Carlos
Highly intriguing in subject matter. The writing is somewhat repetitive and at times opaque, though I can't say how much of that is the translation.
This book consists of two short novels/novellas by Argentine author Enrique Anderson Imbert. The first, Vigilia (Vigil), is narrated by Beltran, the teenage son of immigrant parents. The story chronicles his adventures with his small band of friends, his romantic longings for a neighborhood girl, his struggles over identity and politics, and his literary ambitions. The novel in some ways feels like a cross between Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Arlt's The Mad Toy, with the sensitive young man trying to find his voice while navigating daily street life in Argentina. It's an intriguing premise, which sometimes pays off, such as a section where Beltran laments how dull his friends are and how he wishes they'd partake of the sort of witty repartee one might find in an Oscar Wilde play. The contrast between the funny, vulgar conversation of his friends, and the contrived-sounding dialog Beltran imagines is pretty comic. However, Beltran often feels too stuck in his own head, and by the end I had lost much interest in his musings and obsessions, which occupy much of the narrative. There's also an odd twist near the end of the novel. It seems to come out of nowhere, ending the novel on a rather perplexing note. This story, published in 1934, was Anderson Imbert's first novel, which may account for its sometimes frustrating aspects.
The second novel, Fuga (Fugue), covers some of the same thematic ground as Vigilia, though more compellingly. In this story, the protagonist is, Miguel Sullivan, a young man of Irish descent who moves from Tucuman to Buenos Aires to pursue a career as a journalist at a left-wing newspaper. Somewhat unsatisfied with the work he is producing, he enrolls in classes at the university to further his understanding of the world. At the university, Miguel meets two people who will have a strong impact on him. The story covers some of the same thematic ground as Vigilia–realism vs. fantasy in art, the finding of a literary voice, romantic passion–but also brings in some interesting Gothic themes, such as the doppelgänger and the ghostly lover, to liven things up a little. While I had to force myself to finish Vigilia, once I got into Fuga, I found it very fascinating.
An interesting mix of ghost stories, from the scary to the sad to the somewhat perplexing. As far as creepy, the title story is the high water mark.
A solid collection, though I don't think the back cover's comparisons to Poe and Lovecraft do Speegle any favors. These stories are closer to Aickman – mysterious and sensual – or even Kafka.
Un libro algo diferente de Enríquez, menos Stephen King, mas Neil Gaiman. El libro relata una mitología moderna y tenebrosa, sobre los seres eternos responsables por las muertes resonantes de los gran ídolos del rock. Aunque el tema tiene la posibilidad de resultar en clichés o kitsch, el cuento que resulta es una meditación conmovedora sobre memoria y pérdida.
I'm struck by how utterly gripping the novel ends up being in spite of the protagonist having very little agency. The gut-punch of an ending is expertly pulled off and yet—which is why I'm giving it four stars instead of five—also leaves the events of the novel feeling a little meaningless.
I don't know if it's the so-called “Covid brain,” but I managed to make it through the whole audiobook while absorbing maybe 5 - 10% of the contents. Then again, I had a similar experience with Northanger Abbey almost a decade ago. No rating, but if I ever attempt Austen again, I'll have to try an old-fashioned ink-on-paper book.
Una colección de artículos que Arlt escribió sobre crimenes en la ciudad de Buenos Aires, algunos que fueron después convertidos an aguafuertes. De interés a cualquier que quiere aprender sobra vida humilde de la ciudad en los principios del siglo XX, que le guste el género de “true crime” o la obra de Arlt en general.
Though not as brilliant as We Have Always Lived in the Castle, The Haunting of Hill House is one easily one of the best haunted house tales ever written. Jackson has a talent at bringing out the creepy in the everyday world, making little mundane details of people's behavior or the construction of Hill House as unsettling as the more obvious strangeness going on.
An interesting collection of short stories, some so brief as to count as flash fiction. Sometimes incorporating supernatural elements or a subtle surrealism, though one story goes all the way into tall tale by recounting the story of a giant who rode with Quiroga and then carved out what would become a series of lakes in service to the Devil before finding salvation. Some pretty strong tales, often with a fair helping of dread as in the tale of trains for the dead or the man who has to survive when his home and yard are mysteriously set adrift on the ocean.
I might downgrade this one later, once I've gotten a chance to be a little more analytical. That said, it was a lot of fun, just the sort of book I needed at the moment.
About 90% of the way through, I had to pull up Wikipedia and check the publication date against Eco's biography. Was this one of those posthumously published unfinished works, such as Wallace's Pale King? No, Eco was still alive when this came out, so it seems to have been the novel he intended to publish.
Looking back on this novel, I find myself thinking of a snake swallowing an elephant. (Apologies to Saint-Exupéry.) Much of the fascination is wondering how the snake is going to pull that off. The snake in this example is the novel, Numero Zero, and the elephant is, well, pretty much all that stuff that shows up on the jacket: Operation Gladio, Mussolini, Licio Gelli, La Cosa Nostra, the CIA, right-wing death squads, the Cold War, etc. To avoid further belaboring this questionable metaphor, let's just say the snake puts up a good show but just as it unhinges its jaws and looks like it's going to get to swallowing, it takes one last look at the elephant, does whatever snakes do to shrug, and slinks off.
So, the novel isn't really about any of that, though there's enough of that included to form the basis of a paranoid thriller. What it's really about is a middle-aged academic who gets involved with a start-up newspaper in early 1990s Italy. One might say hi-jinx ensue, though these are principally of the low-stakes variety. While it feels slight compared to his other denser, more intellectually challenging works, the story was pleasant and managed to it at least one familiar Eco theme: how symbols are manipulated to create meaning.
In terms of craft, this tale of the Donner Party which incorporates elements of Wendigo/Skinwalker-type myths is solid, and yet I sometimes found myself asking what the point was. The Donner Party certainly didn't lack for horrors, so did the supernatural element really add anything? I never felt like the novel quite answered that question. 3.5 stars
I hit the halfway mark and gave up. Is the zombie genre itself a kind of zombie, continuing to go through the motions of life while having nothing going on between the ears? Admittedly, I skipped World War Z (both book and film), but the first season of The Walking Dead is my last memory of a zombie tale rising above tolerable.
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.”
A fun yet existential romp through the world of artists, art collectors, art forgers and other questionable characters in the art world of Buenos Aires. Tempted to reread it soon for it's nuances. Falls within Piglia's synthesis of Arltian and Borgesian strategies.
A fairly middle-of-the-road spy thriller. Aside from centering female characters, it appears to be aggressively avoiding doing anything interesting.
In response to the rise of the “gritty” superhero movie (ie., the DC films of Nolan, Snyder), some critics pondered if maybe applying a serious approach to comic book subjects was really the best approach.
Red Widow reflects a similarly muddled mash-up of approaches, attempting to combine the process realism of a Le Carré with the heroism of a Ludlum. The result appears to pull the weakest elements of both, characters with the depth of a pop spy novel engaged in the exiting day-to-day of office politics.
The writing is mostly fine, but it's a largely forgettable story.
Bit of a slow start that sometimes felt a little twee, but it ended up winning me over.
I liked this more than Last House on Needless Street. As with House, the writing is solid but the plot was a bit on the baroque side. Spanning two POVs and timelines, and involving cults, sci-fi mind control, ghosts, bad seeds and possible other elements I'm forgetting, the novel demanded a little more focus than I was able to give it. Still, it has a banger of an ending, which counts for a lot.
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.
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.
I wasn't expecting that a queer retelling of the doomed voyage of the Demeter from Dracula would be so good, but it is. The kind of book where I pause because I think I should savor it more, then end up going back to.