Book Report April 2025 🌱

A very good reading month, including ❊ Stag Dance - by Torrey Peters ❊ The Last Samurai - by Helen DeWitt ❊ On the Calculation of Volume I & II - by Solvej Balle

Hello! The windows are open, spring is here, and books are good. I’m writing from the brief window of relief created by middle-ground politics winning in Canada before the reality of mediocre centrism settles in. Being against something is not the same as being for anything, even though it feels like it sometimes.

Something I’m for (bad segue I’m sorry) is all of these books. I read four books in April and they are all ones that I highly and freely recommend:

• Stag Dance - Torrey Peters

• The Last Samurai - Helen DeWitt

• On the Calculation of Volume I - Solvej Balle

• On the Calculation of Volume II - Solvej Balle

At least once a year in April, my husband says the German expression April, April macht was er will, (translation: April does what it wants), to describe the volatile weather. I hope that even as April did what it wanted, you were the better for it, even a little bit.

Stag Dance - Torrey Peters

I’m happy to state the following: this is a worthwhile follow-up to Peters’ Detransition, Baby, and an excellent short story collection (two facts I was worried about, as both a short story skeptic¹ and a lover of Peters’ first book). The four stories in this collection were written over a decade, and with the exception of a longer novella, were originally self-published and shared by and amongst friends and trans women prior to her book deal. Each of the four stories is of its own distinct genre (speculative fiction, teen campus romance, American tall tale, horror) and as a collective whole, they are quite distinct from her best-selling novel. There’s no contemporary urban trans experience here,² but they are unified by the distinct skill for pacing and wit that made her novel excellent as well. They are also thematically very similar: sisterhood, triangulated desire, the thorny edges of gender, and hierarchies of beauty appear in each story.

The title novella is about an illegal 19th-century lumber camp, using (somewhat jarringly) a lot of lumberjack slang to tell the story of a ‘stag dance,’ in which loggers can choose to go to the dance as a woman (via the symbolism of a burlap sack triangle)—and the havoc that ensues when Babe, the strongest, beefiest logger in the camp, takes up this offer. All four of the stories are similarly high-concept and highly specific.

Along with Babe, several of the stories are about being trans told by characters who do not definitively identify on-page as trans. I went to see Peters in conversation with Vivek Shraya as promotion for this book, and she talked, as she has elsewhere in the press tour,³ about how the stories put feelings as building blocks for the stories and the themes with which they are wrestling. As a reader, you are repeatedly invited to identify with people behaving badly to confront and recognize the contours of your reaction. The stories are provocative and thrillingly readable.

I think this book has a bit of something for many readers—a coded way of saying that even if you weren’t fully sold on Detransition Baby you may still like this. It made me excited to see whatever else Peters writes in the future because each of these stories is so fresh, so distinct, and quite simply good.

The Last Samurai - Helen DeWitt

If you don’t have the time or inclination to read Infinite Jest, may I suggest The Last Samurai instead?⁴ Or if you’ve read that book and want something similar, Helen DeWitt has your answer. They have many surface-level similarities. They’re both door-stopper tomes, but while Infinite Jest could prop open a heavy fire door, The Last Samurai is half the length (~500 pages) so you could at best keep a hollow core door open. They also feel like beacons of similar, memorable literary moments: a casual conversational tone making a half dozen literary and cultural references a page, told less like a formal narrator and more like the book is breathlessly speaking to you.

The Last Samurai tells the story of Sybilla, a wayward intellectual who has an unplanned-for son with a boring man, and then the son, Ludo’s, search to find his father. Despite the rambling style, it’s a novel of ideas and clear convictions. Sybilla is constantly thinking about the promise of free will (e.g. that you could throw everything out the window and be a sculptor’s assistant if you wanted). Of course, reality gets in the way of that promise: money problems take Sybilla out of academia, an unexpected pregnancy and sense of obligation further derails her. Her core belief is that “no one is put off by difficulty only by boredom and if something is interesting no one will care how hard it is.” She does not believe her son has an obligation to her and teaches him to read Greek at age 3 and a half dozen more languages by grade school.⁵ He is not a genius, the novel asserts, just given the chance to learn, an exercise of free will.

The novel is cleanly structured with the first half from Sybilla’s perspective, charting her parents’ history, skipping over her childhood (irrelevantly spent in motels, we glean) to her Oxford years and pregnancy— all told in the past tense while Ludo is three to six years old. Meanwhile, she’s obsessively watching Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai. At around the halfway mark, we transition to young Ludo’s diary entries and questions about his father, and then switch to his perspective for the remaining 250 pages. We’re then in a paternal quest story and you can perhaps guess how many strange and mythical men he will consult on this topic based on the Kurosawa film at the novel’s core.

While reading it, I don’t think I recognized the neatness of the novel’s structure because of how sprawling the writing style is. I can’t imagine listening to this as an audiobook: there are long passages about Greek or Japanese grammar, a book about aerodynamics is quoted at length, and I confess that I skimmed these. Did I find them difficult or boring? Both, but the book as a whole is neither. It poses Sybilla’s challenge: it is not difficult, just occasionally boring. It really and truly believes that the hallmarks of pretension could and should be available to anyone. Tied up in the promise of free will is a question of nature vs nurture: can you mold a genius despite lackluster parentage? What would it mean to choose your own father?

A self-aware irony is the fact that Sybilla would never read the novel she stars in. Her curriculum and worldview shape it, but we spend more time with Ludo and his quest. I read this because I asked for recommendations for books with plots and Eve Matheson kindly suggested this one.⁶ This novel has lots of stories wrapped up in all its ideas. It manages a deft trick of being about some very sentimental ideas while being wildly unsentimental, just like Sybilla.

I started this review off with Infinite Jest because it’s an eye-catching name, but I’m certainly not the first person to compare them. It’s shorthand to say: this book is big, prickly, and ambitious. To belabour the comparison: Infinite Jest has the problem of being subsumed by meta-narratives about the author himself and an idea about The Type of Guy who likes it. The Last Samurai will take you to some of the same places with the same flair. Reading about this novel⁷ is also mired with meta-narratives, largely about the difficulty of getting it published and keeping it in print. I’m glad to live in the same world where this book exists and, despite the odds, it is still in print.

On the Calculation of Volume I - Solvej Balle, translated by Barbara J. Haveland

I first came across these from Catherine Lacey’s rave (now pay-walled) review—Lacey is one of my favourite novelists (and her review of The Details cemented her as a trustworthy source). Then several friends and Substack mutuals,

Celine Nguyen

,

Martha

,

Petya K. Grady

and

Natalie McGlocklin

all posted about it! And then, when I went to the local bookstore to buy a copy, they were on backorder for the first volume!! Intriguing.

These are the first two books in a cycle of seven, both released at the same time. The next two will be published later this year. For the purposes of this post, I’ll be writing about them separately (because they are quite different). However, the contents of the second spoils the ending of the first, so read with caution, or if you don’t care about petty things like spoilers.

The logline of these books is catnip to me: contemplative and dreamy speculative fiction about a woman trapped in an eternal November. Tara Selter is an antique book dealer on a buying trip to Paris when she wakes to discover it is November 18th, the same day it was yesterday. The book begins 120 days into this cycle and tracks back to her first repetition and the decision to return to her home with her beloved husband.

This is not a Groundhog Day-style full reset: Tara can travel to a new location without reverting to Paris and she can bring a few unpredictable objects with her. This is also not a science-fiction book, and Tara only sparingly experiments with the mechanics of the day that traps her (in this volume, at least). Instead, it is largely about the feelings this experience creates in her. There is no dialogue: it is comprised of observations and descriptions, the sights, sounds, and emotional landscape.

It is also a surprisingly romantic novel: Tara immediately wants to return to her husband as the grounding emotional tether of her life. The writing about love is very beautiful. During Tara’s first November 18th, she visits an old friend and his new girlfriend, witnessing their burgeoning love: “The sudden feeling of sharing something inexplicable, a sense of wonder at the existence of the other—the one person who makes everything simple—a feeling of being calmed down and thrown into turmoil at the same time.” Meanwhile, her husband Thomas readily believes her each and every November 18th when she explains her problem and they try to solve it together. Describing their relationship, she says:

Our love has always been microscopic. It is something in the cells, some molecules, some compounds outside our control, which collide in the air around us, sound waves that form unique harmonies when we speak, it happens at the atomic level or even that of smaller particles. There are no precipices or distances in our relationship.

In contrast to the other books I read this month, it is gentle and contemplative—but I read it in about two sittings (it’s only 140 pages). It was a very meditative reading experience, as Tara slowly begins to find herself detached from the reality of her ordinary life with her husband. The repeating days deliver some very clear metaphors about how your life can easily fill with patterns and expectations, but the unimaginable is always lurking beneath the surface, “the unthinkable is something we carry with us always.”

On the Calculation of Volume II - Solvej Balle, translated by Barbara J. Haveland

The second volume charts Tara’s travelogue as she attempts to reconstruct seasons. She wants to experience novelty and change in a world that is trapped in a single day.

I read a long section of this book on the first perfect spring day here in Toronto. My husband, roommate, and I took folding chairs to the park and read in light jackets in the sunshine—a perfect evening. Later, I walked home alone after reading nearly half this book and had one of those slippery moments where my head was so immersed in the thoughts and feelings of these books that I could feel it in the air around me as I walked. The city had that sudden bright spring feeling where everyone was out and thrilled about it, as the sunset glinted off the streetcar tracks—the beautiful novelty created by time passing. Something that Tara is desperate for in this book and tries (in vain) to recreate.

She spends this book traveling to seasonally appropriate places based on the days that have passed: her family’s house for Christmas, a cabin in northern Norway for winter, southern France for winter, and so on. Along the way she briefly meets a meteorologist who tells her that people think of seasons as weather, but they are psychological, not meteorological, “a conglomeration of experiences and feelings.” Spring is not a day warm enough to sit in the park, but a day when hibernation feels over—patio weather, shorts weather, the celebratory feeling of warmth as a reward for having successfully braced yourself for the chill of winter.

This entry into the story starts with Tara returning to her childhood home to recreate Christmas, but she largely spends it alone, in contrast to the previous book. While they are stylistically and tonally similar, textured by minute observations of the senses, this book has a distinct plot: Tara’s adventures through Europe, which makes me very intrigued to see how Balle maintains such a cyclical story across five more volumes—especially given the ending of this one.

---

As is evident in every review: I had an excellent reading month with these four books. I truly don’t think I can pick a favourite among them. After some mediocre reading months at the end of last year and the beginning of this one, I’ve been on a roll reading exceptional book after exceptional book. I’ve just begun Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison and feel my streak is continuing. A strange feeling to read so many good books in bad times.

Some other things I have enjoyed this month:

• Maggie Rogers makes music that could score the “girl who is going to be okay” meme. I have been listening to a lot of Maggie Rogers this week.
  

• I went with my mother to see the musical A Strange Loop (highly recommend the Soulepper production, Torontonians! Maybe don’t see it with your parents as a general rule?). I was reminded how truly incredible a live performance can be. I know many people find musicals distractingly cringe, but I love to see people sing and dance in unison, especially over two straight hours with no intermission.
  

• A half dozen small, tangible things: painting my bedroom olive green, a perfect vintage top, the best restaurant meal I’ve had in a while, tulips in stock at the corner store.

Have you read any of these books? Would you? What would you do if you were trapped in an eternal November 18th?

1. Some might say hater.

2. For the unfamiliar, Detransition, Baby is a soap opera (Peters’ words!) about three women in New York City dealing with an unexpected pregnancy.

3. In conversation with Andrea Long Chu:

In a lot of ways, trying to write about the feelings that I have in [lumberjack slang] made the feelings new to me. A phrase like gender dysphoria, when I say it now, feels so overdetermined. It’s just clunks. Babe Bunyan, in the novel, says, “Mirrors do not befriend me.” I was like, that is how it feels. And I would never have said that if I was not pretending to be a logger to myself.

I’m very interested in having my characters not know things. [...] It opens up a whole thing. For me, oftentimes transness is about knowing things about what’s going on with your feelings.

Something I’m trying to do is see trans less as an identity and more of an invitation. And a lot of these stories are invitations to a reader to identify with these characters who are probably not like them. It’s about taking away the markers of what it means to be trans, and instead looking at the emotional building blocks of this experience, which are often pretty universal things, like the difference between how you’re seen and how you want to be seen.

4. I do still think you should read Infinite Jest. If you want to.

5. A disclaimer: if the implausibility of this conceit sounds like it would annoy or distract you, I don’t think you will enjoy this book. This premise sounds like it could be very saccharine, and the book is not, but you do have to accept this premise as a thought experiment.

6. I don’t know that I accurately captured the reading experience even after ~700 words. Here’s Eve’s review.

7. For the curious: a great write-up from The Paris Review, an profile of DeWitt in Vulture, both as part of it’s re-release, the latter also talks about the David Foster Wallace comparison