{"id":156456,"date":"2021-12-17T14:50:38","date_gmt":"2021-12-17T19:50:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=156456"},"modified":"2021-12-17T16:21:10","modified_gmt":"2021-12-17T21:21:10","slug":"our-staffs-favorite-books-of-2021","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2021\/12\/17\/our-staffs-favorite-books-of-2021\/","title":{"rendered":"Our Staff\u2019s Favorite Books of 2021"},"content":{"rendered":"

In which we tell you some of the things we most enjoyed reading this year.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Rhian Sasseen\u2019s reading log.<\/p><\/div>\n

Maybe this is unsurprising for an audio producer, but I like listening to people talk: about their job, their bad childhood, their love life, the bigots living next door. People are funny, especially when discussing things that aren\u2019t. Here are some of the books I read this year that felt like listening.<\/span><\/p>\n

In<\/span> Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets<\/span><\/i><\/a>, <\/span>Belarusian oral historian Svetlana Alexievich sits at kitchen tables across the former USSR and records people\u2019s stories. Not for the faint of heart. Or if you are, I recommend taking frequent breaks to watch dogs at the dog park.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In the seventies, right before computers would change almost everything, Chicago radio interviewer Studs Terkel<\/span> walked the streets and asked people \u201cwhat they do all day and how they feel about what they do.\u201d<\/span> Every single one-and-a-half-page testimony in<\/span> Working<\/span><\/i><\/a> feels like a novel.<\/span><\/p>\n

For<\/span> The Warmth of Other Suns<\/span><\/i><\/a>, Isabel Wilkerson picked just three people to tell the story of the Great Migration: a sharecropper from Mississippi, a labor organizer in Florida\u2019s orange groves, and a doctor from Louisiana. It\u2019s filled with such great details, it makes me weepy with gratitude that someone saved them from the dustbin.<\/span><\/p>\n

A set of ocher silk sheets, her mother\u2019s death, her electric bike, the time her father was imprisoned in South Africa\u2014Deborah Levy treats every morsel of her living autobiography (<\/span>Things I Don\u2019t Want to Know<\/span><\/i><\/a>,<\/span> The Cost of Living<\/span><\/i><\/a>, <\/span>Real Estate<\/span><\/i><\/a>) with equal aplomb. It\u2019s like listening to someone\u2019s mind. Minus the repetition. <\/span>\u2014Helena de Groot<\/b><\/p>\n

***<\/span><\/p>\n

I read three books this year that I\u2019ll never forget. The first is <\/span>The Dry Heart<\/span><\/i><\/a>, by Natalia Ginzburg, a short book that has all the force of a mountainous novel. On the first page, the protagonist kills her husband; the remaining hundred or so are given to showing why this was an inevitable conclusion to their relationship. You probably won\u2019t like any of the people in this book, but you won\u2019t be able to look away from them. The second is Olga Tokarczuk\u2019s <\/span>Primeval and Other Times<\/span><\/i><\/a>, one of the few books by the recent Nobel winner that we\u2019ve got in English, about a mythical, timeless town; it turns out to be the story of just about everything, all leading up to and away from the horrors of World War II. The last is <\/span>In Memory of Memory<\/span><\/i><\/a>, an indescribable novel\/critical work\/essay collection thingie by Russian poet Maria Stepanova. It\u2019s a long and luxurious meditation on how the past is ever present. It has a beautiful purple cover and nothing that resembles a plot. I\u2019ll be reading it well into 2022. <\/span>\u2014Craig Morgan Teicher<\/b><\/p>\n

***<\/span><\/p>\n

Nothing I read this year had anything to do with anything, except for my perennial desire to read all about love, including bell hooks\u2019s <\/span>All about Love<\/span><\/i><\/a>, which I took up in a tender bid to understand love\u2019s most vexed manifestation, the couple. I read, at a clip, a trio of Natalia Ginzburg books: <\/span>The Dry Heart<\/span><\/i><\/a>, <\/span>Happiness, as Such<\/span><\/i><\/a>,<\/span><\/i> and <\/span>Family Lexicon<\/span><\/i><\/a>. The latter begins with one of the best author\u2019s prefaces in the history of apathetic mic drops: \u201cIn the writing of this book, I couldn\u2019t bring myself to change the real names which seemed to me indissoluble from the real people. Perhaps someone will be unhappy to find themselves so, with his or her first and last name in a book. To this I have nothing to say.\u201d Domenico Starnone\u2019s 2017 novel <\/span>Ties<\/span><\/i><\/a> is, to me, couple canon, which is why I was so happy when Jhumpa Lahiri\u2019s translation of his 2019 novel, <\/span>Trust<\/span><\/i><\/a>, about a couple haunted by a third, came out this fall.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Conspicuously absent from too many books about couples are digressions on sex; I read <\/span>The Right to Sex<\/span><\/i><\/a>, by Amia Srinivasan, whose arguments about the shape-shifting capacities of desire I frenetically paraphrased to everyone I encountered, and then Sara Ahmed\u2019s <\/span>Complaint!<\/span><\/i><\/a>, which is less concerned with the act itself, and more with the way institutional complaints about sexual abuse get stalled and deferred, or else taken up and reflected back onto the complainer, who thus risks being tainted by the negative qualities of the event complained about. Not everything I read was so thematically fixated, or even so continental. I picked up a novel about a white, very online American woman trying to differentiate herself from other white, very online American women, but I didn\u2019t finish that. <\/span>\u2014Maya Binyam<\/b><\/p>\n

***<\/span><\/p>\n

D.A. Miller\u2019s\u00a0 <\/span>Jane Austen, or the Secret of Style<\/span><\/i><\/a>\u00a0is a dazzling close reading of Austen\u2019s prose style that is also an obsessive mirroring of it. I love fan fiction; this is fan criticism. Miller quotes Barthes: \u201cWhatever its sophistication, style has always something crude about it.\u201d Indeed, the whole book, which is also about Miller being gay and Austen being unmarried, is \u201ca bit much,\u201d just like the clothes I most covet\u2014that\u2019s why it\u2019s so good. Analyzing a jewelry-shopping scene in <\/span>Sense and Sensibility<\/span><\/i>:<\/span><\/p>\n

As the figurative manufactory of the brilliant, the sparkling, the precious, the lapidary, the engraved \u2026 the jewelry shop must be the natural mise-en-ab\u00eeme of Austen Style\u2026 Simultaneously determined by narrative thematics and the course of stylistic reflection, the shop situates a collision between the claims of the literal gem, a properly functional item \u2026 and those of the figurative gem, an eminently aesthetic thing whose social destination is vague, mysterious, trifling, troublesome.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Miller\u2019s argument is too intricate to intimate here, but this book is really for anyone who loves language (especially the thesaurus-addicted, adjective-infested, alliterative, \u201cbad\u201d kind you\u2019re not supposed to like); or mean girls; or sparkling, precious, perfect diamonds.<\/span><\/p>\n

Three more well-styled books:<\/span><\/p>\n

Stanley Cavell\u2019s <\/span>Pursuits of Happiness<\/span><\/i><\/a>: Cavell writes with a grace and care appropriate to the subject of his chosen genre (the subtitular<\/span> Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage<\/span><\/i>), which is romantic love: a special kind of love that is crafted, most of all, through conversation. So he speaks with us about <\/span>how<\/span><\/i> he loves the films he does, i.e., how best to write and think about and with them. Like a good boyfriend, he steers us through his argument with a steady hand. I most liked his descriptions of these movies\u2019 mythic personalities\u2014Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart, Lauren Bacall, Katharine Hepburn\u2014and how the aura of each changes the way the camera sees a scene.<\/span><\/p>\n

Guys like Yukio Mishima because of the politics-and-violence demons they struggle with, but the pathologies that take center stage in <\/span>Star<\/span><\/i><\/a>, a lesser-known novella of his translated from the Japanese by Sam Bett,<\/span>\u00a0are more for girls. This book is preoccupied with describing the physiognomies and facial expressions of more or less beautiful men and women, and how being more or less beautiful mars their personalities forever. There are also good descriptions of wearing clothes, and lines of sight. <\/span><\/p>\n

Eyes, countless as the gravel at a shrine, pressed in all around me. They found their center\u2014my image coalesced. In that moment, dressed as a yakuza, I became a sparkling apparition, like a scepter thrust against the sky.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Mishima\u2019s simplicity and precision are admirable; his writing is less \u201ccinematic\u201d than like a detailed script (as befits his sociopathic movie star protagonist). But what makes the book fun are the bouts of bad figurative language to which our narcissistic narrator is given, especially in his most main-character moments:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I like to have a mint before a kissing scene\u2026 I assumed a stoic air, knotted my tie, rolled up my sleeves, and shook a few mints into my palm. Against my skin, these prosaic pellets felt like currency, little symbols of the kisses I relied on for my livelihood.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Jane Unrue\u2019s <\/span>Life of a Star<\/span><\/i><\/a>, conversely, features a hyperfeminine hysteric suffering\/enjoying delusions of grandeur. The story is structured like a creepy hedge maze and proceeds in a strange, vacillating fashion: some pages are nearly blank, some are painstakingly covered.<\/span><\/p>\n

When I am not engaged in matching gazes with the gentleman on horseback posing proudly at the foot of his estate, or with the praying servant boy illuminated by a painted glow of holy-looking light, or with the tiny waxen likenesses in boxy gilt-edged frames, I often find that I am exiting the Gallery of Art and veering toward the little bridge that signals that the northern pathway through the Public Garden is about to take me in the direction of that fountain on so many seemingly ordinary afternoons.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The protagonist herself, what\u2019s happening to her\u2014the plot\u2014vanishes into this baroque, perversely disordered prose, which is like a schizophrenic daydream of what language could be. The effect is astonishing; no one writes like Unrue! (I also like <\/span>The House<\/span><\/i><\/a> and <\/span>Love Hotel<\/span><\/i><\/a>.<\/span><\/i>)\u00a0 <\/span>\u2014Olivia Kan-Sperling<\/b><\/p>\n

***<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cHe understood the word transitional to refer to more than the seasons: for a year he\u2019d live in a transitional time,\u201d writes Wolfgang Hilbig of his directionless East German narrator in <\/span>The Interim<\/span><\/i><\/a>, newly translated into English by Isabel Fargo Cole. Like Hilbig\u2019s C., with his propensity for loitering in train stations, I found myself drawn in 2021 to the idea of the transitional, the fractured, the in-between. The books I liked best this year shared a similar sensibility, like Bae Suah\u2019s <\/span>Untold Night and Day<\/span><\/i><\/a> (translated by Deborah Smith), with its overlapping timelines set in a Seoul plagued by frequent blackouts, or Nona Fern\u00e1ndez\u2019s <\/span>The Twilight Zone<\/span><\/i><\/a> (translated by Natasha Wimmer), which blurs fact, fiction, and references to pop culture phenomena in order to portray post-Pinochet Chile and the liminal space that is life lived under a dictator.<\/span><\/p>\n

I loved books in which forms collided, like Cheswayo Mphanza\u2019s poetry of ekphrasis in <\/span>The Rinehart Frames<\/span><\/i><\/a>, or Ann Quin\u2019s sinister, experimental 1966 novel of a love triangle, <\/span>Three<\/span><\/i><\/a>. The essays in Rachel Kushner\u2019s <\/span>The Hard Crowd<\/span><\/i><\/a>, on subjects as varied as motorcycles, postwar German poets, and prison abolition, fascinated me, as did Lauren Elkin\u2019s <\/span>No. 91 \/ 92: A Diary of a Year on the Bus<\/span><\/i><\/a>, a book literally written in the in-between space of a Parisian bus commute. The strange, off-kilter humor and surreal sensibility of Moon Bo Young\u2019s poetry collection <\/span>Pillar of Books<\/span><\/i><\/a> (translated by Hedgie Choi) thrilled me, as did Anne Serre\u2019s novel of a love affair, <\/span>The Beginners<\/span><\/i><\/a> (translated by Mark Hutchinson), with its sly observations on both writing and the heart. And Teju Cole\u2019s <\/span>Black Paper: Writing in a Dark Time<\/span><\/i><\/a> offered new insights into what a photograph can accomplish that a paragraph can\u2019t\u2014and vice versa. <\/span>\u2014Rhian Sasseen<\/b><\/p>\n

***<\/span><\/p>\n

This year I\u2019ve been reading a lot of Annie Ernaux, on whom no scrap of experience seems ever to have been wasted, and Gayl Jones<\/a>, who speaks in many voices yet whose singular virtuosity marks them all. I could (and perhaps should) reread Elizabeth Hardwick\u2019s Sleepless Nights<\/em><\/a> every year that remains to me. The book I found most useful was Patricia Highsmith\u2019s Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction<\/em><\/a>. The boldest and most unsettling was Percival Everett\u2019s comic novel about lynching, The Trees<\/em><\/a> (though my current favorite of his is Glyph<\/a><\/em>). Then there were the books that moved me in ways I absolutely didn\u2019t anticipate, like historian Joanna Bourke\u2019s Loving Animals: On Bestiality, Zoophilia, and Post-Human Love<\/em><\/a> (full of odd insights about language, autonomy, damage, pleasure), or French anthropologist Nastassja Martin\u2019s weirdly delightful account of being mauled by a bear (translated by Sophie R. Lewis as In the Eye of the Wild<\/a><\/em>), or Niki de Saint Phalle\u2019s small, handwritten Mon Secret<\/em>, written in her sixties about her abuse as a child and its aftermath. Or The Devil\u2019s Treasure<\/em><\/a>, a zine-like concoction in which Mary Gaitskill intersperses pieces of her older and current fiction and nonfiction and, through and alongside these texts, grapples with the more profound and harrowing questions writers encounter. \u201cIt was not about words,\u201d she writes at one point, \u201cit was too big for words and did not care about words. But because I am a person I needed words; I needed form.\u201d \u2014Lidija Haas
\n<\/b><\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Early in the year, I treated myself to Bette Howland\u2019s <\/span>Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage<\/span><\/i><\/a>, a collection of stories I\u2019d been meaning to read since I first encountered her writing in the magazine <\/span>A Public Space<\/span><\/i>. Like the Chicago sky, as Howland describes it, her stories are \u201cfull of gloom, but here and there [is] a splinter, a gleam.\u201d The gleam is often Howland\u2019s sense of humor, and the way the narrator addresses the reader like another member of her comfortingly messy extended family. New to me was the novella that closes the book and gives it its title, a tale that brings mythic gravitas to all the stories that precede it. More recently, I started reading my mother\u2019s copy of <\/span>Pachinko<\/span><\/i><\/a>\u2014a full-on Sweeping Family Saga of a Korean immigrant family in Japan\u2014and finished a library copy, marveling all along at Min Jin Lee\u2019s uncompromisingly democratic approach to fiction, the beauty and precision of her prose, and my own ignorance of history. I balanced this epic with <\/span>Pond<\/span><\/i>, Claire-Louise Bennett\u2019s slim collection of prose about a woman living alone in an ancient cottage. <\/span>Pond<\/span><\/i> is funny, meditative and tender yet sharp as ice, and utterly delightful. I will never again take a kitchen appliance for granted thanks to Bennett. All of these books, I think, recognize a kind of unfulfilled human homing instinct, a desire for a specific place where we can feel right. That may not exist, but in the new year, may we all find books that bring us closer. <\/span>\u2014Jane Breakell<\/b><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Craig Morgan-Teicher\u2019s reading log.<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Some of the books we enjoyed most this year.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[68319],"tags":[68320,41516,67827],"class_list":["post-156456","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-best-of-2021","tag-68320","tag-favorite-books","tag-featured"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nOur Staff\u2019s Favorite Books of 2021 by The Paris Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"December 17, 2021 \u2013 Some of the books we enjoyed most this year.\u00a0\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2021\/12\/17\/our-staffs-favorite-books-of-2021\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" 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