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for “Bubble in My Fizziness,” which will cover up to page 327 (new edition; 277 in the older ones).

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Here are the show notes from the original airing:

This week’s episode is all about Penelope and her experiences with the Karmas. (And a Big Green Cow.) A lot of theĚýOdyssey,ĚýWuthering Heights, and William Burroughs are in this section, which is hilariously dissected by Brian, Chad, and their guest, Tom Flynn, the manager ofĚýĚýin Chicago. One of the funniest–and most free-flowing, almost beat-like–sections of the book to date, this section explains a lot of the causes for Penelope’s madness, while parodying an ultra-rich family of backstabbing, self-involved, frustratingly funny characters–many of whom make great material for a novel . . .

You can purchase each of the books in the trilogy separately (,Ěý,Ěý, OR, if you don’t have them and are ready for the reading event of 2023, then getĚýĚýfor $40—approximately 30% off.

You can find all previous seasons of TMR on ourĚýĚýaaand you can support us atĚýĚýand get bonus content before anyone else, along with other rewards, the opportunity to easily communicate with the hosts, etc. And please rate us—wherever you get your podcasts!

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As always, you can watch these episodes live on our the day before they’re released in podcast form.

The next episode will focus on pages 110-155 (chapters 12-15 of “Thine Eyes Did See My Substance: A Love Story”). The complete schedule can be found here.

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Tom Flynn is the manager/buyer for Volumes Bookcafe ( on all social sites) in Chicago. He can often be found interrupting others’ work in order to make them read a particularly fantastic passage in a new book. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram (mostly book- and grilling-related content) .

Ěýby Norah Lange, translated from the Spanish by Charlotte Whittle (Argentina, And Other Stories)

People in the Room should win the Best Translated Book Award. Hell, every book on the longlist should win. The strength and beauty of this award, for me, has been the sheer range of work it encompasses. From contemporary experiments to classic works, the BTBA is one of the best prizes in literature in that it reflects all that literature is, has been, and can be. And this longlist, in particular, reflects just how incredible literature, and literature in translation especially, can and should be. It’s quite a time to be alive. So, yeah, every title on this list should win the award.

But People in the Room really should win.

I’ll spare you a long bio of Norah Lange, partly because providing a sourced literary biography is neither my strong suit nor the reason you’re reading this; mostly because you should really just pick up the book and read the intro by César Aira. (It is super helpful when writing something like this to have an introduction as stellar as César Aira’s available; it’s also kind of infuriating as he’s already laid out pretty much every argument one might make about the book’s relevance. I wouldn’t presume to possess too many original thoughts, but at least let me make one or two claims without feeling like I’m cribbing straight off of you, César.) Let me instead say that while People in the Room is certainly a product of its author’s time, it’s concerns and attitudes make it timeless. That certainly sounds lame (and felt lame to write), but I mean it in a literal sense: publish it today and say the author was born in 1990, and no one would bat an eye. Most books aspiring to some notion of “literature” endeavor to achieve something greater than the sum of their parts and only great books get close to that ideal. Everyone should read Lange to see how she accomplished this.

People in the Room, translated by Charlotte Whittle, follows a young woman who espies three women in a drawing room across the street one evening. The arrangement of these women, the way they sit, move, light the room, the atmosphere they seem to create/exist in, fascinates her and sparks an obsession. She continues to watch the women, follow them a bit, and eventually draws closer to them and enters their home, which sounds like an invasion because that is precisely what it is. She is invited in, sure, but comes in because she wishes to consume their lives or, rather, the lives she has created for them through her observation. She wishes to know these women, but she wishes even more to consume their history, to feel and live through their pain and loss. She wants to so that she might, through them, better know herself.

In his introduction, Aira describes People as a spy novel and quotes a statement by Lange to the same effect. I won’t disagree, but the sense of dread that permeates the novel makes it something more spectral than that. This is a ghost story as spy novel (which might be redundant: ghosts are forever peering at us as we are voyeurs of their own indistinct existence). Our first description of the women across the street:

. . . for me, Avenida Juramento would always be . . . a dimly lit drawing room looking out onto the street, with shadowy corners, and three pale faces that appeared to be living at ease

and then

Whenever I saw them, two of them sat close together, the third at a slight distance. I could make out only the dark contours of their dress, the light blurs of their faces and their hands. The one sitting farthest away was smoking, or at least so it seemed to me, since her hand rose and fell monotonously. The other two remained still, as if deep in thought, before turning their faces in the direction of her voice.

and after she begins to visit them:

The first time I called on them they assured me they never went out, so I needn’t tell them when I was going to visit.

By all appearances these are three women who exist only in a holding pattern, repeating the same motions day after day, a phantasmal existence of sorts. Only by intruding does she somewhat disrupt the repetition of this scene, though even in including herself in the setting the other trappings do not change: the arrangement does not otherwise change. She has managed to place herself in the ghost story, but does not fundamentally alter its action.

But this is really only one of the many interpretations possible with People. One could instead emphasize the examination of customs and mores that runs throughout. Or, one could read it as a coming-of-age tale as our protagonist observes, enters, and leaves that drawing room and how she changes—and doesn’t change—along the way. One could also simply devour it for its prose and atmosphere. In short, this is novel is complete and so exists as an infinitely faceted and fascinating work.

What we have in People is a paranoid thriller, a spy novel, a ghost story, an odd sort of bildungsroman, a study-but-not-a-comedy of manners, and lush, gorgeous prose. This is the book many writers aspire to write, but only get halfway to. It’s the book one could spend the rest of their life re-reading as a keystone text. It’s perfect reading for darkened, stormy skies and the quiet just after dawn. The dead of winter and the blistering summer heat are equally appropriate settings, too. It’s a classic work by a revered writer in her home country and a revelation to English monoglots like me. In short, it is everything a winner of this award is supposed to be. And then some.

There is an unedited version of this podcast—with maybe eight extra minutes of jokes—that you can watch on And be sure to come by next Monday, March 26th at 9pm to with Chad and Brian. They’ll be talking about Part VI (pages 179-200) and answering any and all of your questions.

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The music for this season of Two Month Review is by Els Surfing Sirles.

This week, Tom Flynn of returns to the Two Month Review to talk about three of the more difficult bits of TĂłmas JĂłnsson, Bestseller: one section that’s a dream, one about mediums and resurrection, and one that’s a poem for going to bed and for death. Thanks to Tom’s perceptive insights and Lytton’s genius, they’re able to puzzle out all three sections and provide some solid guidance for everyone reading along.

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The music for this season of Two Month Review is by The Anchoress.

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by Peter Stamm, translated by Michael Hofmann

Language: German
Country: Switzerland
Publisher: Other Press

Why this book should win: Dismantled relationships FTW!

Today’s post is by Tom Flynn, bookseller and events coordinator at in Chicago.

Let’s get this bit out of the way first: Peter Stamm’s Seven Years is not a terribly pleasant novel. The characters—particularly the narrator, Alexander—are deeply flawed people who probably would have done better in their fictional lives had they never encountered one or another or, after meeting, run in opposite directions. But it is also an engrossing read with direct, clear prose that engages and eggs the reader on.

Alexander is a German architecture student who, at the end of his final year of school, becomes involved with a Polish woman, Ivona, whom he does not much like. She does not engage him intellectually, he finds her unattractive, and he feels her to be beneath him socially. Yet he finds himself unable to stop seeing her. While this is going on, he begins a relationship with a fellow student, Sonia, who possesses an ambition and drive completely absent from Alex. Sonia and Alex marry and open a firm but after several years (the seven year itch that the title can, perhaps, be understood to reference) of marriage Ivona reappears in his life and he takes up with her once again. The effect of this affair eventually lays bare the weakness of his and Sonia’s relationship, which, despite its solid presentation at the beginning of the novel, is doomed to crumble around them.

Architecture and its various metaphors prove an apt vehicle for exploring Sonia, Alex, and Ivona’s movement through life. Sonia wishes to build socially conscious structures that work toward the creation and fulfillment of an ideal human. She has very firm ideas on the type of life she and Alex ought to lead: their work, home, and family life are all clearly laid out. Alex, for his part, finds himself happiest designing buildings he can never build, nor wants to construct; he would rather explore space on the page than express it in the world what with all the compromises that accompany such efforts. He allows others to determine the shape and course of his life, effectively drifting from one event to the next. And Ivona is simply a dweller, moving from one small, unpleasant residence to the next with little regard for how much smaller the physical space she inhabits becomes along the way. Instead, she carves out a world within that houses her love—her mania, really—for Alex and Alex alone.

Much of the drama in the novel feels, well, anti-climatic. A sense of the inevitable pervades the novel. Alex is by no means a passionate character, nor is he anyone—in fiction or life—for whom one should feel much pity. The events of the novel plays out as they do because of his own inertia, his willingness to meander in whatever direction circumstances take him. He builds a life with Sonia because it’s what she wants and it seems he should want her. He returns to Ivona time and again not because he wants to, but because she is always reaching out to him, no matter how he treats her. Inertia is his natural state and by novel’s end his inability to act has yielded the life he sees laid out before him.

Really, I could go on at much greater length about Seven Years. There’s just something about the characters and Stamm’s understanding of human nature that causes the myriad issues the novel raises to jut out in my mind. Truly excellent novels—which in my estimation Seven Years is—worm their way into the reader’s mind, giving them something to gnaw on. The excellent novel also possesses a life of its own and, to turn the phrase somewhat, gnaws on the reader, too. Or creates an itch that the reader can’t help but scratch.

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by Tomás Eloy Martínez, translated by Frank Wynne

Language: Spanish
Country: Argentina
Publisher: Bloomsbury

Why This Book Should Win: In part because MartĂ­nez died just a couple years ago, and has never gotten the recognition here that he deserves.

Today’s post is by Tom Flynn, bookseller and events coordinator at in Chicago.

There’s a fair bit I can say about Tomás Eloy Martínez’s Purgatory. It is a political novel, a study of madness, a ghost story, a meditation on a rich culture that has spawned disastrously violent regimes: it is in many ways a culmination of Martinez’s life’s work. But I spend most of my time these days selling people books in twenty second blurbs that have to hook them on the spot, so a long explication of Purgatory_’s strengths isn’t really up my alley. So let’s start over and try this: _Purgatory is a startlingly addictive character study focusing on a woman’s search for her husband against the backdrop of a country gone mad.

OK, that probably needs a bit more explanation.

Briefly, Purgatory is the story of Emilia Dupuy and her search for her husband, Simon, who disappeared not long after their marriage. More accurately, Simon is disappeared by the Argentine junta during the military’s rule in the late 1970s and early ’80s. After spending decades chasing phantoms of him—despite eyewitness testimony and the reality of life under the junta, Emilia refuses to accept that Simon is dead—she settles in New Jersey to await Simon’s return. The novel begins thirty years after Simon’s disappearance in a chain restaurant where, looking up from her booth, Emilia sees Simon sitting just a few feet away and he hasn’t aged a day since she saw him last.

The events of the junta’s reign are well documented; the history is laid out. But Martínez takes those events and the ways in which an insane political system attempted to remake an entire nation and creates a beautifully personal history in Emilia’s life following her husband’s disappearance. The novel skips about in time, addressing the events of the day and Emilia’s place in them almost thematically, building her personality and the circumstances that bring her to the novel’s opening lines.

What Martínez achieves is a triumph of memory over historical events. By presenting Emilia’s history as a chaotic overlapping of occurrences he allows the personal perspective to take precedence over the factual occurrence. The carefully demarcated line of causation that explains the grand historical movement of peoples and countries from one moment to the next is cast aside in favor of the fragments, the coral that each individual generates. In unmooring this period of history Martinez brings its profound effects into starker relief. And by creating Emilia he makes the pain and misery forced upon his native country a more personal reality for the reader.

I might need to pare that down a bit to get it under twenty seconds.