Books recently read
Aug. 14th, 2018 09:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lotesse-Right now I'm about halfway through Michael Ondaatje's Coming Through Slaughter, a very heavily stylized short novel about a jazz musician losing his mind in turn-of-the-century New Orleans. The prose is pretty thick; it reminds me of Mrs Dalloway a bit, the falling into the fragmented mind ... but I guess it's strange to my ear that a novel so vividly written about Black characters also sounds so very ... formal? I'm enjoying the cameo from the historical photographer Bellocq; I taught Natasha Trethewey's book of poems Bellocq's Ophelia a few times, and it was entertaining to see another set of descriptions of the Storyville milieux, and of Bellocq's artwork.
-Madeleine L'Engle, Dragons in the Waters. A belated entry in my "reread all the Kairos books" endeavor. I always liked this one as a kid. Poly, Charles and Calvin are on a ship heading to a mystical lake in Venezuela. There's a shipboard hearse and a portrait of Simon Bolivar. That stuff I still very much enjoyed, but I was perturbed by the strong vein of US Southern exceptionalism that runs through the book; at the beginning, Poly and Charles make shipboard friends with a little boy who is the last scion of a "happy plantation" family, where, we are to understand, the slaves really were all well-treated. The descendants of the plantation-owners have become poor, and have to live in an outbuilding, displaced from their patrimony. The boy and his grandmother are presented as tragic and aspirational figures; and there's a tense bit when Poly and Charles, having protested that slavery was, in fact, bad, get lectured about how, actually, the North perfidiously laid waste to the South, where things were not, in fact, so bad. It feels like the author is advancing that opinion pretty uncritically; it was a moment of seeing L'Engle, who I've admired since I was little, as a very imperfect theorist of her chosen sphere of human moral history.
As always, I tremendously enjoy glimpses at Calvin as an adult; he gets a much fuller adult arc than any of the other WIT cast, and it's hugely satisfying -- even if I am still always rubbernecking around trying to catch a glimpse of my Meg, who's almost always relegated to the background. I don't know that I'd recommend the book; it's very much a retread of A Swiftly Tilting Planet, still with the fantasy racism and colonialism issues but without the benefit of that amazing unicorn.
-Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. The first time I've reread this one since it was first recommended to me when I was twelve. Then, I was very focused on the precocious girl genius character; my life experiences at twelve were pretty narrow. I enjoyed the book a lot more at thirty-two; I can better appreciate the beautiful and aching human symmetries in the novel's various driven and inchoate characters. All of these people have something very urgent and true inside of them, but they can't seem to communicate it to other human beings; when they try, it all goes wrong. They pour themselves out to a Deaf man, who lives to visit his somewhat uncaring institutionalized best friend, the loss of whom leads to his suicide. All these good people, trying so hard and failing so utterly!
Stylistically, the thing I thought about most was the ethics of the author's work with communication forms from othered communities of which she was not a member. There's a strong engagement with the mechanisms of Singer's communication, from the feeling of sign language in his hands to his rare uses of a pencil. Also, several of the prominent characters are African-American, and McCullers is interested in, and reproduces, their speech, attending to who uses AAVE and who does not. There was something uncomfortable to me at first in seeing a white author reproduce AAVE so broadly; I wasn't sure it wasn't mocking. As I got more deeply into McCuller's analysis of Black language, it became clear that she was engaging in good faith, with deep insight. I suppose it's her insight that I marveled at most. But I don't know that it would fly in work published now; I do think it would be perceived as exploitative. Still, the confrontation between the passionate Marxist white man and the Black doctor with dreams of uplift for his people, where they totally fail to reach each other, felt very, very contemporary. It reminded me of arguing with my father before the 2016 election; in a way that helped me step outside my anger and see more clearly my father's own good intentions, but also the impossibility of communicating political and ethical truths in a world where we are already all caught up in our own tragedies.
-Carson McCullers, Reflections in a Golden Eye
After I finished THIALH, I wanted more -- so I picked up McCullers' slim second novel, which has a much tighter and more claustrophobic focus than her first. Reflections takes place within a few days on a military base in the south; there are a bunch of men and women in various stages of relationships, desire, and neglect; there's sexy horse whipping and crashing through the forest; and a portrait of a sensitive progressive woman going mad surrounded by people who do not understand her or share her values, which back this spring was touching to me in ways I'm only now feeling fully cognizant of.
-Madeleine L'Engle, Dragons in the Waters. A belated entry in my "reread all the Kairos books" endeavor. I always liked this one as a kid. Poly, Charles and Calvin are on a ship heading to a mystical lake in Venezuela. There's a shipboard hearse and a portrait of Simon Bolivar. That stuff I still very much enjoyed, but I was perturbed by the strong vein of US Southern exceptionalism that runs through the book; at the beginning, Poly and Charles make shipboard friends with a little boy who is the last scion of a "happy plantation" family, where, we are to understand, the slaves really were all well-treated. The descendants of the plantation-owners have become poor, and have to live in an outbuilding, displaced from their patrimony. The boy and his grandmother are presented as tragic and aspirational figures; and there's a tense bit when Poly and Charles, having protested that slavery was, in fact, bad, get lectured about how, actually, the North perfidiously laid waste to the South, where things were not, in fact, so bad. It feels like the author is advancing that opinion pretty uncritically; it was a moment of seeing L'Engle, who I've admired since I was little, as a very imperfect theorist of her chosen sphere of human moral history.
As always, I tremendously enjoy glimpses at Calvin as an adult; he gets a much fuller adult arc than any of the other WIT cast, and it's hugely satisfying -- even if I am still always rubbernecking around trying to catch a glimpse of my Meg, who's almost always relegated to the background. I don't know that I'd recommend the book; it's very much a retread of A Swiftly Tilting Planet, still with the fantasy racism and colonialism issues but without the benefit of that amazing unicorn.
-Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. The first time I've reread this one since it was first recommended to me when I was twelve. Then, I was very focused on the precocious girl genius character; my life experiences at twelve were pretty narrow. I enjoyed the book a lot more at thirty-two; I can better appreciate the beautiful and aching human symmetries in the novel's various driven and inchoate characters. All of these people have something very urgent and true inside of them, but they can't seem to communicate it to other human beings; when they try, it all goes wrong. They pour themselves out to a Deaf man, who lives to visit his somewhat uncaring institutionalized best friend, the loss of whom leads to his suicide. All these good people, trying so hard and failing so utterly!
Stylistically, the thing I thought about most was the ethics of the author's work with communication forms from othered communities of which she was not a member. There's a strong engagement with the mechanisms of Singer's communication, from the feeling of sign language in his hands to his rare uses of a pencil. Also, several of the prominent characters are African-American, and McCullers is interested in, and reproduces, their speech, attending to who uses AAVE and who does not. There was something uncomfortable to me at first in seeing a white author reproduce AAVE so broadly; I wasn't sure it wasn't mocking. As I got more deeply into McCuller's analysis of Black language, it became clear that she was engaging in good faith, with deep insight. I suppose it's her insight that I marveled at most. But I don't know that it would fly in work published now; I do think it would be perceived as exploitative. Still, the confrontation between the passionate Marxist white man and the Black doctor with dreams of uplift for his people, where they totally fail to reach each other, felt very, very contemporary. It reminded me of arguing with my father before the 2016 election; in a way that helped me step outside my anger and see more clearly my father's own good intentions, but also the impossibility of communicating political and ethical truths in a world where we are already all caught up in our own tragedies.
-Carson McCullers, Reflections in a Golden Eye
After I finished THIALH, I wanted more -- so I picked up McCullers' slim second novel, which has a much tighter and more claustrophobic focus than her first. Reflections takes place within a few days on a military base in the south; there are a bunch of men and women in various stages of relationships, desire, and neglect; there's sexy horse whipping and crashing through the forest; and a portrait of a sensitive progressive woman going mad surrounded by people who do not understand her or share her values, which back this spring was touching to me in ways I'm only now feeling fully cognizant of.