mmcloe's reviews
235 reviews

The Third Hotel by Laura van den Berg

adventurous challenging dark 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

4.5

A strange, minor key of a novel that caught me off guard with how solid it was. An offhanded mention of the similarities between light fixtures and suicide got me thinking about the frailty of analogy and the odd little analogies the novel constructs. What similarities exist between movies, death, and travel? The Third Hotel limns a portrait in which all three dissolve barriers between our world and a haunting world. Movies haunt us with the future, death haunts us with the past, and travel haunts us with the somewhere-else; these hauntings force our own identities/identifications to buzz and morph, with the physical space we find ourselves in now being the medium for that change. All three at once? The only option is for the hauntings to materialize for us to confront directly. Will we join them or try to carve out something new? 

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

emotional mysterious reflective fast-paced

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

3.75

It was okay! Read like a higher-brow YA novel with half-decent meditations on the nature of personhood and the limits of modern science/medicine. I found the pacing and the prose to be underwhelming on all fronts and the final-pages dump of exposition completely undid any mystery. An unsatisfying novel - though perhaps the point? Will not be lingering in my thoughts long either way. 

The Names by Don DeLillo

adventurous challenging dark funny informative mysterious medium-paced

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

3.75

A minor, transitory, and often underwhelming entry in Delillo's oeuvre. Glittering in moments when prose flits through crowds or the smogged memory of temples. Capitalism rips the bottom out of labor; language can't catch up to the many wheels of capital and we're left some transcendent all-too-human discourse in worship or words or war.

The novel gasps to cohere but can't reach the escape velocity of the gravity it depicts. The gaps between the cults and meditations and geopolitics and half-forgotten little boys are too narrow - the novel collapses on itself. 

Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton

adventurous challenging dark funny informative mysterious tense fast-paced

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

4.0

A lot of fun to read in the moment! Haven't read a book this quickly in a while which testifies to the ease and rapidity of its prose and story structure (not inherently a good thing though). 

A few thoughts for such a expressly political novel: 

• Lemoine was simultaneously too interesting and too bland for a billionaire. Insanely wealthy people are, from what I've gathered, not straightforward James Bond villains but weirdo losers surrounded by way too many yes-men. I think this novel made the billionaire out to be a badass when, in reality, he would just be a libertarian doofus with like a collection of anime girl figures or something. 
• I think the novel smartly approached the tension between white settler "radicals," their efforts to shape and cultivate land, their drive for individual success, and the inherent problems with all of these things. I'm thinking through whether if the massive lack of Maori perspectives was an intentional exclusion to highlight the narrow-mindedness of the group or an illustration of the author's own blind spots. Much to consider! I definitely need to look into more Maori literature in general. 
• I think this would be better served as like an HBO series? I didn't get a major sense of this being expressly literary and many of the characters internal monologues were rather surface-level. The plotting and pacing and cliffhangers would be perfect for an episodic structure. The TV-ification of middlebrow literary fiction? 

I'm excited to discuss with my students! 

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Content Warnings

Moderate: Death

1666: A Novel by Lora Chilton

adventurous emotional hopeful informative inspiring reflective sad fast-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? No

In the vein of Hartman-esque critical fabulation, I think this novel did a decent job at illustrating the details of lives very rarely recorded. There's a humanity and kindness and dignity displayed towards these Indigenous women that is rare to see in any kind of media. I appreciated the citations at the end and the glossary of terms - a powerful testament to language following a story about the restriction and destruction of language. 

I thought the stylistic aspects could've been stronger at points. The prose was often rather dry and the storytelling a bit jerky. Excited to discuss this in my Quaker book club! 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Genocide, Slavery, Murder, and Colonisation

North Woods by Daniel Mason

emotional funny hopeful informative mysterious reflective fast-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? Yes

3.75

A novel that definitely had its good moments! Some of the prose was excellent; there were sections of skilled storytelling; the polyphonic and hypertextual structure is always a fun time. We love an exploration of place. 

Many problems, unfortunately:

• The entire framing was dreadfully narrow - a pity for a novel with such expansive aims. How can you possibly explore the history of human relationships to history and land while starting that history with white Puritans and only proceeding with white people from there? Why do plants and wampus cats and beetles get more humanity than Indigenous people or Black people? Where's the chapter about the enslaved woman seeking refuge in the house? 
• The hypertextual structure didn't always land how it should've, largely a result of undercommitment to the bit. All of the different texts were typeset identically and largely in the same stylistic voice. All of them were neatly separated from one another, even with some gente referencing. The pictures and diagrams were completely contextless; no captions, titles, provenance, anything. (This might be an unfair jab) you can tell a natural scientist wrote this and not a historian or other kind of humanist - there's a disinterest in texts as objects that's disappointing. 

I would recommend something like Lote, Savage Theories, or The Rabbit Hutch for novels doing what Mason is trying here a bit more successfully. 

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Content Warnings

Moderate: Death, Gore, Slavery, Suicide, Medical trauma, and Schizophrenia/Psychosis

The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño

adventurous challenging dark emotional funny informative mysterious reflective slow-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

4.75

It took me like 2 months to read but goddammit Bolaño strikes again. Like 2666, this absolutely DRAGS in the massive center section, only to be completely unfolded, refolded, and folded into a new dimension by the outer sections.

This is a novel that teaches you how to read it. The hunt for Caeseria - combing through archives, talking to half-demented bar patrons and landowners, avoiding murderous pimps, writing mediocre poetry - mirrors the hunt for Lima Belano that the center lays before us like a little chess board. It's a faux archive tangled with real archives of the forgotten avant-garde of Mexico City and the savage detectives, the what's-outside-the-windows is us, the readers, playing Bolaño's archive game however we choose to. 

Imagining a fun little novella framed as an edited anthology of contemporary literary scholars writing increasingly delirious analyses of Lima and Belano based on the testimonies of this book. 

The Fisherman by John Langan

dark mysterious fast-paced

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

3.25

I think it had its strong moments and there were some meditations on loss and community history and the built environment that were interesting. Reasonably spooky and mysterious at times. I think the tremendous tangent in the middle really threw the novel off-kilter and a lot of the scenes where the plot showed its hand (i.e. the monster) didn't live up to their exposition.

I'm not too well-versed in horror as a literary form so I'm interested to continue exploring. 

Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner

adventurous dark funny reflective medium-paced

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

4.25

My first Kushner! On the whole I thought it was good - it mostly read like an extended Pynchon side plot, not a bad thing. 

A novel concerned with human imposition of meaning onto dark, hollow worlds - whether they be surveillance capitalism, agribusiness, or underground cave networks - and the rot, revolution, or retreat that effort to impose can manifest. The narrator was insufferable (and intentionally so) and I enjoyed the ways ideology seduced her in different directions. Few of the characters ideas seduced me, unfortunately. No small product of the mouths that spoke them. 

The Skating Rink by Roberto Bolaño

challenging dark funny mysterious reflective medium-paced

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

3.75

Interesting to see Bolano's first novel to emphasize his maturation to his later work. This had a few excellent moments, especially towards the end, that really highlight his prose skills and his knack for limning out the dialectic between desire and violence. 

I don't think the tone of his different characters was differentiated enough and his prose got a little too purple at moments. Still, a solid first novel of someone with many excellent later novels.