Brittany
Jordan Hall said it best: “this ethereal, infuriating book”
Reader's log: • Came for Carmilla Karnstein, stayed for the mystical moon child Mademoiselle De Lafontaine • Steamiest passage: “A small income in that part of the world goes a great way; eight or nine hundred a year does wonders.” [Half] kidding. It's probably: “Sometimes there came a sensation as if a hand was drawn softly along my cheek and neck. Sometimes it was as if warm lips kissed me, longer and longer and more lovingly as they reached my throat...” • Langor¹⁷ • Everything I could want in a good Gothic — dark, damp, and dusty castles, dramatic carriage wrecks, creepy portraits, unexplainable maladies, strange dreams, mysterious strangers, a story within a story...
Now, how many stars should I knock off for the author promulgating the whole ‘queer women as monsters' trope?
Thank goodness for Lanternfish's edition, which is Le Fanu's Carmilla, kintsugi'd. Carmen Maria Machado's edits and commentary make this 1872 Gothic much more accessible. And the modern reframing of the narrative adds nuance while turning the monstrous lesbian trope back onto its makers, whose “own accounts become highly suspect.” “I wished this edition to bear LaFanu's shame,” Machado writes. “I wish the reader to come to the book with a complete understanding of its inadequacy.”
Now that's the punk rock Mary Shelley energy I'm here for.
And how about those illustrations by tattoo artist Robert Kraiza?
“There has always been a special feeling between Big Sis and me. On her side at least.”
While researching Cluster B personality disorders, I found JCO's Zombie, tagged with reviews like, “...could not finish...” and “...will never read again...” Considering the novel received a Bram Stoker Award for horror, I knew I had to get my eyes on it.
Depraved, disturbing, and unflinching are all apt adjectives here as JCO places us inside the mind of a most terrifying “monster” — a human devoid of empathy and self-control. From descriptions of the hideously botched transorbital lobotomies performed with ice pick and textbook to the disjunctive first- and third-person perspectives Q_ uses to describe various stalkings, abductions, rapes, and murders, Zombie is nightmarish. But also stippled with gracefully-rendered mundanity that grounds the narrative in reality:
“& then Grandma got the idea to hire me for yard work [...] & that was O.K. in theory. Grandma would pay me $50 to $75 cash for just a few hours' work & I did not need to be too thorough, she never came out to examine it. An operation for cataracts or something in one or both of her eyes so maybe she couldn't see too well & I didn't inquire. Grandma slipped these bills to me saying This is just between you & me, Quentin. Our little secret! meaning not Dad nor the IRS would know. Maybe Grandma was lonely & that was why. Trying to get me to stay for supper etc. There was another old woman, a widow who was a friend of Grandma's & sometimes I would drive this other old woman to her home & she would tip me, too. Like a taxi service. In my 1987 Ford van with the American flag decal in the rear window.”
There's no “abduct me, daddy” celebritization here. Just the study of a man inhibited by an extreme and unchecked personality disorder, mowing lawns, eating burgers, visiting grandparents, and driving around in an old Ford van with an American flag decal in the rear window.
For me, it can't get any scarier than that.
In a literary sense, this is a modern religious parable about a physician's interesting professional relationship with a patient and the spiritual trials and growth they experience together.
In a scientific sense, Weiss' alleged “proof,” presented this way, doesn't hold up to the lowest level of critical observation. This doesn't mean all of his claims are false, but truth and proof are different.
I read books like this to explore new possibilities of thinking about the world. Anything presented as fact, though, must undergo some degree of scrutiny before I use it as foundation on which to structure my existence. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
The Passion According to G.H. is the internal monologue of a woman undergoing a paradigm shift. Lispector's prose is nebulous and challenging due to the constraints of language to outwardly communicate inner experiences while also feeling intuitive and validating for anyone who's tried.
Inherent are themes of identity such as authenticity and the vulnerability that accompanies it:
“If I talk to you will I frighten you and lose you? But if I don't, I'll lose myself and in losing myself, lose you anyhow.”
The unfamiliarity of ourselves:
“Why don't I have the courage to find just a way in? Oh, I know that I have gone in. But I've been afraid because I don't know where that way in leads. And I've never before let myself go without knowing where.”
Of having more questions than answers but asking anyway then realizing the answers lie within and always have:
“What was happening to me? I shall never be able to understand it, but there must be someone who can. And I shall have to create that someone who can inside myself.”
And the resulting surprise of being more than you thought you were.
Truly one for the mistresses, mad-women, and poets.
While I'll be forever reeling that these vignettes were written in the 1940s, the real narrative — for me — lies in the framework: Nin (among others) was commissioned by an unknown “collector” to write erotic literature for $1 a page (equal to $18 today), which she accepted to make ends meet. Henry Miller was also recruited. The idea of Nin and Miller, covertly romantically involved, writing hedonistic stories together “where the light was dim, the tea fragrant, the cake properly decadent,” interviewing friends for ideas and possibilities, and laughing at the bad and boring tastes of this not-so-secret secret collector... That's the biopic I want to see, and I want it co-created by Angela Robinson and Sally Wainwright for HBO.
Reads as MFA thesis-cum-journal and contains many (too many?) interesting historical and philisophical references — like Epicurus and his garden school and the rise and fall of 1960s communes — but ultimately lacks structure. Using Odell's own phrase to describe the talk that spurred the book, it's “weird and blobby and hard to define.”
The teenaged male gaze is essentially what you'd expect, but Eugenides makes it pretty: “We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn't fathom them at all. We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.”
For other possibilities, see also [b:God's Debris: A Thought Experiment 50221 God's Debris A Thought Experiment Scott Adams https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1407177447l/50221.SX50.jpg 2005793] and [b:Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives 4948826 Sum Forty Tales from the Afterlives David Eagleman https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320528453l/4948826.SY75.jpg 5014561]
Includes one of my favorite dedications: “I ask the indulgence of the children who may read this book for dedicating it to a grown-up. I have a serious reason: he is the best friend I have in the world. I have another reason: this grown-up understands everything, even books about children. I have a third reason: he lives in France where he is hungry and cold. He needs cheering up. If all these reasons are not enough, I will dedicate the book to the child from whom this grown-up grew. All grown-ups were once children — although few of them remember it.”
Ideally to be read after [b:The Giving Tree 370493 The Giving Tree Shel Silverstein https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1174210942l/370493.SX50.jpg 30530] and [b:The Little Prince 157993 The Little Prince Antoine de Saint-Exupéry https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1367545443l/157993.SY75.jpg 2180358] but before [b:The Alchemist 18144590 The Alchemist Paulo Coelho https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1466865542l/18144590.SY75.jpg 4835472].
A lively, alliterative translation that is a joy to read (aloud, if you can keep from getting tongue-tied); hearty thanks to [a:Robin Sloan 2960227 Robin Sloan https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1524283679p2/2960227.jpg] for passing on the quirky tradition of rereading this epic on New Year's Day; also, compliments to another invaluable bald man in my life, Dr. Robert Hamm, for first introducing me to this Arthurian legend 11 years ago.
