June & July '25
Learn the secret language • Swapping pieces • [Reference to Australia] • Down at the docks • A bad trip • Transplant omniscient
Books read (where & when got):
Intermezzo, Sally Rooney (Helen's pile, --)
The Iliac Crest, Cristina Rivera Garza trans. Sarah Booker (Amazon, 12/20/2024)
The Island, Antigone Kefala (Transit Books Subscription, 6/10/2025)
Manhattan Beach, Jennifer Egan (Helen's Kindle, --)
The Heart, Maylis de Kerangal trans. Sam Taylor (Helen's Kindle, 7/19)
Tripticks, Ann Quin (Hodges Figgis, Dublin, IRL, 7/24/2025)
Books got:
The Island, Antigone Kefala (Transit Books Subscription, 6/10/2025)
The Living and the Rest, Jose Eduardo Agualuna trans. Daniel Hahn (Archipelago Books Subscription, 6/3/2025)
Backlight, Pirkko Saisio trans. Mia Spangenberg (CAT Subscription, 6/10/2025)
Alterations, Cori Winrock (Transit Books Subscription, 7/19/2025)
Tripticks, Ann Quin (Hodges Figgis, Dublin, Ireland, 7/24/2025)
Child of Fortune, Yuko Tsushima trans. Geraldine Harcourt (Hodges Figgis, 7/24/2025)
Stories of Ireland, Brian Friel (Hodges Figgis, 7/24/2025)
Heart Lamp, Banu Mushtaq trans. Deepa Bashti (Books Upstairs, Dublin, Ireland, 7/24/2025)
Scenes from a Childhood, Jon Fosse trans. Damion Searls (Books Upstairs, 7/24/2025)
Wrote the June portion of this before we did our annual trip to Ireland. Did not send, because…? I had a whole thing about the heat, it’s no longer hot, or at least isn’t for now. Books!
The Iliac Crest
Cristina Rivera Garza
trans. Sarah Booker
Feminist Press
A work that plays with ambiguity and alchemy. A doctor at a hospital (really a hospice, all his patients are there to die) on an island welcomes two women into his home. One is an ex-lover, who’s mute and ill, while the other identifies herself, impossibly, as Amparo Davila, a Mexican writer. Amparo tends to the ex and they develop their own language. The doctor goes to the mainland to find the real Davila. He becomes a patient at his own hospital; everyone keeps addressing him as if he were a woman; his boss learns the secret language and takes off with the Davilaling, leaving the doctor with his ex, and the language finally clicks.
For a book that depends on vagaries and shifting roles, there’s a lot to sink one’s teeth into. I’m thinking a lot about Marie NDiaye here, whose stories always have enough signposts of our reality that, when it bends, it does so with ease. Rivera Garza tends to place her work in unnamed places and countries, in order to set things a little more adrift–and it does give more license, setting us up in an edge-place like an island, a hospital where no patients leave alive.
Get it at bookshop.org (affiliate link)
Intermezzo
Sally Rooney
FSG
Good, mostly, though it did tend to go on a bit. It’s been a while since I read any Sally Rooney, and I’m still looking forward to Beautiful World. No one was like, a down-on-their-luck medievalist, and the narrators were just so, so unrelentingly horny, but this was still pretty interesting. It’s a fairly classic mirroring setup, with several pairings: two brothers, one older, successful in work and with women; the younger a former chess prodigy who seems to have peaked at 16, not really a successful social being. But their father’s death occasions several collisions: the older struggles with balancing his affection for two women, the younger with a newfound romance that flips the genders and age gaps in the older brother’s relationship. This is the interlude of the title, which in chess are the moves you make to deal with something before getting back to the plan, which is the arc of this book. Everything settles, it’s highly readable, there’s a fair bit of back and forth and hand-wringing interiority over decisions and the book probably could’ve dropped fifty to a hundred pages or so and been less of a skimmer. Things settle down, and everyone carries on.
Tripticks
Ann Quin
& Other Stories
Ah man, I was so excited to see this. I saw it on a shelf and immediately grabbed it, I absolutely loved Three, a novel that overlays voices in some sections then gives them truly disembodied air in others, a novel that requires work but offers tremendous reward for it. This one plays with narrative as well, burying it in a swaggering, grumbling sludge of language, and burdened by satire. There are images, a cross-country car chase with the narrator and his “X-wife” and her new lover, where who’s chasing who is switching, a talking-to from a billionaire with a cigar. Very much an artifact of its time, I’m sorry to say this is going in the sell pile.
Heart Lamp
Banu Mishtaq
trans. Deepa Bashti
& Other Stories
Simple, classically structured stories based in working-class Muslim communities in India. The perspective is a draw, certainly, as there is not enough in English coming directly from these voices, but I have to acknowledge a kind of voyeuristic othering, as there might always be when we’re suddenly given access to a community we never would otherwise. This won the Booker International, which usually selects some bangers, and some of the stories certainly were: “Red Lungi,” for example, in which a woman, for want of something to take up her kids’ time during summer vacation, decides it’s time for them to be circumcised, and she’s rich enough to offer to pay for circumcisions for the children of the poor. But while the other boys have their tips snipped at the mosque by a man who laughs when asked to boil his implements, her children have it done at a clean, well-lighted doctor’s office. We’re tracking a poor boy and the rich woman in this one; in the end, he recovers quickly while her children writhe. These sorts of twists and surprises abound, though some lack sufficient setup (in one, a child dies from neglect, but its death on the last page is its introduction). Some of the stories were constructed a little awkwardly, so the fact that this won the Booker International elicited brief, shrugging surprise. But I have rarely encountered a translation that captures the thorniness and quirks of the original language so well. Obviously I don’t speak Kannada but some of its rhythms, repetitions, and diminutives slide through, a thoroughly localized post-colonial argot, rather than a flattened neoliberal English.
The Island
Antigone Kefala
Transit
Through no fault of its own this book made no impression on me. Read this in the week before leaving for Ireland, when I was trying to wrap up everything I had to do for my job, get E ready to immediately start kindergarten (kindergarten!) when we got back, and pack. Not a time to read something this.. vaporous. A stronger narrative would’ve been suited. I’m sure it’s good, I’m really sorry, I have no idea.
Manhattan Beach
Jennifer Egan
Scribner
A perfect plane book. Strong narrative anchors, adventure (gangsters! World War II! Underwater welding!), characters who are easily liked but have a lil smidge of complication. You learn a lot about the mechanics of pre-scuba diving without actually realizing it, the technical knowledge is so casually woven in (and, given the danger involved, often heightens the atmosphere). Wraps up neatly with the hero making a heroic decision and leaving for a new life. Pure fun and not dumb.
The Heart
Maylis de Krengal
trans. Sam Taylor
Picador
The surest way for a book to go unread in our household is for Helen or I to recommend it to the other. No matter how surely we know the other will enjoy it, or find inspiration from it, it will just lay there. I have bought books as a gift for Helen which she has read, enjoyed, and with a “you should definitely read this,” casually doomed. There are certain writers we share (Sebald), certain that are more hers (Eimear McBride, Anne Enright) and some that are more mine (Jon Fosse). For several years now that’s a divide that’s held, but it’s better when it’s more porous. I was looking for stuff to read on the kindle and noticed Helen had bought this. I probably showed a little too much surprise, when no reaction would’ve served me better, having handed Helen de Kerangal’s Eastbound but a few months ago. This one is about a heart that gets transplanted, a vagrant omniscient that swivels expertly from patient to nurse to doctor to transplant specialist to loved one as more and more people become involved, stepping on each stone as we make our way to the recipient. Everyone is interesting, no matter how small a part they play. Each is handled with nuance and the patterning is pitch-perfect. This is very, very good, is what I’m saying. I loved Eastbound, I have her Canoes in my pile, she’s two for two for me. And for the record, if you're going to play a sound on headphones while doctors extract my organs (I mean, who'd take em?), I'd want it to be E humming jingle bells to himself, like he does whenever he plays alone.