Antonio Di Benedetto, _Zama_, trans. Esther Allen

IMAGINE THE NARRATOR of Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground as a Spanish colonial official in late 18th and early 19th century Paraguay, before Bolivar and independence, and you will have some idea of Zama. The narrator of the second part of Notes, I should specify— the prickly, hypersensitive bundle of ego, quick to take offense and even quicker to give it, who turns his friends’ dinner party into a psychodrama—that Underground Man, not the older, sadder but wiser narrator of the first part, who has gained a little self-awareness. Don Diego de Zama resents being posted to a provincial backwater without any of the privileges or prerogatives or responsibilities he feels ought to be assigned to a man of his rank and talents—talents we see no evidence of in his discourse or his activities. He never comes within miles of self-awareness.

Envious, resentful, given to petty and not so petty deceits and betrayals, eaten up by bitterness, Zama ought not to be enjoyable to read about, but sure enough, he is. He has no redeeming qualities. He bumbles obtusely from turpitude to turpitude, hypocrisy to hypocrisy. He has no sense of humor, no sense of perspective. The whole governance structure to which he is parasitically attached is rotten, overdue for collapse, and he has no idea at all that such a collapse is coming. 

Yet the book is delicious, somehow. As with Notes from Underground, tracking the character’s progress is like watching a slow-motion train wreck. You don’t want to look away, even though you know it’s going to be terrible.

Amelia Rosselli, _Sleep_

 ROSSELLI (1928-1996) had an unusually complex background. Her Italian father was an anti-Fascist dissident whom Mussolini had assassinated. Her English mother raised her in England, Switzerland, and the United States. She wrote poetry both in Italian and in English; Sleep gathers much of her poetry in English. 

Her poems in both languages are deeply idiosyncratic, full of invented words, logic-defying modifiers, and inside-out syntax: "Preparing the downfall of strips / of teasing talk was the grey upshot of the conversation / which in cannibal laughter demonstrated its impreparation." Her poems sound the way they do partly, perhaps, because she was not fully a native speaker of either Italian or English, but she seems to be using her own dislocation in language as a way of addressing a dislocated reality. 

There's a consciousness of tradition, too, as she was a great admirer of Shakespeare's sonnets. A kind of broken-and-reglued Elizabethan idiom crops up in almost every poem: 

Of mishap we know but the name, yet

our gentle brook, rook-called, (the giant

trees unfurl their tender light by the night

light of a waning moon) the giant trees

do but unfurl the development of our love,

the brook chants to the rook: --black raven

collapsing into the science of every-day

transport.

As with the Elizabethans, love and madness are frequent themes--but "themes" may be the wrong word to use about these quicksilver poems, which do not want to stay in any one place for very long. 

The back of this NYRB Books edition carries a quotation from Pasolini, which surprised me since I had read elsewhere that, though he had been helpful at times, he had serious misgivings about Rosselli's poetry, especially about its experimental and cosmopolitan aspects. In the quotation, he compares Rosselli's poems to "the most terrible laboratory experiments, tumors, atomic blasts" as a way of talking about their "stupendousness." Is there an upside to having your work compared to a tumor? 

I found the poems spell-binding, myself, although hard to describe. Every sentence makes sense while you are in the middle of it--it was only later that I went, "wait, what?" If you like immersions in sheer otherness, Rosselli is worth a look.

John Ganz, _When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s_

 THERE IS ALREADY a small library of books trying to account for Trump and MAGA. I have read a few--David Corn, Jeff Sharlet, Luke Mogelson--as well as some of their Cassandra-like precursors of the late Obama era, like George Packer (The Unraveling) and Arlie Hochschild (Strangers in Their Own Land). I am going to declare John Ganz's book the best of the lot. Even though it is concerned with events and people of thirty-some years ago, it does the most persuasive job of explaining how we got here. Ganz's key point is that we have been headed here for a long time.

A lot of the people and events to which Ganz devotes attention might not show up even in a trivia contest these days, but he makes the case that all the key features of the MAGA world-picture surfaced in one or another manifestation in the 1990s. A political player willing to bring the dog whistles of racism well down into the audible range? David Duke. The hope that a businessman in the White House will save us? Ross Perot. Culture wars? Pat Buchanan. Unapologetic police violence? The beating of Rodney King and the trial that exculpated the officers who beat him. Adulation of tough  guys? John Gotti's elevation to icon. The idea that the United States government is an oppressive occupying power that has to be resisted with firearms? Randy Weaver and Ruby Ridge.

Ganz explains his title in the opening pages. Left-leaning people lazily assume that social and cultural progress occurs naturally, linearly, as time proceeds, and that reactionary forces cannot, so to speak, "turn back the clock." But maybe the clock can be broken, if those who feel excluded by and resentful of progress decide they have nothing to lose. We can certainly see that willingness to burn it all down in the Trump era, and Ganz forcefully shows that we had been seeing it, without quite recognizing, for decades.

Ariana Reines, _Wave of Blood_

 THIS CAME OUT last fall from a British publisher, Divided Publishing, and I don't happen to know whether there will be a U.S. edition or not. It's not hard to obtain--I got my copy from Seattle's Open Books--and the price is printed on the back cover in dollars as well as pounds, so maybe this edition is it. In other words, don't wait, because if you are at all interested in Ariana Reines, you ought to read it.

The book is a good many things at once. It was written after October 7, 2023, and addresses that horror and the horrors that have followed. Reines is Jewish, and her family, like most Jewish families, was affected by the Holocaust; lest you think her engagement with Judaism and history follows familiar lines, though, ponder this: "The real tradition isn't written in our books. The real Judaism is hidden in women's bodies." If that pulled you up short--wait, what? what do you mean?--well, she's not done.

Tears sprang to my eyes as I wrote the last sentence. How dare I write such a thing.

I have been sick with shame and dazed with blood. I will be told that such a feeling is unrevolutionary and that to give in to it is bourgeois.

I have been searching for a way to speak accurately and protest accurately that does not masculinize me, that does not find me hardening my speech into the eroticized militancy of the noble freedom fighter.

And that's the hybrid of emotional honesty and intellectual rigor that makes Reines one of a kind. Wave of Blood consistently achieves that hybrid.

Another surprising hybrid: Reines could be considered a confessional poet, and this book is particularly remarkable for her candor about her family, especially her mother. But she's also a visionary poet. Most visionary poets are too spellbound by the eternal and infinite to devote much time to the muck and muddle of the here and now, but not Reines. "I'm someone who has had overpowering mystical experiences. [...] These experiences are here to be had, by all of us, by anyone who wants them. [...] Having experienced such things, it behooves  the experiencer to cultivate and create an active relationship with these new regions of consciousness--or else  they'll just close back up." A grounded visionary...how many of those have we had? Traherne, Dickinson, I would say Yeats...but they are scarce. And Reines is one.

There's more: glimpses of a reading tour of Europe, interpretations of Milton, quite a few poems (including "Disinhibitor," the brilliant one that showed up in the New Yorker, of all places). I'll close with this:

          Poetry isn't a profession

A person simply goes into. You have

To be fucked up to do this and especially

To stay. It does not attract the best

Or the brightest. We are some of the most

Sanctimonious low-attention-span narcissists

Around. But it gave me life

Which I had longed  to see naked

And it held me up to living

In a very naked way

And showed me breathing

And gave me space

To find my way...

Morgan Parker, _Other People's Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night_

 PARKER'S FIRST COLLECTION (2015) includes a poem called "Young, Sassy, and Black." It's easy to imagine Parker frequently hearing this trio of adjectives; she was 28 when this collection came out, she is often audaciously funny (e.g., the five poems here with the title "Miss Black America"), and many of the poems foreground Black culture, history, and experience. It's easy to imagine her getting weary of those adjectives, too. The entirety of the poem "Young, Sassy, and Black" reads:

I use these words
to distract you.

I'm not sure whether the "I" is Parker talking to the reader or some embodiment of the literary marketplace talking to Parker, but the clear message is that Parker is not going to be pigeonholed--she has a lot more arrows to her quiver than being young, sassy, and black. Verbal invention, for one thing: "Somewhere in Jersey, the wood house / cowers around me like a smell." Fearlessness, for another: "I'm thinking, what would happen / if I started masturbating on this subway car?" Put the two together and you have a gift for laying it right on the line:

Baby think of my skin
as the best part of the song. Take me
by the ribs and lay me at the bottom
of a dirty creek where I can 
get a good view.

John Banville, _Snow_

 I'VE READ NINE novels by Banville, but never, until this one, any of his mysteries. As it happens, this is the first of his mysteries to be published under his own name, rather than the pen name "Benjamin Black." One review I read suggested that Banville made an exception this time because of the gravity of the issue in the novel's background: pedophilia in the priesthood and the Irish Roman Catholic Church's extraordinary efficiency in covering it up.

He may also have decided to put his own name on it just because it's really, really good. I do not read many mysteries and enjoy even fewer, but I was impressed by this one. It has a lot of Banvillean virtues: diamond-eye social observation, masterly prose, and a first-person chapter from the point of view of Father Tom, the pedophiliac priest, that is absolutely convincing and absolutely chilling, pure Dostoevsky.

There was also a small but perfect gift for readers who, like me, lean more to the literary Banville. Snow is falling for a great deal of Snow, which called to my mind Joyce's classic short story, "The Dead." I was delighted when Strafford, the novel's detective, dropped an allusion to Joyce's early masterpiece in a phone conversation with his superiors:

    "Where would he have gone to? Is it now snowing down there, like it is here?"
    "Yes, Chief. Snow is general all over Ireland."
    "Is it?"
    "It's a quotation--never mind."
    Strafford could hear his superior breathing down the line. Hackett valued Strafford, but also considered him  too clever by half.

That's all, but it's plenty. If you recognize the quotation, you know it occurs in the devastating final paragraph of Joyce's final story, and that the snow that falls both on Gabriel Conroy's Dublin and on Michael Furey's graveyard in Galway falls alike on "the living and the dead," that Gabriel has just learned the lesson that the living and the dead constitute a whole, that the past is always ineradicably with us. The past is still very much part of the present for the boys, now men, that Father Tom abused--PTSD, we could also call it--and that little Joycean inflection explains why Snow is the perfect title for Banville's novel.

Jonathan Beecher, _Writers and Revolution: Intellectuals and the French Revolution of 1848_

I DO PLAN to attempt to scale Christopher Clark's magisterial Revolutionary Spring at some point, but this one is really the perfect book on 1848 for me. As Beecher's title indicates, he focuses on writers who lived through and wrote about the events in Paris of that year; a few of them, Alphonse de Lamartine and Marie d'Agoult, are no longer much read, but most are still heavy hitters: Marx, Flaubert, Hugo, Tocqueville, George Sand, Alexander Herzen (if Tom Stoppard writes plays about you, surely you are a heavy hitter).

Okay, why did I love this book? First, Beecher is staggeringly well-informed about each writer, but avoids getting mired in pedantic detail (which could easily happen in writing about a historical phenomenon with the documentary record this one has). Every chapter is gracefully written and skillfully paced. Had Edmund Wilson written a book about Paris in 1848, it would probably be as good as this one, but I'm not sure. That's how well made it is.

Second, I have been enjoying following up my reading of Beecher by turning to the writers themselves. Marie d'Agoult, whom I never would have picked up without having been tipped by Beecher, turned out to be a brilliant, engaging writer, and I am in the middle of seeing a whole new side of Tocqueville--the cool, judicious tone of Democracy in America almost disappears from his memoir of 1848. Herzen awaits, and I am hankering to re-read The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon and A Sentimental Education. I may even try Napoleon le Petit even though I tend to find Hugo tiresome.

Third, Writers and Revolution gave me a kind of refracted perspective on our own turbulent times. Think of the last sixteen years--the elation and high hopes of Obama's election, only to have our souls stomped on by the election of Trump, then the flaming up of hope with Biden, and then the looming shadow of authoritarianism with Trump 2.0.  In 1848, France went through just as precipitous, just as cardiac-arresting a political roller-coaster in just ten months. Beecher shows that it marked all of these writers, who were all eyewitnesses, for life. And boy, do I get that.