Homesick

Homesick by Jennifer Croft
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Not sure how to classify this book--novel, autofiction, memoir--nor are publishers with British publisher calling it a novel while the Unnamed Press copy I have calls it memoir. Admired its lyricism, topics of sisterhood and language study illustrated by annotated photos taken by the author and her sister.

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Alix's Journal

Alix's Journal by Alix Cléo Roubaud
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Alix's Journal has a certain addictive quality for me: I was captivated by her reading references to some seventy-odd writers and poets plus music and art, and took notes. Alix Cléo Roubaud was a Canadian living in Paris who kept sad daily journals which talk of insomnia, suicide, depression and her concerns about ailments, drinking, smoking, weight gain and clothes as well as her work as a photographer and her frustrated creativity. She died at the age of thirty-one from a pulmonary-embolism. Examples of journal entries will give an idea:

I read nothing but the TLS.
Every night I fear reading my journal; fear of finding nothing there; or the phrases of an entirely despicable person.me.
impossibility of writing, married to a poet.
The smell of big hotels and deckchairs, when people are having aperitifs: a mixed scent of amber, cigarette smoke, wax polish; and those meats cooking in wine.
Seurat did a good job with Grande Jatte.
48 hour visit from my parents.
I forget more and more.
Insomnia.
Beautiful weather.
In playing with God, one loses every round.
--fear of madness. of egocentricity; of everything.
--the moment arrives to put cream on my hands. I wish, intensely, that the scent of mimosa will not die off.
. was it worth all that psychoanalysis to see me melted like butter in the sun and to die of fear.

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Undiscovered

Undiscovered by Gabriela Wiener
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"The strangest thing about being alone here in Paris, in an anthropology museum gallery more or less beneath the Eiffel Tower, is the thought that all these statuettes that look like me were wrenched from my country by a man whose last name I inherited."

Undiscovered by Journalist Gabriela Wiener is a dive into Peruvian history as she traces the lineage of her Jewish Austrian/French great great grandfather, an explorer in Peru, grieves the death of her father and tries to understand his dual life with two families, and documents the racism and colonial-tinged political slurs she's encountered as a Spanish resident. She also discusses her polyamory relationship with her husband, Jaime, and her girlfriend, Roci, plus other affairs she experiences. She's a busy narrator. Although the book is catalogued as fiction, I am thinking it is more like autofiction from the online interviews. She's a good writer but I bogged down a bit in the ancestral family tree hunts and wanted to whip back to the contemporary which yielded plenty of drama. Her exchanges with her mother toward the end were satisfying in conversation and letters, although my overall assessment is that I would rather see any one of the story lines developed, particularly the effects of her move to Spain and life there as a journalist.

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1,000 Words, a Writer's Guide to Staying Creative, Focused, and Productive All Year Round

1000 Words: A Writer's Guide to Staying Creative, Focused, and Productive All Year Round by Jami Attenberg
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

1000 Words: A Writer's Guide to Staying Creative, Focused, and Productive All Year Round is a book of enjoyable essays with writing advice, interviews and inspiration by well-published Attenberg (six novels, a memoir, a short story collection) generated on her motivational social media site https://1000wordsofsummer.substack.co.... Extolling the virtues of a daily writing practice, Attenberg has set her own output at one thousand words every day and encourages her readers to try doing the same. In June, the sixth version of this communal two-week practice starts with a daily letter of encouragement from the author. The book uses the four seasons of the writer's cycle to discuss creativity, motivation, drafting and publishing. There are notes and insights scattered throughout, all geared to inspiring the writer to make art. And the book's messages could be used for other art forms as well. Highly recommended. Thanks to Net Galley for the ARC.

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The Body in Question

The Body in Question by Jill Ciment
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Body in Question hums along as a story of a sensational murder trial of a young girl accused of murder, and the participating jurors, each identified only by profession or number. In Part Two, the story shifts our focus to one of the key jurors and her aged husband. Now each juror is identified by name and an irregularity surfaces which could challenge the verdict. Journalists hound the jurors and alliances crumble at the same time as one juror's husband is dying.
"Feet planted on the floor, he is half off the bed, half on, the posture of a man who has passed out from a night of hard drinking, but the scene lacks all the joys of inebriation. Only a drunken old poet would imagine that he is going to rage against the dying of the light. At whom? Death is excessively attentive. Death taps her husband's shoulder each time he falls asleep, startling him awake only long enough to remember that the is going to die. Death puts ice packs on his already cold feet. Death fill his bladder..."
Not only funny in bits, the prose is succinct and the pace moves swiftly to a surprising end.

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Heroines

Heroines by Kate Zambreno
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

There are some disagreeable reader comments about the author's excessiveness in this book, but I applaud its combination of memoir and literary commentary about the women writers who are psychologized and pathologized by their creative male partners, i.e. Zelda Fitzgerald, Vivien Eliot (Painted Shadow: The Life of Vivienne Eliot, First Wife of T. S. Eliot), Jane Bowles, Jean Rhys, June Miller (Henry and June), Sylvia Plath, Anaïs Nin, as well as fictional characters in Virginia Woolf, Kate Chopin, Gustave Flaubert, Anna Kavan, H.D., Elizabeth Hardwick'sThe Ghostly Lover, etc. In Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper, the doctor tells the woman writer "to never touch pen, brush, or pencil as long as you live." Kate Zambreno describes "mean reds," fears of abandonment, her IBS and endometriosis, obsessive shopping, and her history of depression and sleeplessness, hence shrinks, pills, hospitalization as one of the "slit-your-wrist girls." She is accused of writing which is too personal, too emotional, too excessive. While some of the stories were familiar, I was sorry to finish this enlightening book and I was grateful for the extensive bibliography of over 150 books and articles about these women's lives. My TBR (To Be Read) quakes under the strain.

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Coastalegre

Costalegre by Courtney Maum
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Costalegre is a story in which I keep trying to fill in all the fictional blanks with real artists. Evidently about Peggy Guggenheim (the mother is called Leonora) and her cadre of Surrealists on the Pacific Coast of Mexico near Careyes doing art and escaping from Nazis in 1937, it is told from the viewpoint of the lonely lovesick teen daughter (inspired by Guggenheim's ill-fated daughter Pegeen), this erratic crew bond, scrap and neglect each other like the real Marcel Duchamp, Andre Breton, Max Ernst, Djuna Barnes and Leonora Carrington might have. The chapters are short, labeled for days of the week as though a diary, and a smattering of drawings contribute to the whimsical touch of a lively coming-of-age contribution to the many writings on Peggy Guggenheim, her family and friends.

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Three

Three by Ann Quin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Finishing Three gave me a sense of accomplishment. Ann Quinwrote this dense experimental novel of a ménage a trois often using no distinguishing orthographies or paragraphs for the three different speakers (a British middle-class couple plus their missing tenant/visitor) as well as no such breaks in their journals, diaries, etc. Just endless unpunctuated sentences, thoughts and movement so it is never clear who is speaking: "verbiage bumping up against verbiage in a dim, junk-cluttered hall" described by Joshua Cohen in the introduction. Although confused by the lack of plot, I was at the same time, swept along trying to build a story and propulsively attuned to Quin's fine writing. I intend to read another of her works, Berg.
"...Days become shorter. Hours lengthen. Wind rises
out of the sea
carries mist
to the house. Buries itself
into stonework. The possibility of what might have been sinks
away. Into what is left."

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Ex-Wife

Ex-Wife by Ursula Parrott
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Ex-Wife by Ursula Parrott, published anonymously in 1929, was as good as promised when I heard about it on Backlisted's Patreon podcast and they recommended it as the feminine counterpart to Gatsby in describing the Jazz Age and what happens to young women who are caught between Victorian morality and the sexual revolution of the twenties. I responded with a raised glass to the blurb's description of the narrator as "wedged between Edith Wharton's constrained society girls and the squandered glamour of Jean Rhys's doomed wanderers."
The first person narrator, Pat, announces to her newest man, Noel:
"Don't have any illusions about me. I have slept with more men than I can remember." That was exaggeration, but I had to exaggerate, lest I should understate.
And he responds..."Whatever happened to you has made you poised and tolerant, and comprehending, and anyone who knows you should be grateful for whatever produced the result." But, in the all too familiar refrain, he's taken, and Pat continues the high life in search of a stable closure. And Ursula Parrott sold 100,000 copies of the novel.

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Flight

Flight: A Novel by Lynn Steger Strong
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Flight: A Novel by Lynn Steger Strong is a good domestic novel of three grown children and their spouses and children gathering for Christmas now that the matriarch, Helen, has died. They try to maintain old customs and some are more entrenched in family memories than others, a couple are artists, each has concerns of their own. Most rue the mother's passing. There are mishaps and challenges with the five children present, and the last quarter of the book steps up the pace considerably when a child is missing in a snowstorm. At that point, it went from a three-star to a four-star for me. I thought the writing admirable with a nice balance of scene and dialogue plus introspection. In the beginning with six adults and a neighbor, I struggled to keep track of who was married to who, made their living doing what and who had which kids. I put notes in the front of the book to guide me. Kate, whose mother has died, remembers her: "But she's the only person in the world who ever saw me the way she saw me, who loved me like that, who remembered me as all the things I'd ever been and also thought of me as all the things she still thought I might become...It feel harder--fucking terrifying--that there is no longer any person in the world who loves me like she did." A poignant sketch of mothering and mother loss.

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Tremor

Tremor by Teju Cole
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Teju Cole's book is a learning experience. He writes beautifully, talks about historical tragedies, and the book has a challenging shifting narrator scheme and the same with many locations, starting in Maine, then Cambridge, MA to Mali and Nigeria and back. He discusses J.M.W. Turner's painting "Savers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying" which we've seen with its foreground of roiling seas and brilliant red sky and the ship Zong, plus the Africans, some in chains, which the slaver is throwing overboard, cargo he is transporting to America. Lloyds of London has since offered reparations. There were at least 130 who drowned in 1781. According to the BBC this ship and the crime paved the way for eventual abolition of the slave trade so something was learned by someone.

He also fields an interesting discussion of the unreliability of Western custody of artworks citing the WWII destruction of work by Van Gogh, Courbet, Murillo, Rubens, Titian, Goya, Botticelli, Tintoretto, and Caravaggio. by allied bombs. And there are references throughout to so many paintings (i.e. Chris Ofili's "Mary Magdalene" with a "violet so deep it could drown the eyes, in whose "Raising of Lazarus" there is a violet so base it could raise the dead."

In the beginning of the book, Cole includes a scene where his partner and he are shopping for antiques at a rural warehouse in Maine and find a couple of things they wish to buy including a ci wara, a ritual object representing an antelope and used by the Bambara people of Mali. Later, he goes to Mali for a conference and buys others of these sculptures. He also spends evenings listening to the music of the area at a club and the music is available on a playlist: https://open.spotify.com/queue

I'll skip a recap of the serial killer mentioned by a student in his creative writing class.
He also watches The Searchers and a 1994 film by an Iranian director, Abbas Kiarostami, Through the Olive Trees.
Art and music predominate but fewer books from this creative writing professor at Harvard. except for a handful of titles, Virginia Woolf's "The Death of a Moth." Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America about captivity narratives; Invisible Cities and Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali. But I remind myself it is not about a WRITING professor, it's about a photographer! I had a hard time not reading it autobiographically.

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The Door

The Door by Magda Szabó
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Door by Magda Szabó is about a hard-working cleaner who is hired to look after the writer-narrator's apartment and performs impeccably until she is struck ill, found by neighbors immobile in squalor and sent to hospital with no help from the narrator who has writing obligations elsewhere. "Emerence was pure and incorruptible, the better self that each and every one of us aspired to be. With her permanently veiled forehead and her face that was tranquil as a lake, she asked nothing from anyone and depended on no-one. She shouldered everyone's burden without ever speaking of her own, and when she did finally need my help, I...left her, in the squalor of advanced illness, for others to witness the single moment of degradation in her life." The author began her writing life as a poet and has written numerous novels, non-fiction and short stories and won various awards. A compelling read.

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Winter in the Blood

Winter in the Blood by James Welch
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A teacher recommended this book and I dutifully picked it up and inhabited another world, a Montana reservation where members of the Gros Ventre and Blackfeet tribes live outside of towns such as Harlem, Dodson, Havre, where they grow grain and run cattle. James Welch writes with humor and truth. His dialogue skills are rich and authentic: "Why don't you settle down?" I said to my hands. "Pay up," said the bartender. When he left, I said, "If you settled down you'd be a lot better off; you'd be happier, believe me, Agnes." "You bore me," she said. "You should learn a trade, shorthand," I said. "There's a crying demand for secretaries." She looked at me as if she didn't recognize me. "Shorthand?" she squealed.
His images of nature and characters put you right out on that flat grazing land of the West. "Evening now and the sky had changed to pink reflected off the high western clouds. A pheasant gabbled from a field to the south. A lone cock, he would be stepping from the wild rose along an irrigation ditch to the sweet alfalfa field, perhaps to graze with other cocks and hens, perhaps alone. It is difficult to tell what cocks will do when they grow old. They are like men, full to twists." Welch started as a poet and is quoted in Louise Erdrich's introduction: "we are storytellers from a long way back. And we will be heard for generations to come." The book was published fifty years ago and I am as excited about reading it as if it were just out, a new discovery. And his storyteller credentials are evident in the braided tale describing a cattle drive perfectly paced with a bar spree. The narrator describes his mother, "she had always had a clear bitter look, not without humor, that made the others of us seem excessive, too eager to talk too much, drink too much, breathe too fast...I saw...how much she had come to resemble the old lady." Highly recommended.

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Reading Year at a Glance 2023

2023 on Goodreads by Various
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A fruitful reading year of 72 titles, 17,475 pages, and ratings averaged 3.8. Most of my collection was from the U.S. but 26 titles were translations and 9 were poetry collections. Apparently, twenty of my authors were men. Authors new to me numbered 25 and included Sophie Divry, Elissa Bassist, and Tan Twan Eng. Old favorites continued to be favored, i.e. Ian McEwan's Lessons, Diane JohnsonThe true history of the first Mrs. Meredith and other lesser lives and Muriel Spark The Abbess of Crewe. My non-fiction selections were 18, anchored by Nabokov's memoir (Speak, Memory).
Books published in 2023 came to 25. The oldest was Nabokov's. The stories that excited me the most were The English Understand Wool and The Wren, the Wren(Irish)and Foster(Irish), although I was quite taken with Australian author Helen Armstrong (The Children's Bach). I thought The true history of the first Mrs. Meredith and other lesser lives was a delight and an ingenious history and Mary Ruefle'sThe Book pleased me with its discussions of friendships, of plums. Authors new to me were Sophie Divry, Elissa Bassist, Tan Twan Eng and Marie NDiaye.
***
Just read Val's valiant effort to reduce her number of TBRs to 195. My 1164 TBR's are really books I want to read so the longer the list, the more curious and interested in variety I appear, no? Such a didact! My shame would be the number of books on my shelves which I have yet to read, and still I buy more. These two categories conflate in my records. I read Susan Hill's Howards End Is on the Landing: A Year of Reading from Home and aspired to do as she did, stop buying books and curtail library usage, until the landings were cleared. In fact, one of my categories toward this end is "Howard's End is On the Landing" (HEIOTL). I also chuckle familiarly over Nick Hornby's The Believer columns where he reviews books bought and books read and sometimes there is no overlap. I understand. I now must catalog the HEIOTLs with new vigor and make next year's 70-book goal to read my own books.

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Look at the Lights, My Love (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

Look at the Lights, My Love by Annie Ernaux
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Nobelist Ernaux has written an initially compelling study of a superstore in France called Auchan (think, Walmart) and every aspect from the standpoint of an observer on marketing strategies, product placement, pricing, sociological implications, customers, staff, departments (i.e. fish, pharmacy, bakery, bookstore, etc.) and the satellite stores such as McDonalds, a bowling alley, a news and tobacco shop along side. She kept a journal of her observations for many months and ends this eighty-page journal with
"As the months went by, I was able to measure the controlling force exerted by mass production spaces in real and imaginary ways. By provoking desires at dictated times, its violence equally present in the colorful profusion of yogurt flavors as in the gray everyday deals aisles, and by reinforcing social stigmas through the accommodation of individuals with low incomes. The items purchased whether in a little heap or a toppling mountain on the conveyor belt, are nearly always among the cheapest. Upon leaving the superstore, I was often overwhelmed by a sense of helplessness and injustice. But for all that, I have not ceased to feel the appeal of the place and the community life, subtle and specific, that exists there."
Alas, I ceased to feel the appeal of her book midway and put it down.

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2022 Reading in Review

2022 on Goodreads by Various
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A satisfying year meeting my goal and reading a few extra volumes (69 total) mostly due to pandemic quarantining. My most generous reviews were of my husband's book Southern Voices: Biet Dong and the National Liberation Front (about the Vietnam War), several poetry volumes (discovered Robert Wrigley and Larry Levis, revisited Octavio Paz), and fiction: Still Life, Fight Night, The All of It, The Fell, Recitatif,Burntcoat, Trust, The Lovers, Companion Piece, The Passenger, and Small Things Like These; and non-fiction include Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, Deborah Levy's memoir trilogy, Aurelia, Aurélia: A Memoir, Suppose a Sentence (on favorite sentences), In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss(on death with dignity), The Last Days of Roger Federer: And Other Endings (on endings), Also a Poet: Frank O'Hara, My Father, and Me, and A House of My Own: Stories from My Life, both memoir hybrids and Figure It Out (on art and life). A satisfactory collection but this year I would like to strive for more classics, read more books in translation and finish Ducks, Newburyport. Certainly, something can be found in my TBR pile of 1,093 titles the oldest and highest rated of which is The Invention of Hugo Cabret. I am already looking at a maxed out library holds list and an ample in-house collection.

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Vertigo & Ghosts: Poems

Vertigo & Ghost by Fiona Benson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The first half of the book addresses Zeus and his rapist ways and it blew me away, captivated and chilled me. The second half deals with motherhood and nature and was less interesting, but her gifts of word choice made every poem worthwhile. Recommended by Andy Miller from Backlisted.fm where I hear about the best books.

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The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"Suffering is a part of the human condition and must be borne. But misery is a choice," and Bobby Western is a man in misery broken by the loss of his sister, several close friends, sought by government agents he knows not why, unemployed and unhoused much of the book allowing for extravagant descriptions of weather ("It had rained earlier and the moon lay in the wet street like platinum manhole cover.") nature, birds ("In the spring of the year birds began to arrive on the beach from across the gulf. Weary passerines. Vireos. Kingbirds and grosbeaks. Too exhausted to move. You could pick them up out of the sand and hold them trembling in your palm. Their small hearts beating and their eyes shuttering. He walked the beach with his flashlight the whole of the night to fend away predators and toward the dawn he slept with them in the sand. That none disturb these passengers."). The idea of the missing passenger from the downed plane is never clear, but I let it go as government chicanery. I meandered through the author's digressions on physics, math, war, atom bombs, guns, cars and Kennedys, what is a photon? I did not love the hallucinations and dream segments, but I would not, could not, stop reading because of the dialogue, rich descriptions and settings especially New Orleans and Ibiza. Is Bobby's future a "nameless burial in the hard caliche of a potter's field in a foreign land?" Reminded me of past reading treks with Robert Stone or Jim Harrison.

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