Two Books I Spent My Fall Reading

In the month of November, my book club chose to read The Plague, by Albert Camus, a book I last encountered seventeen or more years ago, in the 1948 translation. This new iteration, translated by Laura Marris in 2021, felt, for lack of a better word, punchier. Its language seems better suited to the philosophy that Camus espoused, downplaying some of the melodrama of that earlier version. The discussions we had in our meetings this season—about freedom, loneliness, religious belief, human nature, germ theory, bureaucratic inaction, the patron saint of wrongful convictions, Flannery O'Connor's opinion of Jesuits, and quite a few other scattershot topics—lent themselves to some very engaging Wednesday mornings.

Unstructured leisure time is at a premium in my life. The reading I get to do is split in several different ways. The New York Review of Books brings me joy, even though I take weeks to read a single issue and skip many of the political articles. The books waiting for my attention seem to increase in number weekly. (I've come to think of my to-read list as aspirational at best; I have e-book versions of several tempting texts and zero idea of when I might start any of them.) When I do get to pick out leisure reading, it's a special treat.

Recommended by a small host of writers whose opinions I trust, Anna Kavan's Ice proved to be an unsettling little novel. I bought Penguin's fiftieth anniversary edition, with a foreword by the writer Jonathan Lethem, and was floored. Kavan's hypnotic storytelling kept me rapt, chapter after chapter, as her horrific tale unfolded like a fever dream.

The book centers around one man's obsessive chase of a young woman—not motivated by love or even lust, but by an odious desire to possess. His quest leads him around a war-ravaged world on the brink of ecological disaster. Is it science fiction? Yes and no. The story takes place on earth, in a time very close to ours, but under the perpetual threat of "the ice," huge freezing shapes that will soon engulf and smother all life.

Despite the high concept at play, Ice is decidedly "soft" sci-fi, verging on Surrealism. Kavan gives us a phantasmal tale that doubles back on itself, revising as it goes, like a nightmare or a bad trip or a spell of amnesia. You think it's headed one way, until it picks up at another point, ignoring everything you just read. The girl dies, then she's alive again. Then something else is undone and done again, in a different way. Events aren't undone so much as un-done. Further confusing matters, the narrator's protean account continually shifts perspective. He describes impossible-to-know events and changes identities at the blink of an eye. The whole time, you hate him, but he gives you a window into this story that you can't help but stare through, mute and aghast. What a book!

In the months to come, I'll probably pick through a textbook, devour some Gothic horror, and ingest some philosophy—if I can make time amid my various commitments. Where there's a will, there's a way.