|
I thought Oscar Wao was a good book, and Junot Diaz's interview about it on Bookworm really resonated with me, but Diaz being involved in sex scandals is really not very surprising. I also don't mind the way he uses Spanish in his novels, but maybe that's because I grew up in a city with a lot of Hispanic people, so my day-to-day life involved just not being able to understand people mid-sentence sometimes.
|
#
¿
May 7, 2018 05:31
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 9, 2024 01:23 |
|
|
I have a weird recommendation request. I've noticed that most of the books I read are melancholic, tragic, or have a sense of postmodern detachment. Does anyone have a recommendation for literature that has some firm sense of gentleness, peacefulness, or positivity? I've seen poetry and comics handle that sort of feeling before, but I can't think of many examples in fiction.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 1, 2018 03:07
|
|
|
I read the first section of Klara (the first 45~ pages) and it is so delicate and fragile that I had to stop reading because I didn't want to rush through the experience. I think it also maybe won the award for novel that most quickly made me want to cry (5 pages).
|
|
#
¿
Mar 3, 2021 02:45
|
|
|
Klara and the Sun is phenomenal.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 6, 2021 08:32
|
|
|
My head has been full of thoughts about Klara and the Sun so I am going to braindump my feelings in a big chunk of spoiler text. The novel strikes a balance of horror and hope that is really disorienting. The great irony of the book of course is that Klara is a Person, and an extraordinary person with a depth of caring and kindness and spirituality that far exceeds the humans around her, but she is treated at worst like a vacuum cleaner and at best like a thoughtful maid. More striking is the irony that Klara is an exceptional child, but not a single person cares for her the way they care for Josie or Rick. The thoughtlessness with which she is abandoned at a dump to "slow fade" like an outdated cellphone is of course striking and abominable. But the thing I find viscerally painful in the story, that actually makes me feel nauseated, is that the adults are complicit in a plan to have Klara "continue" Josie. And this involves coercing Klara into consenting to self-annihilate to become another person. Ishiguro's novels often have blurbs about how they are like illusory worlds suspended over an abyss. I think Klara and the Sun is situated above that abyss as well. Klara is such a tender character, written with an abundant goodness that combines a faithful dog, a children's book character, and Christ. Her conception of being a good Artificial Friend is caring for people's wellbeing, reprieving their loneliness, and intruding upon their privacy as little as possible. The second time she prays to the Sun in the barn at sunset, it struck me how pure and gentle she is--her pleas to the Sun involve showing it courtesy and thoughtful deference to its right to personal space, and she hopes that because she is fulfilling her role as an ever conscientious and kind helper, the Sun (and by extension the creators who guaranteed her existence) will be pleased with her and grant her selfless wish. Her defining characteristic, I think is that she 1. has a sense of smallness of self while also 2. having extraordinary meaning-making abilities. Klara's observational skills are commented on at length in the book, but I think it's not merely her ability to observe accurately that is unique. Because she is a child, she misinterprets the way reality operates around her because she has so few points of reference to work with--she sees the homeless man and his dog and mistakes their waking up for the existence of the Sun's miraculous healing abilities. She sees the Cootings Machine and mistakes it for the sole agent of Pollution in the world, and so on. A character comments on AFs almost always giving accurate advice. And Klara's belief that Josie will recover ends up being well-placed. I think that her childlike misinterpretations of things like the Cootings machine are not physical assessments but rather assessments of the symbolic significance of things. 1. The Sun is generous, provides good to the world, and is happy when once-lonely people are reunited in love. 2. Machine pollution harms all living beings and sickens the world. Which is to say that another one of the ironies of the book is that Klara, an artificial being, recognizes and lives by natural law, but the humans don't. She believes in grace and acceptance and the generosity of what is given freely and naturally. But the humans in the story are engaging in a society of peer-pressured gene editing that kills their children because they believe so thoroughly in meritocracy. She symbolically recognizes the Cootings machine as a synecdoche of the reason that Josie is ill--construction equipment that makes everyone sick and unhappy but that is deemed necessary for the further development of society. I think the greatest tension I have with the book is the conflict of Klara's small sense of self with her abundance of spiritual and empathetic grace. She is neglected and exploited by the people around her, even the ones she cares about with every fiber of her being, but she shows only love and deference--seems to exist in a state where she is incapable of experiencing anything but love and deference. I think her great triumph is at the very conclusion of the book, when she realizes that she could have continued Josie perfectly, but that she would have no control over the Josie that exists within other people. More than anyone, she's in the position to know if humans are nothing but external phenomena, but she finds the irreducible heart of living beings that the adults in the book had all given up on. She becomes more human than the humans. But everyone in the book walks away from her and leaves her to die alone, even as she spent her whole existence reprieving them of their own loneliness, because their own imaginations and observational powers are so diminished that they can't recognize her as a real person. I can't help but think that when Klara tells Josie that she thinks every person is a little lonely, that clearly means that Klara is lonely too. But the humans are so grossly incapable of serving Klara as well as she serves them--the kindest thing Josie does for her is stack some boxes up so she can look out the attic window. Basically, I think you can really see the children's story roots of the book in how it models the ways humans should treat one another: quote:The novel initially began life as a children’s story. Ishiguro wanted to create a book for 5 or 6-year-olds with bright illustrations and a simple narrative. Klara was to be a “doll-type figure, or a small animal.” He shared the idea with his daughter Naomi, who was then working in a bookstore. “She said, no way,” he says. “You cannot tell this story to children, you would traumatize them.” Ishiguro's novels often have endings that are like a slap in the face, saying, "Wake up!!" I feel like this novel modulates its tone slightly. It's a slap in the face and a shout: "The world could be kind, if only we'd wake up!!"
|
|
#
¿
Mar 6, 2021 18:45
|
|
|
snailshell posted:I totally buy that interpretation! I guess I just feel that if an author uses the exact same tone/prose style for tons of their works throughout their oeuvre, it becomes less an intentional choice/commentary on any individual narrator and more just how they do things lol. But maybe he creates stories and narrators explicitly because of how well their poo poo fits in with his tone/style I think Ishiguro's view of humanity is that it largely gets by on acts of self-delusion and willful ignorance. It's a recurring element in his stories and is a part of why his prose style is so consistent across books, because his protagonists tend to have that same core willful ignorance driving them. That's one of the things I find really interesting about Klara and the Sun. The humans in the story clearly all have diminished senses of good and evil compared to Klara. And I think there's ample evidence in the story that Klara, despite being a manufactured lifeform, has a deep humanity to her, deeper than that of the humans who created and lived with her. So that makes me wonder--if she's so human, and has such insight to the human condition--then is she capable of recognizing the tragedy and injustice of her own situation? Is she capable of realizing it, or has she been constructed to be incapable of realizing it? If she is capable, has she realized it, but has enough selflessness and goodwill to remain principled and kind until the very end? Or is she like Ishiguro's other humans, repressing the horrific truth of her situation in order to make life more bearable? On a side note, I also thought that the prose style wasn't plain at all; I found it incredibly tender, touching, and intense. I had to put the book down when she was being bullied at the children's social party, and there were a couple times that made me ugly cry. FWIW I fell asleep trying to finish The Buried Giant despite it seeming to be an ideal book for me (an Arthurian travel story written by Ishiguro).
|
|
#
¿
Apr 22, 2021 03:26
|
|
|
Heath posted:I've been reading a lot of Japanese authors lately (mainly Mishima, Tanizaki, Oe, and some assorted excerpts from Donald Keene's Modern Japanese Literature, which I recommend as a good primer, in addition to a couple of nonfiction things) and basically everyone who sees me reading them goes to Murakami as That Japanese Author Everybody Knows who I should pick up next. But nobody seems to be able to give a specific reason as to why he's worth reading except that his books are popular and almost always get described as "dreamy" or "dreamlike," whatever that means. I'm curious about him because he clearly has some kind of cache with a general American audience that other Japanese authors don't seem to have broken through, but like was said above that appears to be accounted for simply by a combination of social media saturation and the fact that the stuff he writes holds the kind of quirky appeal that resonates with the sort of audience that would pose a dog-eared copy of WUBC next to a napkin with a semicircular coffee stain. From what you guys are describing it sounds more like the books are fantasy (in the non-genre sense) romps with manic pixie dream teens. And I guess jazz records are a constant theme too. I know this is several pages old but since the conversation got brought up this page, I guess I'll chime in. I genuinely really like Murakami's stories, and I've read almost everything he's written. I think there are a few things you have to get out of the way when talking about him: 1. His protagonists are horndogs and are often times not good people 2. He writes incredibly awkward sex scenes, and his narration always brings up women's bodies 3. More often than not, his books dip into the same well for inspiration, so they tend to be variations on similar themes rather than new reinventions every time (with some exceptions). That means jazz records, cats, folding laundry, unfulfilling sex, ear fixations, and all sorts of stuff come up over and over again That said, there are some things I really like about his stories. He writes about subjective encounters with the subconscious mind in a way that I find very compelling. Characters will have dreams, or enter hypnagogic states, and have mysterious encounters that seem inscrutable but very meaningful to them, because these encounters have something to communicate to them about death, or loss, or trauma. The supernatural is never just for fun in a Murakami story; it is always a monster in the etymological sense: a warning. The supernatural being is pointing to some truth about the protagonist, or about the protagonist's world, that they are either naive to or are actively repressing. But they're usually also morally ambiguous, and their warning is ambiguous but also crucial. They seem more metonymy than metaphor, so by the end of the story they still feel very "active" rather than "resolved", if that makes sense. Murakami allows his supernatural elements to remain unresolved rather than wrapping them up in a tidy metaphorical bow. I also think it's interesting that he places importance on the way people behave in their dreams. In "Thailand," a woman who is harboring some kind of grudge against a man who harmed her is told that she is going to dream about a snake, and she's instructed to behave a particular way to the snake in her dream. How she behaves is of utmost importance. In both Kafka on the Shore and Colorless Tsukuru, there are men who have dreams about committing sexual violence that they would never commit in real life. But the fact that a part of them was capable of doing it in their dreams weighs on them heavily, and they consider it a point of moral failure that tarnishes their character and spirit. I think this is a really interesting idea--that there's something beyond how you behave in society that matters. That there's an interior self, or a self that navigates imaginative spaces, and that its predispositions can't be separated from your conscious self. Sometimes our decisions are automatic, and happen without our conscious intervention, and these characters are shamed to know that they have failed a test of spiritual strength. His older stories tend to romanticize being a loner, with loose connections to people, but as he's gotten older his novels have placed a greater importance on connecting to people. Even his jaded, psychologically tumultuous loners have to find people to connect with. That's what Colorless Tsukuru is about, and I think Killing Commendatore is largely about people who have lost children in their lives and don't know what to do with themselves. So basically, I like his stories because they're about lonely, broken people trying to navigate their inner worlds and find connections in the real world. The pop culture symbols of Murakami are cats, jazz, whiskey, mysterious women, etc. but I think those are all false flags. His stories are about psychologically fractured characters trying to attain wholeness, and the attending chaotic eruptions of their inner landscapes onto their personal lives. His prose is usually leisurely and kind of repetitive, but it's also pretty smooth (When he gets an opportunity to describe something more dreamlike, I think the language elevates and becomes more striking). So even though his books have been getting pretty long, his leisurely writing style and familiar stomping grounds (jazz, cats, etc) give his books a strangely warm, comfort-read quality to them, considering how they're usually situated on top of a roaring chasm. I would recommend the short stories "A Shinagawa Monkey" (the 2006 one, not the sequel story, Confessions) and "Chance Traveler" as good representations of his overall works. I absolutely get why people would not like his stuff at all. But as a weirdo who has had intensely vivid dreams and nightmares almost every night for the entirety of my life, Murakami and Twin Peaks are kind of the only things I've encountered that have captured what that experience is like. (I'm also curious about the aforementioned "YA mindset")
|
|
#
¿
Oct 10, 2021 19:57
|
|
|
I liked Demian, but it's funny how clearly it falls into the 1910-1920s version of whatever emo-alternative is (theosophy, I guess). Siddhartha gets some kind of weird duplicity merit badge for confusing every western person who reads it into thinking they've learned about the Buddha's life. I've wanted to read the Glass Bead Game for a while now, but I haven't gotten around to it, and for a nobel prize winning novel, I've never once heard any one talk about it. All of this is to say that I could not tell you one way or another if Herman Hesse is actually any good, just that Demian has some pretty pithy new-age quotes that inspired my favorite anime (Revolutionary Girl Utena, the spiel about cracking the world's shell)
|
|
#
¿
Oct 27, 2021 03:49
|
|
|
I guess I shouldn't say prescriptively that it's where the quote is from. “The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Who would be born must first destroy a world. The bird flies to God. That God's name is Abraxas.” I feel like the "God's name is Abraxas" part fits in with Utena's deal, where Dios is simultaneously Lucifer.It's not exactly the same quote, but it seems pretty close to me. I've always thought of it as the most likely inspiration. As far as I know there's no confirmation or anything on that, it's just my personal pet theory.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 27, 2021 04:03
|
|
|
lost in postation posted:That's not really on Hesse, though, is it? Siddhartha is very explicitly not about Gautama, who appears as a secondary character. It's not really Hesse's fault, no. But between it being about a character named Siddhartha and most publications of it having some depiction of Gautama Buddha on its cover, it seems like it confuses a lot of readers. I read it because I had a German professor who told me it was an easier novel to read for someone learning German, and that it was about Buddha's life. I remember thinking "huh, this doesn't sound exactly like what I remember about Buddha's story, but maybe there was more to it?" until I got to the point where Siddhartha meets Gautama. I thought the pivot point of the novel was pretty compelling, when Siddhartha respectfully declines studying under Gautama because he doesn't believe Gautama's teaching of a neat, tidy system like samsara having a supernatural, metaphysical exit point in enlightenment. I gave Siddhartha's idea a shot and was reading the novel while waiting in the lobby of a blood test clinic, surrounded by TVs blasting local news, people talking to each other, and babies crying, and I don't know if the oneness of reality really penetrated into my supreme consciousness. Not a bad book by any means, just an ironic one, because it's about a character who actively rejects Buddha's thesis but gets regularly mistaken for Buddha by readers. I feel like there's a Cervantes or Italo Calvino story in that somewhere.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 27, 2021 15:12
|
|
|
I'm having such a good time listening to The Magic Mountain on audiobook. The narrator is named David Rintoul, and he does such a great job conveying Hans Castorp's  sensibilities, as well as Herr Settembrini's bombastic lectures on humanism. I feel a little sad that I'm listening to it on audiobook rather than sitting down with the actual book in my hands, but the experience is so rich that I can get over my luddism. I was worried that literature would be too dense to appreciate while cooking or driving, but it's really the opposite, livening up the day. It makes me feel like this is the sort of approach that will let me finally work through my backlog of classic literature. I slept on Thomas Mann for too long. Hans Castorp is a great character, and the juxtaposition of pre-war cultural decorum with terminal illness is such a vivid combination.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 17, 2023 18:38
|
|
|
Gaius Marius posted:It might be too early to say but I'm enjoying Doctor Faustus quite a bit. Germans seem to have a penchant for blending their literature with natural sciences and I'm here for that. The second chapter with Adrian's father showing the kids experiments was fascinating. I wonder if that's a cromulent criticism of more modern work, literature to me at least seems to be becoming more divorced from science, religion, and philosophy and more and more strictly only commentating on social issues or literature itself. George Saunders has a background in geophysical engineering. When you listen to him in interviews, his descriptions of his ideas about writing sound somewhat informed by his engineering background, but his books themselves aren't really "the writings of a former geophysicist." Yiyun Li was an immunologist and served a compulsory year in the Chinese military, but Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life doesn't contain a trace of immunology--it's about communion with authors long past. Ishiguro and Murakami definitely let their experience with music influence their writing. David Foster Wallace studied modal logic, and his awesome weirdo philosophy sensibilities are definitely evident on the page and in the structures of his work. I don't know if it's really fair to compare contemporary writers to Goethe. He was born to a well-off family in the late 1700s. That was a time when a generalist could make meaningful contributions to the sciences. These days, one would have to have an advanced degree to even be allowed to engage with the peer review process. As far as contemporary fiction I can think of that has interests in other fields of inquiry... I guess there's The Overstory by Richard Powers, for ecological fiction. A lot of Ursula K. Le Guin's books are clearly informed by anthropology. Ruth Ozeki is an ordained Buddhist priest, and her novel A Tale for the Time Being is in conversation with an 800-year-old Buddhist religious treatise. Saunders' Lincoln in the Bardo is also definitely a Buddhist piece of writing. Anyway, I have a copy of Guerney's translation of Dead Souls coming in the mail, and I'm extremely stoked for it.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 15, 2023 19:18
|
|
|
Listened to the audiobook of Liberation Day by Saunders. Overall pretty solid, with some really standout stories for me (Liberation Day, Love Letter, Mom of Bold Action, Sparrow). There are some passages near the end of "Liberation Day" where you can absolutely feel the sweat dripping down Saunder's brow as he's revising the hell out of certain sentences. But I think Sparrow might be the best piece in the book when it comes to his approach, which seems to be concentrating so deeply on the lives of desperate (often despicable) people, in a spirit of metta, until he can lovingkindness his way to an ending point of grace. I feel such an immense respect for Proust but I also have yet to finish Swann's Way. I'm halfway through with it! It's just... It puts me to sleep. Not because it's bad; far from it. But the prose is so dense that I sometimes lose sight of what is actually happening in the story, and when I take a moment to reorient myself, the answer is something like "he was thinking about his aunt's housekeeper's kerchief" and I'm left unmoored once again. I've been reading the Lydia Davis translation, and it is really wonderful, but I almost have to suspend any judgment of it as a novel. I associate it with the same feeling I have when listening to music in a darkened room at night. It feels like words washing over me, rather than a sequence of events leading characters to a conclusion.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 20, 2023 05:57
|
|
|
I picked up The Summer Book and Fair Play by Tove Jansson. Halfway through The Summer Book now. It's really lovely. There's a sort of dignity and equal regard that the writing gives to the natural world--while not quite being "nature writing"-- that I find compelling. The closest comparison I can think of (which some of the jacket blurbs mention as well) is the way nature is treated in Hayao Miyazaki's works. It's also interesting to read a book by an experienced visual artist, because so much of the language of the book is carefully-constructed imagery. can't wait to read her lesbian artist love story next.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 1, 2023 18:26
|
|
|
3D Megadoodoo posted:I remember some interview where she was like "yeah it's beautiful and clean in the archipelago because you can throw all your trash in the sea". Notes from an Island posted:The sea was chalk white in every direction as far as the eye could see. It was only then that we noticed the absolute silence. i guess when you're born in 1914 you can't help but dump your trash everywhere. (rabbit hole: here is an old swedish instructional film from 1964 encouraging people to poke holes in their garbage before tossing it into the sea, so it sinks lmao) Cephas fucked around with this message at 19:39 on Dec 3, 2023 |
|
#
¿
Dec 3, 2023 19:35
|
|
|
I mostly like Murakami when his writing focuses on liminal spaces and aporetic creatures. I personally find that his writing can have a sort of hypnotic effect where all of the mundane tropes he's known for are just fodder for one or two scenes of violent intrusions of the uncanny. A lot of his stories defy explanation or resolution and are very mysterious, and after I finish reading his novels, I usually end up having strange and vivid dreams about them some time afterward. Like it gives my subconscious something to chew on. For an author as popular as he is, it's hard for me to think of who I would recommend him to. I guess early 20-somethings who would find his coolly detached and self-assured characters compelling, or people who are into oneironautics?
|
|
#
¿
Dec 5, 2023 05:09
|
|
|
Scylla and Charybdis are right there.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 27, 2023 16:52
|
|
|
Gaius Marius posted:I dislike Audiobooks king lear is an exceptional and deeply beautiful work of art, imo shakespeare's best. just some truly moving language in that play. also "out, vile jelly!"
|
|
#
¿
Jan 20, 2024 19:15
|
|
|
olorum posted:Like some others in the thread I've been recently reading To the Lighthouse, just finished it and it's some of the best prose I've ever read. Kinda wish this wasn't my first Woolf novel because now I'm afraid I'll be disappointed by the other ones. I'll probably be reading Orlando next highly recommend the 1992 Tilda Swinton Orlando film. Takes an already weird story and turns it into a complete phantasmagoria.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 23, 2024 17:33
|
|
|
ulvir posted:I am talking about adults here, not young kids. there are people who are now 40 years old who refuse to let go of young adult fiction and poo poo they read/watched as kids. like that person who was mad at the lack of quotation marks, for instance it's not just a millennial thing. I know some older gen xers who have suspicion and disdain for challenging literature. One of whom wrote a book of poems with the mission statement being that it was poems for regular everyday people, and not that ivory tower crap. The other said "no one reads the iliad and the odyssey by choice" and thought Nabokov should have been arrested for writing Lolita (and loves Disney). it's just a people thing. Honestly, I think it's great that people can feel deep connections to or still appreciate things that moved them when they were younger. Or still be open to appreciating good art even if it's aimed at younger audiences. I kind of think that the problem is that people have very limited mental bandwidth, and literature is often too much work, or there's too much inertia, for people to want to seek it out voluntarily. Which is understandable in our stupid society. But it's a shame because an active relationship with literature can be a deep comfort on an existential level.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 4, 2024 07:38
|
|
|
Mrenda posted:Becky Chambers, specifically. Because why I've had her first book in a Waterstones bag for a week or two is it's described as being character driven in the sci-fi world. Which is, I know, fundamentally groundbreaking. I want to see how it's understood, though, or "why." I've read a couple of Becky Chambers books. I couldn't really get into her Wayfarers books (I'm just not that into Star Trek pastiche, I guess), but I read both of her Monk and Robot novellas. The first book in the series is a bit stronger, I think. I have mixed feelings about it. I've seen it come up now and then as a sort of "quietly revolutionary" story insofar as it grants major moral value to comfort, rather than ambition or industry or productivity. It manages to accomplish this by imagining a far-off civilization that lives on a small moon with a post-scarcity ecofriendly infrastructure, where people believe in a chill and tolerant religion that doesn't seem to ask much of them. I think as a piece of literature, it's basically a cup of Sleepytime tea. Late capitalist society is so utterly hosed that a story that says "imagine a future where people figured out how to have comfortable lives without destroying the earth, and where everyone's comfort is considered a basic human need" serves as a kind of existential backrub, trying to loosen the reader's pent-up tensions and restore them to some kind of a sane baseline where it's considered okay for adults to think "you know, it would be nice if things were nice." I have to admit I had some resistance to the story for how disarmingly positive its imaginary future is. I guess that makes it very New Sincerity, and in a way it's kind of punk, in the same way that drag queen storytimes in public libraries are kind of punk. i think the sequel is a lot rougher, because it introduces some elements that I think it doesn't fully manage to wrangle. The society is basically based around trading utils, but the story seems incapable of imagining a utility monster. And it handwaves an obvious scifi analog to the Amish without interrogating any of the ramifications that might arise from isolationist social units. By adding those extra details, the imagined world becomes more realized, but it also becomes more obvious that the books are operating in a naive mode where the basic existence of evil isn't going to be acknowledged. in my opinion the monk and robot books are scifi novellas with the aesthetics of a slice of life anime/manga, which is fine and all, but if you place them within that genre of slice-of-life anime/manga, they don't seem especially notable. and of course there is absolutely nothing groundbreaking about character-driven scifi. But "character-driven" is kind of a misnomer for the issue, I think. The Metamorphosis is character-driven; Lolita is character-driven. I don't think the issue is that her stories are character-driven rather than plot-driven, but that her stories (from what I've read of them) seem interested in the daily lives of average people.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 1, 2024 06:52
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 9, 2024 01:23 |
|
|
Finished Le Guin's The Farthest Shore and Powers's Bewilderment today. The Farthest Shore rules. I think Tombs of Atuan is still my favorite of the three Earthsea books I've read so far, and I think its ending was more poignant than Farthest Shore's. But The Farthest Shore manages to capture the pure, distilled joy of a fantasy adventure without compromising its moral-ethical vision. I'll probably wait a bit before reading Tehanu, to give the original 3 Earthsea books a chance to breathe. I'm really curious to read Le Guin's Searoad. Bewilderment is... a tricky book. Robin's character strains belief, and the commentary on current events and barely-concealed real-life people is a little clumsy. The father in the story is very clearly an unreliable narrator, and the novel's psychological depth comes largely from how his perspective tints the entire book. But the very elements that risk clumsiness and preciousness also facilitate the book in genuinely grappling with the question of how not to fall into despair over the state of the world. The question of what one person can do--what is one person responsible for doing?--when an entire system is broken and killing so many things, is such a painful question to examine closely. I have gratitude toward Powers for writing a book that was able to touch those raw feelings of grief and anger out of a desire for kinship. I'll probably work backwards with Powers, and read The Overstory next, before checking out The Echo Maker and The Goldbug Variations.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 1, 2024 01:20
|
|