this is a nicely written love story, really two love stories mirroring each other, with gentle men and strong women. it's sweet. since in my more advathis is a nicely written love story, really two love stories mirroring each other, with gentle men and strong women. it's sweet. since in my more advanced age i only want love stories to be between queer people this is not quite for me, but if you love straight love stories, give it a read....more
i wouldn't have read this book if i had known what it was like, but then i guess i finished it, so there's that. it's very different from the other rai wouldn't have read this book if i had known what it was like, but then i guess i finished it, so there's that. it's very different from the other rachel cusk books i've read. i have very inchoate thoughts about it, mostly cuz i half-raced through it, refused to be drawn into the narrator's web of thinking about the reality and unreality of things, including herself. i basically didn't understand anything.
p.s. after a conversation with someone smarter than i i realized cusk's style and thematic choices in this are linked to modernist and existentialist literature, and that this novel can very well be historical! i missed all that. but now i know why i didn't understand anything. ...more
i will not read volume 3. jane gardam is a genius as far as i am concerned. she writes spectacular literatuI just don’t know what to say.
THE DAY AFTER
i will not read volume 3. jane gardam is a genius as far as i am concerned. she writes spectacular literature that is beautiful and smart and i am unworthy of it.
but this is a paean to the british empire and the good ole golden times. you can easily get an idea of the pain and damage the british empire inflicted upon the world by reading novels by authors who live in or come from areas that were once british empire. what i mean is, you don't need to immerse yourself in history, there are nice novels you can read instead. Michael Ondaatje is one. Amitav Gosh is another. devastating stuff.
this is what gardam writes in the last paragraph of the acknowledgments:
"Most of all, thanks to my husband David Gardam, especially for memories of our travels to places where the English Law continues to be heard."
This is for every lesbian and gayboy whose heart was broken because of the pandemic. Sarah sees you, sisters.
---- let me attempt of a bit of proper revThis is for every lesbian and gayboy whose heart was broken because of the pandemic. Sarah sees you, sisters.
---- let me attempt of a bit of proper review. i think that sarah waters is a phenomenal writer. i have read 2.5 of her books and i want to read them all (i did not finish Tipping the Velvet cuz i was a messed up young lesbian and i didn't need the further messing up that book was causing me. i loved The Paying Guests). Night Watch is both very gripping and very frustrating. it tells a sprawling story about four young people (they don't feel very young even tho they are in their early 20s; they feel used up and on their way out), across the span of WWII and a couple of years afterwards (in truth there are only three years covered, and the narrative jumps backward from the most recent, 1957). the story proceeds from set piece to set piece, or scene to scene, and the scenes are told in great details and over many pages. since waters is a great writer, they are delightful to read (and painful, but a delight to the reading mind). for some reason, however, waters decides in this book not to go inside the characters' minds, or lives, at all, so that we don't quite know why they do what they do, what their story is, what is going on inside them.
and i guess it's fine, the story stays on the outside, but i think that literature fails, maybe, when it's not conducive to knowing the people it describes.
so this book is a literary failure, though it was most enjoyable and gripping and i couldn't stop listening and i am sorry i no longer have it to listen to at night before i go to sleep.
i want to say something about reading about WWII during the 2021 pandemic. i will keep it short bc i don't want to think about it too much. this pandemic is happening during a catastrophic and almost irreversible worsening of global warming. scientists have connected the two but i haven't delved into the connection. when the pandemic started i had a sense of endtimes and terror, especially because t* was still president. then biden was elected and things felt better. for a while. and then people refused to wear masks and governments handled things terribly and vaccination is proceeding sloppily and the capitol was invaded by people who will get away scot free, which means that radical fascism will continue to blossom in the US and other places too, with terrible consequences for humanity. it all feels catastrophic again. so i was reading this book and getting a full sense of the deep terror and despair that grips people in the middle of a world war, and i was also thinking, but yours at least ended....more
This is just beautiful. What a writer this woman is.
---- i think what humpheys is trying to do here, and what she succeeds in doing, is give a sense ofThis is just beautiful. What a writer this woman is.
---- i think what humpheys is trying to do here, and what she succeeds in doing, is give a sense of the depth and width of love -- how love moves from person to person and person to place and creature to creature, across time, across space, across barriers of all kinds.
jane loves her lost soldier and this love keeps her alive.
gwen loves london and flowers and virginia woolf (what a little mrs dalloway she is!), she loves jane and she loves raley and she loves in spite of not having being loved.
the creator of the garden loved someone in his or her time, and now loves whoever touches the garden.
the lost generations of the first world war are replaced by live generations getting reading for the second world war and those will be lost too but love continues because life continues, even when ghosts take chickens in the night because they are hungry, and then someone is sacrificed to the hunger of others but still, we love, and live, and love.
humphreys does quite some magic here with other-sex love and same-sex love here, making it all mix and merge into love we have for others or an other, and love we have for ourselves, and also mercy and kindness....more
as others have noted, there is no way to review this book without spoiling it, so i'm putting this plot-light, mHoly smites. My heart is in my throat.
as others have noted, there is no way to review this book without spoiling it, so i'm putting this plot-light, mostly thematic review under spoiler tags.
(view spoiler)[ Reviewers have read this as the story of a self-absorbed young man, but it is seems to me instead to be an investigation of the ways trauma disrupts time.
Saul, the protagonist, is a bisexual man who carries a hefty load of queer trauma. After his mother’s death his father and his brother torture him for being “inappropriately” masculine, and if you know about gender/sexuality trauma, you know that it never, ever goes away Society will never stop being heteronormative, and every fresh reminder of your unfittingness will break the wound wide open.
When we encounter him, Soul is startlingly beautiful and universally attractive. His girlfriend has turned down his marriage proposal and, since he’s a scholar of the GDR and, fittingly, also a scholar of male dictators and their attitudes toward women (is he himself the women dictators abuse?), he goes to East Berlin to do research. In East Berlin traumatized, queer Saul lives that most heady of all times: the miraculous point in one’s youth when suffering and delight are equally acute and plentiful, and life feels like a torrential, delicious flood of pathos, lust, and love.
No one can stay long in such time. People prolong it with drugs but it inevitably ends. The mind cannot take all that intensity, and life doesn’t work that way.
The non-traumatized mind (or the not-too-traumatized mind) moves on, looks back with nostalgia or embarrassment, incorporates the past into the present through memory, and finds a way to create satisfaction and contentment (and joy!) in adult living. The traumatized mind remains stuck in the past and the past is the present and its presence and absence equally torture us.
Levy is doing two things here:
the first is the thought experiment, would you survive a trip into your headiest days? Could you carry on after the acute re-experiencing of what you had and lost?
The second is an investigation of the mind of those who cannot but live in two places at once — the suffering and excitement of their past, the inevitable disappointment of their present.
I think the thought experiment is not really the point here. I think the point is that saul needs to go back, and back, and back, and both fix the terrible things that happened to him and also relive the grand things that happened to him and, this time, make them last, make them not go away. He needs to be back there and make it all override the way his life has become.
I love levy’s portrayal of the free, whirlwind, reciprocated desire Saul experiences in East Berlin. It’s beautiful and queer and delightful. Saul is innocent and kind, forgetful and selfish; he gets to have a second, less troubled childhood. He is hurt and he smothers this hurt in sex, as queer people sometimes do. Queer sex connects Saul to himself and heals, to an extent, or for the moment.
We don’t really know what the rest of saul’s life is like. We know he is loved, at least by some, and we also know that he fails massively at being happy.
Time is a kindness. Queer-traumatized people, most of us, find some relief in the dulling that time brings. How can one survive reliving freshly the moments when everything was still possible? Maybe one can’t. (hide spoiler)]...more
I am profoundly ignorant when it comes to English culture, and in particular, for the sake of this review, Black English culture, so this was a bit ofI am profoundly ignorant when it comes to English culture, and in particular, for the sake of this review, Black English culture, so this was a bit of an introduction. It left me with a number of questions, which is precisely what introductions should do. I live in the United States and, even though I'm white and an immigrant, I can say with a certain degree of assurance that there is such a thing as African American culture. Of course there are more Black people than African Americans, or maybe some people who don't quite identify as African Americans while being Black; and of course when we say that "there is such a thing as African American culture" we do not mean that all African Americans think/feel/behave the same.
Having said all this, I have a feeling from this novel that there isn't an analogous culture in the UK. The Black people in this book don't feel themselves part of a community that is grounded, identifiably, on skin color or biological heritage. They or their ancestors come from the Caribbean and from Africa, and many of them are first-or second generation British. They have white friends and go to mixed schools and live in mixed neighborhoods. Some of them are poor and some of them are extravagantly rich. Even those who start off poor seem to end up comfortable as they grow old and for somebody who has spent half of her life in the United States, a country whose limitations to social mobility massively belie its own understanding of itself (the much vaunted American Dream), this is such a breath of fresh air.
In fact, much as there is heartbreak in this book, there is above all an exuberant sense of the myriad ways you can be a Black woman in the UK, and you can thrive. It is, in other words, a joyous and celebratory book and I for one am grateful to see so many queer women represented as satisfied, integrated and fulfilled.
Writers from underrepresented communities are particularly fun to read because they tend to invent their own forms. This novel defies many of the rules of what makes something a novel. The most striking and new, in my opinion, is its resistance to giving us emotionally engaging slices of life in favor of long-span chronicles of women's lives that feel more journalistic than narrative. And this is brave because the western novel reader is used to compelling stories, not one-chapter accounts of people's lives, one after the other. So, western reader, if you feel some dissatisfaction, just realize that Evaristo is doing something different here: a folder of women, a chronicle, a beautiful presentation....more
i'm a bit stuck on something here. crudo, the italian word, means indeed "raw." but anyone who has spent more than a week in italy, and laing definitei'm a bit stuck on something here. crudo, the italian word, means indeed "raw." but anyone who has spent more than a week in italy, and laing definitely has, knows that the first association anyone has to the word crudo used by itself and out of context is to prosciutto. italians call prosciutto "prosciutto crudo" or just "crudo." i wouldn't know why laing would choose this particular word for her novel's title, but since it evokes luxury and pleasure (prosciutto is both super tasty and expensive -- the good kind at least), i think it goes with some of the themes of the novel.
which are, in no particular order, love, luxury living in italy and england, an august-november marriage, the t* regime, the end of the world, aging, nostalgia, and kathy acker. (this is my second t* novel; the first is the beautiful and omg hopefulThe Book of Dog, by our own Lark Benobi).
i loved this book. i love the free-flowing yet carefully chosen language, the ruminations on how to love and age and enjoy things in late-stage capitalism, when so many are in incredible pain and deprivation and, also, a ridiculous head of state is bringing us all to the brink of worldwide insanity.
i love that kathy and her husband enjoy each other so damn much, don't sleep in the same room (a still shameful practice that i think would fix many a couple), and have a somewhat open marriage but are too in the throes of love to make anything of it. i love the massive love between these two, that the protagonist thinks of herself, a la kathy acker, a kind of gay man, that she surrounds herself with art and literature and good friends, that she's a free spirit who is openly narcissistic (as per her definition) but doesn't give a shit.
also i love that the book unabashedly and openly cannibalizes other published words (mostly by kathy acker) without putting the stolen bits in quotation marks (but acknowledging them in the endnotes). it's comforting to creators to think, to paraphrase kathy acker, that all literature/art is plagiarism. if this, this book, is how plagiarizing others looks like, let's all do it i say....more
This book hit some place tender. It’s written in a slightly experimental way, which means that it’s a tiny bit weird, and i confess i like that stuff,This book hit some place tender. It’s written in a slightly experimental way, which means that it’s a tiny bit weird, and i confess i like that stuff, i like it when women or non-white-men-in-general play with the form of the novel, cuz the form of the novel was developed by white dudes and it seems only right that those who question white patriarchy should also play with the form.
The 25-year-old narrator is way younger than the author when she wrote this (or at least when she published it) and it pleases me to entertain the fantasy that Deborah levy sat on this story for a long time, for as long as it took to find the words and the way to say it.
The narrator, Sofia, and her mother were abandoned by Sofia’s dad when Sofia was 5, and subsequently experienced abject poverty. At the same time as her father left, Sofia’s mom developed a mysterious illness with a multitude of shifting symptoms, and Sofia grew up as her personal medical sleuth.
In the narrative present Sofia and mom are in Almería, Spain, to visit a doctor who promises to be a miraculous healer.
The novel brings together women’s disability (presumably as a product of the abandonment and pain inflicted by men), children’s captivity to their parents’ selfishness, and the difficulty traumatized children have of coming into their own — sexually, economically, intellectually, emotionally. These are all themes that hit me in a soft spot.
I love the character of the doctor. The quirky but wise healer is a bit of a trope, yet i like the way levy does it here. Hurt children love rescuers.
The prose and setting are fantastic. There is something a bit Hemingwayan (and i mean this in the best possible way) in the way the desert landscape shapes Sofia’s life in Almería and impacts the reader in a deeply sensory way. I was brought back to the posthumous Hemingway novel whose title i don’t remember: the sea, the heat, the sun, the sea creatures, the earth creatures, sex, food, the inevitable lounging about. it did something for me.
(view spoiler)[the section of the novel in which Sofia finally meets her dad again was devastating to me. My friend kept asking me if the novel is funny, and i had to say, yes, it’s funny, but it’s not funny to me. The older father seems so much like my father, may his soul rest in peace. Whatever is wrong with these men, whatever tortuous journeys brought them to be abusers of wives and children while being regarded by the world as half saints or at least blandly innocuous creatures, i can’t forgive them. This is a hard time in the history of America and i have it up to here with men who abuse everyone around them with complete impunity and the assurance of public forgiveness. Not me. No, not me. (hide spoiler)]...more
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