This time I read the novel solely for the pleasure of arriving once more at its perfect ending, and since I don't know whether it would be insulting tThis time I read the novel solely for the pleasure of arriving once more at its perfect ending, and since I don't know whether it would be insulting to you if I put a description of that ending behind a spoiler tag (because maybe it's insulting to assume you've not already read it), or rude to not put it behind a spoiler tag (because maybe it's an old book that no one reads anymore), I will just say, it is still a perfect ending.
This is a story in which the characters are on a vertical path downward, from bad, to very bad, to very terrible, to the worst outcome imaginable for their lives, and yet, somehow, here in its last 800 words, Steinbeck manages to end his story in a way that honors all that terribleness and then, magnificently, finds a way to leave me with a breath of hope, and a belief that all is not lost, and that the life of each one of us is precious.
I love the entire book for its mix of social realism and epic, but it's these last few paragraphs that make it a masterpiece for the ages....more
The Man Who Lived Underground is the only posthumously published novel I've read that I believe is equal to, or surpasses, the novels published duringThe Man Who Lived Underground is the only posthumously published novel I've read that I believe is equal to, or surpasses, the novels published during an author's lifetime. The combination of very realistic sentence-level writing with a surreal and allegorical story makes the experience of reading this novel powerful, painful, shattering.
It's hard to come to grips with the way Wright couldn't get this novel published in his lifetime--his publisher believed that the first scene in particular, of white police officers beating a black man into confessing a crime he didn't commit, was unrealistically violent. Frankly the interrogation/torture scene in The Man Who Lived Underground wasn't nearly as disturbing to me as the scene in Native Son when Bigger suffocates a woman and stuffs her body parts in a furnace. So I'm left to grapple with the only explanation that makes sense, as to why this novel wasn't published when it was written: that any amount of violence where a white man hurts a black man was deemed by the publisher to be too much for the reading public, whereas a novel about a black man murdering a white woman seemed just fine to them. What the hell, people. This is an extremely disturbing example of the way media industries massage and assuage and censor and suppress. I'm experiencing one of those moments when an artistic work totally surpasses my ability to write about how important I believe it to be. And also, of reality slapping me across the face....more
This is a book that carried me through the first time with the surprise and delight of the words themselves. What marvelous attention to language!
The This is a book that carried me through the first time with the surprise and delight of the words themselves. What marvelous attention to language!
The the second time I read the book, though, what formerly hit me as 'exuberant' now hit me as 'ridiculous.' And 'ridiculous' is fine--some of the best most beloved characters in the world are ridiculous, from Don Quixote to Yossarian--but ridiculous only works if you take your own characters seriously. I do think Williams could have given her characters more inner fire and humanity and seriousness than she does and I'm sorry she missed the chance.
Winceworth has all the makings for a great tragicomic hero but there isn't enough inner motivation here on the page for him to live up to that potential. There is something so poignant in the way he is reflecting his inner life in his mountweazals, but it's an understated theme, and, I don't know, I longed for Mallory to honor the person who had added those odd words instead of mindlessly doing her job and erasing Winceworth from existence. I wanted there to be some connection or empathy between the main characters of the two braided threads in this novel, where Mallory would want to preserve Winceworth's made-up words or try to understand them as a full message from the past. To have those words speak to her more fully and to make this odd character from the past come alive to her--the way shakespeare in his sonnets claims his words can give a person a kind of immortality.
It's a tribute to the book's strength that here I am wishing it were better than it is. It's still a very fun read. If a book wants to be ridiculous, I want it to capture the ridiculousness of human existence while still making me care very much. There is such lovely writing here that I wanted more from this author than she gave me. I'm not sure if that's fair at all.
I still believe what I wrote in my former review below about the audacious remarkable use of language in this novel and look forward to a next novel from Williams that gives the same loving attention to her characters as well.
first review:
Yay! Yay! Yay!
The Liar's Dictionary is so entertaining, so riveting, and above all so attentive to language, that reading it felt like I was in the presence of a virtuoso performer of an instrument called Language. Williams set an audacious goal for herself, here, when she made the underlying premise of her novel be the search for precision in language/meaning. With this as her premise, she needed to write in a narrative voice equal to the task--to write in precisely the right words, one after the other. Her narrator is a fascinating, perceptive, big-hearted logophile. I loved spending time with her! This novel may be a delightful comedy, but the language is breathtakingly precise. It's surprising in its incisiveness and nuance, and it's this attentiveness that makes the novel such a delight to read....more
I've read Leave the World Behind three times and each time I love it more. It took me a while to get used to its voice--sardonic and even a little bitI've read Leave the World Behind three times and each time I love it more. It took me a while to get used to its voice--sardonic and even a little bit mean, as well as being outrageously, unapologetically omniscient. It's a voice that I've more or less been schooled to distrust in this postmodern world. Once I tuned myself to this novel's unique rhythms, though, both the story and the storytelling became explosively alive for me.
I needed to learn how to read this novel. I needed to overcome my natural likes and dislikes to fully appreciate its genius. For example, one thing I typically don't have patience for in novels is long lists of stuff. Authors seem to like lists a lot but usually they seem kind of lazy and unnecessary to me. Alam uses this technique to perfection in chapter 3, though, when he lists all the things Amanda puts in her grocery cart. It shouldn't be riveting, but it is. Each item Amanda chooses off the shelves gives me one more angle to view her character, and by the end I understand her limitations, and her self-image, and the ways she feels most vulnerable. All from a bunch of food items. It's extraordinary writing.
My favorite novel published in 2020. It won me over. It snuck up on me.
Note with spoilers 2/16: (view spoiler)[I'm diving in for a fourth time, honestly, I'm fascinated by this novel and how it works. This time I'm listening to the audiobook. The narrator is really good.
It's a very complex book in terms of craft. At first it's written in a way that you assume it's one of those big social novels like The Corrections, and then it morphs into something more stark, some kind of an examination of privilege and race and prejudice...and then there are a series of ever-more-horrific encounters, all of which never spill over into the expected violence, AND THEN it leaps into a seriously gorgeous meditation on what-might-be-next if and when the rarified world we live in collapses.
I don't say "gorgeous" too often about novels and the way they're written. The flamingos in the pool. The deer moving in huge herds. Rose in the woods, and the little fire of hope the author puts out there for us readers, when he assures us that she'll survive. And that through her something meaningful will survive. (hide spoiler)]...more
I don't know why I read this again. I took it out of my bookshelf, felt the heft of it, opened it to page one, and fell in. I was totally hooked by thI don't know why I read this again. I took it out of my bookshelf, felt the heft of it, opened it to page one, and fell in. I was totally hooked by the second paragraph, more specifically, when I got to the word "gerontocratic." What a perfect, perfect word for the meaning Franzen wanted there. This isn't beautiful writing, but it's perfect writing. The absolute attention to the meanings of these words, sentence by sentence, adds up to a perfect whole. It's not the work of a singular artist. It's the work of a singular artisan. It's not the guy who painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. It's the guy who made the chapel. I know what I mean.
I read this first within a week of it being published. What a strange time, and a strange time especially to be reading a book about upper middle class American life. Here we are nearly 20 years later and still in the throes of working out that national trauma, and here we are again, as close to starting a war with the middle east now as we were back then. What's changed for me is that I have changed. I used to be so much like Chip that it was painful to read his story. Now I'm more like Enid. The level of humanity and reality Franzen breathed into these characters is remarkable, and I'm most amazed at his achievement in making Enid and Alfred so human, when he was so far from their age.
I'm grateful that this book is in the world, both for the pages inside its cover and for the cultural and historical touchpoint the novel represents....more
This novel is written with a supernatural attention to detail. It's as if Crummey has taken it upon himself to inhabit the interior spaces of the brotThis novel is written with a supernatural attention to detail. It's as if Crummey has taken it upon himself to inhabit the interior spaces of the brother and sister that he conjures up from his imagination. He inhabits their daily lives. He channels them onto the page for us, until I could see and feel what these characters see and feel. Never mind that the world he imagines for these two is like nowhere I could have imagined on my own--I'm there. At just this moment, I can't remember another novel I've read that so fully imagines the lives of its characters the way Crummey does here. The novel is bleak but full of beauty. It's a remarkable achievement....more
A woman gets pregnant unexpectedly, just as the world careens toward a the most horrific eco-disaster you can imagine. The writing was great, the emotA woman gets pregnant unexpectedly, just as the world careens toward a the most horrific eco-disaster you can imagine. The writing was great, the emotional landscape was truthful, and I'm going to read everything Naomi Booth writes from now on.
My fondest delight, when it came to my reading experience with this book, was the birth scene. I don't think it's much of a spoiler to say there is a birth scene, since the whole book before then is the story of a ponderously pregnant woman searching for a safe place to give birth, while simultaneously coping with some seriously creepy eco-disaster action.
This birth scene, when it comes, is magnificently done. Ok, it ignores the way that every contraction, in actual birth, is a peak experience of sorts...but even without that explicit kind of veracity, the scene captures the deep-heart horrific truth about birth. It captures what it's like to have your body taken over by a primal force over which you have no control. No matter how great a woman's individual birth experience might be (or how great she happens to remember it being, later, when it's over), every laboring woman comes to understand at some point (unless she is utterly etherized), that her body is no longer hers...and that realization can be momentarily disorienting, or completely terrifying, depending on how you feel in general about experiencing a total loss of control of your body. Naomi Booth nails it.
So at the heart of this eco-horror-fiction Naomi Booth has slyly written the best metaphor for birth-terror that I've ever read.
I just reread Threats for the third time, just to see if I can figure out how Amelia Gray does it.
At times the experience of reading Threats reminds mI just reread Threats for the third time, just to see if I can figure out how Amelia Gray does it.
At times the experience of reading Threats reminds me of having a conversation with a schizophrenic person: the grammatical logic is there, intact, but the semantic sense unthreads by the end of each sentence. You know it's nonsense but still your mind grasps for meaning, and sometimes finds it. In other passages reading Threats was like looking at random patterns on a wall and finding faces there, because our minds are so good at imposing that kind of order on random things. Sometimes a verb or an adjective was so unexpected in a given sentence that I imagined the author playing Mad Libs.
And yet I am so moved by this writing. That is the amazement of this novel for me. This is a novel that nearly obliterates the typical relationship between novelist and reader. Novels usually engage parts of the brain that are rational, logical, social. That's the kind of exchange between text and reader that novels can do well. Reading Threats was very different. I'm disoriented by this writing. I feel the book leaves me to flounder on my own. But then suddenly I find myself making connections. As I read I have feelings of compassion, recognition, and joy, feelings that may or may not be anything at all to do with the "author's intent." I also have the feeling that whatever I decide to feel or imagine is happening will be completely ok with Amelia Gray.
As I read this novel I try to think of literary precedents. "Lenz" by Buechner comes to mind, or in contemporary literature, Remainder by Tom McCarthy. A few reviewers mention that the novel reminds them of Murakami. But in Murakami's novels any fantastic elements are corroborated by multiple characters, where I feel I can count on a certain mode of reality being the "correct" reality to believe in, within the framework of a Murakami novel. Threats gives me absolutely no framework to count on. No firm ground where I could say "this is really what I'm meant to believe is the 'real' for this novel." The reality you believe in for a few pages is quickly undermined by a new happening. The disorientation is marvelous and though-provoking.
The word "original" is so sloppily used for almost everything that I almost hate to use it, but there it is: This is original writing. It gives me joy just to know that something so new and unexpected can still be written after all the thousands of years we humans have been writing stories....more
A lovely little tale about a class of six-year-olds on their first overnight camping trip. Things don't go quite as expected. This very short novel isA lovely little tale about a class of six-year-olds on their first overnight camping trip. Things don't go quite as expected. This very short novel is relentless, ruthless, and unbelievably cruel to both the reader and the characters alike. It gripped me, and it horrified me, and you should read it, not just because it gleefully stomps on every convention of story-telling, but also because it does so in such a clever, literary, and playfully metafictional way. Great fun. In its execution it reminds me of Michael Haneke's film Funny Games....more
This novel is small in scale--just four characters, on a single day--but in spite of its small scale, it's full of human experience. With just a few pThis novel is small in scale--just four characters, on a single day--but in spite of its small scale, it's full of human experience. With just a few perfectly chosen details Almada sets a scene, and reveals her characters' imperfections and humanity. I could see this place. I could see these people.
This is a very quiet book. The writing is extremely disciplined. There isn't a single unnecessary word. After having read many baggy monsters in a row recently, reading Almada's short novel felt like an encounter with a miniature perfection. I'm very happy to have read it....more
If I get just one person to read this novel who wouldn't otherwise have heard of it, I will feel I've done my job here on Goodreads. I'm still quite oIf I get just one person to read this novel who wouldn't otherwise have heard of it, I will feel I've done my job here on Goodreads. I'm still quite overwhelmed by what I just read, but let me try to give you a sense of the novel.
Léonora Miano has written with a singular purpose: to document what it must have been like, at the start of the Atlantic slave trade, to live in a village within easy reach of the coastline. What it must have been like to be living in exactly the way you and your people have always lived, and then to have this terror, this violence, this unthinkable and incomprehensible disruption of your reality, come into your lives.
Miano begins in medias res just after several young men disappear from a village. We readers know they have been kidnapped to be taken to the coast and sold. But to their people, they are just gone. And the people don't know how such a thing could have happened. People can die, or be born, or commit crimes, or marry, and these happenings are part of the rhythms of village life, and are well understood, and everyone knows what is to be done in each case. But when men disappear? In this case no one knows how to react. Are the men dead? Then where are the bodies? If there were bodies then the people would know to mourn. But there are no bodies. No one knows what to do. A hasty plan is made to isolate the men's mothers from the rest of the village--because maybe it has something to do with the mothers. But no one really believes that. And when one woman drifts back to her home, no one is sure what to do next. It takes days for the village leaders to decide to ask a neighboring village if they know anything about the men's disappearance. It takes far longer--not until it is too late--for anyone in the village to suspect the truth.
I can't capture for you the perfection of how Miano paints this village and its inhabitants; its rituals and its hierarchies. The way she reaches through history to recreate a pre-literate, pre-colonial culture that is on the brink of losing everything that they trust is true about the world. We know it happened. We know this history in a theoretical way. But we don't have access to the voices of the people that faced this terror. Miano gives them voices. I'm in awe of how deeply she imagines these people, even to the point of making their utter lack of guile, in the beginning of their story, completely believable and heart-rending....more
Ruthlessly gothic, but with just a dash of Jodi-Picoult-like familial feeling so that the story became somehow all the more troubling than if it had bRuthlessly gothic, but with just a dash of Jodi-Picoult-like familial feeling so that the story became somehow all the more troubling than if it had been purely gothic.
The novel reminded me of the magnificently terrifying horror film "Hereditary," which like this novel also features an artist-parent who tortures her children, plus a smidge of self-immolation.
But because this novel comes to me outside of a tidy genre framework, and because it just barely nudges into a "maybe this could happen in the real world" space, I found the story unusually disturbing. It's in something of an 'uncanny valley' for me. If the novel were pure genre then its excesses would be easier to predict. But the novel instead asks me to feel real feelings, for situations that aren't terribly realistic, and as a result it was an upending, entirely unique reading experience....more
The Drought is written in a prose so consistently overwrought that it entertains on a different level of reading altogether, one that is experiential,The Drought is written in a prose so consistently overwrought that it entertains on a different level of reading altogether, one that is experiential, and a little bit nauseating. It’s exactly like drinking one of those fragrant, fruity gins. It reminds me of Poe at his most hysterical. It makes me nostalgic for the era when novelists were allowed space and time to develop their craft, because this early Ballard novel is an adjective-laden morass of hokey fun, and I can’t shake the feeling that debut authors would never get away with this kind of thing in these highly competitive days of publishing, when everything must be either deeply earnest and/or sellable as a movie script.
As with the last several Ballard novels I just read, just days ago and just days apart from each other, I got the feeling that any one sentence of this novel was a sentence that no one else but J.G. Ballard could have written. Start for instance with this doozy of a first sentence:
At noon, when Dr Charles Ransom moored his houseboat in the entrance to the river, he saw Quilter, the idiot son of the old woman who lived in the ramshackle barge outside the yacht basin, standing on a spur of exposed rock on the opposite bank and smiling at the dead birds floating in the water below his feet. ...more
I've read a couple of Virginia Woolf's novels so many times now that they have become a place to inhabit rather than a story to be told. I come upon sI've read a couple of Virginia Woolf's novels so many times now that they have become a place to inhabit rather than a story to be told. I come upon sentences like old beloved friends whose gestures and habits I already know and love. It's like music, this novel, and I can listen to it again and again without ever feeling I've heard it entirely. Now I'm trying to imagine the exact music that is this novel and what I come up with is that it's like Berlioz's les nuits d'été, as a matter of fact. okay so here is a link to what I mean--
Oh, my goodness. I'm so glad I returned to this novel for a second read. I just have to throw up my hands here, and admit that everything changed in mOh, my goodness. I'm so glad I returned to this novel for a second read. I just have to throw up my hands here, and admit that everything changed in me, about halfway through my second read, where I, hmm, I suppose what I did was yield to this narrator--yield to her voice, and yield to her grief.
The first time through I listened to the audiobook and the story wasn't helped by the performer's even tone, which I heard as cynical and superior. The words on the page are deep and full. They reflect a friendship of a very particular sort, between a man and a woman who aren't in love, but who love one another. I can't remember ever reading a novel that captures so absolutely this kind of relationship, a very intellectual one but for all that a very intimate one; a relationship where the woman in the friendship knows that, to remain an intellectual equal in the eyes of this man, she needs to become a sort of stand-in man herself, de-sexed and undesired. Is there any smart woman in the world who doesn't understand this man, who hasn't experienced a kind of bifurcated friendship where intimacy of intellect comes at the cost of any other kind of intimacy? It seems to be a side effect of patriarchy, to me, anyway. The first read-through I had a bit of trouble with the way the narrator reflects on the flaws of her friend's wives, but now I understand it in this context, that the narrator is just reflecting a reality where her closeness was perhaps more genuine than what her friend had with his wives.
I don't know if anyone else read this novel in this way, or would describe the core relationship the book describes in this way. It seems like a common kind of relationship in our world but it's also the kind of relationship where both the intimacy and the grief this woman feels wouldn't have a socially acceptable place to be expressed. The way Nunez finds a way to tell the story of this love in this small story about a woman adopting her dead friend's dog is perfect.
Perfect. I take it all back. This is an extraordinary novel.
My Sister, the Serial Killer is a perfectly-executed story about a woman who kills men, and a sister who helps her cover up her deeds. On the surface My Sister, the Serial Killer is a perfectly-executed story about a woman who kills men, and a sister who helps her cover up her deeds. On the surface the story seems simple and straight-forward. The author moves us briskly from Death A to Death B, etc., with very little introspection or digression. The novel seems on the surface to be meant to be a bit of fun, a broad farce, a comical statement about two women living in a misogynistic world who have had enough. The lightness of the novel, physically and semantically, makes it easy to forget that it is fundamentally a horror story. The tension between the lighthearted writing style and the horrific story is what made this such an unsettling read for me.
On almost every page, some kind of niggling subterfuge happens to us readers, where you are never quite sure what is going on, or who to believe, or how you are meant to feel about it. The novel never lets us slide into the complacency of "it's just a story." The victims are kind men. One writes poetry and his family mourns him deeply. Another is a beloved doctor. There is a sub-plot where one sister treats a man with profound compassion, after his own family has rejected him, and this sub-plot further muddies the moral waters.
As I read along, my "hey, this isn't funny" feeling increased. I grew uncomfortable with my complacent amusement at the role-reversal, where women are the dangerous aggressors. The lack of clear resolution to the story, at its end, left me stranded with a moral puzzle that has no clear answer. It left me thinking about how we readers have a choice, when we read fiction, to either think of a given story as a self-contained reality, with its own, self-contained moral rules; or to think of it as saying something about the real world. This novel's refusal to descend entirely into farce is what made it a great read for me....more
In 2018 I began to re-read novels with frequency and zeal. I'm not talking about re-reading Shakespeare plays and Jane Austen novels and new translatiIn 2018 I began to re-read novels with frequency and zeal. I'm not talking about re-reading Shakespeare plays and Jane Austen novels and new translations of The Iliad and all the other stuff we all agree is worth re-reading, if and when we have the time. I'm talking about turning around and re-reading a newly published book within months or weeks or days of my first reading, a practice that I've come to embrace and to even look forward to, even though (like all the other avid readers here) I have an ever-more-ominous tower of 'to-be-read' books on my list that is trying always to persuade me to call the novel "read" and move on.
The House of Broken Angels is my latest re-read. It's maybe fitting, since this is a novel about family, that three weeks ago when I first read the novel it gave me the feeling I have sometimes when members of my own extended family come to visit--'ok I love you guys, but too much of a good thing is too much of a good thing, so maybe now it's time to go home.' I got to the end of my first read of this novel thinking almost exclusively about what I didn't like about these characters. Especially the men. Throughout the novel their thoughts and actions pricked my sensibilities, and made me hypercritical, until I was very cranky by the end.
But then it felt to me, because it was true, that I'd closed my mind to the goodness of these characters, and focused on their flaws. I don't like doing that with people, so why did I think it was fine to be so opinionated about people in books?
And so I read it again, deciding that this time I'd let these people be themselves.
Let me tell you something. I was deeply, deeply moved. By getting out of my own way and my own judgments I could see the extraordinary depth of feeling Urrea has created here among the members of this fictional family. A history of choices, and of memories shared. The extraordinary careful rendering of a blended family, not only blended by ethnicity but also by nationality--here is a fictional rendition of a family living the reality of border politics for the last few decades, the way undocumented and citizen exist within the same family, their fates determined by a few miles difference between their place of birth. It gently, yet devastatingly lays out the way border-crossing experiences can be, in some years, easy memories, whereas in other years (like those closer to the present day) border crossing becomes a harrowing outrageous violation of selfhood. The second time, I marveled at the way these people forgive one another. I loved the way the author loves this family, too, flaws and all, and the way he invites me to love them. My previous irritations with these characters' faults felt like I was being that kind of a family member who refuses to forget and move on and to forgive other family members, whereas this family, Big Angel's family, was all about forgetting and moving on and forgiving.
This novel is a beautiful humane depiction of the dignity of everyday humans, and you should read it.
Sometimes a get to the end of a book and it says to me, "turn around. go back. take another look." I'm so glad this novel said that to me.
... 1/3/19: Ok, I am reading this again and I'm loving it completely and without reservation. More to come. ...
First Read/Review, 12/15/18:
I loved this book but in a quiet way. As I read I kept thinking: 'wow, that's lovely,' and 'my, that is beautifully put,' and 'oh, what a dear way to capture this filial feeling,' but even so I was also feeling a little restless, and as if I'd stayed too long in a bath, or maybe, it's that I felt exactly as if I, too, was at this big family reunion, where almost everyone is a bit noisier than I would like, and none of them are very good listeners, and, even though I love them, and even though I know they are good people who are doing their best, all I want is for them to leave me alone, so I can go find a quiet room, and close the door behind me preferably with a glass of wine and a good book to keep me company....more
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