The books I read in November 2024 - like a hideous spinster who has learned the grim humor of the disappointments of life

 

Thank goodness I write these down.

FICTION

The Story of the Stone, Vol. 2: The Crab-flower Club (c. 1760), Cao Xueqin – written up long ago.

Cartucho (1931) &

My Mother's Hands (1938), Nellie Campobello – Brutal vignettes of the Mexican revolution by a diehard partisan, a child at the time, later an important figure in Mexican modern dance.  The title tough guy Cartucho (Cartridge) is killed on the first page.  The rate of killing is not one per page, but close.  The later book is more of a tribute to Campobello’s mother but still incredibly violent.  If you wonder why Fernanda Melchor’s novels are the way they are, or why that one section of 2666 is the way it is, well, here is an ancestor.

The Horizontal Man (1946), Helen Eustis

Last Seen Wearing (1952), Hillary Waugh – By pure chance the two mysteries I read this month were both set at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts.  Or, you know, “Smith,” made fictional, but not really hiding much.  I did not know this in advance.  The novels are tonally opposites.  The murdered English professor in The Horizontal Man, and everyone who knew him, is neurotic or worse.  Smith is one high-strung, Freudian place.

He liked his tall old house.  It had a bitter friendly ugliness, like a hideous spinster who has learned the grim humor of the disappointments of life.  (205 of the Library of America edition)

While Last Seen Wearing is an early, influential police procedural, literally inspired by the Dragnet radio show, all about legwork and dead-end leads told in plain language.  A little bit of detective novel nonsense slips in, but not too much.

Smith College, was, I presume, a pleasant and safe place at the time, with fewer lunatics and predators than most places.

The Passion (1987), Jeanette Winterson

So Much Blue (2017), Percival Everett – The typical – usual – same every time – Everett narrator is an abstract painter in this one, interweaving three stories in three genres (in one life). 

Suggested in the Stars (2020), Yoko Tawada

Our Evenings (2024), Alan Hollinghurst

 

POETRY

The Dispossessed (1948) &

Homage to Mistress Bradstreet (1953), John Berryman

Some Trees (1956), John Ashbery

95 Poems (1958) &

73 Poems (1963), E. E. Cummings

Expressions of Sea Level (1964) &

Collected Poems 1951-1971 (but I only read 1951-65), A. R. Ammons

I never write anything anymore about the poetry I read.  I do not know why.

 

TRAVEL

My Life as an Explorer (1926), Roald Amundsen – written up over here.

The Best American Food and Travel Writing 2024 (2024), various – I learned a lot.  Some of the prose was quite purple, which surprised me, given the tendencies these days, but why bother writing about grilled cheese sandwiches or gas station food if you’re not going to write.

 

IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE

Vingt Mille Lieues sous les mers (1870), Jules Verne – best read with constant reference to your globe and your beautiful illustrated childhood encyclopedia.  Seeing Verne’s many debts to Poe is interesting.

La steppe rouge (1923), Joseph Kessel – The journalist’s first book, sad, violent stories set during or soon after the Bolshevik revolution.  Kessel is highly skeptical.  Given the high interest of the subject matter, I am surprised that this book has never made it to English.  To any young translator from French: it is short, easy, about interesting people and events, and in the public domain.  Please see the Book around the Corner review of The Red Steppe that led me to the book.

L'Étrange Défaite. Témoignage écrit en 1940 (1946), Marc Bloch – Besides being among the greatest modern historians, Bloch had a special place in Lyon because of his service, and death, in the French Resistance.  I finally got to his frustrated memoir of his official military service in World War II, where he managed the French army’s gasoline supplies in the Low Countries and was evacuated with the British troops at Dunkirk.  The essay about the reasons for the French defeat were less interesting because they have been so thoroughly absorbed.

As Duas Águas do Mar (1992), Francisco José Viegas – An early entry in one of the few long-running detective series in Portuguese, written by a bigshot in the Portuguese literary scene.  Editor of their Bookforum-like magazine, for example; a perpetual guest on the literary panel shows.  I wish someone else would write some Portuguese detective novels for me, because this one was thin, sometimes I suspected contemptuous of the genre.  There is a scene where the insomniac police detective goes through a drawer – his own drawer! – listing every object.  The novel literally ends with the same character preparing, step by step by step, a dish of eggs and ham and potatoes.  Now, given that I read the book to improve my Portuguese, these scenes were great.  Tedious fiction; terrific language exercises.  French language-learners owe Georges Simenon a lot.