August of plany?? ough time

[recognito]

This post is so, so late... the good news is that I'm writing a lot for a new novel project, which means instead of channeling my frustrated writing impulses into book reviews, I'm back to being a genius writer. The bad news is, I am so, so, so so behind.

This post covers all my July reads and some of my August ones.

Suggested in the Stars, Tawada - Sequel to Scattered All Over the Earth, and I am realizing there is a reason why trilogies have cheesy themed names because I am not going to remember that these two are linked books at all. Anyway, my combination of fascination and complaints continue: fascinating concept, some strong thematic links, some real disinterest in conventional plot that I think is working against the project of having a trilogy.

There's some real bad synergy between Tawada's writerly mode and her transgender characters, and lol I'm actually really mad about it. So, the thing that elevates Tawada's interest in language, the body, and national identity for me is that she does not lmao give a shit about ideals of the body/language/etc.—there's no real mourning of a lost, perfect body/language/familial arrangement/romantic relationship that has now fallen into decaaaaay so many other works that address the same topics end up falling prey to. This is often illustrated not through direct conflict, but through two generations reflecting on a common situation and one generation going, "wow, messed up!" and the other going, "okay? sure? not my business" — for example, with The Emissary, the older, "healthy"/quasi-immortal generation pities the younger, frailer generation, who have been radition-poisoned, but the younger generation are far casual about their struggles. They don't have the same kinds of attachment to the ideals of health, capability, or shape of the human body. The two generations operate on entirely different emotional planes. With Akash, I can't help but feel like Tawada wants to link the in betweenness of nationality/nations and language to an in betweenness of gender with Akash, but the process of trying to give Akash that space basically reads identically to passive aggressive "what ARE you really" and "he… I mean she… who knows…" and it really does drive a man crazy even if he thinks Tawada is not intentionally being a bonehead. Not too happy I finished the book but I do feel motivated to check out her earlier works.

The Empusium, Tokarczuk - A pretty slow-moving horror-ish riff on The Magic Mountain, with some charms and fascinations and many frustrations. A Tokarczuk novel is one that often demands reading with a wiki page ready for some added context. The Paris Review article, for example, about St. Emerentia does a good job of displaying the depth of curiosity and engagement Tokarczuk has with the original text… I'm only partway through my own read of The Magic Mountain, so cannot provide a total picture of how she adapts it, but Tokarczuk presents us with a beautifully rendered vision of early twentieth century Poland.

The protagonist, Mieczyslaw Wojnicz, finds his stay at the sanitarium troubled by more than just his illness. To Wojnicz, the sanitarium represents a kind of death, his father banishing his unmanly son to the mountains. He's been in treatment for an unspecified illness for years now, and the treatment extended to his home life, where he was commanded to eat food that would improve his masculinity, exercise in a more masculine way, and so on. The sanitarium, with its rigid protocols, ends up being another way to subject Wojnicz to a routine of improvement and betterment. Wojnicz dodges other Poles, disliking the false fellowship of nationality, and, among the other residents at the boarding house he's staying at, is the often silent participant of heated philosophical debates among the residents, a debate which seems to largely center around lol the frailty, moral turpitude, and general inferiority of women. Tokarczuk quotes the vast Western canon of misogyny, to great effect (making the reader feel insane and angry).

The women of the novel are almost entirely absent, save for the apparently omniscient narrator, the first person plural and feminine empousa, spirits of the wood/land. Wojnicz sees women from afar and experiences desire, though different from Castorp's fruitless yearning. Despite the misogynist forces around him, Wojnicz only feels at peace when he's sneaking into the attic, where his landlord's wife once lived. (She commits suicide on day one of his stay.) He tries her clothes on, imagines her life, and finds secret, delicious mushrooms in an apparently secret dimensional pocket in the closet; these moments, aside from Wojnicz's friendship with the doomed, gay art student Thilo, who gifts him a painting with similarly transportive properties depending on the viewer's perceptiveness, are his only moments of ease, and the only place where Wojnicz can inhabit the womanness that his father and uncle tried to stomp out.

So at this point, maybe you're thinking, oh, okay, got it! Wojnicz is trans! And kfhn here I think Tokarczuk seems to have decided that would be too obvious and makes him intersex, possessing male and female secondary sex characteristics with a gender identity of "it depends on how you see it."

I do think she sees this as separate and different from being trans: a theme in the novel is revelation and perspective, where apparently flat, fixed images or static locations gain depth and multitudes if you're able to change your perspective. The intended reading seems to be that Wojnicz can be either gender and sex, depending on how he styles himself; the epilogue suggests that he lived both as a man and woman in different periods of his life. Maybe there's also supposed to a nod to mushrooms and their unclassifiable reproductive strategies, too, and how it doesn't line up with mammalian sex, but lol I guess I find this fake out does make me feel like cis writers find being trans less capable of conveying the potential for infinite potential than being. a metaphor for a mushroom.

Exploding the Phone, Lapsley - This book is a great instruction manual for how to fuck around with landline telephones. The book was recommended to me as a jolly romp about phone phreaking, and it takes the reader through the development of telephone technology: building the phone, building the wire, building the company, building the monopoly, building the machines to run the monopoly, and, finally, building the movement of people who found all the weaknesses of the giant telecommunication network and the steps Ma Bell (which includes that wretch, AT&T?!) took to try to squash it. I think it's a really effective illustration of the early and present telecommunications industry; landline phones are kind of becoming a distant memory (do you know how to use a rotary phone??? I never did), but Lapsley clearly makes the link between the past and today. He also really effectively shows the tight links between Ma Bell, the defense industry, universities, and various federal agencies. Kind of remarkable to think about how Lapsley was able to get so many interviews with key figures—really a case of publishing right on time.
 
The Wilderness, Savas - The project starts with Savas deciding to document these forty days in the last weeks of her pregnancy, figuring it'd be "like watching a psychological thriller;" like a psychological thriller, it is harrowing and really stressful! I picked it up because, frankly, I have a cat and that's about all the paternal instinct I can muster, but a number of my friends are either having kids, thinking about having kids, or on their way to having kids. Pregnancy is highly visible and often written about and written from, but the postpartum leads people away from the prying eyes of strangers and semi-strange friends and into the family, and then, after some time, the parent and child return to the world, both new to it.

Savas also wrote The Anthropologists, which I read a few months ago and was neutral-positive on it. I'm more wholly positive on The Wilderness, and not only for the gratification of my voyeuristic impulse. I do find it a remarkable text when it comes to exploring "becoming," especially with the difficulty Savas experiences with her own mother's arrival to help with the baby and how it starkly illustrates how the process of becoming a mother is tied to the need to receive mothering in the same moment for her. That "becoming" is a difficult period of time to write about; I think all the time about like, how many transitions have these prefilled narrative forms to help you through that "becoming" period, but many of those transition periods are impossible to really write through when you're "becoming" and difficult to write about after.

Next up: yes, like everyone else, I am reading Tanith Lee.