Tuesday, December 18, 2018

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)






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