Books I Read December 6th, 2023

The year winds towards its conclusion. Here in LA the palm trees are strung with fairy lights and there are Christmas markets on the boardwalk. Every day I make a list of things that make me smile and most days the mountains are on there, and the winter blossoms. Last week I read these books.

The Good Cripple by Rodrigo Rey Rosa – A kidnapping goes awry in Rey Rosa's tight, bleak novella. Reminiscent of Bolano in its interweaving of violence and literature, Paul Bowles and severed limbs. Good stuff.

The 42nd Parallel by John Dos Passos-- A kaleidoscopic portrait of the American century in its infancy, Dos Passos combines the bittersweet stories of his cast with vignettes of major labor leaders, snippets of newspaper headlines and pencil doodles into a rough, sad, beautiful tableau. Really enjoyed reading this one, to the point that I carried a hardback into the restaurant and read it at the counter during my break.

Watch Where the Wolf is Going by Antonio Skarmeta – Youth, fascism, colonialism, sex, love and literature are the topics of this slim but excellent selection of short stories from one of Chile's reigning masters. This was excellent – I've spent much of the last year working through the titles of the now sadly defunct publishing house Readers International, which was putting out a ton of foreign language literature in the 80s, and its been an enormously valuable exercise.

Aurelia, Aurelia: A Memoir by Kathryn Davis – Memories of her dead husband and effervescent youth collide in a meditation (not really a memoir) about the impossible but unalterable movement of time, the inability of literature to effect an indifferent universe.

Tokyo Ueno Station by Yu Miri – An unhoused resident of the eponymous metropolitan park considers his tragic life, the injustice of postwar Japan. Unremarkable but brief.