Given that there wasn’t much else to do, I read a lot of good books this year, but there was no single standout. I would have trouble picking a best book I read this year, and that means I also had a lot of trouble deciding what to include here, and what to omit.
Inherent Vice (Thomas Pynchon, 2009) I saw it pitched as Pynchon, literary star, tries genre for the first time. But that’s not it, because it’s the same FBI conspiracy story and burnout-sellout divide dynamic as Vineland. Maybe you say then Inherent Vice is not enough of a progress to something new, but this is wonderful stuff and no one else does it quite like this. The thing about Pynchon is that at heart he is not a cynic, and neither are his characters, no matter how hardboiled. Inherent Vice features P.I. Doc Sportello as he investigates a huge conspiracy at the border of the burnout-sellout world of the end of the 60’s. What at first seems like a way-too-wise attitude that suspects everyone and everything is transformed upon closer inspection into a tender compassion. This compassion and affection includes the sellouts, and is actually not at all predicated on not being sold out by them. It’s the ones that they’re being sold out to, that Sportello, and Pynchon, reserve their real hatred for. Pynchon this accessible, this mellow, and this — dare I say, almost optimistic, is a real gift.
Дом в котором (The Grey House, Mariam Petrosyan, 2009) This long, weird novel set in a boarding school for disabled youth is possibly as compulsively readable as a book where nothing really happens can be. One reason is that its interweaving timelines make it kind of a mystery: you try to pair the boys in their older avatars to some of the same boys earlier in their schooling and find pleasant surprises of recognition. But this doubling isn’t just fun in and of itself. It is also reflected in a wider spirit that pervades the writing: treating the school (referred to as the House) as a place apart, where the rules, the legends, the stories and the walls themselves are constantly rewritten, outside of the rules of time and of normality. You feel part of a lore, as if you found a manuscript of someone’s diary. And this sense of the House being apart is also seen in how Petrosyan treats the supernatural. It’s just that the House is Different: if things that wouldn’t make sense in the outside world happen there, then that’s just The Way It Is. Supernatural events are treated in a way that’s rarely seen in fiction: both as special and worthy of awe, and yet not as something that’s unexpected or up for doubting.
The Dregs of the Day (Máirtín Ó Cadhain, 1970, tr. Alan Titley) The Dregs of the Day is a novella that follows N., a man who has to plan his wife’s funeral even though two things are true: before one can do something, one must do something else first; and, one cannot rely on any help from bureaucracy or officialdom, whose first instinct is to shunt one off elsewhere and say to come back next Monday. Following N.’s meandering inability to achieve anything while he is smashed against the rocks of these two predicaments, and while he is also smashed full stop, is immensely relatable and immensely frustrating. Which feeling wins out probably has to do with how you personally feel about achieving things, and the kinds of people who do so.
Oh yeah, the fact that he is smashed the entire time is also pretty important. In other words, you can also call the Dregs of the Day the meandering comic-lyric-philosophical thoughts of a put-upon drunk who sets out on a mission, and ends up in the same place he started. Of course, as Russians, we are well-aware of this genre. But then again, it’s a mistake to think of the Dregs of the Day as essentially similar, because it is just very, very Irish. The wording is so reminiscent of jocular Joyce and especially of Flann O’Brien – and it’s unbelievable that this is kept even though Ó Cadhain wrote in Gaelic and O’Brien in English. I don’t know if that similarity would still be there if I knew Gaelic and was reading in the original, but it’s amazing to see. To unite writing traditions of the same culture but different languages in this way is a stunning achievement, and it’s a huge credit to Alan Titley’s translation how it comes through.
Sarajevo Marlboro (Miljenko Jergović, 1994-1999, tr. Stela Tomasevic) Archipelago Books is a publisher that specializes in translations of world literature, and they had a big giveaway early in the pandemic. Two books on this list (and several others I read and liked this year) are from them. If you are interested in reading more literature in translation, you should check them out. I made a point of trying to read books translated from languages I haven’t read translations from this year and I think it made my reading more interesting. Jergović is a Croat from Bosnia, who was around 30 years old at the time of the Balkan wars. In this set of mostly darkly comic stories set in Bosnia in and around the war, what stands out is a focus on the extremely minor detail. Some stories are bathed in tragicomic pathos, but most aren’t. They’re just very precise and full of odd, incongruous imagery, and an informal, realistic approach to chronicling human interaction.
A Useless Man: Selected Stories (Sait Faik Abasıyanık, 1936-1954, tr. Maureen Freely and Alexander Dawe) There’s apparently a cross-cultural phenomenon of early 20th century, compassionate stories of the mundane life of the underclass and various city misfits put together with romantic lyrical descriptions of cityscapes and of nature. Everything I’ve read in this genre I’ve enjoyed, and Sait Faik is its representative for Istanbul. Stories of neighbourhood oddballs mix with tragic portraits of illness and love. Not only beautiful prose, but also an interesting window into how social relations in Turkey worked at the time. Plus, as we covered earlier, in the quotes section, Sait Faik got expelled from school for putting a needle into his Arabic teacher’s sitting cushion, which is pretty funny.
В Питере — жить! (In Piter — We live!, various authors, 2017) One of my favourite things in the world is cities. I love their intricate, interweaving connections. Human lives great and small rubbing shoulders. Grand architecture and important history, but also how the mundane palimpsest of shops and cafes, and so on, changes over time. Seeing and being in cities is definitely one thing that I missed a lot in 2020. And so I was extremely gratified to get that dose of city-ness in this book, a series of geographically themed essays by Russian writers. Given how enjoyable it was for St. Petersburg, a city whose geography I know very poorly and to which I don’t have a particularly strong connection, I think that a book like this on basically any of the great cities would be a good thing. The essays themselves are very varied, from memoir to literary criticism to song to politics. Bykov’s and Nikita Eliseev’s essays, full of allusions and quotes that send you searching names of poets, historical incidents, and everything in between, are the highlights. Tatiana Tolstaya’s essay, much like all of her political polemics, is a lowlight.
One Good Story, That One (Thomas King, 1993) I normally think I have an aversion to anything that is too preachy, and yet I loved these stories, which are, well, quite preachy. But it’s King’s gift for the cadence of storytelling that makes them worthwhile. If writing can emulate the experience of that distant relative, or just some guy you meet at some gathering who you have no idea who they are, who gathers a small group around them and goes: let me tell you a story, and then holds your attention through it all with aplomb… then it should! And well, if it turns out the story has a moral, so be it, that’s not such a bad thing, I think.
A Time of Gifts (Patrick Leigh Fermor, 1977) the account, compiled forty-some years after the fact, of an upper-middleclass Englishman who decides, at the tail end of 1933, to forgo university and instead sets out to reach Constantinople by foot. This first volume goes from the Hook of Holland to Hungary (which means, among other things, that we get a firsthand account of a foreigner travelling through Germany in early 1934). Fermor combines a talent for beautiful, lyrical prose, an amazingly large vocabulary (I have never had to look up so many words outside of a Joyce book), unparallelled erudition when it comes to art, architecture and Western European history, an admirably imperturbable attitude that accepts anything as it comes (being put up in castles, Nazis yelling at him at a bar, busking as an artist, getting wrongfully arrested for sugar smuggling, etc.), and that total obliviousness that only an Englishman or a teenager (or in this case, both) can have. An often beautiful, but at times exasperating read.
Born A Crime (Trevor Noah, 2016) I was surprised how much I enjoyed Trevor Noah’s memoirs. Frequently funny, and a window into apartheid-era South Africa that is both frightening and fascinating. On one hand, it’s a totally unlike anything I knew about, because Noah is, you know, a world famous comedian, and also a mixed-race South African. But on the other, he felt close in spirit because of how in so many situations he’s most interested in language, and language styles in the interaction. And, here once again, the gift for an oral style of storytelling comes through in writing.
From the Fifteenth District (Mavis Gallant, 1979) I always thought of Mavis Gallant as some sort of knock-off brand Alice Munro: look! she’s an old Canadian lady too! And writes realist short stories too! For the New Yorker, too! And, in truth, Munro is the better writer. But Gallant’s stories are not actually very similar to Munro’s. Instead, it’s better to think of Gallant as an Italian neorealist that somehow got put in the body of a Canadian living in Paris. If, like me, you’ve read all of Natalia Ginzburg’s short stories and started to wonder where next, Gallant has you covered. The stories are all about lives that can easily be described by one word: “desultory”. That hard disconnect between expectations of life and its realities. Gallant’s collection is a series of masterful portraits of people caught in such lives, told with understated, journalistic detachment.
The City & The City (China Miéville, 2009) China Miéville’s strength is always his absolute commitment to his invention. Here, the invention is an Eastern European city that is actually two city states whose borders overlap so thoroughly that the only way citizens can live is by “unseeing” the other city. This causes problems when an unsolvable crime is discovered in one city, and we follow detective Borlú, as he is torn between following some clues, and having to strenuously ignore others. Some might come up with that, and then use it off-hand as a metaphor for something they want to talk about in our world. Not Miéville. He is committed. When bizarre consequence after bizarre consequence of this arrangement is revealed, it doesn’t seem like a writer’s ad hoc addition, but as a natural consequence of the rules he set up. The mystery itself at first seems he thing is that is going to let this book down. Miéville is one for grand, sweeping gestures rather than subtlety. He’s the one whose political system in his first book was basically a shadowy cabal of higher-ups having meetings about how to be more evil. And so you worry that you can tell exactly where the story is heading. But he pulls off the plot masterfully, and, combined with the unique talent for setting that I mentioned, that is more than enough to make a wonderful book.
Rated Zed 
Thanks for excellent short reviews. I would definitely read A time of Gifts (if you have it) and В Питере Жить. Where did youtube it from?