Witty, sparkly, inventive, yes all those things, at a sentence level, and at a paragraph level..but man, as the story progressed the characters began Witty, sparkly, inventive, yes all those things, at a sentence level, and at a paragraph level..but man, as the story progressed the characters began to feel like tedious blowhards, self-absorbed and self-important, and their preoccupations were not all that intellectually interesting. The conceit of the novel never felt like more than a not-too-interesting framework for Despentes to explore some ideas that interested her personally. The novel read like mini-essays written by the same person donning different personas. This novel is of the very few misses for me personally from FSG, a publisher whose books I almost always end up raving about....more
It seemed to him ever more insistently that he and Valette were dead, that they'd died long before, with a bullet in their heads in some far-off wadi.It seemed to him ever more insistently that he and Valette were dead, that they'd died long before, with a bullet in their heads in some far-off wadi.
This is one of the best (the best?) novels I've read about the disorientation of soldiers feel, after experiencing extremes of bloody conflict, when they return to the 'normality' of civilian life. The novel much more understated and less sentimental than other novels I've read on the subject.
This novel perfectly captures the complete dislocation between those returning from the war, and those who never left. I love it for the way it refuses to provide relief or redemption. The soldiers feel ennui and despair when returning to their homes on leave, and cynicism and helplessness when they must return once more to a war they know is pointless and unpopular and that will probably kill them....more
Maylis de Kerangal's novel The Heart was perfectly told. The story itself was very simple, and that is what made perfection possible, and de Kerangal Maylis de Kerangal's novel The Heart was perfectly told. The story itself was very simple, and that is what made perfection possible, and de Kerangal never tried to oversell me or inflate the story to be bigger than it was.
Painting Time feels so much more ambitious and it isn't perfect but it is very interesting. The style itself (a blended voice between author and translator, in this case, as I'm reading it in Jessica Moore's English translation) is breathless and break-less and filled with forward momentum. Sometimes I felt as if the author missed a chance to allow us readers to pause and reflect, but for the most part I enjoyed the language almost more than the story itself--it swept me along.
Like this:
"The discovery, already, is a wound--Paula pauses, she doesn't let go of the phone, but slips off her shoes, her socks, and climbs onto the bed--the outside and the inside open to each other through a hole that is scooped out--it's about twenty centimeters wide on the day of the discovery, and five by five meters only a month later--and through this contact, something is irreversibly lost. When the cone of loose scree is destroyed, the cavity loses its climatic, hydric, and thermic stopper, and the stability of the environment inside the cave is changed--the exact relation that existed between the air, water, and stone is disturbed, and a continuity of twenty thousand years collapses."
It make sense in context. But you need to pay attention. Reading this novel is like swimming underwater a little longer than you imagine is possible and then the air when you get to the other side is so sweet....more
Maybe everyone knows this but it was news to me that at https://www.comixology.com I'm able to read graphic novels in a very reasonable way online--inMaybe everyone knows this but it was news to me that at https://www.comixology.com I'm able to read graphic novels in a very reasonable way online--including this novel, which is hard to find in English in a nondigital form (and maybe doesn't exist). I'm amending this review to include this information, for those who were interested in reading this after reading my review and didn't know exactly where to find it.
I can't recommend this graphic novel enough. I found it groundbreaking and intimate and humane, and, when called for, shockingly real.
This is the first book of any kind I've read that has an intersex protagonist. The story was so thoughtfully told. There is a fairy-tale level of coincidence in the top-story happenings that is lovely and that needs to be accepted on its own terms. The joyful buoyancy of that story allows a very nuanced and disturbing and enlightening and life-affirming story to be told underneath it. It's a story about gender, and genitals, and sexual attractiveness/confidence, and body acceptance, and listening. and agency, and medicine vs. healing. Just an incredible amount of stuff going on! This graphic novel exemplifies all the ways graphic novels can impart meanings that are deep and best told in this form and no other.
I loved both the art and the storytelling flow of this graphic novel. The main character Jean was instantaneously knowable and human, from simply drawn gestures, facial expressions, bare scraps of dialogue. The art is fantastic! I loved...Jean's ears! What a wonder how a few lines could show such subtle and thoughtful storytelling. The movement from frame to frame was a delight. My only regret is that I wasn't able to find a physical copy to buy that was in English--I did enjoy it in the Comixology app, though. I'm very curious now to read the novel on which it was based....more
Beautiful galloping prose. Almost too personal. The events described felt suffocatingly close to my head--they got inside my head. Even though the twoBeautiful galloping prose. Almost too personal. The events described felt suffocatingly close to my head--they got inside my head. Even though the two books each describe a very different childhood, the reading experience reminded me of THE GLASS CASTLE--I felt threatened, and on the edge of peril as I read.
Meike's review is an excellent and thoughtful critique of this book and I suggest you read it.
This novel reminded me very strongly, in its voice and nMeike's review is an excellent and thoughtful critique of this book and I suggest you read it.
This novel reminded me very strongly, in its voice and narrative style, of two beloved books that I'm sad to never have the chance to read for the first time again: The Long Ships by Frans G. Bengtsson, and Her Mother's Mother's Mother and Her Daughters by Maria José Silveira. Bengtsson, I know, very deliberately rejected modern storytelling techniques with their interiorities and their streams-of-consciousness, to go back to a much older style of tale-telling. All three of these books tell their stories through narrative anecdote, like the style of sagas and legends and epic poems, and the style allows all three authors to sweep across centuries at a breathless pace to tell their stories. "Saga" sounds a little boring, maybe, but to me these books are full of action and consequences with no time to spare for how people feel or what they happen to be thinking. I love it in all three books and I admire their authors for trying a storytelling style so old it's new again....more
Reading this novel feels like you've just bought a ticket for a ride at an amusement park, when you're not quite sure if you want to go on this ride aReading this novel feels like you've just bought a ticket for a ride at an amusement park, when you're not quite sure if you want to go on this ride at all, but you get on anyway, because your friend says it's going to be so much fun, and at some point during the ride you know your friend was sorely mistaken, because you're well on your way to a vertiginous and unpleasant and embarrassing outcome if the ride doesn't end soon, but then the ride does end. and you think: wow, that was incredible, and get back in line for another turn....more
This novella read like a narrative summary written by a writer who is bored with her own story. Compared with The Heart which I adored and which was fThis novella read like a narrative summary written by a writer who is bored with her own story. Compared with The Heart which I adored and which was full of vivid human happenings, it felt detached and insignificant.
Or it could be I just can't get excited over novels about food, and cooks. I felt the same way about the 2020 novel The Cheffe: A Cook's Novel by Marie N'Diaye, another writer whose past novels have left me stunned and speechless, and grateful....more
This is an exhilarating read--each sentence brings me to an unexpected place, whether it be into the lives of three newly released prisoners, or insidThis is an exhilarating read--each sentence brings me to an unexpected place, whether it be into the lives of three newly released prisoners, or inside the head of a wounded bird, or in the shoes of a phobic clown. My only other experience of reading Antoine Volodine was with the exhilarating, maddening post-nuclear-apocalypse (maybe) story RADIANT TERMINUS. I would say that SOLO VIOLA is a similar read, for the way it bombards me with sense impressions as I read along, until I'm feeling many emotions, the chief among them being a profound sense of grief. I have no idea if this is the intention of the author but it's what happened to me. I was wrung out after reading this brief novel. I'm indifferent to the superstructure of stories and personae and contradictions that make up the Antoine Volodine mythos--this novel fortunately stands on its own....more
2021 Winner of the National Book Award -- Translated Literature
I'm sitting here very much at a loss for words about how to describe the exquisite read2021 Winner of the National Book Award -- Translated Literature
I'm sitting here very much at a loss for words about how to describe the exquisite reading experience that is this book. I keep trying to write something cogent and then deleting what I've written, and starting over. I'm trying and failing to describe why such a small story could deliver such a revelatory and emotional gut-punch.
The author creates a narrator who has very little regard for herself, but who is never sorry for herself. She lives in a world where nothing ever changes, and yet she describes her world so vividly that it feels charged with beauty and possibility. She so rarely judges those around her, or allows herself to think largely, that when she does speak her mind, it's a revelation.
I've had the privilege of spending time with a character who has found a way to live an intentional and meaningful life, however limited her life is by her circumstances. The relentless torrent of detail--colors, smells, temperature--make the argument on the page that even simple, mundane acts can be filled with intention and beauty....more
I adored the experience of reading this novel. It's such a deeply sensory experience to read, and such a deep dive into a first-person voice that is iI adored the experience of reading this novel. It's such a deeply sensory experience to read, and such a deep dive into a first-person voice that is incantatory and surreal, and maybe insane. For the most part I had no idea what was going on, and I didn't care.
I want other people to read this novel so I can ask them what they experienced while reading it. The back-cover copy promises "a meditation on memory and forgetting, creation, and oblivion," which sounds about right, but I'd add to that description a delicate powdering of "ecstatic revelation." It's the kind of book that compelled me to read it through in a "wow"-like stupor, and then, when I was done, I opened the pages at random to read solo sentences in isolation, because they were each so evocative and strange. It's tangentially about a big old smelly mushroom, by the way. And, it's sort of a love story. The mushroom is referred to with she/her pronouns and I hope she's okay with that. She communicates in ways more olfactory than verbal. If this were longer it might have become too challenging because there is just so much of "what is going on" I can take in my fiction but at 176 pages this was just right. I will quote a blurb from the back now, because for once the blurb is right: "A singular novel."
This is my third work of fiction published by Bellevue Literary Press and they are a new favorite. In each case the novel I read was like nothing I'd read before, and I was left grateful that Bellevue Literary Press took the leap of faith to bring these books into the world....more
The premise is interesting, but the story execution was (except for some flashes of brilliant imagery that made me sad for what might have been) tedioThe premise is interesting, but the story execution was (except for some flashes of brilliant imagery that made me sad for what might have been) tedious-to-ridiculous. The author seems to have had an idea for a story that didn't quite work. I kept wanting to edit the story as I read and that is never a good sign. Too much of the story line depends on a dog that behaves in unbelievable, non-doggish ways. I can’t recommend it....more
A lovely little tale about a class of six-year-olds on their first overnight camping trip. Things don't go quite as expected. This very short novel isA lovely little tale about a class of six-year-olds on their first overnight camping trip. Things don't go quite as expected. This very short novel is relentless, ruthless, and unbelievably cruel to both the reader and the characters alike. It gripped me, and it horrified me, and you should read it, not just because it gleefully stomps on every convention of story-telling, but also because it does so in such a clever, literary, and playfully metafictional way. Great fun. In its execution it reminds me of Michael Haneke's film Funny Games....more
The first image you see is the cover: a drawing of an African man's head with someone's white hands around his throat, choking him. The style of the dThe first image you see is the cover: a drawing of an African man's head with someone's white hands around his throat, choking him. The style of the drawing is rough and disturbing.
Next, open the French flap on the inside front cover: you're confronted with a crude but unmistakable drawing of Alan Kurdi, the three-year-old boy who drowned while fleeing Syria with his family and his body washed up on a Turkish beach. You didn't even know how deeply his small shape has become part of your memory, and then here it is, and the image confronts you at once with the subject of this book: the dehumanizing and desperate outcomes that humans suffer, because of racial and economic inequality.
What follows in this book are seven stories of people trying to survive in a post-colonial, inter-racial, economically unfair world.
The first story, "Love," has no words at all. Only bodies in relation to one another in a powerful series of inter-related poses. I'm not even sure whether "Love" signals hope, or if it is a graphic representation of racial oppression. There is a jittering uneasiness in these drawings. Even though the images in "Love" resolve themselves, panel by panel, into a scene that, in a non-racist world, would be peaceful and loving, we don't live in such a world. Even the most peaceful of images in this graphic novel pulse with more sinister meanings.
I hate to call this work a "graphic novel" because it works on a less linear and more visual plane than any graphic novel I've read. I see that there are many "I didn't get it" comments in the reviews here on Goodreads, and that's fair if you're judging this book as a graphic novel that follows storytelling conventions, which it decidedly does not do. But this book isn't really about the language or story. This book works the way fine art works. The text provides a guide to the images, not the other way around.
Like the best contemporary art, Alagbé's illustrations invite interpretation, rather than telling you what to think. They evoke great meaning and feeling, even at their least representational. The drawings in some panels are nothing more than dark, rough scribbles, and yet they project a loss of order and a sense of human helplessness. They frequently reflect the feelings that his characters feel when confronted with situations beyond their control....more
If I get just one person to read this novel who wouldn't otherwise have heard of it, I will feel I've done my job here on Goodreads. I'm still quite oIf I get just one person to read this novel who wouldn't otherwise have heard of it, I will feel I've done my job here on Goodreads. I'm still quite overwhelmed by what I just read, but let me try to give you a sense of the novel.
Léonora Miano has written with a singular purpose: to document what it must have been like, at the start of the Atlantic slave trade, to live in a village within easy reach of the coastline. What it must have been like to be living in exactly the way you and your people have always lived, and then to have this terror, this violence, this unthinkable and incomprehensible disruption of your reality, come into your lives.
Miano begins in medias res just after several young men disappear from a village. We readers know they have been kidnapped to be taken to the coast and sold. But to their people, they are just gone. And the people don't know how such a thing could have happened. People can die, or be born, or commit crimes, or marry, and these happenings are part of the rhythms of village life, and are well understood, and everyone knows what is to be done in each case. But when men disappear? In this case no one knows how to react. Are the men dead? Then where are the bodies? If there were bodies then the people would know to mourn. But there are no bodies. No one knows what to do. A hasty plan is made to isolate the men's mothers from the rest of the village--because maybe it has something to do with the mothers. But no one really believes that. And when one woman drifts back to her home, no one is sure what to do next. It takes days for the village leaders to decide to ask a neighboring village if they know anything about the men's disappearance. It takes far longer--not until it is too late--for anyone in the village to suspect the truth.
I can't capture for you the perfection of how Miano paints this village and its inhabitants; its rituals and its hierarchies. The way she reaches through history to recreate a pre-literate, pre-colonial culture that is on the brink of losing everything that they trust is true about the world. We know it happened. We know this history in a theoretical way. But we don't have access to the voices of the people that faced this terror. Miano gives them voices. I'm in awe of how deeply she imagines these people, even to the point of making their utter lack of guile, in the beginning of their story, completely believable and heart-rending....more
But: I have no idea what this novel is supposed to mean. I could read up about it, I suppose. But even with When I finished this novel I began to cry.
But: I have no idea what this novel is supposed to mean. I could read up about it, I suppose. But even with more knowledge, I'm not sure there would be a way for me to have loved it more, or to have been touched by it more, or to have been made to think more, than the choice I made, which was to read this very complicated and mysterious novel as a dialogue, a 1-1 relationship between me and the words on the page.
So how to describe this complicated knot of feeling, now that I've reached the end?
What I'm feeling has to do with a sense that this novel stands for the permanence of human relationships--that our thoughts and feelings and actions as thinking creatures can create a reality that endures every kind of assault.
Described here is a horrific world. And yet the characters trapped in this horrific world never fully despair. And the story itself, however violent and seemingly hopeless, always holds out in the end a thread of fragile hope that humanity (not just people, but their best selves) will endure....more
This novel gets to the heart of the human condition. I feel scoured out by it. I feel like my head was held tight until I was forced to look at the saThis novel gets to the heart of the human condition. I feel scoured out by it. I feel like my head was held tight until I was forced to look at the sadness of being alive. The meanings in this novel are not entirely rational and yet the bedrock truth of the story felt so familiar. It was like reading about some tragic, true event.
The characters are worthy of love, and yet they are each so alone and so unloved, and so confused in their isolation, and so unknowable even to themselves. They pity each other but they don't stop to pity themselves. They think the best of one another and yet they never manage to be entirely real to one another, or to make their inner selves known to those they love.
The writing is surprising-- it's flat and straightforward, and yet full of mystery. The novel entraps you in the most unlikely of stories, just when you're expecting the most typical of stories. It carries you along into unexpected journeys where it seems poised to unwind into nonsense at any moment, and then just at that moment it becomes deeply disciplined, anchored in repeating symbol and theme, on a path toward an inevitable, tragic conclusion. This combination of unexpectedness with discipline made the novel a very satisfying and a very unique read.
It's a terribly sad story. It upended my defenses....more
This novel is a great example of how simplicity can be transformed via some kind of alchemy known as "great writing" into high art. I'm reminded of PiThis novel is a great example of how simplicity can be transformed via some kind of alchemy known as "great writing" into high art. I'm reminded of Picasso's "Bouquet of Peace." The story of The Heart is so basic that I almost gave the novel a pass after reading the book jacket--the plot is the stuff of straight-to-video movies--and yet in Kerangal's hands it transforms itself into a story that is exquisitely particular and full of humanity. I'm in awe of her storytelling skills and I'm grateful to her translator Sam Taylor for making this novel easily accessible for me.
In addition to good writing and its deep sense of humaneness, yet another feature that makes The Heart work is its meticulous attention to medical detail. Another work of great skill that I thought of while reading The Heart was "Mrs. Kelly's Monster," a nonfiction feature article written by Jon Franklin that won a Pulitzer in 1979, and that Franklin has graciously republished on his blog, here:
I started reading three hours ago and sat reading as it got dark around me and didn't answer the phone or even turn the lights on until I couldn't seeI started reading three hours ago and sat reading as it got dark around me and didn't answer the phone or even turn the lights on until I couldn't see the page. What riveted me--aside from the story itself-- was the utter starkness of the language. Not "minimal" at all, no, it's rich and musical, but what's there on the page is only what is absolutely necessary. Every word. The rhythm of the language is so startling, the rhythm of the repetitions in the conversations, the give and take, the way "elle" and "lui" echo and augment one another throughout. It's all the more startling at the end when a sudden English conversation, ugly, out of rhythm, inserts itself into the script, interrupts their reverie, upsets their total one-ness of understanding with one another and threatens to destroy it in one of the most uncomfortable scenes I've ever read.
I can think of things not to like about this screenplay. For example I'm not sure about the total focus on "elle" and her individual suffering during the war, vs. the sufferings of "lui" during the war, which are barely mentioned anywhere...but "lui's" suffering of course is apparent all around them: His name is Hiroshima.
I'm so grateful I was able read this in the original language. Tonight I'm grateful I can read at all....more
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