Carlos
Initial reaction:
I enjoyed it more than Station Eleven but overall I'd say it was fine. I may try another St. John Mandel joint in the future but I suspect I'll never get out of her work what other people seem to get.
Additional thoughts:
I think as I've sat with this story, I've started to like it a little more. Though I have my quibbles with the way the story is constructed, I think it's an effective reflection of the experience of dislocation and isolation that we all underwent during 2020.
Some people say novels should be about story or about characters, but The Bell Jar is a prime example of why prose quality matters, as well as a useful reminder why you shouldn't sleep on poets.
Yes, it's a harrowing depiction of mental illness. Yes, it's a searing look at the limited options open to women (even relatively privileged white ones) during the middle of the 20th Century.
More importantly, the book is fucking beautiful. I found the pages slipping by, while also finding myself pausing to savor a turn of phrase or striking image. Plath's mastery of language is breathtaking.
An entertaining ghost story with a unique setting which mostly suffers from trying to be in dialogue with Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca. This is Rebecca as filtered through a modern sensibility, where the ghosts have to be literal, the heroine plucky and the lines between good and evil unambiguous. A solid debut novel from Cañas.
This very much falls into the interesting idea/disappointing execution bucket.
In its purest form, done right, watching an experimental film is the closest you can come to dreaming another person's dreams. Which is why to watch one is, essentially, to invite another person into your head, hoping you emerge haunted.
I think herein lies the contradiction at the heart of the novel. Experimental Film is not a film but a book. Consequently, the experience is less like dreaming another person's dream and more like listening to another person explain their dream to you, an experience which tends to be less haunting than it is tedious.
There's definitely an interesting idea here, something like an analog version of The Ring with an Old World god at its center.
The real weakness for me was the narrative style, which is clogged with references.
So, a moment of confrontation is filtered through a reference to a Larry Cohen interview, complete with a handful of notable films he created. A tense moment of silence is compared to a John Cage composition. Near the climax, the protagonist describes their predicament as “if Quentin Tarantino-directed a supernatural giallo or a Guillermo del Toro sitcom with a CanCon twist.”
Sure, it's clever, but it falls into that all-too-common pitfall of postmodern horror: a feeling of alienation from the text, from the characters, from the menacing forces driving the story. By the end, I was skimming and hoping for a really brutal ending because I wanted something to shock me into caring.
I've seen this compared to S.A. Cosby's Razorblade Tears and while there are may overlaps in terms of genre and theme, it wasn't nearly as good. The protagonist is mostly passive. The pacing is often slow. The incorporation of horror elements - drawn from the milieu of the Mexican drug world - was interesting, but otherwise this was okay but not particularly special.
Overall enjoyable if a little plodding at times. On the one hand, an interesting indictment of colonialism. On the other hand, its strike feels strangely Randian. For a while, I found it a little frustrating that the novel introduced this fantastical element but had history play out the same, but towards the end, I was struck with how much of an allegory it is, with silver standing in for lithium.
Funny timing to finish this just as the US is freaking out over Chinese balloons.
I'd previously read The Hunger and Red Widow, but this is my favorite Katsu novel so far. As with Hunger, there's a fantastical conceit connected to a real historical tragedy, but I think this has a more powerful resonance between the fictional and historical threads. I'd also compare it favorably with Red Widow in its handling of the themes of patriotism and the moral challenges of the national security apparatus.
DNF at 48%. It wasn't bad, but I had to return it to the library. When it became available again, I let it pass, realizing I didn't feel any investment in finishing the story.
It's an interesting concept, but I found the Power Rangers-style mechanics a bit juvenile and the politics kind of incoherent. It's a novel dealing with racism and New York City in which Lovecraft gets name-checked 9 times and Robert Moses not once. Overall, a rather surface-level take on both Lovecraftian horrors and social justice.
DNF'd at 62%. Schweblin is a good writer, but this the combination of theme and structure didn't work for me. The story concerns the latest electronic toy, called a Kentuki, a sort of terrible cross between a Furby and Chat Roulette. The narrative is fractured into little vignettes, following different people who are affected by the presence of the Kentukis. Intellectually, it's an interesting commentary on things today, but the effect felt like a whole season of Black Mirror devoted to the same doohickey.
Overall enjoyable tale of would-be documentary filmmakers working in an isolated Swedish ghost town haunted by the mysterious disappearance of almost all of its residents. There's a lot to like in the story, from its creepy setting to the escalation of unease as the filmmakers begin to see signs they may not be alone.
This main plot is interspersed with scenes from the town just prior to the mysterious disappearance. As the mill fails and the town starts to die, a charismatic preacher arrives and starts to bring the town under his sway.
The ending was a bit of a disappointment, being both of a bit too much and not quite enough. The aura of ambiguous supernaturalism resolves into a series of revelations that are non-magical and yet borderline ridiculous.
My boring “review as consumer guide” review:
This is another solid novel from Moreno-Garcia. Much like Mexican Gothic, the novel's character are engaging, the pacing is good, the historical Mexican setting is well integrated into the story and there's an interesting intertextuality, if that's the kind of thing that interests you. While it doesn't quite reach the same level of horrors as Mexican Gothic, it's still an excellent read.
My idiosyncratic “review as personal essay/literary commentary” review: As a tween, I owned an omnibus of H.G. Wells novels. I still remember reading the original Island of Dr. Moreau at 11 or 12 and the feeling that it may not have been entirely age appropriate. While the other novels in the collection had their dark moments, only Island managed to maintain a real “crimes against nature” atmosphere throughout the entirety of the tale. Moreno-Garcia's reimagining of this classic work takes a much gentler approach, finding the humanity in Moreau's creations while saving it's sense of horror for the systems of exploitation that Europeans created in the Americas. It's a nice twist on the classic novel.
The Stand meets E! True Hollywood Story. DNF'd at 63%.
I'll avoid a deeper analysis for now, but I want to highlight the moment I turned against the novel. I continued reading but couldn't forget how much this line reflected the novel's flaws.
During an endless account of a character's rise to Hollywood stardom, we learn that several times he had to drop off friends at emergency rooms because of “exotic combinations of alcohol and prescription medications.”
Hollywood actors getting into trouble by mixing alcohol and prescription drugs has been happening before the Hayes code existed! What is the word “exotic” doing there, aside from trying to disguise the sheer banality of what's being described?
——————
Update. I've decided to rate this. I don't normally spite rate, but after watching and really enjoying the HBO adaptation, I decided to give this another shot.
It lasted until page 2.
He'd dropped the British accent he'd been using earlier and now sounded as if he were from Alabama, which in fact he was.
this thing seemed like X, because it actually was
Pablo talks about metaphorical machines a lot, also the Man. He sometimes combines the two, as in “That's how the Man wants us, just trapped right there in the corporate machine.”
I liked the ending, actually found its ambiguity compelling, but the moments leading up to it felt like a slog. I'll write a fuller review later in an attempt to capture what did and didn't work for me.
[That promised update]
The basic premise of a small family in an isolated family coming under threat by a group of four strangers guided by questionable religious revelations is initially intriguing but doesn't really work in execution.
As far as good points, Tremblay's writing is solid, if a little wordy, on a sentence level. And the characters of the family (made of two gay fathers and their adopted daughter) are drawn to be likeable. I can see how their plight will emotionally engage a reader.
The religious quartet invade the cabin and tell the family that God demands they choose and kill one of their own (either of the fathers or the daughter). Should they fail, he will destroy the world.
As much as the premise may be suspenseful, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. This isn't God asking Abraham to sacrifice his son or demanding Lot find 10 righteous men or even sending himself/his son/his messiah to be crucified. Despite the horrific nature of those, they resonate with a certain logic.
What is this sacrifice of a family member supposed to prove and to whom? Is God testing the quartet? Is he testing the family? What does any of this have to do with the fate of all mankind? It's hard not to feel that God is just a novelist who's cooked up a source of tension because tension is what drives novels.
You could try cutting God out of the equation. What if the quartet is forcing this sacrifice for their own ends? There's a suggestion one of the four is a homophobe, but his motivations are quickly rendered irrelevant. We're given no indication that the other three are driven by animus or sadism or self-interest. The quartet is doing this because God told them to and God told them to because...? (See previous paragraph.)
This arbitrariness would have been forgivable in a shorter or more surreal novel, one that leaned into the parabolic nature of the story. Instead, the narrative halts frequently to give us flashbacks or recount the plots of a couple episodes of Steven Universe. This realism only serves to highlight how awkwardly constructed the central premise is.
DNF at 25%. The book's not awful, but it's definitely not for me. Half of the story is a low-stakes romance set amidst Argentina's Dirty War. The other half, where a young socialite investigates whether her rich, handsome, urbane father was also a hero during the Dirty War, has even lower stakes. (For a while, I held out hope that we'd learn he had actually done bad things which could at least create the potential for drama, but this did not strike me as that type of book.)
While there are is some good information about Argentine culture and history, much of it is communicated through these info dumps that while often related to what's going on are poorly integrated into the character's voice & journeys.
Also, to be just a little political, but every time the rich male protagonist claims that his family–large land owners who are also “good Catholics”–has a reputation for being “politically neutral,” I cringed. Considering the role of class and religion in Argentina's history this is, at best, tone deaf.
I think the book is trying to balance information about Argentina and its often tragic history with a lightweight romance plot. But its blindspots and blandness made it an experience I felt I had to walk away from.
Overall entertaining and inventive with flawless writing. Suffers from the classic “weird fiction novel problem” (that it's tough to maintain a really eerie atmosphere over the length of an entire novel)–compounded by a little bit too much “Men, Women & Children”-style commentary on modern life and the internets. Felt most acutely at the climax where I could feel the novel drift between “unexplainable Ligotti-esque horror lurking the streets of Detroit” and “blunt metaphor for how our current attention economy is destroying society.”
