{"id":169425,"date":"2024-12-13T10:00:36","date_gmt":"2024-12-13T15:00:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=169425"},"modified":"2024-12-18T11:27:46","modified_gmt":"2024-12-18T16:27:46","slug":"the-best-books-of-2024-according-to-friends-of-the-review-part-one","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2024\/12\/13\/the-best-books-of-2024-according-to-friends-of-the-review-part-one\/","title":{"rendered":"The Best Books of 2024, According to Friends of the Review<\/em>: Part One"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Issunshi Hanasato, The Timeless Treasures of Literature<\/em> (ca. 1844\u20131848), via Wikimedia Commons<\/a>. Public domain,<\/p><\/div>\n

One more year has passed: the humanoid robots are coming, my taxi has no driver (not even a metaphor), and ChatGPT tells me \u201cthere is hope even in the most hopeless times.\u201d In our\u00a0unreal\u00a0reality,\u00a0I\u2019m inspired by\u00a0a genre of compassionate absurdism: Roberto Bola\u00f1o, Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, Leonora Carrington, Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon.\u00a0Another such writer\u00a0is Enrique Vila-Matas, whose brilliant\u00a0essay-fiction\u00a0Insistence as a Fine Art\u00a0<\/em>(translated by Kit Schluter) came out this summer. Beginning in somewhat ekphrastic mode with Julio Romero de Torres\u2019s painting\u00a0La Buenaventura<\/em>, Vila-Matas embarks on a playful defense of \u201cinsistence\u201d: how authors echo themselves and others in their works; how these spiraling repetitions create an imaginary world more truthful than the adamantine pseudofacts of general reality. The publisher\u2014Hanuman Editions\u2014is also an expert practitioner of \u201cinsistence\u201d: reimagining the legacy of Hanuman Books, a cult series of chapbooks\u00a0produced between 1986 and 1993.<\/p>\n

\u2014Joanna Kavenna, author of \u201c<\/strong>The Beautiful Salmon<\/strong><\/a>\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Joseph Andras\u2019s writing favors the political: his novella Tomorrow They Won\u2019t Dare to Murder Us<\/em>, published in translation by Simon Leser in 2021, is narrated by a pied-noir during the Algerian Revolution, and in\u00a0Faraway the Southern Sky<\/em>, released in English this spring, the author traverses Paris to retrace the steps of Ho Chi Minh\u2019s life there. Andras hunts down the houses where Ho Chi Minh allegedly resided and the offices where he worked, constructing a map of the relationship between France\u2019s capital and Ho Chi Minh\u2019s burgeoning radicalism. Descriptions of Paris\u2019s underbelly intermingle with Andras\u2019s account of a twenty-something-year-old who, dreaming of liberating his country, would one day dictate the assassination of his political enemies. The novel is a story of how ideologies transform but also, largely, of hope: \u201cIf the rebel intoxicates, the revolutionary impedes. \u2026 If the first is accountable only to himself, the other embraces humanity as a whole.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2014Zoe Davis, intern<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Saskia Vogel\u2019s translation of Linnea Axelsson\u2019s \u00c6dnan: A Novel in Verse<\/em> does what you want a translation to do: take you inside a world and an experience that you couldn\u2019t otherwise access, and make you ache for it. This epic follows three generations of Sami people in Norway as they try to preserve their way of life in the face of shifting borders and encroaching modernity. This spare and beautiful book will haunt you.<\/p>\n

\u2014Megan McDowell, translator of Samanta Schweblin’s \u201c<\/strong>An Eye in the Throat<\/strong><\/a>\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Susie Boyt\u2019s Loved and Missed<\/em> is one of those books whose premise\u2014the long-suffering narrator Ruth, in lieu of her absentee addict daughter Eleanor, raises Eleanor\u2019s daughter\u2014sounds so plainly tear-jerking that you go in with your guard all the way up and your heartstrings secured. But the book is written with such understatement and so little pity that it slips past all your tactical gear and shanks you in the lungs, spleen, and femoral arteries before double-tapping you, in the final chapter, with a POV shift that\u2019s borderline unethical. Ruth is pissed off, elegiac, heroic, ironic, forbearing, and glum, but never saintly, and Boyt\u2019s careful modulations of tone keep you off-balance: \u201cI propped a tall red candle in an eggcup and lit the wick, sheltering it with the curve of my hand, the flame hot on my fingers until the fucking wind blew it out.\u201d Your guard may go up again when you learn\u2014to extend the parenting theme\u2014that the author is Lucian Freud\u2019s daughter and Sigmund\u2019s great-granddaughter. Is it nepotistic? I think it\u2019s nepotastic<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\u2014Tony Tulathimutte, author of \u201cAhegao<\/a>\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In Aesthetic Action<\/em>, the philosopher Florian Klinger articulates a model of the aesthetic (which includes art) as a specific form of action performed in parallel by the \u201cmaker\u201d and the \u201ctaker\u201d (e.g., the artist and the viewer)\u2014an action that produces a defined but irresolvable \u201caspectual irresolution\u201d between conflicting ways of making sense of something. For example, Mazen Kerbaj’s \u201cStarry Night,\u201d recorded in Beirut during the 2006 Lebanon War, works the explosions of bombs into an improvisational jazz piece. As Klinger puts it, \u201cwe cannot let go of hearing the bombs as bombs, but neither can we refuse to hear what the improvisation makes of them.\u201d His other examples include Franz Kafka’s short story “Wish to Become an Indian,” Marina Abramovi\u0107’s The Artist Is Present<\/em>, Tino Sehgal’s This Is Good<\/em>, and Kara Walker’s A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby<\/em>. By staging irresolutions between recognizable orienting logics, Klinger argues, aesthetic action renews access to something like aliveness, to the open-endedness of what it means to be human. Many of Klinger\u2019s points are familiar, but the book achieves a certain clarity in its synthesis of various strands of thinking on aesthetics and sense-making, ranging from Kant and Hegel to Marx to Wittgenstein to contemporary action theory (that said: unless you\u2019re a scholar in the field, skip chapters two and three). Klinger\u2019s work provides a useful model for thinking about how art might meet, resist, and rework the existing logics of its world(s).<\/p>\n

\u2014Kai Ihns, advisory poetry editor<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

One of the books that has brought me the most pleasure, solace, and wisdom this year is Disability Intimacy<\/em>, an anthology of essays on love, care, and desire edited by Alice Wong. Care in this anthology is defined broadly enough to encompass the intimacy of in-home personal assistants, how cerebral palsy can be an asset in kink, the weird eroticism of parenthood, and the joy of interspecies and pet love. This expansive definition allows each writer to bring their distinct perspective and nuance to the complexities of intimacy in a society that defines desirability narrowly.<\/p>\n

\u2014Morgan Thomas, author of \u201c<\/strong>Everything I Haven\u2019t Done<\/strong><\/a>\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I\u2019m gonna give my favorite-novel-of-the-year award to Venita Blackburn\u2019s Dead in Long Beach, California<\/em>, about a woman who assumes her brother\u2019s identity shortly after his death. It\u2019s fun, beautiful, slim, weird. And it\u2019s about grief. Blackburn\u2019s approach to space-time in her short fiction is awesome; her novel has vivid characterizations\u2014<\/strong>of both its people and setting (LA)\u2014and a lot of wisdom.<\/p>\n

\u2014Elijah Bailey, author of \u201c<\/strong>Social Promotion<\/strong><\/a>\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yoko Tawada\u2019s Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel<\/em>, translated by Susan Bernofsky, set in post-lockdown Berlin, is an absurd, dark, dreamlike narrative that meditates on warfare, religion, memory, migration, and belonging through the strange consciousness of a literary researcher, Patrik. A Celan scholar who self-identifies as \u201cthe patient,\u201d Patrik is a study in the precarious obsessions of academic life. Tawada\u2019s novel moves through fragmented first- and third-person narratives, its feverish, furious narration bewitching in Bernofsky\u2019s lucent translation.<\/p>\n

\u2014Sana R. Chaudhry, translator of Julien Columeau’s \u201c<\/strong>Derrida in Lahore<\/strong><\/a>\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I picked up Edwin Frank\u2019s Stranger than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel <\/em>thinking I might read a few chapters. But this is literary criticism that is itself literary\u2014alive and strange and hard to put down. Frank\u2019s selection is eclectic\u2014of the thirty-two novels he covers, some are expected (James Joyce\u2019s Ulysses<\/em>), some unexpected (H. G. Wells\u2019s The Island of Doctor Moreau<\/em>), some devastating (Hans Erich Nossack\u2019s The End: Hamburg 1943<\/em>), some comic (Colette\u2019s Claudine at School<\/em>). I\u2019ll admit these aren\u2019t all novels I want to read, though I did pick up Claudine at School<\/em>, which was thoroughly enjoyable. Some are the extreme permutations of a form capable of such extraordinary metamorphosis. Stranger than Fiction<\/em> gave me a fascinating glimpse of their souls.<\/p>\n

\u2014Marlene Morgan, author of \u201c<\/strong>The Miracle<\/strong><\/a>\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0My favorite fellow intern in fiction this year was the inimitable Catalina, who spends the first few pages of Karla Cornejo Villavicencio\u2019s eponymous novel taking the L train to a summer gig at \u201cAmerica\u2019s third-most-prestigious literary magazine.\u201d Despite her hard-won access to Harvard and its associated network of elite institutions, a correspondingly starry future remains out of reach\u2014undocumented and lacking a work permit, she can accumulate unpaid internships but not cash them in. The only capital the U.S. government allows Catalina is cultural, so she crafts the kind of besequined, Bukowski-reading persona seductive to old money white boys and alumni donors alike: manic pixie dream girl, Latina edition. Dreaming of being Woody Allen\u2019s muse is a salve for her more impossible fantasies\u2014she longs to be a \u201cboy reporter on the eve of a revolution,\u201d rather than a doomed civilian, a victim. But, like college-age protagonists everywhere, she remains trapped within the campus novel\u2019s inexorable timeline. By the time she graduated, I already missed her.<\/p>\n

\u2014Emmet Fraizer, intern<\/strong><\/p>\n

Alexis Wright\u2019s Carpentaria<\/em> (reissued this year) was, for me, the most thrilling novel since The Savage Detectives<\/em>. I wanted it to never end, and am now deep in her latest, Praiseworthy.<\/em> The first two novels that have been translated (by Barbara J. Haveland) of Solvej Balle\u2019s fugal septology, On the Calculation of Volume<\/em>, suggest that it may, in fact, never end, as its narrative time is in a page-turning repeating loop.<\/p>\n

In poetry, everything from the press World Poetry takes you far into the global imagination. A favorite among its recent titles is the wacky and inventive The Cheapest France in Town<\/em> by the Korean poet Seo Jung Hak, in a snazzy translation by Megan Sungyoon. And Forrest Gander\u2019s book-length Mojave Ghost<\/em> is perhaps his best yet, occupying a place in his prolific work as \u201cAsphodel, That Greeny Flower\u201d does in the poetry of William Carlos Williams.<\/p>\n

\u2014Eliot Weinberger, author of \u201c<\/strong>The Ceaseless Murmuring of Innumerable Bees<\/strong><\/a>\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Rio Shimamoto\u2019s First Love<\/em>, an overdue English-language debut by an important Japanese author translated by Louise Heal Kawai, is a portrait of patriarchy as a series of glassy, threatening surfaces. It turns a procedural setup\u2014Yuki, a psychologist, investigates the case of a woman who stabbed her father to death, seemingly without motive\u2014into a meticulous presentation of everyday life haunted by trauma. The killing at its center is the catalyst for the protagonist to confront not only the darkness in her own past but that which underpins a world saturated with masculine power. A classic slow burn, First Love <\/em>brings the lives of both killer and psychologist into gradual, devastating focus. Kawai\u2019s translation beautifully recreates Shimamoto\u2019s tone\u2014a smooth, unruffled narration that\u2019s interrupted, every so often, by a casually devastating image or turn of phrase.<\/p>\n

\u2014Brian Bergstrom, translator of Fumio Yamamoto’s \u201c<\/strong>Naked<\/strong><\/a>\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Recommendations from five Paris Review fiction writers, three translators, one poet, one poetry editor, and two interns.<\/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":[68386],"tags":[45095,20550,12369,67827,883],"class_list":["post-169425","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-reviews-review","tag-best-books","tag-best-books-of-the-year","tag-best-of-lists","tag-featured","tag-staff-picks"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Best Books of 2024, According to Friends of the Review: Part One by The Paris Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"December 13, 2024 \u2013 Recommendations from five Paris Review fiction writers, three translators, one poet, one poetry editor, and two interns.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, 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