Good evening! Happy St. Patricks day.
This week has seemed very long and I’m completely done in, and I’m ready for the weekend. Unsure if any of this newsletter will be coherent, but I am committed to the weekly post, so we’ll see.
What I’ve been reading this week and what I think about it
I read two books this week, one I enjoyed, and one I didn’t enjoy so much. Of the actual books themselves, I don’t have too much to say, but I do think it's interesting how I came across both of them.
The first was Adrian Duncan’s A Sabbatical in Leipzig (2020) (always feel for people whose books came out in 2020), a book and writer I hadn’t heard of more than two weeks ago. This was one of those lovely finds in a bookshop, when you have a lot of time and actually look at their selection instead of marching in with a title in mind. It was a complete cover sell; both the colour green and the photo of Richard Serra’s dominating Guggenheim architectural piece on the front are really striking.
The blurb also seemed good. It’s about an older man living in Bilbao, and is set over the course of a single morning. He is Irish, but has been away from Ireland for most of his life, living in London, then Germany, and now Spain. During his years in Germany, he was largely on sabbatical from his career as a bridge engineer after a project he worked on in France failed spectacularly. He lived with his long-term partner Catherine, and the nature of their relationships and his mental well-being is slowly revealed over the course of the text. It’s a slow-moving, reflective novel, as the protagonist takes in the details of his immediate surroundings, as well as how his life has gone. What I liked about it most is how it captured association, and how objects and time can be remembered through the lens of something completely unconnected to it. For example, a person’s relationship with a well-loved photo can bring back memories of things seemingly unconnected to the photo, because of where the photo has been handled, who has made a comment on the photo, where the photo has been taken and what other memories are associated with that setting, etc. We end up with an impression of things and places that are sometimes so far removed from the thing/place as it actually exists.
I didn’t buy it straight away, but I thought about it for a few days and thought, yes, that’s the kind of book I’d like to read. Since putting it back on the shelf, I had seen Duncan’ name mentioned online a couple of times, probably only because I was more inclined to notice him after finding his book.
It’s interesting who gets talked about online. Duncan is fine -- he’s successful, has won awards and is highly regarded among other writers of quality. I think there is a belief that online book communities are the entirety of book culture, and if you’re being spoken of in those spaces then you’ve made it, and if you’re not then you’ve failed. This, obviously, isn’t the case, and I think it speaks to how certain demographics value ‘success’. The majority of people online are younger, and have grown up with the internet as a tool of both validation and networking, so it’s easy for them to think that anything outside of these circles is not worth validating or associating with.
This doesn’t really have anything to do with Duncan, but I have been reflecting on these kinds of things when I realised I had never heard of him, and how that skewed my initial perception of him. Because I hadn’t heard anybody saying that he was good, I was hesitant to pick his book up. Recommendations go a long way, but sometimes it’s nice to go out and find things by yourself.
The other book I read this week, which has been talked about a lot online, is Saba Sams’ Send Nudes (2022). This was off to a promising start, with a really brilliant story called ‘Tinderloin’ about a 16 year old girl who is the daughter of a butcher, and who uses Tinder to meet an older man. The narrative is really good, and was genuinely quite surprising in how it developed.
Throughout the rest of the collection, there were random little moments of great prose, as well as narratives that seemed like they were going in a promising direction. On the whole, however, I found it to be underwhelming, with little in the way of being innovative or new. I don’t need ‘new’ every time I read something, but I do feel like the stories were grasping for a uniqueness that ultimately made them overly laboured, and that wore their influences a little heavily. Not for me, but not everything can be!
Books on my radar
I’m in the mood for something pacey, so I might pick up my copy of Eric Ambler’s Cause for Alarm (1938). It’s a spy thriller set in fascist Italy, so it could well do the job.
I also need something dependable, so I think I might read something by Natalie Ginzburg soon. I have Family Lexicon (1963) to read, bought in New york last year.