Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.
It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.
Mary Oliver, from ‘The Uses of Sorrow’
—
It’s my grandfather’s birthday. Yes, today, the darkest day of the year. I think it’s nice that in the months immediately after he was born, the days only got brighter for him. In fact, one of the things I like most about my grandfather is how bright he is, and how relentlessly curious. If you’re knowledgable about something, he wants to know everything about it, no matter the subject. Economics and auto-mechanics, sure, but also endometriosis and how a piano works. I bought him books every year for his birthday, until one year I found them all unread in the basement. He’s a slow reader and finds it exceedingly difficult — I imagine it’s dyslexia — but I didn’t know that then.
I don’t often tell my grandfather about what I’m reading anymore, for that reason. As for what I’m writing — I sent him the link to the first piece I was ever paid for: a ‘listicle’ of contemporary novels from the Balkans. He bought a world map that year and pinned it up over his desk, learning the names of all the places I’d been. But I never sent him anything after that, knowing the letters on the screen would be jumbled and harsh. That it would make us feel farther from one another, rather than closer.
In Iran, the winter solstice or Shabe Yalda is traditionally celebrated by eating pomegranates, drinking together, and reading poetry. My grandfather will turn 80 on the solstice next year, and talks a lot about what Leonard Cohen called ‘leaving the table.’ I doubt he’s ever had a pomegranate, so I’ll bring him one. I’ll read a little poetry aloud, so he doesn’t have to.
—
I caught the darkness / It was drinking from your cup.
I said, “Is this contagious?” / You said, “Just drink it up.”
Leonard Cohen, from ‘Darkness’
—
Shabe Yalda is supposed to reflect the victory of light over darkness, as I hope it will for the Iranian people. I’ve been reading (and writing) more poetry than usual this year, maybe because this year has ached more than others. Poetry feels possible even when speech is not — perhaps this is why it answers us when we’re faced with heartache (the good or the bad kind).
I published very little this year, but as the wonderful Erin Somers so cheerfully reminded us in a tweet, “Whether you published a lot or nothing this year, keep in mind that nothing matters.” Somers published a lot.
I reviewed two novels persistently labelled ‘tomes’: Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob and Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand. For such different books, I can think of few authors (and their respective translators) who play so well with language. While we’re talking language, I published my first translation — To My Fellow Machines — a little piece by Heinz Helle that I first read in a newspaper on the train to Cologne back in 2018. I wrote a little about socialism and a lot about how men write women in a review of Salka Valka. I felt confronted by my own mirror image in Édouard Louis’s A Woman’s Battles and Transformations — it’s a miracle that review got written at all. And a simple review of a poetry collection called Contrapasso spiralled into an unfinished essay on birds and prison poetry (I’ve made promises to have it polished before the year is done, so watch this space).
I published a little poem about heritage and my hometown in a new anthology, Borders & Belonging. I travelled a lot — saw my family for the first time since before the pandemic, watched two beautiful friends marry in autumnal bliss, and launched a new travel site with my partner for queer folks who are more interested in where the radical bookshops are than the gay clubs.
In the meantime, Russia launched a war in Ukraine. My father ordered the Svetlana Alexievich books I’d recommended years ago, to remind himself of the human stories. The newspapers keep talking about gasoline prices. I keep compulsively clicking on a kitschy travel article I wrote on Lviv in 2017 for the now dissolved Calvert Journal. Once a year, they’d tidy up a piece I did on Russia’s yolka, or ‘New Year’s tree’ and republish it at Christmas. It’s still sitting there now with it’s 2021 date-stamp, marking some less-troubled faraway time.
But every year I look back on what I’ve written, read, and watched, and compile it all. It’ll sit here with it’s own date-stamp and help me remember what carried me through 2022.
—
My favourite book I read this year: And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photographs by John Berger
My second favourite book: Strangers: Essays on the Human and Nonhuman by Rebecca Tamás
Other exceptionally good books:
Carol by Patricia Highsmith
A Woman’s Battles and Transformations by Edouard Louis, trans. Tash Aw
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
Real Estate by Deborah Levy
Exposure by Olivia Sudjic
Tomb of Sand by Geetanjali Shree, trans. Daisy Rockwell
Paul by Daisy Lafarge
When I Sing, Mountains Dance by Irene Sola, trans. Mara Faye Lethem
Two memoirs that broke me down and built me up and let me say things out loud I simply couldn’t before:
Consent: A Memoir by Vanessa Springer
Being Lolita: A Memoir by Alisson Wood
Books I devoured in one sweet sitting:
Girl Meets Boy by Ali Smith
Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill
Books that were critically acclaimed but I just couldn’t get into:
The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss. My disappointment in this book has caused an irrevocable rift between me and my father, who made the absurd comparison to Tolkien.
Leave Society by Tao Lin. I’ve never had a big appetite for this type of narrator, though one critic called it ‘dorm-room philosophising’, which I usually love (as long as it’s Elif Batuman). Big apologies to the good friend who lent it to me and, without judgement, accepted me returning it unfinished.
A book that transported me to another place:
The Last Supper by Rachel Cusk
A book that challenged and changed me:
Hooked: Art and Attachment by Rita Felski
Poetry collections I returned to:
Dancing in Odessa by Ilya Kaminsky
The Flame by Leonard Cohen
Thirst by Mary Oliver
Books piled up next to my bed for winter reading:
The Secret History by Donna Tartt (not sorry)
After Sappho by Selby Wynn Schwartz
The Last Pomegranate Tree by Bachtyar Ali, trans. Kareem Abdulrahmen
Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami (yes, this was on the same list last year. The order of the TBR pile isn’t perfect)
—
It’s been a strange year in film, so I’ll be brief. In fact, I pivoted more toward TV series this year — Succession, The White Lotus, and A League of Their Own making the top 3 for me, in that order. But, for tradition’s sake, here they are:
A film I loved without reservations (coincidentally the first film I watched this year):
Microhabitat (2017), dir. Jeon Go-woon
The best documentary I watched this year:
Fire of Love (2022), dir. Sara Dosa
A 5-star short film that I keep misremembering as directed by Ken Loach, which tells you what you need to know:
Wasp (2003), dir. Andrea Arnold
The best, most challenging musical I think I’ve ever seen:
Annette (2021), dir. Leos Carax
A film that spoke to me as if out of my own heart:
In Front of Your Face (2021), dir. Hong Sang-soo
Three excellent but very different films about queer women:
Comets (2019), dir. Tamar Shavgulidze
Blue Jean (2022), dir. Georgia Oakley
Disobedience (2017), dir. Sebastián Lelio
A film I’d watch again (and again):
The Worst Person in the World (2022), dir. Joachim Trier
The film that made me laugh the most:
What We Do in the Shadows (2014), dir. Taika Waititi & Jemaine Clement
Obligatory Agnès Varda film:
Ulysse (1983)
The worst film I saw this year:
Le Week-end (2013), dir. Roger Michell
Tied for my favourite soundtrack this year:
The Hunger (1983), dir. Tony Scott
Blue Jean (2022), dir. Georgia Oakley
The Hunger also tied with Hitchcock’s Rebecca for my favourite use of curtains, but that’s another story.
A Christmas film that brought me solace, and which I hadn’t seen since childhood. How beautiful and how surprising it was to recognise Brighton in the colour-pencil snow:
The Snowman (1982)
—
No longwinded reflections this year. I’ve got 30 more minutes to catch my grandfather on the phone to wish him a ‘happy birthday’. He’ll tell me what time the sun will rise tomorrow — a minute or so earlier than today. I’ll leave you, instead, with a little poetry:
I will praise your madness, and
in a language not mine, speak
of music that wakes us, music
in which we move. For whatever I say
is a kind of petition, and the darkest
days I must praise.
Iyla Kaminsky, from ‘Author’s Prayer’
Speak to you in 2023…