Here’s wishing you all belated merry merrys from the wet and hot streets of Melbourne, far from my usual haunts.
It’s not hard to read a lot of books. How do you get the time? friends ask me. The real question is how do I ‘get’ the time to think and write about them, rather than simply gobble books up like Latvian long chips, the most irresistible potato chips in the world.
This substack was my 2023 experiment. Enough of you indulge me to keep it going for another year. I’ve just begun reading book Nr. 95. I won’t read a hundred this year, and who cares, anyway. If you read ten books this year, that’s fantastic. If you read one, that’s too little and you’re probably not into my substack.
#90 in 2023
I’m sick of Percival Everett, a bookish friend whispered. He was tired of my trying to read the whole oeuvre. I decided to read all of Everett in 2022. I started with his earliest work and kept going from there, because this guy put the P in prolific. And now my motivation is flagging. So Wounded is the last book I’ll read by Everett in chronological order. Next I’m going to jump to his latest book and work backwards, and if I’m still everetting by next December, I won’t continue. There’s a resolution for the new year!
Still, Wounded is the happiest book by Everett I’ve read so far, even though there is no lack of unfortunate events. A kind of serenity permeates this story; so much of it is involved with animals: the horses the protagonist wrangles; the coyote pup he saves from a burning. That said, the central story is violence against gays, inspired by the murder of Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming. That hate crime has generated more than one work of art; theatre buffs will be familiar with Moishe Kaufman’s The Laramie Project (2000) a pioneering work of verbatim theatre.
Everett tries to concoct an alliance extending from queer people to Black people and the Native community. The writing comes so much from the pov of a straight cisgendered male that it gets cringey at times, sounding old-fashioned even though it was published only 16 years ago. Yet it’s an easy and loving read. And the horses are beautiful.
Two young men entered the restaurant. .. They wore jeans, new Western boots and short-sleeved shirts. They were not so differently dressed from others in town. They were healthy looking and strong enough, but their postures said they weren’t ranch men. They walked like nothing really hurt.
#91 in 2023
Here are ten things that pulled me into the memoir Unearthing by Kyo Maclear.
To offer a different way of thinking about the ever-changing ground of our stories, the book is split into twenty-four sekki, the Japanese word for ‘small seasons’.
Kyo’s mother was a gardener, and Kyo was not. A mother enters a story. But how does she enter?
The book sprouts from grief. Kyo’s celebrated journalist father dies. Yet after his death, he isn’t her father for long.
We talk about marriage like it is something winnable, something we can tame into a fixed and faithful orbit, when really it involves a lot of failing and trying again. Marital love is extreme. It’s stamina. A marriage with complications or doubt is not a fiasco. It is a marriage.
She does a DNA test and discovers that she is not Scottish-Japanese.
She searches for her real father. I won’t spoil it for you, but there is a connection to Latvia.
It is quite a search because her mother is sliding into dementia.
An artist not quite identified as Yoko Ono plays a part in the story.
Kyo includes her own enchanting drawings.
Right now is the time called TŌJI (WINTER SOLSTICE)
I have a personal connection. I was studying hybrid forms of literature with Kyo as Covid took hold in Canada, and she led a very fertile class even when we switched to Zoom. Later I won a prize for a collage I made with origami papers supplied by Kyo’s mom. Also I read Kyo’s book Birds Art Life, twice, and that book was inspired by my boyfriend’s film, Fifteen Reasons to Live. So when Kyo writes, I pay special attention.
Everywhere, the gardens asked, How can love take root without a true home to ground it? And all the small green shoots poking through the ground said, Like this.
I forgot to say the book won the Governor General’s Award in Literature, a high Canadian honour.
#92 in 2023
ABORT MISSION the red light blinked on my console, urging me to eject from the pilot seat, yet I stuck to reading The Magic Mountain even as rude words like ‘wanker’ and ‘wankfest’ poked their way into my mind. If Thomas Mann were alive today, this massive book would be his podcast. It’s like every day, right after Mann hung out with his friends, he dashed home and wrote down everything they talked about, the discussions about the church and the Middle Ages and torture and politics and why women are weird. That’s no crime, but why did I read 700 pages of this? Yes, there were also good parts, though my more militant feminist friends would have flung the book across the room.
This is my favourite sentence: I’m getting blepharospasmosis from all the winking I do.
Here are some highlights:
Chapters have titles like He Tries Out His Conversational French
The book is set in a sanatorium for patients with tuberculosis. They eat a lot, always at the same tables. Dinner included a chaudfroid of chicken, garnished with shrimps and halved cherries; ices with pastries in little baskets of spun sugar; even fresh pineapple. There is a table for the Good Russians and the Bad Russians. I found this amusing.
The book was written in the 1920s and new technology is described with wonder. For example, an X-ray machine:
Discharges exploded like gunshots. The gauges sizzled with blue light. Long sparks crackled along the wall. Somewhere a red light blinked, like a silent, threatening eye, and a vial behind Joachim’s back was filled with a green glow.
Or watching a movie: When the lights went up in the hall and the audience’s field of dreams stood before them like an empty blackboard, there was not even the possibility of applause. There was no one there to clap for, to thank, no artistic ahievement to award with a curtain call. …One the illusion was over, there was something repulsive about the crowd’ s nerveless silence.
#93 in 2023
I’m jealous of Jan Wong, the way she breezes through this memoir without glancing left or right. Beijing Confidential: A Tale of Comrades Lost and Found is about searching for a needle in a haystack, finding someone she has wronged in a country of many millions. Thirty years after living in China as a fervent Canadian Maoist, Wong returns with her husband (nicknamed Fat Paycheck), a Caucasian who speaks fluent Chinese, and her two teenage sons.
I need my family to reassure me that I’m not a horrible human being. Or that, if I am, they love me anyway. Thirty-three years ago, in one thoughtless, misguided moment, I destroyed someone’ s life. This is what I did: in 1973, I ratted out a stranger at Beijing University who wanted to get to America.
I was that very dangerous combination: fanatic, ignorant and adolescent.
Wong’s search for redemption is focused on finding the woman she snitched on, and It’ s Like Looking for Her in a Vast Ocean. As she tells her story, you get to know Beijing not only through her, but her teenage sons as well. Some teenage children of expatriate diplomats get so drunk they throw up on the sidewalks and get into knife fights with locals.
Some of the aspects of the post-Maoist society remind me of Latvia shortly after the renewed independence, with its lusty, driven, short-sighted materialism. A lot has changed in China since 2007, when the book was published, and I wish Wong would go back one more time to tell us what she sees now.
For now, a tidbit: She checks out the Beijing Ming Hao Private Detective Agency, which literally means ‘ Smart and Meticulous’ and decides they are too shady. That’ s another advantage of a police state gone bourgeois: you can hire an ex-cop to do what Beijing cops have always done — filch records, spy on people, tap phones, open mail, tail someone, pry into the government’ s confidential databases.
#94 in 2023
Ruta Sepetys deserves a medal for doing the impossible — building an enormously successful career by writing YA novels about the sufferings of the Baltic people. Her perspective comes from Lithuania, Latvia’s sister to the south, though in Salt to the Sea she widens the lens to include Poles, Prussians, and Germans. (The documents of a dead Latvian woman protect a pregnant Polish refugee.)
It’s a suspenseful story written for a teenage audience, which means very short sentences, very short chapters, each one ending with a cliff-hanger. Sepetys covers ground I know well: the mass evacuation of the civilian population during WWII in what is now Mecklenburg and Poland as Germany collapses, and the raping and slaughtering by the advancing Soviet troops begins. Four characters are hellbent on making it out of Germany on the ship called Gustloff and for anyone who knows history that signals their doom, since this ship was torpedoed and sank with more than 10,000 refugees on board. It is a greater naval tragedy than the Titanic and yet people know nothing about it.
Someone screamed. Desperate. Panicked. Strangled with fear.
My fingers twitched. A tingle ran up my spine.
This book has gotten an armload of medals and prizes and I can add my praises given that our shared history is generally invisibilised. A blurb on the back from the New York Times says that Sepetys champions the interstitial people … whole populations lost in the cracks of history. That term ‘ interstitial’ stings when applied to us Balts, but in this case, they also mean the Poles, of which there are 38 million, a population as big as Canada or California.
Nevertheless, NYT has a point: people know nothing. Just yesterday I was having a chat here in Melbourne with someone who told me their thirty-year old neighbour had never heard of the Soviet Union.
So bravo Ruta Sepetys for your doing your darnedest Lithuanian best to make young readers understand what happened in the Bloodlands and why all dictatorships must be opposed.
I made my way through the mass of people to the old woman.
“Labas,” I said.”Where are you from?”
“Kaunas,” she said. “And you?”
“Biržai, originally. I’ve been gone for four years. But my cousins are from Kaunas. How are things there?”
She shook her head, barely able to speak. “Our poor Lietuva,” she whispered. “We shall never see her again.”
I know too much to be able to read: Jacob Mikanowski, Goodbye, Eastern Europe: an intimate history of a divided land, 2023 and unfortunately the subject matter (divorce) didn’t grab me enough in Maggie Smith, You Could Make This Place Beautiful, a memoir, 2023 (sorry, friend)
I’m currently reading: Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future (thank you, Diz)
Next time I write this blog, it’ll be about my Top Ten of 2023. Until then, bookish friends, enjoy your reading!!
**
My new list:
Featured Author: Percival Everett, Dr. No, 2022 (his latest novel)
Second Latest Saved: Natalie Haynes, Stone Blind, 2022
Reader Recommended: Thomas Halliday, Otherlands, 2022 (thank you, Juliet)
Oldest Title on the List: Andrew Sean Greer, Less (comedy novel, 2017)
The Random List:
Anne Enright, The Portable Virgin, 1991
May-lee Chai, Tomorrow in Shanghai and other stories, 2022
Ursula M. Franklin, The real world of technology, 2014
Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Three Plays, 1890s
Deepti Kapoor, The age of vice, 2023 (brand new novel)
Melissa Febos, Body work: The radical power of personal narrative, 2022
Unearthing. ❤️❤️❤️