sunday roundup 3/29

hello i am back

Hi! What can I say—sometimes life runs away from me, sometimes I would rather die than keep looking at a laptop screen. Here’s what I’ve been reading since I wrote to you.

Books

• House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski, published 2000. One of those books I’ve always meant to get around to but never did until Arya recommended it and leant me her copy. It’s known for being formally challenging with its Russian doll-style narratives. The innermost doll is a manuscript of a critical theory text about a documentary that doesn’t actually exist, about a family who buy a house that they soon discover is bigger on the inside than the outside. The father of the family is an explorer who makes documentaries about his expeditions inside the threateningly unfolding maze inside the house. The doll outside that is the footnotes by a guy called Johnny Truant who found the manuscript inside a dead guy’s house and becomes devoured by it. We get letters from Johnny’s mentally ill mother and long descriptions of Johnny’s antics involving sex and drugs. This layer was less interesting to me and I found Johnny to tiresomely misogynistic. The final outer layer is footnotes from the editors who got ahold of Johnny’s manuscript, and the book you hold is their proof copy. But it’s not actually a Russian doll, more like a mobius loop. I found the book to be enormously fun to read, since you have to mark it up, hold it upside down, and lug it everywhere. It felt like an open-world videogame where I finished the main storylines, but there were several little sidequests or clues to research that I could have dug into more deeply. It gave me nightmares though— the shifting house reminded me of the unsteady lurch I feel when something bodily happens and I am reminded I could die at any second and in fact some second I definitely will. The title comes from this poem enclosed in the book:

  Little solace comes

  to those who grieve

  when thoughts keep drifting

  as walls keep shifting

  and this great blue world of ours

  seems a house of leaves

  moments before the wind.

• We are Green and Trembling by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, translated from Spanish by Robin Myers and published in 2023. It takes inspiration from the real life of Antonio de Erauso, who escaped a convent at the age of 15 and began living as a man first in Europe and then the New World as a conquistador. Undoubtably a fascinating basis for a story, but I personally felt bored by the novel as it relied on tropes of indigeneity, specifically the fantasy of adoption of a white person by indigenous people and the trope of indigenous people transforming into animals. I’m not arguing that those tropes should never be deployed, but I wasn’t convinced they were worth it here. I’m definitely missing something here given its popularity and Booker longlisting.

• Annihilation, Authority, & Acceptance by Jeff Van Der Meer, published in 2014. People have been telling me to read these books for so long that I felt silly actually opening them. I loved Annihilation- really beautiful and strange in the best way. A strange type of zone, referred to as Area-X, has cropped up, a place where people who go in vanish or come back weird, and our hero is sent on an expedition there. I found myself wishing I had just stopped after the first book- neither Authority or Acceptance came close to Annihilation for me. Annihilation revels in the sense that there is so much that the reader doesn’t know because humanity can’t know it because we are limited. Any answers that the second and third book in the series provide are bound to be unsatisfying compared to that great unknown. It reminded me of Roadside Picnic in that way, another weird book about a strange zone and those who explore it, where answers are not provided and shouldn’t be.

• Your Name Here by Helen Dewitt & Ilya Gridneff, published in full in 2025- though the first chapter was published in n+1 in 2008 and the manuscript floated around the internet without a publisher for some time. Dewitt wrote The Last Samurai and YNH has a similar character, a depressive genius, this time a writer who imagines a world where children learned Arabic and thus were invulnerable to the war-on-terror fearmongering of the Bush administration. It’s another formally inventive book with a novel-within-a-novel, email texts, pseudonyms, authorial stand-in characters— unfortunately, despite all that, I did not find it fun to read. It felt like a slog. I am a book nerd but not a publishing nerd, and I couldn’t find it in me to care about the characters’ publishing woes.

• They by Helle Helle, translated from Danish by Martin Aitken, published 2025. A beautiful and sparse story about a mother and teenage daughter navigating a cancer diagnosis and growing up in the 1980s. It was gorgeous and the first of a trilogy with the next book coming out next year.

• The Sisters by Jonas Hassen Khemeri, published 2025. Khemeri, who is Swedish and Tunisian, historically has written in Swedish; he wrote The Sisters in English, translated it to Swedish for publication (and acclaim) in Sweden, then back to English for its English publication. The sisters in the book, Ina, Evelyn, and Anastasia, speak in English, French, Swedish, and Arabic to each other. Khemeri said he wanted to mimic how a life feels when it passes, with the childhood portions long and the adult portions more fleeting. Khemeri infuses the novel with autofiction as he makes himself a character. This book is thick, but I sped through it because I was attached to the characters and wanted to see how their lives would shake out. Made me sad I don’t have sisters!!

• House of Day, House of Night by Olga Tokarczuk, translated from Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, published in English first in 2003 but given new hardcover life post-Nobel. I had been feeling a sort of reading malaise when I picked this up. I was reading good books but I was missing the feeling of “oh my god, this is why we have books!” that I usually get with a good book. HoDHoN gave me that feeling and more in its vignettes about small Polish border town and the people who inhabit it. I realized that sense of place is very important to my enjoyment of fiction, and sense of place is heavily threatened by internet-centric literature. The chapter about a man with a bird inside him really stays with me.

  • A character says, “each of us has two homes — one actual home with a fixed location in time and space, and a second that is infinite, with no address and no chance of being immortalized in architectural plans — and that we live in both of them simultaneously.” Felt spookily related to House of Leaves.

• Flesh by Daniel Szalay, published 2025. The book follows a Hungarian boy named István. It’s well-written but István is frustrating vacant of inner voice. The moments where he does have an inner voice are ridiculously beautiful, but for the most part he is floating along as a bystander to his own life— a doubtless intentional choice that communicates his disaffection, but one that made the book less compelling for me to read. It’s a sad book, and if all the blurbs are right about Szalay capturing contemporary masculinity are correct, that’s pretty tragic.

• Darryl by Jackie Ess, published 2021. This book is so fucking good. I’ve been meaning to read it for years— it’s billed as a hilarious book about a cuck named Darryl, and it is certainly that. The first sentence is “You live vicariously through celebrities, I live vicariously through guys who fuck my wife.” It’s very funny and very tragically white. It’s also maybe the most nuanced and tender exploration of gender and desire I’ve ever read. Funny books about self-loathing losers are skillful but tend towards a caustic disdain for their characters or the world (Rejection, Worry, Banal Nightmare). Darryl’s voice is so funny (“I prefer hiking to rock climbing and cuckoldry to ‘relationship anarchy.’ Is this just a generational thing?”) but it has a real warmth. I rooted for Darryl the whole way and felt seen in my own gender journey in a way I wholly unanticipated. It’s a book I think almost anyone (maybe not your mom) could like or take something from as long as they can stomach the whiteness. And it has a great sense of setting— in this case, Eugene, Oregon. It’s going on the list of books I give as birthday presents for sure.

• Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated from German by Michael Hofmann, published in the US in 2024. My first Jenny Erpenbeck, whom I’ve long had on my TBR. I was deeply impressed by the flow her sentences have— it really does mimic how I think when I think in words, in fragments that do not feel fragmentary. Kairos is about a 19 y/o who gets into a relationship named Katharina with a married 53 y/o communist named Hans. They both live in East Berlin, though Hans was actually born in the West and was part of Hitler Youth until things didn’t look so good for Hitler. Spoiler alert, a 53 year old who is into a 19 year old is not a good guy. The novel starts a few years before the end of the GDR. Erpenbeck was herself about Katharina’s age when the wall fell and some of Katharina’s first experiences of the West are likely lifted from experience. It’s critical of the GDR while maintaining an anticapitalism, which I appreciated. The first half of the book is excellent, the second half a hard and tedious read. Very interesting.

• Journey into Moonlight by Antal Szerb, translated from Hungarian by Len Rix, originally published in 1937. Another book about a loser that I totally loved. Mihály is a bourgeoisie banker on honeymoon with his hot wife Erzi in Italy when he’s suddenly confronted with memories of his past high school/college friend group and overcome with nostalgia for their psychosexual games about suicide and blurred boundaries. Kids a century ago are just like us! He becomes melancholy and weird, kind of a Holden Caulfield-type wandering around Italy and reflecting on his place in society and the life he wants to live. I was impressed with how Szerb wrote Erzi, a spoiled girl who ends up as a three-dimensional character. The book inspired me to create a “loveeee” tag on libby, so I can easily come back to it.

  Szerb was a Jewish Hungarian writer and intellectual who turned down many chances to escape Hungary and ended up beaten to death in a concentration camp. According to wikipedia, admirers offered to get him out of the camp and he turned them down, “wanting to share the fate of his generation.” He took a trip to Italy before writing the book, noting that it seemed that international travel for Jewish people was getting more difficult so he should get to Italy while he could. I deeply enjoyed the book and the voice and would like to read more from him. I’ve been interested in post-WW2 literature for years, but would also like to read more from right before the war, when censorship and fascism were steadily rising. There is a sense that Mihály and his friends, in another life, could afford to be dreamers, but in this one they are trapped by their circumstances, a sense I think many people right now (and perhaps always) can empathize with.

• A Personal Matter by Kenzaburō Ōe, translated from Japanese from John Nathan, published in 1964. I’ve been meaning to read something from the Nobel-winner for a while, and APM seems to be a highly recommended one, so on a whim I downloaded it to my new e-reader. APM is about a guy called Bird whose wife births a child with a severe deformity, such that Bird calls his son a monster and goes on a bad-decision bender while he decides if he’s going to let his baby live or die. I hated Bird right up until the end and marveled at how Ōe constructed such an unsympathetic character. Then I read that the book is semi-autobiographical. Turns out Ōe had a disabled son himself and, thankfully, cherished him and helped change the way Japanese people view disabilities through his fame. There’s another semi-autobiographical book that takes place six or so years later, when the child is older, that I would like to read. I also want to read his Hiroshima Notes.

essays/substacks/etc- honestly, not much here, mostly related to the novels from the above section and then some good substacks

• “When An Author You Translate Gets Death Threats” by Jennifer Croft about translating Olga Tokarczuk

• “Jenny Erpenbeck on Spying, Lying, and Eros” by Ellen Adams

• “snuff film political economy” by STM.

  • “Here is the paradox for me, the one I keep turning around in my mind: the contemporary snuff film economy of state killing produces and erodes grievability at once. It sensitizes and it anesthetizes simultaneously. It produces intense emotion and often a sense of ‘us vs. them’ affiliation and enmity, and that intense emotion can be parlayed into the burning down of the police precinct or the passive consumption of the doomscroll.”

  • If you like this essay I would also recommend Black Meme: A History of the Images that Make Us by Legacy Russell, which explores this paradox of the viral killing image/video.

• “american ice cream” and “a late style of fire” by Meghna, about the history of ice cream machines and poet larry lewis respectively

movie- I actually watched a LOT of movies in the last few months (I have letterboxd now, username is alf42069) but only one I’m gonna talk about here because this is already SO long. It’s called Watch Out for the Automobile, a Soviet comedy about a car thief and the detective assigned to catch him. It’s so silly and homoerotic. This movie is my Heated Rivalry. Free on Youtube

music- obsessed with this new album from Sega Bodega & Maya Alkhateri, whom I’d never heard of before. It’s a mostly arabic shoegazy album with a soft hint of SB’s signature clubby pop touch. Wrote most of this newsletter listening to it. Also listening to the song ‘you will never be alone in barcelona’ on repeat from 2charm, produced by Ninajirachi.

OKAY that’s it for now <33333333 ALF