i finished Elizabeth Costello by J.M. Coetzee today. This is a book that Sunn Wolf recommended me. It's the first novel i've read in a little while.
i have to say i liked it a lot. i don't think i've read anything quite like it before. Actually, i felt as though the author was always leaps and bounds ahead of me and i got rather dizzy with it. i couldn't say, at the end, whether it was a funny novel or a serious one. It felt kind of both those things, usually at the same time.
Wow this is so misleading, haha
it's not a pacy novel. it doesn't have a fast plot, it doesn't really have a plot at all, it's more like a series of vignettes
i think what i found dizzying about it was the way it always seemed to be operating on multiple levels and referring back to itself. You need to be awake or you miss it.
Know your lines? Of course you know your lines! But I don't want to just hear your lines...I wanna hear what's in YOUR SOULS!!
I'm reading Yukikaze and the Red Dwarf novelization. Former is good Japanese sci-fi, latter is what I feel the TV show would have been if the budget was way higher.
also the first chapter is comprised mostly of a haunting, magical realism tinged thing that ends up with a deer getting pretty brutally mulched by a car so there's that
also the first chapter is comprised mostly of a haunting, magical realism tinged thing that ends up with a deer getting pretty brutally mulched by a car so there's that
The deer approaches the end of the channel of men, its small hooves click on the frost-hardened asphalt and steam plumes from its nose. It pauses then, preparing to leave this human forest. As it steps clear, the last man reaches out and gently places his hand flat against its fur. In an instant it is running. It jumps once, and then again. In two leaps it is over the fence. The men drop their arms and rush to the chain-link, hook their fingers and watch the deer bound down the weedy and trash-strewn slope to the freeway and into the traffic.
The first car clips its legs from under it and it flies into the air, rolled up the ramp of the windshield. The yearling lands on the hood of the second and the men hear the bone mulch. Again, for what seems an eternity, it is sent toward the leaded sky. The legs mill on broken joints, a gout of blood erupts from between the pages of its ribs. The deer is lofted once more before it falls limp on the litter-strewn shoulder, its head among the brown winter weeds where black garbage bags have caught fast and flutter like crows. The deer is dead.
The clocks began to strike the dawn hour, but it did not dawn. In surprise we all went out to the street, to the patio. In the quarter where the sun should have appeared the sky was covered by a strange reddish cloud, like smoke, like hot ashes, like a dark pollen that had arisen swiftly, stretching from one horizon to the other. When the cloud moved overhead it began to rain butterflies on the roofs, the water-jars, our shoulders. They were little butterflies, deep amaranth in colour, striped in violet, which had come together by myriads in some unknown spot behind the immense jungle, frightened, perhaps, driven away, after multiplying frenziedly, by some cataclysm, some awful occurrence, without witnesses or record. The Adelantado told me that these swarms of butterflies were nothing new in the region, and that when they took place the sun was almost blotted out for the whole day. The burial of the father would have to be carried out by candlelight in a day that was night, reddened by wings. In this corner of the world, great migrations were still a fact, like those described by chroniclers of the Dark Ages when the Danube turned black with rats or packs of wolves invaded the market-place of the cities. The week before, he told me, a huge jaguar had been killed in the church portico.
Abraham was already known as a writer who considered economics an integral part of his fantasy worlds (the cotton trade, of all things, launches generations of upheaval in The Long Price Quartet) when he launched The Dagger and the Coin quintet, in which he crafts a world with a deep history of civil strife (the titular Dragon’s Path); 13 specific races, each with its own socioeconomic place and culture; and plenty of warfare, battles, near-escapes, and thrills. It’s also a world where one of the five point-of-view characters runs a bank branch, and where banks are almost nations unto themselves, crossing borders and wielding incredible power. The story climaxes in an audit that is somehow as exciting as any sword fight. No one else makes realistic economics an essential part of an exciting story like Abraham.
Abraham was already known as a writer who considered economics an integral part of his fantasy worlds (the cotton trade, of all things, launches generations of upheaval in The Long Price Quartet) when he launched The Dagger and the Coin quintet, in which he crafts a world with a deep history of civil strife (the titular Dragon’s Path); 13 specific races, each with its own socioeconomic place and culture; and plenty of warfare, battles, near-escapes, and thrills. It’s also a world where one of the five point-of-view characters runs a bank branch, and where banks are almost nations unto themselves, crossing borders and wielding incredible power. The story climaxes in an audit that is somehow as exciting as any sword fight. No one else makes realistic economics an essential part of an exciting story like Abraham.
I read an early novella of his ("Flat Diane") and egads, was that depressing.
I was reading an interview with notable russian fashion designer Alexandre Plokhov where he lists his favorite pieces of media/inspirations, and on that list he put The Master and Margarita. What interested me was the comparison he made that "He (Bulgakov) is sort of the Russian equivalent of Michael Chabon."
China Mieville rarely writes straight horror, but if Sacken and The Ball Room are any indication, he's really really good at creeping me, specifically, right the fuck out.
i picked up a copy of The Aleph from a charity shop today, and, well, it is a borges book, and i am me, do i rly need to tell you that i think it's extremely great
Comments
it's not a pacy novel. it doesn't have a fast plot, it doesn't really have a plot at all, it's more like a series of vignettes
i think what i found dizzying about it was the way it always seemed to be operating on multiple levels and referring back to itself. You need to be awake or you miss it.
(The other Jane)
Well at least today isn't a total wash
Although Mieville's picked up the Gene Wolfe habit of leaving the point of the story kind of obscure, now.
it is quite something
(The other Jane)
don't say The Phenomenology of Spirit
The first car clips its legs from under it and it flies into the air, rolled up the ramp of the windshield. The yearling lands on the hood of the second and the men hear the bone mulch. Again, for what seems an eternity, it is sent toward the leaded sky. The legs mill on broken joints, a gout of blood erupts from between the pages of its ribs. The deer is lofted once more before it falls limp on the litter-strewn shoulder, its head among the brown winter weeds where black garbage bags have caught fast and flutter like crows. The deer is dead.
posting this here so y'all can appreciate
(The other Jane)
(The other Jane)
Not sure what my cutoff point is
so now i am reading news of a kidnapping by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
I read an early novella of his ("Flat Diane") and egads, was that depressing.
like a bulletproof talking cat having a shootout with the KGB is hardly the material for a dry literary novel
it is certainly a slightly off the wall comparison. not entirely invalid though. did he expand on it at all?
Gentlemen of the Road is pretty antic and droll.