The Complete Short Stories, Agnes Owens

My favorite of Owens's stories are the darkly twisted tales like "Arabella," which follows a compellingly detestable woman who pushes her four dogs in a pram and practices some sort of alternative medicine that relies on her own healing brew of excrement and other odds and ends. "The Castle," about two sisters on holiday, is grimly fantastic, as is "Roses," which tells of a bookish woman who can't seem to keep good help around -- but who needs a gardener when you have a green thumb like she does?

For a longer exploration of Owens's work, and her place in Scottish literature, Alasdair Gray's "'Honest poverty' and Agnes Owens at 70" is a good primer.

Anarchism is Not Enough, Laura Riding

This 1928 treatise is strange and, at times, hard to follow, but Riding’s musings remain remarkably fresh. A few quick hits, to give you an idea of some of her arguments -- for instance, on writing and the blank slate:

“... literature is preferable to experience, since it is for the most part the closest one can get to nothing.”

Or, on precision in wordsmithing:

“Language is a form of laziness; the word is a compromise between what is possible to express and what is not possible to express. ... Prose is the mathematics of expression. ... Prose evades this problem [of communication] by making slovenly equations which always seem successful because, being inexact, they conceal inexactness."

She also has a renegade, take-no-prisoners view on matters of the heart:

"Love is simply a matter of history, beginning like cancer from small incidents. There is nothing further to be said about it."

Nothing further, then? I guess we’re dismissed.

White is for Witching, Helen Oyeyemi

In the great tradition of house as character (see also classics like The Turn of the Screw and The Fall of the House of Usher, as well as newer entries to the canon such as House of Leaves), White is for Witching weaves a creepy tale of a family broken, a family trying to mend. Although I don’t always fully grasp Oyeyemi’s work, complex and elliptical and odd, she’s turned into a must-read writer for me; one can’t help but fall under the spell of her books.

The Narrow House, Evelyn Scott

People live nearly atop one another in Evelyn Scott’s The Narrow House, a suffocating invocation of middle-class provinciality in early 20th century America (Theodore Dreiser, none too cheery a sort himself, called it one of the “grimmest” books he’d read, apparently). Indeed, it’s a bit difficult to read, but her unflinching portrait of people hurting each other and themselves -- there’s a rather frank description of one character’s habit of self-harm -- is also inspiring, in a way, seeing as it was published in 1921.

Scott, once hailed as one of the country’s best modernist writers, has all but fallen into obscurity; however, several of Scott’s works, including Narcissus, are in the public domain and can be accessed via Project Gutenberg. It may otherwise be difficult to find her texts.

Five Star Billionaire, Tash Aw

Life moves at hyperspeed in Aw’s Shanghai, where letting your guard down for even a second can mean being left behind. "You must appreciate that time is always against you,” he writes. “It is never kind or encouraging. It gnaws away invisibly at all good things. … if you have any desire to accomplish anything, even the simplest task, do it swiftly and with great purpose, or time will drag it away from you." But what will be the result of this relentless competition, and how do you reckon with lagging behind when it seems like everyone else is getting ahead?

 

Blood in the Parlor, Dorothy Dunbar

I was looking for an odd little gem to read, and a recommendation from Donna Tartt, made in an old Voice article, prompted me to pick up Dunbar's tales of "creative murders, committed by people with a sense of symmetry and imagination in life, art, and crime." From Tartt's recommendation: "My mother has had this book since I was a little girl, but no one else I know has ever heard of it, and it's almost impossible to find. Each of the 12 stories is an account of a 19th-century murder told with a light, macabre sense of humor. I'd love to see it back in print with illustrations by Edward Gorey."

I checked out a copy at the Center for Fiction; perfect, light reading for the days leading up to Halloween. Dunbar has a wry wit -- take, for instance, this observation about the horror of Lizzie Borden's murderous spree: "There are many elements of horror in the Borden case, but one of the worst was the August fourth breakfast---mutton, sugar cakes, coffee, and mutton broth." 

Moonwalking with Einstein, Joshua Foer

I read this too quickly and now I remember little about it; if only I had constructed a memory palace to put some of its passages in! Foer's immersive attempt at becoming a memory champion is an absorbing read, and offers an interesting take on how we get to remembering things; it's a good counterpoint to the Proust I've been reading, which expounds on memory and its trappings in a much freer flowing, more discursive way. 

Nightwood, Djuna Barnes

At one point, a character observes, “I had an image of her, but that is not the same thing. An image is a stop the mind makes between uncertainties. I had gathered, of course, a good deal from you, and later, after she went away, from others, but this only strengthened my confusion. The more we learn of a person, the less we know.”

How much can we know a person, and how much can we know a piece of writing? The more I read on, the less I felt I knew, and yet Nightwood was entrancing. What language, what lovely set pieces. It begs to be reread, but I suspect another reading, three more, will yield only more questions. 

The Residue Years, Mitchell S. Jackson

A great, messy, wrenching read; the city Jackson writes about, Portland, is at once so familiar (Oaks Park, MLK, places I've visited, streets I've driven down) and yet undeniably a bit foreign, too. Champ and his mother are extraordinarily drawn, making it all the more gutting to watch them struggle. But the world isn't meant to be an easy ride: "Listen, don't forget this. Don't let this slip your mind," one character, Mister, says. "Most of us, if we're lucky, we see a few seconds of the high life. And the rest are the residue years." It's refreshing to see those years, the little and big struggles, shown in such an unflinching but still somehow tender way.

Passing, Nella Larsen

This incredible short novel by Nella Larsen tells of two friends who have lost touch and seen their lives diverge, one joining the vibrant black community in Harlem, the other marrying a white man and immersing herself in his world; published in 1929, it explores the meaning of passing for white in segregated America. The book, available in full on archive.org, simmers and builds to a stunning conclusion that's hard to shake.

The Color Master, Aimee Bender

I love Aimee Bender's stories, but there's something about a collection of them that can become a little overwhelming -- instead of appreciating the finely wrought little worlds in and of themselves, it's easy to get lost in a universe of these worlds, dizzyingly unfamiliar and yet still recognizable.   Perhaps best not to read the collection in a single sitting, then. 

Of course, the dedicated reader will find something to suit her fancy. Bender's glorious empathetic weirdness is at its best in "Tiger Mending," a story of sisters, one of whom is a seamstress called to duty to patch together tigers coming apart at their stripes; the lush language of "Appleless" leaves you yearning for more. 

 

Gods Without Men, Hari Kunzru

Kunzru's book is full of searchers, people lost and looking for something, though they don't always know what it is. "He always suspected that any valuable truth would be hidden," the narrator observes at one point, "that unless you had to dig for a thing, it wasn't worth possessing."

The reader herself has to bear down, somewhat, to follow a number of narrative threads that initially seem unconnected but gradually begin to converge. (It's rather clever, the way that form mimics thematics.) Still, in the end, you shouldn't expect any neat conclusion. Even when great secrets of life are revealed, the end up "[receding] into forgetfulness, for that which is infinite is known only to itself and cannot be contained in the mind of man." Are we each, unto ourselves, stranded alone in these deserts?

The Book Borrower, Alice Mattison

It took me awhile to come around on this -- two books in one about female friendships, art, anarchy, and trolleys, among other things -- but by the last pages, I didn't want it to end. The Book Borrower is odd and a little slow moving, yet the characters are fascinating and well drawn.

Berry Cooper (or Gussie/Jessie Lipkin) in particular is captivating. Cooper is a sculptress, a centenarian, who was the subject of a book (of the titular book borrowing) that her sister wrote about their youth, when Cooper was suspected of causing a trolley accident as an act of political protest. By chance, Toby Reuben and her family are drawn into Cooper's orbit, not realizing, at first, that she is the subject of The Trolley Girl, passed among friends. Cooper's still a firebrand, a woman who understood "that feeling bad is sometimes necessary." Though she's unreliable, and you often wonder whether she's touched with dementia, she presents an interesting vision of a woman who lives completely for herself and her art, unconcerned with following a well-trod path---indeed, Cooper holds,  "People who think evil but unpredictable things are not as bad as people with predicable minds."

It'll be interesting to contrast this more closely with Claire Messud's The Woman Upstairs, which touches on some of the same themes. 

A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit

I loved The Faraway Nearby, so as soon as I got my hands on another Solnit book, I sunk my teeth into it. And I was not disappointed in this meditation on being lost, being found, and being willing to surrender to what you may not be able to articulate. Again, her narrative manages to be both incredibly focused on the topic at hand---one's sense of location---while also broadly surveying a diverse landscape of subjects, from Meno to mapping America to the color blue and Yves Klein. 

I found myself scrawling down notes about many, many different passages, but perhaps what resonates most is this call to welcome ambiguity into your life, and the ensuing question about how that translates into the day to day:

Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go. ...
The things we want are transformative, and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation. Love, wisdom, grace, inspiration---how do you go about finding these things that are in some ways about extending the boundaries of the self into unknown territory, about becoming someone else?

I guess now I need to find Wanderlust, As Eve Said to the Serpent, Hope in the Dark, or one of her many other books.

The Passion According to G. H., Clarice Lispector

A woman falls into mystical reveries in cleaning out a vacated maid's rom, encountering a cockroach. In confronting herself, she must find a way to push beyond what's safe, what's comfortable: letting go of even the bright lights of the horizon. This is "relinquishing hope," which "means that I shall have to start living, and not just promising myself life. And this is the greatest fright I can have." But what is fright anyway? We must ingest even the most detestable things, assimilating the revolting, for it is part of our humanity, too.