Books read (where & when got):

1. Gate of the Sun, Elias Khoury trans. Humphrey Davies (Archipelago Books order, 3/30/2024)

2. Battles in the Desert, José Emilio Pacheco trans. Katherine Silver (2nd Act Books, Charlottesville, VA, 11/26/2023)

3. At Night He Lifts Weights, Kang Young-sook trans. Janet Hong (Transit Books Subscription, 11/15/2023)

4. The Halfway House, Guillermo Rosales trans. Anna Kushner (Daedalus Used Books, Charlottesville, VA, 2/23/2024)

Books got:

1. The Novices of Lerna, Ángel Bonomini trans. Jordan Landeman (Transit Books Subscription, 5/20/2024)

Unfairly it is June. Describe to me how this could happen. How nearly half the year has already passed. I am against it, this constant measuring and doling out of time. I would like to speak to anyone in charge, and also, I would like to feel a little less tired all the time. Anyway. Got bogged down in a big book in May, tried to make up for it with a few littler novellas, but my brain broke a little towards the end of this month so that didn’t happen either. It’s getting to be summer out, and I’m worrying more every year about brownouts on these hotter and hotter days. A wall of strange weeds and tendrils is nibbling at our yard and I can barely keep the lawn mown. But we’re hanging on.

Gate of the Sun

Elias Khoury
trans. Humphrey Davies

Archipelago

A former Palestinian fedayeen fighter sits by the hospital bed of a man in a coma and talks. He tells of massacres and betrayals, tiny pinpricks within greater historical violence, but also of love. He tells the man in a coma the story of the man’s life, the lives and deaths of those around him, of bulldozed villages and torture in the desert. He talks about the man’s wife, his years away from her, the death of his first son, and the narrator’s own grief for a woman whose violent death revealed she did not love him. There are the betrayals of the British, betrayals of parents of their children’s trust, betrayals of the Arab countries who say they’ll protect the Palestinians but, as time goes on, grow tired of them. Stories are strung together, the narrator grabs anecdotes from any source, family members as they fled their homes for Syria or Lebanon, those who dared to remain in Palestine, what they saw and did and whether they ever saw their homes again.

Names matter. They multiply. Places have names in Arabic and Hebrew. Fighters have their given names and their callsigns. The man in the coma has a name similar to that of the speaker’s father, and the speaker has a name almost identical to that of the man’s son. An old woman visits the house she ran from when the Israelis arrived and finds another old woman living there. Palestinians, meanwhile, inhabit places as living ghosts. While there’s no explicit moments of magic, there is a fantastical feel and a closeness to the earth (caves, springs, olive trees, the desert) that creates an otherworldly sense. Khoury expertly handles the required shifts in register from violence to tenderness.

While, yes, it declaims a litany of violences inflicted on the Palestinian people during the Nakba, in exile and occupation, it’s mainly one of those sprawling multi-generational family novels, and the ways violence visits them in the many years since the Palestinians were driven from their land. A lament of a book, and fantastic.

Get it at bookshop.org (affiliate link: when you buy using these links, I get a percentage)

Battles in the Desert

José Emilio Pacheco
trans. Katherine Silver

New Directions

This little Mexican novella caught me by surprise. The narrator is looking back on his upbringing in a country in flux, and generalized anxieties about modernization or nuclear war are subsumed or conflated with the naive confusion of childhood. Reflections from the narratorial present are key and neatly put. The earlier chapters are more impressionistic, setting the scene as we zoom in on the narrator’s relationship with his half-American friend Jim, then his obsession with Jim’s young mother. Eventually, still very much a child, he confesses his love to her, and from there things decline for everyone. It’s a book about money and privilege and their signifiers, what people do to access them, the gates that remain forever shut for others. But it’s also about this misguided, defining moment of childhood for the narrator, and its reverberations (tremors) through his life thereafter. Short, wonderfully translated, very cool, and you could read it in an afternoon: it’s less than 100 pages, even bulked up by the afterword by Fernanda Melchor. Assuming you ever have an afternoon.

Get it at bookshop.org (affiliate link)

At Night He Lifts Weights 

Kang Young-sook 
trans. Janet Hong 

Transit Books

A collection of unsettling stories, often starting out deceptively small and domestic, but hints of a greater decay insinuate themselves. There is often a stench. A man chases visions of his missing ex-wife in the streets. A murderer drops from a woman’s ceiling and unrolls duct tape from his mouth. A woman inherits a warehouse where she’ll store pretty much anything except pets and names it after Pripyat, the abandoned city beside Chernobyl. Alienation, domesticity, visceral rot, variations on grief and loss. It’s balanced quite well, with much of the strangeness sewn in among the everyday–the overall effect is often uncanny. I would put this up there with Samanta Schweblin’s Mouthful of Birds as a collection of stories that explore the fantastic, often uncomfortably, peering around the darker edges of reality (I’M WRITING).

Get it at bookshop.org (affiliate link)

The Halfway House

Guillermo Rosales
trans. Anna Kushner

New Directions

Cuban exile arrives in Miami in the 80s. His relatives are disappointed he’s a sullen, schizophrenic poet, so they put him in a for-profit adult care home. The other residents range from dangerously unwell to simply unwanted: there’s a few with various mental illnesses, but also a dwarf, a gay man who speaks in vaguely threatening parables, an old woman dumped there by her children, and a pair with Down’s syndrome. Conditions are bad–the badness of the conditions is the point of the story. The guy left in charge is drunk and abusive. Everyone’s yelling, lying, stealing from each other, getting into fights. There are roaches and ripped shirtsleeves stuffed in the overflowing toilet. Then Frances arrives. Frances isn’t really present, at first she mostly just repeats the same few words, and it’s not entirely clear if she can actually consent to what begins between the two, but soon they are a pair. They begin to form a plan for escape. Her vocabulary grows a bit, and in the end she agrees to leave with him, to rent a house where they’ll live together, just as soon as their next social security checks come in. They almost make it. 

Get it at bookshop.org (affiliate link)