Reviews – Koba English

The New York Trilogy

Here’s another left field book, a pick for a book club on Meetup. I’d never heard of The New York Trilogy before, or even Paul Auster. There’s a whole slew of literature from the 80s and 90s that were too new to be part of curricula but too old to be topical by the time I was reading Big Serious Grown-Up Book, and The New York Trilogy falls neatly into that category.

It’s unclear to me whether the now-accepted convention of publishing all three novels (novellas, really) as one collection is according to Auster’s own wishes or a publishing company decision, but I have to say I can’t imagine reading any one of these stories in isolation, or what it would have been like to read the first and then have to wait a year to read the next two. Not because the first story ends on a cliffhanger that gets resolved in the sequels, but because it must have felt incomplete. (Or maybe I’m only saying that because I only know it as one chapter in a larger book.)

The New York Trilogy consists of three novellas: City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room. All three have the same, or nearly the same, noir-adjacent plot point:* the protagonist is induced into tailing a mark for some shadowy purpose. In City of Glass it’s a mystery writer who is mistaken for a private investigator; in Ghosts it’s an actual private detective we only know as “Blue” who is paid to follow “Black” in a world with only colors for names; in The Locked Room a frustrated writer finds himself obligated to track down his missing-presumed-dead friend who has become a posthumous literary success, whose widow he has now married and whose son he is now raising.

*Paul Auster on LitHub: “… it was always irritating to me to hear these books described as detective novels. They’re not that in the least.” Sorry, Paul.

Mistaken identities, self-referentiality, literary references, meditations on language and madness and identity permeate all three books. At the moment of writing I’m still waiting for my book club to meet to discuss it, but as it currently stands I’m not sure I got the point, or if there even was a point, but I still liked the ride.

Journey to Russia

If I had been a better planner, I would have made an effort to read a Croatian author or two before spending a week and a half in Zagreb. Instead, I hustled from one store to the other in search of English translations of Croatian. That’s one way to spend a vacation, I suppose!

But in the end I triumphed. One of the books I came away with was Miroslav Krleža‘s essay collection Journey to Russia, translated by Will Firth. I will fully admit that even though I liked it, I might not have given the book the full attention it deserved. For one, I read a goodly portion of this book under the influence of a not insubstantial amount of beer. For another, midway through I became gripped by the fantastic ambition to finish it and mail it to a book friend before my flight home. It’s exactly the kind of thing they would love and it would be less weight for me to schlep around! Everybody wins! The only problem with this brilliant plan was that I no longer had their address saved on my phone, which I didn’t realize until I got to the last chapter. Oops.

Journey to Russia is an account of Krleža’s…journey to Russia…in the mid 1920s. What’s Communism going to be like? What’s the Soviet Union going to be like? Hard to say, but for Krleža it’s the future! His optimism in that matter is both endearing and sad—aged like milk, as the expression goes. But there’s a lot in the collection that’s still a delight to read today. “Entering Moscow” is a fantastic reflection on the power of memory as well as an evocative depiction of a Moscow from another era. (I guess? Haven’t been to Moscow myself to compare…) Other moments came as a bit of a restorative balm, so to speak, with Krleža critiquing the racism of the capitalist imperialist project a full decade before Saint-Exupèry’s casual French disdain for Bedouins and “the Orient.” Krleža also has an eye for portraying characters with nuance and insight, for example his account of an awkward dinner party hosted by once-great but now dispossessed aristocrats with guests including a dimwitted German businessman, simple laborers, Party cadres, and Krleža himself.

I’m sure for someone more schooled in Soviet history or central European literature than me, Krleža’s commentary on contemporary theater and literature will carry vastly more meaning. It’s hard to appreciate dunking on Chekhov when I’ve never read anything by him. Same with unknown-to-me directors at different Moscow theaters. “Leninism on the Streets of Moscow,” meanwhile, made me question my own reading comprehension: at first blush it read to me like sarcastic criticism of the obsession with Lenin and its manifestation in assorted trinkets and gewgaws, but even at the time of writing Krleža was a fervent Leninist. The last chapter, a polemical on imperialism, is a bit hit and miss. Partially my fault (again: the beers), but pages and pages of calculations designed to support the inherent and inevitable triumph of socialism by the end of the century is a struggle even for sober readers. (Every time I re-read Walden, I skip the introductory “Economy” chapter. Sorry, Henry.) On the other hand, the criticisms of capitalism and the relationship between financial institutions and the state ring just as true today as in the 20s. Plus ça change…!

Firth’s translation is only from 2017 and is the first appearance of the text in English. It comes with an introduction from Dragana Obradović that puts the collection in context for English readers who aren’t necessarily familiar with Krleža (like yours truly).

Journey to Russia probably wasn’t the best introduction to Krleža, but it was what was at hand. I still liked it and I can see how I might better appreciate his fiction.

Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style

I added Virginia Tufte’s Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style to my TBR after it was referenced in the generally underwhelming Refuse to be Done. That might have been the only worthwhile takeaway I had from that book—if I’m even remembering correctly, maybe I heard of it from somewhere else.

Artful Sentences is a fantastic compendium of, well, artful sentences. Each chapter focuses on a particular syntactic structure by opening with a brief introduction and explanation and then diving right into the examples. Tufte provides additional commentary throughout and, occasionally, brings up some examples that are less than artful for the sake of comparison.

This is not the kind of nonfiction book that everyone needs (“needs”) to read; the finer points of writing style are not in the general public’s interest in the same way that understanding the environment, racism, democracy, history, etc. are. But for book lovers and voracious readers, Artful Sentences is a fun investigation of what fuels great writing, and for writers and editorial professionals it is an absolutely indispensable reference. I borrowed a copy from Stockholm University’s library but by the end of the first chapter I knew that I would want my own private copy for reference.

Conflict is Not Abuse

While I was browsing Što čitaš? after I dropped off The House of the Dead, my gaze fell on Conflict is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair by Sara Schulman. What a relevant and potentially controversial premise! Praise on the back from Claudia Rankine and bell hooks! The only problem is that it was a bit of a chonker; moreover, the original English edition was easily available at the Stockholm library. Really, it wouldn’t have killed me to wait. But I was impatient and wanted to leave the store with something, so I figured, why not? As it turns out, Schulman’s Gentrification of the Mind was already on my TBR anyway. So it kind of counted, right?

Schulman’s thesis here is a bit complex. Her first argument is that the structure of private relationships, such as those in families or between lovers or friends, is the basis or model for the relationship between citizens and then state. Interpersonal and political conflicts are therefore analogous, or can at least be analyzed in similar terms. The second argument is that we often conflate “being uncomfortable” with “being in danger” (“overstating harm,” in her words) which leads to the claim Schulman makes right in the title of the book: many forms of “being uncomfortable” that are considered “being in danger” (whether by an abuser, the state, or a victim) should instead be thought of as either 1) literally Nothing (as in, one of the parties involved being triggered by something completely innocuous because of their own personal history), 2) Normative Conflict, or 3) Resistance. Overstating harm, Schulman argues, renders us unable to actually address the root of the issue. Her third argument is that the usual responses perpetuate more harm than whatever the inciting incident may have been.

With all of that established, Schulman then goes through four different approaches to conflict resolution that she believes provides a better alternative—historical psychoanalysis, Al-Anon, mindfulness, and pop psychology. A disparate group of frameworks, to be sure, but Schulman argues that all of them provide space for 1) pause and reflection in the moment (rather than immediate reactivity) as well as 2) accountability to a larger community. Throughout the book she illustrates her arguments with various case studies, from domestic violence and sexual assault to HIV disclosure laws in Canada to Israel’s occupation of Gaza, to demonstrate the various levels at which overstating harm and its consequences play out.

At this point, I will note that Schulman is not writing out of any particular academic discipline; her background is as a writer of literature, though also of nonfiction as well. She is up front about this and introduces the book and her argument as ideas she is offering up for consideration rather than a traditional academic examination (though she occasionally cites research and statistics when appropriate and includes a Works Cited section as well as citations by page).

Conflict is Not Abuse ended up being one of those books where the more I thought about it, the more mixed my feelings became. Schulman is very clear about her progressive bona fides right from the start because I think she’s perceptive enough to know that, at least from an unexamined surface level, her arguments are going to sound reactionary, or that she’s going to be excellent ideological cover for conservative talking points. (“Look at how this particular leftist is saying the same things about the left that we are!”) A quick Google leads to a glowing review from Heterodox Academy, for example, a group that I would feel safe saying is not in alignment with Schulman’s own values. It’s impossible to prevent that kind of reading or use of a text, however. The best you can do is what Schulman did: make it clear that you’re arguing from a specific position, in her case a queer leftist position including advocacy for people living with HIV and AIDS.

But there were other things that didn’t land well even when situated in that biographical context, with Schulman telling on herself in different ways. The first section, for example, could have well been titled Someone Had A Fight With Sarah Schulman Over Email Once And She Never Forgot. (The vibe was very similar to Bellwether in that vein: “A brash young person once asked Connie Willis to put out her cigarette in the 90s and she decided to write a whole book about it.”) As she sees it, emails and other forms of textual communication are the bane of all interpersonal conflicts today. Telephone calls and in-person conversations, meanwhile, are pure and holy and have never led to a single misunderstanding. This struck me strange as I was reading it, considering that Schulman foregrounds everything with her career as a writer and novelist—how could a professional and successful writer really believe that the written language is somehow insufficient and lacking in nuance? It only became stranger once I came to the section with her proposal for conflict resolution, the foundation of which is delay and reflection: taking a moment to choose words and reactions carefully. Isn’t that one of the advantages of written communication? That we can take all the time we need to say exactly what we want to say and to be able to revise it accordingly? That it can occur, if necessary, asynchronously? But then you realize: Schulman was 58 when Conflict is Not Abuse came out in 2016. Ah hah, Boomers and their predilection for phone calls.

Schulman also punctuates the book with personal anecdotes, both from her own life and those of people she knows. They soon begin to take on a sort of Goofus and Gallant tone, as Schulman always presents herself as an aspirational model of conflict resolution, whereas it’s always other people who escalate things unnecessarily. I understand not wanting to put your own painful or embarrassing mistakes out there for public consumption in a book for all eternity, but you can at least dial it back from being the Sarah Schulman Show and let other people be shining exemplars of conflict resolution. I think talking about the ongoing genocide in Palestine is important, but reproducing your Facebook posts and comments on it for pages and pages is the book equivalent of telling someone about this weird dream you had at length: it’s an exercise in self-absorption that is only interesting to you.

More seriously than just Schulman telling on herself, however, is a key point her larger argument. She (rightly) argues that people almost always have a reason and a motivation for doing what they do, even when the things they do are horrible. But then she pivots on that and argues that sometimes it’s not the person themselves but an outside observer who has the best insight into that reason. I suspect, but cannot prove, that this thesis seems largely uncontroversial to her because of her stated admiration for psychotherapy and psychotherapists; that she has a sort of paradigm where “good friends” (to use her words) are like gifted therapists who know what their friends’ problems are before their friends realize it themselves. That unexamined argument is where the book (partially) falls apart for me, because that’s the backdoor by which you can smuggle in all kinds of toxic nonsense. “You’re not trans, you’re just a tomboy.” “You’re not gay, you’re just brainwashed.” “I know you want it.” This single belief is the pernicious assertion that undergirds everything else toxic in this book.

To that end, someone should have been a good friend (or a good editor) to Schulman and told her: hey, you’re not coming across as your best self here. I don’t think it’s good or necessary to include these anecdotes. Here, I found some experts in these topics you’re covering, would you like them to review your material and talk to you about it? Schulman picked a sticky wicket to tackle, but in the end I don’t think she was quite equipped for it.

The House of the Dead

As a rule I generally pack light for my vacations, but this is always in favor of bringing too many books. The prospect of long hours of travel always inspires me to bring a selection, so that if my mood or attention span should shift, I’m more likely to have something suitable on hand. Plus there’s just the fact that I never want to feel like I “only” have one thing to read. Yes, there is Kindle (or the Kindle app, in my case) but sometimes phone battery is at a premium. Inevitably, then, I travel with at least two or three paperbacks, ideally ones without sentimental value so I can leave them behind (to make room for new books). Only sometimes, against my better judgment, do I bring library books or hardbacks that I was desperate to finish at that particular moment.

Nor can these books be just any random unread book off the shelf, either. A mysterious quality guides my hand, the “vibes” if you will. This is how I choose most things, actually—I have to bask in the collective presence of the options and contemplate them until one suddenly just feels right. The decision cannot be rushed or rationalized. Ice cream parlors with miles and miles of flavors were agony for me as a child (and no doubt for the parent accompanying me).

All of that preamble is to say that I can’t for the life of me explain why I chucked Dostoyevsky’s The House of the Dead into my bag beyond “the vibes.” Crime and Punishment was one of my favorite books out of my entire high school English career and afterwards I set about acquiring, but never actually reading, other works by Dostoyevsky. The next book of his that I read to completion was The Idiot last January—some twenty years later, in other words.

Where I struggled with The Idiot, I deeply enjoyed The House of the Dead. The character studies are more penetrating, more engaging, more revealing. The back of my Dover Thrift edition (ah, yes, Constance Garnett, my old friend!) describes the book as a “semi-autobiographical memoir,” which I take to mean as more or less true. The introduction purporting to be “oh look at these notes I just happened to find among a dead man’s papers” seems to be the plausible deniability cover-your-ass gloss of fiction over the rest of what’s to come.

The various prison personalities are interesting enough that you can overlook the lack of overarching plot or conflict. The narrator relates various observations that roughly correspond to a year, from winter to summer to winter again. Not really a strict chronological year, as such; it’s maybe akin to a thematic grouping, with several summers or winters collapsed into one, with a substantial chunk of time elided: Dostoyevsky himself served four years at a prison camp, and the self-insert narrator (Alexandr Petrovich) claims to have served ten. Petrovich acknowledges this gap and explains that he was the most observant and inquisitive during his first few months at the prison, so those memories are the strongest.

Since The House of the Dead is set in a Siberian prison camp, certain comparisons spring to mind. Not only Solzhenitsyn and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich—the portraits of the various inmates reminded me a lot of Homeboy. Enough that I might send my Homeboy book buddy a copy of The House of the Dead. Preferably a newer translation than Garnett’s, though. Several have been put out since then, including Pevear & Volokhonsky! My own copy is now residing on the shelves of Što čitaš? in Zagreb, where it will hopefully find a second life.

Letters to a Young Poet

Who has two thumbs and is constitutionally incapable of going on vacation without purchasing a book or two? This girl!

I stumbled on Ivallan’s Secondhand and Exceptional Books on a quest to patronize the legendary Bei Slawinchen on a recommendation from a coworker. Bei Slawinchen didn’t happen, whether because it was closed for renovations or because I wasn’t cool enough to be let in (maybe both), but the trip out to Neukölln was worth it for Ivallan’s. Did I spend three hours browsing? Yes! Did the staff at any time pressure me to pay up and get out of the tiny space? No! Did they in fact help me locate an upcoming book club read? Yes! (I didn’t end up buying it, but paging through a couple chapters was enough for me to decide that it wouldn’t be for me.) I wandered around with various books in hand, waiting for my excruciatingly slow data connection to load library websites and my Storygraph TBR so I could check my spontaneous interests against books I was already planning to read or that I could borrow for free.

In the end I walked out with a novelty cross-stitch (“AWKWARD” in silver thread on green background), a bookmark I think I’ve already lost, and two slim volumes, one of which was the new Penguin Classics edition of Letters to a Young Poet, in a relatively new translation from German by Charlie Louth from 2011. Their collective weight was probably less than, or at most equivalent to, the copy of Wind, Sand and Stars that I had resigned myself to depositing at my hostel. Therefore, totally legitimate purchase: no net gain or loss.

On my last day in Berlin, I ended up sitting in a strandkorb at Tempelhof with some snacks and reading most of the book there, pausing occasionally to watch a family playing basketball. Contemplative. Idyllic.

A hundred years later, a lot has changed, but Rilke’s advice right from the third paragraph is still on point and perhaps the best advice any writer could get:

Go into yourself. Examine the reason that bids you to write; check whether it reaches its roots into the deepest regions of your heart, admit to yourself whether you would die if it should be denied you to write. This above all: ask yourself in your night’s quietest hour: must I write? Dig down into yourself for a deep answer. And if it should be affirmative, if it is given to you to respond to this serious question with a loud and simple “I must,” then construct your life according to this necessity; your life right into its most inconsequential and slightest hour must become a sign and witness of this urge.

Everything else is just details.

To The Lighthouse

My birthday gift of The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter was such a success with its intended recipient that they already owned a copy. “You’ve given me one of my favorite books for my birthday! I think this one is up there with To The Lighthouse,” they texted me after opening it. “Thank you! ❤️”

(If I can toot my own horn for a minute, I want to stress that even though this is a book friend and that most of our conversations touch on books, Carson McCullers had never come up. I was just operating on vibes.)

I’d given To The Lighthouse a couple of tries, years ago, because Mrs Dalloway was that rare piece of assigned reading that I actually enjoyed. It’s one of the few books I’ve liked enough to read more than once, and I even made a point of attending Bloomsday in 2019 in a low-key Clarissa Dalloway costume (so low-key that it was more akin to a private, petty joke that only I found amusing). Alas, I found To The Lighthouse so much harder to get into. Something about Woolf’s prose in anything else I’ve ever read from her is just…unpleasant. I don’t mean that it’s difficult; there’s lots of difficult writing I enjoy on the aesthetic level. I mean that I derive almost no enjoyment from it.

But the siren song of a book friend’s recommendation is hard to resist—and besides, I’m older and wiser now. Maybe, also, the paperback version I tried to read back in Korea was just too ugly, with too-small text and an unappealing font. Maybe this time I would fall in love with Virginia Woolf again. (Even though just three years ago I’d panned Orlando for “not being Mrs Dalloway.” Conveniently forgot that!)

This time around I at least finished To The Lighthouse, so that’s an improvement. I admire the conceit and the concept: the way that Woolf freezes a single afternoon into a cut gem and then examines it like a jeweler, assessing it from every angle and perspective; the graceful skip through the intervening years and tragedies (war, deaths, failed marriages) to arrive at the return of the Ramsays to the island. “Time Passes” was actually the one section of the book that flowed for me, that I enjoyed reading. Everything else was bumpy, jerky, hard to get into.

Always a weird, hollow feeling when you really want to like a book for whatever reason (it’s by an author you like; it’s a friend or lover’s favorite book) but you just can’t. Again, I ask: Why aren’t you Mrs Dalloway?

Wind, Sand and Stars

When I first read Le petit prince, I was in my author-obsessive phase and so immediately decided to find other books by de Saint-Exupéry. The high school library had Wind, Sand and Stars and I gave it a shot, but for one reason or another didn’t get more than a couple pages in before I gave up.

Then, last year on a trip back home, I saw a beat-up old copy at the Little Free Library someone had established on the porch of the post office. Why not try again? I picked it up, along with one or two others, and took them back to Sweden with me.

Now, a year later, I read it! Halfway through the year and this was the first book to qualify for my physical library quota. Oops.

I’m in the process of comparing the translation to the French original (which my local library happened to carry, hooray!). I’m not sure if substantial changes were made for the English translation, or if there are multiple editions available, because there are ten chapters in English and only eight in French, and I’m not sure that all eight of the French are even part of the English. As of writing I sat down and started re-reading one of the chapters that appears in both books, and even between those there are substantial differences. Whole paragraphs appear in the English that are nowhere to be seen in the French. Did Lewis Galantière take huge liberties with his translation? Was the French revised from one edition to the next? Unfortunately at the time of writing I’m practically on my way out the door so I’ll have to leave that question for another time.

As it exists in English, Wind, Sand and Stars doesn’t hit in the same way that Le petit prince does. There’s plenty of adventure and lyricism about the act of flying, the psychology of being a pilot…but there’s also plenty of French imperialism. You can expect or write off certain things as being “of their time” (and the original French came out in 1939), but when you have in your head the sensitivity, curiosity, and nuance of Le petit prince, it’s a bit of a shock to stumble across de Saint-Exupéry’s complete lack of interest in the Bedouins he describes—of its time or otherwise. To the extent he gives them any thought at all, it’s not much more than stereotype; French superiority isn’t ever stated outright but it’s there as background radiation.

That’s the only fly in the ointment, but unfortunately it’s a pretty big one. Big enough to chuck the book into the memory hole? No, of course not. But certainly big enough to detract from the magic of the rest of the book—including the near-fatal crash in the Sahara that led, years later, to Le petit prince, where de Saint-Exupéry and his mechanic were rescued from certain death by a passing Bedouin.

Om det regnar i Ahvaz

I fell a little bit in love with Nioosha Shams at Stockholms Litteraturmässan two years ago in a panel discussion on the phenomenology of reading. I added her only book to my TBR, one of the more recently published books to end up there.

I’m still in love with Shams, but Om det regnar i Ahvaz is not for me. The premise is simple: the first teenage heartache, pasted over that most exciting of times, graduation. And yes, since we’re talking about teenagers, this is squarely within Young Adult territory. Just to pick up a copy, I had to creep in to the Youths TM section of the library like an interloper, past the sternly-worded Official Rules explaining that in order to keep the space friendly for the Youths TM, no one over 25 was allowed to sit and linger in this space. Not an auspicious start, perhaps!

Since I’m an old, and not particularly romantic, the drama doesn’t hit the same. Our protagonist Ava falls in love with the (only slightly) older, glamorous Nadja, a summer love that unravels over the course of the book. Ava also has her two obligatory Teenage Shenanigan Besties, with whom she shares a rather wholesome and aspirational bond, and her younger brother who has been ensnared by a different glamor: gang life. This last point takes up the intermittent B plot, which I would have liked to see feature more prominently (or just have its own book?), I guess because I find stories about navigating familial relationships more interesting than romance.

But if I were a queer teenager, this would have no doubt been fun escapism. The story wasn’t for me, but Shams has a fantastic way with words and populates the book with fun and relatable (if highly idealized) characters.

How to Be an Anti-Capitalist in the 21st Century

I read this one over the course of several months for a neighborhood book circle, even though it’s short and simple enough to finish in a couple of days. Erik Olin Wright intended this to be a quick introduction for laypeople, free of academic jargon and complicated arguments. Maybe stretching such a thin text over too long a time hampered my understanding of it, but by the end I felt like How to Be an Anti-Capitalist in the 21st Century didn’t deliver on the promise of its title.

I say this as someone who already fundamentally agrees with Wright’s larger project. But a how-to guide includes concrete steps and real-life examples to follow. Wright provides no instruction whatsoever, and for all of his theorizing about how different anti-capitalist (or simply not capitalist) groups and projects can be organized, the only specific example he mentions is Wikipedia. Contrast this with Chokepoint Capitalism, This is an Uprising or Rules for Radicals, which constantly refer back to real life protests and research, picking apart successes as well as failures. When hypothetical alternatives are floated to solve a current problem under capitalism, they are described in very precise terms. You come away from those books feeling prepared and capable of doing something.

A more appropriate title would probably be How to Think About Anti-Capitalism in the 21st Century, because what Wright does well in the volume is defining, categorizing, and organizing concepts. Instead of coming away from the book knowing what to do, I came away from it with better and more precise ways of articulating my ideas. This is by no means an unimportant part of the process of “eroding capitalism” (Wright’s own concept), but it’s not a fulfillment of the promise of the title.

How to Be an Anti-Capitalist… was intended to be accompanied by a denser, more scholarly text on the subject. Wright already had a heavy-hitting career as an academic and had been asked by various groups he’d organized with to write a more approachable popular text. He got that one out of the way first and then died from cancer before he could finish the bigger one. Perhaps that would have had the meat and potatoes I felt was lacking here.