HT reviewer Prahlad Srihari picks his favourite reads of 2023
A search for a lost horror film leads the protagonists into a world of Nazi occultism in a novel that explores the legacy of colonialism in Mexico
After 2020’s moody chiller Mexican Gothic, Silvia Moreno-Garcia returned withSilver Nitrate, an intoxicating tale about childhood best friends, one a talented sound editor and the other a washed-up soap star, seeking a long-lost horror film haunted by a curse. The search leads the pair into a netherworld of Nazi occultism and quite literal movie magic. The complementary points of view of two brown-skinned film nerds deepen its exploration into how white supremacists co-opted the practices of people of colour and how the legacies of colonialism linger in Mexico. Reading this textured tale centring a nitrate reel — a magical but tangible ribbon that transformed dreams and memories into luminous images — will motivate you to hold onto all your treasured books, CDs and vinyls before physical media dies a slow but inevitable death.
I also enjoyed Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. Pain and suffering are merchandise in a near-future America where prisoners fight to the death as gladiators on TV to win their freedom. What Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah imagines in his debut novel is a dystopian codex of prevailing fears about violence as sponsored entertainment, surveillance capitalism as an assault on autonomy, and mass incarceration as racialised social control. By making the readers as complicit in the spectacle of violence as the crowds cheering on, it is hard not to feel bruised by the damning prose.
Then there’s Biography of X by Catherine Lacey. In it, widowed reporter CM Lucca sets out to write a biography on her wife X, an enigmatic multi-hyphenate who inhabited different personalities throughout her life and career. But the more Lucca digs into X’s past, the less sure she becomes if she ever knew her. As she uncovers each layer of mystery, she is forced to question where the person began and the persona ended. Is knowing a person essential to loving and mourning them? But what if people are essentially unknowable? Catherine Lacey’s counterfactual pseudo-biography was easily one of the wildest, most subversive works of fiction this year.
In Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, Naomi Klein funnels the horror of being confused with once-feminist-icon-now-anti-vax-conspiracist Naomi Wolf into a nightmare about a country caught in an identity crisis of its own. Doppelganger jumps off from an all-too-real story about the volatility of identities in an Internet age to dive down a rabbit hole of misinformation, conspiracy theories and divisive politics. The mirror world reveals how the far-right fomented confusion and chaos, especially during the pandemic, to further deepen the schism in society.
Honourable mentions: Same Bed Different Dreams by Ed Park, Monica by Daniel Clowes, Translation State by Ann Leckie, The Wager by David Grann.
READ MORE: HT reviewers pick their best reads of 2023
Prahlad Srihari is a film and pop culture writer. He lives in Bangalore.