What I've been reading, January 2021: Dostoyevski, Hamnet, Charles You

 Here's what I've been reading in January 2021:

Elliot’s Reading 2021

It may be me or it may be Dostoevsky, you decide, but I’ve been trying for more than a week to get into FD’s novel Demons (Pevear/Volokhonsky tr.) and have found it so impenetrable that I’m giving up at about 15% of the way into this 700+-page novel. Aside from the gag lines about the long names and complicated nicknames of the characters in Russian fiction (P-V, with their assiduous footnotes on every person or publication mentioned in the novel, never saw fit to give a simple reference page w/ character names and inter-relations?!), more to the point the first 10+ pages are random and rambling - completely unlike his other great novels, notably C&P, The Idiot, and the Brothers K, all of which draw us in w/ dramatic incident (a murder! a patricide!) and with vivid characters so that we have a great footing from which to step into these sometimes demanding, long novels. But here? I literally have no idea what the characters are up to , what they’re saying, who they are - I can’t even remember the names as I’m reading! What I gather: A well-to-do widow is a lifelong friend and companion to a man who’s a bit younger and a would be scholar and writer who never actually writes much; the woman - V - sets the man - S - up with a much younger woman whom he will marry. But others in their small, gossip-addled village, may be his rival. We see the very beginnings of some political activism and radical thought - but nothing at all developed, yet, about this; we also see a disturbed man prone to violent outbursts, known for his crass and anti-social behavior (he pulled an elderly gentleman by the nose, literally; he kissed on the lips, in public, the wife of a village leader (the mayor? I can’t remember) - in short, he seems like the kind of troubled eccentric so familiar in D novels (e.g., RAskolnikov, the Underground man) but we get little of his personality - the novel is narrated by a near-omniscient villager who does not disclose his name - rather than as a testimony of one character such as the Underground Man). All told, I’ve worked hard enough at this one to know that it’s just not happening, at least for me - though I did somehow manage to enjoy reading this book some 15+ years back. Maybe it’s me. 

Andrea Lee has had a fine writing career, from her NYer debut piece about her time in the USSR (off the slush-pile, I think) and her early novel, Sara Phillips, and many fine works since then - but somehow she’s always been off or below the radar, seldom if ever included on lists of the best writers of our time, not even mentioned in conversations about the best Black writers of our time. Why is that? First, I think because she has lived most of her adult life in Italy, and her writing is often about Europeans and seldom if ever about contemporary American themes and issues; race in particular seems apart from her topics. All that said, whenever she does resurface in the New Yorker she’s almost always worth reading, as w/ her story in current NYer, The Rivals. I would say that story is challenging at the start, as AL introduces a # of characters quickly and it’s hard, for me at least, to keep the names and salient details clear in my mind; but it’s worth the extra effort, as this is a fine story in the traditional, realistic mode, which so many contemporary writers have abandoned in the search for new forms, irony, topicality. As the title suggests, this story is about a rivalry, in this case between two elderly Italian ex-pats on the island of Madagascar, at first close friends but eventually rivals for the affections (or attention) of a native woman. The story has the classic form of American short fiction - from the 50s! And what’s wrong w/ that? This does appear to be a selection from her forthcoming book, which may be collection of stories about a single setting, not sure. Worth reading. 1/9

I’d read Helen Macdonald’s best-selling H Is for Hawk and found it well-written and intelligent but I just could not get into the way of life of falconry; was given her new book, Vesper Flights, as a gift and approached it w/ some trepidation, as it is not the kind of book - collection essays on nature - that I’d ordinarily read. But, guess what?, this turns out to be an absolutely terrific book - she’s a born essayist: intelligent, witty, observant, imaginative, and never a sentimentalist or a show-off. Yes, she knows a lot about the natural world, animals especially, birds of many species in particular, but her essays don’t (just) display her knowledge - all of them take us to a higher plane as she uses her examination of and fascination w/ the natural world as a spring board to jump to insights that elude most of us. This is not a bird-book per se; you may learn some things about birding, but it won’t help you ID special (in particular for American readers, who won’t even see most of the species she discusses) - but it will help you, maybe make you, respect, care for, and comprehend the world around us. What might start out as an essay about deer crossing the road, or birds in the night sky over Manhattan, or how and why birds fly in flocks and patterns, will inevitably lead HM, and you, to higher ground, to an almost god-like view of the world around us. Anyone would enjoy and learn from this book, which need not, probably should not, be read straight through but rather chapter by chapter over time.  1 /10

Charles Yu’s prize-winning novel, Interior Chinatown (2020), is one of those clever concepts that usually falls flat after 50 pp or so but in this rare case is a success throughout, thanks to CY’s sense of humor, which plays off well against the serious matters that his unusual novel encounters and presents. The entire novel is written in the form of a screenplay - right down to the hideous Courier typeface that all screenplays for some unknown reason must conform - pf what at least initially is a police-detective murder mystery set in Chinatown (NYC, I think, though could be elsewhere). As he tells the story of the murder and the investigation by 2 police detectives, he slyly deconstructs the racism behind genre movies - in particular, the racist attitudes toward Asian-Americans, who in the screenplay are depicted as Old Asian Man, e.g. The fact is that the makers of movies need and depend on these racial stereotypes - and the novel veers off into describing the lives of several generations of Asian-Americans who aspire to roles beyond the periphery in these genre shows and films; an interesting sidelight, which is probably true: The bit characters sign contracts that forbid them to take on another role for 60 days after their character “dies” in the film/show, so as not to disconcert or confuse audiences: Hey, that guy died last week, etc. W/ great subtlety, Yu brings the novel onto a higher plane, as he uses the racism implicit in the screenplay to show how racial minorities, Asians in particular, are disposable (and interchangeable?) in a culture that never recognizes them as more than types. Without becoming didactic or polemical, the novel becomes an examination of race and racial relations in the U.S. - and all the while, right down to the final scene at which you the reader (and an obvious pun on Yu the author) are on trial - a surprisingly moving conclusion to an unusual novel that is an easy read on a difficult and disconcerting topic 1/11

Simon Nasrat’s collection The Best American Food Writing 2019 is for the most part a good read, though it’s definitely not a book you’d go to for recipes. To her great credit, SN has put together a collection that’s far from the glowing and often sycophantic food/travel pieces that we see in, say Food & Wine (FoodSwine, as we call it), to which I subscribe and in which I have found some great recipes. Her collection focuses on diversity, with a particular emphasis on food and cooking by people of color in the U.S. and elsewhere and, to a lesser extent, on food exposes (such as the long piece about an extremely wealthy avacado/walnut farmer in California whose success is due largely to stolen water!). But the book comes up short when it comes to great writing; many of these pieces are about worthwhile and often neglected aspects of the food world, but not all are well written - many are just pretty much standard good but not great journalism, when it comes to writing style. Too bad - there are a few examples of great writing, though, notably the pieces on licorice, on sugar, on the late LA Times food writer, the visit to Ghana by a troupe of chefs. Worth a read - not straight through, but maybe one entry at each sitting over a span of time. Don’t want to overdo it! 1/15

Read the first half of Maggie O’Farrell’s well-received novel Hamlet (2020), obviously about Shakespeare and his early years in Stratford, his marriage to Agnes, birth of their children, notably the twin boy Hamlet, who dies of plague several years before S wrote Hamlet. There are few known and reliable facts about S’s life, in particular about this early life, but MO’F uses what she’s got plus her copious imagination to present a novel that’s a detailed depiction of what life might have been like for a farming family in a small, semi-rural town on the outskirts of London in the mid- to late-16th century. That said, I am not particularly interested in this time and locale and would never have picked up this novel but for my interest in Sh (who, by the way, she never names in the novel!, he’s always “the Latin tutor” or “the husband,” etc.), and I suspect that’s true for almost all readers. And, sadly, she has little or nothing to say about S’s thoughts about writing, literature, the theater biz - there is nothing, a least in the first half of the novel, that explains or explores how this young man could have matured into the greatest writer of all time, hands down - no clever or insightful references to works he would later write, no passages of juvenile writing, nothing (and I’m told this is so throughout the novel). I may come back to this work later, but for now I’m putting it down (figuratively, as I’m reading it on Kindle) with some disappointment and puzzlement at the strong reviews. 1/16

Very good story by Allegra Goodman, Challenges You Have Overcome - a really good story title, btw, for a piece about a family of 4 in which the younger son is preparing, or supposed to be preparing, his college ap., prodded in particular by his mother who works as a private college-prep counselor. AG seems assured and knowledgable about this territory, and the mom’s advice to her clients seems really good (what an advantage these kids have!) as does the father’s advice to writers. He’s employed by an educational publishing house that’s on its last legs, and he feels entirely superfluous, which he is, as the publishing industry has changed (toward online training sessions rather than books of advise for writers) and left him behind. In short, the troubles and dilemmas in this family seem familiar, contemporary, and for so many, imminent, and AG does a really good job presenting the family without undue melodrama or hyperbole or cynicism. My only quibble: Man, so many characters introduced so quickly, by first name only, in the first for few paragraphs - a plight facing many writers of short fiction, but here handled so bluntly that I almost gave up on this story right out of the box; glad I persisted. 1/25/21