bookshelves: america--f-k-yeah-, fictions-of-the-big-it
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bookshelves: america--f-k-yeah-, fictions-of-the-big-it
I'm not finished, but I'm really enjoying it.
I don't know what it is, but I think I could read sad, slightly maudlin, slightly angst-ridden tales like this for years.
Particularly when they're written by somebody like Richard Ford.
I loved Independence Day and I knew I'd have to check out the Bascomb trilogy. This one is not disappointing. He seems to really get inside the situations- the character psychology, surely, and the landscapes and the atmosphere of locale and middle age (as far as I would be able to imagine it, at least)- but also sheer evocative capability. Meeting the parents, snooping through your lover's purse when they're fast asleep, a sudden and painful and painfully absurd crisis an acquaintance might drop on you out of the blue, the Zen of athletics....
Everything he's writing is so vivid in such a classy, understated way that I just listen to the audiobook for hours after I had been planning to sack out.
People bring up his whole 'dirty realism' distinction- I don't really see it. Frank is comfortably middle-class, at a job he appreciates and enjoys. Doesn't seem like what I'd call dirty realism at all- though that term might have applied more directly to some of his other work.
I have a hunch that Ford might be (or have been at the time of writing these things) a big Saul Bellow fan. I catch a whiff of Bellow's phrasing and some of his descriptive power and maybe a bit of his tone and humor. This isn't to knock Ford in any way, of course, merely to enhance his value with happy comparison.
I'm only giving it three stars because I'd like to be a little more severe with my rankings generally and because though I love it it's not so unalterably, shatteringly profound that it knocks on the door of the supreme 5 star designation.
It might get 4, though, depending on how the rest shakes out.... ]]>
bookshelves: fictions-of-the-big-it, satire, top-shelf
I'm only a little bit of the way through but I'm totally in love with this book...
This is a rare gem, a brilliant recommendation from a friend. Like most people I'd never even heard of her. She wrote amazingly witty, wise and pungently sarcastic (as well as somehow generous and healthily spirited) parodies on all manner of people and all manner of topics: political idiocy, legislative constipation, dictatorial vainglory, neurotic business mores, gender relations, impossible crushes on the opposite sex, literary and cinematic gender condescension, all her parodies are vivisection's done as if through some kind of eminently, uniquely seductive code- spot on in tone and target.
She's the modern (70's, 80's era) New Yorker equivalent of maybe....Dorothy Parker mixed with Barbara Kruger (Flannery O'Connor?, too, maybe? a little Jane Austen?) mixed with some of the more cerebral Franken and the bitter cocktail of Michael O'Donohue and Janine Garofalo. Let's throw in Jane Curtin and maybe a little Sarah Silverman, for good measure.....
You've maybe never read anything like this before but its guaranteed to be a delight.
She reminds me of the sort of style and substance of a lot of today's humor: often quite absurdist, deadpan, faux naive in some ways, a penchant for getting into the cracks and idiosyncrasies of different voices in pop culture to explode them, syntactically, from the inside of the discourse. Her ear was indeed amazingly well tuned to catch the hypocrisies and double think which seems soaked into so much of our communal language...naturally it becomes very surreal (and, go with me here, a little bit geometrical) which is all to the better if you ask me. But brevity is definitely the soul of wit and Geng knew it. Not very much contained herein is more than maybe 10 pages long, tops.
If you enjoy surreal, pointed, subversive, parodic, incisive, sneakily warm satire this is the gal for you. If only more people were hip to her. If only she were around today. If only I'd, like, met her at a party or something....*sigh*......
R.I.P. ]]>
bookshelves: fictions-of-the-big-it, to-read, worldly-lit
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bookshelves: fictions-of-the-big-it, put-aside, to-read, worldly-lit
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bookshelves: literary-crit
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bookshelves: historyonics-world, literary-crit, worldly-lit
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matt
took the never-ending book quiz.
| questions answered: | 190 |
| correct: | 169 (88.9%) |
| skipped: | 161 |
| best streak: | 11 |
| questions added: | 0 |