Reader's Choice: Books Introduced by Merve Emre
Your Choices: 'I Am Alien to Life' by Djuna Barnes, 'Waiting For the Fear' by Oğuz Atay and 'Texas: The Great Theft' by Carmen Boullosa
If you don’t know who Merve Emre is, my friends, get informed. She is one of the sharpest, most insightful, prolific and delightful-to-read literary critics writing today. She’s a professor at Wesleyan University, a contributing writer at The New Yorker, the Special Projects editor at The New York Review of Books, a podcast host for Lit Hub, and has won more awards and accolades than I can count. Donna and I saw her at a recent McNally Jackson panel about books published by its in-house imprint. We were riveted as she took over the hosting duties from a boring and unprepared emcee, and guided her fellow panelists to a fascinating conversation about Dorothy Parker, Caroline Blackwood and Djuna Barnes. Donna and I were like:
Over the last few months, I’ve acquired several books with a foreword by Emre. I thought it would be fun to showcase them and ask you to help me pick which one to read first. Remember to scroll down and vote!
‘I Am Alien to Life’ by Djuna Barnes
I was excited to read more Djuna Barnes after reviewing ‘Nightwood’ last year, and when I saw McNally Jackson was publishing a collection of her short stories called ‘I Am Alien to Life’—which is edited and has a foreword by Emre—I knew I had to get it. In the fall, Donna and I braved the high winds and torrential rains to visit the Brooklyn Book Festival. At McNally Jackson’s table, I spied copies of the book—before it’s official release—so I politely but purposefully pushed through the damp scrum of book lovers to secure a copy like:
The back-cover blurb says ‘I Am Alien to Life’ includes the ‘best of Djuna Barnes’s dark, droll, incisive short fiction, spanning her all-too-brief career.’ Here’s a bit of what Merve Emre says:
To read Djuna Barnes attentively is to begin to suspect how wretched she must have been. Her themes are love and death, especially in Paris and New York; the corruption of nature by culture; the tainted innocence of children; and the mute misery of beasts. In nearly every other one of her stories, one encounters a man or a woman down on all fours, trembling, weeping, half-mad with lust or torment. In “Spillway,” the tubercular Mrs. Julie Anspacher returns from a long stay at a sanatorium with a daughter, the dying child of a dead lover, and tries to explain the nature of her misery to her bewildered husband. “It is a thing beyond the end of everything,” she tells him. “It’s suffering without a consummation; it’s like insufficient sleep; it’s like anything without proportion.” Yet her suffering fills her with a hysterical joy—with the ecstasy of having become “alien to life.” When, at the end of the story, she lowers herself “down, down, down, down” on her hands and knees, one wonders if she will ever get up again.
That sounds like an intense follow-up to ‘Nightwood,’ indeed!
‘Waiting for the Fear’ by Oğuz Atay
I was browsing Lofty Pigeon Books, my neighborhood bookstore/wallet vacuum, when I saw the spine of ‘Waiting for the Fear’ on a shelf. The title piqued my curiosity, as did the red-and-black color scheme, the fact that the author was unknown to me, and that it was published by the New York Review of Books, which rarely misses. I was like:
I pulled it from the shelf, and when I saw the cover photograph and the note of an intro by Emre, I headed straight to the cash register. The back-cover blurb says: ‘Atay’s stories are vivid with life’s absurdities and psychologically true to life, while his characters, oddballs and losers all, are utterly individual. A brilliant examiner of the inner life, Atay is no less aware of the flawed social world in which his people struggle to make their way, and he is exceptionally attuned to the strange power storytelling itself can exert over fate.’ Here’s a bit of what Merve Emre says:
It was a great shock to me to learn that the writer Oğuz Atay was only forty-three years old when he died of a brain tumor in 1977. The eight stories in Waiting for the Fear, first published in 1975, evoke the rancor and loneliness of a much older man—a misanthrope, or a crank, the beneficiary of a lifetime’s worth of comically bad luck and disappointment. But Atay was reputed to be even-keeled and pragmatic and largely content with his life as a professor of engineering, who in private had happened to write some of the funniest and most enigmatic fiction in Turkey. Photographs show a boyish, handsomely dressed man with laughing eyes and a trim little mustache, sitting at his desk or standing by the seashore with his daughter. “Ben sanıldığı kadar karamsar değilim,” he liked to insist. “I am not as pessimistic as people think.” How to explain the absurdism and the despair of his writing, which stands as one of the crowning achievements of Turkish literature?
I’m definitely intrigued!
‘Texas: The Great Theft’ by Carmen Boullosa
After picking up ‘I Am Alien to Life’ and ‘Waiting for the Fear,’ I posted a photo of both books on Instagram and said, half in jest, that I should find a third book introduced by Emre and do a roundup. She replied! She mentioned she had recently done intros for a new edition of ‘A Room of One’s Own’ by Virginia Woolf and the 10th anniversary edition of ‘Texas: The Great Theft’ by Carmen Boullosa. Since Donna already has a copy of ‘A Room of One’s Own,’ I was like:
‘Loosely based on the little-known 1859 Mexican invasion of the United States, Texas: The Great Theft is a richly imagined evocation of the volatile Tex-Mex borderland,’ reads the back-cover blurb. ‘Boullosa views border history through a new lens, decentering U.S. narratives, and her sympathetic portrayal of each of her wildly diverse characters—Mexican ranchers and Texas Rangers, Comanches and cowboys, German socialists and runaway slaves, Southern belles and dancehall girls—makes her storytelling tremendously powerful and absorbing.’ Here’s a bit of what Merve Emre says:
The spirit of gossip presides over Carmen Boullosa’s Texas: The Great Theft. Opening the book to its first page, we find “A Busybody’s Brief Note.” “Let’s state it up front, so we don’t get muddled: this is the year 1859,” it begins “We’re on the northern and southern banks of the Rio Bravo, known to some as the Rio Grande, in the cities of Bruneville and Matasánchez. Heading into the wind on horseback we could make it to the sea in half a morning.” It is a relief in a strange new novel to know where we are and when. But do we? If we read these sentences again, we begin to see how the matter-of-fact precision of the first—“this is the year 1859”—is, in fact, muddled by the second. How are we on both the northern and southern banks of the Rio Bravo (or is it the Rio Grande?), in the cities of Bruneville and Matasánchez at the same time? Before we can figure out how to be in two places at once, we are swept away by the third sentence, galloped from the city to the sea; its cold blue air rises to greet us at the end of a journey we barely register making. Already, we are bewildered—well before the busybody tells us about the thefts and betrayals of the Americans, the gringos who carved the state of Texas out of Mexico’s northern frontier and established the city of Bruneville to protect their invented border.
This sounds fascinating and relevant to today’s issues. What do you think of these books? Have you read any of them? Let me know in the comments, and tell me which to review first by taking this poll:
Books on GIF does not solicit or accept review copies. We feature books we purchase at independent bookstores around New York City and on our travels, or were borrowed electronically from the Brooklyn Public Library.
Thanks for reading, and thanks especially to Donna for editing this newsletter!
Until next time,
Mike
Texas is a wildly fun book! (Haven’t read the other two)
“my neighborhood bookstore/wallet vacuum” 😂😂😂