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With that, let’s get into the books.
Since Alice Munro’s death last month, I’ve been rereading The Beggar Maid, her 1987 novel-in-stories, and thinking about what a perfect book it is.
The novel-in-stories form is maybe one of the most beautiful variations on the novel, and it’s a structure Munro innovated and mastered. It means a collection of short stories featuring the same characters which, when compiled into a single volume, become a long narrative about them. You might think here of Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad or Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street.
In The Beggar Maid (published outside the US as Who Do You Think You Are?), the short stories are about Rose, a bright and awkward girl growing up in small-town Canada, and her stepmother Flo, who Rose both admires and is ashamed of. You follow Rose from her clumsy childhood up to her glamorous adulthood, watching the way her life is informed by the impoverished small town she’s left behind. Each story in the cycle stands on its own, discrete and shining like a pearl, and then Munro strings them all together into something new like beads on a necklace.
If you haven’t read Munro before, The Beggar Maid is a good place to start. If you’d like something else to read, let’s see what we can do for you.
On the shelf
The Virgin in the Garden by A.S. Byatt
While we’re on the subject of memorial readings! A few months ago, we also lost A.S. Byatt, author of Possession and a longstanding favorite of mine. Byatt, who was also an English professor, wrote primarily bookish novels about academics. She had a deep sense of the pleasures of reading and analyzing a text, and she had an impeccable eye for writing about color. Byatt novels are always streaked with descriptions of peacock greens and deep rich crimsons and shadowy mauves, so that reading them feels like standing beneath a stained glass window.
Byatt’s best known for the Booker Prize-winning Possession, but the book of hers that’s been speaking to me most lately is her 1978 novel The Virgin in the Garden. It’s about a family of academics, all very clever and varying degrees of unhappy, who are roped into putting on a play about Queen Elizabeth I to celebrate the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. The great joy of it for me is Fredericka, the youngest daughter of the family, bursting with bratty joy at her own erudite intelligence. There’s no one else in fiction quite like her.
You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue, translated by Natasha Wimmer
This is an absolute wonder of a new novel from Álvaro Enrigue, an institution in Mexico but whose work only recently became available to English-language readers. (You Dreamed of Empires is Enrigue’s third book to be published in English.) It takes place over the course of a single day in 1519, when the Spanish conquistador Cortés arrives at the imperial palace of Moctezuma in what is now Mexico City.
Cortés’s troops are ragged and unwashed, “provincials, nobodies, hicks,” who are fixated on “the juice of rotting fruit they bring from their own lands.” The Tenochtitláns (rendered Aztecs by the rude Spanish) are, in contrast, magnificently wealthy, at the seat of a massive empire, and lavished with such marvels as quilts, grasshopper tacos, and magic mushrooms. (Moctezuma spends a lot of his page time in this novel tripping.) We know how history ends — but in Enrigue’s playful, hallucinatory prose, it feels entirely possible for things to go in different directions.
The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley
The Ministry of Time is an unbelievably satisfying read, one I could not put down. Published just last month, it takes place in a near-future London where the British government has developed the technology to time travel. To test it, they’ve extracted people out of historical death traps and into the present moment. Our unnamed narrator is a government bureaucrat hired to help one such time traveler adjust to the present as his live-in companion. Of course they fall in love, but there’s a lot more to it than that.
The narrator references Graham Greene’s midcentury wartime spy novels a lot, and that’s more or less the best comparison for this book. Think: smoke-filled rooms full of intrigue, hard-won camaraderie that is all the more precious for existing in so desperate a time, a protagonist who is never quite as innocent as she would like to believe herself. To that mix, Bradley adds time travel, romance, and a sophisticated exploration of the ways post-colonialism shapes our minds. I gobbled this book up in a matter of days. You will, too.
Off the shelf
In the New Yorker, Katy Waldman explores what Covid did to fiction.
Dracula is an epistolary novel, made up of dated diary entries, letters, and newspaper clippings. This delightful Substack sends excerpts from the book to your inbox on the dates referenced in the original story.
In an escalation that should surprise none of us, the people who went after school libraries are now going after public libraries, too.
A question advice columns were built for: Should I warn my family about the sex scenes in my book?
At the Paris Review, Lucy Schiller explores the strange formality of internet prose.
BookTok isn’t actually a community driven by fans, writers, influencers, or even publishers, argues Jezebel.