It’s going to be tough to find time to put this text-heavy Books Post together while we’re travelling, but if I leave it until we get home, the November post will be nipping at its heels. Luckily, I did bring my hand-written journal along with me and I managed to keep up the October entries (I haven’t added any November reading yet, and we’re — EEK! — halfway through the month, but that’s a worry for later).
Because I’m short on time and we’re on the move, I’m going to stick to transcribing directly from my Reading Journal as I usually do, but with little of the added commentary I generally manage. Better than nothing, right?
Here we go. . . picking up from September’s #63 to #69 in my 2022 reading . . .
70. Regardez-nous danser. Leila Slimani. (Read in French, but apparently available in 2023 in translation by Sam Taylor, Watch Us Dance); Volume 2 of Le Pays des Autres; French contemporary literature; Family saga; Moroccan history; French colonialism; Feminist fiction; Women’s lives; Franco-Moroccan writer.
Volume 2 of Slimani’s projected trilogy Le Pays des Autres (I wrote about Volume 1 here, and about Slimani’s earlier novel, Chanson Douce, here — #31, scroll down) , this novel begins with Mathilde surveying the progress of the new swimming pool she has finally convinced her frugal husband to build now that his years of hard work on the barely arable land he inherited from his father have brought prosperity. Mathilde has found her life in Morocco very difficult, not what she imagined when she defied her Alsatian family to marry a Moroccan soldier fighting for her country in WWII. Now, at least , against the summer’s harsh heat she will have the relief of swimming whenever she wishes.
And life seems easier as well, years after the political violence of the 50s (which is where the first volume culminated) and the eventual granting by France of Moroccan independence and restoration of the Moroccan monarchy.
Meanwhile, their daughter, Aïcha, has been in Strasbourg for four years studying medicine (and experiencing French racism daily) and their son is on his high school swim team, a potential champion except that he’s not managing to complete his schoolwork.
And hippies are arriving at the small beach towns — while at other larger centres, the international and Moroccan elite gather. Culture is changing, but the poor are still everywhere and the state is still abusive and silencing when an iron hand is deemed necessary, and the idealistic young Moroccans find themselves compromised or complicit as they grow older, more bourgeois even.
Complicated, nuanced, thoughtful, well-researched, and insightful. I’m looking forward to Volume 3.
71. A Round-Heeled Woman: My Late-Life Adventures in Sex and Romance. Jane Juska. New York: Villard, 2004. Memoir; Aging; Women’s Lives; Sex Over 60.
Reading this as research / background for “that blog post” (on women, aging, and sexuality) — I remember reading reviews of the book when it came out and being intrigued — but either too busy to track it down at the time and /or suspicious it might be too . . . . hmmmm, sensationalistic, too exploitative of our prurience?
Instead, it’s a very well-written memoir, thoughtful and self-reflexive. A woman of my mother’s generation who grew up in a small town, father a doctor, mother well-educated and creative; both parents wanted Jane to have a university experience and, in preparation, taught her how to play bridge, dance, mix a drink . . .
But Jane took up smoking and swearing at university with more alacrity than bridge. Also some kissing until she came squarely (pun intended) down on side of purity, as she puts it. At one point, in fact, she reports on the inappropriately “loose” behaviour of a fellow student in her uni residence.
Juska regales us with her account of the ad she places in the New York Review of Books: “Before I turn 67 — next March — I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like. If you want to talk first, Trollope works for me.” She describes her decision to do so; her sorting of responses into Yes, No, and Maybe piles; and then the relationships that evolved. Exciting; initially satisfactory (yes, she got to have sex and, almost as importantly to her, be touched); puzzling; hurtful; affirming . . . . above all, for readers an engaging and often moving — and just as often hilarious narrative.
Just as compelling is the narration she offers of the legacy left to so many women of a painfully limited and constraining sex education, especially to women of her generation. And her honest account of what she finds out about herself in years of psychoanalysis as she realizes she has to correct course (her son runs away, lives in precarious circumstances; she’s become obese and unfit in her unhappiness and even her work as an English teacher — which she had always loved, and — spoiler! — will again, eventually) leaves her dissatisfied, resentful, frustrated.
The story of the recovery she makes is a powerful one that precedes her quest for sexual satisfaction as a single sexagenarian. All told by an erudite and creative woman — a pleasure to read.
72. Take My Hand. Dolen Perkins-Valdez. Literary fiction; Historical (20th century, American civil rights) fiction; Reproductive medicine; Racism in Medicine; Contraception; Black Lives Matter; Women’s Lives; Feminist Black American writer; NYTimes bestseller.
Thanks to my daughter in Italy for recommending this book. Such a pleasure to have nurtured readers who now nurture me! I was disturbed and moved and informed by this fictionalized narrative, inspired by a historical courtroom drama: two sisters (Black, poor) who were involuntarily sterilized at the respective ages of 11 and 13.
Two storylines: the novel begins in 2016 when an obstetrician-gynecologist, Civil Townsend, embarks on a road trip and explains to her adoptive daughter where she’s going and why; the second time-line begins in 1973 when Civil was a young nurse, working in a family-planning clinic in Montgomery, Alabama. Black, the daughter of a family physician and an artist, she is appalled at the living conditions of two girls — 11 and 13 — whom she visits to administer Depo-Provera shots, a form of contraception she comes to realize is not appropriate for the sisters — both still virgins, not yet dating or interested in boys, one not even yet menstruating.
But the result of Civil’s decision to stop administering the shots is one she couldn’t have anticipated and both she and the family she’s taken responsibility for suffer lifelong consequences. At least their “case” brings about historical legal changes and exposes ugly truths about so-called reproductive care in the United States (unfortunately not the only country to have used birth control to limit populations on a racist agenda. Canada has its own history and conscience to examine).
Although this novel testifies to a painful historic event, it doesn’t do so without rewarding the reader who’s willing to witness what can be hard going. Richly described landscapes, both urban and rural; well-developed characters and their inter-relationships; thoughtful attention to subtleties of race, gender, and class. And ultimately hopeful although never naïvely so. Recommended.
73. The Museum of Desire. Jonathan Kellerman. Mystery/Thriller; Police Procedural; Alex Delaware/Milo Sturgis series; forensic psychologist; gay detective; Los Angeles setting.
Paul got this from the library and finished it quickly, so I picked it up before it was due back (just before we left for Europe). I used to read this series and enjoyed the relationship between psychologist Alex Delaware and his friend LAPD Lieutenant Milo Sturgis (an early example of a gay police detective in popular mystery series, along with Reginald Hill’s Sergeant Edgar “Wieldy” Wield). Back then, the developing relationships of the two men with their respective partners kept me entertained, and I loved getting to know Alex and Robin’s French bulldog — my introduction to the breed, in fact, and I still dream of bringing one home.
This recent addition to the series (2020) has all that, but for me not much has developed. Interesting enough plot — as you’d expect with a series featuring a psychologist, the murders tend to feature a sociopath or psychopath. There’s a neat enough twist here, but much seemed familiar if not predictable to me. I wonder if I’d still enjoy the early titles. . . 1985 for the first one! Almost 40 years of these!
74. Confidence. Denise Mina. Thriller / Mystery; Road trip; Scottish Noir; Anna & Fin series; Amateur sleuths.
Another road trip adventure with the “Anna and Fin” team we met in Mina’s Conviction (when I wrote about that book, I noted that it was a “standalone,” but that I hoped Mina might write another title featuring these two . . . from my lips to God’s (or Mina’s, at least!) ears. . . ). The duo now host a true-crime podcast together and follow the trail of a missing young woman whose disappearance is connected to a precious artifact the provenance of which supposedly links directly to Pontius Pilate.
Along the way, they’re co-opted by a South African art dealer / con artist / thief accompanied by his just-discovered barely adolescent son, and they find themselves embroiled in high-stakes auctions and murderous histories in repressive regimes going back 50 or more years — these histories manifesting themselves violently in the present.
Twists and turns as we move from stormy Scotland and a family vacation (which unfortunately experiences inter-personal and emotional storms of its own) to YouTubers filming their exploration of an abandoned French chateau to Paris and back across the channel. A thriller of a ride!
75. In the Dark We Forget. Sandra S.G. Wong. Mystery / Psychological Thriller; Canadian writer; Asian-Canadian writer; Chinese-Canadian writer; Chinese-Canadian protagonist; Canadian history; Race and Racialism; Amnesia.
A Canadian psychological thriller-mystery: a woman wakes up by the side of a forested mountain road with no memory of how she got there . . . and no idea of who she is, where she lives, nor even what she looks like. She finds her way (a kind passer-by on a fairly remote highway — she’s fortunate!) to the nearest RCMP station and is profoundly relieved the officer is a Japanese-Canadian woman. So relieved that she intuits that she is, herself, Asian-Canadian. And gradually, slowly, with the help of the police, she finds a brother and sister-in-law, although she doesn’t remember them properly. And she learns that her parents are missing.
Discoveries about her family, about her career (apparently she was good at it, but has recently been released (with compensation) from her position, about her personality (she is disliked and mistrusted by most of her former colleagues) threaten to overwhelm her and her trust in the police is low. Painful revelations, violent memories and nightmares . . . as Cleo slowly remembers who she is and, finally, who left her on the side of a mountain, and why.
At first, I thought there was a bit too much lecturing in the opening chapters, the amnesiac Cleo operating as a ventriloquist for some consciousness-raising the author hopes to achieve. But the complaints and the Canadian history of racism are undeniably legitimate and, I quickly recognized, witnessing them doesn’t get in the way of an entertaining and mostly convincing thriller. And witnessing Cleo’s transformation as she deals with some difficult truths about her personal and her family history is painful at times but ultimately redemptive.
I’m going to search out Wong’s Lola Starke series. Have any of you read any of these?
Before I go, a sneak peak at a book I’ll be writing about in next month’s post — because today this new edition of a friend (and erstwhile neighbour)’s gem of a memoir is being launched at a celebration back in the city where I lived for years.
I just finished it yesterday on the train from Florence to Turin, this new edition of what I called “Carol Matthews’ Labyrinth book” when I posted about it 11 years ago. Since then, Carol’s beloved husband, Mike, has died, and she’s written a memoir, Minerva’s Owl: The Bereavement Phase of My Marriage about living in that loss; I wrote about that memoir here and know that many of you have read it and found it moving and instructive and useful.
The new edition of her labyrinth book — Ariadne Then and Now: The Labyrinth and the End of Times — retains Carol’s erudite exploration of the history and continued relevance of labyrinths, particularly the way that walking them meditatively can facilitate self-knowledge (or healing or consolation or problem-solving). The pages still contain her thoughts about ageing and mortality (although I read these pages so differently now, Carol and myself over a decade older, Mike gone almost that long).
But there are new sections now: in some of which Mike replaces Ariadne as interlocutor; in others Carol considers the labyrinthine possibilities of technology as highlighted by pandemic lockdowns; and other sections wherein a wise old woman wails and rants and comes to terms with some of her frustrations with humanity and what we’ve done to our planet. And sometimes refuses to come to terms with that. Ariadne and Mike chime in and advise. There’s humour, there are wonderful art and literary and musical allusions, and there are word-sketches of a granddaughter growing. A gem for any library shelf, in fact. Wishing you all the best at your book launch today, Carol! I would love to be there!
Edited to add: Visit the website of NeoPoiesis Press to find out more about Ariadne Then and Now and to read what others have said about it. You can also purchase a copy there.
That’s it for now — we’re heading out for dinner in a few minutes to a restaurant Paul discovered when we were here a year ago. I hope you’ll enjoy this post, perhaps find some titles to look for at your local bookstores or library. I look forward to our monthly conversation about the books I mention here (have you read them? might they appeal? did you think differently about them than I did?) but also about what you’ve been reading lately or why you haven’t. And if you’ve poured yourself a cuppa before you started reading and writing here, I’ll have one as well and imagine you across the table from me, here in Turin this evening.
All the best,
xo,
f
Thanks for the good wishes, Frances, and for mentioning my book. I too wish you could be at the launch but it is much more exciting and much more beautiful where you are. You’re in the right place.
Thanks, as always, for the good book suggestions. You are the best reader I know — and I know a lot of good readers!
Travel well. I hope to see you before the year is out.
c.
Author
You’re very welcome, Carol. The book launch will have wrapped up by now, I imagine, and your latest book is now out in the world — Congratulations!
I’ve edited what I wrote to include a link to the publisher. And since this post was, strictly, my October reading and I only just finished Ariadne, I’ll pull most of what I said here into my next book post. Who knows, by then perhaps I’ll be able to chat about it with you in person. xo
Always enjoy your book reviews. I have one for you: The Color of Water, a Black Man’s Tribute to his White Mother by James McBride. I read it when it was new and enjoyed it immensely. I am about to reread it, as I have decided to pick some old favorites from my library to read again. “The story of a rabbi’s daughter, born in Poland and raised in the South, who fled to Harlem, married a black man, founded a Baptist church, and put twelve children through college.” It was a NY Times #1 bestseller and Book of the Month club choice published in 1996. It’s a very upbeat and inspiring story, I recommend it.
Enjoy your travels!
Author
Thanks, Marcie! Your recommendation looks interesting — and I always think it’s worth revisiting “the backlist.” I wonder what you’ll find different about reading it now, more than 25 years later. I know I always find surprises on second (and third and fourth and all the way when I would reread for teaching). Another advantage of bestsellers from years back is that we can often find secondhand copies or borrow easily from the library without a huge waitlist — I’ll check my library for this one.
So many new suggestions!!
Leila Slimani’s Watch Us Dance is already on my list,all the others seem very interesting,too!
My October reading was dedicated (by serendipity) to croatian authors and books. I don’t know how interesting it might be for you and your readers,but nevertheless, there you have it :
I’ve written here about Jurica Pavicic recently-he has a new book, Mater Dolorosa, a very noir psychological thriller set in Split. He writes utterly good
Ivana Šojat is an author I knew about for a long time and for no reasons didn’t read before(similar as with A. Horowitz’s Magpie Murders-I’ve read it in October as well. Why,oh why, didn’t I read it before,you’ve recommended it a lot, I think, and now I love it indeed). Her novel Unterstadt is a story about a city,Osijek,and destinies of a couple of Folksdojčer (from Volksdeutsche )families . Excellent! I’ve run imediately for another of her books,Ezan. It is a story about a Croat boy from Herzegovina,who, through devşirme (system of child levy), became Janissary (a member of elite units that formed the Ottoman Sultan’s households troops ) in Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent time. This book was even better! Think Orhan Pamuk or Elif Shafak (or our Meša Selimović or Ivo Andrić)
David Diop’s awarded novel At Night All Blood is Black is heartbreaking novel describing two “more-than-brothers” young Senegalese men from an African village during WWI .Their experience,horrors of the war and the death of one of them, leads to grief and descent into madness of the other one. Dark, dark story ,written in an incantatory way,full of anaphoras…..
And for something more entertaining,there was Richard Osman’s The Bullet That Missed
Dottoressa
Author
You know I’m very interested in reading Croatian writers (in translation, obviously!). I just did a search and it looks as if Mater Dolorosa isn’t available in translation yet or at least I can’t find any available edition — but I just found that two of Pavičić’s thrillers are available in French, as e-books, so I’ve just bought those for my Kobo. Making my second language work for me!! 😉
I did like the first of that Horowitz series very much. Clever writing!
Ezan sounds wonderful, and I’d love to find an English translation — It looks as if Unterstadt’s been translated into English but not published yet. I hope it is soon!
At Night All Blood is Black will go on my list, but I’ll wait until I’m ready to witness. . . Haven’t yet read anything by Osman (like you with Sojat and Horowitz?). maybe it’s time?
Thanks again for your contributions — always so interesting and so varied!
Thank you!
You and Sue and some of the readers ( here and there) always open so many choices for me-I’m both spoiled and in awe! And utterly happy and grateful!
It is wonderful to read in many different languages,brava!
There is J. Pavičić’s awarded L’eau rouge,in french translation-it is excellent and I hope it is among those two books you’ve bought
D.
Author
Yes, that’s the one I bought – L’eau rouge! Looking forward to it!
October seems a long time ago now; we have moved from autumn to winter. For me, when that happens, the time before seems like a distant dream. 🙂
I finally abandoned Ruskin’s Stones of Venice (and it was abridged!! not three volumes, only one) after two library renewals. He got to me…I knew what he was like but it was things like this (on architectural orders): ‘You have, perhaps, heard of five orders: but there are only two orders; and there can never be any more until doomsday.’ The punctuation alone would drive me to distraction but the lecturing pushed me over the edge. Someday when I feel especially strong I might try again.
More successfully I am reading Annie Ernaux, in translation, I can’t cope with nuance in any language but my own. Right now it’s Getting Lost, I have A Girl’s Story and Exteriors sitting on the nightstand. The jacket blurb for Exteriors says ‘…a territory bounded on one side by commitment and on the other by desire’. I am in book-love, a nice state of being for the long, cold winter to come.
Author
I think you stuck with Ruskin much longer that I would have. That’s an arrogant and didactic (and rather breathy — all those stops and half-stops and dramatic pauses) sentence. I didn’t know what an architectural order was, but a quick search on Google shows me that Ruskin might have considered doomsday to have come and gone were he to appear now. . .
I’m reading Ernaux as well (for the first time, I’m somewhat chagrined to admit). I’ve just begun Les Années, trying to use the train time from Turin to Paris to reset my brain for language. Given how many times I’ve said “Si” for “Oui” since, the strategy isn’t working and who knows how much nuance I’m missing 😉 I think I’ll try your approach when I get home, so maybe you’ll come back with a recommendation for which title I should read (in translation) next. And yes, book-love is the perfect state to be in as winter takes over. (I just checked for Winnipeg and looks as if you’re at -11 and that’s both High and Low for the day/night! Yikes!)
Coincidentally I opened this post just after returning from the library. I finished Laura Moretti’s The Stolen Lady, historical fiction moving between the Italy of Leonardo Di Vinci and the Second World War. Pure fiction in terms of the artist, his subject the wife of a wealthy silk merchant, and her servant and the war years. The novel describes the effort to save the treasures of the Louvre including it’s most famous painting, the Mona Lisa. This is based on facts though the heroine is a composite of many involved in the undertaking. Next was a novel which was highly recommended. As would I. It is Horse by Geraldine Brooks. A graduate student in art history picks up a discarded painting on the streets of Washington DC. Meanwhile across town at the Smithsonian Institute, a researcher takes an interest in an skeleton stored in the dusty storeroom of the museum. The story moves through three time periods, pre civil war in the US, the New York art scene of the 50’s and current day Washington. It tells the tale of a famous race horse and the black groom who cared for him. The book encompasses much, racism, art, police brutality, horseracing and love in it’s various forms. I felt enraged, and it made me cry. My next read was a kind of break from such strong emotion. The Sweet Remnants of Summer, by Alexander McCall Smith. It is the most recent work in his Sunday Philosophy series. It’s protagonist, Isabel Dalhousie, is a philosopher and seems driven to help others in need. this series has been referred to at times as a murder mystery but in fact no murder ever occurs, at least in this story and in a number of the others I have read. actually not much happens but I love the conversation between Isabel and her husband Jamie. It is is set in Edinburgh which I recall fondly and I kind of feel that I would like to be their neighbor. Following this our book club read I Must Betray You by Ruta Sepetys. She is the daughter of a refugee who seeks out stories which she feels need to be told. In this case is is the story of Romania under the Caeusescu dictatorship in the later 1950’s, not so long ago for some of us. The story is told through the words of a 17 year old student, the young man is recruited to spy on the family of an American ambassador as his mother cleans their apartment. He believes he has no choice if he is to save his family, especially to obtain medicine for his elderly grandfather. I have to say I had no idea how unbelievably cruel this regime was to it’s citizens. the author writes for both adults and a YA audience. We were lucky to have an online interview with the author. My senior group is focusing in Brazil this term and I got to read and discuss a few stories by Brazilian writer Machado De Assis, who wrote in the 1800’s . I did enjoy them, quite clever. Finally I have just finished The It Girl by Ruth Ware. A murder mystery set in Oxford and again Edinburgh. A popular college student is brutally murdered. Ten years later the alleged killer dies in prison professing his innocence. the victims former roommate has doubts as well and sets out to discover the truth. It felt a bit familiar but I did not guess the ending, always a good thing, and it was a compelling and enjoyable read. just started the new Elizabeth Strout, who’s book I have always liked.
I remember reading the first books by Johnathan Kellerman, and also his wife Faye. especially, as you said, he is a psychologist as am I. I liked them at first, but as I recall, though it was a long time ago, I think I found them too violent. this is I suppose a silly comment as they are after all murder mysteries but that is my recollection . So that’s it, going to curl up with my book on this chilly evening.
Of the ten or so books which I read the last three months, there is only one which I fully enjoyed, and it is the one which you have already recommended in a former blogpost, I think: The Offing by Benjamin Myers. I liked the close look at class divides, the way in which sea, land, the weather, plants and animals are given their equal share of attention, and the both distanced and benevolent way of presenting the protagonists.
Most of the other books were in German, but two of them were translations from French. One of them: Civilizations by Laurent Binet. It is a kind of alternative history, but not completely unrealistic: First: Some vikings from Iceland not only reached the coast of North America, but went south, bringing with them horses and the production and use of iron (including weapons). Second: Columbus never returned from his first voyage. And third: internal conflicts drive the Inca prince Atahualpa from his home country and eventually across the Atlantic towards Europe… Now imagine what all this might have meant for European history. Very amusing (and thought-provoking) as an intellectual experiment, but not very satisfying as a novel.
The second french book was my first by Annie Erneaux: Memoire de fille (in German as well). I found ist intellectually challenging to follow her ideas about memory and personal identity, but I could not relate – neither to the remenbering nor to the remembered Annie.
Another book, and this I can recommend, was by Swiss author Arno Geiger. It is a kind of journal about his years with his aged father who is slipping away into dementia. I was very moved by the kindness with which the author looked not only at his father but at everybody affected by the situation. There is a French translation: Le vieux roi en son exil.
Author
It wasn’t me who recommended The Offing — I wonder if it might have been Dottoressa. I looked up a review and have put it on my Holds list at the library.
Interesting re Annie Ernaux. I’m enjoying Les Années, and I do find much to relate to, but I think it makes a difference that she’s 13 years older than I am. I’m so interested in the effect on France of the protests of ’68, but even before that the encroachment of capitalism and retail consumerism.