"But then silence is articulate and what's not said is felt not heard. She could see that now."
On their surface, Erskine's stories can seem l4.5 stars
"But then silence is articulate and what's not said is felt not heard. She could see that now."
On their surface, Erskine's stories can seem like they are one-note, mundane or else not very dynamic. But in her stories, there is always a frisson of tension, of panic, disquietude, anxiety, that all of a sudden unsettles the still, placid exterior of their narratives. In fact, it is exactly this undisturbed exterior that makes that frisson of something—be it of existential panic in "Last Supper" or sharp loneliness in "The soul has no skin"—all the more meaningful, so much more capable of illuminating that what had once seemed shallow had actually been very deep. It is exactly as Erskine writes: "silence is articulate," and the silence in Sweet Home is no exception.
In case you were wondering (which you probably weren't), my favourites were "The soul has no skin," "To All Their Dues," "Last Supper," and "Sweet Home."...more
"She laughed. There was a pleasure in hearing him use her name; it was so direct. It was somehow a higher level of attention than she usually got f
"She laughed. There was a pleasure in hearing him use her name; it was so direct. It was somehow a higher level of attention than she usually got from people; almost cheekily personal. Intimate, that was what it was. And yet pulled clear of intimacy, at the last second, by the reins of irony which seemed to control everything he said, by his constant closeness to mockery. She found herself wanting more of it, and she found, too, that it held a chellenge: to edge him away from that mockery towards something warmer. To make him see that he was wrong in whatever decision he had made about her, about her silliness, about her childishness, about whatever it was he had, by now, set down for her in his mind."
Mckeon's Tender is a novel that progresses much like a bruise would: the writing, when it initially hits the page, is sharp and vibrant in its impact, filled with all the excitement of a new, all-engrossing friendship. But as the plot unfolds, the bruise of that initial impact becomes more and more apparent, blooming into increasingly worrying shades of purple and blue, the colours of something gone wrong, something that is so clearly not right happening.
All of this is to say, McKeon is so good at depicting the gradual collapse of her protagonist, Catherine; the narrowing, over time, of Catherine's psychological vision. The writing is honest and fluid, almost overflowing in its attempts to catch up with Catherine's frantic thoughts. Form and content work in parallel, here, the writing becoming more fragmented and divided just as Catherine's ever-increasing focus on her singular subject becomes more desperate.
(Trying to be vague here so as not to spoil the intrigue. ...more
"You were the sudden, inadvertent occupant of a place where bad things had happened. And then it occurs to you one day, standing in the living room, t"You were the sudden, inadvertent occupant of a place where bad things had happened. And then it occurs to you one day, standing in the living room, that you are this house's ghost: you are the one wandering from room to room with no purpose, gaping at the moving boxes that are never unpacked, never certain what you're supposed to do."
"Loneliness, I began to realize, was a populated place: a city in itself. And when one inhabits a city, even a city as rigorously and logical4.5 stars
"Loneliness, I began to realize, was a populated place: a city in itself. And when one inhabits a city, even a city as rigorously and logically constructed as Manhattan, one starts by getting lost... Many marvelous things have emerged from the lonely city: things forged in loneliness, but also things that function to redeem it."
"We are frenetic with hunger, with wanting, with the repentance of the season. We laugh like hyenas, our heads thrusting forward from our
4.5 stars
"We are frenetic with hunger, with wanting, with the repentance of the season. We laugh like hyenas, our heads thrusting forward from our bodies."
Jane Austen once wrote in one of her letters, “Pictures of perfection, as you know, make me sick and wicked”; she might as well have written Salt Slow's thesis.
Salt Slow is a short-story collection about problem women. The first line of the book is, after all, "I have my Grandmother's skin. Problem skin." Problem skin, problem women. The women of this collection are problem women because they are simply too much: too greedy, too selfish, too obsessive, too dependent. Put another way, they are problem women because they are unruly. And what is so brilliant about Salt Slow is that instead of trying to temper the unruliness of its women, it unabashedly leans into—even celebrates—it. It says, These women are problem women—so what? It never tries to make its women anything less than what they are: ferocious, gross, lazy, needy, careless. Indeed, these are women whose desires and emotions are so extreme they literally push against the bounds of reality: every one of Armfield's stories contains a surrealist/magical realist element, one seamlessly woven into the fabric of its protagonist's life.
I mean, look at some of these descriptions:
"Beneath her dressing gown, she is bloody with mosquito bites. Unrazored beneath the arms, unplucked, unmoistured."
"I had a bad body around that time - creaking joints and difficult digestion, a martyr to mouth ulcers and bleeding gums."
"Beneath my dress, my skin is churning. My legs feel cracked in half, articulated - a spreading and a shifting, as though my bones are springing out of their intended slots."
"Words can wound—but they’re bridges, too . . . Though maybe a bridge can also be a wound? To paraphrase a prophet: Letters are structures, n4.5 stars
"Words can wound—but they’re bridges, too . . . Though maybe a bridge can also be a wound? To paraphrase a prophet: Letters are structures, not events. Yours give me a place to live inside."
This is How You Love This Book:
You start reading it and it's this cat-and-mouse back-and-forth between two women from two opposing sides of a time war, of all things. But what begins as an adversarial, albeit playful, show of bravado unfurls into something unexpected: a connection. It is a thread that is tenuous, unsure of its presence, but present nonetheless. And then the adversarial becomes symbiotic; these two women hold each other up in and through their letters. They are each other's confessionals, writing and ciphering, deciphering and reading. The thread becomes taut, asserts its presence, makes itself known—that is to say, these two women fall in love.
Zoom out from the moving, almost effortless beauty of this story and you remember: oh yeah, we've got a time war on our hands. There are pasts to modify, futures to alter, courses of history to reroute, to nudge this way or that. This is not a metaphor; this is the world of these women. There is a war to win, agents to outsmart, rules to follow, secrets to keep.
The thing about This is How You Lose the Time War is that it does both those things simultaneously and masterfully; it is both the forest and the trees. You are so absorbed in the almost intoxicating intimacy of Blue and Red's correspondence, the way they increasingly skirt closer to truths about themselves and what they mean to each other. But this is not happening in a vacuum: they live, after all, in a world where they weave and up down the course of time at their will, where what is at stake is the future of their respective sides. This is a world with its own terminology, its own tangled history, its own rules and fine print. But you finish this novel having such a complete sense of both the trees and the forest; the searing closeness of its protagonists, but also the backdrop which has at once enshrined and obstructed this closeness. The more the trees of these characters grow taller, the more the forest sprawls like a carpet to ground them in their world. That is to say, this novel draws the contours of its world even as it colours in those contours with characters of vivid, layered interiorities.
There is really no other phrase that can capture my reaction to this book more effectively and succinctly than "holy shit"—because holy shit,holy shit
There is really no other phrase that can capture my reaction to this book more effectively and succinctly than "holy shit"—because holy shit, this book was insane. Farrow's writing is precise, thorough, and extraordinarily compelling. I could not stop reading this book. (I couldn't sleep one night and next thing I know I'd listened to 4 hours of the audiobook.) (P.S.: the audiobook is top notch; Farrow pulls out all the stops for his narration, accents and all.)
More than anything, I think Catch and Kill is about power and the disturbing lengths to which those who wield it will go to get their way. But as Farrow repeatedly highlights, it's also about how those on the receiving end of abuses of power find ways to speak out against it, for better or for worse. After all, this is a story that came out not only thanks to Farrow's persistent efforts, but also to the brave sexual assault survivors who refused to be silenced....more
"The body is an afterthought. We don't stop to think of how the heart beats its steady rhythm; or watch our metatarsals fan out with every step. Un"The body is an afterthought. We don't stop to think of how the heart beats its steady rhythm; or watch our metatarsals fan out with every step. Unless it's involved in pleasure or pain, we pay this moving mass of vessel, blood and bone no mind. The lungs inflate, muscles contract, and there is no reason to assume they won't keep on doing so. Until one day, something changes: a corporeal blip. The body - its presence, its weight - is both an unignorable entity and routinely taken for granted."
im sat here trying to find a way to write a review of this book that could ever do it justice, and im just coming up completely short. it feels wrong to try to reduce gleeson's brilliant, humane writing into some kind of pithy review.
just read constellations. that's it really. the book speaks for itself; it's a feat of writing....more
"It is easy to forget, but stories need not always have a purpose. We are quick to say that folktales have a moral or a lesson or a creed.
4-4.5 stars
"It is easy to forget, but stories need not always have a purpose. We are quick to say that folktales have a moral or a lesson or a creed. But most of the stories that have survived the ages are told for one purpose only, and that purpose is to say this: 'Being human is difficult. Here is some evidence.'"
Just absolutely exquisite storytelling. Drager has written a story about stories--in the moment of their telling and through time--and about the powerful bonds that tie siblings together. Her novel is sprawling and specific, widening and narrowing the scope of its story with beautiful fluidity. The biggest compliment I can give this book is, I would love to study it in class. Write essays about it. Talk about it with other people. It's incredibly layered and genuinely meaningful, simple in a way that makes it affect you all the more.
"In order to record a tale, something must always be lost. Some things must be left unsaid and disguised. The art of storytelling, his brother said, is all about where and how to leave the voids."
The Archive of Alternate Endings is by far the most surprising book of the year for me, not to mention a severely underrated one. I picked it up expecting nothing at all and finished it knowing it was a new favourite. I want to reread it already....more
"Look! Look at this woman who is both the emergency and the relief. Let me be both (I have no choice.) Give in. Fall apart. Look at the pieces
"Look! Look at this woman who is both the emergency and the relief. Let me be both (I have no choice.) Give in. Fall apart. Look at the pieces. Reassemble. This is the essential movement of my holy flux."
this book is the best friend that gives u a big, long hug and tells u that everything's gonna be okay but also tells u to get dressed, get out of ur house, and get ur shit together. i loved it.
It feels like Jenny Slate wrung her soul out into this book. And what a weird, beautiful little book it turned out to be.
Little Weirds is a deeply personal book; it's also a deeply moving book. Really, it's the former that allows for the latter. Its title is a perfect encapsulation of what you'll get inside it: stories short and long, weird in small and not-so-small ways. And Slate is such a talented writer, so good at a surrealist, off-center kind of writing that only serves to make the emotion at the root of her stories all the more affecting.
Some of my favourite quotes (and I was listening to this on audiobook too so the fact that I got a hold of these quotes is a Big Deal):
"I see it. I know it. That natures makes art and I am a creation and I make things. This is an expansive fact that I could never measure, and it calms me. The elemental companionship of light and air make it so beautiful on those leaves that when I turn in my chair to really look, the leaves are just there existing, and I feel my heart break even more and I say, Good, let it fall away, and look, look, everything is always remaking itself and so are you. Everything is art and nature and so are you."
"Very boring, very lonely, very tired, again. It was hard to feel anything, except I am not one of the creatures who will experience anything precious."
well. that, uh, hit close to home.
One more thing: this book is a perfect companion piece to Slate's Netflix special, Jenny Slate: Stage Fright. Consume them in whatever order you want, but I think your experience of one will be very much enhanced if you see/read the other....more
Convenience Store Woman is an absurd novel; it's also a novel that makes a lot of sense.
This book is so strange that I could've easily disliked it (*cConvenience Store Woman is an absurd novel; it's also a novel that makes a lot of sense.
This book is so strange that I could've easily disliked it (*cough* My Year of Rest and Relaxation *cough*), but I didn't. In fact, I actively enjoyed this peculiar little novel. Like its protagonist, Convenience Store Woman is a book that is preoccupied with a very specific microcosm: work. What work means for those who engage in it, what work entails, how work affects workers—in this case, the novel's protagonist, Keiko. But I also think Murata deftly examines how the microcosm of the convenience store Keiko works in intersects with these macrocosmic forces acting on her: expectations to marry, to get a Proper Job, to have some kind of larger purpose in her life. And what makes Keiko so fascinating is precisely the fact that she resists all these macrocosmic forces, not even consciously, but simply because she doesn't feel their pull.
Murata's novel is one whose premise could be characterized as kooky or weird or far-fetched, but I don't think Murata is aiming for a realism here, at least not a traditional one anyway. Her story works kind of like magical realism does: it goes outside the bounds of what is considered "realistic" to make something that's (ostensibly) within those bounds more clearly understood. And I think regardless of how you feel about this novel, it's a memorable one. It was certainly memorable for me; to my surprise, this strange but believable story engrossed me....more
"In chronic leukemia, the cells can mature partly but not completely, the website said. These cells may look normal, but they are not."
It's a very sho"In chronic leukemia, the cells can mature partly but not completely, the website said. These cells may look normal, but they are not."
It's a very short story, but one that's nevertheless filled with nuance, with individual particularities, and with characters who perfectly toe the line between being knowable and being enigmatic. I've only ever read one other work by Sally Rooney, but I can already tell you that this short story is just Classic Sally Rooney....more
I've decided that I love everything that Sally Rooney has ever written or will ever write. Everything about her stories just clicks with me: 4.5 stars
I've decided that I love everything that Sally Rooney has ever written or will ever write. Everything about her stories just clicks with me: the characterization, the themes, the writing style. Something about the way Rooney crafts her stories really reminds me of Jane Austen's novels (which, as pretty much everyone knows at this point, I LOVE), not necessarily because of her narratives or themes, but because of the feel of her writing. Just like Austen's, Rooney's writing is deceptively simple; on the surface, it's brusque and straightforward. But it's a simplicity that hides complexity, a simplicity that's made even more complex by the fact that it hides that complexity.
I'm also endlessly intrigued by Rooney's characterization. Her characters are so cerebral, often taking themselves as objects of inquiry, examining and evaluating their emotions and actions. And yet their cerebral nature makes them more complicated than clear. I think Frances especially is an interesting character because it can be quite disorienting being in her head. She's not exactly forthcoming with her emotions, but that implies that she actually understands those emotions: she doesn't, not always at least. You'd think that having her as your POV character would illuminate rather than obscure her internal experiences, but her internal experience itself is characterized by her inability to figure out what it is she's experiencing in the first place. IT'S FASCINATING.
One last thing: I am always so impressed by the way Rooney ends her novels, especially this particular one. (The ending to this novel was beautiful, not because it was poetic or devastating, but because it was pared-down and simple; it hit its mark precisely and effectively.) Her novels never end with some momentous or cataclysmic event, neither do they end in the ways you'd expect—or even want—them to. They're always a little off-center, solid enough in that they give you some closure, but malleable enough that they always leave some things up in the air.
I just love this book. I want to pick it apart, read between its seemingly simple lines. I could keep gushing about it (and I do want to), but instead I'm just going to leave you with a quote which I think encapsulates the substance of Rooney's writing, the way it puts the momentous and the mundane on a level playing field.
"I went into the living room, where Bobbi was watching a documentary about Algeria. She patted the couch cushion beside her and I sat down. Do you ever feel like you don't know what you're doing with your life? I said. I'm actually watching this, said Bobbi. I looked at the screen, where old wartime footage was overlaid with a voice-over explaining the role of the French military. I said: sometimes I just feel. And Bobbi placed a finger over her lips and said: Frances. I'm watching."
-------------------------------------------- PS: thank you SO much to Andrew for helping me get a copy of the oh-so-elusive UK hardback edition of this book. And when I say elusive I mean ELUSIVE, so thanks again Andrew!!!! 😊
Normal People is a novel that moved me. It's a book that could've so easily veered into the grandiose, but instead maintained a quiet kind of significNormal People is a novel that moved me. It's a book that could've so easily veered into the grandiose, but instead maintained a quiet kind of significance, an insistence of the momentous in the everyday. Its story hinges on two central characters—Connell and Marianne—their thoughts, their flaws, their conversations, their relationship(s). On the surface, the story's plot isn't much: two people living their lives, coming together and drifting apart. But what draws you into this story is not the structural but the personal. Rooney's characters are so tenderly drawn, so well-realized. Their conversations feel authentic, filled with pockets of humour and hints of vulnerability and the undercurrent of things unsaid. More than anything, though, the novel's moments ring true. They are not disembodied Deep Literary Moments, but individual, particular, personal moments—not about meaning as a distant concept, but about meaning as a lived experience.
Like I said, this book moved me. I finished it crying but not knowing why, only feeling that I'd read something that struck me as remarkably honest.
(Thank you to Penguin Random House/Knopf Canada for providing me with an eARC of this via NetGalley!)
---------------------------------- i dont know why but im crying right now
ill come back and write something more coherent later on, but i honestly dont know how to wrap my head around this book....more
currently overwhelmed by my love for simon snow and baz grimm-pitch __________________________________ THIS COVER IS SO DAMN BEAUTIFUL i think i opened currently overwhelmed by my love for simon snow and baz grimm-pitch __________________________________ THIS COVER IS SO DAMN BEAUTIFUL i think i opened this photo on 5 separate occasions today just to remind myself how BEAUTIFUL IT IS. BAZ'S FACE ???? THE HAIR ???? THE COLOURS ???? SIMON !!!! I LOVE IT ALL SO MUCH AND I CANNOT WAIT FOR THIS GLORIOUS BOOK
---------------------------- HELLO RAINBOW JUST POSTED THIS LINE FROM WAYWARD SON TO HER TWITTER
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