Stig Dagerman was a leading writer in the post-WWII Swedish movement Fyrtiotalism, which was concerned with existentialist themes and influenced by Dostoevsky, Kafka, and others. He killed himself at 31 years old. In Wedding Worries, a group of people in a small village gather over one twenty four hour period and in alternately absurdist, melancholic, transcendent, satirical, and burlesque tones they struggle and exist with the despair.
“She turned off the light and wakened the boy. How do you say in German “Am I a bad person?” He answered and fell back asleep.
Since then she always uses this. Bin ich ein schlechter Mensch? Saying it this way has its advantages. It sounds as if it concerns someone else, the foreign tongue serving as a buffer between the scream and silence. It turns the whole thing into a conundrum, and she often ends up thinking: Good Lord, I’m really an intellectual, you know. Fortunately she doesn’t know enough German to ever be able to answer her own question.”
“But Westlund doesn’t like seeing Siri’s heart cut out like a piece of cake.
“What have you done to the girl?” he shouts again, and now they all come and crowd together under then pendant lamp.
“We’ve just opened her little heart,” Mary explains, “There’s nothing more wonderful than opening small, small hearts.”
“When did you get this?” Irma asks in a scathing voice, and she points to a deep wound with festering edges.
“As long as I can remember,” Siri show more whispers, “I’ve always had it.””
“At the end, everyone falls asleep - all except one. Everyone always falls asleep at the end - all except the blessed. But before everyone falls asleep, a chase has taken place. Where to find the friend I seek? Each of them, before they fell asleep, had been searching. In the mornings, we find them sleeping everywhere, many in the strangest positions. In the mornings, the seekers are sleeping. Some sleep in the forest on black stones, stretched out across the stones, their nails torn. Some come floating along the current, their hair flowing in the opposite direction. Many are lying in meadows; in the mornings some meadows look like battlefields, but battlefields without blood. Some lie in hollows. This small, black hollow - could it be my home? But no one asks, all the seekers fall asleep wherever they have found something; and if they haven’t found anything, they fall asleep where they are. In the morning, we find many on glaciers, their arms melting, and some are hanging in the trees, vertically as if they were standing on air.
Yes, in the mornings we find them in all places, those who have been searching for their friend.” show less
“She turned off the light and wakened the boy. How do you say in German “Am I a bad person?” He answered and fell back asleep.
Since then she always uses this. Bin ich ein schlechter Mensch? Saying it this way has its advantages. It sounds as if it concerns someone else, the foreign tongue serving as a buffer between the scream and silence. It turns the whole thing into a conundrum, and she often ends up thinking: Good Lord, I’m really an intellectual, you know. Fortunately she doesn’t know enough German to ever be able to answer her own question.”
“But Westlund doesn’t like seeing Siri’s heart cut out like a piece of cake.
“What have you done to the girl?” he shouts again, and now they all come and crowd together under then pendant lamp.
“We’ve just opened her little heart,” Mary explains, “There’s nothing more wonderful than opening small, small hearts.”
“When did you get this?” Irma asks in a scathing voice, and she points to a deep wound with festering edges.
“As long as I can remember,” Siri show more whispers, “I’ve always had it.””
“At the end, everyone falls asleep - all except one. Everyone always falls asleep at the end - all except the blessed. But before everyone falls asleep, a chase has taken place. Where to find the friend I seek? Each of them, before they fell asleep, had been searching. In the mornings, we find them sleeping everywhere, many in the strangest positions. In the mornings, the seekers are sleeping. Some sleep in the forest on black stones, stretched out across the stones, their nails torn. Some come floating along the current, their hair flowing in the opposite direction. Many are lying in meadows; in the mornings some meadows look like battlefields, but battlefields without blood. Some lie in hollows. This small, black hollow - could it be my home? But no one asks, all the seekers fall asleep wherever they have found something; and if they haven’t found anything, they fall asleep where they are. In the morning, we find many on glaciers, their arms melting, and some are hanging in the trees, vertically as if they were standing on air.
Yes, in the mornings we find them in all places, those who have been searching for their friend.” show less
A book of creative nonfiction that straddles genres, the work is, above all, what Irish poet Ní Ghríofa says it is in its first sentence, in its final sentence, and throughout: a female text. It is about women's desire and women's disappearances. In it she pursues and makes connections with the hidden life of Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, the 18th century poet and composer of the esteemed "Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire", an oral lament she composed following the murder of her husband while pregnant with their third baby.
Desire features strongly at first. Eibhlín's desire for Art is present in the first lines of her lament:
She sees in the wives of the city merchants their own desire for her handsome, fearless husband when he walks down the streets:
This desire is further powerfully expressed in the language of the flesh when she discovers his dead body, Art having been shot while on horseback:
Ní Ghríofa was captivated by this description of female desire from school age, and now as an adult, married with several children, in passionate show more love with her own husband, she identifies with and sees its connection to her own life. While we have many descriptions and musings on male desire, how welcome for a forthright depiction of female desire to get a turn.
Rediscovering this poem, making this connection, Ní Ghríofa now becomes intent on learning more about Eibhlín's life, and is aghast to find it largely missing. We don't know what became of her after Art's murder, how long she lived, where she lived, what she did, where she died, even where she is buried. The texts we have from that time are almost entirely about men, and even though Eibhlín's nephew was the political leader Daniel O'Connell, with lots of scholarship dedicated to his life and family, little of Eibhlín has survived. Ní Ghríofa decides to pursue the physical record and physical remains to retrieve what she can of the female life that lies hidden, that has disappeared.
The back and forth in the work between Ní Ghríofa's own life and her attempts at a reconstruction of Eibhlín's life seeks to build echoes between the two women's lives, and perhaps in a sense the lives of all women. Knowing all the details of her own life, and few of the details of Eibhlín's, it's a work that leans on poetic language and imagining what is not known based on what is. It's also a work of exhaustion, of frustration, before a final letting go of mysteries and language. show less
Desire features strongly at first. Eibhlín's desire for Art is present in the first lines of her lament:
The day I first saw you
by the market's thatched roof,
how my eye took a shine to you,
how my heart took delight in you,
I fled my companions with you,
to soar far from home with you.
She sees in the wives of the city merchants their own desire for her handsome, fearless husband when he walks down the streets:
How well, they could see
what a hearty bed-mate you'd be,
what a man to share a saddle with,
what a man to spark a child with.
This desire is further powerfully expressed in the language of the flesh when she discovers his dead body, Art having been shot while on horseback:
Love, your blood was spilling in cascades,
and I couldn't wipe it away, couldn't clean it up, no,
no, my palms turned cups and oh, I gulped.
Ní Ghríofa was captivated by this description of female desire from school age, and now as an adult, married with several children, in passionate show more love with her own husband, she identifies with and sees its connection to her own life. While we have many descriptions and musings on male desire, how welcome for a forthright depiction of female desire to get a turn.
Once the burden on my breasts diminishes, my inner clockwork clicks back to its usual configuration, bringing with it a hormonal swerve I hadn't expected. Desire returns, slamming open the door. Desire flings me to my knees, makes me tremble and beg, makes me crawl and gasp in the dark. Desire leaves me sprawled over beds and over tables, animal, throbbing, and wet. Every time I come, I weep. I missed it, desire, blissful and ordinary. I can't remember a time when I felt so relieved, or so happy.
Rediscovering this poem, making this connection, Ní Ghríofa now becomes intent on learning more about Eibhlín's life, and is aghast to find it largely missing. We don't know what became of her after Art's murder, how long she lived, where she lived, what she did, where she died, even where she is buried. The texts we have from that time are almost entirely about men, and even though Eibhlín's nephew was the political leader Daniel O'Connell, with lots of scholarship dedicated to his life and family, little of Eibhlín has survived. Ní Ghríofa decides to pursue the physical record and physical remains to retrieve what she can of the female life that lies hidden, that has disappeared.
The back and forth in the work between Ní Ghríofa's own life and her attempts at a reconstruction of Eibhlín's life seeks to build echoes between the two women's lives, and perhaps in a sense the lives of all women. Knowing all the details of her own life, and few of the details of Eibhlín's, it's a work that leans on poetic language and imagining what is not known based on what is. It's also a work of exhaustion, of frustration, before a final letting go of mysteries and language. show less
Brilliant novel. I loved the narrator's askew view and ironic comic attitude describing her life in what was a warped culture under tremendous pressure at the time from the "political problems" often given the side-eyed glance. Her decision to use depersonalized monikers like "second sister" or "third brother-in-law" or that "country over the water" instead of proper names I quickly got used to and appreciated, as it reflects her efforts to hold the entire twentieth century at ten-foot-pole's length.
Long before Seinfeld came along with the show about nothing there were modernist writers writing novels about nothing. The plotless novel, bereft of much in the way of story, depends instead on a focus on daily life and psychological states, and a demanding experimentalist mode of writing sure to trip up less talented authors. Thankfully Henry Green was not one of these, as evidenced by the application of that trite phrase “a writer’s writer” one can find applied to him in various articles and essays.
Party Going is about a group of people stuck at a train station for a few hours due to heavy fog - a concept famously ripped off by Seinfeld in the episode where the characters are stuck at a mall parking garage because they can’t remember where they parked (but maybe Jerry Seinfeld didn’t, in fact, adopt the idea from Henry Green, who am I to say). These are terrible, shallow people, much like their later parking garage stranded brethren. Where they differ, however, is in their being much higher up in social class, and in being much more boring.
Green’s second novel, Living (Party Going was his third), focused on the working class of Birmingham, people like those who worked in Green’s family owned factory. For my money those characters were far more worth reading about than these ones who inhabit a moneyed class like Green himself. Trying to survive the daily grind is simply more interesting than trying to figure out who sent a letter to a newspaper about a show more socialite missing an embassy party he wasn’t actually invited to.
So this became a novel for me that was not that easy to want to resume reading. What rewards it gave were to be found in the prose construction, which is top notch - Green was, in reality, a writer’s writer. Here’s how the novel begins:
The driving rhythm of that sentence I find remarkable and most enjoyable! Could be up there with my favorite opening lines of any novel I’ve read (Lolita’s, not that you asked, are my best ever). What follows from there is a bunch of nonsense described most exquisitely. If I had to lay out one passage as evidence that this book is worth reading despite all the nonsense, I think it would be this one, describing the moment the artificial lights in the station’s waiting area turn on above the massed crowd of delayed passengers:
Good Lord that’s good. show less
Party Going is about a group of people stuck at a train station for a few hours due to heavy fog - a concept famously ripped off by Seinfeld in the episode where the characters are stuck at a mall parking garage because they can’t remember where they parked (but maybe Jerry Seinfeld didn’t, in fact, adopt the idea from Henry Green, who am I to say). These are terrible, shallow people, much like their later parking garage stranded brethren. Where they differ, however, is in their being much higher up in social class, and in being much more boring.
Green’s second novel, Living (Party Going was his third), focused on the working class of Birmingham, people like those who worked in Green’s family owned factory. For my money those characters were far more worth reading about than these ones who inhabit a moneyed class like Green himself. Trying to survive the daily grind is simply more interesting than trying to figure out who sent a letter to a newspaper about a show more socialite missing an embassy party he wasn’t actually invited to.
So this became a novel for me that was not that easy to want to resume reading. What rewards it gave were to be found in the prose construction, which is top notch - Green was, in reality, a writer’s writer. Here’s how the novel begins:
Fog was so dense, bird that had been disturbed went flat into a balustrade and slowly fell, dead, at her feet.
The driving rhythm of that sentence I find remarkable and most enjoyable! Could be up there with my favorite opening lines of any novel I’ve read (Lolita’s, not that you asked, are my best ever). What follows from there is a bunch of nonsense described most exquisitely. If I had to lay out one passage as evidence that this book is worth reading despite all the nonsense, I think it would be this one, describing the moment the artificial lights in the station’s waiting area turn on above the massed crowd of delayed passengers:
Fog burdened with night began to roll into this station striking cold through thin leather up into their feet where in thousands they stood and waited. Coils of it reached down like women’s long hair reached down and caught their throats and veiled here and there what they could see, like lovers’ glances. A hundred cold suns switched on above found out these coils where, before the night joined in, they had been smudges and looking up at two of them above was like she was looking down at you from under long strands hanging down from her forehead only that light was cold and these curls tore at your lungs.
Good Lord that’s good. show less
Henry Green was a terrorist. That’s in the words of the contemporaneous French critic Jean Paulhan, describing those writers of the day who fought what they saw as the looseness, the drabness, the unsuitability of the current language (French as well as English). The critic and writer Philip Toynbee described this person thusly in a 1949 article: “The Terrorists are those writers who confront their language as a wrestler confronts his adversary, knowing that they must twist it and turn it, squeeze it into strange shapes and make it cry aloud, before they can finally bring it to the boards.”
Personally, I’m usually up for some interesting linguistic terrorism. Living was Green’s second novel, and it is a resident of the Modernist foothills around Mount Joyce. Its particular contribution to the insurgency is to blow up the definite article. Thus you get, to begin the novel:
Green later in life remarked that he did not think this approach quite successful, and thought it sounded too affected. However I think it does draw your attention to the language and show more words in a more intense way, as your brain notes it is different from regular speech and writing and thus your attention can’t merely glide along as usual. More focus must be paid on the level of the individual sentence. The contrasting viewpoint is expressed succinctly by Toynbee again, who while in league with Green’s motivation, remarked that “the” is “both an innocent and a useful word, and to concentrate so heavy a gun against it seems a curious misdirection of this writer’s fire-power.”
There’s much more to Living than matters of language, however. The plot, as suggested by the opening, concerns working class life in 1920s industrial England, specifically Birmingham. Christopher Isherwood called it the best proletarian novel written, which caused Green to humbly quip in wonder how familiar with proletarian life Isherwood actually was.
I found it to focus more, against my expectations, on interpersonal relations and family life among its subjects, as opposed to the conditions and details of work inside the industrial factories. There is some of that, to be sure, but it’s a more universal novel in reality, dealing with the emotional and imaginative facets and challenges of human nature, which, come to think of it, is indeed appropriate for a novel with the simple title of “Living”.
With a wide cast of characters, Lily Gates is the one most central in my view, a young woman who never sets foot in a factory. Living a constrained life taking care of the men in her household, she escapes in her mind into dreams and fantasies, fed by the movies that she goes to see, ultimately grasping hopefully at the one chance she sees to make her escape a reality through a love affair with Bert Jones, a factory worker with a vague plan to emigrate to Canada. The following passage I think gives a good sense of the universal human emotion the novel deals with, in its peculiar linguistic construction:
I love that passage. Ultimately this novel may not be perfect but it is a great and interesting contribution to literature. show less
Personally, I’m usually up for some interesting linguistic terrorism. Living was Green’s second novel, and it is a resident of the Modernist foothills around Mount Joyce. Its particular contribution to the insurgency is to blow up the definite article. Thus you get, to begin the novel:
Two o’clock. Thousands came back from dinner along streets.
“What we want is go, push,” said works manager to son of Mr Dupret. “What I say to them is - let’s get on with it, let’s get the stuff out.”
Thousands came back to factories they worked in from their dinners.
Noises of lathes working began again in this factory. Hundreds went along road outside, men and girls. Some turned in to Dupret factory.
Green later in life remarked that he did not think this approach quite successful, and thought it sounded too affected. However I think it does draw your attention to the language and show more words in a more intense way, as your brain notes it is different from regular speech and writing and thus your attention can’t merely glide along as usual. More focus must be paid on the level of the individual sentence. The contrasting viewpoint is expressed succinctly by Toynbee again, who while in league with Green’s motivation, remarked that “the” is “both an innocent and a useful word, and to concentrate so heavy a gun against it seems a curious misdirection of this writer’s fire-power.”
There’s much more to Living than matters of language, however. The plot, as suggested by the opening, concerns working class life in 1920s industrial England, specifically Birmingham. Christopher Isherwood called it the best proletarian novel written, which caused Green to humbly quip in wonder how familiar with proletarian life Isherwood actually was.
I found it to focus more, against my expectations, on interpersonal relations and family life among its subjects, as opposed to the conditions and details of work inside the industrial factories. There is some of that, to be sure, but it’s a more universal novel in reality, dealing with the emotional and imaginative facets and challenges of human nature, which, come to think of it, is indeed appropriate for a novel with the simple title of “Living”.
With a wide cast of characters, Lily Gates is the one most central in my view, a young woman who never sets foot in a factory. Living a constrained life taking care of the men in her household, she escapes in her mind into dreams and fantasies, fed by the movies that she goes to see, ultimately grasping hopefully at the one chance she sees to make her escape a reality through a love affair with Bert Jones, a factory worker with a vague plan to emigrate to Canada. The following passage I think gives a good sense of the universal human emotion the novel deals with, in its peculiar linguistic construction:
She came nearer street lamps and then stumbled a little. Looking up she saw them, light sticking out from them, and as she came nearer so night left, excitement effervescent in her she put coat straight, and felt cold. When she stepped into cone of light of this lamp, night was outside and it might not have been night-time.
She met Bert at corner.
They kissed. Her warmth and his, their bodies straining against each other, became one warmth. Walking, his arm round her enclosed her warmth and his. So it came from his veins flowing into hers, so they were joined.
They walked from cone of light into darkness and then again into lamplight, nor, so their feeling lulled them, was light or dark, only their feeling of both of them which was one warmth, infinitely greater.
I love that passage. Ultimately this novel may not be perfect but it is a great and interesting contribution to literature. show less
A few days ago the book [b:The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity|49348225|The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity|Carlo M. Cipolla|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1595814345l/49348225._SX50_.jpg|358622] came across my desk. Living as I do in the vaccine-refusing epicenter of the US Delta variant surge of infection and of hospitals that are once again becoming overwhelmed, I couldn’t help feeling a note of sympathy with the book. Opening it up I read the first law: “Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.” Here’s an author who probably read Thomas Bernhard.
I take it that all of Bernhard’s work is essentially variants of a theme, of which stupidity plays a large role. Stupidity is the spike protein of Bernhard’s worldview, always present as the details of the larger work change a bit. I have no idea if that claim works, by the way, but I’m leaving it. How does Bernhard put it across in Gargoyles?
The shattering thing,” he said, “is not the ugliness of people but their lack of judgment.”
Naturally this makes for an unhappy outlook. “As I go about, there is hardly a man I see who isn’t repulsive.” “He was used to sacrificing himself to a sick populace given to violence as well as insanity.” “It would be wrong to refuse to face the fact that everything is fundamentally sick and sad.”
Sometimes this is funny. Nothing is above the novel’s complaints: “If I send it now, at noon, I thought, it won’t reach Kobernausserwald until tomorrow morning. The postal system, the hopeless, ruined Austrian postal system.” Now there’s some pettiness. And here it reads like a parody of Grumpy Old Man: “We paid and left. In the restaurant a band of schoolchildren were being fed. They were given hot soup and admonishments not to make noise. What gruesome people these innocent creatures will inevitably become, I thought as we left the restaurant.”
Bernhard’s apparent horror of sex appears: “I once saw him naked by the river, together with his equally naked wife; I remember that infantile penis. There they were, indulging their pitiable Sunday connubiality behind the bushes, away from the clear water, where they thought they were alone and could indulge themselves in their revolting intimacies, succumbing to their stupor in the sunset.” That’s some pretty good and funny anti-eroticism, I have to admit.
If Bernhard’s debut novel [b:Frost|12203|Frost|Thomas Bernhard|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1537115859l/12203._SY75_.jpg|1244054] had one solitary note of optimism and grace, embodied by nuns caring for the ill, Gargoyles has its one note of optimism and grace located in nature:
I liked this novel more than I did Frost, perhaps because it has more variety and hints of an actual plot to its largely one note hammering away. Bernhard’s third novel, I read, marks the start of his major work, so having served somewhat of a gruesome apprenticeship I look forward to the gruesome main event. After all, “We always want to hear something even worse than what we have inside of us,” as the prince said. Perceptive. show less
I take it that all of Bernhard’s work is essentially variants of a theme, of which stupidity plays a large role. Stupidity is the spike protein of Bernhard’s worldview, always present as the details of the larger work change a bit. I have no idea if that claim works, by the way, but I’m leaving it. How does Bernhard put it across in Gargoyles?
show more compelled to make a stupid society realize it was stupid, and that he was always doing everything in his power to prove to this stupid society how stupid it was.
I say to Huber: The republican death-throes are probably the most repulsive, the ugliest of all. Aren’t they, Doctor? I say: The common people are stupid, they stink, and that has always been so.
I have been reflecting, Doctor, on the stupidity of all phrases, on stupidity, on the stupidity in which man lives and thinks, thinks and lives, on the stupidity…
… has never come into conflict with the law and never will because the world is too stupid.
The prince said he was forever
The shattering thing,” he said, “is not the ugliness of people but their lack of judgment.”
Naturally this makes for an unhappy outlook. “As I go about, there is hardly a man I see who isn’t repulsive.” “He was used to sacrificing himself to a sick populace given to violence as well as insanity.” “It would be wrong to refuse to face the fact that everything is fundamentally sick and sad.”
Sometimes this is funny. Nothing is above the novel’s complaints: “If I send it now, at noon, I thought, it won’t reach Kobernausserwald until tomorrow morning. The postal system, the hopeless, ruined Austrian postal system.” Now there’s some pettiness. And here it reads like a parody of Grumpy Old Man: “We paid and left. In the restaurant a band of schoolchildren were being fed. They were given hot soup and admonishments not to make noise. What gruesome people these innocent creatures will inevitably become, I thought as we left the restaurant.”
Bernhard’s apparent horror of sex appears: “I once saw him naked by the river, together with his equally naked wife; I remember that infantile penis. There they were, indulging their pitiable Sunday connubiality behind the bushes, away from the clear water, where they thought they were alone and could indulge themselves in their revolting intimacies, succumbing to their stupor in the sunset.” That’s some pretty good and funny anti-eroticism, I have to admit.
If Bernhard’s debut novel [b:Frost|12203|Frost|Thomas Bernhard|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1537115859l/12203._SY75_.jpg|1244054] had one solitary note of optimism and grace, embodied by nuns caring for the ill, Gargoyles has its one note of optimism and grace located in nature:
I would climb the northern hills and let myself dream while contemplating the outward aspects of nature. Whenever I looked at it, I said, and from any perspective, the surface of the earth struck me as new and I was refreshed by it.
I liked this novel more than I did Frost, perhaps because it has more variety and hints of an actual plot to its largely one note hammering away. Bernhard’s third novel, I read, marks the start of his major work, so having served somewhat of a gruesome apprenticeship I look forward to the gruesome main event. After all, “We always want to hear something even worse than what we have inside of us,” as the prince said. Perceptive. show less
Shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize, which describes itself as for "the finest fiction from around the world, translated into English." Leaving aside "finest", is this fiction? We have a very well known model for this sort of thing, it's been around since 430 B.C. - Herodotus' "Histories". Herodotus blended fact, myth, and narrative, he related facts and told stories, and gave us a fantastic picture of the worlds he described. Despite controversy over the nature and veracity of his work from the very beginning, he has still earned the name "father of history". Should we give him a Nobel Prize for Fiction in recognition of his fine work? Probably not. (Ok, he’s dead, for one, which violates a Nobel guideline, and technically it’s a Literature not Fiction prize, but bear with.) Herodotus wouldn't have considered what he was doing as writing fiction, and similarly I don't think what Vuillard is doing here is writing fiction either. I'm against this attempt to poach it from historiography.
Going back to "finest", now. Well, it's very short, half the size of what I'd consider a novella. So that's a strike. In terms of plot and character development, well, how much can you do in such a short space. It's necessarily impressionistic, but I will say that it makes a strong impression. It gets across a history of peasant uprisings and the resulting slaughter of said peasants forcefully, and it leaves a forceful impression of its central character of Thomas show more Müntzer, all thanks in large part to the impassioned and colloquial language the translator (and I assume Vuillard himself) use. This passage, for instance, impresses me:
Language like that will keep me turning pages, for sure. Literary language that shakes its closed fist, that spits with zeal and menace and urgency, something like a Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds song from back in the day. In fact, yeah, I love that analogy. "I'm your Loverman," Müntzer threatens. And he's waiting outside your door, you German princes, and he's bucking and braying and pawing at the floor, and he's howling with pain, and he's shouting your name and asking for more. Insert crunching guitar noise here. show less
Going back to "finest", now. Well, it's very short, half the size of what I'd consider a novella. So that's a strike. In terms of plot and character development, well, how much can you do in such a short space. It's necessarily impressionistic, but I will say that it makes a strong impression. It gets across a history of peasant uprisings and the resulting slaughter of said peasants forcefully, and it leaves a forceful impression of its central character of Thomas show more Müntzer, all thanks in large part to the impassioned and colloquial language the translator (and I assume Vuillard himself) use. This passage, for instance, impresses me:
Something terrible inhabits him, agitates him. He is enraged. He wants the rulers' skins, he wants to sweep away the church, he wants to gut all those bastards. But maybe he doesn't know this yet, and for the moment he is choking it down. He wants to put an end to all that pomp and miserable circumstance. Vice and wealth devastate him; their conjunction devastates him. He wants to inspire fear. The difference between Müntzer and Hus is that Müntzer is thirsty, hungry and thirsty, terribly hungry and thirsty, and nothing can sate him, nothing can slake his thirst. He'll devour old bones, branches, stones, mud, milk, blood, fire. Everything.
Language like that will keep me turning pages, for sure. Literary language that shakes its closed fist, that spits with zeal and menace and urgency, something like a Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds song from back in the day. In fact, yeah, I love that analogy. "I'm your Loverman," Müntzer threatens. And he's waiting outside your door, you German princes, and he's bucking and braying and pawing at the floor, and he's howling with pain, and he's shouting your name and asking for more. Insert crunching guitar noise here. show less
This is an interesting case. Firstly, the novel looks to depend in its structure on an obscure 1920s memoir, a knowledge of which would shed light on several things, like why this entire text is continually addressed to a person named Jeffers. However the author seems to not want us to make too much of the connection. To which I say, “ha!”. Literary criticism, amateur or otherwise, will not be dictated to by authors, will it.
The novel’s protagonist is a neurotic, and much of the book is her addressing her neurosis to this aforementioned Jeffers, its unknown silent recipient. She has invited the artist referred to as L to a retreat on her and her husband’s land, hoping that through some uncertain mechanism he will free her mind and give her the rebirth into freedom that she longs for. She has invested L with a near mystical potentiality over her and her emotional state swings wildly in his presence, from despair to hysteria and back again. Evidently this is modeled on that obscure memoirist’s experience of inviting D.H. Lawrence to her own retreat; Lawrence did not like the memoirist and neither does L like our protagonist. L, and presumably Lawrence, are rather unpleasant themselves.
Cusk’s prose is complex, often beautiful, often difficult. Here’s an excellent passage from when our protagonist first encounters L through his paintings and incorporates him into her melancholic universe:
Another feature of the novel is the narrator’s strained relationship with her young adult daughter. As a parent myself I couldn’t identify with some of her attitudes towards her daughter, which edged into existential alienation at times, but this passage I mark well:
Other times the prose refuses to cohere into meaning, no matter how many times I reread it. Here is L looking out at the horizon and speaking to the narrator:
Well the narrator may understand that, but I don’t! Are we meant to? Or is the confusion and incoherence something of what Cusk is aiming for? Is the reader supposed to take this as merely further illustration of the characters’ sad estrangement from the solid core of reality, from a healthy functioning in the physical world, a functioning embodied in contrast by the narrator’s husband Tony, a quiet soul content to be working on the land? I’m not certain.
In any event it’s a novel that lends itself to much thought and discussion of what it’s about and what it’s doing. If there is no clear morality here, no clear take on what it means to be human, it is at least intellectually interesting. And sometimes quite confusing. show less
The novel’s protagonist is a neurotic, and much of the book is her addressing her neurosis to this aforementioned Jeffers, its unknown silent recipient. She has invited the artist referred to as L to a retreat on her and her husband’s land, hoping that through some uncertain mechanism he will free her mind and give her the rebirth into freedom that she longs for. She has invested L with a near mystical potentiality over her and her emotional state swings wildly in his presence, from despair to hysteria and back again. Evidently this is modeled on that obscure memoirist’s experience of inviting D.H. Lawrence to her own retreat; Lawrence did not like the memoirist and neither does L like our protagonist. L, and presumably Lawrence, are rather unpleasant themselves.
Cusk’s prose is complex, often beautiful, often difficult. Here’s an excellent passage from when our protagonist first encounters L through his paintings and incorporates him into her melancholic universe:
The painting, by the way, was a self-portrait, one of L’s arrestingshow more portraits where he shows himself at about the distance you might keep between yourself and a stranger. He looks almost surprised to see himself: he gives that stranger a glance that is as objective and compassionless as any glance in the street. He is wearing an ordinary kind of plaid shirt and his hair is brushed back and parted, and despite the coldness of the act of perception – which is a cosmic coldness and loneliness, Jeffers – the rendering of those details, of the buttoned-up shirt and the brushed hair and the plain features unanimated by recognition, is the most human and loving thing in the world. Looking at it, the emotion I felt was pity, pity for myself and for all of us: the kind of wordless pity a mother might feel for her mortal child, who nonetheless she brushes and dresses so tenderly.
Another feature of the novel is the narrator’s strained relationship with her young adult daughter. As a parent myself I couldn’t identify with some of her attitudes towards her daughter, which edged into existential alienation at times, but this passage I mark well:
When Justine was younger there had been a feeling of malleability, of active process, in our relations, but now that she was a young woman it was as though time had abruptly run out and we were frozen in the positions we had happened to assume in the moment of its stopping, like the game where everyone has to creep up behind the leader and then freeze the second he turns around. There she stood, the externalisation of my life force, immune to further alterations; and there was I, unable to explain to her how exactly she had turned out the way she had.
Other times the prose refuses to cohere into meaning, no matter how many times I reread it. Here is L looking out at the horizon and speaking to the narrator:
‘I suddenly saw it, right out there,’ he said, pointing toward the distant blue shape of the receded tide, ‘the illusion of that death-structure. I wish I had understood before how to dissolve. Not just how to dissolve the line – other things too. I did the opposite, because I thought I had to resist being worn down. The more I tried to make a structure, the more it felt like everything around me had gone bad. It felt like I was making the world, and making it wrong, when all I was doing was making my own death. But you don’t have to die. The dissolving looks like death but in fact it’s the other way around. I didn’t see it to start with.’
When L said these things, Jeffers, I felt a thrill of vindication – I knew he would understand it!
Well the narrator may understand that, but I don’t! Are we meant to? Or is the confusion and incoherence something of what Cusk is aiming for? Is the reader supposed to take this as merely further illustration of the characters’ sad estrangement from the solid core of reality, from a healthy functioning in the physical world, a functioning embodied in contrast by the narrator’s husband Tony, a quiet soul content to be working on the land? I’m not certain.
In any event it’s a novel that lends itself to much thought and discussion of what it’s about and what it’s doing. If there is no clear morality here, no clear take on what it means to be human, it is at least intellectually interesting. And sometimes quite confusing. show less
The Protestant work ethic vs the Roman Catholic High Mass. The Dave Matthews Band vs George Clinton and Parliament. Vanilla vs Ben & Jerry's Schweddy Balls. To this illustrious history of the proud representatives of the dull and the fabulous, this novel gives us the Garreaux Residency vs LOTE. Winner of the 2021 Republic of Consciousness prize for UK small press fiction, Lote for me has a foot in each camp. Some really interesting stuff here, yet also often really boring, thesis and antithesis produce a synthesis of 3 stars.
Mathilda, who is Black, British, poor, and queer, is an Escape artist. Facing racial, sexual, gender, and economic oppression, she survives by jumping from one name and life into another. The constant is her fascination with the eccentric non-conforming socialite Modernists of 1920s Britain. While researching them she stumbles across a photo that sets her on a quest to uncover buried artistic history: in the photo is a "lost" artist from that period - the black, female, and queer poet Hermia Druitt, who despite having no money herself seems to have belonged to a subset of this counterculture.
Hermia thus shares significant similarities of identity with Mathilda, and is the basis for an exploration of two related phenomenon: the hidden history of black artists in Europe in earlier decades, and the added racialized pathologizing of black eccentrics in an already suspect general class of eccentrics. This is most interestingly explored in passage in a show more (fictional) generally unknown essay Mathilda discovers about a (fictional) Hermia:
Mathilda discovers that Hermia and her friends were involved in an occult society that attempted to contact the Luxuries - black Angelic beings connected to the Lotus Eaters of Greek myth. In a curious coincidence (or is it?) Mathilda is awarded a place in an artists residency in a continental European town where Hermia and friends formed their LOTE society, where there is located a pillar dedicated to the medieval saint Christina the Astonishing (the very subject of the fine Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds song of that name, which is neither here nor there, really...) and which they believed contains trapped Luxuries.
This residency turns out to represent the opposing force to LOTE, the Luxuries, and all expressions of sensory enjoyment. It represents Odysseus dragging his men away from the island paradise of the Lotus Eaters so they can suffer and die properly, as they're expected to. Based on the "thought art" of John Garreaux, residents spurn all but the most dully utilitarian in all sense modes, speak incomprehensible jargon reminiscent of corporate speak, and preach "self-abnegation", which includes producing art that will intentionally never be shown to another living person (an ironic claiming on the part of privileged white people of something that is forced on dispossessed black people like Hermia and Mathilda, the denial and hiding of their true core).
This was a big part of my problem with this novel. The Garreaux Residency is satire, and satire is a literary form that is my Achilles heel. I usually tend to find it dull, uninteresting, and unengaging, and this was no exception, alas. The whole Garreaux facet of the novel was tiresome for me and it's a large part of the work. In the end it unsurprisingly turns out to be intimately tied up with Hermia and LOTE, which I think works well enough, but it takes a long time to get there. show less
Mathilda, who is Black, British, poor, and queer, is an Escape artist. Facing racial, sexual, gender, and economic oppression, she survives by jumping from one name and life into another. The constant is her fascination with the eccentric non-conforming socialite Modernists of 1920s Britain. While researching them she stumbles across a photo that sets her on a quest to uncover buried artistic history: in the photo is a "lost" artist from that period - the black, female, and queer poet Hermia Druitt, who despite having no money herself seems to have belonged to a subset of this counterculture.
Hermia thus shares significant similarities of identity with Mathilda, and is the basis for an exploration of two related phenomenon: the hidden history of black artists in Europe in earlier decades, and the added racialized pathologizing of black eccentrics in an already suspect general class of eccentrics. This is most interestingly explored in passage in a show more (fictional) generally unknown essay Mathilda discovers about a (fictional) Hermia:
Her costumes had the ability to temporarily dazzle onlookers into confusion, or sometimes admiration and awe. At the very least they could shut people up, even if they went on to racialize what they saw, rather than view it as a creative trait like her outlandish peers or enshrine it as 'eccentricity'.
Even today, Western conceptions of eccentricity very rarely tend to encompass Black personas. This is because eccentricity is tethered to the idea of a rarefied and semi-fragile aristocracy. For it to work, unconventional elements require a foil of idealised social stability, hence why the history of eccentrics is even more populated by the white, privileged and wealthy than other histories... Note that, without class, eccentricity loses prestige... Thus, on the one hand, eccentricity is not seen as erupting from Blackness, and on the other, the personal effects and performativity of the Black eccentric generally are seen as erupting from Blackness, but not as eccentricity. Instead, as eccentricity divested of the constellate qualities of creativity, nobility or genius, which is deemed something else altogether.
Mathilda discovers that Hermia and her friends were involved in an occult society that attempted to contact the Luxuries - black Angelic beings connected to the Lotus Eaters of Greek myth. In a curious coincidence (or is it?) Mathilda is awarded a place in an artists residency in a continental European town where Hermia and friends formed their LOTE society, where there is located a pillar dedicated to the medieval saint Christina the Astonishing (the very subject of the fine Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds song of that name, which is neither here nor there, really...) and which they believed contains trapped Luxuries.
This residency turns out to represent the opposing force to LOTE, the Luxuries, and all expressions of sensory enjoyment. It represents Odysseus dragging his men away from the island paradise of the Lotus Eaters so they can suffer and die properly, as they're expected to. Based on the "thought art" of John Garreaux, residents spurn all but the most dully utilitarian in all sense modes, speak incomprehensible jargon reminiscent of corporate speak, and preach "self-abnegation", which includes producing art that will intentionally never be shown to another living person (an ironic claiming on the part of privileged white people of something that is forced on dispossessed black people like Hermia and Mathilda, the denial and hiding of their true core).
This was a big part of my problem with this novel. The Garreaux Residency is satire, and satire is a literary form that is my Achilles heel. I usually tend to find it dull, uninteresting, and unengaging, and this was no exception, alas. The whole Garreaux facet of the novel was tiresome for me and it's a large part of the work. In the end it unsurprisingly turns out to be intimately tied up with Hermia and LOTE, which I think works well enough, but it takes a long time to get there. show less
The best thing about this book is the idea of a mythical heron made out of rain, which can take any form and shape of water it pleases when it pleases, and which has powerful control over the local weather conditions. But there's no way this badass bird would be captured and contained in modern times by the first group of dumbasses with an oilcloth and a small cage of metal bars that find and attempt it. I'm offended on the bird's behalf.
However that's how this blandly told eco-allegory tale would have it. It has an interesting setup, with the rain heron myth telling leading into a modern day setting of an unnamed country where climate change disasters have led to societal collapse and military coup. The storytelling however doesn't fulfill the promise and the prose is just average, leading to disappointment. Soldiers are looking for a hermit woman they hope can lead them to the bird. You know they'll find her and they do. Then you know she'll lead them to the bird and she does. You don't know that absolutely nothing will happen from the military rulers having control of the bird. I mean, nothing. Zip happens. What a blown opportunity from their point of view, I tell you what.
Instead the novel focuses on the character development of the soldier who lead this mission, a turning away from world building into characterization which is unfortunate. The world of the novel is left quite vague, while the character development is nothing you wouldn't expect, unexceptionally told. show more The rain heron is really beside the point for all of this once it has helped serve as catalyst, featuring some rather too-obvious symbolism involving an eyeball and sight which later leads to a stomach turning passage involving a "river of pus" streaming down someone's face. Sorry.
The premise then is greater than the execution. It's not bad, it's just disappointing. show less
However that's how this blandly told eco-allegory tale would have it. It has an interesting setup, with the rain heron myth telling leading into a modern day setting of an unnamed country where climate change disasters have led to societal collapse and military coup. The storytelling however doesn't fulfill the promise and the prose is just average, leading to disappointment. Soldiers are looking for a hermit woman they hope can lead them to the bird. You know they'll find her and they do. Then you know she'll lead them to the bird and she does. You don't know that absolutely nothing will happen from the military rulers having control of the bird. I mean, nothing. Zip happens. What a blown opportunity from their point of view, I tell you what.
Instead the novel focuses on the character development of the soldier who lead this mission, a turning away from world building into characterization which is unfortunate. The world of the novel is left quite vague, while the character development is nothing you wouldn't expect, unexceptionally told. show more The rain heron is really beside the point for all of this once it has helped serve as catalyst, featuring some rather too-obvious symbolism involving an eyeball and sight which later leads to a stomach turning passage involving a "river of pus" streaming down someone's face. Sorry.
The premise then is greater than the execution. It's not bad, it's just disappointing. show less
Mills Tavern was a shabby old saloon with a plank floor, dark wood paneling. An old jukebox played Johnny Cash: Early one mornin' while makin' the rounds, I took a shot of cocaine and I shot my woman down. "Buddy of mine from Oklahoma played this song at his wedding," the guy sitting next to Gene said. The bartender and the other guy laughed.
Recommended if you're a fan of Ottessa Moshfegh, who both offers a blurb for this novel and named it as one of her six favorite books in a 2017 interview (I might should go read all that list!). Hobson's Deep Ellum is an interesting compare/contrast to Moshfegh; while both get deep inside characters inhabiting the alienated edges of society, barely hanging on to the deformed shape of a life which is the best they've been able to fashion to this point, and are able to do so with not necessarily a lot of pages, I've always felt Moshfegh's work was steeped in misanthropy, while Hobson doesn't really seem to have that quality to his fiction, even here. His characters may be equally fucked up, yet his calm and undramatic prose offers them more grace.
Possibly it's partly age - as Hobson says he took a long time to work out his fiction; Deep Ellum was published when he was 44 and is his de facto debut, if you leave out a short experimental long out-of-print work published eight years before this one. Moshfegh in contrast isn't even 40 yet and has several major novels to her name. Will she move further towards grace and away from misanthropy show more in her novels of the next decade? I'll certainly be reading to find out.
Deep Ellum reads like an extended short story, leaving much unresolved and ambiguous. It's about family, and addiction, and mental illness. It paints a compelling picture and characterization without ever spelling a whole lot out. The characters are mostly depressed. It's almost as if the prose itself is depressed, rousing itself to tell you a little, but then sighing, "whatever, nevermind". Gideon, our narrator, pops hydrocodone pills, but the prose just tells you "I took a hydrocodone", without any fuss. The reader can construct what that means for herself.
Plot wise not a terrible lot happens. Gideon takes a walk through the Deep Ellum neighborhood. He chats with a girl. He scrounges a job. He sees an old friend who works at Taco Hut. He gets into a bath with his older sister (here too just hints of something dark, not overly spelled out). He takes pills. He visits his mother, gets in a fight with his stepfather. Little bursts of activity that form a picture of a whole.
On the final page the family all gets together and "It seemed this would be the moment of a great communication for all of us, but as we walked along the fence toward the barn, nobody said anything." Without saying much, this book says a lot, which is always a nice trick. show less
Recommended if you're a fan of Ottessa Moshfegh, who both offers a blurb for this novel and named it as one of her six favorite books in a 2017 interview (I might should go read all that list!). Hobson's Deep Ellum is an interesting compare/contrast to Moshfegh; while both get deep inside characters inhabiting the alienated edges of society, barely hanging on to the deformed shape of a life which is the best they've been able to fashion to this point, and are able to do so with not necessarily a lot of pages, I've always felt Moshfegh's work was steeped in misanthropy, while Hobson doesn't really seem to have that quality to his fiction, even here. His characters may be equally fucked up, yet his calm and undramatic prose offers them more grace.
Possibly it's partly age - as Hobson says he took a long time to work out his fiction; Deep Ellum was published when he was 44 and is his de facto debut, if you leave out a short experimental long out-of-print work published eight years before this one. Moshfegh in contrast isn't even 40 yet and has several major novels to her name. Will she move further towards grace and away from misanthropy show more in her novels of the next decade? I'll certainly be reading to find out.
Deep Ellum reads like an extended short story, leaving much unresolved and ambiguous. It's about family, and addiction, and mental illness. It paints a compelling picture and characterization without ever spelling a whole lot out. The characters are mostly depressed. It's almost as if the prose itself is depressed, rousing itself to tell you a little, but then sighing, "whatever, nevermind". Gideon, our narrator, pops hydrocodone pills, but the prose just tells you "I took a hydrocodone", without any fuss. The reader can construct what that means for herself.
Plot wise not a terrible lot happens. Gideon takes a walk through the Deep Ellum neighborhood. He chats with a girl. He scrounges a job. He sees an old friend who works at Taco Hut. He gets into a bath with his older sister (here too just hints of something dark, not overly spelled out). He takes pills. He visits his mother, gets in a fight with his stepfather. Little bursts of activity that form a picture of a whole.
On the final page the family all gets together and "It seemed this would be the moment of a great communication for all of us, but as we walked along the fence toward the barn, nobody said anything." Without saying much, this book says a lot, which is always a nice trick. show less
What connects these two linked novel(la)s that focus so greatly on being female in contemporary Japan is an existential worry with a religious and philosophical history going back to ancient times. From Book One:
From Book Two:
This is the antinatalist viewpoint, popularized in recent times by the philosopher David Benatar in his 2006 book [b:Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence|660518|Better Never to Have Been The Harm of Coming into Existence|David show more Benatar|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348531771l/660518._SY75_.jpg|646592]. Writing, "It is curious that while good people go to great lengths to spare their children from suffering, few of them seem to notice that the one (and only) guaranteed way to prevent all the suffering of their children is not to bring those children into existence in the first place," Benatar traces this idea back to Sophocles (“Never to have been born is best") and even into the Bible ("I have praised the dead that are already dead more than the living that are yet alive; but better than both of them is he who has not yet been, who has not seen the evil work that is done under the sun" - Ecclesiastes).
Benatar argues that there is a mismatch between pleasure and pain. While pleasure's presence is good and pain's presence is bad, pleasure's absence is not bad if there is no one existing to miss it, while pain's absence is always good. Since existing results in both pleasure and pain, while not existing results in missing pleasure, which is not bad, and missing pain, which is good, not existing is better. Thus the ethical choice is to not have children, to not bring a being into existence as it would have been better off not existing.
Book Two of Breasts and Eggs presents this argument and asks if it convinces an adult considering procreation, while Book One asks, from the point of view of a child, if it's true or not. Kawakami's text doesn't offer a clear answer I don't think, leaving it to the reader to consider if they so choose to... not being a question that most people actually ever consider, I don't think.
In Book One, originally an independent novella, a woman in Tokyo is visited by her sister and 12 year old niece. The niece, Midoriko, is suffering through the early stages of adolescence and has stopped talking to her single mother, Makiko, only writing short responses to her on a pad of paper. Makiko drinks to escape her own pain and has come to Tokyo for a breast implant consultation, something she has become obsessed with. The combination of her own painful transition into womanhood and her mother's painful experiencing of womanhood has pushed Midoriko into a highly charged but blocked emotional state.
This impasse breaks open in a stunning scene in her aunt Natsuko's kitchen in Tokyo. She confronts her mother, sobbing, smashing raw eggs into her own head, begging for something that she's unable to clearly articulate. Makiko is unable to provide her daughter a verbal reassurance that makes sense, that makes all the suffering understandable and true. So,
This award winning novella is fantastic. Powerful and tight and a perfect length, and as above, occasionally funny in the middle of all of it. For its English language publication, a second story has been added afterwards picking these characters up about a decade later. This second story is twice as long, far more meandering and a bit of a slog to get through though not without merit as well. It features Natsuko, now a successful writer struggling to finish a second novel, while perhaps actually more focused on how she can have a child. Single and asexual, as a woman in Japan she faces high barriers to fulfilling a desire she can't quite rationally explain the existence of, but which nevertheless powerfully drives her onward, even in the face of another character's arguments against having children as noted above.
There's a lot of discussion in this second section about what it means to have a child and what it means to be a woman, either with children or childless/childfree. How the characters deal with and try to escape the misogyny that surrounds them. There's also a lot of sagging exposition that makes it harder to enjoy and recommend it.
5 stars for Book One, 3 stars for Book Two, so 4 stars together. show less
"Do you have any idea how scared I am? I don't get it, any of it. My eyes hurt. They hurt. Why does everything change? Why? It hurts. Why was I born? Why did any of us have to be born? If we were never born, none of these things would have happened, none of it would - "
From Book Two:
"You have no idea what I'm talking about, do you?" She exhaled through her nose. "it's really simple, I promise. Why is it that people think this is okay? Why do people see no harm in having children? They do it with smiles on their faces, as if it's not an act of violence. You force this other being into the world, this other being that never asked to be born. You do this absurd thing because that's what you want for yourself... Once they've had a baby, most parents would do anything to shelter them from any form of pain or suffering. But here it is, the only way to actually keep your child from ever knowing pain. Don't have them in the first place... No one should be doing this," Yuriko nearly whispered. "Nobody."
This is the antinatalist viewpoint, popularized in recent times by the philosopher David Benatar in his 2006 book [b:Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence|660518|Better Never to Have Been The Harm of Coming into Existence|David show more Benatar|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348531771l/660518._SY75_.jpg|646592]. Writing, "It is curious that while good people go to great lengths to spare their children from suffering, few of them seem to notice that the one (and only) guaranteed way to prevent all the suffering of their children is not to bring those children into existence in the first place," Benatar traces this idea back to Sophocles (“Never to have been born is best") and even into the Bible ("I have praised the dead that are already dead more than the living that are yet alive; but better than both of them is he who has not yet been, who has not seen the evil work that is done under the sun" - Ecclesiastes).
Benatar argues that there is a mismatch between pleasure and pain. While pleasure's presence is good and pain's presence is bad, pleasure's absence is not bad if there is no one existing to miss it, while pain's absence is always good. Since existing results in both pleasure and pain, while not existing results in missing pleasure, which is not bad, and missing pain, which is good, not existing is better. Thus the ethical choice is to not have children, to not bring a being into existence as it would have been better off not existing.
Book Two of Breasts and Eggs presents this argument and asks if it convinces an adult considering procreation, while Book One asks, from the point of view of a child, if it's true or not. Kawakami's text doesn't offer a clear answer I don't think, leaving it to the reader to consider if they so choose to... not being a question that most people actually ever consider, I don't think.
In Book One, originally an independent novella, a woman in Tokyo is visited by her sister and 12 year old niece. The niece, Midoriko, is suffering through the early stages of adolescence and has stopped talking to her single mother, Makiko, only writing short responses to her on a pad of paper. Makiko drinks to escape her own pain and has come to Tokyo for a breast implant consultation, something she has become obsessed with. The combination of her own painful transition into womanhood and her mother's painful experiencing of womanhood has pushed Midoriko into a highly charged but blocked emotional state.
This impasse breaks open in a stunning scene in her aunt Natsuko's kitchen in Tokyo. She confronts her mother, sobbing, smashing raw eggs into her own head, begging for something that she's unable to clearly articulate. Makiko is unable to provide her daughter a verbal reassurance that makes sense, that makes all the suffering understandable and true. So,
Face smeared with yolk and shell, she stood and went back to Midoriko, grabbed another egg, and cracked it right between her eyes. Midoriko was still in tears but paying close attention, watching everything. She grabbed another egg for herself and rammed it into her temple. Its insides ran down her cheek, followed by bits of shell. Makiko grabbed the last two eggs, then broke them on her face, one after the other, then turned to me.
"No more?" she asked.
"There's some in the fridge," I said.
This award winning novella is fantastic. Powerful and tight and a perfect length, and as above, occasionally funny in the middle of all of it. For its English language publication, a second story has been added afterwards picking these characters up about a decade later. This second story is twice as long, far more meandering and a bit of a slog to get through though not without merit as well. It features Natsuko, now a successful writer struggling to finish a second novel, while perhaps actually more focused on how she can have a child. Single and asexual, as a woman in Japan she faces high barriers to fulfilling a desire she can't quite rationally explain the existence of, but which nevertheless powerfully drives her onward, even in the face of another character's arguments against having children as noted above.
There's a lot of discussion in this second section about what it means to have a child and what it means to be a woman, either with children or childless/childfree. How the characters deal with and try to escape the misogyny that surrounds them. There's also a lot of sagging exposition that makes it harder to enjoy and recommend it.
5 stars for Book One, 3 stars for Book Two, so 4 stars together. show less
He thought, "Thomas Bernhard is mentioned as the most important post-war writer in German, is credited with ownership of a particular style, and is frequently referred to." He thought, "I shall read Bernhard's novels, starting with his first." He thought, "Bloody hell."
The cover blurb proclaims Frost to be "A blast of raw feeling." It's a blast of something, all right. 350 pages mostly consisting of a steady rant of complaints and invective, described by its admirers here - its admirers, mind - with words like "impenetrable" and "increasingly incomprehensible", which leaves me wondering, "do you people want something totally different than I do out of literature?"
There's not a plot so much as a vague gesture in that direction. A medical internist is sent by his superior to observe the doctor's brother for a month. The text does not have exchanges of dialogue but rather a few lines of this brother's directly spoken rants alternating with the internist's summary of the next few lines of the man's rants, and, repeat. A better recipe for boredom if this is not done well is hard to imagine.
Sometimes you can sort of chuckle at the rants. Of his fellow villagers: "The children had lice, the grown-ups had gonorrhea, or the syphilis that finally overwhelmed their nervous systems... Almost all of them have cankered lung lobes, pneumothorax and pneumoperitoneum are endemic. They have tuberculosis of the lungs, the head, the arms and legs." On rural folk: "That whole simple, show more pitiless world of thought, where simplicity and low-mindedness get hitched and ruin everything! Nothing comes from country people! Villages, morons in short sleeves! The country is no source anymore, only a trove of brutality and idiocy, of squalor and megalomania, of perjury and battery, of systematic extinction!" On the nature of humankind: "Where there is putrescence, I find I cannot breathe deeply enough. I always want to breathe in the odor of humanity, you understand."
For me, the human imagination is an aspect of "God created man in his own image," the imagination and creative impulse acts that bring us closer to God. But it's seen rather differently here: "The imagination is an expression of disorder, it has to be. In an ordered world, there would be no such thing as imagination, order wouldn't tolerate such a thing, imagination is completely alien to it. All the way here, I was asking myself what imagination is. I'm sure imagination is an illness. An illness that you don't catch, merely because you've always had it. An illness that is responsible for everything, and particularly everything ridiculous and malignant."
But then amazingly, about exactly halfway through the book, I found a few lines that counter the entire novel's essence. It's about a hospital attached to a chapel, nuns working as nurses. The internist reflects: "The sisters perform astonishing feats. Never get to bed before eleven, and are back from church already by five, having been heard singing there at half past four. Everywhere, the great white tulips of their bonnets, which manage to flower where everything is dark with despair, where everything else is bleak and bare and inimical."
Well, how un-Bernhardian seeming! A lone bright ray, surrounded by darkness.
So you see why I can't give it just 1 star, despite the fact that I skimmed near the end, and I hate skimming, it's the antithesis of my entire being, and I can't imagine recommending this book. Now, I wonder how I'll like his second novel... show less
The cover blurb proclaims Frost to be "A blast of raw feeling." It's a blast of something, all right. 350 pages mostly consisting of a steady rant of complaints and invective, described by its admirers here - its admirers, mind - with words like "impenetrable" and "increasingly incomprehensible", which leaves me wondering, "do you people want something totally different than I do out of literature?"
There's not a plot so much as a vague gesture in that direction. A medical internist is sent by his superior to observe the doctor's brother for a month. The text does not have exchanges of dialogue but rather a few lines of this brother's directly spoken rants alternating with the internist's summary of the next few lines of the man's rants, and, repeat. A better recipe for boredom if this is not done well is hard to imagine.
Sometimes you can sort of chuckle at the rants. Of his fellow villagers: "The children had lice, the grown-ups had gonorrhea, or the syphilis that finally overwhelmed their nervous systems... Almost all of them have cankered lung lobes, pneumothorax and pneumoperitoneum are endemic. They have tuberculosis of the lungs, the head, the arms and legs." On rural folk: "That whole simple, show more pitiless world of thought, where simplicity and low-mindedness get hitched and ruin everything! Nothing comes from country people! Villages, morons in short sleeves! The country is no source anymore, only a trove of brutality and idiocy, of squalor and megalomania, of perjury and battery, of systematic extinction!" On the nature of humankind: "Where there is putrescence, I find I cannot breathe deeply enough. I always want to breathe in the odor of humanity, you understand."
For me, the human imagination is an aspect of "God created man in his own image," the imagination and creative impulse acts that bring us closer to God. But it's seen rather differently here: "The imagination is an expression of disorder, it has to be. In an ordered world, there would be no such thing as imagination, order wouldn't tolerate such a thing, imagination is completely alien to it. All the way here, I was asking myself what imagination is. I'm sure imagination is an illness. An illness that you don't catch, merely because you've always had it. An illness that is responsible for everything, and particularly everything ridiculous and malignant."
But then amazingly, about exactly halfway through the book, I found a few lines that counter the entire novel's essence. It's about a hospital attached to a chapel, nuns working as nurses. The internist reflects: "The sisters perform astonishing feats. Never get to bed before eleven, and are back from church already by five, having been heard singing there at half past four. Everywhere, the great white tulips of their bonnets, which manage to flower where everything is dark with despair, where everything else is bleak and bare and inimical."
Well, how un-Bernhardian seeming! A lone bright ray, surrounded by darkness.
So you see why I can't give it just 1 star, despite the fact that I skimmed near the end, and I hate skimming, it's the antithesis of my entire being, and I can't imagine recommending this book. Now, I wonder how I'll like his second novel... show less
What pure fun reading this novel was! Just a joy. Susanna Clarke has finally followed up her debut novel [b:Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell|14201|Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell|Susanna Clarke|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1357027589l/14201._SY75_.jpg|3921305] sixteen years later with Piranesi, which shares some similarities with her debut - including that quality of being an absolute delight to read - but which differs enough to make it a unique work. In my esteem this may launch her up there with [a:Donna Tartt|8719|Donna Tartt|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1409871301p2/8719.jpg], who has taken a decade between each of her three fabulous novels.
Clarke's debut novel combined the heritage of Dickens and Austen with fantasy in what felt really fresh and new. Piranesi doesn't feel like either of those writers, it's considerably more circumscribed - fewer pages, fewer characters, smaller realm of action (though ironically set in an apparent infinite labyrinth of classical architecture). It shares a general essence however of treating magic as a real existing thing, though largely cast off by the modern world, now hidden and found only by a few. In Piranesi, magic left our world when we stopped believing in it and one "transgressive thinker" correctly deduced that it had to go somewhere, and was able to discover how to open a door to other worlds, including the world our protagonist exists in.
This world is a never ending maze of show more halls and vestibules, a somewhat crude representation of our physical reality in that there are three levels of rooms, the bottom containing the deep waters and the top containing the clouds. Other than sea creatures, and birds which fly through and live in the middle level as well (the presence of birds must have some symbolism but I'm not sure what it is), the only living creatures here are Piranesi and another man who bestowed this name upon him, whom Piranesi refers to as The Other, whom he only occasionally sees. Every room, on each level, is packed with marble statuary. Millions, billions of statues altogether. These statues I think bear some relation to Plato's idea of Forms. Piranesi suggests this when talking to a person from our "real world" near the novel's end:
If Piranesi is existing in a world something like Plato's idea of Forms (which Plato said do not exist in any material condition, so it's certainly not an exact comparison), it is a world of ideas. Living in a world of ideas suggests cutting oneself off from real life and from other people, and Piranesi is indeed that. He has completely forgotten about the "real world", completely forgotten about his family and friends, and completely forgotten his "real" identity. He is happy in his pure world of ideas, and reluctant to leave. "The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite," he says in the novel's opening. Why give that up for the pain of that other world?
He is reluctant to do so, but when the opportunity presents itself, he ultimately agrees to return to our world so as not to be alone. That's the problem after all with living in the world of ideas, living in your own head, pure as it may seem there. He is however changed from the person he was before, a person who was said to be arrogant and difficult to like. It seems rather like descriptions of people who have undergone a near death experience (NDE), say they visited another world while technically dead, and come back to life, but changed - more kind, more loving, less concerned with material things. Walking through a city park, looking at the people he passes, the novel's final line repeats that line from the open: "The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite." Only it now seems to apply to a different House, a loving benediction for ourselves and for our known world.
An excellent way to start the new year of reading. show less
Clarke's debut novel combined the heritage of Dickens and Austen with fantasy in what felt really fresh and new. Piranesi doesn't feel like either of those writers, it's considerably more circumscribed - fewer pages, fewer characters, smaller realm of action (though ironically set in an apparent infinite labyrinth of classical architecture). It shares a general essence however of treating magic as a real existing thing, though largely cast off by the modern world, now hidden and found only by a few. In Piranesi, magic left our world when we stopped believing in it and one "transgressive thinker" correctly deduced that it had to go somewhere, and was able to discover how to open a door to other worlds, including the world our protagonist exists in.
This world is a never ending maze of show more halls and vestibules, a somewhat crude representation of our physical reality in that there are three levels of rooms, the bottom containing the deep waters and the top containing the clouds. Other than sea creatures, and birds which fly through and live in the middle level as well (the presence of birds must have some symbolism but I'm not sure what it is), the only living creatures here are Piranesi and another man who bestowed this name upon him, whom Piranesi refers to as The Other, whom he only occasionally sees. Every room, on each level, is packed with marble statuary. Millions, billions of statues altogether. These statues I think bear some relation to Plato's idea of Forms. Piranesi suggests this when talking to a person from our "real world" near the novel's end:
'Yes,' said Raphael. 'Here you can only see a representation of a river or a mountain, but in our world - the other world - you can see the actual river and the actual mountain.'
This annoyed me. 'I do not see why you say I can only see a representation in this World,' I said with some sharpness. 'The world "only" suggests a relationship of inferiority. You make it sound as if the Statue was somehow inferior to the thing itself. I do not see that that is the case at all. I would argue that the Statue is superior to the thing itself, the Statue being perfect, eternal and not subject to decay.'
If Piranesi is existing in a world something like Plato's idea of Forms (which Plato said do not exist in any material condition, so it's certainly not an exact comparison), it is a world of ideas. Living in a world of ideas suggests cutting oneself off from real life and from other people, and Piranesi is indeed that. He has completely forgotten about the "real world", completely forgotten about his family and friends, and completely forgotten his "real" identity. He is happy in his pure world of ideas, and reluctant to leave. "The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite," he says in the novel's opening. Why give that up for the pain of that other world?
He is reluctant to do so, but when the opportunity presents itself, he ultimately agrees to return to our world so as not to be alone. That's the problem after all with living in the world of ideas, living in your own head, pure as it may seem there. He is however changed from the person he was before, a person who was said to be arrogant and difficult to like. It seems rather like descriptions of people who have undergone a near death experience (NDE), say they visited another world while technically dead, and come back to life, but changed - more kind, more loving, less concerned with material things. Walking through a city park, looking at the people he passes, the novel's final line repeats that line from the open: "The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite." Only it now seems to apply to a different House, a loving benediction for ourselves and for our known world.
An excellent way to start the new year of reading. show less
This was my entry into Antoine Volodine's unique literary project, which he promises can be read in any order. Volodine is only one of a number of heteronyms used by the French-Russian writer behind them, which is certainly unusual but not unheard of, but then each of these personas is writing from the same alternate reality. In this reality these writers are all left-wing prisoners in a totalitarian state, telling each other stories, and birds are human-like members of the resistance. Weird, huh. The project so far consists of 44 of a planned 49 works published in France over four decades, under various of the heteronyms, and together they make up the "post-exotic" literature. Eight have been translated into English over the last 25 years and there are three new translations coming out in 2021 to push that total to 11, of which Solo Viola, published by the University of Minnesota Press is one.
Solo Viola consists of two main parts with a short postscript. The first section had me in mind of Italo Calvino. It has that fable-like, somewhat whimsical quality to it. It introduces the reader to several groups of separate characters in a capital city. There are three just released political prisoners - a horse thief, a circus wrestler, and a bird. There are four members of a string quartet. There is the horse thief's more successful brother. There are millions of Frondists, followers of a populist nationalism that controls political and public life, expert in manipulating the show more dark currents of the human soul. There is a clown. And there is a writer:
I imagine we can take this description of the character of Iakoub Khadjbakiro (all characters in this novel have exotic sounding names to this reader, often seeming to bear some resemblance to Armenian ones) as a fair description of the author's decades-long project. And if he was horrified by ominous developments concerning populist nationalism in 1991, when this novel was published in France, he would hardly be less so when considering political developments in the Western world leading up to 2021. Thus his project unfortunately has just as much relevance today as at any time in the last forty years of its compilation.
All these characters, and Frondism, come together in the second part of the novel in a gradually building set piece of horror that reflects an attack on the arts and its supporters, an attack on a perceived cultural elite by the populist mass expertly manipulated by totalitarian leadership. Those of us who enjoy a good string quartet performance will be rather uncomfortable here. Volodine portrays the helplessness of those who become the target of the totalitarian mob's rage, a mob for whom, as would be said of Donald Trump's rallies twenty five years after this book's publication, the cruelty is the point.
The brief postscript suggests, in my initial read at least, that escape from this fate is only partially achievable by turning away from the reality of human nature and society and turning inward to the world of imagination, where we can at least imagine a society of the brotherhood of man - but which would ironically only exist in the mind of a sole person, and which here is suggested by a solo viola playing. I'll have to read more of the author to see if that fatalistic reading holds! show less
Solo Viola consists of two main parts with a short postscript. The first section had me in mind of Italo Calvino. It has that fable-like, somewhat whimsical quality to it. It introduces the reader to several groups of separate characters in a capital city. There are three just released political prisoners - a horse thief, a circus wrestler, and a bird. There are four members of a string quartet. There is the horse thief's more successful brother. There are millions of Frondists, followers of a populist nationalism that controls political and public life, expert in manipulating the show more dark currents of the human soul. There is a clown. And there is a writer:
He is not content to offer peevish, bitter pronouncements about the world that surrounds him. He does not reproduce in exact detail the elemental brutality to which humanity has been reduced, the bestial tragedy of their fate... [his] usual process was to replace the hideousness of current events with his own absurd images. His own partial hallucinations, both troubled and troubling. Most of the time, although obviously not always, he obeyed the rules of logic... suddenly his exotic parallel worlds would coincide with something buried in some random person's unconscious mind. Suddenly, that reader would emerge from the subterranean levels of mirage and onto the main square of the capital... he was unable to render on paper, without metaphors, his disgust, the nausea that seized him when he faced the present day and the inhabitants of that present... we approach the story of a man who lives in the anguish of being unclear, a man who spends twenty-four hours a day obsessed by the real, but who nevertheless expresses himself in an esoteric, sibylline manner, locating his heroes in nebulous societies and unrecognizable times.
I imagine we can take this description of the character of Iakoub Khadjbakiro (all characters in this novel have exotic sounding names to this reader, often seeming to bear some resemblance to Armenian ones) as a fair description of the author's decades-long project. And if he was horrified by ominous developments concerning populist nationalism in 1991, when this novel was published in France, he would hardly be less so when considering political developments in the Western world leading up to 2021. Thus his project unfortunately has just as much relevance today as at any time in the last forty years of its compilation.
All these characters, and Frondism, come together in the second part of the novel in a gradually building set piece of horror that reflects an attack on the arts and its supporters, an attack on a perceived cultural elite by the populist mass expertly manipulated by totalitarian leadership. Those of us who enjoy a good string quartet performance will be rather uncomfortable here. Volodine portrays the helplessness of those who become the target of the totalitarian mob's rage, a mob for whom, as would be said of Donald Trump's rallies twenty five years after this book's publication, the cruelty is the point.
The brief postscript suggests, in my initial read at least, that escape from this fate is only partially achievable by turning away from the reality of human nature and society and turning inward to the world of imagination, where we can at least imagine a society of the brotherhood of man - but which would ironically only exist in the mind of a sole person, and which here is suggested by a solo viola playing. I'll have to read more of the author to see if that fatalistic reading holds! show less
I received this novel as part of a subscription to the Republic of Consciousness, which focuses on small presses in the UK (and which I entirely recommend). Am I entirely sure what I just read? No, not at all. The best way to describe it, for me, is the painting Nocturne in Grey and Silver by James McNeil Whistler:
It's a dusky wash of sensations, unclear outlines, uncertain distances, plenty of room for the subconscious mind to wander and fill in.
It begins like a science fiction post-apocalyptic scenario: boats of young people whose memories have seemingly been wiped clean, now emerging from what they call "the blackout", traveling from one island to the next along an apparently unending string of islands, each given a number but also creating their own names, finding all their needs taken care of by unseen hands at each stop/barracks along the way inside lockers labeled with their numbers, mysteriously viewed with some unsettled combination of trepidation/unease/hope/dependence by islanders they come across.
One of them with the name Reger Bede is left behind at an island, where he ages for decades and fills notebooks with his writing (nod to Saint Bede, I presume) as the island society apparently grows all around him. We're not quite sure what his purpose is, or indeed that of the entire group he set out with, what he calls his "cohort". Some themes have settled around him/them but what exactly they mean is not told. They're connected however to burgeoning light, and show more hearts, and time, and turning records.
Eventually officials take him away for a "time out", a debriefing. You think the author is about to spell out for you what exactly is going on? No, no way. The officials are there to listen to Bede, not give us any information. But, but, but. I seize on this as a clue:
Ah, the idealism of youth. Optimistic that they can remake the world in a more just fashion. Generation after generation rising up anew with that hope, which, [looks around] never quite comes to pass... oh, hey...
Whether I'm on or off base with that interpretation of what this novel is "about", I really enjoyed the language and uniqueness of this novel, and the unresolved plot details intrigued me rather than left me frustrated, which I could definitely see the other reaction being. show less
It's a dusky wash of sensations, unclear outlines, uncertain distances, plenty of room for the subconscious mind to wander and fill in.
It begins like a science fiction post-apocalyptic scenario: boats of young people whose memories have seemingly been wiped clean, now emerging from what they call "the blackout", traveling from one island to the next along an apparently unending string of islands, each given a number but also creating their own names, finding all their needs taken care of by unseen hands at each stop/barracks along the way inside lockers labeled with their numbers, mysteriously viewed with some unsettled combination of trepidation/unease/hope/dependence by islanders they come across.
One of them with the name Reger Bede is left behind at an island, where he ages for decades and fills notebooks with his writing (nod to Saint Bede, I presume) as the island society apparently grows all around him. We're not quite sure what his purpose is, or indeed that of the entire group he set out with, what he calls his "cohort". Some themes have settled around him/them but what exactly they mean is not told. They're connected however to burgeoning light, and show more hearts, and time, and turning records.
Eventually officials take him away for a "time out", a debriefing. You think the author is about to spell out for you what exactly is going on? No, no way. The officials are there to listen to Bede, not give us any information. But, but, but. I seize on this as a clue:
On our earliest travels, I explained, we saw communities of all shapes and sizes, and were treated much the same by each. There hardly seemed to be haves and have-nots, since no one back then had had two beans to rub together. You could therefore believe (as most of us did) that when the regrowth brought plenty, its fruits would be shared out equitably -
I remember one visitor leaning forward when I paused here, a point I had reached previously with at least two of his colleagues.
"And you feel this was not delivered?" he asked.
Ah, the idealism of youth. Optimistic that they can remake the world in a more just fashion. Generation after generation rising up anew with that hope, which, [looks around] never quite comes to pass... oh, hey...
Whether I'm on or off base with that interpretation of what this novel is "about", I really enjoyed the language and uniqueness of this novel, and the unresolved plot details intrigued me rather than left me frustrated, which I could definitely see the other reaction being. show less
Reminds me of Adler and Offill and the somewhat dreaded, for me, "plotless novel", however this is really more of an extended creative essay that makes use of fictional elements while mostly working in a similar style to those authors. What I mean is that it is generally composed of short chunks of text, as if Sagasti has taken his research, put it on notecards, and then mixed the cards up in a fashion and read them through, perhaps in an effort to find new connections between seemingly separate but related things. And thus you get a whale song and a Rothko painting sharing both a page and a point.
As the title suggests the focus of the work is on music, more specifically its creative expression. It begins by imagining how the apocryphal story of the purpose behind Bach's composition of the Goldberg Variations may have played out, a Russian count who suffers from insomnia being lulled to sleep each night by a pianist playing the pieces the count specifically commissioned from Bach for this purpose. This nightly musical offering then has as its formal goal its opposite - silence, for the Count, as he falls asleep and the pianist quietly leaves.
Silence is paradoxically the constant companion to music in Sagasti's telling. As is its relative, disappearance. This is explored in more obvious ways, such as John Cage's (in)famous 4'33" or Glenn Gould's preference that his audiences not clap and for the lights to simply fade to darkness after his performance. But also through show more interesting less obvious ways, such as the "loneliest whale in the world" swimming the ocean by itself and making a song too high pitched for other whales to hear, detected by our scientific instruments singing and getting back only silence every year since 2004. And Rothko's "yellow painting", auctioned off every few years to be bought by a new investor at ever higher prices and moved from the seller's secure vault to the buyer's secure vault, never to actually be seen and witnessed. Rothko's offering stripped of all meaning and purpose in the world except as a minor mark in some billionaire's ledger, silenced, is about the saddest thing here, even among the stories of Japanese soldiers who hid in caves for decades or the starving residents of Leningrad listening to a new Shostakovich symphony.
There's a rather funny fable in the middle that departs from the general style of the book to tell about a gigantic organ commissioned by some Baron in an Alpine region that would play all orchestral sounds louder and better than any actual orchestra, but when finally completed and played to great fanfare caused an avalanche that buried it and the town that built it. Snow silenced this ultimate hubris of musical offering. Too much, too much.
If silence can be a lonely response or a righteous response, it can also be a meaningful response. Mahler's Ninth symphony, written not long after the death of the composer's daughter, ends with a solo violin fading into the distance followed by the conductor moving his baton to silence for several minutes. The audience thus sits with Mahler's grief in silence. "It seems," Sagasti writes, "that Mahler composed almost ninety minutes of music just to achieve that silence."
Shh. show less
As the title suggests the focus of the work is on music, more specifically its creative expression. It begins by imagining how the apocryphal story of the purpose behind Bach's composition of the Goldberg Variations may have played out, a Russian count who suffers from insomnia being lulled to sleep each night by a pianist playing the pieces the count specifically commissioned from Bach for this purpose. This nightly musical offering then has as its formal goal its opposite - silence, for the Count, as he falls asleep and the pianist quietly leaves.
Silence is paradoxically the constant companion to music in Sagasti's telling. As is its relative, disappearance. This is explored in more obvious ways, such as John Cage's (in)famous 4'33" or Glenn Gould's preference that his audiences not clap and for the lights to simply fade to darkness after his performance. But also through show more interesting less obvious ways, such as the "loneliest whale in the world" swimming the ocean by itself and making a song too high pitched for other whales to hear, detected by our scientific instruments singing and getting back only silence every year since 2004. And Rothko's "yellow painting", auctioned off every few years to be bought by a new investor at ever higher prices and moved from the seller's secure vault to the buyer's secure vault, never to actually be seen and witnessed. Rothko's offering stripped of all meaning and purpose in the world except as a minor mark in some billionaire's ledger, silenced, is about the saddest thing here, even among the stories of Japanese soldiers who hid in caves for decades or the starving residents of Leningrad listening to a new Shostakovich symphony.
There's a rather funny fable in the middle that departs from the general style of the book to tell about a gigantic organ commissioned by some Baron in an Alpine region that would play all orchestral sounds louder and better than any actual orchestra, but when finally completed and played to great fanfare caused an avalanche that buried it and the town that built it. Snow silenced this ultimate hubris of musical offering. Too much, too much.
If silence can be a lonely response or a righteous response, it can also be a meaningful response. Mahler's Ninth symphony, written not long after the death of the composer's daughter, ends with a solo violin fading into the distance followed by the conductor moving his baton to silence for several minutes. The audience thus sits with Mahler's grief in silence. "It seems," Sagasti writes, "that Mahler composed almost ninety minutes of music just to achieve that silence."
Shh. show less
It has elements that appeal to me, but there are two big problems with the novel from my perspective. The narrative voice became more grating as the story went on; strong in machismo and a tone of ironic distance, Yunior’s voice was not the voice to tell this story for me. How much this is affected by the controversy surrounding Díaz’s own behavior and a sense that this voice is how Díaz likes to see himself, as a Don Juan who sees himself a bit above it all, I’m not sure, but I feel I would have enjoyed the novel more told in Oscar’s voice. There’s a reason the novel isn’t called The Continuing Irritating Life of Yunior.
Secondly the novel’s structure impeded my enjoyment. This is a personal preference to be sure, but in general I prefer not to hop around between characters and time periods back and forth, forth and back, in lengthy sections. In some novels it works great but generally I like a more time linear construction.
Secondly the novel’s structure impeded my enjoyment. This is a personal preference to be sure, but in general I prefer not to hop around between characters and time periods back and forth, forth and back, in lengthy sections. In some novels it works great but generally I like a more time linear construction.
Those first few days are disorienting. You don't know what exactly is happening. You don't know what exactly is changing. You don't know what exactly will have changed for good on the other side. You don't know where the other side is. No one can tell you. You cling to any normalcy you can. Unsettled, your emotions can be precarious.
Alam's novel completely inhabits this space, making for the most anxiety-personifying novel I can recall reading in a long time. And as if it's not enough that his central characters are confusedly facing a world where suddenly, to quote Yeats, "all changed, changed utterly", he forces them together in a rural vacation home with two complete strangers of different race, class, and generation, which would be an anxiety inducing social negotiation in its own right in the best of times. What chance could they have to navigate it gracefully in this situation?
It's the last time. You don't know that. There's always a last time. You'll not know when it is. It seems quotidian and unremarkable, but if you're able to look back later, knowing it was the last time, you may find it miraculous.
I went to a concert. I went to a bar. I went out unmasked.
Our pandemic time will pass soon now but there could be some inflection point coming. We won't know when we're doing something for the last time before whatever's coming has come. We'll be here, in this novel. These characters will not find their known world coming back. It will not resume. It provokes great empathy for them as they struggle. We would struggle. Perhaps our kids would do better.
Alam's novel completely inhabits this space, making for the most anxiety-personifying novel I can recall reading in a long time. And as if it's not enough that his central characters are confusedly facing a world where suddenly, to quote Yeats, "all changed, changed utterly", he forces them together in a rural vacation home with two complete strangers of different race, class, and generation, which would be an anxiety inducing social negotiation in its own right in the best of times. What chance could they have to navigate it gracefully in this situation?
It's the last time. You don't know that. There's always a last time. You'll not know when it is. It seems quotidian and unremarkable, but if you're able to look back later, knowing it was the last time, you may find it miraculous.
Rose was at the kitchen island with a bowl of cereal. Amanda remembered (it was not so long ago) when the girl had needed adult intercession to fetch the bowl, fill it, slice the banana, pour the milk. She had tried not to resent it at the time; she had tried to remember how fleeting those days were. And now they were gone. There was a last time that she had sung theshow more children to sleep, a last time she had wiped the feces from the recesses of their bodies, a last time she had seen her son nude and perfect as he was the day she met him. You never know when a time is the last time, because if you did you could never go on with life.
She bought yogurt and blueberries. She bought sliced turkey, whole-grain bread, that pebbly mud-colored mustard, and mayonnaise. She bought potato chips and tortilla chips and jarred salsa full of cilantro, even though Archie refused to eat cilantro. She bought organic hot dogs and inexpensive buns and the same ketchup everyone bought. She bought cold, hard lemons and seltzer and Tito's vodka and two bottles of nine-dollar red wine. She bought dried spaghetti and salted butter and a head of garlic. She bought thick-cut bacon and a two-pound bag of flour and twelve-dollar maple syrup in a faceted glass bottle like a tacky perfume. She bought a pound of ground coffee, so potent she could smell it through the vacuum seal, and size 4 coffee filters made of recycled paper. If you care? She cared!
I went to a concert. I went to a bar. I went out unmasked.
Our pandemic time will pass soon now but there could be some inflection point coming. We won't know when we're doing something for the last time before whatever's coming has come. We'll be here, in this novel. These characters will not find their known world coming back. It will not resume. It provokes great empathy for them as they struggle. We would struggle. Perhaps our kids would do better.
G.H. knew her. It had been decades! "I think it's something we're going to laugh about when we hear what it was. That's what I think." He didn't think this. But it was right to lie sometimes.
Rose wasn't brave. Kids were merely too young to know to look away from the inexplicable.show less
If you believe animals should have the same rights to life as humans, and thus we should stop eating meat, what's one way you could try to advance your philosophical argument? You could write a novel based on your belief that the rights of cows/pigs/chickens = the rights of humans, there's no rightful difference between us, by substituting humans into the meat processing chain in place of cows/pigs/chickens and showing what that would look like. Why not?
Bazterrica, in a column she wrote for the Irish Times, lays it out thusly:
To create such a scenario, Tender Is the Flesh posits a virus that infects all animals except humans, only being transmissible to humans by our physical contact with animals or any of their byproducts like eating meat or wearing leather, and invariably being fatal in that event. True, this is scientifically absurd, so the novel also suggests that this virus is a lie created by global governments, corporations, media, and medical institutions and doctors so we'll eat humans to reduce problems of show more overpopulation, poverty, undesirables, etc. This is even more absurd.
But let's say we simply grant the premise for the sake of the novel's experiment. Nothing wrong with that, we do the same for plenty of speculative fictions.
The first third of the book, maybe even a little more, is very heavy on narrative exposition. It plants a few seeds of the eventual story, but mostly it is giving the reader background information for it. There is a lot of sentence construction that begins, "He remembers..." and that goes on to give flat reportage of past events. There is a long section where the process of meat processing, from the unloading of live subjects to their preparation for slaughter to the actual slaughter to the carving up of the body is given through dialogue between characters in instructional format.
Not great. To me this is indicative of this book being more a polemical work than one concerned with the craft of fiction. It's more a thought experiment than a story.
However, on the positive side, the novel does pick up later. The protagonist, a manager in a meat processing plant, is given a gift of a young woman bred for consumption who has been treated accordingly all her life, much as we currently treat pigs bred for slaughter. He has also recently lost his young infant through sudden death syndrome. This creates a scenario brimming with possibilities, which I'll just say are developed and concluded with real bravura.
Bazterrica is also concerned with language, and how words are used and what sort of effects they have based on the intentions behind their crafting. Words are powerful and their regulation, which ones we're allowed to use and which ones we aren't in given situations, matters.
This is a book a lot of readers will have trouble making it through, which I think is both the author's point and what will limit her success at making it. show less
Bazterrica, in a column she wrote for the Irish Times, lays it out thusly:
Thanks to my own reading on the topic I gradually changed my diet and I stopped eating meat. When I did, a veil was drawn, and my view of meat consumption was completely changed. To me, a steak is now a piece of a corpse. One day I was walking by a butcher’s shop and all I saw were bodies of animals hanging down and I thought, “Why can’t those be human corpses? After all we are animals, we are flesh.” And that’s how the idea for the novel emerged.
To create such a scenario, Tender Is the Flesh posits a virus that infects all animals except humans, only being transmissible to humans by our physical contact with animals or any of their byproducts like eating meat or wearing leather, and invariably being fatal in that event. True, this is scientifically absurd, so the novel also suggests that this virus is a lie created by global governments, corporations, media, and medical institutions and doctors so we'll eat humans to reduce problems of show more overpopulation, poverty, undesirables, etc. This is even more absurd.
But let's say we simply grant the premise for the sake of the novel's experiment. Nothing wrong with that, we do the same for plenty of speculative fictions.
The first third of the book, maybe even a little more, is very heavy on narrative exposition. It plants a few seeds of the eventual story, but mostly it is giving the reader background information for it. There is a lot of sentence construction that begins, "He remembers..." and that goes on to give flat reportage of past events. There is a long section where the process of meat processing, from the unloading of live subjects to their preparation for slaughter to the actual slaughter to the carving up of the body is given through dialogue between characters in instructional format.
Not great. To me this is indicative of this book being more a polemical work than one concerned with the craft of fiction. It's more a thought experiment than a story.
However, on the positive side, the novel does pick up later. The protagonist, a manager in a meat processing plant, is given a gift of a young woman bred for consumption who has been treated accordingly all her life, much as we currently treat pigs bred for slaughter. He has also recently lost his young infant through sudden death syndrome. This creates a scenario brimming with possibilities, which I'll just say are developed and concluded with real bravura.
Bazterrica is also concerned with language, and how words are used and what sort of effects they have based on the intentions behind their crafting. Words are powerful and their regulation, which ones we're allowed to use and which ones we aren't in given situations, matters.
He wishes he could say atrocity, inclemency, excess, sadism to Senor Urami. He wishes these words could rip open the man's smile, perforate the regulated silence, compress the air until it chokes both of them. But he remains silent and smiles.
This is a book a lot of readers will have trouble making it through, which I think is both the author's point and what will limit her success at making it. show less
A feminist French novella centering on the expression of sexual desire in young women, told with a Calvino-like modern fable quality. Anne Serre doesn't have much of her work (14 novels thus far) translated into English yet, her debut from 1992 here finally introducing her to the English speaking world only in 2018. In a rare English language interview with Serre I found, she says that she writes from her subconscious, which sounds a bit difficult to fathom practically speaking but explains the dreamy fable-like quality and why it was a good thing that her translator here was not only a close friend, but someone who more often translates poetry.
Like dreams, this novella impresses with the feelings it provokes more than with its often spotty plot progression, and its language frequently seems to nail a particular feeling incredibly well. Our governesses, three young women who are practically a single life force, are bold and fearless in taking what pleasure they want, until they fall in love for the first time:
I've obviously never been a young woman in love for the first time, but I feel this.
Or this description of a dead marriage, between the parents of the house the governesses enliven:
I'll end this review, such as it is, with my favorite passage, about the governesses coming into ownership of their desire:
Whew. show less
Like dreams, this novella impresses with the feelings it provokes more than with its often spotty plot progression, and its language frequently seems to nail a particular feeling incredibly well. Our governesses, three young women who are practically a single life force, are bold and fearless in taking what pleasure they want, until they fall in love for the first time:
It's at this point that the pangs of suffering sink into their tender flesh for the first time. They ignore them - they're not unpleasant, in fact. The stranger grows ten inches, his hair turns a deeper gold, his flesh tastier, his voice more resonant. They succumb.show more they were melting.
In love they cease to possess that marvelous self-assurance that sent them striding through garden, woods and fields, lashing the wayside grass. They mellow. They mellow so much, in fact, that you'd think
I've obviously never been a young woman in love for the first time, but I feel this.
Or this description of a dead marriage, between the parents of the house the governesses enliven:
Neither could imagine living without the other. They preferred to go on lying to each other. They preferred to live apart, so long as they were together. And that wasn't so simple either. It's not that easy to keep one's soul under lock and key, as it were. It was like being alone in the world and, in a way, doomed. Yet they were in thrall to a kind of law according to which the person who has accompanied you in love will be the one who accompanies you in death. They were like animals, obedient to an instinct whose meaning and function eluded them.
I'll end this review, such as it is, with my favorite passage, about the governesses coming into ownership of their desire:
At first, they didn't know how to placate these storms. Time and experience are needed. At first, they thought you had to rush everywhere, so they'd race around the garden like madwomen, climbing trees, scaring the birds away, stamping their feet at the gates, hurling all kinds of objects at each other. They would swim or read - feverishly, all night - devour an entire pheasant, tear their dresses, kiss the maids. Then came the first stranger, whom they didn't trust one little bit. They had heard about love, they had heard about men and the power they wielded. It filled them with dread. They would hide behind the curtains in their rooms, or in some dark corner in a corridor, behind a doorway, and from there would study him.
If he approached, their faces would be inscrutable, their bodies dumb. They didn't really have bodies, in fact. So long as the stranger remained outside them, they could examine him all they liked, they still didn't know a thing about him. And it was because of this fiercely guarded secret that they eventually went up to him.
They emerged from the shadows where you can see without being seen and walked into the center of the lighted room. They looked him straight in the eye. When there was desire in his gaze they knew that it was somewhere nearby that the secret was hidden. So they tried to open the door, but only a little, just to get a glimpse inside. Of themselves they gave nothing away - not a thing, not even a fingertip. They wanted to know the secret, but without having to share it with him. Again they failed. When they opened the door slightly, they saw the same thing they had seen in his gaze. Nothing more than that. The secret was still further back. They would have to go up to him and let him touch them. They gave him a mouth, a breast, occasionally an entire body, but even when he was inside them, it wasn't enough. They were still in the dark because they didn't feel a thing.
Then, one day, something in their body stirred. Something that went coursing through their limbs, igniting a million sparks that began to glow day and night. They stopped being afraid, opened their golden gates, and sat quietly without moving, waiting for him to walk into the silky trap that was the secret of his own desire.
Whew. show less
It's easier for me to respect than love a novel written in the fragmentary style, to say "Yes, I see what you did there, well done, it's not really for me, though". No One Is Talking About This at least has a formal reason for being written this way, even arguably a necessary one, being about the experience of being extremely online, but even more specifically being extremely online on Twitter, or "the portal" as Lockwood's narrator calls it, and this is how the portal writes. It is also however about the experience of having the ultimately inescapable reality of human bodies and sickness suddenly jerk you out of your previous life, even when that life is the disembodied mind inside the portal, and seeing that life continue on in its great stream while you are busy with something else, and when you lift your head and look over at it, you realize that you are now an outsider viewing it through a film of difference and alienation rather than an integrated participant.
Why be a part of the portal in the first place? Why, when what goes on in it, your contributions in it, fly by and are gone in nearly a blink. "Already it was becoming impossible to explain things she had done even the year before, why she had spent hypnotized hours of her life, say, photoshopping bags of frozen peas into pictures of historical atrocities, posting OH YES HUNNY in response to old images of Stalin, why whenever she liked anything especially, she said she was going to 'chug it with her ass.' show more Already it was impossible to explain these things."
Personally I have no idea why people on Twitter photoshopped bags of frozen peas into pictures of historical atrocities or posted OH YES HUNNY to pictures of Stalin, but if even core participants have trouble explaining why they did it a short time later, it can't be very important, really. And so I think it's not important if readers of this novel know the memes Lockwood is referencing or not. It might be a fun sort of parlor game, but that's all.
The important thing to know is why the character is immersing herself into the portal, and what it is doing to her, rather than the frankly irrelevant details of what flies by in the portal. She says, "it was a place where she would always choose the right side, where the failure was in history and not herself, where she did not read the wrong writers, was not seized with surges of enthusiasm for the wrong leaders, did not eat the wrong animals... she knew how it all turned out... she floated as the head at the top of it and saw everything, everything, backward, backward, and turned away in fright from her own bright day."
So we get a hint that the portal offers self-esteem and a sense of belonging to a favored tribe, psychological benefits that humans seem designed to chase. It offers certainty and a way to avoid the scary unknown. It also becomes a self-erasing addiction. "You have a totally dead look on your face," her husband tells her as she's doing something or other in the portal. She thinks, "Gradually it had become the place where we sounded like each other, through some erosion of wind or water on a self not nearly as firm as stone." And it takes on a darker cast over time. People - Russians, capitalists, our own ambitious political leaders - exploit it to manipulate us. There's a lust to find transgressors and righteously hound and shun them: "Callout culture! Were things rapidly approaching the point where even you would be seen as bad?"
"Something has gone wrong," her mother texts her. But she's not referencing the portal. The character's sister has had a terrible revelation about her pregnancy. A rare and fatal genetic abnormality in the baby has been discovered. Her sister's life is in danger. She is suddenly and without warning jerked out of her previous life, undone by the reality of these fragile bodies we inhabit outside of the portal. Lockwood writes,
She finds that being surrounded by and participating in her family's pain rather than living so greatly inside the portal reintroduces her to herself: "the previous unshakable conviction that someone else was writing the inside of her head was gone." As ever, illness and death have a great way of shifting one's perception of the world, one does not have to be extremely online to experience this fact of life, it's just one more way of being that has to bow before something greater. New, but ultimately not different in this respect, anyone can identify with this passage where the character looks at her previous life, before the Great Encounter:
So the novel takes a turn towards the universal as Life asserts itself over life. It's not sentimental, Lockwood is far too strong of a writer to get trapped in clichés and sentiment only, rather we see the characters doing the best they can to live out love with each other and in the baby's short life among the difficulties and realities that lie in wait. The character wonders if this experience will change her, fill her with more love and kindness towards her fellow humans. On an airplane, she feels the world calling her back, and the rainbow that follows the plane's path just might offer an answer.
Love to you, whether you find yourself in the portal or elsewhere. show less
Why be a part of the portal in the first place? Why, when what goes on in it, your contributions in it, fly by and are gone in nearly a blink. "Already it was becoming impossible to explain things she had done even the year before, why she had spent hypnotized hours of her life, say, photoshopping bags of frozen peas into pictures of historical atrocities, posting OH YES HUNNY in response to old images of Stalin, why whenever she liked anything especially, she said she was going to 'chug it with her ass.' show more Already it was impossible to explain these things."
Personally I have no idea why people on Twitter photoshopped bags of frozen peas into pictures of historical atrocities or posted OH YES HUNNY to pictures of Stalin, but if even core participants have trouble explaining why they did it a short time later, it can't be very important, really. And so I think it's not important if readers of this novel know the memes Lockwood is referencing or not. It might be a fun sort of parlor game, but that's all.
The important thing to know is why the character is immersing herself into the portal, and what it is doing to her, rather than the frankly irrelevant details of what flies by in the portal. She says, "it was a place where she would always choose the right side, where the failure was in history and not herself, where she did not read the wrong writers, was not seized with surges of enthusiasm for the wrong leaders, did not eat the wrong animals... she knew how it all turned out... she floated as the head at the top of it and saw everything, everything, backward, backward, and turned away in fright from her own bright day."
So we get a hint that the portal offers self-esteem and a sense of belonging to a favored tribe, psychological benefits that humans seem designed to chase. It offers certainty and a way to avoid the scary unknown. It also becomes a self-erasing addiction. "You have a totally dead look on your face," her husband tells her as she's doing something or other in the portal. She thinks, "Gradually it had become the place where we sounded like each other, through some erosion of wind or water on a self not nearly as firm as stone." And it takes on a darker cast over time. People - Russians, capitalists, our own ambitious political leaders - exploit it to manipulate us. There's a lust to find transgressors and righteously hound and shun them: "Callout culture! Were things rapidly approaching the point where even you would be seen as bad?"
"Something has gone wrong," her mother texts her. But she's not referencing the portal. The character's sister has had a terrible revelation about her pregnancy. A rare and fatal genetic abnormality in the baby has been discovered. Her sister's life is in danger. She is suddenly and without warning jerked out of her previous life, undone by the reality of these fragile bodies we inhabit outside of the portal. Lockwood writes,
She fell heavily out of the broad warm us, out of the story that had seemed, up till the very last minute, to require her perpetual co-writing. Oh, she thought hazily, falling rain-wise like Alice, finding tucked under her arm the bag of peas she once photoshopped into pictures of historical atrocities, oh, have I been wasting my time?
She finds that being surrounded by and participating in her family's pain rather than living so greatly inside the portal reintroduces her to herself: "the previous unshakable conviction that someone else was writing the inside of her head was gone." As ever, illness and death have a great way of shifting one's perception of the world, one does not have to be extremely online to experience this fact of life, it's just one more way of being that has to bow before something greater. New, but ultimately not different in this respect, anyone can identify with this passage where the character looks at her previous life, before the Great Encounter:
Through the membrane of a white hospital wall she could feel the thump of the life that went on without her, the hugeness of the arguments about whether you could say the word retard on a podcast. She laid her hand against the white wall and the heart beat, strong and striding, even healthy. But she was no longer in that body.
So the novel takes a turn towards the universal as Life asserts itself over life. It's not sentimental, Lockwood is far too strong of a writer to get trapped in clichés and sentiment only, rather we see the characters doing the best they can to live out love with each other and in the baby's short life among the difficulties and realities that lie in wait. The character wonders if this experience will change her, fill her with more love and kindness towards her fellow humans. On an airplane, she feels the world calling her back, and the rainbow that follows the plane's path just might offer an answer.
Love to you, whether you find yourself in the portal or elsewhere. show less
Irving Kristol once semi-famously said that a neoconservative is a liberal mugged by reality. In Kunzru's Red Pill, the narrator is a liberal mugged by existential crisis, and the reader has to wonder if he's found any better answer to the challenge than Kristol's unfortunate liberal.
The narrator's crisis is essentially a crisis of Enlightenment and liberal values. On the one hand they are assailed by new knowledge in fields like neurochemistry, which argue that humans are nothing but neurons and chemical impulses. Just bits of matter, protons and electrons. If this is so, what gives humans any particular value? "Why do you believe in human rights?" the narrator urgently asks his wife, a human rights lawyer, at one point. "Isn't it just a fiction, though? Just something we tell ourselves? If we still believed in the soul, maybe." Her answer, "We're human. That's enough" is not close to enough.
On the other hand is something old and ancient: the human will to power, and the irrationality and bloodshed that marks human history. The narrator sees the rising again of an irrational tide that threatens the placid and rational reality everyone around him believes they are living in. This is specifically embodied by the rise of the alt-right in politics, which the narrator becomes obsessed with, though it's only a part of what he fears:
When the narrator runs into Anton, a fictionalized Steve Bannon, at a party of the rich and famous he's invited to by some acquaintances, he comes to believe he can resolve his crisis and save humanity and his family by defeating Anton in a final showdown that he is mysteriously being led to. Kunzru's hallucinatory digression mirrors what he did in his previous novel White Tears, though it feels more coherent here.
Our narrator's mental breakdown is brought to a sort of conclusion, however, not by a confrontation with Anton but by a stay in a mental hospital. Upon his release back to his family and social circle, which carries on in its "end of history" style complacency and incomprehension of his crisis, he sees a therapist and works to say the right things, but she is like everyone else with an unjustified faith in the victory of human rationality, and he tries to just shove down his worries.
The philosophy of Joseph de Maistre occupies a central role in the novel. Maistre, who was active in the time immediately following the French Revolution, believed that an evil in the world led to a never-ending procession of human bloodshed and violence, and that a rational attempt at government inevitably lead to unresolvable disagreement and competing claims of illegitimacy, giving rise to violence and chaos. Anton superficially adopts Maistre's philosophy, while the narrator is deeply disturbed by it.
To escape what he saw as the bleakness of the human condition, Maistre believed in God and a divinely ordered ultimate plan of redemption (a part of his philosophy Anton ignores). The narrator doesn't have access to this relief however; when Anton asks him if he's a Christian, admitting that Christianity does present a legitimate objection to his power obsessed worldview, he says no (modern scientific materialism has taken care of that, after all), marking himself as a "typical liberal" in Anton's eyes.
Kunzru doesn't end up offering the narrator much, in my opinion, in compensation with which to counter the existential darkness he faces. "It's not much, but I can say that the most precious part of me isn't my individuality, my luxurious personhood, but the web of reciprocity in which I live my life... Alone, we are food for the wolves. That's how they want us. Isolated. Prey. So we must find each other. We must remember that we do not exist alone", Kunzru writes in the novel's conclusion.
So, community and meaningful relationships. But the narrator had that at the start of the novel. It wasn't enough to answer. show less
The narrator's crisis is essentially a crisis of Enlightenment and liberal values. On the one hand they are assailed by new knowledge in fields like neurochemistry, which argue that humans are nothing but neurons and chemical impulses. Just bits of matter, protons and electrons. If this is so, what gives humans any particular value? "Why do you believe in human rights?" the narrator urgently asks his wife, a human rights lawyer, at one point. "Isn't it just a fiction, though? Just something we tell ourselves? If we still believed in the soul, maybe." Her answer, "We're human. That's enough" is not close to enough.
On the other hand is something old and ancient: the human will to power, and the irrationality and bloodshed that marks human history. The narrator sees the rising again of an irrational tide that threatens the placid and rational reality everyone around him believes they are living in. This is specifically embodied by the rise of the alt-right in politics, which the narrator becomes obsessed with, though it's only a part of what he fears:
This was a problem between us, Rei's faith in the democratic process, in the Democratic Party, in the essential reasonableness of the world. To me,show more the presidential election later that year was only a small part of what I feared. The shift was bigger... I saw nothing reasonable about what was coming. Nothing reasonable at all.
When the narrator runs into Anton, a fictionalized Steve Bannon, at a party of the rich and famous he's invited to by some acquaintances, he comes to believe he can resolve his crisis and save humanity and his family by defeating Anton in a final showdown that he is mysteriously being led to. Kunzru's hallucinatory digression mirrors what he did in his previous novel White Tears, though it feels more coherent here.
Our narrator's mental breakdown is brought to a sort of conclusion, however, not by a confrontation with Anton but by a stay in a mental hospital. Upon his release back to his family and social circle, which carries on in its "end of history" style complacency and incomprehension of his crisis, he sees a therapist and works to say the right things, but she is like everyone else with an unjustified faith in the victory of human rationality, and he tries to just shove down his worries.
The philosophy of Joseph de Maistre occupies a central role in the novel. Maistre, who was active in the time immediately following the French Revolution, believed that an evil in the world led to a never-ending procession of human bloodshed and violence, and that a rational attempt at government inevitably lead to unresolvable disagreement and competing claims of illegitimacy, giving rise to violence and chaos. Anton superficially adopts Maistre's philosophy, while the narrator is deeply disturbed by it.
To escape what he saw as the bleakness of the human condition, Maistre believed in God and a divinely ordered ultimate plan of redemption (a part of his philosophy Anton ignores). The narrator doesn't have access to this relief however; when Anton asks him if he's a Christian, admitting that Christianity does present a legitimate objection to his power obsessed worldview, he says no (modern scientific materialism has taken care of that, after all), marking himself as a "typical liberal" in Anton's eyes.
Kunzru doesn't end up offering the narrator much, in my opinion, in compensation with which to counter the existential darkness he faces. "It's not much, but I can say that the most precious part of me isn't my individuality, my luxurious personhood, but the web of reciprocity in which I live my life... Alone, we are food for the wolves. That's how they want us. Isolated. Prey. So we must find each other. We must remember that we do not exist alone", Kunzru writes in the novel's conclusion.
So, community and meaningful relationships. But the narrator had that at the start of the novel. It wasn't enough to answer. show less
Characters generally on the edges of society feature in these stories set in Little Rock and the surrounding area, which I read out loud with my wife in said surrounding area during the Great Pandemic of 2020. I think my favorite of them is History 232, set in Central High during the cancelled school year of 1958 as the state tried to avoid desegregation of its public schools. The story centers on the relationship between a white maintenance supervisor and a black maintenance worker retained to keep up the empty high school, and illustrates how even someone who not unreasonably sees themselves as well intentioned can still fail to understand the view from another man's shoes.
Other stories that stick out for me are Afterglow, in which a man is surprised to find himself in the middle of a couple's sexual kink, and To the Fordyce Bathhouse, which reflects on love, regret, the decay of age, loneliness, and ends the collection by striking an uplifting note.
Other stories that stick out for me are Afterglow, in which a man is surprised to find himself in the middle of a couple's sexual kink, and To the Fordyce Bathhouse, which reflects on love, regret, the decay of age, loneliness, and ends the collection by striking an uplifting note.
This somewhat chilling examination of children and of human nature was first published in 1929 and republished decades later as the very first entry in the NYRB classics imprint. Hughes' debut novel, it tells the story of seven British children, ages about 13 to 3, whose ship is captured by pirates around the waters of Cuba; transported to the pirate ship as part of an effort to terrorize the ship's captain, the pirates become accidental kidnappers when they don't notice the ship fleeing from them in the night. At first indifferent to and annoyed by the presence of the children, the pirates discover the children to be alien creatures who provoke conflicting emotions: fondness, desire, and finally fear, while the children themselves adapt easily and joyously to life aboard a pirate ship.
The boundary between childhood and adulthood is presented as a yawning chasm with mutual incomprehension. The children have not yet learned to be "human", a comprehensive transformation which comes with adulthood. Their minds and nature are alien to adults: "I would rather extract information from the devil himself than from a child," a lawyer at the end of the book confesses. Some of the pirates feel affection for the children, these strange creatures, but this difference can provoke dark emotions as well. There is disturbing pedophilia: the oldest child, 13 year old Margaret, becomes the lover of the first mate on the pirate ship, and its captain, Jonsen, in a charged moment while drunk show more caresses Emily, a child of about 10 or 11, then is overcome by shame, while she does not understand what happened.
The pirates are stupefied by what happens when they capture another vessel and transport its captain to their ship for safekeeping while they sack it. Emily, seeing this captain straining to reach a knife with which to cut himself loose, grabs the knife herself and in a frenzy stabs and slashes him to death. The pirates return from the captured vessel to find the body in a pool of blood and are gobsmacked. But the children have already displayed an apparent cold indifference to death - Emily's 10 year old brother John had broken his neck in an accidental fall while they were with the pirates, and been promptly forgotten about by all.
After rescue, Emily, with what amount of conscious calculation is left unspecified, leaves the impression that Jonsen murdered that captain, in a dramatic courtroom scene. Jonsen is sentenced to death for the murder, while in the novel's final scene, Emily is integrated into a new classroom, while Hughes writes of the little murderer, with a note of ominousness, that "perhaps God could have picked out from among them which was Emily: but I am sure that I could not."
This novel bears obvious parallels with the later novel Lord of the Flies, and I'm left wondering about its portrayal of human nature in childhood. There's an actual real life Lord of the Flies type situation that I read a news story about recently, and happily the children in real life did not become amoral wild things who discard civilization, but rather cooperated and lived peaceably until rescue. On the other hand, you have child soldiers forced into various conflicts worldwide and these children can reportedly become as vicious as you please. However they are forced into it by adults, they don't choose it. Still, it's true that the brains of children are still developing and maturing past their teenage years, so the gulf between childhood and adulthood is real enough, and children surely don't grasp the concepts of consequences and permanence like adults do. There will always be room to explore the difference, and the similarities. show less
The boundary between childhood and adulthood is presented as a yawning chasm with mutual incomprehension. The children have not yet learned to be "human", a comprehensive transformation which comes with adulthood. Their minds and nature are alien to adults: "I would rather extract information from the devil himself than from a child," a lawyer at the end of the book confesses. Some of the pirates feel affection for the children, these strange creatures, but this difference can provoke dark emotions as well. There is disturbing pedophilia: the oldest child, 13 year old Margaret, becomes the lover of the first mate on the pirate ship, and its captain, Jonsen, in a charged moment while drunk show more caresses Emily, a child of about 10 or 11, then is overcome by shame, while she does not understand what happened.
The pirates are stupefied by what happens when they capture another vessel and transport its captain to their ship for safekeeping while they sack it. Emily, seeing this captain straining to reach a knife with which to cut himself loose, grabs the knife herself and in a frenzy stabs and slashes him to death. The pirates return from the captured vessel to find the body in a pool of blood and are gobsmacked. But the children have already displayed an apparent cold indifference to death - Emily's 10 year old brother John had broken his neck in an accidental fall while they were with the pirates, and been promptly forgotten about by all.
After rescue, Emily, with what amount of conscious calculation is left unspecified, leaves the impression that Jonsen murdered that captain, in a dramatic courtroom scene. Jonsen is sentenced to death for the murder, while in the novel's final scene, Emily is integrated into a new classroom, while Hughes writes of the little murderer, with a note of ominousness, that "perhaps God could have picked out from among them which was Emily: but I am sure that I could not."
This novel bears obvious parallels with the later novel Lord of the Flies, and I'm left wondering about its portrayal of human nature in childhood. There's an actual real life Lord of the Flies type situation that I read a news story about recently, and happily the children in real life did not become amoral wild things who discard civilization, but rather cooperated and lived peaceably until rescue. On the other hand, you have child soldiers forced into various conflicts worldwide and these children can reportedly become as vicious as you please. However they are forced into it by adults, they don't choose it. Still, it's true that the brains of children are still developing and maturing past their teenage years, so the gulf between childhood and adulthood is real enough, and children surely don't grasp the concepts of consequences and permanence like adults do. There will always be room to explore the difference, and the similarities. show less
I have a history of disappointment with comic novels, in that I never much like them or find them all that comic, but I enjoyed this book immensely. It is truly funny! Or it matches up with my sense of humor better than those other novels. Maybe it also helps having been a teenager in 1989/1990, myself. Whatever. The writing is smart and witty and for such a large cast of characters, each one comes through as an individual remarkably well. Jen Fiorenza’s Claw and Mel Boucher’s Splotch are also characters who in Their own right will live long in my memory.
Nominally about a high school varsity field hockey team’s turnaround from chumps to champs, with a side of teenage dabbling in witchcraft and the Salem witch trials, it is really about a group of teenage girls coming into their own in the late eighties. Each girl (and one teenage boy) has her own unique family dynamics and expectations cocooning her, and if writing her name in a book of darkness (fronted by Emilio Estevez) and occasionally dancing naked in the woods together helps her to find and live her true self, what’s the harm. It all makes for a touching, humane, and very comic novel.
Nominally about a high school varsity field hockey team’s turnaround from chumps to champs, with a side of teenage dabbling in witchcraft and the Salem witch trials, it is really about a group of teenage girls coming into their own in the late eighties. Each girl (and one teenage boy) has her own unique family dynamics and expectations cocooning her, and if writing her name in a book of darkness (fronted by Emilio Estevez) and occasionally dancing naked in the woods together helps her to find and live her true self, what’s the harm. It all makes for a touching, humane, and very comic novel.
Edited to add: some great discussion of this book in the Newest Literary Fiction group (Dec 2020 group read) has helped me with the ending, which I can see now as a metaphor either for the self-destructive tendencies of trauma victims (pessimistic take) or for breaking down one’s dysfunctional beliefs/behavior patterns and being born-again, so to speak, with a new way of seeing your place in the world (optimistic take).
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Earthlings is a novel of abuse, alienation, and horror wrapped up in a deceivingly cute package. The whimsical tone is a stark contrast to the content which creates some interesting dissonance and some laugh-out-loud moments of black comedy sprinkled throughout the disturbing story (but there's still no excuse for the misleading blurb the book advertises itself with: "Immensely charming" says John Freeman from LitHub, er, no).
Natsuki is eleven years old at the novel's opening. She suffers constant degrading emotional abuse from her mother and sister and then sexual abuse from a popular teacher. She attempts to cope by imagining she has magical powers conferred onto her by a cute stuffed animal who is from another planet. Once a year at a family gathering she meets up with her cousin Yuu, who suffers abuse from his own mother and copes by imagining he is actually from another planet. They truly share a tragic fraternity, and the examination of their childhood experiences is excellent.
For a moment he couldn't get his words out, but then he said in a small voice, "Children's lives never belong to them. The grown-ups own us. If your mom abandons you, you won't be able to eat, and you can't go anywhere without help from a grown-up. It's the same for all children." He reached out a hand to cut a flower from the bed. "That's why we have to try hard to survive until we've grown up ourselves."
The novel then moves a couple of decades ahead and loses some of its power. Natsuki marries a man she meets online for convenience and a separate togetherness; both severely damaged people, they find a sympathetic friend in one another while struggling to deal with "the Factory", what they call family and society's rigid insistence on everyone becoming productive working and reproducing cogs in the machine:
This critique of adulthood in the novel has all the nuance and insight of an angsty teenager vowing never to be anything like their perfectly normal mom and dad, though I tend to think of Japanese society being considerably more heavy on the push to conformity than my own, so perhaps it bites harder for that.
Natuski's break with reality however is even more complete now than as a child, she has come to believe she is from an alien planet herself, and a horrifying scene of butchery and murder from her childhood that took place shortly after the novel jumped ahead in time explains her continued mental slide. Her husband comes to adopt her reality as well. They then meet with Yuu at the family's old gathering place, and while at first he's naturally skeptical of Natsuki's alternate reality she shares with him, his apparent dissatisfaction with life leads him to adopt their worldview, concluding in a final bizarre and surreal scene of human slaughter, cannibalism, and then mutual voluntary cannibalism as the three characters literally consume parts of each other's bodies that is difficult to make sense of. What Murata was going for with this ending, I'm not sure to be honest. Maybe it makes more sense in a Japanese cultural context?
The part of the novel focused on Natsuki's childhood I thought was excellent, the part focused on her adulthood I got less from, so I probably would have enjoyed this novel more if it had remained a story of childhood and powerlessness in a sometimes brutal world of adults. However, it is certainly memorable. show less
——————-
Earthlings is a novel of abuse, alienation, and horror wrapped up in a deceivingly cute package. The whimsical tone is a stark contrast to the content which creates some interesting dissonance and some laugh-out-loud moments of black comedy sprinkled throughout the disturbing story (but there's still no excuse for the misleading blurb the book advertises itself with: "Immensely charming" says John Freeman from LitHub, er, no).
Natsuki is eleven years old at the novel's opening. She suffers constant degrading emotional abuse from her mother and sister and then sexual abuse from a popular teacher. She attempts to cope by imagining she has magical powers conferred onto her by a cute stuffed animal who is from another planet. Once a year at a family gathering she meets up with her cousin Yuu, who suffers abuse from his own mother and copes by imagining he is actually from another planet. They truly share a tragic fraternity, and the examination of their childhood experiences is excellent.
"Yuu, have you ever thought that your life doesn'tshow more belong to you?"
For a moment he couldn't get his words out, but then he said in a small voice, "Children's lives never belong to them. The grown-ups own us. If your mom abandons you, you won't be able to eat, and you can't go anywhere without help from a grown-up. It's the same for all children." He reached out a hand to cut a flower from the bed. "That's why we have to try hard to survive until we've grown up ourselves."
The novel then moves a couple of decades ahead and loses some of its power. Natsuki marries a man she meets online for convenience and a separate togetherness; both severely damaged people, they find a sympathetic friend in one another while struggling to deal with "the Factory", what they call family and society's rigid insistence on everyone becoming productive working and reproducing cogs in the machine:
Everyone believed in the Factory. Everyone was brainwashed by the Factory and did as they were told. They all used their reproductive organs for the Factory and did their jobs for the sake of the Factory. My husband and I were people they'd failed to brainwash, and anyone who remained unbrainwashed had to keep up the act in order to avoid being eliminated by the Factory.
This critique of adulthood in the novel has all the nuance and insight of an angsty teenager vowing never to be anything like their perfectly normal mom and dad, though I tend to think of Japanese society being considerably more heavy on the push to conformity than my own, so perhaps it bites harder for that.
Natuski's break with reality however is even more complete now than as a child, she has come to believe she is from an alien planet herself, and a horrifying scene of butchery and murder from her childhood that took place shortly after the novel jumped ahead in time explains her continued mental slide. Her husband comes to adopt her reality as well. They then meet with Yuu at the family's old gathering place, and while at first he's naturally skeptical of Natsuki's alternate reality she shares with him, his apparent dissatisfaction with life leads him to adopt their worldview, concluding in a final bizarre and surreal scene of human slaughter, cannibalism, and then mutual voluntary cannibalism as the three characters literally consume parts of each other's bodies that is difficult to make sense of. What Murata was going for with this ending, I'm not sure to be honest. Maybe it makes more sense in a Japanese cultural context?
The part of the novel focused on Natsuki's childhood I thought was excellent, the part focused on her adulthood I got less from, so I probably would have enjoyed this novel more if it had remained a story of childhood and powerlessness in a sometimes brutal world of adults. However, it is certainly memorable. show less
This novel put me in mind of Nabokov... its distinguishing feature is wordplay, a bit of experiment with form, a cleverness. And a coldness, a sterility. Does anyone care about any of these characters? Can they produce genuine feeling in the reader? Are they doing anything or struggling with anything that engages the reader’s empathy? The character of Astrid, a 12 year old girl trying to emerge into her own, comes closest, but the other characters are a big “who cares?” Amber’s character just makes no sense whatsoever, and she’s the catalyst for most development, so that’s a big issue.
Perhaps I got a bit burned out on Nabokov-ian style after reading his entire corpus of novels. Cleverness is not enough. I want more humanity. This isn’t a badly written book by any means, but it’s not what I’m looking for.
Perhaps I got a bit burned out on Nabokov-ian style after reading his entire corpus of novels. Cleverness is not enough. I want more humanity. This isn’t a badly written book by any means, but it’s not what I’m looking for.
Come for the gimmick, stay for one touching, and one puzzling, relationship. The gimmick of course is the children who periodically burst into flame, which doesn't do them any harm. The story doesn't try to explain how this could be, making it magical realism instead of science fiction. Also making it explainable as a mere metaphor for how children can be difficult. What, children can be difficult? It's true!
The puzzling relationship is between Madison, the two children's step-mother, and Lillian, her roommate for half a year of ninth grade at an elite boarding school. Madison is beautiful and was raised to be at home with power and wealth, and is now married to the kids' father, an important Senator, but has trouble forming relationships and has no real friends. Except Lillian? Lillian was a scholarship kid at the school before being expelled, taking the fall for Madison's actions after Madison's arrogant father wrote Lillian's uncaring mother a large check, sending Lillian back to a life of poor schools and dead end jobs. This relationship has all sorts of subtexts - a massive and uncomfortable power imbalance, hidden and repressed sexuality, dysfunctional families, thwarted ambitions.
The touching relationship is between these kids and Lillian. The children's mother, a paranoid recluse, has killed herself and tried to kill them as well. Their father, the Senator, has no feeling for them and wants them to be hidden away. They catch on fire. Safe to say, they've got some show more issues. Madison asks Lillian to leave behind her barely functional life to care for them in a guesthouse on their massive estate. It shouldn't work out but it does, and the kids and Lillian find love and redemption in each other. And it's actually written pretty well.
There's less done with the flammable aspect of the children than I was expecting, so I got a different book than I thought I was about to read, but it's an entertaining and solid read. show less
The puzzling relationship is between Madison, the two children's step-mother, and Lillian, her roommate for half a year of ninth grade at an elite boarding school. Madison is beautiful and was raised to be at home with power and wealth, and is now married to the kids' father, an important Senator, but has trouble forming relationships and has no real friends. Except Lillian? Lillian was a scholarship kid at the school before being expelled, taking the fall for Madison's actions after Madison's arrogant father wrote Lillian's uncaring mother a large check, sending Lillian back to a life of poor schools and dead end jobs. This relationship has all sorts of subtexts - a massive and uncomfortable power imbalance, hidden and repressed sexuality, dysfunctional families, thwarted ambitions.
The touching relationship is between these kids and Lillian. The children's mother, a paranoid recluse, has killed herself and tried to kill them as well. Their father, the Senator, has no feeling for them and wants them to be hidden away. They catch on fire. Safe to say, they've got some show more issues. Madison asks Lillian to leave behind her barely functional life to care for them in a guesthouse on their massive estate. It shouldn't work out but it does, and the kids and Lillian find love and redemption in each other. And it's actually written pretty well.
There's less done with the flammable aspect of the children than I was expecting, so I got a different book than I thought I was about to read, but it's an entertaining and solid read. show less