With apologies to Refused, sometimes the classics don’t go out of style

Émile Zola (translated by Elinor Dorday), La Débâcle

We all have gaps in our reading history. In the first decade of this century, a pair of Slate articles posed this question to a number of lauded writers, whose candid responses made for excellent reading. For me, Émile Zola has been a substantial entry in the “authors I plan on getting to someday” list for most of my adult life. I’d had a copy of his La Débâcle on my to-read shelf for years now, and brought it with me on a recent trip.

This novel follows a group of characters through the end of the Franco-Prussian war and the ensuing collapse in French society. I was not prepared for utterly intense this book was; I’ve tended to associate fiction about the horrors of war with the 20th century and beyond, but this book features several sequences — including one in which a group of starving soldiers begin butchering eating a horse while it’s still alive — that are among the most disturbing I’ve ever encountered in prose.

This novel, as the saying goes, goes hard. When I posted a photo of my copy on Instagram, a friend responded to the effect that it was one of the best novels of war that he’d ever read; having finished it, I feel confident in seconding that assessment. Throughout the novel, Zola emphasizes the experience of everyday people, reserving his disdain for those in positions of power who have placed them in impossible positions. Moments of unspeakable violence and haunting absurdism coexist here; it’s a reminder of just how hellish war can be.  

Elsa Morante (translated by Jenny McPhee), Lies and Sorcery

Do I make a habit of bringing massive books with me when I travel? Yes, I do. (That’s also how I came to read The Quincunx, The Adventures of Augie March, and Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.) And on the same trip where I began my forays into M. Zola’s oeuvre, I also opened up Elsa Morante’s 775-page Lies and Sorcery.

Morante has some big names in her corner, with Natalia Ginzburg, Italo Calvino, and Elena Ferrante among her admirers. There’s an excellent reason for that: Lies and Sorcery manages to work as both a psychologically rich chamber drama and a haunting generational saga. Our narrator here recounts the complex relationship between her mother, her guardian, and two men often referred to as “the Cousin” and “the Pockface.”

One of the more striking aspects of Lies and Sorcery is how Morante taps into a certain timeless quality. I mean that in the most literal sense: while the action of the book takes place over the course of several decades, there’s little sense of technological or societal changes; instead, it seems to exist in a perpetual present. This may not be a surreal device a la A Little Life; instead, Morante might be illustrating the relatively static nature of Italian society in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But it’s an unsettling aspect nonetheless, much as the way this novel’s structure ends on a disquieting note suggesting the full effect that all of this familial drama has had on the book’s narrator.

Some recent work 

Well, I contributed to Publishers Weekly’s recent list of notable books from the U.S.A. In preparation for the World Cup, I wrote about Carlos Labbé’s novel The Murmuration, about a dramatic soccer game as well as psychic powers. I discussed some of May’s books in translation for Words Without Borders. And I reviewed Sarah Gailey’s unsettling novel Make Me Better for Reactor.

On the latest episode of Framed & Bound, Paula Bomer and I chatted about the 2006 drama Even Money. And at Postcards From Komiksoj, I reviewed Joe Ollmann’s excellent collection The Woodchipper.