Yeah I just finished and my brain is full of tiny twinky stars. The only thing I’m likely to write next in this review space is going to sound like blYeah I just finished and my brain is full of tiny twinky stars. The only thing I’m likely to write next in this review space is going to sound like blurb garbage, you know, like: “STUNNINGLY ORIGINAL.” Here is a coherent thought I’m thinking, though: this is one of those rare books where there are at least two conversations going on in every sentence. I know what I mean....more
If I wrote here ‘I loved it from beginning to end’ that would be a true statement but also true would be the statements ‘for about half the time I hadIf I wrote here ‘I loved it from beginning to end’ that would be a true statement but also true would be the statements ‘for about half the time I had no idea what was going on’ and ‘I could have picked this book up and begun to read at any page or indeed could have read the whole thing back to front and it would have been at least as interesting, and maybe more.’
The big takeaway for me is that we writers are exactly ourselves and you might as well go with the brain you’ve got, all you writers out there, because you’re the only one who can tell your stories, and probably you’ll be better telling your own stories than trying to write the thing you think you should be writing instead.
(speaking to my Self here, as well, in case you had any doubt of that)
Antkind gave me exactly, precisely the same experience of reality, the same confusions, the same wonder, that watching a Charlie Kaufman film gives me. Reading Antkind was eerily and precisely like being dropped into a set from the film “Synecdoche, New York.”...more
Every time I opened the novel Comemadre and began to read, it felt like some big hulking horrible thing had just grabbed me by the wrist and wouldn't Every time I opened the novel Comemadre and began to read, it felt like some big hulking horrible thing had just grabbed me by the wrist and wouldn't let go. I couldn't get away. Then I remembered. I could close this book. I could let it go. I could pick up Wind in the Willows and never think on this book again. ...more
There were parts in this novel that were beautifully ugly and disturbingly thought-provoking and among the best things I read this year. There were otThere were parts in this novel that were beautifully ugly and disturbingly thought-provoking and among the best things I read this year. There were other parts that felt muddled to me, and I was bored and cranky and I wanted Cole to hold my hand a little more tightly and to lead me through some fairly dense stuff where I just felt left to flounder and find my own way. There were parts where I felt overexplained to, and other parts where I felt Teju Cole left me at a loss and didn’t provide me with enough context to feel confident I knew what the heck was going on.
I suspect a lot of my crankiness is because I was in the wrong mood and wasn’t patient enough to slow down and let the story tell itself. Parts 1-4 eventually settled into a magnificent whole where each sentence and scene exhilarated me but I could not fully make the leap to what came next.
If the novel were more deliberately fragmentary from the beginning, then I would have managed this book’s challenges better, I think. I just finished reading The Book of All Loves byAgustín Fernández Mallo for example, and it’s in every way possible a more fragmentary, more challenging novel than Tremor is, but it was consistently challenging in the same way, and I adapted and knew what to expect.
The challenge of Tremor is that the narrative voice at its center is unstable. It shifts and upends and questions its own validity. That’s a very tricky thing to put a reader through.
It’s not the kind of book that I personally can read confidently in ebook format, either, which is what I had access to on this first encounter with it. I need to read this again soon, with a live book in my hands. In spite of these cranky complaints this is a terrific read that gave me many new thoughts. ...more
What a puzzle of a book this was for me. If it had been exactly the same book and labeled "creative non-fiction" I would have been bowled-over-amazed What a puzzle of a book this was for me. If it had been exactly the same book and labeled "creative non-fiction" I would have been bowled-over-amazed by it. Its lack of plot would have been no impediment--because life doesn't come with a plot. To have been aware, as I read, that I was reading the meditations and wonderings of a real person in space would have been captivating.
But it's fiction. and I can't seem to give these fictional meditations, made by fictional people, the weight they deserve, without there also being a plot or some kind of forward momentum to give these fictional lives meaning.
I'm not sure this is a defensible position to take. Why the same words work as one thing, and not another. I'm reporting an actual subjective experience of reading this novel and being very aware it fails for me as fiction, and as some other thing it would have soared....more
I got to the end (again) and said to myself, 'Okay, have I read this novel now? Am I done with this novel?'
And I can't answer myself.
More than any oI got to the end (again) and said to myself, 'Okay, have I read this novel now? Am I done with this novel?'
And I can't answer myself.
More than any other novel (possible exceptions: the novels of Volodine and Can Xue), the reading experience I had was like being at a concert, listening to a live performance. It is a contemporary piece of classical music. I'm hearing it for the first time. Sometimes the music grips me. Sometimes I hear repeating themes that I can grab onto and derive meaning from. But there are also intervals where I'm passively listening, and a little zoned out, having my own thoughts that may or may not be inspired by the music coming through my ears. And in the end I've had an artistic experience that swirls inside me and leaves me feeling deeply satisfied, but the experience I had may not be the experience anyone else had, and the experience was not one I could derive definitive semantic meanings from. It was not to be pinned down by words, or summarized in a synopsis, any more than music can be summarized or described as having certain definitive 'meanings.'
I enjoyed it most when I found a sweet spot where I was paying rapt attention to the words, and at the same time was allowing myself to free-associate with their meanings. I even gave myself permission to make up my own meanings, as I wished.
For instance. There is an un-openable box in this novel, and it is very small and nondescript, but, hey, what is inside? Everyone wants to know. It plagues people. They need to know but they can't figure out how to open this box. And this box seemed to fit exactly with how I was plagued to find meaning in the novel, in the words I was reading. I wanted to know exactly what these words were meant to mean. What the heck. I couldn't figure it out because the stories kept leaping and darting forth and then hiding themselves in the grass.
And then I remembered how often I personally imagine words themselves as "boxes." Words-as-boxes fascinates me. Often I find myself thinking about how each word really is just a sound or a string of scribbles, and yet we humans think of words as a kind of container (or box) for a thing we call "meaning," and how weird is that? The way we count on these word-boxes to hold a meaning inside themselves, as they pass from one human ear to the next? It's remarkable. It's not like we can open a word up and see MEANING inside there.
But was I supposed to have had this thought as I read this novel?
Who knows.
The novel travels swiftly along from one vivid scene to the next--but then upends itself, or shifts in a radical way. It was challenging and I loved it but I can't tell you what it was meant to mean. In this review I've used music as a metaphor for my reading experience, but I could just as well have said it was like abstract art. Like a Pollock painting. Beautiful, enigmatic. Whether this work is a messy accident, or completely controlled in its effect, might be a matter for debate. The point is, I never felt guided toward a certain conclusion. I was invited in, to make my own judgments. And that was a wonderful thing.
This is such a surprisingly gorgeous and completely heartfelt book. The narrator is moving through the tragedies of everyday life, caring for her dyinThis is such a surprisingly gorgeous and completely heartfelt book. The narrator is moving through the tragedies of everyday life, caring for her dying mother, trying to cope with her husband’s failing health while also being the best mother she can to her young daughter, and yes allowing herself to complain about how tough and confusing it is, to be pulled in so many directions, and to be doing a poor job at caring for any of the people you love because you simply don’t have the time; and yet. What a beautiful chronicle of love this brief book is. Love, and faith, that things will get better. It’s hard for me to express how much this writing moves me. The way it doesn’t look away from what’s ugly and painful about being human—we get a no nonsense precise blow by blow story of her mother’s physical wasting away, of the daily impossible grind of caring for (and about) too many people at once—and then the writing soars effortlessly into deeply resonant poetic reveries, observations so beautiful that they seem to argue that any amount of suffering is worth it, to live in a world so filled with unexpected splendor.
It’s taken me seven years of reading, and about a thousand books, to be able to say once again: “This is the best book I’ve ever read.”
Here are some It’s taken me seven years of reading, and about a thousand books, to be able to say once again: “This is the best book I’ve ever read.”
Here are some reasons why I feel this way.
Luisa Hall has written what is by far the best depiction of childbirth I've ever seen in print.
Elsewhere in her book she has perfectly captured the hollow void of grief a woman feels after the miscarriage of a wanted child, and in other pages she reminds me of the sometime-strangeness of living inside a woman's body when it refuses to get pregnant when you want it to, or gets pregnant when you don't want it to.
And yet this book holds so much more than these particulars about living inside a woman's body. I've also had the privilege of spending time with a deeply feeling, deeply observant narrator. She has gifted me with a wise and revelatory view of these times. I feel as if I can see this right-now world that we're living through so much more clearly than I did before, because of this book. The plague. The weird climate events and what they might portend. The way new technologies keep upending our lives at an ever more frantic pace. The hysterical politics.
When I read this book again in ten years I'll surely be saying to myself: "yes, that is exactly how it was."
Some people have asked in the comments to this review or in DM's which book made me feel this exhilarating feeling of "this is the best book I've ever read" last time. It was Laurus by Eugene Vodolazkin....more
The first time I tried to read The Children's Bible I didn't understand it at all. I was more or less baffled. I read the tone as cynical, and the lanThe first time I tried to read The Children's Bible I didn't understand it at all. I was more or less baffled. I read the tone as cynical, and the language as unnecessarily brittle. I put the book down. I missed the subtle strangeness of these children in the novel, extraordinary children, ones who experience and chronicle the crumbling of civilization. Since this first, failed attempt at reading this novel, which happened about two years ago, I've read Lydia Millet's latest novel, Dinosaurs, which helped me understand Millet’s language. And even more significantly I've read a lot of Joy Williams, whom I understand was Millet’s teacher and mentor. Williams helped me unlock the goodness of The Children's Bible. Williams and Millet speak a related dialect of literary English and now they have taught me this language. It feels as if an entirely rich way of saying and understanding the world has been opened to me. This is a gem of a book.
Fiction is a conversation between writer and reader. Reading a novel is all about give and take and sometimes if you're lucky it resolves into a shared conversation between two people who may never meet. I'm using "shared conversation" to mean a vocabulary of shared experience between writer and reader that informs this deep language between them as they shape meanings together. When I don't like a book, when a book disgruntles me, it's more often than not because it's written in a language I don't yet understand....more
Carlotta, formerly known as Dustin, returns home on parole after spending twenty years in a men’s prison. Her story is achingly sad but she is resilieCarlotta, formerly known as Dustin, returns home on parole after spending twenty years in a men’s prison. Her story is achingly sad but she is resilient and it’s impossible not to root for her. She’s so aware of the absurdity of the cruelties she suffers. It’s almost as if she can convince herself she’s taking pratfalls in her own weird sitcom, rather than living a life nearly bereft of hope or joy. The scenes are punctuated with a sudden, starburst humor—the kind of humor that makes you eventually want to cry, because it’s so biting, and so ruthlessly uninterested in making you see the pain less clearly. The writing is gorgeous. The voice requires concentration. I could say the story is Joycean, but only if Leopold Bloom were a Black/Colombian trans woman who is too “pee shy” to urinate in front of her parole officer and that is the least of her problems....more
Enjoying this book requires you to imagine that a spite-suicide can be an excellent foundation for a comic romp. I was there for it. I was hooked fromEnjoying this book requires you to imagine that a spite-suicide can be an excellent foundation for a comic romp. I was there for it. I was hooked from the first clause of the first sentence, that being: "The night Ralph's mother flayed her forearms...". This book is incredibly funny to me and I need to admit it even though I'm slightly ashamed to admit it. Only slightly. What can I say to excuse myself? Well, there's the writing, which is delightful. The sentences made me laugh. The sentences zing. I was embarrassed to be laughing at this story which is really very shocking in many ways, but I was laughing. I was snorting, actually. You may need to be in a certain mood for this book, I admit. But it may put you in that mood before you know it. It's consistently written in a manic hysterical sometimes-schizophrenic voice that takes no prisoners. I wish I'd written it. Ainslie Hogarth is the master of first sentences, and the god of surprising verbs....more
I had no idea what any of it meant, but I kept reading anyway, and time passed as if in a dream, or maybe an hallucination, and then I came to this seI had no idea what any of it meant, but I kept reading anyway, and time passed as if in a dream, or maybe an hallucination, and then I came to this sentence:
Every night, large cabbage leaves covered with beer drops were scattered over the flower beds, and at dawn, each one, like a trap, was transformed into a green drawing room teeming with intoxicated snails....more
The novel reminded me of what matters, and it did so in a slow, careful, irrevocable way--a way that both acknowledged the smallness of our lives, andThe novel reminded me of what matters, and it did so in a slow, careful, irrevocable way--a way that both acknowledged the smallness of our lives, and also made room to celebrate the preciousness of our individual life experiences, including our sufferings. As a reading experience, this novel reminded me less of any other novel I've read, and reminded me more of what it was like to read The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius, in that it's a lament, but that it is also somehow full of hope....more
The experience of reading Sterling Karat Gold felt very similar to how I feel when I'm trying to read a novel written in Dutch. I've never studied DutThe experience of reading Sterling Karat Gold felt very similar to how I feel when I'm trying to read a novel written in Dutch. I've never studied Dutch. ...more
Zing, zing, zing...this novel gripped me in exactly the way I love in a book. Every sentence was like an exquisite story all by itself. I guess I don'Zing, zing, zing...this novel gripped me in exactly the way I love in a book. Every sentence was like an exquisite story all by itself. I guess I don't need conventional plot to be completely captivated, when a story feels so true. I loved it....more
What a delight. The story zings along and you can either try to puzzle it out as you go or let it lead you where it will. Kathryn Davis has created a What a delight. The story zings along and you can either try to puzzle it out as you go or let it lead you where it will. Kathryn Davis has created a unique world in this novel and I was all in. It's the kind of story where the beginning of the sentence means something different by the time you get to the end of the sentence and for me this kind of writing is so refreshing and alive and delightful that I could spew many exclamation points after each of the sentences in this review.
For instance take this sentence on the first page--
She was a real woman; you could tell by the way she didn't have to move her head from side to side to take in sound.
Soon the story will reveal to you that it's taking place in a world of real people and sorcerers and robots, all living on the same street. Yeah. Why not?...more
What an extraordinary novella, not only for the gorgeous prose on every level but also for the feeling it gave me. I felt lifted. I felt wiser. The naWhat an extraordinary novella, not only for the gorgeous prose on every level but also for the feeling it gave me. I felt lifted. I felt wiser. The narrator is intensely observant of both her environment and her inner worlds. She describes her family in ways that aren't always complementary, but are always full of love. The descriptions of mood and place are outstanding and revealing. Au perfectly channels the sensibility of a young person trying to understand the world in a deeper way.
Cold Enough for Snow reminds me of other recent favorites including Three O'Clock in the Morning by Gianrico Carofiglio and Optic Nerve by María Gainza--if you loved those, then you will love this--but it has a, well, the best word for it really is 'love'--it has a love of life and language that, for me, catapulted it beyond even these great favorites....more
I adored this novel. The staccato rhythms of the language. The harsh half-sentences. The personality of its narrator: young, wise, frighteningly discoI adored this novel. The staccato rhythms of the language. The harsh half-sentences. The personality of its narrator: young, wise, frighteningly disconnected, bored by the idea of consequences, cynical, naive, loving. The story comes off the page in shattered pieces. Do I need to understand every word and intention? I decided I did not. I decided to approach this rush of linear language as I would a linear work of art in another medium. A piece of music. A film. I don't demand absolute literal clarity from these other genres. So why must I demand that the written word be so blocky and precise? Why not read this novel the way I listen to music? And so I did. The reading experience was one-of-a-kind. Harsh. Enlightening. It's not a difficult book. Just different. It's a joy to travel through one vivid scene after another, A joy to let go of all expectation because after the first page it was clear the book was not going to conform. An eerie and beautiful reading experience....more
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