First, the Eclipse Drama.
My husband took Monday off to see the eclipse. “It won’t be a total eclipse. You have to drive to Buffalo for that.”
“I love Buffalo!”
Buffalo is a much hipper city than you’d think. I like the dim light, the ocean-like waves of Lake Erie, Talking Leaf Books, Delaware Park, the art museum, and the Peace Bridge. (Niagara Falls is on the other side of the Peace Bridge.)
But it’s a long way from here.
My husband laughed. “The motel rooms have been booked for years.”
Because, you know, there are a lot of eclipse fans.
I have to say, I loved Haley’s Comet, but I was wary about the eclipse. You can’t look directly at it. That kind of thing makes me nervous.
That’s how I know I’m my mother’s daughter.
One year in school we made eclipse viewers out of a shoebox, tin foil, and a pin hole.
My mom did not trust these simple components.
I felt a bit that way about the special eclipse glasses ordered on the internet.
A few minutes before the eclipse, I donned my eclipse glasses. “I see nothing!”
And they were also too big, so I had to hold the earpieces on.
“Look. It’s right there. Can you see it?”
I saw a teeny, tiny black moon and an orange crescent of the sun. I must have looked at it too long because then the sun turned green.
And then I saw double.
“Well,” I said, after staring at the eclipse for three or four minutes. “I’m seeing double, so I’d better call it quits.”
And we weren’t drinking, either. Well, iced lavender Earl Grey tea.
In retrospect, I should have made festive eclipse cookies to heighten the mood.
Though my guess is there was quite a lot of festive drinking among the real Eclipse Heads, who are like Deadheads.
Did you see the eclipse? Was it dramatic?
THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE SHORTLIST DRAMA
I excitedly awaited the announcement of the International Booker Prize Shortlist today.
I was sure The Silver Bone, by Andrey Kurkov, would make the list. It is my favorite book of the year.
But it did NOT make the shortlist.
That’s always the way, isn’t it? The book you love makes the longlist if you’re lucky, but it seldom makes the shortlist, and it never, ever wins the prize.
On the other hand, I would not have read The Silver Bone if it hadn’t made the longlist. That is why we like awards.
Anyway, here’s the official International Booker shortlist. Do you recommend any of these?
Godspeed, Shortlisted Authors, & Good Luck to Thee!
Not a River, by Selva Almada, translated from the Spanish by Annie McDermott
(Charco Press, Graywolf Press)
Almada’s compelling style is here applied to a “singular vision of rural Argentina,” in this novel about three men on a fraught fishing trip. Praised for its depth and gut-punching prose, you can find an excerpt here.
Mater 2-10, by Hwang Sok-yong, translated from the Korean by Sora Kim-Russell, Youngjae Josephine Bae
(Scribe)
This multi-generational epic following a family of railway workers comes to us from one of South Korea’s most celebrated novelists. Charting Korea’s history over a century, this meaty, politically-inflected saga draws on the author’s personal experience “in labour and pro-democracy movements.”
Kairos, by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated from the German by Michael Hofmann
(New Directions)
This luminous novel tracing the end of a doomed love affair is set in East Berlin, in the 1980s. Erpenbeck is already a well-established chronicler of this tumultuous place-in-time. Find the author in her own words here.
The Details, by Ia Genberg, translated from the the Swedish by Kira Josefsson
(Wildfire Books)
Witty and lively, this unusual assemblage has been called a fever dream in the most literal sense. Narrated by a woman trapped in bed with, yes, a high fever, you can find an excerpt of this audacious and hard-to-classify book right here on Lit Hub.
Crooked Plow, by Itamar Viera Junior, translated from the Portugese by Johnny Lorenz
(Verso Fiction)
This “evocative journey into the heart of Brazil’s quilombos,” follows two sisters in and out of a pivotal incident. Praised for its nuanced portrait of a family in crisis, this one is supposed to haunt and stick.
What I’d Rather Not Think About, by Jente Posthuma, translated from the Dutch by Sarah Timmer Harvey
(Scribe UK)
This second novel examines both deep grief and identity via a set of twins, one of whom dies by suicide. Yet critics praise its absurd and “at times startling funny” navigation of difficult mate