As someone who has spent a good deal of time with domesticated birds (in my case, racing pigeons) I loved the way Lucie Rico gave space for her protagAs someone who has spent a good deal of time with domesticated birds (in my case, racing pigeons) I loved the way Lucie Rico gave space for her protagonist Paule to delight in her chickens, to recognize each of them as individuals with their own personalities and quirks, and to honor them for their unique contributions before she slaughters them for market. It's a confounding miracle to me that birds, and I imagine all living things to some extent, really do have their own individual ways of being in this world. Ok, I'm not sure about sheep. I hear they are a little one-note. But birds, yes. There is so much to enjoy in this novel for this reason alone, that it dares to suggest how creatures with bird-brains somehow have an individuated glorious uniqueness to be celebrated. I can imagine a god that has told birds each feather on their heads is counted. Rico takes this premise to the furthest possible, ridiculously dumbfounding extreme, and I was here for it....more
Makhene made me want this book to be longer than it is. This is immersive and extraordinary writing. What a gift. These stories are intensely sensuousMakhene made me want this book to be longer than it is. This is immersive and extraordinary writing. What a gift. These stories are intensely sensuous, every one of my senses was firing, the smells, the sounds, the way things look in a particular slant of sun. What I adore about this language and these stories is the way the language is so foreign to me. Here is a book originally written in an English wholly unfamiliar to me, a language that zips and sings and doesn't care whether it challenges my American-English ear or not, and Makhene even drops in some Afrikaans, when the mood suits her, or the story warrants it, of course she does, because everyone in her native country knows at least some Afrikaans.
I come to this novel as a spectator. I love that this book was not written for me. I love that it is written originally in English, but not my English. Far from it. This is a foreign, gorgeous form of English. Wonderful....more
The subtitle of this novel could be Confessions of a Bulimic Intellectual. There are glorious wild descriptions of food on nearly every page. An obsesThe subtitle of this novel could be Confessions of a Bulimic Intellectual. There are glorious wild descriptions of food on nearly every page. An obsession with food's smells and colors and sounds and taste all like fireworks in their vividness and their cadence. Its sentences are a nearly synesthetic paean to food and its preparation. But always along with these vivid food-sense impressions comes a coupling of descriptions of grotesque foul digestion and excrement and decay. There is no nourishment in this book that comes without the cost of corresponding filth. There is no joy without illness. There is no sex without blood. No love without death.
Reading this novel is like being force-fed a feast of words all the while knowing you'll be sick in the end. I can honestly say I fell in love with each exquisite sentence after another of this feast. I could quote whole sentences and paragraphs and chapters that left me weak-kneed with their intensity and beauty. But in the end there was no joy in this read. No sense that the author was sharing something he cared about with me, his reader. Just this, in the end: an emptiness.
Profound and simple, both at once, and what a delight, what a joy to read this strange unpredictable mashup of life-and-death matters (mostly, death mProfound and simple, both at once, and what a delight, what a joy to read this strange unpredictable mashup of life-and-death matters (mostly, death matters). The novel has such a waiting-for-godot-like sanguinity in its pages. Everything and nothing matter equally. An indescribable read. Sorry. I'm trying to describe it, a little, but it's impossible. Daniell is a joyous confident writer. Jennifer Croft is a genius. I say "genius" because of the adverb "Britishly" on p. 37. Honestly doesn't it make you wonder what the word was in the original Spanish if you can't go read the original and find out for yourself? It made me wonder. I thought it wondrous, as words go, and it's just one out of a whole book of words that make up a story that's as gripping and historical as Labatut's When We Cease to Understand the World only without the despair; and as riveting as Binet's Civilizations only without the galloping plot. Don't worry. You will never miss the plot. Or maybe you will, I can't say how you read, but for me however plotless the book seemed to be, I leapt forward eagerly and was delighted by every page. This is what literature is all about. Something new. Something true....more
I didn't know what to make of this. If it were written by a white person I would just think it was unintentionally racist. It's written by a Black CamI didn't know what to make of this. If it were written by a white person I would just think it was unintentionally racist. It's written by a Black Cameroonian, though, and the publisher says it's satire...ok...but what does it mean to call a novel a satire when it's about a real historic tragedy, and when, at the same time, the writing sounds something like a cross between a badly overwritten Edwardian novel and a Tarzan screenplay? Is the stilted writing part of the satire? A fault of translation? Something else?
"The truth would come out but for now he had more urgent worries in his mind."
"Hate-filled black faces burst from the huts."
"The villagers froze and all eyes converged on the white woman...then a wave of servile smiles soon reassured her."
"Were it not for her pygmy guide, she may have ended up six feet underground."
"Slender half naked young girls jumped and danced unselfconsciously while muscular boys stared intently at the white woman."
So.
I have the same feeling I have sometimes at a contemporary art exhibit where the work makes no sense until I read the liner notes that explain its political context and its artistic intention.
Captivating, gorgeous, gripping. Full of mystery, dread, and revelation. The old people in this novella know what's going on and sometimes the women dCaptivating, gorgeous, gripping. Full of mystery, dread, and revelation. The old people in this novella know what's going on and sometimes the women do, too. The men? They are just trying to hang on and pretend they're in charge. Each moment that passes in this eerie novella is full of happenings just this side of surreal. I love stories like this, the ones that take time to make me appreciate the utter strangeness of our world. The pigs' teeth stuck in the wych-elm in Howards End. The dead sparrow hanging from a wire in Gombrowicz's Cosmos. The fish that leaps out of its tank and pins a man to his bed in Weasels in the Attic. This is the kind of fiction that captivates me. Fiction that is unexplainably weird and yet also somehow exactly the truth. Fiction that is terrifyingly chaotic and yet at the same time comforting, and I find myself thinking, yes, that's right. That's exactly the way it is.
If you liked the following books then you will probably like this novella, too: Threats by Amelia Gray. Desperate Characters by Paula Fox. Ice by Anna Kavan....more
I've read maybe six zillion translations of Beowulf. I think Benjamin Bagby's meticulous striving to perform the poem exactly as it might have beenI've read maybe six zillion translations of Beowulf. I think Benjamin Bagby's meticulous striving to perform the poem exactly as it might have been performed in Year 900 is a wonder of interpretation. and a triumph of art...and I NEVER thought I'd love a modern translation more than I love Seamus Heaney's 2000 translation...and yet, here we are. Here is this amazing, surprising, baldly new re-interpretation of Beowulf that is somehow also deeply, fundamentally respectful of the original poem. I'm gob-smacked. Maria Dahvana Headley's extraordinary attention to this oldest of extant English poems has given me my favorite reading experience of the year, and wow, that's a wonderful thing to realize after such a stellar year of reading many amazing books....more
Hurricane Season compels me to examine my own belief system about literature and to make sure it's defensible, and to conclude, probably not.
The prosHurricane Season compels me to examine my own belief system about literature and to make sure it's defensible, and to conclude, probably not.
The prose is gorgeous. The story is ugly. The author relentlessly degrades and debases her characters. Their moments of respite from their lives of squalor, violence, and brutishness are nearly non-existent.
Even so, this story, written in neat letters across the pages, is so much less awful than the reality of women being murdered and mutilated in Mexico at an accelerated rate each year and without any consequence meted out to their murderers. The squalor and horror in this book are the faintest echo of the truth, about something happening far away from me. The beauty of the sentences shields me from the facts. However ugly the story, it's just a story. I'm sitting in my comfortable chair as I read it. The effect is harrowing, but temporary. It's like those precisely lit photojournalistic images of war and famine victims--I'm moved, and then I move on.
I disliked how much the novel disturbed me, though, even if this story is so much less disturbing than the nonfiction version of this story. I wanted more beauty. The beauty of the sentences themselves wasn't enough. I wanted a glimpse of what's lost, when human life is valued so cheaply. I hated that there is no air or hope or light in the novel. The characters behave like wild animals trapped in a vicious lab experiment where they are deprived of all love and hope until in desperation they start chewing their paws off to comfort themselves.
So I end up realizing that I need some sort of redemptive moment in my fiction--even if it's a lie....more
A perceptive little girl is at the heart of this novel. She sees everything and yet she understands so little. Telling a story from a child's point ofA perceptive little girl is at the heart of this novel. She sees everything and yet she understands so little. Telling a story from a child's point of view gives an author the chance to blend wisdom and naivité in the narrative voice and it can lead to such powerful outcomes. So few authors get it right, though. Either the child sounds like a wizened tiny old person (Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close) or the voice sounds hopelessly baby-talk-artificial (Room).
The Only Daughter gets it perfectly right. It's the most beautiful rendering of a child's viewpoint, adopted for fictional ends, that I've read since The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers. ...more
The grammar and syntax are simple. The simplicity of the language gives this brief allegorical novel the feel of scripture. The rhythms reminded me ofThe grammar and syntax are simple. The simplicity of the language gives this brief allegorical novel the feel of scripture. The rhythms reminded me of the Jewish Bible, in particular, of Genesis and Exodus, which were also, in their time, a people's attempt to write their own history. This novel could just as easily have reminded me of origin stories of another culture because all of the origin stories I've read seem to be preserved, or translated at least, in a style that is direct, and almost simple. Scholastique Mukasonga has created an origin myth for contemporary Rwandan history that uses the same rhythms of these ancient stories and it's a marvelous and confounding read, both easy to understand on its surface and profoundly challenging to understand for all its implications....more
The book jacket promises "this is a novel that gives Teha'amana a voice; one that travels with the myths and legends of the island, across history andThe book jacket promises "this is a novel that gives Teha'amana a voice; one that travels with the myths and legends of the island, across history and asks now to be heard," but I personally could not tell the difference between Teha'amana's fictive voice vs. the voice she might have been given in a novel by Joseph Conrad. The voice felt overloaded with Western/colonial assumptions. She is sweet, innocent, sexually aware, submissive. She asks ignorant questions of her white overlord. She speaks in a register that mixes oral history and folklore--it's a way of writing an indigenous voice that has become the gold standard for novelists, but it's a voice that sounds disturbingly the same whether the novelist is writing about an indigenous character from North America or Africa or Micronesia.
I would venture to say that Teha'amana's story might work better as a poem, or as history/nonfiction, or, in very skilled hands, it might be told as fiction if written in the third person. Entering her body--speaking for her--felt violating to me. The danger is that you're replacing a real person up with modern-day assumptions about who she was and what she experienced. Good intentions, certainly, and other readers will have a different experience....more
I'm left feeling much like I felt at the end of One Hundred Years of Solitude. Gabriel Garcia Márquez cited this novel as the most important influenceI'm left feeling much like I felt at the end of One Hundred Years of Solitude. Gabriel Garcia Márquez cited this novel as the most important influence on his own writing so I guess my reaction is not surprising. As I read along, one breathtakingly imaginative sentence after another, I kept thinking--wow--wow--wow--but then my breath had been taken away so consistently that I discovered I was fatigued and that I had totally lost track of myself because there are so many threads to this story, and they aren't really woven together, so much as they are thrown down along a path into the woods, and the path keeps growing more and more tangled and overgrown, and then it stops, and here you are: in the middle of the woods with no way out....more
Werner Herzog feels like kin to me. It feels like I have known him from childhood. I get an "i know exactly what you mean" feeling whenever I watch onWerner Herzog feels like kin to me. It feels like I have known him from childhood. I get an "i know exactly what you mean" feeling whenever I watch one of this films. This gloriously strange little book, a biography-adjacent, not-quite-true exploration of the life of Hiroo Onoda, the Japanese soldier who defended a small island in the Philippines for twenty-nine years after the end of World War II, made me feel understood. Wacky and indefensible, as feelings go, but even so.
Michael Hofmann's translation is marvelous. I love the way he consistently chooses words like "the gloaming" in his translations, instead of "dusk," or even "twilight," for that matter. His translations are precisely beautiful.
I was transported by Werner Herzog's narration of his own book in English, and recommend the audiobook.
Reading this novel felt claustrophobic, and that would be ok if it felt like I was moving through a plot that was developing tension and/or a release Reading this novel felt claustrophobic, and that would be ok if it felt like I was moving through a plot that was developing tension and/or a release of tension, but it felt a little one-note instead. It didn't help me love it that so much of the story is written as flashback. I admired the mastery of the prose. I would love to see Karen Jennings try a novel where she didn't keep quite as tight a stranglehold on the characters and action....more
I spent the morning re-acquainting myself with the fictional girl I fell in love with when I was a child. When I was a child, I never once thought a mI spent the morning re-acquainting myself with the fictional girl I fell in love with when I was a child. When I was a child, I never once thought a man with a gun might come shoot me in my classroom. Here is the blithely confident Pippi Longstocking to remind me of that feeling. Some reviews think she is a bit of a monster but I like that about her....more
I am pretty much forced to give this little book five stars, because I can read it in German, because it has adorable line drawings throughout, becausI am pretty much forced to give this little book five stars, because I can read it in German, because it has adorable line drawings throughout, because it's charming, because it was signed by the author on Sept 25 1953--Sept 25 being my birthday--and because in 1953 the author signed this book with a fountain pen, in a gorgeous glorious script that nobody writes in any longer.
It seems that, like the painter Emil Nolde (who is on my mind because I just read a retrospective of his work), Manfred Hausmann was Nazi-lite, at first buying into the idea that athletic young aryans were a good thing, and then living out the war years in Germany, not exactly as a collaborator, but certainly as someone who did not get in the way of atrocity, either. This personal history makes me wonder about the extreme simplicity and the complete lack of seriousness or cynicism in Martin, which the author wrote in the immediate postwar years. The story's sweetness and lack of guile, so soon after the horrors of the war, raise questions in me that maybe the author didn't intend, like: why was he writing sweet family stories, while at the same time Böll and others were writing vivid horrific accounts of Germany's postwar destruction, and about how difficult it was for the people to grapple with what they'd just done as a nation?...more
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