1.
Lars Iyer’s Wittgenstein Jr. is the only book I read twice this year. It took me much longer than usual to write the review, because I was afraid I wasn’t doing the book justice. It is an absolutely exquisite, elegant novel, with a cadence and rhythm all its own.
2.
I picked up the galley of Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things with low expectations, because it was just one of those random books that arrive on my doorstep every day and aliens and interstellar travel aren’t usually my thing, and found one of the best books I’ve ever read. It’s about a Christian missionary on an alien planet, and it’s a love story, and the last line destroyed me.
Some months later in London I was signing stacks of books in the basement of the wonderful Goldsboro Books, which specializes in signed first editions, when the proprietor wandered downstairs with the Goldsboro edition of The Book of Strange New Things, an exquisite object in white and gold. I am generally immune to the charms of signed first editions, but I ordered it when I returned to New York. A few weeks later, an editor in New York sent me a finished copy of the American version, and now the two hardcovers sit next to one another on my bookshelves, and usually I am ruthless about preserving bookshelf space, but it is impossible to dispose of either edition.
3.
Elena Mauli Shapiro’s second novel, In The Red, was left out in the rain by a UPS delivery guy. By the time it reached me it had turned into a swollen, rain-warped thing. I brought it indoors and let it dry for a few days before I read it.
Shapiro’s novel is spectacular. It’s a dark story about a bright young woman’s descent into a criminal underworld, realism interlaced with fairy tales. The protagonist is the kind of woman who we’re used to seeing as arm candy in gangster films, the kind of woman whose main jobs are to be beautiful and to not notice what’s going on around them.
The book is an expert meditation on money, morality, and belonging, and I found it mesmerizing. I tried to champion it on tour. That was the book I named when people asked what I’d read recently that I’d recommend, unless they asked about books that have science fictional overtones, in which case I went with the Michel Faber.
4.
The book I loved most this year was J.M. Ledgard’s Submergence. Without reservation, I would call Ledgard’s novel a masterpiece. It opens in Somalia, 2012, with a British spy imprisoned by jihadists in a windowless room. Far away, on a distant northern sea, a biomathematician is preparing to descend by submersible to the ocean floor; her area of expertise is the Hadal zone, which encompasses the very deepest parts of the ocean. The imprisoned man and the biomathematician met some months earlier, and are in love; they are hopelessly far apart, but their thoughts return to one another as they go about their days.
When you consider that the Hadal zone exists in trenches and was named for Hades, unexpected parallels between their situations begin to emerge. It’s a book about, well, submergence; a man sealed into a prison from which he might not emerge, a woman descending into the inhospitable dark.
More from A Year in Reading 2014
Don’t miss: A Year in Reading 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)