It must have been fate that I finally opened Ariel Dorfman’s The Suicide Museum during the week of September 8. I’d asked for the book ages ago and then kept avoiding it because it looked thick and the title was… not where I was at. But I had forgotten why I’d wanted to read this book in the first place—it’s an investigation of Chile’s past (specifically the death of Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973) and Dorfman’s relationship to his country in and out of exile.

I’d wanted to read this book because Chile is a mythical land to me, a place I lived once when I was small enough that the white calla lilies in our garden were taller than I was. Small enough that my younger brother and I found infinite entertainment in the snails that covered our driveway. Small enough to not really understand what was happening in the country in the mid-1980s, but not small enough to not have heard about what happened at the stadium or to know about the ongoing protests. I’d wanted to read this book because I wanted to investigate my own memories of Chile with actual information this time. What I found was a gloriously complex narrative and some pretty fantastic writing.

The Truth of Fiction vs. Memoir

The Suicide Museum is billed as a novel, not a memoir, although many of the life events happened to Dorfman and the people who surround him in the novel are the real people of his life (or at least versions of them). I love that he chose this conceit, because it freed me to be sucked into the narrative rather than fact-checking the book in my mind as I went. It was also an important framing because what the Dorfman of the narrative is tasked with is finding the truth about the death of Allende.

One of the most beautiful things about the way that this book is constructed, then, is a near constant unveiling of different truths as experienced by different characters. This is most notable in the investigation of Allende’s death when we find earnest character after earnest character telling their version of what happened that day at La Moneda and yet each story contradicts the last. It’s a Rashomon-like experience, but with such a warmth of feeling that I believed all of them. And the truth was the complexity.

A Feminist Vein

There is a strong respect for women that is woven throughout this book, one that was unfamiliar to me from my own experience of Chile and also from my experience of men of Dorfman’s generation. It was a relief, honestly. While very few of the characters who were present at La Moneda were women (history is what it is), Dorfman presents wives, daughters, mothers, and girlfriends as whole people who also shaped the historical events and who were shaped by them.

I was surprised to find as Dorfman was describing a play he was writing during the events of the book that I recognized the play. In fact the play, Death and the Maiden became a movie that was very important to me as I was living in Poland, and later as I was writing Polska, 1994. It is the story of a woman who was broken by a military dictatorship and the strength she eventually finds in retribution. I hadn’t known that Dorfman was the author, but this helped me understand the closeness I felt to his writing from the start. Dorfman also looks closely at class and how the full populace of Chile was and was not served by any of the governments.

It sounds like a sociology text the way I’m describing it, but it’s not. The Suicide Museum is a deeply moving and engaging story that I often stayed up far too late reading.

A Fractured Life

One thing Dorfman explores in The Suicide Museum is the ways that exile and return make his view and experience different from the people who could and did stay. I have never been sorry that I had the privilege to live abroad as a kid (not once, but twice), but it also changed me in ways I’m still trying to understand. Reading Dorfman helped me at least find camaraderie in the fracture.

“Maybe it was just that the trauma of changing countries and cities and homes and languages had left me wallowing in a paralyzing incertitude about who I really was and whether I could ever truly belong anywhere” – Ariel Dorfman, The Suicide Museum

This keeps coming up for me, as I’d read an essay this summer by Luc Sante about his relationship to the French of his childhood versus the English he lives in. He wrote, “A chasm yawns between languages, between my childhood and my present age. But there is an advantage hidden in this predicament: French is an archaeological site of emotions, a pipeline to my infant self. It preserves the very rawest, deepest, least guarded feelings.” I feel this, though less than I once did as I’ve let my languages go. Where in my twenties I’d run around throwing whatever word felt right into a sentence, no matter the language, I’ve reverted almost entirely to English anymore and I rarely have anyone around who would understand the “foreign” word or its nuance anyway. It’s time for that to change, though, and I found strength and encouragement in the September 2023 issue of Poetry Magazine which was almost entirely bilingual (in multiple languages) as though plurality is a strength.

I look for traces of Chile, still, finding comfort in the Latinissimo cookbook my husband bought me last Christmas (the flavors and also the rich plurality of the history of each dish). And I’ve been screening records by Inti-Illimani that my dad and his partner gave me, listening for rhythms that remind me of who I was then and there. Luc Sante also wrote, “I suppose I am never completely present in any given moment, since different aspects of myself are contained in different rooms of language, and a complicated apparatus of airlocks prevents the doors from being flung open all at once… That sometimes makes me feel as though I have no language at all, but it also gives me the advantage of mobility. I can leave, anytime, and not be found.”

In these ways I am myriad, as we all are. But not everyone gets to picture my little brother dancing the Cueca when you hear just the right song.

Or to know, when Dorfman mentions Santa Lucía Hill, just what it feels like to climb those steps.

I’ve never been back to Chile in body, but someday. Someday I’ll return. Until then I am grateful for this opportunity to learn more about a place and a time that made me who I am today. And to appreciate that for the gift it is.

Every year I save a list of the books I most want and then give that list to my husband as my Christmas wish list. I try to pick the things that are going to be sure wins and he’s kind enough to buy me hardbacks of books I’d otherwise wait years to read (no, it doesn’t take years for a hardback to come out in paperback, but once a book is no longer top of mind it might take me years to get back to it). This year was a rousing success, which is fantastic! I’ve had weeks of reading a wide variety of the best books. It was so successful, I’m now out of new books. But at least I have a huge batch of new recommendations to share with you. And the list is diverse enough that there’s something for everyone here.

Liliana’s Invincible Summer

Who wouldn’t want to counterbalance the sweetness of the Christmas season with a book about femicide in Mexico? Okay, so I get that isn’t a selling point for most people, but if you’re reading Bolaño, you’re probably reading about it anyway and Cristina Rivera Garza’s book is so tender and personal, I’d recommend this 1000 times more than 2666 (which I did not finish because 400 pages in I decided I’ve had enough literary vaginal and anal rape for a lifetime). While Liliana’s Invincible Summer is sometimes hard to read, it’s hard to read for the right reasons, because Liliana is so lovingly portrayed as a whole person whose victimhood is one thing that happened to her, not her entire purpose. Which makes sense because Liliana was Cristina’s sister and Rivera Garza is sharing with us the love of a sister’s gaze.

I’d previously read Rivera Garza’s The Iliac Crest and she was admiringly quoted at E.J. Koh’s book launch party for The Liberators with a perspective on trauma that deepened my thinking, so this book shot to the top of my list.

Liliana’s Invincible Summer is not at all what I expected. And I loved it. I hadn’t read the reviews too deeply because I wanted to encounter the book on my own, so I did not realize that Liliana had been murdered by someone who knew her, a type of femicide that’s so common that it too rarely makes the news. But what really floored me and made me fall in love with the book was the beginning where Rivera Garza is on a Kafkaesque trek through Mexico’s bureaucracy to even find the files related to her sister’s murder. It’s funny and it’s bleak, but most of all it’s exceedingly well rendered and sets up the rest of the book very well. Reading this book I got a sense of Liliana and also of the times she was growing up in. I learned more about intimate partner violence and I felt outrage. And I knew all the time that I was in the hands of a masterful storyteller.

It sounds like this book is heavy, and it is, but before you dismiss it consider all the heaviness we read about every day without thinking about the life that is present too. Liliana’s Invincible Summer is a book full of life.

Take What You Need

I’ve adored everything I’ve ever read that was written or translated by Idra Novey and we had some nice interactions on Twitter (when that was a thing) so I was excited to continue our “relationship” with Take What You Need, her latest book. The fact that she was dealing with mother/daughter relationships and the ways that our rural and urban selves have become so separated was a bonus.

The premise of Take What You Need is fresh: Leah was Jean’s stepdaughter for a time and once Jean dies, she hears from a man who was living with Jean about an inheritance that Jean’s left for Leah. As interesting as Leah’s relationship with Jean is (something we explore in alternating chapters as Leah travels to Jean’s after Jean’s death, while we see Jean in life), it was Jean I was most fascinated by. Perhaps because Leah felt more close to the author, she isn’t as fully explored. Jean, on the other hand, is a force that we get to know well in her contradictions and humanity as she watches the increasing poverty and isolation around her. It doesn’t hurt that Jean was a huge Louise Bourgeois fan (a sculptor I love with all my heart) or that my own first artistic forays were in sculpting metal.

I chose this as my first book to read in 2024 because I thought it would be healing. It was, and it was also cathartic. I don’t think it will spoil the ending to say that I wept at the care that can be taken with someone else’s work. Take the time to read this book and your brain will thank you.

Lone Women

What better way to follow up a book about a woman discovering her inner sculptor in a slowly rotting neighborhood than with a book about a Black woman trying to make her way on the Montana frontier with a terrible secret (horror-style)? I’m a huge fan of Victor LaValle, big enough to get me to read a western, and this book did not disappoint.

The ways Adelaide and the other settlers in the desolate landscape interacted with each other were carefully drawn, natural, and built a wonderful (and appropriate) sense of dread. I learned something new about the history of this vast nation and I was reminded, when reading this, of a visit we took to Bannack, Montana back when my husband and I were touring the west photographing ghost towns. I was also reminded that I cannot wait for the next season of The Changeling on AppleTV, feeling somewhat robbed about where the last season stopped and also hopeful that the next season will live up to my expectations. Narrated by Victor LaValle, the show made me realize how strong his authorial asides are in his books, the ways they shape the narrative with the power of his voice. This one is a classic:

“It would be nice to imagine Adelaide storming out of the store, climbing onto Obadiah, and galloping out of town, catching up with Bertie and Fiona and never looking back. But the human animal is a social animal; a lifetime of being treated like an outsider may make a person yearn to finally be let in.” – Victor LaValle, Lone Women

So wait on watching The Changeling if you haven’t already started it and read Lone Women in the interim. As with all LaValle books I’ve read, this one is a stark and important reminder that the monster is in all of us, a monster Jean tries to fight in Take What You Need and a monster Ariadne is slow to recognize when she meets him in Crete…

Ariadne

If the themes so far are in looking at people as people and trying to understand them across our differences, then Ariadne by Jennifer Saint is no exception. Technically this was a gift from my eight-year-old son (who loves Greek myths with his whole heart) but Imma guess he had a little help here from his dad. I’d read Elektra earlier in the year and was entranced by the deep exploration of this familiar material from a female viewpoint. I was less familiar with Ariadne’s story but that didn’t make me love this book any less. I got to see how little I knew about the Minotaur and then to catch glimpses of Daedalus and Icarus. Mostly, though, I really enjoyed learning more about Ariadne herself and her relationship with Dionysus. As this is my second of Saint’s books, I’m also realizing that what I like exploring is the archetypes we’ve been given and how they fit and don’t fit me and our modern world.

Ariadne is a very compelling book and I’m looking forward to reading Atalanta next.

Chilean Poet

I don’t know how I got from Ariadne to Chilean Poet, but a non sequitur was the perfect leap into this book. I’ve read Alejandro Zambra’s work before and was excited to inhabit his worldview and to visit Chile again, a country I hold deep in my heart from the year I lived there as a kid.

Chilean Poet starts in 1991, a few important years after we left, but the world was still familiar in the best of ways. The world in this book is also universal in some wonderfully human ways. It starts with first love and some furtive fumblings between young lovers on a couch. Zambra so fully inhabits those uniquely teenage moments that I started taking notes for my own book (but in a “hurry and get back because the writing is really good” kind of way). Alas, young love rarely lasts and Carla and Gonzalo are separated.

Until they aren’t. In a crazy second coming, they find each other again and Gonzalo becomes a stepdad to Vicente (I’m not spoiling much here, this happens very early in the book). What Zambra masterfully does here is jump from one life stage to another without any regard for formality or time we might otherwise experience passing. It’s a little jarring but being put directly in the stages of life where the story action is makes the book read fast, despite a strong tendency for authorial asides (more on that in a second). And he completes these jumps more than once, all equally well.

As I mentioned, Zambra takes us on these windy and lovely detours through linguistics that are entertaining and educational and made me love the book all the more. I don’t actually know whether to credit Zambra or the translator, Megan McDowell, here, but I learned more about Spanish, about English, and about how language shapes my worldview just by following the tangents. About authorial asides (and tangents): one of the things I’ve criticized Bolaño for before (and Hemingway and anyone else who thinks they are due my attention because I showed up to read their book) is using voice as a means to captivate an audience. But voice only. Now you’ve read me praise LaValle’s voice above and I’m into Zambra’s and I’ll sing the praises of Jonathan Lethem here soon, so it isn’t voice alone that irks me, it’s when I don’t feel the voice is earned. As I’m getting older I’m realizing this is my reaction to a patriarchal experience I sometimes have where people look at me—not unattractive, still youngish woman—and think “AUDIENCE.” I say people but it mostly happens with men (except this one older woman in Dublin outside a WC, but I think she was a witch). My lack of defense to this type of attack has gotten me in trouble before (just ask my husband about the time I got our whole family locked in an otherwise empty bookstore in Bellingham for an hour because I didn’t know how to say “excuse me, we have to leave” while one of these men droned on), but I’m learning. So when I say that an authorial aside is worth it or that someone’s voice is powerful and strong (in a good way), I mean it.

Well that was long. Now I’ve held you captive with my voice, sorry, turnabout is fair play? One last thing about this book I loved was that it’s full of poets. Not just people who write poetry (though lots of those) but also people who care about language and experience and taking a few minutes to see clearly the world around them. Which made reading this book feel like hanging out with the best of friends.

Fevered Star

Speaking of women ruling the world (even if it’s a fantasy world), I fell so hard for Black Sun (the first book in this series) that I gave it as a Christmas gift to at least one person who reads this blog. It felt great after reading Chilean Poet to dig back into Latin America in a more fantastic way. Fevered Star is just as strong as Black Sun, a book that pulled no punches as the worlds in it collided. I had forgotten how much I enjoyed all three of the main characters (Serapio, Xiala, and Nara) in their own ways and it was exciting to follow their further adventures in this book. I did not know what was coming and I’d been worried that this second book would not live up to the first. My worries were completely unfounded. Now I just have to worry about how long it will be until the next one comes out. That’s all I’m going to say because I don’t want to spoil either of these gorgeous books for you, dear reader, you know who you are.

Brooklyn Crime Novel

I love Jonathan Lethem’s work so hard, especially his essays, and my first introduction to his work was Motherless Brooklyn, so I was excited to return to that place which is so clearly dear to his heart with Brooklyn Crime Novel. What I didn’t realize is how close this book would bring me to my own work as Lethem experiments with some things I’m working my way through, too: unnamed characters navigating a world that’s drawn heavily from the author’s childhood. It’s something I’ve been shy about at times as I’m writing my first draft and it’s been really good for me to see what does and does not engage an audience (at least the audience of me). For sheer reading pleasure, I think I’d choose Fortress of Solitude over this book, but Lethem’s voice remains strong, strong enough to carry what could be a very challenging novel if he wasn’t so engaging.

I love that Lethem’s embraced writing about place so specifically. I had been doing something similar with my book and it started to feel like I was writing introduction after introduction full of information that felt essential but also maybe too much and I didn’t know how to part with any of it. I don’t think I’ll ultimately make the same creative choices he has (I don’t have the voice to carry it or the career clout to get it past an editor), but I’m glad to read something that feels different (in a good way). I also think I’ll ground my characters with more details earlier than he has because I struggle between twenty minute bouts of reading to hold on to who is who. Was it Toni Morrison who said you write the books you need to read? In this case I’ll also be writing the book I can read at this stage of my distracted life.

I’m actually still reading this book at this writing, as the pattern of petty and not-so-petty crimes is a little too familiar at the moment and I can’t sit with the image of my kid getting a baseball mitt stolen, let alone stuffing his pockets with mugging money, so I can only read the book in spurts for that reason as well. Lethem the human turned out okay, though, and so will my son of a painter, I’m sure. Fingers crossed for life’s lessons not being too harsh along the way.

Don’t worry about me and my empty bookshelves yet. Not only do I have an extensive pile of things I was going to read someday (really, I will finish the complete poetry of Gabriela Mistral before I die, maybe?), but my birthday is this next week. I hope your year is full of great books and great friends! If you have any recommendations, please share them with me in the comments.

Fantasy has never been my go-to genre. While I deeply respect the massive creativity that goes into building a strong fantasy world, my own brain doesn’t work that way and I often find fantastic novels hard to engage with—to surrender to. So when I say that I loved Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse with my whole heart, I mean this book leapt over all my fences, grabbed me by the hand, and dragged me (wonderfully) into a richly-imagined world I could not get enough of.

Fantastically American Mythology

In her end notes, Roanhorse describes her own love of fantasy and how there’s remarkably little of it written about the Americas. So she wrote the book she wanted to read. I wish I knew enough about the mythology and folklore of the pre-Columbian Americas to draw direct comparisons between the book and specific tribes, but also I know that Roanhorse took creative liberties in making her own world. The fragments I did recognize—the importance of the sun and crows—put me in mind of the shelves of kachina dolls my mom has in her home, gorgeous representations of immortal beings. So, for instance, when one character wears a cape fashioned from the feathers of a gigantic crow, I had a jumping off point. When Roanhorse describes the regalia and mask of the sun priest, I know enough to take my imagination farther than I normally would and try to soak up the details on the page so I can match the vision she has. An experience totally worth the effort. The various clans, religions, and locations in this book very much became real for me and I had so much trouble putting the book down (ask my kid).

Vivid Characters and a Compelling Plot

The opening scene of this book is visceral. Serapio’s mother is cutting her young son’s body and exposing his eyes to the sun to make him into a vessel for a god. As the mother of a young boy, it was a lot, but it was also richly described and layered enough to be fascinating. This was not gratuitous violence, this was the determined act of a woman trying to change the destiny of her people.

Other characters are equally interesting and nuanced. Naranpa, the sun priest, is a woman from “the wrong side of the tracks” grappling with some fascinating “palace intrigue” while trying to alter the relationship of the priesthood to the population entire. And Xiala, a drunk ship’s captain from a matriarchal culture that may or may not eat their lovers, is the hope on which Serapio’s plan hinges. There are also many side characters—including two nonbinary characters (it took me longer than it should have to get used to the “xe/xir” pronouns)—that complete and complicate this world, each with a story and a motivation interesting enough to earn them a place in the book.

Black Sun is a page turner in the best of ways as Roanhorse takes us from scene to scene in alternating locations from the point of view of alternating characters as the story weaves towards its conclusion. I had the pleasure of being stuck on a train with this book. It was thicker than I would usually carry downtown with me, but I couldn’t part with it. By the time I reached my destination I’d read more than 60 pages and I read another 40 on the way home. I also stayed up late reading because I wanted so badly to know what happens next.

Of course more happens than I can know at this minute because this is the first book of a trilogy. I’m holding off on buying the second book because the third won’t be out until next year and I want to pace myself. But you know if I’m planning my book buying for the next year around a series…it’s really fucking good.

For my friends and family who are fantasy readers and writers (hi Natasha, Roxana, and Nikki!) and interested in pre-Columbian history (hi Tosh and Dad!)—check out Black Sun, I really think you’ll love it as much as I did.