Putting my little snout to the air and sniffing: the vibes continued to be bad out there. Bad things happened to me, my loved ones, and the things I care about in the world. If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.
A short post this month as I wrote about several of these at length already, but below:
📚The Anthropologists - Ayşegül Savaş
📚H is for Hawk - Helen MacDonald
📚The Dispossessed, The Left Hand of Darkness - Ursula K Le Guin
📺Survivor (2000)
🎥Wild Strawberries (1957), All That Jazz (1979)
The Anthropologists - Ayşegül Savaş
What does it mean to belong in a new place? What does it mean to belong nowhere? Asya and Manu are a happily married couple, originally from two different countries, who have chosen to live in a third (unnamed) city somewhere in Europe. The book tracks their search for an apartment to buy because they agree, “it’s time to make things a little more solid.” Meanwhile, Asya is working on a film about daily life in a nearby park, made possible by a grant for making documentaries about more serious subjects that “taken together gave a sense of social critique.”
The book’s 180 pages are divided into 2-3-page scenes or meditations, told in a dreamy first-person voice that occasionally cuts to the first-person perspective of one of Asya’s park subjects. It’s a book driven by feelings and not constraints; neither finances nor obligation are a relevant component to the question of homeownership. Buying this home is more of a philosophical decision to create a home in their shared third country. Asya’s park documentary is meant to capture the grace of everyday life, which is also the project of the book. It’s the ins and outs of a very specific life: easy casual drinking, apartment buildings, and the carefully purchased belongings they’re filled with, and the quiet inner life of a happy marriage.
Between this quotidian life, there’s the undercurrent of migration and distance. Asya and Manu love their families, who visit and whom they call, but feel the impossible-to-breach distance formed when you are not part of each other’s daily lives. To me, these feelings were the most interesting part of the book. It captures so many small details of choosing to (rather than being obliged to) live in a new country, to which you do not necessarily belong, and which you still hold at arm’s length. One element: Asya’s fascination with a friend who is a local, someone who did not choose to be here but who has that irreproducible local connection. Another: the “haphazardness of [their] lives” as they work to create new rituals to ground themselves in place. And beneath it all, that longing for family without the desire to actually be with them where they are.
Overall, I liked this book a lot. The writing is silky and as easy to read as a cool glass of water. But there was a surface-level quality that I couldn’t quite broach. The decision to leave the city unnamed, while otherwise telling a story with such precise specificity—a litany of little details of a shared life, language, and secrets—felt like a distracting contrivance rather than a thought-provoking choice. She references it many times as “the city that wasn’t even ours,” and there’s a sense throughout the book that the only home Asya truly belongs to is with her husband. In this way, it is a deeply romantic book. It was refreshing and interesting to read about romantic love as a series of choices made together. There are so many books about the beginnings and endings of romance, and this is a book about the long, quiet middle.
H is for Hawk - Helen MacDonald
I wrote about this book in detail below. This is a memoir of grief and falconry, when Helen MacDonald decides to train a challenging hawk following her father’s unexpected death. This book is a comfort when you’re going through it and want to read something beautifully written and meditative.
The Dispossessed, The Left Hand of Darkness - Ursula K Le Guin
This year, I want to try (try!) to read more by interest and desire, rather than my usual guiding lights of mood and library hold arrival. After loving The Left Hand of Darkness I wanted more, and I already owned The Dispossessed. My local bookstore also had a copy of The Lathe of Heaven, which found its way home with me, so let’s make this a Le Guin year.
For more thoughts on these two perfect, fresh novels, I wrote about them at length here:
Other Items of Interest: Survivor
I only read four books this month, and already wrote about three of them at length. You know what else I did this month? I watched almost four seasons of Survivor. The following is not a letter of recommendation. You’re already a fan or you’re baffled that people are still watching a show you last remember being relevant in 2005. I write for the baffled.1
As a documented television program enjoyer, I am powered by nosiness and a deep interest in the human psyche. What could capture the indominability of the human spirit like someone recovering from a messy breakup, dating a truly forgettable man but telling your disinterested coworkers, over and over again, that this new boyfriend mounted a TV in under seven minutes?2 The inane specificity of this brag, who could write such a thing!
Survivor is a neat, clean package. It’s a perfect show to cross-stitch to because it’s mostly talking and then occasionally physical challenges narrated by a guy yelling while running backwards. There are a shocking 48 seasons. Someone once asked me how there could be that many—doesn’t the format get stale? No one asks this about sports, which is the same format across hundreds of games!
But to the baffled, I offer two explanations: first, it’s a delivery mechanism for satisfying narrative arcs. The show has a set sequence of events that has evolved in small ways, but is structurally the same over and over again. Within that framework, the good seasons have a storyline that is simple and satisfying: a close alliance that works together to run the show, a rivalry that goes head to head, likeable or entertaining people behave strangely. People claim to watch it for the strategy—by which they mean the clever ways people manipulate the game mechanics or each other—but the structural limitations make it lulling, pacifying entertainment.
And the other explanation: you know the expression, wherever you go, there you are? People go on this show hoping to express some idealized form of themselves, to learn or grow, to challenge themselves. But, well, if you’re sad now you might still feel sad there. People often get voted out for the simple reason that they have bad vibes. You cannot change your vibe by going on national television. This show introduces you to a true cavalcade of weird guys (gender neutral) trying to get ahead to varying degrees of success. It is high art (lol) watching a weird guy doing their best.
Wild Strawberries & All That Jazz
I’ve watched two strikingly similar movies recently, featuring a man nearing the end of his life looking back on it and thinking: damn I really worked too much. Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries and Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz. The former is the story of a doctor driving from Stockholm to Lund to accept an award for 50 years of service. Along the way, he has a series of dreamy flashbacks and imaginings about his childhood love (his cousin), his increasing isolation, and his professional relevance. The Fosse movie is more explicitly autobiographical (autofiction, one might say): a choreographer/director working himself to an early grave, told with surreal, brightly lit dance numbers and dream sequences.
I’m fascinated by depictions of regret. Not the small-time stuff, but huge, paths-not-taken regret. They are, to me, some of the saddest stories to read or watch. Unexpected early ends or personal failures are tragedies, but there is a specific intensity to regretting the way you spent your life that radiates off the page or screen. There are a lot of versions similar to these movies, usually told by men,3 and if a lesson can be taken, it seems nearly universal: working less, connecting more, moving slowly. The movies were made, respectively, 68 and 46 years ago, but the regret of a life lived in which you keep happiness at arm’s length feels universal and timeless.
While this year has been pretty rancid thus far, I have been reading consistently good books! Taking wins where they come. I hope to have something insightful to say in Q2. Publishing a week into April means I’ve already read Stag Dance (loved) and have started The Last Samurai, which so far sort of reads like it’s yelling at me (complimentary).
Potential memoir title. Not mine. But somebody’s.
Scheana Shay, Vanderpump Rules
Off the top of my head, the most moving version of this story, and one of the few from a non-male perspective, is the exceptional Home by Marilynne Robinson.
I will never not be watching survivor 🙂↕️
I look forward to your thoughts on The Last Samurai because I'd like to read it! Also the last line of your the anthropologist review is really beautiful. If I ever want to read about the middle of a relationship, I'll reach for it.