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
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
In addition to being a slice-in-time example of the energizing era known as the Harlem Renaissance thEveryone should read Emily M's review, here.
In addition to being a slice-in-time example of the energizing era known as the Harlem Renaissance this book is one to read on its own merits, a unique story told in an eerily timeless voice. I could call it dated, but it's too unique to belong to any era. It's marvelously strange. The writing is unrealistic and exaggerated and yet, captivating. McKay had a prose style all his own, effulgent and excessive and blooming with alliterative excess and I'm here for it. This novel belies the idea of literature being something that progresses. It's iterative. It's constantly reinventing itself....more
There is something magical about experts. They're like wizards. Although this book is full of references to other experts who have helped the author, There is something magical about experts. They're like wizards. Although this book is full of references to other experts who have helped the author, or have studied or dug up things in a slightly different way, David Anthony's book made me feel I was in the presence of someone who knew more about his field than anyone else. I felt as I read that I was in the presence of a singular mind, one whose field experience and study allowed him to advance our collective idea of what it means to be human. Anthony and his wife and research partner, Dorcas Brown, have been taking research teams to the Eurasian Steppes since the late 1980s. One of their innovations was to develop a way to determine whether jawbones of horses, preserved in the steppes, showed signs of the horse wearing a bit. It's one example of the way the research and conclusions in this book seem both common-sensical and yet innovative--no one had ever thought to look for evidence of civilization/horse domestication in quite this way before, or thought it possible. It's a wonderful, mind-opening book in every way....more
The Man Who Lived Underground is the only posthumously published novel I've read that I believe is equal to, or surpasses, the novels published duringThe Man Who Lived Underground is the only posthumously published novel I've read that I believe is equal to, or surpasses, the novels published during an author's lifetime. The combination of very realistic sentence-level writing with a surreal and allegorical story makes the experience of reading this novel powerful, painful, shattering.
It's hard to come to grips with the way Wright couldn't get this novel published in his lifetime--his publisher believed that the first scene in particular, of white police officers beating a black man into confessing a crime he didn't commit, was unrealistically violent. Frankly the interrogation/torture scene in The Man Who Lived Underground wasn't nearly as disturbing to me as the scene in Native Son when Bigger suffocates a woman and stuffs her body parts in a furnace. So I'm left to grapple with the only explanation that makes sense, as to why this novel wasn't published when it was written: that any amount of violence where a white man hurts a black man was deemed by the publisher to be too much for the reading public, whereas a novel about a black man murdering a white woman seemed just fine to them. What the hell, people. This is an extremely disturbing example of the way media industries massage and assuage and censor and suppress. I'm experiencing one of those moments when an artistic work totally surpasses my ability to write about how important I believe it to be. And also, of reality slapping me across the face....more
I've read Leave the World Behind three times and each time I love it more. It took me a while to get used to its voice--sardonic and even a little bitI've read Leave the World Behind three times and each time I love it more. It took me a while to get used to its voice--sardonic and even a little bit mean, as well as being outrageously, unapologetically omniscient. It's a voice that I've more or less been schooled to distrust in this postmodern world. Once I tuned myself to this novel's unique rhythms, though, both the story and the storytelling became explosively alive for me.
I needed to learn how to read this novel. I needed to overcome my natural likes and dislikes to fully appreciate its genius. For example, one thing I typically don't have patience for in novels is long lists of stuff. Authors seem to like lists a lot but usually they seem kind of lazy and unnecessary to me. Alam uses this technique to perfection in chapter 3, though, when he lists all the things Amanda puts in her grocery cart. It shouldn't be riveting, but it is. Each item Amanda chooses off the shelves gives me one more angle to view her character, and by the end I understand her limitations, and her self-image, and the ways she feels most vulnerable. All from a bunch of food items. It's extraordinary writing.
My favorite novel published in 2020. It won me over. It snuck up on me.
Note with spoilers 2/16: (view spoiler)[I'm diving in for a fourth time, honestly, I'm fascinated by this novel and how it works. This time I'm listening to the audiobook. The narrator is really good.
It's a very complex book in terms of craft. At first it's written in a way that you assume it's one of those big social novels like The Corrections, and then it morphs into something more stark, some kind of an examination of privilege and race and prejudice...and then there are a series of ever-more-horrific encounters, all of which never spill over into the expected violence, AND THEN it leaps into a seriously gorgeous meditation on what-might-be-next if and when the rarified world we live in collapses.
I don't say "gorgeous" too often about novels and the way they're written. The flamingos in the pool. The deer moving in huge herds. Rose in the woods, and the little fire of hope the author puts out there for us readers, when he assures us that she'll survive. And that through her something meaningful will survive. (hide spoiler)]...more
If I get just one person to read this novel who wouldn't otherwise have heard of it, I will feel I've done my job here on Goodreads. I'm still quite oIf I get just one person to read this novel who wouldn't otherwise have heard of it, I will feel I've done my job here on Goodreads. I'm still quite overwhelmed by what I just read, but let me try to give you a sense of the novel.
Léonora Miano has written with a singular purpose: to document what it must have been like, at the start of the Atlantic slave trade, to live in a village within easy reach of the coastline. What it must have been like to be living in exactly the way you and your people have always lived, and then to have this terror, this violence, this unthinkable and incomprehensible disruption of your reality, come into your lives.
Miano begins in medias res just after several young men disappear from a village. We readers know they have been kidnapped to be taken to the coast and sold. But to their people, they are just gone. And the people don't know how such a thing could have happened. People can die, or be born, or commit crimes, or marry, and these happenings are part of the rhythms of village life, and are well understood, and everyone knows what is to be done in each case. But when men disappear? In this case no one knows how to react. Are the men dead? Then where are the bodies? If there were bodies then the people would know to mourn. But there are no bodies. No one knows what to do. A hasty plan is made to isolate the men's mothers from the rest of the village--because maybe it has something to do with the mothers. But no one really believes that. And when one woman drifts back to her home, no one is sure what to do next. It takes days for the village leaders to decide to ask a neighboring village if they know anything about the men's disappearance. It takes far longer--not until it is too late--for anyone in the village to suspect the truth.
I can't capture for you the perfection of how Miano paints this village and its inhabitants; its rituals and its hierarchies. The way she reaches through history to recreate a pre-literate, pre-colonial culture that is on the brink of losing everything that they trust is true about the world. We know it happened. We know this history in a theoretical way. But we don't have access to the voices of the people that faced this terror. Miano gives them voices. I'm in awe of how deeply she imagines these people, even to the point of making their utter lack of guile, in the beginning of their story, completely believable and heart-rending....more
I've read a couple of Virginia Woolf's novels so many times now that they have become a place to inhabit rather than a story to be told. I come upon sI've read a couple of Virginia Woolf's novels so many times now that they have become a place to inhabit rather than a story to be told. I come upon sentences like old beloved friends whose gestures and habits I already know and love. It's like music, this novel, and I can listen to it again and again without ever feeling I've heard it entirely. Now I'm trying to imagine the exact music that is this novel and what I come up with is that it's like Berlioz's les nuits d'été, as a matter of fact. okay so here is a link to what I mean--
Oh, my goodness. I'm so glad I returned to this novel for a second read. I just have to throw up my hands here, and admit that everything changed in mOh, my goodness. I'm so glad I returned to this novel for a second read. I just have to throw up my hands here, and admit that everything changed in me, about halfway through my second read, where I, hmm, I suppose what I did was yield to this narrator--yield to her voice, and yield to her grief.
The first time through I listened to the audiobook and the story wasn't helped by the performer's even tone, which I heard as cynical and superior. The words on the page are deep and full. They reflect a friendship of a very particular sort, between a man and a woman who aren't in love, but who love one another. I can't remember ever reading a novel that captures so absolutely this kind of relationship, a very intellectual one but for all that a very intimate one; a relationship where the woman in the friendship knows that, to remain an intellectual equal in the eyes of this man, she needs to become a sort of stand-in man herself, de-sexed and undesired. Is there any smart woman in the world who doesn't understand this man, who hasn't experienced a kind of bifurcated friendship where intimacy of intellect comes at the cost of any other kind of intimacy? It seems to be a side effect of patriarchy, to me, anyway. The first read-through I had a bit of trouble with the way the narrator reflects on the flaws of her friend's wives, but now I understand it in this context, that the narrator is just reflecting a reality where her closeness was perhaps more genuine than what her friend had with his wives.
I don't know if anyone else read this novel in this way, or would describe the core relationship the book describes in this way. It seems like a common kind of relationship in our world but it's also the kind of relationship where both the intimacy and the grief this woman feels wouldn't have a socially acceptable place to be expressed. The way Nunez finds a way to tell the story of this love in this small story about a woman adopting her dead friend's dog is perfect.
Perfect. I take it all back. This is an extraordinary novel.
In 2018 I began to re-read novels with frequency and zeal. I'm not talking about re-reading Shakespeare plays and Jane Austen novels and new translatiIn 2018 I began to re-read novels with frequency and zeal. I'm not talking about re-reading Shakespeare plays and Jane Austen novels and new translations of The Iliad and all the other stuff we all agree is worth re-reading, if and when we have the time. I'm talking about turning around and re-reading a newly published book within months or weeks or days of my first reading, a practice that I've come to embrace and to even look forward to, even though (like all the other avid readers here) I have an ever-more-ominous tower of 'to-be-read' books on my list that is trying always to persuade me to call the novel "read" and move on.
The House of Broken Angels is my latest re-read. It's maybe fitting, since this is a novel about family, that three weeks ago when I first read the novel it gave me the feeling I have sometimes when members of my own extended family come to visit--'ok I love you guys, but too much of a good thing is too much of a good thing, so maybe now it's time to go home.' I got to the end of my first read of this novel thinking almost exclusively about what I didn't like about these characters. Especially the men. Throughout the novel their thoughts and actions pricked my sensibilities, and made me hypercritical, until I was very cranky by the end.
But then it felt to me, because it was true, that I'd closed my mind to the goodness of these characters, and focused on their flaws. I don't like doing that with people, so why did I think it was fine to be so opinionated about people in books?
And so I read it again, deciding that this time I'd let these people be themselves.
Let me tell you something. I was deeply, deeply moved. By getting out of my own way and my own judgments I could see the extraordinary depth of feeling Urrea has created here among the members of this fictional family. A history of choices, and of memories shared. The extraordinary careful rendering of a blended family, not only blended by ethnicity but also by nationality--here is a fictional rendition of a family living the reality of border politics for the last few decades, the way undocumented and citizen exist within the same family, their fates determined by a few miles difference between their place of birth. It gently, yet devastatingly lays out the way border-crossing experiences can be, in some years, easy memories, whereas in other years (like those closer to the present day) border crossing becomes a harrowing outrageous violation of selfhood. The second time, I marveled at the way these people forgive one another. I loved the way the author loves this family, too, flaws and all, and the way he invites me to love them. My previous irritations with these characters' faults felt like I was being that kind of a family member who refuses to forget and move on and to forgive other family members, whereas this family, Big Angel's family, was all about forgetting and moving on and forgiving.
This novel is a beautiful humane depiction of the dignity of everyday humans, and you should read it.
Sometimes a get to the end of a book and it says to me, "turn around. go back. take another look." I'm so glad this novel said that to me.
... 1/3/19: Ok, I am reading this again and I'm loving it completely and without reservation. More to come. ...
First Read/Review, 12/15/18:
I loved this book but in a quiet way. As I read I kept thinking: 'wow, that's lovely,' and 'my, that is beautifully put,' and 'oh, what a dear way to capture this filial feeling,' but even so I was also feeling a little restless, and as if I'd stayed too long in a bath, or maybe, it's that I felt exactly as if I, too, was at this big family reunion, where almost everyone is a bit noisier than I would like, and none of them are very good listeners, and, even though I love them, and even though I know they are good people who are doing their best, all I want is for them to leave me alone, so I can go find a quiet room, and close the door behind me preferably with a glass of wine and a good book to keep me company....more
War and Peace is one of many books that I can re-read for the rest of my life and not feel I'm wasting my time. What a tragedy that this vivid novel hWar and Peace is one of many books that I can re-read for the rest of my life and not feel I'm wasting my time. What a tragedy that this vivid novel has become the go-to meme, a stand-in for any too-long and unreadable tome. Because this novel reads outrageously fast. This novel reads like a pot-boiling, page-turning cliff-hanging wonder. Begin at the beginning: in the first pages we're guests at a party with the gentry, full of intrigue and innuendo, and then, whoosh, we're immediately plunged forward into a drunken, alpha-male bacchanal, in a scene that rivals Shakespeare's "exit pursued by a bear" line in strangeness...and after that each page and each scene builds upon the rest, in a novel that manages to be both epic and intimate at the same time. ...more
Waldemar Bonsels' Maya the Bee is full of story and feeling, and it also happens to be beautifully written, with the vocabulary and diction and wonderWaldemar Bonsels' Maya the Bee is full of story and feeling, and it also happens to be beautifully written, with the vocabulary and diction and wonder of other great children's books of this era--this is a book that rivals The Wizard of Oz, or Wind in the Willows.
In addition to its lush diction--0ne beautifully written sentence after another--this novel is different from modern children's books in the way it neither shirks from nor exploits violent happenings. Characters are mostly insects; throughout the book some die, or are subject to grave danger. Bad things happen and those who survive carry on. It's a look at life when the young deaths of innocents wasn't terribly uncommon. Before penicillin or cures for childhood diseases were discovered. I read this first as a child, a copy in my grandmother's house, and reading again this time I remembered so vividly the scenes when insect lives are cut short. They didn't scare me as a child--they did make me feel wiser and more ready for this business of growing up, though.
The German version is lovely. The English translation is also out of copyright and it is very good, too, available for free online. There are even illustrated versions on the Gutenberg project. You owe it to yourself to read it, and then, to read it with your children....more
I resisted everything about this novel in the beginning. I honestly thought it was impossible to believe in. I wrote highly critical marginalia as I rI resisted everything about this novel in the beginning. I honestly thought it was impossible to believe in. I wrote highly critical marginalia as I read--normally I don't write any marginalia. And then something happened. I gave up, maybe, trying to make the book conform to my expectation. This is the story of a man for whom everything in life goes terribly wrong. He lives out his life in nearly complete isolation from others. He wanders around North America with no sense of where he is, no education, and barely any ability to communicate with others. His luck is very bad. He spends most of his life, and most of the book, utterly alone. Hernan Diaz needed extraordinary imagination and empathy for this odd man he created; Diaz pulls off one scene after another where his character encounters an insoluble problem that threatens his survival, and overcomes it....more
6/27/18: can it be i read it again? yes. Karamazov Brothers has become something like a beloved destination to me, like The Magic Mountain, and The Vo6/27/18: can it be i read it again? yes. Karamazov Brothers has become something like a beloved destination to me, like The Magic Mountain, and The Voyage Out, and Room with a View, and anything at all by Thomas Hardy. I think I have separate reviews somewhere on my books list of at least three translations....this time I read this one while alternately listening to Frederick Davidson read the Constance Garnett translation to me.
(previous review of this translation):
Ignat Avsey's translation is brilliant, full of clarity. I know I've read it before but this experience was like pre- and post-cleaned ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. I recommend it especially to anyone who got bored and stopped reading before the end of the Pevears/Volokhonsky translation....more
I finished re-reading The Blizzard this weekend and when I got to the end my feeling was one of exalted revelation. It felt like a completely differenI finished re-reading The Blizzard this weekend and when I got to the end my feeling was one of exalted revelation. It felt like a completely different book from the last time. Once more I'm amazed at the way books can mean very different things, depending on who we are when we read them.
This time for me The Blizzard was about how what one thinks is important in life turns out to be not important at all. It's about how even our most terrible mistakes in life can reveal themselves over time to be glorious and meaningful, if we've lived honestly. The novel suggests that a life lived with quiet acceptance of what can't be helped leads to peace, whereas a life lived by striving forward from one goal to the next leads to nothing.
Last time I framed the characters in this novel differently. I thought of the doctor as the protagonist and everyone else as a secondary character. This time the full nature of the relationship between Garin and "Crouper" became the focal point of the novel for me, and it led to a deeper interpretation.
The first time I read the novel I was also distracted by the flurry of events that come one after another in its pages. There is a relentless series of happenings in the story, a metaphorical blizzard of bizarre experiences and scenic wonders. This time the blizzard of happenings felt like they were written to demonstrate the way we humans allow ourselves to be trapped in strife and frustration, from moment to moment. The real story here beats more deeply, like a huge and generous heart.
Well wow. This is an interesting and captivating read and not like anything I've read before. Even as I write that I'm thinking, "yes-but..." --because this novel keeps fooling me into thinking it's exactly "THIS" kind of novel--a survival novel...a "To Build a Fire" story of human hubris...a 19th century Russian story...whaa, a ZOMBIE novel? and all the while it keeps artfully skirting the edge of multiple literary tropes, including ones that align with realism, and then something extremely unexpected happens and the story veers wildly away and plunges me back into a fantastic world where I have no idea what will happen next. The way some aspects of the story-telling mimics a dream state reminds me of avant-garde or absurdist writing. But there is a big difference: so many avant-guard novels feel like fairly static thought-pieces to me, whereas the narrative tension in The Blizzard never flags.
The word "mordant" could have been created for just this book. The use of humor and exaggeration to describe some very dark themes is unsettling in alThe word "mordant" could have been created for just this book. The use of humor and exaggeration to describe some very dark themes is unsettling in all the right ways. It's a disorienting and demanding read which is a fair place to put your novel when you're talking about forced enslavement and racism and violence toward the weak.
In some ways though the book as written was a little too demanding for me. I think the narrative voice and timeline of events jumps around far too frenetically for the needs of the story and this stylistic choice made me impatient sometimes and less willing to keep going.
Even so I was drawn in to this story, and cared about its characters, to the point that I got angry at some of the ways the author chose to lead the story--Hannaham is very mean to characters that I liked, and the characters themselves make some very stupid choices, and when that happened I reacted almost the way I would if reading a new Dickens novel--I wanted these characters to prevail and to make better choices than they did....more
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