wmbogart's reviews
72 reviews

Enjoyed this - given how formally experimental it is, I thought it was very readable.  The run-on style works for me. Really funny, too! 

I don't think you necessarily need to read it looking for great insights into the modern condition or anything; a lot of Natsumi's flowing narration is rooted in small, everyday interactions. She often "concludes" thoughts in either an ironic dismissal or a digression far removed from the original subject. But there's value in adapting that kind of modern, associative thinking to the page.

And obviously the subject itself is under-recognized; a woman's life; navigating relationships, raising a family, completing chores, and taking in art, with all the pretension that can entail.

In the afterword, a writer tries (unsuccessfully, in my mind) to adopt Kanai's writing style. She tells us, in this adopted style, that she is unable to come up with an angle for her assignment. It is bizarre, and I think the novel deserves better.

I still struggle with Sarraute. The characters here are cruel, vindictive, and afraid. The text is written mostly as confused inner monologue. Every character here is prone to catastrophizing around the smallest gesture or faux pas. It makes for (intentionally) tough reading.

Though the perspective shifts between characters, they all have this catastrophizing in common. If it's a comment on a larger bourgeois condition, and I think it must be, it does get a little exhausting after a few hundred pages. Again, intentionally I'm sure.

Each character is loosely aware of their own illness. That's compelling! To recognize your behavior as unwell while it occurs (or even before), and fail to adjust for it, or adjust for it in a way that only makes things worse? These are difficult things.

The self-awareness of each character's reactions and behavior as "incorrect" or bearing the markings of impropriety, weakness, or mania comes and goes. The narration spirals between denial, negotiation, externalization, self-concern, acceptance, and denial again. These thoughts interrupt one another. They clash violently with what came before, and rationalize and disregard themselves from clause to clause. It's an interesting effect. That kind of ever-shifting perspective, blurred and warped in illness, of oneself outside oneself, resonates with me. But sitting down and reading it? Not so fun.

Incredibly well-spoken guy, as it turns out. A lot of interesting thoughts and diagnoses here, even if he does fall back on a few recurring talking points from interview to interview.

One key point of clarification. Unfortunately, purchasing this book does not entitle the reader to have their own conversations with Don DeLillo. The book is made up of conversations that have already occurred, between people that are, in all likelihood, not the reader. While it can be fun to project into the interviewer’s portion of the text and make believe that you yourself are having a little conversation with esteemed American novelist Don DeLillo, you are not able to have your own dialogue together in any literal sense. Kinda disappointing.

Family Lexicon is a string of impressions, or rather, one long impression, of a family through the years. There’s a huge depth of character here, even as certain details are intentionally omitted or casually downplayed. Each member of the family is rendered in their quirks, their turns of phrase, through Italy’s turbulent twentieth century.  In spite of the larger political turmoil and a gradual divergence in their individual lives, the family’s private language endures. 

Ginzburg’s writing (and McPhee’s translation) has a warmth to it while still drawing attention to the ugliness of the larger situation and the less savory traits of her father. It’s a great book. 

Peg Boyers’ afterword gets to the heart of it, I think. Recommended!

You have to be in pretty deep to really engage with this, but I imagine anyone buying a book called Late Godard is already at that stage.

The evolving usage of “natural” imagery in these later films is a big focus. Those shots function in various ways - as a temporal interruption from the narrative, as a contrast (or juxtaposition) against political systems (alongside the idea of “first” and “second” nature), and as demonstrations of human intervention and mediation in reality (shown here through physical frames and conscious awareness of topography as a result of political will) and in the cinematic sense (in playback speed and manipulation). This all comes to a head narratively in the explicitly political study of Germany Year 90 Nine Zero and in the more subtle (but no less engaged, in Morgan’s reading) Nouvelle Vague.

The general critical understanding is that these films (really dating back to Every Man for Himself) represent a kind of withdrawal from the thorough and explicit political engagement of his prior work within the Dziga Vertov Group. This book argues that, far from a “retreat” into images of nature and the classically beautiful composition that some critics decry, Godard continued to probe political and theoretical questions. If the films explore the beautiful or the sublime, they do so in service of a larger aesthetic consideration of what these things might mean relative to the political situation and the apparent defeat of revolutionary movements witnessed around the globe in the last quarter of the century.

The analysis of Histoire(s) du Cinema is particularly interesting. The visual references and allusions function in a variety of different ways, and Daniel Morgan does a great job of analyzing why that might be (and situating it within a larger Modernist tradition, even if the project overall was unprecedented in film). Godard’s methods are necessarily fluid and difficult, and Morgan engages with them in good faith. If I don’t necessarily agree with every connection or conclusion drawn here, I do find them compelling. 

Godard’s general theses in that series (that cinema failed in its inability to fully document and prevent the Holocaust, the importance of cinematic projection in the literal and psychological sense, the idea of images as constructed dialectically, film as descended from painting rather than photography) are laid out and commented upon, often with additional background and dissenting viewpoints from contemporary critics and those that came before Godard (Bazin, Deleuze, etc). If Godard’s methods are illegible or obscure, Morgan contends this is demonstrative of a larger point regarding the active consideration and reading of images and associations on the part of the viewer, in a larger historical context or in the context of Godard’s own life.

I’m oversimplifying, and probably not doing it justice. If Godard’s films in this period interest you, I’m not aware of a better study than this one. 

Underworld concerns itself with byproducts. Detritus. Fallout. Nuclear waste. Graffiti. Histories, embedded in corporate slogans. Objects and remnants and rooms, haunted. Magazines. Films. Memories. Box scores and rats and paranoia.

Sure, DeLillo often gets his own preoccupations and observations down and then backfills them into the novel’s larger structure. But it works. It does! It ties together, somehow. The connections are subtler than you might expect. And, as is typical with DeLillo, these connections are often delayed. In some cases, just an object or an aphorism can tie two strands together. But it all congeals. He pulls it off.

I mean, Pafko at the Wall? The invented Eisenstein film? The Texas Highway Killer? The Das Kapital epilogue? An embarrassment of riches here. I’d try to live in this text if I didn’t live in it already.

And.

I really, really tried to write about this. Ended up with five pages. Single-spaced. Sent me on a bit of a manic spell that I’m only recently getting over. I wish I was joking. So, in the spirit of self-preservation, I gave up.

I’ll just say that I think Libra gets to the heart of modern American life more than any other book I’ve read. This is a country where citizens are sentenced at birth, to rooms and lives alike. Oswald’s struggle, our struggle, is for self-determination in what “Oswald” calls “the territory of no-choice.”

The characters here are defined. They do not define themselves. They are refractions of a single American experience, defined in relation to the empire. They are creations placed within an overarching narrative, just as a “Lee Harvey Oswald” was created in documents and dossiers as means to an end.

Language, the word, can be a tool towards liberation or a tool for oppression. It can be appropriated to (mis-)inform our understanding of what is and is not possible. It functions both below and above the surface.

The struggle to define ourselves is a linguistic one.

These were the general ideas in my draft. But I couldn’t get it down. So I’m replacing my monograph with this: Libra is a great book. Fans of great books might enjoy this book.

The idea here is very compelling - to oversimplify, a series of interior vignettes, absent context.

But I wasn’t able to connect with it at all. The translated prose read as clunky and affected. I understand that these are internal states, rendered to some extent in each character's voice, but I wasn’t able to find a way in. 

Maybe a translation issue, maybe a me issue. A lot of very smart people love Sarraute’s writing, so I'm sure it's the latter. I’ll try one of her novels and then revisit.

Condensing ten years of history into a few hundred pages is not easy! The sections on Brazil were the strongest, probably by virtue of Bevins' own experience. Some of the historical context outside of Brazil felt a little perfunctory, and the writing is largely casual. But it's all done in the service of accessibility. These are complex movements and histories, and Bevins does as good a job as anyone at making them accessible for readers.

The actual analysis is light but straightforward. Bevins concludes that horizontal organization is not a particularly effective structure (or non-structure) for revolutionary movements. Instead, the case studies here result in leadership vacuums. These vacuums are quickly occupied by (right-wing) opportunists. The end results differ from anything the initial actors might have envisioned or hoped for. It’s a valuable study, if not a little bleak.

His conclusion aligns with my own ideological leanings, but I'm sure readers on the anarcho side would dispute it. I’m not close enough to a lot of the history to gauge or take issue with his summaries, but they seem well-researched and precise enough. In any case, these are important, largely misunderstood movements and events, and I'm glad Bevins collected a general outline of them here.

I wrote Pynchon off for a long time. Vocally. With the benefit of hindsight, this might have been what can only be referred to as “dunce behavior.”

There’s no disputing his technical ability - even after I abandoned an attempt years ago to get through Gravity’s Rainbow, I think I’d have granted him that. I found myself unable to engage with him at any level. Just couldn’t latch onto anything or gauge his tone. I misread it as grating. Again, this is a me issue. Between the two of us, he wasn’t the guilty party on that count. “Criticism” works like that sometimes!

So, for any skeptics, The Crying of Lot 49 is a good way in. Promise! The central conspiracy that drives the narrative is hilariously convoluted. There’s a dark, tongue-in-cheek humor in the tangents that make up a large portion of the novel. And all the post-modern targets are covered; a vapid culture (Metzger’s film) and counterculture (The Paranoids), the pomposity of “high” art (The Courier’s Tragedy), automation (the Yoyodyne executive) and privatization (alternative mail couriers) and globalization (Beaconsfield’s bone filters), lovesickness (Inamorati Anonymous), and just about everything else. It’s a rich text!

But the comedic element doesn’t assuage or soften Oedipa’s mania. If anything, it lends the novel a kind of delirious momentum. Tenuous connections build and build from page to page, but these are frequently interrupted by longer, poignant passages relating Oedipa’s inner-monologue to the reader. These passages, around the need for a sense of order in the face of the absurd, a need to understand the inexplicable, are genuinely moving and beautifully written.

Most compelling, for me anyway, is Oedipa’s constant oscillation between conviction and doubt. She fears that there is a sinister order to be pieced together in the remnants, in the symbols and words and the indistinct traces of something larger. But she also fears that her suspicions are unfounded, that it’s all either a put-on or a delusion. A dual paranoia that extends outward and inward, upward to the recurring angels overhead and downward to America’s hidden foundation. An internal discord in the face of the ineffable, a “nightmare about something in the mirror,” “nothing specific, only a possibility.” A “central truth, too bright for [our] memory to hold,” dictated in the Will of the dead, or in the clandestine boardrooms of the living. Or a trick of the light, latched onto and overanalyzed in sheer desperation. As is often the case with these things, it’s never clear which.

The text mocks its own investigation at every turn. The reader is almost dragged through farce after farce to the point of surrender. The desire for a concrete explanation is shown to be futile almost immediately as things get more and more complex. But the strength and momentum of the prose sustains the reader’s desire to understand.

Or it did for me, this time anyway. I don’t mean understanding just the narrative, but understanding some of what Pynchon’s doing in the larger sense. I think the reader needs to yield to his pace a bit to really get it, and I was probably incapable of that before. But I’ve seen the other side now friends - there’s something here after all. Go figure!