May 4, 2026 On Books Wolfgang Koeppen’s Structural Musicality By Joshua Cohen © Suhrkamp Verlag, courtesy of New Directions. Wolfgang Koeppen, the maestro dirigent of the post-Nazi German-language novel, was born in the cold old Prussian port of Greifswald in 1906, a bastard, as they used to be called, the out-of-wedlock son of a seamstress who moonlit as a theater prompter and an ophthalmologist father, who dabbled in winter sports and competitive ballooning and refused most contact. Mother and son moved around a lot, from Koeppen’s grandmother’s house to the house of his mother’s stepsister. In 1912, the year Death in Venice (not Death in Rome) was published, the pair settled in Ortelsburg, Masuria, which is now the Polish city of Szczytno, where Koeppen attended Realschule. Mother and son fled west with World War I, heading along the Baltic coast until returning to Greifswald, where Koeppen made efforts to resume his schooling before dropping out totally and working as a deliverer for a bookstore, a cook, a ship’s cook, an assembler in factories, a theater usher, a movie theater usher, a projectionist, an ice maker and deliverer, and a tester of light bulbs. Each of these occupations, it might be argued, is a metaphor for “novelist”: delivering the books, preparing nourishment, et cetera. They certainly provided what in German industrial circles is called “material.” Read More
March 11, 2026 On Books Bolaño’s Heresy: On Distant Star By Ben Lerner Photograph by Kgbo, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Are there any actual poems in Distant Star? “The three poems were short; all less than ten lines,” Arturo B., our poet-narrator, says of the early verse of Alberto Ruiz-Tagle, the mysterious autodidact who one day appears, as if from nowhere, in the poetry workshop Arturo attends. “One described a landscape: trees, a dirt road, a house in the distance, wooden fences, hills, clouds.” No part of the poem is quoted; we’re given none of the text or texture. According to Marta, another young poet in their orbit, these weren’t Ruiz-Tagle’s “real poems” anyway; even the poems withheld from us are only stand-ins. Where, then, in Distant Star, are the “real poems”? One fateful night soon after Pinochet seizes power, the Garmendia sisters—“identical twins and the undisputed stars of the poetry workshop”—read their poems to Ruiz-Tagle (right before he’s revealed to be the murderous aviator Carlos Wieder), but they don’t read them to us; we’re just told their poems are “wonderful.” They “often described painters lost in the wilds of southern Chile, embarking on hopelessly ambitious works and hopelessly in love.” (The poems we don’t see are about impossible works of art.) Again and again, poems are characterized in a way that only makes them more opaque: “the opening lines were worthy of Isidore Isou, while the unexpected ending would not have been out of place in a Chilean folk song,” or “a narrative poem, which … reminded me of John Cage’s poetic diary spliced with lines that sounded like Julián del Casal or Magallanes Moure translated into French by a Japanese psychotic,” and so on. Read More
March 3, 2026 On Books Main Character Syndrome in Wartime By Julian Castronovo Kamala Harris shares a statement to reporters following the mass shooting at the Kansas City Chiefs parade before boarding Air Force Two at Joint Base Andrews, Wednesday, February 14, 2024, in Maryland. Official White House Photo by Lawrence Jackson. The White House, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. I have begun to suspect that I am not the main character. I spend my days watching history unfold on the screen of my phone. History, of course, is a story: a narrative sequence of causes and effects. Right now it seems to be a story about intolerable violence, something from which I am, I know, profoundly remote insofar as I continue to tolerate it. This is not very protagonistic of me. Main characters, surely, do not feel the world to be distant and bewildering in its senseless horror. They do not feel the story of history to be totally disconnected from their personal, concurrent experience of being alive. Main characters, after all, drive the plot. Conveniently, real-life main characters love to write about themselves, so there’s plenty of material from which I might learn how to achieve main character status myself. Material, for example, like George Templeton Strong: Civil War Diaries and 107 Days, two recently published diaristic texts. Both of these meticulous nonfictional accounts of living through history are said to be very novelistic. One is “remarkably vivid and suffused with novelistic detail” such that its author “emerges as an unforgettable, three-dimensional character.” The other, we’re told, “reads like a suspense novel” in that it has “a novelistic feel” and “the pace of a page-turning novel.” It would seem that these writers—George Templeton Strong and Kamala Harris, respectively—are main characters because their realities were, even during times of crisis and dissolution, like books. Things, in other words, make sense when you’re a protagonist because you live inside a novel. The present operates with a narrative purpose and a unifying logic by which the lives and actions of individuals are bound together and to the world at large such that it is possible, as any main character innately knows, to do something important. Read More
November 14, 2025 On Books Soraya Antonius’s Portrait of a Lost Palestine By Selma Dabbagh A Palestinian woman from Jerusalem, 1938, via Wikimedia Commons. Photograph by John David, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. The Lord, Soraya Antonius’s vivid chronicle of Palestinian life before the Nakba of 1948, is a novel that moves fast, driven by fury and passion. Tales are told within tales; there are jump cuts and flashbacks. Antonius’s eye is as keen as her wit. The narrator of the book, which was first published in 1986, is an unnamed woman journalist in the Lebanon of the early eighties. She is covering current events—the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacres are obliquely referred to at one point—but she also takes an interest in the region’s past, and is particularly curious to find out about a young man named Tareq, who grew up under the British Mandate and played a significant role in the 1936–1939 Palestinian uprising against colonial rule. Her curiosity leads her to the elderly Miss Alice, an Englishwoman who was Tareq’s teacher in a mission school founded by her father at the start of the twentieth century. Tareq, Miss Alice tells the narrator, was a boy of humble background and an undistinguished student, who, however, possessed uncanny powers that Miss Alice can’t really account for. How he put those powers to use will be the novel’s story. Read More
October 24, 2025 On Books Myths of Meaning: Kay Cicellis’s The Way To Colonos By Rachel Cusk Photograph by Roger Pic. Bibliothèque nationale de France, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. This savage little book is a recasting of three Sophoclean tragedies into the modern era. It unfolds for its reader certain human situations that are familiar enough, with an absence of sentimentality that renders them entirely shocking and strange. Its themes are the pain of youth and the disillusionment that comes with observing the less-than-faithful relationship between authority figures and the truth, but its originality resides in its broaching of the force of tragedy in ordinary human relationships. This is not to say that existence is presented as merely nihilistic or absurd: on the contrary, the characters here are beset by almost ungovernable emotion. What is tragic is the infallibility with which their natural love of justice and truth is taken from the hands of these young protagonists and bruised or broken by the people on whom they rely—rely not just for survival but for the explanation of life and the example of how to live it that their elders are meant to provide. Read More
October 24, 2025 On Books The Female Picaresque: Jan Kerouac’s Baby Driver By Amanda Fortini Jan Kerouac in Eugene, Oregon, 1983. Photograph by D. Alexander Stuart, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Halfway through her 1981 autobiographical novel, Baby Driver, the story of her hectic, careening life as a young bohemian woman traveling through North and South America in the sixties and seventies, Jan Kerouac calls herself “a gum wrapper in a whirlwind.” In this moment, Kerouac has just decided to move from Santa Fe, where she’s been sleeping with local politicians for money, to work as an escort at a poolside men’s club in Phoenix. It’s one impulsive decision in a long string of them, and although the remark seems tossed off and casual, it perfectly captures the whole chaotic course of her wayward existence. Not surprisingly, the gig goes awry. The police raid the club for prostitution, and the owners are forced to reconstitute as a “massage parlor” in a trailer outside of town. Kerouac soon grows weary of the work, for which she consumes an obliterating combination of wine, soda, and “bennies” to produce “a loose capable vigor just made to order for the job,” as she winkingly puts it. She makes a snap decision to get back on the highway, leaving as hastily as she arrived: “Bounding along, flashing past saguaros in my silver Caddy, serenaded by Willie Nelson wailing in the desert air … never felt so free,” she writes. “I had $800 and I was going back to Santa Fe. … I was like Marco Polo bringing wondrous bounty to amaze the folks back home.” Read More