The Annotated Nightstand: What Sarah Chihaya Is Reading Now, and Next

In Sarah Chihaya’s memoir Bibliophobia, we enter into the moment of her breakdown—an event that she has seen on her horizon since childhood, but also seemed impossibly remote. As a child of Japanese and Japanese-Canadian immigrants to the US, Chihaya’s parents “didn’t really believe in the concept of mental health,” while her father continuously exacts psychological torture on her, throwing plates so they barely miss, showing up to track practice unannounced to caustically critique her, both parents telling her to lose weight.

Living in a town in Ohio in which Chihaya was outside the two predominant racial groups (white and Black), life beyond the walls of her home was hardly a balm.  (She attempts suicide three times, but her parents do nothing about it.) As an adult, Chihaya has hit the marks so many aim for: a PhD, a tenure-track position at Princeton.

So she finds herself before the terrifying chasm of writing her tenure book—a dread-inducing experience for anyone. Yet for Chihaya, who has come to largely lean on self-harm as a coping mechanism, it is like jumping out of a plane and trying to knit the parachute on the way down. She ends up in the hospital.

One of the most devastating results of her breakdown is she suddenly cannot read without dread or simply having the words scramble before her eyes (hence the memoir’s title). “Looking at these books, I felt shunned,” she writes, “like I’d walked into a chamber full of hostile turned backs.”

Throughout the memoir, while making plain how debilitating her condition is as it zaps her capacity to read, Chihaya catalogs, chapter by chapter, the different books in her life prior to this moment that were instrumental in her self-realization and deep love of literature.

Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye gave her insight as a teen into self-hatred and internalized racism; A.S. Byatt’s Possession informs her notions of affinity and intellect; Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables series gives her a sense of the beauty of fantasy and selfhood. Each title operates as a window into that period of Chihaya’s life, and how the book changed her.

All of this is hounded by a specter of Chihaya’s very real desire from childhood to find a book that would be her salvation, a kind of religion. Her friend Merve (Emre) gamely hosts Chihaya at Oxford to help shepherd her into recovery. It is ultimately a book a that Emre forces into Chihaya’s hand, Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai, that opens the door to Chihaya’s ability to read again.

About her to-read pile, Chihaya writes,

For me, 2024 was defined by illness and physical limitation, so I ended up doing a lot of comfort reading and rereading. This year, I’m trying to ease one foot out the metaphorical door by reading books—many of which are unfamiliar texts by authors I already love—about encountering new people, circumstances, worlds, selves.

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Isabella Hammad, Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative

Hammad was a guest on this column when Recognizing the Stranger came out. Here is a bit of what I included in that post.

“Empires have fallen, The Berlin Wall fell, political apartheid in South Africa did end,” she writes, “[These] are testaments to the fact that, under the force of coordinated international and local action, Israeli apartheid will also end. The question is, when and how? Where in the narrative do we now stand?”

In her extended afterword, penned in January of this year, Hammad reflects on the words we have just read. “I began the lecture claiming that we can only identify turning points in retrospect. Given the speed and violence with which the cogs are presently rotating, it does feel like we might be in a turning point now: still, we don’t know in which direction we are moving.”

Rashid Khalidi calls Recognizing the Stranger “extraordinary and amazingly erudite. Hammad shows how art and especially literature can be much, much more revealing than political writing.”

Roland Barthes, Michelet

While I believe Chihaya is reading this in the original French, I’m bringing in a review of the Richard Howard translation. I love digging into old reviews, and this one is from the LA Times in 1987.

“In ‘Roland Barthes,’ Barthes writes that Michelet attracted him by founding ‘an ethnology of France,’ that is, by his skill in questioning historically the most natural objects, such as faces, food, clothes, complexion,” begins Annette Smithy in her review.

Rather than analyzing Michelet’s prose in a conventional way, Barthes creates a parallel text of his own, often governed by little more than his own free associating on Michelet’s text. Although each section is followed by relevant excerpts from Michelet, it is not so much his voice the reader hears as it is Barthes.

As an enormous Barthes fan, no complaints here.

Katie Kitamura, Audition

Kitamura’s forthcoming novel describes a meeting between a young man and an actress. Though the young man is a stranger, he informs the protagonist that she is, in fact, his mother. In a profile in Elle, Lauren Puckett-Pope writes,

The idea for Audition first occurred to Kita’mura seven or eight years ago, she says, when she came across a headline that stated, “A stranger told me he was my son. She didn’t click on the link itself, but its mystery lit a subconscious fuse. In 2021, after Intimacies’ release, she finally started writing this “are you my mother?” tale, which would become Audition.

“I’m fascinated by the idea that there can be a moment, an interaction, an exchange with somebody, that can completely overturn your sense of who you are and what your place in the world is,” Kitamura says. “And I think the novel is really about the aftermath of that encounter.”

Lauren Groff says “Audition is eerie, a book so cold it feels hot.”

Andrea Wulf, The Invention of Nature: The Adventures of Alexander Von Humbolt: The Lost Hero of Science

Purva Variyar at Sanctuary Asia states Wulf’s work on Alexander Von Humbolt is “not your run-of-the-mill biography.” She writes,

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Humboldt embarked on various explorations of the New World of South America, climbing the highest peaks, crossing the deepest rivers and traversing the densest jungles in the most challenging tropical conditions. No European had ventured into such faraway lands before. A deep scientific curiosity and an even stronger urge to learn more about nature drove Humboldt.

Variyar goes on to say,

Humboldt’s groundbreaking ideas and views on nature were way ahead of his time and delightful in their simplicity….It was he who laid the idea of webs and networks of ecosystems. After he witnessed the ruthless decimation of the pristine forests of Venezuela and other parts of Latin America by colonial powers, he warned of the incalculable human-induced changes that were destined to have a lasting impact on our planet.

Rona Jaffe, The Best of Everything

“The Best of Everything, Rona Jaffe’s best-seller from 1958, is what you would get if you took Sex and the City and set it inside Mad Men’s universe,” writes Michele Moses in the New Yorker.

A novel about three young women who meet while working in the typing pool of a publishing house, it has the white-gloved, Scotch-swilling aesthetic of the fifties but also an unflinching frankness about women’s lives and desires—a combination that makes it feel radical, prescient. In order to write it, Jaffe interviewed fifty women about ‘the things nobody spoke about in polite company’: losing their virginities, getting abortions, being sexually harassed.

“I thought that if I could help one young woman sitting in her tiny apartment thinking she was all alone and a bad girl, then the book would be worthwhile,” Jaffe wrote, in the foreword to the 2005 reissue of her novel. Put simply, she wanted it to say, “Me, too”….The Best of Everything imparts this vision with sly humor, top-notch banter, and a sudsy plot that made me gasp out loud.

Ali Smith, Gliff

Alex Preston at The Guardian reviews Smith’s Gliff, the final book in Smith’s series.

The story is narrated by Bri, a characteristically precocious and logomaniacal Smith avatar, non-binary and in their early teens when the novel opens. Bri and their sister, Rose, find themselves alone and unwelcome in a more-or-less identifiable Britain when a family emergency calls their mother away.

Bri and Rose are “Unverifiables”—a subclass in a culture that has taken the hostile environment to dreadful extremes. It’s not clear whether they are excluded on grounds of nationality, race or because, as a result of a headstrong and idealistic mother, they have not submitted to the model of surveillance capitalism that dominates the country.

Their mother thinks smartphones are “liabilities”: “a device that means you see everything through it.” The government has imposed a system whereby the homes of Unverifiables are painted around with red lines, then bulldozed. Bri and Rose are on the run from a force that is both faceless, terrifying and banal in its relentless bureaucracy.

Carmen Boullosa, Texas: The Great Theft (trans. Samantha Schnee)

“The spirit of gossip presides over Carmen Boullosa’s Texas: The Great Theft,” writes Merve Emre here at LitHub.

Like a thief, gossip moves swiftly, undeterred by rivers or valleys, indifferent to borders and the hotheads who patrol them. It makes it possible for us to be on both the northern and southern banks of the Río Bravo, in Bruneville and in Matasánchez at the same time. Or rather, it floats us just above the cities, high enough for us to chuckle at their inhabitants, but not so high that we mistake ourselves for gods.”

The plot circles around the gossip of a particular encounter: “At high noon, Don Nepomuceno, the Robin Hood of the Rio Grande, tries to get the Sheriff to stop beating Lázaro, an old vaquero who is drunk in the plaza.” The Sheriff’s racist epithet of a response prompts a shutout, leaving one person dead and the other on the run. “All this transpires in less than a minute. But it takes the first part of the novel, almost two hundred pages, for the narrator to tell it.”

Mário de Andrade, Macunaíma (trans. Katrina Dodson)

The jacket copy for this wild ride of a book states:

This landmark 1928 novel follows the adventures of the shapeshifting Macunaíma and his brothers as they leave their Amazon home for a whirlwind tour of Brazil, cramming four centuries and a continental expanse into a single mythic plane. Having lost a magic amulet, the hero and his brothers journey to São Paulo to retrieve the talisman that has fallen into the hands of an Italo-Peruvian captain of industry (who is also a cannibal giant).

Written over six delirious days—the fruit of years of study—Macunaíma magically synthesizes dialect, folklore, anthropology, mythology, flora, fauna, and pop culture to examine Brazilian identity. This brilliant translation by Katrina Dodson has been many years in the making and includes an extensive section of notes, providing essential context for this magnificent work.

I was lucky enough to see Dodson speak about the book before the screening of the 1969 film version of Macunaíma starring, in part, Grande Otelo, who (if I remember correctly), Dodson equated to the Brazilian Jerry Lewis.

Edward W. Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method

“Where, or when, or what is a beginning?” begins (sorry) Said in his 1968 article.

If I have begun to write, for example, and a line has started its way across the page, is that all that has happened? Clearly not. For by asking a question about the meaning of a beginning, I seem to have deposited a ghostly load of significance where none had been suspected.

Levi-Strauss chillingly suggests that the mind’s logic is such that “the principle underlying a classification can never be postulated in advance. It can only be discovered a posteriori.” To identify a point as a beginning is to classify it after the fact, and so a beginning is always being left behind: to speculate about beginnings therefore is to be like Moliere’s M. Jourdain, acquiring retrospective admiration for what we had always done in the regular course of things: only now, the classification seems to matter.

Somehow, we know, we have always begun, whether to speak, to feel, to think or to act in one way rather than another, and we will continue to do so. If that is beginning then that is what we do. When? Where? How? At the beginning.

Stuart Hall, Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands

Ruth Ramsden-Karelse reviews Familiar Stranger for Hall’s foundation, writing

Across nine essays, this characteristically untraditional memoir gives an account of Hall’s existence between entangled colonial and post-colonial worlds, centering on his 1951 journey from colony to metropole: from Kingston, Jamaica to a post-war Britain rife with racism. It gives insight into his life prior to his Directorship of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (and later Professorship of Sociology at Open University).

And narrating these first thirty-two years, before he became known as the godfather of multiculturalism, Familiar Stranger maps the early development of Hall’s ground-breaking ideas on cultural theory, through various challenges including stints of generally rather inadequate formal education, and through key partnerships, alliances, and periods of feverish political engagement.