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#NYRBWomen25 Special – Highlights of the Year

In the last three years, #NYRBWomen23, #NYRBWomen24, and now #NYRBWomen25 have been some of the biggest highlights of my reading. Conceived and hosted by the lovely Kim McNeill (@joiedevivre9 on Bluesky and Instagram), I discovered so many literary gems because of this reading project and connected with like-minded folks on social media. Unsurprisingly, it has proven to be a popular readalong, and as I write this piece, I’m getting ready for Version 4.0 of this project – #NYRBWomen26 (Kim has already released the schedule with a slightly changed format – one book per month instead of two).

Like the last couple of years, broadly, I have split this post into three sections: (a) the books I read this year for #NYRBWomen25, (b) a brief look at the books on the list that I read in previous years, and (c) my reading plans for #NYRBWomen26. 

Now, coming back to #NYRBWomen25, I will do what I did last year since I enjoyed the exercise so much – rank the twelve books I read. Mind you, all twelve books are excellent and all are definitely worth reading, but obviously, there are some that I preferred more than the others. So, let’s begin…

SECTION ONE

#NYRBWOMEN25: RANKING THE BOOKS

Here are the twelve books ranked in terms of my preference, from the lowest (no.12) to the highest (no.1):

12

WRITTEN ON WATER by Eileen Chang (Translated from Chinese by Andrew F. Jones)

First published in 1944, Written on Water is a captivating collection of essays by Eileen Chang, offering her sharp, elegant reflections on art, literature, war, urban life, and her experiences as a writer and woman in wartime Shanghai and Hong Kong.

One of the standout pieces in the collection, “Writing of One’s Own”, presents Chang’s nuanced views on literary theory. “Notes on Apartment Life” presents a witty and keenly observed reflection on the quirks and quiet allure of urban existence, centering on Chang’s own experience of apartment living. In “Peking Opera through Foreign Eyes,” Chang turns her attention to the rich, stylized world of this traditional Chinese art form, while in “Unforgettable Paintings,” Chang reflects on a selection of artworks that have left a profound imprint on her imagination.

Nicole Huang aptly summarizes in her afterword: “From Peking Opera to women’s fashion, from the culture of the streets to highbrow aesthetic properties, from histories of dance to shows of European modernist paintings, from nostalgic rambles through classical Chinese literature to a fond tour of Shanghai cinema, Chang’s breadth of knowledge is impressively on display throughout Written on Water.”

11

I USED TO BE CHARMING by Eve Babitz

I Used to Be Charming is a spirited and lively compilation of previously uncollected nonfiction writing by Eve Babitz. Spanning nearly 50 pieces written between roughly 1975 and 1997, the collection is an eclectic mix of magazine articles, essays, celebrity profiles, cultural commentary, travel pieces, lifestyle reportage, and occasional personal reflections. Babitz wrote for publications such as Mademoiselle, Esquire, The Washington Book Post World, Movieline, Vogue, LA Style, The New York Times Book Review, Smart, The Los Angeles Times, and so on. In other words, it is a wide-ranging anthology of articles that showcase Babitz’s voice across decades – her journalism and her unique eye for culture intertwined with personal experiences.

Some of my favourites in this collection are the lengthier pieces, which dwell on her interactions with movie and music personalities, the vibrant LA art scene, comparisons between LA and New York, as well as the cultural haunts that embodied the spirit of LA.

In “My God, Eve, How Can You Live Here?”, Babitz slips effortlessly into the role of an expert travel guide, leading the reader through her beloved LA, and pinpointing what truly matters on a visit, picking out the best of what LA has to offer. “Sunday, Blue Pool, Sunday” – the title probably a playful riff on U2’s popular song Sunday Bloody Sunday – is a reflective piece on languid life in LA, specifically the relaxed, sun-drenched atmosphere of Sundays by a swimming pool. In “All This and The Godfather Too,” a piece that pulsates with Babitz’s characteristic cool and casual, smart and glamorous style, she recounts her time on the sets of The Godfather, observing Francis Ford Coppola and Al Pacino at close quarters and offering sharp, amused insights into their temperaments and artistic vision. “Jim Morrison is Dead and Living in Hollywood” is a compelling, nostalgic, candid reflection on Jim Morrison, exploring the stark contrast between the myth and reality of the lead singer of The Doors. 

I Used to Be Charming can be read as a document of a certain time and place, filtered through Babitz’s astute eye and brought to life through her blend of cultural reportage and intimate reflections. The result is a rich, often dazzling portrait of Los Angeles and its world of dreamers, glitterati, misfits, and nightlife. 

10

TALK by Linda Rosenkrantz

Originally published in 1968, Talk is an experimental novel created from recorded conversations among three friends, capturing the flavour of the 1960s with its focus on topics such as sex and relationships, LSD, partying, and psychoanalysis.

As Steven Koch tells us in his introduction, “None of the dialogue in this book is invented, or vaguely remembered, or a figment of some writer’s fantasy.” Rosenkrantz carried the tape recorder with her to the Long Island beach town of East Hampton throughout that summer of 1965, and what she had on her tapes was a melee of conversations teeming with a range of people and voices. She meticulously pared down the recordings to focus on three voices – a close-knit circle of friends: Marsha, Emily, and Vincent. The names are fictional, but the conversations are not, and it is even possible that Marsha is a stand-in for Linda herself. The characters are unfiltered, sometimes brutally honest with themselves and each other. 

Frank, sophisticated, fun-filled, while also often moving and shot through with slivers of sadness, Talk wonderfully evokes a certain time and place. This was a very original novel and I had great fun reading it.

9

A HOUSE AND ITS HEAD by Ivy Compton-Burnett

Ivy Compton-Burnett’s A House and Its Head is a singular, subversive, darkly comic novel of manners – a dissection of the intricacies of familial relationships and power struggles, repression and patriarchy, and the allure of money. Given its heavy reliance on dialogue, the novel demands a certain amount of concentration from the reader, but the vitriol-laced conversations and brittle wit pretty much drive the narrative forward.

At the heart of the drama is Duncan Edgeworth, a tyrannical patriarch who rules his family with an iron fist through snide remarks and needling insinuations.  The family comprises Duncan’s long suffering, submissive wife Ellen, their two daughters Nance (“a tall thin girl of twenty four, with her father’s head placed rather squarely on her shoulders”), and Sybil (“a nearly grown girl of eighteen, with a fair, pure, oval face, and blue eyes set unusually close, and thereby gaining charm”). Completing the family set-up is Duncan’s  nephew Grant Edgeworth  – “a spare, dark youth of twenty-five…and an odd feature that ran in his mother’s family, a lock of pure white hair in the front of his smooth, black head.”

Duncan’s overbearing personality quickly stands out, but there’s a sense that the daughters resist this; they challenge him even if they don’t always come on top. As the novel progresses, there will be a death, a marriage of convenience, adultery, murder, wrongful allegations, and relentless gossip that will threaten to upend the standing of the Edgeworths within the community.

8

THE NEW YORK STORIES OF ELIZABETH HARDWICK

The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick is a dazzling collection of fiction characterised by Hardwick’s razor-sharp prose and artfully constructed character studies. Best known for her essays and criticism, Hardwick brings the same clarity, wit, and psychological insight to her short stories, many of which first appeared in The New Yorker, Partisan Review, and other literary journals.

The collection begins with “The Temptations of Dr. Hoffman”, in which the narrator is a young woman living in “one of those co-operative apartments around Columbia University in which many ladies, most of them well past middle age, live.” She generally avoids mingling with these women, but when a distant friend introduces her to Dr Hoffman, something about him, his wife, and their daughter captures her attention, and she soon finds herself drawn into the intricate drama of their lives. “A Season’s Romance”, one of my favourites in the collection, is a superb tale on the cost of intellectual ambition, the seductive pull of wealth, and the quiet but relentless tension between the two, brought vividly to life through the choices and conflicts of its protagonist, Adele Wayland. Fear of commitment lies at the heart of “The Final Conflict”, a brilliant story that centers on Russell Simmons, a thoroughly bored man employed in a dingy, overcrowded antiques shop filled with kitschy, unsellable items. Another standout story, “The Oak and the Axe”, is about self-deception – the misleading notion that people can be saved by love, that transformation can be influenced by one’s environment or intention.

Domestic tension, wavering ambition, romantic disillusionment, class and wealth disparity are some of the myriad themes wonderfully explored in Elizabeth Hardwick’s New York Stories. Hardwick is a master of characterization; her sketches are finely detailed and vividly rendered, capturing the essence and singularity of her subjects with the precision of a microscope – nothing escapes her piercing gaze.

7

FAMILY AND BORGHESIA by Natalia Ginzburg (Translated from Italian by Beryl Stockman)

In Family and Borghesia, we see all the classic Ginzburg attributes that make her books such a joy to read. She’s wonderful at capturing the complexities of messy families and relationships; her short, matter-of-fact sentences convey multitudes and it’s a marvel how she artfully blends comic timing with deep sadness, a quality that’s quite vivid in these pair of novellas.

Family is a beautifully rendered, melancholic meditation on missed opportunities, the vicissitudes of time, and the quiet sorrow of a life that seems to have slipped by. At its heart are Carmine Donati and Ivana Riviera, whom we first encounter on a summer Sunday afternoon as they go to see a film – not alone, but accompanied by three children of different ages: Ivana’s daughter, Angelica; Carmine’s son, Dodò; and Daniele Meli, the child of Ivana’s neighbor, Isa. This seemingly ordinary outing serves as the novel’s entry point, setting in motion a narrative that will come full circle – delving into the past, tracing the circumstances that have shaped these characters, particularly Carmine and Ivana (once lovers, now friends), before returning to the present and pushing forward into an uncertain future.

Though shorter than Family, Borghesia is just as captivating, tracing the life of the aging Ilaria and her family – a household shaped by the frequent occurrence of quiet misfortunes. The book opens with Ilaria’s decision to adopt cats to ward off loneliness, hoping to find solace in her feline companions despite never having kept pets before. Yet, as the fates of her cats intertwine with her own, their small tragedies become a poignant reflection of the losses and disappointments that subtly shape Ilaria’s own existence and that of her family.

6

FREE DAY by Inès Cagnati (Translated from French by Liesl Schillinger)

Set against the bleak marshlands of southwestern France, Inès Cagnati’s Free Day is a haunting and heart-wrenching novella about Galla, a fourteen-year-old girl raised in grinding poverty, who yearns for a life of dignity and love, even as she recognises the futility of such hopes. Galla is our narrator, and her interior monologue reverberates with a detached, repetitive yet lyrical cadence while oscillating between grim reality and flights of fancy. The novel unfurls over a bitterly cold winter’s night – Galla’s so-called ‘free day’ – when she impulsively rides her bicycle home from the boarding school she attends.

Indeed, Galla’s journey becomes the central axis around which her memories, flights of the imagination, hopes, and buried traumas revolve – she tells us of her abusive father, her weak mother, the burden of feeding and caring for her sisters, the jeering of her classmates at school, the narrowness of her world due to abject poverty, her cherished friend Fanny who comes from a rich loving family, her dog Daisy who showers her puppy with tender care in a way that Galla’s mother doesn’t, stories from books she has read such as ‘The Little Match Girl’ and ‘Hamlet’, and last but not the least her precious bicycle, a character in its own right and a faithful companion (“if it had been a person I would have rushed into its arms, carried away by tenderness”) that not only heightens Galla’s sense of independence and over whose wear and tear she frets.

Above all, what stands out is Galla’s unique voice – candid like that of a young girl, yet laced with the hard-edged wisdom of an adult. There’s a raw intensity to it, a fascinating blend of self-loathing and fierce defiance that pulls you into her world. It’s a novella that brims with psychological depths as Cagnati wonderfully captures Galla’s internal struggles and conflicts, as her thoughts veer wildly between tenderness and rage, fantasy and despair. 

5

MEMORIES: FROM MOSCOW TO THE BLACK SEA by Teffi (Translated from Russian by Robert & Elizabeth Chandler, Anne Marie Jackson, and Irina Steinberg)

I adored Teffi’s Other Worlds, a collection of stories I read last year, and was very keen to read more of her work, and what a brilliant book this turned out to be! Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea is a memoir Teffi wrote in exile, wonderfully evoking the lightness, irony, wit, and emotional restraint that define her voice. Though often humorous and farcical on the surface, the book is a haunting, frightening, sad, and unsettling account of the tumultuous days following the Russian Revolution and Civil War, told through the eyes of a writer watching her world disintegrate in ways that are, by turns, absurd, tragic, and terrifying.

The memoir chronicles Teffi’s journey out of revolutionary Russia between 1918 and 1919, as it opens in Moscow, with news of the Russian Word shutting down and her “life in Petersburg liquidated.” An opportunity to give public readings in Kiev and Odessa arises, offered through the dubious impresario Gooskin, whose strange accent and slippery manner make him an almost comical figure, and Teffi accepts. But as the Bolsheviks’ reign of terror spreads across cities and towns, Teffi finds herself moving from Kiev to Odessa, and then to the dismal port of Novorossiysk, before finally embarking for Constantinople. While Teffi narrates the broader arc of her journey in a linear fashion, within the time spent in each place, she relies on an episodic style of storytelling – vignettes, encounters, and sharp observations – that mirrors the chaos of the era and the fragmentation of the lives around her.

Rather than dwell on the bigger political picture, Teffi focuses on small details, on the everyday rhythms and disrupted lives of the ordinary people she meets, as well as friends and acquaintances caught in the same tide. She conveys the fear, uncertainty, and aching sense of loss that grips them as they are uprooted from their homeland, unsure whether they will ever return. The memoir’s brilliance lies in this blend of farce and horror; Teffi can be funny despite the terror and tragedy all around as she flees from Moscow to the Black Sea.

 THE FAB FOUR – FROM MY BEST BOOKS OF 2025 LIST

These four books featured on My Best Books of 2025 list that I published recently…

4

GREAT GRANNY WEBSTER by Caroline Blackwood

Like her wonderful novella The Stepdaughter, Great Granny Webster is a wonderfully sharp, bleak, gothic novella about a dysfunctional family burdened by a dour matriarch, madness, suicide, and a decrepit country house. Structured in four chapters, the novel opens with our fourteen-year-old narrator’s brief yet indelible stay at her great-grandmother’s austere home in Hove. Following an illness, the narrator’s mother, on the doctor’s advice, sends her to recuperate by the sea, though the reality is anything but restorative. For the most part, Great Granny Webster (GGW) sits on her high-backed, hard, uncomfortable Victorian chair, secretly proud of her endurance and sacrifice, and as silent as a grave, expecting our young narrator to match her in upholding this deadly quiet. 

The effects of Great Granny Webster’s cold tyranny reverberate tragically across generations as readers will quickly learn, particularly embodied in her granddaughter, Aunt Lavinia – a vibrant woman who embodies everything GGW is not: sensual, pleasure-seeking, and expressive – but harbours a sense of darkness and despair; and her daughter who after marriage stays in the decaying, decrepit Dunmartin Hall and who descends into madness. Shot through with biting wit and a deadpan sense of the macabre, Great Granny Webster is a terrific novella exploring the themes of intergenerational trauma, dysfunctional families, the lack of agency for women, and mental health.

3

PARIS STORIES by Mavis Gallant

Selected by Michael Ondaatje and first published by NYRB Classics in 2002, Mavis Gallant’s Paris Stories is a stunning short story collection tracing the lives of exiled families, estranged couples, rootless siblings, those adrift in faded careers, and so on. Her characters form a part of an eclectic, dislocated community; outsiders navigating foreign landscapes while grappling with private upheavals of identity, belonging, and loss. Over fifteen luminous stories, Gallant brings to life men and women longing to belong, often at odds with the world they inhabit.

The first in this collection and one of my favourites, “The Ice Wagon Going down the Street” dwells on an expat couple adrift in the present and living in the past, a story that touches upon the themes of exile and rootlessness, class and privilege, and missed chances.  “August”, a haunting, heartbreaking story of mental breakdown, isolation, and strained mother-daughter bonds, focuses on Bonnie McCarthy, who frets over her daughter Flor’s ‘peculiar’ character, when Flor is really experiencing a mental health crisis, most likely depression. Another brilliant story, “The Moslem Wife” dwells on the unravelling of a seemingly happy marriage set in a hotel in the south of France during the lead-up to and aftermath of the Second World War; a psychologically layered story of isolation and endurance blending the personal with the political. Another favourite, “The Remission”, is a dark, melancholic tale about terminal illness, exile, and familial breakdown unfolding in the French Riviera, while “Speck’s Idea” is a brilliant satire on the art world, flecked with Gallant’s dry wit and intelligence.

Gallant is a remarkable observer of people; her subtle perceptions and keen insights blaze like a jewel in these stories. Akin to the pleasure of being lost in Venice’s winding and enchanting alleyways, you can similarly lose yourself in Gallant’s intricate sentences with a sense of wonder and admiration.

2

LIES AND SORCERY by Elsa Morante (Translated from Italian by Jenny McPhee)

Lies and Sorcery is both mesmerizing and, at times, exasperating – an intricate tapestry teeming with larger-than-life characters, each tormented and over-the-top almost to the point of caricature. The characters, men and women, wrestle with a tempest of emotions – jealousy, despair, rage, fear, fleeting happiness, scorn, and derision – creating a narrative that is as immersive as it is volatile.

The story begins with a section titled “Introduction to the Story of My Family”, where our narrator, Elisa, finds herself newly orphaned. Her adoptive mother, Rosaria, has recently died, while her biological mother passed away years before. Branded “a fallen woman”, Rosaria is nonetheless deeply respectful of Elisa’s virtuous upbringing. Yet Elisa, lost in her grief, withdraws into an imaginary world, drifting through life in a daze of strange dreams and visions. Recognising the futility of pulling Elisa from her self-imposed exile, Rosaria eventually stops trying, leaving her to her own devices.

It is only after Rosaria’s death that Elisa is compelled to confront her family’s turbulent and tragic past. Across three of the novel’s six sections, four central figures dominate the narrative: Elisa’s mother, Anna; her cousin Edoardo Cerentano – arrogant, cruel, and the object of Anna’s obsessive love; Francesco, Edoardo’s impoverished friend, who harbours an unrequited devotion to Anna; and Rosaria, whose steadfast admiration and respect belong to Francesco. Surrounding them is a vivid cast of secondary characters, each entangled in the family’s misfortunes. There is Cesira, Anna’s mother and Elisa’s grandmother – a once-proud, ambitious beauty whose aspirations for social advancement are crushed under the weight of reality. There’s Nicola, the cunning and resourceful Cerentano estate manager, whose dubious dealings thread through the fates of these central characters. Last but not least is Francesco’s mother, Alessandra, an illiterate peasant woman who idolises her son and harbours grand dreams for his future.

Lies and Sorcery unfolds like a melodrama, but once you surrender to Morante’s world in which her characters inhabit a realm of heightened emotion and operatic misery, you can allow yourself to become a detached observer in a drama where the unravelling of the characters’ fates becomes a fascinating spectacle to watch.

WE HAVE A WINNER…

1

ANGEL by Elizabeth Taylor

Angel is a perceptive, exquisitely written novel in which Elizabeth Taylor depicts the meteoric rise and tragic decline of a willful, monstrous, yet utterly fascinating character.

We first meet Angel in the dull, fictional town of Norley, where she lives with her widowed mother. Mrs Deverell runs a small shop below their home and occasionally receives financial help from her sister, Aunt Lottie. Both women believe Angel to be bright and capable of further education, and Aunt Lottie helps support her schooling. But Angel loathes school. Constrained by her bleak circumstances, Angel struggles with the narrowness of her world. Yet, unrepentant and ambitious, she starts dreaming of wealth and fame, and the idea of a novel begins to take shape in her mind. Soon, she writes her first novel – a florid historical romance filled with passion, palaces, and improbable plots – and manages to find a publisher, and as her books flourish, so does her fame and fortune.

Wry, elegant, and often ironic, in Angel, Taylor offers not only a compelling character study but also a satire of the literary world while exploring themes of loneliness, burning ambition, and the blurring boundaries between fantasy and reality. Angel is undeniably the heart and soul of the novel, and it’s a testament to Elizabeth Taylor’s brilliance that she manages to draw out the vulnerability and pathos in a protagonist who is, by all accounts, rude, selfish, and deeply unlikeable. 

SECTION TWO

#NYRBWOMEN25: THE ONES I READ IN PREVIOUS YEARS – A BRIEF GLIMPSE OF SOME SUPERB BOOKS

Because I had read them in previous years, I did not join in for these two books, but I’ll briefly write about them with links to my reviews.

THREE SUMMERS by Margarita Liberaki (Translated from Greek by Karen Van Dyck)

Bursting with vibrant imagery of a sun-soaked Greece, Three Summers is a sensual tale that explores the lives and loves of three sisters who are close and yet apart given their different, distinctive personalities. It’s a lush, vivid coming-of-age story that coasts along at a slow, languid pace, drenching the reader with a feeling of warmth and nostalgia despite moments of piercing darkness. 

THE JUNIPER TREE by Barbara Comyns

The Juniper Tree is Barbara Comyns’ retelling of the macabre fairy tale of the same name, but Comyns provides her own twist on it. The book is narrated in the first person by the female protagonist, Bella Winter, and possesses all the characteristics of a classic Comyns tale – a beguiling voice, and a narrative that feels like an adult fairytale, where the tone is light and delicate, deceptively blunting the impact of darker undercurrents that lace the story.

SECTION THREE

#NYRBWOMEN26: WHAT I PLAN TO READ

I plan to join in for as many books as I can, but there are seven that I definitely want to read…

  1. Instead of a Letter by Diana Athill
  2. Crazy Genie by Inès Cagnati (tr. from French by Liesl Schillinger)
  3. Sun City by Tove Jansson (tr. from Swedish by Thomas Teal)
  4. The Sweet Dove Died by Barbara Pym
  5. Abigail by Magda Szabó (tr. from Hungarian by Len Rix)
  6. Corrigan by Caroline Blackwood
  7. Notes of a Crocodile by Qiu Miaojin (tr. from Chinese by Bonnie Huie)

That’s it, folks! I’m quite excited about #NYRBWomen26 – for all the literary treasures I’m likely to discover and for bookish chats with everyone who participates.

Wishing you much joy this festive season,

Radhika (Radz Pandit)

Posted on by Radz Pandit

A Month of Reading – November 2025

I read some excellent books in November – a mix of literary fiction (novels and novellas), translated literature, essays, and poetry – but overall it was a month dominated by Nordic literature (Norway, Denmark, and Finland). So, without further ado, here’s a brief look at the seven books. Barring one, you can read the detailed reviews on the rest by clicking the title links.

THE LOWLIFE by Alexander Baron

Originally published in 1963, The Lowlife by Alexander Baron is an engrossing, darkly humorous novel about a charming Jewish gambler with a distinctive, compelling voice; an avid reader who lives in a shabby boarding house in post-war London, gets caught up in a young family’s domestic drama, and finds himself crossing paths with the underworld.

Told in the first person, we meet the suave, unrepentant, uniquely named Harryboy Boas, the lowlife of the title, who resides in a cheap boarding house in Hackney, east London. Harry whiles away his days gambling at the greyhound tracks, reading Zola in his spare time, always ensuring he has enough money in hand to cover his meals and rent. When Lady Luck favours him, Harry is on cloud nine: flush with cash, he treats himself to hearty meals at his favourite cafés, spends unhurried mornings reading, and immerses himself in the races each evening. But in the world of gambling, fortunes turn quickly. When his luck runs dry, Harry falls back on earning a living as a Hoffman presser – work that brings in just enough to keep him afloat, with a little left over to bet at the races again. It’s a precarious existence, yet one he finds satisfying in its own way.

At the boarding house where Harry resides, we meet its small cast of residents. There’s Mr Siskin, the passive-aggressive owner who occupies the basement flat, and the elderly Miss Ethel Gosling, lonely and depressed by the recent death of her sister. And then the Deaners arrive, setting in motion a chain of events that soon spirals out of control and upends Harry’s life. By turns frenetic and entertaining, comic yet laced with danger and darkness, The Lowlife navigates themes of guilt and memory, war trauma and the longing for redemption, struggles of the everyday and middle-class aspirations, social class and snobbery, racism and prejudice, fraught families, parenting and sacrifice; rich, varied elements that are seamlessly woven into a propulsive narrative.

THE BOAT IN THE EVENING by Tarjei Vesaas (Translated from Norwegian by Elizabeth Rokkan)

The Boat in the Evening by Tarjei Vesaas is a mesmeric, dreamlike book about the mysteries of the natural world, memories, death, man’s relationship with landscape, solitude, loneliness, and the yearning for human connection. It’s a difficult book to pin down. Not a conventional novel, it’s described instead as “a series of semi-autobiographical sketches” infused with hauntingly poetic scenes, striking imagery, visions, and hallucinations. Across its sixteen pieces, the work dissolves the boundaries between prose and poetry – while structured as prose, each chapter pulses with a lyrical, trancelike intensity.

The opening piece, “As It Stands in the Memory,” is a haunting and poignant portrayal of a strained father-son relationship set in the depths of winter. The second piece, “In the Marshes and on the Earth”, is cinematic in scope, with its evocative portrayal of humankind’s communion with the natural world. “Spring of Winter”, a sketch of young love, unfurls in a snowstorm as “whiteness poured down into the comers incessantly” and where “the snow near the lamps was trackless”, while death and menace hang over the chapter “The Drifter and the Mirrors,” where a man, seemingly at the end of his tether, leans out over a river, entranced by the “mirrors”, perilously close to falling in (“The thought of slipping becomes stronger the longer one looks down into the water”).

The highlight of the book comes towards the end in the chapter called “The Melody” and presents a miniature portrait of family life, home, and childhood. Vesaas captures the natural world in all its splendour – its stark beauty and grandeur intertwined with the sense that it can also often be a desolate, unforgiving, and inscrutable place. 

BARON BAGGE by Alexander Lernet-Holenia (Translated from German by Richard and Clara Winston)

Alexander Lernet-Holenia’s Baron Bagge is a strange, haunting novella of love, loss, war, trauma, and the dreamlike liminal space between life and death set in Eastern Europe during the First World War. Narrated by Bagge, he recounts his singular experiences in 1915, the year he served as a first lieutenant in the Count Gondola Dragoons under the command of the erratic, hot-tempered, and perhaps even mentally unstable Captain Semler.

Under fresh orders, the unit is dispatched on a reconnaissance mission for the division and the army, and they set off, led by the temperamental Captain Semler, who charges ahead with reckless determination and no discernible strategy. Holenia infuses this section of the story with much tension and foreboding as the reconnaissance patrol gallops into uncertainty, the threat of a sudden Russian assault ever-present. When the patrol reaches the bridge near the Ondava, it is immediately attacked by the Russians. In the skirmish that follows, the baron is hit by stones and briefly loses his bearings, yet, against all odds, the men survive and make their way to Nagy-Mihály astonishingly unharmed.

The most peculiar encounter of all is Bagge’s first meeting with Charlotte Szent-Király, the daughter his mother had hoped he would marry. To his surprise, Charlotte openly declares her love for him. Bagge is taken aback – had they not just met? Shouldn’t she take time to know him before professing such feelings? Still, Charlotte remains steadfast in her love, and slowly, almost imperceptibly, Bagge finds himself drawn into her charm. As Bagge falls in love with Charlotte and begins to feel truly at home amidst the warmth and gaiety of Nagy-Mihály, the thought of returning to the battlefield with the looming spectre of death becomes almost unimaginable. He would rather spend his days with Charlotte than heed Semler’s call to leave the town and pursue the enemy – but does Bagge even have that choice?

THE WAX CHILD by Olga Ravn (Translated from Danish by Martin Aitken)

Set in 17th-century Denmark and told through a singular narrator, Olga Ravn’s The Wax Child unfolds as a dark, haunting, eerie tale of misogyny, power, scapegoating, and witchcraft, particularly rooted in the intense wave of witchcraft trials of the period.  The backdrop here is the region of Jutland in the country, which experienced one of the most feverish phases of witch-hunting in the 1600s, fuelled by ignorance, religious beliefs, royal power, and local politics.

At the centre stands an extraordinary narrator: a wax doll fashioned by its mistress, Christenze Kruckow, the novel’s protagonist. Sculpted to resemble a child, mute yet perceptive, the doll bears witness to Christenze’s life and, crucially, to her death. Now buried – “I speak again to the soil that covers my face” – the wax child recounts the past and also views the future, sifting through the events and undercurrents of fear, power, and accusations that shaped Christenze’s fate. As Christenze flees Funen to the larger town of Aalborg (“This was not Nakkebølle, it was not even Funen; shudders ran even through my hardy wax, this was Aalborg, 1616, city of hate”), she encounters Maren Kneppis, who “gleamed with a light that was golden, as though she were part deity, part effervescent ale”, along with her circle of friends – Apelone and the one-eyed widow, Dorte – and soon becomes enmeshed in their lives, part of a wider community of women. 

At around the same time, the King of Denmark intensifies his campaign of putting an end to witchcraft, urging citizens to report suspected witches, escalating trials, and condemning the accused – most often women – to the stake. Composed of brief fragments and longer vignettes – some only a paragraph, others stretching to three to four pages – Ravn’s narrative feels like an incantation, as she infuses it with the language of spells, potions, and old magic. This lends the novella a strange, hypnotic, almost otherworldly aura, even if it sometimes seems abstract.

LOWEST COMMON DENOMINATOR by Pirkko Saisio (Translated from Finnish by Mia Spangenberg)

Originally published in 1998, Pirkko Saisio’s Lowest Common Denominator is a beguiling tale of growing up in 1950s Finland, narrated from the perspective of a young girl struggling to make sense of the ever-shifting expectations of the many adults who populate her large, extended family and shape her understanding of the world. The novel, however, opens in the present, where our narrator is Pirkko herself – now an adult, a mother to her daughter Elsa, and still a daughter navigating the complex relationship with her own father. After having returned from a trip to Korea, she calls her father for a chat, only to find him sounding unusually distressed and disoriented.

Once the father is admitted to the hospital, and Pirkko finds herself lingering in its corridors, the narrative slips into the past, as episodic memories of her parents, extended family, and childhood fears and insecurities rise to the surface. These drifting recollections, moving fluidly across time, evoke a richly detailed childhood and gradually assemble a portrait of the many people who moulded her – family members across generations, friends, teachers, and other figures whose presence influenced her inner world. For much of the book, these memories unfold as long-form vignettes that capture specific moments from her early years, mirroring the non-linear yet sharply etched texture of memory itself.

One of the most striking aspects of Lowest Common Denominator is the way the narrative seamlessly oscillates between the first and third person, positioning Pirkko simultaneously as storyteller and subject. The first-person perspective immerses the reader in her immediate experiences, as well as reliving the distinct, formative years of childhood, while the shift to third person allows her to observe herself from a distance, reflecting on her past with a keen, sharp awareness (“I had become she, the one always under observation”).

I USED TO BE CHARMING by Eve Babitz

I Used to Be Charming is a spirited and lively compilation of previously uncollected nonfiction writing by Eve Babitz. Spanning nearly 50 pieces written between roughly 1975 and 1997, the collection is an eclectic mix of magazine articles, essays, celebrity profiles, cultural commentary, travel pieces, lifestyle reportage, and occasional personal reflections. Babitz wrote for publications such as Mademoiselle, Esquire, The Washington Book Post World, Movieline, Vogue, LA Style, The New York Times Book Review, Smart, The Los Angeles Times, and so on. In other words, it is a wide-ranging anthology of articles that showcase Babitz’s voice across decades – her journalism and her unique eye for culture intertwined with personal experiences.

Some of my favourites in this collection are the lengthier pieces, which dwell on her interactions with movie and music personalities, the vibrant LA art scene, comparisons between LA and New York, as well as the cultural haunts that embodied the spirit of LA.

In “My God, Eve, How Can You Live Here?”, Babitz slips effortlessly into the role of an expert travel guide, leading the reader through her beloved LA, and pinpointing what truly matters on a visit, picking out the best of what LA has to offer. “Sunday, Blue Pool, Sunday” – the title probably a playful riff on U2’s popular song Sunday Bloody Sunday – is a reflective piece on languid life in LA, specifically the relaxed, sun-drenched atmosphere of Sundays by a swimming pool. In “All This and The Godfather Too,” a piece that pulsates with Babitz’s characteristic cool and casual, smart and glamorous style, she recounts her time on the sets of The Godfather, observing Francis Ford Coppola and Al Pacino at close quarters and offering sharp, amused insights into their temperaments and artistic vision. “Jim Morrison is Dead and Living in Hollywood” is a compelling, nostalgic, candid reflection on Jim Morrison, exploring the stark contrast between the myth and reality of the lead singer of The Doors. 

I Used to Be Charming can be read as a document of a certain time and place, filtered through Babitz’s astute eye and brought to life through her blend of cultural reportage and intimate reflections. The result is a rich, often dazzling portrait of Los Angeles and its world of dreamers, glitterati, misfits, and nightlife. 

THERE LIVES A YOUNG GIRL IN ME WHO WILL NOT DIE by Tove Ditlevsen (Translated from Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith & Jennifer Russell)

Generally, I’m not much into poetry, I’m not the right reader for it, but Tove Ditlevsen’s collection of poems piqued my interest because I’ve loved her prose so much – The Copenhagen Trilogy, The Faces, and the short story collection, The Trouble with Happiness.

There are some wonderful poems in There Lives a Young Girl in Me Who Will Not Die, gathered together from a slew of collections from 1939 to 1973; although I must say, I strongly preferred the first half of the book to the second. In these poems, Ditlevsen dwells on some similar themes that made her prose so compelling – anxiety and depression, a mother’s insecurities, troubled love, death, the nostalgia of childhood, and, as Olga Ravn in the introduction states, “Ditlevsen’s poetry is always about the discrepancy between ‘who I ought to be’ and ‘who I am’.

In the poem “Anxiety”, Ditlevsen is assailed by mounting fears and insecurities at night that rob her of restful sleep (“But I am seized and swept across turbulent waters of dread”).

Are there seven seas of anxiety

where every single drop is bound

to drip its poison into my mind,

until love and hope cannot be found?

Are there oceans of anxiety

where every single wave

is destined to crash into me,

bringing horrors I alone must brave?

“I Love You” is about fleeting and precious love not hampered by commitments and daily drudgery (“For I will never darn you tattered socks or see you trudge about with a frown, and you will never find me tired and glum, wasting away in an old nightgown”). “The Eternal Three” dwells on the two types of men Tove often meets and how all women are caught between these two (“There are two men in the world who always cross my path, one is the man I love, the other man loves me”).

In some of these poems, Ditlevsen muses on the fragile nature of love, as in the poem “Admission”…

Don’t you see? I want you to understand:

Anything entrusted to me slips from my hand,

and so, for the sake of our happiness, my dear,

do not care for me so much, you hear!

It’s definitely a collection worth exploring for both its wit and sadness, especially if you are a fan of Tove Ditlevsen’s work.

That’s it for November. I began December with Alba de Céspedes’ There’s No Turning Back, which was wonderful (review to follow soon), and I’ll probably read Teffi’s From Moscow to the Black Sea for ‘NYRBWomen25’. Plans on the anvil also include reading another Miss Marple and Stories for Winter and Nights by the Fire from the British Library Women Writers Series.  Plus, I plan to release my Best Books of 2025 post around mid-December, so watch this space!

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I Used to Be Charming: The Rest of Eve Babitz

It’s always a joy to read Eve Babitz’s work; there is simply no one like her and I thoroughly enjoyed her earlier books Slow Days, Fast Company and Eve’s Hollywood; books that showcase Babitz’ classy, effervescent, smart, and witty persona. I Used to Be Charming is also a fun book, one that I read for Kim’s “NYRBWomen25” reading project.

I Used to Be Charming is a spirited, lively compilation of previously uncollected non-fiction writing by Eve Babitz. Spanning nearly 50 pieces written between roughly 1975 and 1997, the collection is an eclectic mix of magazine articles, essays, celebrity profiles, cultural commentary, travel pieces, lifestyle reportage, and occasional personal reflections. Babitz wrote for publications such as Mademoiselle, Esquire, The Washington Book Post World, Movieline, Vogue, LA Style, The New York Times Book Review, Smart, The Los Angeles Times, and so on. In other words, it is a wide-ranging anthology of articles that showcase Babitz’s voice across decades – her journalism and her unique eye for culture intertwined with personal experiences.

Some of my favourites in this collection are the lengthier pieces which dwell on her interactions with movie and music personalities, the vibrant LA art scene, comparisons between LA and New York, as well as the cultural haunts that embodied the spirit of LA.

THE AURA OF LOS ANGELES

A defining thread running through the collection is Babitz’s evocative, affectionate, often ironic portrait of her native Los Angeles. Across these pieces we get glimpse of the city’s many guises, its glamour and nightlife, its burgeoning art scene, and the spectrum of spaces it contains from clubs and rock-star haunts to its less glamorous everyday corners.

In “My God, Eve, How Can You Live Here?”, Babitz slips effortlessly into the role of an expert travel guide, leading the reader through her beloved LA, and pinpointing what truly matters on a visit, picking out the best of what LA has to offer. She singles out Chateau Marmont, “a bastion of grace”, with its “slow elevators, high ceilings, and amazing views”, alongside the Sunset Marquis, praised for its “jolly ambience like a summer camp” for a truly satisfying hotel experience. Don’t go the Marina for Sunday brunch, she warns; one risks of falling “into a slough of despair which will be almost impossible to shake.” Along the way, she also offers a wry and entertaining account of the varied attitudes between San Francisco and LA, noting San Francisco’s habitual disdain for LA and LA’s comparatively open-armed welcome in return.

Like an evil sister who’s gone on the stage and enchanted the world, L.A. may be all right for everyone else, but San Francisco knows all about her and is not impressed. “She simply won’t do!” ladylike San Francisco says, “She won’t do at all.” And when it’s unavoidable, for business reasons, that the northern sister make a trip to the grisly south, she holds her breath until she once more flies over the narrow escape of water that is the San Francisco Airport. Meanwhile, people from L.A. think, “Wouldn’t it be nice to go up and visit darling San Francisco. I know she won’t mind.”

“Sunday, Blue Pool, Sunday” – the title probably a playful riff on U2’s popular song Sunday Bloody Sunday – is a reflective piece on languid life in LA specifically the relaxed, sun-drenched atmosphere of Sundays by a swimming pool. Suffused with melancholy, the piece unfolds within the palatial home of an older man, Babitz’s current boyfriend, who openly admires her beauty. Yet even in this atmosphere of languor, Babitz finds herself drifting back to memories of an earlier relationship, one marked by the ache of having felt unloved (“I once told my lover who didn’t love me, when we were calm and civilized, that when I was suffering from periods of depression or actually acted crazy, he didn’t have to evaporate”).

The man beholding me just as I was did so through the blue swimming-pool water where I swam naked and would get no tan marks; he let me swim suitless. That afternoon, I dried myself off and went to lie on his white bed that a manservant (it was that rich) came and made every morning. He beheld me in the dim room, sprawled across his bed where I waited for him to come out of the sun and be surprised. He said, “Oh, Jesus, how beautiful you are!”

Some of the most interesting pieces are those where she writes about legendary venues and cultural places such as nightclubs, music clubs, and art galleries offering what feels like an insider’s chronicle of a bygone LA: its bohemian swirl of art, music, and decadence. For instance, “Honky-Tonky Nights: The Good Old Days at L.A.’s Troubadour” is an evocative portrayal of this music club where Babitz hobnobbed with the who’s who in the music industry, established bands as well as those starting out, while also highlighting the groupie culture prevalent at the time (“The bar was just jammed with record-company people, friends of the bands, the bands themselves, and groupies”).

Perhaps when a certain group of people enters a certain place for a while, the time is so electric and crackling that later it all looks the same-washed in a blur of amazing grace. And I don’t think it was just the tequila, either, at least not entirely, though I’m not saying all those double margaritas poured over ice cubes in large tumblers with no salt didn’t have something to do with the rosy glow in which it all still basks.

THE WHO’S WHO IN FILM & MUSIC

Many essays profile or reflect on celebrities, artists, and public figures: from musicians like Jim Morrison to contemporary actors of her day such as Marlon Brando, Al Pacino for example, giving a dazzling picture of the cultural milieu of 1970-90s America.

In “All This and The Godfather Too,” a piece that pulsates with Babitz’s characteristic cool and casual, smart and glamorous style, she recounts her time on the sets of The Godfather, observing Francis Ford Coppola and Al Pacino at close quarters and offering sharp, amused insights into their temperaments and artistic vision.

“It’s a perseverance of vision,” he mentioned en passant one after-noon to a reporter. “That’s all.”

Francis perseveres. He remembers what we like.

And we like movies. We like movies with plots, with people we care about, with scary parts, with mystery… We like to go to the movies, sit down, and let someone take over the controls. And all the promotional campaigns in the world cannot make pudding into roses. Gatsby is the proof of that.

Thanks to her relationship with Coppola’s producer – and her ex-boyfriend – Fred Roos, Babitz enjoys easy access to the sets and even appears as an extra in the film. This privileged vantage point allows her to slip in a series of priceless asides about the actors who populate the sets (“Over in one corner, I saw one nondescript extra who looked like Al Pacino’s brother’s friend. Someone told me later that he was Robert De Niro”).

“Jim Morrison is Dead and Living in Hollywood” is a compelling, nostalgic, candid reflection on Jim Morrison exploring the stark contrast between the myth and reality of the lead singer of The Doors. Through Babitz’ eyes we seem him as less of a smouldering rock star and more of a complicated figure prone to mindless self-destruction while entangled in an intense, bizarre relationship with Pamela Courson. From the piece it’s clear that Babitz knew Morrison personally, and she demystifies the rock god persona, portraying him as a human with flaws, while exposing the sad, troubled, haunted person behind the music.

Jim was embarrassing because he wasn’t cool, but I still loved him. It was his mouth, of course, which was so edible. Just so long as he didn’t smile and reveal his too-Irish teeth, just so long as he kept his James Dean smolder, it worked. But it takes a lot of downers to achieve that on a full-time basis. And no fat.

“Sunset Tango” dwells on Babitz viewing Dirty Dancing for the first time and falling under the spell of Patrick Swayze; a film that also fuels her passion for tango.

I began thinking about it all the time, and because the theater where it was playing was just two blocks from my gym, I began going more and more often. My sister thought I was endangering my sanity, but what sanity? All that actually happened to me was that I began taking ballroom dancing lessons at the Hollywood YMCA and, except for the tango, I wasn’t that bad. The tango is harder than it looks, danced entirely on bent knees with the woman continuously backing up.

ART, ART, BABY

“The Soup Can as Big as the Ritz” is a play on both the Scott Fitzgerald story The Diamond as Big as the Ritz as well the Campbell soup cans, a series of paintings produced by the American pop artist Andy Warhol, who forms the focus of this piece. Babitz notes, wryly, that Warhol’s artistic legitimacy remains a point of contention – “Believe it or not, people still debate that issue – whether Andy was a great artist or a complete fraud.”

Babitz then wonderfully conveys LA’s art scene and how it shot into the limelight thanks to the extraordinary vision of Walter Hopps, the founder of the Ferus Gallery.

The Ferus Gallery was run by Walter Hopps, who never got tan and wore dark Brooks Brothers-y looking suits and ties. His straightness was a perfect cover for the anarchy going on in his gallery. If Walter Hopps decided someone was cool, the person was (in my opinion) cool for all eternity.

Hopps would later go on to direct the Pasadena Art Museum, the Smithsonian, and the Menil Collection in Houston, among others. Eve Babitz, meanwhile, became notorious for the now-iconic photograph of her playing chess in the nude with Marcel Duchamp – an image that has often eclipsed her writing in the public imagination. Her essay “I Was a Naked Pawn for Art” captures that experience, beginning with a misunderstanding between Babitz and Hopps, who never returns her calls and fails to invite her to Duchamp’s exhibition at the glamorous Green Hotel, awash with champagne and the LA art crowd. It is an earlier scene watching Duchamp and Hopps absorbed in a game of chess, that the photographer Julian has his flash of inspiration: “Hey Eve, why don’t I take pictures of you playing chess with Marcel Duchamp?” Babitz agrees. As the shoot unfolds, she becomes genuinely engrossed in the game – until Hopps suddenly walks in, utterly unprepared for what he sees.

Another essay “Rapture in the Shallows” is a commentary that contrasts the LA art scene with the New York art world, as Babitz argues for the appeal of LA’s more pleasure-oriented, laid-back style and aesthetic. Babitz defends LA culture against the patronizing attitudes of the East Coast, particularly the New York establishment’s preference for what they call serious but often tormented art epitomized by Jackson Pollock.

In New York, people feel about art the way they feel about wine in France: if it’s from California, it ain’t wine because wine’s French, and if it’s from L.A., it ain’t art because art’s from New York. That’s their mythic definition of art. Art comes from the squalor of Jackson Pollock drunkenly demanding to be famous, to be taken seriously, to be great. Art comes from New York because they’ve got the history, the family trees, the museums that won’t let you in until it’s too late or else will let you in because you’re Willem de Kooning and your abstract-expressionist pictures of women look like Marilyn Monroe in a kind of East Coast depressing angst-filled way.

TRAVEL, HEALTH & FITNESS, SHOPPING & LIFESTYLE

In “Party at the Beach” Babitz displays her flair for travel writing in her mesmeric rendition of Miami and its sparkling party landscape, a city that intoxicates her with its “pearly, silky, feminine, luxurious, tango-salsa air.”

What I loved about Miami Beach, I decided as I packed to leave, was that what it wanted to be was something to look forward to-a mirage unrealized, a half-finished vision. And I loved the water, water everywhere that was so blue and so tropical and so clean and so seductive, and the people with boats launched from their backyards, great boats and rowboats and even canoes. The whole of Miami is a city rising out of water, reflected in water, shimmering in water, mingled in water.

A lot of the pieces on fashion, lifestyle, and fitness might seem frivolous on the surface but there’s much intelligence and depth here accentuated by Babitz’s verve, brilliant wit, and a sharp, singular gaze. My favourite here was the witty and hilarious “The Path to Radiant Pain” in which Babitz zooms her lens on Iyengar yoga…

I had heard that yoga was supposed to be relaxing, but Ivan had been a devout student of B. K. S. Iyengar, who didn’t think yoga should be relaxing at all. He thought it should be perfect. Iyengar’s idea was that unless I held poses until my nose fell off, I was a straggler.

In “Tiffany’s Before Breakfast”, Babitz suffers a nervous breakdown, phones her friend Tina, and is taken to Nickodells to stuff herself with turkey croquettes, followed by a therapeutic trip to Tiffany’s to purchase some engraved and aesthetically pleasing stationery.

EVERYTHING ELSE

In “Hippie Heaven”, Babitz looks through sepia tinted glasses at the flamboyant, bold sixties (“The Sixties were a dance that began because everyone was so sick of the uptight fifties, they just went hog wild, and then wilder and wilder”).

The titular piece “I Used to Be Charming” focuses on the freak accident that forced Babitz out of the public eye showing her vulnerable side while losing none of her penchant for wit and sharp observations.

Here’s what you would have witnessed if you happened to be standing outside the Raymond restaurant in Pasadena on April 13, 1997: A ’68 VW Bug comes to a stop, a woman flies out, skirt aflame. She drops to the ground by the side of the road, rolls on the grass, setting the grass along the side of the road on fire, and then against the green bushes, setting those on fire too. “Oh no, oh no!” is all she can manage. That woman was me.

It’s such a large collection that it’s daunting to write about all of the essays, but other topics Babitz touches upon are shopping, body image and losing weight, dancing, the politics of fashion, and so on.  

In a nutshell, I Used to Be Charming, then, can be read as a document of a certain time and place, filtered through Babitz’s astute eye and brought to life through her blend of cultural reportage and intimate reflections. The result is a rich, often dazzling portrait of Los Angeles and its world of dreamers, glitterati, misfits, and nightlife. Reading this book feels like drifting through smoky clubs, stumbling into art openings, lounging by pools, or eavesdropping on conversations, brought alive by Babitz’s rebellious personality and her edgy, incisive prose. She captures with wit and verve, the possibility, beauty, longing and loneliness of a particular era inviting us not only to observe but also to feel. There’s so much varied material here, it’s not a collection one can rush through, but it’s definitely a book worth spending time with.

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Two Months of Reading – February & March 2025

I read some excellent books in February and March, there was no dud in this stack. Barring the Baker, translated literature dominated these two months represented by five languages – Italian, Danish, Czech, French, and Chinese – including three books I read for #NYRBWomen25.

So, without further ado, here’s a brief look at the eight books…You can read the detailed reviews on each by clicking the title links.

LIES AND SORCERY by Elsa Morante (Translated from Italian by Jenny McPhee)

Lies and Sorcery is both mesmerizing and, at times, exasperating – an intricate tapestry teeming with larger-than-life characters, each tormented and over-the-top almost to the point of caricature. The characters, men and women, wrestle with a tempest of emotions – jealousy, despair, rage, fear, fleeting happiness, scorn, and derision – creating a narrative that is as immersive as it is volatile.

The story begins with a section titled “Introduction to the Story of My Family”, where our narrator, Elisa, finds herself newly orphaned. Her adoptive mother, Rosaria, has recently died, while her biological mother passed away years before. Branded “a fallen woman”, Rosaria is nonetheless deeply respectful of Elisa’s virtuous upbringing. Yet Elisa, lost in her grief, withdraws into an imaginary world, drifting through life in a daze of strange dreams and visions. Recognizing the futility of pulling Elisa from her self-imposed exile, Rosaria eventually stops trying, leaving her to her own devices.

It is only after Rosaria’s death that Elisa is compelled to confront her family’s turbulent and tragic past. Across three of the novel’s six sections, four central figures dominate the narrative: Elisa’s mother, Anna; her cousin Edoardo Cerentano – arrogant, cruel, and the object of Anna’s obsessive love; Francesco, Edoardo’s impoverished friend, who harbors an unrequited devotion to Anna; and Rosaria, whose steadfast admiration and respect belong to Francesco. Surrounding them is a vivid cast of secondary characters, each entangled in the family’s misfortunes. There is Cesira, Anna’s mother and Elisa’s grandmother—a once-proud, ambitious beauty whose aspirations for social advancement are crushed under the weight of reality. There’s Nicola, the cunning and resourceful Cerentano estate manager, whose dubious dealings thread through the fates of these central characters. Last but not least is Francesco’s mother, Alessandra, an illiterate peasant woman who idolizes her son and harbors grand dreams for his future.

Lies and Sorcery unfolds like a melodrama but once you surrender to Morante’s world in which her characters inhabit a realm of heightened emotion and operatic misery, you can allow yourself to become a detached observer in a drama where the unravelling of the characters’ fates becomes a fascinating spectacle to watch.

FAMILY AND BORGHESIA by Natalia Ginzburg (Translated from Italian by Beryl Stockman)

In Family and Borghesia, we see all the classic Ginzburg attributes that make her books such a joy to read. She’s wonderful at capturing the complexities of messy families and relationships; her short, matter-of-fact sentences convey multitudes and it’s a marvel how she artfully blends comic timing with deep sadness, a quality that’s quite vivid in these pair of novellas.

Family is a beautifully rendered, melancholic meditation on missed opportunities, the vicissitudes of time, and the quiet sorrow of a life that seems to have slipped by. At its heart are Carmine Donati and Ivana Riviera, whom we first encounter on a summer Sunday afternoon as they go to see a film – not alone, but accompanied by three children of different ages: Ivana’s daughter, Angelica; Carmine’s son, Dodò; and Daniele Meli, the child of Ivana’s neighbor, Isa. This seemingly ordinary outing serves as the novel’s entry point, setting in motion a narrative that will come full circle – delving into the past, tracing the circumstances that have shaped these characters, particularly Carmine and Ivana (once lovers, now friends), before returning to the present and pushing forward into an uncertain future.

Though shorter than Family, Borghesia is just as captivating, tracing the life of the aging Ilaria and her family – a household shaped by the frequent occurrence of quiet misfortunes. The book opens with Ilaria’s decision to adopt cats to ward off loneliness, hoping to find solace in her feline companions despite never having kept pets before. Yet, as the fates of her cats intertwine with her own, their small tragedies become a poignant reflection of the losses and disappointments that subtly shape Ilaria’s own existence and that of her family.

MISS HARGREAVES by Frank Baker

Frank Baker’s marvellous Miss Hargreaves is a dark whimsical supernatural comedy about a woman made up on the Spur of the Moment. Set in a quaint English village, the novel follows Norman Huntley, our protagonist and narrator, as he recounts an extraordinary series of events from nine years prior – an incident that cast suspicion upon him and ultimately drove him from his home in Cornford.

Looking for some fun while in a dreary church in Ireland, Norman conjures up, on the Spur of the Moment, an elderly woman – the 80-year-old Connie Hargreaves endowing her with a cockatoo, a dog, and a harp. His good friend Henry, quick to seize on the joke, embellishes further, by throwing in a portable bath for good measure. It is all meant as harmless fun, a spontaneous act of creative mischief. But then Norman takes the prank one step further – he writes a letter inviting Miss Hargreaves to visit him in Cornford and, on a whim, posts it. To his horror, a reply arrives. Miss Hargreaves has accepted his invitation. Miss Hargreaves’ arrival in the village sends ripples through Norman’s family and the inhabitants of the village.

As the novel progresses, Norman marvels at Miss Hargreaves’ joie de vivre but recoils at her autonomy, battling an innate desire to control what he has brought to life. At its core, Miss Hargreaves explores the power and limitations of imagination – how much control we truly have over what we create, and the unforeseen consequences of our own inventions.

ZONE by Mathias Énard (Translated from French by Charlotte Mandell)

“Everything is harder once you reach man’s estate…” So begins Mathias Énard’s Zone, as our protagonist Francis Mirković, a low-level spy, boards a train in Milan clutching a suitcase of secrets, destined for Rome. His original plan to fly is derailed by a night of excess – booze and drugs leave him scrambling for the train instead. The suitcase he carries holds a trove of secret documents detailing decades of atrocities in the nebulous ‘Zone,’ along with the identities of its key players. Selling these to the Vatican is Mirković’s desperate, possibly treacherous gambit: a final act to sever ties with his old life, atone for his sins, and start anew. But can redemption truly be within his grasp?

Zone’s defining feature is its narrative style (wonderfully translated by Charlotte Mandell) – a 500-page single sentence that mirrors the frenetic, fragmented nature of Mirković’s thoughts. It is a brilliant, dizzying, bleak but compelling novel, an unflinching examination of war, memory, and guilt in which Énard depicts Mirković’s journey as a metaphor for Europe and the Middle East’s troubled 20th-century history, depicting uncomfortable truths about political ideologies, power struggles that fuel humanity’s darkest impulses. 

ON THE CALCULATION OF VOLUME, BOOK 1 by Solvej Balle (Translated from Danish by Barbara J. Haveland)

Presented as a series of journal entries, On the Calculation of Volume 1 by Solvej Balle is a hauntingly beautiful and meditative exploration of our perception of time, the rhythms and minutiae of daily life, the nature of human connections, and an aching sense of loss.

The novel begins with Tara Selter, our protagonist, documenting a journal entry labeled #121. This is not, as one might assume, her 121st diary entry, but rather the 121st time she has awoken to the same date: November 18th. Isolated in the spare room of the house she shares with her husband, Thomas, Tara becomes hyper-aware of the sounds of his movements upstairs, their timings now deeply ingrained in her consciousness. For Tara, time has inexplicably and disturbingly ground to a halt. Every morning, she wakes not to a new day but to a repetition of the same November 18th, as though she is ensnared in a surreal temporal loop. Struggling to comprehend this anomaly, she turns to journaling, using her entries to make sense of this disconcerting development that has overtaken her life.

Balle’s prose is wonderfully lyrical and hypnotic, weaving a dreamlike, almost musical quality into this often philosophical narrative. Tara’s acute, distilled observations lend a vivid, textured touch to the singularity of her altered world, while her intense introspection gives the reader a feel for her quiet desperation and fragile flashes of hope. 

LIFE WITH A STAR by Jiří Weil (Translated from Czech by Rita Klímová with Roslyn Schloss)

Posthumously published in Czechoslovakia in 1964 (Weil died of cancer in 1959), Life with a Star is a brilliant, heartbreaking novel with its portrayal of Jewish life under Nazi occupation. Viewed through the lens of its protagonist and narrator, Josef Roubicek, the novel dwells on the themes of death, oppression, cruelty, as well as the meaning of life, and the glimmers of hope that persist even in the face of despair.

One of the novel’s most striking elements is that nowhere does it explicitly mention the oppressors as Nazis or Germans. Instead, they are simply they, them – a choice that renders the novel eerily universal, as if applicable to any era of oppression. Likewise, the deportations are never called by their name; Josef merely refers to them as transports to “the fortress town” (likely Terezín) or “the east.” What also stands out is the tone of the novel laced with black humor, irony, and Kafkaesque absurdity as Josef finds himself at the mercy of nonsensical and arbitrary rules that govern his life and that of his fellowmen.

But more than anything what shines through in Life with a Star is Josef Roubicek’s unshowy yet singular personality and quiet dignity, his will to somehow survive (even though for the larger part of the novel he isn’t sure how), and cling to the smallest things that give him meaning in a world that has lost all meaning. 

THE HORLA by Guy de Maupassant (Translated from French by Charlotte Mandell)

Guy de Maupassant’s novella The Horla is an intense, feverish tale of paranoia, fear, and existential dread unfolding in a bucolic French countryside in Normandy. Told through a series of diary entries, the story opens on a deceptively serene note. In the first entry, dated May 8, our narrator – a cultured and seemingly rational man – finds peace in his idyllic rural surroundings: verdant grass, towering plane trees, the Seine winding gracefully along the edge of his garden, and the picturesque view of Rouen (“vast blue-roofed city”) with its gothic spires.

But soon his tranquility is disrupted by a creeping air of unease (“Where do these mysterious influences come from that change our happiness into despondency and our confidence into distress?”). Feeling increasingly feverish, exhausted, and weary, the narrator visits a doctor seeking a cure, but medicines don’t do much in terms of quelling his rising anxiety. Sleep often eludes him, but when he does fall into a slumber, he is gripped by frightening dreams. He soon becomes convinced that an invisible being, which he names “the Horla,” has a hold on him, draining his life force and exerting a sinister influence over his mind, and in his single-minded determination to get the Horla off his back, our narrator resorts to one final act of desperation.

WRITTEN ON WATER by Eileen Chang (Translated from Chinese by Andrew F. Jones)

First published in 1944, Written on Water is a captivating collection of essays by Eileen Chang, offering her sharp, elegant reflections on art, literature, war, urban life, and her experiences as a writer and woman in wartime Shanghai and Hong Kong.

One of the standout pieces in the collection, “Writing of One’s Own”, presents Chang’s nuanced views on literary theory. “Notes on Apartment Life” presents a witty and keenly observed reflection on the quirks and quiet allure of urban existence, centering on Chang’s own experience of apartment living. In “Peking Opera through Foreign Eyes,” Chang turns her attention to the rich, stylized world of this traditional Chinese art form, while in “Unforgettable Paintings,” Chang reflects on a selection of artworks that have left a profound imprint on her imagination.

Nicole Huang aptly summarizes in her afterword: “From Peking Opera to women’s fashion, from the culture of the streets to highbrow aesthetic properties, from histories of dance to shows of European modernist paintings, from nostalgic rambles through classical Chinese literature to a fond tour of Shanghai cinema, Chang’s breadth of knowledge is impressively on display throughout Written on Water.”

That’s it for February and March. In April, I finished reading Sybille Bedford’s A Favourite of the Gods; my first Bedford and it was wonderful. I’m also dipping into The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick (which is terrific so far!) to be followed by Caroline Blackwood’s novella Great Granny Webster; both books are for #NYRBWomen25.

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Written on Water – Eileen Chang (tr. Andrew F. Jones)

A few years ago, I read and loved my first Eileen Chang, Love in a Fallen City – a collection of four novellas and two short stories offering a fascinating glimpse into the lives of people in 1930s/1940s Shanghai and Hong Kong. I also vaguely recall having read her short story collection Lust, Caution (which I might need to reread), but meanwhile, the Chang I read last month is her essay collection Written on Water for the wonderful #NYRBWomen25 reading project.

First published in 1944, Written on Water is a captivating collection of essays by Eileen Chang, offering her sharp, elegant reflections on art, literature, war, urban life, and her experiences as a writer and woman in wartime Shanghai and Hong Kong.

The collection comprises a little over thirty pieces of varying lengths, a few fit within a page while many others run into several pages. Obviously, for this review, I will only focus on those essays that stayed in my mind more than the rest.

One of the standout pieces in the collection, “Writing of One’s Own”, presents Chang’s nuanced views on literary theory. Originally penned in response to a prominent critic who dismissed her unpublished serialized novella as superficial – though he praised her literary technique in two other novellas that would later appear in her celebrated collection Love in a Fallen City – the essay is both a subtle rebuttal and a meditation on the purpose of storytelling. Chang argues that tragedy and struggle often form the foundation of literature, serving as a springboard for the “uplifting and dynamic aspects of life”: “People only engage in struggle in order to attain harmony,” she writes.

She also firmly defends her work, which eschews the grand themes of war and revolution (“All I really write about are some of the trivial things that happen between men and women. I think that people are more straightforward and unguarded in love than they are in war or revolution”). Among the many compelling ideas in this essay is her exploration of narrative structure – specifically, whether a story requires a dominant theme to shape its plot, or whether it’s more powerful to let a story unfold organically, leaving space for the reader to uncover their own meanings and revelations.

I think the theory that a literary work needs a main theme could do with some revision. In writing fiction, one ought to have a story. It is better to let that story speak for itself than fabricating a plot in order to fit a certain theme. Readers often pay very little heed to the original themes of the great works that have come down to us through the ages, because times have changed, and those concerns no longer have the power to engage us. Yet readers of these works may at any time extract new revelations from the stories themselves, and it is only thus that the eternal life of any given work is assured.

“Notes on Apartment Life” presents a witty and keenly observed reflection on the quirks and quiet allure of urban existence, centering on Chang’s own experience of apartment living.

An apartment is an ideal retreat from the world outside. Often, people who are weary of metropolitan life yearn for the quiet harmony of the countryside…Little do they know that in the countryside the mere purchase of a half-pound of smoked meat elicits storms of idle gossip, whereas in an apartment on the top floor, you can change clothes right in front of the window without anyone knowing the difference!

 In “A Chronicle of Changing Clothes”, Chang traces the evolution of Chinese fashion with a keen eye, linking shifts in clothing styles to broader societal changes. Another favorite, “Shanghainese, After All”, captures the complex, often ironic contours of Shanghai’s cultural identity with characteristic insight and flair.

Shanghainese are traditional Chinese people tempered by the high pressure of modern life. The misshapen products of this fusion of old and new culture may not be entirely healthy, but they do embody a strange and distinctive sort of wisdom.

Everyone says Shanghainese people are mean, but their meanness is measured. Shanghainese know how to flatter and deceive, how to curry favor with those in power, how to fish in troubled waters. But because they also understand the arts of life, their practice of these arts never goes beyond the bounds of propriety. And as far as mean-ness goes, the only thing I know for certain is that every fiction needs a villain. Good people like to hear stories about mean people, but bad people most certainly do not enjoy stories about those who are good. This is why none of my stories has for its main character a saint.

Another remarkable essay, “From the Ashes,” evokes the atmosphere of wartime Hong Kong during Chang’s university years. With striking clarity, she captures the surreal coexistence of everyday routine with the relentless backdrop of air raids and falling bombs. At the war’s outset, students are almost gleeful at the prospect of missing exams, but this fleeting reprieve soon gives way to the creeping intrusion of daily hardship. When the conflict finally subsides, they are once again thrust into the delicate task of adapting – this time, to a new and hopeful reality.

Eventually, the battle came to an end. It was a bit difficult to adjust to its absence after the cease-fire. Peace came as a kind of disturbance, acting on us like too much wine. To see airplanes in the blue sky above and know that one could enjoy watching them fly without risking a bomb falling on one’s head-this was enough to make them seem lovable. Forlorn, sparse winter trees spreading their hazy canopies like pale yellow clouds, clear water flowing from a faucet, electric lights, busy street life: all these things belonged to us again.

“Speaking of Women” begins with several pages of aphorisms from a pamphlet titled Cats, which catalogs the attributes of so-called “catty” women. Rather than interrogate the accuracy of these claims, Chang delves into what such quotes reveal about women’s motivations and the social dynamics that give rise to such stereotypes.

In “Peking Opera through Foreign Eyes,” Chang turns her attention to the rich, stylized world of this traditional Chinese art form. With vivid detail, she explores its emotional resonance, narrative structure, and striking aesthetic – all while placing it in dialogue with Western artistic standards and social customs. Among her many observations, she notes how marriage and death, unlike in the West, are not viewed as private affairs in Chinese society. This cultural sensibility, she points out, is deeply embedded in the fabric of Peking Opera itself.

Marriage and death are above all else matters of public concern. Spectators hide under the bed in the bridal chamber, and a man breathes his last surrounded by a roomful of people waiting to hear his last words. It is not without reason that Chinese tragedies are loud, bustling, and showy. Grief in Peking opera is rendered in bright tones and vivid colors.

In “Unforgettable Paintings,” Chang reflects on a selection of artworks that have left a profound imprint on her imagination. Through her characteristically lush and painterly prose, she brings these paintings to life – their textures, their radiant colors, and the emotions they stir are rendered with almost palpable immediacy. For instance, when describing Gauguin’s Nevermore, the first piece she considers, her writing becomes a kind of parallel artistry, as expressive and evocative as the image itself.

Her body is the golden brown of hardwood. The dark brown of the sofa, though, is rendered in a shade more like ancient bronze, and little white flowers are visible on the sofa cover, semi translucent like mother-of-pearl. Inlaid on this dark bronze background is the atmosphere outside: colored glass, blue sky, red and blue trees, a pair of lovers, a big clumsy bird from a children’s fairy tale perched on a stone railing. Glass, bronze, and wood: these three textures seem to encompass the different worlds that we can touch with our hands, in a way that is as tangible as the woman herself. She must have loved with every fiber of her being and now “Nevermore.” Although she sleeps on a civilized sofa, her head nestled on a ruffled pillow embroidered with lemon-yellow flowers, there is still a primal sadness here.

Throughout the collection, Chang’s prose is effortlessly stylish, laced with wit, satire, and a keen eye for social detail. Her observations – whether on art, cinema, fashion, war, or the rituals of daily life – are as penetrating as they are elegantly expressed.  Nicole Huang aptly summarizes in her afterword: “From Peking Opera to women’s fashion, from the culture of the streets to highbrow aesthetic properties, from histories of dance to shows of European modernist paintings, from nostalgic rambles through classical Chinese literature to a fond tour of Shanghai cinema, Chang’s breadth of knowledge is impressively on display throughout Written on Water.”

A lovely surprise in the book are the charming black and white illustrations (by Chang herself) gracing many of the essays, which besides the striking book cover accentuate the overall beauty of this NYRB edition. In a nutshell this collection is an enjoyable read – thoughtful, witty, and perceptive – but if you are new to Chang, Love in A Fallen City is the book to pick up.