mmcloe's reviews
213 reviews

Astragal by Albertine Sarrazin

adventurous emotional funny hopeful reflective medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

Lovely micro-picaresque through a handful of the major Institutions of mid-century France (the prison, the hospital, the home, the workplace, oh my!) and how these institutions can shape our selfhood through direct contact and indirect hauntings. 

The language was slick and its quite a shame Sarrazin died so young - I could see her becoming a big hit

The Ruse of Repair: Us Neoliberal Empire and the Turn from Critique by Patricia Stuelke

I'm not completely convinced of Stuelke's binary opposition of repair and critique and I think there's space for the mingling of both towards something generative and destructive at the same time (Cruising Utopia is a good example of this, shame she doesn't cite it much). That being said, this was a needed intervention into a lot of scholarship that has become a little too reckless in its optimism and a little too accepting of the precarious conditions that created the need for repair.

Also, this was a stellar example of interesting American Studies work - I loved the diversity of sources, topics, and targets of critique towards the same goal. 

A Small Apocalypse by Laura Chow Reeve

adventurous dark emotional funny reflective medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

Really charming debut with many excellent stories written in breezy, slightly humid prose that captures a lot of the joys and sorrows and mundanities of community-building, especially amongst Southern queers 

I particularly enjoyed the circling entanglement around Rebecca's group of friends and her never resolved death. 

I was anticipating a bit more magical/speculative realism? The magic of the every day is good too, I suppose. 

I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman

mysterious reflective medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.75

There's a brand of French existentialism that positions the singular perceived "outsider" as being the central point of reflection on the human experience. We see it in Camus and Sartre all the time and we see it in this novel as well. Reducing an individual to the most absurd conditions possible can be really helpful for thinking through some of the major questions about what it means to be a human on this strange little rock. I don't know if Harpman tackles these issues super well - there's a major lack of any kind of conflict or struggle against anything other than boredom, which can be profound but mostly when coupled with other kinds of conflicts. The focus on the individual also eliminates much of the communal, the divine, and the ecological that makes existential thought so intriguing. 

I don't see this book doing much that Angela Carter or Ursula LeGuin can't do ten times over. That being said, this is technically the writings of a person only raised on astronautics books and intro existential literature, so maybe it is an accurate depiction.

Social Justice Pedagogies: Multidisciplinary Practices and Approaches by Katrina Sark

Went through a good chunk of the essays here - not quite as practical as I was hoping and the theory was more introductory than anything 

Oh What a Paradise It Seems by John Cheever

funny hopeful lighthearted fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

I'd be really intrigued to see this analyzed in depth alongside White Noise. Both came out around the same time and engage with parallel stories of environmental and suburban/social degradation. The major difference being one of age and artistic positioning: Delillo as younger hig  postmodernist, Cheever as an elder end-of-era modernist. The outlooks differ in the ultimate optimism and the acceptance of the possibility of human camaraderie, despite the perils of the late 20th century and the foibles of mankind (Cheever), whereas Dellilo's America is far too absorbed in signs and projections and irreality to ever suggest a redeemable America. 

This book felt a bit too disjointed - Cheever really is a short story writer at heart - but it was very funny and the prose was often gorgeous. 

Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo

adventurous challenging dark emotional mysterious reflective tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

This is the good stuff. I don't have many words because I'm so floored but it's incredible the ways that the past haunts us and the space we inhabit. Our brief kisses with power don't make it into the story but lord how they make it into our stories all the same.

Hallucinatory, delirious prose at its best. Would love to see this read alongside Amos Tutuola or Ishmael Reed.

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Content Warnings

Moderate: Rape and Death

Corey Fah Does Social Mobility by Isabel Waidner

adventurous challenging funny lighthearted mysterious medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

It's really easy to describe books like this as "acid trips" or "surreal nightmares" or whatever but it's honestly not any more baffling than the original Disney Bambi which is some of the most bizarre anthropomorphization of heterosexuality I've ever seen. I think this book does a good job at highlighting just how stupid so much of neoliberal capitalism and all of its social institutions can be. There's violence and exclusion, certainly, but also so much foolishness and distorted logic that the kind of landscape in this novel is often the only way to capture it. 

Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar

dark emotional funny mysterious medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Reminds me a lot of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow in that there were some shining moments in an overall dull package. 

One one end, Akbar has some truly beautiful moments of prose - Uncle Akash's segments, Cyrus' ending, the retelling of the Ferdowsi legend, to name a few. I also thought the discussion of death as a social and discursive process just as affected by the world as life was a meaningful and often novel intervention that I don't often see in fiction. 

On the other end: 

• Much of the prose was simply not very good, like it was written to be quoted for Booktok. References to the butterfly effect, Margaret Mead's theory of civilization, and others were directly cribbed from Tumblr/Twitter truisms. 
• The twist didn't land for me on a narrative or common sense level
• I don't think the interwoven polyphonic structure lended itself well to the content and many of the conceits that kept the structure going (bookofmartyr inserts, dream dialogues) felt underdeveloped and frequently abandoned. 
• A lot of the philosophizing felt like watered-down mid-century existentialism. 

A good debut, certainly! And I LOVED the cover. 

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Content Warnings

Moderate: Alcoholism, Addiction, Suicide, and Suicidal thoughts

Lysistrata by Aristophanes

funny informative fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

Lots of fun for a stupid weekend read, especially with the Picasao illustrations in my edition. 

Idk much about ancient Greek politics or social relations and I'm sure they don't map onto our current ones much at all but it's interesting to see how women can be depicted as leveraging some kind of social capital for political aims, even if it's depicted wholly as satire