What I’m Reading Jake Arthur
If you had to choose three books that triangulated your personality, what would they be? I’ll give you a minute or two to think. Got them? Now, imagine you’re encountering them all at once: that’s the delicious situation I find myself in.
One third is Norman Rush’s Mating. It’s from 1991 but it feels fresher than anything I’ve read in years. It’s about an American grad student who’s living in Botswana when they fall in love with an anthropologist running a women-only utopia in the Kalahari desert. If that plot wasn’t enough, the style of this book gets you in a fireman’s hold and then runs you through a burning building. It’s ludic and a bit ludicrous. It’s a comedy of manners; it’s a comedy of language; and its unnamed female narrator feels like the voice I’ve been waiting years to hear.
The second is Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob. This is the kind of book I’m in awe of anyone writing. It tells the real-life story of Jacob Frank, an 18th-century Polish Jew who claims he’s the Messiah. Through fragmentary chapters, it brings to life a whole historical milieu with characters of different nations and creeds responding to Frank as upstart or saviour depending on their persuasion. It’s a novel about how charisma – that ineffable thing – can reshape the world. It counts its 912 pages backwards, evoking the way Hebrew is read left to right. All this might sound like a turn-off, but the book doesn’t feel ponderous. That’s testament to Tokarczuk, who won the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature, and to her terrific English translator, Jennifer Croft.
The third angle of my triangle is Louise Glu¨ck’s Poems 1962–2012. Much imitated but rarely bettered – why not read the original? If Mating is all stylistic excess and Jacob rich dramatisation, then Glu¨ck’s poems are a bit like giving yourself a slap in the bathroom mirror when you’ve got a hangover. It’s salutary and it leaves you feeling a little ashamed, a little trivial. Kate Kellaway puts it perfectly: ‘‘To read [Glu¨ck] is to encounter stillness and slow time. There is a bare-branched, midwinter feeling to her writing, a leaflessness that has its own beauty.’’
A perfect farewell to summer.