Michael Kevane

Book club discussed Shopgirl, by Steve Martin. It’s a slight novella, later turned into a movie (book reads as a script, we thought, with stage directions and present-tense narrator). We mostly intensely disliked, and were disappointed. It came across as cringy and unaware. Characters were flat.

I started to intensely dislike his prose style halfway through the novel, in the long scene with Connie (“Slowly her head came up, and he saw her face clear, and his voice quickened and gathered strength.”), and then just could not enjoy one more reference to Karla. Every 20 pages a reference to “Anne” who in the end appeared to be Helena Bonham-Carter playing a 50 year old Princess Margaret in The Crown? What then did that make Smiley?

I read Azúcar, by Nii Ayikwei Parkes, a few months ago, but forgot to add to reviews. Enjoyable and light. Not as rich for me as Tail of the Blue Bird. I kept waiting for the novel to go deeper, but instead it stayed relentlessly on the surface. More like a young adult novel, in that regard, and I can see it having a lot of appeal to teen readers. Nice review by Houman Barekat from The Guardian is here.

I read James Ellroy, My Dark Places, while overlapping with 2666. The misogyny, the femicides… can get overwhelming. I give Ellroy a lot of credit for putting down in writing a person’s dark places. We humans do not like to go there, especially when it comes to sexuality and adolescence. Yet, how are we to learn and share if we never talk or read about it. It would be scary to “teach” this… so glad to be an economist. On the downside, the writing is the standard hardboiled LA prose, that often skirts cliché. And can be repetitive. Piling murder on murder, the way Bolaño does in 2666, is literary when the writer is paying careful attention to language and nuance. Here it is just one more piled on.

I chuckled at the semi-pompous self-deprecation in this fairly decent intro book. Clearly written for a “market” and not really any academic contribution.

I’d talk about this book, at a coffeehouse, for hours!

Just, pretty amazing. Ruiz-Tagle was actually a writer in the Pinochet period?

Very competent writing, starts off strong with good plot and characterization, but then just becomes plodding as the obvious plot slowly (excruciatingly so) unfolds. Will they cross the mountain pass? Yes! Will he marry the princess’s handmaiden? Yes! Will the plucky princess end up with the nice handsome prince? Yes! Will the greedy lords be defeated? Yes! So, distracting and light for a couple of nights, but then regret reading.

Camille Bordas Colorin Colorado. I read it twice. Second time with a close read, three pages of notes. Great short story for breaking down structure. Shame seems to be the central theme on the surface. Is there something lurking underneath?

Marie NDiaye – the good denis… is death? did not like much

Kevin Barry – Finistere… alternating story of him on ferry with tenn, and recalling his affair with women

Sterling HolyWhiteMountain False Star – coming of age… he gets his claim check…. and the girlfriend… and it ends with structure and agency as he looks in her eyes and cannot read the look, as they have gone through all the tropes in the previous day of buying the car and getting drunk.

The Middle Voice by Han Kang. structurally and thematically complex, but in the end I wasn’t left with anything…

Joyce Carol Oates Love Letter…. a little throwaway gothic about a woman remarrying late in life… is the husband having nightmares, or is she having the nightmare?

Yiyun Li Wednesday’s Child…. getting over, or not, a very mean mother.

Evolution by Joan Silber…. coming of age americana of the 1970s…. nostalgia and regret and a sense of an ending…

The Last Grownup by Allegra Goodman…. children gone, alone… with the dog.

Sparingly, I use godawful. This was one of those occasions. Lots of imagination, fine. But as a novel where the reader is immersed and transported? It did not work for me at all. Too many adjectives?

A very nice review from The Guardian is here. I enjoyed this short collage-novel. Lots of abrupt paragraphs, but a coherent mood and flow. A bit absurd, a bit melancholy. Apparently it is part of a quartet of similar approaches. Personally, I prefer a more leisurely exposition that facilitates transportation/immersion. But happy to have read this and will look forward to someday reading some of the other ones.

Lo único que quiero escribir es que estoy bastante seguro de que en mi lista de 10 libros a leer otra vez antes de que me muera esta novela estará incluida.

People who are older than me often speak in hushed tones of Somerset Maugham… his world-weary tone, the wry commentary, the idea that some special humans grapple with BIG decisions and we should all strive to emulate them or perhaps be in awe of them… did I miss something? I found The Moon and Sixpence very interesting primarily for the Gauguin Wikipedia rabbit-holes to explore, but the novel itself was tedious going. I could appreciate the technical innovations of introducing a narrator who is learning about the story and recounting as he learns, while having numerous digressions into stories told by other narrators. But the Artist shaking a fist at the universe to elicit Truth I found more to be a self-involved guy who didn’t care much about the well-being of others. I find it hard to be convinced that creating eternal beauty is more virtuous than being nice to a fellow human. But that’s just me! It’s definitely undergraduate meaning of life philosophy stimulating.

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.