Dear readers,
Could I interest you in a literary field trip to the sauna? The oak branch whipping is optional. The cold plunge is not.
Every so often these shocks to the system are tremendously welcome: a way to clear the mind, heart and qi, even if the dry sauna is filled with groaning men in a midlife trance. Even if the ice bath is really a repurposed meat freezer with no apparent filtration system.
The novels I recommend here come close to replicating these extremes — a sudden shove from humid to arctic that stuns the senses. As with any good water circuit, you’ll be marveling at the effects for days.
—Joumana
I do not instinctively consider any of this novel’s elements (Econo Lodges, jury duty or frankly even Central Florida) sexy. Yet in Ciment’s story of an illicit romance between two jurors impaneled on a murder trial, all are essential to their relationship, and sequestration sends it into the extreme.
C-2, as she is known for the lion’s share of the book, is a photographer in her 50s, married to an acclaimed journalist three decades older. The specter of caregiving, the shift from erotic to palliative love, makes both uneasy and unsteadies their marriage. Her attraction to F-17, a younger anatomy professor, during voir dire is nearly instantaneous.
The case is grotesque: A teenager on the autism spectrum has been accused of killing her brother, a toddler. Right away it becomes a spectacle, drawing the requisite news media, but also busloads of retirees from a nearby community.
The affair is comparable in emotional pique, and a way to pass the time. What could be a sterile period of horror is infused with a countervailing charge, so consuming that even the “elevator doors kiss.” It provides a respite from group meals at Olive Garden and forced games of Trivial Pursuit. The lovers have more in common than some of the other jurors; both exercise in the motel pool, for starters. “‘I deep-water-run by choice,’” C-2 says, a telling self-observation. “There is a great lesson in running as fast as you can and not getting anywhere.’”
After the trial, their release into the free world is a shock. So too is the revelation of the affair to C-2’s husband.
“I wanted a last dalliance before I got too old,” she explains.
“You couldn’t wait until I’m dead?” he asks, wounded.
Ice bath!
Read if you like: AquaJoggers; furtive, shared cigarettes; any true-crime documentary
Available from: In a perfect world, national pharmacy chains would stock this with the astringents. But check your library or any good bookstore.
“The Meursault Investigation,” by Kamel Daoud. Translated by John Cullen.
Fiction, 2013 (this translation 2015)
Personally, I relish being wrong. That’s not a prerequisite for appreciating this rebuke to Albert Camus’s 1942 novel “The Stranger,” but it helps.
Camus’s novel, hailed as an absurdist classic, hinged on the narrator’s seemingly random killing of an unnamed Arab man. A wave of midday, brain-broiling heat is blamed for the murder.
Daoud, an Algerian journalist, imagines the details that the original didn’t stop to consider. The dead man had a life, and a name — Musa, or Moses. His brother recounts the story decades later, soused in a bar in Oran, including his own symmetrical crime. In 1962, with Algerian independence close at hand, the heat “scrambles” his mind, pushing him to kill a French settler.
I’m leery of literary retellings — too many attempted grafts miss the mark. But Daoud imbues the story with kinetic energy, heaving off the emotional stagnation of its source material. It is refreshing to re-examine the stories we think we know: an immersion that encourages new ways of thinking or seeing. It’s no wonder people go to the baths to sweat out a problem, and leave feeling clear.
Read if you like: Assia Djebar, Howard Zinn, Fremen lore, walled cities
Available from: Anywhere good books are sold, or ask your trusty librarian
Why don’t you …
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Dine at a high-concept (a.k.a. “high con”) Los Angeles restaurant of Dana Spiotta’s debut, “Lightning Field,” and think deeply about Cassavetes?
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Sublimate your ennui into Henry Green’s “Party Going,” as young, impatient people try to reach a fabulous soirée?
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Roam around Mexico City with poets of Roberto Bolaño’s creation, who were unleashed in the world only after his death?
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