Good evening!
It feels flippant to be writing and sending out a newsletter on reading without mentioning the current climate. I hope everyone is well and bearing up well during a week of horrendous news around the world. I feel like I’m constantly refreshing my phone looking at updates.
If you’d like to buy me a coffee, on Ko-Fi, you can do here 🙂 - or, better yet, donate some money towards earthquake relief for Afghanistan or MAP to help people on the ground in Gaza.
Just a heads up that there probs won’t be a newsletter next week, or it will be late, because I am going on holiday on Tuesday.
What I’ve been reading this week and what I think about it
The first book I read was Sylvia Molloy’s Dislocations,translated by Jennifer Croft (2022). I read this over two sittings as it’s very slim, but it is so unbelievably powerful. It’s made up of short passages made up of anecdotes and memories as Molloy visits her close friend who is declining from an age-related memory disease -- it’s not specified but it sounds like Alzheimer’s. Molloy goes over what her friend is like now, how they used to be and muses on things like the nature of memory, friendship and language, as she zips between her native Argentina and the United States. It reminded me a lot of Annie Ernaux’s writing.
After reading this I just kind of naively thought that there would be more of Molloy in translation, but after several google searches it doesn’t look like there is. I was so taken by Dislocations that I started digging into Molloy as much as I could, and discovered that she lived and taught in America, was a lesbian who had a wife, and that she died last year. I found this piece on her by Andrea Weiss in The Gay and Lesbian Review published after her death, which outlines some of her life as well as Weiss’ own interactions with her. I was particularly taken by how she would switch between Spanish and English without really realising -- Weiss recounts how, if a person used even one word in English, Molloy would answer them completely in the same language, seemingly unaware that a moment ago she had been speaking Spanish. I felt that this summed up the reading of Dislocations, which was (by nature of it being a translated text) in English, but had many musings on the nature of language. Her friend, like her, spoke both languages fluently, but when her disease took its full hold she could only speak her native language. If somebody gave her something to translate, however, she could do it easily, almost like muscle memory. It’s such a fascinating image that really struck me and I’ve been thinking about it a lot.
The next book I read was a doozy, I’m sad to report. It was The Odyssey by Lara Williams and I really did not like it. It’s about a woman who works on a huge cruise ship and gets accepted into a programme for gifted employees, led by the captain of the ship. It’s meant to be a loose retelling of Homer’s Odyssey, which I couldn’t really see -- I’ve read the original text but ages ago, and I wasn’t invested enough to hunt for the similarities. It started off positively, setting out the premise and the eerie atmosphere quite well, but it just absolutely did not deliver on so many levels for me.
I think a big issue for me was Williams’ writing itself. There were often lines in it which sounded good on their own, but were completely untethered from anything else in the text. There was one scene in which the protagonist is serving a woman in the gift shop she works in, and she describes what she is wearing and what she looks like (she makes her sound ancient even though she says that she is in her late 60s, which is not old), and then finishes with something like ‘She made me want to close my eyes and sleep for years.’ What does that mean, when we get down to it? I really hate when writers prioritise sounding intelligent over writing things of actual worth, and it was a pattern that was repeated too many times for it not to be jarring.
This was actually my overall impression of the novel -- it was bitty and had nothing to it. Soooo many blurbs called Williams’ writing satirical, but I feel like there needs to be some depth to the representations of the social elements you are trying to criticise for it to be an effective criticism. I also felt like it was extremely underdeveloped, with a lot of elements seeming really half-baked and hidden by the wishy-washy style of narration. Not for me, thank you.
I’ve been crocheting a lot this week, and because I need to count I can’t really watch films so I have been listening to interviews. This one between Gwendoline Riley and Merve Emre when Riley’s books First Love and My Phantoms were published in the US last year, was particularly good. I loved how Riley was not afraid to say she didn’t know the answer to things, which is a brave thing to do, especially if you’re a woman in an academic or literary space. A lot of other people would have talked their way around a point in order to sound they knew what they were talking about and to ‘justify’ their being there, but instead she was ready to admit she couldn’t answer to some interpretations of her work.
I’m currently reading My Tender Matador by Pedro Lemebel, translated by Katherine Silver (2003). Now this is much more my thing than my last read -- it’s about an ageing drag queen who falls in love with a revolutionary during the Pinochet regime in Chile. I don’t think it has a UK publisher as the copy I have is imported (I found it in Waterstone’s -- clearly a member of staff is a fan and demanded it be brought in, which I always appreciate). I love it so far.
Books on my radar
I stopped by the Oxfam on Bold Street yesterday, which was very plentifully stocked, especially since my last visit. It had a huge number of left-wing political books in which was fun to rifle through. I got a copy of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), which I’ve never read, The Fran Lebowitz Reader (2023), The Tiger by Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa (1958) -- which I had actually picked up and put back down again in Waterstone’s the day before, after Melissa Broder said she loved him! -- and The Shutter of Snow by Emily Holmes Coleman (1930)