Good evening!
There are quite a lot more of you here this week than there was when I sent out my last newsletter. On Sunday, The Observer listed Jess White Reads Books as one of the ‘33 best’ substacks to sign up to, something I would strongly contest but was very grateful for nonetheless. I started writing this a year ago as a kind of early-internet type blog where I dumped my thoughts every week with very little regard for engagement and stats. I just wanted to write about what I read, because that is the main thing I do. It has never felt like a chore, and I hope it never does.
I think it would be good to re-introduce myself. I am a final stage PhD student at the University of Liverpool, researching representations of the textile industry and textile work in Victorian Literature. I am currently editing it, which I moan about a lot. I spent some time as a graduate teaching assistant, mainly teaching Victorian lit. For a short time, I was the administrator for the Centre of New and International Writing in the Department of English, and I am also part of the team that runs the department’s podcast, The Bibliography.
I am a culture writer, and my work has featured in The Guardian, The Faber Journal, Little White Lies, i-D, Dazed and The Face. I pop in and out of researching for the BBC podcast You’re Dead To Me after I did an internship with them back in 2020 -- most recently I worked on the Christmas episode on Charles Dickens. I also write fiction; my short story ‘The Rialto’ was published in The London Magazine. I am currently (attempting to) write a novel about old Hollywood. I also interview authors on a semi-regular basis at The West Kirby Bookshop.
I also work in a hotel part-time, and I have an Etsy shop, where I make and sell book sleeves.
I mainly both read and write this newsletter in coffee shops, and so, if you’d like to buy me a coffee, on Ko-Fi, you can do here 🙂 I’m currently enjoying a pumpkin spice latte, as everyone should be.
What I’ve been reading this week and what I think about it
To the main event. Last week I was part way through Giorgio Bassani’s Within the Walls (1956), the first book of The Novel of Ferrara, translated by Jamie McKendrick. I enjoyed this; it is essentially made up of short stories set in the Italian city of Ferrara with characters and events that interconnect. I’m not in a rush to read the remaining books that make up the novel, but I think I will eventually. For a slim book, it’s incredibly dense, and I found myself taking my time with it, even taking a break to read something else at one point. The central aspect is its concentration on post-war life in Italy for the Jewish community, which is weaved in and out of people’s lives. A character might not be Jewish themselves but they might fancy someone who is, or they might be strongly connected to someone in some capacity that is Jewish. The nuances of being Jewish in a previously (extremely) hostile setting is explored from a multitude of angles.
As I mentioned last week, the Holocaust haunts the text in a Derridean capacity. One of the strongest, if not the strongest, characters is Geo Josz, the only person to survive the concentration camps from his family. He returns to Ferrara in time to laugh at the person writing his name on the city’s wall of remembrance because, against it all, he has survived. He begins to take back what was his before the war, to the annoyance of the local people who would rather ‘move on.’ This was very good at showing how people actually ‘remember’ traumatic events that they would rather forget, because it means that they would have to interrogate their own participation.
My favourite story was ‘The Final Years of Clelia Trotti’, which had another incredibly strong character, that of Clelia Trotti herself. Trotti is an anti-Fascist living in a kind of limbo state, as she is watched by Mussolini’s henchmen and has to regularly report to the local police station, and be at home during the night. She begins as a shadowy figure -- well, she actually begins dead, as the story starts at her funeral, but when she is actually introduced as a character through memory, she begins shadowy. The protagonist is trying to find her after hearing that she has done good work in her anti-racism and anti-fascism stance, and he comes into many obstacles, not limited to Clelia’s stout, staunch sister. She and the young man strike up a friendship that sees her pushing the limits of her curfew and the safety she has found in her older age. It’s a moving story about an ageing revolutionary.
I mentioned above that I took a break from Within the Walls, in which I read Sheila Heti’s Pure Colour (2022). This is a novel that I started out loving, but I felt like it tapered off for me somewhere around the middle, when she was talking about leaves a lot. It opens with the hypothesis that the world we live in is a first draft by God in order for him to see the mistakes that he has made in his initial creation. In the second draft, these mistakes will be ironed out. The protagonist is Mira, a young woman living away from home and her loving father for the first time, to attend college. She becomes enamoured with a woman called Annie, and in this relationship she makes a lot of the mistakes that God will do away with in his second go at things.
I really liked the concept that frames the text -- that of the creation process -- which we’re left to make up our minds on whether this is actually God’s thinking, or a way for Mira to conceptualise the things that happen to her. Her life is pervaded by sadness, and so it makes sense that this is a coping strategy. It’s a strange, otherworldly text that has room for both possibilities, however, which was what I mainly appreciated about it. It put me in mind of a lot of other texts but in a ‘almost-but-not-quite’ way; The Employees by Olga Ravn, translated by Martin Aitkin (2020) for one, The Idiot by Elif Batuman (2017) for another, as well as Anne Boyer’s Garments Against Women (2015). All very good pieces of writing that have elements of feeling alien in university (The Idiot), social commentary that utilises prose-poetry (Garments Against Women) and short, ethereal chapters (The Employees) -- aspects that make up the fabric of Pure Colour.
I did feel like it weakened in the middle, and picked up a lot near the end, but it is a book that I enjoyed a lot. There is a lot of commentary in it that could stand as short essays,my favourite being one about Mira can’t stop playing a ‘jewel game’ on her phone, and she thinks through this as a coping mechanism. This really struck me as someone who loves little phone games and I think I might write an essay about it, springboarding off Heti’s writing on it.
I had the opposite experience that I had with Pure Colour with Diamela Eltit’s Never Did the Fire, translated by Daniel Hahn (2021). I started off thinking that I wouldn’t really enjoy it, but finished marvelling at how it is an extraordinary feat of writing. Eltit is extremely well-known and well-decorated in her native Chile, having won multiple awards and fellowships at home and over South America. She is barely translated into English, which I think is a real shame -- I’m grateful that the fantastic Charco Press have published her. (This also gives me the willies a bit. We’re so reliant on translators to introduce us to writers that would otherwise be alien to us if we not only don’t speak the language of another country, but also aren’t intimately au fait with its culture. It makes me question how many writers we all miss out on without the aid of translators. Anyway, pay, support and celebrate translators).
Never Did The Fire centres on two ex-revolutionaries, who rebelled against the Pinochet regime (as Eltit herself did). They are getting old and are losing their faith as they deal with their ageing bodies and the cost of cigarettes. The premise drew me in, because it’s rare to see depictions of revolutionaries not actually enacting revolution, but as tired people after the fact, just trying to get by, and dealing with how they have given up. It’s told in an almost stream of consciousness, which is why I thought I might not gel with it. I don’t have an issue with stream of consciousness, but I wasn’t sure what Eltit’s aim was in doing it, and so I felt a bit bamboozled. It became evident, however, that she is invested in the intimacies of care, of pain and of memory, and so this narrative form actually serves the narrative extremely well. At times, there are great blocks of text that might centre on a two word exchange between the protagonist and her partner, unpicking the history in what has been said, what emotions were felt, what emotions were intended to be elicited in the words used, and so on. It’s not for everyone, but I loved it.
I’m now about 100 pages into a reread of William Morris’ News From Nowhere (1890). I actually didn’t intend to properly reread this, but I started and found myself continuing so I might as well. I intended to skim through it in order to edit my writing on it for my thesis, but I’m really enjoying it as a revisited text. I like this novel, and Morris, a lot, despite being fully aware of its (and his) flaws. More next week.
Books on my radar
I was sent an advance copy of Sheila Heti’s Alphabetical Diaries (2024) by Fitzcarraldo Editions, which is what pushed me to pick up Pure Colour. Despite what I’ve said above, I do admire Heti as a writer, and this one sounds very interesting -- it charts ten years of thoughts that have been written down by Heti, then put in alphabetical order. You can’t deny that she runs with a fun idea.
I was also sent an advance copy of Yiyun Li’s Wednesday’s Child (2023) by 4th Estate, which has an extremely gorgeous cover. More decadent covers!