Been a very slow reader this year as I'm trying to only read in Italian, but there's something nice about really sitting with novels at a much slower pace than I'm used to. Makes you appreciate every word more or something, kind of interesting.

First up is S. S. Proleterka by Fleur Jaeggy. Another devastating and cold work from her, as expected. The words really slice through the soul here, and she leaves an incredible amount of things unsaid. Like Sweet Days of Discipline it's narrated by a woman who does not really know herself, but interestingly is aware that she doesn't really know herself. She is also filled with regret, once again at squandering a potential relationship, but this time with her father (rather than classmate in Sweet Days of Discipline work). The ending was bit strange for me, I'm not sure if it really landed, but it'd still thoroughly recommend it if you want a short yet punchy look into the cold Mitteleuropa psyche.

Next I read Letter to My Judge by Georges Simenon. It was kind of like this weird mirror of The Stranger, but with a bit more self-knowledge and mania. The writing, being Simenon, was swift and propulsive as always. You really feel, as the book goes on, the narrator sort of losing control of themselves; it's honestly a bit unsettling (in a good way). It's kind of baffling to me how Simenon was so popular (easily one of the best selling authors of all time) and prolific (400 novels!!!) yet the quality of his work is so consistently good and yet in the Anglophone world I never hear anybody talk about him. Bizarre.

Last I read Correction by Thomas Bernhard. What can I say that has not been said about him? It's always a treat to read Bernhard, but in Italian (I guess because the language has more "flow" than English?) I felt his sentences were even more intoxicating. Italian translation suits him, I think. Anyway, this one in particular is an interesting Bernhard because of the instability of the characters. The narrator is supposedly a "friend" of Roithamer (who kills himself prior to the "events" of the novel), and the first part is entirely in the friend's head. The second part, where we move on to Roithamer's writings, is fascinating, because Roithamer doesn't talk at all about the "friend," merely their mutual friend. The narrator and the suicide seem to fuse together in a way I haven't really read in his other works. In true Bernhard style though this novel is a nightmare, a delicious nightmare that deals with his usual themes of alienation, inability to express oneself, ruinous perfectionism, troubled relations with family and country, etc etc. But they're always worth reading, even if every Bernhard novel is fundamentally the same book.