Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt

 

Revisiting this after 27 years. Still pretty great. The first-person voice now seems a little tedious. I remember well how shocking and powerful I found it in 1996.

Days Without End by Sebastian Barry

 

If Maryland ain't pretty country God's a girl. [151]

Amazing Barry streak continues. This is in America, mid 19th century, Tennessee, Georgia, Virginia, Maryland, Missouri, points west toward Montana. 

Two gay soldiers raise a Native American girl they orphaned. One cross dresses for their years in vaudevill.

They fight in the Indian Wars and in the Civil War. They farm and travel. Everything about Barry's prose style continues to delight, confound, and elude me - how does he do it? Echoes of Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy and maybe Melville. Can be arduous for short periods, but his characters and journey-plot always come back to save one.

Antarctica by Claire Keegan

 

The Temporary Gentleman by Sebastian Barry

 

Small Mercies by Dennis Lehane

 

The 1974 busing crisis in Boston is the backdrop for racial tensions in Southie. Familiar Lehane territory - and satisfying as usual. The working-class mother on mission of vengeance against the Irish mob and everything she grew up in is marvelous.

A Girl's Story bu Annie Ernaux

This one is ringing more finely than the previous Ernaux books I have read. Don't know why: have I matured in my reading of her, or is this a better book? Familiar pattern of female obsession with the lover. But in this case it's a 17 year old camp counselor losing her viriginity to a callous older guy (21? 24?).

But what is the point of writing if not to unearth things, or even just one thing that cannot be reduced to any kind of psychological or sociological explanation and is not the result of a preconceived idea or demonstration but a narrative: something that emerges from the creases when a story is unfolded, and can help us understand--endure--events that occur and the things that we do? [98]

I am not a culture hound, the only thing that matters to me is to seize life and time, understand, and take pleasure. [149]

It is the absence of meaning in what one lives, at the moment one lives it, which multiplies the possibility of wring...

Explore the gulf between the stupefying reality of things that happen, at the moment they happen, and, years later, the strange unreality in which the things that happened are enveloped. [final page]

Old God's Time by Sebastian Barry

Strange, disorienting, but still beautiful. A Dublin detective in his late 60s retires to a seaside castle flat to dwell on his past, as his mind goes but his will for redemption grows stronger.

Simple Passion by Annie Ernaux

 

The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry

 

Another powerhouse. Madness, murder, mayhem in the Irish 20th century. The tragic life of Roseanne Clear McNulty, daughter of a Presbyterian graveskeeper in Sligo, and her awful manhandling by Catholics, and others. Told from her viewpoint in the present time, turning 100 years old, in her flashbacks over the century, and in the voice of a concerned doctor in the present time who uncovers at least two versions of her sad story.

There are pits of grief obviously that only the grieving know. It is a voyage to the center of the earth, a huge heavy machine boring down into the crust of the earth. And a little man growing wild at the controls. Terrified, terrified, and no turning back. [165]

Morality has its own civil wars, with its own victims in their own time and place.

I Am Not Sidney Poitier by Percival Everett

 

No One Left to Come Looking for You by Sam Lipsyte

 

Nice to read Lipsyte again. And I liked this novel, by the end. Was a little underwhelmed in first half though: prose about punk music almost always leaves me a little underwhelmed. Although Lipsyte is as surprising and wizardly as ever with his sentences. Echoes of Lester Bangs on meth.

I liked his cross-hatching of real-life music references with fictional music references, when they worked - but sometimes I didn't understand at all what style he was pointing toward.

The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power - Volume 1

 

On Canaan's Side by Sebastian Barry

 

Sebastian Barry was completely unknown to me before I read the recent New Yorker profile about him.

This is a gorgeous book. The prose reads like poetry in long stretches, almost impossible to quote. And the plot coils very, very quietly, waiting to strike.

Her sense of the delicious is maybe part of that effort, not to dwell on terrible things.

'Telling his beads, o'er and o'er. [130]

How is it that the human body is designed sometimes to melt into a white lineny bed, in the city of New York, and couples on linen beds in all the cities of the world, trying to climb into each other's skins? That's one queer, wonderful creature. [138]

'The past is a crying child, that's for sure,' said Joe, 'but it will all be made up to him in the coming times. Yes, sir.' [141]

But for those moments he had brought me back to the pact we make with life. That we will see through and live it according to the length of time bestowed on us. The gift of life, oftentimes so difficult to accept, the horse whose teeth we are so often inclined to inspect. [171]

'I want you to tell Bill that his father loves him dearly, will you do that?'

'Of course I will.'
I was thinking, it's hard for a child to understand a love like that. He would rather go fishing with his father than hear such a declaration. But I knew Ed existed in a parsimonious place. He had only the farthings and pence of love to give. [229]

Foster by Claire Keegan

 

A stunning story. Haven't seen the film but plan. Just amazing, the compression of the story and characters.

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

 

Interesting, compelling read. About video/computer games which is not my wheelhouse. But the central drama about the two childhood friends who become influential game designers together, and apart, is interestingly done.

The Water Cure by Percival Everett

 

Strange and difficult reading. A man apparently seeks revenge on his young daughter's killer by kidnapping an torturing. First, though, Everett tortures us with linguistic grammaritications and philosophical blowing.

Half an Inch of Water by Percival Everett

 

Hope: A Tragedy

 

Put it down halfway through. Didn't care. Endless offense delivered humorously.

The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa

 

Astonishing novel about the Dominican Republic by Peruvian Llosa. Nothing less than a thirty year chronicle of the Trujillo dictatorship, it employs three points of view: in the present time, the return of daughter of Trujillo's minister after 30 years in the U.S, as she revisits the trauma of her 14th and final year in DR; the four assasins waiting in a car to murder Trujillo in May of 1961l; and a roaming point of view that encompasses Trujillo and many of his most prominent ministers.

The flashback technique is incredible. Great book. All news to me.

Anyone Who Had a Heart by Burt Bacharach with Robert Greenfield

 

Assumption by Percival Everett

 Liked it but got lost at the end. Sort of Jim Thompson crossed with Thomas McGuane. Down on his luck deputy sheriff in New Mexico grows increasingly despondent and bitter while investigating seemingly unrelated murders.

Continental Drift by Russell Banks

 

Mesmerizingly beautiful. How the fates of a New Hampshire oil furnace repairman and a distressed Haitian new mother intertwine over the course of years. Tectonically growing closer to each other. I'm in awe of Banks. Reminds me of Updike a little, but with more heart.

The Haitian religious ceremonies rendered are completely unhinged and terrifying. Mostly in the Haitian Creole patois, they involved demonic possession, animal sacrifice, rhythmic music and dance, but Banks provides them with an unnerving logic and character relevance.

He doesn't know if he has been a good man or merely a stupid or scared man. Most people, like Bob, unchurched since childhood, now and then reach that point of not knowing... [60]

... the three children and mother become one unit, and he became a solitary, outriding, secondary unit, like a comet accidentally passing through their solar system and moving on into deep space alone. [273]

So Much Blue by Percival Everett

 

My obsession continues. Another good, took awhile to get going for me, but in the end, I really liked how three different time settings/plots came together. A painter takes a much younger lover in Paris, remembers a long-ago trauma in El Salvador, and somehow heals his marriage.

Telephone by Percival Everett

My Percival Everett journey continues. Another twist in the road: TELEPHONE is an unflinching story of a man losing his 10 year old daughter to a deadly medical condition that slowly over a couple of months destroys her mind.

Not for the faint of heart.

At the same time, the father receives mysterious messages of distress in shirts he orders online, and takes off to New Mexico to attempt a rescue.

Yikes.

Very different in feel from THE TREES and DR. NO, but Everett's intelligence and obsession with, well, everything, shine through.

Mother for Dinner by Shalom Auslander

Very funny, very black, very disturbing satiric novel about the race of "Cannibal-Americans," or "Can-Ams," the death of a Can-Am matriarch, and the struggles of her thirteen children to properly dispose of her remains.

See title.

Sending up the immigrant experience in America, tribal religions, and the family, it's hilarious and upsetting.

Foregone by Russell Banks

 Terrific, moving, mysterious. An American film-maker consents to a documentary ostensibly about his career in Canada making films after dodging the Vietnam War draft and escaping north. Instead, he spends several hours relating, sometimes out loud, and sometimes internally, the mixed up pieces of his past and his emotional reckoning of how and why he had lived.

But it was her memoir, not theirs, her memories, not theirs. And if all her memories were self-serving rationalizations of behavior that, seen in another's light, 

would seem stupid, narcissistic or superficial, in her own view her memories were redemptive. They revealed the reasons for her life of pain and suffering and confusion. They made sense of an otherwise incomprehensible, meaningless life and, in her own eyes, redeemed it.

Is that why Fife is trying to do? Tell his autobiography as he remembers it? Yes, he says, that is what he's trying to do today and tomorrow and for however long he is trying to tell it. [136]

Korsakoff syndrome: confabulation is a symptom, fairly common with advanced alcoholism. [238]

Dr. No by Percival Everett

 

Odd but addictive, in Percival Everett fashion. A little AUSTIN POWERS, a smackerel of THE THIRD POLICEMAN. The mathematics of nothing combined with a billionaire who wants to become an evil James Bondish villiain. The book is more farcical than compelling, but I couldn't put it down. Like THE TREES, it reads quickly, in a couple of hours.

Never trust a laugh you can spell. Or something like that.

Rule of the Bone by Russell Banks

 

Delightful, mysterious, swerving coming-of-age novel. The second half and the immersion into reggae and Jamaican mysticism caught me completely by suprise.

Matilda by Roald Dahl

 

Liked it. Liked Tim Minchin's 2023 musical better.

Getting Lost by Annie Ernaux

 Annie Ernaux in New Yorker profile talks about old age (she will be 82), and how "I will never remember my old age."

I found it compelling reading and tore through this, but must admit it was the sex I was interested in and not incessant longing and sadness. She limits the scope of her diary entries very much to the story of her affair with the Russian man, S., who is 35 years old to her 48. And S. does not come off well -- boorish and anti-intellectual, a Stalin fan. We hear almost nothing of her two children, though they're often in the apartment with her. She refers to her other great passions mostly by the year in which they happen. I'm interested in reading the other memoir to see what depth they lend to this story, in my memory.

It's not much of a story, just a layer of egocentric suffering. Yet I know that it is through this layer of suffering that I communicate with the rest of humanity. [169, 7 Stories Press Edition]

Yesterday, it came to me with a certainty that I write my love stories and live my books, in a perpetual round dance. [171]

Ted Kennedy: A Life by John A. Farrell

 

The Latecomer by Jean Hanff Korelitz

 

Liked this a great deal. Very different from THE PLOT until the middle of the book where, indeed, there is a rather large plot swerve. The concept of triplets as never before recorded -- including how many persons that actually implies.  The high-art, wealthy milieu gets a bit wearying, but Korelitz' prose is glittering, at least.

The Trees by Percival Everett

 

Never read a book like this before! Racial injustice and a history of lynching in the U.S. - and dozens of small-town characters, each quickly and indelibly sketched. 

It reads so quickly you almost forget the heaviness of the theme.

The structure - very short chapter 1-3 pages - lend an extraordinary quickening to the plot, and it is a breathless style, following a classic detective/police procedural model.

Kill 'Em and Leave by James McBride

 

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

 

Loving this, DAVID COPPERFIELD cast in Appalachia, voice of a young foster child/orphan, opioid addiction and coal country poverty. High school football world skillfully sketched by Kingsolver. Pre-sad that it's almost over (300+ pages in).

Really wonderful, enjoyable reading. Hard to remember a long (500+ pages) novel that I relished as much. Wise and sweeping and loving, a mutli-dimensional panorama of southern Virginia, TN and KY that I've certainly never seen before.

Getting clean is like taking care of a sick person, versus being the sick person. They get all the points for bravery, but they're locked in. You have to get up every morning and decide again, in the cold lonely light of day, am I brave enough to stick this out? [p. 509]

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.