Open Secrets by Alice Munro

 

"Carried Away"

"A Real Life"

"The Albanian Virgin" - amazing, circuitous story of a woman lost in the forest of Albania.

"Open Secrets"

"The Jack Randa Hotel" - an abandoned women follows her husband to Australia.

"A Wilderness Station"

"Spaceships Have Landed" - girl lies about a sexual assault - or does she?

"Vandals" - vicious revenge.

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.

"Friend of My Youth"

"Five Points"

"Meneseteung"

"Hold Me Fast, Don't Let Me Pass"

"Oranges and Apples"

"Pictures of the Ice"

"Goodness and Mercy"

"Oh, What Avails"

"Differently"

"Wigtime"

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.