You Glow in the Dark by Liliana Colanzi

He switched off the lamp. In the dark, as he suspected, the salt became an incandescent snow. He rubbed at that substance and the glow spread over the palm of his hand. Awed and puzzled, he observed the celestial combustion. There between the blue glow and the shadows of the scrap metal behind him, an idea began to emerge in his brain like the head of a mushroom pushing up after showers. He would make a gift for his wife; the most beautiful, shimmering, unusual ring. He smiled.

The title story of Bolivian writer Liliana Colanzi's collection You Glow in the Dark reimagines the true story of a Brazilian scrap metal dealer who came upon a bit of uranium. Not knowing what it was, he fashioned a piece of jewelry out of it for his wife, with predictable results. Colanzi tells the story through a series of brief vignettes from different vantage points and in different registers: not just the scrap dealer or his wife, but a young receptionist who, evacuated and bused out to a different town, where the fate of her own has already become known, is pointedly asked: "Do you glow in the dark?" Another, heart-rending section, details the numbered lots of buried radioactive ephemera that had to be abandoned: a doll, a dress, a diary, and even the remains of family pets. In this way, Colanzi circumscribes the rippling effects of the disaster, like the spread of the radiation itself, and the havoc brought on innocent people by capitalist neglect.

Many of the stories here are in this polyphonic mode. Some of them take big swings that don't connect, as with "Atomito," a story very reminiscent of "You Glow in the Dark," which imagines a nuclear fallout in the Bolivian community of El Alto as being in the shape of, perhaps enspirited by, the cute cartoon mascot of the local plant. Much more successful, I thought, and perhaps the best story in the collection, was "The Cave," about a single cave over the course of thousands of years. In prehistory, a cavewoman paints the handprints of her newborn twins before killing them (such births are taboo); later these same handprints are wondered at by tourists and interlopers. A fungus grows in the cave that turns out to be the birth of White Nose Syndrome, the disease which has been decimating bat populations for years, or something like it. In the future, the cave becomes a node in a teleportation game. What might have been cheesy or forced is, I thought, quite effective, turning the cave which is at heart a kind of absence into a historical presence. Perhaps it works because the manifold nature of the stories keeps them from being too easily summed up or resolved; the best ones feel as if something else is going to happen next, just out of reach of the story.

With the addition of Bolivia, my "Countries Read" list is now up to 118!

An Imaginary Life by David Malouf

We have some power in us that knows its own ends. It is that that drives on to what we must finally become. We have only to conceive of the possibility and somehow the spirit works in us to make it actual. This is the true meaning of transformation. This is the real metamorphosis. Our further selves are contained within us, as the leaves and blossoms are in the tree. We only have to find the spring and release it.

An Imaginary Life is the story of Ovid, the Roman poet of the Metamorphoses, who was exiled to the Black Sea by Augustus for being a little too cheeky with his writing. As Malouf points out in his afterword, not much is known about his life there, which makes it a fertile opportunity for the imagination. (This is, perhaps, one meaning of the title.) What Malouf imagines is that Ovid, despondent to find himself among rustics who do not speak his language, struggles to reconcile himself to his fate, until, when on a hunting trip, he discovers a feral boy in the woods. The locals know all about the boy, and Ovid convinces them to capture him and bring them into the town, where he forms a connection with the boy, teaching him the rudiments of speech. Later, when sickness strikes the village, the boy is blamed by superstitious elements, and Ovid and the boy run away, even further into exile.

I think An Imaginary Life is a pretty bad title for a book that ought to be titled something along the lines of Metamorphoses. As in the passage above, Malouf often writes beautifully on the topic of metamorphosis and transformation. There is the metamorphosis of Ovid into the new person he has become at the edge of the Empire. There is the metamorphosis of the boy, who resembles something like the halfway point of Ovid's characters, stuck between human and beast. But for all that, I was surprised how little An Imaginary Life was interested in making literary connections to the work of Ovid. The fanciful "feral boy" story might have belonged to anyone, and feels a little grafted on to the story of the great poet. But maybe that's the kind of critique that looks for the book that isn't there rather than the one that is. The book that is here is often lovely, elegiac, though I found it a little slow and at times bordering on mawkish. It's a genre of book that I really love--here I'm thinking of John Williams' Augustus, Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian, Robert Graves' I, Claudius--but compared to those, this one felt very forgettable.

Entering Fire by Rikki Ducornet

Septimus, jealous of my love for plants, despised them all. He attempted to justify this hatred when he insisted that plants, the whores of the natural world, fornicate with whatever comes their way: the wind, bugs, bats, birds, bees, snails, slimes and even men. In fact, the beauties of Evangelista's Palace were far more promiscuous--if less adventurous--for they copulated with only members of their own species.

My son had a morbid hatred of females, and whores in particular. Whores, like orchids, are the female archetype par excellence, painted, scented, seductive. Beneath their masks, the women of the Palace were fragile, luscious, and unique. But the men who visited them were so blinded by lust they never saw what was there, only what was painted there.

Rikki Ducornet's Entering Fire has two narrators: the first is Lamprias de Bergerac, a Victorian botanist and world traveler who spends most of his life absent from his family in France, exploring the wilds of the Amazonian jungle, where he adopts the free-love ethos of the women at the roadhouse known as Evangelista's Palace, and eventually falls in love with an Indigenous woman named Cucla. Lamprias is a recognizable kind of 19th century adventurer, who approaches all things, places, pants, and pussy (sorry, I couldn't help it) with the same sense of gleeful adventure and abandon. The other narrator is his son, Septimus de Bergerac, whose resentment at being abandoned by his father curdles into a rejection of everything his father stands for. Septimus, in turn, turns toward the savage nationalism and racism that will come to dominate the European landscape in the early 20th century.

It's a bold move to start your book with the words of an anti-Semite. You have to trust your reader--and your publisher, frankly--intimately. The first victim of Septimus' anger is his half-brother, the son of Lamprias and a Chinese woman whom he brings back from his travels named Dust. This son is named, somehow, "True Man," and his beauty and symmetry are an indictment of Septimus' own physical ugliness. Septimus delights gleefully in True Man's ultimate destruction--hanged for a minor crime--but it's the whole kit and caboodle of his father's worldview that he seeks to ultimately destroy. We get to watch as Septimus' Nazis take over Europe, and then collapse; Septimus flees (where else) to the South America that his father had loved, like so many other Nazis. But this turns out to be only a pit-stop on the way to the Catskills in New York, where his father and Cucla have taken up residence, and Septimus--slowly disintegrating thanks to the syphilis he's contracted from the women he despises--sets up a final watch on his father. 

Like with her other (incredible) novel, The Jade Cabinet, Ducornet seems to be really interested in the particular shape and pattern of history. How did the Victorian era, with its interest in open science and exploration, curdle into the inwardness and smallness of fascism and Nazism? (Of course, the seeds of race science were sown beginning with Darwin, someone whom Lamprias much resembles, but the novel, I think, is as loathe to blame Darwin as it is Lamprias.) In doing so, I was really struck by how Ducornet identifies racism as something psychological, even psychosexual or Oedipal, the son striking out at the father who abandoned him, Septimus' dalliance with Jewish prostitutes (whom mostly he wants to, like, kick him in the chest). And Septimus' seizing on whiteness as a way to obviate his own ugliness, both physical and mental, seems to me very shrewd. In fact, I was struck at just how recognizable Septimus' racial resentment is, its essential smallness and pettiness, its need to be made large by associating itself with a larger historical movement, which, of course, is all imaginary:

Time is on the march and Time is on my side. Like fish and bread I am multiplied; the armies of Hitler, upright and invincible, fan out in all directions like the spoke of a wheel. And France--the France of philosophers, Protestants, dissimulators, atheists, heretics, impostors, the spontaneous, the autonomous and the perverse--lies crushed beneath this wheel.

Looking back, I think maybe I have not said enough about Lamprias' half of the book, which is as lovely and free-spirited as Septimus' half is unsettling and difficult. Lamprias, perhaps, is guilty of many things, including abandoning his family (although the racist nastiness of both Septimus and his mother makes it hard to think so), abandoning Dust and True Man to their fate in that horrible household, and doing as he wished. But Lamprias' adventures among the whores and cutthroats of 19th century South America seem to capture something Ducornet really admires about the figure of the Victorian adventurer. Lamprias' tragedy, perhaps, is that he simply lives too long, all the way into the 1950s--long enough to be hauled into an interview by the House Un-American Activities Committee!--and long enough to receive a kind of final bittersweet triumph over his son's revenge

Killing Stella by Marlen Haushofer

Stella had always been a little clumsy and shy, and even when she was cheerful, her regular, wide face was immobile. Then it blossomed from within to her lips. Stella had been very happy for a short time, but she was unable to learn the rules of the game, she couldn't adapt and she had to perish.

Killing Stella is narrated by Anna, a dissatisfied housewife whose husband, Richard, cheats on her constantly. She's reconciled herself to this life, which is mostly miserable, though she maintains her grip on family life by nurturing an intense attachment to her son, Wolfgang, who seems not to have much of an attachment to anyone. Another, younger daughter, Annette, is still too young to understand just how dysfunctional the family is. Into this world comes Stella, the teenage daughter of a friend, who upsets the delicate balance that Anna has struck: she isn't happy, but it might be much worse. We know from the beginning that Stella's visitation ends with her demise--killed by a passing truck--and Anna must tell us, by way of expiating her own guilt, an glee, how it came to be.

Anna's theory is that Stella was fated to die. She begins to waste away quickly in the household, falling into spells of depression and tearful explosions. Stella, Anna reasons, has fallen in love with Richard, and is tortured by Richard's lack of regard. Is that true? Or is it only Anna's projection onto Stella, derived from her resentment toward her husband's philandering? The trick of Killing Stella is that Stella herself is always something of a black box. Anna tells us that there was no other fate for Stella than to step in front of that truck, and the logic of this seems to emerge from the teenager's declining demeanor as well as a sense of Anna's own fatedness: she is stuck in this marriage, and anything that threatens to disrupt it, for better or worse, must eventually be expelled. No, the real central character here is Anna, whose conflicted feelings about Stella are terribly frightening. It's not suggested that Anna had any hand in the death, of course, but her claims to feel guilty are unconvincing, and her insistence that Stella's intrusion in their life necessitated her death only makes her feel, somehow, more implicated.

Even for Short Book February, this is a slim little book, a snapshot of misery and resentment that is incredibly dark. Unlike The Wall, which has become a book I recommend to everyone anywhere I go, nothing unfolds and no one changes, except perhaps for Wolfgang, who hightails it out of Dodge. The Wall is about a woman trapped beneath a glass dome, but the barriers that enclose Anna seem somehow even smaller, and more impermeable.

In the United States of Africa by Abdourahman A. Waberi

But you, Maya, where are you really from? What woods did you come out of? Stone by stone, you build your own edifice. You've raced through your life with your elbows close to your sides without ever looking back. The result of the race: if you admit everything you owe to others, it's because you're also well aware that you didn't engender yourself, and to a certain extent you are still determined by your place of birth, your family, your culture, and your origins, since a generic, self-engendered human being does not exist. At least not yet.

In Djiboutian writer Abdourahman A. Waberi's In the United States of Africa, 20th century history has been reversed: the "United States of Africa" are a prosperous conglomerate of wealthy and technologically sophisticated states, while Europe and America have plunged into civil war and famine. French, Swiss, German, Spanish, Italian refugees flock to the capital of Asmara to find work and food, where they form a despised and unfortunate underclass who live and die invisibly. Against this backdrop Waberi tells the story (in second person) of Maya, a sensitive young sculptor who discovers that she is half French, and who becomes increasingly socially aware of the plight of her European kinsmen, ultimately fleeing to troubled France to find her birth mother.

Part of me thinks: what's the point of this? There is, or could be, a kind of facileness in simply reversing the polarity of society in this way. At best, it reveals the way our language fails at universalism and becomes absurd when its applications become reversed, talking about, for instance, the "warlords" of France. At its worst, it becomes a kind of easy joke, a "what if" repeated a couple hundred times. But I think that's all redeemed by Waberi's writing, which is clever and erudite, full of cultural knowledge and allusion that gets pulled apart and remixed in ways that keep the worldbuilding fresh and curious. (Interesting to see how, for instance, Black Americans like Langston Hughes and Martin Luther King, Jr. remain part of the historical scene--don't get too tripped up on the "well, what if" of that--and become celebrated figures after whom schools and airports are named.) 

The second person narration keeps us at a distance from Maya that keeps the focus on the topsy-turvy world, I think. She never quite emerges as a real character in a way that might elevate the imaginative qualities of the book even further. And yet there are scenes of real pathos, as with Maya's disillusionment upon discovering her destitute French mother, who has little to provide her, a victim, like so many, of world circumstances, and Maya's flight back to the safety of Africa. Change the victims, let the exploiters become the exploited, and still the shape of the world feels tragically familiar.

With the addition of Djibouti, my "Countries Read" list is up to 117!

Zama by Antonio di Benedetto

Nature, as she exists in this country, is most gentle, and for that  very reason I'm at pains to keep my distance from her. For she is childlike and might captivate me, and in my moments of lassitude when I'm barely half awake she may bring me sudden, treacherous thoughts that persist far too long and give neither satisfaction for repose. Nature holds up the mirror of external things; were I to submit to her wiles I might recognize myself there.

Diego de Zama is a moderately powerful colonial figure in 18th century Paraguay. Unlike many of his fellow administrators, he is an Americano, born in South America, not Spain. His wife and son are back at home in (I think) Lima, while he toils in a relative backwater. He is professionally and romantically frustrated, obsessed with women of "pure" European blood, unlike his own. His amorousness leads him into several complicated relationships: with Luciana, the wife of another administrator, with Emilia, a peasant woman who bears Zama's child, and others. At one point, unable to pay for his room in the hotel (his salary from Madrid being humiliatingly delayed), he moves into the house of an old man where either one or two women are living. He grows obsessed with her--or them? The intractability of this mystery, punctuated by sudden glimpses of a woman at a window or at the end of a hall, is indicative of the strangeness and indeterminacy of Zama.

I read Zama at the beach. This was, I think, not quite the ideal choice, though some of the salt marshes recall the stinking swamps of Zama's Paraguay, which is, at the novel's opening, captured by the corpse of a monkey moving in and out with the tide. But I wasn't prepared for just how weird Zama is. I hate the word "difficult" when applied to books, because books can be difficult in different ways, but Zama is a book whose fundamental reality is subject to obfuscation and slippage. It's strange that Zama himself is an Americano, because he seems to have absorbed already a colonial's perspective on South America as a strange and exotic place where strange and mysterious things might happen.

One thing that is clear, though, is that Zama's life is a series of frustrations. He's entirely unable to get his request for a transfer sent to Madrid, and is thus indefinitely separated from his family and forestalled from professional prestige or advancement. His fellow administrators treat him with dismissal or even unexplained hostility, even going so far as to sic beggar thieves upon him. The final of Zama's three sections ends with him enlisted in a platoon tasked with hunting down an infamous murderer and thief. But Zama is the only one who knows that the murderer is actually one of the party, and the dilemma this puts him in--whom to ally with, whom to betray--is typical of a book in which the colonial apparatus appears more as a knot of shifting allegiances and alliances. There is no way for Zama, no path forward for advancement or even stability, and there is no choice that can prevent him from suffering the final destiny that meets him at the novel's end.

The Ten Loves of Nishino by Hiromi Kawakami

It takes about half a year to reach this "final conclusion," Nishino said with a laugh. It's like the laws of physics. Why is it that, eventually, all girls end up adhering to the same formula in their response, no matter whether they are chubby or skinny, laid-back or uptight, conventionally beautiful or idiosyncratically striking, pescatarians or red-blooded meat-lovers? Nishino inclined his head in wonder.

"Nishino, do you really believe that all girls are exactly the same?" I asked.

"I could be wrong," Nishino said leisurely. "All the girls I've ever known, at least, they've all been the same, down to the last."

Well, then, the girls you date must all be pretty boring, I thought fleetingly, but I immediately regretted feeling mean toward all the girls Nishino had dated whom I had never laid eyes on.

Hiromi Kawakami's The Ten Loves of Nishino collects ten stories, all about, or related to, women that have been the lover of Nishino. The women range in ages, professions, attitudes, etc. Nishino himself something of a mystery, a little bit aloof and hard to pin down. The stories, when taken together, only give one oblique views of Nishino, who never has the opportunity to speak for himself like the women do. But overall, there is a sense of someone who is magnetic and charismatic, but difficult to read, and someone to whom love, in its permanent marriage state, never seems able to attach. Like the women of the story, Nishino struggles with a single question over and over again: Am I really in love? Or do I just think I am? And if I'm in love now, when will I fall out of it? Or have I already?

Real love is the big theme of The Ten Loves of Nishino. I found this interesting, but perplexing: is "love," in its romantic comedy aspect, being satirized or undermined here? How interesting or meaningful, exactly, are we meant to take this question? My favorite of the narrators was Manami of "Good Night," who is not a lover of Nishino but another man named Yukihiko, who undermines her own relationship by insisting that Yukihiko has fallen out of love with her, until she ultimately persuades him of the same truth. This felt like a familiar story: a pair of people who end up convincing each other, by way of themselves, that a relationship couild never work out. But I do have to admit that when Nishino said that all women end up the same, I agree with him--at least in the context of the stories, where the women began to bleed together and get mixed up for me.

The most interesting thing about The Ten Loves of Nishino is what I least know what to do with: one of the narrators describes seeing Nishino as a young boy, suckling at his own sister's breast. He explains that she had recently given birth to a baby that died, and that in her mental distress she turns to him to relieve the horrible pain of her breasts filled with milk. "Are you in love with your sister?" one of the lovers ask, but we can see that whatever kind of love Nishino bears his sister is more difficult and more complex than the rom-com love he bears toward these women, less easily categorized and thus less easily understood. This quasi-oedipal relationship lies in the background of all Nishino's failed relationships, but how much it explains is entirely unclear.

A Small Island by Jamaica Kincaid

Again, Antigua is a small place, a small island. It is nine miles wide by twelve miles long. It was discovered by Christopher Columbus in 1493. Not too long after, it was settled by human rubbish from Europe, who used enslaved but noble and exalted human beings from Africa (all masters of every stripe are rubbish, and all slaves of every stripe are noble and exalted; there can be no question about this) to satisfy their desire for wealth and power, to feel better about their own miserable existence, so that they could be less lonely and empty--a European disease. Eventually, the masters left, in a kind of way; eventually, the slaves were freed, in a kind of way. The people in Antigua now, the people who really think of themselves as Antiguans (and the people who would immediately come to your mind when you think about what Antiguans might belike; I mean, supposing you were to think about it), are the descendants of those noble and exalted people, the slaves. Of course, the whole thing is, once you cease to be a master, once you throw off your master's yoke, you are no longer human rubbish, you are just a human being, and all the things that adds up to. So, too, with the slaves. Once they are no longer slaves, once they are free, they are no longer noble and exalted; they are just human beings.

A Small Place, Jamaica Kincaid's jeremiad about her home country of Antigua, beings in the accusatory first person: suppose you are a tourist, visiting Antigua for the first time. You see the beautiful green hills and blue waters of Antigua, and you see the poverty: the dilapidated library, the school, which looks like a latrine, and you have a kind of sense of superiority to what it is you lay your eyes on. There is an Antigua that has been fashioned for you, but still you cannot help but see what you might think of as the "real" Antigua, and you--you!--do not think about why or how this "small place" in the middle of the Caribbean sea might have inherited corruption and degradation from the colonial powers of which you, whether you know it or not, are a belated representative. It's a pointed and really quite vicious accusation. Kincaid doesn't mince words: "An ugly thing, that is what you are when you become a tourist, an ugly empty thing, a stupid thing, a piece of rubbish pausing here and there to gaze at this and taste that..." She goes on to say the one thing that you will not and cannot imagine is that the people of Antigua despise you, and what is worse, they laugh at you.

A Small Place contains other sections, but they're all as frank and forthright as this one, and for that, I really enjoyed it. One section details the astonishing corruption of Antigua's leaders in the decades between independence from Britain and the 1980's in which Kincaid was writing, but Kincaid makes it clear that these methods were learned from the colonists, and reflect a kind of rapaciousness that the English taught to their subjects. One thing that really struck me, and will stay with me as I think about colonialism and its consequences, is that Kincaid describes the Antiguans of the colonial era not thinking of the English as racists: what they thought was that they were "ill-mannered," or in some cases, "puzzling," because they spent their time among people they clearly did not like. This provides an interesting response to modern critiques of (God help us) "wokeness," which might be described by its critics as a tendency to see racism everywhere, because the Antiguans, as Kincaid describes them, didn't see racism at all; they saw boorishness and ill manners--the sad and sorry traits that lie, perhaps, at the bottom of racism.

And the whole thing is filled with remarkable prose, because Kincaid is really a terrific prose writer. Her precise and cutting way of writing, I think, is really well disposed to a jeremiad like this one. She doesn't pull any punches, but neither does it seem one-sided or unfair, whatever that might mean in this case. Funnily, for someone so skilled at writing in the English language, Kincaid repeats a really familiar critique: "For isn't it odd that the only language I have in which to speak of this crime is the language of the criminal who committed the crime?") It is especially tragic to think of Kincaid, a talented and incisive writer if ever there was one, describing herself as having "no tongue." Tongueless though it may be, A Small Place lashes powerfully.

Norwood by Charles Portis

The train was slowing for the block in Philadelphia when Norwood suddenly awoke. He was asleep one second and wide awake the next. A thin wall of sunlight was coming through the doorway crack, with a lot of stuff dancing around in it. Something was wrong. It was his feet. He felt air on his feet. He sat up and there wasn't anything on them except a pair of J. C. Penny Argyles. Somebody had taken his thirty-eight-dollar stovepipe boots right off his feet. "Son of a bitch!" He got up and climbed over the floor and pulled sacks this way and that but there was no one to be found, and no boots.

Norwood Pratt works at a gas station in Eastern Texas, but he dreams of being a country music star on the radio show Louisiana Hayride. His sister Vernell has recently married, and brought into Norwood's house, a cantankerous old veteran named Bill Bird. Norwood takes a job offered to him by a smooth-talking local magnate named "Grady Fring, the Kredit King," driving a pair of cars--and a reluctant female passenger--to New York. Norwood figures out quickly that the cars are stolen, and the girl more or less the same, and dispatches both, but still continues on to New York in hopes of recouping seventy dollars owed to him by a buddy in the Marines. In typical shaggy-dog fashion, the friend has gone back to Arkansas--basically Norwood's backdoor--and New York is a hellhole. Among other things, I love how small the stakes are of a novel like this one--seventy dollars was probably a lot more back then that it is now, but it ain't that much, either.

I love the collection of characters Norwood picks up on his journeys. Besides Grady Fring, whose unctuous patter is among the novel's best bits, there's Edmund Ratner, a little person once billed as "The World's Smallest Perfect Man," and a "wonder-chicken" named Joanna who can answer any question. Portis has a real talent for making individual characters stand out; even someone as minor as Mrs. Reese, the mother of the man who owes Norwood money, who only cares about her familial connections to local judges (a Southern archetype I wonder if Yankee readers will get), pops out memorably on the page. And I liked the sojourn to New York, which is clearly in its "bad old days" era. Among the first things that Norwood sees is a group of Puerto Rican teenagers roasting marshmallows over a burning mattress. Still, even in New York, Norwood, a wandering Odysseus, is treated with kindness by some and suspicion by others, the same as in Memphis or on a Trailways bus.

Norwood was Portis' first novel, and it shares a lot in common with The Dog of the South, which is the only other one of his books I've read. Both are road trip novels and both are riotously funny, though I think Dog of the South has a clear edge in almost all of the novel's shared qualities. One way in which Norwood is different is that it's much gentler and more kindhearted. The Dog of the South is a hopeless tale, in which the narrator's quest--to hunt down his missing wife, along with his credit cards--is clearly doomed from the start. But Norwood, who is a gentle soul underneath his cowboy cool, comes back enriched. He does get his money--which is probably the novel's biggest surprise--though, generously, he loans much of it away immediately to the World's Smallest Perfect Man. And what's more, he comes home with a new fiancee, Rita, whom he has picked up on the Trailways bus. The final image, of Norwood arriving home, carrying a sleeping Rita in his arms to his own couch, adds a touch of unexpected sweetness.

The Seers by Suleiman Addonia

A throaty voice somewhere inside me--and I can't remember when or why I had labelled the voices I held inside me as a way of distinguishing between them, as if to give the multitude of my identity a voice--rose from a long slumber, ready to hurl accusations of selfishness at me. But that voice of reason soon incinerated between my thighs, pulsating, pumping out a sensation. I opened the window and invited the London night into my room. And London arrived carrying conversations of people on the verge of being born, dying, creating, singing, seducing, of killing and being killed, speaking in hundreds of different languages, and of Anne about to fuck someone somewhere.

Suleiman Addonia's novel The Seers begins with its narrator, an Eritrean refugee in London named Hannah, fucking a man in the ass with a strap-on in a public park. I'm not sure, but it the whole novel might take place mid-thrust, as Hannah looks back on her difficult and solitary journey from her war-torn country, and reflects on the self-awakening she's had since coming to London. That self-awakening, as she describes it, is pointedly sexual: it begins with a crush on a fellow refugee living at a halfway house, Anne, who scorns and humiliates her (something which, as it turns out, turns Hannah on). Hannah is guided--but also repulsed--by the diary of her mother, who describes her own predilection for men's butts and assholes, something which Hannah herself pursues with a similar gusto. As we see her in flagrante delicto with her lover in the park, she is as happy and whole as she's ever been, having learned to pursue her desires in this country as a way of being truly herself.

That description might make The Seers sounds a little silly, overwrought, or even gratuitous, but I was genuinely impressed by it. Addonia relates the whole story as a single long paragraph that stretches for 120 pages--which doesn't make it easy to find a place to pause between readings, but which effectively gives the sense of an orgasmic stream-of-conscious. Addonia makes good use of a few strange flourishes, as when he has certain sections narrated by (not through, by) Hannah's eyes, or when she describes some of the great English writers she has come to embrace get up and walk around from their graves at night and talk to her. As with anything, I suppose, the proof is in the pudding; these flourishes work because Addonia treats them with sincerity and skill. The Seers is a novel that carries you away on a flood of ecstasy, with pain and struggle mixed in equal measure, and I thought it was ultimately very affecting and convincing.

With the addition of Eritrea, my "Countries Read" list is up to 116!

Weather by Jenny Offill

It was the same after 9/11, there was that hum in the air. Everyone everywhere talking about the same thing. In stores, in restaurants, on the subway. My friend met me at the diner for coffee. His family fled Iran one week before the Shah fell. He didn't want to talk about the hum. I pressed him though. Your people have finally fallen into history, he said. The rest of us are already here.

Lizzie, the narrator of Jenny Offill's Weather is a washed-out academic working at a local library. Her former mentor, Sylvia, asks her to fill in answering questions she gets emailed in connection to her podcast, like "What are the best ways to protect children from the coming chaos?" At home, she has a husband and a son, as well as a brother, Henry, who seems to be on the road to a family life himself until he relapses and becomes, we sense not for the first time, the narrator's burden to bear. Lizzie's own marriage pulls under the strain of Henry's presence, and her husband takes a little break, during which time Lizzie considers sleeping with a handsome journalist she's been flirting with at the bar. He's a war correspondent, and the world they share is a little like war, turned topsy-turvy by a recent event that is, but is never quite outlined, the election of Donald Trump in 2016. An emailer asks the difference between a disaster and emergency--well, which is this? And how does it fit in with the larger dread Lizzie feels as she imagines her future "doomstead," where she plans to be safe--she hopes--with her husband and son?

The most notable thing about Weather is its clipped, various style: each section takes up about a half a page at most. I've seen this work in other books, like Mary Robison's Why Did I Ever, where it's used for great comic effect. Weather tries to be comic, too, though perhaps it is too anxious and depressed about the state of the world to really rise above a general wry cleverness. Moments in Lizzie's life are mixed in with questions from the emailers, yoga mantras, other bits and bobs. It's all woven together, and cleverly and effectively enough.

But I have to admit this didn't work for me, for reasons I'm not sure I can really articulate. It might be that the little bits all seemed a little bit too neat, too clever. It might be that the non-narrative pieces, pulled from history and culture in the fashion of a librarian pulling cards out of catalog, felt as if they were simulating meaning rather than creating it. Or perhaps it was just too obvious that there was a hand there, manipulating the pieces, putting them into places. I don't think the reason it didn't work for me is that its vision of Trump's election as a kind of ambient disaster already seems a little bit passe here at the beginning of Trump 2--but I have to admit, it didn't help. It seemed to me to capture a kind of woeful liberal handwringing and malaise that has aged very poorly. But even saying that, I feel like I might have been more kindly disposed to another version of the same thing, and maybe the reason it didn't work for me is that it just didn't work, no more no less.

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.

Ice Rivers by Jemma Wadham

The entwining of spirituality and water intrigued me. I was very taken by the idea that glaciers and springs were the realm of living goddesses with the power to cleanse and give life--for I had recently started to catch myself wondering, while trudging through the landscapes of Patagonia, whether there might be something more, something beyond what I could see, touch and sense? In these icy wastelands I had at times felt close to some kind of vitality that was neither human nor born of the terrain--a playfulness in the breeze as it ushered clouds up and over the soaring peaks, or the momentary warmth from the sun as it rose to quell dark, cold shadows, or (occasionally) an almost animated presence lurking at the fringes of a glacier. These were fleeting moments, lasting a mere millisecond, but long enough to spark a sense that, just maybe, there was a higher being at work.

Glaciers, scientist Jemma Wadham explains, are really "ice rivers": masses of water that move, slowly but inexorably. Their "snouts" may melt and stay where they are, or, in the climate change era, retreat backward, but the ice itself is always moving forward, though it may seem to stand still even as you are standing on it. It's easy to see why glaciers, which seem so much larger than we can comprehend in time as well as space, might capture someone's imagination. Wadham's science-book-slash-memoir takes the reader from the Alps to Greenland to Patagonia to the Himalayas to Antarctica, detailing not only the different glaciers found there, but the kind of research that Wadham has done, measuring the flow of water through the glacier and looking for small microbial life that might leave deep beneath, at the bottom of glaciers.

I did find the glaciers fascinating. The book is also deeply personal to Wadham, who braids the stories of the glaciers with her own personal troubles, beginning with the death of her mother and continuing with a series of headaches and blackouts that culminate in emergency brain surgery. (The glossy inset photographs of glaciers also include a pretty gnarly pic of Wadham's neck and skull stapled back together.) I don't know if this kind of book started with H is for Hawk, but it certainly reminds me of it. Wadham even describes how, for a long time after the surgery, she was unable to write the kind of logical scientific prose required of a researcher, turning instead to creative writing of the sort that clearly produced this book. I could have used either a bit more of this autofiction or a bit less, but I don't want to nitpick; in the end, Ice Rivers manages to balance well the small life of one dedicated human and the larger life of the glaciers.

The Names by N. Scott Momaday

The events of one's life take place, take place. How often have I used this expression, and how often have I stopped to think what it means? Events do take place; they have meaning in relation to the things around them. And a part of my life happened to take place at Jemez. I existed within that landscape, and then my existence was indivisible with it. I placed my shadow there in the hills, my voice in the wind that ran there, in those old mornings and afternoons and evenings. It may be that the old people there watch for me in the streets; it may be so.

When I visited Walatowa, the main settlement at the Jemez Pueblo in northern New Mexico, a couple summers ago, I told the guide at the visitor center that I was interested in the life of author N. Scott Momaday, who had grown up at Jemez. He took me into their small museum and showed me a huge photograph of Momaday's mother, Netachee, who had come with Momaday's father to teach at the Jemez Day School. A similar photograph, or perhaps even the same one, is printed in Momaday's memoir The Names, an illustration of the community that adopted Momaday and his family, inviting him into the place about which he writes, "My spirit was quiet there." As in House Made of Dawn, Momaday writes so beautifully about the landscape of Jemez, and it's clearer here than ever that it's a loving eye that produces such descriptions. It's the voice of a man writing about his home.

The Names begins with accounts of Momaday's ancestors, including his namesake Mammedaty, and Pohd-lohk, who gave Momaday his "Indian name," Tsoai-talee, which is derived from the name of Bear Lodge, or Devils Tower, in Wyoming. On his mother's side, Momaday describes a heritage that is part Cherokee but mostly white Kentuckians. His father's side is Kiowa, and here as in The Way to Rainy Mountain, Momaday writes with affection about his Kiowa family in Oklahoma. These places and heritages combine to make Momaday who he is, but not all equally; you can see that Momaday writes with respect and reverence for the Kiowa of Oklahoma, and with a mystic detachment about Bear Lodge, but much more ardently about Jemez. Between these there is a sojourn to Gallup, the colorful, largely Native city of western New Mexico, and Hobbs on the state's northeastern side, where Momaday's account of his life might be difficult to distinguish from any of the other children, whose big themes are school and sports, bullying and being bullied. This section contains a long section of stream-of-consciousness that captures the point-of-view of young Momaday, and is some of the memoir's most experimental and unusual writing.

What struck me when the novel turns to Jemez was the feeling that Momaday has of being an outsider. The hero of House Made of Dawn (and I did read much of The Names through the lens of this novel) is a native of Jemez, made an outsider by his alcoholism and the alienating experiences of war, but the novel is also interested in true outsiders, like the white woman Angela and the priest, Father Olguin. Here, as in the novel, Momaday writes of the Pecos Pueblo people who were given refuge at Jemez when their pueblo was destroyed. But only here in the memoir did I understand how much Momaday identifies with those people: refugees. The Names illuminates other parts of the novel, too. Here, for example, is an old and admired man named Francisco, who no doubt has become the Francisco of the book, and here is an account of the strange ritual where men try to pluck a buried chicken from the ground on horseback. Momaday describes it here as an ancient tradition that has degenerated, becoming a game for boorish young men; this really recontextualizes the scene in House where Abel kills the man who has embarrassed him at it.

More than anything, I thought The Names was beautiful. Momaday has a way of writing that feels utterly sincere. I guess it's not true that there's no room for irony here--Momaday's account of growing up in Hobbs makes great use of a child's narrow and self-involved worldview--but when Momaday grows up, or when he talks about Jemez, or the land, there's none of that, no detachment. I think of it as the prose of a writer who is deeply engaged with the world, and who speaks only when he has something to say. He really was remarkable.