Harry Miller's Blog, page 2

Book Review: Metagestures, by Carla Nappi and Dominic Pettman

Metagestures, a collaboration between Carla Nappi and Dominic Pettman, is an homage to Vilém Flusser’s 1991 book Gestures (Gesten in the original German), which the reviewer has alas not read. Owing to this ignorance, I’m somewhat unclear on the significance of the gesture, which seems to me a superfluity, one step removed from more easily graspable themes. Looking through the table of contents, where the authors’ treatments of “The Gesture of Writing,” “The Gesture of Speaking,” and “The Gestur...

Book Review: Lake of Urine, by Guillermo Stitch

Guillermo Stitch’s Lake of Urine consists of four parts. Part I, “Seiler,” describes the narrator’s (Seiler’s) obsessive persecution of homely Ms Urine, in a way that calls to mind Harry Mathews’ Tlooth and its narrator’s murderous fixation upon Evelyn Roak. It’s a twenty-page giggle.

Part II, “Noranbole,” is named for Urine’s half sister, who has made her way to the big city and now sits at the helm of the Terra Forma corporation. She seems to be the only one capable of managing anything, becau...

Book Review: A Cat at the End of the World, by Robert Perišić

A Cat at the End of the World is a wondrous study of human society and the institutions of freedom and slavery arising therefrom. It draws the reader forward by means of brief chapters that alternate between plot advancement and commentary by a chorus named Scatterwind. It is mostly Scatterwind who develops the themes of freedom and slavery by noting their origins in human interactions with other species.

As Scatterwind recounts, man learned of freedom from cats:

Cats…caught mice and baby rats, ...

Book Review: Eyes Like the Sea, by Mór Jókai

(‘You have a rich aunt at Ó Gyalla, and you’ve only got to say a word to her and she’ll get your book printed for you. I suppose you’ve only got to ask her?’

‘I shall not tell my rich aunt a word about it.’

‘Then you’ll get your book printed at Fani Weinmüller’s, I suppose. Now listen, that won’t do at all. I know an author who published his own book and went from village to village, and persuaded every landed proprietor to buy a copy from him. That is a rugged path.’

‘My romance will not be one...

Book Review: When True Love Came to China, by Lynn Pan

Lynn Pan’s When True Love Came to China is one of the most fascinating books I’ve ever read about anything. It argues that China was a stranger to love – or at least to “true love” – until the New Culture and May Fourth movements of the 1910s, when love was imported to China from its Western place of origin.

To make her case, Pan reviews Chinese and Western literary sources and shows that China, where “feeling” and “lust of the mind” were indeed well known, nonetheless fostered only a pragmatic ...

Book Review: Sanshirō, by Natsume Sōseki

Sanshirō’s namesake protagonist journeys to Tokyo from his provincial hometown in 1908, to pursue his education in Western subjects. What he finds on arrival is no brave new world of expanding horizons but a stagnant morass of demoralization. On a basic level, the Western ideas he encounters are not liberating but imposing, adding nothing to the native culture but confusion:

‘The sky was so clear before,’ said Mineko. ‘Now the color is all muddied.’

Sanshirō took his eyes from the stream and lo...

Book Review: The Village Notary, by József Eötvös

The Village Notary is no great pleasure to read, for the compelling moments of its plot are scattered between cynical diatribes. 

The diatribes are telling, at any rate. Here’s one on democracy:

“It makes me laugh to think that the very men who now divide the county trace their origin as political parties to an idle controversy on the uniforms of the county-hussars. Hence the yellows and the blacks. I am sure your Excellency would laugh if you had seen their committee-rooms. Rety’s head-quarter...

Book Review: Last Words from Montmartre, by Qiu Miaojin

Sophisticated people use art to assimilate life. In extreme cases, the process feeds back, and they sublimate the latter to the former. Qiu Miaojin (or her protagonist, Zoë) was an extreme case.

My goal is to experience the depths of life, to understand people and how they live, and to express this through my art. All my other accomplishments mean nothing to me. If I can only create a masterpiece that achieves the goal I’ve fixed my inward gaze upon during my creative journey, my life will not h...

Book Review: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, by Harriet Jacobs

This book was written (and published in 1861) to inoculate northerners against southern sugar-coating of slavery. This passage exemplifies its purpose:

One day I saw a slave pass our gate, muttering, ‘It’s his own, and he can kill it if he will.’ My grandmother told me that woman’s history. Her mistress had that day seen her baby for the first time, and in the lineaments of its fair face she saw a likeness to her husband. She turned the bondwoman and her child out of doors, and forbade her ever...

Book Review: Six Frigates, by Ian W. Toll

Although I read mostly novels these days, it’s good every once in a while to check in with an amazing history book, of which Six Frigates is a superb example. The story of the founding and early institutional history of the United States is easily as enthralling as any novel. Toll’s book is very nautically detailed, but it also includes thorough treatments of the Founders, the political parties, the leading issues facing the young republic such as Barbary piracy and French and British impressmen...