August in Review — Lit Chat, Vol. 11
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Hey friends,
Happy Labor Day! This is going to be another quick & dirty Lit Chat Lite™ because I’m leaving for the airport again in approximately five hours and I haven’t finished packing or located my Kindle charger. If you see any typos, no you didn’t. Here we go!!
The Foundation:
Les Années — Annie Ernaux
I mentioned last time that this sucker was taking me forever because I was determined to read it in the original French, and 3 1/2 weeks later, we did it, Joe! Les Années (The Years) is a fascinating narrative memoir that chronicles Ernaux’s life via a series of described photographs, starting as a child in the post-WWII era and moving through the decades into the present moment. She speaks of her memories in the third person and contextualizes each phase of her life against the backdrop of ongoing socio-political events and pop culture, including elections, protests, songs, and the emergence of new technology. It made me wish that I had read this book as part of one of my college French classes because my unfamiliarity with the details of French socioeconomic history combined with lots of new vocab made for slow reading and not a lot of absorption. One day, I’ll come back to this in English and find out just how much I missed.
The Summer Book — Tove Jansson
Most famous for her Moomin comics, Tove Jansson also wrote novels for adults that are positively delightful. The Summer Book is a collection of vignettes following the day-to-day adventures of a young girl and her grandmother as they spend their summers on a remote Finnish island. Even though this book is for adults, it’s the kind of book I would have loved as a kid, because it conveys such a strong sense of nostalgia for slower, simpler times and long days spent outdoors searching for magic under every rock and tree root. This is the perfect book to help you gently transition out of these last couple weeks of summer.
Adelaide — Genevieve Wheeler
This book hit home for me in a lot of ways, and I think it will for many of my friends as well, even though I wish it wouldn’t. Adelaide is a twenty-five-year-old American ex-pat in London who thinks she’s found her Disney prince, but her fairytale ending escapes her when he proves to be painfully unreliable and noncommittal. I found this book frustrating at times because it was difficult to watch Adelaide continue to bend over backward for someone who so clearly did not love her back, all while she clung to the romanticized version of the relationship to the detriment of her own mental health. My frustration with Adelaide came less from her character and more from the fact that I saw in her so many of my friends’ and my own misguided experiences growing up and learning to navigate adult relationships. This is a really candid and vulnerable look at love, mental health, and what it means to feel valued and worthy in a relationship, but it’s definitely not a light-hearted love story.
THE TIPPY TOP:
Yellowface — R. F. Kuang
You might remember that I was not a huge fan of Kuang’s fantasy novel Babel when I read it back in April, but oh man, I flew through her newest contemporary novel. Yellowface is the story of white writer June Hayward, who after witnessing the freak death of her friend, the much more successful Asian-American author Athena Liu, decides to steal Athena’s unpublished manuscript about Chinese soldiers in WWI and pass it off as her own. As someone who has been adjacent to the trade publishing world for a long time, I devoured this darkly funny satire of the industry and its trends and biases.
The part of this story that struck me as most devastating, though, was June’s loneliness. As she goes from critical acclaim as publishing’s newest darling to being canceled and becoming social media’s villain of the day for months at a time, the only friend she ever mentions is the one who dies in the first chapter—and even that relationship we know to have been fraught with envy and resentment. She has no real, honest writing community to lean on or gut-check her, which explains her extreme need for validation from the greater literary world. None of this excuses her truly horrible behavior, but for those of us who are lucky enough to know the benefits of a creative community, it does help us pity her just a little bit in her downfall.
Okay gotta go finish packing, so until next time, happy reading chat later love you bye!!
❤ Catherine
Catherine Thoms 