versmonesprit's reviews
217 reviews

I wanted to love this, I really did. And at first I indeed did, the first titled poem, Roastbeef, was amazing! It was pure language without foregoing some sort of sense. I found myself smiling while reading!

And then things took a dive, very fast. I read all these out loud, and by just the third poem, I was exhausted, I barely had the breath in me. I was no longer able to find anything particularly enjoyable, and soon all sense was abandoned completely, with no rhythm or mastery of language to make up for it. Here and there, on rare occasions, I liked a few lines, but as a whole the book was a genuine stroke simulator. I even suspect Stein might have had a stroke while writing some of these. And I even suspected I was about to have an aneurysm myself, my brain hurt so badly it triggered a migraine attack. I am not alright.

Do you like your books with an aura of nostalgia? Do you like reading about melancholy? Then you might enjoy In the Café of Lost Youth. Maybe.

I love both of those touching (and a bit bleak) sentiments in books, but they cannot be conveyed all that well when the book offers plot upon plot upon plot. Unfortunately, In the Café of Lost Youth was neither atmospheric enough to land the sense of nostalgia, nor passionate enough to convince the reader of the melancholia. It got close sometimes, but never attained that emotionality. That said, this light detachment was quite reminiscent of French arthouse films, so you could at least say the book is authentically French.

I wonder if I’d enjoy it more had I read the original, rather than the English translation. Unfortunately, I was a bit of a clown and thought Modiano must be Italian (I rarely look up authors) so I never thought to look for the French editions. I did not like this book enough to justify buying it a second time and rereading, so I can’t comment on the quality of the translation either.

So in short, you could love In the Café of Lost Youth, or like me you could find yourself bored of the plot-heavy narration that never changes its voice sufficiently for different characters. Either way I’d categorise it as a very elementary book, without much depth of character and emotion despite dealing with the fleeting of youth and people, which makes it very easy to read quickly. If you want an unchallenging Nobel laureate read, this might even be ideal for you! 

Reading Ginsberg for the first time through this small selection might not have been the best idea. While the variety it offers might be seen as a good intro, the selection feels extremely random and directionless.

The first poem featured is written by Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Cassady. It feels like it was written for fun before anything else. I wasn’t wowed, but I also didn’t dislike it. It sort of felt like it’s in a similar vein as Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons.

The following 4 poems unfortunately ended up being terrible. They felt dated and flat when they weren’t completely artless. While some passages were actually good, the rest ruined their effect. The titular poem gave me genuine rage due to how unintelligible and horrendous it was — it took all my power not to rip the book in my fury.

An intelligible but equally flat  poem follows them, which almost works as a barrier between the bad poems and the ones that are actually good.

The following 7 poems made me consider the possibility of giving Ginsberg another shot. They’re at times salacious, at times pornographic, which must have shocked the conservative 80s American society. Their subversive nature added to their allure for me.

Out of these 7 poems, the one that felt the most Beat was Mind Breaths, which reminded me of Kerouac’s prose.

Without the 4 aforementioned poems, this would have gotten a 5/5 from me. I can’t help but think Ginsberg must have written much better ones to include here instead. As it is, I don’t really see what made Ginsberg such a revolutionary figure for poetry, though the latter poems at least establish him as a writer of merit for me.

Black Forest had been on my digital TBR for a very long time, but suffered from my inability to retain anything of its blurb. Even while reading the book’s description, it was already completely erased from my memory. Sometimes my brain refuses to retain information, and though it’s not a reflection on anything other than my brain’s capriciousness, it meant that Black Forest kept being overshadowed by “more enticing” books.

I am so glad I took the plunge tonight. I hate it when reviewers take the lazy way out by saying “go into it blind,” but this is one of the very few books for which such a suggestion will not only work, but work a lot better than having many ideas about what the book is about.

One of the reasons is that when you sum it up, the book doesn’t sound interesting. Statements on opposing tonalities might even put you off. It’s difficult to pin down Black Forest truly, because while it’s very concrete, its nature is still elusive. Black Forest is its very own thing. All I’m willing to offer as information is that it’s a book on death. Mréjen’s approach is so novel, so unique, that even if you like me read often on loss and grief, you still will not have read anything like Black Forest.

I would have loved to read the original, which is something I always advocate for (if you know the original language, read the book as written by the author!) but unfortunately accessibility sometimes prevents that. I can’t get my hands on any Mréjen books at the moment aside from Black Forest, and so I don’t have the original to compare against, but the translation read so seamless in English, that I’m inclined to believe it is formidably done!

I rarely read books in one sitting. I’m glad I could do it with Black Forest, and would recommend waiting until you have uninterrupted time to spare to read it as well. The way the book is set up demands that flow in order to be effective. This way, you slowly find your footing inside the initial disorientation the book throws you into, and witness the book slowly settle and unfold before your eyes. I’d also highly recommend reading it in the quiet and dimness of the night to enhance the aura of the book.

I have no words. Clarice Lispector used them all, and used them so exquisitely, there are no more words to use, because there is nothing else left to say that she didn’t say. She concludes Água Viva with “What I’m writing to you goes on and I am bewitched.” It goes on; it’s me who is bewitched. Because Água Viva is not a book. It’s a spell. It’s a transcendental experience. It is the utterly relatable invocation of a woman’s uncaged, unrestrained, untamed inner life, like a lush and feral jungle. Everything Clarice Lispector set out to do in Água Viva, she did. If she wrote this in the Middle Ages, she would be canonised, for this book is philosophically divine, poetically holy. It is the most striking meditation on existence, on time, on word. A must read.

My rating reflects the quality of, or rather lack thereof, the audiobook; I’d rate the book itself just a tad bit higher, though not by far.

To start with the issues of the book itself, the biggest disappointment was the lack of atmosphere. I was hoping for a better established tropical setting, but the story was so removed from its setting at its core that it could have been set anywhere else without it impacting the story!

The other issue is that while Miss Marple’s bits are wonderful, she’s absent from so many scenes which makes them terribly boring. It’s only Miss Marple’s easily likeable personality that livens up the endless chain of conversations. I don’t know if this is one of the censored versions from which they removed Christie’s racist slurs — bearing in mind I didn’t hear any racial slurs, I found the book quite adamant in its rather feminist remarks, which made the book feel beyond its time. That was an unexpected but great surprise!

Finally, without giving any spoilers away, there are far too many affairs that it becomes a stupid choice.

Onto my issues with the audiobook… of course, they reside with the narrator. As usual the narration is excruciatingly slow, to the point some portions of dialogues sound perfectly regular at 2.5x speed! I’m a slow reader myself, but there’s a huge difference between reading at a pace you enjoy and having to listen to someone speak in slow motion.

As if this is not enough of a bad thing to allow a narrator to do, they certainly made up (!) for the lack of racism on Christie’s part by allowing the narrator to do something nauseatingly disgusting. The very much white narrator does mock accents of South Americans and Caribbeans. Yes, you read that right. Mock accents. Yikes! 

Upon seeing so much glowing praise for Telluria, I had to read a Sorokin asap, and that’s how I ended up with The Blizzard. I certainly don’t regret this introduction to his works, seeing how well it has worked out for me.

Knowing what Telluria is about, there seems to be several thematic parallels in Sorokin’s works, which I’m excited to discover as I read through them over time. His futuristic but also somewhat past-time-y setting was a delight to read here, as was the sort of funny vision of a fantastic future with giants, “zoogenous” fabrics, and strange drugs. As such, it’s also impossible to miss the inspiration Dune must have given Sorokin.

The Blizzard is very plot-heavy, and it’s rare that I find such books to be perfect. But Sorokin is great at pacing, doesn’t let things drag on to the point of boredom, and balances the strange and the realistic in a most compelling way. You never know the direction the book is taking, and so I won’t ruin it with many details, which also means not revealing the book’s message.

For circumstances out of my hands, it took me several days to read, but The Blizzard is one of those books that just glide … like oil? You’ll get the reference once you read it, which you can easily do in one sitting is what I’ve been trying to say!

Never have I ever cared less for a character I related so much to. Rest and Be Thankful’s narrator-main character Laura is a worn out woman, sleep deprived, in an unhealthy relationship, plagued by nightmares, and just slightly unhinged in her daydreams. And yet what starts off as a singularly gripping, vivid, engrossing, feverish book quickly dulls down when Glass, a nurse herself, gets duped by her own first hand experiences: she goes into extremely boring details about a nurse’s work. These minute descriptions of patient care do not add anything to the book to depict just how worn out Laura is; they just make the book dull with unending tedious work. Yes, even if your job is eventful and tense and at times sad, descriptions of it are still work descriptions. Of course they’re tedious.

And this went on for so long, I completely stopped caring for the book, and for Laura altogether. It took me 3 days to read this small book, which, despite being so short, was still so painfully overdrawn with repetitions. The book evaded its own climax so fervently that when the ending that’s supposed to be impactful came, I felt nothing at all.

Oh and the attempted poetic language, with words associations like ‘dream days’ and ‘dream haze’, or rhymes like ‘headache’ and ‘wake’, somehow manages not to land at all. It never hits the spot. It’s not organic; it’s forced. Sorry, Glass just isn’t a poet.

What a shame, because I sat on this book for a year, fully convinced it’d be one of the best books I’ve ever read.

It’s hard to believe this is a debut, as I feel this might be Moshfegh’s absolute best work. It’s not an exaggeration when I say literary history will laud McGlue as a modern classic.

It’s equally hard to write a review for a perfect work, so I’ll just mention how this is a feverish, hazy book with a most cathartic ending. A must read for everyone.

The book is divided into two parts, during the first of which I thought if my dislike for the book was due to how I seem not to have reconciled with Mishima after reading the abhorrent fascist rambling that is his essay Sun and Steel. But as the second part opened, I was confronted with the bitter reality: that this is a book barely about what the blurbs claim it is, and that for the majority of its length it’s pretty much a romance, which is to say, it’s an incredibly dull book. The only thing I felt through the dreaded hours of reading, besides boredom, was seething disgust against children — yes, in general. As someone who already has an aversion to them, this book solidified it even further, to the point I wish boys were just illegal, as a whole. Never seen one that isn’t an actual sociopath.

Anyway, back to the book: when it isn’t a dull account of a relationship, it’s unending descriptions. Even the entirety of the final act, the supposed climax, is nothing but scenery descriptions. To crown all this, it also cuts off before anything actually takes place. Why? Who knows! Maybe Mishima just wanted his fiction to be as trash as his little fascist essay. I’m so angry at myself for having paid for 4 more of his books. Seriously considering getting rid of them.