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It's been a long time since I read the 1831 edit, so I can't really compare them. But a few thoughts:

Fittingly for Frankenstein, the author is both alive and dead. "Mary Shelley (with Percy Shelley)". Because heaven forfend we think a teenage girl wrote this completely on her own, practically inventing the entire SF genre, with no influence from any editor, or that married couples with the same profession help each other out. The Lone GeniusTM is, after all, male; we will never see a critical edition published as "Paul Auster (with Siri Hustvedt)" or "Stephen King (with Tabitha King)", but the merest suggestion that Harper Lee let Capote read To Kill A Mockingbird before publication and we can all assume that he really wrote it, amirightfolks? That said, having PBS's contributions clearly marked is interesting, and confirms that he was more an editor than a co-creator; sometimes he just adds purple prose, sometimes he helps her clarify themes, but at no point does he seem to invent anything that wasn't already there.

Frankenstein discovered that I detailed or made notes concerning his history; he asked to see them, and himself corrected and augmented them in many places, but principally in giving the life and spirit of the conversations he held with his enemy.

The enemy, the adversary, the creator, the monster. Everybody knows that Frankenstein is the scientist, not the monster. Except he kind of is. Whatever Mary Shelley's intended moral of the story, Victor Frankenstein doesn't come across as a very good man. He creates a feeling, intelligent, moral creature in his image, and when he finds it repugnant, abandons and rebukes it until it lashes out. (And I totally just called Adam "it", didn't I?) At no point does he accept responsibility, yet he feels guilt. He claims to refuse the demands made upon him by his creation for the greater good of humanity, yet he's so self-centered that when the monster whose entire strategy so far has been to kill his family to make him suffer tells him he'll "see him on his marriage night", Frankenstein never once considers that the threat might not be on HIS life. Hell, up until the epilogue, you could easily claim that the monster only exists in his imagination. He's the narrator, he's the Man, he's the Hero; of course everything is about him, and when his fiancée drops very unsubtle hints that she'd like to have her own adventures while she waits for him to settle down, he doesn't even notice it. That's not to say that the monster isn't monstrous either, of course; but she does give him several chances to accuse his creator and defend his own actions, while admitting that they are monstrous. Throughout the novel, as much as they try to accuse the other, the lines between them blur.

The Swedish word "mönster" means "pattern". The German word "Münster" means "church". Of course there's a lot of romantic/proto-existentialist playing around with Man vs God here, and Shelley leaves it all wonderfully open-ended; the power balance between creator and creature (etymology!) shifts around, they demand answers and actions of each other that the other cannot give; at the end of Frankenstein wait both Nietzsche and Sartre; the zeitgeist has started accusing God, contemplating His death, but finds the idea both unavoidable and horrific. The Monster is too eloquent; he's learned all this philosophy, and none of it helps him any when Victor simply says "no". Shelley's dynamic duo of Victor and Adam go to their deaths lamenting that they no longer have a reason to live when the other is no longer there to be accused, interrogated, tortured until they accept responsibility, but neither actually kills the other.

My person was hideous, and my stature gigantic. What did this mean? Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination? These questions continually recurred, but I was unable to solve them.

Of course, most adaptations and more-or-less outright thefts of the story try to simplify it, as if to create much clearer demarcations between Good and Evil; make Frankenstein himself a simple mad scientist with an Igor, and the monster a nearly-mute beast, far from Shelley's constantly orating philosophy student. Introduce a real hero and a few villagers with pitchforks to do the dirty work. Yet in Bride of Frankenstein (the first sequel, confirming that the Monster was simply too cool to not be kept alive through a thousand reincarnations) when the monster kills his creator, the only two characters who remain through all versions, his last immortal words are "WE BELONG DEAD!". "We". And so the author (and reader) remains both alive and dead.

Neil's second memoir in just a few years. Do we really need two books on the life of an aging - if occasionally still brilliant - rocker, both written within months of each other? Especially when Waging Heavy Peace was quite good, but also a bit unfocused?

Well, sort of. Special Deluxe is a much more straight-forward autobiography than the predecessor, in that Neil uses cars that he or his family have owned through the years as signposts for changes in his life, from a small town in Canada to superstardom (somewhat ironically, given his praise for his wife, ending just before his recent divorce). And Neil loves his cars. He may not remember exactly when he played a certain gig, but he'll remember every detail of the car he bought on a whim on the way home, and the technical problems that led to him getting rid of it. And ultimately, the big question: How can he be a socially conscious old save-the-Earth hippie and still drive around in huge 1950s gas-guzzlers? Well, he wouldn't be Neil Young if he didn't on a whim decide to do something about that...

Full disclaimer: You had better have at least a passing interest in cars, and preferably alternative fuels, if you want to get through this. As much as Neil often uses the car as an entry point to a story he wants to tell about life, fame, drugs, music or family, there are also long stretches where he seems to impatiently brush all that stuff aside just so he can gush about the design of the grill of a 1959 Continental for a while.

But you take the good with the bad; even if the book occasionally drags, it has that charm that comes from listening to an enthusiast being indulged to nerd out about something he loves, and I can't not like how unassuming it comes across. Neil Young's music has always been a work in progress, and judging by both his books, he himself is as well - there are no sure answers, no big lessons learned that don't come with a shrug that you can't always be perfect. It's not a book I need, but you can't live by need alone.

Javier was there, in my body, in my skin, instead of me. I no longer knew what he wanted from me. I no longer knew what I wanted from him.
I wasn't myself anymore.
I had to find myself again. And to do that I let myself get lost on the streets of Cairo.

Taïa's short autobiographical novel takes you from growing up in Morocco, knowing he's interested in other boys who only want him back if they get to call him a girl, to life in exile in Paris, to movie shoots in Cairo (film, of course, is about shining through something to create an image that's both true and false), through near-death and near-rape experiences to heartbreaks and some sense of self-knowledge.

The prose is feverish, skittish, but still very self-assured. It's never a simple novel of Overcoming Homophobia or Surviving Racism, instead reading like a series of short breathless vignettes on the inextricable nature of infatuation, sex, fear, body, memory, culture. The fearful need of the fucker to feminize the fuckee, the need for absolute certainty of one's position in relation to others and oneself (the Biblical sense of "knowing" isn't just a linguistic gag). An extremely physical novel, as if the very existence of a gay African body were an important act of actively being oneself.

I turn the last page and wish there was more of it, that it didn't just stop. Then again, by the time it does, it's lobbed itself like a benevolent handgrenade at its reader, and doesn't offer a simple denouement. It continues being.

He came home from the war with a party in his head

A brother goes off to war, leaving his sister to fend for herself. He returns home with untreated PTSD, can't go back to the Deep South and all its memories until he gets a message that his sister is in trouble. You can go home again, you just have to be prepared to pay... as if you didn't pay to stay away.

This is, to my shame, only the second Morrison novel I've read. I read Beloved last year and was absolutely bowled over by it. According to the blurb, the novella-ish Home is "a Rosetta stone for her entire work, containing all the themes that have fueled her novels", and I can't argue with that; but as good as Home is at times, it feels like it could have used either fewer themes or more pages. There's so much cooking between the lines here; the way Morrison writes about race, gender and class, never needing to say who's what, just making it obvious with a few sharp observations, how people have learned to behave and relate. The unspeakable horror of childhood and wartime memories that have to be pushed down if you're going to live. But at 150 pages, it feels too crowded; especially towards the end, where she abandons that sharp eye to instead simply have the characters tell us their hangups, and some of it feels a bit like one of Alan Alda's Serious Episodes of MAS*H.

But damn, I need to read more Morrison. Because when she's good, she's incredible.

3.5/5

The thing about terrorism is that it implicates us all. Your fear is the terrorist's weapon. It is an intrinsically memetic act; the terrorism of the 2010s doesn't require the organised bank robberies of the 1970s or even the underground networks of the 1990s and early 2000s - I read this as Omar Mateen murdered 49 people and ascribed it to an ISIS he'd never been a member of, like a young punk learning three chords, starting a band in his basement and somehow feeling a part of a movement, like Breivik before him, like Thomas Mair after him. You don't need organisation any more; you just need to throw the idea out there and let the right people make it theirs.

I digress right away. Osama isn't a great novel, Tidhar's overcooked prose bothers me more than it should and once he telegraphs the reveal you've still got a lot of ground to cover before you get there, but the idea at its core is both creepy, well done, and shot through with grief and anger. In a world where things went differently after WWII (exactly how different we don't know), a mysterious author starts publishing stories of the "vigilante" Osama bin Laden, a literary supervillain or superhero sold by a porn publisher and drawing legions of fans speculating on how things work in the Osamaverse, writing fanfiction called "Love in the desert", etc. A private investigator who's just a little too perfectly noir gets a visit from a mysterious woman asking him to track this writer down, while a mysterious government agency hunts him, terrified of what he might know. And another (maybe) mysterious woman shows up, disappears, mumbles about Nangilima (gold star for that reference, and for not explaining it).

Not sure what to make of the ending. It's either a copout or a gutpunch. Are there some things we don't want to know, some ideas we would rather simply forget? If so, who would blame us?

So this is basically Withnail and I in Italian, right? Except with a slightly less sympathetic time to be nostalgic about, if your grace permits me saying so.

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Det är rätt länge sen nu som jag såg Luchino Viscontis filmatisering av Leoparden. Jag minns mest ett mäktigt kostymdrama, stora balsalar, grönskande italienska dalar där en nästan känner doften av olivlundar, rika människor som gnäller över att de snart inte är lika rika längre.

Att Lampedusas förlaga nu kommer i nyöversättning, och en oerhört lyxig och påkostad sådan dessutom, känns lite tidstypiskt på något vis. Romanen börjar 1860 på Sicilien, och där ska den också förbli även om tiden går. Garibaldis rödskjortor har precis landstigit utanför Palermo i sin kamp för ett enat sekulärt Italien i stället för alla de katolska småkungadömen och republiker det varit i sekler, och i sitt palats sitter don Fabrizio, prinsen av Salina, och inser att tidens vingslag är för tunga för att inte vika sig för. ”Om allt ska förbli som det är måste vi ändra allt”, säger hans systerson åt honom innan han drar upp i bergen för att kämpa med revolutionärerna och mot den ordning som gynnat hans familj i generationer, för framtidens skull. Men finns det någon framtid?

Detta mynnar sedan ut i ett storslaget porträtt av en tid som författaren och läsaren vet är dödsdömd. Genom familjen Salinas ögon får vi följa en förändring som hade verkat omöjlig innan, så rikt (pun intended) och detaljerat beskriven, hela vägen ner till dammlagret på de gamla porträtten i palatsrum som inte används längre, att känslan av något ruttet bara skiner igenom gradvis. Don Fabrizio håller god min medan han försöker rädda vad som räddas kan av traditioner, inflytande och ansvar medan det blir alltmer uppenbart att framtiden tillhör vulgära småborgare som familjen Sedára, som tror sig kunna bli adliga genom ett stycke papper. Om han bara kan bygga upp sin systerson till en framtidens man med rätt idéer, hitta ett lämpligt parti åt honom, slippa att själv behöva förändras mer än absolut nödvändigt innan sin ofrånkomliga död…

Jo, Leoparden känns bitvis mer än lite reaktionär, nostalgisk för en tid då alla Visste Sin Plats; de vackra men inte speciellt intelligenta kvinnorna på sin, de tacksamma okunniga bönderna på sin, Gud och kyrkan på sin, och Adeln överst med ett strängt men välvilligt leende. Inte för att don Fabrizio har några illusioner om att adeln behövs på samma sätt som den en gång gjorde; hela det gamla feodala samhället sköts ju i sank av Napoleon, och adeln fyller nu egentligen ingen annan funktion än att föregå med gott moraliskt exempel (trots att don Fabrizio är helt öppen med sina unga älskarinnor), upprätthålla någon form av nationell stolthet (trots att namnet på nationen bytts ut med jämna mellanrum sedan de gamla grekerna) och bestämma över småfolket som inte vet sitt eget bästa. Då och då får vi veta vad som ska hända framöver, till och med exakt när bomber byggda i Pittsburgh kommer att utplåna palatsen som då sedan länge förlorat makten till kortsiktiga amatörer som bara bryr sig om att blidka pöbeln för egen vinning. Boken är ju skriven på 50-talet, och vi vet ju vart utvecklingen ledde under 1900-talets första halva i Italien. Elefanten i rummet, här precis som i Umberto Ecos sista bok från i fjol, heter Mussolini, kulmen av den nya tidens politiker, den mest mardrömslika slutsatsen av liberalimens nödvändiga idéer, en återvändsgränd för framgångstanken som nu är populär igen.

För ögonblicket, tack vare er ödmjuke tjänare i viss mån, talar man inte längre om rödskjortorna, men det kommer man att göra. När de har försvunnit, så kommer det andra i en annan färg: och sedan kommer de röda igen. Och hur kommer det att sluta?

Leoparden är en roman som prunkar, så full med mångsidiga personporträtt, torr humor och nostalgiporr att motsägelserna, mörkret i den kan läsas på många sätt; en roman att sjunka in i, förlora sig i som en myllrande renässanstavla så att en bara då och då upptäcker att en inte får syre. Bonniers nyutgåva känns på många sätt som ett stycke nostalgi i sig, Viveca Melanders magnifika översättning parad med så många fotnötter, kritiska kommentarer och fragment och noveller ur Lampedusas övriga produktion, att den verkar vilja skrika att detta är Stor Litteratur av ett slag som inte skrivs längre. På gott och ont stämmer det kanske.

Efter att jag läst ut boken ser jag om Viscontis film. Den är bättre än jag minns den, och fungerar lika väl som en kommentar på romanen. Han lägger till ett lager av ironi, av medvetenhet om dem som gjorde den Gamla Goda Tiden möjlig, låter kameran dröja på kammarjungfrun som placerar ut pottan. Där Lampedusa har en tendens att skriva läsaren på näsan om hur allt kommer att gå åt helvete när man ger makten till en okultiverad pöbel slutar filmen med konstaterandet ”En rejäl armé, det var det vi behövde på Sicilien. Nu blir allt bra.” Revolution betyder cirkel, och det enda som vi lär oss av historien, etc…

I should probably rewatch the movie, too. Murakami's take on the story feels both more intricate and clumsier; the themes of desire, empty consumtion and the hunt for something authentic is vintage Murakami, but at times Asami and her motivation feel too telegraphed, too straightforward, losing the ambiguity of Miike's movie. Still, that works for Murakami, and it's still a pretty powerful short-sharp-shock take on being careful what you wish for when you have the power both to make it happen and to forget that that "what" is actually a "who".

"I've lived for sixty-five years. And I keep seeing things that almost convince that we're not human. Guests, at best. Strange guests from nothing."

Harrowing (and partly autobiographical) story, told effectively enough, without either shying away from the horrors of Saddam's prisons (the big metaphorical one and the small literal one) or sensationalising them. I think the publisher may be hoping to sell it as a YA novel, going by the binding, and as such it's certainly no slouch. There are things in here that remain too undeveloped for my taste - Khider is fond of nodding to history, without ever doing much with it - and compared to, say, Hassan Blasim he only intermittently hits THAT spot. But the irony in the title runs throughout the whole book, from all the conquerors that have come and gone to the image of US soldiers retreating as Saddam takes back his country after the first gulf war. Prisoners are told Saddam's birthday is coming up, they're asked to celebrate it, with the understanding that they'll be pardoned... and their reward is one orange each. Gee, thanks.

Will it all end, as eighty years of superhero fiction suggest, in a meaningless, explosive slugfest?

Yes. Yes it will.

I like the idea of this book; a non-US-centric take on the superhero myth, challenging the way the world is set up to work, etc. And for the first couple of chapters, I hold out hope that it'll be a fun mashup of, say, Heroes and The Satanic Verses. In the end, though, despite a few hints at interesting ideas, I find myself bored with it by the halfway mark. The characters are flat and fickle, Basu's prose reads like an excited fan's retelling of any action-laden MCU movie, and the only thing that makes me finish the book is that I'd forgotten to bring another one.

The tour diary is a special kind of rock'n'roll memoir; the account of work-a-day rock'n'roll filtered through equal parts honesty and exhaustion along with the general surreality of a rock star being herded from city to city.

The Sick Bag Song is set during Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds' 2014 tour of the US and Canada, as Nick travels from city to city, performs, tries to call home, considers his influences, his past and his future ... It makes for a good companion piece to his film 20,000 Days on Earth, equal parts self-mythologizing and self-reclaiming. I can't, as a decades-long Cave fan, say how well it stands up on its own. There is no "on its own" for me.

That it's a North American tour is not coincidental. Aussie Cave, fan of the blues and gospel and punk and Nabokov, has always been caught up in the fictional America, the myth of it. He sees all the layers.

He keeps coming back to the image of a young boy jumping off a bridge. Metaphor? No, he insists, that happened in his hometown as a kid, he saw the corpse, about the same time he heard Leonard Cohen for the first time and knew what the world had to offer. Years later he met Dylan and couldn't write a decent song for years afterwards. Now he writes, constantly, on the back of the sick bags the airlines hand him as he travels the country he's been hunting for 30 years. Writing is his job. Some of it will suck. His working through that does not.

After the tour, after the book, his teenage son was killed in a rock climbing accident. The text, the writer Cave, doesn't know why I wince every time he talks about railroad bridges.