THE REMEMBERED SOLDIER, Flemish writer explores the Great War's breakage in intimate detail

THE REMEMBERED SOLDIER
ANJET DAANJE (tr. David McKay)
New Vessel Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$22.95 all editions, available now

Rating: 5* of five 2025's SIX stars of five from me!

WINNER of the Republic of Consciousness Prize, US & Canada, 2025!

FINALIST for the 2026 PEN Translation Prize

2026 International Booker Prize longlistee!

One of Publishers Weekly's Best Books of 2025!

One of LitHub's 100 Notable Small Press Books for 2025!

Wall Street Journal's The 10 Best Books of 2025

The Publisher Says: An extraordinary love story and a captivating novel about the power of memory and imagination.

Flanders 1922. After serving as a soldier in the Great War, Noon Merckem has lost his memory and lives in a psychiatric asylum. Countless women, responding to a newspaper ad, visit him there in the hope of finding their spouse who vanished in battle. One day a woman, Julienne, appears and recognizes Noon as her husband, the photographer Amand Coppens, and takes him home against medical advice. But their miraculous reunion doesn’t turn out the way that Julienne wants her envious friends to believe. Only gradually do the two grow close, and Amand’s biography is pieced together on the basis of Julienne’s stories about him. But how can he be certain that she’s telling the truth? In The Remembered Soldier, Anjet Daanje immerses us in the psyche of a war-traumatized man who has lost his identity. When Amand comes to doubt Julienne’s word, the reader is caught up in a riveting spiral of confusion that only the greatest of literature can achieve.

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My Review: Deeply satisfying, immersive, emotionally intense, and really long.

Okay. You can go buy one now. Ebook, trade paper, whatever, the choice is yours on format. Reading it ought not to be a choice not to.

Maybe this is the last time he will walk down the familiar corridor as the man called Noon Merckem, that door there on the left with those welcoming panes of glass could mean the end of his existence, weak in the knees like a man being dragged to the gallows, that's how he feels in this instant, as the hope that sustained him, the certainty that everything would be new and better beyond imagining and normal at last, that he would pass through that everyday door and be another man when he came out, a man with a home and a family and a life outside these walls, all drains away. And he comes to a halt on the sun-dappled tiles and Brother Reginald turns toward him and sees the desperation on his face and murmurs that God will never test Noon more harshly than he can bear, and gives an encouraging nod, and Noon remains silent, because in his four years here he has not seen much to reassure him about God's notions of what is bearable.

The ecstatic terror of being someone..."this is what it is like to be someone"...who belongs to someone, who is known to someone, whose voice and habits and smells aren't case notes but facts of a shared life...permeates Noon (Amand now) from every axis and angle. Julienne is now real. He has a wife and she not only knows him but wants him (unlike other men in the asylum whose wives families whoevers do not have strength to bear them up) back with her and their children (children? oh god) to create anew the life that war stole from them all. But here are losses too, what is to become of Basiel his electively mute buddy? what of Maurice Constant Jules? and this is where Julienne becomes, to my mind, the single luckiest person on this planet to rediscover a man she was amazingly lucky to find in the first place. He (Amand) has room in his hour of grace bestowed to care for and about those he will leave to become someone, restored to life, to his life again. At last. But the men he leaves in the asylum? Only in body. They're still with him.

Bodies. How incredibly important bodies are in, and after, war breaks them. A body is a thing we use to carry our memories that grow our feelings and shape our personas. All of those are plurals. Plurality and duality and dichotomy are the lot of all bodies, most especially as we move them through...whatever time is, listen if the physics geniuses assembled at Solvay in Belgium a mere five years after this book takes place didn't have a clue what time *is* what chance do I have...time, and things happen to around in us. Children, for example, happen. How? "The usual way" glibly tossed off, but how usual is any way?

What makes me so very happy as I re-experience this story after abandoning it back in March, stuck in my hate-fog as Felonious Yam and cronies began their assault on us, only to pick it up on Thursday morning and finish all close-to-six-hundred pages on Friday afternoon, is the respect for my intelligence this book embodies from beginning to end. Julienne never once comes across as anything other than sincere, Amand never steps into any role but the one of honorable man, no one tells me what to think of their foibles, failings, fallings-short.

What I look for, every time I pick out a story to read, is the one that will make it impossible for me to do the ordinary thing, find faults, even ones that normal people wouldn't care about, and instead surrender to the story's currents and tides, falling in falling down falling in love.

That's what happened here. I hope you'll follow me, hope you'll have that experience, hope this read will fulfill you the way it did me.

I'll note that Goodreads has hundreds of Flemish-language reviews that award four and five stars.

HOW TO BE ENOUGH: Self-Acceptance for Self-Critics and Perfectionists, or "explaining my entire life to me"

HOW TO BE ENOUGH: Self-Acceptance for Self-Critics and Perfectionists
ELLEN HENDRIKSEN, Ph.D.
St. Martin's Essentials (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$14.99 ebook edition, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Are you your own toughest critic? Learn to be good to yourself with this clear and compassionate guide.

Do you set demanding standards for yourself? If so, a lot likely goes well in your life: You might earn compliments, admiration, or accomplishments. Your high standards and hard work pay off.

But privately, you may feel like you’re falling behind, faking it, or different from everybody else. Your eagle-eyed inner quality control inspector highlights every mistake. You try hard to avoid criticism, but criticize yourself. Trying to get it right is your guiding light, but it has lit the way to a place of dissatisfaction, loneliness, or disconnection. In short, you may look like you’re hitting it out of the park, but you feel like you’re striking out.

This is perfectionism. And for everyone who struggles with it, it’s a misnomer: perfectionism isn’t about striving to be perfect. It’s about never feeling good enough.

Dr. Ellen Hendriksen—clinical psychologist, anxiety specialist, and author of How to Be Yourself—is on the same journey as you. In How to Be Enough, Hendriksen charts a flexible, forgiving, and freeing path, all without giving up the excellence your high standards and hard work have gotten you. She delivers seven shifts—including from self-criticism to kindness, control to authenticity, procrastination to productivity, comparison to contentment—to find self-acceptance, rewrite the Inner Rulebook, and most of all, cultivate the authentic human connections we’re all craving.

With compassion and humor, Hendriksen lays out a clear, effective, and empowering guide. To enjoy rather than improve, be real rather than impressive, and be good to yourself when you’re wired to be hard on yourself.

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My Review: I was the youngest child of my parents. My older siblings were more like aunts than siblings...we were two presidencies apart, almost three...and as adolescents lumbered with a toddler they didn't want in their ambit, weren't any more careful of word or deed than one would expect from members of a toxic system at a terrible passage in human life. In other words, not kind, not loving, not supportive. Add that to parents who didn't model those things and...well.

This book understood me.

So much of the world is based on conditionality: if you want this thing/state/privilege, you must give that thing/service. Conditionality and capitalism are deeply intertwined, I venture to suggest inseparably so. One's self-worth in a capitalist system becomes imbued with that transactional conditionality: I'm not working hard enough to deserve this or that bauble. Far worse is the knock-on of that, I'm too "poor" to afford this thing/service so I must be lazy/undeserving/unworthy.

It enters one's bones and imbues all one's relationships: I'm not getting this thing/behavior/feeling I need so I must not deserve it...if I work harder/behave better/give more of this or that resource I have, maybe then I will deserve or even get it.

The internalization of perfectionism is thus complete and the transactional relationship template is frozen into immobility. As are many of us who got this message. We're frozen into immobility because then the desired whatevers *not* being ours makes sense. We don't deserve whatever. Therefore the world makes sense because we don't have it.

A book like this one that makes the pathology plain does a huge service to the sufferer from the condition. It's wonderful to be told plainly and baldly that: "Pretty much every high achieving person experiences a gravitational pull to feel left out. Meaning we reflexively look for signs and signals that tell you you’re being excluded or not wanted." It's a balm to know the roots of this awful paralysis are there in multitudes of us, then be told how that: "What perfectionism neglects to tell us is that getting it right doesn’t make us part of a community." Ultimately, we've bought the bullshit and not the bull himself; we paid for the bull, and now here's a way to get him.

The author is, I suspect, an excellent therapist in practice. In writing she is clear, concise, and manages to be evocative in her phrasemaking. No small feat! I don't tthink this book is for those who struggle to see their own pathologies, there are more effective tools to break walls of denial. I think most readers are some way into the process of denial-busting, but again the best audience for the read are those who already see their perfectionism, have an idea it's a problem, and would like some help building coping strategies for its dismantling.

This book is a wonderfully useful tool for that purpose. I can't offer a full fifth star because there is just that soupçla;on too little interlinking of strategic implementation: How, after this insight hits home, the reader should look for that and the other one to arise.

As cavils go, it's really pretty minor. As self-help books go, this one belongs on far more bookshelves/Kindles than it doesn't.

UNCLE OF THE YEAR & Other Debatable Triumphs, famous gay actor writes vignettes a la Sedaris...and succeeds at it!

UNCLE OF THE YEAR & Other Debatable Triumphs
ANDREW RANNELLS
Crown Books
$28.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From the star of The Book of Mormon and Girls, candid, hilarious essays on anxiety, ambition, and the uncertain path to adulthood that ask: How will we know when we get there?

In Uncle of the Year, Andrew Rannells wonders: If he, now in his forties, has everything he’s supposed to need to be an adult—a career, property, a well-tailored suit—why does he still feel like an anxious twenty-year-old climbing his way toward solid ground? Is it because he hasn’t won a Tony, or found a husband, or had a child? And what if he doesn’t want those things? (A husband and a child, that is. He wants a Tony.) In deeply personal essays drawn from his life as well as his career on Broadway and in Hollywood, Rannells argues that we all pretend—for friends, partners, parents, and others—that we are constantly succeeding in the process known as “adulting.” But if this acting is leaving us unfulfilled, then we need new markers of time, new milestones, new expectations of what adulthood is and can be.

Along the way, Rannells navigates dating, aging, mental health, bad jobs, and much more. In his essay “Uncle of the Year,” he explores the role that children play in his life, as a man who never thought having kids was necessary or even possible—until his siblings have kids and he falls in love with a man with two of his own. In “Always Sit Next to Mark Ruffalo,” he reveals the thrills and absurdities of the awards circuit, and the desire to be recognized for one’s work. And in “Horses, Not Zebras,” he shares the piece of wisdom that helped him finally come to terms with his anxiety and perfectionism.

Filled with honest insights and a sharp wit, Uncle of the Year challenges us to take a long look at who we’re pretending to be, who we know we are, and who we want to become.

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My Review: Impostor Syndrome played for laffs. And it got them from me! What I don't always understand is how the idea of this common mental illness is so undertreated in the world of psychology, except of course among women in whom it was first identified forty-five years ago. That makes sense because it's a subtle way of (in)validating women's power.

Actor Rannells is a gay man of a certain age writing about himself and his multivalent struggles to achieve success, find love, gain self-esteem and confidence, and then Own It. If Impostor Syndrome does nothing else, it weaponzes the "virtue" of modesty to create eternal insecurity and "unworthiness" in those not inoculated against those insidious underminers of personal satisfaction and empowerment by virtue of gendered, class- and race-specific messaging. Just look around at those whose self-esteem is most on public display to get the import of this effective means of social control.

Those reflections being delivered, the story itself is a laugh-out-loud collection of short essays, the precise proper length to be read while in down-time from tasks of ordinary living...waiting in waiting rooms, between required or assigned busy-work bursts...and they deliver not simply respite from these but quietly effective food for thought. Rannells has lived an active public-facing life. His reflections on how that's worked for him, what it's cost him, where it's led him, are both completely personal and universally applicable in their outlines. (Funny how often those things go hand-in-hand, isn't it?)

What I enjoyed most about the read was how much honesty Actor Rannells brings to his gayness. He denies, hides, celebrates, and ultimately integrates his sexual and romantic focus on his own gender in a social milieu, the theatre, where it's not exactly uncommon. The process isn't direct, and is never over...gay men never stop coming out...but it's a lot less time-consuming as he ascends the career ladder with candor and humor. Aging has its good points. He's in charge of his own life and future in ways he never thought he could be as a young gay man. But the eternal struggle to believe himself actually possessed of that power, and the deservedness of that success, that is the ongoing "gift" of Impostor Syndrome, is the quiet but inescapable burden of his humorously delivered anecdotes.

I'm older than Rannells, older even than his decade-plus older partner, and I still recognize and relate to all the struggles he underagoes. I found comfort, fellowship, and fun in this read. I hope you'll take it with you to the next doctor's office or bureaucratic waiting room you go into.