the cassandra pages

Books of 2023

I feel like I read a lot in the last year, but there aren't that many books on my list, mainly because several were very big ones. The two largest were The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk, and Herman Melville's Moby Dick, both read with my book group, but Orhan Pamuk's Nights of Plague was also a long read. If you have never read Moby Dick, as I somehow had not, I encourage you to do so - it really does deserve its reputation as one of the greatest novels of all time.

It took me 75 or 100 pages to warm up to Tokarczuk's The Books of Jacob, which is written in an unusual style that eschews detailed dialogue or description of the characters' thoughts or feelings, but instead relies on description of events. We found that challenging, because we just didn't have the normal ways of entering the characters' heads, but by sticking with it, the reader is rewarded with immersion in their world -- in this case, Jewish communities in eastern Poland/western Ukraine in the mid-to-late 1700s. At that time, a self-proclaimed "Messiah" named Jacob Frank appeared, and gained an ardent following. Of all the books our group read this year, this one probably created the most lively and wide-ranging weekly discussions.

Other books that stood out for our group were Lalla Romano's A Shared Silence, an intense novel about two couples in the Italian resistance, and Pamuk's Nights of Plague, an epic about a made-up Mediterranean island dealing with an outbreak of plague, and the politics and human behaviors that result.

I was thrilled about the publication of Teju Cole's Tremor, his first novel since Open City. Readers here will know that he and I are long-time friends, and I was privileged to be one of the first readers of the manuscript, so I don't feel that I can "review" the book objectively. I will say that it is beautifully written and conceived, as we have come to expect from Teju; it is timely, dealing with subjects from marriage to racism, from the ownership of art objects to the complexities of academic life, from friendship to, perhaps most importantly, death. It is also experimental, pushing the structure of the novel in new directions, and involving the reader in a reading experience that is not entirely linear. So, of course, I recommend it highly.

Greek Lessons, by the Korean writer Han Kang, intrigued me because of its title and also because of its knockout cover, and I was not disappointed. This book, also, pushes the form of the novel, and tells a poignant story of two people who use the study of language to address their own difficulties in communication. It's probably the most unusual novel I read this year. I plan to write a full-length review of it later.

While we're speaking of highly original writing, I was extremely impressed by Nay Saysourinho's The Capture of Krao Farini. This short, chapbook-length work defies categorization as to genre; it is listed by the publisher, Ugly Ducking Press, as poetry, and could be called a narrative prose poem of sorts; it includes illustrations that are integral to the text. It is a work of art that cuts to the heart of what human beings are capable to doing to each other; it's the most original thing I've read this year and I found it brilliant, deeply disturbing, and haunting.

More recently, our book group has begun John Berger's trilogy, "Into Their Labours", about the lives of peasants in the French Alps near Berger's home in the second half of his life. As V., one of our book group members, said, "I am attracted to Berger right now because of his deep humanity," and she was right; these are books that get to the essence of what is human, what constitutes survival, what we need most, and what is unnecessary. They are antidotes to capitalism, consumerism and fads, social media and modern conformity; they're not without violence, but it tends to be the violence of raising and slaughtering your own animals for food, or the rough feuds of local people. Likewise, Patrick Leigh Fermor's Roumeli speaks of Greece before mass tourism, when wandering tribes of herders still moved through the remote mountains, speaking dialects that were already in danger of being lost, and mountain-top monasteries were still inaccessible except by horseback or donkey. Having visited some of these remote places myself, his words were more meaningful now than when I first read the book some years ago, and I find myself feeling grateful to both him and Berger for writing down what they observed, and what came to matter deeply to them. This encourages me as a writer, too -- that the daily lives of ordinary people do matter, and it is in our hands as writers to preserve the truths of their existence.

I should also mention that I do a lot of online reading of shorter fiction and essays (in places like The New Yorker, Emergence Magazine, Beshara, The Guardian long reads, quite a few individual Substacks) and I'm a regular subscriber to Brick, a very fine Canadian literary journal which doesn't confine itself to solely Canadian authors, and publishes a lot of work by people of color, indigenous writers, and immigrants, and (I think) as many female as male writers. Do check it out; it's a good journal to support.

Please, as always, do share your own reading lists or highlights from this year! Here's my full list:

2023

The Abyss, Marguerite Yourcenar (in progress)

Roumeli, Patrick Leigh Fermor (rereading)

The Capture of Krao Farini, Nay Saysourinho

Pig Earth, John Berger #

Tremor, Teju Cole

A Recipe for Daphne, Nektaria Anastasiadou

*Greek Lessons, Han Kang

*Moby Dick, Herman Melville #

The War that Killed Achilles, Caroline Alexander

The Tentmaker, Michelle Blake

Three Short Works, Gustav Flaubert #

*A Shared Silence, Lalla Romano  #

The Sleeping Car Porter, Suzette Mayr #

Just a Mother, Roy Jacobsen (Barroy Chronicles 4) #

Nights of Plague, Orhan Pamuk #

Woman at Point Zero, Nahwal el Saadawi

House of Names, Colm Toibin

District and Circle, Seamus Heaney

Amsterdam, Ian McEwan

Night Train to Lisbon, Pascal Mercier #

*The Books of Jacob, Olga Tokarczuk#

The Other Side of the Mountain, Journals of Thomas Merton Vol 7., Fr. Thomas Merton

Enduring Love, Ian McEwan

The Innocent, Ian McEwan

Review: A Recipe for Daphne

I'll probably never go to Istanbul in spite of it being a very enticing destination; my husband's Armenian heritage isn't compatible with Turkish politics or revisionist history. However, I was very pleased to read and review Nektaria Anastasiadou's  new novel A Recipe for Daphne, for Cha: An Asian Journal, which is based in Hong Kong. It's an engaging, well written novel about the dwindling Rum (Greek Orthodox) community of Istanbul, their complicated history and challenging future. I also reflected on the history of the different religious and ethnic minorities under and after the Ottoman Empire, including that of my Armenian and Protestant in-laws. When doing the research for the review, I learned a lot more about the history of the ethnic and religious minorities in former Ottoman territories and in Turkey -- and it is not a happy story. Please go to the review page on Cha if you'd like to read the full piece; I'll just excerpt a little of it here. Kosmas, mentioned below, is an Istanbul pastry chef who falls in love with Daphne, a beautiful American woman visiting her aunt in Istanbul and searching for her own roots.

Kosmas also turns out to be a romantic idealist, as symbolised by his search for a recipe for a once-famous pastry called the Balkanik. While Daphne returns to the United States to see her parents and make a final decision about moving, he spends months trying to recreate the delicacy for her, from notes in an old Ottoman cookbook unearthed by his Muslim assistant. The Balkanik was a sort of large éclair, filled with eight differently coloured and flavoured creams, representing each of the original tribes of the Balkans: Bulgarians, Romanians, Albanians, Greeks, Serbs, Croats, Jews, and Turks, all existing together in harmony.

---

I understand this longing. My own father-in-law was an Arab Protestant from Damascus who had lived under Ottoman rule, in a family that had survived persecution, and yet spoke movingly of the vibrant multiculturalism of all the great cities of the Near and Middle East, and his friendships with the local Orthodox priest, and Jewish, Muslim, and Maronite schoolmates. He too was a lover of proverbs. My mother-in-law was an Armenian, born in Turkey, whose father was killed in the Armenian genocide along with all the other men of their village, and who had managed to escape with her mother and small brothers for a life in Alexandria and then Beirut. During their lifetimes, they watched as the once-thriving Christian communities in many of these ancient cities became smaller and smaller, and deplored the religious and political fanaticism that caused it. Like Daphne’s parents, they had wistful memories, but little desire to go back.

A few months ago, I was in Greece myself, and spent a week in Thessaloniki, the largest major city close to Turkey. Once under Ottoman rule, and still retaining many ties to Istanbul through the Orthodox Church, Thessaloniki also offers many Turkish culinary traditions—like the Rums of Istanbul, we ate gilt-head bream, sesame bracelets, cream-filled pastry shells, and honey-drenched baklava, and sat for hours over our plates of delectable mezze while watching ships come and go on the sea. I could well imagine wanting to stay there for a lifetime. In Thessaloniki we also saw an exhibition of Armenian photographs taken in Turkey between 1900 and 1950, documenting the history of a family whose lives mirrored that of my mother-in-law. Thessaloniki is close to the Turkish border, but the exhibition would never be allowed in that country, where the Armenian genocide has never been acknowledged.

Thank you to Tammy Lai-Ming Ho, editor of Cha: An Asian Journal for publishing this review, and for all the tireless work she does on behalf of Asian literature and writers. I first "met" Tammy when Dave Bonta and I were editing qarrtisiluni, where she submitted excellent work that we published on several occasions. That was a long time ago! It's always a pleasure to find these old connections circling back around, and to make new ones.

 

 

Announcing my new book, "Snowy Fields"

I'm happy to announce the forthcoming (mid/late Nov 2023) publication of my book of drawings and written reflections, SNOWY FIELDS, done during the past year. It's a slightly oversized 9" x 10" paperback art book, printed on coated paper. It contains the entire series of drawings, a long reflective essay that I wrote about place, identity, grief, and my artistic process, and an essay about my work by the British artist, writer, composer and educator Michael Szpakowski. The book can be pre-ordered now at a reduced price, and you can find all the details about it on the Phoenicia Publishing website.

It's always exciting when a project that began in uncertainty gradually comes together, takes shape, and is finally refined into a finished form. The moment when it is launched, to find its own way into the world, is also my chance to thank YOU, my online readers, who encouraged me and offered feedback as this series of drawings took shape. I also thank all those who corresponded with me about the artwork, and supported me through a time of change, grief, and discovery. You helped me personally, and you helped this project come into being. I'm grateful.

Books of 2021

Well, here is the list of books I read during the past year, and I am grateful for every one of them. Each became my companion for a time during this second pandemic year, and through many of them, I was joined by the intrepid members of my book group who met every Friday morning to discuss the next 50 or 100 pages of whatever novel we were reading together at the time. We helped each other finish a lot of long and sometimes difficult books, we kept each other company, and got to know each other better as friends. So although reading is, by its nature, solitary, it's hard for me to look down this list and not think of the experience with certain titles as a shared one. I know that this sort of group is not for everyone, but it's been good for me, and as facilitator for most of the books, it's really kept me on my toes.

If I could only recommend one of these books to you, I think it would be Milkman, by Anna Burns, written about Ireland during the Troubles: one of the freshest, most original pieces of writing I've read in years, with brilliantly-drawn characters who will win your sympathy. I've just finished Arturo's Island by Elsa Morante, and admired her writing, though the story of a boy growing up on an island off the coast of Sicily is one that makes you cringe at times. While we're talking about islands, there was the Laexdal Saga, from The Sagas of Icelanders, well worth anyone's reading time as a vivid portrait of human love, jealousy, greed, generosity and wisdom 1000 years ago, with characters who leap off the page and feel entirely recognizable. Finally, Roy Jacobsen's The Unseen is the first book of four about people living impossibly difficult lives on tiny islands off the coast of Norway. It's Nordic noir without even trying to be; I've only read the first in the series but found it absolutely compelling.

The year began with Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, which is a book that should be on every serious reader's shelf and taken down several times as we go through life, because with each reading, it reveals something new to you about yourself. I was very happy to read it with the book group; I think we all got more out of it than we would have alone.

Teju Cole's Black Paper is a collection of essays not just about race, but about the dark side of human nature as well as the forces of beauty that are its counterpoint, and most employ his signature style of interweaving seemingly-unrelated ideas or subjects to give a new perspective. Golden Apple of the Sun combines a series of photographs of his kitchen countertop during the pandemic with a concluding essay that is a searing indictment of racism from the early days of American colonial history. Fernweh, on the other hand, is a book of carefully-sequenced photographs taken in Switzerland that has been a consolation to me this year, not because they are pretty or conventional pictures, but because in depicting a place that at once feels closed but seductive, both artificial and natural, beyond-human and yet curated and manufactured, it somehow evoked the strangeness and alienation of the world in which we've found ourselves, but lands squarely on the side of beauty, offering a space in which to breathe. It has stayed on my bedside table since the day it arrived.

A confession: I started with the intention of reading all of Dante's The Divine Comedy, but found Inferno hard going: it's because the year itself was just too depressing to spend more of it in a fictional or imagined hell! On the other hand, I thought that Hermann Broch's The Death of Virgil was one of the most brilliantly-written books I've ever read. It's not well known, and it's written in a daunting stream-of-consciousness style with page-long sentences and few paragraph breaks, to which you simply have to surrender, allowing yourself to be swept along. The reward is that if you stay with it, your view of what it might mean to meet one's impending death, as a literate and conscious person, will be enlarged and changed.

Finally, I was surprised to find myself enchanted and then almost obsessed by Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game. I had read almost all of Hesse's other works, but not this one, his last major novel, which sets up a hypothetical world in the future where education and culture are preserved and controlled by an elite group of celibate, secular, male intellectuals who live in near-monastic remove from the "real world" of ordinary people. The high achievers of this elite society became Masters of the "Glass Bead Game", a never-fully-described exercise in which participants make connections between disparate aspects of cultural artifacts or knowledge, such as relating a law of physics and a Bach sonata. The book provoked a great deal of thought about contemporary academia and tensions between the life of the mind and "real" everyday life in the world; European intellectual life prior to WWII; the preservation of human culture; relationships between men and women; and the interplay (or lack thereof) between political history and cultural/scientific achievement. If you didn't read it back in the 1960s, take a look now! To whet your appetite, I'll include, at the end of this post, my somewhat lame but colorful response to our group leader's challenge to create a mini "glass bead game" ourselves.

Happy reading in 2022, and, as always, please let us know in the comments what YOU read in 2021 and what books were highlights for you! I look forward to hearing from you.

 

2021

We Are All Equally Far From Love, Adania Shibli

The Unseen, Roy Jacobsen

Arturo's Island, Elsa Morante #

Dubliners, James Joyce (excerpts)

Shifting the Silence, Etel Adnan

Time, Etal Adnan

Black Paper, Teju Cole

The Glass Bead Game, Hermann Hesse#

Beowulf, Seamus Heaney, trans.#

Anil's Ghost, Michael Ondaatje#

Unwinding Anxiety, Judson Brewer

Real Presences, George Steiner

The Lowlands, Jhumpa Lahiri

Golden Apple of the Sun, Teju Cole

Fernweh, Teju Cole

The Laexdal Saga (from Sagas of Icelanders)#

The Interior Circuit, Francisco Goldman

The Little Red Chairs, Edna O'Brien

Under the Glacier, Haldor Laxness #

Clive Hicks-Jenkins, a monograph by various authors

The Hostage, Brendan Behan

Milkman, Anna Burns#

The Divine Comedy: Inferno, Dante

Faithful and Virtuous Night, Louise Gluck

O Pioneers, Willa Cather #

Girl, Woman, Other, Bernadine Evaristo

Death Comes for the Archbishop, Willa Cather

The Noise of Time, Julian Barnes

Agamemnon, Aeschylus #

The Death of Virgil, Hermann Broch

Travels with Epicurus, Daniel M. Klein

The Return, Hisham Matar

A Month in Siena, Hisham Matar

Breasts and Eggs, Mieko Kawakami

The Lying Life of Adults, Elena Ferrante

Maps for Migrants and Ghosts, Luisa A. Igloria

The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky #

# indicates a book read with my book group. Stats:  37 books total; 14 by women, 23 by men, vast majority read as e-books. 20 of these books were written originally in English, 17 read in translation.

 

 

Hermit Diary 58. My Companions the Books

Today, I learn, is #WorldBookDay. Who makes up these things? (And immediately hear a response in my head: "Publishers like you!") Be that as it may, in my life, every day is book day, and it's been so practically ever since I can remember. Last week the members of my book group started talking about when we had begun to be readers, and what form it took for each of us. We told stories about the books in our homes, local libraries in the small towns many of us had grown up in, how reading early made problems for us in school, happy hours spent reading in treehouses, or curled up on couches on rainy days, what those favorite books were and how they shaped us as the readers we are today. I've never been a solitary introvert, but I was definitely a bookworm whose parents often told me, "Come on, get your nose out of that book, and go outside!" This was a somewhat half-hearted admonition from my mother, who was pretty much of a bookworm herself. As an only child, I was alone a lot, and books always felt like my friends as well as boats and planes and magic carpets on which I could travel to other places and times.

Exactly one year ago today, Jonathan and I made a decision at 5:00 in the morning, half an hour before calling a taxi, to cancel our planned trip to Mexico City because a pandemic looked like it was actually going to happen. We figured we could get down there all right, but coming back on March 20 might not be easy, or safe. A number of people thought we were being over-cautious, but it proved to be the right decision. During this long year, one that I don't think any of us will be able to truly process until much more time has passed, life has changed a lot. In addition to the good developments, like becoming proficient at Zoom and finding new friends, communities, and artistic outlets through that medium, we've stopped seeing family and friends, moving freely from place to place even within the city, having a studio, singing with my choir and going to the cathedral, shopping in stores, having routine medical appointments or getting our hair cut, going to any kind of in-person event, or even having normal visits with our neighbors. Montreal has been hit very hard, and people over 65 have been asked, and at times required, to stay in their homes. Thank God none of us knew it would be this bad, or go on this long, or I think we would have been even more despairing. Although it's been a very hard year for us in a number of ways, I feel incredibly lucky that we're still here, and we have appointments for our first vaccinations next week. I'm immeasurably grateful to the scientists who have developed these life-saving, world-saving vaccines in record time. I just wish that they would be available equally and fairly to all human beings -- but, as this year has also shown, inequality and injustice are concentrated in minority populations, and there is no vaccine for that: we ourselves are the only solution.

Fortunately, during this time I've had three steady companions: my husband, my cat, and books. As always, books have transported me to other places and allowed me to glimpse other lives, and that has been both a saving grace and at times uncomfortable, as it should be. Walking with James Baldwin, Ibrahm X. Kendi, Toni Morrison or Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie have forced me to confront realities and histories that have not been my own. While I've already read a lot of Haruki Murakami and his rather peculiar world of male-female relationships, the experience of reading a previous generation of Japanese writers like Yukio Mishima and Yasunari Kawabata is disconcerting in a different way. They speak of a world where women's and men's lives were markedly stylized and fixed, often to the great detriment of women, but there is little sense of happiness or fulfillment on anyone's part. I've gone on this year to read some contemporary Japanese female authors like Banana Yoshimoto and, most recently, Mieko Kawakami, whose Breasts and Eggs depicts in graphic detail the lives and preoccupations of non-wealthy Japanese women seeking self-fulfillment in a rough life, mostly without men at all. Roberto Bolano's 2666 is a literary exploit that took me from academic literary Europe to the horrific world of Mexican drug cartels -- an undercurrent we have always felt and guarded against during our tips to Mexico City, but never experienced directly. Then there was the pre-revolutionary Russia of Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamzov, where a sense of social morality and ethics based on tradition, culture and religion clashed with "new" nihilistic, atheistic ideologies espoused by young thinkers influenced by Europe, who insisted that free will is all, and "everything is permitted." The book list has been long and challenging, and probably isn't most peoples idea of escapist, but it's been a big part of what's kept me going while living in a two-room apartment, especially through this long winter.

Right now I'm re-reading Aeschylus' Agamemnon, written in the 5th century BC, which reminds me of how little human beings have actually changed. The immediacy and familiarity of the characters and their thought and language goes a long ways toward erasing the cultural and historical differences between us and 2500 years ago; it's what drew me with amazement to those myths and stories when I was young, and then to the original works of literature. Agamemnon was written when Athenian democracy was just beginning, and its author was critical of government and especially of tyrants who fought wars that cost thousands of lives -- he himself had fought at the famous battle of Marathon during the Persian Wars. Athenians were preoccupied with the questions of justice, the rule of law, and free will in a society where the tyrant and the fear of his wrath had been removed: a new form of justice had to be created and agreed upon by its members. At the time of Aeschylus, most people still believed in fate being determined by the will of the gods, and that the sins of the father were often visited through subsequent generations, but as the Greek plays and Athenian democracy evolved in the next hundred years, we see a change away from this sense of fate and divine retribution to a greater exercise of free will and human choice, and how that is reflected in the government.

Fast-forward to Russia in the waning years of the Tsar; and further still to our own time when large swaths of society believe that individual freedom is more important than the collective good. These seem to be fundamental human tensions, with which we still struggle, along with the fact that justice is never equally applied. Thinking these questions through and acting on them are a lifetime's work, and for me, that task is helped by reading what humans have written not just in our own time, but throughout the millennia. While justice struggles to advance and our understanding of difference is greatly enhanced and shaped by contemporary writing, the best and the worst aspects of human behavior have always existed; we are neither unique nor isolated from the past, and, frankly, we believe so at our peril -- as books and their authors have always tried to tell us.

Hermit Diary 51. Books of 2020

Roberto Bolaño and Fyodor Dostoevsky

 

Books of 2020 (list at the end of this post)

Books have been my salvation during the months of isolation. I know many people have said they've had trouble concentrating on reading, but my situation has been the opposite: for me it's been a deep dive. One thing that's helped is an online book club of far-flung friends which grew out of a desire of a friend for companionship reading Murakami's IQ84 during the early days of the pandemic. Sadly, that friend decided they didn't really enjoy reading with a larger group, but some of the people stayed on with me and we've formed a cohesive and congenial group. We've mostly been reading long, challenging books together that we might not have read alone, and meeting each week via Zoom for a discussion -- and it's been great. The other reading group of which I've been a part for several years has not met regularly, so there's been a shift, but it was with that group that I read Beloved and re-read Americanah in the early part of the year.

The #1 standout of the year for me was Roberto Bolaño 's 2666, a huge, challenging, harrowing, and brilliant book I had been afraid to read on my own, but which we tackled together in the new group after completing IQ84. I am so grateful now for having read it -- it's one of those books that changes you forever, both as a reader and as a human being. I've long admired Bolaño 's writing, and completed Savage Detectives and several of his shorter novels in previous years. But 2666 is both masterwork and monster-work -- the great unwieldy sort of literature Bolaño himself said was the only literature worth giving one's life to -- that grapples with the most important themes and questions that confront human lives. A work in five parts, each one a "book" on its own, but related, it is perhaps unfinished - other fragments were found in Bolaño 's papers after his early death - but he raced to complete these parts before succumbing to his illness, and the result feels complete while leaving many questions for the reader unanswered -- which could also have been his intention.

We're currently reading The Brothers Karamazov, which is the other major fiction standout for me this year. Supposedly I read it years and years ago, but I barely remember it, so Dostoevsky's plot and characters are coming to me afresh and vivid. I'm in awe of what he attempted and accomplished, and sad about how slight, insubstantial and superficial most literature of today seems by comparison to either of these two books.

Having said that, I both enjoyed and cringed at Lisa Halliday's Asymmetry, her thinly-disguised autobiographical account of a young woman's affair with an aging writer who resembles Philip Roth, and very much liked Scorpionfish, by Natalie Bakopoulos, a novel about relationships and choices set in modern-day Athens and on one of the Greek islands. But though I've admired some other books by Rachel Cusk, I lost patience with her perturbed, blaming voice in Coventry.

My interest in Japanese literature has continued with contemporary works by Banana Yoshimoto and Yoko Tawada, tense re-readings of The Frolic of the Beasts by Yukio Mishima and Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata, and then Kawabata's new-to-me The Master of Go, which is actually non-fiction literary reportage of the highest order, about an epic, months-long final match between an elderly Go master and his young challenger who represents a new generation of players as well as customs. (If you enjoyed watching The Queen's Gambit, as I did, this book would make a very interesting counterpoint.)

Toni Morrison's Beloved, of course, is a work that ranks with the highest, and one that I was grateful to read even before Black Lives Matter became the major movement it did in 2020. I think I wrote admiringly in a previous year about Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Later this year I read James Baldwin's searing novel Giovanni's Room, and several non-fiction books about racism, all of which I recommend. I'm ashamed that I hadn't read Beloved or The Fire Next Time before now.

Three non-fiction books rise to the top of the list. One was Gathering Moss by Robin Wall Kimmerer, who brings both a botanist's and Native American's knowledge to one of the most fascinating natural history books I've ever read, and inspired me to rekindle my own interest in primitive plants, gather some moss and lichens of my own in the fall, and make two terrariums that are still doing very well in mid-winter here in my apartment. The other two are books about Greece by the great travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor, that were particularly meaningful to me because of having traveled in the same areas many decades after the books were written. Roumeli (1966) is about the disappearing tribes, villages, customs and linguistic complexities Fermor encountered in the north-central mainland, and Mani (1958) is about the fierce and independent people of the remote peninsula of the southern Peloponnese where Fermor eventually made his home, and where Jonathan and I traveled to consign the ashes of his mother to her beloved Mediterranean. Late in the year, I also read Fermor's memoir about three writing retreats in Orthodox monasteries, A Time for Silence.

In the Mani near Anatoliki. Pen-and-ink in my Greek sketchbook, 2019.

To my surprise, I felt lukewarm about Virginia Wolff's To the Lighthouse, and never finished The Voyage Out: I'm sorry but while appreciating her modernist approach to point-of-view and female perspective, I found them both tiresome, although I love her non-fiction and essays, and liked Mrs. Dalloway more than either of these novels. Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera was just as good as it had been the first time around.

I was impressed and riveted by David Foster Wallace's essay This is Water, and his long essay on Dostoevsky and his biographer Joseph Frank, and it made me think perhaps 2021 is the year to attempt Infinite Jest, and certainly to read his essays in Consider the Lobster, which concludes with the piece on Dostoevsky. I will leave you with a quote from Wallace's essay, with which Bolaño would almost certainly have agreed:

“The big thing that makes Dostoevsky invaluable for American readers and writers is that he appears to possess degrees of passion, conviction, and engagement with deep moral issues that we here, today, cannot or do not permit ourselves...

“It’s actually not true that our literary culture is nihilistic… For there are certain tendencies we believe are bad, qualities we hate and fear. Among these are sentimentality, naïveté, archaism, fanaticism. It would probably be better to call our own art’s culture now one of congenital skepticism. Our intelligentsia distrust strong belief, open conviction. Material possession is one thing, but ideological passion disgusts us on some deep level.”

Will the pandemic and the paroxysms of political tensions and change finally alter this fact about modern American literature? Perhaps 2021 will be too soon to tell, but I eagerly wait to see.

And, last but not least: what have you read in 2020, and has it been easier or harder than usual? Please send me your lists! Here's mine:

** are this year's standouts; *books I liked a lot but not in the top tier; # books read with my book club

 A Legacy of Spies, John le Carré (in process)

**Gathering Moss, Robin Wall Kimmerer

**The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky # (in process)

A Time for Silence, Patrick Leigh Fermor

Make Ink, Jason Logan

The Road to Santiago, Cees Nooteboom (in process)

Inés of My Soul, Isabel Allende (dnf)

Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez # (rereading)

*Scorpionfish, Natalie Bakopoulos

The Voyage Out, Virginia Woolf (dnf)

To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf #

Asymmetry, Lisa Halliday

The Emissary, Yoko Tawada

This is Water, David Foster Wallace

**2666, Roberto Bolaño #

The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin

The Four, Scott Galloway

False Spring, Darren Bifford

How to be an Antiracist, Ibram X. Kendi

Moonlight Shadow, Banana Yoshimoto

Kitchen, Banana Yoshimoto

The Frolic of the Beasts, Yukio Mishima (rereading)

When Things Fall Apart, Pema Chodron (rereading)

*Snow Country, Yasunari Kawabata

**The Master of Go, Yasunari Kawabata

The Woman of Porto Pim, Antonio Tabucchi

*1Q84, Haruki Murakami (rereading) #

Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Stout

*Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie # (rereading)

Coventry, Rachel Cusk

**Roumeli, Patrick Leigh Fermor

The Writer and the World, V.S. Naipaul

*Giovanni's Room, James Baldwin

**Mani, Patrick Leigh Fermor

**Beloved, Toni Morrison #

Flights, Olga Tokarczuk

Normal People, Sally Rooney

Pond, Claire Louise Bennett

 

Hermit Diary, Montreal. 4: Shakespeare

                    But when the planets
in evil mixture to disorder wander,
What plagues and what portents, what mutiny,
What raging of the sea, shaking of earth.
Commotion in the winds, frights changes horrors,
Divert and crack, rend and deracinate
The unity and married calm of states
Quite from their fixure!

William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida

It's probably not surprising for me to turn to literature during times like this, as I search for historical patterns and the meanings that past writers have found in similar events. In The Atlantic, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, a professor of English at Linfield College, writes "Shakespeare wrote his best works during a plague:" an article about present and past theatre closures due to epidemics from bubonic plague to AIDS, and the dramatic literature that came out of those times.

Shakespeare's work is full of references to the plague, which took the lives of several of his young brothers and interrupted his own life several times. Productions had to be halted, theatres closed, and Shakespeare, as actor/producer, was left to go back to writing. In 1593, he wrote poetry during the closures, and in 1606, he wrote King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra. The plague also figures in a number of his plays. Here's a quote from Pollack-Pelzner:

"In Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, written just after the end of the 1593 outbreak, the friar who’s supposed to tell Romeo that Juliet is only pretending to be dead gets prevented from delivering his message because he’s quarantined with a fellow priest who’s been helping the sick: “The searchers of the town, / Suspecting that we both were in a house / Where the infectious pestilence did reign, / Sealed up the doors and would not let us forth.” Romeo never gets the message, of course, and he kills himself before Juliet revives."

Shakespeare was just echoing prevailing beliefs when he blamed plagues and earthquakes and violent storms on "planets in disorder" or the wrath of God. I'm sure there are plenty of people who would still do that, if they couldn't conveniently blame this particular horror on "foreigners." What I noticed particularly in the quote from Troilus and Cressida was the wonderfully-stated and apt comment that these disasters "divert and crack, rend and deracinate/the unity and married calm of states" from what before felt firmly fixed -- just as we now witness the world's most successful economies, and supposedly top-drawer health care systems, cracking apart and tearing up the roots of the seemingly-solid states themselves. What is new to us was not new at all to a keen observer like Shakespeare, who never stopped at the event itself, but sought to look underneath and behind and beside it, as well as having his characters predict possible futures that could result.

In watching Trump's pathetic, deluded performance during this crisis, it seems as if we're seeing a drama unfold in the same proportions as some of Shakespeare's history plays or his immortal tragedies: a tragedy that will go down through the ages in history and in literature. The king blusters and blasts and blames through the first act; in the second he concocts fantastic schemes; but by the third, he's relegated to one side of the stage, where he sits, defiant, his jaw set, having lost every shred of our sympathy, while the disaster he's failed to prevent swirls around him, his toady-ing ministers desert him, and once-minor characters begin to take the reins or emerge as heros.

What we can't see yet, of course, is how it all ends.

"Woe to that land that's govern'd by a child!
All may be well. But if God sort it so,
'Tis more than we deserve or I expect."

William Shakespeare, Richard III (II.3)

---

(Portrait drawing by me, in pencil, 3.5" x 5")

 

Books of 2019: eclectic as usual

Boxing Day. Traditionally, this has been a day of curling up on the couch with a new Christmas book, but for the first time I can remember, I didn't receive a single one! I wonder if this is a trend among readers of this blog too. We don't buy or receive as many physical books, and maybe our friends and families are less likely to give them to us. I wonder, and, as a publisher, I worry. No matter -- trends haven't affected my reading patterns very much, except for the change to reading e-books borrowed from the Overdrive service at my library, or purchased on Kindle. I read almost exclusively on my phone, unless I've borrowed a physical book from the library. And though I did buy myself a couple of books about Greece that haven't arrived yet, I'm trying not to acquire too many these days -- the shelves are already overburdened. But read, I do.

I don't have a great deal to say about the books I read this year... there's a definite focus on Portuguese literature, because of traveling there and trying to write about it subsequently (a still-unfinished project). As usual, there are some classics from both ancient literature and the 19th and 20th centuries. After a debate with a friend about "the greatest novels" I decided to reread some of the candidates. Middlemarch was a first-timer for me, and I liked it. War and Peace was a re-reading, but while I had remembered the characters and basic plot, the book affected and impressed me much more now than when I read it before as a much younger person with so much less experience of life -- I think it deserves its status as one of the greatest novels ever written. I finally made it through Ulysses a few years ago, and don't plan to re-read The Brothers Karmazov, Anna Karenina, or Madame Bovary any time soon; other candidates are lined up for re-reading next year: The Magic Mountain, Moby Dick, The Sound and the Fury. But I find I'm more interested in continuing to read books in translation from world literatures that are less known to me. In addition to War and Peace, the "biggest read" was Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet, about the city where my mother-in-law spent her youth after leaving Armenia -- a city whose history is virtually disappearing.

Particular favorites this year were Compass by Mathias Enard, and two books by friends: Immigrant, Montana, by Amitava Kumar, and Human Archipelago, by Fazal Skeikh and Teju Cole. Among the Lisbon books, I especially loved For Isabel: A Mandala, and Requiem: An Hallucination, both by Antonio Tabucchi, and A History of the Siege of Lisbon, by Jose Saramago. Helen Vendler's Seamus Heaney is brilliant and illuminating. I didn't think Pachinko was incredibly well-written, but it was such a great window into a diaspora I knew little about (Koreans living in Japan). Likewise, there's always a Murakami on my list: I liked Killing Commendatore a lot, but didn't think it was in the same league as, say, 1Q84. The Frolic of the Beasts, by Yukio Mishima, is an excellent, extremely disturbing novel by the great Japanese writer.

It might be worth mentioning (since I don't think I have before) that I also regularly read and highly recommend the Canadian (but international) literary magazine Brick. I'd love to have a piece in there someday -- I came close with one this year, according to a kind letter I received from one of their editors, and will try to submit something again in 2020.

Right now I've started Flights by Olga Tokarczuk -- original, unsettling and intriguing so far. I enjoyed Greek to Me, a love letter to Greece and the Greek language by New Yorker copy editor Mary Norris, especially because since our recent trip I've been studying modern Greek - half an hour each morning, along with half an hour of French in the afternoon. In her book, Norris mentions visiting the home of the late great travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor in Kardamyli, Greece, on the Mani peninsula. We were nearby and fascinated by the stoic ruggedness and remoteness of that region, so I've ordered a couple of Fermor's books -- one about the Mani, and the other about northern Greece -- so that will be how 2020 is likely to start out.

Finally, it was a great pleasure to hear and meet one of my literary heroes, Michael Ondaatje, this year at a reading he gave in Montreal.

What about you? Please share your favorites, or entire book list if you keep one, in the comments! I always love hearing from fellow readers at this time of year, and wish you all a happy year of reading ahead!

 

Book List, 2019

Drink Time! In the Company of Patrick Leigh Fermor, Dolores Payás

Greek to Me, Mary Norris

Electric Light, Seamus Heaney

The History of the Siege of Lisbon, Jose Saramago

The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, Jose Saramago (rereading)

The Man Who Loved China, Simon Winchester (audiobook, dnf)

For Isabel: A Mandala, Antonio Tabucchi

The Lives of Things, Jose Saramago

Helen, Euripedes

The Women of Troy, Euripedes

Ion, Euripedes

Falling Upward, Richard Rohr

The Proper Study of Mankind, Isaiah Berlin (bits and pieces, mainly the essay on Tolstoy "The Hedgehog and the Fox")

War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy (rereading)

Human Archipelago, Fazal Skeikh and Teju Cole

Middlemarch, George Eliot

Pachinko, Min Jin Lee

The Frolic of the Beasts, Yukio Mishima

O Sing Unto the Lord: A History of English Church Music, Andrew Gant

4 3 2 1, Paul Auster (DNF)

Pereira Maintains, Antonio Tabucchi

Warlight, Michael Ondaatje (second reading, for book club)

Requiem: an Hallucination, Antonio Tabucchi

What is Not Yours is Not Yours, Helen Oyeyemi

The Tiny Journalist, Naomi Shihab Nye

The Lisbon Poets (anthology)

Five-Minute Sketching: Architecture, Liz Steel

The Book of the Red King, Marly Youmans

Seamus Heaney, Helen Vendler

The Alexandria Quartet, Lawrence Durrell (3rd and 4th books, Mountolive, Clea)

Killing Commendatore, Haruki Murakami

The Alexandria Quartet, Lawrence Durrell (First two books: Justine, Balthazar)

The Relic Master, Christopher Buckley (DNF)

Immigrant, Montana, Amitava Kumar

Compass, Mathias Enard

In Memoriam

Photographer Robert Frank died yesterday at the age of 94.

Jennifer Lewis, artist, photographer, ceramicist, and one of our closest lifelong friends, died a year ago this week, at the age of 68; the day the photograph above was taken, we were together at the 2008 Robert Frank show at MoMA, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the publication of Franks' masterpiece, The Americans.

Aaron Moore, historian, professor, and husband of my dear friend Nilanjana Bhattacharjya, died on Sunday at the age of 47 -- just half that of Robert Frank.

I have no way to make sense of the unfairness of life, the time we're each allotted, or the way each of us meets our fate. What I do know is that each of these people used the time they had to be creative, to be productive and engaged, to connect with others, to try to make a difference, and to be courageous. Each of them touched me, in quite different ways, and I will always be aware of them and remember them.

Jonathan and Jenny looking at Robert Frank's contact sheets, New York City, 2008.

--

It's September 11th, a day of remembrance that goes beyond any one person. That morning, Jennifer called us in Vermont, from her roof in lower Manhattan: we were on the phone with her when the second plane hit the tower.

And on this day, I think, too, of what Robert Frank photographed in his iconic book, The Americans. Like Dave Heath, whose photographs we saw earlier this summer at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, like Jack Kerouac and Alan Ginsberg, all of whom knew each other, Frank was trying to express something tragic and destructive that he sensed at the heart of American life in the 1950s and early 60s -- something that would explode into violence later in the 1960s, and has never been resolved. Frank showed us America's racism, economic inequality and insensitivity, its feel-good culture, and above all, its denial. Now, much of the divisive toxicity that became an undercurrent after the 60s has been allowed, and encouraged, to boil over and come to the surface. So I think a post entitled In Memoriam today is also a requiem for an idea of America that is dying, and must die eventually -- but how long that will take, and at what cost, none of us can predict.

 

The Book of the Red King

I hope that readers of this blog will want to know about this beautiful new book of poems, written by Marly Youmans, illustrated by Clive Hicks-Jenkins, and designed and published by me. It's available as a hardcover with linen covered covers and a printed dust-jacket, and a paperback, and the pre-order pricing extends until this Friday, July 19th. All the ordering information and full book information is on the Phoenicia website.

"For those who love well-formed poems and for those who love fantasy, this is a must-read and a distinctive, evocative voice. There is no one like Marly Youmans." --Kim Bridgford 

"The reader will be spellbound." --Kelly Cherry

"It is the territory of Yeats and Tolkien." -- A.M. Juster

A short book description:

From Marly Youmans, author of the epic poem Thaliad (Phoenicia, 2012) comes the story of the mysterious Red King, the metamorphosing Fool, and the ethereal Precious Wentletrap, told in a series of connected poems of rare beauty. Whether read as fantasy, symbolic story, or simply poetry, the world Marly has created is a spellbinding place where we can glimpse truths about our own lives, and the world. The Book of the Red King is illustrated with drawings by the acclaimed Welsh artist Clive Hicks-Jenkins.