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0553448188
| 9780553448184
| 0553448188
| 3.58
| 180,706
| Oct 30, 2007
| Feb 02, 2016
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really liked it
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**Han Kang has been awarded the2024 Nobel Prize in Literature**
There are few greater honors in the global literary community than being awarded t **Han Kang has been awarded the2024 Nobel Prize in Literature** There are few greater honors in the global literary community than being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature and I am thrilled to learn that South Korean author Han Kang has now had her name immortalized in this list of honorees.Chaesikjuuija—The Vegetarianin English—is Kang’s best known work, winning the Booker International Prize in 2016 along with translatorDeborah Smith,and is a searing portrait of obdurate patriarchal societies that strangle out women's autonomy in order to more strongly shackle them to a life of passivity and familial obedience.The Vegetarianis a tapestry of four interwoven lives in three voices emphasizing the lack of agency afforded to the life most central to the narrative: Yeong-hye, the wife of Mr. Cheong who’s ‘life was no more than a ghostly pageant of exhausted endurance,’ at the hands of those around her. At least until she decides to stop eating meat. Told in a darkly poetic prose strong enough to hold a host of horrors, Kang cuts through the masks of society until ‘familiarity bleeds into strangeness, certainty becomes impossible’ in order for her to take critical aim at forces of violence and control. Sharp, sinister and surreal,The Vegetarianis a powerful tale of the aggressions aimed at those who step outside the social norms and the misogynistic assumptions that impose subservience and suppression and it makes for a truly unforgettable read. ‘It’s your body, you can treat it however you please. The only area where you’re free to do just as you like. And even that doesn’t turn out how you wanted.’ Originally published in South Korea as three novellas,The Vegetariansthree sections, each from the voice of a different character, stitches the perspectives of family in orbit around the story of Yeong-hye. We begin with her husband, Mr. Cheong, who enjoyed her being ‘completely unremarkable in every way,’ and because ‘it was rare for her to demand anything of me’ making her suited to be the quiet, submissive wife he desires. Her choosing to refrain from eating meat is an annoyance to him, but his real frustration is her desire to attain bodily autonomy as he believes ‘it was nothing but sheer obstinacy for a wife to go against her husband's wishes.’ We move to her brother-in-law as he uses his art to seduce her but, like Mr. Cheong, becomes angry when her actions are less in submission to his sexual hunger but instead enacted as a way to perform her body in a way she desires. Finally we have her sister who is haunted by Yeong-hye’s refusal to eat but beings to understand it as an act of resistance. Kang orchestrates these characters in a sort of destructive dance where we find them rather inscrutable to one another. Or often to themselves.There is a certain sorrow to discover those closest elude decoding or have interior lives we cannot decode, such as In-hye’s revelations after divorcing her husband: ‘Had she ever really understood her husband’s true nature, bound up as it was with that seemingly impenetrable silence? She’d thought, at one time, that it might be revealed in his work…Despite her best efforts, though, his works proved incomprehensible to her. Nothing was revealed.’ The incomprehensibility becomes a clever theme on how our best efforts to understand each other often amounts to placing the personality of others into a box of faulty assumptions and then becoming upset when they act off script of our presumptions. It shines a spotlight on the assumption of control one might impose upon others, a control that becomes harshly oppressive when it is enabled by misogynistic gender roles and feels threatened by any resistance to it. Which is what Kang executes so brilliantly here by denying Yeong-hye a voice similarly to how it has been suppressed by those around her and she must have her own thoughts decentered from her own story to instead have it told through the flawed assumptions of others who can’t truly comprehend her, or, such as the men narrating the first two sections, could never begin to understand what it is like to live as a woman denied any sense of self-agency. ‘She had never lived. Even as a child, as far back as she could remember, she had done nothing but endure.’ Yeong-hye, ‘a woman of few words,’ represents the push and pull between the desire for an authentic, autonomous self and the socially imposed role of a subordinate, familial self. Haunted by horrific dreams of meat and violence, she decides to be a vegetarian as a refusal to be a part of the violence all around. In this way she views plant life as a sort of innocence and her draw to the brother-in-law is only mistaken as sexual when in actuality she enjoys the flowers he paints on her naked body as symbolic of becoming innocence or, better yet, being able tochooseto be painted as a symbol. But her actions are met with the consequences of societal disdain, reflected in her husband's anger and the family attempting to force her to eat meat. ‘The very idea that there should be this other side to her, one where she selfishly did as she pleased, was astonishing. Who would have thought she could be so unreasonable.’ The idea that she could have a sense of agency is outright offensive to those around her. ‘Look at yourself, now! Stop eating meat, and the world will devour you whole.’ Even in her attempts to not eat entirely, she is held into a hospital bed with a feeding tube shoved into her nose. The message is clear: you cannot have autonomy. The novel steers us through episodes of social enforcement of norms, with Kang emphasizing the violence society tolerates in order to uphold its narrow values. ‘In-hye stares fiercely at the trees. As if waiting for an answer. As if protesting against something.’ Kang’sThe Vegetarianis situated in a South Korean society that has grappled with issues glaring issues of oppression against women, one that has onlycontinued to be exacerbatedin the years since the novel was first published in 2007. Kang takes aim atissues of misogynyin South Korea such asviolence against womenwith South Korean being amongst thetop 3 highest rates of women as homicide victims in the worlddespite a generally low homicide rate, gender inequality problems such as havingthe worst gender pay gap amongst OECD countries,and until 2013 marital rape wasnot a criminal act(such as is seen in the novel). While Yeong-hye’s actions are seen as outrageous to others, Kang depicts her and her role in life in such a way that one can certainly see that her refusal to submit ‘as if boundaries and limitations didn’t mean anything for her’ may be the only reasonable actions in the story. ‘She was no longer able to cope with all that her sister reminded her of. She’d been unable to forgive her for soaring alone over a boundary she herself could never bring herself to cross, unable to forgive that magnificent irresponsibility that had enabled Yeong-hye to shuck off social constraints and leave her behind, still a prisoner. And before Yeong-hye had broken those bars, she’d never even known they were there.’ While the novel may have raised controversy with its subject matter, Deborah Smith’s translation into English raised more controversy. Soon after winning the Booker International, Smith’s English translation began to receive harsh criticism in Korean literary communities and presses, stirring a bit ofcontroversy with opinions on either sidewith one critic stating the book was ‘so different that it was more reasonable to speak of Smith’s work as an adaptation, not a translation.’ Smith has defended her artistic choices and while she admits ‘there's plenty to criticize in my translation,’ she stands by it and says her aim was to capture the spirit over one-to-one translation. ‘Translators feel a great responsibility to the original text,’ sheexplained in the press,‘I would only permit myself an infidelity for the sake of a greater fidelity.’ Readers can decide for themselves and, personally, I’m a huge fan of translated works because it allows for a greater global community around literature that I—and many others—couldn’t read otherwise. Inan essay forLA Review of Books,Deborah Smith voiced concerns that the criticisms of her work and Kang’s original seemed to be a method of distracting from its message: ‘It’s not difficult to see why a book that exposes this pervasive structural violence might have been received differently by the (mostly older male) literary establishment than by the many Korean women who didn’t consider it “extreme and bizarre” at all. Perhaps the overwhelming focus on The Vegetarian’s aesthetics is a way of avoiding talking about its politics?’ Personally, I quite enjoyed the read though I have no way to know accuracy, and Han Kang has defended Smith’s choices and has continued to have her works translated by Smith. ‘What makes me worry,’ Smith expresses, ‘is when the desire to prove a particular argument about a translation encourages a misleading view of the original — in this case, overlooking the poetry I and many others see in Han's writing.’ There is indeed a beautiful poetry here, even in all the darkness and violence of the text. ‘Translating from Korean into English involves moving from a language more accommodating of ambiguity, repetition, and plain prose, to one that favors precision, concision, and lyricism,’ she continues, ‘this is simultaneously a gross generalization and an observable phenomenon.’ I will remain grateful for translators everywhere who are able to bring us such excellent stories from around the globe. Stories that have left such an impact their author now can be celebrated as a Nobel Prize recipient. This powerful, unsettling, often Kafkaesque, and societally damning tale makes for an excellent read and shocking reminder of the oppressions women face the world over. Han Kang takes aim at patriarchy and subjugation of women and offers a loud voice in protest to make room for self-agency and bodily autonomy.The Vegetarianis fascinating and fierce and a gift to us all from this Nobel Prize winning author. 4.5/5 ‘Life is such a strange thing, she thinks, once she has stopped laughing. even after certain things have happened to them, no matter how awful the experience, people still go on eating and drinking, going to the toilet and washing themselves—living, in other words. and sometimes they even laugh out loud. and they probably have these same thoughts, too, and when they do it must make them cheerlessly recall all the sadness they'd briefly managed to forget.’ ...more |
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Oct 10, 2024
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1644452987
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| 1644452987
| 4.53
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it was amazing
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‘If I can’t be the freed, let me be the corrosion’ While art can be a great comfort, a great rallying cry, a great way to give voice to the otherwise v ‘If I can’t be the freed, let me be the corrosion’ While art can be a great comfort, a great rallying cry, a great way to give voice to the otherwise voiceless, art has its limitations. ‘There is no poem greater than feeding someone,’ Danez Smith decries the limitations of the form, ‘no poem to admonish the state / no poem with a key to the local / no poem to free you.’ Returning with his third collection,Bluff,the poet who once wrote ‘my poems are fed up & getting violent,’ returns with works that check the fault lines of art, staggering but strong in the wake of the first half of a new decade that arrived with an outpouring of grief, violence, protest and frustrations. Living in Minneapolis, Danez Smith chronicles the reactions to the murder of George Floyd amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, placing us into a reality where ‘my neighbors are dying. / my neighbors are killing’ and the alarm that ‘we became our own cops.’ With a sharp aim at social ills, the society that enables them, and a reckoning with one’s own inevitable complicity in our own greater oppressions, Danez Smith’sBluffshows the now-seasoned poet at the top of their game in gorgeous verse that bears a powerful bite. ars poetica fuck all that other shit even when the fog cleared the wrong sky on my mind the horizon at the end of pity is a useless sun, hotheaded & bitter-born light, let the daughter rise when my earth meets the clouds what her say? what next she believe in & nurse? my big bad for how long i spent making apologies for what i ain't do, caught myself sorry for bodies the nation caught in its borderless maw, caught myself washing blood off someone else's hands. i'm off that, that being the mode that made a cage of guilt out my depression that being what fault i fell into & dressed into a lovely but ineffective grave. what i'm sorry for: making poetry into a house of rebuttals, a temple for the false gods of stagnant argument & dead-end feels. here, in these lines, in these rooms i add my blues & my gospels to the record of now, i offer my scratched golds to the blueprint of possible. dear reader whenever you are reading this is the future to me, which means tomorrow is still coming, which means today still lives, which means there is still time for beautiful, urgent change which means there is still time to make more alive which means there is still poetry In every way,Bluffreveals itself to be a collection that desires ‘justice the verb not justice the dream.’ The dilemma, as we find all throughout the poetry, is that the idea of a perfect world is complex, out of reach, set up to fail simply by the contradictory needs of people even in the best of circumstances. They ask ‘what is my eden? is it mine? is our eden the same as mine?’ and what spaces are there in the already limited space for queer people or Black people in a society that tries to erase them through violence. Literal violence as well as social, emotional and economic violence. ‘I don’t want a country’ they proclaim throughout the book, ‘look at what countries have done / the borders perform a killing floor.’ Smith looks at a country that can kill for profit, that wears its disdain for those who are different on its sleeve, and is tired and sick of it. i don't want America no more. i want to be a citizen of something new. i want a country for the immigrant hero. I want a country where joy is indigenous as the people. i want a country that keeps its word. i want to not be scared to drink the water. i want a country that don't bomb other countries. i want a country that don't treat its people like a virus. i want a country not trying to cure itself of me. i want a country that treats my mama right. i want a land where my sister can be free. i want a country that don't look at me & my man & think about where & how we should burn. i want a nation under a kinder god. i want justice the verb not justice the dream. i want what was promised to me. i want forty acres & a vote that matters. i want no prisons & a mule. i want all lives to matter. i want to be over with race but race ain't over me. i want peace. i want equity. i want guns to be melted into a mosque, a church someplace for us to pray toward better gods & i wanna stop praying for my country to be mine, for it to put the gun down take the bomb back. —fromprinciples Smith addresses the social ills, centering on the violence and grief that rocks the nation on a daily basis. Of particular note is the rampant gun violence, the guns sold for the purpose of profit that leave small children dead on classroom floors. ‘“If you want us to change the world someday, we at least have to live long enough to grow up!” shouts the child.’ They write about the protests in the summer of 2020 following the murder of George Floyd and the ways people tried to dismiss the horrors of violence by equating property destruction as somehow a valid complaint in juxtaposition: ”Wont someone please think of the Arby’s?” seems like a very weird place to put your concern. What America are you mourning? Target wasn’t in the fields, cotton-bloodied hands. Walmart never hung from a tree. But Smith also recognizes we are somehow all complicit in the ills of the world. Even when we protest ‘tired of yelling at the machine / shaking our angry, nonviolent fists at the nuts & cogs / & the next day, resuming our roles as oil and sparks / taking place inside the machine’ How can we fight a machine we exist within, they ask. ‘if the cops kill me don’t grab your pen before you find your matches.’ Smith turns this criticism at poetry and the publishing industry, interrogating their own complicity in ‘the joy industrial complex’ as they write in the poemless hope: they clapped at my eulogies. they said encore, encore. we wanted to stop being killed & they thanked me for beauty &, pitifully, i loved them. i thanked them. i took the awards & cashed the checks. i did the one about the boy when requested, traded their names for followers. in lieu of action, i wrote a book They express guilt for having supported empire when ‘my captor / Wore my face,’ as he writes inLast Black American Poemabout former President Obama. ‘Admit it, Danez, you loved / your master in your shade’ they write, ‘as bombs dropped / in the middle of childhoods.’ There is a strong reckoning in these poems about poetry as an art that cannot truly solve the problems and becomes a way to make money from a capitalist system that creates many of the problems poetry critiques. What is one to do, Smith asks us. ‘so why are we in the cage? because we need to survive. why do we need to be in the cage? because they will make use of us if they don’t find us beautiful.’ —fromTwo Deer in a Southside Cemetery Though not all is sadness and bleakness here, as Smith presents a hope that we can come together and rise above. In one poem, when asked ‘what was the world like?’ Smith responds ‘hurt.’ But when asked ‘how did you survive’ the answer is ‘with others.’ Together we can always try, and that is what is important. And perhaps there is no utopia, but Smith still gives us a vision of a better world, one where ‘somewhere my children can write poems about being. / without protest, their songs full of stars.’ It is a lovely dream to strive for. ‘It would be easier if God was dead & we knew it. Then we could get on with it: the final choice of the human: repair or epilogue.’ This third collection,Bluff,shows Danez Smith as a valuable poet with an extreme talent and one that is not afraid to look critically at oneself as well. A strong reckoning with the violence of a world riddled with grief, climate change, and sorry, but also a strong voice of wisdom asking the right questions,Bluffis an incredible collection of poetry that stands tall. 5/5 ‘Summertime at the end of the world, and it’s so beautiful. Trees and rivers and flowers I know by scent and not name. So pretty I could cry. I’ll miss it if we kill it. I guess I’ll miss it.’ —fromMy Beautiful End of the World ...more |
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unknown
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| unknown
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it was amazing
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I often think of the best short stories as being perfectly fine tuned machines. Like in old cartoons where the watchmaker opens the back of some golde
I often think of the best short stories as being perfectly fine tuned machines. Like in old cartoons where the watchmaker opens the back of some golden timepiece that counts the heartbeats of life with impeccable precision to reveal the intricate innards of gears that must be adjusted to nearly impossible standards, the best classic stories make every word count, every word ricochet off each other towards an amalgamated effect of themes and ideas that make the small collections of words resonate far beyond the sum of their parts. And, like a cartoon watch, accurately assess the heartbeats of life. Katherine Mansfield’sThe Garden Partyis such a story. Based on her own extravagant childhood home in Wellington, New Zealand,The Garden Partyjuxtaposes the frivolities and festivities of wealthy society with the harsh realism of death and destitution as symbolized in the poorer families living just outside the Sheridan’s garden gates. With a bold examination of class consciousness and a sharp critique of upper class snobbishness where their extravagant gates secure them from needing to feel empathy as much as securing their property,The Garden Partyis an extraordinary piece that brilliantly balances the darkness and light of life into its tiny package of prose. Having recently finishedAli Smith’sSpringin which Katherine Mansfield figures prominently, with Smith having also provided an introduction to her collected stories, I was eager to give Mansfield a read. I’d long been fascinated by hertumultuous friendship and rivalrywithVirginia Woolfand while Woolf may have said Mansfield ‘stinks like a civet cat that had taken to street walking,’ she also admitted ‘I was jealous of her writing. The only writing I have ever been jealous of.’ As we plunge into the warm, idyllic days of summer, what better story to try than one which begins ‘And after all the weather was ideal.’ This is a powerhouse of a short story that lulls you into its depiction of warm, slow joy amidst the happy anticipation of a garden party before it abruptly bashes you into a wall of death and the cold insensitivity of the wealthy for the lower classes. The story places us alongside Laura as she navigates the day, from her empathy and idolization of the working class aiding in the set-up of the party to her confronting her own family about the crassness of holding a party so near a grieving family and later visiting the house containing the dead man to offer sweets and condolences. The latter section reminded me a bit ofLouisa May Alcott's classic novelLittle Womenwith the sisters sharing their Christmas meal with the impoverished family down the road, which is likely an inspiration for Mansfield as the other Sheridan siblings, Jose, Meg and Laurie, share names with Alcott’s characters. ‘If you're going to stop a band playing every time some one has an accident, you'll lead a very strenuous life.’ There is a sharp juxtaposition between classes present here, though Mansfield does well to remind us that distinctions are merely constructs enforced in order to oppress and depress those who do not hold power in order to retain control of it. While the happenings around the party are a celebration of beauty and life, we see how death is always creeping in and the two cannot be truly separated. Mr. Scott dies just outside the gate when thrown from a horse, but even the gate cannot keep the inevitably of death away, such as how, when singing a song to focus on how beautiful her voice is, Jose sings about death with lines like ‘this life is weary, hope comes to die’ which serve almost as foreshadowing. But best is the description of the wealthy cottages with the poorer homes, existing practically right on top of one another yet depicted as such opposites: ‘True, they were far too near. They were the greatest possible eyesore, and they had no right to be in that neighbourhood at all. They were little mean dwellings painted a chocolate brown. In the garden patches there was nothing but cabbage stalks, sick hens and tomato cans. The very smoke coming out of their chimneys was poverty-stricken. Little rags and shreds of smoke, so unlike the great silvery plumes that uncurled from the Sheridans' chimneys. Washerwomen lived in the lane and sweeps and a cobbler, and a man whose house-front was studded all over with minute bird-cages. Children swarmed. When the Sheridans were little they were forbidden to set foot there because of the revolting language and of what they might catch. But since they were grown up, Laura and Laurie on their prowls sometimes walked through. It was disgusting and sordid. They came out with a shudder. But still one must go everywhere; one must see everything. So through they went.’ The descriptions have you looking down your nose at them, so couched in the perspective of the Sheridan’s and their contemporaries. The juxtaposition is in everything, from the lushness and light of the garden party to the poorer homes always described in terms of darkness. While the Sheridan house is a world with trees ‘lifting their leaves and fruits to the sun in a kind of silent splendour,’ amidst ideal weather ‘without a cloud,’ the people at the Scott household are ‘a dark knot of people’ curling into a ‘gloomy passage’ or crowding a ‘wretched little low kitchen, lighted by a smoky lamp.’ Laura’s journey from the glow of the garden to the darkness of the Scott household seems like a journey into the underworld to see death firsthand and bestows an epic sense not unlike the Greek myths into the narrative. ‘People like that don't expect sacrifices from us,’ Mrs. Sheridan scoffs at Laura’s insistence their festivities are vulgar in light of Mr. Scott’s death, ‘and it's not very sympathetic to spoil everybody's enjoyment as you're doing now.’ Which is really the crux of this story–the working class must sacrifice everything to uphold the world of the rich but the rich will not lift a finger for them. To them the lives of those outside their circle ‘seemed blurred, unreal, like a picture in the newspaper.’ Worse, they validate their inhospitality and insensitivity by assuming the worst, such as Jose insisting the Scott family are drunks and blaming drinking on the accident despite any evidence. For the Sheridan’s even the rose bushes ‘bowed down as though they had been visited by archangels’ which touches on the idea that wealth was a sign of god’s grace and divinely deserved while the poor suffer out of sin. But this cruelty only pushes Laura towards empathy and embarrassment and her hat, a symbol of frivolity is suddenly garish in the space of death. ‘Forgive my hat’ she says, meaning forgive my family, forgive my class, meaning Laura has had her eyes opened. ‘What did garden-parties and baskets and lace frocks matter to him? He was far from all those things.’ A quick story, but one full of power and crackling with social critiques and class consciousness. Written in 1922 as Mansfield was slowly succumbing to tuberculosis,The Garden Partycontinues to impress and is a marvelous little story. 5/5 ...more |
Notes are private!
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Jun 24, 2024
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Jun 24, 2024
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ebook
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1637583915
| 9781637583913
| 1637583915
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| Sep 12, 2023
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really liked it
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As culturally awash in irreverence and irony as it was clothed in stonewash jeans, what better way to tap into spirit on the 1990s US youth scene than
As culturally awash in irreverence and irony as it was clothed in stonewash jeans, what better way to tap into spirit on the 1990s US youth scene than to harness the profane towards something profound. Alex Kazemi’s sardonically satiricalNew Millenium Boyzcomes violently alive as a 90s period piece—I’m sorry to anyone who may have grimaced thinking of the 90s as long enough ago for such a thing—that drags you through the darkness of the foul-mouthed, cynical toxic masculinity of an era right as the Columbine massacre is sending shockwaves through the country. This book, which has been targeted by book banners, is shocking itself, though the almost suffocating depictions of misogyny, homophobia and crass cruelty never feels played for shock value but rather an damning indictment of how such rampant vulgarity was normalized in many corners of society and only festered in its own filth as the expansion of internet access gave it a wider outlet. Dark and gruesome,New Millennium Boyzwon’t be for everyone, nor does it need to be and—truthfully—there were times where the bluntness of its brutality had me questioning if it was even for me but I can’t deny I was strongly impacted by this and that the discomfort is part of the understand. Kazemi successfully captures the dark side of the 90s and pulls off a satirical cultural indictment in a novel that has created a bit of a scandal but ultimately reminds us to reject a toxic masculinity that teaches ‘caring is so embarrassing,’ or a romanticization of apathy and cruelty. Before we go any further, I’d like to thank Permuted Press for providing me with a copy in exchange for a review and also apologize for my absurd tardiness in reviewing the book. I’d like to claim I was just being an unaffected cool 90s kid who didn’t believe in timelines but the truth is I’m trash at actually doing anything I should be reviewing. But I was intrigued when I saw the novel had been blurbed byBret Easton Ellisas ‘my favorite millennial provocateur.’ This is high praise from someone who has notably feuded with Millennials in the press, such as saying ‘what is millennial culture?… It kind of disturbs me,’ in an interview withThe Sunday Timesof London in 2019 before stating ‘where is the great millennial novel? There isn’t one.’ It seemed Ellis has now found one he can smile upon, and it is a smart blurb as it may seem lazy to compare this to Ellis’ works likeAmerican Psycho—especially for the ever present immersion in pop culture, darkness, and violence in both books—but it’s also an accurate and productive comparison. I’m glad I read this as it isn’t one I’d probably have reached for, but I recall a time as a teen living amongst peers that talked and acted like many of the teens in this book and it would have fit right into the sort of “edgy” media I was consuming then. What Kazemi does best is truly capture the vibes of the 90s, from the turmoil to the feelings of rapid change amidst great prosperity that tried to push aside the lower class while romanticizing being tough, edgy and disaffected. It was a time where the term “alternative” reigned supreme with Alternative music, alternative tv networks like MTV, alternatives to everything as the internet opened up access and going “against the grain” became the cool thing to do. Kazemi spent 10 years working on this novel, largely honing his skills to recreate the speech of teen boys and that comes across quite effectively. And while it is very pop-culture heavy—referencing the current culture was HUGE in the 90s—it isn’t kids saying “eat my shorts!” shouting “booyah” or saying “talk to the hand” but leaning in to the 90s cynicism of being as crass and profane as possible. This is the culture that made Bob Saget famous for saying the filthiest things possible, mind you, andwhewthe dialogue is indeed foul. You've been warned, but its presented this way for a much greater purpose than mere crassness. I took a college course once on how media and culture reflect each other where I learned how the popular performance art of any era is a gold mine for cultural artifacts and commentary on values of that decade. I recall a lecture on the 90s leaning heavily on how shows likeSeinfeldorFriendsmarked a shift from family-based sitcoms to one of “found family,” or howSeinfeldtakes a rather mocking tone towards people outside their group and a lot of jokes barbed against ideas of inauthenticity. But we also haveMTV,heavily present in this novel, which glamorized the lifestyles of the rich and famous while also bringing shows likeJackasswhich popularized pranks and handycam antics. The show featured a lot of fairly mean-spirited humor and people getting hurt for laughs, a social acceptance that Kazemi’s characters are intensely aware of. The character Lu, for instance, is never without his camera always hoping for the moment that will be his big break. It's through these cultural references we get to the heart of the issues. Kazemi spoke on this in an interview withDocument Journalrecently: ‘I wanted to mock and satirize, and pop culture became a vehicle to do that. Obviously, I take it to such an absurdist, exhausting degree to depict how brainwashed millennials were by corporate Boomer pop culture.’ In the 90s it was the epitome of cool to be disaffected, ironic, self-referential and cynical with music and movies glamorizing the idea of the “cool loser” (Beck songLoseris very indicative of white culture at the time). Being authentic and “not a poser” or “a sellout” was championed. This image was something corporate marketing teams staffed by Boomers were pushing on teens, capturing the idea that sex and violence sells but then turning around and shaming teens for being too sexualized, too violent, too cynical and “ruining the national morality” sort of thing. It’s like inKurt Vonnegut’sCat's Cradlewhere in order to control people they invent a religion and then ban it in order to ensure everyone will want to practice it in private rebellion. I grew up too late to be amongst these characters, but I recognize in them the culture my friend’s older siblings lived in. ‘We romanticize that era for its simple truths,’ Kazemi says, ‘but there’s so much darkness in it.’ It was a time of great growth but also turmoil, which we can see in hindsight how the unsustainability of the era smashed its face into a brick wall of the new millennium as the dot com and housing bubbles burst and 9/11 changed everything. That spiral towards an inevitable bad end can be felt on every page here though. The story ofNew Millennium Boyzfollows Brad as he realizes the normalcy of suburban life is always teetering on the edge of a cesspit of violence and debauchery. ‘What is the fucking point of being alive if my life doesn’t fit the vision I have of myself in my mind,’ he wonders and sets out to seek a fulfilling life. After a teen-movie-trope summer of camp, finding a sweet girlfriend and losing his virginity suddenly gives way to something more like a punk music video as he befriends Marilyn Manson-worshiping Shane and nihilistic Lu (which is either short for Luke or Lucifer) who will do anything to shock the system. But leading a double life of polite Brad and Badboy Brad becomes to much as the trio descend as far as possible beyond decency in hopes of overnight fame. ‘I’m becoming a prophet, an icon, and I don’t even have to move to Hollywood.’ What occurs is rather alarming and while it has shock value it is using the shock to expose and criticize. ‘I think that it could be interpreted that like, I just wrote a bunch of shock porn,’ Kazemi admits in an interview withDaily Beast,‘But I think if you zoom out, I’m trying to talk about the escalation of the behavior and a culture that is sort of encouraging their worst impulses.’ If media and culture reflect each other back to each other, what we find here is a feedback loop amplifying itself into an ear piercing pitch of violence and cruelty that became so embedded in toxic masculinity. ‘I think, because a lot of my generation likes to romanticize goth culture—Manson, Nine Inch Nails and stuff—I wanted to expose it for being just another aspect of the ‘bro’ culture. You know, just cause Manson was wearing lipstick and all, it doesn’t change the fact that he was a part of that very male culture.’ You’ll remember exactly why it has become so necessary for a social pushback against misogyny, racism, homophobia and all the various bigotries that casually spew from the mouths of these characters. Not that times are perfect now, but it is unsettling to remember just how accurate the horrible language was even when I was in high school. And just using homophobic slurs so casually as a general insult. I’m also reminded of a song from the 90s fromThird Eye Blind(who apparently are still a thing based on my google search just now) calledSlow Motion.Deemed too vulgar to make the album—their albumBluecontained an instrumental version that I liked to play on guitar with a friend who played the piano parts—the lyric version that appeared online does make me think of this book. The song is a litany of horrors, drugs and violence but ends as so: ’Hollywood glamorized my wrath Much in this way we see how this descent into the worst of human impulses are misguided teens internalizing media in a harmful way. After Columbine, which is present in the novel, everyone was quick to blame video games and music. ‘The Columbine era destroyed my entire career at the time,’ singer Marilyn Manson hassaid in interviews,his music largely being targeted as a “cause” of the violence. Much debate ensued at the time if media caused violence or exacerbated violent urges in kids and many concerts were cancelled. Masonarguedthis unfair blame only made it worse for kids who were already bullied for being different. ‘The media has unfairly scapegoated the music industry and so-called Goth kids and has speculated, with no basis in truth, that artists like myself are in some way to blame. This tragedy was a product of ignorance, hatred and an access to guns. I hope the media's irresponsible finger-pointing doesn't create more discrimination against kids who look different.’ Similarly, authorStephen King’s novelRage,which he wrote in high school about a school shooting, was found to be on the reading list ofmultiple school shootersand lead him to discontinue publication of the book saying: ‘My book did not break [these teenagers] or turn them into killers; they found something in my book that spoke to them, because they were already broken…Yet I did see ‘Rage’ as a possible accelerant, which is why I pulled it from sale. You don’t leave a can of gasoline where a boy with firebug tendencies can lay hands on it.’ I bring this up becauseNew Millennium Boyzhas been found to be rather controversial, landing on book ban lists and being flagged by conservative content review website BookLooks—which is associated with the group the SPLC deemed a “hate group”, Moms For Liberty— as “a 5/5 aberrant content rating” with a 33-page document of pull-quotes as to why (read more on thishere). The issue here is that representation isnotthe same as condoning and as already discussed the troubling aspects of the novel are intended to capture the ideas in order to criticize them, or, as Kazemi said inInterview Magazine,‘there’s no sense of glamorization about any of it. I’m actually exposing it and reprimanding it.’ Which feels adjacent to the idea that media depicting violence begets violence and poses the question if representation of bigotry in order to push back against bigotry thereby begets bigotry. A rather intense and uncomfortable book but for the sake of using the discomfort to examine a much more uncomfortable and violent cultural issue of the 90s,New Millennium Boyzis certainly a very affecting novel that achieves its goals. Rife with pop-culture references and a selection of songs that would rival any I Love the 90s CD, this plunges the reader through a horrific ride of 90s culture and cynicism where you can practically taste the soda-can bongs stuck with a needle everyone was smoking out of behind the high school. Thank you to Permuted Press for a chance to read and review. ⅘ ...more |
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May 07, 2024
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May 07, 2024
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1542093570
| 9781542093576
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| 4.03
| 29,924
| Sep 17, 2019
| Sep 09, 2019
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really liked it
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‘To save the world, people had to think differently.’ What will our planet look like 100 years from now, or maybe 1000 or a million years? Tapping into ‘To save the world, people had to think differently.’ What will our planet look like 100 years from now, or maybe 1000 or a million years? Tapping into the anxieties of climate crisis, economic collapse, wars and societies structure around endless profit chasing instead of equitable and sustainable systems, N.K. Jemisin’s Hugo Award winning storyEmergency Skinoffers a startling and subversive look at the distant future. Here we discover earth has long been abandoned and left for dead by those deemed the best, brightest and strongest of humans when they set out to form a new planet deep into space. ‘We left because it would’ve cost too much to fix the world,’ they tell us believing in the principal that it was ‘cheaper to build a new one.’ But on a secret mission to return to the abandoned planet there is a startling discovery that earth might not have collapsed into a tragic wasteland as once thought, and perhaps the “perfect” society that has abandoned bodies and embraced eugenics might be lying about a lot more. A short and sharp story from a master storyteller of speculative fiction,Emergency Skinis a hopeful look towards the future imagining a society that values cooperation and survival for all. ‘Six billion people working toward a goal together is much more effective than a few dozen scrabbling for themselves.’ Jemisin excels at fascinating framing to her stories, taking what would otherwise feel like an overly philosophical look at community organizing and equitable structures but crafting it into a riveting sci-fi tale that teases out big reveals and tension. There is a certain kinship to the stories ofUrsula K. Le Guinhere in the way it is sociology by way of sci-fi, almost like a reversal ofThe Dispossessedif the people from the extreme neoliberal planet instead arrived at the anarchist society and had to make sense of it from their context. This would need a lot more nuance to expand as a novel but as a short story its pretty fun. The framing here—the constant chatter of someone from the traveller’s society speaking to him through his suit—allows us to experience the shock and disgust of their society when faced with the workings of a world they left behind assuming it would perish. It doesn't tell you what the focal character says, but Jemisin gives enough context that you can assume without confusion. The great fun of the story is that, without those who opted for profit over people and didn’t value anyone beyond the strongest and wealthiest, there was actually an opportunity to save the planet when they realized they had to get along or perish. ‘The problem wasn’t technological…people just decided to take care of each other.’ Jemisin hits a lot of big themes in social justice ideas, particularly ideas of mutual aid, inclusivity and accommodations for all. There is the pushback from the narrator who scoffs at their social choices because they ‘find such chaos ugly and inefficient,’ and we see the contrast between theories of efficiency being one that actually upholds a sustainable society or one that only values a select few at the expense of others. They realize that what divided them most were the things also threatening survival and the abolition of these social structures allowed them to thrive and cooperate. ‘We realized it was impossible to protect any one place if the place next door was drowning or on fire. We realized the old boundaries weren’t meant to keep the undesirables out, but to hoard resources within, And the hoarders were the core of the problem.’ I love the irony that the people who abandoned them were the problems all along. I love that Jemisin can create stories like this that hit on so many ideas while still making an engaging story that manages to not feel jumbled and I especially love how effortlessly her world building works. Sure it is all a bit heavy handed and idealistic without nuance, but it’s also pretty fun to read and the frustrated reactions of the "narrator" are rather enjoyable.Emergency Skinis a satisfying little romp through the stars and into brighter futures and well worth the quick read. 3.5/5 ‘Some will fight for this, if they must. Sometimes that’s all it takes to save a world, you see. A new vision. A new way of thinking, appearing at just the right time.’ ...more |
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Feb 05, 2024
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ebook
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0375701877
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| 0375701877
| 4.05
| 72,028
| May 18, 1953
| Sep 12, 2013
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it was amazing
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‘Set thine house in order, for thou shalt die and not live.’ I found myself stranded in Chicago over the weekend due to a blizzard and sub zero tempera ‘Set thine house in order, for thou shalt die and not live.’ I found myself stranded in Chicago over the weekend due to a blizzard and sub zero temperatures and kept busy doing what I love best: visiting art museums and bookstores. While browsing the basement ofAfter-Words,I discovered a copy of Baldwin’s first published novel,Go Tell It On the Mountainstickered with Chicago’sOne City, One Bookinitiative and figured no better time than to finally read this beloved classic by an author I’ve recently come to love. It was a perfect choice and companion as I read it traveling over the hills and everywhere for my harrowing journey home on various trains and buses that kept breaking down. To read the works of James Baldwin is to encounter prose that lingers like a prayer on your lips, prose that you’d suspect could be picked up on a seismograph for the way it shakes you deeply within, prose that could feasibly crack open the world. And to readGo Tell It On the Mountainis to bask in the bitter beauty of an undeniable classic of religious trauma, queer desires, and grappling with family legacy. Published in 1953 and introducing the literary world to a writer who would go down in history as an essential author,Go Tell It On the Mountainis a semi-autobiographical work that truly comes out swinging. Baldwin confronts issues of racism, sexuality, sin and the hypocrisy of religion being harnessed to uphold oppressive patriarchy and other abuses while flooding his pages with gorgeous passages on desire and struggles for selfhood. Brilliantly condensing decades of lives struggling to survive society and themselves all within the span of a narrative set over 24 hours,Mountainalso condenses a vast American experience into the corridors of Harlem and the blocks around the aptly named Temple of the Fire Baptized. Here we experience 14 year old John’s internal tribulations to either accept the endless struggle up the mountain of holiness—‘It’s a hard way. It’s uphill all the way’—or a rejection of the church altogether. Yet the scope of the novel rests beyond the boundaries of John and, through flashbacks and visions, the novel becomes one about the legacy of John’s family and the struggles of Black Americans everywhere in the 20th century. ‘There are people in the world for whom "coming along" is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive.’ Taking its title from the popularspiritual tune,Baldwin immerses us in a family and community for whom the church encompasses the whole of their daily existence. In many ways this felt like a good companion read toJeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit in its depiction of an insular community that uses religious devotion and fervor to justify incredible amounts of abuse and castigate not only queer desires but any sexuality outside of marriage. At the heart of the story is John who is expected to walk in the footsteps of his father—or so he thinks Gabriel is his father—and become a preacher. Gabriel is the personification of Christianity in the novel with Baldwin representing his criticisms of the organized religion through his portrayal of Gabriel as hypocritical, misogynistic and abusive. He is also very imaged-based, with his coming to God informed by the opportunities of social positioning as is his first marriage to Deborah—once she is considered the holiest of the community—a calculated move to be seen as holy himself. Baldwin represents religiosity as a false front, one that uses piety to mask abuse. ‘salvation was finished, damnation was real’ Baldwin demonstrates how religion is used for purposes of control within the community, or for Gabriel over his family. The fear of sin is pervasive, such as the novel opening with John feeling he will ‘be bound in hell a thousand years’ for his act of masturbation, and used to control behavior. Especially of women or young people, as we see in the early pages when Elisha and Ellie May are publicly shamed for ‘walking disorderly’ as evidence they ‘were in danger of straying from the truth.’ Gabriel sees it as his duty to uphold moral standings in his congregation, though not in himself, and John worries it may already be too late to be saved so he feels the need for salvation all the more intensely. However, he recognizes Gabriel as a gatekeeper to salvation and that he cannot ‘bow before the throne of grace without first kneeling to his father,’ which is something he feels he cannot do having recognized Gabriel as a cruel abuser who beats his children and “fondles” his own daughter. ‘The menfolk, they die, and it's over for them, but we women, we have to keep on living and try to forget what they done to us.’ Baldwin also represents how Christianity upholds patriarchy through the rather misogynistic double standards against women. Sexuality is a taboo and while sex outside marriage is considered unthinkable, Gabriel had a child out of wedlock, Royal, who he discards feeling he is unholy and not worth his life, and thinks of the mother, Esther, as a ‘harlot’ for having accepted sex outside marriage and entered into ‘a forbidden darkness.’ Similarly, Deborah was shamed after having been the victim of sexual assault by a group of men—like the story of Medusa, the victim is the one who bears the punishment—and was only acceptable to society if she devote her entire being to holiness ‘like a terrible example of humility, or like a holy fool.’ She comes to hate all men and sees ‘they live only to gratify on the bodies of women their brutal and humiliating needs.’ The men hide behind claims of religious superiority, chastizing women for the things they do themselves, and thus religion only becomes another pillar reinforcing patriarchal abuse. For John there is the issue of ‘a sudden yearning tenderness for Elisha... desire, sharp and awful,’ a desire he has been taught is filthy and thus internalizes it to believe himself filthy and unworthy of salvation. ‘Dust was in his nostrils, sharp and terrible, and the feet of saints, shaking the floor beneath him, raised small clouds of dust that filmed his mouth. He heard their cries, so far, so high above him—he could never rise that far. He was like a rock, a dead man's body, a dying bird, fallen from an awful height; something that had no power of itself, any more, to turn.’ Baldwin probes at the long history of homophobia in religious communities, an issue that continues to this day andstudies have showna greater risk for internalized homophobia, rejection from family, mental health risks and suicide for LGBTQ+ youth in religious households. This theme of struggling to accept a gay sexuality as natural was explored in depth in Baldwin’s later novel,Giovanni's Room,where David’s internalized shame leads to self-destructive tendencies and outwards abuse to others. ‘The rebirth of the soul is perpetual; only rebirth every hour could stay the hand of Satan.’ Still further we see how religion is used to justify greater atrocities, such as John’s vision of the biblical story ofHamwasused to justify slavery.The novel also explores how the legacy of slavery still casts a vile shadow over the country and racism runs rampant. There is the unjust treatment of Richard arrested for theft despite being innocent and simply a Black man at the wrong place and the wrong time (not unlike theDylan song) which leads to his tragic end. There is even internalized racism, with Deborah seeing Gabriel’s dark skin as a sin which nudges the long, racist legacy ofassociating Blackness with evil.This is all tied in with Gabriel being born from a former slave, showing how the cruelties and abuses of slavery continue to manifest themselves for generations to come. ‘You in the Word or you ain’t - ain’t no halfway with God.’ These experiences are the ones John considers in opposition to his need for salvation. His rejection of the church becomes, ultimately, a rejection of society at large and all the racism, homophobia, misogyny and abuse. Yet it is hard to imagine beyond the bubble of the church, which thinks of itself as a safe haven from all the sinners and “undesirables” they pass on their way. He feels trapped and helpless, and his frustrations with the futility of cleaning the rug—a never ending task—is symbolic of the path up the “mountain” to holiness. This is also symbolized in his climb to the cliff in Central Park: ‘He did not know why, but there arose in him an exultation and a sense of power, and he ran up the hill like an engine, or a madman, willing to throw himself headlong into the city that glowed before him. But when he reached the summit he paused; he stood on the crest of the hill, hands clasped beneath his chin, looking down. Then he, John, felt like a giant who might crumble this city with his anger.’ He comes to see life as an endless struggle beleaguered by sin, yet runs down the “mountain” anyways. ‘If it’s wrong, I can always climb back up,’ he thinks. Yet still he must go to the threshing-floor to be judged, and hopes he can be found righteous. ‘It was his hatred and his intelligence that he cherished, the one feeding the other.’ This is a powerful novel, one that devastates in theme, exhausts you in its moral burdens, yet utterly enchants you in pitch perfect prose.Go Tell It On the Mountainis a marvelous microcosm of society at large in the day-long drama of a mass and generational struggles of a family that put Baldwin on the map. He would fulfill this early promise time and time again. Personally I felt rather outside the novel, not having much experience with being immersed in a religious community, but I know many who’s stories of their own upbringing rang in harmony with the book. This is a harrowing tale that takes dead aim at society, hypocrisy and abuse and delivers heavy blows. 4.5/5 ‘Men spoke of how the heart broke up, but never spoke of how the soul hung speechless in the pause, the void, the terror between the living and the dead; how, all garments rent and cast aside, the naked soul passed over the very mouth of Hell. Once there, there was no turning back; once there, the soul remembered, though the heart sometimes forgot. For the world called to the heart, which stammered to reply; life, and love, and revelry, and, most falsely, hope, called the forgetful, the human heart. Only the soul, obsessed with the journey it had made, and had still to make, pursued its mysterious and dreadful end; and carried heavy with weeping and bitterness, the heart along. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Jan 16, 2024
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037460987X
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| 037460987X
| 4.01
| 12,090
| Jun 06, 2023
| Jun 06, 2023
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it was amazing
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‘I feel more like a person than ever because I’m starting to hate myself.’ I’m a big fan of cats, and the big cat narratingOpen Throatby Henry Hoke h ‘I feel more like a person than ever because I’m starting to hate myself.’ I’m a big fan of cats, and the big cat narratingOpen Throatby Henry Hoke has certainly stolen my heart. Examining the blurred boundary between human and animal, Hoke’s heartfelt and often hilarious novella follows the stream-of-consciousness of a queer mountain lion based on P-22, a real-life mountain lion who crossed the 405 and the 101 freeways to live in Griffith Park. This is a novel that seems like it shouldn’t work, yet it does. And marvelously so, making elements that could quickly trip into cloyingly quirky instead rise up in emotional and satirical glory. Hoke’s sharp yet playful prose comes at us in double-spaced, single lines, reading almost like poetry as the lion navigates complex emotions from hunger and shame to repressed desires and concerns around identity, but their perspective (the lion tells us they are they/them) also gives us a fascinating gaze at human society from the perspective of an outsider on our gross inequalities, narcissisms and ecological terrors. A quick but powerful read, Hoke’s offbeatOpen Throatmakes the familiar seem strange and the strange so utterly satisfying through the eyes of an unforgettable and tender narrator that, while an animal themselves, explores what it means to be human, themes of domestication, and removal from the wild. [image] P-22, the “Hollywood Cat” This is a wild ride. A quick book that could feasibly be finished in a single evening,Open Throat’s unconventionality manages to pull a wide range of emotions and insights through the narrative while keeping the reader in rapt attention. While we never learn the name of our feline narrator because ‘it’s not made of noises a person can make,’ we are treated to a deep investigation into their emotional state and concerns for society. I was delighted to learn how much of this story comes from real events about P-22, to whom this book is dedicated and inspired by (Hokesays the story was also inspiredby the songHollywoodfrom Nick Cave,which reminded him of P-22). Its a similar feeling to when I’m readingAli Smithand think ‘that is an oddly specific detail’ only to find it is entirely true, and thetrue events on the life of this lionare just as thrilling as the novel such as P-22taking up residence under someone’s porchor having been the likely culprit in thedevouring of a beloved LA zoo koala.In hereulogyfor P-22, California director for the National Wildlife Foundation Beth Pratt said: ‘He changed us…He made us more human, made us connect more to that wild place in ourselves. We are part of nature and he reminded us of that.’ This keys into a major theme of the novella, though as much as the lion makes us think about our humanity, the lion, in turn, feels they are becoming more human. A therapist is ‘something I want,’ for instance, though they also find annoyance in human behaviors. ‘I don’t trust screens to tell me who I am,’ they think upon seeing their reflection in a mirror. ‘I want to devour their sound / I have so much language in my brain / and nowhere to put it.’ The narration is made possible by the lion having picked up on human speech, either from the encampment of unhoused people for whom the lion feels an affinity for their shared outsider status or from the people hiking the trails.Sure, this may be a stretch for some but Hoke handles it in such a delightful way with situational irony and malapropisms that defamiliarizes the ordinary into an uncanny landscape where the abstractions of reality are more pronounced for analysis. Learning the language draws them closer to humans and I giggled at aspects such as picking up the word for helicopter but always as ‘fucking helicopter’ due to learning it from a man in tent city, or mistaking the term ‘scarcity mentality’ for ‘scare city’ which becomes an all-too-accurate name for LA. ‘I traded old fear for new fear.’ Becoming more human also means processing internal struggles (a theme I’ve quite enjoyed in theMurderbotseries). In many ways this story is symbolic of repressed identities and the ways society commodifies everything to take the bite out of it. Watching two men have sex in a cave dredges up bittersweet memories of a “relationship” the lion had with another lion, ‘the kill sharer,’ but also the traumatic memories of being cast out from their lion society by a violent father. ‘A father to a kitten is an absence,’ they reflect, ‘a grown cat to a father is a threat.’ This vague tale of violence and abusive fathers is a familiar queer trope, and Hoke juxtaposes the history of violence with the violence present in human society. And not just the threat of death to cross the freeway—‘the long death’—but also violence humans display against their own outsiders such as an act of horrific cruelty towards the unhoused people the lion clings near. ‘I know what their hands can do and what their hands would do and the violence waiting behind every motion.’ I’ve never eaten a person / but today I might.’ The story also looks at the ways society will take anything raw, wild, or unfamiliar and commoditize (think of how capitalism will often co-opt activism in order to render it as nothing but slogans on t-shirts) or domesticate it, such as the imagery of a wild mountain lion becoming a half-starved, tame and timid creature slinking through the streets ofscare city.A lion is a perfect symbol for a book set in hollywood, which is full of icons like theMGM lionorSimbathat take a wild beast and turn it into family friendly marketing. Disney in particular is called out in a surreal scene late in the novel that briefly envisions the lion in full anthropomorphic adaptation walking on two legs and enjoying the rides of Disneyland. There is a bit of irony that in the most notable moments of domestication when a teenage girl takes in the lion, she also pays homage to their wildness, calling them ‘heckit’ (the mythologicalHecateassociated with ideas of transition) and refers to them as a goddess. ‘If you feel alone in the world / find someone to worship you’ Though for all the ways the lion sees humans as perpetuating many of the world’s ills, there is also that affinity and tenderness many of them. Particularly the outcasts. Though, as we see in the shocking ending, the world of humans and animals are always separate.Open Throatis a reminder of the violence that gets swept under the rug or the other sacrifices made in order for the masses to pretend we live in a polite society and is an excellent edition to the genre of animal perspectives showing us what being human really looks like. I also can’t wrap this up without mentioning that I will forever read novels about pumas in honor of Mike Puma, some of you here may remember him, a best friend that I miss every single day. Love you buddy. Anyways. Offbeat, humorous and often surreal,Open Throatis an endlessly readable tale that reminds us to embrace the wilderness and wild because society can never truly cage it. 4.5/5 Cause they say there is a cougar that roams these parts, With a terrible engine of wrath for a heart That she is white and rare and full of all kinds of harm And stalks the perimeter all day long But at night lays trembling in my arms. -Nick Cave, Hollywood ...more |
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Jan 10, 2024
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Jan 10, 2024
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Jan 10, 2024
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Hardcover
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1916751008
| 9781916751002
| 1916751008
| 3.59
| 2,691
| Mar 01, 2022
| Aug 06, 2024
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really liked it
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The quest for the idealized life has long tempted and eluded the human mind and while Eva Baltasar’sMammothoffers a scorching criticism of such an e
The quest for the idealized life has long tempted and eluded the human mind and while Eva Baltasar’sMammothoffers a scorching criticism of such an endeavor destined to end in disillusion, her work is illuminated in what could certainly be an ideal prose. The third in her triptych of novellas, following the equally unhinged, emotional tempests found inPermafrostandBoulderyet still fully accessible as a stand-alone read,Mammothonce again places us in the mind of an nameless, queer woman narrator as she grapples with the volatility of finding her place in the world. Desiring a child and fed up with life in the ‘ripened, self-corrupted’ city, she flees to a remote village in the Catalonian countryside believing ‘the phraseto do withoutmay be the thing that frees me.’ Though the utopian image of rustic living and returning to the basics might crack in the cold reality of living as the narrator finds a wildness within herself full of violence. As with each of the triptych,Julia Sanchesdelivers an excellent translation into English and each page crackles with purpose. A brutal confrontation of the fetishization of rural life by city dwellers, the crushing weight of expectations on women, and the harsh realities of survival pull the reader throughMammothas Baltasar yet again flays the reader with a pristine prose, sharpened and deadly succinct in its critical aim. ‘I go through hell and find it thrilling. I can’t get enough of this feeling—of my heart pulling the trigger and shooting.’ Beginning with the epigraph ‘an idea hungers for your body,’ by poetLes Murray,Baltasar—an accomplished poet in her own right—brings us into the headspace of a woman who finds her body to be commodified by the society around her. It is a common thread in the triptych, each featuring a different narrator yet the nameless aspect (unless otherwise nicknamed for a defining feature that affixes them in the minds of those around them such as the titular Boulder or, here, being referred to by her rural cottage name Llanut) grants a universality to each of these queer women and their difficulty maneuvering in a patriarchal society. Their relation to sexuality and, ultimately, motherhood is also a uniting theme, like a gravitational center pull each into orbit from the nannying positions inPermafrostthat end abruptly in a new responsibility thrust upon her or the resistance to her partner’s journey to motherhood inBoulder.Mammoth,however, launches us directly into the narrator’s desire to have a child—though this is more honestly simply a ‘desire to gestate’—and a planned fertility party under the guise of her 24th birthday celebration. It is an urge like leaping into oblivion without any wish for a partner where ‘’any one of them would do’—a phrase I attack myself with and have to endure,’ and the brash nature of this headlong venture marks her general engagement with the world. ‘I’d been living in a drowning city, and I need this—the restorative silence of a decompression chamber.’ In the city she finds ‘a sterile, impenetrable life locked in ice,’ her body commoditized by for-profit labor she finds dehumanizing on all fronts. She frequently quits jobs and stresses over the ways the labor force uplifts the rich at her expense. ‘I lasted a few days at each job and left just as I was starting to get the hang of it, terrified I would become used to the exploitation…when I worked to someone else, I gave them the most precious thing I had, more precious that my time or body, more precious even than the meaning of the word itself: my dignity.’ Working for the university interviewing elderly patients in senior-care she also finds her dehumanizing labor to become an act that dehumanizes those around her, something that is later paralleled where the violence of humans and animals in rural living begins to spread into violent actions from her. ‘Reducing life to an Excel spreadsheet felt like a crime. I hate my tool, the specialist axe I used to cut up emotions and memories, the experience and suffering of those people who, at the end of the day, had somehow persuaded life to put up with them all those years.’ Ininterview forGrantawithIrene Solà,Baltasar, who herself lives in a rural Catalonian village near the mountains like the narrator moves to here, admitted ‘I’ve never been able to love a city,’ and this anxiety pours out of our narrator. Her Barcelona apartment has proximity to the zoo that allows her to hear the lion’s ‘ancient, roaring sorrows,’ something that she feels growling within her trapped in the city and identifying with ‘the singing of caged birds.’ Feeling city living has driven her into anhedonic despair, she sets out seek an idealized life in a small rural community. ‘Feeling alive means shouldering the burden’ Baltasar takes aim at rural tourism and the fetishization of ‘simple living,’ demonstrating the reality of hardship in such communities and the annoyance of those who merely visit as some self-serving “quest” but do not truly value such a life. The sort of city folks withJ.R.R. Tolkien’s ‘not all those who wander are lost’ quote on stickers attached to cars or water bottles who come to see the sights or, worse, abandon old cats that the narrator then has to deal with in increasingly unhinged and disturbing ways (trigger warning for those where feline violence is a dealbreaker). The narrator is not unlike them at first though, thinking the rural silence will give her the ability to live ‘cleaved to the rock like a root, sucking up nutrients until every finger, every tooth, every last one of my thoughts is worn through,’ and idealizes an ascetic lifestyle. ‘I like the thought of a house without a real bathroom,’ she tells herself, ‘the pigsty-messiness of it. I like that I have to focus on the essentials. How the need for a bathtub drives away all my more trivial thoughts.’ She makes bread feeling like she has tapped into her roots and ancestral heritage of breadmaking. It comes out poorly but she eats it anyways. Had this novel been written in the US one might find it to be a criticism of the trad-wife culture and traditional living social media influencers. Baltasar has different aims, not only critiquing the city folks (or ‘big pond’ people as the shepherd, the closest thing to a friend she has there, calls them) idealizing the rural landscape, treating it as their entertainment, leaving their trash behind—‘I’m starting to understand the hostility towards big pond folk’—but also disillusioning such an image of rural life.. It is a brutal book and will make one consider that ‘There is no desirable life.’ ‘The land belonds to life and life is the animals.The only purpose of humans is to steer and exploit them just enough to eke out a living.’ A rural citizen herself, Baltasar shows the harshness, the violence towards animals hidden from city folk who merely eat the food without seeing how it comes to be on their store shelves, and also the patriarchal structures and misogyny that aren’t just confided to the city. Just like the city, labor in the rural communities feeds the strong at the expense of others. In this case animals like the shepherd's lambs. We also see the narrator objectified, asked to engage in sex work for the shepherd (which she accepts in her pursuit of a child), and their disagreements often turn violent. We see the violence and cold of the land seeping into her, The use of language is incredible too. In the early stages of the book living in the city she assesses herself through animal metaphors but later, in the rural life, through metaphors of weapons or objects with connotative violence such as feeling like a ‘rusty fish hook.’ People tend to be often compared to animals as well, from the senior-living community seeming ‘ferret-like’ and when sexually entangled with the shepherd she notes ‘his semen had the same manure-like aftertaste as the lamb.’ Baltasar’s prose is exquisite at every turn, moving through intense introspection to searing indictments of society with deft, devastating linguistic power. Julia Sanches does an excellent translation here, as she has with all Baltasar’s novels and her work onBoulderfound it shortlisted for the Booker International. Whilebeing interviewed for the prize,Baltasar shared her joy at working with Sanches: ‘She knows me, my writing, and my terrain; she knows when the path is flat and when the dunes are variable, and she knows how to take up and translate the landscape of my writing, which in her hands becomes a shared space where the two of us meet. A translated novel is always a co-authorship, and I am lucky to share this with Julia Sanches.’ I cannot overstate how incredible her writing is. Even the title is well done, and though the titular beast does not make an appearance we are reminded of it (or more so its absence) in lines like ‘I don’t care whether I live or go extinct,’ or just simply the mammoth amount of expectations placed on women in society. Though my favorite is the idea of a mammoth living in caves and how our narrator thinks about the ways modern living responds to the exhaustion of work and society through our own modern idea of caves: ‘You lose the ability to think of anything but the basics: hunkering down in one place for as long as it takes to eat and then, when the day is done, sheltering in some hole from the dark and the inclement weather. Thousands of years ago, we referred to these holes as caves. Now we call them leisure, exercise, social media. We retreat to our depressing cells and feel smug, convinced we are the lucky ones.’ While this novellas are short and most one-sitting reads, they completely overpower you with prose and leave the reader breathless, bruised, and eager for more. ‘Nothing is mine, except me.’ A bleak and brutal yet rather beautiful novella, Eva Baltasar dazzles with the sharp critiques and unhinged survival mechanisms inMammoth.While perhapsBoulderremains my favorite, this was still a wild ride of poetic delight and scathing wit. Like the warning of assuming the grass is always greener on the other side,Mammothlampoons the belief in an idealized living, critiques both rural and city life, and presents a quest for motherhood in harsh tones that are destined to sink right into the reader’s heart. A fantastic little book from a fantastic writer. 4/5 ‘I call for everything that was once mine to be turned over to life, for it to find a path of its own in this bitter, inhuman life, because it isn’t mine anymore.’ ...more |
Notes are private!
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Oct 2024
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Oct 2024
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Jan 10, 2024
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Paperback
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0241207029
| 9780241207024
| 0241207029
| 3.82
| 21,842
| Nov 02, 2017
| Nov 02, 2017
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it was amazing
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‘Where would we be without our ability to see beyond what it is we’re supposed to be seeing.’ The winter months are a time of cold and dark, but also a ‘Where would we be without our ability to see beyond what it is we’re supposed to be seeing.’ The winter months are a time of cold and dark, but also a sense of beauty and calm in the muffled silence of a world blanketed in wet snow. The winter ‘invites a turning in, a quieting, an upped interiority,’ writesNina MacLaughlinin heressays on winter,and it is in this introspective spirit of the season thatOscar Wildeasserts ‘wisdom comes with winter.’ But there is a duality to winter, for there is also the harshness, the chilling reminder of our frailty and mortality, and often we withdraw indoors and into ourselves. The political metaphor is right there for the grasping and Ali Smith manages to take and transcend it brilliantly inWinter,the second book of her seasonally thematic tetraology. The prose ofWinterdrifts down through puns and politics (there’s enough wordplay here to make Nabokov and Pynchon envious) as the novel becomes a kaleidoscopic expression of the essence of winter. Yet it is so much more than that, functioning as an investigation into the interplay of art, identity, truth, beauty and culture on social levels both political and personal as well as an effective publishing experiment to capture a current moment of social discordance as it unfolds in real time. It is a tale of British politics and British artists, yet it also feels a universal exploration of truth and beauty in a time of great anxieties. Set during the days surrounding Christmas and matching the intimacy and interiority of the season,Winteris as sharp and insightful as it is comical and redemptive and makes for the perfect cozy winter read. ‘That’s what winter is: an exercise in remembering how to still yourself then how to come pliantly back to life again.’ While this is the second of a four-set seasonal trilogy,Wintercould still serve as a standalone. That said, there is a thematic unity with the previous book,Autumn,beyond capturing a literary expression of it’s titular season. Smith deftly knots past and present on both personal and political levels and garnishes the political landscapes in narratives of under-recognized women artists (the inclusion ofBarbara Hepworthhere isn’t as pronounced as that ofPauline BotyinAutumnyet her artistic story is still deeply integral to the themes) and fraught family dynamics. The fallout of the Brexit vote is less a backdrop and more the landscape upon which the narrative plays out, and Smith manages to position the reader in almost real-time of the events taking place. The story is set Christmas 2016 though by the end we have references to theGrenfell Towerfire and Donald Trump telling a crowd he will make retail employeessay “merry christmas”at an October 2017 event withWinterbeing published just a month later in November. [image] Barbara Hepworth This is particularly impressive as this event leads to a perfect closing statement in the novel, one that is a play on the final lines ofCharles Dickens’A Christmas Carolto mirror the playful opening reference. I had read Smith’sGod is dead, to begin withas a great punchy opening only to watch later that day, Christmas Eve no less, a favoriteMuppetsadaption of the book and when the banter over the line ‘The Marleys were dead, to begin with’ came I had a eureka moment. I enjoyed how this was in keeping with the opening line ofAutumnbeing a play on the opening toA Tale of Two Cities.The novel works within the framework of Dickens’ holiday classic as the story slips seamlessly into hauntings of Christmas past and visions of the future—‘That's one of the things stories and books can do, they can make more than one time possible at once’—complete with a seasonal spectre of a floating child’s head. ‘Spring, summer, and fall fill us with hope; winter alone reminds us of the human condition.’ -Mignon McLaughlin The plot, as far as there is a “plot” in an Ali Smith, is a bit of a riff on a whole slew of familiar christmas narratives. Arthur, or Art—a name that’s usage in the book would seem heavy handed in lesser hands but the consistency of Smith’s witty and whimsical wordplay miraculously makes it work—hires Lux to be play the role of his recently ex-girlfriend, Charlotte, for a holiday trip to his mother’s in Cornwall. The Hallmark rom-com vibes are especially enhanced when Lux insists they phone mother Sophia’s estranged activist sister, Iris, to join them. And so the family drama and false personas all descend upon Cornwall (which was particularly charming to me because it nudges my absolute favorite rom-com film,About Time) and the family friction is bound to spark fire. ‘It isn’t a good enough answer, that one group of people can be in charge of the destinies of another group of people and choose whether to exclude them or include them. Human beings have to be more ingenious than this, and more generous. We’ve got to come up with a better answer.’ But this is a Christmas story at heart, and Dickens and all his holiday hoopla is not the only classic work integral to theWinter.William Shakespeare’sCymbelinebecomes a redemptive touchstone as fake-Charlotte/Lux, a Croatian woman with an uncertain future in the mindfield of Brexit laws shows a greater love of English literature than those of birthright citizenship, elucidates the plot almost as a metaphor for present day politics. ‘[Characters] living in the same world but separately from each other, like their worlds have somehow become disjointed or broken off each other's worlds. But if they could just step out of themselves, or just hear and see what’s happening right next to their ears and eyes, they’d see it’s the same play they’re all in, the same world, that they’re all part of the same story.’ The telling of the story is an emotional turning point in the novel, especially juxtaposed with Sophia’s defense of her vote to leave the EU, with the reader clearly recognizing the importance of ‘a play about a kingdom subsumed in chaos, lies, powermongering, division and a great deal of poisoning and self-poisoning,’ but also Lux’s admission she came to the UK because of the way Shakespeare could take that and end it with balance and grace where ‘lies are revealed and all the losses are compensated.’ Smith ingeniously uses literary and art criticism as expressions of her own works, such as Sophia’s impressions of Hepworth’s sculptures: ‘It makes you walk round it, it makes you look through it from different sides, see different things from different positions,. It’s also like seeing inside and outside something at once.’ The way her structure weaves in and out of perspectives, memories, visions, etc. lets us move about the story from a variety of vantage points. It isn’t just a family narrative, or a Brexit narrative, but a narrative of individual struggles, of political activism of the now and Iris’ history protesting nuclear stockpiling, of single-motherhood after giving up the love of one’s life for ones own life(view spoiler)[and having a child with who is plausibly Daniel Gluck from the novelAutumn,though he is only referenced briefly as Danny here(hide spoiler)],and of all the hopes, dreams, fears, flaws, and possible futures a human life can have. I just need to interrupt the flow of this review because I need to scream that this book is just so unbelievably good. Honestly, thinking about it makes me want to weep it’s just so good. There’s so much I can’t fit into this review but like, the way a remembered story is an amalgamation of two different storytellers and the implications in that, of the history of the anti-nuclear protests, or the ways Smith puts you in the minds of the two characters who are indifferent to the Brexit vote so a lot of the story is tongue-in-cheek but in a way that really slaps…this book is miraculously good. Okay I just needed to say that because this book is just intensely beautiful in a way that makes all the shit that life can be seem worthwhile to know a human can make something like this. ‘We all mine and undermine and landmine ourselves, in our own ways, in our own time.’ Truth, lie and beauty are central to the story. People living as characters of themselves are rampant in the novel and Smith nudges the way internet culture and personalities are more marketing than authentic selves. We see how truth has fallen second fiddle (Charlotte is a violin virtuoso, supposedly) to stories that satisfy, how we trade facts for useful details, and posturing for clicks replaces authenticity. ‘It is the dregs, really, to be living in a time when even your dreams have to be post-postmodern consciouser-than-thou.’ ‘There was furious inteolderace at work in the world no matter when or where in history’ And so we asked ‘into who’s myth do we choose to buy?’ There is a literal sense, such as buying Sophia’s products that are new but made to look vintage, or the duality of present day Boris Johnson versusSamuel Johnson’s fight for reality, ‘A man interested in the meaning of words, not one whose interests leave words meaningless.’ Sophia calls Iris a “mythologizer,” though under Smith this seems more a compliment than anything else, Smith who is in turn mythologizing the Brexit era. Do we believe the government, or do we believe Iris and her friends trying to expose political and corporate corruption and pollution harming people. And this is why we have art. ‘I said, Art is seeing things. And your aunt said, that’s a great description of what art is,’ Smith playfully writes about Art’s hallucination, though it also hits home the idea that art mythologizes reality in order to see, process, and understand it better. And such is the purpose ofWinter.And why artists are valued over politicians, because artists represent the human at the cost of power. ‘He thinks about how, whatever being alive is, with all its pasts and presents and futures, it is most itself in the moments when you surface from a depth of numbness or forgetfulness that you didn't even know you were at, and break the surface.’ The French writer and philosopherAlbert Camusonce wrote ‘in the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.’ Such is the lesson here, that in this season of cold, of withdrawing, or introspection, we can choose to release ourselves from the shackles of the characters we choose to present ourselves as and find the beautiful summer of truth and hope within us. This is a gorgeous novel, one that moves slowly yet surely through both the heart and mind and balances both the personal and political in a way that transcends them both.Winter,likeAutumnbefore it, is an impressive expression of its season and a story that warmed my heart like a yule log during the holidays. I only hope winter passes quickly so I can read the next seasonal installment. 4.5/5 ‘Mind and matter are mysterious and, when they come together, bounteous.’ ...more |
Notes are private!
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Dec 31, 2023
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Jan 2024
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Dec 31, 2023
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Hardcover
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166802778X
| 9781668027783
| 166802778X
| 3.91
| 1,190
| Oct 17, 2023
| Oct 17, 2023
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really liked it
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‘She is stilled by the knowledge that she will emerge from this isolation a one woman show.’ This is such a unique and creative book that asks how can ‘She is stilled by the knowledge that she will emerge from this isolation a one woman show.’ This is such a unique and creative book that asks how can one present the entirety of a life. What artifacts and still frames from our collection of days could best be arranged to tell the story of our existence? For Christine Coulson, who spent twenty-five years writing for theMetropolitan Museum of Art,what better way to show a life than as a museum exhibit, which she does brilliantly in the quirky yet gorgeous novelOne Woman Show.The focus of this exhibit is Kitty, living from 1906 to 1999, and her life is presented entirely through museum wall label texts with a few bits of overheard gossip from throughout her life sprinkled in for a bit of seasoning. Through these snapshots of her life—all written with a wry wit mimicking discussions on artistic themes and presentation while employing a clever and well refined lexicon—we see Kitty who ‘was raised as a prize—a pretty thing entitled to pretty things’ by wealthy parents enter into a tumultuous adulthood with the Great Depression and WWII rending all pre-planned futures asunder, go through multiple marriages and be a bit of a scandal amongst high society. Through the framing of a museum exhibit,One Woman Showis an effective and creative experiment that examines how women are often garniture in their own lives, being considered precious objects in a collection subject to appraisal from society. ‘Even at age ten, Kitty senses a suffocating tyranny on the horizon. Not the war in Europe, but the fragile need to be forever cared for according to someone else’s tastes and appetites.’ This is such an intriguing little book and Coulson—who wrote the wall labels for the MET’s British Galleries—successfully manages to probe a great depth of character and nuance through her miniature expressions of a person as a work of art. It is a quick book with each page being a single “piece” in the collection and given a single, succinct paragraph. For example: “BULLFIGHTER, AGED 44, 1950 Mrs. Luis de Braganza (known as Kitty) Collection of Luiz Carlos Alfonso Antonio de Braganza Ex-Collection of Martha and Harrison Whitaker; William Wallingford III Traveling exhibition Rejecting the vernacular during a visit to London, Kitty champions the canon in a discreet assignation with Picasso during the second of his two trips to England. The artist's legendary appetites are no match for Kitty in full force. She seduces with industry and abandon, replacing traditional modes of expression with robust techniques based on curvilinear forms. Picasso, awed by the stark and savage edges beneath Kitty's gilding, handles her as if she were made of bronze.” Its clever but never falls into the trap of substituting substance for format and becomes a rather incisive way to both follow Kitty’s story but also address aspects of society. While this one is listed as a ‘traveling exhibition,’ we often see the character’s represented as belonging to various collections, such as Kitty belonging to her parents private collection, and later each of her three husbands. We see how Kitty is quite literally an object on display, a high society woman who must live ‘within the confines of its pillowed virtue’ that become rather stifling. The text is playful, with character’s value appraisals changing along with events and new details about their persons and the composition of each display comes loaded with implications about the people and events depicted. Coulson should be praised for sustaining the style throughout while being always enjoyable and insightful as well as knowing how to keep the novel short enough that it doesn’t overplay the technique. It manages to avoid seeming like a gimmick and more like unique artwork. ‘What are we girls but farm animals once we get married off?’ Objectification of women is a predominant theme in the novel, and we see how Kitty’s “value” is attached to whatever “collection” she is currently a part of. Her first marriage to Bucky is high quality, with museum cards for each bridesmaid that shows them all in a bit of surprise to find Kitty the centerpiece of a wedding collection instead of themselves marrying into Bucky’s Philadelphia fortune, but also shows the how for people of this status, love and marriage was more a business deal than actual affection. ‘Someday, I might really like you’ he tells Kitty on their wedding night. But her value changes in the collection, especially as a solo piece as a widow, or when she divorces her second husband (‘His highly polished veneer cannot conceal the violent carcass to which it is attached.’). The novel also looks at how women are harshly judged in society for aging, with Kitty being less valued by everyone around her in her advanced age, or how her lifelong habit of stealing small objects is sort of charming in youth but viewed as creepy when she is older. Kitty is quite a dynamic character, being quirky and a bit of a scandal (having been rumored to have slept with Picasso when he painted her) and her life takes us through many major events of the 20th century. I enjoy how she has a love for words as well. Coulson manages to address heavy topics in playful ways, such as how she combines Bucky’s bafflement at Kitty’s vocabulary with a somber moment when Kitty accepts that her multiple miscarriages are a sign she will never have children (and therefor never a “collection” of her own). She says there will be ‘no surfeit of babies after all,’ and he, not understanding what many of her words mean, responds ‘who needs surfing babies anyways.’ Coulson keeps the story moving quickly and lightheartedly without sacrificing depth. One Woman Showis an exciting and entertaining read that takes art criticism and shifts it’s gaze to human life. It is a fast read but you come through feeling like you’ve experienced much more beyond the mere length of pages. A great look at society, patriarchy and a must read for lovers of art and museums. 4.5/5 ...more |
Notes are private!
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not set
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not set
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Oct 20, 2023
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Hardcover
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0062699229
| 9780062699220
| 0062699229
| 4.12
| 51,642
| Jul 24, 2018
| Jul 24, 2018
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really liked it
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‘From the ground, we stand. From our ships, we live. By the stars, we hope.’ Storytelling is at core of understanding a culture as culture is, in its o ‘From the ground, we stand. From our ships, we live. By the stars, we hope.’ Storytelling is at core of understanding a culture as culture is, in its own way, a type of collective narrative. Though, as in Becky Chambers’Record of a Spaceborn Few’ one begins to wonder if the connotative division between patriotism and propaganda is blurred when perpetuating such a narrative is essential to upholding a civilization where the reality is at odds with the stories being told. The third novel in Chambers’Wayfarerseries,Record of a Spaceborn Fewis the quietest book yet though also one of the most complex and interesting to me. Set aboard the Exodant fleet and following a large ensemble cast of characters (one being the family of Cpt. Ashby’s sister, Tessa), Chambers examines a sort of eutopia where everyone’s basic needs are met but overall it is beginning to crumble, especially in the eyes of the younger generation for whom ‘survival alone wasn’t enough’ compared to their dreams which can be as vast as the cosmos. Chambers excels at crafting cultural thought experiments as sci-fi narratives and this volume furthers their extraordinary ‘We are a longstanding species with a very short memory. If we don’t keep record, we’ll make the same mistakes over and over again.’ Chambers gift to make stories out of what basically amounts to sci-fi anthropology is endlessly entertaining to me and feels very indebted to the works of the late, greatUrsula K. Le Guinwho also told stories via cultural examinations such as inThe Left Hand of Darkness.Like that novel, Chambers inserts fictional historical accounts and anthropological writings between chapters that create context for the galaxy at large, though much of how we learn about galactic politics and daily life is gleaned through the actions and conversations of characters. Often dubbed “cozy sci-fi” for the rather heartwarming messages and characters, I would add that these books also feel so cozy because they allow you to experience them as if you are nestled inside the world which comes alive and makes sense through the complexity of its construction. Though it is perhaps Le Guin’sThe DispossessedthatRecordfeels most akin too as much of the book sets about looking at a civilization that seems to be a sort of eutopia and examining the cracks forming in the perfect veneer their own self-mythologizing would have you believe. Because, when it comes down to it, this is a hippy commune in space that is not everything they want you to think it is. ‘What was better – a constant safeness that never grew and never changed, or a life of reaching, building, striving, even though you knew you’d never be completely satisfied?’ The Exodant fleet boasts there is a home and food for every member and no job is seen as “lesser” This also includes sex work, like the character Sunny, which is seen as a form of being an entertainer not unlike a musician and Exodants are a very sex-positive culture—though this is no less embarrassing to teenagers to hear their parents speak so openly about sex which was a detail that was both humorous but also felt true (I enjoy how so much of this series is asking “how does this species think about sex?” ). Self-worth is not tied to capitalist instincts and all are viewed as equally valid. ‘There is no such thing as a meaningless job in the Fleet. Everything has a purpose, a recognisable benefit. If you have food on your plate, you thank a farmer. If you have clothing, you thank a textile manufacturer. If you have murals to brighten your day, you thank an artist. Even the most menial of tasks benefits someone, benefits all.’ However, the fleet technology is old (it opens with a ship equipment failure that causes a mass death), the people live meagerly, and propagating one’s own narrative is losing its luster. Particularly with younger people for whom the possibilities of the wider cosmos full of danger and potential glory seem quite attractive. This is best explored through the character Kip, who, as only a teen can so eloquently put it, says ‘Stars, fuck this place. Fuck these stupid rules and stupid jobs and fuck being sixteen. He was gettingout...anything was better than here.’ (I LOVE how Chambers has characters say ‘stars’ like a curse word like everyone yelling ‘frak’ in the rebootedBattlestar Galactica). And there is also Tessa’s daughter, Aya, who is scared of space and wants to live on the ground. Yet, for all its shortcomings, we see how the fleet can be attractive to someone like Sawyer who seeks refuge there: even a poor home and meager living is better than being broke and unhoused. As Le Guin oncewrote,‘Every eutopia contains a dystopia, every dystopia contains a eutopia.’ ‘That’s a poisonous thing, thinking your way is all there is.’ The interactions between archivist Isabel and a Harmagian, Ghuh'loloan, were exceedingly enjoyable and ponderous (I love the aspect that humans smell bad to other species, sort of like humans to Vulcans in Star Trek) because in this way the Exodant’s cultural narrative is lit up against the larger narrative of the Galactic Commons for a more dynamic picture of everything. The Exodants are caught either falling behind keeping their old ways or accepting help and adapting, though a big lesson is ‘I worry about those who think adopting someone else's story means abandoning their own.’ I really appreciate the angle of looking at the cultures and the galaxy as a whole as a big narrative (I mean, we process experience as a narrative in general) and how, sometimes, we need to access if the narrative is useful or harmful. ‘Our species doesn’t operate by reality. It operates by stories. Cities are a story. Money is a story. Space was a story, once. A king tells us a story about who we are and why we’re great, and that story is enough to make us go kill people who tell a different story. Or maybe the people kill the king because they don’t like his story and have begun to tell themselves a different one. When our planet started dying, our species was so caught up in stories. We had thousands of stories about ourselves – that’s still true, don’t forget that for a minute – but not enough of us were looking at the reality of things. Once reality caught up with us and we started changing our stories to acknowledge it, it was too late.’ This of course details the Harmagians rejecting their own empire when faced with the consequences and horrors of their wars and creating the Commons to try to do something good and cooperative, but another aspect of Chambers novels is always how excellently their sci fi worlds correlate to present-day social issues. In the US, for example, there has been huge pushback against any mentioning of negatives in the US, like the history of slavery, leading tomass book bans and attacks on public institutionsto control the narrative. But nobody is perfect and we must learn responsibility to our stories and accept reality. ‘Show me a species who has never wronged another. Show me a species who has always been perfect or fair…either we are all worthy of the Commons or none of us are.’ Chambers shows how storytelling can quickly become propaganda and that facing the harsh truths is always better than dismissing them and mistaking it for patriotism. But, will the Exodants be able to adapt and how will they maintain their culture if they do (okay but it is super heartbreaking when Tessa brings up that she doesn’t understand why her brother, Ashby, is so upset over replacing his AI…). ‘learn nothing of your subjects, and you will disrupt them. Learn something of your subjects, and you will disrupt them.’ Narratives, however, also show what cultures value and I find Chambers always does a wonderful job with this in their books. Family and home are a big one here, but also death. It is noted ‘socially unsettled [humans] become around death,’ and how much this seems connected to their ideas of family, something the Harmagians find quite odd. For Eyas, this also means that in her role as caretaker for the dead she too becomes a sort of cultural narrative but she is struggling with how stifling this all feels ‘because I always have to be Eyas the symbol…I can only ever be this one thing.’ How much do we find ourselves living stories that tell of our culture, nation, family or perhaps become a mere symbol of ourselves instead of an authentic self (pagingJean-Paul Sartre), and is this useful or merely propagating our own myths. Speaking of, I love the aspect that Exodants want to use names of the past on Earth but are bad at it, like intending to name a child Wolf but ending up with Walrus. ‘Knowledge should always be free,’ she said. ‘What people do with it is up to them.’ The quietest of the series but also the most focused, I really lovedRecord of a Spaceborn Few.I like the whole aspect that the hippie-commune place is both cool but also becoming impractical and the message about adapting to change can be a way to benefit all. I loved the family dynamics in this one (the adorable older lesbian couple is great) and how it just offers another heartfelt look at what its like to live in this world. Another solid read. 4.5/5 ‘We are the Exodus Fleet. We are those that wandered, that wander still. We are the homesteaders that shelter our families. We are the miners and foragers in the open. We are the ships that ferry between. We are the explorers who carry our names. We are the parents who lead the way. We are the children who continue on.’ ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Sep 11, 2023
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Sep 25, 2023
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Sep 11, 2023
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Paperback
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3.52
| 192
| unknown
| Nov 30, 2021
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liked it
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‘No loss is more irreparable than that of mystery, which has vanished for the benefit of no one.’ We are often advised to slow down and appreciate the ‘No loss is more irreparable than that of mystery, which has vanished for the benefit of no one.’ We are often advised to slow down and appreciate the small details in life because what seems prosaic when we rush through our day to day suddenly becomes poetic upon calm reflection. This is at the heart of Uruguayan writer Ida Vitale’s experimental—and often obfuscating—Byobu,which follows a man who has a ‘knack for stopping to look at minuscule things lacking in importance,’ and examines the notion that ‘everything important lies below the surface.’ A poet first and foremost, Vitale proceeds using language like a shovel to dig with abstractions in order to unearth the heart of an idea instead of navigating us along a plotline towards it as if it were a city’s center. The whole book (less than 100pgs told in brief vignettes) comes at us as if ‘inside a nebulous veil.’ This creates a very quiet and contemplative work, though also one without much to grasp hold of. Her ideas appear like fingerprints on a glass window, floating aimless in space, that we can see when we look closely but almost completely transparent from afar. But those fingerprints of language are truly something to behold and Vitale weaves such expressive phrases and striking imagery. While never learning much about our character, who bears the name of the titleByobu,his ‘meticulous consciousness’ becomes a vessel to examine how one lives in the world, the juxtaposition of what truly matters versus what society values, and even the idea of narrative in the face of the books near absence of narrative. ‘Poetry seeks to extract from its abyss certain words that might constitute the scar tissue we are all unconsciously chasing.’ While this is a rather aimless book without much to really feel beyond completion, I am still in awe at Vitale’s use of language as well as the excellent—and likely difficult and intricate—translation work by Sean Manning. We have images of jasmines as ‘a vertical Milky Way, delirious with aroma,’ or reflections of singular words that form an entire landscape in the mind. It is often dense and something that, in keeping with the message of the book, forces you to slow down and contemplate fully. Though it all comes at you in short chapters that sometimes aren’t even the length of a page. One of the more beautiful ones—at least I felt—isUnforgivable Distractionwhich reads in its entirety as such: ‘A threadlike obsession begs for a fissure through which to recall, from within a free soul, a lost moment of a past that is constantly less stable, more emaciated and evanescent. Sentences arrive not quite crystallized, as if coming from somebody talking on a beach alone, convinced no one else can hear them, that no one can collect them to confirm or deny them. Sentences that are immediately buried by the sand of that careless loss. Byobu thinks: there is no despair quite like the shadow that collapses down upon our most guarded memories, akin to a wall without ivy, the ivy piling up at its base, with no sense of purpose or beauty, a green tomb, a dark mass grave.’ I love this careful expression of the emotions and actions of language. Simple images come alive into something much larger, such as how the image of a single traffic light sends us tumbling down a rabbit hole of thought on it as a ‘mechanism of supervision and compliance with an ergonomic intention’ (a major theme of the book is the idea of compliance with society or being defiant and disrupting that flow). But the language just comes alive and, as Vitale describes being out in nature, ‘it’s a delight for the flesh and the imagination.’ The imagination seems to be what Vitale argues for inByobu.The mystery and magic of the world is what counteracts the mundane, and she shows how the former can be found when we quiet our minds and appreciate the minutia and abstractions in life. The circuitous thought process is favored over the direct, which we see in the novel in the expressions that ‘the world loves conversations in straight lines and single-minded strides. Intersections divert. Labyrinths confound.’ Byobu values useless facts and deep but unprofitable thinking, which he sees as something vital to retain in a world of straight lines and valuing knowledge on ‘advancing in society’ instead of advancing in spiritual, emotional or intellectual growth. We see the grandiousity of language as a direct rebuttal to the tempered and shallowness of ordinary society Vitale describes as ‘the insight that marionettes have most likely gained, by virtue of delegating the heavy burden of their movement to other hands,’ that allows them to be cogs in neoliberal advancement. While we don’t know much about the character of Byobu, I did find him rather empathetic and enjoyed his ‘habitual indecisiveness’ and felt very much attacked by him described as ‘Truly melancholic due to lack of rest, his dark moods moods intensified, cyclically obstructing even the most accidental access to sleep.’ But most importantly I enjoyed the way he looks at the world: ‘he always looks at everything with eyes that are also tongue and touch and ears and sex, letting himself be penetrated by the world and lamenting not having a magical memory where everything seen and sensed and everything read in the prodigious coagulations of the alphabet enters for eternity.’ That said, there is just not much to cling to and while I appreciate the lack of narrative as an expression on narrative, its almost too formless to make much of it with. I do, however, love her commentary on this aspect, such as in the beginning her discussion that ‘a story’s existence, even if not well defined or well assigned, even if only in its formative stage, just barely latent, emits vague but urgent emanations.’ She asserts that ‘Openness too can dissolve in the outrage of extroverting every boundary,’ and much of the poetic quality of this book is in subverting boundaries and trying to examine living in the world through an abstract way. ‘The author assumes that whoever follows him through the twists of his invention is sure of their own ideas and will turn to them to give their ending to the story.’ Overall,Byobuis a gorgeously written book with a lot of interesting ideas, but is almost too formless for it’s own good and doesn’t have much forward moving power to keep you wanting to read. Still, it is quite lovely and I enjoy many of the ideas within and hope that soon I can read translations of Vitale’s poetry. 3.5/5 ‘Where are we running to, those of us who are so still?’ ...more |
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0345806565
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| 0345806565
| 4.33
| 180,940
| Jan 01, 1956
| Jan 01, 2013
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it was amazing
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‘[N]ot many people have ever died of love. But multitudes have perished, and are perishing every hour - and in the oddest places! - for the lack of it
‘[N]ot many people have ever died of love. But multitudes have perished, and are perishing every hour - and in the oddest places! - for the lack of it.’ Sometimes a novel comes along that completely overpowers you. It sends your heart soaring to great heights on wings of perfect prose and then plummeting towards destruction on the rocks below. It crushes you and then rebuilds you from the wreckage then sends you out into the world, electrified by the experience, to contemplate the themes that are now humming through your entire body and mind.Giovanni’s Roomis such a book. It’s perhaps too good. My emotions are just bleeding in a corner wanting to ask Baldwin “what the fuck is wrong with you, this was amazing.” For really thought, this second novel by James Baldwin,Giovanni’s Roomadroitly addresses love, guilt, and our inner battles with ourselves over the two through a story and impeccable writing style that will have the reader exhausted from feeling all the feelings and thankful for it. It comes alive in the streets and bars of Paris as David, an American expatriate living in Paris (not unlike Baldwin himself at the time), struggles to accept himself and his feelings for Giovanni, nestling us into the titular room where they hide away from the world much like David is trying to hide his sexual identity. We experience how people who feel cornered often react in destructive ways. A powerhouse of a short novel that takes a sharp aim at the constricting social expectations of gender and sexuality while also exploring shame, expatriatism and the elusiveness of freedom, Baldwin’sGiovanni’s Roomfeels perfect in all its design and execution. ‘He made me think of home—perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.’ Feeling distraught by the US and its prevalent racism, James Baldwin left for Paris in 1948 where he hoped to be able to see himself outside of the context of American prejudice. ‘Paris is, according to its legend,’ Baldwin wrote in his 1954 essay A Question of Identity ,‘the city where everyone loses his head, and his morals, lives through at least one histoire d’amour, ceases, quite, to arrive anywhere on time, and thumbs his nose at the Puritans—the city, in brief, where all become drunken on the fine old air of freedom.’ It was in Paris he wrote his first novel,Go Tell It on the Mountainin 1953 and then, later,Giovanni’s Roomin 1956, the latter featuring an American expatriate in Paris that allowed him to discuss many of his thoughts about the two countries juxtaposed by travel. While Baldwin would argue it was far from autobiographical,Roomwas in part inspired by a real man Baldwin had met which he discusses in a 1980 interview: ‘We all met in a bar, there was a blond French guy sitting at a table, he bought us drinks. And, two or three days later, I saw his face in the headlines of a Paris paper. He had been arrested and was later guillotined... I saw him in the headlines, which reminded me that I was already working on him without knowing it.’ What he would work on became a perfect little novel, though his US publisher, Knopf, was not interested in it because they wanted him to write of the Black experience. Baldwin had done so quite successfully in his previous book but withRoomfelt he could not address this as well as themes on homosexuality together. ‘The sexual-moral light was a hard thing to deal with. I could not handle both propositions in the same book,’ he admitted, ‘there was no room for it.’ Inanother interview,Baldwin says Knopf told him publishing a queer novel would alienate his audience and ‘will ruin your career,’ stating they would not even publish it ‘as a favour to you.’ So ‘I told them, ‘Fuck you’,’ he says, andGiovanni’s Roomwas instead published under Dial Press. We are all lucky for it, as this is a gorgeous book and it is a shame to think it almost never happened. Especially with how strikingly gorgeous the writing is, navigating the emotional currents with such poetic finesse that we, the reader, find ourselves totally at it’s mercy, gleeful and grateful to be caught in the tumultuous undertow as Baldwin sweeps us out to the sea of destruction with these characters. His dialog is pitch perfect and his atmosphere is so encompassing and vibrant we are there with David shivering in shame through the streets or awash in boozy, conflicted confidence in the bars. Baldwin handles words with the best of them. ‘I stared at absurd Paris, which was as cluttered now, under the scalding sun, as the landscape of my heart.’ The novel almost feels like something fromErnest Hemingwayat the outset, and perhaps this is what makes the subversion of the traditional concepts of masculinity play out even more effectively. David is living in Paris spending time with Hella, a girl he ‘thought she would be fun to have fun with,’ and drinks his time away with friends while she is gone to Spain to consider his marriage proposal—something that seems more going through the motions of expectations than a heartfelt desire for marriage. The idea of an expatriate in Paris has been a frequently romanticized theme in US literature, and through the characters we get a taste of the idea ‘you don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.’ This is true of Giovanni as well, who has left Italy after a personal tragedy and also uses travel as a means of escaping who one was to discover who they will become under a new geographical context. However, we see how ‘nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom,’ and the characters find themselves feeling dislocated and unmoored more than anything, perhaps running to their own destruction in search of having anything to grasp. ‘Perhaps everybody has a garden of Eden, I don't know; but they have scarcely seen their garden before they see the flaming sword. Then, perhaps, life only offers the choice of remembering the garden or forgetting it.’ ‘The Americans have no sense of doom, none whatever,’ Baldwin reflects. ‘They do not recognize doom when they see it,’ and right from the start we are keenly aware everything is careening towards imminent doom. The story is framed on the final day of Giovanni’s life before he faces the guillotine (the guillotine was last used in 1977 and then France outlawed capital punishment in 1981) and mostly told reflecting on the story of the time David and Giovanni spent together until Hella returns and everyone must face-up for their actions. There is a tone of dread permeating every facet of the novel, even worming its way into the nooks and crannies of desire so that we feel nearly suffocated by its imminence. ‘The beast which Giovanni had awakened in me would never go to sleep again; but one day I would not be with Giovanni any more. And would I then, like all the others, find myself turning and following all kinds of boys down God knows what dark avenues, into what dark places? With this fearful intimation there opened in me hatred for Giovanni which was as powerful as my love and which was nourished by the same roots.’ This suffocation seems to impart the social forces that impose the shame and dread, largely because David struggles with a sense of identity that is outside the socially enforced expectations of gender and sexuality. In his childhood he hears arguments between between his widower father and Aunt Ellen, with his Aunt chastizing his drunkenness and womanizing as setting a bad example while his father expresses his desires for David to be a ‘true man’ and ‘when I say a man, Ellen, I don’t mean a Sunday school teacher.’ The expectations of what is masculinity haunt him, causing his early gay experiences to be a mark of shame and self-hatred in him. ‘I couldn't be free until I was attached—no,committed—to someone.’ There are some very misogynistic moments in the novel—be advised—though Baldwin seems fairly aware of them as such and the comments by both David and Giovanni seems a reflection of the social conditioning they are struggling within. Not that this excuses their comments or behaviors. Though we also see how the gender expectations are even more oppressive for women, such as Hella’s discussion on how it is a ‘humiliating necessity’ that women are disregarded unless she is attached to a man, ‘to be at the mercy of some gross, unshaven strange before you can begin to be yourself.’ This doubles into the theme on how when chasing a sense of freedom, you often find yourself more constrained or oppressed. ‘I was guilty and irritated and full of love and pain. I wanted to kick him and I wanted to take him in my arms’ The expectations of heteronormativity cause David great internal suffering and he can never fully give himself to Giovanni. We see this play out in David’s symbolic impressions of Giovanni’s room, seeing it as both a haven for love but, due to his shame and disgust with himself, begins to despise the room. His desires come chased with loathing and diffidence which is a destructive force that wounds not only the one who swallows it down but all those around them as well. As if they are bystanders to the blast. It becomes a betrayal, not only to the self, but to love in general. ‘You want to leave Giovanni because he makes you stink. You want to despise Giovanni because he is not afraid of the stink of love. You want to kill him in the name of all your lying moralities. And you--you are immoral. You are, by far, the most immoral man I have met in all my life. Look, look what you have done to me. Do you think you could have done this if I did not love you? Is this what you should do to love?’ If one is caught up trying to play the role of who society thinks they should be, they can never be who they truly are and the dissonance between the hidden self and the public self brings only trauma. This becomes more intensely felt as one slips away from youth where playacting is more easily digestible. ‘Confusion is a luxury which only the very, very young can possibly afford and you are not that young anymore,’ David is warned. Warnings from older men appear all throughout the novel, with a particularly chilling moment in the bar when a man appears like a haggard and horrid seer from myths to broadcast David’s doom. Self-deception becomes a major theme of the novel in this way. ‘People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception,’ Baldwin writes and we witness how David’s acknowledgement of his own self-deception but unwillingness to fully depart from it becomes his own undoing. Similarly, the frustrations of others that become seemingly hopeless and unbearable destroys them in turn. ‘People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.’ But it is also why we all must fight for a more welcoming and empathetic society that allows space for such things. The thing about social expectations is we are all complicit in them by perpetuating them instead of dismantling them andGiovanni’s Roomis a call to confront this in life. We’ve come a long way, but there is still a lot to be done. ‘If you cannot love me, I will die. Before you came I wanted to die, I have told you many times. It is cruel to have made me want to live only to make my death more bloody.’ I could rant forever about the power and beauty ofGiovanni’s Roomand Baldwin as an author in general. This is an emotional ride that will shake you to the core while dazzling you with pure poetic intensity. This is a novel full of incredible social and interpersonal criticisms that bruise you but make you better for it and I cannot wait to read literally everything Baldwin wrote.Giovanni’s Roomis not only a queer masterpiece but an all around amazing and essential novel. 5/5 ‘No matter how it seems now, I must confess: I loved him. I do not think that I will ever love anyone like that again.’ ...more |
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Aug 31, 2023
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Aug 31, 2023
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Aug 31, 2023
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1506734189
| 9781506734187
| 1506734189
| 4.37
| 2,070
| May 20, 2021
| Aug 08, 2023
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it was amazing
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Sara’s longterm relationship takes a turn in her adorable and informative graphic memoir,Us,when Diana breaks some big news to her. After a lifetime
Sara’s longterm relationship takes a turn in her adorable and informative graphic memoir,Us,when Diana breaks some big news to her. After a lifetime of trying to understand themselves, Diana has realized she is a trans woman and is ready to make the transition but is nervous how Sara will treat her as well as all the social elements that will inevitably come into play. This is a really tender and touching look at Diana’s transition as well as Sara’s journey to realizing she is bisexual, all told through Sara Soler’s cute illustrations and translated into english by Siliva Perea Labayen (Sara and Diana are from Spain). The memoir proceeds with a bubbly and boisterous energy that makes it fast-paced, humorous and very accessible while still productively covering big ideas. From social stigmas and harassment (Sara points out how misuderstandings and disinformation have allowed people to ‘opt harmful attitudes’ that can be very hurtful and dangerous) to the discomforts around how to present oneself and the oppressive weight of social gender roles,Uscovers a lot of topics through the story of Sara and Diana’s relationship and experience. It is careful to make room for many different kinds of experiences as well, discussing the topics in the way they related to them but showing that everyone is unique and may have different experiences. ‘There are as many experiences as there are trans people in the world. Each person chooses their own path.’ This is a really lovely graphic memoir and truly shows how much love and support goes a long way. [image] ’You’re not alone’ is one of the most important messages in this book. This story covers several years and does well by showing how coming to terms and transitioning can be a big process. When Diana first brings it up it is a full two years before she is ready to make any changes and the opening of this book dives into a lot of anxieties that can keep people trapped in their own silence and afraid to be themselves. What makesUsreally work is how effectively it juggles a lot of big concepts on the intersections along the spectrum of gender and sexuality. It is a good look at how society comes into play as well. For example, Diana notes how finally seeing positive trans representation in media was a big opening for her to finally start addressing what she was feeling inside and Sara discusses how the stereotypes of trans people and usually only being seen as villains or murder victims can be really harmful. Especially in a demographic that has an alarmingly highsuicide rateand rate of beingvictims to violence.Having positive representation isn’t the only thing though, and having the support of loved ones and space to accept yourself positively have shown to be ahuge mental health benefitfor lgbtq+ people of all varieties. I really appreciate how this book never deadnames or misgenders Diana, even in the scenes before her transition, which shows that it is actually not that difficult to get that correct if you try. And earnestly trying is what is often most important. Through Sara’s journey the book also discusses the stigmas against bisexual people (like myself), which I appreciated being threaded in for a larger scope of discussion on these topics. Perhaps the biggest topic discusses is gender roles and how socially enforced stereotypes around gender can be harmful to everyone. Things like “boys don’t cry” or “girls should be delicate”, for instance, are shown as harmful and how beliefs on how someone of a gender should act are increasingly oppressive if that just isn’t who you are. There are also a lot of interesting looks at how, once she presents as a woman, Diana begins to experience the harassment and misogyny faced by women and it is really eye opening for her. Something I found this book does well is offer information and ideas in a way that reach a large audience and how it applies to them. It’s just a well done book but through all of it, the most important thing we learn about Diana and Sara is: [image] ”We’re happy!” I really enjoyedUsby Sara Soler and I feel this is an important book that many can get a lot out of as well as just enjoy the couple’s really loving relationship and openness about their experiences.Usis fun, funny and quite effectively done while being very heartfelt. 5/5 ...more |
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Aug 29, 2023
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037461007X
| 9780374610074
| 037461007X
| 3.60
| 1,362
| Aug 08, 2023
| Aug 08, 2023
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it was amazing
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‘Death was a communal process even if you wanted to experience it alone.’ When returning to a familiar place, the comfort of recognition always arrives ‘Death was a communal process even if you wanted to experience it alone.’ When returning to a familiar place, the comfort of recognition always arrives in tandem with the acute awareness of anything that has altered. Facades change, as do the people within them and it becomes like a sort of geographical ship of Theseus while we, too, have changed in our mutual time apart. This dissonance is both thematic and tonal to Maya Binyam’s brilliant debut novel,Hangman,amplified by the state of separation having been one of political exile and the return shrouded in a bit of mystery that seems to only portend the news of death. It is a story made up of smaller stories all cascading at the narrator, each registering with a near-mythic property to them as we hear life stories of politics, family, traditions, exorcisms or simply two grad students arguing ideology. Binyam’s writing is utterly captivating, crafting a surreal and sardonic tale of an émigré finding themselves a stranger in a strange land that happens to be his home country now as unfamiliar to him as he is to it. Moving with a steady drip of existential dread through a labyrinth of conversations, the narrator seems stubbornly disinterested in assembling a sense of meaning or self-reflection and instead allows himself to be pulled through events as if ‘waiting for my life to happen’ in a way that makes everything feel threateningly disjointed and disorienting. Wryly humorous and deeply ponderous,Hangmanreads like an existential fable on exile, homecomings, culture and the ways each shape and are shaped by political history all wrapped up in the narrator’s surreal journey back into Africa. ‘Sometimes the events of the world were clear, and at other times they rearranged themselves in such a way that nothing made sense, and even if they did make sense to other people, they made no discernible sense to you.’ This is an astonishingly accomplished debut with sharp writing that pulls off stylistic flair and is entirely engrossing. The opening chapter had me completely enthralled, opening with death and a body transported on a return trip home, and it keeps you turning pages with a growing tension and dread as we guess as to what is occurring and getting tiny pieces of clarity along the way—not unlike the stick-figure game that is the novel’s namesake. It is a rather enigmatic novel, one where the events feel akin to having bit off more than one could chew and trying to make sense of it all, though the writing manages to create this effect while still having confident control over all the elements. We are at the mercy of Binyam’s narration through a man who, through his refusal of a deeper meaning to anything, will not read between the lines for symbolism, and it whisks us through the story shrouded in a sort of acerbic ambiguity. There are almost no proper nouns, making room for rather humorously cumbersome flourishes like repeatedly addressing someone as “my son’s mother’s brother” but it also establishes an atmosphere of distance and detachment. Locations are never named, though through the whiffs of clues we can assume it is somewhere in a post-revolution country of Africa and the narrator had been a political refugee in the US (there are references to drones and a President who “looks like us” as his brother writes). It all seems rather cacophonous at times, seemingly leading somewhere we don’t quite grasp which is often reflected in the cities themselves—’viaducts cast the city in shadow, enticing its inhabitants to ascend staircases that led to nowhere’—or homes such as the narrator’s cousin’s that seems to be made up ‘entirely of hallways.’ In many ways it feels adjacent toFranz Kafka,though shorn of the Europeanness, but here it isn’t that the logic is impenetrable or simply meaningless, it’s that we are outside of being able to even grasp the meaning while the narrator insists on it’s meaninglessness that keeps us feeling small in the mechanisms of some threatening and surreal story. ‘Some situations in life really were confusing and couldn’t be appreciated without prior knowledge about local customs, current events, and other people’s personal lives. However, that information was usually discernible, even if it wasn’t explained in a straightforward manner. Even invisible histories had their physical manifestations.’ This addresses issues on two fronts in the novel, being both his feeling outside the country of his birth but also seen in the ways the country in which one takes refuge might resist any efforts to understand their cultural differences and ‘People just choose to ignore those manifestations, because being ignorant gave them an excuse to do whatever they wanted.’ The home he has left is no longer his own it seems, and feels ‘only partially accessible to me, given that tie, geography and my changing legal status as a citizen, refugee, tourist, etc., had conspired to dislocate me from it.’ He feels distressed by the dichotomy of re-emerging in a society of more collectivist traditions after having been shaped by the mold of individualism rampant in US culture yet seems uninterested in examining it beyond the surface despite having, we briefly learn, been jailed for being a political revolutionary. ‘He could either be like everyone and help no one, or be an individual and help the world.’ Politics, it seems, is constantly invading and morphing everything and everyone under it. It lingers over every conversation and many of the mordant situations read like parables, such as being required to have a cart to get your baggage at the airport and having to pay someone in order to obtain a cart but having to way of accessing money, or his cousin asking to invest in the completion of a home that has already been finished. The narrator’s own former home is now occupied by missionaries who presumably purchased the house from the government, making for a quick yet devastating jab at the legacies of missionaries colonizing Africa. As for US aid programs to Africa,Hangmanaddresses aid as something that often exists more for the benefit of the giver to feel they’ve done something than for the recipient, ‘Sending them in lieu of things the local government had asked for, and which might have sustained its constituents forever.’We see this in the used clothing a man forces upon our narrator, or the phone’s the President gives to those who lost their homes in a disaster when what they really needed was a home. But we feel good because someone was selected as ‘a stand-in for the gratitude of all’ and we can turn our heads again. ‘That was how people, living people, dealt with the new of people who were suffering: pretending to summon the experience of dying…Pretending that it could be controlled was just something that living people did in order to convince themselves that the real experience was something that happened only to others.’ Our narrator sees much of the way people process grief and tragedy as a ‘performance,’ and it is one he isn’t inclined to participate in. Even the potential death of his own brother doesn’t spark anything in him (though his emails do seem to mimic the scam emails of the early 2000s and perhaps he suspects his brother of just trying to get money). It’s all the same to him either way: ‘Most of the things that happened in life had no meaning, but eventually all the meaningless things combined to produce an emotion so strong that people felt the need to find an explanation for it. So, at the end of their lives, they described the events of their lives through the lens of happiness, or sadness, or resentment, even though the same things happened to basically all of us.’ Of course we can see how he might be jaded from time in prison and the US, which he finds less the land of possibility and freedom and more just another way to be oppressed, this time largely by racism and his Otherness marking him as suspicious and not worth bridging cultural barriers to understand. Hangmanis often quite bleak, particularly with a narrator we see being pushed along as if he weren’t even in control of himself (‘and then my body went away’ he says to describe his getting on the flight to Africa), and slowly being transformed by his experiences without any attempt at consent. Yet for all the bleakness, the surreal humor keeps it afloat and it refuses to be bogged down. The ending is a knockout, one that I found excellently executed despite not usually thinking twists actually work beyond initial shock. It arrives as a two-fold twist and while I think we can get caught up in all the foreshadowing of the main twist, doing so allows the second part of it to catch us off guard. Binyam is not only good at crafting the writing of a novel, but shows a brilliant understanding of the mechanics of how a reader reads and processes a text and uses that to help pull off her conclusion. I really loved this one. It’s elusive and sly, surreal and sinister, yet rather goofy and fun even in the face of otherwise unbearable bleakness.Hangmanis a unique look at the exile narrative, one that turns its own gaze inward, as well as the ideas of our own understanding of ourselves and our place in the world. Witty and wild,Hangmanis an extraordinary debut and this is a strong promise to start a career I can’t wait to watch. 4.5/5 ‘It didn’t matter that we had been political prisoners, neglectful fathers, exiles, and so on, because now we were just two people, two tourists, returned to a country that might as well have been any country in the world. That was how insignificant our personal experience was, even if that personal experience had derailed the events of everyday life.’ ...more |
Notes are private!
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Aug 19, 2023
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Sep 05, 2023
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Aug 19, 2023
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Hardcover
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1737625350
| 9781737625353
| 1737625350
| 3.29
| 524
| Sep 19, 2023
| Sep 19, 2023
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liked it
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Although humans like to think of ourselves as above the animal kingdom, we are still animals. With Hiromi Kawakami, we often find any distinction betw
Although humans like to think of ourselves as above the animal kingdom, we are still animals. With Hiromi Kawakami, we often find any distinction between human and animal to be rather tenuous, and in the eight stories found in her collectionDragon Palace,we not only find the characters’ personal identities to often be in flux and ambiguous but also their animalistic identity. ‘Each and every home contains at least one member who has something inhuman about them,’ a character advises in one story, and we see a spectrum of characters ranging from definitely human, to transitioning from animal to human, and many others who openly announce ‘I am not human.’ This new release, translated byTed Goossen,is actually a collection mostly drawing from Hiromi Kawakami’s earlier stories but they all fit together quite nicely with overarching themes and an overall narrative feeling approaching folklore. An octopus becomes a human sex pest, an older woman commands a cult with sex, moles care for depressed humans, humans care for humans that might also be foxes, kitchens have gods living under the stove and more fantastical and fascinating occurrences go on in this collection. With gendered examinations on sexuality (often brushing up against the taboo) and sexual power dynamics, and a look at identity in outlandish situations, Hiromi Kawakami’sDragon Palaceis chock full of dark charm. I’ve long loved the quietness of Kawakami’s narratives, the way she can make loneliness snuggle up with you like a cat on your lap, and the way a character’s day to day can shimmer in nearly overwhelming bittersweet emotion. There is certainly another side to her as well where she can crack open the world and pour out a dark magic that awaits just beneath the surface.Dragon Palacefinds itself among the latter, feeling much more likeRecord of a Night Too Briefor the interconnected stories ofPeople From My Neighborhoodthan, say, my personal favoriteThe Nakano Thrift Shop.Which isn’t a bad thing, I quite enjoy the whimsicality she finds in the bizarre and her ability to write stories that feel like folklore just outside of full understanding, I just tend to really love the softness of her writing in the former. Though I wonder, perhaps, how much of that is the brilliance ofAllison Markin Powell’s translation, whereas both this andPeople From My Neighborhoodwere Goossen and have a more detatched feel to them not unlike howHaruki Murakamicomes across in his (or really any other translator’s) translation. Not that this is necessarily negative, as it seamlessly moves between normal reality and the more bizarre moments without making them feel out of place which is a really key aspect to capture in her stories. Like most of her work,Dragon Palaceoften steers situations towards the sexual and there appears to be a few themes for her explorations of it. Large age gaps are often present, such as in her belovedStrange Weather in Tokyo,and inFox’s Denwe read about a caretaker for the elderly who slowly falls into a sexual relationship with a man twice her age (after having earlier chastised him for sexual harassment) as well as the storyShimazakiwhere a woman falls in love with her ancestor who is now over 400 years old. With the latter, the idea seems to use romantic love to probe our ideas of what familial love is by approaching taboos, which is also common for Kawakami. I did findThe Ten Loves of Mr. Nishinoto be rather problematic in this way though here it feels more symbolic like in a fairy tale. The storyThe Roardetails the life of a character who is passed amongst his sisters, feeding from their breasts and marrying one of them. While I think “sister” is meant loosely here (maybe?), I’m curious why breastfeeding from an older sister is something that has now appeared in multiple of her books (it is used to convey the closeness of Nishino with his sister inThe Ten Loves of Mr. Nishinoas well). As with much of the more bizarre aspects in her more magical tales, Kawakami seems to be pushing the envelope on ideas of relationships and love into the taboo as a sort of social commentary on how couched our ideas are in social norms. I don’t, however, find it nearly as effective as, say,Sayaka Muratawho puts her finger more directly on the topic and guides the reader towards that understanding in what is usually a more shocking manner. Though the stories here certainly explore sexual power dynamics through many of these moments. Two of the stronger stories bookend this collection and both feature an animal that has turned human, the first being an octopus who became a man in order to seduce women and the latter being a sea horse who was drawn to the love of a man and has spent decades being objectified and passed from husband to husband as a sort of trophy (it made me want to revisitCassandra Khaw’s The Salt Grows Heavy which opens with a revenge tale of sorts for that type of situation). The juxtaposition takes a stab at the way unequal sexual power dynamics are often socially normalized such as the narrator engaging in some rather misogynistic bonding and finding it completely normal, even ‘liberating’ as he says. ‘I felt strangely liberated. I stood there assigning numbers and adjectives to each woman that came by, one after another. In the process, they stopped being individuals with personalities and real lives.’ Which is all undeniably gross and I’m certain the woman they chase through the streets as she runs for her safety does not find the experience liberating. Nor does the sea horse turned woman find being objectified to be liberating and instead seeks to return to the ocean, as does her daughter (that her sons have no ocean-tendencies but the daughter seems so much like her nudges the theme as well). In Kawakami stories we notice the taboo sexuality, though the fact that sex can often be a horror story for women who are assaulted, objectified or otherwise abused is something that is commonplace.The Kitchen God,for instance, has a sexual assault occur late in the story that passes with hardly any recognition (that aside, it is easily my favorite story in the collection, following a young woman with kleptomania and the society of older women in her housing complex, but also a kitchen god spirit). The title storyDragon Palace,however, throws the dynamic out of whack and features a woman revered like a cult leader who uses sexuality to keep her followers in line, and they in turn using it against her. ‘I didn't know my own name. I didn't know why I had been born into this world. I had no idea what would become of me.’ Though not everything about this collection is entirely sexual, don’t let me give the wrong impression. A rather charming story tiltedMolefeatures—you guessed it!—a mole who picks up depressed humans and brings them into his hole until they recover. The humans have ‘lost the energy to stay alive,’ but ‘this does not mean they are dead. Apparently, dying requires actual strength,’ and when he identifies their condition they shrink down to a size that can fit in his pocket. This story also addresses the ideas of animals in our own society, with him working an office job long enough that people mostly don’t notice anymore. I like the tenderness of this one as well and shows a strong idea of community because the loss of human to this condition has a ripple effect: ‘If left alone, they hollow out. First, they themselves, then the place where they stand, then ultimately the entire area around them empties. All real substance is lost.’ This loss of substance seems to permeate this collection, with ideas of identity being a sort of substance the characters are unsure what to do with. The octopus, for instance, is unsure if he is octopus or man at times and feels he’s lost that connection to the ocean (likely why he often shifts into ‘an undulating, shape-shifting blob’ with the frail grasp on identity), and much ofThe Roardeals with having no idea of ones own purpose. Are we animals just following instinct and surviving, or are we some grand idea of humans with a purpose, and does chasing the belief in the latter lead us to despair? Hiromi Kawakami is a drop-everything-to-read author for me and I’m glad I did that withDragon Palacedespite being a tad underwhelmed at times. That said, I read this fairly slowly which seemed to help, as I’d often find myself thinking of the stories for several days and enjoying them more the longer I turned them over in my head. She has such a wonderful use of whimsicality, and while these are rather dark stories they still feel effervescent in the mind while you read them. A strange yet ultimately satisfying collection. 3.5/5 ...more |
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Sep 28, 2023
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Jul 21, 2023
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1910312649
| 9781910312643
| 1910312649
| 3.76
| 58,963
| Jul 23, 2020
| Jul 23, 2020
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really liked it
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‘Do I have to smash a glass over the head of every single man I come into contact with, just so I leave a fucking mark?’ Power dynamics have been a top ‘Do I have to smash a glass over the head of every single man I come into contact with, just so I leave a fucking mark?’ Power dynamics have been a topic of necessary criticism in recent years, with a reckoning coming to those who exploit their power to abuse others. This has notably addressed the entertainment industry, with horror stories surfacing of monsters of anywhere from massive wealth like Harvey Weinstein to niche fame like Ryan Adams abusing and harassing women and many have paused to consider how we process the art of monstrous men (such was the title ofClaire Dederer’s viral essay, which you can readhere). Into the fray comes Eliza Clarks debut novel,Boy Parts,a first person narration chronicling the spiral into abuse and otherwise unhinged behavior of Irina, a strikingly attractive rising star in the realm of fetish photography. Opting to shoot so-called average looking men she finds on the streets to model for her in work that subverts the male gaze and examines ideas of power and sexuality, Irina has snagged a career changing gallery exhibition in London and sets about revisiting the trajectory of her art, triggering memories that show a history of abuse and struggles in an art world where only the strong survive. Meanwhile, her fixation with a shy Tesco cashier and a head full of drugs are amalgamating into a dangerous cocktail. Sharp, darkly humorous and caustically insightful,Boy Partsis a bold maelstrom of sexuality, violence and power hierarchies that is too engaging to turn away from in horror even as it seeps in and shakes you to the core. ‘I look at the photos again, the ones I didn't delete. I look at his purple face, his bloody chin and nipple, his swollen cheek. I wonder what the fuck I have to do for people to recognise me as a threat, you know?’ First, shoutout toEmma’s reviewthat inspired me to pick this up immediately, I’m so glad I did. Clark manages to make a feverish descent to hell into a thrill ride where we clutch the page like the harness on a roller coaster and spend the whole trip both screaming and laughing. This shakes you around like a rag doll and you love it as you begin to seeBoy Partsas your dominant partner and while you are going to get pleasure you are also going to get pain. She takes you down the tracks of her prose so effortlessly, balancing the action of parties, photoshoots and…well, completely unhinged moments that often involve shards of glass, with the softer, introspective times revisiting Irina’s history in the classroom and behind the camera. She captures dialogue and regional accents as if she bottled it up from the air and pinned it to the page where, still fresh and alive, it squirms in discomfort as much as the reader. The sections written as text messages are amusing as well, with drunk misspellings or autocorrect mistakes that felt true to life. There are some laugh out loud lines, such as describing Timothée Chalamet as ‘that white-bread, absolute fucking baguette of a lad from Call Me by Your Name’ (I texted photos of that page to several friends), and I was obsessed with Irina’s obsession withLord of the Rings: ‘He eats loudly, reminding me of that bit inThe Return of the King(the film) where Denethor is eating cherry tomatoes, and making Pippin sing for him. In this metaphor—allegory?—I guess I’m Pippin, which is strange because I’ve never identified much with the Hobbits before, and I’m actually a little annoyed that this is the position I’m in. Shocked to hear it comes in pints, and wondering if my simple Hobbit songs are good enough for these grand halls and their talking toilets.’ Yea, of course I’m going to love a book that rattles off lines like this.Boy Partsis an impressive debut that, considering the subject matter, reads like she just punched out the scariest person in prison on the first day. The book has drawn comparisons withOttessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation as well as American Psycho byBret Easton Ellis(the latter most notably during a delightfully disturbing scene when sudden violence in a fancy restaurant for extremely wealthy conservatives has people more concerned if the staff will comp their meal for witnessing violence than actually concerned about the violence), though with a woman instead of Bateman. Not unlikePsychowe do see this as a criticism on wealth and consumerism as one of the themes—amusingly, Irina gets termed as a ‘working-class’ artist despite being able to afford fancy universities something she has an uneasy relationship with seeing it as both an insult but not upset it can help open doors for her—and, well, the violence and unreliable narration. Is Irina actually truthful to what she not only tells us, but tells herself as well? Is all of this happening? The book this felt closest to for me, however, is the ideas inRoberto Bolaño’s Distant Star and how art can have moral boundaries that, when crossed, becomes evil. Here we have Irina, a tall, intimidating redhead criticized by her professor, lesbian art icon and former lover, Frank, for having ‘had a contemptuous attitude towards my models. I clearly saw them as interchangeable, disposable objects.’ This is not unlike the depiction of the poet-turned-murderer inDistant Star,who uses actual photos of women he killed as an art exhibit that even distresses his fellow fascists, that he ‘looked down on the world as if he were standing on top of a volcano; he saw you and me and himself from a great height, and, in his eyes, we were all, to be quite frank, pathetic insects.’ If abuse is leading to the photographs Irina takes, is the art somehow tainted by this? And whew, does some alarming things happen to get the shots she wants. ‘Consuming a piece of art is two biographies meeting: the biography of the artist that might disrupt the viewing of the art; the biography of the audience member that might shape the viewing of the art.’ --Claire Dederer, Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma Key to this book are the gazes into power structures that shatters any rose colored glasses they might try to hide behind. ‘Whether I’m in control or losing it, I’ve always had a power thing,’ Irina admits, and this is central to her art. Clark brings us into the world of fetish art and kink sexualities and explores how those with power over others very often abuse it. The whole absolute power corrupts absolutely maxim may come to mind, though Clark is also careful to show how just becausethisstory is about abuse doesn’t mean that all kink or dom/sub relationships are inherently abusive and harmful. As mentioned earlier, the recent years have been a litany of men in positions of power in the art world being exposed for using this power to assault and silence women, though we also know this has occurred throughout time with big names such as Picasso or Edward Hopper abusing their muses, and Andy Warhol has often been criticized for exploiting those around him. Clark is probing some interesting ideas of power and gender by reversing the gender roles with Irina being the intimidating role using her power to exploit her models. And hit them. ‘What about any of that read as safe, sane or consensual?’ she even admits to herself, yet sort of loves the power over these men. And not just men, but even Flo, her best (only?) friend and former lover that she keeps around to take care of her (okay, I sort of loved Flo, she really meant well and I felt bad for her). Now the idea of reversing gender in this sort of power hierarchy isn’t new—I quite enjoyedAzareen Van der Vliet Oloomiexploring this inFra Keeler—but I quite liked how this touches on ideas of “woke culture” and how society will overlook abuse if they find a way to look at it as subversive. There is a moment when Flo tries to find a way to look at buying heterosexual, exploitive porn by men into a queer act of disruption where even the lesbian feminist professor can only roll her eyes in embarrassment. Its why books such asIn the Dream HousebyCarmen Maria Machadohave been talked about as important for reminding people that abuse can happen even in relationships that we are championing. Like yes, protect queer relationships and let us be considered legal and normal, but also yes abuse can happen in them and we shouldn’t allow people to suffer in silence. ‘and that gets sewn into them young, doesn’t it? Violence.’ Irina represents a lot of power abuse, such as how being photographed by her is framed as an honor to these men. Such as the unhoused boy who possibly meets a bad end who should “feel thankful” for a place to stay and a starring role in her art. Clark has a sharp eye for the ways people try to represent themselves and there are some great insights into behavior in this book, and how Irina is able to hone in on it and exploit it. Even Eddie from Tesco, her “muse” in this book (and a lot of this is why muse culture is so toxic and exploitative) admits he comes across like an INCEL and can’t believe someone who looks like Irina would be interested in him. Yet for all the power Irina exhibits over others, there is still the aspect of a patriarchal society she works within and how dangerous it is for women. Men lash out at her and she is often in danger (her works bring out a LOT of bad behavior from the men) and some of the violence is legitimate self-defense. There is also a lot of looking at how men with money can elbow their way into anything despite mediocrity, that there is ‘still this entitled, still this generic, still this wealth of privilege and connections filling a void where there should be talent,’ and when they don’t get what they want they lash out. Often violently. ‘If we were playing rock, paper, scissors, but it’s camera, toxic masculinity, skull — camera wins’ I couldn’t put this book down. And when I had to do so for life reasons, I thought about it the whole time.Boy Partsis a distressing novel, but one that probes really important questions about power, sexuality and violence, and does so in a way that will have you laughing as much as you are cringing. I especially appreciate the ending and that Clark understands the conclusion of themes is vastly more effective than a tidy ending with a full stop as it allows Irina and her shenanigans to play out further in your mind long after the book concludes. The trigger warnings on this would be a mile long and this isn't for the faint of heart, but it is a wickedly well done ride. The writing is sharp and so is the social commentary and I will definitely read anything Eliza Clark puts out next. 4.5/5 ‘Nothing matters, and nothing lasts. Everyone forgets, and everything disappears. The things you do, the things you are, it's all nothing. Would anyone miss you, if you went away? Would anyone look for you? Would anyone listen, or even care, if I hurt you? If I put my hands around your neck and crushed your windpipe and chopped you up, would anyone find you? And if it's a no to any of these, did you even exist in the first place?’ ...more |
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Jul 18, 2023
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Jul 18, 2023
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Jul 18, 2023
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ebook
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0802160859
| 9780802160850
| 3.99
| 16,833
| Feb 22, 2022
| Nov 14, 2023
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really liked it
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Claire Keegan is a master of quiet profundity and her prose is so succinct and intoxicating that she could write the whole vastness of the night sky i
Claire Keegan is a master of quiet profundity and her prose is so succinct and intoxicating that she could write the whole vastness of the night sky into a single sentence and the stars and moonshine would not be diminished. Those who, like myself, have been dazzled by Keegan’s novellas (I’d rateFosteras my favorite book I read last year) will not be surprised to learn she began her career writing short stories where she refined her seemingly preternatural skills of brief, poetic simplicity that slices straight to an emotional core.So Late in the Dayis a sampler plate of sorts, offering three stories from the span of her career that highlights the best of her abilities. The stories collected here offer a much grittier vision than her two novellas and hone in on the struggles of women under a patriarchal society. Keegan excels at crafting a story where the dark shadows of humanity are lurking within stories delivered with idyllic imagery and gorgeous phrases, of people ‘carrying smoothly on, despite the tangle of human conflicts and the knowledge of how everything must end.’ This is an excellent introduction to Keegan’s short stories and a window into the incredible amount of insights and social criticisms she can neatly fold into a tiny space. ‘You know what is at the heart of misogyny? When it comes down to it?...it’s simply about not giving…whether it’s not giving us the vote or not giving help with the dishes—it’s all clitched to the same wagon.’ The three stories here are well chosen to represent the versatility and grace of Keegan’s work though I wish there were more in this small volume, particularly as only one story was new to me. It begins with the title story that was first printed in The New Yorker in 2022 (I reviewed the story at lengthHERE), and the other two being from her collectionsWalk the Blue FieldsandAntarctica(if you are interested, I reviewed the latterHERE). But as always, Keegan bewitches the reader with her words. Her sentences feel like you could unpack them and have a lush green field roll forth from the vowels, trees sprouting from each noun, and verbs becoming a sweet spring wind and rain. It feels much like the description of her writer character in the second story: ‘She had made the incision in place and time, and infused it with a climate, and longing. There was earth and fire and water on these pages; there was a man and a woman and human loneliness, disappointment.’ With such an economy of language she brings the world and characters into our minds as so alive with their fears, frustrations, hopes and dreams. ‘‘She thought of Antarctica, the snow and ice and the bodies of dead explorers. Then she thought of hell, and then eternity.’’ There is a theme of interpersonal communications between men and women here, often demonstrating how women are objectified, looked down upon or treated as property and how misogyny can be passed down generationally with sons falling into step with the behaviors of their fathers. The title story deals with this rather directly, with Cathal, despite vowing to break the cycle, ending up driving his love away when his fears and fragility get the best of him. Sabrine must reflect him back upon himself in order for him to realize the reality of his behaviors and must of the story deals with the emotional as well as physical labors that burden women that men just assume they should carry. ‘‘At least half of men your age just want us to shut up and give you what you want, that you’re spoiled and become contemptible when things don’t go your way.’ In many of Keegan’s stories we see how the inability of the men to productively process and address their emotions becomes another emotional burden women must shoulder. Cathals insistence that ‘if things have not ended badly, they have not ended,’ is also a stark reminder thatthe most dangerous time for a women is when she leaves her partner,with 75% of all domestic assaults occurring during a separation. Much of this stems from a belief of women as property, which we see in the chilling twist of the final story,Antarctica,where what begins as simple fun for a woman looking for an extramarital good time turns into something nightmarishly sinister. In this story, Keegan does an excellent job of disarming the reader, making you feel the initial unease but then lulling you into a feeling of comfort until the twist strikes. The idea of women seen as property is also represented in the second story,The Long and Painful Death,where there are multiple references to men not wanting women to own land. In her bookThe Second Sex,French feminist and existentialist philosopherSimone de Beauvoirspends an entire chapter drawing a direct line from property ownership of land to the social assumptions of husbands possessing their wives like legal property in which the woman has no say. In the story, the narrator is living in the former home ofHeinrich Böllon a writer’s residency when she is intruded upon by a professor who wishes to see the house. He is overtly dismayed to find a woman residing in Böll’s residence who would spend time baking cakes or enjoying a swim, as if a woman’s leisure between periods of writing is a direct attack on the legacy of Böll. That she is unwed is also certainly seen by him as a slight against all men, and here we can see Keegan approach the idea that unwed women without children who write are seen as frivolous and obscene whereas for a man to do the same is the height of literary genius. Keegan is a master of short stories and, while it would have been nice to see more new work,So Late in the Dayis a lovely little collection. This would make an excellent introduction to Keegan and I would highly recommend checking out her full short story collections as well. With so little, Keegan can create so much. 4.5/5 ...more |
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not set
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Jul 14, 2023
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0141036141
| 9780141036144
| B006QNC5VC
| 4.19
| 4,819,284
| Jun 08, 1949
| Jul 03, 2008
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really liked it
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‘If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.’ ‘History stopped in 1936,’ George Orwell oncesaid tofellow a ‘If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.’ ‘History stopped in 1936,’ George Orwell oncesaid tofellow authorArthur Koestler.During his time in the Spanish Civil War, Orwell observed the pervasiveness of propaganda as a pillar upholding authoritarianism, from censored newspapers to lies perpetuated for political convenience and began to fear that ‘the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world.’ This fear presented itself across the whole of his works during his short life, culminating in his famous1984where he warns ‘who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.’ Published in 1949 and written as Orwell wasdying from tuberculosis,he didn’t live long to see how1984and his dire warnings against authoritarianism would have a lasting effect even to this day, often being used by all sides of the political spectrum as a cultural touchstone. And while this is mostly owing to the broad criticisms showing how any ideology can become oppressive when hungry for power, it also exemplifies his own dread that words will be twisted and quoted as cudgels to fit a desired purpose as truth is washed away. A harrowing story of dystopia, surveillance, manipulation and resistance being crushed underfoot,1984still chills today with its themes on collective vs individual identity under totalitarianism and controlling all aspects of reality to eliminate all those who step outside the boundaries of orthodoxy. ‘We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.’ When we read sci-fi, words like “prophetic” and “warning” often get applied.1984continues to remain relevant due to its warnings against irresponsible use of rhetoric, which almost makes the references to it amusing or ironic. Such as theApple computer commercialin 1984 that uses the novel for the sake of marketing (and what is “marketing” but a euphemism for propaganda) a product that would lead to all sorts of concerns over government surveillance for which people would quote1984in addressing them. I think the term prophetic often frames a book in a way that causes us to consider how close it came true, which seems beside the point because when we look at the ways itdidn’t,that often becomes an excuse for delegitimization or ignoring the warning. Born Eric Arthur Blair in Bengal in 1903 and passing in 1950, Orwell’s short life left a lasting legacy from his works likeAnimal Farmbeing classroom staples in the US and terms like “Orwellian” being blithely applied to anything that brushes against government use of technology and surveillance. Hardly a political cycle goes by in the US without1984coming up. In the US alone in the past decade we saw it returning to the paperback bestseller list under the Trump administration when the term “alternative facts” was being tossed around, and a few years later it was being referenced by the GOP to claim the government was denying an election victory and inventing the January 6th terrorist attack to arrest people. Though with a president making statements like “What you're seeing and what you're reading is not what's happening,” naturally one is reminded of Orwell writing ‘the party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command,’ and we are reminded of the power of literature and how we often turn to great works for guidance during uncertain times, though often, as Orwell warned, using it as propaganda shorn of context. Orwell did live long enough to see the novel used improperly, having to put out a statement almost immediately for those who wished to use the novel as an example against the British Labor Party. ‘My recent novel is NOT an on Socialism or on the British Labor Party (of which I am a supporter),’ he wrote, and an introduction to the book states: ‘every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.’ Which becomes a pretty important distinction, as Orwell believed in better form of governing yet also was suspicious of anyone who would seek out power in order to change it as he writes in the novel ‘we know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.’ I feel1984is best read with an openness to nuance and in good faith, which is often glossed over for the sake of political identifying which is, ironically or not, the exact thing he was warning against. Which is to say, call out problems even if it’s your own “side” and don’t create further divide by abusing rhetoric for the sake of scoring quick political points. I think there is a tendency when trying to score quick political points that things need to have some sort of unassailable pure aim to them.1984is critical of any regime that seeks to keep power, but narrowing it to a pointed attack against an opponent without seeing how it might apply to your own political "team" (US politics is so much cheering for your "home team" than actually hashing out politics, especially lately, though I also find the whole "both sides" angle to often be used less for establishing nuance than trying to delegitamize any efforts for progress too, but hell who am I to say I'm just as bad as anyone) is more convenient. But even Orwell himself isn’t a “pure” figure, having been aninformantfor the British government delivering a list of names of people suspected of communism (the list includesJohn Steinbeckand many have observed that there is a strong presence of gay people on the list which makes many of Orwell’s rather homophobic comments seem all the more menacing). He also, asA. E. Dysonobserved in his book on Orwell, that he ‘had a very English dislike of intellectuals, supposing that anyone willing to wear such a label would be diminished or depraved.’ Which is all neither here nor there, but goes to show how one can create a narrative out of anything, and that is what1984taps into. So let’s move on to the novel and head on down to Room 101. As I said earlier,1984can be read as a culmination of a lot of his themes and ideas across his short career. Warning of totalitarianism arrives everywhere with Orwell, such asBurmese Dayswhen he describes the town as ‘a stifling, stultifying world…which every word and every thought is censored,’ not unlike1984because ‘free speech is unthinkable.’ And one can read inKeep the Aspidistra Flying,with Comstock (a name derived from Common and Stock similarly to how the terms in 1984 are often truncated phrases) bemoaning ‘I’m dead, You’re dead. We’re all dead people in a dead world,’ as a precursor to the pivotal moment when Winston and Jane declare ‘we’re dead’ right before being exposed as having been set up. For Orwell, speech and language is very key. Language itself is fallible and can be morphed to meet many purposes—it’s the medium of poets for a reason—and in1984Orwell examines how this can be used to negate truth and establish entirely fictional histories that become generally accepted as a means to upholding power. ‘War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.’ Winston’s job is to rewrite history to fit the purpose of the party. Within his department we find all sorts of nefarious linguistic play designed to control the masses because it is thought that ‘if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.’ We can argue that we see this notion reflected in our modern day, where books exposing history that can be seen as a blemish on the US are banned or dismissed as unpatriotic or trying to rewrite history (the irony in the latter is thick) and many have spoken on the suppression of queer books as an effort to erase the language people need to assess their own identities. What Orwell is looking at is the way language and propaganda is used to control. I enjoy the way he makes creative use of language to compile entire terminologies used by Ingsoc (the party in control that is pretty blatantly a nod to Soviet Russia) to create a propagated history that fits whatever they need, even erasing the history of entire wars to portray other countries as allies and erase the recent memory of them as enemies. ‘Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.’ To step outside the orthodoxy of the Party’s version of history is to become an enemy of the Party and society and find yourself “vaporized” and erased from history. ‘Orthodoxy means not thinking--not needing to think,’ Orwell writes, ‘Orthodoxy is unconsciousness,’ and when the truth we know conflicts with the truth of the Party, it must be edited. ‘Lies,’ writesRebecca Solnitin her bookOrwell's Roses,‘the assault on language -- were the necessary foundation for all the other assaults.’ Afterall, ‘the first victim of war is truth, goes the old saying, and a perpetual war against truth undergirds all authoritarianisms.’ “Doublespeak” comes into play here, where one can hold conflicting opinions in their mind and just accept them, and the Party finds that fear is a great tool for ensuring willing erasure of truth. ‘Truth is not a statistic,’ Winston argues, claiming that just because the masses agree doesn’t make it true, though over the novel we see how the power to rewrite “truth” can potentially eviscerate anyone who says otherwise until it becomes the only known “truth.” Returning toRebecca Solnit,she observes: ‘To be forced to live with the lies of the powerful is to be forced to live with your own lack of power over the narrative, which in the end can mean lack of power over anything at all. Authoritarians see truth and fact and history as a rival system they must defeat.’ It is in this way the Party keeps people subservient. ‘A hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance,’ and Winston, upon reading Goldstein’s book (the book serves as an insert into the narrative that provides a LOT of exposition about the world and its structures as well as being a sort of Marxist-esque handbook, though it only offers thehowthings came to be and never thewhy,much to Winston’s interest), Winston realizes that the proles (the working class) are the possible solution. However he realized the proles can only revolt if they become conscious of their conditions and only can become conscious of their conditions if they revolt (not a far cry from Orwell’s own statement ‘we cannot win the war without introducing Socialism, nor establish Socialism without winning the war.’), and worries this may never happen. There is also the issue that a revolution will only put a new Party in power that will inevitably oppress again, just in different ways. ‘The masses never revolt of their own accord, and they never revolt merely because they are oppressed. Indeed, so long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison, they never even become aware that they are oppressed.’ So without giving anything away because this book is full of surprises (though one may guess if they have readWebyYevgeny Zamyatin,which Orwell “borrows” heavily from—as does Huxley’sBrave New World—and still remains my favorite of the three), across this novel we see a spirit of resistance rise and the forces of power come to meet it with a heavy boot and the power of erasure. While much of the novel focuses on the individual versus the collective, the biggest act of betrayal comes at the end in choosing to protect oneself, the individual, and asking for the harm of others in order to enter the “protection” of the collective Party by erasing any part of oneself outside their orthodoxy. Where once was the belief ‘to die hating them, that was freedom,’ we see ‘in the face of pain there are no heroes’ and fear keeps people in line. Reminding the people of the frailty of being an individual drives them towards compliance. Yet, in another way, we see the collective existing because of the desire of individuals to protect themselves at the expense of everyone else: nobody will revolt out of fear for themselves and in doing so allows the oppression of all to continue. I think this is whatUrsula K. Le Guinis getting at when her books look at the need to integrate both the individual and collective by refusing easy binaries and hierarchies. She also, especially inThe Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopiaargues that history can never become stagnant and that, like Orwell argues, an revolution will try to uphold power and oppress leading to the necessity of another revolution. While Le Guin sees this as the natural course of history (the double meaning of revolution as a revolt and a constant turning cycling through) Orwell sees this as a constant erosion of truth due to the weaponization of language as propaganda that will inevitably erase reality in place of a false, collective reality where truth is sent to the grave. ‘We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.’ One might find1984to be a rather bleak book, but it is also intended as a warning. There are many minor warnings building up to the larger, main point—such as the paperweight symbolizing a past now inaccessible where art could be beautiful for the sake of beauty, as well as symbolizing the frailty of the individual—and that we must take care to use language responsibly lest we hold the door for open propaganda. We can even do this on an individual level, such as not perpetuating misinformation (funny political memes are easy to share but dilute the severity of problems when we poke fun at, say, the looks or mannerisms of a politician instead of focusing on their policies) and not giving in to easy attacks instead of respecting the nuances. And so that's my rough rant on1984,a book that lives on for both its relevance and its political convenience and maybe we should all remember that truth is more important than winning an argument or scoring political edgy points. I fail at it too, we all do, but Orwell reminds us to do better. ⅘ 'A nation of warriors and fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting, triumphing, persecuting - three hundred million people all with the same face.' ...more |
Notes are private!
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Jul 03, 2023
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1646052935
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| Jun 13, 2023
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it was amazing
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‘Wonder is coming back for us, but not yet’ This book is so hard hitting I might need to put some ice on my entire essence to recover. Alina Pleskova p ‘Wonder is coming back for us, but not yet’ This book is so hard hitting I might need to put some ice on my entire essence to recover. Alina Pleskova pummels you with her prose across the course ofToska,perfectly capturing the cocktail of spiraling modern anxieties and dread that we drink to numb ourselves from. With a wry and witty gallows humor that comes with watching what might be the collapse of a neoliberal hellscape all around us, Pleskova examines themes of immigrant identity, queerness and desire in a world where everything is converted into consumerism.Toskais a book that will have you nervously laughing along to hide the sads creeping in as each poem so strikingly shakes us up and makes us feel. The poems twist and dance to a rhythm of modern living, shuffling from topics where at any time ‘some remarkable disruption could arrive in the middle of things’ in their circuitous route of examining truths that manages to avoid feeling overly sporadic. Grim yet gorgeous, I devouredToskaonly to realize that it had devoured me. ‘All around me, women grip the buoys of their autonomy to stay afloat until personhood washes up on the shores of no nation.’ I began reading this in the waiting room of a toddler’s gymnastics class, which somehow feels an ideal setting to have this collection slap you around and push all your buttons on the discomforts of modern living. Pleskova comes out hard withTake Care(read ithere), ushering us into a voyage of crushing capitalism, constant anxieties, delivery robots, ‘microdosing Adderall’, in a world where ‘everyone seems too woke or weary for a ruinous type of intimacy’ and ‘luckiest among us score mental health days— / what might, in an alternate timeline / be the ability to simply exist.’ It’s practically a thesis statement of a poem for what the collection will bring, particularly the hard-hitting moments on being from one land in a new land and stuck somewhere between them. The subjects in poems shift just as much as she explores the way identities shift and one person is many things, likeWalt Whitmantelling us ‘I contain multitudes.’ She perfectly captures the way everything can feel exhausting and overwhelming and how we are all just trying to get by the best we can, or, as she puts it, ‘We’ve each got our own way of keeping / the lights on.’ ‘In adapting to regional customs, / one becomes a citizen of border & bootstrap mythologies,’ Permeating these poems is a poetic investigation of national identities and retaining her Russian heritage while living in the US. ‘The country where I live— / its surveillance of us surveilled by the country I’m from,’ she writes, along with discussions of watching old Soviet animations for ‘secondhand nostalgia,’ feeling pride when ‘when someone compliments my undiluted pronunciation,’ references toMarina Tsvetaevaand an infusion of Slavic folklore. ‘Our people prefer their tea & humor darker,’ she writes inOur People Don’t Believe in Tears,accounting for the style of humor that livens up this collection and binds it to her heritage as well. Though she sums it all up most effectively in the title poem,Toska,where she writes: Cautionary tales about crones & hungry wolves & wicked hearts lost, like so much else, in the gap between the old world & this amerikanka, launching immigrant daughter guilt into the receiver while my mother gains traction in the hatched narrative that she'll die before her firstborn's settled. Pleskova also acknowledges how she must ‘regard my debts to our legion,’ looking not only at Russian heritage but also the long history of those for who being queer meant having to hide but fighting so that one day future generations would not have to. ‘To be legible / is a release’ she writes, and I love the beauty of that statement of being able to present openly and finding the freedom in it. This feels especially pertinent reading it during Pride Month in a country where, despite all the incredible gains where queerness is legal and open, there have been many pushbacks and legislation trying to erase all the work and make our identities illegible again. That the quickest way for a book to face a banning is to be a queer or Black author is quite telling. I’m no longer terrified of vastness My love Let’s abscond Find some galaxy some town some meadow in which to become stranger & stranger -fromElusive Black Hole Pair Perhaps my favorite moments of the collection are her discussions on love and desire, always delivered with sardonic wit: Desire doesn’t aspire to anything other than itself— I don’t miss so-&-so, just being seen in that way. Just having an unholy place to rest, set all this down. -from Re:Eros Yet also we have ‘devotion like the best cure / you can hope to suffer’ and it all seems to bend towards an excavation of the truth that our modern living is so overly stuffed with erasing any part of us that isn’t either being a worker or consumer for the benefit of the rich that the space for processing love and desire is too fragile. Or comes with a price tag. ‘Nothing is free in America— // that’s every first gen’s starting inheritance—but most anything / can become commerce.’ We are all stuck doing the ‘Mental math on what I can afford to enjoy.’ Yet while everything is depicted as rather bleak, there is still the celebration of us all dealing with it as best as we can: Here’s to the rest of us, fixated on cosmic dealings ancient beyond human intervention. Give us our daily digest of microplastics & plots to place ads in our dreams. Anonymous donors sponsored today’s witnessing of Art & I treated myself to a bath bomb while reading about the demise of the Choco Taco & why “no one” “wants” “to work” “anymore” -from Sacred Bath Bomb If the statement ‘Do you know / anybody who is okay right now / with the question mark deliberately left out’ is something you have pondered in recent years, thenToskais for you. It is a deeply probing work wrapped up in gritty humor and the flashy trappings of modern day such as the language of online discourse and anxiety. I even learned a few things, like scientists termed the average color of the universe ‘cosmic latte.’ For all the sardonicism it is also very beautiful and moving, and will totally kick your ass. You’ll love it. 5/5 What’s that French phrase meaning ‘sweet note’ & did millennials kill it along with Applebee’s, napkins, homeownership, fabric softener, savings, & putrid, distinctly American idealism— I mean, finally. -fromComposure ...more |
Notes are private!
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Jun 15, 2023
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s.penkevich > Books: society (53)
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Jun 15, 2023
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