Many of the books I read this year were connected in one way or another to the horrors unfolding in Palestine. When details began to emerge of the torture and rape of Gaza prisoners at the Sde Teiman detention facility, I turned to Primo Levi’s Survival In Auschwitz for his devastating depiction of human cruelty and the logic of tyrannical rule. A book that could not be more different in tone but shares a similar anti-totalitarian spirit is the great Palestinian satirist Emile Habiby’s The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist, a long-delayed and deeply rewarding experience.
I also read the Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani’s All That’s Left to You, the Israeli writer S. Yizhar‘s novella on the 1948 war Khirbet Khizeh, Raja Shehadeh’s What Does Israel Fear From Palestine and We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I: A Palestinian Memoir, the great Israeli historian Avi Shlaim’s Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew, Leo Tolstoy’s short novel about collaboration and resistance Hadji Murad, and A Human Being Died That Night: A South African Woman Confronts the Legacy of Apartheid, which recounts the psychologist Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela’s interviews with Eugene De Kock, an assassin, torturer, and police colonel given the moniker Prime Evil.
No book left a deeper impression on me this year than Prophet Song, the gorgeous, incantatory, Booker Prize-winning novel by the Irish writer Paul Lynch. It is a story of parenthood and grief and love and pain, the story of every refugee, of every person who asks as the walls close in whether it is the right time to leave. “The end of the world is always a local event,” Lynch writes, “it comes to your country and visits your town and knocks on the door of your house and becomes to others but some distant warning, a brief report on the news, an echo of events that has passed into folklore.” I gave my copy to the Jewish Currents publisher Daniel May, who spent the next days cursing me for subjecting him to one of the most painful and powerful reading experiences of his life: “I had visions of the pages reaching up my chest and wrapping themselves in cords around my neck,” May writes in a beautiful piece in the Jewish Currents newsletter.
I was touched by the work of another supremely talented Irish writer, Claire Keegan, whose masterly, Booker Prize-shortlisted novella Small Things Like These is about a man forced to face his complicity in injustice. The only novel I have reread several times and plan to continue rereading for years to come is Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee, and I raced for his recent novella The Pole. On book tour in Germany, I subjected myself to the relentless cruelty depicted in Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos. I also chipped away at that towering pile of books I had long meant to read but had either never started or never finished: Russell Banks’s The Darling, Albert Camus’s The Stranger, Don Carpenter’s Hard Rain Falling, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Annie Ernaux’s A Woman’s Story, Michael Herr’s Dispatches, Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and Elizabeth Strout’s My Name is Lucy Barton. One book I was determined not to let onto that pile was the new novel by Hisham Matar, author of the achingly beautiful, Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir The Return and one of my favorite writers. Longlisted for this year’s Booker Prize and a finalist for the National Book Award, Matar’s My Friends is a profoundly moving, gracefully written tale of family, friendship, and exile.
Three superb works of nonfiction that I read in recent months were Åsne Seierstad’s One of Us: The Story of a Massacre in Norway — and Its Aftermath, Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, and Viet Thanh Nguyen’s A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial, a bold and original book that resonated with me not just as a writer engaged with questions of colonization and what Nguyen calls AMERICA™ but also as a child of an immigrant family in the Bay Area.
