This Week in Books: Read As You Are
“I don’t know how it’s happened, but everything enters me more deeply now and keeps on going where it used to stop.”
Dear Reader,
First off, big thanks to TEOTWR reader Ron Hogan, who informed me that when a book has its own sign, like the sign that appears throughout this new edition of Gaspard de la Nuit, it’s (probably) properly referred to as a sigil.
Which got me thinking, Hey, I have one of those. I made it up in summer of 2020 and it’s been haunting me ever since: three downward pointing triangles, the ever-inverted sigil of the end of the world. I mean, I assume it would go by the same term in a magazine as in a book. Maybe not. Maybe someone will write me back and tell me. Anyway, I always put it at the end, below the paywall, so I guess you have to subscribe if you want to see it!! (Eh, eh, eh, what a smooth plug!)
I read Annie Ernaux’s Simple Passion the other day. I felt as awfully embarrassed as when I read Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse; but it was a shorter, simpler dose of abashment, like she’s the Hemingway of cringe or something. The only line I made a note of, probably because the rest felt so excruciatingly self-damning, was a parenthetical bit unrelated to the topic at hand, on the ultimate goal of writing about the self—does the writer seek to discover what is normal among other people (such as: have you ever made a sigil that you now feel haunted by? is that normal?), or to infect other people with a lingering thought that will one day work its way into normalcy (for example: one day, when you’ve forgotten all about me, your sigil will arrive):
Sometimes I wonder if the purpose of my writing is to find out whether other people have done or felt the same thing or, if not, for them to consider experiencing such things normal. Maybe I would also like them to live out these very emotions in turn, forgetting that they had once read about them somewhere.
I read a passage in Ruby Tandoh’s Cook As You Are (which I’ve been assuming is an intentional goof on this title, but Ben says he thinks it’s a riff on the Nirvana song, and now we’re at an impasse—both of us have made strong cases, neither of us is backing down) that immediately had the feel of something I was going to internalize and then reproduce in my own life one day, having entirely forgotten I once read it:
I have an email in my drafts folder that might be the saddest thing I’ve ever written. The subject line is halloween. The recipient is me. The body of the email is divided into subheadings, which speaks to my enthusiasm. It goes something like this: to make: pumpkin cheesecake, sweet potato and gachujang soup, peanut butter and salted dark chocolate cookies. to buy: halloween creme eggs. crafts: halloween tic-tac-toe. films: black christmas, texas chainsaw massacre, the love witch. With every line, it gets sadder. The last line is the worst of all: to invite, I have gone to the trouble of writing, ???
I do a lot of this kind of “planning,” for occasions that I know in my heart will never happen. I think a lot of us do this. It feels good somehow, when the concerns of the real world weigh so heavy, to just escape into daydreams about meals we’ll never cook, for friends we’re yet to make, in a kitchen we’ll never able able to afford. When you’ve just got home from a shift at a brand-new job, your body aching and your head pounding, somehow this is as good at time as any to start imagining what it’d be like to, who knows… lacquer a pheasant.
—Dana
1. “The Novelist Watching Us Work” by Lauren Oyler, The New Yorker
Lauren Oyler writes about Maylis de Kerangal, whose novel Eastbound (Archipelago) was recently translated by Jessica Moore.
De Kerangal’s novels tend to describe workplace dramas, and she’s particularly interested in process, how people accomplish a task during a set period of time. Here it’s decorative painting; elsewhere it’s restaurant work (The Cook, from 2016), a heart transplant (Mend the Living, from 2014), or the construction of an ambitious suspension bridge (Birth of a Bridge, from 2010).
…Her research involves documentary-style immersion, during which she harvests terms and phrases from the professions she depicts. (In Mend the Living, a patient’s ailment transforms her into a “shaky, claudicant creature,” and a young surgeon delights in the “auscultation” of his lover’s body.) Too often, she says, this kind of language is deemed “not glamorous enough” for the novel; by using it, she aims to make literature “porous to the world.”
2. “No Way in the Skin without This Bloody Embrace – Jean D’Amérique” by William Repass, Full Stop
William Repass reviews Jean D’Amérique’s No Way in the Skin without This Bloody Embrace (Ugly Duckling), translated by Conor Bracken.
In his book-length poem… Haitian poet Jean D’Amérique sets a solitary insomniac speaker adrift in cityscapes teetering on the edge of ruin… “The dreams sleep naked,” the speaker tells us, “so the graves have clothes.”
…What we get in No Way in the Skin is an inverted surrealism. Its “systematic derangement of the senses,” in the words of Rimbaud, is a product not of sleep but its deprivation: “It’s not that I’m keeping vigil, / sweet grass in a field of insomnia, / every night I tally my flowers far off / unsure of how to kill time, I break clocks.”
…In his indispensable Translator’s Note placed after the text, Bracken expresses a desire for readers to “be mystified and stymied by [the poem], to research its contexts and references, to puzzle over its ambiguities and try to perceive within it the systems that structure and surround it. In short, I want everyone else to be a translator, too.” In this, he echoes Walter Benjamin’s demand, in “The Writer as Producer,” for writing to urge the transformation of the reader into a writer, becoming a producer, as opposed to passive consumer, of meaning.
3. “The Fabulist in the Woods” by Lila Shapiro, Vulture
Lila Shapiro profiles Kelly Link on the occasion of the publication of her story collection White Cat, Black Dog (Random House).
Her stories do not abide by the rules of conflict and resolution — they make sense in the way that dreams make sense. Pressed to explain these phenomena, Link’s characters tend to change the subject. “The mechanics of how I can speak are really of no great interest, and I’m afraid I don’t really understand it myself, in any case,” a talking cat insists in a story from Link’s new collection…
…Most working days, Link meets up with two of her closest friends, the fantasy novelists Cassandra Clare and Holly Black, in an Amherst barn that Clare had converted into a studio. The three work there together, surrounded by steampunk-themed decorations and appliances: a wooden “assassin’s hand” equipped with needles designed to inject poison into the intended victim, a microwave encased in the shell of an old-fashioned camping oven…
Black, whose curtains of blue-black hair conceal ears surgically altered to make her look like an elf, said improving her drafts usually came down to plugging up the plot holes. Simple. She turned to Link. “There’s stuff about your process we will never truly understand,” she said. Link, soft-spoken and unassuming, protested that she wasn’t so unusual…
4. “The Failed Promise of Having It All” by Apoorva Tadepalli, The Atlantic
Apoorva Tadepalli reviews a recent reissue of Rona Jaffe’s The Best of Everything (Penguin Classics).
Jaffe’s novel… chronicles the lives of four young women in the early stages of their careers and romances. While working at a publishing house in her 20s, Jaffe met a Hollywood producer who was looking for “a book about working girls in New York” to turn into a film; when he told her the kind of salacious story line he was imagining, she thought it was ridiculous. “He doesn’t know anything about women. I know about women,” she thought. She quit her job and wrote the novel in five months.
…It was an instant best seller. The original manuscript was copied by a group of typists at Simon & Schuster, who would excitedly read the chapters they were assigned and then call her to tell her they couldn’t wait to read the rest.
5. “Down and Out in Paris With Rainer Maria Rilke” by Ratik Asokan, The Nation
Ratik Asokan reviews Rilke’s only novel, Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (Norton), in a new translation from Edward Snow.
Rilke arrived in Paris hoping that a wealthy benefactor would house and sponsor him. When that didn’t pan out, he settled for a bohemian, downwardly mobile lifestyle, moving from one hotel room to another, without finding a regular job. (“I am poor. I do not suffer from poverty because at bottom it refuses me nothing.”)
…The young Rilke was a gifted if unworldly poet, with a few gushing pamphlets to his name and a dubious interest in Russian spiritualism. (“It was as if he saw the people, actions, and objects of the world as basins into which he might empty the apparently boundless bladder of his being,” William Gass said of the adolescent poetry.) His studies in Paris brought him down to earth and gave his florid sensibility an acid bath. From Cézanne and Rodin, he learned the importance of material observation and, conversely, of handling language as a material. (“Only things talk to me, Rodin’s things, the things on the gothic cathedrals, classical things.”)
“I am learning to see,” he announces early on. “I don’t know how it’s happened, but everything enters me more deeply now and keeps on going where it used to stop.”
6. “The Road to Auto Debt” by Julie Livingston & Andrew Ross, n+1
An excerpt from Julie Livingston and Andrew Ross’ Cars and Jails (OR Books).
…With loan terms now being stretched to more than 84 months, many owners never succeed in paying off their debt. They end up “upside down” on their loans, meaning that they owe more for the car than it’s worth—and so they fold the balance into another loan for a new vehicle. (In 2020, a whopping 44 percent of all traded-in vehicles were carrying negative equity.)
…Dealers and lenders operate like a tag team, trading off liability to evade regulation. Conveniently, the National Automobile Dealers Association lobbied hard to get dealerships carved out of the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), set up after the 2008 crisis, on the premise that the cratering auto industry was too weak to withstand tougher oversight…
…In many states, an increasingly prevalent tactic deployed by payday and auto title lenders is to sue delinquent borrowers under a “theft by check” law. Typically, these kinds of creditors require borrowers to provide a post-dated check or access to their bank account in order to secure a loan. When the account cannot cover the amount of the check, they are sued for fraud or theft. The violation may be treated as a misdemeanor, carrying a potential jail sentence, but it can also be considered a felony if the sum is large enough…
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