Carlos
This little volume (edited by August Derleth) brings together a sampling of H.P. Lovecraft's better poetry. While I've often heard the opinion that Lovecraft's poetry is quite poor, reading this gave me the impression that's not an entirely fair. If there's one weakness to HPL's poetry, it's his archaism. This is especially true of the earlier works, where Lovecraft indulges his most Edwardian inclinations. The later poetry, beginning with The Ancient Track, while still somewhat old fashioned in style captures a pleasant weird vibe. Especially worthwhile is “The Fungi From Yuggoth,” which features thirty-six different sonnets. Some are little scary stories in their own right, while others aim more for the sense of the numinous that often accompanies the horrible in HPL's fiction. While Lovecraft is arguably not the best weird poet of his era–that title would probably go to Clark Ashton Smith–I would argue he's worth reading for anyone in seeing this curious overlap betwixt the poetic and the uncanny.
Jack Kerouac is in Big Sur when R´lyeh rises from the deep. The Great Old Ones are coming back, so Kerouac thinking the planet may need whatever dharmic firepower he can spare, sets out to stop them. This quest will take him to San Francisco, Denver, New York, and many points in between, during which he'll join forces with Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and Neal Cassady. He's going to need the help, as the path to salvation is filled with those who have heard the call, beetlemen and mugwumps. (In an interesting inversion of Lovecraft, it's the average Joe's and workday stiffs who are most susceptible to Cthulhu's influence.)
The Beats vs. The Great Old Ones seems like the kind of literary mashup that shouldn't work or would at least lose its charm in anything longer than a short story, so it's a pleasant surprise to see how well it works. The crazy energy of Kerouac's writing feels right at home with the end of the world, while capturing both Kerouac's spiritual hunger and his growing world-weariness. Nick Mamatas pulls off a fun, pulpy story with quite a bit of soul.
Derleth's posthumous “collaborations” weren't bad as short stories. Despite being derivative of Lovecraft and resorting to turgid writing, most of them managed to maintain some goofy charm. Not “The Lurker at the Threshold,” whose writing is so terrible it becomes some sort of endurance test. Worse, Derleth fills the final third of the book with pointless exposition, thereby destroying what meager sense of suspense or urgency managed to remain from the previous two-thirds of the story.
“The Great God Pan” is a classic horror tale, though pretty dated in its Victorian approach to sexuality. The Hill of Dreams is more interesting, an autobiographical tale of the dreams, frustrations and alienation of a sensitive young man and aspiring writer. Machen's introduction, where he details the sometimes frustrating process of creating the novel, is worth a read on its own.
Una colección de varios cuentos cortas del principio de la carrera de Piglia. En general, son bastante buenos, pero la verdadera joya es el que da titulo a la colección. “Nombre falso” es una narrative del descubrimiento de un nuevo manuscrito de Roberto Arlt, en que la ficción y la no-ficción se mezclan libremente. El resultado es una intersección genial de las influencias de Arlt y Borges, la clase de experiencia que puede cambiar como une lee ficción.
En general, el libro realiza la onda de William Gibson en Bolivia sugerida por la descripcion. Yo no lo llamaría brillante, ya que juega un poco como pastiche: un poco de Gibson, un poco de Borges, un poco de García Márquez , un poco de Phil Dick, etc. Además, no estoy convencido que todos los experimentos estilísticos y las diversas líneas argumentales se combinan efectivamente.
La mayoría de la acción desplega durante los últimos días de la administración Montenegro. El gobierno ha promulgado muchas de las reformas neoliberales, incluyendo la privatización de los servicios públicos. El crisis empieza porque la gente se harta con la multinacional que dirige la compañía eléctrica y comienzan a demostrar publicamente. Un grupo clandestino, dirigido por un hacker llamado Kandinsky, decide que esta sera la oportunidad perfecta para derrocar al presidente.
Oponiendolos es el servicio de seguridad del gobierno, incluido el departamento de criptografía que se denomina Cámara Negra, que es dirigido por un ex-empleado de la CIA con el nombre de Ramírez-Graham. Entre su personal es el veterano Sáenz, quien va por el apodo de Turing, y que es totalmente Old School. La esposa y la hija de Turing también están involucrados en la acción (a diferentes grados). Además, un ex magistrado ha estado investigando los crímenes cometidos por el gobierno de Montenegro cuando era una dictadura y ahora ve una oportunidad para obtener justicia.
Por alguna razón, Turing es el único personaje cuya narrativa se da en la segunda persona. El uso de narración en segunda persona no salo malo, pero no me parece que fue realmente necesario. Los otros personajes, salvo uno, se narran en tercera persona. Ese personaje, que es el ex-jefe de Turing, pasa la mayor parte del libro inconsciente en una cama de hospital, la víctima de algún trastorno neurológico degenerativo, los primeros síntomas de que consistían en halucinaciones en que él era inmortal y tenía anteriormente encarnado todos los criptógrafos de la historia. Este aspecto, junto con la atmosfera de paranoia, es donde el libro me recuerda a la obra de Phillip K. Dick.
Me pareció interesante como los temas del cyberpunk caben en el tercer mundo actual. En muchos aspectos, un pequeño país en desarrollo es más parecido al escenario de Neuromancer que los Estados Unidos contemporáneos. Es decir, se contará con la presencia de una cultura popular global, los gobiernos débiles y corruptos, las multinacionales sombra con mucho peso para repartir, yuxtaposiciones dramáticas de la riqueza y la pobreza (así como de alta y baja tecnología).
Sadly, I found this book to be a major disappointment. I'm huge fan of British comedy and science fiction–Monty Python, Douglas Adams, Dr. Who, Neil Gaiman–and something of an autodidact lit geek, so this novel which promises the exploits of a special agent who has to travel into the novel Jane Eyre in pursuit of a villain sounds right up my alley. So, what went wrong?
Let's start with the world building. While Fforde's alternate universe England is quite inventive, it's also tonally weird. England has been locked in the Crimean War all the way into the present day (circa 1985), with no end in sight, and the government appears to be controlled by a large corporation dubbed (unsubtly) the Goliath Corporation. OK, so this is some sort of dystopia, right? But wait, thanks to cloning, scientists have been able to bring dodos out of extinction, and it turns out that they make great pets! Like, OMG!, is that cute or what? The Eyre Affair may be the only dystopic novel I've read in which the Breads and Circuses are intended as much for the reader as for the regime's subjects. (Oh, if only Big Brother had thought to provide everyone with messenger owls, 1984 could have been a much more amusing novel!)
Second, there's the use of names. As Roger Ebert once said, “Funny names, in general, are a sign of desperation.” I'd like to amend that slightly to say, it's really a bad idea for a novel to feature characters whose names are vastly more interesting than their personalities. Heroine Thursday Next gets a pass, as does main baddy Acheron Hades, but I can't think of anything funny about Paige Turner, Victor Analogy or Alexandria Belfridge.
Oh, and let me just say, Acheron Hades' motivation to engage in villainy for no reason because pointless wickedness is the purest form of wickedness? I know it's supposed to make him seem particularly evil, but it just makes him seem arbitrary. I kept expecting the revelation that he was an escapee from a second-rate potboiler.
The biggest failure, though, is how panderingly The Eyre Affair wields its metatextuality. Dead British authors are like celebrities in Fforde's England. People change their names to John Milton out of devotion. Robo-Shakespeares quote the bard from every corner. Surrealists somehow manage to spark riots. (This joins with the whole Crimean War aspect to give the sense that England is terribly stagnant. None of the authors that inspire devotion ever saw the 20th century. And surrealism is controversial enough to spark riots? Really, how very quaint.)
The scene that really put me off, and which should have inspired me to quit the novel, was the performance of a Rocky Horror version of Richard III, after which a couple of the characters discuss how much they love classic literature. There's something a little jarring about seeing a camped up production of Shakespeare held up as an expression of deep love, as if the Thursday Nextiverse (or even Fforde himself) completely misses the point of camp. Does Fforde think people bring cutlery to midnight showings of The Room because they feel Tommy Wiseau is an auteur?
It may be hyperliterate in its use of references, but the effect often feels superficial. In the action revolving around the titular novel, Jane Eyre is reduced to a damsel in distress and Rochester to a straightforward hero, the complex characters I so loved in their original context reduced to cardboard cutouts. Fforde is like a lobotomized Borges, finding ways to dumb down the literature he loves instead of finding new and interesting depths.
So, sorry, just did not enjoy this novel. I have to confess though, if I ever got a hold of one of those devices to travel into literature, you know the first thing I'd do? Carpet bomb Fforde's England with copies of every major modernist and postmodernist work from the last century. I'd like to think I'd be treated as a liberator.
Ernesto Sabato's El Túnel is the first person account of an artist's murder of the one person who understood him best. At an exhibition, Juan Pablo Castel notices a woman captivated by the window that takes up a small section of one of his finished paintings. She is the only person who appears to have realized the importance of the window, which leads to him becoming to become slowly and utterly fixated on her.
He seeks her out in a somewhat roundabout matter, finally running into her seemingly by accident. He learns that she has been thinking about his painting all the time since that showing. They become romantically involved, but Castel feels she is not being completely honest with him. He begins to suspect she has other lovers, perhaps even that he's just a plaything to her. He becomes increasingly obsessed with possessing her until his actions cross over into derangement.
This is a novel about obsession and man's futile struggle for meaning, and it is no surprise that Camus found it important enough to have translated into French. I must admit I was not entirely captivated by the story. Though I'm fond of eccentrics in literature (especially the obsessive kind), I often found Castel's obsessiveness more irritating than contagious. I also felt the metaphor of the tunnel as reflecting the essential loneliness of human existence was a bit on the literal side.
So, overall an interesting look at one man's obsession and how it reflects modern man's fruitless search for connection, but not entirely satisfying.
When Juan Peron returned to the Argentine presidency for the last time in 1974, he brought along two intimates who would go on to create some trouble. The first was his third wife Isabela, who would ascend to the presidency after his death. The second was Jose Lopez Rega, a character so odd it seems hard to believe he was not invented by Arlt or Borges. Rega was fascinated with occult and mystic arts, including Umbanda (like Santeria or Voodoo) and astrology. His interests earned him the nickname El Brujo, not inappropriate given the Rasputin-like hold he had on Peron and later Isabela. It was under Rega that Dirty War began, which was run out of the Office of Social Welfare under the auspices of the triple-A. (Argentine Anticommunist Alliance)
Cola de lagartija is based loosely on Lopez Rega, parting ways with the historical facts of Lopez Rega to create a surreal and disturbing meditation on violence and power. After the fall of Isabela's government, El Brujo heads to his childhood home of Laguna Negra in northern Argentina with his followers. Here he organizes new rituals of blood and sacrifice, and stages a very twisted orgy to which he invites prominent members of Argentine society.
Even in internal exile, he is dangerous enough to inspire enemies, among them the ruling junta, a revolutionary, and an author working on El Brujo's biography. The revolutionary and the author have a brief relationship, during which the revolutionary asks the author to finish her book by killing off El Brujo. But can she really pull it off in such a way as to kill the original?
El Brujo soon finds a new enemy in the mayor of the town of Capivari and its little newspaper. He takes over the town and the newspaper, changing the emphasis of the latter to occult themes. This inspires in him the plans for a new ritual, an immaculate conception which will cleanse Argentina in a river of blood.
I was expecting a touch of the strange, perhaps even some magic realism, when I started this book, as can only be expected from a story based on an already strange individual. But the story is strikingly surreal, often disturbing or funny, presenting an exaggerated look at the relationship between power and violence, and the role of the journalist or writer in responding to the terrible.
A group of Argentine criminals have got what could be a great heist planned out. They will grab the municipal payroll in a daring daytime robbery, then cross the river and slip into Uruguay until the heat dies down. The gang includes Gaucho Dorda and Nene Brignone, who are lovers; Cuervo Mereles, who swaggers with outlaw charisma; and Malito, a cold-blooded and calculating man and their defacto leader. The robbery goes off as planned, but they soon find themselves on the run, guns blazing as they drive their getaway car through the streets of Buenos Aires. Though the events related in Money to Burn seem outrageous enough to belong to a Tarantino film or a pulp crime novel, Ricardo Piglia as invented nothing in this hypnotizing tale of crime, loyalty and vengeance.
Piglia has a minor personal connection to the story, having met Mereles' ex-girlfriend in 1966 while on a train ride to Bolivia. During the trip, she told Piglia a confused and seemingly incredible story of the man she had been in a relationship with and the crimes he had been involved in. Though he never saw her again, he became fascinated by the story and began to research and attempt to write about it. It was a project that he ended up setting aside for the better part of two decades, only to return to and finish later.
Plata Quemada is a novelistic retelling of true events, with Piglia acknowledging where the historical record is ambiguous or incomplete. The only license taken is in the extent to which we get inside the heads of those involved, not just the criminals but also the police who are hunting them. What emerges is a fascinating portrayal of criminality and politics in Argentina and Uruguay of the 1960s, as well as an unforgettable portrayal of characters far outside the pale.
The word “thug” comes from the Thuggee (deceivers) who allegedly plagued India prior to the arrival of the British. Though there is some controversy nowadays as to the extent of their existence, tales of their exploits made a strong impression on the 19th Century British and helped justify a stronger colonial presence on the Indian subcontinent.
Confessions of a Thug is the story of one of these men, Ameer Ali, a Muslim thug who led a long and successful career as a Thug before his luck ran out. Ali relats his story to an English interviewer, starting with the death of his father at the hands of thugs and his adoption by the band's leader. Soon, he is grown up and interested in taking up the family trade, which his bravery and cleverness make him particularly suited to.
Though the interviewer occasionally interjects to render moral observations on the action, the voice that predominates is that of Ali, who comes across as an interesting anti-hero. With his cunning and boldness and his travels across India in search of those to rob, he comes across as an exotic adventurer-criminal, like some mix of Sinbad the Sailor and Tony Soprano. This is somewhat underscored by his tales of commanding men under the Pindaris, using freebooting armies to extort treasure from defenseless communities. Ali is as proud of his battlefield exploits as of his work with the strangling cloth.
An interesting story of crime and death on the Indian subcontinent, with many interesting local details. Somewhat dated nowadays, especially in its transliterations from Hindi, but still an interesting read.
In many ways, this is a very enjoyable book. John Irving's style is pleasantly unadorned. His characters are fairly interesting, and they have some pretty entertaining adventures. But overall, I felt this was a flawed though enjoyable work.
Prayer is the story of two boys growing up in New Hampshire, the narrator and his friend, Owen Meany. The narrator has a very sweet and beautiful mother but he doesn't know who his father is. Owen Meany is small and has a funny voice, but he's very smart and serious and knows he's destined to serve God in some meaningful way. The story is actually told in flashback by the narrator, who has grown up to be an English teacher in Canada.
And if this were a novel about two boys growing up in New England, it would have been pretty enjoyable. But this is a novel about FAITH and GOD and the MORAL EXHAUSTION of AMERICA and its FOREIGN POLICY. Which is really too much baggage for the narrative to carry. The foreign policy angle is in some ways the weakest. It comes from two equally dull angles: much action takes place during the troop buildup in Vietnam, and the adult narrator comments on the Iran-Contra affair. The Vietnam material really doesn't offer anything new. Vietnam was a misbegotten foreign policy adventure, and the counterculture response to it was largely overblown, self-serving, and ineffectual. It's a perfectly reasonable position, and perfectly dull. Dull would be acceptable in an essay about Vietnam, not in a novel. The commentary on Iran-Contra is even deadlier to the novel, as it contributes little to the story. I generally agree with the narrator on Reagan and Iran-Contra; that doesn't make me interested in hearing him opine.
The spiritual elements are more integral to the novel and overall handled in a better manner. The main problem is that the issue of faith in the novel revolves around a miracle, one which we do not learn about until the very end. This miracle, which takes a tragic form, gives meaning to Owen Meany's life and leads the narrator to become religious. The miracle is heavily foreshadowed: heavily and somewhat obviously. I had a pretty good idea of what the miracle would be over 100 pages before it comes about, which made those pages particularly dull and robbed it of whatever impact it may have intended to have. The effect was less of a sense of mysterious forces at work and more of an author going through plot machinations to achieve an effect.
So, I overall enjoyed the story, especially the first half or so before the author really tries to bear down with those heavy themes that his novel is not really set up to handle.
I had some concerns when I started this book. Concerns such as, “Am I too old for Kerouac? Is all this poet-hipster adventuring sort of pretentious?” So I was surprised by the deep current of melancholy that runs through the book. Jack Duluoz (Kerouac's alter-ego) certainly has his share of adventures in the poet-artist scene, but there's also a real sense of the madness and precariousness of the scene.
The story starts of with Duluoz' time spent as a fire lookout in the Skagit Valley national park. The solitude and melancholy is in some ways at its strongest here, with no drugs or companionship to take the edge off of it.
Duluoz then hithchikes and rides his way back to San Francisco to spend time with the Beats there. Here we meet his regular crew, including the Ginsberg stand-in Irwin Allen, who comes off as a fascinating figure.
One gets the sense of the ferment of the social scene, of how the desire to create and to challenge social norms led to experimenting with art and notions of the self. From here, Duluoz and friends head to Mexico, then Morocco, Europe and back to America.
I wouldn't describe Kerouac's style as my favorite, but it does a good job of capturing the feel of the era and his own spiritual hunger. Kerouac, in fact, seems already somewhat jaded by the reaction to One the Road, frustrated by the empty hipster pose it seems to have inmspired among many.
So, if I had to sum it up, a fascinating narrative of spiritual hunger and frustration, of social ferment and an era when one world of post-WWII conformity was about to break apart.
I've never been a huge fan of “magical realism.” In fact, I've kind of disliked the label, often thinking of it as shorthand for “fantasy written by non-anglos.” I am, however, willing to admit when I'm wrong. And this is certainly one of those cases, as this work goes far beyond the conventions of fantasy. Marquez sets up a unique narrative, the story of a family and a town, in which miraculous and strange events are treated as everyday occurrences, and names seem to be reused in each generation. The effect of all this isn't one of confusion or arbitrariness. Instead, the novel reads like a very complex fable or myth.
Yet Marquez incorporates into this myth very real events, such as a bloody and pointless civil war, the reign of the fruit companies, and the murder of striking workers. In doing so, he's creating what could be taken as the foundation myth for Colombia (and by extension Latin America). That's certainly a tall order, but Marquez is up to the task. His prose, which with its twists in time and space are reminiscent of a more lyrical Faulkner, is integral to the fabulous sense of the tale.
It's probably fair to say that this is one of the great Latin American novels of the 20th century. It innovated many elements that would be borrowed later by other writers. Yet these elements, which make up magic realism, are so well integrated into the novel that one doesn't get that sense of cliche that often happens with reading influentual works.
The story of a poor orphan boy who runs away to sea, has a series of adventures among a crew of misfits, and returns home somewhat the worse for wear. The sort of novel Melville and Faulkner would have written had they been collaborating and had a supply of hallucinogens handy. The tale Fishboy tells is dark and gruesome, yet also funny and moving, told in a lyrical style full of rich language and set in a surreal yet familiar world of ghosts, mermaids, and strange civilizations. Not recommended for anyone who prefers happy endings.
The idea of hint fiction is that by keeping a story at 25 words or less a writer can suggest a larger, complex story in the space of only a few lines. It's an intriguing concept which, if this collection is any indication, is tricky to pull off. Many of the stories either feel like great lines, either as something brilliant to open with or a nice little bit of characterization or plot twist within a novel. I think the collection is best seen as a serious of experiments, with the determination of success or failure left to each individual reader. That not all of these experiments are succesful is understandable given the challenges of hinting at so much by so little.
DNF'ed at 28%.
I can appreciate the themes and elements (intergenerational trauma among women, particularly Latinas, and how it manifests in figures of darkness like La Llorona), but the execution just doesn't work for me. The prose is flat and repetitive, the characters are overdetermined, and there's no real sense of mystery or suspense. For me, it takes more than a few moments of gore to qualify as a horror novel.
While Noctuary features some strikingly powerful stories, it's not an entirely successful collection and would seem to be a small let down from Ligotti's previous collection, Grimscribe. This may be because Noctuary, like Ligotti's debut Songs of a Dead Dreamer, is a transitional work. With Songs, it's clear that Ligotti was working to combine his literary influences with his own original voice and ideas to create something strikingly original yet very much within the tradition of weird fiction. This project would find it's full articulation in Grimscribe. Seen from the perspective of Songs and Grimscribe, Noctuary would seem to represent a step backwards or a sort of exhaustion. Ligotti has, of course, always trafficked in exhaustion whether Alice's weary adulthood as she faces her last adventures or the narrator's dismissal of horror stories in Nethescurial; yet realms of exhaustion often prove to be rather fertile for the generation of new horrors.
Among it's horrors are the death god of “The Prodigy of Dreams,” the supernatural vengeance of “Conversations in a Dead Language,” and the Lovecraftian dreams of “Mrs. Rinaldi's Angel,” all quite strong stories that feel somehow slight in this collection, as if Ligotti is spinning his wheels. One story, “The Tsalal,” while arguably along the same lines as much of the stories in Grimscribe, stands out because it is so powerfully crafted, perfectly structured and with the sort of shockingly inevitable ending that marks Ligotti's best work.
Other tales, such as “The Medusa,” in which an eccentric scholar seeks out the fabled monster whom he believes to be lurking in the every day world, or “Mad Night of Atonement,” in which a Nyarlathotep-like showman reveals the true will of God, feel markedly transitional, attempting to go a step beyond the previous confines of weird fiction, yet never quite making the leap. These stories, despite moments of brilliance, are somewhat disappointing, lacking the powerful build and surprise of Ligotti's previous works. Ligotti has, I believe, started to chafe against the bonds of his own chosen idiom, though this can be seen only from the perspective of his later work. With such collections as Teatro Grottesco, Ligotti would dispense with much of the Lovecraftian baroqueness of his earlier style, leaving behind the dark gods and forbidden texts, as well as stylistic flourishes, for a more banal and bleaker world. If stories such as “Medusa” and “Mad Night” disappoint, it is probably because Ligotti has already begun the process of trying to break free of his earlier style.
The final section of the novel is the Notebook of Night, a collection of brief vignette, rich in language and imagery but often nearly plotless. These also reveal Ligotti experimenting with how best to express his own dark concepts. This is my favorite section of the collection, since even those that don't quite work as tales still are full of wonderfully sinister atmosphere.
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.
I saw a tweet today which stated:
honestly PINK FLAMINGOS is such a potent depiction of the difference between transgression and edgelordiness
Some men will put on elaborate, expensive, likely illegal masques of questionable Jungian imagery rather than suggest their friend go to therapy.