Someone is squatting the only copy of Borges’ Library of Babel available at the library. It was supposed to be returned today but when I looked it up they renewed their lending period for another month.
That story has like 83 pages what are you doing my dude. Also why is there only one copy like come on.
Library doesn’t have Ficciones?
And most of that is extratextual stuff, the story itself is more like 20-30 pages. What is that person doing!
Unfortunately only in Spanish, which I don’t speak.
I’m in no rush to read it but I saw that it was supposed to be returned today so I kept refreshing the page only to see that the person extended the loan by a month. So that’s a bummer.
But I’ve got plenty more pages of Schattenfroh to read through so I won’t run out of reading material any time soon.
Speaking of, I just finished Through the Night by Stig Sæterbakken, a heavy name in Norwegian literature and one I’ve always heard mentioned by Jon Fosse, Knausgaard, and the like. I only knew that he wrote “dark” books and died by suicide.
As it happens, Through the Night is about a father whose son commits suicide. The bulk of the book isn’t about the son or his suicide so much as it is about the father having an affair prior and abandoning the family afterward. Beyond that, the conceit of the book is a house in Slovakia where “hope turns to dust,” where you can pay a shadowy bartender and thousands of dollars to let you stay in the house overnight where all your worst fears will be revealed to you, an experience that will either leave you unburdened and free or mentally broken.
I guess the most interesting thing about the book was that “house of leaves-y” angle (which is cool but not what I usually go for), mixed with your standard Norwegian world-weary realism (which is what I do typically go for). The passages about grief and emptiness and loneliness and pain were very true, but were not as nihilistic as I’d been led to believe given the authors reputation. There was almost a little whimsy about the book. This took the worst form in the final two sentences of the novel, which were so off kilter that I ended up searching out a review that identified that same thing. (Good review and good online mag too btw).
Speaking of the authors reputation, I also found out he’s the type of guy to do this sort of thing and has a section on his Wikipedia about the time he invited a holocaust denier to the Norwegian book festival
Finished recently Checkout-19 and now I’m onto Dreams of Red Pavillion. Couldn’t be more similar, my friends.
Checkout-19 solved me a lot of issues regarding how I want to write, but also some of the concerns of trying to do that kind of style and how that is lost into sensations. It’s a good style for framing a kind of a whole period of life, but one where the feeling of being lost and dissociation is a constant force in the book, and it manages to do so even when the reiterations, the going-back-and-forths and so on won’t work because it might be overused. Fortunately, it’s a much more interesting book that most that try being experimental precisely because of taking that risk.
Dream of Red Pavillion is an interesting one. I’m taking it slow, but I know this might be the last book I read in 2025.
I wanted to like Checkout-19 since in theory that discursive style is in my wheelhouse, but I found something really off-putting and artificial about it that I ended up not even finishing it, which is rare for me. I’ve always had half a mind to revisit it just to see if I was in an exceptionally bad mood when I read it or something. I’m in the minority of my distaste.
I think it feels artifitial because it is so overused and at times not as purposeful as it seems that continually destroys part of the intention she wants to apply. It’s something that also happens with people like Eimear McBride: I love them as authors because of how risky they are in terms of style, but I think it ends up as you said, and I think you can make a great novel if you try to apply those to a larger text. This is what I’m trying and it seems that everything in those cases are tried in structures that function like vignettes or theater scenes.
Recently read The Lost Scrapbook by Evan Dara. Really cool novel written entirely in unattributed monologues and dialogues. It was a bit jarring at first- there are no chapter breaks and the book does not give you many clues as to what is going on; it just throws you into different people’s streams of consciousness- but I eventually got the hang of it and even enjoyed surfing its heavy waves of prose. It’s sort of a surreal-mundane psycho-portrait of a town in the '90s with a heavy dose of environmental activism in the back third.
Probably about as interesting as the book itself is Evan Dara’s anonymity. Apparently nobody knows anything about him at all, and for a time, people thought he was just a pen name for Thomas Pynchon or William T. Vollmann, (though those rumors have generally been brushed off, but hey, who knows). Style-wise, the book most reminds me of William Gaddis though more contemporary, but even then, Dara is doing his own thing.
Anyway, really interesting book if you like postmodern American fiction.
Super interesting, never heard of this.
Also crazy to learn that FC2 is based at Illinois State while Dalkey Archive is based at University of Illinois. Something in the water.
watched the movie Heat and had forgotten Deniro does this with a book “about metals”
Reading it one letter at a time.
Did some performative reading tonight, but since I was reading on an iPad and no one knew I was reading Camus, I made this low-effort meme to send to friends so I can tell them I am reading Camus and get the validation I want/need from that:
camus can do, but satre is smart-re
@tomjonjon tagging you in for this joke specifically ^
yeah, i really like that “novel in parts” type of feeling, too.
have you read rachel cusk? i thought her outline trilogy was really great and a fantastically understated + literary approach to the type of autofiction we see in checkout-19 and other cases.
Finished re-reading Mars Trilogy, kept going after the sun came up. Very nearly captivated me just as much this time around.
On to Water Margin. Emboldened to actually finish a work of classical Chinese literature by reading in the foreword Mao Zedong used to hide it from his schoolteachers using the covers of assigned Confucian novels. Mao was right about hong shao rou too
No, I didn’t know about her. Which is that trilogy you were writing about?
Do you mean the one by Kim Stanley Robinson? Ever since finishing Three Body Problem I’m kind of itching for another space epic and this sounds like it might be a good fit.
Just looked for a spoiler free discussion on YouTube and I’m glad to report that we have a new record holder for TTIJ[1] with 9 seconds into the podcast! (only in the background but very deliberately placed)[2]
Please share how you like it! What translation do you intend to read? I’m currently deciding between reading water margin or dream of the red chamber and what translation to read. At least for dream there doesn’t seem to be a real definitive and complete “good translation” to read so I’ll probably read it in English instead.
I’m very interested in learning about classic chinese literature.
Time To Infinite Jest ↩︎
So far I got my book recommendations mostly organically through friends, family and from this thread. The only book content I watched online was Angela Collier’s second YouTube channel so I’m new to the world of more mainstream book influencing and maybe enjoying measuring this KPI a little too much. Not making any value judgments (I haven’t read the book yet) just trying to figure out if it’s a good pretentiousness indicator. ↩︎
i saw today that the guy who posted the “who has a better performative reading book?” poll put out a substack post where he ranked books based on how good they are as performative reading books:
The Myth of Sisyphus: 3/5
Atomic Habits: 1/5 (“an advertisement that you don’t have your life together”)
Annihilation: 5/5
Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential: 6/5
Infinite Jest: “Starts as a 0/5 but gradually increases to a 5/5 the further along you are in the book”
