This is the year in which I read too little of contemporary books, even if I bought some 30 or so books, mostly published this year! But in between heavy travels, and a new job that demands my attention like a thrift collector, I found a few. The travel itself brought me in contact with Simon Sylvester’s The Visitors. It is a wonderful book that tells the story of a strange, quiet town in Scotland being transformed by the incursion of “strangers.” It is rare that a novel mines this level of landscape awareness, or that a novel push you to feel the air of an unknown land blowing at you from reading about it on paper. I visited Scotland for the first time this year, but this book imprinted more than my eyes saw of that wonderful nation during my trip there. The Visitors appears in America next year, and I can’t wait to begin crowing more about it.
I read through The Jewish War by the early-century historian, Flavius Josephus. It is a remarkable attempt to portray Jewish history through a secular lens much different than from that contained in the Torah and the Bible.
The howling masterpiece of 2015 must surely be Eka Kurniawan’s Beauty Is a Wound. It is — I mean it — a howl, an outrage, and a sheer burst of particular talent. It is the kind of thing you want fiction to do, and the kind of thing you want to imagine it is doing. It tells the story of a woman who returns from the dead after having birthed a “shirt-like” human being who is uber-ironically named “Beauty.” Kuniarwan sharpens the story of Indonesia with an energy that is rare. An earth-shattering review in Publishers Weekly in June first brought it to my attention, then in October, my agent signed him, and in November I met him in Indonesia.
Just last week, I read Make Your Home Among Strangers by my friend Jennine Capó Crucet, and it struck a chord with me. As a friend, I went into the book with a thicker skin, but it is a genuine, heartfelt portrait of a young woman striving to plant her feet firmly in the soil of an adopted country. It is believable, intriguing, and bright.
More from A Year in Reading 2015
Don’t miss: A Year in Reading 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005
The good stuff: The Millions’ Notable articles
The motherlode: The Millions’ Books and Reviews
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I most enjoyed Barbara Pym’s A Glass of Blessings, which I only just discovered this year. Pym is funny and witty, brilliant at portraying the middle class English of the 1950s, and in particular she does the ‘psychology of femaleness’ very well.
I love the whole “prim but subversive” canon. Claire Messud’s character in “The Woman Upstairs” is a type of “crazy cousin locked up in the attic” to the more well-behaved Pym characters. Their spiritual godmother is Jane Austen.
When I think of the writing of Mailer and Hemingway, I imagine a big noisy, farting guy wrestling, drinking, wenching, and bullfighting his way through the page, with an army of quiet Pym characters bringing up the rear, wiping up the piss, blood and sweat with a sturdy cloth and ammonia cleanser, a silent universe of observation seething in their brains. Their presence is at the periphery of the page and their quietness belies what my be waiting there in the wings.
I have sensed that same peripheral lurking in the corners of paintings of 17th Century manor houses in western County Cork in Ireland, full of dappled sunlight and green meadows. Hunting parties gallop along through the woods, masters of their domain. You might spy a picturesque garden boy in the background, making hay. He might be my great, great great grandfather, who would happily throw a very large rock at any of them within reach if he could get away with it. His descendants would then ultimately successfully oust them all and form a republic.
It’s all in the perspective!
Prim but subversive struck a chord here too. Also comment above re: Austen. And what goes on just beyond the frame….
Interesting, the write up is full of perfect rhetorism that stimulates the reader’s ego to change the reading gear forward, keep it up its a nice piece!
Hi Evelyn Walsh!
Are you the same person who published “Birthday Girl’ in Narratives? Glad to see another “chord” being struck. :)
Moe Murph
(Rough Week At Work — Subversion Unfortunately Limited To Slamming Door To Stall In Ladies Room In Especially Energetic Manner)