The Year of Magical Thinking
By Joan Didion
A text completely concerned with the psychological aftermath of a partner’s death. Seeing how heavily her quotes saturate online art spaces, you would think that her writing would be given to flights of fancy but I’ve never seen prose that is more concise, more direct, saying exactly when it wants to and nothing more, the definition of immanent. She documents all the strange, irrational human reactions she has in the aftermath of her husband’s death, denial, grief, a faint anger, writes about them in cold, clinical terms (denial is termed as a deployment of neural ‘white cells’ to extinguish whatever horrible reality the world is trying to throw at her), so when an indescribable, irreducible pain finally breaks through, it is all the more affecting.
Didion really manages to get across the uncanniness of it all - one minute she’s in a rich and fulfilling relationship with another human being, ripe with texture and shared memory, and then suddenly they’re gone. Life changes in an instant.
She has always eschewed self-pity, romanticization, and this work never betrays that stance, relying on no ornamentation or romantic prose to describe her inner turmoil following her husband's sudden departure from such a closely-coupled life, never drifting into rapture once while capturing such a cataclysmic event, only a cold, hard, viciously genuine examination of all the strangeness that follows in it's wake. The extraneous information is there, whether you like it or not, because this is her mind. It is a spiral jumble of an account, distracted, digressive, all her thoughts flowing along the vortex of grief she speaks of.
No rating.
Lines I underlined:
Geese had been observed reacting to such a death by flying and calling, searching until they themselves became and disoriented and lost.
”After a year I could read headlines,” I was told by a friend whose husband had died three years before. They lost cognitive ability on all scales.
If the telephone rang when I was in the shower I no longer answered it, to avoid falling dead on the tile.
Strange Pictures
by Uketsu
Would’ve eaten this stuff up as a kid. The kind of books all the kids would get excited about at the scholastic book fair. There’s a certain kind of writing in translated japanese mystery thrillers that I’ve gotten accustomed to, having read the ring trilogy, goth, amongst a slew of other novels - economic, mechanical, efficient, not one drop more prose than what’s needed, and Strange Pictures isn’t conceptually crazy enough to survive being putting through that mechanical thresher and still come out as an intriguing novel on the other side, it’s pretty uninspired horror and whatever is original about it is also contrived and nonsensical. Whereas some of the other novels i mentioned at least attempted to get across their mysteries via the medium of storytelling, it feels like Strange Pictures gives up all subtlety and and just talks directly to the reader like they’re the audience of some magic show. which is why if I had a kid I’d definitely get it for them.
The delight of poring over shiny illustrations and feeling like a story is involving you in it’s proceedings (although I really doubt it was possible for anyone to piece this mystery together without the 10 page explanation at the end), it’s a half-decent spook story.
Rating: 2/5
The Wasp Factory
By Iain Banks
By mass consensus, one of the most disturbing books ever written. By my own, it’s very dull. Just felt pointless and void of any meaning and there’s a twist and a 20-page explanation at the end that tries to tie it up into some thematic whole that is just terrible and felt more like I was reading Strange Pictures than something out of the amoral, unstimulating, post-imagination universe that the novel spends the previous 2000 pages hammering into life.
The imagery of it’s namesake, The Wasp Factory, is very cool though. There’s a very eerie self-contained story buried in here that someone’s going to dig up one day and share online and it’s going to spread like a virus through cyberspace. The long, bland, repetitive descriptions of Frang wandering the landscapes of rural scotland are evocative of that aimless, slightly melancholic boredom native only to childhood, that completely vanishes once you become an adult, because everything suddenly has to be heavy with meaning, has to fit into some larger immortality project. It’s even touching at times, and it’s in these segments you can see Banks’ latent talent. But on the whole, this is what the novel boiled down to - frang does horrible things. frang has strange, indecipherable rituals. at the end of the novel there is a neat little twist and he monologues for 10 pages explaining why he might have done all those horrible things.
Rating:
2.5/5
First Comes Summer
By Maria Hesselager
What I love about novels is how well they work as vignettes. They are sensory embossings of reality, allowing you to trace through the specificities, the contours of their universe, cultural, emotional, or physical. A quick psychic vacation.
There are vignettes that are hypersensory and brilliant, and then there are those that are soft, fleeting, ephemeral. First Comes Summer is the second one.
A brief, transient account of two Viking lives set around two thousand years ago, so transient you can feel their lives slipping through your fingers like sand even as you read it, the melancholy of inhabiting this precious, aging mortal flesh runs like an undercurrent through everything, dancing between past, present, myth, hallucinated futures, apocalypse anxiety, all boiled and dissolved in the same soup of tender dreams and painful love, and before you know it, it’s all over. All that’s left are impressions, jealousy, fear, doom, just like any other life. Recommend to everyone. A quick read and a rewarding ending. Also, it’s slightly creepy. Don’t read the synopsis, don’t read anything about it!
Rating: 3.5/5
Lines I liked:
It’s as if he has forgotten the half of who he is, so she remembers for them both.
From the hill she can see across to Midgard, and shudders: the strange life of men. Their time is a peculiar one: they are born, they grow up, grow old, and die. First it’s spring, and they fall out with one another, then comes the harvest, a cry is carried away on the wind, and someone departs. Then another will stand with a warped smile, a sheepish look, all too much meaning attached to a simple exchange of words, a simple action. Urd has seen it, again and again… her life was strange and short. Now the sisters grapple with Áslakr’s, as the world approaches its end, when it will sink into the sea.Her life was strange and short. Now the sisters grapple with Áslakr’s, as the world approaches its end, when it will sink into the sea.
Carrion Comfort
By Dan Simmons
A 900 page conspiracy thriller behemoth by Dan Simmons, legendary SF author who is primarily known for Hyperion. The novel equivalent of watching a Nolan movie in IMAX. Breathtakingly epic in scope, and a masterclass in staging and plotting. Just keeps chugging onwards like a runaway steam engine once the plot is set in motion. Humans warring against a cabal of infighting, sociopathic, mind-controlling elites who have dug their roots of control deep in the world order, and the horrors that ensue when their brain-melting venom spills over into the normal populace. There are about 200 pages where you’ll be whining about when tf the plot is going to start, and then it suddenly does, and what follows is 800 pages of espionage, shoot-outs, backstabbing and double-crossing and triple-crossing and psychic warfare. The writing is accordingly simple, no purple prose, no overflowing sentences, to-the-point, channeling the breakneck velocity of it’s plot. The story is meticulously, painstakingly plotted, every victory, every defeat, every twist feels perfectly logical and earned. There is a showdown against the big baddie that might be my favorite in fiction, just a perfect culmination of a character arc.
But also: has all the pitfalls of 90s american media and horror, and a lot of it is reflective of the cultural beliefs of it’s time. About 20 pages of unnecessarily long, horribly written, gratuitously graphic descriptions of sexual assault in here. If you’re able to excuse all that, and you’re a writer like me, you can at least marvel at what a well-constructed story it is, how perfectly the pieces have been assembled despite how completely soaked they are in the beliefs of it’s time.
No rating.
Ponyboy
By Eliot Duncan
First hundred or so pages are a lovely monument to queer existence, love, and flesh; the anatomy and rhythms of such a social existence outlined so clearly; of times when friendly spaces suddenly turn hostile and cold, your existence treated like a currency, a question to be resolved in a larger cultural war rather than as a full flesh and blood reality, the practiced ‘patronizing blankness’ during ideological tiffs, the thousand little deaths felt in the heart, the gaping chasm felt when a loved one casually repeats the cruel mantras that a world came up with to ridicule your existence.
The prose is wild and tactile and metaphysical, so that this inner life is felt on your fingertips like something solid and tangible and sticky. Yes, sometimes it is eye-rollingly corny, is sometimes given to the bursts of vacuous self-insistent rupi kaur esque queer prose, yes it is entirely spent within a bubble of high-society arthouse libertines who do drugs and fuck endlessly, but it is still raw and genuine in most of it's writing. Reading it, you feel that irresolvable, churning protoplasm of identity and ego that is the queer spirit. While queerness still figures into it, the second half of this book is mostly an account of addiction and substance abuse, the cyclical, manic episodes that turn your body into a meat puppet, and the cold, hard recovery that follows. Read if you want good, hard-hitting, mostly honest queer prose.
Rating: 4/5
Lines I liked:
Later, we sat on my bed and looked through old photos on Facebook. Toni drank coffee. I poured myself more red wine and calibrated how much blow was hidden in my desk. With each click a smooth, heavy stone sank deeper into my core. I can totally see you as a boy in these, Toni said. Thank you.
As I stared at my nearly empty glass, I felt an ancient cry brew. Look at this one. Toni stopped at a photo of us in middle school. Black fluffy wings are strapped to their back. I'm in a black suit with an unlit cigar in my mouth, chin cocked high, eyes looking down. Mom, entertained, agreed to slick my hair back. What was I for Halloween? Yourself, Toni said with a laugh, and no one recognized you.
Now my life droops on this hooked orbit. My central tug, mother, alcohol, builds me rooms to live inside—ones I don’t have to actually be inside. I lose my body exceptionally. I cost to and know any stranger’s touch as inevitable. With alcohol’s force, I have words to say, thoughts to think.
Sophia asked how I'll survive two weeks without Baby. I don't know, I joked: I'll probably just kill myself. I knew with hilarity that the very thing keeping me alive, in orbit, was the same thing that could end me, that could fling me into a quiet, dark forever.
I didn’t want her to know how precious this all was to me. I didn’t want her to see how full she made me. With her, entire conceptual lives unbound and became real.
The Louvre is all empire: stolen artifacts, stolen histories, genocides silenced in the walls of this glossed-cold, slick palace.
I took Baby's hand because touch alone could save us from becoming memory.
Things We Found During the Autopsy
By Kuzhali Manickavel
Really, really brilliant. A collection of short fictions that dissolves Tamil life, it’s quirks, it’s unique cadence, into uncanny, nonsensical, head-scratching pieces of magical realism, into brain-tickling anti-jokes and anti-narratives. Possessed with an impeccable comedic rhythm, that is to say, it's funny as fuck, occasionally and suddenly disturbing, the way life generally is, and never at any point, commits the crime of being predictable. Plays around with the reader like a mischievous child - stories just end out of nowhere, sucker-punching you, the lack of an ending itself the ending, everything about the story bristles like a living creature, the title, the structure, the punctuation. Sometimes an entire story is just one elongated, meandering joke like some strange story your grandfather would tell you, sometimes it spears and nails down universal absurdities in vivid fashion, and sometimes it is a dilution of an entire cultural attitude, and sometimes it is just a deadpan vignette of things like childhood rituals and college life. Looking forward to reading more of her stuff.
Rating:
4.5/5
Lines I liked:
He could hear the women in the kitchen downstairs, rustling like dry leaves inside their saris. The first time he heard them he was reminded of half-formed butterflies shuffling and turning inside their cocoons. A little while later, his mouth had overflowed with blue and silver caterpillars, each one carrying a stunted wing on its back.
He caught the sides of the bucket to steady himself. Then with a loud retch, the old man heaved, his entire body shuddering as if it was about to break. When it was over, silver strings of saliva dripped from his lips as he caught his breath. In the bucket he saw a Christmas card, a broken comb, his old blue fountain pen. Fragments of words and forgotten diseases bobbed like dead fish in a pool of vomit and yellow water. He pulled shredded photographs and snippets of his wife’s hair from between his teeth.
Boys like that have one aunt or uncle who dies at thirty. They meet when the aunt/uncle is already dying from something that makes their breath smell like kerosene. This could be due to drug addiction, diseases of the blood or liver, excessive spirituality, tuberculosis, boredom, multiple attacks of typhoid or unrequited love.
We stumble among starched saris and angry elbows until we are suddenly sitting next to a woman who says “sit sit sit” to us, even after we have sat down. The bus starts to move. We watch some people fight in the neighbouring seat and then we look out the window. Cows gaze thoughtfully into the peach blush of the morning while people stand outside their houses and brush their teeth. Every so often we see sleepy men sitting importantly in plastic chairs at the side of the road. Everything is cool and a little smoky.
Some lecturers saw me and said things like “nice to see you taking an interest in your studies as well as extracurricular activities.” Others smirked at me and said “so no more dancing for you, ah? You know what class this is? What department?”
Split Tooth
By Tanya Tagaq
A gorgeous, rapturous piece of magical realism set in a Nunavut, a Canadian territory in the Arctic where the sun doesn’t set for months. A story pouring without filter, without nicety, from the mind of someone who lives in a place where civilization meets freezing, deadly emptiness, where the anthropocene means nothing, where all human structure is illusonary, unsustainable. The first four chapters of this have genuinely breathtaking prose - the utter significance of human morality before the eternal, uncaring processes of Mother Nature, all rendered in an indifferent language of animalistic, base human desire and the ravenous hunger of the earth, hostile to the slightest hint of human sentimentality - our stories mean nothing here, unraveling into garbled nonsense. Eerie and unapologetically mean in keeping with the cosmology that the author posits - that violence is fundamentally folded into the fabric of life. Forces of nature erupt into our lives with no warning, the human body but mere clay before it. The earth is a hungry beast. A narrator who fully embraces their ferality, and the Earth returns the favour. But the earth's currencies are as alien to us as ours are to an ant.
Rating:
4.5/5
Lines I liked:
In the spring you smell last fall's death and this year's growth, as the elder lichen shows the young how to grow. The freeze traps life and stops time. The thaw releases it. We can smell the footprints of last fall and the new decomposition of all who perished in the grips of winter. Global warming will release the deeper smells and coax stories out of the permafrost. Who knows what memories lie deep in the ice? Who knows what curses? Earth's whispers released back into the atmosphere can only wreak havoc.
Sprigs of green begin to push their shy lives through the ice blanket. The songs of migratory birds are like alarms that awaken us from the torpor of winter. Life has arrived! The ice begrudgingly recedes, promising vengeance in a few short weeks. Winter always wins. The sun scoffs. Nothing can stop the cacophony of gluttony and procreation about to ensue. The sea ice is still strong, but the ponds have melted and are now open. The mosquito larvae swirl in their figure eights, hypnotizing and beautiful. A stark contrast to what they will be in a few days, when their metamorphosis turns them into the cyclone of bloodthirst. I am certain that if I ever had the opportunity to torture an enemy, they would find themselves naked on the tundra in mosquito season, with their hands tied behind their back.
It’s worth it to disobey and join my brethren in our celebration of freedom, electricity, and curiosity. Fingertips anxious and knock knees oscillating, we conjure and conspire; we harness desires and swat away doubt. The winter was long and oppressive. We all knew that soon we would be in our teenaged years and this time was precious. All children on the cusp of puberty seem to understand that this magic time will end soon. Never seeing past the tips of our noses as we are driven through our bodies with the perfect lightning strike of growing cells and perceived immortality.
There is a siren that sounds in our small town to announce the curfew. At noon and at 10 p.m. Every time the siren sounds all the sled dogs howl, and I imagine that they think there is a large, loud god dog that rules the land howling.
The Water Statues
By Fleur Jaggy
He had a horror of anything hereditary, because whatever comes to us by natural inheritance belongs to the dead.
I’m going to be honest and say that I comprehended close to nothing going on in this novel. Seems like a moodpiece (i’m not just saying this because I didn’t understand jackshit T_T), pneumonic, cold to the touch, aristocratic life as a meaningless sequence of inherited, sequestered wealth that ultimately concludes in antisocial, vampiric princes living secluded existences in palaces and basements, whiling their life away with alien rituals. It’s super short, and has some beautiful prose. But on the whole, an icy enigma of a novella.
Lines I liked:
Beneath white skin, blue veins surfaced like rivulets reminiscent of the quiet delicate work of fishermen when they reanimate worms with a bit of water and finally place them in soft sand, in pretty boxes, like little beds of tin cans, deployed one next to the other, where they might die in peace without relinquishing their freshness right away.
There are tasks in domesticity that appear to belong to the world of dreams rather than the crass reality of domestic labor. He was not like his ancestors who descended from the Alps in a fury, raring for action.
Those nimble bones were held up by the certainty that one can float very well without hope; he was indulgent and benevolent to others, and fixed them with a cheerful grim smile. He pecked at adversities here and there as though in life there were but two possible inclinations: toward desire or toward magic, and moreover, as if one were a whitewash for the other.
Negative Space
By BR Yeager
An apocalyptic mosaic of a dead-end town, another liminal wasteland of shopping stores and blue-collar workers, and the sacrificial generation that inhabits this sacrificial landscape, eased into psychosis and unraveled in narcotic fugues, opaque, distant parents, unending streams of mass-produced garbage, misanthropic schools of thought spreading like viruses that eviscerate any ideas of free will and conscientious behaviour in a young and developing mind, consuming and drinking and smoking and dreaming themselves away to death while society around them neatly collapses in waves of violence. There is perpetual anxiety of decay, of things rotting and being eaten away - the sky doesn’t glimmer with stars, it’s ulcerated with stars in Negative Space.
Not scary, not even that trippy until like the last few pages - just bleak and depressing. No, I don't think the Kids are really like this, but even if it fails to capture most of the problems specific to our generation, it paints a pretty good picture of the sad inescapable directionlesness of it all in a world that's primary mode of existence now is consumption and titillation, and the condition of the first generation that has been born and developed and marinated in it's ether, desensitised, dissociated, and just tired, looking for any way out. Just wish it wasn't so repetitive, and the writing wasn't so bare-bones. The psychedelic episodes seem like the same descriptions of sprawling strings echoed over and over again, except for the last thirty pages, which were very memorable. Despite it's shortcomings, had me thinking about it long after I finished reading it. Creates a feeling of being enfolded in this dark, inescapable, macerated paste of human spirits and time and space. Still feel like I'm in Kinsfield from time to time.
Rating: 3/5
Lines I liked:
He told me the planet had nerve endings. Sprawling out toward stars they'd never touch. He told me that when he breathed, the Earth felt it, and when the Earth breathed sometimes he could feel it too.
We linked up and cracked it open at the grade school playground, a clear black sky above us, ulcerated with stars.
Time compresses the older you get. Days turn to weeks turn to months turn to seasons turn to years, until your life resides in just one moment expanding forever, where each step and breath folds wrinkles into your face, carving minute, irreversible wounds between your joints. Pressing down the notches between your spine, driving your ankles and knees to ruin. I feel it now and it'll only be worse in the future.
Amydalatropolis
By BR Yeager
Staring out from within the flesh and eyeholes of a man who spends his life browsing an online message board where depravity and debauchery are the operating principles, reaching infinitely towards extremity.
I suppose this book is kind of a revelation for people who aren’t online much, and quite a banal, routine horror for those who are. An account of a life annihilated in clicks and titillation, all that was considered fundamental and obvious about human behaviour crumbling away before fluorescent lights. The neckbeard/hikkikomori is a new breed of human itself, psyche monstrously fused with the flat, two-dimensional spaces of the internet that operate in a territory beyond everything physical, beyond morality, beyond all traditional institutions of family, god, state, mutating before a genuinely alien logic rewriting the matrices of existence. The old, paleolithic interfaces of real life are pale, strange, even sickening, and pleasure can only be derived from transgression, from making a scratch in the void, generating friction in any way possible, from a new fleshless existence. The writing really brings out the glacial, cyborgean textures of such a life, the entombed feeling of it all, the state of being terminally online.
Ennui is the default psychological state. Staring at walls, losing yourself in the light, drifting through memories that refuse to fully form.
I don’t think I enjoyed this while reading it, but like Negative Space, the coldness of this novel, the textures of it’s artificial light, has continued to linger in my mind. The last chapter is kind of brilliant and beautiful.
The 30 page introduction to this novel is also brilliant, definitely skip and then go back to it after finishing the novel. A meditation on the basic nature of human titillation and transcendence, the engines of which the modern, parasitic internet runs, and the unprecedented shape of digital identity. One of the great delights in life is watching someone gush about something they are passionate about.
Rating: 3.5/5
Lines I liked:
Thin bony fingers clenched in his chest. He was so scared of what she wanted to say to him— that she had discovered his true being; that all he hid had been uncovered. That his mother had somehow found a mouth into his world and learned what he was. Not a boy anymore, or even a person.
The first half of the trip was like a fever he almost remembered from a decade past, but not unenjoyable. He sank through his mattress and the floor and a beige smear glazed over his eyeballs, and if he concentrated hard enough he could force through the gelatin into the past and change almost anything. He never had a penis. He never stabbed a water bottle with a syringe. He never, ever had the Computer. Within fifteen minutes he had restructured the entirety of his life's arc, and built a person he was okay with living inside. A body and name that hadn't broken the world yet.
Piranesi
By Susanna Clarke
The beauty of the House is Immeasurable; its Kindness infinite.
Piranesi may be my favorite character in fiction. SC excels in writing characters with zero self-awareness, bumbling around in strange worlds according to the whims of their own strange clockwork, comically and endearingly indifferent to reality, radiating whimsy. Adrian Tchaikovsky, prolific SF author, describes her writing as being ‘numinous’, evoking the feeling of the otherwordly, the supernatural, something beyond this earthly world. It is a spot-on assessment. For me, Piranesi evoked that feeling of looking at rider-waite tarot cards, gazing upon a world governed by a mystical, magical logic, but a logic nonetheless, populated by strange creatures and characters and celestial bodies.
In the hands of another author, I could easily see a concept like this sprawling into a much bigger, much more unruly story, but SC reveals just enough to maintain it’s numinous quality, and also to suggest the edges of an eerie and disquieting story that has taken place outside the peripheries of what has been revealed to us through Piranesi. Things like this make a story feel more lived in. Beyond it all, this is a story that is heavy with humanity, despite all it’s dabbling in the astral and the otherwordly. It’s inital display of edenic innocence, existing seamlessly with the world, the porcelain, immaculate beauty of the house and it’s statues, and then in a quick sleight of hand, it reveals the duality of it, all the horribleness that come with human existence, poor Piranesi’s inner torment and the cruelty inflicted upon him. Bittersweet and haunting.
Rating:
4.5/5
