This novel depressed me deeply. Even so I loved it for presenting a dystopian vision that comes very close to metaphorical truth. And for all that, itThis novel depressed me deeply. Even so I loved it for presenting a dystopian vision that comes very close to metaphorical truth. And for all that, it's also remarkably funny. And darn, I want to read it again right now after reading Lorde by João Gilberto Noll, a book that has many parallels to this novel. But in September I gave it to a friend whom I knew would love it. Thus proving the law of book physics once more, that not too long after you give a book away you will need it desperately....more
Reading this extended essay about human interactions with apex predators was something like studying Louis Wain's paintings of cats to glean informatiReading this extended essay about human interactions with apex predators was something like studying Louis Wain's paintings of cats to glean information about real-life cats. Church's take on his subject isn't just "personal"--it borders on "incomprehensible" and even has a touch of "scary" to it.
The logic in this extended essay is highly unusual. Arguments are propped up in a spindly way by fanciful speculation rather than by evidence or reasoning. Conclusions circle back to the beginning in an incantatory way. The author makes connections that don't seem very supportable outside of their own transitive and self-referential existence. The author also makes many connections having to do with ears, for example, connections between the ear of Evander Holyfield, the ear of Vincent van Gogh, and the ear of a woman named Charla whose face was bitten off by a chimpanzee (but her ears remained intact). What is the nature of the connection between these ears? Hmm.
The author writes many sentences in third-person-plural, as if to assume that the reader will naturally have feelings in concert with the author, although I personally can't remember feeling these feelings before, myself. For example:
what many of us want is perhaps less like being violently raped by an apex predator and more akin to the French concept of jouissance, which implies a kind of ecstatic experience, a mixture of pleasure and pain that shatters the self and, thus, provides an opportunity to reassemble oneself....It's the desire to be fucked to death and to be reborn.
It's possible the book is one big send-up of strange academic pursuits of the kind that are supported by grants and regularly mocked by people writing stories about all the silly things your tax dollars are used for. I'm not sure.
It entertained me. In a shock-value kind of way....more
I enjoyed reading these stories very much. They're smart and they present a view of contemporary Mexico that, although it plays dangerously close to sI enjoyed reading these stories very much. They're smart and they present a view of contemporary Mexico that, although it plays dangerously close to stereotype, always ends up exposing the stereotype rather than succumbing to it.
The stories here unfold a bit like intellectual puzzles at times, where the author/narrator seems to be trying to fit his storytelling into a given preset theme or thesis. I didn't mind this approach here though because the themes were universally thought-provoking. I didn't mind feeling a bit boxed in by the writer's intent, or bothered by my sense that the writer was laboring a bit to make a point, because the points he made were interesting ones.
The American expatriate-in-Mexico viewpoint was new to me and I enjoyed that viewpoint, especially since I've read several novels-in-translation recently by Mexican authors, including some that are exploring what it's like to be an expat living in the US. ...more
This odd and remarkable and nearly inaccessible novel affected me deeply for reasons that have nothing to do with the story or the writing. "InaccessiThis odd and remarkable and nearly inaccessible novel affected me deeply for reasons that have nothing to do with the story or the writing. "Inaccessible" I mean quite literally--Langgässer, born in 1899, wrote from a philosophical/religious perspective that feels distant and alien. The intellectual striving that undergirds every sentence in the novel gave me the feeling as I read that I was studying an artifact rather than reading literature. But what an interesting artifact.
The novel is in part a German/Catholic reckoning with the German defeat and social collapse following WWII. Langgässer was raised in a Catholic family; her father was a convert from Judaism and Langgässer was classified as non-Aryan after the rise of the 3rd Reich until she married an SS officer, after which she was re-classified as Aryan; her daughter, however, was classified a "Jew" and sent to Auschwitz (and survived). Not surprisingly there are threads of guilt and suffering and retribution throughout the novel and there is also an obscurity in the prose--nothing is simple at all in this novel.
There are easier ways back to this past, in fiction. What comes to my mind immediately are Feldafing by Simon Schochet (I can't believe this book is out of print, a crime) and the novels and stories of Heinrich Böll (which are sometimes labeled Trümmerliteratur). This novel took me to a place where the author was so affected by events that the writing itself feels like Trümmer, but that is somehow appropriate given the author's life and times....more
What an interesting read. A woman who considers herself to be mentally fit falls in love with a man who is charming and attentive to her, and then leaWhat an interesting read. A woman who considers herself to be mentally fit falls in love with a man who is charming and attentive to her, and then learns the man is considered dangerously mentally ill. That sounds very heavy but this is actually a very playful book. It's not disrespectful of mental illness--but it just allows this relationship to happen. The feelings I had while reading the novel ranged from amused to discomfited. Each scene feels nearly-normal in action and tone and scene, and yet, as you get deeper into the scene, you realize it really is not normal at all. What people say is slightly off. What they observe is random and not pertinent to the story. What is reported by the writer/narrator/pov character is always a little off, not square but skewed somehow. In terms of the reading experience it reminds me most of Jane Bowles but it is really quite unique. I'm very glad to have read it....more
I'm not sure if my disappointment is warranted or if I'm just too impatient with the relative flatness of this prose and now I have blown up my disappI'm not sure if my disappointment is warranted or if I'm just too impatient with the relative flatness of this prose and now I have blown up my disappointment into a tragic feeling because I wanted to love the novel unequivocally.
p. 5: "Fix said he would buy the ice himself."
This felt to me like the first sentence Patchett wrote, in the very first draft, because it's such an echo of Mrs. Dalloway's opening, the kind of sentence that will be what a writer will grab first when beginning a new novel. But this opening party scene is so not Mrs. Dalloway, and it's so not "The Dead," and it's so not even Bel Canto. Instead, the writing feels like stirring-the-pot prose. The story feels like it drifts.
But it could also be that it's all just too subtle for the reading mood I'm in....more
This novel proved to me the importance of sticking with a book longer than its first few pages. The metafictional whimsy of the first 50+ pages gratedThis novel proved to me the importance of sticking with a book longer than its first few pages. The metafictional whimsy of the first 50+ pages grated on me...and then all at once the book soared. Many times I feel that metafiction becomes cold and pointless, too self-aware for it to have greater purpose than to point back to the author's cleverness, so I tend to be on my guard when I begin a book that uses these elements. Oyeyemi's novel masterfully achieves what the best metafiction can do, though: It breaks the easy sentimental fictional dream that lulls readers into believing what they're reading is real, when it isn't; and then--this is the tricky part--it replaces the typical dream-fiction-sentimentality with something that feels genuine and real. So this is a bit of a meta-essay about this meta-fiction where I'm talking in generalities rather than specifics but it will have to do. The only authors I've felt have pulled this same trick off before in my reading experience--the trick of using metafiction to come closer to human experience, rather than distancing the reader from it--are Nabokov and Donald Barthelme. ...more
Wistful, and well-mannered, and sad, and loving, these poems give me the sense that I am in the presence of a fellow human being, one with a big soul.Wistful, and well-mannered, and sad, and loving, these poems give me the sense that I am in the presence of a fellow human being, one with a big soul. There is humility here, in the best sense of the word. The poet knows his strengths and doesn't hide them (that would be false humility)-- but he also confronts, sometimes quite directly, not only his own mortal smallness, but also the likelihood of his poems dying out one day.
There is a lot of Ecclesiastes here.
It feels as if I know a lot about Koethe after reading this collection--although his is not at all what I would call autobiographical or confessional poetry, it is strongly of a specific time and place, and it describes the historic circumstances of Koethe's life, and it uses the benchmarks and collective memories of people of his age and times. His experience is more refined and more erudite than mine, but recognizable as a history shared. There is a clearness of vision about the past, free of nostalgia, yet full of love.
I feel this poet would be a good friend of mine, if I had the privilege of knowing him, and although I don't have any friends currently who own even one navy blazer....more
It felt like Sinisalo began with an idea rather than a story. Possibly my enjoyment of this novel was inhibited by the truly weird, one-of-a-kind, nevIt felt like Sinisalo began with an idea rather than a story. Possibly my enjoyment of this novel was inhibited by the truly weird, one-of-a-kind, never-at-all-careful novel Troll: A Love Story by the same author. In contrast The Core of the Sun felt like The Handmaid's Tale lite to me. The peripatetic writing style--a combination of the personal reflections of two characters, epistolary entries to a probably-dead sister, and examples of propaganda from this dystopian society--gave the story a detached air for me where the characters never quite gelled and I never quite cared about them. The society depicted here felt a little vague and bland and lacking in vivid detail. The core relationship of the story was strangely sterile. The idea of chile peppers as an outlawed, addictive drug is interesting but it didn't tie for me into any larger theme. ...more
I came away with respect for the author and translator but I didn't love this novel.I came away with respect for the author and translator but I didn't love this novel....more
Granted: there were many things I didn't like about the novel. There were too many characters, too supeThis novel is a triumphant act of imagination.
Granted: there were many things I didn't like about the novel. There were too many characters, too superficially drawn. Sometimes I felt there was too much narrative summary. The bad guys were specious evil caricatures rather than multidimensional. There was an odd distancing effect between the reader and any one character because there is so little offered of each character's interior thinking.
But complaining about these flaws, if I can call them flaws in a book I loved reading so much, feels something like complaining about the boring parts in a Shakespeare play--the masque scene in The Tempest that always gets cut, or the hour or so of lines typically left out of Hamlet productions like when Hamlet soliloquizes about eating crocodiles and so on.
The Underground Railroad feels like so much a more than a metaphor. To imagine a real railroad dug by African American hands and kept secret from their white enslavers is a slap-in-the-face reminder of the extraordinary accomplishments of African American slaves, that they could ever imagine a better life for themselves or imagine that they deserved a better life or could step out into an utter unknown of danger, and claim their freedom. By making this impossible Railroad real, Whitehead forces readers to acknowledge just how unbelievable and extraordinary the true history of African American resistance really is.
Another narrative technique I loved, something that worked well when it shouldn't have, was Whitehead's use of interstitial brief chapters to give the backstory of characters who had already died. On the surface I can't think of a more obvious way to grind the story to a halt than with a side story of a character who has already reached his/her literal end, but, wow. These were amazing. I was grateful for the detours....more
I'm torn on how to review this novel. I recognize the writing as unique and I feel that Fagan was trying for something new, and taking chances, which I'm torn on how to review this novel. I recognize the writing as unique and I feel that Fagan was trying for something new, and taking chances, which are always things to be applauded. And it also feels to me as if many people will enjoy this book--possibly fans of Neil Stephenson and William Gibson--even though I didn't enjoy it myself. For me the story felt underdeveloped, and the syntax felt a little unmoored from any concrete idea I could make for myself about what it meant. There are too many themes and characters packed in. I didn't feel invested in any of them. I had trouble following events. It felt like there were too many themes going on at once and too many sharp scene cuts to ever really believe I was being taken care of as a reader. In sum I just wasn't the right reader to catch what was being offered here....more
**spoiler alert** Bad things happen. Everybody dies.
The flatness of the prose in this novel at first bothered me and then delighted me because it fre**spoiler alert** Bad things happen. Everybody dies.
The flatness of the prose in this novel at first bothered me and then delighted me because it freed me from that somewhat squicky feeling I often have, when reading a murder mystery, that violent death should not be quite so entertaining. The characters here are nothing more than pieces on a magnificent, imaginative board game, and their lack of dimension allowed me to feel pleasure in the storytelling.
I lived for years in Japan and this experience made my reading all the more delightful. The translation sounds exactly like the Japanese, to the point where many times I could know for certain what the Japanese word or phrase had originally been. It felt as if the translator is not a native English speaker, or at least the translator never stepped out of literal translation, and the unusual nature of the language in the novel gave it a charged, unexpected feeling as I read.
The English here sounds something like Japanese native speakers who have only a fragile command of English. Some of the direct translations of Japanese concepts include "senior" for a person who is ahead of you in the same school, or "after-after-party," which is self explanatory but is an actual thing in Japan for that smaller, frequently drunken gathering that happens when you're too tired to go home or the trains have stopped running and you're stuck in limbo with your friends until morning comes. The proper names weren't reversed to fit English usage. Some words honestly seemed made up or taken from a not very good bilingual dictionary--like "shrubberies" rather than "shrubbery." I'm going on about it because it was an aspect of the novel that I enjoyed deeply but I'm not sure how readers who haven't lived in Japan would take it.
Then there is the mystery itself. Honestly I felt both very satisfied by the solution to the puzzle, and kind of snookered by it. I didn't feel the story gave me all necessary clues throughout the novel for me to feel satisfied with the ending as it unfolded--a lot of these clues instead were given after the fact, to fill in the blanks. I didn't mind this however because I got such pleasure from reading this strange little book, and because of all the ways it was different from anything else I'd read, and because of all the ways the language intersected with my experience of Japan....more
This essay collection reminded me of Ecclesiastes more than anything else; it rages against Eccleiastes's unassailable truth: ashes to ashes; dust to This essay collection reminded me of Ecclesiastes more than anything else; it rages against Eccleiastes's unassailable truth: ashes to ashes; dust to dust.
In the last decade, the last wave of memoirs to ever be published by WWII veterans has been published; written by old men who, aware they are approaching the end of their lives, are powerfully motivated to preserve their witness to history in words. In a similar way, in this collection, Ozick is witnessing her life as a 20th century literary intellectual.
Ozick isn't writing literary criticism here so much as she is mourning the passing of an era. I'm very moved by what she writes here, but my feeling has little to do with its intellectual content or its logic, and everything to do with the sadness in it.
To declare, as Ozick does here, that Saul Bellow is the only writer who has survived from her era is sad; it's sad to realize so many great writers and critics, writers central to 20th century letters, are little read today; it's all the more sad to realize as I read this essay that no one reads Saul Bellow much any longer, either.
I come away with the fragile hope that, even as the literary culture and the literature we once experienced as new and vivid becomes old and unread, Ozick's essays will point the way for some literary critic of the future to discover the way back....more
I enjoyed spending time with Ben Lerner's prose and I enjoyed getting to know his thoughts and even when he went off on a path where I didn't want to I enjoyed spending time with Ben Lerner's prose and I enjoyed getting to know his thoughts and even when he went off on a path where I didn't want to follow, I did follow, and was rewarded.
Even so this was so cussingly not the book I wanted to read. I don't hate poetry. So I guess I should have known this wasn't exactly my book. In fact I love poetry, whenever I discipline myself enough to read it. Even so I approach poetry the way a lot of people approach music, where they just listen to Death Metal or Mozart or Country Western or Blues or whatever and they never wish to try anything else. Poetry wise, I keep going back to Rilke or the German Expressionists. Also I really love re-reading Dover Beach and no one can talk me out of it--it makes me cry every time. I like Yeats and D.H. Lawrence. I tend to flounder otherwise. And modern American poetry just feels like a hermeneutically sealed box and I can't get it to open and I don't even know where to start. I felt like Lerner is in something of the same boat, vs. being the person who could help me enjoy poetry more than I do....more
This was a sluggish read for me. The language kept settling into bland assertions about the war and its aftermath, assertions that I found to be both This was a sluggish read for me. The language kept settling into bland assertions about the war and its aftermath, assertions that I found to be both self-evident, and overly verbose. The tone altered from intimate writing to academic writing, with little warning. Also I think you get away with writing sentences that begin with words like: "The Vietnamese in America understood that..." only if you're writing a sociological study, and only if you have actually interviewed enough individuals in the group known as "Vietnamese in America" that you can say for sure what it is that they understand, rather than just speculating and homogenizing their understandings. There are so many generalized notions in the book that it felt shallow.
Here is the rest of the passage that begins with: "The Vietnamese in America..":
"The Vietnamese in America understood that strength and profit came in the concentration of their numbers. Thus, like other new arrivals, they gathered themselves defensively into ethnic enclave, subaltern suburb, and strategic hamlet, those emergent landscapes of he American dream, distinct from the sidelined ghetto, barrio, and reservation of the American nightmare."
These sentences are a representative example of Nguyen's writing throughout, and frankly I have a lot of trouble with this kind of writing. Not just that "the Vietnamese in America" homogenizes this group, but also, just how much of this sentence makes actual sense, anyway? Just what difference is there between an ethnic enclave and a sidelined ghetto to make one "American Dream" and the other "American Nightmare"? Maybe Nguyen is asserting that Vietnamese immigrants chose to live in segregated neighborhoods, and other ethnic groups are victims of segregation forced upon them? Or? And although "ghetto" and "barrio" and "reservation" are ethnically coded in contemporary American English, and do call to mind a specific kind of community, just what defines "ethnic enclave," "subaltern suburb," "strategic hamlet," and "emergent landscape?" Are those real categories of community, or just something Nguyen made up to balance the sentence? What the heck makes some of these community types a definitive part of the "American Dream" and the others "American Nightmare?"
If Nguyen had been in my English class I would have handed this book back for a rewrite, marked "fuzzy thinking."...more
This novel is rollicking nonsense that unravels in every direction at once. It's very enjoyable to read, though, no matter how many loose threads it lThis novel is rollicking nonsense that unravels in every direction at once. It's very enjoyable to read, though, no matter how many loose threads it leaves in the end. Part ghost story, part desperate-women-behind-bars story, part perry-mason-like courtroom drama, part love story...and many other moving parts, too, all in a jumble, and let's not forget the protagonist who goes off on her own adventure eventually and leaves the story to carry on without her, and even though nothing makes sense in the end, and no one bothers to explain, none of this matters, because it turns out to be a completely captivating read anyway....more
This novel gets to the heart of the human condition. I feel scoured out by it. I feel like my head was held tight until I was forced to look at the saThis novel gets to the heart of the human condition. I feel scoured out by it. I feel like my head was held tight until I was forced to look at the sadness of being alive. The meanings in this novel are not entirely rational and yet the bedrock truth of the story felt so familiar. It was like reading about some tragic, true event.
The characters are worthy of love, and yet they are each so alone and so unloved, and so confused in their isolation, and so unknowable even to themselves. They pity each other but they don't stop to pity themselves. They think the best of one another and yet they never manage to be entirely real to one another, or to make their inner selves known to those they love.
The writing is surprising-- it's flat and straightforward, and yet full of mystery. The novel entraps you in the most unlikely of stories, just when you're expecting the most typical of stories. It carries you along into unexpected journeys where it seems poised to unwind into nonsense at any moment, and then just at that moment it becomes deeply disciplined, anchored in repeating symbol and theme, on a path toward an inevitable, tragic conclusion. This combination of unexpectedness with discipline made the novel a very satisfying and a very unique read.
It's a terribly sad story. It upended my defenses....more
What if the best things in life weren't free? There is an utter sweetness to this novel in which Karlsson explores exactly this question. The protagonWhat if the best things in life weren't free? There is an utter sweetness to this novel in which Karlsson explores exactly this question. The protagonist isn't an especially good person. His life is not particularly well-lived in terms of experiences or relationships or achievements. And yet in each of the every-dayness of his experiences he manages to find great pleasure. There are such delightful details in the writing where the narrator recounts what should have been a dull experience in obsessive detail, it seems, until you as a reader realize that the narrator finds these things worthy of his attention and his joy, from just the kinds of events that would bore or irritate or frustrate anyone else. The novel is light and short and a pleasure to read. At times I was thinking, well, there is not much to this novel, and then would find myself oddly influenced by the message in the text itself--to just let it be, I was enjoying myself and enjoying the words and didn't need to spoil that pleasure by wanting somehow to be reading something more complex. It has influenced my thinking....more
This novel lands exactly in the middle of the "NOT FOR ME" bulls-eye, so while I can imagine many readers loving it, I wasn't one of them. It's well-wThis novel lands exactly in the middle of the "NOT FOR ME" bulls-eye, so while I can imagine many readers loving it, I wasn't one of them. It's well-written, it's vividly imagined, it's character-focused, and it's charged through with sweet melancholy, all things I usually adore. What I can't get past, though, is the use of a consistent first-person, present-tense narrative voice for several different characters, chapter by chapter. Although these characters are all very different from one another, the voice sounds very much the same. The prose style, while lovely, intrudes very noisily into my fictional experience because of the first-person requiring, for me, to express a unique persona. Each of these characters though writes/speaks in a voice full of canny asides; a voice that delves into the most intimate emotional truths of each characters without hesitation, to the point where my literal mind keeps thinking, "Why is this character being so candid with me, a total stranger?"
Many readers I'm friends with never have these technical, visceral reactions to the artistic choices writers make with voice. I can honestly imagine so many readers will enjoy the artistry here. As for me I would have enjoyed this novel in a third-person/past-tense voice, where the self-awareness and artfulness of the prose would not have intruded on my understanding of character the way it does for me in first-person....more
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