happy big honking books

[recognito]

Happy end of the year! This is one of two to three book blog posts I will be writing. I guess there's a chance I will read one or two more books this year but afjklgh that can go. in a different post. this set of reviews is already pretty long.

Good reading month! I liked pretty much everything I read and wrote up little reviews for all of them.

In no particular order this time:

Sing, Unburied, Sing, Ward - I'm decently familiar with Ward's other works: I've read her breakout novel, Salvage the Bones, and her memoir, The Men We Reaped. As a reader, she's not always to my taste, especially on a sentence-level (see my numerous other complaints about lyricism in prose... I do not like it), but I got on better with Sing, Unburied, Sing than I did with Salvage the Bones, and I'm appreciating how merciless Ward is when it comes to depicting the psychological dynamics of family: how disappointments and failures get layered into the psyche over the years, and how difficult it is to feel grown up and complete.

I checked the Goodreads for this (bad habit!) because I knew this was had been critically and popularly well-received. First off, lol @ the first review that shows up, which gives the book two stars for having ghosts. (Another lol for the big name author coming in to say she loved the book but felt like the characters lacked dimension.) Ward clearly conceives as history as something that continues to happen in the present, not something that's only made or discovered. The dead lingering into the present and demanding their recompense from the living makes perfect sense. The ghosts are trapped in the violence and cruelty of their deaths; they linger because the causes (racist cruelty, imprisonment, slavery) remain. The song that will free them can be sung, but the ghosts are hard to send away.

I do think there are some problems about action and movement: the book's strongest set piece is the road trip to the prison in the middle, and the end struggles a bit with moving characters in and out of rooms. If her style works for you, I don't think you'll notice. It's a beautiful and dark book and yeah. pretty hard to bear.

 

 

 

Greek Lessons, Han - My enjoyment of this was like a solid “terrified” by the end. I first read Han when The Vegetarian was translated and thought it was nice but not amazing. The thing that stuck with me most was like the cut of it, like this cutting away from and of people, society, and feelings.

There’s a similar cutting nature in Greek Lessons. The premise: a woman, beset by personal and professional problems, loses her ability to speak. She enrolls in Greek lessons at a school; the lessons are taught by a blind man with a degenerative eye disease. The woman’s steadily accumulation of losing reminds me a bit of Lispector’s Apprenticeship, except without the promise of love, purpose, or idk life…? at the end of it. Meanwhile the man is a real fumbler: he recounts his failed attempt to romance his ophthalmologist’s dead daughter (it ends with her slamming a block of wood in his face) and then his homoerotic friendship with a male classmate who faced death and went into philosophy. He’s a character who is (as they say) between world: blindness and sightedness, Germany and Korea, his fanciful ideals and “reality,” though I think Han discourages us from believing he has a grasp of it. He’s a faintly sad and pathetic character, full of misconceptions about others and never able to get it right. The thing he has the most love and certainty for is ancient Greek, a language he loves for its complexity and being dead. In that respect, the mute woman, dead to herself and nearly everyone else, is a natural target of his romantic and sexual need.

Some obvious points of comparison with Greek Lessons: Tawada’s Scattered All Over the Earth and Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police in the way they treat the loss and absence of language/words. Greek Lessons is more emotionally despairing book, I think: loss and losing hurts, and there may never be a return to wholeness, or even its promise.

 

 

 

The Crimes of Sheila McGough, Malcolm - Malcolmania continues... This one is a return to Malcolm's interest in courts and legal proceedings. She seems to get a LOT out of trials and sifting through documentation--I've never read someone who so clearly relishes chewing through the legal proceedings. I read in some interviews that she feels like this book is underrated in her oeuvre or like, not quite understood well, and I can see why. Malcolm's understanding of her case can be distilled into, "It seems scarcely possible that in this country someone could go to prison for merely being irritating, but as far as I can make out, this is indeed what happened to Sheila McGough."

McGough is a fascinating kind of character, the kind of protagonist that some television shows would have instinctive sympathy for: a naive, earnest, truthful defense lawyer who takes every possible action to do right for her client. she struggles against the machinery of the federal courts, appealing cases, demanding that the prison system stop shuffling him about, and otherwise filing motions over and over again. She refuses to let go of the case, even when it becomes clear that the court itself is done with it. McGough says, insists, that she had every right to file motions and to appeal. She's a highminded idealist, an honest and determined lawyer, in a profession that views this idealism and her rigid adherence to it as poor judgment.

I have to admit that this is not my favorite Malcolm book, for reasons that other reviewers have pointed out. The scam the client's running is hard to get one's head around, and I felt like I was expecting Malcolm to really dive into the contradictions of the legal profession a bit harder, but I think she had a harder time getting the lawyers to open up to her in the same way that she was able to get the psychoanalysts. I guess it's giving "fun but not loveable" vibes. Onto the next one!

 

 

 

Seduction and Betrayal, Hardwick - A few years ago, I wanted to check out a collected volume of Hardwick’s writing from the university library only to discover that this freshly released edition could not be checked out… you had to go to a special library and read it in the reading room. and you would not be permitted to take photographs. This book was about 700 to 800 pages, and I was not in the mood to live that way.

Happily, I acquired a digital version of some of her essays. Seduction and Betrayal collects various essays Hardwick published in the New York Review of Books and a lecture she delivered at Vasser, and they're pretty much uniformly wonderful. I realized I'm really vulnerable to writers who can make these super flashy judgments with flinty seriousness while flinging big dollar vocabulary words everywhere... she has incredible gifts of neat summarization, analysis, and generalization. I haven't read most of the works she reviews (a selection of white European and American writers, most notable and some unknown, from the mid-18th century to the mid-20th century), but after reading Hardwick, I feel (this is the key word) well-acquainted with the themes and characters of the works and the author's interests and strengths. She's not the kind of pyrotechnic stylist that appeals to everyone but to me, she writes with enormous appeal. for example:

Wuthering Heights is a virgin's story. The peculiarity of it lies in the harshness of the characters. Cathy is as hard, careless, and destructive as Heathcliff. She too has a sadistic nature. The love the two feel for each other is a longing for an impossible completion. Consolations do not appear; nothing in the domestic or even in the sexual life seems to the point in this book. Emily Bronte appears in every way indifferent to the need for love and companionship that tortured the lives of her sisters. We do not, in her biography, even look for a lover as we do with Emily Dickinson because it is impossible to join her with a man, with a secret, aching passion for a young curate or a schoolmaster. There is a spare, inviolate center, a harder resignation amounting finally to withdrawal.

or:

It is Ibsen's genius to place the ruthlessness of women beside the vanity and self-love of men. In a love triangle, brutality on one side and vanity on the other must be present; both are necessary as the conditions, the grounds upon which the battle will be fought. Without the heightened sense of importance a man naturally acquires when he is the object of the possessive determinations of two women, nothing interesting could happen. If he were quickly, carefully to choose one over the other, the dramatic reverberations would be slight, even rather indolent. The triangle demands the cooperation of two in the humiliation of one, along with some period of pretense, suffering, insincerity, or self-delusion. In Rosmersholm the husband is unusually dense and mild. He courteously refuses to understand the drama that has exploded around him, to take in the violent sweeps of feeling in himself and in the two women. Rosmer leans as long as he can on the stick of "friendship" and "innocence" to protect himself from his love of Rebecca and his complicity in his wife's suicide.
...
Isn't Rosmer just a bit comic? He has been turned into an object by Beata and Rebecca. Observers on the sideline see everything about him that is hidden to himself, especially his fertile justifications. Vanity, boastfulness, emotional pomposity infect his thoughts and actions. He cannot in the end be taken seriously and this above all makes the bitter battle for possession stupid and ugly. After it is over, Rosmer will inevitably be overcome by a suspicion that something has happened to him he has not expected. Is he loved for himself the object will finally wonder, just as the heirness is aware of the commercial value of her decisions. Am I worth dying for? the conscience luxuriously asks. The answer is No. Soon all the joy--they have called it here the "innocence"--has gone out of the future. Rosmer is sensibly filled with fear of the conquering woman. Where did her ruthlessness come from? Has it died away forever, or is it only lying hidden for the moment?

Do these paragraphs appeal? Are you in the mood to suddenly want to read Clarissa or watch a bunch of Ibsen plays? This may be for you.

 

 

Nixon Agonistes, Wills - I got into this because of the Know Your Enemy podcast, which has some great author overviews and book reviews I've heard in podcast form in a while. Thorough, literary, good connection and grasp of the author's strengths and their place in the wider cultural sphere--really enjoyable, they make me feel assured that the hosts have read books and read them well. In general I do not enjoy book podcasts because I am the enemy of fun, but I do think these are fun to listen to. my current malcolmania is largely due to these guys. Is that good? Bad? Am I alone in the world? Hello?

Among the books they read and discussed was Nixon Agonistes by Garry Wills, a book I've never heard of and never would have picked up otherwise. This is a 600 page book about Nixon written pre-Watergate, divided into five parts. Three of the parts, one dedicated to Nixon's second successful presidential campaign, one dedicated to Nixon's cringe-inducing political career, and the final dedicated to the 1968 Republican National Convention, are really amazing. I've never read a book where the author was so thoroughly committed to dissing the subject: Nixon's a tryhard, he's sanctimonious, he's ugly (I'm not joking: there are multiple paragraphs dedicated to how weird and ugly Nixon's face is), he plagiarizes himself constantly, he plagiarizes others in his speeches, he doesn't understand a damn thing about himself, he lacks charisma, he's the kid you beat up in high school and somehow he's president. Some leaders come about when "the man and the moment [come] together;" there's a real sense of despirited headshaking as Wills concludes that Nixon is this era's man and this era's moment meeting each other. Please hold while the modern reader looks to the year 2025...

I've been thinking about this book for a few weeks and its commentary on liberal market logic and the way it interacts with American politics because my initial feelings about this book was that the character work was really brilliant but the commentary on politics, economics, and foreign policy were insightful and intelligent but kind of hard to get through and less essential to read... Having had a few more weeks to think about it, I understand the point of it more, even if ultimately I think the framing of some of the matters clunky: we've seen a takeover of this market logic in every domain of American life and politics and it's fucking us up real bad. Why, for example, are we always trapped in this stupid dickfuck argument about "free speech" and the right to say whatever? Because we think of free speech not as freedom from persecution but as "ideas competing in a marketplace."

The academia chapter about how the logic of liberal marketplaces have taken over the academic world is really sobering and kind of dark to contemplate now. It opens with a very funny anecdote about students taking over a building and a professor crawling up the window to talk about how he sympathizes and understands and in the fifties he was totally against McCarthyism but this is not the way! and the students are like sir please leave and tip him back out the window. A savage takedown of the aristocracy of academia and a strong analysis of generational and class struggle. Not that surprising to me when I found out that wills taught at Northwestern.

There's an extended chapter called "A Good Election" where Wills discusses the problems of voting in terms that feel extraordinarily familiar: what is a "free" vote? This question was particularly urgent during the Vietnam War years: America went to war in Vietnam to (supposedly) guarantee free elections under the idea that nations can only be fully "free" (self-determining) if they have democratic elections. He then dives into the many problems around determining what voting represents, the political process of selecting candidates, and the difficulty of understanding what the results of a vote represent.

The error of Wilson in Mexico, of Nixon on Vietnam, of our whole quest for "self-determination," is clear: we have reversed the order of cause and effect. Free elections are created by free men, not vice versa. The machinery of election will not call up, establish, or guarantee political freedom. The belief that it will reveals our trust in "the market," our believe that competition of itself makes excellence prevail. Our faith in the electoral process is based entirely on myths of the market. We think we can be "open" to all political alternatives (we cannot). We think we welcome all competitors for power (we do not). We think this will give us the best rulers available (it does not). We think the freedoms we possess were wrought by this process (they were not). We think the process will work automatically for others (it will not). If our freedoms are impaired, we think ... this comes from some failure in the voting process (it does not). And we hope to cure all such discontent by repairing, restoring, or improving the process (we cannot). We think that voting is freedom's "invisible hand." In several senses, all deeper than the one he intended, Americans agree with Nixon's statement in 1968: "There is nothing wrong with this country that a good election cannot cure."

This will make me sound insane but sometimes I wonder why we enjoy listening to new music or reading new books or watching new tv shows. Surely we're tired of hearing the same chords? The same themes? The same bad, plodding writing? Why do we need to see new faces when there are old ones? Why, with all the inventions of the world to preserve knowledge, do we have to laboriously enact the whole stupid ritual of coming to understand instead of just [snap!] getting it? And it seems like unfortunately the timing of the encounter is really, REALLY important and that we imprint onto the things that give us knowledge and it feels BETTER when it's new and not yet something part of the knowledge/mental bodies of others, when we feel as though we are discovering it for the first time... just feeling like lol I'm fucking done with this year and have been done with it since like, October, and the present feels like a worsening time loop.

Should you read Nixon Agonistes: It's good! Maybe too in love with its own takedowns of metaphors. Would I describe this as a rollicking good time? Yes, one followed by the emotion of like. grim contemplation.