11 book reviews I have been promising you

Everything I read in February through April.

Do you remember when I said I was going to start doing monthly book reviews? Lol. Lmao, even. Anyway, here is everything I read in February, March, and April.

All Our Yesterdays by Natalia Ginzburg

When I read this book…something shifted. I have recommended it to so many people and have since sworn my allegiance to the Natalia Ginzburg fan club.

Published in 1952, All Our Yesterdays follows the path of two families living in Northern Italy, starting from the dawn of the Second World War through 1944. While it is, in a sense, “a war novel,” it is far more concerned with the impact of fascism on domestic life and relationships than it is on, let’s say, the more abstract, macro horrors of the time. It might be easy for a writer to evoke a setting of suffering and pain with little gradations, but what sets Ginzburg apart as a writer is her humor and matter-of-factness.

Much of the novel examines the domino effect of marriage, especially in a wartime context. Concettina, who at the beginning of the novel, has “so many fiancés” finds herself wondering if it’s so bad to marry a moderate—I mean fascist—and to have to sleep in a marriage bed under a portrait of Mussolini. Anna, her youngest sister, makes a consequential decision that reflects her perceived limited options; she is torn, earlier, between her desire for “the war to come quickly, and to be killed,” and her fear of death, but ultimately at the root of her torment is the particular pain of being a young woman who doesn’t know exactly what she wants and doesn’t quite know where she can go.

Fascism does, obviously, have a large presence in the book, both literally and figuratively, as the novel interrogates the freedom of its participants to move through their limited world. So many of the passages where the young revolutionary Danilo speaks of his philosophy read as prescient now, or perhaps, at time of publication, clear-eyed and retrospective, understanding of all the many things that had to happen in order for them to end up like this. This is not a novel of hope or despair, but rather one about what it means to persist, to put one’s head down, and find a few steps forward even as the pavement appears to be crumbling in. “The Fascist party,” Danilo says, “had in it plenty of these young calves, it was by no means entirely composed of wolves and eagles, there were the calves as well and to-morrow they would be going off to be killed in the war, exactly like calves going to the slaughter-house. And it was an important thing to talk to these young calves in the meadows, it was an important thing to talk to anything that was still alive in Italy.”

Office Politics by Wilfrid Sheed

The experience of reading a 1966 novel about the internal politics of working at a New York City magazine while you yourself work at a magazine in New York City in 2025 is, to put it one way, validating. That is, there is a kind of perverse pleasure in being able to realize, “Oh thank god, it’s always been this way,” despite the pervasive tales of Grayson Carter and Tina Brown’s luxurious reigns.

This novel, however, isn’t just for the media workers among us. Patently satirical, Office Politics is filled with such petty dramas and characters—a wealthy widow who so desperately wants to write theater reviews, an upstart, Machiavellian editor who sees a relationship with said widow as his pathway to power (magazines do need money), etc.—that make it a pleasure to read, even after readerly schadenfreude may give way to the the occasional cringe or pang of pity.

The omniscient narration lends a playful and occasionally empathetic air to the staff of the magazine as they clamber to get their ideas in in the absence of their larger-than-life editor-in-chief. The humor of Office Politics lies not in the absurdity of these characters and their political battles, but in their admitted realism. Surely you, too, have had coworkers like this.

Bibliophobia by Sarah Chihaya

Every reader has a book that changed something for them—made them look at literature differently, opened their eyes to a new way of storytelling, shifted the way they moved through the world and the kinds of ideas that floated, uninvited, through their minds. That, at least, is what Sarah Chihaya believes, and these “life-ruiners,” as she calls them, are actually what have saved hers.

Bibliophobia is an unconventional memoir of a writer’s life through books. Most essentially, it is a memoir about living with depression and suicidal ideation, and how one person has found literature to be a life raft in some of her most dismal moments.

This is not an unfamiliar premise to many. But where Chihaya stands apart is in the depth of her readership and her access to self analysis that enables her to clearly isolate and expound on the impacts of individual pieces of literature in her life. This was a fairly quick read, but one with a refreshing clarity of thought and unrelentling vulnerability. The bonus: You’ll come away with a short list of even more books to read.

Lord Jim at Home by Dinah Brooke

Dinah Brooke really freaked it with this one. Lord Jim at Home, published in 1973, is an unconventional bindungsroman: it begins when its protagonist, Giles, is an infant, and transforms genres as he ages, makes his way through school, endures the violence of war, and comes back, perhaps changed from his experience—or perhaps the way he’s long been conditioned to be.

What you should know is that Giles does not have it easy. He endures abuse, starting from infancy, and hardly develops into a fully realized person before he finds himself in the fever dream of military service. The one thing he cares about is that he is a somewhat decent cricket player. There is not much it seems he can do.

This protagonist, who seems, for so long, to have such little agency over his own fate, is not a pitiable character, in spite of his harsh treatment. This is the impact of Brooke’s narration, which holds the protagonist at a distance, both from his own family members and from the reader. Rather than evoking empathy, the young man is more likely to generate feelings of frustration; his inaction drives the majority of the book.

I don’t want to give away too much here, because I do think Lord Jim is a novel worth going into with few assumptions. But its examination of consequences and reactions to true suffering is visceral and striking. I think of a comment one unnamed character—a person in passing, really—makes to another, while arguing about art and experience: “No one who has not experienced the horrors of such a life has the right to express them.”

There’s No Turning Back by Alba de Céspedes

There are many reasons this novel, published in 1938, feels particularly suited to my interests. It’s originally written in Italian and translated by queen Ann Goldstein—who I saw speak at McNally Jackson Seaport—and it centers on eight young women in their 20s and 30s, living as boarders in a Roman convent. Some are there to study, others have different matters on their mind and secrets they feel compelled to guard. Set between 1934 and 1936, it’s kind of a proto—The Best of Everything: a tale of paths that meet for one bright moment when the future is just a far-off possibility until each person continues on their unique orbit, diverging from the life they once shared with one another.

Compared to Elena Ferrante, the Italian writer that Goldstein is most known for translating, Alba de Céspedes (1911-1997) engages a touch more with humor (one of the girls has a pet turtle named Marguerite, which hibernates under her nightstand during the winter) and takes a matter-of-fact approach to unpacking class awareness and discomfort; while each girl’s varied personal fortune has a considerable impact on the path she may take forward, there is little resentment or competition that brews between them, but rather a sense of acceptance. They make do. There is little kidding oneself to be done about the possibilities in ones’s life.

What make this book so commendable is de Céspedes’s ability to craft eight distinctive, empathy-inducing character portraits that are equal in consideration while not equal in “screen time.” The novel feels ahead of its time particularly because of the frankness with which it considers privilege and work. “You had to accept the truth, without feeling guilty,” one character reflects at the end of her storyline, “Some live on their labor, others on their mind, and the most fortune on their money.”

The Dry Heart by Natalia Ginzburg

You know that a novella is about to go crazy when it starts with a woman shooting her husband right in between his eyes. This is, of course, what happens in the fourth sentence of Ginzburg’s less-than-100 page book, which, over the course of the following pages, primarily goes back in time to illuminate the first-person narrator’s motivations in the murder.

It is, unexpectedly, a story about a bad marriage—a plot we have seen and heard many times before. A woman marries a man who doesn’t show her much consideration—and she, admittedly, already finds much fault with him that she’s willing to overlook. It gets worse from there. He’s out constantly, he’s carrying a flame for another woman, he expects the wife to take care of the household on her own, and, of course, to produce his next of kin. Like I said: there is no shortage of stories that follow these lines. But Ginzburg’s economy of prose, which is sharp and violent, gives this particular story its potency.

I find, sometimes, that stories that center on the dissolution of a relationship can tend to be so internally focuses that the couple seem to exist in a vacuum of their own misery. But Ginzburg is adept at building a world with side characters who can accentuate or contrast the thoughts and decisions of the couple at the forefront. Francesca, the narrator’s friend, so often plays this critical role. When the narrator cries to her about her boy troubles with her eventual husband Alberto, her friend is blunt: “Still the same old guy?”

If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino

So rare are the occasions when I feel compelled to reread a book as soon as I have finished it, but this, I think, is the natural sensation that one should feel upon finishing Italy Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. It took me a bit to get acclimated to the unexpected rhythm of this novel, because while it is technically a “novel,” it’s something far more kaleidoscopic: a set of stories within a story that don’t exactly build on one another but present a range of faux novel beginnings which the second-person “you” encounter on a quest to finish a book that proves evasive.

It’s a meta book in which Calvino himself is a character of sorts. So much of the anchor plot about the core reader centers on the sensations and pleasures of reading. This is a novel specifically devised for people who really love books and writing, though Calvino is very much in on the joke. The figure of the author is one who is at once self-serious and absolutely absurd. One character, a novelist, speaks of his writer’s block: “On the wall facing my desk hangs a poster somebody gave me. The dog Snoopy is sitting at a typewriter, and in the cartoon you read the sentence, ‘It was a dark and stormy night’….Ever since I have had this poster before my eyes, I have no longer been able to end a page. I must take this damned Snoopy down from the wall as quickly as possible, but I can't bring myself to do it; that childish figure has become for me an emblem of my condition, a warning, a challenge.”

It is through his convulsion of plot lines, storytelling conventions, and novelistic clichés across cultures that Calvino makes the act of reading active rather than passive. There are countless bits of meaning that you may pick up or abandon through the text in order to find some key truth that the author is trying to convey. Writing is either everything—“behind the written page is the void,” one character believes—or it means nothing at all.

Ballerina by Patrick Modiano

Dancing, it has been said, is what happens between the steps. Similarly, much of Ballerina is about what is lacking from the narration of pieced-together memories. It’s a short one, at just 101 pages, and the story itself is fragmented. The narrator, upon meeting an old friend on the street—one who doesn’t quite admit to his real identity, falls into an arresting state of remembrance. He is thinking about the ballerina he once knew, her little boy, and the characters surrounding them that he’d fallen in with at some earlier point in time.

The plot is hardly the point of Ballerina. It’s a bit like recounting a plotless ballet: there are certain moments and movements that linger in the mind for days, even years later, but the rest eventually becomes undefined and unclear. What you are left with is the afterimage, whose edges and details may grow fuzzy with time.

There are no big reveals in Ballerina nor are there tensions pulled to a snap. Instead, the novel is lyrical yet precise in its selective memory, giving an impression colored in pale blue melancholy.

Rattlebone by Maxine Clair

While Rattlebone gets its name from the fictional Kansas town in which it’s set, its characters, who move in and out through one another’s lives over the passage of time, who create a real sense of place in this novel-in-stories. At its core, it is a coming-of-age story about a young girl named Irene living in a Black neighborhood in the 1950s, though the perspective travels over the course of the book, to neighbors, classmates, and parents. A slight novel, just under 200 pages, Rattlebone is deft in its domino effect; several striking capital-E Events stand as markers of change in its characters lives, without the novel ever feeling overwrought with action or melodramatic.

Part of Clair’s mastery is her ability to embody the anxieties and compulsions of a wide stretch of characters. Young Irene comes to understand the world through incidental moments—scenes that evidence her parents’ infidelity, the reading of a friend’s diary, the disappointment of a relationship that was predestined to fail. But it is not just her consciousness that inhabits the 11 stories that make up the novel; secondary, and even tertiary characters add context to the environment in which our protagonist grows up. And all the more a delight to the reader: this varied approach allows Clair to flex her precise and sensory style.

There are no real mysteries to uncover here, nor is there an undercurrent of urgency driving it forward. Rather, Rattlebone paces forward unveiling, often at unexpected moments, a new view to behold, which will better inform the way you look out at the path before you. Much like adolescence, it’s over with quiet ceremony, the future outlined but not quite shaded in.

Playworld by Adam Ross

Set over the course of a year—from the fall of 1980 to the following—Playworld explores, in depth, the worlds of 14-year-old child actor Griffin Hurt. I say “worlds” because this novel is deeply invested in its setting (New York City, largely, with some escapes both to and from Long Island), but so much of it is about the compression and compartmentalization of Griffin’s experiences into different spheres. The story is at once narrow and deep; the narrator is an older Griffin, recounting the often hard to stomach relationships he develops with the adults in his life, the lessons he learns from his observations of their relationships, and his understanding of his own wants and desires. Ross’s writing spares no expense for its description; the play-by-plays of Griffin’s wrestling matches are detailed in their choreography, as are his accounts of his moments on the set of the TV show in which he stars. A lot happens in Playworld, to the degree that I often found myself wondering, “Where is this all going?” But within the dense diorama of Griffin’s childhood is enough breathing room for a yawn of figurative language to aerate the whole thing. More often than not, I was eager to continue.

Much of the novel—you will find out on the very first page—focuses on Griffin’s relationship with a 36-year-old mother of two, Naomi, a friend (though not that close a friend) of his parents. They all share the same therapist. Their relationship is inappropriate, to say the least, with narrator-Griffin stating at the book’s outset that the older woman fell in love with him when he was just a boy. Naomi is something of a specter throughout the novel; even when she’s not there, she looms in the near distance. When other people see her, too, it’s even worse.

I enjoyed Playworld. Ross’s talent for developing atmosphere and writing strikingly natural, and often funny, dialogue is of note. But the novel left me wondering why the narrator felt driven to tell his story in the first place. There are moments of reflection throughout the text—glimpses of more-mature realization sometimes blink into focus to allay younger Griffin’s waywardness. But what was missing for me was some kind of spark or impetus that could have made the novel just a touch more compulsive.

Throughout the latter half of the novel, Griffin busies himself developing an obsession with Dungeons and Dragons roleplay and works to create his own campaign in his own imaginary world—the map of which looks like a stretch of Manhattan and Long Island that’s been run through a Medieval-inspired filter. Griffin, as a child, as a high school wrestler, as an actor, exists within worlds where he appears to act not necessarily by his own direction, but by an internal sense of what he should do, according to some imaginary script that is triggered in moments where he does not feel he has control. As the novel progresses, he gains a better understanding of his own free will—perhaps some power he claims through his development of his own fantasy land. It may be that in his retelling of this one formative year of his life, in recreating the world in which he existed then, that narrator Griffin finally gains some semblance of control, too.

Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico

I think a lot about how much things have become shorthand to describe one’s taste, intelligence, class, popularity, and success in contemporary culture. How sharing a collage with Mary Jane shoes and the cover of The Bell Jar could, to some, suggest one’s depth of thought or how one’s pristine white apartment could signal their productivity. How it seems like everyone these days wants to become a salesperson, peddling their wares on ShopMy or personally claiming a share of a brand’s marketing budget in exchange for their beautiful content. These can feel like truly contemporary phenomena. But Perfection is set in the 2010s, and its protagonists Tom and Anna are guilty of much the same. (And better yet, the novel that inspired it is set even earlier: Things: A Story of the Sixties by Georges Perec was published in 1965).

Their story is not unheard of. The young couple move to Berlin from their unnamed southern European home in the quest to create a life that is beautiful, curated, and cultured. They grew up at that particular time when the internet, once a passion, became their careers. They do graphic design, write copy, advise on brand strategy. They are creatives. Their apartment is filled with thriving plants, a vinyl collection, and issues of Monocle. It all looks so perfect in the photos. Of course it’s not.

The hypocrisies and shallow tendencies of Tom and Anna are not shocking revelations, though it is compelling to follow Latronico along as he pulls apart their fantasy. Part of the fun of reading this novel is the schadenfraude. How vain these people are. How silly their put-upon pantomime of Millennial yuppie life. But the real power of this novel about exteriority is its ability to reflect back at the reader their own slippage into some of the same tendencies. Who among us, after all, hasn’t posted a beautiful vacation photo that showed a far more edited view of the trip? ▲