Five Books to Read This Month

As we begin a new month, here are five suggestions from the books which have been published in September.

GRACE PERIOD, Maria Judite de Carvalho

Two Lines Press, pp. 168

Maria Judite de Carvalho was one of Portugal’s foremost authors, as well as one of the acutest observers of womens’ lives under the oppressively patriarchal regime of Salazar—the dictator who ruled over Portugal well into the 1970s. (The regime he cemented was deposed by the Carnation Revolution in 1974.)

Published a year before this left-wing military uprising, which returned democracy to the country—Grace Period is a little different to de Carvalho’s better-known Empty Wardrobes (2021) and So Many People, Mariana (2023), in that it centres on a male protagonist, Mateus, who travels to a seaside town to sell the childhood home he hasn’t visited in 25 years. And yet, in its melancholy, sombre atmosphere, it perfectly captures the feeling of living under a dictatorship: the self-repression and unexpressed yearning for something different, better. 

Translated from Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa.

IN THE FARTHEST SEAS, Lalla Romano

Pushkin Press, pp. 192

In the Farthest Seas manages to distill a whole life together by juxtaposing the first four years of mid-century Italian author Romano’s relationship with Innocenzo Monti with the four final months of their life after her husband had fallen ill. A beautiful, heartfelt elegy to a late partner, filled with scintillating, revealing details.

Translated from Italian by Brian Robert Moore.

INDIGNITY: A Life Reimagined, Lea Ypi

Allen Lane, pp. 368

Free—Lea Ypi’s account of her formative years growing up in 1990s Albania, a country torn by the rapid transition from communism to neoliberalism—was a coming of age that struck a special chord: It combines personal experience with pressing philosophical questions, such as the nature of freedom. 

Indignity, Ypi’s second book, takes a familiar genre, the family memoir. The narrative starts with Ypi, a political philosopher and professor at LSE, discovering a photo of her grandmother, Leman, wearing a white fur coat while honeymooning with Ypi’s grandfather in Fascist Italy. As the pages go by, as the subtitle suggests, it becomes as much a reflection on the nature of memory, blurring fact and fiction. A unique writer who investigates the personal and the universal with crystal clear, deceptively accessible prose.

REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY, CHEKHOV AND ANDREYEV, Maxim Gorky

Fitzcarraldo Editions, pp. 208

Originally published in 1920 by Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press, Maxim Gorky’s Reminiscences of Tolstoy is less a coherent attempt at reconstructing his existence than a series of vignettes and brief sketches, written down as it were on the spur of the moment. And yet, in its haphazardness, “It makes one hear, see, feel Tolstoy and his character as if one were sitting in the same room”. (Those words are Virginia Woolf’s.) The volume comes with a similar sketch of fellow titan of Russian literature, Anton Chekhov.

Translated from Russian by Bryan Karetnyk.

WILL THERE EVER BE ANOTHER YOU, Patricia Lockwood

Bloomsbury Circus, pp. 256

You may remember Patricia Lockwood for her Booker-nominated fiction debut No One is Talking About This, a novel about the experience of being terminally online, or perhaps if you are bit bookish like myself for her skewering of David Foster Wallace in the London Review of Books.

Will There Ever Be Another You, a work of auto-fiction and in many ways a sequel to her No One is Talking, similarly takes inspiration from the author’s experience of chronic illness as a result of contracting long COVID in 2020. Nothing will quite prepare you for the blend of weirdness and inwardness that is this book’s best feature. 

Bartolomeo Sala is a writer and reader based in London. His writing has appeared in Frieze, Vittles, and The Brooklyn Rail. You can find all of Bart’s writing for Something Curated here.

Header photo: Taken from Maxim Gorky’s Reminiscences of Tolstoy, Chekhov and Andreyev, courtesy of Fitzcarraldo Editions.