Dear readers,
I moved apartments recently, a task that made me sorely wish I had added even the breeziest treatise on D.I.Y. organizing to my reading list. How had the “life-changing magic” of decluttering so thoroughly passed me by?
Perhaps one of those neat, cheerful manifestoes from Scandinavia or Japan could have taught me something about writing more tidily, too. In that arena, alas, as in home decor, minimalism is generally not my bag. Give me a lily and I will gild it; sing me a song of semicolons and fat, flamboyant sentences that wrap around corners like overgrown houseplants. Let my windy paragraphs, like my kitchen-drawer hoard of expired Covid tests and obsolete technologies (hello again, sweet BlackBerry), run free!
In the cold light of a moving truck I eventually found some fortitude, consigning piles of personal flotsam and unread periodicals to the curb. Still, all actual houseplants survived the purge, and so did the works of two authors whose prose style evokes its own whiff of Swedish Death Cleaning: direct, purposeful, shorn of sentiment and curlicues. I like to think they both have gorgeous living rooms.
—Leah
“A Woman’s Story,” by Annie Ernaux
Nonfiction, 1988
Ernaux’s lean requiem — translated from the French by Tanya Leslie — begins with a Hegel quote about the nature of human suffering and a phone call from the care home of a hospital outside Paris: “Your mother passed away this morning, after breakfast.”
What follows is reported in the mode of pure observation: the body washed and wrapped in gauze “like a small mummy”; the selection of a coffin (oak, with a mauve lining); the unremarkable service (gusty rain, prerecorded organ music, then lunch at an indifferent restaurant). “Everything,” she notes coolly, “was definitely over.”
And yet in the days following, Ernaux often found herself crying for no reason and forgetting the simple order of things; she struggled to read, or to properly peel a vegetable. So a few weeks after the funeral, she turned herself over to writing out the life of “the only woman who really meant something to me” — not subjectively (quelle horreur), but forensically.
We learn that Ernaux’s mother, born fourth in a family of six to a farmworker and a weaver, escaped hard-drinking poverty but held on to her Catholicism; that she managed to start a small grocery and lost her first daughter, at 6, to diphtheria; that she sometimes slapped her second and last child, Annie, across the face, but also poured her hopes and aspirations into her. And that before dementia took her mind away, she already seemed a little bit lost, caught up in old rules about age and class and unsuited to the empty hours of retirement.
I could throw some adjectives at you about the willful austerity of “A Woman’s Story” — my pockets are full of many florid ones that Ernaux would no doubt hate — though I like my colleague Dwight Garner’s 2022 summation best: “She is, in her writing, definitely not the sort of girl whose bicycle has a basket.” This bike is built for speed, but it holds pretty much everything.
Read if you like: Chantal Akerman movies, midlife crises, making people talk about autofiction at parties.
Available from: Seven Stories Press, or the nightstand of your underheated Airbnb in Normandy.
“My Death,” by Lisa Tuttle
Fiction, 2004
Kudos to the clever people at New York Review Books who chose a cover illustration by the late feminist artist and occultist Marjorie Cameron for their recent reissue of Lisa Tuttle’s uncanny mystery “My Death.”
Initially, Cameron’s ink-and-gouache sketch of two shaggy, beguiling she-beasts locked in some kind of pagan tango seems entirely too wild and woolly for Tuttle’s minor-key depiction of a 50-something widow in rural Scotland, mourning the recent loss of her husband and the slow fade of her middling career as a writer.
But when the novel’s unnamed narrator goes to Edinburgh to meet up with her agent and stops in first at the National Gallery, the presence of a favorite old painting by the (fictional) portraitist W.E. Logan sparks a purpose: Tell the story of Logan’s long-ago lover and muse, Helen Elizabeth Ralston.
Like the narrator, Ralston was an ambitious young American who came to England seeking art and adventure, and stayed on at least in part because of an older, more accomplished man. Though in her 90s now, she’s still alive and living nearby; she is also, it turns out, aware of her aspiring biographer, and very willing to talk.
That’s when “My Death” starts to get gloriously weird, in ways that more than justify the entwined figures on the cover. Don’t expect big jolts; Tuttle — herself a native Texan who moved to Britain in the ’80s — has a quieter, more creeping sensibility. Her voice from the start is frank and conversational, almost bog-ordinary, but the story’s manifest plainness blooms into something strange and doubling, somewhere between Hitchcock and “Picnic at Hanging Rock.” I finished it on a stormy night, appropriately, and had strange dreams.
Read if you like: Lochs, Shirley Jackson, catching your reflection in odd places.
Available from: The NYRB reissue, or wherever trick mirrors are sold.
Why don’t you …
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Ride along on Rachel Cusk’s French vision quest, which eventually led her to Annie Ernaux’s kitchen?
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Lean into more doubling and speculative horror, this time with a mothering twist, in Helen Phillips’s excellent 2019 novel “The Need”?
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Read Lisa Tuttle’s fond recollection of her 1970s friendship with George R.R. Martin, built on “idea germs” and long, chatty letters about flying and flan? The eyewear alone is extremely groovy.
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