Posts from the ‘Recently Read’ Category

Nov 13

Recently Read: Caleb Klaces & Rebecca Grandsen

I’ve recently read two worthy novels that involved searching for a family member during a pandemic, both published by intriguing small indie presses (see below).

In Caleb Klaces’ Mr. Outside, which takes place during the COVID pandemic (although that barely comes into play), the unnamed narrator arrives at the home of his father, Thomas, to help him move into a care home. But Thomas, a poet and former priest who was fired for posing naked in photographs inside his own church, is nowhere to be found. His mind is failing and as the son explores his father’s house he finds only garbage, disorder, and other sights that confirm his father’s failing mental state. Along with a mysterious skirt.

Eventually, Thomas is found and father and son spend a weekend together grappling with memories, discoveries, fears, and regrets. Everything the son sees around him and nearly everything he touches seems disgusting. How could his father live like this? Apparently, he learns, Thomas just likes to wear a dress now and then. He writes “torrents” of complaining letters—to the supermarket, the local leisure center, Virgin Trains, English Heritage, the library, and so on. And he has repeatedly refused to trim the overgrown tree in the front yard. The painful discoveries feel endless and the son responds by going into panic mode. But eventually, he learns that by accepting Thomas as he really is will reduce the panic level. Over the weekend, many childhood memories come flooding back to him, and he finds he must reevaluate much of his childhood. His father must do some readjusting, as well. It’s a novel about two people negotiating a major life change between themselves, but also two people negotiating with their own pasts alone.

Klaces’ writing is appropriately disorienting, as befits a novel about senility and panic. It’s also acutely observant and tender. At one point in the book the son attempts to get his father to fill out the short biography required by the care center, and he begins by writing that Thomas was born in Wales.

“I was born inside a volcano,” he said, indicating with his finger that I was to replace my text with this new line.
“This is serious, Dad. They need to know who you are.”
“That is who I am. ‘I was born inside a volcano.’ Write that down on the piece of paper.”
I crossed out the fact that he was born in Wales. I wrote his version.
“Did you write it?”
“I was born inside a volcano.”
“Perfect. Now write, ‘As school I was captain of the rugby team. There wasn’t much competition for the position, given that I was the only boy with three arms.'”
. . .
He stared at the ceiling and conducted his silent orchestra. He delivered the next improbable chapter. I wrote down what he said. He was a dragonfly and he was a sparrow. He was a seal and he was a rat. He was middle-aged, a baby, and finally old.

Included in Mr. Outside are a dozen or so small photographs (snapshots, really). The blurb on the back of the book tells us that the book is based on the life of the author’s own father, so I think we can assume these might be his own photographs. The images don’t reproduce very well in halftone and some of them are a bit murky. But perhaps that’s the point.

Amid of a mass exodus northward fleeing the mysterious red sky, Flo is seeing fewer people every day and most of them are sick. Rebecca Grandsen’s novella Figures Crossing the Field Towards the Group is subtitled A Pilgrimage: An England in Delirium, and it follows Flo as she both runs for her life and searches for her brother through a nightmarish, dystopian English landscape. She comes across very strange individuals and small groups of people who have been driven mad or who have banded together to prepare for the apparent coming mass extinction in their own mysterious way. For example, there is the Honey Ghost, the Tent Man, the man who lusts, and the Illuminated Man. Flo travels through “somnambulant woods,” down roads that have “gone wild,” through a haze of golden grasses and spores, across fields that crunch beneath her feet, through “sick towns,” and finally to some white chalk cliffs.

The narration is written entirely in words of one syllable, except when characters speak. This forces compound and multi-syllabic words to be forced apart. Grandsen makes deliberately odd and antiquated word choices, and trims away strictly unnecessary words—all to slow the reader down and give her narrative the sense that it has somehow been removed from a specific time.

On some more and the crowd thins, lone bods stand in gloom, they do not know who they are, or ere, and there is no hope for them. Tween these lost peeps, Flo spies the back of rows of the cross, shapes caught in the dark glow of the camp torch at her rear now. Cross and cross and cross, all ace a dark world. Flo can not see what is out there. The dark is too much, the light takes the sight of it down. But the light hits each wood cross. Cru ci fix. There is bulk on each cross, on the side that turns to the sea, that Flo can not see yet.

This is a poet’s novel, a story of dystopian beauty and unspeakable brutality. Flo deals with sexual assault and, from a distance, witnesses human sacrifice, crucifixions, and cannibalism. “Rust cars sit, some burnt out, bon fi res up front, she sees stakes, and shakes her head. They did it. They did. They fell back on myth and made the worst of things bo il.” But perhaps because the possibility of mass extinction seems so real in the book, much of the writing focuses on the strange beauty of nature.

Bluff twines in need round a sun haze morn, birds nest their down with kind beaks, ruff soft breast on fair green boughs, lace wings step on flut green leaf, grass hops tend a verge at peace. Flo skates the back road through miles at rest in light, on her skin is the touch of no god, just the sol rise, just the room to float the world. Straw limbs form, sun lap field on for good, chaff rags, dolls in twist and knot born. Weed chain worn as a lop may queen crown, straw and gold and rust buds tug snug in fine hairs. A slow beast laps at a road side pot hole, cool drink on its tongue, puff tawn fur on its haut. Beasts nudge through field brush with ease and scamp with kicks.

Both novels are emotionally tough to read at times. And they should be.

Caleb Klaces. Mr. Outside. London: Prototype, 2025. Prototype is the London-based publisher of Kate Zambreno, Derek Jarman, Chloe Aridjis, Danielle Dutton, Bhanu Kapil, Stephen Watts, Iain Sinclair, and many other writers worth reading.

Rebecca Grandsen. Figures Crossing the Field Towards the Group. London: Tangerine Press, 2025. “Tangerine Press has been publishing misfits, mavericks and misanthropes since 2006,” including William S. Burroughs, Iain Sinclair, Will Self, and R. Crumb, just to pick a few.

Sep 29

Recently Read: Shirley Hazzard’s Two Early Novels

In Shirley Hazzard’s first novel, The Evening of the Holiday (1966), we are told very little about Sophie, the young woman who comes from England to visit her invalid aunt for a short summer vacation. We never even learn Sophie’s last name. Hazzard wants us to remain in the here-and-now because that is where Sophie lives, unconcerned about her past or her future. At an afternoon social event one day, Sophie meets Tancredi, an architect whose wife has just left him, taking their children with him. (We never learn his last name either.) At first, Tancredi is unimpressed with the “archetypal Englishwoman,” who “was nothing special.” She seems unimpressed with him as well, deducing that she was only one year old when he was already in university. And very soon the reader begins to be unimpressed with Tancredi as well, when the word “conquest” creeps into his thinking, as he watches the Englishwoman more closely. “He liked the idea of supremacy and believed, correctly, that women want to be prevailed upon.” That single word “correctly,” slipped between commas by the book’s omniscient narrator, hammers home an unpleasant image of Tancredi.

Nevertheless, he begins to drive her around the countryside to introduce her to the sights, and he finds himself falling for her. She has some strange appeal for him, though she keeps her emotional distance. She eventually warns him she is going to return to England. “You’re a threat to me,” she tells him.

But she stays. “Nothing need be undone; nothing more need happen,” she tells herself. They continue to see each other and he immediately senses she is changing her opinion of him. Then the annual summer holiday happens in the city, celebrating some great battle that took place centuries earlier (the city was defeated). Sophie has decided to stay in the city, in her hotel room, avoiding the events of the festival as much as possible. Tancredi has gone to visit his children for a week. On the main evening of the holiday week, he telephones her. He has begun divorce proceedings. “I have to tell you something. Don’t be horrified. . . I’m in love with you. . . Would you come to Florence with me?” “Yes,” she says. Before we know it, she has moved into Tancredi’s house. It’s one of those sudden, unexplained, change-of-heart reversals that happen in Hazzard’s novels.

For the most part, Hazzard keeps the reader at arm’s length from the daily thoughts and decisions of Sophie and Tancredi. She leaves few, if any, clues to help us decide whether Tancredi has buried his sense of male superiority because of Sophie or why Sophie has finally fallen for Tancredi, or why she ultimately decided to break off the relationship and return to London. Is she really an independent woman or has she mistaken being decisive for true personal autonomy?

The Evening of the Holiday (Knopf) is less than 140 pages long and was originally published in the April 16, 1965, issue of The New Yorker. It contains some of the key ingredients of the three novels that lie in her future, but it reads a bit like a sketch. With less use of free indirect style, it is not as fully fleshed out with the interior thoughts of its main characters as her later novels. But, like all sketches, it leaves more to our imagination.

How tortuous, these strands of love.

After The Evening of the Holiday, with its simple plot and only two main characters, Shirley Hazzard’s second novel The Bay at Noon (1970) feels almost symphonic by comparison. At its heart it is the story of three couples, but it is also a portrait of a complex city (Naples, Italy), a report on a giant bureaucracy (NATO), and a scathing image of the new postwar military complexes. The writing in The Bay has taken a great leap forward. It is richer, more complex, much more dazzling than that of The Evening. Time, in Hazzard’s second novel, has become fractured. She moves the narrative back and forth across years without warning.

Jenny, the book’s narrator, has come from London shortly after the end of World War II to work at a giant NATO base in Naples, translating documents and doing other clerical tasks (read: women’s work). She is a watchful observer of how the gears of the world operate around her. She wants to be an independent woman. In addition to closely watching all the new people in her life, she often finds herself staring out at the Bay of Naples, which she describes as an “oval mirror.” A view of the Bay is inescapable from practically any vantage point across the city, as is Mount Vesuvius. Vesuvius, which sits at the edge of the Bay across from Naples, has ruined the city more than once, and is a constant reminder throughout the novel of the possibility of imminent disaster.

The Bay is structured around the relationships of three couples, all seen from Jenny’s perspective: there is her own on-again, off-again affair with a divorced Scotsman named Justin; the marriage between her brother Edmund and his wife Norah, which she analyses from a distance; and the ongoing romance between her new best friend in Naples, Gioconda, and Gianni, a film director who is separated from his wife but cannot obtain a divorce because it is prohibited by Italian law.

The novel is also a loving, if gritty portrayal of Naples, a “city of volcanic extravagance where a “sense of catastrophe, impending and actual, heightened the Neapolitan attachment to life.” Hazzard, who lived there for many years, paints a detailed picture of the streets and the people, and a panoramic view of the Bay and its stunning islands, notably Capri. Gianni warns Jenny that Naples will change her. “This will change everything for you,” he tells her. “Naples is a leap. It’s through the looking-glass.”

One way to characterize this novel is to rephrase Tolstoy’s opening sentence from Anna Karenina “All happy couples are alike; each unhappy couple is unhappy in its own way.” In every novel by Hazzard, a key motif is the question: Why are people attracted to each other? What turns that switch on and then, sometimes, off again? Why do some people (but especially women) commit to another despite all the shenanigans, the seemingly ever-present (but mostly male) issues of infidelity, the never-ending misogyny, and all the other potential risks to heartbreak? In Hazzard’s universe, what people call love can be a form of chemistry, a type of personal calculus, or several other excuses that characters give to stay with another person.

What is curious to me is that Hazzard is so brave and clinical at locating the illnesses in male-female relationships that she feels like a feminist. But she does not let any of her three female characters break free in The Bay at Noon. Jenny’s sister is destined to continue with her misguided marriage. After several terrible infractions and a very serious blow-up, Gioconda takes Gianni back for good, knowing he will never reform. And Jenny informs us that she, years after all her Naples era has ended, is back in London and is married to a lawyer. Nevertheless, she has been oddly haunted by Justin, the man she hardly seemed to care about in Naples, but who left the city one day without a word and disappeared. She now admits having searched for him everywhere. But, by accident, she reads in an newspaper article that he is one of several occupants of a small airplane that has disappeared and presumed to have crashed in the Caribbean. She can only think: “Trapped in the events, we must live through them in order to learn the outcome.”

Both of these novels are short and very entertaining, and they let the reader watch a masterful writer taking giant steps forwards toward the style that comes fully into its own with The Transit of Venus (1980), which I wrote about in my previous post.

The Evening of the Holiday. NY: Knopf, 1966.

The Bay at Noon. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1970.

Aug 11

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Recently Read: Énard & Tawada 2

Once upon a time, in a country far away. . .

Not too long ago, I wrote about Mathias Énard’s The Deserters (2020/2022) and Yoko Tawada’s Scattered All Over the Earth (2018/2025). Fascinated by both books, albeit for very different reasons, I followed up by reading another novel by each writer. Énard’s Tell Them of Battles, Kings & Elephants was written ten years earlier than The Deserters and tells the story of when Michelangelo was invited to Constantinople in 1506 to design a bridge that would cross the Golden Horn, connecting Europe with Asia. Entranced by the design challenge, the riches offered, and the opportunity to surpass Leonardo da Vinci (whose design was just rejected), he accepts. The basic outline of the story is true, but in this very brief novel Énard sketches a portrait of mid-career Michelangelo as he deals with the emotional, political, and cultural issues of working under pressure for an all-powerful Sultan in a foreign—and Muslim—country. Énard wants us to see this as a dry run for two years later, when Michelangelo will work for yet another all-powerful figure on another major project, Pope Julius II and the Sistine Chapel.

The book opens with a voice that mysteriously addresses Michelangelo. “You think you desire my beauty, the softness of my skin, the brilliance of my smile, the delicacy of my limbs, the crimson of my lips, but actually, what you want without realizing it is for your fears to disappear, for healing, union, return, oblivion. This power inside you devours you in solitude. So you suffer, lost in an infinite twilight, one foot in day and the other in night.” This voice belongs to a dancer, singer, and storyteller. Even though Michelangelo encounters this mysterious figure multiple times, he cannot decide on the gender, although he convinces himself the person is a man. “Your arm is hard. Your body is hard. Your soul is hard. Of course you’re not sleeping. I know you were waiting for me. I noticed you looking at me.” The person comes to spend the night with Michelangelo several times. “You’re trembling. You don’t desire me? Then listen. Once upon a time, in a country far away. . .” Throughout his stay in Constantinople, Michelangelo resists the tempting dancer, who seems to know his heart and his state of mind so well.

Most of the time in Battles, Kings & Elephants, Énard writes relatively simple sentences. Because this is a book about a great artist, it is a deeply observant type of writing. Michelangelo makes a long list of the spices he sees in the marketplace and then he daydreams of the types of stone he can use for his sculptures: “cipolin, ophite, sarrancolin, serpentine, canela, delfino, porphyry, brocatello, obsidian, marble from Cinna. So many names, colors, materials, whereas the most beautiful, the only one worth anything, is white, white, white without veins, grooves or colorations.” But every now and then, Énard gives us a few sentences full of strange names, a bit of mystery, pomp, and erudition, sentences which stand out for the sheer exuberance of the images they conjure up. “The Ottoman delegation is made up of a young page, a man from Genoa named Falachi, and a squad of janissaries wearing crimson turbans. They settle the sculptor in a grey and gold araba with a dashing harness; two spahis trot in front of the procession, to make way; their scimitars bump against the horses’ flanks.”

More than anything, Énard wants to transport the reader to faraway, exotic places. The dancer tells Michelangelo: “I know that men are children who chase away their despair with anger, their fear with love; they respond to the void by building castles and temples. They cling to stories, they shove them in front of them like banners; everyone makes some story his own so as to attach himself to the crowd that shares it. You conquer people by telling them of battles, kings, elephants, and marvelous beings; by speaking to them about the happiness they will find” This is Énard’s formula.

“The stars stay where they are, and talk to us from there-bear.”

When we last left Hiruko and her coterie of a half dozen characters from across the globe, they were determined to travel to Copenhagen to visit Susanoo in his hospital room and support his efforts to regain the ability to speak. The trilogy’s overarching quest, which is to find someone who can speak Japanese with Hiruko now that the entire country of Japan has sunk beneath the ocean due to climate change, remains, but has been put on hold. Like its predecessor, Scattered All Over the Earth, Suggested in the Stars is narrated in turn by the book’s various characters. It opens with an intriguing new character, Munun, a dishwasher in the hospital where Susanoo is being treated. To amuse himself, he sometimes stops “to look at the patterns on the dirty plates. . . [and] wonder what the patients had for lunch.” To help overcome their stuttering, he and his co-worker Vita use a special language that they have invented in which they occasionally throw in a rhyme, “to make things easier.”

“We can’t read-weed, can we?”
“Yes we can-pan.”
“Munun, can you read the newspaper-caper?”
“I can read the plates-mates. Plates-mates and the paper-caper. And I can read the moon-loon. The moon-loon and the paper-caper.”
“The moon-loon isn’t out yet.”
“When the night-tight comes, the moon-loon will rise.”
“Where does the moon-loon come from?”
“I don’t know-toe. We come from faraway too.”
“What about the stars-mars?”
“The stars stay where they are, and talk to us from there-bear.”

But after Munun’s initial turn at narration, the life seems to whoosh out of the book and much of the charm of the first volume dissipates. There are no Smilephones or digital genomoney to remind us we are supposed to be in an inventive world of the near future. The idealism that figured so large in Hiruko’s group has given way to travel woes, conversations about practical matters, and apparently pointless digressions.

Dr. Velmer, the man in charge of helping Susanoo recover, understands that he is “a world-weary, cranky old man.” Nevertheless, he is madly in love with Inga, a nurse, who shares his passion for IKEA. They both pride themselves on being able to accurately name any piece of IKEA furniture. Velmer is a worn-out caricature of the snooty physician who yells at the nurses and hospital staff over the smallest issues. And, in the claustrophobic universe of Yoko Tawada’s trilogy, Inga is also the mother of Knut, a member of Hiruko’s coterie and the sponsor of the college education of yet another coterie member, Nanook. Together, Velmer and Inga make a tiresome pair of central characters in Suggested.

Suggested in the Stars feels like a book without a purpose. The gathering in Copenhagen is thwarted by transportation problems that only lead to long digressions. Nanook decides to hitchhike from Trier to Copenhagen (not for climate change reasons, but for preference), which takes him on multiple rides and a zig-zagging trip far off the direct route. Meanwhile, Nora and Akash run into an airport strike and are forced to make the trip on the backs of two motorcycles. By the time that everyone gathers in Susanoo’s hospital room, petty arguments and tensions fill page after page with little respite.

But then, with less than twenty pages to go in the book, Munun, the delightful dishwasher, returns as narrator and some of the magic returns to the book. He enters the room with a radio that is playing music, and slowly everyone begins to dance in a circle. All of the recent hostilities and tribulations are magically forgiven and forgotten. A tiny robot and teddy bear appear and begin handing out tickets for Hiruko and her coterie to take a cruise ship to India and then to points east. To find Japan? Who knows? Munun then invites everyone into his tiny bedroom in the half-basement of the hospital, where he has rigged up a planetarium by making holes in his window curtain with a hole punch. As a going-away present, he gives everyone leaving on the cruise a symbolic star that suggests something about their personality. In 2026, we will get the third volume of the trilogy. But, alas, Munun and Vita, the two most vibrant characters of volume two, did not receive cruise tickets from the tiny robot.

Mathias Énard. Tell Them of Battles, Kings & Elephants. Fitcarraldo Editions, 2018. Translated by Charlotte Mandell from the 2010 French original.

Yoko Tawada. Suggested in the Stars. New Directions, 2024, Translated from the 2020 Japanese original by Margaret Mitsutani.

Jul 24

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Recently Read: Énard & Tawada

“Betrayal begins with the body.”

He is filthy, unwashed, his tattered uniform stiff. He has a rifle, cartridges, a knife, and a few biscuits. A man has deserted from his army and is desperately trying to reach the safety of the border. Along the way he encounters a woman who has fled her village where she perhaps was raped and nearly killed for apparently consorting with the enemy. Circumstances force them to stick together in their effort to escape, even though they intensely distrust each other. But neither can bring themselves to kill the other one, although both are tempted. The book jacket simply says this takes place in “the Mediterranean wilderness,” and the time period could be anytime within the past half century. In one half of The Deserters, Mathias Énard uses free indirect narration to burrow deep into the thoughts of both the man and the woman. As he has shown in Zone and his other previous novels, he can bring visceral and troubling images of war and individual survival to the page.

He intercuts this brutal story with one of European intellectuals and mathematical prodigies. In 2020, as the war in Ukraine breaks out, Irina looks back on the life of her parents, Paul and Maja. The primary focus of her memories is a conference she helped to organize that began on September 10, 2001, to honor the legacy of her father, who was a very prominent mathematician and also a Buchenwald survivor. The following day the events of 9/11 brought to the surface not only intense political discussions among the conference attendees, but also led to revelations about the pasts of both of Irina’s parents, who had lived apart much of their adult lives on opposite side of the Berlin Wall. Paul was a devoted Communist and anti-fascist who tried desperately to believe in the cause of the German Democratic Republic, while Maja had served in the Belgian Resistance during WWII and became a committed activist in West Berlin. Irina studied, instead, delved into the past and studied classical Arabic and the history of mathematics. I’m going to assume the many fascinating references that Enard makes to complex mathematics are knowledgeable (which would be an impressive accomplishment in itself).

Énard reveals the engrossing story of Irina, her parents Maja and Paul, and their intellectual circle of elite mathematicians in carefully managed stages, so the reader is always sure that there are more surprises to come. The juxtaposition of a group of people dedicated to esoteric intellectual pursuits in pleasant surroundings with two people fighting nature and each other just to survive is jarring. The sharply diametric differences between the two halves make it all the more dramatic to switch between the two stories. The struggle, violence and tension of the deserters section makes the lives of the mathematicians, academics, and their circle seem cocooned and lush by comparison. Is Énard saying that they, too, are somehow deserters from the real world of the 21st century because, despite their personal engagements in their earlier years, they can now only theorize and argue about its problems? Regardless, the result is a compelling, propulsive novel.

Yoko Tawada’s recent novel Scattered All Over the Earth is strikingly different from Énard’s twin tale of brutal survival and elite mathematics. It is set in a somewhat cartoonish, slightly futuristic version of our world. The entire nation of Japan has simply disappeared (no one seems to know how), but there are hints that climate change has worsened and might be the culprit. People now use Smilephones and withdraw digital genomoney from banks using strands of their hair. Europe has become a welfare state for every resident, including immigrants, but speaking English might get one deported to the United States.

The plot, such as it is, seems lighthearted, almost trivial. Over the course of the novel, a handful of characters find their way to each other by pure happenstance, one by one, and then coalesce into a small coterie. They find various reasons to spontaneously move around Europe—Copenhagen, Trier, Oslo, Arles—to attend events like a sushi chef competition or an Umami Festival/Dashi Workshop held, improbably, at the Karl Marx House.

If the novel has a central character, it is Hiruko, a homeless foreign student now that Japan has disappeared, who has been moving among Scandinavian countries looking for a country to accept her. When Knut, a Danish linguistics student hears her being interviewed, he realizes that she is not speaking Danish but that he can understand her perfectly. Is it Norwegian? Swedish? Icelandish? No, it’s “homemade language.” “No time to learn three different languages,” Hiruko explains, “might mix up. insufficient space in brain. so made new language.” Listening to Hiruko “breathing in several grammars. . . and then exhaling them as sweet breath,” Knut thinks that “maybe solid grammar would be replaced by some new grammar, more liquid or air-like.” Hiruko calls her homemade language Panska. “Though it’s spontaneous and far from perfect, as the words stream along the wrinkles of my memory, picking up every sparkling thing, no matter how small, they take me to magical faraway places,” she thinks. “Only Panska can take me there, not my native language.”

Joining up with Knut and Hiruko are Akash, who is from India and is transitioning to a man; Nora, who works at the Karl Marx House; Tenzo, a sushi chef of mixed Greenland/American parentage who wants to pass himself off as Japanese; and Susanoo, a Japanese man who runs a sushi restaurant in Arles, France, and who has lost his voice. When Tenzo is unmasked as being from Greenland, not Japan, he admits that his real name is Nanook. One common thread they all share is a love for linguistics and languages, and so Scattered is full of wordplay and discussions about language.

Each character takes turns narrating the story. Several of them have their own odd takes on language. Nora always keeps her bedroom door shut tightly. “If I come across a word I can’t get out of my head while I’m reading, and end up taking it into the bedroom with me, it will sometimes flit around the room all night like a mosquito, keeping me awake.” Knut wants “to go to a place where adjectives have a past tense, and prepositions come at the end of the phrase.”

The book is light on its feet, but there there are suggestions that Tawada’s small band of idealistic misfits seem determined to take on the ills that plague the world—climate change, greed, anti-immigrant politics. Nora is determined to be a true member of the working class and not be “on the side that exploits.” She has read a book comparing contemporary society to a multi-tenant building in which everyone looks out for themselves. The result is that “the deterioration in the capacity for empathy” is actually what keeps the building safe and functioning.

Scattered ends in Arles when Susanoo, who has been unable to speak at all for a while, can suddenly “talk” silently. Akash announces to the group that Susanoo wants to go to a place in Stockholm where the loss of speech is being studied. “travel so continues,” Hiruko declares. “People who are connected by an invisible thread are fated to meet, but the mystery of that thread is hard to grasp,” Hiruko thinks to herself. Scattered is the first volume of a trilogy. Presumably, in the next segments we will learn more about that thread and we will see if the group tries to do something about the world’s problems.

Tawada’s curious, subtle novel continually inquires into the ways in which language shapes our relationships with people—with everything, in fact. Surprised at a word she has just uttered, Hiruko thinks “If you use trite words like that too much without thinking, just because they’re convenient, you end up letting the words control you. I was sure that speaking Panska was helping me escape those bonds of conventional wisdom.” Although Scattered was written in Japanese, Tawada lives in Berlin and famously often writes in German to keep herself slightly estranged from her native language. Scattered seems designed to assist the reader to become slightly estranged as well.

Mathias Énard. The Deserters. New Directions, 2025. Translated from the 2020 French original by Charlotte Mandell.

Yoko Tawada. Scattered All Over the Earth. New Directions, 2022. Translated from the 2018 Japanese original by Margaret Mitsutani.

Dec 29

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Recently Read: Timothy O’Grady & Alice Attie

When it was first published in 1997 by Harvill, with the imprimatur of a Preface by John Berger, I Could Read the Sky was hailed as a great collaborative work of text and photographs that captured the special sadness and melancholy of Irish economic exiles everywhere. As he looks back on his life, the unnamed aging narrator recalls his youth in Ireland, the trip he made to England in search for work (along with so many other young men of his generation), the succession of back-breaking jobs he held over the years, and the woman he loved whom he has just buried. Timothy O’Grady’s text alternates between numerous b&w photographs by Steve Pyke, photographs which are made in the great tradition of photographers like W. Eugene Smith and Bruce Davidson, photographers who could move us with powerful portraits, emotionally strong images of land and labor, and sequences that tell a great story. Perhaps not surprisingly, I Could Read the Sky reminds me of the classic non-fiction book from 1967 written by John Berger with powerful photographs by Jean Mohr, A Fortunate Man: The Story of a Country Doctor.

Recently, London’s Unbound Press has brought out a fresh new edition of I Could Read the Sky with additional images by Pyke. O’Grady’s writing is visceral, direct, and yet it has a certain kind of poetry at times. Pyke’s photographs either punch you in the face or leave you staring full of emotion at something utterly human.

She straightens her back against the back of the chair

thinking about shapes, about words: her back against the back of the chair

how books lift their shapes among the branches

Shape is a word that shapes
from “Schubert in the Library”

For a poet like Alice Attie, who is also a visual artist, the shape of the poem is just as important as the words that comprise it. In her new book, Bending into the light (Seagull Books, 2023), every poem is carefully shaped into a visual presence. In the long tradition of visual artists leaving works untitled, Attie also leaves several of her poems without titles, simply lines on a page, like these two below.

Many of her poems are about nature, about the freedom of birds and the nature of light. But a number are about the materials she is working with—words—and about what makes a poem a poem. In short, she is trying to understand the process of how we go from seeing birds and observing light to converting those experiences into words which are then reimagined by readers.

Soon, illusions, like seeds, will scatter.

The real will overtake us

Pitching these sounds into grammar.
from “Fluencies”

She thinks about other poets and writers, like Wallace Stevens, Samuel Beckett, and George Oppen. She weaves some of Oppen’s own lines into one of her poems.

Yet I am one of those who from nothing but a man’s way of
thought and one of his dialects and what has happened
to me
Have made poetry
from: George Oppen, “Of Being Numerous”

In one sequence of five poems, Attie writes about photographs that are reproduced on the pages opposite. Three of the photographs were made by her late father and have marks drawn on them by Attie. One photograph by Attie shows a blackboard on which she had drawn a blizzard of white math-like symbols and markings. And the fifth photograph was found at a Paris flea market.

Many of Attie’s artworks are drawings or paintings that appear to be text-based, except that her texts are almost always scribbles or imaginary letter systems or pseudo-scientific symbols.

*Alice Attie, Letter, 2008, 30 x 22 inches, Ink on paper, courtesy Foley Gallery*

Aug 22

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Recently Read: Fictional Museums by SJ Fowler & Natalia Zagorka-Thomas

In his recent novel, SJ Fowler has imagined for us a dystopian future in which terrible climactic surges occur. Violent tremors and fogs are releasing noxious gases, killing everyone who is trapped outdoors. “Ash and pumice rains down.” As the nameless museum guard who narrates MUEUM puts it, “we are not at the ‘what’s worst for human health above all factors‘ stage yet. We’re getting there.”

Nevertheless, rebuilding is constantly going on. “Culture begins in the history we rebuild. History begins in the Museum rebuilt.” The Museum is an immense repository, with more than one hundred galleries, countless secret rooms, barracks for its workers, and a Great Hall.

MUEUM is narrated by an unnamed male museum guard who seems to be warehoused there, although whether this is voluntary or not is unclear. “I am not a visitor,” he admits one day. “I can’t own anything, nothing can be given to me.” What is clear is that the living and working situation for the guards is highly regimented and there can be extreme penalties for stepping out of line. One day, another guard complains to the narrator, “The Union was big back when the new Museum opened. There is no Union now. After our nine-and-a-half hours, or five-hundred-and-seventieth minute, the day ends and we return to barracks. Once every seven weeks we are allowed, or rather it is our turn, to take our lunch breaks in the Clemency Galleries, or Knocking Shops, whatever you’d like to call them, at the back of the Museum.” 43

The guard’s job is generally boring, but visitors want to touch the objects and they pester him with stupid questions. “Is it real?” “So they’re replicas, eh?” “Is it real or not?” He carries “a small implement” that “resembles a gunstock warclub” for his personal safety, in case one of the visitors gets out of hand. Then one day a curator says to him, “It’s not all real,” and he can scarcely believe what he has heard. “Please,” the curator begs him, “keep on telling them. Not to touch.”

His brief description of the museum makes it sound as if its galleries are dedicated to displaying the history of violence.

To get to Egypt you walk through seven galleries. I pass Augustus, Nero, Caligula, Tiberious, with their children and swimming pools and horrible fake blood. I pass markets with soft manacles for the visitors to try on, in all sizes, small to large. I pass early military tactics, with the shield wall and open toed sandals and the conviction to stab not what is in front of you but what is to your right. I pass gladiators and the trident net combo or the film, with disinfected headphones, on a loop. Some Christian stuff and the automated Seneca. That’s just Rome at its quickest. . . Then there’s some properly modern paraphernalia, what happened afterwards, how hard an act that was to follow and where it moved onto, the Empire, etc. . .

One day, two guards maliciously slip something into the narrator’s tea and he spends the day hallucinating in the Writing Room, where, ironically, his spelling goes to hell for several hours and several pages. “Museums? Museums. Musems. Musums. Meseums. I coup my ears to the big doome above me.” This is one of the two central events that befall the narrator before the book comes to an abruptly poetic conclusion. Both events are strange, seemingly random, and terrifying (especially the second), and I think both occur without the book making completely clear what their real purpose was. Regardless, the pleasure of reading Fowler’s icy, mysterious prose overcame whatever questions I had about his plot. Fowler, who is primarily a poet and a visual artist, worked as a guard at the British Museum from 2007 to 2014, so he writes from experience. Although the dangerous weather plays a small role in the novel, it’s not really an example of ecofiction. The novel is largely concerned with our relationships to violence and to sex. MUEUM (Tenement Press, 2022)

My second museum book is not really about a museum but about a hoard, which is an archaeological term for a collection of valuable objects or artifacts. In this case, however, the value is only in the eye of the beholder. Natalia Zagorka-Thomas is the curator and author of The Camden Town Hoard: A Collection of Archeological Artefacts Excavated Along London’s Regent’s Canal During Summer 2021 (London: Studio Expurgamento & CB Editions, 2022). It’s a beautifully-produced pocket guide to the strange ancient objects rescued from oblivion and given tall tales of strange utility by a group of guest writers. This farce of an archeological handbook is brilliant and laugh-out-loud funny. There are rat aqualungs, a teaselwangler, an ectoplasm tube, and many other fanciful items, each stunningly photographed like invaluable museum objects and lovingly described in serious museum-speak.

In his Foreword, independent curator and former museum director David Thorpe writes: “The purpose of the museum has changed. As has that of the curator, the artefact, and the audience. Now we are all curators, organising and exhibiting our lives.” And he reminds us of the mudlarks, men who in previous centuries scavenged objects from along the banks of the River Thames for items of any value that they could sell. During the Covid lockdown, Natalia Zagorka-Thomas filtered through the detritus that resulted from the dredging of Regents Canal in London, looking for objects. This book represents part of what she found.

[Recently Read is an occasional post in which I do shorter accounts of two or three books that I recently found worthy of note.]

Apr 6

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Recently Read: Kirsty Bell & John Hawkes

You know that if something begins with a leak in the living room ceiling and ends up as a book that serves as a mini-history of a major city, you have a very tenacious person behind the whole project. Kirsty Bell, a new owner of an apartment in a nineteenth century building in central Berlin that somehow survived World War II, became curious about its history, the previous owners, and the odd neighborhood, bounded by railway tracks and the Landwehr Canal. In The Undercurrents, Bell tells the story of the family that once owned and lived in the building and how they all fared during and after the war. While she does that, she widens her scope to explore the area surrounding her building, including the history of the canal and the railways. But that leads her even farther afield, and soon she’s giving the reader a mini-lesson in the city’s history. She places all of this within the context of Berlin’s intellectual and artistic history. Anyone who visits Berlin after reading her analysis of the sad history of post-war city planning will be better prepared to see the city with new eyes, especially a place like Potsdamer Platz, Berlin’s highly touted destination showplace. Finally she gave me the best summary I’ve read yet of all that went wrong during “re-unification.” Every city should be so lucky as to have a book like this. London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2022. (Other Press is the U.S. publisher, with a release date of September 6.)

Who knows what it’s like in real life, but in the crime worlds of cinema and literature, death is dirty and meaningless at the lower end of the food chain. It offers no drama, no sustenance. Push the bodies aside and move on. In The Lime Twig, John Hawkes explores the chaos, confusion, terror, the small-time treachery, the illusions of grandeur, and the outsized dreams of success that are the prelude to several cheap and terrible deaths. A motley gang of petty English crooks hatch a plot to steal a race horse and insert it in a rich race under a false name. It’s all just an excuse for lots of wild Hawkesian writing and carefree plotting, although this is somewhat more restrained than the earlier novels I have written about—The Cannibal (1949) and The Beetle Leg (1951). If Graham Greene had taken a pair of scissors to Brighton Rock, it would have turned out something like The Lime Twig (NY: New Directions, 1961). The Introduction by the late, great Leslie A. Fiedler feels like a Hawkes’ short story unto itself.

Apr 15

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Recently Read: Stephen Downes & Louis Armand

Here are two novels I recommend, both with embedded photographs and both, oddly, by Australian writers, although Louis Armand is now based in Prague.

Here’s the premise of Stephen Downes new book The Hands of Pianists (Fomite Press, 2021): “A neurotic freelance writer aims to prove that pianos kill elite pianists. For decades, he has grappled with the guilt that followed an accident in which he severed his talented sister’s fingers. ending her promising career at the keyboard. His investigations centre on the violent deaths at 31 of three great pianists.” At first, I will admit that I was skeptical. Downes’ narrator is an obsessive driven by his guilt and I don’t have much patience with obsessives. But as it turned out, I read the book in two non-stop sittings, fascinated and ready for more. My initial prejudices melted away when I saw that the narrator’s true obsession was a global search for meaning through music.

The three men whose deaths are being investigated by the narrator are genuine virtuoso pianists who all curiously died at the age of 31. American William Kapell died in 1953 returning from Australia when the commercial airplane he was in crashed south of the San Francisco airport. Australian Noel Mewton-Wood also died in 1953, committing suicide. He apparently blamed himself for failing to notice symptoms of the disease that would cause the death of his partner a few days earlier. New Zealand pianist Richard Farrell died as a passenger in a car crash in Sussex in 1958. In this well-written, digressive, almost Sebaldian novel, Downes takes the reader into the minds of pianists to explore what music and performance means to them. For someone like me, who frequently listens to classical music and attends concerts, Downes gives an insider’s window from the professional’s perspective. He writes about stage-fright, pianists hands, the quality of different pianos, recorded music, and much more, in addition to writing about the aesthetic qualities of music. The book moves from Australia to London to the Czech Republic. My favorite section is a visit to the Czech campus of Paul McNulty, the foremost builder of fortepianos, who builds them completely by hand for some of the foremost musicians of our time, one fortepiano at a time. In Prague, during a visit to the Kafka Museum, the narrator encounters a ghostly “Dr. K,” who challenges him on the nature of his quest. Have you transferred “your guilt about your sister’s accident,” he asked, “to a dead instrument?” By the end of the book, the narrator admits that “my notion that pianos kill pianists was unraveling.”

The Hands of Pianists includes several dozen small black-and-white photographs, many apparently by the author. A few are purely documentary in function, but many are very evocative, helping the narrative feel more like fiction.

Canicule is French for the dog days of summer. In Louis Armand’s Canicule (Equus Press, 2013), three men struggle with their pasts, their passions, and their failures. The book culminates with two of the men, Hess and Wolf, meeting to scatter the ashes of the third, aptly named Ascher, who has committed suicide by self-immolation.

Hess is our first-person narrator. He’s a screenwriter who can’t get anyone to return his calls anymore. But he has a dream about “the perfect film. . . about three characters whose lives are completely empty.” “But why not tell it like it really is? Begin with that much, keep it in the margins, let the story speak for itself. The full two reels’ worth.” And so some of the chapters are written in third-person, free-indirect mode, with Hess just another character in his own story.

“Three boys in a fading kodachrome” first met in 1983, “the year the US embassy in Beirut got bombed. . . the sunset of a world with no future.” Wolf’s father was murdered on live television during an airplane hijacking in the 1970s. Depressed, his mother tried but failed to commit suicide and murder Wolf by putting rat poison in their milk one day. Ascher, an East German, was orphaned at ten, when his parents were killed in an auto accident. When the Berlin Wall came down he found himself angry “at having grown up at the fag-end of a defeated ideology” and proceeded to join “a succession of more and more radical groups. . . looking for the edge.” But in the end, Ascher’s wife walked out on him and took the children, and he ended up impoverished and friendless in an attic in Hamburg, where he finally killed himself.

Canicule is bleak and, to some extent, the men’s lives seem to be a reflection of the times they in which they live. But after a while I didn’t give two cents about the male characters in Canicule. Their masculinity had left them utterly adrift as adults and they were blithely ignorant about the damage they did to the women that got drawn into their circle. But what kept the novel intriguing was Armand’s ragged, inventive writing and Hess’s continual attempt to re-imagine his story as a film. Each chapter begins with a photograph, most of which appear to be film stills from classic movies (none of the images are credited or identified). Hess tends to see the world filtered through film terminology. “All of a sudden Ada turned towards him, tears in her eyes. Like Maria Falconetti in Dreyer’s Jean d’Arc. That silent terror in the exchange of looks, shot-reverse-shot, between Falconetti and the mad monk Artaud. Martyr and prelate. History’s revenants, like blackened celluloid dolls. And right before his eyes she began to dissolve, a piece of film erupting into invisible flame.” But, in the end, even Hess questions his own belief in film. “Somebody dies and right before your eyes they turn to celluloid. Is that all there is?”

Jun 15

7 Comments

Recently Read: Writing Slantwise

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
Emily Dickinson

Two terrific books that I recently read both approached their subjects slantwise, or indirectly. They did so in ways that strengthened their messages and kept this reader more engaged. The two books are Finding Dora Maar: An Artist, An Address Book, A Life by Brigitte Benkemoun (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2020) and Square Haunting: Five Women, Freedom and London Between the Wars (NY: Tim Duggan Books, 2020) by Francesca Wade.

Finding Dora Maar (which was translated from the French by Jody Gladding) has a remarkable backstory. Benkemoun set out to find a replacement vintage Hermes address book for her husband after he lost his. She bought one on eBay for seventy euros and when it arrived she found that it still had a twenty-page index of telephone numbers from a previous owner tucked inside one of its pockets. Flipping through the pages, she immediately recognized that some of the names were famous, names like Jean Cocteau, André Breton, Louis Aragon, Tristan Tzara, Balthus, and Brassaï. In fact, the address book was full of the names, addresses and phone numbers for key figures in the Parisian art and literary world of the 1920s and 1930s! So whose vintage address book had she just purchased? With a bit of reverse engineering, Benkemoun finally figured out that it belonged to Dora Maar (1907-1997), a painter and photographer. But perhaps more famously, Maar was the lover of Pablo Picasso from the late 1930s through about 1943 and the subject of scores of his paintings and prints

Pablo Picasso, Tete de Femme (Dora Maar), 1939, etching
Musee Picasso, Paris

In Finding Dora Maar, Benkemoun writes short chapters for about thirty-six of the entries from Maar’s telephone directory. Most of these cover the high-profile artists and writers that Maar knew, but others deal with some of the more day-to-day people from her life, such as the architect who helped restore one of her houses, a friend who was a civil servant and police officer, a graphologist (Maar believed in handwriting analysis as a way to explore psychology), a doctor, and a manicurist. For each entry, Benkemoun describes how she identified the person (Maar sometimes had indecipherable handwriting and was prone to misspelling names) and what their relationship was to Maar. Maar was tough on friendships. She was suspicious of everyone’s intentions (she thought they were after her valuable collection of paintings by Picasso) and, as she aged, she became increasingly difficult to deal with. By the end of the book, we learn that few of the people in her address book were still on friendly terms with Maar.

By mimicking the format of an address book, Benkemoun ignores chronology and approaches biography from a friendship by friendship basis. In the end, I felt like a had a much better sense of Dora Maar than if I had read a traditional biography of her. Sure, I missed out on a lot of facts, but I felt like I was given the heart and soul of Maar in this slantwise approach to her life. My only regret about the book was that it has no reproductions of the address book itself, aside from the glimpse shown on the front cover.

Francesca Wade’s Square Haunting: Five Women, Freedom and London Between the Wars explores the lives of five very different women through the prism of London’s Mecklenburgh Square, where each of the woman lived for a spell sometime between 1916 and 1939. The five women are Hilda Doolittle (the poet and writer known as H.D.), Jane Harrison (a pioneer of classical and anthropological studies), Eileen Powell (groundbreaking medieval historian), Dorothy Sayers (mystery writer), and the writer Virginia Woolf. In the heart of Bloomsbury and near both the British Museum and the University of London (now University College London), Mecklenburgh Square was “a radical address” favored by artists, writers, and thinkers of all kinds between the two World Wars. By focusing on a single city square, Wade demonstrates how cities contribute to intellectual life through their ability to bring people and resources from diverse disciplines to nurture each other and create cross fertilization between disciplines. While the great universities of Oxford and Cambridge continued to discriminate against women, barriers came down much earlier in cities and in some of the universities in cities, like the University of London, which had been granting degrees to women since 1878. Oxford didn’t grant degrees to women until 1920, Cambridge not until 1948.

While each of Wade’s five biographies are much longer than Benkemoun’s and they are slightly more academic in tone, they nevertheless are written equally slantwise. Wade’s mini-biographies first focus on how the time that each woman spent in Mecklenburgh Square was “formative.” “They wanted to break boundaries and forge new narratives for women.” Wade summed up her book by saying that “the legacy of these women lives on . . . in future generation’s right to talk, walk, and write freely, to lead invigorating lives.”

Jan 3

Recently Read: Two Slim Books by Josipovici and Berger/Platonov

The first release from the new House Sparrow Press is a beautifully produced book/CD combo called A Sparrow’s Journey: John Berger Reads Andrey Platonov. The book contains a short story by Platonov (1899-1951) called “Love for the Motherland, or A Sparrow’s Journey: A Fairytale Happening,” along with a piece of writing by Berger that is obliquely about Platonov called “That Have Not Been Asked: Ten Dispatches about Endurance in Face of Walls,” a brief essay about Platonov’s story by Robert Chandler (who co-translated it with his wife Elizabeth), and an even briefer piece about discovering this previously untranslated story by Gareth Evans, editor of House Sparrow Press (among other things). Platonov’s story about a fiddler and a sparrow was written in 1936 in homage to Alexander Pushkin in advance of the one hundredth anniversary of his death in 1937.

A Sparrow’s Journey is one of those publications that remind you how wonderful it is to hold and read a book. Smartly designed and nicely printed on thick paper, handling this small volume is like holding a sparrow in your bare hands. The accompanying CD of a recording of Berger reading the Platonov story is housed in it’s own paper folder with artwork by Georgia Keeling. The story fits into 25 slim pages but Berger takes a full 44 minutes to read it in his quiet, luscious, and deliberate voice and I didn’t want the reading to come to an end. Somehow, Berger’s reading gave me insights into Platonov’s story that I never suspected were there.

As I was writing this yesterday, word spread that John Berger had died at the age of ninety. Do yourself a favor and get this publication and listen to his voice over and over.

An old man stands in a room, staring out the window, listening to the sounds of children in a playground below. Incomplete snippets of conversations – shuffled into chronological disorder – appear on the pages of the slim book I am reading. Conversations between the man – Felix – and his two wives, between Felix and his son and his daughter at various stages in their lives. The conversations with the second wife and his friends often drift into the subject of literature. Felix listens to Beethoven’s String Quartet in A minor, opus 132 and stares out the window some more.

Gabriel Josipovici’s Everything Passes (Carcanet, 2006) is a rich and suggestive novelette that is only 60 pages long including oodles of white space. It reads like poetry with every sentence resonating with possibilities. During the brief time that it took for me to read and reread the book, I realized that Josipovici had cunningly fractured the reader’s viewpoint so that we observe the characters and the sequence of events from multiple perspectives simultaneously – as if looking through the compound eye of an insect. Everything in Everything Passes takes place in the present tense, so it is ambiguous whether Josipovici is deliberately presenting the fragments to us in random order or whether we are witnessing the order in which Felix is recalling memories. Is the reader inside Felix’s mind or an observer watching the observer as he stares out the window? Or both.

As he has tea with his second wife, Felix explains his one great and final obsession – to write down his theory on how literature became modern (a topic Josipovici considers at length in his 2010 book What Ever Happened to Modernism?). But the writing won’t come.

Rabelais though, he says, sucking his spoon, understood what this new miracle of print meant for the writer. It meant you gained the world and lost your audience. You no longer knew who was reading you or why. You no longer knew who you were writing for or even why you were writing… I want to tell people about his modernity. About what he means or should mean to all of us, now.

He looks at her. She smiles.

There are two main events in Everything Passes, but it is not clear which happens first. Felix has a heart attack and is saved by an injection into this heart, a “red hot needle.” And one day the writing suddenly starts to flow.

I was writing fast, without pause, setting down on the white paper what had been waiting all those years. Everything would be said. I knew that. I couldn’t write fast enough. All in the right order. I knew it was the right order. It flowed out of me. I couldn’t stop.

Depending on the reader’s predilection, the outcome, which I won’t reveal, is either a moment of heartbreaking sadness or of joyous release. Probably, it’s both.

Where literature and art intersect, with an emphasis on W.G. Sebald and literature with embedded photographs