“Whatever I have to do has not yet begun”

Reviews of the books, films, and artworks I interacted with in March.

Still from Le Pont du Nord.

Every March, a certain few lines from a poem by W. S. Merwin ring through my head. “It is March and black dust falls out of the books / Soon I will be gone,” go the first lines in the first stanza, their somewhat-gloomy focus on mortality a testament to the half-frozen nature of the month, the tail-end of winter transforming into spring. But the last line—“Whatever I have to do has not yet begun.”—offers a sense of hope. Spring is here; the chance to continue our life’s work begins anew.

Here are some reviews in miniature of the ten books, two films, and various artworks that I interacted with over the course of the last month. We’re now entering another poetic few weeks—April, which you might recall was termed “the cruelest month” by T.S. Eliot.

Books

1. Medium Hot: Art in the Age of Heat, Hito Steyerl

Forthcoming from Verso in June, this is the latest book by the German video artist Hito Steyerl, dealing with the relationship between climate change, artificial intelligence, and image-making. A few years ago, I saw an interesting show of Steyerl’s work at the contemporary art museum in Amsterdam; one of the most arresting works in it was a kind of video game exploring questions of surveillance. I read this mostly because I’ve been collecting research on the relationship between fire, politics, and art-making for an essay I keep saying I’m going to write, but it offers a spirited rallying cry for humanity when A.I. advocates try to push us out of the very act of art-making.

2. Compass, Mathias Énard (translated by Charlotte Mandell)

Background reading for a review of Énard’s forthcoming The Deserters, which I’m writing for The Baffler. There’s a hypnotic quality to this book, which portrays a musicologist’s insomniac night in Vienna and explores the relationship between the West and the Middle East.

3. Time Shelter, Georgi Gospodinov (translated by Angela Rodel)

You can read my thoughts on this novel here.

4. Pink Dust, Ron Padgett

I’m reviewing this for The Nation—maybe you’re noticing a theme of what much of my reading list for the first half of March was focused on.

5. A School for Fools, Sasha Sokolov (translated by Alexander Boguslawski)

I love it when a book features numerous footnotes from its translator explaining how a certain phrase, sentence, or paragraph is essentially impossible to translate. A School for Fools is filled with notes like this. First published in 1975, this surrealistic novel follows a young man in Soviet-era Russia as he dwells on memories of childhood, his frustrations as a student in his “school for fools,” his longing for a woman named Veta, and a general sense of disillusionment prompted by the state of the society surrounding him. But trying to pin this book down into a linear sense of being “about” anything is a hopeless task; Sokolov essentially dissolves time, constantly merging the past and the present while imbuing every page with a kind of blue-colored longing, like the wistful minutes before day fuses totally with night.

6. Lili Is Crying, Hélène Bessette (translated by Kate Briggs)

With a translation by Kate Briggs, author of the book-length meditation of translation This Little Art, and an introduction by the Irish writer Eimear McBride (who has a new novel forthcoming herself), I was pretty sure even before I began Lili Is Crying that I was going to enjoy it. The first in a ten-book deal (!!) that Bessette signed with Raymond Queneau when he was an editor at Gallimard, Lili Is Crying is a highly visual exploration of the fraught relationship between a mother and a daughter. With its stripped-down language and emphasis on the external actions of its characters over their interior thoughts, it reads almost at times like a stage play or film script.

7. Dreaming of Dead People, Rosalind Belben

First published in 1979, this strange, exciting, and oftentimes befuddling book is being re-released by And Other Stories in August. Lavinia, its narrator, is traveling in Torcello, a small island near Venice. At thirty-six, surrounded by vacationing families, she declares herself “a shriveled person, I have sucked myself dry…an old maid; or I shall be.” What follows veers between the audacious (a twenty-page chapter devoted to the clitoris and the transformative effects of masturbation and the female orgasm) to the slightly confusing (a chapter that transports us back to medieval England and considers the mythology of Robin Hood). Though I wasn’t always spatially quite sure of where I was while reading it, this is a book that celebrates in language, and where I often found myself underlining at least one to two particularly cutting lines per page.

8. Heart Lamp, Banu Mushtaq (translated by Deepa Bhasthi)

Longlisted for the 2025 International Booker, this excellent collection of short stories by the writer, activist, and lawyer Banu Mushtaq depicts the ordinary lives of women and girls in Muslim communities in southern India. Particular highlights for me included the opening story to the collection, “Stone Slabs for Shaista Mahal,” exploring the disposable nature of wifedom under patriarchy, and “A Decision of the Heart,” in which a man decides to marry off his widowed mother. Deepa Bhasthi’s translator’s note, in which she delves into the process of translating from the Kannada language, offers some interesting insights into how language structures everyday relationships, too.

9. The Time of the Novel, Lara Mimosa Montes

This is a fascinating, brief novella about what happens when you try to live your life as though you were the narrator of a book. I might be writing about it elsewhere, so I won’t say much more, but I really enjoyed it.

10. Adrift on the Nile, Naguib Mahfouz (translated by Frances Liardet)

“There were no more accusations to make,” goes an observation halfway through this 1966 novel by Naguib Mahfouz, the first writer in Arabic to be awarded the Nobel Prize (in 1988). “History? The future? It was all nothing. Neither more nor less. Zero. Miracle of miracles. The unknown was revealed in the moonlight.” Following an aimless circle of bored civil servants, art critics who espouse “art for art’s sake,” and various other members of the Egyptian upper middle classes as they drug themselves nightly on a houseboat, this is the first book by Mahfouz that I’ve read, and it certainly won’t be the last. It’s a sharp critique of a certain class inoculating themselves against political realities, confining themselves away from the world—“He does not read newspapers or magazines,” Mahfouz writes of his main character. “Like Louis XIV, he knows nothing of what goes on in the world.”—until their closed-off clique is shattered by the arrival of an outsider: the journalist Samara, described by one member of the circle as “an alarmingly serious person.”

Film

Nightshift, dir. by Robina Rose (1981)

I saw this brief (only 68 minutes!) depiction of a receptionist’s night shift at a London hotel on a rainy night at the Anthology Film Archives in the East Village, and the atmosphere of the city combined perfectly with the atmosphere of the film. Taking place over the course of one night, the movie follows a nearly-wordless front desk worker—played by punk fashion icon Jordan, whose face takes on an eerie, seventeenth-century quality in the evening low light, like a figure in a Dutch oil painting crackling to life—as she deals with the demands of rowdy bands, simpering aristocrats, and drunken bankers. There’s a particularly fantastic moment near the end of the film when, as a marimba plays softly in the background, the receptionist finds herself at last alone, an air of restlessness surrounding her, as daylight—real life—finally breaks in.

Le Pont du Nord, dir. by Jacques Rivette (1981)

This is not Rivette’s strongest movie—that title would probably go to his infinitely charming Celine and Julie Go Boating, from seven years earlier—but Le Pont du Nord continues his familiar blend of off-kilter games and a fascination with the act of storytelling itself. Starring the mother-daughter duo Bulle Ogier and Pascale Ogier, the film follows a bank robber (Bulle Ogier) after she has just been released from prison; wandering Paris without any real goal in mind beyond reuniting with her boyfriend (Paul Clementi), she bumps into a biker (Pascale Ogier), and the games begin. A mystery, as found inside a briefcase, ensues; the two drift through Paris discussing the nature of reality; it all ends up converging into a real-life version of the French board game, Game of the Goose. “It’s nothing like a novel,” one character says to another at one point, as though baiting me to take a photo of the screen and post it to my Instagram story (indeed, I did). “It’s real life.”

Visual and performing arts

Metamorphoses, (or A Few Ways of Keeping a Child from Running Around at His Great Uncle’s Funeral), written and directed by Dmitry Krymov

You can read my thoughts on this play, which I did not feel entirely cohered, here.

Video After Video: The Critical Media of CAMP, the Museum of Modern Art

I thought the third piece in this exhibition of works by the Mumbai-based artists’ collective CAMP was the most interesting. In it, a series of floor-to-ceiling video screens play a series of footage culled from CCTV footage of the city of Mumbai, creating a dizzying panorama of urban life and the oft-exciting, oft-ruthless energy of modern cities. The show will be on display until July 20th and features two other works dealing with communal aspects of modern-day video technologies.