Vigil by George Saunders

 

Disappointed (so far) in this new novel - using the tropes of LINCOLN IN THE BARDO without any of the emotional zing (so far).

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allen Poe

 

Spell-binding. Was prompted to re-read this after reading an old journal entry of mine from freshman year of college, where, out of the blue, I read this for the first time - don't know why, wasn't studying it in a course at the time.

Anyway, it was just as good this time around - couldn't put it down, even though I'm in the midst of reading several other books. Part adventure story, part mystical journey, partly (rather boring) history of South Pole journeys.

The ending is particularly dramatic (not that all the starvation, murder, shipwrecks that precede it are UNdramatic), with its quasi-spiritual white clouds and whitening water and giant white human figure that rises up out of the mist.

Clairvoyant of the Small: The Life of Robert Walser by Susan Bernofsky

 

Ruth by Kate Riley

 

Strange, puzzling, powerful book, tracking a woman's interior and exterior life as part of a strict Anabaptist community in upper Michigan.

Ruth is a thinker - on the surface, a compliant (if bizarre) cult member, but underneath, in her thoughts, a poet and a puzzler and a rebel and resistor, rebellious the only place she can be, in her own mind.

The prose structure is almost all touched by the omnicscient narrator giving us Ruth's thoughts - but the narrator speaks in a much more abstract, formal, supremely-ironic tone of voice and vocabulary than does Ruth, when we actually hear her speak (which is not often).

Really liked the book - deceptively simple-looking, but the language and its levels of irony require a slow, deliberate, reading pace.

A child wa no longer a baby when he hit back. A child was no longer a baby when he knew how to use a comb. A child was no longer a baby when his mother had another child. By this last definition did Jamie and Rose Feder quit their statio, and by this last definition did Gretel Feder remain a baby her entire life. (166)

Makup allowed one to life without speaking. (216)

She had finally read Revelation, and for all the beasts, remembered best the description of a Heaven defined by the nouns it lacked: death, mourning, sorrow, tears. A modest facility in which mixed species could rest together without histrionics.

Vacant Possession by Hilary Mantel

 

Great horror/thriller, existential  psychological statement on mental illness and modern British suburbs!

She reminds me of the great Iris Murdoch in her pathological obession with the cruelty of human relations - but she's much more plot-driven than Murdoch.

This one is just stunning, scary, bleakly hilarious.