Books from April / 2025
April with her French philosophy, grieving undead & spellbinding fantasy...
Desperately, I’m trying to hold onto the last wisps of April breezes refreshing in their touch, and I haven’t been taking for granted the vibrant green all around me - the trees seem full of life after getting our rare bouts of rain. I say all this because I can’t not mention the weather when I look back at each month, but also maybe because the 4 books I read all on a certain level reminded me the importance of paying attention to the spaces we occupy and have the privilege of gazing at. With all that being said, let’s get to the wrap-up!
It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over by Anne de Marcken
I’ll borrow two reviewers’s words to describe my overall feeling for this one: “too magic-mushroom” & “a meditation”. It’s a feeling that at times just about left an impression on me, like a thumb pressing against skin, while at others made me think about things translucent and impossible to grasp, the attempt to do so bringing about some frustration. However, give me any meditation on grief and memory and I will be immediately enticed to try and give it some thought, for there must be endless ways to explore these universal experiences that happen to be really important to me. Not to mention that this narrator is part of the “undead” - a zombie living in a hotel of other zombies in a post-apocalyptic world. And while there are moments of the kind of horror or tension we’d expect from this genre, the central matter is very different: the narrator is missing someone, and in their longing is pervaded by a pitch black and bottomless hunger that goes deeper than the desire to consume. Filled with this indescribable but pressing ache, the narrator goes on a journey that, to me, entailed the attempt to reach back towards what could no longer be there. What is the undead in this case but a person with unresolved grief, moving through the world as if it were a dream? Though all the ties that once connected them to their life lie frail and undone, the narrator still seeks for evidence of their knots, and I think it will be this seeking, so futile and human, that I’ll remember most.
The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard (trans. by Maria Jolas)
Don’t be like me and think that after reading this you’ll know where to put your sofa to make the best use of your space. Foolish me opened a French philosopher’s book on space (which encompasses our homes, but definitely expands beyond) assuming I’d learn more about architecture and interior design and what not… and then I ran up against words like “phenomenology” and “topoanalysis”, “the poetic image” and concepts about our universe. At times Bachelard’s words lulled me into a nap or washed over and right through me. Reading 240 pages never felt so taxing, but in the end I’m proud and quite glad that I did, for I think what he discusses will inform my future reading experiences even if only from a distant shore.
What I was most mesmerized by was his expounding on how our dwellings and perception of certain kinds of dwelling shape how we feel inside a space and ultimately how we feel within ourselves. A wonderful example of his is the house in the middle of a deep winter. For someone who has only ever known the heat of southern summers, why is it that I can not only imagine clearly that lone house lit by its lamps, sitting amidst a sea of snow, but also feel the security and warmth of being in its living room, by a fireplace I have never actually experienced? The way he described this kind of image felt almost ancient to me, and to Bachelard it seemed that a person’s house, specifically one’s very first and true shelter, carries in it the universe; our home, along with the various objects, corners and levels of which it is composed, can become a new realm for thought and reverie if we let ourselves be carried away by our imagination.
Maybe even more than giving me a new way to see and treat the places I’ve inhabited and the objects that carry more of us than we might be aware of, the book impressed on me ideas that I’ll take with me as I meet other books. How writers build their worlds and shelters, for example to perhaps reflect the book’s themes; in how they build these places, will the reader find herself seeing new, extraordinary things in an environment thought to be familiar? The “intimate immensity” in our relationship to the spaces we live in can help break us free of the hard, defined geometrical lines of the world as we know it, transforming our mode of experience.
Personal Writings by Albert Camus (trans. by Ellen Conroy Kennedy & Justin O’Brien)
To see life in the way Camus saw it would be no easy feat; you’d have to make yourself believe that life is worth living, that it is a beautiful and wondrous thing even if bloodshed covers the world in front of you in red. You’d make yourself believe in life while also shedding away the idea of hope; I think it means touching life in all its rough and smooth plainness, and not looking up towards a someday-elsewhere while doing it. I don’t know if/when I’ll reach this point, but it was a rewarding, worthwhile experience to read Camus’s view on what that point might look, smell and feel like.
Many of his collated essays in this collection felt like a window we could look through, as if seeing from his heart his love for Algeria, his homeland. Even if Camus wrote that it would be an impossible task to ever fully describe to someone one’s love for their home country, his words still left their mark on me by their warm sincerity, making me understand more how Algeria existed at the center of his life and work and how heritage can act as starting point, guide, shelter and destination. His lyrical philosophy wasn’t always easy for me to pick up, but what pleasantly surprised me was the way he saw and loved nature. The land and sea, sun and stars seemed to consistently astound him, bringing him back to the belief that the earth he lived in was enough and that no other realm, above or below, mattered. Like digging your hands into soil or for me, rubbing seasoning on raw pieces of fish that end up feeding my brother and I. Physicality - feeling your body get brushed by wind or sand, smelling and seeing the silence around you - and the knowledge that such physical emotions and sensations are as important, perhaps even more so, as the realms we try to decipher in our minds runs strong throughout the essays. The beauty Camus was able to see and understand in his homeland, its inhabitants and the earth came from a love that didn’t rely on the promise of hope, and was one that acted on the memory of the home that brought it forth.
The Spear Cuts through Water by Simon Jimenez
It’s always a joy when you find a book that has so much to discuss while being so fun to read. One I feel confident to recommend to both fantasy & non-fantasy readers, Jimenez’s story puts to good use the nested narrative to reach through the generations of a family to perform the story of their homeland. In the “present” it’s told in the second-person: we inhabit a boy who grows up listening to his grandmother’s stories of the Old Country. At the same time we are plunged into a liminal realm, the Inverted Theater where spirits (of a sort) reenact on stage a journey made by two young warriors long ago. Jun and Keema, young men thrown together in a carriage to bring to the other side of the Old Country a great power that would help end an abusive rule. From here we go on an epic journey that reads like a well-executed animated TV show, meaning reading this enveloped and propelled me through a world clearly created with love.
Maybe unsurprisingly one of the things that struck me the most, as a child of immigrants myself, was reading of the strength & reassurance we can get from the stories we’re told about our heritage and homeland. In a hushed place of no-time, in a place like the Inverted Theater a boy is given the chance to see how his & his family’s lives have always been tightly tied to the world from which they left, though their new home exists so far away and so many years have passed. Reading and then remembering the fantastical journey Jun and Keema take is part-and-parcel with reading and remembering those very ties; the image of the boy watching his lola smoke as she tells him stories of battle and love and loss the foundation for everything, making the book always grounded in love.
I’m almost done with Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of my Mother for Jess’s How to Read and Analyze a Novel substack course and unsurprisingly, Kincaid can do no wrong in my eyes. The protagonist’s voice has such a hard, almost unforgiving edge to it that stems from her being born into the world not knowing her mother, and it’s the kind of voice I’ll always associate with Kincaid only: the gentle squeeze of a knife stabbed through body.
500/800 pages into Isabella Hammad’s The Parisian & my excitement from the first chunk of the book’s starting to wane a bit, though overall I’m still enjoying her storytelling of a young Palestinian man whose return to Nablus from France is bringing more questions to his life than answers. I imagine she too will become a writer who can do no wrong in my eyes.
Looking at my May & June TBRs, I have quite the lineup all thanks to the buddy reads and book club picks in The Unseen Review book club! In between I’ll also try to pick more from my personal TBR. How about you? Any priority books you want to read in May? (˶ᵔ ᵕ ᵔ˶)