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kingofspain93's reviews
325 reviews
The Dry Heart by Natalia Ginzburg
in The Fourth Trimester author Kimberly Ann Johnson argues that what gets diagnosed as postpartum depression is often just the emotional fallout from women having zero social and spousal support at an unbelievably demanding time. i can confirm from the POV of the man that we do expect to be able to be children forever and that we never want to get bored or make hard choices; if I didn't have a huge mental shift in my twenties I'd be there still. I've read so many books like The Dry Heart this year alone and I think it's because women, without having experienced the galactic selfishness that is being a man, are horrified to realize just how empty their husbands and lovers are and put it into lit. so if Ginzburg’s novel is of a kind with Woman at Point Zero or Days of Abandonment it is because they are the literary counterpoint of the one million novels like Stoner that are about men feeling kind of sad and having affairs. two groups working through the same issue, one with surprise and dread, one with wilful obliviousness to their own evil.
4.0
I thought of how men and women spend their time tormenting one another and how stupid it all seems when you are face to face with something like a baby’s fever.
in The Fourth Trimester author Kimberly Ann Johnson argues that what gets diagnosed as postpartum depression is often just the emotional fallout from women having zero social and spousal support at an unbelievably demanding time. i can confirm from the POV of the man that we do expect to be able to be children forever and that we never want to get bored or make hard choices; if I didn't have a huge mental shift in my twenties I'd be there still. I've read so many books like The Dry Heart this year alone and I think it's because women, without having experienced the galactic selfishness that is being a man, are horrified to realize just how empty their husbands and lovers are and put it into lit. so if Ginzburg’s novel is of a kind with Woman at Point Zero or Days of Abandonment it is because they are the literary counterpoint of the one million novels like Stoner that are about men feeling kind of sad and having affairs. two groups working through the same issue, one with surprise and dread, one with wilful obliviousness to their own evil.
An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro
4.0
'But there’s no need to blame ourselves unduly,’ he said. ‘We at least acted on what we believed and did our utmost. It’s just that in the end we turned out to be ordinary men. Ordinary men with no special gifts of insight. It was simply our misfortune to have been ordinary men during such times.’
i was introduced to the concept of the unreliable narrator when someone handed me a copy of Pale Fire and said “this book has an unreliable narrator.” this is a stupid way to teach a lesson and guaranteed that I learned it wrong. for years I measured narrators against Charles Kinbote to determine their relative reliability (not incidentally I also misunderstood Pale Fire for about as long). unreliable narrators were those who intentionally omitted, obscured, or misled.
this gross oversimplification left no room for narrators like those written by Ishiguro. as in the bitter The Remains of the Day and the unfair Never Let Me Go, An Artist of the Floating World unfolds from the perspective of someone who does not understand themselves enough for anything they say to be taken as truth. here Ishiguro has written not about loss or injustice but guilt, the guilt of a man whose sins are incommensurate to his sorrow, and whose sorrow is hidden from himself.
Ishiguro effectively conveys an ethereal pain, which is that it feels worse to realize one has committed an act of insignificant pettiness than if one had unknowingly done some great and majestic evil. the world may redefine us in ways we can't anticipate and don't understand but the sadness of coming face to face with our own mundane ignorance cuts deeper. most of us will not face a trial in the court of public opinion; we will just age out, old, ordinary, the wrong people for the times we have nevertheless lived to see. Ishiguro’s mastery comes in showing all of this through the eyes of a character who, without being obvious, never entirely realizes what it is he is revealing.
i was introduced to the concept of the unreliable narrator when someone handed me a copy of Pale Fire and said “this book has an unreliable narrator.” this is a stupid way to teach a lesson and guaranteed that I learned it wrong. for years I measured narrators against Charles Kinbote to determine their relative reliability (not incidentally I also misunderstood Pale Fire for about as long). unreliable narrators were those who intentionally omitted, obscured, or misled.
this gross oversimplification left no room for narrators like those written by Ishiguro. as in the bitter The Remains of the Day and the unfair Never Let Me Go, An Artist of the Floating World unfolds from the perspective of someone who does not understand themselves enough for anything they say to be taken as truth. here Ishiguro has written not about loss or injustice but guilt, the guilt of a man whose sins are incommensurate to his sorrow, and whose sorrow is hidden from himself.
Ishiguro effectively conveys an ethereal pain, which is that it feels worse to realize one has committed an act of insignificant pettiness than if one had unknowingly done some great and majestic evil. the world may redefine us in ways we can't anticipate and don't understand but the sadness of coming face to face with our own mundane ignorance cuts deeper. most of us will not face a trial in the court of public opinion; we will just age out, old, ordinary, the wrong people for the times we have nevertheless lived to see. Ishiguro’s mastery comes in showing all of this through the eyes of a character who, without being obvious, never entirely realizes what it is he is revealing.
Lulu in Hollywood by Louise Brooks
5.0
As for my own failure as a social creature, my mother did attempt to make me less openly critical of people's false faces. "Now, dear, try to be more popular," she told me. "Try not to make people so mad!" I would watch my mother, pretty and charming, as she laughed and made people feel clever and pleased with themselves, but I could not act that way. And so I have remained, in cruel pursuit of truth and excellence, an inhumane executioner of the bogus, an abomination to all but those few who have overcome their aversion to truth in order to free whatever is good in them.
Lulu in Hollywood is a valuable reflection on the machinery and gender politics of filmmaking that I expect is as relevant today as it was to the era of Brooks’ career. for someone who is famous for their acting career, Brooks has a startlingly clear authorial voice. she is dry and insightful. and she is SMART, the kind of smart that people hate in women. there are a few moments where she seems out of touch (comparing being a movie star in early Hollywood to enslavement is obviously tasteless) but otherwise her writing feels timeless and she is herself perilously easy to fall in love with.
Lulu in Hollywood is a valuable reflection on the machinery and gender politics of filmmaking that I expect is as relevant today as it was to the era of Brooks’ career. for someone who is famous for their acting career, Brooks has a startlingly clear authorial voice. she is dry and insightful. and she is SMART, the kind of smart that people hate in women. there are a few moments where she seems out of touch (comparing being a movie star in early Hollywood to enslavement is obviously tasteless) but otherwise her writing feels timeless and she is herself perilously easy to fall in love with.
The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris
4.75
Being smart spoils a lot of things, doesn’t it? And taste isn’t kind.
The Silence of the Lambs is a slicker story than Red Dragon. gone are the civilians and the extended sequences providing insight into the killer. instead Harris has distilled his world of professionals into geniuses, monsters, idiots, and soldiers. everyone has their role; every role has its process.
and yet Clarice Starling is as emotionally available as Will Graham, almost effortlessly despite the pared down style. Harris remains a master of careful control and sizzling dialogue while also engineering devastating emotional disclosures with a delicate touch. that he convincingly writes about a world of killings and manhunts is impressive, that he does so beautifully while centering a timeless female lead is laudable. (oh and Clarice is canonically a Celt! 🏴🏴🏴)
The Silence of the Lambs is a slicker story than Red Dragon. gone are the civilians and the extended sequences providing insight into the killer. instead Harris has distilled his world of professionals into geniuses, monsters, idiots, and soldiers. everyone has their role; every role has its process.
and yet Clarice Starling is as emotionally available as Will Graham, almost effortlessly despite the pared down style. Harris remains a master of careful control and sizzling dialogue while also engineering devastating emotional disclosures with a delicate touch. that he convincingly writes about a world of killings and manhunts is impressive, that he does so beautifully while centering a timeless female lead is laudable. (oh and Clarice is canonically a Celt! 🏴🏴🏴)
The Castle by Franz Kafka
Kafka's world and writing are bizarre and singular but that doesn't mean I can stand them. there is only room for one monumental, nightmarish, intentionally boring work of art in my heart and it already belongs to another (Twin Peaks: The Return). I'm glad I read this for cultural reasons and bafflingly I do think it will stick with me but all of the praise directed at it seems to entirely miss the point, which is precisely that it is expertly written to be the kind of thing no one should want to read. for a novel about a massive castle bureaucracy I much prefer the mystical Titus Groan.
2.25
"Well, yes,” said Amalia, “but people are interested in different ways, I once heard of a young man whose mind was taken up day and night with thoughts of the Castle, he neglected everything else, people feared for his ordinary faculty of reason since all his faculties were always up at the Castle, but in the end it turned out that it wasn’t actually the Castle he was thinking of but only the daughter of a scullery maid at the offices, he got her, and then all was fine again.”
“I would like that man, I think,” said K.
it shouldn't come as any surprise to me that the word “Kafkaesque” is not remotely descriptive of Kafka’s actual work, at least in common usage. the intended evocation is of an individual brutally disoriented within a Byzantine bureaucracy. in The Castle, K. is actually an equal actor in the nonsense. the world of the Castle and its functionaries may be new to him but he approaches it with an arrogance that makes his continual punishment seem to be the just deserts of an entitled tourist rather than the cruel outcome of implacable administrative authority. maybe the biggest misconception about Kafka's work is that it is possible to identify with it in an emotional, human way, when really it is a closed system which only the reader can find truly inscrutable.
Kafka's bleak imagination produced a world where no one lives a civilian life and everyone is a bureaucrat 24 hours a day. the stakes are impossibly petty and simultaneously totally overwhelming. the idea that K. might ever physically reach the Castle quickly evaporates. i naively thought that the lord of the Castle, Count Westwest, might be an important character at some point but he is mentioned by name exactly once; instead, all of the drama is based on K.’s scrabbling to establish meaningful contact with minor secretaries, or their secretaries, or their secretaries’ stewards, or their secretaries’ stewards’ servants, or… and the connections that K. does make are infinitely complicated and also completely unimportant. except for a few absurd sequences the novel is massive blocks of dialogue covering the most minute politicking imaginable. Kafka's style is perfectly attuned to his subject matter in that it is hideous and humorless. there is a magnetic quality that, against all odds, pulls the reader along well past the point when it becomes clear that nothing significant will develop. that The Castle breaks off mid-sentence is the only satisfying ending possible, I think. it is otherwise unendable.
Kafka's world and writing are bizarre and singular but that doesn't mean I can stand them. there is only room for one monumental, nightmarish, intentionally boring work of art in my heart and it already belongs to another (Twin Peaks: The Return). I'm glad I read this for cultural reasons and bafflingly I do think it will stick with me but all of the praise directed at it seems to entirely miss the point, which is precisely that it is expertly written to be the kind of thing no one should want to read. for a novel about a massive castle bureaucracy I much prefer the mystical Titus Groan.
Dream Telepathy: Experiments in Nocturnal ESP by Stanley Krippner, Montague Ullman
Did not finish book. Stopped at 0%.
Did not finish book. Stopped at 0%.
picked this up because I tend to like nonfiction about parapsychology but I realized while reading it that what I like about this genre is the interesting personal experiences of psychics, astral projectors, mediums, etc. and/or an engaging methodological approach to a pseudoscientific topic. despite the promising subject matter, Dream Telepathy offers neither. the anecdotal experiences are extremely tedious. the introductory chapters attempt to lend the subject of dream telepathy an air of credibility but fail utterly; it’s telling that many of the supposedly scientifically rigorous examples are taken from the lives of the authors themselves, colleagues from their work at the American Society of Psychical Research, their wives, etc. very boring AND bad science.
for examples of interesting personal experiences of parapsychological phenomena I recommend:
Astral Projection by Oliver Fox (a great book)
The Psychic World of Peter Hurkos by Norma Browning
Grasshopper Woman: Medium in Training by Laura Chase
for an example of a methodologically gripping study of paranormal experience I (highly) recommend:
The Terror That Comes in the Night: An Experience-Centered Study of Supernatural Assault Traditions by David J. Hufford
The Theatre and Its Double by Antonin Artaud
basically Artaud claims that theatre has been reduced to the exchange of dialogue, the tensions of which are mostly mundane and psychological, and that the capacity of theatre as a visual medium has been eclipsed by these tendencies. full disclosure: I am coming at The Theatre and Its Double from the perspective of a lay film theorist (hardly even deserving of that term; I just like movies) and that’s where I am most interested in applying it. I think it holds true for cinema and can only assume that it is in fact relevant to theatre. I am routinely disappointed by how low most movies aim. we have near-infinite possibility to depict and it is often squandered. the same subjects, the same shots, the same edits, the same performances, blah blah blah blah. sometimes though a movie like Resident Evil: Afterlife or So Close or Salomé comes along and reminds me what’s possible. breaks my heart all over again. he may be full of shit but Artaud’s right that we should be testing the limits rather than simply retreading the same ground over and over. let’s play to all our senses! let’s approach the mystical! and importantly let’s look everywhere but the “classics” and for everything but what we have already seen.
4.0
I propose something to get us out of the slump, instead of continuing to moan about it, about the boredom, dullness and stupidity of everything.
I disagree with a lot of Artaud’s big assumptions and vague imperatives. he believes that the theatre has lost something inherent and pure about it that can be recovered only through diligence and theoretical austerity. Artaud is also an Orientalist through and through, writing glowingly of Indonesian theater as though it is a pure, undiluted, “primal” theater from which the West can and should learn. note, too, his frequent use of the term “hieroglyphic” as an adjective describing physical stylization, a clear indication of his leanings. the essays collected here and the spirit of the Theatre of Cruelty rely heavily on a romanticized idea of what theatre is/can do, on the existence of a mythical theatrical Eden from which we in the West have been banished, and on the short-sighted refraction of Asian theatre through a Western lens in order to make it apprehensible for Western use.
there is one argument of Artaud’s that I like and I choose to believe it is the core of his manifesto. it is articulated best in Production and Metaphysics:
Given theatre as we see it here, one would imagine there was nothing more to know than whether we will have a good fuck, whether we will go to war or be cowardly enough to sue for peace, how we will put up with our petty moral anxieties, whether we will become conscious of our “complexes” (in scientific language) or whether our “complexes” will silence us.
basically Artaud claims that theatre has been reduced to the exchange of dialogue, the tensions of which are mostly mundane and psychological, and that the capacity of theatre as a visual medium has been eclipsed by these tendencies. full disclosure: I am coming at The Theatre and Its Double from the perspective of a lay film theorist (hardly even deserving of that term; I just like movies) and that’s where I am most interested in applying it. I think it holds true for cinema and can only assume that it is in fact relevant to theatre. I am routinely disappointed by how low most movies aim. we have near-infinite possibility to depict and it is often squandered. the same subjects, the same shots, the same edits, the same performances, blah blah blah blah. sometimes though a movie like Resident Evil: Afterlife or So Close or Salomé comes along and reminds me what’s possible. breaks my heart all over again. he may be full of shit but Artaud’s right that we should be testing the limits rather than simply retreading the same ground over and over. let’s play to all our senses! let’s approach the mystical! and importantly let’s look everywhere but the “classics” and for everything but what we have already seen.
The Dain Curse by Dashiell Hammett
2.0
this is certainly the weakest of Hammett’s novels. The Dain Curse doesn’t build to all-out havoc like Red Harvest, it lacks the honed wit and emotional sophistication of The Glass Key (Hammett’s best imo) and The Maltese Falcon, and at its most urbane it feels clammy next to The Thin Man. if you like Hammett you will find something to like about this book, but you will have to put up with a lot of sloppy plotting and boring characters.
Perhaps my least favorite part was the inconsistent narrative style; we get too much interiority into the Op and it blows the whole tone. Hammett is a master at first-person narratives where the protagonist's motivations are only revealed through dialogue and action, and not through internal monologues or reminiscence. it makes for subtle and compelling storytelling and complements the subject matter. this is the one novel of his where I can recall Hammett failing to maintain that style throughout. it would have been fine to pivot entirely, but the inconsistency was particularly ungratifying.
Perhaps my least favorite part was the inconsistent narrative style; we get too much interiority into the Op and it blows the whole tone. Hammett is a master at first-person narratives where the protagonist's motivations are only revealed through dialogue and action, and not through internal monologues or reminiscence. it makes for subtle and compelling storytelling and complements the subject matter. this is the one novel of his where I can recall Hammett failing to maintain that style throughout. it would have been fine to pivot entirely, but the inconsistency was particularly ungratifying.
Cailleach: The Hag of Beara by Leanne O'Sullivan
5.0
That was the story, how it was told, in the hundred fire-lit homes, the smuggling in of myth.
O’Sullivan uses poetry to work through her personal relationship to cultural/ethnic myth, an archetypal Celtic figure that is crucially important to the unconscious and especially so given the contemporary overvaluation of youth (itself a misperception of youth). hallowed and erotic.
O’Sullivan uses poetry to work through her personal relationship to cultural/ethnic myth, an archetypal Celtic figure that is crucially important to the unconscious and especially so given the contemporary overvaluation of youth (itself a misperception of youth). hallowed and erotic.
Red Dragon by Thomas Harris
4.5
There were no effective partitions in his mind. What he saw and learned touched everything else he knew. Some of the combinations were hard to live with.
a stunning work of procedural crime fiction that comes close to being mythological while mostly sidestepping the overblown Americana of, say, Stephen King. all the characters in Red Dragon are professionals, whether they’re killers, cops, scientists, or just darkroom techs. it speaks to Harris’ skill as a writer that it’s always believable, even with supposed super geniuses like Lecter on the page. he's fascinated with process; it feels like a Dashiell Hammett novel at times (high praise). it’s also significantly less sexist than expected (though of course it’s still highly male, all the men are called by their last names while the women are all known by their first names, etc.). the two women who do play a meaningful role are well-written, with internal lives and skills (especially Reba! queen).
one interesting idea that Harris articulates here is that serial killers, basically people engaged in carrying out extreme taboos, are prone to discovering that the limits of human autonomy are not as narrow as is popularly believed. it’s a basic existentialist realization (and not one you need to kill a bunch of women to arrive at) that can still make for cool characterization. I'm very excited to read the next one!
a stunning work of procedural crime fiction that comes close to being mythological while mostly sidestepping the overblown Americana of, say, Stephen King. all the characters in Red Dragon are professionals, whether they’re killers, cops, scientists, or just darkroom techs. it speaks to Harris’ skill as a writer that it’s always believable, even with supposed super geniuses like Lecter on the page. he's fascinated with process; it feels like a Dashiell Hammett novel at times (high praise). it’s also significantly less sexist than expected (though of course it’s still highly male, all the men are called by their last names while the women are all known by their first names, etc.). the two women who do play a meaningful role are well-written, with internal lives and skills (especially Reba! queen).
one interesting idea that Harris articulates here is that serial killers, basically people engaged in carrying out extreme taboos, are prone to discovering that the limits of human autonomy are not as narrow as is popularly believed. it’s a basic existentialist realization (and not one you need to kill a bunch of women to arrive at) that can still make for cool characterization. I'm very excited to read the next one!