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Dec 23

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Notable Books from My 2025 Reading

In 2025, a handful of titles that I read set the bar so high that I felt the list of truly notable books this year needed to be small. So, this year my Notable list has only twelve books on it. The three books that blew me away were: John Trefry’s prose fiction Plats, Richard Siken’s brand new volume of poetry I Do Know Something, and Martha A. Sandweiss’s non-fiction The Girl in the Middle: A Recovered History of the American West.

Since 2020, I have kept a brief running commentary on every book I have read in an annual Reading Log, and you can find my annotated comments on the nearly 100 books from 2025, along with all the previous years under the pull-down menu Old Reading Logs at the top of this page.

So here are my notable books from this year’s reading, alphabetically by author.

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T.J. Clark. Heaven on Earth: Painting and the Life to Come. Thames & Hudson, 2018. Clark’s 2006 book The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing, in which he writes about his experience of looking at two paintings by Poussin almost daily over the course of about six months while on a fellowship at the Getty Museum, is a book I have read multiple times. He is a master at close looking and big ideas. What I like so much about Clark is that his writing always foregrounds his struggle to deal with the non-verbal through words. As Clark writes in his Introduction here, “Painting does not have anything to say.” How do we best speak about what we see with our eyes? Heaven on Earth includes essays on paintings by Giotto, Bruegel, Poussin, Veronese, and Picasso.

Don DeLillo. Libra. Library. Penguin, 1988. DeLillo has been writing about the American outlier for much of his career—the loners, kooks, paranoids, billionaires, and geniuses who seem to thrive in our death-cult nation—and he gets everything just right in this one, in my opinion. Lee Harvey Oswald, born under the sign of Libra, is perhaps the epitome of these loners—aggrieved, paranoid, cocky, ambitious, susceptible. This is DeLillo’s alternative history of the Kennedy assassination. But it’s also a multi-leveled novel about language—about the acronyms, cryptograms, and lingo of the CIA; the language of revolution, Communism, Marxism, and Trotsky; the brutal language of the Marine brig; the dishonest language of US government propaganda abroad; of Lee learning Russian and his Russian wife learning English. “After Oswald, men in America are no longer required to lead lives of quiet desperation.” They can just go buy a rifle and shoot somebody famous.

Richard Flanagan. Question 7. NY: Knopf, 2024. Many of us, I suspect, have wondered how the course of our lives might have been radically altered were it not for some very minor, perhaps accidental, event. Richard Flanagan has an example that takes the cake. Two people meet for a second time in a bookstore and kiss—the married and famous H.G. Wells and the as-yet unknown writer Rebecca West. According to Flanagan, this kiss will lead to Wells writing a book that will provide the inspiration for the physicist Leo Szilard to realize that nuclear fission holds the secret to the controlled chain reaction necessary to create an atomic bomb. And dropping the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ironically, saved Flanagan’s father from certain death in a Japanese slave camp, so that he, Richard, could eventually be born. In this digressive memoir/essay, Flanagan delves into family memories, the tragic devastation that British colonists brought upon the original Tasmanian peoples and their lands, and the history of the atomic bomb. It’s an utterly engaging piece of writing and a terrible indictment of humanity (or at least most of us).

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism. Oxford University Press, 1988. This wise, now classic book traces the attempts of Black writers to fashion a voice that truly captures the Black experience and Black vernacular, starting with slave narratives and ending with several key novels of the twentieth century, notably, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. Gates manages to provide solid scholarship with a sense of contagious excitement at what lies within the books he has chosen. I immediately read Zora Neale Hurston and reread parts of Ishmael Reed with new eyes.

Michael Gorra. The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War. Liveright, 2020. Michael Gorra is a very thoughtful close reader and an equally engaging writer. Here, he takes a number of William Faulkner’s novels and carefully examines them for what they say about Faulkner’s attitudes toward the Civil War, America’s unending racism problem, reconstruction, Jim Crow, and Black life in the South. As Gorra sees it, Faulkner came to believe that the defeat in the Civil War bequeathed the South a Lost Cause—a forever dream of a two-tiered society and White paradise that can one day be recovered. Too often he agreed with his fellow Whites’ hazy, wishful nostalgia for a different outcome to the Civil War. Gorra provides enough biography and history to make a very wise book about both Faulkner and America. The saddest word? “Was.” What once was (even if imaginary), can once be again. Or so people believe.

Susan Howe. Penitential Cries. New Directions, 2025. In the long title poem, the poet admits that it is “hard to make out the numbers” on the watch strapped to “a widow pariah’s thin arm.” The seemingly autobiographical poem is about aging and healthcare and death and includes numerous uncited, tantalizing quotations as the poet thinks about the poets and poetry of the past. The other major poem is “Sterling Park in the Dark,” which consists of fifty pages of her “woven” poems, which are made from parts of phrases, words, and individual letters woven together architectonically, reminding us how suggestive written language can be even when we cannot glimpse the context or the connection of the words on view.

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Zora Neale Hurston. Their Eyes Were Watching God. 1937. Hurston’s novel of Janine, her three lovers/husbands, and their time in 1930s Jim Crow Florida is justifiably praised as brilliant. The writing is split between first-person and third, between Hurston’s version of Black speech when Janine is the narrator and more the straightforward prose of the omniscient narrator. The novel is also split between the perspectives of women and men and between Black and white worlds. Hurston’s message is that if one is forced to continually flip between two worlds, the place to thrive is in between. There seems to be at least one sentence on every page that can drop you dead with admiration. Hurston’s lengthy description of folks fleeing a hurricane rushing across the Everglades is simply astonishing. It was helpful to read this after finishing Henry Louis Gates’ book above.

Javier Marías. Tomás Nevinson. Knopf, 2023. The great Spaniard’s final novel is narrated by Nevinson, a Spaniard who has retired after serving more than two decades as a spy for England. But, in classic spy novel form, he is brought back for one last job, to decide which of three women living in a provincial Spanish city is the mastermind fundraiser behind several atrocious terrorist attacks. While on assignment in the aforesaid city, Nevinson realizes that he might be over the hill and have no more taste for the game, and he spends much of the novel in thought rather than in action. Marías uses Tomás Nevinson as a platform to write about the kind of topics that ran through all of his books, issues like trust, justice versus vengeance, loyalty, responsibility, democracy, and terrorism. Here he writes more freely and at greater length than in any of his other novels about ETA, the terrorist wing of the Basque Separatist organization. Tomás Nevinson is a thinking-person’s spy novel, translated from the 2021 Spanish original by Margaret Jull Costa. I wrote more about the novel here. It includes one photograph of the bloody aftermath of a terrorist bombing that is accompanied by a fascinating example of ekphrastic writing (which I wrote about here). This was a powerful book to end a great writing career.

Martha A. Sandweiss. The Girl in the Middle: A Recovered History of the American West. Princeton University Press, 2025. Sandweiss takes a single photograph by Alexander Gardner, the great photographer of the Civil War and the West, and tells a series of sharply detailed stories about the people in the picture. The photograph was made in the spring of 1868 at Fort Laramie, as members of a U.S. Peace Commission met with the leaders of multiple tribes, while thousands of their followers camped nearby. Six men, including famed Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman, stood in a line on the prairie, with an unnamed Native girl in the middle, facing the camera. Sandweiss provides deeply researched mini-biographies of several of the men, and she miraculously managed to recover the identity of the girl in the middle and tell the story of her extended family. The book shoves aside the myths of the West and of American history and reminds us of the real way the West was won—through violence and deceit. Sandweiss also demonstrates that photographs, used correctly, can better aid historical research. A phenomenally fascinating book.

Richard Siken. I Do Know Something. Copper Canyon Press, 2025. In Richard Siken’s astonishing new book of poems, I Do Know Something, the reader doesn’t stand a chance. The poems are written in tight rectangular text blocks that afford the reader no way in or out between the first word and the last. No enjambments to ponder, just Siken’s captivating, singular voice. Frequently, his poems will start out with a simple declarative sentence. “When I was ten, I had an imaginary friend.” Then he will meander, get lost, get lost again, and then suddenly, with a single line or two, snap the entire poem in place like a taut string, and it will become clear that every bit of meandering had a clear purpose: “By the time I was eleven, I stopped being sad and started being afraid.” Siken had a terrible stroke some years ago, and this book is his return, his struggle to regain language and the use of his body, and the need to rebuild his memory all over again, beginning with his family. Do not pass Go, do not collect $200, but buy this book immediately.

Sebastian Smee. Paris in Ruins: Love, War, and the Birth of Impressionism. NY: Norton, 2024. How could I not love a book about the Impressionists and the Paris Commune? Smee synthesizes a vast amount of material about the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, the ensuing Paris Commune, and a number of the Impressionist painters into a very readable history that focuses on painting in Paris in the 1860s and 1870s (more or less). Smee argues—and he’s not the first person to do so—that Impressionism grew directly out of the tragic years of 1870-72, when France lost a war that it started with Prussia, and then had to fight a protracted civil war in the streets of Paris with several hundred thousand of its own citizens dying as a result. The new paintings of the Impressionists “offered respite not only from the traumas of recent events and the scars still marking Paris itself but more generally from the stress and insecurity of living at the beginning of the modern age.” His main subjects are Berthe Morisot, Édouard Manet, and Edgar Degas. Very well done.

John Trefry. Plats. Inside the Castle, 2015. Plats will take you on a ride like no other book. If the front cover didn’t explicitly say that Plats was “A Novel,” one might be hard pressed to say what type of writing it really is. I’m half tempted to call it an abstract novel (if there is such a thing), except that it has a city (Los Angeles) and there are pronouns (but no characters, as far as I can tell). What Plats does do is use language in extraordinary ways to help the reader to conjure up images and situations that can only be constructed in the mind, to let the reader visualize the impossible. Yes,it’s one of those books where the reader does half of the work, but this is a bravura performance of language and pure imagination. Plats might be something you read just for the pleasure of reading Plats. I wrote more about the book here.

Dec 17

Telling It Backwards—Samantha Harvey’s “The Western Wind”

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“Your parish all sinful and superstitious and muttery.”

Before Samantha Harvey wrote Orbital, her 2024 Booker-prize-winning novel about one day in the life of six astronauts circling the Earth in a space station, she improbably wrote The Western Wind (2018), which takes place across four days in an isolated English village at the end of the fifteenth century. The village’s biggest landowner has gone missing, possibly drowned in the river, and the citizenry is very concerned. If Thomas Newman committed suicide, “his house, his animals, his money, everything” would revert to the crown and the future of Oakham as an independent village would be in doubt. John Reve, the village priest and the book’s narrator, has assigned himself the task of calming everyone and getting to the bottom of matters, a task made more difficult when the region’s dean (or sheriff) arrives. The Archbishop wants him to investigate the death and report back quickly. He insists that Reve identify a murderer by Shrove Tuesday. By then, nearly a half dozen people will come to Reve and confess to murdering Newman for various reasons.

A village of scrags and outcasts. Oakham: Beastville, Pigtown, Nobridge. The village that came to no good; the only village for tens of miles that doesn’t trade wool, doesn’t make cloth, doesn’t have the skill to build a bridge.

The structural twist in The Western Wind is that we read the four days in reverse order. Chronologically speaking, the story begins on page 235 and ends on page 83, Shrove Tuesday, 1491. We are used to the idea that mysteries are solved at the end. But The Western Wind is a reminder that mysteries are usually unraveled as a result of knowledge and perceptions gained along the way. By playing out the four days in reverse, the truths behind key details that appear in the later days are only revealed through actions and conversations that happen in earlier days. Reve, as a priest, becomes a detective who doesn’t even have to leave his office to be given a constant stream of rumors and clues. The villagers come to him to confess what they have seen, heard, and done. But as each day unfolds, we also begin to learn that John Reve can be a very unreliable narrator. Is it because he has something to hide, or because he doesn’t know himself very well, or because he can’t be honest with himself? As Reve deals with his stricken parish and jousts with the dean, he tries his best to calm everyone down with his Shrove Monday sermon. He flourishes a common priest’s manual in his hand and tells his parishioners, “I have here a treatise, ‘On the Lord’s Prudent and Timely Use of the Wind’.”

It divulges how the wind can be sent by the Lord not to punish, but to save us from corrupted vapours and reward us for our good work. Think how the locust plague came in on an easterly wind and, at God’s fitful command, was blown out on a westerly—for the wind is God’s breath, and through it he speaks to us.

Needless to say, the western wind never comes.

In The Western Wind, Harvey permits her characters to take more time than she allowed those in Orbital to debate the big issues that seem to obsess her—things like God, religion, mankind’s purpose on Earth. In one flashback that takes place in the confessional, Reve and Thomas Newman, the man who disappeared, debate for several engrossing pages whether God wants us to appreciate the beauty of the world in which we live. Newman had just made a religious pilgrimage to Rome, and he lists and describes for several paragraphs the many sublime and exotic things he saw and experienced along the way—spices from China and the Red Sea, Venetian glass, elephant tusks, gems from India. “Did I know that music,” Newman said, “being of the air, has a perfect resonance with the air in the ear and the air in the human spirit—that music might therefore bring us direct to the Lord and heal us?” Reve, who believes that this world is nothing but a distraction and an endless series of temptations, sits in his confessional and thinks that Newman’s “words coming through the grille were moths disintegrating.” Newman finally goes too far and informs Reve that there are actually multiple translations of the Bible to be found out there in the world beyond Oakham. Reve sputters and abruptly ends the session before Newman can confess anything.

Orbital read more like non-fiction than fiction and thus seemed a strange choice to me for the Booker Prize for the best novel of 2024. The Western Wind, on the other hand, is eminently engaging as both an excellent mystery and a solid work of historical fiction. Harvey dramatically conveys a sense of an isolated English village where (to our eyes) the villagers’ religious beliefs blur with superstition and outright ignorance. But, the masterfully human John Reve is great reason to read the book. He’s an artful mixture of ambition, self-doubt, altruism, and zealotry. Throughout, he is tempted by a woman named Sarah, who regularly will come to him and “sit and face me bare-fronted as if it were a game, while my breath rucked at the back of my mouth and my hands splayed at my thighs.” Finally, one day she completely strips before him. “Two years I’d been in love with her, two years, and those bruising and thankless, which no doubt they were supposed to be. The Lord doesn’t set us easy tests and temptations.”

Dec 8

Samantha Harvey’s “Orbital” and The Planet Shaped By Want

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“A small thing is a big thing seen from afar, a big thing is a small thing seen up close.”

I’ve taken this quote from Samantha Harvey’s 2018 novel The Western Wind, but it feels more apt to her recent 2024 Booker Prize-winning novel Orbital, about a single day in the life of six astronauts orbiting in a space station 250 miles above Earth. I was immediately drawn in by the hints of poetry, mythology, and science that are blended in Orbital‘s first paragraph.

Rotating about the earth in their spacecraft they are so together, and so alone, that even their thoughts, their internal mythologies, at times convene. Sometimes they dream the same dreams—of fractals and blue spheres and familiar faces engulfed in dark, and of the bright energetic black of space that slams their senses. Raw space is a panther, feral and primal; they dream it stalking through their quarters.

The book’s focus rotates quickly from astronaut to astronaut, just as the space station rotates quickly around the earth. They see sixteen Earth sunrises and sixteen Earth sunsets for every one of their days. Orbital really feels like an ode to the Earth—or, perhaps, to the universe. Collectively, the six astronauts (four men and two women) spend much of the book looking out of the station’s windows, giving us pages of exceptional prose descriptions of what they see. The extent of these compelling visual reports of the Earth’s geography and its weather patterns (including an immense typhoon) and of the Moon and the stars makes sections of Orbital feel like a work of non-fiction nature writing. Similarly, the detailed accounts of the aging space station, the training and equipment of astronauts, the physiology of living for months in space, and the scientific experiments being conducted give portions of Orbital the flavor of color-filled, animated non-fiction science writing.

In the new morning of today’s fourth earth orbit the Saharan dust sweeps to the sea in hundred-mile ribbons. Hazy pale green shimmering sea, hazy tangerine land. This is Africa chiming with light. You can almost hear it, this light, from inside the craft. Gran Canaria’s steep radial gorges pile the island up like a sandcastle hastily built, and when the Atlas Mountains announce the end of the desert, clouds appear in the shape of a shark whose tail flips at the southern coast of Spain. . .

Harvey’s description of the Northern lights is one of the more bravura bits of writing in the book. Here is only a quarter of her paragraph: “The light gains edges and limbs; folds and opens. Strains against the inside of the atmosphere, writhes and flexes. Sends up plumes. Fluoresces and brightens. Detonates then in towers of light. Erupts clean through the atmosphere and puts up towers two hundred miles high. . . Remember this, each of them thinks. Remember this.”

After six months in space they will, in technical terms, have aged 0.007 seconds less than someone on earth. . . They know that the vision can weaken and the bones deteriorate. Even with so much exercise still the muscles will atrophy. The blood will clot and the brain will shift its fluid. The spine lengthens, the T cells struggle to reproduce, kidney stones form.

The only part of Orbital that really reads like fiction has to do with the characters. We learn a little about the lives of the six astronauts (two are technically Russian cosmonauts), who are each given an inch of depth. Anton, Roman, Shaun, Nell, Chie, and Pietro—two Russian, and one each American, English, Japanese, and Italian. Chie’s mother has died and she will not make it to the funeral. Roman is always thinking about his son in Moscow. Pietro has warned a friend who lives on an island in the Philippines that his family is in grave danger from the onrushing typhoon. Anton is secretly worried about a lump that recently appeared in his neck and his loveless marriage. Nell keeps want to challenge Shaun, not understanding how someone who believes in a creationist God can also be an astronaut.

The intellectual heft of Orbital comes largely in the form of brief forays, usually by the omniscient narrator, into topics that ease the reader into philosophical or political territory for a page or two. Occasionally the astronauts will discuss something that feels heavy momentarily—like the Challenger space shuttle disaster in 1986—but these episodes tend to be very brief.

As we saw in the opening paragraph quoted earlier, the six astronauts are introduced as a kind of collective unit and, at times, they seem to be providing a collective vision of Earth from on high. Harvey’s narrator frequently uses “they” and other plural pronouns and speaks in collective statements on behalf of all six. The most important of these moments comes halfway through the book. During the first part of any astronaut’s tour of duty on the space station, we are told, Earth will look to them like a planet without borders and a place where “a sense of friendliness and peace prevails.” But “before long, for all of them, a desire takes hold. It’s the desire—no, the need (fueled by fervour)—to protect this huge yet tiny earth.” As they each find themselves frustrated by the daily news from home and their own powerlessness, “one day something shifts. One day they look at the earth and they see the truth.” And what they see is “the politics of want.” The Earth, which they previously thought was so beautiful and benign before, they now see has been completely “sculpted and shaped” by politics.

Every retreating or retreated or disintegrated glacier, every granite shoulder of every mountain laid newly bare by snow that has never before melted, every scorched and blazing forest or bush, every shrinking ice sheet, every burning oil spill . . . the expanding green-blue geometries of evaporation ponds where lithium is mined from the brine, or Tunisian salt flats in cloisonné pink . . . The hand of politics is so visible from their vantage point that they don’t know how they could have missed it at first.

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Harvey tucks one small puzzle into Orbital. Shaun, the American astronaut, keeps a postcard on board of the famous painting Las Meninas (1656) by Diego Velázquez that his wife mailed to him many years ago. On the back, she had written a short message that included several questions which he perpetually puzzles over. What is the subject of the painting? Who is looking at whom? In a casual conversation with Pietro, the Italian astronaut, Shaun suddenly sees the painting in a way that he had never seen it before and he finally has answers to those questions.

Orbital is full of lyrical writing on every one of its 207 pages, with hints of deeper things spread across the pages like breadcrumbs.

About the two covers: Aino-Maija Metsola, who designed the original 2024 British edition on the left for Vintage Books, also designed the covers for the Virginia Woolf series for Vintage Books about ten years ago. Kelly Winton designed the US edition on the right for Atlantic Monthly Press.

Forthcoming: a post on Harvey’s 2018 novel The Western Wind.

Nov 13

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Recently Read: Caleb Klaces & Rebecca Grandsen

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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.

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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.

Nov 3

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The Photograph Worth 297 Words

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In the last book he wrote before his death, Tomás Nevinson, Javier Marías reproduced a single photograph, an image credited on the copyright page to the Spanish photojournalist Pere Tordera. Marías used 297 words to describe what he saw in the photograph. He has used ekphrasis in a similar manner in several earlier books, describing in words what we can see in a photograph on the same page or a nearby page with our own eyes. What’s he doing in this description?

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In this book, Nevinson is a Spaniard who thought he had retired from a career spying for England and who had returned to his position at an embassy office in Madrid. But then he is asked by his old handler to do one last job: ferret out which of three women now living in a provincial Spanish town was the fundraising mastermind behind several bloody terrorist attacks that occurred more than a decade before. For a long time, Nevinson wants to say ‘No.” He’s been away from his wife too long, he feels estranged from his children, and he is worried that he is rusty. His handler tries to convince him that this terrorist must be identified and must pay for the deaths and injuries she helped to cause in two horrific bombings in Barcelona and Zaragoza, Spain in 1987. The mention of these two events causes Nevinson to recall a photograph he saw in the press at that time. “It was just one of those images you never forget.” Marías then proceeds to have Nevinson describe and think about the photograph for a full page and a half.

At the heart of Nevinson’s recollection of the photograph is his 297-word description of what it depicts. This description occurs on the page prior to the reproduction, so we read his verbal version first.

Against a backdrop of desolation and destruction, the ground was strewn with rubble and, hanging over it all, a malignant cloud of smoke, a policeman, his tie visible beneath his uniform, and his face all bloodied, is running towards the camera carrying in his arms a little seven- or eight-year-old girl whose face is a picture of pain, pure pain. In the background – it was one of those black-and-white photographs you can’t take your eyes off of – you could see a couple, the husband with his arms around his wife, and the wife with one hand on a buggy in which her baby is still sitting, the child is, at most, a year old, and given his or her age, would forget everything it was now hearing and seeing. Elsewhere, you can see a father (I assume he’s the father) putting his arms out to another child of four or five, and beside him a taller girl, who appears to be staunchly coping on her own. What I remember most clearly, though, is the expression of the face of the young policeman, or was he perhaps a fireman, carrying the little girl. Although much of his face was covered in blood, so that you really couldn’t make out his features (the blood could have been his own or someone else’s, like the blood on the girl’s arm), his expression was a mixture of determination and profound pity, perhaps there was also an element of postponed rage and another of sheer incredulity at what he was witnessing. Determination to save the injured child he wasn’t even looking at, instead staring straight ahead, his gaze perhaps fixed straight on the hospital that he needs to reach as soon as possible. And profound pity for many possible reasons.

The very fact that this photograph is reproduced in Tomás Nevinson requires some slippage between the book’s narrator and its author. Tomás Nevinson is only remembering an image he saw ten years ago. (It’s a remarkably accurate memory, but then Nevinson has spent more than two decades risking his life on his ability to see and remember details.) It was Javier Marías who decided to have this photograph reproduced in the book so that readers could see it for themselves. I think this should prompt us to be more than a little curious about his text concerning the photograph. One of the things that Nevinson is doing in his description of the photograph quoted above is focusing our eyes on where he wants us to look. But I think Marías is intervening here, as well. Presumably, Marías saw the photograph in a somewhat better version and the image would have been clearer for him. As a result, he would have been aware that he needed to prepare the reader to pay attention to something that is nearly lost among the half-tone dots of the mediocre reproduction that his book would produce. I definitely think that is why he wanted to make sure the reader noticed that the young girl in the man’s arms has lost not only one of her sneakers but part of her left foot as well.

It might seem odd that Nevinson spends only sixteen words on the site of the bombing or on any other evidence of the terrorists’ bomb, such as the blown out car windows. If this photograph wasn’t reproduced in the book, the only thing we would know about it other than the commentary on the people in the forefront is this: “The ground was strewn with rubble and, hanging over it all, a malignant cloud of smoke.” Nevinson says absolutely nothing about a street that is lined with automobiles and buildings. Then again, we have to keep in mind the reason that Nevinson has recalled this image of a newspaper or magazine photograph from so long ago. He’s in the middle of making a very human equation. What would it take for him to go out and try to bring a terrorist to justice one more time? Apparently, property damage doesn’t enter into the equation for Nevinson, he’s only sensitive to the human cost of terrorism. Does visualizing the pained face and damaged foot of a young girl tip the scales for him? This is why Nevinson is only focusing on the human cost of the terrorist bombing that is visible in the photograph.

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Nevinson’s 297-word description is embedded within a longer discussion of the photograph that takes place in his head because the photograph has led him to recall both the public horror and the political arguments that took place when ETA, the terrorist wing of the Basque Separatist Party, began bombing locations that involved children victims. As he sits and debates his own future with his handler, this factor weighs on Nevinson, but he still doesn’t make the decision to accept the job for another forty pages.

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Marías/Nevinson uses nearly half of the 297-word description of the photograph to tell us about the expressions on the faces of the man and the girl in the foreground. The girl’s face, the reader is told, is “a picture of pain, pure pain.” Several phrases are used to explain what should be seen on the face of her rescuer: “a mixture of determination and profound pity” . . . “an element of postponed rage and another of sheer incredulity” . . . “Determination” . . . and, once again, “profound pity for many possible reasons.” Furthermore, the reader is told that that “his gaze [is] perhaps fixed straight on the hospital that he needs to reach as soon as possible.”

The idea that we can accurately read the emotions on other people’s faces is as old as time, but it first achieved a real scientific stamp of approval in 1872 when Charles Darwin published The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, illustrated with numerous photographs intended to show what certain emotions looked like on a variety of faces. Most of the photographs used in the book were made by the French neurologist Guillaume Duchenne de Boulogne, who, along with his colleague, Jean-Martin Charcot, conducted experiments on patients at Paris’ Salpêtrière, a university hospital. At least two decades before he published On the Origin of Species in 1859, Darwin had begun wondering whether the psychological aspects of life were hereditary. After considerable research and consultation with psychiatrists on the subject, he became convinced that there were some core expressions that were universal among all peoples and certain animals.

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Photographs illustrating emotions of grief from Darwin’s “The Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animals,” 1872. Image courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University.
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Guillaume Duchenne de Boulogne performing facial electrostimulus experiment.

As a fiction writer, Marías can make up whatever story he wishes about the events that take place within a photograph. But when he lets the reader compare the photograph to his words, he is giving us the ability to compare his ekphrastic version with what we see. I happen to be of the school that believes that it’s not always possible to accurately judge what the expressions seen on the faces in photographs are “telling” us. I’ll let you be the judge if the face of the man in the photograph represents determination, pity, rage, and incredulity.

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Javier Marías’ Tomás Nevinson. Knopf, 2023. See my earlier post on this novel.

Oct 22

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Tomás Nevinson – Javier Marías’ Farewell Novel

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“Perhaps. You never know.” With these four words, Javier Marías (1951-2022) ended his remarkable literary career and fifteenth novel, Tomás Nevinson. These four words also aptly characterize the level of heightened uncertainty in which he kept his readers for many of the several thousand pages of his novels, throughout all of the lengthy, winding sentences in which he often said something one way, then said it another way, then found yet a third way to suggest the very same thing, and, more often than not, found a fourth variant, leaving the reader agasp at his gift of language. And, as his narrators and characters talked themselves through situations and options, weighing the pros and cons, they usually found themselves momentarily capable of convincing themselves of any possibility.

When you feel forced to do something, the solution is to convince yourself not only that you have to do it, but that it’s the best possible option. You can always find a reason for everything, or two or three or more, there’s nothing easier than coming up with reasons and thus feeling, quite impartially of course, that you have right on your side.

That is certainly the case with Tomás Nevinson. The plot is such that I can’t reveal much without spoiling the book, and I don’t want to let anything get in the way of your reading this book. These could be some of the most luxuriant 635 pages in your near future. Tomás Nevinson is a finely tuned, thinking person’s spy novel, with several ingenious plot twists. Nevinson, a Spaniard who had thought he was retired from a career spying for England and who had returned to his position at an embassy office in Madrid, is called back to do one last field job: ferret out which of three women in a provincial Spanish town was the fundraising mastermind behind several bloody terrorist attacks that occurred more than a decade before. Following a well-worn formula in spy fiction, Marías’ spy immediately regrets his decision and wonders if he is over the hill.

I had grown rusty, my faculties and my resolve had waned, perhaps I had grown lazy. I no longer believed in the defence of the Realm, in the purity of democracies or of the Crown, nor in the aseptic nature of the State or indeed in anything . . . I wasn’t even sure I wanted to punish crimes already committed. What was the point, what did it solve, since they could not be undone?

In fact, Nevinson had only recently returned from being away for a remarkable twelve years on secret assignments, “not just a continuous absence but a continuous silence too.” During that time, he had literally been declared dead and his wife, Berta Isla, technically became a widow. (Marías’ prior novel, Berta Isla, looked at the marriage and absences from her point of view.) Now, after all the times he has been ordered away on missions over a career of some twenty-five years, into other countries, with fake identities, and into total silence, Nevinson and his wife live in separate but nearby apartments.

As Nevinson becomes more aware of being manipulated into this decision by his handler, he begins to rethink the legitimacy, even the morality, of his own role, as well as his former loyalty to his adopted country England. He looks askance at his own spy agency; in fact, he is no longer sure if he works for MI5 or MI6. “How closely,” he thinks, “our [spy] organizations resemble mafias.” Nevinson’s growing insecurity gives Marías a forum to let Nevinson ponder all sorts of spy-adjacent topics, like trust, vengeance versus justice, loyalty, responsibility, democracy, terrorists, and state terrorism. Marías also writes more freely and at greater length than in any of his prior novels about ETA, the terrorist wing of the Basque Separatist Movement. But even as Nevinson questions the authority of his own spy organization and the possible legitimacy of his previous assignments, he must also come to terms with the matter of his own complicity, his personal guilt from the actions he had taken as a secret agent of the British government for two and a half decades.

Fifteen years ago, in a post about Fever and Spear, the first volume of his Your Face Tomorrow trilogy, I wrote: “Marías uses the world of spies and spying as a vast, flexible metaphor for literature.” Many of his novels have been about spies or their literary equivalents, translators, people who sit at the cusp between two worlds, moving information from one into another. Partway into Tomás Nevinson I began to wonder if perhaps Marías didn’t sometimes think of himself as a spy on the world around him, a spy who whose duty it was to report back to us what he thought about whatever he saw. It’s a role he never seems to exhaust in his fiction. Here, it takes until page 123 for Nevinson, who narrates his eponymous novel, to finally agree to accept the job that will consume him through the remainder of the book. Until the moment that he reluctantly makes this decision, he thinks at length about his past career, his mixed feelings about his handler, and how his life as a spy (or agent) has affected his marriage and relationship with his children. (In every one of Marías’ novels, the narrators and main characters spend great swaths of time just thinking.)

Ironically, when Nevinson is finally situated in the provincial Spanish city under cover as a schoolteacher named Centurión, he often sees his spy cover as a separate character from himself. During the time he is actively working on the problem of identifying the terrorist, he vacillates between referring to himself as “I” and as “Centurión,” sometimes within the same paragraph. Nevinson seems to need this literary schizophrenia to stay sane as he goes about his final job.

Marías reproduces a single photograph in Tomás Nevinson, an image credited on the copyright page to the photojournalist Pere Tordera that shows the aftermath of a terrorist bombing on a narrow street lined with cars. A policeman “is running towards the camera carrying in his arms a little seven- or eight-year-old girl, one of whose feet appears to have been half blown off, and whose face is a picture of pain, pure pain.”

It has always been easy to think of Marías as a conservative, highly traditional novelist. He’s an erudite writer of intricately plotted novels about highly educated, articulate characters who love to quote Shakespeare, John Milton, John Donne, William Butler Yeats, and other writers of the British and European canon. But with his death we’ve lost a writer we need now—someone humane, compassionate, and deeply moral. Late in Tomás Nevinson, the narrator has occasion to think of one of the important lessons he learned from a former MI5 instructor who taught him that: “We must always remain immune to the five contagions . . . Cruelty is contagious. Hatred is contagious. Faith is contagious.  Madness is contagious. Stupidity is contagious.” Marías, always a harsh critic of the reign of Francisco Franco (who “contaminated” Spain), and who kept a wary eye on the compromises of post-Franco Spain, used Tomás Nevinson to offer some worrying opinions about the future of our democracies. “You only have to introduce a little truth into a lie for the lie to seem not just credible, but irrefutable.”

Javier Marías. Tomás Nevinson. Knopf, 2023. Translated from the 2021 Spanish original by Margaret Jull Costa.

Sep 29

Recently Read: Shirley Hazzard’s Two Early Novels

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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.

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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.

Sep 15

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Transiting Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus

At first, there is something you expect of life. Later, there is what life expects of you.

Shirley Hazzard’s novel The Transit of Venus (1980) is a novel I have looked forward to rereading for a long time. It’s brilliantly written, pleasantly quirky, and always keeps the forward momentum flowing. Over four decades she wrote four novels, and all of her major themes are prominent here—putting characters under a microscope, exerting nearly unbearable pressure on love, debating what it takes to have an ethical spine, and trying to move women out from under the thumb of men in both home and the public arena.

Transit follows two newly orphaned sisters and the tangled relationships they will have with the men who become their husbands, lovers, and admirers across some twenty-plus years. Caroline (Caro) and Grace Bell arrive in England as young women from Australia, anxious to restart their lives. They couldn’t be more different, and Transit is going to explore and exploit everything that sets them apart.

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The most important of the male through-lines in Transit is that of Ted Tice, a young astronomer who makes a dramatic appearance on the book’s first page. A storm with devastating results has been predicted in the opening sentence.

That noon a man was walking slowly into a landscape under a branch of lightning. A frame of almost human expectancy defined this scene, which he entered from the left-hand corner. Every nerve—for even barns and wheelbarrows and things without tissue developed nerve in these moments—waited, fatalistic. Only he, kinetic, advanced against circumstances to a single destination.
Farmers moved methodically, leading animals or propelling machines to shelter. Beyond the horizon, provincial streets went frantic at the first drops. Wipers wagged on windshields, and people also charged and dodged to and fro, to and fro. Packages were bunged inside coat-fronts, newspapers upturned on new perms. A dog raced through a cathedral. Children ran in thrilling from playgrounds, windows thudded, doors slammed. Housewives were rushing, and crying out, “My washing.” And a sudden stripe of light split earth from sky.

Ted, small suitcase in hand, is walking to the house where he will start working with a famous elder astronomer, and where he will also meet the astronomer’s guests, the two Bell sisters. Grace Bell has already become engaged to the astronomer’s son, and before the evening is over, Ted will become smitten with the other sister, Caro. For most of the novel Ted will go all out to win her love, but she will turn him down repeatedly. Caro tells herself she has other standards. “There were necessities, of silence and comprehension that she valued more than love, thinking this a choice she had made.”

It is likely to go unnoticed by the reader at the time, but Hazzard foreshadows most of Transit within the first fifteen pages of the book. Each sister will marry the wrong man and will then engage in adultery as an attempt at course correction. Making the wrong choice is the way characters are tested in Hazzard’s universe. Ted, continually spurned by Caro, eventually marries, even though Caro continues to remain his North Star

The transit of Venus refers to the very rare event when Venus crosses in front of the sun, permitting astronomers (if the skies are clear!) to do measurements that help them extrapolate the distance between the Earth and both the Sun and Venus. (I’ll refer you to the Wikipedia article for precise details.) At the dinner when Ted first meets Caro, he tells a story about a transit of Venus that took place in the 18th century.

A Frenchman had traveled to India years before to observe a previous transit, and was delayed on the way by wars and misadventure. Having lost his original opportunity, he waited eight years in the East for that next transit, of 1769. When the day came, the visibility was freakishly poor, there was nothing to be seen. There would not be another transit for a century.
He was telling this to, and for, Caroline Bell.

Despite having only met Caro that day, Ted was already predicting his own fatalistic devotion to her by the middle of dinner. “His story has such nobility you can scarcely call it unsuccessful,” he added, referring both to the 18th century scientist and also, undoubtedly, to his future self.

Hazzard uses multiple weapons from her writer’s arsenal to focus our attention on her characters’ motivations and their innermost thoughts during their conversations and when they are together. Written in free indirect style, we are witness to the thoughts and micro-emotions of each of Hazzard’s main characters as they muse and interact, and when they are at decisive moments. This intimacy betrays the frequency with which characters misinterpret and mistranslate the words and actions of others, which in turn leads to bad or wrong decisions.

As is evident in the quotations I have selected, everything—the weather, the landscape, rooms, objects—conspires to even further underscore the mood of characters. For example, when Grace and Christian make up after a fight, the entire room becomes anthropomorphic: “meaning flowed slowly back, like a stain, into the cream rug; twill cushions miraculously reinflated; and a pair of Spode plates, mounted on a wall, renewed their encircling spell.”

Transit is also a novel about secrets, secrets withheld out of shame and fear. When the secrets are confessed, Caro finds that a significant part of her life had been led as a lie. Suddenly, a key part of her past had been swept away, leaving a giant gap.

Like each of the females who take the leading roles in Shirley Hazzard’s novels, Caro Bell is a richly complex character. As a young woman she is dynamic but naïve, ambitious but with just enough preconceived ideas about what she is looking for to make bad decisions.

But it is Grace who sums up their lives as they reach middle age. “At first,” Grace says, “there is something you expect of life. Later, there is what life expects of you. By the time you realize these are the same, it can be too late for expectations.”

Grace had discovered that men prefer not to go through with things. When the opposite occurred, it made history: Something you’ll always remember.
She said, “Women have to go through with things. Birth, for instance, or hopeless love. Men can evade forever.”

Near the end of the book, the two battle-scarred sisters sit together and exchange “some pain for a tragedy not exclusively theirs.”  Grace has stuck out her marriage with self-satisfied, entitled Christian, despite his affairs. Caro fell passionately in love with London’s hot playwright of the moment, a married man, and had an affair with him that wounded her badly. Then she was “resurrected” by a marriage to a wealthy, but very appreciative American, except he died unexpectedly. Then, finally wishing she could see “all she had been blind to,” she is back where she began, face to face with Ted Tice. She has come to realize that he has had the ethical spine that almost no one else in the novel possessed.

Shirley Hazzard. The Transit of Venus. NY: Viking, 1980.

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This is book number 12 in my Vertigo 15 Books Project, which I began in 2022 as a way of looking back across fifteen years of writing Vertigo. I am selecting and rereading fifteen titles that have really stood out during that time.

Aug 11

5 Comments

Recently Read: Énard & Tawada 2

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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.

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“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

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“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.

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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.

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