December 26, 2017

From The New Yorker:

I also admired a very different, extremely beautiful novel, “Reservoir 13,” by Jon McGregor (Catapult). Despite the fact that it was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, this book, too, went almost unnoticed in the United States. “Reservoir 13” is nothing less than the portrait of an entire community, a northern English village, over the course of thirteen years. In a sense, it’s a radical novel: nothing much happens, the plot is almost subterranean, and McGregor practices an experimental poetics in which no character—among a very large cast—is lingered over for more than a few paragraphs at a time. But “Reservoir 13” uses unfamiliar techniques for deeply traditional and humane purposes. The repetitive and circular narrative—the same things happening to the same people, year after year—yields a kind of prose almanac in which the reader can measure the passage of months and years in a single community: we see how lives are lived, how the seasons come and go, how the light fades and grows, month by month. Novels aspire to be social documents, group portraits, measurers of time, renovators of the ordinary, but few come close to achieving those ambitions. This entrancing book does.

From The New Yorker:

It’s doubtless gauche to recommend a book to which I contributed the foreword—but I wrote the foreword because I admired the book, and the book is as brilliant now as it was when it was published, three months ago; and, once again, it received very little American notice. The young Danish-American critic Morten Høi Jensen, who is just thirty, has written his first book, and it happens to be the first biography in English of a major nineteenth-century Danish novelist. “A Difficult Death: The Life and Work of Jens Peter Jacobsen” (Yale University Press) narrates the life and amplifies the historical context of the writer Jens Peter Jacobsen (1847–85), who was an almost exact contemporary of Chekhov’s and who, alas, died of the same ailment, tuberculosis.

If you had asked most major European writers, around 1920, for a list of the great nineteenth-century novelists, Jacobsen would have featured near the top. He was admired and praised by Lawrence, Kafka, Joyce, Mann, and Rilke. Adorno and Benjamin discuss him in their correspondence. He remains canonical in Denmark, where he is still routinely assigned in school, but perhaps because he was a Romantic atheist his renown began to dim somewhat after the Second World War. Contemporary Anglophone readers, however, now have a superb recent translation, by Tiina Nunnally (for Penguin Classics), of his best-known novel, “Niels Lyhne”; and they now have Jensen’s elegant, concise, wonderfully well-written biography. Jensen brings alive the intellectual ferment of Copenhagen in the eighteen-sixties and seventies, when naturalism and secularism were taking root. Jacobsen played a large role in that modernist revolution: a trained natural scientist, he translated Darwin’s major work into Danish; he was a committed atheist in a society that was still deeply traditional and ecclesiastically conformist; and he used his great storytelling powers to stage and prosecute his radical nonconformism. In the English tradition, his nearest rivals might be Thomas Hardy or D. H. Lawrence. But Jacobsen is urban where Hardy and Lawrence are generally rural, and he reads more like a God-infested Flaubert. If that sounds like your ideal, then seek out “Niels Lyhne,” surely one of the most shatteringly atheistic books ever written—and take Morten Høi Jensen’s rich, supple introduction with you.

From The Economist:

A market exists for rooftop solar panels and electric vehicles; one for removing an invisible gas from the air to avert disaster decades from now does not.

From Harper's:

Six percent of US adolescents were engaging in digital self-harm, and doctors were reporting wrist fractures from taking selfies.

From The Paris Review (Brian Ransom on Favorite Books of 2017):

I spent the last two years working retail, toiling away as an indie bookseller, and in that time I read plenty of books but learned the stories of many, many more. The business of bookselling requires its worker bees to stretch beyond the limits of their own preferences, to slot into place season after season of titles and authors and blurbs and buzz—and then to step back, assess the amassed galaxies of information, and zero in on which exact book best suits a particular customer. It’s a wonderful way to stay in the know, but it’s exhausting. I’ve been happy to spend most of 2017 letting the new books stream past me like schools of fish. It means I’ve been able to go back and nudge stones I haven’t touched yet: the mind-warping nightmares of Kenzaburo Oe; the haunting agony of Han Kang; Joy Williams’s dead-eyed, disquieting brushes with the beyond; and the peppy charm of Haruki Murakami (whose running memoir, to my doctor’s dismay, did not turn me into a pro athlete or even a casual jogger, but I’m getting there). And after all this buildup, I’m still going to tell you that the best thing I read this year is Lincoln in the Bardo, the hottest, tenderest ghost chorus I’ve ever witnessed. Relative unknown George Saunders knocks it out of the park with his debut novel, and then the park dissolves into ectoplasm and the pitching mound sings a shanty. Enough has been said already about Saunders’s latest; I don’t have much to add. I’ll just say that prior to reading Lincoln in the Bardo, I had left the contemporary novel for dead, and Saunders—with his characteristic heart and funny bone—showed me just how deeply wrong I was. Looking back at a strange, terrible year, that discovery is enough for me.