This has been a strange summer for reading: lots of work,
lots of abandoned books, and lots of distraction from travel and big changes in
the weather. To get caught up on past reading, here are quick summaries of three books I’ve read (and even finished!) over
the last month or so: I enjoyed all three, albeit in very different ways,
though, hmm, I can’t help but notice that all three books are first-person
narratives with very strong voices.
My favorite of the bunch, by far, was J.L. Carr’s A Month in the
Country, a lovely and lively short novel about a World War 1 veteran, Tom Birkin, who
goes to Oxgodby, Yorkshire, to restore a mural in an old country church. Of
course Birkin restores himself from the trauma of the war in the process but the
book didn’t feel predictable at all, thanks to small twists, like a hint of
madness in a lovely local lady, Birkin’s feelings about religion and faith, and
an organ-shopping expedition. I particularly enjoyed some of the descriptions
of Birkin’s work, like these lines I found when I opened the book at random:
It was a splendid medieval gallery—nearest me, an almost Spanish head of the stricken Christ caught amid the leaves of a gallows tree; further along, a golliwog devil thrusting his grinning head between a couple trapped in the wrong bed; finally, a plump woman holding a blue shield of lilies. It proved what every church-crawler knows—there’s always something of surpassing interest in any elderly building if you keep looking.
I’d recommend A Month
in the Country to just about anyone. I’d recommend Jerzy Pilch’s The Mighty Angel,
which I read in Bill Johnston’s translation from the original Polish Pod Mocnym AnioĊem most to readers who
enjoy Eastern European novels about drinking: Pilch’s not-so-angelic narrator,
Jerzy (hmm…), tells tales of life as a rehab recidivist. He tells the tales of
(and for) others on the ward, too. No novel about drinking is complete without references
to Venedikt Yerofeev’s Moscow-Petushki,
a.k.a. Moscow to the End of the Line,
and Pilch fits Venya in early on, on page 11, when Jerzy mentions some teetotalling
days:
“Why on earth don’t you drink?” my brothers sitting at the bar would ask, and they were angry, and the ghost of Venedikt Erofeev hovered over their heads, and their volitionless tongues spoke with his tongue, and I wrote down a few lines under his influence, and having paid homage, I released myself from his influence.
The language of Johnston’s translation, both in terms of
vocabulary and cadences, is lots of fun to read; it feels like it was fun to
translate, too. Finally, Ben H. Winters’s
Countdown City, the second book
in a planned trilogy about pre-apocalyptic America, narrated by an ex-cop living
in New Hampshire, didn’t catch me as much as the first book, The Last Policeman (previous post), which won an Edgar
Award earlier this year, but it still kept me turning pages, waiting for the
end of the world with Hank Palace. This time around, Palace investigates the disappearance
of Martha Milano’s husband: Martha babysat Palace and his sister when they were kids. Winters again looks, through the low-key and methodically responsible Palace,
at questions of moral duty, wondering, among other things, who has the
right to track down the missing when the end of the world is imminent. Winters
includes some nice uses of a favorite word, “rummage.”
Disclaimers and
Disclosures: I bought my copy of A
Month in the Country; I am collaborating on a translation that will be
published in a collection from New York Review Books, which published A Month in the Country. I received a
copy of The Mighty Angel from
publisher Open Letter Books; I always enjoy talking about translations (and not
only!) with Open Letter. And I received two copies of Countdown City from Quirk Books… and gave the second copy to my local
library. Thank you to all!
Up Next: Antal
Szerb’s Journey by Moonlight, which I’m
loving… I have so many promising-looking new releases from publishers and used
books from the library book sale that I’m not sure what will come after that…
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