"I read the way one might stroll. … I feel myself to be a sacred trespasser…"
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
“I read a book one day, and my whole life was changed.”
That moment, as described in Orhan Pamuk's The New Life, came for me during my first year of university. In southern California while on spring break, conversation from the next room grew louder. Demands rang out to pass the bottle and shuffle and deal the cards. Yet I wanted only to plunge deeper into The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
This (for now) is less about Denis Johnson than about the way that following our favorite authors opens unexpected conversations, permitting chance encounters with writers we otherwise might not have met. It’s like one friend guaranteeing that we’ll enjoy the company of another.
My start-of-the-year reading of Johnson’s work opened the door to Leonard Gardner and his slim masterpiece Fat City (1969).
At no time during April 2010 or in the months and years that followed the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf Coast, when the environment went from bad to worse and people along the Louisiana Gulf Coast lost their livelihoods and restaurants removed local oysters from the menu, did I consider writing a novel about these devastating events.
We should all be thankful that Tom Cooper did.
My fantasy sometimes shifts into nightmare: towers of books on every surface, each new must-read publication waiting for me, shelves of lauded (yet still unread) novels and histories and stories and essays. Bounty, depending on my mood, becomes indictment or thrill or never-fulfilled obligation or weight on my conscience.
If I start at page one and continue for three chapters, should I forge on if I’m mildly interested? How, when so many other spines beckon me from the shelves?
Every reader shares some version of the fantasy. We play that Desert Island Game— what to pack when we’re finally allowed a holiday, a parade of days filled with nothing but the turning of pages. Titles tend to change with the passing of years. We discover new writers. We amend selections inside the box of books that always overflows despite our best logistical efforts.
What we need, what I’m begging for here, is for Joan Didion to do what she did in 1988. We need her observations and—let’s say it now—the enormous engine of her prose style to tell us how it is, to get inside “the process” of politics and the characters at the center of this “self-created and self-referring class, a new kind of managerial elite [who] tend to speak of the world not necessarily as it is but as they want people out there to believe it is.”
Take a deep breath. Now read.
Translator Phoebe Weston-Evans discusses a breathless, surreal sentence from Yves Ravey's Alerte.
"There’s something about the unbridled energy of its form that blurs the notions of past and present and arranges them, briefly, uncomfortably, on the same plane." —Phoebe Weston-Evans
Recently, while rearranging our bookshelves by region rather than alphabet, I noticed a major gap in my personal geography of literature. While it didn’t surprise me that Poland, South Africa and Chile take up so much shelf space, the near-absence of an entire continent—Asia—felt shameful.
This year, I’m working to correct this oversight.
Tom Piazza’s new novel, A Free State, chronicles two runaways—one black, one white, each masquerading to claim his own life.
"...we enacted our imagined scenes of plantation life, our comic dialogues, our walk-arounds and our solo routines, our 'Boatman Dance' and 'Clare de Kitchen,' assuming a set of alternate identities behind the burnt cork, and we found a freedom there, behind the dark mask. The bitter irony of it all was as yet invisible to us. We were innocents, and yet we were complicit in a monstrous evil, in ways we could not see." —A Free State
When Kent Wascom published his debut novel, The Blood of Heaven, in 2013, readers witnessed the arrival of a visionary writer, one in his twenties but already likened to Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy.
In this installment of On Air, he discusses and reads from his latest novel, Secessia, set in Civil War New Orleans.
To mark Australia Day, we asked some of our favorite book people—novelists, booksellers, librarians and critics—to write about the Australian books they love the most, or the ones they find quintessentially Australian, or that they find essential to the Australian canon. Some of their picks will be familiar. Others will surprise you, much as they surprised us. They’ve given us lots to look forward to in our future reading and re-reading.
© Jennifer Levasseur & Kevin Rabalais. All rights reserved.
