April is the month of deadlines, of personnel reviews, of conference papers coming due, all of which a good book to come home to of an evening all the more important, even if I find myself reading in ten- or twelve-minute bursts. What I’m now reading, or what I just finished:
Angélica Gorodischer’s Fábula de la Virgen y el Bombero (1993). We’ve been consulting about a new translation project (many options out there) so I’ve been reading quite a bit of her work. This is a dense, tangly puzzle of a novel, with multiple perspectives (temporal and personal)–a police procedural, family drama, social history (early 20th-century Rosario), fable? A bit of everything. I’m just past halfway through, and each chapter pulls me further into the mystery. Not at all sure yet where we’ll end up.
Belief Is Its Own Kind of Truth, Maybe, by Lori Jakiela (2015). I picked this one up at AWP, from Atticus Books. It’s a memoir, an adoption story. I found the pacing masterful, the way we learn about the narrator and her family step by step. I was caught from the first sentence (“When my real mother dies, I go looking for another one.”). No burdensome backstory, and a willingness to leave gaps–not irritating gaps, but the spaces in a story that maybe can’t be filled in. It becomes clear that much of the search she’s describing occurred years ago, but it feels immediate. I liked the way Jakiela works in dialogue, sometimes listing several statements or remarks by one speaker, leaving the reader to imagine the likely or possible response. I wonder if I can do that? I’m still thinking about this book, and how it connects to or differs from other adoption stories I’ve heard or read.
And for comic relief: Dear Committee Members, by Julie Schumacher. An epistolary novel in letters of recommendation from a cranky professor of creative writing. Need I say more?