Bookreview

Quincy’s Absence was my book club’s pick for May, and it’s one of the books we’ve read that I’ve appreciated (enjoyed might not be the right word) the most over the past year. I was sad to miss the group’s discussion; I finished the book around 9pm in an ER with a fractured fibula. For a short book, Absence does read longer, probably because of Quincy’s very (occasionally very) long and sometimes meandering sentences. Though, as someone known to word-count sentences and to go through and circle the number of commas in a passage, I never felt the need to do so while reading. Only in transcribing the notes below did it occur to me how long they sometimes are. The bigger contributor to the elongated feeling is probably the darkness; it feels that there is a suicide or death besides every few pages. The book is really about our narrator encountering different people who have lost others, who are soon to loose others, or who in their distant past have lost them and continue aching across the years. ...

Quite fun! I grabbed this in a book swap with my Small Press Fiction book club. Much of what makes speculative fiction interesting is that it is speculating on our future. Good spec fic finds roots in our contemporary world and draws them out through time, to some logical conclusion. ‘Logical’ here does not mean ‘exact’ or ‘unexaggerated’ or even especially ‘likely.’ It means, the reader can suspend disbelief such that they can imagine the book happening, and they can see parallels in the current world. When those parallels are foundational to the story, and when the story is some version of fun (gallivanting, interesting, riveting, perplexing, even sometimes the right dose of depressing), the writer has produced something worth reading and worth enjoying, as here Beauman has done. ...

This is an unpublished screenplay from Cormac McCarthy that follows a few characters as they contemplate whales, existence, language, and destiny. There are early elements here that echo throughout much of his future work: a character called Western, themes around language and consciousness, and racing cars, among many others. I highlight these because these are the clearest found later, in The Passenger, though the commentary on language is deeply explored in The Kekulé Problem, which this reads almost as a mental discussion of. ...

My review will be shorter than the average paragraph in this book. The paragraphs are so long and so punctuated by ellipses that after a time my eyes began to slide across the pages and shift up and down and all around trying to track the internal monologues of our characters. I resisted this at first, feeling that I was losing some sense of coherence. Eventually, I gave up on this and understood that the impression of scattered internality is at least a part of the point. These characters are all wrapped up in themselves, and in how their expressions of self communicate status and prestige. ...

Bought this a while back because I felt compelled to investigate some of the Classics, but didn’t want to dive right into The Brothers Karamazov. I have no idea if this is reflective of Dostoevsky’s broader writing style, but I found this almost physically painful to read. Our narrator is so repellent that I couldn’t make myself read it on the metro with a dead phone. After 60 pages, I pulled up the audiobook on YouTube and sped it up to 2.65x speed to get it over with. ...

Greenwell’s follow up to What Belongs to You feels more distinctly like a collection of short stories. I picked the book off my shelf before heading to work, unwilling to scrape my brain against Dostoevsky on my 50-minute morning metro ride. Small Rain, my first Greenwell and the follow up to this book, knocked me flat on my back, and I enjoyed What Belongs very much. So much that I’ve been saving Cleanness for just an occasion as this, a need for something I knew would capture me. ...

I love Twin Peaks. While I only discovered it a few years ago, I feel like it has become a part of me in a way difficult to describe. Fix your hearts or die is a thing I think about so often, especially today. “What do you fear most in the world?” “The possibility that love is not enough.” That’s my favorite line in the series, and probably the essence of my greatest fear as well. ...

Preparing for my small press club this past week, I stood around and scanned titles. A person came up and picked this off the turning rack and recommended it. “It’s tiny!” I said, referring not only to the thickness but the form factor, which reminds me a bit of the Archipelago books. The person that handed me the book turned out to be the author. It is probably fair to say I bought the book 33% out of a sense of social obligation interior to myself (the same voice in my head that tells me I can’t walk into a store and then leave without buying something), and 67% out of curiosity. The back flap notes that it is the winner of the 2020 Gold Line Press Fiction Chapbook Competition, and chapbooks are something I’ve been curious about without having ever read. ...

Larson’s report on the experiences and actions of the Dodd family in the years during which Hitler rose to power is a depressing thing to read today. It is frankly impossible not to draw straight lines from rhetorical style, evasions, and populist manipulations from Hitler to Trump. See page 159: “The Chancellor’s assurances were so satisfying and so unexpected that I think they are on the whole too good to be true,” Messersmith wrote. “We must keep in mind, I believe, that when Hitler says anything he for the moment convinces himself that it is true. He is basically sincere; but he is at the same time a fanatic.” Emphasis added. Is this not the behavior that we tend to witness from current American leadership? ...

This will be a short note. Ana Simo’s Heartland was my small press book club’s March pick, and wow! Unfortunately, I did not like it. I found it so grating to read that I couldn’t finish it, despite getting about 90 pages into its 200something pagecount. I felt the use of slurs so over the top that it smelled like an amateur novelist trying to scare the reader, to tell them, Hey, this is Serious Stuff. But it did not work for me, and only made me roll my eyes. ...