Read and Appreciated in 2004
A Year’s Best List
Books
Chekhov
In terms of reading and what has been read, 2004 stands out in my memory primarily because it was the one hundredth anniversary of Anton Chekhov’s death. This matters not because I like numerology, but because publishers do. Hence, three marvelous books of Chekhoviana made their way to the U.S. this year: Complete Short Novels translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, The Shooting Party translated by John Sutherland, and A Life in Letters translated by Rosamund Bartlett and Anthony Phillips. (Bartlett also put together a small selection of short stories, About Love for Oxford University Press, which is a fine starting place for reader new to Chekhov, and published a biography that has so far only been seen in the U.K.)
Why does Chekhov matter? I could say it’s because fiction and drama in the 20th century were as deeply influenced by him as by anyone else, but that’s the teacher in me coming out too much. Chekhov matters because he was humane, and his writings were humane. He was seldom sentimental, seldom predictable, and he always matched sorrow with a trace of absurd humor. His words, then, and the characters and situations they create, are a refuge and a mirror, an entry into a meditation on the vast, inhumane world we inhabit.
Read the stories in whatever translation you can find. Read the plays (preferably in translations by Carol Rocamora, Michael Frayn, or Paul Schmidt). Read the letters—particularly in the new edition, which is the first completely uncensored one.
Put me in an apocalypse, and all I will ask is to keep a couple volumes of Chekhov.
Novels
I read very few novels this year. I’ve vowed to read more next year. Of the novels I did read, most seemed competent but not particularly original. Good but unnecessary.
There were some valuable, necessary novels, though. For instance, China Miéville’s Iron Council, of which I deeply admire about two-thirds. Few people, I expect, will fully embrace the entire book, and yet I also doubt that any two readers could ever agree on exactly what is best or worst about it, and that, to me, is a sign that Mieville is doing something right.
The novels that stuck with me most vividly tended to be short ones. Travel in the Mouth of the Wolf by Paul Fattaruso is 114 pages of marvelously whimsical metaphysics, a series of fragments that want to be a story that wants to be a poem that wants to be a eulogy for the entire human race, and maybe even the universe itself. The Labyrinth by Catherynne M. Valente did not excite me quite as much, did not tickle the visceral centers of textual pleasure lodged in the birdhouse of my soul in the same way Fattaruso’s little book did, but I admired every page of Valente’s book, and nearly every sentence. It’s a song, not a novel, and I can appreciate that.
Old Friends by Stephen Dixon was probably the most impressive novel I read this year. It’s quite funny at certain moments, but phenomenally sad throughout. Dixon’s style of writing—vernacular, tangential—may look easy, even offhanded and careless, but it is no more so than is an illusion by a particularly skilled magician. 1,000 other writers could try to write in Dixon’s style and would produce piffle. He produced a book that aches like life.
Boy Genius by Yongsoo Park kept me amused while I read it. If the caricatures were ultimately a little too broad for me to embrace the book fully, I also have to admit that few books I read this year were as much fun during the reading.
I read far fewer novels that were pure science fiction than I normally do. L. E. Modesitt’s Archform: Beauty may have been the only one; it’s certainly the only one I remember. If you like traditional science fiction, it’s worth seeking out.
