spring reading

notes on books, etc.

May 11, 2023

Of Dogs and Walls is my first time reading Yuko Tsushima. I’m more familiar with the work of her father, Osamu Dazai (No Longer Human, Schoolgirl, The Setting Sun, etc,) who drowned himself when Tsushima was one year old. As a writer he is one of our best chroniclers of depression. Because of this, Tsushima’s short story “The Watery Realm” hit like a brick.

“At some time or another, I had come by the knowledge that my father died in water, not on land. I guess I picked that up the way children do. When I was about ten, I also learned the difficult word jusui (‘entering water’), an indirect term for suicide by drowning. It was a weight off my mind to think that my father hadn’t died on land. To me, a death on land and a death in water were not the same thing. Dying underwater didn’t count.”

How to describe the sense of loss Tsushima must have felt for the tragic life and death of someone she never knew? It becomes, like any attempt to reckon with the intangible, a sort of prayer. “Because we on terra firma sense the watery realm close by us, while knowing that it is out of our reach, we make it the bearer of some wish or hope—of feelings that might be called prayers.”

The story naturally questions the relationship between parent and child, how identity is formed and informed by it. Tsushima wields the two perspectives so expertly that each one’s tensions and anxieties felt for the other are equally as distinguishable as their voices are indistinguishable. At times you can’t tell who is speaking. It’s within this middle ground that Tsushima creates something beautifully, tragically in conversation with her familial and literary heritage.

The effects of Knausgaard’s My Struggle are cumulative, rarely lying in crystalline sentences. Reading these books is a process of brewing—you take in a life and, as with any life, a form appears, a way of seeing and being, at once familiar and yet alienating.

Nothing has brought back childhood as vividly as the third entry in the series, Boyhood. Most of the book consists of Knausgaard as a child running around a suburban landscape bordered by forests and lakes. He crawls through drainage tunnels, sets fire to grass, and experiences lust for the first time.

Being nonfiction that reads like fiction, Knausgaard’s prose is the strongest it has been yet in my reading of My Struggle, especially suited for the bare, uninformed world of childhood.

While family ties are central to the series, love is not something easily defined. Those who give and receive it in the series do so with tumultuously varying degrees of selflessness and self-interest. The brutality of Knausgaard’s father sheds light on an important aspect of parental love evident only by his mother: to be taken for granted. “I have my own children, and with them I have tried to achieve only one aim: that they shouldn’t be afraid of their father… If there is anyone I am happy to be taken for granted by, it’s them. And should they have completely forgotten I was there when they turn forty themselves, I will thank them and take a bow and accept the bouquets.”

I’ve had the good fortune to read Solenoid alongside members of my local book club—a diverse and engaging group that has helped to widen my reading of a novel that warrants a broad perspective. Simply put, Solenoid is about a Romanian teacher and failed writer trying to use reality and the form of the private journal in order to escape from this dimension. In this way the form of the novel is inseparable from its narrator—a character haunted by the horrors entailed by existence. Admittedly, I struggled somewhat with the first half of the book despite deeply admiring Cartarescu’s lush and unrelenting prose. It’s only where I am now, in part three, that I’ve come to truly love the book. The sudden flashback to childhood provides background that justifies the novel’s unrelenting grayness and phobias.

In very Solenoidian fashion, its English translation has been published near the English publication of Kakfa’s full diaries—translated by Benjamin Ross—which I have been slowly reading over these past few months. These diaries are mentioned explicitly in Solenoid as a primary influence on the narrator. Both embody writing that is liberatory, enlightening, and fundamentally solipsistic. This pairing is a wonderful reminder for any artist about why we do this.

I’m disappointed by how much of the criticism for Solenoid refuses to actually stick its hands into the material. Much of the praise functions only to acknowledge its grandiosity and leaves it at that. Solenoid deserves a Solenoidian review—something unruly, not concerned with form in a way that ultimately sheds new light on it.

I don’t pretend to do that here. Because in a way, to explain Solenoid to others is to betray it.

I didn’t know what to expect going into this one. All I knew was that it was a previously untranslated German classic being put out by Penguin in the UK. I might not have read it for a while had my new local bookstore not had the Transit Books edition displayed (now THAT’S a fucking cover), set out on a table dedicated to translated fiction. (I recommend buying a book or two from them, if you care to support a young independent bookstore in a city severely lacking in them). Very early into the novel, I’m discovering a voice reminiscent of Tove Ditlevsen and Mieko Kawakami. Clean, natural prose captures the world of a divided Berlin in 1960, seen through the lens of a group of siblings caught up in a space where ideals are embodied in the walls that surround them, the roads and vehicles they travel through—the literal fabric of society. Reimann, a product of this space herself, deftly conjures the hypocrisies underlying both sides of the city, with a radical eye that has aged well. I’m excited and hopeful that we’ll have more translations of her work soon. (Ecstatic to learn as I write this that her diaries have already been translated).

I could go on about the 17 other books I’m reading, but my patience has run thin. The books are calling me. Happy reading to you all.

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apocrypha