Scan barcode
wmbogart's reviews
72 reviews
The Music of Chance by Paul Auster
There’s a momentum to the novel even as it moves into totally different registers. It can abruptly shift from hilarious to deeply unsettling within a single passage. I understand this is common in Auster’s writing. It’s interesting.
There’s an openness to the imagery and the plot too; interpretations are occasionally suggested, but elements are frequently left unresolved or undefined. Part character study, part meditation on chance, risk, freedom (quote-unquote), and labor. Mostly liked it!
The Man Who Watched Trains Go By by Georges Simenon
Readable prose, but you can see how Simenon was able to churn these out. Popinga's psychology felt obvious and hollow. I won’t be rushing to read his other four hundred novels.
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk
Surprised I didn’t connect with this! I’m sure I’m missing something. But my tolerance for the “goofball narrator’s life musings” genre only extends so far. Even when that narrator occasionally stumbles on larger truths or whatever. Not one for “thrillers” in general, so I struggled to care about a lot of the plot. Much prefer The Books of Jacob.
Running Dog by Don DeLillo
Pardon the pun, but… rough. Probably his worst? DeLillo’s (tongue-in-cheek) take on the noir thriller, with all the casual misogyny (and plot contrivances) that entails. Some great lines and strong dialogue, but not much here that he didn’t explore more successfully elsewhere. First section of the book is particularly unfortunate.
Go, Went, Gone by Jenny Erpenbeck
Go, Went, Gone is knowingly framed from the perspective of Richard, a concerned classics professor, rather than from the perspective of the asylum seekers themselves. Given Erpenbeck’s background, this is probably necessary. She uses the novel to interrogate the academic’s response and sense of guilt, and the response of German bystanders more broadly.
We see why Richard would get actively involved with the refugees as he comes to understand Germany’s disregard (if not outright disdain) for them. Obviously there’s some moral obligation there. But in fleshing out his backstory, we find other motivations. Loneliness for one, and a vague sense of identification relative to his own experience around German reunification.
The frequent questions he poses to the refugees, though well-intentioned, are initially sociological to an almost gross degree. His perspective and associations are rooted in an older academic canon that has little bearing on the lives these men lead.
We quickly see that perspective’s limits. His “understanding” of the broader situation and the individual refugees is filtered through his prior studies. He assigns new names to asylum seekers to better remember them. He often catches himself making untoward assumptions. The novel is critical of this, without outright condemning his character. We see this too in juxtapositions as the narrative progresses - the opulence of a catered meal or a party is implicitly compared to the harsh “living” conditions “provided” to these refugees as a stopgap for their eventual forced removal from Germany.
A more obvious didactic tone grows throughout the novel; these asylum seekers are mistreated, disregarded, and demonized. They are victims of imperialist aggression and the extraction of natural resources by European colonizers. As Richard grows and continues his research, the letter of the law in Germany (and elsewhere) is shown as a maze of bureaucratic excuses to “justify” an inhumane disregard for these people. This is hopefully obvious enough to the reader already, but a point worth making.
The novel is much more nuanced than a straightforward white savior narrative. Some other interesting ideas here too, related to the collective memory around reunification (as with Kairos), and how that memory is subtly present in objects, architecture, and behavior.
As always, there’s a focus to Erpenbeck’s writing that I really appreciate. Every passage dovetails cleanly and neatly into the novel’s larger themes. Don’t let the tonally bizarre cover fool you.
We see why Richard would get actively involved with the refugees as he comes to understand Germany’s disregard (if not outright disdain) for them. Obviously there’s some moral obligation there. But in fleshing out his backstory, we find other motivations. Loneliness for one, and a vague sense of identification relative to his own experience around German reunification.
The frequent questions he poses to the refugees, though well-intentioned, are initially sociological to an almost gross degree. His perspective and associations are rooted in an older academic canon that has little bearing on the lives these men lead.
We quickly see that perspective’s limits. His “understanding” of the broader situation and the individual refugees is filtered through his prior studies. He assigns new names to asylum seekers to better remember them. He often catches himself making untoward assumptions. The novel is critical of this, without outright condemning his character. We see this too in juxtapositions as the narrative progresses - the opulence of a catered meal or a party is implicitly compared to the harsh “living” conditions “provided” to these refugees as a stopgap for their eventual forced removal from Germany.
A more obvious didactic tone grows throughout the novel; these asylum seekers are mistreated, disregarded, and demonized. They are victims of imperialist aggression and the extraction of natural resources by European colonizers. As Richard grows and continues his research, the letter of the law in Germany (and elsewhere) is shown as a maze of bureaucratic excuses to “justify” an inhumane disregard for these people. This is hopefully obvious enough to the reader already, but a point worth making.
The novel is much more nuanced than a straightforward white savior narrative. Some other interesting ideas here too, related to the collective memory around reunification (as with Kairos), and how that memory is subtly present in objects, architecture, and behavior.
As always, there’s a focus to Erpenbeck’s writing that I really appreciate. Every passage dovetails cleanly and neatly into the novel’s larger themes. Don’t let the tonally bizarre cover fool you.
Mao II by Don DeLillo
You can see how DeLillo got here after Libra.
Bill Gray, an aging, reclusive novelist, agrees to have his photo taken for posterity. He is asked to participate in a reading in support of a hostage being held in Beirut. Words, images, terrorism. Hijinks ensue.
There’s a thesis to Mao II that I can get behind. We collectively need some sort of cohesive, guiding narrative for a sense of cultural or political direction. But DeLillo, as an author and as someone compelled by the power of the written word, is particularly interested in the role of the novelist in all this. He concludes that literature has lost its role in providing these guiding narratives.
Novels don't shape our culture. DeLillo proposes that images and news cycles provide the modern narrative that occupies and compels the public’s attention. News of terrorism or catastrophe or violence. The mediation of these events by the larger news apparatus is just as important as the events, if not moreso.
How does this tie back to the concerns around images, and the plot of the reclusive novelist? There is a power that comes with the withholding of an image from the public. Given the proliferation of images (in advertising, in art, in print, on television), the absence of an image sparks fervor in a public unaccustomed to a lack of access.
Images (think press photos or Warhol’s works) can strip a subject of its power and context. But these visual representations have their own kind of power - the public readily receives and absorbs iconography, the signifier, to the extent that the iconography can come to replace the actual individual in the cultural consciousness. The author, in time, is “known” through their photo. The subject, the author as they were, is lost; only the image is preserved. Likewise with the subject’s works; the books “disappear into the image of the writer.” In this way, the image invents its subject. Or the subject’s eventual history.
So, as with all DeLillo, it comes down to words and images. The public narrative is now disseminated in images rather than in novels or in text. Televised newsreels. Advertisements. Photographs. Modern life is organized in relation to these images; we are guided in some way by them, even when they are reductive, or deceptive, or decontextualized. The narrative is in the sheer quantity of images provided to us.
In a culture flooded with images and micro-narratives, what cuts through? On one end of the spectrum - terrorist activity, mass cult rituals, war. And the other extreme - the absence of the author’s press photo.
I realize this is not really a review of the book. But Mao II explores these ideas and raises these questions. It’s trite to say that DeLillo’s novels are prescient. But they are!
I’ve become someone’s material. There’s the life and there’s the consumer event. Everything around us tends to channel our lives toward some final reality in print or on film. […] Everything seeks its own heightened version. Or put it this way. Nothing happens until it’s consumed. Or put it this way. Nature has given way to aura. […] Here I am in your lens. Already I see myself differently. Twice over or once removed.
You can see how DeLillo got here after Libra.
Bill Gray, an aging, reclusive novelist, agrees to have his photo taken for posterity. He is asked to participate in a reading in support of a hostage being held in Beirut. Words, images, terrorism. Hijinks ensue.
There’s a thesis to Mao II that I can get behind. We collectively need some sort of cohesive, guiding narrative for a sense of cultural or political direction. But DeLillo, as an author and as someone compelled by the power of the written word, is particularly interested in the role of the novelist in all this. He concludes that literature has lost its role in providing these guiding narratives.
Novels don't shape our culture. DeLillo proposes that images and news cycles provide the modern narrative that occupies and compels the public’s attention. News of terrorism or catastrophe or violence. The mediation of these events by the larger news apparatus is just as important as the events, if not moreso.
We don’t even need catastrophes, necessarily. We only need the reports and predictions and warnings.
How does this tie back to the concerns around images, and the plot of the reclusive novelist? There is a power that comes with the withholding of an image from the public. Given the proliferation of images (in advertising, in art, in print, on television), the absence of an image sparks fervor in a public unaccustomed to a lack of access.
The withheld work of art is the only eloquence left.
Images (think press photos or Warhol’s works) can strip a subject of its power and context. But these visual representations have their own kind of power - the public readily receives and absorbs iconography, the signifier, to the extent that the iconography can come to replace the actual individual in the cultural consciousness. The author, in time, is “known” through their photo. The subject, the author as they were, is lost; only the image is preserved. Likewise with the subject’s works; the books “disappear into the image of the writer.” In this way, the image invents its subject. Or the subject’s eventual history.
Sitting for a picture is morbid business. A portrait doesn't begin to mean anything until the subject is dead. This is the whole point. We're doing this to create a kind of sentimental past for people in the decades to come. It's their past, their history we're inventing here. And it's not how I look now that matters. It's how I'll look in twenty-five years as clothing and faces change, as photographs change. The deeper I pass into death, the more powerful my picture becomes. Isn't this why picture-taking is so ceremonial? It's like a wake.
So, as with all DeLillo, it comes down to words and images. The public narrative is now disseminated in images rather than in novels or in text. Televised newsreels. Advertisements. Photographs. Modern life is organized in relation to these images; we are guided in some way by them, even when they are reductive, or deceptive, or decontextualized. The narrative is in the sheer quantity of images provided to us.
In a culture flooded with images and micro-narratives, what cuts through? On one end of the spectrum - terrorist activity, mass cult rituals, war. And the other extreme - the absence of the author’s press photo.
Inertia-hysteria. Is history possible? Is anyone serious? What do we take seriously? Only the lethal believer, the person who kills and dies for faith. Everything else is absorbed. The artist is absorbed, the madman in the street is absorbed and processed and incorporated. Give him a dollar, put him in a TV commercial. Only the terrorist stands outside. The culture hasn’t figured out how to assimilate him. It’s confusing when they kill the innocent. But this is precisely the language of being noticed, the only language the West understands. The way they determine how we see them. The way they dominate the rush of streaming images.
I realize this is not really a review of the book. But Mao II explores these ideas and raises these questions. It’s trite to say that DeLillo’s novels are prescient. But they are!
The Dry Heart by Natalia Ginzburg
Even in a narrative that involves murder and infidelity, Ginzburg’s writing is very direct. It has a matter-of-fact, unadorned quality to it.
The novella’s structure is interesting; it begins with the murder, then provides a kind of (non-)justification for it retroactively. But in filling in the backstory, Ginzburg takes a realist approach largely devoid of embellishment or hysteria. This is a relationship founded on obsession rather than love; the clear incompatibility is treated plainly because, despite the end result, the discord in the relationship is not particularly unique. It is a bleak, unsparing novella because it is written without affect.
The novella’s structure is interesting; it begins with the murder, then provides a kind of (non-)justification for it retroactively. But in filling in the backstory, Ginzburg takes a realist approach largely devoid of embellishment or hysteria. This is a relationship founded on obsession rather than love; the clear incompatibility is treated plainly because, despite the end result, the discord in the relationship is not particularly unique. It is a bleak, unsparing novella because it is written without affect.
End Zone by Don DeLillo
“Maybe he had heard others use it and thought it was a remark demanded by history, a way of affirming the meaning of one's straggle. Maybe the words were commissioned, as it were, by language itself, by that compartment of language in which are kept all bits of diction designed to outlive the men who abuse them, all phrases that reduce speech to units of sounds, lullabies processed through intricate systems.”
In retrospect, it’s hard not to read End Zone as a rehearsal for DeLillo's later novels; most of the concerns here are fleshed out and expanded on elsewhere. Nuclear disaster, war, and academia in White Noise. Sport, tradition, and the relation of objects and spaces to silence in Underworld. Optics and linguistic struggle in Libra and mass ritual in Mao II.
Ultimately, DeLillo is preoccupied with language. How it is used, by people and systems, how it changes and molds and affects people. How we use it, or how it uses us, or how we are used through it. There are incredible passages on that subject in End Zone, even if the novel doesn’t reach the heights of Libra or Underworld. Few do!
As with Great Jones Street, there are some unsavory comedic elements here that haven’t aged well. And his singular approach to dialogue doesn't always land in the way it would in his later writing. But the central metaphor is inspired and explored with impressive depth, and the prose itself is astounding. I don’t think any novelist diagnosed the (post-)modern condition as well as DeLillo did. He was able to render that diagnosis in the system’s own language from the beginning, with his signature blend deadpan absurdity and despair.
In retrospect, it’s hard not to read End Zone as a rehearsal for DeLillo's later novels; most of the concerns here are fleshed out and expanded on elsewhere. Nuclear disaster, war, and academia in White Noise. Sport, tradition, and the relation of objects and spaces to silence in Underworld. Optics and linguistic struggle in Libra and mass ritual in Mao II.
Ultimately, DeLillo is preoccupied with language. How it is used, by people and systems, how it changes and molds and affects people. How we use it, or how it uses us, or how we are used through it. There are incredible passages on that subject in End Zone, even if the novel doesn’t reach the heights of Libra or Underworld. Few do!
As with Great Jones Street, there are some unsavory comedic elements here that haven’t aged well. And his singular approach to dialogue doesn't always land in the way it would in his later writing. But the central metaphor is inspired and explored with impressive depth, and the prose itself is astounding. I don’t think any novelist diagnosed the (post-)modern condition as well as DeLillo did. He was able to render that diagnosis in the system’s own language from the beginning, with his signature blend deadpan absurdity and despair.
Directed by Yasujiro Ozu by Shiguéhiko Hasumi
Rather than basing his analysis on what <i>isn’t</i> present in Ozu (camera movement, eyeline matches, fluid scores etc), Hasumi focuses on what <i>is</i> present in his filmography. This differs from the negative rhetoric applied by Bordwell, Schrader, and other American theorists and writers.
The book convincingly outlines a few recurring elements in Ozu’s films, and analyzes how they function in his body of work. These can be gestures in the narrative or techniques in the shooting and editing of the film. A few highlights: the sharing of meals and the removal of clothes. Group photographs linked to a ritual of separation or death. Communal laughter as a signifier (and as a segue in or our of scenes). The intimacy of two characters gazing into the distance rather than looking at one another directly.
Counterexamples to these “systems” are abundant, as the book calls out. But I think the analysis is interesting and worth considering. It certainly complicates some long-standing (and reductive) readings of Ozu.
In a few cases, Hasumi seems to fall back into a negative rhetoric himself. For example, he highlights that Ozu frequently does not show us the exterior view of a character looking out a window. The book also calls out the absence of shots of connective stairs between floors, barring a few notable examples. Hasumi believes that this allow for a kind of suspended planar relationship between floors and spaces that might be lost otherwise. This fits a larger rhetoric of ellipsis that you could read in Ozu, but I'm not entirely sold on it. Likewise with the section on the supposed unreality of uniform crowd movement in his films. Not sure I agree!
A disclaimer - the book is only appropriate for those that are deeply familiar with Ozu’s filmography. There are references described as "obvious" in the text that would likely go over the head of anyone that hasn’t spent a great deal of time with his films. But for those that have, it's well worth reading.
The book convincingly outlines a few recurring elements in Ozu’s films, and analyzes how they function in his body of work. These can be gestures in the narrative or techniques in the shooting and editing of the film. A few highlights: the sharing of meals and the removal of clothes. Group photographs linked to a ritual of separation or death. Communal laughter as a signifier (and as a segue in or our of scenes). The intimacy of two characters gazing into the distance rather than looking at one another directly.
Counterexamples to these “systems” are abundant, as the book calls out. But I think the analysis is interesting and worth considering. It certainly complicates some long-standing (and reductive) readings of Ozu.
In a few cases, Hasumi seems to fall back into a negative rhetoric himself. For example, he highlights that Ozu frequently does not show us the exterior view of a character looking out a window. The book also calls out the absence of shots of connective stairs between floors, barring a few notable examples. Hasumi believes that this allow for a kind of suspended planar relationship between floors and spaces that might be lost otherwise. This fits a larger rhetoric of ellipsis that you could read in Ozu, but I'm not entirely sold on it. Likewise with the section on the supposed unreality of uniform crowd movement in his films. Not sure I agree!
A disclaimer - the book is only appropriate for those that are deeply familiar with Ozu’s filmography. There are references described as "obvious" in the text that would likely go over the head of anyone that hasn’t spent a great deal of time with his films. But for those that have, it's well worth reading.
The New Animals by Pip Adam
Didn’t really land for me, unfortunately. The first half of the novel is an exploration of the dynamics within a workplace, with allusions and hints to a larger backstory that is initially withheld from the reader. I found the terse prose in this half difficult to engage with.
Then there’s a huge formal break where the tone shifts. It's interesting enough, but the novel’s commentary on the modern situation (w/r/t waste, labor, ecology, old/new money, fashion) seems obvious and is spelled out plainly throughout. It’s a quick read, and I can appreciate the spirit of experimentation, but I wasn’t able to get much out of it.
Then there’s a huge formal break where the tone shifts. It's interesting enough, but the novel’s commentary on the modern situation (w/r/t waste, labor, ecology, old/new money, fashion) seems obvious and is spelled out plainly throughout. It’s a quick read, and I can appreciate the spirit of experimentation, but I wasn’t able to get much out of it.