by Albert Camus o-o

Did not end up enjoying this as much as I thought I would. For one, it's a sausage fest. I don't recall encountering any female characters at all. So strange for a book that centers on an isolated town, where each of the characters featured is to a large degree meant to represent an entire segment of society. Are women not part of society? Are there no stories about women in a plague-stricken town worth telling at all? Such an odd and bizarre choice.

Another issue is that the book could've easily been a third of the size and not at all been substantially different. It's kind of a slog to get through despite not even being that big. Part of the reason is the characters and their stories: not all that interesting. I really didn't care for most anyone, which isn't as much of a problem as my inability to even remember any of their names by the end of the book. Most of them, to me, came off as awfully interchangeable.

Camus also commits what I consider to be one of the most cardinal sins in storytelling in that he has one character deliver this long monologue about what the plague presumably philosophically represents, thereby attempting to drill into the leader the point of the book in the most on the nose way imaginable. Even if that point was actually interesting, this is a terribly way of making it known, but Camus' philosophy here doesn't even strike me as all that interesting.

But that doesn't mean there aren't things I did like about the book, there are! I certainly enjoyed the opening chapters, the way Camus describes the creeping in of the plague. How denizens would come across the occasional dying rat and how they would deal with it. The gradual increase in dead rats and the odd ailments people began to suffer from shortly thereafter, all of which is chronicled by Camus most evocatively. I do like how he makes it a point to illustrate how this town erected on the Algerian cost exists solely for commercial activity and it was commercial activity that governed its inhabitants very existence. Which would make something like being subject to a plague of particular economic concern, something I wish would've perhaps played out more in the novel. There is one character who takes advantage of the city being quarantined, and makes the crisis work to his advantage by being part of some smuggling operation, and I thought that was a nice touch, but it wasn't really a major enough part of the story.

All in all, an okay read that could've been much better, much slimmer, and far more profound on the basis of the premise alone.

Buy anyway

#fiction

by Cesar Aira o

My first Aira and most likely my last. The book's premise is certainly charming: a seamstress in a small town near Buenos Aires who is very good at what she does is making a wedding dress for a pregnant woman, but then suddenly her son goes missing. She suspects he might've been kidnapped by a local truck driver and taken off to Patagonia (he is in fact—completely unbeknownst to the driver—a stowaway). The seamstress gets a local taxi driver to help her follow suit, but not without taking the wedding dress along with her because she really needs to finish it. The pregnant bride-to-be hears about this and is worried she won't get her dress in time and follows suit too. So far so good, with echoes of IT'S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD but maybe even better, but then it gets strange when midway through the journey the truck driver stops at a casino and things get weird. The entire plot is dropped, no longer does anyone have any purpose or motive. There's an auto-accident, the dress is swept away by strong winds along with the seamstress herself who engages in conversation with the wind, the pregnant woman is bet on at the casino, and the sleeping quarter within the truck leads to a vast underground world and at some point a car is repaired by replacing its wrecked body with the idle shell of a huge Paleozoic armadillo.

Listen, I like whimsy. In fact, I love whimsy. But I like my whimsy to add up. The Looney Tunes of old are full of whimsy, but it's whimsy that when strung together, delivers one coherent narrative. THE SEAMSTRESS AND THE WIND starts off on solid ground and sort of promises something but ends up delivering nothing but completely detached scenes of whimsy that don't actually say or do anything. It is said that Aira is influenced by fairytales, but fairy tells are seldom incohesive and almost always have a pretty obvious point to make, or a few. It is why they are so enduring and successfully pass the test of time and space. Whatever it is I just read, it is certainly not that.

Buy anyway

#fiction

by Jorge Luis Borges o-o-o

Not quite a collection of short fiction as much as it presents blueprints for approaching fiction, often very grand, interestingly-structured fiction. The reviews of fictitious non-existent books are my favorite in the collection, but there are only a handful of those, and the rest is mostly pretty straight fiction which I didn't get much out of. Not that I didn't like them, they just mostly went over my head. Tedious read, despite how slim the book is (179 pages). Very often I would find myself rereading a sentence I'd just read just to make sure I understood what I had just read and after multiple attempts still not sure that I fully know what I'd just read. Lots of clunky sentences, the reading of which is the literary equivalent of chewing abhorrently tough meat. It's a shame, because you know there are some really great ideas supposedly being expressed (the ones I could understand for example touch upon stories nested within stories, as well as infinite stories that end where they start, and stories told backwards). You can feel you're reading something great but you can't quite grasp it most of the time. This leads me to believe that it may be a translation issue I've encountered here. The edition I have is the Penguin edition featuring translations by Andrew Hurley, which I admittedly nabbed because I preferred the cover design (not the image featured above, that's my interpretation). My experience with Hurley's translation however is prompting me to consider acquiring the Grove Press edition which features translations by Anthony Kerrigan, Anthony Bonner, Alasteir Reid, Helen Temple, and Ruthven Todd. Perhaps then I can compare both and adequately assess whether the issue is one of translation, or the actual ideas expressed in the text, or my very own brain.

[buy]

#prose #fiction

by Italo Calvino o-o-o-o-o

You are about to read Ganzeer's review of Italo Calvino's IF ON A WINTER'S NIGHT A TRAVELER, a book which Ganzeer devoured in a week and immediately upon completion couldn't wait to write his impressions of, the task he is embarking on at this very moment. In doing so, however, he must be careful not to spoil too much of the plot or even concept for you, because he's very aware of the added enjoyment he derived from not knowing anything about the book other than it being authored by Italo Calvino, and he didn't have the slightest idea of the compounded surprises that awaited him within its pages. How sad it would be if he were to deny you the opportunity to experience the same thrill he got from the unexpected events that unfold in the novel. Is it even possible to write a proper review without giving anything away though?

“Yes,” Ganzeer hears, “you can do it.” He looks around but there is no one in sight. Who said that? Where did it come from? Was it you, dear reader? Did you notice your lips moving? Or was your response communicated by other means? Ah, the metaphysical freeway that cerebrally connects writers and readers, of course. Why use any other means when such a connection exists? The existence of this special pathway is of course understood, given that every writer must have naturally started out as a reader. Of course, not every reader necessarily becomes a writer, but every reader by definition contains within them the receptacle for potential literary insemination.

Very well, Ganzeer agrees, he shall attempt to write just enough about Calvino's WINTER's NIGHT to entice you to want to read it while still ensuring that you will still enjoy reading it if you do in fact decide to read it. But where to start? His frame of mind upon exiting the novel is not at all the same as his frame of mind upon entering, and having just finished reading it, he is certain to relay an impression of the book you may find a little at odds with what you encounter upon starting it. Perhaps, the best thing Ganzeer can do at this point is find an early impression of the book he might've noted somewhere, and paste it right here in the body of this post unchanged and unedited. Yes, he decides, that is exactly what he will do right now.

Italo Calvino's IF ON A WINTER'S NIGHT A TRAVELER may just be the most post-modern book I've ever laid hands on. It's about an apparently misprinted book, whereby every other chapter seems to belong to a completely different book. In that regard, it can be quite challenging to get into, but in so doing it held up a mirror to me and reminded me of a thing I did in THE SOLAR GRID, in which I relegated the half of each chapter to what may seem like a completely new story, until much later you discover that it is all in fact one story. Which made me realize how challenging I must've made it for readers too.

Sticking with Calvino pays off though, because by around the 75-page mark, you're hooked, and the brilliance of Calvino's ploy begins to dawn on you like eureka.

Dear goodness, Ganzeer, what are doing? What part of not wanting to divulge too much of the book entails even hinting at what might occur several dozen pages into the damn thing?

Never mind any of that, reader. The only thing you really need to know about Calvino's WINTER'S NIGHT is that it is luscious bait for any lover of books. It will do things you may not have known books were capable of, but in the end may just create a convincing enough argument that it is actually doing the only things books are really capable of, and as such is very much a must read.

[buy]

#prose #fiction

by Albert Camus o-o-o-o

A man's mother dies. That right there puts you in the state of mind he might be in. Camus doesn't tell you what state of mind that is, nor does he tell you a lot of things. That's what's great about Camus' writing, he spoon-feeds you nothing, and instead prefers to paint a general impression of things and lets you make heads or tails of it however your mind can muster. His sentences are short, telegraphic, unadorned, yet he is able to create a great deal of mood.

THE STRANGER's plot is thin and may at first seem like a series of meandering, inconsequential happenings; i.e. this happened, and then I did this, and then I went over and spoke to that person, etc. By the end of it however, you realize there was a grand design all along, which isn't unlike how life itself tends to unfold a lot of the times. It is indeed a book about life, its joys and complexities, and how it can all be taken away based on societal perceptions and judgement. A slim, seemingly inconsequential tome that leaves you contemplating long after you're done reading it.

My only dislike is how the protagonist, a Frenchman living in occupied Algeria not unlike Camus himself, only ever refers to locals as “the Arabs”. But it now occurs to me that this may have been intentional on Camus' part, an attempt to illustrate how not entirely great people can still warrant a fair degree of sympathy.

[Buy]

#prose #fiction

by Kim Stanley Robinson o-o-o-o

May just be the best climate-fiction novel in existence, certainly the best climate-fiction novel I've ever read. It is for the most part a problem-solving novel, and I like that. Robinson is able to make the uphill battle involved in all the bureaucracy and policy-making and head-butting that would ostensibly constitute the seemingly impossible task of reversing climate change read like a rollicking adventure without ever once diverging from keeping it grounded in realism. Robinson also seems to have a genuinely global perspective, which comes across very believably and in a way that is not easily accomplished. Central to the narrative is also an assassination plot and an unlikely friendship that add a good dash of thrill to the narrative and help guide the entire story through. It is only at the very end that Robinson loses my interest, from chapter 100 onward, after all the damage to the planet is successfully reversed and the protagonist retires from her position, we spend several chapters following her around, meandering from place to place not really doing anything of great interest. At that point, the whole purpose of one's inclination to pick up the book at all, the “Ministry for the Future” stuff, has long passed and successfully been put to paper. What happens after that is just so pointless and boring and to my mind wouldn't really be of interest in any novel of any genre for any reason. It's a shame so many chapters were written to end what is otherwise a fantastic novel on the blandest note imaginable. Still, the first two thirds of the book are enough to make it essential reading.

[Buy]

#prose #fiction