- A Passionate Mind in Relentless Pursuit: The Vision of Mary McLeod Bethune by Noliwe Rooks
(2024). This intellectual biography of a Black activist was fairly interesting (and blessedly short). But what really caught my attention was the author's name. Back in 1988 I spent 3 weeks at a Spanish language school in Antigua, Guatemala, and there was a young woman there, another student, whose name was Noliwe. It's just not a common name. I studied the photo on the book jacket and compared it with a photo taken in Guatemala that summer. I think it's her. So weird! I didn't know she was an academic, but back then she probably wasn't, yet. I was 28 at the time, and she was a few years younger. Wikipedia says Noliwe Rooks was born in 1963, so that would make her about 25 that summer in Guatemala. Maybe she was still thinking about what exactly she wanted to do with her life.
I'm tempted to send her an email, tell her I liked her book, but the problem is that I didn't like her at all back in 1988. She and two other girls at the school were really mean to me, almost as if we were still in junior high. So I'll probably let things lie. But still, so weird to encounter her again, near the end of what seems to have been a successful career. I think instead of contacting her, I'll look for some of her other work. - The Blizzard by Vladimir Sorokin, translated from the Russian by Jamey Gambrell (2010-2015). I thought this was going to be fun, but it wasn't, and it got worse as it went along. I also suspect that I missed most of the point. I read that in addition to being a commentary on modern Russian society, it's also a riff on the Tolstoy story "Master and Man," which I hadn't read before, so I found it online. It also reminded me of the Kafka story, "A Country Doctor," although in this novel the doctor never gets where he's supposed to be going. A doctor in a blizzard, struggling to get somewhere -- kind of a Russian trope (or eastern European, to include Kafka). Only this book also had horses the size of quails and other horses the height of 3-story buildings. The quail-horses broke my heart. I don't need my heart to be broken any more these days.
Sorokin, who is a year younger than Rocket Boy, is, according to Wikipedia, "one of the leading and most popular writers in contemporary Russian literature." He's also a big Putin critic and is living in exile in Berlin. So I'm glad I sampled his work, but I don't really want to read more.
Best books of the 21st century so farIn April I decided to read some more books off the New York Times list by authors with last names beginning with F. But there was only one "F" book I wanted to read. (The others on the list were by Elena Ferrante, whose first book I didn't enjoy so I haven't wanted to read her others.) So I thought this would be easy.
- Septology by Jon Fosse, translated from the Norwegian (actually, Nynorsk) by Damion Searls (2019-2021). Fosse, who won the 2023 Nobel Prize for Literature, is just a year older than me, born in 1959. When I started reading his novel, I wasn't engaged. So I went looking for negative reviews. And I really couldn't find any. Almost everyone who actually made the effort to read this monster seems to have loved it. So I tried again.
The 667-page novel consists of seven separate books (thus the title), which were originally published in three parts (I-II, The Other Name, III-V, I is Another, and VI-VII, A New Name) but are now printed together as one book. The seven books, or sections of the one book, are written as all one sentence, with no period at the end of any of them, including the last one. Each book begins with the words, "And I see myself standing" and each one ends with the main character, Asle, an artist, praying, sometimes in Latin. In between we get the story of Asle's life, as well as his interactions with people in his current life, many of whom are each other's doubles, or doppelgangers. For instance, he has a painter friend who is also named Asle, and he encounters a woman named Guro who seems to have the same history as his neighbor's sister who is also named Guro. The other Asle is kind of the dark side of the main Asle: the main Asle gives up drinking, but the dark Asle dies of alcoholism; the main Asle falls in love with his wife at first sight and is true to her even after death, but the dark Asle has multiple wives and children, and dies alone.
I can't say I loved this the way all the other readers seemed to, though I've continued to think about it since finishing it. It took me over two weeks to read the whole thing. I'm not sorry I read it, but I didn't find it mesmerizing (as others have described it).
So I've now read 40 of the books on the list of the top 100.
My other reading this month consisted mainly of the book for the book group (Here One Moment by Liane Moriarty), which was pretty good. I was planning to read FDR by Jean Edward Smith, but Septology took all my time. I also started reading Patriot by Alexei Navalny, but only managed to read the first two sections.
Next month
In May I will read two more books from "Briefly Noted" and try to read a couple more from the NY Times list, focusing on the letters "G" and "H." If I have time, I'll try again to read FDR, but the month of May is looking very complicated, so I don't know. Maybe I'll spend the long hot summer reading presidential biographies.
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