Hux

Pedro Páramo (1955) Juan Rulfo I never fully got to grips with this one. There is an element of magical realism (a genre I have little time for) and the book is an an almost ethereal journey into an obscure dream which floats without form until you lose its thread. The book begins with Juan Preciado arriving in the town of Comala after his mother's death to search for his father Pedro Páramo. The narrative then jumps back and forth between the present time and the past where we learn about the life of Pedro Páramo. In the present, the book is a first person narration by Juan Preciado as he encounters a ghost town. In the past, it is a third person narration where Comala is a thriving community. In both periods, there is the addition of characters who are possibly dead, spectres and ghosts, who tell tales and narrate the story themselves, leading (certainly in my case) to quite a lot of confusion and uncertainty. It's difficult to keep track of everyone and their place in the narrative, to know how they connect and what relationships they have. As such, the whole book has a quality of dreamy otherness that conjures up a haze, a sense of delirium and shadows, of emotional phantoms. It was both beautiful but unclear. The book was very easy to read but I was always left with a feeling of being lost, like I'd stepped into a mystery, long forgotten by others. It reminded me a little of 'The Blind Owl' but while that book never entirely grabbed me, this one did. It was more enjoyable but, ultimately, still not something that ever blew me away. I would definitely recommend it though. It might be one of those books you need to read more than once. 7/10

The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches (1998) Gaétan Soucy A very curious story narrated by a young girl (perhaps seventeen) who wakes up one morning (along with her brother) to discover that their father has committed suicide. The book then details that not only are these two children essentially feral (having neve gone beyond the grounds of their estate) but also that their father was an abusive and somewhat disturbed individual. The girl has also been, for unknown reasons, raised to believe that she is in fact a boy (who lost genitalia when very young). She walks with her horse into the village in the hopes of buying a coffin but, understandably, piques the interest of some of the villagers, one of whom she is attracted to and who provides her with some small details regarding her father's wealth and background. I really enjoyed her voice and found it very convincing. She is somehow both feral yet fiercely intelligent, ignorant of the world (and how it works), but equally sharp and resourceful. Her narration is always fascinating and thoughtful but occasionally bogged down in colloquialisms created by her own unique experiences which gives the book the occasional feel of being post-apocalyptic. It reminded me a little of Riddley Walker but was, significantly so, a lot more accessible and more enjoyable to read. You can sense the twist coming but never entirely know what it's going to be. I actually found it to be rather tame compared to what I had been conjuring in my own mind. And I didn't entirely enjoy the way Soucy spells it all out at the end by having the story continue beyond its point of purpose. It was all rather unnecessary if you ask me. I would have preferred more ambiguity regarding the ending, perhaps leave things so that they were a little more open to interpretation. That being said, I was very impressed overall. A unique work. 8/10

Thanks. Books being a major disappointment is all part of the fun.

Heaven (2009) Mieko Kawakami The story of an unnamed 14-year-old boy with a lazy eye who is mercilessly bullied at school. He begins receiving letters from a girl called Kojima who is also bullied for being scruffy and poor. They meet and develop a friendship that is predominantly lead by her, and, as such, she proffers a philosophy that weakness is good and that the beatings and cruelty they suffer are a necessary experience. As the bullying continues (often bordering on torture porn), the book culminates in the bullies discovering their friendship and a final showdown. I found this easy enough to read with very straightforward writing. There are occasional moments of beauty in the prose but mostly it's standard stuff, as such, you're relying on the story and the characters to keep you interested. For the most part, they did but I wasn't really excited by anything until chapter six when Momose -- essentially second in command of the bullies -- meets his victim in the hospital and they discuss why he and his friends bully him. His argument is interesting (and even convincing to the bullied boy) and essentially revolves around a principle of 'might is right.' People either do what they want or they don't. It's not a question of right or wrong. They do what they can get away with. People are hypocrites who would be appalled if their daughter were in porn but will just as happily masturbate to someone else's daughter in porn. You either do what you want or you don't. Regardless of any sense of morality. And so on... It was an interesting idea and one worth looking into but the book barely scratches the surface of its implications. Plus, it's difficult to believe that a 14-year-old boy would possess such a cynical worldview or articulate it so effortlessly. The speech would have made more sense in the mouth of an adult and, as such, could have allowed for greater exploration of the idea itself. Ultimately, I interpreted the ending as the boy accepting the fundamental truth of this argument. He agrees to get his lazy eye fixed (a thing which Kojima is explicitly against) which suggests the he has given in to the notion that strength, no matter in what prosaic form it comes, is a requirement for happiness. A decent read but nothing exceptional. 7/10

Heaven by Mieko Kawakami

Omon Ra (1992) Victor Pelevin A bildungsroman novel about a young Soviet boy named Omon Ra who has dreams of becoming a cosmonaut. He meets a fellow space obsessed boy called Mitiok and together they bond over their shared ambitions and interests. As the story goes along, they both attend an academy for cosmonauts and begin their training for a mission to the moon. I was enjoying the book is as a rather straight-forward story about a boy's dreams coming true amid a satirical landscape of soviet incompetence. But as it builds, there is a sense of the bizarre and surreal, culminating in an experience at the reincarnation test which results in (what appears to be) a drug induced rant form Mitiok where he reveals that, among other things, he was a Nazi in a past life. From here on in, the strangeness continues and the increasing sense of uncertainty is palpable as Omon Ra prepares for the final stages of the moon mission where he (and a handful of others) will have a leading part. All the while you can sense a blind devotion to the cause and a bleak, over romanticised craving for the heroic. The ending contains what most certainly would be described as a twist but which was not entirely unexpected. It's the manner in which it's presented that gives it more impact, the stark, almost blunt conclusion leaving a bad taste in the mouth. Perhaps a metaphor for the magic bean socialist experiment gone wrong that the USSR so strongly represents. 7/10

Memoirs of a Good-For-Nothing (1826) Joseph Von Eichendorff A charming picaresque novella about a young man who, on being told that he is a good-for-nothing by his father, decides to go wandering. He arrives at a great palace near Vienna and acquires a job as a gardener then a toll keeper. Here, there is a countess who he falls in love with but on discovering that she is betrothed to another, he again leaves and, with two painter companions, travels through the lush countryside to Italy. It's hard to describe the book as anything too demanding. It revels in the romantic language of the era and contains lines of poetry that add further to the notion of ideals regarding love and courtship. The book very clearly provides an early 19th century interpretation of the world, a straightforward adventure and romance, a pleasant melodrama with interesting characters and themes. I kept expecting a twist, a disappointment, but it ends exactly as it is supposed to... happily and without cynicism. I don't think it will live long in the memory but it's worth a look. 6/10

Life: A User's Manual (1978) Georges Perec If you're someone who thinks great literature is rooms being described then boy... do I have the book for you. Perec has written about an apartment block in Paris and tells you about the current inhabitants, the previous inhabitants and, most exciting of all, the many, many objects in those rooms. At first glance, this is an interesting idea and, somewhat surprisingly, I zipped through the first half of the book fairly quickly and found Perec's writing fun and engaging. But I kept waiting for something to happen, for the cleverness to kick in but it never does. Instead, you get a banal puzzle of sorts, a jigsaw of rooms and people that, due to its own expectations, never amounts to anything. The entire content and structure of the book exists purely to satisfy the rules Perec has established (like inventing the plaster then realising you now need to invent the cheese grater to justify it). His attempt to do something original inadvertently corners him in a room (a very boring, over described room). The first problem you have is that you never really get to know any of the characters in any meaningful way as they all come and go without ever being properly fleshed out. Bartlebooth is probably the only exception with a smidgeon of intrigue to his puzzle making but the rest are far too abstract and foggy. Meanwhile Perec throws more pointless vignettes at you (because he has to fill this crap up with something) with other characters that only add to the tedious confusion. For example a story about Henri Fresnel who appears purely because he has a tangential connection to one of the rooms. He left his wife to become an actor. Then he became a cook. Then he hooked up with a woman named Twinkie. Anyway, we're done with that now, so let's move on... It's very difficult to care about characters when you know they are pointless, have no further role to play, and contribute nothing to the overall narrative or the other characters. As such, you endlessly feel justified in skipping ahead. Because you're missing nothing. But the puzzle, I hear you cry. The amazing clever puzzle. Yeah, it's people occupying rooms. That's it, mate. Calm down. That's your astonishing piece of genius puzzle. That's it. It's really not that impressive. Fine, it took work to accomplish but it says NOTHING about the human condition. NOTHING!! Now back to describing rooms. Okay you've finished. Great. Now what? Oh, you're going to describe a painting and spend so much time on it that I can't remember if your talking about the characters in the rooms or the characters in the paintings. Great. What's next. The book on the bedside table. Well, I guess you should describe half the plot and characters in that for no apparent reason. And maybe a list. Yeah, let's have another list. Can't get enough of those. Look, I'm sorry but this is a cheat. Books that are nothing more than vignettes masquerading as novels in order to force a theme. I understand why writers do it. I've read enough of them to get the message. You throw your vignettes together under some contrived roof and hope it looks clever and original (certainly enough to have a seemingly cohesive thread). Essentially, I think the thing you're supposed to be impressed by is that Perec manages to keep track of all these things (hence the utterly pointless appendices at the back). But it's just immensely boring. I don't have a problem with difficult books. If you don't have a story, fine, give me amazing characters and events. Don't have those either, then impress me with experimental writing that's fluid and exquisite. Don't have that? Then I guess I'll settle for a mundane puzzle that isn't really a puzzle at all. This book might appeal to some (so I'd still recommend it) but, to me, it was contrived ball-baggery of the most heinous kind. (And a truly horrible title too while we're at it). Fundamentally, Perec forgot the primary purpose of a puzzle. To alleviate boredom, not induce it. 4/10

So chocolatey, it even turns the milk round.

I don't know. Perhaps because sometimes, as I said, I actually do enjoy it. But more often than not, I dislike the way it manipulates the reader into A) reading at a certain speed or in a certain manner (as opposed to your own choice) and B) into thinking something profound is being said when it isn't (as I've said many times before, I think a lot of very bad prose hides behind stream of consciousness writing). But ultimately, I can still recognise good writing even when I don't enjoy the reading experience (such as Krasznahorkai). Similarly, I can thoroughly enjoy reading a book (Piranesi/Secret History) but not regard it as being of any literary significance.

War and War (1999) Lazlo Krasznahorkai A man named Korin has discovered an ancient manuscript and has become obsessed by it. He wishes to secure it for prosperity by writing it down on a website before intending to kill himself in New York, a place he believes to be the nexus of the known world. There, he meets a fellow Hungarian, an interpreter, and ends up living with him and the interpreter's lover. What follows is a curious descent into madness. This is the third time Krasznahorkai has managed to write a book that explores something fascinating to me but in a style which, to a painful degree in this instance, I found utterly draining. In fact, this was probably the least pleasant experience I've had reading his work which is strange given that he finally beaks up his chapters instead of smashing me over the head with walls of text. The problem is, however, that he is now gushing with such a relentless flood of stream-of-consciousness writing that I actually found myself craving the stolid, dense writing of his previous works. The parts that focused on Korin were fine (for the most part) but once he starts telling his temporal tale regarding the ancient manuscript (four refuges named Kasser, Bengazza, Falke and Toót, escaping war and travelling through Europe), I was so thoroughly bored that I can't even describe the feeling (such was its intensity). Again, Krasznahorkai is talking about interesting things here, dark and profound things, but the delivery of them is always my issue. I've always had problems with stream-of-consciousness writing (it can achieve such levels of banality that it will make your nipples spin) but, occasionally, I actually, often to my surprise, find that I enjoy it. But not here. It just wasn't compelling or exquisite enough to make me shudder. It felt like a tedious chore. I suspect Krasznahorkai was aiming for a sense of the swirling madness of Korin's mind, the scattergun mania and excited anxiety, which is all well and good but, like his other works, it left me mostly unengaged and frustrated. The ideas are always intriguing and, as such, I'm willing to trudge through the mud of his style (to the detriment of my own sanity) because it feels like there will big rewards when you do, I just wish the rewards were bigger than this. Even the amusing (or is it heartbreaking?) discovery that Korin's work, his glorious sacrifice, was utterly fruitless (google http://www.warandwar.com) doesn't quite save it. I will keep reading him. But I might need a break before I go back into the trenches. 5/10

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was that she once headbutted Mick Jagger during a drug fueled orgy in 1969. But worse than that, she...

Mysteries (1892) Knut Hansun This was bizarre. A stranger named Johan Nagal comes to a small Norwegian coastal village with a seemingly infinite supply of money and anecdotes as well as a significant number of mysteries which, along with his mannerisms and ideas, bamboozle both the reader and the inhabitants. I actually loved this. At first I thought it was a (very early) detective novel as Nagal seems fascinated by the recent murder (or was it suicide) of a man who appears to have been in love with a young woman called Dagny Kielland. He questions the people of the village about it, specifically a short, disabled man referred to by everyone as the Midget. As the novel proceeds, Nagal demonstrates that he has brilliant insights into the human psyche, can psychologically manipulate people with ease, and even admits to his games when he's caught out, claiming that he is lying but that his confessions should also be taken into account. I genuinely belived a twist was coming which would reveal his clever plan, his subtle investigation into these village people and the recently deceased man. But... that never comes. Instead, we are left with a deranged man, a lunatic, who claims to have fallen madly in love with Dagny but also pursues the spinster Martha (asking her to marry him). He tells tales, and weaves stories, and provides anecdotes that marvel and bemuse his listeners. Some of his stories are bizarre and monstrous, ghost stories and drug fueled memories of hallucinations (which reminded me of Hesse). He is pleasant to people one minute, then ranting about their dishonesty and furtive motives the next. The man is all over the place, a delusional maniac but one of immense and subtle intelligence. I think I adored him. At first the ending felt flat, a disappointing nothing on the shoulders of so much potential. An unfinished thought. But then I was relieved, glad that Hamsun didn't give us the obvious and instead chose to leave his audience as perplexed as the people in the village. This one had me thinking, churning it all over in my mind. What was Hamsun getting at? Why build things up like this only to knock them down? What was he attacking? What was he implying? The book's title is apt and the whole thing was a curiosity that fascinated me. I especially enjoyed his feverish rants (and the insights which are clearly Hamsun's in the mouth of Nagal), regarding socialism and literature, in particular when he criticised Tolstoy (a man who, amazingly, was still alive at the time). That Hamsun wrote this in 1892 only adds to its stature. It isn't perfect but this one will stay with me a while. 8/10

The Eight Mountains (2016) Paolo Cognetti The story of an Italian boy who befriends another boy when his family take him to their holiday home at the base of the alps in the grana community. As children, they climb the mountain, follow the streams, and explore together. As the book goes along, they become teenagers, adults, and middle-aged men who regularly check in with each other. Or more precisely Pietro, the wanderer (and narrator), checks in with Bruno (who knows no other life than living on the mountain side). It's a perfectly sweet book with a charming quality but ultimately I was a little underwhelmed. The writing is basic and the story is never especially gripping or insightful. It always feels as though the book is on the verge of saying something about life, about friendship and isolation, about death and loss, about something. But it never quite does. It just plods along in a rather bland manner. Even the obvious tug of war between nature and modernity isn't entirely meaningful. I kept waiting for something to happen but all I got was a prosaic story that has been done better elsewhere. There are occasional moments where it almost becomes something beautiful but doesn't quite get there, offering little more than a straight-forward and forgettable story. Under normal circumstances this would be fine and I'd pass the book off as a mildly enjoyable and readable piece. But this book has quite a lot of hype around it and has apparently been translated into a billion languages (my copy has a quote from Annie Proulx describing it as 'exquisite' and 'achingly painful' and I'm sorry... but it's none of those things). I'm afraid this gets filed under 'contemporary literature lets me down again.' It's not a terrible book by any stretch, there's just nothing remarkable about it and I wish the media, publishers, etc (whoever it is) would stop promoting average literature like this as something profound and impressive. It's fine. It's perfectly fine. 6/10

Any recommendations? Doesn't even have to be a good twist. Recently I enjoyed 'I See you' (2019) And even 'Black Butterfly' (2017) despite the twist being fairly obvious (to me at least). That's the kind of thing I'm looking for though.

The Appointment (1997) Herta Muller A female factory worker in Ceausecu's Romania is on the tram heading towards an appointment with the secret police. On the way there she reminisces about many things in her life, including her ex husband, her current husband, her work, her friend Lilli, and her life in general. The book returns to the present day on the tram as the narrative goes along so the sensation of this entire book taking place in her head, her racing thoughts, is very effective and, consequently, produces a distinct stream-of-consciousness style. Similar to the first book I read by Muller, it took a while to get into this. I have many issues with stream-of-consciousness writing and find that when it's good, it's excellent but when it's bad, it's a barrage of profoundly inane navel-gazing. It's difficult to care about people and events that are so remote from you that they're being casually brushed over in the mind of a fiction character. It's hard not to find it all rather trivial and indulgent. What do I care that your grandfather had a glass eye or that your co-worker is a dick but one you eventually sleep with? It all feels somewhat detached and vague, producing a sense of the obscure and unclear. But Muller is clearly a gifted writer so more often than not, I was very engaged by her writing and enjoyed the book. I found the life she was writing about mostly interesting and thoughtful. But I just don't like this style of writing in general, even when it's done well. Muller is very good at creating a sense of oppression and fear, however, and the two books I've read by her both deal exceptionally well with the totalitarianism of communist Romania. It's difficult not to come away feeling impressed. 7/10

The Setting Sun (1947) Osamu Dazai The narrator, Kazuko, a 29-year-old woman who is recently divorced, is forced to live with her mother in the country as they have lost their previous home. She takes care of her mother as she is afflicted with various ailments but it seems clear that the end is in sight. As such, Kazuko is looking for a purpose, a reason to keep going, and, having dabbled with notions of Christianity and Marxism, has ultimately settled on the notion that she she is love with a married man she barely knows. They met only briefly and he was inappropriate with her but she, over estimating the significance of the encounter, has imbued the potential relationship with a profound aura of love. Meanwhile, her brother, Naoji, (who inadvertently introduced his sister to this man) has returned from the war with an opium and alcohol addiction. As the book comes to a climax, there is little in the shape of happiness to be had for either. I enjoyed reading this a lot. There is a simplicity to Dazai's writing which elevates it to a level of disturbing intimacy. You're immediately naked with these characters, a witness to their inner shame and guilt. There is always a feeling that some residual sin has taken place, something salacious and defining. Dazai speaks of being between worlds, of morals and values, of one system of civilisation being replaced with another. He uses Kazuko (and Naoji) as vessels for exploring these changes. And, given the accusation of misogyny he often receives for No Longer Human, I think he does a pretty good job of fleshing out Kazuko as a woman with a genuine humanity, seeking a genuine desire for meaning. It was short and sweet, and enjoyable to read. Dazai has a technique which gets to the point whilst simultaneously giving you food for thought. He takes the bleak and makes it very human. 8/10

Froth on the Daydream - Foam on the Daze - Mood Indigo (1947) Boris Vian This one was a curiosity. A surrealist novel about Colin meeting and falling in love with Chloe. My version was called 'Mood Indigo' but I think it has also been translated as 'Foam on the Daze' and, most commonly, 'Froth on the Daydream.' The book exists in a world of whimsy and surrealism, a world where you can walk down the street inside a cloud, where rooms change shape, where a mouse is a central character, where technology and dreams are combined in bizarre and peculiar ways. The book is full of absurdist quirks that are sometimes charming, sometimes silly (or downright unclear). Colin has a clavicocktail, for example, which, as far as I could gather, is like a piano that, when you play it, produces special (unique) drinks depending on what notes you play. Not long after Colin and Chloe get married, she falls ill and develops water lily of the lung, an ailment that can only be cured by being surrounded by flowers. Colin, having lost or given away a lot of his money, must find (an assortment of weird and wonderful) jobs to pay for the flowers. The writing is fairly basic and easy to read. I enjoyed the experience and finished the book quite quickly. Given that this book has been on my 'to read' list for a very long time (and I therefore had some awareness of what to expect), I was slightly disappointed by how conventional the book actually turned out to be. The surrealism comes in sporadic waves, only hints at a greater potential for the absurd and other worldly, and is often quite sparse and even a little juvenile and silly when it does arrive. But in a strange way, it works and by the final third of the book, I was slightly in love with it all. It was rather heartbreaking and beautiful. At least to me. Watching someone's grief and heartbreak through the prism of a surrealist lens was actually very effective and created a dream-like sense of sorrow. The idea of a flower growing in Chloe's lungs as a metaphor for cancer, the idea of surrounding her with flowers as a cure. I want to say that this book was really nothing very special, a straight-forward piece of writing, terse and formulaic, an example of simplistic prose, a book that was never that original or impressive and yet... it affected me for some reason. It got me. It made me feel something. I thought it was rather beautiful. 9/10

Reading a book with several titles. The most common appears to be 'Froth on the Daydream" but there's also "Foam on the Daze" and the one I'm reading called "Mood Indigo." By Boris Vian.

a woman got on the bus who looked familiar. It was the Nobel prize winner writer Olga Tokarczuk. I had some questions about her work and how to pronounce her name so walked over to her and said...

Drive Your Plow Over The Bones of the Dead (2009) Olga Tokarczuk I really enjoyed this. It wasn't what I was expecting. It begins with a woman in her sixties, Janina Duszejko (the narrator), being woken by her neighbour (who she refers to as Oddball) because another neighbour (Bigfoot) has been found dead in unusual circumstances. At first this seems like a simple starting point for an altogether more introspective narrative but what follows is a series of deaths which produces a slight whodunit quality I wasn't anticipating. While other dismiss the deaths as accidents Janina (being so inclined) suspects that the animals are somehow involved. Eventually, the book reaches, what seemed to me, to be a somewhat inevitable conclusion given the slow development of events but which others might describe as a twist. I don't think it can be viewed that way however. The prose is crisp and clean (with occasional flourishes) but never becomes anything truly outstanding or exquisite. Olga Tokarczuk is a Nobel prize winner, however, so I would need to read more of her work to make a better judgement. For me, the book was very readable but the majority of my pleasure came from the story and the character of Janina herself, more than from the actual writing. Janina is not a sympathetic character, she believes things which are absurd (astrology) and has cantankerous traits which make one think of those elderly women who 'demand to see the manager.' She is outraged by the behaviour of young people, makes haughty complaints, and thinks certain people are scandalous. As a character, she is one of the most wonderfully realised I've ever come across. You have absolutely met women like this. And yet there are moments when, even as she maintains her disdainful qualities, she surprises you. Her love of animals, for example which, like the book itself, is a strong feature. And her cool indifference to social etiquette like the way she describes having sex with a younger man she has only just met. "I raised the quilt and invited him to join me, but as I am neither maudlin nor sentimental, I shall not dwell on it any further." As such, she is the the embodiment of the unreliable narrator. But it's hard not to take her at her word. I really liked this woman. I really loved this book. And I suspect that she and John Wick would have lots to talk about. Will definitely be reading more of her work. 8/10