Don’t think I’m not aware that as soon as I said I was in the mood to read older books I proceeded to read books only published this year. I’m a gemini!!
Anyway, I had a lovely month and I hope you did, too!
What I read in October:
Kamila Shamsie, Best of Friends (2022)—I was excited to read Shamsie’s first novel since Home Fire (2017), a novel that I very much enjoyed when I read it 5 years ago. I of course do not remember enough (or anything) about Home Fire to be able to judge whether Shamsie’s style has changed, whether I have changed, whether it’s a little of both, or whether Shamsie’s style hasn’t really changed and maybe she was just Going Through Something while writing Best of Friends.
Let me put it this way: this book was fine! The subject—friendship, how it forms, how it evolves, how it propels and weathers individual choices—is compelling! The writing is mostly immersive, except for the times when it YAs a little too close to the sun (ie, does a little too much telling, especially in the part of the book where the protagonists are teenagers) or when the copyediting has failed, making it hard to stay focused on pages not just littered with the same word, but a misspelled version of the word. I’d rather believe that Riverhead Books fired all its copyeditors and replaced them with spellcheck than that a copyeditor missed s e v e n instances of “chaise lounge.”
Anyway! I don’t want to be mean about this book. To me the experience of reading it was like eating a pretty tasty cake that had some unfortunate clumps of flour in it. I would say that if one wants to read a “profound novel about friendship” (as Madeline Miller called Best of Friends), one would be better served by reading Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels.
Hiroko Oyamada, Weasels in the Attic (2012-2014/2022)—The thing I love about preordering a book, as a person with ADHD, is that when I order it early enough, I forget about it entirely and am then genuinely surprised when the book arrives at my door. Thank you to past me for preordering Oyamada’s third book translated into English, which was published early this month!
As previously documented, I love everything about Hiroko Oyamada’s writing. I am pleased to report that Weasels in the Attic is just as thrillingly weird and compelling as her other translated works, The Factory (2013/2019) and The Hole (2014/2020).
Weasels explores similar themes as the “earlier”1 novellas—gender, alienation, late capitalism—but from a different perspective and with characters at different stages of life. Where The Factory approaches the themes through women’s experiences as workers; and The Hole does so from the point of view of a woman who exits the working world to focus on the work of being a wife and, ultimately, a mother; Weasels expands upon the themes by depicting 3 snapshots from the life of a couple who have been trying for many years to have a child, narrated through the husband’s perspective.
Weasels is weird and surreal, but also very straightforward and easy to follow. It is sometimes like a very smart horror film in that certain scenes are dread-inducing and the dread builds to a satisfying, borderline-profound insight. I absolutely turned into the son from Parasite (2019)2 while reading Weasels, and I mean that in the best possible way. How can it be that 71 pages contain such a fascinating story that also makes me think deeply about existing under capitalism but doesn’t necessarily lead me to despair? Oyamada is magical!!
Hua Hsu, Stay True (2022)—I wanted to read this book because I tend to really like (aka agree with) everything Hsu writes. He popped up on my radar over a decade ago with essays on music and basketball and the rest was history!
Anyway! Hsu wrote a beautiful memoir! Focusing mostly on his college years, with a little bit of expansion into his teens and graduate school era, Stay True looks back on the formative years of life when Hsu was figuring out who he was, largely through the things he liked and did and through the people he was friends with. As much as it is a memoir about “the search for self” it is also about “friendship, grief, . . . and the solace that can be found through art,”3 because it is a memoir about the transformative relationship that Hsu experienced with his friend Ken, a friendship abruptly ended the summer before their senior year when strangers m*rd*r*d Ken. :(
What I appreciate about Stay True is how much space Hsu gives to Ken’s life, both before and after the part documenting his death. Throughout the book, Hsu contextualizes his own experiences through theory (the way he explains theory . . . he is a very good teacher). His gloss on Derrida in fact describes what Hsu has done in Stay True:
Writing in the wake of his colleague Jean-François Lyotard’s death, Derrida wonders, ‘How to leave him alone without abandoning him?’ Maybe taking seriously the ideas of our departed friends represents the ultimate expression of friendship, signaling the possibility of a eulogy that doesn’t simply focus attention back on the survivor and their grief.
There are so many other aspects to this memoir that are worthy of praise! First of all, I half listened to/half read it. I listened while driving to the Cape and, as a book that opens with the lines “Back then, there was no such thing as spending too much time in the car. We would have driven anywhere so long as we were together,” it was the perfect thing to have on during a multi-hour drive. Second, Hsu is so thoughtful toward his younger self and to the younger selves of his parents, who immigrated to the US in the late 1960s. The care he demonstrates toward these people in the past is not extended at the expense of “staying true” to the larger story Hsu tells about coming of age in America at a specific point in time. Rather, it’s just one of many remarkable elements of the work as a whole. Third, Hsu says he’s been writing this book for 20 years. It shows! This is a wise and profound memoir.
Ling Ma, Bliss Montage (2022)4—I chose to reread this book only a month after I first read it a) because it’s that good, and b) because I was excited to discuss it with Book Club! Our discussion reminded me that there was a third reason to reread—short stories reward repeat readings, particularly those in a collection, as they yield up patterns and meanings that may not have been so apparent in the first read.
To be more specific, I was better able to see how the stories within Bliss Montage together and individually revisit tropes that the film historian Jeanine Basinger (who coined the term “bliss montage”) identifies in the classic Hollywood “women’s film” genre—“stories of rags to riches, riches to rags, unwed motherhood, spinsterhood, betrayal by a loved one, the battle of the sexes, the other woman, the need for sacrifice, and plain old girl meets boy in all its variations”5—using these generic conventions to interrogate contemporary narratives about what it means to be a woman.
As in those old movies, “[r]epeated episodes about meaningful events in a woman’s life appear and reappear” in Bliss Montage. But in Ma’s collection, the events get reworked, reenvisioned, reimagined, in each story. Across the collection appear different angles of looking at the ways women love, at the relationships they maintain with men, parents, friends, and children, or more generally at the ways women form their identities throughout their lives.
What I love most about Ling Ma and these short stories is how they are compulsively readable, funny, and deep. A reader doesn’t have to engage with the layers if they don’t want to—the stories are imo very enjoyable on their own! But for those who choose to to peel away some of the layers, there is so much to reflect upon.
What I’m looking forward to reading in November:
Lynn Steger Strong, Flight (2022)
Dionne Irving, The Islands (2022)
E. M. Delafield, Diary of a Provincial Lady (1930)
Yiyun Li, The Book of Goose (2022)
Kate Beaton, Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands (2022)
I recognize that all 3 were originally published in the same time period.
This is clearly one of only two movies I’ve ever seen.
Citation: the copy in the front cover inside jacket.
Book Club selection for October.
Basinger J. A Woman’s View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women, 1930–1980. Wesleyan University Press. 1993.