Tag: novels

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.

Döden och pingvinen

Nothing like book clubs for finding new books and keeping you on track for reading goals!

Andrey Kurkov’s Döden och pingvinen (Death and the Penguin) was the pick for my WhatsApp book club, a motley international crew put together by an American online acquaintance currently residing in Türkiye. She also happens to have a background in Russian literature, so between her own history and the diversity of geographies in the group, the selection ends up being pretty eclectic.

Döden och pingvinen is a satire and a farce, and was generally a fun relief from other books I had on the go at the same time (e.g. a revisit of Rien où poser sa tête, which deserves to be required reading in the face of ongoing ICE raids in the US). Viktor is a struggling writer in post Soviet Kyiv who suddenly finds himself with a new job: writing obituaries for still-living people of note. He also happens to own an emperor penguin named Misha. These two factors bring a whirlwind of new people into his life, but of course things quickly spiral out of control and Viktor eventually finds himself in the crosshairs.

A lot of the satire probably missed me since I’m not intimately familiar with the post-Soviet politics of Ukraine in the mid-90s. That knowledge might have provided some structure to the story; as it was, most of the time the story revolves around things just happening to Viktor. This works fine as satire—when absurd things happen to a straight-laced protagonist, there’s still narrative satisfaction to be had—but in the last act of the story, the satire takes a backseat to actual pathos. People have died (or are at least presumed dead), Viktor’s life is in danger, and an aura of menace hangs over his newly-found loved ones. In that kind of situation, the protagonist’s lack of action becomes more frustrating. There are also events in the first part of the book that have a foreshadowing aura, where you expect they will be part of a coming plot twist or complication, but nothing ever comes of them. When Döden och pingvinen is straight comedy, it’s fantastic, but when it starts to dip into spy thriller territory it gets slightly confused and deflating. The ending, too, is much more of a downer than the first several chapters would suggest. Black humor is definitely a thing, absolutely, but for me it wasn’t quite the same. I don’t want to get too into the weeds with that, though, because I consider it a spoiler.

It’s also not worth noting except in passing my deep, world-weary sigh at Viktor’s love interest. Another man approaching 40 who gets a “barely legal” ingenue dumped in his lap, as was the style at the time.

Most of us were in agreement that the book started off strong but that by the end we were the most concerned about what would happen with Misha the penguin. Good news for us, Kurkov wrote a sequel!

Tordyveln flyger i skymningen

I once heard someone describe the experience of relocating to another country as “having a childhood that is now totally irrelevant.” The flip side of that coin is that you’re constantly playing catch-up with the childhood that most of the people around you share. Maria Gripe was part of that cultural catch-up for me. I’d never heard of her before I moved here, but weirdly enough no one mentioned her either. I only added her to my TBR list after a profile of her in a past issue of Historiskan, and when I brought home Tordyveln flyger i skymningen (“The Dor Beetle Flies at Dusk”) my partner was pleasantly surprised.

“I loved that one as a kid!”

Not enough to mention it to me, I guess?

Other books by Maria Gripe have come out in English but, as far as I can tell, this one hasn’t. Neither has the radio drama, and the new miniseries from SVT only has Swedish subtitles. Once again, I’m writing a book report in English about a book that’s not available to English readers.

One summer, three children in a fictional Småland village—siblings Annika and Jonas, and their friend David—discover a hidden cache of letters at the abandoned Selanderska house. With that a two-hundred-year-old history is uncovered that includes ancient Egyptian statues, curses, Carl Linneaus, unhappy love affairs, and psychic plants. There are discoveries and disappointments along the way, but in the end they come to a quiet but satisfying conclusion.

All of that would have been my jam as a tween, so it was a fantastic bit of escapism for me, a throwback to favorites like The Dark is Rising and From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. The only hiccup for me was the writing style: Gripe favors short, slightly choppy sentences with a profusion of exclamation marks, to the point where Child Me might have felt a bit condescended to. I felt the same way about books for children that didn’t use contractions, for example.

On a more positive note, much of the story is advanced through conversations and dialogue, and while that can get tiresome when poorly handled, in this instance it works. Tordyveln was originally conceived as a radio drama, after all, so that structure makes perfect sense. As an adult, and reading in a foreign language, I was also particularly interested in seeing how Swedish has changed over time. This wasn’t limited to specific words or slang, which of course cropped up—norms of etiquette were also different. Our protagonists soon enlist the help of the village priest*, and they always refer to him in the third person when speaking directly to him (“Vill farbror ha….?”). I don’t think that would be the case today, and I was a bit surprised to see it in something as recent as this.

And even if the language sometimes felt a bit oversimplified to me, an adult reading this middle grade fantasy novel, Gripe (and her co-creator, Kay Pollak) didn’t shy away from asking their readers to reflect on some pretty heady material. The book opens right away with a meditation on coincidences and chance and destiny; then, as more about Emilie and Andreas’s love story unfolds, Annika and David dig into surprisingly nuanced thoughts about feminism and gender roles in the 1700s. In a summary like this, I realize that sounds like it would come off as a bit precocious and moralizing, but in the story their commentary sounds like any conversation I could have had with a friend when I was sixteen. These are not the insufferable teenagers of a John Green novel.

Cute, cozy, but not at all cloying. A nice bit of new nostalgia for me.

Postscript: I pressganged my sambo into watching the new SVT miniseries with me. Later we found a statement from Gripe about how she was worried that a TV adaptation would strip the story of all of its more thoughtful, philosophical elements. Turns out she was right. I’ll close with a quote  from Pastor Lindroth near the end of the book that will sit in my head for a long time:

Och när jag nu tänker närmare på saken här, så tycker jag nog att ingen kan ta på sitt ansvar att döma sin egen tid. Det kallar jag högmod…Vi måste allt lita på vår egen tid även om det kan vara svårt ibland, annars sviker vi…

Vi måste allt lita på vår egen tid även om det kan vara svårt ibland, annars sviker vi…

*Maybe pastor? I’m not sure which is the right title for clergy in the Swedish church.

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.

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?

Austerlitz

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

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

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

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

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

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

Den blinda ugglan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

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

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

In no way was I disappointed.

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

Maybe now in 2025 I can give it a shot.