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I just finished Cities of the Plain, and good Goddamn was that a wonderful way to tie together and continue All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing. The restrained McCarthy in these novels is the best McCarthy.
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Jul 14, 2021 02:36
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Northwestern U Press bookstore is doing a 40% off any book sale. Not as good as their sale last year but whatever. EDIT: looks like it's a limit of five books per customer.
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Jul 16, 2021 14:04
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Lex Neville posted:At Night All Blood is Black by David Diop No seriously. I have to be missing something here, but it sure wasn't beautiful prose, or poignant observations about historical events, or anything novel concerning the human condition. How is this an award-winning novel
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Jul 17, 2021 21:44
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immolationsex posted:what the hell, man? I know, I understand, God's truth, this rhetorical gimmick got old real quick. Tell me I missed something obvious because all I see is a garden-variety story of war-time atrocities and some poo poo about how tight the protagonist was with his war buddy back in the day. I liked it, I preferred another of the nominees, but I won't get too upset about awards. The prose IS nice, it feels very poetic/rythmic. Maybe you are more well versed than I am in WW1 (or was it 2?) history, but to me at least the african perspective was fresh. Not sure how poignant it is, but it's a new POV. The Iliad, Lattimore's translation. It's very good (duh). I do feel like I'm owed a wooden horse though. I got Fagles' Odyssey on the way, do you all think there's a noticeable difference? Once again when reading ancient works I'm surprised by the humanity of them, I really should start to expect it. The little biographies given for each dead soldier, the final scene. Learning about the Epic Cycle, and then learning they are all lost was a roller coaster of emotions.
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Jul 17, 2021 22:05
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Mr. Nemo posted:Once again when reading ancient works I'm surprised by the humanity of them, I really should start to expect it. The little biographies given for each dead soldier, the final scene. You'd like 'memorial' by alice oswald
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Jul 17, 2021 23:25
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immolationsex posted:what the hell, man? I know, I understand, God's truth, this rhetorical gimmick got old real quick. Tell me I missed something obvious because all I see is a garden-variety story of war-time atrocities and some poo poo about how tight the protagonist was with his war buddy back in the day.  For what it's worth, to me, it shone a harrowing light on a side of WW1 of which I was shamefully unaware, namely the inhumane and haphazard employment of Senegalese troops in WW1. I think that's by far the most important war-time atrocity in the book, especially because it's swept under the rug to so far that to this day it's on no one's radar. I certainly wouldn't call that garden-variety, but maybe you were just talking about the hands?
Lex Neville fucked around with this message at 00:00 on Jul 18, 2021 |
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Jul 17, 2021 23:58
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PeterWeller posted:I just finished Cities of the Plain, and good Goddamn was that a wonderful way to tie together and continue All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing. The restrained McCarthy in these novels is the best McCarthy. That moment when I realized it was 2 favorite protagonists was great. I think I need to reread the trilogy—I remember being enchanted with the idea of going back in time and to Mexico for a while after ATPH.
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Jul 18, 2021 08:40
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Lex Neville posted:Sorry to hear you didn't enjoy it. I do think you're placing a little too much importance on that one aspect by calling it a gimmick, but hey, at least it was short
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Jul 19, 2021 05:50
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The North Tower posted:That moment when I realized it was 2 favorite protagonists was great. I think I need to reread the trilogy—I remember being enchanted with the idea of going back in time and to Mexico for a while after ATPH. I recalled John Grady immediately, but it took me a bit to remember Billy. Once I keyed in on that, I began to see all the parallels with their previous journeys and relationships.
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Jul 19, 2021 18:24
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I'm almost done Romain Gary's Life Before Us and there's a reason this dude won the Prix Goncourt twice (besides the alias). It is a wonderfully black, dry, crack of a novel that revels in stories of quiet humanity, loss, and love and is fast going up there with my favourite novels for just its pitch perfect tone and wit. Can't wait and go back to read his first Goncourt-winning book. The man is a capital W Writer.
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Jul 20, 2021 03:48
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I've been plowing through the audiobook of The Magus waiting for the physical copy I ordered to arrive at my local bookstore, this one's got me hooked. The book finally arrived today and I'm surprised to see it's a revised version with a number of differences from the audiobook, which I'm assuming is read from the original release. Is there a consensus on which version is preferred? I've already stumbled across one passage that seems a little over-explanatory in the revised text, where the audiobook kept things subtle and brief. I'm thoroughly enjoying myself either way! I'm about 200 pages through and the mysteries keep piling up. Excited to see where things go from here.
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Jul 21, 2021 04:41
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Segue posted:I'm almost done Romain Gary's Life Before Us and there's a reason this dude won the Prix Goncourt twice (besides the alias). Yeah, Gary is great, although I enjoyed The Promise at Dawn more than Life Before Us, but that might be because I found the narrator's voice grating in this.
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Jul 21, 2021 05:55
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Reading the sleepwalkers by Herman Broch. About horny sad dudes mostly. Good stuff, very relatable
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Jul 21, 2021 07:21
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What are the thread’s opinions on the goldfinch. I just finished the Nevada chapters and I’m loving it. Characters feel so raw and authentic.
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Jul 21, 2021 22:30
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Idaholy Roller posted:What are the thread’s opinions on the goldfinch. I just finished the Nevada chapters and I’m loving it. Characters feel so raw and authentic. i enjoyed it, i liked Tartt's portrayal of male bonds
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Jul 21, 2021 22:43
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Idaholy Roller posted:What are the thread’s opinions on the goldfinch. I just finished the Nevada chapters and I’m loving it. Characters feel so raw and authentic. It was too beautiful for me. One of the few books, at the time, I put down. A merry-dance about nothing much. Too much prose about prose, which at the core may have been about something. Very feminine, in the sense it was about beauty, but I don't understand the language of beauty. Circumspect through obfuscation, it is good at what it does, but is that what we/I want? Layers that only reveal themselves if you're versed, unless you stick with another loving hundred pages, maybe another, with hope. Tightly observing hidden bullshit at best, possibly surface layer bullshit. I didn't have time for it. Definitely better, or better in control, than a lot of what's going on now. But, A.) I don't want to be in control, and B.) If you are in control then why hide it? The answer is C.) I am in control, and I can hide it, and you can find it. Which leaves us with D.) This control tastes of roses which is not a nice taste.
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Jul 22, 2021 02:44
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Idaholy Roller posted:What are the thread’s opinions on the goldfinch. I just finished the Nevada chapters and I’m loving it. Characters feel so raw and authentic. I also loved The Secret History, which I think does a lot of what The Goldfinch does but in a more uncontrolled/erotic/wild/unpolished way, so that knowledge may inflect your interpretation of my answer lol Also, once you're done reading it, or for anyone else who already has, check out this bitchy review in Vanity Fair
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Jul 22, 2021 05:22
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I read The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea on thread recommendation. I enjoyed it, but I didn't love it. The thing I enjoyed most about it was how much Mishima let us see into the minds of these characters who are all ultimately pretty shallow and pretentious. I cracked up when Fusaku goes from admiring to loathing Yoriko in a span of moments because Yoriko gave her good practical advice about marrying Ryuji. I thought the ending chickened out some, but I guess I can appreciate the bit of ambiguity it creates.
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Jul 22, 2021 18:27
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Mishima is full of people whose opinions of others flip on a dime for some obscure reason.
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Jul 22, 2021 18:36
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yeah the whole reason the boys do what they do to the sailor is because they built him up in their mind, only for him to turn out to just be a human being after all and not the platonic ideal of a sailor like corto maltese that theyd hoped for because they all lack reliable father figures and have weirdo mothers
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Jul 22, 2021 23:14
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That's cool and all, but what's even better is that Ryuji imagines himself as the same sort of heroic sailor as Norubo and his gang do, but then he gets laid and just wants to settle down.
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Jul 22, 2021 23:29
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PeterWeller posted:I thought the ending chickened out some, but I guess I can appreciate the bit of ambiguity it creates. ambiguity? you know exactly what they are going to do to him because they already did it to the kitten earlier in the novel. the fact that he can make me feel so horrified at the ending without describing a single thing is what makes it so amazing
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Jul 22, 2021 23:36
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Yeah, nothing more needed to be said. Ending it there at the moment of highest possible tension leaves you feeling ice cold. You don't even need the actual act of the thing because you already had the dress rehearsal with the cat, and all of the implications of it are left entirely to your imagination and whatever image you've built up of the group of boys and Noboru (it struck me that he's the only one who gets a name)
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Jul 22, 2021 23:59
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Burning Rain posted:Yeah, Gary is great, although I enjoyed The Promise at Dawn more than Life Before Us, but that might be because I found the narrator's voice grating in this. Could be since I read it in French my ear isn't as attuned, but I can understand that. I found it a really great capture of a punky kid, so it worked well. Also finding a positive portrayal of a black trans sex worker in a 70s novel was surprising and nice! Also whoever recommended Nadine Gordimer for the prose holy poo poo thank you. This woman's writing is just sublime.
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Jul 23, 2021 02:50
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the book ending at that point, besides just being great writing, also kind of encapsulates mishima's whole philosophy of things being at their most beautiful point right before they die. so the book ending right before it 'ends' keeps it frozen forever at its most beautiful point.
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Jul 23, 2021 03:59
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derp posted:the book ending at that point, besides just being great writing, also kind of encapsulates mishima's whole philosophy of things being at their most beautiful point right before they die. so the book ending right before it 'ends' keeps it frozen forever at its most beautiful point. lol ironic given his end
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Jul 23, 2021 04:55
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i have a bunch of untranslated mishima's lying around here including kyoko's house, i might get to it eventually but i'm reading medoruma shun first, mishima's japanese is pretty hard i honestly think the way mishima writes women is probably the weakest part of his writing, ai no kawaki has a woman protagonist but it always just kind of feels like mishima in a dress rather than a real person, when they're not the perspective character they tend to seem quite flat too, i guess this is why the mother in sailor fell from grace seems like such an odd person, she's just not the best part of the book mori ogai was much better at this i think, but otherwise doesn't quite offer what mishima offers
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Jul 23, 2021 08:37
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my favorite mishima character is probably honda, it's just easy to sympathize with him, a lot of the characters that are supposed to be examples of corrupt immoral people are the ones he wrote best, while the cold appolonian ones are more like ideas than people, like toru in the final book of sea of fertility
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Jul 23, 2021 08:44
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Honda is definitely the stand out as a character, but he also gets 3 and a half books in which to develop and ultimately crumble
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Jul 23, 2021 08:53
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derp posted:ambiguity? you know exactly what they are going to do to him because they already did it to the kitten earlier in the novel. the fact that he can make me feel so horrified at the ending without describing a single thing is what makes it so amazing Yeah, a bit of ambiguity, not much. It is a novel where nobody lives up to their idealized selves and where Noburu botched his last plan. So while mostly I thought, "yep they're doing it," a part of me thought, "nah, this as close as they're gonna get to actually doing it."
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Jul 23, 2021 17:38
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Even if they didn’t do it, they should’ve. Ryuji deserved it.
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Jul 23, 2021 20:32
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Ryuji is one of the few sympathetic characters in any Mishima. Dude just wanted to settle. Compared to like every other Mishima character, he's positively Regular
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Jul 23, 2021 20:53
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Heath posted:Ryuji is one of the few sympathetic characters in any Mishima. Dude just wanted to settle. Compared to like every other Mishima character, he's positively Regular Yeah, I can't speak to his other novels, but while Ryuji is a bit of a doofus and a weirdo, he doesn't deserve to be dissected by a pack of kids with dumb ideas.
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Jul 24, 2021 04:26
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I do recommend The Sound of Waves if you want to read a Mishima story that seems to be more for general consumption than most of his ouvre. It's a fairly benign love story set on a coastal Japanese island and is summarily intimate but it lacks the heavy introspection and pervasive sense of perversion (figurative and literal) that all of his other characters suffer from. It's just kind of nice, although there is an attempted rape that is comically foiled by the would-be rapist getting repeatedly stung in the butt by an angry hornet which was a scene that felt like the one uncharacteristic stab at humor that I've read from him. Speaking of him, I finished Confessions of a Mask today, and prior to reading that novel I thought the assessment of Mishima as closeted may have been a little over exaggerated, but Mask felt like the most deeply intimate portrait of the author himself, since so much of the main character's anguish felt so specifically autobiographical. It represented a shame so deep that I think it would be difficult to conjure as a pure fiction. I'm glad that I waited to read this one because I think it would have colored my reading of his other novels too much. I also can't help but contrast Mishima's endings with Tanizaki's, another author I've recently read, because where Mishima ends his books at the exact moment of the highest tension such that it suffuses through even the most mundane things, Tanizaki ends his books at similarly sudden moments but they're much more ignoble -- I just finished The Makioka Sisters last month and the last sentence of the book is Yukiko finally heading off to get married after an exhausting number of proposals falling through, and then getting diarrhea on the train or in Naomi where the incredibly embarrassing main character Joji spends the entire novel getting cuckolded by Naomi only to basically turn his entire life over to her whims anyway. Mishima references Some Prefer Nettles at one point in Mask and now I'm curious about the relationship of those two authors in the "modern" Japanese literary canon, because there seems to be some continuity of themes but the authors approach them very differently, and I'm sure the age disparity has much to do with that, but my knowledge of Japan and Japanese literature is novice level at best
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Jul 24, 2021 05:03
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the sound of waves and after the banquet are the translated novels that i cared for least (i'm also not a huge fan of confessions of a mask but it has its moments at least), i think sea of fertility, sailor fell from grace and temple of the golden pavilion are my favorites, thirst for love and forbidden colors are both good too but have some flaws as well
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Jul 24, 2021 08:36
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Sound of Waves is definitely the least interesting of his novels but for what it is it's just kind of a nice book. It's interesting in contrast to all the rest of his work for how relatively straightforward of a story it is, less so on its own terms
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Jul 24, 2021 08:52
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Reading derek walcott's selected ... those are some good pomes
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Aug 2, 2021 00:39
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Jrbg posted:Reading derek walcott's selected ... those are some good pomes 
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Aug 2, 2021 01:12
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I gave a book I wrote a few years ago its own website A man walks into the night seeking purpose. A woman visits a beautiful estate where its residents choose to die. A teenager despairs over her confident girlfriend. http://ahalfgreythought.com/
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Aug 5, 2021 19:50
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| # ? May 20, 2024 07:16 |
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Some stuff I've read recently: Milkman (2018) by Anna Burns. Nothing much to add beyond what I said earlier. The strange style contributed to a sense of alienation and anomie. All in all a pretty affecting book. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994) by Haruki Murakami. Most of the mental space I have about this book is taken up with rage at the translation, which I learned made some modifications to the book when translating it into English, which for my money is up there with the Holocaust in terms of very bad, don't do that, etc. If you want to gently caress with a story just write your own, don't pick someone else's. Obviously translation always requires making choices and it's not a rote process but there's a difference between a judgment call about a rough translation, on the one hand, and chopping stuff out, rearranging chapters, and other misconduct. I think some of this was at the publisher's behest but whatever, it's all awful. Anyways the book is fine. Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellman. 1,000+ pages and almost entirely a single sentence stream of consciousness from a housewife/baker in Ohio some time during the Trump presidency. It's pretty long so it touches on a lot of stuff but some of the main themes are the environment, America and guns, and her relationship with the rest of her family, especially her mother, aunt, children, and husband. It's all pretty anxious, as befits the times I think, and for my money it's a masterpiece. I can imagine people thinking that its portrait of America is somewhat thinly sketched and stereotypical but as far as I'm concerned it's just playing the hits, baby. Highly recommended if the idea of a sentence about America that goes on for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pages does not turn you off. Currently reading Sputnik Sweetheart (1999) also by Murakami.
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Aug 11, 2021 07:14
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