The Möbius Book by Catherine Lacey

4/5 stars

What's it about? Catherine Lacey dissects the end of her marriage through a hybrid work in two parts: a memoir detailing the breakup’s aftermath and an uneasy novella about two old friends, whose relationships have both ended, reconnecting despite suspicious activity next door.

How’d I find it? We all know how much I adored The Biography of X. If Catherine Lacey writes it, I want to read it.

Who will enjoy this book? While I didn’t care for Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry, those who did might like the oblique structure of The Möbius Book.

What stood out? Catherine Lacey knows how to put a book together. I don’t doubt that the personal nature of the content made this a taxing book to write, and she approaches that subject matter (loss, grief) with innovation in form. “Husband left wife,” she seems to say. “Here’s the cliché I survived, and the fiction that came from it.” The Möbius Book can be read in either direction (starting with the novella or the memoir piece). I found the novella a more interesting approach.

Which line made me feel something? Some of Lacey’s anguish hit close to home: “Haven’t you ever tried to love or take care of someone despite being given ample reason that they cannot or do not want to receive your love or care? A faith it could go differently. An amnesia of how it’s gone. Haroula thought for a moment, very still, then handed me a half orb of orange. No, she said. Why would I do that?”

Last Summer in the City by Gianfranco Calligarich, translated by Howard Curtis

3/5 stars

What's it about? Leo wanders indifferently around Rome, living from paycheck to paycheck and failing at getting sober. On his thirtieth birthday, he meets Arianna, and their tepid affair causes Leo to reexamine meaning in his life.

How’d I find it? The staff recommendations shelf at Powell’s has the goods.

Who will enjoy this book? This book is Catcher in the Rye in the style of Bret Easton Ellis.

What stood out? Rome seems to hit people in a particular way, and Calligarich captures that feeling, the burden of the city’s history, its frivolity. The reader may be following Leo through the streets in the 1970s, but they might as well be trailing Jep in Paolo Sorrentino’s 2013 film La Grande Bellezza or Marcello in La Dolce Vita.

Which line made me feel something? Leo’s best friend, Graziano, kept me smiling: “We found ourselves in a cloister enclosed by columns carved from boulders. ‘Christ,’ he said. ‘More rocks.’”

Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky, translated by Sandra Smith

4/5 stars

What's it about? This vivid and human account of the Nazi occupation of France is made all the more potent by the fact of the novel’s publication long after the author’s death at Auschwitz.

How’d I find it? Suite Française appears on “best of” lists, and I had to check it out.

Who will enjoy this book? Fans of Kristin Hannah’s work and Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See should like this one.

What stood out? Suite Française collects two of a planned five-part series unfinished by Némirovsky; the work she was able to complete captures war in the intimate details of individuals trying to survive. The edition I read concludes with Némirovsy’s notes on the project, as well as heartbreaking correspondence that describes her deportation and disappearance.

Which line made me feel something? “Yet this music, the sound of this rain on the windows, the great mournful creaking of the cedar tree in the garden outside, this moment, so tender, so strange in the middle of war, this will never change, not this.”

Ultramarine by Mariette Navarro, translated by Eve Hill-Agnus

5/5 stars

What's it about? An accomplished ship captain impulsively allows her crew to swim in the sea, and everything that comes after goes awry. Most concerning: the voyage started with twenty sailors—now there are twenty-one. An eerie page-turner.

How’d I find it? I picked up a few titles from a display of short reads at Powell’s, and all have been bangers. Admittedly, this cover played no small role in my purchase.

Who will enjoy this book? The disjointed narrative and dreamy prose of Ultramarine recall Julia Armfield’s Our Wives Under the Sea.

What stood out? Mariette Navarro knows what she’s doing. The shifting realities of Ultramarine keep the reader tense, but the siren effect of its atmospheric language make the discomfort worthwhile. That uneasiness lingers, even though the book is brief and can be consumed in one captivated sitting. The ocean is very scary.

Which line made me feel something? A representative example of Navarro’s beautiful writing: “They’ve left the sounds of the earth and of the surface: they discover the music of their own blood, a drumming to the point of jubilation, percussion that could lead them to a trance. Dark sound of held breaths, symphony of lightness.”

Overstaying by Ariane Koch, translated by Damion Searls

4/5 stars

What's it about? The narrator lives in her childhood home alone and can’t quite rouse herself to leave the small town where she grew up. She becomes fascinated by a visitor and invites him to stay, and before long the visitor consumes her whole existence. Funny, trippy, and endlessly strange.

How’d I find it? I love this influencer for translated book recs. She knows what’s up.

Who will enjoy this book? Overstaying embraces absurdity and tension in the manner of Samanta Schweblin. In fact, the fluidity of interiors reminds me of Seven Empty Houses.

What stood out? The narrator’s sense of humor makes this bizarre tale more fun than creepy, quite a feat when the visitor with his furry “brushfingers” mutates and evolves the longer he lingers. Overstaying fills inertia with small horrors (how I loved the sentient vacuum cleaners) and completes its sense of claustrophobia with short, choppy chapters. Koch pulls off an immersive mirage of a book.

Which line made me feel something? This tidbit had me laughing out loud: “It’s all the same to me whether or not he’s planning to poison the neighbor children. They’re all right, because they’re small, but then again they’re not that small; now that I think about it, they have chubby thighs.”

Glaciers by Alexis M. Smith

5/5 stars

What's it about? Isabel goes to work at the public library in Portland, nurses an impossible crush, and attends a party. Those are the happenings in this trim, satisfying novel that captures perfectly an ambivalent twentysomething circa 2010.

How’d I find it? The staff picks at Powell’s rarely steer me wrong.

Who will enjoy this book? The library link and worry about climate change in Glaciers make this reader suspect that Jenny Offill was heavily inspired by Smith’s work in writing Weather. Either way, the two books pair nicely. For another read that takes place over one day, try A Simple Man by Christopher Isherwood.

What stood out? Smith nails time to the wall, writing into a moment when rising sea levels and the war in Iraq joined the search for intimacy as prime concerns for young adults. Glaciers presents a tiny time capsule, made all the more potent by Isabel’s nostalgia and need to preserve the past as well as the possible. The novel ends with a circle of partygoers swapping stories; it’s an elegant departure from the focus on the individual and sticks its landing.

Which line made me feel something? This bit of banter between Isabel and her friend Leon: “Who darns socks? Girls nobody tells stories about.”

Sun City by Tove Jansson, translated by Thomas Teal

3/5 stars

What's it about? The residents of the Berkeley Arms in St. Petersburg, Florida squabble, fret, and weather the realities of aging and retirement in this trim, breezy novel.

How’d I find it? This came in the mail as the monthly selection of the NYRB Classics Book Club.

Who will enjoy this book? Sun City tackles the humor and distress of older adulthood à la Helene Tursten (without the murder).

What stood out? The novel shifts between the perspectives of its many characters, lending depth to the daily humdrum of life. I was particularly drawn to the formidable Mrs. Rubinstein, whose sharp tongue and sway over her retirement community make her a delight to accompany, and Linda, an adored employee of the Berkeley Arms whose boyfriend impatiently awaits the next coming of Jesus.

Which line made me feel something? “Afterward, Miss Frey thought she had been lost, but sometimes even then she would secretly indulge a wonder and a daydream that had to do with the beauty of emptiness and extinction.”

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

1/5 stars

How’d I find it? This anguished cover has been haunting me from bestseller tables for years, but it wasn’t until a friend gave me her copy that I considered reading it. And I’m glad she did, because I have thoughts.

Why not 3 or more stars? Four tidily diverse men meet in college, make mistakes, fall in love, and somehow all achieve incredible success in their respective professions. A Little Life is set in a fantasy world in which people receive everything they ever wanted, including permission to avoid their issues indefinitely and to damage those who support and enable them. The most extreme of these examples is Jude St. Francis (oh, I will get to the names in this book in a moment), whose youth is so brutal that even this cynical reader couldn’t decide whether to feel irritation or pity when Jude gets to sniveling. Jude’s horrific backstory proves not enough for Yanagihara; the story freedives through its last hundred pages to a truly punishing level of bleakness. A Little Life doesn’t earn its hefty page count, weighed down with clunky imagery and sloppy rephrasings that read as if written by early AI. Speaking of AI, the names in this book! Citizen van Straaten? Andy Contractor? Millicent Stein-Hernandez? So bad that I bet you can’t guess which one I made up.

The Suicides by Antonio Di Benedetto, translated by Esther Allen

2/5 stars

How’d I find it? I mention the NYRB Classics Book Club enough for it to be the obvious source.

Why not 3 or more stars? A reporter investigates a story on the nature of suicide, haunted by the realization that he’s approaching the same age at which his father took his own life. Written in 1969, this circular and dark novel proves to be a tough read thanks to the narrator’s constant mistreatment of women and generally obnoxious company. Photographer Marcela offers an interesting foil, and I would have preferred to read a whole book about her.

On the Calculation of Volume I by Solvej Balle, translated by Barbara Haveland

4/5 stars

What's it about? Tara Selter wakes up every morning to November 18th, and nothing she tries ever seems to propel her out of the time trap. A trim, melancholic novel on the mystery of existence.

How’d I find it? I read an excerpt from this novel in Harper’s had to pick up a copy to read the rest.

Who will enjoy this book? This blends the dreaminess of Samantha Harvey’s Orbital, the enigma of Hervé Le Tellier’s The Anomaly, and the domestic focus of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

What stood out? This book is the first in a series of seven, and I appreciated its metaphysical musings in the form of Tara’s daily journal. We enter the story on her 122nd iteration of November 18th and follow as she tries to lure her confounded husband to her aide, develops an obsession with the night sky, and logs how her continued presence diminishes the resources of the day. On the Calculation of Volume is about time in such a way that you feel time while reading it.

Which line made me feel something? “The unthinkable is something we carry with us always. It has already happened: we are improbable, we have emerged from a cloud of unbelievable coincidences.”