*denotes favorite

denotes book club

april

Once Upon a River by Diane Setterfield

*On the Calculation of Volume I by Solvej Balle

• call this lit-fic groundhog day if you will, a slim novel (the first of seven) that chronicles the stream of Nov. 18ths experienced by an antiquarian bookseller trapped in a “container” of time. at first there’s some degree of trying to escape the time loop, but the best part of the book is its observations about relationships and the hunger of existence.

In Calabria by Peter S. Beagle

*Death Takes Me by Cristina Rivera Garza

Silver in the Wood by Emily Tesh

Friends and Relations by Elizabeth Bowen

• not making this a favorite because it’s not my favorite Elizabeth Bowen ever, but it is very funny and cutting, packed with her devastating sentences. central issue: imagine the horror if an English person experienced one (1) genuine feeling.

*Build Your House Around My Body by Violet Kupersmith

• did not realize this was horror and so was probably more frightened by those aspects of it than I would otherwise have been. not sewn up real tight but I couldn’t stop reading it and I like a book that doesn’t explain everything.

Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century by Wolfgang Schivelbusch

Old Soul by Susan Barker

• not as white-hot as her previous novel The Incarnations (please read if you haven’t), but still a furious, compulsive story about all the ways love can be monstrous and insatiable, as malignant as it is miraculous.

That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana by Carlo Emilio Gadda

The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Wastelands by Sarah Brooks

death takes me and the pleasures/pains of effortful reading

somehow last month I read two separate books that were metaphysical murder mysteries in translation. neither book cared about solving the murder(s). they both made me think a lot about effortful reading, books that require, or at least seem to require, a constant engagement with the text not simply for linguistic beauty or for plot, but for something like decoding, a constant and active act of interpretation.

one was for book club: that awful mess on the via merulana, written by carlo emilio gadda and published in 1957. the english translation, which we read, was done by william weaver in 1965. people call gadda the james joyce of italy, and it’s not hard to see why. but I’m not going to get into it really here, other than to say that it was a great book club discussion about translations and cultural resonances that may be ultimately untranslatable.

death takes me, by cristina rivera garza, was originally written and published in spanish in 2013, and released in english this year. it’s about a series of murders in a dense city, made more disturbing by the fact that the victims are all men and they’ve all been castrated. the person who discovers the first body is a professor of poetry (or rather, poetry is her “field of action”) named cristina rivera garza. she also notices a fragment of poetry next to the corpse, a poet whose words appear at the scene of subsequent murders. she’s an expert, a witness, and a suspect. the investigation (if you can really call it that — I might say the “close read”) of the murders takes the reader through experiments in form, layering in academic papers, telescopic shifts in perspective, and even a full chapbook of poetry.

neither book is “easy” to read, in the sense that neither uses plot as the primary mechanism to move the narrative along. in death takes me, garza seems to expect the reader to work at least as hard as she is on making a novel, to bring their own critcal muscle to the task. it doesn’t offer the same pleasure as reading a typical mystery novel, eschews the guided-tour feeling that concludes with a tidy wrap-up. don’t get me wrong, I like that feeling and I gulp down dorothy sayers novels. but garza is trying something else here. the reader isn’t searching for clues that will lead to a specific, predetermined answer, but for morsels to support her unfolding interpretation of the texts. it’s a kind of dismembering of the text, in a way becoming complicit in the novel’s crimes. the corpses aren’t real, after all — they’re just words, and we can all read them.

some critics did not enjoy this, and found the novel obscure and confusing. I get it, I do. there were moments in the early pages that forced me to slow down to understand them. later, those passages came back to me as knowledge. ideas I had encountered earlier in the book began to clarify. I felt rewarded for taking my time, for considering and pondering. I do not think my prize was a solution — I certainly don’t know who killed anyone — but that is not the point. instead I got the excitement of my own ideas colliding with garza’s, the heady feeling of intellectual collaboration. I realize this is snob/nerd shit, but there’s something so thrilling, especially in a time of incredibly simplistic and didactic art, about a multiplicity of interpretations, about an author who refuses to explain everything to you. you figure out! you get to figure it out.

it’s a different mode of reading, an active and involved one, and it’s not always euphoric. sometimes it’s boring and sometimes it’s just work. not every book can or should require this type of focus. but when one does, to me it’s worth pushing past any initial frustrations. to bring this out of the airy realm of thought and into something more tangible, I think it’s like eating a crab. it’s worth breaking the through the shell to get to the good part.