Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield

 

Couldn't finish. Same sex women, atmospherically done. Lost interest.

Animal Dreams by Barbara Kingsolver

 

Beautiful heavy book. 1992? First Kingsolver I've ever read, in preparating for DEMON COPPERHEAD.

About sisters in Arizona, environmental/political issues of the 1980s (one sister goes to Nicaragua to aid the contras).

Beautiful description of why the liver, and not the heart, should be the metaphor for human desire and soul. Heart is an incredibly strong, tough muscle, difficult to cut into and repair. Liver is like a stack of damp tissue paper, dissolving at the touch.

Recommended.

The Abstainer by Ian McGuire

 

Fenians in Manchester, England and in the U.S. in the period right after the American Civil War.

Liked it, but nowhere near as powerful as his THE NORTH WATER.

It is the solitude of death that frightens him. Not the pain but the loneliness.

Everything different, he thinks, but everything the same. Time becomes memory, and memory becomes the ditch where we drown. [244]

Here Goes Nothing by Steve Toltz

Toltz's prose style is stunning. I stopped turning over page corners to mark especially pungent sentences, as there were too many. Fatalistic, funny, unswerving look at mortality and its alternatives.

The way I saw it, faith in the Lord was like walking around in a suit of gold that looks fancy but weighs you down. [27]

Congratulations, bitches. It's an arranged marriage, and you arranged it. [33]

My mind was a tour de force of what the fuck. [68]

Like a secret tradition on the road to the road to perdition/
To think and talk in mediocrities/
Fake philosopher, you are bluffing, "I know I know nothing"
Fool, ignorance doesn't make you Socrates. [114]

Whenever I hear someone reciting a poem, I also hear the hours of practice they put into memorizing it just for the occasion of saying it to you. It's excruciating. [114]

Gracie went downstairs and knocked at the front door from the inside. Who is to say this is not how summon ghosts? [166]

"Now raise your glasses. That was a joke. Put your glasses down. Who toasts a baby? What are you, alcoholics?" [227]

Being born is okay for personal growth, but aside from that, what's it good for? [227]

Tears and laughter are the only common language between all people on earth. [227]

'He who does not answer the questions has passed the test.' - Franz Kafka [249]

Take it from me-- when you get sad enough, you'll vote for the precipitous over the slow decline every time. [255]

It had occurred to me that all my self-criticisms were innuendo and hearsay, everything I'd ever pretended to be was for someone else's benefit, and if people were ever looking at you, it was actually to see if you were looking at them, and if they were paying you attention, it was only to gauge your level of attention. [364]

"Notions of beauty are socially constructed, to be sure, but ugly is ugly." [369]

Gracie put her head down on the bar, muttering, 'I didn't want to be more sinned against than sinning. I wanted to sin too.' [369]

"You're playing God."
"God isn't. Someone has to." [371]

Liberation Day, Stories by George Saunders

 

The story "Love Letter" is worth the price of admission alone. Not blown away by anything else, some retreads of his earlier theme-park-as-existence m.o.

Bubblegum by Adam Levin

 

Another strong, fascinating, disturbing, sometimes annoying work.

Check in: halfway through. Deeply annoying. Levin goes on deep dives that are remniscent of DF Wallace but he lacks DFW's genius. The middle section of manuals, case studies, video descriptions about caring for the robotic pets that are the central theme of the book -- is just deadening.

On the other hand, the long two letters from a mother to her son as she is dying of cancer, and about to overdose to end her pain are absolutely breathtaking.

Mercury Pictures Presents by Anthony Marra

 

Well, it seemed to go on forever, but I got through it. Terribly overwritten, in my opinion, not just in the prose but in the jarring shifting points-of-view and flashback/forwards. I thought A CONSTELLATION OF VITAL PHENOMENON was so tremendous that I opened this novel with trembling hands. He's gifted - and the story was intriguing and intricate - but the structure was not great. Reading CHRIST STOPPED AT EBOLI at the same time - one of the many texts Marra acknowledges in his afterword - couldn't have helped, as EBOLI is a masterpiece of concision and beauty.

Mount Chicago by Adam Levin

 

Extraordinary, and extraordinarily weird, story. Funny and sad. And weird. Levin riffs and raffs hilariously. It's a book about his mind more than it is about Chicago. But marvelous.

The consciousness and point of view of Gladman's parrot Gogol were particularly outstanding. Everything you wanted to know -- and much much more --about parrot sexual reproduction is explained [362-363].

That there were basically only two things to fear: flocklessness and death. [247]

Penguins having oral sex: cloachalingus.

Tracy Flick Can't Win by Tom Perrotta

 

Mr. President by Miguel Angel Asturias

 

Astonishing hidden-Modernist novel written in the 1920s by the Guatemalan Miguel Angel Asturias, but only published after political exile in 1946. One of those books that might have made a different historically had it been published in its own time.

Cesaire described Asturias as "a mountain perennially green, on the horizon of all mankind. [xiv]

The prisoners continued walking by. To be them, and not to be the onlookers so happy not to be prisoners. [xxix]

"I'm the Apple-Rose of the Bird of Paradise, I'm life, and half my body is a lie, the other half truth... I am the lie in every truth, the truth of all fiction.' [19]

"You'll either die or go blind reading." [17]

"Sir, he couldn't bear the two hundred lashes because he died first. "[30]

She took comfort in remembering her son. She imagined him still in her womb. Mothers never completely empty of their children. [102]

When fingers tremble bonelessly, hands shake like gloves. When jaws tremble, unable to speak, they telegraph worry. When legs tremble, someone is standing up in a carriage harnessed to two runaway horses like souls the Devil is about to usurp. [108-109\]

"Love, my girl, is a cherry snow cone. When you start eating, there's tons of red syrup and you're happy. Then it drips all over and you've got to lick it before the top tips over. Then you're left with a tasteless, colorless clump of ice." [112]

You would fit perfectly

In the keyhole of heaven:

The locksmith carved your body

On a star, on the day you were born. [115]

Christ Stopped at Eboli by Carlo Levi

 

Where do I start about this remarkable book? A political prisoner in Italy, a doctor and painter, in 1942-1943 is sentenced/banished by the fascist Mussolini regime to a remote peasant region in the southern part of the country. Whereupon he makes notes for an anthropological, social history of the region and its people. The peasants' superstitions and conduct are vividly conjured.

"We're not Christians," they say. "Christ stopped sort of here, at Eboli." "Christian," in their way of speaking means "human beings." and this almost proverbial phrase that I have so often heard them repeat may be no more than the expression of a hopeless feeling of inferiority. We're not Christians, we're not human beings; we're not thought of as men but simply as beasts, beasts of burden, or even less than beasts, mere creatures of the wild. (p. 3)

tax collector who is also a clarinetist (35)

disgraced priest (40-41)

The mayor and schoolmaster was at this moment exercising his teaching function. He was sitting on a balcony just off the classroom and having a smoke while he looked at the people in this square below... He had a long cane in his hand, and, without moving from his chair, he restored order within by striking through the window with astonishing accuracy... (44-5)

public latrine built by fascists - no function (46)

man who inflates dead goats to strip the skin and make flasks of it (46-7

drawing room cut up into dark prison cells (50)

two political prisoners who take turns cooking lunch for each, and setting it out - but who are not allowed to see each other and fraternize (51-2)

He was on obese, heavy, deaf old man, greedy and grasping like an enormous silk-worm. (59)

the peasants relationship to the state (76-78)

shitting outside (96)

Giulia physical description: Her face as a whole had a strongly archaic character, not classical in Greek or Roman sense, but stemming from an antiquity more mysterious and more cruel which had sprung always from the same ground, and which was unrelated to man, but linked with the soil and its everlasting animal deities. (105)

Thrust by Lidia Yuknavitch

 

Sleepwalk by Dan Chaon

 

Sometimes animals and machines look more human than people do. 30

The Past by Tessa Hadley

 

The Candy House by Jennifer Egan

 

Meh. Apparently there are recurring characters from GOON SQUAD, but I don't remember it clearly enough for continuity. Some interesting stuff but thought the second half trailed off instead of building up to something.

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle

 

Re-reading another favorite book from my childhood - now that Disney has made a movie of it, we get a new edition -- with photos from the movie production, including Reese Witherspoon as Mrs. Whatsit and Oprah Winfrey as Mrs. Which. And Zach Galiafinkis as the Happy Medium. And whatshername as Mrs. Who.

Another horror of the modern age. 

Might have to see it, just for the blood-bath of criticism it will stir up in me.

I last read and considered this novel in 2010.

Read a different edition this time, and had just as pleasurable an experience this time as I did 12 years ago. If pleasure is the right word for one of the best, and most unusual, novels about WWII.

In the special introduction to the 1976 Franklin Library edition of the novel, Vonnegut wrote:

The Dresden atrocity, tremendously expensive and meticulously planned, was so meaningless, finally, that only one person on the entire planet got any benefit from it. I am that person. I wrote this book, which earned a lot of money for me and made my reputation, such as it is. One way or another, I got two or three dollars for every person killed. Some business I'm in.

Every Good Boy Does Fine by Jeremy Denk

 

Look at Me by Anita Brookner

I enjoyed this novel, yet found myself constantly turning back to the copyright page, to reassure myself that I had read it correctly and that the novel was published in 1983. I think it takes place in the 1960s, but indeed it reads like a novel of the thirties or forties. Concerning a watchful, self-torturing, quiet female librarian in London, embarking on her first real friendship and love affair, who is just beginning to take writing seriously and plans a career doing it, it is correct and laced-up in diction, in character, in dialogue. On the surface,there is no hint of anything swinging about London except the occasional "sex shop" the narrator passes in walking around the city. There is no mention of technology beyond the occasional shared telephone.

That said, the book is a withering, compact 200-page study of loneliness, social vs. private character, and the power of the bold and attractive and lively, over the cautious and quiet.

The savageness is not in the setting, but in the seething feelings the narrator reads in the faces and words of those around her.

"I saw the business of writing for what it truly was and is to me. It is your penance for not being lucky. It is an attempt to reach others and to make them love you. It is your instinctive protest, when you find you have no voice at the world's tribunals, and that no one will speak for you. I would give my entire output of words, past, present, and to come, in exchange for easier access to the world, for permission to state 'I hurt' or 'I hate' or 'I want.' Or, indeed, 'Look at me.' And I do not go back on this. For once a thing is known it can never be unknown. It can only be forgotten. And writing is the enemy of forgetfulness, of thoughtlessness. For the writer there is no oblivion. Only endless memory."

The Violin Conspiracy by Brendan Slocumb

 

Cool plot, excellent music writing about performance, violins, and music culture.

Less enchanted with Slocumb's prose, which is often workaday and one-dimensional, gushing, emphatic, and repetitive.