In the order I read them.
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Zeno's Conscience. Italo Svevo
I read this in preparation for a trip to Italy, particularly Trieste. It is one of, if not the, most famous novels to come from Trieste. Svevo was a contemporary and friend of James Joyce, and Zeno is often said to be one of the models of Leo Bloom, from Joyce's Ulysses. It shares Joyce's linguistic wordplay and stylistic experimentation (features that didn't really come through in translation), his fealty to a city, and his interiority. Parts of Zeno are really funny; other parts seem tedious to a reader who doesn't get all the jokes and teasers about a city's history It comes into my best list because I actually finished it (a feat that neither of the two people who read it with me--one of whom suggested it--could boast of), and because I really liked parts of the book. It helped me see Trieste somewhat differently, and it gave me a taste of Italian modernism.
The Winter Soldier. Daniel Mason.
I really knew nothing about this book. It had appeared on one of the Kindle Daily Deals; it was about World War I; it got good reviews. It turned out to be so much more than I had expected. A beautifully written and poignant novel about a young inexperienced physician who unexpectedly becomes a surgeon and falls in love with a nurse who is holding a field hospital together in the Carpathian mountains. Read in Budapest, where I am particularly attracted to novels about this part of Europe.
The Mirror and the Light. Hillary Mantel
The Photographer at Sixteen. George Szirtes.
I like to read Hungarian literature when I am in Budapest, and each year visit two bookstores I know that carry high-quality novels that are translated into English. George Szirtes is a famous Hungarian and English writer and translator, and this year I found his memoir of his mother, The book begins with his mother's death and moves backward in time until his last memory of her. The book recounts her escape with her two sons from Hungary in 1956, internment in two concentration camps, girlhood as a photographer and the unknowable fate of her family in Transylvania. The book also tells Szirte's story as he tries to reconstruct her past, particularly in relation to the mother he knew. The book also relies on photographs with speculations about what they reveal and what they leave out. This is one of the best contemporary Hungarian books I have read. And I was pleasantly surprised to discover that it was available on Amazon in the US.
The Acts of My Mother. Andras Forgach. (Also published as No Live Files Remain)
Another book about a Hungarian writer trying to find out who his mother was. In this case, the writer discovers, many years after her death, that his mother. Bruria, was an informant for the Communist regime in Hungary. She informed on friends and colleagues, and even her own family. As it turned out, Bruria never really discovered any compromising information. Nevertheless Forgach is forced to see his mother in completely different ways. The book is a narrative of his discovery of his mother's past and how that shaped his past--what it meant then, and what it means now. It is a very interesting book.
The Aspern Papers. Henry James. Back early from Budapest and thrown into a pandemic, Tony and I find it hard to concentrate. So we went back into our pasts for something we know--something interesting and rewarding for multiple readings. We also saw the movie with Vanessa Redgrave and Joely Richardson.
The Dutch House. Ann Patchett.
Still battling concentration, this turns out to be just the thing. Patchett can be an uneven writer, but she's mostly good, and highly readable. Plus I got to enjoy it (via some problematic tech issues) with my book group.
The Fifth Woman. Henning Mankell
Still having a kind of pandemic brain and finding it unusually hard to concentrate, I again returned to familiar writers. This time one of my most favorites: Henning Mankell's Wallender series. Although I have seen at least three versions of Wallendar, in English and Swedish, I haven't read them all. Several years ago, I decided to read one each summer. This year I arrived at The Fifth Woman. Mankell is SO good. The Wallender books are police procedurals, but of an unusual sort. Though Wallender and his team look for clues, take interviews, analyze data of all sorts, the most important thing they do is think and talk. Wallender regularly calls meetings with his team and they talk through all the evidence. I immediately ordered the next book, One Step Behind, which was equally engrossing, but decided to stop there because I have so few left. (Though I'm sure I could go back to the beginning and not remember much of anything.)
The Nickel Boys. Colson Whitehead.
Set in the 1960s in Tallahassee Florida in a reform school for delinquent boys that operated for 111 years. The story is familiar: young black boy who values education and works to "better" himself is unfairly is admitted to a sadistic juvie facility. An unlikely friendship is forged with a white boy who is a trouble-maker. A bad ending. Whitehead reframes another part of Black history. This is much more focused than the prize-winning Underground Railway. I liked the Nickel Boys better. But either way, Whitehead is a major talent.
The Executioner's Song. Norman Mailer.
Still searching for something to draw me in, I decided to re-read The Executioner's Song. My first--and only--prior reading was when it was first published. I remember being mesmerized. And I always said--and still believe--that it was this book that made me really opposed to capital punishment, The story of Gary Gilmore, who was certainly guilty of murder, but was himself so messed up, so damaged, made it impossible for me to ever see execution as an ethical decision. The fact that he wanted to be executed makes it even worse. The book always had a kind of radium around it, in the decades between my first and last reading: it vibrated with energy. The second time I read it, I still thought it profoundly important but it didn't hit me in the gut as the first read did. Much time and many horrors had taken place in the 40+ years since it was first published and I first read it. I still list it a a great American book, one of the first of creative non-fiction genre.
The Splendid and the Vile. Erik Larson.
Churchill's first year as Prime Minister, and the year of the Blitz: May 1940 to May 1941.
Vividly rendered in compelling detail. Churchill's job: to keep Britain alive until the Yanks entered the war, a feat that was accomplished in part through Churchill's magnificent rhetoric. Larson is a great historian for a general audience, and he keeps it compelling. Even though you know that Yanks will eventually enter the war after Pearl Harbor, you still are riveted.
The third of Mantel's Cromwell trilogy, The Mirror and the Light brings the complusively readable story of Thomas Cromwell, the man who did everything Henry VIII asked for, to its conclusion. In preparation for reading this, I reread the first two books of the trilogy: Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies--a decision with mixed results. (A lot of Tudor England to get through but a conclusion to a fascinating life.) Again, those of us who grew up on the Tudors (certainly me) know exactly how this is going to end. Nevertheless we find it compelling. It is a very different book from the first two, each of which had a compelling plot: the first, getting divorced from Katherine I and marrying Anne, and the second, conniving Anne's guilt and execution in order to marry Catherine II. By the third book, Henry is falling into illness and possible dementia, and things move along in a less dramatic (though more morbid) manner. Nevertheless, we have Thomas in all his humanness, a modern man in a medieval world. I love all three of these books, and they stirred up again in my childhood fascination with all things Tudor. (See future post).
Mothering Sunday. Graham Swift.
I keep forgetting what a wonderful novelist Graham Swift is. Waterland, Last Orders, Wish You Were Here (among others) and recently Mothering Sunday. His books are magical (in many senses of the word) and shimmerinly realistic. Mothering Sunday is small but deep, pivoting around a single day in 1924 when Jane, an English housemaid, has an assignation with her upper-class lover. The novel moves back and forth across time, putting us inside Jane--how she thinks, knows, remembers, writes. And also how England changes--class, war, gender. The world. A lovely novel.
PS This was a really odd reading year for me (as for so many other readers). We left Budapest in March 2020 because of the pandemic and came home to fear and isolation. It took me a long time to find my concentration, which is really only now beginning to feel familiar. Such a strange and terrible year it has been. Wasted, for me, in a lot of ways.
