found myself starting several books and putting them down for extended periods of time ~50% of the way through. tried to power through them to finish these reviews. feeling like this is a sufficient number to publish for now.
hunger by knut hamsun: bought secondhand locally based on having heard it's good but otherwise not knowing anything about it or the author. first person narrative about a really broke guy just trying to not starve to death while wandering around the city of christiana, norway (now known as oslo). enjoyed the stream-of-consciousness approach and emphasis on examining/marveling at his constantly shifting moods, which is, apparently, based on reading about it briefly online, more or less why it's famous/influential. i assume its influence on modern writing is why it felt very contemporary in spite of its late 1800s setting. enjoyed the experience as a reader of wanting to figure out ways the protagonist could logically improve his material conditions/survive vs. the increasing emphasis on his delirium/insanity/pride/religious guilt. felt it was funny how the book emphasizes the daily minutia of not being able to get any money for food or a place to live framed by each section more or less starting with him inexplicably having secured a new place to live/squat and a little bit of food and money. enjoyed various scenes and interactions of him being an asshole/liar for no reason and other intentionally comical moments. but i read this book during a period of extreme personal anxiety, which seemed dangerous/bad, as the book is very stressful; i think i will associate this book and a couple depeche mode albums with a panicky pit in my stomach for the rest of my life. would recommend.
the hare by cesar aira: very similar in tone, theme, and execution to ema, the captive. an englishman goes on a strange, epic quest around patagonia, interacting with various native american tribes. contains lots of beautiful nature writing and interesting/invented scientific and lingustic fabulism, and is extremely problematic re: native americans. but if you put that aside it sort of reads like a fantasy adventure -- described it to the bj boys as a "kids adventure book for adults". some scenes made me laugh. some made me think. the plot reveals got increasingly convoluted in an eventually comedic way. i get the sense that he just sort of wrote whatever popped into his head and ran with every first idea he had without second guessing himself. would generally recommend. very engaging writing.
dinner by cesar aira: a very short novel that simply asks the
question: "what if cesar aira wrote a zombie apocalypse book?" the
answer is what you would expect: a boring/predictable zombie apocalypse
narrative written in an engaging, detail-heavy way. enjoyed the first
~1/5th being a prolonged dinner scene with a bunch of backstory,
substories, strange vignettes and details, then pivoting randomly to a
zombie thing. funny in conceit. but a strange experience in execution. i
like his writing a lot. enjoyed for the minor details, setting, and
characters throughout more than any aspect of the plot. fun little scenes/digressions and compelling moments, like the bride wandering down the church aisle toward a gruesome crucifix scene which turns out to be a zombie. vaguely enjoyed
it as 'proof' that he is a good writer, how he can turn a stupid story
into something naturally engaging and interesting. the ending felt
needlessly convoluted/clever, but overall i liked its emphasis on
shitty/mean/disagreeable characters saying stuff. still would enjoy reading more aira.
the book of camp-lore and woodcraft by d. c. beard: i liked his shelters shacks and shanties book as dumb escapist reading. this has similarly fun discussion of cooking, making campfires, etc. some parts made me laugh out loud. some parts i mostly skipped.
pure color by sheila heti: bought used based on all the publicity hype when it came out (and the good cover). written in multiple sections. big fan of the first section, which was a relatively straight forward narrative about a depressed person going to college for literary criticism and working at a lamp store. second section feels like a discrete 'linked cnf collection' ruminating on her father's death, with lots of repeated ideas/images presented in a sort of melodramatic way; i liked it, but not as much as the first section. third section is the two of them in a leaf together having vaguely uninteresting discussions about existence/purpose/science; i liked the conceit of this one but got annoyed by the extended pontification on philosophy/science, which felt predictable and sort of reddity. the remaining sections were more interesting but in general i felt like the second half of the book dragged, despite various good moments. overall i enjoyed her intentionally provocative (i assume) deployment of sexual language for father-daughter emotional connection, which the press focused on, but which to me is mostly funny in a sort of punk way, like she knew the reviews would get hung up on it. enjoyed the ending, mostly. felt mixed on the language/style - some of it was a little too precious, but sometimes the bluntness was powerful. think i would recommend various passages but less the book overall.
doppler by erland loe: a short, satirical, 'funny' novel about contemporary norway. the protagonist decides to go live in the woods and makes a lot of baldly satirical pokes at things like skim milk, constitution day, conservatism, childrens' television, the lord of the rings, etc. generally enjoyed it but felt like the characterization was often inconsistent in order to set up these jokes, e.g. the protagonist is ardently anti-norway/technology but goes on a long monologue about the wonders of skimmed milk via centrifuge. was also wary of the prolonged suspension of disbelief to facilitate the plot - moose meat never going bad, living in the wilderness being pleasant/easy, people not caring about random things they would typically really care about. enjoyed the sort of nonsequitur ending. the emphasis on summarizing pop culture things in order to satirize them felt overbearing at times. but several scenes/plot points were very compelling and exciting, felt impressed by the large range of emotional depth crammed randomly into a sort of silly story. overall very uneven. unsure i would recommend.
breasts and eggs by mieko kawakama (europa editions): two part literary fiction - the first part is a rewritten novella and is maybe only 1/5 of the book length, yet it is the most interesting, exciting part. enjoyed the unexpected characterization choices/scenes, the general conceit of the family dynamic/silent teenager/journal entries. felt like i would give this portion of the book to my children at a certain age in a sort of embarrassing attempt at helping address issues in adolescence. enjoyed the unique neuroses and the moments of someone sort of diving into reverie/telling a story. enjoyed the sense of time and place. the rest is fine but slow, focused on prolonged dialogues with random characters all on the theme of parenthood/childhood, felt like a sort of linear video game in this sense, the protagonist having cheap excuses to go to some location/meet with some person just to initiate a long dialogue tree. the connection to the first part felt arbitrary - little from the first part played a role in the second. sort of felt like two fully separate books that just happened to reuse some characters. didn't like the second part's focus on being a writer/publishing and the neat little bow at the end - felt too 'clean' and predictable, based on the preceding text. enjoyed one passage where a potential sperm donor slowly begins behaving unhinged and horny.
snow country by yasunari kawabata: this is my 3rd YK book, i think. this one is kinda short, about a stilted, doomed relationship between a geisha in the snow country and a guy who comes to see her like every 9 months. across all three books of his i've read, i feel interested in the emphasis on how bleak/shitty things were for the women characters, mostly due to societal/cultural norms. lots of precarity and dependence on men for being able to just live -- the systems of debts and contracts, the roles of geisha and mistresses, the elevated importance of love in this context, how maintaining relationships is really the only way to survive for a lot of women in these stories. also enjoyed the scenery, nature writing, emphasis on colors in the various descriptions. often felt impressed by how vivid the descriptions can be, including of facial expressions and movement. made me want to take a train to the japanese snow country in the 1940s. liked the ending, in general, i think. unexpected and a bit dramatic, but is an interesting, elevated, bleak turn.
my weil by lars iyer (melville house): was sent an ARC of this
because i had interviewed lars before. i enjoy his writing. this is the
third in a trilogy of sorts, wherein each book relates a cast of
characters to a mysterious newcomer who looks/acts like/seems obsessed
with a different philosopher. this one is about depressed phd students
meeting a woman named simone weil, who's obsessed with simone weil.
unlike the previous books in this set, simone actually really
infrequently shows up. the majority of the book is the usual greek
chorusy effect of the phd students complaining, shittalking, and
exaggeratingly talking about things like the fate of fate and the
apocalypse. they also complain about their dissertations while doing
everything but write, including remaking tarkovsky films in the woods
and playing badminton. felt seen/understood by it at various times as a former depressed phd student,
gripped by minor events at times, made anxious at other times, bored by
repetition/lack of plot other times. huge focus on referencing famous
music from manchester (joy division, happy mondays, new order) and arty
films like stalker. lacked some of the sublime diversions into actually playing/performing music from nietzche and the burbs, but had moments like it with the badminton in 2-3 scenes -- would have liked to see, maybe ironically, more about the characters
actually doing grad student things, which happens 2-3x, instead of complaining about them,
but also that's sort of the whole conceit of the book. felt like the love story/interest in/character of simone is underdeveloped. felt like the ending tries to make a potentially-already-dated cultural commentary, but i enjoyed how he lets the story sort of go into the unreal in the last few chapters. feels like it is modeled after a tarkovsky film, which makes sense, and is kind of fun. overall liked it a lot at various moments but felt like it was too long and had a few too many characters.
earplugs by bram riddlebarger (university of west alabama press): bram sent me this and some other
books during a trade, i think, a long time ago. this is basically a cynical place study of a dying
appalachian town written with a mix of resigned seriousness and
light, if mostly mean spirited, humor. noticed a
really huge number of similes, sometimes a single thing being described
with 3+ different similes in a single paragraph, and often similes with
complex/mixed imagery, e.g. (making this up) "the house looked like
a moon lander floating in a ghost's dirty bath water." a surprising amount of the book is dedicated to saying that old women smell bad. bram has seemingly started shittalking me on twitter -- feeling uninterested in finishing and writing any real contentful review because of this, uninterested in making him more angry with me because of a middling or bad review.
meloncholy
by jon fosse (dalkey archive): bought this a couple years ago, started
it, stopped it, picked it up again following my recentish jon fosse
reads. this is about an insane norwegian painter in germany, for art
school, who is in love with his landlord's niece and shittalks the other
painters in his program. this one is much more repetitive than the
other books, noticeably so, line by line, which makes for a slow,
frustrating reading experience. enjoyed the shittalk and insanity-based
humor, things like "she stares at me with her breasts" and repeatedly
saying "you can't paint" to his classmate, and enjoyed the unexpected
hallucinations about black sheets, but felt like finding each
fun line was an exercise in digging in the dirt. didn't feel compelled
to finish.
chapbooks and errata:
love at the end of the world by lindy m biller (masters review): purchased because someone i know was friends with her in highschool, and saw lindy post about it on facebook. this is a short collection of interconnected stories with a lot of melancholy, flowery prose and themes which are common in certain kinds of online short fiction-based magazines, in which lindy has published before. she made a tweet about feeling anxious about her religious family reading the book because it "contains a blasphemous retelling of the Noah's Ark story, sex outside of marriage, a haunted queer love story, climate change anxieties, and the word fuck." i felt like this was an accurate summary of the book. seemed overall good for what it aims to accomplish, but not really the kind of writing i gravitate toward. would probably be more engaging (and successful) as a full-length novel that tracks multiple protagonists.
books i've recently blurbed or read prior to publication:
since there are few indie lit books in the above list, i thought i'd mention some in this more roundabout way:
cheap therapist says you're insane by parker young (future tense): parker requested a blurb and i sent back several blurb ideas including this "Vaguely review-like rambling": In Cheap Therapist Says You're Insane,
Parker Young slyly presents us with simple paradoxes, and he calmly,
realistically, evilly details their effects on his poor protagonists.
Each story is like a multidimensional array of dominoes, the
throughlines incomprehensible yet reasonable, once you see how
everything cascades out. His characters are both unknowable yet deeply
relatable, and their muted, internal chaos mirrors that of the upside
down world he puts them in. Their desires and actions ping off of each
other and skitter in strange yet predictable arcs, beholden to the laws
of an unfamiliar universe. These brief and impressionistic stories
capture the strange, inchoate
logic of dreams better than any collection I've read. They are ripe with
a vague foreboding, confident yet dissociative leaps in time and place,
inarticulate obsessions, quiet and bizarre quandaries. A fresh spin on
continental neuroticism. They are a litany of intrusive thoughts for
those of us who suffer different, more predictable intrusive thoughts. you should buy this book.
SALMON by sebastian castillo (shabby dollhouse): sebastian sent me this asking to read through it. i provided some minor copyedits and some thoughts on it as a whole, including "i liked it. made me laugh a few times" and "i think it's fun and well-written, consistent in execution, following a clear thesis...i haven't studied much formal absurdism, especially plays" and "many of the gags feel divorced from the particular character -- often someone will say something silly, but it could have been any character who said it to the same effect...the exception, to me, is Sebastian, who is consistently unique and well-characterized" and "my sense is that it's nearly finished, and so i don't think i have much value to add to it". this comes across as much more negative than i actually felt. but you gotta ask for a blurb if you want only praise. you should buy this book.
echo chamber by claire hopple (trident press): claire had asked me for a blurb but i missed the deadline to provide one. she is a sentence writer, with a lot of interesting figures of speech and word choice. there are lots of wacky conceits/characters. you should buy this book.
consumption and other vices by tyler dempsey (death of print): i offered to typeset this for tyler and alan after bear creek fell apart. in typesetting it, i also provided a number of mostly comma-based edits and ended up reading the whole thing 2x. after sending the final version, tyler then requested a blurb, which i, probably meanly, ignored. i don't feel comfortable blurbing it because it is basically a noir crime thriller and i don't know anything about this type of book, what makes one better or more interesting than the other. i remember liking his emphasis on speech/affect, feels like he put a lot of work into making the dialogue feel realistic and engaging. you should buy this book.
!!! by mike andrelzcyk (ghost city press): mike and i blurb each other pretty consistently. he asked me for a blurb for this one, of which i had read various earlier versions across manuscript ideas. i sent him twelve potential blurbs to use. you should buy this book:
Mike Andrelczyk is the best living American poet.
