Recent Reads I Loved

Only books this time!

Apr 01, 2023

book lot on table — Photo by Tom Hermans on Unsplash

How’s your 2023 reading goal going? I’m keeping track, as usual, on Goodreads. I’m not seeking a huge number for the year but mindfully moving along with some fantastic titles. I love to see the record of these books here to remind myself of my journey and share reading ideas with others.

I also tend to post photos of what I’m reading on Instagram. Who doesn’t love a good book cover?!

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The Sentence

Louise Erdrich (2021)

Minnesota is a dear place to me. So are bookshops!

Erdrich is a multi-genre indigenous author with a bookshop in Minnesota, who uses both for the setting of her latest novel — The Sentence. This book was written just following Erdrich’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction with The Night Watchman in 2020. The novel that focuses on indigenous identities from different perspectives is a ghost story and a story of redemption that takes place during the pandemic and George Floyd’s murder. Most of the plot is set in a bookshop where the protagonist works, and the tale is followed by a large further reading list from the fictional character that would keep one busy for a couple of years.

My mother grew up in Minnesota with eight siblings, five of whom still reside there. We used to visit via a long scenic drive from Massachusetts. My brother has since moved to the Twin Cities (Minneapolis and Saint Paul) when his wife started a medical residency there, although he still works as a journalist and editor in Boston (proud big sis here).

They happened to move first just around the corner from Cup Foods, the shop where Floyd used a counterfeit bill. I was there with my then baby son at Christmas of that year and wandered into the shop several times for the odd grocery.

Having been there just weeks before Floyd was murdered outside that shop — it means absolutely nothing — but you always wonder, could I have done something? Would trying to intervene with a baby strapped to my chest have made the cops listen? Probably not. It’s hubris to think so.

It transformed my brother’s neighborhood though - at least temporarily - from a friendly hang-out-in-the-front-yard place with progressive political signs on most lawns to one where you could regularly hear gunshots and many of the shops shut down. An unfortunate side effect to a place of mourning and pilgrimage and action. Perhaps the anger and the fires have since cooled in Minneapolis, but the fight thankfully goes on.

One of the characters in the novel who happens to be a Native American police officer also used to stop at Cup Foods “to pick up a thing or two on his way back from working on the universe.” He wonders if “I was just there. Maybe I could’ve…” (p. 235). So I realized it’s a common feeling, one that many of us may ask in the face of tragedy. It’s good to ask; maybe we will be there someday. This scene also demonstrates the power of literature in connecting us; although our encounters with this space of mourning came from entirely different perspectives, our thoughts were the same. We are more connected to strangers (and fictional characters) than we sometimes realize.

Erdrich describes the murder as a “signal event,” one that should “engender[] multiple ripple effects of legislation and landmark legal cases” (p. 235) and goes on to describe the “haunted city” that ensues (p. 238). It’s both a backdrop and invisibly weaved into the fabric of the personal story of imprisonment that the book explores. Erdrich exposes acts of injustice in many ways but ultimately offers hope through “repatriations” (p. 371) and “peace” (p. 366) and “surviv[al]” (p. 364).

The Luminous Novel

Mario Levrero (2021, English translation by Annie McDermott)

I love the meta-artist / metafiction sub-genre á la Kundera, Auster, Murakami, Woolf…the list goes on. This time, however, it’s also in the form of both non-fiction and novel paired together as a complete text, which also blurs the genre lines along with making us more aware both of the act of creation and the presence of the real author during the fiction. This book is long, but one could argue that the length is part of the story.

First, we have 421 pages of journals about the creation of a novel as well as the procrastination of completing it. Then, the next 109 pages are a novel, The Luminous Novel, for which Levrero received a grant from the Guggenheim foundation to complete. However, nothing is a completed manuscript for he died in 2004 from a heart attack before completion and is often compared to Roberto Bolańo’s posthumous “genre-defying magnum opus 2666” (translator’s note - Annie McDermott, p. 533, And Other Stories edition"). McDermott also quotes Argentinian author Mauro Libertella:

‘If [Chilean] Roberto Bolańo showed us it was still possible to write the great Latin American novel, [Uruguayan] Levrero told us it wasn’t necessary.’ 2666 is a book about everything, but The Luminous Novel is a book about everything else: about how writing, imagination and the human soul behave in the downtime, in the never-ending small hours’ when most people are asleep.

In the first part, Levrero talks about his dreams, his lover, sleeping too much, visiting a psychologist, walking…everyday life. These things are the seeds of his creation as well as the stuff that gets in the way.

While I was often enticed to simply skip a few hundred pages to get to the novel already, there was something captivating in the raw nature of the artist’s rambles. There was a melancholia mixed with imagination. There was a clarity about life mixed with an ambivalence about time and society.

When we finally get there on page 425, we are really ready for it. And the beauty bounces off the page…you can imagine Levrero finding solace in these words:

Fairly often, for some time now, an image has been occurring to me spontaneously in which I’m writing calmly with a pen and India ink on a sheet of very high-quality white paper. And now I’m doing just that, giving in to what seems to be a deep-seated desire, even though all my life I’ve tended to use a typewriter.

But just when we think we’re getting to the masterly crafted fiction that Levrero has been slaving over for years, he tells us farther down the same page:

The luminous novel, however, will never be a novel; I have no way of reshaping the real events in such a way that they become ‘literature’, any more than I can free them from a line of thinking — not necessarily a philosophy — that inevitably connects them to one another.

So we as the writer-reader have to embrace these uncertainties and consider our own lives and writing lives and fiction lives we create. It will either make you run or dive deeply. We witness love and sadness, joy and ambivalence alongside the author as he explores his own spirituality instead of the “earthly” and “political” Church.

The Memoirs of Stockholm Sven (2021)

Nathaniel Ian Miller (2021)

I am a snow and solitude lover but this is extreme. In Nathaniel Ian Miller’s The Memoirs of Stockholm Sven, the title character leaves his home for the arctic in search of a more interesting life and ends up staying isolated in the cold climate for most of his.

Sven is at odds with many of the Finnish workers and is disfigured early on in an avalanche in the mine. Both factors make him even more isolated than the other characters. But Sven still finds companionship in a Scottish geologist, his books, and his niece who comes to stay with him for a while.

This story is one of internationalism but also an individual’s fight of survival and acceptance. As The New York Times says:

Amid the quietness and seclusion of Svalbard, the novel finds various ways of reminding the reader of the big events happening elsewhere in Europe. Through Tapio, who is a committed socialist, and Illya, a later acquaintance who is a Ukrainian anarchist, we learn about the Russian Revolution and the Finnish civil war. But although Miller allows us to glimpse a larger world of national conflict and upheaval, his true interests lie in the realm of the personal.

Besides politics, there’s a beloved dog, murder, arctic hunters, discoveries of selfhood, forgiveness, and more. It’s truly a wonderful and memorable novel.

The story has echoes of Frankenstein, Crime and Punishment, Call of the Wild, and Walden. The author was a resident in the Arctic Circle Expeditionary Program, giving the story a natural quality though the story may be extraordinary.

Have you read any of these books? What do you think? What have you read so far this year?