|
I just finished A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov. A fascinating book and a nice way to kick off this wild foray into Russian literature. The last couple chapters were powerful poo poo. That said, I don't think I absorbed nearly enough on the first read. If I have the time, I'd fancy a reread, perhaps with a different translation and set of notes. Also, Inch'Allah Dimanche by Yamina Benguigui. I'm not sure what I expected out of this, but it was so underwhelming.  It's got a lot of drama with very little substance to it. Just a series of sad things that don't hit you nearly as hard as they ought to.
|
#
¿
Sep 23, 2013 21:57
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 19, 2024 14:38 |
|
|
Florida Betty posted:I liked the movie. I didn't even know it was based on a book. Could be the other way around. I plan to watch the movie tonight--maybe I can better judge it with that in mind.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 25, 2013 22:26
|
|
|
I just finished Pnin. The prose was good, though not quite at the level of Lolita or Pale Fire. Apart from that and Pnin's character, it didn't really appeal to me. Certainly funny and clever, with an interesting take on the role of the narrator, but beyond that it was hard to get into. I'unno. Maybe I need more context. Anyway. Next up: Look at the Harlequins!
|
|
#
¿
Dec 24, 2013 03:29
|
|
|
The Wind City by Summer Wigmore Urban fantasy infused with Maori mythology. Lots of influence from American Gods, so I've heard. The characters were my favorite part, though I think some of them could have been developed further, at least prior to the climax. That aside, the prose is...Whedonesque, for lack of a better word, which can be irritating in large doses. Good ending, though. Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead The book is a coming-of-age story set in the Hamptons, specifically during the mid-eighties. Hip-hop's entering its golden age, Coca-Cola's bringing out New Coke, people still carried around radios, and so on. Whitehead is fantastic at setting the scene--he really brings you back to the eighties. The story itself is unremarkable and lacks direction beyond some vague sense of growing up.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 1, 2014 19:49
|
|
|
Just finished The Book of Collateral Damage by Sinan Antoon. This is the second book I've read by an Iraqi author about the invasion, the other being Hassan Blasim's The Corpse Exhibition--as it turns out, they have the same translator. Corpse Exhibition is a short story collecton steeped in psychological horror, gallows humor, bits of magical realism, and an overwhelming sense of the world devouring itself all around you. You want to stop reading and look away, but you feel like an rear end in a top hat for doing so. Not to mention the writing's pretty solid. Save for a couple of duds, it's a strong read. Collateral Damage is more soberly written, although it has moments of hallucinatory horror and despair. It's composed of two narratives--one within another, each meant to complement the other. The first is from the perspective of Nameer, a guy who fled during the Gulf War and is getting his PhD at Harvard. Not unlike the author himself--and fair, you write what you know and all. He ends up in Iraq in 2003, translating for a documentary on the invasion. There, he meets a bookseller named Wadood, who's writing a catalogue of all that has been destroyed in the war. Not just people, but also an ancient manuscript, a stamp album, a rug, birds, an old lote tree, and so on. From there, the book is half Wadood's stories and half Nameer's life in the states. Have a sample. quote:The minute will be a three-dimensional space. It will be a place where I snipe at things and souls as they move. The juncture where they meet before disappearing forever, without saying goodbye. Humans say goodbye only to those they know and those they love, whereas things say goodbye to each other and to humans too. But we rarely hear their voices, their whispers, because we don’t try. We rarely notice things smiling. Yes, things have faces too, but we don’t see them. Those who do see them, after making an effort and training themselves to do so, and those who talk to them are labeled mad by your standards. Suffice to say, the book's pretty bleak. Both guys are dealing with deep psychological problems, but Wadood's been in an agonizing feedback loop of severe PTSD, paranoia, and hallucinations for years long before the invasion. Nameer, at least, can afford therapy. I'd recommend this book to anyone who wants to read good literature from Iraq and also experience the literary equivalent of being punched in the stomach repeatedly.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 20, 2019 14:19
|
|
|
Just finished I Burn Paris by Bruno Jasieński. This book is insane.  For a brief summary: a miserable French everyman gets laid off, dumped by his girlfriend, etc etc. Depressed and despising Paris, his girlfriend, and his life, he decides to poison the water supply. With bubonic plague. Cracking under the catastrophic pressure, Paris fragments into a bunch of autonomous neighborhood-republics, including a Soviet republic in Belleville, an Anglo-American Territory (centered around the American Express building), an Autonomous Chinese Communist Republic in the Latin Quarter, a dictatorship for unemployed cops on the Île de la Cité, and a restored French monarchy on the Left Bank. The White Russian émigrés also set up their own piece of home. It's some good, audacious, communist farce. Although the French weren't particularly entertained and had him deported.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 15, 2019 17:46
|
|
|
I just finished The Brink: President Reagan and the Nuclear War Scare of 1983 by Marc Ambinder. The book's loosely based around Able Archer 83, the nuclear war scare that doesn't get nearly enough attention--understandably, since it's been highly classified up until recently. The short of it is that in November 1983, NATO carried out a war-gaming exercise with significantly more realism than its predecessors, and some Soviets took it as a possible opener to World War III. How close we actually came to World War III is still up for debate. Some say it's the closest we've gotten since the Cuban Missile Crisis. I say loosely because it wasn't the exercise alone that brought us to the brink of crisis, something which Ambinder factors into the book. Able Archer 83 came in the midst of brinkmanship-style rhetoric, the Soviets' conviction that the US was planning an imminent nuclear strike, US psychological operations (e.g. near-penetrations of Soviet airspace and waters), a massive combined naval exercise in spring 1983, the Soviet shootdown of Korean Air Lines Flight 007, massive US weapons buildups including the deployment of Pershing II missiles and the announcement of the Strategic Defense Initiative (aka Star Wars), and a false alarm in the Soviets' early warning system in September 1983. There was a lot of other poo poo going on that put the Soviets on edge. Suddenly "we begin bombing in five minutes" isn't quite as funny anymore. Anyway, Ambinder shows us the exercise in its larger context, and rightfully so. The miscalculation factor in a potential nuclear war deserves far more attention than it gets, at least in public discourse. That's valuable. Unfortunately, I have beefs with how Ambinder tells this story. First, he spends an awful lot of ink on individual actors' stories and lower-level issues. Oleg Gordievsky's family troubles come to mind. I wouldn't mind this, per se, if the book were stronger on the analysis. It isn't. So that's the second beef. Third, this book was either not proofread at all or had a lovely proofreader. It's spattered with grammatical, punctuation, and usage errors, on top of some plain bad writing. Reviews from more milhist-minded people elsewhere say it's also plagued with factual errors about missiles, dates, etc. I'd add that his interpretation of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan is highly questionable, but hey. This book isn't about that. All in all, pretty disappointing. Karenina fucked around with this message at 17:40 on Jan 25, 2020 |
|
#
¿
Jan 25, 2020 17:37
|
|
|
Everything You Have Told Me Is True: The Many Faces of Al Shabaab by Mary Harper A concise, harrowing book on Harakat al-Shabaab al-Mujahideen, aka al-Shabaab, the al-Qaeda-affiliated jihadist group controlling a hefty chunk of Somalia. It's interspersed with the voices of Somali people from many walks of life and sides of the conflict, including other journalists, members of the diaspora in the UK, refugees in the Dadaab camp in Kenya, and a doctor trying to run a humane mental hospital in Mogadishu. And al-Shabaab's spokesmen. Communication is very important to these guys. They want you to know that that bombing attack was very much their doing, who the target was, and why any innocents caught up in the carnage really should have known better than to go anywhere near the hotels, restaurants, and cafés their targets stay at. If you ignore their warnings and sell tea or SIM cards to the apostate authorities, you've really only got yourself to blame. The big exception to this policy was the massive October 2017 truck bombings in Mogadishu that killed over 580 people. While very clearly their work, al-Shabaab never took credit for it publicly. The spokesman Harper had on the phone dodged any questions about the attack. He was traveling. It wasn't a good time. He'd get back to her later, he said. Sometimes the spokesman throws some religious propaganda her way. Sometimes he gives advice. Say: "You must not phone while driving. You will have an accident or you will be arrested by a traffic cop." Or: "Please don't go [to Nigeria] again. Nigeria is a very dangerous country, and anything could happen to you there." Before reading the book, I didn't know a thing about the Somali Civil War beyond: (1) there was a Communist military dictatorship, (2) then there were jihadists, (3) clan politics matter somehow, and (4) Somaliland is de facto independent and seems to be doing all right. Relatively speaking. And that there was a war with Ethiopia before the civil war that factored into the dictatorship's collapse. Somehow. The Horn of Africa is not my wheelhouse. Anyway, to put it rather clumsily, the book gave me some good insight into why clan politics mattered and how intricate they were. Harper also points out the role of international involvement in making the situation more convoluted. Assuming not much has changed since 2017, Somali security forces, on top of being underequipped and understaffed, get training from a range of countries--Turkey, the UAE, the US, the UK--with little to no coordination. Many of these troops end up in regional armies that clash with the federal troops. Or the lucrative private security companies. Or elsewhere.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 15, 2020 01:52
|
|
|
just finished le malade imaginaire by molière as part of a larger scheme to keep my french from going further to poo poo than it already has. next up is frantz fanon's peau noire, masques blancs. i've already started it and am getting destroyed by some of the vocab, but that's okay, i deserve it malade imaginaire is great, btw. i cannot stress enough how much it helps to have the book in one hand and a good stage adaptation on-screen, because half the humor is in the visual humor. like the part where argan wails that they're leaving him to die, lies down on the floor in despair, and then glances up to see if anyone's noticed.  also didn't expect molière to name-drop himself in act III, but hey, why not
|
|
#
¿
Apr 19, 2020 01:17
|
|
|
The Last of Mr. Norris, also known as Mr Norris Changes Trains in the UK. This is the first half of a shabby edition I have of Christopher Isherwood's Berlin Stories, the other half being Goodbye to Berlin. Both feature the city in 1930-1933, with many of the characters teetering on the brink of an abyss, kind of like the city itself. The story centers around the puzzling title character, Arthur Norris, an Englishman who enjoys a personal blend of coffee, fine silks, warm baths, and a good spanking from attractive women. The Berlin Stories being semi-autobiographical, the narrator is a thinly-veiled version of Isherwood who finds himself drawn to the odd, nervous-looking, masochistic Norris, himself based on Gerald Hamilton. Norris turns out to be as shady as they come. He's good at suggesting it himself, like someone asked "where were you and what were you doing on the night of the murder" responding with "haha, what's anyone doing anywhere?" and tugging at their collar, sweating vigorously. Norris isn't a subtle man, and this isn't a subtle story. For the most part, we see little of the characters beneath the surface. People are living in dire straits, but their motives and the implications of their circumstances are barely explored at all. Like there's a meaty, juicy story that Isherwood is dancing around, or at best drawing the contours of. Lots of intrigue and suggestion with little payoff. Also, while I can't say I'm against reading mean-spirited narrators (or authors), the superficial storytelling combined with the desperation in the setting gave me the impression of a well-to-do foreigner pointing and gawking at human beings living under miserable conditions. Apparently Isherwood came to the same conclusion years later: quote:What repels me now about Mr Norris is its heartlessness. It is a heartless fairy-story about a real city in which human beings were suffering the miseries of political violence and near-starvation. The ‘wickedness’ of Berlin’s night-life was of the most pitiful kind; the kisses and embraces, as always, had price-tags attached to them, but here the prices were drastically reduced in the cut-throat competition of an over-crowded market. … As for the ‘monsters’, they were quite ordinary human beings prosaically engaged in getting their living through illegal methods. The only genuine monster was the young foreigner who passed gaily through these scenes of desolation, misinterpreting them to suit his childish fantasy. Other books finished in September: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson, Daughter of the Cold War by Grace Kennan Warnecke, and How to Avoid Being Killed in a War Zone by Rosie Garthwaite.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 23, 2020 23:07
|
|
|
Following Fish: Travels Around the Indian Coast by Samanth Subramanian. Very chill book about different culinary and cultural traditions around fish in West Bengal, Hyderabad, Goa, Tamil Nadu, Mumbai, Kerala, Mangalore, and Gujarat. Subramanian builds a strong narrative around all the ways in which fish and fishing shape people's lives, his included. Case in point: reminiscing about growing up with asthma and his parents trying everything--pills, inhalers, ayurveda, an "ice cream-free existence"--but the fish treatment doled out to thousands in Hyderabad every year by the Bathini Goud family. The fish treatment is basically cramming a yellow herbal paste inside a live murrel fish, which then goes down the person's throat. Now an adult writing a book on the fish traditions of India, the author decides to give the fish treatment a try. It's not great. According to Subramanian, the worst part isn't the fish, but the paste inside the fish, which tastes strongly of asafetida. Anyway, it's a fun and light book. Give it a shot if you like culinary travelogues. I also got Ishmael Reed's The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda after a week's delay. Mix-up at the bookstore. This is my third book of the year by Ishmael Reed, the other two being Mumbo Jumbo and The Last Days of Louisiana Red. The gist is that Miranda, tripping on Ambien prescribed by his agent, is visited by the spirits of people left out of Hamilton--enslaved people owned by the Schuyler family, Native Americans, indentured servants, and so on--in the style of A Christmas Carol. Is it as good as Mumbo Jumbo or Louisiana Red? No. Was it funny as hell and satisfying to read? Yes. Extremely. Also finished: Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky and Zinky Boys by Svetlana Alexievich.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 18, 2020 19:03
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 19, 2024 14:38 |
|
|
Last night I finished A Dream in Polar Fog by Yuri Rytkheu, a story about a Canadian explorer stranded on the easternmost tip of Siberia and the local Chukchi community that takes him in. Spanning eight years, the narrative shows mutual suspicion giving way to trust, love, and community against a vivid backdrop of snow, ice, and wind. Ryktheu, who was himself Chukchi, depicts everyday life and traditions with painstaking detail, from shamanic rituals to hunts for walrus and nerpa, in which nothing is wasted. There's also some lovely bits of creation myth and cosmology, which Rytkheu lays out in greater detail in another work of his, The Chukchi Bible. I found the ending a little underwhelming. All in all, though, it's a great read, especially in the wintertime.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 8, 2021 20:54
|
|