Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro

 

"Dimensions" is first, famous story - about a woman visiting her husband in prison, after he murdered their three children. Graceful, reconciliatory story that takes place sort of miraculous, against all odds.

my mop of black hair (the worst hair in the world for showing up in food, as the manager had warned me).  p.89, “Wenlock Edge”

The Sound of Waves by Yukio Mishima

 

Mr. Peanut by Adam Ross

 

Another winner, stranger, earlier novel by author of PLAYWORLD. Man is questioned by two detectives in the suspicious death of him wife. It is revealed that both detectives also has suspicious dead wives in their past.

Or is just in a book the man is writing that all of this is happening?

It's a puzzle book, and like PLAYWORLD, it ran too long for me. While in PLAYWORLD it was more descriptive and expanded long moments with many different characters, here the number of characters is limited. But I got lost in the puzzle.

Still, Ross is a gifted, powerful writer whom I will read again.

Below is the Escher illustration that serves well as the flyleaf to the book.

Open Secrets by Alice Munro

 

Playworld by Adam Ross

 

Thick, long book - possibly too long - but I'm halfway through and digging it. Great schoolboy wrestling descriptions. NYC in 1980-1981.

Finished - exhausting, but Ross's lapidary prose style is not to be believed. I feel that several of the plot lines lost energy in his creation of such a sprawling bildungsroman that covers maybe two years tops, when the narrator is 14 until about 16.

Plots include narrator's seduction by a 36 year old woman (a family friend), his wrestling coach's sexual abuse, his parents' marriage seemingly about to dissolve, his TV star financial status as an actor on a popular series, his pining for an out-of-reach teenaged girl. And that's just some of them.

Under the Volcano by Malcom Lowry

 

"Re-" reading this after forty years. How did I even pretend to understand it at twenty years old? Lowry's prose is dense, elliptical, allusive, often semi-private. A late entry in the great modernist novels. But I'm having real trouble "finishing" it.

Friends of My Youth by Alice Munro

 

Despite her recent cancellation, Alice Munro is a genius. Going back and re-reading her now is stunning and numbing: her men are cruel and selfish, her women are passive and selfish, the northern landscape is bleak and cold, but other setting details are lavishly and lovingly rendered: interiors, trees, flowers, clothes, anything inanimate with color.

The Betrayers by David Bezmozgis

 

Ending up liking this quiet, calm novel about a Jewish Russian refusenik who served 13 years in a Soviet gulag after being betrayed by his Jewish friend and roommate. 

Refusenik visits Crimea and accidentally books a room in his betrayers house. 

Yid dreitzikh. A Jew gets by.