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wmbogart's reviews
72 reviews
Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov
Pnin is the story of a lovable émigré egghead. When we’re introduced to him, he’s a guy that can’t catch a break. The narration mocks him. His broken English, juxtaposed with Nabokov’s mastery of sentences and form, is often played for comedic effect.
But this is soon problematized. Nabokov uses a unique episodic structure to give the reader different angles and context into Pnin’s character. We likewise gain insight into the narrator, whose perspective quietly colors the text.
The reader is left to reflect on their prior reading of Pnin. Some may have allowed themselves to laugh at tragedy. It is a lesson in empathy, and a call for more careful consideration.
Now, should the lesson in empathy have involved a character that isn’t obviously a stand-in for Nabokov himself? Maybe, maybe not. Write what you know, right? It’s a moving work nonetheless.
I will add that there’s a great literary device involving a squirrel here. Inspired!
But this is soon problematized. Nabokov uses a unique episodic structure to give the reader different angles and context into Pnin’s character. We likewise gain insight into the narrator, whose perspective quietly colors the text.
The reader is left to reflect on their prior reading of Pnin. Some may have allowed themselves to laugh at tragedy. It is a lesson in empathy, and a call for more careful consideration.
Now, should the lesson in empathy have involved a character that isn’t obviously a stand-in for Nabokov himself? Maybe, maybe not. Write what you know, right? It’s a moving work nonetheless.
I will add that there’s a great literary device involving a squirrel here. Inspired!
The Lily in the Valley by Honoré de Balzac
The Lily in the Valley explores a complex relationship - a semi-maternal love, a confused longing, a mutual dependence, an unspoken (mis-)understanding between two closely connected lovers(?), around a love that is never physically consummated. Again, complex! In the way relationships between people often are.
Balzac will flood the reader with passages that detail a character's worldview in incredible depth. You have to read these passages critically, obviously. This is made clear in the novel's conclusion.
The prose is thoroughly adorned. The guy wasn't exactly going for economy of language; he was slamming coffee and burrowing into psyches. If some of the attitudes expressed by Félix are antiquated or essentialist in our modern lens, the character is young and the novel was written in the nineteenth century.
Balzac will flood the reader with passages that detail a character's worldview in incredible depth. You have to read these passages critically, obviously. This is made clear in the novel's conclusion.
The prose is thoroughly adorned. The guy wasn't exactly going for economy of language; he was slamming coffee and burrowing into psyches. If some of the attitudes expressed by Félix are antiquated or essentialist in our modern lens, the character is young and the novel was written in the nineteenth century.
Me & Other Writing by Marguerite Duras
When is man alone in all this? Alone before G-d, before his own immensity. When we talk about the issues humanity faces, we are framing things the wrong way. The everyday issues that arise for the individual, meaning those related to his purpose and his futility, are crucial issues for all of humanity, and they are mundane, they are the most observable, the most frequent. With each of his tragedies, with each of his problems, man bangs up against his own definition: What am I doing here?
Everything will be done to ensure man forgets the Pascalian perspective of his existence, which is to say his constant struggle with himself. To think, to read, to write, to travel, to commit suicide, to love, to construct, to deconstruct, to destroy, to face this contradiction in his blood, in his mind, and to stand tall before the idea of G-d, and above all above all never managing to solve a thing, and always always trying, trying to solve everything, that is the problem, and the only one, in every case, man's problem in every case.
The Singularity by Dino Buzzati
The prose (or translation?) really took me out of this.
An example: “But there was an exceedingly abnormal element that gave those structures an air of enigma.”
???
An example: “But there was an exceedingly abnormal element that gave those structures an air of enigma.”
???
The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster
The first story here (City of Glass) really knocked me out. The narrator’s identity dissolves into depersonalization (or psychosis) as he bores deeper and deeper into an obsessive investigation.
Auster’s trick here is in having his characters self-consciously perform thriller/detective tropes. He’s able to engage in these tropes with a post-modern distance while grounding the narrative in a recognizable form. This allows him a sense of momentum. Of course, the narration eventually unspools itself from the form. But even with these formal breaks, Auster’s prose is incredibly accessible.
It does feel like a case of diminishing returns when this is restaged in Ghosts and The Locked Room. I can’t quite decide if the interplay between the stories is fun or obnoxious; Auster has a tendency to over-explain. The connections to other literary works (Don Quixote, Henry David Thoreau) are spelled out for the reader in long digressions. Likewise with the explicit consideration of framing in all three stories. The text feels a little too eager to explain or justify itself.
And yet! I really enjoy reading him.
What he liked about these books was their sense of plenitude and economy. In the good mystery there is nothing wasted, no sentence, no word that is not significant. And even if it is not significant, it has the potential to be so - which amounts to the same thing. […] Everything becomes essence; the center of the book shifts with each event that propels it forward. The center, then, is everywhere, and no circumference can be drawn until the book has come to its end.
The first story here (City of Glass) really knocked me out. The narrator’s identity dissolves into depersonalization (or psychosis) as he bores deeper and deeper into an obsessive investigation.
Auster’s trick here is in having his characters self-consciously perform thriller/detective tropes. He’s able to engage in these tropes with a post-modern distance while grounding the narrative in a recognizable form. This allows him a sense of momentum. Of course, the narration eventually unspools itself from the form. But even with these formal breaks, Auster’s prose is incredibly accessible.
It does feel like a case of diminishing returns when this is restaged in Ghosts and The Locked Room. I can’t quite decide if the interplay between the stories is fun or obnoxious; Auster has a tendency to over-explain. The connections to other literary works (Don Quixote, Henry David Thoreau) are spelled out for the reader in long digressions. Likewise with the explicit consideration of framing in all three stories. The text feels a little too eager to explain or justify itself.
And yet! I really enjoy reading him.
The End of the Road by John Barth
As with A Floating Opera, the characters in The End of the Road espouse a hollow “rationality” to the point of absurdity. But the pedantry takes a darker turn here; the indifference that more or less discourages suicide in Barth's debut novel is shown here to be a paralyzing, crippling force that seems to justify inaction and a gross disregard for others.
There’s a lot here about the performance of “selves” and the “self” at a distance that I enjoy. Obviously most (if not all) of the dialogue around these subjects shouldn’t be taken at face value. But that (post-)modern ambivalence and lack of conviction is always interesting to me.
Barth’s typical comedy of social processes is still here. Our narrator will frequently envision a host of counter-arguments or paths that a conversation can go down before answering “no reason” or shrugging. That’s a great bit! A lot of anti-climactic, ironic reveals that I laughed out loud at. Also laughed at the frequent abstraction of people to symbols/principles/ideals.
The misogyny and the casual violence towards women throughout the novel is more difficult. I understand the narration mocks the men as well, but there is a larger misogyny to the writing that goes beyond the intentionally loathsome perspective of the narrator. Gotta acknowledge that, I think. For that reason, and for the bleaker, anti-social nihilism throughout the novel, I preferred A Floating Opera.
“Where the hell else but in America could you have a cheerful nihilism?”
As with A Floating Opera, the characters in The End of the Road espouse a hollow “rationality” to the point of absurdity. But the pedantry takes a darker turn here; the indifference that more or less discourages suicide in Barth's debut novel is shown here to be a paralyzing, crippling force that seems to justify inaction and a gross disregard for others.
There’s a lot here about the performance of “selves” and the “self” at a distance that I enjoy. Obviously most (if not all) of the dialogue around these subjects shouldn’t be taken at face value. But that (post-)modern ambivalence and lack of conviction is always interesting to me.
Barth’s typical comedy of social processes is still here. Our narrator will frequently envision a host of counter-arguments or paths that a conversation can go down before answering “no reason” or shrugging. That’s a great bit! A lot of anti-climactic, ironic reveals that I laughed out loud at. Also laughed at the frequent abstraction of people to symbols/principles/ideals.
The misogyny and the casual violence towards women throughout the novel is more difficult. I understand the narration mocks the men as well, but there is a larger misogyny to the writing that goes beyond the intentionally loathsome perspective of the narrator. Gotta acknowledge that, I think. For that reason, and for the bleaker, anti-social nihilism throughout the novel, I preferred A Floating Opera.
The Floating Opera by John Barth
RIYL: Self-aware navel-gazing, parenthetical asides, direct addresses to the reader, formal gags, ironic pedantry.
Or if you like critiques of literary realism embedded in any of the above, this might be the novel for you. I loved it! It is intentionally insufferable, in the best way.
Barth calls his shot early on:
The irony here is that the "revelations" in The Floating Opera, despite the narrator's belief to the contrary, are mostly laughable. Until they aren't. Without giving anything away, I found the conclusion life-affirming, without compromising the hilarious, bizarre tone of the novel up to that point.
Full disclosure - not everything here has aged well. There are some unsavory attitudes throughout, both in the narrator's voice (more forgivable) and in what I'm reading as Barth's (unfortunate).
Still, I really enjoyed it! I frequently disturbed my cat by laughing out loud while reading. But I could laugh at a narrator's intentionally moronic ~ruminations~ all day if the prose is strong enough. Others, understandably, feel differently.
And this is what I wanted to say, because I consider it fairly important (hell, even urgently important) to the understanding of this whole story: quite frequently, things that are obvious to other people aren't even apparent to me.
RIYL: Self-aware navel-gazing, parenthetical asides, direct addresses to the reader, formal gags, ironic pedantry.
Or if you like critiques of literary realism embedded in any of the above, this might be the novel for you. I loved it! It is intentionally insufferable, in the best way.
Barth calls his shot early on:
Were you ever chagrined by stories that seemed to promise some revelation, and then cheated their way out of it?
The irony here is that the "revelations" in The Floating Opera, despite the narrator's belief to the contrary, are mostly laughable. Until they aren't. Without giving anything away, I found the conclusion life-affirming, without compromising the hilarious, bizarre tone of the novel up to that point.
Full disclosure - not everything here has aged well. There are some unsavory attitudes throughout, both in the narrator's voice (more forgivable) and in what I'm reading as Barth's (unfortunate).
Still, I really enjoyed it! I frequently disturbed my cat by laughing out loud while reading. But I could laugh at a narrator's intentionally moronic ~ruminations~ all day if the prose is strong enough. Others, understandably, feel differently.
The Complete Stories by Clarice Lispector
My first Lispector. Her writing feels like a kind of tangled thinking. The text frequently "clarifies" itself with dependent clauses. Her sentence structures are very interesting. There's a unique rhythm (or anti-rhythm) to them.
And as her style develops over the collection, she incorporates more and more jarring devices in her work. Not that they feel like "devices" necessarily, because the writing flows in a bizarrely organic, disorienting way.
A lot of the stories explore the inner psychologies of women in various forms of exile. Characters overanalyze things until thoughts turn in on themselves. The narration wraps itself up in knots. But not without a kind of clarity. It reminded me of Sarraute in this way.
With collections like this, a reader is always tempted to trace the development of the author over time. As noted in the introduction (and the translator's note), Lispector gets more and more concerned with aging. This is made sadder in light of the obsession around appearances earlier in the collection.
And there are some unsavory elements here; Lispector clearly prizes a thin figure. The bourgeois "ruminations" around class, wealth, and guilt can be a little exhausting. Not every story worked for me. Particularly the more fantastic ones in the middle of the collection. But I don't mean to complain. Her prose is incredibly unique at every turn.
I particularly enjoyed "The Imitation of the Rose" as a psychological portrait of someone aware of her own illness and how she might appear to her partner.
And as her style develops over the collection, she incorporates more and more jarring devices in her work. Not that they feel like "devices" necessarily, because the writing flows in a bizarrely organic, disorienting way.
A lot of the stories explore the inner psychologies of women in various forms of exile. Characters overanalyze things until thoughts turn in on themselves. The narration wraps itself up in knots. But not without a kind of clarity. It reminded me of Sarraute in this way.
With collections like this, a reader is always tempted to trace the development of the author over time. As noted in the introduction (and the translator's note), Lispector gets more and more concerned with aging. This is made sadder in light of the obsession around appearances earlier in the collection.
And there are some unsavory elements here; Lispector clearly prizes a thin figure. The bourgeois "ruminations" around class, wealth, and guilt can be a little exhausting. Not every story worked for me. Particularly the more fantastic ones in the middle of the collection. But I don't mean to complain. Her prose is incredibly unique at every turn.
I particularly enjoyed "The Imitation of the Rose" as a psychological portrait of someone aware of her own illness and how she might appear to her partner.
Apocalyptic Ruin and Everyday Wonder in Don DeLillo's America by Michael Naas
This basically amounts to 200+ pages of DeLillo excerpts, organized by theme. The material is mostly left to speak for itself; the commentary mostly just rearticulates the concerns in each passage. But that's by design.
The thesis here should be pretty obvious to readers. DeLillo is interested in exploring the interconnectedness of things.
When reading just about any DeLillo, you get a sense that everything is a manifestation of a larger process or system. At one extreme, we have the small, day-to-day concerns. Waste, sport, haircuts. At the other, we have nuclear disaster, terrorism, commerce, and death. Naas refers to this as "contrabanding," or the reconciliation (or juxtaposition) of these extremes.
I'm oversimplifying, but it sounds about right to me.
And again, 200+ pages of DeLillo quotes. What more could you want?
The thesis here should be pretty obvious to readers. DeLillo is interested in exploring the interconnectedness of things.
When reading just about any DeLillo, you get a sense that everything is a manifestation of a larger process or system. At one extreme, we have the small, day-to-day concerns. Waste, sport, haircuts. At the other, we have nuclear disaster, terrorism, commerce, and death. Naas refers to this as "contrabanding," or the reconciliation (or juxtaposition) of these extremes.
I'm oversimplifying, but it sounds about right to me.
And again, 200+ pages of DeLillo quotes. What more could you want?
Americana by Don DeLillo
DeLillo's funniest novel? Maybe his most "entertaining" at some base level? I don't meant to imply that it is slight or trivial. It isn't. With Americana he surveys the many preoccupations that would serve as a through-line in his work - language, commerce, systems, the image, ritual, community, (im-)personal relations, academia, the self at a distance, etc. Only in comparison to something like Underworld would this feel like a breezy, enjoyable novel.
Disclaimer - I think almost every DeLillo novel is funny. You gotta laugh at the crushing absurdity of systems and at the interconnectedness of things both terrifying and trivial. Maybe. What else can you do?
"[The television commercial] moves him from first person consciousness to third person. In this country there is a universal third person, the man we all want to be. Advertising has discovered this man. It uses him to express the possibilities open to the consumer. To consume in America is not to buy; it is to dream. Advertising is the suggestion that the dream of entering the third person singular might possibly be fulfilled."
I have reached the point where the coining of aphorisms seems a very worthy substitute for good company or madness.
“Interesting,” I said.
“What do you think it means?”
“Very interesting.”
“Thanks a lot.”
DeLillo's funniest novel? Maybe his most "entertaining" at some base level? I don't meant to imply that it is slight or trivial. It isn't. With Americana he surveys the many preoccupations that would serve as a through-line in his work - language, commerce, systems, the image, ritual, community, (im-)personal relations, academia, the self at a distance, etc. Only in comparison to something like Underworld would this feel like a breezy, enjoyable novel.
Disclaimer - I think almost every DeLillo novel is funny. You gotta laugh at the crushing absurdity of systems and at the interconnectedness of things both terrifying and trivial. Maybe. What else can you do?