reading recap (april-june)

on classics and deranged women

Folks, it's time for our quarterly book recap. I like doing these every three months—it allows me to gauge trends in my reading habits, see what kind of books I've been gravitating towards over longer periods of time ... an occasionally disturbing self-study, to be honest.

I read a little less than usual this quarter, mostly because I've been trying to have a social life. Working on my balance, I suppose. Not the easiest thing in the world for me, but here we are.

For the first time in probably years, this quarter I read more male authors than female ones. It wasn't an intentional decision, but I found myself picking up a few ~classics~ I'd missed, or that I read too young, and a fair few of those ended up being male-written. What are you gonna do?

I’ll warn you, I guess, that I wrote this recap in several locations over the course of a couple of weeks, so there are little footnotes, asides, and remarks relatively unconnected to the books at hand. Snippets of life, if you will. More of this at the end of the post.

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Here's an initial breakdown of my April-June reads before we get into my longer thoughts:

• Macbeth by William Shakespeare (1623)

• The Vegetarian by Han Kang (2007)

• Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan (2021)

• Primavera con una esquina rota by Mario Benedetti (1982)

• The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (1967)

• Letter from an Unknown Woman by Stefan Zweig (1922)

• Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev (1862)

• Near to the Wild Heart by Clarice Lispector (1943)

• Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1934)

• Washington Square by Henry James (1880)

Let's discuss.

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Macbeth

• So the main reason I revisited this for the first time since high school was because I finally watched the Denzel Washington/Frances McDormand film adaptation of the same (2021), directed by Joel Coen. (We can blame the pandemic for making me miss it originally.) And listen, I hate to be all "it holds up" about Shakespeare of all people, but ... it does! Like, I marked this copy up extensively. No matter how old I get, it will never not feel insane to realize something still in regular parlance today was first written by a man in 1600s England. Embarrassing. (Separately, but also extremely relatedly, how excited are we for the Hamnet film adaptation coming out later this year?)

The Vegetarian (trans. Deborah Smith)

• Can I say this book fucked me up? Can I say that? I read Greek Lessons earlier this year and it quickly became one of my favorites so I decided I needed to read all of Kang's work, stat, and this was the second book of hers I chose. Well. Well. This one was different. And it's not that I hated it—The Vegetarian is wonderfully written and very much worth reading. But it was, essentially, about a woman's self-destruction brought about by her dietary choices, to put it mildly. So it stirred up some things in me. I rushed through the last thirty or so pages so I could be done and put it behind me, which speaks to Kang's ability to portray deeply harrowing imagery. It was not a fun book. Incredibly written, and: I will never again pick it up. If you've had any sort of disordered eating issues in the past, I'd be perhaps cautious getting into it!

Small Things Like These

• I read this because the film was coming out and I wanted to read the book before then. Besides, Claire Keegan has never once disappointed me. And guess what, she once again delivered. I'm not going to wax poetic about this because I already wrote about it back in April, but yeah, I can't recommend it enough. A bit haunting, sure, but what story involving the Catholic Church in Ireland isn't? It's also a novella, so if you're traveling this summer, Small Things would be a great pick. You should be feeling existential on vacation.

Primavera con una esquina rota

• Fittingly, this may have been my favorite book I read in the spring. And I normally don't even enjoy multivocal stories.¹ A story told from the point of view of a political prisoner during Uruguay's military dictatorship, his father, and his wife—the latter two, both in exile. Another short novel, and beautiful. Touching and soft despite the subject matter. It's translated into English as Springtime in a Broken Mirror.

The Master and Margarita (trans. Hugh Aplin)

• I've been wanting to read this novel for a while. It's one of

  Marion Teniade
  's favorite books and I love reading the books that my friends care about. And I did enjoy this one, although it took me a hot minute to get through it. Not, one might say, a page turner, mostly because it’s so bonkers (complimentary). Historically, I’ve read a lot of 18th and 19th century Russian literature, and M&M, written between 1928 and 1940, took some getting used to. So much more casual in its language, more akin in style to Turgenev than to Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. But the satire ... the satire! Incredible things are happening in this novel's treatment of the Soviet regime and society, which is of course why it was not published (sans censoring) until 1967 (in Paris; it took a few more years to be published—uncensored—in the USSR). If you have taste, you've seen and enjoyed The Death of Stalin (2017), and if that is the case, then you need to give this novel a read.

Letter from an Unknown Woman (trans. Carmen Segovia)

• Fun fact, I actually read the Spanish translation of this one, titled Carta de una desconocida. With books not originally written in English (Zweig was Austrian and wrote in German), sometimes I dip into the Spanish translations so I don’t solely consume books in English. I also enjoy reading about deranged women—they make me feel better about myself. And boy oh boy, was this narrator deranged. Like, a lot of you think you're reading about unhinged women, but are you reading a long letter from a dead woman to the man she fell in love with as a child and never forgot nor got over?² I didn't think so! This straddles the line nicely between obsession and mental illness. Another short one, which is good, because I don't think my nerves (cue Mrs. Bennet) could've handled more than about 80 pages of this woman. Spent about five hours doing a deep dive on Stefan Zweig once I was done, though. An afternoon well spent.

Fathers and Sons (trans. C. J. Hogarth)

• I think I mentioned I was reading this? Maybe it was on Instagram and not the newsletter? This is why I'm barely on TikTok anymore, I can't keep up with all my different little Internet personas. I was recently telling my friend I wanted to be more mysterious online and she looked at me with both pity and disbelief in her eyes, which was, to be honest, a bit of a humbling moment. Like, okay, sorry I crave witnesses to my life! Anyway. Fathers and Sons. I allegedly read this in college, I'm pretty sure, but retained approximately 0% of it. And since I'm having a Turgenev couple years, I figured why not keep it going?³ Anyway, loved. Mostly because I think recognizing (maybe even mocking) nihilism and its uselessness, not to mention its incredibly off-putting nature, is important in this day and age. Why not have a bit of hope? Hope won't kill you, but while you're off having your little daydreams of cynicism, life might.

Near to the Wild Heart (trans. Alison Entrekin)

• Lispector has been another of my literary fixations this year. I wrote about her a few weeks ago because I find her writing so inspiring in its freedom, its unrestrained nature. This was her debut novel and while I didn't love it as much as Agua Viva (her last novel, which I'm actually re-reading now), I still found myself moved by it. Experimental, shifting between the narrator's childhood and present adulthood, reading it made me feel slightly trapped. Not necessarily in a bad way, but such is the strength of Lispector's prose.⁴ I think I’ll read The Passion According to G.H. next.

Tender is the Night

• This is one of the classics I mentioned I'd missed growing up. Fitzgerald was such a little sicko, so if you're reading him in public you have to shake your head and frown the entire time to make sure people don't think you agree with his or his characters' choices. Imperative. Like, I do think at least some of the heat people have for Nabokov should be redirected toward Fitzgerald. But you know what? You can't say he couldn't set a scene. Like, I just know that were I to come across Scott and Zelda and his literary stand-ins in the south of France in the 1920s, I would've taken the first little ship as far away as possible. A mess.

• Re Tender: You've read one Fitzgerald novel, you've read them all, I fear. I say that respectfully. Oh, you've got tragically juvenile thirty-somethings, languishing wealthily by the sea? Oh, they're beautiful? Oh, the women are mentally ill and/or jealous of each other? Oh, the most beautiful one and the most damaged one are simultaneously in love with and too good for the Fitzgerald stand-in? Color me shocked. Still. Not to be cavalier about it, but the novel's not badly written, is it? And there remains something familiar—and frustrating—about adults staunchly holding on to the immaturity of unguarded youth.

Washington Square

• And another missed classic to round out the list! Readers I respect love Henry James so much, so when I saw this novel of his at one of my favorite used bookstores in Barcelona, I went ahead and grabbed it. And you know what, I'm glad I did: I appreciate a thin novel about boring people who entertain themselves by thinking about money. You gotta have something to talk about in this life. I will say, it was bold of James to craft a protagonist so deeply devoid of endearing or even interesting qualities ... like at least Daisy Miller was fun through/because of her deep naivete. Catherine Sloper⁵, though ... it almost feels like James set himself a little challenge: can I make readers care about the fate of a character unremarkable in every way? Jury's still out, folks, but do let me know if you've read this one and have #thoughts.

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And that’s all! Thank you for reading, and apologies for the delay with this post. July and August are always very weird months for me—everything feels so up in the air in the summer and I hate that a little bit. My feet feel more firmly planted when the weather starts to cool. But I think I’ve gaslit myself into a routine now, so all should be good with the newsletter.

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1. This is a lie, actually. It's not that I don't like multivocal novels, it's that I often think they're poorly done. Lazy, almost. But when they're well executed... well! Kudos all around.

2. I can't emphasize enough how much this is not a spoiler.

3. So far I've got First Love, Sketches from a Hunter's Album, and Fathers and Sons. Sound off in the comments if you have strong opinions on my next Turgenev read.

4. If you can read in Spanish, might I suggest reading the Spanish translations of her work instead of the English ones? Wild Heart was the first English translation of hers I read and I think that had something to do with my reduced appreciation for it ... the Spanish captures her better, I think.

5. I literally had to look up her name to type it now, and I read this book less than three weeks ago; that's how non-impactful she was to me.