Every Exit Brings You Home by Naeem Murr

 

Festival for Spies by E. Howard Hunt

Rabbit hole of reading Richard Helms book THE MAN WHO KEPT THE SECRET. This novel (according to a footnote in TMWKTS) was given BY MY OWN FATHER to another CIA agent, Victor Marchetti, in Helms' office - Helms was a spy fiction fan and kept a stack of same on hand for distribution.

This is of course the same EH Hunt famous for his Watergate exploits - he was semi-retired by the CIA already in early 1960s and charged with writing sanitized spy novels where the good guys always won, a reaction to the more knotty guiltily-existential novels of someone like Le Carre.

I bought it thinking it would be a joke - and it is light unintentionally semi-humorous reading, melodramatic, purple prose, all breezily accomplished in around 130 pages - but the travelogue descriptive prose on southeast Asia is quite nice. I'd read another of his, guiltily. Complicitly!

The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton

 

Got halfway through, it's beautifully written, but the conspiracy - the twelve men's role in murder/robbery/coverup plot - is too drawn out and 12 is too many variations of complicity for me to follow.

Good New Zealand local description, eye-opening, had never really thought about its "colonial history".

But over all annoyed feeling at wasted effort.

I read about this novel in some discussion of meta-novels and DFW and Infinite Jest. There's a horoscope/celestial cast of characters list and pie chart at the beginning, supposedly indicating fate tracking movement of starts, etc. - but I couldn't follow it. 

And really won't be bothered.

The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA by Thomas Powers

 

My Struggle Book Two: A Man in Love by Karl Ove Knaugaard

 I read Book One many moons ago and (sort of) remember liking it, after reading about the Knausgaard phenom and being completely prepared to despise it.

So on to Book Two - if nothing else, it gives me something to go to when INFINTE JEST grinds my teeth down to powder (usually three pages).

The 13 Clocks by James Thurber

 

Don't know how I've missed reading this book all my life - intriguing fairy tale/children's book about an ugly, misanthropic nobelman hiding away his beautiful daughter from the world, giving suitors impossible tasks to fulfill to win her, then killing them and feeding them to the geese when they fail. An intrepid prince (disguised as a minstrel) enters the scene and wins the girl, helped along by some mysterious Deum de Machina characters.

The wordplay is fascinating and funny and deep. Need to re-read it immediately - and find the edition pictured, with illustrations by M. Searle of DOWN WITH SKOL and Molesworth fame.

The Rest of Our Lives by Benjamin Markovitz

 

Sailed right through this - a relief while still laboring away at INFINITE JEST - a short narrative of a disgruntled husband and father dropping his younger daughter off at college and just continuing on, away from his wife, his job, his troubled marriage. 

Interesting, and compelling as far as it goes - but seems to drop out quickly without resolution.

The narrator is easy for me to sympathize with, but I didn't really care about him. Is that cruel? Yes!

Lost Lambs by Madeline Cash

 

Good characters - but second half of plot gets a little ridiculous with enslaved prostitutes and ring of predator men.

The Slowworm's Song by Andrew Miller

The Irish Troubles, as navigated by an ex-British-Army recovering alcoholic dying of liver cancer/failure, as told in a long letter to his newly-reconciled daughter.

Very pretty prose. A small quiet narrative about big things, like love and forgiveness and addiction. 

 

Always funny. Each story is much the same, but Wodehouse's crafty vocabulary and diction makes each unique.