Weekly Recap July 4-July 11 2021

Fellow readers, I messed up this week. I read six books—the best rate this year—but in order to conserve space in my suitcase I shipped one of them home before transcribing my favorite quotes. I’ll include my review of it in next week’s summary.

In the meantime, I’m still pretty proud of the five books I managed to read:

The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro

Upon arriving in an anonymous Central European city, a famous pianist finds himself embroiled in a mess of critical disputes, bourgeois functions and failing marriages. I am unsure whether this book seeks to destroy the soul on purpose or if I am merely too young to understand it, but either way it is utterly unlovable.

“Is it any wonder at all that in this little town of yours, you have all these problems, this crisis as some of you choose to term it? That so many of you are so miserable and frustrated? Does it puzzle anyone…look at the way you treat each other” (271)

 

Anna in the Tropics by Nilo Cruz

The arrival of a Tolstoy-toting lector at a Cuban-American cigar factory causes both workers and owners to reexamine their marriages. The plot is snappy and Cruz effectively elegizes the Cuban cigar of the 1920s, but his play as a whole lacks the emotional and thematic punch of other Pulitzer winners.

“PALOMO: Alcohol is prohibited in this country because alcohol is like literature. Literature brings out the best and the worst parts of ourselves. If you’re angry it brings out your anger. If you are sad, it brings out your sadness. And some of us are…Let’s just say, not very happy” (52) 

Omeros by Derek Walcott

In an epic poem for the 20th century, the dramas of the Iliad and the Odyssey play out on Walcott’s native St. Lucia. The verse is fluent as hell and the story manages to reflect the currents of the world in a single drop of water.

“I sang of quiet Achille, Afolabe’s son,

Who never ascended in an elevator,

Who had no passport, since the horizon needs none” (320)

 

Murder in the Age of Enlightenment by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa

The essential stories of the famous Japanese novelist, who balances a love for world literature with the anxieties of Taishō-era Japan. While the stories themselves weren’t particularly thrilling, they illuminate a smart and nervy author from whom I must read more.

“Isn’t there someone kind enough to strange me softly in my sleep?” (206)

 

Artforum by César Aira

Through the political and economic turmoil of Y2K Argentina, a lonely man in Buenos Aires searches for copies of the titular art magazine. While it’s not as lovable as An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, it conveys the subtle thrills of fandom better than any book I have ever read before.

“The great and so highly praised contiguity is valid for information, but not for physical objects that transport it...Thinking about this I realized that if I were offered the entire content of Artforum without Artforum, I wouldn’t be interested…Was this, then, fetishism of the object? My vainglorious information about Contemporary Art was merely a masquerade to hide a puerile longing for possession?” (68)