Tomoé Hill on Some of Her Favorite Wafer-Thin Books

When I asked Tomoé Hill if she were willing to recommend some of her favorite wafer-thin books, she responded enthusiastically with the following. “I had a lot of fun writing it,” she remarked, and you will have even more chasing after these enticing books (I must append Julian Green, Yves Bonnefoy, and Etel Adnan’s books to the post on “Seven Wafer-Thin Slices of French Life”).

1. Observations of Home

I am a great fan of the travelogue, though my preferences lean to ones mostly set long past in a less homogenised world. Within that, there are some books I would classify as the home travelogue, where the writer is writing of their home city/country or place they consider a home with the same distant yet sharply observant eye.

• The Beauty of the Metropolis by August Endell, translated by James J. Conway) (Rixdorf Editions, 150 pages)
  • The one requirement of this list was it fit the brief of ‘wafer-thin book’. I start with a book which only just fits, if you consider the edition as a whole consists of the original book alongside magazine articles and an afterword. But Endell’s 1908 book, brought back in translation by the now-shuttered small press Rixdorf Editions, is too beautiful not to include by any means possible. Endell reflects on the German city in every perspective from its design and nature, night and day, as a critique of modernity, and the beauty of the street as a living being; the end result, with thanks to Conway’s translation which perfectly conveys the enthusiasm of the author, pulsates with an exciting urgency which makes you want to go out and look at your own city through his eyes.
  • (The Rixdorf Editions edition of this book is exceptionally rare now, but you can see the German original on the Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/dieschnheitdergr00ende/mode/2up) or an English translation by Zeynep Çelik Alexander in Grey Room No.56 (Summer 2014) on JSTOR.)

• Paris by Julian Green, translated by James Amery Underwood (New Directions and Penguin Modern Classics, 153 pages
  • Green was an American born and brought up in Paris. This is a haunting more than anything else, which he fully admits; by knowing a city in and out of wartime, through beauty and destruction, he captures the essence of a life and city whose changes can only be understood by being swept along with them through observation. We are given multiples cities within a city, the overlap of history which shows us what is physically no longer still remains in spirit. By turns sombre and joyful, it makes the heart ache for a city one thinks one knows yet does not.

• Watermark: An Essay on Venice by Joseph Brodsky (Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Penguin Modern Classics, 144 pages)
  • The phrase ‘a love letter to …’ for this genre always rubbed me the wrong way in its reduction; love is a given here, and even if it were the opposite, that is still part of the same whole, and the whole is what allows one to see properly. Brodsky’s brief essay to the city he did indeed love and was buried in begins with two olfactory memories: the scent of frozen seaweed from the lagoon, and the (he thinks) Shalimar perfume adorning the gorgeous fur-wearing Venetian scholar who comes to meet and bring him to his hotel in the night, then continues his observations by contrasting the majesty of its water and politics, people and architecture to the awe of its observer.

• Garlic, Mint, & Sweet Basil: Essays on Marseilles, Mediterranean Cuisine, and Noir Fiction by Jean-Claude Izzo, translated by Howard Curtis (Europa Editions, 128 pages)
  • Izzo was, among other things, a French noir writer. This book moves between a similar style and beautiful, meandering recollections of his Marseille in everything from migration and family, food and women. As someone who has many of the same tastes in literature and other things, reading Izzo talking about James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice to the smell of garlic on a woman’s body is to read a glorious ode to multiculturalism and appetite: ‘the people of Marseilles sing in several languages, just as we think and dream in several languages. And love too.’

2. Fantastic Light

 Sometimes I read a book at am struck by how the prose and ideas within it come across strongly in way which might apply to another practice, as if the creators (in which I include translators) recognise and deliberately work in another medium in order to best express their thoughts. In reading these, I immediately think of painting and the capturing of specific light and angles.

• In Praise of Shadows by Junichirō Tanizaki, translated by Thomas J. Harper and Edward G. Seidensticker (73 pages, 128 pages in illustrated Vintage Design edition)
  • It is probably of no news to anyone that I often struggle with wanting to write about the Japanese part of my heritage and also not wishing to be trapped in a stereotype as a result. When I first read this, it is no lie to say I was left aching at how much it resonated, even as someone who was born and raised in Wisconsin. As the years go by, I find more and more of an instinctual pull to Tanizaki’s descriptions of light and lacquer, texture and subtlety that (still) permeates Japanese sensibilities, because that’s where I have found myself, somewhere in the shadows and reflections, the blurred in-between.

• The Story of the Paper Crown by Józef Czechowicz, translated by Frank Garrett (Sublunary Editions, 76 pages)
  • A beautiful story of a young man’s revelatory coming into being sexually, intellectually, and emotionally, I was struck on multiple readings that I came back to the same idea. I was reading something that felt as if I were looking at both the gilded depictions and strict perspectives in religious paintings and Barbara Hepworth’s hospital drawings: full of light and haze, a Giotto-like rendering of awareness with a certainty of focus. Frank Garrett’s translation leaves the reader in no doubt that the process of translating Czechowicz was a labour of precision and delicacy, the picking through endless pebbles on a beach in order to find the ones which reflected the sky and sea in full.

• Rue Traversière by Yves Bonnefoy, translated by Beverley Bie Brahic (Seagull Books, 77 pages)
  • Strictly speaking, Bonnefoy is mainly a poet, but this, a reflection of childhood and memory, combines prose poetry, almost aphoristic lines, and even brief essay, so genre is a very blurred line here. I recently mentioned Italian light to someone who had sent me a photo of their holiday—that I found it unique to the country, a kind of golden light that gilded whatever it touched. Bonnefoy’s writing affects me in the same way: his style and thoughts are always light and golden, enveloping the reader in a warmth that imparts the sensation of being gilded, turned precious from their presence on the page and tongue.

3. Other Sides of Love

 I once posted a photo of a book stack offering alternatives to the usual love story, which for some reason was quite popular. While I spend more time than I should admit making up themed book lists in my head, this is one I tend to come back to and revise, as love, desire, and all its myriad facets are a part of human nature that has always fascinated me.

• A Cup of Rage by Raduan Nassar, translated by Stefan Tobler (New Directions and Penguin Modern Classics, 47 pages)
  • Years ago, I had a great but fleeting gig at a new print magazine where I co-reviewed classic erotic literature with a writing partner under the pen name duo ‘XX and XY’. Alongside that, I wrote reviews in brief of erotic literature newly in translation under my own name. It was then I encountered Nassar. This is the slimmest of books at 45 pages plus afterword, but it hits the reader with blunt force of a slap; most likely its author’s intention. The story of an older man’s weekend tryst with his younger journalist lover at his Brazilian farm, it lays bare desire which plays with cruelty for mutual pleasure. The sex act is merely foreplay to the main event, an argument which silently builds from the moment she arrives and explodes the following morning, each giving as viciously as the other. Nearly the entirety of the book is their verbal warfare game in isolation, clinically set out in sections consisting of one extended sentence—a feat of breathlessness by Stefan Tobler. It would be too easy to dismiss this as a disturbing work; it may well be, but it is more importantly a study of very human desire willing to rip itself inside out in order to understand the strange love imbedded.

• Not One Day by Anne Garréta, translated by Emma Ramadan and the author (Deep Vellum, 99 pages)
  • Sometimes I read books without needing to know where the boundaries of genre lie; perhaps for women who write, this can be a sort of armour countering the irrelevance of wanting to know precisely what is true and what is fiction. I read this in that way: I couldn’t tell you if it’s fiction or not, and it doesn’t matter to me. What it is is a snapshot of longing and the memory of people that come and go in our lives cloaked in colours of desire. Each chapter is a woman, each woman only identified by a letter and the night she was remembered. Such a telling could seem cold, the recounting of a collector only interested in showing off. Instead, it is a scrapbook that aches and reminds us of our own memories of intense loves; the tableaux where we recall a face first seen, a voice first heard, a body first touched. Garréta keeps these short, as if too aware anything beyond these glimpses strays into unnecessary nostalgia. As she writes, ‘life is too short to resign ourselves to reading poorly written books and sleeping with women we don’t love’. Indeed.

• The Governesses by Anne Serre, translated by Mark Hutchinson (New Directions, 108 pages)
  • I include Serre in a group with Fleur Jaeggy and Barbara Molinard, among others, which I refer to as ‘false notes’; by which I simply mean their style is akin to a note played out of step which then reverberates in the reader, never allowing them to return to a place of comfortable narrative. The story of three governesses tending to the young boys of one family, it is a sensually detached allegorical tale of symbiotic and parasitic female desire, its detachment allowing the story to unfold as a kind of study to the reader. Are we witnessing women or animals, young ladies or insects preying; is there a difference in these instincts and how we act upon them? The first time I read it, it immediately brought to mind a favourite E.E. Cummings poem, ‘Doll’s Boy’s Asleep’, where a boy dreams of a group of women discussing how best to lovingly divide him. Our desires demand visibility, but can that only ever be a dream?

4. Never Enough

This might be my favourite category of book list, because it is one I recognise my own thinking and writing in. There is something about connection and not being limited by one’s speciality or interest which I find incredibly appealing and attractive: when the mind not content with staying within certain boundaries, and so exploring everything that it feels reaches out to touch it. Ideas attract ideas, crossing subject and genre in a beautiful network.

• The Eyes of the Skin by Juhani Pallasmaa (Wiley, 128 pages)
  • Pallasmaa’s architectural theory resides as much in the sensory and bodily world as it does the inanimate structural. The result sets aside boundaries and questions why we don’t look at one world through the eyes of another. His sometimes surprising references touch upon everyone from Calvino and Heidegger to Dziga Vertov and Magritte; there is no aspect of thought Pallasmaa finds irrelevant to understanding the structures that form our world. When I wrote Songs for Olympia, I used a quote from this as a reminder that in writing, I was seeing with every part of my being: ‘the eyes want to collaborate with all the senses’.

• Profanations by Giorgio Agamben, translated by Jeff Fort (Zone Books, 102 pages)
  • I’m not sure how much time I have for arguments that a living author is someone we have to cancel due to their opinions. I like to think I can consider you an asshole and still find beauty where it exists in your writing. Profanations happens to be a book which delights me: he connects everyone from Orson Welles, Walter Benjamin, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Dostoyevsky and Buñuel in a series of short essays on everything from magic and genius to play, profanation and photography.

• A Balthus Notebook by Guy Davenport (David Zwirner Press, 112 pages)
  • A series of short reflections on Balthus by one of America’s greatest thinkers, the author explores the child-adolescent subjects of the painter via such authors as Colette and Proust and the attitude of different cultures towards children, while at the same time declaring them ‘illustrations for a writer … who doesn’t exist’. Balthus for Davenport exists in a space occupying both fantasy and reality, ‘discord and harmony’, but the ultimate questions around his work lies in the viewer’s ability to reconcile these aspects in art in themselves. Davenport opens with ‘If there are eternal values in art, it seems they are preserved only by those who strive to realize them in a new content’; a throwing down of a cultural and intellectual gauntlet.

• Photo, Phyto, Proto, Nitro by Melissa McCarthy (Sagging Meniscus, 144 pages)
  • Melissa’s book came out just after mine at Sagging Meniscus: I’d first read an essay of hers in the great Public Domain Review, an experimental piece of sorts about sharks, surfers, and language. She has the curiosity of connection shared by the rest of the writers listed in this group, and Photo is no different. It would be too simple to say she writes about photography and the image: it is much richer and far-reaching than that. She draws together everything from Hiroshima and flowers, X-rays and neuroscience, to Jaws and Colonel Alfred Capel Cure, a photographer ignominiously solidified (or fragmented) in history for blowing himself up in trying to dynamite a tree.

  5. Restless Place

This stands in relation to the first category: while I see that one to an extent as panoramic and fixed in memory, the books here are a constantly moving within their observations, as if the writers are constantly looking to change memory and makes sense of an experience or time which by its nature can never rest.

• Dusty Pink by Jean-Jacques Schuhl, translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman (Semiotext(e), 128 pages)
  • Careening between 60s Paris and London, Schuhl’s book is pure movement and noise: a clash of sensory observations of everything from the boots of Parisian riot police, Marlene Dietrich as the precursor to Mick Jagger, a Grand Marnier crepe being eaten and the aldehydic floral scent of Revillon Detchema. The title references a salesgirl in the famous Biba boutique in London covering her face with ‘dusty pink’ powder; every detail, vividly translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman is an explosion ushering in the next and the next until we are left with cultural chaos more fittingly describing what it must have been like to be there than any documentary.

• Paris, When It’s Naked by Etel Adnan (Post-Apollo Press, 115 pages)
  • Adnan’s book of daily life in Paris is one of constant conflict: knowing she is both part of and not of her surroundings, that the city itself is made of and lives and breathes it. From making rice to walking along the Seine, there is no act that does not remind her of displacement and unbelonging: ‘should I go on living in this paleness, under the shadow of French trees, walking painfully? When everything pulls you apart, you play dead.’. For all that, she is in full recognition and appreciation of its beauty while never ceasing to be aware it is only a covering for the hurt which people bring to it. Paris wants you to forget, but some people will always remember.

• Mirror of Tauromachy by Michel Leiris, translated by Paul Hammond (Atlas Press, 79 pages)
  • This most likely seems a strange book to include here, but I can’t think of anything better fitting to the idea of restless place than a book that uses bullfighting as a reflection of ourselves in life and art. I have no interest at all in it—in fact, despise it—as a sport, but as a metaphor, it is apt. In his typical style, mixing both aphorisms and shorter essays, he dissects the act, reducing it to its essences of sacrifice, dance, and death, while asking if we can really elevate to more than what it is, when we lack the true ritual meanings such acts once held. But in the abstract, he uses it to do precisely that: comparing it to things as the acts of love, he reveals that we are never far removed from mimicking its brutality and spectacle in whatever we do.