This is in no way a list of great books from 2015 (check out last Sunday’s article in the New York Times book review for a good and comprehensive list of new literature) this is just a list of my favorite books that I’ve managed to read since I moved to New York. I found most of them at used book stores around the city, but a few I found new in paperback. If you’re in NYC check out Better Read Than Dead in the alley off Broadway and Spoonbill and Sugartown off Bedford Ave.
Limassol - Yishai Sarid - “I’d gladly drink a shot of whiskey now and end the day before it started.” Dark, dry, detective noir from Israel.
Unforgiving Years - Victor Serge - “If I’m still alive, it’s because I realized that we misrepresented the grandeur of conscience. You don’t have to tell me about the deformed or rotten or spineless consciences, the blind consciences, the half-blind consciences, the intermittent, flickering, comatose consciences! And spare me the conditioned reflexes, glandular secretions, and assorted complexes of psychoanalysis: I’m all too aware of the monsters swarming in the primeval slime, deep inside me, deep inside you. There’s a stubborn little glimmer all the same, an incorruptible light that can, at times, shine through the granite that prison walls and tombstones are made of; an impersonal little light that flares up inside to illuminate, judge, refute, or wholly condemn. It’s no one’s property and no machine can take the measure of it; it often wavers uncertainly because it feels alone- what brutes we’ve been, to let it die in its solitude.” Disillusioned in Europe after the horrors of WWII with fascism, and then bearing witness to the fascism of the Communist Party, the characters in this book drift around Europe and then later in Mexico, looking both inward at their own conscience and also over their shoulder.
The Mersault Investigation - Kamel Daoud - “Night has fallen. Look at this incredible city, doesn’t it present a magnificent counterpoint? I think something immense, something infinite is required to balance out our human condition. I love Oran at night, despite the proliferation of rats and of all these dirty, unhealthy buildings that are constantly getting repainted; at this hour, it seems that people are entitled to something more than their routine.” Incredibly precise in its writing and also poetic in its language, this novella examines The Stranger by Albert Camus from the perspective of the dead arab’s brother.
Carte Blance - Carlo Lucarelli - “It was an old farmhouse with charred, crumbling walls, without any more roughcast, almost in the countryside, in an area the city has reached before the war transformed it into a suburb. So black, solid, and squat was the building, it almost looked like a convent, isolated from the other houses. On the wall, low, far from the door, there was a message painted in red smudged letters: Get ready, murderers.” A detective tries to do his job faithfully while the country changes hands from the fascists, while also dealing with anarchists and communists struggling for power at the end of the war.
Train Dreams - Denis Johnson - “He laid his head back, and opened his throat, and a sound rose in the auditorium like a wind coming from all four directions, low and terrifying, rumbling up from the ground beneath the floor, and it gathered into a roar that sucked at the hearing itself, and coalesced into a voice that penetrated into the sinuses and finally into the very minds of those hearing it, taking itself higher and higher, more and more awful and beautiful, the originating ideal of all such sounds ever made, of the foghorn and the ship’s horn, the locomotive’s lonesome whistle, of opera singing and the music of flutes and the continuous moaning of bagpipes. And suddenly it all went black. and that time was gone forever.” A haunting recollection of one man’s life in the wild, empty places of America in the 1800’s.
The Vorrh - B. Caitling - “Dawn, like the first time. The lead-grey clouds are armoured hands with the weak sun moist and limp inside them. the night still sits in the high branches, huge and muscular, rain and dew dripping to the pungent floor. It is the hour when night’s memory goes, and with it the gravity that keeps its shawl spin over everything in the forest.” Still kind of unsure about this book, because there’s a lot going on in it (i.e. biblical references that went over my head, some historical references and also a lot of references to Heart of Darkness, maybe?) but every sentence is pure pleasure. There’s a mysterious forest, a few different hunters, a cyclops, and robots.
Crush - Richard Siken - “Chemical names, bird names, names of fire / and flight and snow, baby names, paint names, / delicate names like bones in the body, / Rumplestiltskin names that are always changing, / names that no one’s ever able to figure out. / Names of spells and names of heces, names / cursed quietly under the breath, or called out / loudly to fill the yard, calling you inside again, / calling you home.” Punch drunk poems of love and despair from a young gay poet in America.
Bluets - Maggie Nelson - “For to wish to forget how much you loved someone- and then, to actually forget- can feel, at times, like the slaughter of a beautiful bird who chose, by nothing short of grace, to make a habitat of your heart. I have heard that this paint can be converted, as it were, by accepting “the fundamental impermanence of all things.” This acceptance bewilders me: sometimes it seems an act of will; at others, of surrender. Often I feel myself to be rocking between them (seasickness).” Half poetry, half prose, this small book contains 240 short meditations on the color blue, love, loss, and self. I think anyone who has ever been heartbroken, or fallen in love, or been in love even with just certain colors of the world, should read this.
This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen - Tadeusz Borowski - “I think about these things and smile condescendingly, when people speak to me of morality, of law, of tradition, of obligation...Or when they discard all tenderness and sentiment and shaking their fists proclaim this the age of toughness. I smile and I think that one human being must always be discovering another- through love. And that this is the most important thing on earth, and the most lasting.” A series of short stories the author wrote while in concentration camps in Poland and Germany. Published in Poland when he was released, he became a model artist for the communist party. When his same friends who were arrested by the Nazis and sent to a concentration camp were later arrested by the then ruling communist party, he put his head in his oven and killed himself.
Simone - Eduardo Lalo - “Writing. What other choice do I have in this world, where so many things are forever beyond my reach? But I’m still here, alive and irrepressible, and it doesn’t matter if I’ve been condemned to corners, to cupboards, to nothingness. I’ve taken the blows and I’m still standing. That’s about all I’ve accomplished. That is what writing or reading is good for, and I’ve devoted nearly my whole life to it. Now and then, I’ve known something akin to grace.” Just started this book that was recently translated from the Spanish (it takes place in Puerto Rico) about a writer who is being stalked by a student of his. It’s dark and funny and exactly what I wanted to be reading around the holidays.
