As I look back over these three books I’ve chosen to share with you for this month, I’m struck by an unplanned commonality: they all involve the attempt to connect across the ultimate divides of death and time. This is perhaps an especially fitting group of titles for closing out one year and bringing in the new. I hope you’ll discover in this list at least one book you didn’t know you wanted to read in 2024!
A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki
Lately, I’ve been reading literary agent profiles on Manuscript Wish List in preparation for querying my novel-in-stories, and it’s interesting to see which books are more commonly mentioned as agents’ favorites, while others—including some rather famous prize-winners and best-sellers—rarely, if ever, get referenced. A Tale for the Time Being pops up often in agents’ lists, and I can see why. This novel is a perfect combination of thought-provoking and emotionally engaging. It is a deeply pleasurable and memorable read. In alternating storylines, a writer named Ruth living on an island in British Columbia becomes deeply invested in the diary of Nao, a Japanese teenager. The diary washes ashore, perhaps connected in some way to 2011 tsunami and earthquake. While Nao’s first-person voice and storyline are more dynamic than Ruth’s third-person sections, the latter adds a lovely meta twist to the book by placing the writer-character (obviously a nod to the actual writer) in the position of reader within the book. This was one of the most enjoyable and transporting books I’ve read in the past year; I found myself portioning it out in the same way as Ruth forces herself to artificially slow her pace of reading through Nao’s diary, though I could have just as easily devoured it in just a weekend. This is one to pack for a trip or a vacation.
Blackouts by Justin Torres
I picked up Justin Torres’s sophomore novel mostly cold, having read next to nothing about it, but my expectations ran high based on his first book, We the Animals, and the fact that Blackouts just won the National Book Award for fiction. Immediately, its sepia typeface signaled something unusual, intentionally deviating from proscribed norms. Flipping the pages, I noticed short sections of text interspersed with archival photographs and scanned excerpts from an archaic psychological study of queer sexuality partially blacked out to create found poems out of the untouched words. These are all hung within the larger frame of an extended, ruminative conversation between the unnamed narrator and a man named Juan in a mysterious place called the Palace, which seems to be a cross between an asylum and an anteroom for the afterlife.
In case you, too, would like to experience this book with minimal explanation, I will refrain from further discussing its core themes and premise. (If you are the type of reader who likes to read a more thorough run-down before you commit, I recommend my friend Stephen Patrick Bell’s recent interview with Torres). While I was somewhat bewildered during the first sixty pages, the story began to fly once I felt I grasped the book’s larger concerns and intentions. The narrative form Torres chooses dovetails with his themes in satisfying ways, and nothing about the book’s construction feels loose or haphazard. Alexander Chee’s blurb on the back cover describes it “as if David Wojnarowicz rewrote Nabokov’s Pale Fire and then left it for years in an abandoned building, just for you.” I’ll admit I recently tried to read Pale Fire and felt more irritated than intrigued by its ouroboros of marginalia that struck me as a puzzle without a solution (likely this reflects on my patience as a reader and not on the book’s genius), but let me assure you I had no such frustration with Blackouts. It’s a challenging but rewarding read that plays the line between fiction and nonfiction in ways that (for me) evoke some of the same spirit as Carmen Marie Machado’s ground-breaking speculative memoir In the Dream House, but from the fiction side of these borderlands. A very worthy winner of the National Book Award, if my opinion counts for anything.
Pure Colour by Sheila Heti
This 2022 novel is far more experimental than those I usually favor (as I mentioned above, I had no idea how experimental Blackouts would be when I picked it up), but I encountered it on the heels of reading a rather large pile of good but conventional short stories. I opened Heti’s book and started reading a creation story that describes people as being hatched from either a bird egg (artists, who tend to see the world from on high), a fish egg (humanists, who care more for the common good than the individual), or a bear egg (people who devote themselves to a small circle of loved ones). I was deeply refreshed and enraptured by a way of telling stories that favors playing with metaphor over constructing a tidy chain of causality.
That said, this book definitely had enough narrative structure and character development to keep me comfortably oriented. The basic premise is that the world in which we live is a first draft, doomed to destruction and replacement, and we, through the perspective of Mira, the book’s artist-critic-daughter-lamp store employee protagonist, are confronted with the problem of how to live and love in the face of this. The novel engages these questions on a personal level (much of the book centers around Mira’s grief in relation to her father’s death and her unrequited love of a woman named Annie) but also at a broader philosophical level: what is the meaning and value of making art in the face of individual and societal obliteration? The chapters are very spare and episodic and feel almost fable-like, and the narrative voice is often quietly comic and oblique: “Nothing makes a person feel like their life’s work—or their self—is less seen when it’s being judged by someone from a different egg.” Books don’t often make me laugh or cry; this one did both.
As always, thanks for reading! Hope your 2024 is already off to a lovely start.
Warmly,
Jules