Category: Reviews

Orbital

Still reading books, bad at posting here!

Samantha Harvey’s Orbital won the 2024 Booker Prize, which was a significant factor in its selection for my monthly Swedish book club. There is a Swedish translation, but we all read it in English.

We all hated it, too! Gratifying!

Orbital gives us 24 hours in the life of astronauts on the International Space Station. Cool concept, but since Harvey spends most of the book describing Earth from space instead of really getting into anyone’s heads, or dissecting any relationships or examining any characters, it’s just pretty blah. It feels like reading an Instagram account: each chapter its own post, with a meticulously described view over the Earth and then an accompanying “caption” in the form of a crew member’s thoughts, always too short to plumb any depths.

The orbital perspective—the fact that we are constantly presented with the image of the Earth as a whole, as a single planet out in space—suggests profundity, but in the end goes no farther than suggestion. Nothing is asked of the reader. If you find the constant descriptions of Earth repetitive and uninteresting, skimming over them does nothing to diminish your experience of the book. If you instead find the internal narrations and thoughts of the astronauts repetitive and uninteresting, skimming over those parts likewise changes nothing. The super typhoon that the astronauts track throughout the book, whose damage Harvey occasionally zooms in to describe, doesn’t actually have personal repercussions for any of the characters since we never find out if loved ones lived or died. The omniscient narrator informs us of a crack in the hull, but nothing comes of it.

The judges have their reasons, I suppose, but I wonder if one of the most important reasons was their sheer exhaustion with the world. If I were still in academia I might be tempted at this point to write a monograph on the concept of the “burnout novel,” with a nod to my boy Byung-chul Han. That’s the new genre to which I’d say Orbital belongs: the burnout novel. Every day we are inundated with crises and catastrophes that demand our attention and our empathy, and maybe it turns out those are not boundless resources. Likewise it seems our ability and our means to renew those resources are becoming increasingly stunted. In that context, Orbital is a book that can gently wash over a passive reader with no effort whatsoever. There is no urgency, no message. How easy to read a book that makes no emotional demands. How relaxing.

How pointless.

The Phantom Tollbooth

Every year around Christmas I habitually re-read a beloved childhood classic that survived my move across the Atlantic. While my reasons for this are tactical and pragmatic—these are very easy reads to squeeze in at the end of the year if I’m behind on my book count goals—it’s also a nice bit of cozy comfort reading that’s appropriate for the season.

This year it was The Phantom Tollbooth, which I read in ebook form on my flight to the US. There is something about ebooks that ruins the magic of these kinds of books, I have to say. It’s harder to appreciate Jules Feiffer’s charming illustrations when you’re staring at them on a tiny smartphone screen, never mind the tactile loss of the feeling of the edges of the pages against your fingers as you turn them.

Which reminds me of a point Maryanne Wolf made in either Reader, Come Home or Proust and the Squid: everyone of a certain age right now, or at any given moment in time, had access to similar levels of technology. Everyone my age, definitely everyone older and certainly some of the ones who are younger, learned to read from books because there were no tablets or smartphones or ereaders. That’s the experience built into our learning brain. Maybe generations who grow up learning to read on those devices will have the same emotional association with reading on them that we have with reading books? So much depends on what the young, growing brain is exposed to, after all.

That’s a post for another day, though!

Otherwise everything else was just as magical since the last time I read it. The Phantom Tollbooth was one of the few books I would actually bother to reread, I enjoyed it so much. But even so it had been several years, making this my first reread as an adult. Exactly the kind of comfort food you need in these deeply and unpleasantly weird times.

Njals Saga

This was a recommendation from my The Heart is a Lonely Hunter book friend.

“It’s fantastic. Reading it now and it’s all about lobbying and politics and getting as many people on your side as possible. You realize that nothing ever changes. You can see so much of modern Sweden in there, too. You read this and you’ll understand us Nordic people better than we understand ourselves.”

Maybe I do now, and maybe I don’t. For being something like seven hundred years old, plenty of things still seem modern. The lobbying and politicking, sure, but also the dialogue (at least, as translated into Swedish from Icelandic by Lars Lönnroth). Reading Njals Saga is a completely different beast from reading The Iliad or The Odyssey. People in Njals Saga are just constantly roasting each other with devastating one-liners, starting as early as Hrutr’s comment about his niece Hallgerd to her boasting father: “I do not know how thieves’ eyes came into the family.”

More personally for me and my flavor of bad brain, the structure of Njals saga also makes it an easier read than other classics. The Swedish translation is prose, not poetry, and divided into relatively short episodes—I assume this reflects the original. Yes, it also happens to be 500 pages long, but it’s not a difficult 500 pages. Other epics of this style are usually poetry and usually translated as such, and somehow that’s enough to make my eyes glaze over. Even though I’m otherwise a huge mythology nerd! Impossible to explain. A public domain English translation is available at the Icelandic Saga Database, so you can browse yourself and see what you think.

The Encyclopedia of the Dead

This was the other book I bought on vacation in Zagreb, along with Journey to Russia. Danilo Kiš was born in what is now Serbia, rather than Croatia, but nationstates are a fiction so why bother splitting that many hairs. I enjoyed Krleža’s journalism but still had an itch for something literary. The Encyclopedia of the Dead fit the bill perfectly. It might be a slim little collection, but it still packs a punch. Short stories are, in my opinion, the most difficult literary form. I’m probably more impressed by a really good short story than by a really good novel, at least from a technical perspective, because in my opinion they’re so much harder to write.

According to Wikipedia, The Encyclopedia of the Dead initially received mixed reviews, but to my mind the stories in here are all fantastic examples of the form: not a single word wasted or out of place. The only uninteresting one for me was “The Legend of the Sleepers”; as a retelling of an early Christian myth I’d never heard of before, it wasn’t anything I could delight in recognizing. Everything else covers a wide ground of social, historical, political impact: religious schisms, personal betrayals, conspiracy theories, doomed love affairs.

Easily a permanent addition to my library. A digital copy is available to borrow in the Internet Archive for the curious. If I had to pick just one story to recommend, it would be the title story, “The Encyclopedia of the Dead (A Whole Life).” It simultaneously has a spooky, dreamlike quality (an actual encyclopedia of the dead like the one in the story would be, of course, impossible to assemble in real life) and a laser-like focus on the small, tangible details that make up someone’s life. It’s the Serbian literary equivalent of a Twilight Zone episode. Beyond that, “Simon Magus” struck me immediately, perhaps because I saw so many parallels with Lagerkvist’s Barabbas (one of my all-time favorite novels). And finally, “The Book of Kings and Fools” is simultaneously of its time and timely, still speaking to our concerns about truth, factuality, scapegoating and authoritarianism.

The new Penguin edition that I bought is still the first English translation by rockstar in the community and founder of the PEN Translation Fund, Michael Henry Heim. Why mess with perfection?

Fat-Talk Nation: The Human Costs of America’s War on Fat

Out of something of a fluke, I ended up reading three very different books with very similar themes and topics (in this case, fat) in very quick succession while I was visiting my family for Christmas. I suspect this was the byproduct of working through my TBR backlog and hitting the vein of fat acceptance/health at every size/body positivity books that I had added to the list in 2017 or so, but still a bit weird for the cookie to crumble in just that way! But since they were anthropological nonfiction, a YA novel, and a dishwater attempt at satire aimed at adults, I decided there wasn’t much to be gained by combining them. At least for review purposes.

The first in this Fat Triptych is Susan Greenhalgh’s Fat-Talk Nation: The Human Costs of America’s War on Fat. It isn’t impenetrable by any means, but it’s definitely an academic and scholarly approach that’s a cut or two above more popular science fare. Greenhalgh is an anthropologist (specializing in China, apparently, which was not at all apparent to me reading Fat-Talk Nation!) and admits in the introduction to the book that she fell into writing about this topic basically by accident. Class discussions in a course on feminism she was teaching brought diet culture and fat shaming into her awareness when before it had largely been absent for her; being a person of average weight, she explains, meant she hadn’t personally been subject to body scrutiny. Stories from students prompted her to conduct an entire research project that eventually became Fat-Talk Nation.

The bulk of Greenhalgh’s material here consists of student essays, the majority of which from her own students (writing such an essay was an optional piece of extra credit for a class she was teaching). She may have followed them up with personal interviews as well? I’m writing this three months after the fact and some (many) things have since slipped my mind. But all the participants included in the book give informed consent, names and so on are changed, and Greenhalgh situates their stories in the context of diet culture (local to Southern California but also nationally), biology, and so on.

(Expertise in China might have surprised me, reading her biography now several months later, but “the entanglements of state, corporation, science, and society, and their consequences for human health and social justice writ large” are very much part of Fat-Talk Nation.)

Much of the book centers around BMI, both itself as a concept and also a wedge or vanguard for larger discussions about what Greenhalgh calls “biocitizens” in arenas like doctor’s visits or public schools. Reading these initial chapters brought back memories of countless gym and health classes where we dutifully learned to crunch our own numbers to see if we were fit or not; embarrassing visits to the school nurse for check ups. My second grade teacher posted our photos, heights, and weights on the bulletin board for a month or two. It was dressed up in the cutesy way elementary school teachers do bulletin boards (I think maybe we were all, like, apples hanging on a tree?) but I still wanted to melt into the floor. The second-fattest kid in the entire class.

And all that misery without BMI!

In retrospect it seems so pointless. Everyone can see who the fat kids are, including the fat kids themselves. What good does it do to also tell them that, according to this metric, you are going to keel over dead?

Greenhalgh also uses the BMI categories to structure the book, looking at the experiences of students according to whether they were underweight, average, overweight, or obese. This is the bulk of the book and, for me, is a compelling case for empathy. (Granted, I went into this book biased.) There are plenty of absolutely brutal stories about how parental anxieties and concerns about (bodily) perfection in their children strained or even ruined family relationships. Greenhalgh makes the point that the appearance of scientific legitimacy given to BMI makes it easy to stoke concern in parents who might say or do horrible things out of genuine concern for their child’s health. At least one of the respondents in the underweight and overweight categories talked about how their parents had never been worried about their weight, or were even aware of the metric, until the school nurse sent home some kind of note or comment about the child’s undesirable weight.

Upon reflection I would say that the focus on BMI is maybe the book’s only flaw. It’s not that I think Greenhalgh is on a hobby horse or anything, far from it. When you’re looking at “the entanglements of state, corporation, science, and society,” then BMI becomes the most obvious marker for that in a discussion about obesity. It looks quantifiable and objective, it’s easy to calculate, it’s used everywhere under the guise of being “scientific.” It’s more that our pop-science understanding of obesity, and the terms we use to discuss it, have evolved. It’s only in the last section that I think Greenhalgh has overstated the case, waxing overly optimistic about the potential good of taking BMI out of public discussions—and, indeed, about the overall potential of the body positivity movement.

This is also an Obama-era book, so Michelle Obama’s various First Lady initiatives to reduce childhood obesity get mentioned a lot—relic of a bygone era. It would certainly be interesting to see an updated version or even a sequel, a full ten years later. I can’t help but think that Ozempic and other GLP-1 drugs would replace BMI as the locus of state, science and biocitizen discussion.

Even though Fat-Talk Nation feels a little, or very, out of date in places when it comes to discussions of policy, overall it holds up because of the survey responses. People’s lived experiences will never feel dated in the same way that reading about First Lady Michelle Obama does. I’d also like to think that those are the most persuasive sections of the book, but I’ll be the first to admit I’m a big ol’ softie.

On the off chance you’re curious about this one, be aware that there are several books with “Fat Talk” in the title that come up when Googling. Double check the full title.

Notes of a Crocodile

Notes of a Crocodile by Qiu Miaojin was another international WhatsApp book club pick and I was the only one who liked it!

It’s a short book, and a bit weird, but still relevant thirty years later as reactionary ideologues exploit anxieties over gender and sexuality to consolidate power. It follows the trajectory of Lazi, a character who would be classified as a “disaster lesbian” in my corners of the Internet, as she and her queer circle of friends try to survive university in Taipei and find their place in the world. Lazi’s chapters alternate with those about crocodiles who fit in to society by wearing human suits, an extended metaphor for closeted homosexuals.

That’s not the best summary—somehow I’ve made it sound more melodramatic than it actually is. But several book club members said that it felt very much like a YA book to them, so maybe there’s more melodrama in the story than I realized while reading. A better summary would be that it’s like the Taiwanese version of Kris. It’s full of surreal imagery, never really going anywhere, just people trying to come to grips with themselves. I think this description from translator Bonnie Huie in an interview very perfectly captures its essence:

Notes of a Crocodile is not about how “it gets better”; it’s about living in permanent wartime. A vicious cycle begins when you lose the ability to feel, then the ability to tolerate discomfort. Qiu handed down a book of memories that preserves these essences so that you can use them like smelling salts.

Notes of a Crocodile first came out in 1994, but no English translation was available until Huie’s was published in 2017. (As far as I can tell, at least. I did not devote hours of detective work to this little book report.) I’m not qualified to comment on her translation, of course, but she’s done us all a favor by rendering these smelling salts in English. Good to have on hand when it feels like, thirty years later, we’re still living in permanent wartime.

The Safekeep

Yael van der Woulden’s The Safekeep was an International WhatsApp Book Club pick, and with a publication date of 2024 it’s probably the newest book I’ve read so far this year. It even came right on the heels of Filosofins tröst from 523 CE for a bit of chronological whiplash!

Set in the Netherlands in 1961, The Safekeep focuses on Isabel, who is living in a house her family happened to acquire during World War II. (“Happened to acquire” = yes, you can look at that timeline and probably guess the means by which they came into it.) Isabel’s situation is rather tenuous, however; the house is actually willed to her brother Louis in the event he ever decides to marry and start a family, and Isabel is understood to simply be the caretaker until then. While things look promising for Isabel on that front—to quote the immortal bards LMFAO, Louis is “running through these hos like Drano”—it’s still no guarantee.

A series of incidents leads to Eva staying at the house with Isabel while Louis goes abroad for work. The two women could not be more different: Isabel is aloof, distant, and proper, while Eva is gregarious and uninterested in following rules. Sparks fly, the tightly-wound Isabel finally lets her hair down, and the two women begin a passionate love affair.

Isabel’s erotic fixation on Eva is simultaneously very obviously telegraphed but also very in character. Right at their first meeting at an awkward family dinner, Isabel zeroes in on all of Eva’s physical failings: the roots that need a touch-up dye, the way the buttons on her dress gap, the shoddy hems, and so on. It’s clear to the reader that Isabel is hyperaware of Eva’s body and Eva’s looks, even if it’s not immediately clear to Isabel herself. Whether or not readers enjoy that kind of signaling is a matter of taste. Are you the kind of person who relishes the obvious ignorance of the protagonist to their own desires, or does it just try your patience?

The other plot twist, which is late enough in the book that I would consider it a spoiler, had similarly obvious telegraphing but that I found to be much less satisfying. It’s a delicate balance to strike for van der Wouden, trying to find the balance between too many hints and not enough. The difference between the two cases for me is that 1) Isabel’s disconnection from herself at the beginning of the novel is part of her characterization and 2) the love affair resolves much, much earlier on in the story. This is a pretty horny book at times.

In the end I wasn’t blown away by The Safekeep, but I was glad I read it. I appreciated the focus on post-war Netherlands, a particular piece of history I know very little about. There is a precision and an exactitude to van der Wouden’s prose that I enjoyed, plus the shift of perspective in the penultimate section proves that she’s quite versatile as well.

Filosofins tröst

Somehow I earned a BA in philosophy without ever reading Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy. Now I am ignorant no more!

A free copy of the English translation by H. R. James is available through Project Gutenberg, but I opted for a newer Swedish translation by Bertil Cavallin (1987) that was available from the Stockholm University library. To start I kept the Gutenberg copy open on my phone while reading the Swedish, just as a handy reference if something was unclear, but quickly gave up on that. Scrolling through my phone screen is never an easy or intuitive process, and the James translation is over 200 years old: not a combination that makes for easy cross-checking.

As far as philosophical classics go, Filosofins tröst is a short and accessible one. Maybe staring down your execution—in one of the most literal cases of a “deadline” known to history—makes you forgo the piddling little details of endlessly classifying objects, refining a logic system, or pondering the constituent elements of the world and instead keeps your focus on the big questions: how can evil exist? why are the wicked so often successful and the good so often punished? is there free will?

The answers Boethius poses through the mouth of Philosophy, here personified by a woman clad in heavily symbolic garb, aren’t the most convincing if you’re not already sympathetic to Christian apologetics. For me the interest was more in tracing philosophical and theological influences in the chain of thinkers before and after Boethius. Plato’s forms and what seems a very Stoic approach to Fortune are very apparent throughout; meanwhile the entirety of Book V puts forward an argument for free will that John Milton seems to echo in Book III of Paradise Lost: “if I foreknew, / Foreknowledge had no influence on their fault…”

This Swedish edition from Bokförlaget Faethon comes with commentary and a foreword by the translator as well as a new afterword from Johan Sehlberg. Much of that content was helpful for situating Boethius in a larger context, with notes from Cavallin ranging from clarifying historical contexts and references or elucidating metrical forms to drawing comparisons with later thinkers (mostly my homeboy Kant). If that Swedish commentary is inaccessible to you, I also found The History of Philosophy (Without Any Gaps) podcast to be a big help as well. Episode 118 discusses Boethius generally, while episode 119 is an interview with John Marenbon to dig further into some of the arguments in The Consolation.

Three Apples Fell From the Sky

My original objective when I was at the library to pick up Save Me the Waltz was Narine Abgaryan’s Three Apples Fell From the Sky. It was on my TBR because a (long) past issue of Karavan featured a favorable review, and it was the first book from my TBR that was available at a nearby library while I was in between appointments.

The story centers on the Armenian village of Maran, ravaged by war and natural disaster. The youngest resident is the 58-year-old Anatolia, whose deathbed preparations are the opening action of the book. Naturally, of course, she doesn’t die. Instead she is at the center of a series of events that have the potential to revitalize Maran; our entrance point into a multifaceted history of the village.

Abgaryan is an accomplished novelist with several works out by now, but Three Apples is the one with the most accolades: the English PEN Translates award, the Yasnaya Polyana Award in Russia. Reviews call it “a balm for the soul,” “an enchanting fable,” “an absolute joy,” or “a tender and quirky tale.” Lord knows I could have used a bit of feel-good reading when I picked it up!

Alas, it wasn’t to be. Maybe I’m too cynical for “quirky,” I don’t know, but it’s hard to feel rejuvenated or inspired by anything in the magical realism genre. The last I checked, I don’t have a totemic white peacock shielding me from harm. Being unimpressed with this book feels a bit like kicking puppies—though unlike Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, I didn’t actively dislike Three Apples. I just wasn’t especially charmed by it.

I should note, however, that the book did have one high point for me: food. The book doesn’t skimp on details about various regional foods and desserts, and everything sounds amazing. Perhaps some of this is an artifact of translation (and credit to translator Lisa C. Hayden, the language is beautiful), but given this is a novel about the Armenian countryside written in Russian for a largely not-Armenian audience, I’d be willing to bet that most of the flavor descriptions and explanations were in the original as well. Time to see if there are any Armenian restaurants in Stockholm!

Save Me the Waltz

A series of random events that began with my dad catching COVID on a cruise last year led to me standing in the English section of the library at Medborgarplatsen (can’t get used to calling it the Tranströmer library yet) on a Monday afternoon and noticing Zelda Fitzgerald’s name on one of the spines. Of course I knew who she was, but I didn’t really have any awareness of her as a writer—plus I happen to find her husband’s work more or less insufferable.

Plenty of interesting women have insufferable husbands, however, so I figured it would be only fair to give Zelda her due outside of Scott’s reputation. Unfortunately, even the relatively recent Vintage Classics edition from 2001 still puts Save Me the Waltz squarely under the shadow of Scott:

One of the great literary curios of the twentieth century Save Me the Waltz is the first and only novel by the wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald. During the years when Fitzgerald was working on Tender is the Night, Zelda Fitzgerald was preparing her own story, which strangely parallels the narrative of her husband, throwing a fascinating light on Scott Fitzgerald’s life and work. In its own right, it is a vivid and moving story: the confessional of a famous glamour girl of the affluent 1920s and an aspiring ballerina which captures the spirit of an era.

Is it even possible to talk about Save Me the Waltz without centering F. Scott Fitzgerald? Impossible to say.

Save Me the Waltz is deemed a largely autobiographical novel about Zelda Sayre’s childhood, marriage, and crushed ballerina aspirations. In that sense the book is pretty easy to summarize: the impulsive, carefree Alabama grows up, courts several different men but marries David, has a daughter, moves to Paris, takes up dance and moves to Naples, then loses first her dance career and then her father within a few months of each other.

Anyone who knows anything about the novel (and more than I did going into it) knows that it was a flop, critically and commercially. As someone who didn’t hate the book, and even liked it better than The Great Gatsby, it’s hard to know what to make of this response. It’s hard for me, nearly a hundred years later, to see what’s wrong with Save Me the Waltz that isn’t wrong with something like The Great Gatsby. Alabama isn’t a “likeable” protagonist (absentee mother numero uno), but that was hardly the same concern for novels in the 30s as it is now; besides, I’d argue that Gatsby is full of psychopaths. The entire second half captures in a taut, subtle way the frustrations that come when you have a wildly famous and successful artist for a spouse, and the obsession to prove yourself independently of their notoriety. The prose is flowery sometimes, but never so much that it’s not fun as well. I think the last sentence is an absolute banger, for example:

They sat in the pleasant gloom of late afternoon, staring at each other through the remains of the party; the silver glasses, the silver tray, the traces of many perfumes; they sat together watching the twilight flow through the calm living-room that they were leaving like the clear cold current of a trout stream.

Thus the temptation to lean hard in the other direction and hail it as an overlooked and unfairly dismissed classic; to name Zelda an artistic genius who never got a fair shake. Is that so? The truth is I can’t tell and that’s deeply unsettling. It’s the inverse reaction, in a way, to Tropic of Cancer or Ulysses: instead of the fear that I would be unable to recognize greatness in a manuscript, the fear that I would be unable to recognize mediocrity.