9 Books Like Pereira Maintains

After I visited Sicily at 22 (the same age as Mariella in the book) and stayed with relatives in Siracusa, I fell in love with Sicily (and all of Italy) and wanted to know everything I could about it, its history, its customs, architecture, food, and especially to understand the collective psyche of its people. 

My grandmother was born in Sicily and never spoke English even after moving to the United States, and my uncles and father spent a good part of their childhoods in Catania, where the Sicily part of Becoming Mariella takes place. I had never before felt the deep longing of a cultural belonging, and this book, written in 1958, is one of the finest works of twentieth-century fiction (according to Daunt Books), and opened my eyes to the pride and richness of the Sicilian people and its aristocracy, their stubbornness and an understanding of how,… show more.

Deeply immersive and politically subversive.

This book, the first in Rachel Cusk’s famous trilogy, was a revelation to me because it feels so radically unstructured but at the same time is fascinating in its form.

The narrator travels to Athens to teach a summer writing course but the details about her are kept so sketchy that we only really get to know her through the way she receives what others tell her. Faye is brilliantly observant, and only gradually do you begin to realise, as a reader, that the author is subtly meditating on a series of themes through these conversations, mostly about disappointments and divorces.

Last year, I went on a run where I read nothing but Clarice Lispector, completely surrendering to her experimental spellcasting and literary bewitchment. Ukrainian-born and Brazilian-raised, the iconoclastic Lispector was unmistakably her own as a writer, searching for "the word that has its light."

This brings me to my favorite of the Lispector books that I devoured: Água Viva. It is a happy birthday dirge and confessional, a sustained incantation punctuated by necessary silences, a chamber music concert performed in the bluest hours by a splintered soloist.

Or, in the words of Lispector herself, "This isn't a book because this isn't how anyone writes. Is what I write a single climax? My days are a single climax: I live on the edge." I read this book three times, craving the balm of its lyrical hypnosis.

On the face of it, this seems like a straightforward book. Magris traces the geography of the Danube from Furtwangen or Donauschingen in southern Germany to the Black Sea, and in so doing surveys the history of the regions through which it passes. That would be a bold enough project in its own right, but the book itself is so much more than this and is one that I’ve returned to many times since I first stumbled across it fifteen years ago. The riverine structure of the book sweeps the reader from prehistory to the twentieth century and back again, individual eddies linger on intriguing episodes – the building of the cathedral tower at Ulm, the significance of the Iron Gates – and then we’re off again on another evocative description of the river or aside on the forgotten history of Mitteleuropa. A terrific read.

This is the only book on the list that relates directly to my main topic of research, but that is a strong recommendation in itself. In truth, there are lots of books about ‘late antiquity’ (or ‘the later Roman Empire’), and many of them are very good indeed. But they also tell a familiar story in familiar ways: they discuss politics, military actions, transforming towns, and (increasingly) plague and climate change. Sessa’s book deals with all of these themes in some way, but flips the whole thing on its head. This book looks at the period from the bottom up, thinking about the lived experiences of women and children, of country-dwellers, and those who inhabited the less glamorous corners of the empire. Reading this made me think again about lots of topics that I thought I knew well. It is also accessibly written and introduces a sometimes complex period very… show more.

I love this book because it’s a collection of mini-biographies of contemporary writers, musicians, and artists from the 20th century, some I’d heard of and some I hadn’t, but they’re all weird.

Like, as I’m writing this, I just flipped to a random page and there’s a section on Michael Mann, who once owned the apartment I’m writing this in. And then I flip a little more and get five succinct and totally bizarre pages about Mao.

I love how random his book is!

I came across this book unexpectedly in an American bookstore, and have since given it as a gift countless times. In essence, Reynolds provides a survey of human history through facial hair, creating a rambling, eccentric overview and proposing all sorts of improbable theories, many of which are probably right. The bookseller’s note on the back cover of my copy lists it as ‘History (?)’, which seems about right, but it has definitely made me think about history in a different way. I also now have a beard of my own (not connected).

Reynolds also wrote a similarly inspiring book about toilets.  

This is the story of a highly educated writer living with the poorest of the poor in the U.S. Agee was sent to live with Alabama sharecroppers during the Depression. His assignment was to write about them for a magazine, but he ended up making it into a magnificent memoir (Jimmy Carter’s favorite memoir) that is often paired with Walker Evans’ photos. They lived and worked as a team.

Agee is a well-educated, well-off writer, but manages to describe the lives of the poorest of the poor with great respect, artistic originality, and sincerity, and to give us a full, if painful, understanding of the lives of people who could not afford shoes and were worked to the bone by the landowners.

It’s a deeply spiritual work, artistically original in structure and language, a long, slow, magnificent read that has touched me deeply each time I’ve read it.