It shares several features of other Borges fictions. Like “The Cult of the Phoenix“, it’s a kind of literary puzzle or riddle. In this case, the main point is to guess the identity of the main character, who is a famous mythological character. Borges drops a few hints along the way, like a thread helping us to navigate the literary labyrinth, but it’s not until the final line that he reveals the answer.

Note: I’m going to reveal the answer to the riddle in the next paragraph, so if you’re about to read the story and don’t want to spoil it, look away now!

It’s also a retelling of a famous story from a very unusual point of view, much like “A Biography of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz“, which we read a couple of months ago. In this case, the famous story is the killing of the Minotaur by the Greek hero Theseus. Even for those of us not well versed in Greek mythology, it’s a familiar tale, and it has obvious parallels in other monster-slaying fables from a variety of cultures.

In “The House of Asterion”, Borges chooses to tell the story from the point of view of the monster. The effect is to make us feel sorry for the Minotaur, who bears no ill will to the people around him. When he leaves his labyrinth and is spotted by the inhabitants of the town, he misinterprets the reason for their terror:

“Not for nothing was my mother a queen; I cannot mix with commoners, even if my modesty should wish it.”

The Minotaur doesn’t see himself as a monster, of course—no monsters do. When we inhabit another person’s reality (or another creature’s reality in this case), it becomes impossible to see them as a monster. That is only possible when you view the story only from one side, as we always do with monster-slaying fables. But Borges delights in blurring the lines between heroes and villains (see “The Shape of the Sword“, for example). He helps us to see the world through the Minotaur’s eyes, and we can no longer view the monster’s killing as a simple act of heroism.

Borges writes in his Afterword: “I owe to a canvas painted by Watts in 1896 the story called ‘The House of Asterion’ and the character of its poor protagonist.” When I found the painting online, I could see why.

There’s nothing monstrous about this Minotaur. Yes, he does have some kind of dead animal in his grip, but his gaze is fixed longingly on the horizon. The face reminds me of a faithful dog awaiting its owner’s return. We can’t hate or fear this Minotaur. We can’t see him as a monster or feel good about plunging our sword into his defenceless body. I can picture Borges viewing this painting in a gallery or book and feeling the germ of a story begin to take shape in his mind.

Many of the familiar symbols and themes of Borges fiction are present and correct. In addition to the switching perspectives and the blurring of the line between hero and villain, we have the presence of a labyrinth and frequent references to infinity. The Minotaur tells us that the labyrinth has 14 doors, but Borges adds a note from an imagined editor telling us that the number fourteen means “infinite”. (Who this editor is and how this person knows anything about the Minotaur’s language or number system is a mystery that the reader is left to ponder.)

There’s also a religious dimension to the story. The Minotaur views his killings of the young men who enter the labyrinth as freeing them from evil, and he eagerly awaits the arrival of his own “redeemer” who will free him from the solitude of his existence. In a poignant moment just before his death, he ponders the nature of the redeemer, as humans over the centuries have speculated about the form of God:

“What will my redeemer be like, I wonder. Will he be bull or man? Could he possibly be a bull with the face of a man? Or will he be like me?”

When Theseus finally arrives to “redeem” this poor, lonely creature, casually remarking that the creature barely defended itself, we see the killing in an entirely different light.

“The House of Asterion” contains a timeless lesson with strong contemporary resonance. We live in an age when politicians are routinely trying to dehumanise whole groups of people, aiming to make us accept their imprisonment/deportation/slaughter. After all, who wouldn’t want to slay monsters, and who wouldn’t want to celebrate the hero with the bloodied sword? But compassion and empathy for our fellow beings demand of us that we reject simplistic binaries and embrace the more complex truth that Borges shows us: there are no heroes, and there are no monsters. We must make the effort to see the world through the eyes of those we hate and fear. We might be surprised what we discover.

The post The House of Asterion: Borges Marathon, Part 33 appeared first on Andrew Blackman.

The first was how successfully Marie Darrieussecq evokes a time and a place: primarily southwestern France in the 1980s, although later we move into the 90s and early 2000s in Paris, London and Los Angeles. This is one of those novels that leaves you feeling as if you’ve lived for a time as a teenager in that small village.

Interestingly, Darrieussecq doesn’t achieve that feeling through meticulous physical description—there’s actually very little description of buildings or landscapes that I can remember. Instead, she evokes the atmosphere of the place, the claustrophobic feeling of growing up in a place where everybody knows you, where every false step will be remembered and recounted, where you’re a teenager bursting with questions about sex and your body and a million other things, but you can’t ask anyone because they’ll judge you and your secret questions, and the anonymity of the Web doesn’t exist yet.

The second thing that stood out from How to Make a Woman was the characterisation. The novel revolves around two teenage girls, Rose and Solange, who were best friends as small children but gradually drift apart as the novel progresses and they take different paths into adulthood. As with the setting, I really felt as if I knew these two girls/women.

This part, I think, is due to the narrative style. The whole novel is narrated in third person, but the first section focuses tightly on Rose’s perspective, the second retells the same events from Solange’s point of view, and the short final section brings the two strands together. In the Rose section, we are deep inside Rose’s head, and the same applies in Solange’s. That kind of deep immersion doesn’t always work in novels, but in this one it does. It gives us a strong sense of the inner lives of both characters.

This was my first time reading Darrieussecq, so I read How to Make a Woman as a standalone novel, but I later discovered from Wikipedia that she has written several novels that are set in the same fictional village of Clèves in the Basque country of southwestern France, with the same cast of recurring characters shown at different stages of life. It sounds a bit like the work of Elizabeth Strout, where I enjoy tracing characters through different situations, so I think if you’ve read other Darrieussecq novels, you’ll probably get more out of How to Make a Woman than I did.

However, it does work as a standalone novel too. As the title suggests, Darrieussecq is exploring different ways of becoming an adult woman. Rose takes a more conventional path, studying hard and marrying her childhood sweetheart and having names picked out for her children before she’s even graduated from high school. She stays with her boyfriend Christian despite having frequent doubts about whether she really loves him, mostly because she’s scared of a life without the certainties to which she has learned to cling:

“Leave Christian, and fall into what dizzying depths?”

Damage avoidance is hardly the most romantic reason for staying with your future husband, but it’s Rose’s way of navigating life and becoming a woman. Here’s her reaction to seeing a child across the street:

“Rose would like to erect a magic shield around him. It’s such an effort going through life avoiding life, doing your best not to suffer too much, rubbing up against reality as little as possible. She understands that.”

That protective instinct reminded me of The Catcher in the Rye, a book that How to Make a Woman doesn’t resemble in any other way. It also tells us a lot about how Rose views life and explains her choices and her way of becoming a woman.

Solange, on the other hand, rubs up against reality quite a lot. She has a baby at 15, then leaves the boy with her mother so that she can escape the village and free herself from the feeling that her life is over before it’s begun. She goes to Bordeaux, then London, then Paris, then LA, staying in squats and partying in gay bars that at the time were illicit and countercultural and then, when the AIDS epidemic hit, became places of sorrow. She gets a part in a sitcom, then a movie later, and gradually builds a career and a life in America.

The two sections, Rose’s and Solange’s, give quite different views of the same events, and it’s up to us to decide which is correct, or perhaps the correct answer is both and neither. Rose seems at times to resent Solange’s freedom, even though she would never have wanted to make those choices herself. And Solange also resents Rose at times:

“Rose, her best friend Rose, is trying to be kind. But it’s too hard to accept it, that kindness. They’re so perfect, mother, daughter, with their real tea, not in bags, their ceramic teapot, their eyes full of tenderness and understanding. Solange could hit them.”

From Rose’s description, Solange seems to have an easy life of wealth and fame, but Solange’s perspective is quite different, with her life much more of a struggle and her success much more limited and precarious. There are plenty of inconsistencies like that, which it’s up to us as readers to resolve (or to leave hanging if we prefer).

In reality, of course, there are as many ways to become a woman as there are women. Darrieussecq gives us two contrasting approaches, but despite the self-help-style book title, I’m sure she’s not suggesting these are the only two. What is, perhaps, essential to becoming a woman is what lies beneath the story: not so much the safety/freedom dichotomy but the slow and sometimes painful process of pulling a life together through a combination of decisions made with limited information, responses to emotional pulls, the intervention of random chance, coincidences and happenstance, fear and uncertainty. Nobody really “makes a woman”—it’s not a conscious effort but a chaotic process that nobody, least of all the person at the centre of it, really understands until they look back on it later.

In that sense, coming of age as a girl in 1980s Clèves is not so different from coming of age as a boy in 1990s London or [insert your decade and place here]. Those are the good literary experiences, I think: when you get taken into a completely different world that nevertheless reflects something of your own experience and makes you feel less alone.

Thanks to Fitzcarraldo Editions for the review copy of How to Make a Woman by Marie Darrieussecq, which will be published tomorrow in the UK. Looks as if the North American edition will be published next month by Transit Books.

Let me know in the comments if you’ve read any other books by Marie Darrieussecq and can recommend (or recommend avoiding) any of them. I might dive further into the Clèves literary world after this.

The post How to Make a Woman by Marie Darrieussecq appeared first on Andrew Blackman.

Paris in Turmoil by Eric Hazan

A lifelong Parisian examines the changes the city has witnessed over decades and centuries. I read this one for Emma’s “Paris in July” event and wrote a full review here.

Across the River and Into the Trees by Ernest Hemingway

I read this late Hemingway novel after Meredith of Dolce Bellezza recommended it in a comment on my May roundup. I enjoyed the melancholy, death-tinged mood and the Venice setting, but I found the relationship between the retired American colonel and the teenage Italian countess tedious. So quite a mixed bag for me, but overall I’m glad I read it. More detailed thoughts to follow if I have time.

The Three-Cornered Hat by Pedro Antonio de Alarcón

Another book that I reviewed this month—this time a new translation of a 19th-century Spanish novel about corruption and social hierarchies. Also, a comic novel that I actually found funny, which is a rarity.

Running Down a Dream by Tim Grahl

I was expecting a fairly typical you-can-do-it creative-self-help adrenaline shot, but this book is a little different. Running Down a Dream kind of delivers the “road map to winning creative battles” that it promises in the subtitle, but it also undercuts that message by showing that the best techniques don’t necessarily provide satisfaction, and that even when you do run down that dream, it doesn’t always make you happy. So more of an adrenaline shot with a side of Xanax.

The West by Naoíse Mac Sweeney

In The West, historian Naoíse Mac Sweeney shows in great detail how “the grand narrative of Western Civilisation is factually wrong,” and the myth of an unbroken line of descent from ancient Greece through Rome to modern Europe and North America is perpetuated not because it’s true but because it’s ideologically useful.

I want to write more about this book, but in the meantime, please read it. We could save a lot of time on tedious culture wars if more people understood when and why the West was invented.

Beauty Is a Wound by Eka Kurniawan

I bought this Indonesian novel in a bookshop in Jakarta and recently discovered it in a storage box. I’m glad I read it. It’s a very creative fictional journey through Indonesia’s painful history with heavy doses of magical realism (ghosts, curses, people returning from the dead, men who are impervious to bullets, etc.).

However, there were also some parts that left a very bad taste in my mouth, primarily around this male writer’s repeated depictions of rape, incest, bestiality, grown men falling in love with children, etc. I was bothered not so much by their frequency in the book (which could perhaps be justified based on allegories to the country’s violent history both during and after colonisation) but by the language with which they’re described and the way characters react to them, which seems at times to normalise or even approve of them. So, although it has some wonderful elements, I wouldn’t recommend this one.

What did you read this month?

Let me know your favourite books of the month in the comments, and tell me if you’ve read or think you’d like to read any of mine.

The post Books I read in July 2026 appeared first on Andrew Blackman.

The second thing that makes it stand out is the plot: Emma Zunz fakes her own rape to give herself a justification for killing a man she believes cheated her father and caused his suicide. Sexual violence and revenge killings don’t make much of an appearance in the work of Jorge Luis Borges outside of this story.

The reason becomes clear in the Afterword to The Aleph (1949), the collection in which this story appeared. Borges says that the “wonderful plot—much superior to its timid execution—was given me by Cecilia Ingenieros.”

The name didn’t mean anything to me, and most online sources just refer to her as a friend, but this Spanish-language newspaper article claims that Borges and Ingenieros were in love and planning to marry, and Borges wrote this story while they were together. But then Ingenieros abruptly broke things off and went to Europe without him.

This explains, perhaps, why the story is a bit of an outlier in subject matter. But in its construction, it is very typical of Borges. He returns to the theme of a life consisting of a single moment, from the previous story, “A Biography of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz“, when Emma Zunz receives the letter telling of her father’s death:

“Her father’s death was the only thing that had happened in the world, and it would go on happening, endlessly, forever after.”

The revenge plot is then related in meticulous detail, with Emma Zunz completing a series of apparently unrelated acts, all of which will come together at the very end to explain how she set things up to make it appear as if Loewenthal had raped her and she had killed him in self-defence. Borges as usual blurs the lines between real and unreal, honour and deceit. Although Emma Zunz commits murder and lies about being raped, she is still clearly the hero of the story, with a strong moral justification for everything she does:

“Emma Zunz’s tone of voice was real, her shame was real, her hatred was real. The outrage that had been done to her was real, as well; all that was false were the circumstances, the time, and one or two proper names.”

What makes the story successful, I think, is the combination of suspense and revelation that marks so many Borges stories. He tells us a lot of what is going to happen, but withholds just enough to keep our interest. We know from the start that Emma Zunz blames Loewenthal for her father’s death and means to take revenge, probably by killing him. But then she goes about all those apparently unrelated tasks, like calling Loewenthal to snitch on her striking colleagues, reading about a Scandinavian ship arriving from Malmo, going down to the docks and picking up a sailor from the ship to have sex and then tearing up the money he gives her, etc. It all seems to be part of a clear plan, but it’s not at all clear what that plan is until the last few lines of the story, and that revelation at the end is very satisfying.

So although it’s a departure from the usual content of Borges stories, “Emma Zunz” works very well and is one of the best stories in The Aleph collection. And despite his self-deprecating afterword, the execution is not timid at all.

For more reviews of Borges fictions, check out my years-long Borges Marathon. And do join in, either by commenting below or by writing your own thoughts about these stories on your blog or social media.

The post Emma Zunz: Borges Marathon, Part 32 appeared first on Andrew Blackman.

What does all this have to do with a nineteenth-century Spanish comic novella? Well, at the heart of The Three-Cornered Hat is the Corregidor, a corrupt authority figure who tries to use his power to seduce another man’s wife, among other vile acts. He writes a letter to grant the woman’s nephew a plum job and then issues orders for her husband to be arrested so that he’s out of the way.

But it’s not just the Corregidor: everyone in authority in the novel is corrupt, dishonest or hypocritical in some way. The Corregidor’s assistant, Garduña, is named after a small Spanish mammal known for its cunning and speed. The village mayor happily goes along with the Corregidor’s plan, after he has drunk a jug of wine and administered his wife’s daily beating. The village constable is also a drunkard, and the clergymen, lawyer and other notables are all flawed in some way.

The Three-Cornered Hat, then, is a novel that has a lot to say about the times we are living in, when a convicted felon can launch a war to divert attention from the fact that his name comes up more than a million times in the Epstein files. The Corregidor is a small, petty man who uses the power embodied in his three-cornered hat to make himself feel bigger. No matter where we live, I think we’ve all probably encountered someone like that.

Thankfully, the novel doesn’t centre on the Corregidor. The main characters are the miller, Lucas, and his wife, Frasquita. They live just outside the city and regularly entertain the most powerful men on their afternoon strolls, plying them with food and wine in exchange for favours. Although they are not rich, it is worth it to them to give these men free food and hospitality.

“In times when more than fifty different levies were owed to Church and State, a rustic of such clear intelligence had little to lose by keeping the goodwill of aldermen, canons, friars, notaries, and other persons of consequence … Tio Lucas saved himself a fortune each year through his policy of entertaining everyone.”

The Corregidor’s attempt to seduce Frasquita by presenting himself honestly as a man in love with her is a disaster: she contemptuously rebuffs him (the chapter is cleverly called “The Bombardment of Pamplona” in reference to the city’s renowned fortifications). So he comes up with a new plan that depends not on his person but on his power alone.

As the plot advances, the book becomes reminiscent of a classic opera buffa, with much changing of clothes and misunderstandings that are resolved in the end to the benefit of the virtuous and the detriment of the evil. The drama shows people in their true colours, and it’s those without power who are revealed as superior in virtue to those who in daily life are superior in status.

If that sounds like the ending of a folk tale, that’s because this novel is indeed based on a traditional Spanish folk tale—the novel begins with an account, which may or may not be true, of how Alarcón (or his narrator) first heard it.

However, The Three-Cornered Hat is also more than a folk tale. Alarcón brings in carefully observed details of the period to make subtle points about social classes and their values, and the translation faithfully either renders those details into English or leaves them in Spanish with a note to explain their significance. In a few places, these notes veered too far into explanation for my liking, spelling out details of the plot or of Alarcón’s jokes that were either obvious or that I would have preferred to work out by myself. Mostly, however, they were helpful in detailing the meaning of particular subtleties of dress and behaviour that would have been obvious to a nineteenth-century Spanish audience but meant nothing to me.

I’m always a bit suspicious of comic novels because I never seem to laugh out loud while reading a book in the same way as I do when watching a movie or a stand-up comic. However, I did find this book funny—not in a “laugh out loud” way but in appreciation of the satire, the absurd situations, the ridiculous pomposity of the minor officials who act as if they are the King of Spain.

It’s also a folk tale told in a sophisticated literary style, with symbols and foreshadowing scattered throughout. One great use of foreshadowing is when Lucas and Frasquita jokingly talk about what would happen if the Corregidor succeeded in seducing Frasquita, and Lucas says he doesn’t know what he would do because he would be a different person then—his whole life is built around his faith in her.

“I am now a man who believes in you as in himself, and has no more life in him than this faith. If I stopped believing in you, I should die, or become a new man; I should live in a different way; it would seem to me that I had just been born…”

This is a light-hearted conversation at the time, but it takes on a new light later on, when in all the confusion and misunderstandings, Lucas does stop believing in his wife for a time, and he does start behaving like an entirely different person.

Overall, I’d recommend this short novella as a quick, light-hearted story that also has plenty of depth for those who want to look for it. The Three-Cornered Hat is published by Espresso Publishing House, a new publisher based in Calgary that’s dedicated to “beautiful new editions of overlooked European fiction.” That sounds like a great premise to me, so I was happy to accept a review copy of this, their second published book.

The post The Three-Cornered Hat by Pedro Antonio de Alarcón appeared first on Andrew Blackman.

What Eric Hazan writes about instead is the long-term changes that happen in vibrant cities like Paris. Neighbourhoods evolve, ethnic groups come and go, old-style buses and taxis disappear, traditional buildings are replaced with both architectural marvels and eyesores.

I suppose that if you step back and look at Paris over the longue durée, all these changes could indeed look like turmoil, even though it’s not what we usually understand by the term. I’d be interested to hear from Emma or other French readers if the French title Le Tumulte de Paris has different connotations.

Although Hazan has a clear nostalgia for some of the forgotten elements of Parisian life—like newspaper delivery bicycles with smaller front wheels to accommodate an enormous metal rack of papers hot off the press—he mostly takes an even-handed approach to the changes he documents in this book.

“‘Paris is no longer what it used to be’—yes, and fortunately it changes and constantly evolves like a living organism, some parts atrophying while others proliferate.”

As far as I can tell, Paris in Turmoil was the last book Hazan wrote before his death in 2024 at the age of 87. He lived most of his life in Paris, and it’s clear from this book that he knew its streets and neighbourhoods intimately. While reading it, I felt as if Hazan wanted to document all the details he had spent a lifetime observing, to pass them on to whoever picked up the book before they fade into the past and are forgotten.

I could stroll down Rue des Rosiers today, for example, and have no idea that where the Japanese fashion store now stands, the Goldenberg charcuterie used to serve up legendary pastrami and gefilte fish to residents of the now-disappeared Jewish quarter. I wouldn’t know that tobacconists were often run by natives of Auvergne. I also wouldn’t know that many of the taxi drivers used to be White Russians, and I wouldn’t have this clear image of them:

“beret pulled down to the ears, grey overcoat, dead Gitane, and a very particular way of mistreating their old black and red G7 taxi.”

If the book consisted only of laments for a bygone Paris, it would be an interesting curiosity but perhaps a little boring. What makes it vibrant is Hazan’s clear interest in contemporary Paris. He explains the evolution of tabacs from Auvergnat to mostly Chinese ownership and why so many Indians from Madagascar want to own a droguiste.

Paris in Turmoil is structured as a series of vignettes on different themes. We have “Boulevard Périphérique”, for example, examining various options for destroying, burying or otherwise dealing with the city’s traffic-clogged ringroad. One chapter is on Jean-Paul Sartre, another is about studded crossings, and one called “Left Bank” examines how a vibrant, creative neighbourhood became a “dreary shop-window”.

Readers of this blog will probably appreciate the chapter on “Bookshops”, which thankfully is not an elegy to a lost past but a celebration of the fact that independent bookshops have not been wiped out in Paris to the same extent that they have in London or New York. Hazan charts the geographical shifts as sky-high rents in traditional bookshop strongholds like Montparnasse and the Left Bank price out the artists and writers in favour of “classy foreigners, managers with pointed shoes or directors of PR, not great book buyers on the whole.” But the bookshops have simply shifted to the north-eastern quarter of the city instead.

I also enjoyed Hazan’s views on what makes a good bookshop, which intersect somewhat with my own thoughts but also go further. He says it has nothing to do with size or range and everything to do with the bookseller’s point of view and how they connect books and display them in a coherent way.

The section on “Parisian Writers”, meanwhile, sets strict boundaries around the definition.

“I would suggest confining the title of ‘Parisian writer’ to those for whom Paris was an essential source of inspiration. Being born in Paris or having lived there all your life does not do the trick.”

So Valéry, Gide and Malraux are out, and Proust is also excluded because of a new condition introduced later: Parisian writers must enjoy walking the city alone and collecting memories and details, just as Hazan himself clearly loves to do from the details he shares in this book. By his idiosyncratic criteria, he names Balzac, Baudelaire and Hugo as the great Parisian writers, and gives wonderful examples of the details they observed and included in their books.

This eclectic selection of short, themed snippets of Parisian life reminded me somewhat of the feuilletons of Joseph Roth in The Hotel Years. It’s not for you if you want a deep, logical examination of Parisian history, but I loved its broad sweep and vivid collection of details. Despite the apparently random, disconnected series of vignettes, I felt by the end as if I had accumulated an image of Paris more accurate and true than the one I had before, assembled on various short visits as a tourist. Hazan is an insider with a deep knowledge of and a clear love for the city, and in Paris in Turmoil he piles detail upon detail to eventually communicate something of its essence.

I wrote this post for Emma’s Paris in July event, celebrating all things French. It’s running for the rest of the month, so do check out the other posts, and maybe even join in and post your own thoughts on French books, movies, art or anything else.

The post Paris in Turmoil #parisinjuly2026 appeared first on Andrew Blackman.

News From Nowhere by William Morris

A man falls asleep in 1890s London and wakes up in a socialist utopia of the future. Although it’s described as a novel, it’s really more of a political tract with a loose fictional framing. Morris’s goal is to explore how British society could function without money and private property.

I found it interesting that Morris’s vision of the future looks a lot like the past, with smaller communities living simpler lives and showing more respect for the environment. People actually enjoy work because they are producing things they and their neighbours need, and they make them as beautiful as they can. So it’s a craft-based future in which people don’t see the point of turning everything over to machines.

Taiwan Travelogue by Yang Shuang-zi

This year’s International Booker Prize winner is an English translation of a Chinese novel that is itself billed as a translation of an earlier Japanese novel set in 1930s Taiwan. It’s a beautiful and delicate portrait of a relationship that is forbidden for two reasons: firstly because it’s between a representative of the Japanese colonisers and a supposedly inferior native Taiwanese islander, and secondly because it’s between two women. I can see why this won the Booker and want to write more about it soon.

The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout

Elizabeth Strout’s novels have been a mainstay of previous European road trips, and I listened to her latest one as I drove through eastern Europe and across the Alps to Basel for this year’s art fair.

The Things We Never Say shows us the ordinary life of schoolteacher Artie Dam and then gradually reveals all the unspoken details in the lives of Artie and those around him, from existential angst and suicidal thoughts to long-held secrets and betrayals. Like Strout’s other books, it skims along like a simple, well-told story but also leaves you thinking quite deeply about its themes—in this case, the distancing effect of those secrets on friendships and relationships, how every retreat from honesty makes it harder to achieve true connection.

Kin by Tayari Jones

My road trip listening also yielded a new entry in a category every reader will recognise: books that everyone raves about but that leave you cold. Kin has a wonderful premise, tracing the trajectories of two motherless babies as they grow into adult Black women in the 1950s American South. While Niecy tries to fill the void left by her dead mother, Annie is desperate to find out why her mother abandoned her.

It should work well, and yet I found that we spend too long in side-plots and not enough time on what mattered. And there were several occasions when the characters behaved in such bizarre ways that it broke the fictional spell and made disbelief very difficult to suspend.

East Wind: West Wind by Pearl S. Buck

For a recent Wall Street Journal story I wrote about entertainment in the Great Depression, I interviewed English professor Peter Conn, and he was so enthusiastic about Pearl Buck that I decided to try her work for the first time.

East Wind: West Wind tells the story of a generational clash between Chinese traditions and Western influence. It reminded me of later post-colonial literature in that way, and it was quite even-handed in helping me sympathise both with the characters who wanted to embrace modernity and those who valued tradition. I enjoyed it, although I didn’t love it as much as I expected to, and I plan to read more by Buck, who I find gets quite scant attention given her status as the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

The Starmer Project: A Journey to the Right by Oliver Eagleton

I downloaded this book on my Kindle but kept finding myself so consumed with loathing for the man that I was unable to read it without feeling sick. Now that Starmer’s odious political career has finally ended, I was able to read it with more equanimity, seeing it as a retrospective story of how a man can abandon every single principle he might ever have possessed in blind pursuit of power and then, when he has achieved his goal, find himself having absolutely no idea what to do with it.

For those of you outside the UK, the specifics of the tale will have less resonance, but the overall trajectory may give you an interesting perspective on your own set of invertebrate, focus-group-obsessed, centre-left hypocrites.

How was your reading month?

I hope you’ve read some good books this month. Let me know in the comments which ones you’d recommend (or not), or tell me your thoughts on the books I’ve highlighted above.

The post Books I read in June 2026 appeared first on Andrew Blackman.

This means the story would have a very different resonance for Argentine readers, who would be instantly familiar with the story and would recognise the details as they started to accumulate.

For an English reader like me, who has never read Martín Fierro, the effect is different. I had to dig into the footnotes to understand the historical context and the Fierro references. Without them, the story is a biography indeed, although this being Borges, it’s not a standard biography by any means. He begins by eschewing the very purpose of a biography, to tell the story of Cruz’s life:

It is not my purpose to repeat the story of his life. Of the days and nights that composed it, I am interested in only one; about the rest, I will recount nothing but that which is essential to an understanding of that single night.

So we get a kind of cursory summary of some of the main events in Cruz’s life: his work as a gaucho, his sudden and senseless murder of another man, his valiant fight and eventual capture, his conscription into the army in lieu of a prison term. Then we skip forward to the night Borges is interested in, the moment that defines him:

Any life, however long and complicated it may be, actually consists of a single moment —the moment when a man knows forever more who he is.

I don’t really agree with this—I believe in multiple moments, multiple opportunities to know who you are and to evolve and become who you want to be. But perhaps that’s more of a contemporary notion; in any case, Borges’s idea of a single defining moment makes for a good story.

As Cruz approaches his defining moment, a strong sense of deja vu creeps into the story. He and his men are chasing an outlaw who’s wanted for murder, and the whole episode echoes his own flight from the law and subsequent capture decades earlier. He realises that, although he’s now on the side of the law, his true nature is to be the outlaw he is pursuing.

He realized his deep-rooted destiny as a wolf, not a gregarious dog; he realized that the other man was he himself.

That idea of a character recognising himself in others occurs in other Borges stories. It hints at our deeper connections beyond the superficial things that divide us, but it’s also connected with Borges’s fascination with mirrors, infinite duplication, and repeating patterns throughout history. We enter a kind of infinite recursion, where Cruz is both the pursuer and the pursued, and we start to wonder how many times and in how many ways this episode has already occurred and will occur again.

This made it a satisfying story for me, even though I missed a lot of the historical references and the Fierro rewriting. The big realisation for people familiar with the epic would be that the man he’s pursuing is Martín Fierro himself, and the ending is a famous moment in the epic when Cruz abandons his men and joins forces with the outlaw. In Martín Fierro, the episode is told from the hero’s point of view, but in “A Biography of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz”, we approach it from an entirely different perspective.

This concept of switching sides is also reminiscent of other Borges stories such as “The Shape of the Sword” and “The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero“, while the rewriting of Martín Fierro is a technique he also uses in “The End“. For more details on Borges fictions, check out other posts in my Borges Marathon, a slow and steady reading of all 100+ stories by Jorge Luis Borges.

The post A Biography of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz: Borges Marathon, Part 31 appeared first on Andrew Blackman.

In the case of Natives of My Person, however, the introduction by Caryl Phillips perfectly describes what I wanted to say about the book:

“The fine, sinewy prose beautifully illuminates the many ideas about the colonial world and the role of the colonizer which inform the novel; yet the allegorical nature of the novel creates a distance which often militates against the reader’s feeling any real drama.”

I’ve read quite a few books by the Barbadian writer George Lamming, such as In the Castle of My Skin and The Pleasures of Exile, and I saw him speak about the politics of reading at a literary festival in Barbados 16 years ago now. So I knew what to expect from the prose, and Lamming didn’t disappoint.

His style reads as quite old-fashioned these days, more like a classic nineteenth-century novel than a 1970s one, with an omniscient narrator and a heavy dose of detailed physical descriptions. It’s the small, surprising details that I appreciate the most. To take a page at random, we have a very unusual description of the sea’s action:

“The tide quickened and came high up the bow, rubbing its weight against the waist of the ship.”

Then we meet the captain of the ship, who is missing his usual ostrich-feather hat:

“Now his hair was naked and shifty in the wind.”

I’ve never heard hair described as either naked or shifty, but it works perfectly in this context. And the way the tide rubs its weight against the ship’s waist is almost sexual, which again works in context (the ship has been delayed in port for months, and it’s as if the sea is trying to lure them out).

Every page is like this, with words and sentences selected and assembled with great care, each with a very specific job to do.

Then we have the ideas, which, as Phillips rightly notes, form a rich and interesting examination of colonialism. The ship we have encountered is a vessel from the fictional nation of Lime Stone (which bears a striking resemblance to Britain in the age of empire). It embarks on a long voyage to settle the distant island of San Cristobal, which Lamming uses in other novels as a fictional representation of a Caribbean island, although the geography in Natives of My Person is always vague, and the Caribbean or West Indies are never mentioned by name.

The ship contains within it the hierarchies that it will export to the New World, along with the violence and cruelty. The officers and crew repeatedly doubt each other and fear that they’ll be betrayed to the House (a ruling trading company, which reminded me of the East India Company). They vie for favour and power, while functioning within an overall order that demands absolute obedience and submission.

I think this is what Phillips means by the “allegorical nature of the novel”. The ship’s voyage feels like an exploration of what drove European colonisers to do what they did, and how the injustices and inequalities of colonial societies were contained in their very origins.

Natives of My Person is also, I think, a novel about male fragility and the use of violence and bravado to mask that vulnerability. The ship’s crew is entirely male, and several of them have quite disturbing back stories involving women (resenting them, feeling oppressed by them, lying to them, having them committed to mental asylums, etc.). When it emerges later that a ship of women is also making the voyage to San Cristobal, including some of the officers’ wives, it has an interesting effect that I won’t spoil for you here because it’s an important part of the novel’s conclusion.

For many characters, the inability to relate to the women in their lives leads to a kind of emotional stuntedness and repression, which then causes the violence, aggression and lack of empathy that will make them (or men like them) into able colonisers and colonial administrators.

But Phillips is right that the “allegorical nature of the novel” creates a sense of distance. Everything is happening for a reason, but the reasons are to do with what George Lamming wants to say about the psychology of colonisation. The characters themselves are not interesting or compelling, and I often struggled to tell them apart. Many are referred to not by names but by functions (Boatswain, Priest, Steward, etc.), which fits with the theme of individuals being cogs in a colonial machine but doesn’t help the reader care what happens to them.

Also, not much happens on the voyage. There’s a lot of talking and not much action, which is odd for a maritime voyage like this. It’s clear that Lamming would never write an “adventure on the high seas” kind of novel, but I was surprised that a premise like this led to such a slow, dialogue-heavy book.

All in all, I think there’s enough beautiful prose and complex themes in Natives of My Person to make it worth reading (and worth publishing in a new 2026 edition—thanks to Penguin Classics for the review copy). However, if you’re new to Lamming’s work, I’d recommend starting with his beautiful debut novel In the Castle of My Skin.

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