There have been books throughout the year that stand out because they astound on a general level, accomplish a number of things well. Others are memorable because they do one or two things incredibly well. In some cases, it’s as if the books are devoted to that one ambition, to that one possibility of literature. This seeking out of one specific bit of a book, whether it’s something in the structure, tone, style, or subject matter, etc. has a couple motivations. The most common one, unfortunately, is when a book isn’t very good, and I still want to engage with it. I have faith there must still be something interesting there, and I seek it out. When it’s found, not only does the reading experience turn more pleasurable, but help forms another way to think about writing. Less common, more worth spending time writing about, are the books that have the one fascinating aspect and do it so well that the reading becomes about that singular pleasure, even if others play in the background. And in the end, I just find this way of identifying a single stand out aspect of a book a way of entertaining myself and beginning conversations. So, here are some BTBA books from the latter category, of books memorable from one pleasure, rather than mundane books scarcely saved.

The first such experience in BTBA reading was Violette Leduc’s (trans. Sophie Lewis). The story of a love affair, kept secret, between two girls at a boarding school, Thérèse and Isabelle is so hyper focused it is nearly overwhelming, which is exactly what Leduc portrays. It is unrelentingly physical: “My recollection of the two fingers grew sweeter, my swollen flesh began to recover, bubbles of love rose up. But Isabelle was there again, the fingers turned faster and faster. Where had this mounting wave come from? Smooth wrappings inside my knees. My heels were drugged, my visionary flesh was dreaming.” There is little to no time spent describing how or why these two are attracted to each other, because it is irrelevant. All that matters is the overpowering attraction, the desperate emotional desire that courses in their bodies.

With absolutely nothing in common with Thérèse and Isabelle, Christian Kracht’s (trans. Daniel Bowles) may have at its heart something to say about the blind following of ideals that led to the world wars, as the cover copy wants to emphasize, but that was not the compelling reason to read. Instead, the humor, the parody of historical adventure novels, is the source of pleasure. The hero is the joke, August Engelhardt, idealist, blind to his flaws and to the fact that other people aren’t the naïve waif he is. His faith is in coconuts, the purest food devised by God, and in nudity. Telling the story of Engelhardt’s travel to New Guinea, his life on an island there, and the failure of his attempt to found a society, the narrator celebrates and mocks sailing and adventure tales, all the while cynically undermining, knowing his utter failure is coming, the man it puts forth as a hero.

It’s through prose that makes the most minute details and observations into something affecting that Jean Echenoz’ story collection (trans. Linda Coverdale) finds its identity. The opening story, “Nelson,” is of that oftentimes epically depicted historical figure, Admiral Nelson, but this is not of battles and history being made. Instead, it is him visiting friends, their care for him, his adjustment to age and his loss of arm and eye. It is a simple, pleasing tale of him planting acorns so for them to grow into “trees whose trunks will serve to build the future royal fleet.” Only then can the grand scheme of history return through his death in battle. The title story is a roving description of a country landscape, leaving a writer’s hand to travel across the surrounding land, in details of hills and trees, all building to make a tiny moment with ants full of depth and insight. These stories are above all quiet. That quietness is the success of The Queen’s Caprice, parsing down even and abundance to the quietness scenes that can communicate the most.

Regina Ullmann’s (trans. Kurt Beals) is a story collection that is completely of a time and space, yet a step outside of that, a skewed mirror image not quite real, but unsettled. (trans. Katherine Silver) is Horacio Castellanos’ distillation of paranoia, anxiety, and haunting guilt of a culture, of a time, into the daily life of a man who may in fact be utterly safe. This could go on, this way of reading and talking about books, the aspect that makes one memorable, makes it stand off from others, but these are the best of the bunch so far, though if I wrote this a week from now, Léon Bloy’s (trans. Erik Butler) would probably make the cut for its triumph of the sinister.

And to be honest, for the first time in a long time, I found the accompanying texts to be more interesting than the book itself. I know, I’m still kind of reeling. The book has two afterwords, which provide a lot of history on Violette Leduc (who is best known for her autobiography La Bâtarde), her writing, her style, and her attempts and later small victories in getting published:

Thérèse et Isabelle formed the first section of a novel, Ravages, which Leduc presented to the publisher Gallimard in 1954. Judged “scandalous,” this work was censored by the publisher. . . . In its original version, Ravages was intended to retrace the three love stories of its heroine, Thérèse. These were inspired by, if not calqued on, the three liaisons that had marked Leduc’s youth . . .”

The first of these liaisons was a “carnal coupling with a fellow schoolgirl.” And that’s basically what the book is about. A schoolgirl, Thérèse, who envies and claims to hate another girl, Isabelle, and who then wind up fingering each other (and more) in Isabelle’s bed (among other places). (The manuscript even made Raymond Queneau, then a member of Gallimard’s reading committee, nervous.) The moments captured by the two girls are sweet and youthfully panicked/self-discoveryish enough, but it also more often than not read in a way that was robotic. In-between all the frantic fingerings and whispered nothings are extended moments of imagery, both poetic and broken (mostly broken), that, for some reason, I found more forced than charming:

Isabelle is kissing me, I tell myself. She was drawing a circle around my mouth, she encircled my trouble, put a cool kiss at each corner, she dived down to place two notes, returned, rested. Beneath their lids my eyes were wide with astonishment, the thundering of the conch shells too vast. Isabelle continued: we descended knot by knot into a night beyond the school’s night, beyond the night of the town and of the tram depot. She had made her honey on my lips, the sphinxes had gone to sleep once more.”

I may not be the audience for this kind of narrative—or dialogue, for that matter, which struck me as equally robotic—but, going back to those afterwords, I was time and again fascinated by Leduc’s history. The first afterword quotes a letter of hers that at least puts her writing into perspective:

“I am trying to render as accurately as possible, as minutely as possible, the sensations felt in physical love. In this there is doubtless something that every woman can understand. I am not aiming for scandal, but only to describe the woman’s experience with precision. I hope this will not seem anymore scandalous than Madame Bloom’s thoughts at the end of Joyce’s Ulysses. Every sincere psychological analysis, I believe, deserves to be heard.”

As a reader, I wholly appreciate this, both for its insight into the author’s process-related goals, and for her desire to break the mould of what then-conventional emotions in literature were “accepted.” I also find it interesting that a country such as France would want to censor sensual things (I may have missed that part in my French history course as an undergrad, but I may have also been too distracted by scenes of a young Gerard Depardieu in the numerous French movies our professor made us watch), but then again, it’s not that surprising. What I also like is the promise of Leduc’s attention to detail combined with said detail—all of which I, as a reader, am to experience.

The actual “scandalous” part aside (this is 2015, after all, and I’ve seen enough episodes of True Blood to know a thing or two), the rest of what Leduc was aiming for didn’t resonate with me. In terms of her extremely close attention to detail, her efforts certainly show, but I frequently felt there was too much going on all the time—though do I realize that the overload of detail can be compared to the cloudburst of emotions one feels when in love, or lust. Some of the dialogue made me squeamish as well, not because of its “scandal,” but because I found it to be abstract and random in a way I found distracting—and not in a good way:

I threw myself at her sex. I would have preferred it to be simpler. I almost wanted to sew it back up all around.

“My darling trout, my beloved submarine pout. I’m coming back to you. I’m here. . . . It’s the pink brute. I love it, it devours me. I adore it without illusions.”

Okay. While I could agree with an argument stating that young people in a first-time, socially-forbidden relationship may say words just to say them, regardless of how said term of endearment comes across, some of the sayings are more-than-foreign to me. Darling trout? Submarine pout? The Bloodhound Gang’s “Foxtrot Uniform Charlie Kilo” lists more inventive, and ultimately less awkward, names for the female genitalia. Maybe it sounds sexier in the French.

Overall, my reading experience was admittedly not what I wanted it to be. This is also, truthfully, the first book I’ve read by Feminist Press myself—as opposed to book reviews of their books—so I was hoping my own reaction would be different. (That’s right, I’m saying this is an “It’s not you, it’s me” scenario.) What I found was an abstract and stilted narrative that doesn’t fit into what I gravitate toward as a reader. However, Leduc’s writing and struggles as a writer—a female writer—and her desire and need to express an understanding of sexuality that was so deep and personal should not go overlooked. Thérèse and Isabelle will surely push the right buttons in other readers—possibly someone more in-tune with the history of writing and publishing in France, and that Feminist Press is giving further voice to these women authors is highly commendable; I look forward to reading more from them.