Granskningar och kommentarer

Clarice Lispector finished this (if she did finish it) while dying of ovarian cancer. Killed by that which can give life. (Which is bullshit essentialism I guess, but it's hard not to imagine the metaphor occurred to her in a book about death and creation.)

In the beginning was the Word. So in A Breath of Life she creates a nameless male author who creates a female character named Ângela, who, The Author tells us, is a lousy writer and will never finish a book, but will be useful to him to investigate the big questions of, y'know, life the universe and everything. Ângela, of course, doesn't know she's fictional, and goes about storming language and thought itself, looking for permanence, looking for clarity, looking for essence in the face of fleeting time, impending death.

The whole book reads like a lopsided dialogue; The Author makes his grumpy analyses; Ângela her breathless (sorry) freewheelins on God; The Author tells us (or whoever is supposed to be reading him) that she's stupide, a typical woman, with neither the wits nor the endurance to understand and communicate; she just works to ecstatically be, unafraid and clear.

I won't say this is my favourite Lispector. Whether unfinished or not, it's fragmentary by design, occasionally frustratingly vague. Maybe if I'd read this before Stream of Life I wouldn't feel like I'd read some of this before. But in a sense, I guess that's the point; the novel doesn't so much put a full stop on a life, a career, as disseminate it and open it up, in that magnificent finale, find Grace. Even if I don't believe in that, I do believe in this book.

I continue to be thoroughly whelmed by Scalzi's novels. He has great ideas, but there always seems to be something lacking. Based on this, I think it might be that his plots aren't nearly as interesting as his worldbuilding. Lock In has a lot to recommend it - a clever setup, a well thought-through world, some neat touches (a narrator whose gender is not only unrevealed but completely immaterial, and you barely even notice it)... and yet I find myself vaguely annoyed with the murder-mystery plot and the endless technobabble.

Maybe I should just stick with his blog and twitter feed.

Kleeman studied creative writing and cognitive science at Brown University, and received an MFA from Columbia University in 2012.

No shit.

Maybe I'm unfair. Maybe it's just that I just read the not-entirely-dissimilar but far superior My Year of Rest and Relaxation the other day, but YDCHABLM does indeed feel more like a writing exercise than an actual novel, and not an entirely successful one either. There are good ideas in here - a society based on empty calories both in food, self-awareness and relationships, applied gnosticism, a sort of Pynchon-lite absurdism with both fake TV commercials and secret societies etc - but overall, it doesn't work. The novel feels just as super- and artificial as the society it tries to satirize.

Plotwise like a mix of Good Soldier Svejk and Inglourious Basterds as a troop of Nigerian colonial soldiers are sent into the jungles of Burma to fight the Japanese on their own turf, teach them to fear the jungle in the name of King George.

There's good stuff here, but the tone never quite sits right with me; the mix of horror and dry irony not quite jelling, and a feeling that it could have benefitted from being longer.

I keep thinking of comparisons as I'm pulled, grinning, through this novel in two long breathless sessions. Kafka, Camus, Ellis, Wurtzel, whatever... then on the last few pages it strikes me that this is essentially the millennial, post-postmodern, post-ironic version of Perec's A Man Who Sleeps.

And all of it is just my projecting things on the novel that it doesn't need, because Moshfegh's writing feels so self-assured, so sneeringly matter-of-fact but with a good ol' dose of US sentiment lurking in the corners that any comparisons to other writers feels like I'm trying to lend the novel a glory it doesn't need to borrow.

It makes perfect sense that Karin Tidbeck is published in English by Jeff & Ann Vandermeer. Her delightfully Weird stories about body... not quite horror, but y'know; about the thin layer between our world and others; about the unreliable nature of time; etc, all feel like they iris out just enough to show us something, and then close again without that tedious explanatory bit where the magic dies in favour of moral or conclusion. It comes across anyway.

Now go read Amatka, it's out in English now.

Det här känns inte 2010-tal, så det känns kanske väldigt 2010-tal. Numera bor Jerker i Paris. Oavslutad, men inte så det märks, för hela upplägget känns oavslutligt; en pikaresk utan pikar.

Catch me on a more optimistic day and it's a 4.

What if the US had decided to import thousands of hippos in the 1850s to feed a growing population, and basically turned the Mississippi into one big hippo-friendly marshland? (As indeed they almost did, albeit 50 years later.)

What if the Cowboy was replaced by the Hopper - a hippopotamusboy, with wellingtons instead of cowboy boots?

And what if a ragtag bunch of pansexual misfit conmen and assassins found themselves caught up in the inevitable power struggle over just who makes money off this, and having to do battle on hippo-back?

Yeah, this is just too much fun. In a way, it feels like a tiny bit of a missed opportunity. This could have been an American War With the Newts, you could easily have used the setup to burrow a lot deeper into US history - past and present. But Gailey sticks to the simple setup, a heist story in a hippo-infested version of the Deep South, and it's just... well, too much fun. If this doesn't get turned into a TV series (on cable, obviously), it's proof that we don't deserve the world.