Sam Moore

(read for work)

Epistolary break-ups will always be my jam; all those ghosts and failures, letters as archive of a past, a self, what might have been. Full of really incisive stuff -- obviously reminded me of things like Kraus and Anne Carson -- that I naturally devoured. Haunted, not just by a lost lover but a lost self, one that for better and for worse, emerged through intimacy with a specific person. All alchemy, magic

(re-read)

Read it if you like: Seinfeld; greed being good; Huey Lewis and the News; molecular gastronomy; the world ending not with a bang but with a whimper; architectural digest tours; Ludwig Van and a bit of the old ultraviolence

***

Weirder and more like Seinfeld than I remember; the stream of consciousness so effective in terms of just burying you in Bateman's brain and the way he sees the world: all slick, hollow surfaces. Struck by the fact there's not much violence and grizzly stuff (but when it rains, it pours...), so much of it is Bateman wandering through a hell-ish, barren landscape, a world that's different to everyone around him; informed by money, status, suits, Those little flickering moments of the mask slipping, mode of address changing is great.

It's also, incredbly funny; in the dialogue, in the ridiculous food, even in some of the most brutal and unsettling moments there are jokes that cut through it.

More emo-coded than I remember; Victor less a mad scientist and more a romantic poet taken to extremes, his fear and revulsion of The Creature a fear of himself, as if it were his soul given form

Bizarre inasmuch as it always flirts with being a Bond parody in ways that stress how grotesque a lot of spy fictioh can be but it has a really interesting thematic core about voids and how people choose to fill them: with country, with wealth, with sex, with food. And I think more than anything this is probably a spiritual novel; about the decay of Hillier's soul, if it happens as a requirement for spycraft and if the cost, in the end, could ever be worth it. It's also just full of really smart uses of language, even in throwaway lines and moments that all add up to something that's occassionally confounding, but always really interesting. Had an enjoyably strange time with this one

Fascinated by this formally; its refusal to really do much of anything with plot, and absolute absence of dialogue or character's as individuals -- they're always a couple, always defined together and always through the prism of other things. Their relationship to objects, geography, night clubs, sex shops, all the patchwork that defines them, becoming ever more rigid, as if their sense of selves might calcify and trap them forever. The way distance -- from a time, a place -- changes the way we see it and constantly try to make things seem better than they are (through our own eyes, and when we're perceived). Morbidly compelling, and really rather good