Good evening!
This is late and long. It’s long because I have read a lot this week, and quite frankly have a lot to say on all of it. I’ve been ‘getting up early’ and ‘exercising’, which quite fantastically has given me the gift of both time and energy.
What I’ve been reading this week and what I think about it
I said last week that My Men by Victoria Kielland, translated from the Norwegian by Damion Searls, could potentially be a favourite of the year. Unfortunately… it isn’t going to be. It initially had a lot of promise, but didn’t deliver the way I wanted it to.
I’ll get to what I was disappointed by in a minute, but I have been thinking about why I said it could be a ‘favourite of the year.’ Because I’ve logged what I read on various apps (Goodreads, which I’ve now logged out of permanently, Instagram, intermittently Twitter and now Substack), I tend to think of my reading within timeframes. Because Goodreads always gives you that funky summary at the end of the year, and its premise is to work towards an annual reading goal, it’s easy to see why I’ve fallen into that line of thinking.
Is it right? Does it matter? I don’t think so. I’m not really bothered about reading goals anymore, because I’m no longer that kind of reader. I don’t chronicle every book I read on Instagram (I used to post a review of every single one) and at the minute I’ve genuinely no idea how many books I’ve read so far in 2023. I do, however, still love end-of-year reflections, not just on the books I’ve read but in a lot of areas of my life. I like to use December as a time of reflection on what I’ve done in the last 11 months; what I’ve enjoyed, what I haven’t, what has worked for me and what I can carry forward. Even if I hadn't been in a Goodreads trap for years, I still think I’d ‘wrap up’ the year with favourite reads and a final count of the number of books that I’ve read. There’s a lot of satisfaction in it, especially when you remove quantity goals for the next year.
What is also interesting about this kind of thinking is how favourite reads of the year assert themselves. Kathryn Scanlan’s Kick the Latch was an extremely enjoyable read that I’ve talked about a lot, but I wasn’t sure it would be a 2023 favourite. However, the more I’ve thought about it, the more I appreciate what it achieves as a text. For that reason, it most definitely will be a favourite of the year, because it’s given me so much to chew on -- mostly in how Scanlan gathered her material (taped interviews), built on it and then presented it as fiction.
Kiellan’s My Men also does something interesting with form. It’s very vague and dreamy, and captures how its protagonist feels too much -- she feels too much love, too much shame, too much hate, she sees too much beauty. It’s based on the life of real-life serial killer Belle Gunness, a nineteenth-century Norwegian immigrant who is thought to have killed around 40 people in Chicago and La Porte, largely through poisoning and arson. If you weren’t aware that she was a murderer, this actually wouldn't be immediately obvious to you because Kiellan portrays the murders as things like ‘people going away’ or ‘dying of an enlarged heart.’ At first, I really liked this because it seemed as though she was really trying to capture an unthinkable reality and inner life of a person who actually seems a little bit addicted to killing. If this had been a novella or a long-ish short story, I think it would have been more successful for me, because this is a difficult narrative style to sustain over so many murders.
Something I appreciated about My Men was how Kiellan has an acknowledgments section for texts that have informed her writing, such as biographies of Gunness and the Netflix documentary on Joan Didion, The Center Will Not Hold. It’s not immediately obvious how this documentary has influenced My Men, but that’s often the case isn’t it -- we get ideas for things from unlikely sources.
The next book I read was an advanced copy of Fernanda Melchor’s This Is Not Miami, translated by Sophie Hughes, which is out this month. This is without a doubt one of my favourite books of the year, maybe even ever, but I’ll need more time with it to confirm that as that’s quite dramatic, lol. But it really is a possibility. I loved Melchor’s Hurricane Season and Paradais, and I think she’s one of the most exciting writers we have right now -- it’s a blessing that she’s been translated into English.
Unlike Hurricane Season and Paradais, This Is Not Miami is non-fiction. It’s made up of crónicas, a Latin-American genre of writing that blends reportage and autofiction. I think we’re missing something like this in English -- when personal essays use fact in the same way that crónicas’ do, the writer is accused of being bland and not emotional enough. On the other hand, journalism about, for example, crime or social issues is often quite dry, and we aren’t offered insight into why the person writing about it is invested in it all (if they even are). This style of writing sits comfortably in the middle, as Melchor brings in just enough of herself to see why the particular topic she’s writing about is important to her, personally, while also displaying good research and commentary. She writes about how she got obsessed with UFOs as a child, as her and her sibling thought that they saw one. She researched them as much as she could, and she found that there were a few individuals in Mexico who kept track of ‘inexplicable’ lights in the sky. As an older person, Melchor concedes that these lights were often the lights from cartel planes moving illegal cargo or foot soldiers, and the UFO ‘researchers’ were conspiracy theorists. What she does extremely successfully is show us what it is like to grow up as a normal, imaginative child in a city like Veracruz, where gangs and illegal trade run rife, while also showing us quirks of Mexico such as the few alien-obsessed people who are given screen and radio time.
The stand-out story for me is ‘The House on El Estero’, a haunted house story told to her by her first husband. There is so much in this story to discover that I won’t outline it in detail, but this is a really excellent look at superstition in Mexican society. It’s also incredibly scary -- some parts sickeningly so. Melchor is a gifted storyteller.
The next book that I read was Susanna Moore’s latest, The Lost Wife (2023). I think everybody is aware of how much I loved In The Cut (1995), and I was extremely excited about the timing of a new novel coming out not long after I read it. I liked this a lot, but it’s not on the same level as In The Cut (although this is a very difficult level to achieve). It’s a frontier novel (very thrilling to me because of my love of Westerns), loosely based on the life of a woman called Sarah Wakefield. The protagonist is Sarah Brinton, a woman who starts the narrative on the run from an abusive husband, on her way to a friend who has written to her to come and join her. Sarah takes a pretty perilous journey across America to get to her, and once she arrives she ends up in a bit of trouble. Eventually, she marries a local doctor and has two children with him, moving to an agency settlement in Minnesota. She and her husband are on good terms with the local Sioux people, until war breaks out as a result of the Civil War impeding the delivery of government payments to Native people.
This is a fascinating look at the nineteenth-century prairies, and how relations between white people and Native Americans developed over time. Sarah, who has spent most of her life rejected and alone, is a woman who is hard to convince of anything, and so she isn’t fazed by white people’s embellished accounts of ‘savagery’. This is a constant theme throughout the novel, which comes into difficulties when the reality of war and war tactics are made manifest. She’s an extremely interesting protagonist, which I feel Moore does well -- the women who are at the centre of her novels are very human. There is a lot to love in The Lost Wife.
The last book I read, just now actually, which is why this newsletter is late, was Mark Hyatt’s Love, Leda (2023). Another extremely special novel that will most likely be a favourite of the year, and maybe also ever. Hyatt is a man who wasn’t known for writing when he was alive, and so his poetry and now, this ‘lost’ novel, have mostly been published posthumously. Hyatt had what people love to call a ‘tragic life’; his mother died when he was five, he had a volatile relationship with his father, he did not receive any formal schooling and so only learned to read and write as an adult, and he committed suicide in his early 30s. He was gay at a time when it was extremely dangerous to be so, and the writing of this novel predates the Sexual Offences Act of 1967.
As the afterward by Luke Roberts notes, there are elements of Hyatt’s life story in Love, Leda, especially in protagonist Leda’s relationship with his family. This is, however, not a special book because it encapsulates the sadness of Hyatt’s personal circumstances, but because this is an exquisitely written novel. There were sentences in it that made me feel real, unfltered joy, such as:
As a person of many guilts, I feel that the whole value of my body and my mind is built on instincts.
When plastic goods no longer look perfect you throw them out. People do the same with friendships as both are cheap.
Surely if one’s self can love Christ for what He was and what He did, then one’s self should be able to love modern man? But people call it something different these days. The dead man becomes religion; the living becomes homosexuality.
This is a book full of details, written by a person who notices everything. The sentences are clean and largely unembellished, with random drifts into little metaphors that make complete sense (cat’s eyes looking like watery clocks, the world as a sea of words). Leda is practically homeless, staying at friend’s houses and day jobs as he needs them, and so we see the London that he zips through as a kind of chaotic jumble that is full of transactions (emotional and monetary), and full of movement. The detail about the transactions is constant, with Leda -- who professes not to care about anything or the way that he lives his life -- constantly narrating the money he spends, who he gives it to, and what change he receives. I still don’t quite know what a sixpence is, but I appreciated Leda’s spending of them as a fine narrative detail.
Books on my radar
I picked up William Gay’s Twilight (2006) in a charity shop this week, which looks promising. Also very different to the vampire books.