kind-of. anyway in august I was like >I need to become a better or smarter or more well-read person, and since I was not getting a job, despite, needing to get a job, and resigning myself to joblessness, I decided to read 100pages a day. I had also decided, earlier in the summer, to learn bangla and french. neither of which i did. anyway now we are in september, and I have added spanish to that list. just for fun. in any case the french is because when I made a different reading list in the beginning of summer, again, for the quest of intellectualism or whatever it is when you know you're stupid but not as stupid as the next person down the line and you need to at least do the reading to allow u to think like that, that list contained quite a lot of french. actually, I was glancing though a wikipedia article of scholars from martinique, and i realised many of the greatest post-colonialists are from small countries annexed by the french, and so these intellectuals all wrote in french, as did the actual french such as foucault and sartre and d'beauvoir, though I can't say I ever added the second sex to my reading list due to, Being A Woman, camus, et all, and some guys, who weren't even french, wrote in french anyway because it was the thing. marx. i'm referring specifically to marx. anyway. and then I also saw that spivak taught herself french by translating derrida, so I'm trying to do that with les damnes de la terre. oh and how could i forget. I WATCHED ANATOMIE, which really did settle it for me. the bangla because I really should know bangla, obviously. the spanish because there's this spanish short story class that I wanted to take that required lvl600 proficiency. because. presumably. we would have to read the stories in spanish. well, anyway. here we are now. my bangla is not any better. my french is... lacking, and every other second i regret not paying more attention during my mandatory schooling, how the fuck was I supposed to know this would become a necessary interest of mine. my spanish is coming in form of a spanish<>eng dictionary i picked up in perth, ON, at a little library. and my books! some read.
so august was women in translation month. I read, three? women in translation. one helen dewitt. fortysomething pages of clarice lispector that I gave up, perhaps I was not meant to start with a novel but instead the thing she was actually known for. a dostoevksy. a woman who was a fan of dosotoevsky. um. probably one other thing that's slipping my mind idk. ANYWAY. mostly I have learnt that I hate modernism. which anyone could've said.
the list: lolita, minor detail, the gambler, the idiot, notes of a crocodile, crooked line, kim jiyoung born 1982, brick lane, the last samurai
LOLITA
I will start by cheating. I read lolita in like.... april...? i actually have yet to finish it, but that's how you know it's GOATED. litr one of theeee greatest novels of all time to me ever, was feeling so many feelings that I had only previously felt about my brilliant friend, ummm isn't it so amazing in the end that you don't even need to finish this book to know it's just That Good. well that's how I'm looking at it. I did read it to understand the 3 lectures in the yale amy hugerford the american novel since 1945 series, and they were good lectures kindof sort of she is such a nabakov head which is FINEEE... it's fineee... but since then I have realised I facking hate the american novel (and obviously this doesn't count since nabakov is RUSSIAN and writing as a 'tourist' and it is not so much about america but observing america) and also that I hate when art is not autonomous and we give so much importance to the history of the author in the making and meaning of the novel but obviously hugerford was also making an argument about artists and institutionalisation and public attitudes and how all things converge into making such a thing that we know as 'the novel' (in the american sense) ... also I hate modernism. which can't be true because there is some modernism that I enjoy. but i think on the whole i hate it's resistance and lack of commitment and self-pitying attitude towards 'identity' and it's love for senselessness... anyway.
do you want me to actually talk about the novel. I think nabakov is the writer of the century, he achieved something with his prose that possibly literally no one else on this earth ever will. when I say i don't have to finish this book to know that it's one of the greatest novels of all time, i just mean stylistically. i just mean because of his prose. it's kinda ctfu because this novel drags so much but the prose goes so crazy, and also it really really made me realise how much of a disservice we do to art and also life to look at it moralistically... like pleaseeeee... I really do think the themes of pedophillia are by far the least interesting thing this novel does. in any case, one of the novels of all time ever that u read and then go drive on the highway for hours and go 'WOW! This is Just Like Lolita' <very real experience I just had. it's so gorgeous and the greatest and worst reading experience and just entertaining (...) IDK It's literally such a good read, I loved it, I was, exactly as hugerford predicted... captivated....
MINOR DETAIL
the book that we have all been talking about since october last year. I don't know how to describe what has happened, what has been happening, and what is happening right now in palestine in a way that can encompass all her sorrows and struggles and suffering and offer any kind of well-meaning sentiment and nuance about it. it's just awful, and I think, you can never really understand how this judgement of 'awful' can be so much worse than just the newest terrifying headline you've read or clip you've seen or indignity a Palestinian has suffered. this is also what sitting with minor detail was like, because after I had read it, I watched adania shibli's interview with fatima bhutto about it (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TJ1jpTYQcU) and, she reveals that while she was doing research for this novel and going to the very museum it describes, she had been arrested and detained. and that was simply a detail that hadn't been reflected into the text, that made it somewhat, hopeful even. the fantasy that she had gotten away with her deceptions somehow.
otherwise, as a novel, i think it was so aptly named and so well formed, and it's encompassed with the section where she tells you the story of how you can recreate a whole picture with only minor details, as in the story of the three brothers and the camel. what she does for you, of course, is allow you to recreate this whole picture of occupation and israeli violence as her two characters go about, what is to them, a normal day. it's very precise and very concise. easy to read, but hard to sit with.
THE GAMBLER
kind-of the funniest read of this list ctfuuu... huge tonal change from minor detail which perhaps was not what i needed but what happened anyway. also during I was re-entering the sally rooney mines due to writing fic inspired by sally rooney so I was like, creating parallels in my mind et all et all, like sally rooney is only good at writing one thing and that is the interpersonal and the inability of people to understand one another and her characters are always doing some pantomime of communication and never quite succeeding due to class/gender/etc while dostoevsky is only good at writing psychological profiles and his characters never talk to each other so much so as they talk At each other, anyway this was a translation done by a woman who time has sort of forgotten about in comparison to all the other very well translators/translations of dostoevsky, but according to some random website and a reddit post, it was a decent translation and the one on the library shelf (...) mostly, there was a preamble about dostoevksy's personal life and history and it was genuinely sooo entertaining i was going 'he really is just like me FR FR' and he was truly living a very third world life, i guess, and obviously, was addicted to gambling and a woman who was decades younger than him that he'd only met once. and that was what the story was about. genuinely reading it like ...IF NOT FOR THE LAWS OF TIME FYODOR U WOULD LOOOOVEEEE MOBILE GACHA... he would be a yae miko stannie or whatever.
anyway. two accessory things of note, (1) allegedly dostoevksy was more or less conservative re/his views et all, because he believed in russian orthodoxy, but obviously to the west, due to his criticisms of the catholic?church he comes off less conservative but idk, this is again from a reddit comment i will have to read more to know but also idk if i'm interested like that. he was also living an amazing life where he would simply just um be writing from deadline to deadline and he never had enough money and he was juggling eight different mouths and he was emotionally or spiritually cheating on his wife and his dreams and motions were huge flops but at least he was a slayful novelist! which did not matter because he was always gambling away any and all money he had and therefore he could write this story where everyone falls into destitution and delusion because all they have is gambling. the second note is that everyone thinks dostoevsky is more or less sexist, which is so funny, to me, because yah obviously none of his women are agents in a story so much as objects of infatuation or more commonly irritation, but also: he writes women the exact same way he writes men, which makes me laugh and doesn't make me despair at how he hates women because he doesn't really. he's just ... a man.
NOTES OF A CROCODILE
so the very first page has an author biography and I read it and then I made my roommate read it and then we both like, laughed, in an uncomfortable and pained way because um, of course. anyway, it very much set the tone of the book. nico said that they liked it but it was a little painful and depressing! and I think i liked it too, mostly. a lot of it reads like someone has made a novel about all the assorted east asian movie still/frames/quotes tumblr posts you see, which makes sense due to it being a 80s/90s literary relic from taiwan. some of it was moving, I particularly enjoyed the main rhetorical device, which was the crocodile metaphor as outsiderism/genderfuckery/et all, and the section where the narrator describes the woman they are living with...and she describes all the pitfalls and weaknesses of her character and provides the full psychological profile... it was very gripping I'M SO SORRY THE NAME IS FAILING TO COME TO ME... otherwise very quotable book, I'm not sure I got anything out of it other than it being very moody and trying to encompass a certain kind of depth of thought and aimlessness of having to live a life that you don't want and don't know what to do with. idk i think it's books like this that make you understand the want/importance to be 'one's most authentic self' more so than any pride pin or what have you.... also the writing is a mix of very contemporary but also sometimes lyrical but also easy to read... this is more or less my first taiwanese novel, and anything else I read that's been translated from chinese has been danmei LOL so in many ways it was much more accessible for the american psyche than other stuff. sorry i really did not have a lot to say about this one ;-;
NORMAL PEOPLE
it must be said I knew I would like this and it also must be said that while I like sally rooney on a personal level, I do not respect the regard and popularity and celebrity she's garnered. like ummm... how to say... kind of made me realise in many ways one truly has to be a little mediocre in order to be popular. and while i don't like that, this is the stage of worldwide reading comprehension we are at rn. in any case, everything i liked about normal people the book is better represented in the show, and i really do think sally rooney is better at script writing than prose writing, but every now and then she'll have a moment in her book where she'll meander and describe a road or room or something about the setting rather than her characters internals/externals, and it'll be, idk, oddly fanfiction-y almost in how out-of-place it is. like an afterthought where she's been reminded that she shouldn't have empty room syndrome lol. which is not a real thing btw.
anyway I do not think I can get into my extended sally rooney rant rn, but it's umm soo crazy, because I went back to read some of the sex scenes of beautiful world bc i remember them making me so uncomfortable the first time around but this time around, i realised they were a lot softer? than i thought. like literally.... i was kindof promised D/s and there wasn't even D/s for babies... which is fine. i don't care that much. anyway I would never recommend anyone read any sally rooney unless u can truly appreciate the one thing she does really well because u will just hate her and not like it and assign her as one of the many milennial white women writing about whiteness which is not fair. at least I don't think so. like, real white women writing whiteness is much more annoying. i know because I'm reading boy parts rn.
CROOKED LINE
literally uhhh imagine me discovering ismat chungtai in my partition literature search and then learning about the blanket, and then aris tells me about this being a book that changed my life, and then THIS BEING LIKE EVEN MOREEEE CRAZY THAN THE BLANKET X100000000... anyway. she suffers from short story writing disease like many authors, due to some of her chapters reading like a collection of different stories/happenings from the life of one woman rather than an actual novel, at points, but it was still soooo enjoyable, chughtai was obviously so modern but obviously sooo of her time, and more importantly she was sooooooooo coy... and you can read it so clearly in her writing, like she's known for her satire and also, like this deadpan sort of sarcasm or whatever. where you know, she's never going to tell you what she actually thinks, but also you're dumb as shit to take her at face value, which u will do, because she is a woman. kind-of a terrible thought, but this was doing normal people in the 1940s way before sally rooney was even decided to exist, in that, you have a narrator who is convinced she is unloveable and there is something fundamentally wrong with her except obviously this is coming from an indian muslim woman from the subcontinent. but also literally so faaaacking funny that the book ends with her romance with an irishman. and then her decision to get an abortion. which was the only righteous way for it to end, imo. though uh, the ending is very open-ended. anyway the foreword was literally so beautiful in that the book was describing shamman as a crooked line herself, refusing to bend the way society dictates her too. LITERALLY SUCH A GOOD BOOK... it sort of makes me giddy just to think about, due to how groundbreaking it is in my mind likeeee sooo much homoerotic sexual exploration happening between women, and then they're expected to hang out with men and make lives with them, and they do, but the men never even matter, not really, IDK.... LITERALLY BEAUTIFUL GROUNDBREAKING NOVEL OF ALL TIME TO PROVE THAT EVEN IN A SOCIETY WHERE THEY ARE DEEPLY SUBJUGATED BY MEN WOMEN STILL HAVE AGENCY AND IF NOTHING ELSE CONTROL OVER THEIR OWN THOUGHTS... lovely incredible wonderful showstopping book.
THE LAST SAMURAI
sorry lin for only reading the last samurai ummmm .... so many years after u first told me about it. HOWEVER. it was so good it was so worth it helen dewitt U SLAYEDDD... i love sitting down to write these reviews because I forget literally everything i could ever think or say. ummm literally incredible novel about loving ur mom and both of u being bored geniuses, and the book of ADHD personified ever like wow.... the moment where you're in the middle of a section and ludo breaks it, wonderful lovely book. incredible amazing moment. probably will live in my mind forever. I think there's some fair criticism about why is the novel trying to imitate film/audiovisual medium/etcka etcka but I was reading the back cover, where a critic describes it as a 'new kind of novel. a breakthrough in the genre' and I don't know that I agree still, but I think, obviously what makes a good novel so different from a normal novel is when the structure can imitate the content, like this is a book that is constantly interrupting itself and that in and of itself, is soooo good!!! anyway i really dk if it's never been done before, but I think it's good at capturing the scattered mind... someone wrote something about it being about the male father figure and masculinity or whatever, but I don't know if i agree with that at all, like obviously half the book is him searching for a father, or rather, screening men as possible fathers, but it's not for the sake of Having A Dad, it's to the end of relieving his mother some of this burden of parenting. i genuinely did find some of the commentary on how children are one of the classes that have the least rights/freedoms really interesting. as well as, just the thing in the beginning about how constraining writing to one language is to strip it of all further dimensions, bc obviously reading is so much of a mental thing, but the most important thing about a sentence is how it sounds or how it Reads and english is soooo limited with syllables and context and meaning... not a beautiful or conveying language at all... anyway. one of the books about everything ever. and I really did think I would hate it once it became about the little boy!
KIM JIYOUNG, BORN 1982
the end of this where you realise this is case notes from a male psychologist and he speaks a little of his wife and then his colleague who is leaving work, and it just ends in that very note of dismissal and ignorance that precipitates kim jiyoung's breakdown. i read this just as the nth room 2 news was breaking, and it was genuinely horrific to be so constantly and persistently reminded about how awful it is for women. idk. again this sounds so trite but I don't know what else to say. i think i live in such a bubble, really. i don't think i've ever been against sexism in such a sharp hard way as this. anyway, the rate of sex crimes and sexual harassment/related incidents are so high in korea, and it just got me thinking about the american influence versus the developing social stigma, and so you have conservatism regarding gender roles and roles of women et all, but also, this complete looseness of sexual degeneracy. like attitudes towards women are very similar in the south/islamic countries, but sexual abuse/crimes are obviously a lot more hidden and happen more in the marital sphere? i would garner. like, the very controversial bangla law where if a man rapes a village girl, he has to marry her. there's some nuance to that one. but, generally, this cultural thing where the nature of sexual degeneracy changes depending on the social conditions of the country right. anyway, this is sort of baby's first book on feminism, and it covers a lot of things in various realms with a pointblankness that makes it both easier and harder to swallow.
THE IDIOT
this is the elif batuman novel. anyway, noura was begging me to read boy parts due to her own parasocial rs with eliza clarke and i was like, ok, well since i hate the idea of reading it and have prejudice against it i will read it along with this other novel i also hate the idea of reading and have prejudice against (...) anyway, neither were available at my uni library so i resigned myself to reading them on my phone, and then I read the first page of both and realised I would immediately like the idiot so much more. so i read it first, to stave off the misery from boy parts. AND IT WAS SO GOOD. kind of the girlautism novel written with ME in mind... im sure many other young women have said that but truly due to the sexless nature of the romance and the asexual representation and the >Nothing Happens They Both Leave ... i was so gagged... bc everyone mentions this along with normal people as a Campus novel, and ig a lot of campus novels are so about sex so for something to be so popular and focus so much on the absence of sex as well as just, the narrator herself, selin, always being like 'why does he hate meee' and then giving him the one word answers. and being like 'i love him so much' but you can't even tell from her actions until u read her write it out... it's soooo... LITERALLY SO PERFECT TO MEEE!!!
I was telling oomirl about this, and obviously I described it as a campus novel, due to that being it's principle setting, and she was like, 'you know i think i've matured out of those, i'm no longer in that period of my life' and i didn't say anything, but I didn't think the point was the campus or the romance, but i think it is very much about this search of/loss of identity.language and u could say, well that's literally every modernist/post modern novel everrrr... and Yes but no, obviously the campus/first yr harvard student thing comes in here because it is so painfully youthful and awkward in how selin is beginning to stumble on her very first legs, and I think, i don't know I just thought it was so good!!! i was so endeared!!! i have to say like 90% of my enjoyment of this book was her fixation on social convention and how much she disliked/could not understand it and then would say or do those things anyway, trying to seem 'normal' like it was soooo.... there was such a funny line where she's like 'i was lying about being unable to resist chocolate like everyone else does' and then a couple sections later, she wakes up in the middle of the night to sneak the chocolate she brought for other people. she was very endearing to me. also, out of every single book, i think this had the most decisive and impactful ending line. that made it SOOOO GOOD. and in her acknowledgement elif batuman shoutouts dostoevksy so cutely for letting her borrow his title.
BRICK LANE
book that MY MOM and MY BROTHER have both read but I had never heard of. i tried to watch the movie after I finished but i could not take the britishism seriouslyyy... after reading 10489952385300 books about how intelligent academic scholarly women who understood the world or something deeper and also understood the ways the world wounds them, this was startling. i was genuinely so impressed about how, books do not have to be about smart women. and monica ali truly did go out of her way to write a book about a very simple woman, plucked from the village, who does not question any part of her life. it was painful at times, because of her passivity. her always eating by the sink in the dark, the way she doesn't protect her daughters. there is this one scene, where she and her youngest are in the kitchen, eating at the sink together, and pretending not to look at each other because they both can't bear it. INSANEEEE... my brother's criticism of this book was that 'it was written for white people' which i think is so patently ridiculous because i think half of this book is incomprehensible unless you're bengali and you've seen these living situations. especially, hasina's letters from bangladesh, like i don't think you can understand her situation at all and what's really happening beyond her descriptions unless you have had house help like that. you're like 'is this the sixpeenceee child maid situation' and I'm like yeah a little bit, but it is worse for an older woman. AND SHE WAS BARELY THIRTY. anyway. incredible book. really really really worth the read. also one of the best ending scenes possible.
uhhh...anyway, so I'm currently suffering through boy parts, am really trying to find the copy of the idiot my school library is convinced is on the shelf bc it seems like mandatory follow up reading for batuman, resurrection which is my parent's joint favourite book, am obviously tuned in for intermazzo, i will be trying to read some russian women, obviously i am also on the hunt for more subcontinental literature, ummm and I'm also thinking of raking through the kincaid archives. no i do not want to read anything published after 2005, thank u for understanding my endless disappointment with contemporary lit. sally rooney is literally my version of vaping or whatever.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
