THE PIANO STUDENT, fictionalized gay love story from the scariest part of the 1930s

THE PIANO STUDENT
LEA SINGER (tr. Elisabeth Lauffer)
New Vessel Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$10.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: The Piano Student centers on an affair between one of the 20th century’s most celebrated pianists, Vladimir Horowitz, and his young male student, Nico Kaufmann, in the late 1930s.

As Europe hurtles toward political catastrophe and Horowitz ascends to the pinnacle of artistic achievement, the great pianist hides his illicit love from his wife Wanda, the daughter of the renowned conductor Arturo Toscanini. The affair is narrated by Kaufmann in the 1980s to another music devotee, who comes to him enchanted by Schumann’s composition Träumerei and awakens memories of the thwarted relationship. Kaufmann is spending his final years playing in small-time Zurich bars, never rivaling his teacher’s musical mastery and rapturously received concerts.

Based on unpublished letters by Horowitz to Kaufmann that author Lea Singer herself discovered in Switzerland, the novel portrays the anguish that the acclaimed musician felt about his never publicly acknowledged homosexuality and the attendant duplicity of his personal life. It's a riveting and sensitive tale of musical perfection, love, and longing denied, with multiple historical layers and insights into artistic creativity.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Given the times and the stakes, Horowitz staying closeted was a solid decision to make. If his wife didn't see a golden opportunity in his necessary secret, I'll kiss a pig. But being "out" as we twenty-first centuryans conceptualize it would've been career...possibly literal...suicide.

Suicide's a major part of this work. Do not pick it up if you are in distress, or if ongoing ideation around ending your own life is an issue for you. This review will not be delving more deeply into the topic.

This novel polarizes readers. It's more a stream of consciousness work than a standard narrative. It does not spoon-feed readers, it expects you'll be paying attention to the details well enough to follow or at least be able to figure out who is speaking, whose head you're in, or whose PoV is dominant at that moment. For those not looking for a read of that nature just now, it's best to pass it by.

As a story this is a pretty ordinary one: lovers must hide from the world because the world does not and would not accept their love as valid or acceptable. This moment in history we in the Anglophone world are seeing how much that story resonates with readers and viewers with the wild ascendancy of Heated Rivalry. I do not recall anything like this level of investment or passion for a yearning-romance story since Moonlighting in the 1980s. I hope it does not fizzle like that show did...or this excellent novel has done in the past six years.

I'm certain that the author's choices of narrative complexity were deliberate and considered. The framing device of Robert Donati avoiding the consequences of a decision he made but regretted meeting Nico Kaufmann and exchanging stories is a well-worn one, only rescued from triteness by its stream-of-consciousness presentation. It establishes the psychological safety of baring one's soul to a stranger as the reason we're hearing the stories at all. Considering the pseudonymous author discovered the Kaufmann story in letters buried in an archive the device is very apt, reflective of her own presumptive experience of discovery.

The unbearably sad life of a man who does not control his own destiny isn't a new idea for a story either. Wanda Toscanini Horowitz managed the career of her husband for her benefit, his safety, and their material security. Horowitz did not have any freedom, any latitude, in the course of his musical career—though not one soul could claim much credit for directing his astounding musical gift, how it became world-famous cost him a lifetime of terrible depression, emotional collapses, and caustic unfreedom of living an honest, open love. Kaufmann was the first (we know of) musical protege who was really a lover. Nico's story makes it plain he loved Volodya very much but was ultimately unable to commit to a life on Wanda's terms. Or Volodya's...Nico was too young to consider monogamy a good personal choice, and that was always going to be their downfall as lovers.

It does not prevent their friendship, based in the camaraderie of living double (dishonest) lives, from persisting...Horowitz writes to Nico over the years of his ups and downs. It's a sad truth of life that friendships based in shared trauma can, as this one did, curdle; ultimately the choices of a life lived for an external goal amputate the lingering ties to a life lived for personal happiness incompatible with that goal.

Nico's unexceptional talent and Volodya's era-defining one were doomed to clash. Their moment of lovingkindness and connection was a gift each man treasured. It could not be celebrated in their world, but it can be now.

I'd recommend this passionate love-chronicle to the readers who enjoy, and are in the mood for, putting some effort into living inside a great love's contained world.

MY DREADFUL BODY, five-star novella debunking misogyny's lies

MY DREADFUL BODY
EGANA DJABBAROVA (tr. Lisa C. Hayden)
New Vessel Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.95 all editions, available now

On the 2026 Longlist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: A dazzling debut novel about a young woman's vexed coming of age in a traditional Azerbaijani community in Russia, grappling under the weight of Muslim patriarchal norms and a debilitating neurological condition.

The mysterious affliction leaves her unable to control her muscles, plagued by pain and speech disorders, defying diagnosis. Addressing each body part with the scrupulousness of a medical researcher, the narrator explores memories, traditions, and taboos related to her physical self. In the process, a woman once destined for the role of a beautiful marriageable daughter comes to be perceived as damaged goods.

With verbal elegance and poetic power, Egana Djabbarova unveils a hidden world in which illness unexpectedly facilitates her liberation.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Poetically laconic, elegantly simple, maximally affecting prose telling a woman's life of contradictions in identity. For a woman in Azeri culture, her body defines her. It is female therefore these are her options, this set of rules apply to her. Then along comes Egana, like the author's name...probably like the author. She yearns not to be defined by her body, and paradoxically freed by having a woman's body defined by a painful, disabling illness called dystonia blends both those realities.

Eleven body parts define the course of this narrative, under 150pp in length, and still eternal. It's Egana coming to terms with patriarchy and its religious, its community, its intimate controls over women. This is a fierce and outraged shout in the face of a god and a culture that insists femaleness has no agency, can only exist in relation, in submission, to masculine needs and wants. Egana doesn't shout her rage, she trumpets her horrible escape from the unkind fate of a life spent in drudgery and servitude...a decidedly mixed blessing, but a blessing she catalogs in careful, intimate detail. This is what makes this read so different from US feminist fiction: It prescribes no path to follow, defines no road not taken or taken by stricture. Egana has no say in her desirable opting-out from Womanhood's duties as prescribed by her culture. It was wished on her by a bodily dysfunction, a painful affliction; but it serves as a space separate from her culture's expectations so is a vantage point from which to observe the power of normative expectation. It is a meditation and an examination, not a prescription for others to follow.

Possibly the most powerful strand in the tight, compact story for my disabled-by-pain self was not related to that shared experience but the equally defining quality of being in a cultural diaspora. A Muslim and an Azeri in Russia, the colonial power that defined her family's country's course in the modern world telling the story of her intimate estrangement from that community was perhaps the least expected source of empathy and pathos in my read of the story. I felt as though I was fully in Egana's life when I realized how alienated from her Othered cultural reality...doubly, triply Othered by religion, sex, and culture.

It's astonishing how deep this experience of identification was as I considered my own alienation from US culture with its youth-worship, its heteronormativity, its serious lack of interest in including the disabled or the chronically ill. It lifted the read into five-star territory because it managed this feat without once telling me how terrible Egana's fate was. I got to experience her life with her, in her words, grounded in her own body...each discussed part of which I also possess. Nothing in Egana's "dreadful" body is unique to femaleness. It is female because she is a woman. It is discussed as a woman's body in relation to every other cultural reality only because she is a woman.

If you can think of a better way to point up the sheer idiocy of misogyny, its illogic and its sadism, I encourage you strongly to write about it. You'll be a bestseller in no time at all.

As My Dreadful Body should be.

VILLA OF DELIRIUM, a récit in translation to keep you intrigued this winter weekend

VILLA OF DELIRIUM
ADRIEN GOETZ (tr. Natasha Lehrer)
New Vessel Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$26.95 all editions, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Along the French Riviera in the early 1900s, an illustrious family in thrall to classical antiquity builds a fabulous villa—a replica of a Greek palace, complete with marble columns and frescoes depicting mythological gods.

The Reinachs—related to other wealthy Jews like the Rothschilds and the Ephrussis—attempt to recreate "a pure beauty" lost in the 20th century. The narrator of this brilliant novel calls the imposing house “an act of delirium, above all an optimistic act, proof that one could reset time as one could reset a clock and resist the outside world." The story of the villa and its glamorous inhabitants is recounted by the son of a servant from the nearby estate of Gustave Eiffel, designer of the Paris tower, and the two contrasting structures present opposite responses to modernity. The son is adopted by the Reinachs, initiated into the era of Socrates and instructed in classical Greek. He joins a family pilgrimage to Athens, falls in love with a married woman, and survives the Nazi confiscation of the house and deportation to death camps of Reinach grandchildren.

This is a Greek epic for the modern era.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I've been years without writing up my notes on this read. It's shameful. I'm so sorry not to have warbled about it...in my defense, it was COVID time.

First off I want to encourage you to take the virtual tour of the (real) villa itself. It definitely blurs the lines between reality and fantasy...both the fact there is a real place, built by real pre-war Jewish aesthetes, and the fact the novel (a roman à clef, surely, though I don't have the key) treats its subject as so close to the mythical world it embodies conspire to give the story a powerful impact. Attributed to the fictional creator pf the fictional villa is the epigraph: "The Greeks discovered glory, they discovered beauty, and they brought to this discovery such jubilation, such an overabundance of life, that a sense of youthful contagion can still be felt even after the passage of three or four thousand years."

As a statement of purpose for this novel that one is spot-on. It's a bit Tom Ripley/Line of Beauty/Saltburn-esque in its insertion of a young lad from an impoverished background into a world he could not even have dreamed up, still less entered. He learns vast amounts of cultural information not widely available to boys of his class as he companions, somewhat à la Patroclus, his wealthy young compatriot Adolphe.

Time passes; the education he gets by being whisked out of his dead-end life leads him to, on a trip with Adolphe and his uncle Theodore (benefactor of Achilles), to do something very wrong; in his turn, wrong is done to him by Theodore who dresses it up as redressing the balance. It is not that at all, it is greed. A set of scales falls from Achilles' eyes, and the reader's; being cultured, being educated and deeply humane, does not being a good person.

Time-jumping decades, we meet Achilles in his famous-artist phase. He might not have profited from his bad deed fortyish years before, but his connection to wealth and high culture is solid, and very useful. As it is 1956, the area is abuzz with the marriage of Grace Kelly to Prince Rainier of Monaco. Achilles uses this influx of strangers to mask his return to the now-derelict villa of his childhood. We all know what he has gone to look for: the object purloined by him, then stolen by Theodore.

Greed and the complicated desire to Win, to Beat Them, are deeply enmeshed with the self-justifying desire to be Right, to get the last word. Humans...such irredeemable scum. Recovering an object? No, no more than the madeleine was the object of Swann's memory palace. Recovering a moment once lived with intensity? Okay...recovering lost, doomed first love? Okay...all of these at once, reviving memory's mood board as it was being edited and stuck into place is rather the project of middle age. In Achilles' case it's quite a beautiful reconstruction. Do we trust him? Is he, in the confines of his mind that is this récit, editing, embellishing, altering the raw material of memory, cutting the scenes into the movie he wants to watch?

This is where the story becomes so much more than the sum of its beautiful parts. In any récit, we're not given the momentous clash between narrator and reality because there is only the one person speaking to us. In this story's case that means reckoning with the nature of memory, the pain of identity being formed as it must always be in tension with Other; it is Achilles' story, but of necessity it is only his story of the myriad he comes into consequential contact with. Author and translator let us be in the flow with Achilles, of sacred name, and hurry no revelations to keep us "engaged" by creating an unnatural action. It is meditative, it is dense, and it is going to be obvious to you in twenty pages if it's one for you pursue.

I'm now approaching Achilles' end-age. I see things as he does, in strobe-flashes of intense memory followed by blind black voids of time. I found Achilles and his remarkable life deeply pleasant company, telling me an involving story at an old man's pace.

It was a slow read. It kept calling me back. I was able to pick right back up after literal years away from it because I was that invested in the man. It's a story I think will reward the reader who can just...go with it. I hope you'll read a sample, see if it's for you or not.

THERE'S NO POINT IN DYING, words that (now) chill me

THERE'S NO POINT IN DYING
FRANCISCO MACIEL (tr. Bruna Dantas Lobato)
New Vessel Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.95 all editions, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In this kaleidoscopic novel set in a favela of Rio de Janeiro—“in the city of stray bullets, in the land of lost opportunities”—a gang member runs wildly through the streets not knowing he has only seven minutes left to live. Barflies, prostitutes, immigrants, a gay couple, a taxi driver, cops, a mobster, and more populate Francisco Maciel’s first book to appear in English.

Leaping back and forth across time and spiraling into the surreal, the novel coalesces around a brutal massacre. Maciel’s multiracial characters write poetry and discourse on soccer, insects, samba, and climate change.

Gritty, unpredictable, and percussive, There’s No Point in Dying is translated by National Book Award winner Bruna Dantas Lobato.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: So once Dafé dies in the first pages of this raucous story-braid, we meet Guile Xangô (a philosophe who's out of place among the pimps and criminals in the favela, and his condescending companion in curmudgeonry and friend Vovô do Crime, as they bounce among times and between people in their geographic orbit. They leave contrails of wry judgment and mean-spirited character assassination. They're flâneurs of the favela, wandering hither thither and yon, taking it all in, standing apart from it, never more than ankle-deep in the roiling waters of undeclared wars, pitched battles between different kinds of criminal gangs.

It sounds violent because it is, because life at street level always is unless you're standing on mountains of privilege. Vovô and Guile aren't, yet they're held apart by the general consensus on the street that they're different, apart by nature, not targets...it's their role to bear witness. Like all us outsiders, weirdos, marginal people.

The ghost stories, animal fables, violent assaults avenged, and socially frowned on intimacies snatched in the chaos of Life, aren't strung on a novel's plot. They're fragments of reality, shards of fracturing order. They're not in linear, but emotional, order. The tone of these pieces of story is consistently manic. A lot happens, just like in life.

It's quite fun if you're in the right frame of mind. The world, the sensory world, is evoked well. It's sights and sounds don't obtrude, they weave in and out of the foreground to good effect. The reason I'm not offering a fifth star on this one is that it's less a narrative than vignettes; it's not a flaw, it's a design decision, and it carries costs with its benefits. The author is able to set a tremendously propulsive pace, at the expense of the emotional investment in the characters. This is not to say they're mere labels moving through a complicated storyboard like something from the Marvel Comics Universe. It's not a narrative to linger, though.

It's a terrific tale of fracturing lives in tension and under pressure. If you're after that sensation of "wow! what happened then?" without lingering on the consequences, this is your read.

RETURN TO LATVIA, it's happening again and you're not paying attention

RETURN TO LATVIA
MARINA JARRE (tr. Ann Goldstein)
New Vessel Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.95 all editions, available now

Rating: ?

The Publisher Says: Building upon her celebrated autobiography Distant Fathers, Italian author Marina Jarre returns to her native Latvia for the first time since she left as a ten-year-old girl in 1935. In Return to Latvia—a masterful collage-like work that is part travelogue, part memoir, part ruminative essay—she looks for traces of her murdered father whom she never bid farewell. Jarre visits the former Jewish ghetto and the forest south of Riga where tens of thousands were slaughtered in a 1941 mass execution by Nazi death squads with active participation by Latvian collaborators. Here she attempts to reconcile herself with her past, or at least to heal the wounds of a truncated childhood.

Piecing together documents and memories, Return to Latvia explores immense guilt, repression and the complicity of Latvians in the massacres of their Jewish neighbors, highlighting vast Holocaust atrocities that occurred outside the confines of death camps in plain view.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: If you're Jewish and support this administration, you should realize how extremely delusional you are after you read this book. It does not start with Jews, not this time, but it won't stop before it gets to you.

Don't beleve me? Neither did the Jews who smiled smugly as "gypsys" and fegelehs and communists went to the camps.

Hate can not be satisfied. Hate cannot be appeased. Hate cannot be directed.

Stand up to it or be consumed by it.

There is no healing from hate. It deforms and disfigures and eats its fuel as certainly as their targets. It's the same bitter irony: To combat the thing, you must adopt the thing. Controlling evil, paradoxically, requires doing evil, thus scaring the haters into silence.

The lesson of history is the bitter, horrifying truth: Nothing can ever stop hatred. Scare haters into silence, and never, ever stop suspecting the grim, ugly truth is they're still there. Make it too expensive to their own lives to enact hatred like we are seeing roar back to life in the world today. The camps are real. The "news" is reporting on them and y'all aren't out in the streets...those who can be physically...calling attention to them. That is called "complicity".

Future Marina Jarres will write this story again, and again, and again, unless y'all pull your thumbs out and start doing the hard, icky work of combating hatred with hatred. It's ugly. It's unpleasant. But if you can read this story and not see how hugely much it costs not to do it...

...

...I've answered my own question. Signed, one your inaction has doomed to the camps unless I get lucky and die first.

UNTRACEABLE, ex-Soviet thriller author slyly pokes powerful people in the ribs..."I saw that!" with deniability

UNTRACEABLE
SERGEI LEBEDEV (tr. Antonina W. Bouis)
New Vessel Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$22.95 all editions, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In 2018, a former Russian secret agent and his daughter were poisoned with a lethal neurotoxin that left them slumped over on a British park bench in critical condition. The story of who did it, and how these horrendous contaminants were developed, captivates and terrifies in equal measure. It has inspired acclaimed author Sergei Lebedev’s latest page-turning novel.

At its center is a scheming chemist named Professor Kalitin, obsessed with developing an absolutely deadly, undetectable and untraceable poison for which there is no antidote. He becomes consumed by guilt over the death of his wife, the first accidental victim of his Faustian pact to create the ultimate venom, and the deaths of hundreds of test subjects. After he defects from the Soviet Union to spend his “retirement” years in the West, two Russian secret agents are dispatched to assassinate him.

In this fast-paced, genre-bending novel, Lebedev weaves tension-filled pages of stunningly beautiful prose exploring the historical trajectories of evil. From Nazi labs, Stalinist plots, the Chechen Wars, to present-day Russia, Lebedev probes the ethical responsibilities of scientists supplying modern tyrants and autocrats with ever newer instruments of retribution, destruction and control. Lebedev, one of Russia’s most important and exciting writers, has never been better.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I do not know why this story did not sell a million copies on release, or why so many highly respected outlets' praise (The New York Times, Library Journal, CrimeReads) did not result in bestsellerdom and a residency on top of the lists. It couldn't be the quiet discouragement of Powerful People, of course not...but somehow y'all slept on this well-told, excitingly plotted, extremely timely thriller.

What do you mean, "so did you"? No of course I didn't! I had...COVID...oh yeah...forgot about that.

Time to rectify that.

Let's start with the prose:

Kalitan felt uncomfortable. The pushy women, the noisy, grumbling line, the obnoxious kids annoyed him. The boys suddenly ran off and whispered to the adults pointing at the car. Kalitin turned around and saw that the bouncing ride had loosened the tarp. The sun shone on the monkey's dead face, yellow teeth bared in the pink mouth; shiny chrome-green flies crawled over the black fur.

A Goodreads friend, herself a novelist, used this passage to illustrate why the story did not work for her. I'm the opposite, in this case. As a reader of thrillers I want to see, to get into my eyes, the scenes; it's the m.o. of the thriller to be cinematic and evoke a response with urgency not build-up in most situations. I got my cues...yellow, pink interiors of vulnerability; metallic green, black, shiny exteriors of impermeability. My eyes are there.

It isn't going to work for everyone, but what does? Translator Bouis did not overcomplicate or undersell at any turn the intent of a thriller. I really got involved, as a result, in the way the story presents the conflict of guilt and culpability as reluctant internalization of results in physical reality.

Poisoning someone by premeditated action would come across as depraved, indifferent, if done in this framework. Instead this story is about creating conditions by one's curiosity and labor to resolve that curiosity in physical form that result in...entirely without one's own involvement...the greatest possible harm to a stranger. Think it's implausible? Go watch Oppenheimer, and/or read American Prometheus.

What works best in this way of presenting the story is (for me) the sheer number of SNAFUs and FUMTUs that plague attempts to "neutralize the threat" that is Kalitin's continued existence, after his creation is revealed to be the cause of death of politically inconvenient people. While he is not-really trying to deal with knowledge that processing would render horrifyingly painful, those trying to make their orders from on high real get more and more tripped up, screwed up, and outright thwarted by...well, everything.

It is always the case that ability to act outpaces ability to reflect. Kalitin is now reflecting, reluctantly, on his actions. We are not, thank goodness, subjected to his self-justifications. We see actions and results, we perceive probable responses, but we are never in the muck that is this morally compromised, no bankrupt, man's head. I think listening to a human's self-exculpatory inner chatter is pointless and painful.

A reckoning is a cathartic experience in life and in reading. Very, very seldom do reckonings come cleanly defined, with sharp edges and self-evident results. Fiction tries for that completeness at its peril, as this is fantasy fulfillment. Would you expect a Russian author, in the time of Little Vladdy Pu-Pu, to attempt that kind of blame assignment?

AUGUST WAS #WITMONTH...NOW IT'S SEPTEMBER, NATIONAL TRANSLATION MONTH

AUGUST 2025 was a very satisfying #WITMonth! My goal was writing at least 30 reviews of works translated by, or written by and then translated, from women the world around sourced from the DRC aggregators.

End of celebration report: thirty-two (32) posted, two ahead of my goal. As is always true, searching the tag "#WITMonth" on the blog, by clicking it at the bottom of this entry or by entering the text in the search box, will give you all the entries so tagged. You can also click right here.

There were standout reads, of course; fewer than I would've preferred, but including a strong contender for my 2025 six-stars-of-five accolade is The Remembered Soldier, a Dutch Great-War story of identity, of need and longing and love you can't imagine life without, all so precisely, sharply even, wrapped in that wooliest of media: Memory. There is nothing in any of that warbling of joy to detract from the amazing non-fiction work (So What) If I'm a Puta that tells the own-voices stories of transfem sex workers in Brazil. Transfem folk are at the highest risk imaginable for femicide. It's a tough, bleak read, but it left me fully aware of how easy it is for transphobic...people...to do their ugly, hateful work without knowing a fraction of the cost others must pay for it.

I'm delighted that August is going out on the happy note of a lovely stretch of just-right days with sun, breeze, not-hot not-cold temperatures, not-too-humid (I live on the beach, humid gonna happen) air. It's like it was before climate change really began biting us.

So, September is #NationalTranslationMonth, which I'll be leaning into for my reviewing. I'll include women's translations as new ones pop up, hashtagging with both #NationalTranslationMonth and #WITMonth to be sure they're discoverable from every abgle. It won't be as focused a push, but will definitely be noticeable. No goals set so I'm not pressuring myself to accomplish something; I'll just be taking extra note of a book's origins.

And with that, I'll wish global-northerners a happy incoming fall and global-southerners the same for spring! Excellent reading mojo for all, of course.

PROFESSOR SCHIFF'S GUILT, humor is hard, but better when hard-edged

PROFESSOR SCHIFF'S GUILT
AGUR SCHIFF (tr. Jessica Cohen)
New Vessel Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.95 all editions, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A stellar novel rendered into a darkly comic, unforgettable narrative by Booker International Prize winning translator Jessica Cohen.

An Israeli professor travels to a fictitious West African nation to trace a slave-trading ancestor, only to be imprisoned under a new law barring successive generations from profiting off the proceeds of slavery. But before departing from Tel Aviv, the protagonist falls in love with Lucile, a mysterious African migrant worker who cleans his house.

Entertaining and thought-provoking, this satire of contemporary attitudes toward racism and the legacy of colonialism examines economic inequality and the global refugee crisis, as well as the memory of transatlantic chattel slavery and the Holocaust. Is the professor’s passion for Africa merely a fashionable pose and the book he's secretly writing about his experience there nothing but a modern version of the slave trade?

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I'm willing to bet that most people squirm just reading the synopsis. It's a reckoning with the long shadow of chattel slavery and its ties to Jewish merchants.

I think the best choice Author Schiff made was to tell the story in a comedic register, relying on farcical coincidences of crime and punishment to acknowledge past harms while lampooning present ones caused by some clumsy, bureaucratic attempt at balancing cosmic scales.

The far more interesting point Author Schiff makes, to me at least, is the sheer ubiquity of the mental construct of Africa as lesser, as broken and needing "us" to fix it. The way Professor Schiff approaches his putative project in the narrative begs the question "why are you doing this?"

As a meditation on white guilt versus White Guilt, I think it's a great contribution to necessary conversations about Jewish complicity in the crimes of chattel slavery. As a novel about an individual man's coming to self-awareness, it felt...off.

The parallels drawn between Ancestor Schiff and his appropriation of the slavegirl, and Storyteller Schiff and his relationship to his cleaner, weren't that successful in my reading eyes. They felt as performative as the arrest and legal proceedings of Storyteller Schiff did, without the sharp edge of satire to make them cut my tough hide of willful ignorance. As a result, I was more squicked out than I was challenged to contemplate the real meaning of these sexual crimes. In fact I felt less sympathy for Ancestor Schiff before Storyteller Schiff's peccadillo was brought in. I think the opposite was intended.

I know that could really be a "me" thing, but I bring it up to alert readers who find sexual exploitation deeply unpleasant that this could decrease their reading pleasure.

I'm not as delighted by the read as others were but I am happy to have read a reckoning with an underrepresented crime of historical complicity.

THE PROPAGANDIST, a careful personal inquiry into that weird addiction, Hate (with a capital-H)

THE PROPAGANDIST
CÉCILE DESPRAIRIES (tr. Natasha Lehrer)
New Vessel Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.95 all editions, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: In a grand Paris apartment, a young girl attends gatherings regularly organized by her mother. The women talk about beauty secrets and gossip, but the mood grows dark when the past, notably World War Two, comes under coded discussion in hushed tones.

Years later, the silent witness to these sessions has become a prominent historian, and with this chilling autobiographical novel she sets out to unmask enigmatic figures in and around her family. Why, she seeks to understand, did they betray their Jewish neighbors and zealously collaborate with the Nazi occupation of France, remaining for decades hence obsessive devotees of that evil lost cause.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Very much like My Dinner with Andre, only French and about Nazi collaborators, in their own damning words.

What a book to write from one's own experiences. I'm amazed she was not more vilified, as it seems her brother had the most powerful negative response to publishing what amounts to the filthiest of dirty laundry. The author "is a specialist in Germanic civilization and a historian of the Nazi occupation of France. She is the author of several historical works about the occupation and the Vichy regime. Born in Paris in 1957, The Propagandist is her first novel," though certainly not her first book (publisher's provided biographical info). I think my favorite title of hers is "Ville Lumière, Années Noirs" or roughly "City of Light in Years of Darkness" about the Nazi occupation. I wish someone would translate it because my days of slugging through big honkin' books in French are gone.

Lucie, the Propagandist of the title, was married to an Aryan named Friedrich before the convenient marriage to the narrator's rich father. It was Friedrich, the One True Love of Lucie's life and an early eugenics researcher, who formed the future matriarch's attitudes ever after. Lucie and her female relatives all use the corruption of French legal and social systems (this is the land of the Dreyfus Affair and the LePens' evil racism, recall) to benefit materially from the vanishing and lack of return of Parisian Jews.

Probably the best time I had reading about these vile people as they sat around discussing their necrotic morality was the details of how exactly the collaborators accomplished this feat of theft. "Listening" to them as they bemoaned being called collaborators and spewed hatred was, frankly, unpleasant. It's a lot like people in the US not protesting ICEstapo's disappearing of people the scum risen to the top don't like. If you're wondering what those "good Germans" and ordinary French collaborators thought of just sitting back and not speaking out, look in a mirror.

The last third of the book dragged past me. The horrified fascination of learning what these entitled sleazebags got up to in order to hide from justice while keeping their ill-got gains wore off; the stars fell from my eyes and my rating. The absence of a central conflict got to me at last. I can't help but praise the author and the book, while tutting over the story as a story.

What I want to say and do at this passage in US political history is very much what the author has done here: Hold an unsparing mirror to the inner workings of "good people" who make excuses for their inaction. Its consequences are real. The Gestapo, loyal only to The Leader, and constrained by no laws, is operating now.

What are you doing to resist it? Are you sitting in your comfy world tutting? At least sending money to help refugees somewhere? Anything? Or are you these detestable Parisian ladies' spiritual descendant?

SLEEPLESS NIGHT, grief never really ends...so what do you do with it?

SLEEPLESS NIGHT
MARGRIET DeMOOR (tr. David Doherty)
New Vessel Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$15.95 all editions, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: A woman gets up in the middle of a wintry night and starts baking a cake while her lover sleeps upstairs. When it's time for her to take the cake out of the oven, we have read a story of romance and death. The narrator of this novel was widowed years ago and is trying to find new passion. But the memory of her deceased husband and a shameful incident still holds her in its grasp. Why did he do it?

Margriet de Moor, the grande dame of Dutch literature, tells a gripping love story about endings and demise, rage and jealousy, knowledge and ambiguity—and the possibility of new beginnings.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: When I get a deMoor translation, I hop right on reading it because I know I'll go deep into a fascinating place. First Grey, Then White, Then Blue seduced me into her fan club thirty-plus years ago; then, over the years, a few other tries at getting Anglophones interested in her storytelling have been made. None has riled up the delighted baying and howling I feel she deserves for her beautiful, considered, lapidary work.

Oh...I think I see why others aren't flocking to get her latest. More fools they be.

This story will speak loudest to those among us who have lost a love. Left behind to make sense of the life we now live, our love now unreturned, figuring out how the hell to keep plowing through endless, cheerless, drift-filled days and then...horror of self-sadism...those reflective contemplative unanswerable-questioning nights.

Bake a cake!

In this case a tulbandcake (here translated as a "bundt cake" which, yes, but in a curious way, no):

A tulbandcake showing its candied-fruit interior and cool fluting

Staying busy, trying to keep your thoughts out of the toxic death-spiral of loneliness, resentment, anger, hollowness; that's all so relatable, and more poignant because on this night she's come to her kitchen to escape a man she's trying to find a passion for who is sleeping (she thinks) in her bed. He's been left behind as well...though her abandonment is to the love of her life's suicide some time ago and his to his wife's unwillingness to be married to him. That's it, that's the sum total of his existence in this story; having been him before I'll say it's my considered opinion he's lying awake wondering what the hell he's doing where he is when she's not even willing to be there with him for afters.

That said, the love of her life gave up on her, their brand-new life together, and on Life. That leaves a scar. What this nocturnal awakening is about is that scar. Is she so puckered and warped by it there's no longer a way to lie flat again? Is this hopelessness real or imagined? Can she tell the difference? How can she tell the difference?

Is the cake ready?

Because if it is, it needs to come out and cool down so it can be eaten.

IYKYK.

MAYA ARAD'S PAGE: HAPPY NEW YEARS; and THE HEBREW TEACHER: Three Novellas

HAPPY NEW YEARS
MAYA ARAD (tr. Jessica Cohen)
New Vessel Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.95 all editions, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: After emigrating to the United States in the mid-1960s, Leah maintains her connection to Israel by writing an annual letter on the Jewish new year to her old friends from a women's teaching college.

Comprising five decades of correspondence, the novel skillfully weaves together Leah's high hopes and deep disappointments as she navigates relationships, marriage, divorce, single motherhood, financial struggles, and professional ups and downs. Leah's relentless optimism and cheerfulness conceal disturbing truths behind her carefully crafted words. As her letters turn increasingly introspective, the secrets and shame that shaped her trajectory unravel.

This is the epistolary novel at its best, inviting the reader to play detective and probe between the lines of Leah's insistently rosy portrayal of her life. Gradually piecing together her true circumstances, we are charmed into forgiving her minor deceptions and richly rewarded with the profound insights that Leah's self-constructed narrative reveals.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: What does a lifetime of dissembling hide? What does a multi-decade one-sided relationship require of the one creating it? Leah, sixty years ago, made temporary friendships she mistook for real friendships (or tried to will into real friendships) in Israel before emigrating to the US. The reason she emigrated, like everything else in her life, is behind a scrim of what she wants these "friends" to see.

It's a common enough experience to commit to a relationship that the other party/s are not having, mostly in earlier life; but to continue to make the effort to inform these clearly indifferent people of what she wants them to think is her life...! The effort, the energy put into thinking of what it *should* be, this life she's crafted. I was slightly in awe at the artifice of the story as Author Arad told it.

But really now, is Leah doing anything most all of us do not do? Is the Story of Your Life the real story, or curated by memory to make your mistakes, cruelties, neglectful unkindnesses tolerable to the You doing the thinking? Leah is all of us, I think, at least those of us not doing ourselves the service of going into therapy.

I'm not all the way sure most people will bother to look past a narrative device, the epistolary novel, to look into a deeper crevice of Leah's commonality with us all: what stories is she telling herself to get through her life? Is it a life, or an existence, as she is experiencing it? And how are we all using these same means to be in any way satified by life as we live it? I'm guessing a lot of Leahs are just not ready or willing or able to stop writing their own letters, the literal scripts (in its multiple senses) of artifice and craftsmanship. The bulk of people are the Cleopatras of old, barging down Denial.

So it was that Leah won my sympathy as she lived the life she had to, and showed the life she wanted in letters to people who never cared much. Author Arad weaves the two together all the way through the story but it isn't obvious how until the ending. I know most of y'all wouldn't be bothered by a spoiler, but...well...the noisy ones would, so not this time.

I'll say this much: I was deeply satisfied, fulfilled even, by the resolution. That's saying a lot.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

THE HEBREW TEACHER: Three Novellas
MAYA ARAD (tr. Jessica Cohen)
New Vessel Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.95 all editions, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD FOR HEBREW FICTION IN TRANSLATION (2024)

Three Israeli women, their lives altered by immigration to the United States, seek to overcome crises. Ilana is a veteran Hebrew instructor at a Midwestern college who has built her life around her career. When a young Hebrew literature professor joins the faculty, she finds his post-Zionist politics pose a threat to her life’s work.

Miriam, whose son left Israel to make his fortune in Silicon Valley, pays an unwanted visit to meet her new grandson and discovers cracks in the family’s perfect façade. Efrat, another Israeli in California, is determined to help her daughter navigate the challenges of middle school, and crosses forbidden lines when she follows her into the minefield of social media.

In these three stirring novellas—comedies of manners with an ambitious blend of irony and sensitivity—celebrated Israeli author Maya Arad probes the demise of idealism and the generation gap that her heroines must confront.

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My Review: There are few things more fraught than women pursuing lives and careers of their own, not subordinate to, lesser than, or determined by, a man's life/career/convenience or a family's needs. Even in Israel, an aggressively egalitarian gender system's mothership, there are traditional religious practitioners who resist this facet of the Sabras' intent when setting the State of Israel up. Maya Arad, in these novellas, probes the roles, minds, and hearts of her "women of a certain age" whose courses in life were set to accomplish things for, well, for others but still for themselves.

What happens is a quiet-seeming, radical takedown of unquestioned, unquestioning, unquestionable "morality." It is a pity that Author Arad is not a household name in the US. Translator Cohen has made her art umistakable by exercising the translator's alchemy on it.

The Hebrew Teacher brings Ilana, whose Zionism stopped being examined in the 70s, into abrupt awareness of what younger assimilated US-raised Jews think and feel. Her new colleague at the college where she's taught Jewish Studies her entire adult life, is...not in sympathy...with her views, nor (to her startlement) is her US-born son.

The shock of realizing how much one has built and then benefited from a mountain of privilege is always existential. Ilana, in Author Arad's capable brain, discovers and processes how deep the divide in what has been her intellectual...and moral...fief for so long really runs.

Costs are exacted. Life's inexorable moving, too-often-wilfully ignored, never ever ceases. 4*

A Visit (Scenes) has family communication at its heart. It is fragmented, as the title suggests; Miriam is, possibly, suppressing or possibly simply ignoring (as we all do in older years) what comes between the moments limned clearly here.

Yoram's deeply estranged relationship to Mother Miriam is not close to unusual for immigrant parents to assimilated/assimilating children. Is Miriam the woman he's made in his mind, one he does not want his son Yonatan in close contact with, or is she simply bearing the brunt of his dissatisfaction?

In the end, this set of interrelated vignettes was not emotionally resonant with me, for no reason I can articulate at all well. 3.5*

Make New Friends is a mantra for immigrant mom Efrat to her socially awkward daughter Libby. I can understand why, since Efrat comes across as someone who never quite belonged; but more than that, Libby is in a new world that's never existed before of internet-mediated socialization and socializing that befuddles, scares, leaves behind most people older than twenty-five.

Immigrant moms are at the most unnervingly invisible-to-them disadvantage: The natural, inevitable rejection of an adolescent for a parent's wisdom and experience is exacerbated by a real cultural gap. Efrat can not possibly know what Libby faces online. It was not part of her life at that time of life, and is not part of her life now.

How does one guide a foreigner one gave birth to? Is it even possible? or is offering love and unquestioning support enough?

Extremely relevant questions in 2025's societal landscape. 4*

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.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

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.

THE LADY OF THE MINE, bitter take-down of imperialism's Silent Majority

THE LADY OF THE MINE
SERGEI LEBEDEV (tr. Antonina W. Bouis)
New Vessel Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.95 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: The mystical laundress at the center of this novel is obsessed with purity. Her task is formidable as she stands guard over a sealed shaft at a Ukrainian coal mine that hides terrible truths.

The bodies of dead Jews lying in its depths seem to attract still more present-day crimes. Acclaimed Russian author Sergei Lebedev portrays a ghostly realm riven by lust and fear just as the Kremlin invades the same part of Ukraine occupied by the Wehrmacht in World War Two.

Then corpses rain from the sky when a jet liner is shot down overhead, scattering luxury goods along with the mortal remains. Eerie coincidences and gruesome discoveries fill this riveting exploration of an uncanny place where the geography exudes violence, and where the sins of the past are never all that in the past.

Lebedev, who has won international praise for his soul-searching prose and unflinching examination of history’s evils, shines light on the fault line where Nazism met Soviet communism, evolving into the new fascism of today’s Russia.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: When someone sets out to write about how truly vilely humans treat, and think about, each other, they get...pushback. Unsurprisingly a man from Moscow known to support anti-Russian causes gets review-bombed for this bitterly anti-imperialist examination and take-down of the memory hole people put their dark collusions into on Goodreads. 82% of all the reviews are one-star Cyrillic alphabet ones. I don't speak or read Russian so I can't comment on what those reviewers say. The few among the one-starrers who wrote in English don't seem to me like real people based on their profiles, which fits.

I wish nothing but the best for Ukraine. This book is set there because it's the place most in the news; because it's clear the Russian Army is there to forcibly reintegrate Ukraine into whatever Little Vladdy Pu-Pu plans to call the new Soviet Union. The entire thrust in the guts of this book is aimed at imperialism and conquest, using the silently collusive's various ways of justifying their collusion against them, in service of the downtrodden. Simply not doing something active in support of evil is not enough to remain a decent human being. The mine in this story has no bottom, has no end, it never closes or runs out of its resource: Victims who were not saved by those who could have.

If you, cishet white person reading this, are feeling a wee bit uncomfortable about now, you should pay attention to that feeling. It's as fresh as the headlines: we're reading everywhere about disasters, and doing the "easy" to do; about how our nature as humans is to go along to get along, to survive, to be small targets. That will only gain force in the coming years as duck-and-cover feels safe, feels good.

There is no safe.

Stand up whatever way you can. Not doing so will not keep you safe. Ask those people in this novel's crashed airplane...they weren't safe.

I assume I don't need to explain the metaphors used by Levedev, they're not very subtle. I hope I don't need to say "not getting this book and reading it isn't anything but denial of your humane duty." Listen to the people who know what they're talking about, like exiled writers; plan your resistance with their examples. Help them keep the message going, keep the help spreading.

Or sit and wait for it to happen to you. It will.

Not quite five stars for me, because as mentioned above the metaphors aren't terribly subtle. The story deserves your time and treasure.

OF SAINTS AND MIRACLES, family tragedy that creates a folk hero

OF SAINTS AND MIRACLES
MANUEL ASTUR (tr. Claire Wadie)
New Vessel Press
$16.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: This mesmerizing novel opens with a fratricide in a beautiful if impoverished region of northern Spain.

The perpetrator, Marcelino, lives alone in his parental home where he recalls having doted on his baby brother and sought to protect their mother from their father’s drunken rages. Author Manuel Astur’s poetic language and seamless blend of lyricism with the grotesque renders this book a treasure for the reader that includes the mother’s bewitching tales about the sun, the moon, and an invisible horse-drawn carriage of death. Glimpses into other villagers’ lives reveal a community that gathers to slaughter pigs for feasts and to confront a mysterious plague of white worms.

The mountainous green of rural Asturias is as much a character as these residents, from whom Marcelino flees to the wild peaks after his brother’s slaying, becoming a cult hero as he evades authorities. Of Saints and Miracles is a sensuous portrayal of an outcast’s struggle to survive in a chaotic world of both tragedy and magical splendor.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: What startled me most was being in medias res, knowing the murderer from the get-go and the inside out. That is a subversion of expectations that made me stick to the tale as it was being told. Normally I read murder-themed stories while looking for clues and hints from the off. I was made to think a different way about this true-life tale.

It worked in this read's favor, as the way the story's written is a joy to read:

When you see a weed in the vegetable plot you pull it out. When you've got more chickens than you need, you wring the neck of one and chuck it in the pot. When some dog mounts your bitch and she gives birth to a litter, you choose the best puppy, put the rest in an old potato sack with some stones and throw the sack in the river. When an apple tree no longer bears fruit, you cut it down and chop it up for firewood. When the grass in your field gets too long, you cut it, gather it up and store it in the hayloft. When a man in a suit comes and shows you some papers and tells you some stuff about mortgages and wants to take away your vegetable plot, your hens, your bitch and your fields, you defend yourself. Even if this man in a suit is your brother. And they can call you a revolutionary and talk about you on TV and in the papers and say who knows what about the oppressed peoples, or the last remaining guerrilla, but the truth is simpler, it's always simpler. And the truth is that you have to do what you have to do.
–and–
(Marcelino/)Leno's mother told him to give the little old lady a kiss. She smelled of cookies, earth, and bleach. Then she gave a toothless smile like a baby magpie and made a gurgling sound as if she had sand in her throat. She gurgled some more and his mother understood, even if he didn't. That was about all he could remember of the old world. The yellow smell of human piss and past lives filled with misery. A white washbowl with a tear shaped chip in its enamel, glowing in the darkness like an apparition. A one-eyed ginger cat asleep at the old woman's feet. A tatty old oil cloth on a rickety table. A few empty hooks, blackened by grease over the years. A handful of dried ears of corn tied up in a piece of cloth. Shadows dancing on the filthy wall. That's about it.

You like it, you don't...I don't think anyone can make much of a case that this isn't a robust storytelling voice. The way the voice comes across in telling this sad, brutal tale of a simple man solving problems he doesn't understand as best he can suited this reader as well as anything could.

The fearsomeness of committing a fratricide is never far from Marcelino's mind.

You see, this wound hurts just as much as yesterday’s wound, which hurt as much as the one before, and the one before the one before that, and as much as the first wound, the original wound that the first man feared. And though this wound is bleeding in the same way as all wounds bleed, and blood has always been the same, this wound thinks itself unique.
–and–
Death is never heroic. Life can be, but not death. Death comes to us all, but we know that if a woman watches over us on our deathbed, we’ll go to heaven.
–and–
All the dead are good because they are no longer alive and can therefore be imagined. As with fools and saints, we can lie about them because they can't defend themselves. They are a tale with countless morals, in illustration of whatever you like, a myth to be molded. The dead don't belong to the dead; the dead are ours.

These are simple thoughts, basic, grounded—even rooted—in the life of a man who has no sophisticated veneer to hide his innocent belief that the world can, and must, be made to make sense. Even or especially when it doesn't. Marcelino, based on a man called Tomasín whose life ended in exactly this concatenation of nightmares, becomes a symbol of the distant and rural province of Asturias's resistance to the rapidly modernizing economy of Spain after Franco's 1975 death. No one who's ever had a credit card or a cellphone contract won't, in some small way, fail to comprehend this desire to see someone stick it to The Man. No one whose family is normal won't, in some small way, recognize the urge to commit murder of a sibling who's just done you dirt.

Author Astur set out to tell us a story of a world, an old one, that is losing its battle to remain as it is. A world that pays attention, not compound interest. A world where Marcelino, salt of the Earth that he is, can be so in tune with Life that it becomes Art before his fulfilled eyes:

Just as a sun-soaked stone radiates heat for a while after nightfall, there is a point on still summer evenings whe objects appear to shine, as if to give back part of the generous daylight they've received. In such moments, Marcelino would stop what he was doing — clod of earth on the hoe, spade sunk deep in the hay, scythe dripping with fresh green blood — to stand up straight, wipe his brow with the back of his hand and contemplate the valley below. Everything would be gleaming, chiming like a bell of golden light. He would let his eyes fill with sky.

And so, as the sun set on that July evening, Marcelino stopped and contemplated. The house, the stilt granary, the cart with its shaft reaching skyward, the dry straw, the ears of corn, the cows in a single spine coming home along the track, the dog’s bowl, the rusty drum among the nettles, the axe in the tree stump, the woodchips and the logs, the sawdust on the ground, even the moss that hugged the stones in the walls of the small vegetable plot, even the trees in the nearby woods and the mountain peaks: everything shimmered, silhouetted against the deep-blue sky, in which a single bright star heralded the coming of a new age. Everything, that is, except the large bloodstain in the sawdust, and his brother’s body, both so dark they seemed to trap the light, as if the black ink that was slowly flooding the valley was seeping directly from them, saturating the sky and drawing the shapes of bats, which began to dance around the yellowish light of Cobre’s lone street lamp.

We go into this read certain murder is Wrong, murderers must be caught and required to suffer punishment; and come out without such a comfortable Certainty. Did Marcelino do wrong by killing his wicked brother? Yeah. Was he Wrong, was his action a rip in the fabric of society?

Dunno about you, but I came out of this read not at all sure. Read it soon, tell me what you thought.

THE WORDS THAT REMAIN, and mold and carve and stain

THE WORDS THAT REMAIN
STÊNIO GARDEL (tr. Bruna Dantas Lobato)
New Vessel Press
$16.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 5* SIX of five for 2023! Far and away the best of my 2023 reads. Gorgeously translated, beautifully wrought, so piercinlgly sad and not the least bit maudlin with it. Superb.

WINNER of the 2023 National Book Award in Translated Literature

The Publisher Says: A letter has beckoned to Raimundo since he received it decades ago from his youthful passion, handsome Cícero. But having grown up in an impoverished area of Brazil where the demands of manual labor thwarted his becoming literate, Raimundo has long been unable to read.

As young men, he and Cícero fell in love, only to have Raimundo's father brutally beat his son when he discovered their affair. Even after Raimundo succeeds in making a life for himself in the big city, he continues to be haunted by this secret missive full of longing from the distant past.

Now, as an elderly man, he at last acquires a true education and the ability to access the letter. Exploring Brazil's little-known hinterland as well its urban haunts, this is a sweeping novel of repression, violence, and shame, along with their flip side: survival, endurance, and the ultimate triumph of an unforgettable figure on society's margins. The Words That Remain explores the universal power of the written word and language, and how they affect all our relationships.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: When I was very young, all of thirteen, I fell in love with a football player. To my amazement, he gave every sign of returning my interest. It was all kind-of innocent, not like a giant orgiastic sexual discovery. And how beautiful I felt when he'd just...look at me. That had never happened to me before.

I did what a kid does...I wrote him notes. He wrote me notes. I kept one.

My appalling, homophobic, faux-religious mother discovered that note where I'd hidden it inside my favorite nautilus-shaped tchotchke box.

I had, not long before this, put a stop to her physical abuse of me by belting her in the belly. She retaliated by using this lovey-dovey note to cause all sorts of ugly trouble. The echoes of that awful passage in my life will likely never die down, since they haven't in the ensuing fifty years. This novel, then, was quite clearly aimed right at me, targeted on my sensitive spot for the cost of queer first love, the power of words written by someone you love to become talismans that organize your life. I organized mine by never, ever again letting anyone who could harm me have information about the man I was in love with...to this day it's a struggle for me even to speak of my Young Gentleman Caller to an individual person, even one who doesn't and won't ever know him. Luckily (or unluckily) his own family's awful behavior towards him has left him with a similar issue and we exist in a bubble of our own.

Like Raimundo's abandonment of a home that didn't want him, I left Texas for New York; like him, I made a life for myself, one where (like him) I never had the full decoding ring to really thrive in. Like Raimundo, I never knew the end of that first-love story. Like Raimundo, my Cícero disappeared along with my ability to believe people were good.

So when I read this under-150-page blaring klaxon, my Issues were summoned from their therapy-induced comas to bring me nightmares. To evoke my life-long sadness of not ever allowing myself a Home. Because then, if I did, some vengeful demoness would come, screeching bible verses and shouting about how god hates Sin but will welcome you "home" if you'e just willing to be fake, and miserable, and change into who and what you aren't.

That therapy worked because the Issues were clubbed into unconsciousness. They gave me the clear awareness, though, that Art was happening here, that honest truth was being told to me in beautiful sentences, that one old man's early pain is a lot like another's...that Fiction is doing her blessèd work of bringing the people who read it into a closer communion than any church could ever pretend to offer.

National Translation Month is a cornucopia of excellent work, any amount of which might give you the limpidly clear and bracingly cool sense of being seen, heard, and understood. If you buy one book from the thousands that arrive on our Anglophone shelves from all points, let 2023's be this one.

POLLAK'S ARM, beautiful, maddening, horrifying, so very desperately sad

POLLAK'S ARM
HANS von TROTHA (tr. Elisabeth Lauffer)
New Vessel Press
$16.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: October 16, 1943, inside the Vatican as darkness descends upon Rome. Having been alerted to the Nazi plan to round up the city’s Jewish population the next day, Monsignor F. dispatches an envoy to a nearby palazzo to bring Ludwig Pollak and his family to safety within the papal premises. But Pollak shows himself in no hurry to leave his home and accept the eleventh-hour offer of refuge. Pollak’s visitor is obliged to take a seat and listen as he recounts his life story: how he studied archaeology in Prague, his passion for Italy and Goethe, how he became a renowned antiquities dealer and advisor to great collectors like J. P. Morgan and the Austro-Hungarian emperor after his own Jewishness barred him from an academic career, and finally his spectacular discovery of the missing arm from the majestic ancient sculpture of Laocoön and his sons. Torn between hearing Pollak’s spellbinding tale and the urgent mission to save the archaeologist from certain annihilation, the Vatican’s anxious messenger presses him to make haste and depart. This stunning novel illuminates the chasm between civilization and barbarism by spotlighting a little-known figure devoted to knowledge and the power of artistic creation.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: First, read this:

Rome is so eerie these days. The city seems caught in the chokehold of some immense, capricious beast, especially at night. Pollak said the same thing, worded a little differently, but similar. A monster lying in wait, outwardly quiet, but ready to strike at any moment. Every monster strikes eventually. It's in its nature. Those of us harbored here in the Vatican feel a wave of gratitude and relief whenever we reach a building that the German embassy has marked as Vatican property. It's like a magic spell keeping the monster at bay. One may feel safe here.

In a nutshell, that's the book's burden of meaning. In this tightly paced read, you'll be subjected to a high level of frustration because it's just not possible not to be. These are Jews fleeing Nazis by hiding behind the Vatican's skirts. ... Talk about emotional whiplash.

The man narrating the book, K., to Monsignor F., is the one sent on the delicate, but very important for the Vatican, mission to see that Ludwig Pollak is brought to safety in the Vatican's boundaries. Pollak, a Jew, is about to be deported and, as we reading the book know from before we so much as blink, that means death for an elderly man, his diabetic wife, and his disabled progeny. K. is busily trying to instill in an elderly man who's been exiled from his Roman home before (for being an Austrian subject during World War I), who's lost his first wife during exile and been forced to serve an Emperor he had no slightest regard for, but who's been fêted and celebrated by that Emperor before and who now wants nothing to do with the Jew...there are simply too many miles on the clock, K. Pollak winds his hours down by emulating Sheherezade and using K.'s ears to pour his meaning into. After all, K. will survive and Pollak, well...the past means more to him:

One tends to think the weather was nicer and people were friendlier when remembering the past, and although it's not true, there is some truth to it. Every memory has its own truth; otherwise it wouldn't exist.

So we're going down the garden path with a man who's been mistreated many times, in many ways, for being a Jew. For being an Austrian in Italy, for being Czech in Austria, and a Jew to boot. This is a man whose life is Art. He's been ushered in ahead of Barons to the presence of J. Pierpont Morgan because he has, knows, can connect the dots...

What could possibly surpass the exhilaration a collector experiences after making a significant find or finally acquiring a piece he has long coveted and lost sleep over? This realm of terrific, silent joys has revealed itself to me as well, Pollak said; it may be the only joy that truly exists. Collectors, he continued, are the most passionate people on earth. People prepared to venture into the foulest corners of the criminal code to take possession of a teacup, a painting, or some other objet d'art.

And Morgan is not the first powerful man who has used Pollak's art-sense to make something extraordinary his own, or explain why what he has is extraordinary from Pollak's vast stores of knowledge. It is this quality of Pollak's mind that K. is called upon by the gods, via the peculiar institution of the Vatican, to witness. It is this extraordinary votary of Art who is, at long last, saying out loud why his life mattered and what he has done cannot be undervalued because of his Jewishness. It is there, in all its glory, the objet d'art and the sculptures and...and...and...it's physical. While Pollak as a name might vanish (not really, though not for lack of the world trying) his work remains:

Pleasant memories cannot exist, Pollak stated for no reason I could figure, if the experience itself wasn't pleasant. Or, he asked, can they? He didn't think so; he had written down everything important, or at least, everything that seemed important to him, because who knew what would prove important in the long run?

False modesty, or real, we the readers know that Pollak always knew what was always going to be important in the long run: Art. He was correct. This récit gets its title from a discovery Pollak made in the early 1900s, a piece of a sculpture made in Greece in times most ancient, and spoliated by the Empire's vast greed for Art and what were, even to them, antiquities.

from the Musei Vaticani

They {their arms} are not, however, extended in pride but in a fight against death, to fend off the snakes. Their death is certain. Whether one is fighting death or fighting certain death makes all the difference. Is it noble? Pollak asked. Naïve? Quiet? Grand? Or is it just terrible, plain and simple?

This is the sculpture in question. The right arm, the one bent at the elbow ever so slightly, is the one recovered by Pollak, and then donated to the Vatican Museum...he explains why in the text, but that is something you'll need to read for yourself, there's no way to excerpt it without typing many paragraphs. For this splendid act of generosity, he is awarded all sorts of attention and perks in the archeological community, and his (barely post-Dreyfus Affair) Jewishness is grandly overlooked as the crowned heads pin medals of merit all over him. The arm completes the emotional arc of the story of Laocoön as the gods mete out punishment for his unforgivable act of hubris. Read the story, I am not discussing it here.

When Pollak returned from his Austrian exile, he resumed his life-long career in service to the culture industry. His life spent as an art dealer, now spent being the director of a museum dedicated to sculpture, a collection assembled by an old friend of Pollak's. I don't imagine it will surprise you to know that there were vicissitudes...and betrayals...and that Pollak, in the end, cared less for any of that than he cared for the art, and for the stories inherent in caring for Art. The Vatican (for better or worse) has a very long memory. They sent K., a car, and their urgent invitation to Pollak and his family to accept rescue from certain death.

It's different in the Vatican, I quietly offered, and you know it. ... You will be safe there. And they're expecting you. I sleep very little, he said, barely at all now. It must be nice. How could I possibly wake them when the world they'd wake up to is the world they'd wake up to? I didn't know how to respond. We sat there in silence until he, rather than getting up and rousing his family, resumed his tale.

Despite the urgency, the despairing urgings of K., the certainty of death...is not troubling Pollak. He knows, from his connection to Laocoön, that the gods send what they will and it's not up to puny mortals to complain. He saw what was coming. He was, at sixty-plus years of age and in frail health, not going to argue with the gods again. Men, as he has bitter cause to know, are not creatures of reason. They are snakes, they are beings without character but with brute, brutal strength, when they serve their passions:

Not one of them wrote about what they saw; instead, they wrote about what they thought. And when a man thinks long enough about what he wants, it eventually becomes what he sees.

It is nothing but the truth, put in the mouth of Ludwig Pollak, guilty of the crime of Jewishness in a world where the powerful hate you for that unforgivable breach.

It is no accident that New Vessel Press chose this title to come out hard on the heels of The Vanished Collection. Fiction and non-fiction about spoliation. The parallels between Pollak and Jules Strauss, the parallels in our own times' spoliation crisis and restitution failings. There is so much to be said about the concept of "Museums" in today's world, the one where facing up to the past is at last becoming effective...and the immensity of the hate-stoking that is working against the deepening of the many, many overdue reckonings with the Imperial Past (not to mention present). The world is, sadly for some and confusingly for all, changing. The problem with resisting that change is it does not work. It merely stores energy to be released in the eventual great change. 1789 ring any bells?

We live in interesting times. Read this slender, one-sitting meditation on just how interesting, just how much there is still to be accounted for and dealt with. You will be glad you did.