The best books we've read in 2021 (2023)

„DeGaulle' by Julian Jackson

This excellent biography of the former French head of state brilliantly shows how he managed to dominate his country's political life for decades. Jackson's account of de Gaulle's youth and conservative background only reinforces respect for de Gaulle's attitude towards the Vichy government in 1940, and his account of de Gaulle's war years in London makes it clear why. Churchill and Roosevelt found it almost impossible to treat. The second half of the book, which deals with de Gaulle's return to power during the conflict in Algeria and his somewhat autocratic presidency, is even more intriguing; together, the two halves make as good an argument as one can believe that a single individual can change the course of history. But Jackson, with sublime prose and an assured understanding of the politics and figures of the Third, Fourth and Fifth Republics, never allows this argument to overshadow de Gaulle's extremely difficult and domineering personality and why he never adapted to democracy. that he helped save. and then he presided."Isaak Chotiner".

„Next: A romanceby Maryse Conde

In a year that began with a coup attempt, it was good to remember that bigotry and partisanship threatened every society, and that it is often a great narrative too. Maryse Condé's 1984 novel Segu begins in the fiercely competitive capital of the 18th-century Bambara Empire, in present-day Mali, where the government reigned supreme.Mansahauntingly follows the rise of Islam and the mysterious arrival of white explorers. The griots sing of the exploits of a noble family, the Traores, whose children are destined to suffer all the consequences of the upheavals of modernity. Condé, who was born in Guadeloupe but spent many years in West Africa, is the great novelist of the Afro-Atlantic world, and Segu, his masterpiece, is the mother of Diaspora epics. The novel follows the Traorés around the world, from Moroccan universities to Brazilian sugarcane fields, drawn in all directions by their religious ambitions, desires, and yearnings. Condé excels at evoking the tensions of a changing world, be it the ambivalence of a man torn between his family's gods and the cosmopolitanism of Islam, or the cynicism of a wealthy mixed-race woman living on the coast of slaves sold in Senegal. Despite his commanding range, "Segu" is also warm and talkative, completely lacking the sentimental attachment to heritage that makes many family stories ancestral stations of the cross. Condé has a wicked sense of humor that is not very flattering, especially towards its mostly male leads, whose naive adventurism and distracted cruelty (especially towards women) profoundly inform the story, which defies your comprehension.– Julian Lucas

„Upper Bohemia: a memoryby Hayden Herrera

I found this recent memoir while browsing the shelves of the Brooklyn Public Library and was immediately intrigued by its cover: a black-and-white photograph of two girls crouched in the rear window of a sports car, their tops tousled and their blond hair. ...suggested a kind of patrician free spirit. Herrera is known for her biographies of artists like Frida Kahlo and Arshile Gorky, but in Upper Bohemia she turns to the story of her own family, a clan of high wasps as privileged as they are fucked. During the 1940s and 1950s, Herrera and her older sister, Blair, were indiscriminately sandwiched between her divorced parents, who possessed good looks, erratic temperaments, and intense narcissism. Her mother and her father, both married five times, often dismissed the girls, treating them as considerably less important than their own artistic or sexual fulfillment, the pursuit of which led them into street art circles on Cape Cod and the city of NY. Mexico and Cambridge. . Herrera tells a fascinating cultural story of a given medium, but what is most moving is her ability to channel in sensitive detail the life of a lonely boy trying to make sense of the world around him. Her tone carries a certain detachment, but I often found it immensely moving. "Blair and I hadn't spent much time with our mother since the fall of 1948, when, after taking us by train to a boarding school in Vermont, she went to Mexico to divorce her," she writes. "Every time our mother showed up, she would bring gifts from Mexico, clay animals or embroidered blouses for Blair and me. She always made everything sound wonderful. She was like the sun. Blair and I would approach her like two Icarus, but never we touch". the golden rays from her.” This is a beautiful book.– Naomi Fry

„Long live the post office horn!' by Vigdis Hjorth, translated by Charlotte Barslund

A fun, fast-paced novel about existential despair, collective commitment, and the Norwegian postal service, Vigdis Hjorth's Long Live the Post Horn inspired me in this strange and turbulent year. Ellinor, the novel's narrator, is a 35-year-old public relations consultant whose projects and relationships are characterized by a shadowy and abiding detachment. When her colleague Dag leaves town, Ellinor reluctantly inherits one of her clients: Postkom, the Norwegian postal and communications union that opposes a deal with the EU. directive that would introduce private sector competition. For Ellinor, the project starts out shaky; Little by little he lets go. The result is something of a personal awakening, a new desire to live, connect and communicate, and a truly absorbing treatment of bureaucratic boredom. "Long live the mail horn!" it is rich in political and philosophical themes and smooth in its delivery. They come in the form of disassociated journal entries, awkward Christmas gift exchanges, and the world's loneliest description of a sex toy ("bought the hottest model online, the one with the highest ratings"). There's also a long story narrated by a postal worker, which makes for a wonderful, almost mythical embedded narrative. "What exactly does 'real' mean?" asks Ellinor, who is experiencing an authenticity crisis while desperately trying to produce public relations copy for The Real Thing, an American restaurant chain. "Was he the man behind Real Thing Real Thing, I wondered? I researched him; he looked like any other capitalist." Long and hackneyed, this novel was pure joy for me.– Anna Weiner

„Free: A boy and a country at the end of historyVon Lea Ypi

Some people feel free to imagine their life free of history. Lea Ypi did not have that luxury. Born in 1979 in Albania, then one of the most closed countries in the communist bloc, she had little reason to question her love for Stalin until 1990, when she hugged the statue of her and discovered that protesters had been beheaded there. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, the edifice of Albanian socialism also collapsed. Even more confusing was the fact that Ypi's parents never believed this: they just cast a good spell to keep her dissident middle-class background from hurting her prospects. Ypi's new book, Free, launched in the UK and scheduled for a US release in January, is a tender and dark childhood memory of hers. But it is also a work of social criticism and a reflection on how to feed on misinformation in a world where history is far from over. Ypi, a political scientist at the London School of Economics, is interested in how categories of thought like "proletariat" have been replaced by reductionist slogans like "freedom." "When freedom finally came, it was like a plate served frozen," she writes. "We chew little, swallow quickly and stay hungry." Her parents became leaders of the new democratic opposition, but lost their savings to a shady investment scheme, and when the country plunged into civil war in 1997, her stunning mother was forced to move to Italy. , where she worked as a cleaner. When Ypi studied abroad, her left-wing friends didn't want to hear her experiences: her socialism was doing well and Albania's was better forgotten. But she Ypi does not forget, neither the repression of the system in which she grew up, nor the harshness of capitalism. Her book is a quick read, but like the specter of Marx that haunts Europe, she stays with you.-Margaret Talbot

„Egge: a romance' by Joy Williams

I alreadywritten at length about the miracle of the latest Joy Williams novel, "Egg". But I feel compelled to restate my case. Set in a world that climate change has turned into a tomb, the book is filled with wild oddities, mystical intelligence, and a poignancy and beauty that begins at sentence level but sinks to the heart of the book. "Harrow" chases a teenager named Kristen through the desert, where she eventually finds a "terrorist asylum" of a retired race determined to avenge Earth. Her partner, Jeffrey, is a ten-year-old boy of an alcoholic mother or the judge of the underworld. Williams, the true judge of the underworld, plays here as theologian, animal rights activist, mad oracle, social historian and philosopher of language. His comic pieces—A Birthday Party, for example, in which the hastily prepared cake is a glazed replica of Goya's Saturn Devouring His Son—elicit tears, and his elegies elicit laughter, if only for what it means. absurd to find so much joy in a study of desolation. When he finished the book, I missed the terrible, cleansing darkness of his eyes on me.–Katy Waldman

„Crazy Love: An Introduction to Opera,” by Vivien Schweitzer

My late grandfather spent most of his weekends in his office, a sunken room adorned with a battered Chesterfield sofa and posters of various international chess championships, listening to opera. As a child, I found this practice impenetrable. He didn't understand the languages ​​coming out of his record player and he wasn't old enough to grasp the rhapsodic emotion inherent in that form. The opera is about great feelings; it exudes youth, but it is still a passion that most people develop. (Maybe it has something to do with the cost of a Met ticket.) Then the pandemic hit, and suddenly all I wanted to hear was Maria Callas, whose outlandish arias were the soundtrack to my throbbing, anxious mind. My grandfather wasn't around to talk about my fixation, but luckily I found Vivien Schweitzer's 2018 book A Mad Love, which is a brilliant cultural history of the greatest opera composers and their obsessive minds. Beginning with Monteverdi and ending with Philip Glass, the book is about the blood and sweat it takes to write an opera (an often maddening endeavor, it seems) and the feverish attachment of fans to the resulting work. I found myself flipping through it in the shower, delighted not only to breathe the gossip backstories of the Ring cycle and La Traviata, but also to join the Society of Opera Fools, of which my grandfather was a full member. I finally understood what I was hearing on those Sunday afternoons: fear, joy, love, betrayal.– Rachel Syme

„not even a dayby Anne Garréta, translated by Emma Ramadan

It's a strange feeling to read a book that feels like it was written for you, but wasn't. The friend who recommended "Not a day" by the Oulipian writer Anne Garréta to me must have known that this fusion of intimacy and anonymity would be irresistible to me. As she recovers from an accident that immobilized her body, the book's narrator, a nomadic literature professor, decides that she will write about the women she has desired so much. Each woman is identified with a letter of the alphabet; She spends five hours a day on each letter for exactly one month. She knows that expressing desires requires discipline, and she discovers that desire always, always gets the better of her. The letters are skipped and encoded so that the TOC reads "B, X, E, K, L, D, H, N, Y, C, I, Z". The narrator takes a long break from the project and when she returns to it, one of the stories she is writing is fiction. Slowly, the categories that keep desire and its creation of "our little selves" at bay - me and others, past and present, masculine and feminine, heterosexual and homosexual, solipsistic alienation and shared passion - blend beautifully and terrifyingly... Instead of a confession written in the familiar "alphabet of desire," we see an entirely new language emerge. I could choke on the book: it's painful and maddening, smart and unbelievably sexy. But it would be easier to say that reading it is like meeting someone and feeling like the world is falling apart. Here is a book that insists that fictional desire, its imitation and illusion, is indistinguishable from another person's desire.– Merve Emre

„Tom Stoppard: A Life' by Hermione Lee

for a while this yearLee's latest biography.it just seemed to beone, and for a few weeks supposedly reading other stuff, I opened it at odd times, at breakfast while I was waiting for the pot of pasta to cook, until I realized it had all worked. The biography runs almost nine hundred pages, so my experience of it as a benefit, a diversion, is a testament to Lee's craft. Much of Stoppard's story is well known: his journey from young itinerant refugee to Bristol journalist and radio drama writer, and then to fame and fortune as a witty playwright with 'Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead'. What Lee adds are details, particularly interesting changes in his career, as well as a great deal of his own admiration. (Not entirely to his credit, I suppose, this is the kind of biography everyone dreams of writing about; our leading man is always brilliant, invariably a delight. Stoppard was apparently delighted to read, to make it clear that he's "not so good as people think.") What Stoppard brings is a touch of whimsy as he climbs the tall tower of success. His work has a pleasing cohesion with its mix of literal wit and lighthearted verbal humor. Off the page, it's clear who combines casual social climbing with the joyous pursuit of material comfort, often courtesy of Hollywood, has a script workflow for projects like the Indiana Jones franchise and his constant drive to do more luxuries than are offered: your budget must increase to accommodate a luxury hotel suite, he tells a study, "because I'd rather not sleep and work in the same room"-are some of the little charms of this book. Ultimately, though, Lee's biography is a treat because it'sFrom the writerBook: full of respect for the emotion of the job, capable of balancing the pace of life and working at height. Reading it means getting excited about the act of literature again.-Nathan Heller

„Romano 11, Buch 18' by Dag Solstad, translated by Sverre Lyngstad

I first came across 'Novel 11, Book 18' by the great Norwegian writer Dag Solstad on a warm sunny day while walking with some friends who were visiting from out of town. I loved the mood and the beautiful cover of the book, dark green on cream, and most importantly, the proximity to my friends, I bought it. It was almost fun to find out just how relentlessly dark the book is. Released in 1992 but released this year in the United States by New Directions, translated into English by Sverre Lyngstad, it tells the story of Bjørn Hansen, a mild-mannered civil servant who left his wife and son to pursue his own lovers, Turid. Lammers. . A change of life means a change of location: Hansen leaves Oslo and settles in Kongsberg, a small airless town, where he soon joins an amateur theater company of which Turid is widely regarded as the most talented artist and a kind of spiritual leader. guide. In what is probably the best and darkest sitcom I've read all year, Hansen tries to persuade the company, normally a vehicle for light musicals, to put on a production of Henrik Ibsen's The Wild Duck. He wins, but the show is a resounding flop, and even worse in Hansen's eyes, Turid delivers a cynical, crowd-pleasing performance that inoculates her, and only her, of the general public's disapproval. . The relationship will end soon. Solstad tells the story in deceptively simple sentences that are fleetingly repeated, bringing together new and increasingly sad aspects of meaning. Hansen, going through the disappointing laundry of his life (he's having the worst midlife crisis imaginable), finally hatches a revenge plan so sad and absurd it's almost slapstick. The generic title of the book suggests that little tragedies like Hansen's happen everywhere and all the time, as a simple cost of living. For Solstad, what feels like rest, sun and privacy, the company of friends, is just another step on a tightrope that stretches across the void. Maybe I'll save that for the summer.– Vinson Cunningham

„Patchwork: a life in clothesde Claire Wilcox

One of the books that surprised and moved me the most this year is Patch Work: A Life Between Clothes, a memoir by Claire Wilcox. Wilcox is a Senior Fashion Curator atin London, and writes of clothing with a heady quirk: the centuries-old robes are made of "narrow lengths of the finest Japanese silk, hand-sewn and then pleated like the delicate underside of a field mushroom." But this fragmentary and dreamlike book is not about fashion, as it is usually understood. There is no industry gossip, no trend analysis. Instead, Wilcox uses her encounters with objects—the lace handbags in the museum's collection, the purple velvet pants lent to her by a charismatic friend—to explore themes of love and loss, birth and mourning, family and tribe. Constructed as deftly and obliquely as the sumptuous garments it describes, the book is carefully woven from fragments of storytelling and imagery, ultimately revealing how materiality and memory interact, to the point of feeling like holding a button. between his fingers. Wilcox recalled her earliest memories of buttoning his mother's cardigan: "I buttoned it all the way and then I buttoned it all the way."– Rebeca Met

„sabbath theaterpor Philip Roth

During the pandemic, actor John Turturro and I adapted Roth's novel for the stage, so I must have read the book twenty times. I am always amazed. It is never adulterous urination orall the cakesSmell of underwear that shocks me. It's Roth's unique ability to summon death: its promises, its terrors, its reliability, and the unrelenting pain it leaves in its wake. There are moments when Roth approaches the subject with cosmic levity: "Sothey arehis mother? Are you here or are you everywhere?” Mickey Sabbath, the aging, insatiable puppeteer, asks the ghost of his dead mother. "Do you only know what you knew when you were alive, or do you know everything now, or is 'knowing' no longer an issue?" - death is colored with so much desire that it's almost too much for Sabbath and the reader (this one, at least) to bear. He's gotten used to the oxygen pen in his nose. I'm used to the drainage bag attached to the bed, Sabbath thinks, remembering the last of many nights he spent in his hospital bed. “The cancer is too widespread for surgery. I was used to it, too.” For all Sabbath's slippery opportunism, Drenka is his only love: “We can live with tears and we can live with tears; we can live with it night after night as long as it doesn't stop." But of course it can be done. It always does. Not in this book, though, for Sabbath, Roth's most unrepentant diabolical hero, despite his relentless flirtation. with suicide: "I couldn't die. How could he leave? How could he leave? Everything he hated was here.–Ariel Levy

„cordialitybut daniel sherrell

In "Heat" by author and organizer Daniel Sherrellinvigorating opening memory, he calls climate change "the problem": the amazing, mind-boggling fact that should make all sentient people lose sleep, cry themselves hoarse, and fundamentally recalibrate their lives. And yet, except for a small minority, most people seem content to listen to the string ensemble on the deck of the Titanic and silence anyone who tries to interrupt the music. To be clear, this is my heavy load, not Sherrell's. An unabashed climate alarmist, he mostly feels sorry for the quietists, in part because, like all Americans, he was one of them. Sherrel was born in 1990. His father, an oceanographer, made extensive research trips to the polar caps. The Sherrells, of all people, understood what emergency climate change was, but his house was normal in the sense that the topic wasn't discussed much. "Even with all the evidence in front of us," Sherrell writes, "it was hard to name."sad moodMemories, and they certainly are, but what came even clearer to me than the pain was a kind of existential irony: not only do we seem unable to solve the problem, we also apparently can't find an honest way to solve it. talk. Most Americans say they believe in science; Science says that the future will be disastrous unless we make drastic changes. and yet, Sherrell notes, "it still sounded rude, even a little ridiculous, to say it all in conversation." This is how the world ends: not with a bang, not even with a lot of wailing. Written in the form of a letter to a child who may or may not conceive Sherrell, "Heat" is not a thesis book of any kind. But if there is a central claim, it is that the brown-haired activist "Don't suffer, get organized!" it is a simple mantra, a wrong choice. Why not both?– André Marantz

„brothers and guardiansde John Edgar Wideman

John Edgar Wideman was teaching at the University of Wyoming in the mid-1970s when his brother Robert showed up in town unannounced. Wideman had a young family and a steady job as a writer and academic. Robert was on a more tumultuous path; He was on the run after a botched robbery at a home in Pittsburgh ended with one of his accomplices killing a man who later died of his injuries. Released in 1984, Brothers and Keepers is Wideman's attempt to come to terms with their different lives and the bond they will never break. He examines episodes from his childhood looking for forgotten plot points. No genre can tell such a complex story. At times, the book deals with the difficulties of the criminal justice system, while Wideman details his visits to the prison where Robert is serving a life sentence. (Robert would educate himself in prison, and in 2019, his sentence was commuted.) At other times, the book feels surreal and fantastical as Wideman considers the possibility that his life has taken her elsewhere. And there are moments of sadness and fear as he ponders the ethics of making his brother a character. I often find that memoirs level the degree to which "the personal is political" is a contradictory idea. What makes Brothers and Keepers so compelling is that Wideman feels love but not compassion, not for his brother and certainly not for himself.–Hua Hsu