booksounds: remix

Thinking about a change in direction for this blog. So far it hasnt captured me the way I would like. I cant tell if that's a problem of my own enthusiasm or the way I'm handling the subject matter. I think it needs to be more free-wheeling and spontaneous than I had originally planned. I dont want this to feel like an english assignment. This is about books, and enjoying books, and sharing those experiences. Period.

"All the Pretty Horses"

"Between the wish and the thing, the world lies waiting."

I heard one reader sum up Cormac McCarthy as “somewhere between John Grisham and literature.” After reading McCarthy for the first time, I can’t disagree more. I'm not sure if the comment was meant as a stab at the commercialization of literature, but McCarthy's writing can’t be judged by its movie adaptations. This is no mass-market, for-quick-consumption-only book. The reader is standing in the same vast world as the characters, and sometimes that world is hostile.
This is not your traditional western either. McCarthy gives us just enough to feel the terrain, to drink the coffee, to smell the horses and feel them moving under your body; but then he slowly takes that away; he defamiliarizes. It is the 1950s, WW2 has shattered many lives, and things are changing. A cowboy is just as likely to get a beer can thrown at him from a pickup truck then receive a tip of the hat. Our protagonist, John Grady Cole, is a displaced remnant of the past fleeing the onslaught of modernity. Cole has all the stoicism as someone out of Hemingway, and yet is far more driven. The story explores what it means to live as an alien in your own land, a land that your ancestors have tended for generations. It explores the generational divide between father and son, between idealism and defeat. It is no coincidence that the book is wrapped with images of the Comanche, vital and alive at the beginning, waiting and dying at the end.
The prose is beautiful. Something simple like walking through a tiny, run-down village takes on mythic proportions. Same with camping near a cook fire. Or brushing a horse. In fact, a lot of the scenes in this book take on mythic proportions. But it's never outlandish. It is always with respect for the odd and simple things. The writing is always controlled, fluid, sometimes threatening towards hallucinatory but never chaotic.
Much of his longer paragraphs in All the Pretty Horses are more reminiscent of Faulkner than any dime paperback Western. If Gabriel Garcia Marquez suffered a horrible loss, got into peyote and perhaps set his stories further north, then maybe something like McCarthy would happen. Probably not though.
His lucid descriptions of the environments are starkly juxtaposed against the terse dialogue that the characters often take part in, creating a very tiny human space in relation to the vast expanse of the plains.
No one I've read but McCarthy can be so bleak and yet still let hope slip out. He shows the blood and the loss, but the sun always rises.
This one is definitely recommended.

The Birth of Tragedy by Friedrich Nietzsche

This was my first book-length reading of Nietzsche. As one of the most thrown-around names in literature and philosophy, Nietzsche is the "college" highbrow read. But for everything that his name evokes, his actual work was startlingly fresh, fascinating and generative. The book begins many of his most well-known ideas, including his ever-important revaluation of morality, his notorious skepticism, and his concept of "life as art." We see the wheels begin to turn of an idiosyncratic, brilliant, and over-the-top mind.
I didn't think I'd be drawn into a philosophical work about Greek Tragedy and Socrates, but his prose is infectious, like only very few writers can achieve. (For me, it was Whitman, Woolf, Hunter S. Thompson, Bukowski and Delany.) This only becomes more pronounced in his later works, such as Beyond Good and Evil.

An interesting addition that Nietzsche included in later publications of this book was a sort of apology attached to the beginning. In it he undertakes a mission that is admirable (and too rare) for any writer: self-critique. Not only that, but brutal self-critique. Freud said (hyperbolic statement activate) that Nietzsche was the most self-knowledgeable person that had ever lived; I'm not sure about that, but reading Nietzsche's prologue to this book, I do get the impression that Nietzsche's mind could not rest when he knew that it could do better.

If you're looking to get in to Nietzsche, this might be a good place to start (it was his first published book). If you're off-put by the accruements of ancient Greek tragedy, you could skip right to Beyond Good and Evil (it dives right in to the major components of his philosophy), or Thus Spoke Zarathustra (it's a story! - sort of. Definitely my favorite.)

The Crying of Lot 49 is a very brief, very quick, density

I just finished reading Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49.

Still kinda want to throw it across the room.
I dont know if I like it yet, honestly. I couldnt stop reading it though. So many names and concepts and real things and fake things, all over the place, from over 800 years of time. I might need to sit on this one for awhile. But a few short bits about the book:

1. Happens to be Pynchon's shortest novel, at 152 pages (his longest being Against the Day, at 1085)
2. Shortness does not gaurentee ease. Satisfaction = difficult. But...
3. Delight = easy. Some of the best character names in literature, like: Randolph Driblette, Clayton Chiclitz, Manny di Presso, Genghis Cohen, and, I kid you not, Mike Fallopian.
4. Abundent with conspiracy theories, complex coincidences, stamp collecting, archaic postal service trivia, puns, wierd sexual advances, random snippets of song lyrics, and early Protestant history.
5. Its a detective story, and a quest story, the goal of which may not be reachable or even real.

that's all for now.

Who Fears Death, by Nnedi Okorafor

What made this book exceptional was its simplicity. While many scifi and fantasy books (and everything in between) can make excellent use of baroque language, others suffer for it. Sometimes, it's the light touch that works best for fantastic literature. Here is the example.
With her bare and unadorned language, Okorafor speaks of complex and often brutal subject matters; genocide, weaponized rape, alienation, she is unflinching towards all. But it is never at odds with her story-telling and such subject matter is always respected. Perhaps that is what I most appreciate about this work; that she describes things that other authors, especially in the speculative fiction realm, don't dare to touch. She does it concisely and without fear.
Where some writers in the genre may extrapolate and over-do the more horrible scenes for the sake of shock value, Okarafor simply says what needs to be said. That she does this and still manages to suffuse the story with such warmth, magic (juju) and hope is amazing. That she does so without flinching from the often brutal subject matter is a mark of her maturity and her talent.
The story itself is set in a post-apocalyptic Africa and is rife with both the fantastic and the everyday. In one of the most memorable scenes, a whole village of people travel inside the eye of an enormous sandstorm. Coolest imagery in the book.
One thing that is constantly explored in the novel is prejudice. Onyesonwu is a child of rape, an Ewu, and is marked by this by the way she looks, with sand-colored skin and eyes like a desert cat’s. In the culture of the novel, tradition dictates that children born of violence will be violent themselves. Much of the tension in the story revolves around this mixture of fate and free-will that Onyesonwu must navigate. Does she allow herself to be the thing that most see her as, as savage and grotesque? Or does she exercise her own will in forming herself into what she desires? And what about when these things intersect? Adding to this theme of genetic fate and free-will is the fact that she is also Eshu, a shape-shifter. She very literally can make herself into what she wants. But as with all juju, there are consequences for everything.
This novel is both poignant and hard to put down. (No one can accuse this work of speculative fiction to be mere escapism!) Both shocking and beautiful, Okorafor creates a world that is fixed directly to a concern for humanity, and for everything that it's capable of.