Early this year, I joined a book club at a local independent bookstore. It’s been great, not just to talk books without having to manage the talk, but also to have the choice outsourced, to have the next book curated for me.
The most recent novel this book club chose was Laurent Binet’s Perspective(s), translated from French by Sam Taylor. It’s an epistolary novel, and often an entertaining one. It’s set in 1557 in Florence, when master painter Jacopo da Pontormo is found murdered in San Lorenzo chapel where he’s painting an enormous fresco (his never-finished Last Judgment). This murder mystery, however, expands via the letters to give voice to Medici family political intrigue, Renaissance-era religious movements / conflicts, refined principles of art criticism, and more. Certain letters ring quite false, in rare but lasting way; Binet crafts a secondary mystery / suspense story in the form of a scandalous-to-some, politically-expedient-to-others painting that was taken from Pontormo’s studio. The resolution to the murder mystery is … not satisfying, but the debates about the intersection of religious faith & mannerism carried me through the last quarter of what had become a frustrating read for me.
Last month, I read a ton of Francis Spufford, which spilled over into this month with Light Perpetual. In this lovely act of imaginative historical fiction (maybe that’s a redundancy), Spufford returns to the site of a disaster — the V2 Woolworths rocket bomb of November 25, 1944. Rather than tell the story of that disaster, Spufford spares the innocent, imagining that the rocket was off target that November day. He imagines five children at Woolworth’s that day — What if they had not died that day? What might their lives have been like five years later, ten years later, decades later? Via each of these survivors, Spufford is able to look at pop cultural and political cultural touchstones of Great Britain: rock & roll music, the rise of White Nationalism, the erosion of labor unions, the everyday realities of social climbing & mental health, etc. In rare cases, the novel’s research is a little clunky; more often, however, Spufford places his narrative lens lovingly & realistically into the ambiguities of our lives: How do we make a living? How do our relationships change us? What tragedies do we create or dodge just by being alive?
Kinda continuing with my 2025 pattern of reading several works by a single author in a single month, I chose three Colum McCann novels. First, Let the Great World Spin, then Apeirogon, and finally Twist.
Let the Great World Spin is a great NYC novel. It’s set in gritty neighborhoods and upper class penthouses, it’s got love and loss, and it’s got tremendous heart. One of McCann’s first novels, which I haven’t read, digs deep into NYC also, focusing on the construction of the subway system. This novel begins with & returns throughout to an upward gaze, leveraging the story of Philippe Petit’s 1974 tightrope walk between the Twin Towers. No matter the class or race or social comfort of McCann’s New Yorkers, the reader sees the risk & joy of their walk through the city. He constructs some surprising rubbing of shoulders, each of which rises to a decades-long, hard-won small orbit of love. Really impressed by this one.
I read Apeirogon next, and I think I like it even better. The summary of the novel captures the idea well: McCann tells the true story of two fathers, “one Palestinian, one Israeli, both connected by grief and working together for peace”. What the summary doesn’t capture is the organizing principle, which is in the title, namely, an infinitely-sided polygon. For a story of grief & loss & the struggle for peace in the Middle East, you’d expect at least two sides; McCann provides 1,001, inspired by Scheherazade. Growing up, I knew that character’s name, and I knew about the 1,001 Arabian nights, but I didn’t know that Scheherazade tells her unending story for a reason — to tell the tale is to stay alive. McCann honors the two fathers, Bassam Aramin and Rami Elhanan, by joining in their life work, which is to keep the memory of their daughters alive by telling their stories. All but two of the novel’s 1,001 chapters offers a unique facet of the story, not chronological, not predictable in any way, so you are always learning some new detail in what you might have thought was a simple story of the Nakba, a simple story about the Second Intifada. Two of the 1,001 chapters are turned over entirely to Aramin & Elhanan. I can’t wait to hear what my students think about this novel.
Before moving on to Twist, I read the back cover, which made several Conrad references. So I made a detour to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, a novella I’ve read a few times & taught once (though I don’t remember how the students responded). Because it’s a story told by Marlow while a crew waits for a turn of the tide, I’m really glad that I audiobooked this one. It’s a story of descent, a story of how the best of us succumbs to the temptation & payoff of horrific power; it’s a story of crews & support staff on land and aboard a steamer, revealing how the narrow lens most of us have never prepares us for the moral shock of a full vision of the systems we sustain. I didn’t know how this story inspired McCann’s Twist, and even if the inspiration is slight, I’m glad I reread it. McCann’s Twist turned out to be a subtle take on Conrad. Early in the novel, the narrator attempts to make sense of the story’s years-ago events, preparing the reader for ”a story about connection, about grace, about repair” (5). It’s set on the ocean and eventually upon the ocean floor, where the journalist narrator & the crew of the St. Georges travel to repair a severed undersea cable. Like the narrator, I didn’t know that around 97% of internet traffic runs not via satellites above us but via deep in the ocean. Several elements carried over gracefully from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness — a journey of descent, an engagement with the negative consequences of our global connectedness, a narrator taken morally & narratively & personally with an enigmatic protagonist, some morally ambiguous choices, a closing conversation between the narrator & the protagonist’s “Intended”, etc. McCann’s narrator admits on the last page that there are some things that he “can’t presume to explain” — the ultimate state of the narrator’s family relations, the ultimate goal of the protagonist’s action that drives the last third of the novel, the relationship between global internet traffic & global injustice, etc. Really human, really perceptive, really good novel nonetheless.
I don’t read much nonfiction, but with a book group, I gave one a try — Charles S. Cockell’s Taxi From Another Planet: Conversations With Drivers about Life in the Universe. The really good part, which is most of the book: Each chapter is fueled by Cockell’s response to a different question, the responses & questions always posed in really accessible language. For example, Should we solve problems on Earth before exploring space, or Do microbes deserve our protection, or Might the universe be devoid of aliens? If I challenged my students to come up with big questions to ask an astrobiologist, they could do worse than the questions Cockell chooses. Each response is thorough & brisk, detailed with scientific terms without ever descending into jargon. The less-than-good part, which is a small part of the book: The framing is often not great. The taxi drivers sometimes ask an innocent question that Cockell takes where he wants it go; Cockell sometimes leads the taxi driver explicitly & awkwardly. The recounting of / the conceit of a conversation lasts maybe the first two pages of each twenty-something-page essay. I often found myself skipping those pages entirely. And it’s still a pretty engaging set of essays.
Jane Gardam’s Old Filth is a novel about a long & rich, troubled & surprising life. Sir Edward Feathers comes to be known as Old Filth, filth an acronym for Failed In London, Tried Hong Kong. We meet him via gossip among lawyers at the highest reaches of the British legal system — they know his legend, his wealth, his being cuckolded, his travels, his precise if no-longer skill in a certain corner of the law. But nobody knows each facet of Filth. With each chapter in this non-chronological account, Gardam presents a deep relationship, a deep betrayal, and surprising good fortune that sustains & wounds Filth. Childhood friends, parents, aunts, his wife. Two journeys he takes (one by car, one by plane) drive Filth closer to some kind of reconciliation, some kind of closure. These journeys are punctuated by his poise & his wandering mind, his memories & his traumas. It’s a powerful & complex novel, one that resolves with a homecoming that satisfies in a deeply emotional way. Gardam wrote two more Filth narratives (one told from the POV of his wife, the other from the POV of his nemesis), but I don’t think I’ll be reading those. They cannot be as good as this one.
middleagedmiddlechild. 