brief book reviews

was violently sick for ~3 days this past week and 'enjoyed' elements of some of these frequently-dystopian books showing up in my fever dreams.

 

the wild geese by ogai mori: unsure why i bought this...i think based on the thriftbooks recommendation algorithm, seemed good, felt interested in reading progressively older japanese literature. initially felt confused about when this was written due to the minimal publication info in my copy, but have since discerned this was written/published ~1906, and mostly takes place ~1880. a short novel about a woman who agrees to be a mistress to support her widower father, but who becomes disinterested in her...guy(?)...and falls in love with a student she only ever sees through her window. the middle portion of the book gets a bit slow and repetitive but the ending felt intriguingly eventful, funny, and bleak. often felt confused by plot points that hinge on cultural understandings of the time, like what the mistress actually was expected to do for her master and generally just do all day, plus the relative morality of 'having a mistress is fine' vs 'being a money lender is bad.' i 'enjoyed', morosely, the sense of mutual imprisonment perpetuated by the presence of maids/servants, something i hadn't considered as part of this time period/social class. enjoyed various quirks of the writing, which ranged from casual to overly poetic, sometimes humorous, specifically a line that is like "[long paragraph summarizing a guy feeling complex emotions because he bought a mistress]. If I were asked to describe how he felt, I would say he felt like a man experiencing complex emotions from having just bought a mistress." one of those first-person books almost fully about other people, which feels old-school, less common now.

ema, the captive by césar aira: did a brief bookclub for another, more recent aira book (the divorce) with sebastian last year and bought this one at random afterward. it's from ~1980 and set in some early colonization period in patagonia. felt grossed out/distressed by various scenes of comedic brutality in the first and penultimate sections. felt interested in its general lack of plot and the emphasis on (mostly, presumably, fictionalized) nature writing -- at the end especially i recognized my positive/excited feelings for the nature/travel sections of the book, with the slightly fantastical descriptions, as similar to my feelings playing dwarf fortress ~2011-2013 and reading invisible cities 2x in ~2007-2008. felt vaguely uncomfortable about the mix of irony (i think) and descriptions of (mostly, presumably, fictionalized) native americans throughout. most of the book seems to emphasize/idealize a sort of leisure-heavy nihilistic existence in big nature, including cozy romantic sequences, swimming, cooking, and lots of tobacco smoking. self-consciously wondering about it having a goal, as a novel, of making the reader interrogate their own longing for the drowsy, uncomplicated, nature-heavy descriptions in the context of colonialism's needless, inhuman brutality. felt like the emphasis on complicated vocabulary is both a defining trait of the work yet also a little distracting/unneeded, and that the bernhardian dialogue was often superfluous (e.g. random contradictory/menaingless monologues where people say things like (making this up) 'money limits life, but makes it infinite. we obscure our own lives, living is impossible, and nothingness extends life to nothing'). enjoyed the description of an area called Pringles, which is a real name used for some regions in Argentina (and this book, i assumed wrongly, predates pringles the snack, which were invented in 1968, which seems fucked up and wrong), but which still made me laugh, the idea of having a sort of semi-fantastical alternative historical fiction with a city named after a contemporary snack food, a joke which i think may still be intentional after the inclusion of a princess named "F.C. Argentina," which i assume is a soccer joke. by the end i felt more interested in the awkward structure of it -- i get the sense he kind of just wrote what he felt like when he felt like it and didn't really want to emphasize a greater narrative arc (but the themes are consistent, esp. the 'joke' about ema being a captive). since the ending offers no real 'conclusion,' i had the thought that i would have enjoyed reading another ~700+ pages of the book.

harrow by joy williams: i like joy williams, have read 4+ books by her in the past few years. enjoyed how this book felt like it was set in the late 70s/80s in spite of actually taking place in a semi-distant future apocalypse. employs several williamsian tropes such as a precocious child with an alcoholic mother and, stylistically, the use of extensive and inventive adverbs and adjectives. noticed the book's gradual abandonment of the already-shaky-at-the-start narrative pretense of the 'main character', moving from 1st person in part 1 to third person in part 2, with the character then being used as more or less an arbitrary gopher used for introducing the reader to new wacky characters, then quickly thereafter being dropped entirely as a means of connecting scenes. felt like some of the adverbs/adjectives were very solidly deployed (with the constantly inventive ways of describing the natural world as looking shitty, e.g clouds looking 'dirty') but then grew kind of tiresome an clunky, with every clause in some multiclaused sentences bearing 2-3 stacked, descriptive terms. noticed most dialogue is spurred by non-sequitur-seeming statements that are used to present an entrance point for some kind of joke or interesting diatribe. enjoyed the plot/conceit of the book, seemed realistic in its bleak dark humor (e.g. a throwaway line like "they gave tax breaks to whoever bought a gun, then they stopped collecting taxes because everyone had a gun"), the hopelessness/pointlessness of addressing disaster, and made me think about my own visions of the apocalypse. as criticism, i felt that nearly every character speaks the same way, a sort of pidgin of theological/philosophical references and 'that reminds me' humor, which made the cast of characters and flashbacks more or less merge into a soup where anything could have been said by anyone. overall enjoyed the book and a number of specific images/phrasings that made it feel more like a sketch of a novel's plot fleshed out by poetry.

this is strange june by tex gresham (rly srs lit): poetry book marketed as consisting of poems for people who don't like poetry, but the poems generally strike me as straightforwardly post-alt-lit poetry with various standard poetic devices and pop culture references. mostly memoiristic with partially self-deprecating emphasis on minor childhood trauma, pop culture (particularly cinema), (low) self-confidence, and nostalgia for/reflections on childhood, as an adult. felt slightly unfocused as a collection, or slightly too long. felt less interested in the poems that seem to emphasize self-pity or airing grievances, but did enjoy the poems with more of the postmodern play, various straight forward memoiristic poems where it feels like he's exploring wonder/self-acknowledgement more than making a formal statement, and the image of getting a head wound infection from whale tank water at sea world. felt curious about/distracted by the approach to line breaks throughout. kept thinking it would interesting to see it rewritten as a collection of flash-length personal essays, dispensing of the poetry conceit and just focusing on the imagery/themes. i also liked the back cover 'how do you feel' blurb idea.

leech girl lives by rick claypool (spaceboy books): i think i purchased this book (mostly about mold) directly from rick, along with another book (about mold) when he had reached out concerning reviewing another of his books (which is also about mold, or tentacles...maybe both). this one is a pulpy sci-fi action book set in the (distant) future in two parts. the first is told mostly along two converging timelines ("earlier/later"), about an 'art safety inspector' who lives in a sort of biodome. the second half changes settings and is more straightforward in narrative. as with the other book of his i read, i enjoyed the inventiveness and imagery but found the prose itself sometimes awkward, repetitive, messy; this is definitively a plot/idea-forward book meant to stroke the imagination and stir up philosophical thought regarding art, purpose, humanity, etc. -- the big ideas, basically -- more than line-by-line execution. every time i picked it up i felt convinced i was almost done, but would be surprised to see i had a large portion of the book left. felt distracted by the seemingly reductive reliance on the protagonist's frequent and sole motivation being that she is in love with/wants to find her boyfriend during her various escapades 'saving humanity' and 'having her entire understanding of the world shattered every few chapters'... ultimately disliked the long length and the ending's oversaturation with twists and reveals...feeling a stronger conviction as i write this that i have not read enough fantasy/action/sci-fi/thriller books as an adult to actually speak competently about rick's writing.

girl on heaven's pier by eeva-liisa manner (dalkey): got this based on navigating the dalkey archive website, which lists books by region; this one is finnish, unsure i've ever read a finnish author before, and the synopsis sounded interesting. it's a small little novel about a little girl who hates her shitty school and develops epilepsy. enjoyed the descriptions of things in terms of her childlike perception of beauty, the theme of her wrestling with the meaningless cruelty of the world and rebelling in small ways she can't articulate well, feels like part of its conceit is the intersection of the 'old' and 'new' world (it was published in 1950), including discussions of/relationships with god/religion, esp. in children, and some of the 'insights' leena has about god; the cast of characters is small but consists solely of either the very old or the very young. felt like i couldn't understand/follow some of the dialogue but style-wise, i enjoyed the deployment of variously simple phrases like her feeling "utterly unhappy" and the descriptions of nature/buildings. felt less interested in the extended 'dream' sequence at the end and how it's written, but ultimately liked the simple image of the ending.

the diaries of anaïs nin, vol 1: picked up from a small free library. read the first ~50 pages, probably won't finish even though it felt enjoyable and generally interesting, specifically the focus on describing/analyzing other people, and felt like the writing was generally engaging and varied. the lack of structure and the fact that it is the first of like 15 volumes may contribute to my hesitancy to fully invest in it. enjoyed considering the complexity of evaluating a diary as a piece of literature re: character and voice.

 

do you think life is meaningless? sound off in the comments ⬇