In Memory of Memory, by Maria Stepanova, translated from the Russian by Sasha Dugdale (New Directions). This remarkable account of the author’s Russian-Jewish family expands into a reflection on the role of art and ethics in informing memory. After the death of an aunt, Stepanova examines family lore and heirlooms that hint at how the family largely survived the atrocities of the tsarist and Soviet eras. She probes gaps in her knowledge, and—drawing on artists and writers including Charlotte Salomon and Marina Tsvetaeva—considers how memories are perpetuated and manipulated. Stepanova is both sensitive and rigorous, writing that she was “smitten with the idea of blindly retrieving and reliving scraps from my life, from a collective life, rescued from the shadows of the known and accepted histories.”
American Baby, by Gabrielle Glaser (Viking). In 1961, Margaret Erle Katz, an unmarried teen-ager, gave birth to a son she named Stephen. Her story anchors this book, an indictment of forced adoptions in mid-century America. Threatened with juvenile detention, she was coerced into surrendering her baby to an adoption agency that lied to adoptive parents about where the babies were from, and to birth mothers about where they were sent. Shame, and a closed adoption system, discouraged Katz from looking for her son, and it was not until he started researching his ancestry that, in 2014, a relative was able to connect them. As some states unseal birth records, millions of Americans are still seeking their biological parents—victims, Glaser writes, of a system in which in order “to create one family, another had to be disintegrated.”
Cathedral, by Ben Hopkins (Europa). Set in Germany, this ambitious début novel begins in 1229, when a young serf buys his freedom and becomes an apprentice stonecutter, working on the construction of a cathedral. “It will be made of the mortal Stuff of this World,” his master says of the project. “But it will point, in all its stones and mortar, to He who laid the cornerstone, the foundations of the Universe.” As the edifice rises and decades pass, Hopkins weaves together a multitude of voices to examine the relationship between medieval worship and the era’s politics and economics. The resulting epic is both sweeping and human.
The Weak Spot, by Lucie Elven (Soft Skull). This fable-like novel takes place in an unnamed town at the top of a mountain, accessible only by funicular, and near woods where, centuries ago, beasts were said to roam. The narrator is a pharmacist-in-training, alienated from her family, who arrives to work for an imperious, mercurial man named Mr. Malone. Watching him absorb the complaints and confessions of his customers, she begins to imitate him, learning to enter their minds “like a contortionist threading her fillet of a body through her arms.” This process, along with Malone’s subtle intimidations, leads to the erosion of her identity. Hints of trauma begin to flicker through the novel’s dreamlike surface, as the narrator attempts to keep her feelings “as still as possible.”
