Padgett Powell’s The Interrogative Mood is a supreme literary stunt: a short “novel” composed only of questions, each of which seems to implicate the reader in a narrative conspiracy as serious and absurd as his or her own life. Ultimately, Powell’s little book can be seen word-machine designed to induce unprecedented states of interior monologue, or narrative drug.
A Year in Reading: Jonathan Lethem
A Year in Reading: Kevin Young
Both these books make us rethink these women writers and restore them to the center of our cultural conversation.
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A Year in Reading: Jason Diamond (Flavorwire)
Both James Wood and Wayne Koestenbaum continue to be in leagues of their own.
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A Year in Reading: Jean-Christophe Valtat
The best things I read this year have not yet been translated into English. One was Il tempo materiale, by Giorgio Vasta. First published in 2010 in Italy, Il tempo materiale tells the story of Sicilian schoolkids in the late 70s, who, fascinated by the Red Brigades’ rhetoric, take it as a guideline for their everyday lives. Taking their cues from pop culture icons and radical politics, they redefine their relationships – to the world, to themselves – through their own ridiculous sign language and absurd felonies, in a way that becomes increasingly catastrophic.
As such, it could sound a little moralistic, if it were not for the depth and the tense weirdness of the writing. Taking the point of view of a gifted but slightly oddball child with a taste for precise and strange sensations (he spends some of his time licking the tv screen) and a curious use of words (he nicknames his family members the Thread, the Stone, or the Cotton), the novel quickly becomes a quirky and often comical inquiry about the ways language authorizes or forbids access to reality, especially when you’re a young adolescent in love with a mute girl.
It has one of the most uncanny first paragraphs ever and the last pages are just amazing for their cosmic ambition.
But let’s face it – when it comes to Literature with a big gothic L, the Germans are the best. And if you do not mind that your reading comes along with a little mud-wrestling, then Perrudja is the book for you.
Written in the late 20s by cult-writer-without-a-cult Hans-Henny Jahnn (musician, architect, guru of an androgynous colony of artists, and a total maverick of the mind), this book is just how I like them – able to turn my brain inside out. Imagine Ibsen’s Peer Gynt rewritten four-handedly by a bisexual Joyce and a mystical Musil, and you’re about halfway there.
Telling the improbable experiences of an immensely rich man living in the wild Norwegian forest, it is a series of baffling paradoxes: a realistic description of Norwegian rural life but for pure expressionist purposes; characters chiseled out from the monolith of myth and yet affected with all the symptoms of the most fastidious modernist psychology; a sublime depiction of nature in his most crude, even gross aspects, but with a fascination for an extremely refined culture; a study of global techno-capitalism, but steeped in the memory of golden age utopias. It is wildly barbaric and incredibly sophisticated, incarnate and abstract, meticulous and yet exuberant – and all in a single sentence.
Reading it sometimes feels a bit like being sewn in sackcloth, clubbed and thrown down in a mountain torrent – but a very powerful and often beautiful one. Readers beware: other book may pale by comparison – and writers, be warned that this can be a humbling experience.
More from A Year in Reading 2011
Don’t miss: A Year in Reading 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005
The good stuff: The Millions’ Notable articles
The motherlode: The Millions’ Books and Reviews
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A Year in Reading: Edan Lepucki
I read so many great books this year, from Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, which hijacked my life for two weeks with its absorbing story of an orphan, his grief, and that stolen painting, to Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings (reviewed here), which I still sigh over lovingly each time I pass it on the bookshelf.
However, two books stood above the rest in 2013, one a novel and the other a work of nonfiction…
It doesn’t matter that I attended public school (L.A. Unified in the house!) whereas Matthew Specktor went to one of the best private schools in Southern California. Or that his dad is a legendary Hollywood agent, while mine works below the line as a location manager. Or that he was a boy in L.A., probably burning bugs with a microscope, or whatever boys do, and I was a girl, filming fashion shows with my sisters in the living room, getting my ears pierced on Melrose. None of these piddling distinctions mattered when I read Specktor’s brilliant and ambitious novel, American Dream Machine, which waxes poetic about the Hamburger Hamlet on Sunset (R.I.P.!) and Damiano’s, the cave-like pizzeria on Fairfax, and which comes out swinging with descriptions like this one: “And eventually the whole hill flattened out into that ash-colored plane, that grand and gray infinity that is Los Angeles from above: God’s palm, checkered with twinkling lights and crossed with hot wind.” My city, its ash-colored plane! There it is! Specktor’s gorgeous book, about the flawed, chauvinist, talented film agent Beau Rosenwald, as tender as he is damaged, made me feel like my native city had been properly seen. It made me feel like a piece of fiction had finally and properly seen me. And if you’ve never even been to Los Angeles? No matter. Specktor’s prose alone is enough to lure you in: it’s sharply observed and nimble, like a more mischievous cousin of John Cheever, and his characters are wonderfully and deeply complicated, wounded and secretive. American Dream Machine is narrated by Beau’s illegitimate son, Nate, and the sprawling first person omniscience (first person omniscience!) is what I keep coming back to, months later, to puzzle over and admire. How did Specktor do it? He’s a magician, I tell you.
If I see you at a holiday party this December, I will corner you at the punch bowl and talk your ear off about Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity by Andrew Solomon, which resonated with me not only as a mother and as a daughter, but as a human being on this big messy planet of human beings. It’s page-turning nonfiction in the tradition of Random Family by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc and Columbine by Dave Cullen, a genre I love but don’t read enough of. Solomon spent years researching this book, and he interviewed many, many parents with children who are different from them; the book includes chapters about the deaf, the autistic, the schizophrenic, geniuses, and so on. Solomon depicts these communities with respect and compassion, and he consistently raises meaningful questions about tolerance and empathy. Solomon’s book pushed me to investigate my own notions of normalcy, and I came away grateful to my own parents, for letting me become who I needed to become. This book is a masterpiece! And, hey, here, let me ladle you some punch, that’s a nice sweater, etc.
More from A Year in Reading 2013
Don’t miss: A Year in Reading 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005
The good stuff: The Millions’ Notable articles
The motherlode: The Millions’ Books and Reviews
Like what you see? Learn about 5 insanely easy ways to Support The Millions, and follow The Millions on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr.
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A Year in Reading: Jesse Ball
There's a lot of posturing about contemporary writing, but the truth is -- most of it isn't any good. That's where Robert Walser comes in, from the first quarter of the last century, riding the wagon from his Swiss sanatorium.
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