The Man of Feeling, by Javier Marías.
A short novel about an opera singer who falls in love with the unhappy wife of a banker. The real power of the book—and it is powerful—is the narrator, the opera singer, whose meticulous and at times pedantic voice takes over the narrative in a way that reminded me of Thomas Bernhard, while retaining more of the features of the traditionally suspenseful plot than do Bernhard’s novels. The plot was like a shoal beneath a froth of absorbing digressions and reflections, which would suddenly appear in front of my readerly boat and threaten to capsize the whole thing.
Jade War, by Fonda Lee.
The second volume in Lee’s Green Bone Saga.
Europe in Autumn, Europe at Midnight, and Europe in Winter, by Dave Hutchinson.
These three books form three quarters of a near future science fiction sequence about European borders, smuggling, pocket-universes, and skullduggery. Each book stands alone despite taking place in a shared future and featuring overlapping sets of characters. Each book has the overpowering richness of a novel written by a short story writer, from which it is saved by also having the pacing of a spy thriller. I’ve heard it described as the love-child of John Le Carré and China Miéville, and although I usually despise that kind of description-by-comparison, it is surprisingly apt in this case.
The Tortilla Curtain, by T.C. Boyle.
A novel about two couples whose lives violently intersect: a pair of undocumented immigrants trying to survive by wild-camping while they scrounge for work, and two upper-middle-class U.S. citizens living in a gated community where their shallow liberalism is being undermined by peer pressure and self-interest. It hurts and feels true.
The Blue Angel, by Francine Prose.
A novel about a creative writing professor at a small New England college who develops an extremely improper crush on one of his students — old ground for a literary novel in every respect. Ultimately it becomes a college sexual harassment novel, and it provoked a lot of critical disagreement as to what Francine Prose’s point about sexual harassment was, exactly. (Does a novel that provokes moral reflection automatically have a moral message?) Before it becomes a sexual harassment novel, however, it’s also a novel about the secret, the treasure of good writing.
The Sound of the Mountain, by Yasunari Kawabata (trans. Edward Seidensticker).
A terse, painterly novel about an old man with memory problems feebly dealing with the bad marriages of his two children. It reads like an oblique psychodrama punctuated by nature poetry — unlike anything I’ve encountered, and deeply beguiling. Also, like seemingly half the 20th century Japanese novels I have read, one of its subplots concerns the old man falling in love with his daughter-in-law. This must have been a prominent dramatic situation in a society of multi-generational housing, paper thin walls, and filial piety.
A Cathedral of Myth and Bone, by Kat Howard.
A short story collection by a fantasist, heavily featuring Arthurian and Roman Catholic themes, figures, and situations, re-imagined as feminist urban fantasy. Six years ago, reading one of the stories collected here when it was first published in Clarkesworld — “The Saint of the Sidewalks” — reignited my childhood desire to write speculative fiction, a desire which has recently blossomed into the beginnings of a career. I have nothing but good to say about Howard.
The Bad Side of Books, by D.H. Lawrence.
At long last an in-print compilation of Lawrence’s non-fiction to replace the out-of-print collection entitled Phoenix. I’m reviewing it at length for LARB, so I won’t say much here, except to note that the pieces were chosen by Geoff Dyer and really illustrate the very worst and the very best of Lawrence: and the very worst is terrible (windy gender essentialist metaphysics, racism, eugenicism, lazy editorializing, and sheer overpowering tedium), and the very best is excellent (some of the most living descriptions of nature and human life in English, incredible perceptiveness about the work of others, a compelling defense of the autonomy of literature, unflagging stylistic originality).
As you can see, it was a relatively meager month of reading, thanks to a good deal of exhausting travel and a fair amount of sickness that kept my nose out of books and into tissues. Next month, which I will be lucky to spend in proximity to several very good libraries, promises to be much richer.