Friends, haters, and the merely curious: I present to you The Obstructive Fictions Year of Reading. This is not a list of the best novels of 2021, but rather a list of the best books I read this year, regardless of their original publication date.
Thank you to the indie presses and translators who made most of these books possible.
I hope you find something to pique your interest. Without further ado…
The Luminous Novel by Mario Levrero (translated by Annie McDermott)
A glorious anti-novel from the Uruguayan master, The Luminous Novel is one of the great evasive acts of twenty-first century literature. Paralyzed by a recently awarded Guggenheim fellowship, Levrero begins a diary in lieu of the novel he is meant to finish. “The aim is to set the writing in motion, no matter what it’s about, and keep it up until I’ve got into the habit,” he explains. For just over a year, the prosaic features of his existence – his PC, to which he’s addicted; detective novels; dreams and interpretations; physical ailments; tango; pigeons; women with whom he enjoys varying levels of intimacy – are subject to the gentle, implacable pressure of sustained attention.
Neither autobiography nor autofiction, his magnum opus is a kind of solipsistic anti-literature, an extension of Perecian daring, its prodigiousness enabled by its constraint. It is both a grotesque failure and a masterpiece, a fussy, limpid, gorgeous, grumbling work of love and obsession.
My favorite novel of 2021.
If you’re interested in a longer take, I wrote about The Luminous Novel for New Left Review.
With My Dog-Eyes by Hilda Hilst (translated by Adam Morris)
With My Dog-Eyes, the third of Hilst’s novels to be translated into English, follows the unraveling of Amós Kéres, a professor of mathematics, whose lengthy and inexplicable silences during lectures have prompted the dean to place him on administrative leave. From the first page, we negotiate an unfamiliar narrative language. Hilst depicts Kéres’s psychic fissures with a range of formal devices: tense switches, first-to-third-person jumps, streams of consciousness, and inexplicable leaps in time and circumstance. (Translator Adam Morris doubtless had his hands full; he acquits himself marvelously.) Hilst, who adored Beckett and Joyce, writes with a compression that feels paradoxically expansive. Spare, flinty clauses rub against one another, giving off light and heat.
I have about half an essay on Hilst completed. I hope to publish the final piece here in 2022, if other deadlines allow. She’s a profane genius whose works surpass even Lispector’s.
The Inquisitors’ Manual by António Lobo Antunes (translated by Richard Zenith)
I picked up The Inquisitors’ Manual (1996) on a tip from Mauro Javier Cárdenas — whose “first page test” has yet to steer me wrong — and read it in a state close to ecstasy. (This sounds like hyperbole, but I assure you it’s not.) This was, by some margin, the best book I read this year.
What’s it like to read? Imagine Faulknerian voice-sculptures encircling a diminished oligarch in Salazar-era Portugal. Antunes writes the prose of a decayed modernist. His psychological portraits are marbled with coagulated darkness. These are the vivisections of Bacon taking life on the page, minds-in-meat that speak, and laugh, and remember times that may have been better, but probably weren’t.
Read it — and then read everything else by Antunes that you can get your hands on.
Panthers and the Museum of Fire by Jen Craig
In Jen Craig’s Panthers and the Museum of Fire, a woman walks from Glebe to a central Sydney café to return the manuscript of an estranged childhood friend who has recently died. Over the course of the walk, she considers her past and the mysteriously rejuvenating effect the manuscript has had on her own writing.
This description does no justice to the rangy intellectual freedom and aesthetic vitality of Craig’s novel. I read Panthers over the course of two days earlier this year, increasingly bound by its filaments of time, language, and observation. Its form —a series of digressive memories — suggests that the impossibilities of writing and the impossibilities of life sometimes mirror one another, and other times enable their own unexpected reversals.
If you’re interested in reading more about this novel, I spoke with Craig about it (and many other things) here.
The Water Statues by Fleur Jaeggy (translated by Gini Alhadeff)
This brief, mesmeric work, structured in part like a play, concerns a man named Beeklam, a recluse who stocks the flooded basement of his Amsterdam villa with statues. His father, Reginald, lives in seclusion with an enigmatic servant, Lampe. Father and son circle the abyss of their late wife and mother, Thelma.
There is no plot so much as a series of wintry moods, a vast, disembodied brooding. Those used to the gorgeously pared sentences of the later Jaeggy will be surprised to find a comparative surplus of language. This voluptuousness lends the proceedings a languid quality. All is submersion, iridescence, intoxication.
If you’re interested in reading more about this dreamy and deracinated book, I wrote about The Water Statues for New Left Review.
Cremation by Rafael Chirbes (translated by Valerie Miles)
On the Edge by Rafael Chirbes (translated by Margaret Jull Costa)
Chirbes’s final novels, Cremation (2007) and On the Edge (2013), castigate the late aughts’ feast of mammon. His critique is portable, though it centers on Spain’s financial crisis. Cremation offers the cocaine-rimmed bacchanal brought on by the real-estate bubble, while On the Edge depicts the mortal hangover that attended its bursting. Each whirls about a lost paterfamilias, like heliocentric systems whose suns have been extinguished. The sometimes bleak proceedings benefit from the velocity of Chirbes’s remarkable prose—thrillingly translated by Valerie Miles and Margaret Jull Costa—a raging stream of consciousness in which bits of history, memories, hesitations, wishes, and dreams fleck the foaming surface.
I have a long piece on Chirbes publishing shortly at The Baffler.
A Homemade World: The American Modernist Writers by Hugh Kenner
Alongside Elizabeth Hardwick and Michael Hofmann, Hugh Kenner represents, for this reader, an integral part of literary criticism’s Triune God. His masterpiece, The Pound Era — which situates the rise of modernism within the preoccupations of Ezra Pound — is never far from my desk. It has gained a talismanic power over the years. Whenever critical language feels dead, I open it up to discover again what’s possible.
A Homemade World seems destined to occupy a similar position. It covers the reshaping of American language brought about by a native literary modernism. It is a slimmer and jauntier work than The Pound Era, dancing across a range of American poets and novelists: Fitzgerald, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Hemingway, Faulkner. It has the prototypical Kennerian dash and élan, a digressive poetic that marries close readings to remarkable juxtapositions: Joyce and the Wright brothers; Stevens’s Crispin and Matisse. Kenner constellates new systems of connectedness, which is all a critic can hope to accomplish. A masterful work.
Awake by Harald Voetmann (translated by Johanne Sorgenfri Ottosen)
In this grotesque and beautiful novella, Pliny the Elder obsessively dictates new chapters of his Naturalis Historia amid imperious and wildly ambiguous musings on conflict, beauty, death, roses, and stars. It didn’t get a lot of coverage, so it was nice to see Claire Messud’s piece in Harper’s a couple of issues back.
The Cheap-Eaters by Thomas Bernhard (translated by Douglas Robertson)
I wrote extensively about Bernhard for The Baffler, including a bit on this typically — wonderfully! — recursive novel:
The Cheap-Eaters (1980), recently reissued by Spurl Editions, in a new translation by Douglas Robertson, sports several typical features of the Bernhardian novel. There is the obsessive intellectual (Koller); the mostly passive listener to whom he relays his unspooling thoughts (an unnamed school friend); examples of Austrian vulgarity (the eponymous cheap-eaters); the search for aesthetic or intellectual perfection; limited resolution; and the mesmeric narrative flow of a mind in duress. The plot, such as it is, exists as an armature for the mold of Koller’s consciousness. Having been bitten by a dog, he uses the occasion of his leg’s amputation, and the ensuing legal payout, to devote himself more fully to his life’s work, a long essay entitled Physiognomy. No details are offered about this essay—concealment and incompleteness being hallmarks of the Bernhard monologist—though Koller believes the cheap-eaters, a group of four men who daily eat at the Vienna Public Kitchen, are somehow central to its realization.
The Melancholy of Resistance by László Krasznahorkai (translated by George Szirtes)
This was my second go-round with Melancholy and it only deepened my admiration for Krasznahorkai. A series of inexplicable events in a provincial Hungarian town — including the arrival of a circus whose only attraction is the Leviathan returned — seem to set in motion the apocalypse.
What struck me this time around was how an early scene establishes an entire entropic system, the Krasznahorkaian oeuvre condensed into a disintegrating miniature. Valuska, a gentle visionary, begins his nightly cosmic rhapsody at the Peafeffer bar, detailing the journey of light to earth and the silent orbits of planets to an intoxicated mass of disinterested workmen. But on this particular night, Valuska recruits the drunkards to partake in a kind of celestial mummery to accompany his telling. He orchestrates their positions with assurance. The redfaced driver he names the Sun, the grinning house-painter the earth, and the insensate warehouseman the moon. As he speaks, they begin to move in circles about the bar, a great lubricated gear. Valuska’s monologue ignores his low surroundings and the disinterest of the Peafeffer’s patrons. He assumes a sublimity above his station as town idiot, even as the moon keels over, and the sun falls asleep. In the dream of a holy fool, the silent universe spins out of control above the wet boards of a village bar.
Many thanks for this list, Dustin. António Lobo Antunes is now on my radar. Just did pick up his What Can I Do When Everything's On Fire - since it has that 'open' format with loads of space on each page. The subjects of this novel sound white powder delicious