Open Secrets by Alice Munro

 

Playworld by Adam Ross

 

Thick, long book - possibly too long - but I'm halfway through and digging it. Great schoolboy wrestling descriptions. NYC in 1980-1981.

Under the Volcano by Malcom Lowry

 

"Re-" reading this after forty years. How did I even pretend to understand it at twenty years old? Lowry's prose is dense, elliptical, allusive, often semi-private. A late entry in the great modernist novels. But I'm having real trouble "finishing" it.

Friends of My Youth by Alice Munro

 

Despite her recent cancellation, Alice Munro is a genius. Going back and re-reading her now is stunning and numbing: her men are cruel and selfish, her women are passive and selfish, the northern landscape is bleak and cold, but other setting details are lavishly and lovingly rendered: interiors, trees, flowers, clothes, anything inanimate with color.

The Betrayers by David Bezmozgis

 

Ending up liking this quiet, calm novel about a Jewish Russian refusenik who served 13 years in a Soviet gulag after being betrayed by his Jewish friend and roommate. 

Refusenik visits Crimea and accidentally books a room in his betrayers house. 

Yid dreitzikh. A Jew gets by.