Putting out a list of your year’s favorite books, I think, is hack and anti-literature; however, I saw Bruna’s Carta para navegantes stack do an awards thing, and I liked reading it, so I have thereby stolen her idea, and I am doing my own version of those awards here:
JOÃO GUIMARÃES ROSA AWARD
(this is named after my favorite writer, the greatest brasilian writer, author of the greatest novel in world literature, Grande Sertão:Veredas—or as it will be known in its new english translation, Vastlands: The Crossing—and it awards my favorite brasilian book of the year)
ROMANCE D’A PEDRA DO REINO E O PRINCIPE DO SANGUE DO VAI-E-VOLTA (1971), ARIANO SUASSUNA
My grandma bought me this book at one of them chaotic used bookstores in downtown Rio on Camões street. I thought it was gonna be a big wack tome (753 pages; though, come on Harold, how often is a book this big, wack?); cause all I knew about Ariano Suassuna is that he wrote one of the most famous brasilian plays, Auto da Compadecida—and I think people have a natural skepticism to multi-hyphenate pollination. But then I seen this blog I super respect (that writes solely about great untranslated literature) did a whole write-up about it, and so I was like I gotta hit it.
Turns out, it’s f*****g Dante, Don Quixote, a damn Paraíba Tristram Shandy. The narrator, Dom Pedro Dinis Quaderna, is writing this book from prison. We don’t know why he’s in there, and he sure delays on telling us. The book is full of digressions, crazy adventures, full of these woodcuts and photos, it plays with the historical facts of Ariano Suassuna’s hometown in Paraíba: Taperoá; and, it’s f*****g hilarious. I was so impressed by this book, that I’m gonna reread at the top of 2025. This time, with an eye to translating it.
Here’s the first paragraph of ROMANCE OF THE STONE OF THE KINGDOM AND THE PRINCE OF THE COMING-AND-GOING BLOOD, in my translation:
FROM UP HERE, on the top floor, through the barred windows in the jail where I’m imprisoned, I see the outskirts of our indomitable sertanejo town. Looking up at the sun, it trembles, shining on the nearest rocks. From the harsh, rocky and thorny land, battered by the ovenlike Sun, a burning breath seems to emanate, which could just as well be the gasp of generations and generations of cangaceiros, prophets, and holy men, assassinated during years and years between these wild rocks, as it could be the breathing of this weird Beast, the earth—this Cougar in whose flank resides the flea-ridden race of men. It could also be the fiery breath of that other Beast, the Divinity, the Jaguar, the owner of the Cougar, and who, for millenniums, spurs on our Race, pulling her up high, toward the Kingdom, and toward the Sun.
There are some obvious translation problems already; these very region-specific words like sertanejo and cangaceiro. Which is kinda like countryside and kinda like cowboy… but enough of that for now.
THE SOUND AND THE FURY AWARD
(reading is rereading, the first time you read a book, your eyes are just getting used to what the pages look like; no book exemplified that more to me than The Sound and The Fury, a book I couldn’t make jack-s**t out of the first time I read it, but on subsequent re-reads everything fell into place and now it’s an all-time fav. so this goes to my favorite reread of the year.)
COMPASS, MATHIAS ÉNARD (2015) (translated by CHARLOTTE MANDELL)
This could’ve gone to a few different books. I reread Machado de Assis’s marvelous trilogy (Brás Cubas, Quincas Borba, Dom Casmurro) and Mathias’s first big book Zone; but I already thought those were amazing the first time I hit em.
The first time I read Compass, I thought it was pretty good. But now it’s clear to me that it’s one of the best books of the century. Franz Ritter is an insomniac musicologist. He is up all night in Vienna, sick, probably dying, thinking about classical music, the relationship between the East and West, literature, Syria, but most importantly of all, he’s thinking about the great love of his life, Sarah.
When you read Énard, it’s shocking initially how much he f*****g knows, it’s a flood of erudition, which sounds daunting, but the prose is so stunning and he grounds everything in the simplest most basic human experiences: love, shame, guilt, death. Like, as smart as Franz is, he’s such a doof! Check him here, on a date in Paris, annoying the s**t out of Sarah:
Of course I should not have pointed out to her right away that she had lost a lot of weight, that she was pale, her eyes lined, that wasn’t so clever; but I was surprised by these physical transformations, so pushed to futility by anguish, that I couldn’t help myself, and the day, that day I had brought about, worked on, waited for, imagined, started off on a lamentable footing… [we paused for lunch] in a Turkish restaurant, she kept a sticky silence, while I lurched into hysterical chatter—when you’re drowning, you struggle, wave your arms and legs… I told her the latest news from Vienna… and talked about the oriental lieder of Schubert—my passion at the time—then about Berlioz… until she stopped me in the middle of the pavement,
“Franz you’re getting on my nerves. It’s incredible. You’ve been talking without interruption for two kilometers. Good lord how talkative you can be!”
But the book, beautifully, unmaudlinly, ends on a literal and metaphorical sunrise.
There is no living writer writing better novels than Mathias Énard. Not your Everetts or Fosses or (come on, ew) Franzens (all of whom are more than a decade older than this Mathias).
THE NADA AWARD
(named after one of my all-time favorite novels, the miraculous Nada by Carmen Laforet, it goes to a European novel written by a woman with an untranslated title)
LA BÂTARDE, VIOLETTE LEDUC (1964) (translated by DEREK COLTMAN)
For some reason this book is grouped with the smut in McNally Jackson. I only picked it up because I was at leaves in Brooklyn one day with Gaby and the cover was different than the Dalkey Essentials one it mostly has now. I wasn’t really gonna read it, but we went to a bar and it was daytime and so I read the first paragraph and was completely shocked. Here’s what I said in my pseudonymous amazon review (the only review):
If you love literature, this is one of those necessary books. heed not the description; this is a smutless book abt the ecstasy of everything: pleasure, horror, grief. raw in that it saws down to the essential nerve of feeling. only imaginable comp: if James Joyce wrote Sally Rooney’s novels.
La Batarde (1964), or The B*****d is an “autobiography” of the controversial writer Violette Leduc; I guess she’s controversial cause she fucked women, I don’t know. Violette has the power and perspicacity to dig at the marrow of feeling and experience. When I was reading it I felt like an unshelled turtle or a slug, something very worldprone; I could hardly go outside. I was very affected. Here is a passage about her grandmother’s death, her grandmother who she called “the angel Fideline”:
One night I heard noises and people coming and going. I heard my mother. It’s all over, she said to Clarisse. I got out of bed, I made my way on tiptoe out to the half-open door. What was all over? The pillows, the braid, the nightgown, the lowered eyelids, the hands lying on the sheet were all the same. I went back again. “What is it that’s all over?” I asked the darkness. I could hear the water jug, the basin. Why wasn’t she coughing? I didn’t see Fideline again. I was nine, she was fifty-three. The day that Fideline was buried, this I do remember, it was raining. I didn’t cry, I felt no grief. I chattered to my rag doll. Fideline left the house surrounded by a sea of umbrellas. I leaned out from a second-floor window and watched her go. Five years later I realized that she was dead, that I loved her passionately, that I would never see her again. The cypress beside her grave filled me with despair. Every time I went there, I thought it looked like a torch flaming with anger.
THE ERICH SEGAL AWARD FOR SHITTY F*****G CRAP
(named after my least favorite book of all time, Erich Segal’s Love Story: a book built out of smarm and artificiality: a book that can’t even accidentally evoke a real feeling: a work of anti-literature)
APPLES NEVER FALL (2021), LIANE MORIARTY
I read and listen to plenty of commercial fiction. I like to see what the masses are reading, and I really enjoy a lot of it. Hey, I’ve read and enjoyed all of Sally Rooney (before Intermezzo, which I have but haven’t hit), and this year I really liked Writers & Lovers and The Da Vinci Code and Gone Girl; and was listening to Emily Henry’s People We Meet on Vacation and vibing, before my Spotify listening time ran out (b******s!).
But I picked up Apples Never Fall from the library and this is what I wrote right after I finished it:
really enjoyed the suspense & build up of this book; but it all fizzles, worse than fizzles, it turns craven. it is a book too afraid to explore actual wrongdoing. actual badness. every character only appears to be bad illusively. in reality they are Good. i can forgive the overdrawn-out prose, and the stretches of tedium. but i can't forgive that.
I get that there are different strokes for different folks, but get the f**k outta here with your cowardice. I won’t even tell you the plot or nothing, skip this book. Sorry Liane.
THE PIERRE; OR, THE AMBIGUITIES AWARD
(this award goes to a psycho book written by a lunatic)
PIERRE; OR THE AMBIGUITIES (1852), HERMAN MELVILLE
The common story about Herman Melville is that Moby-Dick ruined his career, but actually it was this book, Pierre; or The Ambiguities. He published it the year after Moby-Dick and one of the reviews ran the headline HERMAN MELVILLE CRAZY. Herman must’ve definitely thought he was crazy. I can’t imagine writing Moby-Dick and this masterpiece, Pierre, within a year of eachother and having everybody talk about how much the books suck. Even a normally astute critic like John Updike says this book is “ludicrously bad” (and he would know a thing or two about ludicrously bad bookS—though amidst the stinkers, Updike has some winners).
Pierre is about a Herman-like young man named Pierre who has a very close, kinda weird (definitely weird) relationship with his mom, and he’s engaged to a very pretty young woman, Lucy, and they live in this idyllic flower-filled world; until he sees this dark-haired sad girl at a party and his loins explode; and then he finds out his dead father (who he’s also obsessed with via a portrait of him), had a secret daughter—and guess who it is? the girl from the party, Isabel. Darkness subsumes his life: he breaks off his engagement and runs off to New York City with his half-sister under the guise of protecting her but really out of some lusty-lustiness. And then his old fiance comes to live with him. And they’re dead-ass a throuple. Melville sought out to write an entertaining romance, he said, and I think that’s what this book is. But his style is ludicrously sublime, filled with authorial intrusions. Sure, yeah, it’s crazy, but that’s what makes it so awesome. Here’s right after Pierre finds out about his sis:
IN their precise tracings-out and subtile causations, the strongest and fieriest emotions of life defy all analytical insight. We see the cloud, and feel its bolt; but meteorology only idly essays a critical scrutiny as to how that cloud became charged, and how this bolt so stuns. The metaphysical writers confess, that the most impressive, sudden, and overwhelming event, as well as the minutest, is but the product of an infinite series of infinitely involved and untraceable foregoing occurrences. Just so with every motion of the heart. Why this cheek kindles with a noble enthusiasm; why that lip curls in scorn; these are things not wholly imputable to the immediate apparent cause, which is only one link in the chain; but to a long line of dependencies whose further part is lost in the mid-regions of the impalpable air.
Idle then would it be to attempt by any winding way so to penetrate into the heart, and memory, and inmost life, and nature of Pierre, as to show why it was that a piece of intelligence which, in the natural course of things, many amiable gentlemen, both young and old, have been known to receive with a momentary feeling of surprise, and then a little curiosity to know more, and at last an entire unconcern; idle would it be, to attempt to show how to Pierre it rolled down on his soul like melted lava, and left so deep a deposit of desolation, that all his subsequent endeavors never restored the original temples to the soil, nor all his culture completely revived its buried bloom.
As much as I like to pretend all books are for everybody, Pierre is certainly not for everyone. Thusly I’ll award a second, more accessible book,
GENOA: A TELLING OF WONDERS (1965), PAUL METCALF
The legend goes that when Paul Metcalf was a child, he went up into his attic and unearthed some manuscripts by his grandfather (a name that was hush-hush-hush in that household up until then because of his tremendous life-failure), and it turns out that one of the manuscripts he found was the unpublished Billy Budd. Metcalf was the grandson of Herman Melville; reared by his only child (out of 4) who survived into late adulthood.
This book is totally awesome. The narrator is obsessed with Herman Melville and Christopher Columbus and he uses their stories, excerpting from Columbus's journals and Melville’s books to try to make sense of what happened with his brother—his brother who is in prison, about to be executed by the state for doing something heinous. It’s a book that tries to make sense of failure and negligence and evil; erstwhile grappling with the fact that it might just all be written in our genetic code. I’d never heard of Paul Metcalf, but his collected works were put out by Coffee House Press and introduced by Guy Davenport (one of the best readers of all time; anything he puts his stamp on is worthwhile), and I’ve flipped thru it and everything he’s doing is super interesting and seems very relevant in 2024. Genoa is his best book and it’s a slim one. It’s hard to quote from it because the whole style is the threading and stitching of everything. But please check it out!
THE FINNEGANS WAKE AWARD
(for the book that pushed artistic boundaries the farthest, the most magisterial book of the year, i.e. the best book of the year written in some semblance of english)
ADA OR ARDOR (1969), VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Vlad is coy about his influences. But this book is his version of Finnegans Wake (though he hated that book, he said); except much, much more readable. And, I think, he had Pierre; or The Ambiguities in mind here, too (he adored Melville). This book is the culmination of Nabokov’s whole artistic project. It’s written in the form of a nonagenarian’s memoir about his life-ruining & enriching love affairs. Our narrator, Van Vleen is probably the devil. He certainly leaves a lot of destruction in his wake. This book moves from paradise, to inferno, to purgatory, back to paradise—and all those states are mixed up in between. At the end though, our demon Vleen comes to a sort of married bliss with his Ada, that makes one think of Vlad and Vera in their senesce. I love Nabokov, a lot. And this is OD Nabokov. The writing is off the charts, the literary games are running wild. It’s so tender, so beautiful, so sweet, so horrific, and often very funny. In his copy of the novel, he wrote “A work of genius—a pearl of American literature.” It’s only arrogant if you’re wrong, and he is spot on!
Here is him, writing coyly about Van and Ada’s original sin (original sin, I mean, in the Edenic sense):
Van, in blue gym suit, having worked his way up to a fork just under his agile playmate (who naturally was better acquainted with the tree’s intricate map) but not being able to see her face, betokened mute communication by taking her ankle between finger and thumb as she would have a closed butterfly. Her bare foot slipped, and the two panting youngsters tangled ignominiously among the branches, in a shower of drupes and leaves, clutching at each other, and the next moment, as they regained a semblance of balance, his expressionless face and cropped head were between her legs and a last fruit fell with a thud—the dropped dot of an inverted exclamation point. She was wearing his wristwatch and a cotton frock.
He grabbed her ankle as she would’ve a closed butterfly, come on!!! The fruit falling to periphrase their pruriency, come on!!!
THE HAROLD ROGERS AWARD
(awarded to the most recent book published by Harold Rogers)
TROPICÁLIA (2023), HAROLD ROGERS
Maybe I’m a little biased because I know the author. But come on, bruh. This book is sick. New Year’s Eve in Rio de Janeiro. Mysteries, secrets, murders, betrayals. There’s a family tree on page 0 that we actually find out is a dupe, is a fake. It’s a good one!
From midway thru the book, Lucia speaking:
If it was my fate to be just like my mother there was nothing I could do. We were all sick trees planted in a sick soil, everyone in my whole family from the very beginning, all we did was hurt eachother. It’s these entanglements that sink us. I needed to be perfectly alone, where there was nobody to harm, nobody to betray, no reason for me to be Lucia, I would be as pure as the wind and the air and then finally I could be good. But there was no leaving this web. We were jumbled in this muddle forever. Was it really all just oblivion? Just terror and torpor until your coffin is sealed shut? It couldn’t be. What about those grinning mornings spent listening to my grandma’s stories and hearing Marta laugh? Love was anguish when you were in the dark pit of it, but then the pretty sunshine peaked over the horizon and you forgot. How could you live just for yourself? That would grind you down to a nub of a soul. It would be an emaciated life. I didn’t wanna spend my brief drama of flesh in spiritual penury… Existence was a putrid, overflowing dump, filled with all these dumb idiots getting in my way, but I wanted all of it.
ETCETERAS
Dear reader, careful reader, you may notice the paucity (utter lack) of books on this list published in the last few years. Expecting mine, the most recent book is Compass, and that’s about ten years old. Every year, I read many very recently published books. But it’s hard for me to judge because I like almost all of them a whole lot. Because contemporary language can be ingested very rapidly. So it’s like eating a delicious meal whose nutrition can’t be determined, I think, for a decade or so. It’s not my business to determine the immediate value of these books; only time will tell. But here are 10 very contemporary books I enjoyed this year in the chronological order of when I read them:
Diorama, Carol Bensimon
Via Apia, Geovani Martins (coming out in english in 2025!)
O Presidente Pornô, Bruna Kalil Othero
The Most Secret Memory of Men, Mohammed Mbougar Sarr
Same Bed Different Dreams, Ed Park
Victim, Andrew Boryga
The Red Handler, Johan Harstad
Os Supridores, Jose Falero (Pedro and Marques Take Stock, in english)
America del Norte, Nicholas Medina Mora
American Abductions, Mauro Javier Cardenas
IF YOU HAVE ALTERNATIVE PICKS YOU THINK SHOULD’VE BEEN AWARDED IN ANY OF THESE CATEGORIES, PLZ DROP A COMMENT. HAPPY BOXING DAY.
