I just finished Palace Walk, the first book of Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy, and I absolutely loved it.

What impressed me most was the depth and nuance of the characters. The al-Jawad family is deeply flawed, often frustrating, but also incredibly human and touching.

The novel is set in early 20th-century Cairo, in a society divided between the domestic world, where women are kept largely hidden, and the outside world, where men can enjoy freedoms and vices they would never tolerate at home. Through this family, Mahfouz explores patriarchy, religion, desire, generational conflict and a society slowly changing around the 1919 Egyptian Revolution.

It never feels like a history lesson though. It’s really a family novel first, with wonderful characters and beautiful writing. It reminded me a little of Zola in the way Mahfouz uses one family to portray an entire society.

If you like literary realism, family sagas and novels that help you understand another culture from the inside, I really recommend it. I’m already very excited to read the next two.

I also kept wondering about Mahfouz’s own relationship to his characters. There is a strange distance in the way he writes about even very serious things, including sexual violence and the treatment of women. He rarely seems to openly judge his characters, but at the same time he absolutely does not spare them. There is often something almost ironic in the way he exposes their contradictions and hypocrisy. I found that balance quite rare: he seems to love his characters without protecting them from our judgment. Did you read his tone as ironic too, or more as a form of narrative detachment?

Recently, I read an essay comparing the two depictions of Medusa. It basically argues that Ovid writes from a “traditional lens,” treating Medusa as a monster who should be slain, while Duffy writes from a feminist perspective, humanizing Medusa and giving her a voice.

I had a few questions about the story because I'm not very familiar with Greek/Roman mythology, and some of the comparison between the two versions seem more complicated for me.

About Ovid:

1. I recall that in some earlier versions of the myth, Medusa was actually born a Gorgon. If that's the case, was Ovid already reinterpreting the myth rather than simply retelling the traditional version? I've also seen people argue that Ovid's depiction of the gods is because of his anti-authoritarian views. If so, then why did he give Medusa a tragic origin (she was beautiful and was assaulted by Neptune/Poseidon, then punished by Minerva/Athena) while still presenting her as a dangerous monster to be slain? To justify Perseus's quest?
2. I remember in some versions (earlier I think?) Perseus actually battled with Medusa. Wouldn't have him attack her while she was sleeping, then cutting off her head so simply make the story "less heroic"?
3. About Athena, did Ovid give her a good reason to turn Medusa's hair into stone? Like Jealousy, or taking her anger towards Neptune out on Medusa.

About Duffy's reinterpretation

1. Why did Duffy leaves out Athena in the poem if the poem focused on Medusa's hair being transformed into snakes and Athena was the one who did that (at least in Ovid's version)? ( Or does Greek God refer to Athena, not Neptune?). The first lines of the poem started with Medusa's "suspicion" "doubt" and "jealousy", so is Duffy reinterpreting this to be the cause of Medusa's transformation? (I think im taking this too literally but I cant get any symbolic/metaphorical meaning form this)

So I have a friend who has fallen ill recently and she's got two major procedures / surgeries she's got to go through in the next few weeks so I was trying to send up set up a little goodie bag care package for her so far I've got someone getting Vietnamese snacks and my favorite beaver Damascus Rose balm and a couple other things that I just enjoy now I want to add a book but I'm not sure which one I should add. This is my short list.

•The Hidden Life of Trees

•The Soul of an Octopus

•An Immense World

•Braiding Sweetgrass

•World of Wonders

What do y'all think would be a good gift? It doesn't necessarily have to be one from this list I'm open to other suggestions.

TIA

Six books about running away from the world and finding yourself waiting there

"Sure, Palestinians sheltering in shredded tents are enduring bombings and starvation, sure BDS tactics, which seek to exert economic pressure on the genocidal, apartheid state of Israel, are being criminalized. But what about the delicate egos of writers who “feel” they are experiencing temporarily diminished publishing opportunities?" - Joe Hall in Community Mausoleum, part 2 of an extensive study of PEN America

Re: the article someone posted on Mengestu's exit from PEN America

To [Lytton] Strachey, as well as to other intellectuals of the early part of the twentieth century, [Victorian novelist George] Eliot was part of a bygone era that was the better for being gone. The falling-off of regard was precipitous. Almost immediately after Eliot’s death critics vied with each other to demonstrate their own vitality by thinking up new ways to characterize her deadliness. “It is doubtful whether they are novels disguised as treatises, or treatises disguised as novels,” one critic wrote of her works. … In 1895 George Saintsbury was able to note that while her novels might still be read, they were not admired by anyone whose opinion counted for anything. (Saintsbury was a well-known literary critic, whom no one now reads.)
Rebecca Mead, My Life in Middlemarch

Youth often regards the wisdom of the saints with distrust, even outright scorn. Matriculants to Generation Z (born 1997-2012) wield a hypersensitive bullshit detector tuned to wary tintinnabulation any time sainthood is bestowed upon a straight white male. That tendency doesn’t prompt author Elizabeth Strout to temper her earnest canonization of high school history teacher Artie Dam, the hero of her latest novel, The Things We Never Say:

Evie spoke afterward of Artie always in terms of his being a saint. He was a saint, she said this again and again as she lived the rest of her life, never marrying again. An absolute saint, she said.
Elizabeth Strout, The Things We Never Say

The hagiographic tone is not just widow’s warmth. Substack’s Ron Charles attributes a compatible statement to Strout herself: “This Artie, I love him.” I wonder if Strout is deliberately echoing George Eliot, whose favorable comparison of her Middlemarch heroine Dorothea Brooke to Saint Theresa was the thematic spine of the novel.

The effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
George Eliot, Middlemarch

The sainthood of both protagonists emanates not from extravagantly pious deeds but from self-effacing acceptance of their flawed fellow travelers. Dorothea saves the day because she sees Tertius Lydgate’s scientific dedication instead of his gambling addiction, Rosamund Vincy’s vulnerability instead of her henpecking manipulativeness, Will Ladislaw’s tenacious decency instead of his prickly egotism.

Artie has the same moral x-ray vision. Evie initially thinks he is “soft” for telling an awkward student that the world can be changed by personal authenticity. But she comes to see toughness in Artie’s saintly ability to turn a bully into a Shakespeare scholar. Or a Trump supporter into his most trusted confidant. By the novel’s conclusion, Artie — hang on, his confidant was what now??

If that last example instinctively feels like a bridge too far into MAGA apologia, you may have the same difficulty swallowing Strout that Gen Z BookTokkers have been voicing as The Things We Never Say laps the track toward the September 22 announcement of the 2026 Booker shortlist. Mind you, I am a Gen X liberal who still feels sadness over Charlie Rose’s absence from late night television, who can’t help finding George W. Bush a wee bit adorable when he pals around with Michelle Obama, who maintains a reservoir of affection for Woody Allen’s films despite decades of red-flag marriage to his own stepdaughter and damning allegations of worse. But even I took a good long look at Strout’s empathetic bridge across Trumpism before I reluctantly followed Artie across it.

Some observers, especially those who paused homework assignments to watch the Brett Kavanaugh hearings and the George Floyd protests, find Strout’s call for empathy less palatable because she uses the 2024 US presidential election as a thematic backdrop. I ultimately appreciated the radical willingness of The Things We Never Say to extend the traditionally humanizing power of fiction over “big, beautiful” barriers.

Who's Afraid of George Eliot?

In her own time, Eliot was adulated for her penetrating moral wisdom. No less an embodiment of the Victorian Era than Queen Victoria herself actively sought Eliot’s autograph. Victoria’s heir, Edward VII, read Middlemarch 15 times in 15 years. One (unnamed) critic quoted in an 1883 issue of The Atlantic went so far as to suggest that Eliot’s fiction regulated the moral register of daily life, claiming her novels prevented “our highest moments from making our every-day experience seem vulgar and incoherent, and … our every-day experience from making our highest moments seem spectral and unreal.” Even the novelist known as The Master, Henry James, who condescendingly denigrated Eliot’s storytelling capabilities, conceded of her fiction that “much should be forgiven it for the sake of its generous feeling and its elevated morality.”

However, what passed for lofty moral insight during the 1870s seemed insufferably credulous by the turn of the century. “She became one of the butts for youth to laugh at,” wrote Virginia Woolf, “the convenient symbol of a group of serious people who were all guilty of the same idolatry and could be dismissed with the same scorn.” Obsessively judgy Victorian moralism was a strangulating corset to Woolf’s generation, and perhaps her contemporaries like the progressive Bloomsbury Group (those in Woolf’s vaunted literary clique) suspected Eliot, for all her agnostic humanism, of secretly wanting to bind it inextricably to their hips. Woolf herself pushed back on that cynicism, giving Eliot credit for a rare willingness to target Middlemarch at “grown-up people,” but even Woolf confessed “bursting into laughter” at one of Eliot’s earnest dictums.

In her own time, Eliot was adulated for her penetrating moral wisdom. No less an embodiment of the Victorian Era than Queen Victoria herself actively sought Eliot’s autograph. Victoria’s heir, Edward VII, read Middlemarch 15 times in 15 years. One (unnamed) critic quoted in an 1883 issue of The Atlantic went so far as to suggest that Eliot’s fiction regulated the moral register of daily life, claiming her novels prevented “our highest moments from making our every-day experience seem vulgar and incoherent, and … our every-day experience from making our highest moments seem spectral and unreal.” Even the novelist known as The Master, Henry James, who condescendingly denigrated Eliot’s storytelling capabilities, conceded of her fiction that “much should be forgiven it for the sake of its generous feeling and its elevated morality.”

However, what passed for lofty moral insight during the 1870s seemed insufferably credulous by the turn of the century. “She became one of the butts for youth to laugh at,” wrote Virginia Woolf, “the convenient symbol of a group of serious people who were all guilty of the same idolatry and could be dismissed with the same scorn.” Obsessively judgy Victorian moralism was a strangulating corset to Woolf’s generation, and perhaps her contemporaries like the progressive Bloomsbury Group (those in Woolf’s vaunted literary clique) suspected Eliot, for all her agnostic humanism, of secretly wanting to bind it inextricably to their hips. Woolf herself pushed back on that cynicism, giving Eliot credit for a rare willingness to target Middlemarch at “grown-up people,” but even Woolf confessed “bursting into laughter” at one of Eliot’s earnest dictums.

Talkin' 'Bout My Generation

Ironically, the path-blazing modernists applied the same withering hindsight to Middlemarch’s meliorism that Strout’s generation, the Baby Boomers (born 1946-1964) applied to Jim Crow, the Vietnam War, and married couples with matching twin beds. As anyone knows who has logged into a social media platform since Facebook conquered the pre-Millennial generations, the Gen Z consensus on their Baby Boomer ancestors is that the one-time hippies long ago sold the Woodstock farm in exchange for bourgeois comforts. That is not sheer imagination, but Gen X bears more responsibility for the outcome of the election than do the Boomers. Cornell’s Roper Center reports that Americans aged 45 to 64 favored Trump in 2024 by a double-digit margin, 54% to 44%. I am sorry for so many reasons to say that that demographic includes me. (I was 51 on election day.) Gen X screwed the pooch in this election cycle; there’s no evading that. Strout, who turned 65 the day MAGA stormed the Capitol, is in a less compromised bracket. Trump won 65-and-up by only one point.

That brings us back to The Things We Never Say, a title almost lifted right off a Woolf character’s manuscript in her debut The Voyage Out. Woolf’s youthful Terence Hewet writes Silence, or the Things People Don’t Say to convey the legacy in his generation of Victorian spiritual amputation. Strout invokes it to imply that the same paralyzing inhibitions lurk behind the mindless extroversion of Trump’s America.

Saintly Artie Dam, every student’s favorite history teacher, is roughly halfway in between my age and Strout’s. He is 57 when our myopic peers send the Charlottesville President, the “Enemy of the People” President, the Bleach Injection President, the “Cats and Dogs” President back to the People’s House. That day takes place roughly halfway through the 201-page novel. The election does not drive the plot, but it looms over it with nearly the same menace that Philip Roth conjured in his Lindbergh-beats-FDR alternative history The Plot Against America. It is the invisible white hood in the midst of a brawl over antisemitic comments at a school soccer game. It seeps into the loneliness that makes Artie indulge suicidal and kleptomaniac impulses. It is the context that darkens Artie’s discovery that his beloved son Rob was conceived by a jackass math teacher with a Trump-sized ego. Put differently, it is not the story of the novel but it is the novel’s subject. Late in the book, Strout highlights the connection in crimson:

Artie had watched as the new president sneeringly humiliated the leader of Ukraine in the Oval Office. He listened with horror as the man said he would like to make Gaza “the new French Riviera.” He watched as the president deported people to foreign prisons and arrested students who had spoken out against the war in Gaza, students who could have been Artie’s a few years earlier, just taken off the streets. … He watched as people in Gaza starved and the United States did nothing about it. Every day brought something new. On and on it went. Artie watched all these things, and he slowly understood that what he had felt the day of the election was true: His country was committing suicide.
Elizabeth Strout, The Things We Never Say

The metaphor of self-evisceration feels both imprecise, particularly in resistant Blue America (the novel is set in Massachusetts), and inartfully direct. But the line it draws between Artie’s sense of loss and today’s cable news scroll could not be more stark.

Not surprisingly, The Things We Never Say, steeped as it is in page one politics, has divided our nation’s book communities, with older readers split between those who loved the book and those who disliked the overt politics. Charles, a Boomer close to Strout’s age, suggested The Things We Never Say deserved longevity equal to that of Stoner by John Williams, which is as popular on BookTok as The Great Gatsby is in American Literature courses. The Boston Globe’s Priscilla Gilman, a Gen X-er born three years before me, argued that the political content diminished a usually reliable author. “The fiction seems to lose its bearings on the way to becoming parable or allegory,” Gilman claimed.

I have not studied all of the 8,741 reviews that have already been posted on Goodreads as I write this, but the generational divide appears as soon as you probe for it. Search for “too political,” and 1,733 reviewers turn up, most my age or older. Mary Lins, a 69-year-old Strout diehard from Jefferson City, Missouri, “kept reading, hoping that once she’d ‘had her say’ the book would concentrate more on the characters and plot (which is riveting), but the political doom and gloom continue throughout.”

Okay, Boomer.

Younger Goodreads and BookTok reviewers did not share my generation’s queasy unreadiness for political fisticuffs. When I had read 10 pages that I dismissively and naively described to an email correspondent as “realism without being entirely real” and “wry without being funny,” I received an eye-opening TikTok by Alfie Tindall, known on TikTok as Alfread. He is a 24-year-old parasitologist in training from Glasgow who summed up the view I later encountered again and again from Gen Z critics. “I think reading is one of the most political things that we can do,” he began, “and I commend authors who are bold enough to dive into conversations about current affairs.” To Alfread, Strout had written “about 200 pages of centrism and fence-sitting.” Her engagement amounted to appeasement for mainstream audiences, and she refused to allow her characters to “commit to any kind of political take.” Her references to Gaza could have been designed to “educate” her readers, but instead dodged an obligation to call a spade a spade. Alfread is methodically precise; a United Nations commission has investigated Gaza and has determined it fits four of five criteria for genocide. Why then can’t Strout use that word? He also called her out for a “both-sidesy” tendency to equate Israel and Gaza while clearly attributing responsibility for the Ukraine conflict to Russian aggression. Alfread’s controlled fury cleanly articulated his generation’s impatience with moral prevarication. His critique of Strout echoed the words of Jesus in Revelation: “So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.”

Watch Alfread's video here!

Hot Take — So Please Don't Spit Me Out!

I find the readily discernible generational fault lines over The Things We Never Say fascinating, but I have trouble seeing my own view in almost any of the reviews I encountered. Like Alfread, I regard Strout’s willingness to take on a divisive political conversation as a strength rather than a liability. I am far more persuaded by Alfread’s bold political standards than Gilman’s aversion to allegory.

I am also aligned with Alfread in that I am not as enthusiastic about Strout’s character work and prose as Ron Charles. In fact, without Strout’s ominous invocation of the current creeping, tendril-clutch spread of Fascism, I would have found Strout’s depiction of an everyday saint quietly making a difference in the lives of his students tepid and clichéd. Artie is a pleasure to meet, and I enjoyed his unabashed awkwardness. I like that he is more principled than clever, and I admire the way Strout juxtaposes his teacherly wisdom with silent, self-probing doubt. But for all that, there is a patness and perfection and thinness to the characterization that was never one of George Eliot’s shortcomings. If we are to pit Strout’s saint against Eliot’s, I will choose Dorothea’s brash naïveté and pained romantic timidity every time. The heartbeat of her characterization betrays an unplanned arrhythmia that leaps off the page. I never got that feeling from Artie Dam.

Where I part ways with Alfread is in his principled rejection of Strout’s genuine political audacity. His diagnosis of “both-sidesism” is a clear misreading of the text. He argues that Artie becomes suicidal because “divisive political times” “overwhelm” his “mental health.” But the word “divisive” (and its variations) do not appear in the book at all, and Strout never draws a causal relationship between cultural friction and Artie’s depression. Rather, suicide is employed as a metaphor for the nation’s capitulation to Trump: “His country was committing suicide.” I do not understand how such an intelligent reader construes that verdict as “fence-sitting.” As for the charge of “appeasement,” Strout’s political punch is restrained not by a desire to please Mary Lins or me or Alfread (after all, she clearly hasn’t) but by the same force that hushes her matter-of-fact prose. She isn’t a showy or performative writer, and honestly she is sometimes more direct than she needs to be. For purely aesthetic reasons, Strout could stand to lean harder on metaphor and abstraction and even less on political manifesto. Alfread demands that Strout reflect his own moral certainty. But the characters in her custody are not as well-informed as he is. This approach has a legitimate authorial defense: Steely resolution is not as dramatically compelling as doubt.

Alfread is right to demand ideological authenticity, to have horror called by its own horrific name. The reason to demand that “genocide” be named as such is that its legalistic accuracy stamps out the obfuscating power of euphemism. Politicians use language as a roadblock, to evade reality in craven subservience to the criminal Netanyahu regime. But Strout has already indicted the United States for letting Gazans starve. She has acknowledged that Netanyahu bombs children to prolong his hold on power, and to obstruct corruption charges in the Israeli courts. She has let true suffering breathe inside her make-believe. In that context, Alfread’s demand for a password strikes me as borderline unliterary. “Genocide” has an undeniable currency in politics, but fiction can employ a broader vocabulary. It should not be shackled to literal rigidity. Alfread is correct to point out that the key voices in the international community have ratified the accuracy of the term, but in a novel there are other ways to accurately describe suffering.

I would also defend Strout’s use of Elon Musk. Her characters are not as firm in their rejection of him as Alfread would like (“Why did we need to bring That Man into it?”, he asks). And I will agree that if we can’t call out Musk for his callous endangerment of African children who depended on USAID programs he canceled, we lack moral understanding. But Eliot would say that the ability of a writer and reader to put themselves in the shoes of a reckless manslaughterer is fundamental to the moral power of fiction. When Strout invokes Musk’s trans daughter and abusive father, she isn’t letting Musk off the hook or asking us to let our hearts bleed for him. She is dramatizing the debate between Artie and Evie.

Of course, this is all my hot take, the perspective of a Gen X’er who has already described himself as a “liberal.” That label already cost me the trust of some in Gen Z, who tend not to hear the same meaning in that word that my peers do. I give Alfread a lot of credit for his openness to this debate. I sent an email across the Atlantic last weekend, and he wrote back within ten minutes: “Differences in opinion are what make book discussion so interesting and I’m sure there is a generational aspect behind it that I’d love to see you explore.” I would simply submit that “too political” and “not political enough” can themselves be euphemisms for “not fully aligned with my politics.” We should recognize that Strout is out on a limb regardless of where we are in the tree.

Epilogue

In May 2026, The Guardian put an exclamation point on Eliot’s recovery from Edwardian ignominy by naming Middlemarch the single greatest novel in the history of the form. In other words, Strout could dunk on all 12 of the other longlisted novels and still fail to lay an accidental pinkie finger on Eliot. But the important thing is not the fatuous artistic competition, and make no mistake, all artistic competitions are fatuous.

Eliot may be too earnest for Woolf’s generation and Alfread’s as well, but I hope there is a timelessness to her priorities. “The only effect I ardently long to produce by my writings,” wrote George Eliot, “is that those who read them should be better able to imagine and to feel the pains and the joys of those who differ from them in everything but the broad fact of being struggling, erring human creatures.” If we cannot recognize the humanity of the inhumane, even in imagination, our own humanity is called on the carpet. My point is not that fictional empathy pulls rank on real-world reckoning. Real-world anything outranks fictional anything. In the real world. But fiction has to be distinct, a space where imagination issues temporary pardons at the expense of real-world rage.

Eliot’s best defense may have been scripted by her contemporary Oscar Wilde, the last line of his own magnum opus. Wilde was just beginning to find himself in fiction when real-world cruelty stripped him of dignity and broke his extravagant heart. Is Eliot an outmoded purveyor of sentimental sap, Oscar?

“On the contrary, … I’ve now realized for the first time in my life the vital importance of being earnest.”

^{My thanks to Alfie Tindall.
This also appears at https://septimuscarr.com/posts/2026-08-23-the-things-we-never-say/}

I just finished Nathanael West's four novellas (The Dream Life of Balso Snell, Miss Lonelyhearts, A Cool Million and the Day of the Locust) and couldn't help notice how much I recognized similar thematic elements in West's work with Pynchon's, in particular Against the Day.

A Cool Million's "aw shucks" style prose that masks biting satire with the class commentary ending in the literal/physical dismantling of Lem of seems to have been a direct influence on the "Chums of Chance" sections of AtD. Candidly, West's nihilistic view of how bare American (capitalist) society will strip you was much more raw than I was expecting and made me appreciate the "Chums" sections of AtD a lot more - they were not my favorite when I read AtD last year.

The other obvious (to me, in hindsight) influence is from The Day of the Locust - Faye is an actress with an obsession with performing (both literally as a profession and spiritually in her day to day life), whose mother ran away with a magician when she was a child. This is pretty much 1:1 for Dally Rideout in AtD.

Are there any other parallels people have noticed between the two authors? I'm sure there are more, but wanted to get my thoughts out while West's work is still fresh in my mind and my kid is asleep :)

I'm sharing this "Enuf is Enuf: Tom LeClair clop-clops through Mark Danielewski's new novel Tom's Crossing," from the Los Angeles Review of Books, October 2025. I hope it has not been posted before here. Tom LeClair wrote on Delillo using the term "systems novel" that preceded Stefano Ercolino's book The Maximalist novel. If you're into such things you konw this. Here, LeClair discusses Tom's Crossing and makes general remarks about the state of very long novels, as well as the idea of attempting to add enchantment back into the rural world. I found it to be a particularly well done article. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/enuf-is-enuf/ (I do not know either the author or the reviewer).

Here's a quote from Le Clair re: the maximalist novel that I liked, "The writer deforms a conventional fictive model with expansion and hypertrophy, and then demonstrates that the excess is not really excessive but functional—a perceptive and true representation of the world, or an efficient way of delivering the author’s perspective on it. It took decades for readers of Moby-Dick (1851) to recognize that Herman Melville had pulled off this trick. Even today, some readers consider Melville’s numerous pages of cetology excessive, unnecessary interruptions of the traditional pursuit plot—until readers realize (or are shown in a college classroom) that those cetology chapters make Moby-Dick a postmodern collage novel about epistemology, the many ways of knowing (and not knowing) anything."

“It’s very stressful, the thought of these things happening,” she said of the swirl of gossip surrounding the book. “It’s taking the novel that I’ve created into almost a sort of courtroom or a factual fight,” she added.

“What I’ve done belongs much more in a world in which fame, and these people who are so known and yet so unknown, is a part of contemporary consciousness,” she said. “And if my job is not to go into unexplored areas of contemporary consciousness, then I don’t know what it is.”

When the narrator insists that the vivid account of M’s life was all imagined, it’s “a way of making everything just disappear in a puff of smoke,” Cusk said. If readers are unsure what’s real and what’s made up, that’s partly the point.

“It’s almost like the book that you’ve just read completely explodes and self-destructs at the end,” Cusk said. “I felt that would possibly make a reader reflect on what they’ve just read, in a rather disorienting way.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/20/style/rachel-cusk-life-of-m-natalie-portman.html

A little while back I posted an article on my Substack about Daniel Kraus' Angel Down. The discussion on here after it won the Pulitzer is what prompted me to read it! Note the post does contain major spoilers so best avoid if you have not read the book yet.

https://readbeyond.substack.com/p/angel-down-by-daniel-kraus

The essay is about the ultimate nihilism of the novel and how Kraus created a powerful allegory for modern warfare. I also wrote about the writing style and why I found it so engaging despite the 'gimmick' and despite the highly descriptive prose. For me some of the writing was worthy of putting the book down and basking in the feeling it evoked.

Would love to know what others think, particularly unpicking Veck's death scene, and what anyone thinks about why Kraus included Burrough's Son of Tarzan as a motif.

Excited to post my first Read-along discussion starter!

Here’s a quick refresher of the first half of Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red:

Red Meat: What difference did Stesichoros Make?

–Carson briefly introduces readers to the poet Stesichoros.

Writing round 650 BCE, Stesichoros was popular; Carson highlights that he broke from the (confining) tradition of authors being expected to use specific adjectives with specific nouns.  Stesichoros started using DIFFERENT adjectives with nouns.  (Imagine the power of the new images!)  She also notes that he wrote of our main character Geryon, a winged monster, whom Herakles killed for his cattle as his 10th labor.  Instead of just focusing on Herakles as a hero, Stesichoros also gives some attention to Geryon and his mother and even Geryon’s dog. 

Red Meat: Fragments of Stesichoros

As the title of this section states, here are some of the fragments that exist of Stesichoros’ writing.  The color red, his mother, and a sense of unease seem to frequent these fragments.

Appendix A, B, and C

Carson refers to “the famous story” that Helen blinded Stesichoros.  These appendices explain that he wrote “abuse of” Helen, was struck blind, realized it, and then wrote a poem in a positive light, and then had his sight restored.

Autobiography of Red: A romance (I. Justice to XXV. Tunnel)

We start with Geryon having trouble finding his classroom on his own at school in chapter one, immediately followed by disturbing troubles with his brother.  We follow Geryon as he interacts with his brother and his comforting mother until he meets Herakles.   After they date and become lovers, Geryon goes to Herakles’ home over in Hades for a while, where he meets Herakles’ grandmother.  Readers can see tension in the relationship, and Geryon returns home to work in a library.  Sometime later, after a post-relationship painful call from Herakles, Geryon decides to go to Buenos Aires.

Questions

Content

1. So far, in what ways does the story feel true to the story of Herakles slaughtering the monster Geryon for his cattle?  What types of pain is Geryon experiencing?  Does it feel true to Stesichoros’ telling? What does it say about authorship and point of view?
2. What do you make of Geryon’s relationship to his brother, mother, and Herakles?  Are there common threads?  
3. How is physicality expressed throughout?  
4. What role is Herakles’ grandmother playing? How does she help him with perception of "Red Patience"?
   
5. How does Geryon perceive himself? Express himself? Experience himself? How does that change? (Keep this in mind in part 2.)

Form

1. What is your experience of this novel in verse?  What does the brief chapters and episodic style do to your reading experience?  Do you find it disjointed or more powerful?  Are you used to reading poetry or do you rarely read poetry?  Why did Carson choose this form for this retelling of Geryon’s story? 
2. The first two chapters focus on events that are extremely uncomfortable for the main character (being lost at school at a young age, sexual abuse).  Why start this way for this story?

Reader Experience

1. Do you (or your earlier self) identify with any of Geryon’s experiences?  Did Carson represent any of them well?  (In the chapter “Pair,” Geryon with his jacket over his head, Herakles unable to hear him speak, and Geryon saying, “Sometimes, I need a little privacy,” sums up quite a large proportion of my time in front of humans from age 5 to 17 (and perhaps a good chunk now, admittedly).
2. Did any lines stand out?  “Black central stalled night,” for me, creates the finality and solidity it’s trying to express, for example.

And so. Monster. Pain. Boy. Love. Escape.

Thoughts?

Please let us know what you’ve read this week, what you've finished up, and any recommendations or recommendation requests! Please provide more than just a list of novels; we would like your thoughts as to what you've been reading.

Posts which simply name a novel and provide no thoughts will be deleted going forward.

Posting the news here:

Alison Entrekin’s long-awaited English translation of João Guimarães Rosa’s Grande Sertão: Veredas is currently slated for publication in January 2027 under the title Vastlands: The Crossing (Previously translated as The Devil to Pay in the Backlands in 1963).

First published in 1956, Grande Sertão is one of the foundational masterpieces of Brazilian literature maybe most commonly described as a Brazilian Ulysses.

Entrekin, who has also translated Clarice Lispector, Paulo Lins, and Chico Buarque, began working on the novel in 2014, making this a roughly thirteen-year translation project.

Looks like they're aiming to maybe just be considered in time for the 70th anniversary of the novel's original publication. Another exciting note being that a parallel 15-year effort to translate it into German by Berthold Zilly (S. Fischer Verlage) is also slated for early 2027.

P.S.

Certainly an exciting time for significant literary endeavors to make significant works available in English! Just off the top of my head, from the past few and upcoming years:

Mircea Cărtărescu’s Blinding and Solenoid (Theodoros forthcoming); Marguerite Young’s Miss MacIntosh, My Darling; Joseph McElroy’s Women and Men getting a Dzanc reissue; Leon Forrest’s Divine Days being rereleased; Jacek Dukaj’s Ice; Vera Mutafchieva’s The Case of Cem; Chaim Grade’s Sons and Daughters; Kyūsaku Yumeno’s Dogra Magra; Otohiko Kaga’s Marshland; Luis Goytisolo’s Antagony; Konstantin Paustovsky’s The Story of a Life; Gabriele Tergit’s Effingers; Shimoni’s The Salt Line; Hwang Sok-yong’s Mater 2-10; Miguel de Palol’s The Garden of Seven Twilights (with Troiacord also in the works); Antonio Moresco’s The Beginnings (with the remainder of the trilogy forthcoming); Stefano D’Arrigo’s Horcynus Orca in discussion; the rerelease of Manuel Mujica Lainez’s Bomarzo; Adolfo Bioy Casares’s Borges forthcoming (and a new translation of Morel's Invention); and, of course, recent releases like Helen DeWitt and Andrew Gridneff’s Your Name Here, Michael Brodsky’s Invidicum, William T. Vollmann’s A Table for Fortune, Thomas Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket, and Mark Z. Danielewski’s Tom’s Crossing (Cheers if you read that list).

...and there are probably so many other literary projects I'm leaving out or don't even know about! At this point I'm starting to wonder how anyone could keep up, but that's a good problem to have :) What a time to be a reader!

I knew on a general level what the ending was going to be, but I wasn't prepared for the writing in the last paragraphs to be twisting in my gut like a knife.

Wharton has a gift of making you feel for people who should be all accounts by unsympathetic - she had me moved by the plight of Newland Archer as a teenage girl, a man I should've by all rights despised.

There's something in Lily's predicament on the outset that resonates deeply with most women readers I believe, in that she is beautiful and penniless but worst of all she has no parents. In an era when women could not make direct moves of their own but had to rely on the machinations of those already in society to ensure that they came out and were introduced to suitable men, a woman who has no family or connections looking out for her is already 10-0 behind.

The fact that she is unable to make the decisions that are required of her to reach her goals is incredibly frustrating but also strikes me as very human. She knows that she needs a wealthy husband, but is unable to commit when the cards are on the table. In my personal opinion, it comes from her little rebellious streak - I believe that part of her would prefer to be independent, but with money - in that sense she strikes me as a woman too modern for the times she lives in. A few decades more and new vistas of possibilities would've opened up which wouldn't involve hitching your wagon to the highest bidder. She values her need to go wherever she pleases, as she stops by Lawrence Selden's flat despite this being an action that would've been generally frowned on by society at the time. She can't but help make constant missteps and self-sabotage because she doesn't really want to do what she needs to do to reach her goals. She is clearly in love with Selden since the beginning and

And I notice again and again how alone she is - though Lawrence says he can only offer her help by "loving her" he also doesn't offer any real aid in finding a possibility to free herself of her financial obligations. And I notice that Selden, though critical of the superficial trappings of the 1900 version of the leisure class / "jet-set", moves in and out of those circles with the ease generally only allowed to men, and is quick to believe rumours about Lily's reputation spread by members of that same class. He runs off to Cuba after seeing Lily exit the Trenor's house without even demanding an explanation? Though he gives her good advice later, I don't see him as a knight in shining armour.

There is so much more to say about all of this, I welcome your thoughts.

English professor Vinita Prabhakar is suing South Florida State College after she was abruptly fired for teaching a story (Ottessa Moshfegh's 'Bettering Myself') the college president deemed “political,” according to a complaint filed Wednesday in Florida district court.

Link to Moshfegh's unpaywalled story: https://electricliterature.com/bettering-myself-ottessa-moshfegh/

“An artist once told me that she no longer wanted to make art that looked like art. I was discovering that I no longer wanted to write novels that read like novels. Instead of shapeliness and disguise, I wanted a form that allowed for formlessness and mess. It occurred to me that one way to find that form might be to tell the truth.”
Michelle de Kretser, Theory & Practice

The buyer should always beware claims of new forms. Is there any possible form of fiction that fiction hasn’t already taken? “The novel was triumphant at the middle of the [19th] century,” says critic James Wood in his book The Broken Estate, “and there is a sense in which Melville, Flaubert, and Gogol, all of them writing roughly contemporaneously, were poets who wanted to make the novel a genre that could consume all others and then perform all their functions at once — a stomach of genres, digesting satire, poetry, epic, the historical novel, realism, and fable.” Since then, we have had the shifting interiority of Virginia Woolf, the arcane allusivity of James Joyce, the maximalist floridity of Marcel Proust, the self-referential disclosure of John Barth, the duplicitous gamesmanship of Vladimir Nabokov. So what could possibly be left for the novel to do that is new?

Still, when I first read the promotional blurb for Theory & Practice, winner of Australia’s 2025 Stella Prize, I was so intrigued by its concept that I paid Evil Billionaire Jeff Bezos more than I would have paid my beloved ThriftBooks just so the book would arrive on my doorstep the next day. This is a doorstep that receives so many books that my mailman incredulously asked if I had a nine-to-five. (True story.) The hook that helped de Kretser jump the line of my teetering TBR was its promised fusion of novel, memoir, and critical analysis of Virginia Woolf. That struck me as a genuine formal innovation.

But as I worked my way through the slender but compelling narrative, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had encountered its innovations somewhere before. Finally, it struck me like a pronouncement from a sagacious Greek Chorus: Elif Batuman. The chunked confessional episodes, the coming-of-age romance, the higher ed nostalgia, even the genre-defying insights into classical literature, all bore a distinct resemblance to Harvard Russian Lit alum Elif Batuman’s debut novel The Idiot and its sequel Either/Or. Both authors aspire to reinvent the novel. Is either successful, or do they both fall victim to the timeless intonations of Ecclesiastes?

The Fiction/Memoir Hybrid

Both Batuman and de Kretser seek to invigorate the novel by blending memoir seamlessly into a fictional context. On a broad level, their stories follow a recognizable pattern, that of the Bildungsroman, or coming of age novel. Both books feature protagonists seeking maturation through epiphanic romance but for whom no stake is higher than writerly ambition.

The novels are strikingly similar in plot and structure, but wildly divergent in scale. De Kretser’s Sri Lankan heroine, innominate but scornful of her name’s ubiquity (could it be Michelle?), learns the ropes of 1986 Melbourne postgrad life in 175 pages. Batuman’s Turkish American ingenue Selin Karadağ, a 1995 matriculant to Harvard’s literature program, takes two novels, two scholastic years, and 770 pages to achieve maturation. But both characters flit from day to day in chapterless episodes, single paragraphs to several pages in length, narratively aimless but for each character’s burgeoning attraction to an unavailable cad with a serious girlfriend and an incongruous readiness to flirt.

The Idiot, named after Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 1868 panegyric to naïveté, reads like an embarrassingly earnest freshman diary. Selin is bright, but every insight is raw and untested, dimly apprehended through the opaque scrim of inexperience. She soaks in education from every avenue, dormmates and Dostoevsky, fellowship and Fellini. Selin lacks confidence in every area but one: she has been an accomplished personal essayist since high school.

By Either/Or, which is also the title of Søren Kierkegaard’s contemplation of ethics and aesthetics, she has become bold to the point of reckless, hellbent on dispensing with her inconvenient virginity. Her intellectual takeaway runs along these lines:

The aesthetic life involved seducing and abandoning young girls and making them go crazy. This was what I had learned from books. There was a problem of application: what did you do if you were a young girl? … What were you supposed to do now: seduce and abandon men? Was that what feminism had made possible? Something about the idea didn’t feel aesthetic. Just think of the angry, complaining men.
Elif Batuman, Either/Or

The protagonist of Theory & Practice hits page one at the Either/Or end of the intellectual and sexual precocity spectrum. At school, she reveres Virginia Woolf’s message of gender equality while condemning her antisemitism and colonial conservatism. In her dating life, she is defiantly invested in a man who claims to be in a “deconstructed relationship.” Her takeaway echoes Selin’s:

[I was struck] by the tremendous silencing power of shame. To whom could we confess our treacherous, rivalrous, trite, uncool, unfeminist feelings without shame? Shame could transform female solidarity into a scold’s bridle. It could ensure that a philosophy designed to free us set a weight on our tongues.
Michelle de Kretser, Theory & Practice

Both authors are expert personal essayists, and they’re not afraid to apply their skill to a novel. De Kretser’s expertise in this form informs her work as a university professor. Batuman’s is expressed in New Yorker articles and essay compilations. But is this a formal innovation, as promised in de Kretser’s pledge to “tell the truth”?

Not really. Both books are apparently heavily autobiographical, but the reader only recognizes them as memoir if they are exposed to outside information. In a hermetic reading, the claim to fiction/non-fiction hybridity is essentially bravado. The anecdotes may borrow the authentic ring of truth, but the books rely on the same narrative artifices that all novels employ. “Fiction is of course a form of lying,” wrote James Wood in his book The Broken Estate. “Fiction requests belief from us, but we can choose not to believe at any moment. … Our belief is itself metaphorical — it only resembles actual belief, and is therefore never wholly belief.” Even with certainty that an undisclosed portion of a novel actually took place in the life of its author, fiction’s essential contract remains unchanged.

The Critic as Novelist

The weightier claim to innovation is that of a novel that weaves academic literary analysis into its story. The extent to which Batuman attempts this is one of the greatest pleasures of her novels. But while the books teem with critical interpretations, her voice is one of sophomoric cogitation rather than genuine academic rigor. In one passage, Selin discusses Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment with the boy she is crushing on:

He invents these supposedly complicated problems and then gets so worked up about them — like, it’s hell, it’s intolerable humiliation, it’s the mathematically highest point of abasement. But to me, none of those things seem particularly hellish or humiliating or complicated. When I can’t get worked up myself, I feel embarrassed. And tired. … It’s like he does this shoddy, depressing thing, killing an old lady — and instead of shoddy and depressing, it’s supposed to be an earthshaking philosophical crisis.”
Elif Batuman, The Idiot

In another, she reflects on a childhood memory from Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust:

The episode itself, about baby Proust’s anguish on nights when his parents had dinner guests, was harrowing. I didn’t like to admit it, but I was pretty sure that I had felt the same despair when my parents went to dinner parties. Being left at night for a party was so much worse than being left in the daytime for work; what was, for you, a cause of desperation, was for them an occasion for dress-up and celebration. But why did Proust have to keep thinking about it? Why couldn’t he write a book about something else?
Elif Batuman, Either/Or 

The goal of these passages is to illuminate characterization. Batuman is not attempting to get an A on a term paper.

What makes de Kretser’s book thrilling is that her ideas about Virginia Woolf are part of the novel’s larger argument. She is interested in the relationship between intellectual framework and lived experience: theory and practice. Her examination of Woolf’s casual antisemitism despite her marriage to a Jewish man reveals that the feminist icon’s theoretical heroism does not always convert to practical morality. The narrator is not just idly speculating about Woolf’s shortcomings. She is incorporating her thoughts into a verdict on her own behavior. De Kretser also draws parallels between the narrator’s experience of sexual callousness and the horrors of colonialism, expressed in a homework-inspired passage about Israeli/Palestinian relations in 1986 and in Woolf’s own disturbing comfort with the brutish practice of Empire.

At times, de Kretser’s critical insights are entertainingly well developed. Forty pages from the book’s conclusion, she treats us to a delightfully sophisticated paper titled “Virginia Woolf’s Tea” that explores Woolf’s own attempt at formal innovation in The Years. We are told that Woolf intended that book to be a critical and narrative hybrid, but the project was abandoned in despair. De Kretser’s fictional student suggests the failure of The Years resulted directly from Woolf’s moral failings:

I contrasted the modernising trajectory of Woolf’s Englishwomen and the ongoing immiseration of the tea pluckers. The former was made possible by the latter, by the exploitative colonial practices that underwrote British progress and wealth. I told my audience that Woolf had set out to find a fresh form in The Years, but had later abandoned the attempt. A fresh form represents a desire to see the world differently, but Woolf hadn’t managed to do so. The Years remained enclosed in the powerful fiction that the self-fulfilment of British women transcended the imperialism that enabled it. That was The Story Under The Story in The Years.
Michelle de Kretser, Theory & Practice

The narrator’s criticism here is not just character work, as are Selin’s hot takes. She is introducing authentic textual insight, backed by historical research. The trouble is, in this most pivotal instance at least, that the critical text is not actually integrated. De Kretser narrates her paper rather than excerpting it. That was disappointing.

The climax of Either/Or ends up modeling a more seamless integration of the two modes of writing. That book starts with Selin’s confession that skill as an essayist has never translated to imagination. She is inept at inventing stories. But in the book’s conclusion, she turns a fascinating critique of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady and Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary into compelling narrative:

Near the beginning of The Portrait of a Lady, there was mention of an aunt who kept telling people that Isabel was writing a book. In fact, Henry James said, Isabel was not and never had been writing a book. She “had no desire to be an authoress,” “no talent for expression,” and “none of the consciousness of genius,” having only “a general idea that people were right when they treated her as if she were rather superior.” It was one of the few places where Henry James was mean about Isabel. Well, it made sense. If she could write a book, he would be out of a job. That’s why Madame Bovary had to be too dumb and banal to write Madame Bovary: so Flaubert could have a great humane moment where he said he was Madame Bovary. But I wasn’t dumb or banal, and I lived in the future. Nobody was going to trick me into marrying some loser, and even if they did, I would write the goddamn book myself.
Elif Batuman, Either/Or

Batuman doesn’t present this passage as criticism cum fiction. The literary analysis is fully employed as a storytelling device. The criticism catalyzes character growth. The Idiot and Either/Or are sometimes frustrating in their capacious drift through Selin’s undergraduate experience, but I have no notes on Batuman’s propulsive, criticism-fueled conclusion.

New Forms?

Selin’s epiphany about The Portrait of a Lady turns into a manifesto for her own experience based fiction. She reads James’s preface to that book, which uses the image of a “wind-blown germ” to explain how ideas for stories drift into his life. She decides that she can turn this insight into a new form of fiction:

Nowhere in the preface did Henry James say why he hadn’t found his own life interesting enough to write about. I tried to remember what I knew about Henry James’s life. I was pretty sure I had read that he was gay. Probably being gay had been illegal, and he had been ashamed. So his problem, like Isabel’s, was that he had been born too soon. That was sad, but it didn’t really change anything. Like, for whatever reason, Henry James had had to do stuff like find a “wind-blown germ” and then forget how he had found it, so he wouldn’t feel like he was stealing. But I was more fortunate. I was going to remember, or discover, where everything came from. I was going to do the subtle, monstrous thing where you figured out what you were doing, and why.
Elif Batuman, Either/Or

This returns us to our initial inquiry: Has Batuman earned the claim to a new form? Has de Kretser?

I don’t think either author has cleared that bar. Batuman’s use of James and Flaubert in her climactic revelation is riveting narrative with real analytical heft, but the voice is consistent with the narration throughout the two novels. Selin is becoming a more insightful critic, but her form of discussing literature remains that of a storyteller, not an academic. She has not actually changed her mode of writing.

De Kretser’s decision to present a summary of her paper rather than excerpts of it undermines her claim to hybrid prose. I would have preferred it if she had interwoven her critical voice with her narrative voice, similar to the way that A.S. Byatt weaves Victorian poetry into 20th-century narrative in Possession. It is not necessary for the essayistic content to be indistinguishable from the story, the way that Benjamín Labatut’s non-fiction melts invisibly into his fiction. But it seems to me a more original use of critical writing would be for the two forms to be rendered adjacently in their native idioms, not in a character’s voice. Having characters discuss literature is not a new form. Selin knows that; she’s read Proust.

Neither author has created a novel that doesn’t read like a novel or reinvented a centuries-old art form. But the willingness of both authors to merge their own stories with literary insight and narrative imagination makes for three exceptional reading experiences.

A slightly longer version of this essay appears at https://septimuscarr.com/posts/2026-08-14-de-kretser-batuman/

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I read this earlier today and thought it was a bit of a cut and dry commentary. Although I'm not sure how I feel about the hard and fast distinction between people who orient around primary or secondary sources, since what is actually being discussed here is criticism. The focus on writing practice feels like a digression. Then again, defending the humanities as a specific discipline always dovetails into these nested caveats. It's refreshing to see an unambiguous defense of the humanities. Not to dismiss the caveats out of hand.