#31 in 2024
But you see, Dad, what I really want to read / and hear is stuff about us, about now,
about Nubians in Londinium, about men / who dress up as women, about extramarital
peccadilloes, about girls getting married / to older men
If you, like me, had to study Latin in high school, or like my daughter, had to read The Iliad more than once, you will thrill to the sheer hijinks that Bernardine Evaristo lets loose in The Emperor’s Babe. Tease open any page of this lusty novel, and you’ll be seeing couplets:
Winner of the Booker Prize 2019, the babe in Evaristo’s novel is the unforgettable Zuleika, a Nubian girl living in Londinium, AD211. Her father sells her to be married to some fat old guy when she is barely twelve years old. Londinium is wild and swinging (what else?), and whenever her husband is away, Zuleika the teenager tastes all the licentiousness of the city — the fashion, the gossip, the orgies, the poems —until up from Rome comes Emperor Severus.
I held on to my seat, as we raced / over the wild sloping grassland of Mayfair,
cut across the wheatfields of Hyde Park, / passed a sleeping hamlet of mud huts
by the Serpentine
*
I have known only this, a shiver, / a million dreams expelled:
‘Was I good?’Magnifico! I gasp, / floating down, swim
to the wash bowl, your dead sons / trickling down my legs
This stubby little book will love to nestle next to the sunscreen in your beach bag. I liked it even though all the pastiche brought back squeamish memories of being in high school Latin class, where Mr. McNeil tasked me with translations of the most straight-up sexual poetry by Catullus at a time when I was still a virginal kid. Let’s hazard a guess as to what he had to hide under his desk as he made me read my translations out loud: Oh Lesbia, fucked to bits Lesbia… Shame on you, teach — or, as they say, o tempora o mores.
#32 in 2024
The cover put me off. It whispered soft romance with a dash of eat-pray-love. But Aube Rey Lescure’s novel River East, River West turned out to be nothing like a pearl-clutching Bildungsroman. Teenage Alva grows up with her American single mom in Shanghai, 2007; Lu Fang is a native Chinese man whom her mother marries to Alva’s dismay, and his life story starts in 1985. Angry stepdaughter, tight-lipped step-dad: through these two characters, Lescure gives an intimate view of how successive generations of Chinese have weathered the storms of Mao’s communism and state capitalism, and how the expats function or dysfunction within this society. Everyone is extremely unhappy most of the time, due to alcohol, bad parenting or political interventions, with rare and compelling exceptions.
Pirated CDs and DVDs were her lifeline to adolescence across the Pacific. She coiled her earpods and hid them in her pocket before she reached the gates of Mincai Experimental School, where no electronics were allowed. She straightened her Communist Young Pioneers red kerchief and joined the swarm of kids in the same hideous yellow-and-green polka-dot tracksuits.
In her acknowledgments Lescure thanks Garth Greenwell for his exceptional writing workshop called “What Sex Can Do,” so I guess he’s partly responsible for the memorable sex scenes. Also there are editions of the novel with a better cover design.
River East, River West is on the shortlist for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2024. “The Prize is awarded annually to the author of the best full-length novel of the year written in English and published in the UK. The winner receives £30,000, anonymously endowed, and the ‘Bessie’, a bronze statuette created by the artist Grizel Niven.” Good luck, Lescure.
#33 in 2024
My beloved actor Juris Bartkevičs is in a hit show called ROHTKO, a mega-multi-media theatre extravaganza born in Riga and now making the rounds of European cities: Athens, Paris, Milan, Vienna next. In the program, the eloquent and ebullient director, Lukasz Twarkowski said he was deeply influenced by Byung-Chul Han and his book Shanzhai: Deconstruction in Chinese, translated by Philippa Hurd. I’ve seen ROHTKO twice now, and if it comes to North America, I will go see it again, all five hours of it, and not only because my friend Juris plays Mark Rothko. Now I’ll watch it through Lens of Han.
This is a thought-provoking treatise on art and copies, reminiscent of John Berger’s Ways of Seeing in how it discusses images. Shanzhai is the Chinese neologism for 'fake’. Initially the term was applied to cell phones, but now it encompasses all areas of life in China, and often involves an ingenuity superior to the original. If Being is core to Western philosophy, Han says, then Process is key to Chinese thinking.
Han is a professor of Korean origin who teaches in Berlin and is one of the most widely read philosophers in Europe. I can see why. The writing is clear, concise, witty and original — which is an ironic thing to say because his argument is all about the devaluing of originality.
It was of no small importance for a painter’s career in China to get a forgery of an Old Master into the collection of a well-known connoisseur.
The Chinese often send copies abroad instead of originals, in the firm belief that they are not essentially different from the originals. The rejection that then comes from the Western museums is perceived by the Chinese as an insult.
The creativity inherent in shanzhai will elude the West if the West sees it only as deception, plagiarism, and the infringement of intellectual property.
#34 in 2024
Too bad Colette Willy can’t teach workshops on how to write about sex because she is certainly an expert. In Retreat from Love (translated by Margaret Crosland), her alter ego Claudine has withdrawn to the countryside with the blushing sex addict Annie, later to be joined by her nephew Maurice, who is being blackmailed for his homosexual dalliances with rough trade. In the meantime, her sickly husband Renaud is languishing in the Alps … Hardly a page goes by without some description of a sexual adventure, followed by melancholic musings during walks in the woods.
“There’s no him, Claudine.”
“Oh, should I have said her?”
The remains of a strange little snake, which I had thought dead, writhed within me.
“No, not that either!” admitted Annie, in a low voice. “It’s — them…”
She had the lowered eyelids and the smile of some virgin who had drifted into sleep and died while contemplating the faces of angels.
*
Her memory was a bumpy road, a steep slope with the dizzy sharp rises of a switchback, scattered with little nude men, young, obscene, of all colors…I was sure she had done everything she told me, and everything didn’t; and all things considered, nothing was simpler and more commonplace than her life, the life of a little animal who’d discovered her sexuality and used it with delight.
Though our gutsy author still calls herself Colette Willy, she announces that she has ceased to collaborate with her husband Willy. Also, for those of you with a knowledge of grief, the last pages of this book contain some of the most beautiful writing about mourning that I have ever read.
#35 in 2024
I’ve never liked Ernest Hemingway. I scorned his drinking, all those cigars, boxing, killing animals for sport. I assumed he was a misogynist. I approached his reminiscences about his early days in Paris with skepticism. Nevertheless that scrappy pugilist won me over with his very first sentence in A moveable feast: “Then there was the bad weather.” It’s like any successful pick-up line: one adverb — ‘then’ — and Hemi can do no wrong.
He grinned with the hat on his head. He looked more like a Broadway character of the Nineties than the lovely painter that he was, and afterwards, when he had hanged himself, I liked to remember him as he was that night at the Dôme. They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil and with a higher grade of manure.
The stories are all about when Hemingway was very young and very poor and very earnest about his writing. Now I know how bad Parisian toilets were in the 1920s and how goats were milked in the middle of the street. In Hemingway’s Paris, you can write in a café all day and meet all the greats. He argues with Gertrude Stein and they are both (!) infuriatingly homophobic, and F. Scott Fitzgerald gets anxious about the size of his penis until Ernest takes a look.
He used the word gamut.
*
“Poor everybody,” Hadley said. “Rich feathercats with no money.”
We both touched wood on the café table and the waiter came to see what it was we wanted. But what we wanted not he, nor anyone else, nor knocking on wood or on marble, as this café table-top was, could ever bring us. But we did not know it that night and we were very happy .
Hemingway wrote this seven years before he killed himself, after a tremendous career. All would-be writers should read this. After all, I did.
Currently reading: Patrick Radden Keefe, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland (this one will take some time)
***
Remaining List
Mikhail Bulgakov, The Life of Monsieur de Molière, 1933 (intriguing)
Francine Prose, Reading like a writer: a guide for people who love books and for those who want to write them, 2006 (what can she tell me?)
Samantha Irby, Meaty: essays, 2013 (new to me)
I’ve had Say Nothing on hold at the TPL for what seems like forever!