Tag: novels

Jag heter inte Miriam

“The story is fiction, but it is true.” YuanTsung Chen’s remark in her introduction to The Dragon’s Village is also a perfect description of Majgull Axelsson’s Jag heter inte Miriam.

Looking back at my year of reading at the age of 39, there was great deal of history, especially World War II. Using the strictest possible definition of history or historical fiction, the list is:

*Still only currently reading, so I might not finish before I turn 40, or even at all.

Some of it was intentional, some of it (for example, book club picks or recommendations from friends) was pure happenstance. A year of reflection.

Jag heter inte Miriam is a kind of bildungsroman, following the titular Miriam (née Malika) from her childhood in Germany through the Holocaust and finally to land in Sweden. The name change arises when Malika takes on the uniform and identity of a dead Jewish girl, Miriam Goldberg, during her transport from Auschwitz to Ravensbrück. Malika is Romani and has already experienced life at the bottom rung of the prisoners’ self-determined hierarchy. The Nazis might have the most animosity for the Jews, but most of Miriam’s day is spent among prisoners, not Nazis. There was more foresight in this decision than Miriam could have realized, as she ends up on one of the white buses out of the camps and into Sweden—whose immigration policy at the time denied entry to Romani people. As a result, Miriam spends more of her life passing as Jewish than being authentically Romani.

Her entire life story is presented across 450 pages, through the narrative framing device of celebrating her 85th birthday with her stepson and his family: wife, daughter, grandson. The gift of a silver bracelet, engraved with her name and of what looks to be Romani craftsmanship, prompts her to remark “Jag heter inte Miriam” (“My name is not Miriam”), which naturally sends the family into a small uproar. Is this dementia? Alzheimer’s? A strange joke?

Granddaughter Camilla is the one to ask Miriam about it directly, and about her experience in the camps, which sets up the framing device for the rest of the story. In between long episodes of Miriam’s past, we come back to the present day setting and her lakeside walk with her granddaughter, where Camilla tries to come to grips with this history lesson.

There’s obviously a lot in here, and Axelsson includes a long list of references and books for further reading at the end, as well as a lengthy thank-you to fact checkers, historians, and interviewees. (I recognized Hans Caldaras‘ name among them, whose biography continues to live rent-free in my head even though I read it six years ago.) However, even if many of the events of the book actually happened—including the “tattarkravallerna” in Jönköping in 1948 or the Roma uprising in Auschwitz in May 1944—the character of Miriam Goldberg is still just that: a fictional character. There’s advantages and disadvantages to this approach to presenting history, and I don’t think there will ever be a conclusive answer to the question “Historical fiction: good or bad?”. It’s just something to be aware of.

Jag heter inte Miriam was another one for my annual reading goals, one that I’ve owned for more than a year. It took a painfully long time to read, not only because it’s 450 pages but also because it’s a goddamn Holocaust novel. Still, I’m glad I read it. By all accounts it seems like Axelsson tried to be as respectful and thoughtful as possible, and like she genuinely wanted to tackle history through the lens of fiction rather than crank out some tragedy porn.

It doesn’t seem like the book is out in English, but the fantastic Asymptote has an excerpt available, an excellent translation by Kathy Saranpa.

Stacken

Stacken (Eng: The Colony) was a Swedish book club pick and it generated a range of responses, which is exactly what you want in a book club pick I suppose. Unlike the previous meeting I attended, where everyone agreed that Orbital was pretty underwhelming.

What made Annika Norlin’s debut novel a non-starter for me was that it ultimately seemed to lack cohesion. Norlin’s previous fiction release was a collection of short stories, and Stacken feels like an unsuccessful attempt to glue seven or eight short stories together in a single narrative. We have an ensemble cast consisting of Emelie, a young Stockholmer who has fled to the countryside up north after serious case of burnout, and the cult-adjacent group she stumbles on out there: Ersmos, Aagny, Sara, József, Sagne, Låke, and Zakaria.

If I were to summarize Stacken in a single sentence, it would be “Midsummer for scaredy cats.” It has the kinda culty one-with-nature commune, but without any murders. (There are a couple of murders in the backstory, but that’s a separate matter.) Wikipedia tells me it’s “being adapted for television,” but I can’t find any unpaywalled source for more details, so who knows. I can see how it would work as an anthology series of character studies, like LOST, but that is in no way a compliment. For lack of anything else to say about the book, here is the cult character gallery in brief:

Ersmos is around Emelie’s age. He grew up with a tyrannical single mother in the house that would eventually become cult headquarters. Not very brainy, much more mechanically oriented.

Aagny is well into middle age. After doing a stint in prison, the only job she can find is caregiver for Ersmos’s horrendous mother. She’s the first to move in to the house.

Sara is also around Emelie’s age, gifted with incredible charisma. She served a prison sentence following an animal rights stunt (unsuccessfully trying to liberate some chickens), spent a few years at an ashram in India, and eventually moves in together with József.

József is ten or fifteen years older than Sara, the son of two Hungarian Holocaust survivors. Intergenerational trauma has made him something of a people pleaser, and when he meets Sara he’s working as a church choir director.

Sara and József run into Aagny up north visiting some of Sara’s extended family, and they’re the next to move in.

Sagne is a a huge bug nerd, distantly related to Sara by marriage? a cousin? marriage to a cousin? and relatively local to the area. She goes off to get a PhD studying ants, but then A TRAGIC BACKSTORY happens to her and Aagny finds an extremely pregnant Sagne out in the woods. Sagne doesn’t move in so much as she’s brought in.

Låke is Sagne’s son, born and brought up on the property. Despite József’s protestations, Låke is kept out of school and so gets a very singular and uneven education on their off-grid little homestead. By the time Emelie shows up he’s a teenager, maybe sixteen or seventeen? Sagne spends most of the book avoiding him, and the rest of the commune can’t quite seem to decide what to make of him.

Zakaria is the last to arrive, again brought in by Aagny when she meets him in a drunken stupor, on the run from the law. He is young and Greek and gorgeous and naive, and everyone’s a little bit horny for him. Aagny especially is desperately in love with him.

By the time Emelie runs into them, they have amassed several idiosyncracies. They talk about Out There and Outsiders in hushed tones. They sleep outside as much as possible. They thank nature for every gift of berries, vegetable, animal. Sara has morphed into a cult leader and dictates, with charisma and soft power and suggestion, their goals and activities.

I often joke that I would read about absolutely nothing at all happening so long as the writing was good, but Stacken really put that assertion to the test. Norlin can write lovely prose, but that still wasn’t enough to get me interested in the story. Maybe because she never gets beyond the surface of things: of events, of feelings, of character psychology. Really grim, serious things happen to the characters and Norlin just skims over it. Not to mention how she handwaves things things like how this bunch of amateurs learned to build proper shelter, and garden, and tend chickens, to the point where they became almost completely self sufficient. I get that you didn’t want to do the research, Norlin, but then maybe you could have told a different story.

Kusinerna

I first heard of Aurora Venturini’s Kusinerna (Spanish: Las primas) in a review in an issue of Karavan a few years ago. I remember sitting in Konserthuset during intermission and reading about a pitiable yet terrifying character zooming around in a wheelchair. Then I forgot about it until my international WhatsApp book club picked Las primas—more specifically than that, I forgot about it until I came to a chapter in Kusinerna with a…pitiable yet terrifying character zooming around in a wheelchair.

Ah hah!

Kusinerna is a story about an impoverished family told through the perspective of the daughter Yuna, who claims that all the women in her family are “freaks” in some way or other, including herself. The nature of her own disability is unclear except that it’s tied to a difficulty with language, which gives rise to a distinct literary style and occasional breaks in the fourth wall. Her sister Benita is the one in the wheelchair, and seems to be seriously handicapped both physically and mentally. One of their cousins on their mother’s side, Petra, has dwarfism while the other cousin, Carina, has six toes on each foot. There we have our titular cousins.

Yuna and Petra are the only two who are capable of living more or less independently in the world. Yuna shows an early knack for drawing and art that more than makes up for her struggles with language, and as the book progresses she is easily able to support her family. Petra, on the other hand, quickly turns to sex work to earn money.

Lots of other reviews talk about the book’s portrayal of misogyny, patriarchy, abuse, and any other number of awful things. Very true, this is all in there! There is definitely a lot that happens in the book, and most of it has to do with suffering and abuse. But getting too into the weeds where plot is concerned would spoil quite a bit and somehow feel overly reductive. It doesn’t seem like Venturini is trying to shock anyone with the events of the story; they’re more the foundation of some seriously acerbic dark comedy. Lorna Scott Fox’s review at the Times Literary Supplement calls Cousins “breezy and brutal,” a perfect description. When you use Yuna’s distinctive, almost manic narrative voice (run-on sentences abound, for example, because she finds punctuation tiresome and complicated) to relate some of the worst things that can happen to a person, it transcends misery porn and becomes that most vaunted of all things: Social Commentary.

The comparison that springs to mind for me is Paul Pen’s El brillo de las luciérnagas (English: The Light of the Fireflies). It’s not a fair comparison, maybe, since the only thing they have in common is Spanish and brutality towards women. But without a narrator like Yuna, the brutality never really elevates and it just stays at a deeply unpleasant level of misery and torture porn for the entire time. Brutal yes, breezy not so much. While I blazed through Cousins at lightning speed, Fireflies is one of the rare books that I have consciously, deliberately chosen to not finish. This is where spoilers come in handy, and I’m glad GoodReads users delivered so I could decide to spend my time reading something else instead.

It would be remiss of me not to mention that Venturini was also just a really cool and interesting and talented person! Nothing else to add there, just felt I should make that clear.

The Swedish translation by Hanna Nordenhök was also a delight to read, and a credit to her craft considering how many puns and plays on words there must have been to translate. More than a lot of our other WhatsApp book club choices, Cousins led to a lot of discussion about puns and translations: for one original Spanish joke about snacks and pickaxes early in the book, in English it was rendered about bird beaks and pecking, in Swedish about rodents and gnawing, and in German about sofas and canapés.

The best possible book club pick!

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 Extinction of Irena Rey

Does it count as professional narcissism if I want to read a book because it’s about translators?

I first saw an ad for The Extinction of Irena Rey in LitHub, though another bookish friend later mentioned enjoying it. But the only thing that made me add it to my list was translators! mystery! The author, Jennifer Croft, is also a translator of renown (Olga Tokarczuk’s  Flights, among others) and that only made the prospect even more tempting.

At its most basic, The Extinction of Irena Rey is about the search for missing Polish author Irena Rey. She’s always been very idiosyncratic about how her translators work, we learn, so this time is no different: she invites them to her house for a summit (as she calls it) and everyone works together to translate her latest work into their respective languages. They can’t talk about the weather, they can’t use their names, they can’t translate any other Polish author. There’s certainly a cult-like element to everything. This time around, however, the cult leader has mysteriously vanished. What to do?

This straightforward series of events is wrapped in multiple levels of metatext. The novel you as a person in the real world are reading is in English, of course, but within the world of the novel this is a translation into English from Polish that was (again, in the world of the novel) originally written by an Argentinian woman. Who just so happens to absolutely despise the translator. Oh, and the imaginary Polish original text is supposedly a fictionalized account of actual events!

This is where I have to regret that I fell so behind with my dorky little book reports here because I know there are a lot of things about the book that I’ve forgotten, in addition to the little scraps I remember but can’t find a place to shoehorn in here. It’s been several months now since I finished it. But I remember that I enjoyed every minute of it: it was weird and unhinged and just incredibly smart.

Gabi: A Girl in Pieces

The third and final part of my Fat Triptych was Gabi, a Girl in Pieces by Isabel Quintero.

This one didn’t make the rounds quite as much; I think I only saw it on one blog, but that one review was enough to get me intrigued. And then my US library had an ebook copy!

Gabi, a Girl in Pieces focuses on Gabi Hernandez’ senior year of high school, told in the form of her diary. On the one hand, I could summarize it as high school drama, and that would be way more glib than the book deserves. On the other hand, I could summarize it as an Issues Novel tackling things like racism, addiction, body image, teen pregnancy, sexual assault, and family trauma, and that would be far more of a downer than the book actually is. Really, in the end, the story is about a year in the life of a very particular human who is going through very particular things, and that’s what keeps Gabi from becoming an overwrought or anvilicious After School Special. I’m pretty sure that high school me would have respected Gabi and related to her; grown up me wanted to protect and encourage her.

No surprise then when I say that Gabi was a welcome palate cleanser after Dietland. Where Plum was an absolute blank void who only served as an excuse for Walker to lecture her readers, Gabi is an actual character. She has a personality, she has strengths and weaknesses, she has opinions, she has interests. Gabi isn’t a manifesto, and Quintero doesn’t have an axe to grind. She just has a character—people—that she cares about.

It’s also refreshing to read a YA novel that isn’t a stealth attempt to sell books to fully adult readers looking for a bit of lazy, easy escapism. Gabi is actually for young people, and I mean that as a compliment and in the best way possible. It’s not up to me to say that Quintero understands the readers she’s targeting, but it’s clear that she respects them.

Dietland

The second part of my Fat Triptych from Christmas 2025 (yes I’m writing this in May 2026) was the splashy and much-lauded Dietland by Sarai Walker.

I had been so excited to read this one back when it was first announced. All of the book blogs I was following at the time loved it and kept comparing it favorably to Fight Club and it just seemed like it would be a really fun and life-affirming read!

It was not.

I wonder if I would have liked it better if I’d read it on first release—when I was a different person, when the world and The Discourse was different as well—or if that wouldn’t have made any difference at all. It left such a disappointing taste in my mouth that I had to immediately schedule a meeting with the other member of the Bad Reads Club to give vent to my spleen.

Dietland just comes across like Walker’s own personal airing of the grievances: with Weight Watchers, with Victoria’s Secret, with unattainable beauty standards, with anti-depressants, with advertising, possibly with a few blind dates that went spectacularly poorly. That’s not the same thing as social commentary, even if her grievances touch on social or cultural phenomena.

Obviously a book that includes a radical feminist underground that carries out vigilante justice on behalf of sexual assault victims and kidnaps British media moguls as a response to Page 5 Girls is not realistic in any sense, much as nothing about Fight Club is realistic in any sense. But there is a lack of emotional? psychological? realism in the small moments that made it impossible for me to connect the book to real life in any sense. People are absolutely cruel, but in Dietland everyone’s top priority seems to be going out of their way to make fat women (namely Plum) suffer. And I do mean everyone. Plum herself is also nearly completely without self-insight or reflection, and this obviously has to be by design because the book isn’t about Plum, and it was never about Plum: it’s Walker’s manifesto. Plum has to constantly be lectured and explained to so that Walker can have a soapbox. On occasions when Plum turns it around and has an epiphany of her own, they’re full of secondhand embarrassment because they’re just so…shallow.

One that stuck with me and I think sums up the entire mood of the book: at some point near the end of, or perhaps right after, her anti-makeover (or “makeover,” complete with scare quotes, if you prefer) Plum is sitting on the subway and contemplating a fellow passenger. A man. And she thinks to herself that being fat has given her the superpower of seeing people’s true selves—selves that they would never reveal to thin, beautiful women. (By “people” here, she really seems to mean men in particular.)

My reading of the text is that Walker means this “I’m 14 and this is deep” kind of insight completely unironically and straight-faced. Plum doesn’t really evolve beyond that point or come to a more nuanced understanding. Walker doesn’t really criticize it or show Plum to be wrong in any way; none of the soapbox lecturer characters talk to Plum about this claim. If anything, it’s the enlightenment they were pushing her towards for the entire book.

It’s been ten years since Dietland. I hope Walker’s feeling better.

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.

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.