Michael Kevane

Beautiful writing. I’m inspired a little bit, to think more cosmically. But in the end, it seemed like a Koyaanisqatsi. Without plot, there is just the music of Harvey’s language evoking images.

Almost done with Jennifer Egan’s The Candy House and a nice chart of all the characters imgur.com/gallery/8OLD… reinforced for me that there doesn’t seem to be theme or plot or nada and I guess that’s what people like in novels nowadays? The novel as rabbit-hole hypertext?

I really liked Doomsday Book, but these two novels, Lincoln’s Dream and Passages, were just awful. Reading goodreads reviews it seems that this is well-known… I wish I had known. Repetitive, constantly dropping obvious hints, incoherent transitions. I gave up on both and just skimmed to the ends, and even then found myself not caring much.

Our neighborhood book club read a few short stories, including of course “The Lottery.” I had read that long ago, and probably several times since, and there is an excellent reading aloud of the story on The New Yorker website. But smaller in scope, though more ambiguous in theme, was “The Intoxicated,” which I quite enjoyed.

El espíritu de la ciencia-ficción / Roberto Bolaño (stopped after awhile)

Nocturno de Chile / Roberto Bolaño (When he goes to the house at the end where they used to have the literary conversations, and it was a torture house… wow.)

The death of Vivek Oji / Akwaeke Emezi (stopped after awhile)

Tremor : a novel / Teju Cole (read whole thing but really did not like… seemed very lazy writing- I mean, inserting what seemed to be an art lecture talk “he” gave? I appreciated Pnin’s lecture more.)

Distant star / Roberto Bolaño, translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews. (Yasss! He seemed to mine the same vein in his novels… so interesting to see the variations.)

The Snow Queen / Joan Vinge (It won the Hugo? It was tediously endless.)

Llamadas telefonicas / Roberto Bolaño (The story about him in Spain corresponding and then meeting the older poet and talking about submitting to literary contests was very good.)

I have been working through short stories by Bolaño, in a collection I bought when I accompanied MBA students to Chile. “William Burns” has that narrative ambiguity that I guess is his trademark: the occasional narrator remark that a detail (or even central element of the story) could be this or could be that, and then the narrator carries on, letting the reader perhaps decide which branch was the one to follow. Since I had just been browsing randomly a few hundred pages of Middlemarch, it is nice to be reminded and have salient the notion that narrators intruding into the narrative, to directly address the reader, is not something really that new. And since I was listening to a fun (if meandering) podcast discussion of Nabokov’s Pale Fire by supercontext, this was especially salient.

As usual, found a nice review and comments at Mookse blog: https://mookseandgripes.com/reviews/2010/02/01/roberto-bolano-william-burns/

I read about 100 pages of Passage, by Connie Willis. I really liked Doomsday Book. But Passage was typing, not writing. Dialogue and inner monologue that repeated itself, the complicated hallways and stairways of the hospital. After 100 pages the setup still had gone nowhere, and as a reader I just kept thinking, “So far this is all fluff… i could have gotten the character and background in a few well-written pages. This is just making the reader wade through stuff because… the author is getting paid by the word?” At least Dickens introduced new characters and plot. This just went on and on. So I checked out the Goodreads one star comments and guess what? Exactly my thoughts! So I knew then it was time to abandon the book. Do not recommend unless you are on a 10 hour airplane flight.

Read Gene Wolfe’s Shadow & Claw… part of ‘The Book of the New Sun’. Reviews suggest amazing. First part, Shadow, indeed great- wonderfully written, A+ narrator voice. Then falls apart. Claw a hodgepodge. Wolfe seemingly lost track of what we was doing as writer. Veers all over. Disappointing.

My book club read The Great Divorce, by C.S. Lewis, and discussed today. All agreed: a ham-fisted, boring allegory for thinking about the meaning of life and how to be a person who will be closer to God. God turns out to be a distant mountain range, a never-ending exploration of love for the wholeness of All Creation blah blah. I can be generous about it: Lewis was trying to work through ideas in WWII when presumably intelligent people were having a hard time seeing God In All Things. He perhaps sincerely thought he could write a short allegory that would give people hope, and deepen their faith. It did not speak to me or most others in the book club. Does not stand the test of time. Camus was writing The Stranger around the same time, and I think it is definitely better as a novel, and engages more honestly with the fundamental question of meaninglessness, in the context of the times.

Published back in 1994 and 1998, the novels seem very prescient about our new cusp-of-AI age. In the novels, scanning and uploading of conscious human sentience is achievable. It feels like that could be 50 years away, at this point in 2023 (considering that 50 years ago, 1973, there basically were no computers at all for practical purposes). Egan then deals with a lot of the issues of how these computer programs would interact and evolve, in an environment without embodied boundaries. Our slow human trait of mind-training (basically the idea that consciousness is self-consciously alterable) is vastly sped up when a computer program simply edits itself, perhaps after running many trial and error simulations in a sandbox. Computing power is a central issue, but the assumption is that when computing moves to the quantum scale, this somehow goes away, in the same way it is mysteriously accomplished in our brains. Lots of food for thought about philosophical questions of meaningfulness. As novels, however, they are pretty clunky!

I loved the narrator voice here. It’s a picaresque farce of a novel, drawing a lot on Shakespeare’s comedies. Very enjoyable read, although in the end maybe more like a delicious trifle. Possibly there is a deeper literary subtext going on, but you’d really have to be in the weeds. The Hollywood scenes are especially enjoyable– the Forest of Arden. Lots of melancholy, too. Life can be sweet, but its ending … ah!

I really wanted to like this, but in the end it seemed more trifling that substantive. A foreword tries hard to make the case for the novelette as a showcase for writing craft mastery, in the device of the narrator telling the story through the voice of a different character. But in this case, or two related stories told by two different narrators, the stories are of different events, so there is no complexity added in the point of view. And the central characters (the chess opponents) are exaggerated “very serious literary characters” (you know, the kind who never go to the bathroom). There is no arc to the story, really. or at least the small arc of each chess master moving their understanding of their chess self a little bit did not resonate with me. Characters: Czentovic, the peasant grandmaster, and Dr. B., a discreet lawyer of the Austrian aristocracy imprisoned by the Nazi’s.

Our book club read this odd young person book. As one member said in our discussion, “It’s an allegory, but an allegory for what?!” Definitely worth sharing with a 12 year old avid reader, and discussing with them, is my guess.

Tremendous! I loved reading this. Such amazing writing as Saramogo elides the story of the present-day publishing house with the story of the reconquest of Portugal from the Moors, with the same narrator commenting on what he is doing.

Another in what is apparently an enormous fan-fiction of Greek and Roman myths. That I think I was sort of unaware of. And maybe that is because most of them are bad? This one is a throwaway- Atwood seemingly makes little effort to keep the Penelope narrator’s tone consistent… Almost as if each section had been written at different times, and she had not bothered to re-read the earlier sections in order to be consistent.

I thought they would be better. More clever, more interesting details. Instead they seemed perfunctory. I think I’ll take Patricia Highsmith or Muriel Spark.

I don’t need to write much, since Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s novel, La plus secrète mémoire des hommes, is probably the best novel I’ve read in a decade (since I read Alan Garner, Beppe Fenoglio, Nii Ayikwei Parkes, I guess?). Definitely I want to start reading it again: it is dense, complex, and full of subtle writing.

Wow, reading this was a pleasure, after having read Jean Rhys. You can see almost a direct line from Kafka to Rhys to Kavan to more contemporary novels like Annihilation. The subject matter is banal; everything relevant in the novel is in the writing style and narrator voice. Hazy, elliptical, jumpy, somewhat surreal, sometimes seemingly non-linear, conventional explanations of plot deliberately left out. As you read you’re just in awe of a writer who can pull something like this off, and it feels so incredibly hermetic and thoughtful, rather than contrived. And the subtext of gendered violence penetrating every paragraph.

A friend was reading this “creature feature” and so I borrowed The Legend of Charlie Fish by Josh Rountree from the library. Competent tale in the setting of Galveston in the “mighty flood” of 1900. It is definitely genre fiction, almost like a preliminary sketch for a television miniseries… Very visual.