There are no queer people at the end of the world. Maybe that's a good thing.There are no queer people at the end of the world. Maybe that's a good thing....more
“Kick the Latch” hovers, a little uneasily for me at first, between fiction and oral history. For a while I worried a good deal about attribution (the“Kick the Latch” hovers, a little uneasily for me at first, between fiction and oral history. For a while I worried a good deal about attribution (the lack of it). In the beginning pages I kept snittily comparing what Scanlan does here to what Aaron Copeland did when he stole for himself the scratchy exuberant melody to Hoedown from a recording he'd found of an Appalachian fiddler.
But then I just had to let it go. Let go of the uneasiness in my head. I just had to say it doesn't matter in the end whether this is a mostly-accurate transcription of interviews Scanlan conducted with a woman named "Sonia," or was instead mostly invented, and marvelously transformed, by Kathryn Scanlan. It exists. It wouldn't have existed without both women contributing to it.
What is remarkable to me about this language, this story, is the way its relentless understatement makes everything feel so much larger, and more epic in scope, and more heroic and strange. Before long I was overcome by the profound simplicity of the language. My concern over where truth stood in relation to fiction dropped away and I was left with just one feeling, as I read forward: This is true. This is the way it really was....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
I've read this novel twice, as a print book as well as listening to the audiobook. The narrator is fantastic for this story. I have huge respect for tI've read this novel twice, as a print book as well as listening to the audiobook. The narrator is fantastic for this story. I have huge respect for the Alison Rumfitt for writing this novel and for the way she mixes the contemporary historical real horror of everyday life with the tropes of genre horror. It's a unique and tricky mix of personal and political and horror story and I can't say it always worked for me. Sometimes the story felt last on the list of this novel's ambitions. Sometimes I felt the story was telegraphed, where too many times I knew exactly what was going to happen by the end of the sentence or paragraph or chapter....more
A child’s story set in the 14th century, about a boy who is separated from his parents by wars and plagues and who then loses the use of his legs, leaA child’s story set in the 14th century, about a boy who is separated from his parents by wars and plagues and who then loses the use of his legs, leaving him alone in the world and helpless. I’m a little embarrassed to admit how much it moved me, much like the way the boy is too embarrassed to let himself cry when he is finally reunited with his mother in the end. What I love most is the way there is always a friendly monk or two nearby, to feed the boy when he is hungry, or to bathe him, or to carry the boy whenever he needs to go up some stairs. Wouldn’t it be grand to live in a world where someone is always right there to help us when we need them....more
This collection made me despair because it seems to me that Nada Alic has a lovely understanding of language and verbal rhythms and yet in this collecThis collection made me despair because it seems to me that Nada Alic has a lovely understanding of language and verbal rhythms and yet in this collection she committed to a storytelling style that is already very crowded with other brilliant young (women) writers who choose to write cynically about slightly gross stuff....more
Time Shelter is so remarkably clever that its cleverness became a distraction to me. I never felt there was a human connection to be found in the happTime Shelter is so remarkably clever that its cleverness became a distraction to me. I never felt there was a human connection to be found in the happenings on the pages--it was just a story. However witty the flourishes the effect as a whole was a little airless and self-referential. I wanted it to matter more. Just now my thoughts zinged in the direction of Saramago, an author whose books are also often dependent on incredibly clever intellectual absurdities like 'what if everyone went blind?' or 'what if everyone stopped dying?' or 'what if the Iberian Peninsula broke off the European continent?--and yet somehow these absurdities lead the author to such profound meditations on humanity. This novel amazed me just as much as those. But I wanted also to be moved....more
Aleksandar Hemon gallops right up to the line dividing "perfect" from "overwritten" but he never steps over it. Every sentence is so lush and so rich.Aleksandar Hemon gallops right up to the line dividing "perfect" from "overwritten" but he never steps over it. Every sentence is so lush and so rich. It took some getting used to. It was like falling in love when I didn't want to but in the end I had no choice. It's rococo writing. It's full of filigrees and flourishes. I fell in love with each wavy swirling sentence--the way each sentence always manage to fit in one more perfect clause before the period came along. I read this book in electronic ARC while also listening to the audiobook. I adored the narrator of the audiobook, Aleksandar Mikic--what a talent!--but I also loved reading the words on the page at the same time, so that I had a view of the hills and valleys of the sentences as they came along. I appreciated having both audio and print versions handy, as I read, where they could reflect and refract one another in my brain. This is rich writing. It required a few channels into my thoughts and feelings for me to fully engage with it.
There are so many specific scenes that took my breath away. So many varied moods. One aspect I particularly loved in the novel were the wrenchingly beautiful lovemaking scenes between men--scenes that are full of desire, but also, great gentleness. They were a little gauzy. There was a romantic sheen on the writing that fit the story so well and made me realize how rarely I've read scenes where two men get to be gentle and romantic with one another, vs having a more visceral physical experience on the page...and I thought it was great....more
Captivating, gorgeous, gripping. Full of mystery, dread, and revelation. The old people in this novella know what's going on and sometimes the women dCaptivating, gorgeous, gripping. Full of mystery, dread, and revelation. The old people in this novella know what's going on and sometimes the women do, too. The men? They are just trying to hang on and pretend they're in charge. Each moment that passes in this eerie novella is full of happenings just this side of surreal. I love stories like this, the ones that take time to make me appreciate the utter strangeness of our world. The pigs' teeth stuck in the wych-elm in Howards End. The dead sparrow hanging from a wire in Gombrowicz's Cosmos. The fish that leaps out of its tank and pins a man to his bed in Weasels in the Attic. This is the kind of fiction that captivates me. Fiction that is unexplainably weird and yet also somehow exactly the truth. Fiction that is terrifyingly chaotic and yet at the same time comforting, and I find myself thinking, yes, that's right. That's exactly the way it is.
If you liked the following books then you will probably like this novella, too: Threats by Amelia Gray. Desperate Characters by Paula Fox. Ice by Anna Kavan....more
Given my strongly unhappy reaction to this book I plan to read it again soon because anything that bothers me this much is probably not done with me yGiven my strongly unhappy reaction to this book I plan to read it again soon because anything that bothers me this much is probably not done with me yet. ...more
I was moved, dazzled, continuously surprised. The story leaped around unabashedly. It's like the writing-equivalent of improvisational jazz, where theI was moved, dazzled, continuously surprised. The story leaped around unabashedly. It's like the writing-equivalent of improvisational jazz, where the base chords of the horror genre are familiar--a relentless monster, gore in just the right places, and a plucky heroine who may or may not make it--but the improvisational leaps around these base chords were magnificent and strange. Many of the happenings in this book are incoherent on a literal level. It didn't matter. I cried at the end....more
I've read maybe six zillion translations of Beowulf. I think Benjamin Bagby's meticulous striving to perform the poem exactly as it might have beenI've read maybe six zillion translations of Beowulf. I think Benjamin Bagby's meticulous striving to perform the poem exactly as it might have been performed in Year 900 is a wonder of interpretation. and a triumph of art...and I NEVER thought I'd love a modern translation more than I love Seamus Heaney's 2000 translation...and yet, here we are. Here is this amazing, surprising, baldly new re-interpretation of Beowulf that is somehow also deeply, fundamentally respectful of the original poem. I'm gob-smacked. Maria Dahvana Headley's extraordinary attention to this oldest of extant English poems has given me my favorite reading experience of the year, and wow, that's a wonderful thing to realize after such a stellar year of reading many amazing books....more
Hurricane Season compels me to examine my own belief system about literature and to make sure it's defensible, and to conclude, probably not.
The prosHurricane Season compels me to examine my own belief system about literature and to make sure it's defensible, and to conclude, probably not.
The prose is gorgeous. The story is ugly. The author relentlessly degrades and debases her characters. Their moments of respite from their lives of squalor, violence, and brutishness are nearly non-existent.
Even so, this story, written in neat letters across the pages, is so much less awful than the reality of women being murdered and mutilated in Mexico at an accelerated rate each year and without any consequence meted out to their murderers. The squalor and horror in this book are the faintest echo of the truth, about something happening far away from me. The beauty of the sentences shields me from the facts. However ugly the story, it's just a story. I'm sitting in my comfortable chair as I read it. The effect is harrowing, but temporary. It's like those precisely lit photojournalistic images of war and famine victims--I'm moved, and then I move on.
I disliked how much the novel disturbed me, though, even if this story is so much less disturbing than the nonfiction version of this story. I wanted more beauty. The beauty of the sentences themselves wasn't enough. I wanted a glimpse of what's lost, when human life is valued so cheaply. I hated that there is no air or hope or light in the novel. The characters behave like wild animals trapped in a vicious lab experiment where they are deprived of all love and hope until in desperation they start chewing their paws off to comfort themselves.
So I end up realizing that I need some sort of redemptive moment in my fiction--even if it's a lie....more
Overwhelming. Surreal. Syntactically it follows the laws of the English language but the meanings refuse to follow along, or to behave rationally. EacOverwhelming. Surreal. Syntactically it follows the laws of the English language but the meanings refuse to follow along, or to behave rationally. Each sentence is a poem. There is no other book like this one. This book was written by someone with tremendous confidence and a tremendous deep wisdom about the power of the word--how the word can mean so many things at once. Or: how it can mean nothing. I could quote every sentence, each one of them exuberant and surprising. The sun was lemon ice, virginal overhead. I'm dumbstruck. That this book is out of print is a sin of omission that hurts my heart....more
‘Vivienne woke before Sasha and Jesse. Her need to pee wasn’t super urgent, so she nestled with her back against Sasha's stomach (though in general sh‘Vivienne woke before Sasha and Jesse. Her need to pee wasn’t super urgent, so she nestled with her back against Sasha's stomach (though in general she preferred to be big spoon…)’
This novel is written in one semicolorful declarative sentence after another and there is honestly something appealing about the pah-pah-pah rhythm set up by this kind of prose, like the appeal of reading something written by a teenager who draws little hearts above the i’s instead of a dot, and although I found the story pointless and shallow maybe it’s purposefully pointless and shallow, like those pop art Campbell soup cans that were already passé the first time you saw one, and although this novel is not as interesting as the arrangement of old chewing gums you happen to notice on the sidewalk as you’re walking along, it almost is....more
The first time I tried to read The Children's Bible I didn't understand it at all. I was more or less baffled. I read the tone as cynical, and the lanThe first time I tried to read The Children's Bible I didn't understand it at all. I was more or less baffled. I read the tone as cynical, and the language as unnecessarily brittle. I put the book down. I missed the subtle strangeness of these children in the novel, extraordinary children, ones who experience and chronicle the crumbling of civilization. Since this first, failed attempt at reading this novel, which happened about two years ago, I've read Lydia Millet's latest novel, Dinosaurs, which helped me understand Millet’s language. And even more significantly I've read a lot of Joy Williams, whom I understand was Millet’s teacher and mentor. Williams helped me unlock the goodness of The Children's Bible. Williams and Millet speak a related dialect of literary English and now they have taught me this language. It feels as if an entirely rich way of saying and understanding the world has been opened to me. This is a gem of a book.
Fiction is a conversation between writer and reader. Reading a novel is all about give and take and sometimes if you're lucky it resolves into a shared conversation between two people who may never meet. I'm using "shared conversation" to mean a vocabulary of shared experience between writer and reader that informs this deep language between them as they shape meanings together. When I don't like a book, when a book disgruntles me, it's more often than not because it's written in a language I don't yet understand....more
This book was so far into the territory of 'not for me' that I gave up on attempting a linear read and spent a relaxing and entertaining half-hour opeThis book was so far into the territory of 'not for me' that I gave up on attempting a linear read and spent a relaxing and entertaining half-hour opening pages at random where without exception I would discover yet another sentence that baffled me and made me wonder just what the heck the author meant by it
but then
by continuously following a practice of opening a page and reading one sentence after another, I eventually entered into a Dada-esque semantic dreamscape
(one that reminded me fondly of youthful encounters with magic fungi)
(and to be honest, you should try reading like this, sometime)
and the book in my hands said this to me:
He flinches awake with all his limbs and is struck by a divine astonishment.
He lifted her into the crook of his neck and the viciousness brought on by his fatigue instantly dissolved into something else.
He smiles to himself. The food is warm. He eats.
Shrewd? Stoic? Naive?
Behind her, the car comes spilling over the lip of the flyover and drifts downward with a kind of floating grace....more
Louise Glück is 79 and I should have more respect but I'm irked by this book. Maybe Louise Glück by this time in her life and career deserves to writeLouise Glück is 79 and I should have more respect but I'm irked by this book. Maybe Louise Glück by this time in her life and career deserves to write a clunker. I like the cover....more
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