Things I Read In 2022
With the year nearly over, here is a list of things I’ve read which stuck in my mind for one reason or another.
Gerald Murnane - Stream System
This startling collection of short stories and novellas by Gerald Murnane changed the way I think about fiction. Its elliptical, recursive tangents loop around a central image or conceit, likening the psychological response of reading to the recall of memory, presenting a mental landscape in which the narrator finally unifies the disparate threads of his life into a “private history of the world.”
Tomasz Jedrowski - Swimming in the Dark
A cosy, nostalgic novel, set in the last days of communist Poland. Its narrator, Ludwik, explains to his former lover Janusz why he left his country. Their doomed love is an allegory for the hopelessness of those persecuted by the Communist regime. But Jedrowski achieves something even rarer, showing the little glimmers of joy which flourish in the cracks of any evil empire.
Emil Cioran - The Temptation To Exist
Cioran was a startlingly idiosyncratic thinker who wrote in both his native Romanian and French. Even in translation, one grasps his tremendous ability as a writer. But what is most arresting about these essays is how he turns writing upon itself, using the full richness of the word to show the folly of trying to capture life in any systematic whole—whether literature, religion, or philosophy.
Chinua Achebe - Things Fall Apart
Colonisation did not just end with the exploitation of native peoples and their lands. It also destroyed the integrity of their cultural memory. Achebe—with a detached writing style somewhat reminiscent of a 19th century anthropological account—chronicles the downfall of Okonkwo, an Igbo wrestling champion, and the strongest man of his tribe. The British arrive by the end of this book, and the same strength and unwavering bravery which made Okonkwo a great man are exactly what doom him in the world to come.
Ottessa Moshfegh - My Year of Rest and Relaxation
Sometimes you get the sense that writers don’t like to examine life as it is actually lived today. The real thing is too banal or boring or mutable. Moshfegh is funny precisely because she is willing to zoom in on our most slovenly selves. The depressed narrator of My Year of Rest and Relaxation, unable to pull any meaning out of her life and feeling it drift by without her involvement, resolves to spend a year in a drug-induced coma.
Shūsaku Endō - Stained Glass Elegies
When Christianity began to spread in Japan in the 1500s it was outlawed by the shogun. A small group of Kirishitan publically renounced their faith while privately keeping it alive in secret rituals. Most of them rejoined the western churches when it was made legal again in the 1800s, but a select few held onto these rituals, which had long syncretised with Shinto and Buddhist practices. Endō’s stories explore the guilt of living with a hidden faith in a persecuting world.
Natsume Sōseki - Kokoro
After centuries of isolation Emperor Meiji opened up Japan to foreign ideas and influences, and the old Samurai spirit began to erode in the face of modern values. In Kokoro, an anonymous generation lingers in oblivion on the edge of these two worlds; drawn to excellence in the old Confucian values, they are just modern enough to not quite believe in them. Kokoro is the testament of one desperate soul to another, and his inability to confront a changing world that has condemned him to obsolescence.
Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀ - Stay With Me
A romantic, polygamous drama set in a Hausa community in Nigeria. Stay With Me has the most plot-twists of any book I’ve read in recent memory. I like its rather unusual premise, and its examination of how love pulls us through our most painful trials.
Olga Tokarczuk - Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
A weird recluse in the back-country of Poland lives her life by astrology and a firm belief in the equality of animals and humans. She spends her time thinking bad thoughts about her neighbours and trying to get them arrested for hunting. Then the animals start to take revenge. This is a book where your enjoyment will turn on your ability to stomach the narrator; I found her one of the most hilarious (albeit deranged) people I have ever met.
George Eliot - Middlemarch
Often considered the best book written in English, Middlemarch is a great place to spend several months of your life (four in my case). Henry James called it “a treasure-house of detail”. I think this is the best description. Among other entangled destinies, a disastrous marriage crosses paths with an ambitious doctor. Tertius Lydgate and Dorothea Brooke, believing they will storm their way through life on the nobility of their ideas, have their dreams threatened by the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
Tracey Slaughter - Deleted Scenes For Lovers
The first thing to note about Tracey Slaughter is her name. It’s perfect for some sort of anarchist punk-rock musician. The next best thing would be a writer whose unstable stories teeter on the extremes of love and sex: affairs, deaths, lies, heartbreaks. . . They are like fast-forwarded tapes, the characters assuming vicarious archetypes, unable to slow down or control the direction and destination of their passions.
Iris Murdoch - The Sovereignty of Good
Iris Murdoch so thoroughly convinced herself of the ways in which moral philosophy was misguided that she spent the next few decades writing novels instead. This collection of three essays, written before her departure, articulates a Platonic view of Goodness: we are, above all, an egocentric psyche, driven to actions largely by the way we attend to the world. By seeing Goodness as it lights up our lives—and in contemplating Goodness itself—we become better people, able to see each other with a more kind and just and loving vision.
Anton de Kom - Anangsieh Tories
The “Anansi Stories” (as they are called in English) are a collection of folk stories from across West Africa about a cunning spider. Incredibly, they survived the Atlantic slave trade, kept alive through oral re-tellings, just as they had been done for centuries before. Anangsieh Tories is a Surinamese telling aimed at children, but with such evocative and joyful language that anyone can enjoy them.