Gifts Part Two
Punks and Radicals
Hello!
My translation of the Spanish writer Clara Usón’s The Shy Assassin came out last month. It’s a strange and slippery book, sometimes called a novel and sometimes called a memoir, that tells its protagonist’s story—I consider it a novel, since I like novels better—through the lives of Ludwig Wittgenstein and a soft-core porn star named Sandra Mozarowsky. I recommend it because I translated it, but I translated it because I so badly wanted people to talk about it with me.
In that spirit, I’m organizing today’s don’t-call-it-a-gift-guide around some books, shows, movies, and music your loved ones might be thinking about. I hope these ideas make for some good conversations.
Starting in January, I will be paywalling my recommendations. I’ll also use this newsletter—above the paywall, of course—to share updates about my novel (The End of Romance, out in February) and various translations. No matter how much you read, thank you for reading.
For a Person Thinking about American Canto
Go on eBay and get this person Nancy Lemann’s The Ritz of the Bayou. I cannot describe this book better than its subtitle does. The trials in question had to do with racketeering rather than sleeping with RFK, Jr., but it will scratch the political-intrigue itch while—more importantly—getting some good prose in this person’s worm-riddled brain. The Ritz of the Bayou is a gift that keeps on giving, since once a person reads one Lemann they need all the Lemann. She has a new book coming out in April, and I yearn for it.
For a Person Thinking about the Hot Rabbi Show
It took me a long time to watch Nobody Wants This, but eventually I accepted that it was my duty as a Jewish critic to curl up on my couch and watch Adam Brody flirt with Kristen Bell. I enjoyed it, but my main thought is that a rom-com about a cute Reform rabbi is for beginners. For Hanukkah, buy the person in your life who actually wants to think about Jews and sex a copy of Felicia Berliner’s Shmutz, a heartfelt proto-Portnoy about a nineteen-year-old Hasidic woman who gets addicted to porn. Berliner is upfront but not confrontational, a surprisingly difficult line to walk in literature, and her prose is light but not lightweight.
(Troll addendum: Pre-order this person a copy of Wayne Koestenbaum’s My Lover, the Rabbi—bonus points for the British cover—and don’t say anything about it. When it shows up at their house in April, they’ll know.)
For a Person Thinking about DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS
Unlike American Canto Person, this person is living well. We should all think more about Bad Bunny. He’s hot! He’s outspoken! He’s playful! He’s capable of mashing up six different musical genres and making them sound like they were always one! For a person who enjoys both the high-level experimentation and the hip-level danceability of DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS, the correct gift is a shaggy, innovative, intelligent book with a lot of parties in it. I suggest Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives or Michael Muhammad Knight’s The Taqwacores, a cult classic about Y2K-era Muslim punks in Buffalo. Both of them have characters with almost as much swagger as Bad Bunny, but not quite.
For a Person Thinking about One Battle after Another
This is not so much a recommendation as a recommendation section. I love all stories about ideologically degraded radicals, and One Battle after Another sent me on an absolute tear. Certain members of my household are calling this my “lit bro era,” and yes, there has been some Pynchon involved, but you don’t need me for that. (You may need me to remind you, I believe for the second time, that you should be reading Denis Johnson. Tree of Smoke isn’t about radicals, but its ’70s fug fits the bill nonetheless.)
If you’re dealing with a History Dad (gender- and age-neutral), the correct book to give is Bryan Burrough’s Days of Rage, an extensively researched and very well-told narrative history of the Weather Underground and the most important of the radical bombing movements that sprang up in its wake. I personally would pair this book with an eBayed copy of Jane Alpert’s memoir Growing Up Underground, which describes the five years she spent as a fugitive after she and her boyfriend blew up several buildings in New York.
If you have more of a fiction reader on your hands, the correct non-Pynchon book to give—is Dana Spiotta’s Eat the Document, a thoughtfully anti-paranoid novel about two onetime radicals who live underground so long they all but float away from themselves. One of Spiotta’s radicals notes, as she sheds her old life for the new, that “slovenliness and sloppiness” are now her greatest enemies, which I believe makes her the polar opposite of Leo in One Battle after Another.
If your gift recipient is equally interested in radicals and in film, they absolutely require Juan Gabriel Vasquez’s Retrospective, a true-story novel—both like and unlike The Shy Assassin—about a Colombian director whose leftist family moved to China to get trained in Maoism when he was a child, then went home to become guerrillas. The writing, in Anne McLean’s translation, is impeccable; the book’s construction is brilliantly intricate; and the story is just bats. After I, the Divine, it’s the best thing I read this year.