a beautiful and opaque book… both more and less than it impresses to be… more, because it *is* a fugue–vittorini actually thought of it more as an opera, but in any case: a beautiful music of characters and basic desires and hopes. less, because its mystery is partly the result of some functional opacity–to hide from fascist censors–so its mystery is somewhat generated by utility rather than an inherent and natural profound ineffable-ness. the result may look the same so it’s eye of the beholder stuff whether that makes a diff to you. …except for the fact that the allegory has no clear signified, a very beautiful allegorical novel.

consume. 

‘varieties’ is accurate in that she has several techniques, vaguely constellated around her interests (of translation and epistemology, of ‘deep ideas’ of self).

she’s a great bridge to the Modernists… she’s thinking about them–Kafka, Proust, Beckett, Woolf–throughout, but we hear her thinking in a very contemporary language, one that is constructed and fragmented *from* modernism, a cento of modernism. relatedly: she’s a good mimic. beyond this also, she’s several of her own styles.

the short shorts that worked best for me were those that point to that one vaguely has experienced but has never been able to articulate–and so come with an a-ha! …some however were confounding and i wonder that in these absolutely crucibled forms (the FF) if authors are forced to use personal or limited connotations of language that simply don’t ‘mean’ for everyone, and thereby necessarily create (unintentionally?) obtuse texts…
“The walk” is so far my favorite. at first glance seems a very traditional story–about two people, a proust translator and a proust critic, taking a proustian walk–but reveals itself to be self-commenting, creating a neat and mirrored world (which in itself is an act which comments on proust’s architecture of the two ways). also a beautiful style, wistful.

other longer ones are exhausting and exhaustive thought experiments, some by their exhausting function are similar in their ambitions to sorrentino’s use of the exhaustive list…
by her carefully chosen and paced varieties, she satisfyingly obliterates the dichotomy of show and tell.

“Enlightened,” in entirety:

I don’t know if I can remain friends with her. I’ve thought and thought about it - she’ll never know how much. I gave it one last try: I called her, after a year. But I didn’t like the way the conversation went. The problem is that she is not very enlightened. Or I should say, she is not enlightened enough for me. She is nearly fifty years old and no more enlightened, as far as I can see, than when I knew her twenty years ago, when we talked mainly about men. I did not mind how unenlightened she was then, maybe because I was not so enlightened myself. I believe I am more enlightened now, and certainly more enlightened than she is, although I know it’s not very enlightened to say that. But I want to say it, so I am willing to postpone being more enlightened myself so that I can still say a thing like that about a friend.

consume via amazon.

i absolutely loved this one… the sentences seem thought thinking in this one, clever but not ostentatious. character is created by language rather than by event. though, that said, there might, if not for events and circumstance, be only one character. but i loved that character. she was smart and curious and acknowledging of pain and conscious of privledge. an unexpected sincere pleasure.

consume via amazon.

so far my favorite of his, which, i’ve to space them out.

consume via amazon.

the best shaggy dog ever. and perhaps the most beautiful title for a novel.

consume via amazon.

when youre 20 and want to say everything at once… like how it was supposedly done in ON THE ROAD when they stayed up for two nights and talked and talked and talked and then ate pie. exhaustive and beautiful and heartbreaking. rumor has it that the original title was “no anticipation allowed.”

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best new fiction i’ve read in a loooong time. hidden within its seemingly conventional narrative, is a sprawling style of heartache barely held together by the integrity and personality of the writing. honest and dark.

a strung together series of short stories a novel makes, this time. the best book ever. in death-defying sentences and in a tremendous organic and complex structure, this book is an autobiography of the best kind, made completely of true lies, which rewards you with basic insights into the human condish, a now deceased nyc artworld, and one spectacular case-history of schizophrenia.

i’d tried years ago and couldn’t get through it. but this time, with my wife’s help, did. a beautifully sustained dreamworld slash alternative reality your choice. a massive accomplishment. i read it after NEVER LET ME GO, which i thought was a similar project, but the latter lost steam i thought as it tried to explain itself after the first third. ishiguro’s always in control though, which is admirable. in this book he lets the dream be its own explanation, which is a purer effort though probably more likely to frustrate. in this one he has some beautiful ruminations on the nature of art and celebrity from the voice and POV of the narrator, a famous pianist.

I understand the desire to dismiss this book and this author–but he’s too good a novelist for it. Theo Tait has a great take on him in the London Review of Books here, which also has some juicy biography bits:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n03/tait01_.html
He isn’t always as honest as he purports himself to be, is probably the worst thing you can say about him. His vileness is just there, condemnable, what else to say about it other than maybe it’s simultaneously repulsive and titillating. But the weight, development, momentum he can put into a book is very impressive.