May '25
Cults of Lower Canada • And there she is • Gentrifying Cairo • The lady with the little dog • Therapist’s delight
Books read (where & when got):
The Harmattan Winds, Sylvain Trudel trans. Donald Winkler (Archipelago Books Subscription, 3/1/2025)
Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf (Chapters, Dublin, IRL, 8/15/2023)
Sleep Phase, Mohamed Kheir trans. Robin Moger (CAT Subscription, 5/15/2025)
Springtime, Michelle de Kretser (Blue Whale Books, Charlottesville, VA, 3/26/2025)
stay with me , Hanne Orstavik trans. Martin Aitken (Archipelago Books Subscription, 5/6/2025)
Books got:
stay with me , Hanne Orstavik trans. Martin Aitken (Archipelago Books Subscription)
Wickerwork, Christian Lehnert trans. Richard Sieberth (Archipelago Books Subscription)
Sleep Phase, Mohamed Kheir trans. Robin Moger (CAT Subscription)
Keyboard shortcuts: once you have discovered them there it is hard to see how you lived so long in darkness. Why move your whole hand all the way to a touchpad or that far off mouse when you could merely align your right middle finger and left thumb just so and press. The satisfaction of knowing this secret! The thrill of speed! They are both a vestige of a mouse-less past and the few remaining real conveniences of our technologically suffocating present. Whatever you’re working in, whatever you’re using, if you’re got a keyboard, look up your shortcuts, print them out and post them on the wall. Save yourself from the struggle. Reclaim your time, live your best life, etc. Because who knows how long we have. Things are not good, you guys. Not good at all. Why waste a second longer?
The Harmattan Winds
Sylvain Trudel
trans. Donald Winkler
Archipelago Books
Mmmph. I’m not sure about this one. A child, adopted, befriends another adopted child, who happens to be from Ethiopia. Together they create a vivid world together, exuberant and breathlessly imaginative, which gets them into trouble with parents and other authority figures. Habeke, the Ethiopian, provides much of the imaginatory drive, convincing the narrator to take part in worshipping his invented Ethiopian gods. Eventually, at the behest of these gods, the boys spirit away a classmate with terminal cancer, which throws their whole town into a panic. Though she’s kept willingly in an unused cabin and is delighted to be out of her hospital bed, they’re caught, Habeke goes to juvie, and that’s that. Written from a child’s perspective with unrelenting wonder, which I suppose people like. I think parts of it are supposed to be funny. Reminded me of Jean Giono when he gets into his fantastical mode, though there’s also a layer of sentimentality that I don’t really go for. Good, maybe, but not for me.
Mrs. Dalloway
Virginia Woolf
Vintage Classics
Far, far better than I anticipated. I was worried after the disappointment of Orlando that this would end up in a similar vein. It was not. Exemplar modernism, full of life, sprinkled with death to make the life in it shine brighter. It moves at a ravenous pace, character-hopping as they pass each other at parties, on the street, in parks, sliding from this consciousness to another. At center is Clara Dalloway, throwing a party, out to buy her flowers. She is visited in the morning by an old love, the man she turned down before she became Mrs. Robert Dalloway. He has been in India, having left to cope with the heartbreak. Seeing him again, Mrs. Dalloway goes about her day, in her thoughts reaffirming her choice of husband (in a doth-protest-too-much way) and generally revisiting her youth. I’ll give nothing else away, except to say if you haven’t read this, you should, and if you’ve forgotten it or it’s been a while, re-read it. This is a tight, intense little fucker. Mortality and our one shot at it, and what if we get it wrong? Coheres on so many levels. Fuck Orlando, Orlando is trash.
Get it at bookshop.org (affiliate link)
Sleep Phase
Mohamed Kheir
trans. Robin Moger
Two Lines Press
I really enjoyed the ambiguously fantastic Slipping. Throughout that book, you slowly become aware that something weird might be (is!) happening. Really terrific. In this one, it’s more obvious from the start, and almost (sigh) Kafkaesque.
Our guy has been recently released from prison by the Egyptian government. More or less a political prisoner, he got caught criticizing the regime online. It’s been years, and Egypt has transformed. Gentrified, one might say. The government has relocated old neighborhoods wholesale and a new European workforce dominates the city. Europeans, mostly from the eastern?, ex-Warsaw Pact, do all the jobs, and the prosperity this has brought allows all native Egyptians to receive a stipend. Our guy, however, is determined to get his job back, even if it’s been taken by a foreigner.
There is that same sense of something beyond the real happening, even under the surface of this speculative world. And ambiguity persists, as it’s not clear which side our friend is on, which world he belongs in, or belongs to him, down even to his relationship with his half-Egyptian ladyfriend. The end, unfortunately, left me wondering whether it was all a fantasy, which undermined what came before. Certainly the title points towards the it’s-all-a-dream argument. This was interesting, though not necessarily a keeper. I would still (highly) recommend Slipping.
Get it at bookshop.org (affiliate link)
Springtime
Michelle de Kretser
Catapult
This is a fun one. An art historian moves in with her boyfriend, which requires a move across Australia. Things are still a little tenuous, since he had to exit his marriage to be with her. She takes her dog on walks every day, encountering a strange woman and dog in a garden as she passes. We see Frances with Charlie and their friends; we see cracks appear. A Russian emigre named Joseph is a sage pillar of their social circle. Lots of vague eerieness and dislocation. A pervasive, unsettled strangeness. And yes, at least one ghost, we learn. A slight and crisp little novel, absolutely terrific.
Get it at bookshop.org (affiliate link)
stay with me
Hanne Orstavik
trans. Martin Aitken
Archipelago
Well, okay. I really like Hanne Orstavik. Her novels Love and The Pastor are smart and expertly-rendered narratives and forever won me over on her forever. This one moves in different ways. A woman, a writer of Orstavik’s age, is involved with a younger man, in his 30s. She’s anxious, attached, trying to fix him and his anger. She’s also trying to write a novel about a widow like herself who’s suddenly interested in a younger man. That novel shows up in the text as well. Then there is also a father, the moody, unpredictable kind, who, when the author was young, drank too much and got into terrifying moods, stalking the house while the children lay listening in bed. Now he’s old, shuffling, enervated. Her mother too. All of this threads through the writer’s intertwinings with the younger man, M, their splits and reunions, her joy, reverence, and fretting. It’s watching someone psychoanalyze themselves in page-time, the momentum of examination and learning, drip by drip: why am I like this? Why am I trapped here, in this particular situation? Which, I guess, is what a lot of books have their characters doing (thinking again, and often of Gwendolyn Riley’s My Phantoms). It is, simply, the psychological significance of backstory brought forward. If you’re interested in writing of the self, if I can be so presumptive to assume this is more or less writing of the self, this would be one well worth cracking open.