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screen_memory's Reviews (234)
This book has further solidified my reasoning for maintaining a strict measure of distance between the artist and their art--emphasizing the latter well above the former. Tsypkin deals heavily with Dostoevsky's gambling and marital issues in this novel, dealing only very lightly with other more widely discussed peculiarities of his, e.g. his seizures, his penal servitude, his separation from the more noble and higher-class authors of his time (Goncharov, Turgenev, etc.)
Certain emotional, psychological, historical, and other person and extant factors are important when considering an artist's work, but I personally like to deal with such considerations from a safe distance because it seems quite often that I dislike or downright despise an artist I love as an individual once I learn the more minute aspects of their lives, or how they are as people. Egon Schiele is a wonderful artist, but my God did he seem like a fucking baby. Dostoevsky is no doubt one of the world's greatest novelists, but what a miserable and insufferable son of a bitch. I found myself getting angry reading about him returning home to ask his wife for money or to pawn more of her jewelry or clothes for money time and again to gamble away so he could try and win what he had lost.
On this topic, is it any surprise when the public finds out what an asshole or what a scumbag an artist is? I take them all to be guilty until proven innocent in that regard, and, anyway, I don't see the artist as integral to their art. Rather, I see their art as existing other to the artist. It is a multifarious fracturing and fragmenting of the self, their world and their experience. I don't need to like Dostoevsky as a person to adore his works. He sounds like a total shitbag, and seemed to have often treated his wife poorly, but his novels will always be canonical. This was an interesting read, of course, and Tsypkin seems to have done an extraordinary amount of research into the minutiae of Dostoevsky's life, but this novel is another exhibit in the case of art v. artist; of why the two must exist with some considerable distance from one another.
Certain emotional, psychological, historical, and other person and extant factors are important when considering an artist's work, but I personally like to deal with such considerations from a safe distance because it seems quite often that I dislike or downright despise an artist I love as an individual once I learn the more minute aspects of their lives, or how they are as people. Egon Schiele is a wonderful artist, but my God did he seem like a fucking baby. Dostoevsky is no doubt one of the world's greatest novelists, but what a miserable and insufferable son of a bitch. I found myself getting angry reading about him returning home to ask his wife for money or to pawn more of her jewelry or clothes for money time and again to gamble away so he could try and win what he had lost.
On this topic, is it any surprise when the public finds out what an asshole or what a scumbag an artist is? I take them all to be guilty until proven innocent in that regard, and, anyway, I don't see the artist as integral to their art. Rather, I see their art as existing other to the artist. It is a multifarious fracturing and fragmenting of the self, their world and their experience. I don't need to like Dostoevsky as a person to adore his works. He sounds like a total shitbag, and seemed to have often treated his wife poorly, but his novels will always be canonical. This was an interesting read, of course, and Tsypkin seems to have done an extraordinary amount of research into the minutiae of Dostoevsky's life, but this novel is another exhibit in the case of art v. artist; of why the two must exist with some considerable distance from one another.
I wasn't too impressed with this one, but I'll cut Chejfec some slack because The Dark was great, and authors don't always have the good fortune to write an unbelievable first novel, or one with all of the elements--some either budding or fully bloomed--of the style they became known for with their later works.
Chejfec has a way of detailing the mind as it operates in the midst of the body's wandering through the world, processing all available sensory data, turning to contemplating ideas that come to mind from their sight, proceeding on toward memories recollected during the body's wandering, considering what those they pass might be saying or thinking about them as they slowly wander ever closer.
The prose is delicate and ethereal. One wonders whether it is the world, its environs, its people, or the conscious wanderer who is so alienated, and from what--the world itself? One's own inner experience? Is the narrator's alienation our own? The plot is terribly minimal, but perhaps it is the archetypal experience of wandering the planet and navigating our lives and feeling so incredibly alone and alienated from everything one encounters or the memories one recollects that is of value here.
Chejfec has a way of detailing the mind as it operates in the midst of the body's wandering through the world, processing all available sensory data, turning to contemplating ideas that come to mind from their sight, proceeding on toward memories recollected during the body's wandering, considering what those they pass might be saying or thinking about them as they slowly wander ever closer.
The prose is delicate and ethereal. One wonders whether it is the world, its environs, its people, or the conscious wanderer who is so alienated, and from what--the world itself? One's own inner experience? Is the narrator's alienation our own? The plot is terribly minimal, but perhaps it is the archetypal experience of wandering the planet and navigating our lives and feeling so incredibly alone and alienated from everything one encounters or the memories one recollects that is of value here.
I've been contending with the idea that we as author, as speaker or writer, are incapable of offering ideas all our own, that, instead, our every word is but a thread borrowed or pulled loose from the unfathomably vast patchwork of reference - subconscious or overt - that we have been weaving all our lives. Ugresic's Fox is a novel - and here "novel", as with her Museum, exists not as indicative of narrative and structural limits, but as the delineation of the open territory spanning across where borders once stood - that embraces this idea in its opening, entitled, "A Story about How Stories Come to be Written."
Such an idea is directly influenced by Boris Pilnyak, a lesser-known Soviet author, certain of whose autobiographical details are presented in one of the book's chapters. Other Soviet writers are detailed, most of whom, if not all, will be unrecognizable to the reader. Vladimir Nabokov and his wife, Vera, also figure into the novel, although the narrative focuses on Dorothy Leuthold, the woman who drove them across the country and accompanied the Nabokovs on the lepidopteral outing where Vladimir chanced upon an undiscovered species of butterfly (the Neonympha dorothea dorothea).
For Ugresic, the stories about how stories come to be written centers on those on the margins, the lesser-known's, or the completely unknown (one gets the feeling Ugresic feels herself to be such a lesser-known; such is often the fate of the exile whose works are banned or burned in their native country whose new regime has turned against them). One of the more prominent figures in her stories is Bojan, a Croatian who was living in a property Ugresic inherited from a fan of her works - a man she's never known or heard of. Bojan is a de-miner, working with a squad of people tasked with ridding the Croatian landscape of the thousands of landmines still strewn about decades after the war. Imagine, a cozy, calm house in the Croatian countryside, surrounded on all sides by landmines - all of which have been documented and marked, Bojan explains, the same Bojan who is later killed by an unmarked landmine.
Having learned of the tragic, ironic, and perhaps secretly expected death of Bojan, Ugresic, now infinitely more uncertain of the surrounding landscape, opines, "The world is a minefield and that's the only home there is."
Such an idea is directly influenced by Boris Pilnyak, a lesser-known Soviet author, certain of whose autobiographical details are presented in one of the book's chapters. Other Soviet writers are detailed, most of whom, if not all, will be unrecognizable to the reader. Vladimir Nabokov and his wife, Vera, also figure into the novel, although the narrative focuses on Dorothy Leuthold, the woman who drove them across the country and accompanied the Nabokovs on the lepidopteral outing where Vladimir chanced upon an undiscovered species of butterfly (the Neonympha dorothea dorothea).
For Ugresic, the stories about how stories come to be written centers on those on the margins, the lesser-known's, or the completely unknown (one gets the feeling Ugresic feels herself to be such a lesser-known; such is often the fate of the exile whose works are banned or burned in their native country whose new regime has turned against them). One of the more prominent figures in her stories is Bojan, a Croatian who was living in a property Ugresic inherited from a fan of her works - a man she's never known or heard of. Bojan is a de-miner, working with a squad of people tasked with ridding the Croatian landscape of the thousands of landmines still strewn about decades after the war. Imagine, a cozy, calm house in the Croatian countryside, surrounded on all sides by landmines - all of which have been documented and marked, Bojan explains, the same Bojan who is later killed by an unmarked landmine.
Having learned of the tragic, ironic, and perhaps secretly expected death of Bojan, Ugresic, now infinitely more uncertain of the surrounding landscape, opines, "The world is a minefield and that's the only home there is."
The major theme of Moravia's Boredom should need no introduction. The former artist, Dino, defines his boredom as a lack of relation to external things. He claims to have grown bored of his mother and the almost unconditional funds she offers him. He's grown bored of painting, bored of his studio, of his expensive sports car, and he grows immediately bored of his love interest, Cecilia, the former muse of a recently deceased artist whose nude portraiture consisted solely of portraits of Cecilia.
The irony of Dino's boredom, or perhaps the paradox of it all, is that Dino, despite his apparent loss of relation to and interest in certain things, pursues certain of them obsessively. Embarking from the initial delusion of discovering whether or not Cecilia truly loves him, he pursues her as a lover only so that he might grow bored of her after being assured of her love. Further delusions follow from then on: Dino relentlessly stalks Cecilia to confirm whether or not his suspicions of her infidelity are true; he funnels all of the money he receives from his mother into Cecilia's hands after their lovemaking to see if she is as venal as he suspects; he seeks her hand in marriage so that, with the ultimate symbolic affirmation of their love finally won, he might finally grow bored of her.
Dino's boredom is a nauseating sickness characterized by a seemingly fevered desire to regain his relation to external things. He interrogates his mother and Cecilia on separate occasions, seeking a greater understanding of their interior emotional world. Dino's boredom is perhaps nothing like a lack of relation to external things, but rather an obsessive fascination with them, a fascination that cannot be satisfied, moving him to recognize .
It is Cecilia who is truly bored and fails to recognize her total boredom precisely because of her boredom.
She is the muse of all men who she is or has been involved with, all of whom have spent fortunes on her, fortunes she gives away to other lovers, fortunes that might have aided her disabled father and her poor mother in moving out of their austere flat. She has no apparent interest in anything, and she responds to each of Dino's questions with her essentialist tautology: this is this, that is that - "What kind of room?" Dino might ask. "A room with a table, chairs, those sorts of things," she might say. She sees no importance in anything, nor does she see the importance of remembering anything.
She loves Dino for reasons she both cannot describe and doesn't care to describe. She recollects episodes of her past life with no details, no reference to anything, and is only forced to account for her past in her own peculiar way - informed by little to no relation to or recollection of anything - during Dino's recurrent interrogations. Cecilia is bored with her life to the utmost limits of boredom, while Dino fails to realize that he is nauseatingly bound to the things he claims to have resigned from. For fans of more psychological literature.
The irony of Dino's boredom, or perhaps the paradox of it all, is that Dino, despite his apparent loss of relation to and interest in certain things, pursues certain of them obsessively. Embarking from the initial delusion of discovering whether or not Cecilia truly loves him, he pursues her as a lover only so that he might grow bored of her after being assured of her love. Further delusions follow from then on: Dino relentlessly stalks Cecilia to confirm whether or not his suspicions of her infidelity are true; he funnels all of the money he receives from his mother into Cecilia's hands after their lovemaking to see if she is as venal as he suspects; he seeks her hand in marriage so that, with the ultimate symbolic affirmation of their love finally won, he might finally grow bored of her.
Dino's boredom is a nauseating sickness characterized by a seemingly fevered desire to regain his relation to external things. He interrogates his mother and Cecilia on separate occasions, seeking a greater understanding of their interior emotional world. Dino's boredom is perhaps nothing like a lack of relation to external things, but rather an obsessive fascination with them, a fascination that cannot be satisfied, moving him to recognize .
It is Cecilia who is truly bored and fails to recognize her total boredom precisely because of her boredom.
She is the muse of all men who she is or has been involved with, all of whom have spent fortunes on her, fortunes she gives away to other lovers, fortunes that might have aided her disabled father and her poor mother in moving out of their austere flat. She has no apparent interest in anything, and she responds to each of Dino's questions with her essentialist tautology: this is this, that is that - "What kind of room?" Dino might ask. "A room with a table, chairs, those sorts of things," she might say. She sees no importance in anything, nor does she see the importance of remembering anything.
She loves Dino for reasons she both cannot describe and doesn't care to describe. She recollects episodes of her past life with no details, no reference to anything, and is only forced to account for her past in her own peculiar way - informed by little to no relation to or recollection of anything - during Dino's recurrent interrogations. Cecilia is bored with her life to the utmost limits of boredom, while Dino fails to realize that he is nauseatingly bound to the things he claims to have resigned from. For fans of more psychological literature.
At home in Pasolini's lyrical voice - and often in bed with one another - are both the sacred and the profane (watch Pasolini's Salo to witness this styling manifested in film).
Such beauty and filth emanate and ooze from his verse; such touching and rapturous lyricism (in tribute to the working poor, to the Catholicism of his native Italy, to his love for his mother, to poetry and art themselves).
Pasolini is an auteur in a filmic, poetic, and literary sense; an artist in every sense of the word. His poetry is not confined to the boundaries of language as it is written, but manifested in words as they are spoken, in bodies in motion in film, in the petty crimes of the poor in his stories and movies, and so on. I mean, my God, Pasolini is perhaps one of the very precious few who could produce a work of art consisting of its subjects being abused, tortured, murdered, sodomized, forced to eat and drink bodily waste that could be widely hailed, despite it all, as BEAUTIFUL.
All hail Saint Pasolini.
Such beauty and filth emanate and ooze from his verse; such touching and rapturous lyricism (in tribute to the working poor, to the Catholicism of his native Italy, to his love for his mother, to poetry and art themselves).
Pasolini is an auteur in a filmic, poetic, and literary sense; an artist in every sense of the word. His poetry is not confined to the boundaries of language as it is written, but manifested in words as they are spoken, in bodies in motion in film, in the petty crimes of the poor in his stories and movies, and so on. I mean, my God, Pasolini is perhaps one of the very precious few who could produce a work of art consisting of its subjects being abused, tortured, murdered, sodomized, forced to eat and drink bodily waste that could be widely hailed, despite it all, as BEAUTIFUL.
All hail Saint Pasolini.
Goytisolo's what-have-you, Juan the Landless, is more of an anti-novel; there are no definite characters; there are sudden shifts in perspective, focus, and subject; occasional breakdowns in language.
The thing is, this (anti-)novel is seething with detestation for his native Spain, whose civil war not only led to senseless bloodshed en masse, but whose bombs took his mother's life. Spain was a country of brutal colonizers, of Christians who burned heretics at the stake, a country that took up arms against itself, murdering its own people.
The informality of the writing - there isn't a period to be found, meaning perhaps that the book consists of a single unbroken sentence which explains the lack of capitalization - is a sign of marked disrespect for his native language. He internalizes his mother tongue, ingests its vitriol, absorbs its spirit of violent history, and spews it back onto the country he despises, seething with racial slurs, hatred for the Africans they kept as slaves, violence toward the heretics the Spaniards burned at the stake, et. al. No hateful epithet, of course, is meant to be understood as Goytisolo's own. They are the historical concentrate of Spain's own hatred; internalized, sharpened, and thrown back in its face.
The final pages of the book is a sort of apologia of his literary methods, beginning with a panel of critics serving as a sort of meta-critique of the book's lack of characters, the absence of a single unified voice, and the fact that the book is markedly empty of nearly all of the components that are characteristic of a novel.
Finally, the bomb that Goytisolo was building throughout the course of the book explodes at the very end, leading to the absolute combustion of his language; his words smolder and melt, turning more and more into an incomprehensible, garbled mess, bearing little resemblance to the language that once stood in its place until, at long last, the facade goes up in smoke, the infrastructure collapses. What is left standing is the stolid substructure of the Arabic language belonging to his adopted homeland of Marrakech, Morocco which he lived in for 25 years after living in Spain.
The thing is, this (anti-)novel is seething with detestation for his native Spain, whose civil war not only led to senseless bloodshed en masse, but whose bombs took his mother's life. Spain was a country of brutal colonizers, of Christians who burned heretics at the stake, a country that took up arms against itself, murdering its own people.
The informality of the writing - there isn't a period to be found, meaning perhaps that the book consists of a single unbroken sentence which explains the lack of capitalization - is a sign of marked disrespect for his native language. He internalizes his mother tongue, ingests its vitriol, absorbs its spirit of violent history, and spews it back onto the country he despises, seething with racial slurs, hatred for the Africans they kept as slaves, violence toward the heretics the Spaniards burned at the stake, et. al. No hateful epithet, of course, is meant to be understood as Goytisolo's own. They are the historical concentrate of Spain's own hatred; internalized, sharpened, and thrown back in its face.
The final pages of the book is a sort of apologia of his literary methods, beginning with a panel of critics serving as a sort of meta-critique of the book's lack of characters, the absence of a single unified voice, and the fact that the book is markedly empty of nearly all of the components that are characteristic of a novel.
Finally, the bomb that Goytisolo was building throughout the course of the book explodes at the very end, leading to the absolute combustion of his language; his words smolder and melt, turning more and more into an incomprehensible, garbled mess, bearing little resemblance to the language that once stood in its place until, at long last, the facade goes up in smoke, the infrastructure collapses. What is left standing is the stolid substructure of the Arabic language belonging to his adopted homeland of Marrakech, Morocco which he lived in for 25 years after living in Spain.
This is the first I've read of Chejfec, and with any luck I'll be reading more of him soon. This is an interesting novel - there is not a single line of dialogue and there is very little characterization between the few characters.
The prose casts a sweeping shadow over all things in the novel. All potential for action hesitates on the border of its realization. Thoughts often wander into the darkness of the mind into abstraction. The main character's reflections on his ex Delia betrays a vague pretense of a person - she is all abstraction, she is barely there, barely real. It is only industry that makes her real, her labor in the factory and the machines that vibrate with technical purpose that reveal any trace of humanity in Delia. Even the child she is pregnant with exists as nothing more than a vague promise, perhaps a threat, that will linger as well on the safer side of the border of possibility, never to be realized, never to be born.
I usually dislike novels that skimp on characterization or present a feeble pretense of purpose or resolution (see my post on Dennis Cooper's My Loose Thread), but Chejfec presents the absence of these things in a way that is all too real and relatable; it is the reader's own melancholy and sadness that underscores what is left unsaid, what is left in the dark.
The sparseness and the delicacy of the prose perfectly illustrates in only the bleakest grayscale a portrait of two disparate subjects who seem infinitely distant, who, despite their earlier intimacy, remain isolated from one another, each unto their own lonely corner of the world (indeed, Delia is only watched through a window or a fence or seen in memories).
I only remember there being two mentions of light sources in the book, yet the light they provide is purposed only to cast a shadow. Neither is there any sense of movement afforded from the disaffecting prose. Rather, any movement implied seems to occur as one might imagine viewing a stock-motion video - each movement itself mirroring stillness in its portraitesque passage.
As a final point, the narrator often speaks of having read multiple novels relating to a particular thought or idea. There is no certainty in his knowledge, only the recollection of some varying number of novels that have addressed the same idea presented, a sort of x-number-of-authors-can't-be-wrong assurance in his secondhand wisdom.
The prose casts a sweeping shadow over all things in the novel. All potential for action hesitates on the border of its realization. Thoughts often wander into the darkness of the mind into abstraction. The main character's reflections on his ex Delia betrays a vague pretense of a person - she is all abstraction, she is barely there, barely real. It is only industry that makes her real, her labor in the factory and the machines that vibrate with technical purpose that reveal any trace of humanity in Delia. Even the child she is pregnant with exists as nothing more than a vague promise, perhaps a threat, that will linger as well on the safer side of the border of possibility, never to be realized, never to be born.
I usually dislike novels that skimp on characterization or present a feeble pretense of purpose or resolution (see my post on Dennis Cooper's My Loose Thread), but Chejfec presents the absence of these things in a way that is all too real and relatable; it is the reader's own melancholy and sadness that underscores what is left unsaid, what is left in the dark.
The sparseness and the delicacy of the prose perfectly illustrates in only the bleakest grayscale a portrait of two disparate subjects who seem infinitely distant, who, despite their earlier intimacy, remain isolated from one another, each unto their own lonely corner of the world (indeed, Delia is only watched through a window or a fence or seen in memories).
I only remember there being two mentions of light sources in the book, yet the light they provide is purposed only to cast a shadow. Neither is there any sense of movement afforded from the disaffecting prose. Rather, any movement implied seems to occur as one might imagine viewing a stock-motion video - each movement itself mirroring stillness in its portraitesque passage.
As a final point, the narrator often speaks of having read multiple novels relating to a particular thought or idea. There is no certainty in his knowledge, only the recollection of some varying number of novels that have addressed the same idea presented, a sort of x-number-of-authors-can't-be-wrong assurance in his secondhand wisdom.
The subtitle for this book is A Text On the Most Important Things in Life; a rather cheeky one since the principal character is incapable of earning the most-important-thing that he's after: a night in bed with just one of twenty-two girls.
Danny Smiricky, a young saxophonist and student, ambles through numerous aborted attempts to bed one of six women the novel focuses on, each of whom either refuse his advances outright (his reputation as a skirt-chaser precedes him), except for two young sisters whose "spiritual sadist" of a father foils each of Danny's attempts to bed one of them.
The schemes Smiricky designs to be alone with these women all lead to situations that are absurd and border on utter farce - The swapping-places of two sisters who are similarly dressed with differences only in smaller details leads Danny to believe he is courting a witch who can change her clothes and erase a tell-tale hickey from her neck by sheer force of will. Smiricky's explanation to an upset father that he was only helping her daughter with her math homework leads to a grueling, hours-long series of solving equations written by the father to test Danny's mathematical knowledge which he labors over until midnight.
The novel takes place in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, characterizing the setting as one of frustrated desires and aborted dreams; one in which only failure and, come the novel's conclusion, tragedy can occur.
Danny Smiricky, a young saxophonist and student, ambles through numerous aborted attempts to bed one of six women the novel focuses on, each of whom either refuse his advances outright (his reputation as a skirt-chaser precedes him), except for two young sisters whose "spiritual sadist" of a father foils each of Danny's attempts to bed one of them.
The schemes Smiricky designs to be alone with these women all lead to situations that are absurd and border on utter farce - The swapping-places of two sisters who are similarly dressed with differences only in smaller details leads Danny to believe he is courting a witch who can change her clothes and erase a tell-tale hickey from her neck by sheer force of will. Smiricky's explanation to an upset father that he was only helping her daughter with her math homework leads to a grueling, hours-long series of solving equations written by the father to test Danny's mathematical knowledge which he labors over until midnight.
The novel takes place in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, characterizing the setting as one of frustrated desires and aborted dreams; one in which only failure and, come the novel's conclusion, tragedy can occur.
This book SUCKS! This is easily one of the WORST books I've read in a long time which is a bummer because I've been meaning to read this fkn guy for a while, but, good Lord, this book was so underwhelming.
Hey, Dennis Cooper fans, is he always this bad? I'll probably still give Closer a shot, but my expectations have been absolutely decimated and that book has since plummeted to the bottom of my to-read list.
I see this dude mentioned by the same circles that frik with Guyotat, Genet, Sotos, de Sade, Mishima - all those weirdos - so I had high hopes for this book, but, man, the characters in this book are so flat, and the writing was just awful that I couldn't enjoy it at all.
The story seems interesting enough on its own - a neglected child struggling with questions of his own sexuality, his murder of an ex-friend, and his sexual relationship with his 13 year-old brother has been hired to kill another student and destroy his journal - but nothing is explored with any sort of depth or attention. For a story dealing with certain sexual issues, one would like assume there to be some sort of, ahem, deeper penetration into them, but no attempt at exactitude or even the most cursory analysis/investigation into certain characters' thoughts or motives is seen.
For example, we merely know his mother's an alcoholic because she appears twice in the book, once when incapacitated and unconscious on his return home, and another during an underwhelming scene following his attempted murder of his brother. The ending, too, was so comically underwhelming. It was a school shooting that comes out of nowhere. I started laughing once I finished the book the way a bully laughs at the kid they pick on when he does something stupid. I didn't have a damn clue why it happened or what the killer's motivation was. Everything just kind of happens in this book for it's own sake.
This book was so shallow and sparse and boring. I felt like I was reading some edgy young adult novel due to how sophomoric and plain the prose was. But I've prattled on enough. Basically, the book sucks. Alright...see ya.
Hey, Dennis Cooper fans, is he always this bad? I'll probably still give Closer a shot, but my expectations have been absolutely decimated and that book has since plummeted to the bottom of my to-read list.
I see this dude mentioned by the same circles that frik with Guyotat, Genet, Sotos, de Sade, Mishima - all those weirdos - so I had high hopes for this book, but, man, the characters in this book are so flat, and the writing was just awful that I couldn't enjoy it at all.
The story seems interesting enough on its own - a neglected child struggling with questions of his own sexuality, his murder of an ex-friend, and his sexual relationship with his 13 year-old brother has been hired to kill another student and destroy his journal - but nothing is explored with any sort of depth or attention. For a story dealing with certain sexual issues, one would like assume there to be some sort of, ahem, deeper penetration into them, but no attempt at exactitude or even the most cursory analysis/investigation into certain characters' thoughts or motives is seen.
For example, we merely know his mother's an alcoholic because she appears twice in the book, once when incapacitated and unconscious on his return home, and another during an underwhelming scene following his attempted murder of his brother. The ending, too, was so comically underwhelming. It was a school shooting that comes out of nowhere. I started laughing once I finished the book the way a bully laughs at the kid they pick on when he does something stupid. I didn't have a damn clue why it happened or what the killer's motivation was. Everything just kind of happens in this book for it's own sake.
This book was so shallow and sparse and boring. I felt like I was reading some edgy young adult novel due to how sophomoric and plain the prose was. But I've prattled on enough. Basically, the book sucks. Alright...see ya.
I'm largely disinterested in short stories even by authors that I love, yet I still took a chance on Lustig's Night and Hope even after having never read him before (bought this and Darkness together).
I was surprised by how much I enjoyed reading each story, and what I thought particularly interesting was the exploration into the lives of a character who made only a brief and minor appearance in a previous story.
The most touching was the second, Rose Street, which tells the story of a Jewish store owner who is continually harassed by Nazi officers. One of the officers, fraught with guilt, returns to her store, much to the woman's fright, and leaves her a bizarre gift as a token of his apologies before making his exit in silence.
“For forgetfulness, he thought, was the burying place of human folly in which all words and deeds were interred."
I was surprised by how much I enjoyed reading each story, and what I thought particularly interesting was the exploration into the lives of a character who made only a brief and minor appearance in a previous story.
The most touching was the second, Rose Street, which tells the story of a Jewish store owner who is continually harassed by Nazi officers. One of the officers, fraught with guilt, returns to her store, much to the woman's fright, and leaves her a bizarre gift as a token of his apologies before making his exit in silence.
“For forgetfulness, he thought, was the burying place of human folly in which all words and deeds were interred."