I don’t need to write much, since Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s novel, La plus secrète mémoire des hommes, is probably the best novel I’ve read in a decade (since I read Alan Garner, Beppe Fenoglio, Nii Ayikwei Parkes, I guess?). Definitely I want to start reading it again: it is dense, complex, and full of subtle writing.

Wow, reading this was a pleasure, after having read Jean Rhys. You can see almost a direct line from Kafka to Rhys to Kavan to more contemporary novels like Annihilation. The subject matter is banal; everything relevant in the novel is in the writing style and narrator voice. Hazy, elliptical, jumpy, somewhat surreal, sometimes seemingly non-linear, conventional explanations of plot deliberately left out. As you read you’re just in awe of a writer who can pull something like this off, and it feels so incredibly hermetic and thoughtful, rather than contrived. And the subtext of gendered violence penetrating every paragraph.

A friend was reading this “creature feature” and so I borrowed The Legend of Charlie Fish by Josh Rountree from the library. Competent tale in the setting of Galveston in the “mighty flood” of 1900. It is definitely genre fiction, almost like a preliminary sketch for a television miniseries… Very visual.

Apparently this short experimental novel, Good Morning, Midnight, by Jean Rhys, published in 1938, temporarily ended Rhys’ writing career, the novel was so depressing. I’m here to validate that. Think Down and Out in Paris and London by Orwell but instead written by a really clinically depressed person who sees no way forward in life. She abuses herself and is abused in turn. Crappy hotels, dirty restaurants, abusive men in bars. The ending section is a long interior monologue, confused and choppy, about what seems to have been sexual assault in the hotel room in Paris. Really sad and depressing.

My neighborhood book club just finished a easy-read detective story from 1960s Australia, The Lake Frome Monster, by Arthur Upfield…. All about the Outback and ranching and First Nations People/aboriginal people… the detective is interesting… not the best detective mystery but lots of interesting local stuff and apparently most Australians are familiar with it… The language is quite dated, but presumably close to how white Australians thought/spoke…

The only reason I checked out Galatea, by Madeline Miller, was because it looked really short. It’s like a 30 minute read, or less. A trifling story, where booksellers and publishers are happy to take your $12 for the hardcover (!) and you can gift it to a friend who is vaguely feminist, has a literary air but doesn’t really read much, and liked Greek myths as a child. Otherwise, really this is a waste of your time and dollars… Put it in a short story collection about reworking myths for modern readers.

Sometimes it only takes a few pages for you to realize there is a gap between the promise of the cover and the reality of the words on the page. In this case, the promise was a kind of time-travel (immortality for hundreds of years without aging, but at a cost)… so historical novel across the ages as the central character gets to live through them, becoming weary and wise. The reality is that it was a genre romance novel dressed up a bit for a certain kind of reader. Did she swoon? Did her Luciferian counterpart come to understand love? I certainly stopped caring and just skimmed a few pages every now and then, and it stayed the same. Buh-bye….

Vagabonds, by Hao Jingfang, translated by Ken Liu, published back in 2020, is a long, shaggy dog story of Mars colonists gradual rapprochement with Earth, after a war of independence 100 years earlier. Jingfang imagines Mars as very much like a small country, rebelling against the commercial imperium of corporate control from Earth. Totally plausible. The Martians then establish a command economy, with some decentralization, in order to survive, and eventually to prosper. Inevitably, the command economy butts against desires for individual liberty and more freedom of choice. The novel traces through several characters, but focuses on an adolescent girl coming to understand the system. She’s waking up! As she struggles to understand the complexity of a social system, other actors are not waiting, and the system evolves even as her understanding grows. Jingfang nicely advocates for intellectual and engagement humility and sobriety. The enemies of the people end up being the hotheads, whether on the communitarian or the libertarian side. It’s long, but worth reading.

Was bored and wanted something light, so I re-read Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel. I was amazed at how much I had forgotten. I last read it in May 2022. It is a very quick read: two nights. Enjoyable, but slight. Knowing that she doesn’t deal seriously with time travel paradoxes may have made it more enjoyable to read the second time around. The first time I had found myself annoyed that she was so glib about time travel.

Beautifully written, Admiring Silence, by Abdulrazak Gurnah follows the return of the protagonist, who has been living in England since the independence regime of Zanzibar lashed out against the Arab families of the island, and the island descended into poverty. He has a companion and child in England. Returning, he finds that Zanzibar holds few of the memories of childhood he hoped to rekindle, and he finds himself more lost than ever. The style is deliberately a bit foggy, as Gurnah tries to recreate the narrators own sense of displacement. While this is a genre I don’t normally enjoy (the emotional labor of the return home, and the creation of a new set of memories of those left behind) there is no doubting Gurnah’s very capable and enjoyable prose.

Historical non-fiction, immersing the reader in the world of lower Manhattan in the post-revolution period around 1790. New York just has about 25,000 residents. Sweet reconstructs the social world on a young woman Lanah Sawyer who is raped by a young landed gentleman Henry Bedlow. The rape trial was followed closely, and written up in summary form by a young lawyer, and commented on extensively by the press. Alexander Hamilton was one of the lawyers for the defendant. Many of Bedlow’s family (he was related to the Rutgers) left lots of records, too. And the “bawdy house” of Mother Carey, where Bedlow performed the act, was well-known. So in The Sewing Girl’s Tale, John Wood Sweet is able to give a compelling account. It makes me want to walk through lower Manhattan, with a new eye and appreciation for the early history of the place, which was so central to the early Republic.

Enjoyed this sprawling family saga, A History of Burning by Janika Oza. A boy from Gujarat is tricked into become an indentured servant building the Mombasa-Kampala railroad around 1900. After the end of his work, he remains and hardscrabbles a new life. His granddaughter Latika becomes a central figure for most of the book, as the descendants move to Canada after the Amin expulsion of 1972. If you liked the bittersweet coda of Mira Nair’s film Mississippi Masala you’ll definitely want to read this book.

Reading novels from Tanzania, in anticipating some travel for work there in coming months. Enjoyed this sprawling saga on a boy who grows up in Kilwa, half-Indian half-African, ends up becoming a successful doctor in Canada, and returns 30 years later. A small framing story, not really necessary, has a publisher listening to his story, with a view to bringing it to print. The novel covers about 100 years of Swahili coast history, which was nice for me. But as a literary work, the occasional magical realism, the poorly developed characters (Kamal’s mother, for example, is never really given any depth, perhaps correctly, since she i recounted form the view of the child who left her as an adolescent). Saida, remarkably, as a central element of the story, remains just a construction of Kamal’s childhood, and the denouement is a serious disappointment for the reader. So overall I would say worth reading if you have some connection to Tanzania.

My brother suggested this novel. It is well worth reading, though it demands a very lot from the reader. Old God’s Time, by Sebastian Barry is high literary fiction about a dreadful subject. (Barry is Irish.) The fogginess of protagonist Tom Kettle’s memories, and the misdirections of the plots, are quite deliberate. The style reminded me of Kazuo Ishiguro, The Buried Giant. I wonder if that was deliberate? A Google search reveals that as of now (July 2023) no reviewers seem to have thought about a link. Would be fun to play literary detective.

A very (very) short book, which is the only reason I read it. You learn a little, you laugh a little, you cry a little. Well, maybe not… It is just a succession of battles (boy there were a lot) and Charlemagne rode (I assume? on a horse?) all over France, Spain, Italy, etc.

This is popular history, a narrative based on letters and records uncovered in various archives. I found it plodding, though the essence of the tale really helps one understand some aspects of the Atlantic world in 1767. Two “princes” related to a slave warlord in Calabar are enslaved (while many of their companions are massacred) by a rival warlord scheming with captains of slave ships. They are transported to Dominica. Because they speak English, and understand the slave trade, and personally know many captains and sailors, they are able to escape to Virginia. but they are enslaved again. They again escape and end up in Bristol. Eventually, they find their way back to Calabar, and end up becoming slave traders again. Ouf. Definitely worth reading.

Read this book in two nights, mostly skimmed the last third as it moved to a fairly predictable conclusion. A multiverse semi-thriller. Was remarking the other day that once Nolan introduced, in Interstellar, the visual of the multiverse, at the edge of the black hole, or who cares, really, that has given license to every writer and filmaker to appropriate the trope and imagine the multiverse as a series of doors. And you can go through them through some incantation or other. The OA did this really well, partly because it was hard and it might not work and it would be scary if you did it. But they too faltered (with Khatun/Baba Yaga fishing?). Anyway, this novel, Dark Matter, is basically a midwestern identity thriller (think Witness) with a little sci-fi dress-up. I needed an airplane book distraction, so it worked just fine.

The pastiche or collage graphic memoir by Nora Krug, Belonging, traces her increasing curiosity about her family’s involvement in supporting the Nazi Party and the persecution of Jewish people in the 1930-45 period. Was her grandfather a reluctant follower, compromising his values because the price of resistance was too high? Or was he, and other family members, active Nazis? Along the way, discussions of collective guilt, memory, ties to family, self-identity, etc. are explored. The collage and drawing work is striking and well-executed. It almost feels like a day trip through a long, extended, museum gallery. Super-interesting. My one quibble, that I can understand, but at the same time cannot understand, is why Nora’s father and sister AnneMarie never spoke again. Nora’s father’s childhood and adolescence was likely (from the graphic memoir) filled with abuse, and the trauma presumably remains even 70 years later.

I am almost finished with the 3rd part of this four-part experimental novel, and it is possible I will never read the last part. It turned into a slog. The first part is a “sensational” novel about the main characters, Benjamin and Helen Rask. Presumably you want to read it because of the unimaginable luxury of a JP Morgan type financier in the roaring twenties, and the unhappy fate of his wife, submitted to quack mental illness cures of the period. But it is just dull. The discussions of finance are Econ 1… Maybe high school Econ, actually. Full of pat clichés about “capital.” The second part is Rask’s ghostwriter’s “rebuttal” memoir in the style of Andrew Carnegie’s The Gospel of Wealth. So pretty boring too. Then the point of view shifts to Ida Partenza, the ghostwriter of Rask’s rebuttal memoir. Trouble is, she and her poor Italian anarchist father are pretty boring also. It’s as if allusion to the really interesting history of the period was enough to make a novel readable. The fourth part is Helen Rask’s diary entries and notes, and skimming through them I was just like, “Wut?” So sorry, can’t recommend… it just seems to be missing some key elements of a good novel.