Hello,
I am writing to you from a dark night in the Catskills, when it is very cold outside. I’m in a cabin next to a forest preserve, one that I am lucky to share with my husband and friends in a sort of queer family set up. We bought it collectively in 2014 back when I thought I might be a New Yorker forever. Sometimes, many times, I am here with friends, but I also think of it as the writing retreat I don’t have to apply to in order to go, where I will never have to wash the dishes of some man who left them behind at dinner unless that man is me. Many of my Iris Murdoch hardcovers live here year round. The temperature outside is a lucky 7 degrees Fahrenheit.
A brief announcement: these kinds of newsletters will now be called Activity Report after those dismal messages your phone sends you every Sunday about how much you used it over the previous week.
I finally finished Isabella Hammad’s Enter Ghost. I have been reading it throughout the second half of 2023, slowly. I was often enraptured, honestly, or consoled, or moved, and I felt a regular delight in the way she made the pages do what she wanted. Her expressive capacity and range in Enter Ghost created an urgent novel that is intimate, dense, capable of shattering shifts in feeling as she tells a story about how we make art to survive and how it sustains us—how it sustains a person, a cast, a community, a family.
Sonia, the actress narrator in Enter Ghost, flies to Haifa to see her sister and to escape the end of a disastrous affair with a London director, the sort of relationship ending where you just need to go somewhere and not communicate with the person, as much as possible. She isn’t sure what she’s after beyond that but what she does first is she goes immediately to the ocean, and with this we are off into this story of someone who isn’t sure why she is doing what she is doing on even a day to day basis, even as she pursues a reconnection with her family, her sister, Palestine, the house her family grew up in, and acting, all as a means to returning herself to herself by the end. What had she lost and how did she lose it and can she ever find it again? These are the questions the novel asks. The writing is located intensely in her body—we feel the story through her and with her. As she is drawn into performing in a West Bank production of Hamlet in Ramallah, directed by a friend of her sister’s, Mariam, a charismatic and blunt Palestinian director, the novel sometimes turns into a play in the way it is structured on the page.
It is also the first time I have ever read about a place that is being destroyed while I read about it. Set in 2017, the novel felt remarkably at times to be describing events that could have been more recent. If you aren’t certain of what the day to day life of a Palestinian in the West Bank would be like much less someone visiting them, the novel’s narrator, Sonia, is the sort of character to whom much must be explained, as she has been away in London, and much has changed, and much changes, even in the short time she is there.
Next for me is Anton Shammas’s novel Arabesques, which I found through this essay Hammad wrote about it in Jewish Currents.
You may know Hammad more recently from her conversation about the Israel Palestine conflict with Sally Rooney a month ago now in the Guardian, a conversation that went viral online. I think her novel is a good example of something I’ve written about novels and war, that “novels can protect what a missile won’t.” But, as she also says in this Financial Times interview, “When you read a novel, you’re alone, usually. It’s a solitary thing, it’s thinking deeply. These things don’t lend themselves to quick action, but they work on your inside. I do believe books can change people, but it’s a very slow process.” And of course it feels hard to trust any slow process when every day brings so much death.
I experienced a glimmer of hope this week when Israeli war cabinet minister Gadi Eisenkot did this interview, calling for new elections and saying Netanyahu’s plan to eliminate Hamas was a fantasy, and that he had to be replaced to return the people’s trust in their government, given his many failures.
Gaza meanwhile has been bombed so much, it is a different color from space.
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I have also been reading Knole and the Sackvilles, by Vita Sackville-West, after my Letter 8 about Knole. I seem to be more fascinated rather than less by the house, the more I learn about it. Sackville-West was, it seems, the family scholar of the house, growing up for a while there with just her grandfather for company, and giving tours to his guests as he was simply not interested in that kind of sociability. Her grasp of the many histories and her intimate knowledge of the vast house itself are a hypnotic contrast all their own.
The house is not haunted, but you require either an unimaginative nerve or else a complete certainty of the house’s benevolence before you can wander through the state rooms after nightfall with a candle. The light gleams on the dull gilding of the furniture and into the misty depths of mirrors, and startles up a sudden face out of the gloom; something creaks and sighs; the tapestry sways, and the figures on it undulate and seem to come alive. The recesses of the great beds, deep in shadow, might be inhabited, and you would not know it; eyes might watch you, unseen. The man with the candle is under a terrible disadvantage to the man in the dark.
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Last weekend Kelly Link’s new book arrived, The Book of Love, her debut novel. “A novelist at last,” she said of it when I posted about the book on BlueSky. The package contained a packet of hot chocolate, a guitar pick with a line from the novel on it, some delightful stickers and some tape with the figures of the moon. Also a tarot card—the Moon of course.
The first lines:
A girl wakes up in her sister’s bed. “Laura?” she says. No one answers.
Oh, she shouldn’t be her. The one who should be here isn’t.
The novel is out February 24th. Until then? I might recommend Link’s story collection from last year, White Cat Black Dog, one of my favorite reading experiences. She has an uncanny sense of our culture’s blindspots, and she builds her stories as if from within them.
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Today I am fresh out of a launch reading for Marie-Helene Bertino’s new novel, Beautyland, about a woman who believes she is an alien changeling from outer space, and she sends her observations about human life to her alien superiors by fax machine. Minutes after I posted about the event on Instagram, my friend Priyanka Mattoo replied and said, “I needed this book.” I mention this in case maybe you will too.
Signed hardcovers from today’s event are available in person or by mail from the excellent Golden Notebook Bookstore in Woodstock, NY, which hosted the event at the Graveside Variety, a new kind of public cultural space that everyone is hoping will survive and thrive. Bertino was accompanied today for the first time by her mom, a charming and adorable woman who brought a novel Bertino wrote and published at the age of 12, saying, “You are actually the author of five books” when she pulled it from a bag, thrilling everyone in the room except maybe the author.
After the event we convened at Pearl Moon, which I foolishly assumed would be an Asian restaurant, and Halimah Marcus, also an event participant, brought out tiny alien dolls and we helpfully populated the table with them just as Bertino arrived.
This line from the novel, quoted in the Times review above, made me laugh.
“Living in New York is like sitting at a nine-million-person blackjack table. We work together against the dealer.”
Anyway, this alien has our number. Imagine me in a message t-shirt and it says don’t deprive yourself as I hold this book out to you.
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A shortish television diary for this week: We binged The Brothers Sun, and finished Reservation Dogs, which we could not watch from London last summer. Highly recommend both if you like to experience stories this way. Started Death and Other Details, a delightful confection if you like murder mysteries, camp and dueling billionaire lesbian heiresses. Quiz Lady is funny and sweet, and Sandra Oh as the misbehaving scam artist older sister who somehow manages to mentor her younger, more responsible nerd sister Awkwafina into a better life made me feel some happiness.
On the advice of Katherine Angel, I downloaded the audiobook of The Secret History, which apparently is read by Donna Tartt, something that had not caught my notice before. So I mention it just in case you need to know this too. Meanwhile, the next London story comes Monday.
Until soon,
Alexander Chee
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Dangerously high level of adds to my TBR pile thanks to this newsletter this week.
Thanks, I’m glad--I’ll be curious what you think of them.