refractions.

on reading the Man Booker International longlist, childhood, and having hobbies.

I saw a TikTok ‘roasting’ a thirty-something guy for taking skateboarding classes. It’s weird how we don’t allow ourselves to have new or interesting hobbies as we age. Suddenly, life is just about ‘work and’— work and maybe keeping healthy, work and maybe having a social life, or a family, work and maybe taking one vacation a year, but mostly it becomes a daily hustle. Sometimes I worry that I’m boring, that I’m letting myself become work, it’s so much of my day that it feels like I am just a job. However, I am nothing if not a collage of my varied goals and hobbies. And, in defense of the skateboarding man, I love taking classes. I just finished a grant-writing course, I have a California wine certification, I can speak and read some Russian, I recently went to a lecture from a UC Berkeley professor about the existence of aliens.

I’ve been thinking about taking a stained-glass art class—my grandpa made stained glass and, after he passed, I kept one of his pieces hanging in our office. I remember him working on his endless projects, soldering on a card table in the garage while he smoked. Maybe I just want to feel closer to my childhood. Maybe that’s why I write too. I am trying to write about childhood recently, not mine, but not not mine either, and it’s hard to recall the way I saw the world in words because it was so visual, like looking through a pane of differently colored glass.

Many of the books I’ve read recently have also dealt in some way with the theme of childhood, family, and creating a life for oneself that is separate. Since I like to set completely arbitrary and relatively meaningless reading goals for myself, this month I decided to read all the Man Booker International longlist books I already owned—which was several. I am a longtime fan of several authors who made the longlist this year: Hwang Sok-yong, Domenico Starnone, Gabriela Wiener, and Jenny Erpenbeck, although I didn’t have all their books on hand. The ones I did have I am going to do rapid-fire reviews of below.

What I’d Rather Not Think About by Jente Posthuma, translated by Sarah Timmer Harvey

“I didn’t understand that what is comforting to one person can stifle another.”

Oh, this book. I still find myself thinking about it days later, it’s so poignant. The narrator is a twin whose brother has committed suicide, and the book is looking back on their life together, their childhood, in a series of vignettes, no more than 1-3 pages, that piece together like a somewhat unfinished collage. She struggles to make sense of their story, mostly of how they’ve grown apart in adulthood, of their own idiosyncrasies (she owns 142 sweaters, he joins the Bahgwan movement), and the distinctly ‘millennial’ time period they are existing in. She reads his journals and delves down Internet rabbit holes (a relatable experience) in search of some kind of connection, but comes up empty handed, standing instead by the river where he died.

Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated by Michael Hofmann

"Will you come to my funeral?"

The above is the opening line to Kairos, a book I think I really enjoyed, but also hated. In my reading notebook I wrote, ‘these people are toxic af’—and I stand by that. Both main characters are truly unlikeable, but Erpenbeck’s writing is masterful. Katherina, a nineteen-year-old student, meets Hans, a married fifty-three-year-old novelist, by chance on a bus and they begin a love affair that, while passionate perhaps, is described in a cool, cerebral way that keeps the reader at something of a distance. The interesting part of this novel is the political background of the DDR in the 80’s, the variety of styles Erpenbeck employs (different points of view and perspectives, present tense narration, jumping across large expanses of time), and the subtleties of violence she hides in plain sight. The translator did an excellent job making sure Erpenbeck’s confidence and intent come across.

Lost on Me by Veronica Raimo, translated by Leah Janeczko

“In my family, each of us has our own way of sabotaging our memory out of self-interest.”

Autofiction can be hit or miss for me, but I enjoyed this. Lost on Me is a fast-paced, witty novel about Vero coming of age in a fairly neurotic and risk-averse family whose behavior fosters in her a deep desire for independence. The novel has no plot to speak of and is mostly comprised of nonlinear character-centric anecdotes that weave between both her childhood and her adulthood. It reminded me a bit of Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Lexicon (a connection that was also made in the English edition), with the existence of a specific familial ‘language’ and ritual. Ultimately, the book speaks to her aspirations as a writer, even the competition it fostered with her brother, also a writer, but, happily, she still insisted on telling her story her way.

The House on Via Gemito by Domenico Starnone, translated by Oonagh Stransky

“When my father told me he hit my mother only once in twenty-three years of marriage, I didn’t even bother replying.”

I know Starnone for his slim novels like Ties and Trust, and I’ve always enjoyed his work, so I ordered The House on Via Gemito and was humbled by the 480-page tome I received in the mail. Like Lost on Me, this is memoir-esque, an autofictional novel of childhood and family. In my reading notebook I wrote, ‘daddy issues.’ Set against the background of Naples, Starnone sifts through his memories of the past to try and recreate a portrait of his father, a man he never wanted to resemble. The novel centers around his father’s rage, his violence, his misogyny, and his unrequited dream of being a famous Italian artist. Starnone’s prose is angry, resentful, and hurt in equal measures, it feels as though he is trying to purge his father’s influence from his body through words. He tries to write something about his mother, but she existed only as a shadow in the background, and he never manages to make her seem real. Starnone is a great writer, he does so much with language, but this book was very long and very male.

Ultimately, I enjoyed the longlist selections I read, some more than others, but I’d recommend any of them. They’ve announced the shortlist now, and the final prize will be May 21^st, so TBD on if I finish any additional novels between now and then. In the meantime, I will be trying to write my own work about childhood, and maybe signing up for an art class.