Top Books 2016: A Year in Reading*
Books published for the first time in 2016 (in no particular order -- English, French, and translations)
Dodge Rose, Jack Cox (Dalkey Archive, 2016)
The story of how Jack Cox’s novel about inheritance and property laws in Australia (really it’s about way more than that too) was acquired by Dalkey Archive has become something of a legend. You know from the spare first sentence (“Then where from here.”) that Cox has an insanely elegant syntax; the one following is among the best I’ve read in years. It’s no surprise that this manuscript was picked out of the slush pile. Comparisons to Beckett are not hyperbole. This is not some kind of derivative third generation Gordon Lish acolyte whose turns of phrase beg to wow you. Maurice Blanchot talks about two different kinds of writers -- those who experience language as abundance or those who experience it as lack. Cox is in the first category -- you can’t achieve that kind of precision if you are struggling with your own lack of language.
Chanson Douce, Leïla Slimani (Gallimard, 2016)
My French is still a bit rough, so even though I can read, I question if I can judge the literary quality of books in French. Still, the last five pages of this Prix Goncourt winner were so engrossing that I felt compelled to reread them as soon as I finished the book -- not because I couldn’t understand them, but because they were so good. The story of a bourgeois family and the nanny they hire, Chanson Douce is about contemporary Paris and all of its socioeconomic disparities. I also like what it didn’t narrate, what it chose to leave unsaid.
In the Café of Lost Youth, Patrick Modiano, trans. Chris Clarke (New York Review of Books, 2016)
After I read In the Café, I also read it in French just to get a sense of how Clarke, whom I’ve known for years, translated it. (And I doubt I would have read the translation if I hadn’t known him.) Clarke manages to approximate Modiano’s tone and voice in English, as well as taking a few interesting liberties, which is difficult to do, with Modiano’s elements of noir, plus the spartan and surreal quality of the prose. There is a simplicity to Modiano’s prose that, in the wrong hands in English, comes off as corny. Clarke gets the tone right at times by making some unique changes of phrase.
The Noise of Time, Julian Barnes (Jonathan Cape, 2016/Knopf, 2016)
A new book by Julian Barnes. Do I need to say more? OK, I’ll say more: A new novel by Julian Barnes about Shostakovich. A book about the life of an artist who compromised his life just so that he could continue to make work under an oppressive regime. The book is in turns pathetic and heartbreaking. Barnes continues to be one of the best stylists in English. That clarity.
Le Cas Annunziato, Yan Gauchard (Les Editions de Minuit, 2016)
On a few occasions, I had to put the book down because I was laughing so hard. I loved this strange tale of a man who becomes trapped in an Italian museum (in a Fra Angelico room, nonetheless). Then it follows all of the resulting complications and fame. I also admired how the novel could switch between a comic register to serious political commentary. This is a book that I think I would like to translate; we’ll see.
Transit, Rachel Cusk (Jonathan Cape, 2016)
Second in her trilogy of novels that began with Outline, the mostly plotless observations of a narrator as she moves back to London, newly divorced, Transit sees Cusk continue to develop the style that made Outline so good.
Counternarratives, John Keene (Fitzcarraldo, 2016/New Directions, 2015)
A collection of fictional documents, accounts, stories, and monologues that retell the history of North and South America through the eyes and voices of black Americans, from early slavery in Brazil onward. From the formal ingenuity to the political acumen of Counternarratives, as well as the virtuosity of command of different styles, genres, and voices, I’ve never encountered a book like it before, even though I can see its precedents (Samuel R. Delany, for example). (Released by New Directions in 2015, but I read the Fitzcarraldo Edition, which was released in 2016, so I’m including it here.)
3 Summers, Lisa Robertson (Coach House Books, 2016)
These poems are the result of three summers lived in rural France. In some sense, they continue from Lisa R’s Magenta Soul Whip. With Robertson’s sumptuous and brilliant balance of vagueness and clarity, each book is also, in a sense, a reading diary. We continue to follow the speaker meander through a long study of the Epicurean poet Lucretius, Hannah Arendt, and others, as we also encounter the France of Robertson’s writing.
Le Materiau Humain, Rodrigo Rey Rosa, trad. Gersende Camenen (Gallimard, 2016)
It’s become a bit of a genre: the Latin American writer who writes a novel about accessing archival documents relating to war crimes or police brutality. And this is Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s contribution to it. When will this be translated into English? It needs to be. I’d put it in the top three or four Rodrigo Rey Rosa novels. I think that should say enough about that.
The Invisibility Cloak, Ge Fei, trans. Canaan Morse (New York Review of Books, 2016)
Comparisons to Murakami are irksome -- Ge Fei is a very different kind of writer, even if his protagonist is a music aficionado. Although I’ve never been to Beijing, this was the first book I’ve read that felt as if I were inside the city. He seems to know Beijing so well that he has no need to pontificate or rhapsodize. That said, is it possible to like a book and yet find its representations of gender and race disquieting? Translator Canaan Morse even mentioned this in a comment he made on Paper Republic before translating it. Mind you, there is not a single redeeming feature about any of the characters, all of whom are trying to get ahead in New China by swindling and scheming against everyone else, including other family members. So I have that significant caveat with recommending it. But, as a final aside, if you have ever wanted a literary novel with a joke about Jay Chou, here it is.
Eileen, Ottessa Moshfegh (Jonathan Cape, 2016/Penguin US, 2015)
This year, I read five of the six Man Booker nominees. I was particularly interested in the award this year because, even before the announcement of the short list, I had read four of them simply out of interest. Although I liked those four a great deal, and was thrilled with the winner, and would have been happy with others, Eileen was my favourite. It gave me nightmares. If a book does that, it’s done something right. (I read the Jonathan Cape edition when it came out in early 2016 in UK/Europe, so again, like Counternarratives, I’m including it in 2016, although Eileen was also a sensation in the US last year.)
The Surrender, Scott Esposito (Anomalous Press, 2016)
Originally, I was going to put this chapbook in an endnote, along with a shout out to Esposito’s excellent The Missing Books, Vol. 1 PDF, in a section dedicated to shorter books and pamphlets, but after thinking about how much I enjoyed this collection, I decided it needed its own complete entry. The fierce and passionate brilliance of these three essays that announce and explore Esposito’s desire to be a woman were among the best things I read this year. I loved his prose and voice.
Pond, Claire-Louise Bennett (Fitzcarraldo, 2015/Riverhead, 2016)
Certain parts of this book, “stories” if you will, wowed me -- I don’t say that lightly. To that end, though, it’s too bad that the Man Booker classified it as a “collection” because Pond has one continuous voice, a kind of fragmentary novel, and it should have at least been nominated.
The Quarry, Susan Howe (New Directions, 2015)
New Directions notes that this book was published in December 2015, but I couldn’t locate a copy to order until January. Howe’s prose shows us one possible path toward non-conformist thinking. Her essays on Wallace Stevens and Chris Marker were highlights for me. (It now rests in my small collection of essential works of criticism, along with Gertrude Stein, James Baldwin, Oscar Wilde, Jeff Wall, Hannah Arendt, Edward Said, Sir Thomas Browne, and Lynne Tillman.)
Sudden Death, Alvaro Enrigue (Riverhead, 2016)
A novel about tennis. And tennis shoes. And the violent history of colonialism. And Mexico. And the way in which the Americas were absorbed, via the violence of colonialism, into what we call the West. It’s about beheadings. And depictions of beheadings. The whole thing is structured around a tennis match between the Spanish poet Francisco de Quevedo and Caravaggio.
Reprints 2016 (not exactly “new” because they were previously published, or new collections of material previously published, I also wanted to include a few reprints)
The Complete Madame Realism and Other Stories, Lynne Tillman (Semiotex(e), 2016)
This is not exactly a reprint, but most of its material had been previously published in either Madame Realism Complex or This Is Not It, so I’m putting it in this category for those reasons. It collects some of Tillman’s writings on art, the Madame Realism pieces, the Paige Turner pieces, and finally the Translation Artist pieces (which I knew the least and which I was thrilled to read). For years, these stories have been incredibly influential on me, for the wit and irony of her voice, for the sharpness observation, and for how they show a contemporary way of mixing fiction and criticism. In Tillman’s prose, you can see her thinking -- the delightful jumps and shifts in thought as the reader follows her move from word to word, sentence to sentence.
A Fairly Good Time, Mavis Gallant (New York Review of Books, 2016)
A Canadian living in Brussels, I sometimes wonder if I’m a character in a Mavis Gallant story, so I reread her this year, including this reprint. Gallant writes with a generous irony: she lets her characters be, and she gives us enough distance from them to let us watch them be. That’s rarer than it sounds. She is a profoundly unconventional storyteller who manages to trick us into thinking her stories are conventional.
The Last Samurai, Helen Dewitt (New Directions, 2016)
A lot has been said about this book. Between it and Counternarratives, New Directions has published remarkable English-language books over the past year and a half. But what is there to say about The Last Samurai? I bought multiple copies. Enough said.
Books I didn’t get to but want to
Au peril de la mer by Dominique Fortier. (It was only on my second last day in Brussels that I discovered a bookstore that stocks littérature quebecois. I’d already overloaded my luggage for my month back in BC -- where not a single bookstore stocks Quebecois literature. I’ll read it next year.) Likewise, I’ve just picked up or intend to soon copies of Sam Wiebe’s Invisible Dead, Lauren Elkin’s Flanuese, and Meredith Quartermain’s U-Girl.
*I always try to read at least 100 books a year. I still have a two weeks left, and right now I’m at 97 -- safe to say I made my goal as I average two per week.
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