Peruse: Five From 2024
Reviews of five books from the 2024 reading goals
As promised last week, a series of quick reviews of the books in my 2024 reading goals. Please keep in mind that I don’t have most of the books with me as I’m writing this from Germany, not my home in Thailand. So these reviews will be limited by that factor. In this post, I’m reviewing only the three International Booker Prize winners and the two classics that I read last year.
3 International Booker Prize Winners
Celestial Bodies | Jokha Alharthi | Translated from the Arabic by Marilyn Booth | 2019*
Edition: Sandstone Press, paperback
This gorgeous, affecting little novel takes us deep into the lives of the members of an upper-class Omani family and those in their households in the years following the country’s abolishment of slavery in 1970. Alharthi writes from the perspective of various characters—three sisters (Mayya, Asma, and Khawla), their father, his mistress, Mayya’s husband (Abdhalla), Abdhalla’s father, and the former slave woman who chooses to remain serving her former master and his family. The book follows these characters in a non-linear manner for a few decades, from right before the three sisters get married until their children’s early adulthood. Although it’s not at all plot-driven, the novel is very absorbing because Alharthi so thoroughly plumbs the emotional depths of her characters. I find Celestial Bodies unique in the way it wrestles with the impact of a patriarchal society on ordinary lives—surprisingly, she puts more weight of its damages on men than women. The most compelling and sympathetic character for me was Abdhalla—the character she focuses on the most, and the character whose story I found most heartbreaking. More crucially, Alharthi portrays the power dynamics in these relationships between men and women in unexpected and complex ways. This novel reminds me of Jhumpa Lahiri’s fiction that she originally wrote in English. It’s the kind of fiction I have come to really admire as I get older—intimate and realistic but still full of surprises. I just really respect the imaginative work realist fiction requires, the work of entering and rendering the inner and outer lives of others in convincing details.
Time Shelter | Georgi Gospodinov | Translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel | 2023
Edition: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, paperback
I finished the book in late June, but funnily enough, not much of this novel has remained with me. I didn’t dislike it though. In fact, I quite admired it. Before reading the book, I had heard several reviewers on YouTube say that they found it laugh-out-loud funny. That was not my experience at all. To be fair, the premise of the novel is absurdist and comical: a city, a country, and eventually the world being swept up by an epidemic of nostalgia to the point where nations begin voting for eras they want to return to, including, in some cases, non-democratic times. And all this starts with a man with an idea to build a hotel where each floor reconstructs a past decade to the most minute detail. At first, it is meant for people with dementia, but it then begins to attract others with no memory-loss problems as well. I was more struck by the books’ occasional poignancy and the questions it asks about our attachment and relationship to the past and history. But then again, a certain amount of poignancy is inevitable in a novel about memory, memory loss, and nostalgia. Kudos to Gospodinov, though, for his ability to treat the subject of memory with lightheartedness and creativity. If I want to explore the subject of history and memory in literature in the future, I can see myself returning to this book. It was a thought-provoking read.
Flights | Olga Tokarczuk | Translated from the Polish by Jennifer Croft | 2018
Edition: Fitzcarraldo Editions, paperback
After having read Celestial Bodies and Time Shelter—which have such short chapters and sections that constantly require you to shift perspectives or moods—I had a daunting feeling about Flights. I had read about its structure beforehand: short sections of texts, mostly unrelated but connected through the theme of travel. I was beginning to wonder whether the brevity and constant shifting within a novel had become an unconscious trend in long-form fiction due to our shorter and shorter attention span—that perhaps novelists, too, are having problems with their focus. But not that long into this book, I fell in love with it. It did take me a few months to finish it. I put it away for some time because its jumpy, disconnected way made me crave a plot-driven book with longer chapters and a less complicated through line. But what did I love about it? I’ve always loved books that give me that same feeling when I travel and find myself in a place so completely new and foreign that it fills me with a giddy sense of wonder. A lot of readers have remarked that the book is like a wunderkammer, or a cabinet of curiosities. I had the exact same thought as I went further into the book. Tokarczuk said that she wanted the book to give this feeling of hopping from destination to destination. But not all the stories are about the beautiful aspects of human travels. There were also stories of cruelty and mysterious disappearances. I loved the novel the most when Tokarczuk touches on ideas of existence, presence, and our inevitable foreignness in this world. Her writing is so specific—I don’t know how else to describe it. I remember thinking at one point, No wonder she’s a Nobel laureate. It’s as if no detail, no matter how small, escapes her curiosity and scrutiny. I loved the book so much I took it back to Thailand with me, even though I had finished it while I was in Germany. I just wanted to keep going back to it. I haven’t had time to return to it in any significant way yet, and it didn’t travel back with me to Germany this time.
2 Classics
I had felt ashamed for years for not having read the Iliad and the Odyssey. That shame is now over. Mission finally, finally, finally accomplished. There were times in the last few months of 2024 that I thought I wouldn’t be able to finish both by the end of the year. While I was enjoying The Iliad, I was afraid I wouldn’t be in the mood for another lengthy epic poem so soon after. My journey with these two books seriously began a few years before the pandemic. I started by looking for a translation I wanted to tackle. The most important thing for me was the beauty of the language. The second most important thing was accessibility. I simply compared the first few lines of about three English translations of the Iliad and picked Fitzgerald’s because I found it the most beautiful. I didn’t do any extensive research. I just went with my gut. I also own the George Chapman’s translations of the two poems, which I had stupidly bought without examining the texts beforehand. They were published in the 1600s, so naturally the English felt a little foreign. The only thing annoying about the Fitzgerald translation is the way he spells the names, but that was a minor issue. I do encourage people to read these two books if they haven’t already. It may seem like summiting Everest, and it was indeed a challenge at times. But pick a translation you like the most, and just take it one page at a time. I tried to read one chapter (in this case called “book”) a day. If you can stick to that schedule, it’ll only take you under a month to finish each epic poem.
The Iliad | Homer | Translated by Robert Fitzgerald | 1974
Edition: Kindle
What I love most about the Iliad is the intimacy of the battle scenes. Every soldier mentioned has a name and loved ones he left behind to fight the war. As he is killed, a snapshot of his life unrolls—the children he will never have, the parents who will never see their son again, the farm that will now be inherited by another family line. My first ancient Greek literature was the plays, which I studied and performed as a theater student in college, and a little bit of Plato’s Republic in a philosophy class. My more recent encounters with the ancient Greek is through a contemporary source: Stephen Fry’s Mythos, which retells the stories of the Greek gods and goddesses with such ebullience, generous spirit, and warmth. I haven’t read the rest of Fry’s Greek myth series yet, but I’m looking forward to reading them soon now that I’ve read Homer’s works. Then there was the movie, Troy, that came out while I was at university. I really enjoyed going to see it with my girlfriends. But I knew that people who had read the Iliad or were more familiar with Greek mythology didn’t like the adaptation. Now that I’m a very different reader from my college days, I have more appreciation and fascination for the kind of society and civilization that created such a vast and complicated universe of characters. Troy, while highly entertaining and generally well-acted, cuts out the gods and goddesses that influence the war and the actions of the mortals. But more importantly, it puts Greek mythological characters into simplistic good and bad camps. That’s the movie’s greatest mistake—to portray certain characters as plain villains. But because the Iliad doesn’t take sides in the story of the Trojan War, what we get is art that is more layered, its gods and warriors more complex and human. The poem actually shows us, in a much more intimate manner, the tragedy of war.
The Odyssey | Homer | Translated by Robert Fitzgerald | 1961
Edition: Kindle
While the Odyssey is in some ways much lighter—more an adventure story than a war story—the shadow of war persists in the mind and actions of Odysseus. I think the most brilliant and insightful summaries of the two epic poems is by American writer, artist, and literary critic Guy Davenport: “The Iliad is a poem about force; the Odyssey is a poem about the triumph of the mind over force.” Odysseus, the great tactician who helped the Greek win the war against Troy with his Trojan horse idea, is tricked and thwarted from arriving home for a decade after the war ended. The victor has lost everything—his men, his ship, his war bounty. His home is overrun by suitors who slaughter his cattle and eat his food, aided by some of his own servants, as they covet Odysseus’s wife, Penelope, and his throne. While it’s great fun to read about how Odysseus triumphs over the cyclops and his other misadventures, at the heart of the story is a soldier who never gets to enjoy the glory of a hard-won victory, a husband who spent the entirety of his youth away from his wife, and a father who never got to raise his son. What struck me the most in the Odyssey is the lingering sense of loss and grief that permeates the entire story. We’re constantly reminded of the havoc that the Trojan War continues to wreak upon the psyche of the soldiers and upon the family they left behind. Odysseus’s visit to the underworld, where he meets fellow warriors and his mother, was one of my favorite parts of the poem. Perhaps because we mostly see Odysseus using his wits to fight his way home and to fight for his own home, when bloodshed happens, it feels much more shocking and brutal. There’s still so much to ask and explore in both the Iliad and the Odyssey about the nature of war and violence.
*****
A lot of the discussion surrounding the Iliad and the Odyssey today has to do with the different translations, especially now that Emily Wilson became the first woman to translate the Odyssey into English. Her translation of the Iliad came out in 2023. The first woman to translate the Iliad into English is Caroline Alexander, whose translation was published in 2015. She’s also the author of the book, The War That Killed Achilles: The True Story of the Iliad, which was recommended to me as a great companion piece. The question of translation is something I’m interested in despite the fact that I’ve never studied ancient Greek. So there are other interesting translations I really want to explore in the future, including ones by Chapman, Richmond Lattimore, and Robert Fagles. My journey with these two poems are not finished yet.
Meanwhile, here are a couple of articles about Wilson’s translations that I found interesting:
“The First Woman to Translate the ‘Odyssey’ into English”
“What Emily Wilson’s ‘Iliad’ Misses”
*Year the book won the International Booker Prize