Project Bookshelf: Leila Tilin

One of the first books I was deeply affected by was William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. Reading it in an early year of high school, I was struck by the narrative style and how it showed the universal experience that all we know is shaped by all we’ve already known. This fascination and obsession with perspective only grew from there, since playing a remarkable role in the books I love most. 

Today, the favorites on my bookshelf still lend themselves to this defining characteristic, but they sit alongside many others as well. Political theory books, research books from my undergrad, books I received as gifts, and aspirational books that I haven’t gotten around to yet. For me, books are one of the only things I’ll allow myself to buy whenever I wish. This has created the effect that often, when I want something new to read, I can go to the library that I’ve begun to curate of books I want to read but haven’t yet. 

One of those classics on the shelf is Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, which was the next memorable book I loved. For similar reasons as Faulker’s book, the fragmented, post-modern narrative resonated with me. One of my all-time favorites on the shelf is Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns. Wilkerson’s work tells the story of the Great Migration, but tells a true history through the individual stories of three different migrants. Her extensive research and detailed storytelling have the effect of recounting a major shift in American history through poetic narrative. What provoked me about Wilkerson’s book was also what provoked me about my more contemporary favorites: the use of individual experience to exemplify the effects of living through history and political change.

Currently, I’m obsessed with books and genres that live mostly in reality, with a tinge of magical realism. Sometimes, these are the classics, like Isabel Allende and Julio Cortázar. One of my favorite short stories is “Apocalipsis de Solentiname,” a short story by Cortázar which explores dark magical realism and political unrest. However, László Krasznahorkai’s The Melancholy of Resistance achieves something akin to this feeling of magical realism in its own dark but insightful world. Krasznahorkai paints an apocalyptic world. He does so not in a broad setting, but in nuanced details of how his characters feel and see; the apocalypse isn’t something that hits them all at once, but a state of emotion and divinity that they live under. 

I love this apocalyptic writing for the same reason that I love magical realist writing: I understand these worlds with little tinges of fantasy and strangeness as much more akin to the world we live in now than a more “realistic” fiction. These edges that are colored differently, a world that is painted to be almost too vivid, resonates more with the great miraculousness, but also the great catastrophe, of the real world. These tinges of fantasy reflect something sacred in human life, whether you want to call it divinity, emotion, or the human experience.

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Leila Tilin (she/her) is an aspiring writer and researcher, and she holds a BA from Pitzer College, where she studied American Studies and Spanish. She has a particular interest in writing and learning about the intersection of religious belief and politics. Tilin finds this convergence to be at times detrimentally dangerous, at others, astoundingly hopeful. She is interested in literature as a means for inquiry into belief systems and as a mode to participate in the creation of meaning in the world.