10 posts tagged “books”
But then I realized that if someone were to replace my library with all brand-new books, I would be very sad. The wear on my books - as physical objects - holds their history and makes my relationship with their contents immediate and visceral. Many of my childhood books have bite marks on the spine, because I would hold them in my teeth while climbing up to read in a tree or on the roof. The books I carry when I travel get stained and frayed, and the damage tells a story. And I love secondhand books that have been marked up in pencil, because I can see what was important to the person who read it before me.
Su Blackwell's book-cut sculpture is beautifully crafted. In a way, it's very similar to receiving a marked-up copy of a book from a friend. Their particular interpretation of the text is privileged for your consideration, and you can re-evaluate your response to the work through the lens of their relationship.
It's like turning books into memories, I guess. I think Blackwell's work is stunning, and the little frisson of revulsion I feel at the sight of a damaged book makes it all the more interesting.
A pair of shredded wings spreads from the cover of Breton's Nadja, who was both an angel and a tiger, always unlike herself.
Charles Vildrac believed that art and intellect should stand apart from a utilitarian regard for worldly concerns - and now his book is unreadable, a purely aesthetic object.
Memoire sheds a mass of tatters, as messy and multilayered as a lifetime of impressions retained and recalled.
I love books not only for their contents, but also as physical objects. Whether considered as concept or as craft, this is just amazing.
I've lately been loving A Little White Shadow, by Mary Ruefle. She took a book by the same name, published in 1889, and strategically whited out swathes of the original text. What is left behind comprises poetry.
It's not quite the same as radi os, in which Ronald Johnson pruned a new text from the first four books of Paradise Lost. That was a single coherent piece, while A Little White Shadow is all bits and shards.
And it is not entirely like A Humument, which is more visual.
I was also reminded of John Clark's film noir-inspired mystery novel portraits, which you can buy by the page from his Etsy shop.
I don't read a lot of poetry - there are only so many hours in a day - so perhaps this seems more fresh and new to me than it does to readers who are less naive. But I've been loving it, so there it is.
Not long ago, on a rainy night, my car's back window was smashed in with a brick. Up and down the street, little cubes of safety glass lay glittering like a sky full of ersatz diamonds. It was brutal, unexpected and surprisingly beautiful - much like Yannick Murphy's novel Here They Come, published by McSweeney's earlier in the year.
Well, now. Murphy's gift for detailed and powerful imagery is undeniable. Her sentences and paragraphs are complex and deeply affecting. The plot - or seeming lack thereof - appears to be the point at which opinions of this book diverge."Yannick Murphy seems to lack the patience and craftmanship it takes to be a good novelist. Her writing is self-gratifying with no real respect for the craft."
I would argue that one's appreciation of Here They Come hinges on the slight difference between an Entwicklungsroman and a Bildungsroman. While Murphy's novel deals with the narrator's development and maturation, her growth is implicitly demonstrated rather than overtly emphasized. To explicitly show the arcs of plot and character development would be to shatter the lucid immediacy of the story and undermine the narrative voice.
Murphy's narration perfectly conveys the tone of adolescence without being a literal transcription of adolescent speech. She sounds like what we thought we sounded like, when we were thirteen and putting words down in our diaries. Both lyrical and deadpan, its freshness often scraped down to rawness, it captures the pathos of childhood's self-centered perspicacity.
In Here They Come, Murphy has done the near-impossible with deceptive alacrity. She has deftly manipulated the conventional elements of plot and storytelling in a way that is completely true to the narrator's way of seeing the world. Rather than lacking craftsmanship, this book is so precisely engineered that its structural supports are nearly invisible to the casual glance. In this sense, she has written a very subversive novel.
Here They Come is a brilliant, remarkable book, and I recommend it highly.
"Paper Losses," a new short story by Lorrie Moore, is up at the New Yorker.
There is a great deal of structure lurking within the dismembered verse and topsy-turvy typography. Danielewski selectively ignores certain rules of spelling, punctuation and grammar. At the same time, he adheres tightly to tenets of his own invention. The drop caps are significant, as are the number of words on each page and the narrators’ initials. It’s clear that the author took a lot of pleasure in creating this book. I’d suggest that exploring its construction is the most gratifying aspect Only Revolutions has to offer the reader.
Among other novelties, Danielewski assigns a date to each page and lists historical events in a sidebar. This serves not only to plunge his adolescent narrators backward and forward in time, but also to catch and engage the reader’s attention with familiar events. He constantly references animal and botanical names to similar effect. In Only Revolutions, Danielewski obscures a straightforward plot in postmodern costume, then invokes historical and natural references to bring the story back into a realm where readers can connect with it. I am always interested in the devices authors use to pin their stories to the real world.
Using callow narrators to justify shallow and insufferable writing is a trick of which I am not fond, and Danielewski proves disloyal to his talent by falling prey to this device. It would have been nice of him to spend more time developing his plot and characters. That this book was worth reading despite the many weaknesses of these core elements is a testament to the strength of Danielewski's creativity.
Sometimes, you want to suggest someone a book you know they’ll hate, because even the experience of hating it is worthwhile. As Only Revolutions is neither as captivating as Gertrude Stein nor as demanding as Finnegan’s Wake, I’d be extremely hesitant in giving it this sort of broad endorsement. Nevertheless, I would wholeheartedly recommend it to a select few, and conditionally suggest it to many others.
A few days ago, though, I stopped to peruse the offerings of a sidewalk bookseller.
“How much is this one?”
“Eleven dollars.”
“Aw, that’s too bad…you know, it’s only just fifteen on Amazon…”
“Here, I’ll tell you what. I’ve been dying for some decent coffee. If you run across to Starbucks and grab me a venti latte, I’ll give you the book.”
“Sweet! It’s a deal.”
And so I became the happy owner of Jennifer Egan’s latest.
I don’t feel like I am giving much away by revealing the tale-within-a-tale. Handled differently, multiple “escapes” through multilayered narratives could have built the meaning of the book through its structure alone. Here, though, Egan uses this particular device to explore the internal, subjective distinction between freedom and incarceration through the experiences of different individuals without succumbing to the perils of omniscience. She keeps the substance of her work closely tied to her characters, their environs and their own personal fictions.
The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves give us the freedom to engage and interact and simply survive within the world, but they are also inherently self-limiting. Danny buys a pair of hipster shoes in a trendy store and tells himself, “I’m the kind of guy who wears boots like these,” but their slick soles hamper his gait even on the city streets. Later in the story, they almost – but not quite – keep him from falling out of a window. Here and elsewhere, Egan's deft hand at metaphor shines through Ray's declarative writing-workshop style.
Following his defenestration and resulting head injury, Danny becomes progressively more unmoored from reality. His increasingly phantasmagorical experiences stand in contrast to the simultaneous rising action in Ray's story, in which the prison setting is bleak and all too real. As the stories alternate, the tension between them practically flips the pages on its own accord.
When Holly's story shifts to the fore, the pace changes as her narrative voice showcases Egan's elegant, lucid prose. Holly's experiences tangle with Ray's, leading to her arrest and humiliation during a strip search. She recounts, “At that point I sort of leave my body; I think, this isn’t me.” Her retreat into the keep of fiction is deeply poignant given the self-awareness surrounding this act. Ideally, the book would have ended there.
Whether the subsequent denoument was intended to tie up loose ends, or if it was Holly’s fiction of self-preservation, it really added very little to the story. This short and anticlimactic section merely attenuated the work as a whole. Honestly, I think Holly's character had a great deal of potential that could have been accomodated via more time on the page, but it should have been cut short to preserve the shape of book presented here.
I feel like I've rambled on here, thoughts in all directions. The Keep is just that kind of book, emotionally engaging and intellectually rewarding. It was definitely worth far more than the price of a venti latte.
The Booker shortlist has been announced; I haven't read any of these yet. It's nice to have something to anticipate.
This is a strange and lovely book.
It's a story that grows out of a collection of vignettes, about a father and daughter who leave Mexico for an agrarian town in southern California, where a street gang wages war against the omniscient eye of Saturn, who is actually the author, whose sad preoccupation with his ex-girlfriend and current lover has taken his attention away from the story. Sort of. Basically, I guess.
It's hard to describe this novel; it's much easier to say what it is not. Rather amazingly, I found it to be neither pretentious, nor precious, nor self-indulgent. The myriad fantastic elements - the mechanical tortoises with binary brains, the flower chewers, Baby Nostradamus, the saint in hiding as a Mexican wrestler, Merced de Papel herself - all circle tightly back into melancholy. This story is built out of clear sentences, many of them describing physical action and concrete sensations. I'm fascinated by the ways in which writers keep their readers invested in the reality of their imaginary landscapes.
Similarly, the structure and the content inform one another in a precise, almost ascetic way. It's a strange book, with narrow, topsy-turvy blocks of text, blacked-out patches, paragraphs fading from black to grey into oblivion, punched-out holes of an old love's new lover's name. I can only imagine that once one, as an author, gives oneself that kind of power over text, the temptation to abuse it must be tremendous. Plascensia deserves much credit for resisting.
Typographical innovation aside, I daresay we can all relate to melancholy and the bitterness of failed, imperfect love. As true-life emotions and experiences are folded into new shapes - creating this tremendously idiosyncratic, mythological landscape - the weirdness lifts them up out of the story into a place where the reader has to engage them within the idiosyncracy of his or her own experience.
This is a lovely, lovely book. Strange and lovely and brilliant.
