I’m typing this on a train to Charleston, South Carolina. Until my sister and her family moved there a few months ago, I never thought I’d be a person who had people in the South. Grandparents in Florida, yes, but that’s just a place – a kind of geographic neutral zone – where grandparents go to retire. My family has always seemed firmly grounded in the Northeast, a region with its own sense of socially acceptable interactions.
Speaking of which, I recently saw an IG post describing how, in New York City, if you’re trying to get a stroller down into (or up out of) a subway platform, a passing stranger will grab the front of it, walk it down the stairs with you, nod and walk away. No words exchanged. And it’s true. I’ve seen it happen and even been that passing stranger. And when you think about it, any other dealings in that situation would just be weird. Why are you being so chatty? What do you want? Where’s my train? Oh god, are they still here? To me, this is indicative of the entire tri-state mentality. These are my people – efficiently helpful and slightly suspicious. Kind, but not nice.
This train ride gives me roughly twelve hours to take care of a few housekeeping items. The first is to tell you about my review of the Japanese writer Yu Miri’s The End of August, translated by Morgan Giles. It was published months ago at Words Without Borders. This incredible novel looks at Korea’s and Japan’s tangled relationship through the lens of one family’s history. I think it’s as important to the international literary canon as The Brothers Karamazov, War & Peace, and Ulysses. I hope you read my review. But if you need further convincing, I loved The End of August so much that I found and ordered a UK copy signed by the author and translator. I think I paid more for shipping than the actual book.
In other delayed news, I was on my friend Lori Feather’s podcast, Lost in Redonda, in March. She, her cohost Tom Flynn, and I discussed Being Here is Everything: The Life of Paula Modersohn-Becker by the French writer Marie Darrieusseqc and translated by Penny Hueston. When I started Ex Libris, I wrote about a triptych of very similar books by another French writer, Nathalie Leger. Fragmentary non-fiction narratives that exhaustively investigate a subject while incorporating some form of personal memoir. Like an auto-non-fiction work on a topic the author finds personally fascinating. The format encourages readers to supplement their reading with Wikipedia searches and leaps down internet rabbit holes.
Our conversation was great fun and an introduction to a female artist I was embarrassingly unfamiliar with despite knowing many of the men (like Manet & Rilke) who were in or adjacent to her social circle.
The views from the train car window are of small-town streets, old buildings, and little pink houses built (or left) too close to the tracks. They remind me of Walker Evans’ and Dorothea Lange's photos. Everything looks like it was abandoned six or seven decades ago. I don’t see people except when we pull into the stations. It’s lonely, but at the same time, I can imagine myself moving into one of those houses, fixing it up, and living my best life in some twisted version of a Hallmark movie.
I also reviewed The Freaks Came Out to Write: The Definitive History of the Village Voice, the Radical Paper That Changed American Culture by Tricia Romano over at On the Seawall in March. I still feel quite a bit of nostalgia for the Village Voice, and I’m apparently not alone. “If you spent any time south of 23rd Street between 1955 and 2017, you probably have a connection to the Village Voice. The alt-weekly newspaper and NYC counterculture institution occupies a near-mythical space in the collective memory of a specific subset of readers. It was the paper of record for Lower Manhattan, covering news and trends too edgy the old grey lady uptown. It was where you went to find an apartment, plan your Thursday night, or have your mind blown by its incredible line-up of writers — Norman Mailer, Jill Johnston, Lester Bangs, Vivian Gornick, Robert Christgau, and Colson Whitehead (to name just a few)”. Most of this is retrospection since, ironically, I don’t think most of its readers realized how good the Voice was while the paper was still in print. While I doubt there’s still a place for alt-weeklies in today’s world, I believe their spirit of irreverence continues online. The Freaks Came Out to Write easily ranks in my top five books of 2024 so far.
For the train ride down and back, I brought C.J. Sansom’s slow-burn historical suspense novel Winter In Madrid, where a British spy goes to Spain to reconnect with “an old school friend turned shady Madrid businessman.” It takes place in 1940, shortly after the British evacuation at Dunkirk, at a pivotal point in WW2. There are flashbacks to the Spanish Civil War – a conflict that set the destinies of the four main characters and, arguably, all of Europe.
Thanks to his Matthew Shardlake mystery series getting a television adaptation, Sansom is in the news. Set in Tudor, England, Shardlake is an investigator for Thomas Cromwell, who is dissolving the monasteries. Based on the trailers, Sansom’s Cromwell is a slightly more sinister version of the man we met in Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall. I intend to eventually get to the Shardlake series and the books it’s based on, but Winter In Madrid is a standalone and seems like an excellent place to start.
Also in the bag is The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu by Augusto Higa Oshiro, translated from Spanish by Jennifer Shyue. This novel is set in Peru and is one of those stories about a man grappling with his life choices and personal history while walking/exploring an urban landscape. The description on the front flap promises Dante’s descent combined with Odyseuss’s more surreal adventures (though I’m entirely inferring and/or projecting this since neither name is mentioned).
And, finally, as a kind of Hail Mary and text of last resort, I packed a collection of Zadie Smith essays because it’s always good to have a ringer in reserve.
Books I mentioned (and some I didn’t):
The End of August: A Novel by Yu Miri, translated by Morgan Giles. New York: Riverhead Books, 2024. 720 pages.
Being Here is Everything: The Life of Paula Modersohn-Becker by Marie Darrieusseqc, translated by Penny Hueston. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2017. 160 pages.
The Freaks Came Out to Write: The Definitive History of the Village Voice, the Radical Paper That Changed American Culture by Tricia Romano. New York: PublicAffairs, 2024. 608 pages.
Suite for Barbara Loden, Exposition, & The White Dress by Nathalie Leger, translated by Natasha Lehrer & Amanda DeMarco. St. Louis: Dorothy, 2016 & 2020.
Winter in Madrid by C.J. Sansom. New York: Penguin Books, 2006. 537 pages.
Dissolution by C.J. Sansom. New York: Penguin Books, 2004. 416 pages.
The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu by Augusto Higa Oshiro, translated by Jennifer Shyue. New York: Archipelago Books, 2023. 102 pages.
Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays by Zadie Smith. New York: Penguin Publishing, Inc., 2010. 320 pages.
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, translated by Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky. New York: Picador USA, 2021. 880 pages.
The Odyssey by Homer, translated by Emily Wilson. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2018. 592 pages. “Tell me about a complicated man.”
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2009. 560 pages.