Recent Reading: December 17th, 2016

I have one novel and two nonfiction books to report on this time. First the novel: Seeing Red by Lina Meruane. I’ve seen this described as auto-fiction, a term that … I guess makes sense? Autobiographical novel is better, but frankly I’m not that interested in its autobiographical origins. What’s interesting is that it’s a first-person account of struggling with blindness. The novel opens with the main character — Lina, of course — at a party, discovering that her eyes are filling with blood. She has known that this might happen and has had to be careful to try to keep it from happening, but it was inevitable that it would happen eventually. The rest of the novel is about trying to get by afterward — about learning to cope without sight and living with the hope that her eyes might get better but with the possibility of disappointment as well. It’s a fierce novel, about pain and anger and fear. It’s short, and I think that’s a good thing, because even though I liked the book quite a lot, it would be hard to read a work with such intensity for very long. I like fiction that gets deeply into a character’s mind, even when that mind is an uncomfortable place, and this book satisfies that desire perfectly.

Then there’s The Clothing of Books by Jhumpa Lahiri, a very, very short book — an extended essay, really — on book covers. It’s a great follow-up to her book from earlier this year In Other Words, which was about learning to speak and write in Italian. That book was also about identity and how language and writing have shaped her, and The Clothing of Books picks up the same theme, just this time in relation to her feelings about book covers generally and the covers of her own books in particular. I like Lahiri’s nonfiction style — translated from the Italian in both cases — which is very simple and straightforward while managing to make intriguing arguments and to suggest depth of thought. Both books are great for people how like to think about language and writing and books as physical objects.

Finally, there’s 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write by the playwright Sarah Ruhl. The essays here are 1-2 pages usually, and most of them are about the theater — Ruhl’s thoughts about her own plays and her experiences working in the theater and also more theoretical ideas about how drama works and what plays can and should do. Ruhl starts with a description of trying to write with small children to explain the genesis of the book: each essay is an idea told briefly and simply, an idea that perhaps she could have expanded if she had had more time. But they feel complete already, or at least most of them do, and I enjoyed them for their suggestiveness and their air of exploration: they are essays in the sense of “attempts” or “assays” into a thought instead of fully-developed and defended arguments, and they are enjoyable in their brevity and incompleteness. This book is a must-read for anybody who has thought about the theater a lot, and interesting for those who haven’t but wouldn’t mind giving it a try.