“What makes a witch, then? If it is not divinity?”
Madeline Miller’s sophomore sensation springs from the first page like Athena from Zeus’s brain—full“What makes a witch, then? If it is not divinity?”
Madeline Miller’s sophomore sensation springs from the first page like Athena from Zeus’s brain—fully formed and fully realized, breaking all the MFA/workshop rules of writing (almost as if they are the arbitrary orders of idle, self-regarding gods), and reminding you that fiction is a witchery of the highest order, one that certainly understands transformation.
And if one accepts Circe’s proposition that what makes a witch is “mostly will,” then you will greatly enjoy the way this tale turns itself inside out. Miller draws you in with the power and glamour of Titans, Olympians, and the heroes and monsters whose names loom as large as Zeus himself, only to place you squarely on the side of this seductive, chimeric world’s misfit spinster witch. It’s Homer meets Carrie at the prom, but this time she has centuries to figure her shit out.
And oh how fascinating being a witness to the shit-figuring-out turns out to be. I’m still of two minds about the ending, but I can say with all my heart that I have not loved a book or its heroine this much in a very long time....more
“Eaters of asparagus know the scent it lends the urine. It has been described as reptilian, or as a repulsive inorganic stench, or again, as a sharp, “Eaters of asparagus know the scent it lends the urine. It has been described as reptilian, or as a repulsive inorganic stench, or again, as a sharp, womanly odor... exciting. Certainly it suggests sexual activity of some kind between exotic creatures, perhaps from a distant land, another planet. This unworldly smell is a matter for poets and I challenge them to face their responsibilities.”
I gather from other reviews here that First Love, Last Rites is the better collection of early Ian McEwan stories, but I liked this better than most of his novels. I recommend going in with low expectations and then keeping an open mind. Every other story ends weakly: not a great batting average for a 150-page collection of seven stories. Some of the would-be twists will make you roll your eyes.
But McEwan’s prose is as pungent and irresistibly precise as post-asparagus piss, and, with some exceptions, he chooses his material wisely: a divorced father overthinking his teenage daughter’s birthday gift, a painstakingly self-aware ape in love with a self-absorbed celebrity author, an elaborately delusional financier. The final story, “Psychopolis,” about a British man in Los Angeles is especially strong.
I even liked it slightly better than Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, whose influence glares throughout like a floodlight in the whimsical first person voice that many of the stories share, the attempts at a knowingly Grimmsian surrealism, and the half-baked endings....more
"In a sense life in the high-rise had begun to resemble the world outside—there were the same ruthlessness and aggression concealed within a set of po"In a sense life in the high-rise had begun to resemble the world outside—there were the same ruthlessness and aggression concealed within a set of polite conventions."
This narration comes just 7 pages before the character comes across a woman who is feeding her cat with blood and flesh from her wrist.
I would have enjoyed the very dark, very ironic dark ironies of this book much more if the technique and craft had been there. It's a book about the hollowness of a great achievement in modern form, but the dialogue, as is typical for Ballard, is either forgettable or wooden and the prose shows lack of discipline, full of perfunctory metaphors that break the fourth wall of the high-rise's hypnotic insularity by bringing in imagery from the banal outside without being especially illustrative or poetic.
In fact, the book is one long (tall?) metaphor, but Ballard, instead of going all in on the pretty damn good one he already has—his creepy Sodom and Gomorrah ziggurat by the Thames—he is constantly comparing this and that to ladders in board games, middle-aged gymnasium dumb-bell teams, "the decor of a nightmare," waking up on battlefields, rehearsing scenes from melodramas, and other some such.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no. There is a reason none of us bought the novel Ladder in a Board Game by J.G. Ballard or the short story collection Middle-Aged Gymnasium Dumb-bell Team. We came to read about the high-rise. Sometimes Ballard remembers this, and gives us images of seagulls gathering nearby the growing carnage like vultures, or devastating portraits of human beings who prefer not to behave and crave depravity and sloth and all the bad smells that come with.
Girl meets boy. Girl starts gaining weight. Girl gets work in the oldest profession in the world, is upbeat about it.
Girl grows extra breast... or twoGirl meets boy. Girl starts gaining weight. Girl gets work in the oldest profession in the world, is upbeat about it.
Girl grows extra breast... or two or three or four...
And a curly tail.
Darrieussecq can't be accused of holding back in her first novel. She covers a lot of ground: from the dark side of heterosexual relations in modern Paris, to the end of the world. In the end, however, it's a tad too much, ahem, red meat on the chopping block for a 134 page novel.
I love eating and reading the offal truth, but this was a bit of a disappointment....more
"The air pressure dips, like before a storm. A keening sound wells up soft and low, as if it's always been there, just outside the range of human hear"The air pressure dips, like before a storm. A keening sound wells up soft and low, as if it's always been there, just outside the range of human hearing. It swells to howling. And then the shadows start to drop from trees, like raindrops after a storm. The darkness pools and gathers and then seethes."
Well, I'm not sure I ever want to go to Joburg.
The humans (and some of the landscapes) at the center of this vivid, if at times too cheeky, urban fantasy noir are damaged shells of their former selves. In what one hopes is a sly wink at the critique of portrayals of Africa in which animals have more dimensionality than black people, the central conceit of Zoo City is that people who have committed murder find themselves saddled with an animal companion. They become Zoos, aposymbiots: outcasts who are at turns feared, shunned, and exoticized.
A Zoo feels her animal's pain, feels pain if separated physically from it, and dies if it dies. Upon their death, Zoos are claimed by a menacing force known as the Undertow. It is a horrifying way to die.
Our narrator is a Zoo in Johannesburg named Zinzi December, who got her Sloth companion in a mysterious episode that resulted in her brother's death. She has her hands in many rancid pots. Her story plays out like a classic noir, but when the femme fatale is a bulky security guard with a past that includes a long-lost family in Zimbabwe and a pre-Zimbabwe stint in the LRA, there are still plenty of surprises.
At her best, Beukes can be witty and perceptive about broken institutions and people. Zoo City is even reminiscent of Buffy at times. At her worst, Beukes is sloppy and cheaply snarky, a potty-mouthed Marisha Pessl.
In the end, however, Beukes creates real beauty, pathos, and dimensionality out of some of the weirdest and most cringeworthy hustles in contemporary Africa - 419 emails, muti magic healing, tabloid journalism, income inequality, the pop music industry. She shows us our world and the black magic of hope and regret....more
"I am not trying to say that I was happy, during those weeks of hauling a sledge across an ice-sheet in the dead of winter. I was hungry, overstrained"I am not trying to say that I was happy, during those weeks of hauling a sledge across an ice-sheet in the dead of winter. I was hungry, overstrained, and often anxious, and it all got worse the longer it went on. I certainly wasn't happy. Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you can't earn, and can't keep, and often don't even recognize at the time; I mean joy."
The main protagonist of The Left Hand of Darkness, Genly Ai, whose words I quote above, is both inciting incident and reader proxy, being a male human from a two-sex society on a (possibly suicidal) mission to convince the leaders of an ambisexual world, Gethen, to join a peaceful coalition of human-settled planets known as the Ekumen. To lend credence to his story, Ai lets himself be examined by Gethenian doctors, and people subsequently refer to him, with his unrelenting maleness, as the Pervert. He, and we the readers, in turn, have difficulty seeing the Gethenians, who are truly neither male nor female nor sexless but both and complete, as other than aberrations. We are told early on that the Gethenian biology is the legacy of some millenia-old experiment, and we believe it.
The Left Hand of Darkness earns its conversation-starting subject matter and then some. Each of the beautiful Gethenian myths that Le Guin intersperses throughout could stand on its own. Alongside the main narrative of political intrigue and weeks-long travels through the notoriously harsh climate of Gethen/Winter (if not as a prisoner then as a fugitive), everything builds to the quietest of climaxes, one underlined with paradox and humanity, one that opens up as many questions about gender and life itself as it answers, one only a sustained work of prose fiction could contain.
Perhaps it is appropriate and right that a book about gender should not have any sex scenes. I found it a notable omission nonetheless....more
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