📚 24 - September
I've begun reading more books by contemporary authors (that is, people who are or will be my peers), so I'm giving some thought to how to operate this blog in a way that maintains its integrity without stepping on any current or future career-limiting toes. Please don't take this for more than what it is! Conflict Is Not Abuse!!
I may have to rethink this "Reading Blog" project in its current form. It doesn't make sense to have a blog about my reading when I feel I have to hold my tongue.
Lyudmila Ulitskaya (2019). The Body of the Soul. [trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky]
The Roches (1979). Hammond Song.
I loved this book and look forward to reading more of Ulitskaya's fiction.
The writing style seems to be tied up to a particular worldview and orientation; the narrators are often at the distance of a blood relative. The lives of the characters (sometimes from childhood to death) are told in narratives of fixed personalites and tendencies, in traumas that cause permanent explanatory results. Who else but a relative would explicitly say something like He was never the same after his injury or She always needs someone in her life who tells her what to do? At once intimately knowledgeable and casually reductive?
I have been thinking a great deal about the distance (ironic or otherwise) between omniscient narrators and characters; there's always an ideology or worldview informing that distance. What kind of love does the narrator have for the characters? For some writers it's sentimental; for Ulitskaya there's something more like the tough love of the Roches' Hammond Song—a chorus of familial voices singing "We'll always love you, but that's not the point."
There's debate ("debate") over whether POV is actually a central concern of writers—often people say so, but there are contrarians. But POV is finally deeply tied to the Patricia Highsmith individuality/personality/voice that I agree is so fundamental to what a writer offers a reader. What makes Ulitskaya's work so particular and wonderful, among other things, is this unusual POV orientation.
Chester Himes (1957). Rage in Harlem.
Love these "Harlem detective" books; I've learned they're part of a genre called the "caper story"—small-time swindles that go, in this case, completely off the rails as more and more people get pulled into their orbit.
Maya Binyam (2023). Hangman.
I enjoyed this novel and look forward to the future novels of this author. The Highsmithian personality is strongly engaging in this work. I picked it up because of the beautiful cover (a print of Belkis Ayón it turns out) and an interview I read with Binyam about building artistic networks/community/relationships with people who inspire us, not necessarily with those whose clout can help us. A great reminder.
An issue I had with this novel was a slippage that happened between the narrative voice (the first-person narrator) and the stances of the novel itself. The character acts as a cipher or sounding board to people who engage him in conversational monologues, and he seems to find almost everything contempible and ridiculous. This makes sense, given his retiring and alienated position. But a positive alternative is never proposed by him or the novel as a whole, and there's a sense in the language sometimes that it's not the character but rather a broader novelistic voice that's casting this judgment.
Adam Mars-Jones (2005). Box Hill
This book—subtitled "A Story of Low Self-Esteem"—captures extremely well a particular fussy/obnoxious personality type.
Matt Bell (2022). Refuse to Be Done.
It's interesting to read other writers' advice; it's a window into what worked for them in their projects.
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