Notes from the book closet on new titles that caught our eye.
“An Unnecessary Woman” (Grove Press), by Rabih Alameddine, out February 4th.
This novel opens in Beirut as Aaliya Saleh, the titular “unnecessary woman,” prepares for a tradition she has held since she was twenty-two: at the beginning of every year she starts a new literary translation; at the end of the year her manuscript goes neatly into a box and is never read again. She was married at sixteen, divorced by twenty, and has been alone ever since. “It is a choice I’ve made,” she says, “yet it is also a choice made with few other options available. Beiruti society wasn’t fond of divorced, childless women in those days.” She turns to the companionship of literature and “a blind lust for the written word.” Books are her retreat from the turmoil of the world and her consuming passion. The story of her life, told in her own sharp and irreverent voice, spans the years of the Lebanese civil war. It is the history of a nation through the observations of an independent-minded woman and the books that carried her.
—A.D.
“The Book of Jonah” (Henry Holt and Co.), by Joshua Max Feldman, out February 4th.
Feldman’s début novel is a retelling of the Book of Jonah set in modern-day New York City. The protagonist is thirty-two-year-old Jonah Daniel Jacobstein, an ambitious corporate lawyer at a corrupt firm, with one committed girlfriend and another on the side. (His philosophy: “Living life—having fun—that was what mattered.”) After an ominous encounter with a Hasidic man in the subway, Jonah, intoxicated at a party, has the first of a series of disturbing visions—a flood consuming Manhattan, a sidewalk full of naked pedestrians—that end up shaking his life, despite his efforts to ignore them. (“Jonah felt as if he had spent years, maybe his whole life, able to abide—to thrive!—on the finest surface of things, and having been plunged momentarily beneath this surface, he could no longer find it.”) Jonah’s story is interwoven with that of Judith, an intensely bright and driven young woman who faces personal tragedy after 9/11.
—R.A.
“Vodka Politics: Alcohol, Autocracy, and the Secret History of the Russian State” (Oxford University Press), by Mark Lawrence Schrad, out February 5th.
In 2002, on the five hundredth anniversary of the invention of vodka, the Russian writer Victor Erofeyev wrote in the New Yorker about the spirit’s impact on Russian culture: “More than any political system, we are all held hostage by vodka. It menaces and it chastises, it demands sacrifices. It is both a catalyst of procreation and its scourge. It dictates who is born and who dies. In short, vodka is the Russian god.” Schrad’s book expands on this theme. Vodka has been both a prop and a tool of the Russian state since the sixteenth century, when Ivan the Terrible commandeered a monopoly on the trade. The government’s financial interest in the industry grew, and by the eighteenth century, vodka revenues accounted for a third of the national budget. Bolshevik revolutionaries like Lenin eschewed alcohol “in order to cast off the shackles of capitalist domination,” but vodka returned to the table under Stalin. “Soviet high politics assumed the air of a college frat party with the devil,” Schrad writes, as Stalin used alcohol to control his underlings and keep potential rivals off their game. Schrad also discusses ruinous rates of alcoholism and alcohol-related deaths in contemporary Russia and the dark legacy of “the state’s subjugation of society through alcohol.”
—A.D.
“Dancing Fish and Ammonites” (Viking Adult), by Penelope Lively, out February 6th.
“This is not quite a memoir,” Lively writes at the beginning of this collection of essays. “Rather, it is the view from old age.” At the age of eighty, the author, whose novels include the 1987 Booker Prize-winning “Moon Tiger,” looks back at a lifetime of reading and writing. She describes how literature shaped her from the time she was a small girl growing up in Cairo, and gives a deeply thoughtful account of the formative powers of consistent literary engagement. She ends with a chapter structured around six objects from her house that speak to the web of events and associations that form the scaffolding of her life. Her consistent theme is, as she says, old age, which she describes with keen perception and honesty. Lively moves with agility between a wide range of observations on the personal and social consequences of being old, providing her readers with a perspective from “an unexpected dimension.”
—A.D.
“The Dream of the Great American Novel” (Harvard University Press), by Lawrence Buell, out February 10th.
The question of the Great American Novel—whether it exists and, if so, what defines it—was first put forth just after the Civil War, in an essay by the novelist John W. De Forest. In the time since, the G.A.N. (a nickname bestowed by Henry James) has remained what Buell calls an “unkillable dream”—an idea that has continued to preoccupy literary critics even as it has been derided, dismissed, and reduced to “media cliché.” In this thick volume, Buell, a professor of American literature at Harvard, explores our “resilient fascination” with the G.A.N. and its connection to larger anxieties about American identity. He then defines four scripts to help explain which kinds of novels historically have been candidates for Great American status: stories that get retold (“The Scarlet Letter”), American Dream narratives (“The Great Gatsby”), ones that center upon racial or social divisions (“Beloved”), and ones that dramatize the promises and failures of democracy (“Moby-Dick”).
—R.A.
“A Place in the Country” (Random House), by W. G. Sebald, out February 11th.
Originally published in German in 1998, this collection features six essays by Sebald, centering upon the life and work of a writer or artist: Johann Peter Hebel, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Eduard Mörike, Gottfried Keller, Robert Walser, and Sebald’s contemporary, the German artist Jan Peter Tripp. The lives of these figures spanned two centuries, from the Enlightenment through the Second World War, but Sebald uses his allusive, memoiristic style to explore connected themes—in particular, his subjects’ common failure to balance their personal lives with the “awful tenacity” of their work. He writes in the foreword that the connectedness among these figures shows “how little has altered … when it comes to that peculiar behavioral disturbance which causes every emotion to be transformed into letters on the page.”
—R.A.
“It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens” (Yale), by Danah Boyd, out February 18th.
A media scholar and researcher at Microsoft Research, Boyd travelled across the country between 2005 and 2012 interviewing teen-agers and observing how they engage with social media. Her anti-alarmist, largely optimistic book positions itself against the “hand wringing,” “full-blown panic,” and “dystopian narratives” that often characterize discussions of adolescents and the Internet. Her findings suggest that teen behavior online is driven by the same motives that lead them to gather at the mall or at school football games—namely, their “interest in getting meaningful access to public spaces and their desire to connect to their peers.” Their practices online, Boyd writes, “cannot be separated from their broader desires and interests, attitudes and values.”
—R.A.
“Now I Know Who My Comrades Are: Voices from the Internet Underground” (Sarah Crichton Books), by Emily Parker, out February 18th.
In late 2010, Parker writes, “the idea of social-media revolutions was out of vogue.” The failure of Iran’s so-called “Twitter revolution” had put a damper on commentators’ belief in the ability of online dissent to be turned into action. A few months later, revolution broke out in Egypt, largely thanks to online organization. Parker, a former Wall Street Journal reporter and State Department policy adviser on Internet freedom, argues that online communication can undermine authoritarian rule even when its effects don’t make their way to the streets. Despots, she says, use isolation, fear, and apathy to stay in power, and the Internet is particularly well suited to foster the sort of information-sharing and relationships that can combat these psychological controls. The book consists of portraits of three activists—in China, Cuba, and Russia, respectively—whose political beliefs and actions have been profoundly influenced by the Internet. She traces their paths to political awakening and their creation of “parallel universes” on the Web.
—A.D.
“Europe in Sepia” (Open Letter Books), by Dubravka Ugrešić, translated by David Williams, out February 18th.
In her previous essay collection, “Karaoke Culture,” which was a finalist for a 2011 National Book Critics Circle Award, Ugrešić counted herself as a member of the “dubious guild” of critics who are “prepared to see more” behind our cultural enthusiasms than mere passing fads. In this new collection, she continues and extends her unpredictable cultural readings in essays on topics ranging from sex and national identity in her native Croatia, to the popularity of aquarium ownership among wealthy young men, to the marginalization of unattractive people. The essays are loosely united around the theme of nostalgia—the “unnerving premonition that the world” is “about to suddenly vanish”—but they delve into history, politics, entertainment, and sometimes take off into personal flights of fancy. Ugrešić’s writing is lithe and passionate, but maintains a strangeness and humor that make it endlessly intriguing.
—A.D.
“Bark” (Knopf), by Lorrie Moore, out February 25th.
This is Moore’s first short-story collection since her beloved “Birds of America” was published fifteen years ago. The eight stories (four of them first published in The New Yorker) feature crumbling marriages and unmoored divorcées, and aging parents raising teen-agers or caring for adult children. In “Debarking,” a recently divorced man is perplexed by his new girlfriend’s erotically tinged relationship with her teen-age son. In “Referential,” an homage to Nabokov’s story “Signs and Symbols,” a woman visits her mentally ill son in a psychiatric hospital. In “Paper Losses,” an estranged couple on the brink of divorce take their kids on one last family vacation to the Caribbean, despite their roiling hostility. (“They spawned and raised their hate together, cardiovascularly, spiritually, organically. In tandem, as a system, as a dance team of bad feeling, they had shoved their hate center stage and shone a spotlight down for it to seize.”)
—R.A.
