№ 34 reading list: Annie Ernaux

Happy New Year! I decided to start the blog year with a new reading list which will also be the final one in this format. I'm thinking about giving the lists a break or turning them into round-ups where I recommend some of the books that I have read. Part of me will miss this format because it disciplines me to know what I will be reading a few weeks ahead. At the same time, it takes away the spontaneity when I get a new book that I want to start reading right away, but feel as if I first have to finish the books on my current reading list - a luxury problem, I know. Another reason for the change is that I would like to read more in German to get a better grasp of the language.

№ 34 reading list:

1  A Man's Place  · Annie Ernaux
2  Of Time and the River  · Thomas Wolfe
3  Letters of Leonard Woolf  · edited by Frederic Spotts
4  Útsýni  · Guðrún Eva Mínervudóttir [Icelandic]
5  Dichter im Café  · Hermann Kesten [German]

Translated by: 1) A Man's Place: Tanya Leslie

Last year the French writer Annie Ernaux received the Nobel Prize in Literature. Her book on the list, La Place in French, is about her relationship with her barely educated father and the gap that gradually forms between them as her education takes her onto the pathway to the middle class. A recurrent theme throughout the narrative is the importance he attributed to language: she describes an incident where he needs to sign some documents in the presence of a notary. The shame he experiences when he realises that the has misspelt a short phrase is way out of proportion. In this compact book of only 100 pages, Ernaux sometimes pauses to tell us a few words about the writing of it or to share her thoughts related to a certain memory. I read the English translation published by Fitzcarraldo Editions, which has already made 8 books by Ernaux available in English.

A December morning with books & coffee

I fell for Annie Ernaux when I read The Years (№ 20) for the first time, a kind of memoir that vividly captures a certain period in history, remarkably narrated without the personal pronoun I. Last autumn I bought the German translation, Die Jahre, so I could read the book yet again with the English translation as support. I have also read I Remain in Darkness, which is about her mother who died from Alzheimer's. Reading it sometimes felt like being punched in the stomach because of the raw and revealing writing.

If you are interested in Ernaux I can recommend an episode of the TLS podcast (min. 27:40), broadcast after the Nobel Prize announcement. The writer Lauren Elkin was a guest and mentioned e.g. Ernaux's interest in the theories of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. I first became familiar with his ideas when studying Museology and now I keep him in mind when reading Ernaux.

A coffee moment in January with a new Icelandic novel by Mínervudóttir,
a Christmas present from a dear friend

images mine, appeared on Instagram 28/11/22; 01/01/23; 02/12/22

Mothers, Fathers, and Others: Essays · Siri Hustvedt

A new collection of essays, Mothers, Fathers and Others, by Siri Hustvedt was recently published by Simon & Schuster. On Hustvedt's website it is thus described: 'Feminist philosophy meets family memoir in this new essay collection from an exploration of the shifting borders that define human experience, including boundaries we usually take for granted which turn out to be far less stable than we imagine.'

This morning I listened to editor Sam Leith of The Spectator Book Club in interesting conversations with Hustvedt about the book.

Cover image: Louise Bourgeois, Self Portrait, 1994
Photo: Christopher Burke

Mothers, Fathers, and Others: Essays
By Siri Hustvedt
Hardcover, 304 pages
ISBN: 9781982176396
Simon & Schuster

Reading journal: Simone de Beauvoir

I am halfway through Force of Circumstance, the 3rd volume of Simone de Beauvoir's autobiography (№ 26). The idea was to finish it before sharing a new reading list. Beauvoir's life story is interesting but this volume has its flaws: Sometimes she's too concerned with setting the record straight and often it feels as if Jean-Paul Sartre is the main subject. Obviously, their lives intertwined, but I'm interested in her story, in her writing, not the content of Sartre's political articles in Les Temps Modernes or the plot of his plays. Speaking of politics. The book has plenty, sometimes to the point of being tedious or exhausting. Depending on my mood. On a positive note, Beauvoir travels all over the world and is a keen observer of people and landscapes. Those narratives, her books, and how they were received makes this volume worth reading, so far.

Bookmarks & journal notes

Books I recently bought:
✔  Philip Roth: The Biography by Blake Bailey
✔  The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth

... added to my wish list:
✔  A Splendid Intelligence: The Life of Elizabeth Hardwick by Cathy Curtis

... added to my TBR:
✔  Hannah Arendt by Samantha Rose Hill
✔  This Little Art by Kate Briggs
✔  Endpapers: A Family Story of Books, War, Escape and Home by Alexander Wolff

... want to read again:
✔  The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

Bookish joy:
✔  Recently the 2021 International Booker Prize longlist was announced, containing the authors and translators of 13 books published in the UK or Ireland. I have yet to read any of them but was pleased to see among them In Memory of Memory by Russian poet and writer Maria Stepanova. It was translated by Sasha Dugdale. It so happens that in a recent blog entry I featured the US cover. Later in April, they announce the shortlist and in June the winner.

Recommended podcast:
▶  The 135th Backlisted episode was superb. They featured the novel The Fish Can Sing (1957) by the Icelandic writer Halldór Laxness (1902-1998), who received the 1955 Nobel Prize. Its Icelandic title is 'Brekkukotsannáll', which literally translates 'The Annals of Brekkukot [Hill cottage]'. This time the guest on the podcast was the British novelist and poet Derek Owusu. If you happen to understand Icelandic you can listen to Laxness himself reading his novel on RÚV, the Icelandic National Broadcasting Service.

image by me, appeared on Instagram 19/03/21

Reading journal: Mendelsohn and Gornick

My holiday break has started and these days I carry with me an agreeable stack of books. Not far though, we are in a Coronavirus lockdown in Austria. Some were on my last reading list and I‘m still reading them, others are new ones that will appear on my next two lists. On Monday I received Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate by author, critic and classicist Daniel Mendelsohn. I meant to put it under the tree this year, as a Christmas present to myself, but I started reading it during a coffee break and couldn‘t put it down. It's short and contains three essays, an interesting mix of biographical writing, history and literary criticism, in essence about the writers Erich Auerbach, François Fénelon and W. G. Sebald. If you like books about books this one might appeal to you.

Another book in my stack is an essay collection by Vivian Gornick, Approaching Eye Level. It's my first by her; not the last. It goes down well with coffee and biscotti, as I predicted in my last blog entry.

In the Reading journal entries I have talked about books from a specific reading list but some time ago I felt the need to make changes, to make the journal more random and current. I also needed a category to archive my literary bookmarks. I mentioned once that it was never the idea to comment on all the books on my reading lists. I’m a picky reader and am seldom disappointed with the books on my lists. Sometimes when I truly enjoy a book, all I want to say is I loved this book and nothing else. That, however, hardly calls for a blog entry, using Instagram or Twitter is better.

Bookmarks & journal notes

Books I recently bought:
✔  Suppose a Sentence by Brian Dillon
✔  The Rings of Saturn by W. G. Sebald

... added to my wish list:
✔  The Krull House by Georges Simenon

... prioritised on my TBR:
✔  fiction: Oresteia: Agamemnon. Libation-Bearers. Eumenides by Aeschylus
✔  non-fiction: Trieste by Jan Morris

Bookish joy:
✔  The moment when Margaret Busby, chair of the 2020 Booker Prize judges, announced Shuggie Bain had won and its author Douglas Stuart gave an emotional acceptance speech. When Stuart won I literally screamed out loud for joy, even though I still hadn't read his debut novel. I was rooting for him but was afraid that a white male author wouldn't win.

Podcasts I can recommend:
▶  Back to Shuggie Bain: Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator, recently talked to its author Douglas Stuart on their podcast, The Book Club.
▶  And here Leith talks to Natalie Haynes about women in the Greek myths.
▶  In conversation with Eleanor Wachtel of Writers & Company, Martin Amis talks about literary life, loves and losses. A very honest and sincere Amis.
▶  I rejoiced when I saw that Stig Abell, the former editor of the TLS, has a new podcast called Stig Abell's Guide to Reading. (The TLS podcast is not the same without him.) The new podcast accompanies his recently published book Things I Learned on the 6.28: A Guide to Daily Reading. These two episodes are my favourites so far: Modern Literary Fiction with Kit de Waal and English Classics with Sam Leith, the aforementioned editor.

images by me, appeared on Instagram 14/12/20; 12/12/20; 23/11/20