Some Books I Enjoyed in 2018

I love winters in my state (you'd hate them, so don't get any ideas).  And few things are as enjoyable as going for a long walk in the snow and returning home to a pile of good books, tea or bourbon (depending), Schubert's "Winterreise," and forgetting for a few hours the turmoil of the world.  

By the way, there's a very nice accounting of Schubert's great song cycle on a blog entitled "The Conversation" and posted by Jeanell Carrigan of the University of Sydney.  Here's a stanza from my favorite of the songs, Der Lindenbaum, one that reminds me of my own walks in the windy cold:

Die kalten Winde bliesen

mir grad ins Angesicht;
der Hut flog mir vom Kopfe,
ich wendete mich nicht.

[The cold wind blew

directly into my face; 

my hat flew from my head--

I  did not turn back]

Russell Platt, writing in the New Yorker, expresses perfectly the wonder of these simple songs:

"The seeming simplicity of 'Winterreise'—a piece that is constantly reinterpreted in performance, not held in sonic amber—is of a richer and more ambiguous type: it grows and changes over the years, just as the mind and body of the person who first encounters it. Its story, of a doomed lover who wanders aimlessly around the town where his former girlfriend lives, is both intimate and epic, literal and metaphorical. It’s a whole world, not just a neighborhood, or a village rectory."

"Not held in sonic amber:" I first heard the version of Dietrich Fisher-Dieskau in college.  As Platt understands, the songs grow on you, and with you--their melancholy, their simplicity.  Half a century later I still love D F-D's version, but have been increasingly drawn  to Ian Bostridge's interpretation. Give them a listen one of these cold nights.  

***

As for the books: not "the best" books of the year since my reading habits are eccentric and reflect the time I have to read (often not much), my shifting tastes and interests, and where each book leads me.  Also, most of the books I liked best weren't published this year, so as a guide to what's new this list is useless. But these ten, in no special order, were the books that meant most to me, that I thought about for the longest time.  

--Lily King: Euphoria (novel, published in 2014): Margaret Mead, Reo Fortune, and Gregory Bateson in an erotic tangle in New Guinea. Ms. King is smart as all get out, and inventive, and this is a really splendid book.

--Valeria Luiselli: Faces in the Crowd (novel, also 2014): A young women living in Harlem working on a translation of the (fictional) Mexican poet Geoffrey Owen; surreal, deeply literary, poetic. I'd bring up Savage Detectives, but won't. Ms. Luiselli has also written a wonderful book on the border "crisis"--Tell Me How It Ends, An Essay in Forty Questions.

Elif Bautman: The Idiot (novel, 2017): Picaresque story of young Harvard student besotted with both Dostoevsky and a young man from Hungary (whom she has never met). A completely enjoyable and witty book. Bautman's essays, collected in The Possessed are also a delight. I've handed this book to several high school students who are not ordinarily readers. And they read it!

David W. Blight: Frederick Douglass (biography, 2018): Definitive life of one of America's most important figures.  Full of interesting and previously unreported details (not all of them flattering) about Douglass's long and complex life. Blight writes like Bernard DeVoto or Richard Hofstadter--history as compelling narrative.

David Baker: Never Ending Birds (poetry, 2009): I read quite a bit of poetry this year. Baker was new to me and I spent several enjoyable days with his books (there's ten or more).  This was my favorite. 

Gerald Murnane: Barley Patch (novel?, 2011): Peter Nash has gotten me started on Murnane, the eccentric Australian unclassifiable writer of books about (among other things) not writing. How often do you find a writer who has no predecessors? I'm finishing up The Plains at the moment--it is quite extraordinarily strange.

Mathias Enard: Compass (novel, 2017): I haven't yet read Zone (a long, one sentence novel), but I loved Compass. Parts of the novel record the narrator's (he's a musicologist) attendance at a very odd international conference and reminded me of Rachel Cusk's Kudos. Central to Enard's writing is the "zone" of Europe that links West to East; much of Compass is about a European's experiences of Istanbul, Tehran, points east. Also music, opium, and obscure poets play a key role in Compass, all of which makes his book delightful. He also reminds me of Teju Cole and Open City--erudite and deeply engaging. 

Robert Kuttner: Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism (economics, politics, history, 2018): Hands down the best of many books about what threatens all of us right now. Kuttner gives us the history of a lost, mostly humane capitalism then shows how the New and Fair Deals were dismantled piece by piece beginning in the late 1960's.  This is a sad story that has been told many times, but Kuttner tells it in more detail, and more compellingly than anyone I've read. You'll want to underline the entire book.

Deborah Eisenberg: All Around Atlantis (short stories): Eisenberg came to my attention this year with the publication of Your Duck is My Duck, her most recent collection (there are seven). I started with her 1997 volume ('cause it was cheap) and loved every story.  Aside from the craftsmanship, the delicacy of feeling matched with deeply troubling undercurrents of madness and violence (think Alice Munro meets Joan Didion), I really like how Eisenberg surprises me in every story.  It's "now where is this unpromising premise going?" And go it does.  If you haven't tried this writer, please do.

Morten Stoksnes: Shark Drunk: The Art of Catching a Large Shark from a Tiny Rubber Dinghy in a Big Ocean (adventure? craziness? nature? 2018): The most unlikely pleasure of the year.  Not sure why I even picked it up, but once I started, I couldn't stop. Shark-lore, unpronounceable names of fjords, colorful characters (it made me happy just to know that men do undertake adventures that don't involve Sherpas and oxygen tanks). And who doesn't love a book with sharks?

And the classics that I reread this year: The Trial, Don Quixote (in Edith Grossman's new translation), Eichmann in Jerusalem (it really is a classic), Culture and Anarchy (not as much, but the nostalgia for lost culture is heartwarming), Within a Budding Grove (it gets better and better), and George Steiner's Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, the book that made me first enjoy reading literary criticism. 

Books I didn't finish for various reasons: Ali Smith's Autumn; Middlemarch (again!); Jenny Epenbeck's Go, Went, Gone (a book I should have loved, but didn't); Louis Guilloux's Blood Dark (I will try again in 2019 to finish this masterpiece); David Harvey's Marx, Capital, and the Madness of Economic (I forget the rest; the only David Harvey I haven't penetrated).  Oh, and once again this year I failed to finish (I got to page 46) a science fiction novel (The Fifth Season).

 

Peace friends, and good reading in the New Year....

George Ovitt (12/18/2018)

A Woman Alone

Stillpoint (a novel)

I apologize for this bit of self-promotion, but my excellent publishers at Fomite--Marc Estrin and Donna Bister--are among the many small literary presses that lack the resources of the corporate and amalgamated publishers.  They are Bosque Brewery (my local favorite) to MillerCoors--so I have to do a little advertising for myself.

This is my first published novel--not the first I've written, but the first that felt finished enough and decent enough to publish.  Is it any good? Honestly, I have no idea.

Like my collaborator Peter Nash, I prefer a certain type of book, one out of the mainstream of plot-driven, irony-riven, arch and hip books that largely comprise today's literary scene.  In general, just as a matter of taste, I am more likely to be spending my reading time with Gerald Murnane, Juan Jose Saer, Italo Sveno, Thomas Bernhard, Kenzaburo Oe, and Fernando Pessoa (all recent reads) than with Times bestsellers. 

I say this so that, should you try my novel, you won't be too disappointed.  It's a quiet little book that examines a single day in the life of a widowed woman in her seventies as she goes about doing the work she loves--translating the poetry of Leopardi--remembering her past, dealing with solitude, reflecting on a life well-lived. 

Here's a bit of it, and thanks for your patience:

“I am unyielding,” Elle spoke to the ravens mingled with crows that were coaxing sunflower seeds from the feeder she’d put up for the finches. Fra poco in me quell’ultimo/Dolore anco fu spento.  Elle smiles at this idea. No, the pain never dies, but dolore is so lovely, dolorosa, she can’t resist jotting this on the paper as well. The thought of Simon offering to carry the cross made her weep even now. Can you imagine it? No one holds a chair for you any longer, but this man took the cross. She had stood once in the courtyard of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, walked the Via Dolorosa, imagined the procession to Golgotha, or tried to—at certain times the mind simply shuts down, focuses on the trivial rather than on what is, in truth, too momentous to imagine. At Auschwitz it was the same thing; standing in Birkenau she had closed her eyes with the secular reverence required—no tears would come, though she had wanted, upon entering beneath the notorious gate—“Arbeit macht frei”—to summon tears, to faint under the weight of history’s cruelty, instead she couldn’t shake the chilling lines from Dante, “Through me you pass into the City of woe/Through me you pass into eternal pain,” nor could she resist imagining the Florentine poet and his guide crossing to Dis, even while silently reciting the verses to herself, intoning them like a prayer. Elle felt guilty and somehow unhinged—how could she let herself be so distracted? Must she be dithering with poems even here? And then, within the walls of the crematorium, she offered a prayer for the dead, Kaddish, but it was no good, the images of gas and fire, the smell of death, the cries of the dying, all leaked away in the dusty light that struck the floor, the odor of dirt and cement, the weight of her living body on a blazing hot day. Sufficient reverence, Elle thought, was impossible. All she had at her disposal were gestures. She crossed herself—when had she last done that—and hoped that would suffice. Dolorosa.

 

George Ovitt (12/16/2018)

https://www.fomitepress.com/Our_Books.html 

 

https://www.amazon.com/Stillpoint-George-Ovitt-ebook/dp/B07K3ZYPDW/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1545004835&sr=8-3&keywords=George+Ovitt

Hiding Out in Lisbon

Like a Fading Shadow (a novel), Antonio Munoz Molina 

Munoz Molina read Hampton Sides Hellhound on His Trail--the history of James Earl Ray's pursuit and murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and, after conducting a great deal more research, he produced a remarkable novel, Like a Fading Shadow.  Molina uses the fact of Ray's brief stay in Lisbon to create a detailed documentary account of Ray's life from 1967, when he first began to track King across the United States, until his capture in London in June, 1968, two months after the assassination.

James Earl Ray lived in a fantasy world.  To say he was paranoid is to understate the case--his daily life both before and after the assassination of Dr. King followed a pattern familiar to us from reading the life stories of his peers--Lee Harvey Oswald, Mark David Chapman, John Hinckley, Jr.--men who belonged to nothing but their fantasies, loners and losers, men who fixated on individuals whose existence either undermined or justified their own. Chapman thought he was Holden Caulfield, Hinckley lived (still does apparently) to impress Jodie Foster, Oswald developed an obsessive hatred for the racist ex-general Edwin Walker. None of these men, and certainly none of their deeds, were "banal." Hannah Arendt's point in developing the concept of the "banality of evil" in her book on the Eichmann trial was not to diminish the horror of murder or the evil of murderers but to remind us that evil is committed by men who are, in most respects, not unlike ourselves, ordinary persons whose lives are anonymous, even boring, up until the moment they commit their crimes. I remember how surprised I was when I read about Mark David Chapman--a nobody--and how Hinckley's psychotic fixation on a young movie actress reprised what was normal in American culture--love of celebrity and admiration for fame. 

Molina brilliantly captures the banality of James Earl Ray's inner life and the ceaseless turmoil of his outer life.  The nondescript man in black glasses and a musty suit wanders the streets of Lisbon, lies in bed in his cheap room, rehearses his lines and tries out new identities, watches his meager cash supplies dwindle, thinks of everything except the murder that propelled his escape from the United State. Molina is utterly convincing as Ray's voice, almost as his alter ego.

Molina approaches Ray's story obliquely, through the device of a fictional memoir.  The author--clearly Molina himself--travels to Lisbon to reinvent himself as a writer; it was in Lisbon, thirty years before, the the author found  inspiration for his first book (A Winter in Lisbon).  Molina layers his three stories--of himself in the present, of James Early Ray's brief stay in Lisbon, and of his own earlier visit to Portugal--in such a way that eerie parallels emerge.  All three strands of the story explore questions of truth-telling, of personal identity, and the cost of isolation. Most striking is the way in which Molina uses the idea of disguise, of hidden identities, in exploring both his own and Ray's story.  Ray, after all, was a pathological liar, a story-teller and shape-shifter of considerable skills, so much so that he was able, for a time, to convince the King family that he was innocent of the killing at the Lorraine Motel.  It takes little imagination to see that what Molina is doing in part is questioning the mechanisms of the novel itself, interrogating the idea of finding truth in falsehood, or perhaps asking if it is possible to create a literary form whose truth can be perceived through its disguises.

George Ovitt (12/16/2018)