Monday Links

Christmas crime fiction, weird Christmas carols, revisiting “Clear Light of Day,” André Aciman’s “Roman Year,” and more.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

This is the last email of the year. I would like to thank everyone who has supported this newsletter by subscribing to it or by telling others about it. It wouldn’t exist without you. Happy reading, and see you on January 1st!

Alan Jacobs continues his reflections on the family by revisiting Anita Desai’s 1980 novel Clear Light of Day: “Whenever people talk about neglected masterpieces, the first book that comes to my mind, always, is Anita Desai’s 1980 novel Clear Light of Day. What follows will reveal some key elements of the plot, but I don’t think knowing these things will spoil anyone’s experience of this deep, rich, generously meditative book. It’s the kind of book that gets better with re-reading.”

Jake Marmer talks to André Aciman about his new memoir, Roman Year, which picks up where Out of Egypt left off: “It’s been exactly 30 years since André Aciman’s literary debut: his memoir Out of Egypt, which tells the story of the author’s younger years in Alexandria—years filled with comfort, leisure, discoveries of reading, but ultimately, change of the regime that brought on the dissolution of the Jewish community that surrounded him . . . Roman Year is not at all a sequel, even as it does seem to pick up where the other memoir left off. What’s different here is not merely the fact that the author presents an older version of himself. It is also the fact that his approach to the genre of memoir itself has changed. ‘This book,’ Aciman told me, ‘is about coming out and saying things as they were, as opposed to camouflaging them constantly as I did in Out of Egypt . . . You see what the result of poverty is, and what the threat is . . . We’re poor, we’re refugees, and we need money, and we need help to pay the tuition. These are aspects of my life that I had never spoken about.’”