on the shelf, episode twelve

postcard 52: shaye (shayebytheshore)'s favorite books

We almost always live outside ourselves, and life itself is a continual dispersion. But it’s towards ourselves that we tend, as towards a centre around which, like planets, which trace absurd and distant ellipses.

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prelude

from Pinterest

“For a while, Criticism travels side by side with the Work, then Criticism vanishes and it’s the Readers who keep pace. The journey may be long or short. Then the Readers die one by one and the Work continues on alone, although a new Criticism and new Readers gradually fall into step with it along its path. Then Criticism dies again and the Readers die again and the Work passes over a trail of bones on its journey toward solitude. To come near the work, to sail in her wake, is a sign of certain death, but new Criticism and new Readers approach her tirelessly and relentlessly and are devoured by time and speed. Finally the Work journeys irremediably alone in the Great Vastness. And one day the Work dies, as all things must die and come to an end: the Sun and the Earth and the Solar System and the Galaxy and the farthest reaches of man’s memory. Everything that begins as comedy ends as tragedy.”

—The Savage Detectives, Roberto Bolaño

Every month, I’ll be featuring someone’s favorite books so you get to hear from someone who isn’t me. This month’s feature is my lovely friend Shaye, who I’ve known and talked about books with for years. I adore her (and her actually insanely good taste in books), and admire her so much as a writer. She runs the newsletter Born Under Saturn, which is one of my favorites on the platform. I’m so excited that I finally get to have her on my on-the-shelf segment because she influences my book taste so much.

As always, as I do for my Substack friends, I’ve linked a few of my favorite essays of hers in the article links!

1. Solenoid by Mircea Cǎrtǎrescu

“I was enveloped in a fear that I had never felt before, even in my most terrifying dreams; not of death, not of suffering, not of terrible diseases, not of the sun going dark, but fear at the thought that I will never understand, that my life was not long enough and my mind not good enough to understand. That I had been given many signs and I didn’t know how to read them. That like everyone else I will rot in vain, in my sins and stupidity and ignorance, while the dense, intricate, overwhelming riddle of the world will continue on, clear as though it were in your hand, as natural as breathing, as simple as love, and it will flow into the void, pristine and unsolved.”

A lonely teacher in Bucharest recounts the anomalies that have shaped his life, the series of bizarre events he believes can lead him (if combined in precisely the right way) to the answer for existence—both the meaning of life, and a way to escape the human condition. It is for him not about accepting our limitations but exceeding them: stepping outside of our three-dimensional logico-mathematical universe and into a higher dimension where the human drama plays out like two-dimensional images on a screen. Meanwhile, his surreal visions lead us through enormous underground caverns, infinite houses, and fantastical micro-landscapes, where mites leads their blind lives with an ignorance not unlike that of humanity.

Covering concepts in topology and physics, oneirology and biology, Solenoid depicts a metaphysical romp through the tragic labyrinth of reality, which holds escape as its ultimate goal. It is a work of staggering insight and genius, written in language so poetic that you’ll be underlining every page.

2. Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges (or otherwise his Collected Stories)

“You have wakened not out of sleep, but into a prior dream, and that dream lies within another, and so on, to infinity, which is the number of grains of sand. The path that you are to take is endless, and you will die before you have truly awakened.”

I often say the Solenoid is my favourite novel, but Borges is my favourite writer. Borges never wrote a novel, believing the form to be a madness, a waste of time. The economy of the short story appealed to him; he felt that a few pages were more than enough to say what you wanted to say, and in fact the shortness of the form meant your ideas had to be more refined, more rigorous, lacking in any and all excess, whittled and smoothed to perfection.

What he crafts in his short stories are pure ideas, pure wonder. He takes concepts such as time, space, dreams and infinity and unfolds them as far as they can go. Some of his best and most well-known stories include “The Library of Babel”, in which the universe is a nigh-infinite library that holds every book which could ever be written, and “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”, in which an invented world emerges from the pages of a fictitious encyclopedia and overruns our reality. Labyrinths is an excellent introduction to his short stories and essays, but if you enjoy them I would highly, highly recommend reaching for his Collected Stories.

3. House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

“Then no matter where you are, in a crowded restaurant or on some desolate street or even in the comfort of your own home, you’ll watch yourself dismantle every assurance you ever lived by. You’ll stand aside as a great complexity intrudes, tearing apart, piece by piece, all your carefully conceived denials, whether deliberate or unconscious. And for better or worse you’ll turn, unable to resist, though try to resist you still will, fighting with everything you’ve got not to face the thing you most dread, what is now, what will be, what has always come before, the creature you truly are, the creature we all are, buried in the nameless black of a name. And then the nightmares will begin.”

Mark Z. Danielewski was highly influenced by Borges and this is nowhere more apparent than in House of Leaves—a book about a manuscript about a film about a house in which is contained pure and annihilating absence: true nothingness. People often call this book a horror novel (sometimes even “the scariest book ever written”), and it is, but I find this label severely misrepresents the exquisite, intelligent and thrilling labyrinth that is House of Leaves. This is maybe the only book I’ve ever read that at multiple moments made me legitimately question what was real and what was not. It is pure metafiction; postmodernism at its limits. Not only is there a labyrinth in the narrative, but there is a very real labyrinth born of the text itself, of its strange contortions and manoeuvres across the page. As one critic has written, this is a book preoccupied with its own writing, consumed with the need to unwrite itself, to flee in terror from its own telling. There is truly no reading experience like that of House of Leaves. Forget all your fears, forgo all expectations, and abandon yourself to the words. You won’t regret it.

4. The Secret History by Donna Tartt

“And if beauty is terror,” said Julian, “then what is desire? We think we have many desires, but in fact we have only one. What is it?”
“To live,” said Camilla.
“To live forever,” said Bunny, chin cupped in palm.

The Secret History unfolds the motives, plotting and consequences of the murder of Bunny Corcoran, a student at Hampden College. It is a quiet and quietly tragic tale, a story of academia and hedonism, and of evil and recompense.

In recent years I have felt myself somewhat souring on this widely beloved modern classic—something I have quickly recognised as a mistake. I think if I read it for the first time today I would have a very different reaction to it, but as it is, I read it for the first time as a teenager and instantly fell in love. Here, I thought, was a book that could describe for me the fascinations of my soul. This is the book that both expanded my reading horizons into literary fiction and re-ignited my inspiration. I have since read it twice more and each time loved it just as much. While it is certainly not the peak of literature, it holds within its pages an atmosphere so consuming and compelling that emerging from the book feels like waking from a dream. To this day, it is one of the only novels that I can truly lose myself in, and I think that demands respect, regardless of what anyone says. Crafting a novel is damn hard work (I’ve done it four times) and Donna Tartt clearly knows what she’s doing.

5. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter—to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning— So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

The American classic that everyone and their dog has read and loved. I watched the 2013 Baz Luhrmann adaptation a few years before I read The Great Gatsby, and usually watching the film first will spoil my reading experience when I later pick up the book. That wasn’t the case here. Maybe due to the faithfulness of the adaptation or maybe because Fitzgerald writes with a vibrant and modern lyricism, reading The Great Gatsby has only heightened my love for its story—as well as for its titular character, Jay Gatsby. There is something so hopelessly and tragically romantic about this book, and it speaks to so much both socially and philosophically. I admit, I cry every time I watch or read this classic tale. You could say it was the classic that made me fall in love with classics.

6. Play It As It Lays

“She walked back to the car and sat for a long time while in the parking lot, idling the engine and watching a woman in a muumuu walk out of the Carolina Pines Motel and cross the street to the supermarket. The woman walked in small mincing steps and kept raising her hand to shield her eyes from the vacant sunlight. As if in a trance Maria watched the woman, for it seemed to her then that she was watching the dead still center of the world, the quintessential intersection of nothing.”

A narrative about nothing (quite literally), Play It as It Lays follows a woman in the 60s as she awakens to the vacuity which underlies existence. In this novel, horror and destruction is juxtaposed with blasé attitudes and shallow distraction, which in turn is backdropped by the sweaty and sprawling wasteland of Los Angeles and the dusty, sunburnt swathes of the desert. Meanwhile, Didion’s prose is beautiful but understated; she expends few words and says quite a lot. The effect is powerful: you are at once captivated and horrified, sickened and numbed, by the tragic arcing of Maria’s life and the lives of those around her. Play It as It Lays is, at its heart, an existential novel, and it centres on a recontextualisation of Hamlet’s famous question: To be, or not to be?

7. Less than Zero by Brett Easton Ellis

“And later when we got into the car he took a turn down a street that I was pretty sure was a dead end.
‘Where are we going?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Just driving.’
‘But this road doesn’t go anywhere,’ I told him.
‘That doesn’t matter.’
‘What does?’ I asked, after a while.
‘Just that we’re on it, dude,’ he said.”

It was Bret Easton Ellis’s first novel, Less than Zero, which in fact led me to Didion’s Play It as It Lays. Here, we find the same existential numbness, the same juxtaposition between horror and banality. In typical Ellis style, however, the narrative is a lot more disturbing and graphic. Less than Zero is about physical and existential stasis, about ennui and the dangers of bored and unpatrolled youth. Its protagonist, Clay, is vacuous, a shell of a person—he’s disturbed by what he sees but is trapped in a state of torpor, unable to do anything, even if that thing is to rescue himself from his own empty circles of existing.

Something about this book sticks in the mind, the same way certain sentences get stuck in Clay’s thoughts (“People are afraid to merge. Disappear Here. Wonder if he’s for sale”). The simplicity and repetition of Less than Zero is its strength. The book passes in a blur of clubs and drugs and driving, and then, in between, there are bright, hot shocks: a coyote mangled under the wheels of a car; a boy OD’d in a back alley; a young girl raped. And all this against the hot, dystopic, disaster-prone landscape of Los Angeles. Everything is delivered raw. Every character is trapped in space and time, locked in a cycle, shooting darkly down a dead-end road. A horrifying book, but trust me, you won’t be able to look away.

8. The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño

“What a shame that time passes, don’t you think? What a shame that we die, and get old, and everything good goes galloping away from us.”

The Savage Detectives is about the lives of a group of poets who had their start in Mexico in the 1970s: the visceral realists—a wild and promiscuous crowd led by the mythic figures of Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano. Through a long series of vignettes from outside perspectives, from those who knew them or met them, we catch fragments of their lives over the decades, as they travel and cause havoc and fall in love and grow apart, and as they move through a steadily darkening world, one of fragmentation and estrangement, of silence and decay and death.

This book reads as a slow and steady tragedy, a subtle weaving and unweaving of lives and words. It paints the future as a wasteland and then thrusts its characters into the sands. It’s about the poet but it’s also about Latin American poetry and Mexico and the corrosive effects of time on the individual and the eternal battle between words and the void. If you’re willing to give it the time, to let yourself get swept up in the momentum of Bolaño’s writing, it’s meaning will unfurl at the back of your mind like a dark flower, beautiful and tragic and hidden and utterly mesmerising.

9. The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa

“Time! The past! Something—a voice, a song, a chance fragrance—lifts the curtains on my soul’s memories… That which I was and will never again be! That which I had and will never again have! The dead! The dead who loved me in my childhood. Whenever I remember them, my whole soul shivers and I feel exiled from all hearts, alone in the night of myself, weeping like a beggar before the closed silence of all doors.”

Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet is described as a factless autobiography, a fragmentary collection of thinking and musing that enquires into being and existence, and atomises and examines experience. The value of Pessoa’s writing lies in its intensely poetic expression of universal suffering, which is the disquiet of being, the pain of existing and, particularly in Pessoa’s case, the pain of being alone. He puts words to so many of our fears and agonies and dreams and minute experiences.

It’s not a novel in the traditional sense: although apparently fictional (the bulk of the work authored by a fictional character, one of Pessoa’s heteronyms) it has no real story to speak of, and little ties the hundreds of short vignettes together beyond the undercurrent of existential examination. As a result—and given the rich observations of each episode—the work can and is probably best read piecemeal, over a long period of time. It is a book that helps you to understand yourself, to find and form connections with others, and indeed for some it would probably change your life.

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

“You spend a restless night, your sleep is an intermittent, jammed flow, like the reading of the novel, with dreams that seem to you the repetition of one dream always the same. You fight with the dreams as with formless and meaningless life, seeking a pattern, a route that must surely be there, as when you begin to read a book and you don’t yet know in which direction it will carry you. What you would like is the opening of an abstract and absolute space and time in which you could move, following an exact, taut trajectory; but when you seem to be succeeding, you realize you are motionless, blocked, forced to repeat everything from the beginning.”

If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler is an experience you cannot predict or prepare yourself for, a metafictional journey through narrative and narrative form, through truth and fiction, through infinity and reality; you embark from an ordinary train station and soon find yourself in strange worlds. Every world is a labyrinth and each labyrinth is built by and concerned with story—with the reading of stories, the writing of stories, and the words which form them. This novel is really a collection of stories, of the beginning of stories, each linked by thematic concerns and a reader’s quest (your quest) to find the thread of the original narrative, the unfinished story they (you) wish desperately to go on reading, and instead you are led to story after story, world after world, each fragmented and incomplete, and the stories proliferate, and there are those who deal in the fake stories, stories which are forgeries of other stories, whose goal is to turn all literature into counterfeits, feeling that in mystification one finds truth, and there are those who seek the truest representation of reality, who want to craft or find the story of all stories, the story unfiltered through any human perception, the absolute story, which would contain absolute truth. I have really only uncovered the tip of the iceberg here—so much looms under the surface. This really is a story you have to experience for yourself.

interlude i: what i read this week

I read Checkout 19 by Claire Louise Bennett, which I didn’t quite love the way I thought I would. It was dense but felt a bit…meaninglessly dense? Not sure how to describe it—I’ll come back and edit this when I have a proper review.

Still reading War and Peace because I have to finish it by February, it’s a must.

Here are ten articles to read this week:

1. The Listening Gift by Faith Lawrence

   It is the dark matter of conversation, the white space around a poem. For Rilke, listening is receiving the divine.

2. Everything Dances with the Abyss by

   Shaye Easton

   On the fundamental fuzziness of things.

3. In Praise of Subspecies by Richard Smyth

   To lump or to split? Deciding whether an animal is a species or subspecies profoundly influences our conservation priorities.

4. The Image of the Doll: Tove Ditlevsen’s Worn Out Language by Olga Ravn

   “I am 52 years old, 172 centimeters tall, slender and blonde.”

5. The Desire for Meaning by

   Shaye Easton

   On absent absolutes, man-made mysteries, and Solenoid by Mircea Cǎrtǎrescu.

6. Room, Moon, Moon, Balloon: Reading and Breathing by Jaimeson Webster

   “Reading aloud is a magical exposure to words that speak to the enduring mystery of life, breath, language, sleep, and time.”

7. The Leaning Tower of New York by Eric Lach

   How a luxury condo building in Manhattan went sideways.

8. I Demon Want Your Heart by

   Shaye Easton

   On Suffering for One's Art.

9. America’s Bee Problem Is an Us Problem by Lex Pryor

   You may have heard America’s honeybees are dying. But what does that mean for the people on the front lines—and what could it mean for what ends up on your plate?

10. A Cheat(ing) Sheet to the ‘Montoya, Por Favor’ Memes by Jennifer Zhan

interlude ii: what i watched this week

I didn’t watch any movies, but I did watch the “MONTOYA, POR FAVOR!” clip about ten times. If you don’t know what this is, check out the last article! I am about to explain this to my very offline friend…wish me luck!

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postlude

things i love: friends coming to visit me! also cooking new recipes, fuzzy pajamas, amika hair oil, brandy melville scrunchies