The UN-furrowed Dozen

This year I'm doing a little something different with my year-end listmaking. No, I'm not tampering with the FM Dozen, which has since time immemorial (or 2014 at least, which at this point feels almost as long) counted down my favorite blog-related reads of the year (i.e. those which are directly relevant to the main topic of this blog, British women writers 1910-1960). That will still be posted right around New Year's (give or take a bit, depending on how much eggnog I have). 

But for this week, I thought I'd expand my horizons a bit and list some of my favorite reads from outside of my main topic. Since the pandemic began, about 900 years or so ago, and particularly since I joined Twitter this year, my reading has not only increased (less commute time does indeed equal more reading time, it seems, not to mention more exercise time and more happy time, though I know that not everyone has felt the same way), but it has also been more varied than in some previous years. I've rediscovered my love for modernist fiction and for European and Latin American lit in translation, and even for the "classics". I actually read not one but two of Stendhal's blockbuster novels this year, not to mention Flaubert's Sentimental Education, which I first read as an undergrad or soon after, though I'm not including these here because I don't think either author requires my seal of approval. (The fact that I read three classics this year and my TBR shelves now boast an entire shelf of such grandiose aspirations as The Tale of Genji, Madame Bovary, The Decameron, Dostoevsky's Demons, Gargantua and Pantagruel, and quite a fair number of others is certainly not disproportionate at all…)

At any rate, I thought it would be fun to share this side of my reading a bit. I'm sure that, like me, many of you read all sorts of books, not only books by British women 1910-1960, so we may sometimes find we have other authors in common besides Elizabeth Fair, Frances Faviell, D. E. Stevenson, and Agatha Christie, and some of the books below fit in with our FM titles surprisingly well. And if you are only interested in British women 1910-1960, then feel free to skip over this post and rest assured the FM Dozen is coming soon!

Even though middlebrow fiction is still a substantial majority of my reading, it was surprisingly difficult to narrow down this list to only twelve titles. And as always, ranking them is impossible and relatively random—apart, I should say, from my top three, which really are the top (as Cole Porter would say). Those are genuinely Shakespeare sonnets, Napoleon Brandy, and the smile on the Mona Lisa all rolled into one. They might even be camembert, but they're certainly three titles that particularly blew me away this year.

Drum roll please…

12) VLADIMIR NABOKOV, Glory (1932)
(translated by Dmitri Nabokov with Vladimir Nabokov)

I've had a love/hate relationship with Nabokov for years. He's one of those writers who can wow you with his brilliance and then make you want to slap him with a wet noodle for his "isn't he just sooooo clever" kinds of tricks. Pale Fire nearly finished me off as a grad student, but in the past couple of years I paid a first visit to a couple of his early novels, and Glory in particular caught my fancy. I'm always interested in the Russian émigré experience, and this novel is a wonderful bit of nostalgia for Russia combined with some of Nabokov's most beautiful writing. In other words, even if Nabokov isn't your thing, Glory might just be.

11) PATRICK MODIANO, Sleep of Memory (2017)
(translated by Mark Polizzotti)

In 2021, I was finishing up with Patrick Modiano, who absolutely consumed by Unfurrowed reading in 2020. Of the final books of his I finished, Sleep of Memory was the most haunting. For those unfamiliar, Modiano's short, potent novels are more or less always about older characters looking back on youthful experiences, which can only be remembered in fragmented and uncertain ways. For me, the novels are themselves riveting, but also, rather like hypnosis, they always bring back vivid memories of my own past. Something about their dreamlike quality allows the reading experience to morph into something much more personal. This one for whatever reason brought back living in DC in my 20s–buildings I would pass, restaurants I hadn't recalled in years, people I met in passing, places I would walk when restless late at night. It seemed to even bring back the energy, the mood of the city, the sounds of traffic, the rustling of leaves on one particular tree-lined street. By the time I finished, I wasn't sure whether some of the images in my head were from the novel of from my own experience. Heady stuff indeed, so do give Modiano a try if you haven't (and if you dare!).

10) PRINCESS MARTHE BIBESCO, The Green Parrot (1924)
(translated by Malcolm Cowley)

I knew that Bibesco was a close friend of Violet Trefusis, of whom I've written a lot this year, and that she was a successful novelist herself, but it wasn't until our Thanksgiving trip to San Diego that I came across one of her novels. At first, I thought it was entertaining but too melodramatic for my taste. But as I read this very odd tale of a woman, neglected in girlhood by parents who can only adore the memory of her dead brother, and of something bordering on sibling incest aided and abetted by reincarnation (!!), it became more than the sum of its parts. I found Bibesco's sensibility and intelligence, and her perspective on the situation of woman in society and in love, irresistible. I want to re-read this novel, and it likely won't surprise you to learn I already have two more of her books on my shelves…

9) MASATSUGU ONO, Lion Cross Point (2013)
(translated by Angus Turvill)

Last year, I read what was really Masatsugu Ono's second novel in translation, Echo on the Bay, and merely liked it. But then I kept thinking about it, and flashing back to its setting and scenes. So I decided I should try the earlier Lion Cross Point, and now I'm hopelessly hooked. Both of these short works deal with childhood and trauma, both are set in small Japanese fishing villages, and both are dreamlike and addictive. One critic called Ono a cross between Garcia Marquez and Simenon, which is both ridiculous and … kind of true? Ono's third novel in English, At the Edge of the Woods, is coming next April from Two Lines Press, and I can't wait.

8) ANAKANA SCHOFIELD, Bina: A Novel in Warnings (2019)

Fragmented and dark, but also flowing like a dream and often outright hilarious, this tale of a woman who's had all she can take might be a blast even for those who don't think they like edgier, more experimental fiction. I can't praise it too much, and I can't say too much about it, because Bina herself has warned me:

So if you are listening to a woman
Hoping she'll shut up
Try imagining the 2,000 years
Where she did all the listening.
Sit down
Shut up
And if the woman is talking, listen.

I've never had so much fun listening, and I'll listen to Anakana Schofield's shopping list if she publishes it.

7) NATHALIE SARRAUTE, The Golden Fruits (1963)
(translated by Maria Jolas)

The most experimental and "difficult" work on this list, for sure, but also a riot. It's a chaotic cacophony of anonymous voices ranting about a novel called The Golden Fruits. First the voices are praising and parroting, name-dropping, then disenchanted; the novel is first a sign of sophistication and being "in the know" and later a sign of being hopelessly "déclassé", and it's all such a brilliant skewering of intellectualism and faux cultural cachet. If you can overcome the complete lack of a plot or identified characters, it's sooooo much fun. Sarraute should be much more widely read than she is.

6) BENJAMIN LABATUT, When We Cease to Understand the World (2018)
(translated by Adrian Nathan West)

So many other people have written about how good this one is that I won't say much. I was sceptical that a novel (in the loosest sense of the word) flirting with—and sometimes fictionalizing—scientific history would be my cup of tea, and yet it completely was. Ambitious, life-or-death themes, and yet also a page-turner.

5) JEAN FREMON, Now Now Louison (2016)
(translated by Cole Swenson)

A very short novel about the life of artist Louise Bourgeois, but that doesn't begin to cover it. I knew nothing at all of Bourgeois when I started reading (based on a Twitter recommendation), but Fremon's potent, poignant look at her past and her obsessions, mostly "narrated" by Bourgeois herself, got me hooked, and I'm ready to travel the world in search of spiders (as well as more Fremon).

4) MERCÈ RODOREDA, Garden by the Sea (1967)
(translated by Maruxa Relaño & Martha Tennent)

If our publications were to go international, I'd absolutely choose this one for an FM España imprint. Much of Rodoreda's work is darker and more experimental, but this one is perfectly lovely. Set in the roaring 20s over the course of several summers in a villa by the sea, as a solitary gardener observes the Beautiful People coming and going. There are dark undercurrents, and the looming suggestion of bad times ahead, but they only make Rodoreda's subtle tale glitter even more. 

3) SERGIO PITOL, The Love Parade (1984)
(translated by George Henson)

What a crazy, wild, wonderful ride this one is. Sergio Pitol is surely, in the English-speaking world, the best kept secret of Latin American literature. His "Trilogy of Memory" sustained me last year in the early days of the pandemic, and this one, very different but equally wonderful, gave me a necessary break from the world news. Set in the 1970s in Mexico City, on the surface it's a mystery about a historian investigating a murder from 1942, at a time when the city was a hotbed of immigrants, refugees, shady business dealings, and spies. But it's really a magnificent symphony of eccentric voices demonstrating that memory and history are as slippery and elusive as some of the novel's characters. I feel sure this one will repay any number of re-readings. Pitol also makes me yearn for more of this evocative setting—any recommended books about Mexico during World War II?

2) MARIA JUDITE DE CARVAHLO, Empty Wardrobes (1966)
(translated by Margaret Jull Costa)

Be still my heart, I love this novel so much, and this one could absolutely be a Furrowed Middlebrow publication if we published Portuguese authors. Several wonderfully-delineated women and their troubled relations in 1960s Portugal. At the time, I made a note that it reminded me of both Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome and Pedro Almodovar's Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, and if you can imagine that, I don't think you're so far off of this gorgeous little jewel. I can imagine re-reading this every year or so as I used to do The Great Gatsby (in my younger, shallower days).

1) DOIREANN NÍ GHRÍOFA, A Ghost in the Throat (2020)

My top three this year are really all neck-and-neck, but if one has to have the illustrious honor of the #1 position, it should be this treasure (which also happens to have been my first Book Twitter discovery). Part memoir, part novel, it's a totally unique hybrid about a young modern Irish wife and mother who becomes obsessed with an 18th century noblewoman who composed an impassioned poem of mourning for her murdered husband. Its theme of obsessive research into a forgotten woman writer had obvious appeal for me (ahem!), but it's also exquisitely written and oh-so-beautifully structured. I think lots of fans of FM titles would also enjoy this one.

And that's that. I hope you've enjoyed the history-making inaugural UNfurrowed Dozen. More great books to come next week on the FM Dozen!