“Pilgrims” is kind of intense and twisted with this weird dynamic of parents taking care of themselves seemingly at the expense of their children one of whom becomes barbaric in his grief. There’s something about “The Isabel Fish” (where the title of the collection comes from) that I liked at first, but it ended unconvincingly positive. “Stars of Motown Shining Bright” is an example of Chekov’s “rule” about the gun. Except as soon as the gun appeared I thought, “Oh great, a gun. Now someone’s gonna die.” But then it didn’t quite pan out how I expected, so it seemed like the gun shouldn’t have been so important.

That might be the weakness in these stories. They feel very crafted. It’s not an entirely bad thing, but I didn’t quite lose myself in the collected moments. It’s like the sort of painting where you find yourself appreciating the brush strokes more than the image as a whole. It’s great to have a clean technique, but that doesn’t necessarily make the sort of magic that pulls at your heart.

While I enjoyed the cinematic take, the book definitely wins out with the additional internal perspective on the main characters. There are some great dialogues and scenes that are well-captured on screen, especially since the film is so well-cast, but many of the best parts to me are those that can’t be shown visually: thoughts and reflections, unspoken truths. In many ways this could have been an epic story with the amount of time that it spans, but Lahiri lets lots of time pass between chapters. You still feel like you know the core characters intimately.

This year Lahiri published another collection of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth, which will definitely go on my list right now.

Coetzee’s writing style is so simple that it’s hard for me to feel overwhelmingly moved by his writing — though I suppose I have been moved by simple writing before, so it can’t just be that. I just didn’t find any evocative descriptive passages or singularly profound moments, but overall his stories are really compelling and often elegiac in a way I tend to appreciate. I think it may be that he says so much without actually saying it that his startling truths manage to feel all together ethereal.

The story concerns two friends who start a week-long trip around the world to give away a bunch of money. Apparently this trip was motivated by the narrator Will’s overwhelming grief after their friend Jack died suddenly in a car accident, so it should be kind of emotional and touching. Unfortunately the two dudes are just assholes. And then there are the bad attempts at multilinear storytelling that fall hollowly flat. It’s strange because I think of Eggers as a pretty good writer from various non-book writings of his that I’ve read, but this story seems structurally flawed.

After finishing the book today, I started reading some reviews and commentary about it and find out that a later edition included a supplemental section from Will’s friend Hand that discounts many of the bigger parts of the story (including saying that Will made Jack up to deal with his mother’s death) and was retitled Sacrament. I downloaded just the extra Sacrament part on the McSweeney’s site but only managed to skim through it before getting annoyed at his claims of Will’s all-out fabrication of pieces of the story.

I don’t know if it’s just that I’ve read some books that I really loved lately, but this was so surprisingly disappointing. For some reason I just didn’t buy the unreliability of the narrator aspect of Hand’s addition to the story. Why should I believe any of it then?

There are a lot of interpretations (totally spoilers) surrounding whether any of the fictional characters and places are “real” — in the metafictional sense. Which is kind of funny since Nabokov confirmed one theory in an interview in 1962 (cited in that Wikipedia section). It seemed like the clues were pretty obvious to me, though I missed pieces of it.

Díaz’s narrator writes in a kind of Spanglish which is mostly English but the Spanish isn’t italicized to mark it as such, so the mixed language all flows together. It’s a only slight departure from the way mixed texts are usually treated, but it makes a big difference. There might be little nuances you’d miss without a foundation in Spanish, but you can definitely glean the meanings.

In some ways the book is incredibly political, as the family’s curse is tied directly to Trujillo’a reign, with sometimes lengthy footnotes filled with horrific stories. But the narrator has such a breezy voice that it never gets bogged down. There is ultimately a lot of sadness in this story, yet it’s carried off by an impressive cloud of hope.

There are a few chapters that seem to depart from the regular narrator, which is intriguing. It seems like a lot of books I’ve been reading lately have interesting narrative perspectives. Like Auster’s trilogy and my current read, Nabokov’s Pale Fire. This one too shifts in different directions in a few chapters in a manner that made me feel almost like I was reading a work in progress (as the narrator mentions doing a lot of research and then there are chapters not from his point of view), or maybe it’s just a record of the a story being slowly built over many years. That other level of consciousness (not just what we are being told straight-out, but what we can infer between the lines) does impart a certain energy to the book.

I have the Penguin Classics edition with cover art by Art Spiegelman and a foreword by Luc Sante. Sante discusses the importance of absent texts — as he phrases it, “Fates pivot on these unread texts” — but what’s so compelling about them is the books themselves are texts written by characters (rather than an omniscient narrator). So there are just layers upon layers in the stories both in the ways the different narratives are mind-bogglingly pieced together and the manner the narratives are told, as well as the manner in which parts aren’t told.

POEM AFTER RECEIVING VOICEMAIL FROM YOU AFTER (I DON’T EVEN KNOW ANYMORE) HOW LONG!

Your voice and the weighted
stammering between us
evident
and the train of my routine
adjustment to nothing anywhere
as unforgettable
as your bare feet on the flagstone
pathway
next to bunched up honeysuckle
blooming aromatic in the a.m.
of a daily life
we shared but never dared
to lock and key
into
our problematic/
intersection—
That train derailed/my
regular defenses failed
to lower the volume
of the million and one
or zero
meanings
of your call

Above the decorous walking around me, sounds of footsteps leaving the verandas of far-flung buildings and moving toward the walks and over the walks to the asphalt drives lined with whitewashed stones, those cryptic messages for men and women, boys and girls heading quietly toward where the visitors waited, and we moving not in the mood of worship but of judgment; as though even here in the filtering dusk, here beneath the deep indigo sky, here, alive with looping swifts and darting moths, here in the hereness of the night not yet lighted by the moon that looms blood-red behind the chapel like a fallen sun, its radiance shedding not upon the here-dusk of twittering bats, nor on the there-night of cricket and whippoorwill, but focused short-rayed upon our place of convergence; and we drifting forward with rigid motions, limbs stiff and voices now silent, as though on exhibit even in the dark, and the moon a white man’s bloodshot eye.

I was surprised by how experimental this narrative feels overall, with some incredibly surreal sections and others entirely decked out in layers of metaphors. Though it is an entirely critical look at race in the mid-nineteenth century, spanning over many different arenas to portray just how pervasive problems are in the culture of the United States, the language and atmosphere of the story is often quite beautiful. This is the sort of book that makes me wish I was studying literature, to spend some time reading lit theory and exploring the depths of the story. While an ever-recurring feeling of hopes dashed threads throughout, I found something uplifting about the brutal truth of it all or perhaps the fact that these truths were told against the odds.

Invisible Man was the only novel published by Ellison in his lifetime. Thanks to John F. Callahan, his literary executor, a bit of his second (2,000-page) manuscript was published as Juneteenth in 1999. A fuller version of that manuscript (also edited by Callahan) will be published by Random House this summer as Three Days Before the Shooting.

I think this is one of my favorites:

Small Murders

When Cleopatra received Antony on her cedarwood ship,
she made sure he would smell her in advance across the sea:
perfumed sails, nets sagging with rosehips and crocus
draped over her bed, her feet and hands rubbed in almond oil,
cinnamon, and henna. I knew I had you when you told me

you could not live without my scent, bought pink bottles of it,
creamy lotions, a tiny vial of parfume—one drop lasted all day.
They say Napoleon told Josephine not to bathe for two weeks
so he could savor her raw scent, but hardly any mention is ever
made of their love of violets. Her signature fragrance: a special blend

of these crushed purple blooms for wrist, cleavage, earlobe.
Some expected to discover a valuable painting inside
the locket around Napoleon’s neck when he died, but found
a powder of violet petals from his wife’s grave instead. And just
yesterday, a new boy leaned in close to whisper that he loved

the smell of my perfume, the one you handpicked years ago.
I could tell he wanted to kiss me, his breath heavy and slow
against my neck. My face lit blue from the movie screen—
I said nothing, only sat up and stared straight ahead. But
by evening’s end, I let him have it: twenty-seven kisses

on my neck, twenty-seven small murders of you. And the count
is correct, I know—each sweet press one less number to weigh
heavy in the next boy’s cupped hands. Your mark on me washed
away with each kiss. The last one so cold, so filled with mist
and tiny daggers, I already smelled blood on my hands.

You can listen to Nezhukumatathil read this one on From the Fishouse (though I’m not so into her reading of this).

There’s something in the way Gomez has written this book that kept eliciting these knee-jerk, argumentative responses, and I’d find myself angrily relating some piece of what I read nearly every day that I was reading this book. I suppose even from the title, it’s apparent that he’s taking an incredibly provocative stance. The crux of his thesis is an analogy between music and books, and he aims to prove that books will inevitably follow music into the purely digital world. The comparison doesn’t sit so cleanly with me — recorded music is so different from books. Music existed for thousands of years before recorded music was invented. Yet books are so unto themselves. I find it unlikely in some apocalyptic scenario where books and digital gadgets were gone (and only real-time oral presentations were available for storytelling) that we would continue to see such complex narrative works.

While Gomez disclaims at the beginning that he’s not looking at how any of this will affect libraries and universities, that he’s looking primarily at adult trade publishing, I don’t think the debate can really exclude any of that. He might call that “bloat,” but I think those are key parts of the industry, almost more than adult trade publishing. I’m still concerned about how a push towards digital reading will impact educational communities that don’t have the financial ability to stay on top of potentially expensive technologies.

All that said, I do think at some point the right ebook reader will come along, and we’ll see a lot more books in electronic form. Right about now, I could do with an easy search function for this book — too bad Print is Dead isn’t on Google Books. But I don’t really agree with Gomez that printing companies will instantly go out of business (what about printers that print things other than books?), and books will instantly become just nostalgic collectors items. I don’t think publishers are “irresponsible” for not pursuing electronic books more aggressively, since they did on the first push, but the technology wasn’t there yet. And it’s still not quite there. Books and print are still very alive.

Unless kids today seriously cannot take to reading books, in which case I don’t think just books will die, but novels and the types of works that are too tied to the book format themselves.