Reading list: July & August 24
Raise your kids in semi-feral isolation • Little fascist asides • It's a war of succession • Alienation Cruise • Last stop Vladivostok • Just write one book • Kurosawa on the Loop Line • Caste legacy
Books read (where & when got):
Arturo's Island, Elsa Morante trans. Isabel Quigly (Blue Whale Books, Charlottesville, VA, 5/9/2024)
An Ordinary Youth, Walter Kempowski trans. Michael Lipkin (New Dominion, Charlottesville, VA, 6/28/2024)
The Thirty Years War, C.V. Wedgwood (Unknown, Unknown)
Proleterka, Fleur Jaeggy trans. Alastair McEwen (Vernon Avenue Spar, Dublin, IRL, 8/1/2024)
Eastbound, Maylis de Kerangal trans. Jessica Moore (Archipelago Books order, 3/30/2024)
Trust, Hernan Diaz (New Dominion, Charlottesville, VA, 10/1/2022)
The Last Samurai, Helen DeWitt (Books Upstairs, Dublin, IRL, 8/7/2024)
The Joyful Song of the Patridge, Paulina Chiziane trans. David Brookshaw (Archipelago Books subscription, 6/7/2024)
Books got:
Against the Grain, James C. Scott (Borrowed from parents, 7/5/2024)
Proleterka, Fleur Jaeggy trans. Alastair McEwen (Vernon Avenue Spar, Dublin, IRL, 8/1/2024)
The Soviet Century, Kurt Schlogel trans. Rodney Livingstone (Hodges Figgis, Dublin IRL, 8/2/2024)
The Last Samurai, Helen DeWitt (Books Upstairs, Dublin, IRL, 8/7/2024)
Land of Smoke, Sara Gallardo trans. Jessica Sequira (Books Upstairs, 8/7/2024)
Homesick, Jennifer Croft (Books Upstairs, 8/7/2024)
Great Fear on the Mountain, Charles Ferdinand Ramuz trans. Bill Johnston (Archipelago Books Subscription, 8/23/2024)
Celebration, Damir Karakaš trans. Ellen Elias-Bursač (CAT Subscription, 8/26/2024)
In Ireland, we buy books at Spar. It’s a convenience store, the kind that’s every couple of feet, where you can buy snacks and magazines and trash bags and get a chicken patty sub with coleslaw made to go. It is also a place where you can buy Fleur Jaeggy. And Claire Keegan. And Mike McCormack. The little Spar around the corner from Helen’s childhood home has the usual mass-market mysteries and romances as well as an extensive Cadbury’s selection, but alongside these are… books I’d actually want to read. Books I’m excited to find, anywhere. Books you’d never see at Hudson News. I’m imagining this must be driven by a government regulation of some kind, but what if it’s not? But still. It’s a novelty, one that adds another touch of despair whenever we fly back to the US.
Before books: I have never read Henry James before, I am increasingly thinking I would like to, if you have any opinions about where would be good to start please convey them.
Arturo’s Island
Elsa Morante
trans. Isabel Quigly
Steerforth Italia
I wanted to like this more than I did. Morante’s History was tremendous, mid-century realism done right, but that was translated by someone else. I had been looking out for the Ann Goldstein version, which I may still try if I ever find it; this translation was published not long after the original, British, and suffers for both. I finished in early July, so I may not remember much, but here goes: teenage Arturo and his father live on an island off the coast of Naples. They live in a former monastery that his father inherited from a reclusive benefactor, a sworn misogynist who banned women from his property, never married, and threw parties for all the handsome young men of the island (this winds up exactly where you think it does). It’s post-war-ish Italy; Arturo idolizes his father, who is constantly off-island, leaving Arturo to more or less raise himself (his mother died in childbirth). Then the father brings home a wife who’s scarcely older than Arturo, then leaves, and things get (ahem) complicated. Eventually, Arturo finds the man his father loves hiding in their basement–but the man has no affection at all for Papa, which is an interesting complication. The book is about the slow understanding Arturo gains of his father as they grow older, the slow peeling away of the father’s power and mystery, his turn from stern patriarch to base supplicant at the hands of the man he adores. Gaining maturity, the deepened understanding of the world–the deeper experience of the world and people–once you realize sex exists, that it guides relationships and lives.
In any case, this was fine, there were a lot of exclamation points in the dialogue, which I think you could get away with midcentury but feels false now. Didn’t kick as hard as History, I’ll read another translation one day maybe.
An Ordinary Youth
Walter Kempowski
trans. Michael Lipkin
New York Review Books
At the start, young Walter has–as the title mentions–a fairly standard childhood. He goes to school, to camp, he’s smiling in all the family pictures. His mother is kind, his father is stern but steady. It is, by all accounts, a happy and appropriately naive, complicated in fairly relatable ways. But young Walter is growing up outside Berlin in the 1930s; his summer camp is run by the Hitler Youth, his father poses for family portraits in his brownshirt uniform. National Socialism is in the air. Young Walter, when he thinks about it at all, finds it all fairly exciting. He looks at a map of Europe hung outside a shop and thinks: look how big Germany is getting!
Mostly, however, he is focused on school and friends and sports. Like him, most people he knows are just going along, their world is unremarkable to them. Oh, Hitler invaded Poland? Well now, good for him, don’t forget to get milk on your way home.
Kempowski (the writer) is remembering without reflecting, he uses a flat affect and finely-turned crots to present elements like the brownshirt, a friend’s offhand praise for Hitler, a comment about Jews; they are noteworthy, to Kempowski, the writer, and us, the reader, because we know what weight they carry. They are evidence, piled up over pages into an argument. A tacit condemnation.
All this exists alongside warm, nuanced depictions of his family, neighbors, friends. We see this family, we see kindness and gruffness, care and fear, even as they participate in the murderous status quo. Young Walter never explicitly praises Hitler or says antisemitic things, but his active participation in society makes the point.
By the end, teenage Walter is picking over the bombed-out ruins of Berlin, trying to escape to his family. The general mood has shifted–all the fair-weather fascists have pulled down their flags and claim to have never really liked mean Mr. Mustache anyway. It’s a neat project, “autofictional”, quick to read, incisive in its implications. RIYL Zone of Interest
Get it at bookshop.org (affiliate link)
The Thirty Years War
C.V. Wedgwood
New York Review Books
Glad to report I now know what the Thirty Years’ War was. Didn’t before. Got some good little facts out of it, the succession war that started it off, the pillage of Madgeburg was brutal, sure, but I wonder how long I’ll actually retain them. I’ve already happily let go of the battlefield maneuvering and commander’s quarrels that take up a fair bit the book, stuff that feels almost Tolkein-esque in its panoramic battle-glee. But it was a fun narrative, if a little old-fashioned (written in Britain in the mid-1930s). Worth noting it was also written by a woman not yet 30 years old. In that somewhat pipe-and-wingback historian way, it does give a little too much weight to perceived personality–the character, as they used to call it–of historical figures, more so than might be in style these days. But it is, essentially, an early pop history of a very specific time during the European wars of religion.
Get it at bookshop.org (affiliate link)
Proleterka
Fleur Jaeggy
trans. Alastair McEwen
& Other Stories
Aforementioned Spar-bought Fleur Jaeggy. Got it, read it, liked it. Short volume. Sixteen-year-old narrator goes on a cruise with her father, who she does not really know. Not like a Carnival Cruise–what they might have called an excursion. He barely interacts with her, barely acknowledges her when they sit together at dinner. At the time, neither are quite curious enough about the other. Narrator skips forward and backward in time, filling us in. They will go on this cruise and then they will part ways. Narrator will learn, years after the cruise, that this man is probably not her father at all. Then, back on the boat: narrator kills time on cruise by having sex with one of the officers. Then another. Why not? Prose is airy, deliberate, we’re with that inquiring presence of mind–that sturdy, declarative Jaeggy voice, excavating the past, examining each piece. The girl has no connection to these men. She *feels* no connection. She submits to them wordlessly.
Get it at bookshop.org (affiliate link)
Eastbound
Maylis de Kerangal
trans. Jessica Moore
Archipelago
Adventure! A young Russian conscript and a French woman, traveling east on the Trans-Siberian Railway, both looking to escape the grip of the Russian state. The two meet when she gets lost on the train and wanders into third class, where he bums a smoke. Later, when he impulsively decides to desert, I don’t remember the circumstances exactly but it’s a precision turn in the narration, well-executed, he comes to her for help. She, meanwhile, has walked out on her lover, a Russian hydroelectric engineer who’s been lured home by the big paycheck, promising her he’s only playing a part, winking at her as he shakes hands with the suited men climbing from the great, black car. She has watched him turn and so she leaves him. I mentioned Clare Keegan earlier and there’s something of the sharpness of her work in here, short and fast and sleek. The book takes place over long hours, in a train, mostly focused on two people who don’t share the same language, and we take turns looking from one at the other, wondering what they’re thinking. There are close calls, an unexpected ally, and the conscript makes a choice he will have to live with. Great.
Get it at bookshop.org (affiliate link)
Trust
Hernan Diaz
Riverhead
Oh, boy. This one. Man, I dunno. Maybe Hernan Diaz was tired. Like, what came first: the four-book structure or the characters? In earlier drafts, was the Ida Tarbell-type character, the third voice in this book and the most compelling, whose experience of the other texts gives order to the novel, more interwoven? I like a good found-text mystery, but the four discreet sections felt a little too neat for me, the moments intended to provoke forward motion and curiosity a little too expected. I was wondering where the getting-good got to when the Ida section started, and I immediately wished I’d spent more time with her sooner, because her story felt the most alive. But if he hadn’t done that, the other two books would’ve needed to be shorter–and maybe they should’ve been.
Get it at bookshop.org (affiliate link)
The Last Samurai
Helen Dewitt
I said I would buy this and read it if I saw it and I did and wow, yes, this is the motherfucker everyone says it is. Ostensible plot: a single mom living in London is raising a language prodigy. He speaks excellent Greek, Hebrew, Japanese, etc., but does not know who his father is. He and his mom are constantly watching Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, the way college stoners left films on repeat. Anyway, the question of who his father is sets him on an adventure around London where he explores the possibility of various kinds of men being his father, which is really just an opportunity for DeWitt to showcase her absolutely incredible range. The potential father figures vary wildly in their reception of the boy, there is violence and generous breakfast spreads and at least one suicide. He collects lessons along the way, until he meets the final boss. It is all about understanding, learning, immersing yourself in something until you get the click, practice and perfectionism, I’m typing now trying to remember things because Helen is asleep with the book on her nightstand and I can’t go in and grab it. Mastery. Mastering knowledge, life, half-assing nothing, but very much in the opposite of an Ayn Rand way (can’t believe I’ve ended up talking about Ayn Rand here) but in a deeply human way, though without suffering fools, especially when the fool happens to be ourselves.
Get it at bookshop.org (affiliate link)
The Joyful Song of the Partridge
Paulina Chiziane
|trans. David Brookshaw
Archipelago
A book I, on balance, liked. The voluble oral-tradition approach of this book is very much not my thing, but the characters were complex and engaging, the story has momentum, and the book’s out-loud thinking fun to nod along with. A skillful translation, I found my discomfort for the prose style overpowered, and I was pulled along regardless. This is why I always finish books, because they can reward me in spite of my shitty, superficial attitudes. Like, in my adult life, I have only ever not finished two books: The Human Stain (obviously bad) and Reality Hunger (“I’m a collage! I’m a collage. Aren’t I a clever little collage?”). I really try hard to finish reading everything I start reading, because I can’t pull off that completion anywhere else in my life. I barely write this thing most of the time. Anyway. It’s about a woman who tries to climb the racial ladder of colonial Mozambique, marrying an African and making him join the colonial army, then leaving him for a white colonial, having children with both. It’s a powerful, harrowing tale of the body, of bodies. If this was your thing, you’d love it.