Molly Young is on leave for the next several months. In her absence, colleagues from the Book Review will pick up the recommendation torch and appear in your inbox every two Saturdays.
Dear readers,
I love to panic. Like a Don DeLillo character, my favorite group activity is mass hysteria. So when my friends started freaking out about A.I. coming to take our jobs, I self-soothed by fully participating in the fear fest. At the time, I was working on an essay about dating apps in contemporary fiction, and I asked ChatGPT if it too could recommend books where people swipe in search of sex, I mean love. To my horror, the program spit out the names of novels I hadn’t come across in my research, like “The Algorithm,” a novel about a detective who uses dating apps to track down a serial killer. How did I miss this!? You’re only human, I reassured myself, already performing the kind of therapy that no doubt would soon come preprogrammed in earbuds. Except, “The Algorithm” is not real. It was merely the actual algorithm’s best guess, culled from existing metadata, for what the next great American novel about catfishing could be.
I should have been elated. I had beaten the computer. Yet new technology does what it does best, and merely supplied me with new desires: I now wanted to read these fake books. I mean — fictional fiction!? I decided this had to be literature’s purest form. I started searching for books that didn’t seem real. What do I mean? I wanted books that felt as if they should exist only in Wes Anderson movies, books that feel like hoaxes, stories so fictive, so densely layered with imagination and device, that they could make a machine short-circuit.
—Jennifer Wilson
The writer Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915-2011) is the fakest-sounding real person I’ve ever come across. He was born in London to Lewis Leigh Fermor, a distinguished British geologist who discovered several new minerals (including Fermorite) and wrote a book on manganese deposits in India. At age 18, Patrick set out to trek from the Netherlands to Istanbul on foot, carrying a volume of Horace’s “Odes.” He spent time in Greece, where he lived with his lover, purported to be a Romanian princess, in an old water mill that overlooked the island of Poros. During World War II, he joined the local resistance to Nazi occupation on the island of Crete, disguising himself as a shepherd in the mountains for nearly two years. After the war, he leveraged his aristocratic social network to support a career as a travel writer. “I borrowed people’s castles, that sort of thing, because there are countless people in Italy with a half a dozen castles they never use,” he told Melvyn Bragg in 1989.
In 1947, he traveled to the Caribbean to write captions for a corresponding book of photographs. Five years later, he began turning his observations into his sole work of fiction. It began as a short story, set in 1902, about a volcanic eruption that destroys an imaginary island called Saint-Jacques des Alisés on the night of a wild Mardi Gras ball. Originally intended for an anthology called “Memorable Balls” (incredible title), the story became the basis for Fermor’s only novel: “The Violins of Saint-Jacques” (1953).
The novel is a lush queer romance that sees the eldest daughter of a wealthy Creole family torn between her affections for the family’s governess and the son of the local governor. Some might read lines like “Their intimacy was fostered by long rides through the waving avenues of sugar-cane and the nocturnal highwoods alive with fireflies” or “Everything that an idyll possesses that is most primitive and innocent seemed to surround these girls, like a Garden of Eden,” and feel Fermor is using their romance to romanticize the colonial setting. However, these references to cash crops and the Westerner’s gaze feel to me like intentional interruptions, taints of realism serving as little reminders not to get too caught up in the love plot.
There’s also some great fictional fiction within “The Violins of Saint-Jacques,” like the lost works of “Aimable Bruno, the mulatto poet of the island,” and “Les Tonkinoises,” a travel book by Henri Joubert, a writer on the island who “specialized in outlandish settings — islands, deserts, pagodas, icebergs and so on, in a most melodramatic style.”
Read if you like: The films of Claire Denis, “Wide Sargasso Sea,” the tower card
Available from: NYRB
“Ticknor,” by Sheila Heti
Fiction, 2005
It feels strange to include Heti’s book on this list since it is, ostensibly, based on real people. George Ticknor was a Boston Brahmin, a celebrated scholar of Spanish literature who wrote a favorable biography of his friend William Hickling Prescott (himself an eminent historian of the early Spanish empire). Heti fictionalizes Ticknor’s life in a manner many academics would consider a crime of the highest order: She shortens his C.V. Her Ticknor is, relatively, a bit of a loser, struggling to publish much beyond “a smattering of articles.”
Altering the scholarly record is not what gives Heti’s fiction its extra fictional quality, though. What makes this book seem unreal is that Ticknor’s conscious thoughts sound like ones that should live in the subconscious. We do not merely hear his reflections. It is more like that sensation when you turn on your headphones without realizing that the volume on your device has been turned all the way up. Sure, Prescott’s parents have died, but more important — what did they think of Ticknor when they were living? Ah good, Prescott has found a wife, Claire, who boasts a “wide backside.” Yet now Ticknor will no doubt have less of his friend’s attention. “I was as lost as a card that has blown from the deck,” he says of life now at chez Prescott. I force myself to label the narrative surreal. The alternative, that this is an honest assessment of our brains on insecurity, is a truth I must reject out of self-preservation.
“Ticknor” is page after page of hypnotic narcissism, but so funny, so deliciously written. Of Claire, Ticknor thinks: “I have always wanted to reach out and grab her, though I never felt she and I had very much in common.” Reading this feels like being locked in an escape room with your crush: hectic, and too good to be true!
Read if you like: “Pale Fire”; the parts of “Pure Colour” that take place entirely within a leaf; Boston as a setting for movies (but not the city itself)
Available from: This is a Sheila Heti deep cut so either very cool bookstores or the publisher’s website.
Why don’t you …
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Learn to distill your own liquor using recipes from 16th-century Russia? You’ll need them if you want to keep six kinds of mead on hand, and you will as, according to the “Domostroi: Rules for Russian Households in the Time of Ivan the Terrible”: “Anyone who keeps his house stocked and has an orderly wife will never be shamed before his guests. Except for the occasional rare item, God has provided everything they need at home.” Dying to know which “occasional item” even God has to order on Amazon.
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Be like me and go down a “Gwynocent” rabbit hole until you’re learning about how the Rocky Mountain states became a winter playground for the rich and famous?
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Debate whether a dandelion is a flower or a weed? It’s April and spring has fully sprung, just in time for National Poetry Month. Here’s one of my favorite poems by Hanif Abdurraqib: “How Can Black People Write About Flowers at a Time Like This.”
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