Such a complex relationship with this small book: it's stuffy, detached, boring, but has also completely overtaken my mind over the 92nd book of 2024.
Such a complex relationship with this small book: it's stuffy, detached, boring, but has also completely overtaken my mind over the days reading it and since finishing it (on Saturday), I've been exploring it in my head. All the negatives above actually aid the book. The stuffiness made it feel real, like I was reading dusty old travelogues of an arctic explorer. Lovecraft's wordiness sometimes got the better of him, but I was also drawn into descriptions, which were startlingly vivid.
Little by little, however, they rose grimly into the western sky; allowing us to distinguish various bare, bleak, blackish summits, and to catch the curious sense of fantasy which they inspired as seen in the reddish antarctic light against the provocative background of iridescent ice-dust clouds. In the whole spectacle there was a persistent, pervasive hint of stupendous secrecy and potential revelation. It was as if these stark, nightmare spires marked the pylons of a frightful gateway into forbidden spheres of dream, and complex gulfs of remote time, space and ultradimensionality. I could not help feeling that they were evil things— mountains of madness whose farther slopes looked out over some accursed ultimate abyss.
And reflecting on the horror, I've come to realise that it is a horror of 'exceptional' calibre, for it is so understated. Why were so many passages unnerving me, particularly when the majority of the story was given to describing the icy wastelands of Antarctica and the jagged structures of ancient, uninhabited alien buildings? Because Lovecraft places the alien not on another planet, but on our own, and the empty forgotten cities are marked with a forgotten and terrible history. He somehow created fear by simply describing a desolate black city surrounded by ice and snow. It is the uncanny perfected.
The more it has sat in my mind, the more I've come to respect it and enjoy it in retrospect. Lovecraft's longwinded descriptions sometimes made me feel impatient, but every time I left the book, I left it a little unsettled. There was a lingering disquiet.
At nearly midnight the other night my girlfriend suddenly remarked that she could not see the cathedral spire out the window. We can usually see it. The sky had a strange remote orange tint and a thick fog had fallen. At once we put our shoes on and headed out. A few drunkards were wandering and yelling, but once we reached the cathedral, there was a strange muffled quality. We could hardly see far ahead of us, and the cathedral spire, even up close, disappeared out of sight into the fog. We walked about for half an hour, and I kept thinking, for some reason, of At the Mountains of Madness, and the slow, meditative, even boring, horror that lay within its pages....more
3.5. A hypnotic read. We had a rewarding discussion in the book-club about it, almost all of us liked it to some degree, but we deba84th book of 2024.
3.5. A hypnotic read. We had a rewarding discussion in the book-club about it, almost all of us liked it to some degree, but we debated the prevailing theme of the book. "Desire vs reality", the "self vs the imagined-self", "loneliness" and so on. We also debated and disagreed concerning the ending (which I won't spoil); it is left openly, and according to how we saw and thought of Frankie, we thought different things would happen past the story's ending. For a short book it generated lots of discussion, which is always a good sign. This was my first McCullers and I was entranced by certain drawn out scenes that felt Gothic, full of decay and a kind of hopelessness. A very skilled writer. ...more
My friend and fellow-booklover, J, who once studied under Abdulrazak Gurnah, recommended me this book. I've owned a few Gene Wolfe n81st book of 2024.
My friend and fellow-booklover, J, who once studied under Abdulrazak Gurnah, recommended me this book. I've owned a few Gene Wolfe novels over the years but never read him. He told me this was a good starting place. J is completely disillusioned from academia (he was once a lecturer himself) because of the elitism and narrowmindedness he found in the field. He tried for a long time to write papers and get Wolfe's name considered seriously among his peers, but to no avail. J promised me this book is complex. He even promised a near-on 'Proustian' beginning. I could not refuse.
And for 220 pages or so, it is insanely complex. The beginning is Proustian, or at least nods its head to the Frenchman, 'When I was a boy my brother David and I had to go to bed early whether we were sleepy or not', and throughout the other novellas I was reminded of countless other books, Darkness at Noon, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn . . . The three novellas collected as The Fifth Head of Cerberus slowly unravel a chilling plot about colonialism. Did the colonisers who go to Saint Anne kill all the aliens there (the shapeshifting abos) or did, as some people believe, the abos kill the colonisers and assume their forms and identities? Even at the end, I was left with so many questions and wanted to begin the text again. The most literary science-fiction I've read in a while. ...more
3.5. So many paradoxical thoughts about this book: on the one hand it has so many fascinating ideas and 'predictions' of the future,75th book of 2024.
3.5. So many paradoxical thoughts about this book: on the one hand it has so many fascinating ideas and 'predictions' of the future, wrapped up in a post-Vietnam (Haldeman was a combat engineer, wounded in action) military science fiction, but equally has some ridiculous ideas (everyone in the future is a homosexual) that are told in bizarre ways and for bizarre reasons and so very American (and therefore, to my Britishness, very corny, in American fashion ('Try me, buddy.')).
The idea of the Forever War is brilliant as it captures the hopelessness and pointlessness of combat. Haldeman supposedly struggled adjusting to civilian life after his service, so the time-dilation in the book (when travelling through space for combat against the Taurans, Mandella doesn't age as much as earth. By the end, he has been fighting for over 1000 years in earth years). The Forever War is in fact 1143 years long. Not forever, but nor was the Hundred Years' War one-hundred years.
I enjoyed a lot of it in a non-intellectual way. That sounds belittling, but I don't read sci-fi for the prose but the ideas, so generally find myself reading more for pleasure than I would normally read something. Alongside some of the stranger ideas in the book, one that surprised me the most was this description, set in the 2020/2030s, so roundabout now,
Some of the new people we'd picked up after Aleph used 'tha, ther, thim' instead of 'he, his, him', for the collective pronoun.
I was startled that he'd even 'predicted' the timeframe.
More important coming from a post-Vietnam America, I think, but nowhere near as affecting or important as other science-fiction classics I've read so far. ...more
Vonnegut was a big part of my early 20s, and I haven't read anything of his for a little while. I used to religiously wear a t-shirt69th book of 2024.
Vonnegut was a big part of my early 20s, and I haven't read anything of his for a little while. I used to religiously wear a t-shirt that had the gravestone on it that read EVERYTHING WAS BEAUTIFUL AND NOTHING HURT. Slaughterhouse-Five shook up what I thought a novel could be or do. And I guess in a way, something of Vonnegut's humour and worldview helped me construct mine as adulthood became something I no longer looked at from afar but was a 'part' of.
After watching Hozier at Finsbury Park, I had some time in the city. I read this cross-legged in Foyles in London the other day. I have a bad habit of reading books in bookshops so I don't have to buy them. It's maybe unethical.
Vonnegut dies a lot in 'controlled near-death experience[s]'. When dead, he goes to the 'blue tunnel' and meets the other men and women who have gone to heaven. There is no hell. So he even meets Hitler up there. It's sometimes hard to know whether we should laugh or not. Hitler says to Vonnegut, "I paid my dues along with everybody else", and that he hopes a 'stone cross, since he was a Christian' be placed on the grounds of the United Nations headquarters in New York, dated '1889-1945', and read, '"Entschuldigen Sie." Roughly translated into English, this comes out, "I Beg Your Pardon," or "Excuse me."'
Mary Shelley, after Vonnegut tells her that people are always calling the monster 'Frankenstein', replies, "That's not so ignorant after all. There are two monsters in my story, not one. And one of them, the scientist, is indeed named Frankenstein."
I did laugh (as in, I didn't laugh at all, but my brain was tickled), when Vonnegut said he was asked to provide some filler and interview someone who is actually alive: 'He is science-fiction writer Kilgore Trout.'
But Vonnegut also chats to Isaac Asimov, Shakespeare, Sir Isaac Newton, and more.
Fun for those who already have a soft spot for old Kurt. ...more
Read for a bookclub back in July. Despite being science-fiction, the noir elements seemed to severely date the text. Gibson's prose72nd book of 2024.
Read for a bookclub back in July. Despite being science-fiction, the noir elements seemed to severely date the text. Gibson's prose was clunky and chockfull of jargon. I didn't find the plot, the characters or the prose remotely desirable. Some of the ideas were fascinating, and reading this after watching so many things that have come from it, most obviously The Matrix, it is hard to ignore its cultural significance... but it's a chore to read. ...more
3.5. This is a back review as I left it unwritten for bookclub purposes. Only two of our quartet enjoyed it (granted, the other two 62nd book of 2024.
3.5. This is a back review as I left it unwritten for bookclub purposes. Only two of our quartet enjoyed it (granted, the other two didn't even finish it). The general difficulty, it seems, is with the style. It took me a while to get into it myself. The style is distant, very telling (we know the whole ‘show don’t tell’ is really a nothing rule), and though it is dealing with very heavy (and therefore, let’s face it, fascinating themes), it reads slow. Eugenides’s use of ‘we’ as the narrator of the book is genius and actually stands out as one of the great things about it for me, even though most of the time the ‘we’ fades from the narrative. But the ‘we’ are the boys of the town, obsessed with the Lisbon girls who, we know from fairly early on in the novel (or even by the title), all kill themselves. It’s a ‘why’ and a ‘when’ book.
Slowly, the suburban American life transforms into nightmares. It reminded me somewhat of McEwan’s debut, The Cement Garden, though I didn’t think much of that when I read it in my first year of university. To the end, I was mostly enjoying it, impressed, but not wholly sold, until I read the last page or two and felt it all rushing to a head, and I put it down feeling disturbed, a little in awe, and realised Eugenides has done something brilliant here.
With some time away from it before writing the review though, my feelings have settled to 3-stars. I'd like to read more of him, regardless....more
Well, here we are again with a 1-star Pulitzer winner, like Demon Copperhead last year. Phillips has written a clunky, mostly boring55th book of 2024.
Well, here we are again with a 1-star Pulitzer winner, like Demon Copperhead last year. Phillips has written a clunky, mostly boring novel, set in a fascinating time period (post-Civil War). It felt like a shoddy Faulkner wannabe. It starts,
I got up in the wagon and Papa set me beside Mama, all of us on the buckboard seat. Hold her hand there, he said to me, like she likes. Sit tight in. Keep her still. I saw him lean down and rope her ankle to his. I was warm because he made me wear my bonnet, to keep my skin fine and my eyes from crinkling at the corners. In case someday I turned out after all. Talk to her, he said. Tell her she'll like it where she's going. A fine great place, like a castle with a tower clock. Tell her.
Many reviews focus on the graphic and longwinded sexual assault/rape scene, but there are plenty of problematic scenes, even right at the end with the most ridiculous, dramatic and excessive climax imaginable. The characters' motives all seemed unbelievable and the writing is transparently trying to be good, and so, comes off false. Coincidentally, in my current Karl Ove Knausgaard volume, he talks about Phillips, along with Bret Easton Ellis, as being the good American authors he likes. I'd never actually heard about her, or this book, till she won.
When she's not trying to be Faulkner (the 'fool' Weed has some perspective chapters that read a bit like crap Benjy imitations), I also saw Crane's influence with the singular war scene. I just find myself frustrated by the whole thing. It felt messy, drawn-out (then very rushed at the end with everything magically falling into place like a romance novel), and tiresome. Weed's chapters, particularly, just felt gratuitous. Not a worthy winner at all....more
These reflections were provoked by the events and debates of the last few years as seen against the background of the twentieth c
43rd book of 2024.
These reflections were provoked by the events and debates of the last few years as seen against the background of the twentieth century, which has become, indeed, as Lenin predicted, a century of wars and revolutions, hence a century of that violence which is currently believed to be their common denominator.
So starts On Violence, which Arendt wrote between 1967-69. Though short, it is riddled with quotations and explorations from a number of other sources, such as Marx, Sartre, Fanon, and Chomsky. Her main line of thought seems to be in detangling the idea that power and violence are synonymous; Arendt believes, on the contrary, they are opposites. I found her idea interesting that violence is the result of failing power*. She does, state however, that violence can destroy power, whilst also being 'incapable of creating it'. In one brilliant portion of the essay, Arendt asks, 'Who are they, this new generation?' and answers her own question with, 'Those who hear ticking'. As Spender calls the future, 'a time-bomb buried'. This is very of its time, post-WW2, and in the middle of the Cold War, but it is true of today too. As she writes on the very first page (partially quoting, too, Harvey Wheeler),
The 'apocalyptic' chess game between the superpowers, that is, between those that move on the highest plane of our civilisation, is being played according to the rule 'if either "wins" it is the end of both'; it is a game that bears no resemblance to whatever war games proceeded it.
An interesting read, though at times a little bogged down with the insistent quoting. The argument could have been tighter, but the last few pages where she begins to conclude some ideas, are worthwhile. Sadly, she also leaves lots unanswered and unexplored. ___________________
*
Rule by sheer violence comes into play where power is being lost; it is precisely the shrinking power of the Russian government, internally and externally, that became manifest in its 'solution' of the Czechoslovak problem - just as it was the shrinking power of European imperialism that became manifest in the alternative between decolonisation and massacre. To substitute violence for power can bring victory, but the price is very high; for it is not only paid by the vanquished, it is also paid by the victor in terms of his own power.
Pure narrative delight. At times like Billy Joel's We Didn't Start the Fire, at others, like Forrest Gump. A freewheeling novel that40th book of 2024.
Pure narrative delight. At times like Billy Joel's We Didn't Start the Fire, at others, like Forrest Gump. A freewheeling novel that jumps through time, multiple storylines, like flash-fiction, multiple places, and complete with many real historical figures appearing briefly as characters: Henry Ford, Emma Goldman, J.P. Morgan, Theodore Dreiser, Sigmund Freud, Emiliano Zapata, and, recurring throughout the whole novel as if a strange motif himself, Harry Houdini. The end of the novel culminates into a kind of revenge plot. And yet, with all its threads, starts and stops, the novel remains compulsively readable. The central fictional family at the centre, made up of simply Father, Mother, Younger Brother, etc., are well-drawn and worthy anchors to the ragtime, indeed, ragged rhythm, around them. I'm certainly a Doctorow fan now. ...more
I've wanted to read Martin Eden for some time, and a colleague recently raved about it, so I finally took it down from my main case 39th book of 2024.
I've wanted to read Martin Eden for some time, and a colleague recently raved about it, so I finally took it down from my main case and began. The plot is simple: an uneducated sailor, Martin, dreams of becoming a famous writer and falls in love with a woman, Ruth, from a bourgeois family. It's a writer's bildungsroman. Anyone who writes, or dreams of writing, would find this a moving and relatable read. As Martin asks himself at one point, '"What does it profit a man to write a whole library and lose his own life?"'
There are many discussions on socialism and art throughout the novel. The introduction makes it clear that London wrote this semi-autobiographical novel as a way of attacking the world he lived in, but instead, made Eden one of his most endearing and ambitious characters.
"But, Martin, if that be so, if all the doors are closed as you have shown so conclusively, how is it possible that any of the great writers ever arrived?" "They arrived by achieving the impossible," he answered. "They did such blazing, glorious work as to burn to ashes those that opposed them. They arrived by course of miracle, by winning a thousand-to-one wager against them. They arrived because they were Carlyle's battle-scarred giants who will not be kept down. And that is what I must do. I must achieve the impossible."
So there is indeed more to London than The Call of the Wild. This is a well-written and well-plotted novel about the plight of all artists, not just writers. It seems in today's society, as much as in London's, there's a certain scorn around budding artists. As Martin Eden in the novel discovers, he was not praised for 'work performed'; when he finished a story, the people around him did not care, and continued to tell him to get a job, but when that same story was later accepted into a magazine: they congratulated him, adored him. The age old battle of the artist and the so-called 'real-world'. A man who lives across from my parents used to baulk at my degree choice of writing and literature and, in so many words, mock me whenever I was visiting home and we met in the street. This same man, on the next occasion, would attempt to impress me by works of classic literature he was reading and adoring. Amazingly, it never occurred to him that these artists he loved (writers, musicians), would never have created the works of art he relied on, had someone like himself been in their lives, stamping on the embers of their passion. One of the great ironies Martin Eden would have attacked. ...more
Three Jewish boys in 1907 Poland are on the road to what could be an imaginary place, Lublin, to sell brushes. They fight, tell joke38th book of 2024.
Three Jewish boys in 1907 Poland are on the road to what could be an imaginary place, Lublin, to sell brushes. They fight, tell jokes, stop for plenty of pisses and stories.
"An alter moid, who needs but cannot find a husband, agrees to meet the most undesirable man in Mezritsh and a date is arranged. The night of the date, there's a knock on the door. When she opens the door, the old spinster sees a man with no arms or legs sitting in an invalid's chair on wheels. "How can I marry you?" she asks, "you have no legs." "Which means I can't run out on you." "You have no arms." "I can't beat you." "But are you still good in bed?" she enquires at last. "I knocked on the door, didn't I?"
'What does a Russian bride get from her husband on her wedding day that's long and hard?' a restored Elya asks his friends. 'A new last name!'
'What do you call a beautiful girl in a Russian town?' Elya is going for two in a row. 'A tourist.'
'A rabbi wanted to try pork,' says Elya. 'He drives his carriage one night to a distant Polish inn and order this forbidden food. And plenty of it. Just as the waiter sets down a whole roast pig with an apple in its mouth, the doors opens and a group of men from his synagogue enter. They stare at the rabbi in disbelief. "What kind of farkakta is this?" the rabbi greets them, throwing up his hands. "You order an apple and this is how they serve it?"
And so on, and on. But for all the jokes, puns, play fights and tomfoolery, a thread of unease runs through the book. Someone else aptly refers to it as "the walking of Godot"; and, it's quite clear, that Wilkinson doesn't want us to feel too comfortable. There are frequent references to the future. And with so much lightheartedness, the darkness at the end of the book feels like the only payoff we should expect. And Wilkinson serves it to us like a roast pig with an apple in its mouth....more
Weirdly, I had a conversation with a colleague of mine the other day about how women eating people seems to be in vogue right now. S37th book of 2024.
Weirdly, I had a conversation with a colleague of mine the other day about how women eating people seems to be in vogue right now. So I waved this book in her face and said, You won't believe it, this is about a woman eating people (she's a zombie!). She replied, "God forbid women have hobbies."
Trust Fitzcarraldo to publish a zombie book. If it's one thing you'd expect never to work, it's zombies. The only writer who has written a zombie book that I can think of, and one of the few writers I trust to write a zombie book, is the inimitable Vladimir Sorokin; but, you know what, de Marcken gives it a good go. This is a "funny", first person narrative about a girl who is a zombie. Her arm falls off in the first line of the book. The world is a wreck, humans run around avoiding zombies and zombies, when they're not hungry, avoid humans.
When I was alive, I imagined something redemptive about the end of the world. I thought it would be a kind of purification. Or at least a simplification. Rectification through reduction. I could picture the empty cities, the reclaimed land. That was the future. This is now. The end of the world looks exactly the way you remember. Don't try to picture the apocalypse. Everything is the same.
There is a horrible moment in the book where the narrator spots a little old lady, alive, going into a little shed. On the other side of an inner wall, the narrator hears a small voice, "I'm hungry." The old lady reassures the little voice before putting a wooden spoon in her mouth and sticking her already-stump of an arm through a sort of cat-flap. The sound of noisy eating commences, and the old lady cries. Her grandson, a zombie, is on the other side of the wall. She is slowly feeding him her arm so he doesn't go hungry....more
A sequel to Less Than Zero, one that, I guess, never needed to be written. I read Ellis's debut years ago and I remember all the mot28th book of 2024.
A sequel to Less Than Zero, one that, I guess, never needed to be written. I read Ellis's debut years ago and I remember all the motifs that get thrown around: "DISAPPEAR HERE" and the horrible gang-rape of a young girl at the end of it, which is referenced at the beginning of this novel. This book was published in 2010, just five years after Lunar Park (2005), and they share many of the same ideas. In this, Clay is now a screenwriter and the start is a bit meta, about the movie adaption of Less Than Zero and how his life was written by someone else. In Lunar Park, a version of Ellis is the main character and he is haunted by Patrick Bateman from American Psycho. Interesting that his books circle the same few characters and events and they all seem to hail from where it all began when Ellis published his first book at 21. And now The Shards, which I read part of, is out too, 13 years after this was published, and returns to an idea that, supposedly, 17-year-old Bret had, but couldn't write. Anyway: Clay is still disillusioned, nihilist. He thinks he's being followed, there's a small cast of characters all somehow connected in his half-baked noir novel. There's a few expected Ellis scenes which are grotesque to read: a torture involving an insane amount of stabbing, tongue cutting-out, and the tying down of a woman who has been drugged and having seizures, raping her, pissing on her, and her eyeball coming out, before finally murdering her. Sometimes I look at the number of Ellis books I've read and wonder Why? What for? But perhaps he's still writing of generations gone, the exaggerated, sexed-up violence of the 80s which he can't seem to escape from. ...more
I wrote a piece on Shelley, Lord Byron and Trelawny in Greece a while ago and did a solid amount of research for it. Most evenings I26th book of 2024.
I wrote a piece on Shelley, Lord Byron and Trelawny in Greece a while ago and did a solid amount of research for it. Most evenings I was trawling through newspaper clippings, through biographies and through what the men themselves had written about that time. I wrote a ridiculous amount of words, mostly amassing to nothing but aimless passion, before stripping it all back to find the heart of what I was saying. When I saw the blurb for Hall's latest novel, a story about motherhood, birth and miscarriage struck alongside Mary Shelley's life, motherhood and miscarriages, I was sold. The second paragraph of the book reads,
Still, however, parts of her story detached themselves from the page and clung to my life. The fact, for instance, that in her later years she recalled that Frankenstein was written in the aftermath of a "waking dream": a "pale student" kneeling beside a creature he'd sewn together. The vision terrified her, she said, so absolutely that she couldn't shake it all through that strange, gloomy summer, the summer of 1816, the year after the fall of the Napoleonic empire, when ash from the volcanic eruption at Mount Tambora had blotted out the sun's light.
And, of course, later on, the famous anecdotes about how Frankenstein came to be, from telling ghosts stories by Lake Geneva with Percy, Byron and Claire.
However, despite Mary's importance in the first part, she fades from the narrative. The descriptions in the middle portion of the book, of labour, miscarriage, bleeding, were incredibly visceral. The passages on childbirth alone were enough for me, as a man, to feel relief and guilt.
Then comes the final long part titled "Science Fiction" in which an old friend of the narrator's, Anna, comes back into her life. Hall showed off a certain skill in the first part but I was sorely disappointed with the final: Anna's past comes to light, her troubles with an abusive ex-boyfriend she tried to "fix", and Hall uses this as a clumsy and obvious parallel to Frankenstein creating his monster and suffering the consequences. She spells it out, frequently. I also began to shake the book furiously at the amount of times she uses the word 'nauseous'; I counted it five times on a two-page spread. Perhaps it is the perfect word for pregnancy, but I couldn't help but think, How did she not realise how jarring it was to be used this many times? So for all my initial excitement, it was a botch job at the end, a baggy and slightly messy book, like, dare I say, bits and pieces sewn together into a monster. ...more
Often regarded as one of the greatest science-fiction books ever written, and recommended by a colleague who has read (it seems) eve27th book of 2024.
Often regarded as one of the greatest science-fiction books ever written, and recommended by a colleague who has read (it seems) every novel ever written, Bester's book left me a little underwhelmed. It's pulpy, rough and jagged. Bester's prose staggers along so there's hardly a pause in the book. It's The Count of Monte Cristo in space, and minus about 900 pages. So there's credit there, that Bester does it in such a short space. And for its publication date in 1956, all the jaunting (teleporting), technology (accelerating time), Solar Wars and whatever else, it is impressive when looking at it with context; but it's aged, it feels lacking. The writing suffers and isn't as strong as other sci-fi writers and generally pulp doesn't interest me anyway. A massively influential book (often hailed as influencing the rise of cyberpunk in the 80s), that has its issues as it ages. Bester also wrote for DC Comics ("He clearly didn't mind slumming it," as my colleague put it), and when he died, left his literary estate and home to his bartender. ...more
This book was my companion last week as I was in Malta with my brother. We walked the usual 20,000+ steps a day when travelling, had23rd book of 2024.
This book was my companion last week as I was in Malta with my brother. We walked the usual 20,000+ steps a day when travelling, had no dinners and instead opted for liquid dinners (big lunch at 3pm, then in the evenings drink local Cisk beer), and woke every morning to the Basilica view our fairly large apartment gave us.
V is far easier to read than the other Pynchon's I've read, save perhaps Vineland. Of course, Gravity's Rainbow remains the most challenging (but at times, the most rewarding). Pynchon's writing here is sometimes exceptional, and he wrote this aged 26. I actually found the Whole Sick Crew and the modern bits a bit gratuitous; I wonder how much is autobiographical or just Pynchon enjoying writing about yo-yoing and getting drunk. The historical bits were more interesting to me, particularly Mondaugen's long story in chapter 9 (which I read almost entirely in Malta International Airport). One of the standouts, as many have already said though, has to be Profane hunting alligators in the sewers and the bit with the priest and the rats. But generally, the same old problems I have with Pynchon persist: there's too much going on, loose threads, too many characters, it's difficult to care about anyone or anything; it is enjoyable at times but a lot of the time, I just felt like he was waffling, even showing off. Alan recently sent me something about Pynchon from James Wood, which I won't quote in its entirety but,
There are pleasure to be had from these amiable, peopled canvases [e.g. Pynchon's novels], and there are passages of great beauty, but, as in farce, the cost to final seriousness is considerable: everyone is ultimately protected from real menace because no one really exists.
And I think I agree with that; as much as I start to enjoy a passage or a chapter of Pynchon, by the end, everything is a wash of silliness, fart jokes, puns and cardboard characters with no true menace or heart. Or he goes the other way, like in Vineland, and made me sick with the heart. Perhaps I'm impossible to please. ...more
4.5. Brilliant novella. Larsen has somehow managed to create this tiny thing out of just a few perfectly balanced scenes. The sort 21st book of 2024.
4.5. Brilliant novella. Larsen has somehow managed to create this tiny thing out of just a few perfectly balanced scenes. The sort of book you read and feel as if you are in the hands of a master, which is astounding as this is only her second novel and the last thing she ever wrote. I read that she worked for some time on a third novel, but nothing came of it. One of the scenes, the sort of centrepiece of the novel, is this genius cobstruction where one of the character's, a white man, discusses and jokes about how much he hates black people, unknowingly, in a room of three "passing" women, one of them being his wife. The dramatic irony is palpable. It's a shame this was probably overshadowed for so long. A fantastic little book....more
My first Limón. I liked the personal poems and the nature, two things I care about myself. I think all good writing is, in essence,16th book of 2024.
My first Limón. I liked the personal poems and the nature, two things I care about myself. I think all good writing is, in essence, autobiographical. Some poems were far better than others, of course. She has a talent for looking at a bird and realising that that bird, or the that moment, reflects something bigger about herself or her experience. One that really struck me was
Joint Custody
Why did I never see it for what it was: abundance? Two families, two different kitchen tables, two sets of rules, two creeks, two highways, two stepparents with their fish tanks or eight-tracks or cigarette smoke or expertise in recipes or reading skills. I cannot reverse it, the record scratched and stopping to that original chaotic track. But let me say, I was taken back and forth on Sundays and it was not easy but I was loved each place. And so I have two brains now. Two entirely different brains. The one that always misses where I'm not, and the one that is so relieved to finally be home.
I also thought highly, particularly, of the beginning of,
The Hurting Kind
I. On the plane I have a dream I've left half my torso on the back porch with my beloved. I have to go
back for it, but it's too late, I'm flying and there's only half of me.
Back in Texas, the flowers I've left on the counter (I stay alone there so the flowers are more than flowers) have wilted and knocked over the glass.
At the funeral parlour with my mother, we are holding her father's suit and she says, He'll swim in these.
For a moment, I'm not sure what she means,
until I realise she means the clothes are too big.
I go with her like a shield in case they try to upsell her the ridiculously ornate urn, the elaborate body box.
It is a nice bathroom in the funeral parlour, so I take the opportunity to change my tampon.
When I come out my mother says, Did you have to change your tampon?
And it seems, all at once, a vulgar life. Or not vulgar, but not simple, either.
Matthew Ted
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Books:
lit-american
(271)
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