katherine – Koba English

Austerlitz

Everyone in my book club was so utterly charmed by Aaliya from An Unnecessary Woman, and impressed with the breadth and depth of her literary references, that we decided to pick one of her favorites as a book club read for later. I was privately gunning for Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet but in the end we went with Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald.

I’m glad that this was the book we picked for June, and not earlier in the year when my brain would have been fried from work, because Sebald demands a lot from the reader. One book club member joked that they thought it would be an easier read because of the wide margins and all of the photos sprinkled throughout. Hah!

In addition to the near-complete lack of paragraph breaks, the narrative itself is deeply nested. We don’t follow the titular Jacques Austerlitz through his life in real time; the story unfolds as he tells it, over the course of several years at happenstance meetings, to the book’s anonymous narrator. The narrator, meanwhile, reveals so little about himself that he vanishes almost entirely into the scenery. The sentences are also dense and complicated, and while I can’t speak to the German original (or the English translation), in the Swedish that complexity takes the form of long asides in dependent clauses or adjectival phrases that almost feel like an entire extra sentence smuggled in the middle of the first one you were reading. I had to go back and re-read sentences on nearly every page because those clauses and asides aren’t always (usually aren’t) offset with commas and reading turned into a game of “find the conjugated verb.” You either need a sharp memory or a lot of uninterrupted reading time to make it through Austerlitz without losing your train of thought.

Beyond just the grammatic and syntactic overwhelm, Austerlitz is also full to the brim with historical anecdotes, references, and other asides that I hesitate to call “trivia” because a lot of them pertain directly to the Holocaust. Architecture! Nazi propaganda! Moths! Train stations! You come away with the sense that your head has not only been crammed full of Austerlitz’s biography but also random facts. Consensus among the book club was that Aaliya might just be much smarter and more elevated than us mere mortals. I might revisit An Unnecessary Woman (in ebook format for that search function!) to see exactly what Aaliya thought of it.

To get to the narrative itself, Austerlitz is a fictional account of a man named Jacques Austerlitz, who was sent off on one of the Kindertransport trains and grew up in Wales under the care of a minister and his wife. I used “fictional account” up there, but Sebald made it clear that he was inspired by the real-life case of Susi Bechhofer. Like Susi, Austerlitz’s adoptive parents do their best to erase memories of his previous life, including but not limited to changing his name. (Also like Susi, Austerlitz doesn’t learn about his double identity until he goes to sit an exam and the teacher instructs him to give his name as “Jacques Austerlitz” rather than “Dafydd Elias.”) Between a childhood devoid of warmth or affection and the suppressed trauma of being completely ripped away from his previous identity, Austerlitz struggles as an adult. While he excels academically and manages to become an art historian and teacher, he is never able to complete the book on architecture he had set out to write and eventually suffers a serious mental breakdown. After he returns to Prague as an adult and learns more about his parents, Austerlitz becomes a more integrated version of himself. Or so it seems. Is he better now? Is he not? What’s going to happen with him? Who knows! A more conventional story would have ended at Austerlitz’s funeral, or the narrator learning of Austerlitz’s death after the fact, but instead the two part ways and the narrator is left thumbing through Dan Jacobson’s Heshel’s Kingdom, which he received as a gift from Austerlitz.

Austerlitz is one of those books where even though I didn’t have fun (as such) reading it, I still…enjoyed? appreciated?…reading it. The whole thing is a technical marvel; despite the grammatic and syntactical complexity I mentioned before, you still have a sense of flow and the overall whole of the story (even if you can’t remember what was going on at the beginning of the sentence). There’s also an element of personal satisfaction in finishing a book like this akin to the odd occasion when I manage to run a 10K: it’s a good sign that my body (or in this case, my brain) is still capable of rising to such a challenge. At this point credit goes to Ulrika Wallenström‘s Swedish translation. I can only infer what the German might be like from the Swedish, after all. Never mind all of the names, official translations, and technical terms to check. Austerlitz might not have officially finished his book on architecture and history, but much of that preparatory research material permeates the story. No mean translation feat, this one.

Den blinda ugglan

Sadeq Hedayat’s Den blinda ugglan (The Blind Owl, or Boof-e Kur in Persian) came to my attention through a member of my monthly philosophy reading group. Not because it had anything to do with philosophy, but because we were chatting about Swedish book clubs. I’d never heard of the book or the author before, and the description sounded intriguing:

The Blind Owl is described as a text without peer, with influences from Kafka and Poe as well as from Persian mythology and folk tales. A man recounts his life history to his own shadow. The confusion of losing his mystical lover has driven him to the edge of death or madness. Time and space have disintegrated and the same motifs, the same people constantly reappear in new forms.

The book can be read as a horror story, a surreal depiction of a nightmare or perhaps as an opium-laced game with distorted reflections. André Breton called the book one of the few true masterpieces.

The most frustrating thing for me now is finding out after the fact that it’s full of references to Persian mythology. That’s a huge field to dive into just for the sake of a short book, and yet without that knowledge it feels like the story loses a lot of its impact.

At the end of the day, I’m not sure what I read, but it cracked my idea of what a novel can be wide open. What we have, nominally, are the journalistic confessions of an ailing, unnamed narrator addressed to the shadows on his wall. Is he dying? Is he depressed? Both? Something else? In the first portion of the novella (no chapter breaks, only a handful of section breaks) he mourns the death of an otherworldly woman with whom he feels mystically connected. In the second we get distorted glimpses of a slightly less surreal life, with a domineering (though affectionate) mother-in-law and a promiscuous wife who withholds sex from the narrator. Are they the same people? Is this the same tale told twice, or is one just the opium-induced hallucination of the other? Is any of this even happening at all? Another review compared it to Steppenwolf but for my money, Den blinda ugglan is much, much weirder.

I happened to watch Mulholland Drive while I was reading this, so maybe that’s why the comparison is ready at hand for me to make, but the even so the two are similar. Putting aside the shared surface-level surrealism, they’re both bifurcated, with two distinct narratives that might or might not be connected, presented by two unreliable narrators who might or might not be the same person. Events in both parts are paradoxical or explicitly contradictory, though they are united by the names and images and phrases that recur in both parts. Romantic jealousy is also a key part of the narrative, whether literal or as a metaphor for a more spiritual struggle.

There’s my nutshell summary, I guess: What if Mulholland Drive were a novella written by an Iranian author living in Paris during the 1930s?

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

This one is a re-read for me. I originally bought my copy at my beloved, now-shuttered What The Book? in Seoul in 2012, though the cover of the Mariner Books edition that came out in 2000, with its haunting photo of Carson McCullers, was a constant presence in my high school book store visits. The text also made an impression on me, and long after I forgot the events of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, the emotional wallop it packed lingered. It’s remained in my library ever since.

I picked it up again for a re-read now, in June 2025, because I was craving a comfort read. On a related note, I got the notion that it would be the perfect gift for a new book friend I’d recently made, and while “I don’t remember anything that happens in the book, but I know that I loved it” might be a glowing recommendation, it’s not a very convincing one.

In no way was I disappointed.

I don’t know why I never picked up another book by McCullers. Part of it is no doubt due to the fact that I try to read as many authors as possible rather than hyperfocusing on just a few. But I expect I didn’t want an inadequate follow-up to tarnish my affection for The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.

Maybe now in 2025 I can give it a shot.

Jag sjunger och bergen dansar

Most of the reviews here recently are from an international book club my American friend in Turkey invited me to at the beginning of the year. Which is to say, Jag sjunger och bergen dansar by Irene Solà was our pick for May!

Much like with En attendant la montée des eaux, the back-of-the-book summary for this one (in my opinion) mischaracterized the plot as well as the tone of the book. In this case, the blurb for Jag sjunger… suggests that the book is a kind of bildungsroman focusing on a pair of Catalonian siblings, or perhaps a family portrait. At least that’s the case with the Swedish blurb (my own rough translation):

Farmer and poet Domènec lives a rural life in the Pyrenees mountains in northern Catalonia, in the lingering shadows of a war-torn past. One day, out picking mushrooms during a thunderstorm, he is struck dead by lightning. Left behind are his wife, Sió, and their two children, Mia and Hilari. Together, they have to remember and create their lives in a mythological landscape where people, as well as nature, have something to say about the land’s unhealed wounds–but also about the possibilities of love.

When I Sing, Mountains Dance is a marvelous novel depicting, in a unique poetic style overflowing with literary delight, previously unspoken Catalonian experiences and a people subject to the whims of Mother Nature.

The book doesn’t really focus on Sió, Mia, and Hilari trying to collectively remember Domènec. Nor does it focus on how they struggle to create a life for themselves. It’s more of a portrait of an entire community and landscape anchored in a pair of tragic events. Because what’s not clear from that summary is that most of the book’s perspective characters are not, in fact, Sió, Mia, or Hilari. Not only do we get to hear from their neighbors; we get to hear from anonymous visiting tourists to their village, storm clouds, ghosts, dogs, mushrooms, even the mountains themselves. And where Solà really excels in Jag sjunger… is in crafting a genuine variety of voices, often supernatural or otherwordly. Each chapter is so self-contained that you could equally call the book a collection of short stories rather than a novel, even as the red thread of Mia and Hilari brings many of them together.

I’ve had a mixed experience with novels written by poets. Kris is a powerful work of art and I enjoyed On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, while Ixelles left a lot to be desired. I think the determining factor here is the novel’s structure: are we talking about a straightforward, traditional plot? Or something more avant garde? The common denominator in all three books I enjoyed was their episodic, decentralized structure. The timeline is often erratic, jumping across chronology, in favor of presenting specific scenes or images rather than a straightforward narrative with a beginning, middle, and end. The same holds true for Jag sjunger…: we begin with the death of Domènec and we end with Mia (perhaps?) achieving something like closure about various tragedies in her life, but in between the timescale is just all over the place. When poets aren’t afraid to lean into their strengths and experiment with a form rather than try to capitulate to established market norms, that’s when interesting art happens.

And finally, I love seeing how book covers vary internationally. The English language ones all feature a landscape, with assorted flora in the foreground and the Pyrenees in the background. The Swedish edition, on the other hand, focuses almost entirely on the mushrooms, with only a subtle framing from the contours of the Pyrenees. (It took a minute of staring to realize it was supposed to be the Pyrenees and not just a ragged piece of fabric or paper.) Tranan knows how to appeal to their target demographic.

En attendant la montée des eaux

As can be inferred from the sparse updates here, I haven’t finished many books lately. This is attributable to being busy with work but also the fact that the book I was most recently trying to get through was Maryse Condé‘s En attendant la montée des eaux. According to my check-out dates from the library, I started this one back in February. My tardy pace is no way any fault of Condé’s, since I was engrossed in her writing and the story from the beginning—it’s always the natural consequence of reading in French.

I first became aware of Condé through a short biography in one of Karavan’s 2024 issues following her death last April. Now and again the journal will include one of these retrospectives on the death of a particular favorite (of the magazine’s editorial staff? of the Swedish literati?), which is a handy if somewhat grim way for me to discover new authors. Stockholm library has a fairly wide offering of her books in the original French, so I could get started right away. I put Moi, Tituba sorcière… on my Storygraph TBR, but mostly as a placeholder for any Condé book. En attendant… happened to be the first and easiest one to find.

En attendant la montée des eaux follows obstetrician Babakar, a Malian now residing in Guadeloupe, in the chaos surrounding his surprise adoption of an orphaned infant. In the middle of a dark and stormy night, the young Movar appears on Babakar’s doorstep and asks him assist in an emergency birth. The child’s father is unknown, though presumed murdered back in Haiti; the mother, an undocumented Haitian migrant named Reinette, dies in childbirth before Babakar can do anything to save her. Still scarred by the loss of his beloved wife and their unborn child to political violence back in Africa, Babakar takes it upon himself to adopt the newborn and names her Anaïs. This act promptly throws his life into disarray: the native Guadeloupeans, who had never been fond of him but who take an even dimmer view of Haitian immigrants, slowly abandon his practice, while as far as the local Haitians are concerned Babakar has stolen one of their children. On top of this, Babakar’s closest confidante and only friend passes away shortly afterwards. It’s not surprising, then, that when Movar returns and demands that Babakar bring Anaïs to Haiti in accordance with the wishes of her dying mother, Babakar just shrugs his shoulders and decides, “why not?” Once in Haiti, Babakar quickly settles in with Movar’s family: his friend and mentor Fouad and two younger sisters, Jahina and Myriam.

This sets up the various stories, long and short, that take up the bulk of the book. This is really my only criticism, which isn’t really a criticism as such but more an observation: Anaïs is absent for most of the book, and when she does appear, Babakar doesn’t really seem to be parenting her all that much, no matter how much we are assured by the narration that she is the light of his life. This makes sense structurally, because the story of Babakar and Anaïs is the set dressing for bringing the ensemble cast together. At a rough estimate I would say that at least a third, maybe half, of En attendant... consists of flashbacks from Babakar as well as the various secondary characters: Movar, the Haitian migrant who had been desperately in love with Reinette and who had been the one to bring Babakar into things; Movar’s friend and mentor Fouad, a Palestinian chef and would-be poet exiled from Lebanon to Haiti; Reinette’s estranged sister Estrella; Estrella’s jilted lover Roji. Together they give Condé an excuse to present these different narratives alongside each other in one book. But this structure has a weird side effect where all of the present-day scenes involving Anaïs feel a bit like an afterthought.

I’m not alone in this sentiment, it seems. The first thing I do after finishing a book is to see what other people thought of it, not because I don’t have an opinion of my own but because it’s always gratifying to see someone validate your own take. Other times, a reviewer will level a particular piece of criticism that makes me stop and reflect on my own experience of the book: do I agree or disagree? In this case, a lot of other readers felt the story dragged. While I can understand why other people might feel that way, I personally didn’t. Perhaps this is in part a marketing issue, as the English summary of the book suggests a much more breathless, nail-biting story than what takes place:

Babakar is a doctor living alone, with only the memories of his childhood in Mali. In his dreams, he receives visits from his blue-eyed mother and his ex-lover Azelia, both now gone, as are the hopes and aspirations he’s carried with him since his arrival in Guadeloupe. Until, one day, the child Anaïs comes into his life, forcing him to abandon his solitude. Anaïs’s Haitian mother died in childbirth, leaving her daughter destitute―now Babakar is all she has, and he wants to offer this little girl a future. Together they fly to Haiti, a beautiful, mysterious island plagued by violence, government corruption, and rebellion. Once there, Babakar and his two friends, the Haitian Movar and the Palestinian Fouad, three different identities looking for a more compassionate world, begin a desperate search for Anaïs’s family.

“Desperate” is not quite the word I would use. Anaïs’s family consists solely of Estrella, who proves trivially easy to track down. To the extent any search in this story is desperate, it’s the living’s search for the dead: Movar’s search for Reinette, and then later Jahina and Myriam’s search for Movar. Desperation? Absolutely. Just not the kind advertised on the back of the book.

Likewise, a lot of people were put off by the seemingly relentless tragedy. Maybe the fact that I crawled through the book over the course of three months helped in this regard, as I never felt overwhelmed by all of the (and this is a technical term) bummer shit. Upon reflection, of course, I’d say that yeah, of course En attendant… is filled with a lot of bummer shit. It’s about colonialism, about neoliberalism, about power; you can’t tackle these subjects and keep everything sunshine and roses. Again, this might have been a case of false advertising, though more subtly: to my reading that English summary is making a promise that the story doesn’t really keep. I don’t know that Babakar, Movar, or Fouad would say that they were looking for a more compassionate world as such, and I don’t think they’ve found one by the end of the book, either.

But if it’s a book filled with tragedy, then Condé keeps a light enough touch throughout that (for me) it never comes across as relentless. I’m a cynical, jaded reader, and I consider myself highly sensitive (maybe even oversensitive) to even the slightest impression of tragedy wielded as a blunt tool of emotional manipulation. I’m not here for your teenage cancer patients and their romance, John Green, and I think it was tacky of you to write the book in the first place. In En attendant… the deaths and devastation are presented as plain facts of life, inevitable occurrences on a long enough timeline. In a brief aside, for example, Babakar has failed to save the miscarriage of a young teenage mother (fifteen years old, the book tells us). The mother is described as exhibiting both relief and a false display of mourning, but then Condé adds, off-handedly, that the girl’s relief would be short lived because not much later she would find herself pregnant again. In a single sentence, the enormity of this event is deflated and the whole thing becomes almost blasé.

This perspective is maybe a natural consequence of Condé’s narrative ambivalence. Not ideological ambivalence, to be clear: political violence and instability only leads to suffering, especially for those at the bottom. No one advocating for such is portrayed sympathetically, regardless of who they claim to represent. But narrative ambivalence in terms of what is fact and what is fiction, what is the true nature of events. While nothing in En attendant… is quite as drastic as in, say, “In a Bamboo Grove,” Condé often presents us with parallel narratives or interpretations of events that are so precisely weighed that either (or both) could be true. Babakar’s nightly visits from his mother are treated as factual events, but Haitian vodoun practitioners consistently fail to work any similar miracles for characters in the novel. Babakar unearths a variety of accounts of his wife’s death, all of which are unsatisfactory but all of which could equally be true. Fouad dreams of being a poet and subtly boasts about his natural talent, but we never read any of his work and only have Babakar’s thoroughly nonplussed response by which to judge Fouad’s work. Estrella’s account of herself and her life is not entirely incompatible with what we hear about her from Roji, even if in one story she’s the heroine and another the villain—and then she dies before we can learn more to judge for ourselves.

The Swedish translation from Helena Böhme was well done. There are brief conversations throughout the book in Creole, posing an extra problem to solve: even if the translator herself can decode them, how to present them to the reader? Böhme opted to keep the original and then present a Swedish translation in brackets, which I think is the optimal way to present both the difference between Creole and French (the class difference, the Self/Other difference) and the translated meaning. There’s also a list of Caribbean and West African terms at the back that Böhme chose not to render in Swedish at all. Some of them seemed simple enough that she could have included the explanation in the text, I thought, but others were more complex or abstract. The English translation is from Condé’s husband, Richard Philcox, and was longlisted for the 2021 National Book Award for Translated Literature. Even though I didn’t read it, I assume you’re in good hands there.

The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

I’m increasingly deliberate about the physical books I buy to add to my library these days. My bookstore browsing always involves me checking what’s available at the library before making a final purchase. And I make a final purchase more often than not! Just less impulsively. Bookstores function as an important randomizing factor in a world with algorithm-based recommendations. The human element is key.

A recent trip to The English Book Shop in Stockholm—which also reminded me that I had put Sister Outsider on my TBR—brought Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine back to my attention. I’d seen it countless times in friends’ libraries, and Klein as a journalist was already familiar to me, but for whatever reason this was the moment where I decided to actually read one of her books. And as luck would have it, it was available in English from the Stockholm library.

The Shock Doctrine is a comprehensive look at the spread of Milton Friedman’s free market philosophy in the latter half of the twentieth century. I could list all of the case studies Klein takes up, but it would get long, fast. Suffice it to say that she draws on examples from all over the world. Her main thrust, however, is showing its most recent (at the time) application in the post-9/11 invasion of Iraq.

The distinctive element of Klein’s approach (compared to, say, The Jakarta Method) is her use of metaphor to frame her research: in this case, the gruesome techniques used by Donald Ewen Cameron in the Montreal experiments. The connection Klein repeatedly makes is that massive disaster (either man-made or natural) visited on an entire population is, if not the only, then the easiest or most direct way to traumatize a country enough to sneak in wildly unpopular changes—the ones she happened to focus on here with economic ones rooted in the Chicago school. Much like Cameron used electroshock therapy and other techniques in an attempt to turn his patients into blank slates upon which he thought he could rebuild them into healthy people, Klein argues, the US used the shock of these disasters to turn entire countries into blank slates upon which to build new highly privatized ultrafree market economies specifically to benefit the ultra wealthy (usually but not always located in the US). In other words, “disaster capitalism.”

She’s received criticism for this choice of metaphorical framing device, which isn’t entirely unwarranted I suppose, but personally I think the metaphor is an apt one. It allows Klein to highlight the common factors of a large number of disparate tragedies and make sense of the bigger picture and it’s also not entirely unrelated, considering how those electroshock techniques were often applied in the campaigns of violence Klein describes throughout the book. Fractal violence.

My only lingering thought, since this was published in 2007, is whether or not Klein’s attempt at optimism in the final chapter ended up being warranted. In what I assume was a deliberate choice in order to leave readers with a sense of hope for the future, she closes with developments in South America she feels will help create “shock-proof” countries and economies and lead to more just and equitable outcomes. This was a chapter written before Bolsonaro or Milei rose to power, obviously. Since there doesn’t appear to be an updated edition, for the moment I’ll just have to hunt down subsequent interviews and op-eds.

Sister Outsider

Audre Lorde is a name that’s been familiar to me for years, for better or for worse through people quoting her in well-designed little social media banners about poetry, the master’s tools dismantling the master’s house, or self care. There is something kind of sad and deflating in that: to generate a substantial body of artistic work as well as intellectual and theoretical thought, only to be reduced to the 21st century equivalent of a soundbite, lost in the stream of other reductionist soundbites.

The Sister Outsider essay collection came up in a podcast I was listening to—contextualizing Lorde a bit more beyond a neatly designed and typeset swipe-able image—and anyway, here we are now!

I actually finished the collection a few weeks ago; I just couldn’t find the time or brain to write about it until now. The short review that Sister Outsider doesn’t need is that it’s a fantastic collection. Lorde is a deep thinker and an engaging writer. I just wanted some of them to be longer, because there were lots of ideas and assertions that Lorde presents without cracking them open because they were always in service of some other, larger thesis, particularly in “Uses of the Erotic: the erotic as power.” Lorde uses a very nuanced and all-encompassing concept of “the erotic” that I was hoping she would examine more deeply and that I get the feeling she perhaps hashed out in other pieces not included in the book—like, I don’t immediately see the eroticism of constructing a bookshelf?

The diary accounts of visiting the Soviet Union and Grenada also stick out as personal favorites, maybe because those are more self-contained accounts of real-world events rather than out-of-context selections from longer, fuzzier academic conversations?

I’m also keenly aware that this is the rare piece of nonfiction by a Black author I’ve managed to read as an adult. Out of that nonfiction, almost all of them are either autobiographical or a treatment of race relations in the US. (I expect all of them are, but I’m hedging my bets here in case I’m wrong.) Obviously race relations, or whatever the best term is anymore, is important and one worth learning about. But I feel like surely Black journalists and academics are experts in a wide variety of fields, so why should the default expertise readily available to me be so limited? Offhand I can think of astronomy: Neil deGrasse Tyson, who has at least a couple of popular science books out by now, as does Maggie Aderin-Pocock.

Of course limiting this to English, to books published in the US or the UK, is another factor. Etc. I guess my point is, this is something I try to reflect on in my nonfiction choices: whose expertise do I have access to? Whose is marginalized? How can I broaden the knowledge pool available to me?

An Unnecessary Woman

After years of an uncertain future on my TBR—always tempted to admit defeat and remove it, yet never quite gave in—my WhatsApp book club decided the issue for me and made Rabih Alameddine’s An Unnecessary Woman our read for March.

My reluctance about getting around to An Unnecessary Woman was entirely because I thought it would be a very serious, morose book. I think I added it to my TBR at about the same time as Bel Canto, and then after I read Bel Canto last year assumed An Unnecessary Woman would be more of the same.

This was not the case at all!

An Unnecessary Woman unfolds over the space of two days in the life of the narrator Aaliya, a childless divorcée living alone in Beirut who has just accidentally dyed her hair blue. After working for years in a bookstore, she is now retired (or unemployed? her source of income was unclear to me) and spends her days translating her favorite books into Arabic. In the space of these two days, the isolated and solitary Aaliya reflects on her life in Beirut, her rare friendships and strained familial relationships, her love of music and literature. Aaliya and Renée from L’Élégance du hérisson would get on like a house on fire.

I go through periods in my life where I get very grumpy and frustrated with fiction. There are so many books, so many novels, what’s the point of trying to wade through the tidal wave of stories out there? Maris Kreizman over on LitHub expressed it well, though less from a reader or existentialist perspective and more from a publishing perspective. An Unnecessary Woman was just the book I needed to read in that sort of mood.

Avlägsen stjärna

The same bookish friend with opinions about Aslı Erdoğan and Tezer Özlü was so enchanted with Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 that she picked his much shorter Distant Star for the online book club she started this year. I opted for the Swedish translation by Lena E. Heyman because if I’m reading a translation anyway, why not boost my Swedish numbers for the year?

This is a short novel that retreads (and is maybe even literally the same text?) as Bolaño’s earlier Nazi Literature in the Americas. An unnamed narrator, who is understood to be Arturo Bolaño from Nazi Literature working together with a metafictional Roberto Bolaño, relates the story of skywriting poet and serial killer Carlos Wieder, alias Alberto Ruiz-Tagle. After making an initial splash in the years of Pinochet’s rule, Wieder vanishes into thin air.

Or so it seems.

Decades later, the unnamed narrator (now residing in Europe) is contacted by a Chilean detective on the hunt for Wieder. Hired by a very wealthy client who believes that Wieder is still alive, the detective in turn wants to hire the narrator to comb through a bizarre international collection of genre fiction magazines. The detective is convinced that Wieder has submitted work to at least some of them, but needs the narrator’s poetic and aesthetic sensibilities to more specifically hunt him down. The story ends with the narrator positively identifying Wieder in person at a café, after which point the detective pays a visit to Wieder at home to (it is understood) murder him.

Distant Star met mixed reviews in our book club. Despite being only novella in length, it’s full of long asides that are completely irrelevant to the primary story: German vocabulary, Paralympics mascots, Soviet generals, fictional (?) Chilean revolutionaries and literary movements. The ending is inconclusive; we never find out who this wealthy client is or why they want Wieder dead.

I probably liked it the best out of everyone, but that was maybe because I’m so busy with other things right now I didn’t have the focus or mental processing power left over to even try to make sense of anything. Something about the narrator’s journey through the zines and his attempt to hunt down Wieder by way of his publications also reminded me of Foucault’s Pendulum, a book that will always inspire warm and fuzzy feelings in me.

I also finished Avlägsen stjärna a week ago at the time of writing (this entry is backdated because I’m fussy). That kind of delay is not ideal for writing a more thoughtful review, but such is life.

The Idiot

The Idiot made me feel like an idiot: there’s my pithy one-sentence review.

Crime and Punishment was one of my favorite pieces of required reading in high school (and one of my favorite books, full stop), so I went on a bit of a Dostoyevsky collecting spree in my early twenties. The Brothers Karamazov, Notes From the Underground, The House of the Dead and, of course, The Idiot got piled on my TBR with abandon, but I only ever finished Brothers.

Well, now that I’m making a more concerted effort to clear out my TBR, it was time to finish that project!

I made an attempt at The Idiot in Swedish a few years ago, but I quickly gave up—I was swamped with work and didn’t have the focus left for Dostoyevsky in Swedish (even if I was curious about translations besides Constance Garnett’s). Browsing the shelves at the freshly renovated library at Medborgarplatsen back in January, I came across the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation (pictured here) and decided why not! So here we are.

The translation is great and I would like to sing the praises of the abundance of explanatory end notes. Very interesting, very informative, very essential. Well done, Pevear and Volokhonsky! I might have cleared one book out of the TBR queue by finishing this, but I also just added two more because now I’m deeply curious about their treatment of the Dostoyevsky I’ve already read.

But man oh man, as far as a story goes this was a confounding bummer for me, which is why it made me feel like an idiot. I am bad at subtext even in the best of times; with novels of a certain age it’s all but impossible. I would never have guessed at Totsky’s sexual exploitation of Nastasya Filippovna if I weren’t reading summaries of the book as I finished each part.

And while I appreciate the larger point, or the thought, or motivation, or whatever behind the book—what happens when you take an Actually Good person and throw them into real society?—the society in question felt populated by flat characters who were either extreme melodramatic stereotypes or bland interchangeable nobodies, making their response to pure angelic precious baby Myshkin not particularly interesting. In a lot of ways The Idiot was the complete opposite of what I remember from Crime and Punishment or The Brothers Karamazov, with complicated characters presented with nuance and depth, but I read them so long ago that maybe I’m just making that up.

Characters aside, the structure is also a bit loosey-goosey. There are whole pivotal sections that just happen off-screen, off the page, that people only refer to in weird info dumps, like Nastasya Filippovna ping-ponging back and forth between Prince Myshkin and Rogozhin. There’s no urgent organizing crisis or imminent threat, no murder to solve (or get away with), just a Jane Austen problem of who gets to marry whom. The one saving grace is that it ends in murder, which is more than you can say for a Jane Austen novel.

Speaking of: it would be great if someone could Wide Sargasso Sea the novel from Nastasya Flippovna’s perspective, and maybe someday someone will. I’d be the first to sign up to read it.