SEVEN RECENT READS

Notwithstanding my January 7th Substack ramble about reading less, books remain essential, whether in physical form or on Kindle, whether reading them or writing them. Here are seven titles that have engaged me lately.

Pedro Paramo, Juan Rulfo (new translation by Douglas J. Weatherford). 

First published in 1955, this Mexican novel is considered an icon of Latin American literature, credited with being the foundational text of magical realism. (Gabriel Garia Marquez claimed it inspired the writing of A Hundred Years of Solitude.) Mexican writers have complained that Pedro Paramo is undervalued as a classic of world literature; now with this translation, some prominent Mexican authors such as Valeria Luiselli feel the book finally has a version in English it deserves, more colloquial and closer in spirit to the original. I just finished it, and while I found it wonderfully strange, lyrical and haunting, it remains difficult to discern why it shook the literary earth. 

Biography of X, Catharine Lacey. 

This recent novel is a fictional biography about a fictional woman - a now-dead, controversial artist widely known as X. Much of it is set in the downtown New York art world of the 1980’s. So far - I’m partway through - I find it full of invention and surprise. (For example, it imagines the U.S. divided in 1945 into Southern and Northern Territories.) This is an ambitious, intriguing, original tour-de-force, among the more memorable and challenging American novels I’ve read in a while.

The Maniac, Benjamin Labatut. 

Getting me to read a book about mathematics or those who practice it is near impossible. But I found this Chilean author’s When We Cease to Understand the World - a quasi-novel about figures including Heisenberg, Bohr, Einstein and Godel - riveting. The new one tells of more mad mathematicians, along with epic matches in the ancient game of Go that took place a few years ago between Google’s AI machine AlphaGo and the Korean grandmaster Lee Sedol. Labatut toys provocatively with the line separating fiction and “reality”.

The Trouble with Happiness, Tove Ditlivsen. 

This book of stories follows upon the recent success in English of Ditlivsen’s The Copenhagen Trilogy. Set in and around the World War Two years, in a working-class neighborhood of Copenhagen, her compelling narratives of fatal romance, addiction, and art are uncanny and hard to put down. A Danish writer tells me that Danes are fed Ditlevsen’s poetry and stories “like mother’s milk” from childhood. For the rest of us, she’s a fresh revelation. 

The Iliad, Homer (new translation by Emily Watson). 

I was probably eighteen when I was assigned The Iliad in an English class along with, of course, The Odyssey. This shining, propulsive new version is aided by the translator’s introductory comments helping explain the poetic conventions and procedures of the ancient text, rendering the poem itself supple and alive.

The Half Known Life, Pico Iyer. 

I opened this book by the master travel writer anticipating a compendium of his travel articles but soon found myself in deeper waters: dark, reflective pieces on mortality set in locales as diverse as Sri Lanka, Varanasi, North Korea and London. A book to take you places on earth you most likely haven’t been, and set you to thinking about what existence is all about. 

Stella Maris, Cormac McCarthy. 

I was never a McCarthy acolyte, but his paired final works come as a rich surprise. More math here, believe it or not. This novel, following upon its companion work, The Passenger, is simply a conversation between a psychiatrist and his patient, a young woman, math prodigy, and sister of the protagonist of the other novel, which opened upon her suicide. I found Stella Maris deft, hypnotic, thrilling. It features as well a spectral, hallucinated character as much out of William Burroughs as McCarthy.