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July 02
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Joseph
is currently reading:
Omega Minor (Paperback)
by Paul Verhaeghen
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June 29
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Joseph
is currently reading:
She Drove Without Stopping (Hardcover)
by Jaimy Gordon
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Joseph said:
"Jaimy Gordon's language is scaring me. It's tough and generous and unashamed. But it also swerves (sorry) toward a kind of fake lyricism that is choking American fiction in and out of MFA programs, the kind of writing where unusual vocabulary and a...more
Jaimy Gordon's language is scaring me. It's tough and generous and unashamed. But it also swerves (sorry) toward a kind of fake lyricism that is choking American fiction in and out of MFA programs, the kind of writing where unusual vocabulary and an excess of figurative language is rallied to give the impression of tremendous significance to every tiny event, such that everything in a novel can have a uniform significance, a uniform terror, and a uniform tension, so that nothing is tense at all. But I don't find myself saying, "No, it's not like that," or sneering at this book the way I do when I'm reading a novel that indulges in that kind of writing. I'm nervous because this book might actually be great....less
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Joseph
added:
Hotel Crystal (Dalkey French Literature)
by Olivier Rolin
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read in June, 2008
Joseph said:
"Here's how the book is structured: there are 43 short chapters (averaging 1000 words in length), each titled with a room number, the name of the hotel, and the city in which the hotel is located. Each chapter begins with a plain description of the r...more
Here's how the book is structured: there are 43 short chapters (averaging 1000 words in length), each titled with a room number, the name of the hotel, and the city in which the hotel is located. Each chapter begins with a plain description of the room, which, after a page or so, leads into a fragment of a spy story, disconnected in time and place from the other chapters.
The narrative is ostensibly a collection of writings on scraps of paper, postcards, and scribblings over the printed text of other books; arranged by editors; and presented to the reader with comments by the editors (and also by the author, but I think those comments are supposed to be part of the original fragments). Of course, the book doesn't really look like this. It's just regular text, so you have to imagine the words written across other books, which doesn't do much for me, but it's an idea with potential.
Next, the narrative functions equally well as a gratuitous adventure story and a study in boredom leading to delusion (you can easily imagine the narrator to be a dull academic and writer traveling the world and inventing a more interesting life for himself, a life full of sex and murder). Now that I've summarized it like that, I realize that this shouldn't be my kind of book at all, because I never enjoy adventure novels and I usually don't like stories where the sole purpose is to portray delusion, because such delusions tend to be one-dimensionally sad. But somehow this book, existing in a place of perfect harmony between those two types of stories, is enjoyable. Sure, it's some kind of delusion, either the narrator's or my own, but it's not all-consuming, it flits in and out, and therefore it's really fun to read. It's not serious at all.
Or maybe part of the book is serious, but only the descriptions of the rooms. Those require careful reading and imagination, and they suggest that the capitalist logic of hospitality is uniform and predictable, but also contains minute flaws, as if to show that humans make and occupy these rooms, as if anything else ever could. It's more interesting and ambiguous than any of the intrigues that the narrator claims to be involved in. Space is what matters. But the spaces repeat themselves, in form, in color, in tackiness!
Two different books are essentially smashed together to create at least two more possible books. There might be a meta-narrative (starring a delusional narrator) but there might not. I was reading James Wood in The New Yorker the other day, writing about those so-called unreliable narrators, and how so many of them are reliably unreliable...which is to say, they leave enough clues, open enough rifts in their own narratives, to allow the reader to decode the superficial narrative and determine what "really" happened. Perhaps it would be better to say "what happened at the base of the fiction."
But not in Hotel Crystal! This narrator, I believe, is unreliably unreliable, just as the narrator in Tim O'Brien's In the Lake of the Woods is. You can't decode Hotel Crysal because beneath the code is another code and beneath that is the first code again. And I think that this brings us to the novel's problem. There's nothing in Hotel Crystal. After reading other reviews of the book, I felt destined to solve the mystery that the other reviewers claimed wasn't even there, but I, too, have found nothing in the middle of this book. The good news is that the novel literally asks for someone else to complete it. Please let me know if somebody does.
I should not enjoy this book at all. I should consider it a fraud. But what a marvelous fraud!...less
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Joseph
added:
Death Comes for the Archbishop (Vintage Classics)
by Willa Cather
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read in May, 2008
Joseph said:
"Though the sympathies of the narrator are clearly with the French missionaries, Cather writes in such a way that we can see the story from the viewpoint of characters under the jurisdiction of Father Latour and Father Vaillant.
I'm intrigued by...more
Though the sympathies of the narrator are clearly with the French missionaries, Cather writes in such a way that we can see the story from the viewpoint of characters under the jurisdiction of Father Latour and Father Vaillant.
I'm intrigued by the efficiency of Cather's narrative: she blows through events that other novelists would set out moment-by-moment. For instance, the two priests encounter injustice in every episode, but even when the narrator bothers to detail these situations, they get resolved without much action, leading our attention elsewhere, to the landscape, to the inexplicable mandates of religion, to the friendship that persists because it persists (does that make sense?)
All of this is anti-drama. And the anti-drama which animates this book gives it a sedate sense that sits in opposition to the relentless tensioning and releasing of every other Western I've ever read. But it's more than an aesthetic choice, for when the priests decline to seek justice for a woman imprisoned by her psychopathic husband, leaving such things to Kit Carson, they are making an ethical choice. And that choice is murky and questionable, but never questioned.
I'm not sure what to do with this book. ...less
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Joseph
added:
The Drop Edge of Yonder (Paperback)
by Rudolph Wurlitzer
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read in June, 2008
Joseph said:
"A mishmash of Western cliches, coincidences, mystic talk, and awkward repetitions, this book is better than it seems to be. It's best when the story is flying free, with characters appearing and disappearing without notice, and with people gettin...more
A mishmash of Western cliches, coincidences, mystic talk, and awkward repetitions, this book is better than it seems to be. It's best when the story is flying free, with characters appearing and disappearing without notice, and with people getting shot up and robbed and laid in between chapters.
The book is at its worst when Delilah is around. Yes, she's a collage of cliches like everyone else, but it's not working with her because Wurlitzer gives the reader nothing to experience. And if I ever reread this book, I swear I'm going to count the number of times a sequence or chapter ends with some variation of the following: "and then he got up and left the room without a word."
Every now and then this novel keys into some crushing atmosphere, but not often enough.
The story of this book's creation is also worth reading about....less
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Joseph
added:
Uncommon Carriers (Hardcover)
by John McPhee
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read in June, 2008
Joseph said:
"I could read John McPhee's writing about cross-country trucking and package sorting forever. It's fascinating the kind of careers that exist in the shadows of capitalist expediency, and the lives that grow symbiotically with those careers. For inst...more
I could read John McPhee's writing about cross-country trucking and package sorting forever. It's fascinating the kind of careers that exist in the shadows of capitalist expediency, and the lives that grow symbiotically with those careers. For instance, Ainsworth, the trucker profiled in the first and last chapters of the book, [SPOILER ALERT:] rereads Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy once a year if I remember right, something that I've sort of been doing myself. Such a thing is made possible, and likely more meaningful, by spending a lot of life on the road. ...less
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June 19
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Joseph
added:
Distant Star (Paperback)
by Roberto Bolaño
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Joseph said:
"The first time I read this novel the structure perplexed me. I didn't understand those chapters that I thought to be digressions, and I suspect I would have had a diffuse, dull response to the book had not the last section tickled the reader-of-dete...more
The first time I read this novel the structure perplexed me. I didn't understand those chapters that I thought to be digressions, and I suspect I would have had a diffuse, dull response to the book had not the last section tickled the reader-of-detective-stories that, at last, I am. Because let me tell you, the way that this book resolves from a scattered mystery into a much more focused one is the kind of palliative response to horror that only narrative can muster.
But my second time through this short novel of Bolano's, I noticed that the chapters that confused me earlier weren't digressions but consequences or reflections, or perhaps, as the introduction states, "a mirror and an explosion" of what has come before. So I felt enriched by reading the varied (and hypothetical) experiences of the characters fatefully gathered at the beginning. Enriched, not distracted!
Also, careful readers will notice that the introduction could be considered to spoil one of the endings of The Savage Detectives if you're among those who believe literature can be spoiled! And speaking of that big book, Distant Star is recommended to those who felt that there wasn't enough investigation in The Savage Detectives (I'm looking your way, Peter G!). Readers who feel that is too much in that book or this one, or are more inclined to marvel at Bolano's voices might prefer another short novel of his, By Night in Chile....less
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June 13
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Joseph
added:
Voss (Paperback)
by Patrick White
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read in January, 2008
Joseph said:
"The virtues of this book might be limitless. White places a novel of domestic life parallel to a novel of adventure. He imitates Victorian prose but evokes a sensibility as modern as it is misfit. But finally, what I admire more than anything els...more
The virtues of this book might be limitless. White places a novel of domestic life parallel to a novel of adventure. He imitates Victorian prose but evokes a sensibility as modern as it is misfit. But finally, what I admire more than anything else is the spiritual dimension of the relationship between Voss and Laura, a relationship both dependent on and free of the characters' physical surroundings. That's all I should say.
...less
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Joseph
added:
The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel (Paperback)
by Isaac Babel
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read in March, 2008
Joseph said:
"In one of my notebooks I have written this command: Never write a short story again unless you can lay open its insides as quickly as Babel.
That is probably enough of a reaction to post here, but let me add that Babel is one of the few writers wh...more
In one of my notebooks I have written this command: Never write a short story again unless you can lay open its insides as quickly as Babel.
That is probably enough of a reaction to post here, but let me add that Babel is one of the few writers who can preserve just enough of the mystery in a short story to keep it interesting when it is read again and again.
His stories usually lunge toward their ends thanks to the intervention of an ethical system unknown to me and perhaps corresponding to none extant. But I notice unsettling similarities in the way that Revolution eats its young in Danilo Kis's A Tomb for Boris Davidovitch. Intellectuals are never trusted in the end....less
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Joseph
added:
Nine (Hardcover)
by Andrzej Stasiuk
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read in November, 2007
Joseph said:
"The geography of Warsaw overlays this novel like...well, not a street map, but a transit map, with many details left dark but with the useful routes marked in bright lines. Ways of escape and ways of survival underlay the action. I'm reminded of &q...more
The geography of Warsaw overlays this novel like...well, not a street map, but a transit map, with many details left dark but with the useful routes marked in bright lines. Ways of escape and ways of survival underlay the action. I'm reminded of "System D" in Eva Hoffman's memoir, Lost in Translation, which is not so much a system as an attitude. (Suddenly I remember that I first heard of Nine by reading Eva Hoffman's review of it.) So the overlay and underlay together give this novel a consuming atmosphere, though "consumptive" may be a better way to put it.
In particular, the acts perpetrated against women during the course of the book are as horrible to us as they are invisible to the male characters. The narrator turns aside from the worst of them, not to ignore their brutality but to spare us from gratuity. This is not to say that detailed acts of violence must necessarily be gratuitous, but that Stasiuk has such control over the focus of his book that he knows what must be left out to keep the novel from becoming a thriller (or even a cousin to a thriller, such as No Country for Old Men).
Nine is also notable for its portrayal of male friendship, and the cronyism that too often accompanies it. This would seem to be a thought disconnected from the above paragraph, but I think that what Nine makes clear is that the tacit arrangements between its men make the violence against its women inevitable.
...less
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