The first book I finished in 2020 was László Krasznahorkai’s Satantango, the inaugural volume in a series of four novels that Krasznahorkai thinks of as his life’s work (though he’s written many other books). It culminates with Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming which was certainly my novel of the year. Here’s what I said about it:
In a one-star review on Amazon.com a dissatisfied punter says of this novel, “Fans of Ulysses by James Joyce will probably enjoy this novel.” He seems to mean it as a criticism. As odd as that may be, he’s not wrong: Those who enjoy novels in which the author strives not for mere competence but for greatness, and achieves greatness, will enjoy this artful mingling of voices from in and around a provincial Hungarian city, the things that happen there, mundane and odd, the threads the conductor of this symphony picks up and drops, the entirely satisfying aesthetic delight László Krasznahorkai gives us. Read this novel now. You won’t read a better novel any time soon.
A little earlier in the year I read for the first time the poet Yoko Danno and found in her Further Center: Poems 1970 ~ 1998 the best collection of poems I read this year. I wrote:
Most of this book is filled with some of the best poems by a living poet I've read in a while. This would be the first two-thirds of the book which is made up of carefully chosen words sparingly used in the service of careful description, like this:
the glazed
ground
began to thaw:
she looked
back
to shake
the dew
from her straight hair:
the pointed trees
stood leafless against
the slippery sky
like a triumph.
“Triumph,” surprises us, and is evidence of the skill with which Danno, a Japanese who writes in English, makes use of the language. One wonders if, as with Beckett and Conrad, writing in a language that is not her first makes Danno a better poet than she would otherwise be. The last third of the book is largely given over mostly to a prose poetry fantasia in memory of her son, who died in a mountain climbing accident. For all the emotional power of this section, reading it one often feels the same dread as when collared by someone who announces: “I had the strangest dream last night.”
The best non-fiction work I read, because it was the most challenging, was Miguel de Landa’s A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History I made a weak effort at summing it up thus:
“Despite its title, this is not a book of history but a book of philosophy.” So begins Manuel De Landa's thought-provoking Thousand Years of Nonlinear History. All histories, I suppose, have a philosophy implicit in them, and all philosophies occur inside histories. De Landa makes this explicit, and in the course of doing so rejects, as I suppose most historians do these days, histories built on notions of progress and great men. He postulates and demonstrates, in three sections—one devoted to geology, one to genetics, and one to language—that it may be more fruitful to think of history as the stratification and solidification of, for want of a better word, energy. “Our individual bodies and minds,” he writes, for example, "are mere coagulations or decelerations of flows of biomass, genes, memes, and norms.” He helps us see that this sort of development has parallels in geology (stratification, solidification) and languages (congealing into standard forms). In building this philosophy he fills every page with startling insights, makes us see connections we had not seen before, and shows us the usefulness of his project in prose that is careful and clear.
The best reread of the year was Samuel Beckett’s trilogy plus (for the first time) How it is which came packaged together in the second volume of my complete Beckett. I responded to those masterpieces:
In Beckett’s miracle years, roughly 1946 to 1950 he completed three of the novels collected here: Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnameable as well as the play which garnered him substantial attention, Waiting for Godot. Having seen what his friend James Joyce had accomplished in Ulysses, and what he was going on to do in the work in progress that would become Finnegans Wake, he realized that one kind of novel had reached its apotheosis, and set out to write something different. He succeeded with the novels of the trilogy, and began his lifelong project of paring away, leaving only hints of a plot, faltering action, and characters barely distinguishable from the mud through which they often find themselves moving. In so doing he created masterpieces, an alternative to pretty good books written in the usual way. His work is often not an easy read, but as someone once noted, there’s a joke every page and a half; one can only agree with Hugh Kenner that Beckett is, indeed, a comedian.
The fourth novel in this volume, How It Is, takes the further step one might have thought impossible after the trilogy away from the busyness of standard issue fiction. Much is made of its being fragmented and unpunctuated. What is astounding is that even without the marks that we usually depend on to tell us how to read, it is always clear when to pause, where one phrase ends and another begins. Beckett is not only a comedian, but also a master stylist.
In addition to these highlights, other standouts are Emily St. John Mandel’s Station 11 (a post-apocalypse novel that’s actually good), Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (unfortunately topical, and the best thing I’ve read on pandemics), Shakespeare’s history plays (what fun!), Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage novels (Virginia Woolf is not the only female who belongs in the modernist canon), Joseph Hansen’s Dave Brandstetter mysteries (hard-boiled in the tradition of Ross Macdonald [they share the Southern Californian settings] with the twist that the detective is gay), and Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley novels (I’m working through a biography of the author now. She’s as odd a bird as Ripley).
Happy new year!
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