What the Wednesday Brings (on Thursday)
Jun. 4th, 2020 06:28 pmWhat I've Finished Reading
trans(re)lating house one is a failed novel on purpose. Almost before the story begins, the questions took over: how and whether to memorialize, how to choose, how to be a "fair" narrator and whether that's possible, what good any of this can possibly do. The story of the missing statues isn't really the story in the first place - it's a couple of flagstones set down for a half-finished path into the weeds, and doesn't really function as a parallel. The (nonfictional) obituaries of Iranian protesters completely take over the missing-statues narrative and the questions about whether it's possible to tell any kind of story about anything crowd them out in turn.
Whether its failure is also a success, I'm not sure I can say, or if that's beside the point. I found myself wondering if some of the dead might prefer a medium who is a little less endlessly interrogative about the whole thorny business of mediuming, but they're legitimate questions and luckily there is room for more than one kind of book in the world.
What I'm Reading Now
The Little Paris Bookshop is not messing around about being the book equivalent of a gigantic puff pastry. I read the first couple of chapters the other day and was blown away by the sheer density of confectionary quirkiness on display. This book is a simple-syrup syringe shot directly into a major artery. Do I "like" it? Not exactly. Like the gigantic puff pastries it resembles, the first bite is already haunted by the ghosts of sugar crashes yet to come. Have I found myself consuming a little more of it than I set out to, in spite of this warning? Equally like unto the giant puff p. of metaphor, yes.
The story: there's this sad widower who runs a bookshop. In Paris! He likes to do book-related favors for his customers and has two cats named Kafka and Lindgren. Because he loves books, get it? He's sad because his wife, or possibly girlfriend, died twenty years ago and he's not over it. One day, a sad divorcée moves into his building. Will romance blossom? WHO CAN POSSIBLY SAY. Also, people have distinctive traits and there's a bookshop. Everyone loves traits and bookshops! P.S. the bookshop is on a boat. I expect this is the sort of thing![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
liadt might call "twee."
The opposite of The Little Paris Bookshop is, of course, A Theory of Literary Production, or The Little Paris Marxist Discourse. But it took me so long to work out what the first two chapters were on about that I have decided to take a break for the rest of the week.
Ancillary Justice is a classic (though newish) space opera set in a millennia-old space empire. The space empire is undergoing a very slow and secret crisis that may or may not become significantly less slow and secret by the end of the book. I'm finding it very pleasantly Asimovian. The narrator is a two-thousand-year-old ship's AI stranded in a human body, but not in a way that makes the prose hard to read.
What I Plan to Read Next
The extreme sugar-bomb action of The Little Paris Bookshop is making me look forward to Penelope Fitzgerald's novel The Bookshop, which I picked up along with Ancillary Justice from my own local non-Paris, cat-free and land-based bookshop on Thursday. They are doing a better job than most of the businesses in town of promoting friendly caution as my state experiements with retail re-opening. They've got a five-customer limit on store capacity and hang a little sign on the door to tell you if there's room for you or not. When I went in for the first time in many weeks, the other three people in the store were standing at very deliberate distances, one guy trying to recruit another to his literary magazine across two display tables (book-themed candles and books about taking a break from your phone, in case you want a clearer picture of this bookstore). Anyway, I expect this other fictional bookshop to be about 4000% less sentimental.
Thanks to a very appealing description fromoracne, I ordered a children's violin novel called The Mozart Season, and would you believe Better World Books sent me exactly the same message as before? On reflection, I guess it's more believable than having a team of writers to lovingly craft new messages for each book.
What happens to the other narratives, the ones that escape us while we're busy digging into these narratives and these voices? Are they lost forever?
What to do as the voices from the past recede further and further into the past?
Is this the very thing that allows us to go on living? Or is it the very reason we are doomed?
trans(re)lating house one is a failed novel on purpose. Almost before the story begins, the questions took over: how and whether to memorialize, how to choose, how to be a "fair" narrator and whether that's possible, what good any of this can possibly do. The story of the missing statues isn't really the story in the first place - it's a couple of flagstones set down for a half-finished path into the weeds, and doesn't really function as a parallel. The (nonfictional) obituaries of Iranian protesters completely take over the missing-statues narrative and the questions about whether it's possible to tell any kind of story about anything crowd them out in turn.
How can I be a narrator? A fair narrator?
How can I channel the voices of the dead, of the living?
How can I bear the brutality, the intimacy, the immediacy, of a movement, of a place?
How can I be a medium while lost in the search, in the labyrinthine hell of humanity and history?
Am I writing these lives to give voice to them, or to give myself a voice and a body?
Whether its failure is also a success, I'm not sure I can say, or if that's beside the point. I found myself wondering if some of the dead might prefer a medium who is a little less endlessly interrogative about the whole thorny business of mediuming, but they're legitimate questions and luckily there is room for more than one kind of book in the world.
What I'm Reading Now
The Little Paris Bookshop is not messing around about being the book equivalent of a gigantic puff pastry. I read the first couple of chapters the other day and was blown away by the sheer density of confectionary quirkiness on display. This book is a simple-syrup syringe shot directly into a major artery. Do I "like" it? Not exactly. Like the gigantic puff pastries it resembles, the first bite is already haunted by the ghosts of sugar crashes yet to come. Have I found myself consuming a little more of it than I set out to, in spite of this warning? Equally like unto the giant puff p. of metaphor, yes.
The story: there's this sad widower who runs a bookshop. In Paris! He likes to do book-related favors for his customers and has two cats named Kafka and Lindgren. Because he loves books, get it? He's sad because his wife, or possibly girlfriend, died twenty years ago and he's not over it. One day, a sad divorcée moves into his building. Will romance blossom? WHO CAN POSSIBLY SAY. Also, people have distinctive traits and there's a bookshop. Everyone loves traits and bookshops! P.S. the bookshop is on a boat. I expect this is the sort of thing
liadt might call "twee." The opposite of The Little Paris Bookshop is, of course, A Theory of Literary Production, or The Little Paris Marxist Discourse. But it took me so long to work out what the first two chapters were on about that I have decided to take a break for the rest of the week.
Ancillary Justice is a classic (though newish) space opera set in a millennia-old space empire. The space empire is undergoing a very slow and secret crisis that may or may not become significantly less slow and secret by the end of the book. I'm finding it very pleasantly Asimovian. The narrator is a two-thousand-year-old ship's AI stranded in a human body, but not in a way that makes the prose hard to read.
What I Plan to Read Next
The extreme sugar-bomb action of The Little Paris Bookshop is making me look forward to Penelope Fitzgerald's novel The Bookshop, which I picked up along with Ancillary Justice from my own local non-Paris, cat-free and land-based bookshop on Thursday. They are doing a better job than most of the businesses in town of promoting friendly caution as my state experiements with retail re-opening. They've got a five-customer limit on store capacity and hang a little sign on the door to tell you if there's room for you or not. When I went in for the first time in many weeks, the other three people in the store were standing at very deliberate distances, one guy trying to recruit another to his literary magazine across two display tables (book-themed candles and books about taking a break from your phone, in case you want a clearer picture of this bookstore). Anyway, I expect this other fictional bookshop to be about 4000% less sentimental.
Thanks to a very appealing description from
oracne, I ordered a children's violin novel called The Mozart Season, and would you believe Better World Books sent me exactly the same message as before? On reflection, I guess it's more believable than having a team of writers to lovingly craft new messages for each book.
