Unopened bottle of Mumm champagne,
found and displayed by artist Jenny Odell
at the Recology Artist-in-Residence program
of the San Francisco City garbage dump.
Seraillon’s fifth year of existence, 2015, has been
something like a Christmas panettone: delicious Italian (mostly Neapolitan) ingredients,
but with a few domestic and exotic fruits and a very, very few rancid walnuts
thrown into the mix. For another year, I’ve been awestruck by the works I’ve
read; each succeeding year-end wrap-up serves to underscore how the universe of
literary marvels is ever-expanding, and how my sense of getting a grip on it
all seems ever-receding.
Here are a few notes from this year of reading:
Best Work Consisting
of 2,279 Sonnets
The year began with the joyful discovery of the Roman
sonnets of Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli, who used dialect to create, in sonnet
form, a raw, ribald and not infrequently moving portrait of the Eternal City.
The enthusiasm and different approaches taken by Belli’s several translators -
perhaps most notably Anthony Burgess in his literary novella ABBA ABBA -
helped to ramp up my own enthusiasm. Belli is a poet to read and re-read.
Best Work in which
All The Characters End Up Enclosed in a Pumpkin
Going back a bit further in time, Teofilo Folengo’s Baldo
may well rank as my favorite book of the year, a hugely entertaining, bawdy and
inventive tale that served as a chief inspiration for Rabelais but which offers
up a free-wheeling innocence unmatched by its offspring.
Five Exceptional 20th
Century Italian Novels (and a Note About Four 21st Century Italian
Novels)
Raffaele La Capria’s The Mortal Wound, which inspired
Paolo Sorrentino’s film La Grande Bellezza, beautifully captures the
paralysis of an entire generation of Neapolitans.
Guido Morselli’s “alternate history” novel Divertimento
1889 I found charming, funny, and subtly disturbing.
J. Rudolfo Wilcock’s catalogue of mostly fictional artists
and dreamers in The Temple of Iconoclasts stood out by virtue of its
incredibly wry humor.
Ennio Flaiano’s riveting The Short Cut, exploring an
episode during Fascist Italy’s misadventure in East Africa, ranked up there
with the best of Graham Greene.
Finally, a late contender, Daniele del Giudice’s surprising Lines
of Light counts among the most inventive contemporary novels I’ve read in a
long time, an almost plotless story concerning two men, a novel writer and a
particle physicist, briefly intersecting and diverging amid love’s lines,
angles and rhymes in their approaches to the exploration of knowledge.
Before leaving off the Italians, I feel obliged here to say
something about Elena Ferrante’s “Neapolitan Quartet,” which I chomped down in
a gulp. I intend to write about these books in early 2016, after having written around them in 2015 by noting some of
Ferrante’s obvious influences.
Best Travelogue/Anti-Clerical
Parody for Showing Up Gustave Flaubert
José Maria Eça de Queiroz’s The Relic proved an
unexpected and utterly charming, funny and irreverent novel, one so different
from his The Maias that I have trouble deciding which, between these
two, is my favorite among the several of Eça’s works that I’ve now read. But I
can easily say that The Relic is among my favorite works read in 2015, a
novel I’m already pushing on other readers unfamiliar with this terrific
writer.
Best Modern Poetry Discovery
A terrific discovery in poetry this year, thanks to a kind
friend who sent along a recently translated selection – The Perfect Hour
- is Portuguese poet Sophia Mello de Breyner Andresen. Here’s a book I’ve kept on
the night table for frequent reading of delicate poems which prove that
sometimes a limited palette is all that’s needed to create marvelous poetry. It’s
a short book one can read in an hour – a perfect hour.
Probably the Best Novel Ever Set Anywhere Near Bakersfield, California
I owe thanks to Jacqui of Jacquiwine’s Journal for turning me on to Dorothy Baker’s Cassandra at The Wedding, a comic psychological novel of two sisters whose complex relationship is tested by the impending marriage of one. Why this isn’t a better-known American classic I do not know.
Best Second Visit with a Writer I’ve Wanted to Read Again
Thanks to another suggestion from Jacqui, I returned for a second time to Elizabeth Taylor, this time her novel Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont – delicate, funny, moving, among the most affecting works about aging that I can recall having read.
Best Discovery of a
Writer I’d Resisted Reading Before
Arnold Bennett. I loved his Anna of the Five Towns,
and quickly followed it with his delightful The Card.
Best Fulfillment of a
Decades-Long Reading Project
Finally this year I succeeded in finishing a goal I started
at age 17: reading all of Virginia Woolf’s novels. The Voyage Out, her first
novel, was the only one remaining, and what surprises it provided! Perhaps
reading everything else before reading this one was a good thing, for in The
Voyage Out one sees the germs of almost everything else Woolf wrote, including
the introduction of Clarissa Dalloway. The Voyage Out also possesses a
liveliness and humor that seems somewhat diminished in Woolf’s later writing,
and contains one of my favorite scenes from all of my reading this year, in
which two of the characters, braving a storm at sea, sequester themselves in a
cabin on the boat and drink champagne from a glass that's still holding a toothbrush.
Most Moving Short
Novel about Approaching the End of Life
Little Songs in the Shade of Tamaara, by Egyptian
writer Mohammed Afifi. A simple idea: a man catalogues everything in his garden.
But through attentiveness and reminiscence he manages to recall and evaluate an
entire life of tragedy and triumph as he approaches the end of it. This small,
beautifully structured book resonated profoundly; would that any of us could
express the feelings of facing life’s end with such courage, grace and beauty.
A Great Novel About
the Sahara
New Waw is the second novel I’ve read by Taureg
writer Ibrahim Al-Koni, who creates poetic gems through merging ethnography and
a profound appreciation of the desert in exploring the lives of Taureg nomads.
A Bad But
Entertaining Novel About The Sahara
Pierre Benoit’s L’Atlantide was a colossal success in
France when it appeared in 1919. I read it in an English translation under the kitsch
title Queen of Atlantis, one I found entirely appropriate to the B-film
quality of this story of French explorers discovering a lost civilization in the furthest reaches of the desert (it’s Atlantis – surprise!). A hoot from start
to finish.
Best Historical
Fiction
This award must go to Jean-Noel Schifano’s Chroniques
Napolitaines – beautifully written, filled with love affairs and violence
stemming from the same addiction to passion that characterized baroque Naples.
Best Short Story Collection That Involves the Paint on
the Mona Lisa’s Canvas Suddenly
Deciding to Fly Off and Explore the World
To be fair, I only read a handful of short story collections
this year, but César Aira’s The Musical Brain, a long-anticipated
translation of the Argentine novelist’s shorter works, ranked for me among the
best of the books I’ve read by Aira, with one deliriously inventive story
succeeding another. The New Directions hardcover edition also gets kudos for
its terrific cover.
Two Novels I Intend
to Re-Read Before Writing About Them
Long on my list of novels to be read, and now read at last
for the first, but surely not the last time, is Ford Madox Ford’s The Good
Soldier. I flagged so many lines on so many pages that in the end I decided
I’d just have to read it again.
Effi Briest, by Theodor Fontane. I am still haunted
by the Chinese figure in Fontane’s novel, as well as by the quick eclipse of
youth that occurs in its opening pages. Though I read Effi Briest early
this year, it has rested in my head as perhaps the novel I am most eager to
re-visit.
Best Work I’m Still
Reading, and Other Projects for 2016
I am thrilled to be halfway through a re-read of Don
Quixote. This coming year I’ll likely still keep exploring Italian
literature, but look forward to pursuing many other writers I’ve yet to
discover as well as re-reading authors I want to revisit (perhaps especially
Arnold Bennett and his The Old Wives’ Tale). One of the writers I intend to
revisit, for the umpteenth time, is Jane Bowles and her novel Two Serious
Ladies. Please see this announcement of a proposed group read with the Dolce Bellezza blog.
Finally, a huge thanks to all of you who have visited Seraillon this
year and to all of you who have pointed the way to so many wonderful paths to
explore in literature. I wish you a joyful and peaceful 2016 - wherever you might get your champagne.
