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
Profound and simple, both at once, and what a delight, what a joy to read this strange unpredictable mashup of life-and-death matters (mostly, death mProfound and simple, both at once, and what a delight, what a joy to read this strange unpredictable mashup of life-and-death matters (mostly, death matters). The novel has such a waiting-for-godot-like sanguinity in its pages. Everything and nothing matter equally. An indescribable read. Sorry. I'm trying to describe it, a little, but it's impossible. Daniell is a joyous confident writer. Jennifer Croft is a genius. I say "genius" because of the adverb "Britishly" on p. 37. Honestly doesn't it make you wonder what the word was in the original Spanish if you can't go read the original and find out for yourself? It made me wonder. I thought it wondrous, as words go, and it's just one out of a whole book of words that make up a story that's as gripping and historical as Labatut's When We Cease to Understand the World only without the despair; and as riveting as Binet's Civilizations only without the galloping plot. Don't worry. You will never miss the plot. Or maybe you will, I can't say how you read, but for me however plotless the book seemed to be, I leapt forward eagerly and was delighted by every page. This is what literature is all about. Something new. Something true....more
“That feeling of inexplicable horror certain places provoked in him could have been caused by whatever it was the doctors and psychiatrists were strug“That feeling of inexplicable horror certain places provoked in him could have been caused by whatever it was the doctors and psychiatrists were struggling to name: the aftermath of trauma, epilepsy derived from the accident, some kind of mental illness…”
This novel has little resemblance to Enriquez’s short fiction. It’s straightforward storytelling, without much mystery, and without the unpredictable weirdness of her stories. The narrative is disciplined. Every word on the page has a narrative purpose. As such it was a little disappointing to me, because I’m in love with Enriquez’s inexplicable meanders and dead ends, and I'm in love with all of the open-ended questions that her short fiction poses.
The sentence above is a good example—it does the job, but there is no verve or surprise about it. Maybe Enriquez felt she needed to rein in her smoky wanderings, of girls hiding meat in mattresses, and weird baby teeth, and self-immolating women, in order to give this longer work the structure it needed to not collapse in on itself.
Naked glorious storytelling. Even though the story itself is full of violence and pain and loss, the words weave their way forward exuberantly, where Naked glorious storytelling. Even though the story itself is full of violence and pain and loss, the words weave their way forward exuberantly, where even in this novel's starkest moments--and there are plenty of them--the narrative voice always keeps alive the possibility of human connection. It's fair to call this book bleak--and yet it left me with the hope that love overcomes despair, and that kindness exists even in the midst of poverty and squalor.
I will have a lot more to say about this novel, but I want to think on it more. It's worth reading for its glorious prose style alone--let me also credit the translation of Kit Maude--but it also is a wonderful literary contribution to the growing library of trans stories told by trans authors....more
Oloixarac keeps her narrative style at a fairly extreme emotional distance from her characters in MONA. The style almost reminded me of the tone of PaOloixarac keeps her narrative style at a fairly extreme emotional distance from her characters in MONA. The style almost reminded me of the tone of Paul Theroux's (seriously great) train-travel books--perfect observational detail at all times, and yet just a little mean.
"Mona slumped back into her seat and massaged her neck. Her nearest neighbor was across the aisle. He resembled a giant toad."
It was the perfect tone frankly for this story of a talented yet disaffected writer who is negotiating a literary scene--at the beginning of the novel she's on her way from California to accept a literary prize in Europe--that she can see is vapid, and yet wants to honor her. It's hard for me not to read this novel at least partly as a cynical but healing self-exorcism of the sudden fame Oloixarac was vaulted to after the publication of SAVAGE THEORIES but a nearly-redemptive, almost-hallucinatory ending raised the novel up for me into a memorable study of a character at odds with herself, her past, and her fame....more
"The sheets were impregnated with the smell of chicken cutlets."
"The girls had opened the casket to fe"Coca ate her cat, and then she killed herself."
"The sheets were impregnated with the smell of chicken cutlets."
"The girls had opened the casket to feed on Espina's remains with devotion and disgust; around the grave, pools of vomit bore witness to their efforts."
I love these sentences. There are so many more I could have chosen as examples of Mariana Enriquez's unique storytelling style, which (in English translation, at least) is straight-forward, literally gutsy, and completely bare of ornamentation. Also, somehow, there is a nearly jolly tone in the storytelling, a casual fatalism in the way each of these horror stories spools out, where no matter how horrific the story becomes along the way to its end, what's happening on the page still seems perfectly normal, somehow.
It's a perfect style to continuously disarm me. There is such a fearlessness here, in imagery and message. I'm a little grossed out by these stories, but also, I'm dazzled.
The stories here in this newly published collection are less layered, and more direct, than those in Enriquez's previously published collection in English, "Things We Lost in the Fire." The stories here go straight for the jugular, with very little meander along the way. I didn't love all of them, but I loved the audacity of all of them....more
This remarkable novel gives voice to a character unlike any I've ever met before. The young woman at the center of the story is unnamed and impoverishThis remarkable novel gives voice to a character unlike any I've ever met before. The young woman at the center of the story is unnamed and impoverished, and she has a terrible skill thrust on her: After her mother dies violently, this young woman develops a compulsion to eat earth, and the ingested earth gives her a true vision of how her mother died. Soon everyone has heard about and believes in her eerie skill. As she's living in an Argentinian slum where loved ones regularly disappear, and where violence toward women is an everyday fact, she is inundated with petitions for help. How she navigates a world where she is both shunned and respected is an extraordinary reading journey. The first-person voice of the protagonist is what makes the story so compelling: uncomplaining, clear-sighted, compassionate.
Gorgeous prose but I was a little distracted by the artifice of the language. Which is contradictory,I know, but what I mean to say is that at times tGorgeous prose but I was a little distracted by the artifice of the language. Which is contradictory,I know, but what I mean to say is that at times the beauty of the words overshadowed their meaning. An overpolished feeling kept me at arm's length, especially in the sections where first-person narrators recount past experiences with the central character. These first-person observations seemed excessively formal sometimes, and a little shallow at other times.
So I'm coming out of this read both disappointed and intrigued. I feel the need to keep looking for a fictional transformation of the Fukushima disaster that goes deeper. And I want to keep reading this author. What I liked: The reflection on the two nuclear disasters that have shaped Japanese self-identity, and how these events might affect a sensitive man who had live through both. ...more
Remarkably vivid and replete with sensual detail. As I read, I saw the scenes and the people to a degree that I never do. The book urged me to read itRemarkably vivid and replete with sensual detail. As I read, I saw the scenes and the people to a degree that I never do. The book urged me to read it slowly. It invited me to take in each page. It persuaded me to allow myself time to look around before I moved on.
I'm not sure what I think of this novel yet in terms of emotional resonances...what I'm feeling from it right now is a blobby wonder, and a fuzzy feeling in my fingertips. I'm noticing things around me in real space in much the way I do, for a little while, after visiting an art museum.
One of the most relentless and ugly books I've ever read. A book that describes a society where humans are slaughtered for meat, in more detail than IOne of the most relentless and ugly books I've ever read. A book that describes a society where humans are slaughtered for meat, in more detail than I was ready for. This novel willfully refuses to allow itself to fall into any category of fiction that would make it easier to take as a reader. The flat direct style of its prose didn't allow me, as I read along, to think of it as horror, or satire, or a metaphorical representation of social injustice, or a nihilistic moral thesis about humanity. It is exactly what it is. Never boring, it managed to continue to shock me until its final pages.
I am required to award stars to movies I review. This time, I refuse to do it. The star rating system is unsuited to this film. Is the movie good? Is it bad? Does it matter? It is what it is and occupies a world where the stars don't shine.
That goes for this novel, as well. If forced to give stars, I would give it five stars, for the way it relentlessly fulfills its purpose....more
This novel is small in scale--just four characters, on a single day--but in spite of its small scale, it's full of human experience. With just a few pThis novel is small in scale--just four characters, on a single day--but in spite of its small scale, it's full of human experience. With just a few perfectly chosen details Almada sets a scene, and reveals her characters' imperfections and humanity. I could see this place. I could see these people.
This is a very quiet book. The writing is extremely disciplined. There isn't a single unnecessary word. After having read many baggy monsters in a row recently, reading Almada's short novel felt like an encounter with a miniature perfection. I'm very happy to have read it....more
Nearly every sentence in this novel offers up an image that was either grotesque, or alarming, or disturbingly violent. I haven't been so repulsed by Nearly every sentence in this novel offers up an image that was either grotesque, or alarming, or disturbingly violent. I haven't been so repulsed by a story since reading Kathy Acker. And that's the point. This novel brilliantly accomplishes what it sets out to do. And the translation I can only call masterful, because the precise words and phrases chosen here for the English transformation of the original Spanish consistently surprised and disgusted me, which is the aim of this work. Can words on a page be so disruptively disturbing? Yes, they can be. Even now that I've read the novel I can open to any page and some sentence will brim over with a brilliantly grotesque nugget of turdish perfection.
I'm mulling over why this novel is so much more disturbing and frankly more nauseating to me than the author's previous novel, Die, My Love, when these two novels reach for the same territory of alienation and female fury. All I know is I felt soaring release when I read Die My Love; I identified with the postpartum alienation of its protagonist and rejoiced at her rage. Whereas with Feebleminded I felt like the author was holding my head under and I was drowning in a fetid pool of nihilistic and unhinged madness.
From the first page, I was immediately and intensely endeared to the narrator of Optic Nerve. I would follow this narrator on any reading journey, wheFrom the first page, I was immediately and intensely endeared to the narrator of Optic Nerve. I would follow this narrator on any reading journey, wherever she would lead me, because the places she leads me, sentence by sentence and chapter by chapter, are unexpected, wonderful, startling, and humane.
The chapters hang together loosely. There is no plot to speak of. And yet the pieces and digressions come together again and again to become something whole and true.
The novel situates you in the mind of an insightful person, and makes you wiser as she herself becomes wiser. Her epiphanies come to her through the experience of viewing art, and thinking about art deeply. She lets her experience of art reverberate through her life experience.
So, of course I love this novel, because at its core it is championing the idea that contemplation of the arts can be life-changing, enriching, devastating, and above all, an essential part of what makes us human.
To have an entire novel make this case, at a time in the world where there is so much ugliness, and so much attention given to economic utility over aesthetic utility, is a gift.
The first four stories were creepy masterpieces. The rest felt like sketches where Schweblin explores themes that will no doubt be the core of her worThe first four stories were creepy masterpieces. The rest felt like sketches where Schweblin explores themes that will no doubt be the core of her work as a writer, and that recall the everyday dread of Fever Dream: the weirdness of family; the impossibility of knowing even those you know best; the way everyday routine can decay unexpectedly into chaos and terror. In real life it’s an accident or unexpected illness; in these stories it’s learning your daughter is eating live birds or that the butterfly you just killed wasn’t a butterfly at all. The terrors here are metaphorical phantasms but they map onto real-life fears and that is what makes these stories powerful rather than just macabre....more
Whether you love this book or feel assaulted by it depends on where you situate yourself as a witness to this female narrator's harrowing account of pWhether you love this book or feel assaulted by it depends on where you situate yourself as a witness to this female narrator's harrowing account of perfectly normal and privileged life in the French countryside. If the definition of 'a perfectly normal and privileged life' has ever felt like a horrifying nightmare to you--if you have ever looked around you and thought, however fleetingly, 'wow, these people, my family, actually think they are behaving rationally, when really they are trapped in a nightmare inside their own skulls, and are living a script in which they never question their values or beliefs, and I'm trapped along with them'-- then you'll experience your own alienation, and recognize your own thoughts, while reading this brief testimony of a woman who refuses to look away. If instead you situate yourself, as a reader, outside of her experience, then you'll read this novel as a chronicle of madness, and it will be far less interesting to you.
In an early scene the narrator's husband urges her to look at the stars--he wants her to feel the wonder of them, he insists that she feels what he feels. Her resistance felt so familiar to me. It's the moment when you realize how much of your life is governed by long-held expectations of culture and history and family. Who does not love the stars? Aren't we all supposed to love stars? And yet this woman permits herself to acknowledge, in secret only, that she feels indifferent to stars, and oppressed by her husband's doggish enthusiasm for them. From that point in the story, it's almost as if her inability to feel excited about stars is a deadly insight that prevents her from feeling anything else, just because she is supposed to feel it. Instead of auto-love for her baby, for example, she is absorbed by and obsessed by the lamprey-like truth of being pregnant, of nursing.
The unnumbered chapter that begins on p. 13, of a Christmas dinner with in-laws, is so searing and insightful and scary that I wish I could quote the whole chapter, but here is a little of it:
As soon as all the other had escaped to their rooms to digest their meals, I heard my father-in-law cutting the grass beneath the snow with his new green tractor and thought that if I could lynch my whole family to be alone for one minute with Glenn Gould, I'd do it. Later on I saw him sitting at his desk, going over last month's supermarket receipts. He read the price of each product and then checked the total with a calculator. By the time he'd finished recording the sums in his log of monthly expenses, the desk lamp was no longer giving off enough light. We ate dinner, all of us together again, and I can still remember the tired, backlit image of an average man who thinks he's exceptional....more
From the first page, this collection made me remember how much I love stories that are macabre, unexpected, or full of dread. These stories feel both From the first page, this collection made me remember how much I love stories that are macabre, unexpected, or full of dread. These stories feel both contemporary, and yet deeply connected with the magnificent stories of the macabre from past eras--stories that I have read over and over again, like The Monkey's Paw by Saki, and The Horla by de Maupassant, and The Most Dangerous Game by Connell, and anything ever written by Poe.
What is different about Enriquez's stories--startlingly, shockingly, eye-opening-ly different--is how deeply they reflect a female perspective. Female fears. Female dreads.
I say "eye-opening" because I never really took time to feel how masculine these old stories are until I read Enriquez's stories. I cut the old stories all kinds of slack because I read them as a child and they made me fall in love with reading. In many of my favorites, though, women might as well not exist--take "The Most Dangerous Game," a story about two men locked in a life-and-death battle for survival. Other old macabre tales might include women characters, but the stories frequently hinge on, let's face it, misogyny or gynophobia--check out "Berenice" by Poe, for example, if you haven't lately:
I finished the story last night and I'm still magnificently unsettled. As I read I was gripped by a suffocating sense of dread that never let up. The I finished the story last night and I'm still magnificently unsettled. As I read I was gripped by a suffocating sense of dread that never let up. The story is told in dialog, and neither of the participants in the conversation are fully connected with a rational world of cause-and-effect. Nothing is ever completely explained. The novel asks you to banish any thoughts like "what is going on?" from your mind as you read, and to yield to its unhinged and unexplained storytelling style.
As in a real fever dream--as in a nightmare--the events in the novel move in shuddering and unpredictable ways, from the mundane to the terrifying and back again. Always though events are closely anchored to one or another universally human fear: the fear of paralysis; the fear of abandonment; the fear of dying; the fear that one's children are in danger; the fear of being trapped.
"The genius of “Fever Dream” is less in what it says than in how Schweblin says it, with a design at once so enigmatic and so disciplined that the book feels as if it belongs to a new literary genre altogether."
Each of these authors writes in a straightforward, disarmingly affectless tone, about horrific events suddenly invading the typical lives of typical people. In all of these works, even as the stories become more and more terrifying, the calm rational voice of the narrator remains. It's a very disturbing combination. And somehow it reflects perfectly my experience of daily life in the 21st century, which might be summarized as--"how can this be real?"...more
I was disturbed by this novel. Sometimes that can be a good thing. I'm not sure whether it is in this case, though.
Ema felt to me throughout, as I reaI was disturbed by this novel. Sometimes that can be a good thing. I'm not sure whether it is in this case, though.
Ema felt to me throughout, as I read, as a horrific embodiment of a male fantasy. Ema is an ever-youthful, ever-desirable female who is subject to terrible violence (along with her children being subject to it) without her having much of a problem with it. She just passively makes the best of things. Because she is so passive about being carried off with regularity to be raped some more, then she doesn't really come across as a survivor who has agency, and her ultimate successes feel very pasted on, not believable.
The interstitial cuts to a male point of view throughout this novel all objectify Ema and focus on her sexual desirability, in ways where I'm simply not sure what to make of them--because the men raping her seem kind of reasonable and caring. The messages I'm getting from the text are garbled because I'm not confident that Aira is in command of the subtext, that this woman is a victim of serial torture. His writing dovetails too neatly with misogyny and male fantasy for me to trust that he knows what he's doing.
So one way to deal with this objectionable-ness is to separate my feeling about the book from any notion of author intent. If I do that, as an exercise in alternative interpretation, the novel becomes a deliberate farce, I guess, in a Candide-like way, of a character who decides she is in the best of all possible worlds. Or maybe the novel can be read as an indictment of men treating women like animals, or as a tribute to women's strength to overcome horrible abuse. If I try to shoehorn any of these interpretations into my own reaction to the novel, though, I'm still unable to resolve how such a completely passive character could ever survive and prosper.
The novel reminded me of the D.H. Lawrence short story "The Woman Who Road Away," a story of a woman who is as passive as Ema is about her fate, in a South American setting, but whose ultimate fate is a lot more believable, frankly, than Ema's:
I was on the edge of being beguiled by the story over and over again, but as I read along I honestly kept thinking: "Is this author primarily a screenI was on the edge of being beguiled by the story over and over again, but as I read along I honestly kept thinking: "Is this author primarily a screenwriter?" until I finally looked the author up online and discovered Figueras did indeed write this novel first as a screenplay.
So here is what I often feel is off with novels written by writers who are primarily screenplay writers. There will be no clear sense of an inner narrative voice driving their story. The details will be scanty. There will be no depth in the writing and every scene will feel a little bit shortchanged, word-wise--because after all the film is already there in the writer's head. Screenplay writers are used to working in conditions where the scantness of words will be made up for by moving images of film so the chapters in a screenwriter's novel will trend toward scenic shorthand.
In the chapters where Figueras breaks out of this limited and flat screenwriter's voice--chapter 33 stands out--to write from a more novelistic point of view, the writing is moving.
But for the most part the book is one of the rare times where I get the feeling the movie must be better....more
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