Dear readers,
Very recently an old friend moved back to Brooklyn after nearly a decade in the South.
In terms of sheer volume of knowledge, she’s one of the people I know best. I remember the breed of large mountain dog her old boss had, and the precise hue of the cat suit she was wearing when she realized she would leave her first serious boyfriend. (Kingfisher blue.) I have clocked each step of her curl-maintenance routine. And I could always sense when she was about to head-butt some blowhard at a party, because her pupils narrowed into feline slits.
This is just a scattering of the detail I gleaned from being terribly (terrifically?) close with her during the hotbed of our 20s. Back then, my friend and I felt every seism the other experienced. For a very brief period, we were pursued by a pair of Buddhist-Marxist cousins. We saw the same gynecologist.
Of course, that degree of intimacy isn’t tenable. We’ve grown apart, and grown into ourselves. She’s been gone for long enough that both of us have fallen in and out of love with people the other will never meet. (I can hear my 22-year-old self protesting from the wings: Unthinkable.) We leave our most precious sacrifices at different altars and bay at separate moons.
Neither book I recommend here is one we feverishly texted about years ago, though our tastes are still pleasingly in sync. The first is a zany, erudite memoir I wish we’d read while we were still undergraduates; I see strains of my friend in the author, particularly in the untrammeled enthusiasm of a fiendishly intelligent 20-something who’s stumbled upon her intellectual muse.
The other is a novel I discovered only last week, though it’s hardly new, and it might be the best book I’ve read in 2024. I brought it to the beach at Fort Tilden for my first outing with my friend since she moved back, just in case we ran out of things to say. Happily, I didn’t touch it at the shore. I can’t wait for her to read it.
—Joumana
“The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them,” by Elif Batuman
Nonfiction, 2010
Before she was lauded for her novels “The Idiot” and “Either/Or,” Batuman wrote this hysterical travelogue/memoir/ode. Like her fiction, this book takes its title from a work of Russian literature, one of Dostoyevsky’s rather opaque novels that charts the unraveling of its principals. I suspect Batuman has had a better time than anyone of his invention.
The story follows her from a Russian violin teacher’s studio in Manhattan, where she tasted “the riddle of human behavior and the nature of love,” to California, Hungary, remote towns in Turkey (including one whose name “literally means ‘a slap in the face’”) and Uzbekistan. She is an omnivore, with an expansive sense of humor and a memory for detail. Would you believe Old Uzbek has 70 words for duck? What about 100 for crying?
Batuman’s endless appreciation and ardor for her subjects (literature, yes, along with transcultural irony and ungenerous breakfast practices, to rattle off a few) practically vibrate on the page. On Chekhov’s short story “Lady With Lapdog”:
I especially remember the passage about how everyone has two lives — one open and visible, full of work, convention, responsibilities, jokes, and the other “running its course in secret” — and how easy it is for circumstances to line up so that everything you hold most important, interesting and meaningful is somehow in the second life, the secret one.
Had I gotten to Chekhov before my friend (a Russian scholar, naturally), I’d have screenshotted the same idea, probably pinned to a dumb question: Are you the lady and am I the lapdog, or vice versa?
Read if you like: Infused vodka, the ballet version of Onegin, shashlik, being on a first-name basis with your local librarian.
Available from: Hostel lounge areas, language departments on liberal arts campuses, the Brighton Beach bookstore of my dreams.
“Swimming Home,” by Deborah Levy
Fiction, 2011
The Niçoise villa at the center of this unsettling, elegant novel imposes a peculiar moral code. What to do when a naked stranger is found in the pool of your vacation rental? Shunt her off to the spare room, of course, while hoping she’ll blow up your marriage.
That’s ostensibly the line of thinking employed by Isabel, a war correspondent who’s about to overplay her domestic hand. Isabel doesn’t realize her teenage daughter’s fealty lies with her husband, a poet whose life has been scarred by the Holocaust.
The woman in the pool is Kitty, a youngish botanist with copper hair, green-lacquered fingernails and a tendency to put everyone in her vicinity on edge. She’s rarely clothed, and has timed her appearance at the villa to coincide with the poet’s vacation. For someone whose grasp on reality seems tenuous at best, Kitty is awfully skilled at setting sinister activity in motion. (And, for that matter, disabling rat traps in the kitchen and eating the bait.) When she tells the poet she loves him, “he no longer knew if she was threatening him or having a conversation.”
As I furiously underlined phrases and whole paragraphs in an admiring stupor, I also chided myself: I’ve enjoyed everything else by Levy that I’d read before this (I devoured “Hot Milk” and “August Blue”) but never dipped into her older works — why?
Structurally, the novel resembles a fugue. Passages, patterns and details recur throughout the story at different pitches and in minor keys, building toward an unhappy resolution. Trust me, that’s not a spoiler; when the inciting character is someone who is found “to arrange the tails of three rabbits Mitchell had shot in the orchard in a vase — as if they were flowers,” you can sense you’re in a mad, bad universe.
Bad, mad and one that serves up sentences that astonish from each word to the next. See: “He could probably lift a wardrobe with his teeth. Especially if it had a beautiful woman inside it.”
Read if you like: Socca; Binnie Kirshenbaum; Sylvia Plath’s “Ariel,” even if you’d never admit it aloud; curios; FFFs (read the novel to discover the definition of this useful acronym).
Available from: The garage shelving unit that stores the pool lounger cushions, ideally the Chagall museum gift shop, Waterstones.
Why don’t you …
Ponder where you’d put a third arm, prompted by a melancholic, ephemeral protagonist invented by Anne Carson?
Luxuriate in Saidiya Hartman’s new satire in n+1, modestly styled as a “solution to the problem of race relations”?
Inhabit Madrid like a poet, by way of “Leaving the Atocha Station,” by Ben Lerner?
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