Books I Read, March 2021
Dear friends,
If you signed up to receive the first issue of this newsletter, I'm guessing you already know who I am. But let's get on the same page, just in case.
I'm Robert. I'm a 31 year old freelance writer, currently living in Pittsburgh. I have a PhD in philosophy, but I left academia to write. Most importantly for our purposes — I love to read. Even though this newsletter is supposed to be a career thing — the idea is that you'll enjoy it so much you'll want to buy my novel, when I have a novel to sell you — in actuality I'm going to use it just to talk about what I've been reading. Once a month, on the first Sunday of the month, I'll send you a letter about books. Sometimes I'll send you a second letter partway through a month to tell you about something I've published. But mostly, we'll talk about books.
So let's talk about books. This is what I read in March:
Human Acts, by Han Kang. A novel about a boy who was murdered by the South Korean army during the Gwangju Massacre in 1980. The novel is also addressed to him. At first I thought it was written in the second person, but then I began to realize the "you" the narrator was writing to was not me but a ghost. The boy's story is told piecemeal, mostly through the memories and afterlives of people who knew him. It's one of the most difficult books I've ever read. Not difficult to understand, but difficult to endure in its depictions of state killing and torture, its bleak insistence that trauma is irremediable, and its open nihilism about the meaning of life in the face of suffering.
The Ferrante Letters, by Sarah Chihaya, Merve Emre, Katherine Hill, and Jill Richards. Subtitled "an experiment in collective criticism," this book gathers the correspondence of four literature professors from a summer spent reading Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Quartet. I must confess to being a bad reader of literary criticism — I embark on monographs by critics often, but seldom do I read them to the end — yet I devoured this book. The writers refer often to each other's letters and set their observations about Ferrante's books in the context of their own lives (as the letter form prompts one to do). There's an appendix full of additional letters from random people who watched the correspondence unfold and wanted to participate (it was published letter by letter on a blog before it became a book). Easily the most readable work of literary criticism I've stumbled upon in years.
The Subversive Simone Weil, by Robert Zaretsky. Five thematically organized biographical essays concerning what Simone Weil had to say about suffering, attention, political resistance, rootedness, and goodness. Zaretsky adopts a style I associate with popularizers of philosophy like Sarah Bakewell, anecdotal and free-ranging, conversational, personal. He attempts both to set Weil's ideas in their historical context (which I liked) and also to make them relatable by comparing them to less difficult and more familiar ideas (which I did not like).
Working, by Robert Caro. Some observations about writing and researching that the famouse biographer of Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson wanted to publish in case he doesn't have time to complete his projected memoirs. (He's getting old, and even completing the multi-volume Johnson bio is looking iffy.) In this book he describes learning the basic rule of investigative reporting — "turn every page" — from his first editor, and he shows what that kind of work looks like in the case of a presidential archive too large for any one person to read. He also describes, with sometimes crowing triumph, some of his more sensational personal interviews. I was struck by the correspondence between the mechanisms of power he considers his primary subject — manipulation, espionage, blackmail, the techniques of ruthless persuasion — and his own ways of getting the story he wants to tell. He subborns the guardians of documents, infiltrates communities to get their gossip, engineers Proustian moments for his sources, flatters and wheedles and threatens and demands. Ultimately his gigantic books are a testament to power in themselves, not just studies of it.
The Souls of Black Folk, by W.E.B. Du Bois. An essay collection exploring the history, culture, social roles, economic prospects, and political hopes of black Americans in 1903. I felt I knew this book before I read it, so often was it quoted in the articles I read in grad school. But my feelings of familiarity were wrong. The book surprised me with its variety: the essays range from exegesis of gospel songs to analyses of economic statistics to nature writing to institutional history to short stories and personal essays. I was expecting something more uniform, like a contemporary academic monograph. Instead, it's an assemblage of wildly different pieces, adding up to a work of proto-sociology that seeks (as C. Wright Mills would later say of the sociological imagination in general) to relate biography to history, by any available means.
The Universal Harvester, by John Darnielle. A novel in which a guy who works in a video rental store discovers several VHS tapes onto which creepy home videos have been spliced. Normally the next line following such a premise would be, "tracking down the origin of these home videos leads him to discover a serial killer who has been preying upon the citizens of his small midwestern town for decades" — or something along those lines. That's what the novel made me expect. But in fact the ominous clues only lead to other disappointed and dwindling lives. It's a foreboding story of American malaise that constantly threatens to tip over into horror, but in the end suggests that the real horror is the bleakness of everyday life and the inexorability of time, and that we should tolerate and respect the weird projects by which people shore up their ruins.
Incidental Inventions, Elena Ferrante. A collection of short texts Ferrante wrote in response to prompts given her by The Guardian. Essentially a series of op-eds on the human heart. The strangest part of the book appears — of all places — in the acknowledgments (which follow the main text). There, amidst the usual expressions of gratitude to various people, Ferrante suddenly launches into a denunciation of inequality. I have spent far too much time this month trying to imagine why she chose to turn her acknowledgments section to this purpose instead of just sticking on an additional essay. You have to be the sort of person who reads acknowledgments to find it.
Escaping Exodus, by Nicky Drayden. A science fiction novel about the intertwined adolescence of two girls who live inside the stomach of a gigantic space-faring beast. It's the sort of novel that reminds you how infinite the possibilities of worldbuilding remain in speculative fiction. Of course the other, paradoxical thing about speculative fiction is that everything has always already been done, and this book belongs to the venerable subgenre of feminist biopunk. Its premise — a matriarchal society on an organic, living space-ship, presumably a generation ship lost between the stars — is almost exactly the same as Kameron Hurley's 2017 space opera, The Stars Are Legion. On balance, I would say Hurley wrote a better-shaped story, and Drayden created a more visceral and visualizable world. This squelching, bleeding, sphinctering, excreting, rippling, slavering, digesting, contracting, birthing, and defecating setting is both gross and engrossing. It almost didn't matter what happened, I just wanted to spend time exploring the setting.
See/Saw, by Geoff Dyer. A collection of essays about photographs, sorted into chronological order by subject so that it forms a patchy history of the art. It isn't published until May, and I have a review of it forthcoming in On the Seawall, so I won't say too much here. Basically, the surprising thing about Geoff Dyer, given the volume of his work and his reputation as a critic, is that he doesn't write photography criticism at all. He writes photography appreciation. Informative about quirky details and very easy to read — this is true of everything Dyer writes — the book also seems to keep its subject at arms length and to avoid making any judgments. I'll explain what I mean in more detail in the review.
On Photographs, by David Campany. A very different collection of essays about photographs. I say "essays," but they are very short — micro-essays, I suppose. The book is composed like a photobook: each famous or historically significant picture sits opposite one page of text in two columns. In the introduction, Campany claims that Sontag told him he should write this book when he interviewed her about her own book on photography and complained that she'd failed to discuss individual photographs. He approaches the art as a curator and historian rather than a belletrist. Thus his book is less pleasurable and readable than Dyer's, but ultimately it adds up to a more cohesive narrative about the history of photography: it's the narrative of a practitioner and connoisseur, informed about techniques and technology, about the slow drift of style and genre.
On Photography: A Philosophical Inquiry, by Diarmuid Costello. A philosophical monograph systematizing a question that has plagued thinkers about photography for a long time: how can photographs both give us uniquely accurate, objective representations (so much so that a photograph has a status as evidence that a painting or drawing does not, capturing things the artist didn't even notice) and yet be an art with the same capacity for subjectivity and expression as the other arts? Aesthetic philosophers have fallen mostly on one side or the other of this question. Costello seeks an account of photography that overcomes this central difficulty, salvaging both the medium's epistemological uniqueness and its status as an art, and he does this through a wonderfully dialectical process (in the Aristotelian, not Marxist, sense), systematizing and counterposing major historical theories and extending them with his own ideas.
Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, by Manning Marable. A (Pulitzer-winning) biography of Malcolm X. I listened to it as an audiobook, and it changed my understanding of many things. I learned to see the parallels between the religion of the Nation of Islam to which Malcolm converted in jail and the philosophy of Marcus Garvey to which his parents had subscribed. I learned about the crucial and prefiguring role his siblings played in his own eventual ideology. And I got a new picture of his personality and gifts. Even though Marable has a profound respect for Malcolm — for reasons made clear in the introduction by his daughter, who finished the book for him after he died — he takes an unblinking view of his subject's malleable personal ambitions, willingness to bend truth and principle, and moments of moral and political misjudgment. In this respect, the book reminds me of Robert Caro's biography of Lyndon Johnson (also probably because I was just reading Caro): neither hagiographic nor calumniating, it sorts out the contingencies of history and the improbable intersection between a man of power and his moment of influence. Marable is particularly good at set-pieces: moments of high drama as gripping as anything in a novel — such as when Elijah Muhammed sent Malcolm to negotiate directly with the leadership of the KKK, only for the white supremacists to end up asking him to help them lynch Martin Luther King. These and other moments in Malcolm's life that, I suspect, were as important turning points as the famous prison conversion, alongside a lot of elegant historical summary to contextualize everything, make Marable's book probably a lot more informative for a 21st century student of the civil rights era than Malcolm's own autobiography.
[Errata, 4/9/21: In the capsule review above, I confused the book I listened to on Audible — The Dead Are Arising, by Les Payne and Tamara Payne, which won the National Book Award in 2020 — with Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, by Manning Marable, which won the Pulitzer in 2012. I have not read the latter book by Marable, and everything I say above concerns the book by the Panyes; specifically, the audiobook narrated by Dion Graham.]
Where Reasons End, by Yiyun Li. A novel in which the narrator holds imaginary conversations with her son, who recently committed suicide. They squabble about language — she dislikes adjectives, for example, but he loves them — and dance around the haunting question implied by the situation: why did he do it? Why did he kill himself? And what responsibility, if any, does his mother bear for his death? And what is she doing by talking to him in her mind all the time — is she really talking to him, or just deceiving herself? Yiyun Li, shortly before writing this book, did lose a son to suicide. It's a moving book, despite (or perhaps because of) it's lack of sentimentality or the typical appurtenances of a novel — its lack of scenes or an overt plot or setting, or indeed of anything but the two voices in the narrator's head, endlessly lovingly dueling.
And that was March. I'm looking forward to April's reading because for the first time in a while I'm pursuing a reading project, rather than just reading at random or as background for various writing projects. After enjoying Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar's great novel of Istanbul, A Mind at Peace, I decided I would like to dive deeply into Turkish history and literature (and the Ottoman Empire which preceded it). I've been preparing a big reading list of history and literature on the subject, and I put in a massive interlibrary loan order, most which has now arrived. So my next reading letter will be largely devoted to the fruit of this reading project. (If you have any recommendations, by the way — I mean beyond the famous Turkish writers like Orhan Pamuk, Nazim Hikmet, Elif Shafak and so on, whom I already know about — I'd love to receive them. You can reach me simply by responding to this email.)
Until then, you have my warm regards,
Robert Minto