Tag: English

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.

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.

Burnout: The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat

I don’t remember how I came across Hannah Proctor’s Burnout: The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat, but I remember that it took me the better part of a year to read it. This was largely a problem of format, since my copy was an ebook gifted to me by a friend. If an ebook isn’t a library loan or a book club read, then it is doomed to take forever because I’ll treat it as a backup book to pull out in desperate times rather than an active project with a looming deadline.

Burnout was published in early 2024, so Proctor is addressing very recent political events; she began writing it during the COVID lockdowns in response to the electoral defeats of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn. The book obviously went to press before Trump’s re-election, however, and I wonder how different the book would (or wouldn’t) be if she had started writing in 2024 rather than 2020.

To quote directly from the back-of-the-book summary from publisher Verso:

In the struggle for a better world, setbacks are inevitable. Defeat can feel overwhelming at times, but it has to be endured. How then do the people on the front line keep going? To answer that question, Hannah Proctor draws on historical resources to find out how revolutionaries and activists of the past kept a grip on hope.

…

Jettisoning self-help narratives and individualizing therapy talk, Proctor offers a different way forward – neither denial nor despair. Her cogent exploration of the ways militants have made sense of their own burnout demonstrates that it is possible to mourn and organise at once, and to do both without compromise.

Perhaps it’s my own inattentive, piecemeal reading that’s to blame here, but having finished the book I’m not sure I can articulate “how revolutionaries and activists of the past kept a grip on hope.” Nor can I really describe the different way forward that Proctor is offering, beyond “quashing the individual for the sake of the movement doesn’t work.” Maybe my brain is simply too melted from easily digestible pop science and self-help books with punchy, pithy bulleted lists to grasp the more complicated or ambiguous solutions she raises.

Even if my brain is fully melted, the historical scope of Burnout still made it a rewarding read for me. Proctor covers a broad swathe of leftist organizing history through eight discrete concepts: melancholia, nostalgia, depression, burnout, exhaustion, bitterness, trauma, and mourning. Each concept is illustrated by specific historical movements or moments, such as exiled Communards as a framework for looking at nostalgia. Reading it felt like catching up on years and years of history that I should have already known about. Now that I have the history in place, I can give it a more careful re-read and come away with a better understanding of the lessons Proctor believes we can learn.

Small Things Like These

Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These was the latest pick for the Swedish book club I’ve recently (if intermittently) started attending, and yet again they’ve opted for a translation into Swedish. (Previous entries include The Blind Owl, The World of Yesterday, The New York Trilogy.) No complaints from me, exactly, but I suppose that means I need to find other ways of keeping abreast of contemporary Swedish literature.

It’s getting on to Christmas in 1985 in New Ross, Ireland and protagonist Bill Furlong is working hard to get coal deliveries out and payments in to support his wife and five daughters. A delivery to a convent brings him into unusually close contact with behind-the-scenes matters at the local Magdalene laundry and (spoiler, I guess) the story ends with Furlong helping one of the girls escape.

Points for brevity and, despite the subject matter, not being an absolute morass of despair. I was expecting the conflict to revolve around one of Furlong’s own daughters being sent to the institution and spent most of the story trying to guess which one it would be. Maybe that was deliberate misdirection by Keegan, who’s to say? A lesser writer would have gone that direction, I’m sure, and I appreciate that she didn’t.

Otherwise, I imagine that a lot of the staying power a story like this has depends on the emotional resonance the setting has for a reader. I’m not Irish; I have no immediate connection to that particular tragedy. In the same vein, I expect a novel like Beloved hits different if you’re not American.

Brave New World

This was another book club pick, this time for a group that usually focuses on philosophy. I wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about it, since this is a group I appreciate for filling in the gaps in my philosophy education rather than my literary reading, but Brave New World was also one of those Great Classics that had passed me by, the rare book that I remember giving up on, so I was still game.

Well, at least I finished it this time around. Some ninety years after publication and I struggle with understanding why it persists as a Great Classic. Brave New World suffers from the kind of aged-like-milk retrofuturism that consigns other science fiction to the dustbin of history; I’m feeling a bit punchy today so I’ll make the bold claim that Huxley’s continued commentary and sequels, as well as his overall literary reputation, probably helped Brave New World stick better in the public consciousness than your typical pulp magazine story. The novel starts with a load of technobabble infodumping at the hatchery that would have been right at home in an issue of Amazing Stories or Weird Tales, and my eyes glazed over as quickly as they had on my first attempt some twenty-odd years ago. Most of the satirical bits, such as the all the Ford jokes, have also lost their shine in the intervening years.

The most interesting parts of the book for me were the parts that Huxley didn’t spend that much time on: the psychic, psychological cost of the culture clashes, like between Linda and the Savage Reservation community, or John and the World State. They both suffer miserable fates, but that narrative fate  is the shallowest, laziest commentary Huxley could have possibly provided. Why, for example, is John so unmoored by his attraction to Lenina? Sure, the differences in the sexual norms they’re used to would naturally lead to misunderstandings or incompatibilities—John even articulates that when he rejects her point-blank offer, saying he wants to do or accomplish something to deserve her first. Sure, that’s understandable, even if it’s completely dismissive of what the woman in this situation thinks. But while the violent outburst that follows is a fairly realistic, if extreme, depiction of the mixed and unprocessed emotions a lot of (straight) men have about sex and the women they’re sexually attracted to, Huxley doesn’t really dig any deeper into John’s psychology than that. To a modern reader (or, to this modern reader), John’s reaction to Lenina isn’t anything spontaneous that would arise in nature: it’s one that’s a result of repressive ideas about sex and gender norms. But because Brave New World isn’t supposed to be a critique or a satire of the society John grew up in, it’s hard to argue that Huxley recognizes that. It sure seems like for Huxley the normal state of sexual relations is one where men must constantly strive and impress naturally disinterested, picky women.

The only character who gets any interesting psychological treatment is Bernard. His suffering and marginalization because of his outsider status don’t automatically turn him into a hero, which is too often the case in a lot of stories. Being slightly outside the order of things has given him something a moral standard, and a greater insight into (and cynicism about) the whole World State system, but when it comes to his actions Bernard is just as often a coward or a clout-chaser as he is an upstanding moral person. In a story full of cardboard cutouts, Bernard is the only actual person.

Brave New World is one of the most notorious of banned books, and as someone who ardently believes in not banning books, I feel a bit guilty about not liking it more. Should it be banned? Of course not. But not every banned book is worth reading, either.

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.

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.

 

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?

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.