Speaking of audio books, for @yeso specifically (not sure if it’s your thing but if it wasn’t now, it may be)
he has an intelligence….of a certain kind
Doesn’t everyone?
Your library is probably the best option if you don’t mind potentially long waits.
Otherwise, Audible is really the king of this sort of thing.
Has anyone rea James by Percival Everett? I’m thinking of rereading Huck Finn and then picking it up.
I’ve been reading some Dostoyevsky short* stories (the penguin collection that includes The Gambler). I was very surprised to learn that White Nights from the collection is having a resurgence on TikTok. I found it to be melodramatic and almost amateurish.
The rest of the collection however has been stellar. A Nasty Business in particular is one of the funniest stories I’ve read in recent memory. Just a classic Dostoyevskian tale of someone being crushed by the weight of their stupid ideals and making an ass of themselves. A very narrow and specific lens that somehow manages to be epic in scale. Really great stuff. They should teach this guy in schools.
havent done so yet but been meaning to check out the Bresson film adaptation. So about as anti-melodramitic a filmmaker as possible
no but I would be curious to know how it is
i would watch it but the trailer does not inspire confidence that it could redeem it for me
Bresson is one of those guys where it’s basically all there in the trailer
Some pages into the Arlt book, I feel like I’m hanging on by a thread (comprehension, not interest). Again reading it in French because as you say yeso (know you’re there) the English version of the second volume is lamentable, so figure this is better for continuity. The English seems fine but the first page lacks some reference to an Umberto I-like haircut, and I can only assume it foregoes such nuance elsewhere.
In the chapter “Los sueños del inventor // The Inventor’s Dreams” you have this paragraph:
Español
Anduvo por las solitarias ochavas de las calles Arenales y Talcahuano, por las esquinas de Charcas y Rodríguez Peña, en los cruces de Montevideo y Avenida Quintana, apeteciendo el espectáculo de esas calles magníficas en arquitectura, y negadas para siempre a los desdichados. Sus pies, en las veredas blancas, hacían crujir las hojas caídas de los plátanos, y fijaba la mirada en los óvalos cristales de las grandes ventanas, azogados por la blancura de las cortinas interiores. Aquél era otro mundo dentro de la ciudad canalla que él conocía, otro mundo para el que ahora su corazón latía con palpitaciones lentas y pesadas.
Deteniéndose, observaba los garajes lujosos como patenas, y los verdes penachos de los cipreses en los jardines, defendidos por murallas de cornisas dentadas, o verjas gruesas capaces de detener el ímpetu de un león. La granza roja serpenteaba entre los óvalos de los canteros verdes. Alguna aya con toca gris paseaba por los caminos.
¡Y él debía seiscientos pesos con siete centavos!
English
He walked past the lonely crossing of Arenales and Talcahuano Streets, past the crossing of Charcas and Rodríguez Peña, past the corner of Montevideo and Avenida Quintana, savoring the sight of magnificently constructed neighborhoods, forever off limits to the poor. His feet, on the white sidewalks, squished the fallen leaves from banana trees, and he looked up at those great oval-paned windows, like leaded mirrors with white curtains inside. It was a world apart, set inside the grimy city he knew, a world apart to which his heart now beat in slow, heavy longings.
Stopping, he eyed the ritzy garages that almost glistened and the green-tufted cypresses inside the gardens defended by rampart walls, or by ironwork solid enough to halt a charging lion. The red-paved walkway slithered among the ovals of greenery. A gray-hatted governess was strolling down the street.
And he owed six hundred pesos and seven cents!
Which I don’t know about video games but that’s the most recent time I laughed out loud at a book. The comedic timing scans even if I don’t understand every word. I’ve got a handle on probably 95% of the vocabulary, and what I’m missing tends to add to the paranoia, although I do occasionally worry I might be missing something important.
My reservation at the library came in when I had already started making my way through Balzac’s At the Sign of the Cat and Racket, which I intend to post about more at length when I get back to it, but for now will just say has almost been more about reading endnotes than the principal text; it offers so much context for every single reference or deliberate word choice or historical detail that I’ve unknowingly become kind of addicted to it, where now with the Arlt I feel totally adrift. I get the general thread, he’s going around trying to get money from his acquaintances and not getting any and letting what he does have go along the way, and everything is sort of half-crazed, especially his not-friend Barsut who haha jokingly is going to kill him (but Erdosain might instead kill Barsut himself, we’ll see). I’m missing some subtleties but the language also seems to be angular on purpose. The first sentence of one chapter, “Sa vie saignait.” is not a typical expression in French, for example.
Having no knowledge of Argentine surnames I have to ask, are Erdosain and Barsut real ones? Is this a Turkey and Nippers situation? Google returns nothing except references to this book, but then again why would it.
Trivia moment: in French maquereau literally means mackerel but is also equivalent to the noun pimp. Perhaps I would have understood eventually but I looked it up as soon as there were mackerels everywhere. Of interest is this: the activity is not named after the fish, but the other way around, as mackerels apparently act as sort of matchmakers for male and female herring during their migration. (NOTE: I learned this from Wikipedia I think yesterday, and it is now nowhere to be found. Might be lazy disinfo.)
On the lookout for the sentence about testicles exploding(?)
If you’re still in the initial stages of the novel then yeah I think it’s to be expected that you may feel a little at sea. The book introduces quite a few characters of which more than a few have these pre-existing relationships with one another, compounded with the weird schemes they have already in motion, and does so without any context. There’s not much interiority to Erdosain of his own ,really, although there’s a lot of space given to the narrator’s description of his mental deterioration which doesnt help orient the reader, although it is engrossing to read.
If you have any specific questions or think you missed something lmk! I am here to spread The Good News.
not quite, but Erdozain and Bersuit are names you might run into once in a blue moon. As @Bonsai and I discovered on looking at the first edition text, Arlt sometimes just goes with his own phonetic spelling of less common words. May be the case with those surnames. Most of later editions of the books “correct” his “mistakes” but I suppose bc proper names can be whatever, editors left those eccentric.
yeah that’s in Chapter one of Los lanzallamas. Def need to know what they used for “estallar”
I’ve been reading some Dostoyevsky short* stories (the penguin collection that includes The Gambler). I was very surprised to learn that White Nights from the collection is having a resurgence on TikTok.
I think one thing to understand about tiktok in general is that it’s full of influencers with terrible taste, but if this leads to a bunch of zoomers reading Dostoevsky, I’m pretty all right with it.
I read Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros. It’s a different tiktok book but also a megabestseller romantasy. I bought it for my wife for christmas because who cares and she became obsessed with it to the point that she needed me to read it. Sadly, I read it painfully slow for her liking! But finish it I did.
It’s pretty all right. I…don’t really have much more to say about it. I understand why it’s done so well and why people like it so much. It has a lot of prose quirks that I find annoying as shit, but I’m also pretty far from the target audience here. And she does do at least one thing that is extremely clever and well executed, structurally.
I’ll likely be reading the rest of them because this is my life and I do quite like my wife.
I read the first Percy Jackson book in part because I found out a lot of incoming college freshmen consider it their favorite book but also because I was curious how old my son will need to be to read it.
I think it’s honestly kind of bad. It’s quite dull and moves, I think, too quickly for it to have the same kind of appeal as Hogwarts, for example. I don’t know what to make of 18 year old boys considering this their favorite book but it does fill me with a strange sense of doom.
Also, for those interested, I’ve begun reviewing short stories in podcast form. The most recent episode has Stephen Graham Jones on to discuss his short story Father, Son, Holy Rabbit.
I need to go back and actually finish Lanzallamas, I had to return my edition of the book to the library too soon.
I finished reading Krik? Krak! by Edwidge Danticat. I loved this book quite a bit. It’s a compilation of stories told from the perspectives of different people who are loosely connected through family ties, set in Haiti and New York.
Danticat writes about familial love and responsibility in a very touching way. Most of the characters feel a deep sense of connection to their relatives (dead and living), often in palpable ways like hearing their voices, talking to them in dreams or even in visions. The stories often feature some kind of Haitian “folk tale” or knowledge, idioms and phrases, rituals, things like that. Danticat also connects this spiritual tie to ancestor by invoking Haitian history: the revolution, dictatorships, foreign intervention are all very present here.
Similar to Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun [phenomenal book] the portrayal of family history also serves as a way to understand aspects of what its like to live in a time of civil upheaval, unrest, dictatorship. The first story is composed of letters between lovers, one who is writing the letters while on a raft to the US, the other staying in Haiti. The letters are addressed to the other person but it’s never read by them due to their situation, so it reads like a very sad story. These stories are narrated by people in the thick of these things and its enriching to engage with stories of people who otherwise would not have the time, peace, resources to write and publish these stories themselves. I think this is why Danticat’s role as storyteller feels very meaningful, it certainly adds to why I feel like her work is so compelling.
The epilogue of the book seems the most autobiographical, it’s about her relationship to writing and why she decided to become a writer. I’ve included it here (it’s a few pages long) in case anybody wants a little something to read.
I think overall, Danticat’s storytelling is quite absorbing and I deeply enjoy the way she connects the different meanings of family, community, spirituality and love. I think she’s a pretty great author, is a simpler way to put it.
Her most famous book is Breath, Eyes, Memory, and I think that’ll be next for me.
Women Like Us:
You remember thinking while braiding your hair that you look a lot like your mother. Your mother who looked like your grandmother and her grandmother before her. Your mother had two rules for living. Always use your ten fingers, which in her parlance meant that you should be the best little cook and housekeeper who ever lived.
Your mother’s second rule went along with the first. Never have sex before marriage, and even after you marry, you shouldn’t say you enjoy it, or your husband won’t respect you.
And writing? Writing was as forbidden as dark rouge on the cheeks or a first date before eighteen. It was an act of indolence, something to be done in a corner when you could have been learning to cook.
Are there women who both cook and write? Kitchen poets, they call them. They slip phrases into their stew and wrap meaning around their pork before frying it. They make narrative dumplings and stuff their daughter’s mouths so they say nothing more.
“What will she do? What will be her passion?” your aunts would ask when they came over to cook on great holidays, which called for cannon salutes back home[…]” Her passion is being quiet," your mother would say. “But then she’s not being quiet. You hear this scraping from her. Krik? Krak! Pencil, paper. It sounds like some-one crying.”
Someone was crying. You and the writing demons in your head. You have nobody, nothing but this piece of paper, they told you. Only a notebook made out of dis-carded fish wrappers, pantyhose cardboard. They were the best confidantes for a lonely little girl.
When you write, it’s like braiding your hair. Taking a handful of coarse unruly strands and attempting to bring them unity. Your fingers have still not perfected the task. Some of the braids are long, others are short. Some are thick, others are thin. Some are heavy. Others are light. Like the diverse women in your family. Those whose fables and metaphors, whose similes, and soliloquies, whose diction and je ne sais quoi daily slip into your survival soup, by way of their fingers.
You have always had your ten fingers. They curse you each time you force them around the contours of a pen. No, women like you don’t write. They carve onion sculptures and potato statues. They sit in dark corners and braid their hair in new shapes and twists in order to control the stiffness, the unruliness, the rebelliousness.
You remember thinking while braiding your hair that you look a lot like your mother. You remember her silence when you laid your first notebook in front of her. Her disappointment when you told her that words would be your life’s work, like the kitchen had always been hers. She was angry at you for not understanding. And with what do you repay me? With scribbles on paper that are not worth the scratch of a pig’s snout. The sacrifices had been too great.
Writers don’t leave any mark in the world. Not the world where we are from. In our world, writers are tortured and killed if they are men. Called lying whores, then raped and killed, if they are women. In our world, if you write, you are a politician, and we know what happens to politicians. They end up in a prison dungeon where their bodies are covered in scalding tar before they’re forced to eat their own waste.
The family needs a nurse, not a prisoner. We need to forge ahead with our heads raised, not buried in scraps of throw-away paper. We do not want to bend over a dusty grave, wearing black hats, grieving for you. There are nine hundred and ninety-nine women who went before you and worked their fingers to coconut rind so you can stand here before me holding that torn old notebook that you cradle against your breast like your prettiest Sunday braids. I would rather you had spit in my face.
You remember dunking while braiding your hair that you look a lot like your mother and her mother before her. It was their whispers that pushed you, their murmurs over pots sizzling in your head. A thousand women urging you to speak through the blunt tip of your pencil. Kitchen poets, you call them. Ghosts like burnished branches on a flame tree. These women, they asked for your voice so that they could tell your mother in your place that yes, women like you do speak, even if they speak in a tongue that is hard to understand. Even if it’s patois, dialect, Creole.
The women in your family have never lost touch with one another. Death is a path we take to meet on the other side. What goddesses have joined, let no one cast asunder. With every step you take, there is an army of women watching over you. We are never any farther than the sweat on your brows or the dust on your toes. Though you walk through the valley of the shadow of death, fear no evil for we are always with you.
When you were a little girl, you used to dream that you were lying among the dead and all the spirits were begging you to scream. And even now, you are still afraid to dream because you know that you will never be able to do what they say, as they say it, the old spirits that live in your blood.
Most of the women in your life had their heads down. They would wake up one morning to find their panties gone. It is not shame, however, that kept their heads down. They were singing, searching for meaning in the dust. And sometimes, they were talking to faces across the ages, faces like yours and mine.
You thought that if you didn’t tell the stories, the sky would fall on your head. You often thought that with-out the trees, the sky would fall on your head. You learned in school that you have pencils and paper only because the trees gave themselves in unconditional sacrifice. There have been days when the sky was as close as your hair to falling on your head.
This fragile sky has terrified you your whole life. Silence terrifies you more than the pounding of a mil-lion pieces of steel chopping away at your flesh. Some- times, you dream of hearing only the beating of your own heart, but this has never been the case. You have never been able to escape the pounding of a thousand other hearts that have outlived yours by thousands of years. And over the years when you have needed us, you have always cried “Krik?” and we have answered “Krak!” and it has shown us that you have not forgotten us.
You remember thinking while braiding your hair that you look a lot like your mother. Your mother, who looked like your grandmother and her grandmother before her. Your mother, she introduced you to the first echoes of the tongue that you now speak when at the end of the day she would braid your hair while you sat between her legs, scrubbing the kitchen pots. While your fingers worked away at the last shadows of her day’s work, she would make your braids Sunday-pretty, even during the week.
When she was done she would ask you to name each braid after those nine hundred and ninety-nine women who were boiling in your blood, and since you had writ-ten them down and memorized them, the names would come rolling off your tongue. And this was your testament to the way that these women lived and died and lived again.
Was about to muse aloud I wish they did this in the French edition, but if it’s less common words they may indeed be doing it and I have no idea. I’ll keep any eye out in 400 pages for estallar, but I’ll guess here it’s going to be éclater
here’s a way to test. In the chapter entitled “En la caverna” in the Spanish (guessing it’s something similar in French) - is “Roosevelt” spelled “Rooselwelt”? If it is, then you’re looking at a translation of the original rather than the revised text
This particular translation came out in 1981, so almost certainly made from the corrected text I suppose.
I just finished Schilf by Juli Zeh. (Translated into English as Dark Matter in the UK and In Free Fall in the US)
I procrastinated reading this for a while after The Honjin Murders left me uninspired to jump straight into another detective mystery novel. The nearing library deadline eventually motivated me to peek inside and I got pulled in pretty quickly.
The book is a fun read. Zeh likes playing with language: metaphors, flowery descriptions and personified objects are often part of the prose. I personally like this lighthearted use of language. Critics at the time were not very fond of her style, claiming the playfulness was distracting, out of style and pretentious. I think those critics should try having fun sometimes. I’m kind of curious about what the English translations are like, given the style of the prose.
The Honjin Murders read, to me, kind of clinical and more like a traditional murder case to be solved by the reader along with the book’s detective. But I just wasn’t interested. The characters felt like cardboard cutouts which just didn’t inspire any desire to solve the case in me. The book wanted me to ask the classic question whodunit? but the only question in my mind was why would i care?
Schilf presents an interesting constellation of characters from the start and deliberately waits before it introduces the actual murder. The characters are all a bit larger than life. Two renowned elite physicists that are equal part friends, rivals and lovers. Oskar, who dedicated his life to physics and works at CERN. And Sebastian who decided not to follow his friend into the world of physics but to focus on his picture perfect family: A beautiful and kind wife who runs an art gallery and their perfect son. The underlying tension being that Sebastian loves his family but was never really able to let go of the what if of joining Oskar in the Olymp of bleeding-edge physics research and romance. Eventually they find themselves working on differing, opposing theories, the many-worlds-theory versus determinism. A lot of the plot is driven by that friend-lover-rivalry-family dynamic and the questions raised by it.
The overall structure of the book is as playful as the prose. It is structured into seven chapters made up of seven parts each. Every chapter starts with a subtitle, a short sentence basically telling us what will happen in it. (e.g. Chapter 2 - in which a child gets abducted and the murder happens or Chapter 4 - in which the detective makes his late appearance, Chapter 6 - in which the case gets solved but there are still questions to be answered) After introducing most of its cast the book proceeds to show us how the murder happens. We know from the start who did it, how they did it and that the murderer’s hands was forced by someone else.
This makes the central mystery of Schilf the much more interesting question of why? instead of the somewhat menial details of who and how.
The detective Schilf is also an interesting character. His characterization basically beginning by being late to the novel that is (in German) named after him. When he enters the story he begins to think about himself from the perspective of a third person past tense narrator which is in turn addressed by the book’s actual, present tense narrator, leading to fun constructs like “Now that he knew who the murderer was, he needed to figure out their motive, thought the detective, thinks the detective.” (fictional example)
I went into the book blind. Simply based on the recommendation of my friend from many years ago and I was glad I did because a lot of introductory paragraphs and description texts online spoiled one of the initial interesting mysteries, even if it gets solved pretty quickly. So if you want to read this and mind minor spoilers, be warned.
I’d like to read some more Juli Zeh in the future. Her book The Method is actually officially part of the German language high school curriculum these days, making her kind of famous among contemporary German authors.
Next up is Kawakami Mieko’s Heaven.
I started reading Iron Age by Wang Xiaobo last night, which is about a college student who starts working at his older cousin’s “iron apartment complex”, where all the tenants are female college graduates that his cousin had bought at the tenant market, where tenants are sold by the pound. He has to escort them to the bus each day, since the tenants are required to be handcuffed and bound whenever they leave their rooms or work place. All of the tenants naturally start making romantic advances towards him, just as they had with his cousin before him, but since the first item on his employment contract stated he could not sexually harass the tenants, he is worried that if he accepts any of their advances he’ll get fired.
The thing I like about Wang Xiaobo is his novellas always start out feeling like obvious metaphors, but then he gets really obsessed describing the sex lives of his characters or the minutiae of the setting, and by the end you have no idea what the story was about. Like in his novella 2015, the narrator keeps having to pick up his uncle Wang 2 from the police station because he gets arrested over and over for painting without a license. He used to have a license, but he got it revoked because all of his paintings made people dizzy and caused them great physical distress if they looked at them too long, though they also made girls horny. Eventually he gets arrested too many times and gets sent to reeducation school, but he fails out of that and has to go to the alkaline mines, where the guard put in charge of him falls in love with him. She takes him back to Beijing and forces him to have constant sex with her by gunpoint, which makes the nephew narrating the story jealous because he feels like he is the only one worthy of loving his uncle. Eventually he discovers that his uncle’s paintings just happen to be visualizations of some mathematical equation studied in the mid-20th century, and when he reports this to the Chinese academy of the arts they reinstate his uncle’s license, though he has to conceal this from his “police officer auntie” because otherwise she won’t like his uncle anymore.
His settings are often these “lovable dystopias” that certainly sound like dystopias when I describe the plots in abstract, but his characters are always so at home and comfortable in the bizarre worlds they find themselves in. Everything I’ve read by him up to now has taken place either in the near past, present, or near future, but apparently he also has a bunch of stories taking place in the Tang dynasty, so I’m very curious how his style translates into historical fiction.