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The Great Fall 2024 Book Preview
With the arrival of autumn comes a deluge of great books. Here you'll find a sampling of new and forthcoming titles that caught our eye here at The Millions, and that we think might catch yours, too. Some we’ve already perused in galley form; others we’re eager to devour based on their authors, plots, or subject matters. We hope your next fall read is among them.
—Sophia Stewart, editor
October
Season of the Swamp by Yuri Herrera, tr. Lisa Dillman [F]
What it is: An epic, speculative account of the 18 months that Benito Juárez spent in New Orleans in 1853-54, years before he became the first and only Indigenous president of Mexico.
Who it's for: Fans of speculative history; readers who appreciate the magic that swirls around any novel set in New Orleans. —Claire Kirch
The Black Utopians by Aaron Robertson [NF]
What it is: An exploration of Black Americans' pursuit and visions of utopia—both ideological and physical—that spans the Reconstruction era to the present day and combines history, memoir, and reportage.
Who it's for: Fans of Saidiya Hartman's Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments and Kristen R. Ghodsee's Everyday Utopia. —Sophia M. Stewart
The Third Realm by Karl Ove Knausgaard, tr. Martin Aitken [F]
What it is: The third installment in Knausgaard's Morning Star series, centered on the appearance of a mysterious new star in the skies above Norway.
Who it's for: Real Knausgaard heads only—The Wolves of Eternity and Morning Star are required reading for this one. —SMS
Brown Women Have Everything by Sayantani Dasgupta [NF]
What it is: Essays on the contradictions and complexities of life as an Indian woman in America, probing everything from hair to family to the joys of travel.
Who it's for: Readers of Durga Chew-Bose, Erika L. Sánchez, and Tajja Isen. —SMS
The Plot Against Native America by Bill Vaughn [F]
What it is: The first narrative history of Native American boarding schools— which aimed "civilize" Indigenous children by violently severing them from their culture— and their enduring, horrifying legacy.
Who it's for: Readers of Ned Blackhawk and Kathleen DuVal. —SMS
The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich [F]
What it is: Erdrich's latest novel set in North Dakota's Red River Valley is a tale of the intertwined lives of ordinary people striving to survive and even thrive in their rural community, despite environmental upheavals, the 2008 financial crisis, and other obstacles.
Who it's for: Readers of cli-fi; fans of Linda LeGarde Grover and William Faulkner. —CK
The Position of Spoons by Deborah Levy [NF]
What it is: The second book from Levy in as many years, diverging from a recent streak of surrealist fiction with a collection of essays marked by exceptional observance and style.
Who it's for: Close lookers and the perennially curious. —John H. Maher
The Bog Wife by Kay Chronister [F]
What it's about: The Haddesley family has lived on the same West Virginia bog for centuries, making a supernatural bargain with the land—a generational blood sacrifice—in order to do so—until an uncovered secret changes everything.
Who it's for: Readers of Karen Russell and Jeff VanderMeer; anyone who has ever used the phrase "girl moss." —SMS
The Great When by Alan Moore [F]
What it's about: When an 18-year old book reseller comes across a copy of a book that shouldn’t exist, it threatens to upend not just an already post-war-torn London, but reality as we know it.
Who it's for: Anyone looking for a Sherlock Holmes-style mystery dipped in thaumaturgical psychedelia. —Daniella Fishman
The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates [NF]
What it's about: One of our sharpest critical thinkers on social justice returns to nonfiction, nearly a decade after Between the World and Me, visiting Dakar, to contemplate enslavement and the Middle Passage; Columbia, S.C., as a backdrop for his thoughts on Jim Crow and book bans; and the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where he sees contemporary segregation in the treatment of Palestinians.
Who it’s for: Fans of James Baldwin, George Orwell, and Angela Y. Davis; readers of Nikole Hannah-Jones’s The 1619 Project and Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste, to name just a few engagements with national and racial identity. —Nathalie op de Beeck
Abortion by Jessica Valenti [NF]
What it is: Columnist and memoirist Valenti, who tracks pro-choice advocacy and attacks on the right to choose in her Substack, channels feminist rage into a guide for freedom of choice advocacy.
Who it’s for: Readers of Robin Marty’s The New Handbook for a Post-Roe America, #ShoutYourAbortion proponents, and followers of Jennifer Baumgartner’s [I Had an Abortion] project. —NodB
Gifted by Suzuki Suzumi, tr. Allison Markin Powell [F]
What it's about: A young sex worker in Tokyo's red-light district muses on her life and recounts her abusive mother's final days, in what is Suzuki's first novel to be translated into English.
Who it's for: Readers of Susan Boyt and Mieko Kanai; fans of moody, introspective fiction; anyone with a fraught relationship to their mother. —SMS
Childish Literature by Alejandro Zambra, tr. Megan McDowell [F]
What it is: A wide-ranging collection of stories, essays, and poems that explore childhood, fatherhood, and family.
Who it's for: Fans of dad lit (see: Lucas Mann's Attachments, Keith Gessen's Raising Raffi, Karl Ove Knausgaard's seasons quartet, et al). —SMS
Books Are Made Out of Books ed. Michael Lynn Crews [NF]
What it is: A mining of the archives of the late Cormac McCarthy with a focus on the famously tight-lipped author's literary influences.
Who it's for: Anyone whose commonplace book contains the words "arquebus," "cordillera," or "vinegaroon." —JHM
Slaveroad by John Edgar Wideman [F]
What it is: A blend of memoir, fiction, and history that charts the "slaveroad" that runs through American history, spanning the Atlantic slave trade to the criminal justice system, from the celebrated author of Brothers and Keepers.
Who it's for: Fans of Clint Smith and Ta-Nehisi Coates. —SMS
Linguaphile by Julie Sedivy [NF]
What it's about: Linguist Sedivy reflects on a life spent loving language—its beauty, its mystery, and the essential role it plays in human existence.
Who it's for: Amateur (or professional) linguists; fans of the podcast A Way with Words (me). —SMS
An Image of My Name Enters America by Lucy Ives [NF]
What it is: A collection of interrelated essays that connect moments from Ives's life to larger questions of history, identity, and national fantasy,
Who it's for: Fans of Ives, one of our weirdest and most wondrous living writers—duh; anyone with a passing interest in My Little Pony, Cold War–era musicals, or The Three Body Problem, all of which are mined here for great effect. —SMS
Women's Hotel by Daniel Lavery [F]
What it is: A novel set in 1960s New York City, about the adventures of the residents of a hotel providing housing for young women that is very much evocative of the real-life legendary Barbizon Hotel.
Who it's for: Readers of Mary McCarthy's The Group and Rona Jaffe's The Best of Everything. —CK
The World in Books by Kenneth C. Davis [NF]
What it is: A guide to 52 of the most influential works of nonfiction ever published, spanning works from Plato to Ida B. Wells, bell hooks to Barbara Ehrenreich, and Sun Tzu to Joan Didion.
Who it's for: Lovers of nonfiction looking to cover their canonical bases. —SMS
Blue Light Hours by Bruna Dantas Lobato [F]
What it's about: Through the emanating blue-glow of their computer screens, a mother and daughter, four-thousand miles apart, find solace and loneliness in their nightly Skype chats in this heartstring-pulling debut.
Who it's for: Someone who needs to be reminded to CALL YOUR MOTHER! —DF
Riding Like the Wind by Iris Jamahl Dunkle [NF]
What it is: The biography of Sanora Babb, a contemporary of John Steinbeck's whose field notes and interviews with Dust Bowl migrants Steinbeck relied upon to write The Grapes of Wrath.
Who it's for: Steinbeck fans and haters alike; readers of Kristin Hannah's The Four Winds and the New York Times Overlooked column; anyone interested in learning more about the Dust Bowl migrants who fled to California hoping for a better life. —CK
Innie Shadows by Olivia M. Coetzee [F]
What it is: a work of crime fiction set on the outskirts of Cape Town, where a community marred by violence seeks justice and connection; also the first novel to be translated from Kaaps, a dialect of Afrikaans that was until recently only a spoken language.
Who it's for: fans of sprawling, socioeconomically-attuned crime dramas a la The Wire. —SMS
Dorothy Parker in Hollywood by Gail Crowther [NF]
What it is: A history of the famous wit—and famous New Yorker—in her L.A. era, post–Algonquin Round Table and mid–Red Scare.
Who it's for: Owners of a stack of hopelessly dog-eared Joan Didion paperbacks. —JHM
The Myth of American Idealism by Noam Chomsky and Nathan J. Robinson [NF]
What it is: A potent critique of the ideology behind America's foreign interventions and its status as a global power, and an treatise on how the nation's hubristic pursuit of "spreading democracy" threatens not only the delicate balance of global peace, but the already-declining health of our planet.
Who it's for: Chomskyites; policy wonks and casual critics of American recklessness alike. —DF
Mysticism by Simon Critchley [NF]
What it is: A study of mysticism—defined as an experience, rather than religious practice—by the great British philosopher Critchley, who mines music, poetry, and literature along the way.
Who it's for: Readers of John Gray, Jorge Luis Borges, and Simone Weil. —SMS
Q&A by Adrian Tomine [NF]
What it is: The Japanese American creator of the Optic Nerve comic book series for D&Q, and of many a New Yorker cover, shares his personal history and his creative process in this illustrated unburdening.
Who it’s for: Readers of Tomine’s melancholic, sometimes cringey, and occasionally brutal collections of comics short stories including Summer Blonde, Shortcomings, and Killing and Dying. —NodB
Sonny Boy by Al Pacino [NF]
What it is: Al Pacino's memoir—end of description.
Who it's for: Cinephiles; anyone curious how he's gonna spin fumbling Diane Keaton. —SMS
Seeing Baya by Alice Kaplan [NF]
What it is: The first biography of the enigmatic and largely-forgotten Algerian artist Baya Mahieddine, who first enchanted midcentury Paris as a teenager.
Who it's for: Admirers of Leonora Carrington, Hilma af Klint, Frida Kahlo, and other belatedly-celebrated women painters. —SMS
Absolution by Jeff VanderMeer [F]
What it is: A surprise return to the Area X, the stretch of unforbidding and uncanny coastline in the hit Southern Reach trilogy.
Who it's for: Anyone who's heard this song and got the reference without Googling it. —JHM
The Four Horsemen by Nick Curtola [NF]
What it is: The much-anticipated cookbook from the team behind Brooklyn's hottest restaurant (which also happens to be co-owned by James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem).
Who it's for: Oenophiles; thirty-somethings who live in north Williamsburg (derogatory). —SMS
Seeing Further by Esther Kinsky, tr. Caroline Schmidt [F]
What it's about: An unnamed German woman embarks on the colossal task of reviving a cinema in a small Hungarian village.
Who it's for: Fans of Jenny Erpenbeck; anyone charmed by Cinema Paradiso (not derogatory!). —SMS
Ripcord by Nate Lippens [NF]
What it's about: A novel of class, sex, friendship, and queer intimacy, written in delicious prose and narrated by a gay man adrift in Milwaukee.
Who it's for: Fans of Brontez Purnell, Garth Greenwell, Alexander Chee, and Wayne Koestenbaum. —SMS
The Use of Photography by Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie, tr. Alison L. Strayer [NF]
What it's about: Ernaux's love affair with Marie, a journalist, while she was undergoing treatment for cancer, and their joint project to document their romance.
Who it's for: The Ernaux hive, obviously; readers of Sontag's On Photography and Janet Malcolm's Still Pictures. —SMS
Nora Ephron at the Movies by Ilana Kaplan [NF]
What it is: Kaplan revisits Nora Ephron's cinematic watersheds—Silkwood, Heartburn, When Harry Met Sally, You've Got Mail, and Sleepless in Seattle—in this illustrated book. Have these iconic stories, and Ephron’s humor, weathered more than 40 years?
Who it’s for: Film history buffs who don’t mind a heteronormative HEA; listeners of the Hot and Bothered podcast; your coastal grandma. —NodB
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The Philosophy of Translation by Damion Searls [NF]
What it is: A meditation on the act and art of translation by one of today's most acclaimed practitioners, best known for his translations of Fosse, Proust, et al.
Who it's for: Regular readers of Words Without Borders and Asymptote; professional and amateur literary translators alike. —SMS
Salvage by Dionne Brand
What it is: A penetrating reevaluation of the British literary canon and the tropes once shaped Brand's reading life and sense of self—and Brand’s first major work of nonfiction since her landmark A Map to the Door of No Return.
Who it's for: Readers of Christina Sharpe's Ordinary Notes and Elizabeth Hardwick's Seduction and Betrayal. —SMS
Masquerade by Mike Fu [F]
What it's about: Housesitting for an artist friend in present-day New York, Meadow Liu stumbles on a novel whose author shares his name—the first of many strange, haunting happenings that lead up to the mysterious disappearance of Meadow's friend.
Who it's for: fans of Ed Park and Alexander Chee. —SMS
November
The Beggar Student by Osamu Dazai, tr. Sam Bett [F]
What it is: A novella in the moody vein of Dazai’s acclaimed No Longer Human, following the 30-something “fictional” Dazai into another misadventure spawned from a hubristic spat with a high schooler.
Who it's for: Longtime readers of Dazai, or new fans who discovered the midcentury Japanese novelist via TikTok and the Bungo Stray Dogs anime. —DF
In Thrall by Jane DeLynn [F]
What it is: A landmark lesbian bildungsroman about 16-year-old Lynn's love affair with her English teacher, originally published in 1982.
Who it's for: Fans of Joanna Russ's On Strike Against God and Edmund White's A Boy's Own Story —SMS
Washita Love Child by Douglas Kent Miller [NF]
What it is: The story of Jesse Ed Davis, the Indigenous musician who became on of the most sought after guitarists of the late '60s and '70s, playing alongside B.B. King, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and more.
Who it's for: readers of music history and/or Indigenous history; fans of Joy Harjo, who wrote the foreword. —SMS
Set My Heart on Fire by Izumi Suzuki, tr. Helen O'Horan [F]
What it is: Gritty, sexy, and wholly rock ’n’ roll, Suzuki’s first novel translated into English (following her story collection, Hit Parade of Tears) follows 20-year-old Izumi navigating life, love, and music in the underground scene in '70s Japan.
Who it's for: Fans of Meiko Kawakami, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Marlowe Granados's Happy Hour. —DF
Didion & Babitz by Lili Anolik [NF]
What it is: A dual portrait of Joan Didion and Eve Babitz, who are so often compared to—and pitted against—each other on the basis of their mutual Los Angeles milieu.
Who it's for: Fans or haters of either writer (the book is fairly pro-Babitz, often at Didion's expense); anyone who has the Lit Hub Didion tote bag. —SMS
The Endless Refrain by David Rowell [NF]
What it's about: How the rise of music streaming, demonitizing of artist revenue, and industry tendency toward nostalgia have laid waste to the musical landscape, and the future of music culture.
Who it's for: Fans of Kyle Chayka, Spence Kornhaber, and Lindsay Zoladz. —SMS
Every Arc Bends Its Radian by Sergio De La Pava [F]
What it is: A mind- and genre-bending detective story set in Cali, Colombia, that blends high-stakes suspense with rigorous philosophy.
Who it's for: Readers of Raymond Chandler, Thomas Pynchon, and Jules Verne. —SMS
Something Close to Nothing by Tom Pyun [F]
What it’s about: At the airport with his white husband Jared, awaiting a flight to Cambodia to meet the surrogate mother carrying their adoptive child-to-be, Korean American Wynn decides parenthood isn't for him, and bad behavior ensues.
Who it’s for: Pyun’s debut is calculated to cut through saccharine depictions of queer parenthood—could pair well with Torrey Peters’s Detransition, Baby. —NodB
Rosenfeld by Maya Kessler [F]
What it is: Kessler's debut—rated R for Rosenfeld—follows one Noa Simmons through the tumultuous and ultimately profound power play that is courting (and having a lot of sex with) the titular older man who soon becomes her boss.
Who it's for: Fans of Sex and the City, Raven Leilani’s Luster, and Coco Mellor’s Cleopatra and Frankenstein. —DF
Lazarus Man by Richard Price [F]
What it is: The former The Wire writer offers yet another astute chronicle of urban life, this time of an ever-changing Harlem.
Who it's for: Fans of Colson Whitehead's Crook Manifesto and Paul Murray's The Bee Sting—and, of course, The Wire. —SMS
Stranger Than Fiction by Edwin Frank [NF]
What it is: An astute curveball of a read on the development and many manifestations of the novel throughout the tumultuous 20th century.
Who it's for: Readers who look at a book's colophon before its title. —JHM
Letters to His Neighbor by Marcel Proust, tr. Lydia Davis
What it is: A collection of Proust’s tormented—and frequently hilarious—letters to his noisy neighbor which, in a diligent translation from Davis, stand the test of time.
Who it's for: Proust lovers; people who live below heavy-steppers. —DF
Context Collapse by Ryan Ruby [NF]
What it is: A self-proclaimed "poem containing a history of poetry," from ancient Greece to the Iowa Workshop, from your favorite literary critic's favorite literary critic.
Who it's for: Anyone who read and admired Ruby's titanic 2022 essay on The Waste Land; lovers of poetry looking for a challenge. —SMS
How Sondheim Can Change Your Life by Richard Schoch [NF]
What it's about: Drama professor Schoch's tribute to Stephen Sondheim and the life lessons to be gleaned from his music.
Who it's for: Sondheim heads, former theater kids, end of list. —SMS
The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer [NF]
What it is: 2022 MacArthur fellow and botanist Kimmerer, an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, (re)introduces audiences to a flowering, fruiting native plant beloved of foragers and gardeners.
Who it’s for: The restoration ecologist in your life, along with anyone who loved Braiding Sweetgrass and needs a nature-themed holiday gift. —NodB
My Heart Belongs in an Empty Big Mac Container Buried Beneath the Ocean Floor by Homeless [F]
What it is: A pseudonymous, tenderly comic novel of blue whales and Golden Arches, mental illness and recovery.
Who it's for: Anyone who finds Thomas Pynchon a bit too staid. —JHM
Yoke and Feather by Jessie van Eerden [NF]
What it's about: Van Eerden's braided essays explore the "everyday sacred" to tease out connections between ancient myth and contemporary life.
Who it's for: Readers of Courtney Zoffness's Spilt Milk and Jeanna Kadlec's Heretic. —SMS
Camp Jeff by Tova Reich [F]
What it's about: A "reeducation" center for sex pests in the Catskills, founded by one Jeffery Epstein (no, not that one), where the dual phenomena of #MeToo and therapyspeak collide.
Who it's for: Fans of Philip Roth and Nathan Englander; cancel culture skeptics. —SMS
Selected Amazon Reviews by Kevin Killian [NF]
What it is: A collection of 16 years of Killian’s funniest, wittiest, and most poetic Amazon reviews, the sheer number of which helped him earn the rarefied “Top 100” and “Hall of Fame” status on the site.
Who it's for: Fans of Wayne Koestenbaum and Dodie Bellamy, who wrote introduction and afterword, respectively; people who actually leave Amazon reviews. —DF
Cher by Cher [NF]
What it is: The first in a two-volume memoir, telling the story of Cher's early life and ascendent career as only she can tell it.
Who it's for: Anyone looking to fill the My Name Is Barbra–sized hole in their heart, or looking for something to tide them over until the Liza memoir drops. —SMS
The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami, tr. Philip Gabriel [F]
What it is: Murakami’s first novel in over six years returns to the high-walled city from his 1985 story "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World" with one man's search for his lost love—and, simultaneously, an ode to libraries and literature itself.
Who it's for: Murakami fans who have long awaited his return to fiction. —DF
American Bulk by Emily Mester [NF]
What it's about: Reflecting on what it means to "live life to the fullest," Mester explores the cultural and personal impacts of America’s culture of overconsumption, from Costco hauls to hoarding to diet culture—oh my!
Who it's for: Lovers of sustainability; haters of excess; skeptics of the title essay of Becca Rothfeld's All Things Are Too Small. —DF
The Icon and the Idealist by Stephanie Gorton [NF]
What it is: A compelling look at the rivalry between Margaret Sanger, of Planned Parenthood fame, and Mary Ware Dennett, who each held radically different visions for the future of birth control.
Who it's for: Readers of Amy Sohn's The Man Who Hated Women and Katherine Turk's The Women of NOW; anyone interested in the history of reproductive rights. —SMS
December
Rental House by Weike Wang [F]
What it's about: Married college sweethearts invite their drastically different families on a Cape Code vacation, raising questions about marriage, intimacy, and kinship.
Who it's for: Fans of Wang's trademark wit and sly humor (see: Joan Is Okay and Chemistry); anyone with an in-law problem.
Woo Woo by Ella Baxter [F]
What it's about: A neurotic conceptual artist loses her shit in the months leading up to an exhibition that she hopes will be her big breakout, poking fun at the tropes of the "art monster" and the "woman of the verge" in one fell, stylish swoop.
Who it's for: Readers of Sheena Patel's I'm a Fan and Chris Kraus's I Love Dick; any woman who is grateful to but now also sort of begrudges Jenny Offil for introducing "art monster" into the lexicon (me). —SMS
Berlin Atomized by Julia Kornberg, tr. Jack Rockwell and Julia Kornberg [F]
What it's about: Spanning 2001 to 2034, three Jewish and downwardly mobile siblings come of age in various corners of the world against the backdrop of global crisis.
Who it's for: Fans of Catherine Lacey's Biography of X and Joshua Cohen's The Netanyahus. —SMS
Sand-Catcher by Omar Khalifah, tr. Barbara Romaine [F]
What it is: A suspenseful, dark satire of memory and nation, in which four young Palestinian journalists at a Jordanian newspaper are assigned to interview an elderly witness to the Nakba, the violent 1948 expulsion of native Palestinians from Israel—but to their surprise, the survivor doesn’t want to rehash his trauma for the media.
Who it’s for: Anyone looking insight—tinged with grim humor—into the years leading up to the present political crisis in the Middle East and the decades-long goal of Palestinian autonomy. —NodB
The Shutouts by Gabrielle Korn [F]
What it's about: In the dystopian future, mysteriously connected women fight to survive on the margins of society amid worsening climate collapse.
Who it's for: Fans of Korn's Yours for the Taking, which takes place in the same universe; readers of Becky Chambers and queer-inflected sci-fi. —SMS
What in Me Is Dark by Orlando Reade [NF]
What it's about: The enduring, evolving influence of Milton's Paradise Lost on political history—and particularly on the work of 12 revolutionary readers, including Malcom X and Hannah Arendt.
Who it's for: English majors and fans of Ryan Ruby and Sarah Bakewell—but I repeat myself. —SMS
The Afterlife Is Letting Go by Brandon Shimoda [NF]
What it's about: Shimoda researches the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII, and speaks with descendants of those imprisoned, for this essay collection about the “afterlife” of cruelty and xenophobia in the U.S.
Who it’s for: Anyone to ever visit a monument, museum, or designated site of hallowed ground where traumatic events have taken place. —NodB
No Place to Bury the Dead by Karina Sainz Borgo, tr. Elizabeth Bryer [F]
What it's about: When Angustias Romero loses both her children while fleeing a mysterious disease in her unnamed Latin American country, she finds herself in a surreal, purgatorial borderland where she's soon caught in a power struggle.
Who it's for: Fans of Maríana Enriquez and Mohsin Hamid. —SMS
The Rest Is Silence by Augusto Monterroso, tr. Aaron Kerner [F]
What it is: The author of some of the shortest, and tightest, stories in Latin American literature goes long with a metafictional skewering of literary criticism in his only novel.
Who it's for: Anyone who prefers the term "palm-of-the-hand stories" to "flash fiction." —JHM
Tali Girls by Siamak Herawi, tr. Sara Khalili [F]
What it is: An intimate, harrowing, and vital look at the lives of girls and women in an Afghan mountain village under Taliban rule, based on true stories.
Who it's for: Readers of Nadia Hashimi, Akwaeke Emezi, and Maria Stepanova. —SMS
Sun City by Tove Jansson, tr. Thomas Teal [F]
What it's about: During her travels through the U.S. in the 1970s, Jansson became interested in the retirement home as a peculiarly American institution—here, she imagines the tightly knit community within one of them.
Who it's for: Fans of Jansson's other fiction for adults, much of which explores the lives of elderly folks; anyone who watched that documentary about The Villages in Florida. —SMS
Editor's note: We're always looking to make our seasonal book previews more useful to the readers, writers, and critics they're meant to serve. Got an idea for how we can improve our coverage? Tell me about it at sophia@themillions.com.
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Beautiful Deaths: On the World of Gabrielle Wittkop
1.
Readers would be well advised to don a Hazmat suit before wading into the thrilling, pestilential world of French writer Gabrielle Wittkop. In a jungle, one is confronted with the “effluvia of rotting carcasses or the fetid exhalation of orchids and carnivorous plants;” in a Baltimore tavern the face of an old sailor “being eaten away like a pumpkin by phthisis;” in the New York City sewers the “eternal fungus of putrefaction” and the “sweet slime of the deep darkness;” and in Venice “baskets and pails are overflowing with filth...snot, purplish riches, gray-green defecations, iridescent stews, buzzing with life.” These are only some of the fleurs du mal that blossom in Murder Most Serene (translated by Louise Rogers Lalaurie) and Exemplary Departures (translated by Annette David), two works recently published in gorgeous editions by Wakefield Press. Wittkop’s only other novel to appear in English, The Necrophiliac, supplies some choice mephitic bits as well.
Wittkop was born in Nantes in 1920 and home-schooled by her father, devouring the books in his extensive library. In her translator’s postscript, David charts Wittkop’s literary influences from her early immersion with Marquis de Sade and other Enlightenment writers through her lifelong fascination with the “decadent romantisme noir” of Joris-Karl Huysmans, Comte de Lautrémont, André Pieyre de Mandiargues, Edgar Allan Poe, the subject of one of her stories, and E.T.A. Hoffmann, about whom she wrote a biography. While living in Paris during the Occupation, she harbored and then married a deserter from the German Army, the bisexual Justus Franz Wittkop. Both Wittkop and her husband would commit suicide in their 80s, he while suffering from Parkinson’s and she after receiving a diagnosis of lung cancer in 2002.
Wittkop is best known for The Necrophiliac, the narrator of which is an antiques dealer, a “situation almost ideal” for his off-hours pursuits: digging up freshly buried bodies, secreting them back to his Paris apartment and keeping them there, sometimes for weeks. Amid lurid, loving descriptions of his disinterred guests -- he rhapsodizes over his “boyfriends with anuses glacial as mint, my exquisite mistresses with grey marble bellies” -- there are occasionally moments of dark levity. Upon being propositioned by a prepossessing young man, he politely rejects him while thinking to himself, “I would love your eyes sunken in, your lips silenced, your sex frozen, if only you were dead; unfortunately, you have the bad taste to be alive.”
The Necrophiliac is ultimately about the intoxication and isolation of genuine connoisseurship. “The dead,” the narrator tells us, “are full of the unexpected,” a knowledge, and pleasure, he is condemned to savor alone while hiding from a “hostile world” that sees him as a monster. Of course he is a monster of sorts, but Wittkop succeeds, remarkably, in illustrating the perversely empathetic (“All these sexes under the earth, does anyone ever think of them?”) and elevating quality of the necrophiliac’s depredations:
The smell of the dead is that of the return to the cosmos, that of the sublime alchemy. For nothing is as flawless as a corpse, and it becomes more and more so as time passes, until the final purity of this large ivory doll with its mute smile and its perpetually spread legs that is in each one of us.
The devotion to his sordid obsession reveals, to him at least, a seldom glimpsed purity.
As both translators note in their accompanying essays to these new releases, and as should be evident from the The Necrophiliac's subject, death and decay are two of Wittkop’s idées fixes. Take a representative description of a tree in a rainforest from the story “Mr. T.'s Last Secret” in Exemplary Departures:
Insect humors travel through the veins of the bark; liquefied, the reptile is reborn in the fetid pulp of fungus; the feather becomes leaf; the flower changes into a scale; eggs and soft roe burst into living myriads; death embraces resurrection, the two of them twinned like day and night
Passages like these adequately communicate her Eros-and-Thanatos aesthetic, and Wittkop’s prose usually glimmers as her subjects decompose. However, her decadent style is not without its flaws. Of a casino in Monte Carlo, she writes:
Like the vulva of some huge primeval hussy but also the secret charm of a Ganymede at its zenith, it gapes before the onrush, at the exact moment when the act is consumed in the triumphant erection of porphyry columns, so thick that they look as though about to burst, in the gold decorations reflected in the mirror where the chandeliers’ infinite galaxies explode, and in the simultaneous ejaculation of the innumerous thrusting palms, eternally soaring, as far the eye can see, toward the nudity of the ceilings.
Wittkop is not finished, still having to explore the “sphincter of the circular banquettes,” the “titanic birth labors announc[ing] themselves on the lips of the drapes,” and the spacious bathroom, “sanctuary for excrements.” (God knows how she would have allegorized the furnace room.) It is hard to defend such delirious imagery except to say that at least when she’s bad, she’s very bad. Contrast this architecture porn with an enticing, restrained, and more representative passage from another story, this one describing the spiraling staircase of a donjon that is
Unspeakably inviting, promising enchanted glimpses as it coiled itself despite the angular bones of its planks, forming a kind of sirens’ tail. It was, in short, as staircases admittedly are, destined to all kinds of betrayal.
Wittkop comes alive when she injects an element of sardonic sadism into her observations, the sense that there is enjoyment to be had at watching the dissolution (natural or violent) of a body. Her intense focus on the death throes of her protagonists, and on the post-mortem decomposition of their corpses, could be interpreted as a curious quest for self-knowledge. “But why this obstinate dwelling over a corpse’s pluck?” the narrator of Murder Most Serene asks after exhaustively describing a poisoned woman’s “spectacular final agony” and her autopsy. She provides the answer herself: “Simply because it is there inside us all, day and night.” Wittkop frames her macabre voyeurism in the tradition of the ancient injunction inscribed on the Delphic temple: Know thyself.
2.
Set in 18th-century Venice, Murder Most Serene is a novella concerning the not-so-gentle art of poisoning. Over the course of 30 years, a Venetian nobleman and bibliomaniac, Count Lanzi, witnesses each of his four wives perish -- his “conjugal monomania” unflagging despite their particularly gruesome deaths. Count Lanzi is too busy wandering in his library, a “boustrophedonic labyrinth” wherein he indulges his “blind, vehement, irrational passion” for books to look too deeply into the matter. Poison is usually involved, or suspected in each case; when one of the curtailed marriages produces a deformed child, the unfortunate offspring is dispatched with less finesse.
The short work begins with a theatrical nod, Wittkop likening herself to a “bunraku master” who “controls his puppets’ movements” to the audience’s, and his own, delight: “I enjoy presenting their spectacle, and I watch it, too, my own spectator.” The action itself commences on a stagey note, with an exasperated Count Lanzi complaining, “Can a man not read without being constantly disturbed?” When the interruption turns out to be an announcement that yet another one of his wives has died, he responds “Again?!” This sounds like a Wildean quip: to lose one wife may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose four looks like carelessness. And indeed, the “strange, cruel drama” to come is accompanied by a laugh track of sorts, the peals of mirthless, diabolical laughter of a decadent society in the throes of “misrule:” “It is almost always Carnival, that endemic epidemic.” The case of the murdered wives concludes in 1797 just as Napoléon Bonaparte comes into the city with cleansing wrath that will abruptly put a stop to the Most Serene Republic’s cackling: “We cannot always be laughing...” read the novella’s last lines.
The mystery is largely an excuse for Wittkop to present the unfortunate spouses in their “spectacular final agon[ies]” and immerse us in the “flamboyant misrule” of Venice, “city of appalling gravity, where even the corpses weigh more heavily than elsewhere.” At one point, after pausing to describe how an old lecher places pornographic drawings between the pages of the missals in a church, the narrator dismisses it as “of no importance, merely anecdotal interest, a flourish.” On the contrary, the entire novella revolves around such “anecdotal interest,” lurid, impressionistic snapshots of a gossipy, shadowy world.
Murder Most Serene, in other words, is mostly local color, concerned with effects rather than causes. This explains the scant attention paid to interiority and the lavish attention paid to the aesthetics of how certain poisons, “painterly magicians,” act on the human visage:
Their effects are played out in color: suddenly, we see a sky-blue iris turn the rich purple of the abattoir; a camellia complexion takes on a tint of bluish mauve, coral-pink lips turn to coral-black, which is infinitely more precious, as everyone knows.
Note the touch of the aesthete’s snobbery. As with precious jewelry, so with poison: refinement is king.
3.
If Murder Most Serene Wittkop revels in the corruption of a society approaching a crisis (“the time of the Atreidae is come...”), Exemplary Departures casts an icy gaze on individual reckonings with death. The five titular “exemplary departures” are as follows: A shady American intelligence officer-cum-antiquarian disappears into a Malaysian jungle without a trace; a young Scottish girl on vacation in the Rhineland starves to death after being trapped atop a dilapidated castle tower, where she had gone to sketch the countryside; a delirious Edgar Allen Poe, “haunted by angels,” breathes his last in Baltimore’s Washington Hospital; a feckless shoe salesman drifts into homelessness and is beaten to death in a New York City sewer; and hermaphroditic twins -- noble, sensual, completely absorbed in themselves -- cavort in pre-Revolutionary Paris as seemingly immortal deities. Only at the moment of their grisly death are they bestowed a “fragile and derisory crown of a brief humanity.”
As Wittkop notes about one of these “departures,” it represents “a situation characterized by misunderstanding and revelation.” “Exemplary” is therefore used somewhat ironically, as the stories are neither models of noble deaths nor cautionary tales. These five stories are tragedies stripped of pathos, clinical examinations of creatures governed by a “conditioned determinism,” and moving inextricably, and heedlessly, toward their fates: “It is while blindly dancing the Dance of Death that we make our way toward our downfall.”
Again, a rire diabolique is usually audible in the background, a derisory chorus here comprised of monkeys, rats, crows, and grotesque statues. Straightforward Oedipal drama and fairy-tale villainy reign. The tales are less psychological than physiological; how a character thinks matters less than how a body moves, or perishes. Wittkop is an anatomizing narrator. “Idalia on the Tower” begins by zooming in on Idalia’s foot, the “slender low-arched foot with rosy nails cut straight and bluish skin the color of thin milk” that will eventually slip on the rotten stairs of the castle tower and leave her stranded: “Here we have what, moved by muscles, nerves, a very complex and dynamic mechanism, would cause the determining event, the very slow and painful death...” Later, Wittkop will redirect her anatomical gaze to the stranded, starving girl’s contracting “maxillary muscles,” her convulsing neck (“opisthotonus”) and various internal injuries so severe that the once supple body has “metamorphosed into a machine.” The “dynamic mechanism” highlighted in the story’s opening has begun to malfunction.
In “Claude and Hippolyte,” Wittkop’s anatomical gaze is primarily erotic, focusing on the twins of “unrestrained narcissism” who couple in front of mirrors, the better to revel in the “reflection of their strange genitalia...a hortus deliciosus...unfolded on the cold glass.” The more the merrier.
Finally, we have the opening of “A Descent,” which mercilessly dissects its protagonist in a piece of body shaming par excellence:
Seymour M. Kenneth had a slight paunch. Not much, in fact, a small deposit of fat evenly distributed over the flabby musculature of his abdomen, a pad just visible when Seymour was naked, but only then, an adiposity giving way to the pressure of a finger that would sink in no deeper than a few millimeters, in short, a concession. Had one been given the task to examine it...this paunch might have represented an avowal rather than a failure or a deficiency. One might have seen in it the symbol of a formless destiny, a propensity, to spinelessness. It wasn’t the elastic balloon of a cheerful, desperate person who eats his way to ruin, but the slowly accumulated burden of omissions, of wear and tear, of self-neglect, a pitiful gravidity that, so utterly unwarranted, would never reach its term, because nothing, not even failure, could be properly fulfilled in Seymour M. Kenneth’s life.
In fact, the hapless character does properly fulfill his lifelong, if not particularly ambitious, dream, which is to return to the womb. Our last view of him alive is in the tunnels below Grand Central Station, laying “curled up...a silent embryo,” his paunch morphing into either a fetus’s or mother’s stomach: “Spongy now, his belly was swelling up, spherical.”
I wrote earlier of Wittkop’s sardonic sadism, which is omnipresent but most evident in Exemplary Departure's finest story, “Idalia on the Tower.” Consider how Wittkop describes how an exhausted Idalia, the girl trapped in her tower, repeatedly fails to build a stone plinth on which to stand and attract help. Rest assured, Wittkop informs us, the length and intensity of the girl’s struggles will make for an entertaining show:
In spite of its repetitions the spectacle is not as monotonous as one might fear. It is possible to see in it the delicate leitmotif of a choreographed figure and find much delight in observing Miss Dubb’s gestures. A certain duration of this pleasure can also be expected, seventeen being the age of great battles when one, even though deprived of both water and food, does not die quietly like a lamp that goes out for lack of fuel.
Elsewhere, Wittkop pauses a long description of a feast the starving girl has hallucinated with the following parenthetical: “You may have noticed the pleasure I have in presenting all this foodstuff for Miss Dubb, but who doesn’t like to present beautiful things?” That would be icy enough, but then Wittkop coolly resumes her mouthwatering inventory once again. This commitment to finding aesthetic pleasure in suffering is accompanied by a view of the universe as an indifferent, amoral universe in which divine retribution is illusory: “The eye that watches Cain is pure fiction.”
4.
“There is purity each time that a new threshold is crossed,” Wittkop writes in The Necrophiliac. The great threshold, of course, is between life and death, and the best deaths, at least according to Wittkop’s morbidly decadent philosophy, are stage-managed. In that same work, she describes the final moments of Gaius Petronius Arbiter, author of The Satyricon, who, upon being accused of treason, chose to have his veins opened in a bathtub rather than contest the charges. His exemplary departure is narrated thusly:
Surrounded by his concubines and his Greek slaves slipping their tongues into his mouth and caressing his hair...He heard their tender words pull back towards another planet because he himself was about to leave the earth...He sensed nothingness invade the network of his veins...while the dancers stuck their vulvas to his body like barnacles onto a ship and the fingers of these ephebi explored his secret parts. Floating into his bath as if into the maternal liquid, Gaius Petronius Arbiter sensed his life escaping him as sweetly as it had once come to him. That’s how death should be.
No objections here.
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