What’s up! It’s been a bit. 2021 got a little too much for me there—who amongst us can say that 2021 did not get a little too much—and I became overwhelmed in attempting to keep up with this newsletter, but here we go, it’s a new year and I’m back, though probably not as regularly as before; I’m thinking monthly-ish, being a great lover of crucial -ishes when necessary. Anyway. The best & brightest bits of literature to carry me out of last year, yanked along by the back of my collar, tended to be ugly, dangerous, crazy, magic, or all of the above. I’m talking, of course, about witches.
My copy of Eloghosa Osunde’s forthcoming VAGABONDS! is criss-crossed with my own annotations, exclamation points sprouting in the margins, huge chunks in parentheses with jagged lines under my favourite sentences, of which there were quite literally hundreds. A sprawling yet tightly plotted novel narrated by a trickster god about a series of interconnected characters living in Lagos, VAGABONDS! is generous yet sharp, funny and sad and wildly romantic. Osunde has this trick of writing sentences so good they feel like a plot twist — think of Wura, who knows the best way to deal with people talking shit is arrive confidently “looking like you have no skeleton”; or watching a man while you unbutton your blouse as “a way to test the fit, to use the man as one would a mirror”; another character returns to his hometown “a new man with arrogant cologne that could lift you by your collar and pin you to the wall”. My favourite passage is too long to transcribe and has to be read in the grip of VAGABONDS!’s compelling, urgent rhythm to be properly appreciated. It told me something I knew instinctively—“women are magicians”—and then took me up, higher and higher.
(preorder @ bookshop; out in May)I heard a lot of hype about Helen Oyeyemi’s PEACES before it came out and then not much of anything in the months that followed its release, which is a shame, because this might be my favourite thing Oyeyemi has written since her stunning debut Icarus Girl. PEACES is a love story, a puzzle, a vast and cinematic enterprise that feels like Wes Anderson without the twee. It’s the tale of Otto and Xavier Shin’s honeymoon on a train where each carriage is full of new marvels, not to mention the women onboard and a surprising amount of mongooses (mongeese?). Each passenger hovers in that ambiguous realm between magic and morality which is a witch’s special domain. There is a moment, towards the end of the novel’s second act, where all its riddles seem to resolve into a clear image and for a handful of pages I felt like I understood it all, before the kaleidoscope shifted everything back into glimmering, lovely mystery.
(buy @ bookshop)Sometimes returning to a book you read when you were young—especially one of the first books you read about capital-f Feminism—is an exercise in embarrassment or indulgence, the kind of ideas that felt radical at fifteen freshly sweet and defanged. But Isabel Allende’s EVA LUNA held up in the fourteen odd years between my two reads of it. It’s not that it doesn’t feel dated, with its 80s-typical embrace of sex positivity, but that it feels dated in the way that classics do: typical of its time, better than its time. We watch Eva Luna (a storyteller, a witch, a beating romantic heart) grow up in an unidentified South American country—with its turbulent political background, it feels very much like Allende’s native Chile, but it defies being pinned so absolutely—and shift through a variety of caregivers until she reaches adulthood and her life intertwines with another central character. What struck me most in rereading the novel is how tender and loving it is, how optimistic its aims and hopes for women and humanity. It’s a soft novel, but not because Allende didn’t understand the challenges we face. It approaches gender and sexuality gently, but with real intelligence. And in between, it is wryly funny and surprisingly sexy.
(grab yourself a cheap paperback with a range of good covers @ ebay)My favourite book that I read last year is an early 20th century classic called CHRIST STOPPED AT EBOLI, by the Italian-Jewish communist and artist Carlo Levi. Levi was exiled by Mussolini in the 1930s to the remote region of Lucania; this memoir chronicles his time amongst the townspeople and peasants, and the desperate poverty they lived in. The title, as Levi explains in probably the best first chapter ever written, is both symbolic—“‘We’re not Christians,’ they say. ‘Christ stopped short of here, at Eboli.’”—and frighteningly literal, for “Christ did stop at Eboli… Christ never came this far, nor did time, nor the individual soul, nor hope, nor the relation of cause to effect, nor reason nor history.” Yet CHRIST STOPPED AT EBOLI is not a misery memoir or the literary equivalent of tragedy tourism, and though one of its lasting effects was spurring public interest and investment in the region it details, there’s something about the common spirit between its exiled narrator and the population he meets that feels much more about connection and intimacy than pity. Case in point: Levi needs someone to help him cook and look after the house, but town custom dictates the separation of men and women. The kind of woman who can work in his house has to already exist outside the community’s social norms; she has to have proven her exemption to the rule; she has to be sexually and romantically experienced enough to hold her own. “In a word,” says Levi, “witches.”
(buy @ bookshop)ALSO CONSIDER: Serafina Pekkala and her branch of cloud-pine; all of T.H. White’s The Queen of Air and Darkness, but especially its terrifying first chapter with the poor panting cat; The Worst Witch, either book or TV show both proving to be more enjoyable long term than other British boarding school magic; The Hounds of the Morrigan, a criminally underrated Irish children’s novel; “She is neither pink nor pale,/And she never will be all mine”; all the baba yagas, shapeshifters, gingerbread houses, mysterious beauties and cackling crones you can find.
Some places I have been writing while I failed to write this newsletter:
for the White Review, I wrote about David Lowery’s film THE GREEN KNIGHT and its disappointing failure to do justice to the medieval poem it is based on;
for Gawker, I exposed way too much about a particularly ridiculous/sexy reading method my wife and I practice;
every now and then I pretend I am a tech writer — for Inverse, I got fascinated by the narrative potential of virtual trucking;
for the Washington Post, I asked a bunch of your and my favourite writers what they ‘see’ as they write;
and as ever, if you’re looking for another book to read, I’d love it if you picked up the one Onj & I wrote together.