Holdings 1:3

What’s going on at The Book Hold? A couple of things.

The Book Hold shelves

I’ve added an introductory shelf of works on the dictator novel, a genre of obvious contemporary relevance. The “fictions of authority” shelf includes the ‘big five’ by Asturias, Carpentier, Roa Bastos, García Márquez, and Vargas Llosa, and four precedent works of varying influence on the establishment of the genre.

The stacks now include links to posts on:

• literature under fascism in Italy,
• French interwar travel literature,
• realism and its discontents in Spain, and
• experimental Eastern European literature.

Each of the entries on the “stacks” page includes a link to an introductory post as well as a shelf on Bookshop. The Book Hold’s Bookshop site is here.

Some recent reads

A couple of books took me in recently.

• Matei Călinescu’s Zacharias Lichter is the first of the books in the Bloc experiments list, and in addition to being a chin-scratcher in all sorts of ways, it was also (in the end) an oddly affecting text.
• Carmen Laforet’s Nada is one of the early books in the Salidas list; a realist work in or adjacent to the tremendismo movement in Spain. Nada reads, as I describe it in my note, like Emma, but bleak as hell. Letting the book just sort of wash over me was a wild experience.

The Book Hold everywhere

I’m on Bluesky and Substack, and for now that’s all I am: on them.

Coming up

In the chute are notes on:

• Roussel’s Impressions of Africa;
• Svevo’s Zeno’s Conscience;
• Blecher’s Adventures in Irreality; and
• Valle-Inclán’s Tyrant Banderas.

Finally, some recent stuff

I’m just getting into Cristina Morales’ Easy Reading, and it is rocking my planet. Fernanda Melchor’s Paradais and Olga Ravn’s The Employees are on my immediate radar. I started Patricia Lockwood’s Will There Ever Be Another You, and I more or less immediately put it down for reasons I don’t understand yet.

Thanks for your support!