Bookreview

Chambers dedicates the book, “For anybody that could use a break.” It’s quite a good way to spend a break. I didn’t mean to read this in one sitting, but found it read fast enough to about page 60 or so and by then I couldn’t put it down. I have marked up a lot of passages that really spoke to me, though I can’t say why other than that I can see myself in them. And by seeing myself in them feel connected to the writer and to others who inevitably see themselves in them. ...

A few months ago for my small press book club we read The Years, also by Ernaux. I enjoyed it, and felt a strong pull to read it in the original French. Yet, what puts Ernaux on my radar isn’t necessarily that, it was that someone in that book club spoke so passionately about Ernaux (they were wearing a shirt that said “Annie Ernaux” on it, also). I can’t remember what they said, but I remember the affection and admiration for the author’s works. So, when I was on Fitzcarlando’s website looking for an excuse to buy a pretty book, Ernaux was a perfect choice. Especially since the title is a thing I am fascinated by and feel often. ...

Notes p9 - But I don’t see anyone but him, this slender and distant boy who doesn’t speak, who’s happy just to listen to the two guys talking next to him without interrupting. Without even smiling. p14 - I find it a handsome name, a beautiful identity. I don’t know yet that one day I will write books, that I will invent characters and I will have to name those characters, but I am already sensitive to the sound of identities, to their fluidity. p15 - In any case, I like to repeat his name to myself in secret. I like to write it on scraps of paper. I am stupidly sentimental: that hasn’t changed much. p17 - I feel this desire swarming in my belly and running up my spine. But I have to constantly contain and compress it so that it doesn’t betray me in front of others. Because I’ve already understood that desire is visible. This feeling of love, it transports me, it makes me happy. At the same time, it consumes me and makes me miserable, the way all impossible loves are miserable. Difficulty, you can cope with; you can deploy ruses, try to seduce. There is beauty in the hope of conquest. But impossibility, by nature, carries with it a sense of defeat. p22 - I remember, also, that he’s reserved in a way that sets him apart. I could be put off, but instead it moves me. Nothing touches me more than cracks in the armor and the person who reveals them. p23 - He says that he can no longer be alone with this feeling. That it hurts him too much. p24 - He says: Because you are not like all the others, because I don’t see anyone but you and you don’t even realize it. He adds this phrase, which for me is unforgettable: Because you will leave and we will stay. p30 - Love, it’s mouths that seek, lips that bite, drawing a little blood. His stubble irritates my chin, his hands grab my jaw so that I can’t escape. p35 - I ask myself: Does he regret it? Was it only a stroke of madness for him? A tragic, wrongheaded, even grotesque error? He acts as if nothing happened, or as if everything should be forgotten, buried. It’s even worse than being forgotten, it’s a denial. And then suddenly, I can’t see anything but his rejection. It’s as if he’s negating everything that transpired between us, one body against the other, as if the image has been completely erased. p36 - I discover the pain of missing someone. I miss his skin, his body, which I once possessed and then had taken away from me. It must be given back under threat of madness. p37 - Later I will write about this longing, the intolerable deprivation of the other. I will write about the sadness that eats away at you, making you crazy. It will become the template for my books, in spite of myself. But absence is, first and foremost, silence. p45 - This is important: he sees me in a certain way, a way he will never deviate from. In the end, love was only possible because he saw me not as who I was, but as the person I would become. p49 - He doesn’t notice my excitement when he comes in, or any of the efforts I’ve made either. p52 - All of a sudden I see a sort of admiration return to his face, but it’s a painful admiration; what he likes about me is also what keeps me separate from him. I’m still thinking that everything has to be done according to him and his desires. I’m not sure where this need for another man’s sex comes from but I sense that on the other side of all the repression and self-censoring there exists an equally powerful fervor. p53 - I will repeat to myself: I am for him a boy he fucks, nothing more. I’m reduced to a body, a penis, a function. p54 - He caresses me with hands that know exactly what to do. He bites my hips, my torso. He groans, no longer able to contain it, a sound that he releases maybe without even realizing it himself; he moves me tremendously. p58 - I explain that in general it’s the likelihood that actually matters more than the truth, that the feeling counts more than accuracy, and above all that a place is not a question of topography but rather the way that we describe it—not a photograph but an impression. p70 - I will discover that these books speak to me, and speak for me (and will become aware of the power of literary minimalism, the neutral voice that’s closer to reality). (TB: referencing Herve Guibert’s The Remarkable Adventures (title, perhaps as translated by M Ringwald?) and also the film The Wounded Man.) p76 - Immediately it makes me think of the world I’m excluded from, the friendships he’s developed, all the ordinary days that have nothing to do with me. The friends, the handshakes, crystallize it. p79 - Because this scene not only shows a life lived outside of me. It hurtles me back to a void, to nonexistence, really, in the cruelest way. Because it shows what is usually hidden from me. Because it shows the charm of this mysterious boy and how many attempts must be made before one can get close to him. (And when you’ve been hurt once, you’re afraid to try again later, in dread of enduring the same pain. You avoid getting hurt in an attempt to avoid suffering: for years, this principle will serve as my holy sacrament. So many lost years.) p86 - I wrote the word: love. I did consider using another one. It’s a curious notion, love; difficult to identify and define. There are so many degrees and variations. … But those would have just been words. The truth, the brutal truth, was that I was in love. Enough to use the right word. p89-90 - He smiled so that I could take his smile with me. p92 - Everything in its place, everything reassures me. Except that I miss Thomas. I miss him terribly. And that changes everything. Have you noticed how the most beautiful landscapes lose their brilliance as soon as our thoughts prevent us from seeing them properly? (TB: Yes.) p95 - …who asks himself if it would’ve just been better if his body had been left to die in the crash but who eventually heals, because as is often the case, you eventually heal. p101 - He says: You must have liked him a lot, to look at me like that. p103 - These last words are articulated with the lease possible affect, as if life is just like that sometimes, you spend time together and then lose touch and life goes on—as if there were no breaks from which you never quite recover. p109 - I think: If it was already there, this sadness, from the very first hours of the marriage, if it was so massive that it could not be concealed even then, during these moments of the greatest communion, during that happiest of feasts—how heavy must this weight have become in the years that followed? p116 - My father told me about you. p117 - He says: Though my father never reads books, he’s read yours. He intimates that the books are in their house, though not in plain sight; no doubt they’re tucked away in a closet somewhere or in the attic. p118 - I give in and say: The story of two inseparable friends who end up being separated by time. He smiles. I urge him not to read anything personal into it. I specify my books are fiction, that memoir doesn’t interest me. (TB: lol get real buddy, we’re all writing about ourselves and our loves and our losses. Nothing else exists.) p148 - I just wanted to write to tell you that I have been happy during these months together, that I have never been so happy, and that I already know I will never be so happy again. Review A heartbreaking book. A line comes for us in the final 20 pages that made me stop and put the book to my face and take deep breaths. Then we are taken through it for the remainder, and at the end I cried. I cried. ...

I think this is my favorite book I’ve read in a book club. I am afraid to share what I love so much about it. But I see myself in this book in a way I never have so completely. Not all of Leda is me, but so much is that it felt fragile and scary to read at times. Sometimes it was a loving familiarity, or even a pleading with him to do something different. My copy is riddled with sticky tabs sometimes two to a page and often every other page so that it looks like the centrepiece of a research project. I have filled the margins with pencil scratchings. I have no idea if I could ever describe my feelings for it. ...

I read this for the small press book club. It’s good! I finished it about 15 minutes from the meeting and so it hasn’t really digested yet. It is 430 pages focusing on, basically, one day in the life of a mother and her tiny baby. This is misleading because there is a great deal of literary history and engagement with ideas of literary writing, time, space, and perception. ...

Notes Gendered language for beauty - handsome, cute, pretty, beautiful. Science vs Art – Think Irina Hyperaware - think ordering a Mocha Moolatte, being called ma’am. p95 - “If you had been born a girl & lived your life that way–what kind of life would you have lived?” Apps vs in-person attraction. Even more determined on this lately (note from napkin – presumably about writing about gender) Glasses - p40 - “are you a gold or a silver?” p117 - “Manly…?” “Driving a car…makes me feel that I have to be chill while driving… or it’s not manly” Remember driving in high school? p128 - writing about things that are hard to bring up. “You use your pen instead of your mouth.” p130 - “chatting about nothing in particular is probably how we spend most of our time.” This is unbelievably sweet. Review I spent this morning as I spent every Saturday morning, I went to the cafe. Instead of reading, I spent most of my time working on an article and after found that I had a lot of trouble focusing, so after the second cafe I went for a walk. I meandered around DC until I realized I was at MLK Jr. Library and I went in and started to wander the aisles and eventually saw this on a shelf. It was right next to a big graphic novel about building an atomic bomb, which a friend had sent me a picture of at some point. A lot of weird circumstances went into putting me in a place to pick the book up. ...

Notes p35 - You might one day be offered the opportunity to display symbols of loyalty. Make sure that such symbols include your fellow citizens rather than exclude them. p37 - “We have seen that the real meaning of the greengrocer’s slogan has nothing to do with what the text of the slogan actually says. Even so, the real meaning is quite clear and generally comprehensible because the code is so familiar: the greengrocer declares his loyalty in the only way the regime is capable of hearing; that is, by accepting the prescribed ritual, by accepting appearances as reality, by accepting the given rules of the game, thus making it possible for the game to go on, for it to exist in the first place. (Snyder quoting Vaclav Havel.)” p54-55 - In fact [Churchill] himself helped the British to define themselves as a proud people who would calmly resist evil. Other politicians would have found support in British public opinion to end the war. Churchill instead resisted, inspired, and won. … Churchill did what others had not done. Rather than concede in advance, he forced Hitler to change his plans." (emphasis mine, -TB) p66 - You submit to tyranny when you renounce the difference between what you want to hear and what is actually the case. The renunciation of reality can feel natural and pleasant, but the result is your demise as an individual—and thus the collapse of any political system that depends upon individualism. p68 - The final mode is misplaced faith. It involves the sort of self-deifying claims a president made when he said that “I alone can solve it” or “I am your retribution.” When faith descends from heaven to earth in this way, no room remains for the small truths of our individual discernment and experience. What terrified Klemperer was the way that the transition seemed permanent. Once truth had become oracular rather than factual, evidence was irrelevant. At the end of the war a worker told Klemperer that “understanding is useless, you have to have faith. I believe in the Fuhrer.” Connection to my clinical deprogramming thing. p71 - [Fascists] used new media, which at the time was radio, to create a drumbeat of propaganda that aroused feelings before people had time to ascertain facts. And now, as then, many people confused faith in a hugely flawed leader with the truth about the world we all share. p79- (TB: Snyder is making an analogy between publishing/sharing falsehoods and our behavior driving cars.) We know that the damage will be mutual. We protect the other person without seeing him, dozens of time every day. (TB: reminds me a lot of Goffman’s facework theory, which was a sociological thing on how people engage with one another with a concerted effort to protect not only their face (reputation, impression) and that of those around them. Has fascinated me since I read about it in the UIC stacks in 2013.) p81 - “Make eye contact and small talk.” (Lesson 12), then p32: “You might not be sure, today or tomorrow, who feels threatened in the United States. But if you affirm everyone, you can be sure that certain people will feel better.” p84 - Protest can be organized through social media, but nothing is real that does not end on the streets. p120 - We learned to say that there was “no alternative” to the basic order of things, a sensibility that the Lithuanian political theorist Leonidas Donskis called “liquid evil.” Once inevitability was taken for granted, criticism indeed became slippery. What appeared to be critical analysis often assumed that the status quo could not actually change, and thereby indirectly reinforced it. p124 - If the politics of inevitability is like a coma, the politics of eternity is like hypnosis: We stare at the spinning vortex of cyclical myth until we fall into a trance—and then we do something shocking at someone else’s orders. TB: I have seen our current situation described as a “swinging pendulum” and I think this is a manifestation of learned helplessness. I do not believe there is a pendulum. I think there is a clash between good and evil. The pendulum, as they describe it, are bulges in the fight. If you take for granted that the fight is a pendulum and will swing back as a matter of physics, you are ceding the fight. p126: “If young people do not begin to make history, politicians of eternity and inevitability will destroy it. And to make history, young Americans will have to know some. This is not the end, but a beginning.” Review I have heard a lot about this book. Bummed that I felt an ethical panic that resulted in me leaving my apartment in the middle of the day, unprompted, a week or two ago to go to the book store and buy it. ...

I picked this up for a book club at work. I’m going to try to keep my review here quite short, because I have multiple things that I want to writer longer responses to / reflections upon on my Substack over probably the next few weeks. This book has caused me to reflect even more deeply and in much more specific ways about my particular role as an agent of the State in regards to housing standards, program provision, etc. These are not new thoughts, but they are honed here by sharp criticism and by realizations that this writing sparked. ...

Notes p8 - Anger and depression and sorrow are beautiful things in a story, but they’re like poison to the filmmaker or artist. p19 - A film should stand on its own. It’s absurd if a filmmaker needs to say what a film means in words. The world in the film is a created one, and people sometimes love going into that world. For them that world is real. And if people find out certain things about how something was done, or how this means this or that means that, the next time they see the film, these things enter into the experience. And then the film becomes different. I think it’s so precious and important to maintain that world and not say certain things that could break the experience. p21 -So you don’t know how it’s going to hit people. But if you thought about how it’s going to hit people, or if it’s going to hurt someone, or if it’s going to do this or do that, then you would have to stop making films. You just do these things that you fall in love with, and you never know what’s going to happen. p36 - There’s an expression: “Keep your eye on the doughnut, not on the hole.” If you keep your eye on the doughnut and do your work, that’s all you can control. You can’t control any of what’s out there, outside yourself. But you can get inside and do the best you can do. TB: a lot like radical acceptance. p57 - The thing about meditation is: You become more and more you. TB: Why, David, you’ve talked me right out of it! p67 - [Sound] is just another tool to ensure that you’re following that original idea and being true to it. (TB: emphasis mine.) p73 - When people are in fear, they don’t want to go to work. So many people today have that feeling. Then the fear starts turning into hate, and they begin to hate going to work. Then the hate can turn into anger and people can become angry at their boss and their work. p77-78 - TB: Story of Frank Silva and the accidental creation of BOB. Just incredible stuff. p83 - The idea is the whole thing. If you stay true to the idea, it tells you everything you need to know, really. TB: emphasis mine. Very similar to how I’ve heard other writers and makers (I think Adam Savage in particular) speak, the thing knows what it wants to be. The truth of it is what you’re trying to get to. I like that a lot. Truth is important to me. I try to make sure that what I write is true. p93 - In stories, in the worlds that we can go into, there’s suffering, confusion, darkness, tension, and anger. There are murders; there’s all kinds of stuff. But the filmmaker doesn’t have to be suffering to show suffering. You can show it, show the human condition, show conflicts and contrasts, but you don’t have to go through that yourself. You are the orchestrator of it, but you’re not in it. Let your characters do the suffering. TB: next page he goes into the van Gogh idea. Very good. p103 - I have smoked marijuana, but I no longer do. I went to art school in the 1960s, so you can imagine what was going on. (TB: lol) p121 - I don’t necessarily love rotting bodies, but there’s a texture to a rotting body that is unbelievable. Have you ever seen a little rotted animal? I love looking at those things, just as much as I like to look at a close-up of some tree bark, or a small bug, or a cup of coffee, or a piece of pie. You get in close and the textures are wonderful. TB: Okay, David. p125 - “Having a setup” – very good practical advice about having a place for which you’re ready for work all the time. p151 - Keep your own voice. Don’t do anything for the sole purpose of impressing any studio or some money people. (TB: empasis mine) p155 - How we see films is changing. The video iPod and videos online are changing everything. (TB: lol) p159 - Stay true to yourself. Let your voice ring out, and don’t let anybody fiddle with it. Never turn down a good idea, but never take a bad idea. (TB: emphasis mine.) Review Okay, where to begin. I have a lot of love for David Lynch, and reading this (which I did in about an hour, it’s quite short and spaced out), I heard his voice, which is very pleasant. I got a kick out of some of it. ...

Notes p38 - But I felt bad about hitting him. You know how you feel when you hit a drunk. TB: No, Hem, I can’t say I do. p62 - “God looks after rummies,” I told him and I took the thirty-eight off and stowed it down below. p98 - He was mean talking now, all right, and since he was a boy he never had no pity for nobody.. But he never had no pity for himself either. p107 - Well, I got something to think about now all right. Something to ddo and something to think about besides wondering what the hell’s going to happen. Besides wondering what’s going to happen to the whole damn thing. Once they put it up. Once you’re playing for it. Once you got a chance. Instead of just watching it all go to hell. p128 - “His goddamn face,” she thought. “Every time I see his goddamn face it makes me want to cry.” p144 - “What’s the matter with your old woman?” asked Harry cheerfully. “Why don’t you smack her?” || “You smack her,” Albert said. “I’d like to hear what she’d say. She’s some old woman to talk.” Little casual domestic violence for the vintage Hemingway fans. p174 - I guess it was nuts all right. I guess I bit off too much more than I could chew. I shouldn’t have tried it. I had it all right up to the end. Nobody’ll know how it happened. I with I could do something about Marie. … I wish I could let the old woman know what happened. I wonder what she’ll do? I don’t know. I guess I should have got a job in a filling station or something. I should have quit trying to go in boats. p176-177 - TB: there is a great little scene here where a writer observes a woman crossing the street. He has an internal monologue where he talks about how ugly she is and calls her a battleship. He starts to use her in his writing immediately and constructs a whole little tale to explain this woman that he’s seen crossing the street in tears. Hemingway does a great little smash cut at the end in the last paragraph identifying her and the reader immediately understands her tears and there is a new dimension to the mental cruelty of the writer. One of the phrases that Hem puts into this writer’s mental scribblings is, “It was good. It was, it could be easily, terrific, and it was true.” Probably Hem’s most central piece of writing advice is boiled down to, “write one true sentence.” This is how I know this little two page vignette is an artifact of self-hatred. There are a lot of artifacts of Hem’s self-hatred in this book. p185 - “I was so sentimental about you I’d break any one’s heart for you. My, I was a damned fool. I broke my own heart, too.” TB: this whole paragraph is fantastic. More: “It’s broken and gone. Everything I believed in and everything I cared about I left for you because you were so wonderful and you loved me so much that love was all that mattered. Love was the greatest thing, wasn’t it? Love was what we had that no one else had or could ever have. And you were a genius and I was your whole life. I was your partner and your little black flower. Slop. Love is just another dirty lie. Love is ergoapiol pills to make me come around because you were afraid to have a baby. Love is quinine and quinine and quinine until I’m deaf with it. Love is that dirty aborting horror that you took me to. Love is my insides all messed up. It’s half catheters and half whirling douches. I know about love. Love always hangs up behind the bathroom door. It smells like Lysol. To hell with love. Love is you making me happy and then going off to sleep with your mouth open while I lie awake all night afraid to say my prayers even because I know I have no right to any more. Love is all the dirty little tricks you taught me that you probably got out of some book. All right. I’m through with you and I’m through with love. Your kind of picknosed love. You writer.” (TB: emphasis mine. Another artifact of Hem’s self-hatred. It’s no mistake he puts these words in the mouth of the writer’s wife.) p191 - “Well, it’s all over, so why be bitter?” (TB: really great emotional stuff from a Hemingway male character… Fuck this guy.) p195 - The whiskey warmed his tongue and the back of his throat, but did not change his ideas any, and suddenly, looking at himself in the mirror behind the bar, he knew that drinking was never going to do any good to him now. Whatever he had now he had, and it was from now on, and if he drank himself unconscious when he woke up it would be there. p202 - TB: there’s an exchange with some vets in this area, I guess 201-203 and maybe a little past that. I feel like there is more than what’s on the page. I expect I will re-read this someday. But here are parts that stand out to me: “Let us in,” the bloody-faced one said. “Let in me and my old buddy.” He whispered into Richard Gordon’s ear, “I don’t have to hand it out. I can take it, see?” … “I can take it” … “It’s a secret.” “Sometimes it feels good,” he said. “How do you feel about that?” “First it was an art,” he said. “Then it became a pleasure. If things made me sick you’d make me sick, Red.” TB: Clearly they’re talking about pain, the context is basically taking punches. But it’s got to be a lot more than that. I think it’s Hem talking about being able to take emotional pain. That “Sometimes it feels good” seems to me like something a ruminator says. I’m a ruminator. Sometimes you imagine terribly dark things and you imagine people you love being very cruel or saying things they would never say. It doesn’t feel good. But I understand exactly what he’s saying. It feels terrible, but there’s something to it. Like smashing in your tear ducts. There’s something to it. p206 Related to previous note - “Because we are the desperate ones,” the man said. “The ones with nothing to lose. We are the completely brutalized ones. We’re worse than the stuff the original Spartacus worked with. But it’s tough to try and do anything with because we have been beaten so far that the only solace is booze and the only pride is in being able to take it. But we’re not all like that. There are some of us that are going to hand it out.” (TB: emphasis mine.) p212 - As Richard Gordon watched him he felt a sick feeling in his chest. And he knew for the first time how a man feels when he looks at the man his wife is leaving him for. p221 - What he was thinking as he watched him was not pleasant. It is a moral sin, he thought, a grave and deadly sin and a great cruelty, and while technically one’s religion may permit the ultimate result, I cannot pardon myself. On the other hand, a surgeon cannot desist while operating for fear of hurting the patient. But why must all the operations in life be performed without an anaesthetic? If I had been a better man I would have let him beat me up. It would have been better for him. (TB: emphasis mine.) p225 - “A man,” Harry Morgan said, looking at them both. “One man alone ain’t got. No man alone now.” He stopped. “No matter how a man alone ain’t got no bloody fucking chance.” He shut his eyes. It had taken him a long time to get it out and it had taken him all his life to learn it. p229 - TB: line here about a side-character being impotent. Interesting. Hem seems to have a lot of impotent or rumored-impotent characters (do I only think this because I just re-read Sun Also Rises? Maybe). It’s relatively interesting given all his affairs and all his characters’ affairs and the extreme heartbreak in so many of his works. p230 - “Didn’t you ever notice any difference in nights?” (TB: character talking about how during the day it’s hard enough but at night it’s another matter. Two characters in this book have this thought and it’s the same thought that Jake in Sun Also Rises returns to. Things are harder at night. A lot harder.) Chapter 24, from page 227 to 247, has vignettes of other characters throughout the yachtyard. Just incredible. I loved all of them. p238 - Some made the long drop from the apartment or the office window; some took it quietly in two-car garages with the motor running; some used the native tradition of the Colt or Smith and Wesson; those well-constructed implements that end insomnia, terminate remorse, cure cancer, avoid bankruptcy, and blast an exit from intolerable positions by the pressure of a finger; those admirable American instruments so easily carried, so sure of effect, so well designed to end the American dream when it becomes a nightmare, their only drawback the mess they leave for relatives to clean up. (TB: emphasis mine.) p260 - I don’t know what to do. It ain’t like when he was away on trips. Then he was always coming back but now I got to go on the rest of my life. And I’m big now and ugly and old and he ain’t here to tell me that I ain’t. I’d have to hire a man to do it now I guess and then I wouldn’t want him. So that’s the way it goes. That’s the way it goes alright. … I wonder if he thought about me or what he thought about. … Nothing is any good to wish. … Nobody’s going to tell me that and there ain’t nothing now but to take it every day the way it comes and just get started doing something right away. But Jesus Christ, what do you do at nights is what I want to know. … You just go dead inside and everything is easy. TB: emphasis mine. These are from Harry’s wife from pages 260 to 261 across several paragraphs of thought. Review Lots of spoilers in here. ...