Of Cattle and Men is a giddy mix of poetry and brute force. Reading it feels like you just jumped off a cliff and you're a skinny second from hitting Of Cattle and Men is a giddy mix of poetry and brute force. Reading it feels like you just jumped off a cliff and you're a skinny second from hitting the water, which is very cold, and maybe there's an alligator waiting underneath. ...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.
An Orphan World is written in a tone that I would call playful, absurd, post-modern, and surreal. The story itself, on the other hand, is ugly, violenAn Orphan World is written in a tone that I would call playful, absurd, post-modern, and surreal. The story itself, on the other hand, is ugly, violent, and extreme. Tone and story clash jarringly for me here, making this a difficult book for me to interpret. The novel reminds me a great deal of Chilean-French director's Alejandro Jodorowsky's 2013 film "The Dance of Reality," for the way it combines fantastic absurdity with horrific reality. It's not a comfortable combination for me as a reader. So this novel is going on my "reread" list, because I feel like I didn't understand it, and also, that it deserves a more open-hearted reading next time, when I'll know what to expect.
In some places the scenic renderings are so visceral, and so full of smell and touch and need, that I had that delightful feeling as I read along that we readers get sometimes, too rarely, when we read something unlike anything we’ve read before. There is a father and son in this story who show their love for one another in goofy and particular and touching ways. The sea in this story offers up clocks that still work. A kelp-festooned couch on the beach becomes an absurd and effective representation of the poverty of the main characters. The writing throughout is poetic and pleasingly cryptic, with the exception of a passage that seems meant to bore me, as it demonstrates at length the inanity and emptiness of online sex.
While the story's thematic undercurrent is serious—homophobic violence, and the degradations of poverty — the tone is so detached and absurd that these serious themes disturb me and unsettle me and distance me from the horrors. I felt little emotion as I read other than delight about the prose, and curiosity and puzzlement and occasional boredom about the story itself, especially when it turned to these darker themes. The second chapter, for instance, describes bodies after a horrific mass lynching. The bodies have been mutilated in what should have struck me as revolting ways, but the tone is so detached and absurd that my feeling was muted.
Maybe that was the point. Lately I’ve been having conversations elsewhere on GR about the way a writer might choose flat affectless prose to get to the truth of horrific themes, rather than trying to amp up the reader’s empathy artificially by writing emotionally. Colson Whitehead in The Nickel Boys for instance writes in a flat tone when describing the most horrific of realities in his novel. The tonal detachment here, though, was in the direction of a exaggerated surrealism, and not in the direction of trying to render a reality that allows readers to experience their own emotions. It will take some acclimation and hence my plan to read this novel again....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.
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
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