Not reviews. I don’t think I’m good at reviews — I can tell you whether a book worked on me but almost never why, and the why is the whole job. So: what stayed, four months on.
A novel about a hotel, translated from the Hungarian. What stayed is a corridor. There is a great deal of plot in this book and I have lost nearly all of it, but there is a description of a corridor on the third floor, about eleven lines long, that I could draw. I have thought about this a lot. The corridor is not important to the story. It may be that the things that survive in a reader are simply the things the writer was most awake for, regardless of what they were for.
A book of essays by a naturalist. What stayed is a fact — that a certain moth navigates by keeping a light source at a constant angle, which works perfectly for the moon and catastrophically for a lamp. I have now told six people this fact and in doing so have entirely stopped being able to remember whether the book was good.
A short, bleak novel about a marriage. What stayed is the ending, which I resented at the time and now think is the only honest one available. This is the second time this has happened to me with this writer. I am starting to think my resentment is a reliable signal and I should learn to read it as approval delayed.
A history of the Portuguese railways. What stayed is that I read it in four days, in bed, with total absorption, having no interest whatsoever in railways. Absorption is not about subject matter. I keep relearning this and keep failing to act on it — my to-read pile is still organised by topic, as if topic predicted anything.
A famous novel I had avoided for years. What stayed is relief, then irritation. It was good. It was not as good as twenty years of people telling me about it. I have no way to separate the book from the recommendation now and I never will, and I think that’s a real loss that we don’t have a word for.
A collection of letters between two poets. What stayed is the shape of the correspondence — how one of them writes longer and longer as the other writes shorter and shorter, over eleven years, until the exchange is a page against a line. Nothing in the content of the letters is as eloquent as that shape. I don’t know whether the editor saw it. It isn’t mentioned in the introduction.
Six books, and what survives is: a corridor, a moth, an ending, a mood, a resentment, and a shape. Not one argument. Not one plot. I don’t know what to do with that except keep the list, which is why I keep the list.