Christopher's Top Ten of 2025!

Next year will be the twentieth of this blog's existence. As Brent recently noted, it's a few months older than Goodreads. One of these days the Blogger platform will probably vanish with a wheeze of dust and smoke. Probably nobody reads these, but I'm still here, because it means something to me to have a written record of what I thought about every book I read. And yet, even after twenty years and well over a thousand books, the number of books out there to read only seems to grow larger and larger.

Among my achievements this year: I finally finished the last book by one of my favorites, Alice Munro. That's always a bittersweet thing. Given what we now know about her, it's not such a bad thing to let her rest for a while. Put her on the heap of all the other writers whose work I've finished with, like Penelope Fitzgerald and Muriel Spark. Patrick White and Cormac McCarthy will soon follow. With each passing year, I appreciate more writers like Graham Greene and Philip K. Dick, who, with my habit of only reading one book per author per year, will keep me going for decades to come.

My little projects have kept me going. I succeeded once again in reading an equal number, more or less, of men and women writers. I read books by authors from Angola, Croatia, Guatemala, Iran, Kazakhstan, Lesotho, Libya, North Korea, Peru, Slovenia, Somalia, and Suriname, bringing my "Countries Read" list up to 114. One of my simple projects for this upcoming year is just to read, once a month, a book that's been on my shelf for a year or more.

As always, this year was full of grand surprises. My top ten contains only three authors I'd read before: Elena Ferrante, Tove Jansson, and one of my literary heroes, N. Scott Momaday. Among the others are writers I'm excited to really dig into, like Janet Frame and Rikki Ducornet. And with 122 books read this year, there are several books that didn't make the top ten, like Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America and Italo Svevo's Zeno's Conscience, that I'll be thinking about for a long time. Without further ado, here's the best stuff I read this year.

Honorable Mention:

The Nenoquich by Henry Bean
Trout Fishing in America by Richard Brautigan
Mao II by Don DeLillo
The Blind Owl by Sedagh Hedayat
The Removed by Brandon Hobson
The Way of Florida by Russell Persson
Why Did I Ever by Mary Robison
Mating by Norman Rush
Zeno's Conscience by Italo Svevo
The Pelican Child by Joy Williams

Top Ten:

10. Men of Maize by Miguel Angel Asturias: There are twenty (!) footnotes on the first page of Men of Maize. That may be a good indicator of whether the "modernist epic of the Guatemalan Indians" is a challenge you'd like to take on or prefer to avoid. For me, I found it breathtaking--as successful as Ulysses in drawing a national conscience out of the stuff of myth and the vernacular register. Men of Maize, in fact, reads like a 20th century origin myth, about the emergence of the consciousness of a Guatemalan Indian class against elite planters. I was fascinated by the way Asturias manages to tell a modern story in a sequence of mythical time; characters in Men of Maize have dalliances with wizards and are transformed into animals; their stories immediately become legends, without intervening centuries. And I was amazed by the way that Asturias shifts seamlessly from a kind of homespun Don Quixote humor to the fantastical world of coyote-men and fairy wizards.

9. Dayswork by Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel: What is this book, exactly? A biography of Herman Melville? A memoir about a troubled marriage? An essay about life during covid? A fictional novel about one or more of these things? The strange un-pin-downability of Dayswork seems to honor its nature as a collaborative novel. Somehow, it turns the story of a woman writing a biography of Melville into a kind of rich, intense personal drama that weaves together the personal and the literary, the present and the past. There is a scene at the end of the book, after Bachelder and Habel have spent much of its length withholding key information about the marriage at its heart, where the narrator reads excerpts from Melville's letters to Hawthorne that is the most romantic--and even, perhaps, erotic--things I have ever read, despite adding nearly no original text. It's one of my favorite "scenes" of the year, and a great image of the strength of Dayswork, which understands how to create something entirely novel out of readymade parts.

8. Divorcer by Garielle Lutz: It's amazing to know, even after doing this blog for nineteen years, that there are still authors out there who can surprise me with the way they use words. On the level of words and sentences, nothing gave me as much delight this year as Garielle Lutz's Divorcer, a series of stories about coupling and uncoupling whose sentences also couple and uncouple, that is, come together and cohere before crashing out, throwing up novel coinages like secret revelations or evil surprises. The stories themselves blend together, each being a kind of divorce-story with the genders and sexualities swapped around--perhaps even, one might say, fluid. The stories of Divorcer capture well how human desire spills over the boundaries of gender and sex we try to trap it in, and despair, too. The characters are shy, isolated, shriveling ever-inward, teetering on and then falling into total collapse. The stories offer bummer after bummer, but still they might be the most fun I've had all year.

7. A Heart So White by Javier Marias: Marias' novel, about a United Nations translator unraveling his father's terrible secret, is an innovative riff on the detective novel, perhaps the spy novel. There really is a terrible secret--having to do with the death of the father's first wife--but it almost seems beside the point. Marias understands that the heart of a mystery is not the revelation but the act of investigation: wondering, speculating, searching. And so the novel offers up several mysteries to be investigated, wondered, speculated about, searched for, and most of them end up having no real payoff--which sounds frustrating, but which, in fact, makes the novel wonderfully unsettling. Who is the man in the next hotel room, and is he really going to kill his wife? Who's the secret admirer who keeps demanding lurid video tapes from the narrator's friend? How many paintings in the Prado are forged by the narrator's father? And if we know we're never going to get answers to these questions, how is it that they're still so engrossing> I ended up not being sure if A Heart So White is a parody of the genre or something else, but I found it gripping from beginning to end.

6. Lanark by Alasdair Gray: It's hard to call Lanark a novel--it's more like two novels, or maybe four novels, in one. One is a straightforwardly realistic novel of a young man struggling to make his way in mid-century Glasgow as a painter. The other is a science fiction novel about a man transported to a shadowy realm known as "Unthank" where people grow dragon scales and then explode, and time moves strangely, and one can travel by being swallowed by big holes in the ground. Are the two men the same? Is this world life after death, or something else? And why does it look and feel so much like industrial Glasgow? Lanark, by the author of book that became the movie Poor Things, was a suggestion someone gave me when I traveled to Scotland this summer, and it was a great one. I loved how it captured the spirit and history of Scotland in a novel way, and I found its shift between the real world and Unthank to be improbably effective. If I had to choose, I think I liked the realism a bit more--but the two halves of the book really don't work without each other, the world and the underworld, the figure and shadow.

5. The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante: Boy, she makes it look easy, doesn't she? The Days of Abandonment covers so much of the same thematic ground as the Neapolitan novels, but in other ways it couldn't be more different. Gone is the Dickensian sweep of Naples or the passage of decades, instead there's just one woman, abandoned by her husband, locked in her apartment with her children and dog. A friend of mine really loathed this book, finding it brutal and nasty; those are the same reasons that I really loved it. Even moreso than the Neapolitan novels, The Days of Abandonment is about the cruelty that men visit upon women, and the novel smartly removes the husband to focus on the narrator's slow collapse in the apartment by herself, with a sick child and dying dog that are somehow like manifestations of her own infected spirit. And even then, the novel ends on a note of cautious hope unlike anything in Ferrante's black-hearted body of work.

4. Sun City by Tove Jansson: This is where I look at the list and start to say to myself, "Are you sure that's not the best book you've read this year? Or ever?" Tove Jansson's Sun City is like a book that's tailor-made for me: a tight satire about old people living in a Florida retirement community. It has a Tocqueville-like quality to it, a foreigner writing about America from the outside, and for being fifty years old, it really nails South Florida, a place we go at the end of our lives to forget there's any such thing as a history, either personal or national. The swamp and jungle lurk just outside the carefully cultivated lawns, the "movie" pirate ship, and the air conditioning, just as death lurks at the margin of the life that the novel's large (and terrifically funny) cast inhabit. Jansson smartly balances the old folks out with a pair of young dreamers, the Jesus Freak-hippie Joe who doesn't believe in the future of aging and death (because Christ is coming back post haste) and his beautiful girlfriend, the retirement home's wise housekeeper. But perhaps the best praise I can think of for Sun City is that it would fit in among the best work of another favorite of mine, Penelope Fitzgerald.

3. Owls Do Cry by Janet Frame: I can't stop repeating this fact: they were going to lobotomize Janet Frame until her first story collection was published, and then they decided maybe they shouldn't start ripping pieces out of her brain. Among other things, the remarkable Owls Do Cry turns that near-lobotomy into the novel's climax, in which Daphne, the long-hospitalized youngest daughter of a suburban New Zealand family, struggles to recognize her father. Though her thoughts appear to us disordered, Daphne sees things about her father that no one else--for example, her sister, caught in a narrow web of mid-century propriety--can see. What, we wonder, will be lost when Daphne goes under the knife, and what will be gained? Daphne's other three siblings are also viewpoint characters, and together they make Owls Do Cry a touching picture of life at the edges of polite society; the novel's most important meaningful setting is the garbage dump, which is the site of probably the most shocking and unexpected scene I read all year. And all this is told in a modernist, stream-of-consciousness style that rivals even the masters like Woolf and Joyce, I felt.

2. The Jade Cabinet by Rikki Ducornet: Every year I come across another writer or two who makes me say, "I have to read everything this person has written." Janet Frame is one; Rikki Ducornet is another. The Jade Cabinet is a cosmic phantasmagoria set in the 19th century of Lewis Carroll. (Funnily, I mentioned that Lanark author Alasdair Gray wrote the novel Poor Things; having only seen the movie, The Jade Cabinet reminded me much more of the fantastic-but-not-quite-steampunk image of the Victorian era that Poor Things embodies.) The narrator, Memory, writes about her sister Etheria, raped and abused by her industrialist husband, then disappeared. The husband, Tubbs, pursues her to Egypt and back, encountering the divine image in the pyramids and a sinister "hunger artist," among other strange and fantastical images. It's all very wild and freewheeling, and to describe it almost makes it sound like a grab-bag of uncontrolled moments and images, but Ducornet's skill is to tie the whole thing together in a way that makes it powerful and persuasive. In the end, it's one of my favorite things, a novel that ought to be much sillier than it is, and worthy of what I consider the highest praise: I've never read anything like it.

1. The Ancient Child by N. Scott Momaday: The great N. Scott Momaday died last year, and it's difficult to explain what was lost. If you know anything about him, it's House Made of Dawn, a masterwork that, maybe for the first time, saw Native American legend as a source and structure for modernist storytelling. I was afraid to read The Ancient Child, because I expected it to be a step down from that novel, which means a great deal to me, but what I found was a novel that is at least nearly its equal. The story is about Locke Setman, a Bay Area-artist who is compelled to return to the Kiowa family in Oklahoma he barely knows. Waiting there for him is Grey, a woman who slips in and out of time, and who has become the lover of Billy the Kid. I think it's this last detail that signifies to me just how far-reaching and universalist Momaday's writing is; it's something different than the kind of defensive bearhug of traditional stories that you sometimes see in modern Native American writing. It encompasses all of the West, the frontier, and all people. The legend that underpins the whole thing is the man who, transformed into a bear, scratched the lines into Devils Tower, and this becomes a powerful symbol of transformation, wildness, and the other--the kinds of things, perhaps, that an artist tries to access through their art. This was the book I loved most this year because it managed to be both wholly familiar and wholly new, better even than a simple encore.

Happy new year, everyone. See you on the first page.

A New Name by Jon Fosse

And I see myself standing there looking at the two lines that cross in the middle, one brown and one purple, and I see that I've painted the lines slowly, with a lot of thick oil paint, and the paint has run, and where the brown and purple lines cross the colours have blended beautifully and I think that I can't look at this picture anymore, it's been sitting on the easel for a long time now, a couple of weeks maybe, so now I have to either paint over it in white or else put it up in the attic, in the crates where I keep the pictures I don't want to sell, but I've already thought that thought day after day, I think and then I take hold of the stretcher and let go of it again and I realize that I, who have spent my whole life painting, oil paint on canvas, yes, ever since I was a boy, I don't want to paint anymore, ever, all the pleasure I used to take in painting is gone...

A New Name closes out Jon Fosse's Septology, a work that is either one book or seven or, in this case, and probably the least reasonably, three. It continues the present story, in which the painter Asle prepares to visit his friend's sister for Christmas day and struggles with a numinous painting, and the story of the past, which comes in memories that overwhelm Asle: meeting his wife Ales, who later died young, becoming a painter, as well as memories that recount the life of his friend and namesake, another painter named Asle, who is currently languishing in a hospital to which our Asle has ferried him. How does Asle know all this stuff about the other Asle? He might be thinking through what he's been told, of course, but there's a strong suggestion, too, that the men have somehow overlapping identities, and that our Asle draws from a store of memory that belongs to him as well.

Many of the memories in A New Name are lovely, happy memories. We hear how Asle met Ales one day by pure chance, and how they became almost immediately joined at the hip. The same day that Asle meets Ales, he goes to rent a room in Bjorgving where he'll be attending art school. The landlady, an aged beauty named Herdis, is suspicious of Ales, and refuses to let her in the house. Later on, Asle paints the stern landlady's portrait in exchange for free rent he will end up not needing, as he moves in with Ales almost immediately. This old lady is, I thought, one of the novel's best characters: an image of the way that people seem to shrink into themselves, their homes, with age, and I enjoyed her mix of affection of possessiveness.

But A New Name ends up being quite a sad ending, I thought. Spoiler alert--the namesake Asle dies, and we find out bloodlessly, through a nurse at the hospital. Fosse piles it on, too, with the unexpected death of Guro, a woman who had been flirting with Asle in the previous novels (and who, as one of the novel's many doubles, resembles the sister whose house Asle is meant to head to for Christmas day), in a terrible fire, no less. The book ends with Asle rebuffing the advances of said sister and then, perhaps dying himself as a "ball of blue light" shoots into his forehead. The Lord's prayers, then, that end each of the novel's seven sections, and which underpin its thematic interest in the presence of God and the possibility of knowing God, take on the sense of prayers for the dead, in which the protagonist finally includes himself.

Olav Audunsson: Crossroads by Sigrid Undset

Now, in a state of calm reflection, Olav listened to the only voice that spoke to him in a language he understood. Here, in this foreign land, all other voices shouted at him as if there were a wall between them and him. Yet the voice of the church was the same one he had listened to as a child and a youth and a grown man. He himself had changed in terms of goals and thought and speech as he moved through the stages of life, but the church had changed neither voice nor meaning. It spoke to him in the holy mass just as it had spoken to him as a little boy, when he understood very few of the words yet still understood much by observing--the way a child understands his mother by watching her expressions and gestures before he understands the spoken words. And Olav knew that if he traveled to the farthermost regions where Christian men lived, their language and customs and appearance might seem strange and incomprehensible to him. But wherever he happened upon a church and went inside, he would be embraced by the same voice that had spoken to him when he was a child.

When we last left Olav Audunsson, his wife Ingunn had just died after a long illness. Ingunn's death resolves what might have seemed like the central tension of Undset's tetralogy, the love between the man and woman that thrived in spite of all the machinations of their families to drive them apart. I admit I was surprised, but I had to remind myself that, as one learns in Kristin Lavransdatter, Undset is no believer in the primacy of romantic love when there is a higher love, and a higher law. But Ingunn's death leaves Olav in a strange place, having taken in Ingunn's love-child Eirik and raised him as his own, while his own bastard, a son named Bjorn with a woman named Torhild, is at a neighboring estate. It's Eirik that will inherit the manor Hestviken, despite Olav's dislike of him (and he is quite annoying, apart from being the son of another man), while Bjorn exists for Olav only as a reminder of lost possibilities.

The first part of Crossroads is taken up by a trip to London, where Olav does some merchant business. Olav, lonely and adrift, nearly enters into an adulterous relationship with the wife of a blind man, but runs away at the last minute, repelled by her strangeness and foreignness. The blind man's wife speaks in a language Olav can't understand, but during his trip he rekindles his love for the church, which, as described in the passage above, speaks in a universal language that can be understood no matter where Olav is. Olav decides, with only some misgivings, that he will never remarry, and devote the remainder of his life to the memory of Ingunn and to the church.

The novel's subtitle suggests that it captures Olav at a "crossroads," and the novel feels like a crossroads, too, a necessary transition between points of stronger dramatic tension. The conflict that's established between Olav and Eirik only festers. Though the two find a way to become somewhat closer, Eirik's anxiety that somehow his inheritance will be stolen from him--deep down, perhaps, he understands something that he cannot articulate about why his father is so alienated from him--make him especially anxious and unreliable. Ultimately, Eirik flees from the conflict, entering into a knight's service, and the last time we see him, he has grown at last into a man. Olav is left with his manor and his daughters, but more or less alone.

The novel ends with something I'd never seen from Undset before: an honest-to-god battle. When Olav hears that Norway has been invaded by a Swedish duke, he and his fellow knights are called into battle to repel the party of the invaders. In the melee, Olav is badly wounded and left facially disfigured. (Perhaps sealing the deal on that promise to never remarry.) This, it felt to me, was the point to which Crossroads has been leading our hero: ravaged, abandoned, and yet with a renewed sense of his own obligations to God and country, which perhaps will steel him in whatever crisis of inheritance and fatherhood is coming in the series' final installment--coming, for this reader, next December.

Ice Palace by Edna Ferber

Later Baranof boasted that Chris Storm could pilot a float plane, drive a car, mush a team of nine huskies, paddle a skin boat, handle an outboard motor, cut up a seal with an ulu and mix the best sourdough pancakes in Baranof. Only this last accomplishment made her the envy of the town's more solid citizens. She had inherited her sourdough starter from Thor, who had originally come by it from a prospector on one of his Far North journeys. Melting, feather-light, delectable, the golden circlets were a more potent asset than all of Christine's more spectacular activities. She had shot a polar bear, helped pull in a beluga white whale, caught king salmon. She could knit and wear a sweater expertly. In her second and last Baranof college year Chris appeared at the final big dance in a slinky black strapless dress. The effect, with all that blondeur, was devastating.

Chris Storm is Alaska. She's the granddaughter of the two most notorious men in the city of Baranof, and probably the whole territory: Czar Kennedy, the business magnate responsible for the towering "Ice Palace," and Thor Storm, a Norwegian immigrant and newspaperman whose hardiness exemplifies the pioneer spirit. These men, with their opposing ideas of what Alaska should be, are long rivals, brought together by the romance of their children and the birth of Chris. As a result, Chris comes to represent both the pioneer spirit and the cutting edge of Alaska's future. She boasts that, as her mother was dying in childbirth, she was placed into the carcass of a caribou to keep warm--a real Alaskan birth.

Edna Ferber's Ice Palace was published in 1958, a year before the territory of Alaska earned its statehood. Territorial issues are at the heart of the novel: when it opens, a sinister business associate of Czar's is scheming to have his son Bay made governor of the territory, a position that might be a springboard to the role of Senator--from the state of Washington. Chris and Thor are believers that only statehood can fully guarantee independence and self-sufficiency for Alaska, which suffers from (as they see it) the importation of labor from "Outside." Ice Palace is familiar stuff for Ferber, who wrote similar books about the "larger-than-life" cultures of Texas, in Giant, and Oklahoma, in Cimarron. Ice Palace, in fact, might be read as a kind of update to Cimarron, about a pioneer territory hurtling toward full statehood, except it remains, for Alaska, still a future promise.

I'm OK with Ferber's own brand of pulp propaganda, but Ice Palace, unfortunately, stinks as a novel. It was Ferber's last book, and you can sort of see her narrative power leaving her behind. The novel spins and spins, setting up the competition between Thor and Czar, but never really figuring out what to do with either of them. Ferber insinuates over and over that Chris' "Alaskan-ness" promises her a role in the future of the territory--or state--but what that might be, the novel really has no idea. There's a suggestion that being Bay's wife is not enough for either Chris or Alaska, but the character remains all promise and no execution; it feels like Ferber spends the whole time setting up a novel that never really gets started.

The best part, I thought, was the visit to an "Eskimo" village on the Bering Sea, part of a months-long exploration of the territory that Thor wants to be a kind of education to Chris before she leaves to go to college "Outside." Chris is drawn to a handsome part-Inuit pilot named Ross, who offers a kind of alternative to Bay--a real Alaskan, rather than an imported power-grabber from Outside. Ferber's books all have a kind of "unwoke woke" quality to them, full of racial stereotypes but a larger message of American syncretism and cosmopolitanism, and the Inuit village is the only place where Ferber's image of Alaska feels really convincing. It's a site of tradition and continuity in a territory that's rapidly changing. Though Chris boasts of being born in a caribou, much of what Ferber spends her time doing is emphasizing how modern this Alaska is, how it has bowling alleys and cinemas and debutante balls and all the other stuff that makes it worthy of being American.

Ada, or Ardor by Vladimir Nabokov

Revelation can be more perilous than Revolution. Sick minds identified the notion of a Terra planet with that of another world and this "Other World" got confused not only with the "Next World" but with the Real World in us and beyond us. Our enchanters, our demons, are noble iridescent creatures with translucent talons and mightily beating wings; but in the eighteen-sixties the New Believers urged one to imagine a sphere where our splendid friends had been utterly degraded, had become nothing but vicious monsters, disgusting devils, with the black scrota of carnivora and the fangs of serpents, revilers and tormentors of female souls; while on the other side of the cosmic lane a rainbow mist of angelic spirits, inhabitants of sweet Terra, restored all the stalest but still potent myths of old creeds, with rearrangement for melodeon of all the cacophonies of all the divinities and divines ever spawned in the marshes of this our sufficient world.

When he is a young boy, Van Veen falls hopelessly in love with his cousin, Ada. Except she's not actually his cousin, but the daughter of his own father, who had a tempestuous affair with his wife's sister, which makes Ada, of course, his sister. This is a fact discovered at some point by both parties in a long life of stormy coming together and breaking up, but if it ever matters, it doesn't matter for long. (One thing you could never say about old Vladimir is that he shies away from taboo, especially sexual taboos--the love affair between Ada and Van seems, perhaps in a small respect, a response to those who felt a little too squeamish about Lolita.) Ada, or Ardor tells the story of how Van and Ada are driven apart by jealousies, affairs, duels, and the romantic attentions of Ada's sister Lucette upon Van--a more palatable relationship, maybe, being just his cousin--but we also quickly understand that the novel is being written by Van at an old age, and the interpolations that appear "written in Ada's hand" signify a happy ending for the sexy siblings.

I've heard people describe Ada, or Ardor as a "love it or hate it" novel. That's too strong, maybe, but I certainly hated it more than I loved it. In Ada Nabokov indulges more heavily in his beloved wordplay than in any other novel of his I've read, and it often felt to me like one long punny joke, but one you have to know English, Russian, and French to understand. So I have to admit a lot of what was supposed to be funny was lost on me, and the stuff that was supposed to be funny that I did understand, I didn't think was very funny.

What I did like was the setup. Ada takes place in an alternate universe where Russian and French advances on North America were never fully repelled, and so much of the western continent is a Russian province called "Estoty" and the east a French province called "Canady," while "America" extends throughout what we call the Americas. In this world, electricity has been outlawed after a vague disaster, and what technology remains is powered instead, somehow, by water. But the most interesting part is that some people on this world have come to believe in an alternate Earth they called "Terra," making their Earth "Antiterra," and these beliefs sweep through the world like a powerful cult tradition, seen mostly as a delusion or fringe belief, but which enforces a sense that the world the characters live in is a kind of pale shadow or reflection of some deeper, truer existence. It's interesting to think about how we might lie at the bottom of the subconscious of the characters we read.

I liked many other things. I liked "The Texture of Time," a treatise of Van's about time which I understand some people find difficult or ancillary, but which for me were a welcome break from the barrage of silly punning and banter. I liked the character of Lucette, whose love for Van--who only loves Ada--drives her to the point of suicide. But overall, I found this one kind of a tedious experience.

Knots by Nuruddin Farah

She had never imagined she will see the day when she will appreciate the very thing she has always taken for granted--a clean washroom, the toilet system functioning, the bathroom floor immaculate, towels on the rails. She is comforted at the thought of being in an impeccable one for the first time since her arrival, and she is flushed with joy. It goes to show that only a corrupt society tolerates living in such filth, especially the men who put up with the muck they have made, as if dirt makes itself, reproduces itself. No woman with the means to do something about it will endure so much grunge. Her mother has always said that you are as clean as you make yourself.

Cambara is a Somali woman who, until recently, has been living in Toronto. Riven with grief at the death of her son, who drowned in a pool while her husband was having an affair, she has returned to Mogadiscio to reclaim her family property from the warlords who have appropriated it. She begins her journey at the house of Zaak, her former husband, whom she once married to help receive immigration papers. Zaak has been back in Mogadiscio for a long time, and his state--dirty, selfish, addicted to the stimulant qaat--is a representation, she feels, of the degradation of her country. Zaak is a lost cause, but there are other allies waiting to assist her, such as Kiin, the hotel operator, Bile, a handsome young defense contractor, and, for some reason, an Irish woodworker named Seamus. Cambara's plan is to inveigle her way back into the property when the warlords are out warlording, set up a defensive perimeter, and then put on a puppet show. As this process develops, she semi-adopts a couple of child soldiers to fill the hole in her life left by her son's death.

Farah's depiction of Mogadiscio is one of remarkable decline, but also one in which resilient and resourceful actors understand how to live within the ruined city. Kiin and the others are members of a network of women who provide each other mutual support in the absence of a functioning government. The warlords, interestingly, are largely kept off the page: we learn, for example, that Cambara's guards have killed a couple of the warlords' agents, but Farah's focus is on the helpers, not the villains, and a showdown I'd long expected with the warlord himself who had until lately been living in Cambara's family home never materializes. This is a novel about building and restoring, starting with the filthy shit-covered bathroom that serves as a representation of what the warlords have down to Somalia and Mogadiscio. They are, quite literally, filth.

I was shocked by how bad the prose in this book is. Several of the blurbs on the back describe Farah as a candidate for the Nobel Prize! But the prose struck me as written by someone without a genuine command of the English language, or a high school kid who's a little too attached to the thesaurus. Mixed metaphors, overly ornate but imprecise word choice abound. One character is described as having "long-term chicaneries hatching on the back burner." A typical sentence goes like this: "Nonplussed, she surrenders herself to the unbecoming mixed emotions knocking at the door of her brain." And once you notice it, you can't stop noticing it. In the passage above for example, isn't "grunge" a really strange choice? I found the whole thing actually quite baffling for a glossy major-publishing house release, and for an author with not a little bit of critical praise. Anyway, with the addition of Somalia, my "Countries Read" list is up to 114.

Owls Do Cry by Janet Frame

And listening to their father say about Francie, the children felt afraid, as if suddenly the walls of the house would collapse and the roof disappear and leave them, naked, with nothing to shut them away from the world, and the  world in one stride would walk in and take possession of them, holding them tight in his hand of rock and lava, as if they were insects, and they would have to struggle and kick and fight to escape and make their way. and each time they made their way and the world had dropped them for a while to a peaceful hiding place, it would again seize them with a burning one of its million hands, and the struggle would begin again and again and go on and on and never finish.

The Withers family of Waimaru, New Zealand: Father Bob and Mother Amy, and the children, Francie, Toby, Chicks, Daphne. Each of them grows up among the stultifying conformity of this small town in their own way, each a little strange. Toby is an epileptic, and his disease puts him outside the bounds of normal society; he grows up to work in the "tip," the garbage dump, where as a child he used to hunt for treasures. Chicks is a little strange in her vicious insistence on being normal; her section of Owls Do Cry is a long journal in which she confesses her desire to fit in with the respectable neighbor company, until she learns that one respectable neighbor has respectably murdered another one. As the oldest, Francie is the first to grow up into this world and face a life of working at the woollen mill, where the local lower-middle-class is condemned to its particular shape of narrow life. It's Francie who is the first to learn of the "time of living" in which people are slotted by life into their little niches:

But in all her knowing, she had not learned of the time of living, the unseen always, when people are like the marbles in the fun alley at the show; and a gaudy circumstance will squeeze payment from their cringing and poverty-stricken fate, to give him the privilege of rolling them into the bright or dark box, till they drop into one of the little painted holes, their niche, it is called, and there roll their lives around and around in a frustrating circle.

Here I will issue the customary SPOILER ALERT because I have to talk about the moment that I knew Janet Frame's novel was something special: after a quarter of the book devoted to Francie and her the particular struggles of her coming of age, she accidentally falls down the side of the garbage dump, where she's taken her siblings to forage, into a garbage fire, and dies. It's Francie's death that makes her strange, that puts her outside the margins of society and makes her like Toby, and it continues to haunt the other three siblings as they grow up. To Daphne, the youngest sibling, who spends most of the novel inside a mental institution, Francie never really dies. Daphne's mental state is not one that understands or permits death, at least not in the usual way. There's something incredibly bold about including both Toby and Daphne, and whether they differ in the unusualness of their perspective by kind or degree, I'm not really sure.

Daphne's story has a special resonance when you know a little about Janet Frame, the legendary Kiwi author. In and out of institutions herself for much of her life, Frame was scheduled to undergo a lobotomy when she received notification that a collection of her stories had been accepted for publication, the news of which made her doctors decide maybe it would be better not to remove a hunk of her brain. Daphne undergoes the procedure that Frame never did, and her final section of the book--in which her father comes to visit her, for the first time in years, right before the operation--is one of the book's most shocking and original moments.

Owls Do Cry blew me away. It reminded me a little of Patrick White, her counterpart across the Tasman Sea, who also wrote about altered states of understanding and the way epiphany emerges amid the repressive qualities of modern middle-class life. It reminded me, too, of N. Scott Momaday in the way that Frame folds in multiple modes and points-of-view that vary the voice and tone, like Chicks' diary. But it reminded me, too, of the great modern masters like Joyce--if what this is is "stream-of-consciousness," it's among the best of it. I found Owls Do Cry in turns shocking, tragic, bewildering, and profoundly funny. One of my favorite experiences every year is discovering a new author that makes me say, I want to read everything they've ever read, and Janet Frame is one of two for me this year, along with Rikki Ducornet. Really looking forward to that.

Three Books About Puerto Rico

Puerto Rico has been called the oldest colony in the world. While some people contest that statement, Puerto Rico's history is marked by five centuries of colonialism, stretching from 1493 to the present day. Colonialism has shaped the ways that Puerto Ricans conceptualize themselves, their politics, and their ideas of the nation. This book argues that we cannot understand Puerto Rico's current fiscal, political, and social crises without recognizing its colonial reality.

I took three books with me on my recent trip to Puerto Rico. The first was Jorell Melendez-Badillo's Puerto Rico: A National History, a general history of the island from the days of the Taino to the present. For "the world's oldest colony," such a history holds few surprises: the island was colonized by the Spanish beginning with Columbus, and its position made it a key stronghold in the Caribbean as well as a producer of, at various times, sugar cane and coffee. Despite a few skirmishes, the Spanish held the island without interruption until the Spanish-American War, when it was seized by the United States, who have never let it go. This history has put Puerto Rico in a strange place: though it's developed its own national identity, part of that identity is that it never really has had any kind of self-determination.

One thing Melendez-Badillo makes clear is that one of the primary fault lines, if not the primary fault line, in Puerto Rican society is the question of its status. Are you for continuing with the commonwealth status quo? Are you for statehood, or for independence? Melendez-Badillo makes it clear where he stands on the issue by focusing largely on the history of the Puerto Rican labor movement and independentista activism. Far be it from me to label something "too woke," but this is, in the end, a book that counts a twerking protest on the steps of the capitolio as a historical watershed of the same order as the American invasion. I thought it also did a good job of capturing the fact of "circular migration," by which the Puerto Rican diaspora in the United States cycles back to the island, and how that affects ideals of a national identity. But for the most part, I found that the book was heavy on the this-then-that of history and struggled to articulate larger patterns or themes, including the five hundred year impact of colonialism that is the center of its thesis.

There was a Sears catalogue in every middle-class home in Ponce at that time. Like most families on the island, ours was divided politically. Carmita and Carlos were for statehood, whereas Abby was defiantly Independentista. But we all liked to browse through the Sears catalogue. Having it at hand was reassuring--proof that Puerto Rico was an inseparable part of the United States. We weren't like Haiti or the Dominican Republic, where people still hadn't heard of the telephone and kept food fresh in wooden crates with blocks of ice instead of in General Electric refrigerators. Thanks to the Sears catalogue we had the same access as the people of Kansas and Louisiana to the latest inventions and home appliances, and we could import them to the States without paying taxes. The cardboard boxes and crates came by ship from "el Norte" and took months to get to the island, but when you opened them up, you felt the invigorating cool air of the United States trapped inside like a breath of fresh air against your face.

But maybe I'm just a fiction guy. Much more informative and illustrative of Puerto Rican history was, I thought, Rosario Ferre's novel The House on the Lagoon. It's a familiar kind of book these days: a multigenerational history of a single family in a slightly "exotic" locale. But I thought it introduced a few interesting touches to this paradigm: The House on the Lagoon takes the shape of a book written by Isabel Monfort Mendizabal about the history of her family and that of her husband, Quintin Mendizabal. The Mendizabals, we're told, are an upper class Puerto Rican family whose paterfamilias, Buenaventura, is proud of his (spurious) Spanish nobility. Buenaventura lives through the passage of Puerto Rico's Spanish era to its American one, and is always ready to use it to his commercial advantage. The "House on the Lagoon" is a mid-century modernist construction that is emblematic of Buenaventura's wealth and power.

The question of statehood vs. independence looms. Quintin is an inveterate statehood supporter, while Isabel tends toward independence. Although Ferre shows how different attitudes exist even within families, there's a clear sense that statehood is the choice of the upper-class, whose relationship with the United States, like their relationship with Spain beforehand, is to their commercial advantage. But Ferre is skeptical, too, of the violence embraced by some independentistas: Quintin and Isabel's sons become mixed up in a terroristic nationalistic cell that threatens to bring down the Mendizabal family fortune. What makes the novel most interesting is that Ferre includes interstitial scenes in which Quintin, having discovered Isabel's novel, can't help writing his own version in the margins that flatters his own sense of how history has unfolded. Quintin is allowed to "talk back" to Isabel, but the novel is far from treating the two attitudes as balanced; in fact, we come to understand that the novel itself is Isabel's way of finding a voice that the domineering Quintin has never let her have. Beyond this there's little in the way of metafictional tricks or even stirring prose, but I thought The House on the Lagoon captured something fundamental about the history Melendez-Badillo writes about it in a gripping and specific way.

I also consider that these messages, which seem to arrive on sunbeams or on the wind, could surely only happen here, that they're a form that life takes on in San Juan. Like this, like writing at this table with a tangle of feelings lashing out against the ocean that separates us from everything and everybody, even our friends, such as Diego. For some reason we've chosen to talk without looking at ourselves, without knowing for sure who we are, without any real contact. The routine of the city: solitude drives down the highways, making pit stops at twenty-four hour gas stations.

Eduardo Lalo's Simone takes the trio of novels up to modern-day San Juan, and it's certainly the most literary and accomplished of the three. Lalo's narrator is a Puerto Rican writer who struggles with feelings of anomie and disconnection: the first quarter or so of the novel, which are little more than single-paragraph vignettes of a drifting life in San Juan, is a real high point. The writer begins to receive messages from a mysterious stranger, each one consisting of a quotation from some other text. The quotations reinvigorate him, giving him something to search for. Eventually he discovers that they are written by a Li, a worker at a Chinese restaurant. They begin a strange and not-quite-satisfying affair--Li insists she is a lesbian--that forces the writer to confront his understanding of himself.

Simone--named for Simone Weil, one of the personas Li adopts in her messages--draws a parallel between the life of a Puerto Rican and an immigrant like Li. Li may feel isolated and atomized by being an extreme minority in Puerto Rico, but to be Puerto Rican is itself a kind if isolating, atomizing position, a nowherehood. Lalo makes his interests clear in a long passage where the writer and his colleague get into a passionate argument with a smug writer from Spain. I thought this was all very interesting, and captured a psychological side of the same historical processes that interest both Melendez-Badillo and Ferre. But neither does Lalo sacrifice the specificity of the protagonist and his relationship with Li, which I found to be affectingly and tenderly drawn, even as it unfolds toward what we expect is its doom. As the novel brings the narrator and Li together, and then tears them apart again, it becomes slightly more conventional, but still effective and touching.

Lili is Crying by Helene Bessette

He is dragging his wife along the hot road in the shadowless evening.
He is shouting:
--You'll have to choose, it's me or her.
--She's my mother, sobs Lili, I choose my mother.
--Naturally, Lili, she is your mother, and its a great shame, but if you want to see her again, you'll have to do it without me there. A separation, Lili. This evening, I broke up with my mother-in-law.
He cracks a match. He lights a cigarette, leaning forward, cupping his hands around his mouth.
He's a man.
And this evening he's fighting.
This troubled evening.
This tormented evening.
This tearful evening.
This cigarettes evening.
Lily is crying.
He hates to see Lili cry.
And so he gets angry.

Lili is Crying takes place in Provence during the early 20th century. Lili is a young woman living with her domineering and possessive mother, Charlotte, who runs a small boarding house. Charlotte is suspicious and resentful of any suitor of Lili's, regarding them as thieves who want to take her daughter away from her. To Charlotte, a mother should enough for Lili--a patently ridiculous thing to believe about the life of a young woman, but a belief with long-reaching consequences. Eventually, Lili marries a man who has no idea the trap he's walking into, how Charlotte will rage against him simply because she took her daughter away, and much of the novel is a back-and-forth between Charlotte and Lili's husband in which one demands that Lili choose them over the other. No wonder Lili is crying. "There are so many ways to love a daughter," Bessette writes, "And how well she could have loved her daughter, that mother Charlotte. There are thirty-six right ways. (But she chose the thirty-seventh.)"

This impossible dynamic is solved, in a way, when the man is taken away by the Nazis and sent to Dachau. In his absence, Lili and her mother become entangled again, and though the man eventually comes back, he struggles to realize that he has lost Lili's affections entirely in his absence. He's rich, in a way, having filled his pockets with the jewels and other affects that the dead of Dachau will no longer need, but Charlotte threatens to turn him into the authorities for this--all of which is a particularly bitter image of the life that those who managed to come back from the Nazi camps might have found. There's no place for Lili's husband; his absence was like a vacuum that has been filled. This culminates in a dalliance between Lili--who is now in her 40's--and a simple-minded shepherd who is thirteen years younger. Life at Charlotte's side has made Lili stunted, and an ordinary life seems to have passed her by; she has aged without ever really having the normal married life she dreamed of.

Helene Bessette was a member of Oulipo, the French school of "potential literature" founded by Raymond Queneau that prized wordplay and "constrained" writing. Lili is Crying is not so playful or experimental as some of what the Oulipians produced, but you can see the influence in her language. The novel unfolds almost like a poem of strung dialogue, sometimes demarcated by dashes when a speaker changes. The line between what characters think and what they say is not always clear. Its simple, staccato phrasing provides a grounding of the strangeness and tragedy of the story, which i found very affecting.

Baltasar and Blimunda by Jose Saramago

Every man follows his own path in search of grace, whatever that grace may be, a simple landscape with the sky overhead, a certain hour of the day or night, two trees, three if they are painted by Rembrandt, a sigh, without our knowing whether this closes or finally opens the path or where the path my lead us, whether to some other landscape, hour, tree, or sigh, behold this priest who is about to cast out one God and replace him with another, without knowing whether this new allegiance will do him any good in the end, behold this musician who would find it impossible to compose any other kind of music and who will no longer be alive a hundred years from now to hear that first symphony, which is mistakenly referred to as the Ninth, behold this one-handed soldier who has ironically become a manufacturer of wings, though he has never risen to being more than a common foot soldier, man rarely knows what to expect from life, this man least of all, behold this woman with those extraordinary eyes, who was born to perceive wills...

Medieval Portugal. Baltasar is a former soldier who has lost his hand in Portugal's wars, replacing it with a spike or a hook, whichever is most useful. Blimunda is the daughter of a woman exiled by the Inquisition, and she has her own secret that it would be best that the Inquisitors not discover: she can see into people. When she looks into a person--which she must be fasting to do, therefore she eats a crust of bread every morning before opening her eyes so she will not pry into Baltasar--she sees mostly guts, but also a black cloud that is the human will. These two unlikely people find each other and fall in love.

This romance is set against the construction of a great cathedral in Baltasar's hometown of Mafra, to celebrate the birth of the princess of Portugal. It's a process that takes years and a lot of labor; one of the best scenes--if something as long as the Saramagian single-sentence gauntlets can be called a "scene"--is when Baltasar is put in charge of moving a giant stone miles and miles from the quarry to the cathedral, a task that crushes a man to death and maims others. Much of the historical background is drawn from life, including the figure of Dominic Scarlatti, the famous musician who spent time at Portugal's court, and Bartolomeu Lourenço de Gusmão, a Brazil-born priest who invented a primitive flying machine called the Passarola. Baltasar and Blimunda become Father Lourenço's accomplices, and they alone know how the machine really works: with the upward thrust of the wills that Blimunda has collected from the dying.

The Passarola flies only a couple of times, partly because it seems to be impossible to steer, or land. But long after it's crashed in the woods outside of Mafra and the Father Lourenço disappeared, Baltasar and Blimunda continue to tend to it, repairing it and restoring it. For what? Perhaps its power is mostly symbolic: it represents a kind of dream kept in reserve, the power of the will to help one rise above the station of the common person, who is so pushed around by the powerful, as Baltasar is with his heavy stone, or Blimunda, with her mother in exile. For these themes, I found Baltasar and Blimunda very moving, and I enjoyed the richness of its evocation of medieval Portugal, though Saramago is not an easy read, and the circuitous, comma-packed sentences keeps one at a remove from the immediacy of the story. Still, it's hard to emerge from Baltasar and Blimunda without feeling as if you've been invested in something both impossibly clever and impossibly rich, and the ending, I felt, was remarkably affecting and sad.