Books I Read October 14th, 2019

After several weeks of enjoying myself I got back down to the grind, though not quite quick enough to keep up with my appropriate monthly pace. Judge me as you must.

The Killing Gift by Bari Wood – A telekinetic woman who can kill with her mind!!! is pursued by a police detective to unclear ends. This felt like the kind of book that I sneaked off my father's shelves in middle school, which isn't really anything one way or the other as far as you're concerned. A competent if unexceptional 80's horror story.

The Givenness of Things by Marilynne Robinson – Essays on God, faith, hope, humanity by one of the better living writers working in English. Some of the theological stuff was outside my bailiwick but I always find Robinson's sober, sincere Christianity a balm to my troubled mind.

Venus Drive by Sam Lipsyte – A suite of short stories of the 'I used to be a scuzzy drug user' school. They're competently, sometimes even skillfully written, but bluntly this is an MFA sub-genre I've just lost interest in. It's got that unrelenting semi-comic bleakness which comes off as one note, not to mention kind of tedious from a reader's perspective since every story pretty much ends the same.

The Interpreters by Wole Soyinka – A group of young Nigerian intellectuals struggle to articulate meaning amid the general squalor of modernity in post-independence Africa. Very good. Soyinka was better known as a playwrite, but this is small masterpiece. The characters are rich, humorous and tragic, the style is difficult but evocative, the setting will be foreign to most readers (or most readers reading this blog); in short, everything you'd want in a novel. Worth your time.

The Magic Toyshop by Angela Carter – A young woman and her orphaned siblings go to live with a tyrannical toymaker. I wanted to like it more than I did. There's a lot of artistry here, Carter's a skillful writer, but I felt like this was stuff I'd seen before, and not in a 'we're contemplating our collective gender archetypes through the medium of myth' kind of way (although we are) but more in a 'Barbara Comyns did this better' kind of way. That said, other people might react more strongly to it. What do I dunno, I can barely work my moka pot and I've had it for like two years.

Bonneville Blue by Joan Chase – A diverse collection of short stories, narratively sufficiently dissimilar as to leave me struggling for simple description. Thoughtful ruminations on the fault lines that run through human existence, how was that? Anyway, they're excellent, really, really good. Joan Chase was a fabulous writer; her prose is excellent, the narrative construction generally quite tight, and she had a genuine sympathy for her characters which you don't always find in these sorts of things. I'm saddened to have just discovered I've now read all her published work, and envy you the opportunity to check her out.

The Knox Brothers by Penelope Fitzgerald – Biographies of the author's father and three exceptional uncles, Victorians who distinguished themselves in a variety of fields. It's fine, I dunno. I don't have anything clever to say about this, sorry, maybe just move on to the next book, not that I can guarantee much insight there either.

Nada by Jean-Patrick Manchette – A group of fabulously unlikable leftists kidnap an American ambassador in 70's Paris. The characterization is a little spotty, and this might have been a better book at half again the length (I never, ever think this) but the end is Manchette in his usual masterful form, brutal noir serving as scathing satire for every element of French civilization. Very good, if not his best.

English, August: An Indian Story by Upamanyu Chatterjee – A pampered, cosmopolitan, aimless Anglo-Indian goes to work for the civil service in a miserable, backwards portion of his country, smokes a lot of pot, struggles to accept the essential necessity of labor as a condition of human existence. Very funny, very clever, like Soyinka above a novel which feels at once very much of its place and universal in its depiction of youthful ennui. Excellent stuff, I'm looking forward to picking up another by the author.

Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabel – A drunken book-collector and paper pulper struggles to make sense of literature, his life, life generally, in this slender but compelling volume. I really like Hrabel's zany, stream of conscious style, and the text is richly marbled with allusion and literary subtext. Visceral and complex, worth your time.

Count Zero by William Gibson – Apparently I read this already, and actually don't seem to have enjoyed it that much, but maybe I was just having a bad week or whatever because I thought this was actually a ton of fun on a second pass. Apart from the fact that Gibson was genuinely inventing a sub-genre (and one which seems increasingly prescient as time passes) but the narrative is propulsive and mean but not too mean. I liked it, I'm looking forward to finishing out the series.