Flights

 Flights by Olga Tokarczuk is a plotless, impressionistic work of long fiction that faintly explores the themes of travel and death. The varying characters and voices span countries and centuries, and the loose connections--only in ideas, not in any other literary element--do not add up to a unified whole, at least in this reader's mind. Each piece of the "novel" is well written and, translated by Jennifer Croft, Flights is clear and thoughtful, sentence by sentence. But something was lacking, something I couldn't quite identify. It was as though one or two vignettes were missing that could bring cohesion. (I also acknowledge that the message could have been above my understanding.) Still, I finished it. I've tried other plotless, European, thematic novels--Replacement by Tor Ulven, Septology by Jon Fosse--and been thwarted each time. Tokarczuk and Croft are great artists, and even while not on board with Flights overall, I found many moments of beauty and insight. 

The Wolves of Eternity

 The Wolves of Eternity, by my boy Karl Ove Knausgaard, takes an  eternity to get to the point. At almost 800 pages, the "sequel" to The Morning Star does not even mention the same universe as that novel until 700 pages in. (It's the title symbol--the morning star--that finally appears in the sky as the novel is winding down.) Knausgaard is one of the most innovative writers of structure and pacing today, so it was not an unpleasant read, just mystifying. The Morning Star remains one of the best novels I've ever read: wild, ruminative, eerie, shocking, brilliant. The Wolves of Eternity was so different that I'm still mulling it over, unclear what to think or feel. 

Part of that was my fault. I didn't read any reviews or promotions for Wolves--not even the jacket notes--so hungry was I to be surprised by whatever Knausgaard would throw in there. So I missed that the series behind the first novel would continue for at least another two books (already published in Norwegian and awaiting translation). I didn't have a sense of the scope of this project, more My Struggle than his seasons tetralogy. The narrative in Wolves is like his memoirs. Characters would stop to fix meals, go for drives, decide what to wear, listen to music, and so on. The overarching story was not about the apocalypse, but about serendipity, family ties, and humanity's place in the cosmos. Gone were Morning Star's demons, pagan rituals, and walking corpses (mostly). In their place was international travel, graduate school, and household chores. There were shared threads between the novels--death, and the defiance of death through religion or science--but not enough over the 800 pages. At this point, then, the series is uneven. But don't think I won't immediately pick up volume three! Knausgaard is one of the greats, and I'm along for the ride, wherever it goes. 

American Rust

 American Rust by Philipp Meyer is a gritty, affecting novel about Rust-Belt decay. Early in the text, two young men participate in a violent encounter, and the ramifications of that event resonate for the rest of the novel. Living in poverty, both men have an inchoate sense of future hope that then becomes derailed. The novel is told in close-third-person point of view--each chapter a different perspective--from the young men to their immediate, and intimate, periphery. I found American Rust to be fast-paced and engaging, with scenes (especially in a federal prison) of true suspense and terror.

I'd read another Meyer novel, 2013's The Son, which came after American Rust and is equally concerned with historic forces converging on powerless characters. Both novels are imperfect: The Son makes some narrative decisions (a epistolary character, for example) that don't always land, and American Rust is a bit too deterministic. Most characters spend great stretches of text ruminating on the economic or cultural forces pitted against them. Many a barroom conversation lands on mill closures, veteran's rights, Wall Street, opioids, etc. The thesis statement is a bit too surface-level in Meyer's work; the exposition drives home any ambiguity. And yet. Meyer is still a great writer. His characters become fully realized and sympathetic, and the persistent violence is believably visceral and distressing. I read The Son seven years ago, during the 2016 Election, and it's stuck with me more than most books in the intervening time. I have a feeling American Rust will do the same.

The Mirror & the Light

 The Mirror & the Light is the last, and best, of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall trilogy. It is the only one that did not win a Booker Prize, somehow. I found it a seamless transition from the previous two books, but one that got increasingly complicated and dark as it went on. The world--Tudor England during Henry VIII's cycling through wives--was as vivid as always, if a bit more explicitly violent. The strengths of the previous novels remained. There were short scenes peppered with lively dialogue. There were impressionistic tableaus of English life. There were fleshed-out, complex characters. There were beautiful vignettes and snippets of poems and song. And at the center, there was Henry VIII's most talented subject, Thomas Cromwell.

In the previous books, Cromwell was almost super-human. He was powerful, tender, learned, pragmatic, blunt, honest, and funny. The will of the king was often bent to Cromwell's. Despite his common birth and against great resistance, he could make things happen. Somewhere in The Mirror & the Light though, a few hundred pages in, things begin to slip. Whether  his advanced age or the impossibility of holding together a religious reformation with a flighty king, Cromwell's successes begin to unravel. Things move slowly, slowly, and then all at once (like Hemingway's bankruptcy line), and the conclusion is not surprising, but still weighty and affecting. 

Pale Horse, Pale Rider

 Pale Horse, Pale Rider by Katherine Anne Porter is a novella of stunning beauty and pathos. My edition actually contains three books: the title story and two others: "Old Mortality" and "Noon Wine." Porter is a brilliant writer, and each story is well composed and illuminating. They feel incomplete, though. Each novella is part of a larger family saga, in Texas, at the turn of the century. Porter's alter-ego, Miranda, is either explicitly or thematically present in each novella. Taken together, they invite further reading of her frontier short stories. 

"Pale Horse, Pale Rider" is the strongest in a strong collection. In this story, Miranda navigates the home front at the end of the First World War, including the 1918 Great Influenza. Porter expertly charts Miranda's disillusionment with patriotism, young love, and harrowing illness. The Miranda character easily anticipates Esther Greenwood in the The Bell Jar or any of Joan Didion's cynical, fashionable protagonists. Given the depth of the character and the strength of the writing, I'd put "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" next to anything by Fitzgerald or Hemingway as essential to understanding American Modernism. 

Jude the Obscure

 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy is strange, beautiful, uneven, surprising. At its most basic level, it's an anti-marriage polemic. There's a lot more going on in this late-Victorian novel, however. The pressures of class, gender roles, academic elitism, and societal expectations thwart its protagonists at every turn, and in the end it's difficult to locate just one obvious antagonist. The title character and his cousin/lover Sue are victims of their era and place, but they're also deeply impulsive, annoying, and foolish. There's a horrific tragedy near the end that feels unearned. It's a weird read, but I enjoyed it on the whole.

Thomas Hardy is canonical and well known: many of his works are assigned in college or advanced high school classes. To me, though, he's new. One reason that I'm intentionally vague in my summary is that the plots of these novels are genuinely surprising if you're like me and don't know the story going in. I read my first Hardy novel, Far from the Madding Crowd (a more successful work), last summer and enjoyed it. One of these years, I'll get around to Tess of the D'Urbervilles, and beyond. I prefer Hardy to Dickens: he's more economical and, when he wants to be, poetic. Every so often, every few chapters, the prose elevates into Keats/Shelley/Byron-levels of transcendence, and that makes me want to keep reading. 

Ducks

 Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton is a memoir and graphic novel about her time, just after college, paying off her student loans in work camps in northern Alberta. I thought it was terrific. I'm not accustomed to graphic novels, and I read Ducks in less than a day, so I don't know if that's the medium or my fascination. Either way, it's a powerful work: beautiful and tragic, infuriating and inspiring. I'd seen some of Beaton's work before, a hilarious internet cartoon strip that lampoons The Great Gatsby, among other things. I was excited for Ducks, but unprepared for the depths and honesty of her account.

By her telling, the gender disparity on the work crews is about fifty to one, men to women. As a young woman, she stood out in the worst possible way, then, in a pre-#MeToo workplace. She had to navigate the pervasive sexual harassment, along with communal overwork, drug abuse, environmental degradation, racism, and untreated mental illness. In her honesty and avoidance of didacticism, she also remembers moments of beauty, courage, and kindness. I read a book recently called Kim Ji-young, Born 1982 (reviewed on this blog) that presented workplace sexism as a cudgel, an unrelenting force. That book was a diatribe; Beaton's is a complicated memoir. In its humor, weariness, and unsparing realism, Ducks is much more effective.

When I was in college, I worked for an emergency catering company that served forest fire camps. It was dramatic, hardscrabble labor. I worked 110-hour weeks, smoked cigarettes, lost sleep, and went mildly crazy. And I only worked that job for two summers! Given her sex, job description, time frame, and remote location, Kate Beaton had a much worse go of it than I ever did. My experience helped in my reading of Ducks--it gave me a starting point and several moments of shared understanding--but her story took me on a journey. Highest recommendations for this astonishing book. 

Olive Kitteridge

 Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout is a collection of short stories that take place in a small town in Maine, all of which have something to do with the titular character. It's a strong collection, concerned with interiority and trauma response. Olive as a character reminds me of Ramona Quimby, in a series I'm reading with my daughter. Both act out in publicly antisocial ways, which is dealt with predictably by their peers, but which masks their inability to communicate frustration and anxiety. I felt that some stories in the collection forced a cameo from Olive, and that on balance they actually had too many traumatic things to be quite believable, but it was a worthwhile read on the whole.

We Don't Know Ourselves

 We Don't Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland by Fintan O'Toole is one of the better nonfiction books I've ever read. Thorough and lively, it's a comprehensive survey of Irish history since the author's birth, in 1958. O'Toole's personal narrative is muted and serves only to ground the larger account of Ireland's economy, political violence, and culture. I had heard of the Troubles, of course, and seen films and television shows that told parts of the story (with varying success). O'Toole's book gave the big picture, without making the terrorism the most interesting aspect of those years. Sociological and religious forces drove much of We Don't Know Ourselves, explaining everything from political corruption to population declines to real estate. 

The inherent contradictions and "known unknowns" that permeate Irish society were the real subject of the book. It explored Ireland's place, as a mostly independent, mostly Catholic, population on the frontiers of Europe during the Sexual Revolution. The tensions between public and private morality proved unsustainable. How a country can officially enact the most socially conservative laws in the developed world, while privately ignoring child abuse at parochial schools, engenders barely concealed rage. O'Toole is not detached. He does not romanticize his country's plight. His clinical descriptions of the IRA's bloodlust, for example, deflate any sympathy from American readers. If there's a plot in the text, it's how a country gradually but emphatically rejects the teachings of the Catholic Church. Given the hypocrisy and collective, willful ignorance, it is an understandable conclusion.

1312

 1312: Among the Ultras by James Montague is about extreme soccer fans from across the globe. It's a rare example of a nonfiction work that, somehow, understates its subject matter. Sometimes I would skim a paragraph, encounter something monumental, and go back to see if I read it correctly. I googled several names, places, and teams. From an American perspective, the subject matter of 1312 is so outside my experience that I had trouble believing everything in the book.

Broadly speaking, soccer fan culture originated in different ways depending on region, and throughout the 20th century, supporter groups adopted elements as they encountered outside teams or countries. So English hooliganism could merge with Brazilian drums or Italian right-wing politics, to match whatever context. The modern-day effect, then, is a dizzying collage of extreme behavior that vaguely situates itself around a soccer team. Egyptian supporters might rally against a dictator. Russian ultras might gather in forests for coordinated, MMA-style mass brawls. Indonesians might ambush away fans on highways during road games. Albanian nationalists might get around stadium bans by flying provocative flags into stadiums by drones. And so on. The term "ultra" proved impossible to define neatly, but those fans were generally united against authorities ("1312" is a cipher against police that Montague saw in graffiti around the world). Throughout, the common threads were transgressive, often neo-Fascist politics, and deviant behavior. 

It's a fascinating read, and I enjoyed the book. It's a bit uneven, though. In attempting to capture histories across continents, Montague sometimes glossed over enormous events, like the Bosnian War or the Arab Spring. At times he had tremendous access and wild, first-person stories; at times he painted a broad brush over decades and cultures that made me have to research things on my own. His story of Ismail, the Albanian activist, was gripping. His recounting of Egypt's tumultuous governmental shifts should have been three times as long. I don't know how to fix that exactly, other than maybe choose fewer countries or make this a seven-volume opus. Anyway, despite its flaws, 1312 is deeply important to anyone interested in international fan culture and the intersection of sports, class, and government. 

Gravel Heart

Gravel Heart by Abdurazak Gurnah is hypnotic. The novel follows Salim, a citizen of Zanzibar, who moves to London in his early adulthood and begins to make sense of his family's troubled past. Gurnah, a Nobel Prize winner, writes in a calm, restrained, often beautiful voice. He meanders around, taking several pages for minor characters or subplots. Salim's college days in London felt so real--so messy and weird and awkward--that the effect was more like reading a memoir than a novel. That made Gravel Heart's final quarter that much more devastating, as the reason for the characters' impotence and dislocation seemed to be happening to real people. It was like learning something terrible about a neighbor, or old friend. 

Gravel Heart is a fine postcolonial novel. Like Things Fall Apart, it is complex and murky. There's a great aside midway through the book when Salim is bewildered by the naïve certainty of student activism in his London college. Some of his roommates experienced firsthand social ills like child soldiers or apartheid. They didn't talk about it, though, because, as Salim reflects, "questions simplify what is only comprehensible though intimacy and experience. Nor are people's lives free from blame and guilt and wrong-doing, and what might be intended as simple curiosity may feel like a demand for a confession. You don't know what you might release by asking a stupid question. It was best to leave people to their silences. That was how it seemed to me but it was not how it seemed to my fellow students." I am certainly in the "fellow student" category here, and reading thoughtful novels like Gravel Heart allows me to develop, if only in a small way, a level of "intimacy and experience."

Aftermath

Aftermath by Scott Nadelson is a haunting collection of short stories. Nadelson, a proud Oregon State grad, covered familiar ground in each story. All of them had a sense of lapsed Judaism, a romantic relationship ending, and a vague threat of physical danger. They all took place in New Jersey. Most explored a post-college ennui. Reading Aftermath felt repetitive, then, as though the collection were a dreamlike record caught in the same loop. This was not unwelcome, though. While the themes and motifs (and setting, and characters) were often similar throughout these stories, the writing was alive and poetic, and unexpected events kept the stories from being formulaic. The protagonists often made bad decisions, and the dread of watching them unfold was both jarring and unsettling. Often, collections of short stories aim for more varied styles and themes, with wide ranges of quality. Aftermath is a strong collection by a writer that knows what he wants to write about, and each story was written with the same high standard.

Everybody Behaves Badly

 Everybody Behaves Badly by Lesley M. M. Blume recounts the backstory behind Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. I teach that novel, and for several years I've had my students listen to an NPR interview with Blume to learn the real-life inspiration. But, in part because I've attempted some bad reads about literature I like, I had never actually read Blume's book until now. I was wrong to ignore it. It's in depth, fast paced, fascinating, and engaging. 

There are many interesting facts and connections with The Sun Also Rises and other great works of Modern fiction. There's also a lot to be gleaned about post-war Europe and the expat community, as well as early 20th-Century publishing. But the largest theme that emerges in Everybody Behaves Badly is the personal cost of great literature. Hemingway detonated his social and familial circles to write his first novel. He was sociopathic about revealing his friends' secrets and personalities, and he ignored his long-suffering wife. On a purely artistic level, it worked. He absolutely accomplished what he set out to achieve. Blume is a personable, often funny writer, but she wisely doesn't moralize about this choice, nor does she need to. Everybody Behaves Badly, despite the clarity of the title, allows the reader to draw his or her own conclusions about the Lost Generation. 

Bring up the Bodies

 Bring up the Bodies is the second in Hilary Mantel's excellent Thomas Cromwell trilogy. It's shorter than the other two--Wolf Hall and The Mirror and the Light--because, I gather, it marks a turning point in the court of Henry VIII. A lot of commentary about this series is that Mantel makes history that everyone knows into something suspenseful and exciting. As a product of American catholic high school, the only history I really knew about this era was about Thomas More. The trilogy, then, is scintillating: I really am surprised by most of what I read. A great, great read. 

The Plot Against America

 The Plot Against America by Philip Roth tells an alternate history--America in 1940 if Charles Lindbergh, not FDR, was elected president--from the perspective of a seven-year-old protagonist named Philip Roth. The alternate timeline is more believable than the precociousness of the narrator, and it's a good novel on the whole. Roth was one of America's greatest writers, and this novel is buoyed by his great talent. Some of Roth's favorite motifs are present: comic set pieces, worried Jewish elders, beautiful and essayistic asides. Mercifully, it isn't as sexual or misogynist as Roth often gets, probably due to the pre-pubescent narrative voice, or the gravity of the subject matter.

The strongest part of the novel were the interpersonal tensions that arose from the election of a fascist sympathizer. The central question of how much, if any, danger the Jews were actually in drove the conflict. Vague paranoia collided with naïve optimism. Families were forced to navigate the hyperbolic declarations. In an era with greater stakes than our own, but with no social media, it made for a fascinating thought experiment. It's impossible for readers of this novel, written in 2004, set in the early 1940s, to not think of Trump, Covid, George Floyd, polarization, etc. 

The Books of Jacob

 The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk is massive, brilliant historical fiction. Tokarczuk won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2019. This is her largest work, and while it took me two months to get through, it never lagged. The novel--broken up into seven "books"--charts the life of Jacob Frank, a Jewish messianic figure from the 1700s. Like Rachel Cusk's Outline trilogy, The Books of Jacob spends much more time on the effect of its protagonist on others, rather than a first- or close-third-person narrative of Frank himself. (This is similar to the first two books of Peter Matheissen's Shadow Country: we only get others' unreliable perspectives.) Jacob Frank--a real person--appears to run a manipulative sex cult. He seems no different than other abusive, false messiahs of history. And yet, in Tokarczuk's hand, the story is a beautiful exploration of places and people. We travel from Turkey to Poland to Austria. Many religions are explored, from esoteric Kabbalist Judaism to mainstream Roman Catholicism. Horrific atrocities are only hinted at--without changing the voice--so there's an unsettling haze over much of the novel. Like W. G. Sebald's work, pictures and diagrams and pamphlets from actual museum archives give the text a lived-in, historic feel. Reading the novel was immersive and satisfying. 

From my perspective, a few things stood out. First, I am unfamiliar with 400-year-old Jewish-Polish names. About halfway through, half of the characters actually changed their names when they tricked the Catholic church into "converting" them. This really happened. The Frankists used their fake "Christian" status to gain land, favor, and titles. That said, it made for a confusing read when twenty or so characters went from things like "Srol Mayorkowicz" to"Mikolaj Piotrowski." I confess, I did not track all of the monikers throughout the 960-page text. Secondly, and happily, this was perhaps the most beautiful translated text I've ever read. My boy, Karl Ove Knausgaard, is great, but I've only read translated stuff from the original Norwegian. Often, it's clunky or clichéd (which may be just how he writes). The Books of Jacob, written in Polish and translated by Jennifer Croft, was gorgeous. The imagery was stunning; the poetic asides were dazzling. Every sentence was carefully crafted and useful to the greater effect. Very few original English texts sound this perfect. It's easy to see why Tokarczuk is celebrated in Poland and beyond, and with Croft translating some of her other works, I'm eager to read more. 

Death Valley & the Amargosa

 Death Valley & the Amargosa: A Land of Illusion by Richard E. Lingenfelter is thorough, lively, and absorbing. A self-proclaimed "history of Death Valley," the book devotes only a few chapters to the geology, indigenous people, and the National Monument/Park era. Mostly, it's a history of failed mining. From the 1870s to about 1920, claims blossomed all over the region, chasing trace amounts of gold, silver, copper, lead, and other precious metals. However, the difficulty of refining ore in a land with almost no water or plants, combined with the (inevitable) over-confidence of the mining companies, led to more resources going into the infrastructure of building mining towns than they actually earned from the land. At 470 pages--along with 160 more pages of notes--Death Valley & the Amargosa is exhaustive and at times repetitive, but Lingenfelter is so taken with the subject that it's easy to follow his enthusiasm. The many pictures of mines, newsreels, stock certificates, maps, characters, and desert scenes also help move the reader along.

Still, I don't know how the book would read to someone who isn't passionate about Death Valley: it assumes a lot of local familiarity. I was able to understand most of it. I've been there five times so far--with specific plans to return. In my hikes I've come across several old mines, cabins, and forgotten machinery. This book helps locate each boom-and-bust town and operation, and it's a great resource. As someone enamored with Death Valley, I loved returning to that part of California. When I'd finish reading a chapter each night, before falling asleep, I'd have very clear pictures of the Inyo and Panamint and Amargosa mountains, out there above the salt flats, and the wheeling desert stars.