October '25
Goosestepping • Extreme code switching • Facebook gang wars • Seaweed wraps • A gray life
Books read (where & when got):
Migratory Birds, Mariana Oliver trans. Julia Sanches (Transit Books order, 2/10/2022)
Star of the Sea, Elias Khoury trans. Humphrey Davies (Archipelago Books Subscription, ???)
Cécé, Emmelie Prophète trans. Aidan Rooney (Archipelago Books Subscription, 9/7/2025)
Sea Now, Eva Meijer trans. Anne Thompson Melo (CAT Subscription, 10/15/2025)
Grace Period, Maria Judite De Carvalho trans. Margaret Jull Costa (CAT Subscription, 9/20/2025)
Books got:
Sea Now, Eva Meijer trans. Anne Thompson Melo (CAT Subscription, 10/15/2025)
One, None, and a Hundred Grand, Luigi Pirandello trans. Sean Wilsey (Archipelago Books Subscription, 10/25/2025)
The Leucothea Dialogues, Cesare Pavese trans. Minna Zallman Proctor (Archipelago Books Subscription, 10/25/2025)
Pandora, Ana Paula Pacheco trans. Julia Sanches (Transit Books Subscription, 10/20/2025)
Finally: reading more than I’m buying, something I should try to make a habit. The original impetus for this whole project was to whittle down the backlog–I have not been successful. Indeed, the backlog has blossomed, and I hope will continue to do so until, y’know, the end of days. It’s difficult to manage the books I’ve read, though. We’re running out of space, and while I don’t need to keep each and every volume because I might one day read them again, these books are good, and why get rid of a good book? Perhaps I think too many books are good. Or, no, that’s not true. I’m fairly certain most books are bad, but the ones I read are mostly good.
Migratory Birds
Mariana Oliver
trans. Julia Sanches
Transit
Get it at bookshop.org (affiliate link)
Falling somewhere between the loose association of Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights, a book I refuse to stop thinking about, and the crottic implication of Bluets. Elegant, slim, and airy, we are presented with histories and facts to ponder. Look at these geese, Oliver asks, look at these women stacking bricks in post-war Berlin. We look, we sit, we ponder. Connections are hinted at, questions are raised about belonging, leaving, home. World War II, fear, and hiding come up a fair bit. A neat little volume.
Children of the Ghetto II: Star of the Sea
Elias Khoury
trans. Humphrey Davies
Archipelago
Did this kick as hard as Gate of the Sun? Arguably not. But it has other goals, plays with other textures; to give you an idea, the narrator, later in life, encounters “the writer of Gate of the Sun.” There’s a lot of impersonation, code-switching, and pretending. A fair-skinned Palestinian attempts, or finds himself in situations where he can’t avoid, passing as an Israeli. For a while, he lives in a home with pictures on the walls of the Palestinian Family who used to live there, then imagines them as his own. When he says he grew up in a ghetto, everyone assumes he’s talking about the one in Warsaw, not something more local. This occasions an awkward class trip to Poland. The child of a Muslim and a Chirstian, he is constantly falling in with women for whom belief is a border: a Jewish girl, their Polish Catholic guide, the daughter of a Palestinian leader who made too many concessions to the settlers. We often get a third person look back from the future, when he’s a somewhat successful writer; at one point he has a conversation with “the author of Gate of the Sun.” So we’re messing with the idea of hiding behind masks here, is my basic, twenty-minutes-before-bedtime thought. Of needing different personalities, different stories to survive. Thought this was great.
Cécé
Emmelie Prophète
trans. Aidan Rooney
Archipelago
Imagine my surprise to find I’d never before read a book from Haiti. I could’ve sworn I had, at least twice. But no. This one places us squarely in the unending cycle of gang violence in the poor neighborhoods of Port-au-Prince. A young woman does what she can to survive once her mother dies. We see the whole block: neighbors, good and bad, people who run out of luck. We watch gang leader after gang leader fall to mutinies. Cécé lives off likes: she posts everything she sees to Facebook and eventually paid promotions find their way. Interesting as a voyeuristic peek into a radically different life, thankfully with little direct exposition aimed at an audience that will buy it.
Sea Now
Eva Meijer
trans. Anne Thompson Melo
Transit
Holland, and only Holland, starts to flood. No one can explain it, or the explanations provided aren’t very good. The first part of the book is the event: the creeping inundation of a major(ish) European country. We hear the news reports, the gossip, the progress of the tide; we meet individuals among the many people living in the country, some who are instantial, capturing individual moments of panic that speak to the greater national calamity, while others recur and begin to reveal themselves as our characters. We’re given disembodied voices that we eventually learn are newscasts, poems, notes taped to walls. Our characters, a scientist, an activist, and a poet, then return to their flooded country in small, borrowed boat. It becomes a classic quest: there are still people trying to live and die out there, and they meet the mad, the starving, the happy. Things get spooky. There are more voices and some storms, and an ambiguous, worrisome ending (I think—I can’t really remember and I can’t find the book as I write this, the cats knocked a pile over the other day and now I can’t find my copy. Also, we got cats.*) Eerie, obliquely climate-related. I was impressed.
Grace Period
Maria Judite De Carvalho
trans. Margaret Jull Costa
Two Lines
It’s getting late and I’d really like to finish drafting this. Anyway. This was such a nicely odd one. Guy’s trying to sell his family home because his lover is sick and wants to see the Acropolis before she dies. It’s a really interesting take on the whole “man of a certain age” idea, the mid-life crisis arriving somewhat early. He sells the house to the father of an old friend, whose wife he remembers as beautiful; she had an affair with his father, which may or may not have led to a half-sister. Anyway the maybe-half sister starts showing up at his work. They hang out. Nothing really changes, which is the point. The prose is sharp but the world is hazy, a little uncanny most of the time. Nothing, not even the prose, seems to be on the level. But it’s a taut, strange, surprisingly stressful real estate novella. I’ll keep it.
* Just two. Their names are Margaret and Mona. E named the latter after the Mona Lisa, the “most beautiful woman in the world.” I am surprised how much I am enjoying having cats.
Always love reading your list Adam,though it usually makes me feel an admonishment for not reading enough. Glad you are enjoying the cats. Cats are the business, love 'em.