Reading and Routines

It's the part of January where I start to lose my marbles

Every day I wake up at 6:30. I take my dog outside then bundle her up in her blanket on the couch, then I do two Duolingo lessons while the water for coffee comes to a boil. I eat breakfast and read, then walk the dog once around the block. 

When the weather’s decent, we’ll often stop to visit with neighbors: the princess-obsessed seven year old and her moms, the super-chatty platinum blonde who looks like she was transported straight from Brighton Beach, the mail carrier who always greets my dog like she’s a person: “Hey, good to see ya! What have you been up to lately? You’re looking great!” 

But now the temps are in the single digits and the sidewalks are solidly iced over, and nobody wants to be outside unless it’s absolutely necessary. The trees are dormant, the skies are overcast, it’s hard to believe that I’ll ever again in my life see a color other than gray. The world offers none of the pleasures of surprise, only routine. I used to think that I read so much in January out of some kind of New Year’s enthusiasm, but I wonder if it isn’t just because I’m desperate for encounters, surprises, experiences. Here’s a movie and two books I liked a lot recently. What have you been into?

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Carmen Comes Home (1951, dir. Keisuke Kinoshita)
In Japan’s first color feature, Carmen is a big-city dancer returning on a visit to her rural hometown. Residents are starry-eyed over the thought that their humble village produced such a fine artiste, until some schoolkids catch her rehearsing an “indecent” routine and everyone discovers she’s really a stripper. Scandal! To the shame of her father and the consternation of the local intelligentsia (read: school principal), Carmen decides to perform her act for the town. Spoiler alert: everything goes great, actually. While the USA was in the middle of the Hays Code years, Keisuke Kinoshita was making this gentle comedy about a stripper living her best life. It’s so thrilling to watch a sex comedy that is, whatever its own hangups, decidedly not haunted by the particular hangups of American Christianity. 

All This Could Be Different (Sarah Thankam Mathews) 
In theory, at least, I love “political” fiction, but in practice it’s always risky to write characters who love talking about Big Topics: capitalism, gender politics, whatever. Not because it’s unrealistic—obviously, real life people talk about this stuff constantly—but because sometimes (as in, say, some of Jonathan Franzen’s less-good stuff) you get the impression that the writer got so seduced by the ideas that they lost interest in the actual people. All This Could Be Different is filled with ideas, but also with characters who all, always, have bodies, histories, desires, vulnerabilities! Not representatives of ideologies, not personality types, but full-fledged personalities. The evil property manager is one of the most chilling villains I’ve ever met in literary fiction. I loved it so much. 

Is Mother Dead (Vigdis Hjorth)
Thirty years ago, Johanna moved to America and cut off contact with her family. Now she’s back in Norway and hellbent on making contact with her mother, who wants nothing to do with her. The more her mom ignores her, the more it drives Johanna nuts: Has she gotten my messages? What does she think about me? She is thinking about me, right, she has to? With the exception of a single explosive scene at the end, relatively little actually happens—most of the action is interior, as Johanna projects, wonders, replays history, argues with imagined versions of her mother. Like Will and Testament, whose 2019 translation brought Hjorth to the attention of the English-speaking world, this is a novel about the emotional experience of being a family’s scapegoat—about, to use language currently fashionable in online self-help spheres, breaking generational curses. I’m a little surprised that Hjorth hasn’t gotten huge on pop-psych TikTok. I’m scared it’s coming.