I need to go back to German class. I haven’t been since December and all my new nouns are happily flitting away and out of reach again. In the meantime I’m playing the expat game and investing way too much meaning in whatever bits of language I can hold onto, like a bad Tumblr post from 2012 (my default year for all bad Tumblr posts, the bad Tumblr heyday). A couple of German grammatical structures rest heavily on the idea of Bewegung, which means movement in general and in grammar can sometimes become a very specific form of movement, a targeted sense of direction that changes the verbs you use with it, especially when you’re talking in past tense. Are your verbs moving correctly? Are your books taking you with them? Are you going in the right direction? Obviously all of these books are also about death.
Amy Bonnaffons’ newly released THE REGRETS is about a guy who fucks up dying, even though he did it wrapped around a motorcycle with his best friend and a cherished death wish. He’s sentenced as a result to a half-life back on earth, with a couple of months to get closure and a warning to stay away from people, which, of course, he ignores. How can I say this: this book is like a really hot person, where you eagerly await for them to do something stupid or look kind of ugly from a specific angle because it is a momentary relief from how attractive they are. You’re harder on them because of how good their face is. I noticed all the places it didn’t work for me with a kind of triumphant skill, and then was immediately back to embarrassed infatuation. It’s brash, impressive, asshole writing, like a real fuckwit showing off, pulling a trick on a skateboard, knocking a cap off a bottle of beer, turning around all cocky like do you see how hot I am. Unfortunately, they are very hot. A wild ride, with a magical acupuncturist and a very good angel.
(buy @ indiebound)In some online circles there’s been a lot of talk about a big new book that deals with queer kink and consent and agency etc etc; anyway, I read it this week and tossed it aside with disdain, because its 500-odd pages don’t come close to stacking up to BOX HILL, a slim novella by Adam Mars-Jones about a teenage boy in the 1970s who meets a biker. The relationship that develops is immediate and shocking and cruel: sadomasochism without much interest in rules or boundaries or explanations. It’s intense and this rec comes with a solid warning for rape and dubious consent throughout (not to mention violence, death, etc; 120 pages and pulling no punches), but I read this as though in a calm dream. Most of all it’s a story about nostalgia; every couple of pages, our narrator Colin remarks that this was how they did things then, or how things were, this is what a radio played, this is what a park looked like. The thrill of the biker scene and the purr of motorbikes echoes throughout, but quiet Colin is moving in the opposite direction to the bikes, pushing back against their relentless forward momentum. It’s a weird, lovely shock to realise who’s winning.
(buy directly from fitzcarraldo editions)Primo Levi’s IF NOT NOW, WHEN lives necessarily on the run: the story of a group of Russian and Polish Jewish partisans and refugees stranded in occupied territory during WWII. It’s a book made up of different journeys, a book that makes you remember how large Europe is, with people criss-crossing back and forth through it. Mendel, our protagonist, is separated from his crew in the Red Army and ends up in German territory; he shelters in a bombed out plane; he finds companions along the way; and eventually, he joins a group of Jewish resistance fighters. It’s a bitterly angry, ceaseless book, a book about genocide and persecution and revenge on a grand and miserable scale, and it was a window into partisan fighting, an aspect of WWII I don’t know very much about. But this is also a book about refugees in a way that feels very modern. There’s a moment, towards the end, where Mendel and his fighter comrades are informed they’re no longer partisans, but DPs, Displaced Persons, and all the mockery and fury of the novel seems to rise up and hover above you, like a cloud.
(buy on ebay)If Levi makes you remember how big Europe was (or is), turn to James Meek’s TO CALAIS, IN ORDINARY TIME for a version of England as wide and alien as some kind of deep sea journey. Set in the 14th century, the novel follows a collection of characters — some high-born, some ecclesiastical(ish), some rowdy archers and one triumphant pig-herder — on their way to Calais, as the plague makes its leisurely, unhurried way towards them. It’s a feat of brilliant language and very Chaucerian humour, and it surprised me by turning into more of a thriller than you would expect from its stately literary blurb, with a side of loving and setting-appropriate allegory, but by far the thing that most surprised and delighted me about the book is the queer love story that picks up roughly twenty pages in and becomes the clear moral heart of the novel. Madlen is gone, Madlen is forever.
(buy @ hive)ALSO READ: the chapters in The Two Towers when Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli go on their big boy run, “in single file, running like hounds on a strong scent, and an eager light was in their eyes”; Alice Oswald’s Memorial, which translates only the deaths and the metaphors of the Iliad and feels like an arrow speeding through the dark; Markus Zusak’s The Messenger, for the barefoot girl running every morning, with the caveat that I have not reread it since I was seventeen and it’s probably a lil male gazey; the Britomart sections of The Faerie Queene, a girl who knows what she wants and is going to fight her way through to it; Wild by Cheryl Strayed, obviously, but also her essay The Love Of My Life, where the movement that kills me is her imagining diving into the same spot in the river, over and over, though she doesn’t actually do it.