What I read in January 2025 - You must understand that truth is fiction, and fiction truth.

Farewell to The Story of the Stone and a valuable browse in Chinese literature.  I’ll do it again someday.

FICTION

The Peony Pavilion (1598), Tang Xianzu – written up back here.

The Story of the Stone, Vol. 5: The Dreamer Wakes (c. 1760), Cao Xueqin & Gao E – some notes here.  The quotation in my title is from p. 94.

Naomi (1924) &

Quicksand (1930), Junichiro Tanizaki – and these are over here.

Calamity Town (1942), Ellery Queen – A very lightly metafictional mystery.  Not only does the detective share his name with the book’s actual “author,” itself a fiction, but he is a mystery writer who at times seems to be generating the crime within the novel so that he will have something interesting to write about.  But not quite doing that, unfortunately.  That novel would have been more interesting.  The actual novel was fine.  This is one of those mysteries where every instance of clumsy plotting is in fact a clue.

A Question of Upbringing (1951), Anthony Powell – I think I will write something about this book once I have read another volume of the series.

Damned If I Do (2004), Percival Everett – short stories.  A perfect Everett title.  It is all his characters need since it doesn’t matter what will happen if they don’t.  They always do.

On the Calculation of Volume I (2020), Solvej Balle – a Groundhog Day story told with more philosophy and less humor.  A good fantasy on its own terms, but the puzzle is that the series has six more volumes, two of which have not been written yet.  The whole thing will be at least 1,200 pages long, for all I know more.  This first volume is reasonably complete, so I have no idea where the series might be going.

 

POETRY NOT IN FRENCH OR PORTUGUESE

Selected Poems (1968), Zbigniew Herbert

 

TRAVEL, MUSIC HISTORY

Tschiffelly's Ride (1933), Aimé Tschifelly – a Swiss English teacher rides a pair of Pampas horses from Buenos Aires to Washington, D. C., just for fun, and writes an equestrian classic.  Lots of emphasis on the horses and horse-riding.  My geographical knowledge of South and Central America has greatly improved.  I have only been to one of the countries Tschifelly passes through.  Peru gets the largest number of pages; Mexico second.

Time's Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance (2023), Jeremy Eichler – Before I finished The Emigrants in 1996 I knew that Sebald was going to be an important writer.  I knew that people were going to want to do what he was doing.  That was the only time I have been right about that, really, and I did not predict how much Sebaldian visual and musical art would follow, nor that there could be Sebaldian music history, which is what classical music critic Jeremy Eichler has written.  Lightly Sebaldian – he includes uncaptioned photos, yes, but always says, somewhere in the text, what they are.  The book is about World War II memorial pieces, built around Schoenberg’s A Survivor in Warsaw (1947), Strauss’s Metamorphosen (1945), Britten’s War Requiem (1962) and several Shostakovich works.  Highly recommended to anyone who likes this sort of thing.

 

IN  FRENCH AND PORTUGUESE

Odes et Ballades (1828), Victor Hugo – young, young Hugo.  I had read the first half several years ago; now I finished it up.  He sounded like himself from the beginning, but he would not become the greatest French poet until, well, almost immediately after this book.

Les songes en equilibre (1942) &

Le tombeau des rois (1953) &

Mystère de la parole (1960), Anne Hébert – Lovely dream and childhood poems from a Quebecois poet.  I have not read Hébert in English, but I will bet there are some good translations.  Her Catholic poems did not do much for me.  If you have opinions about her fiction, please share them.

Éthiopiques (1956), Léopold Sédar Senghor – One would not – I would not – guess that he would be President of Senegal four years later.  I have visited his childhood home.

Post-Scriptum (1960), Jorge de Sena

Flores ao Telefone (1968) &

Os Idólatras (1969), Maria Judite de Carvalho – I do not remember exactly how this book was recommended to me by a soon-to-be distinguished Portuguese author.  “If you like sad stories about depressed people, these are good.”  Carvalho has a place in Portuguese literature and feminism perhaps a little like Edna O’Brien in Ireland or Grace Paley in the United States, sharply ironic domestic stories, although without O’Brien’s sexual explicitness or Paley’s humor.  Culture hero Margaret Jull Costa is bringing Carvalho into English and is presumably working right now on these books, recently published in Portuguese in Volume 3 of Carvalho’s collected works.  Of course with that recommendation I had to buy a copy.