Bunch of Reviews

[recognito]

 

The Emissary, Tawada - a rude summary of The Emissary might be something like, "a great-grandfather has a series of flashbacks over 80 pages while waiting for his great-grandson to put on his clothes; great-grandson goes to school and may be selected to be an emissary to the wider world in a post-apocalyptic isolationist Japan; great-grandson has a dream about being fifteen and about to embark on the journey; great-grandfather gets a call from the school that great-grandson uhhhh has died??? transformed? gotten a new body? maybe just died." The end.

Tawada isn't quite for me, though I can identify the strengths and appeal of her works: people undergoing (or experiencing) massive social/bodily changes and reacting with surprising equilibrium or relatable bewilderment, an enduring interest in disappearing/changing words as environments become more repressive/mutable... the one thing she is NOT interested in is plot. Tawada does not give a shit about pacing. Mood and vibes all the way. Personally, as a reader, I don't need the characters to reverse the nuclear damage or get on a ship and explore every single continent or whatever, but I do need some sense that the form was designed or planned or shaped?! The novel seems more like a way of extending a thought than a narrative, and I guess she got to "he transforms" and decided yes. That's enough for no.

 

 

Canoes, de Kerangal - The physical edition of this book is really pleasing in terms of its actual physical dimensions, although I'm so-so on the texture of the cover/paper... Anyway this is a novella + short story collection translated from french. each story features a canoe in there as either an image or central theme. There's a strong Americana element to the collection--unsurprising, as the canoe is a new world creation, used by the native people of the eastern United States and Canada. The best piece is the novella, about a French woman moving to Colorado after her partner is accepted into a geology program and the alienation/seduction of the American west, and I cannot tell you much about any of the other short stories. They were there. There's a baffling author's commentary at the end about how her works were influenced by COVID-19, translations, masks, and so on... girl, why did you include this note, which only worsens the ways we can interpret your collection? Keep that shit a mystery!

Didn't jive with this and not quite sure who will... short and. fine. it's fine

 

 

Two Lives, Malcolm - have you thought lately about Gertrude Stein? I haven't, but now after reading Malcolm I'm like, man, why haven't I? Should I be reading more Stein biographies? Should I be reading stein's novels?? At least two or three poems, for sur.

Two Lives covers both the lives of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Stein's life partner. I've known Stein primarily through her reputation as a difficult modernist writer/poet and some tantalizing morsels slipped out of the mouths of her male modernist peers. For whatever reason, I imagined Gertrude Stein to be uh prickly and serious, but the picture that comes out of Two Lives is a Gertrude Stein who is merry, confident, and dead certain of her own genius; in fact, insistent upon it, and a real egotist with it, too. Gertrude had incredible charisma, Malcolm notes, and there's this incredible quote where Stein cheerily admits that she had the "petting privileges" of being the youngest and has basically always enjoyed those privileges. Gertrude has an uncanny ability to persuade others to assist her: from starting her car to finding her houses to managing her household--and eventually, to finding people who could protect her and Alice, two elderly Jewish lesbians, from Vichy France.

This question of survival leads, naturally, to questions of elision. Gertrude Stein was an intensely biographical writer: as a writer, Gertrude prefers not to invent scenes wholecloth but to take from her real life. Stein made a number of pointed omissions, some which can be explained by her protecting herself from the era she lived in, but others are driven more by Stein's ego and art. Malcolm eventually does dig into why Gertrude and Alice declined to write about being Jewish in any of her texts; shrewd readers will remember that Malcolm, as a child, was taken out of Europe to the United States because of worsening anti-Semitic persecution in Prague, and has also declined to mention this textually.

As always, Malcolm is always interested in the conversion of real life to narrative, whether in psychoanalysis or in writing; her interest further extends into metanarrative shaped by the biographers and the scholars. Some of the events Malcolm depicts are genuinely amazing to me: a scholar has a dream??? that leads to a new interpretation of why Stein changed a poem to make it worse because it reminded Alice (Gertrude's chief source of support, utterly convinced of Gertrude's genius) of Stein's ex-girlfriend (she and Alice had some intense sadomasochism going on?!) , the revelation that Stein and Alice survived World War 2 because they befriended an obsequious gay Catholic collaborator, the tangled mess of Gertrude's will...

The most interesting thread here concerns Leon Katz, a playwright/director who interviewed Alice and apparently got far closer to Alice than any other interviewer later on--he held onto the notes from the interview for some forty plus years, and his definitive book was only published. after his death in 2022. Katz made a number of discoveries about The Making of Americans, Steins big 900+ page novel that has gone pretty much unread. Steinians are apparently deeply upset Katz didn't publish this book sooner because the scholarship Katz did would have totally led to this enormous tomb being added to college syllabi, thereby cementing Stein's place in the modernist canon.

Skimming through the Goodreads reviews, the reception of this biography is relatively flat. I wonder if it's because there's no clear "occasion" for this book. Two Lives came out in 2007; by the time Katz' book was published, just about everyone named in the book has died. Malcolm packages Gertrude and Alice's lives with all her usual charm, but there's nothing "new" to those in the know. Stein was and remains a little-read writer most famous for her difficulty. I, for one, remain badly afflicted by Malcolmania, so it takes very little for me to get excited by a Malcolm book... to me, this is another banger, but it got me thinking about how current events enhance a work's relevance and appeal. Like, oh, we are both discovering this for the first time! I can link these things in a chain of related events!

This will make me sound crazy, but sometimes I do think, why do we need new music? Why do we need new books? Why do I need to meet new people? I don't like sounds or words, never mind people! What's wrong with this book from 2007, or this biography from 1980 or whatever... but there does seem to be something special about encountering something new for the first time and going, wow, this is speaking to me and my time... do you think I'm a normal human being who exists in the same time as you? It's feeling dubious.

 

Calamities, Gladman - so instead of reading old books I do like, I guess I've decided to read new books I don't really like. Great 2025. Earlier this year, I read and wrote up my impression of Gladman's My Lesbian Novel, a book I read and was ultimately kind of neutral on, for reasons already I covered.

It's hard to communicate what Gladman is like as a writer, so here's a link to two of the essays featured in the book. Most of the essays are roughly this long, use a similar syntax and diction, and are similarly untitled, with the exception of the numbered calamities list at the end.

Following the linked essays from sentence to sentence, I actually think they're quite complex with intriguing ambiguities: she stopped writing but we're presented with a finished work; we get plenty of detail about blood and a chipped tooth, but the phrase "to love or sex with" comes up constantly in the second work--clunky, but probably no worse than the clumsy, mismatched construction of "had a relationship with or fucked." Does the narrator need to be there in the room at all? She's an extreme outsider in the department party (she is out of the moment, the present shared by the others), yet is needed by these non-present "others" in order to create a "map."

What are the calamities Gladman writes about? A calamity about writing? broadly speaking, we can split the essays into "daily life" essays, which originate in events that have happened in the immediate present of the essay, and "writing" essays, and at the end of the work, The narrator comes to an apparent breaking point: she wants to stop writing, but the way she stops writing is to write, "I want to stop writing." Relatable!

Gladman's preoccupied with drawings, lines, and architecture, and the idea of a relationship map brings to mind Franco Moretti's maps of relationships in novels in the way that they clarify relationships yet abstract them from the actual events. I think Gladman would characterize her contemplation of points, lines, and grids more as an attempt to extend the metaphor: going through things "point by points," drawing the "line" from one concept to another, identities "intersecting," meaning coming from the "empty spaces" above and below the poem--aka in the space between the words (points) and lines (sentences). a person's individual attributes form a series of points and lines, which then forms a person-grid; a person's grid can connect to the grids of others. Yet in a room full of grids, not all grids belong. We have, then, tension between these abstract points/lines/grids and the material forms and histories of people, a tension that cannot be resolved in a one-page essay or poem about writing process or languag.

So this is where I have to admit I do not have patience for the questions that really make Gladman tick. Can one ever really inhabit the present, the now, the moment, through language? Can you inhabit a space through sentences? Can words become architecture? And to me the answer to all of those questions is "no, I don't think the aim of writing needs to encompass these things"--but I guess there's a subheading to this answer, which is that writing can only ever be done post-hoc, after the moment is done, and that words are meant to convey the idea or image, which creates the architecture, rather than being the architecture itself... anyway this is the conventional position to take. I'm not explaining anything special here. We're both bored of me here.

I'm of two minds on whether I want to check out Gladman's drawings and book of drawings. I saw in an interview that she's interested in writing beyond language, but I guess I'm like, I don't think we need to think of that as writing. I think we can let that be something else. As for the books, I'm fine with not reading any more of them, even though I know they're objectively quite interesting... this choice reflects my own intractable nature and meaningless conviction in my conclusions re: art, language, and points/lines/grids. Maybe you'll like Gladman if this review intrigues... if you do lol I'm happy to hear from you.

 

 

How Should a Person Be?, Heti - I told someone I was reading this book and she was like, I haaaate this book! it's about bourgeoisie nothing! Nothing happens in it! These two women have a fight over a dress! and khn I clearly disagree with this. One of Heti's major tricks is to take non-literary genres and make them literary. By "non-literary" I don't mean science fiction or fantasy, but genres even less respected by Serious Readers: self-help books, airport books, her personal diaries.

How Should a Person Be? has two major strands: the first is the narrator's friendship with her best friend Margaux, and the second is narrator's attempt to finish a play. A sample of the narrator engaged in the process of writing:

I am writing a play. I am writing a play that is going to save the world. If it only saves three people, I will not be happy. If with this play the oil crisis is merely averted and our standard of living maintains itself at its current level, I will weep into my oatmeal. If this play does anything short of announcing the arrival of the next cock--I mean, messiah--I will shit into my oatmeal.

Relatable!

The narrator's attempt to write a play leads her to pick up a tape recorder and start recording the people around her--including Margaux. The narrator adores Margaux, who she sees as a unique, strongminded person. The narrator sees herself, in contrast, as something of an empty container, still in search of who she is. She's recently divorced; her encounters with men, and eventually the object of her sexual obsession, often involve a strain of extreme but very happy and fulfilling submission. A rare example of happy heterosexuality??!

Heti's interest in self-help is a cheeky one: a common refrain in How Should a Person Be? is, "but he was just another man who wants to teach me something." One of the narrator's problems is that she's always looking for clear, explicit guidelines on how to be. She turns her recorded conversations with Margaux into lines for a play, then buys the same dress as Margaux--all moves we'd describe as "getting a little Single White Female in here." There's a major rupture in their friendship; the narrator runs off to New York City (classic!); the narrator discovers that she's meant to write a book, not a play.

throughout the novel, Margaux and another friend, Sholem, have been engaged in a competition where they challenge each other to make a deliberately ugly painting. The challenge has existential stakes: to deliberately make something ugly, to make it so ugly that it affronts your artistic self, might keep you from making art forever. Margaux and Sholem make their paintings, but their friends cannot decide which one is truly the ugliest. The contest is ultimately settled over a game of squash, except no one knows the rules. Seeking clear rules, the novel suggests, is not the answer; instead, you should whack the ball with your friends and see what game emerges. Art and self cannot be produced through commands--at some point, you have to stop hoping for the world to tell you how to do it and start doing it.

And that's it! That's the novel. The end. A whole lot of bourgeoisie nothing.

I think it's quite good--a deft but light touch, apparently spontaneous and unfiltered, and ironic but not disdainfully so. Tthe "ironic but not disdainful" is an important element for me--too often, irony is wielded as a way of holding characters up to the audience and pointing at them and saying, what a fucking idiot!!! but Heti's writing does not indulge such pettiness. I find that really enjoyable.The prose is admittedly not excellent, but it's competent and quite funny, and that's enough for me. 

I wonder here whether a part of what people find upsetting about Heti is this lightness. This isn't a novel that's going to tell you, for example, how to survive a fascist state or how to successfully be a man or a writer. You don't get the pleasures of Lies and Sorcery, where there are clearly very wrong ways of being and those ways lead to ominous descents and miseries and ghoulish cruelty. The worst that can happen in How Should a Person Be? is that you might break up with your friend. Sucks, but at least no one is branding you with a curling iron! but ksdfhg I also think it's a little strange to read How Should a Person Be and come away with this urge to get an exact prescription for living in all situations. It’s clear on the stakes and the world it’s writing about; take it or leave it.