A Year in Reading: Ariel Saramandi
The post has not come. The post hasn’t come in six months. The last delivery was in May: a bundle of books and journals from 2020, some art books. Most of my copies of The Paris Review, The LRB, The White Review, Granta are growing mouldy in the docks of the capital.
Getting mail from abroad, pre-Covid, was already quite the hassle. Most books usually did arrive, though: December’s post would be delivered in March; parcels that I’d written off would find their way into my P.O. box after having been re-routed from Mauritania.
I wait and I am disappointed every day. There is so much horror and death in the world, in my country, that it feels so trite to be complaining about the post. And yet.
I spend most of my disposable income on books and literary journals. “Income,” what a joke. Mine was slashed during the pandemic, after the near-collapse of our economy. My income now has to reckon with our new excruciating levels of inflation and outrageous shipping costs. Still, the fact that I can still buy books from abroad makes me luckier than most people here. We have no proper English-language libraries in Mauritius and the selection in bookshops is poor.
Anyway. All this to say that most of the books I
