I have long been fascinated by the life and work of Victor Serge. Ever since I read the stunning Unforgiving Years many decades ago, I have tried to read everything I can by – and about – him (a project facilitated by NYRB republishing a lot of his novels). As an artist, as an anarchist, and as a person, my view of him is – I think – a view shared by many others: deep respect, tinged with admiration, primarily for a man with moral integrity, who refused to compromise on it, and who paid a staggering price for his refusal.
I came across Unruly Revolutionary through a Boston Review interview with the author, Mitchell Abidor. As the title – Turncoat Radical – suggested, the interview promised to upend this widely held view about Serge. After reading it, I came across the book itself at the World Book Fair. I bought it with some trepidation: I was expecting revelations that would create the kind of jarring dissonance I felt when I read Patti Smith casually talking about playing a “harmony” concert in Tel Aviv in the 1990s. Never meet your heroes – and never find out too much about them either.
This impression is fortified when you read the book’s introduction, where Abidor is almost apologetic about what follows. And yet, the book itself is not quite near the character deconstruction that the interview suggests. To start with, let me note that it is an excellent biography: rigorous, detailed, excellently written, and – as biographies of such figures should do – crystallises the era in the person, and the person in the era.
Now, as for Serge himself: the book does not so much deconstruct him as much as it humanises him. Abidor does an excellent work of setting the context through which a lot of Serge’s writing and actions – which might otherwise seem inconsistent – make sense. What emerges is – in anarchism’s classic formulation – “neither a god nor a master,” but a human being with all his human flaws – flaws that are accentuated and amplified because of the nature of the times in which Serge lived. Thus, we do not excuse – for example – his support of the bloody suppression by the Soviet Union of the Kronstadt Rebellion, but we can understand it – an understanding that is informed by his subsequent and public change of a view, a change that he paid a high price for.
The most serious charge that Abidor claims to lay against Serge is that towards the end of his life, he became not just anti-Stalinist but anti-communist, to the point where – akin to George Orwell – he was involved in making lists and reflexively supporting the US. Unlike Orwell, however, Serge died in 1947 (an early death, hastened by privation and exile). At the time he died, institutional and governmental communism was Stalinism: other variants had been stamped out. From the vantage point of 2025, we can distinguish the two, but in 1945, that would have been a much more difficult task. At the time, even McCarthyism had not yet entered the picture. One thing about Serge that this book brings out very clearly is his ability to change his mind as the reality around him changed. With that quality, there is no reason to believe that, confronted with reality of the Cold War, and of the militant decolonisation movements that swept the world in the 1950s and 1960s, Serge would not have changed his mind again – I rather believe he would have.
We will never know, but perhaps Abidor here is a victim of his own success: the portrait he paints of Serge is so nuanced and – despite everything – sympathetic, that both at his best and at his worst, he is a figure that we can continue to admire as quintessentially human, and bearing the best of human courage as well as (on occasion) the worst of human short-sightedness – but never human evil.
For that alone, and for everything else, this is a book worth reading.
Alejandro Zambra’s Not to Read is, on first glance, a disparate collection of critical work: reviews, essays, and reflections on writing. Taken by themselves, the individual pieces are deeply enjoyable: the style is reminiscent of some of the fragmentary, episodic writings of Eduardo Galeano, there is a dry, biting, and sometimes caustic – but never ungenerous – wit, and you get to learn about an entire set of Latin American writers that the “Boom” does not normally consider. Zambra has no time for literary canons, and that is something that makes this book unique.
More than that, however, as you read, certain themes emerge. Zambra is deeply skeptical of literary establishments, and of literature as a profession. Manuel Puig, he writes, has created “a literature outside of literature, of an oeuvre that is simultaneously legible and inscrutable, one that calls the nature of the literary into question.” In one of the most memorable essays in the collection – on Pedro Lembel – he writes: “his work was forged in the night, in the barrio, in life and not in literature.” There are traces here of Joseph Andras. Still later, he writes: “Ribeyro writes to live, not to demonstrate that he has lived.” And perhaps, towards the end, the kicker:
Books say no to literature. Some. Others, the majority, say yes. They obey the market or the holy spirit of governments. Or the placid idea of a generation. Or the even more placid idea of a tradition. I prefer books that say no. Sometimes, even, I prefer the books that don’t know what they are saying.
Reading this, you get the sense that for Zambra, the phrase “full-time writer” would be a contradiction in terms: you cannot write without the stuff of life, and that comes from living.
The mirror of this is another theme that shines through the essays: for all his humour and wit, Zambra takes writing – and the practice of writing – very seriously. Early on, he writes of a compatriot: “I want us to have writers like him again: forthright, committed, beautiful, forever young, cultured, generous, loud-mouthed.” The word choice – especially the words that I have italicised – seems significant. Again, on Pedro Lembel, he notes that Lembel “reminds us that literature is not offensive, that it’s not mere decoration, that it does something to society. To give him the [Nobel] prize would be to honour that. It would be, I think, a collective prize.”
This is not a call, of course, for didacticism; Zambra is, again, careful with his words, and “does something to society” is not prescriptive about what that “something” should be. But that is not to say, either, that this is an amoral practice. Zambra’s “philosophy” of writing – or perhaps it would be better to say that the meaning he seeks in and through writing – is – echoing Vaclav Havel – to:
… find oneself with the weight of words, to reconquer their necessity, search incessantly, even when they – the words – have become ever more transitory, more perishable, more erasable than ever.
So you can read this book at multiple levels: as an insight into the craft of reviewing and of criticism; as a guide to a collection of Latin American writers that you might not instantly find displayed in a bookshop; but above all else, I think, a reflection on how even within “th[is] pile of debris … [that] grows skyward,” writing remains necessary.
I ended 2025 with Alba de Cespedes’ Her Side of the Story. After my mid-year journey through Elsa Morante’s Lies and Sorcery, this was my second tragic bildungsroman novel set in mid-20th century Italy, focusing intensely on women’s lives, their rich interiority, their friendships, and confrontations with patriarchy in the context of a violently changing world. Both Lies and Sorcery and Her Side of the Story presage themes that you can later find in Elena Ferrante, and it’s of little surprise that Ferrante herself acknowledges her debt to these two writers.
In fact, some of the early parts of Her Side of the Story – set in a tenement complex in Rome – reminded me of the brilliant HBO TV adaptation of Ferrante, in how it communicated the suffocating atmosphere in these tenements, and of the patriarchal violence that lurks just underneath the facade of forced marital and familial civility:
In the apartment above ours, the one next to it, the modern white buildings rising up beside ours – in all the buildings in Rome, all the buildings in the world, I saw women awake in the dark, behind the unscalable walls of men’s shoulders.
Early on in the novel, the protagonist’s mother – caught between an unhappy marriage she cannot escape from, and a love affair that she cannot escape into, dies by suicide; this event shapes the protagonist’s own life, her relationship with her father, and the emptiness of her own marriage. Meanwhile, Italy has entered World War II, the protagonist’s husband is a part of the resistance and is imprisoned, driving her to join the resistance as well – in the hope that through militant action, she will come to understand her husband better.
Her Side of the Story is a novel of permanent deferral: the novel’s women protagonists confront and struggle against patriarchy and violence in the hope that the barrier immediately before them (whether a loveless marriage or fascism) is the last barrier that they have to overcome before they can find something resembling happiness. But that happiness appears to be permanently deferred, always beyond the next barrier, and the next, and the next.
At times, this results in what appears to be a frustrating lack of agency on part of the characters (for example, the protagonist’s natural curiosity, love for reading, and ability to put herself in danger are at odds with the passivity with which she approaches decisions that have to do with her marriage, including her decision to join the resistance) – but perhaps that is the entire point:
In other words, you had to accept that you couldn’t be a hero or play a leading role. And I would have to accept my marriage, the loneliness it brought with it, its decline, the end of the romantic plan through which we had invented ourselves.
At the same time, however, I did not read Her Side of the Story as a novel about defeatism – far from it. Throughout the story, there are cracks in the edifice that let the light in – even though the form of that light is as much wont to illuminate as it is to blind.
It is fascinating to read Lies and Sorcery, Her Side of the Story, and The Neapolitan Quartet together. Between them, these books chronologically cover most of 20th-century Italy, and thinking of them together lets you see both the incremental, crawlingly slow progress in women’s agency through the course of the century, but also – and at the same time – the constraints, traps, and nightmares that persist generation upon generation. In each of these books you find the violent clash between the richness and complexity of these women’s interior landscape, and the structures of a world that have been designed to snuff it out – with varying outcomes.
It is probably the spectacular success of Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet that has brought Morante and Cespedes’ work back into the public eye, and into the consciousness of readers (like me) who’d otherwise have been unlikely to come across them. For that – as for so much else – we have a lot to thank Elena Ferrante for.
Welcome to the annual year-in-books post. I’ve changed the format a bit: I’ve felt for a while that the genre/ratings approach I used to take in previous years had run its course. In this post, I’ve taken a more fluid, thematic approach, and dispensed with the ratings system. It also means that I’ve not covered every book I read this year; for that, I now have a regular Substack newsletter, where I talk fortnightly about what I’m reading (you can subscribe here). The Substack also has a version of this post, if that’s the format you prefer. Some of these books I’ve reviewed separately on this blog, and I’ve linked to those reviews below.
I began 2025 with two books at the intersection of poetry, history, politics, and revolution. Samuel Hodgkin’s Persianate Verse and the Poetics of Eastern Internationalism told the story of how Persian poetry constituted a glue that bound together a number of decolonisation projects in the mid-20th Century, in central and South Asia. From Iran to India to the USSR to the central Asian republics, Persian poetry provided a cultural vocabulary and a grammar that diverse peoples could use to talk to each other – a grammar that was eclipsed as the USSR eventually turned it into a top-down, State-led project. Eric Calderwood’s On Earth or in Poems: the Many Lives of al-Andalus movingly chronicled how, centuries after the fall of the Kingdom of Granada, al-Andalus has lived on in history, memory, legend, and as an anchor for radical political projects, including in Palestine. Al-Andalus has fascinated me ever since I came across it as a teenager in a fantasy novel by Guy Gavriel Kay, and I loved reading this book. In summer, I would re-read the book wandering through Andalusia, in the squares of Granada, in a tea-house in Cordoba, and by the corniche in Cadiz.
In July, I read Michael Craig Hillman’s part-biography, part-literary analysis in A Lonely Woman: Forough Forroukhzad and her Poetry. I had previously read Forroukhzad’s poems in a scattered way, but this book did a wonderful job not only of setting them in context, but also in illuminating Forroukhzad’s own poetic and personal development through these poems, in the context of mid-20th century Iran under the rule of the Shah. The book is a window into what rebellion through poetry might mean in a society where other modes of rebellion are closed off, and it forever altered my reading of the beautiful – and unsettling – Conquest of the Garden.
On a similar theme, the month after, I read Whitney Chadwick’s The Militant Muse: Love, War and the Women of Surrealism, my annual find at Budapest’s matchless National Gallery Bookshop. This book chronicles the intense relationships between women surrealist artists in the mid-20th century, who confronted both the travails of World War II as well as the patriarchal art world. I discovered new things about the lives and loves of artists like Frida Kahlo, and I discovered new artists entirely, such as Claude Cahun (“True poetry, the kind that keeps its secret … is like the paving stone … that can be used by the revolutionaries rather than the police.”) The fictional complement to this book was Lucy Steeds’ The Artist, which is one of the best novels I read this year: the story of a young woman in early-20th-century Provence, who dreams of being an impressionist artist, and struggles against the strictures imposed by her reclusive uncle, whom she lives with, and who actually is a famous artist. Rarely have I come across a novel with as narratively perfect an ending as this one.
On the topic of art and the novel, and hopping from France to Italy: the dazzlingly unpredictable Laurent Binet’s latest novel, Perspectives, is set in renaissance Italy with Michelangelo as a character, and is a historical-detective novel that moves through the world of renaissance art. Binet is as virtuoso as ever as a novelist, with shades of The Name of the Rose in this novel (long-time Binet readers will be unsurprised, given that Umberto Eco himself is a character in The Seventh Function of Language). I was told by someone with impeccable taste that they found the ending a let-down; I’m not so sure!
Still on the same theme, and back to non-fiction, in February, at the World Book Fair in Delhi, I chanced upon Jacopo Galimberti’s Images of Class: Operaismo, Autonomia, and the Visual Arts – a dense, complex, and ultimately rewarding book about how the the post-war, militant left-wing political movements in Italy gave rise to an entire genre of art, from the visual to the aural to the architectural, and how these artists struggled to craft a vision of what it means to be – and to make – radical art within the constraints of a capitalist world. Set in the same era, Luigi Pintor’s Memories from the Twentieth Century: A Kind of Trilogy is a set of political montages and reflections of radical movements and their limits. These books fortified my view that Italy from the end of the War to the conclusion of the Years of Lead is one of the most fascinating places to read about, if you’re interested in radical politics and art.
Ah, the Italians! More than a decade ago, I read Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet, and it changed my life. It turns out that Ferrante was just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Italian women writers writing the most intense, the most visceral, and most unforgiving bildungsroman novels about womanhood, revolt, and patriarchal and political tyranny. In summer, I read Elsa Morante’s 800-page, three-generations-spanning Lies and Sorcery, which left me raw. Barely had the wounds closed when I decided to finish the year with Alba de Cespedes’ Her Side of the Story, set in the years before and during World War II, with the protagonist a blend of a Ferrante and a Morante character, whose travails in the resistance and in a love-starved marriage leave you with alternating feelings of rage and helplessness, until a late sting in the tail leaves you not knowing what to think at all; I’m still navigating my feelings about this book.
My one day in Barcelona in summer, half of which was spent in an anarchist walking tour, finally drove me to start reading the Spanish Civil War and Spanish anarchist history books that I have long been procrastinating on. Danny Evans’ Revolution and the State: Anarchism in the Spanish Civil War is a fascinating account of the anarchist perspective in the revolution, of the anarchist movement’s valiant – and ultimately doomed – attempts to avoid co-option in the effort of republican State reconstruction that was ongoing even as Franco’s fascists were at the gates of Barcelona. This is a detailed and granular history. Meanwhile, Mark Bray’s The Anarchist Inquisition: Assassins, Activists, and Martyrs in Spain and France takes the longer view, starting with the “propaganda of the deed” that began in the late-19th century, and going on to discuss the anarchist movements in the early 20th century, culminating with Barcelona’s “tragic week” in 1909. The book starts with an immortal line about terrorism and human rights being the two fractious siblings born out of the 20th century, and only gets better from there. In between these two I read Serge Pay’s little gem, Treasures of the Spanish Civil War, a set of interconnected reflections and anecdotes about the revolution, the war, and the aftermath, set in spare and haunting prose.
Still on the theme of anarchism, but moving away from Spain, Kavitha Rao’s Spies, Lies, and Allies: the Extraordinary Lives of Chatto and Roy is a fantastic account of a certain moment in Indian revolutionary history, and which really should be a lot better known, and read by a lot more Indians, than it currently is. I also discovered at the book fair Ngo Van’s In the Crossfire: Adventures of a Vietnamese Revolutionary, which tells the little-known story of the radical Vietnamese revolutionaries who were persecuted both by the colonial powers and by Ho Chi Minh’s party, because of their anarchist views – a necessary corrective to the otherwise brilliant (and seductive) works such as Joseph Andras’ Faraway the Southern Sky, which I had read last year. It once again convinced me that the revolutionary movements of early and mid-20th century east and south-east Asia (Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia) are some of the most fascinating to have ever been – and their almost total erasure a tragedy. On the subject of Vietnam, I read Salar Mohendesi’s brilliant Red Internationalism, which chronicles the rise of the anti-war Vietnam movement, the global solidarities that it created, and how – ultimately and ironically – the victory of the Vietnam led to its fracture and ultimate co-optation of the language of anti-imperialism by the language of human rights, actively promoted by the United States as a legitimation strategy. After reading this book, you’ll never quite be able to look at the concept of human rights the same way.
Another revolutionary movement that has long fascinated me has been the Ethiopian students’ movement that overthrew emperor Haile Selassie – but was then co-opted and ultimately destroyed by the military regime of the Derg. This summer, I read two excellent book about that history. Baalu Girma’s Oromay – only recently translated – is a haunting novel about the political repression that followed after the victory of the Derg. Elleni Centime Zeleke’s Ethiopia in Theory: Revolution and Knowledge Production, 1964-2016 interrogates the radicalism of the students’ movement – and its long legacy, for good and for ill, that still informs contemporary Ethiopia. This is one of the best books of critical non-fiction that I read this year.
Patti Smith is a writer I’ve always wanted to read more of, ever since I read her beautiful eulogy for Sam Shepard; this year I finally did so, reading her memoirs Just Kids(about her life as a young artist and musician in the New York of the 1960s and her love story with Robert Mapplethorpe) and Bread of Angels (about her childhood, her life with her husband Fred Smith, and her rebuilding of her music career after Smith’s death). I found Bread of Angels – especially the bits about domestic life – a little patchy, but Just Kids – whew! Patti Smith has an ear for the rhythm and the music of words – and for the movement of the sentence – that is simply extraordinary.
As always, I read a lot of science fiction this year, with mixed results. Alastair Reynolds’ Century Rain – doubling up as an alt-world SF novel and a love letter to Paris – was my stand-out read, the best Reynolds I’ve read (and that’s saying something, as he’s my favourite SF writer active today). I was not overly impressed by the Clarke Award shortlist, with Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time perhaps being my favourite in the shortlist. I bookended my year with two two Adrian Tchaikovsky novels – Alien Clay and Bee Keeper – that had all kinds of weird and unsettling biological speculation, in the classic Tchaikovsky mold. I enjoyed Stew Hotson’s Indian-influenced space opera, Project Hanuman, which also came out this year. And one of my favourite genre reads was a book that’s not been published yet, but is forthcoming in 2026: I was asked to write a blurb for Mahmud El Sayed’s The Republic of Memory, a book that brings together two of my favourite themes that I never thought I’d see crossed over: a generation spaceship, and the 2011 Egyptian Revolution! Watch out for this one when it’s released in the Fall.
Among the unclassifiable books that I read this year: Sonallah Ibrahim’s Ice, a novel about an Arab student’s time in the Soviet Union in that most consequential of all years, 1973; Venus Ghata-Khoury’s The Last Days of Mandelstam and Dominique Noguez’s The Three Rimbauds: one imagines Osip Mandelstam’s final days, and the other imagines a world in which Rimbaud did not die, but became a member of the French literary establishment; Julie Lekstrom Hime’s Mikhail and Margarita which, sticking to the Soviet theme, (fictionally) reconstructs Bulgakov writing his novel in the climate of censorship and disappearances (Mandelstam plays a part here too); Kaouther Adimi’s A Bookshop in Algiers, a novel about how an Algiers bookshop played a part in the war for Independence, before falling into disuse, disrepair and – ultimately – destruction; Dubravka Ugresic’s A Muzzle for Witches, an absolutely wonderful memoir – written towards the end of her life – of the relationship between nationalism, literature, and women’s writing; on a similar theme, and also a last memoir, Eduardo Galeano’s The Hunter of Stories; Alejandro Zambra’s delicious, ironic, and bitingly witty collection of essays on literary criticism and the Latin American novel, Not to Read (come for the Neruda barbs, stay for discovering writers you didn’t know you needed to read); Julio Llamazares’ The Yellow Rain, a Pedro Paramo-esque novel where an atmosphere of loneliness and death creeps up on you so quietly that you don’t even notice it until the moment that it thoroughly disorients you; Han Kang’s We Do Not Part (probably the most famous novel in this list!) which I really don’t have much to say about that hasn’t been said already, other than that I loved it; and finally, one of my favourite novels of the year, John Williams’ Stoner, which has the finest and most moving treatment of death that I’ve ever read in fiction.
These are not all the novels I read this year, but they form a significant portion of them. Reviews of the ones I read most recently will be forthcoming in the first January 2026 issue of the newsletter. I hope that some of these books pique your interest, and that you find them to be the compelling and magical companions that I did this year.
To the writers who read this newsletter, I wish you a 2026 where words are kind to you; and to the readers, I hope 2026 brings you many more books that – as Kafka said – can be “an axe for the frozen sea” within us.
‘Even if he does become a communist, I want him to be a happy communist,’ said his mother. Her marriage to a communist, which had lasted for some years, and her interaction with her husband’s comrades had led her to the conclusion that communists were always gloomy and pensive and never had a good time. So throughout that difficult era, the entire Japanese occupation and the revolutionary war, she let Kliwon live in an endless hoorah.
‘Have you become a communist?’ asked his mother, almost in despair. ‘Only a communist would be so gloomy.’
‘I’m in love’, said Kliwon to his mother. ‘That’s even worse!’
Eka Kurniawan, Beauty is a Wound
“What do communists do?” Maddalena whispered.
“I don’t know,” Aida replied. “I really don’t know. They’re not happy. Antonio was never happy. Friends often came to see him and they seemed unhappy too. They were never lighthearted like other young men his age. I’d open the door and every time it seemed like they’d just had bad news. They came to Antonio and read … it’s odd, but thinking back, I remember that when it got dark and I went to Antonio’s room to close the shutters, they would look up from their books, their eyes full of sadness. God! What sad expressions they had!”
“If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all.”
John Keats, Letters
“… poets trip over tongues, language comes to them the way it does to a stutterer, as a problem.”
Alejandro Zambra, Not to Read
“I close parentheses to return to Clarice Lispector, though only to recall the moment when, in the middle of a chronicle, she stops and breathes and says: ‘I am writing with a great deal of ease and fluidity. One must distrust that.’”
Alejandro Zambra, Not to Read
“The book is the sum of our highest potential. Writers, alas, are the rough drafts.”
Sandra Cisneros, Introduction to Eduardo Galeano’s Days and Nights of Love and War
“As many critics have noted, in the end Macedonio was a draft of Borges. And sometimes – every other year – we like drafts more than the clean version.”
Many years ago, and entirely by accident, I came across a eulogy written by Patti Smith for Sam Shepard. Both names were unfamiliar to me, but “My Buddy” was – and still is – one of the best pieces of writing I’ve ever read. From the first line, her words laughed, wept, and sang – all at once. They possessed the movement of poetry and the rhythm of music. The piece accomplished what every one of us who writes always dreams of accomplishing, but never can: the very depth of feeling sublimated into language in a way that almost no gap remains between the two, what Adam Parry – writing on Virgil – calls “a conscious feeling that the raw emotions of grief have been subsumed in an artistic finality of vision.” Picking on the same lines from the Aeneid, Seamus Heaney would also write of how the “redress of poetry” lies in its ability to absorb and re-absord the “tears of things” (“lacrimae rerum”) into the words of a poem.
“My Buddy” was the prose embodiment of this sensation; in the years to come, I would quote its lines (especially “only not just any nowhere, but a sliver of a many-faceted nowhere that, when lifted in a certain light, became a somewhere. I’d pick up the thread, and we’d improvise into dawn, like two beat-up tenor saxophones, exchanging riffs”) at the very beginnings of intimacy.
More than anything else, I’m surprised that it took me so long to come to Patti Smith as a writer; perhaps a lingering apprehension that nothing else could quite match up to the distilled intensity of the eulogy. I need not have worried: when I did finally take the plunge last week – with her memoir, Just Kids – here was everything all over again, and so much more of it.
Just Kids is a coming-of-age story. It is about how Patti Smith arrived in the New York of the 1960s, and – after much stumbling – found her way into her art, as a songwriter who combined poetry with rock-and-roll. It is also about her complex relationship – first as lover, and then as close friend – with the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. It is about much else: poverty, precarity, and poetry; New York; the 1960s; the beatniks; the sexual revolution; companionship and jealousy; how music lives in all of us; and what it means to live.
As with “My Buddy,” I found myself reading a book about famous artists that I had only the dimmest awareness of (like everyone else, I had a beatnik phase in my early twenties, but beyond that my knowledge of the American 20th century cultural world is sketchy, at best); as with “My Buddy,” it simply didn’t matter. Just Kids is testament to how literature, at its best, is “universal” (with all the connotations that word contains). The lives of precarious artists living together at Hotel Chelsea from 1966-1969 is highly specific, but love, envy, companionship, solitude, the longing to be “loyal, yet free,” the sadness of being an outsider, the rage of being an outsider, the yearning to create art, and the yearning to create art that is recognised (specially when all of this is mixed up together) – are not.
Here again, there is that depth of feeling, and somehow all the right words: when, early on in their relationship, Robert tells Patti, “nothing is finished until you see it,” there is, somehow, crystallised into seven words what an entire book about intimacy would struggle to communicate. “I craved honesty, yet found dishonesty in myself,” in eight words, sublimates that strange alchemy of self-forgiveness and self-loathing that inhabits everyone trying to create art under conditions of capitalism. “My tears are inside – a blindfold keeps them there,” gives words to a feeling that, until I read these lines, seemed impossible to name. When Robert Lowell called Elizabeth Bishop an “unerring muse who makes the casual perfect?,” it was one thing, but Patti Smith writing about how Robert Mapplethorpe was a “master of transforming the insignificant into the divine” crackles with quite a different electricity. In Just Kids, lines like these form the scaffolding of a work that – to quote Smith herself – is “part boxcar, part fairyland.”
The book is shot through with pain, and nowhere more so at the end, when Mapplethorpe dies (young). In another book that I read recently – John Williams’ Stoner – I realised that there is a way in which literature can, if not ennoble death, at least dignify it. Reading the end of Just Kids made me think of death again, and specifically, the last line of my favourite Shakespearean Sonnet, #146: that if, on one’s death, one could be written of in the ways that Patti Smith wrote of Robert Mapplethorpe (or, for that matter, Sam Shepard), then indeed, “death once dead, there’s no more dying then.”
I think there’s a lot to say about the craft of this novel (including some oddly disjointed moments, although arguably that was the point), and perhaps even more to say about the undeniable brilliance of the translation. Yet, my overwhelming feeling throughout reading the second half, and after I’d finished, was this: here’s yet another 20th century massacre perpetrated against the left that I’d never heard of, and would never have heard of, were it not for a novel uncovering it for me.
We Do Not Part is a recollection, decades after the fact, of a 1940s, State-led massacre of Korean communists on Jeju Island (there’s something to be said for the fact that much like Bali, which was also a site of a very similar massacre, Jeju is now a prime holiday destination). A year or so ago, I’d read Kaya Press’ new translation of A Song of Arirang, and so I was somewhat aware of the revolutionary legacy of Korea in the 1920s and 30s. After that, there was a gap: I had a general sense that after the Korean War, South Korea spent many years under a West-sponsored military dictatorship before emerging into market democracy decades later. It never occurred to me to wonder, however, what happened to that revolutionary tradition, and why there’s no trace of it now.
We Do Not Part answers the question: there’s no trace because it was physically eliminated. It was physically eliminated much like how the anarchists and communists were physically eliminated in Japan after the Great Kanto Earthquake, and how a million communists were physically eliminated in Indonesia in 1965. Mourid Barghouti ends his memoir, I Saw Ramallah, with the verse “What deprives the spirit of its colours?/ What is it other than the bullets of the invaders that have hit the body?” That is pretty much what you feel when you put down We Do Not Part.
The novel strongly reminded me of Eka Kurniawan’s Beauty Is A Wound. These two books are stylistically very different, but both of them seek to use fiction to uncover political massacres that the histories – having been written by the victors – tend to pass over (in the case of Indonesia, this is probably changing of late). It also made me think of the role of fiction in our lives. In Grand Hotel Abyss, Stuart Jeffries has this to say about Walter Benjamin:
“He was a historian … not just of defeated humans, but of expendable things that, back in the day, had been the last word … In his last essay, Benjamin wrote: ‘There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.’ That sense of the repression of the unacceptable, the embarrassing, the awkward, the ideological disappearing of that which doesn’t fit the master narrative, had come early to him and remained with him lifelong: barbarism, for Walter Benjamin, began at home.”
This, to me, sums up books like We Do Not Part and Beauty Is a Wound, and this is why we need fiction: it can do exactly this, in a way that non-fiction might not be able to.
The other thing that struck me was that every time I read more about mid-20th-century South-East Asia, it seems both that this was the place that saw the most direct physical violence against, and destruction of, the organised left, as well as the most complete erasure of that violence and destruction. I haven’t read enough to know whether there was more violence in Latin America, or in parts of Africa, but I feel that this combination of massacres and amnesia is something unique in the history of State-led violence against the organised left. Given how significant this area was for the Cold War, this is perhaps not all that unsurprising; and yet, there’s something both galling and infuriating about the feeling that every read like We Do Not Part is an exercise in the excavation of a buried past that should never have been buried, but should have always informed the way we understand the world and how we act on that understanding. Instead, it’s something akin to having been once deprived of language, and now having it restored to us word by word and sentence by sentence, instead of the entire grammar. And for me, the power of We Do Not Part – apart from its literary qualities – lies in how starkly and uncompromisingly it does that.
In an age where so much of our reading is curated via social media and online newsletters, there is something romantic about going to a bookshop, chancing upon a book you’ve never heard of, and picking it up solely on the strength of the blurb. That is what happened with me and The Artist (and also why I will always remain a votary of Delhi’s Bookshop Inc, as that is where such things frequently happen).
The Artist is set in 1920, in a country house in a remote part of Provence, where the lives of three individuals intersect – and then collide: Tartuffe, a famous and reclusive painter; Ettie, his niece, caretaker, and caregiver; and Joseph, a journalist newly arrived from London, hoping to make his name by writing a feature about Tartuffe. As the story progresses, however, Joseph finds that Ettie has long harboured an ambition to be a painter herself – an ambition that has been viciously thwarted by Tartuffe at every opportunity. Within Ettie, blazing talent and simmering resentment vie for supremacy, even as Joseph struggles to cultivate his own relationship with Tartuffe, while also grappling with the sparks of mutual attraction that have begun to arc between him and Ettie. Throw in a shocking cameo by Paul Cezanne, and the stage is set for a violently incandescent denouement.
The Artist is a novel that is best read in company, as so much of it is about experiences that are deeply individual, yet intimately shared, and the bridge between the two. Perhaps, indeed, that is the best way to do it full justice.
At its heart, the story is about a woman’s determination to become an artist in a patriarchal art world that sees women as models or muses, but not as painters. There are two things that set the novel apart. First, as an art historian, Lucy Steeds brings a depth and sensitivity to the story that is reminiscent, for example, of how Dona Tartt’s knowledge of classical Greece enriches The Secret History. And secondly, The Artist has one of the most brilliant endings to a novel that I’ve come across in recent times. The novel pivots on two hinges: Ettie’s desire to become an artist, and Ettie’s romance with Joseph. At one level, there is a tension between these two – the first, the struggle of an individual against patriarchy, the second something deeply relational. Steeds, however, crafts an ending that, if not reconciling these two elements, nonetheless manages to honour them both. Once you put the book down, you feel that this, in fact, was the only ending that could ever have been. Far too often, brilliant books are let down by endings that don’t quite stick; but if there was ever a book where the ending made the story, it is The Artist.
In a Spanish village in the Pyrenees, its last surviving inhabitant lies on his deathbed. As he awaits the end, he plunges into a reverie about his own past – and the past of his village – and the slow decay of a once-full life into solitude – a solitude symbolised by the fall of yellow rain.
The Yellow Rain is a genuinely unclassifiable book, although the novel it reminded me most vividly is Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo. Both novels are about the passing of community that was once alive into a terrain of ghosts, and both novels show us the world refracted through the interior landscape of their protagonists. Stylistically, both novels construct a cloying, almost oppressively bleak atmosphere, that colour and taint the actions of their characters. And both The Yellow Rain and Pedro Paramo are novels of unraveling, where a story that begins in medias res unravels strand by strand into its constituent elements, with its core premise creeping up on you without warning.
At an obvious level, The Yellow Rain is a novel about loneliness and melancholy. While reading it, however, I experienced another emotion, one that reminded me of Colm Toibin’s response to Francis Bacon’s 1944 painting, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. In his book of biographical sketches, Love in a Dark Time, Toibin says that the three figures, in their tortured, wordless expressions, call to mind a living being who once knew language, has since forgotten it, but still retains the memory of knowing it.
But more than loneliness and solitude, I found The Yellow Rain to communicate a sense of terror: as in Bacon’s painting, a sense of terror at once having possessed the faculty to live, and to experience life in the fullest way, having since lost it, and now left only with the memory of possessing that faculty (with no way to get it back). I cannot imagine a more fearful end than that.
In part, The Yellow Rain achieves this effect through a skilful synthesis between the protagonist’s interior landscape and the physical environment around him. In his essay, The Two Voices of Virgil’s Aeneid, Adam Perry notes the Roman poet’s technique of mirroring his characters’ emotions in the landscape around them. So, for example, at one point in the book, Llamazares articulates the corrosion of human relationships through the physical spread of rust through the buildings of the village – and remarkably sustains this image for the length of an entire chapter, making the reader feel as if they are plunged into the very realness of it. Or, you have these sharp, staccato bursts:
I remember I spent all day wandering around the village as if in a dream. Despite its undoubted reality. I could not believe what I was seeing. Fences, walls, roofs, windows, doors, everything around me was yellow. Yellow as straw. Yellow as the air on a stormy afternoon or like a lightning flash glimpsed in a bad dream. I could see it. Feel it. touch it with my hands, staining my retina and mv fingers just like when I was a child at the old school, playing with paint. What I thought was an illusion, a fleeting visual and mental hallucination, was as real as the fact that I was still alive.
As Eduardo Galeano would describe the writing of Alejo Carpentier, he made you “feel the rain and smell the violent fragrances of the earth and the night.” And that is where the greatest power of this novel lies.
anenduringromantic 