Frank Herbert’s Dune Messiah picks up about a decade after the conclusion of the original Dune, Paul Atreides sits as Emperor of the Known Universe anFrank Herbert’s Dune Messiah picks up about a decade after the conclusion of the original Dune, Paul Atreides sits as Emperor of the Known Universe and Messiah of the Fremen. Having unleashed a holy war leaving a tidal wave of blood from billions of deaths across the cosmos, Paul, for all his power and influence as messiah, is unable to cease the destruction in his name. Meanwhile, forces within the imperium seek to assassinate Paul. Core to this plot is the resurrection of Paul’s long dead heroic ideal, Duncan Idaho, as a ghola, or manufactured clone, who is built from the physical body of Idaho but also programmed to kill Paul upon a specific trigger.
As far as sequels go, Dune Messiah is a great feat—often sequels feel superfluous and wallowing in the adoration fans have for the original. But Herbert takes the old trope, “you either die the hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” In Dune, Paul is a reticent participant in his ascendency as messiah, and seemingly only participates in so far as he sees it as the best possible way to wage revenge on the Harkonnens and the Empire for what they’ve done to Leto and the Atreides family. However, realizing the power he wields as Lisan al-Gaib, Paul unleashes unintended consequences. The success of Messiah is that the villainy of Paul is woven into his heroism and complicates our connection to hero myths and messianic figures.
In many ways, this novel feels like an inversion and coda to Dune and the triumphs within it. Good intentions gone bad. The elusive power of influence. Unintended consequences. There’s also ideas of legacy, of where power comes from and within whom it lies. While the novel sometimes gives itself conveniences of plot, for example, Paul’s ability to still “see” once he’s blinded, Herbert, I think, is using this to further complicate our understanding. At the core of these novels is the question: is Paul actually a “chosen” figure? Is he actually superhuman and deserving of his status as Messiah? Surely Paul’s “sight” is a nod toward that he might actually be a god-like figure. But then, if he is, what if his power extends only so far as to initiate events without control over how they play out and how they conclude? Every god then is a devil. A fun trip into philosophics of heroism, power, myth, and messianic figures. Dune Messiah succeeds and excels as a sequel because it enriches and improves the original....more
Gave up after about 200 pages. I very, very rarely give up books, but this one sapped every iota of joy out of reading for me. I don't know what it isGave up after about 200 pages. I very, very rarely give up books, but this one sapped every iota of joy out of reading for me. I don't know what it is about it. For all intents and purposes, I love everything about it--the weird dead-or-alive mother, the endless bus journey that goes no where, the macguffin search for the titular Miss MacIntosh, the surrealistic interweavings, but when it came to reading it, it's like a wall of the same, over articulated, painstakingly wrought sentences that, maybe in isolation, are beautiful constructions, but when there is absolutely no modulation, no diversity, no tone other than a middle C note sustained for fucking ever, its just tedious and no longer actually beautiful, mesmerizing or arresting. It's just monotony. Kudos to those of you who are able to find something within this tome, but it just scraped out my ability to enjoy reading it....more
I’m not an expert in Russian history. Very far from it, in fact. Most of what I know, especially of the Russian Revolution, is filtered through the anI’m not an expert in Russian history. Very far from it, in fact. Most of what I know, especially of the Russian Revolution, is filtered through the antagonistic perspective of a post-Cold War American public school system. Which is to say, heavily biased and limited in scope. Despite the fall of the Soviet Union being fully in history’s rear-view mirror (i.e. closer than it may appear even in 1997 when I entered secondary ed.), American schooling was (and is) still putting its thumb on the scales of anticommunist rhetoric and teaching. All of this is to get to the point that reading Andrey Platonov’s 1929 masterwork, Chevengur is likely one of very few first-hand experiences I’ve read of the communist revolution in Russia.
The novel, long unpublished for its subversive nature, is an elegiac tale of the promises lost in the immediate aftermath of ideological revolution. This plays out in the rise and fall of Chevengur, a utopia of communism in the immediate aftermath of the Russian Civil War—as revolutionaries Sasha Dvanov and Stepan Kopionkin traverse the steppe of Russia to establish communism, they catch wind of Chevengur where communism is reportedly already established.
Upon arriving, in this almost mythic place, Dvanov and Kopionkin discover something less than what they envisioned. Platonov creates a kind of inversion of expectations by filling Chevengur as a place where everything that isn’t communism has been removed—and by virtue of that fact, communism has been established. This is made apparent in a flashback to the establishment of communism in Chevengur when those leading the change in the town make clear they have yet to read Marx and begin making changes based on surface readings of the text.
For Platonov, the promises of communism soured from utopic promise to dystopian nightmare of state power as we see the satirical “requisitioning” of grain from starving populations across the steppe and the irony of Lenin’s market-oriented New Economic Policy in response to the wide-spread destruction in the wake of the war. This allegory mirrors much of the utopic rhetoric still employed today by communists seeking for a humane response to capitalism’s cold callousness. Sasha and Kopionkin’s idealism and mythos of soviet communism gets destroyed by the reality of Chevengur where no one will work, wives are shared communally, and the bourgeoisie are brutally executed.
There were parts of Chevengur that reminded me a bit of Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren in how the towns functioned as communal living spaces where there’s an ever-present feeling of an outside threat coming to destabilize a chaotically assembled system. The fragility of Chevengur as a town seems ever on the precipice much in the same way we’re unsure of the safety and stability of the inhabitants of Delany's Bellona. There’s also a kind of inversion of how a communistic society could work in Delany’s version where Platonov’s more disillusioned with the reality of communism.
However, even as I write this, I can’t help but wonder if there’s another way to read Platonov’s novel as hopeful about the promise of communism in Soviet Russia....more
Look, there’s a searing history of critics and readers jerking themselves off about how meta-fiction is just writers jerking themselves off, and in geLook, there’s a searing history of critics and readers jerking themselves off about how meta-fiction is just writers jerking themselves off, and in general, my friends and I jerk ourselves off making fun of these types of jerk offs. I love meta-fiction. I love “games” in fiction. I love post-modernist literary rug pulling, goof-off-ery, onanism (erm.) and the general “hey, look what we can do with art” quality of the work of writers like Robert Coover, John Barth, Donald Barthelme, among others. But, damn, if I didn’t come away from reading Coover’s Pricksongs & Descants fairly disappointed and, perhaps worse, bored by this collection.
I couldn’t help be feel like there was something kind of juvenile about the stories in the collection—some nascence or something maybe, a playfulness that feels like maybe, is this a really fully blossomed thing yet, or just an experimental plaything for Coover to explore? Maybe it’s just that I’m too old and getting close-minded? Maybe I would have loved this had I read it 15, 20 years ago instead? Hard to say.
A few of the stories were heads better above the others, like “The Babysitter,” which I had actually read 15 years ago and enjoyed then as much as I did now and the sequence of the “Seven Exemplary Fictions,” was really wide-ranging and cool. But overall, what struck me most about Coover’s collection was how quickly these stories often turned from sex to violence, often gruesome violence. There are obvious plays here at Fruedian themes of sex- and death-drives, and what not, but sometimes, the story felt like it was just looking for shocking or unexpected turns. Sometimes, however, it was successful in setting up blackly humorous moments, for instance, in “The Marker” section of the “Seven Exemplary Fictions,” when the gruesomeness of the scene paints a contrast to the mundane juxtaposition of the punchline (that I won’t spoil here).
I loved Coover’s The Public Burning which was biting, acerbic, witty, damning, and funny as hell. There are glimmers of that same Coover throughout this collection but not enough to warrant reading this over that. I’ll need to read more of his novels in hopes of finding that depth of rigor and voice, but I can’t say that the disappointment in reading this one doesn’t sting a bit. ...more
Despite my disinclination to most post-Underworld Don Delillo, I bought The Silence on a whim second hand at a record shop in town. I remain unchangedDespite my disinclination to most post-Underworld Don Delillo, I bought The Silence on a whim second hand at a record shop in town. I remain unchanged in my stance. Something happened to Delillo’s writing after Underworld, or, at the very least, after 9/11, and it’s often felt meaningless, overwrought yet underbaked, and just absent the penetrative human depth his prose can reach.
The Silence continues the slide into absolute meaninglessness. In the “novel” (really, just a long short story), on Super Bowl Sunday in 2022, all technology (electronic, combustion, anything manmade, basically) just stops working. This begins in an airplane midair and then shifts down to an apartment in NYC. The two are linked as two passengers on the plane are due to arrive at the apartment to watch the Super Bowl.
As the representation of the culmination of human civilization blinkers out, one would think Delillo might deliver master insights into human nature, into reliance on machines, how humans have grown to be a transhuman species in many ways, divorced from our organic natures by generations now. But no. We have a magical plane landing at the correct airport. We have a family seemingly unaffected by a sudden death to all devices—sure, power outages can be a sort of expected occurrence, but for a phone and all cars to stop suddenly, it’s hard to imagine such blasé reaction.
Having been published in the fall of 2020, it’s hard to not get cynical about the book’s publication. Did Delillo merely have an old manuscript of a half-formed thing on his desk that he tossed to his publisher? Was Delillo’s agent sitting on this short story for a few years and saw some wicked parallels that would create great PR at its publication? Maybe it’s not that cynical and it was just a happenstance that Delillo excreted this and thought “good enough” and it just lined up with a global pandemic that caused a different kind of global shutdown.
Either way, this book, for something that should be able to render terror at the mere idea, is so toothless, so plain, so uninteresting and devoid of humanity it feels like a chore to read, even if it only takes 90 minutes to get to the end. It begs the question, does Delillo still have anything worth saying? Has he for the past 25 years? Falling Man was one of the worst novels I’ve ever read, and The Silence would be worse if it weren’t so unmemorable. At least I still have plenty of his earlier novels to read still, but I can’t think of another writer who has fallen so far off....more
In Guy de Maupassant’s final novel, Alien Hearts (which is actually “Our Heart” in the original French), we have a tale of love won and lost, or perhaIn Guy de Maupassant’s final novel, Alien Hearts (which is actually “Our Heart” in the original French), we have a tale of love won and lost, or perhaps better described as love’s mark missed? André Mariolle a rich and talented young man who finds himself sought after by a powerful socialite, the Madame de Burne. At first turned off by the pursuit to lure him into her network of elite artists and intellectuals, Mariolle ultimately winds up coming for dinner and finding himself lovestruck by the Madame.
Warned of her powers to turn men’s hearts to mush and leave them for wanting, Mariolle initially asserts he will not fall to her wiles, but quickly finds himself in a secretive affair with Madame de Burne. As lust boils over in young Mariolle, the Madame becomes distant and seemingly less consumed by the desire Mariolle needs. In reaction, Mariolle flees Paris to get away from the hurt and pain and find within himself meaning from this experience.
It's easy to read misogyny as a throughline in de Maupassant’s slim novel about lusts and desire and how love looks different to different people, and I won’t argue that the novel doesn’t contain an essential woman-hatred in its generalizations. However, I think reading the novel merely as misogynistic is a misogyny in its own turn as one must identify with Mariolle’s point of view to come to that conclusion. That is to say, if we identify with Mariolle’s hurt and pain and his negative views of “coquettes” in Parisian society, then yes, we can very much see a woman hatred brewing in the pages of the novel. But, conversely, to see Mariolle’s lustful rage and hatred as an immature reaction to hurt, then it transforms the novel’s core ideas slightly.
In fact, what I found so moving in this novel were the passages where Mariolle and de Burne discuss the natures of their love—Mariolle’s fiery and burning, all-consuming lustful desire and need, where de Burne is happy to have a loving familiarity and tenderness. The Madame’s position being one of maturity, which in part is due to her social experience as well as the fact that she survived a brutal, abusive husband previously.
But who in us hasn’t felt both sides of this kind of passion? The deep passion of lustful appetite where sex and total communion of the flesh is everything. Where you cannot go an hour without seeing or thinking of the object of your desire—in other words, and obsessive love. While we have certainly, at least, if you’re at least in your 30s, experienced the love that the Madame shares: one of true appreciation and tenderness, but where independence is needed, where preservation of self-identity is essential to the successful continuance of the relationship. Maybe because I’m approaching my 40s, I aligned more with the Madame’s thoughts and feelings on love. It’s easy to feel like the deep passion of lust can be a kind of revelation, but there’s a sustainability to the love like the Madame’s. Sure, she seems to use people for status and influence, but the love she extends to Mariolle is specially amongst the salon of friends. A special-ness that Mariolle, blinded by desire, is too naïve to appreciate and accept. ...more
When idly shopping for books, there are publishing houses that you can look for and just inherently understand that the book will be worth your time. When idly shopping for books, there are publishing houses that you can look for and just inherently understand that the book will be worth your time. One of those publishers is New Directions. But one that has never let me down, even slightly, is NYRB. The trend continues when I bought The Wedding of Zein at a local record shop recently. I had a gift card and the shop was closing, so I needed to make some purchases, so as I perused the books, I saw a few of those iconic NRYB spines—now every bit as iconic as a Penguin spine—and just grabbed them without reading anything more. Tayeb Salih’s book was amongst the selections, as was Guy de Maupassant’s Alien Hearts which I’ll be reading next. (Side note, I’ve also just purchased Andrey Platonov’s Chevengur which I’ll be reading sometime soon.)
Anyway. Aside from the review of Salih, if you’re ever at a loss for what to read next, close your eyes and click on any title published by NYRB Classics and you will be happy you did.
This book is a collection of two short stories and a novella. The two stories read almost like fables, one of a mystical tree and another more moral play about a man being taken advantage of by his neighbors for his land. However, the star of the show is The Wedding of Zein which tells the story of a kind of village idiot, Zein, who’s known for falling in love with many women in his village only for them to marry someone else. The novella opens, however, with two women gossiping that Zein is betrothed, and not just to any woman, but Ni’ma, who is widely held to be the most beautiful woman in the village. The engagement then sets off a whirlwind of conflicts, judgements and gossip in the village.
We learn in flashback about Zein’s life—he was born laughing and has a kind of curse of falling in love. A curse because the object of his affection, through his beatifications, would draw attention of men that would bring a more advantageous union, and so Zein’s love would wind up with another. Zein, though a kind of village idiot (and disfigured by the fact he only has two teeth), is revered for being blessed or holy for his closeness with Haneen, the Sufi holy leader in the village.
In the novella, a conflict arises that shows village life in Sudan at odds with approaching modernity. Sufism is prominent, and its mystical sensibilities are an undercurrent in Zein’s life, however, an Imam in town challenges this mysticism with more fire and brimstone sermonizing that Zein does not like. There is also Ni’ma who defies traditional roles by being independently herself, and even being the one who seeks Zein’s hand for marriage rather than the other way around.
As the narrative unfurls, Salih exhibits the best and worst of a changing tide and perhaps a way to resolve the differences and find acceptance. We aren’t often exposed to African voices in our literary studies in the United States, so seeking them out is an imperative for any serious reader. This only speaks even more to the importance and need for a publisher like NYRB Classics who make the seeking so much easier....more
Tom Drury’s The Black Brook is the story of Paul Nash aka Paul Eammons, a man in the Witness Protection Program after working with the Feds to bust a Tom Drury’s The Black Brook is the story of Paul Nash aka Paul Eammons, a man in the Witness Protection Program after working with the Feds to bust a mob group he was working for. Paul doesn’t really seem to care too much about fulfilling the terms of the protection and makes frequent visits back to his hometown—the last place he should be.
Drury’s prose is very tight and clean, almost Hemingwayan but kind of lacking the emotional depth that Papa was able to build through dense layers of terseness. Instead, Drury’s style hangs its hat on the hope its matter-of-factness will create laughter. I found this to be rarely the case.
It’s an odd thing where this book has all kinds of fun elements loaded with the potential for a really enjoyable time: ghosts, art forgery, a mob boss with a missing hand nicknamed “the Pliers,” strange affairs. But honestly, it doesn’t amount to much. Paul is fearless throughout the novel, whether he’s in the face of the mob that is threatening to kill him, or interacting with a spectral form in the house he’s renting, Paul is unaffected and unreactive. Because there’s no sense of urgency or danger for Paul, the locus of the urgency and danger in the plot, there’s not really make to stake your reading on. For all of its fun elements, it amounts to a pretty boring affair.
I’ve not read anything else by Drury, but the book feels pretty situated in the shitty aesthetics of the “literary short story writer” style that was prominent in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s where irony and postmodernism were eschewed for “raw” “realness” and maybe too steady of a diet of Raymond Carver. Unfortunately, The Black Brook is flat and flavorless, feeling formally like the early styles of “MFA fiction” that would come to blossom later in the ‘00s and ‘10s. I had higher hopes going into this one as a few people whose tastes I trust led me to it, but unfortunately I leave the book wondering what was even the point of reading it. ...more
I buy my nieces and nephew books every year for Christmas. The selection of books I cull from are ones that were and are significant to me and are an I buy my nieces and nephew books every year for Christmas. The selection of books I cull from are ones that were and are significant to me and are an act of trying to share some piece of myself with them. However, one niece asked me for Can't Hurt Me this year because she knows I like to buy books for them. So, while I'm still getting her a book that is important to me, I figured I should probably read this book before I settle on giving it to her.
She is a fitness buff and has an entire weight gym in her basement. So when I first picked this up, I figured she probably saw it somewhere across her algorithms online, and I was very skeptical.
However, the book is fine for what it is. The first half is much stronger than the second half which is really repetitious and equates to Goggins's philosophy that we have only expended 40% of our energy by the time we feel we've given all. But his advice seems mildly dangerous as he puts his body to extreme danger over and over, suggesting that he's not doing something horrible to himself along the way. But the first half of the book where he tells his life story is compelling. Ultimately, it's an interesting look at how much sacrifice, pain and dedication "Greatness" takes, and the motivational aspect may be useful for people who struggle to find a way to self-betterment, but I found, overall, his psychology and philosophy toward physical exertion to be limited, fallacious and maybe damaging for someone who may take him too literally.
The personal story is interesting, the motivational aspect limited and corny, and the second half extremely repetitious to the point of somehow making running hundreds of miles in an unbroken 24 hour period seem boring....more
I recently re-read Jean Toomer’s CANE and found it every bit as mesmerizing and mystical as when I first read it about 15 years ago. Then I came acrosI recently re-read Jean Toomer’s CANE and found it every bit as mesmerizing and mystical as when I first read it about 15 years ago. Then I came across John Keene’s Annotations which has a description that likens it to CANE. I read Keene’s Counternarratives a few years back and found it be challenging and deep and something I’d want to come back to, so I dove right into this one.
The book is a kind of free jazz reflection on a youth in St. Louis in the ‘70s and ‘80s, growing up black in urban and suburban settings with the added complication of being gay. Each chapter sort of centers around a single moment or event in life but manages to capture a whole vision of everything going on at the macro-social level with an economy of language that is marveling. There is a density to the prose and the style is highly idiosyncratic where titles of (mostly jazz) compositions appear randomly in the text. The nods to jazz and the free prose style make the writing as much about the subject of the sentences as it is to their syntactical construction. At times it can be pretty challenging to sort out what exactly is being communicated, but even in these moments, the musicality of the writing carries you through.
As for the links to CANE, I don’t see them. Maybe I’m thinking too literally about that book’s form and content, but I just don’t really get much of a sense beyond the fact that Toomer’s narrative tries to give a glimpse of life in the Jim Crow South while Annotations gives a glimpse of life in St. Louis in the ‘70s. A tenuous connection, I would say, especially given how autobiography-qua-fiction Keene’s book feels while Toomer’s rotates through a series of characters.
I think I enjoyed Counternarratives a bit more than this, but Keene’s writing is immediate and fresh and really something special. I haven’t read his poetry yet, but I hope to see more fiction from him in the future—a unique voice that I think is woefully underappreciated and underread....more
Unintentionally, it seems I’ve returned to Claire-Louise Bennett at precisely the same time I first met her last year with her wonderful and dazzling Unintentionally, it seems I’ve returned to Claire-Louise Bennett at precisely the same time I first met her last year with her wonderful and dazzling Checkout-19. Now, I meet her again with her debut story collection qua novel, Pond, which was also a pleasure and delight to read and live in.
The book is a series of 20 short stories ranging from a few sentences to about 25ish pages or so, which are linked solely by the unnamed narrator who is living in the outskirts of a coastal village. Bereft of a true narrative, the book deals with a bereft narrator who seems to be working past some kind of unknown, unspecified trauma—perhaps one related to the termination of a relationship and the resultant inner-looking we do in these circumstances. The narrator lives alone and most of the sketches and “stories” in Pond are the relatively free associative stream-of-consciousness catalogues of the narrator. From the perfect and precise ways to eat porridge to the plans for a perfect party, Pond is very much in the vein of someone like Clarice Lispector, whose ambition is to use prose to map the interior of human thought.
Fiction is often described as a kind of vicarious living, and thus, because of Bennett’s deeply neurotic, free-associative, thought-driven style, the reader truly comes to inhabit her characters. From the unique word choices to the dalliance of free associative slipstream thought, one comes to think and experience the world as the narrator and only the narrator sees it.
I honestly think Bennett is maybe one of the most exciting new talents I’ve come across—her writing is ebullient and vivid, it is inimitable and striking, and it is wildly alive. As much as Pond is a revelatory experience, though, I do think Checkout-19 is a much stronger work because Bennett exercises some of the same prose muscles, but is able to underpin everything with an undercurrent narrative that is living under the surface a little more clearly for the reader.
Really can’t wait for whatever she does next—keep your eyes open for this literary artist....more
I was a late-comer to John Kennedy Toole’s masterful A Confederacy of Dunces but, as they say, better late than never. And so, before I waited too lonI was a late-comer to John Kennedy Toole’s masterful A Confederacy of Dunces but, as they say, better late than never. And so, before I waited too long to finish the job, I decided to pick up his only other known work, which he wrote at around 15 years old, The Neon Bible.
The publishing history of The Neon Bible is a gothic horror of bureaucratic proportions, wherein arcane inheritance laws in Louisiana despoiled Toole’s mother’s ability to determine the novel’s fate. And only upon a series of lawsuits after her death did the book finally see the light of day. A full expression of the awful nature of greed, the publishing industry, and the sad way in which we treat art as a commercial product. But anyway, the novel, for all of its flaws is an impressive effort which shows the glimmers of talent that would later be augmented by fresh, raw comic prowess that adds dimension to Dunces.
In The Neon Bible we meet our young protagonist, David, who is on a train running away from everything he’s ever known. What follows this scene of fleeing is the young man’s life from roughly 5 years old to 19 or 20 when we see him on the train. Each chapter focuses on a specific “moment” of young David’s life through the Great Depression, World War II into the early ‘50s. Like Ignatius in Dunces, David is a tragic figure. In fact, probably more tragic than the former because where Ignatius is often the writer of his own tragedies, David is the victim of a changing world, poverty, and the adults around him who fail him, or even outright harm him.
The novel is impressive in its emotional depth and the way in which each chapter captures David’s experience in a way that reflects his mentality at that age—how David reacts as a young boy in elementary school to a particularly nasty teacher is in line with how a boy that age would think, much like how the 19 year old David expresses himself and thinks about his first love, and the nervous energy he exudes. It’s an impressive range, especially from a writer who was still so young himself.
Perhaps what’s missing so much in this novel compared to Dunces is the wildly hilarious absurdity. The novel suffers maybe only a bit from its unrelenting somber and serious tone—even in Ignatius’s most depressing moments, there was still something to lighten the mood, to give us a break to laugh. But in The Neon Bible there’s just a pervasive sense of dread for David and his family. Perhaps the only moment where we might be tricked into thinking things might go well for him is when he meets Jo Lynne, but, as readers, we know otherwise.
Like other writers cut down too young, the immense talent of Toole is a blessing this world has forever lost. The way we can see how much improved he was between writing this, his first novel, and Dunces only glimpses at how great he could have become had he seen the success he deserved while still on this Earth....more
James Weldon Johnson is an exceptional historical figure. A novelist, a poet, civil rights activist, he was a critical member of the Harlem RenaissancJames Weldon Johnson is an exceptional historical figure. A novelist, a poet, civil rights activist, he was a critical member of the Harlem Renaissance, and he wrote the lyrics to “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” the Black national anthem. I first read The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, what I believe is his only novel, as an undergrad in my American Literature Survey courses and remembered finding it powerful and beautiful.
It's clear from the outset that Johnson isn’t much of a novelist—that is, there is an essayistic quality to this book, which is in part due to the nature of it as an “autobiography.” Doubly so because he first published it anonymously in 1912, which added a further layer of authenticity to tis narrative. The prose is quite plain and direct, and there are many digressions of philosophic musings—either from the narrator himself, or from conversations he’s privy to as he navigates the world “passing” for white.
The narrator often goes into discussions of the “race question,” which was a soft way of saying “how can we overcome a racist society” in the early 1900s. For this, the book is an excellent artifact, capturing moods, attitudes and prevalent public thought on the issues of race as the urbanization of America was pressing people close and closer together.
As the narrator kind of stumbles his way through life, he traverses the U.S. north, south, and even spends plenty of time in Europe as he’s whisked away by a millionaire patron who loves his ragtime piano playing. It’s kind of fascinating how many of these Harlem Renaissance novels go to Europe to really highlight the racist context of American civil life—and sometimes mirror it.
In these travels, the narrator sees a bustling world, full of life despite its difficulties. He learns Spanish from co-workers at a cigar factory in Florida, he learns of ragtime music which inspires him to do the classics in this new, innovative style, the millionaire businessman who adopts him for several years. There are also images of horrific behavior. Once scene, particularly late in the novel, depicts a terrifying reality of existing as a black man in America in the 1900s. We like to think lynching stopped after Emmett Till’s death in the ‘50s, but what are police killings of black people by modern day lynchings?
Does the novel stand up for me some nearly 20 years later after a significant period of growing racial justice and awareness? I think so, but perhaps it is still more affecting for a younger person just learning of the lingering poison left from the nation’s Original Sin of slavery. In that way, it’s the perfect novel for freshman and sophomore college students, maybe even seniors in high school. Is it a 10/10 novel? No. But it is a particularly evocative time capsule of early 20th century America, and it is, at times, a dark mirror reflecting to us our persistent failures to move beyond race....more
Tomes. I love’em. I do. But a tome must have a reason to be a tome for it to succeed for me. It must be a workhorse, a display of mastery, a glimmerinTomes. I love’em. I do. But a tome must have a reason to be a tome for it to succeed for me. It must be a workhorse, a display of mastery, a glimmering expression the variegated knitting of humanity’s persistence. On this front, for me, Solenoid by Mircea Cartarescu failed in making the case that it needed to be a tome. This will probably feel nitpicky, but for me, it never delivered on any front that qualifies it for its length. So why am I talking about length here? Because, honestly, it’s about the only thing I could find of fault in this volume.
Solenoid is an astoundingly vivid, aesthetically incisive, and wonderfully wrought piece of art. Sean Cotter’s translation feels true, emulates the dreamlogical surrealist mode of its source, and has soaringly high highpoints. Cartarescu’s Bucharest is a hollowed out landscape ripe for the surrealist mode operating throughout this novel. From the body horror of tuberculosis wards, to the delightfully haunting levitation by solenoid, to the nightmarish living statue, there is so many fun sequences and episodes in the novel that it’s hard to understand how it can also exist in the same space as the grinding and dull slogs that yawn between.
Perhaps it’s just a hangover from Proustian modernism that hangsover even into the 21st century, a style that has never really dazzled me in its minutia-taking approach, but so frequently Cartarescu deploys a series of unrelated, undeveloped dream fragments, which, like the dream stories friends and loved ones try to tell, are just boring to the second party. But don’t confuse that with dream logic or liminal space type aesthetics, no, I’m talking about the long sequences of dream fragments that mean little, are too short to be interesting, and come to bear so little on the narrative overall.
I think in some ways, then, Solenoid is a victim of its form—the self-styled journal of an unnamed narrator whose life darkly mirrors that of its author. The “journal” mode can sometimes be a cop out from telling a story, and in this case, I feel it has bogged the story down a bit too much for the reader to care about the stakes for the novel’s characters. In fact, many of the characters are a revolving list of names cycling in and out of the story for episodic glimpses to be put away again until next time.
Much of this comes from the over-stuffed nature of this novel qua tome, in my opinion. The best tomes, while not being plot driven, still employ certain narrative modes in order to create a “wave” so to speak, to carry its audience through. Think the grail quests of Gravity’s Rainbow or Moby-Dick, or for instance the chemical spill plotline simmering throughout The Lost Scrapbook.
And this is what’s such a killer for me about this novel, because, on paper, it has everything to please me—the sludgy, haunting abandoned warehouse of a decaying industrial park, haunting surrealist modes of existence, existentially fraught lives… But maybe it’s not so good to want everything brought into one place for you, because sometimes, you get it. A hard book to recommend, and a hard one to not recommend either. If you know, you know. ...more
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