January Books
Amina Cain, Miguel de Cervantes, Brandon Taylor, Fine Gråbøl, Stieg Larsson
A Horse at Night: On Writing (2022), by Amina Cain
I started this year as I did the last, with a book on writing and literature. Last year it was Jhumpa Lahiri’s Translating Myself and Others, this year it was Amina Cain’s A Horse at Night. Books on books are good ways to start the year. The feeling they give me harkens back to being in college and starting a class that I was excited about. These books provide a syllabus, if nothing else.
A Horse at Night was a pleasant read. It’s smart in a plain-spoken way, without over-intellectualizing things or getting too academic. It is full of short chapters that explore the aesthetic experience of literature as something that is living and human, and full of musings that strive to describe something just beyond effability, like her thoughts on the haunted quality of some fiction:
In my own fiction, I sometimes find myself trying to conjure something that isn’t there, so that it both is and isn’t appearing. For instance, in my novel Indelicacy, when the narrator Vitória is visiting the desert, she says, “I pulled my hair into a loose bun, but not like a dancer would do it.” There is no dancer in this sentence, yet I see the dancer. This is one way to haunt a sentence. Plainly. It is exciting to me to think I might haunt my own sentences, to believe that they can be haunted. That the reader might be taken over subtly, that there is room in fiction for an experience like this. And that something of this experience may remain.
Often her writing takes on an odic quality, and I think that’s when I found the book most enjoyable:
…Today it is October, so six o’clock is still light, but in another month it won’t be. Most people dislike losing daylight hours, which is understandable, but I like a dark six o’clock as much as I like a bright one. I like the cycles of the year. From Toni Morrison’s Beloved: “Time came when the lamps had to be lit early because night arrived sooner and sooner. Sethe was leaving for work in the dark; Paul D was walking home in it. On one such evening dark and cool, Sethe cut a rutabaga into four piece and left them stewing.”
Maybe we get closer to something in the dark, or maybe it’s the opposite, which is why a stove is so nice at night, and sharing a meal, those points of warmth and light that naturally draw things together. Compared to dinner, lunch can be so boring, without the same kind of depth. In Morrison’s novel, as the days grow shorter, Beloved begins to haunt Sethe’s household more intensely, and relationships quicken. Everyone and everything in that household draws closer and closer: pain and love, tragedy and healing, the past and the future. Their house with its lights becomes a stage, and the outside that gradually darkens is where the reader sits.
Above all, Cain’s book tipped me off to a ton writers and titles and sent me on a bit of a borrowing spree at the library. Who knows if I’ll read these, but I at least have the following in my house or on my hold shelf right now:
Suzanne Scanlon - Committed: On Meaning and Madwomen
Renee Gladman - Houses of Ravicka
Tarjei Vessas - The Ice Palace
Don Quixote, Part I (1605), by Miguel de Cervantes, translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman (2003)
I’ve already begun work on the quasi-resolution with which I ended my previous newsletter by reading the first part of Don Quixote and I plan on reading the second half next month. I was forced to read bits and pieces of Don Quixote in various Spanish classes growing up, but no one ever made me read the whole thing. Half-way through, I’m glad I’m reading it.
I imagine most will be familiar with the broad strokes of the plot but, for those who know nothing more than windmills, it’s about a middle-aged man named Alonso Quixano who reads so many books about chivalry that he pickles his brain. He sets out on a quest of knight-errantry, dubbing himself Don Quixote. He roams the countryside in the company of his squire, Sancho Panza, a peasant from his hometown in La Mancha with dreams of his own fiefdom. Most of his deeds involve confusing strangers for villainous knaves, starting fights with them, and getting beat up. Part I ends with the priest and the barber from his home town trying to track down the crazed Don Quixote so they can bring him home and cure him of his madness.
I don’t have much to say about beyond that it’s surprisingly funny, with a breathless, ribald, slapstick quality, filled with passages like this one:
“Señor, your grace is right: so that I can swear with clear conscience that I saw you do crazy things, it would be a good idea for me to see at least one, even though I’ve already seen a pretty big one in your grace’s staying here.”
“Did I not tell you so?” said Don Quixote. “Wait, Sancho, and I shall do them before you can say a Credo.”
And hastily he pulled off his breeches and was left wearing only his skin and shirtails, and then, without further ado, he kicked his heels twice, turned two cartwheels with his head down and his feet in the air, and revealed certain things; Sancho, in order not to see them again, pulled on Rocinante’s reins and turned him around, satisfied and convinced that he could swear his master had lost his mind.
If it’s the first modern novel, it is not just for the books that came after it, but also for birthing the Animaniacs, Porky Pig, Winnie the Pooh, and any other cartoon that wears a shirt with no pants.
Real Life (2020), by Brandon Taylor
I am only just now getting to Brandon Taylor’s fiction after having read him as a critic and blogger for a few years now. I’ve always respected his willingness to be critical, sometimes bordering on caustic. I had one of his most recent posts, “against casting tape fiction”, in my head while reading Real Life, particularly this bit here:
What I mean is that for the writers of this new era, conveying the contents of a thought or even depicting the process of thought itself in language that does not aspire to the visual has the same foreign, baffling aspect as their trying to use a rotary phone. They simply do not know how to write thoughts. And indeed it sometimes seems as though thoughts themselves are an alien artifact from another time. This generation of writers did not grow up as readers. They grew up as watchers. Their experience of consciousness is fundamentally a mediated one. It exists solely on the surface. A highly mobile face shifting through expressions that convey, symbolically, something to an external viewer. The something is never clear. But the faces are described in exquisite, minute detail that loses all significance.
I have read pages and pages of scenes narrated from the first person in which an unnamed narrator sits in a room looking at light on a wall or at a cell phone, describing without affect a whole range of physical expressions—gestures, faces they pull—and yet nowhere on those pages does a single thought appear. Not even glancingly. Say what you will about the highly-stylized and voice-driven narration of novels like Luster or The Flamethrowers or Topics of Conversation or Everything is Illuminated, novels which burst with subjectivity and affect, and which might feel a little cheesy by the astringent standards of today’s lobotomized first-person narrators, but at least there was color. Thought. Emotion. Movement. Observation.
Real Life is a novel about a grad student named Wallace who is studying biology at mid-western university. He is the only Black man in his friend group, and seemingly one of only a few people of color in this town. The novel opens with him in a moment of great personal struggle. His father, who in Wallace’s youth failed to protect him from sexual abuse at the hands of a family friend, has just died and he is unsure how to grieve, or whether or not he even should. He is struggling with a research project in the lab, having been sabotaged by a racist, mentally unstable colleague. He considers dropping out of grad school, feeling overwhelmed and isolated, but soon starts a romance with Miller, a sort of frenemy and the only other person in his social circle to have grown up poor. As the relationship between Wallace and the supposedly straight Miller intensifies, the former’s propensity for self-harm collides with the latter’s history of violence.
I’m not sure when it was that Taylor starting developing his aversion to the sort of first-person Netflix fiction he wrote about on his Substack, but while reading Real Life, I found myself sensitive to this dynamic in his own work, maybe even searching for it unfairly. I detected whiffs of it in these ambiguous moments in which Wallace harms himself, but in a slightly roundabout way, as if to diffuse his own guilt. On more than one occasion he overeats, or drinks so much water as to make himself sick:
He refilled the glass, right up to the bri. He drank it. His lips were red. He kept drinking. He drank four glasses back-to-back, and he went into the bathroom and threw up. Up came the water, the semen, the kernels of popcorn, the sour cider, the soup from lunch, all of it churning and orange in the bowl. His throat was raw and burning with acid. He trembled as he braced himself against the toilet bowl. The stench drew more vomit from him, a heaving, clenching retch.
But ultimately I do think Taylor is right by-and-large, and I think there is proof of concept for his arguments in the things that I liked about Real Life. I do think a third-person narrator, when done right, can actually do a better job of writing thought and interiority than a first-person narrator. I think we can see his yearning for “Thought. Emotion. Movement. Observation.” in the following passage:
[…] Wallace had watched the thick vein down the center of his forehead engorge, wishing with a calm cruelty that it would rupture. Wallace saw Cole, Yngve, Miller, and Emma at the biosciences building almost every day. They nodded to each other, waved, acknowledged each other in a dozen small ways. He did not go out with them, it was true, not to their favorite bars or that time they’d all crammed into two cars and gone apple picking or that time they went hiking at Devil’s Lake. He didn’t go with them because he never quite felt like they wanted him there. He always got stuck on the edges, talking to whoever pitied him enough to throw him a bone of small talk. Yet here was Vincent, making like Wallace was the only reason he didn’t spend time with them, as if they were not also to blame.
Wallace smiled as best he could. “Sounds like you had a great time.”
“And Emma and Thom came over last week. We had a little lunch by the pool and went to the dog park. Scout is getting huge.” Vincent’s forehead vein bulged again, and Wallace imagined placing his thumb over it, pressing hard.
I do think writers have taken the show-don’t-tell advice and run off a cliff with it. There may be a simplicity or an unflashiness to the above section, but this kind of writing feels like a throwback in a good way, less prone to being annoying. Maybe it is less stunning on a sentence level, but it allows for a flexibility that maybe a very dialed-in, overly cinematic first-person narrative lacks. This quick switching between interior (thought) and exterior (action) — with observation as a layover between the two — maybe becomes more cumbersome in more contemporary fiction. Maybe that’s why we have so many books that are fifty percent paragraph break.
What Kingdom (2021), by Fine Gråbøl, translated from the Danish by Martin Aiken
What Kingdom, based on aspects of the writer’s own life, is a slim novella made up of short, diary-like entries written by a woman in a temporary residential facility for young people struggling with mental health illness in Denmark. She mostly describes what life is like, her relationship to her room and the facilities that she spends all her time. Her writings feel like protection against boredom via poetry:
"I’m especially absorbed by the chairs; the way they receive me and others in the room, the light on them in the mornings. Who they belonged to before, how they interact with the space; the greetings of the bed, the mirror, the lamps. The way they address the night, the way the address the day, in what sort of garb; thick, light-blue cotton over the back, coarse yellow silk. Their silent presence when I scratch. It’s impossible for me to figure out if they’re turned towards me or away from me. I open the window, the air’s heavy in here; the draught sends patient packaged inserts scudding to the floor. I sit down on the edge of the chair, its yellow velour faded by the sun. A dream of furniture in motion, at night. I bin things with regularity, it doesn’t bother me that I’ll regret it later on. I’m not mute, but I leave language to the room around me. The peeling paintwork, the shiny lino, the grammar of the floor. I put the bookshelf on like an apron, click the door shut behind me, and go out into the stretchy cooridor,.
She takes time from the day-to-day pains of being alive to rail against the larger, more existential and political pains of existing under the aegis of state. We don’t know much about the narrator’s past, although she discusses her fellow residents’ histories at length. It’s also not until half-way through the novel when we learn her diagnosis, what she has. Instead of a grand revelation, it seems kind of besides the point — a diagnosis is something that is imposed on her, doesn’t alter her lived experience or understanding of herself:
We know wort of diagnosis a person’s got even before they’ve mentioned it: booys are schizotypal, girls are borderline or obsessive-compulsive. Eating disorders are easily spotted. The grammar of the ill is gendered, but also a matter of economics; the curable versus the chronic, benefit rates and supplementary payments, diagnoses and deductibles. Cash assistance subsidies, invalidity pensions, disability supplements. The fatalism of psychiatry. Our tired voices. We make sushi for Hector’s birthday party. I slice the cucumber and avocado. Lasse rolls the rice with Hector. We’re taking too long and somehow we know it. We listen to Michael Jackson at the same time. The oblong table in the communal kitchen. Splendid hearts, free hands.
I enjoyed this book and if I remember it three, six, nine months from now, it will be because of this blend of the essayistic and didactic with the poetic.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2005), by Stieg Larsson, translated from the Swedish by Reg Keeland
It was not my intention to read back-to-back Scandinavians, it just kind of happened. I don’t think I’ll spend too long describing the plot to this, as I feel like one of only a few people who (until last week) had neither read any of these books or seen any of the adaptations.
I flew through this book. It is truly thrilling and moves at such a brisk pace, even as the mystery reveals somewhat slowly. Perhaps it is Larsson’s training as a journalist, but even thought has the feel of action. And despite its brutality, I think there is something satisfying reading it in this moment. It is a novel in which vengeance is inflicted on Nazis and those who harm women.
While reading it, I couldn’t shake the sense that I was reading a middle-brow 2666. Both are explorations of fascism and femicide that are also meditations on each writer’s medium, journalism for Larsson and literature for Bolaño. I think this is where Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is weakest. The biggest mystery and conflict of the story is wrapped up with over a hundred pages left it in the novel, and the rest is dedicated to the main character’s efforts to save his publication. I found it a little hard to care about that after all the Nazism and serial killing, but that is me nit-picking.
Thank you for reading. I’ll be back next month with the second part of Don Quixote, and a bunch of books from the New Directions and NYRB Classics book clubs.