This Week in Books – 10-06-26

This Week in Books is a feature hosted by Lipsy at Lipsyy Lost and Found that allows bloggers to share:

• What they’ve recently finished reading
• What they are currently reading
• What they are planning to read next

A similar meme is run by Taking on a World of Words.

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It’s been a while… 😬

The last book I finished reading was Holy F*ck by Joseph Incardona, translated by Sam Taylor. This is a short read that doesn’t take itself too seriously – I enjoyed it.

Stella works miracles. Literally. She heals the sick and the paralysed, just like in the Bible. The Vatican is overjoyed – imagine, a real saint in the 21st century, and in Georgia, the heart of the American South.

The only hitch? Her method: she heals the people she sleeps with in her motorhome. And she sleeps with a lot of people, it’s what she does for a living. And that’s precisely what’s bothering the Vatican.

For Luis Molina of the Savannah News, this story smells like a Pulitzer for sure. For the Vatican, it smells more like trouble. A saintly hooker isn’t exactly presentable. A martyred saint, on the other hand, has a conveniently rewritten past. That’s a job tailor-made for the Bronski twins – the best contract killers in the business. Provided, of course, they manage to get their hands on innocent little Stella. America is a big place.

Joseph Incardona sets his new story in a dusty, wacky United States. He excels in its film noir atmosphere: travelling funfairs on the outskirts of small towns forgotten by everyone, lost motels, freaks and the disenfranchised. It’s reminiscent of the Coen brothers, Tarantino and del Toro, but also a homage to the novels of Harry Crews.

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I’m currently reading A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan.

Jennifer Egan’s spellbinding novel circles the lives of Bennie Salazar, an aging former punk rocker and record executive, and Sasha, the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Although Bennie and Sasha never discover each other’s pasts, the reader does, in intimate detail, along with the secret lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs, over many years, in locales as varied as New York, San Francisco, Naples, and Africa.

We first meet Sasha in her mid-thirties, on her therapist’s couch in New York City, confronting her longstanding compulsion to steal. Later, we learn the genesis of her turmoil when we see her as the child of a violent marriage, then a runaway living in Naples, then as a college student trying to avert the suicidal impulses of her best friend.

We meet Bennie Salazar at the melancholy nadir of his adult life-divorced, struggling to connect with his nine-year-old son, listening to a washed up band in the basement of a suburban house-and then revisit him in 1979, at the height of his youth, shy and tender, revelling in San Francisco’s punk scene as he discovers his ardour for rock and roll and his gift for spotting talent. We learn what became of his high school gang-who thrived and who faltered-and we encounter Lou Kline, Bennie’s catastrophically careless mentor, along with the lovers and children left behind in the wake of Lou’s far flung sexual conquests and meteoric rise and fall.

A Visit from the Goon Squad is a book about the interplay of time and music, about survival, about the stirrings and transformations set inexorably in motion by even the most passing conjunction of our fates. In a breathtaking array of styles and tones ranging from tragedy to satire to PowerPoint, Egan captures the undertow of self-destruction that we all must either master or succumb to; the basic human hunger for redemption; and the universal tendency to reach for both-and escape the merciless progress of time-in the transporting realms of art and music. Sly, startling, exhilarating work from one of our boldest writers.

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And next? Maybe When You Listen to This Song by Lola Lafon, translated by Lauren Elkin.

A quietly powerful exploration of memory and forgetting, from one of France’s leading feminist public intellectuals.

In 2021, the award‑winning French writer Lola Lafon was granted permission to stay overnight – alone for ten hours – in the Annex in Amsterdam where Anne Frank and her family had hidden from the Nazis between 1942 and 1944. Lafon’s visit to this space, where Anne Frank wrote her famous diary, evoked the confinement and constant danger suffered by the Franks, and the family’s ghostly presence as well. “The night was inhabited, lit by reflections,” Lafon writes. “Some urgency still dwelled at the heart of the Annex, crouched there, ready to be discovered.”

Exploring the many stories told about Anne Frank, Lafon tries to find the precocious girl at the heart of the venerated and exploited myth, a disciplined writer whose famous diary is in fact a wonderfully constructed literary work. Throughout, Lafon reflects on what it means to lose loved ones, both Lafon’s own family in the Holocaust and her childhood friend to the Khmer Rouge.

A prize-winner and bestseller in France, this book asks us to consider the stories we tell ourselves about tragedy, how we grapple with loss, and why, in the face of danger and confinement, women write.

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And that’s my week in books! What are you reading this week? Let me know in the comments! 😎