Books I Read, March 13th 2022

I didn't read as much as usual this week but I baked a hot ton of bread, some of which came out OK.

See?

I also read the following...

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner – I was supposed to read this in high school but didn't, laziness masquerading as rebellion, I suppose. Anyway my memory is that my AP English teacher (who was a tedious, self-important Faulkner-obsessive) saw in Quentin some sort of sensitive, sympathetic surrogate, which gave me the wrong impression of the book going in, since he (like all the men in this) is a sackless (sometimes literally), simpering coward. But that's personal history and neither here nor there—I always enjoy Faulkner's riddles and linguistic mysteries, and this one's great for that, but I also found the parade of grotesqueries which is the hallmark of southern Gothic a bit...I dunno, shlocky? This is coming from someone who has read pretty much everything Faulkner wrote at this point, and regards him as one of the best English writers of the 20th century, so, you know, degrees of genius, but still I'd take Absalom, Absalom.

Love, Anger, Madness by Marie Viuex-Chuavet – A triptych of novellas obliquely describing the nightmare of living in Haiti under the rule of Papa Doc Duvalier. In Love, an embittered, sex-maddened spinster obsesses over her brother-in-law and the brutalities of the coming regime; in Anger, a girl sells her virtue to save her family. Disturbing, erotic, insightful, excellent. Worth a read.

The Open Road by Jean Giano – A melancholic vagabond befriends a self-destructive con artist in a bitter rural French winter. There is an element of menace to everything that Giano wrote, some intrinsic understanding of the nebulous membrane between beauty and death, love and hate. I enjoyed the hell out of this one.

The Ship of Fools by Cristina Peri Rossi – Fantastical vignettes loosely linked by the presence of a its central character, a wandering hero archetype re-imagined for a feminist age. Kind of like if the Night Town chapter of Ulysses went on for 200 pages. Which, thinking about it now, it nearly does. Anyway, I thought this was uneven.