middleagedmiddlechild.

I’ve been trying to read nothing but female authors for the late spring & early summer. I only had one slip-up, but I’m glad I read that one too : )

After Suite Francaise, I was looking for accounts of the daily realities of the Holocaust. Not camp memoirs or novels, not survival stories, but more stories like Nemirovsky’s that showed the way that towns & villages made possible the suffering of six million and more and their families. In that search I came across A Scrap of Time and Other Stories by Ida Fink. Originally written in Polish about Poland, A Scrap of Time is unforgiving in its … I was going to say in its slices of life, but it’s a collection that shows how cruelty and necessity slices through lives. The cast of characters is vast and believable, both those captured and those collaborating to liberate those hunted. Children, young women, the elderly, people alone, married couples, etc. There are moments of relief, but those are recounted in such a way that really had me reeling—was survival about luck? About personal bravery? Some cosmic tragic mix of both?

The blurb at the top of Gayl Jones’ Corregidora had me sold. Toni Morrison, Jones’ editor at one point, proclaims, “No novel about any Black woman could ever be the same after this.” The bar is certainly set high by this novel. It’s an unflinching look at the legacy of slavery & sexual violence, complete with wisdom of the ancients in Corregidora’s memory of her grandmother’s stories of enslavement. It’s a bold novel sexually, complete with frank and explicit depictions of loving intimacy and noncoerced submission. It’s written in a smoothly varied style that readers of Morrison & Hurston will appreciate, shifting effortlessly & powerfully between Black urban vernacular and modern stream of conscious prose and back again, often within the same paragraph. Finally, it’s driven by and complicated by Corregidora’s terrific freedom, in terms of her art, her friends, her family, and her career. A real stunner with a dizzying resolution.

Since I’ve read Dana Stevens’ criticism at Slate for years, I was really excited for her book Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century. It’s a biography as broad as the title. Stevens reconstructs every stage of Keaton’s career and the context surrounding it. The vaudeville stage and the advent of film that transforms / undoes vaudeville; the early days of film and the corporate consolidation of cinematic distribution and talent; the rollicking energy of Keaton in front of & behind the camera and the business errors he makes that compromise his financial stability; the cocktail parties of early Hollywood and the birth of AA; the meritocracy of the performing arts and the female directors, the Black artists that never got their due; Keaton’s struggles with alcohol and his success in his last marriage and as a gag writer for television stars. Like Elvis Costello’s memoir or Mark Harris’s Pictures at a Revolution, this book is gonna be one that you’ll want to read with a device nearby so that you can relive & re-laugh at Keaton’s timeless genius.

I remember hearing about Richard Adams’s Watership Down as a kid. Even then, it was spoken of in reverential terms, spoken of as a book that would move you & change you. It is, and it did. Like most adult readers, I’d say that it’s not really a kids’ book. I don’t doubt that kids will enjoy the suspenseful adventure / survival story—I know that I had a really difficult time putting the book down every night. And I hope that kids and / or suburban readers like me will take the time to follow along in the novel’s map, to look up topographical terms like … y’know, down or copse and botanical terms that show the plentitude of nature, even in a little corner of a little island. When readers like me say it’s not really a kids book, we really tell on ourselves. All great books are books of ideas. In this case, citizenship & power, nature & ingenuity, the self & the Other. One of my desert island books for sure.

I am a sucker for books about books. Geraldine Brooks’s People of the Book would count, I guess, as historical fiction. It is a fictionalized account of the Sarajevo Haggadah. A Haggadah is a book used during the Passover celebration to tell the story of the exodus & faith of the Jewish people; the Sarajevo Haggadah is, in history & in Brooks’s novel, a masterful work of art. The novel begins in the near-present with a manuscript conservationist hired to brave wartorn Sarajevo to work on the Haggadah. Brooks looks deep into the book—its fibers, its stains, its spine, its clasps—which take the reader back in history to see the inspiration & construction, the path & peril of this sacred text. The history is woven into the lives of the characters rather than inserted clunkily between their actions & journeys. The people of this book (in 1480s Seville, 1490s Terragona, 1600s Venice, 1940s Sarajevo) is distinct and deliberate in how they see & how they value the Haggadah. Highly recommend.

Over these past few years, we’ve had an embarrassment of riches with respect to cross-generational cross-cultural novels. Not all are immigration novels, but many are. Not all are trauma narratives, but many are. Not all are novels in translation, but many are. I’m sure you can think of many. Each time I read one of these important works, I’m humbled by the care with which the novelist crafts a difficult & deep personal truth. Dalia Azim’s Country of Origin is just such a novel.

Country of Origin begins and ends with women in transition, with women looking to the skies.

In the beginning of the novel (Cairo, 1951), a young woman looks to the skies from the roof of her comparatively luxurious, comparatively safe family home. She sees a city in ruins, a country in turmoil but one that her powerful, politically-savvy father can just navigate. Despite this father’s deliberate plotting & maneuvering, the young woman imagines, seeks, and secures an escape, an independence, a vista of safety & love. Sadly, it is not a permanent one.

By the end of the novel (Colorado, 1984), a young woman looks to the skies from the safety of a mountain preserve, part art project, part insect lab. She sees nature in its beauty & savagery, a landscape that has its hopes and its cruelties. This second young woman—the only child of the first young woman—has endured much: first-gen struggles, neurodivergence, family illnesses, and family losses. Despite all of this, the young woman sees in this mountain vista—one she will soon leave—a series of possibilities. Some of them quite firm, but many of them fleeting.

It’s that kind of novel. Every generation with its hopes, every generation with just enough to survive & testify to the next one.

Look, like most people who read Trust by Hernan Diaz, I had the immediate impression that this was going to win a lot of things. It’s a shame when that is one of my first instincts, but it wasn’t the only one. I didn’t only think “this one has a high literary fiction written all over it.” I thought about how elegantly Diaz navigates paths that are difficult to make accessible and relatable.

He writes about money in an exciting way, and in a way that doesn’t shirk moral questions. So many stories about money track the way that it can pull a person away from what they value. This novel by contrast demonstrates how money, particularly loads of money, reveals what we value.

He writes about gender in an unsettling way, a way that reveals itself the further you get into the novel, a way that reveals your own gendered perspective the further you get into the novel.

I guess I should say that this is a novel that plays with what a novel can be. It is in four parts, the latter two parts (and much of the second of the four parts) written in the voice of female characters. The further you get into the novel, the further Diaz moves you away from the fiction of part one, the kind of story that we have come to know of the novel at its best, at its peak.

There are spoilers that I’m avoiding here, as you’ve probably noticed. All I can say is that each part in each voice of Trust will have you thinking and feeling, and then thinking and feeling anew.

I recently read a book that was part investigative journalism, part literary criticism, part feminist meditation, and part motherhood memoir. Now I’ve read another one.

I’m glad that I was not familiar with the story of Marguerite de la Rocque, otherwise I might have been frustrated by how often the author centers herself, or how often she calls previous evidence in the question. This herky jerky style and approach turns out to be the one that mirrors the action of writing, and wondering, and drafting better than any “straight” history or memoir could have. Surprises land hard, both personal and academic; blessings abound (just the right library recommended to find just the right centuries-old map). 

Ramqvist has several challenges in the telling. She must navigate the paths taken by three previous authors who have told their versions of the story, sometimes centuries earlier, and thus, sometimes restricted by personal connection to Marguerite, by connection to the uncle that banished her, by connection to centuries-old ideas of propriety & euphemism. She also cannot help but read her current self through the lenses of her selves — as a mother, as a Swede, as a once-young woman making risky choices with dangerous men.

What was most pleasurable about the book turned out to be this personal reading of the self. Her travels & frustrations with her teenage daughter reveal a lot about the blessings Marguerite lost as a mother, a lot about Ramqvist’s own understandings of independence and adventure, a lot about how we read the rare stories extant of famous women from centuries ago.

_{This novel was translated by Saskia Vogel, a writer whose translation of Jessica Schiefauer‘s Girls Lost is also really good.}

I’ve seen Irene Nemirovsky’s Suite Française popping up on my Twitter feed for a long time. The colorized cover photo, which originally I thought was a little sentimental, turns out to be precise & appropriate. Though it’s got a cast of dozens, the heart of the novel is the drama of a man & a woman in a time we think we know well (WWII). The photo shows a man & woman of a certain age … no longer young, but still full of vigor & life & possibility, and in this case, full of uncertainty. They’re united but looking in different directions; I’d say that they’re in an embrace, except for the fact that each of them has a hand free.

It’s that kind of novel. One of uncertainties during a time of turmoil in Europe, here, in occupied France in 1940 & 1941. Nemirovsky, a Jewish novelist living in Paris, begins Suite Française with a kaleidoscopic energy. The Germans have moved from air bombing France and are marching on it, swiftly and successfully.

The opening part of the two-part novel focuses on several different families & citizens fleeing Paris with what little they have, with what little they can not bear to leave behind. Their fates are as varied and as shocking as … well, the fates of refugees in a time of war. Nemirovsky makes these continental events domestic & interpersonal — the wounds & kindnesses, the good luck & the bad fortune. The struggle for shelter & bread, for petrol & a shave.

The second part of the two-part novel focuses on a single occupied village, tracking the uneasy routines that emerge over months. Soldiers billeted in private homes; French officials compelled to (& enjoying the safety) of collaborating with the occupying German forces; children & survivors of the Great War dazzled openly & quietly (respectively) by the precision & strength of the Germans. And finally the women, performing obedience and politeness, while meditating in interior monologues about the beauty and natural novelty of young men in the village — their village’s men having left for war months and months earlier. Nemirovsky centers the drama of part two on the newlywed Bruno (a German officer skilled at music and eager to make the occupation civilized) and the newlywed Lucile (a girl from the forests waiting for a husband that doesn’t love her to return, enamored with the walks & talks, the talent & promise of Bruno).

Nemirovsky meant for this to be a five-part series. She was arrested in 1942  “and deported to Auschwitz, where she died. For sixty-four years, this novel remained hidden and unknown.” As a result, the novel ends with an unintended verisimilitude — none of the characters know and the author cannot hint at what is in store for these characters, for their way of life on part two’s last pages, set in July 1942 as the Germans leave the village for the Russian front.

I have heard great things about Betty Smith’s autobiographical A Tree Grows in Brooklyn all my life—the book and the movie. I finally got around to this readable, accessible, emotionally & historically nimble story.

To say that it’s a coming of age story is accurate, to a point, as accurate as it is to say that it’s a family story or a bootstraps story or a … well, we’d call it historical fiction now, but it was written originally with the psychological & emotional precision that the best stories have.

Betty Smith shapes the protagonist Francie & her family through the lens of what Toni Morrison once called Homeric fairness. That is, it is a story told bravely & honestly, a growing up ennobled & complicated by surprising empathy & honesty. Francie endures the fact that she is less loved by her mother than her brother is — but Smith depicts the mother chides her disarmingly to the effect of, “Oh, honey, don’t make a fuss — you know that he needs my love & support more than you do.” And you believe the mother. Francie bristles at the indignities & consequences of her father’s drunkenness — but Smith also centers the father’s love & struggles, his talent & tragedy.

I could go on. There’s no single antagonist, no enemy (unless it is poverty). There is instead the ambiguities of life & the everyday heroism of love & hard work, the gentle daily blessings that get people through the persistent daily burdens & losses.

It is a beautiful & hopeful book, made all the more beautiful by the direct style (which has moving flourishes & shifts in POV) and made all the more hopeful by the realization that we are not alone, or at least not alone for long.