Hisham Matar, My Friends ** 1/2

My Friends is a novel about three Libyan men living in England during Qaddafi's reign, and their differing responses when that regime begins to falter. As in his non-fiction book The Return, Matar effectively conveys the emotion strain of living in exile.

I find Matar's writing style to be overly ornate, with strained metaphors and a plethora of Conradian subordinate clauses. My Friends is organized as a series of memories as our narrator Khaled walks home after seeing off his friend Hosam at the train station, but the conceit is applied sparingly, making it disorienting when Khaled refers to his location in the present day.

Lastly, Khaled is a disappointingly passive character. His personality is ill-defined, making it hard to understand what attracts Mustafa and Hosam to him. I didn't feel his passion for literature.

Tove Jansson, The Summer Book **** 1/2

The Summer Book is a quiet, meditative novel about a six-year-old girl and her grandmother spending time together at their summer house on an island in the Gulf of Finland. The girl's father is there too, always in the background (he has a single line of dialogue, three pages from the end). Her mother has recently died, which no one talks about but which accounts for the existential undertone to many of the conversations.

The book consists of twenty-two "crystalline" vignettes about everyday life on the island, each one nearly a standalone story. Jannson's writing has lovely imagery that merely suggests the associated emotional depths. As Ali Smith says on the back cover, "Her sentences [are] simple and loaded; the novel reads like looking through clear water and seeing, suddenly, the depth."

Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire **** 1/2

How to Hide an Empire is "a history of the Greater United States," meaning that it looks at US history through the lens of its non-state territories. In the eighteen and nineteenth centuries, much of the West consisted of undigested territories, notably including the ever-shrinking Indian Territory. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the United States started claiming sovereignty over uninhabited islands (for their guano), then won several colonies in the Spanish-American War. We fancy ourselves a republic not an empire, so that status of these territories has always been murky.

The introduction talks about how we "mainlanders" talk about "Pearl Harbor" on "December 7, 1941," despite the fact that the Japanese attacked the much larger US territory of the Philippines at the same time... where it was already December 8.

The book is full of fascinating stories that I was only dimly aware of. Immerwahr shows how things look different from the provinces, and how the federal government has been able to take advantage of the murky legal status to act like other imperial powers (which is to say beastly).

After the Second World War, the US was in a position to greatly expand its empire but instead started divesting itself of many existing territories. Immerwahr argues that empires in the traditional sense are unnecessary in the modern world, where you don't need to control territory to secure trade routes or fight wars. He doesn't note it, but the other imperial powers also gave up their colonies after the war; see Postwar.

The only thing preventing me from granting How to Hide an Empire five stars is that the final chapters try a bit too hard to tie all aspects of recent history to our hidden empire. I felt like I had to do more work on my own to see the key points.

Satu Rämö, The Clues in the Fjord ** 1/2

If you gave an AI chatbot the prompt Write a crime thriller that takes place in Iceland, with characters who will recur in subsequent installments, you'd get something pretty close to The Clues in the Fjord. 

The prose is full of exposition that sounds like it comes from a travel guidebook ("The Westfjords made up a fifth of Iceland's land area, but less than 2 per cent of the population lived at the end of the narrow road"; "the maximum speed on Iceland's roads was ninety kilometres per hour"). The plot is designed to give opportunities to reference traditional foods and cultural touchstones. The main characters have colorful personal quirks—Hildur loves surfing, Jakob knits—and buried traumas to provide an ongoing background through the series of novels.

The (first) murder isn't discovered until page 110, one third of the way through. The police repeatedly pause their investigation to pursue personal agendas. The big break in the case comes from a random tip rather than from detective work. The title and tag line ("Death waits in the icy depths") are generic and have nothing to do with the story.

Overall, the book felt like a typical episode of CSI: Ísafjörður.

Randy Baker, Half Fast ****

Half Fast is an unusual cruising memoir in that it features comparatively few sailing adventures. The first chapters deal with onshore tribulations: riding out Hurricane Andrew anchored in the Bahamas, repairing the damage when their boat is blown ashore, tracking down outboard motor thieves in Honduras, working for a season in the Virgin Islands, refitting for more than a year in Trinidad. Even the on-water stories are harrowing: rescuing smugglers in Saint Vincent, dealing with an aggressive sea lion, nearly getting run down by a Chinese fishing vessel. The book ends with their boat nearly destroyed in a tsunami. Where's the poetry about the call of the sea and the freedom of the cruising lifestyle?

I would say the target audience for Half Fast is fellow sailors rather than people dreaming about sailing the world. Baker's stories are exactly the kind you would share with crew mates out on the water. 

In the final third of the book, Baker and his wife sail through the Panama Canal and cross to the South Pacific. This section features more typical content about life on board and the remote exotic places they visit.

The title, by the way, is a pun.

Andrew Miller, The Land in Winter *** 1/2

This novel features two couples living in the West Country of England in the winter of 1962/3. The Big Freeze forces them to confront their insecurities and dissatisfaction.

The writing style and subject matter make it read like a book written in the 1960s rather than a work of historical fiction published in 2024. It seems like a British variant of an Updike or Cheever novel, addressing the discontents of the suburban class.

Yoko Tawada, Exophony ***

The word exophony refers to the experience of "existing outside of one's mother tongue." Tawada is a Japanese writer who lives in Germany and writes many of her books in German. In this collection of essays, she celebrates exophony as a source of creative inspiration. Non-native speakers notice aspects of a language that native speakers are blind to.

My experience reading Tawada's non-fiction was similar to my experience reading her fiction. She offers interesting observations, but they don't add up to larger points.