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Paradise, by Donald Barthelme. Not to be confused with Toni Morrison's Paradise, which is also quite good. A fairly surreal and innovative novel in which a middle-aged, divorced architecht has three young, attractive women move in who, because they are apparently bored and sort of adrift and have nothing better to do, take turns loving and sucking him and each other. Despite being in "paradise", he can never quite work past the realization that one-day-sometime-maybe-soon they'll just pack up and leave him as suddenly as he came, despite the fact that they don't really give him any indication of wanting to leave. It sounds stupid, and it maybe it a little, but it's also quite sad and black and fairly unconventional in its narrative structure. Jacob's Room, by Virginia Woolfe. A book I read because someone else suggested it, because I like Woolfe, and also because it's canonically "good". I actually really liked it although it took me a while to "get" it. Basically, the novel is a narrative experiment in portraying the paralysis and insensibility of Europe regarding the terrible cost of war, right up to the eve of the First World War. It's all about the life of Jacob, and his room, but in the most oblique and side-on way imagineable. It's never really explicitly stated "Jacob did x, y, z, and was a good guy, and then went and died in the war, very sad." You learn that he's a teacher because he has students that talk about him still -- you learn he's dead because his shoes sit in a corner in his room, never to be filled again. His death, a metonymy for the war, is the figurative "elephant in the bedroom", never addressed or dealt with directly, and certainly never coped with. The way that Woolfe structures the novel is incisive and highly critical of the type of thinking regarding war that typified pre-war Europe. The novel closes with the sound of guns firing in the distance and everyone still as unaware as they were at the beginning. I reread Grettir's Saga a while back. I originally read it in an Old English class as a companion to our travel through the original text of Beowulf. There are a great deal of similarities between the two stories, and the common ground is what we were studying in class. My reading was a lot less scholarly this time around; I just think it's cool and fairly funny for an ancient saga.  Sloth Socks posted:
hell yeah LittleJoe fucked around with this message at 18:19 on Nov 16, 2006 |
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Nov 16, 2006 18:15
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| # ¿ Apr 20, 2024 17:32 |
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