December 24
Zombified domestics • The afterlife is the ocean • Cockroach Index • Oral defenses • Revolutionary character depth
Books read (where & when got):
Vengeance is mine, Marie Ndiaye trans. Jordan Stump (New Dominion, Charlottesville, VA, 6/28/2024)
Morning and Evening, Jon Fosse trans. Damion Searls (Dalkey Archive order, 6/3/2024)
Card Catalogue, Alistair Ian Blyth (Dalkey Archive order, 6/3/2024)
Speak/Stop, Noémi LeFebvre trans. Sophie Lewis (Transit Books Subscription, 9/26/2024)
Peach Blossom Paradise, Ge Fei trans. Canaan Morse (NYRBooks order, 11/27/2021)
Books got:
The Iliac Crest, Cristina Rivera Garza trans. Sarah Booker (Amazon, 12/20/2024)
The Restless Dead: Necrowriting & Disappropriation, Cristina Rivera Garza trans. Robin Myers (Amazon, 12/20/2024)
Cremation, Rafael Chirbes trans. Valerie Miles (Amazon, 12/20/2024)
Bleak House, Charles Dickens (Daedalus Used Books, Charlottesville, VA, 12/23/2024)
The Ambassadors, Henry James (Daedalus, 12/23/2024)
Mr. Kafka and Other Tales from the Time of the Cult, Bohumil Hrabal trans. Paul Wilson (Daedalus, 12/23/2024)
Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England, William Cronon (Daedalus, 12/23/2024)
The Rainbow, Yasunari Kawabata trans. Haydn Trowell (Gift from Helen, 12/24/2024)
The Empusium, Olga Tokarczuk trans. Antonia Lloyd-Jones (Gift from Helen, 12/24/2024)
Didn’t meet my reading goal for the year but still think I read some good stuff. Going to try to use the library more in 2025 and let go of the impulse to hoard. Rollover resolutions include finishing book, getting into shape, etc. The usual. We’ll see. Sitting here waiting for the snowstorm to come hit us. It’s going to be a strange year.
Vengeance is Mine
Marie Ndiaye
trans. Jordan Stump
Knopf
Two women form the core of this story: an independent lawyer and her newest client, a woman accused of drowning her three children in the bathtub. One is divorced, child-free, the other claims she’s subordinated to her husband’s suffocating control. But this is Ndiaye, so we’re trafficking in ambiguities and porosity, the lawyer is obsessed with proving a potential childhood connection between the lawyer and the housewife’s husband, the two versions of their lives that the couples tell, the lawyer’s parents look after the lawyer’s ex’s child as if she was their own granddaughter, eliding her own mother. At one point the lawyer hits her head, and when she encounters the child again, the kid is bug-eyed and woozy as the parents and ex-husband perform “happy extended family” around them, in a scene that feels, in characteristic Ndiaye, both banal and surreal: be a mother, or else. An unsettling discussion of familial pressure–and (male) partner pressure–to be normal, be happy, reproduce. Maybe.
Morning and Evening
Jon Fosse
trans. Damion Searls
Dalkey Archive
A quick little atmospheric Fosse to charge the batteries. The book has two sections, the day a child is born in a fisherman’s cottage on a Norwegian island, and the last moments in the life of the man that child has become (still in coastal Norway). The birth is fairly straightforward, insofar as Fosse can be straightforward. In a cottage on an island, a father waits in the kitchen while the midwife attends to his wife in labor. There is his usual intoning of narrative and dialogue, the anxious not-knowing, The Fossian dissolve takes over in the second half, the death-day of the man who we’ve just seen born–he is in his village but slipping through time, walking past his dead friend Peter’s house, then surprised to see Peter’s boat in the harbor, then surprised to see Peter himself, who he knows is dead, but that’s hard to remember when he’s right in front of you. Others come and go, but the innocuous and everyday is charged with portent. We, the reader, know what’s happening, but the character is confused, but he goes along, since everyone seems to be acting normal. There is also that Fosse thing of perspective handoffs, where you’re tight with one person and then another person is mentioned as an aside, and we just slide on over to their perspective for a little bit, then we sliiide on back. It happens in both sections, in both instances from father to child then back again. Anyway, it’s cool and makes moves and feels very different to read and is, like all Fosse, dropping a tremendous amount of warmth and meaning into the basic, everyday relationships that make up most humdrum human lives. The valuing of people makes them precious and interesting to the character, and thus to us–not necessarily strife or conflict. When conflict descends, it comes from other places, other worlds. A deeply felt novel about the crucible of caring a normal amount about people you love, then dying.
Get it at bookshop.org (affiliate link)
Card Catalogue
Alistair Ian Blyth
Dalkey Archive
This was great, though I have only a vague idea what it was about. An Englishman, in Bucharest before and after the fall of the Ceaușescu regime, meets a fastidious book collector, who invites him over to view his library. They have a long and boring conversation (we’re told), and then the book veers off to talk about another man, whose relationship to the librarian is unclear, but is similarly book-obsessed, in that he catalogues things (objects) mentioned in Russian literature: cockroaches, letters, other books. This is all captured on small pieces of paper, only a handful of which the narrator was able to recover from the dumpster after the landlord chucked it all out following after the catalogist’s death. We are presented, early on, with a list of books the narrator has imagined in his dreams. The word “oneiric” is used. I’m not sure how else to read this besides that the narrator has fallen asleep–or is daydreaming–at the book collector’s house and dreamed up this half-real, half-impossible cataloger, who then becomes real to him? Whatever, it’s cool.
Get it at bookshop.org (affiliate link)
Speak / Stop
Charles Ferdinand Ramuz
trans. Bill Johnston
Transit
I’m sure this is very smart, but I read it over a few days while I was tired, when it very much is a book that demands all of your faculties and a ballpoint pen. Lefebvre’s other work, like Poetics of Work, were, like this one, fun and hilarious as well as conceptually or structurally inventive. Here we’re given two sections, one a inquisition of unnamed voices who clamber over each other, inviting an unnamed person to speak, but never giving her (clearly a her) the chance to; the other section is a critique of the text we’ve just read: what it is or is not, what is the point of it. It feels like some academic ruse, in that the inquisition has big oral-defense vibes, while the critique could in fact be the text being defended, a defense of a defense. In footnotes, Lefebvre cites her work or personal experiences. It’s like a send-up of a Phd, skewering hypocrisies and self-congratulatory liberalism and literature in general, I guess. To be honest, this was conceptually out of reach for me, though it was charming.
Get it at bookshop.org (affiliate link)
Peach Blossom Paradise
Ge Fei
trans. Canaan Morse
New York Review Books
Terrific. A historically-set epic of would-be utopias, falling apart. In China, around 1910, we follow Xiumi through key experiences of her life: as a teenager, when her father disappears and a mysterious visitor comes to stay with her family, who comes and goes at odd hours, then runs away after government forces arrest someone in a nearby town. Xiumi has a big crush, but can’t tell how he feels. Second part: the stranger is gone, Xiumi is betrothed elsewhere, but on her way to the wedding, she’s kidnapped by bandits and held for ransom on an island alongside a buddhist nun. The bandits live in what started as a community based in equality and care, but fell into corruption and greed. Third part: Xiumi has managed to return to her village, where she started to recruit locals into a revolutionary army. She arrived with a son of unknown provenance. In the last, she’s experienced further horrors and gone mute, now lives in the old family house with her maid, tending flowers and writing poetry.
It’s a huge, thoughtful story, and has some neat devices. Though historically set, there are footnotes that discuss things that happen in the 1950s, 80s, etc.–archaeological digs, relocating of structures or cemeteries–that have import on the story, and sometimes offer dire warnings. Perspective is in third person, but swings away from Xiumi in the third section to follow the village as a whole as it looks at Xiumi, and what she’s doing in her compound. Likewise the last section spends more time with the maid than with Xiumi herself. In this way, our knowledge of her retreats in the middle of the book, but returns towards the end, in a cathartic move.
I kept thinking about Lauren Groff’s Matrix as I read this, another book about a woman trying to set up an idyllic community. Not only is that book relatable, most of the characters are also likeable. Peach Blossom Paradise serves up what I felt was lacking from Matrix–which is to say, any kind of real resistance or setbacks to the heroine’s journey. Her intentions are good, but she’s fallible, unlucky, and sometimes completely overpowered. Sometimes she makes bad decisions, and then people die. But she keeps going, and you see where she ends up.