|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
my rating |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0679728740
| 9780679728740
| 0679728740
| 3.83
| 50,534
| 1973
| Jun 29, 1993
|
really liked it
|
‘Were there darker provinces of night he would have found them.’ There is a quote by David Foster Wallace that ‘good fiction's job is to comfort the di ‘Were there darker provinces of night he would have found them.’ There is a quote by David Foster Wallace that ‘good fiction's job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.’ Cormac McCarthy’s trim third novel, Child of God, is an optimal example of this sentiment, as it manages to provide the counterparts of the both comfortable and disturbed elements within the reader by offering them an unflinching portrait of baseness and demanding reaction. The short novel chronicles the hellish descent of Lester Ballard into the maelstroms of human depravity, from simple onanistic voyeurism to murder and necrophilia. Yet, McCarthy reminds us that Ballard is ‘a child of God much like yourself perhaps,’ and reminds us of how human we really are. Through sparse and stupendous prose, McCarthy drags the human soul through the mud and muck of this gruesome parable to show us the degradation of humanity when chased into the shadows by isolation and ostracization, showing us wickedness and making us feel,—much to the reader’s discomfort—equal parts disgust and empathy. To open a McCarthy novel is to step into a nightmarish wasteland of the soul built out of breathtaking bricks of penetrating prose. Through language that borders on biblical and flourishes effortlessly like tangled ivy on Greek pillars, McCarthy brings the reader into the dirty dregs of a small Tennessee town and makes them practically smell the damp soil and sweaty backs and gunpowder of the novel. Broken up into three parts, each unique in style and execution, McCarthy unfolds the story of Lester Ballard through the eyes and ears of the locals as well as his omniscient narration. Each voice is a piece of the puzzle to understanding Ballard, fleshing him out by examining him from many angles and views while also constructing a penetrating look at those around him. Child of God is another impressive addition to the American mythology of darkness that McCarthy has built. The story of Lester Ballard is not for the squeamish as McCarthy illuminates his depravity without ever shielding the readers eyes from the disgusting sights. It is what readers of McCarthy have come to expect; McCarthy is an expert in probing the depths of the human soul and rubbing in our faces all the darkest and most disturbing elements the imagination can find down there in the shadows we try to conceal and forget. Ballard does the unthinkable and inexcusable again and again, yet McCarthy does not create him as a flat, pure-evil character. He has much more in store for our souls to digest and wrestle with. Chronicling his life, McCarthy depicts Ballard as a man alienated by his community, chased like a rat into hiding because of his differences and difficulties putting on a normal persona in the world. Ostracized, isolated and with no one to turn to, Ballard has little choice but to give in to his alarmingly abominable ways. Occasionally he is called out of the darkness, some old shed self that came yet from time to time in the name of sanity, a hand to gentle him back from the rim of his disastrous wrathHowever, being so withdrawn and removed from society, the voice of civilized reason is most often lost in the wilderness of wickedness. His criminal acts seem a way he has found to give voice to a sense of impotence and alienation he has felt all his life. 'You ain't even a man. You're just a crazy thing,' a girl says to him. It is easy to just consider him a 'thing', a being removed from us so that we can despise and scorn him without inner-remorse. It keeps us safe from identifying with him, from having to understand him or see life through his eyes. But is he just a 'thing', or is he still a man? We are reminded that Lester Ballard is a ‘child of God’ and not so different from you or I. Those of the religious faith are taught to forgive and love thy brothers and sisters, as we are all cut from the same cloth. Ballard too. And to deny him of this would be to deny God’s word, and this is the skillful and wonderfully ironic moral conundrum McCarthy imposes on the reader. ‘Let he who is free from sin cast the first stone,’ is a statement from the Bible pointing out that we all bear the scars of sin, and can we really judge Ballard without then judging ourselves? Religious or not, this is a quandary that tests our moral judgment and reminds us that all of us are capable of evil. All the bleakness aside, it is hard to not be astounded by McCarthy’s dexterity with prose styling and his way with diction. And, despite the grim context, this is actually quite a darkly comical novel at times. Ballard gets swindled trying to sell watches, bootleggers are too drunk to find their own hiding places, and other sorts of gross yet somehow humorous elements keep the book from being too flatly dark. It is not an ‘enjoyable’ read, yet there is much enjoyment to keep the reader thinking and turning pages. It is short as to not begrudge the reader with too much darkness and entertaining and engaging enough so that most can finish it in a sitting or two. This is a bleak novel with little to nothing in the way of redemption within the book. However, this is because the redemption rests within the reader; can we look into the heart of another man and disregard him as pure evil? Is everything black or white or can we feel pity even for those who are the epitome of depravity. Lester Ballard is chased from society, eventually having to hide in caves like a wild beast or a descent into hell, and we must question if he is just an evil man or a product of his circumstances. This isn’t to say that he is to be cleared of his crimes, but it does make an interesting point about humanity. I was glad to have read this book on a bright sunny day beside a case of fine IPAs, which lasted the duration of reading this book, as the novel left me feeling cold and hard and hollow on the inside. Child of God might be my least favorite of McCarthy's novels (Suttree toping my list), but it still packs a wallop of a punch. Bleak and brutal, yet darkly funny, this book is not for everyone. But if you are willing to stare into the eyes of darkness and voyage into the deepest recesses of the human heart, McCarthy is the ideal tour guide. 4/5 ‘What sort of meanness have you got laid out for next.’ [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
not set
|
Nov 19, 2014
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 1564785734
| 9781564785732
| 1564785734
| 3.68
| 3,575
| 2003
| Sep 16, 2010
|
really liked it
|
**Huge congrats to Jon Fosse for being awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature!** ‘what ties two people together?’ I’m always on the lookout for a no **Huge congrats to Jon Fosse for being awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature!** ‘what ties two people together?’ I’m always on the lookout for a novella that can pack an enormous emotional and intellectual sting into a tiny package of few pages. Jon Fosse’s Aliss at the Fire is certainly a rewarding book of this sort, and the reader is left in awe at the enormous landscape of thought and emotive power that stands before them as Fosse reaches his surreal, efficacious conclusion. While the ‘reality’ of the book consists only of Signe, an elderly widow, lying on a bench in 2002 after looking out over the fjord that swallowed her husband, Asle, back in 1979, the brilliant metaphysical qualities of this novella open a kaleidoscopic world dancing before Signe’s eyes that bring past and present together, ironing out the wrinkles of time, to allow the dead and the living to comingle in order to grant Signe, and the reader, a painfully insightful look into Asle’s grim family legacy. Told in a long, swirling sentence full of a repetitive cadence that gives language the feel of waves crashing upon the shore, Fosse crafts a microscopic meditation of family and loss that explodes with a prodigious impact through the dazzling, yet haunting mental images that are sure to enchant the mind’s eye. Jon Fosse is a highly regarded novelist and dramatist in his home country, so much so that he was awarded a lifetime stipend from the Norwegian government to continue his literary career. There is such a wonderfully haunting visual nature to Aliss that hints at his talents as a playwright; Fosse perfectly constructs his scenes with deft attention to spatial and surreal visual details that spring such a flawless mental image that I recall the book in retrospect more as something I’ve viewed than read. Brevity is Fosse’s true talent as he dives right to the core of human suffering and resurfaces in only 107pgs with a fist-full of truths that are sure to weigh heavy on the readers mind for days and weeks to come, and the book seems ripe for a one-act stage play. The dialogue, though sparse, is crisp and witty, and rather humorous for a novella of such heavy themes, and feels perfect to be heard echoing from a stage. It is no surprise that he is often compared to Henrik Ibsen, and, as I am yet unaquianted with Ibsen (I use Hamsun’s disdain for Ibsen as my scapegoat for this blatent reading inadequacy), the surreal and hallucinatory nature of Aliss conjure up memories of Sartre’s one-act plays we studied during my undergrad days¹. What a haunting play it would be, giving physical form to the hypnotic words upon the page much like Asle’s family members back through generations given form in the modern day to relive out their past, aquatic tragedies while a young Signe stares out the window awaiting a husband who will never return and an aging Signe lies upon a bench in grief and horror at the waking nightmares that assail her each night. whether he notices it and thinks about it or not the walls are there, and it is as if silent voices are speaking from them, as if a big tongue is there in the walls and this tongue is saying something that can never be said with words, he knows it, he thinks, and what it’s saying is something behind the words that are usually said, something in the wall’s tongue…Signe lives in a house formerly occupied by her late husbands generations stretching back deep into time, and her grief has unlocked their tragedies, unstuck them from time. Fosse expertly pulls the reader through her consciousness as she relives the final moments with her husband, then allows the dead to dance about the fjord and house as the reader and Signe witness a family history forever linked to the fjord—a source of life, as it is full of fish to feed a family and provide a modest living as a fisherman, and death. Aliss, the great-great-grandmother of Signe’s Asle, must rescue her infant son from the icy waters so he may live to foster an Asle that will drown on his seventh birthday in the same waters that Signe’s Asle will perish in years later. Fosse’s fiction is reminiscent of the American Southern Gothic where the past is forever lurking in the peripheries to cast its mighty hand upon the fates of the present. It is actions, the unspoken, that speak the loudest, that echo eternally in the rotting wood of Signe’s home, speaking volumes of torment and grief with each creak brought on by the icy northern winds that toss boats upon the waves. The repetition of events and ideas, two souls snuffed out beneath the frigid waters, or Aliss’ fire (rife with pagan imagery) recalled by the mid-summer festivities when Signe allowed two youthful boys to burn the late Asle’s boat washed up and neglected upon the shore, crash repeatedly on the shore of the readers mind, demanding a connection to ascribe meaning in the void of existence. As if the remembrance of these untimely deaths could validate their ever being here, to resurrect their memory in an eternal flame in the darkness of eternity. but it’s big, the fire, and pretty, the yellow and red flames in the darkness, in this cold, and in the light from the fire he sees the waves of the fjord beat like always against the stones of the shore…As with most Norwegian literature, nature is a primary character, lurking in the shadows as the reader trains their eyes upon the flesh-and-blood characters, but holding the true power and control over their lives and stories. Aliss is kept dismal and dreary with constant imagery of cold and dark. It is interesting that Asle vanishes into the darkness while wearing a black sweater knit by Signe herself. he is standing and looking out into the darkness, with his long black hair, and in his black seater, the sweater she knit herself and that he almost always wears when it’s cold, he is standing there, she thinks, and he is almost at one with the darkness outside, she thinks, yes he is so at one with the darkness that when she opened the door and looked in she didn’t notice at first that he was standing there…Perhaps part of Signe’s torment is a belief that she herself cast her husband into the darkness, cloaked him with it not only physically with the sweater, but through the distance between them. It is hinted that Asle returns to his doomed vessel in order to avoid Signe’s form standing waiting at the window. It is the absence of a woman’s immediate care that causes each tragedy: Aliss is tending to the roasting sheep’s head when her son runs into the water, young Asle drowns when his mother is not watching, and Signe’s Asle drowns when he leaves to, as is hinted, avoid her. Everything moves in waves and cycles. Fosse wields language much in the same way as his cycle of motifs. He is fond of repetition, cycling through several ideas multiple times before moving forward, with each repeated phrase coming crashing back like another wave. It would be interesting to hear this read out-loud, especially in it’s original language as I wouldn’t be able to understand it, but would hear the repetition rolling back in and out. It is almost like a miniature chorus or a repeated phrase of music, over and over, harmonizing with what is present and what is to come yet always pulling us back to what has been. The repetition can be, however, rather grating on the reader and was, for me at least, initially repelling. It is as if forward progress is stifled at times, or like trying to drive fast in too low a gear, yet it is really Fosse trying to best understand an idea that is before us. Like a child first learning their bearings in the world, he takes an idea and turns it over again and again, viewing it from all angles and leaving nothing untouched so as to properly project a fully defined message. He has a few other linguistic quirks that assist him in his goals, yet could easily, and understandably so, be frustrating or annoying to a reader. Aliss has this really fascinating ability to seamlessly transition between characters, usually from Signe into her husband’s perspective and back. However, the voice of the narration never changes, leading the reader to believe that it is one perspective that attaches itself to another, or at least to it’s notion of what another perspective might be perceiving. The lack of periods in the novella’s punctuation lends assistance to building this feel. The conclusion to Aliss is especially haunting, as Fosse drops a heavy, burden of a final statement into the readers hearts and souls, then leaves it open without a period, as if the story is to now flow into the reader, as if the weight is now transferred onto them to carry and come to grips with in the days to come. It is only in the first and final lines (to say sentences does not make sense with the structure of this work) that Fosse mentions an ‘I’, and while the conclusion connects many dots, the elusive ‘I’ only brings more questions to the table. Aliss at the Fire is a heart-wrenching meditation on loss and family legacy that really comes alive with the hypnotic and haunting visual imagery created by the compression of time. It is not for the faint of heart, both with the poetic style that borders on both genius and annoying, but for the weighty conclusions and difficult truths the reader is faced with. Time is no comfort to the broken hearted here, but only a long line carrying a monstrous baggage that will continually beleaguer the broken hearted. This is a book best examined in hind-sight, making it one that I feel requires patience and willingness from the reader to appreciate. Truth be told, I did not particularly enjoy reading it until the final third of the book, however, I feel that a book cannot be adequately judged until it is viewed in it’s entirety, as a completed portrait, and passing judgment before the final unveiling would be a grave misgiving. I had intended to only give this three stars until writing this review made me realize a few things about the book I hadn’t thought of. It is a book that, while being a bit cumbersome, really comes together once you’ve allowed it to properly cook and simmer and be enjoyed with its full flavor. Jon Fosse is a marvelous writer with a sense of style not commonly found, and once you’ve attuned yourself to it, there are fantastic things to be discovered. Aliss at the Fire, with all it’s loss, grief and frozen landscapes, is a brutally savage package of emotional and intellectual power that is haunting to the core. 3.78/5 ‘and the darkness outside the window was black and he was almost impossible to tell apart from the darkness out there, or else the darkness out there was almost impossible to tell apart from him, that’s how she remembers him, that’s how it was…’ ¹ Fun fact: Sarte wrote one-act plays so the audience could view a stage performance yet still have time to get home in before the curfew enforced by the German occupation. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Oct 07, 2013
|
not set
|
Oct 07, 2013
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0393311465
| 9780393311464
| 0393311465
| 3.78
| 5,692
| 1934
| Apr 17, 1994
|
really liked it
|
‘They watch you, their faces like masks, set in the eternal grimace of disapproval.’ While a first love can be a period of intensely effervescent emoti ‘They watch you, their faces like masks, set in the eternal grimace of disapproval.’ While a first love can be a period of intensely effervescent emotion and passion, the decline and death of the ill-fated romance is often a harrowing and hellish plunge into the darkness of pain and sorrow. Jean Rhys impeccable Voyage in the Dark chronicles such a descent, or tragic voyage, through the rise and fall of Anna Morgan’s love affair with a wealthy Englishman. Anna, coming from the West Indies and working as a chorus girl across England—much like Rhys herself, whose own experiences illuminate this emotionally charged novel—has her beautiful and youthful innocents trampled upon by the misogynistic society of men who willfully takes advantage of her to fulfill their carnal lusts. She must stay strong and keep her head above water by accepting the money her late-night lovers pass her way, as the often-married men mistake financial support as a morally acceptable compensation for the responsibility they have no intentions of shouldering. Through her elegantly executed juxtaposition of England and the West Indies, as well as gender relations, Rhys creates a cutting compounded metaphor of English imperialism and misogyny that exposes the hardships a poor, young woman must face in a society that views them as nothing but material goods to be plundered and discarded while they struggle to etch out their own identity. The first draft of Voyage in the Dark predates Rhys first two published novels, yet it wasn’t until she found herself alone in Paris with her first husband behind bars that she began to rework the novel with editor Ford Madox Ford (whom she would have an affair with for several years). She disliked how the novel came out and set it aside, releasing it almost ten years later in 1934. Written early in her life, Voyage carries the weight of her own experience and features a protagonist not unlike Rhys herself. What is most striking about the book, however, is her subtle and perfect prose that rings out so crisp, clear and caustic without calling much attention to itself. There is a brilliant beauty in her concisely incisive observations of social class and others telling mannerisms that really bring the novel to life, as well as her finely-tuned ear for speech patterns. Each character seems to be heard through the ears and instead of read through the eyes, and the speech patterns, as well as the way a character carries themselves, are extremely telling to the sort of person they are. She had…an English lady’s voice with a sharp cutting edge to it. Now that I’ve spoken you can hear that I’m a lady. I have spoken and I suppose you now realize that I’m an English gentlewoman. I have my doubts about you. Speak up and I will place you at once. Speak up, for I fear the worst. That sort of voice.Rhys enacts a prose style that exquisitely breaks into a sort of stream-of-consciousness, imposing Anna’s subconscious into the narrative in a way that often recalls her warm past on the island and wonderfully represents the way her present cannot accommodate her past, leaving her torn, conflicted and imminently alienated. his is England Hester said and I watched it through the train-window divided into squares like pocket-handkerchiefs; a small tidy look it had everywhere fenced off from everywhere else—what are those things—those are haystacks—oh are those haystacks—I had read about England ever since I could read—smaller meaner everything is never mind—this is London—hundreds thousands of white people white people rushing along and the dark houses all frowning down one after the other all alike all stuck together—the streets like smooth shut-in ravines and the dark houses frowning down—oh I’m not going to like this place I’m not going to like this place I’m not going to like this place…Anna’s past in the Caribbean is always remembered as a period of warmth and love, fresh with colour and life (‘Amd the sky close to the earth. Hard, blue and close to the earth. The mango tree was so big that all the garden was in its shadow…’), which is constantly contrasted with the Anna’s view of England as cold, grey and deathly. She is frequently falling ill and misses the warmth of her childhood, the warmth of innocence and naivety. Childhood is looked at as simplistic and preferable to the hardships and cruelty of adulthood, the years when family are loving caregivers that in adulthood turn their backs on account of money, where mistakes are easily corrected and forgiven, and when the world seems a ripe fruit to be picked, tasted and enjoyed. England is the bitterness of reality, where love is fleeting or false and the sweetness of life is either rotten or far beyond reach, where Anna must come to grips that she is of the lower class, ‘the ones without the money, the ones with beastly lives.’ The cold grey streets of England are where Anna must face the grim realities of gender roles in a prejudiced, misogynistic society where there are those who have and those who need and grieve. Women are denied means to support themselves without having much access to work or wealth and thereby are stuck needing to rely on a man to supply them with money and stability and, if they are lucky enough, love that lingers beyond the youthful moments of lust. It makes clear what Simone de Beauvoir means when she wrote that access to financial gain is imperative for women’s liberation. Anna is surrounded by women with ideas of how a woman should behave, most of them involving methods to convince a man into marriage (or at least becoming a kept mistress with financial stability being more valued than romance anyways), viewing men as their Caribbean sun to keep them warm into their twilight years. The harsh reality of her position is made no more clear than the frantic cries of her employer late in the novel as she begs Anna to see her predicament as a single and aging women who must wrangle up money while she can lest she face the cruelest of fates. Voyage in the Dark is filled with rampant misogyny and delivers a powerfully depressing image of men viewing women as nothing but material goods. ‘It's funny,’ Anna’s lover has the audacity to tell her, ‘have you ever thought that a girl's clothes cost more than the girl inside them?’ Anna’s offers her entire existence to a man that is clearly no good for her, pinning her emotional and psychological well-being on his acceptance, to a man that only views her as transitory goods. ‘=The light and the sky and the shadows and the houses and the people—all parts of the dream all fitting in and all against me. But there were other times when a fine day, or music, or looking in the glass and thinking I was pretty, made me start again imagining that there was nothing I couldn’t do, nothing I couldn’t become. Imagining God knows what.When she is loved, she is eternal, empowered, and invincible, but when he leaves, as he inevitably will, she faces a descent into a darkness that she had never thought possible. These men that seek her and her peers hands are men of stature, often already married, that only wish for a fling and are willing to support them financially afterword to avoid a scene. Anna must face a world in England where love is false, where everything is cold, and where any hope of the opposite, anything that would fulfill her desires for her past, is merely a façade. ‘The bed was soft, the pillow was as cold as ice…. The fire was like a painted fire; no warmth came from it.’ While we as the reader can grasp at the beauty in Anna’s heart, her silence and innocence leads those around her to see her as stupid, somehow validating their deception of her. It becomes painful to witness her decline, mistaking lust for love and not recognizing that she is a mere commodity, being paid and adorned in fancy dress in exchange for her satisfying sexual thirsts. Anna’s plight as a woman objectified under a patriarchal society becomes an expression of English imperialism. Often there are passages reflecting on her childhood that align with the most impactful examples of misogynistic policing. She, as a woman in English society, is much like the black population kept as chattel back home; Anna’s former home being an English colony viewed more as a financial tally on account books than a place full of people living, breathing and dreaming. Voyage begins to reveal itself as a spiteful commentary on imperialism as well as social and gender roles, becoming a powerful fist of rebellion against all those who would belittle and tower over another human being for any reason, be it gender, race, religion, etc. Innocence becomes a period of social and cultural blindness, when she is unaware of the reasons why her family dislikes her kinship with the black house girl, and adulthood becomes a cold barren wasteland when the blindfold is released and the soul must take in and accept all the horrors of reality. How can Anna carry on and carve her place in the world, create her own identity, in a world set on viewing her as a commodity? The stream-of-conscious style adopted by Rhys becomes a perfect method of highlighting her conflicted mind, seeming almost like a descent into madness as she finds her experiences of the world and her youthful impression of the world to be totally and painfully incongruous. Voyage in the Dark’ was a fantastic and emotionally stimulating introduction into the works of the fabulous Jean Rhys, and author I have every intention of pursuing until I’ve drunk every last word. She employed a wonderfully simplistic, yet exceptionally poetic style that cuts directly to the heart of matters, wasting not a single word to expose the deepest depths of human emotion. While brief, it is a novel that will stick with you for long after, and will dredge up those painful memories of loss in love, yet allow you to examine them along with Anna in a way that make you thankful for having experienced them simply because you can now understand how they made you the person you are today and simply for reminding you that you are a beautiful human being full of life, love, sorrow, rage and that we all must play our part in the human comedy. There is a strong urge for equality and respect for woman that call to mind beloved authors such as Virginia Woolf, whose book title The Voyage Out partially inspired this ones. Jean Rhys is an author not to be missed, and goes down great with a bottle of dark red wine. 4.5/5 ‘There's fear, of course, with everybody. But now it had grown, it had grown gigantic; it filled me and it filled the whole world.’ [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Sep 25, 2013
|
Oct 27, 2013
|
Sep 25, 2013
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0374114455
| 9780374114459
| 0374114455
| 3.73
| 9,225
| 2003
| Apr 28, 2013
|
really liked it
|
'I have seen the universe, it is made of poems.' ‘All things change—nothing perishes.’ – Ovid It always astonishes me when a book can create a vast amou 'I have seen the universe, it is made of poems.' ‘All things change—nothing perishes.’ – Ovid It always astonishes me when a book can create a vast amount of power and meaning out of such little story and length. Set amid the snow and ice of an Icelandic winter, Sjón’s The Blue Fox, winner of the 2005 Nordic Council Literature Prize, is as still and quiet as a coffin yet holds a horrific truth inside. Sjón masterfully laces two stories together, one of Reverend Baldur’s fateful hunt for a blue fox and the other looping through the life of Fridrik Fridjónsson as he must bury a young girl whom he has been caring for, crisscrossing across space and time like a shoelace looping upward on a boot; what appears as two separate ideas stringing themselves together is really two ends of the same bootlace working towards a purpose far greater than itself. With succinct prose that is both serene and sinister, The Blue Fox is an impressive interlacing of lives, as well as fables and reality, that dredge up the dark recesses of the human heart. The sun warms the man’s white body, and the snow, melting with a diffident creaking, passes for birdsong.The lyrical ecstasy that was only hinted at in The Whispering Muse is displayed in all it’s poetic glory in this earlier (2004) novel by Icelandic author Sjón. Gently building to the heights of a lyrical epic as each word gracefully falls with the next like a winter’s snowfall, Sjón’s prose is as sparse, crisp and still as the icy landscapes depicted within. Yet underneath the chilling beauty is a volatile darkness that can strike as suddenly and violently as the avalanche triggered by the Reverend's gun. Adorned in the breathtaking prose is a bleak tale of abuse that blankets a young girl with down syndrome all the way to the grave, and the heavy burden that Fridrik shoulders as he is unable to turn a blind eye to her suffering. It is the innocent that suffer the most, and often at the hands of self-righteous figures that lurk behind a façade of faithfulness and civility. The grim plot that is sewn together through luring language further emphasizes Sjón’s signature ability to seamlessly knot reality and myth together to create a lucid world of magical realism. There is a fable-like quality to the novel that allows the moral musings to hover in a near-fantastical state in order to be better examined, and also opens the novel up interpretation. The myths and fables of the past are right at home with the 1880’s setting, yet the novel itself conveys the feel of our modern day literature. Each of the four sections of the novel are delivered in their own unique style of form, and Sjón threads back and forth across Fridrik’s timeline to execute his control over the revealing of his and Abba’s history—using the places where Fridrik’s history brushes against the Reverend’s as the method of providing the minimal backstory of Reverend Baldur—all of which reaches towards the direction of post-modernism. Here we have a perfect blend of the past and present, with Sjón looking to the myths and fables as a way of providing the groundwork for modern literature, accepting the modern era without rejecting the past, shown through the Reverend’s debate with the fox on God and electricity. The Reverend is against the idea of electricity, made up of ‘atoms of the world, which form the kernel of God’, being sent by wires into every home and business to drive machines. To which the fox responds: But if electricity is the building material of the world, and light its revelation, compare the first book of Moses, and God himself is a being of light, though perhaps we can’t see this with the naked eye—like the pitch-black rock that surrounds us—well, couldn’t you say then that in reality it is one all-embracing world mission to bring God into people’s homes via electric power lines; even illuminate whole cities with him— n'est-ce pas?Why must modernization mean the destruction of the old? ‘Surely the transmission of electric power ought to be desirable in the eyes of the Church, and its servants, if it is the Almighty Himself who shines in the lamps?’ The Blue Fox, set in a time of modernization, is a call to keep the stories of old alive in our hearts, and in our literature. A quick aside, if I may. When reviewing The Whispering Muse, I discussed that I had detected an intentional use of misogyny, which may have been a statement on the treatment of women in mythology. I found it interesting that this novel featured the sole female role as the victim of abuse at the hands of men, and that it is a male character that attempts to be her redeemer. While this may seem to be playing into misogynistic beliefs at first glance, it is important to note that those who abuse are punished and are fated to become trapped in fables themselves. What had seemed in Muse as a call to ‘rewrite the myths’, as Adrienne Rich put it, seems applicable here as well. We are all human, we are all equals, and deserve to be treated as such regardless of gender, race, beliefs, etc. It is those that violate this that create the grimness in the world, and it is in fable that we find the proper punishment for them—punishments befitting the crimes in order to tow the moral lesson along as it sets the world in balance. As I said before, I may be looking into this too hard, but it is worth considering. While The Blue Fox is not a novel that hits the reader over the head with brilliance (it does, however, tug fiercely at the heartstrings), it is one that weaves into the readers heart and mind and stays there for days begging to be unraveled in order to reveal it’s secrets. Each word feels so polished and perfect as it slowly constructs an immense, foreboding landscape of snow and mystery—immense despite the tiny 115pg package through which it is delivered. Sjón has created something truly magical here that does justice to the literary tradition of fables and myths to which he pays homage to. Powerfully succinct, The Blue Fox is an exquisite blend of myth and reality with a bite to it like the bitter winter winds. 4.5/5 ‘But the closer the priest came to his goal, the less man there was in him, the more beast.’ [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
not set
|
Jun 25, 2013
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0720612683
| 9780720612684
| 0720612683
| 3.66
| 10,160
| 1967
| Jul 01, 2016
|
it was amazing
|
‘I was afraid the dream might turn out to be real…. Something in her demanded victimization and terror, so she corrupted my dreams, led me into dark p
‘I was afraid the dream might turn out to be real…. Something in her demanded victimization and terror, so she corrupted my dreams, led me into dark places I had no wish to explore. It was no longer clear to me which of us was the victim. Perhaps we were victims of one another. Stunningly surreal and chilling, Anna Kavan’s final novel, Ice, is a frightening plunge into the icy darkness of the human mind and heart. Written with a fitful urgency, the reader flows on the glimmering prose across swirling imagery of desolate landscapes beset by an impending apocalypse, as the narrator continuously pursues a woman known only as ‘the girl’ while struggling to anchor himself to the elusive, ever-deteriorating reality. Through spiraling hallucinations and indefinite descriptions, reality becomes nothing but a translucent veil giving shape to the real violent and grim truths that exist only in abstraction. The blurring of reality and unreality that occurs gives these sinister abstractions a staging ground to take form within in order to explore the otherwise unspeakable darkness that leads people to make victims of one another. Nothing in Ice is ever certain or concrete. Characters are not given names and reality is only tasted in fleeting moments, ‘but only as on might recall and incident from a dream.’ Told through the tormented mind of a narrator who—within the first 10 pages—openly admits to suffering from daytime hallucinations, the reader is forced to be led by the hand through this menacing novel by someone they cannot fully trust. Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado and his use of the unreliable narrator immediately come to mind through this narrators vague descriptions and elusive explanations to his afflictions, much like the intentionally unspecified ‘thousand injuries’ in Poe. There is, for instance his explanation of the girl: ‘Systematic bullying when she was most vulnerable had distorted the structure of her personality, made a victim of her, to be destroyed, either by things or by human beings…. It made no difference, in any case she could not escape.’ ¹ Despite being alluded that it was a cruel, obdurate mother that inflicted such psychological injury, there is nothing to ground this to reality and justify his claims. We have only his observations of the girl, much of which may be distorted and our own impression is further distorted as we observe her already believing it to be true and using our glimpses to justify our pre-disposed conclusion instead of constructing our own. The same goes for the slowly creeping apocalypse, a wall of ice ‘marching in relentless order across the world, crushing, obliterating, destroying everything in their path’, the consequence of constant world wars which lead to this new ice age. However, the science behind the ice is only vaguely surmised, more as if playing at a guess, and the reader is occasionally reminded that ‘no reliable source of information existed’. Kavan uses repetition to its glorious, full potential, constantly reminding us of the vague premises to reinforce their believability and tricking us to perceive something formless as concrete. The elusive nature of the novel serves a secondary purpose beyond misdirection, as it allows the reader to experience the story and settings exactly as the narrator sees and comprehends them. The landscapes and the narrative are co-dependent metaphors of one another. ’There were many small islands, some of which floated up and became clouds, while formations of cloud or mist descended and anchored themselves in the sea. The white snowy landscape below, and above the canopy of misty white light, the effect of an oriental painting, nothing solid about it. The town appeared to consist of ruins, collapsing on one another in shapeless disorder, a town of sandcastles, wrecked by the tide’The narrators own fractured mind controls our sense of time and reality, and often, and without warning, we are sent into some unreality, some brief fantasy and then dropped back into the plot as if nothing had occurred. ‘The hallucination of one moment did not fit the reality of the next,’ our narrator reflects, ‘I had a curious feeling that I was living on several planes simultaneously; the overlapping was confusing’. As the novel progresses the seamless hallucination sequences aren’t as obvious, and the novel suddenly drives forward at break-neck pace taking us through spy-dramas, courtroom scenes, war-stories and other edge-of-your-seat escape stories that we must ingest whole and wonder where the fantasy and reality may have blurred. Tiny hints of obvious unreality present themselves occasionally, such as producing a ‘foreign automatic weapon’ when one wasn’t present earlier, however, the all we can truly do is hold on tight and enjoy the thrill-ride. Time itself is subject to the narrators own distorted mind, as events are mentioned that he once observed that could not have occurred within the boundaries of time presented in the scenes, and the positioning of the opening scenes is a bit cumbersome to place along the timeline. The narrative almost feels cyclical at times. There are many different methods of addressing these incongruities depending on how the reader interprets the novel, yet it would appear that nothing in the book aims towards one certain conclusion or meaning. Instead, Kavan seems to write to give a wide interpretability because the real issues at play are very abstract and intangible, and it appears she would prefer to keep them that way in order to allot them their full force. Ultimately, depriving the reader of lucidness and conclusiveness brings the uncomfortable, uncertain tone of the novel to life. The surrealist qualities are elevated to near maddening proportions by taking any safe-guards away from the reader and forcing them to grasp desperately at the intangibles. Brick by brick, Kavan builds only one certainty in this novel – the destructive powers of man. ‘An insane impatience for death was driving mankind to a second suicide, even before the full effect of the first had been felt.. Each scene and setting is beleaguered by references to wars past and present, ‘everywhere the ubiquitous ruins, decayed fortifications, evidences of a warlike bloodthirsty past’, and the encroaching ice and it is always at the forefront of the mind that the world is in a perpetual state of violence. This violence is said to be the cause of the icy apocalypse, a world collapsing both figuratively and literally due to mans ‘collective death-wish, the fatal impulse to self-destruction’. Even the response to destruction is more destruction as wars rage on in increasing intensity to match coming end. ‘By making war we asserted the fact that we were alive and opposed the icy death creeping over the globe,’ we are told, the narrator not missing out on the obvious ironies. He looks at the actions of those around him with disgust and dismay, saddened when encountering a violent brute of a man as being ‘the kind of man who was wanted now’ and placing himself in league with a civilized, admirable man that is brutally murdered for no reason saying he ‘was my sort of man, we were not like that rabble’ to distance himself from the bleak violence. Yet, he knows he cannot escape it and is constantly drawn towards the fighting, joining the army for a time believing he ‘was involved with the fate of the planet, I had to take an active part in whatever was going on’. The narrator’s method of misdirection leads one to wonder where his loyalty and morality really lies*. The war-torn, doomed world is a mere backdrop for the evils that play out within arms reach of the narrator as he embarks on his crusade for the girl. ‘I was totally absorbed in that obsessional need, as for a lost, essential portion of my own being,’ he admits, ‘Everything else in the world seemed immaterial’. The real heart of this novel is the relationship with the girl, and the narrator freely declares the world around him as questionable, as a mere veil of reality where he must conduct his search. While the universal message of destruction and more powerful groups such as the warring armies victimizing one another is chilling, Kavan directs us to the more poignant and disturbing victimization one person can inflict upon another, especially one they love. The interplay between the male characters of the husband, the warden, the narrator and their experiences with the girl show an alarming portrait of obsessive, sadistic possession. The girl ceases to be considered an equal human and becomes nothing more than chattel. ‘It was clear that he regarded her as his property. I considered that she belonged to me. Between the two of us she was reduced to nothing her only function might have been to link us together.’These malignant pleasures of victimization are at the core of each scene, real or unreal, and illustrated through the vibrant imagery of each stark landscape which Kavan paints with her words. ‘All of this was happening, but with a quality of the unreal; it was reality happening in quite a different way.’ The surreal plotline becomes a place for her abstract ideas to flicker in and out of physical form but their malevolent nature is too poisonous to exist in glaring reality so reality must fold up and falter in order for them to truly rear their ugly heads. Hallucinations occur so we can look them in the face and make sense out of non-sense, horrific ideas are structured in a way to make them tangible enough to process. The narrator himself cannot even fathom his own depravity, and suffers from unrealities, or projects them onto others because he cannot face the blinding truth². Kavan presents a humanity that deserves the destruction that it receives, and this is the most horrific aspect of the novel. It makes one wonder if they are blind to their own moral deformities, conditioned to accept them as normal because we are so able to rationalize and gloss over the troubling aspects of ourselves. One must question if they are actually some damnable beast writhing in their own bile yet thinking it smells of roses and projecting onto society and those around them their own personal iniquity. What else is truly alarming is the way the victims become conditioned to accept these monstrosities, playing right into the degredation and violence. Kavan seems to admonish this behavior, creating a borderless world of victimization that damns both parties. ’In the delirium of the dance, it was impossible to distinguish between the violent and the victims. Anyway, distinction no longer mattered in a dance of death, where all dancers spun on the edge of nothingness.’It isn’t so much an attack on the victim, as it is an attack on the ways it is so easy to succumb to behavior that can make oneself into a villain. Anna Kavan was known for these startling perspectives on humanity. Her own life is a fascinating story. Born Helen Woods in what was assumed to be Cannes in 1901, she changed her name to Anna Kavan while institutionalized after a nervous breakdown following the end of her second marriage. The name Anna Kavan, the protagonist of her 1930 novel Let Me Alone, brought with it a new personality and writing style. Beyond suffering from mental illness, she was a lifelong heroin addict³. She died in 1968 of heart failure not long after this novel was published, but before dying she burnt all her diaries, correspondence and other links into her private life to ensure that she would become ‘one of the world’s best-kept secrets’. This fascinating woman had an incredible knack for prose and a sharp, disturbing insight into human nature. For readers interested in further insight into Kavan herself, they will be pleased to know that many of her books contain thinly-fictionalized biographical elements. Books like Asylum Piece cover her mental states and time spent in the asylum, Sleep Has His House hints at her sorrowful childhood, and her addiction to heroin and her open disgust of humanity is unapologetically broadcast in her short story collection Julia and the Bazooka. This novel is one of the most unique and engrossing literary events I have encountered. To give it a genre would cheapen the novel, as it both is and isn’t science fiction and horror, being a work of literature as elusive as its own narrative. The prose will surround and penetrate your heart much like the wall of ice in the novel as it builds the gorgeously surreal images to dazzle your mind. The subject matter, and the tone, is bleak and chilling, and exposes a violently disturbing vision of humanity, yet it is a book that you want to hug tightly as you race through the streets yelling to everyone that they should read it. As menacing as a nightmare, yet as soothing as a pleasant daydream, this book scratches an itch that few other books have been able to reach. 4.5/5 ‘I was oppressed by the sense of universal strangeness, by the chill of approaching catastrophe, the menace of ruins suspended above; and also by the enormity of what had been done, the weight of collective guilt. A frightful crime had been committed, against nature, against the universe, against life. By rejecting life, man had destroyed the immemorial order, destroyed the world; now everything was about to crash down in ruins.’ ¹ The girl, ‘forced since childhood into a victim’s patter of thought and behavior’, is here further victimized by her lack of name. Although ‘woman’ would be a more age-appropriate term for her, the usage of ‘girl’ is delivered with an extremely negative connotation that implies her as weak, a fragile and innocent ‘glass girl’ with no will of her own. Her physical appearance, pale and frail, is also used to highlight her weak and innocent nature, making the narrators own personal ‘indescribable pleasure from seeing her suffer’ all the more sadistic despite his own assertion that ‘I disapproved of my own callousness, but there it was. Various factors had combined to produce it, though they were not extenuating circumstances’. It would appear the narrator is trying to be upfront (this admission coming right at the beginning of the novel) to gloss over his sadism, but reflection on his word choices reveals the residue of the disturbing truths he is attempting to misdirect the reader from. ² (view spoiler)[It is debatable, but there is strong evidence to indicate that the warden and the narrator are one and the same person. There are moments of half-clarity when the narrator recognizes his own denial and notices the inconsistencies in his fantasy. ‘I seemed to be looking at my own reflexion [sic]. Suddenly I was entangled in utmost confusion about which of us was which, We were like halves of one being, joined in some mysterious symbiosis. I fought to retain my identity.’ The husband may very well be the same character as well. In the introduction, Christopher Priest asserts that the warden and the husband are the same man, but says nothing of the narrator. The multiple interpretative quality of this book is one of its strongest aspects. (hide spoiler)] ³ Christopher Priest’s introduction discussed that many critics have unsuccessfully attempted to view the ice as a metaphor for Anna Kavan’s own heroin addiction. This overly self-conscious footnote serves more as an excuse for awkwardly placing the biographical information at the end of the review. The novel is best served by being examined on its own, as the details of the authors life are so engrossing that they easily lead towards the disservice of the Intentional Fallacy, as Priest discusses with the heroin-as-ice metaphor. That said, other novels of hers, particularly Asylum Piece or Sleep Has His House, have been interpreted as being highly-autobiographical. The ice, like much of the symbolism, seems to be reflective of many different ideas, but a corner stone to it's meaning may be (view spoiler)[the silent and white aspect of it that the narrator frequently mentions. It seems it is a fresh start, a blank, pure whiteness to cover up all the ugly and violent aspects of humanity and himself. He often speaks of how it will end all wars and engulf the earth in silence, a silence he so wishes for because his own actions are unspeakable. He is drowning in his and the worlds evils and wishes for them to be purified in their own destruction. (hide spoiler)] [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Jan 2013
|
Jan 08, 2013
|
May 30, 2012
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0720613299
| 9780720613292
| 0720613299
| 3.85
| 13,010
| 1963
| May 01, 2009
|
it was amazing
|
In such a short amount of time and in so few, yet potent, words, Vesaas delivers a chilling, metaphor-driven tale of loss set in the dense winters of
In such a short amount of time and in so few, yet potent, words, Vesaas delivers a chilling, metaphor-driven tale of loss set in the dense winters of Norway. You really should read this book. It is a very quick read, but it will remain with you long after you finish the last page. Vesaas, who was a decorated poet as well as a novelist, delivers a fresh, poetic and concise prose that damn near flows off the page. The real majesty however, is in the way he crafts an environment that reads like a living, breathing character. The snowy landscapes that blanket this novel, and the Ice Palace itself, are just as important characters as the two female leads themselves as Vesaas illustrates them in layers of metaphoric beauty. Also, his ethereal imagery will make you feel like there is a savage winter storm just beyond your window regardless of the actual weather outside. This novel reads like a long form poem as there is so much below the surface and the actual words. It is filled with symbols and metaphors that are very direct to the plot and characters and open up a much broader understanding of Siss and her tribulations. While the prose is swift and the novel is short, you would do well to slow down and really examine what Vesaas has written much as you would do with any poem. Without giving anything away, the ice palace found in the novel can be viewed on many different levels; from a symbol of several of the characters, as death, or even as the novel itself. I don’t want to go into it as not to provide spoilers but after reading this I felt cheated that I didn’t read this for a class and didn’t have an essay to formulate as I had so much to say about all of Vesaas’ hidden messages. This is a near perfect, and very teach-able, novel. It calls up the nostalgic feeling of adolescence, dazzles you with it’s simple and direct poetry, provides food for thought, constantly keeps things fresh as the style shifts around (one chapter is just a short poem), plus it practically has its own soundtrack with the vivid cracking of ice and as it’s hard not to image a woodwind composition playing after all the talk of woodwind players in the last third of the novel. Oh, and there is some terrifying bits about walking down the road in opaque darkness. This novel is powerful and chilling (sorry, after all the descriptions of icy cold I had to include at least one 'cold' pun). 5/5 ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Oct 25, 2011
|
Oct 27, 2011
|
Oct 20, 2011
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| B00LMSVTO0
| 3.90
| 1,908,470
| Dec 1847
| 2002
|
really liked it
|
‘Honest people don't hide their deeds.’ Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is a dark and enormously fervent tale of love and obsession. This is not love ‘Honest people don't hide their deeds.’ Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is a dark and enormously fervent tale of love and obsession. This is not love with lace, frills and flowers, but shorn of all the decorous notions to reveal an intensity more akin to beast than man. It is no surprise that this novel was tough for early critics to swallow, with many citing unlikeable characters and going so far as to declare that the book ‘ presents such shocking pictures of the worst forms of humanity’ (from a review published by The Atlas, found on the wiki article). This is by no means a ‘pleasant’ novel, the atmosphere calls up gothic imagery and emotions with cold, dark, windy nights, gnarled scenery and hushed voices, yet this allows the novel to seize your heart strings and drive you into the madness. The characters are bawdy and cruel, and victims to their raging emotions. The love is passionate and violent and reveals the deep corridors of the heart to be a wild animalistic place. Brontë’s use of language is fantastic. Some of the more powerful statements on love and obsession are to be found within her pages: ‘If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger.’ Plus, she employs an interesting narrative technique that sets her apart from her contemporaries. The novel is told through an observer, who is relatively inconsequential to the actions at hand for most of the novel. Through journals and first-hand accounts of those around him, he pieces together a morbid family history. This allows for multiple voices and perspectives, and keeps the story fresh and flowing. There are slight issues, as a majority of the first half of the book is told through the housekeeper, who recounts the past in potent poetic prose, yet speaks plainly in actual speech. Plus one has to believe that she was able to remember word for word all the loquacious speeches and arguments of the characters. However, a little suspension of disbelief isn’t asking much and this technique is used all the time without complaint, plus I’ll believe in anything as long as it keeps the novel functioning well. And this novel functions with the best of them. Wittgenstein’s Mistress points out that much of this book is just people looking through windows. That is totally accurate. This book will look into the window of the human heart and show you the true emotions of love.This novel is a classic, and rightfully so. It is such a shame that it was her only novel, as with a bit more polishing she could have turned out a shiny diamond of a novel. However, it is the unpolished intensity of this torrid affair that really shines brighter than any diamond ever could. 4/5 ...more |
Notes are private!
|
0
|
not set
|
not set
|
Sep 24, 2011
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||||
| 0811215040
| 9780811215046
| 0811215040
| 4.15
| 5,003
| 1989
| Jun 17, 2002
|
really liked it
|
The Melancholy of Resistance is a novel that truly haunts long after the reading has ended. Krasznahorkai creates a dark allegorical novel that is sat
The Melancholy of Resistance is a novel that truly haunts long after the reading has ended. Krasznahorkai creates a dark allegorical novel that is saturated with dread and overflowing with malice as he depicts a city overrun by strange happenings and menacing mobs of strangers during the icy winter. Even if you were to read this on a warms summers day, he would make you feel as if the world outside your window was frozen over and treacherous. This novel deserves a more wide-spread critical acclaim and its infectious nature has lead me to recommend it to nearly everyone I know, and now I am recommending it to you. Krasznahorkai employs a nearly opaque style of loquacious, dense prose, penning beautiful long sentences with no breaks. The whole novel reads as only a handful of paragraphs. Like a train, this dense prose starts to slowly pull away and the novel picks up a frightening momentum as the reactionary chain of event pushes forward on pure dreadful inertia towards an apocalyptic-like resolve. You will not be able to stop once you the momentum has picked up; this novel will have such a hold on your mind that you will be compelled to drop everything and keep reading. The reader is strapped to this and watches it all unfold in nearly real-time. It is no surprise that Bella Tar's film portrayal is built with a mere thirty nine long flowing camera shots as the novel seems to follow along the characters without ever blinking or breaking the slow grinding pace. We watch a woman ride a train, return home and be visited by Mrs. Eszter, then the 'camera' of language follows Eszter from this scene, home, through the entire evening, hovering about her room as she sleeps, and far into the next day before there is ever a break from the constant flow of the scene. Krasznahorkai's ability to keep this up and maintain an even, continuous flow is highly impressive. I understand the comparison to Herman Melville that this novel receives, and it goes beyond the mere fact that both are allegorical tales surrounding a large whale. Krasznahorkai's verbose style is as eloquent as Melville and both maintain a fluent vocabulary that will keep a dictionary by your side. Fyodor Dostoyevsky is another author used for comparison with this novel, which also has merit. While the two authors style of writing is quite varied, their use of characters flows in a similar vein. Like the great Dostoevsky, the characters in Melancholy are often used to represent a specific idea, value, or force of nature. This is not a detractor of the characters however, as they are fully fleshed out and multidimensional and exist in a realistic sense appropriate and fitting to the world of the novel. There are many characters, each one a bit bizarre and frayed by the world, but each offers an insightful look into their humanity. The philosophical musings that furnish the story are the real meat of this novel. Krasznahorkai has some very brilliant and occasionally controversial ideas that he is compelled to tell you, and the reader will soon realize this novel is an allegory for his philosophical thoughts on existence. In his world, order and chaos, creation and destruction are two sides of the same coin and must coexist in a proper balance. Krasznahorkai shows how all is meant to end in chaos and destruction eventually and to try and deny this is futile and foolish. Yet this is what allows for creation and rebirth. He even shows how biology is wired for its own destruction after death in a brilliant, highly medical descriptive fashion. All his discussions of heavenly bodies in space begs the question, is there a natural order, or are we all spinning at random and merely victims of empty chance and reaction. The question of faith is brought up and Krasznahorkai shakes some ideas loose upon the reader. There is an excellent passage where this question is brought about through the metaphor of musical theory. It is easily understandable by all, but a bit of knowledge of music theory and research into theory and classical composition will shed light on Krasznahorkai's stunning intellect. Also, the idea of power is a overarching theme here. This is an incredible novel, although it should be noted that it is a bit dense and difficult and isn't a quick read. Krasznahorkai is a verbal virtuosos and this should be read if only to view his ability with language and to marvel at how seemingly effortlessly he maintains a constant, unblinking flow through the few days that make up this novel. There is plenty to read into in here, as the whole novel can be taken as allegory and you will have much to ponder for days to come. Months later I still think about this book and have revelations into its meaning. The Melancholy of Resistance is a frightening look into the world, but is at times laugh out loud funny as it pokes at humanity and the ridiculousness of it all. Please find and read this novel, Krasznahorkai should be much wider read than he is. 4/5 ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Oct 06, 2011
|
Oct 21, 2011
|
Sep 24, 2011
|
Paperback
|
Loading...
8 of 8 loaded
