November Books
Hilary Mantel, Raúl Zurita, Yuri Herrera, Rachel Cusk, and Sally Rooney
I recently read a newsletter from the writer Brandon Taylor about his annotation process. After underlining the passages that he is going to teach or write about later, he then copies down those passages into a notebook. When writing these newsletters, I often find myself struggling to remember, let alone have something to say, about a book I read over a month ago. A logical solution to this would be to write these newsletters as I read, but for whatever reason I haven’t been able to do that, it requires a diligence that I don’t possess. I adopted Taylor’s method of annotating in November, and it’s been great and meditative, but now I have the opposite problem: I find myself drowning under a notebook full of hand-written passages, some of them over a page long. This has really gummed up the works and we are approaching mid-December, so I’m going opt for a cop out here and just provide you with the best passages I’ve underlined for each of the books I read in November.
The Mirror & the Light (2020), by Hilary Mantel
The third and final novel in Mantel’s trilogy joins up with Thomas Cromwell right where she left him. After arranging the execution of Anne Boleyn, he finds himself increasingly out of favor with King Henry VIII. This is a trilogy in which famous and not so famous historical figures aspire to greatness and then find themselves in the tower with their heads soon to be on the chopping block. Many such cases.
For the passage, I’ve tried to pick something that captures both the Brugel-esque depiction of everyday life in 16th century Europe as well as Cromwell’s droll awareness of the brutality of court life and the aristocracy, especially towards women. Here we have a diptych. Mantel ends one chapter with scenes from a butcher and starts the next with the fate of women whose luck runs out in childbirth:
He saw beasts disassembled, becoming dinner; witnessed the household officers shovel up their perquisites and portions, neck and scrag-end, fore-legs, feet, trotters and tripes, the calf's head, the sheep's heart. He learned to sweep out the sawdust clogged with blood and swab down the slabs where lung and liver clump, to chase the jelly particles stained with gore. He learned to do it all without a contraction of the gut: to do it calmly, to do it without feeling. Twilight coupage or dawn, the light is the same, grey-stained, wine-darked: the butchers pass without seeing him, eyes front, their burden hoisted on their shoulders.
Get out of their way: he moves back against the wall. They ignore him in the dimness taking him perhaps for some inventory clerk. Still they tread, with their cadavers the size of men, eyes on their feet, their heads bent and hooded, silent, undeterred, squishing the gore from their bloody boots, around the winding stairs and, guided by the sound of rushing waters down into the dark.
—
"What is a woman's life? Do not think, because she is not a man, she does not fight. The bedchamber is her tilting ground, where she shows her true colors, and her theatre of war is the sealed room where she gives birth. She knows she may not come alive out of that bloody chamber. Before her lying-in, if she is prudent, she settles her affairs. If she dies, she will be lamented and forgotten. If the child dies, she will be blamed. If she lives, she must hide her wounds. Her injuries are secret, and her sisters talk about them behind their hand. It is Eve's sin, the long continuing punishment it incurred, that tears at her from the inside and shreds her. Whereas we bless an old soldier and give him alms, pitying his blind or limbless state, we do not make heroes of women mangled in the struggle to give birth. If she seems so injured that she can have no more children, we commiserate with her husband.
Inri (2003), by Raúl Zurita, translated by William Rowe (2009)
In 2001, Ricardo Lagos, the president of Chile at the time, announced that hundreds of people who were disappeared by the DINA and other government organizations under the Pinochet regime would never be found. The reason they would never be found, was because the victims were dropped out of airplanes and helicopters into the sea, the desert, and into volcanos. This was the horrific catalyst that spurred Raúl Zurita, who was a political prisoner himself, to write Inri.
The book-length poem consists of repetitious, spiraling concantenations of images like the one below. It’s as if Zurita acknowledges that the horror and violence perpetrated by the dictatorship has obliterated everything, all thought, and these images are the only thing that one can see or imagine in the face of such evil.
Ploughed fields, sacred lands rain from the sky with broken backs, pieces of necks that weren't there anymore, unexpected clouds of unending spring. They were thrown. They rain down. Amazing harvests of people come down as food for the fish in the sea. Viviana hears sacred lands rain down, hears her son fall like a cloud onto the unclouded cross of the Pacific.
Towards the end, however, this spiral begins to reverse course and the language of rebirth, regeneration, and reincarnation trickles in:
And like a horizon which lives once again in a new horizon our murdered lips will begin again to speak to each other and my mouth will say to you: they killed you and now you are alive. And like the sky, like the snow, like a country of icebergs being born your mouth will say to me: you were dead and today you are alive.
To paraphrase the afterword, Zurita rejects the fascism of reality, of the government, and create something liberating.
Season of the Swamp (2022), by Yuri Herrera, translated by Lisa Dillman (2024)
In 1853, Benito Juárez, before he became the first indigenous president of Mexico, found himself exiled in city of New Orleans. This one year in his life represents a historical lacuna — normally a rigorous diarist and letter writer, he seems to have had not much to say about this time of his life. Herrera’s novel fills in this gap, assuming his life there to be pure misery, depicting him elplessly clinging to his life, his purpose, and his sanity as the chaos of The Big Easy threatens to consume him.
I think it’s this chaos that struck me most while reading the book. New Orleans at the time was a city and a port where enslaved people were bought and sold and sailors from around the world lay anchor. As Herrera depicts it, its an anarchic place, a meat-grinder, a city that was poised to become and eastern outpost of the Wild West. There is drunkenness and violence, revolution and conspiracies, but the most memorable passages for me essentially consisted of the writer talking about the weather.
The weather is a kind of wrathful God, threatening to kill at random:
The real hot arrives slowly but not subtly, and by the time you can say its name it’s already named itself, littering the streets with sunstroked folk. The sunstroked die trusting their brains, and their brains betray them: suddenly they stop, attempt to grab hold of a pole that isn’t there, and bite the dust, dead of cosmic death. He’s seen it
But it can also be beautiful, in its own swampy way:
The green skin that lay over the city began to sprout white dots, as though afflicted by an outbreak that then quickly became an explosion, an explosion of five-armed pinwheels: jasmine flowers; jasmine everywhere, on the slightest pretext, an epiphany on the nose, one that upended all previous understanding of the city.
Written in the wake of Brexit, the final novel in Cusk’s Outline trilogy, Kudos, is mostly about divorce. Our narrator is on a book tour through Europe and listens to the stories and complaint from people who are going through huge, damaging breakups; are still traumatized from past relationships; or seem destined for divorce in the immediate future, whether they know it or not.
I love the way Cusk writes dialogue. I love how her characters tell their life stories and seem wholly sympathetic, reliable, relatable for pages at a time; but inevitably let one or two lines slip that reveal the small ways and discrete moments in which they are entirely deranged.
I loved the way this book ended (don’t worry, it’s not a book that can really be spoiled). For the vast majority of the trilogy, the narrator listens to others and hears about the things that have been done unto them. In the final pages, she visits a nude beach and experiences a disturbing moment when she locks eyes with a man while he pees into the ocean:
I went down to the water, pressing quickly forward through the barging waves. The beach shelved so steeply that I was quickly sucked out into the moving mass, whose density and power seemed to keep me effortlessly on the surface so that I rose and fell along with its undulations. The men had turned to watch me. One of them got to his feet, a huge burly man with a great curling black beard and a rounded stomach and thighs like hams. Slowly he walked down towards the water’s edge, his white teeth faintly glimmering through his beard in a smile, his eyes fixed on mine. I looked back at him from my suspended distance, rising and falling. He came to a halt just where the waves broke and he stood there in his nakedness like a deity, resplendent and grinning. Then he grasped his thick penis and began to urinate into the water. The flow came out so abundantly that it made a fat, glittering jet, like a rope of gold he was casting into the sea. He looked at me with black eyes full of malevolent delight while the golden jet poured unceasingly forth from him until it seemed impossible that he could contain any more. The water bore me up, heaving, as if I lay on the breast of some sighing creature while the man emptied himself into its depths. I looked into his cruel, merry eyes, and I waited for him to stop.
It’s a first-hand experience of malice in a trilogy of second-hand experiences. And yet, the man is peeing into the vast ocean, into the earth itself, and she is just a part of it.
Intermezzo (2024), by Sally Rooney
In Rooney’s most recent novel, two Irish brothers are grieving the death of the father to cancer. The older brother, Peter, is in an ambiguous relationship with two women: there is his ex, Sylvia, who was left chronically injured due to an accident, as well as Naomi, an Only Fans model (I don’t think Rooney calls it Only Fans, but that’s the sense I get) ten years his junior. The younger brother, Ivan, is an awkward chess whiz who finds himself in a relationship with Margaret, a woman ten years his senior. When Ivan tells Peter about this relationship, the older brother disapproves and they get into a huge fight.
I’ve found it hard to pick a good passage for this book. I like Rooney’s novels for their pacing, for the way they zip along, and for the way they portray the very specific anxieties that afflict those in uncertain relationships. But on a sentence level, I’m not sure I find her the most interesting. This isn’t to say I think she’s a bad writer, I just don’t exactly read her for her prose.
I will say, though, I think she can be very funny. Here is a moment of jealousy and self-hatred, with Ivan reflecting on the ways his youth differed from that of Peter’s:
Pictures on social media of Peter on holiday with his rich friends, drinking cocktails, always with some insanely perfect-looking girl beside him. And the pictures would have hundreds of likes, maybe thousands. While Ivan was at home alone with all the lights off, entering depressingly niche search terms into pornography websites. Okay, maybe he was a creep, maybe he was an incel. Maybe he didn’t relate to people on a normal level. It was better than being an arrogant narcissist at least. Better than arranging his whole life around going to parties and getting blowjobs from brainless rich girls. Right, but was it actually better than that? No, of course not, of course it wasn’t.
Trying to think back to Normal People and Conversations with Friends (but not Beautiful World, Where are You? — I tend not to think back to that), I think Rooney’s greatest talent is depicting the absurdly, comically, depressingly bleak nature of self-hatred and its various mechanisms.
Let me know if you have any opinions on this way of doing things, with the emphasis on the passages. If even one person says anything nice about it at all, I’ll probably do one of these again every now and then.