Reading List: May 2020
Books Read (Date & Where Got):
The Tidings of the Trees, Wolfgang Hilbig (ordered via Two Lines Press, 11/1/18)
Last Words from Montmartre, Qui Miaojin (Binnacle Books, Beacon NY, 7/26/19)
Three, Ann Quin (ordered from bookshop.org, 5/4/20)
Garden By the Sea, Mercé Rodoreda (ordered from Open Letter Books, 3/1/20)
Where there's love, there's hate, Adolfo Bioy Casares & Sylvina Ocampo (Binnacle Books, 7/26/19)
They Will Drown in Their Mothers' Tears, Johannes Anyuru (ordered from Two Lines Press, 5/13/20)
Books Bought: (Date & Where Got):
My Husband, Rumena Buzarovska (ordered from bookshop.org)
Three, Ann Quin (ordered from bookshop.org)
Dodge Rose, Jack Cox (ordered from bookshop.org)
They Will Drown in Their Mothers' Tears, Johannes Anyuru (ordered from Two Lines Press)
On Lighthouses, Jazmina Barrera (ordered from Two Lines Press)
When the Waves Came, MW Larson (ARC)
It has gotten harder to get reading in now that I have "gone back to work" and the baby is turning into more of a person. Still managed to get a few done. Stress-bought three Dalkey Archive books mid-month, bought two from a Two Lines Press sale, and got a copy of a book by Michael Larson, who I know from my time in Japan.
The Tidings of the Trees Wolfgang Hilbig
Two Lines Press
An East German book about a man who lives alone on top of a giant ash heap. It has a glowing blurb from Lazlo Krasznahorkai on the back. Need I go on. It's a beautiful little book, unsettling and otherworldly. Comparable to the intense, demandingly dense beauty of Stalker. Time behaves oddly, there's some shenanigans with some garbagemen and mannequins, sometimes it is wryly funny. Good if you have several hours to kill in a cold, damp room.
Last Words from Montmartre Qiu Miaojin
New York Review Books
Not necessarily a novel, not a journal, not a diary... something 'autofictional' but closer to Pessoa than Sebald. The "narrator," a Taiwanese writer in Paris, wrestles with the concept of love and separation, love and ownership, in a series of letters to one ex and one current lover. Oscillates between fury and tenderness from page to page. It's somehow engrossing, this madness.
ThreeAnn Quin
Dalkey Archive
Strange and unbalanced, this book tells it story in three different forms. There is dense, claustrophobic prose for a tightly-laced middle-class English couple; fragments of language that wander across the page, supposedly the recorded words of their boarder, who has somehow died; and then evasive narration of the boarder's life. The discombobulated language reminded me somewhat of Eimear McBride--you can sense a mystery in the language, that it's hiding something, and uncovering what the book is actually about is what pulls you forward. Remarkable. Full of sex.
Garden by the Sea Merce Rodoreda
Open Letter
I picked up Rodoreda's Death in Spring thanks to the cover art alone, which did the book justice (Open Letter's covers are always great). This book, unlike that one, is grounded firmly in our own universe. We follow a gardener, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, as he watches the family who employs him come and go. He is outside of all drama, watching ti unfold, and the prose has this careful, quiet gardener's sensibility: small adjustments are noted, like a vase that's turned just-so during conversation.
Where There's Love, There's Hate Adolfo Bioy Casares & Silvina Ocampo
Melville House
I DID NOT KNOW THESE TWO WERE MARRIED! How cool is that. Anyway, this is murder-mystery set in a hotel that's trapped in a permanent sandstorm. Fun. Agatha Christie a la married weirdo geniuses.
They Will Drown in Their Mother's Tears Johannes Anyuru
Two Lines Press
A Swedish novel about belonging, terrorism, family, and time. Narrator is a journalist who is investigating a woman arrested after failing to detonate her suicide vest. She claims she is from the future, which she describes in dystopian detail. Tore through it in a day or two, it's very engaging, and has this cool spiral structure that in the end reveals itself as completely appropriate.