Three books I’ve read (all on audio) recently:
The Periodic Table; by Primo Levi, read by Neville Jason.
I feel as if I am reading Levi in reverse: Starting with Other People’s Trades a few months ago, then moving to The Periodic Table, perhaps soon arriving at If This Is A Man. In the first, Levi’s own life is relatively abstract; in If This Is A Man, (whose title in the US was Survival in Auschwitz) I assume I would come to understand what must have been formative experiences for him. The Periodic Table is somewhere in the middle. He refers to Auschwitz obliquely in a few chapters, and writes about his time in the Monowitz Buna Werke at the end of the book. But other chapters resemble allegory, and others are simply charming vignettes from his youth. I will admit that I was not as enamored with the book’s structure as I had hoped, but I did feel as if I came closer to the parts of Levi’s life that I clearly want to learn about.
The Year of Magical Thinking; by Joan Didion, read by Barbara Caruso.
I have never read Joan Didion, and I’m told that The Year of Magical Thinking is perhaps a distinct element in her writing career. I found it to be a compelling listen, and blasted through it in a few meditative sessions. Didion both shows and tells the reader what she experienced during said Year — which, if you weren’t already aware, included the death of her husband and also a series of intense medical tribulations endured by her daughter. Didion tells through uncannily precise self-reflection, which I take it is something she was known for. She shows through the choral repetition of a string of out-of-context phrases and quotations, all of which add up to a feeling of dissociative fugue.
Everything Is Illuminated; by Jonathan Safran Foer, read by Robert Petkoff.
I have read this book at least twice before: Once in paper when I was in college, and once on audiobook sometime in my later twenties or early thirties. I have found it incredibly affecting every time.
I am not very Jewish. I have barely stepped foot into a synagogue, have only been to a Seder once, and was told repeatedly, by my one arguably Jewish ancestor, that he did not consider himself to be Jewish. And yet I am, ethnically, twenty-five percent Ashkanazi, and it feels as if there is within me a cultural hole where my Ashkanazi ancestors (who were murdered, in pogroms, around the turn of the twentieth century) once were.
By that same token, Jonathan Safran Foer (either the author or the ostensibly fictionalized protagonist of Everything Is Illuminated) is not very Ukranian. In an interview with the New York Times, Foer said that writing Everything Is Illuminated “was a way of coming to peace with an absence in my life.” About the real trip to Ukraine which he took in 1997, Foer had this to say: “What I found was nothing but nothing. There weren't even people to ask questions of, or gravestones to light candles by. What I found was one, huge hole.”
I think that it is this which I have found so affecting: The knowledge that no matter how much I dig, a big part of my own family history — and of all of our histories, as the Alex character so poignantly shows in Everything Is Illuminated — will remain mostly an absence.