en-US Mon, 07 Apr 2025 22:29:45 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 223941267 Now, women forget all those things they don't want to remember and remember everything they don't want to forget. The dream is the truth.

When, at sixteen, Janie is caught kissing shiftless Johnny Taylor, her grandmother swiftly marries her off to an old man with sixty acres. Janie endures two stifling marriages before meeting the man of her dreams - who offers not diamonds, but a packet of flowering seeds. Rediscovered and championed by Alice Walker in the 1970s, Hurston's lyrical novel of self-discovery is now acclaimed as one of the greatest American classics of the twentieth century.]]> Zora Neale Hurston 0349019681 Baz 4
One of my little pet peeves is the way people have of discussing and distinguishing between literary fiction books and books that are “good reads��, aka “light�� or “beach�� reads. I hear it all the time, all day every day, on almost every bookish podcast I listen to—I listen to a lot of them. People will say they love literary fiction, but talk about reading it in a specific kind of way, appropriate at particular times, because it demands more of the reader etcetera�� I get mildly annoyed at this because literary fiction and “good read�� fiction are not mutually exclusive! I know that you and I know this, but it bugs me when people talk about lit fic in this narrow way. Sometimes I want to read more challenging books, and sometimes I want to read something more propulsive and plotty. Either way, I can, and only want to, read something literary.

Their Eyes Were Watching God is a perfect example of a literary good read. Great narrative drive, great storytelling prowess, and the most stunning musical prose, and sharpness of insight and intelligence.

And the novel, damn it, did the work that great novels do: it hammered its nail squarely on its head. The ending, the final paragraph, knocked me out.

Hurston’s omniscient voice and stylings were giving Homer. The vision and command is there. It was so good.]]> 3.50 1937
author: Zora Neale Hurston
name: Baz
average rating: 3.50
book published: 1937
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/06
date added: 2025/04/07
shelves:
review:
Finally made it to Their Eyes Were Watching God, and it was everything I could want from a “good read.”Once I got started I couldn’t put it down. My experience with Jonah’s Gourd Vine was pretty much the same. Hurston’s a writer of chiseled stories that move. There’s no dawdling. She is intensely lyrical, yeah, but every bit of poetry in them serves the narrative.

One of my little pet peeves is the way people have of discussing and distinguishing between literary fiction books and books that are “good reads��, aka “light�� or “beach�� reads. I hear it all the time, all day every day, on almost every bookish podcast I listen to—I listen to a lot of them. People will say they love literary fiction, but talk about reading it in a specific kind of way, appropriate at particular times, because it demands more of the reader etcetera�� I get mildly annoyed at this because literary fiction and “good read�� fiction are not mutually exclusive! I know that you and I know this, but it bugs me when people talk about lit fic in this narrow way. Sometimes I want to read more challenging books, and sometimes I want to read something more propulsive and plotty. Either way, I can, and only want to, read something literary.

Their Eyes Were Watching God is a perfect example of a literary good read. Great narrative drive, great storytelling prowess, and the most stunning musical prose, and sharpness of insight and intelligence.

And the novel, damn it, did the work that great novels do: it hammered its nail squarely on its head. The ending, the final paragraph, knocked me out.

Hurston’s omniscient voice and stylings were giving Homer. The vision and command is there. It was so good.
]]> 107879612 390 Alejandro Zambra 1783782900 Baz 0 currently-reading 3.97 2020
author: Alejandro Zambra
name: Baz
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/06
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 200459614 O brave new world, that has such people in't.

Once upon a time not very far from now, two children come home to find a line of wet red paint encircling the outside of their house.

What does it mean?

It’s a truism of our time that it’ll be the next generation who’ll sort out our increasingly toxic world.

What would that actually be like?

In a state turned hostile, a world of insiders and outsiders, what things of the past can sustain them and what shape can resistance take?

And what’s a horse got to do with any of this?

Gliff is a novel about how we make meaning and how we are made meaningless. With a nod to the traditions of dystopian fiction, a glance at the Kafkaesque, and a new take on the notion of classic, it's a moving and electrifying read, a vital and prescient tale of the versatility and variety deep-rooted in language, in nature and in human nature.]]> 288 Ali Smith 0241665574 Baz 4
I needed this. I needed something bright and playful and tricksy. Ali Smith is one of my favourite and most read writers, and I’m so glad, once again, that she’s here. Her stylish fictions have a sentimentality that’s beautiful and infectious. This probably sounds tacky to say but I mean it sincerely: she’s a bit of a guiding spirit. Her work, her voice through her work, is consoling. Gliff, similar to previous novels, inhabits a world in crisis, and entangles in its web lightness, hope, darkness and grimness. It challenges a world obsessed with fear and fear-mongering, and calls for resistance.

All while being as sparkly and dazzling and entertaining in fast-flowing addictive prose as ever. This is one of the highlights of my year. Truly radiant.]]> 4.12 2024
author: Ali Smith
name: Baz
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/08
date added: 2025/03/31
shelves:
review:
Smith does it again. The cute precocious rebel-heart child and adolescent characters with their cute sweet parents and carers, thinking and talking about language, art and justice.

I needed this. I needed something bright and playful and tricksy. Ali Smith is one of my favourite and most read writers, and I’m so glad, once again, that she’s here. Her stylish fictions have a sentimentality that’s beautiful and infectious. This probably sounds tacky to say but I mean it sincerely: she’s a bit of a guiding spirit. Her work, her voice through her work, is consoling. Gliff, similar to previous novels, inhabits a world in crisis, and entangles in its web lightness, hope, darkness and grimness. It challenges a world obsessed with fear and fear-mongering, and calls for resistance.

All while being as sparkly and dazzling and entertaining in fast-flowing addictive prose as ever. This is one of the highlights of my year. Truly radiant.
]]> 37858454 106 César Aira 1911508121 Baz 5
Him and Alejandro Zambra are two of the most charming writers I’ve read in some time.

Thank you to @andotherpics for publishing Aira. As an “avante-garde�� “eccentric�� writer of very slim“meandering�� fictions, I know he’s not an easy sell. But they decided to publish six of his novellas anyway, more than they’ve published of any other of their authors. I’ve read two, and I’ve ordered the other four.

If you’re curious about Aira, this one is a great one to read first. It’s not as exuberant and fantastical as a lot of his other stuff, but it is just as delightful.]]> 3.61 2003
author: César Aira
name: Baz
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2003
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/30
date added: 2025/03/30
shelves:
review:
My second Aira this year, and third overall. I loved it. I’ve now fully transformed into total-geek fanboy. His fictions are unique, vigorous, somehow sweet and effervescent. I love his style, his voice. His cleverness, thoughtfulness, playfulness, and natural elegance. His this and his that. You get the picture.

Him and Alejandro Zambra are two of the most charming writers I’ve read in some time.

Thank you to @andotherpics for publishing Aira. As an “avante-garde�� “eccentric�� writer of very slim“meandering�� fictions, I know he’s not an easy sell. But they decided to publish six of his novellas anyway, more than they’ve published of any other of their authors. I’ve read two, and I’ve ordered the other four.

If you’re curious about Aira, this one is a great one to read first. It’s not as exuberant and fantastical as a lot of his other stuff, but it is just as delightful.
]]> 504900
“In his daily walks through London,�� notes Jeremy Treglown in his Introduction to this collection, “Pritchett watched and listened to people as a naturalist observes wild creatures and birds. He knew that oddity is the norm, not the exception.�� This finely attuned sense, coupled with an understanding that nothing in life is mundane, is what makes these stories so immensely enjoyable. Drawing on a vast treasure chest of writings, Treglown has selected sixteen of Pritchett’s gems, including “A Serious Question,�� which makes its debut in book form here. Featuring some of the best work from a long career, this new compilation of Pritchett’s brilliantly compact stories illuminates his legendary skills.]]> 225 V.S. Pritchett 0812972945 Baz 4
I’m a little at odds with the contemporary understanding of what a short story collection should be, or do. People seem to want thematic links. They want the stories to talk to each other in some obvious way. To me, this is kind of an indication of a fundamental misunderstanding of the form of the short story. (This is separate from linked story collections that blur the line between collection and novel. I don’t mean those Joan Silberesque books, which I love. They’re their own thing/genre).

The range in the sixteen stories I read by Pritchett was wonderful. I feel like I read sixteen different works. I liked every story, and I loved a few: The Two Brothers, The Wheelbarrow, and When My Girl Comes Home. These were 5/5 experiences. Stories of extreme brevity that have the density of novels contain the best writing, to me, and give me the most intense pleasure.

Pritchett’s stylish voice is mostly comic, and there’s a little detachment in it, but in some stories that voice is more muted, and the undercurrent of bewilderment is at the fore. In every story the characters, often eccentric and always brilliantly realized, are the focus.

A great read.]]> 3.95 2005
author: V.S. Pritchett
name: Baz
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2005
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/28
date added: 2025/03/28
shelves:
review:
One thing I like about a selected volume by a writer who’s written and produced stories over decades is that they give me the kind of story collection I like best: each story is distinct, existing in its own universe.

I’m a little at odds with the contemporary understanding of what a short story collection should be, or do. People seem to want thematic links. They want the stories to talk to each other in some obvious way. To me, this is kind of an indication of a fundamental misunderstanding of the form of the short story. (This is separate from linked story collections that blur the line between collection and novel. I don’t mean those Joan Silberesque books, which I love. They’re their own thing/genre).

The range in the sixteen stories I read by Pritchett was wonderful. I feel like I read sixteen different works. I liked every story, and I loved a few: The Two Brothers, The Wheelbarrow, and When My Girl Comes Home. These were 5/5 experiences. Stories of extreme brevity that have the density of novels contain the best writing, to me, and give me the most intense pleasure.

Pritchett’s stylish voice is mostly comic, and there’s a little detachment in it, but in some stories that voice is more muted, and the undercurrent of bewilderment is at the fore. In every story the characters, often eccentric and always brilliantly realized, are the focus.

A great read.
]]> 880694 'The Hotel du Lac was a dignified building, a house of repute, a traditional establishment, used to welcoming the prudent, the well-to-do, the retired, the self-effacing, the respected patrons of an earlier era'

Into the rarefied atmosphere of the Hotel du Lac timidly walks Edith Hope, romantic novelist and holder of modest dreams. Edith has been exiled from home after embarrassing herself and her friends. She has refused to sacrifice her ideals and remains stubbornly single. But among the pampered women and minor nobility Edith finds Mr Neville, and her chance to escape from a life of humilitiating spinsterhood is renewed...]]> 184 Anita Brookner 0140147470 Baz 4
I don’t think a novel should be or do one thing or another. Forget the highbrow arguments ppl have about the novel and what makes fiction serious/literary/art. To me, what makes a work successful depends entirely on whether its creator achieved whatever he or she set out to do.

Sometimes I want invention, high-style and a push against the boundaries of form. Sometimes I want to look at the wider picture, read an exploration of the state of a culture. Sometimes I want to be driven by ideas and tackle themes of memory, art, history, technology, death, race, class, war. And sometimes I simply want to delve into the mind of an unremarkable person like myself, but also unlike myself; to forget who I am and experience the world as it revolves around somebody else’s ordinary life; to get a perspective from someone with a similar and yet different conception of reality. Because we are all, essentially, the same but different. I luxuriated in the oldschool feel of Anita Brookner’s introspective novel. No pyrotechnics, no ambition to capture the state of the nation, no straining for literary originality. Hotel du Lac, instead, is—pleasantly and wonderfully, for me—insular. It cares only about one woman, its protagonist Edith Hope. Her desires, all too familiar, and the pain caused by her intelligence and self-knowledge. Her failures and withdrawal, her dissociation and watchfulness of other people. Her wish for happiness and love but inability to play the game. Brookner is Austenesque in her onslaught of beautifully phrased insights that nail the way certain people move through the world and organise their lives, and in getting them down in prose cut and made with gorgeous precision �� it’s packed with quotable lines. It’s a melancholy, resonant, stylish, quiet book that shivers with feeling. By focusing on one person it actually gets at many themes and has a lot to say. It’s a meditation on the hares and tortoises of the world, and how in life the tortoises mostly don’t, in fact, win in the end. One of the highlights of my year.]]> 3.55 1984
author: Anita Brookner
name: Baz
average rating: 3.55
book published: 1984
rating: 4
read at: 2018/09/25
date added: 2025/03/21
shelves:
review:
4.5

I don’t think a novel should be or do one thing or another. Forget the highbrow arguments ppl have about the novel and what makes fiction serious/literary/art. To me, what makes a work successful depends entirely on whether its creator achieved whatever he or she set out to do.

Sometimes I want invention, high-style and a push against the boundaries of form. Sometimes I want to look at the wider picture, read an exploration of the state of a culture. Sometimes I want to be driven by ideas and tackle themes of memory, art, history, technology, death, race, class, war. And sometimes I simply want to delve into the mind of an unremarkable person like myself, but also unlike myself; to forget who I am and experience the world as it revolves around somebody else’s ordinary life; to get a perspective from someone with a similar and yet different conception of reality. Because we are all, essentially, the same but different. I luxuriated in the oldschool feel of Anita Brookner’s introspective novel. No pyrotechnics, no ambition to capture the state of the nation, no straining for literary originality. Hotel du Lac, instead, is—pleasantly and wonderfully, for me—insular. It cares only about one woman, its protagonist Edith Hope. Her desires, all too familiar, and the pain caused by her intelligence and self-knowledge. Her failures and withdrawal, her dissociation and watchfulness of other people. Her wish for happiness and love but inability to play the game. Brookner is Austenesque in her onslaught of beautifully phrased insights that nail the way certain people move through the world and organise their lives, and in getting them down in prose cut and made with gorgeous precision �� it’s packed with quotable lines. It’s a melancholy, resonant, stylish, quiet book that shivers with feeling. By focusing on one person it actually gets at many themes and has a lot to say. It’s a meditation on the hares and tortoises of the world, and how in life the tortoises mostly don’t, in fact, win in the end. One of the highlights of my year.
]]> 50364464 90 Peter Handke 0241457696 Baz 3
My second Handke read this year—I recently read The Left-Handed Woman—and another interesting study of the psyche of an individual who is largely opaque to the reader in some ways, and intimately close in others. I was given the outward presentation, the minute actions and reactions, and mental states, of the character, but Handke doesn’t do omniscient narration, he doesn’t psychologize or give context. He stays close to the character and observes him and goes into his immediate perceptions.

A short work at ninety pages, Goalkeeper’s Anxiety is so concentrated on its subject, so tightly bound by its form, that for me it (maybe) could have been condensed further by another twenty pages.

Handke is a great writer, unusual, fascinating, his prose steely and precise. I’m happy to sit with the two I’ve now read, but I’d happily read him again in the future.]]> 3.13 1970
author: Peter Handke
name: Baz
average rating: 3.13
book published: 1970
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/14
date added: 2025/03/14
shelves:
review:
A man commits cold-blooded murder, for an indiscernible reason, then goes about his days hiding in plain sight while slowly losing his grip on reality.

My second Handke read this year—I recently read The Left-Handed Woman—and another interesting study of the psyche of an individual who is largely opaque to the reader in some ways, and intimately close in others. I was given the outward presentation, the minute actions and reactions, and mental states, of the character, but Handke doesn’t do omniscient narration, he doesn’t psychologize or give context. He stays close to the character and observes him and goes into his immediate perceptions.

A short work at ninety pages, Goalkeeper’s Anxiety is so concentrated on its subject, so tightly bound by its form, that for me it (maybe) could have been condensed further by another twenty pages.

Handke is a great writer, unusual, fascinating, his prose steely and precise. I’m happy to sit with the two I’ve now read, but I’d happily read him again in the future.
]]> 9906 272 Denis Johnson 0413772322 Baz 3
I love Denis Johnson, I count him among my favourite writers, but sadly this is my least favourite of the six books of his I’ve read. It does stand apart from the other five, though: it’s looser, and a lot more open-ended. I would love to know how Johnson felt about it, looking back on it years later �� if he was critical of what I perceive to be a slackness, or authorial indecision. He once said that he regretted his attempts to talk about his religious beliefs: “I’m not qualified. I don’t know who God is, or any of that. People concerned with those questions turn up in my stories, but I can’t explain why they do. Sometimes I wish they wouldn’t.��

In saying that though, I also actually enjoyed it for its very 90s American novel vibe. It made me nostalgic. I used to read a lot more late twentieth century novels by American men. Novels like this don’t get written anymore. And Johnson’s writing is always fantastic. He’s a natural poet, and as one review stated, “there is real music in his prose.��

It had been years since my last Johnson book, so it was nice to be in silent communion with him again. With a writer whose fictions you connect to naturally and deeply, often just their voice alone is enough.]]> 3.70 1990
author: Denis Johnson
name: Baz
average rating: 3.70
book published: 1990
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/10
date added: 2025/03/10
shelves:
review:
A strange genre-bendy novel about a man who moves to a small town, leaving behind a life that culminated in a suicide attempt. The story follows this man as he grapples with his faith, with God, with his delusions, and his sanity.

I love Denis Johnson, I count him among my favourite writers, but sadly this is my least favourite of the six books of his I’ve read. It does stand apart from the other five, though: it’s looser, and a lot more open-ended. I would love to know how Johnson felt about it, looking back on it years later �� if he was critical of what I perceive to be a slackness, or authorial indecision. He once said that he regretted his attempts to talk about his religious beliefs: “I’m not qualified. I don’t know who God is, or any of that. People concerned with those questions turn up in my stories, but I can’t explain why they do. Sometimes I wish they wouldn’t.��

In saying that though, I also actually enjoyed it for its very 90s American novel vibe. It made me nostalgic. I used to read a lot more late twentieth century novels by American men. Novels like this don’t get written anymore. And Johnson’s writing is always fantastic. He’s a natural poet, and as one review stated, “there is real music in his prose.��

It had been years since my last Johnson book, so it was nice to be in silent communion with him again. With a writer whose fictions you connect to naturally and deeply, often just their voice alone is enough.
]]> 221326443 Morning and Evening is a novel concerning the beautiful dream that our lives have meaning.]]> 104 Jon Fosse 1804271217 Baz 4
Being my fourth Fosse, Morning and Evening was a nice deepening of my growing connection with his writing. It’s a fairly simple story that Fosse steeps in an atmosphere of lightness, intimacy and characteristic quiet mysticism. Told in two parts, the first part narrates the moment of the character Johannes’s birth, and the second part takes Johannes from his death into the after.

It was a pleasure to move to the calm music of Fosse’s prose. It’s a beautiful book.]]> 4.24 2000
author: Jon Fosse
name: Baz
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2000
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/26
date added: 2025/02/26
shelves:
review:
With Fosse I started off with The Other Name, volumes one and two of Septology, and I didn’t love it. I loved sections of it, but overall it was too long for me. Then I read Aliss at the Fire and loved it fully—it ended up being a favourite of the year. I learned that Fosse was definitely a writer for me, and that the Fosse of the compressed fictions is the Fosse for me. Economy is a strength. The purity of the short form suits his stories. Then I read A Shining, and it consolidated what I’d learned.

Being my fourth Fosse, Morning and Evening was a nice deepening of my growing connection with his writing. It’s a fairly simple story that Fosse steeps in an atmosphere of lightness, intimacy and characteristic quiet mysticism. Told in two parts, the first part narrates the moment of the character Johannes’s birth, and the second part takes Johannes from his death into the after.

It was a pleasure to move to the calm music of Fosse’s prose. It’s a beautiful book.
]]> 44153384
Birthday begins with a fiftieth birthday. It comes and goes without fanfare, but just a few months later, an apparently banal comment that reveals a gap in the author’s knowledge of the world prompts him to sit down in a café and write. As he sifts through anecdotes and weaves memories together, Aira reflects on the origin of his beliefs and his incapacity to live, on literature understood from the author’s and the reader’s point of view, on death and the Last Judgement.]]> 96 César Aira 1911508407 Baz 4
Birthday is about a man—a version of Aira—whose fiftieth birthday has just passed: hence the title. Except, his birthday is briefly remarked on in the first couple of pages and then the rest of the book goes somewhere else entirely. The birthday was a jumping off point, sort of. I predict this is the case with many of Aira’s novellas. His narratives veer from one thing, an idea or problem or anecdote, to another. The narrator fixates on an idea but also goes off on tangents, kind of like the way Bernhard’s narrators talktalktalk about one thing and then suddenly take a hard left and go somewhere else. I love these kinds of fast-flowing monologues. When the voices are as charming and smart and clever as Aira’s are, I really don’t care what the stories are about, I’m happy to follow them anywhere. The rhythm is the thing. I’m reminded of a bit from a 1997 conversation between Lydia Davis and Francine Prose:

FP: There are lots of books that make me think: I don’t care what’s in them as long as they’re written beautifully.

LD: In fact Beckett said somewhere that he didn’t care what a text said as long as it was constructed beautifully, or something like that—all of meaning, all of beauty is in the construction.

This stayed with me. I read many writers not because of what’s in their books, but because of my connection to their style. This connection is what makes them my favourite writers, and makes me want to keep reading their stuff and live in their fictions.

Aira is not for everyone, but if he’s for you, he’s REALLY for you. I feel an addiction coming on.]]> 3.44 2001
author: César Aira
name: Baz
average rating: 3.44
book published: 2001
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/24
date added: 2025/02/24
shelves:
review:
Aira is apparently (according to the blurb) viewed to be the ‘true heir to Jorge Luís Borges�� literature of ideas.�� He’s super playful and experimental, and he’s been writing restlessly and producing stories and novellas at a rapid rate, and they are these strange, open-ended, daring fictions that are unpredictable, philosophical, warm and delightful. I’ve read two now, so far—The Famous Magician is the other—and these are indeed their signal qualities. Aira is someone I can see myself returning to again and again �� I already have another of his novellas lined up to read very soon.

Birthday is about a man—a version of Aira—whose fiftieth birthday has just passed: hence the title. Except, his birthday is briefly remarked on in the first couple of pages and then the rest of the book goes somewhere else entirely. The birthday was a jumping off point, sort of. I predict this is the case with many of Aira’s novellas. His narratives veer from one thing, an idea or problem or anecdote, to another. The narrator fixates on an idea but also goes off on tangents, kind of like the way Bernhard’s narrators talktalktalk about one thing and then suddenly take a hard left and go somewhere else. I love these kinds of fast-flowing monologues. When the voices are as charming and smart and clever as Aira’s are, I really don’t care what the stories are about, I’m happy to follow them anywhere. The rhythm is the thing. I’m reminded of a bit from a 1997 conversation between Lydia Davis and Francine Prose:

FP: There are lots of books that make me think: I don’t care what’s in them as long as they’re written beautifully.

LD: In fact Beckett said somewhere that he didn’t care what a text said as long as it was constructed beautifully, or something like that—all of meaning, all of beauty is in the construction.

This stayed with me. I read many writers not because of what’s in their books, but because of my connection to their style. This connection is what makes them my favourite writers, and makes me want to keep reading their stuff and live in their fictions.

Aira is not for everyone, but if he’s for you, he’s REALLY for you. I feel an addiction coming on.
]]> 50364466 So she sends him away, knowing she must fend for herself and her young son. As she adjusts to her disorienting new life alone, what she thought was fear slowly starts to feel like freedom.]]> 67 Peter Handke 024145767X Baz 4
Handke’s prose reminded me a bit of Simenon: it’s detached, flat and clear. His images are stark and arresting, and his depictions of little human actions are illuminating. I liked the economy of the writing, the way it’s laser-focused on its subject. A great book. This was my first Handke and I look forward to reading him again.]]> 3.26 1976
author: Peter Handke
name: Baz
average rating: 3.26
book published: 1976
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/21
date added: 2025/02/21
shelves:
review:
A strange, austere novella rooted in something very real and common, and difficult. Stylistically there’s an unnatural quality to the world, the way the characters speak and behave—an affected manner that I liked. And the story is a simple one: it deals in the ordinary passing of days after a woman’s bold decision to end her relationship with her husband. After this significant moment of change, nothing much happens, quiet daily life resumes. But Handke’s subtle and fantastic writing allows us to watch and take the temperature of each little moment, and feel that a lot is actually happening to this woman. He doesn’t make anything explicit, nothing comes through in a clear way—there’s very little psychologizing—but he puts you there beside her as she stands, walks, sits, watches, listens to others, does things quietly, copes with her child. I thought it was brilliantly done.

Handke’s prose reminded me a bit of Simenon: it’s detached, flat and clear. His images are stark and arresting, and his depictions of little human actions are illuminating. I liked the economy of the writing, the way it’s laser-focused on its subject. A great book. This was my first Handke and I look forward to reading him again.
]]> 60534041 A rediscovered literary classic, The Bloater is a rollicking hothouse novel where love and repulsion are two paths to the same abyss

Why do the only men I know carry wet umbrellas and say “Umm?�� I’m being starved alive. Quick: the first bookshop for a copy of the Kama-Sutra.

Min works at the BBC as a sound engineer, and in theory she’s married, but her husband George is so invisible that she accidentally turns the lights off even when he’s still in the room. Luckily, she has her friends and lovers to distract her: in Min’s self-lacerating, bracingly opinionated voice, life boils down to sex appeal―and of late she’s being courted by an internationally renowned opera singer whom she refers to as The Bloater (a swelled, salted herring). Disgusted by and attracted to him in equal measure, her dilemma―which reaches a hysterical, hilarious pitch―is whether to sleep with him or not.

Rosemary Tonks―the salt and pepper of the earth―is a writer who gets her claws into the reader with all the joy of a cat and a mouse. Vain and materialistic, tender and savage, narrated in brilliant, sparkling prose, The Bloater is the perfect snapshot of London in the 1960s.]]> 135 Rosemary Tonks 0811234568 Baz 4
��

The Bloater is about a cheeky neurotic woman who guards herself from the danger of connecting with a man in a real way. She can be a bitch, but she’s just protecting herself!

What nailed the sale of this novel for me was poet and translator Michael Hofmann, who wrote a long glowing piece on Tonks, and whose literary tastes I’ve come to trust: “Writing like this is far too beautiful and accomplished to be kept off the shelf.��

I loved this so much. More than the plot, the narrative is driven by the voice of its narrator Min, her acerbic manner and cutting intelligence, and her snappy dialogues with her friend Jenny and the three men in her life. Her two main conversations with Jenny in which they discuss their affairs were my favourite parts of the book.

Sexy, sophisticated, cunty and tender, Min is intoxicating to men. She’s light on her feet and quick, her energy almost frenetic. And these descriptions of Min are also descriptions of the book: line by line it was consistently fresh and stimulating and entertaining and aesthetically pleasing. The writing is brilliant.

Also! Another thing I really liked was that these characters are not only funny to the reader, they’re funny to themselves and each other—they’re often laughing. It was refreshing. How often in comic fiction are characters being serious and miserable and cracking up at a sudden idea, image or turn of phrase in the same conversation, the way we do in life? Not often enough. It felt real. Min knows she’s being absurd.

The Bloater is for fans of Muriel Spark, Jane Bowles, Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker, and Hepburn’s Holly Golightly.

It’s easily a highlight of my year so far, and I’m sure it’s going to stay a highlight.]]> 3.50 1968
author: Rosemary Tonks
name: Baz
average rating: 3.50
book published: 1968
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/19
date added: 2025/02/19
shelves:
review:
4.5, really.

��

The Bloater is about a cheeky neurotic woman who guards herself from the danger of connecting with a man in a real way. She can be a bitch, but she’s just protecting herself!

What nailed the sale of this novel for me was poet and translator Michael Hofmann, who wrote a long glowing piece on Tonks, and whose literary tastes I’ve come to trust: “Writing like this is far too beautiful and accomplished to be kept off the shelf.��

I loved this so much. More than the plot, the narrative is driven by the voice of its narrator Min, her acerbic manner and cutting intelligence, and her snappy dialogues with her friend Jenny and the three men in her life. Her two main conversations with Jenny in which they discuss their affairs were my favourite parts of the book.

Sexy, sophisticated, cunty and tender, Min is intoxicating to men. She’s light on her feet and quick, her energy almost frenetic. And these descriptions of Min are also descriptions of the book: line by line it was consistently fresh and stimulating and entertaining and aesthetically pleasing. The writing is brilliant.

Also! Another thing I really liked was that these characters are not only funny to the reader, they’re funny to themselves and each other—they’re often laughing. It was refreshing. How often in comic fiction are characters being serious and miserable and cracking up at a sudden idea, image or turn of phrase in the same conversation, the way we do in life? Not often enough. It felt real. Min knows she’s being absurd.

The Bloater is for fans of Muriel Spark, Jane Bowles, Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker, and Hepburn’s Holly Golightly.

It’s easily a highlight of my year so far, and I’m sure it’s going to stay a highlight.
]]> 42870829 240 Graham Greene 0099286092 Baz 3
For me the most interesting element was the setting. I knew nothing about the severity of the Mexican government’s anti-clerical movements. Catholic priests were killed and expelled, churches were closed and repurposed, and people were restricted from religious practices.

The writing didn’t do much for me.

A grim book.]]> 3.92 1940
author: Graham Greene
name: Baz
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1940
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/14
date added: 2025/02/14
shelves:
review:
Of the five Graham Greene novels I’ve read this is my least favourite, but I think it was mostly a timing thing. Sadly, in terms of pure enjoyment, it came no where close to the heights of my two favourites The Quiet American and The End of the Affair, which is disappointing because many people say this is his best work. But again: it’s likely I would have had a better experience if I’d read it some other time.

For me the most interesting element was the setting. I knew nothing about the severity of the Mexican government’s anti-clerical movements. Catholic priests were killed and expelled, churches were closed and repurposed, and people were restricted from religious practices.

The writing didn’t do much for me.

A grim book.
]]> 24624231 My Documents is unflinchingly human and essential evidence of a sublimely talented writer working at the height of his powers.]]> 223 Alejandro Zambra 099297478X Baz 4
I enjoyed Bonsai and The Private Lives of Trees very much. My Documents cements Zambra as one of my favourite contemporary writers. I loved it.

I loved Nicole Krauss’s praise for the book, which stuck out for being less reviewer-like and more warm and intimate: ‘His books are like a phone call in the middle of the night from an old friend, and afterward, I missed the charming and funny voice on the other end, with its strange and beautiful stories.�� This is exactly how I feel about his books. Zambra ticks every major box I can think of: character-focused and socially engaged, the stories are clever, soulful, comic and sad. His style is idiosyncratic, off-kilter, elegant, sharp, formally playful and inventive. He is precise and he produces tightly written fiction.

He’s also definitely one of the most naturally modern of the contemporary writers I read. He’s the real deal.]]> 4.03 2013
author: Alejandro Zambra
name: Baz
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/01
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves:
review:
4.5

I enjoyed Bonsai and The Private Lives of Trees very much. My Documents cements Zambra as one of my favourite contemporary writers. I loved it.

I loved Nicole Krauss’s praise for the book, which stuck out for being less reviewer-like and more warm and intimate: ‘His books are like a phone call in the middle of the night from an old friend, and afterward, I missed the charming and funny voice on the other end, with its strange and beautiful stories.�� This is exactly how I feel about his books. Zambra ticks every major box I can think of: character-focused and socially engaged, the stories are clever, soulful, comic and sad. His style is idiosyncratic, off-kilter, elegant, sharp, formally playful and inventive. He is precise and he produces tightly written fiction.

He’s also definitely one of the most naturally modern of the contemporary writers I read. He’s the real deal.
]]> 10117779 The Price of Salt is story of Therese Belivet, a stage designer trapped in a department-store day job, whose salvation arrives one day in the form of Carol Aird, an alluring suburban housewife in the throes of a divorce. They fall in love and set out across the United States, pursued by a private investigator who eventually blackmails Carol into a choice between her daughter and her lover. With this reissue, The Price of Salt may finally be recognized as a major twentieth-century American novel.]]> 320 Claire Morgan 1408808978 Baz 3 4.00 1952
author: Claire Morgan
name: Baz
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1952
rating: 3
read at: 2015/12/10
date added: 2025/01/29
shelves:
review:

]]> 49150788 650 Hilary Mantel 0008381690 Baz 4
It was as good as I’d thought it would be. It was consistently excellent throughout. A 650 page book that isn’t baggy, ever. And that present tense! The first words of the book, ‘So now get up��, came to Mantel and the book was unlocked, her angle in became clear. Her use of the present tense is masterly, it made everything feel so immediate and concrete. And it gave what is historical fiction a contemporary sensibility.

I don’t know if I’ll read Bring Up the Bodies. I feel like my curiosity has been sated. I immersed myself in the world, and became acquainted with Mantel’s voice, and feel like I got what I wanted out of the experience. It was like watching a really well made action movie: I had such a good time, but I didn’t form a deep emotional attachment to the story or its characters. The characters, including our guy Thomas Cromwell, were and remained opaque, though not in a bad way. Mantel’s portraits were minimal, and I loved that. I’m happy, for now anyway, to leave things here.

I also loved Mantel’s spare use of description, not just with characters. I mean, there are plenty of descriptions throughout of clothing and weather, but Mantel was restrained each time, nailing whatever she was describing vividly in one or two sentences.

650 pages of sharp, tight writing. It can be done!

‘He thinks, I remembered you, Thomas More, but you didn’t remember me. You never even saw me coming.��

Chills!]]> 3.95 2009
author: Hilary Mantel
name: Baz
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2009
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/24
date added: 2025/01/25
shelves:
review:
It was kinda wild the way Wolf Hall became canon almost immediately. The cliche praise for a new book that I hate more than any other is the oxymoron “instant classic��. It’s not something you can know. It doesn’t make sense, it’s stupid. But then Wolf Hall happened and for the first time the phrase worked. We just knew.

It was as good as I’d thought it would be. It was consistently excellent throughout. A 650 page book that isn’t baggy, ever. And that present tense! The first words of the book, ‘So now get up��, came to Mantel and the book was unlocked, her angle in became clear. Her use of the present tense is masterly, it made everything feel so immediate and concrete. And it gave what is historical fiction a contemporary sensibility.

I don’t know if I’ll read Bring Up the Bodies. I feel like my curiosity has been sated. I immersed myself in the world, and became acquainted with Mantel’s voice, and feel like I got what I wanted out of the experience. It was like watching a really well made action movie: I had such a good time, but I didn’t form a deep emotional attachment to the story or its characters. The characters, including our guy Thomas Cromwell, were and remained opaque, though not in a bad way. Mantel’s portraits were minimal, and I loved that. I’m happy, for now anyway, to leave things here.

I also loved Mantel’s spare use of description, not just with characters. I mean, there are plenty of descriptions throughout of clothing and weather, but Mantel was restrained each time, nailing whatever she was describing vividly in one or two sentences.

650 pages of sharp, tight writing. It can be done!

‘He thinks, I remembered you, Thomas More, but you didn’t remember me. You never even saw me coming.��

Chills!
]]> 1993567 130 Roberto Bolaño 0099459396 Baz 2 3.76 2000
author: Roberto Bolaño
name: Baz
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2000
rating: 2
read at: 2013/08/18
date added: 2025/01/12
shelves:
review:

]]> 209622883 It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over is voraciously alive in the afterlife. Adrift yet keenly aware, she notes every bizarre detail of her new reality. And even if she has forgotten her name and much of what connects her to her humanity, she remembers with an implacable and nearly unbearable longing the place where she knew herself and was known—where she loved and was loved. Traveling across the landscapes of time and of space, heading always west, and carrying a dead but laconically opinionated crow in her chest, our undead narrator encounters and loses parts of her body and her self in one terrifying, hilarious, and heartbreaking situation after another. A tale for our dispossessed times, and one of the sharpest and funniest novels of recent years, It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over plumbs mortality and how it changes everything, except possibly love.]]> 132 Anne de Marcken 1804270741 Baz 3
Secondly, on a story level It Lasts Forever specifically recalled for me Moore’s latest novel I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home, published last year. It too is about grief. The loss of a loved one. And it too strays from realism and features an undead person.

This was better. Lorrie Moore is one of my favourite writers—like, a favourite among favourites, not far from Alice Munro—but I had a much better experience with De Marcken’s debut. I’m generally not a fan of (publicly) comparing books because, obviously, each book is its own thing, and comparisons should be more or less unserious. We know they can share many qualities and be totally different at the same time, and that was the case here. But the correlation was interesting to me.

I ultimately “liked and didn’t love�� this because there was an imbalance between my connection/enjoyment of the writing and my connection/involvement in the story. I loved De Marcken’s prose, her voice. I loved her angle. Also, when I take the novel apart, I love many of her scenes and images on their own, as distinct pieces separate from the larger story. But for some reason I never really became engrossed enough to be able to say I loved the overall narrative.

A good read �� unusual, inventive. I took a lot of pleasure in De Marcken’s ingenuity, smarts, and playfulness with form, and will definitely be following to see what she produces next.]]> 3.84 2024
author: Anne de Marcken
name: Baz
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/10/18
date added: 2025/01/09
shelves:
review:
Ok I can’t help but make comparisons to Lorrie Moore. Firstly, De Marcken’s style, the sharp agile prose, the high/low urbanity, delight in words, and the way she doesn’t balance comedy and pathos in two hands but holds them together in one palm, all reminded me of Moore.

Secondly, on a story level It Lasts Forever specifically recalled for me Moore’s latest novel I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home, published last year. It too is about grief. The loss of a loved one. And it too strays from realism and features an undead person.

This was better. Lorrie Moore is one of my favourite writers—like, a favourite among favourites, not far from Alice Munro—but I had a much better experience with De Marcken’s debut. I’m generally not a fan of (publicly) comparing books because, obviously, each book is its own thing, and comparisons should be more or less unserious. We know they can share many qualities and be totally different at the same time, and that was the case here. But the correlation was interesting to me.

I ultimately “liked and didn’t love�� this because there was an imbalance between my connection/enjoyment of the writing and my connection/involvement in the story. I loved De Marcken’s prose, her voice. I loved her angle. Also, when I take the novel apart, I love many of her scenes and images on their own, as distinct pieces separate from the larger story. But for some reason I never really became engrossed enough to be able to say I loved the overall narrative.

A good read �� unusual, inventive. I took a lot of pleasure in De Marcken’s ingenuity, smarts, and playfulness with form, and will definitely be following to see what she produces next.
]]> 28958475
Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts is a genre-bending memoir, a work of "autotheory" offering fresh, fierce, and timely thinking about desire, identity, and the limitations and possibilities of love and language. At its center is a romance: the story of the author's relationship with the artist Harry Dodge. This story, which includes Nelson's account of falling in love with Dodge, who is fluidly gendered, as well as her journey to and through a pregnancy, offers a firsthand account of the complexities and joys of (queer) family-making.
Writing in the spirit of public intellectuals such as Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes, Nelson binds her personal experience to a rigorous exploration of what iconic theorists have said about sexuality, gender, and the vexed institutions of marriage and child-rearing. Nelson's insistence on radical individual freedom and the value of caretaking becomes the rallying cry of this thoughtful, unabashed, uncompromising book.]]> 180 Maggie Nelson 1925355608 Baz 3
The Argonauts is a genre-bending book. In my bookshop we house it in ‘Cultural Studies��, but having read it now I personally think it would make more sense in our ‘Biography�� section. But I could also see it sharing space with Jenny Offill’s Department of Speculation, which it reminded me a lot of, though it isn’t fiction �� they’re pretty similar in multiple ways.

Anyway, I tore through it, it was so readable. Written in short sharp pieces, Nelson moves freely between personal anecdotes and reflections on her relationship with Harry Dodge, pregnancy, motherhood, caretaking and partnership, and connects them to philosophic ideas about love, language, gender, feminism, sexuality and desire.

It’s an intelligent book, a socially engaged critic’s book, but it’s also deeply intimate. Warm, soulful and life-affirming. It was so good.]]> 4.05 2015
author: Maggie Nelson
name: Baz
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2015
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/06
date added: 2025/01/06
shelves:
review:
3.5

The Argonauts is a genre-bending book. In my bookshop we house it in ‘Cultural Studies��, but having read it now I personally think it would make more sense in our ‘Biography�� section. But I could also see it sharing space with Jenny Offill’s Department of Speculation, which it reminded me a lot of, though it isn’t fiction �� they’re pretty similar in multiple ways.

Anyway, I tore through it, it was so readable. Written in short sharp pieces, Nelson moves freely between personal anecdotes and reflections on her relationship with Harry Dodge, pregnancy, motherhood, caretaking and partnership, and connects them to philosophic ideas about love, language, gender, feminism, sexuality and desire.

It’s an intelligent book, a socially engaged critic’s book, but it’s also deeply intimate. Warm, soulful and life-affirming. It was so good.
]]> 15863638 153 William Maxwell 0099560933 Baz 4
There is a quiet and care in the melancholy, steady tone that was reminiscent to me of William Trevor. It also brought to mind Strout’s My Name is Lucy Barton. Maxwell’s style is also elegant and clean and firmly balanced like theirs. I think tone is a defining, powerful characteristic in all their works. They convey truths and make meaning in a deceptively simple and economical manner. They do this in fictions that are thick in ambivalence and irresolution. It’s a form of storytelling I love.

In the novel, the old narrator’s determined grappling with a feeling of blame, and desire to be clear and truthful, is very moving. He’s always fair to himself, and this makes the heaviness he feels even more poignant, because it doesn’t really help.

This book is awesome.]]> 3.90 1980
author: William Maxwell
name: Baz
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1980
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/02
date added: 2025/01/02
shelves:
review:
A beautifully crafted, gorgeously written story of guilt and the power of childhood experience, and of men and women who aren’t let off from life’s complications and miseries despite being basically good people doing the best they can.

There is a quiet and care in the melancholy, steady tone that was reminiscent to me of William Trevor. It also brought to mind Strout’s My Name is Lucy Barton. Maxwell’s style is also elegant and clean and firmly balanced like theirs. I think tone is a defining, powerful characteristic in all their works. They convey truths and make meaning in a deceptively simple and economical manner. They do this in fictions that are thick in ambivalence and irresolution. It’s a form of storytelling I love.

In the novel, the old narrator’s determined grappling with a feeling of blame, and desire to be clear and truthful, is very moving. He’s always fair to himself, and this makes the heaviness he feels even more poignant, because it doesn’t really help.

This book is awesome.
]]> 54318983
A wickedly funny satire of Irish society after WWI, featuring “delicious and deleterious accounts of illicit sex and wild high jinks, and a mother-daughter duo who can scrap with the best of them�� ( Vulture ).

“Hilarious and sinister.�� �� The New York Times

Is it possible to kill with kindness? As Molly Keane’s Booker Prize–short-listed dark comedy suggests, not only can kindness be deadly, it just may be the best form of revenge. The novel opens as Aroon St. Charles prepares to serve her invalid mother a splendid luncheon—the silver gleams, the linens glow—of rabbit mousse, a dish her mother despises. In fact, a single whiff of the stuff is enough to knock the old lady dead. “All my life so far I have done everything for the best reasons and the most unselfish motives,�� says Aroon soon after. In the pages that follow she will make her case, reminiscing about her youth among the hunting-and-fishing classes of Ireland, a faded aristocracy dedicated to distraction even as their fortunes dwindle.

Keane’s brilliant sleight of hand is to��allow her blinkered heroine to narrate her own development��from neglected child, to ungainly debutante, to bitter Aroon understands nothing, yet she reveals all.]]> 320 Molly Keane 168137529X Baz 3
The high quality of the prose never wavers, but still it was a little long for me. That’s not to say I think it’s too long. I think it’s fantastic as it is, but I just mean that for me, I could have done with fewer pages. I can be very ungenerous with word count, I think, when it comes to certain kinds of stories.

But the writing is excellent and clever. The comedy is dark, so dark that the comedy doesn’t comedy �� as a reader you just sit back so thankful you don’t know these people, gaping in awful wonder at their self-deception and malice.

So good.]]> 4.07 1981
author: Molly Keane
name: Baz
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1981
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/29
date added: 2024/12/29
shelves:
review:
A novel about the cultural dominance in the Anglo-Irish ruling classes of “good behaviour��, which prioritises a cool exterior presentation always, even in times of distress, grief and loss, and, as Amy Gentry says in the introduction, is “actively hostile to the inner life.�� As a Turkish person, this white people stuff has always been, and still feels, exotic to me. Weird and idiotic and even, as Keane plays up so well and really brings home, kinda creepy.

The high quality of the prose never wavers, but still it was a little long for me. That’s not to say I think it’s too long. I think it’s fantastic as it is, but I just mean that for me, I could have done with fewer pages. I can be very ungenerous with word count, I think, when it comes to certain kinds of stories.

But the writing is excellent and clever. The comedy is dark, so dark that the comedy doesn’t comedy �� as a reader you just sit back so thankful you don’t know these people, gaping in awful wonder at their self-deception and malice.

So good.
]]> 36012149 Alternate Cover of ISBN 9780099502548

A powerful tragedy distilled into a small masterpiece by the Nobel Prize-winning author of Beloved and, almost like a prelude to that story, set two centuries earlier.

Jacob is an Anglo-Dutch trader in 1680s United States, when the slave trade is still in its infancy. Reluctantly he takes a small slave girl in part payment from a plantation owner for a bad debt. Feeling rejected by her slave mother, 14-year-old Florens can read and write and might be useful on his farm. Florens looks for love, first from Lina, an older servant woman at her new master's house, but later from the handsome blacksmith, an African, never enslaved, who comes riding into their lives . . .

At the novel's heart, like Beloved, it is the ambivalent, disturbing story of a mother and a daughter �� a mother who casts off her daughter in order to save her, and a daughter who may never exorcise that abandonment.]]> 158 Toni Morrison Baz 4
A Mercy is as serious as fiction gets �� it’s intelligent, soulful, but playful too, shifting tonally and stylistically with ease. I loved its structure, and the way it unfolded. And I loved the characters.

It was sad and wonderful.]]> 3.70 2008
author: Toni Morrison
name: Baz
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2008
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/19
date added: 2024/12/19
shelves:
review:
One of the things I want most from the fiction I read is to be surprised—and I don’t mean by a twist, that kind of surprise. It’s one of Morrison’s qualities that I like most. I don’t know where she’s going to take me, and that’s not such an easy thing. She makes you feel more keenly the confines, or boundaries, that other writers necessarily establish for themselves to make their books. Morrison’s authority and versatility seem to allow her a rare kind of freedom, which makes her thrilling to read. It’s a great power she has.

A Mercy is as serious as fiction gets �� it’s intelligent, soulful, but playful too, shifting tonally and stylistically with ease. I loved its structure, and the way it unfolded. And I loved the characters.

It was sad and wonderful.
]]> 217222130 An irresistible novella about two sisters and a night that changes everything, from the master chronicler of our heart’s hidden desires

Evelyn had the surprising thought that bodies were sometimes wiser than the people inside them. She’d have liked to impress somebody with this idea, but couldn’t explain it.

On a winter Saturday night in post-war Bristol, sisters Moira and Evelyn, on the cusp of adulthood, go to an art students�� party in a dockside pub; there they meet two men, Paul and Sinden, whose air of worldliness and sophistication both intrigues and repels them. Sinden calls a few days later to invite them over to the grand suburban mansion Paul shares with his brother and sister, and Moira accepts despite Evelyn’s misgivings. As the night unfolds in this unfamiliar, glamorous new setting, the sisters learn things about themselves and each other that shock them, and release them into a new phase of their lives.

In this irresistible novella of two young women coming of age, Tessa Hadley explores the ever-changing desires, the sudden revelations and the lasting mysteries that are bound up with who we are, and who we might become.]]> 128 Tessa Hadley 1787335550 Baz 4
The Party is a novella composed of three parts or chapters, and each could be read as a standalone short story. The first chapter, Vincent’s Party, was written as a story and published in The New Yorker. At first I don’t think Hadley had any intention to extend it, but over time she did go back and continue writing about the lives of the sisters Evelyn and Moira, and we got this longer work. It’s interesting because I feel like everything that came later, the further details we get about the sisters in the next two parts, everything they do, how they handle their new experiences, all existed in kernel-form in Vincent’s Party. She wrote so well about them, their portraits were so convincing, that I could easily see a novel in it. Those are some of my favourite character-driven short stories: when you can see the novel inside them, rendering the extension into a novel unnecessary. While for a lot of readers it’s the reason they can’t get into the short story—“I wish it were longer, it left me wanting more, it just scratched the surface”—it is exactly the reason I love them. I would have been happy for Evelyn and Moira to have stayed within the pages of Vincent’s Party, but I did also love this extension �� Hadley kept it tight.

Hadley’s in top form in this book. It’s a great place to start for readers who are interested or curious about her and haven’t tried her yet. It’s all here, the understanding and precise articulation of the inner lives of her characters, the sharp eye on class, the stylish, excellent prose, the sensuous descriptions of place and nature. It’s gorgina.]]> 3.33 2024
author: Tessa Hadley
name: Baz
average rating: 3.33
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/12
date added: 2024/12/12
shelves:
review:
One review referred to Hadley’s writing as “daringly old-fashioned.�� Thank fucking God for that. I love her writing precisely because of its old-fashioned qualities. And is it daring? The publishing industry loves its trends and patterns, and is dominated by a small number of large corporate entities, so yeah I guess it is daring to be old-fashioned.

The Party is a novella composed of three parts or chapters, and each could be read as a standalone short story. The first chapter, Vincent’s Party, was written as a story and published in The New Yorker. At first I don’t think Hadley had any intention to extend it, but over time she did go back and continue writing about the lives of the sisters Evelyn and Moira, and we got this longer work. It’s interesting because I feel like everything that came later, the further details we get about the sisters in the next two parts, everything they do, how they handle their new experiences, all existed in kernel-form in Vincent’s Party. She wrote so well about them, their portraits were so convincing, that I could easily see a novel in it. Those are some of my favourite character-driven short stories: when you can see the novel inside them, rendering the extension into a novel unnecessary. While for a lot of readers it’s the reason they can’t get into the short story—“I wish it were longer, it left me wanting more, it just scratched the surface”—it is exactly the reason I love them. I would have been happy for Evelyn and Moira to have stayed within the pages of Vincent’s Party, but I did also love this extension �� Hadley kept it tight.

Hadley’s in top form in this book. It’s a great place to start for readers who are interested or curious about her and haven’t tried her yet. It’s all here, the understanding and precise articulation of the inner lives of her characters, the sharp eye on class, the stylish, excellent prose, the sensuous descriptions of place and nature. It’s gorgina.
]]> 197522384
Adored in Turkey for his post-modern fiction and regarded internationally as one of Turkey’s greatest writers, Oğuz Atay remains largely untranslated into English. First published in 1975, Waiting for the Fear is Atay's only collection of short stories, a book that is routinely praised in Turkey, by, among others, the Nobel Prizewinner Orhan Pamuk, for having transformed the art of short fiction.

The eight stories that the book contains, all of them focused on characters living on the margins of society, are dramatic and even tragic, while also being shot through with irony and a humor. In the title story, a nameless young man, of a thoughtful and misanthropic turn of mind, returns to his home on the outskirts of a enormous nameless city to find waiting for him a letter in a foreign language of which he has no knowledge at all, and from this anomalous, if seemingly trivial, turn of events, one thing after another unfolds with with stark inevitablity. Another story nods to Gogol's "The Overcoat": its hero is a speechless beggar wandering around the back streets of Istanbul dressed in a woman’s fur coat who will end up stuck in a shop window like a manikin. Elsewhere, a professional story peddler lives in a hut beside a train station in a country that is at war--unless it isn't. He can't remember. What do such life and death realities matter, however, so long as there are stories to tell? Atays' stories are full of a vivid sense of life's absurdities while also being psychologically true to life; his characters, oddballs and losers all, are also utterly individual with distinctive voices of their own, now plainspoken, wistful, womanly, now sophisticated and acerbic, with a dangerous swagger. And if Atay is a brilliant examiner of the inner life, he is no less aware of the flawed social world in which his people struggle to make their way

Waiting for the Fear is a book that, page by beguiling page, holds the reader's attention from beginning to end, the rare collection of short stories that not only reflects a unique authorial vision but reads like a pageturner. Ralph Hubbell's new translation will introduce readers of English to a still insufficiently known giant of modern Turkish and world literature.]]> 240 Oğuz Atay 1681377969 Baz 4
There’s an element of absurdism in the stories. The characters�� narrations are erratic and unreliable, messy even. In each story I was hooked immediately by their voices �� their words flowed effortlessly. There’s something beguiling about them. There’s a lot of mental disturbance, struggle and alienation, but there’s a lightness too, a vitality and tenacity. The dejection is often imbued with a kind of comic energy. I was totally charmed by them.

The bones of the stories, or the circumstances that set the characters off, are always interesting. In the title story, a man becomes prisoner in his own home when he receives a threatening letter from a secret sect. In The Forgotten, a woman cleans out her attic and comes upon the body of an old lover, sparking memories. In Man in a White Overcoat a mostly nonverbal beggar comes by and connects with a woman’s white overcoat that he refuses to take off. In Railway Storytellers three people are isolated in huts by a railway station in the middle of no where, writing and selling short stories to train passengers.

Atay would be fun for fans of Kafka, Beckett, and Hrabal. Something about the stories, about the tone maybe, the irony and the finicky or neurotic nature of some of the characters, made me think of Lydia Davis as well.

This collection was so good. There wasn’t a story I didn’t like. I’m glad to see more Turkish literature making its way through—in drips and drabs—in a publishing industry that’s opening itself up to translated fiction from more places.]]> 3.96 1973
author: Oğuz Atay
name: Baz
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1973
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/01
date added: 2024/12/01
shelves:
review:
A fantastic collection of stories. Modern, strange, unpredictable, funny and moving, they mostly take the form of meandering but always intense monologues by eccentric characters who are lonely and estranged from society.

There’s an element of absurdism in the stories. The characters�� narrations are erratic and unreliable, messy even. In each story I was hooked immediately by their voices �� their words flowed effortlessly. There’s something beguiling about them. There’s a lot of mental disturbance, struggle and alienation, but there’s a lightness too, a vitality and tenacity. The dejection is often imbued with a kind of comic energy. I was totally charmed by them.

The bones of the stories, or the circumstances that set the characters off, are always interesting. In the title story, a man becomes prisoner in his own home when he receives a threatening letter from a secret sect. In The Forgotten, a woman cleans out her attic and comes upon the body of an old lover, sparking memories. In Man in a White Overcoat a mostly nonverbal beggar comes by and connects with a woman’s white overcoat that he refuses to take off. In Railway Storytellers three people are isolated in huts by a railway station in the middle of no where, writing and selling short stories to train passengers.

Atay would be fun for fans of Kafka, Beckett, and Hrabal. Something about the stories, about the tone maybe, the irony and the finicky or neurotic nature of some of the characters, made me think of Lydia Davis as well.

This collection was so good. There wasn’t a story I didn’t like. I’m glad to see more Turkish literature making its way through—in drips and drabs—in a publishing industry that’s opening itself up to translated fiction from more places.
]]> 219348770 Did I have a grievance? Most of us, without looking far, could find something that had harmed us, and oppressed us, and unfairly held us back. I tried not to dwell on it, thought it healthier not to, though I’d lived my short life so far in a chaos of privilege and prejudice.

Dave Win is thirteen years old when he first goes to stay with the Hadlows, the sponsors of his scholarship at a local boarding school where their son Giles is his contemporary. For Dave this weekend, with its games and challenges and surprising encounters, will open up heady new possibilities, even as it exposes him to Giles’s envy and violence. As Our Evenings unfolds over half a century, the two boys�� careers will diverge dramatically, Dave a gifted actor struggling with convention and discrimination, Giles an increasingly powerful and dangerous politician.

Our Evenings is Dave Win’s own account of his life as a schoolboy and student, his first love affairs, in London, and on the road with an experimental theatre company, and of a late-life affair, which transforms his sixties with a new sense of happiness and a perilous security; but it is also, very movingly, the story of his hard-working widowed mother, whose own life takes an unexpected new turn after her son leaves home.

Both dark and luminous, poignant and wickedly funny, Alan Hollinghurst’s new novel gives us a portrait of modern England through the lens of one man’s acutely observed and often unnerving experience. It is a story of race and class, theatre and sexuality, love and the cruel shock of violence, from the finest writer of our age.]]> 490 Alan Hollinghurst 1035038536 Baz 2
��

Hollinghurst on a podcast: “The book has an unusual tempo, I think. The first half is very slow and detailed, recreating the expansiveness of time when you’re young, a boy, a teenager�� The second half of the book has a quite different tempo, things are freer, looser, and speed up considerably towards the end.��

I had a mixed experience with Our Evenings. The critical reviews I read seemed to admire the pacing of the book, describing it as stately, languorous, languid. Hamilton Cain in the NYT: ‘Our Evenings is no page-turner; it moves with the heavy tread of a royal procession. It insists on patience as it doles out its pleasures.�� He wrote this in a tone of respect and admiration. Megan Nolan in The New Statesmen basically congratulated the “lack of friction (and therefore narrative propulsion)�� lol.

Alex Preston in The Guardian: “There is an unmistakable sense that Hollinghurst, now 70 and in the foothills of old age himself, has mellowed, his once sharp prose softened into something more languid and reflective.��

My connection to Hollinghurst is strongest when he’s being sharp, and I couldn’t help but think nostalgically back, when reading Our Evenings, to the older Hollinghurst of The Line of Beauty.

Hollinghurst’s pacing was deliberate, so it is not a fault—many readers seem to be vibing with it, and I understood what Hollinghurst was doing—but I couldn’t lose myself in the leisureliness. The slowness of the first half felt like a weight I had to carry across the pages, and so I ended up reading it a few pages at a time. It constantly wore me down, kept bringing me to a halt. It felt sluggish, there was not enough power charging the sentences.

Luckily for me the second half pivots quite abruptly in its tone and style, it had movement and I read it with a lot more quickness and enjoyment. It was the Hollinghurst I recognized.

Ultimately, it wasn’t enough though to make me forget the crawling I did to get there�� Of the four novels I’ve read, this is my least favourite.]]> 3.85 2024
author: Alan Hollinghurst
name: Baz
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2024/11/21
date added: 2024/11/21
shelves:
review:
2.5 (rating reflects my personal enjoyment, not what I think about the book in some objective manner).

��

Hollinghurst on a podcast: “The book has an unusual tempo, I think. The first half is very slow and detailed, recreating the expansiveness of time when you’re young, a boy, a teenager�� The second half of the book has a quite different tempo, things are freer, looser, and speed up considerably towards the end.��

I had a mixed experience with Our Evenings. The critical reviews I read seemed to admire the pacing of the book, describing it as stately, languorous, languid. Hamilton Cain in the NYT: ‘Our Evenings is no page-turner; it moves with the heavy tread of a royal procession. It insists on patience as it doles out its pleasures.�� He wrote this in a tone of respect and admiration. Megan Nolan in The New Statesmen basically congratulated the “lack of friction (and therefore narrative propulsion)�� lol.

Alex Preston in The Guardian: “There is an unmistakable sense that Hollinghurst, now 70 and in the foothills of old age himself, has mellowed, his once sharp prose softened into something more languid and reflective.��

My connection to Hollinghurst is strongest when he’s being sharp, and I couldn’t help but think nostalgically back, when reading Our Evenings, to the older Hollinghurst of The Line of Beauty.

Hollinghurst’s pacing was deliberate, so it is not a fault—many readers seem to be vibing with it, and I understood what Hollinghurst was doing—but I couldn’t lose myself in the leisureliness. The slowness of the first half felt like a weight I had to carry across the pages, and so I ended up reading it a few pages at a time. It constantly wore me down, kept bringing me to a halt. It felt sluggish, there was not enough power charging the sentences.

Luckily for me the second half pivots quite abruptly in its tone and style, it had movement and I read it with a lot more quickness and enjoyment. It was the Hollinghurst I recognized.

Ultimately, it wasn’t enough though to make me forget the crawling I did to get there�� Of the four novels I’ve read, this is my least favourite.
]]> 57735653
Rarely have the foundations upon which our ideas of motherhood and womanhood rest been so candidly questioned. This compelling novel tells the story of one woman’s headlong descent into what she calls an “absence of sense�� after being abandoned by her husband. Olga’s “days of abandonment�� become a desperate, dangerous freefall into the darkest places of the soul as she roams the empty streets of a city that she has never learned to love. When she finds herself trapped inside the four walls of her apartment in the middle of a summer heat wave, Olga is forced to confront her ghosts, the potential loss of her own identity, and the possibility that life may never return to normal again. “Ferrante puts hammer to flesh and invites her reader to penetrate the page.�� �� Financial Times “Extraordinary.�� �� The London Review of Books]]> 192 Elena Ferrante 1787702065 Baz 4
This novel is feral. Ferrante is very effective with her metaphors, she’s good at articulating emotional states, at being fantastic and strange to get at things that are deep and real.

We often talk about the way writers “explore�� things, characters and subjects, in their fiction. I read something like this, The Days of Abandonment, and I get a rare sense of what it really means for a writer to explore. I love the way Ferrante goes for it. She gives herself the license to make big swings, and it pays off. How many writers are this visceral, and write with this kind of intensity? It makes her both exciting and not easy. Tonally she writes about crisis and the drama of everyday reality, marriage and children and separation like a pulpy genre writer: atmospheric, fervid, tense, heightened. Her books really are kind of special.]]> 3.93 2002
author: Elena Ferrante
name: Baz
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2002
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/31
date added: 2024/10/31
shelves:
review:
3.5

This novel is feral. Ferrante is very effective with her metaphors, she’s good at articulating emotional states, at being fantastic and strange to get at things that are deep and real.

We often talk about the way writers “explore�� things, characters and subjects, in their fiction. I read something like this, The Days of Abandonment, and I get a rare sense of what it really means for a writer to explore. I love the way Ferrante goes for it. She gives herself the license to make big swings, and it pays off. How many writers are this visceral, and write with this kind of intensity? It makes her both exciting and not easy. Tonally she writes about crisis and the drama of everyday reality, marriage and children and separation like a pulpy genre writer: atmospheric, fervid, tense, heightened. Her books really are kind of special.
]]> 128655368 ‘The writer who saved my life �� or my soul.�� Merve Emre,��The New Yorker

‘A true living hero of the American avant-garde.�� Jonathan Franzen

‘One of the very few contemporary prose writers who seem to be doing something independent, energetic, heartfelt.�� Lydia Davis

A new collection of stories from the ‘godmother of flash fiction�� (The Paris Review).

In Williams�� stories, life is newly alive and dangerous; whether she is writing about an affair, a request for money, an afternoon in a garden, or the simple act of carrying a cake from one room to the next, she offers us beautiful and unsettling new ways of seeing everyday life.

In perfectly honed sentences, with a sly and occasionally wild wit, Williams shows us how any moment of any day can open onto disappointment, pleasure, and possibility.]]> 128 Diane Williams 1915590582 Baz 4
These super short stories (mostly around two pages) are sprightly, playful, strange, slippery and a lot of fun. Her sentences are highly original, dynamic. I read a lot of them out loud. I sort of performed them to myself.

Mysterious, perplexing, consistently unpredictable, consistently fresh. I loved it. This was my third helping of Williams - I also loved her collections Vicky Swanky is a Beauty, and How High? �� That High.]]> 2.75
author: Diane Williams
name: Baz
average rating: 2.75
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2023/11/07
date added: 2024/10/29
shelves:
review:
‘Readers who love the arresting phrase, the surprising word, will gravitate to Diane Williams�� �� from an LA Times review.

These super short stories (mostly around two pages) are sprightly, playful, strange, slippery and a lot of fun. Her sentences are highly original, dynamic. I read a lot of them out loud. I sort of performed them to myself.

Mysterious, perplexing, consistently unpredictable, consistently fresh. I loved it. This was my third helping of Williams - I also loved her collections Vicky Swanky is a Beauty, and How High? �� That High.
]]> 57044484
With a new foreword by Brandon Taylor, author of Real Life and Filthy Animals]]> 302 Percival Everett 0571370896 Baz 3
This was a great read. It’s super clever and self-assured. It’s a satire but also not, and I liked that about it. The whole not-satirical side of the narrative that followed Monk’s relationships with members of his family was as enjoyable, if not more enjoyable, than the side that everyone focuses on: Monk’s career as a writer and the crazy ride of commercial and pop culture success under his Stagg R. Leigh persona.

I guess I have my both-fair-and-unfair biases about satire, and so I was pleasantly surprised by the depth of what was explored. I had my ideas about Erasure as operating as a kind of commentary, and it does: Percival craftily and explicitly points and laughs angrily via great writing at what he has observed and has had to contend with. But it also goes further than commentary and is very personal. It’s an inward-facing, character-driven novel as much as it’s an outward-facing work of cultural criticism.

As moving as it is funny, and genuinely thought-provoking, Erasure is a layered thing of many working parts, consisting of many textures and elements that coalesce into a polished, cool, effortless-seeming 291-page novel.]]> 4.13 2001
author: Percival Everett
name: Baz
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2001
rating: 3
read at: 2024/10/26
date added: 2024/10/26
shelves:
review:
3.5

This was a great read. It’s super clever and self-assured. It’s a satire but also not, and I liked that about it. The whole not-satirical side of the narrative that followed Monk’s relationships with members of his family was as enjoyable, if not more enjoyable, than the side that everyone focuses on: Monk’s career as a writer and the crazy ride of commercial and pop culture success under his Stagg R. Leigh persona.

I guess I have my both-fair-and-unfair biases about satire, and so I was pleasantly surprised by the depth of what was explored. I had my ideas about Erasure as operating as a kind of commentary, and it does: Percival craftily and explicitly points and laughs angrily via great writing at what he has observed and has had to contend with. But it also goes further than commentary and is very personal. It’s an inward-facing, character-driven novel as much as it’s an outward-facing work of cultural criticism.

As moving as it is funny, and genuinely thought-provoking, Erasure is a layered thing of many working parts, consisting of many textures and elements that coalesce into a polished, cool, effortless-seeming 291-page novel.
]]> 29082615 296 W.G. Sebald 0811226158 Baz 5 ⁣⁣
��...whenever one is imagining a bright future, the next disaster is just around the corner.’⁣��
⁣⁣
��...and I knew then as little as I know now whether walking in this solitary way was more of a pleasure or a pain.’⁣
��
‘In the final analysis, our entire work is based on nothing but ideas, ideas which change over the years and which time and again cause one to tear down what one had thought to be finished, and begin again from scratch.’]]> 4.27 1995
author: W.G. Sebald
name: Baz
average rating: 4.27
book published: 1995
rating: 5
read at: 2020/06/25
date added: 2024/10/25
shelves:
review:
Deterioration, fear, enterprise, violence, migration, patterns of behaviour, repetitions, connections, chance happenings, disappearances, wealth, loss, the construction and destruction of cultures and civilizations, the mystery of human progress, the insatiable thirst for power, industries and structures, geography, the vast scale of futile attempts, the inevitable and unending grief of whole populations, the fickleness of all things that seem colossal and permanent in their creation and the whispers of change present from the beginning that eventually lead to their demise. Sebald in his inimitable, spellbinding way thinks about all these things as a fictional version of himself goes on a walking tour of various places along the eastern coast of England. It’s dreamy, it’s profoundly sad, and it’s a brilliant read.⁣⁣
⁣⁣
��...whenever one is imagining a bright future, the next disaster is just around the corner.’⁣��
⁣⁣
��...and I knew then as little as I know now whether walking in this solitary way was more of a pleasure or a pain.’⁣
��
‘In the final analysis, our entire work is based on nothing but ideas, ideas which change over the years and which time and again cause one to tear down what one had thought to be finished, and begin again from scratch.��
]]> 25489203 Our Spoons Came from Woolworths. But Barbara Comyns’s beguiling novel is far from tragic, despite the harrowing ordeals its heroine endures.

Sophia is twenty-one and naïve when she marries fellow artist Charles. She seems hardly fonder of her husband than she is of her pet newt; she can’t keep house (everything she cooks tastes of soap); and she mistakes morning sickness for the aftereffects of a bad batch of strawberries. England is in the middle of the Great Depression, and the money Sophia makes from the occasional modeling gig doesn’t make up for her husband’s indifference to paying the rent. Predictably, the marriage falters; not so predictably, Sophia’s artlessness will be the very thing that turns her life around.]]> 224 Barbara Comyns 1590178963 Baz 3
Comyns is another discovery for me of excellent female British prose writing from the early to mid twentieth century. I didn’t love this book, but I enjoyed and admired it very much. I liked its buoyancy and idiosyncratic style. Our Spoons was a charming tragicomic treat.]]> 3.95 1950
author: Barbara Comyns
name: Baz
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1950
rating: 3
read at: 2020/11/02
date added: 2024/10/25
shelves:
review:
When I opened to the first page, Sophia the narrator immediately sat me down and told me the story of her impoverished bohemian life with two rather shitty men and her child. Her voice is light, witty, quick and modest, and it was easy at first to be deceived by the comedy and the mercurial nature of her recounting of events �� the story delivered with an offbeat sensibility and casualness is actually a pretty bleak one. It dawned on me that Sophia was telling me how hard and absurd her life was and how the poverty almost broke her. The novel is understated while constantly being blatant.

Comyns is another discovery for me of excellent female British prose writing from the early to mid twentieth century. I didn’t love this book, but I enjoyed and admired it very much. I liked its buoyancy and idiosyncratic style. Our Spoons was a charming tragicomic treat.
]]> 209579908 Subversiva, feminista, Alba de Céspedes abalou os alicerces da literatura na Europa do pós-guerra e abriu, com O caderno proibido, uma janela para a lá fora, o mundo reconstrói-se; dentro de portas, a vida doméstica de uma mulher comum sofre uma implosão, quando ela decide começar um diário.



Roma, década de 1950: Valeria Cossati vai comprar cigarros para o marido, ignorando que sairá da tabacaria com um caderno que há de mudar a sua vida. Ao transformar esse caderno num diário secreto onde regista pensamentos e desejos do dia-a-dia, Valeria transforma-o num instrumento de emancipação: liberta-se das convenções sociais, do sentido de dever para com o marido e os filhos, dos limites autoimpostos que regem o seu pequeno mundo. A partir daqui, tudo é questionado. Valeria compreende que está em translação e decide conquistar o lugar que escolheu para si.

Clássico redescoberto, testemunho histórico de uma época, retrato primoroso da turbulência doméstica, O Caderno Proibido condensa a sede de liberdade de toda uma geração e das outras que se lhe seguiriam. Precursora da linhagem literária mais disruptiva da modernidade - de Virginia Woolf a Natalia Ginzburg, de Marguerite Duras a Vivian Gornick -, Alba de Céspedes celebra aqui o poder da escrita e a audácia indómita de uma mulher numa sociedade em ebulição.]]> 259 Alba de Céspedes 1782278222 Baz 4
From the very beginning the entries are intense, and a sense of danger pervades the writing. It was fascinating to see the narrator Valeria’s mind open up, and what the act of recording does to her perception and understanding.

The revelations were thrilling. Valeria’s anger blazes as she begins to lose her grip on her family, while becoming increasingly enmeshed in a complicated situation that may bring her some light but is doomed to fail.

Not a happy book. Valeria’s growing intelligence only succeeds in making her miserable. It was hard to bear witness to her mental disturbance and desperation, especially as it’s lived in private—in secret. She begins to spiral but keeps enduring with great fortitude. The realism of this feminist domestic horror affected me and made me furious. It was a good read, and I think it has a perfect, heartbreaking ending. You know when the ending of a novel just hits you in the right spot, punches you in the gut, twists the knife? And in the effect of its final pages and words shows you the greatness of the book as a whole, something you may not have been fully aware of until that moment? It doesn’t happen super often, but this one had that impact. The ending cemented its brilliance.]]> 4.33 1952
author: Alba de Céspedes
name: Baz
average rating: 4.33
book published: 1952
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/14
date added: 2024/10/14
shelves:
review:
This book, and others by de Céspedes, mean a lot to Ferrante and Ernaux, and it’s easy, pretty immediately, to see why. The story is structured as a series of diary entries, and the reader gets access to the private thoughts and burgeoning inner life of a woman—a wife and mother—who comes to understand what her life is, to her husband, to her children, and to herself.

From the very beginning the entries are intense, and a sense of danger pervades the writing. It was fascinating to see the narrator Valeria’s mind open up, and what the act of recording does to her perception and understanding.

The revelations were thrilling. Valeria’s anger blazes as she begins to lose her grip on her family, while becoming increasingly enmeshed in a complicated situation that may bring her some light but is doomed to fail.

Not a happy book. Valeria’s growing intelligence only succeeds in making her miserable. It was hard to bear witness to her mental disturbance and desperation, especially as it’s lived in private—in secret. She begins to spiral but keeps enduring with great fortitude. The realism of this feminist domestic horror affected me and made me furious. It was a good read, and I think it has a perfect, heartbreaking ending. You know when the ending of a novel just hits you in the right spot, punches you in the gut, twists the knife? And in the effect of its final pages and words shows you the greatness of the book as a whole, something you may not have been fully aware of until that moment? It doesn’t happen super often, but this one had that impact. The ending cemented its brilliance.
]]> 205901447 People) of a novel about new friendships, old loves, and the very human desire to leave a mark on the world.

With her remarkable insight into the human condition and silences that contain multitudes, Elizabeth Strout returns to the town of Crosby, Maine, and to her beloved cast of characters—Lucy Barton, Olive Kitteridge, Bob Burgess, and more—as they deal with a shocking crime in their midst, fall in love and yet choose to be apart, and grapple with the question, as Lucy Barton puts it, “What does anyone’s life mean?��

It’s autumn in Maine, and the town lawyer Bob Burgess has become enmeshed in an unfolding murder investigation, defending a lonely, isolated man accused of killing his mother. He has also fallen into a deep and abiding friendship with the acclaimed writer Lucy Barton, who lives down the road in a house by the sea with her ex-husband, William. Together, Lucy and Bob go on walks and talk about their lives, their fears and regrets, and what might have been. Lucy, meanwhile, is finally introduced to the iconic Olive Kitteridge, now living in a retirement community on the edge of town. They spend afternoons together in Olive’s apartment, telling each other stories. Stories about people they have known—“unrecorded lives,�� Olive calls them—reanimating them, and, in the process, imbuing their lives with meaning.

Brimming with empathy and pathos, Tell Me Everything is Elizabeth Strout operating at the height of her powers, illuminating the ways in which our relationships keep us afloat. As Lucy says, “Love comes in so many different forms, but it is always love.”]]> 326 Elizabeth Strout 0241634350 Baz 3
I always enjoy Strout’s writing. It’s so clear, and so silky that, despite being a slow reader, I skip across the pages and read her books over a few days, as I did this one. But I have to say that this one crossed that line at times (she fell off the tightrope!) and became—to me!—a little twee. A bit much.

More than that, it lacked some gravity. It felt a little light. I do wonder: maybe Strout wanted to write this more than she felt a need to write it? Which isn’t a bad thing. I bet many of her readers are happy to simply indulge in more stories set in the same world with the same characters, with different characters across different books meeting and sizing each other up. It’s fun! And I bet Strout had a blast. But I personally needed more than that from my experience. I don’t think it did anything significant that the previous novels didn’t do better. And to be honest I didn’t want another Lucy Barton book to begin with. I wanted Lucy Barton-world to be over—a couple of books ago, actually—simply because I’ve been super curious to see what else Strout can do, where else she can go. Regardless, I did end up really liking Oh William! and Lucy by the Sea, but neither was anywhere near as potent for me as the magnificent My Name is Lucy Barton. Am I remembering it wrong, or was that first book very different in its tone? That one was powerful, it really hit me and I loved it so much. I guess I’ve been chasing that kind of experience ever since.

But! This was still Strout. Crystalline, lovely, deeply openhearted and empathic. Just, here, sometimes a little twee.]]> 4.35 2024
author: Elizabeth Strout
name: Baz
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/10/06
date added: 2024/10/06
shelves:
review:
A remarkable quality—to me—of Strout’s Lucy Barton novels—specifically the previous two, Oh William! (2021) and Lucy by the Sea! (2022)—is that they managed somehow to straddle a line. She walked a tightrope, and balancing on it was real heartfelt emotion and moments of the pure expression of genuinely good people—this is what makes Strout an unusual writer in our contemporary fic landscape, and so wonderful!—but underneath, threatening as her balance became precarious at times, was Twee Territory.

I always enjoy Strout’s writing. It’s so clear, and so silky that, despite being a slow reader, I skip across the pages and read her books over a few days, as I did this one. But I have to say that this one crossed that line at times (she fell off the tightrope!) and became—to me!—a little twee. A bit much.

More than that, it lacked some gravity. It felt a little light. I do wonder: maybe Strout wanted to write this more than she felt a need to write it? Which isn’t a bad thing. I bet many of her readers are happy to simply indulge in more stories set in the same world with the same characters, with different characters across different books meeting and sizing each other up. It’s fun! And I bet Strout had a blast. But I personally needed more than that from my experience. I don’t think it did anything significant that the previous novels didn’t do better. And to be honest I didn’t want another Lucy Barton book to begin with. I wanted Lucy Barton-world to be over—a couple of books ago, actually—simply because I’ve been super curious to see what else Strout can do, where else she can go. Regardless, I did end up really liking Oh William! and Lucy by the Sea, but neither was anywhere near as potent for me as the magnificent My Name is Lucy Barton. Am I remembering it wrong, or was that first book very different in its tone? That one was powerful, it really hit me and I loved it so much. I guess I’ve been chasing that kind of experience ever since.

But! This was still Strout. Crystalline, lovely, deeply openhearted and empathic. Just, here, sometimes a little twee.
]]> 53492655 New York Times Notable Book (2020)
A Guardian and Boston.com Best Book of 2020
A Literary Hub Favorite Book of 2020

The Witch is dead. And the discovery of her corpse has the whole village investigating the murder. As the novel unfolds in a dazzling linguistic torrent, with each unreliable narrator lingering on new details, new acts of depravity or brutality, Melchor extracts some tiny shred of humanity from these characters—inners whom most people would write off as irredeemable—forming a lasting portrait of a damned Mexican village.


Like Roberto Bolano’s 2666 or Faulkner’s novels, Hurricane Season takes place in a world saturated with mythology and violence—real violence, the kind that seeps into the soil, poisoning everything around: it’s a world that becomes more and more terrifying the deeper you explore it.]]> 210 Fernanda Melchor 0811230732 Baz 4
This has been described as a murder mystery, and while that may be part of the pleasure of this novel for some, the mystery element wasn’t really a factor in my reading. I never wondered who committed the murder—it’s not really a mystery for long anyway—because the crux of the book was the meaning to be made out of it. It was about looking at all the things, all the lives of people who exist in close proximity to such an act of violence, those both directly and indirectly connected to it �� making meaning of their circumstances, of seeing the sense in the web and sets of experiences that would lead to such a horrific point, a seemingly “senseless�� crime.

It’s a bold, hate-filled but not hateful book, and definitely a generous one �� I thought it was fantastic. I talk a lot about loving character-driven stories, mostly of fiction that’s about the mundane lives of ordinary people (hello Munro, Trevor, Strout). But Hurricane Season fed that other hunger in me that exists on the other side of that coin, by offering an immersive experience that concerns itself with the lives of horrible, severely damaged people who commit monstrous acts.]]> 3.88 2017
author: Fernanda Melchor
name: Baz
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/01
date added: 2024/10/01
shelves:
review:
Such a good reading experience. A novel written in a prose style that operates like a torrent. I love this kind of writing, when it’s done well it becomes addictive, and that’s what Hurricane Season was. The highly charged, often enraged voices of the characters are alive in long breathless sentences that literally propelled me, even flung me, forward, making it impossible to stop reading. Its passion and fury doesn’t let up for a single moment. It’s a story of the mess of darkness and turmoil, of life in a place where light struggles to penetrate, and love struggles to bloom. The mess of life in an institutionally corrupt small town, governed by corrupt people. The mess of life for the poor broken families in these places, especially the girls and women oppressed and violated by the misogyny of men, and especially the boys and men oppressed and viciously warped by the machismo of their culture.

This has been described as a murder mystery, and while that may be part of the pleasure of this novel for some, the mystery element wasn’t really a factor in my reading. I never wondered who committed the murder—it’s not really a mystery for long anyway—because the crux of the book was the meaning to be made out of it. It was about looking at all the things, all the lives of people who exist in close proximity to such an act of violence, those both directly and indirectly connected to it �� making meaning of their circumstances, of seeing the sense in the web and sets of experiences that would lead to such a horrific point, a seemingly “senseless�� crime.

It’s a bold, hate-filled but not hateful book, and definitely a generous one �� I thought it was fantastic. I talk a lot about loving character-driven stories, mostly of fiction that’s about the mundane lives of ordinary people (hello Munro, Trevor, Strout). But Hurricane Season fed that other hunger in me that exists on the other side of that coin, by offering an immersive experience that concerns itself with the lives of horrible, severely damaged people who commit monstrous acts.
]]> 49457718
Blues singer Ursa is consumed by her hatred of Corregidora, the nineteenth-century slave master who fathered both her mother and grandmother. Charged with ‘making generations�� to bear witness to the abuse embodied in the family name, Ursa Corregidora finds herself unable to keep alive this legacy when she is made sterile in a violent fight with her husband. Haunted by the ghosts of a Brazilian plantation, pained by a present of lovelessness and despair, Ursa slowly and firmly strikes her own terms with womanhood.]]> 208 Gayl Jones 0349012148 Baz 4 3.93 1975
author: Gayl Jones
name: Baz
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1975
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/07
date added: 2024/09/28
shelves:
review:
Such a good read. Polished in its composition, complicated in its ideas and full of fiery eloquence in the telling. A bold brutal novel beautifully done about a complex experience—the hardest of experiences. And another gold-standard example of a tightly written short novel that holds so much. It’s fantastic storytelling that doesn’t go a cm further than it needs to.
]]> 209807703
Meanwhile, disturbing things are beginning to happen in the guesthouse and its surroundings. As stories of shocking events in the nearby highlands reach the men, a sense of dread builds. Someone �� or something �� seems to be watching them and attempting to infiltrate their world. Little does Mieczysław realize, as he attempts to unravel both the truths within himself and the mystery of the sinister forces beyond, that they have already chosen their next target.

A century after the publication of The Magic Mountain, Olga Tokarczuk revisits Thomas Mann territory and lays claim to it, blending horror story, comedy, folklore and feminist parable with brilliant storytelling.]]> 336 Olga Tokarczuk 180427108X Baz 3 3.96 2022
author: Olga Tokarczuk
name: Baz
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2024/09/28
date added: 2024/09/28
shelves:
review:
Tokarczuk is a wonderful writer. Her wit, her particular style, the way her intelligence gleams on the page in light prose is a pleasure. Her cleverness, her peculiarity, is present in The Empusium, same as it is in Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. But I loved Drive Your Plow, and I liked this one. Why didn’t this one make as strong of an impression? One reason, an easy to spot reason, is the difference in my affinity for the two main characters. I loved Janina Duszejko, the weirdo protagonist of Plow. She was a more distinctive and compelling character, fierce and full of drive. Mieczysław Wojnicz, the young student of The Empusium, is an altogether different kind of person, and just wasn’t much of a personality. It’s unfair to compare, but the fact is one was more fun to read and be with than the other. And I liked the story of Plow better too. It was more thrilling to me. But anyway, a less easy to spot reason for my lesser experience with The Empusium might have something to do with its moral thrust. Maybe The Empusium didn’t stimulate in the ways that Drive Your Plow did because I simply preferred the terrain of the latter. Large chunks of this one consist of men espousing misogynistic views, and it’s vital to the story, it has to be there, but it meant there was less room for the formulation of different kinds of ideas and perspectives. When they came I delighted in them, but they were few and far between when compared to Drive Your Plow. But again, maybe that’s not quite true, maybe I just think that because the ideas in Plow were more unusual and attractive to me. Overall, although the electricity I was hoping for wasn’t generated, The Empusium was still a good solid read. Tokarczuk doesn’t write a dull sentence, and is always interesting.
]]> 125483102 256 Gerald Murnane 1913505820 Baz 4
I love the seriousness of Murnane’s attention to images, spaces and sights, for example the image of a person in a room filled with books, inside a large house, standing at a window staring out at the vastness of grasslands and trees beyond, or of the particular shade of colour of some small thing that can only be seen in the sunlight of a specific time of the day, and through his sustained attention giving to them a strange power and significance. It was enchanting stuff.

Do you ever, in a long moment of pure idleness, find yourself simply looking at a thing? And then find yourself training your eye, bridging the distance and looking at it closely? Like the tip of your finger, your fingerprint? Or if you’re in a park at a leaf or single blade of grass? Your mind kind of empties out in a pleasant way as it becomes more focused.
Well in some way reading Inland was a bit like that experience. Murnane loves to look, and to write about the act of looking. There’s no proper plot, no themes that are explored, no ruminations or articulations. It’s mostly just an act of looking, remembering, of thinking, concentrating on certain things, certain obsessions, but there’s a palpable metaphysical quality in the writing and it’s delicious.

At one point in the book the narrator tells of a girl who would occasionally talk to him: “…every few days she rewarded me by telling me quietly something that was unimportant in itself but seemed a message from beneath the surface of her.�� Reading Inland was like being quietly told things that are unimportant in themselves but seem a message from beneath the surface of us.

I don’t know wtf I’m saying but Murnane’s prose is hypnotic and gorgeous.]]> 4.19 1988
author: Gerald Murnane
name: Baz
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1988
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/18
date added: 2024/09/19
shelves:
review:
Reading Inland by Murnane was like experiencing a cross between Beckett and Proust. I loved this book. Its story is a story of images, of a man recording the interplay of his thoughts, as they move between the abstract and concrete, and the act of his writing of the pages of the book.

I love the seriousness of Murnane’s attention to images, spaces and sights, for example the image of a person in a room filled with books, inside a large house, standing at a window staring out at the vastness of grasslands and trees beyond, or of the particular shade of colour of some small thing that can only be seen in the sunlight of a specific time of the day, and through his sustained attention giving to them a strange power and significance. It was enchanting stuff.

Do you ever, in a long moment of pure idleness, find yourself simply looking at a thing? And then find yourself training your eye, bridging the distance and looking at it closely? Like the tip of your finger, your fingerprint? Or if you’re in a park at a leaf or single blade of grass? Your mind kind of empties out in a pleasant way as it becomes more focused.
Well in some way reading Inland was a bit like that experience. Murnane loves to look, and to write about the act of looking. There’s no proper plot, no themes that are explored, no ruminations or articulations. It’s mostly just an act of looking, remembering, of thinking, concentrating on certain things, certain obsessions, but there’s a palpable metaphysical quality in the writing and it’s delicious.

At one point in the book the narrator tells of a girl who would occasionally talk to him: “…every few days she rewarded me by telling me quietly something that was unimportant in itself but seemed a message from beneath the surface of her.�� Reading Inland was like being quietly told things that are unimportant in themselves but seem a message from beneath the surface of us.

I don’t know wtf I’m saying but Murnane’s prose is hypnotic and gorgeous.
]]> 6669354 288 Barbara Pym 1844084515 Baz 4 3.87 1952
author: Barbara Pym
name: Baz
average rating: 3.87
book published: 1952
rating: 4
read at: 2018/12/16
date added: 2024/09/10
shelves:
review:

]]> 213160917
As they dream about the possibilities of each new listing, Asya, a documentary filmmaker, spends her days gathering footage from the neighbourhood park like an anthropologist observing local customs, anxious to know how people really live. ‘Forget about daily life,�� chides her grandmother on the phone, ‘no one cares about that.��

Meanwhile, life back in Asya and Manu's respective home countries continues �� parents age, grandparents get sick, nieces and nephews grow up �� all just slightly beyond their reach. But the world they're making in their new city is growing, too, they hope. As they open up the horizons of their lives, what and whom will they hold onto, and what will they need to release?

Unfolding over a series of apartment viewings, late-night conversations, last rounds of drinks and lazy breakfasts, The Anthropologists is a soulful examination of home-building and modern love, written with Aysegül Savaş�� distinctive elegance, warmth and humour.]]> 186 Aysegül Savas 1398529907 Baz 4
I ate this basically conflict-free novel up. Asya and Manu love each other and their relationship is and stays a good one. The novel is perhaps unusual for that, in a good way. Its considerations and insights were illuminating. It was a treat to think about Asya and Manu’s life, and to observe with Asya, with respect and close attention, different people and their ways of being, as well as the little daily patterns that make up ordinary lives.

I get along with Savaş‘s writing, her voice, her delicacy. The prose is elegant in its clarity and stylish simplicity.

The book is a vibe.]]> 3.93 2024
author: Aysegül Savas
name: Baz
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/10
date added: 2024/09/10
shelves:
review:
A coolly written yet intimate story of a young couple who, used to moving around and staying in foreign places, living largely unencumbered lives, make their way to a larger city and decide to stay. They enjoy simple things, they like to spend a day doing nothing much, pleasurably “rotting.�� The events, or nonevents, of an ordinary day are enough for them. But they’ve begun to feel uneasy. Away from family, away from their ethnicities with their shared languages and customs, in a foreign city with no deep connections, no serious obligations or traditions to uphold, to Asya the narrator especially their life begins to feel unreal. She wants to feel tethered in some way and “yearns for a specific existence.�� She likes her life and doesn’t wish to make any big changes, but she begins an attempt at establishing some little routines and rules for living, and casting a net that goes beyond the world that consists of just the two of them.

I ate this basically conflict-free novel up. Asya and Manu love each other and their relationship is and stays a good one. The novel is perhaps unusual for that, in a good way. Its considerations and insights were illuminating. It was a treat to think about Asya and Manu’s life, and to observe with Asya, with respect and close attention, different people and their ways of being, as well as the little daily patterns that make up ordinary lives.

I get along with Savaş‘s writing, her voice, her delicacy. The prose is elegant in its clarity and stylish simplicity.

The book is a vibe.
]]> 826351 227 Joan Didion Baz 3
I’m grateful for this book’s existence. It was clear-eyed, moving and interesting, and of course completely devoid of sentimentality. I’ll likely return to it some day, but before I’ll need to do that I’d like to read some more of her nonfiction. For obvious reasons I’m specifically interested in Blue Nights.]]> 3.86 2005
author: Joan Didion
name: Baz
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2005
rating: 3
read at: 2024/09/02
date added: 2024/09/02
shelves:
review:
Didion writes about her experience of her husband’s death and her daughter’s illness and hospitalization with her characteristic poise and coolness. She mentions at one point the surprising dearth of writing in fiction that focuses on grief and mourning in detail. On the experience of it, with descriptions of what it feels like. This had occurred to me as well and was one of the reasons I wanted to read her book. It made me think about what people who don’t read much have to cling to when their favourite people die—what words? In fact, as much as I read all the time, every day, what are the words, passages, I can read again and hold in my thoughts? I wish I noted things down from the books I’ve read over the years that were about death and dying, and the experiences of characters losing loved ones. It’s a fear I have, and if this book has done one thing for me, it’s make me want to start recording things I can use at some later date. I know I’m going to need them��

I’m grateful for this book’s existence. It was clear-eyed, moving and interesting, and of course completely devoid of sentimentality. I’ll likely return to it some day, but before I’ll need to do that I’d like to read some more of her nonfiction. For obvious reasons I’m specifically interested in Blue Nights.
]]> 60402239 304 Barbara Pym 0349016097 Baz 4 3.64 1961
author: Barbara Pym
name: Baz
average rating: 3.64
book published: 1961
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/27
date added: 2024/08/27
shelves:
review:
The tragedies and comedies of human drama, as they occur on an ordinary day, in drawing-rooms over tea, in churches, on the street, in parks. Pym’s richly textured stories make boring silly people interesting and fun, and the boring world a place I want to hang out. Trying to tell someone what my current read is about when my current read is a Pym novel—or an Anne Tyler or Elizabeth Taylor novel for that matter—is a hilarious exercise. Especially when I’m talking to younger readers to whom people like Pym’s characters are basically invisible. But the thing is, I want to say, I find her voice and verve so attractive. I love her style and the rhythm of her sentences and think she’s a dazzling writer. Fluid, effortless, whip-smart and articulate. Funny. Sad. I have such a good time reading her.
]]> 2231935 640 Henry James 0099511606 Baz 5 3.81 1881
author: Henry James
name: Baz
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1881
rating: 5
read at: 2017/11/09
date added: 2024/08/22
shelves:
review:

]]> 60707 160 J.L. Carr 0940322471 Baz 4
A number of people have loved this, and it turned out to be a bit different from my preconceived impressions, which came partly from what its readers have said about it, and what they chose to focus on. Carr’s stylish dexterity and playfulness were a delight. It was as pleasing and bracing as it was moving. The ending, though, those last couple of paragraphs, were a gently painful blow, giving the whole preceding narration a deeper signficance.

I’m gonna say it: it’s a gem of a book.]]> 4.10 1980
author: J.L. Carr
name: Baz
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1980
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/18
date added: 2024/08/19
shelves:
review:
I loved this book—of course I did. It has a bit of everything, all the elements, I look for in fiction. A praise quote on the Penguin Modern Classics cover describes it as ‘tender and elegant��, and it is both these things. It’s wonderful. But the vibe of gentleness it gives was (pleasantly) a little misleading, and I found that this wasn’t as�� soft? and serious? in its tone as I thought it would be. The narrator, an old man looking back at an idyllic little time in his life, is, in his twenties, a good-natured guy with a comic mind and sense of mischief. He holds sadness and trauma, too, and the funny moments in the novel are balanced beautifully with the poignant ones. The pathos is handled nicely �� when it comes it comes in lightly.

A number of people have loved this, and it turned out to be a bit different from my preconceived impressions, which came partly from what its readers have said about it, and what they chose to focus on. Carr’s stylish dexterity and playfulness were a delight. It was as pleasing and bracing as it was moving. The ending, though, those last couple of paragraphs, were a gently painful blow, giving the whole preceding narration a deeper signficance.

I’m gonna say it: it’s a gem of a book.
]]> 54680670 Neapolitan Novels, Elena Ferrante gives readers a poignant and universal story about friendship and belonging.]]> 471 Elena Ferrante 1787702235 Baz 3
��

The drama! These Neapolitan novels are exhausting! Damn. I felt like The Story of a New Name and I were in a long boxing match and it was beating me up. It was a beast I had to wear down.

I couldn’t help but think of Knausgaard’s My Struggle series of novels. I said that for me the first book, A Death in the Family, was both dull and compelling. These Neapolitan novels, on the other hand, are both frustrating and compelling, almost in equal measure. I can’t say The Story of a New Name ever had a dull moment, but it did try me.

I found it dense. It’s very straightforward and simple in its language, and the plot is always moving fast, hurtling even. But its atmosphere makes it dense. Its unceasing dailiness, its hammering plot—it’s packed on every page with incidents and scenes and experiences condensed in summary form—makes it dense. It’s relentless in its psychology and meaning-making, in its constant shifts and reversals. Ferrante narrates in exhaustive detail and there’s always something of great significance going on and being felt. Everything carries so much weight for these characters. Ferrante holds the tension at a high pitch and it’s brutal and intense for its entire 450-odd pages. It was fantastic, I couldn’t help but admire it, get wrapped up in it, and enjoy it, but I was also happy to be getting closer to the end, and then to be done with it.

The prose doesn’t do anything at all for me, but style aside, this is clearly brilliant, unusual, and a breathtaking endeavor. I don’t know how Ferrante did it. I’ll definitely be reading the third novel, but there will almost definitely be a gap of at least a couple years before I pick it up, as there was between this book and My Brilliant Friend. Phew!]]> 4.58 2012
author: Elena Ferrante
name: Baz
average rating: 4.58
book published: 2012
rating: 3
read at: 2024/08/15
date added: 2024/08/15
shelves:
review:
3.5 (and please remember my ratings reflect my level of enjoyment, and if I were to pretend to be objective I’d give it a higher rating).

��

The drama! These Neapolitan novels are exhausting! Damn. I felt like The Story of a New Name and I were in a long boxing match and it was beating me up. It was a beast I had to wear down.

I couldn’t help but think of Knausgaard’s My Struggle series of novels. I said that for me the first book, A Death in the Family, was both dull and compelling. These Neapolitan novels, on the other hand, are both frustrating and compelling, almost in equal measure. I can’t say The Story of a New Name ever had a dull moment, but it did try me.

I found it dense. It’s very straightforward and simple in its language, and the plot is always moving fast, hurtling even. But its atmosphere makes it dense. Its unceasing dailiness, its hammering plot—it’s packed on every page with incidents and scenes and experiences condensed in summary form—makes it dense. It’s relentless in its psychology and meaning-making, in its constant shifts and reversals. Ferrante narrates in exhaustive detail and there’s always something of great significance going on and being felt. Everything carries so much weight for these characters. Ferrante holds the tension at a high pitch and it’s brutal and intense for its entire 450-odd pages. It was fantastic, I couldn’t help but admire it, get wrapped up in it, and enjoy it, but I was also happy to be getting closer to the end, and then to be done with it.

The prose doesn’t do anything at all for me, but style aside, this is clearly brilliant, unusual, and a breathtaking endeavor. I don’t know how Ferrante did it. I’ll definitely be reading the third novel, but there will almost definitely be a gap of at least a couple years before I pick it up, as there was between this book and My Brilliant Friend. Phew!
]]> 27411950 Deliciously, blackly funny and full of obstinate optimism, Quartet in Autumn shows Barbara Pym's sensitive artistry at its most sparkling. A classic from one of Britain's most loved and highly acclaimed novelists, its world is both extraordinary and familiar, revealing the eccentricities of everyday life.]]> 186 Barbara Pym 1447289617 Baz 2 3.94 1978
author: Barbara Pym
name: Baz
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1978
rating: 2
read at: 2017/12/04
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves:
review:

]]> 13747794 260 Oscar Wilde 0674066316 Baz 3
I actually didn’t know important elements of the plot, so the thing that happens to one of the main characters was a fun surprise. As was what happens to Dorian at the very end.

I know my first lil paragraph is going to give people the impression that I didn’t like it, but I did. How do we say things here that veer from fawning praise without coming across like we’re actively picking apart the book and saying we didn’t like it? After all these years I still don’t know. The most important thing was that I had a good time.

And I of course sympathized with some of the ideology in the book, about the values of an aesthetic, hedonistic life, though of course the characters are too dogmatic and take things way too far lol. “He knew that the senses, no less than the soul, have their mysteries to reveal.�� Agree.

And actually I’ve gotta say that Lord Henry is a great character. I will remember him, his pithy remarks, and the amused distance from which he observed others. A pitiable character, ultimately, but also an admirable one.]]> 4.32 1890
author: Oscar Wilde
name: Baz
average rating: 4.32
book published: 1890
rating: 3
read at: 2024/07/29
date added: 2024/07/30
shelves:
review:
This was a fun, quick, readable novella. It’s a classic �� but does that mean it’s a masterpiece? Not necessarily. It didn’t seem to me to be a Great with a capital G novel. It’s pretty simple, and I guess its simplicity worked as both a pro and a con for me. It has a clever conceit. It was clear what it was about. It seems like the literary critic Richard Ellmann criticized it too harshly, however he said that parts of the novel are “wooden��, and I did experience that woodenness at times. Also, it’s almost a little goofy?

I actually didn’t know important elements of the plot, so the thing that happens to one of the main characters was a fun surprise. As was what happens to Dorian at the very end.

I know my first lil paragraph is going to give people the impression that I didn’t like it, but I did. How do we say things here that veer from fawning praise without coming across like we’re actively picking apart the book and saying we didn’t like it? After all these years I still don’t know. The most important thing was that I had a good time.

And I of course sympathized with some of the ideology in the book, about the values of an aesthetic, hedonistic life, though of course the characters are too dogmatic and take things way too far lol. “He knew that the senses, no less than the soul, have their mysteries to reveal.�� Agree.

And actually I’ve gotta say that Lord Henry is a great character. I will remember him, his pithy remarks, and the amused distance from which he observed others. A pitiable character, ultimately, but also an admirable one.
]]> 199634757 208 Rachel Cusk 1443471674 Baz 4
��

Parade to me has elements of her previous novel Second Place, and the Outline trilogy before that.

Second Place returned to character, albeit in a very bare-bones way, with nothing in the way of portraiture or development. In Second Place Cusk is explicitly articulating ideas and theorizing in abstract terms, going from traditional fictional storytelling to a more essayistic mode of writing. Cusk follows this trajectory in Parade and goes even further. In parts it feels even less like fiction. Though of course it is still fiction because fiction can be anything.

Outline mostly took the form of a series of monologues by cameo characters who talk succinctly and summarily of their life situations, and there’s somewhat of a return to that here in Parade with its spliced narratives in sectioned off parts, or chapters, with different characters speaking at length.

In the beginning it was harder to get into Parade, as Cusk jumped straight into subject and the first character was difficult to “see.�� But it got better and better for me as I turned the pages and qualities from Outline began to emerge.

Cusk is as brutal and intelligent, and as gorgeously precise a writer, as ever, and I’ll keep reading her wherever she goes. Her grappling with the violent dynamic between art, life, gender, the body and the self, is always stimulating and bewildering. I connect to her “hunger for unreality, a yearning for the empty, unmappable spaces outside identity�� (Nicholas Dames), and to that deliciously cool monotone voice of hers that has a ferocity under it. I love being carried by the steady stream of her prose.]]> 3.38 2024
author: Rachel Cusk
name: Baz
average rating: 3.38
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/25
date added: 2024/07/25
shelves:
review:
3.5

��

Parade to me has elements of her previous novel Second Place, and the Outline trilogy before that.

Second Place returned to character, albeit in a very bare-bones way, with nothing in the way of portraiture or development. In Second Place Cusk is explicitly articulating ideas and theorizing in abstract terms, going from traditional fictional storytelling to a more essayistic mode of writing. Cusk follows this trajectory in Parade and goes even further. In parts it feels even less like fiction. Though of course it is still fiction because fiction can be anything.

Outline mostly took the form of a series of monologues by cameo characters who talk succinctly and summarily of their life situations, and there’s somewhat of a return to that here in Parade with its spliced narratives in sectioned off parts, or chapters, with different characters speaking at length.

In the beginning it was harder to get into Parade, as Cusk jumped straight into subject and the first character was difficult to “see.�� But it got better and better for me as I turned the pages and qualities from Outline began to emerge.

Cusk is as brutal and intelligent, and as gorgeously precise a writer, as ever, and I’ll keep reading her wherever she goes. Her grappling with the violent dynamic between art, life, gender, the body and the self, is always stimulating and bewildering. I connect to her “hunger for unreality, a yearning for the empty, unmappable spaces outside identity�� (Nicholas Dames), and to that deliciously cool monotone voice of hers that has a ferocity under it. I love being carried by the steady stream of her prose.
]]> 210320314
The ruined town of Comala is alive with whispers and shadows. Time shifts from one consciousness to another in a hypnotic flow of desires and memories, a world of ghosts dominated by the tyranny of the Páramo family. Womaniser, overlord and murderer, Juan's notorious father retains an eternal grip over Comala. Its barren and broken-down streets echo the voices of tormented spirits sharing the secrets of the past in an extraordinary chorus of sensory images, violent passions and unfathomable mysteries.]]> 129 Juan Rulfo Baz 4 3.87 1955
author: Juan Rulfo
name: Baz
average rating: 3.87
book published: 1955
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/18
date added: 2024/07/18
shelves:
review:
This was a yummy novella. It belongs to that style of storytelling that is both clear and elusive. The form of the novel, the way it’s structured, the way it moves, is interesting and unusual and clever. And the language itself, the prose, is clear and sharp, the descriptions gorgeous, the rhythm magnetic. It has this potency and eloquence and simplicity that made me think of Homer, of my experience with The Odyssey. From things I’d read I got the impression that it would be slippery and full of ambiguities, and yeah I guess it was, but it turned out to be easier to follow than I’d anticipated. A strange, exquisite book.
]]> 49671269 244 Lucia Berlin 1509882316 Baz 4
Her characters appreciate and take pleasure in the beauty of the natural world, in a simple life carved out in small towns in ramshackle houses, where days are spent walking, gardening, fishing, swimming, lounging around with dogs and cats and wild animals in close proximity, cooking and cleaning and sleeping outdoors under the stars. It’s enchanting, transporting stuff. Berlin’s prose shimmers. But there’s also the bleakness, the boredom, the alcoholism, the bottles being consumed all day, hidden around the house, there are relationships that get violent, there’s drug addiction and children who are loved but who are in precarious situations.

These partly autobiographical fictions have a casual feel to them but they’re sharply and cleverly written. Berlin’s style is dynamic, nimble and breezily lyrical. There are lots of stories in this collection, and I loved it all.]]> 3.94 1981
author: Lucia Berlin
name: Baz
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1981
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/14
date added: 2024/07/18
shelves:
review:
From a review: “Berlin expertly balances beauty and bleakness.�� This soulful interplay of beauty and bleakness in her best stories make Berlin such a pleasure to read. In lush prose she evokes a “gritty glamour�� (thanks blurb) that’s alluring and sensuous and dispiriting at the same time. Sometimes they’re melancholy in an almost sweet way, but sometimes they’re crushing. I like to be crushed in fiction.

Her characters appreciate and take pleasure in the beauty of the natural world, in a simple life carved out in small towns in ramshackle houses, where days are spent walking, gardening, fishing, swimming, lounging around with dogs and cats and wild animals in close proximity, cooking and cleaning and sleeping outdoors under the stars. It’s enchanting, transporting stuff. Berlin’s prose shimmers. But there’s also the bleakness, the boredom, the alcoholism, the bottles being consumed all day, hidden around the house, there are relationships that get violent, there’s drug addiction and children who are loved but who are in precarious situations.

These partly autobiographical fictions have a casual feel to them but they’re sharply and cleverly written. Berlin’s style is dynamic, nimble and breezily lyrical. There are lots of stories in this collection, and I loved it all.
]]> 1739971 309 Alice Munro Baz 5 ‘“Anatomised�� might be closer to what goes on in the work of Munro, though even that term is too clinical. What should we call the combination of obsessive scrutiny, archaeological unearthing, precise and detailed recollection, the wallowing in the seamier and meaner and more vengeful undersides of human nature, the telling of erotic secrets, the nostalgia for vanished miseries, and rejoicing in the fullness and variety of life, stirred all together?��

Reading my 14th and final collection, I was reminded of the slyness in the way Munro structures her stories and has them unfold. It’s not uncommon for me, in the middle of a story, to wonder: Where is this going? Or when I reach the end: What is this story actually about?

It’s often unclear. It’s not one thing. While this can put some readers off, it’s one of the things her ardent admirers love most about her work. What is she getting at? What is she circling and working her way towards? It’s some mystery. The mystery of us. A truth that’s arrived at cleverly, at an angle, like it’s a game, where the elusive object is beyond our grasp, our language, and needs to be outwitted, caught, obliquely, with shifts in focus, changes in direction, and movements over time. Munro didn’t just explore general themes of love, marriage, friendship, sex and death, lost innocence, certain ways of life. She went to other, more obscure territories. Her revelations aren’t explicit. She can do this not just because she’s a great thinker and observer of people, but because of her technical skill, and the way she used the short form, often stretching the story to beyond 30 and 40 pages, to work some magic.

Olga Tokarczuk on the fiction she most enjoys:
‘Open-ended books intentionally leave themes and ideas unrestricted, rendering them a little blurred. They grant us wonderful space for making our own surmises, for seeking associations, for thinking and interpreting. This interpretive process is a source of great intellectual pleasure…��

That’s the pleasure in Munro.]]> 3.88 1986
author: Alice Munro
name: Baz
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1986
rating: 5
read at: 2022/02/05
date added: 2024/07/16
shelves:
review:
So, Margaret Atwood on Munro:
‘“Anatomised�� might be closer to what goes on in the work of Munro, though even that term is too clinical. What should we call the combination of obsessive scrutiny, archaeological unearthing, precise and detailed recollection, the wallowing in the seamier and meaner and more vengeful undersides of human nature, the telling of erotic secrets, the nostalgia for vanished miseries, and rejoicing in the fullness and variety of life, stirred all together?��

Reading my 14th and final collection, I was reminded of the slyness in the way Munro structures her stories and has them unfold. It’s not uncommon for me, in the middle of a story, to wonder: Where is this going? Or when I reach the end: What is this story actually about?

It’s often unclear. It’s not one thing. While this can put some readers off, it’s one of the things her ardent admirers love most about her work. What is she getting at? What is she circling and working her way towards? It’s some mystery. The mystery of us. A truth that’s arrived at cleverly, at an angle, like it’s a game, where the elusive object is beyond our grasp, our language, and needs to be outwitted, caught, obliquely, with shifts in focus, changes in direction, and movements over time. Munro didn’t just explore general themes of love, marriage, friendship, sex and death, lost innocence, certain ways of life. She went to other, more obscure territories. Her revelations aren’t explicit. She can do this not just because she’s a great thinker and observer of people, but because of her technical skill, and the way she used the short form, often stretching the story to beyond 30 and 40 pages, to work some magic.

Olga Tokarczuk on the fiction she most enjoys:
‘Open-ended books intentionally leave themes and ideas unrestricted, rendering them a little blurred. They grant us wonderful space for making our own surmises, for seeking associations, for thinking and interpreting. This interpretive process is a source of great intellectual pleasure…��

That’s the pleasure in Munro.
]]> 215150131 A 2024 BOOK OF THE YEAR PICK FOR BBC R4 OPEN BOOK, THE OBSERVER, GQ, GRAZIA, HERO, I-D, NYLON

The New York Times bestselling author of The First Bad Man returns with an irreverently sexy, tender, hilarious and literary novel about a woman upending her life

A semi-famous artist announces her plan to drive cross-country from LA to NY. Thirty minutes after leaving her husband and child at home, she spontaneously exits the freeway, beds down in a nondescript motel and immerses herself in a temporary reinvention that turns out to be the start of an entirely different journey.

Miranda July’s second novel confirms the brilliance of her unique approach to fiction. With July’s wry voice, perfect comic timing, unabashed curiosity about human intimacy and palpable delight in pushing boundaries, All Fours tells the story of one woman’s quest for a new kind of freedom. Part absurd entertainment, part tender reinvention of the sexual, romantic and domestic life of a 45-year-old female artist, All Fours transcends expectations while excavating our beliefs about life lived as a woman. Once again, July hijacks the familiar and turns it into something new and thrillingly, profoundly alive.

Export ISBN: 9781838853457]]> 326 Miranda July 1838853448 Baz 3
It started off great, tightly written and genuinely funny. It was giving me Lorrie Moore vibes, who praised this book and was a big reason I went for it (I hadn’t really seen myself reading July up until the release of this novel). I’d read in some critical reviews and reader reviews that the second half doesn’t maintain the energy of the first and this turned out to be my experience as well. Overall though it’s very readable and punchy.

It’s a perfect book club book. It’s the kind of book you want your friends to read because there’s so much in it to discuss and tussle over. It’s very generous in that way. It’s an ambitious project, spirited and searching, dense with ideas and questions, and it’s mostly about the kinds of things July’s been contending with as an artist for a long time, and so she pulls it off.

I had some moments of questioning its specific literary genre/form. How was I meant to take this world? On its face it feels like it’s pretty rooted in the real world, and so can be construed as a standard work of realism. But could it maybe be a slightly off-kilter version of the real world? Something I refer to as stylised realism. There wasn’t enough in it to warrant that description though. Why this mattered to me was the number of small implausibilities and not so small coincidences throughout the novel. These are hard to buy and can be off-putting in realism, but perfectly fine in the other mode. In the end I realized I was trying to explain these implausibilities and coincidences away, and they just might not be justified (to me).

My favourite part, because I identified with it, was a small moment in a parking lot where the narrator and a guy are in a good mood. She drinks water from a bottle and, unexpectedly, begins to let it pour over her lips and chin and down her dress—just because. An impulsive act. The narrator thinks about it for a second: “…it wasn’t a performance, was it? No, nothing I did ever was. It was only ever the truth of the moment, coming out freely and expecting to be understood, not made much of, just taken seriously like any honest speech. It was dumb, but anything smarter would miss the point.�� People are often unconscious of how contained they are by decorum, limited to normal behaviours and actions. I sometimes do ‘random�� ‘dumb�� things that people think weird, but it makes me feel good. July represented a freedom, openness and improvisational skill of doing whatever in this novel and I loved it for that. It’s been called weird everywhere, even wacky, but these things in the narrator, and July’s style, felt deeply real and truthful and the opposite of weird to me.]]> 3.62 2024
author: Miranda July
name: Baz
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/07/05
date added: 2024/07/05
shelves:
review:
How to be the most appealing novel ever, to me? See blurbs/ for this book.

It started off great, tightly written and genuinely funny. It was giving me Lorrie Moore vibes, who praised this book and was a big reason I went for it (I hadn’t really seen myself reading July up until the release of this novel). I’d read in some critical reviews and reader reviews that the second half doesn’t maintain the energy of the first and this turned out to be my experience as well. Overall though it’s very readable and punchy.

It’s a perfect book club book. It’s the kind of book you want your friends to read because there’s so much in it to discuss and tussle over. It’s very generous in that way. It’s an ambitious project, spirited and searching, dense with ideas and questions, and it’s mostly about the kinds of things July’s been contending with as an artist for a long time, and so she pulls it off.

I had some moments of questioning its specific literary genre/form. How was I meant to take this world? On its face it feels like it’s pretty rooted in the real world, and so can be construed as a standard work of realism. But could it maybe be a slightly off-kilter version of the real world? Something I refer to as stylised realism. There wasn’t enough in it to warrant that description though. Why this mattered to me was the number of small implausibilities and not so small coincidences throughout the novel. These are hard to buy and can be off-putting in realism, but perfectly fine in the other mode. In the end I realized I was trying to explain these implausibilities and coincidences away, and they just might not be justified (to me).

My favourite part, because I identified with it, was a small moment in a parking lot where the narrator and a guy are in a good mood. She drinks water from a bottle and, unexpectedly, begins to let it pour over her lips and chin and down her dress—just because. An impulsive act. The narrator thinks about it for a second: “…it wasn’t a performance, was it? No, nothing I did ever was. It was only ever the truth of the moment, coming out freely and expecting to be understood, not made much of, just taken seriously like any honest speech. It was dumb, but anything smarter would miss the point.�� People are often unconscious of how contained they are by decorum, limited to normal behaviours and actions. I sometimes do ‘random�� ‘dumb�� things that people think weird, but it makes me feel good. July represented a freedom, openness and improvisational skill of doing whatever in this novel and I loved it for that. It’s been called weird everywhere, even wacky, but these things in the narrator, and July’s style, felt deeply real and truthful and the opposite of weird to me.
]]> 29408433 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER �� A stunning “portrait of the enduring grace of friendship�� (NPR) about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves. A masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century.

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST �� MAN BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST �� WINNER OF THE KIRKUS PRIZE ��

A Little Life follows four college classmates—broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition—as they move to New York in search of fame and fortune. While their relationships, which are tinged by addiction, success, and pride, deepen over the decades, the men are held together by their devotion to the brilliant, enigmatic Jude, a man scarred by an unspeakable childhood trauma. A hymn to brotherly bonds and a masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century, Hanya Yanagihara’s stunning novel is about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves.]]> 723 Hanya Yanagihara 1447294831 Baz 3 4.36 2015
author: Hanya Yanagihara
name: Baz
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2015
rating: 3
read at: 2016/08/04
date added: 2024/07/01
shelves:
review:

]]> 184955414 The New Yorker and The Paris Review.

Anne Carson is probably our most celebrated living poet, winner of countless awards and routinely tipped for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Famously reticent, asking that her books be published without cover copy, she has agreed to say this: “Wrong Norma is a collection of writings about different things, like Joseph Conrad, Guantánamo, Flaubert, snow, poverty, Roget’s Thesaurus, my Dad, Saturday night, Sokrates, writing sonnets, forensics, encounters with lovers, the word ‘idea��, the feet of Jesus, and Russian thugs. The pieces are not linked. That’s why I’ve called them ‘wrong��.��]]> 192 Anne Carson 0811230341 Baz 4 4.15 2024
author: Anne Carson
name: Baz
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/06/29
date added: 2024/06/29
shelves:
review:
These “writings��, as Carson calls them, are written as narratives, and as such I read them like I would read any short story collection. Part of the enjoyment of this book is in the showcase of Carson’s flexibility and range. Her intelligence, articulation of ideas, her sudden plunges into pathos, and clear beautiful language are a dazzling combination, and made for a deeply pleasurable experience. And it was funny! Carson’s humour, playfulness and wordplay, reminded me of Ali Smith. This was a deliciously subversive and surprising read. It felt like medicine, it invigorated me. And it was the perfect answer to the question that was my dry experience with Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. Just so, so good. A highlight of my year so far. The first piece, 1 = 1, was stunningly gorgeous and moving �� an easy 5/5.
]]> 145625252 Considered by many to be the iconic French memoirist’s defining work and a breakout bestseller when published in France in 2008.

The Years is a personal narrative of the period 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present—even projections into the future—photos, books, songs, radio, television and decades of advertising, headlines, contrasted with intimate conflicts and writing notes from 6 decades of diaries.

Local dialect, words of the times, slogans, brands and names for the ever-proliferating objects, are given voice here. The voice we recognize as the author’s continually dissolves and re-emerges. Ernaux makes the passage of time palpable. Time itself, inexorable, narrates its own course, consigning all other narrators to anonymity. A new kind of autobiography emerges, at once subjective and impersonal, private and collective.

On its 2008 publication in France, The Years came as a surprise. Though Ernaux had for years been hailed as a beloved, bestselling and award-winning author, The Years was in many ways a departure: both an intimate memoir “written�� by entire generations, and a story of generations telling a very personal story. Like the generation before hers, the narrator eschews the “I�� for the “we�� (or “they��, or “one��) as if collective life were inextricably intertwined with a private life that in her parents�� generation ceased to exist. She writes of her parents�� generation (and could be writing of her own book): “From a common fund of hunger and fear, everything was told in the “we�� and impersonal pronouns.”]]> 240 Annie Ernaux 1609807871 Baz 4
That declarative, direct style is what you get in The Years as well, in which Ernaux sort of carved out a new form/genre. I can’t say for sure whether it is completely original, but that’s how’s it been described, and I for sure haven’t read anything like it. It is a “collective biography.�� The best description would be her own words, as she wrote about it in the book:

“All that the world has impressed upon her and her contemporaries she will use to reconstitute a common time, the one that made its way through the years of the distant past and glided all the way to the present. By retrieving the memory of collective memory in an individual memory, she will capture the lived dimension of History.��

“She will go within herself only to retrieve the world, the memory and imagination of its bygone days…��

The Years goes from 1964 to 2006, and charts changes in the atmosphere, sensations, lifestyles, sentiments and values of French society. It moves fluidly between big world events, and small personal moments. It marks the passage of time in a disturbing way, and considers the strange workings of memory.

Ernaux’s forthright manner, authority and intelligence made this cultural study a fantastic, fascinating read. And a new kind of read, for me.]]> 4.22 2008
author: Annie Ernaux
name: Baz
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2008
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/28
date added: 2024/06/28
shelves:
review:
On a New Yorker Fiction podcast episode where a story by Annie Ernaux was the focus, the guest was asked what made her read Ernaux “so voraciously��, and she said: “There was something startling about the prose. The language is incredibly direct and simple in a kind of shocking way. I had never seen prose quite that declarative in literary form.��

That declarative, direct style is what you get in The Years as well, in which Ernaux sort of carved out a new form/genre. I can’t say for sure whether it is completely original, but that’s how’s it been described, and I for sure haven’t read anything like it. It is a “collective biography.�� The best description would be her own words, as she wrote about it in the book:

“All that the world has impressed upon her and her contemporaries she will use to reconstitute a common time, the one that made its way through the years of the distant past and glided all the way to the present. By retrieving the memory of collective memory in an individual memory, she will capture the lived dimension of History.��

“She will go within herself only to retrieve the world, the memory and imagination of its bygone days…��

The Years goes from 1964 to 2006, and charts changes in the atmosphere, sensations, lifestyles, sentiments and values of French society. It moves fluidly between big world events, and small personal moments. It marks the passage of time in a disturbing way, and considers the strange workings of memory.

Ernaux’s forthright manner, authority and intelligence made this cultural study a fantastic, fascinating read. And a new kind of read, for me.
]]> 57885010 Librarian note: An alternative cover for this ISBN can be found here.

In the summer of 1956, Stevens, the ageing butler of Darlington Hall, embarks on a leisurely holiday that will take him deep into the countryside and into his past . . .

A contemporary classic, The Remains of the Day is Kazuo Ishiguro's beautiful and haunting evocation of life between the wars in a Great English House, of lost causes and lost love.]]> 258 Kazuo Ishiguro 0571258247 Baz 2
��

Ishiguro likes to embody characters who are at a remove in some way from the larger human world, people who are naive, and have specific obvious limitations. In Klara and the Sun there’s an AI character, in Never Let Me Go there’s an unnatural character, and in The Remains of the Day there is a human character, but he’s a buttoned-up, stiff, stoical man who basically talks and acts like a robot. They’re all vastly different characters, but funnily enough they all match perfectly the flat sterile voice that Ishiguro employs.

The writing is clear and simple, and Ishiguro is in complete control. It is meticulously written. These are all attributes I love in a prose style. But, as stated in a review, there’s a “stilted affect that so often characterizes Ishiguro’s prose and dialogue��, and though it serves its function—like I said, it makes sense for his characters—it doesn’t work for me. For whatever reason I just can’t connect to it. I can’t surrender myself and take pleasure in it.

I really had to sit tight and patiently make my way through the first half, but I enjoyed the second half a lot more. A few people had told me that it gets better as it progresses, and for me they were right. It surprised me in the way it opened up and how readable it became. After two weeks with the first half, I basically read the second half in a day.

A review of Klara and the Sun in the NYT sums up Ishiguro’s work as being about “memory and the accounting of memory, its burdens and its reconciliation.�� The Remains of the Day is definitely about memory—most of it takes the form of the butler Stephens conjuring and confronting his past—but more than that it’s specifically about a man who has repeatedly fucked himself over in his life because of the way he was conditioned to position himself in the world by his father, and by his culture. It was finally moving, but I had to make my way through two hundred pages to get to that depth of feeling and satisfying readerly stimulation.]]> 4.10 1989
author: Kazuo Ishiguro
name: Baz
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1989
rating: 2
read at: 2024/06/25
date added: 2024/06/25
shelves:
review:
Just a heads up: the 2/5 rating only reflects my level of personal enjoyment. Don’t take it as any other kind of judgement.

��

Ishiguro likes to embody characters who are at a remove in some way from the larger human world, people who are naive, and have specific obvious limitations. In Klara and the Sun there’s an AI character, in Never Let Me Go there’s an unnatural character, and in The Remains of the Day there is a human character, but he’s a buttoned-up, stiff, stoical man who basically talks and acts like a robot. They’re all vastly different characters, but funnily enough they all match perfectly the flat sterile voice that Ishiguro employs.

The writing is clear and simple, and Ishiguro is in complete control. It is meticulously written. These are all attributes I love in a prose style. But, as stated in a review, there’s a “stilted affect that so often characterizes Ishiguro’s prose and dialogue��, and though it serves its function—like I said, it makes sense for his characters—it doesn’t work for me. For whatever reason I just can’t connect to it. I can’t surrender myself and take pleasure in it.

I really had to sit tight and patiently make my way through the first half, but I enjoyed the second half a lot more. A few people had told me that it gets better as it progresses, and for me they were right. It surprised me in the way it opened up and how readable it became. After two weeks with the first half, I basically read the second half in a day.

A review of Klara and the Sun in the NYT sums up Ishiguro’s work as being about “memory and the accounting of memory, its burdens and its reconciliation.�� The Remains of the Day is definitely about memory—most of it takes the form of the butler Stephens conjuring and confronting his past—but more than that it’s specifically about a man who has repeatedly fucked himself over in his life because of the way he was conditioned to position himself in the world by his father, and by his culture. It was finally moving, but I had to make my way through two hundred pages to get to that depth of feeling and satisfying readerly stimulation.
]]> 57745525
Carmine, an architect, and Ivana, a translator, lived together long ago and even had a child, but the child died, and their relationship fell apart, and Carmine married Ninetta, and their child is Dodò, who Carmine feels is a little dull, and these days Carmine is still spending every evening with Ivana, but Ninetta has nothing to say about that. Family , the first of these two novellas from the 1970s, is an examination, at first comic, then progressively dark, about how time passes and life goes on and people circle around the opportunities they had missed, missing more as they do, until finally time is up.

Borghesia , about a widow who keeps acquiring and losing the Siamese cats she hopes will keep her company in her loneliness, explores similar ground, along with the confusions of feeling and domestic life that came with the loosening social strictures of the 1970s. “She remembered saying that there were three things in life you should always refuse,�� thinks one of Natalia Ginzburg’s characters, beginning to age out of “Hypocrisy, resignation, and unhappiness. But it was impossible to shield yourself from those three things. Life was full of them and there was no holding them back.”]]> 124 Natalia Ginzburg 1681375087 Baz 5
I had a brief exchange in a DM with someone, and I’m stealing his descriptors for Ginzburg. He said ‘piercing�� and he said ‘diamond-cutter brain��. And I thought that was just perfect. She throws into sharp relief, in her distinct tightly compressed way, experiences, dynamics and emotions that are incredibly complicated—diamond-cutter brain. Her stories make me feel the weight of the heart in my chest—piercing.

She has this deceptively simple delivery and incredibly clear voice �� it feels artless but is so bloody artful. I don’t know how she does it, but I’m in thrall to her power.]]> 4.14 1977
author: Natalia Ginzburg
name: Baz
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1977
rating: 5
read at: 2022/03/14
date added: 2024/06/15
shelves:
review:
Ginzburg’s a favourite I’ve read and written about before, not long ago, and I loved these two works for the same reasons I’ve loved the others, so I ain’t gonna say much.

I had a brief exchange in a DM with someone, and I’m stealing his descriptors for Ginzburg. He said ‘piercing�� and he said ‘diamond-cutter brain��. And I thought that was just perfect. She throws into sharp relief, in her distinct tightly compressed way, experiences, dynamics and emotions that are incredibly complicated—diamond-cutter brain. Her stories make me feel the weight of the heart in my chest—piercing.

She has this deceptively simple delivery and incredibly clear voice �� it feels artless but is so bloody artful. I don’t know how she does it, but I’m in thrall to her power.
]]> 53317527 The final volume in the renowned Danish poet Tove Ditlevsen’s autobiographical Copenhagen Trilogy ("A masterpiece" ��The Guardian). Following Childhood and Youth, Dependency is the searing portrait of a woman’s journey through love, friendship, ambition, and addiction, from one of Denmark’s most celebrated twentieth century writers

Tove is only twenty, but she's already famous, a published poet, and the wife of a much older literary editor. Her path in life seems set, yet she has no idea of the struggles ahead—love affairs, wanted and unwanted pregnancies, artistic failure, and destructive addiction. As the years go by, the central tension of Tove's life comes into painful focus: the terrible lure of dependency, in all its forms, and the possibility of living freely and fearlessly—as an artist on her own terms.

The final volume in the Copenhagen Trilogy, and arguably Ditlevsen's masterpiece, Dependency is a dark and blisteringly honest account of addiction, and the way out.]]> 160 Tove Ditlevsen 0374539413 Baz 5
She said that for Nabokov, he would feel a shiver between his shoulder blades, and that for Emily Dickinson, it would happen when she could feel physically as if the top of her head were being taken off.

How does great literature announce itself to me? I’m not sure I know the answer, but it’s a great question because it definitely announces itself when I encounter it and it’s undeniable. The Copenhagen Trilogy blew me away. Sehgal says that to her it’s a masterpiece, and I agree: to me too it feels and reads like some kind of masterpiece.

Ditlevsen’s immediate descent into drug addiction made this the darkest of the three books. The entire thing has been a dazzling experience. One of my favourite writers, Deborah Eisenberg, said it’s “as propulsive as the most tightly plotted thriller; even when you want to put it down, it seems to adhere to your hands.�� And it was that way for me too. I was gripped.

One of those books that’ll be on my lips pretty regularly when talking to customers at the bookshop.]]> 4.45 1971
author: Tove Ditlevsen
name: Baz
average rating: 4.45
book published: 1971
rating: 5
read at: 2023/03/10
date added: 2024/06/15
shelves:
review:
In her review of The Copenhagen Trilogy, Pahrul Sehgal begins by considering a question: ‘How does great literature �� the Grade A, top-shelf stuff �� announce itself to the reader?��

She said that for Nabokov, he would feel a shiver between his shoulder blades, and that for Emily Dickinson, it would happen when she could feel physically as if the top of her head were being taken off.

How does great literature announce itself to me? I’m not sure I know the answer, but it’s a great question because it definitely announces itself when I encounter it and it’s undeniable. The Copenhagen Trilogy blew me away. Sehgal says that to her it’s a masterpiece, and I agree: to me too it feels and reads like some kind of masterpiece.

Ditlevsen’s immediate descent into drug addiction made this the darkest of the three books. The entire thing has been a dazzling experience. One of my favourite writers, Deborah Eisenberg, said it’s “as propulsive as the most tightly plotted thriller; even when you want to put it down, it seems to adhere to your hands.�� And it was that way for me too. I was gripped.

One of those books that’ll be on my lips pretty regularly when talking to customers at the bookshop.
]]> 78432717
Collecting pieces written for the New Yorker and the Paris Review between 1978 and 1982, including the seminal 'Girl', these stunning works announced a fully-formed, generational talent and firmly established the themes that Kincaid would continue to return to in her later work: the loss of childhood, the fractious nature of mother-daughter relationships, the intangible beauty of the natural world, and the striving for independence in a colonial landscape.

Powerful and lyrical, this is an unforgettable collection from a unique and necessary literary voice.

Part of the Picador Collection, a new series showcasing the best of modern literature.]]> 82 Jamaica Kincaid 1529076781 Baz 3 3.49 1983
author: Jamaica Kincaid
name: Baz
average rating: 3.49
book published: 1983
rating: 3
read at: 2024/06/09
date added: 2024/06/09
shelves:
review:
My first Jamaica Kincaid. A collection of linked short stories, or prose poems—either description works. They take unusual forms and sometimes feel like vignettes, or pieces of memoir. The main characters are a girl and her mother, and their relationship is the central concern of the book. The poetry is bold and strong, but the prose is also clear and light on its feet. I liked that in the style. On a story level the pieces are mostly quite amorphous, and often surreal. It wasn’t easy to follow just what was going on, but at the same time it was easy to follow the narrator’s curious, searching and impassioned voice. A dreamy, lovely read, sentimental in a good way.
]]> 102927 One of the most acclaimed novels of the 21st Century, from the Nobel Prize-winning author.

Kazuo Ishiguro imagines the lives of a group of students growing up in a darkly skewed version of contemporary England. Narrated by Kathy, now thirty-one, Never Let Me Go dramatises her attempts to come to terms with her childhood at the seemingly idyllic Hailsham School and with the fate that has always awaited her and her closest friends in the wider world. A story of love, friendship and memory, Never Let Me Go is charged throughout with a sense of the fragility of life.]]> 282 Kazuo Ishiguro 057122413X Baz 3 3.86 2005
author: Kazuo Ishiguro
name: Baz
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2005
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/06/09
shelves:
review:

]]> 213062452 New York Times bestselling author comes a spectacularly moving and intense novel of secrecy, misunderstanding, and love, the story of Eilis Lacey, the complex and enigmatic heroine of Brooklyn, Tóibín’s most popular work, twenty years later.

Eilis Lacey is Irish, married to Tony Fiorello, a plumber and one of four Italian American brothers, all of whom live in neighboring houses on a cul-de-sac in Lindenhurst, Long Island, with their wives and children and Tony’s parents, a huge extended family that lives and works, eats and plays together. It is the spring of 1976 and Eilis, now in her forties with two teenage children, has no one to rely on in this still-new country. Though her ties to Ireland remain stronger than those that hold her to her new land and home, she has not returned in decades.

One day, when Tony is at his job and Eilis is in her home office doing her accounting, an Irishman comes to the door asking for her by name. He tells her that his wife is pregnant with Tony’s child and that when the baby is born, he will not raise it but instead deposit it on Eilis’s doorstep. It is what Eilis does—and what she refuses to do—in response to this stunning news that makes Tóibín’s novel so riveting.

Long Island is about longings unfulfilled, even unrecognized. The silences in Eilis�� life are thunderous and dangerous, and there’s no one more deft than Tóibín at giving them language. This is a gorgeous story of a woman alone in a marriage and the deepest bonds she rekindles on her return to the place and people she left behind, to ways of living and loving she thought she’d lost.]]> 288 Colm Tóibín 1761267736 Baz 3
I just finished Long Island, minutes ago, and I’m still reeling as I write this. What a banger. There’s nothing like a quiet domestic novel that becomes something that amounts to an explosive thriller. Like, damn, I was glued to my couch as I read the last hundred pages and Tóibín steadily turned the crank on the suspense. I was like, What the fuck is going to happen?

And no matter what Tóibín’s choice would be, no matter where he ended it, I didn’t think I would mind. But when I reached the end I saw I was wrong, and did, do, in fact mind. What the hell man?

I’m a lover of short stories. I don’t need things to “conclude��, I don’t need the answer to a question that’s being asked for most of a novel. I love books by authors who just end their fictions abruptly. But the thing is that the ending, whatever it is, needs to make some kind of sense for whatever that book is, in its own singular universe.

For some reason Long Island ending where it did doesn’t sit right with me. I don’t get it. It basically ends on a big cliffhanger. And is that okay? I don’t know. I think this is what is meant when people talk of being “cheated�� lol. I actually think I feel cheated. And I don’t remember when I’ve felt that before. Or even if I ever have. This sounds like I’m just criticizing the novel but I’m not. It’s so good! I mean I am saying that I didn’t love the ending, but the ending is all I can think about right now. Why did Tóibín do that?

The main thing about Long Island is the reader’s investment in the choice its three main characters will make when the circumstances of their private lives are revealed, because it was clear that they would be. And they are, towards the very end. That’s the kind of fiction this is. What, especially, is Eilis going to do?

But things end, I repeat, on a cliffhanger. Like they do on episodes of a TV series. They happen on a series because the point is that the viewer will continue the story in the next episode. But this is a (supposedly standalone?) novel. Damn, Tóibín.]]> 3.82 2024
author: Colm Tóibín
name: Baz
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/06/08
date added: 2024/06/08
shelves:
review:
3.5

I just finished Long Island, minutes ago, and I’m still reeling as I write this. What a banger. There’s nothing like a quiet domestic novel that becomes something that amounts to an explosive thriller. Like, damn, I was glued to my couch as I read the last hundred pages and Tóibín steadily turned the crank on the suspense. I was like, What the fuck is going to happen?

And no matter what Tóibín’s choice would be, no matter where he ended it, I didn’t think I would mind. But when I reached the end I saw I was wrong, and did, do, in fact mind. What the hell man?

I’m a lover of short stories. I don’t need things to “conclude��, I don’t need the answer to a question that’s being asked for most of a novel. I love books by authors who just end their fictions abruptly. But the thing is that the ending, whatever it is, needs to make some kind of sense for whatever that book is, in its own singular universe.

For some reason Long Island ending where it did doesn’t sit right with me. I don’t get it. It basically ends on a big cliffhanger. And is that okay? I don’t know. I think this is what is meant when people talk of being “cheated�� lol. I actually think I feel cheated. And I don’t remember when I’ve felt that before. Or even if I ever have. This sounds like I’m just criticizing the novel but I’m not. It’s so good! I mean I am saying that I didn’t love the ending, but the ending is all I can think about right now. Why did Tóibín do that?

The main thing about Long Island is the reader’s investment in the choice its three main characters will make when the circumstances of their private lives are revealed, because it was clear that they would be. And they are, towards the very end. That’s the kind of fiction this is. What, especially, is Eilis going to do?

But things end, I repeat, on a cliffhanger. Like they do on episodes of a TV series. They happen on a series because the point is that the viewer will continue the story in the next episode. But this is a (supposedly standalone?) novel. Damn, Tóibín.
]]> 125483077 240 Michele Mari 1913505901 Baz 4
More specifically the story centers on Michelino’s boyhood fascination with his grandfather’s gardener, Felice, a gruff ugly man who has always lived alone, loves to kill slugs, and is rapidly losing his memory. Michelino becomes increasingly attached to this man who in his childish excitement he turns into a kind of monster figure in his mind. Narrating Verdigris, he’s in his fifties looking back, going over the events of his investigation of Felice’s character, and he says at one point: “I wasn’t a scientist inquiring out of a love for the truth, I was a fledgling aesthete investigating out of a love for shudders and dramatic effect��, someone who yearned for the “titillation of the nerves and spirit.�� Does this not describe many of us readers? It does me: I love fiction for the kinds of stimulating truths it can emit, but on another level I love it because I’m just a big kid seeking titillation of the nerves and spirit, wanting to be transported. Mari gave me access to this kind of experience as his narrator’s imagination ran wild and I became involved in learning about Felice.

The enthusiasms and bookishness of Mari’s characters, and Mari’s own voice in his playful, stylish fictions, are infectious. Verdigris is beautifully and precisely written. It’s a crafty, clever book that indulges in books and language. It’s full of gothic elements but it’s tender. It has a big heart and it’s wonderful, nostalgic, bittersweet and funny. The unexpected and delightfully strange ending was perfect in its winking at the kid in me.]]> 3.97 2007
author: Michele Mari
name: Baz
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2007
rating: 4
read at: 2024/05/30
date added: 2024/05/31
shelves:
review:
Verdigris is the story of a boy’s passion for fantasy and adventure. A seeker of literary thrills and suspense, open to seeing the stuff of literature in life, he doesn’t have to look far in a country recovering from fascism and a recent war. His curiosity and love of mysteries leads to the uncovering of a past full of strange events and secrets as hair-raising as anything he’s read in any of his favourite books��

More specifically the story centers on Michelino’s boyhood fascination with his grandfather’s gardener, Felice, a gruff ugly man who has always lived alone, loves to kill slugs, and is rapidly losing his memory. Michelino becomes increasingly attached to this man who in his childish excitement he turns into a kind of monster figure in his mind. Narrating Verdigris, he’s in his fifties looking back, going over the events of his investigation of Felice’s character, and he says at one point: “I wasn’t a scientist inquiring out of a love for the truth, I was a fledgling aesthete investigating out of a love for shudders and dramatic effect��, someone who yearned for the “titillation of the nerves and spirit.�� Does this not describe many of us readers? It does me: I love fiction for the kinds of stimulating truths it can emit, but on another level I love it because I’m just a big kid seeking titillation of the nerves and spirit, wanting to be transported. Mari gave me access to this kind of experience as his narrator’s imagination ran wild and I became involved in learning about Felice.

The enthusiasms and bookishness of Mari’s characters, and Mari’s own voice in his playful, stylish fictions, are infectious. Verdigris is beautifully and precisely written. It’s a crafty, clever book that indulges in books and language. It’s full of gothic elements but it’s tender. It has a big heart and it’s wonderful, nostalgic, bittersweet and funny. The unexpected and delightfully strange ending was perfect in its winking at the kid in me.
]]> 52974298 Spadework for a Palace bears the subtitle “Entering the Madness of Others�� and offers an epigraph: “Reality is no obstacle.”��Indeed. This high-octane obsessive rant vaults over all obstacles, fueled by the idées fixe of a “gray little librarian�� with fallen arches whose name—mr herman melvill—is merely one of the coincidences binding him to his lodestar Herman Melville (“I too resided on East 26th Street…I, too, had worked for a while at the Customs Office��), which itself is just one aspect of his also being ��constantly conscious of his connectedness�� to Lebbeus Woods, to the rock that is Manhattan, to the “drunkard Cowley�� and his Lunar Caustic, to Bartok. And with this consciousness of connection he is not only gaining true knowledge of Melville but also tracing the paths to “a Serene Paradise of Knowledge.�� Driven to save that palace (a higher library he also serves), he loses his job and his wife leaves him, but ��people must be told the truth��: THERE IS NO DUALISM IN EXISTENCE. And his dream, in fact, will be “realized, for I am not giving up: I am merely a day-laborer, a spade-worker on this dream, a herman melvill, a librarian from the lending desk, currently an inmate at Bellevue, but at the same time—may I say this?—actually a Keeper of the Palace.”]]> 96 László Krasznahorkai 0811228401 Baz 4
It’s a fun, strange chaotic ride of a narrative, the whole thing sort of stretches out and can be read as one long sentence. It’s essentially a story of interconnectedness. The comic tone and mad exuberance and great writing was a pleasure. A great one for fans of Thomas Bernhard, César Aira, and Beckett. It’s so good.]]> 3.98 2018
author: László Krasznahorkai
name: Baz
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2024/05/22
date added: 2024/05/22
shelves:
review:
This novella tells you what you’re getting with its subtitle: “Entering the Madness of Others.�� It takes the form of a neurotic monologue by a librarian who has this obsession for three figures: the writers Herman Melville and Malcolm Lowry, and the architect Lebbeus Woods. From them he takes inspiration to embark on the creation of a huge library, a Serene Palace of Knowledge, which he intends to be permanently closed to the public, where millions of books are to sit untouched. And his name is also Herman Melville by the way—it’s just a coincidence!

It’s a fun, strange chaotic ride of a narrative, the whole thing sort of stretches out and can be read as one long sentence. It’s essentially a story of interconnectedness. The comic tone and mad exuberance and great writing was a pleasure. A great one for fans of Thomas Bernhard, César Aira, and Beckett. It’s so good.
]]> 22261060 304 James Purdy 0871409526 Baz 4
��

Eustace Chisholm is an extreme novel, and it goes to a wild place. A group of outsiders circulate around Eustace aka Ace, an unpleasant oddball guy you think is going to be the main character but actually isn’t. Almost all the characters are poor, and all are struggling, fucked in their own ways by a country and culture that doesn’t see them, and an air of doom hangs thickly over their lives. Purdy believed life is tragic, and the novel is a powerful expression of that view.

There’s a pulsing edginess in it, ever-present from the very beginning, a peculiar tone that comes from Purdy’s fusing of dark content—the unlucky characters and their bleak worlds—and the showy sophistication of his prose style. Wiki told me jazz was a big influence on Purdy’s work and this book does have a jazzy quality.

You know how it’s clear sometimes in a work of fiction that it was written by someone who’s also a poet? To me it’s super clear here that Purdy was also a playwright. Not only is Eustace Chisholm theatrical but, except for the third part, I can clearly imagine it being performed on a stage. The characters are always vibrant in their screaming and crying at each other, and there’s a lot of fabulous, dying-to-be-read-aloud lines of dialogue.

It’s structured in three parts, and I moved steadily through the first two parts across a week, fascinated by the strangeness and severity of Purdy’s vision, the ‘extreme emotional states�� of his characters, and coolly admiring of his writing, and then there was a switch. Wow. In a novel that’s never not brutal and savage, the final section takes a particularly nasty turn and becomes very violent. It’s horrible. I was rapt, glued to the couch, and read it in a sitting.]]> 3.99 1967
author: James Purdy
name: Baz
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1967
rating: 4
read at: 2024/05/20
date added: 2024/05/20
shelves:
review:
‘“Yes, siree,�� Ace said cheerfully against the painful silence. “Everybody shows up here with their problems. This is the clearing house for busted dreams.”��

��

Eustace Chisholm is an extreme novel, and it goes to a wild place. A group of outsiders circulate around Eustace aka Ace, an unpleasant oddball guy you think is going to be the main character but actually isn’t. Almost all the characters are poor, and all are struggling, fucked in their own ways by a country and culture that doesn’t see them, and an air of doom hangs thickly over their lives. Purdy believed life is tragic, and the novel is a powerful expression of that view.

There’s a pulsing edginess in it, ever-present from the very beginning, a peculiar tone that comes from Purdy’s fusing of dark content—the unlucky characters and their bleak worlds—and the showy sophistication of his prose style. Wiki told me jazz was a big influence on Purdy’s work and this book does have a jazzy quality.

You know how it’s clear sometimes in a work of fiction that it was written by someone who’s also a poet? To me it’s super clear here that Purdy was also a playwright. Not only is Eustace Chisholm theatrical but, except for the third part, I can clearly imagine it being performed on a stage. The characters are always vibrant in their screaming and crying at each other, and there’s a lot of fabulous, dying-to-be-read-aloud lines of dialogue.

It’s structured in three parts, and I moved steadily through the first two parts across a week, fascinated by the strangeness and severity of Purdy’s vision, the ‘extreme emotional states�� of his characters, and coolly admiring of his writing, and then there was a switch. Wow. In a novel that’s never not brutal and savage, the final section takes a particularly nasty turn and becomes very violent. It’s horrible. I was rapt, glued to the couch, and read it in a sitting.
]]> 111152 288 Alice Munro 0099820609 Baz 5 4.13 1987
author: Alice Munro
name: Baz
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1987
rating: 5
read at: 2021/02/22
date added: 2024/05/14
shelves:
review:
Fran Lebowitz on Toni Morrison: “She’s one of my best friends, and she is the only wise person I’ve ever known. I know lots of very smart people, but I only know one wise person.�� I listened to Fran say this a while ago now, but it stuck. There are very intelligent writers, who craft these stories and novels packed with strong feelings of empathy and compassion for how and why people behave, and live, as they do. There are masterful works, humanist or not, formally inventive and innovative, by brilliant minds �� wisdom isn’t required. Wisdom is something else. I don’t know what wisdom is the way I know that 1 + 1 = 2. But I feel strongly that Alice Munro was not only an intelligent writer, person and artist, but a wise one. I know Alice Munro can’t be the Alice Munro to everyone that she is to me. For others that writer will be someone else, if they’re lucky to have found them. I’m just grateful she is that artist for me �� who really wrecks me and is so close to me I feel like I can touch her.
]]> 60853075
‘The fever burning through this story, its suspense and its lyrical escapes don’t curb its sensuality, and precision. [Kerangal’s] language has an incredible driving force. It is both like a stone made up of many crystals, mixing registers with fluidity, and juxtaposing the poetic and the trivial. The whole thing has a unique rhythm, a sense of breathless speed: the sort of graceful rockslide that only she can pull off. In flux between interior and exterior, this is the perfect voyage.�� �� Le Monde des Livres]]> 140 Maylis de Kerangal Baz 4
An absorbing story, stylish and gorgeously written in long sliding sentences that are propelled by the excitement of everything that’s happening, from one tense moment to the next. I loved how cinematic, atmospheric and darkly glittering it was. A wild train ride.]]> 3.94 2012
author: Maylis de Kerangal
name: Baz
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2012
rating: 4
read at: 2024/05/13
date added: 2024/05/13
shelves:
review:
Eastbound is a novella-sized literary thriller, and it’s true, from the first sentence it hits the ground running, hurtling forward in a breathless rush to a great end. A young man is conscripted into the army and is on the Trans-Siberian railway to begin his life of military service �� except he decides to make an escape. It was a thrill to be close to Aliocha and be scared with him as he fights for his freedom. Maylis de Kerangal does an excellent job narrating his turmoil. Aliocha’s fright and desperation are palpable.

An absorbing story, stylish and gorgeously written in long sliding sentences that are propelled by the excitement of everything that’s happening, from one tense moment to the next. I loved how cinematic, atmospheric and darkly glittering it was. A wild train ride.
]]> 42971995 240 Edna O'Brien 0374538840 Baz 3
Most stories were a 3 and a few were a 4 so this was both a ‘liked�� and ‘liked a lot�� experience.

��

O’Brien’s sensibility is very specific, and her worlds have an old-fashioned concreteness and intensity. Women are often ruled by their passions, which feel so big in the small communities in which they reside and eke out an existence. They’re surrounded by country, by fields and flowers and trees and animals, and conservative gossipy people. They’re consumed by desire, loneliness, love, longing, anger, a feeling of being overlooked, and are sometimes trying to take their destinies in their own hands, in their own small ways. The men are often cruel. Men are the rulers. O’Brien’s embattled characters often put on brave faces and bear their hardships and claustrophobia quietly and alone. Or they go a little wild.

All of these stories are contained, individual works, but more or less inhabit the same world. Because of the enclosed settings and small populace, there’s the sense that characters in one story could be passing through somewhere in the background in others. I liked the way this familiarity played against the distinctness of each story, the variety of the circumstances of the different characters.

O’Brien’s writing is effortlessly fluent, her prose stylish and supple, the tone dark but casual. The voice is always super Irish. These are deliciously dreary and blackly comic stories.]]> 4.00 1990
author: Edna O'Brien
name: Baz
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1990
rating: 3
read at: 2024/05/11
date added: 2024/05/11
shelves:
review:
3.5

Most stories were a 3 and a few were a 4 so this was both a ‘liked�� and ‘liked a lot�� experience.

��

O’Brien’s sensibility is very specific, and her worlds have an old-fashioned concreteness and intensity. Women are often ruled by their passions, which feel so big in the small communities in which they reside and eke out an existence. They’re surrounded by country, by fields and flowers and trees and animals, and conservative gossipy people. They’re consumed by desire, loneliness, love, longing, anger, a feeling of being overlooked, and are sometimes trying to take their destinies in their own hands, in their own small ways. The men are often cruel. Men are the rulers. O’Brien’s embattled characters often put on brave faces and bear their hardships and claustrophobia quietly and alone. Or they go a little wild.

All of these stories are contained, individual works, but more or less inhabit the same world. Because of the enclosed settings and small populace, there’s the sense that characters in one story could be passing through somewhere in the background in others. I liked the way this familiarity played against the distinctness of each story, the variety of the circumstances of the different characters.

O’Brien’s writing is effortlessly fluent, her prose stylish and supple, the tone dark but casual. The voice is always super Irish. These are deliciously dreary and blackly comic stories.
]]> 202576816
From a prize-winning German writer, this is the intimate and devastating story of the path of two lovers through the ruins of a relationship, set against the backdrop of a seismic period in European history.]]> 294 Jenny Erpenbeck 1783786132 Baz 3
Erpenbeck is a stylish prose writer. Her voice is simultaneously distant and intimate. There’s a weight in her sentences, often they’re aphoristic, and feel significant. She writes in pieces, fragments sometimes, paragraphs that are each like complete chapters unto themselves.

I loved being in East Germany in the years leading up to the fall of the wall, and the beginning of reunification. There was so much that was new to me about that complex experience and I couldn’t get enough of it. I loved Erpenbeck’s brilliant, often oblique way of telling the story of life there and the way reunification fucked with East Germans in the years after it was sort of legally usurped by the West German democratic capitalist system.

Ok. However! The focus is mostly on the wack love affair of a married man in his fifties and a nineteen year old woman. And the gradual movement of that story, from instant deep connection, passion, infatuation, to unhealthy attachment, drama, and then, finally, to melodrama, didn’t thrill me. Erpenbeck’s treatment is literary, her voice entirely her own, but the content? The exploration of what attends this kind of love, the unrealistic expectations, power imbalance, manipulation, debasement, the intentional and unintentional inflicting of pain etc etc? The hot-cold, push-pull? It didn’t thrill me. I’m so averse to that kind of drama in my life, and it’s often unpleasant to me to read in fiction. It’s hard to say something interesting or different on the subject. Especially when it comes to hetero people. Especially between older men and younger women. A major aspect of the novel is the way their relationship is braided in with and reflects what’s going on socially and politically at the time. I loved the braiding but didn’t need the mirroring, though it was clever.

The ranking of my experiences with Erpenbeck goes: Visitation first, then Go, Went, Gone, then Kairos. The quality of the writing is consistently stunning across the three books, so it largely just comes down to the basic fact of the plots. I enjoyed the stories of Visitation and Go, Went, Gone more. I believe she achieves the most harmony between style and content in Visitation.]]> 3.26 2021
author: Jenny Erpenbeck
name: Baz
average rating: 3.26
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2024/05/04
date added: 2024/05/04
shelves:
review:
How to explain the experience of loving something and not loving it at the same time? This is one of those delicate situations where I have to say that anything I don’t like speaks to a me thing, and shouldn’t be taken as an objective assessment. If you’re interested it shouldn’t be passed up. It’s very good.

Erpenbeck is a stylish prose writer. Her voice is simultaneously distant and intimate. There’s a weight in her sentences, often they’re aphoristic, and feel significant. She writes in pieces, fragments sometimes, paragraphs that are each like complete chapters unto themselves.

I loved being in East Germany in the years leading up to the fall of the wall, and the beginning of reunification. There was so much that was new to me about that complex experience and I couldn’t get enough of it. I loved Erpenbeck’s brilliant, often oblique way of telling the story of life there and the way reunification fucked with East Germans in the years after it was sort of legally usurped by the West German democratic capitalist system.

Ok. However! The focus is mostly on the wack love affair of a married man in his fifties and a nineteen year old woman. And the gradual movement of that story, from instant deep connection, passion, infatuation, to unhealthy attachment, drama, and then, finally, to melodrama, didn’t thrill me. Erpenbeck’s treatment is literary, her voice entirely her own, but the content? The exploration of what attends this kind of love, the unrealistic expectations, power imbalance, manipulation, debasement, the intentional and unintentional inflicting of pain etc etc? The hot-cold, push-pull? It didn’t thrill me. I’m so averse to that kind of drama in my life, and it’s often unpleasant to me to read in fiction. It’s hard to say something interesting or different on the subject. Especially when it comes to hetero people. Especially between older men and younger women. A major aspect of the novel is the way their relationship is braided in with and reflects what’s going on socially and politically at the time. I loved the braiding but didn’t need the mirroring, though it was clever.

The ranking of my experiences with Erpenbeck goes: Visitation first, then Go, Went, Gone, then Kairos. The quality of the writing is consistently stunning across the three books, so it largely just comes down to the basic fact of the plots. I enjoyed the stories of Visitation and Go, Went, Gone more. I believe she achieves the most harmony between style and content in Visitation.
]]> 10571801
Snow Country is both delicate and subtle, reflecting in Kawabata's exact, lyrical writing the unspoken love and the understated passion of the young Japanese couple.]]> 121 Yasunari Kawabata 0141192593 Baz 2
What a gorgeous opening. The images and atmosphere in the first scene of this book, with the main character Shimamura on the train, is something that will stay with me, I think. Those first few pages alone were almost worth the price of admission.

The story’s about a sad love between a married family man from Tokyo and a geisha working in a small “snow country�� town by the mountains. It’s a strange dreamy book, largely about beauty and its strange and sad qualities. Shimamura is regularly mesmerized by visions and instances of beauty. This was more interesting to me than the subject of the it’s-never-going-to-work relationship between Shimamura and Komako, the woman who falls in love with him.

Much is unclear. It’s an ambiguous little narrative, and from fairly early on I was always wondering what was going on, and what the point of things were. This in itself isn’t a bad thing as an experience—in fiction it’s a wonderful thing—but it’s not great when you struggle to find something to latch onto. Because then the story becomes dense in a not so satisfying way. I just didn’t form a strong connection.

The setting of the snow country, and the times when Kawabata distills moments of beauty—as witnessed by Shimamura in an almost hallucinatory state between the real world and his dream world—into a sharp, high-definition image, were my favourite things about the book. And again, that first scene on the train before the story proper begins.]]> 3.43 1948
author: Yasunari Kawabata
name: Baz
average rating: 3.43
book published: 1948
rating: 2
read at: 2024/04/20
date added: 2024/04/20
shelves:
review:
2.5

What a gorgeous opening. The images and atmosphere in the first scene of this book, with the main character Shimamura on the train, is something that will stay with me, I think. Those first few pages alone were almost worth the price of admission.

The story’s about a sad love between a married family man from Tokyo and a geisha working in a small “snow country�� town by the mountains. It’s a strange dreamy book, largely about beauty and its strange and sad qualities. Shimamura is regularly mesmerized by visions and instances of beauty. This was more interesting to me than the subject of the it’s-never-going-to-work relationship between Shimamura and Komako, the woman who falls in love with him.

Much is unclear. It’s an ambiguous little narrative, and from fairly early on I was always wondering what was going on, and what the point of things were. This in itself isn’t a bad thing as an experience—in fiction it’s a wonderful thing—but it’s not great when you struggle to find something to latch onto. Because then the story becomes dense in a not so satisfying way. I just didn’t form a strong connection.

The setting of the snow country, and the times when Kawabata distills moments of beauty—as witnessed by Shimamura in an almost hallucinatory state between the real world and his dream world—into a sharp, high-definition image, were my favourite things about the book. And again, that first scene on the train before the story proper begins.
]]> 78311985 48 Jon Fosse 1804270636 Baz 4 3.47 2023
author: Jon Fosse
name: Baz
average rating: 3.47
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/04/15
date added: 2024/04/15
shelves:
review:
There are two big distinguishing features in much of Fosse’s fiction. There’s the way he merges the ordinary with the sublime. He elevates, with his attention, common experiences by imbuing them with a glowing, almost spiritual, significance. And the other thing is the prose: it’s a thing of high style, but it’s a style that achieves a quietness and simplicity �� it pulls the reader in close. Its flowing rhythm works beautifully for whatever he’s attempting to do by marrying the mundane and the sublime. The Shining is my third Fosse, and this one goes a step further in its elusiveness and openness to interpretation. There are no answers. And there are hardly any questions, even. At least, not for me. The beauty is in the strangeness and abstraction itself. Fosse makes me enjoy being present in it rather than wonder and speculate. I liked this a lot, and I’ll definitely keep reading Fosse’s curious and hypnotic fictions.
]]> 62956435 The Radetzky March tells the story of the celebrated Trotta family, tracing their rise and fall over three generations. Theirs is a sweeping history of heroism and duty, desire and compromise, tragedy and heartbreak, a story that lasts until the darkening eve of World War One, when all is set to fall apart. Rich, epic and profoundly moving, The Radetzky March is Joseph Roth's timeless masterpiece.]]> 369 Joseph Roth 1783788453 Baz 4
��

The Radetzky March is an intimate epic. It’s a huge, expansive thing that economically tracks the shifts and decline of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and at the same time its lens is narrow and focused, its attention wholly devoted to two men, a father and son, two beautifully rendered characters.

I loved Roth’s wry, unsentimental tone and his compassion for his tragic military men, who did what they thought they had to do, and did it expertly, and yet didn’t know what the fuck they were doing. Roth’s simultaneous distance and closeness to his characters, his barely restrained sentimentality, was so well-balanced throughout.

A reviewer in The New Yorker said of Roth that “he had a nineteenth-century style and a twentieth-century vision��, and it’s true: there’s the sweep and storytelling, the cinematic zooming in and zooming out, of the great nineteenth century novels—Tolstoy comes to mind—and the sharp prose, panache and snap of a much more modern sensibility. There’s something in the unique combination in Roth’s voice, of dryness and bleakness, harshness and tenderness, an old-world charm and seriousness, and new-world disillusionment and weariness, that verges on the eccentric. It’s delicious.

This was an enchanting novel, a magnificent saga that sort of does everything you could ask for a novel to do. A big and heavy-hearted dazzler.]]> 4.13 1932
author: Joseph Roth
name: Baz
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1932
rating: 4
read at: 2024/04/14
date added: 2024/04/14
shelves:
review:
“So curious, changeable and knotted is the human soul.��

��

The Radetzky March is an intimate epic. It’s a huge, expansive thing that economically tracks the shifts and decline of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and at the same time its lens is narrow and focused, its attention wholly devoted to two men, a father and son, two beautifully rendered characters.

I loved Roth’s wry, unsentimental tone and his compassion for his tragic military men, who did what they thought they had to do, and did it expertly, and yet didn’t know what the fuck they were doing. Roth’s simultaneous distance and closeness to his characters, his barely restrained sentimentality, was so well-balanced throughout.

A reviewer in The New Yorker said of Roth that “he had a nineteenth-century style and a twentieth-century vision��, and it’s true: there’s the sweep and storytelling, the cinematic zooming in and zooming out, of the great nineteenth century novels—Tolstoy comes to mind—and the sharp prose, panache and snap of a much more modern sensibility. There’s something in the unique combination in Roth’s voice, of dryness and bleakness, harshness and tenderness, an old-world charm and seriousness, and new-world disillusionment and weariness, that verges on the eccentric. It’s delicious.

This was an enchanting novel, a magnificent saga that sort of does everything you could ask for a novel to do. A big and heavy-hearted dazzler.
]]> 54254630 The story of a man undone by a culture that in part created him, Season of Migration to the North, is a powerful and evocative examination of colonization in two vastly different worlds.

When a young man returns to his village in the Sudan after many years studying in Europe, he finds that among the familiar faces there is now a stranger - the enigmatic Mustafa Sa'eed. As the two become friends, Mustafa tells the younger man the disturbing story of his own life in London after the First World War. Lionized by society and desired by women as an exotic novelty, Mustafa was driven to take brutal revenge on the decadent West and was, in turn, destroyed by it. Now the terrible legacy of his actions has come to haunt the small village at the bend of the Nile.

An alternate cover for this isbn can be found here.]]> 192 Tayeb Salih 0141187204 Baz 4
It explores colonization in an unusual and artful way. It’s a hard-hitting, dark and unsettling novel. There’s an “underlying sense of desperation and gloom�� in it—Salih’s own words. I kind of don’t know what I just read, as there is so much to glean from it, but on some other level I know exactly what I just read. It’s gratifying in its complexity, rich in contradictions: I know that the more I contend with it, the more it will open up and give me. But it was also simply a thrilling read. Aspects of it were infuriating, in the best way possible. This book will be challenging for Western readers and feminists. Highly recommend.]]> 3.82 1966
author: Tayeb Salih
name: Baz
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1966
rating: 4
read at: 2024/04/03
date added: 2024/04/03
shelves:
review:
A compulsively readable novel that was highly peculiar and surprising. It was hard to get a read on the tone and style. It was ever-shifting in its rhythms and voice, but always fluid. It’s often lucid and grounded, but then in other parts very poetical, veering at times into something almost fantastical and strange, especially during one of the main character’s monologues as he recounts his experiences to the narrator.

It explores colonization in an unusual and artful way. It’s a hard-hitting, dark and unsettling novel. There’s an “underlying sense of desperation and gloom�� in it—Salih’s own words. I kind of don’t know what I just read, as there is so much to glean from it, but on some other level I know exactly what I just read. It’s gratifying in its complexity, rich in contradictions: I know that the more I contend with it, the more it will open up and give me. But it was also simply a thrilling read. Aspects of it were infuriating, in the best way possible. This book will be challenging for Western readers and feminists. Highly recommend.
]]> 2866981 160 muriel-spark 0140123105 Baz 4
Her main character Tom is making a movie, and the novel’s opening sentence is: ‘He often wondered if we were all characters in one of God’s dreams.�� Spark, one of the sharpest writers I’ve ever read, always starts with a bang. And just keeps going bang bang bang till the very end. Line by line she’s one of my favourite sentence makers.

In Spark’s classic fashion the narrative is never anything but elusive and wild but at the same time compulsively readable and easy to follow. A short novel with a big cast, the story moves incredibly fast. There are affairs, injuries, a disappearance, attempted murder, and all sorts of shenanigans. Spark’s world is deliciously off-kilter, her style and sense of humour entirely her own, and the brilliance that shines on every page comes across as having been achieved with effortless ease.]]> 3.48 1996
author: muriel-spark
name: Baz
average rating: 3.48
book published: 1996
rating: 4
read at: 2024/04/01
date added: 2024/04/01
shelves:
review:
The great novelist Penelope Fitzgerald reviewed Reality and Dreams in 1997, and said that Spark saw the novel as a kind of game. Almost all her novels—her career spans six decades—are overtly meta, and at heart prod and challenge and dissect ‘the whole business of truth and invention.�� She does it again in this novel by delving into the world of movies and movie-making, where people are in ‘the tract of no-man’s land between dreams and reality, reality and dreams.��

Her main character Tom is making a movie, and the novel’s opening sentence is: ‘He often wondered if we were all characters in one of God’s dreams.�� Spark, one of the sharpest writers I’ve ever read, always starts with a bang. And just keeps going bang bang bang till the very end. Line by line she’s one of my favourite sentence makers.

In Spark’s classic fashion the narrative is never anything but elusive and wild but at the same time compulsively readable and easy to follow. A short novel with a big cast, the story moves incredibly fast. There are affairs, injuries, a disappearance, attempted murder, and all sorts of shenanigans. Spark’s world is deliciously off-kilter, her style and sense of humour entirely her own, and the brilliance that shines on every page comes across as having been achieved with effortless ease.
]]> 38342041
Addled by grief and dissatisfaction, thirty-five-year-old mule breeder John Cyrus Bellman takes one step and then another. With a small compass and meager provisions, he sets off into the wild frontier beyond his small farm in Lewistown, Pennsylvania, on a doomed quest prompted by reports of colossal animal bones found in Kentucky. Promising to return in two years, Bellman leaves behind his only daughter Bess to the tender mercies of his taciturn sister Julie. With only a battered wall clock, her dead mother’s gold ring, and a barnyard full of miserable animals to call her own, Bess is forced to make her way in a deceptively hostile world, tracing her father’s path with arcane maps at the local subscription library and shrinking from the attentions paid to her and her aunt by their peculiar neighbor Elmer Jackson.

Meanwhile, Bellman ventures farther into the harsh and alien landscape of the west, forging an uneasy but intimate fellowship with his guide, an American Indian boy who regards him with both suspicion and a piercing understanding. As father and daughter alike reach out into their own respective wildernesses, they find that the wilderness holds out its hands to them as well.

Bold and lyrical, this brief epic transports readers to the beginning of the nineteenth century to explore themes of reckless determination, existential yearning, wonder, madness, and isolation in a majestic and unforgiving landscape.]]> 128 Carys Davies 1925603539 Baz 3
It’s a short historical novel, clearly and sparely written, almost minimalist in its vibe, though not in its action. There was a simplicity and pared back elegance that stroked and matched my aesthetic tastes and gave me pleasure. The story itself made it a propulsive read too. It’s an unusual and interesting tale, with quite a bit of incident and plot and shifts in perspective. Davies’s craft becomes ever more visible as the different strands of the story come together and the tension builds towards a satisfying climax. I’m definitely open to reading Davies again. Her story collection was highly praised, and her latest novel Clear sounds good too.]]> 4.04 2018
author: Carys Davies
name: Baz
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2018
rating: 3
read at: 2024/03/28
date added: 2024/03/28
shelves:
review:
A widowed father leaves his young but growing daughter to an irritable and cold aunt on a journey in search of ‘monsters�� whose huge bones have been discovered a long way out West, and that he believes may still be alive and wandering the country out in uninhabited lands.

It’s a short historical novel, clearly and sparely written, almost minimalist in its vibe, though not in its action. There was a simplicity and pared back elegance that stroked and matched my aesthetic tastes and gave me pleasure. The story itself made it a propulsive read too. It’s an unusual and interesting tale, with quite a bit of incident and plot and shifts in perspective. Davies’s craft becomes ever more visible as the different strands of the story come together and the tension builds towards a satisfying climax. I’m definitely open to reading Davies again. Her story collection was highly praised, and her latest novel Clear sounds good too.
]]> 52407250 New York Times Notable Book (2020)
A TIME Must-Read Book of 2020
A Washington Post Notable Fiction (2020)
An NPR and Esquire Best Book of 2020
An Electric Lit and Literary Hub Favorite Book of 2020

In the highly anticipated follow-up to his beloved debut, What Belongs to You, Garth Greenwell deepens his exploration of foreignness, obligation, and desire

Sofia, Bulgaria, a landlocked city in southern Europe, stirs with hope and impending upheaval. Soviet buildings crumble, wind scatters sand from the far south, and political protesters flood the streets with song.

In this atmosphere of disquiet, an American teacher navigates a life transformed by the discovery and loss of love. As he prepares to leave the place he’s come to call home, he grapples with the intimate encounters that have marked his years abroad, each bearing uncanny reminders of his past. A queer student’s confession recalls his own first love, a stranger’s seduction devolves into paternal sadism, and a romance with another foreigner opens, and heals, old wounds. Each echo reveals startling insights about what it means to seek connection: with those we love, with the places we inhabit, and with our own fugitive selves.]]> 225 Garth Greenwell 150987464X Baz 3
Greenwell is also praised a lot for his sex scenes. He writes openly and freely about desire and the kinds of sex many gay men have. These scenes were intense and enjoyable to read, but they weren’t my favourite parts. For whatever reason, sex isn’t something I have an appetite for in fiction, even though I almost never read about it, it’s so absent. I guess it’s because there are other aspects of my life, of life in general, that are more interesting and mysterious to me.

Maybe I didn’t get much from it here because I was also familiar with the sex depicted, the way communication between two people moves, morphs, what’s involved mentally. The negotiations as pleasure and generosity is mixed in with aggression and cruelty. The uncertain sources of our personal kinks. And I guess I feel like I’m also supposed to be turned on, but I wasn’t, not really.

I agree with Sigrid Nunez in her review: “Some of the most affecting and beautiful scenes in his books have nothing to do with sexual identity or gay desire but involve exquisite observations about others whose vulnerability has touched the narrator’s heart.�� And they are indeed the moments that glow most meaningfully, for me. What got me more than anything was the kindness and compassion of the narrator toward his younger friends and partners.

This is a novel made up of short stories in three sections, and the stories Mentor and Cleanness were my favourites.]]> 3.75 2020
author: Garth Greenwell
name: Baz
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2024/03/25
date added: 2024/03/25
shelves:
review:
I devoured this novel. The sinuous, rhythmical prose, in longish run-on sentences, in long paragraphs, made it hard to stop reading once I got started. Though very different, it kind of has the same effect that Bernhard’s writing does in how I consume it. In the praise for Greenwell’s fiction there’s almost always mention of the beauty of his writing. For good reason. And it works so well for the stories he tells about the interactions between two people, the developments and changes in feeling and atmosphere, the exposures, when engaged in intimacy.

Greenwell is also praised a lot for his sex scenes. He writes openly and freely about desire and the kinds of sex many gay men have. These scenes were intense and enjoyable to read, but they weren’t my favourite parts. For whatever reason, sex isn’t something I have an appetite for in fiction, even though I almost never read about it, it’s so absent. I guess it’s because there are other aspects of my life, of life in general, that are more interesting and mysterious to me.

Maybe I didn’t get much from it here because I was also familiar with the sex depicted, the way communication between two people moves, morphs, what’s involved mentally. The negotiations as pleasure and generosity is mixed in with aggression and cruelty. The uncertain sources of our personal kinks. And I guess I feel like I’m also supposed to be turned on, but I wasn’t, not really.

I agree with Sigrid Nunez in her review: “Some of the most affecting and beautiful scenes in his books have nothing to do with sexual identity or gay desire but involve exquisite observations about others whose vulnerability has touched the narrator’s heart.�� And they are indeed the moments that glow most meaningfully, for me. What got me more than anything was the kindness and compassion of the narrator toward his younger friends and partners.

This is a novel made up of short stories in three sections, and the stories Mentor and Cleanness were my favourites.
]]> 10401601 Booklist

"This boy needs serious therapy. He may be beyond help."��The Washington Post

Just thirty, with a well-paid job, depression and no love life, the narrator and anti-hero par excellence of this grim, funny, and clever novel smokes four packs of cigarettes a day and writes weird animal stories in his spare time.

A painfully realistic portrayal of the vanishing freedom of a world governed by science and by the empty rituals of daily life.

Michel Houellebecq is a multi-award-winning French author. He currently lives in Spain.]]> 156 Michel Houellebecq 1846687845 Baz 4 3.40 1994
author: Michel Houellebecq
name: Baz
average rating: 3.40
book published: 1994
rating: 4
read at: 2024/03/22
date added: 2024/03/22
shelves:
review:
I didn’t expect to get as much from Whatever as I did from Houellebecq’s most acclaimed novel Atomised, but I expected to like it and I did. More than I thought I would. The prose is snappy and fluid and goes down nicely. It’s dryly funny, and dark and cynical and in quick flashes even moving. The protagonist is surprisingly dynamic and interesting. I didn’t expect him to cry, for example. Yes Houellebecq is very politically incorrect and deragotory, and he and his characters say things I don’t agree with. But I don’t mind in fiction. He also says things that do resonate. Is Houellebecq intelligent? Yes. Is he a prose stylist who pleases me aesthetically? Yeah. Does his fiction go to unusual places? Yah. Is he compelling? Yes.
]]> 59468839 Early Light offers three very different aspects of Osamu Dazai's genius: the title story relates his misadventures as a drinker and a family man in the terrible fire bombings of Tokyo at the end of WWII. Having lost their own home, he and his wife flee with a new baby boy and their little girl to relatives in Kofu, only to be bombed out anew. "Everything's gone," the father explains to his daughter: "Mr. Rabbit, our shoes, the Ogigari house, the Chino house, they all burned up," "Yeah, they all burned up," she said, still smiling.

"One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji," another autobiographical tale, is much more comic: Dazai finds himself unable to escape the famous views, the beauty once immortalized by Hokusai and now reduced to a cliche. In the end, young girls torment him by pressing him into taking their photo before the famous peak: "Goodbye," he hisses through his teeth, "Mount Fuji. Thanks for everything. Click."

And the final story is "Villon's Wife," a small masterpiece, which relates the awakening to power of a drunkard's wife. She transforms herself into a woman not to be defeated by anything, not by her husband being a thief, a megalomaniacal writer, and a wastrel. Single-handedly, she saves the day by concluding that "There's nothing wrong with being a monster, is there? As long as we can stay alive."]]> 72 Osamu Dazai 0811231984 Baz 3 3.71 2022
author: Osamu Dazai
name: Baz
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2024/03/17
date added: 2024/03/17
shelves:
review:
I enjoyed all three of the stories put together in this book (Early Light, One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji, and Villon’s Wife) just about equally. I like them for the reason that made me a Dazai fan when I first read him: his fluid style, clear articulation, and directness. The content in No Longer Human gave me a deeper experience, but these stories still gave me a lot of pleasure. Dazai is dark and pessimistic and somehow wonderful at the same time �� a good combination. My next Dazai will be The Setting Sun.
]]> 57615603 Patrick Modiano explores the boundaries of recollection in a "mesmerizing, enigmatic novel" (Publishers Weekly)

“Nobel Prize winner Modiano’s title smartly ties together the theme, plot, and ambience of his latest book . . . The past overlaps and memories half-emerge in classic Modiano fashion, just as a message in invisible ink tentatively reveals itself in the right light.”�� Library Journal

"An enchanting read."���ʱ��dzܲ�����󲹰������

The latest work from Nobel laureate Patrick Modiano, Invisible Ink is a spellbinding tale of memory and its illusions. Private detective Jean Eyben receives an assignment to locate a missing woman, the mysterious Noëlle Lefebvre. While the case proves fruitless, the clues Jean discovers along the way continue to haunt him. Three decades later, he resumes the investigation for himself, revisiting old sites and tracking down witnesses, compelled by reasons he can’t explain to follow the cold trail and discover the shocking truth once and for all.
��
A number one best seller in France, hailed by critics as “breathtakingly beautiful�� (Les Inrockuptibles) and “refined and dazzling�� (Le Journal du Dimanche), Invisible Ink is Modiano’s most thrilling and revelatory work to date.]]> 176 Patrick Modiano 0300261403 Baz 4
This time—maybe the timing was perfect, or maybe it’s a better book—I enjoyed the story as much as I did Modiano’s beautifully spare, ambient style. I felt the pathos of the characters as they dealt with their memories.

An impeccably made novel that felt magnetic whenever I picked it up and started to read.]]> 3.69 2019
author: Patrick Modiano
name: Baz
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2024/03/16
date added: 2024/03/16
shelves:
review:
A while ago I read my first Modiano, Sleep of Memory, and I remember enjoying its prose and atmosphere very much, but not having connected deeply to its content. Which was so fine. It was enigmatic, which I liked, and I enjoyed the prose so much that I was seduced by it and won over anyway.

This time—maybe the timing was perfect, or maybe it’s a better book—I enjoyed the story as much as I did Modiano’s beautifully spare, ambient style. I felt the pathos of the characters as they dealt with their memories.

An impeccably made novel that felt magnetic whenever I picked it up and started to read.
]]> 40718324 From the author of internationally acclaimed The Flamethrowers �� a fearless and heartbreaking novel about love, friendship and incarceration.

Romy Hall is starting two consecutive life sentences at Stanville Women’s Correctional Facility. Her crime? The killing of her stalker.

Inside awaits a world where women must hustle and fight for the bare essentials. Outside: the San Francisco of her youth. The Mars Room strip club where she was once a dancer. Her seven-year-old son, Jackson.

As Romy forms friendships over liquor brewed in socks and stories shared through sewage pipes her future seems to unfurl in one long, unwavering line �� until news from beyond the prison bars forces Romy to try and outrun her destiny.]]> 352 Rachel Kushner 0099589966 Baz 3
The novel is divided into little chunks, parts that move in their focus from character to character, from anecdote to vignette to thought to fact about life in prison.

I felt it was too long, and in this case the reason I felt it was too long is because it had a clear perspective, Kushner’s motives were (too?) clear, and the ideas at the heart of the book were unchanging from beginning to end, so in one sense there was something almost static in my experience.

The Mars Room makes prisoners people. They’re people who on the outside were down and out in some way and had to make a living doing things that were either dangerous or criminal. Kushner centered these people who commit heinous acts, including murder, and empathized with them. This was one of the big draws of the novel for me, and it was its most interesting aspect.

The other clear goal was to tell us about the injustices and cruelties of the justice system, and its treatment of prisoners. This was good but the argument sang its note all the way through and I don’t think it needed to be sung for over 300 pages. Maybe that’s why Kushner chopped it up and included other characters and their different stories, to sort of give some variety and hold the reader’s attention.

I know, from having listened to and followed Kushner for a while, that she’s a writer who has high literary standards for herself and cares about artistic integrity, so I know that some of my reading/experience of her novel is at odds with what she was aiming for.

I like Kushner’s prose, and I liked it here too. And I did become absorbed by it toward the end, when the narrative focused on its main character Romy and her stalker Keith.

Overall an uneven experience, but Kushner is a fantastic and interesting writer, and I’ll continue to follow her. I’m looking forward to her upcoming novel Creation Lake.]]> 3.36 2018
author: Rachel Kushner
name: Baz
average rating: 3.36
book published: 2018
rating: 3
read at: 2024/03/09
date added: 2024/03/09
shelves:
review:
Long story short: I didn’t have as good a time with this as I did with The Flamethrowers.

The novel is divided into little chunks, parts that move in their focus from character to character, from anecdote to vignette to thought to fact about life in prison.

I felt it was too long, and in this case the reason I felt it was too long is because it had a clear perspective, Kushner’s motives were (too?) clear, and the ideas at the heart of the book were unchanging from beginning to end, so in one sense there was something almost static in my experience.

The Mars Room makes prisoners people. They’re people who on the outside were down and out in some way and had to make a living doing things that were either dangerous or criminal. Kushner centered these people who commit heinous acts, including murder, and empathized with them. This was one of the big draws of the novel for me, and it was its most interesting aspect.

The other clear goal was to tell us about the injustices and cruelties of the justice system, and its treatment of prisoners. This was good but the argument sang its note all the way through and I don’t think it needed to be sung for over 300 pages. Maybe that’s why Kushner chopped it up and included other characters and their different stories, to sort of give some variety and hold the reader’s attention.

I know, from having listened to and followed Kushner for a while, that she’s a writer who has high literary standards for herself and cares about artistic integrity, so I know that some of my reading/experience of her novel is at odds with what she was aiming for.

I like Kushner’s prose, and I liked it here too. And I did become absorbed by it toward the end, when the narrative focused on its main character Romy and her stalker Keith.

Overall an uneven experience, but Kushner is a fantastic and interesting writer, and I’ll continue to follow her. I’m looking forward to her upcoming novel Creation Lake.
]]> 18131268 159 Barbara Comyns 1844088383 Baz 3
I definitely liked Our Spoons Came from Woolworths better, but I dug this for its singularity, and, as Sarah Waters pointed out in her praise, “its startling images and twists of phrase.”]]> 3.90 1959
author: Barbara Comyns
name: Baz
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1959
rating: 3
read at: 2024/02/23
date added: 2024/02/24
shelves:
review:
Jane Gardam in the intro says this novel is about the evil that can exist in the most humdrum people. I read this one-sentence explanation by Gardam, and it helped me make sense of it. Because there’s something almost simplistic about The Vet’s Daughter, and I did wonder what was going on with the utter two-dimensionality of the characters. Evil is simple in a way because it’s natural, inherent, it isn’t made, and I suppose Comyns believed in the existence of evil. I don’t know where I personally stand on the concept of evil but anyway I felt like I got the book. The fairytale quality of the story, of things being their bare elements, heightens it to something like a nightmare. Corruption and wickedness pervades the character Alice’s life, and it was a grim read. I enjoyed it mostly for the curious, gothic atmosphere, and for the prose. And the fantastic ending. Comyns writes strange fiction, and she has a distinctive style that’s quick and that blends matter-of-factness with something like obliqueness. The resulting pecularity is delicious.

I definitely liked Our Spoons Came from Woolworths better, but I dug this for its singularity, and, as Sarah Waters pointed out in her praise, “its startling images and twists of phrase.��
]]> 39105827 180 Thomas Bernhard 0857425765 Baz 4 3.80 1978
author: Thomas Bernhard
name: Baz
average rating: 3.80
book published: 1978
rating: 4
read at: 2024/02/18
date added: 2024/02/19
shelves:
review:
Loved these “Bernhardian narrators, with their contradictory, long-winded yet breathless testimonies and self-defense.�� Such a treat, such a pleasure these dark, twisted, elusive and fabulous stories were, of crime and punishment, of helplessness and despair, of mental illness and death and suicide. Brilliant, wondrous, and full of (restless) life. Bernhard forever. ��
]]> 59468833 Maman was exigeante—there is no English word–and I had the benefit of her training. Others may not be so fortunate. If some other young girl, with two million dollars at stake, finds this of use I shall count myself justified.

Raised in Marrakech by a French mother and English father, a 17-year-old girl has learned above all to avoid mauvais ton ("bad taste" loses something in the translation). One should not ask servants to wait on one during Ramadan: they must have paid leave while one spends the holy month abroad. One must play the piano; if staying at Claridge’s, one must regrettably install a Clavinova in the suite, so that the necessary hours of practice will not be inflicted on fellow guests. One should cultivate weavers of tweed in the Outer Hebrides but have the cloth made up in London; one should buy linen in Ireland but have it made up by a Thai seamstress in Paris (whose genius has been supported by purchase of suitable premises). All this and much more she has learned, governed by a parent of ferociously lofty standards. But at 17, during the annual Ramadan travels, she finds all assumptions overturned. Will she be able to fend for herself? Will the dictates of good taste suffice when she must deal, singlehanded, with the sharks of New York?]]> 69 Helen DeWitt 0811230074 Baz 4
I loved this. Everything about it. A young bankable woman trying to write something the way she wants to, in her own voice, clashes with the impersonal world of publishing. It’s a brilliant story, perfectly executed. The writing is immaculate and I took pleasure in every sentence. The narrator is an incredibly intelligent, indomitable seventeen year old, and her odd sharp calm voice was a delight. I loved DeWitt’s spirit and her wit, her comedy and righteous anger. This is my kind of fiction! The ending was very satisfying, just perfect.]]> 4.06 2022
author: Helen DeWitt
name: Baz
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2024/02/14
date added: 2024/02/16
shelves:
review:
Wow.

I loved this. Everything about it. A young bankable woman trying to write something the way she wants to, in her own voice, clashes with the impersonal world of publishing. It’s a brilliant story, perfectly executed. The writing is immaculate and I took pleasure in every sentence. The narrator is an incredibly intelligent, indomitable seventeen year old, and her odd sharp calm voice was a delight. I loved DeWitt’s spirit and her wit, her comedy and righteous anger. This is my kind of fiction! The ending was very satisfying, just perfect.
]]> 61113277 323 Isabella Hammad 1787334074 Baz 3
Hammad’s narrative has many threads. Sonia touches on a past marriage that ended badly, on a foolish relationship with a director that also ended badly, on her relationship with her father, her wider Palestinian family and the secrets they’ve kept from each other, on her awkward connection to their homeland, on life in occupied territory and Israeli-Palestinian tensions, on her acting, on art as resistance, and on her gradual romance with another castmate. She goes deepest into her complicated relationship with her sister, her new uneasy relationship with Mariam (the director of Hamlet and a good friend of her sister’s), the obstacles the production faces, and her own quiet political awakening.

There’s a lot in here, but somehow there were a lot of thin moments where I think I needed more intensity. There weren’t many moments when I read something and felt the thrill and weight of significance. For too much of it the dominant experience was of waiting to see where things would go, rather than pleasure in the writing as the story progressed scene to scene.

It gained in momentum and potency in the second half, when the rehearsals for the play, and the coming opening night, became the focus of the story. I felt things lasering in, and that made me feel better about the book. And the final third was particularly good, and I found where Hammad ended interesting.

This is my subjectivity, my own connection to Hammad’s writing, which was clear, assured, and smart. It’s just that, once again—as someone who reads dense, compact gems all the time, and who as time goes on increasingly turns to these kinds of short fictions, that manage to do so much so artfully—these days I feel like if I’m gonna read a novel that surpasses 300 pages, it really has to earn the length, by which I mean be consistently satisfying throughout.

A like not love situation!]]> 4.07 2023
author: Isabella Hammad
name: Baz
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/02/12
date added: 2024/02/15
shelves:
review:
Sonia, a British Palestinian actress, goes to Haifa to connect with her sister, and finds herself becoming part of a developing production of Hamlet in the West Bank...

Hammad’s narrative has many threads. Sonia touches on a past marriage that ended badly, on a foolish relationship with a director that also ended badly, on her relationship with her father, her wider Palestinian family and the secrets they’ve kept from each other, on her awkward connection to their homeland, on life in occupied territory and Israeli-Palestinian tensions, on her acting, on art as resistance, and on her gradual romance with another castmate. She goes deepest into her complicated relationship with her sister, her new uneasy relationship with Mariam (the director of Hamlet and a good friend of her sister’s), the obstacles the production faces, and her own quiet political awakening.

There’s a lot in here, but somehow there were a lot of thin moments where I think I needed more intensity. There weren’t many moments when I read something and felt the thrill and weight of significance. For too much of it the dominant experience was of waiting to see where things would go, rather than pleasure in the writing as the story progressed scene to scene.

It gained in momentum and potency in the second half, when the rehearsals for the play, and the coming opening night, became the focus of the story. I felt things lasering in, and that made me feel better about the book. And the final third was particularly good, and I found where Hammad ended interesting.

This is my subjectivity, my own connection to Hammad’s writing, which was clear, assured, and smart. It’s just that, once again—as someone who reads dense, compact gems all the time, and who as time goes on increasingly turns to these kinds of short fictions, that manage to do so much so artfully—these days I feel like if I’m gonna read a novel that surpasses 300 pages, it really has to earn the length, by which I mean be consistently satisfying throughout.

A like not love situation!
]]> 50995563 A collection of innovative and ambitious short stories from a visionary young literary artist

In The Dominant Animal—Kathryn Scanlan’s adventurous, unsettling debut collection—compression is key. Sentences have been relentlessly trimmed, tuned, and teased for maximum impact, and a ferocious attention to rhythm and sound results in a palpable pulse of excitability and distress. The nature of love is questioned at a golf course, a flower shop, an all-you-can-eat buffet. The clay head of a man is bought and displayed as a trophy. Interior life manifests on the physical plane, where characters—human and animal—eat and breathe, provoke and injure one another.

With exquisite control, Scanlan moves from expansive moods and fine afternoons to unease and violence—and also from deliberate and generative ambiguity to shocking, revelatory exactitude. Disturbances accrue as the collection progresses. How often the conclusions open—rather than tie—up. How they twist alertly. No mercy, a character says—and these stories are merciless and strange and absolutely masterful.]]> 120 Kathryn Scanlan 1911547569 Baz 4 3.28 2020
author: Kathryn Scanlan
name: Baz
average rating: 3.28
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2024/02/02
date added: 2024/02/03
shelves:
review:
I loved these dark, strange stories. A little disturbing, threatening even, and unpredictable. Sometimes violent. They made me edgy. Quite different from Kick the Latch. They made me think of Jane Bowles and Joy Williams. They were quietly thrilling. I’m a big Scanlan fan now, and will be reading whatever she does next.
]]> 122837489 Kick the Latch vividly captures the arc of one woman’s life at the racetrack—the flat land and ramshackle backstretch; the bad feelings and friction; the winner’s circle and the racetrack bar; the fancy suits and fancy boots; and the “particular language�� of “grooms, jockeys, trainers, racing secretaries, stewards, pony people, hotwalkers, everybody”—with economy and integrity.
Based on transcribed interviews with Sonia, a horse trainer, the novel investigates form and authenticity in a feat of synthesis reminiscent of Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony. As Scanlan puts it, “I wanted to preserve—amplify, exaggerate—Sonia’s idiosyncratic speech, her bluntness, her flair as a storyteller. I arrived at what you could call a composite portrait of a self.�� Whittled down with a fiercely singular artistry, Kick the Latch bangs out of the starting gate and carries the reader on a careening joyride around the inside track.]]> 170 Kathryn Scanlan 1914198255 Baz 4 4.15 2022
author: Kathryn Scanlan
name: Baz
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/31
date added: 2024/02/01
shelves:
review:
Excellent character-driven narrative, excellent prose. An unsurprisingly fast-paced read, but a surprisingly engrossing story. The narrator was so charming. Much is held back but she’s so giving. I loved it. A book of mundane stuff that yields extraordinary results. The writing couldn’t be any sharper. It’s funny, it’s sad, it has a generous heart, and it was a total pleasure from start to finish. Yum.
]]> 38470194
Penguin is publishing the entire series of Maigret novels in new translations.

'Compelling, remorseless, brilliant' John Gray

'One of the greatest writers of the twentieth century . . . Simenon was unequalled at making us look inside, though the ability was masked by his brilliance at absorbing us obsessively in his stories' Guardian

'A supreme writer . . . unforgettable vividness' Independent]]> 160 Georges Simenon 0241303958 Baz 4 3.93 1962
author: Georges Simenon
name: Baz
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1962
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/23
date added: 2024/01/24
shelves:
review:
As good as ever. A total pleasure.
]]> 29082610 Vertigo —W.G. Sebald's marvelous first novel �� is a work that teeters on the edge: compelling, puzzling, and deeply unsettling.

An unnamed narrator, beset by nervous ailments, journeys across Europe to Vienna, Venice, Verona, Riva, and finally to his childhood home in a small Bavarian village. He is also journeying into the past. Traveling in the footsteps of Stendhal, Casanova, and Kafka, the narrator draws the reader, line by line, into a dizzying web of history, biography, legends, literature, and �� most perilously �� memories.]]> 263 W.G. Sebald 0811226166 Baz 4
Made up of four sections, these narratives reimagine times in the lives of Kafka, Stendhal, and other historical figures and artists. The person narrating, similar to Sebald himself, travels across Europe, revisiting places they’ve been and the works they created, before, finally, he goes back to the village of his childhood. Throughout his journey there’s the contemplation of the natural world as well as buildings and other man-made things and spaces.

To experience the uncanny beauty of Sebald’s prose, to be in his dreamy history-soaked world, haunted by memories, and to feel the interconnectedness of things, is to come, for me, as close to the sublime as possible in fiction.

Strange, original, dazzling.]]> 3.97 1990
author: W.G. Sebald
name: Baz
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1990
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/19
date added: 2024/01/22
shelves:
review:
This, the first of Sebald’s four luminous, enchanting novels, is to me the queerest and most enigmatic. I loved it.

Made up of four sections, these narratives reimagine times in the lives of Kafka, Stendhal, and other historical figures and artists. The person narrating, similar to Sebald himself, travels across Europe, revisiting places they’ve been and the works they created, before, finally, he goes back to the village of his childhood. Throughout his journey there’s the contemplation of the natural world as well as buildings and other man-made things and spaces.

To experience the uncanny beauty of Sebald’s prose, to be in his dreamy history-soaked world, haunted by memories, and to feel the interconnectedness of things, is to come, for me, as close to the sublime as possible in fiction.

Strange, original, dazzling.
]]> 53317525 The celebrated Danish poet Tove Ditlevsen begins the Copenhagen Trilogy ("A masterpiece" ��The Guardian) with Childhood, her coming-of-age memoir about pursuing a life and a passion beyond the confines of her upbringing—and into the difficult years described in Youth and Dependency

Tove knows she is a misfit whose childhood is made for a completely different girl. In her working-class neighborhood in Copenhagen, she is enthralled by her wild, red-headed friend Ruth, who initiates her into adult secrets. But Tove cannot reveal her true self to her or to anyone else. For "long, mysterious words begin to crawl across" her soul, and she comes to realize that she has a vocation, something unknowable within her—and that she must one day, painfully but inevitably, leave the narrow street of her childhood behind.

Childhood, the first volume in the Copenhagen Trilogy, is a visceral portrait of girlhood and female friendship, told with lyricism and vivid intensity.]]> 112 Tove Ditlevsen 0374722935 Baz 5
I think this was partly due to the fact that she connected with some aspects of Tove’s experiences, but also partly because of the intense emotional resonance of Ditlevsen’s voice, an intensity restrained by the calmness of her expression. Her style is comparable to Annie Ernaux’s, whose Simple Passion was my last read before Childhood and whose prose I described similarly.

Ditlevsen though is a poet and is the more lyrical writer. Her lyricism works to powerful effect because she’s also blunt and does not waste words. I loved the way she described her childhood, like this thing that was coming off her like flakes of sun-scorched skin, or an experience that was dark and something that moaned like a forgotten animal in a cellar.

I loved the way she described her relationship with her mother, and her home life, and street, and her friendship with Ruth, and her father, and her passion for poetry, and basically everything else.

I think Ditlevsen is brilliant, and Childhood seethes with feeling. A dark, extraordinary book �� to me its reputation is utterly justified and I can’t wait to read Youth and Dependency.]]> 4.19 1967
author: Tove Ditlevsen
name: Baz
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1967
rating: 5
read at: 2023/02/11
date added: 2024/01/21
shelves:
review:
I asked a friend who was reading Childhood how she was going with it, and she said, in a msg online, ‘Well when I first started reading it I was next to a pond and had the urge to throw it in lol.�� This was not a criticism. The opposite. Kafka said that books should wound or stab us, and that’s what it was doing to her.

I think this was partly due to the fact that she connected with some aspects of Tove’s experiences, but also partly because of the intense emotional resonance of Ditlevsen’s voice, an intensity restrained by the calmness of her expression. Her style is comparable to Annie Ernaux’s, whose Simple Passion was my last read before Childhood and whose prose I described similarly.

Ditlevsen though is a poet and is the more lyrical writer. Her lyricism works to powerful effect because she’s also blunt and does not waste words. I loved the way she described her childhood, like this thing that was coming off her like flakes of sun-scorched skin, or an experience that was dark and something that moaned like a forgotten animal in a cellar.

I loved the way she described her relationship with her mother, and her home life, and street, and her friendship with Ruth, and her father, and her passion for poetry, and basically everything else.

I think Ditlevsen is brilliant, and Childhood seethes with feeling. A dark, extraordinary book �� to me its reputation is utterly justified and I can’t wait to read Youth and Dependency.
]]> 29429919 'Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature.'

Ruth Weiss, an academic, is beautiful, intelligent and lonely. Studying the heroines of Balzac in order to discover where her own childhood and adult life has gone awry, she seeks not salvation but enlightenment.

Yet in revisiting her London upbringing, her friendships and doomed Parisian love affairs, she wonders if perhaps there might not be a chance for a new start in life . . .]]> 176 Anita Brookner 0241977754 Baz 4
Brookner has that maturity and knowing that I also experience in the voices of Elizabeth Taylor and Alice Munro �� old-fashioned authors who weren’t all show and no tell, all spareness and ambiguity and suggestion. They were no Claire Keegan. They’re so satisfying to read because they do both, they’re showers and tellers simultaneously. I love them for their psycholgising, the clear experience and understanding that comes through in their sharp observations and articulate telling �� their critical unsentimental eye and compassion. They broke down, neatly and clearly, and brilliantly, what goes on in the whirling dance of our relationships with one another. Thank the almighty whatever for the existence in fiction of the Keegans and the Brookners in the world, because I couldn’t do without the range.

Being a Balzac fan myself, and having read Eugénie Grandet—the Balzac novel most referenced in A Start in Life—added to my pleasure and was icing on the cake.]]> 3.82 1981
author: Anita Brookner
name: Baz
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1981
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/16
date added: 2024/01/17
shelves:
review:
A tragicomedy that’s really mostly tragedy. But a self-conscious, almost tongue-in-cheek one. The protagonist Ruth’s absurd story was a fun one to read. It was self-aware in its dramatics. It was almost pulpy. Ruth is an academic, a lover of literature, and a Balzac scholar. Balzac was an author of darkly dramatic yet super entertaining novels full of moral conflict and scepticism. In this book Brookner immersed me in Ruth’s story, a story full of moral conflict and scepticism, and had me considering the awkward relationship between the things that make up the “stuff of literature”and the “stuff of life.��

Brookner has that maturity and knowing that I also experience in the voices of Elizabeth Taylor and Alice Munro �� old-fashioned authors who weren’t all show and no tell, all spareness and ambiguity and suggestion. They were no Claire Keegan. They’re so satisfying to read because they do both, they’re showers and tellers simultaneously. I love them for their psycholgising, the clear experience and understanding that comes through in their sharp observations and articulate telling �� their critical unsentimental eye and compassion. They broke down, neatly and clearly, and brilliantly, what goes on in the whirling dance of our relationships with one another. Thank the almighty whatever for the existence in fiction of the Keegans and the Brookners in the world, because I couldn’t do without the range.

Being a Balzac fan myself, and having read Eugénie Grandet—the Balzac novel most referenced in A Start in Life—added to my pleasure and was icing on the cake.
]]> 122089797 This extraordinary Strega Prize-winning novel confirms Domenico Starnone’s reputation as one of Italy’s greatest living writers. Told against the backdrop of Naples in the 1960s, a city that itself becomes a vivid character in this lush, atmospheric novel, The House on Via Gemito is a masterpiece of Italian fiction, one that is steeped in Neapolitan lore. A modest apartment in Via Gemito smelling of paint and turpentine. Its furniture pushed up against the wall to create a make-shift studio. Drying canvases moved from bed to floor each night. Federí, the father, a railway clerk, is convinced that he possesses great artistic promise. If it weren’t for the family he must feed and the jealousy of his fellow Neapolitan artists, nothing would stop him from becoming a world-famous painter. Ambitious and frustrated, genuinely talented but also arrogant and resentful, Federí is scarred by constant disappointment. He is a larger-than-life character, a liar, a fabulist, and his fantasies shape the lives of those around him, especially his young son, Mimi, short for Domenico, who will spend a lifetime trying to get out from under his father’s shadow. Starnone, a finalist for the National Book Award with Trick , author of New York Times notable book of the year, Ties , and the critically acclaimed Trust, takes readers beyond the slim, novella-length works for which he is known by American readers to create a vast fresco of family, fatherhood, and modern Naples.]]> 480 Domenico Starnone 1609459237 Baz 3
In this novel Domenico looks back and talks about his dad for 450 pages, what being his child and growing around him was like. It wasn’t pleasant. Federico was a terrible narcissist, an incredibly, unabashedly self-involved artist with tunnel-vision. He was loud, aggressive, mean-spirited, and often violent. He wasn’t physically violent with his children, but he was with his wife, Domenico’s mum. He was a misogynist, a man who would tell his young boys not to ask permission when it came to girls, but to literally grab them and have their way.

This novel is about his challenge to free himself from his dad’s dominance and influence, to chase away the words and beliefs that were instilled in him, to try to be the opposite. In his mining of childhood scenes and experiences, and his struggle to put things in order, to see things clearly, Starnone is also writing about memory.

This is unquestionably, like the other three fictions of his that I loved, a sophisticated, masterful work. I just didn’t love this one, that’s all. It was too long. I love family novels, and this one was unusual, highly focused on his dad’s behaviour and impact, an endless stream of his dad’s personality. And being largely autobiographical, Starnone was probably indulgent for good reason, he really goes deep. But, yeah�� The excellent quality of the writing is there, his sentences don’t waver, but it was just too long for me.

Also, it was too long.]]> 3.45 2000
author: Domenico Starnone
name: Baz
average rating: 3.45
book published: 2000
rating: 3
read at: 2024/01/11
date added: 2024/01/15
shelves:
review:
I fell in love with the Starnone of the sharp, gem-like short novels Trust (2019), Ties (2014), and Trick (2016). These multifaceted, compact little suckers are dazzling comic dramas that do so much in under 200 pages. The House on Via Gemito, a much longer novel from 2000, was a different beast. Less wit, a lot more anger. It’s an autobiographical novel, and Starnone didn’t change the names of his characters. He’s the narrator, and his dad Federico is Federico Starnone the famous painter. The painting on the cover of the book is one of his more well-known works, and it features heavily in the story.

In this novel Domenico looks back and talks about his dad for 450 pages, what being his child and growing around him was like. It wasn’t pleasant. Federico was a terrible narcissist, an incredibly, unabashedly self-involved artist with tunnel-vision. He was loud, aggressive, mean-spirited, and often violent. He wasn’t physically violent with his children, but he was with his wife, Domenico’s mum. He was a misogynist, a man who would tell his young boys not to ask permission when it came to girls, but to literally grab them and have their way.

This novel is about his challenge to free himself from his dad’s dominance and influence, to chase away the words and beliefs that were instilled in him, to try to be the opposite. In his mining of childhood scenes and experiences, and his struggle to put things in order, to see things clearly, Starnone is also writing about memory.

This is unquestionably, like the other three fictions of his that I loved, a sophisticated, masterful work. I just didn’t love this one, that’s all. It was too long. I love family novels, and this one was unusual, highly focused on his dad’s behaviour and impact, an endless stream of his dad’s personality. And being largely autobiographical, Starnone was probably indulgent for good reason, he really goes deep. But, yeah�� The excellent quality of the writing is there, his sentences don’t waver, but it was just too long for me.

Also, it was too long.
]]> 37765158
Richard has spent his life as a university professor, immersed in the world of books and ideas, but now he is retired, his books remain in their packing boxes and he steps into the streets of his city, Berlin. Here, on Alexanderplatz, he discovers a new community -- a tent city, established by African asylum seekers. Hesitantly, getting to know the new arrivals, Richard finds his life changing, as he begins to question his own sense of belonging in a city that once divided its citizens into them and us.

At once a passionate contribution to the debate on race, privilege and nationality and a beautifully written examination of an ageing man's quest to find meaning in his life, Go, Went, Gone showcases one of the great contemporary European writers at the height of her powers.]]> 304 Jenny Erpenbeck Baz 4
Intellectual: Engaging as a passionate but common sense look at the injustices of complicated legal procedures and the belief systems—rooted in fear, ignorance, past national traumas—they’re founded on. Insightful in matters of privilege, disconnection, miscommunication, loss, memory and time. Erpenbeck is a wonderfully sage writer, sophisticated and clear-sighted.

Aesthetic: Spare, neat, quiet, rhythmic. I love Erpenbeck’s prose. There’s a minimalist lyricism to the style that I find really pleasant.]]> 3.91 2015
author: Jenny Erpenbeck
name: Baz
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2015
rating: 4
read at: 2020/05/15
date added: 2024/01/09
shelves:
review:
Emotional: This is a novel charged with emotion. A retired professor develops unlikely relationships with several refugees who have made their way to Berlin from various parts of Africa and are struggling against the state to be granted asylum. I was moved by it and came close to tears more than once. This is an impassioned work.

Intellectual: Engaging as a passionate but common sense look at the injustices of complicated legal procedures and the belief systems—rooted in fear, ignorance, past national traumas—they’re founded on. Insightful in matters of privilege, disconnection, miscommunication, loss, memory and time. Erpenbeck is a wonderfully sage writer, sophisticated and clear-sighted.

Aesthetic: Spare, neat, quiet, rhythmic. I love Erpenbeck’s prose. There’s a minimalist lyricism to the style that I find really pleasant.
]]> 64645700 451 Zadie Smith 0241337003 Baz 4
Smith composed the novel in short, sweet chapters that go backwards and forwards in time, and the whole experience was a breeze. She juggled everything effortlessly, and infused her narrative with a lightness and playfulness that made it so readable and entertaining. Which is odd because she’s not talking about fluffy shit. Smith has spoken in interviews of the uniquely and highly valued English trait of humour and wit, which as much as anything else is a “self-protective�� quality, a shield to hide behind. She interrogates it. The English often can’t be confronted with a truth head-on. It’s unseemly! And I think this belief has something to do with the balance of tone she achieves in The Fraud.

On top of it all there’s queerness too, and there’s some kinky dom/sub sex between the protagonist, the housekeeper Eliza Touchet, and the famous novelist cousin she looks after, William Ainsworth. And William ain’t the dom. William likes to be spanked and have things put up his butt.

A great read! Smith said it was a pleasure to write, and it’s easy to believe. Fluidly written, the prose never wavers.]]> 3.38 2023
author: Zadie Smith
name: Baz
average rating: 3.38
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/04
date added: 2024/01/05
shelves:
review:
I zipped through this hearty, expansive, many-tentacled novel. There’s history here, a cast of characters who are all also real people, a bizarro trial that gripped a country, explorations of identity, both personal and national, class, slavery, sexism, revolution, Englishness; truth and fiction, lies and distortions, both in novels and in life, in the collective conscience of a society.

Smith composed the novel in short, sweet chapters that go backwards and forwards in time, and the whole experience was a breeze. She juggled everything effortlessly, and infused her narrative with a lightness and playfulness that made it so readable and entertaining. Which is odd because she’s not talking about fluffy shit. Smith has spoken in interviews of the uniquely and highly valued English trait of humour and wit, which as much as anything else is a “self-protective�� quality, a shield to hide behind. She interrogates it. The English often can’t be confronted with a truth head-on. It’s unseemly! And I think this belief has something to do with the balance of tone she achieves in The Fraud.

On top of it all there’s queerness too, and there’s some kinky dom/sub sex between the protagonist, the housekeeper Eliza Touchet, and the famous novelist cousin she looks after, William Ainsworth. And William ain’t the dom. William likes to be spanked and have things put up his butt.

A great read! Smith said it was a pleasure to write, and it’s easy to believe. Fluidly written, the prose never wavers.
]]> 198812387 353 Lydia Davis 1805301896 Baz 4
Her stories are as much about the symmetry and rhythm of her sentences and words, as they are about the comic nature of small daily moments, or the strangeness of life as distilled in one community, or single circumstance, interaction, or thought. She has a particular thing for misunderstandings, and quirks of personality.

Her deceptively simple prose is pristine, and it’s a joy to read. And because the stories are so short, I often read them out loud. My antennae is always up super high when I read her because I know every word is carefully, and specifically, chosen. I have this trust in her because I know how scrupulous and precise she is, how learned and interested she is in language, and her interest becomes my interest.

I love Lydia Davis because of her attitude, and the things she singles out as worthy of attention. Her stories are one of a kind, full of delicious irony and wit.]]> 3.74 2023
author: Lydia Davis
name: Baz
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/12/31
date added: 2024/01/01
shelves:
review:
Davis takes pleasure in words, in their sounds, connotations, histories, usages, and the way contexts shape their meanings and effects.

Her stories are as much about the symmetry and rhythm of her sentences and words, as they are about the comic nature of small daily moments, or the strangeness of life as distilled in one community, or single circumstance, interaction, or thought. She has a particular thing for misunderstandings, and quirks of personality.

Her deceptively simple prose is pristine, and it’s a joy to read. And because the stories are so short, I often read them out loud. My antennae is always up super high when I read her because I know every word is carefully, and specifically, chosen. I have this trust in her because I know how scrupulous and precise she is, how learned and interested she is in language, and her interest becomes my interest.

I love Lydia Davis because of her attitude, and the things she singles out as worthy of attention. Her stories are one of a kind, full of delicious irony and wit.
]]> 61340205 The Flowers of Buffoonery opens in a seaside sanitarium where Yozo Oba �� the narrator of No Longer Human �� is convalescing after a failed suicide attempt. Friends and family visit him, and nurses and police drift in and out of his room. Against this dispiriting backdrop, Yozo and his visitors try to maintain a lighthearted, even clownish atmosphere: playing cards, smoking cigarettes, vying for attention, cracking jokes, and trying to make each other laugh. Dazai is known for delving into the darkest corners of human consciousness, but in The Flowers of Buffoonery he pokes fun at these same emotions: the follies and hardships of youth, of love, and of self-hatred and depression. A glimpse into the lives of a group of outsiders in prewar Japan, The Flowers of Buffoonery is a fresh and darkly humorous addition to Osamu Dazai’s masterful and intoxicating oeuvre.]]> 96 Osamu Dazai 0811234541 Baz 3
There’s a big difference between the two fictions, however, in tone. No Longer Human stays below the surface, closer to the truth of Yozo’s feelings, as he is the narrator and we get to be in his head. In this one, Dazai says: ‘A man crushed by reality puts on a show of endurance��, and the tone is much lighter as a third-person narrator stays on the surface, and we mostly see their show of endurance, what’s observable on the surface: the characters clowning and tip-toeing around each other. They have their friendship down to a neat choreography.

Anyway, this is a super short book, a novella that can be read in a single sitting, and it was slight in its substance, in a way, but it’s still Dazai so the writing was smooth and enjoyable. Overall a nice, effortless read.]]> 3.83 1935
author: Osamu Dazai
name: Baz
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1935
rating: 3
read at: 2023/12/28
date added: 2023/12/29
shelves:
review:
In this novella, as in No Longer Human, Dazai is transfixed by the idea of camouflaging true feelings and sentiments. They’re both about the inability of people in a polite society to talk simply, forthrightly, as well as the importance of maintaining relationships and protecting people’s sensitivities under a veneer of affability, which both works and doesn’t work in masking the truth. In one place Dazai describes the group of friends: ‘These friends know all kinds of expressions that could smooth things over. At least ten different gradations for conveying what essentially means “no.”�� And a little later, Dazai reflects briefly on this construction for interpersonal relationships: ‘…should you scratch below the surface, I think you’ll find a personal imperative to serve. Call it a sense of sacrifice. An aimless sense of sacrifice, lacking a clear objective.�� I liked that, an aimless sense of sacrifice, lacking a clear objective. How often do people make those tiny sacrifices, with no real knowledge of why they make them, apart from some vague idea of keeping things pleasant and cruising along? This is a story of unhappiness, incomprehension, and the foolishness in pretending. Yozo and his friends do nothing but mess around and laugh, but they ain’t really jolly people.

There’s a big difference between the two fictions, however, in tone. No Longer Human stays below the surface, closer to the truth of Yozo’s feelings, as he is the narrator and we get to be in his head. In this one, Dazai says: ‘A man crushed by reality puts on a show of endurance��, and the tone is much lighter as a third-person narrator stays on the surface, and we mostly see their show of endurance, what’s observable on the surface: the characters clowning and tip-toeing around each other. They have their friendship down to a neat choreography.

Anyway, this is a super short book, a novella that can be read in a single sitting, and it was slight in its substance, in a way, but it’s still Dazai so the writing was smooth and enjoyable. Overall a nice, effortless read.
]]> 52045757 Minor Detail begins during the summer of 1949, one year after the war that the Palestinians mourn as the Nakba �� the catastrophe that led to the displacement and expulsion of more than 700,000 people �� and the Israelis celebrate as the War of Independence. Israeli soldiers capture and rape a young Palestinian woman, and kill and bury her in the sand. Many years later, a woman in Ramallah becomes fascinated to the point of obsession with this ‘minor detail�� of history. A haunting meditation on war, violence and memory, Minor Detail cuts to the heart of the Palestinian experience of dispossession, life under occupation, and the persistent difficulty of piecing together a narrative in the face of ongoing erasure and disempowerment.]]> 144 Adania Shibli 191309717X Baz 4
The tone is cool, the feeling one of threat, absurdity and alienation. I liked the clarity of Shibli’s prose, and I liked the literal closeness of the story to the two protagonists, how Shibli zeroed in on their bodies and senses, detailed their every action and physical movement, and how this way of telling the larger story worked effectively, in different ways, in the two parts. It was compelling.

A great read, it was patient and unhurried in its movement but fast-flowing too because it was precise, and riveting. And Shibli did both: she was blunt about the experience of life under occupation, and morally and politically clear, but as a novel this book is also subtle and indirect, unusual and interesting.]]> 4.27 2017
author: Adania Shibli
name: Baz
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2023/12/25
date added: 2023/12/27
shelves:
review:
I tore through Minor Detail. It’s a quiet, tense book, spare and simple in its language, highly evocative in its physicality and depictions of place, and unceasing in its edgy atmosphere. The novel is made up of two distinct parts: the first part focuses on a maniacal, laser-focused Israeli officer, and an air of violence and calm brutality pervades throughout, leading to horrific acts perpetrated against a Palestinian girl; the second part is set twenty-five years later and is focused on a Palestinian woman who attempts to find the true story behind the rape and murder of the voiceless girl from the first section. Danger hangs thick as she uses someone else’s identity to cross borders and checkpoints to enter newly-established territories where she’s not allowed.

The tone is cool, the feeling one of threat, absurdity and alienation. I liked the clarity of Shibli’s prose, and I liked the literal closeness of the story to the two protagonists, how Shibli zeroed in on their bodies and senses, detailed their every action and physical movement, and how this way of telling the larger story worked effectively, in different ways, in the two parts. It was compelling.

A great read, it was patient and unhurried in its movement but fast-flowing too because it was precise, and riveting. And Shibli did both: she was blunt about the experience of life under occupation, and morally and politically clear, but as a novel this book is also subtle and indirect, unusual and interesting.
]]> 61492527



The Private Lives of Trees, Alejandro Zambra's second novel, now published in the UK for the first time in a revised translation by Megan McDowell, overflows with his signature wit and his gift for crafting short novels that manage to contain whole worlds.]]> 96 Alejandro Zambra 1804270245 Baz 4 3.72 2007
author: Alejandro Zambra
name: Baz
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2007
rating: 4
read at: 2023/12/25
date added: 2023/12/26
shelves:
review:
Bonsai was funnier, but this was more touching. It was just as playful and tricksy in its structure and crafty with the fiction form. The prose is supple, simple in its language but nimble and stylish. His narratives are a joy. This was my second Zambra this year, and there will be more Zambra in my life next year. I’m glad he has multiple books in translation, ready and waiting to be picked up. Fresh, bold, and compulsively readable.
]]> 62986211 For readers of Alice Munro, Maggie O'Farrell, Ann Patchett, Zadie Smith, Rose Tremain, Ian McEwan, Elizabeth Jane Howard and Lily King.

Sunday Times bestseller Tessa Hadley explores the big consequences of small events in this new collection

Heloise's father died in a car crash when she was a little girl; at a dinner party in her forties, she meets someone connected to that long-ago tragedy. Janey's bohemian mother plans to marry a man close to Janey's own age - everything changes when an accident interrupts the wedding party. A daughter caring for her elderly mother during the pandemic becomes obsessed with the woman next door; in the wake of his best friend's death, a man must reassess his affair with the friend's wife. Teenager Cecilia wakes one morning on vacation with her parents in Florence and sees them for the first time through disenchanted eyes.

These stories illuminate the enduring conflicts between responsibility and freedom, power and desire, convention and subversion, reality, and dreams.]]> 240 Tessa Hadley 178733368X Baz 4
I loved these stories. It was a return to the Hadley I like best. My two previous Hadley reads were her two most recent novels, Free Love (2022), and Late in the Day (2019), and I didn’t vibe that strongly with either. However, immediately into the first story in this collection, the title story After the Funeral, I knew I was back, in the kind of fiction that made Hadley one of my favourite living writers. I think her short stories are where it’s at, for me, and I say that knowing my single favourite work of hers is The Past, an earlier novel.

At her best Hadley is the total package; she has Munro in her, she has Bowen in her, and she has Mansfield in her. She continues in that lineage of writers who wrote dazzlingly, and so concisely, about complex emotions and relationships, about home life, marriage, parents and children, siblings and lovers, and the enclosed interior world of the self that no one will ever know. She does what she does with artful dexterity and aplomb. She’s a master.

There was pleasure in the brilliant psychological insights, and there was pleasure in Hadley’s style. Her prose is full-bodied and rich �� I love her breezy sumptuous language. She writes to excite the senses, and she’s one of the best at it, for me.

These are sophisticated, impeccable stories, and After the Funeral is one of my favourite books of the year.]]> 3.78 2023
author: Tessa Hadley
name: Baz
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/12/23
date added: 2023/12/24
shelves:
review:
4.5

I loved these stories. It was a return to the Hadley I like best. My two previous Hadley reads were her two most recent novels, Free Love (2022), and Late in the Day (2019), and I didn’t vibe that strongly with either. However, immediately into the first story in this collection, the title story After the Funeral, I knew I was back, in the kind of fiction that made Hadley one of my favourite living writers. I think her short stories are where it’s at, for me, and I say that knowing my single favourite work of hers is The Past, an earlier novel.

At her best Hadley is the total package; she has Munro in her, she has Bowen in her, and she has Mansfield in her. She continues in that lineage of writers who wrote dazzlingly, and so concisely, about complex emotions and relationships, about home life, marriage, parents and children, siblings and lovers, and the enclosed interior world of the self that no one will ever know. She does what she does with artful dexterity and aplomb. She’s a master.

There was pleasure in the brilliant psychological insights, and there was pleasure in Hadley’s style. Her prose is full-bodied and rich �� I love her breezy sumptuous language. She writes to excite the senses, and she’s one of the best at it, for me.

These are sophisticated, impeccable stories, and After the Funeral is one of my favourite books of the year.
]]> 53190728 A finely nuanced exploration of responsibility, snobbery and culture clash from one of the twentieth centrury's finest novelists.

When Amy's husband dies on holiday in Istanbul, she is supported by the kindly but rather slovenly Martha, a young American novelist who lives in London. Upon their return to England, Amy is ungratefully reluctant to maintain their friendship, but the skeins of their existence seem inextricably linked as grief gives way to resilience and again to tragedy. Reversals of fortune and a compelling cast of characters, including Ernie, ex-sailor turned housekeeper, and Amy's wonderfully precocious granddaughters, add spice to a novel that delights even as it unveils the most uncomfortable human emotions.]]> 190 Elizabeth Taylor Baz 4
I’ve read most of Taylor’s fiction and, speaking generally, her brutal observations of her characters and their emotional states are counterbalanced by a clear compassion. It was harder for me this time around to feel it. But then I felt it, towards the end, the humanity, and it brought the novel to a great close.

In my edition of the book, there are two quotes by writers that perfectly and succinctly summarise who Elizabeth Taylor is as a writer, and why she’s one of my all-time favourites. I want to share them:

1. ‘Always intelligent, often subversive and never dull, Elizabeth Taylor is the thinking person’s dangerous housewife. Her sophisticated prose combines elegance, icy wit and freshness in a stimulating cocktail �� the perfect toast to the quiet horror of domestic life.��

2. ‘The very English art of seeming is both respected and satirised. Again and again, the world of objects, routines and domestic necessities is expertly drawn, and beneath that the world of half-conscious feelings, suppressed longings, denied impulses, stifled resentments . . . She is adept at capturing the ways people interact �� and how they fail to; how words, thoughts, actions glance off each other in unpredictable directions; how even those closely related can live curiously parallel existences.’]]> 3.87 1976
author: Elizabeth Taylor
name: Baz
average rating: 3.87
book published: 1976
rating: 4
read at: 2023/12/16
date added: 2023/12/17
shelves:
review:
A juicy concoction of tragedy and comedy, this novel is about blame, guilt, and bereavement �� and as with all good fiction, also so many other things. Taylor, in her writing, floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee. Her prose is delicate, agile and sharp. Her characters are pathetic and real, and her stories are full of punchlines, one-liners, dark jokes that wound �� and in her relentless piercing manner these jokes, over time, begin to feel like lashings over that wound.

I’ve read most of Taylor’s fiction and, speaking generally, her brutal observations of her characters and their emotional states are counterbalanced by a clear compassion. It was harder for me this time around to feel it. But then I felt it, towards the end, the humanity, and it brought the novel to a great close.

In my edition of the book, there are two quotes by writers that perfectly and succinctly summarise who Elizabeth Taylor is as a writer, and why she’s one of my all-time favourites. I want to share them:

1. ‘Always intelligent, often subversive and never dull, Elizabeth Taylor is the thinking person’s dangerous housewife. Her sophisticated prose combines elegance, icy wit and freshness in a stimulating cocktail �� the perfect toast to the quiet horror of domestic life.��

2. ‘The very English art of seeming is both respected and satirised. Again and again, the world of objects, routines and domestic necessities is expertly drawn, and beneath that the world of half-conscious feelings, suppressed longings, denied impulses, stifled resentments . . . She is adept at capturing the ways people interact �� and how they fail to; how words, thoughts, actions glance off each other in unpredictable directions; how even those closely related can live curiously parallel existences.��
]]> 11222940 Mine has been a life of much shame. I can't even guess myself what it must be to live the life of a human being.

Portraying himself as a failure, the protagonist of No Longer Human narrates a seemingly normal life even while he feels incapable of understanding human beings. Oba Yozo's attempts to reconcile himself to the world around him begin in early childhood, continue through high school, where he becomes a "clown" to mask his alienation, and eventually lead to a failed suicide attempt as an adult. Without sentimentality, he records the casual cruelties of life and its fleeting moments of human connection and tenderness.

Semi-autobiographical, No Longer Human is the final completed work of Osamu Dazai. Still one of the ten bestselling books in Japan, No Longer Human is a powerful exploration of an individual's alienation from society.]]> 177 Osamu Dazai Baz 3
I dug this novel about a young man at odds with his species, someone who feels so unlike other people that he can barely call himself a human being.

This is a book about the inability to conform, the strange sad habits of conventional society, and suicide, but the narrator Yozo’s experience seems to go beyond alienation and depression. He’s an interesting character. It’s not just that he doesn’t understand people on a fundamental level—he barely understands them on a surface level, why they act the way they do in their everyday lives, why they say what they say, make the faces they make. He doesn’t just feel different, like an outcast: he literally questions his humanity.

It’s an unremittingly sad, hopeless book, but it’s a story that doesn’t have anywhere to go (no matter how many times Yozo changes his living situation). For some suffering people life isn’t worth it, and they might be better off dead than alive.

I liked the cleanness of the prose, the articulate, direct way the narrator expressed himself. And I just liked it overall, a lot, and will probably read more Dazai.]]> 3.80 1948
author: Osamu Dazai
name: Baz
average rating: 3.80
book published: 1948
rating: 3
read at: 2023/12/12
date added: 2023/12/13
shelves:
review:
3.5

I dug this novel about a young man at odds with his species, someone who feels so unlike other people that he can barely call himself a human being.

This is a book about the inability to conform, the strange sad habits of conventional society, and suicide, but the narrator Yozo’s experience seems to go beyond alienation and depression. He’s an interesting character. It’s not just that he doesn’t understand people on a fundamental level—he barely understands them on a surface level, why they act the way they do in their everyday lives, why they say what they say, make the faces they make. He doesn’t just feel different, like an outcast: he literally questions his humanity.

It’s an unremittingly sad, hopeless book, but it’s a story that doesn’t have anywhere to go (no matter how many times Yozo changes his living situation). For some suffering people life isn’t worth it, and they might be better off dead than alive.

I liked the cleanness of the prose, the articulate, direct way the narrator expressed himself. And I just liked it overall, a lot, and will probably read more Dazai.
]]> 43454164 WINNER OF THE 2018 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD and a NEW YORK TIMES a moving story of love, friendship, grief, healing, and the magical bond between a woman and her dog.

When a woman unexpectedly loses her lifelong best friend and mentor, she finds herself burdened with the unwanted dog he has left behind. Her own battle against grief is intensified by the mute suffering of the dog, a huge Great Dane, and by the threat of eviction: dogs are prohibited in her apartment building.

Isolated from the rest of the world, increasingly obsessed with the dog's care, determined to read its mind and fathom its heart, she comes dangerously close to unravelling. But while troubles abound, rich and surprising rewards lie in store for both of them.]]> 224 Sigrid Nunez 0349012814 Baz 3
The Friend was that. A solid three. I liked it. It was about what I’d expected. I had a similar experience with What Are You Going Through, so I looked at what I’d said about it, and I could basically transplant my comments almost word for word, here. And actually, here you go:

“I was trying and failing to describe my experience with this novel to my colleague �� and I said that it has everything going for it that I like in terms of subject matter, and the prose, if described, checks my boxes: it’s careful, precise, clean, there’s an elegant simplicity to it. But sometimes while a writer’s style can be all the things you like, it might only be so ‘on paper,�� so to speak. Because in actuality, though I liked it, I wasn’t really seduced by it. There was something, a final element, missing. An edge, panache, sharpness, a flavour, an emotionality �� I guess it’s that indescribable thing that makes a writer’s Style her unique Voice. In this instance I loved the style, but I didn’t fall for Nunez’s voice. And that’s not a criticism, just a connection thing.��

I’ll add a little more to that and say it might be a question of tone, I didn’t get much from either narrator’s attitude. Unlike the voices of similarly cool, detached, aloof first-person narrators �� Cusk’s narrator in the Outline trilogy, for example �� there’s a lack of pressure, no low-lying tension, in the voices of these narrators in Nunez’s novels. Which is interesting because The Friend in large part is about grief. The narrator’s mourning the loss of a close friend. But that story didn’t hit me, really. In my reading, what came to the fore was her reflections on fiction, and writing, and how people’s relationship to it has drastically changed.]]> 3.80 2018
author: Sigrid Nunez
name: Baz
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2018
rating: 3
read at: 2023/12/06
date added: 2023/12/08
shelves:
review:
I’ve been working at a bookshop for two years now and my colleagues have gotten to know me a little. When they ask me how I’m going with my book and I say, ‘Yeahhh, good, I’m not LOVING it but I’m liking it, it’s interesting, a good solid read��, they shoot back at me with, ‘So 3 stars, eh?��

The Friend was that. A solid three. I liked it. It was about what I’d expected. I had a similar experience with What Are You Going Through, so I looked at what I’d said about it, and I could basically transplant my comments almost word for word, here. And actually, here you go:

“I was trying and failing to describe my experience with this novel to my colleague �� and I said that it has everything going for it that I like in terms of subject matter, and the prose, if described, checks my boxes: it’s careful, precise, clean, there’s an elegant simplicity to it. But sometimes while a writer’s style can be all the things you like, it might only be so ‘on paper,�� so to speak. Because in actuality, though I liked it, I wasn’t really seduced by it. There was something, a final element, missing. An edge, panache, sharpness, a flavour, an emotionality �� I guess it’s that indescribable thing that makes a writer’s Style her unique Voice. In this instance I loved the style, but I didn’t fall for Nunez’s voice. And that’s not a criticism, just a connection thing.��

I’ll add a little more to that and say it might be a question of tone, I didn’t get much from either narrator’s attitude. Unlike the voices of similarly cool, detached, aloof first-person narrators �� Cusk’s narrator in the Outline trilogy, for example �� there’s a lack of pressure, no low-lying tension, in the voices of these narrators in Nunez’s novels. Which is interesting because The Friend in large part is about grief. The narrator’s mourning the loss of a close friend. But that story didn’t hit me, really. In my reading, what came to the fore was her reflections on fiction, and writing, and how people’s relationship to it has drastically changed.
]]> 59774734
With motherhood changing Samsa into a stranger, Boulder must decide where her priorities lie, and whether her yearning for freedom can truly trump her yearning for love.

Once again, Eva Baltasar demonstrates her preeminence as a chronicler of queer voices navigating a hostile world―and in prose as brittle and beautiful as an ancient saga.]]> 105 Eva Baltasar 1913505383 Baz 3
I liked it though, I liked its heavy, smokey, bright black atmosphere. I also liked the simplicity of the story and the voice of its gruff, antisocial, cynical, moody lesbian narrator.

The lyricism was mostly fine. The poetry gives the story its density, but it didn’t weigh too heavily on the narrative and slow its movement. It wasn’t a brisk read, but I moved forward at a nice steady rate. It’s made up of short sections and scenes with white space in between, and that helped. Overall though the metaphors were too much for this reader. It almost became funny to me. I would notice the number of successive metaphors packed into one little section. And I guess it’s not a great sign if I’m not so immersed that I forget the style.

Will I read Permafrost? I don’t know. I might. I did connect with the narrator’s hatred of the patterned lives people lead, the social conventions people unthinkingly follow, as well as her need for solitude. And her horniness.]]> 4.03 2020
author: Eva Baltasar
name: Baz
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2023/11/30
date added: 2023/12/01
shelves:
review:
Boulder was giving (to me) “poet writing a novel.�� When I started reading I’d forgotten that Baltasar was (and I guess still is) primarily a poet, but at a certain point, fairly deep into the book, I looked again at her bio and thought, Oh yeah, okay, that explains it. This book is dense with metaphors. Every other sentence is a metaphor. I feel that if I were to read aloud it would sound like spoken word lol.

I liked it though, I liked its heavy, smokey, bright black atmosphere. I also liked the simplicity of the story and the voice of its gruff, antisocial, cynical, moody lesbian narrator.

The lyricism was mostly fine. The poetry gives the story its density, but it didn’t weigh too heavily on the narrative and slow its movement. It wasn’t a brisk read, but I moved forward at a nice steady rate. It’s made up of short sections and scenes with white space in between, and that helped. Overall though the metaphors were too much for this reader. It almost became funny to me. I would notice the number of successive metaphors packed into one little section. And I guess it’s not a great sign if I’m not so immersed that I forget the style.

Will I read Permafrost? I don’t know. I might. I did connect with the narrator’s hatred of the patterned lives people lead, the social conventions people unthinkingly follow, as well as her need for solitude. And her horniness.
]]> 41940241 LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION

In the nine expansive, searching stories of A Lucky Man, fathers and sons attempt to salvage relationships with friends and family members and confront mistakes made in the past. An imaginative young boy from the Bronx goes swimming with his group from day camp at a backyard pool in the suburbs, and faces the effects of power and privilege in ways he can barely grasp. A teen intent on proving himself a man through the all-night revel of J’Ouvert can’t help but look out for his impressionable younger brother. A pair of college boys on the prowl follow two girls home from a party and have to own the uncomfortable truth of their desires. And at a capoeira conference, two brothers grapple with how to tell the story of their family, caught in the dance of their painful, fractured history.

Jamel Brinkley’s stories, in a debut that announces the arrival of a significant new voice, reflect the tenderness and vulnerability of black men and boys whose hopes sometimes betray them, especially in a world shaped by race, gender, and class—where luck may be the greatest fiction of all.]]> 256 Jamel Brinkley 1555978436 Baz 3 3.89 2018
author: Jamel Brinkley
name: Baz
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2018
rating: 3
read at: 2020/12/28
date added: 2023/11/28
shelves:
review:
A collection of stories about boys and men and their relationships to women, whether it be their mothers or lovers, and their relationships to each other, as friends, brothers, sons and fathers. A lot of it is about masculinity, but it didn’t hit me over the head with it and shout THEME. It wasn’t overtly political or even critical. Brinkley’s main thing seemed to be to inhabit his broken characters and just follow them. There is compassion for their flaws. How tragic, that these dumb things occupy so much of men’s mental spaces. I sensed William Trevor’s influence in the mood and emotional temperature of these stories �� the quiet, elegant prose, the emphasis on the slow reveal. I’m curious to see what Brinkley does next. He’s a valuable contemporary writer, someone who has been able to articulate the way trendy, hot button issues in popular culture are tightly knotted to timeless human matters of intergenerational trauma, love, desire, anger, loss and jealousy.
]]>