Hello Readers,

I usually write these intros over a week before you actually read them, sometimes all at once, sometimes in the moments here and there than I can snatch for writing projects. There is a flippant way to say we always live in a different world today than we did yesterday and we’ll live in a different world tomorrow and then there’s this absolute fucking madness we’re all enduring right now.

The not-always-right-this-goddamn-secondness of writing is one of its powers. By writing about something, we’re able to take that something out of the flow of events, essentially remove it from linear time, and consider it apart from its specific place in the endless stream of stuff going on. This, I think, is a big part of why experts on authoritarianism urge people to write down what they believe, what is important to them, what they think is right, before its onset, so you can remind yourself of who you really are no matter when the never-ending flow of everything happening starts to pull you away.

If you haven’t done it yet, maybe today is a good for it. I hope you never have to read it.

Josh

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YESTERDAY

Seiobo There Below by Laszlo Krasznahorkai translated by Ottilie Muzlet

Did I read that “brodernism” essay? Yes. Did I feel personally attacked? Well, yeah. Do I have any cogent, critical reactions or responses to it? Not really. Or, at least, I don’t have the time or brain space to come up with any cogent, critical reactions. Honestly, my first thought was something along the lines of of, “Oh my god, do I wish I had time for a passionate but potentially pointless literary feud! Imagine being able to live in that world!”

But I am a Krasznahorkai fanboy and I haven’t written about him much in this newsletter to date. I don’t think Satantango was my entryway into “weird books,” but I think it helped me realize the vast potential for serious weirdness. I think Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming is a brilliant parable of the inertia of power and hierarchy. Plus it has an image that I think of as one of the great metaphors for writing novels.

Seiobo There Below is particularly interesting to me because it is unmistakably a Krasznahorkai novel (I, for one, love his cyclical one-step-forward-two-steps-back sentences) while having an entirely different tone and texture to the other books of his I’ve read. Seiobo, to me at least, is about the border between the beautiful and the terrifying, about how perfection (or the pursuit of it) can lead to its own kind of alienation, and also how being awed by beauty isn’t necessarily a good thing, just as being awed by terror isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes it seems like Krasznahorkai is trying to juggle while walking a tightrope. I don’t think he always pulls it off (thinking specifically of Chasing Homer), but when he does, it’s a special kind of magic in literature.

Buy Seiobo There Below from Porter Square Books. (You’ll need to call us)

(And it doesn’t look like it’s on Bookshop.org. Oh well, to your local library!)

TODAY

Lexicon of Affinities by Ida Vitale translated by Sean Manning

The prose in this alphabetical lexicon as memoir is luxurious. The type of indulgence in diction and syntax that I’m not sure anyone but the high modernists can really get away with. (Which, though born a little late to be a part of the actual modernist movement, at least the European one we usually think of when we use the term, her stature in Uruguayan literature certainly puts her in that realm.) I don’t know if I’ll get much of a sense of Vitale’s life from reading this work. I’m not even sure I’ll get much of a sense of what Vitale thinks of her life from reading this work, but I love every sentence I’ve read.

Which, of course, is a way to tell us about the content of Vitale’s life and what she thinks about it.

Buy Lexicon of Affinities from Porter Square Books

Buy Lexicon of Affinities from Bookshop.org

TOMORROW

The Dad Rock that Made Me a Woman by Niko Stratis

Did I decide to read this essay collection in part because while I was describing the premise to my partner and flipping through it I made a joke about how it will definite have The National (who I love) in it only to moments later find The National in it? (And my favorite song!) Yes. But I’m glad I did.

Niko’s is a hard, bleak story and though we know from the fact that the book exists at all, that there is something of a happy ending, there’s a lot of tough going before that. I’m not arguing that organizing the store around a number of “dad rock” songs, lightens the narrative, but it give readers, especially readers who who might not share a lot of experiences with Niko, an entrance point into the story. You don’t need to confront the traumatic events or the emotions they inspired head on; you can approach them through the songs.

In a way, this creates a nice parallelism. You are understanding this content from Niko’s life through the songs she uses to structure and embody it and, of course, through the writing of this book, Niko herself was understanding this content from her life through the songs. All books have this parallelism to some extent as writing something is (unavoidably I’d say) a path to developing understanding about whatever you’re writing about, even if it’s something you think you know and understand already, but I haven’t read many books that make it as overt.

The other important thing to note is that, even when I didn’t know the songs, the writing about them is strong enough, that they still work as the entrance point into the narrative. Though obviously the goal is to evoke her life through the songs, she is also able to evoke the songs with her prose, which also speaks to the strength of the collection.

Preorder The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman from Porter Square Books

Preorder The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman from Bookshop.org 

FOREVER

Rhythm of War by Brandon Sanderson

Wanna hear something funny? At least for this audience. I once staff picked Brandon Sanderson. Yes, that Brandon Sanderson. Wayyyyyy back in 2011, I staff picked the mass market edition of The Way of Kings saying “This is the perfect book for readers waiting for the next book in George R.R. Martin’s Song of Fire and Ice series. Politics and magic.  Assassination and scholarship.  Old ways in conflict with a changing world. Sanderson may be best known for completing Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series, but if The Way of Kings is any indication, his own Stormlight Light Archive might be the next great fantasy epic.”

And you know what, that all holds up, a few more books into the series. Here’s the thing about Sanderson, he is an impeccable craftsperson. I can’t speak for his other series’ but in the Stormlight Archive, he clearly understands the conventions of the genre (both leveraging them and bending them), maintaining a compelling pacing over like a million pages, with characters that are interesting and distinctive but familiar enough that you have no problem remembering their whole deal even if you haven’t seen them in a few hundred pages, all told through universally well executed prose. (I’ve never encountered a sentence whose construction broke me out of flow of the story.) Are his works art? Well, the Stormlight Archive isn’t, but, you know, it’s not supposed to be.

One of the challenges those of us who think and write about books face is distinguishing art and craft from each other in language non-hierarchically, articulating their differences, without placing one above the other, recognizing that they have different jobs and that one job is not more important than the other. We all know about art looking down on craft (or at least we think we do) but it goes in the other direction too. Think about what someone is saying when they say “real readers don’t read experimental fiction. Real readers want [insert whatever is super popular at the specific moment you’re having this annoying conversation].” That is, of course, craft looking down on art. (Here’s a fantastic essay on this idea by Lincoln Michel.)

But, back to the books specifically, I am quite curious how other dudes read them. I mean, at least three characters are actively and productively struggling with PTSD, there absolutely critiques of the “warrior ethos,” and it might be anti-colonial. He’s also built a cast of characters that would be considered “diverse,” for the world, building full characters of many different races and cultures. In a lot of ways, Stormlight Archive is woke as fuck. And yet, just demographically, he has to have a lot of Trump voters in his fan base. Another version of the “How in the fuck could you think the point of Fight Club is that you should start fight clubs?” problem.

To borrow from my standard line about Sanderson when customers ask me if they should read him, you’ll be fine if you never read him. If you like high fantasy, you’ll almost certainly like his books, but, he’s not N.K. Jemisin, you know. It’s just a fun little piece of trivia in my journey as a reader and bookseller.