Transcription by Ben Lerner

And now I felt that Thomas had arranged the exchange he was listening in on (but surely he wasn't listening), that my mentor was conducting this electronic opera, orchestrating these interferences, crossing wires, worlds. Impossibly thin glass filaments underground, underwater, in the lungs, in the cochlea, vibrating with the small waves hit them--You call this fiction, but it is more.

In the third section of Ben Lerner's new novel Transcription, a man named Max is describing his relationship with his father, a respected but somewhat eccentric academic named Thomas. Thomas, Max describes, grows sick during the COVID-19 pandemic, and Max is told by the hospital that he should say goodbye to his father. The iPad they use for these last goodbyes is on the fritz, so Thomas must deliver his last words over the phone. When I read this, I had to put the book down for a moment--it brought back so strongly the memory of telling my own father that I loved him over the phone. Like my own father, Thomas is too weak to respond, and it's unclear whether Max has been heard at all. Unlike my father, Thomas recovers somewhat miraculously. Though he dies somewhat later, the question remains: what has been communicated and how? Have the iPad, the phone, led to a true message being sent and received? 

Max's section isn't what you'll find in most summaries of Transcription, which begin with the narrator of the first section, the classic Ben Lerner stand-in, who has returned to Providence to interview Thomas, his mentor. The narrator accidentally drops his phone in the toilet, and is unable to record the conversation, which he is meant to write up, so he attempts to do it from memory. Later on, he confesses this somewhat sheepishly, but what he thought would be a funny anecdote turns out to enrage people, because the interview has come to be considered the (now) dead Thomas' last words. I will say that Transcription is not what I expected from this description: I thought we would get some sort of metafictional text, a cobbling together of reportage and memory, that asks us to comb through and interrogate it in order to separate the truth from falsity, or to show us that such a task is in truth impossible. But Lerner mostly plays it straight; whether the reported conversation is original or not seems not to be the question.

Instead, the novel seemed to me about the way that technology has shaped the way we communicate with each other, for better or worse. Whether the conversation is genuine or not, did Thomas' belief that he was being recorded change what he said? Can the medium, even when not in use, change the message? Lerner explores these ideas in a dozen ways, including the shame and frustration that the narrator shows in not being able to FaceTime his daughter before bed, nor let her know that he can't. These themes show up in the hospital iPad, obviously, but I thought they were most interestingly explored when, in the third section, Max describes the struggles he's had with his daughter, who engages in severe food refusal. The only thing that works, it turns out, is to let her watch YouTube while she eats. Is this a distraction? Or a lifeline? Can it be both? We all worry about the "iPad generation," of course, but even the technology that steals our attention, or worse, turns out to have its lifesaving uses. For better or worse, we're all wired now, and though we make a practice of lamenting what it's done to us, it is easier than ever to be heard. 

As with most of Lerner's books, this sounds a lot more simplistic in my rendering than it is on the page. I respect and admire his ability to explore the themes that seem so vital to us, and yet are so difficult to talk about; you never leave one of his novels thinking that it's not really relevant to you or the world in which you live. This one won't have the staying power of The Topeka School or Leaving the Atocha Station, but I think I'll remember what it expresses about our wired--or I suppose, now, wireless--world for a long time.

Emily Dickinson Face to Face by Martha Dickinson Bianchi

Her love of being alone up in her room was associated with her feeling for a key, which signified freedom from interruption and the social prevention that beset her downstairs. She would stand looking down, one hand raised, thumb and forefinger closed on an imaginary key, and say, with a quick turn of her wrist, 'It's just a turn--and freedom, Matty!' She read her letters there, never opening one until she was alone--not even so much as a note from a neighbor. Her loneliness has been much deplored; but where and with whom would she not have been lonely? her kind of loneliness was the gift whose riches she herself pronounced beyond the power of 'mortal numeral to divulge.' And what society of her contemporaries would have made up to her for the loss of that precious guest of her solitude she named 'Finite Infinity?'

It seems strange to even have a book like this, Martha Dickinson Bianchi's memoir about her famous aunt. We think of Emily Dickinson locked up in a room, never seeing anyone, never even venturing downstairs for her father's funeral. And yet, as Emily Dickinson Face to Face tells us, Emily was social, a favorite aunt and beloved family member that seemed to have been treasured by everyone she knew, even as they found her eccentric habits a little bit annoying. (As for the funeral thing, well, it also makes clear that Emily was devastated by her father's death, and perhaps retreated even further into isolation after it.) And yet, in passages such as the one above, Dickinson Bianchi--an accomplished writer and novelist in her own right--makes it clear that isolation and solitude were part of what animated the writer, and one feels the strong impression of a brilliant person whose self-sufficiency comes from an abundance of her own capacities.

Because Dickinson Bianchi was a child when she knew her aunt best, what we get most of is a child's impression of an older adult. Emily, as her niece describes her, was particularly beloved by children, and had a way with them, though it's a little like the way that children get attached to someone who remains a little withholding of themselves. The images that struck me most, I think, were of Emily walking to and fro in Amherst with gifts and notes. The notes, as Dickinson Bianchi describes them, were made of the same wit and cleverness as her poetry, as are the clever little letters she would write her niece, and especially the letter she would write to Dickinson Bianchi's mother, Sue, whom as we now know, was deeply romantically entwined with Emily. Are these little letters poems? Why not? I mean, are the poems poems? This is part of what I love about Emily Dickinson: her poetry flouts all the little fence-posts we put up around the entire concept of poetry.

Emily Dickinson Face to Face is a slim little vignette (it is short book February, after all), and so there's little here to really hold on to. Biography-heads looking for a close and intimate look at the poet might want to look elsewhere. But it might be enjoyed by those looking for something a little more like a poem by Emily Dickinson: brief, vivid, contradictory, mysterious.

Sugarcane with Salt by James Ng'ombe

Khumbo stepped into the September sun, now throwing its rays fiercely, but threatened by heavy, dark clouds around it. He knew though that the rains were still a month or so away, and that the bush fires must already have forced hundreds of mice from their underground hideouts into the hands of the scheming and salivating herdboys. The first rain, zimalupsya, when it came, brought with it an aura of ecstasy as expectant mothers rushed out in search of anthill soil which they sucked to satisfy the insatiable greed of the new life within them. Those who didn't have an anthill in sight--although they would not give up looking for this most treasured delicacy delivered by the spirits from underneath through the medium of ants--those who had to look for alternatives, went for the mudwalls of the house, kitchen or nkhokwe, and extracted a lump or two.

Khumbo Dala returns to Malawi from eight years in an English medical school, and finds the place deeply changed. The sugarcane fields that were once privately owned by small farmers have been swallowed up by large conglomerates, who no longer tolerate the friendly theft of a cane or two by hungry children. The school where he was once a student has become increasingly Muslim, and these changing demographics threaten conflict. His family, too, has changed, in ways he did not expect: his mother has given birth to a white child and split from his father; his brother has married a Muslim woman his parents don't approve of (who happens to be Khumbo's childhood sweetheart); the same brother has also gotten mixed up in the drug trade, running hemp. But Khumbo too, has changed. Not only is he now a doctor, but he has a white fiancee, who will soon follow him to Malawi. The two changes push Khumbo in opposite directions: is there a place for him, here, in the country of his birth?

These themes are, in some respect, a little predictable for a novel of mid- to late-century Africa. Sugarcane with Salt is often no more or less than what it presents itself to be; the prose is workmanlike, the story realist to the core, though intricate and interesting. The part I thought was the most engaging, actually, came at the end: Khumbo's brother, arrested by the Malawian regime, who seeks to make an example of him, commits suicide in prison. Tradition demands that Khumbo marry his brother's widow Chimwemwe, and become father to their young son. The fact that Khumbo and Chimwemwe are former lovers only complicates things, and it throws a wrench in his relationship with the Englishwoman Sue, who is already feeling threatened by Khumbo's attentions to a young schoolteacher named Grace. The three women represent different approaches for Khumbo, and perhaps might be thought of as traditionalism, moderation, and radical internationalism. I was interested in the way that, at the end of the novel, Khumbo's situation puts him at the heart of the competing pressures of a modernizing Malawi.

With the addition of Malawi, my "Countries Read" list is up to 115!

The War by Marguerite Duras

I couldn't stop my self--I started to run downstairs, to escape into the street. Beauchamp and D. were supporting him under the arms. They'd stopped on the first-floor landing. He was looking up.

I can't remember exactly what happened. He must have looked at me and recognized me and smiled. I shrieked no, that I didn't want to see. I started to run again, up the stairs this time. I was shrieking, I remember that. The war emerged in my shrieks. Six years without uttering a cry. I found myself in some neighbors' apartment. They forced me to drink some rum, they poured it into my mouth. Into the shrieks.

The first section of The War, Marguerite Duras' collection of memoir pieces about her World War II experiences, depicts the author in the war's waning days, waiting to hear news of her husband, who had been captured by the Nazis and taken to Bergen-Belsen. News is difficult to come by; it's all private whispers and hearsay. In her mind, he is already dead; and the death follows her around like another husband, always with her, even as it is not yet known. Miraculously, he's discovered alive by her friends in the Resistance, but in a deeply weakened state. By the time he makes it back to Paris, he's too weak to even eat--many returnees die, we're told, because their shriveled stomachs burst as soon as something solid is put into them. It's no happy homecoming, but something out of a horror movie: "The war emerged in my shrieks." What follows is a long and arduous process of getting him back to strength. At the end of it, when he's well enough, Duras tells him--and us--that she is, as she has always intended, divorcing him to marry her fellow Resistance fighter D. (presumably, "Duras").

What's funny about The War, which seems to have been cobbled together from several disparate pieces, is that it really isn't interested in the war's progression, but by its end. The war only becomes real, and most horrible, for Duras, when its most ravaged victims, like her husband, begin to return. The other two pieces deal more directly with Duras' experiences in the resistance, but they, too, take place toward the war's end, when Germany is already losing its hold on its possessions in Europe, and this gives the pieces a kind of bitter irrelevancy. One tells about an agent of the Gestapo with romantic designs on Duras; she goes out with him for months as a prelude to identifying him to the Resistance to be killed. The third is about literal torture: the bloody beating of a man expected of collaboration with the Nazis. There's a black humor to the single question he keeps refusing to answer: What is the color of the ID that let you into the Nazi administrative building? Finally, after beating him so badly he's likely to die, he admits that it was green--Gestapo green. Both of these figures, marked for death by the Resistance, have a kind of innocence and naivete that makes them strangely sympathetic, and the fact that the war is in both cases practically over makes their token stubbornness seem mean, vain, and sad.

Boy, Duras could write. The first section, about her husband's return, is some of the most effective and chilling writing I've ever read about World War II--which is maybe the most written-about event in all of world history, you know? I enjoyed all three parts, which I sense were never really intended to be grouped together when they were written, but it's that first section--the war emerging with the shrieks, the rum being poured into the shrieks--that I think will stay with me.

The White Bear by Henrik Pontoppidan

It is true that there would be times when his wild surges of blood subsided for a moment, when he, as it were, came to observe his own face--and looked away. He would then become almost afraid of himself... the sight of his own hand, still bloody from helping with the flaying of seals. Or his uncut, unkempt beard. The suddenly alien sound of his deep voice. Unbidden, visions of his grandfather's terrifying aura would visit him. And the mute silence the name of this "ogre" invoked. The petrified stare in his mother's anxious eyes on the only occasion she had allowed his grandfather's name to pass her lips.

The titular bear of Danish Nobel winner Henrik Pontoppidan's The White Bear is Thorkild Muller, a priest who has spent the bulk of his life preaching to indigenous Greenlanders. As a young man in Denmark, Thorkild is a wayward rascal who offers his services to the Danish in Greenland, thinking he'll basically fuck up his schooling so bad they'll never actually put him in a parish, but as it turns out, he's underestimated the inevitability of bureaucracy. He's a poor and talentless priest, but there comes a moment when he decides to toss away the proprieties of Danish civilization to live among, and like, the Greenlanders, even taking a wife among them. When he returns, as an old man, to Denmark, he has gained fervor and intellect, and even becomes popular among regular parishioners. But he's too wild for the Danish church, who essentially chase him back to Greenland. It's a slim, almost parable-like story, that pokes fun at a buttoned-up Danish culture and suggests that what the Danes perceive as Indigenous "wildness" may represent a truer and more genuine religion.

I'm a sucker for stories about the Arctic, and about Indigenous peoples, but I actually preferred the other novella in this small duo. Titled "The Rearguard," it focuses on a recently married Danish couple living in Rome, Jorgen and Ursula. Jorgen is a notorious painter working in the school of social realism, and Ursula is drawn to him because she admires both his talent and his passion, though she herself is the daughter of an bureaucrat who represents nearly everything that Jorgen despises. Like the young Thorkild of "The White Bear," Jorgen's red hair represents his fiery idiosyncrasy, and the reader has some sympathy with Jorgen's enthusiasm for tearing down the pieties of civil society in favor of a socialist utopia. But, like many would-be revolutionaries, Jorgen turns out to be a total boor. He can't go anywhere without making a scene; he chews out his fellow painters for their violations of his own orthodoxies. Ursula, too, often bears the brunt of his overflow of passion and vitriol; also like many would-be revolutionaries, he makes few distinctions among his targets, and the young marriage founders as it's just beginning. I found this the stronger of the two novellas because Jorgen is a really well-done character--Pontoppidan captures his proud, irascible voice in a way that made it more memorable.

OK, so I'm going to start keeping track of the Nobel Prize winners I've read. With the addition of Pontoppidan, I've read 59/122, so not quite half. I probably won't read them all, but maybe it'll be a nice way of discovering some new things.

Duplex by Kathryn Davis

In a contact dream the dreamer's mind got swallowed by the mind of another dreamer, usually someone who lived in close proximity though not in the same house; this phenomenon occurred most often in the very young or the mentally ill, whose brains lacked such walls as the mature brain erected over time, brick after brick of old passwords, the secret location of a soul, schoolmates' birthdays, how to sew a dress, how to recognize a prime number. People living in duplexes were especially susceptible, which was why the sorcerer had bought such an isolated house in the first place.

Kathryn Davis' Duplex opens on a sunny suburban street: Miss Vicks looks out on a street of cars, lawns, children playing, some of whom, like Mary, are in her class at elementary school. It's all a very ordinary scene, perhaps pointedly over-ordinary, and then a car drives by, and Miss Vicks recognizes its driver as the sorcerer who is called Body-without-soul. Also, he is her boyfriend. From there, the novel explodes, because anything is possible: the neighbors across the street, we learn, are robots. The youngest (?) robot, Cindy XA, is a friend of Mary's, when she isn't in her true form, which is the size and shape of a needle. Mary's childhood sweetheart Eddie has disappeared; later we discover that he has sold his soul to Body-without-soul (who has always, for obvious reasons, coveted it) in order to become a baseball star. And across the wall of the duplex, Mary and Miss Vicks share their dreams. Is this why Body-without-soul pursues Mary, as he pursued Miss Vicks, as she begins to grow older?

Needless to say, Duplex is a strange book. One of the strangest things about it, and one if its great strengths, is how it staggers forward in time. Miss Vicks grows old, dies, and Mary follows her, having had a daughter of her own. Death stalks these characters, as it does all of us, I suppose, but in each case death has a strange appearance. For Miss Vicks, for example, it involves following a wall on horseback, the other side of which can be seen but not penetrated, and ending up in a strange underground room. But Davis is canny about signifying to us exactly where and when we are; time moves forward in leaps and bounds, but she never quite signifies how far along its track we've moved. I suppose that's how aging is: we don't really notice it until a detail pops up to inform us that time has kept on passing.

Since reading Labrador, I have read several of Davis' novels, some of which I liked (Versailles, The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf) and some which I really didn't get (The Thin Place, The Walking Tour). I feel like I've been chasing the high of Labrador all that time, and Duplex is far and away the closest I've gotten, though it doesn't (how could it) surpass that novel that first blew me away. It's so strange, so baffling and difficult to penetrate, that it's hard even to talk about. And yet, beneath the surface, it seems to me to resonate profoundly with much that is human: growing up, being initiated into sex and love, chasing one's ambitions, and then growing old and dying. Cindy XA looks upon these human acts with a bemused and disdainful eye, and the book does too, perhaps, as if saying: human life, isn't it all just a little strange?

Sapphira and the Slave Girl by Willa Cather

The tall black man turned to Nancy and put a hand on her shoulder. "Dey ain't strangers where you're goin', honey. Dey call theyselves Friends, an' dey is friends to all God's people. You'll be treated like dey had raised you up from a chile, an' you'll be passed along on yo' way from one kind fambly to de next. Dey got a letter all 'bout you from the Reverend Fairhead, an' dey all feels 'quainted. We must be goin' now, chile. We want to git over the line into Pennsylvany as early tomorrer as we kin." There was something solemn yet comforting in his voice, like the voice of prophecy. When he gave Nancy his hand, she climbed into the chaise.

Sapphira and the Slave Girl, Willa Cather's last published novel, might be a seen as a return to Virginia, the state where Cather was born. The story takes place shortly before the Civil War (Cather was born not long after it), in the household of Sapphira Dodderidge Colbert, who has grown old alongside her husband, a miller in the Blue Ridge mountains. As a young woman, Sapphira married slightly below her station, and the rural town where she and the miller live is not quite the plantation of her youth, and yet she maintains a full household of Negro "servants," whom she treats for the most part with kindness. The exception is Nancy, a young half-white woman, rumored to be the daughter of either an itinerant artist or one of the miller's own brothers, and who Sapphira suspects--wrongly--to be the object of her husband's sexual or romantic affections. Sapphira punishes Nancy in a lot of passive-aggressive ways, but Nancy's ultimate punishment comes when Sapphira opens her doors to a rakish young nephew whom she knows will not take Nancy's "no" for an answer.

I was surprised by just how heavy the threat of sexual violation hangs over Sapphira and the Slave Girl. Cather's prose is characteristically elegant, bordering on the plain, but in this case it conceals a deep and distressing sexual anxiety. Nancy is already marked from birth by the anxieties of interracial sex and rape, and Sapphira's belief that her husband's kindness toward Nancy is evidence of a sexual relationship shows just how intense those anxieties can be. Sapphira's solution is to introduce, even if by inaction, a greater and more predatory threat, as if to say, "Oh, you want to have sex with your white master, do you?" But of course, Nancy doesn't, and even if she did, there would be no meaningful consent within the boundaries of the master-slave relationship; Sapphira's antipathy toward Nancy reveals the mental gymnastics needed by the slaver to assign a sexual power to the enslaved in order to clear one's own conscience. Sapphira essentially targets Nancy for rape, and a suspicion that the book still believes in her genteel virtues may explain why Sapphira and the Slave Girl is so little read today. Sapphira's daughter, Rachel Blake, ultimately helps Nancy escape on the Underground Railroad.

Toni Morrison famously used Sapphira and the Slave Girl as a case study in her analysis of the white imagination; I haven't read that essay, but it's not hard to see where such an analysis might begin. At times the novel is surprisingly didactic, as when one character realizes quite pointedly that whether one treats one's slaves "well" is immaterial, that the system is fundamentally immoral. But it's hard not to feel that the novel wants to have it both ways, that it really wants us to admire and sympathize with the anti-slavery whites like Rachel, and not to be too harsh on Sapphira. It also wants us, I'd argue, to admire the hardiness and gentility of antebellum society, as when one of Rachel's daughters is killed by a diphtheria epidemic. The biggest flaw, perhaps, is that Nancy herself is a character that holds little interest, a passive recipient of sexual torment whose most developed moment comes when she must agonize over whether to leave the life she has known or light out for Canada. Whatever the promise of the title, it's hard to argue that both Nancy and the woman who keeps her enslaved have equal billing.

America, América by Greg Grandin

It is a maxim in both electrical engineering and international relations theory that power needs a ground. For a long many years, Latin America to the lightning-like United States: its persistent opposition to intervention and conquest, and its unwavering demand for the recognition of absolute national sovereignty, obliged Washington to learn how to discipline itself, to control its energies, letting its power flow more efficiently and evenly.

America, América, Greg Grandin's new history of the "New World," traces the history of both Anglo-America and Latin America together, instead of as separate histories. What would we learn, Grandin suggests, if we were to understand the forces that shaped the United States (and Canada) alongside the forces that shaped the rest of the Americas, from Mexico down to the tip of Patagonia? Should we understand the Spanish and English processes of colonizing the Americas as separate and distinct, or do they share certain important qualities that continue to tie their successor states together?

First of all, I appreciated the way that Grandin laid out the differences between English and Spanish colonization in ways that I have sensed but not been able to articulate. As Grandin describes it, as horrible and violent as the Spanish were--and they were very violent--Spanish colonial society identified a place for the Indigenous in its hierarchy, at the bottom, whereas English and later American colonies conceived of Indigenous people as outside the political order, thus needing to be either ignored or eliminated. You can trace a direct line from this distinction to the idea of mestizaje that dominates the self-conception of Mexico, in contrast with the reservation-and-sovereignty model of the United States. I was also very interested to read about how Spanish colonial society birthed the New World's first civil rights movement, spearheaded by Bartolome Las Casas and other Dominican priests. I had long heard of Las Casas as a kind of contrast to Columbus, and proof that it was possible even at the time to conceive of Indigenous rights, but I had no idea how powerful or influential, or, truly, courageous, he really was.

Las Casas' conception of Indigenous, even equal rights, were later picked up on by social reformers in the colonial Americas, like Marti and Bolivar. America, América does an amazing job showing how ideas of liberty and social change were shared by revolutionaries and thinkers on both sides of the Anglo-Latin divide--the book even opens by focusing on Francisco de Miranda, a Venezuelan who fought in the American Revolutionary War. In the crucible of the revolutionary 18th and 19th centuries, it was possible for people on both sides to imagine a transcontinental republic that would stand in opposition to the old ways of European monarchy. Sometimes that looked like Americans imagining a United States that encompassed Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean, but sometimes it looked like a "Pan-American" republic that would be for all people. It's hard, reading America, América, to shake the idea that it was Miranda, Bolivar, and Marti who best epitomized the "Sons of Liberty" that we imagine in guys like George Washington.

Such Pan-Americanism failed to prosper in the United States, but it seems to never have really died in Latin America. In the latter portion of the book, Grandin describes how Latin America acted as a counterweight to the United States, birthing International Law and ideas of non-intervention and collaboration that would come to define 20th century. Grandin never quite spells it out, but it's easy to read a direct line from Las Casas to Bolivar to the Pan-Americans of the 20th century, who time and again did their best to force the United States to come to to the bargaining table and submit to treaties of peace and collaboration. Grandin puts heavy emphasis on a series of Pan-American conferences in the early 20th century that found brief success with Wilson and FDR, but later reaction produced the American-backed right-wing dictatorships of Pinochet, Somoza, and countless others.

One thing I liked best about America, América: Grandin skips over the stuff he thinks we already knows. The Cuban revolution, for example, gets basically skipped over as a footnote. Instead, we're treated to the story of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, the Colombian socialist leader whose strange assassination (reminiscent, in its breeding of conspiracy theories, of JFK's) set off a violent reaction called El Bogotazo. I, of course, had never heard of that. Grandin does this again and again, treating lightly things he thinks his audience may know a little about already--the Civil War, the Republic of Texas, etc.--to focus on the things we don't. It's a bold strategy that asks a lot of his audience, but I thought it really made the book worth reading. 

Brent's Top Books of 2025

Another year, another list representing another pile of books I read and mostly failed to review. Which I regret every year, but this year in particular, I read a few books early on that I know I really liked but, sadly, I can't remember enough about them to say if they should be on this list or not. Maybe 2026 will be better?

But even with that caveat, it was very hard to trim my list down to the best books I read this year. My initial list of stuff I really liked was around 35 books, and I didn't read anything I really hated. My list this year includes a few new countries, some comics, some weird stuff, and lots and lots of great literature. Every year, when it's time to write these up, I look at all the relatively new stuff on my list, and think back to all the people I see online daily lamenting the lack of quality new books and, with all due respect, it's a skill issue. There's more beautiful, moving, funny, brilliant work published in the last 50 years than anyone could read in a lifetime. So without further ado, my best reads of the year.

Honorable Mentions:

Women of Sand and Myrrh, Hanan al-Shakyh

Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness, Jennifer Tseng

The Shawl, Cynthia Ozick

We the Survivors, Tash Aw

The Man in High Castle, Philip K. Dick

Territory of Light, Yuko Tsushima

The Hearing Trumpet, Leonore Carrington

Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, Rick Perlstein

The Iliad, Emily Wilson

Picnic at Hanging Rock, Joan Lindsay

Best Books of 2026 in rough but not necessarily exact order:

Bone, Jeff Smith

If J. R. R. Tolkien had been a cartoonist, he might have written something like Bone. The entire work weighs in at a hefty 1360 pages, and every one of them is packed with Smith's beautiful black and white artwork. The story Bone tells is serious, dipping its toes in religion, colonialism, generational trauma, and dispossession, but you'd be forgiven for not noticing most of that on a first read. Smith somehow managed to create epic where most sequences manage a punchline and pay sly homage to the last 100 years of American newspaper strips and cartooning. A real treat.

The Scapegoat, Daphne Du Maurier

Du Maurier has much to recommend her, but perhaps her most enviable trait is the way she generates momentum from seemingly mundane situations, piling anodyne happenings and biolerplate plot points on top of each other until they assume a nature unlike anything else. The Scapegoat takes a premise as old as Shalespeare--what if a regular guy secretly traded places with a rich dude?--and takes it in directions no one else would ever.

Flights, Olga Tokarczuk

This is one of the books I really regret not reviewing. Framed by a narrator writing from a series of airports, it's a modernist-style work comprised of mini-essays on travel and place interspersed with loosely-linked short stories that underline those themes. But that doesn't do justice to the writing, which is beautiful, or the structure, that makes it hard to classify. Is it a novel? A short story collection? New Journalism? Maybe all of those, and more. 

Sun City, Tove Jansson

Another writer who seemingly never made a misstep, Jansson is always brilliantly funny and subtly pathotic, even, maybe especially, here, telling a story of a bunch of old folks who've moved to the liminal space of South Florida and dying or trying not to. It's got everything--a pirate ship, a Jesus freak, a pair of twins who die simultaneously, etc, etc. Quite a bit better than actually visiting Florida.

 

The Blind Owl, Sadegeh Hadayat

A bleak, cynical book, one of the most famous Iranian novels of all time, about a man trying to dispose of a corpse that he might've killed. Surreal, gross, poetic, a little scary, it's not like anything else I read this year, or maybe ever.

Lila, Marilynne Robinson

Possibly the best of the Gilead novels, Lila is the story of Lila Ames, wife of Rev. Boughton from Gilead. Robinson is, on the sentence level, one of the best writers I've ever read. Seemingly every page of her novels and essays contains a sentence or two that are perfect. And her stories, though not always neat or "nice", always give me a bit of comfort, even at their darkest. It says something that Robinson is a Calvinist and integrates it so beautifully into her work that I wish I was one too.

Days of Abandonment, Elena Ferrante 

And speaking of bleak and cynical, let's move on the Ferrante, one of the angriest and most honest authors I've ever read. A middle aged woman's husband leaves her and her two children suddenly for a younger woman, and she's left to pick up the pieces--which she's completely incapable of doing. Reading the summary of this book doesn't even begin to tell you what it's about. Perhaps my most harrowing read of the year.

The Savage Detectives, Roberto Bolaño

I tried reading this a few years back and bounced off about 180pp in, when the story switches from a first-person narrative by an young poet to an oral history of the movement that poet was part of, Visceral Realism. But this time, after reading some of Bolano's shorter works, I understood what I was reading and it's brilliant. A sort-of biography of the two men behind the movement told entirely through the eyes of their friends, enemies, and predecessors, it creates an entire world only to ask, in the end, if there was really anything there at all. Also multiple people get stabbed for liking the wrong poets.

The Idiot, Fyodor Dostoevsky

This was the first book I read this year, the only one I reviewed, and the one I've thought about the most. Easily the darkest of Dostoevsky's major works, The Idiot tells the story of Myshkin, an innocent, and asks the question, "What would happen if a human being was actually just like Jesus?" And the answer is, uh, not what you'd expect. More The Last Temptation of Christ then In His Steps, The Idiot asks questions for which there are still no easy answers, and asks them boldly.

And that's a wrap for this year. Thanks to everyone who reads this blog, even though you're mostly reading Chris's excellent reviews, and I hope you stick around for this year. I know I will.

Indian Tales by Jaime de Angulo

In a few days they started again, tras... tras... tras.... The trail wound in and out through slowly rising foothills. There were many outcroppings of rock, jutting out everywhere. Soon the party was strung out in a long straggling line. Coyote Old Man and Antelope were taking their time and bringing up the rear. The Bears were way ahead of them. And way way ahead of the Bears were the Antelope men and women, almost running in their fast electric stride. This seemed to be the only way they could travel, because they were desert people. At intervals they would sit down and wait patiently for the rest of the party to catch up. They just didn't know how to travel slowly. The Antelope children were the same, and Fox Boy and Oriole Girl had work to keep up with them, abut they were too proud to be left behind.

Jamie de Angulo was a linguist and ethnologist who spent time among the Indian tribes of California in the beginning of the 20th century. He was, apparently, an eccentric autodidact who went west to become, and did become, a cowboy, before turning his attention to the languages and folk tales of the area. Indian Tales is his version of the "Coyote Tales" that he heard among these tribes, sewn together into a single narrative that begins when the family of Bear, Antelope, Fox Boy, and the baby Quail set off to visit some relatives. Along the way they meet various figures from Californian legend, including Old Man Coyote, but also the Grass and Flint People, a Grizzly Bear, some hawks, Doctor Loon, and Oriole Girl, on whom Fox Boy nurses an obvious and impossible crush.

The tales themselves are a great deal of fun. They are recognizable to anyone who has heard Indigenous creation stories, which are often long, circuitous, and unpredictable. They've always struck me as different somehow, perhaps more episodic, than stories in European mythic traditions, and more humorous. People die and come back to life, animals perform strange and courageous feats, people are transformed into monsters, that sort of stuff. I was interested in the way De Angulo nests the stories, having Bear, Coyote, and others tell them to each other around the campfire. Are they telling legend, or in their world, history? I suppose both.

What's most interesting, though, is the way that De Angulo manages to seamlessly combine the traditions of Indigenous storytelling and modernist "Western" literature. You can see it, I think, in the romantic tension between Fox Boy and Oriole Girl, who keeps telling Fox Boy (who of course does not listen) that she's not interested in men. You can see it in the beautiful evocations of the thin Grass People or their enemies, the Fire People. You can see it, I think, in the skillful sketching of the characters whose personalities emerge through repetition and gesture: Grumpy Bear, secretive Old Man Coyote, petulant Fox Boy--who, true to the novel form, comes of age in the process of the family's long excursion. At the end, there's even some metafictional flourishes when Fox Boy and Oriole Girl discuss perhaps getting rid of "the author," and what might happen to them if they do. That shows, of course, that what we are reading has been crafted by a single craftsman, rather than the shared or repeated mode of the Indian legends. And it forces us to remember to take the whole thing with a grain of salt, too: Indian Tales is more fiction than ethnography, more novel than myth.