The Ones I Liked

Not the Best Books of 2019

 

Nearly 305,000 titles were published in 2019, rendering any notion of the "ten best" or even the"thousand best" books absurd.  Naturally the lists touted by the Times, the Post, the Guardian, and my other sources of information are dominated by the same titles, the same authors (Ben Lerner!), and by the major publishers.  You won't find any small presses represented, nor will you be surprised to learn that few first-time writers, or non-MFA holders, or people who don't live in Brooklyn made the cut.  If you read this blog from time to time, you know that we here at TR like to branch out and read books out of the mainstream, small press titles, books by unknown writers, books by writers not living in the United States, translated works and books that are quirky, nontraditional, and likely to be ignored by the cultural taste makers in London and New York.  We're snobs, sort of, cultural nobodies who happen to like to read, and we operate on the premise that what is popular is often not what is best, though this isn't always the case, as my own list of favorites demonstrates. 

It has been a splendid year for books.  I can't remember a time when I stumbled upon so many fine writers, so many interesting novels, so much engrossing non-fiction, such splendid and moving poetry.

I wanted to share the titles of some books worthy of your consideration, listed here in no particular order.  I hope that you had a good year of reading and that in 2020 you will find many hours to escape from the insanity of the world in the quiet, solitary silence of good books.

***

Marion Poschmann's The Pine Islands, a slender novel about "a journeyman lecturer on beard fashions in film," was not only a pleasant excursion into Japanese history and geography, but it led me back to Basho's great classic The Narrow Road to the Deep North in the David Landis Barnhill translation. Poschmann is a highly regarded German writer whose books are just now being translated.

Ariana Harwicz's Die, My Love is a chilling story of a woman's deepening hatred for her husband and child (and for everyone else).  This isn't merely another Hollywood version of the alienated wife in the mode of "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore," nor is it a story of madness; instead, Harwicz, a young Argentinian writer, mercilessly dissects the pretensions of love, marriage, and child rearing.  The corpse that's left isn't pretty.

The inimitable Daša Drndi's two novels of the life and near-death of Andreas Ban that I read this year, Belladonna and EEG (her final novel) operate in that rare space of politically sophisticated and philosophically dense fiction that is one of the staples of Eastern European writing. Ban, a melancholic psychologist and writer, meditates on history, genocide, love, hope and hopelessness in the style of Dubravka Ugrešić (The Ministry of Pain) and Zoran Feric (The Death of the Little Match Girl).  These are all bracing books--dense, unrelenting, demanding, but ultimately rewarding as you must think deeply and pay attention as you read. 

Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive, which I have written about in this blog, was the most affecting novel that I read this year. I have now read all of Luiselli's books and also recommend Sidewalks, her short essays on persons and places, thoughts while walking--with a lovely introduction and appreciation by Cees Nooteboom.  I am astonished to learn that former president Obama read and enjoyed this heart-wrenching novel about our border and its victims. Would that someone with power to effect a change in our immigration policies read this fine book. 

Deborah Eisenberg has been on my must-read list for a long time. This year I read her collection All Around Atlantis and have Your Duck is My Duck on my desk.  Few writers can do what Eisenberg does with eccentric America--she is, as someone put it, "the chronicler of our madness." Funny and sad, refreshing in our time of insane public life--memorial characters who look like you and me.

I read a lot of poetry this year. The two books I have read steadily all year are collections from veteran poets: John Balaban's Locusts at the Edge of Summer and Arthur Sze's (winner of the National Book Award this year) The Redshifting Web. Both poets work in open forms, observe the world with compassion, and open up avenues of feeling that draw you not only into individual poems but into the rich body of their work.  Once attracted to Balaban, I sought out three volumes of his translations of Vietnamese poetry (he served in Vietnam as a conscientious objector during that war) and recommend these books as well.  

Andres Resendez's The Other Slavery, an account of the enslavement of Native Peoples in the Americas was a book that stayed with me all year not only for its meticulous research but for the grace and style of the story's telling. 

I read three of Patti Smith's books over the past few weeks--We Kids, Devotion, and, best of all, M Train.  The story of my coming around to read the books that everyone else has already read is too long to repeat here, let's just say that I admired Patti as a musician for many years and had no idea that she wrote splendid books until I stumbled upon M Train in our one remaining bookstore. Patti's travels, her sensibility, and her prose--hallucinogenic, surreal, and as complex as her song lyrics--are worth taking up. I especially love her travels to pay hommage to the graves of writers she admires since I have had the same habit.

Lucy Ellmann's roller-coaster of a three sentence, one-thousand page stream of consciousness book is an insightful, long, long look at where we are now as seen through the consciousness of a not-so-average Ohio housewife.  It takes patience, but Ducks, Newburyport is worth the effort.  You'll be lulled into complacency by a bunch of pop culture references (I didn't get half of them) and then startled into wakefulness by a observations that are poignant and right on target.  Ellmann is the real deal: a novelist who is willing to break up the form and create something like Joyce's final 85 pages of Ulysses--Molly Bloom, with a millennium of pages to fill.

That's it for now.  Happy New Year to all!

George Ovitt (12/31/2019)

Men, Lurking

Milkman, Anna Burns

The Testaments, Margaret Atwood

Ducks, Newburyport, Lucy Ellmann

It's been a bad year for men.  Although, to be fair, when it comes to men's behavior, every year is pretty much the same.

Just recently, watching what reminded me (from my reading, not direct experience) of the spectacle of devout Bolsheviks falling over themselves to praise the Leader--"The Gardener of Human Happiness," The Man of Steel,"and, perhaps most aptly given that our Leader has been likened, without apparent irony, to Jesus Christ, "Dear Father"--I felt deeply embarrassed for my sex, age-group, and ethnicity (full disclosure: I am an oldish white male).  The defense of our recently impeached President by the apparatchiks of the GOP ("Groveling Odious Partisans") presented a nearly eight-hour spectacle not only of mendacity, boot-licking, and abject immorality, it also made it perfectly clear to this white male that what we are seeing is the end--thank God--of the rule of old white men over women, children, people of color, and our planet.

This can't go on, and the fervid displays of disingenuousness, smugness, and worst of all, the sense of entitlement that have been on display during these past weeks not only here but also in Great Britain--B. Johnson being Trump's twin, bad hair, fascistic tendencies, and a shared aversion to the truth--suggest that what is transpiring is a last, desperate attempt by a powerful but increasingly irrelevant class of old men (and young men with old souls) to cling to the prerogatives that they believe must be accorded their sex--power and money it goes without saying, but also unimpeded access to women's bodies, authoritarian control of our political and economic system, dictatorial influence over culture, and, in general, the status of demigods that has been, until now, their presumptive birth-right.  That's over, and, believe it or not, it is Trump, the Omega-Male, who is destroying what he hopes to preserve, destroying his half-baked MAGA-fantasy through fecklessness, narcissism, and immorality, and at the same time, for those persons paying attention, undoing all claims of masculine legitimacy--that is, all of the historic nonsense that has turned an ideology of masculine superiority into a farcical circus peopled by preening nobodies whose claims to "natural" domination of the world would be laughable were it not for the tragic consequences these nabobs have visited on human beings and our planet.

A bit of a rant, and poorly punctuated, but it's how we men talk.

My prognosis may appear counter-intuitive given the numerical dominance of white men in business, government, academe, the military, and everywhere else there is power to wield, but bear in mind that the demise of every hegemonic system in history--from feudalism to absolutism to so-called communism--has come at the moment of that system's seemingly greatest power.  The right-wing, anti-democratic, misogynistic, racist male egotism embodied by Trump, McConnell, Weinstein, Bezos, and their devoted followers is unleashing--even as I write these words--a backlash that is global and that will, in time, wash away the so-called principles and self-serving ideas of these men, wipe it away like a great Tsunami sweeping across a landscape laid waste by centuries of greed, stupidity, and arrogance.

This is the central point of Margaret Atwood's continuation of The Handmaid's Tale, the (I'm sorry to say) far less engaging novel The Testaments whose central premise is that rotten systems of government--in the case of the novel, brutal patriarchy--decay from within.  While the sequel to AHT was clunky, Atwood's premise is right on the money.  Rot begets rot; corruption engenders corruption; the cult of death--for that is what patriarchy really is--kills itself, though, unfortunately, not until it has claimed far too many innocent victims.

Will the rest of us--women, children, the poor and powerless, and decent fellows like myself, get out alive?  That remains to be seen.  I don't anticipate a long-term residence on earth, but I lament daily the world my daughters, my wife, and the good people I know will inherit, and I resent bitterly the stupidity and callous self-interest that has created what has passed beyond crisis to something more akin to disaster.

Yes, of course, there are wonderful men and awful women, sure, natch.  I generalize to be sure. Congressman Schiff seems a decent sort; Congressman Jordan of the shirt-sleeves, not so much. But this isn't a note about politicians, but about the trajectory of masculine behavior as it has for too long existed: we're in danger of expiring as a species; birds and turtles are disappearing; coral reefs are doomed; thousands upon thousands of men, women, and children starve and/or sleep under our freeways while the uber-rich (Rudy Giuliani!) own six homes and belong (Rudy Giuliani!) to eleven country clubs.  It's unnatural. The world is being devoured by piggish men who do nothing for anyone--they don't police our streets, fight our fires, teach our children, tend to the sick and the dying, build anything--they spend their wasteful days spinning money into more money, fomenting wars for others to fight, shitting in golden toilets, and spending an inordinate amount of time harassing, degrading, and raping women.

Enough.

***

Meanwhile, women fight back with courage, dignity, and art.

Anna Burns, for example, in a novel of extraordinary originality, plunks us into the odd reality of "middle sister," an eighteen-year-old who "reads while walking," and negotiates the violent world of what is presumably Northern Ireland during the 1970's (Burns was born in Belfast).  The unnamed characters who walk the streets of Burns's unnamed city negotiate a masculine world of political and personal grievance that leaves nearly every family mourning a son, a father, a daughter.  Burns, with deftness and imaginative scope unusual in contemporary fiction, pushes her story of sectarian violence from realism into the realm of parable: the repetitions of theme and language, the characters identified by their social role rather than by name ("maybe-boyfriend," "Milkman," "renouncers"), the circling back and forth among patterns of action, nearly all of which end in bloodshed--these rhetorical and thematic modes of storytelling add up to a novel that enacts the cycles of violence and degrees of victimization that characterize so many parts of the world in which we live. Most ominous for me are the lurking men, the "renouncers" who hate those from "over the ocean" and who inflict vengeance against any of their countrymen who deviate from a strict pattern of permissible behavior. "Informer" takes on the weight of "non-conformist": maybe-boyfriend who is middle sister's maybe love interest is suspect because he likes sunsets and stars; the Milkman (who isn't a milkman) is the chief of the "renouncers," perhaps an IRA gunman, and his unrequited love interest in middle-sister isn't offered as courtship but as the threat of sexual violence--he's the most powerful man in the community and is entitled to take whomever he wishes, no questions asked.  Middle-sister does her best to negotiate a terrain as replete with fixed rituals and unyielding culture as the Catholic Church; she fights rumors, but truth holds little sway in her world, just as it holds none in ours.  

Milkman is narrated throughout by middle-sister; dialogue is reported by her, all descriptions are filtered through her lively consciousness.  In this regard, Anna Burns and Lucy Ellmann approach the novel with similar aims: Burns reprises the psychological effect of simmering violence on the consciousness of one sensitive character; Ellmann, over the course of one-thousand pages (and about three sentences) uses a hurtling form of stream-of-consciousness (as in Joyce's Ulysses) to survey in (frankly, at times) excruciating detail the anxieties of an Ohio housewife, an Everywoman. In one sense, Burns and Ellmann traverse the same terrain, for both women view a world created by men that is baffling, full of threats, irrational, rapacious, and indifferent to the well-being of the weak, the very people for whom, one presumes, societies were created.  Ellmann's housewife isn't faced with the Shadow of the Gunman (see Sean O'Casey) but with the enervating rituals of up-to-the-minute American life. Ellmann, who has resided in Scotland for many years, is utterly hip to what is going on in our local precincts--the slipping away of a sense that we are anything other than a national shopping mall, that we can have a life outside of the internet, that we exist in any meaningful way with other people, that we give a shit about anyone other than ourselves.  Ellmann does isolation with the same intelligence that Burns does paranoia; in the end, these feelings amount to the same thing.

With Burns one is, as it were, 10,000 feet above the world, looking down at a grid of unnamed streets and neighborhoods and people, at events uprooted from time and place, at the general pattern of human folly. Ellmann, on the other hand, is like one of the historians of the annales school: she unpacks every moment, every impression, every thought of her narrator.  Both novels explore the interior life of a woman who possesses the gift of observation but who is put continuously on the defensive by a world that has become unmanageable.  Both Belfast and Ohio are sunk in violence, though of different sorts. Middle-sister lives among gunmen; Ohio-housewife lives in the murkiness of a way of life that is disappearing--security, community, child-rearing, marriage, work, patriotism--none of the verities with which Housewife has lived are enduring.  Trump makes numerous cameo appearances in Ducks, Newburyport as the talisman of this slipping away. Who better to embody the mess we are in?

What, Housewife wonders, has become of us?  What, indeed?

Christmas Day, 2019
George Ovitt

William Wordsworth, Patti Smith, and One Meaning of History

Patti Smith, M Train (a memoir)

"These beauteous forms,

Through a long absence, have not been to me

As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:

But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din

Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,

In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,

Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;

And passing even into my purer mind

With tranquil restoration:—feelings too

Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,

As have no slight or trivial influence

On that best portion of a good man's life,

His little, nameless, unremembered, acts

Of kindness and of love."

--William Wordsworth, from "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey"

 I finished M Train late last night, and while I should have slept in, I awoke at sunrise, my mind full of images from the book--Patti searching out the grave of Sylvia Plath, Patti photographing Bolano's writing chair in Blades, Patti at Mishima's grave, Patti and her late, lamented husband Fred Sonic Smith traveling to Suriname to fulfill a promise Patti had made to the ghost of Genet...and then the lines I have reproduced above from Wordsworth's Tintern Abby, imperfectly remembered, arrived as the sun rose in a bank of clouds over the Sandia mountains.  I next remembered an interview I had seen with Patti (I couldn't call her "Smith" if I tried) shot in 1975 when, clearly under the influence of something or other, she stole the show from five or six men, band members and a male interviewer, describing her own sense of freedom and of "breaking through to the other side." Somehow all of these disparate images coalesced into, of all things, a theory of history. 



Morning mind, like beginner's mind, is the best place to find new ideas.

Figuring out the arrival of William Wordsworth was easy enough.  His great poem of memory precisely describes Patti's working model: in "lonely rooms" (though by her own admission Patti is never lonely) and at her corner table at the Cafe Ino, she drinks her coffee and writes in her notebooks, remembering what has been a tumultuous life, full of joy, fame, and heartbreak.  Her beloved husband, Fred Smith, died young, as did her companion and lover of the late 1960's and early 1970's Robert Mapplethorpe. She has been celebrated as one of the founders of punk rock, and she was by far the finest lyricist to perform to in this style; she is a successful visual artist, an activist, and, above all (for me) a compelling writer. Her memoir Just Kids won the National Book Award in 2010; she has written half-a-dozen other books of which M Train is perhaps the finest. There is much for her to remember.

But the reason I thought of Wordsworth and of "Tintern Abbey" in particular goes deeper than the centrality of memory in Patti's work; rather it was because, as was the case for the great romantic poets of the 19th century, Patti is inspired by a deep sense of place--by graveyards in particular, but also by landscapes and seascapes, by city streets and remote villages.  Her descriptions of specific locales as a source of self-identity mirrors the Romantics' certainty that the spiritual and therefore the enduring is best discovered by traversing pastoral districts, visiting ruins, gazing on hills and oceans and then, reposing (pen in hand) in tranquility, recalling and reproducing the sensations evoked, not by the places themselves, but by their recollection. 

I can't pretend to know Patti's working methods--I'm guessing from what she has written, which may or may not be construed as a guide to her thinking--but her collections of objects and her offerings to the dead are aptly tied to her interests and obsessions: a few stones for Genet's grave, a cotton sock with an embroidered bee for Sylvia Plath, and always the Polaroid photographs of what feel like melancholy objects (Bolano's writing chair, Frieda Khalo's bed, Tolstoy's bear)--all of these images and objects possess the precise weight of memory one finds in the Romantics, or, closer to us, in the haunting books of W.G. Sebald. (Sebald isn't mentioned in M Train, but his spirit hovers alongside Patti as she writes).

  

The waking dream of my theory of history is, I'm afraid, rather sketchy, at least compared to my sense that Patti Smith is a notable Romantic artist.  But here was the thought I had, for what it's worth. 



Since the end of World War II (Patti was born in 1946), the central passion of American history has been the consolidation of economic and political power--enjoying the accidental fruits of uncontested material superiority that came after the War and the construction of a fragile consensus that would allow traditional elites to maintain social control while at the same time reluctantly doling out just enough wealth and just enough freedom to keep the majority of Americans, if not contented, then at least docile.  I know this is facile and probably untrue, but then, of course, it is true.

The 1950's (e.g. 1945-1963) were an experiment in social control through the narcotizing effects of consumerism on the one hand, and the enforcement of conformity through ideology and violence on the other. Women were locked in the domestic sphere; African-Americans were excluded from the mainstream through legal segregation and quasi-legal lynching; gays were forced into hiding, and non-elite men were pushed into economic and social roles that were, at best, constricting, and at worse, debilitating (see Richard Yates).  All power flowed to the elites of business, government, and the academies.  In other words, the aristocracy first conceived by the Founders had, at long last, been fully achieved within the comfortable borders of prosperity and global hegemony.

However:

There was bound to be an explosion, and the overthrowing of this repressive order was the work of the now much maligned "radicals" of the 1960's.  Actually not radicals so much as persons who hadn't forgotten that ideals like democracy and liberty were a reward due even the lowliest assembly-line worker, hotel maid, and stay-at-home mom.  Yes, it's true, in the Sixties there was folly galore, and self-indulgence, and the stupidity induced by drugs and narcissism, but the social impact of the age, which lasted until 1974, was indelible and salutary.

All of this is well known and it took me only fifteen seconds to think all of the above in that slipshod way I have of thinking in grand narratives.

But what I was actually considering was the weirdly exhilarating image of Patti Smith, age 29, a slender slip of a young woman, explaining to an interviewer that her life was about freedom, and that this (I thought when I heard her say it) was precisely the romantic view of human existence, and that saying this, and living as though it were true--living as though human freedom, especially creative freedom, was the point of living at all--wasn't a reason to shake one's head and worry about narcissism or the fall of American civilization but quite the opposite.

What Patti was saying was the simple truth.  And that, stripping away all of the bullshit about what it means to be a responsible citizen and a loyal American, leads one back to Wordsworth: our duty is to ourselves, to our understanding of our finite earthly existence, and that once we have managed to make some sense of what we are doing, we need to work hard to create something beautiful, however it is that we choose to do so.  All understanding is self-understanding. And the minute this not-at-all original idea came to me it also seemed clear that this was why I have been reading books all these years, precisely to discover for myself the truth and the freedom of thinking. 

Here, I finally said to myself (the sun fully risen at last), was a way to find "the best portion of a good man's life"--how to live both well and fully.

Thanks Patti. 

George Ovitt (12/7-8/2019)