Summer

I have a vague memory of being recommended Ali Smith’s Summer last year by a friend of a friend who teaches English at the university level, but my memory of his recommendation (“It’s like the book version of what we’re doing right now, people having conversations just like this”) so misaligns with what happens in the book that I wonder if I missed something. Or maybe Summer ended up on my TBR for other reasons and the English professor’s recommendation was something else entirely. I also learned, long after I finished it, that Summer is the last of a quartet and that several of the characters had appeared in the previous installments.

Basically, I came in to this book all wrong, so this is going to be an extremely…unfair? confused? unhelpful?…review for anyone who actually has the full context for the book. Sorry.

A pair of siblings—teenage environmental activist Sacha and her proto-edgelord younger brother Robert—end up befriending a pair of adults and, along with their mother, make a quick trip in a post-Brexit, mid-Covid England to return a lost/stolen item to its rightful owner. Based on what I’ve read in other reviews, most of what happens in Summer builds on stories and characters established in the previous three books and maybe? maybe not? ties up some loose ends.

Despite my clearly misguided expectations, I really liked Summer. Smith balances a relatively large cast of characters well, keeping their internal monologues consistent with how they’ve behaved from other character’s perspectives.

Mostly.

There is a missed opportunity with Sacha and Robert’s mother, the sole Leave voter in the group: when the book comes around to her perspective, Smith doesn’t really bother to speculate her motivations or feelings about Brexit and that feels like a cheap out. Its absence is made even more noticeable when you consider how much time we spend with Robert, who is currently acting out through extremely anti-social behavior.

On the whole, though, the different perspective characters feel distinct. Sometimes authors love the sound of their own voice a little too much and when they attempt an ensemble cast, characters lose all personality when it’s their turn to pilot the ship. Even if everyone has more or less similar politics (Brexit aside), Smith avoids that particular trap.

People who had read the previous three note in their reviews that Covid seems shoehorned in based on everything else, but I didn’t really walk away thinking “wow those lockdown bits were a bit tacked-on and weird,” so perhaps that’s an advantage of coming at the book from the completely wrong angle.

My only criticism, which is perhaps more of a reflection on me and the kind of person I am, is that I felt a bit manipulated by the inclusion of Vietnamese refugee Anh Kiệt. The parallels to the internment of “enemy aliens” in the UK during World War II are enlightening and fair to make, and I don’t begrudge Smith that point at all. However, Anh Kiệt himself gets pretty limited time in the story. Sacha writes to him twice throughout the book (and we see both pieces of correspondence) and we get to read his single reply to her, full of enthusiasm and optimism and hope, in the somewhat limited and uneven language you would expect from someone who acquired English informally and later in life. As far as character development goes, it’s not much, and it comes off as romanticized and idealized. His reply to Sacha is the last chapter of the book, which on the one hands lends it some gravitas, but that doesn’t make it any less flat. For comparison’s sake, the flashbacks to the World War II internments are longer (probably, though I didn’t go back and count up the pages, but they feel longer) and through the perspective of a character with fluent command of English, so his depiction is a bit more detailed and multifaceted. Never mind that this character apparently is the central figure in one of the previous books.

My initial reaction to finishing Summer, with Anh Kiệt’s optimism and nearly Pollyanna spirit, was to get a bit choked up at the goodness of the world and the undaunted spirit of hope etc. etc. Then I got annoyed at myself for getting choked up, because in a book full of research this is still fiction and who’s to say if Anh Kiệt ever existed. It’s the same “too good for this world” characterization of Ali from Där vinden vilar, but the book situates Ali so thoroughly in his community that it’s easy to read this idealized teenager as the hopes and desires of a family, of a village, of a country. Anh Kiệt doesn’t have much of a pre-refugee identity or status, so he feels like a narrative device cynically designed to elicit a reaction out of me, and I hate that in a book.

On the other hand, I read L’elegance du herisson and cried at the end all three times, so I like to think I’m not entirely heartless. What makes it effective there but cynical in Summer? I guess the answer is: the time I spent with the characters in question. We spend a lot of time with Renée in L’elegance du herisson since she’s one of the point of view characters. The same, even, with Ali in Där vinden vilar. But Anh Kiệt only gets his single chapter at the very end.

Or maybe the problem is me.

Soul Mountain

I picked up Gao Xingjiang’s doorstopper from the “leave a book, take a book” library at a hostel in Beijing in 2010. After a couple of half-hearted starts, I finally read it in 2024.

One more for the reading stats!

I liked the pointlessness of it all, how Soul Mountain is basically a collection of stuff without much of a structure and no plot to speak of. I liked the split of “I”/”you” perspectives, I liked a lot of the descriptions of the landscapes. It’s the kind of book I can easily return to again and again: there’s so much rich imagery, reflections, descriptions to get lost in, without having to keep all the threads of plot or character relationships straight because there are none!

I clearly tilt towards books that are thinky thoughts interspersed with nature and travel writing.

What I liked less was how Gao can’t seem to get beyond objectifying women any time they turn up. Either the male narrator (text makes it very clear that “I” and “you” are both men, so even with death of the author etc. I’m comfortable slotting this into “problems of the male gaze”) finds a woman attractive but childish or otherwise laughable, or he finds her unattractive and morally repugnant. Regardless, her sex appeal or lack thereof never goes unremarked. A recurring “she” who is part of the “you” chapters gets this the worst: she starts out as attractive and charming, but as things progress she turns more and more impulsive, childish, and petulant.

Who hurt you, Gao?

I would love to know how translator Mabel Lee felt about those moments in the text, how she thought about translating them, if she thought about them at all. I wonder if women in Gao’s other work fare any better than they do in Soul Mountain.

By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept

Following hot on the heels of Mumbo Jumbo, the next entry on the list of “books I feel like should have been on my literary curriculum but never were” is By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, Elizabeth Smart’s intense…novella? multi-part prose poem?…regarding her long-term affair with poet George Barker. Did I know that when I grabbed it at random off the library shelf? Absolutely not. Did I think for a minute that the Elizabeth Smart of my own growing-up had written a novel with a title off a prog rock album? Shamefully, yes, but I was disabused of this notion as soon as I read the back of the book. Considering its light weight and my impending vacation, I figured this was a good contender for a back up English book to have with me and checked it out alongside Ali Smith’s Summer.

The comparison that immediately springs to mind is Requiem över en förlorad stad and Cold Nights of Childhood. We have a nameless woman wandering through the locations of her own memories, though the narrator seems more chronologically bound in Grand Central Station than in either of the other two. While highly surreal throughout, you can still trace a narrative thread that begins with meeting Barker in person, continues through the consummated affair and subsequent periods of separation until it ends sometime after the birth of the narrator’s child, all of which is rendered in evocative and startling metaphor. This will undoubtedly be a re-read for me at some point in the near future, though with my own copy that I can safely mark up and read at my leisure.

2024 Reading Goals Check-In

Much like TBRs become graveyards of aspirations unless you actually make a point of reading the books on them, goals are also useless unless you follow up on them. Back in January I gave myself some reading goals; with the year half gone, how does my progress look?

1. At least 48 books
At the time of writing I am either on par or ahead of the game. It depends on whether you want to count different translations of a book as the same or different: I read La vengeance m’appartient in French, Swedish, and English.

2. At least 4 books in French
Three so far, by some miracle or other.

3. At least 25% of books in Swedish
Not a problem at all thanks to a strong start to the year.

4. At least 12 non-fiction books
Already ten at this point! Not sure how that happened but I’ll take it.

5. At least 12 books that have been in my library for over a year
This is where we start to fall behind, though only a bit. At the time of writing this number stands at five.

6. At least 10 books from my to-read list (as of January 1, 2024).
One of the few criticisms to be leveraged at Storygraph is that there doesn’t appear to be a “date added” function on the to-read section, meaning I have to rely on memory. I’m finding this tricky going; since this post has been a work in progress for a few weeks and I’ve come back to revise, I’ve found that I’m not sure what counts and what doesn’t. I’m going to be very conservative with this estimate and also note the titles here for my own reference, which at this point is six so far:

– Språkets myller

– The Dawn of Everything

– Mumbo Jumbo

– Refuse to Be Done

– Summer

– La vengeance m’appartient

7. At least half are by women or enby authors
Exactly on track, which is slightly disappointing since I assumed I would be ahead of the game.

8. At least 10% of books from Black authors
It’s impossible to fully evaluate success or failure on a percentage until the final count is established, of course. Assuming that my annual number should end up at “about five books,” then for halfway through the year I’m ahead of the game with four. The interviews with Samuel Delaney, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose in Flame Wars (“Black to the Future“) are worth noting as well, though I’m not going to try to pad out my numbers by equating one essay with a whole book.

9. A book from at least one new-to-me country (as of January 1, 2024)
At some point in the spring I got it into my head that my target was ten new-to-me countries per year, so I hustled a bit more than I would have otherwise and managed to meet and exceed this goal already! Countries in question: Senegal, Syria. Here’s the map so far:

Mumbo Jumbo

Ishmael Reed managed to escape my attention until someone mentioned his play The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda in a podcast I was listening to. In lieu of being able to see it staged (I guess I could still read it…), I added his novel Mumbo Jumbo to my TBR. However many years later, I found a copy of it at a bookstore in Chicago. (Not the same one where I found Refuse to Be Done, for anyone keeping track at home.)

The Knights Templar, along with the fictional Wallflower Order, are at work during the 1920s to stop a virus called “Jes Grew,” originating in Black culture and music, that leads to a sense of euphoria uncontrollable dancing. Working against them is PaPa LaBas, a Vodou priest on the trail of a MacGuffin that, united with the virus, will bring an unprecedented new age of freedom and human expression. The Knights, of course, want this MacGuffin destroyed. In the end LaBas is unsuccessful, but fifty years later LaBas is confident that a new opportunity to bring Jes Grew and another iteration of the MacGuffin together is waiting just around the corner, noting that several cultural trends of the 70s are identical or similar to the ones that gave rise to the virus in the 20s.

That summary does a huge disservice to the book, though, since all of that plot is really there as a vehicle for satire and social commentary. It reads a lot like the Illuminatus! trilogy, or what I remember of it anyway, except I never felt like Illuminatus! should have been part of my literary education. In that sense, Mumbo Jumbo has more meat on its bones. It’s another title for my list of “books that I am surprised (not really) were never assigned reading,” which started with No-No Boy in 2017.

Vacation Reading List 2024, Part 1: Follow-Up

How did my reading goals for my recent vacation shake out?

Back issues of Karavan and Historiskan for the journey

Halfway. I finished Historiskan (and some old issues of Situation Stockholm) by the time I boarded my flight out of Reykjavik, but I never got around to Karavan.

I have La vengeance m’appartient by Marie NDiaye in paperback from the library and in Swedish (Min är hämnden) on my phone

I made substantial progress on this. I didn’t finish it, but I came real close (and would have probably finished it on the flight home if I hadn’t left the book at my parents, prayers for its safe return). Bonus: one of my US libraries has the English translation in ebook so I can compare all three!

I also have digital copies of Burnout: The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat by Hannah Proctor and The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe by Matthew Gabriele and David M. Perry

I dipped into Bright Ages now and again. My loan expired and then it was unavailable for a while, so I didn’t quite finish it. I read maybe, like, one page of Burnout.

Last year I left my copy of David Graeber’s Debt at my parents’ house, so maybe I’ll pick it up a third time to see if anything more sticks

Didn’t even see this around the house so I’m not sure if I actually left it there, or if it got put away or thrown out or something else.

Of course, now that I’ve written all that down, I will immediately get distracted by a library or bookstore and wander over to something completely unrelated

This is indeed the way. Even before I left, on what I didn’t realize would be my last visit to Stadsbiblioteket for several years, I checked out Ali Smith’s Summer (hefty book; stayed home) and Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept (very skinny book; came with me). Once in US bookstores, however, I forced myself to stick to my TBR goals. In Chicago I picked up Refuse to Be Done and Mumbo Jumbo.

I also removed a garbage-tier mid-century iteration of The Law of Attraction from a Little Free Library, read the whole thing on my surprise Amtrak journey from Indianapolis to Philadelphia, and abandoned it at the Port Authority Bus Terminal. This isn’t like the time where I hoped that I had released Braiding Sweetgrass into the wild to spread and propagate. I mean I literally threw the book in the garbage. I originally picked it up because the cover looked sufficiently vintage enough to be an interesting period piece, at least, and then only later realized what it actually was. I no longer remember the title or author, and even if I did I wouldn’t want to include it in my reading for the year because The Law of Attraction and all its ilk feels…icky.

But after that I refrained from acquiring more books, mostly because I was so engrossed with La vengeance m’appartient. (With time off to read By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept in one sitting.)

Pretty good work all around, I’d say!

Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts

Honestly, I wasn’t super enthused going into this one. Matt Bell’s Refuse to be Done was the first title from my TBR that I found at a bookstore in Chicago and that was enough for me to declare my errand done rather than force my hosts to languish in the bookstore longer than necessary. (Not that they would have called it languishing, but still.) I finished it on a bus between Albany and the Port Authority Bus Terminal.

This book just isn’t for me. Only a few of the tips or tricks in here are ones that I could apply to my own writing, and the promise of the title (“how to write and rewrite a novel in three drafts”) is 100% a bait and switch. If you follow Bell’s advice, you will definitely write more than three drafts, but “three drafts” is a much more enticing promise than “three stages.”

The three drafts promised in the title boil down to:

  1. What Bell calls the “exploratory draft,” or what I think of as “the NaNoWriMo draft.”
  2. The “rewrite, don’t revise” draft, whose goal and purpose seems a bit unclear and muddled. I think part of the reason the book has no table of contents is because it would become very clear how little meat and potatoes Bell has to offer for this section. (The chapter on the exploratory draft is close to 70 pages; this one is around 16 pages. The last chapter is around 50 pages.)  As far as I can tell, this is where he thinks you should carry out major structural and story revisions. But then he sums up his advice as:

When in doubt, rewrite instead of revise.

How do you know if you’re rewriting versus revising?

Some clues: the presence of new typing (or at least retyping) and the absence of merely copying and posting.

When in doubt, rewrite instead of revise.

Trust me.

And at first blush that seemed like the exact opposite of what he was trying to convey in this very brief chapter? “Just spit and polish that dreadful scene you have instead of fundamentally changing it.” After multiple re-reads and several days of reflection, I think what he means is something like: write over scenes from scratch instead of just trying to tweak what’s there. The problem is that “rewriting” and “revising” never get very clear definitions; it’s the equivalent of being told “cribble, don’t tralapse.” This chapter might as well be called “draw the rest of the fucking owl.”

3. The last stage, or draft, sounds like a “spit and polish” draft where the focus is on language rather than narrative, but again he doesn’t really give it a name or clear purpose so who knows.

In addition to the bait-and-switch title and the “draw the rest of the fucking owl” vagueness in the middle, like any book on writing there is the obligatory list of the author’s personal pet peeves presented as Objectively Bad Writing mixed in with helpful exercises. At least at this point in my life I know to just skim those sections rather than live or die by them.

To his credit, Bell cites a lot of interviews and articles from other authors describing their own process. He also gives a lot of concrete examples of well-done prose and unique narrative structures for curious readers to investigate, as well as in-depth reference books on more niche elements of style. As usual, finishing one non-fiction book on my TBR only led to me adding others.

Really, this would have been better as a library read than a purchase. The only reason I don’t regret plunking down money on this book is that it went to support a local indie bookstore. Refuse to Be Done might be the book that gets someone started on their very first novel, but I am not that person.

Motorcykel genom Sverige

I’ve mentioned before that my reading habits as an adult have largely moved from “obsess over one author and read everything I can get my hands on” to “sample as many authors as possible in the time I have left on this Earth.” There are a few authors I still binge on, and one of them is Ester Blenda Nordström. It’s nice to have a reliable comfort read in a foreign language, someone you can trust to write in language accessible to your limited capacity, which is probably why the authors I binge on anymore are all not in English.

With Nordström in particular it seems like publishers have yet to really make the bulk of her work readily available to the public. Bakhåll has put out some collections, of which Motorcykel genom Sverige is one, but it seems that her reportage from other trips—Chile and Argentina, Japan and China, France and Spain—hasn’t been collected in the same thematic releases as Amerikanskt or Byn i vulkanens skygga. Indeed, contrary to its title, Motorcykel covers more than just her 1914 motorcycle journey throughout Sweden with her father. It also functions as a “greatest hits” collection from those aforementioned travels, an appetizer or sampler tray before the main course. We catch glimpses of her crossing the Andes on mule, attending a bullfight in Spain, surveying the damage of the 1925 North Tajima earthquake. Arranged in what appears to be chronological order, the collection also rather poignantly includes Nordström’s last published article, a reminisce about life out in the countryside. The timeline seems to encompass most of her active career.

There isn’t much need to review Nordström herself here. It’s a collection chosen to represent the best of her writing, so of course it’s good. Any one piece would qualify as a stand out selection, but the first that springs to mind right now is the account of her “hat pin” tram journey, a small piece of undercover reportage during what the above Smithsonian link calls “the hatpin terrors.” Another really excellent chapter is the bullfight, with no punches pulled about its inherent brutality. If I were a comparative literature professor I would probably assign this chapter as reading alongside Hemingway.

It’s a fun collection, though as an introduction to Nordström it might need extra context or explanation. It’s also a shame that the main course feels so incomplete. While all of Nordström’s reportage for papers like Vecko-Journalen, Dagens Nyheter, Stockholm Dagsblad and so on is probably well archived for academics,  the collections that are readily available for general consumption only seem to be new editions of the ones already published as collections in Nordström’s lifetime.

Där vinden vilar

Out of all the books I’ve read in my life, in all the places, Samar Yazbek‘s Där vinden vilar was the first to have me so engrossed that I missed my stop on the subway. Maybe that’s really the only review I need to write.

A young soldier in the Syrian civil war has been grievously injured by friendly fire. Ali’s struggle to reach the shelter of a nearby tree is interspersed with flashbacks to important people and moments of his short life. The lyrical translation from Marie Anell paints a vivid picture of a dreamy and mystical young man with a deep reverence for nature, completely ill-suited for the battlefield. Yazbek also uses this limited perspective to depict dictatorships from a grassroots, ground-up perspective.

If there’s any criticism to be made, you could argue that Ali is deliberately crafted to have the maximal emotional impact; to be the perfect war casualty. He is just too kind, too innocent to be anything but deeply sympathetic. The comparison to Frère d’âme is a natural one to make here, given their similar topics and structures. In Frère, however, it seems like Diop makes at least some effort to present unsavory or off-putting aspects of Alfa’s character alongside his more admirable traits. As a result he ends up as a perhaps more realistic, or at least more typical, teenage boy.

But I think if Yazbek had taken the same approach, it would have landed very differently, potentially undermining the point of the book. In a way, Ali is less of a character and more of a symbol, a way to link the anonymous violence of the battlefield to the people and the communities it devastates. He’s the best parts of everyone’s lost son, the physical embodiment of the collective hope a village or town has for their young people, the perfect angel doting parents see in their children. Alfa’s story is about himself; Ali’s story is about the people around him.

En flöjt av mörker

Edited to add, 25 June 2024: while mine is a tiny voice in the discourse, it would be in poor taste of me to just sit here and idly dunk on this poetry without explicitly acknowledging the horrific violence and war crimes currently being committed against Palestinians in Gaza, or the long-standing conditions that have led to el Sousi and many, many others living in exile. My hot take on this poetry collection is still here, unedited, if you feel like reading it, but first please donate to the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund.

Thanks.

Somaya el Sousi was one of the writers featured in the flash fiction edition of Karavan, and one of the poets reading at Litteraturmässan, so that’s how I became aware of her. I picked up her slim Swedish collection, En flöjt av mörker, at Litteraturmässan in a fit of optimism. I had just read a whole book on how to read poetry metaphorically! Work was beginning to slow down! I could give this poetry collection my best college try and immerse myself in, according to the back of the book:

en berättelse där vi färdas genom tid och rum, och bortom tystnaden*

and fight alongside el Sousi in, quote:

kampen att vara sann mot sig själv som människa**

and bear witness to, quote:

hur samkönad kärlek kan gestaltas i sammanhang där den är förbjuden***

I really gave it my best possible try. I read things slowly, multiple times, out loud. I diligently looked up every unfamiliar word, and most of the vaguely familiar ones as well. It took ten years of collaborative work to translate the collection from Arabic to Swedish; el Sousi is a Palestinian refugee currently residing in Norway. I have mountains of respect for what she’s been through as a person and for the work it took to make this small volume of work available to me in Swedish.

And yet.

I’m still left feeling like the back-of-the-book description above is on par with a hackneyed description of a mediocre wine, and I pick that metaphor deliberately. A friend of mine was once asked to take over the tastings at a winery for a couple hours while the real owner had to run some kind of emergency errand. He and his companions made up the most ridiculous descriptions, really bonkers off-the-wall stuff, as they served wine they had only just tasted themselves to the guests arriving after them.

And the guests all went along with it. No one thought to question their authority or their presentation of the wine. The owner returned and took over tasting duties at an appropriate moment, and my friend’s group went on their way.

I get the impression that the same thing happens with any poetry that is still too new to have been put through the crucible of time to emerge either as a classic or just cruft. The owner is out to lunch and we have people who don’t know any better stringing together vague phrases and aphorisms to try to sell the product to us.

It’s either that, or I have to give up and admit that the problem is me.

*a story that takes us through time and space, beyond the silence

**the struggle to stay true to one’s self as a person

***how same-sex love can be depicted in an environment where it’s forbidden