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
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 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
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
If slavery is America’s Original Sin, then Manifest Destiny is our human blasphemy, and perhaps an under acknowledged horror of our history, if only bIf slavery is America’s Original Sin, then Manifest Destiny is our human blasphemy, and perhaps an under acknowledged horror of our history, if only because most of its victims were eradicated from this soil, and so there is no living memory carried on down. In Cormac McCarthy’s pulchritudinous Blood Meridian; or, The Evening Redness in the West, the sanguine saturates the tale of the kid plodding his way westward as he hops along with mercenary scalpers and the effectuators of Manifest Destiny.
Where slavery’s history weaves through today via segregation, lynching, Jim Crow, redlining, and up through police brutality, Manifest Destiny was America’s first experimentation in empire. As we see The Kid join up with the historic Glanton Gang, we see how power, violence, and lawlessness defined American expansion into the west, which McCarthy paints in sick, horrific images, unforgiving in their detail or their grotesquerie. This violence and horror is pitched against a series of characters nearly void of interiority, further expressing the near animal-like cruelty of their behavior. The characters do no moralizing. They give no equivocation.
McCarthy’s portrait then is a kind of perversion or revision of the idyllic images of frontier times in the United States—often illustrated as a time of affable ingenuity, grit and spirit. It’s these themes that we often use to define American-ness today. But Blood Meridian, in its depiction of what these people really did as they expanded the territory, McCarthy executes an inversion of this popular mythology. It is an ironic inversion that gets closer to aspects of what Americanism truly is: bloody, violent, and cruel empire to capture resources and wield unmatched power against hapless and reluctant belligerents.
When reaching Blood Meridian, you’re struck by a number of things. Firstly, the west itself becomes the primary character of the novel, wherein nature is presented as a force against man’s hubris. McCarthy lingers over setting in some of his most mesmerizing and beautiful passages as he describes the landscape rolling past the marauding gang. Secondly, the stark violence feels surreally distant while being presented in the most plainspoken tone of voice. It is as if the violence, presented so frankly pushes the reader away from the realism of them, forcing the reader to a mental state of the characters who were seeing the acts—repression of a kind.
I don’t know what I’m really trying to get at with these thoughts, other than to say that Blood Meridian is raw depiction of the inhumanity of Americanism, a heritage carried forth today with violent conflicts of now sincere value to American lives. This is a devastating book, but so gorgeous in its devastation that one cannot but stare directly into the pooling blood around the bludgeoned bodies painting our collective history. ...more
In Nella Larsen’s debut novel, Quicksand, Helga Crane, a mixed-race woman struggles with her identity and place in a highly segregated America, torn bIn Nella Larsen’s debut novel, Quicksand, Helga Crane, a mixed-race woman struggles with her identity and place in a highly segregated America, torn between the races, torn by her family, torn by her inner turmoil and in the quagmire of depression onset by all of it. The novel follows Helga’s life from her days teaching at a Southern Black School called Naxos where she struggles with fitting in while still being herself. As Helga seeks somewhere that she fits in, she travels to Chicago, New York, Copenhagen, and the American Deep South.
Helga’s itinerance is fueled primarily by her search for community, for her feeling of fitting in to a place, in with a community of like-minded and fellow people. Because Helga is mixed race (her mother was white and her father was black), her struggles with her racial identity alienate her from the black community of Harlem, while excluding her ability to fit into the segregated white social strata of 1920s America—and, in fact, Helga does not desire to fit in with white American society. While the black community full embraces her, Helga’s own struggles with questions of race complicate her ability to feel completely as one with her Harlem neighbors, which leads her to head off to Denmark where her maternal aunt resides.
Copenhagen is the place where white society will accept Helga, however, this acceptance feels to her like she’s become an object of uniqueness—a kind of marvel of difference for her mixed racial background. This too turns her off. Ultimately, Helga finds herself toward the end of the novel in the Deep South, embedded in a deeply religious community.
Throughout the novel, Larsen gives the readers a nuanced view of Helga’s psychology—though Helga is never able to name the feeling, the depiction of her depression is affecting and visceral, tied so intimately to Helga’s racial identity, her rejection at the hands of her family, and the unique position of a person who fits in neither end of a segregated world.
I think people often read Quicksand and Passing (Larsen’s only two published novels) against one another—where in Passing we see someone who has accepted their ability to integrate into both worlds, in Quicksand we see a character who cannot, will not do that. Both novels are an indictment of segregation, but I find that Quicksand is the more interior novel of this struggle, where the question of race embodies the character’s psychology and illustrates plainly the damage done to people (and society) by racial identification. Where Passing is perhaps a more engaging read in terms of the plot and story, I think Quicksand is actually a more significant novel in terms of how it explores the impact of race, especially of mixed-race, in early 20th century America, as well as its success in depicting the way depression affects a person’s thoughts, feelings and actions....more
I first heard about Kokoro while reading a book of interviews with Steve Erickson, who mentions reading it while in Japan doing some promotion for a tI first heard about Kokoro while reading a book of interviews with Steve Erickson, who mentions reading it while in Japan doing some promotion for a translation of one of his novels. It was mentioned that the book is actually widely read in Japan, and so then I was doubly interested in reading it. And boy, what a treat.
A simple story told simply in quiet and understated ways, Kokoro is a story of a young man, an elder mentor figure referred to as “Sensei,” and both of their coming-of-age moments. The novel is broken into three sections: the first focuses on the origin and development of the narrator’s relationship with Sensei—a man he sees on the beach one day, and sets out to meet. Section two centers around the narrator and his time spent at his father’s side as the man dies from a kidney disease. The third section, which comprises about half of the novel, is a letter from Sensei to the narrator while he’s at his parents’ home, away from Tokyo.
The novel deals with topics of mentorship, isolation, familial relationships, death, suicide, the Japanese Emperorship at the turn of the 20th century, and much more. Told simply, it is a novel that wallops you with its quiet weight as the narrator tends to his sick father who lives in denial of the severity of his disease, or the Sensei who struggles with being in love with the same person his best friend is in love with.
Beginning with a serene beach scene, continuing with a humble life and sincerity of friendship, this book lures you in before revealing the sadness underpinning the rest of it. The novel shows how are most difficult moments are the ones that most frequently shape the narrative of our lives. I really am speaking vaguely about this book, but there’s a beauty to it that carries you as you learn more about what shaped these characters. There’s nothing complex about it, but its poetry gives layers to its significance, adds weight to its characters. Plainly stated, it’s really a kind of comforting book to read in a weird way, and I’m so glad to have had the chance to....more
The Passion According to G.H. is the third novel of Clarice Lispector’s I’ve read, and it’s clear to see the evolutionary line across Near to the WildThe Passion According to G.H. is the third novel of Clarice Lispector’s I’ve read, and it’s clear to see the evolutionary line across Near to the Wild Heart, her debut, The Chandelier and this work. The most immediate thing about Lispector’s writing is the way she uses language to illustrate the interiority of our conscious minds—the prose moves by free associations as thoughts circumambulate other key sensory data entering consciousness. In her first book, we live inside the mind of protagonist Joana, bouncing around key moments in her life, including the infidelity of her husband, and in The Chandelier we go even deeper into the mind of Virginia who sculpts clay figurines.
In G.H., we have another sculptress in the titular narrator, and the story is kicked off as G.H. enters the now vacant room of her former maid who has just quit. In the room she finds perfect order in contrast to the chaos G.H. maintains in her own personal life, and it’s in this organization that she first feels herself being unsettled. It’s the accidental dismemberment of an errant cockroach in the room’s closet that further since the narrator spiraling down an existential rabbit hole of self-identity cast against broader ideas of humanity, life itself (including cockroaches and dinosaurs and all of prehistory), as well as creation.
There are extremely moving passages in the novel as G.H. gazes into the white “paste” slowly seeping out of the half-alive cockroach and she comes to realizations about the supposed evolutionary history of cockroaches connecting us through all time, and how through such connection everything on earth is of one.
Both appalled and enthralled by the size of the oozing cockroach carcass, G.H. is both at once unable to scream in horror nor is she able to leave the room to escape the sight. She’s locked in on it, and it’s this stasis through which she must rediscover herself before she can emerge from the old room. The novel culminates in an alarming moment, which I won’t spoil here, but it’s a remarkable image that illuminates the books ideas.
I still think I “enjoyed” Near to the Wild Heart the most of the three novels I’ve read now by her, but it’s clear that she’s operating on another level in this book, expanding language’s power for exploration and understanding. I said it previously, but there’s this kind of arpeggiated quality to Listpector’s prose, where motifs and themes circulate around the most baroque and mesmerizing sentences. It’s remarkable that she isn’t featured more prominently in the “canon” of literary studies because of how wildly vivid and innovative her writing is, was and ever will be. Please read Clarice Lispector....more
Perhaps it’s a lesson I’m doomed to learn over and over: I just don’t like cut-ups. And so it’s on me that I picked this one off the shelf without reaPerhaps it’s a lesson I’m doomed to learn over and over: I just don’t like cut-ups. And so it’s on me that I picked this one off the shelf without really doing too much reading other than knowing that I wanted to read something by Ann Quin after having read Claire-Louise Bennett’s Checkout-19 last year which heavily references and nods to Quin as an influence on the protagonist, who is basically a stand-in for Bennett herself. Anyway, I wanted to read Berg but when I was in Portland last month, they had Tripticks on the shelf, and so I made my selection on such a whim.
In my experience with cut-up style novels, it feels like a game of literary Mad Libs, and there’s just a lot of boredom for me. I imagine for the person writing it, it’s a delight at every turn as new turns of phrase and unexpected danglers get modified by some unsuspecting thread of text, but to read it is to read a concatenation of lines chewed up and spliced together. Aside from the occasional chortle or snort or cracked smile, novels written in the cut-up style feel empty, void of feeling, meaning, character, idea, void of depth. The style seems like a great launchpad for creative endeavor; something to inspire some wicked pun or juxtapositional nuance lurking on the boundaries of our linguistic echelons, just out of reach save for a chance encounter of mashing to threads of text together. And so what happens in these novels is there’s repetitions and hiccups and a kind of shattered fragmentary quality that never adds up to anything beyond the sum of its parts. Basically, if you like funny sentences for 200 pages, then fair enough, but it just feels like an experiment to unlock creativity for the writer, rather than the creation of a writer.
Maybe I’m being harsh on cut-ups. I just have never read one and thought, “wow, what a provocative and intellectually stimulating affair,” instead, I feel bored and cross-eyed from layer after layer of non-sense.
Like I said, there are moments in cut-ups, and in Tripticks where things kind of conglomerate somehow, but those moments are quickly dashed as the cut-up form devolves the sentence, paragraph, thought into a web of words strung together by chance and a selective hand. I’d love to give Quin’s other novels a try, though, as I understand they are not at all like this one. And maybe I’ll be a little wiser before I try to pick up another novel in the cut-up style.
Perhaps a seminal piece when it debuted, especially under the framework of a satirical perversion of the seriousness of novels like On the Road, sadly, Tripticks offered little for me to like....more
I finally got around to reading Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake’s second entry into the series of the same name. After having read and been floored by TitusI finally got around to reading Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake’s second entry into the series of the same name. After having read and been floored by Titus Groan, I was worried maybe that there’d be some kind of sophomore slump, or perhaps just a kind of repetition in this novel. But delightedly, and defying all odds, Gormenghast, more often than not, exceeds the heights of its predecessor. In fact, I believe this novel is a perfect novel. By that I mean that there isn’t a single errant piece to its design and execution. Every detail from the characterization of the castle itself, to the development of characters, the careful, chess-like gamesmanship of plotting, the hero’s arc, the depth of it all is intertwined so seamlessly we’re left with just one overwhelmingly marveling piece of fiction.
As young Titus grows and learns his predetermined fate as seventy-seventh earl of Gormenghast, the boy shows rebellion from his station early on by escaping the dank walls of his castle abode. Out in the wilderness, Titus’s first taste of adventure is nourished by the landscape and all he encounters—a sense of risk and daring and danger frothing up inside the boy, a possible life that is in stark contrast to the rote and ritualized life as earl that awaits. Meanwhile, Steerpike still works his machinations behind the scenes to use, manipulate, usurp and insinuate himself into more and more important roles within the royal family. As the red-eyed con connives his way up a ladder, he begins to overplay his hand, and risks being discovered for who he is, and what he does.
Peake’s novel somehow still captures the immaculate wonder of a sprawling and labyrinthine castle that is dungeon-like, musty and decrepit, but also towering and spectacular to behold. With how important the castle is as a setting and as a kind of character itself, it’s remarkable how Peake’s immaculate control over language gives fresh life to the castle over and over again. No detail becomes too repetitious or overbearing, but continues its culmination, drawing an almost surreal image.
Few works of fiction are as seamlessly and flawlessly built as the Gormenghast novels, and to live within its world is a joy that knows no bounds....more
As if Los Angeles wasn’t surreal enough, Steve Erickson, America’s master surrealist and surreally sublime novelist, has painted an even more haunted As if Los Angeles wasn’t surreal enough, Steve Erickson, America’s master surrealist and surreally sublime novelist, has painted an even more haunted image of La-La-Land: one that’s either burning in flames or deluged in flooding rains. One that has discordant time zones zig-zagging across its topography in several-minute increments. And as the book’s flap jacket tells us, Amnesiascope is Erickson’s most autobiographical novel.
What is an autobiographic novel for a surrealist writer? Well, it’s one that’s preoccupied with lost loves, lost cities and homes, lost family, and a lost self. In this, Erickson’s fifth novel, we live inside the unnamed narrator as he recounts his most recent love, the sculptress he calls Viv, his job writing movie reviews for a local paper, an erotically-charged film he writes and co-produces with Viv, deluges and earthquakes, all-consuming fires—fires of flame, fires of passion, fires of rage—and of the artists sense of a lost self. The protagonist, a movie critic and novelist with a stutter, mirrors Erickson’s biography, but to what extent the crepuscular LA of Amnesiascope sheds light on the writer’s life would be a fool’s errand.
At times, this novel feels a bit like Erickson’s Dhalgren, where LA has been desolated by natural disasters (plural) and is all but abandoned by a cache of oddballs, weirdos, artists, and those types. Like its predecessor, strange sexual encounters happen freely and with unexpected reactions and reflections from the characters—some of these encounters are comic, for example, when the narrator early on is on a whirlwind tour of penetrating and pleasuring several mistresses with the sole goal of “saving” his release for the woman he truly wants to be with. It’s easy to read these moments of wild promiscuity through a lens of a youth’s budding sexuality, where passing-through lovers is merely a road to travel to our final and true love—for the narrator, it is Viv.
As a psychosexual romance unfolds, the narrator is also faced with coming to grips with the death of his father, and his mother’s endless grief. In what is probably some of the most emotionally charged writing I’ve ever seen in an Erickson novel; the protagonist has difficulty understanding his own acceptance of his father’s death measured against the burden it has forever left on his mother. At a particularly poignant moment as he’s driving across the desert of the west, he reflects on how his father didn’t “get” his writing, but how this didn’t really matter. How as sons, we are never “wholly of our parents” and so there will also be this strange divide among the genetic codes that inexorably connect us to them.
It's the last quarter of the novel where Amnesiascope really comes to life—where the first half of the book feels a bit phantasmagoric, even by Erickson standards, the bizarre nature of time and place melt away into some of the most impactful meditations you’ll find in one of his novels. Supreme, sublime, surreal, and so, so good. It now saddens me to only have one more novel of his to dig into. ...more
Perhaps the austerity of my three stars here represents merely my level of enjoyment/connection to James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young MPerhaps the austerity of my three stars here represents merely my level of enjoyment/connection to James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man because, while I found much more to enjoy about Dubliners, I found little to care for in this novel beyond its construction.
Maybe I found this novel too late in life? Maybe it's because I'm not religious, never have been religious or surrounded by religious people, nor have I felt a distinct oppression by the institutions around me to have much to identify with in Joyce's Portrait. That is to say, the whole Catholic thing is fundamental to Stephen Dedalus's artistic awakening, and it's a stricture that I have no real connection to, even glancing. I do wonder if I had read this in my 20s, I would be singing a different tune? I doubt it. I hate to harp on this, but I think the problem with the book is it takes Catholic experience (or perhaps a generally religious surrounding) to fully understand and appreciate Stephen's arc.
Beyond that, it is fun to see the evolution of Joyce's style--the way his sentences begin to bloom in ways that express humanity in deeper dimension, and (with the exception of the prose in "The Dead," more artfully than in Dubliners). Perhaps the most successful section of the novel is the dialogue between Stephen and Cranly in Chapter V where Stephen outlays his aesthetic philosophy of beauty, which informs the Joycean approach to form and syntax. So far, Ulysses seems like it may be the right balance of this aesthetical goal and of a readership's accessibility, however, I will dig into Finnegans Wake for my first time next year, and am curious to see if it usurps Ulysses's standing for me. ...more
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