As I read I felt there was something new and yet also, at the same time, something deeply familiar going on in this novel. This "new, but familiar" feAs I read I felt there was something new and yet also, at the same time, something deeply familiar going on in this novel. This "new, but familiar" feeling remained an unresolved puzzle until the name "Eugene Ionesco" popped unexpectedly into my head. Yes. As soon as I realized how much I was reminded of Ionesco, the seemingly scattered pieces of "Gretel and the Great War" resolved themselves like a puzzle coming together on its own. I could appreciate the whole of the thing at once. I could come to terms with how the pointlessness of some events in this story could also feel, at the same time, full of meaning. I could appreciate the way moments of disgust could feel like moments of joyous wonder. The chaos felt rich and life-affirming, rather than nihilistic. The novel reminds me so strongly of the workings of last century's Absurdists. It gives me the same feeling of 'yes, this story is absurd, just as human life is absurd, and even so, I feel joy when reading these pages, because what I'm reading reminds me that I love to be alive."...more
I just finished reading Agatha of Little Neon and I feel, I don't know, maybe the word is: "raptured." Which is different from feeling merely "enraptuI just finished reading Agatha of Little Neon and I feel, I don't know, maybe the word is: "raptured." Which is different from feeling merely "enraptured," I don't even care what this story is about--although I loved the story--because what has left me feeling weepy and loose-jointed and maybe even a little in love with Claire Luchette is the prose. The words. The way the sentences leap and curve and sometimes stop still and hang there, suspended--until the next breath comes. The language stupefied me. I kept thinking: How can words on their own be so delightful? How can words keep silently making these lovely little starbursts come inside my mind, almost entirely independent of their meaning? How can a whole book of sentences just keep on, and keep on, each next-sentence so unexpected? So here is what I'm trying to say: If you're a prose person, then you may feel the same way. It's not elaborate prose. It's more like the most lovely handmade thing you ever came across in an antique shop, that handcrafted thing you've been looking for all your life and didn't know it. There it is in front of you. I can't be trusted about this novel any longer is what I'm trying to say. Because this novel has enchanted me.
I'm so happy to see a rave review for Agatha of Little Neon in the Sunday NY Times Book Review section today (Sept 12 2021)~here is a link....more
The novel is achingly, vividly imagined, the narrative voice is smart and believable, the story is so interesting, and I loved it entirely. And yet I The novel is achingly, vividly imagined, the narrative voice is smart and believable, the story is so interesting, and I loved it entirely. And yet I wanted something more. I'm not sure what I wanted. I think maybe I wanted the story to matter more. I wanted it to mean something more. I wanted it to be revelatory along with being exhilarating and damn-great. I wanted the narrator's experiences to build into something more profound than they did. I wanted her to make some deeper realization about life, about her life, than I could glean here. Maybe it's here and I missed it. I'm more than happy to imagine reading this delightful story again and to find in it deeper meanings. On this read there was something cruel and smug about the ending especially that made the novel just one small step from perfect. I've just spent a lot of words trying to explain the absence of something that would have made this book a masterpiece instead of being an incredibly great novel. What's here is so very good. Every sentence. Every word....more
The Scapegoat is a unique and upending reading experience. Every sentence on its own seems to exist nearly in the world of the rational, at least enouThe Scapegoat is a unique and upending reading experience. Every sentence on its own seems to exist nearly in the world of the rational, at least enough for me to keep reading with my guard down, and to keep thinking 'well, that's a little weird, but understandable...' and then before very long I realize that the story has steered me into completely unknown territory where anything can happen, and where I as a reader am sharing the paranoia and the distress of the protagonist. I've sunk into his way of looking at the world. I'm unable to see my way forward in the story or to predict what will happen next.
For a while even after I was done reading the novel, my world still looked a little odd to me, and a little threatening. The unease lingered. There is a level of particularity of detail in the language of the novel that mimics normal life and then subtly distorts it into something monstrous and chaotic and threatening...or maybe, it lets you see just how odd the world is to begin with. It's absolutely a one-of-a-kind reading experience.
And now I’m editing my review because I forgot at first to say there is a unique humor I enjoyed a lot for the way it weaves in and out in the same way as the paranoia...always catching me off guard. Like that the hospital puts on a free concert of Mahler’s “Kindertotenlieder.” These underemphasized ‘nothing to see here’ jokes come rollicking along without warning. I loved it.
Thanks to FSG for the opportunity to listen to the audiobook--the narrator was perfect for the character. I've bought the book since, because I want the opportunity to read it at my own pace and to learn more about just how this novel works. Wonderful....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
Over two million West Africans fought for France in WWI, and yet the image I have of that war is entirely white. I can't remember a single line of WilOver two million West Africans fought for France in WWI, and yet the image I have of that war is entirely white. I can't remember a single line of Wilfred Owen, or a single scene of All Quiet on the Western Front that mentions any other kind of person in the trenches.
Diop's novel corrects that view. It brings to life a world where white officers encourage their "chocolat" soldiers to strike fear in the enemy by behaving with excess savagery on the battlefield. The officers think of these men, after all, as savages. But when one of the men goes too far in his savagery, he's sent to a field hospital to recover from what his officers categorize as a mental breakdown. It's a striking and harrowing counterpoint to Pat Barker's novel Regeneration, where men are sent home from the battle and considered mentally ill for refusing to fight hard enough.
The narrative voice is lyrical, mythical, nearly incantory, and yet the story the narrator tells is one of relentless violence--not just violence of trench warfare, graphically portrayed, but also the violence of colonialism....more
Why read? Here is a book that endeavors to answer the question in a delightful, engaging, erudite, and interestingly-shaped way. Reading it gave me maWhy read? Here is a book that endeavors to answer the question in a delightful, engaging, erudite, and interestingly-shaped way. Reading it gave me many different perspectives, some of which felt playfully contradictory, all of which set my brain to rethinking and reimagining why I spend so much time doing it. Why read? What gain is there? What can I expect to learn or experience when I sit down with a book and what can I reasonably demand?
Voluminous use of quotations and sources make this book both interesting in itself and a great springboard for further exploration. I'm not sure that I read it the best way--from beginning to end, as I'd read most books--because it almost feels like something to be savored like a deliciously laden literary salad bar, to be sampled and enjoyed as I wish rather than in a linear way. I didn't feel the swell of a persuasive argument from page to page so much as I felt many "aha" moments that delighted me, as I read along.
Each brief section in part one begins with a declarative sentence, and #21: "The first demand any work of art makes upon us is surrender"...was one of my favorite "aha" moments in the book. The suggestion here that I'm meant to come to a book with open mind and open heart; to yield to what's on the page, at least at first; to enter into a dialog with the words on the pages without judgment or expectation. That's a wonderful thought and a wonderful reminder.
The playfulness, the invitation to a ruminative sort of dance, continues in part 2, aptly named "Play." There are such leaps here in this section between eras and authors and genres...and yet somehow in its particulars, its examination of specifics, it has given me a different way to enter the dialogue with any work I happen to be reading. It's really a delicious mix of things very familiar to me, and things less familiar. My own delight was heightened most by the mixing thoughts the author has about poems by Elizabeth Bishop I know well, with ruminations of the narrator in Marilynne Robinson's HOUSEKEEPING. It's a remarkable and completely new-to-me kind of literary analysis to read even though of course, OF COURSE it's what happens in my mind, as I read--whenever I read something I am the sum of all I've ever read before that present-moment act of reading, and so frequently things combine in just this way in my head. I may like these pages best in White's book because I'm so familiar with the works she's citing together....but she also gives me a method to celebrate and welcome these same synergies that rise up in my brain when I read. Permission to remember the last time I read the same book and how it affected me then; permission to remember a poem or a play or a piece of music, why not, that enters my mind as I'm reading this next thing in my lap. It was very freeing, this idea that these thoughts aren't obstructions to my concentration on the current reading experience...that this is the way I should be reading.
The next section is called TRANSGRESSION. Well, I've done a lot of thinking about transgression in fiction, and it has led me to read a great deal of -contemporary- fiction. So to me this section was interesting and alive and thoughtful, but also something of a disappointment, because the works examined are classic well-known and well-trodden works and while rethinking and recontextualizing them can be interesting that work is not as interesting to me as a look at the newly transgressive fictional and poetic boundaries of 2021 literature would have been.
Then come INSIGHT and CONCLUSIONS...and I feel I've been in such good company, and i'm so grateful to have read this book. I'm still wishing for something more contemporary in its pages but then I remember the early admonition that I loved to be reminded of: "The first demand any work of art makes upon us is surrender." While it wasn't the book I thought I wanted to read, it turned out to be a book I loved to read, once I surrendered to it not being my idea of what it should be about.
Deeply, heartfully recommended for anyone who loves good literature. Thanks to NetGalley and to the publisher for an early look....more
Laura van den Berg's collection didn't connect with me. It feels to me as I read that there is a deliberate flat tone at work here, where the narratorLaura van den Berg's collection didn't connect with me. It feels to me as I read that there is a deliberate flat tone at work here, where the narrators of each story are unreflectively reporting events in the voice of a clinically depressed person. I felt held at arms-length. I was never really let into the story. This is extremely artful, yet very careful writing, where the author is trying to recreate the mimetic impression of casual conversation. I kept wanting to say: hey, Laura! Let go a little! Let your narrative voice become ridiculously gothic for a change, or interior, or just, something other than this cool detached voice...this reader at least would love to see this talented writer reach for more and varied ways to tell her stories....more
I saw a city filled with people I didn’t know, would probably never know. It didn’t bother me; it’s the same for everyone. When people look at me, theI saw a city filled with people I didn’t know, would probably never know. It didn’t bother me; it’s the same for everyone. When people look at me, they also see a stranger.
Vitória works in a museum (as a cleaner) and becomes obsessed with writing critiques of the art. Her writings are detailed, sensitive, and frequently disturbing. I was continuously gripped by the rich and frequently eerie cultural details Cain writes into this story, on nearly every page. Vitória meets her husband in front of paintings by Caravaggio and Goya, two artists famous for their lovingly detailed paintings of gruesome suffering. A detailed story of women working in a glue factory seems metaphorical at first mention, and then appears again as memory, and then morphs into a meditation on cruelty to horses and finally into an aversion to eating meat. Is it a horror story? I think it is. Not in a classic sense. But through the character of Vitória, Cain creates a perfect, suffocating, horrifying argument, that to be alive is to be alone. Chilling, remarkable, unforgettable....more
I got to the end of this brief collection of literary essays thinking that I'd very much like to have Vivien Gornick over for dinner. She is an intereI got to the end of this brief collection of literary essays thinking that I'd very much like to have Vivien Gornick over for dinner. She is an interesting person. She and I have almost nothing in common when it comes to reading, or re-reading, and that was a bit of a barrier when it came to enjoying her literary criticism. These brief essays make assumptions about how people read and I just am so not like her this way. Hmm, to give an example...well she is just very, very character-focused, identifying with fictional characters and deriving meanings from their actions as if they were real people making choices. I honestly never read this way. I read for theme and movement and language and I'm constantly aware of characters as vessels for a certain philosophy or point of view that was important to the author...if I identify with anyone, it's the author. Recognizing this difference in how I approach my reading was interesting, too, somehow--that we might be reading the same book or looking at the same page and getting something completely different from it--but it was distancing to me that Gornick didn't seem to be aware that there are many ways to read, and re-read. I think if she came over for dinner I'd be doing a lot of listening. ...more
Finally Teresa was experiencing...one of those unlikely moments that saved her life from absurdity.
This is a hard novel to pay attention to, to the leFinally Teresa was experiencing...one of those unlikely moments that saved her life from absurdity.
This is a hard novel to pay attention to, to the level it demands to be paid attention to, and yet it rewards your attention absolutely. On a sentence level it's beautiful. On a story level it's fragmentary, snatching you away again and again from a story line you want to stay in and leaping away into another scene, other characters. Thematically it tackles a fundamental question in life: how a person faces death, and makes sense of his/her own mortality. It's a brave book because Comensal never allows the least bit of romanticization, or faith in the world to come, or any other thing to distract the reader from the fragmentary, absurd way we humans go about dying. A tough, rewarding read....more
Remarkable for the attempt as much as for the execution. May we all be this clear-sighted and confident about our work when we're in our eighties.Remarkable for the attempt as much as for the execution. May we all be this clear-sighted and confident about our work when we're in our eighties....more
The book is an account of a horrific chain of events that in fact happened to the author, who survived Dachau.
But it is also unabashedly subjective: The book is an account of a horrific chain of events that in fact happened to the author, who survived Dachau.
But it is also unabashedly subjective: part-memoir, part fiction, a mix of first- and third-person accounts, and in no way trying to hold itself up as 'the truth,' and it's told in a non-linear, fractured manner, in four broken parts where even the protagonist/author's name is different from one section to the next.
I realize that what I just wrote contradicts itself. If something "in fact happened," then it's not "subjective," or usually it isn't, anyway.
In fact, the author contradicts herself many times about what is true and not-true, right here in the text:
There is a fact that I evaded. By so often saying that i had been deported to Dachau, I ended up believing it. But it's not true. My companions were transferred to that Lager. Not me. I was repatriated.
As I read this book I began to think about how different it was from the shaped memory of Night by Elie Wiesel, a book in which each scene is written novelistically; a book that Wiesel called his true experience.
Wiesel's truth is presented in a more polished way for the reader than Deviation, though. Wiesel's people die in well-written ways, with the tools of fiction vivifying each scene, as in this passage about three Jews who are hanged:
Both adults were already dead. The noose had choked them at once. Instantly they expired. Their extended tongues were red as fire. Only the slight Jewish child with the lost dreamy eyes was still alive. His body weighed too little. Was too light. The noose didn't catch. The slow death of the little meshoresl took thirty-five minutes. And we saw him wobbling, swaying, on the rope, with his bluish-red tongue extended, with a prayer on his grey-white lips, a prayer to God...When we saw him like that, the hanged child, many of us didn't want to, couldn't keep from crying.
In Deviation there is no such scene-building, no use of metaphor, and very little reportage of how witnesses felt to see others brutalized and killed. There is a flatness in the storytelling, frequently to the point where I felt detached from the brutalizing deaths of victims portrayed. It could be that this detachment is closer to the "truth" of what survivors felt when they witnessed so much senseless death all around them. It could be that Wiesel's emotionally vivid scene-building where survivors cry and pray to God gives readers solace, though, and reminds readers of the truth that human lives were lost, and in that way Night provides another kind of truth--truth with a bit of hope in it, maybe.
In Deviation people come and go, events seem utterly random, and what is significant and what is meaningless blend together. By consistently calling attention to itself as subjective, and by refusing to mold itself into a narrative or to use Bildungsroman structural elements, it remains deeply unsatisfying in some ways. It's a lot of work to read this book. Without fictional and scenic props to pull me along, it could be tedious. I find Night much more heart-rending because it's full of the tools of fiction to drive its messages into our hearts. But D'Eramo's kind of storytelling offers an alternative that might bring us closer to the truth of an author's own experience....more
This one landed like a flat mylar balloon for me. The combination of a detached narrative voice plus the strangely muted descriptions of this particulThis one landed like a flat mylar balloon for me. The combination of a detached narrative voice plus the strangely muted descriptions of this particular vision of apocalypse deflated my enthusiasm. I suppose it’s part of the satire that the tiny band of survivors here are all regular joes who lack imagination, but their lack of any real alarm, as civilization collapses all around them, left me feeling uninvolved rather than amused.
For apocalyptic zombie satire, I preferred Zone One by Colson Whitehead.
There are brilliant flashes of insight throughout, which burst into my thoughts as beautiful truths--in the same way that great poetry says those thinThere are brilliant flashes of insight throughout, which burst into my thoughts as beautiful truths--in the same way that great poetry says those things that you have always known to be true, and recognize, in the instant of reading the words (but not before), that you have always known it to be true.
That should be enough for any book to be great but some things did bother me. All the characters think nearly the same thoughts, and in the same cadence of sentences. There is a great deal--a ponderousness, even--of back story, on nearly every page. There are too many characters for me to care about, and all of them are a little bit mean, in almost exactly the same way.
So I'm settling in on a "it was okay" feeling which makes me feel guilty because I feel even so I've spent several hours in the company of an amazing person, with an amazing mind--an author who has written an at-times-glorious novel that sheds light on all the ridiculous, sentimental, hard, and terrifying truths about mortality....more
I've thought this same thought about many books in 2016--what a great reading year!--but War Music: An Account of Homer's Iliad is one of the great woI've thought this same thought about many books in 2016--what a great reading year!--but War Music: An Account of Homer's Iliad is one of the great works I've read over the last 12 months, really magnificent and magical, not a translation of Homer on any level and yet not quite an adaptation either because it feels like it gets to the visceral center of what Homer is about. The scenes are not analogous to a translation--for example instead of beginning with the famous line invoking the muse to sing of Achilles's rage, it opens instead this way:
Picture the east Aegean sea by night, And on a beach aslant its shimmering Upwards of 50,000 men Asleep like spoons beside their lethal fleet.
And on and on, a completely different poem about the same conflicts and characters--to borrow a word from these first lines, "aslant" with new perspectives and new meanings. The power of the poetry is heart-striking on every page and in this way it rises above translation in its expressiveness in English. Remarkable in so many ways. I do think it requires a strong familiarity with the original poem to access, though, because it's in the interstitial differences from the original that a lot of its meanings germinate....more
Wistful, and well-mannered, and sad, and loving, these poems give me the sense that I am in the presence of a fellow human being, one with a big soul.Wistful, and well-mannered, and sad, and loving, these poems give me the sense that I am in the presence of a fellow human being, one with a big soul. There is humility here, in the best sense of the word. The poet knows his strengths and doesn't hide them (that would be false humility)-- but he also confronts, sometimes quite directly, not only his own mortal smallness, but also the likelihood of his poems dying out one day.
There is a lot of Ecclesiastes here.
It feels as if I know a lot about Koethe after reading this collection--although his is not at all what I would call autobiographical or confessional poetry, it is strongly of a specific time and place, and it describes the historic circumstances of Koethe's life, and it uses the benchmarks and collective memories of people of his age and times. His experience is more refined and more erudite than mine, but recognizable as a history shared. There is a clearness of vision about the past, free of nostalgia, yet full of love.
I feel this poet would be a good friend of mine, if I had the privilege of knowing him, and although I don't have any friends currently who own even one navy blazer....more
This novel is a great example of how simplicity can be transformed via some kind of alchemy known as "great writing" into high art. I'm reminded of PiThis novel is a great example of how simplicity can be transformed via some kind of alchemy known as "great writing" into high art. I'm reminded of Picasso's "Bouquet of Peace." The story of The Heart is so basic that I almost gave the novel a pass after reading the book jacket--the plot is the stuff of straight-to-video movies--and yet in Kerangal's hands it transforms itself into a story that is exquisitely particular and full of humanity. I'm in awe of her storytelling skills and I'm grateful to her translator Sam Taylor for making this novel easily accessible for me.
In addition to good writing and its deep sense of humaneness, yet another feature that makes The Heart work is its meticulous attention to medical detail. Another work of great skill that I thought of while reading The Heart was "Mrs. Kelly's Monster," a nonfiction feature article written by Jon Franklin that won a Pulitzer in 1979, and that Franklin has graciously republished on his blog, here:
Lyrical (gorgeous) and unapologetically intellectual, both at once, in a way that is almost nonexistent in modern american literature. I'm still steepLyrical (gorgeous) and unapologetically intellectual, both at once, in a way that is almost nonexistent in modern american literature. I'm still steeped in the feeling the novel left me on the last pages. I feel as if I have spent a few hours with a person (narrator) (author) who thinks deeply about the world; someone who looks so closely at the human experience, and sees it clearly, and finds it beautiful. The rendering of Berlin in the late eighties is magnificent--the city Pinckney renders is a place where everything is both entirely artificial, and yet fundamentally true.
As I read I felt as if Darryl Pinckney went on a journey himself when he wrote his story--that he entered into a conversation with a character, one he didn't know well himself in the beginning. It feels as if Pinckney wrote this novel to learn more about his narrator, a person who is living at a very unique time and place, and who sees things; a person who shares his life with just enough detail, just enough openness, to invite us readers to enter into the conversation, as well.
One of the "Berlins" that Pinckney writes so well about is the experience of being an intellectually-inclined American expatriate with limited German skills, but with a yearning to express yourself in the native language fluently, and to discuss intellectual things with people you find interesting, or whom you want as friends. You grasp for ways to express deep thoughts, using the words you know, but all the time you're painfully aware that what you're saying is sounding unusual, vague, or at times even deep, in a metaphorical way at least, but also in a way that has nothing to do with what you meant to say. I've never read a book before now that captures this particular isolation so well.
Pinckney also nails the expatriate experience in many other ways. He is writing about the specific experience of being a gay black American man in Berlin, but what he writes is representative more generally of what it's like to have the expectations and prejudices peculiar to German culture imposed on you--the way these expectations can limit you, but also, the temptation to exploit these same expectations for your own purposes and desires. The thrill of being different, and the loneliness of being different.
A final thing I loved about the novel was the recurring, quiet theme of the narrator's books--a quiet, chance meeting with Susan Sontag who happens to mention her idea of "home" being where your books are...and then to notice when books are mentioned in the story. It's a small, lovely, thoughtful grace note throughout the novel to trace the journey of the narrator's books....more
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