A Year in Reading: Michael Zapata
On December 29, 2019, in Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow, the visionary artist and writer Alasdair Gray died. His last book published before his death and the first I read in 2020 was Late Verses, a slim, immaculately wise, and heartrending collection of poems. The collection beautifully preserves the big questions of life and death, even if we are all just, in Gray’s words, “parts of a universe that does not need us at all.” After learning of his death from a text message from his publisher at ANTIBOOKCLUB, who knows of my adoration for Gray, I sat for a quiet moment with the news that, in retrospect at the end of 2020, feels half like an omen and half like a kidnapping.
When the pandemic started and just as Chicago’s downtown was pre-apocalyptically shuttered, I was in the midst of reading by , which is translated with acute perception by . Maybe, this is appropriate because reading , like so much of Krasznahorkai’s work, is both an act of literary faith and like entering another
