Red Comet, by Heather Clark (Knopf). Drawing on a wealth of primary sources, this revelatory biography of Sylvia Plath seeks to recover her legacy from myth and misconception. Clark presents the social, political, and cultural forces that forged Plath’s interests, ambitions, and anxieties: pressures of gender and class; the Holocaust and nuclear warfare; the conformity of mid-century America. Plath’s struggles with depression and her marriage to Ted Hughes emerge in complex detail, but Clark does not let Plath’s suicide define her artistic achievement, arguing with refreshing rigor for her significance to modern letters. The result is a new understanding and appreciation of an innovative, uncompromising poetic voice.
Ravenna, by Judith Herrin (Princeton). In A.D. 402, as Rome was undergoing the convulsions that caused its demise, the unassuming city of Ravenna became a new imperial residence. For the next four centuries, as this bold history relates, Ravenna was “the fulcrum of energies” that gave rise to a new world: medieval Christendom. Its rulers embodied a unique synthesis of West, East, and “barbarian,” which shaped Ravenna’s laws and civic culture, as well as its art and architecture, including dazzling mosaics and octagonal churches. Although Ravenna was never entirely its own agent (it served as Constantinople’s entry point to the West), its brief flourishing made it, as Herrin elegantly argues, “the first European city.”
Earthlings, by Sayaka Murata, translated from the Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori (Grove). What does it mean to feel at home in the world? Natsuki, the protagonist of this startling novel, doesn’t know: from a young age, she’s convinced that she has been contacted by aliens who will take her away from a middle-class Japanese life marked by cruelty. As Natsuki grows up, she continues to feel out of place in society’s “Factory,” in which her only purpose is to produce children. After she meets a man equally resistant to the strain of domestic life, the pair embark on an adventure that spirals toward madness. Murata takes a childlike idea and holds onto it with imaginative fervor, brilliantly exposing the callousness and arbitrariness of convention.
Girls Against God, by Jenny Hval, translated from the Norwegian by Marjam Idriss (Verso). In this experimental novel by a noted singer-songwriter, the narrator, a filmmaker, dwells on her childhood in conservative southern Norway and her adolescence playing in a black-metal band. Her recollections feed into a film, described at the end of the novel, that distorts and reimagines existing works of art using blood, guts, and witchcraft. The narrator films two friends to a score of black metal, and the subject of an Edvard Munch painting is re-created “with ferocious, seething eyes.” Hval, who is known for using body imagery to express political ideas about art, depicts cultish rituals to subvert what she sees as “the restrictive framework of our daily lives.”
