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
This time I read the novel solely for the pleasure of arriving once more at its perfect ending, and since I don't know whether it would be insulting tThis time I read the novel solely for the pleasure of arriving once more at its perfect ending, and since I don't know whether it would be insulting to you if I put a description of that ending behind a spoiler tag (because maybe it's insulting to assume you've not already read it), or rude to not put it behind a spoiler tag (because maybe it's an old book that no one reads anymore), I will just say, it is still a perfect ending.
This is a story in which the characters are on a vertical path downward, from bad, to very bad, to very terrible, to the worst outcome imaginable for their lives, and yet, somehow, here in its last 800 words, Steinbeck manages to end his story in a way that honors all that terribleness and then, magnificently, finds a way to leave me with a breath of hope, and a belief that all is not lost, and that the life of each one of us is precious.
I love the entire book for its mix of social realism and epic, but it's these last few paragraphs that make it a masterpiece for the ages....more
This is such a perplexing read to me. It has such an assured sense of place. Really great scenes. Vivid characters. Great evocation of an era. But theThis is such a perplexing read to me. It has such an assured sense of place. Really great scenes. Vivid characters. Great evocation of an era. But the plot is very hard to buy. There is so much reliance on 1) coincidence, and 2) secrets that didn't need to be kept. A near-kidnapping in the beginning fades to the background and re-emerges with unexpected violent unbelievable melodrama near the end. Plot points trail off and disappear. It feels very episodic and some episodes feel unnecessary. The most important characters in the beginning are barely followed through on later. BUT the coda is beautiful and human and just right, and made me cry. So this is a grudging four stars. If it had been marketed as a YA novel it would be five stars. I can't believe this novel isn't a limited streaming series yet, because it has depth, and it has exactly the right level of lurch-y plot twists that would make it work well in the midst of other small-town shows like "Mare of Easttown" and "I Am Not Okay with This" and "Firefly Lane."...more
Ok, I really hated this book, but I give it five stars. Let me explain. I had to put it down a lot--sort of the equivalent of covering my eyes at the Ok, I really hated this book, but I give it five stars. Let me explain. I had to put it down a lot--sort of the equivalent of covering my eyes at the movies. Reading it did strange, bad things to my heart rate. The book is a masterpiece of oblique anxiety and despair. Events are much more unhinged than in Kafka, with whom Hawkes is sometimes compared. Disturbing and unique....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
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