Books I Read July 31st 2023

Garden in the Wind by Gabrielle Roy – Immigrants of various nations discover turn of the century far-western Canada to be cold, isolating. Actually I liked these, thoughtful depictions of the sad but not pointless lives of people rarely portrayed in fiction.

Kilometer 101 by Maxim Osipov – Nostalgia for a youth in the USSR (as for any youth), Jewishness, doctoring among Slav, and small town Russia are the topics of this sad and lovely collection of shorts. There is a blurb on the back of my copy from the inimitable Svetlana Alexievich, and while they differ completely in terms of style and even genre there is the through line of love for an often horrifying culture, nation, species and world. I really liked it.

Smaller and Smaller Circles by F.H. Batacan – Two priests/forensic pathologists pursue a child-murderer, face the best and worst of Filipino society.

Five Plays by Christopher Marlowe – Reading Elizabethan plays you anticipate giving up plot and often character, hopefully compensated for by the compensation of sheer intensity of the individual monologues, but even by those standards these mostly fell flat—with the exception of the Jew of Malta which outdoes Merchant of Venice by a mile. Marlowe's affection for his eponymous Semitic villain (as well as his sympathy for Edward II's homosexual relationship) provides an interesting counterpoint to Shakespeare's basically bourgeois values, even if he couldn't match the man for talent. PS. Why did I read this? I have no idea.

Courtesan's Quarter by Munshi Premchand – The fall of a Brahmin maid sets the stage for this social novel by one of India's first great modern novelists. Interesting as a historical object but I don't actually like social novels so this wasn't so much for me.