Grief came at us with a hammer this year. I moved across the country for work and every week there’s another bit of news from the end of the world. Through several bludgeons of change and loss, I walked, a lot, and wondered whether the part of me that loved to read and write would be lost to grief… but not yet! I began the year in humility, holding Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate and Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy, and oh my god! What inevitable, tender doorstops that held ajar several paths through the abject and inarticulate. Sometimes the power of testimony is its capacity to be reread. If they could, we can, so I went on and opened the next book.
Spring was spent with the work of Steve Erickson – in particular Rubicon Beach, Arc d’X, and The Sea Came in at Midnight – who’s had probably the best bibliographical run of any American English author since the 90s. Then came Underground River by Inés Arredondo, my favorite gothic discovery this year. Then I read all of László Krasznahorkai? I did! What’s there to say, besides the simple fact his writing is perennial, like laughter and an outcry that stretch the horizon of my understanding. Thank you always, translator Ottilie Mulzet.
To celebrate the new José Donoso translations from Megan McDowell, I joined a reading group of his Obscene Bird of Night. At the time I was also drafting a new novella, something like a noir, or a love song, in bruising purples and thunderstorm greens. It felt so peculiar to reconsecrate my pillar, whose style indebts my last manuscript, while also writing down a path I know he could not follow me. His book and mine took under two weeks.
Over midsummer I edited the poet Michael Chang’s latest Things a Bright Boy Can Do, and read the following to tie it all together: Dottie Lasky’s The Shining, Bhanu Kapil’s Ban En Banlieue, and Yona Harvey’s Hemming the Water. From Chicago came a hilarious novella in the vein of Barry Hannah, Bert Gets Hurt by John Wilmes, a force for good in literary Chicago. In the past month I also read the forthcoming Dr Chizhevsky’s Chandelier by Daniel Elkind, a history of the forgotten and dammed from a voice as conversational as Ken Burns and as sardonic as Jakov Lind. Before I moved away from New York, I caught up with Sergio De La Pava, who sent me his latest novel Every Arc Bends Its Radian a few months later; he’s still got it!
How did I go so long without knowing The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers? How! Reminded me, somehow, of Saul Bellow’s Herzog? So I reread Herzog, realized I’d no idea what I thought I saw, but altogether found much to chew through as I began to work on something set in a freezing spring in Miami.
Translated literature has never been better. Michele Mari’s Verdigris came across like Melville thanks to translator Brian Robert Moore, who needs to deliver us Stefano D’Arrigo’s Horcynus Orca. João Guimarães Rosa’s The Devil to Pay in the Backlands is such a riot, deserving care from a master like Alison Entrekin. All of Kit Schluter’s translations for Wakefield Press rock, but his stake on Copi’s The Queen’s Ball is canonical – I never knew I needed Nathan Lane in a Giallo until this novella. I fell deeply into Cheon Myeong-kwan’s Whale, rendered into melancholic, wondrous English by Chi-Young Kim. Thank you.
I thought that grief would keep me from books. What do I know! My wife and I celebrated the warmth of our first anniversary just two weeks ago – what we love will always be.
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