It’s taken me seven years of reading, and about a thousand books, to be able to say once again: “This is the best book I’ve ever read.”
Here are some It’s taken me seven years of reading, and about a thousand books, to be able to say once again: “This is the best book I’ve ever read.”
Here are some reasons why I feel this way.
Luisa Hall has written what is by far the best depiction of childbirth I've ever seen in print.
Elsewhere in her book she has perfectly captured the hollow void of grief a woman feels after the miscarriage of a wanted child, and in other pages she reminds me of the sometime-strangeness of living inside a woman's body when it refuses to get pregnant when you want it to, or gets pregnant when you don't want it to.
And yet this book holds so much more than these particulars about living inside a woman's body. I've also had the privilege of spending time with a deeply feeling, deeply observant narrator. She has gifted me with a wise and revelatory view of these times. I feel as if I can see this right-now world that we're living through so much more clearly than I did before, because of this book. The plague. The weird climate events and what they might portend. The way new technologies keep upending our lives at an ever more frantic pace. The hysterical politics.
When I read this book again in ten years I'll surely be saying to myself: "yes, that is exactly how it was."
Some people have asked in the comments to this review or in DM's which book made me feel this exhilarating feeling of "this is the best book I've ever read" last time. It was Laurus by Eugene Vodolazkin....more
As I read Checkout 19 I felt something like how I might feel if I'd happened upon an old photograph of my beloved mother in a drawer, a photograph I'dAs I read Checkout 19 I felt something like how I might feel if I'd happened upon an old photograph of my beloved mother in a drawer, a photograph I'd never seen before, and in that instant I saw my mother the way she had been before I was born, and before she had children, or met my father, where she was completely herself and knowable to me as my mother, but she was also beautiful in a way I didn't know. This book felt familiar, and yet completely strange to me, both at the same time....more
These stories are all the more remarkable for the elegant, organic ways in which the author unhooks language from its entrenched assumptions about genThese stories are all the more remarkable for the elegant, organic ways in which the author unhooks language from its entrenched assumptions about gender. My favorite was "Bump." It's the best story I've read in years.
Every sentence opened me. I felt as if this book were speaking to me privately and intimately, about private joys and private melancholy. I fell into Every sentence opened me. I felt as if this book were speaking to me privately and intimately, about private joys and private melancholy. I fell into a profound sense of being in a personal conversation with what I was reading on the page. I was reminded of what I should be paying attention to in my life--both in my big life--what it's all about--and in the small daily moments--what beauty there is to be found in them. The book worked on a pre-semantic level in me, where the meanings of the words were deeper than the words themselves. I can't remember reading a book that accomplished this with such ease, such joy. My deep thanks to Sheila Heti for trusting the person inside her who insisted that she write this book.
(Note on Apr 26 2022: I just bought my 5th copy of this book. I keep giving it away to friends. The only other book that I've given away this many times and bought again for myself is In the Distance by Hernan Diaz.)...more
Meike's review is an excellent and thoughtful critique of this book and I suggest you read it.
This novel reminded me very strongly, in its voice and nMeike's review is an excellent and thoughtful critique of this book and I suggest you read it.
This novel reminded me very strongly, in its voice and narrative style, of two beloved books that I'm sad to never have the chance to read for the first time again: The Long Ships by Frans G. Bengtsson, and Her Mother's Mother's Mother and Her Daughters by Maria José Silveira. Bengtsson, I know, very deliberately rejected modern storytelling techniques with their interiorities and their streams-of-consciousness, to go back to a much older style of tale-telling. All three of these books tell their stories through narrative anecdote, like the style of sagas and legends and epic poems, and the style allows all three authors to sweep across centuries at a breathless pace to tell their stories. "Saga" sounds a little boring, maybe, but to me these books are full of action and consequences with no time to spare for how people feel or what they happen to be thinking. I love it in all three books and I admire their authors for trying a storytelling style so old it's new again....more
There are a lot of authors experimenting just now with ways to combine the real, and the fictional, and the historical, and the personal all together There are a lot of authors experimenting just now with ways to combine the real, and the fictional, and the historical, and the personal all together into a narrative. What I've vividly discovered for myself, now that I've read When We Cease to Understand the World, is how much I adore those authors who plumb the depths of history, and then weave a unique mythology of subjective meanings from the facts. Sebald, Labatut, Stepanova all do this. It's quite a different kind of thing from the kind of writing called "auto-fiction' just now, which dives deep into just one person's history, the author's personal narrative, and adds fictional or subjective elements to that very narrow personal experience. Unlike the auto-fictioners, who put themselves at the center of their stories, Labatut and his counterparts efface themselves almost entirely from their stories. They're interested in a bigger picture. Each detail they choose adds exquisitely to the whole and the result is a Bayeux Tapestry of a novel. I love this way of writing, this way of storytelling. It's a gift to read this book....more
2021 Winner of the National Book Award -- Translated Literature
I'm sitting here very much at a loss for words about how to describe the exquisite read2021 Winner of the National Book Award -- Translated Literature
I'm sitting here very much at a loss for words about how to describe the exquisite reading experience that is this book. I keep trying to write something cogent and then deleting what I've written, and starting over. I'm trying and failing to describe why such a small story could deliver such a revelatory and emotional gut-punch.
The author creates a narrator who has very little regard for herself, but who is never sorry for herself. She lives in a world where nothing ever changes, and yet she describes her world so vividly that it feels charged with beauty and possibility. She so rarely judges those around her, or allows herself to think largely, that when she does speak her mind, it's a revelation.
I've had the privilege of spending time with a character who has found a way to live an intentional and meaningful life, however limited her life is by her circumstances. The relentless torrent of detail--colors, smells, temperature--make the argument on the page that even simple, mundane acts can be filled with intention and beauty....more
This novel entranced and absorbed me, and disturbed me, too. The story illustrates the corrosive effects of misogyny and poverty on the female body anThis novel entranced and absorbed me, and disturbed me, too. The story illustrates the corrosive effects of misogyny and poverty on the female body and spirit, and it's so intimately told, and so full of female happenings--the feeling of a sanitary napkin between one's legs, the feeling of dissatisfaction about one's breasts or nipples or skin or some other flaw, the surprise of menstrual blood on a day when it isn't expected--that I frequently had that lovely feeling that only great storytelling can give--that the author/narrator was presenting certain truths to me that I'd never bothered to think about, or to give words to, before reading them here on the page. One small perfect, everyday observation after another is made, setting a scene and grounding the story in a gritty, practical reality--and then the narration suddenly will soar for a paragraph or two into a profound metaphysical observation, about life, or ambition, or fate, or the ravages of poverty, or the obligations of filial love. The characters in the novel are flawed and broken, but they forgive one another. They do their best. I enjoyed the first section for the way it affected me emotionally, and I enjoyed what followed for the ideas it gave me. Wonderful....more
Tyll is so entertaining that I struggled at first to understand just how deep it is. I'm not sure what it says about contemporary literature, or aboutTyll is so entertaining that I struggled at first to understand just how deep it is. I'm not sure what it says about contemporary literature, or about me, that I needed to consciously banish my cynical mistrust of any book that is so delightful to read.
As I read the novel I thought of Falstaff, Shakespeare's comic-yet-deep repeating character. The character who most reminded me of Falstaff is played by a donkey, a character who appears in many scenes, sometimes for comic value and sometimes for something else entirely.
And now that I've brought it up, I realize that I could write several paragraphs just about the donkey in this novel--how funny the donkey is in a given scene, and then how horrifically the donkey's fate plays out in another scene. Sometimes this donkey has a name, and its name is Origenes. And like so much in Tyll, Kehlmann invites me to think of the donkey's name as just a name, and to read on, or alternatively, to ponder what shimmering potentials are added to my reading if I take time to realize "Origenes" is also the name of an itinerant third-century Christian ascetic whose life and fate were caught up in religious disputes not unlike those raging in this novel.
The donkey's story is threaded throughout this broken, nonlinear novel, and always brings with it some new wonder or terror or sadness or revelation, even though it's a minor character, like Falstaff. And the thing is, it's not just the donkey. Every character in the novel is a kind of itinerant bit player, and every one of them--the miller Claus, the Winter King, the expert in dragonology, the little girl named Martha, Tyll himself--has a marvelous and mysterious story to tell, when it's their time on stage. Kehlmann made them all real for me, sometimes in just a few sentences.
References to Shakespeare plays appear throughout this novel with both historical and thematic resonances. A recurring side-theme is how literature was changing in this period of history that we now call "early-modern." The play Macbeth makes its way into a scene as a way to reference James I's rise to power, and Macbeth's last soliloquy is a good description of how this novel unfurls as you read it:
Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
So here we are. Apparently my second stab at coming to grips with Tyll here on Goodreads is going to consist of a little bit of Shakespeare, a little bit of donkey.
Okay. I should also add that I found a lot of Lutheran-like philosophy playing out in profound ways--over and over again the character Tyll projects a belief that suffering and uncertainty is worth enduring for the hope of living through it, and that evil is worth fighting, for the hope of the good to come. This philosophy is most starkly portrayed in the late chapter "In the Shaft."
Well, I'm just gob-smacked by this novel. Read it....more
I don’t know how Poschmann did it but this novel captures with exquisite perfection the disorienting experience that living in Japan can be, for an atI don’t know how Poschmann did it but this novel captures with exquisite perfection the disorienting experience that living in Japan can be, for an attentive non-Japanese person who comes to Japan with no agenda and with some time to look around.
There is such an extreme level of discernment here in this novel...every scene nails it. I would guess most people who have not spent a lot of time in Japan—enough for instance to know about the deeply strange and almost obligatory love every Japanese person professes to feel about Matsushima—would feel like this book is exaggerated satire, when actually it just is the way Japan IS.
I’m kind of in awe and a little woozy from the experience of having just finished this excellent and very funny book, so maybe I will come back and try to be more coherent in my review in a few days. I lived in Japan for years and this novel hit me hard with a lovely nostalgia for a place I still love so its impossible for me to know how anyone else without this experience will react to it. ...more
Reading this book felt something like entering a state of grace, or at least gratefulness. I felt like giving thanks the entire time I was reading it,Reading this book felt something like entering a state of grace, or at least gratefulness. I felt like giving thanks the entire time I was reading it, that Anne Carson has written a translation of Sophocles's Antigone that manages to be very beautiful and very funny and utterly surprising, all at the same time.
Carson's translation plays delightfully with the idea that a work of art changes and accumulates meanings as it moves through time. Carson remains connected at least tangentially to original meanings, but she adds further layers of meaning that come solely from the mind of Anne Carson, as a poet, and as a reader of Sophocles, and as a unique individual woman living in the 21st century. Is not every reading a translation in a way, from writer to reader? Here on the page I experience the play through Carson's personal translation of its meanings. Carson invites me in as a reader, too, to have my own experiences with the flow of word and idea.
Here is an example of what I mean. Sophocles gave Kreon a kingly soliloquy near the beginning of the play. He permits Kreon to wax on about his kingliness and his manly righteousness. We readers know from the beginning, of course, that Kreon's speech is just empty words, and that he will soon discover this for himself. In Anne Carson's work, Creon's speech from the beginning is stripped bare of syntax so that it becomes nothing more than a series of static nouns, a technique that somehow both captures the original pomp and pride of Kreon, and also reflects the true meaning of the speech--the meaning that we know, but Kreon doesn't yet know--that his words are empty of true meaning:
[ENTER KREON]
KREON: Here are Kreon's nouns for today
Adjudicate Legislate Scandalize Capitalize
Here are Kreon's nouns
Men
Reason Treason Death
Ship of State
Mine...
So not exactly iambic hexameter or whatever. But somehow the grip of the original poem is still there, refracted and hollowed out and exposed from the beginning as pompous, hot-gas, baggy stuff. And I also get a very strong feeling about what Anne Carson thinks about men like Kreon and I like having that layer there in the language.
In addition to word play, there's poetry here that makes me cry because it's so beautiful, especially Carson's translation of the magnificent "Ode to Man" that comes at the end of the first act.
Here are the first lines of Ode to Man translated by Fitzgerald:
Numberless are the world’s wonders, but none More wonderful than man; the stormgray sea Yields to his prows, the huge crests bear him high; Earth, holy and inexhaustible, is graven With shining furrows where his plows have gone Year after year, the timeless labor of stallions.
Beautiful. And here is Carson:
Many terribly quiet customers exist but none more terribly quiet than Man: his footsteps pass so perilously soft across the sea in marble winter, up the stiff blue waves and every Tuesday down he grinds the unastonishable earth with horse and shatter.
Also beautiful. Carson's full translation of "Ode to Man" was published in the New Yorker, here:
The entire play is an experience to read, especially in the hardcover illustrated edition hand-lettered by Carson, but the Ode, linked above, is my favorite poetry in the translation....more
If I get just one person to read this novel who wouldn't otherwise have heard of it, I will feel I've done my job here on Goodreads. I'm still quite oIf I get just one person to read this novel who wouldn't otherwise have heard of it, I will feel I've done my job here on Goodreads. I'm still quite overwhelmed by what I just read, but let me try to give you a sense of the novel.
Léonora Miano has written with a singular purpose: to document what it must have been like, at the start of the Atlantic slave trade, to live in a village within easy reach of the coastline. What it must have been like to be living in exactly the way you and your people have always lived, and then to have this terror, this violence, this unthinkable and incomprehensible disruption of your reality, come into your lives.
Miano begins in medias res just after several young men disappear from a village. We readers know they have been kidnapped to be taken to the coast and sold. But to their people, they are just gone. And the people don't know how such a thing could have happened. People can die, or be born, or commit crimes, or marry, and these happenings are part of the rhythms of village life, and are well understood, and everyone knows what is to be done in each case. But when men disappear? In this case no one knows how to react. Are the men dead? Then where are the bodies? If there were bodies then the people would know to mourn. But there are no bodies. No one knows what to do. A hasty plan is made to isolate the men's mothers from the rest of the village--because maybe it has something to do with the mothers. But no one really believes that. And when one woman drifts back to her home, no one is sure what to do next. It takes days for the village leaders to decide to ask a neighboring village if they know anything about the men's disappearance. It takes far longer--not until it is too late--for anyone in the village to suspect the truth.
I can't capture for you the perfection of how Miano paints this village and its inhabitants; its rituals and its hierarchies. The way she reaches through history to recreate a pre-literate, pre-colonial culture that is on the brink of losing everything that they trust is true about the world. We know it happened. We know this history in a theoretical way. But we don't have access to the voices of the people that faced this terror. Miano gives them voices. I'm in awe of how deeply she imagines these people, even to the point of making their utter lack of guile, in the beginning of their story, completely believable and heart-rending....more
I'm only slightly embarrassed at recent my string of novels i'm rating 5 unabashed stars, and here is another, and I'm rating these novels so highly bI'm only slightly embarrassed at recent my string of novels i'm rating 5 unabashed stars, and here is another, and I'm rating these novels so highly because it seems to me that they are filled with love, every one of them. And love is what I need to read right now.
So here is Lord, the latest novel I've read; a novel that defies every possibility of a literal interpretation, and whose sentences spring off the page and fly away from any representational reality. And yet. How fundamentally human these happenings seem to me, however surreal. Each sentence leads me forward to a bright new possibility of human vulnerability, and to a bright new possibility of human connection. Each scene as it comes along (and the scenes come along, over and over and over again, intertwining and pouring forth, from one sentence to the next) is filled with the possibility that life, however fragile, and however filled with obstacles, and fear, and pain, is without question worth living. It seems that this novel is about how our gift of life is worth trying to live in the fullest way we can muster, even in those times when we feel most alone and without purpose. I don't know for sure it that is what this book means. But I do know it held me captive with each sentence, and brought me with each sentence closer to the edge of something unexpectedly human and alive....more
This week I ended up reading Lucia by Alex Pheby while listening to the audiobook of Milkman. It was quite a punch to the literary gut. Both these booThis week I ended up reading Lucia by Alex Pheby while listening to the audiobook of Milkman. It was quite a punch to the literary gut. Both these books accurately and relentlessly (and, somehow, beautifully, which makes them each disturbing on a whole other level) portray how sexual abuse and predation fit so easily into what seems to be normal life on the surface.
The writing style here--an elliptical returning to a very similar sentence, for instance, with a different verb substituted, plus a very repetitive rhythm in sentence structure--seems to reinforce the actual sense of the story, and to reinforce the situation of a much older woman trying to review and understand her memory of being stalked as a child. The style reinforces for me the idea of a woman trying to pin down a very elliptical and emotionally fraught truth about her past.
But there is so much more to this story. It's also a story about way that the violence of "the troubles" has become so frequent that it has become casually accepted, as part of everyday life. People are walking around in fear for their lives, and also in fear one another, and in fear anything or anyone that deviates from absolutely normal, and it's just the way it is. How one young girl navigates her world is something to behold--because most astonishingly of all this is a book of hope. It's a book about joy. It's a book about how love wins in the end, even if the victories are sometimes tragic....more
Insurrecto gives me faith that the root meaning of 'novel', nouvelle, something new—will continue to be true for a long time to come. Every sentence hInsurrecto gives me faith that the root meaning of 'novel', nouvelle, something new—will continue to be true for a long time to come. Every sentence here was a revelation. Manila—so perfectly captured. The strange, very strange layer of popular American culture that paints itself over the Philippines—perfect. The strange, very strange way that Tagalog becomes the language of choice for ‘strange’ in English-language movies set in far-off lands....my friend from the Philippines had never stopped being indignant at the way Tagalog is spoken by Ewoks and Indonesians and Vietnamese, depending on the movie.
Most of all though this novel is an indictment of the way we forget. As well as an indictment of the way we remember, inaccurately. It is my best book of 2018. I’m so grateful to have read it.
If you try to read it yourself, it might help you to take to heart the advice the author gives us on p. 103: "A reader does not need to know everything."
Wonderful.
Also, everyone who matters in this novel is an incredibly interesting woman. Yep....more
This is a beautifully written, riveting story, a book that enlightened me in so many ways. Max Hastings never forgets that history is about human happThis is a beautifully written, riveting story, a book that enlightened me in so many ways. Max Hastings never forgets that history is about human happenings--not movements, not ideologies, not guns or germs or steel. I was fourteen when the Vietnam War ended. My childhood memories are punctuated by memories of this war, and of protests against this war. What a joy, a relief even, to fill in the blanks about events that shaped my world before I could really understand them. The aspect I appreciate most about this book is the way it humanizes actors in the war who were just names to me before--in particular Ho Chi Minh. But even the smallest actors in this story are treated humanely by Hastings--for instance a story about two old women, selling peppers:
American Howard Simpson watched exuberant parachutists tearing down a Saigon street in a jeep which crushed and scattered a row of bamboo panniers, filled with red peppers laid out to drain the sun. After the vehicle passed, two old women set to work painstakingly to collect the debris and salvage what they could of their ravaged wares. Here was a minuscule event amid a vast tragedy, yet Simpson asked himself, how could it fail to influence the hears and minds of its victims, those two elderly street sellers?
An elegiac recreation of a time and a war that continues to echo on into the present....more
As with Vodolazkin's last glorious novel Laurus, The Aviator has at its beating-heart center the storspeechless
ok, several hours later, I'll try now.
As with Vodolazkin's last glorious novel Laurus, The Aviator has at its beating-heart center the story of an ordinary man who is (chosen to) (forced to) lead an extraordinary life. Although God is vividly present in Laurus, and nearly absent in The Aviator, both novels are deeply concerned with right and wrong; with sin and forgiveness. These novels are fictional inquiries into how a person is to live, and how a person is to make moral choices, in a world where life is uncertain, events are chaotic, and justice frequently non-existent.
These themes build moment by moment, not through exposition, but through scenes that fully engage the senses, and that are full of observations that surprise and delight and feel just right in their details. Both of these novels are full of life and moment. Each manages to arrive at a point in the story where a revelatory bursts of understanding came over me, moments both heartbreaking and hopeful. The feeling these novels gave me reflects those life moments I've experienced that are most important to me, and most memorable. That Vodolazkin could write not one but two books that could affect me this way is such a gift. It is the reason to read.
I've been vague on purpose about the actual events that take place here. It's a journey best done without a map....more
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