Reading for Instruction
Books I have and haven't read
There’s a chance that I have simply become lazy and undisciplined in my life outside of gainful employment. Or it may have to do with having chiseled my tastes enough at this point to know quickly when something is not for me, with valuing my time more. I will read a book for as long as I feel I have something to learn from it. The lessons are various, and most often, they are about how to write an ending, even if that of a given book is a failure. Generally, I have become less inclined to seek out or appreciate perfection. I regard any book that comes across my “desk” like a horologist might do with the insides of a watch—trying to identify the mechanisms that make a book tick or, on the other hand, where the faulty gears that cause a slight but consistent delay, or a complete stoppage, are located. Sometimes, I simply marvel at the intricacy of the mechanism.
I was supposed to finish reading the second volume of In Search of Lost Time (the James Grieve translation, if you care), which I spent hours, vainly and in vain, reading on the beach in the South of France last summer. I abandoned it because I got stuck in the early pages of the Balbec section. I was supposed to resuscitate my resolution of getting through all of Proust in two and a half years, three volumes a year—as a very disorganized person, I like to create structures to contain my chaos. The resolution had been set at the start of 2024, and I was on course for completing it, sort of, until Balbec. I find myself now, in a Balbec of the soul. I’m not certain what that means because I haven’t yet gotten too far into it. I’m told I will meet Albertine.
Instead, this year in reading started at 192 Books, where I picked up A Coin in Nine Hands by Marguerite Yourcenar. I was not familiar with Yourcenar, who, of course, turned out to be the first woman to be admitted into the Académie Française, a Nobel Prize nominee, and someone with whom I should have been familiar. But I am shallow, and it simply responded to all pre-requisites of what it takes to get me to buy a book spontaneously: a sort of ugly cover that instills confidence, idiosyncratic volume, and absorbing prose in the first few pages. The highest endorsement is commentary from a bookseller, and in this case they were enthusiastic about the author. They had asked me if I had read a different work of Yourcenar’s, Memoirs of Hadrian, if I remember correctly; their excitement encouraged the purchase and the subsequent reading.
The book tracks a 10-lira coin in Rome as it changes hands—nine times, as stated in the title, in a single day during the 11th year of the Fascist era; the day a young woman, whose hands are among the nine, attempts to assassinate Mussolini. The coin functions as a device that allows the reader into these tenuously interconnected lives in the city. Entire familial histories, an assortment of lonelinesses, and the author’s conspicuous luxuriating in a mythical Italian atmosphere. The coin device could have functioned as a neat way to set the fragmentation of the book in a dancing motion, but instead, I thought, it stumbled through these interiorities and their nostalgias, some of which were reflected in the underlying plot, others completely divorced from it. Unproductive disorientation. Still, I kept reading for the occasional moments where it moved like a music box—a gentle, dainty twirl that delights.
The book, I was to learn, was first written in 1934 and then reworked and published again in 1959. “In some places, I tried to enlarge the role of realism; elsewhere, that of poetry—in the long run these are, or should be, the same thing,” Yourcenar writes in the afterword of the book, a statement she does not elaborate on but that nonetheless (or perhaps due to the lack of elaboration) won me over such that I decided that I liked the book a lot, despite its faults. Generally, the reflections on the reworking of the, which this afterword presents, contains the book’s true value—the oblique instruction it offers, not only from a perspective of “craft” but from the of writing-as-a-life-long-condition. “Perhaps no one will be surprised that political evil plays a bigger part in this version than it did in the older one […] Rereading the new parts of the book as though someone else had written them, however, I’m especially cognizant of the fact that the text is now both a little more scathing and a little less dark, that certain judgements about human nature are perhaps less cutting and yet less vague, and that dream and reality, the two principal elements in the book, are no longer separate, or almost irreconcilable, but now seem merged to form a unity that is, after all, life.”
I went on to a rereading of Fleur Jaeggy’s Sweet Days of Discipline, in one sitting, as I have done every time. I was reading from a new copy I had to buy, devoid of my marginalia and the old cover (that must have been judged dowdy and since replaced with an antiseptic and untrustworthy version), because I had given my old one away to a former Victoria’s Secret angel, a Russian woman with an ugly French bulldog, for her to take on her Cote d’Azur vacation she was being jetted out to by her app-developing beau; of course, I never saw the book again. I had long mourned the loss of my original notes and underlines, and found that in this reading it was helpful to have a clean slate: I was reading to adapt the book into a screenplay with a friend (turns out, someone already has the option on the book, but it should expire in a few months and they already have four movies in development so who the fuck knows, here’s hoping, etc, etc, etc). Reading with a prescriptive structure in mind made the text flexible and allowed for a deeper engagement with the book’s construction—how does one maintain its essence and integrity while shoehorning it into the three acts a script (I chafe at adaptations that change a book’s contents to make it a movie)? I see it so clearly with this book, but I’ll stop here. What I’ll say is: I was as beguiled by it as the first time I read it, and while I’m at it, if you’re tired of being recommended this book, might I suggest reading SS Proleterka? A rare case of lightning striking twice, though I suspect boarding school novels have wider appeal than cruise ship novels.
I started again and abandoned again City of Quartz during the LA fires… too immediate. Instead, I picked up Washington Square by Henry James, a cruel book (delightfully so) written by a total bitch (also delightfully so), in which every character is either stupid or evil.
Then, two of my closest friends, both briefly in Moscow, conspired to bring me a copy of Доска Дионисия (tr: The Board of Dionysius) by Alexei Smirnov (von Rauch), who, after a stint of literary and artistic stardom in Soviet non-conformist artist circles the 1960s, broke ties with the secular world and spent thirty years restoring icons and frescoes at churches and monasteries. The novel, written in 1978 and left unpublished until recently, follows an art history PhD student researching the work of the iconographer Dionysius in the field, when she hears that in a church nearby one of his icons went missing, so she decides to track it down. A sort of detective novel, apparently inspired by the years Smirnov (Von Rauch) spent in around men of the cloth—a heady mix of surviving descendants of the aristocracy, monks in hiding, repentant criminals, and KGB agents. To give further context for this recommendation, my friend is an Anthropology PhD whose own research centers around the intersection of Russian Orthodoxy and (outer) space exploration; she has spent a lot of time “in the field,” talking to priests about icons in spaceships. I did not get far into the book because the prose struck me as all over the place and unintentional, but now, revisiting the author’s biography, I’m inspired to try again.
Staying in the general realm of art history, I picked up a book I’ve dragged from bookshelf to bookshelf for years, which was the Peggy Guggenheim biography by Francine Prose. A really funny book and can be summed up as: “she didn’t have as much money as everyone thought she did, her nose not as big as everyone said it was, and she wasn’t quite so stupid as she was believed to be.” I’m being glib, of course; it treats its principal subject and the requisite historical context with great sensitivity, even with its quirky fixation on her nose. While collecting evidence of Peggy’s ingenuity and unparalleled instincts, it also doesn’t flatten her character: her generosity was sporadic, her choices chaotic, and she named her daughter Pegeen. The amount of gossip, too, single sentences in this book contain, from the first pages on, is riveting: “Peggy was living in a brownstone on East 61st Street with a wealthy British art collector, Kenneth Macpherson, a homosexual with whom she was having a complicated and disappointing love affair.” The parts about her relationship with Max Ernst, who married her to escape Europe and Nazi persecution, heartbreaking and, at times, gross. And there’s also this incredible paragraph which contains an entire family history of mental illness:
Her grandmother, her mother, several aunts and uncles, and Peggy herself were obsessed with cleanliness and phobic about germs. One uncle bathed several times daily, another refused to shake hands, the women (again including Peggy) compulsively wiped down household surfaces and sprayed the air with Lysol. Peggy’s obese Aunt Adelaide conducted a love affair with an imaginary pharmacist named Balch. Uncle Washington survived on a diet of ice and charcoal, wore jackets with zinc-lined pockets, and killed himself at fifty-six. Two cousins were also suicides; one shot his wife and then himself. Her pathologically miserly Uncle Eugene was known for arriving precisely at dinnertime and assuring his relatives’ welcome by performing a trick that involved moving the dining room chairs together and wriggling across the seats on his belly, like as snake.
Peggy Guggenheim in the sunglasses that had become her signature in later life; Francine Prose refers to them as “terribly unflattering” but never describes what they actually look like. A choice!
Next was Office Politics by Wilfrid Sheed, which I picked up at Unnameable Books and was excited about, because I had fallen in love with Ursula Parrot’s Ex Wife last year, a great novel about work, which meant, surely, that McNally Editions could do no wrong. This may still be the case, the jury’s out: I did not get very far into the book. It had not gripped me in any way. What did grip me deeply is Ariane Koch’s Overstaying. I am a sucker, generally, for Swiss people who write, but this book goes beyond the austere weirdness which I have found to be a trait of their national literature. I don’t think I could (or should, for that matter) describe what it is about, but dominant themes could be named as unease, indecision, and an insistence on seeing things through to the end. Just know that if you read just one of the books listed here, it should be this.
From a surreal commuter-town Switzerland, my reading took me into rural Russia, in the immediate, cruel, and hungry aftermath of collectivization. Grisha and I had agreed to read Andrei Platonov’s Chevengur, a novel about revolutionary idealism, together, he in English, I in Russian, which I generally find to be a great activity for a couple (we did that also with the first volume of In Search of Lost Time), but I did not last longer than about a quarter of the book. Some say it is the single greatest book written in the Russian Language; I was very wrapped up in Platonov’s genius, the prose as virtuosic as one of the great marble sculptures of the world, as if it had emerged from non-being complete, untouched by man. Sometimes though, there is only so much time one can spend staring at a sculpture, and I could not keep reading. I decided that its aesthetic qualities, the grit and grotesque, the sorrow of its humor, were not for me; at least not at this moment. Grisha, however, liked it very much and wished for more of Zakhar Pavlovich, the train mechanic whose religion was industry. I keep telling him to read Max Frisch’s Homo Faber, but he has not yet followed my recommendation.
Nineteenth-century France turned out to be a place I wanted to dwell more than early Soviet Russia. It was interesting, reading Madame Bovary, to observe the similarities in how Flaubert’s and Platonov’s treatment of rural lives. I had been too young to appreciate the novel when I first read it in my late teens, and I was glad now to understand Flaubert’s god-like wielding of life’s cruelty, such that even Henry James accused him of excessive coldness.
More cruel books followed: Eurotrash by Christian Kracht, a mischievous romp of a book which serves as a moral indictment of the European project as personified by Switzerland and its money, told through the personal history of the narrator’s family, one littered with Loro Piana sweaters. I’d like to write about it at greater length elsewhere, so I’ll save my thoughts, but the book is great fun. The cruelty in the first volume, which came next, of On the Calculation of Volume by Solvej Balle was less a matter of cultivated tone but more so embedded in the predicament of the plot, which sees its principal character, Tara, experience the same day, November 18, over and over again, with only her having any memory of each of the November 18ths that she’s lived. I was resistant to reading the book because everyone else was, the juvenile contrarian in me believes that if everyone is reading something I don’t have to, but sometimes if seemingly everyone says something is very good, it might indeed be very good. I found particularly striking the simplicity of its language, which, in turn, created a hermetic world of its own, repetition manipulating this straightforwardness into something more intricate. It is a divorce novel, by the way.
I was pulled towards Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh, but abandoned it shortly after the first few pages—I was not in the mood, I think, to orient myself in the chatter of the novel’s Bright Young Things. I did, however, greatly enjoy the preface, written thirty-four years after the novel’s initial release into the world, which all but casts the novel as a failure in a series of abrupt sentences. “I think I can claim that this is the first English novel in which dialogue on the telephone plays a large part. For reasons of novelty the many gross faults were overlooked. There were not many comic writers there and I filled the gap.” Perhaps the attitude of the introduction colored my reading of its first pages. It’s hard not to be infected by a writer’s criticisms of their own work—who knows it better than they could? This is why it is best to say as little in the way of introduction as one can. In spite of Waugh, I shall, perhaps, try again.
Rare entries into a log of my reading habits are novels as contemporary as the ones I read next. Sophie Kemp’s Paradise Logic contains immense pain (its plot) cloaked in immense fun (its language). I enjoyed it very much and thought it captures, with accuracy and sensitivity, the brief moment of early adulthood wherein your prefrontal cortex is still on its path toward maturity; you may be aware of the limitations your own youth imposes upon you and yet still you have to march on in mentally-challenged fashion until things maybe get better. I read Happiness and Love by Zoe Dubno, which made me think, a lot, about the market conditions of creating any kind of art today, especially literature. I won’t say more here. The book is out in September.
Before leaving for vacation, I went to Three Lives and left with a stack of books that had gotten the enthusiastic approval of the bookseller.
In Hawai’i, upon finishing Happiness and Love, I continued my beach reading with The Waves, in an attempt to finally get into Virginia Woolf’s fiction which I have revisited, on and off, over the course of the last decade. Perhaps I need to finally concede that she is not for me and that this is entirely my deficiency. I have a lot of patience for conceit, but that of The Waves wore thin for me very quickly due to a complete absence of humor. It’s possible that has simply been going over my head, and if that is the case, I would hope someone will tell me.
As for the rest: continuing with the seven-volume reading of Solvej Balle’s accounting for time-gone-missing is an easier undertaking than that of Proust—only five of them are written, and only three are translated into English; a friend whose taste I trust is reading a galley of the third one and says it gets even better. I have not read Nell Zink’s work, besides this wonderful n+1 essay on The Golden Notebook/being a writer and a woman to which I keep returning, but I decided The Wallcreeper would be the proper place to start with Nell Zink than her most recent novel Sister Europe, which I kept paging through in bookstores; and so I look forward to reading both. For my work book club I am to read Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad (from whose essay/lecture I’ve derived a lot of instruction in articulation) sometime in the next two weeks. On the horizon too: The Interpretation of Cultures by Clifford Geertz, Imaginary Lives by Marcel Schwob, The Honditsch Cross by Ingeborg Bachman, Ada or Ardor by Vladimir Nabokov.
Right now I am reading The World of Yesterday, Stephan Zweig’s memoir, which I happened to pick up by chance from my bookshelf. I had made an attempt at it in the spring of 2022, at the start of the war in Ukraine, but couldn’t make it through the beginning: I felt Zweig’s voice to be too longing, mournful, sentimental. Several wars later, I find I no longer feel this way about it. I find comfort in the crystalline prose, in the conception of Jewishness without Zionism, and in the reflections on Vienna and its coffee houses.