Books To Read in Heaven

Margin Notes is where various contributors offer their short takes, brief ruminations, spot reviews (book, film, art, even the Internet, god help us).

If you are interested in adding your voice, give the section a careful read and email us at hawaiireviewofbooks -at- gmail.com with Margin Notes and your topic in the subject line.

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It was not exactly a momentous decision, not on a par to decide to bolt from our Honolulu fortress of solitude in late August.

We had decided to seize the day, or window, as our doctor put it. To join the airport’s mobs daring COVID with their near-suicidal ideation on Hawai‘i, anything for sunshine, beaches, the promise of a maskless tropical “paradise” made safe by American Empire even as it crumbled (again) in Kandahar. But when you’re a reader what books to take goes right up there with what shoes. 

I’ll probably be asking that question on my deathbed: What books should one take to heaven? (Or the other place.)

For me, especially, our always slightly lunatic escapes to heaven, or Belle Ile en Mer, seem to boil down to what two-pound novels should I lug in my roll-on and shoulder bag. We don’t check luggage, ever, so it’s not a small matter when the voyage is 7,500 miles from our doorstep to the wildly overgrown weeds and blackberry brambles guarding the door of our summer hovel. 

The small house is a former ruin on an island off the coast of Brittany. Any books will have to justify their weight on two long plane flights, a longish train ride, a shorter train, a one-hour ferry and then a scramble to find a taxi (there are only a handful for the hundred passengers who disembark).

On Belle Ile, where we’ve made our alt-life the last 35 years, we’ve grown a small collection of books and other reading material, including never-opened 20-year-old copies of the Times Literary Supplement. (I used to think of myself as a TLS man, the way a cabbie in Cambridge might confer an advanced degree onto his driver’s license.) 

From the first time we visited, in the winter of 1981, reading material has been precious. It’s France and I don’t read the language well enough to get anything out of novels, though as a researcher I can crunch data and sift events from the grist of histories and other such texts. 

You still can’t order an American book in France or the rest of Europe. It has to be published by an EU publisher. This has denied Belle Ile my book, The French House, but has protected me from critics for seven years since it’s been published, so I don’t totally disagree with the policy. Besides, it’s preserved European publishing from the ravages of Amazon and its ilk. That’s not a flip observation. They have a thriving bookstore scene; we don’t. They have shelves full of American novels in translation, too—good ones, current ones. We don’t see many translations on our shelves, do we, at least not prominently. A Ferrante every couple of years.  

For all my planning, my choices often seem random and turn out to be less than ideal. In 2019, our last visit, I brought Vasily Grossman’s 871-page Life and Fate. As fate would have it, I didn’t read it that summer, instead choosing to start with its 1,000-page prequel, Stalingrad, on my Kindle. There was no surf and I was feeling the Russians in the midst of the election-influence investigations; I didn’t want to scrap my warmth toward the folks that saved the world from the Nazis just because of their current vulpine president. We had our own version in office, too—a real “Pork Air” as my local Telfisaki t-shirt has it.  

I viewed Life and Fate as my insurance policy for a month of rain and (again) no surf on Belle Ile. There’s also a faded Proust I’ve never opened, a dusty collected Zola, the stories of William Faulkner, The Count of Monte Cristo (I’ve spot-read many chapters including the ones on Belle Ile where Porthos dies saving the other Musketeers—yeah, I’m a cheater-reader). And a dozen paperbacks by lesser writers and lesser works by better writers (just the title of A Maggot, by John Fowles, repels me still; it’ll be a cold day on Belle Ile when I try it). 

As life and fate would have it, COVID scrapped all our 2020 plans and in the interminable Year of Sanitary Practices & Stupid Death I ended up reading Grossman’s masterpiece on my Kindle in Honolulu. I felt I needed its grimness, the story of a people under siege who had it far, far worse than we did. They kept going. So would I. Books have always inspired a weakness, no, talent, for emulation in me. As a child I wanted to be Sal in Blueberries for Sal; I was Ferdinand the Bull, a peacemaker and sniffer of flowers—could throw a straight jab in the ring to buy space and time but declined to bring the hook; I am a composite, okay, of a lot of characters I wouldn’t care to admit (though never Holden Caulfield); and some I could name but won’t.   

So no regrets about hauling the Grossman those 7,500 miles. I actually re-read Stalingrad during lockdown in Honolulu. One day in a rainy month I know I’ll crack Life and Fate, that two-pound brick, and I know it will be as if I never read it at all.  

How do I know that? I just re-read Atonement by Ian McEwen thinking I’d never been able to finish it, even once, only to discover I knew the last third almost by heart. On Belle Ile there’s a definite added value to a book you can’t remember reading, one where amnesia strikes after the last sentence.

About that line about EU’s book importation policy protecting me from critics—it’s not just a throwaway. In the seven years since The French House was published, I could rest easy knowing no more than a couple of people here on the island have read it, though one Belliloise friend deciphered certain pages and gave me a thumbs-up and a deeply knowing look. Merci, Carine Gallen! Since then she’s discovered we live in the house her grandmother was likely born in. It’s funny that my book made that connection possible by opening up long-closed compartments between branches of island families.

In 2014 no French publishing house showed interest in a translation, according to my then-agent’s foreign rights agent (consider the chain of transmission there for a moment). The Poles pounced, brought out a version. (Their title translates as This Will Be Ours; in Europe, they still have it all to themselves.) 

It ought to feel disappointing, but I have all the prestige of an author, which in France feels considerable, and none of the drawbacks. Nobody disputes my memory or facts. The islanders and others in the book don’t know who comes off well or doesn’t, so they still smile and talk to us. (The four Parisian psychiatrists in the book are the exceptions; they know their sections by heart. And they love telling people their pseudonyms.)

In 2019 a local bookstore, La Longue Vue, fed up with waiting for the big houses like Gallimard and Hachette, asked to launch its own translation project with their publishing arm, Jadis Editions. Proprietors Sophie Houssiere Naudin and Ronan Naudin are behind it. After a year of pandemic pause, three and maybe five people will be involved as translators (my prose is idiomatic, i.e., impossible). It will literally take a village. 

We’re into it. No one will get rich but the demand is there and Belle Ile is a hub of smart people who love their island, whether they’re from here or have voted with their feet to live here. There’s a waiting list for The French House in English and in French. 

But something funny happened during the two years of enforced absence. It turns out a lot of people were finding the book in English and reading it. The island has a resident population of retired ambassadors and diplomats, a French lawyer who once worked for The New York Times, the brilliant Agnes de Wildenberg, who just did a story about the book and our lives for Ouest-France, the biggest Atlantic Coast newspaper.  “Ces New-Yorkais racontent leur maison belliloise” is the slightly opportunistic headline (in France, New York is sexier than Honolulu, I guess). To find a book that isn’t available in the EU they all had to have had a friend order and mail it, or pick one up on a trip to the U.S., or … 

The most remarkable person, however, is Mehdi Aboud. Tall and rangy, he appeared in our village three years ago with his family. Bought the house behind ours, relieving us of a stream of vacation rentals. The dominoes started falling when we paid a visit to his business, which is owner of the finest wine store on Belle Ile: Le Cave de Gouvenor. I mean, this store rocks—Mehdi can find you an obscure affordable wine for 9 E or gesture to a box of rarities worth 1,000 E each.

Born and raised on Belle Ile, Mehdi, we were told by our Belliloise friends, was one of the original surfers. “Not the first,” but maybe the second. And then the light went on—he was in the book. The first surfer we ever saw, on his sawed-off red board, pulling into tube after tube in big surf, no one else out, getting munched because the beach break at Donnant doesn’t give exit passes.  

That was Mehdi at 15. And now, former sommelier at the Castel Clara, purveyor of the finest to a clientele that includes ambassadors and surfers. And also, bookstore owners. Because Mehdi also read The French House and pressed it on Sophie and Ronan at La Longue Vue. As he has on several other people, including friends in French media. 

And now we’re next-door neighbors. 

As Sophie said at my signing last Saturday, which sold out in an hour and a half: “It’s the only book in English about the island.” In the world.

And at the reading a white-haired lady with octagonal rimless glasses in a proper Breton blue and lace print dress paused to twinkle at me. The people waiting parted respectfully. “I was born in your house,” she said, with a smile.

It seems a lot of people were. Our kitchen saw a lot of action. In a way we’ve continued the cycle, because we’ve always lent out our bedroom—and sheets and tropical peacock duvet—to village newlyweds.

Who’ve broken the bed several times.  

Meanwhile, the seven-year lag in translation almost feels like a policy that has been enacted in Hawai‘i, because of our lack of reviews and criticism. Books come out in English and just disappear. Part of the problem is we have few platforms for reviewing and few reviewers who take their responsibilities seriously. Some of that has to do with our “very sensitive,” or “Balkanized,” or factionalized scene, I’ve been told, multiple times over the last 45 years—most recently as a warning against starting The Hawai‘i Review of Books. If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say it. Or else dissemble and rave so loudly the discerning reader shudders and just knows. 

Islands are polite places because they have to be; when they aren’t, feuds can turn nihilist, as in Sicily or Sri Lanka—or in the literary world, like the insanely self-referential battles among the Brooklynites and other MFA-ia. The current sensation is a cream-puff war between two utterly earnest and self-involved writers that has devolved into lawsuits and Twitter pile-ons, described in delicious deadpan in an article called “Bad Art Friend” in The New York Times. We don’t go there in these Islands. Yet. And maybe that’s why it sometimes seems that all our books are above average, like the children in Lake Wobegon. The rare exception happens when a scapegoat title comes under the gimlet eye of an emerging academic who needs a provocative Ph.D. thesis topic. But nobody reads theses except other academics (and those who study them). 

The upshot is that Hawai‘i’s no-criticism rule can make it feel sometimes that nobody takes a hatchet, or even a butter knife, to local lit. For reasons why, just look at the absence of community; okay, call it the difficulty of community. That may be the price of comity. If we don’t read each other, fine, so long as we don’t criticize each other. To each his or her own silo. 

With the Review, we do set out to champion Hawai‘i writing, first, but also to tap those silos and mix it up. We hope to gently steer writing about Hawai‘i writing away from gush and starry-eyed panegyrics. So far, THROB seems to have threaded the needle and for that we thank you, our readers. You’ve shown that you don’t need your coffee with seven lumps of sugar; four or even three will do. 

And some of you even like it black.

I’ve wandered away from the story about my habit of re-reading the vacation books in our meager salt-and-rain-stained collection. The titles we’ve accumulated feel completely random now. And yet they form an intriguing cross-section of what was au courant in years past and what might be worth hauling on that 7,500-mile trip. 

An original forty pounds of books arrived in one fell swoop in 1996, back when the U.S. Postal Service still had something called Media Rate. They even provided a stout canvas bag that would be sealed with brass brads and shipped by sea, guaranteed arrival in six months or so. No insurance available. It cost $50.

This bag did arrive. It sat on our kitchen floor when we opened the door and we screamed like it was Santa’s sack—40 pounds of books is a lot, supplemented by those Times Literary Supplements in their plastic wrappers. (I had a year’s supply, unopened.) I’d filled it with the free review copies sent by the daily dozen when I was Books Editor at a certain highbrow Conde Nast publication. 

Most turned out to be forgettable; in a hurry, I chose badly. But two of the books I still re-read every year are a wonder, if not well known, even obscure.

The first book that I usually re-read is Luis Sepulveda’s The Name of a Bullfighter, in a superb idiomatic translation by Suzanne Ruta published in 1995. It’s a post-Berlin-Wall-Fall noir thriller pitting two groups made useless and expendable by glasnost: East Germany’s ruthless secret police and the international terrorists who included the Baader-Meinhof Gang, Carlos the Jackel, and the Chileans and Nicaraguan Communists who assassinated Nicaragua’s dictator Somoza. In the book two loser burn-outs are racing (on threat of death by those above) to find an art treasure stolen by the Nazis and hidden in Chile. Once on the same side, now they’re fighting each other. One is principled, the other mercenary. The perspective and storytelling are in the modern Latin American noir tradition, cool, meta, unsentimental-then-sentimental, and so completely different than anything the U.S. publishes that my eye and ear are refreshed.

Sepulveda is a Chilean exiled by the U.S.-backed coup that toppled democratic president Allende. He’s part of a loose group of writers of louche prose noirs, all political, unflinching, that includes Paco Ignacio Taibo III. I’ve always envied those groups that form during key moments in a nation’s or continent’s history. Group 47, the class of German writers who emerged from World War II (Grass, Boll, etc.). The Africans of the 60s: Soyinka, Achebe, etc. Hawai‘i had its own groups thanks to the breakthrough thinkers and courageous activists and genius musicians and graphic artists—especially Herb Kane, our Toulouse-Lautrec—of the Hawaiian Renaissance, around whose fiery nucleus planets capable of sustaining life sprang up, including many Hawaiian writers and philosophers, the Bamboo Ridge crowd, M.I.A., Tinfish Press, Bennett Hymer’s Mutual Publishing, and the Ian McMillan proteges. Sometimes it takes a public declaration or stance to spark a scene into life. We seem to be having that moment again, now.  

Morvern Callar (1995) is the other found novel, short like Sepulveda’s, also “grim” like Bullfighter, also exhilarating—maybe twice as, due to an internal narrative voice emanating from the scene young Morvern inhabits. Set in the economically gutted north of Scotland, the book makes Nomadland look like Disneyland, centering on a group of superstore slaves for life, including “Morvy.” Our heroine and narrator’s unselfconscious (almost subconscious) reportage is a mix-tape of Scots pidgin, working- and loser-class banter, the cesspool filtration of modern commodity-speak, and even persuasively delivered socialist critiques. This being Britain, the latter commentaries flow naturally out of the mouths of bartenders, bouncers, oil platform workers, railway men, and superstore workers like Morvern. 

It opens with the suicide of Morvern’s middle-class writer-exile boyfriend, but the unnamed Him is not in the story at all. Yet his death breaks Morvern in a way that sends her, a 23-year-old wage slave and party girl, plunging into a psychic and literary adventure the likes of which will curl your shorties. Yes, it’s crass in spots, like the other Scottish masterpiece, Trainspotting, but Alan Warner’s daring and immersive prose and embrace of Morvy’s dissolution ought to stun and maybe inspire any writer working today who thinks he/she’s writing tuff stuff. 

I felt an intense parallels with Hawai‘i re-reading both books this year. Morvern Callar manages to get inside the head of a non-literate, non-woke human girl whose interests are making it through the work week and raving all weekend. Getting out of her head. She’s a type we all despair of. But her brain and soul aren’t dead; they’re deadened by us, the overclass. When Morvy breaks out, she’s pure as a Highlands stream. 

My re-read of The Name of a Bullfighter was satisfying but muted by the shadows of Jan. 6 and our ongoing struggle to stay a semi-democratic country. The desperate out-of-work undercover operatives who’ve lost their cover in the failure of their socialist paradises must find out if they stand for anything—if they ever stood for anything. It’s an apt description of Hawai‘i’s political and business class, wrapped in putative “Blue State” sentiments while operating like Russian kleptocrats, interested only in enriching themselves and their children as the Islands sink further into irreparable decline. 

Having re-read both books for the 10th, maybe 20th time, thus refreshed, I could then turn to the slab of prose jammed into my roller carryon… And to finally writing some slabs of prose of my own.

Good luck finding either book in print, though there’s always the digital option. And the movie of Morvern Callar is definitely whiplash-inducing, a tough must-see. If you’d like a noir movie that approximates and even exceeds The Name of a Bullfighter in mood, complexity, and feeling, the extraordinary The Dancer Upstairs, Javier Bardem’s best film, awaits you.

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Image by SJ Objio.