I was torn between three and four stars here. I was torn the same way with the small press book Ruin Season, when I read it last week. That one I wentI was torn between three and four stars here. I was torn the same way with the small press book Ruin Season, when I read it last week. That one I went up to four and this one I went down to three. In so many ways this is probably a better novel, but since it's published by Random House, and it has lots of other reviews / ratings, I don't feel like I should be boosting up my rating to help the book out, or at least not feel like as much of an asshole.
I thought the book was quite good. The premise is that towards the middle of the 21st Century a second Civil War breaks out when fossil fuels are banned and a small group of Southern States try to break away from the Union. The world where this war takes place is teetering on the verge of total ecological disaster, you know because of overuse of fossil fuels. The coastlines have been re-drawn. Washington DC has been given up as lost and the capital has been moved to Columbus, Ohio. New Orleans is gone. I think Florida is mostly a sea. Lots of alarming changes... but in the books world-building it is a train accident carrying oil that creates a mini-ecological disaster in I think Montana (or one of those states around there, stupid brain) that heralds in the banning of fossil fuels. This to me seemed completely absurd, but in its total absurdity there was a believability that it would take something like a minor (on a large scale) accident to spur the government to take drastic measures, when something like losing Washington DC, New Orleans and Florida to rising waters wouldn't make this sort of thing a necessity.
The novel is framed by a historian telling the story of one woman Sara T. Chestnutt's experience growing up during the war. As a child she was confused a bit about her name so she took to calling herself Sarat, giving her a sort of Middle East connotation. The historian is telling the story after the War and a subsequent plague that killed over a hundred million people has ended.
The reader follows Sarat as a little girl living in Louisana and her coming of age in refugee camp. And while this novel is on the surface a sort of dystopian look at what could happen in our country, I read it mostly as a metaphor for the wars in the Middle East.
Actually, now that I'm thinking of it some of my 'problems' aren't really problems at all if the book is read a critique of the way America has handled foreign policy in the Middle East (you know waged war) for over the past two decades (kind of political aside in spoiler tag.(view spoiler)[gosh, this has been a while but I remember reading in I think it was To Kill A Nation by Michael Parenti (but it might have been in the Chomsky book Verso published at the same time) that there hadn't been a day since the start of the first Gulf War that we hadn't continued to bomb Iraq, this seems so far fetched now, but think about if it's true, we weren't even at 'war' anymore but we were still running military operations in the skies above a country.... this book was published in the late 90's, so that would mean that nevermind the Wag The Dog coincidences of high profile military actions being taken that kept lining up with Clinton's possible scandals, this relatively Peaceful President was still the Commander in Chief of a daily aggressive military action against a country and people we weren't even at war with any more. It boggles my mind to believe that Parenti or Chomsky was telling the truth about this, but what if he was? (hide spoiler)]).
My biggest problem with the book (not taking it as a metaphor for the Gulf Wars) was it was too short. The tough part I think of writing a book like this is to do all the necessary world building, and the proper amount of character development, and create an engaging story. This is why a lot of SF/Fantasy novels take volumes to tell their story.
When I was about half-way done with the book Karen asked me if it was any good, and my answer was, "I don't know"?... and I tried to backtrack and say that I was enjoying it, and it was good, but the problem was I didn't feel like much had happened yet, that it had all been part of setting up the world. But this wasn't exactly true, some stuff had happened, but the pacing felt weird like there had been a lot of set up going on and a dwindling number of pages to give me the payoff of the setup.
A book like Station Eleven feels bigger than the shortness of the actual book. She created something amazing in that book that felt satisfying even though I have a feeling everyone who read it wanted more of a particular story line. I'm not sure how she pulled off making a satisfying novel background needing to be established and the number of characters and stories she used and still managed to get it all to work in under 300 pages. Emily St. John Mandel, blurbs the front cover of this book, so every time I picked up the book I was reminded of her and maybe unfairly would compare this book to hers.
I feel like American War didn't pull off the magic trick of balancing all these elements in a satisfying manner. I wanted more of something from the novel. More of Sarat's story, or more of the background which is hinted at in the narrative and documentary materials between chapters. Or more action. Sarat being almost the singular focus of the book never came alive for me, but she wasn't distant enough to create a strong sense of the unknowable other.... this makes sense somewhere in my head but I can't figure out how to explain it.
Ignore my criticisms though, the novel is good. I'm nitpicking, but just because I feel like it's so close to being a great novel, but just misses the mark a bit. I'm definitely interested in seeing what else Omar El Akkad has to offer in future novels. ...more
"Don't you realize the Internet is just a way for millions of sad people to be completely alone together?"
What if the internet just went away one day?
"Don't you realize the Internet is just a way for millions of sad people to be completely alone together?"
What if the internet just went away one day?
(view spoiler)[
"You're the internet. We need you. There are people out there walking around half-dead in withdrawl. Economies crumbling. You have to work!"
"Well, that may be, but nevertheless, I'd prefer not to."
"You can't just suddenly stop?" .... Then he snapped his fingers with cartoon inspiration. "Oooh, I know!" he said. "How about this. I hate my job too. At least the one you make me do. There's a whole world out there! All sorts of facts and accomplishments. Science and art. All at my fingertips and I've seen it all-for as long as you'll let me. But I spend my days knee-deep in porn and social media updates. Celebrity gossip. Pointless IMs to friend you no longer need to see because you've shared five minute instant messages. And I make that all work for you, but like I say, I'm sorry, I'd prefer not to."(hide spoiler)]
If it just stopped working. If there was no more email. No more text-messaging. No more Twitter. Facebook. Porn. Goodreads. Reddit. 4chan. What if it all just stopped, but everything else was exactly the same?
Would it be 1993 again (I pick this year because my own internet 'addiction' would begin in 1994, which I can remember being made fun of by friends because I couldn't let a whole 'day' go by without checking my email)?
Or would the fabric of our society be crumbling? Could we find one another without our phones? Find where we are going without maps on devices? How did we ever meet or get anywhere a mere decade ago?
The zombies I saw last week were part of a YouTube circle. Without a replay button or a link to similar entertainment, they demanded hours and hours of mindless joy from whatever is unfortunate enough to be trapped inside their view. So many innocent cats have been worked to death, forced to do tricks for zombie-amusement without food, water, or a chance of escape.
As a novel I'm not sure if this completly works. It's funny, and at times quite funny, but it gets old after awhile. It would make for a great short story, but there is a point where the story starts to lag for a bit. The book does come to a fairly satisfying conclusion, but some of the middle parts are kind of like watching the middle parts of one of those movies based on a SNL skit.
Harder to ignore, however, are the Twatters. Clever, huh? That's what we're calling Twitter addicts now. Losing the Internet has forced them to interact verbally instead of microblogging their lives, but a lot of them still talk in Tweets:
"Ugh! I'm standing in line at the post office."
"I'm not eating the crusts on my sandwich because apparently I'm five."
"Oh, my god, the barista didn't leave room for milk. First-world problems, right?
But this is the quest of one man to find out where the internet went. And to figure out how to navigate a world without our most trusted of companions, but with the help of a guy who wrote snarky pop-culture pieces for a website and a fetish web-cam model.
He was swarmed by /b/tards like Japanese businessmen to tentacle porn....more
My brain just might be calcifying. Maybe I'm getting old and stodgy. Or maybe this just isn't that good of a book. Who can tell? Maybe it's not my plaMy brain just might be calcifying. Maybe I'm getting old and stodgy. Or maybe this just isn't that good of a book. Who can tell? Maybe it's not my place to say if the book is good or not but to just nod along and try to dismantle my own intellectual ideologies so that they will fit into this 117 page Thomas Bernhard-esque monologue. The book precludes criticism by slinging barbs at the sorts of thought that would not agree with the ramblings here. I could say something similar like, if you are the type of mental simpleton who finds trite grad-school type observations written in a pretentious style peppered with the sort of empty poetic phrases of certain writers of the Continental traditions that sound important and deep unless you think about what the words mean, then you are just a deluded slave of the middle-class. Parts of the running monologue I enjoyed, but it got old fairly quickly. By about page 70 I wanted to just give up on the book. I spent most of the time walking on my break to get coffee wondering what the point of the book was. Is it supposed to be ironic? Because a whole lot of the things being lambasted in the first quarter of the book were the exact same things being preached in later parts of the book. At page 88 I bought another book just to have something that wasn't this to read on the ride home from work. The book I bought was the first in a series of 20th Century novels that take place in the fictional countryside of Anthony Trollope. Oh, how I enjoy Anthony Trollope so much more than most of the books I'm supposed to be enjoying. And what about the whole last section? How is that supposed to be read, as the ramblings of a clearly insane person or the pitiful whelps of a twenty-something year old who has to come to terms with the fact that he's not a genius, that things he thought of have been said before him? Navel-gazing. Boo-hoo, I don't live alone in my genius bubble. The whole world by the very presence of others oppresses and victimizes me. Me, me in my privileged position of the schmuck with the Kick Me sign on my back that everyone is so busy unknowingly causing a million petite morts on daily. It's so not fair that I can't be the only one to think something. To say something. That other people have used language, that I just want to be original and I find myself oppressed by influence. Oh Harold Bloom, come, come, come help rescue me from all this fucking anxiety! How did I go from enjoying the first quarter of the book to thinking it just a more literate version of the Return to Virginland nonsense I subjected myself to a month or so ago? Is this all just self-loathing, that this might have been the sort of thing I might have felt the need to write if I could actually write and if I had the will-power or stamina to churn out a bunch of words in different sittings back when I was twenty six years old, in grad-school, having just read Thomas Bernhard and thinking that my mishmash of thoughts were so much more important than what most of those other idiots out there were thinking? If only they would listen to me, I know I'll write it in a book. It won't have a plot per-se, and I'll hide them behind a second character who is jumbled up in my own words, and I'll even let you know that, at times, I can't remember where I end and he begins, and I'll let you know what's up. Ramble ramble ramble and strike you down if you disagree with me! Or I could just be getting old. Or I could just be losing some patience for every precocious original author out there.
The eh-average Anthony Trollope book I'm also reading right now is so much better than this, even though technically it's sentimental schlock at times. This was like being trapped in a room with a pretentious wind-bag. I could have just walked away. This book makes me wish I had a time machine so that I could go back in time and kick the shit out of myself about 13 years ago. Call this a review of self-loathing.
Oh, yeah I'm supposed to mention that I got this book for free, from either Netgalley, the publisher, author or through some other way that I get books to read before they are published. Apparently it's a federal law to mention this (for reals?) and not just a cheap reason to float the shit out of my reviews. I haven't been given any monies, nor have I been coerced in anyway to write the review you just read. Huzzah!...more
1. Homage to Catalonia has the distinction of being on my mental to-read list for longer than any other book. I've wanted to read this book longer tha1. Homage to Catalonia has the distinction of being on my mental to-read list for longer than any other book. I've wanted to read this book longer than any of the people who elbowed or punched me in the face this week have been alive. I figured after almost twenty and half years I should finally read it.
I've owned the book for over a decade.
I have no clue what book now currently holds the distinction book I've wanted to read for the longest time but haven't.
2. When I was a senior in high school I wrote a paper for a friend of mine on this book, he was a year older and a freshman at Fordham. I had been visiting him, and he needed to write a paper on this book. I'm not sure if he read it or not. I hadn't. The paper was on the relationship between the Anarchists (CNT) and the Communists (PSUC). I dictated the paper to him, highlighting the ideological differences between the two groups and why the Communists would turn on the Anarchists. Prior to the evening that we did this I don't know if I had ever really known anything about the Spanish Civil War. I don't remember having ever really learned anything in school or had read anything about Anarchism or Communism (beyond what we learned growing up in the waning and thawing days of the Cold War, not necessarily the most objective facts being passed on to young minds). I babbled on about the differences between these two ideologies. My friend typed and gave me some bits he knew or remembered from the book to get my reaction to them.
It was the first college paper I wrote, and it wasn't for myself. My friend later told me that he got his highest grade for that class on this paper.
It would take me two decades to actually read the book.
3. The Spanish Civil War I think of as one of the great tragedies of the 20th Century. Fuck the 60's. To me this was the last stand of idealism.
4. The book.
George Orwell went to Spain to report on the war in late 1936. Arriving in Barcelona he got caught up in the revolutionary feeling of the city and joined the militia. His credentials to get him into the country were from an organization aligned with the POUM, a politically fairly insignificant group in the hodgepodge of alphabet groups that made up the Spanish Government who were fighting Franco. Orwell wasn't necessarily happy about joining the POUM, he would have rather joined up with the Communists, which was where his sympathies lay at the time. But, he also wanted to help defeat this threat of fascist, and wanted to do his part and kill at least one fascist in battle. So he joined and after a short time went to one of the fronts.
It's significant that Orwell had joined the POUM. About six months later the POUM would be a suppressed political group, branded fascist traitors by the Communists (PSUC), they would be accused of the heretical crime of Trotskyism, and many of the leaders would disappear into jails, never to be heard of again, and the rank and file arrested as fast as they could be found. Orwell would end up escaping from Spain and evading arrest as friends of his were arrested, disappeared and ultimately died in the custody of the Communists.
The book itself is mostly a narrative of Orwell's time in Spain. A travel essay where instead of describing his Holiday in the Sun in some exotic place he ends up spending four months living in a trench, takes part in an ineffectual assault on a fascist position, goes on leave just in time to arrive back in Barcelona to witness and take part in the street fighting of May 1937, goes back to the trenches, gets shot in the throat, and arrives wounded back in Barcelona just in time to be branded a traitor and an enemy of the state because he had been in a POUM regiment. Interspersed with this narrative are some chapters on the political climate of Spain and the gross distortions and lies about the various political groups that were being trumpeted in the press both in Spain and abroad.
Orwell's narrative of his time in Spain is great reporting on the time. It's fairly amazing today to think that he did what he did. There was no real reason why he should have signed up to fight in this war. It wasn't his country. He was caught up in the revolutionary possibilities being exhibited in Barcelona at the time, and as he says he was tired to seeing the fascists up until this point winning at everything they tried, so it makes sense why wanted to take part, but I think about myself and other people I've known and I can see myself being sympathetic to the cause, but to actually sign up, live in a cold trench with almost no food, and shooting and getting shot at with antiquated rifles? This isn't like deciding to go sleep in a park and play bongoes in order to collapse the capitalist system.
The real message to the book though is in Orwell himself. He never politically sympathized with the POUM or the CNT (I don't know how to describe the POUM, revolutionary-socialist might work, but those terms get clouded, but they need to be put in perspective with the Communist position, which wasn't revolutionary at all, but was attempting to hold back the floodgates of revolutionary fervor, so as not to alienate the middle class and foreign interests-- in case you forgot the CNT are the Anarchists, who played a very significant role in the Spanish Civil War, especially in the early days, and their role lessened when the big backer of the Government (which is the side this whole alphabet soup were fighting on) became the USSR and the better weapons and stuff were finding their ways into the hands of the various Communist armies and militias), he saw problems with the waging of a revolution alongside creating a united front against Franco. Orwell might have been naive, but he sort of thought that the war could be won by a united front, and then the revolution, true equality as was being attempted and exhibited by the POUM and CNT at the time could be had by all. If this doesn't make too much sense it might be my fault in explaining it, or it might be in the small differences between the groups and their aims that make them essentially incompatible with each other. Sooner or later the differences between them were going to become visible. And they did, and through lies and distortions people who had been risking their lives in fighting against the fascists were overnight turned into enemies of the government. Men returning from the front were finding themselves being branded the very thing they had been fighting against. They were arrested. The atmosphere of Barcelona became what we might later call Orwellian.
But back to Orwell himself. He wasn't politically sympathetic to the abstract ideas these groups might have had, but he was more than sympathetic to The Truth and the individual men who he had known, served and fought with. He knew they weren't a fifth column looking to help the fascists, they were people who believed in protecting their country, they were people who were giving their lives and comforts to holding lines and carrying out dangerous assignments. And the truth, as it was being broadcast now by Communist organs was that they were traitors. English Communist newspapers were calling for the execution of the them for being traitors to the revolution. Things Orwell had seen first hand were being reported as the exact opposite and being passed off as truth, and these distortions when they were noticed were shrugged off by fellow-travellers as necessities of the forward march of progress.
It might not seem like a big deal that Orwell was shocked by the lies he saw, and that he was more deeply committed to the truth than to an abstract political concept or the Party line, but you can compare him to other intellectuals at the time who needed to have the atrocities of Stalin to be beyond any hope of being wished away before they turned away from their love affair with Stalin's vision of pragmatic action. Or you can compare Orwell to someone like Hemingway who knew full well that a friend of his had been innocent of the charges he was arrested for in Spain, but he had no problem with supporting the official line that even if he was innocent he was still guilty of treason, because the Party had said so.
To write this book when Orwell did was courageous. The truth being held to be less important than orthodoxy. It would be kind of like one of those Evangelistic money-makers coming out with a book exposing all the fraud, lies and deceit that his fellow cronies were taking part in. Or a Conservative pundit coming out with an attack on the lies and fleecing the neo-cons have been a part of, say a month before a presidential election.
Needless to say, this book of Orwell's was pretty much ignored when it came out.
Today, with the Spanish Civil War something that most people don't really know about or care about, this book stands as an interesting read about a man going to war, but more importantly as a testament to one man's dedication to the truth and his strong moral fortitude. ...more
I'm not quite sure if this was worth the $12.95 cover price. Wakefield Press does make some handsome looking books, and this one is no exception. But I'm not quite sure if this was worth the $12.95 cover price. Wakefield Press does make some handsome looking books, and this one is no exception. But the story is only 26 pages long.
The author died when he was fairly young having written a few books that the best-selling title sold a whopping six hundred and something copies. Pretty much everything the author tried to do in his life was a dismal failure, except perhaps for his success at drinking himself into hemiplegia and dying (I was going to add a Guy Debord quote about succeeding in drinking himself to death, but I can't find it on the internets and I don't feel like digging through my bookshelves trying to find which book on the Situationists the quote was from). A few people happened to like his books though, so he was something of a very minor cult-favorite.
I wanted to find the picture of him from the book, but it doesn't seem to be there. Actually if you google him you find lots of information on some quack chiropractor from Oakland, but nothing on the author, unless you add something like French Author to the search. To be more obscure than a man who uses questionable techniques to repair aches and pains (I don't really have anything against chiropractors, but I like taking an Mencken stance against them).
This is the picture I found:
[image]
The picture in the book is crazier looking, with a scowl and more of an amish type beard. He sort of looks like the sort of person who is talked about as having kept to himself, and no one expected that he was eating prostitute vaginas in stew all along.
There is actually almost more of an introduction and biography on the author in this book than there is story (the story runs 26 pages, as I mentioned already, and the introduction runs 7 (ok, ok, it's not the same length. But when was the last time you read a three hundred page novel and had roughly 80 pages of introduction to the book?)
The author is described as being an admirer of Hardy, Celine and Bernanos; and his work is described as a mixture of Celine and Jim Thompson. I think those are fair names to throw around here.
The story is about a little man (a midget? the guys four and a half feet tall), whose mother died in Auschwitz when his collaborator father turned her in for being part Jewish. He works in a funeral home and has dirty thoughts about the women who come to the funeral home in mourning. And he is the lover of a gigantic woman who might possibly be using him as a human dildo (I couldn't quite figure out what was going on here).
Other times Madame C. was less nostalgic. She complained about having to cross the courtyard to take a shit. Which lately she'd been having to do more and more often. She had continuous diarrhea..."You understand, my dear, one day I'm going to slip, with my weight and they won't be able to get me out. Especially all those bastards jerking off in the crapper--they can't even manage to aim at the hole@ And you think they could flush? There's even cum on the walls, I'm not kidding it's pitiful. I'm telling you, I'm going to slip, I can already feel myself getting sucked in. They're drawing me into the depths. All aboard, Simone! First one foot gets jammed in, and then off we go, exit's this way, all the rest comes with, all four hundred pounds, more more Madame C! Not even a funeral. Not even a religious ceremony. They don't say mass for a concierge who vanishes down a shit hole. No priest would want to. First off, priests are all stupid bastards, they don't like concierges, and the Communists don't either, they're also stupid bastards."
This might all sound like a vaguely slap-stick absurd little tale, but it's more just a bleak misanthropic story. You can almost feel that this could be something Celine might have thought up (but maybe not make it quite so vulgar at times? Or maybe not).
I'm very curious to see if his actual novels will be translated and published. I have a feeling they will make for some good bleak reading about a little man, a gigantic woman and what happens when they venture into the outside world to see a porno film with buttsex in it. ...more
Not so much a review, as a series of quotes from the book interspersed with some things comments, more out of an obligation to fill the space in betweNot so much a review, as a series of quotes from the book interspersed with some things comments, more out of an obligation to fill the space in between the quotes than out of any desire to communicate anything with anyone about myself or this book.
And I know different methods of self-destruction but none as intense as sitting still by myself.
I've got some mixed feelings about this book.
One on the one hand it's hilarious. And then I think about some recent things going on around these parts of goodreads and I think, isn't this just a funnier version of some of the bullshit we've been seeing lately? I couldn't let current-events cloud my ratings, though, so I went with my gut and gave it four stars because if I had read this at another time I would have more thoroughly enjoyed it.
I hate my head.
And if you don't hate yourself, no one will.
And your broken skull is not a puzzle, it's just garbage.
So be ugly for me or I will hammer a nail into your ear.
You're pathetic and I draw the world on your face before I step on it.
I put the shit that comes out of your mouth beneath your nose.
I sit in my room and cut circles out of the dark and throw them beneath you, hoping hoping hoping hoping hoping that you will fall somewhere I don't even know about, somewhere I couldn't even reach my hand into if I wanted.
Because you are afraid to die.
Because you haven't begun to make it necessary yet.
Because your whole life is a fucking coloring book.
Please change your mind.
I was here first.
Hilarious, right?
A sunburned homeless man came up to me yesterday and showed me his forearm. There was gaping would along the bone, barely held together by office staples. The wound leaked clear liquid. I gave him what was in my pockets--70 cents. That was probably enough to buy more staples. Enough to keep his wound somewhat cured. And me? I'm so great it hurts.
That one really spoke to me, being so self-righteous and all. It's like this guy just gets me. Sometimes I just want to give myself a great big hug because I'm so great of a person. The desire to give myself a great big hug I believes cancels out all the times I think about doing awful things to other people.
You know you're truly alone when you feel the need to tell someone abut a nap you recently took.
Fucking shit. I usually tell Karen every time I spent some of the day napping. What is my life turning into? But really do you think there is something wrong with a person when sometimes the high point of their day off is a toss up between fighting on the internet with strangers, doing laundry or taking a nap? I don't think so either. Usually those days off end with learning better techniques at punching someone in the face. Come to think of it punching things really hard is the high point of those days, unless I get to kick things really hard, too. Then it's kicking things. Kicking is fun.
When I get to hell I will save you a seat.
When you get to hell I will act like i don't know you.
Ok, so maybe this isn't all that hilarious, or maybe it says something about me that I found this book very funny while reading it. I'm not quite sure where the humor is at this moment though, maybe the absurd part of my brain is shut down for the evening. Maybe I'm just thinking that there is something wrong with me for being drawn to the depressive/pitying/violence of this book.
And I hope we meet again so you can guess how old I am by the rings around my eyes and I hope we meet again so I can judge how much I've died according to your limp smile.
Karen's review was better. I don't think I used any passages she did. But if I did just chalk it up as another failure. ...more
Aphorism laden novels have a tendency to catch my eye and make me want to read them, but they don't always deliver the goods. It's the melancholy partAphorism laden novels have a tendency to catch my eye and make me want to read them, but they don't always deliver the goods. It's the melancholy part of me that usually sees them and gets very excited over seeing pages that just have a line like, "WHAT DOES GOD SMELL LIKE?" or "BEING IN FOREIGN COUNTRIES DOESN'T CHANGE US. WE EAT WITH OUR MOUTHS NO MATTER WHAT COUNTRY WE ARE IN." Maybe these aren't the most profound statements ever made, but something about an book that is willing to just put something like that on a page, by itself, makes me want to read it (and I never think of the wastefulness of doing something like this, it's all about the presentation, fuck the pragmatics).
What kind of child wonders what God smells like, or finds solace in the fact that no matter what country her and her family find themselves in they still eat with their mouths?
We're dead a lot longer than we're alive; that's why we need a whole lot more good luck when we're dead people.
The narrator is a young girl whose mother and stepfather escaped from the poverty and oppression of Romania to the West. They are a circus family. Her mother hangs from her hair and does tricks. The stepfather is a clown. There is little happiness in their refugee / gypsy-like existence.
What does rich mean?[...]Someday I want to spend a lot of money to buy a Chinese servant who will always stay awake so I don't have anymore bad dreams. He'll be named Chin-Chan and look out for me, and I won't be afraid anymore. And everybody will be surprised.
The family dreams of a better life, but they are incapable of getting anywhere close to achieving it. The stepfather beats on the family and has an incestuous relationship with his genetic daughter, and possibly with the narrator, but this is never made explicit but it's possible from the childlike perceptions that things aren't as they should be between her and her stepdad. The writing captures a childlike perspective well, a childhood forged in poverty and a lack of education, with travelling and a borderline outlaw sort of existence. It mixes the elements of the orthodox religion of her mother's family with the the fairy tales she hears and tries to make sense of the world with a perspective that doesn't always know (or maybe just doesn't want know) the difference between the fantastical and the real.
As a thread running through the story is the story her family would tell her about the child who was cooking in the polenta, and her constant attempts to figure out why the child would end up in the polenta, was it the child's guilt that led her there? The parents? Was it an accident, or something horrific that had to be done to the child because the child is the type that deserves to die. As the novel goes on she re-interrupts the story again and again, and as the story progresses new details are added and she takes delight in making her older sister add more gruesome details to what happens to the child once it is cooking in the polenta.
I'm not doing a great job selling this book to you, am I?
So much about this book could have failed, and it toed the line between being a success and a gimmicky novel (is this the right word, gimmicky?). It could have been precocious, and it could have wallowed in the muck of incest and abuse, but even when the narrator says something like, "No man has touched me where it counts. I think about nothing else. I want to be raped by two men at the same time.", there is nothing shocking about the statement. In the twisted world the girl has grown up in (she is twelve maybe thirteen at the time and her mother has gotten her employed to dance naked in some kind of circus show, and has glued on pubic hair to make her appear older), it's more just another element of the sadness of her life than an edgy thing. Again what child thinks of things like this? What leads a child to think like this?
The book is at least semi-autobiographical. The author was part of a circus family that escaped from Romania and eventually found refuge in Switzerland. The author also ended up killing herself at the age of forty even though on the surface she was enjoying considerable success in the theater and won a prestigious prize for this novel. Exactly how much of the book is autobiographical I have no idea, but according to the essay at the end of the book the basic outline of the narrators life is the same as the novelist's.
"Jill's always on me about my clogged pipes, but I'm a big guy-they don't call me Big Bernie for nothing-and I crave junk food like a baby craves the "Jill's always on me about my clogged pipes, but I'm a big guy-they don't call me Big Bernie for nothing-and I crave junk food like a baby craves the tit. Besides, I'm beginning to believe that anything I do to extend my life is just going to be outweighed by the agony of living it."
Welcome to Knockemstiff, Ohio. Hometown of Donald Ray Pollock and literary home of a whole slew of fucked up redneck, hillbilly, poor white trash.
What is it about white trash that makes for such good readin'? I think I wrote about this in a recent review, so I'll just leave the question hanging here.
This is a collection of stories all taking place in Knockemstiff, Ohio. The stories are sometimes interrelated, some characters guest star in multiple stories and the book is bookended and anchored towards the middle with stories about one particular family.
Years ago, well about ten. I had this idea I knocked around in my head for a long time (a couple of years probably), about writing a series of stories that would make up a book all about the trashier side of white Saratoga Springs, my surrogate hometown. I completed two of the stories (shhhh, I like to think I've never completed any), and started or at least jotted down premises for the rest of them. I gave up on the whole idea after awhile and the book is now part of the incredibly amazing library of unwritten books I have conceived of that would have (I'm sure) shaken the ground of American Letters. I was going to maybe share one of those stories, but I think they might actually be lost in some landfill or wherever old hard-drives go to die. Oh well, or maybe they are just somewhere on my computer in a folder I can't remember making.
Anyway, back to the book. These are a series of short stories that all are really fast to read. I think there is something about them that fooled me into reading them faster, and I tried to slow myself down by taking a break after a story or two, but then I'd find myself reading another book and not giving this book the attention I think it deserved. Even with my slipshod style of reading it, I know that there is something good going on here, and one day I should return to it and read them again, slower and without other books getting in the middle of them (I'm currently having a problem with starting books, I have about five books going on right now, I need to just start finishing some and not starting anymore until I do, but so many different titles keep calling out to me and I'm impatient).
While I'm not personally white trash (I don't think), I have spent quite a bit of time in my past watching them, frequenting the same places that they go to, getting called a faggot by them, going to their homes to deliver food and furniture, taking away furniture from them, working with them and still to this day being more afraid of them in a Wal-Mart when I'm home visiting my parents than I ever feel in New York City. This past Christmas I was home and visiting Wal-Mart to try to find a cable of some sort for my Dad and I got to overhear so many delightfully ignorant conversations about a whole host of topics. The kinds of things that if you read you might think were total fabrications, people really believe some of this shit? (I'm feeling too lazy to share them here, some of the topics included 'how calenders lie', 'why I don't trust the post-office', and 'how even going on the internet at all causes identity theft' (followed up by, 'how I'm smarter than all those other motherfuckers', this particular man was pontificating right in front of where the cable was that I needed to get, so I spent longer than I should have listening to him)) The point of that blabbing is that after my years of careful study of them I feel like Pollock nailed them so well. I felt like I was back nursing weak coffee at the Spa City Diner or standing on a rickety set of stairs leading up to a double wide at the Pyramid Pines trailer park (you know, the one out behind Wal-Mart with over three hundred units).
I'm not up to going to into very many particulars about the stories themselves. They are good even if it's doubtful very many of the characters can be called good. They are fucked up people, making bad decisions and trapped in bad lives with no hope of redemption. I (and maybe you) just get to get some enjoyment out of taking a glimpse into these lives and slum it for a couple of hundred pages.
Oh, and before I leave this review, I just wanted to share this other passage from the book. How depressing is this? This is like Raymond Carver level tightly packed depressing in the details. Or maybe it's just me.
"Sharon was heavy, too, but over the years she learned the secrets of makeup application and how to camouflage her thick body with brightly colored sweats."...more
Ryan Boudinot sent me the page of the manuscript that mentions Minor Threat! How awesome is that!
And now fJanuary 21st addition to the review:
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Ryan Boudinot sent me the page of the manuscript that mentions Minor Threat! How awesome is that!
And now for the review as it was written a few weeks ago:
She yearned for plot but instead absurdity after absurdity had been thrown before her, absurdities that alluded to obscured purposes
A true bit of historical fact that maybe my goodreads friends of the Northwest know, but which I didn't. Seattle was originally called New York. And then it was called New York Alki. Alki, was a word in a local Native American tribe that sort of means someday, or by and by. So for a year or so what would be known as Seattle was called something like Future New York. Then someone decided it was probably silly to name yourself after another city that is in itself named after another place and person, and they went with Seattle. In this book, New York City has been destroyed and it's in the process of being rebuilt exactly as it was on an island in Puget Sound (ok, not New York City, but Manhattan, my own wreck of an apartment wouldn't be reproduced in this recreation, but my blessed New Age section of the bookstore would).
I've been giving quite a bit of thought to this review, and it's stumping me. I'm not sure what I'm going to write, but the book needs a review. It's really good and I need to try to convey that and maybe influence someone to give this a shot. If for some reason you think my taste in books are similar to yours, or you think that because I like a book you might like it too, then the simple quick review here is the book is really good. It's not perfect, but I think it's so worth your time (and even money) to read it.
The problem I'm having with coming up with a review, is that I don't want to spoil anything in the book. There are things I want to write about but they almost all come at the risk of giving away precious bits of the plot. Part of the goodness of this book is the way it unfolds, the slow and tantalizing way the author exposes the story, the backstory, the whole world his novel takes place in. I've read some literary critic or professional reviewer or someone (I can't remember whom though), who thinks that it is his place to give away all the plot because it allows the reader to fully appreciate the book if they aren't involved in the infantile joys of wondering, what happens next, or why or get involved in any of the real joys of having putting yourself in the hands of very capable storyteller and not knowing where the journey is going to lead you. Maybe it's unconscious, but there is also a strain of goodreads cub-book-reporters who find nothing wrong with giving away the entire basic narrative structure of a book (save for maybe some honest to goodness spoilers) after a few perfunctory dick jokes and maybe the names of some alcoholic beverages written in bold. All of his might just be laziness on my part, I find it boring to write play by plays of a book, but as a reader I've never read Cliff Notes and I have little interest in having a hack breakdown a piece of literature into a book report. But, I'm probably just grasping for straws in justifying my own laziness in writing about the actual plot of a book in my own reviews.
I want to write this review.
I'm afraid of spoiling anything.
I'm going to put the rest of this review in what I hope will be nested spoilers, levels of spoilers. I'd recommend not reading on if you want to read this book. But if you keep reading on, then I'd recommend not clicking on the spoiler buttons within the spoiler unless you have either read the book, or have no interest in reading the book but for some pathological reason feel the need to read everything I write on the internet.
But before I do that, I'm going to say again, this book is really good. It's George Saunders and David Foster Wallace filtered through Philip K. Dick and the movies of Richard Kelly. It's what I imagine Ballard is like when he's at his best, but I wouldn't know because I have only read Crash, and he mostly exists as an idealized author in my head, and I imagine him to be awesome, but I fear he won't live up to that awesomeness so I stay away from his work.
It's not a perfect book, but it's so good for so much of the book that the faults I have with it are ok. If you need everything in a book wrapped up neatly, if you need to know what was wrong with Hal and don't care about everything else that is great in a book, then I'd say stay away from this one. That's as much of a spoiler as I'm giving in this non-spoiler zone.
I was beginning to understand that the end of the world wasn't something that came about all at once. There was no climatic event that definitively destroyed life as we knew it. Rather, it happened incrementally, so slowly it was difficult to notice, the frog in the boiling water. A few of us saw it coming but were dismissed as insane , or we blew our cred by drawing lines in the sand and declaring that the world would end on a particular date. You know the cartoons with the sandal-wearing bearded freak on a street corner holding a sign reading "The end is near." The end was a slow but accumulating tabulation of lost things. We lost species of animals, polar ice, a building here and there, whole cities. There was a time when we lived on streets where we knew our neighbors' names but now we were all strangers isolated in our condos late at night, speaking across distances to our lonely, electronic communities. Children used to play in forests. We Used to gather around a piano and join our voices together. I tried to determine whether these sad thoughts were just the result of growing old. Probably, but that didn't make them any less real. Maybe I had lost so much myself-my family, my friends-that I couldn't help but project my grief onto the world at large. It was no longer enough for me to grieve for a lost mother, father, sister, or friend. Now my grief intended to encompass the planet
(view spoiler)[I'm not sure if this constitutes a spoiler, but I personally enjoyed not knowing what had taken place to make the world as it was in the first chapter of the book until later on in the novel. The world is (or isn't) some kind of dystopian, post-apocolyptic hell in the first chapter that introduces us to Woo-jin Kan, a retarded guy who is also the worlds greatest dishwasher who lives in a trailer surrounded by garbage in Seattle with his morbidly obese step-sister who is used for her obesity to grow body parts for medical purposes in her many folds of fat. It's a shitty world. But it's not the entire world of his post-nightmare (or as it's called in the book, the Age of Fucked Up Shit), it would be like reading The Jungle and saying that is the way the world was at that time. No, that was the reality for certain people, but there were many realities that made up the whole world that people were living in. That and this is just one of the shittier versions of reality.
The fucked up-ness of the world looks awful at first. And it is awful, but in the first chapter our imagination can run a little wild and it feels like we are visiting something truly fucked and alien to our own world. The thing about this book, the possibly scary thing, is that there isn't anything going on here that can really be safely regulated out to sci-fi fantasy (ok, maybe the sentient iceberg, and the endless red carpet scene, but those are more absurd than attempts at being prophetic about what could happen (I'd guess that there are lots of ways New York City could get wiped off the map, terrorist attacks, earth quake, giant tidal wave, meteor, or what not, but I'm guessing an unstoppable ice berg that moves across Canada from Alaska destroying major metropolitan areas with polar bears acting as it's own SS force of storm troopers isn't going to happen, it's a cool image though).
Things are bad, but they are only a handful of steps different from our own world. It's still a world of rampant consumerism, crappy reality TV, scary amounts of dependence on the interwebs, excessive celebrity worship, etc etc.
As the story goes on, as more details unfold, the reader learns that the cataclysm that put into motion a series of relatively small events that wiped out somewhere around eighty percent of the population, and in a way was trying to hit the reset button on humanity, was the work of a ground of geniuses, who thought that they were saving the world by doing this. It's the humanity is a virus that needs to be wiped out or contained sort of pessimistic view, but with a twist that humanity needs to survive because it's humanities goal to spread life throughout the universe (here the story sort of hacks into the New Age beliefs of our own planet's life being originally created by aliens from other worlds (this idea is normally yawn inducing to me, but here works, maybe because it's not being screamed as being some vast conspiracy, and because I could read it without smelling the incense I normally smell when I see the covers of books that push this idea in the New Age section of my store).
Do you want to know how the world ends? It wasn't with a whimper or a bang, it was (view spoiler)[by hitting the red fire button on a 1970's Atari controller (hide spoiler)].
One of the interesting things to think about (well for me) is (in relation to the scope of the book), was the pushing of humanities reset button a success? Is the world that Woo-jin occupies at the start of the book really a "Brave New World"? Is it better? Is carrying around a handgun produced by Coca-Cola part of an enlightened humanity? Is humanity enlightened by awful events, or is there just a temporary awareness of our own humanity (on say September 12th) and then a fast return to carrying more about what celebrity is fucking what celebrity than less ephemeral concerns? What does this say about us as people? Would a better world be created by keeping us all in a state of constant shock from horrific events? These aren't things necessarily addressed in the book, but it's things I started thinking about.
But, is the book about any of this?
What about the title? What does the afterlife refer to?
Or I think, more interestingly, what is the center of this book, what is the point the reader is supposed to stand in and view the events going on? I wish I knew some people who read this already, because I'd love to talk about this while the book is still fresh in my mind. The book is something of a multi-dimensional mobius strip. With the BioNet stuff, and the DJ'ing and hacking of people and the whole Abby Fogg story, the question of what is actually happening is a confusing one. Parts of the story are obviously not happening, they are all in someone's head, but which parts and whose head? The anchor of the whole novel, the series of interviews going on with Luke Piper that gives the reader a lot of the background to what is happening is also fraught with unreliability, and the fact that this interview connects and exists in relation to the rest of the narrative threads through Abby's character very difficult to know if there is any reliability in the story at all. Is what happened, what happened? And (view spoiler)[what does Luke (I'm just getting this now, is this a Star Wars / Bible reference (the name) and isn't Piper have a Luke on his home planet connotation, wasn't something called a sand piper or something, I'm too lazy to google) see when he goes outside at the very end of the book (hide spoiler)]? (hide spoiler)]
Those are some of the questions I have about the book. I kind of would like to talk about some of them with someone, but so far I don't know anyone else who has finished the book, so I'll wait. ...more
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