Best reading list in the universe! I hope all's well--
ak ]]>
by Clarice Lispector
ah yes! she does. But lives to tell the tale. ]]>
I loved it, but am discovering through it some inkling of the way what I love in stories works. And that's a bit troubling. The most gorgeously arresting portions of this work, for me, are perhaps the ones that strip out a certain layer of experience-in-time most precisely. That is, they are highly fabricated . . . and this poses the question then of what is driving the fabricating urge. Why this layer and not another? Why is what is left out left out? Finally then, why do we make the stories we make? It appears that it is not reality--full of pushes and pulls and mysteries and lumps, seamless, impersonal, endless--that drives this fiction and maybe any other. It's just what we want. And some kind of claustrophobia attends this.
The separate points of view as a fictional technique are gorgeously done here, utterly different but all connected by some recognizable atmosphere, the scent of time. ]]>
]]>
by Dan Brown
Hi Susannah-- You want cheap thrills? I can loan you my Sax Rohmer omnibus! And slightly more expensive thrills, with a velvety ambience of perpetual nacht und nebel, try Alan Furst. Really good fall reading.
I agree, the nutty Da Vinci Code was a gas. There was amplitude in the cartoon gnostic backstory. But I think, based on your review here, I'll give the next one a miss. ]]>
Ann Klefstad
read and liked
Susannah's
review of The Lost Symbol (Robert Langdon, #3):
"You know, I enjoyed the "Da Vinci Code" -- for all its literary shortcomings, I found the pacing effective and the storyline intriguing enough to keep me entertained. So, when I picked up his eagerly anticipated new novel to read over a lon...more "
"You know, I enjoyed the "Da Vinci Code" -- for all its literary shortcomings, I found the pacing effective and the storyline intriguing enough to keep me entertained. So, when I picked up his eagerly anticipated new novel to read over a lon...more "
I believe I have reviewed this under its English-translation title, "The Wanderer," already. But the book is a miracle. There's nothing else like it, and the world that produced it, a liminal and strange one even then, is gone entirely now. Alain-Fournier produced this one book before being wasted in the Great War along with so many others. The world we are in now would have been, I think, an entirely different one if Alain-Fournier's generation had not been killed and/or psychologically crushed by the idiocies of that war. This is an essential document of what was lost, how elusive, how powerful, how alive it was. ]]>
The texture of the language means that McCarthy can lead you down this punishing road and you do follow. Eventually the desire to find anything but despair drives you on, paralleling the endless steps of the father and son. You fetch up by the sea with them, expecting relief and sort of, kind of, finding it in at least the motion of the water, the potential to cross it--but actually the light comes from elsewhere. the end's not particularly credible--how can a human link survive in the landscape that's portrayed? But you forgive McCarthy his need to make something up in the face of death. That's what we all do, really. A strange and puzzling book, failed in the best way. ]]>
O I have bogged, rather, in this. I hope to resume sometime when I need less from a book and can bring more to it. ]]>