The word for 2022 is disaster. Many of the best books I read this year were quite literally about disaster: Svetlana Alexevich's Voices from Chernobyl, about the nuclear disaster that happened, and Denis Johnson's Fiskadoro, about the nuclear disaster that's yet to come. William T. Vollmann's Europe Central is about that disaster that shook a whole continent--and a century--by its heels. Joy Williams' Breaking and Entering, my favorite book of the year, is about the kind of ecological disasters that are happening around us all the time without our care or attention; the kind of disaster that sprouts at our own touch, like a Midas of petroleum. Other books, like Adam Erlich Sachs' Organs of Sense and Benjamin Labatut's When We Cease to Understand the World--not to mention Cormac McCarthy's The Passenger, a book I enjoyed but which did not make my year-end list--are about epistemological disasters, the ugly wreck of science foundering against its own limits.
Last year, I made a resolution to read more international fiction. I had a great year in that regard, adding eighteen new countries to my repertoire: Antigua, South Korea, Kyrgyzstan, Ecuador, Oman, Tanzania, Equatorial Guinea, Serbia, Belarus, Senegal, Cuba, Latvia, Botswana, Morocco, Rwanda, Indonesia, Nicaragua, and Belize. This project has been a real blessing; it lead me to a half-dozen really terrific books I never would have otherwise read. Among those I really enjoyed, but which didn't make the list below, are Rwandan author Scholastique Mukasonga's Our Lady of the Nile and Moroccan Tahar ben Jelloun's heart-stopping prison novel This Blinding Absence of Light. This project also forced me to do a better job of reading books by people of color: 41 out of 110. For another year, I was able to read roughly equivalent numbers of men and women writers: 55 out of 110 books were written by women. Ten of the 110 were non-fiction.
As always, the more you read, the more there is to read. I've got some great books under the tree to get to, and about 120 more countries. Happy new year, everyone! See you when the page turns to 2023!
Honorable Mentions:
The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years by Chingiz Aitmatov
Gorilla, My Love by Toni Cade Bambara
On Lighthouses by Jazmina Barrera
The Scapegoat by Daphne du Maurier
The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante
Desperate Characters by Paula Fox
Adventures in the Alaskan Skin Trade by John Hawkes
Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid
Six Walks by Ben Shattuck
The Use of Man by Aleksandar Tisma
This Earth of Mankind by Pramoedya Ananta Toer
Top Ten 2022:
10. Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich - What kind of book is this, that has no original words in it? Can an author speak with someone else's voices? Voices from Chernobyl is a stunning thing, a work of journalism that is unsettling because it seems there is no veil between the world and the reader. We are given the thing itself, Chernobyl, killing and maiming and ruining lives. We are allowed to see, seemingly without interpretation or interpolation, the flaws in Soviet society that preceded the disaster and its rippling effects. For those reason few books seem so honest, or so pitiless. My guess is that Voices from Chernobyl is a book we will be returning to again and again in the 21st century, which promises to be a century of unabated disasters. They may not look like Chernobyl--they may be floods, or famines, or diseases--but there will always be powerful people who would prefer we didn't look straight at their complicity, as Alexievich does in Voices from Chernobyl.
9. The Organs of Sense by Adam Ehrlich Sachs - It's funny to think of the resonances, in retrospect, between Sachs' The Organs of Sense and Benjamin Labatut's When We Cease to Understand the World (see below). Superficially, they could not be less alike. Sachs' novel about the mathematician Leibniz visiting a blind astronomer who claims to be able to predict an eclipse without the use of his eyes is a 17th-century picaresque, whereas Labatut's is a novel of the grim and bewildering 20th century. But both manage to capture historical moments at which scientific progress threatens to destabilize us in frightening ways. For Labatut, it's the strangeness of quantum mechanics. But Sachs reveals that such fear, the fear that science will lead us not into greater knowledge but greater darkness, have their roots in the Cartesian dualism of Leibniz's day. And of course, The Organs of Sense is simply a great deal of fun, a bit of illusionist magic that plays the curtain drop perfectly.
8. Europe Central by William T. Vollmann - I almost wanted to dislike Europe Central. Aren't there enough books about World War II, anyway? Why would Vollmann, whose novels about European settlement and conflict with Indigenous people of the Americas are some of the most comprehensive and thorough explorations of that particularly American narrative, want to turn his incisive eye--and what one can only assume is a poor and beleaguered research assistant--toward someone else's continent? But Europe Central won me over, as I knew it would, partly because it contains some of Vollmann's boldest writing, his wildest tightrope-walking. (Who else would dare to have a chapter written from the point of view of a metaphor?) And partially because in composer Dmitri Shostakovich, Vollmann presents a cowardly, corrupted genius who is one of his most sympathetically tragic figures.
7. The Lover by Marguerite Duras - Every year I discover at least one new writer for whom I think, I'm going to read everything this person has ever written. This year, it was Marguerite Duras, whose quasi-biographical story of a young girl's induction into the world of sex and despair at the hands of a rich Chinese man in colonial Vietnam was perhaps the most psychologically rich book I read all year. I was fascinated by what lurks under the surface level of The Lover: a story about two brothers, one innocent and murdered, the other an evil killer--though in what way is never clear--and a mother whose neglect compels the young narrator into a cycle of sexual self-annihilation. The Lover, I think, is a story that threads a historical needle, published at a point after we decided feminine sexuality was a worthy literary subject, but before the kind of statutorily abusive relationship depicted here became too hot to touch. For that reason alone there won't be another book like it anytime soon.
6. The Citadel of the Autarch by Gene Wolfe - I was sad to finish Wolfe's Book of the New Sun series; nearly as sad as I was, I think, to have no more of Ferrante's Neapolitan series to read. (Though surely this is the only meaningful connection between them.) The Citadel of the Autarch is a book that, like the three books that precede it, makes every fantasy book in the world look imaginatively impoverished by comparison. I've never read another book with a setting as clever as the Last House, where every floor exists in a different chronological era--and The Citadel of the Autarch has inventions like these in every chapter. Citadel completes the series by explaining how Severian came to become the Autarch, the all-powerful ruler who seeks to usher in the rebirth of Urth's dying sun, and answers one of the books' fundamental questions--why him?--by subverting it completely: as he takes on the dying Autarch's consciousness, he absorbs the thousands of consciousnesses absorbed before him, becoming a kind of Son of Man. Tolkien could never.
5. Paradise by Abdulrazak Gurnah - The Nobel folks got this one right, I thought. Paradise is a kind of Heart of Darkness from an African perspective: a young Tanzanian boy, essentially sold by his parents into the service of a powerful merchant, joins a disastrous foray into the inner bush, where incipient German colonialism has yet to set foot. Unlike Marlowe and Kurtz, Yusuf isn't far from home; he's searching for one that eludes him, and one of the novel's tragic ironies is that, unable to find one in the cities of the coast or the cloistered villages of the bush, he ends up running off to join the Germans. It seems banal to say, but Africa looks different through the eyes of African writers; there's a complexity and subtlety to Gurnah's narrative that even a master like Conrad could never see. On top of all that, Paradise is just a gripping adventure story.
4. The Topeka School by Ben Lerner - Isn't there always a book that sneaks up on you? One that, once you put it down, you can't stop thinking about it? This year, The Topeka School was that book for me. Everybody's talking about toxic masculinity these days, but few have written about it in ways that feel as true as Lerner's sort-of-autobiographical novel about a prestigious debater at a Kansas high school. I found myself thinking again and again about Lerner's depiction of the way machismo can make its way into our language and speech; the way that talking can become a kind of game of domination. The Topeka School has more going on than this, though; it's also about psychology, and infidelity, and even Trumpism, and it's to Lerner's credit as a writer that it doesn't all fall apart. It's the style that make it cohere, I think, in the end, the words of the poet, rather than the debate champ.
3. Fiskadoro by Denis Johnson - Everybody's got their post-apocalyptic book these days. I think what separates the mediocre ones, even the good ones, from the real greats is a capacity to imagine a whole new world, different from ours in ways that are entirely surprising and strange. That's what makes Riddley Walker a classic of the genre, and Fiskadoro is the closest any book I think has ever gotten to the sheer weirdness, the linguistic transformation, of that novel. It is even, like Riddley Walker, an exploration of a post-bomb society trying to understand, with diminished knowledge, how they got to be where they are. But the bombed-out Florida Keys, the mystical resurrection of Jesus-like Fiskadoro, the ghostly broadcasts from Cuba, the ragtag apocalyptic orchestra, and the final image of the mysterious ship on the horizon--presenting, like the helicopter at the end of July's People, either hope or devastation--are Johnson's alone.
2. When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut - Do you think Cormac McCarthy is bummed to have written only the second best book of the year that prominently features reclusive mathematic genius Alexander Grothendieck? Labatut's novel, a series of vignettes about scientific and mathematic geniuses of the 20th century, is, as the title suggests, a chronicle of a world for whom progress leads to more doubt, more darkness, and even--as in the first section, "Prussian Blue"--the horrible atrocities of Nazi Germany. The seams between reality and fiction are more invisible, and more insidious, perhaps, than any book I've ever read. But such methods seem to match the darkness and inscrutability at the heart of the "new science" that is the book's subject.
1. Breaking and Entering by Joy Williams - I kind of wish it weren't--I like seeing new authors at the top spot--but Joy Williams' Breaking and Entering was the most enjoyable book I read this year. It's the story of Willie and Liberty, a pair of "wanderers" who drift from one stranger's house to another, trying on other peoples' lives like used coats. It was fun to read it in the same year as Fiskadoro, another novel about the Florida Keys. (I have Williams' guidebook to the Keys sitting on my shelf, in case I ever get back to the "spiritual and biological abbatoir" that is Florida--her words.) If Fiskadoro is about a Florida after ecological disaster, Breaking and Entering is about a Florida for which the disaster--as is true in all of Williams' books--is already here, where apocalypse is present in every river, every shopping center, every vacant home. Liberty herself is like the heron she tries to save, wrapped in a wire, free and wild but trapped at every turn by human dross. Her boyfriend Willie tries to seduce her into a kind of non-life, but is there no other way than to embrace annihilation?
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