Book Conversations 2019

Culture is conversation…to publish a book is to insert it into the middle of a conversation…

—Gabriel Zaid

We’ve reached the annual proliferation of reading lists. I read 44 books in 2019 (a joy of retirement) about a third classics, the rest contemporary. I reread poets W.S. Merwin, Mary Oliver, and Lyn Lifshin because they died this year, dipped into Whitman because it was his bicentennial. For now, snippets from seven of those books, with commentary.

I read the e-mail several times. It seemed like an affectation on Melissa’s part not to include paragraph breaks, as if she was saying: look at the tide of emotion that has swept over me. I also believed she has edited the e-mail carefully for effect, the effect being: always remember who is the writer, Frances. It is me, and not you.

Conversation with Friends, Sally Rooney, 2017

Carlos Fuentes said if the English language ever gets stale, there’ll be an Irish writer to refresh it. The way Rooney treats the digital communication dominating this novel struck me as a kind of refreshing. Although, IMO: it should be “as if she were saying.”

Suffering—why, this is the sole cause of consciousness. Though I did declare at the beginning that consciousness, in my opinion, is man’s greatest misfortune, still I know that man loves it and will not exchange it for any satisfactions.

           Notes from Underground, 1864, Fyodor

Dostoyevsky, translated by Andrew MacAndrew

This novella is only 130 pages, thank God, or my depression would have become chronic.

Cover of Rising: Dispatches

It isn’t raining when I arrive in Shorecrest and there isn’t a storm offshore; the day is as clear and as blue as the filigree on a porcelain plate. But the streets are still full of water. I watch as a woman wades ankle deep across Tenth Avenue. She has gathered her long russet-colored skirt in her right hand and in her left she holds a pair of Jesus sandals… “We get flooded with just about every high tide,” the woman tells me…” I spend a minute watching the bay bubble up through the street grate…

                        Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore, Elizabeth Rush, 2018

Shorecrest is a working class Miami neighborhood. Rush visited other such neighborhoods: Oakwood Beach on Staten Island and Isle de Jean Charles in Louisiana, where residents made the painful decision to abandon homes and move to higher ground. She researched these places and their people over years. A Pulitzer Prize finalist, Rising is one of the most important books I read this year. Rush sums up:

We can move out of the way by choice or else the weather events that we have constructed, are continuing to construct, will make the decision for us. I am not talking about abandoning our lives along the water’s edge… But… the time has come for us…to ask ourselves if rebuilding or continuing to develop in the absolute lowest-lying areas has stopped making sense. Do we want to continue to subject the most vulnerable among us, humans and nonhumans alike, to mounting risks?…I worry that, as with Noah and his ark, only a select few will be saved.

Walt Whitman, 1850

A city, this Denver, well-laid out—Laramie (sic) street, and 15^th and 16^th and Champa streets, with others, particularly fine—some with tall storehouses of stone or iron and windows of plate-glass—all the streets with little canals of mountain water running along the sides—plenty of people, “business,” modern-ness—yet not without a certain racy wild smack, all its own. A place of fast horses, (many mares with their colts) and I saw lots of big greyhounds for antelope hunting. Now and then groups of miners, some just come in, some starting out, very picturesque.

                                    Leaves of Grass and Selected Prose Walt Whitman, 1879

Makes you wish you were there. Denver’s silver rush, fast horses and “racy wild smack.” Whitman didn’t stay long, though, and there were ugly underbellies to all that.

Sabrina & Corina, Kali Fajardo-Anstine, 2019. A first collection of stories by a young Denver writer. It’s good to hear about the Westside (pre-Auraria Campus) and the Northside (pre-Highlands gentrification) to hear a house on Galapago Street described as having a front room, visit a botánica on Lawrence Street, the Union Pacific rail yards or a fabricated town in Southern Colorado very like San Luis. Makes me nostalgic for a Denver I once knew. Some of these stories approach perfection. Andale, mujer.

No good writer can emerge in a place like this…I need a true city, not a toy village near a city that looks more like some dreary settler outpost than a city. And just to pour salt in the wound, I spent the whole week wandering around Istanbul with Orhan Pamuk. What makes Istanbul holy, as opposed to Jerusalem, is the fact that it has whorehouses and nightclubs. How can anyone write in a city that doesn’t have a tavern?

          Native: Dispatches from an Israeli-Palestinian Life Sayed Kashua, 2015, translated by Ralph Mandel

I know: Muslims are not supposed to drink. Kashua is way secular. Born in Israel—his family spent generations in villages that later became Israel—Kashua lived in Jerusalem and wrote (in Hebrew) the satirical columns selected here, full of humor, writerly and social insights. Life was oppressive in Israel. He was stopped on his way to the mall, asked to show I.D.; his children were denied the best classes. He also made me laugh out loud.

Most books sell no more than a few thousand copies. “And just a thousand copies, read by the right people, are enough to change the course of conversation, the boundaries of literature, and our intellectual life,” says Gabriel Zaid, the Mexican writer with whom this piece begins and ends.

The quotes are from Zaid’s So Many Books, translated by Natasha Wimmer, 2003. C. M. Mayo raved about it on her blog. I searched the DPL catalog in vain, but it arrived via interlibrary loan not a week later, from a library in Utah. Public libraries are boons of social democracy, their funding now endangered in many places. Save them if you can. They keep our conversation going.