So Many Books, So Little Time

Jim Murdoch’s The More Things Change, a terrific novel I filled with flags in preparation for reviewing it … but the review, like so much of my more enjoyable work, went by the wayside in favor of work work. More’s the pity….

I could have sworn that I’d read far fewer books this year than in past years, but it seems not to be so. It must be one of the few benign side effects of the pandemic. Of course, the pandemic has been hard on my writing, poems—at least poems of my kind—seeming fairly pointless amid the waves of infection and death and the tide of fascism rising out of the GOP (the Goosestepping Old Party). Reading for me has a different value, being a form of communion with the dead and with the distant living, a way of overcoming the self’s isolation and paralysis.

Among the books listed below, all well worth reading, those that particularly hit home were Silvana Paternostro’s extraordinary collections of interviews with friends, acquaintances, rivals, and relatives of Gabriel García Márquez, Solitude & Company. It is insightful, often funny, more often astonishing—a warm and complicated portrayal of a great writer’s development.

Rodrigo Fresán’s challenging novel The Invented Part inspired me to read, at long last, Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night, which I quickly realized is superior to The Great Gatsby, although it would be very tough to situate in a high school curriculum because of the child sexual abuse that—along with the doctor/lover’s egoistic desire to rescue his patient—is the story’s underlying motive force. Fitzgerald’s writing is flawless, as it is in Gatsby, but here it is more adventurous, almost always right on the shimmering edge of transcendence.

Before I wander away from comments on prose works, I have to mention Joanne Greenberg’s extraordinary novel Jubilee Year. It is, I think, the largest of her novels, a portrait not of an individual or a family but a large, conflicted community. If Greenberg had not published it before the rise of COVID, a reader would be forgiven for thinking of it in that context. The book examines, with moving detail and compassion, the impact of an isolating disaster on a community with a history of exploitation—both exploiting and being exploited: a microcosm of the U.S.’s history in the West. The prose, as ever in Greenberg’s work, is clear, fluid, and luminous. It’s among the most humane of the books I’ve read in our pandemic year.

At last, a few words about the poetry I read this year. There is not a collection mentioned below that I wouldn’t recommend. And I have to confess that I tend to read poets, not poetry books. When Cooperman, Jacobson, Giannini, or Kooser, Thomas R. Smith or Mark Irwin or Linda Hogan, offer up their latest work, I’m all in. There are always those that hit home in some inexplicable way, of course, and this year I was especially bowled over by Linda Hogan’s A History of Kindness, Thomas R. Smith’s Storm Island, Edward Hirsch’s Gabriel: A Poem, Dale Jacobson’s Notes from the Travelogue., and Mark Irwin’s Shimmer (winner of the 2018 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry).

As I mentioned at the outset, all the books in this list are worth reading, not least the classics which you may have read in other translations. Set aside, for example, Robert Fagles’s now standard free-verse Odyssey and enjoy Peter Green’s version of Homer’s epic in naturally cadenced English hexameters. And if you know Rilke only in the MacIntyre or Mitchell translations, give Edward Snow’s exquisite and accurate renditions of Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus a try.

Onward into 2021 … with Kapka Kassabova’s To the Lake: A Balkan Journey of War and Peace on the top of my stack….