The Kissing Bug, by Daisy Hernández (Tin House). “Other girls my age were taught to fear rabid dogs and horrible men,” Hernández writes in this study of the tropical disease Chagas, which killed her aunt. “I learned to be terrified of an insect the size of my fingernail.” The bug, of the subfamily Triatominae, is a vector for a parasite that may hide in the human body for decades and can fatally damage the heart and the gastrointestinal system. Hernández discusses current research, the young Darwin’s encounter with the bug, and nine-thousand-year-old mummies in Chile infected with the disease. She also movingly profiles individual patients and writes about “the great epi divide”—medicine’s neglect of illnesses that mostly affect people in developing countries, and the divergent fates experienced by sufferers of differing incomes, origins, and ethnicities.
On Compromise, by Rachel Greenwald Smith (Graywolf). Traversing the 2017 Women’s March, the covid-19 lockdown, and last year’s racial-justice protests, these essays explore how liberalism’s veneration of the middle ground plays out in art and politics. Smith’s ingenious, omnivorous readings find evidence of what she terms “compromise aesthetics” throughout the culture—from Barack Obama to autofiction. Juxtaposing the moderation of liberalism with what she sees as the fruitful absolutism of avant-garde movements, she challenges us to “find a way of making compromises without celebrating them,” and to differentiate “between compromise as a means and compromise as an end.”
The Bachelor, by Andrew Palmer (Hogarth). Living alone in a house in Iowa, the protagonist of this self-aware début novel, himself a début novelist, hopes to “reset my life or quietly retire from it.” He is mired in romantic and writerly self-doubt and spends his days corresponding with women who are similarly in limbo. Equally enraptured by the reality show “The Bachelor” and John Berryman’s poems, he starts to dwell in the lives of the reality stars and the poet as if they were his own. Palmer’s novel wryly tracks an earnest interrogation of art and selfhood: “I would discover something about myself, and in making that process of self-discovery visible on the page, the book would also be an invitation for readers to discover things about themselves.”
Disquiet, by Zülfü Livaneli, translated from the Turkish by Brendan Freely (Other Press). In this arresting novel, Ibrahim, an Istanbul-based journalist, returns to his homeland, at the Syrian border, in search of an enchanting Yazidi woman who inadvertently brought about the death of his childhood friend. As Ibrahim combs the refugee camps where the woman’s people shelter from the slaughter carried out by ISIS, answers give rise to further mysteries. Understated and sorrowful, Livaneli’s tale wrestles with an agonized question: How should we live when such suffering means that, as Ibrahim puts it, we can no longer “stand hearing people talk about where to get the best sushi in Istanbul”?