Alisa Ganieva: Bride & Groom

Ganieva, Alisa (2018 [2015]), Bride & Groom, Deep Vellum
trans. Carol Apollonio
ISBN 978-1-941920-59-6

This is the first novel by Alisa Ganieva I have read – and one of embarrassingly few novels by contemporary Russian writers on my shelf. Bride & Groom (published in Russian as Жених и невеста) is an excellent novel, and my appreciation of it has only increased as the weeks passed between finishing it and sitting down to type up this quick note. This is the second novel by Ganieva to be translated into English (and her third work of fiction generally), with a third (Оскорблённые чувства, translated as Offended Sensibilities) coming down the pike this year, and all reviews and comments on it note the progression from the previously translated novel, The Mountain and The Wall (Праздничная гора) to this one, as one where the writer moves from a more macro to a more micro perspective, from a novel concerned with a whole country to one dealing with one small town and two youngish people who may or may not get married. All three novels are translated by Carol Apollonio who finds such a lively and idiom-rich English language for Ganieva’s words that I am occasionally suspicious of it.

All of her novels are set in Dagestan, a Russian republic in the very south of the still quite enormous Russian Federation. Like many of the republics at the fringes of Russia, it has had a capricious history before being colonized by Russia – in recent years, it has similarly known upheaval. As Ganieva notes in various interviews, Dagestani identity has been eroded by Soviet rule, and while it has a long Islamic history, today’s Islamic movements in Dagestan, such as the 1999 attempt to create an “independent Islamic State of Dagestan,” are not an evocation of old rules. As Ganieva says:

“[young people] began re-finding their roots and many found them in what turned out to be a superficial version of religion. They’re trying to eliminate the Soviet lifestyle, but they’re not truly Dagestani either. They’re trying to be Arabs or, I don’t know, general Muslims.”

What Bride & Groom discusses is how these cultural attempts to find one’s identity put young people in Dagestan in a bind. The Russian state’s grasp on local laws is famously weak this far away from Moscow, as various waves of laws since the early 2000s paradoxically demonstrate, including a ban on the title of “president” for local leaders and an abolition of mandatory minority language teaching in 2018. In effect, this leads to complex layers of local chieftains attempting to control their fiefdoms by using violence, local religion, as well as good old-fashioned corruption. None of this is exactly new. Ganieva’s major success in her novel is to show how these folds of power and violence interact with age-old patriarchal structures, making marriage, the sacrament at the center of her novel, both an instrument of social control and an attempt to establish control over the smallest local community: individual households.

What she also discusses is how women are consistently under threat of power being exercised against them. Violence and control happen to them, though, in a pivotal episode at the very end, they can push those in power a little to achieve their own minor ends. Truly every woman in the novel has to be vigilant of the men in her life, careful to occupy the correct role. Men consistently talk down to women, abuse women, and use marriage as a way to control women and at the same time elevate their own position in life. In her excellent polemic Tomorrow Sex will Be Good Again, Katherine Angel explains why the focus on consent is blind to the many expectations and demands put on women by various systems of power, and how people often operate under a fiction of consent.  It is extremely hard to say that anyone in the novel cares about women’s consent for anything, but consent, explicit consent is frequently given, and not under explicit threats of violence.

Instead, the threats are, mostly, implicit threats, a tapestry woven by the incessant chatter. Marriage is a protection from men. Being in love with a man who does not, then, marry you, is the worst-case scenario. You don’t have to be pregnant for it, but you will then no longer find a husband, unless you are willing to compromise especially deeply. Angel discusses sexual mores and agreements as attempts “to be safe from violence” – and indeed, in Ganieva’s novel, women weigh one act of violence against the other. And even if you accept the above example as a kind of misstep, a wrongdoing, a sin, an action that a woman cannot do in this small town on the fringes of Russia, without condemnation – Ganieva offers other examples of women condemned for the actions of men without any previous mistake.

A man who had sex with a woman presented to us as a prostitute (more likely merely a woman who agreed to have intercourse with said man) comes home to the small town to marry. The woman follows him, having been impregnated. She comes with an army of support, brothers, mothers, in order to interrupt his engagement. Though his own army of friends and family try to prevent a confrontation, the pregnant woman’s mother utters a black curse in the middle of the engagement celebration. The engagement is called off, everyone involved is some level of embarrassed. In later pages we learn that this is a black mark on the fiancée. Not on her husband-to-be, not on his family, not on his friends who made unpleasant jokes about his prostitute earlier. This woman, whose only mistake was picking the wrong partner, is now single, old(er) and effectively unmarriable. She, too, will have to make some kind of compromise, if she does not want to entirely forego the protection of marriage.

In yet another interview, Ganieva notes that while there is indeed “the general perception of women as some kind of property of the family that has to be protected from the outside world” – the internet has not changed things in the slightest:

“the Internet is becoming an instrument of control and surveillance. Compromising evidence on women recorded on mobile cameras by men has turned into a regular blackmailing technique. Secret male groups in social networks are used to accumulate and exchange compromising information about young women.”

In fact, the female protagonist’s flirtatious behavior with a man leads to her being pressured, stalked, and threatened by said man who promises to marshal power, violence, and influence in order to force her into marriage.

This is the first time I mentioned either protagonist of the novel and that’s because the novel is not primarily propelled forward by plot, but by the inexorable accumulation of events, pressure, violence. While there are two protagonists who will have an amorous relationship, Bride & Groom doesn’t just mean specific people, it designates the entire power structure, that mixture of fear, superstition and corruption that pervades everything and that women are at the receiving end of. The book is told in alternating chapters from the point of view of two youngish people approaching their 30s. Both have worked in Moscow and have returned home for a visit. Both meet friends and stay with family, and both are pressured by their respective family to get married. The book charts their movements – and in more broad terms, their movements towards each other. However, as we follow them around town, we find that they encounter different realities.

Marat, a young lawyer, has the respect of important people around town, and his parents rent him a banquet hall in the hopes for his engagement to happen before his visit ends. Marat and his friends speak badly of women, it’s what you do, after all, and he is among the people laughing at the abovementioned prostitute jokes. However, the main topic of conversation are not women. It is the former mayor, it is the rise of Islam and the tensions between the two major Muslim communities in town, weighty topics like that. For Patya, a young woman who has held an office job in Moscow, most conversations revolve around men. Not just because she is not included in political conversation. But also, because she and her friends have to negotiate a very different set of threats and fears. She is not afraid of the growing tension between abstract communities of Muslims, she is specifically afraid of a man named Timur who is a vocal leader in his mosque. And so on. Her mother does not offer the gift and prospect of a banquet hall – instead, Patya is inundated by threats and complaints.

Ganieva’s writing, in Carol Appolonio’s translation, is occasionally a bit static – but much of the value of the novel is not on its surface. Beyond the aspects I mentioned, and which clearly interested me most, there’s an entire additional level of allusions to Islamic myth and sufism. Symbolic colors and objects abound. In the afterword of the Deep Vellum edition, it is Ganieva herself who explains these connections and subtexts. In the end, the paths of the novel’s characters arc towards dissolution “into the substance of the divine.” While the novel can be a bit slow going at times, its multi-layered structure rewards re-readings. What’s more – I may be unreasonably drawn to the dour aspects of the book. Go read this excellent review in Asymptote which notes the light and enjoyable traits of the novel, comparing its patter to Jane Austen.

Catherynne M. Valente: The Past Is Red

Valente, Catherynne M. (2021), The Past Is Red, Tor
ISBN 978-1-250-30113-0

I have complained on this blog about the disrespect shown to genre writers who are regarded a notch below mainstream fiction writers, despite often being just as good – or better- stylists. M. John Harrison is often a standard example, as he is clearly one of the best living British novelists, maybe the single best male one, and yet his work does not receive the plaudits that the boring mealy assemblages of platitudes by Ian McEwan and Julian Barnes often do. There’s a curious justice to the fact that he is currently on the jury giving out the Booker Prize, when almost every book of his had deserved at minimum shortlist consideration in previous years. But despite Harrison being the go-to answer (there’s a famous Miéville note on the subject), the same complaint should apply to his fellow “genre” writers Gwyneth Jones and Catherynne Valente. I have reviewed Gwyneth Jones here (a better writer than Harrison), and I am a great admirer of Catherynne M. Valente – she has been consistently producing imaginative fiction that’s complex, well written and unusual. Her most famous book is The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, the first in a series of YA novels about a young girl named September who gets drawn into the faery world. My favorite Valente novel is Palimpsest, a novel in the style of M. John Harrison’s Viriconium, and the best recommendation to give out to anyone who has read early Gaiman and who would like something similar but better. I feel like Valente has recently been given more of a spotlight and she has made the absolute most of it, with 2021 seeing the publication of two short novels and 2022 another, heftier YA novel in the style of the Girl series of books, all three of them excellent.

The first of the two 2021 books is The Past Is Red, and it is a combination of two related novellettes, one of which had already been published in 2017. It is also an absolute masterpiece. The first half, “The Future is Blue”, won a Theodore Sturgeon award in 2017, and in 2021, Valente added the second half and published the whole thing as a novel(la?). Despite being the best book on the shortlist, the book was merely shortlisted for the best novella Hugo. It is easy to see why Becky Chambers’ book won the award though. Chambers’ work, as a signature book in the solarpunk genre, is a much more open and positive view of the post apocalypse. In fact, it is one of three novellas on the 2021 Hugo shortlist that share the theme of technological collapse in a way. Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Elder Race, which inverts the usual narratives of both fantasy and first-contact science fiction, draws on similar ideas. Where Becky Chambers has her protagonist, who lives in a post-technology world, encounter and befriend a robot, Tchaikovsky’s protagonist is a scientist who is watching over a post-technological human colony, giving a new gloss on the old magic/sufficiently advanced technology chestnut. Both books draw from a contrast between technology and an Edenic technology- free world, where the contrast is used for color and fun, but there is no urgency, no threat, no real problem here. Surely, I’m not the only one thinking about books like Canticle – where technology has been wedded to a certain permanent menace.

This is why Valente’s novella is such a gift to contemporary science fiction. The Past Is Red sits in an interesting spot in this technology vs fantasy divide. The question for post-technology science fiction is always – what do you do with the existing technology? What happens to the existing things? We have all learned, when urged to recycle, how long it takes for things to go away. The usual way texts deal with this is what Tchaikovsky’s book does: the hub, the spaceship, observatory station etc., is now seen as a tower. The main character’s life, by constantly going into stasis, exceeds the lifespan of the colony humans, and technology turns into myth. A house is a house is a house, I suppose. But in order for there to be an Edenic green post-apocalypse, with overgrown electrical equipment, a lot of things have to go right – these are not real dystopias. Valente understands this and updates the fear permeating books like Canticle for our modern age. The apocalypse in her book comes from a surfeit of events that have destroyed earth. Climate change, certainly, but the destruction is so complete that a series of other problems have been added to the list. It is hard to describe this without spoiling a central revelation of the second half of the novel, but before things went to shit, humanity was more advanced than we are now, but even ideas of off-world colonies end up beset by threats and problems. This information is given to us here and there, in drips and drops. “The Future is Blue,” the book’s first half, is particularly impressive at avoiding info dumps. The two halves are tonally different, there is a sad, elegiac sense to the second half of the book, which accommodates the occasional offer of complete pieces of information more smoothly.

“The Future is Blue” on the other hand moves quickly – there is a quirkiness to the narration of events which are objectively less than ideal. Much of Humanity lives on a floating enormous garbage patch called Garbagetown. Garbagetown consists of – well, garbage, and generations of living in these conditions have led to the restructuring of the garbage. People are just as unaware of technology from before the apocalypse as in Chambers’ and Tchaikovsky’s books, but they are not untouched by it. Valente does not reject technology to build a world – instead she recognizes just how much of our world consists of varying levels of technology. People living in Garbagetown can barely use some of the technology they have, they can certainly not understand it. The use of technology has devolved into rituals and magic, and those parts of Garbagetown that run on technology that is still working (there are some functioning machines and there is electricity) are naturally the richest. “The Future is Blue” is one long flashback, narrated by Tetley, the most hated girl in Garbagetown. From her we learn that naming, one of the most common mechanisms in fantasy fiction, is not automatic – parents don’t name you; you go out into the world and the world names you, often through the interaction with objects in the world. And as all objects in that world are our garbage, there’s complex relationship between the traditions and narratives of the world of Garbagetown and our own world and narratives. This is a clever spin on the way traditions work in many indigenous cultures, where maturity is connected to an epiphany, encounter, or act in your teenage-age life. Insults have become a central element of discourse on Garbagetown, and many names derive from insults received on that fateful outing.

Names from our world – brand names, descriptive names, things, in other words that are carried by objects permanently in the form of trash with labels and text and messages – become words in the world of Garbagetown. The original meaning is completely lost and all we are left with are new sources for words in a world with rapidly diminishing stimuli. There is a connection to Waterworld, as the inhabitants of Garbagetown are permanently living in hope of finding terra firma somewhere. People have noted this with regards to Costner’s box office bomb, but the combination of in-narrative utopian ideas within a dystopian setting really underlines and contextualizes the way prophecies and utopias rely on a trace of meaning, an unrecoverable place that suggests a meaningful path but can never entirely be reached. Tetley in the end removes a real-world connection to this permanent hope, which makes her the most hated girl in the world. There are so many more ideas Valente uses – for example: Tetley becomes, as punishment, a homo sacer, a person outside of the law who can be beaten or killed without consequences. That said, there is no such thing as law in the post code civil sense of the word in Garbagetown. It is all ritual and violence. Gifts, threats and other primal elements rule the world of Garbagetown. Fittingly, the writing is sometimes downright rhythmic, dense, some of the most concise prose published in all of 2021.

In the “The Past Is Red”, Tetley flees Garbagetown on a boat – and encounters a piece of technology that still works, but unlike the simple electricity in Garbagetown requires knowledge in order to get it to work. It is an artificial intelligence which has to be activated. During the course of the book, this AI will connect Tetley to a girl named Olivia who lives off-world, but at no point does Tetley entirely understand what is happening on a technological level. This second half of the book is much less dense, softer and more emotional. It exists primarily to close the story of “The Future is Blue,” which gives very little context and information. Olivia and the AI are talking equal parts to Tetley and to us, as ambassadors of this world to us, who share more with us than Tetley does. There is no additional reasons for hope in that new narrative, Valente does not soften the brutality of this post-apocalyptic world, but she does give us something: hope as a function of our humanity, and community as a fundamental element of how we as humans work and survive. I cannot tell you how tired I am of the “lone man on the moon” science fiction stories, written by men, who have wives and mothers cleaning after them. In The Past Is Red, even on the boat in the middle of the ocean, far away from Garbagetown and with no destination, Tetley looks for – and finds – connection. To the AI, to the mysterious girl Olivia, her partner Goodnight Moon, and, ultimately, in the flawed, cruel, brutal humans in Garbagetown. Sometimes that is all we have – and much of the best contemporary fiction is recognizing this. There is no escapism in this book, but it is still not “bleak” – hopelessness, apathy and self-isolation are ultimately luxuries, often requiring the care-work of others who are relegated to the background of the texts.

Yukito Ayatsuji: The Decagon House Murders

Ayatsuji, Yukito (2007 [1987]), The Decagon House Murders, Pushkin
trans. Ho-Ling Wong
ISBN 978-1-78227634-0

Murder by Death, Neil Simon’s brilliant (though dated) cinematic parody on the whodunit, featuring parodies of various well-known detectives, from Hammett’s Nick and Nora to Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, is successful both as a parody and a pastiche of the genre. Or rather: genres, plural, because while Sam Spade, from Raymond Chandler’s dour oeuvre, and Miss Marple, from Christie’s sharp pen, are both in the business of dealing with the aftermath of violent murder, the books in question are very different. In the end, Simon has to settle on one specific tone, and he picks the perceived comfort of a Miss Marple setting. An old country manor, and a series of attempted murders vaguely in the style of Christie’s And then there were none. The greatest strength of Simon’s parodies is not in the characters themselves, though their foibles and habits allow us to identify them immediately, it is the metafictional way Simon mocks the basic act of solving mysteries. During the movie, each detective offers a solution, and each solution comes with its own logic, inherent to that specific writer’s preferred way of structuring surprises and revelations. Simon’s final series of revelations, uncovering (twice) the culprit, is similarly partially based on the famous plot of And Then There Were None, before he finally pulls the rug on the whole structure of logic and inference. Neil Simon understands what makes these mystery genres work, and he plays them off against each other, and in conversation with the audience, letting them ultimately in on the joke. The detective genre, as all genres, is a big, magnificent toy box of narrative, where variations and repetition make stories recognizable and surprising at the same time. A good mystery writer has the skill to work the algorithm in a unique way, without losing the functionality of the tools of genre. Simon, meanwhile, is not a mystery writer and does not use any of the tools: instead, he displays them for us.

Yukito Ayatsuji’s 1987 Japanese mystery classic The Decagon House Murders is oddly similar to Murder by Death. It, like the movie, uses And Then There Were None as a foil, and in it, nobody, just as in Simon’s movie, takes a step back and uses Christie’s novel as a blueprint to solve the case (though Ayatsuji’s characters are more than aware of it – the murderer explicitly refers to it in his brooding introduction). As with Simon, the plot revolves around a group of people named after famous detectives, isolated in the countryside. Unlike Simon, Ayatsuji offers his readers very little humor – and for good reason. The Decagon House Murders is a straightforward murder mystery. The guests are brutally murdered one by one, following Christie’s blueprint, with the murderer’s involvement similar to Christie’s book. There is one major difference between the structure of Christie’s novel and Ayatsuji’s, and that’s the fact that there are two narratives in parallel: the events in the eponymous house, which is on an isolated island, and events on the mainland, which, to anyone aware of the story of And then there were none, provides a clear clue as to the identity of the murderer. It undersells The Decagon House Murders to call it a straightforward mystery – in fact, it is intentionally formally strict. It is a so-called Honkaku novel. As this introduction to the genre explains,

Those who write in this style abide by “fair play” rules, which requires that all clues necessary for the reader to solve the crime be present in the text, as dictated in 1923 by S.S. Van Dine in his Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories.

And since in Honkaku novels, “the solutions are dependent (…) on solving the physical mechanics behind the actual crime,” giving us a clear clue as to the identity of the murderer is not a black mark against the book within its specific genre. The whole book is a work of love, dedicated to Golden Age mystery writers – and yet for all that dedication, it is remarkably joyless and bland.

First things first. The plot: members of a university “Mystery Club” are invited to spend a week on an isolated island, where previously a horrible murder had happened. They land by boat and will not be able to maintain contact with the outside. Rather than use their own names, the members have nicknames

derived from the American, British and French mystery writers they all respected so much: Ellery Queen, John Dickinson Carr. Guston Leroux, [Van Dine] and Edgar Allan Poe. The two women were called “Agatha” and “Orczy”

after Agatha Christie and Baroness Orczy. There are two houses on the island, the “Blue House” of which only ruins remain, and the Decagon House. We are offered a blueprint of the Decagon House in the first chapter, which furnishes us with a wealth of information. The fact that an unsolved murder happened on the island (in the Blue House) becomes immediately relevant, as former members of the Mystery Club, back on the mainland, receive letters saying, “My daughter Chiori was murdered by all of you.” The envelope is signed by the architect who designed both buildings on the island and who himself died recently under mysterious circumstances. Chiori died of alcohol poisoning at a party, and in a way, all seven Mystery Club members on the island were responsible. This of course echoes the fact that Christie’s original novel assembled a group of criminals who each escaped justice for a particular crime. Meanwhile on the island, the next morning, there are seven notes, one per visitor, labeled “First Victim,” “Second victim,” etc. And so the murderous puzzlebox unspools, and murders, one by one, the visitors, while the Murder Club alumni on the mainland, unaware of the ongoing murder, try to solve the mystery of the threatening letters. The final solution is clean, and devoid of surprises or extraneous information, as demanded by the rules of Honkaku. What’s also clean is the story – clean of psychology, sympathy or depth.

By using nicknames, Ayatsuji does not do what Neil Simon does – there is no inherent difference to the way the seven doomed visitors deal with the threat that takes one from their midst each day. Ayatsuji is severely disinterested in examining the narrative differences between the seven different writers and how that might shape a world view, and an approach to logic and perception. Instead, we are given seven largely interchangeable characters, mere stock characters to drape a plot over. That’s the main use of the nicknames – it removes the individuality from the characters. That does lead to certain unpleasant elements – misogyny creeps in. Not just the misogyny from the male characters towards the female characters, but also from the author towards his own female creations – having one of the women die via poisoned lipstick is just one of many superficial treatments of gender. To be fair – Ayatsuji just doesn’t care, and neither does his ideal reader. Using stock cliché as a way to fill in the gaps in characterization just has a way of allowing bigotry to creep in.

That said, this book is first and foremost about the whodunit puzzle, and that one is nice, as far as it goes, but in his urge to abide by the Honkaku “fair play” rules, we are given too many hints to the solution too early and are thus not surprised by the revelation of the murderer. Ayatsuji foreswears many traditional comforts of the mystery novel in order to give his readers a clever puzzle, and yet, as a puzzle, it doesn’t surprise us with the solution. Instead, we watch the story from the outside, much like the audience of Murder by Death, but the amusement is of following one specific mechanism unfolding, of knowing how and why it will unfold, and of anticipating its workings. There’s not so much humor here – rather a kind of grim self-satisfaction of understanding how this works. If you enjoy being right, and nodding along to something being executed in a formally correct but predictable way, boy do I have the novel for you.

The book ultimately brings to mind the famous opposition between Sherlock Holmes and Father Brown offered by Antonio Gramsci in his notebooks. To Gramsci, Father Brown is a Catholic “who pokes fun at the mechanical thought processes of the protestants” – and Sherlock Holmes is petty, narrow and pretentious. How this fits into Gramsci’s politics is examined here, but I want to just note that this gap, this difference also explains why I was left so dissatisfied by the book. Father Brown’s work relies on empathy and introspection – but while we are given an emotional reason for the murders, there is no empathy and next to no introspection. For Chesterton, empathy opens new connections, an understanding of how things work beyond simple appearances, which helps Father Brown deduce the solutions. For Yukito Ayatsuji, there is nothing beyond appearances, except for the one deception that is central to the And then there were none-style plot.

Ayatsuji’s disinterest in deeper motivations comes to a head late in the novel when a decimated group of Mystery Club members suspects one another, offering the blandest of motives which are so laughably dull that Ayatsuji calls them out himself: “rather a simple attempt at a motive, “ one character offers by way of derision, moments before suggesting another, equally plain motive. The fact that the writing is also monotonous does not help. The translator Ho-Ling Wong cannot be blamed for it, since, from what I can tell, older editions of this novel come with an introduction by fellow Honkaku luminary Shimada Soji, who calls the writing in the original Japanese novel “clunky” and the characters “vacant.” In this sense, the translator did a magnificent job in retaining these qualities in the English text. And yet – is it enjoyable? I mean, WEIRDLY, it is a very quick and smooth read – despite all the issues I have with this novel.

The biggest failing of the books comes in comparison with Murder By Death – Neil Simon did not set out to write a satisfactory mystery, which also contains parodies. It is all parody. That said, Simon offers a funny but clear understanding of the mechanics of various Golden Age mystery writers. If you pick up any of their works, you will recognize the qualities and structures Simon satirized. The same cannot be said of The Decagon House Murders. There is absolutely no meaningful relationship between this novel and Christie’s work – or indeed the work of many of the writers used as nicknames. There is no understanding of what makes Christie’s most famous mystery work, the way modernity and traditionalism intersect in her depiction of class and gender, nothing, in the pages of the book. There is a reason Christie’s work has endured, and that reason cannot be found only or even predominantly in the mechanics of her cases. Look, I’m sure Ayatsuji perfectly understands her work, as a devotee to Golden Age mysteries, but the novel as a text has no interest at all in really relating to the writers it supposedly pays homage to. This is the most disappointing aspect of what is, despite all this, quite a breezy mystery.

My Year in Reviewing: 2017

So after blogging 26 reviews in 2016 and 2015 each, I happened to post 33 reviews this year, despite some quiet months without any reviews. An alphabetical list of the books under review this year are below, with very brief commentary.

Melinda Nadj Abonji: Fly Away, Pigeon: A Swiss novel about a not entirely common immigrant experience. Solid writing, sometimes very good. Compelling discussion about how wars in their home country can affect immigrants, and how that might change our view of them.

Charlie Jane Anders: All the Birds in the Sky: Regrettably reactionary/conservative book that is wildly imaginative and entertaining otherwise.

Nina Allan: The Race

Nina Allan: The Rift: Nina Allan is one of the brightest stars in contemporary science fiction, although it’s maybe questionable to what extent her books are science fiction. The contrast with Anders’s novel highlights the missed opportunities in the latter.

Chetan Bhagat: The Three Mistakes of my Life: Oh God no. I regret reading this. The only book I read in 2017 that rivals this level of awfulness is Robert Waller’s bizarrely bad Bridges of Madison County, which I didn’t review on the blog.

Sophie Campbell: Shadoweyes: I admire Campbell’s art so much. She is one of my three favorite artists in comics. I bought a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles trade paperback last month just because of her art. And somehow, improbably, Campbell’s writing is almost as good. This book is also beautifully produced.

Jacques Chessex: A Jew Must Die: Chessex is a great novelist and this is just a masterpiece of prose, control, tone.

Martina Clavadetscher: Knochenlieder: Imaginative, passionate, interesting Swiss novel about the near future, about communities, biology, inheritance, ecology. It’s not perfect, and it’s weaker in the second than the first half, but it’s darn good as is.

Paul Cornell: Witches of Lychford: Of all the books I read in this novella-sized TOR imprint, this one feels most like a genre exercise. I mean, it didn’t have to be a masterpiece like Kai Ashante Wilson’s book or Brian Evenson’s, but this is a bit thin, if very well executed. It could have been better: for example, Kij Johnson’s book in the same imprint, which I read but didn’t review this year, is a novella-length riff on Lovecraft that feels more relevant, necessary, interesting. Plus, there’s a bit of an ideological haut goût in Cornell’s book that didn’t sit well with me.

Wioletta Greg: Swallowing Mercury: Oh man. This is flat, and not great, and the translation feels dubious. Moreover, since writing the review, I read more books by and about Polish writer-immigrants in the UK which made me be simultaneously more interested in the topic and less interested in this particular book.

Dorothee Elmiger: Invitation To The Bold Of Heart. A young Swiss writer. Excellent, excellent novel. Dense, postmodern, but emotionally captivating.

Nathan Englander: Dinner at the Center of the Earth. Man, I love Englander. I don’t know that I can be in any way neutral about his work. Really enjoyed this novel. Really fascinated by the way it embedded borderline nonfiction elements like a biography of Ariel Sharon. A messy book about a messy conflict. Much better executed than his first novel.

Manuele Fior: 5,000 km per second. Fantastic, moving graphic novel. Written in Italian, translated into English. Everybody raved about it in 2016. Everybody was right.

Daniel Goetsch: Ein Niemand. No. One of four novels I read this year by a Bachmannpreis participant, and -hands down- the worst. His story that he read there was a bit worse still. The politics of who gets invited there puzzle me.

Nora Gomringer: Moden. Speaking of the Bachmannpreis: Nora Gomringer won it, she is fantastic, and she will be on next year’s jury. Here’s to hoping she’ll have better luck picking than 75% of her colleagues this year. Oh, also, someone go and translate her books already.

Shirley Jackson: Hangsaman. 2017 is also the year where I became a fan of Shirley Jackson. This is fantastic. Unbelievable. She is fantastic. Saving up to get the LoA edition of her short stories next year. There’s also a recent biography of her that I need to read. Man.

Gwyneth Jones: Proof of Concept. Another one of the TOR novellas. This one is among the very best I have read. I have admired Jones for years. So should you.

Theodor Kallifatidis: Masters and Peasants: Greek immigrant, living in Sweden. Today, people read mostly his crime novels because of the whole Nordic Noir thing. This is a very very interesting sorta-kinda autobiographical novel. Funny, devastating, strange.

Meral Kureyshi: Elefanten im Garten. Recommended to me by Adrian Nathan West, whose excellent novel I have read this year but not reviewed. This book is another Swiss immigrant tale. Not as strong as others I have read, and it often echoes other writers in the tradition, but still good, and certainly better than many books that have been winning awards for German-language literature these days.

Manu Larcenet: Ordinary Victories. This is unbelievably good. I was recommended this, and boy is this good. I have since read two more books by Larcenet, both of them excellent. One is the funny Bill Baroud, about a portly secret agent, and the other one the dark Blast, about, man. Things. Go and read Ordinary Victories. You will not regret it. I promise.

Barbi Marković: Superheldinnen. Another Bachmannbook. This one much stronger than her story. I adore this writer. Someone should translate this book into English.

Ben Mazer: February Poems. I greatly admire Ben Mazer’s poetry, and this is his best book. This year, Mad Hat Press published his Selected Poems which everybody should read.

Wyl Menmuir: The Many. Eh.

Denise Mina: Still Midnight. Denise Mina’s novels are a masterclass in how to write mystery fiction with meaning and a backbone.

Jerry Pinto: Em and the Big Hoom. Mediocre book about a shitty son. It has been reviewed extremely positively, so who knows. Maybe it’s me. (it’s not).

Sasha Marianna Salzmann: Ausser Sich. One of the best books I read all year, and almost certainly one of the three best German-language novels of the year. The other two are Michael Roes’s Zeithain, and Peter Handke’s elegiac Die Obstdiebin, neither of which I reviewed here.

Samanta Schweblin: Fever Dream. One of two fantastic Argentinian books I read this year. The other one is Mariana Enriquez’s story collection Things we lost in the fire, which I didn’t review but still might. Both books were translated by Megan McDowell, and while the translations seem a bit off here and there, the books themselves are extremely strong.

Luan Starova: My Father’s Books. A Macedonian memoir-novel. Lovely. Read it.

Elizabeth Strout: My Name is Lucy Barton. A book with many plaudits. Didn’t particularly like it. Strong execution. Hollow core.

Walter Tevis: The Man Who Fell To Earth. Fantastic science fiction classic about alienation, loneliness, hope and loss. Essential.

Lewis Trondheim/Stéphane Oiry: Maggy Garrisson. French graphic novel about a female private detective-in-training. Writing and art are lovely. Cannot wait to read more.

Juan Pablo Villalobos: Down the Rabbit Hole. Really good Mexican novel about the drug trade from a child’s eye. This tired trope is invested with some interesting new energy in this book. Good not great. If you look for something to fill that Yuri Herrera shaped hole in your life, this ain’t it.

Klaus Cäsar Zehrer: Das Genie. Interesting story. Terrible, boring, blasé execution. Someone, please, someone write a novel about the same person, but with some proper literary skill.

So that’s that. I’m incredibly grateful for every reader and commenter on this blog. Thank you.