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.
Magee has pulled off something so rare in literature with this novel; the prose sings; the observations about the complexity of human relationships arMagee has pulled off something so rare in literature with this novel; the prose sings; the observations about the complexity of human relationships are revelatory; the novel manages to both be intellectually challenging, and also filled with heart; its scenes feel immediate and visceral, but somehow they are also steeped in deep historical references; that it's a tragedy that manages to also be a testament to human resilience.
Updating my review today to add my thoughts on the audiobook, which I've just finished listening to. When I read the hardcover it at times felt like a stage play to me, because of the preponderance of dialogue, mixed with interior monologue. The dialogue-heavy quality of the storytelling makes the novel a perfect fit with Stephen Hogan's incredible narration. The audio performance was a different but equally magnificent experience. Hogan gives the characters a voice that at times surprised me. I had 'heard' these people differently, when I read it silently. The differences delighted me, and his interpretations gave me another way to think about the characters. A really great performance!...more
There are a lot of authors experimenting just now with ways to combine the real, and the fictional, and the historical, and the personal all together There are a lot of authors experimenting just now with ways to combine the real, and the fictional, and the historical, and the personal all together into a narrative. What I've vividly discovered for myself, now that I've read When We Cease to Understand the World, is how much I adore those authors who plumb the depths of history, and then weave a unique mythology of subjective meanings from the facts. Sebald, Labatut, Stepanova all do this. It's quite a different kind of thing from the kind of writing called "auto-fiction' just now, which dives deep into just one person's history, the author's personal narrative, and adds fictional or subjective elements to that very narrow personal experience. Unlike the auto-fictioners, who put themselves at the center of their stories, Labatut and his counterparts efface themselves almost entirely from their stories. They're interested in a bigger picture. Each detail they choose adds exquisitely to the whole and the result is a Bayeux Tapestry of a novel. I love this way of writing, this way of storytelling. It's a gift to read this book....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
This novel belongs on a very short shelf of novels written for adults that remind us of what a feral and terriPerfect, but also, perfectly upsetting.
This novel belongs on a very short shelf of novels written for adults that remind us of what a feral and terrifying experience it is to be a child.* I'm very unsettled just now at the power of Stafford's vision. I'm glad I'm not in total agreement with her nihilistic take on family life, because I wouldn't want to live that way. My relative faith in people, when compared with Stafford, doesn't keep me from recognizing this novel as a stunningly artful story, however bleak its view of humanity.
*Other novels I'd put beside this one, for their equally stark and unsentimental view of childhood:
Tyll is so entertaining that I struggled at first to understand just how deep it is. I'm not sure what it says about contemporary literature, or aboutTyll is so entertaining that I struggled at first to understand just how deep it is. I'm not sure what it says about contemporary literature, or about me, that I needed to consciously banish my cynical mistrust of any book that is so delightful to read.
As I read the novel I thought of Falstaff, Shakespeare's comic-yet-deep repeating character. The character who most reminded me of Falstaff is played by a donkey, a character who appears in many scenes, sometimes for comic value and sometimes for something else entirely.
And now that I've brought it up, I realize that I could write several paragraphs just about the donkey in this novel--how funny the donkey is in a given scene, and then how horrifically the donkey's fate plays out in another scene. Sometimes this donkey has a name, and its name is Origenes. And like so much in Tyll, Kehlmann invites me to think of the donkey's name as just a name, and to read on, or alternatively, to ponder what shimmering potentials are added to my reading if I take time to realize "Origenes" is also the name of an itinerant third-century Christian ascetic whose life and fate were caught up in religious disputes not unlike those raging in this novel.
The donkey's story is threaded throughout this broken, nonlinear novel, and always brings with it some new wonder or terror or sadness or revelation, even though it's a minor character, like Falstaff. And the thing is, it's not just the donkey. Every character in the novel is a kind of itinerant bit player, and every one of them--the miller Claus, the Winter King, the expert in dragonology, the little girl named Martha, Tyll himself--has a marvelous and mysterious story to tell, when it's their time on stage. Kehlmann made them all real for me, sometimes in just a few sentences.
References to Shakespeare plays appear throughout this novel with both historical and thematic resonances. A recurring side-theme is how literature was changing in this period of history that we now call "early-modern." The play Macbeth makes its way into a scene as a way to reference James I's rise to power, and Macbeth's last soliloquy is a good description of how this novel unfurls as you read it:
Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
So here we are. Apparently my second stab at coming to grips with Tyll here on Goodreads is going to consist of a little bit of Shakespeare, a little bit of donkey.
Okay. I should also add that I found a lot of Lutheran-like philosophy playing out in profound ways--over and over again the character Tyll projects a belief that suffering and uncertainty is worth enduring for the hope of living through it, and that evil is worth fighting, for the hope of the good to come. This philosophy is most starkly portrayed in the late chapter "In the Shaft."
Well, I'm just gob-smacked by this novel. Read it....more
I don’t know how Poschmann did it but this novel captures with exquisite perfection the disorienting experience that living in Japan can be, for an atI don’t know how Poschmann did it but this novel captures with exquisite perfection the disorienting experience that living in Japan can be, for an attentive non-Japanese person who comes to Japan with no agenda and with some time to look around.
There is such an extreme level of discernment here in this novel...every scene nails it. I would guess most people who have not spent a lot of time in Japan—enough for instance to know about the deeply strange and almost obligatory love every Japanese person professes to feel about Matsushima—would feel like this book is exaggerated satire, when actually it just is the way Japan IS.
I’m kind of in awe and a little woozy from the experience of having just finished this excellent and very funny book, so maybe I will come back and try to be more coherent in my review in a few days. I lived in Japan for years and this novel hit me hard with a lovely nostalgia for a place I still love so its impossible for me to know how anyone else without this experience will react to it. ...more
This week I ended up reading Lucia by Alex Pheby while listening to the audiobook of Milkman. It was quite a punch to the literary gut. Both these booThis week I ended up reading Lucia by Alex Pheby while listening to the audiobook of Milkman. It was quite a punch to the literary gut. Both these books accurately and relentlessly (and, somehow, beautifully, which makes them each disturbing on a whole other level) portray how sexual abuse and predation fit so easily into what seems to be normal life on the surface.
The writing style here--an elliptical returning to a very similar sentence, for instance, with a different verb substituted, plus a very repetitive rhythm in sentence structure--seems to reinforce the actual sense of the story, and to reinforce the situation of a much older woman trying to review and understand her memory of being stalked as a child. The style reinforces for me the idea of a woman trying to pin down a very elliptical and emotionally fraught truth about her past.
But there is so much more to this story. It's also a story about way that the violence of "the troubles" has become so frequent that it has become casually accepted, as part of everyday life. People are walking around in fear for their lives, and also in fear one another, and in fear anything or anyone that deviates from absolutely normal, and it's just the way it is. How one young girl navigates her world is something to behold--because most astonishingly of all this is a book of hope. It's a book about joy. It's a book about how love wins in the end, even if the victories are sometimes tragic....more
Three Plastic Rooms by Petra Hůlová is the story of an aging prostitute and her relationship with her own body, a novel rendered from Czech into hauntThree Plastic Rooms by Petra Hůlová is the story of an aging prostitute and her relationship with her own body, a novel rendered from Czech into hauntingly poetic English by Alex Zucker. Oh, my goodness. How can there exist a novel that is at once so open to beauty and yet in which every sentence is some new shocker? Here you go. This is that book. It’s the kind of book that nineteen out of twenty readers will say is too upsetting to love, or maybe even to finish, and the twentieth person will say "this book changed my life" or maybe: "this book convinces me that we are nowhere near the end as a species of exploring all the ways human language can be called upon to express new things."
As I write this, there has not been a single review of the novel on Amazon, which is surprising. It seems the book that would make people angry enough to write about it. Let’s see. It’s the kind of book that you can open on any page and be unbelievably disturbed. Let me try now:
the true mumsyfuckers have enough of that little drama at home, and the fuckshop, a quiet backwater of kissed knees, offers a gulf of solace, because what an orgasm means to these men’s wives was drilled into their heads by all those sex scene disasters you see at the multiplex, which whenever they happen my sticker-inner farts with laughter in my seat, and I would only be willing to moan during them, as I said, for the enjoyment of a man all my very own, so that sitting there in the seat next to me, in the dark, he would get an urge to stroke himself, or maybe just enjoy my sights, or maybe all of me, or, sigh, even love me.
I'm amazed this writing, for the way the harshness of the language resolves suddenly into vulnerability and poetry at the end of this paragraph...and also, damn, I'm amazed by translator Alex Zucker that he has done such an amazing job making this writing accessible to me.
Wonderful. Harsh and nearly unreadable at times but I'm so glad to have read it....more
But: I have no idea what this novel is supposed to mean. I could read up about it, I suppose. But even with When I finished this novel I began to cry.
But: I have no idea what this novel is supposed to mean. I could read up about it, I suppose. But even with more knowledge, I'm not sure there would be a way for me to have loved it more, or to have been touched by it more, or to have been made to think more, than the choice I made, which was to read this very complicated and mysterious novel as a dialogue, a 1-1 relationship between me and the words on the page.
So how to describe this complicated knot of feeling, now that I've reached the end?
What I'm feeling has to do with a sense that this novel stands for the permanence of human relationships--that our thoughts and feelings and actions as thinking creatures can create a reality that endures every kind of assault.
Described here is a horrific world. And yet the characters trapped in this horrific world never fully despair. And the story itself, however violent and seemingly hopeless, always holds out in the end a thread of fragile hope that humanity (not just people, but their best selves) will endure....more
When I got to the end of Laurus I thought: "this is the best book I've ever read." I've had that feeling before with other novels and I hope I will haWhen I got to the end of Laurus I thought: "this is the best book I've ever read." I've had that feeling before with other novels and I hope I will have it again in the future but even so Laurus will remain one of the most perfect and memorable experiences of my reading life.
It probably changed my experience to have read "The Confession of St. Patrick" before reading Laurus. Unlike Augustine's Roman intellectualism, St. Patrick's Confession describes a chaotic reality where the spiritual and the physical worlds are so intertwined that they sometimes interact in brutish ways--as when Patrick writes:
"The very same night while I was sleeping Satan attacked me violently, as I will remember as long as I shall be in this body; and there fell on top of me as it were, a huge rock,and not one of my members had any force."
St. Patrick describes the Devil as a force that can reach through from the spiritual world and manifest itself physically in this world, and the same sort of Christianity is at work in Laurus. In both Ireland and Russia Christianity developed without the mitigating rationality of Rome. This faith is visceral and unforgiving and absolute. Demons and angels are corporate. Faith healers are real. Holy fools are venerated. Future and past events can appear in dreams, and the consequences of sin and virtue are made manifest in this life: in the health of the body, in good or bad events, in the weather and the seasons.
The world view described with such tender care in this novel is very foreign to mine, and yet the writing is so grounded in physical detail, and so consistent throughout the novel, that I bought into it completely and was immersed in it entirely as I read.
I cried a lot. Even for the donkey. It's an amazing novel. It got to the absolute heart of me....more
While "The Past" has no plot to speak of, even so I stayed up until 1 a.m. last night to finish it. I've rarely felt this invested in characters, or fWhile "The Past" has no plot to speak of, even so I stayed up until 1 a.m. last night to finish it. I've rarely felt this invested in characters, or felt so tenderly toward fictional beings. Hadley moves freely from one character's interior thoughts and feelings to the next. We never learn the full story of any one character. And yet. What we do learn is so apt, so human, that I feel very close to these people. Where the novel soars is in its exploration of private pain, of the essential loneliness of being inside a body, apart from others, thinking thoughts and having feelings that can never be fully known by another. The people in this story are rarely alone, but they're always alone. The point of view most prevalent throughout the novel is being inside the head of a person who is feeling their flaws and isolation from others, feeling these things as a private grief, even when they know they are in the midst of people who love them. This novel is not an unhappy novel, though. It's full of buoyant light, and hope, that even though each of us is frail and flawed, other people find a way to love us. ...more
This small novel turned out to be one of the most moving reads of 2015 for me. It took a while for me to accept its rhythms and to realize that this bThis small novel turned out to be one of the most moving reads of 2015 for me. It took a while for me to accept its rhythms and to realize that this book has been completely misunderstood by anyone who thinks the tiger living within Margio has anything to do with making this a book of fantasy--this novel instead feels like a glimpse of the real world, from the perspective of those living in a small village on an Indonesian coastline. It feels like a place where belief in the supernatural fits easily into the natural world. It's a place full of life, where for instance a garden grows so abundantly that the village feels in danger of being taken over at any moment by the jungle; where the spirits of the dead make their demands on the living; where animals both natural and supernatural inhabit the empty places just next to civilization.
It's also the story of how one young man comes to a breaking point when confronted with the suffering of his family and loved ones. It's a story grounded in a squalid reality, for all its supernatural overtones. The lives of the women in this novel in particular are lovingly drawn, breathtakingly humane, heartbreaking. The style is digressive and yet deeply affecting, as, one by one, the author dwells on what makes each individual unique and worthy of having his/her story told. The village itself is as much a character in this brief novel as any of the people inhabiting it and the lifelong relationships between characters unfold in a pace that is somehow both languid and breathless. In the end what feels digressive suddenly becomes central to understanding its extraordinary conclusion....more
A novel about New York from the point of view of the most disenfranchised. A book that is never sentimental, never condescending. One of the best bookA novel about New York from the point of view of the most disenfranchised. A book that is never sentimental, never condescending. One of the best books I've ever read....more
Philippe-Paul de Ségur puts humanity back into an event where we get distracted by the sheer number of the dead. I've read histories now where historiPhilippe-Paul de Ségur puts humanity back into an event where we get distracted by the sheer number of the dead. I've read histories now where historians estimate the size of The Grande Armée to have been anywhere from 300,000 and 600,000 men on the way to Moscow; survivors of the campaign are estimated between 30,000 to 50,000. That's a lot of zeroes, and a lot of rounding, and a lot of missing stories of human happenings.
Maybe the best possible representation of the quantitative loss was conceived by Charles Joseph Minard in his famous graphic, here:
Ségur, though, made me understand what it was like to be there:
“The road was constantly running through swampy hollows. The wagons would slide down their ice-covered slopes and stick in the deep mud at the bottom. To get out they had to climb the opposite incline, thickly coated with ice on which the horses’ hoofs, with their smooth, worn-out shoes, could find no hold. One after another they slipped back exhausted — horse and drivers on top of each other. Then the famished soldiers fell upon the fallen horses, killed them and cut them in pieces. They roasted the meat over fires made from the wrecked wagons, and devoured it half cooked and bloody.”
Tess of the D'Urbervilles will always be my favorite Hardy novel but Far From the Madding Crowd is a close second, most of all for the wonderful charaTess of the D'Urbervilles will always be my favorite Hardy novel but Far From the Madding Crowd is a close second, most of all for the wonderful characterization of bad-guy Troy, who is sarcastic, witty, romantic, brash, nihilistic and more.
I read all the Hardy novels every few years and they are different every time for me--the sign of a great book. This time Boldwood seemed a scary misogynist, for example, bullying Bathsheba over and over again, verbally bludgeoning her until she agreed to get engaged. Last time I read this book he didn't seem quite so unhinged.
The only fixed point in character in this novel for me is Gabriel Oak, whom I love each time in exactly the same way, for his quiet competence, and for his rapt attention to beautiful things. It's through this character's eyes that I see the beauty of Wessex. He is the only character who takes time to see what is around him. I love the scene where he carefully places a toad out of harm's way.
I love Bathsheba as well. I love her for the way she grows up, for the way she takes chances, and for the way she muddles her way to becoming a highly moral person. I love her for falling in love with Troy when he practices swordsmanship on her--the sword exercise is easily one of the most sensual scenes ever written, a terrific example of the way cultural censorship gave rise to some highly creative lovemaking scenes in literature.
Well, wonderful. This is of the books I wish I could keep reading for the first time. Someone should let the Jane Austin book clubs know about Thomas Hardy....more
Possibly my favorite novel ever. The unexpected shock of Naphta's solution to a quarrel. the SNOW chapter, of course. The sense of a past never to be Possibly my favorite novel ever. The unexpected shock of Naphta's solution to a quarrel. the SNOW chapter, of course. The sense of a past never to be repeated and a world completely shattered by the Great War. The story manages in almost every sentence to be simultaneously bleak and triumphant. I wish for more people in the world to have read this novel....more
This novel is such a distinct achievement that I haven't written a review before now, and even though this is my third time through the novel, this isThis novel is such a distinct achievement that I haven't written a review before now, and even though this is my third time through the novel, this isn't really a review either. What I can say is that this novel in spite of its setting in the early 20th century is nevertheless written in such a contemporary and innovative way that it makes me realize there is no such thing as progress in the arts, or even evolution, but rather that we have extraordinary masterful artists that come along now and then who write in completely new and exhilarating ways...and we will always have that to look forward to in the future, as long as their are storytellers and people who want to hear their stories....more
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