?? Toni Morrison,
The Bluest Eye 
This book is extraordinary in its success at evoking a time and place. The premise is simple: a poor young black girl grows up with a simple wish: to have blue eyes so she will be as beautiful and beloved as all the blond, blue-eyed children. The book’s enormous power is due, I think, largely to Morrison’s mastery of the English language. So much so that I have trouble imagining how this work could possibly be translated. It seems to me to be so inextricably intertwined with a place and time and with a vernacular use of English that it seems untranslatable. (I think, as an aside, that that is a great topic for another thread: how much works can be so much a part of the place and language and time as to be inaccessible to readers who read the work in a different place and a different time and a different language. Examples that pop to mind: Bely’s
Petersburg or Goethe’s
Faust, though of course the list is endless.) This is Morrison’s first book and it impressed me enormously. In the words of a goodread’s reviewer, it is a “haunting, poignant and unforgettable elegy to the horrors that American slavery spawned.” Although that reviewer was describing Morrison’s
Beloved (not this book), I think the same observation holds true. This is a remarkable work: remarkable for its writing and for its clear-eyed, heartbreaking nostalgia for certain aspects of a world that is both gone and irretrievably still with us.
?? Theodor Storm,
Carsten the Trustee and other stories +
This is another in a series of books collecting novellas by Storm, an important 19th-century German realist. Storm wrote almost exclusively about life in the small rural villages of far northwestern Germany, along the North Sea. His stories are often sad (or at least, as Leseratte noted, melancholy) and can be hauntingly nostalgic. Storm wrote about the lives and beliefs of these people and his writing is remarkable for its psychological insight. His novellas address topics like class tension, social problems, and religious bigotry, but regardless of ostensible subject, most of his work usually dealt with man’s isolation and his struggle with his fate. Storm really only wrote one novel and his mastery of the novella form was such that they are frequently considered among the best in German literature. His writing—at least in the translations of Denis Jackson—is captivating. This collection included the title novella plus “The Last Farmstead” (both of which concern reversals of fortune for farming and burgher families in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars), “The Swallows of St George's” (a love story) and—the only unsuccessful one in the book for me, “By the Fireside,” a somewhat disjointed series of ghost stories.
?? Charles Dickens,
Little Dorrit +
As part of my rest-of-my-life project, I tackled another large Dickens novel to start the year. There’s no getting around it: the fact that Mr. Dickens was paid by the installment clearly meant that many of his books are, um, longer than they need to be. Enjoyable? Yes. Amazingly plotted? Yes. Exceptional characters? Yes. Moving? Yes. But increasingly I am coming to the conclusion that they’re too damn long. Of course, Dickens wouldn’t be Dickens otherwise. Still.
Which leaves us with this tale of rags to riches to rags, the infamous Marshalsea Prison for debtors (where Dickens’ father spent time), and the absolutely lovable, self-effacing, gentle, too-good-to-be-true (or believable) Little Dorrit. The characters, as always, are much of the attraction; the plot threatens at a few points to be nearly incomprehensible (but never crosses that line); the tying-up of loose ends at the end of the book requires some rather silly inventions but it is, after all, Dickens, and so the novel succeeds despite all of this. If it’s not quite at the level of
Bleak House or
David Copperfield, it is also not terribly far from those masterpieces either. It took me quite some time to decide which novel to read this year and I read widely to help me decide. Definitely recommended.
?? Lars Gustafsson,
Stories of Happy People +
I read a volume of Gustafsson’s stories a number of years ago and thought it was time to revisit him. It only took a few stories to remind me of my reaction to that collection. Odd. Definitely odd. Talented writer, interesting ideas, but definitely odd. Gustafsson, who died in 2016, earned a Ph.D. in theoretical philosophy (whatever that is) and, I do not intend it as a compliment to say that some of his stories read as if they were written by an academic. According to the entry in Wikipedia, Gustafsson once wrote: “sometimes I cannot see any sharp boundary between [my literary work] and [my philosophical work]. I tend to regard myself as a philosopher who has turned literature into one of his tools." Yup. That's completely accurate, I think. An academic with a degree in philosophy. There’s a little too much academic-ness about some of the stories; it often shows in the writing itself and it sometimes shows in the way he plays with ideas. In both cases, it made the stories less enjoyable for me. Still, there were some stories I enjoyed. But even so, I have trouble recommending this slim (150 pages) collection. There are stories written from the point of view of someone who is insane, of someone who has an intellectual disability, and of someone who is senile. Happy people? I guess Mr. Gustafsson and I would probably have trouble coming together on a definition of happy.
