THE FACE OF ANOTHER

The Face of Another (1964)

Kobo Abe 

 Years ago, when I was first starting this thing up, I read Kobo Abe’s The Woman in the Dunes and loved the hell out of it. I think it was the second or third book I “reviewed” here, back when it was on blogspot, before tumblr was a real big thing. That book was full of striking imagery and great ideas. Additionally, postwar Japanese weirdo lit might be my favorite genre of fiction. So, naturally, I was very excited to tackle The Face of Another, a book that also promised a lot. And boy howdy was I ever let down. Here, I’ll tell you why. 

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THE HOUR OF THE STAR

The Hour of the Star (1977)

Clarice Lispector 

 All the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born. 

 This is another one of the books that I sat on for far too long. I finished it about a month ago and waited forever to write one of these things. As with all the books I dawdle on, this post isn’t going to be very good, so I’m sorry in advance. It’ll stink up the place. Wish I hadn’t: The Hour of the Star is one of the best books I’ve ever read, and Lispector is an absolute master, and I certainly won’t do her or her work justice. I’m sorry, Clarice. If there’s one thing that’s true about me it’s that I’m a fundamentally lazy, slow-acting and slow-thinking person. 

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TRAIN DREAMS

Train Dreams (2002)

Denis Johnson

            The American Creation Myth has been exported all over the world, and nearly everyone is familiar with the imagery: a cowpoke leaning on a split-rail fence, chewing on a piece of straw; a stagecoach rattling across a wilderness populated only by coyotes and bison, a transient gunslinger with his fingers tensed above his Colt Peacemaker, a woman in a bonnet running after a train. It’s a very romantic image, one with a lot of endurance. For better or worse the Western is a part of our national fabric, in the same way that Ernest Hemingway, the Bald Eagle and the Brooklyn Dodgers are. But, like any other Creation Myth, ours hides a repellent truth: Manifest Destiny was nothing short of genocide. Our genesis is bloodshed, destruction, slavery and obliteration. Waves of the ignorant and savage headed West killing and burning everything in their path in the name of progress. That’s what we are, that’s who we are as a people.

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ANTWERP

Antwerp (2002)

Roberto Bolaño

            Tell that stupid Arnold Bennet that all his rules about plot only apply to novels that are copies of other novels.

            There are so many effusive and embarrassing things to say about Roberto Bolaño and only so much time left. Sometimes I think I’ve exhausted all the things I could possibly say (he’s my best friend and I love him very dearly, more than I have ever loved anything in my life) but every new book I read is a new corner in the backalley labyrinth of his cosmology, an alley behind an unwelcoming bar, knee deep in trash and stinking of unarticulated danger, a danger that throbs in your reptile brain and makes your breathing quick and shallow, like in the seconds before a fistfight. I haven’t been in a fistfight in years, not a real one, if any of those pitiful teenage rumblings could ever be called real. Pugilism is all in my head now. My battles are subtle and internal. Don’t think I have much Bolaño left to explore: one or two of his lesser novels, and his poetry, which I still haven’t touched. I imagine that they too are like brief and repulsive barroom scuffles. Broken pool cues and broken bottles gripped in obscene fists.

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ACCEPTANCE

Acceptance (2014)

Jeff VanderMeer

            Done told myself I wouldn’t wait so long to write one of these things, but here we are, weeks after I finished this book. It’s sort of like how you might come up with a killer guitar riff in the evening, and when you pick up your guitar in the morning, you’ve completely forgotten what it was. Not that I’ve ever come up with any killer guitar riffs, but you know what I mean. So I think this is going to be a real short one, which is probably for the best. Mostly I just want to prove that I read it. Maybe, if you’re lucky, I’ll write about my life or my emotions or something. Not like I have anything else to do. Just sitting in my room listening to Joy Division and drinking tea. Cold out there for a lifelong San Diegan, rained this morning, great Joy Division weather.

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REBLOG if you are hella bored and wouldn’t mind some curious anons.

dog-ear-this:

I don’t usually post this kinda shit on my main blog, but I’m really fucking bored.

still really bored

AUTHORITY

Authority (2014)

Jeff VanderMeer

            When I finished Authority, after a long and focused session, I slammed it down on my desk and said “Holy fucking god,” out loud but to nobody in particular. I was in my room and I think I was home alone. It didn’t sound as if any of my roommates were around. I was totally alone. While I read a lot, and am a strong reader, I don’t think of myself as a particularly fast one, but I have breezed through these books in no time at all. I’m utterly hooked.

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ANNIHILATION

Annihilation (2014)

Jeff Vandermeer

            I like to keep tuned in to literary news, and from what I recall, Annihilation (the first volume of the Southern Reach trilogy) has been blowing up all year long. It’s easy to see why people would be drawn to them: the stunning covers, the ambiguous-yet-strong titles (Annihilation, Authority, Acceptance), and the promise of something new and different. They jump off shelves dominated by books with watercolor paintings on the covers and fusty titles, as if they were designed by old women. Annihilation ruled, and ruled hard. I breezed through it, completely enthralled.

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2666

2666 (2004)

Roberto Bolaño

An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom

            Between finishing Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy, and beginning 2666 by Roberto Bolaño, I read and finished A Universal History of Iniquity by Jorge Luis Borges. It’s a slim book (ninety-odd pages) about the lives and histories of various criminals, bandits, pirates, charlatans and murderers. Reading Borges is an exultant experience, and I adored the book. Borges’ stories are always little fragments, brief glimpses into a vast and improbable world, like a whole library shredded up and pages or chapters picked at random from an enormous and chaotic pile. However, I never book blogged about it, and I can’t think of a good reason why; perhaps I was too hungry, too tired, too overwhelmed, too impoverished, or any number of conditions that might befall someone slowly starving to death under capitalism. I just couldn’t do it, and given that these silly book reviews are so much more about my emotional reactions than deep criticisms that I am wholly unqualified to undertake I find it important that I get these out as quickly as possible, while my feelings are still fresh. In the case of 2666 I finished it around two-thirty this morning, because I never sleep and I don’t dream, and now, a few hours later, I am writing this while I wait for someone to call me about my application for food stamps, which will likely be denied for one reason or another. With A Universal History of Iniquity, I waited a week, a week and a half, until I no longer had anything to say, even less than usual. Bolaño would be so disappointed in me. He would shake his head and say, “Williams, what the fuck are you doing?” He would call me a pendejo, the world’s biggest pendejo, a pendejo of monstrous proportions, a pendejo whose idiocy blankets the globe like an ice age. It would be such an honor to be called a pendejo by my idol; I’d feel awful at first but eventually I would wear it like a badge of pride. Maybe he might not be so disappointed that I read Borges, but he certainly wouldn’t be impressed by my laziness and mental/emotional cowardice.

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OUTER DARK

Outer Dark (1968)

Cormac McCarthy

            Flowers, he said. It ain’t even got a name.

            Confession: I have never been to the American South. The closest I’ve been is Texas and the DC area, but those don’t really count. So all I really know about the South is what I see in movies and read in books. And, let me tell you, it doesn’t really seem like all that pleasant a place to be. Mostly the South seems like some kind of backwards devil-haunted jungle straight out of your steaming and lurid nightmares. Surely there are nice places (probably the closer you get to a college the better) but I wouldn’t count on it. The South is as foreign to me as Guatemala, the Moon, or Ancient Mesopotamia.

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ANCILLARY JUSTICE

Ancillary Justice (2013)

Ann Leckie

            One of the things I like most about science fiction, or at least as “science fiction” exists in my head, is that it really lends itself to commenting on and sometimes even subverting paradigms and social norms. Not all science fiction is interested in subverting anything, of course (Orson Scott Card, you repulsive bigot, I’m looking at you) but the best of it is. Want to say something about conformity? All babies are grown in jars of green liquid! Want to say something about how the technocracy controls the flow of information? Extraterrestrials are beaming subliminal messages in from hidden satellites! Mind control! Dimension X! Robots! Clones! These are all code for little distinct parts of our reality that authors deem worthy of comment. Like everyone knows that zombies mean yuppies and aliens mean communists and so on, right? Comment is really what science fiction, and literature in general, is for, I think.

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