Axes for Frozen Seas

It has been a memorable year in my reading life, more concentrated than most. The high points have been extraordinary, the lows few and already fading into forgetfulness.

The unexpected revelation of my year has been the novels, letters, essays, and diaries of Virginia Woolf. After the thrilling discovery of A Writer’s Diary, followed by The Waves, Mrs. Dalloway, and culminating in To the Lighthouse, it became clear that Woolf’s voice would remain with me. Reading more deeply into a single writer’s body of work, over months rather than days, proved more sustaining than the restless movement from author to author. I have begun gathering better editions of Woolf’s diaries and intend to linger with her other novels, essays, and letters as inclination allows.

There are other presences too: Coetzee, Flaubert, Kafka, and Bellow, each forming a small constellation of ongoing preoccupations. Among the landmarks of this year stands Ulysses, which began as a provocation and ended as an unveiling; that a novel could capture the agony and beauty of life so coherently shook me, and continues to agitate something unsettled within. It is a book I return to almost weekly, dipping into its pages without system or goal.

Finnegans Wake has replaced Ulysses as a delayed challenge, a taxing one I am not yet ready to accept. For now, my only Joycean plan is to read Richard Ellmann’s biography, to stay near the periphery of that difficult light.

Three books set my head on fire this year: Ulysses, Josipovici’s What Ever Happened to Modernism?, and Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Josipovici’s work, offering a personal vision of literature and modernism, clarified something inarticulate in me: why certain novels ignite and others leave only a thin residue of dissatisfaction, or worse, nausea.

Other books left indelible marks: Coetzee’s trilogy of fictionalised memoirs, Leigh Fermor’s A Time to Keep Silence, Yiyun Li’s The Vagrants, John Williams’ Stoner, Josipovici’s The Singer on the Shore, and Andrei Codrescu’s The Poetry Lesson. Revisiting Don Quixote this year was another quiet event; but it feels almost superfluous to describe Cervantes’ work as sublime; it is a truth embedded in the consciousness of anyone who has read him deeply.

Kafka occupied a different cavity altogether. Reading The Trial for the first time, slowly digesting the Collected Stories and the Diaries, created a different order of experience. Kafka’s writing remains, for me, the axe for the frozen sea inside.

There was one regret, inevitable among so many encounters: Michael Cunningham’s The Hours. Out of a misplaced love of Mrs. Dalloway, I finished the book against my instincts and cannot reclaim the hours I devoted to its pallid imitation. But the year, taken as a whole, has been one of immersion, discovery, and necessary disturbance.