bonomini is often playing with language and the act of storytelling itself, such as in “The Bengal Tiger,” which builds a story by implication from accreting, conflicting short declarative sentences. Lightly Borgesian in that each story centers around a concept or riddle that he’s exploring, assuming that is part of what people mean by “Borgesian.” It’s not at all dense, it’s a whole lot of fun.
Get it at bookshop.org (affiliate link)