Worms Best Reads of September 2023

Enya Sullivan

AVALON by NELL ZINK

Avalon is a book my friend Charlie kindly lent me. I love the way that Nell Zink writes, somehow as fast as a firecracker yet simultaneously blunt. 

The novel is narrated by a modern-day Cinderella character named Bran. Bran is an orphan- her mum ran away to a Buddhist temple when Bran was 10, where she died of cancer and her father is nowhere to be seen- who lodges with her stepfather at a farm selling exotic plants. The farm is owned by The Hendersons, who spend their time with gangsters and sex pests. With no money, Bran pays her way by shovelling horse manure. Her only asset is a car, which gives her the freedom to visit her friends who have gone to college.

This could be a bleak tale, of a suffering heroine who is doomed. Bran does suffer, but it isn’t mired in sadness. It’s a funny read. In lots of ways it’s really cheesy, she falls in love with the ultimate intellectual soft-boy called Peter, who quotes Kafka non-stop. Zink is funny here, often using “…” for when Bran is recalling one of his neggy Philosophical rants in order to indicate she doesn’t understand or is no longer listening. Bran also goes on to find her own footing as a writer.

Somehow, none of this comes off as too sentimental. You don’t come away with the sense that love, or philosophy, saves all. The book is littered with rants from college students debating just this, and perhaps Zink too knows this better than most, coming from a working class background and climbing the ranks of academia. I see some of Bran in myself too, coming from a working class background, education was a vehicle to help self actualise but I can never say it truly saves. But I do think Zink is saying that people, regardless of the dystopian mess we live in (some more than others), all deserve to live and to be excited by life. In a time where we are littered with hetero-pessimistic novels where young women suffer, it's nice to read something that says, sometimes, you can get what you desire, and you can find yourself, even in the rubble!

PIERCE ELDRIDGE

INGRESS by KATE MORGAN

Released earlier this year, Ingress is absorbing and has an immediate emotional impact. It's tender, violent, and excruciatingly beautiful. I’m forever in a sincere tryst with our fluids which they write upon with an unusual candour and yet such dignity and intensity.

DEAR JEAN PIERRE by DAVID WOJNAROWICZ

I won’t ever be done with reading this book, it’s tremendous in size, a large brick, the backbone of love found within all of Wojanrowicz’s writings. Deeply moving, letters to his great love Jean Pierre are collected and delicately photographed for the page. I lick myself over all his simple words, finding this Wojnarowicz so different to his more prophetic texts like Close to the Knives. I see a man in love complicated by distance and yearning. I find myself at a typewriter, over a postcard, collecting ephemera from a local gallery to send off to my dearest and furthest loves. I feel like this is one of the most moving collections I’ve read recently. It's encouraged me to take photos of my friends, print them, and scribble out sermons of love on their backs. Wojnarowicz remains my forever favourite.

CAITLIN Mcloughlin

GIOVANNI’S ROOM by JAMES BALDWIN

I had shamefully never read this before it was last month's Book Club pick. I’ve read a few of Baldwin’s essays, but never any of his fiction and this was both stunning and completely devastating. He is able to say so much with so little, so that as a reader you are more aware of what and how David (the narrator) is feeling than he is. It’s an anatomy of the destructive power of shame and the damage it wrecks both internally and externally – yet its assertion that queer love is not inevitably a root cause of shame, is powerful. Rather, it’s David’s lack of language or understanding to deal with his bisexuality and the violent weight of societal prejudice that deems queerness unacceptable. His tenderness is revealed in snatched moments, where he is able to forget himself, submit to his desire and love for Giovanni, and for a second things feel warm. But his torturous inner monologue is overwhelming and he masks his complicated feelings of confusion and terror with a kind of arrogance born from the threat he feels to his masculinity. Often it feels like a play, set on a cramped stage—dingy underground bars, queer spaces kept hidden—until David and Giovanni come spilling out into the hollowed-out light of the Paris dawn. Though, rather than a glorious moment of relief, their exit onto the streets feels uneasy as David suddenly feels exposed – his transgression laid bare in the cold light of day. That you know what's coming from the beginning does nothing to ease the knot that forms in your stomach from the very first page.

Arcadia Molinas

NADEZHDA IN THE DARK by YELENA MOSKOVICH

My expectations were high, coming into this book. Over a year ago I had read Moskovich’s ‘A Door Behind a Door’, which had blown my mind (and of which you can find a fragment in Worms 6). And safe to say, Nadezhda in the Dark did not disappoint.

The narrator, the I, of the book, takes us from a room in Berlin on the longest, darkest night of the year, to a war-torn Ukraine, passing through queer raves in Moscow and days spent chasing cats down the streets of Paris. The narrator battles with her conflicting allegiance to her motherland - a place that exiled her for her Jewishness and to which she has not returned to since she was seven years old, that is now suffering from a ruthless Russian occupation. But underneath it all - her self-doubts as a writer, the suicide of her friend Pasha - holding everything in place, is Nadezdha, her lover, in the room in Berlin on the longest, darkest night of the year. For Nadezdha means hope in Russian.

I was particularly interested in the artists that the narrator brings into dialogue with her own story. Artists like Margarita Kremlin who wrote the underrated book ‘Klostvog’ about being Jewish in the Soviet Union, the rock artist Zemfira who gave a concert at the Music Media Dome in Moscow the day of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and Angel Ulyanov with his bold queer aesthetics, voguing in his music video down Russian streets. The question at the heart of the book, ‘what does it mean to have hope’, is addressed by each of these artists in different ways. Moskovich’s answer is love, loving Nadezhda helps her carry on living.

“I never had a woman look at me / and see / who I was without my body / and tell me the phrase I had waited / for a country to say to me, / Ya lyublyu tebya / in my language / my free language, / my beloved language, / I love you - Ya lyublyu tebya, / the way Anna Karenina said it to Vronsky, / or Dr Zhivago to Lara Antipova, / or the Master to Margarita / I said it back to Nadyenka"

There’s a bold mix of languages in the book [Yiddish, German, Russian and French] which combined with the haunting and tender prose, constantly allude to this feeling of misplacement and appropriation that seems to be at the heart of the portrayal of Ukrainian identity that Moskovich puts forth. Hers is a timely book that brings issues of war, queerness and survival into dialogue, leaving no reader unmoved by the end.

Clem Macleod

BREATHING: CHAOS AND POETRY by FRANCO ‘BIFO’ BERARDI

I’m actually quite annoyed about my best read this month. I’m tentatively choosing Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi’s “Breathing: Chaos and Poetry.” This book is quite amazing, and I’ll get to why I’ve been so tentative about choosing it as my favourite in a bit, but for now I’ll sing its praises. Berardi’s book is about the suffocating effects of financial capitalism. His aim in the book is to “envision poetry as the excess of the field of signification, as the premonition of a possible harmony inscribed in the present chaos” and his argument, although at times a bit convoluted and far-fetched, is really quite amazing. I’ve been thinking a lot about writing and breathing and air, for our upcoming issue, and Berardi’s book definitely helped me to conceptualise and really feel the breath of our collective body. Or maybe more so the collective suffocation that we’re experiencing as a result of climate change, air pollution and a general breathlessness caused by the rate of production that we’re all aspiring to in our day-to-day lives and work. I particularly loved the way he speaks about language, breath and music organising the chaos of the world. It’s such a beautiful and poetic notion in itself, and felt like a real call to arms. A statement to slow down, backed up with philosophy and intellectualism. HOWEVER, this guy seriously has no women in his canon. The book is almost 200 pages and not once (until the last chapter, maybe?) is there a reference to a woman. It is INFESTED with references from philosophers, thinkers, poets and writers that are ALL straight white men. I honestly wanted to slam it shut every time a new male writer was referenced. I get it (not really), Berardi is a man - maybe he feels like he relates to these people he talks of (despite my having no problem reading his work, as a woman, and relating to what he was saying…). But I found it incredibly difficult to ignore this fact, and could think of a number of people that he could have referenced that would have really been amazing at supporting his argument, that he obviously had not read because they were not male French/American philosophers. Such a shame because this could have been an almost flawless read.