bookbug

stories of women turning into trees have been following me for the last eight months. bernini's sculpture of apollo and daphne in a baroque art class (the first time I heard of the myth at all), seeing Jesse Mockrin's A story told this many times becomes the forest in-person in a gallery, and the concept appearing multiple times in a class on short stories, including "Sans Souci" by Dionne Brand. I like how the last two and women without men extend the metaphor until it disturbs the simplicity of the original myth enjoyed by men. resisting men's understanding is one of the only things we have going for us, I think, as long as it's turned against the mystique they try to make of it.

that's the limit of my praise for this book, though. I started reading Faridoun Farrokh's 2011 translation -- the newer translation -- and it was awful. I think it was the first time I was compelled to find an alternative. so much so that I subjected my kobo to the only terrible scan of the 1998 translation that I could find online, compressing it enough so that instead of taking a full 5 seconds to turn the page it was only about a couple. the older translation was more tolerable but it was still soo dry. I can't believe the original farsi is that dry. the stories alone were interesting but the form will always be what matters to me.

but I don't want to act like a north american white woman's enjoyment of the book is what's important as much as what women without men did. my respect for shahrnush parsipur is endless, she was imprisoned for her writing both under the shah and the islamic republic. duras: "a woman that writes. that's cruel for men."

I don't like sports movies and this was a sort of sports book, but I could accept the sportsisms as a vehicle for dr. B's monologue. it has the anime quality of a long backstory told in the middle of the action. It appeared archaic at first for a 20th century novel to have a noble hero descended from schubert's circles defeat an arrogant peasant but it was a satisfying subversion that his skill in chess was so accidental, as if his mastery of whatever topic depended on any random book he could have picked up. and I liked the implied creativity of chess beyond memorizing all the different potential games. the honesty of the bored spectators at the end was charming, too. one thing that was missing for me was that I wanted to see more of czentovic's rudeness because that aspect was sort of only plainly stated. I have also been reading a lot of short stories for a class so I'm a little tired of short fiction, I'm in the mood for something more investing.

I don't get it. though its short, I had a hard time paying attention; nothing invested me in the story or writing at all. the whole time I was wondering "who is the audience for this?" and then I read high rated reviews on storygraph and felt like I was from another planet. nothing to enjoy in the prose, either: "the parquet glitters obliquely, not having been trodden on today." a forgettable first book of the year.

my 5th dostoevsky, and my 5th dostoevsky translated by pevear & volokhonsky. I know it's not faithful to the author to only read him through the same translators, but if that makes me more of a fan of pevear & volokhonsky than of dosto, so be it. their writing reads so smoothly, that even when they resort to more asbtract words for seemingly simple sentences, it still comes off stylistically consistent with the novel's dreariness rather than reading like the romantic poetics that I never like (I think I can articulate what I don't like about Tolstoy now, he's too sincere, too sentimental). whether that's dostoevsky or the translators I don't know, but it reads so pleasurably to me. and after five dostoevsky novels I'm still impressed by its timelessness. for all the references that assume the contemporary readers' familiarity to its time and place, it should feel alien to me. the dialogue, too, has an alien, almost theatrical exaggeration despite dosto's realist style. its timeless without being universal, and that appeals to someone that doesn't like when the canon is justified for its "universal" themes.

though I'm normally peeved by the reputation that russian novels have of containing too many characters with similar names, I will admit to sometimes struggling to follow who is who this time. I'm embarrassed by how many times I mixed up pyotr stepanovich and stepan trofimovich … but I think the fragmentation of part 1 (small chapters, confusing) led to a satisfying clarity in part 2. I thought the anonymous, impossibly omniscient narrator was interesting, it felt like a silent video game protagonist. there is something interesting to say about that but I can't articulate it yet. the silence of darya and mavriky nikolaevich was also a strange contrast to the blabbering of most dosto characters, I liked that. and I was obsessed with the nikolai/shatov/kirillov/pyotr love triangle, I didn't know the homoeroticism could get better than rodion and razumikhin in crime and punishment. I loved marya, and her relationship to stravogin and shatov, too, and I wanted more of her. I appreciate that dosto's women aren't all the same couple of archetypes, men really struggle writing that.

what I praise the most about dostoevsky is that he is so pleasing to read even when I disagree with him. realistically, I would have more sympathy for the russian nihilists than a conservative christian at the time of tsardom. but I think his complicated class position and his early alliance with the ideas he criticizes in demons allows him more nuance beyond some sort of bourgois ignorance; only demons could make me take horseshoe theory seriously in any capacity. it's interesting how everything I criticize in jane austen (conservatism and domesticity), I enjoy in dostoevsky …and his satire is too funny to be offensive, his humour is what I think really characterizes his books despite his reputation for dark and violent themes. I was also led to rewatch the movie la chinoise by jean-luc godard which I write more about here.

overall, demons may be my favourite dostoevsky novel, ever, even above brothers karamazov.

I hadn't heard of Krasznahorkai before his nobel win to be honest, though I did watch the seven hour satantango adaptation one hour at a time in high school. and I was surprised that his writing wasn't like the dryness of tarr's intepretation; melancholy of resistance was so much fun. I really enjoyed the maximalism of krasznahorkai's prose, the lack of paragraph breaks read much more naturally than I expected, especially for a translation. why did anyone even try writing after this? I thought I couldn't do long sentences after my failure to get through Proust but I will make the likely correction of reading him in French next time; melancholy of resistance has enlightened me against conciseness. what really hooked me was the resonance of reading Mrs Pauf navigate the train in the winter while I was on a train myself and the november sun began to set at 4pm, and I was only more excited by the un-sentimental, eastern european morbidity that I enjoy in dostoevsky. as well as the dostoevskian relationships based on accidental proximity, and the alexei karamazov-ness of valuska, though I will have to read dead souls to see the likely more accurate comparison to Gogol. I also have to admit that I still haven't read the comparative herman melville, though maybe I can name melancholy as my substitute for moby dick. what was most impressive about this book was that I was capable of supressing the need to always break only after completing a chapter. I watched the bela tarr adaptation after reading too, Werckmeister Harmonies, and I think it's interesting to see what little action really happens when the story is removed from the characters' thoughts (though I would have liked to see mrs Pauf). I had fun. here's a favourite passage:

'No wonder,' he once winked exaggeratedly in the direction of the armchair, 'that after thousands of years of the earth spinning about its axis people should find themselves somewhat disorientated, since their whole attention is devoted to simply remaining on their feet …'

surprised I liked it. the collector reads fast, I was very much hooked, and I had the pleasure of reading a little more passively as a relief from my class readings (no offense to genre fiction). what really subverted my prejudice against crime fiction is that the female victim was infinitely more interesting than the villain. I think of slashers, where the killers are often offered more depth than the final girl, even in their mystery. I also thought I would be annoyed by the art student but they seem to have been more interesting in the mid-century than they are now. miranda was very relatable to me and I was indulged by her resentment of the petit-bourgeois "new people," I thought of the nietzschean ascetic and erika kohut's hatred of the mediocre (I weigh my enjoyment of anything relative to its similarity with Jelinek's the piano teacher). I felt it deeply when she was compelled to interject that she may "meet someone and fall in love with him and marry him and … become a Little Woman. One of the enemy" despite her conviction in nonconformity, and when she gushed about being essentially born in the right generation. I also resonated with the story about the encounter between her friends and the american army sergeant. and my favourite quote: "I've got lots of friends. Do you know why? Because I'm never ashamed of them. All sorts of people. You aren't the strangest by a long way. There's one who's very immoral. But he's a beautiful painter so we forgive him. and he's not ashamed. you've got to be the same. not ashamed." I didn't care for frederick or the plot. ultimately, I was surprised that a male author invested the time to write a woman character so well.

After weeks of picking up books and not committing to a single one, I joined the online book club bookbug and I read the assigned novel(?) in a day. Agua Viva by Clarice Lispector is the kind of book I’m scared to write, a book with no plot or characters or at least any familiar form, in other words, a book without consumer appeal. But I’m lucky to live in the time after the modernists broke every convention so I can enjoy almost anything without anyone doubting my serious engagement with an artwork. click here to read more …