Here to continue our A Year in Reading series, please welcome Georgina Fooks, who made a conscious effort at the start of the year to expand her reading to include more women and non-European authors. Here is the result:
At the start of 2019, I consciously decided to read as much as possible. After several years of buying books and never reading them (a predicament neatly summed up by the Japanese word tsundoku), I resolved that this year, I wanted to read more books while buying less—so it is that I’ve done my best to read from my own shelves (although that doesn’t mean I have stopped buying books entirely).
The first half of this year was dominated by reading for academic purposes—so I read lots of French and Latin American fiction and poetry. My favourite author is Marguerite Duras, and I enjoyed Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein; there’s something special about the atmosphere she paints through language, her evocative style, and the way she explores desire. Throughout the whole book, Duras keeps you guessing as to who’s in control, who holds power, and she never answers that question for you. I was also really moved by A l’ami qui ne m’a pas sauvé la vie by Hervé Guibert, which is an emotional read that blurs the boundaries between fiction and autobiography. When published in France, it caused a media stir for recounting how Michel Foucault died of an AIDS-related illness, but beyond media sensationalism, it’s a heart-wrenching account that explores betrayal in all its forms—betrayals between friends, broken promises, and the betrayal of oneself when writing an account of your own life.
Some of my favourite Latin American authors are from Argentina, so in addition to reading Borges and Cortázar, two of my favourites, I also enjoyed exploring Silvina Ocampo’s stories for the first time; she is famously overshadowed by Borges (a fellow writer) and Adolfo Bioy Casares (her husband), but she’s received a lot more attention in recent years. My favourite story of hers, “Tales eran sus rostros”, has now been translated into English and serves as the title of a new collection of hers in English: Thus Were Their Faces, published by NYRB Classics. It describes a supernatural phenomenon, and is haunting and ambiguous in the best possible way. She writes that no one knew if what happened was terrible, but became beautiful, or beautiful, but became terrible—but she leaves it up to the reader to decide.
Once the academic year ended, I was eager to read more widely in world literature, and move my focus away from French- and Spanish-speaking countries. This year, I read more translated fiction than ever before, buoyed by my involvement in Asymptote and the desire to finally read all those books I’d kept buying (but not had the time to read). Sweet Bean Paste, written by Durian Sukegawa and translated by Alison Watts, is an endearing tale of friendship between an unlikely trio: an ex-convict, an elderly lady with a talent for making sweet bean paste, and a teenage girl. I loved reading about the love and care that goes into making the bean paste, and the intergenerational friendship that grows here makes it a heartwarming read that shows how we can all show more compassion to each other.
I read my first book written by a Brazilian author this year, Àgua Viva by Clarice Lispector, translated by Benjamin Moser. As a writer, this was one of the books that inspired me most this year; it’s a short but sweet piece of fiction that resists easy definition. A sort of lyrical meditation on life and time, the narrative voice returns to the idea of “instants” that are elusive and ever-present in the flow of time. It flickers between poetry and prose, and while not the easiest read, it immediately felt like the kind of work that merits multiple readings; I can’t wait to read it again and see what I get out of it next time.
As part of my efforts to broaden the range of voices I read, I picked up several books by female essayists this year. While Joan Didion’s The White Album is arguably her most famous book, I particularly enjoyed Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Didion has an uncanny ability for observation in her journalistic pieces, and the way she writes in her personal essays resonates with me. As somebody who keeps a notebook, her essay on her personal journals serves as a reminder to keep up the practice, even when writing feels hard and unnecessary. She writes: “I think we are well-advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not… Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point.”
I also read The Lonely City by Olivia Laing, which weaves together personal stories with art history to explore the themes of loneliness and urbanity with respect to celebrated artists such as Andy Warhol, David Wojnarowicz, Edward Hopper, and Valerie Solanas. I love the way Laing weaves together personal anecdotes, artist biographies, and research in such an organic way to create a work that explored the tension at the heart of being lonely in a city full of people. Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino is another book of essays that explores contemporary culture; while written from an American perspective, it resonated a great deal with my personal experience of the British political landscape today. Her essays range in theme from individualist politics and rape culture to reality TV and spin classes, and her empathy and intelligence radiate throughout.
There are two books I’m ending the year with, and in a year where I’ve read some of my favourite books, I think these two come out on top. Your Silence Will Not Protect You by Audre Lorde gathers some of her most famous essays, speeches, and poems. I had often come across quotes of Lorde’s work on social media, and her essays absolutely floored me. It’s terrifying (although not surprising) that her work, while mostly produced in the 70s and 80s, reads as if it could have been written today, and that makes it an essential read for anyone working to dismantle racism in the contemporary climate. Her writing is visceral; I can’t count the number of times her poetry stopped me in its tracks and genuinely gave me chills.
Poetry is the thread that connects my last two books of the year: the other book is Alejandra Pizarnik’s Poesía completa, which I bought after reviewing the English translation of two of her collections—The Last Innocence and The Lost Adventures—for Asymptote. It’s hard to believe that after several years of studying Argentine poetry, her work had passed me by, but I am glad to finally know it. Her poetry is violent and emotional, but far from being spontaneous or sentimental; she wrote of not writing but making poetry, and her approach to writing struck a chord with me and had me eager to read more by her in the future.
Looking to the year ahead, I can’t wait to continue reading in the way I started to this year: more adventurously, exploring new countries, new genres (the essay was new to me this year), and new voices. This year I made a conscious effort to expand and read more by women and non-European writers, and I look forward to doing more of that in 2020.
Georgina Fooks is a Communications Manager for Asymptote. She studied French and Spanish literature at Oxford and is currently preparing for postgraduate study, in which she is planning on specialising in Argentine literature. She has lived in Santiago and Paris, and currently works in London.