New home

 This blog has a new home! I made myself an actual website, kasiareads.com, which has links to the various things I've written, translation projects, etc, and that's where the blog will be from now on. I feel a little sad about it, because wow, I've been blogging at this url (albeit sporadically), for over 10 years! Gosh! But hopefully this one will remain up as an archive, and the new one will be just as good, or even better. At very least, it has an option to subscribe, if you're into that kind of thing...

Head over to https://kasiareads.com/blog/ for more!

PS. Seem worth noting for posterity that according to the stats, the all time views of this blog are 141,307, and there are 708 total posts. I don't know what the most popular post was; I thought it was the one on Forrest Gump, which generated a handful of angry comments, who would have thought, but the data on search terms that led people to the site included "Bitter Feast spoilers", and I see that the post on Bitter Feast (which I have no memory of) had 700-some hits, as opposed to the 500-some for Mr Gump. So who knows.

Favorite Books of 2021

 My favorite books published in 2021 were...

Ghost in the throat, Doireann Ní Ghriofa

No one is talking about this, Patricia Lockwood

Fake accounts, Lauren Oyler

Detransition, baby, Torrey Peters

Winter in Sokcho, Elisa Shua Dushapin, tr. Aneesa Abbas Higgins

Tomorrow sex will be good again, Katherine Angel

Migratory birds, Mariana Oliver, tr. Julia Sanches

Interior, Chinatown, Charles Yu

Keeping the House, Tice Cin

 

And overall, favorite things I read this year...

 

 

Garden by the sea, Mercè Rodoreda, tr. Maruxa Relaño and Martha Tennent

Bright dead things, Ada Limón

Minor feelings, Cathy Park Hong

The biggest bluff, Maria Konnikova

Dancer from the dance, Andrew Holleran

Collected Body, Valzhyna Mort

BTTM FDRS, Ezra Clayton Daniels and Ben Passmore

Spare room, Helen Garner

Emperor’s Babe, Bernardine Evaristo

Sky country, Christine Kitano

Voices from Chernobyl, Svetlana Alexievich, tr Keith Gessen

Moon of the Crusted Snow, Waubgeshig Rice

 

Here's to more good books, and more time to write about them, in 2022! Happy New Year, everyone!

Small Things Like These, Claire Keegan

 I heard about this one from a Guardian article of best books of the year, chosen by various authors — a format I especially enjoy, and this one seems particularly good. It was chosen by Damon Galgut, whom I haven't read but want to, and was particularly appealing because it was one of two "slender" novels that he recommended. I love a short book! Further research informed me that it's a Christmas novel (but not the treacly kind), so boom, I was sold. And it is very, very good. 

I guess it would best be called a novella, for various technical reasons, but in simple terms — because the plot feels like a contextualized snippet, but the inner world of the character is incredibly developed. Indeed, what makes the book so extraordinary is the richness of the setting. Some of this, I suspect, is the Irishness of it (there's a reason that Angela's Ashes was so popular. Ireland is special.) And this is a wonderfully evocative slice of small town Irish life. It's tender, and tough, and lovely. 

But what really sets it apart is the finely tuned balance of good and evil. The book is a moral drama, a subtle reckoning with the atrocity of the Magdalene laundries and people's complicity and complacence, and the art of it hinges on how it threads the needle of realism and idealism. It's a quietly suspenseful book; one that brilliantly produces a deeply unsettling sense of dread and horror. A powerful indictment of these horrific institutions, but not a bombastic one. Exactly the kind of Christmas story I wanted, in these grim times.

Moon of the Crusted Snow, Waubgeshig Rice

 I don't read apocalyptic fiction all that often, but this one, which has a snowy cover and a book jacket that talks about winter looming, kind of called to me as a good onset-of-cold-weather read, and boy was it ever. I listened to the audiobook, which has an especially excellent narrator, and this book blew me away. What makes it so brilliant, I think, is that it avoids a lot of the tedium of having to theorize/explain how the world ends that other apocalypse fictions are essentially centered around, and instead hones in on the question of what it means, really — how does life go on? Because the story takes place on an Anishinaabe reservation, this question is very different from what it would be elsewhere, and the events described are subtly folded into a longer history of the Anishinaabe people. The book is deliciously suspenseful and absolutely riveting, and very very real about the human casualties, but without being sensationalistically awful. It's a remarkable feat of storytelling.

The story begins with a sense of unease — a power outage, phone lines down — but it's a mild one, because after all, as the various characters remark to one another, this kind of thing happens all the time on the rez, just usually not all at once. The beginning of the book moves slowly, doing a lot of the work of world-building, and establishing a sense of isolation and detachment from the Canadian society beyond. We get to know and love our characters, and to learn about their lives. But tension and dread are building. Two young boys return from college in Toronto with grim tidings about the world's collapse, and then a stranger arrives. The community is confronted with the question of how to survive the harsh winter without any electricity or supplies from the outside world. And the rest of the book just dwells in that discomfort, exploring its nuances. It's absolutely brilliant.

In the Eye of the Wild, by Nastassja Martin

 I've got a new review essay up at the KGB Bar Lit Magazine, check it out! On Nastassja Martin's In the Eye of the Wild and how the romance of the anthropologist has migrated over to stories of human-animal encounter.

I WIll Die in a Foreign Land, by Kalani Pickhart

Note: what follows is slightly spoiler-y: I don't give away anything specific, but I talk about the structure of the plot, so it tells you something about what will happen (though I suspect many will guess long before they reach the end).

I was just reminding you all recently how much I hate it when a novel does that thing where multiple unrelated seemingly stories turn out to be connected... Thinking about it more, I was reflecting that it's one of the most blatantly fictional devices out there — not that it's unrealistic, exactly, because this is certainly a thing that happens in the world, but that it always feels overdetermined (because, of course, it is!). Whenever it happens in 18th century (or earlier) texts I'm teaching, my students roll their eyes and see it as ridiculous, but they seem to love it in contemporary stuff. Whereas I generally find it charming in those earlier works, but the present-day version annoys the hell out of me.  I think the difference is that in modern-day works, the revelation in laced with dramatic irony: we, the readers, know, but the characters don't. So the point is a kind of wonder at how the world works, that the characters don't get to share in, or respond to, and I suppose the deeper point is to also signal to us that perhaps, we are experiencing such things as well, without being aware of them (in fact, we almost certainly are), wow, isn't the world amazing! I mean, it is, and that is an effective way that fiction can illuminate this aspect, but it's just really, really overused. 

It especially bugged me in this book because it really wasn't necessary! There was already a perfectly reasonable connection between the characters — they were all experiencing the Euromaidan protests in Kiev in 2013, and interacting with each other as a result. That was sufficient! I didn't need more! I think I felt particularly cheated because I enjoyed the book SO much for the first 2/3 of it, and I didn't realize that it was heading in that direction, though of course in retrospect, I totally should have.

But the beginning is great, it totally sucks you in, the characters are complex and absorbing, and it's telling a story about an event that I care about (I was actually in Kiev a few weeks before the protests started, to celebrate my birthday with my good friend who was living there and working on a dissertation, and who was also at the Maidan, and whose book ended up being about the revolution as a result). It was a really big deal, and I suspect that in our fast-moving new cycle, globalized world, etc, etc, not enough people really know about it. Anyhow, this is a very good book, and one that most people without my grumpy pet peeves will absolutely relish — an excellent holiday gift.

Fake Accounts, Lauren Oyler

 I've been enjoying Lauren Oyler's critical essays for awhile (this recent one, on the new Sebald biography, is absolutely brilliant), and, full disclosure, have also been enjoying hanging out with her and talking to her about literature and people and life, etc. I hadn't gotten her book yet, despite being curious about it, because I refuse to buy books in hardcover, but then she gave me a copy, so yay, I could read it! And surprise surprise (not really), it's great. 

There are so few really funny novelists working today — the only two contemporary writers who have really made me laugh that spring immediately to mind are Maria Semple and Taffy Brodesser-Akner — so it was such a treat to launch into a book that literally had me cackling on damn near every page. It is very, very funny. Oyler has a razor-sharp wit, and, like the best Millenial authors, finds the perfect balance between a wry irony and a vulnerability that evinces a commitment to being a part of the world; a sense of proportion that ensures that the narrative doesn't remain suspended in the clouds mocking the mere mortals below. 

The novel is surprising, less because of the more spectacular plot fireworks of the opening, as for the slow, subtle work that follows them. It made me reach once again for Stephanie Insley Hershinow's Born Yesterday, a book that brilliantly analyzes (18th-century) realist novels in which characters resolutely do NOT develop (thereby showing us new things about our idea of character, and realism as a form. It's just so smart, and has made me notice things about novels featuring young women protagonists that I otherwise wouldn't), because here, too, we have a story about a character who doesn't know what to do with herself, which therefore turns out to be a story in which not much really happens. Or so it seems, because there isn't the neat and tidy plot of Bildung that we tend to expect — the formative lessons of the Grand Tour that bring some kind of clarity and purpose to the protagonist's life. 

But actually, all kinds of things are happening — indeed, the book is a startlingly accurate portrayal of what it's like to be an American living abroad on a day-to-day basis, rather than in the tidied up Story of An American Living Abroad version. The little frustrations, the odd quirks you notice about the culture, the loneliness, the sense that you're trying to be cosmopolitan and interesting, or perhaps the main character in the Story of An American Living Abroad, while suspecting/worrying that maybe your life... isn't really all that interesting. There was an added pleasure in it, for me, because I lived in Berlin for a year in high school, and have had my own sort of experience of being a confused young woman in that city, and so some things were extra familiar, but also from the perspective of an older person, in a Berlin that has changed in some ways but not others (and is still one of the greatest cities in the world, just saying). 

It's also interesting, as a work of realism, for the way that it minutely describes various things that seem utterly obvious, but are of course incredibly of-the-moment. So, for instance, what an iPhone home screen looks like, how you open an app, how instagram works. It's startling at first, and then incredibly fascinating (and really well done — if you've never tried to write descriptions like that, I'm telling you, it's HARD. I used give my comp students an assignment along such lines and I stopped because they were terrible and reading them was no fun). In many ways, the novel is a really precise ethnography of a very specific cultural moment.

Finally, amidst all this apparent lack of action, things are happening conceptually, as the ideas that the book circles coalesce and combine in really intriguing ways. I guess people probably think of this as a novel about social media and inter-personal relationships in the internet age, and it is that, but it's more broadly a novel about identity, authenticity, and social life. The internet gives a particular inflection to those issues, sure, but they also aren't fundamentally different simply because they're mediated through Tinder, I don't think. Perhaps because I know Lauren, and thus could recognize parts of the story as drawn from her life, and because we've had a lot of conversations about auto-fiction (and what that term even means), I was also musing on the book's own playful blending of fiction and reality, which is heightened by the moments when the narrator pauses to comment on the form of the novel. 

The ultimate effect, for me, is a text that dazzlingly brings together literary form and self-presentation, and playfully questions (challenges?) the notion of straightforward honesty in both art and life, and the idea of intimacy. 

It's a cool novel, definitely on my top 10 of books published in 2021. Check it out.

Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again, Katherine Angel

 Every year in my Intro to Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies course, I teach Kristen Roupenian's "Cat Person" and ask my students whether the sex in the story is consensual. And every year, but increasingly more so, over the course of our classroom discussion I am distressed to realize how much work the notion of consent is doing in current cultural conversations about sex, such that it seems as if they have no way to conceptualize sex that is consensual, but bad, or consensual but unwanted. It is, however, very difficult to convey such notions without verging on sounding like a rape apologist. Or without potentially undermining the very positive and worthwhile work being done by all those who are promoting notions of affirmative consent.

So I appreciated this book so much, because it did an absolutely spectacular job of explaining why the idea of consent, though very important in some ways, is not the gateway to liberation that it is often presented as being. As Angel convincingly argues, to rely so heavily on the notion of affirmative consent is to demand, not only that people express what they want — but that they know what it is, exactly. Such a demand is not only unrealistic, is also fails to account for the ways in which desire is both responsive, and social. It's a really powerful meditation on what we actually want from our "sexual revolution", and how current approaches are falling short. The book is definitely centered on the experiences of cis-het women, but it's up-front about that, and is also careful to acknowledge some of the complications attendant to thinking about sexuality for woman of color, especially Black women. 

A short, compelling read, well-researched, and with some great examples from a variety of films (and some really good ones at that). Strongly recommended!

Soft Science, by Franny Choi

 I'm pretty sure that I was introduced to Franny Choi when Anjuli Raza Kolb quoted her poem "The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On", and I looked it up and read it over and over and over, and saw this  collection at the bookstore a few days later and of course bought it. 

 

  These are smart, tough, and deeply unsettling poems. They bring together the human/cyborg distinction, and stereotypes about Asian women, and dissociation as a response to violence and awfulness, in really remarkable ways. Extremely powerful stuff.

Interior, Chinatown, by Charles Yu

We've been living in an age of irony for years now, it seems, but more recently, at least in literary fiction, there's been a wave of really dense satire about race. I know people have written, and are writing, about this, and I need to read that stuff, but I will confess that I often struggle with the novels. They are, of course, intentionally inhospitable, so it's not surprising, but my discomfort is not that I feel called out so much as that it can often feel like telling rather than showing. Everything is exaggerated, when it feels like nuance would be more illuminating. But sometimes, in the most successful versions of this kind of thing, the exaggeration is so extreme that it goes all the way through and back to nuance again, forcing you to excavate the specificity within the outsize shapes. That, I think, is how Interior, Chinatown works. 

It took me awhile to get into it, because you have to negotiate the utter artificiality of the conceit, the intense layers of irony and parody. The novel is a script/story about Willis Wu, Generic Asian Man, who yearns to become Kung Fu guy — but also to break free of cliche roles. The commitment to the form means that the story can be frustratingly rote, emotionless, and of course, that's the point, as is the disorientation of not knowing whether this is a movie or "real life." 

But once you get into it, it's absolutely brilliant, and quite lyrical. I'm realizing that I've read more than a few texts this year by Asian American authors that are grappling with the complexities of Asian American identity in the racial eco-system of the US — not out of a concerted effort on my part, more by happenstance, but doubtless inspired by the reckoning emerging as a response to the increasingly blatant outbursts of anti-Asian violence. This one is more specifically engaged in the question of representation in movies and tv shows, and how that shapes identity, and it examines these issues in really powerful ways.

Summer, by Ali Smith

 I can't really write about Summer without writing about the rest of the quartet, though actually, I might have liked it more if I hadn't read the others. I've complained enough on this blog (though maybe not recently) about how much I despise the "multiple unrelated stories that get woven together" form (or better to say, how picky I am about it; I actually love it when it's done well, but usually I find it trite). So you'll understand why I say that I might have enjoyed this book more if I didn't know that the characters had appeared in previous books. The fact that I didn't completely remember their stories from earlier didn't actually help (or maybe it did!). 

The thing is: I loved Autumn. I read it 2 years ago and thought it was just gorgeous, and a wonderful meditation on different forms of love, and so clever in the way it subtly referenced extremely recent events. I was already a huge Ali Smith fan, and I was so excited to read the rest of the quartet, but decided I'd wait until all of them were out, and read each in its season. I read Winter in March, and liked it not quite as much as Autumn, but appreciated its slightly surreal quality, and its loving meditation on Shakespeare, and the way it really did capture a feeling of winter, just as the previous book had gotten something right about autumn. But then I kind of hated Spring. I hated the way it used magical realism to talk about some of the more appalling aspects of the political present, and I even started to find Smith's style somewhat grating. 

I disliked it so much that I put off reading Summer for as long as possible, so that I wouldn't still be annoyed when I read it. And so I didn't actually start it until summer was over, in late October, and then things got veryvery busy, so I only just finished it. And it was fine. I was surprised by how heart-rending it was to read about characters experiencing lockdown and the beginnings of the pandemic (too soon?). It did, at moments, evoke a very specific kind of summer feeling (but I am still in the thrall of Garden by the Sea which is just the perfect summer book). I was mostly charmed by Smith's style, though I definitely think it will be a good long while before I pick up another book of hers. But mostly, I found the novel largely forgettable.

Autumn Quail, by Naguib Mahfouz

 I picked this one up at Cherry Valley Bookstore, a cool little shop with a really excellent selection of high quality used books. Mahfouz is one of the authors in my personal pantheon, that is, one of the authors whose works I am trying to read all of. He's an especially fascinating one, because there are observable changes in his style over the long arc of his career, from more typical realist-style fare (though with a goodly dose of symbolism) to more formally experimental (which I prefer, I think). He writes a lot of bitter, angry male protagonists, which I initially found abrasive, but now have grown accustomed to, I guess. 

Anyways, this one was especially interesting, because it's set in the aftermath of the Revolution of 1952, and chronicles the story of a man who is on the outs with the new regime. I am not especially knowledgeable about Egyptian history and politics, but I was really struck by the way this novel captures a sense of frustration, confusion, and malaise connected to massive political changes, and I kept thinking of it in relation to US politics of the last 10 years or so. The thing about political upheaval is that life goes on, in many ways, unchanged, but then it also doesn't. Your individual life is deeply shaped by those various forces and happenings, but there are also aspects of it that seem entirely separate (even if they aren't). There was something about the way this story see-sawed between broader social concerns and deeply selfish individual ones that was really compelling to me. And is curiously echoed in the way that I, in turn, read it as both a particular account of a specific time and place (one I know very little about — but I was dimly aware of the ways that the novel was referencing its particular moment) — and a more universal, or at least transportable, story that resonated with my own time.

 

Transit, by Anna Seghers

 This has been recommended to me more than once, so I was somewhat surprised not to like it more than I did. I think the big problem is that the plot device of, "I saw this woman once and instantly became obsessed with her and completely reorganized my life to stalk her" is just...not that interesting to me. Or convincing. It's kind of hard to believe that this is such a cliche, because really, wtf?

That said, this is in many ways a wonderfully atmospheric novel about bureaucratic morass, and the absolute misery and panic of people caught in its clutches. It has a distinctly East German feel to it, I was thinking to myself, and then I wondered what I meant by that, and decided that it's mostly that something about the prose reminds me of Christa Wolf. 

That I finally got around to reading it is in large part because of a tweet from Dan Sinykin calling for someone to do a Buzzfeed style ranking of all the NYRB books,* which inspired me to collect all my unread NYRB books in one area of my to-read shelf:

                                                    Of course, I immediately found 4 more I'd left out, but whatever

...and to really make a point of starting to read them. And then I was on a TRAIN, and I had a bookmark from TRANSIT BOOKS, and it was just irresistible.

It's not a bad book, but I'm not sure why so many people have specifically recommended it to me.

* It also inspired me to take a stab at selecting my top 10 NYRB books, here it is:

1. Fair Play 

2. Dud Avocado 

3. Skylark 

4. A High Wind in Jamaica 

5. Season of Migration to the North 

6. Late Fame 

7. The Captain's Daughter 

8. Berlin Stories 

9. The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes 

10. The Door

Maluchem do Raju, by Kazik Kunicki i Tomasz Ławecki

 This started out as a book review, and turned into a meditation on what we know about the past, and the kinds of stories we tell about it. It's one of the more personal things I've written, in that it's about my academic interests, but also my family history, and my translation work, and even has a little scene, of sorts, of me interacting with my parents.

Anyhow: here it is, my piece for the Field Notes of Modernism/modernity, with big thanks to Jeanne-Marie Jackson for inviting me to contribute!

A Ghost in the Throat, Doireann Ni Ghriofa

 KGB Bar is one of my favorite bars in the world, so I was absolutely delighted to contribute a review to their lit mag! All the more so because it gave me the opportunity to really think through why I admired A Ghost in the Throat so much. Here's what I ended up saying!

Sidenote, but — you might think that as someone who studies 18th century lit, and Irish fiction, OF COURSE I had heard of this book. But in fact, I learned about it, as I learn about many many many excellent books, from Caitlin Luce Baker's twitter feed. This just reaffirms what I've said many times before, that booksellers are far more up on the important stuff than academics are. And also, that bookseller twitter is so so good! If you want to hear more about excellent literature in translation, or stuff being published by indie presses, Caitlin is a great person to follow.

The Awakening, by Kate Chopin

 It's hard to believe that I somehow made it this far without having read this book. I've always heard it described as a classic, as important, as formative, and just generally soooo great, so I was delighted when a student who is writing an Honors thesis with me wanted to write about it, because it forced me to finally read it. 

So, the big thing that it made me realize is just how little I know about American literature and its history, because I was kind of bewildered by the apparent scandalousness of it. Weren't European writers, especially French ones, writing stories like this for a good 30 years or so already? The Awakening is published in 1899. Madame Bovary is 1856. A Doll's House is 1879. Was this stuff not translated until much later? Was it a big deal because it was an American woman who was articulating these ideas?

And also, OMG IT IS SO RACIST. Maybe if I read more 19th/20th century American lit, I would be more accustomed to this, but WOW. And nobody ever mentioned that, in all the things I've heard about the book! Is it because the racism is not the kind where there is lots of explicit discussion of people of color as lesser (though, ahem, Mariequita's "broad and coarse" feet might give you pause), but is rather the kind where the book is full of Black characters and none of them have a name? My student wants to write about the institution of motherhood as oppressive to the protagonist and I'm like, ok, sure, but you're gonna need to get into the fact that the vast majority of the actual work of caring for her children is done by "the Quadroon". The shit is blowing my mind. I bought myself a copy of a newer edition with an intro by Carmen Maria Machado, thinking that surely she would have something to say about this, but nope, not a word! And then I found this truly unfortunate NYTimes essay (no, I'm not gonna link to it), where a white women suggests — with only the slightest of disclaimers — the the summer of 2020 and the rise of "wokeness" can lead us back to The Awakening and the idea of pleasure as freedom. What the holy hell?

But ok. Calm down. I'm not saying that we have to cancel Kate Chopin. I just think that it is deeply wrong to talk about how this book can be seen as liberatory, inspiring, etc, without also AT LEAST acknowledging, but preferably reckoning with, the fact that Edna's pursuit of freedom is deeply entangled with her racial and class privilege. I mean, this woman up and decides to move out of her house into her own little apartment, and she actually does it, and it's FINE. Her husband isn't delighted but he works it out, her kids are with their grandmother, who is absolutely thrilled to keep them at her place — she not only hasn't taken anyone else into account, but even when this obliviousness becomes clear, there are no negative consequences. One of the most telling moments in the book, to me, is when her kids ask her where they are to sleep, in this new home of hers, and she tells them that the fairies will figure it out. Like, ooops, totally forgot that you existed for a minute there, but, uh, *throws a pile of glitter into the air* I mean, at this point, you really have to wonder, what else does this woman need to be free?

And this, of course, is actually a really interesting question, and one very much worth exploring. There's a great essay by Molly Hildebrand that really lambasts the protagonist as a negative example of solipsism (but also, maybe, a proto-vision of the female artist?), but I think it might be a bit too quick to dismiss some of the difficulties of these issues, I don't know. 

I will say, though, that this is a book that richly rewards close reading and re-reading — it's wonderfully opaque and ambivalent in a lot of ways. I'm having a terrific time wrestling with it with my student. But at the same time, I'm...kind of glad that I didn't read it at a more impressionable moment in my life.

Bright Dead Things, Ada Limón

 Just a short post, because I have such a backlog of books to write about and a lot to do these days... 

Awhile back, Pilsen Community Books posted a poem from this book, and I was so taken by it that I immediately ordered it from them. I started reading it and was absolutely blown away, and then, wonder of wonders, it turned out that Limón was doing a reading at Cornell! So I got to go and hear her read some poems, and tell stories about them, and about her family, and talk about her process, and her worldview, and it was all just so absolutely magical. What an incredible presence she is. 

Of course, maybe it was also just the pleasure of being in a room with people appreciating poetry, which I haven't done in a very long time (my classes don't count, heh heh), but I do think this was an exceptionally good reading. Some credit goes to the audience, who asked really interesting questions (those fancy Cornell folk!). I was especially struck by a person who asked whether she does the line breaks in the first rush of composition, or adds them later (apparently this person had heard someone, maybe Victoria Chang? say that their first draft is one line of prose, and the line breaks come after), and another person who asked whether she composes out loud, or in writing. These are maybe very obvious questions to ask a poet, but I hadn't ever thought of them, and I was very interested in the answers (she does the line breaks in the initial composition, and she does compose out loud, fyi. In my own feeble attempts at poetry, I do line breaks immediately but am constantly playing with them and changing them, and I never compose out loud.)

It's really hard for me to explain what is so absolutely magnetic and immediately captivating about these poems. I gave my copy of the book to a dear friend so I can't even look over it and try to figure it out (though I will definitely be buying myself another copy). But really, they are incredible, and you should go buy this book right away.

In the Next Room, or the Vibrator Play, Sarah Ruhl

 This is a fun, witty play. I borrowed it from the library because, having read Ruhl's essays, I was curious about her plays, and it didn't disappoint. It's simultaneously daring and kind of quaint, in a really interesting way — the tone teeters between irony and wide-eyed sentiment. I think this is in part because the subject matter — the use of vibrators to treat hysteria — unavoidably involves a certain amount of dramatic irony. We know what's really going on here (sex!), except we also sort of don't, because it's so difficult to really understand how people at the time experienced this kind of thing (or at least it is for me). Is it really possible to be so disconnected from your own sexuality? I know it is (and I know I'm very lucky to find it so hard to fathom), but then what does this mean for your sense of your body, for instance?

The brilliance of Ruhl's play is the way it activates multiple meanings of electricity, and the thrills and dangers attendant to it, and subtly plays with our sense of the Victorian era and its moral milieu. There is a faint suggestion, for instance, that sexual identity is more fluid, precisely because less explicitly categorized. There's also an interesting way that the play activates contemporary taboos by confronting us with the "innocence" of certain aspects of the Victorian era, like the racial politics, or the all-knowing authority of medical discourse, without a clear commentary to comfortably situate it in relation to current norms (is the doctor sexually abusing his patients? is the treatment of the African American character racist? The answers will seem obvious to many viewers, but the play withholds comment). This inevitable sense of then-vs-now is neatly echoed in the way the play is staged, with action taking place in two spaces simultaneously, the division between them alternately fixed and porous.

It would be really neat to see it staged, but it was a pleasure to read as well. In one of her essays, Ruhl says something like, stage directions should be meaningful, they carry important ideas and tone, etc, and this is very true here, such that you feel like you're being let in on a secret, in a way, by getting to read them. And you realize with particular clarity that any staging of this play is going to be a particular interpretation (most intriguingly, in the directions to the actors for the sounds they are to make during orgasm). 

It's a really sweet, enjoyable text, I'm looking forward to reading more of her stuff (and hopefully seeing it performed someday!).

Mothers: an Essay on Love and Cruelty, Jacqueline Rose

This book returns me to my questions about the difference between theory, auto-theory, and essay. The subtitle claims this to be an essay (and it's an expanded version of a piece from the London Review of Books), but I guess I nonetheless expected it to be more like a work of theory, or I guess just...more rigorous? Not rigor in the sense of hard, but rather, I wanted it to follow up on the promises it made, and develop the ideas more.

The first chapter was really compelling and laid out a bold and interesting argument about motherhood being a repository for cultural anxieties and unreasonable expectations; the idea that mothers are expected to both shield us from the horrors of the world, and also fix the world, but without every being granted power or resources. But the book doesn't really follow up on that argument. Instead, it's a sort of meandering, often personal, meditation on various ideas connected to motherhood — eros, ambivalence, how the experience is portrayed. Is this because it's an essay — is that what essays get to do? We think of auto-theory as fragmentary, but I think there is an expectation of circling back and having a clear through-line of an overall point.

Something interesting, that I think will end up really dating this book, is that there's a whole chapter on Elena Ferrante's novels, which Rose sees as the best representation of motherhood ever, it seems. It reminded me of just how much critical adulation there was for Ferrante, around that time — I think it's passed now (on to Sally Rooney, perhaps) — I enjoyed those books, but I just don't think they're quite as amazing as they were believed to be back then, or maybe, it's that I think the critical consensus on them sort of got them wrong. Anyhow, the fact that Rose devotes this much time to them (and really just says that they're fantastic because they show you the negative sides of mothering — the implication is that no one else really does, which I think is just not true, especially outside of Anglophone lit) sort of makes it seem like this book was written rather quickly, at a moment when Rose (and others) were still just SO excited about Ferrante.

Anyways. Overall, I liked it, I just wanted it to be something slightly different (in part because I read it with a student who is working on an Honors thesis with me, and thought it would be a good work of theory for her to dig into). I wonder, though, if my frustration also stems from a somewhat uneasy balance in the book between the various things it wants to do — theorize, discuss current politics, discuss literature, and do some personal reflection. These are tricky things to weave together, and I guess maybe it also requires some clear sign-posting (and marketing) about what you really intend. Or just a reader who isn't entering the text with strong expectations!

Garden by the Sea, Merce Rodoreda

I loved this book so much that I almost don't want to write about it. It was the perfect summer read. A lovely, melancholic novel — a gardener who describes the amusements and dramas of the families whose summer homes he cares for. The prose is gorgeous (the translation is excellent), the tone is perfect, I just wanted to crawl inside this book forever.