Books I Read May 18th, 2025

For my birthday I made…

…strawberry tangzhong donuts and read the following books…

Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi – A girl struggles to address the fractured divinities within her mind, medium-ship (?) as a metaphor for mental illness and the complexities of human identity. The idea of competing gods controlling the character and narrative offers an original and compelling take on a fairly conventional coming of age story, although I once again found myself thinking that the use of magic as a literary device allowed for an overly neat conclusion. A lot of my recent forays into African fiction have left me wondering how seriously I'm supposed to take the spiritual aspects of the writing, if they exist entirely as metaphor or are representative of some genuine belief.

Disappearance by Yuri Trofonov – Youthful recollections of the wartime purges which took the author's father and uncle, Soviet stalwarts erased by Stalin's madness. Published posthumously and left unfinished, which was too bad for everyone—this has the makings of something profound and epic, another Life and Fate or The Burning Years.

Broken Glass by Alain Mabanckou – Stories from the downtrodden patrons of Kinshasa's foremost dive bar as told to the eponymous drunkard/intellectual. Rabeleisque tales of cuckoldry and failure, told in Mabanckou's house style, a run-on sentence interrupted by commas and occasional page breaks. I dig it, reminds me a bit of Bohumil Hrabel in its wit and absurdity.

Not So Much, Said the Cat by Michael Swanwick – Literate speculative fiction. Fun and engaging.

I is Another: Septology III-V by Jan Fosse – part two of Fosse's story of an aging artist named Asle and the small cast of characters with very similar names, yes, identity and personhood are part of what we are discussing, yes, what makes us different but more what makes us the same, the indissoluble similarities of time and suffering and death, yes, but also of love and God, yes, there is quite a lot of God in this which I enjoy despite, and after a few pages Fosse's rolling sentence and simple cadence becomes soothing, yes, a comforting way to spend a few quiet hours

Journal, 1955-1962: Reflections on the French-Algerian War by Mouloud Feraoun – The intimate reflections of a righteous man caught in the horrifying brutality of urban warfare. Feraoun was one of Algeria's leading authors and intellectuals as well as a primary school administrator, and his attempt to understand and survive the collapse of French Algeria makes for poignant and tragic reading. Even-handed in its judgments, sincere in its conviction, this is a profound attempt to grapple with the end of the colonial project and the endless compromises required to survive in wartime. That the author would be murdered by the OAS shortly before the start of independence only offers a bitter poignancy to an already worthwhile work.