Inevitably this year, as every year, when the darkness creeps in on both sides of the day and the snow begins to fall and remain, I become newly aware of the weight of unread books in my vicinity: the pile on my desk growing, having spread to the table beside my desk, multiplied into stacks on the window ledge and the chest of drawers, and eventually creeping out into the hallway. They’re in a holding pattern, beckoning to be read before being returned to the shelves.
Collecting and its relationship to hoarding and of both to loss, is the subject of a wonderful, rambling essay by Douglas Coupland in e-flux, which touches on collecting across varied art forms. He writes about how the acquisition of objects fills an emptiness, a longing. This is true for my desire for books, as I imagine it is for many of you. And it’s many other wondrous things too, but come December the growing stacks become a commentary on the passage of time; the awareness of another cycle passing and outpacing me. Soon with the new year, these shortcomings will be transformed into new resolve and focus, the possibility of remaining abreast. But for now I hunger for these books to devour me too.
Which isn’t to say I haven’t read and adored a number of books, this year. I have. The books that stayed with me seem so intrinsically entangled with these ideas of time’s passage, of regret, of collecting and fracturing narratives, of the need to live through art and the desire be devoured by it.
A heightened awareness of the passage of time and to the arc of a life carries Jenny Erpenbeck’s elegant and gorgeously observed The End of Days. The protagonist dies within the first pages as a baby, her parents filled with regrets, with could’ves and should’ves. The narrator is resurrected again and again, and so she dies again and again, too, the cycle of loss never-ending, and the characters always prisoners to time. It’s a novel too of marveling at life’s ephemerality and the objects (the books!) that outlast; it’s filled with the wish to defy time, to reverse it, to manipulate the ways the unseen future slips into a past riddled with loss and regret.
Janice Lee’s Reconsolidation is an elegy for her mother, a laconic meditation in line with Roland Barthes’s Mourning Diary. Writing the book was a way of engaging with the obscene presence of her mother’s absence. And yet, as the book’s title suggests, there is a looming awareness and sadness that this act of conjuring only further distances and distorts her memories.
Included too is the soon-to-be published translation of Argentenian poet Alejandra Pizarnik’s Extracting the Stone of Madness, a bilingual collection of the poet’s middle to late work. Pizarinik died of a deliberate drug overdose at the age of 36. Her poems portend this with their gnawing desire for solitude and death and birthing poetic bodies. Her words and imagery conjure a terrifying beauty best described by Rainer Maria Rilke: “For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror which we are barely able to endure.”
Suzanne Scanlon’s Her 37th Year: An Index is an emphatic, fiery examination of female aging, art, longing, and desire. As she writes under the entry DISCOURSE: “I don’t want to write a mommy narrative or a menopause narrative. As Eileen Myles said, I want to…[be] punk about aging. I won’t fit into what is allowed.” And she doesn’t. The book confronts loneliness, infidelity, and boredom that intermingles with restlessness, depression, inquiry: “Does it mean that, like Fanny Howe, I believe that art must show that life is worth living by showing that it isn’t?” Scanlon retools the female narrative with language and observations that are at times piercing, and yet at others so tender. Consider JOY: “Four-year old musing & inquiry; for a moment I wish that Magoo would be four years old forever, that I might spend a life in this room…There are times it feels like Heaven, to have this life.”
On its surface Jesse Ball’s A Cure for Suicide is a tale about the relationship between two people, a claimant, who awakes with no memory, though is told he was sick and almost died, and an examiner, who teaches the claimant how to live in the world again. Their dialogue waxes philosophical, almost Socratic as they discuss the nature of being and interaction: what is an organism? what is a city? are twins different people? how to interact? Later we learn of a tender love story that ends with overwhelming loss and a potential cure, and asks the question, is it possible to start over?
Dodie Bellamy’s never-complacent essay collection, When the Sick Rule the World, contains her iconic essays “Barf Mainfesto” and “Phone Home,” which is where I first recall encountering her writing: a tender essay about dealing with the loss of her mother, the way they overcame differences and distances and how the movie E.T. became mythic within this context. Bellamy writes of her conflicted admiration for icon Kathy Acker, even after her death — “I didn’t touch the ashes. I didn’t want to and she wouldn’t have wanted me to” — and laments witnessing her San Francisco neighborhood’s gentrification. Also and significantly, too, she writes of her Midwestern roots and the burning desire for art that’s shaped her life: With her mother in the kitchen her father cussing and smoking, she with her notebooks and writing dreamed of escape: “hover[ing] above the world craneless, educated and beautiful, with a mind lofty and brilliant enough to defy.”
Paul Beatty’s The Sellout breaks the mold. It’s the most roiling, irreverent, and raucous ride of a novel, with blunt-toking Bonbon Me at the helm, child subject of his social scientist father’s racial experiments, and with his father’s death he takes over the family farm in the L.A. outpost of Dickens, Calif., (with hopes of catering to the new fad for ostrich meat). The book opens with Bonbon’s case being heard by the Supreme Court: he’s violated the 13th and 14th Amendments by reinstating segregation and by owning a slave, and why? Because he’s lost faith in the system and so he “did what worked.” The book blows up every black stereotype, leaving the detritus in his wake: Bonbon’s just trying to figure out who he is and how to be himself in a world that’s always trying to label him.
More from A Year in Reading 2015
Don’t miss: A Year in Reading 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005
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The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz: I wrestled a bit with putting this one on because he’s getting much respect from all over the place. But it’s well-deserved. This book sprawls, it brawls, it doesn’t apologize, it enlightens and delights. A welcome return from a major talent.
Halfway House by Katharine Noel: Remember not wanting to put a book down? Sometimes I forget the simple pleasure of a book that is so beautifully crafted, so alive, that I simply can’t do anything else until I’m done reading it. This first novel reminded me of what a great feeling that is. I loved it so much that I emailed the author – that’s when I know it’s love.
Call Me By Your Name by Andre Aciman: A really, really, really sexy book that is also an impressive work of literature. If you’ve ever been young and desperate to get your hands on the object of your desire (and lucky enough to find that he or she can’t keep his or her hands off of you either), you’ll vibe to this love story.
The Soul Thief by Charles Baxter. Full disclosure: I am lucky enough to count Charlie Baxter as a friend, which is how I came by an ARC of this novel, to be published by Pantheon in February 2008. But just ’cause he’s my bud doesn’t mean I don’t know a hell of a book when I read one. Both a meditation on identity and on the nature of love, The Soul Thief is sexy, funny, romantic (without being sentimental) and strange (in the best of ways). It’s both a return to Baxter’s deepest preoccupations as a writer and an exhilarating departure from them. We already know he’s one of our best fiction writers. Don’t miss this one when it comes out.
Surprising for her omission of "Man Gone Down" by Michael Thomas, probably my favorite novel of the year and one of the New York Times editors' 10 Best Books of 2007. Maybe she doesn't want to appear too biased because she mentioned it in her NY Times editorial last July.
In last week's review of Faint Praise by Gail Pool, James Wolcott quotes Pool on the positive influence that book reviewers can have: "Their commentary influences not only literary standards but also cultural attitudes, helping to shape what we think about many issues and whether we think about certain issues at all."
Man Gone Down received no publicity and was published only in paperback by Grove, so I think the NY Times editors made a good call in giving this book some well-deserved attention.
Ooh, I can't wait for that new Charles Baxter!
Man Gone Down is an extremely fine novel but it wasn't one of my *very* favorites that I read in 2007. As I made clear in my initial comments, I used my level of immediate personal excitement in making this very idiosyncratic short list. This is not the "best" of anything.
I'm a little disturbed by the use of the word "surprising" about its absence from my list for two reasons: first, because the piece I wrote for the NYTBR was a reported essay, not an editorial, in which I spoke to Morgan Entrekin, an editor from Grove (not Michael's editor) and made no particular mention of Man Gone Down except as a book they had published this year that was prominently reviewed in the NYTBR (which, as I pointed out, hadn't prominently reviewed a work of fiction by a black man in some time)
Two: I hope, hope, hope this isn't true and it may be a bit of the racial discomfort/paranoia that comes with being a black person in America but I really hope that the commenter isn't surprised I didn't mention Thomas because he and I are the same race. This crossed my mind because…well, why isn't it "surprising" that none of the other posters (none of whom are black) mentioned it. All of our lists are idiosyncratic and highly personal. It would really sadden me if race is expected, by anyone, to be part of my criteria. It certainly isn't part of the critieria if you're not black.
Regardless of what "Steve" intended with his comment, there is no paranoia in Martha's tentative response to his words. The fact remains that writers of color have been, and still are, marginalized and isolated into our own special sections of this literary world we work within and outside of. The mainstream voice of the dominant white male has begun to lose its edge in this diversifying world, and what can white writers do now but step into the world people of color inhabit, and how can they truly inhabit what isn't their world but in the one way they can, by creating and controlling the very forums we are allowed to speak in and through. Dave Eggers co-opted the story of a Sudanese man and called it an "autobiography" and failed to let this man's voice, his African voice, live through his own story. The fact that 100% of proceeds went to a non-profit seems to have dulled any real resistance to what Eggers actually has done in taking this story and this man's history and creating a "composite" and slapping the gimmicky "autobiography" title on the front and then letting his own imagination dictate what we know of this Sudanese man's story. Ask any African whether it is an African story and you will hear at best, confusion, and most likely a 'no', and therein lies the truth of what happened to this man's story.
Martha, your hesitation to see what this comment by Steve represents is commendable, but we write in a world that cannot seem to see us outside of race. This is why you will have readings given by so-called progressive hosts that pair African-American writers together when it would be more daring, more in tune with the world we all interact and live in, if different races and varied voices were allowed to live and breathe and expand in the same space.
I was once asked to take part in a reading organized by a writer who prided himself on his progressive politics. I found out he'd paired me with another African-American writer. (And it wasn't even Black History Month) I was unable to take part, it turned out, so declined the invitation. This host could not think outside the racially confining box he'd established for the night and asked ANOTHER African-American writer to read with the already scheduled headlining African-American writer. That second writer also respectfully declined. We will continue to be marginalized until we refuse to let our voices and words be co-opted and pigeonholed by the very same people who feel they're doing us a favor by giving us a forum. The fact is that after all these hip, gimmicky literary works have run their course, people, a la Eggers, will realize that they need to find a story to tell, that they've relied on slick mental somersaults and called it literature and they will look to us and our stories to give their words weight and heart, and my hope is that we will deny them this right to our stories and we will continue to fight for the right to speak and read alongside writers who balance and challenge and create a dialogue with our words, regardless of color.
Thanks Anonymous, for your support. I'm glad I said something. I appreciate your comments as well.