Recent reads:
Anyhow, I was able to break through in September, and here’s what I’ve read lately.
A Door Behind a Door - Yelena Moskovich
A very weird book about a Russian immigrant to the US who gets roped into a… scheme or something, by her old neighbor from Moscow who just got out of prison for killing another of their neighbors. It’s kind of a prose-poem novel, where every paragraph is preceded by a kind of headline. Lots of references to Pushkin and Lermentov, ultimately it feels most influenced by Lynch - there is a very Mulholland Drive-esque confusion of identities. I’d give it a B.
Yesterday - Juan Emar
Truly incredible, a hidden Chilean modernist gem from the 1930s that deserves to be famous. It’s just one dude’s recounting of the events of a day wandering around a city with his wife, either witnessing outlandish events or getting caught up in his mind about paradoxes regarding mundane and trivial things. A lot like Flann O’Brien or Borges in full comedic mode. Cannot recommend it highly enough. A+
When we Cease to Understand the World - Benjamin Labatut
This is good stuff. it got a lot of hype, but it’s well deserved. Bafflingly showed up on Obama’s reading list, but w/e. A kind of non-fiction novel or collection of fictitious essays about various 20th Century scientists and how their discoveries alienated them from the world or disturbed the idea that science can shed light on the reality of the universe. It’s written (or at least translated) in elegant, crisp prose and conjures an incredible, slightly gothic atmosphere of Pre-, inter-war, and post-war Europe. It occasionally lapses into TeenGoth-style darkness, but overall it’s extremely compelling. I give in an A.
Crossroads - Jonathan Franzen
I fucking loved this book. I’m a lil bitch for some Franzen, but this may be his best novel. Whenever I wasn’t reading it, all I wanted to do was get back to it. If you don’t like him, this probably won’t change your mind, but he avoids the pitfalls of topicality that bogged down Freedom and Purity by setting this one all in the past - which is great, since I always found the best parts of his novels to the be the analepses set in oldtimes. As always, the great strength is the characters - Marion, the mother of the family, is incredible, and I’ve found myself thinking about her sections of the book a lot since I finished it last month. There is an awkward unevenness to how much each time we spend with each character, which I chalk up to the fact that this is meant to be the first in a trilogy and we’ll see more of them later. A+/A.