Holiday Reading Recommendations
Adam Levy, Publisher
The Hundreds by Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart (Duke University Press) is a work of experimental criticism, comprising prose poems in hundred-word units or multiples. The constraint “[induces] form without relieving the pressure of form,” allowing Berlant and Stewart to alight on an idea, a moment, a mood, a politics of collaboration, a theory of work, a lesson in writing: “Worlds are already so compositionally full that the question is not what to stay with but how to feel your way in.”
If You Kept a Record of Sins by Andrea Bajani, translated from the Italian by Elizabeth Harris (Archipelago), is about a man following in the footsteps of a ghost. He’s traveled to Bucharest to bury and settle the affairs of his estranged mother, who left the family over a period of years to make a life around her business in Romania. Holding up his mother’s gradual separation beside the present, Bajani shows that grief is not a thing you move past but move through, and Harris’s translation captures the tenderness and melancholy of the journey.
Sato the Rabbit by Yuki Ainoya, translated from the Japanese by Michael Blaskowsky (Enchanted Lion), is the classic boy becomes rabbit story. Finding himself transformed, Sato moves between whimsical dream-fields, finding escape and curiosity in everyday things. At an observatory Sato catches stars with a net. On a rainy day Sato steps through a puddle and into the clouds. There’s a steaming pot of coffee inside a walnut and a sliced watermelon is a ship on the open sea. Imagine a Mark Mothersbaugh score and you could be inside a Wes Anderson storyboard. I’ve read Sato over 100 times, sometimes at the request of our two-year-old son.
Ashley Nelson Levy, Publisher
This book helped us pass the time, writes Marguerite Duras in her introduction to Practicalities (Grove), a work of nonfiction translated by Barbara Bray. The book was born out of conversations between Duras and Jérôme Beaujour that were transcribed and then later revised and edited by the two of them. The insistence on its non-bookness is initially what made it appealing to me. If it’s true that every book must have a raison d'être, this isn’t a book at all, Duras writes. Let’s just say it’s a book intended to be read. But once I began reading, the potency of Duras’s opinions on alcohol, men, writers’ bodies, her own life and writing and love affairs, motherhood, Paris, to name a few, overtook the appeal of the project and it was just the directness of the writing that absorbed me. These thought collections, I suppose they could be called, are at times mournful, at times biting, at times tender, and almost always provocative. They meander, and without apology. It’s possible that, amid the second year of a pandemic, I was looking for something cruder, something born out of long talks in late hours, born to pass the time, as we’ve all been hoping to do. For months I’ve been carrying around this description of writing with me:
What you’re going to write is already there in the darkness. It’s as if writing were something outside you, in a tangle of tenses: between writing and having written; having written and having to go on writing; between knowing and not knowing what it’s all about .… It isn’t the transition Aristotle speaks of, from potential to actual being. It isn’t a translation. It’s not a matter of passing from one state to another. It’s a matter of deciphering something already there ....
I like thinking of the book this way, too, as a deciphering. I also like that the book holds the right to be flexible, to change its mind on the sentiments offered. The book represents, in Duras’s words, what I think sometimes, some days, of some things. Either way, I’m here for the ride.
Liza St. James, Associate Editor
“I grew convinced that following water, flowing with it, would be a way of getting under the skin of things, of learning something new,” writes Roger Deakin at the start of Waterlog: A Swimmer’s Journey Through Britain (Tin House). Inspired by the character Ned Merrill, from John Cheever’s “The Swimmer,” who swims home from a party via a string of neighbors’ pools, Deakin sets out on a swimming adventure, channeling Merrill: “The day was beautiful and… a long swim might enlarge and celebrate its beauty.”
I learned to swim at a pool just blocks from the Pacific Ocean, then swam for years on a team that practiced at a pool, also near the sea. I was in Iceland recently, staying in a village next to a geothermal lake, when I read Waterlog. I swam daily in the public pool next to the lake, appreciative of its predictability, as well as the adjacent hot tub, or “hot pot.” Still, the most memorable swims of my time there—in the lake itself, in a river, in a “secret” swimming hole—were enhanced by reading Waterlog, a chronicle of Deakin’s outdoor swims throughout Britain.
In one section, Deakin describes an encounter with an otter: “We can scarcely be said to have communed, yet I can replay every frame of the brief encounter in slow motion, right down to the just-vacated wet log rolling back into balance, oscillating slightly.” Elated, yet ashamed to have interrupted the otter, he goes on to note that “otters came within a whisker of extinction” and to describe a training session in animal tracking he’d taken, which he likens to wine tasting: “You waved the poos under your nose, sniffed, then passed on the sample to your neighbor.”
Deakin’s excited observations and irreverent humor have kept me company back in New York as I dream of my next swims—as has the magic of his “frog’s-eye view”: “Then the rain eased and the reflected heavens were full of tiny dancers: water sprites springing up on tiptoe like bright pins over the surface. It was raining water sprites.”