my coffee dregs, a few days ago
Writing these reviews taught me a lot about my relationship with books. Whether read a year ago or a month ago, all of them left vestiges that rattle around in my head and dance with other vestiges. In some cases my feelings were heavily influenced by the places and circumstances in which I was reading. I am confronted with the paucity of what I consumed, the impossibility of reading everything that is important. Paradoxically, that feeling makes me want to read more slowly, to read everything again. I wish I could eat books.
Everything is rated on a one to five scale, and all of the ratings are loose, subjective, threadbare, and useless.
Unless appearing after the translator, years given are dates of original publication.
Solenoid - Mircea Cărtărescu (2015, trans. Sean Cotter)
**
I don’t understand when writers make a point of pride out of only writing a single draft. Reading Solenoid is like hearing someone describe their dream, but the dream is not very interesting, and they think every minor detail is of the utmost significance. The dream teller is also a writer who thinks “Nile green” is a revolutionary phrase and repeats it as often as possible. There are some interesting passages, but they don’t make up for the other 600 pages of dry pseudo intellectualism.
Nadja - Andre Breton (1928, trans. Richard Howard)
****
Nadja is both a character and a concept. She is one in a long line of idealized female characters, having in this instance the quality of being open to any experience, drifting on the wind, living completely in the moment. She eats dinner at whichever restaurant is nearest on the boulevard. She is also destitute, artistic, and prone to hallucinations. Magic or mental illness? She is later institutionalized, which brings disillusionment and sobriety to the narrator’s fantasy.
Breton’s work (and Aragon, and Apollinaire, and not to mention Remedios Varo) does not shy from self-criticism, both individually and of the Surrealists as a group. What makes works like Solenoid so empty is that they regard such authors - and others, like Kafka - as untouchable greats. The power of such writing lies in its ability to challenge. Works that seek to replicate these authors without challenging them are merely exercises in style. They are picture windows; they may be pretty, but nothing in them quivers with the pulse of life.
Nadja acknowledges the contradiction in idealistic Surrealism, which belongs to the bourgeois society it attains to destroy. Concerning Nadja’s ultimate rejection of rationality, Breton laments:
“It is from this last enterprise, perhaps, that I should have restrained her, but first of all I should have had to become conscious of the danger she ran. Yet, I never supposed she could lose or might already have lost the gift of that instinct for self-preservation which permits my friends and myself, for instance to behave ourselves where a flag goes past, confining ourselves to not saluting it.” (143)
Paris Peasant - Louis Aragon (1926, trans. Simon Watson Taylor)
****
Aragon more so than Breton breaks open the form in this novel, eschewing character development and plot, giving us instead a document that expands upon the author’s definition of Surrealism as a “mythology of the modern.” Especially in the first section, Le Passage de l'Opera, Aragon’s portrait of a disappearing Paris manages to capture among other things the fading assurance of youth, the luminous underbelly of an engorged and dying city, and at the same time the pathetic reality of a flaneur’s day-to-day life. At times the philosophical passages can be challenging, but I believe they are rewarding.
It’s interesting to measure this up against the modern, popular understanding of “surreal” as Dali-esque imagery. It’s much closer to what is now termed autofiction - more Min Kamp than Persistence of Memory.
Reflections - Walter Benjamin (trans. Edmund Jephcott, 1978)
*****
This collection, a counterpart to Illuminations, includes an account of conversations with Bertolt Brecht, an engaging travelogue on Moscow, and general explorations of culture at the turn of the 20th century, including a treatise on Surrealism, which directed my readings in that vein. There is also an episode called Hashish in Marseille, which is a lot of fun for obvious reasons.
Are these essays impactful beyond the world of literary criticism? In the preface to the companion volume, Hannah Arendt remarks, “[Benjamin] had an unappeasable appetite for the marginal and the idiosyncratic, because deviance looked to him like an epistemological advantage. Nothing that was not neglected could be true. All this led Benjamin into the underground of esoteric interpretation.” (Illuminations, viii)
I feel safely enveloped in the phrases of a writer who reveres obscurity; the fact remains, however, that such writing may be more self-serving than meaningful. The key point here is that Benjamin’s subjects, as they are illuminated, bring the author to a state of contemplation that is practically religious. Joyce does the same thing with a bar of soap; Woolf with a bouquet of flowers or a pair of gloves. Benjamin gets closer than many other writers to defining, presciently, the way we relate to knowledge and memory in the contemporary world.
The Heresiarch & Co. - Guillaume Apollinaire (1910, trans. Rémy Inglis Hall)
****
Apollinaire has a knack for presenting the bohemian lifestyle of a young, poor Parisian (images which have been irrevocably romanticized and commodified), such as in The Latin Jew. There is a daring mix of religious allegory and everyday sensation, along with biting humor. Something emotional is lacking in these stories. They never attain the resonance of a Chekhov or a Flannery O’Connor, but they are valuable in their challenges to rationalism and Christian values, and were probably scandalous at the time.
Benjamin claims that Apollinaire tried to refute Catholicism but ultimately returned to the Church. I’m still trying to figure that one out.
A Season in Hell - Arthur Rimbaud (1873, trans. Louise Varèse)
*****
The Surrealists named A Season in Hell, along with the Comte de Lautréamont’s Chants du Maldoror, as prototypes of their artistic design. I am not very good at evaluating poetry, much less in translation, but the emotions unleashed in Rimbaud’s poem breathe fire and ice, that much is clear. He evokes with great profundity what Breton, Aragon, & co. were constantly wrestling with: the wild power of youthful abandon and the crushing defeat that is its necessary condition. Turmoil.
The Vortex - Jose Eustasio Rivera (1924, trans. Earle K. James)
*****
This haunting account of the adventures of a runaway knave and his mistress Alicia hits all the sweet spots. A daring adventure gives way to a deathly, galloping vortex. The prose is intricate, at times giving flashes of the narrator’s conflicted inner life, but once you get used to his style, the plot drags you forward as if it has a rope knotted around your ankles. The pacing and the brutality of the prose evoke the jungle in which it takes place, although the greatest brutality is reserved for the rubber barons who enslave and exploit people and nature. The work is thus elevated to a politically conscious level without becoming pedantic.
It is interesting to note that Rivera wrote La Voragine after his own participation in a perilous expedition to delineate the border between Colombia and Venezuela.
The Hive - Camilo Jose Cela (1950, trans. James Womack)
****
The Hive is probably a great novel. A huge abundance of characters lead their lives in fragmentary sections. Some are central to the plot, others intrigue for only a moment. Not giving enough concentration to the various plotlines, I sometimes lost track of who was who and what was what. Maybe I couldn’t relate to the characters well enough, maybe I lacked the appropriate cultural context. The Hive is multifaceted and poignant. The ending sticks with you and makes it worth it.
The Postman Always Rings Twice - James M. Cain (1934)
****
The incredibly hard-hitting cover of the above collection of James M. Cain novels made me snatch it up instantly from a book box. Cain is one of three authors regarded as a sort of holy trinity that birthed the noir/hardboiled genre, the other two being Dashiel Hammett and Raymond Chandler. He writes from the perspective of criminals, lowlifes, failed opera singers on the run, without failing to give even the most hate-worthy of characters a good dose of sympathy. Compulsively readable, Postman tells the story of a vagabond who takes up work at a roadside restaurant, only to fall in love with the owner’s wife, eventually conspiring with her to murder her husband for the sake of lust and money. You can imagine how that goes.
Serenade - James M. Cain (1937)
***
A failed opera singer lives a life of exile in Mexico. There is no excuse for Cain’s reductive portrayal of (among other nationalities) Mexican characters. Serenade is certainly a work of its time.
Serenade is too long. The epic unfolds at an uneven pace, and Cain indulges in long-winded digressions, for example on opera, of which he is clearly a fan.
The main character is later revealed to be gay or bisexual; this of course creates plenty of complications, but as far as I could tell Cain was not condemning him to fire and brimstone. Or maybe he was, and homosexuality was a “failing” that Cain saw himself as humanizing in the same way he humanized murder. I lean toward the reading that his feelings, while not benign, were ambivalent or at best neutral. Either way, I was surprised that publishers at the time would allow an explicitly gay relationship to exist in mainstream literature.
Serenade doesn’t quite hit the mark the way Cain’s best work does, but it has its points of interest, and enough momentum to hold the reader.
Double Indemnity - James M. Cain (1936)
*****
The novel that led to one of the great films noir might be just as good, if not better, than the movie. Sparsely written, gruff and brilliant, Double Indemnity follows a life insurance salesman wooed into murder by a cunning housewife. It is undoubtedly the most complete and intense vision of Cain’s American underbelly, dark as a pair of train tracks in the middle of nowhere.
Dawn - Sevgi Soysal (1975, trans. Maureen Freely)
****
Dawn tells the story of a family gathering in Turkey during a period of social unrest and violent suppression. One attendee is a complete stranger, an “internal exile” watched day and night by government agents. She’s there with two brothers, one a lawyer and one a teacher, recently imprisoned for revolutionary activity. The group spans the political spectrum. Everyone is afraid of being informed on.
The party is raided, and four are taken in for questioning. Soysal does a great job portraying the frayed relationships, the mistrust that exists between both strangers and siblings, in a place where authority can impose its terrifying will at any moment, with or without cause. On the flip side, we see into the heads also of a policeman, a torturer, a supervising official. This multi-character view acts as a lens through which we see the fault lines of a broken society. No one has a solution and no one is safe. The main story takes no longer than a few days, but Soysal imbues all of her characters with impressive depth. The novel raises important questions. Who is to blame? What is our responsibility to our nation, our village, our family?
Dawn’s only shortcoming is perhaps a necessary result of its wide sweep. We are granted such little time with each character that the novel feels incomplete. Not that a complete story isn’t told, rather, I was left wanting more.
Mildred Pierce - James M. Cain (1941)
*****
Did you think I was done with Cain? Ah, to be a grass widow running a chain of chicken restaurants in SoCal during the Great Depression, with a pie delivery business on the side. Plus an evil daughter who sticks some wicked barbs. One of my absolute favorites. The 1945 movie is fine, but the Todd Haynes miniseries from 2011 is a truly faithful adaptation that gives free rein to Cain’s bizarre, witty dialogue. Mildred may never grace the pages of a high school English syllabus, but I’ll take it over The Great Gatsby any day.
The Butterfly - James M. Cain (1947)
***
The last novel in the Cain collection is a short one. It is preceded by an introduction arguably more interesting than the book itself. In it, Cain responds to critics who apparently thought he had gone Hollywood, asserting the validity of his research while at the same time humbling himself in comparison to writers like Hemingway. It’s a fascinating insight into Cain’s artistic process, and he comes across as a likeable guy. Regarding his protagonist, a miner from West Virginia in the 1860s, he tells us, after listing a plethora of primary sources:
“...I concluded that any notion the 1860s were noted for peculiarities of speech, or that quaint dialogue, such as some of these critics seemed to think indicated, should be used, was simply silly. These people talked as we talk now. Some words they used differently. They said planished where we would say burnished; they said recruit where we say recuperate; they amused the enemy, where we would divert him. In general, however, they spoke in a wholly modern way, and I thought it would be delightful for a modern reader to have the lights turned up on a world he possibly had no idea had ever existed.” (561)
This experiment with language elevates the story of incest and blood-revenge that is The Butterfly, but in some ways Cain’s commitment to historical accuracy detracts from readability. The dialogue is so sparse, I found myself struggling to understand basic plot points even after multiple rereadings. A stew with quality ingredients, it never quite comes together.
Paul Gaugin, Still Life with Three Puppies, 1888
The Apple in the Dark - Clarice Lispector (1961, trans. Benjamin Moser)
*****
This is the kind of novel I’ve always longed to create. Reading Lispector is like walking through an upside-down city. The images are familiar, even innocent. A coiled-up snake is not the cunning serpent of the Bible or of literature; it is a form erasing the line between being and doing. The harshest reality resembles a still pond. Lispector is fond of animals; the way she writes about them conveys emotions that have no other name: the light inside a stable full of cows; a bird in a barren desert landing in Martim’s hand. It’s not just animals, though, it’s people, plants, clouds, sun, organs. “Used to numbers, he cringed at disorder. That’s because inside was an atmosphere of intestines and a difficult dream full of flies.” (101)
Amerika - Kafka (1927, trans. Michael Hofmann)
*****
Doubts about the value of Kafka’s work are understandable, since his stature in letters has risen to the level of myth, birthing an industry of sycophantic praise. However, just reading the first chapter of Amerika, or Die Verschollene (The Missing Person), gives rise to a reader’s euphoria as undeniable as it is rare. Not a blanket statement: Investigations of a Dog, despite numerous forays, puts me to sleep every time I start it. This is Kafka at his most playful and accessible. Karl is a character who, for once, at least attempts to stare down the teeth that bite, the claws that catch, and wrest back his life by force.
Bullet Park - John Cheever (1967)
***
Bullet Park is full of arresting images, biting into the neck of American suburbia and guzzling its blood. Stylistically, Cheever makes some fascinating choices. I read it in a lawn chair among the mountains of Idaho, surrounded by crystal lakes and ski resorts closed for summer, watching for ospreys and hummingbirds. Following Amerika, Bullet Park is another link in a chain of novels that depict upstate New York, also the setting for Get Out. Not as harsh as the city or as gothic as swampland, it’s an area that wields its own sinister ambiance.
Brenner - Hermann Burger (1989, trans. Adrian Nathan West)
*****
I love when authors debase themselves in their writing, intentionally or not. Hermann Burger comes across as a difficult person. I doubt we could ever be friends. But he makes those cigars, smoked around the grounds of a vast castle estate in Switzerland, sound delectable. He has no fear of sounding eccentric, self-centered, persnickety, preening, vindictive, and bitter - or maye doesn’t realize this is how he comes across. It doesn’t matter. Tell me the dirty truth about yourself. Maybe I’m nothing but a voyeur. I wasn’t terribly focused on the literary acrobatics, the endless references intricately woven, but this is a novel that washes over you with its beautiful language. It hangs around like a haze, dropping bread crumbs to be picked up in the future. In the end you realize that Burger is still the child betrayed by his parents, imprisoned by luxury, and you wish that you could offer him comfort.
Nazi Literature in the Americas - Roberto Bolaño (1996, trans. Chris Andrews)
****
Nazi Literature in the Americas, a pinprick in the Bolaño constellation, deals with one of the author’s favorite themes: obscure literature published by extreme right-wing authors. I think of Bolaño when I accidentally find myself on the disgusting neonazi side of Substack, or the trolls pretending to be neonazis, or whatever the fuck they are.
One point that Nazi Literature makes, and one which I’ve started to understand, is that the goal of revolutionizing art or literature or whatever may exist anywhere on the political spectrum. It’s a dangerous and unhappy truth. John Waters understood this: as Divine says in Female Trouble, before shooting at her audience, who’s ready to die for art? And this is where commodification of progressive ideals leads: nowhere. A shed in the back of the house. I don’t even know what I’m talking about. One might say Bolaño is not a writer but a creature new to consciousness in a swamp bubbling with primordial life.
Nazi Literature contains the seed that would become Distant Star, which further develops the idea of the great revolutionary poet as an agent of evil.
Group Portrait With Lady - Heinrich Böll (1971, trans. Leila Vennewitz)
****
Böll’s multilayered character study. Leni, the eponymous Lady, is named Most German Girl in School. During the war, she fabricates funeral wreaths in a flower shop. She falls in love with a Soviet prisoner of war. She procures incendiary literature and somehow survives the Nazi regime. She barely speaks. The narrator sketches Leni almost entirely from secondhand accounts. Everyone exploits the war; everyone suffers. Leni’s brother’s concrete poetry, which consists of dry military ordinances, foreshadows Bolaño’s Nazi poets. The brother is executed. As the past nears the present, the author creeps more and more into frame, a bold choice which in some ways seems to displace some of the serious questions raised by Böll.
The Years - Annie Ernaux (2008, trans. Alison L. Strayer)
*****
I’m late to the party. Years late. Ernaux shapes history in a way I’ve not seen other authors do. I guess it’s placed somewhere in the realm of autofiction, a term I’m skeptical about. The subjectivity of a novel, that is to say the non-omniscient experience biased by emotion and limited by everything, being its driving force. The author steps down into the reader’s realm, reporting subjective experience over objective. The stories are less so colored by a construction of history than by the author’s own emotions. The faded ones from that time, yes, but first and foremost the emotion felt as the author scratches a pen or gazes at a photograph. One thing separating Ernaux from other memoirists is her constant identification and use of the pronoun we, a we as the people of France, of her generation, her family. We widens and narrows at will like the aperture of a camera. The book ends before you know it. Look at an old photo and think: they’re becoming us.
The Seven Madmen - Roberto Arlt (1929, trans. Nick Caistor)
****
Erdosain, a man in singular despair, animates Arlt’s pages. He is racked with nervous energy and destitute as any Dostoevsky character. There are unnerving, unreal scenes, such as when the protagonist’s wife, beside her pilot lover, informs Erdosain that she is leaving him. The book is as dark as a photo negative, hangs off of you like a dirty jacket hardened by sweat. Megalomaniacs discuss the fascist utopia they see as necessary to bring about via revolution and chemical warfare. Is this one possible ending of a Surrealist timeline? Bolaño says, let’s say Arlt is Jesus Christ. Arlt tells boredom and despair with trees and sidewalks, as cities, and understands cities as madness.
Parade - Rachel Cusk (2024)
***
I found Parade frustrating with flashes of brilliance. An artist paints upside down. A woman is punched in the street. In the best section, The Diver, a group of people discuss a suicide that’s just occurred at their gallery opening. Was I looking for humor and hope? There are some sentences that strike too generally and displace the flow of the story. I like the suggestion that bourgeois humanism, while not completely ill-intentioned, covers up ideas that are multifaceted and contradictory. In the pretty spaces, like European courtyard restaurants, it is appropriate to clarify your view, in fact this is where the view is transformed by looks and admonitions, words tested against the fabric of the group. There is something to be said for striking hard with the hammer. The messages are there, but the plotting at times feels hasty, and there is very little sympathy to go around for any of the characters.
Autobiography of Red - Anne Carson (1998)
*****
“He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet.” (3)
Autobiography of Red is a book I want to read every year. It expands on the fragments of Stesichorus, an Ancient Greek lyric poet who authored the Geryoneis, an epic poem told from the perspective of a monster slain by Herakles. From Carson’s introductory breakdown of how Stesichorus put hinges on language’s doors, to Geryon nestling his head in Herakles’ leather jacket, to bread baked in the heat of a volcano. Mesmerizing, heartbreaking, supreme.
A Spy in the House of Love - Anaïs Nin (1954)
****
This one was short, and I read it lazily, letting Nin’s language wash over me like gentle waves collapsing. A paranoid, American version of Breton’s Nadja, perhaps. She idealizes the men in her trysts, but they all turn on her one way or the other, or reveal to her the consequences of her idealization. Sabina is a complex character who never tells the truth about herself, either in actions or in words. A tiny novel, A Spy in the House of Love is nonetheless explosively thought-provoking.
Palace Walk - Naguib Mahfouz (1956, trans. William Maynard Hutchins and Olive E. Kenny)
*****
Mahfouz fashions his world with elegance and patience, and you don’t realize you’re under his spell until it’s painful to put the book down. The Cairo Trilogy oscillates between internality and action. The link is always present between individuals and the sociohistorical context: Cairo, the British occupation, Islam, rich and poor neighborhoods. His ability to incorporate historical events into the personal lives of his characters, while crafting a coherent family saga, is on the level of a Thomas Mann or a Tolstoy. When Fahmy approaches his father, al-Sayyid Ahmad abd Al-Jawad, with a risky request, you quake in fear along with him. Although long passages delineating a character’s thought process can slow down the action, the rich psychological discussion, rife with playful metaphors, never ceases to entertain.
Mahfouz is critical of al-Sayyid Ahmad’s misogyny and womanizing, and I read al-Sayyid Ahmad, along with his male heirs, as perpetrators of a tragic masculine tradition. This article discusses Mahfouz’s shortcomings when it comes to the female characters in Palace Walk and raises interesting points about Mahfouz’s early work as compared to later.
The Iliad - Homer (???, trans. Robert Fitzgerald)
To my great shame as a classics major, I never finished the Iliad in school, although I read bits of it in Greek. Homeric epic poetry will always feel like home. Achilles is pissed, Agamemnon is haughty, Zeus is fucking around, entrails and blood abound, Patroclus dies, Hector is slain, Priam ransoms his son. Greece becomes a nation in order to conquer a town on the Anatolian coast. For your next summer beach read.
The King Must Die - Mary Renault (1958)
****
I stayed in Hellas, this time to hear Mary Renault spin her tale, the myth of Theseus as told from a first person perspective. Legend is interpolated into plausible fact. The characters believe in magic, although the author does not: the Minotaur is an evil nobleman; Theseus has a sixth sense for earthquakes, qualifying him as protected by Poseidon. Renault’s language is bright and intricate. For example:
He learned it soon, being quick-minded, then he said, “Have you some token, sir, I can give to the King? He is a careful man.” This was true, but I could think of nothing to send. “If he wants a token, say, ‘Theseus asks you whether the white boarhound still drinks wine.’” (238)
Highly compelling historical fiction, The King Must Die gives you a sense of being there without resorting to cliches.
The Morning Star - Karl Ove Knausgaard (2020, trans. Martin Aitken)
****
The way Knausgaard wraps me up in his readability continues to shock me. His preoccupations have not changed much since the 3,600 page memoir (?) My Struggle. He still loves to write about traffic lights and credit card readers and all kinds of family dysfunction, and all of it is gripping. In The Morning Star, he indulges in an apocalyptic vision. A new star appears in the sky, a drummer seems to ritual-sacrifice his bandmates, and everyone is unable to die. Knausgaard will sometimes depart from a story at a moment of great tension, and certain characters I wished dearly to see more of. This is the first in a trilogy, the latest having come out this year, so I am excited to see where supernatural Karl Ove takes us next. Sometimes I think he’s been watching too much Lost, and he chows down on line breaks like no other, but somehow it always works.
The Success and Failure of Picasso - John Berger (1965)
*****
Art historian John Berger considers Picasso. This is not a full biography, nor does it address the problematic aspects of Picasso, his misogyny and his cultural appropriation; I don’t know if these topics were at the forefront of the discussion when the book was written. Berger takes on what I believe to be the more considerable task of giving us Picasso through his paintings. He opens by talking about the painter’s wealth (Picasso was still alive at the time the book was written) – a move which apparently won Berger much derision. He calls out critics who heap praise on Picasso’s work and make him into an untouchable mystic. Berger seeks to humanize Picasso, and to do this he outlines his argument for the works he considers great and those he considers failures. It is ultimately Picasso’s lack of community, he argues, that has stripped his paintings of their force. The talent and skill are there as always, but a connection has been lost. This means that Picasso’s most successful work in his later period is that which deals with his own impotence. Berger is a writer full of heart, whose work goes far beyond dry criticism.
Sounds like you’ve softened on Cusk, but I suppose three stars is av