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Recent reading
Sep. 16th, 2023 09:10 pmNo more reading diary! Reading diary is handed in, the better to be un-distracted from the novel I need to finish by November (soundtrack: cries for help, electronic fizzing noises, running feet, small explosions).
Notes from a while back found on a piece of paper while tidying my desk:
Joyce Carol Oates, Bellefleur.
The Bellefleurs are a wealthy family living in a castle around the U.S.-Canadian border. The book's present day chapters advance the leading edge of their family fortunes. This is interspersed with chapters from four generations of their history, recounting in detail things mentioned offhand in the present day: why was one of the uncles rechristened 'Lamentations of Jeremiah'? Under what circumstances did one of the family's patriarchs request that his skin be made into a cavalry drum? The family doesn't notice the fact that they're haunted in at least five different ways, or else notices but doesn't find it important. There's widely known to be a family curse, but no one can agree on what it is.
I was slow to get into this book because of the approximately 12 family members introduced in the first chapter, and because of sentences like one in which two long nested brackets of unrelated family anecdote are inserted between 'Her horse's name' and 'was Angel.' I had quite forgotten what was Angel. But I was drawn gently under the waters of both the complicated family and the long, tangled sentences. My memory of reading it is very clearly tied to lying on our living room sofa, resting the brick of a book on a cushion, and eventually reaching set-piece flashback chapters which absorbed me completely and which I kept reading late into the night. There's not a lot of plot. One of the pleasures is seeing a puzzle fill in, but, like in most jigsaws, you know from the start what the picture is.
And here? It's that the Bellefleurs are awful! One of its questions, I suppose, is whether anything else isn't, whether the family members who look to God or art will find anything. Content warnings: all, with a particular emphasis on sexual assault and racism. The narrator's voice lets the terribleness of the family be obvious while staying within the Bellefleurs' own general inability to notice it, just as they don't notice the hauntings.
Notes made now about a book I just finished:
Samuel Delany, Triton.
Very different, more interesting version of 'character cannot perceive own terribleness'. A city on Triton, one of the moons of Neptune, takes as its major project the accommodation of about as many wildly different kinds of life as its inhabitants can think up. The essentials of life are denied to none. Marriage, like prostitution, is illegal - but there's a designated district where the laws don't apply, so even those things can be found if wanted. This utopia (or, per the book's subtitle, heterotopia) is introduced and explored by that useful device, a person poorly suited to it. As the book opens, protagonist Bron's problems have endured in a society that's brilliant at problem-solving by remaining almost entirely outside his capacity to understand. Bron is a painful character to spend time with, but the book is interestingly enough structured around that for me to find it bearable.
Delany imagines such interesting cultures, and makes them feel lived in. In the appendices he suggests, as general s.f. advice, that every detail ought to be seen twice in different contexts - and it works! Example: this is the second of his books I've read that has an entirely new and fascinating form of fine-dining culture, contrasted significantly with a different sort of meal taken somewhere else.
I also love, without having yet fathomed or perhaps being intended to, the other significant regularities he creates. Colored numbers, in this book, appear on walls and screens and diagrams and necklaces, each appearance netting together with all the others. I can't describe the trajectory of what these mean, but I sure experienced it when a number of a new color showed up for the first time.
As often, Delany leaves the structure of the book so up for grabs, and there's so much pleasure in just learning what it is as it goes along, that I won't describe the plot - this is also useful because it means I can go to bed now. But Triton hovers on the edge of a war with the Inner Planets, and Bron experiences shifts in living and love which may or may not offer an angle from which things can be fixed.
Notes from a while back found on a piece of paper while tidying my desk:
Joyce Carol Oates, Bellefleur.
The Bellefleurs are a wealthy family living in a castle around the U.S.-Canadian border. The book's present day chapters advance the leading edge of their family fortunes. This is interspersed with chapters from four generations of their history, recounting in detail things mentioned offhand in the present day: why was one of the uncles rechristened 'Lamentations of Jeremiah'? Under what circumstances did one of the family's patriarchs request that his skin be made into a cavalry drum? The family doesn't notice the fact that they're haunted in at least five different ways, or else notices but doesn't find it important. There's widely known to be a family curse, but no one can agree on what it is.
I was slow to get into this book because of the approximately 12 family members introduced in the first chapter, and because of sentences like one in which two long nested brackets of unrelated family anecdote are inserted between 'Her horse's name' and 'was Angel.' I had quite forgotten what was Angel. But I was drawn gently under the waters of both the complicated family and the long, tangled sentences. My memory of reading it is very clearly tied to lying on our living room sofa, resting the brick of a book on a cushion, and eventually reaching set-piece flashback chapters which absorbed me completely and which I kept reading late into the night. There's not a lot of plot. One of the pleasures is seeing a puzzle fill in, but, like in most jigsaws, you know from the start what the picture is.
And here? It's that the Bellefleurs are awful! One of its questions, I suppose, is whether anything else isn't, whether the family members who look to God or art will find anything. Content warnings: all, with a particular emphasis on sexual assault and racism. The narrator's voice lets the terribleness of the family be obvious while staying within the Bellefleurs' own general inability to notice it, just as they don't notice the hauntings.
Notes made now about a book I just finished:
Samuel Delany, Triton.
Very different, more interesting version of 'character cannot perceive own terribleness'. A city on Triton, one of the moons of Neptune, takes as its major project the accommodation of about as many wildly different kinds of life as its inhabitants can think up. The essentials of life are denied to none. Marriage, like prostitution, is illegal - but there's a designated district where the laws don't apply, so even those things can be found if wanted. This utopia (or, per the book's subtitle, heterotopia) is introduced and explored by that useful device, a person poorly suited to it. As the book opens, protagonist Bron's problems have endured in a society that's brilliant at problem-solving by remaining almost entirely outside his capacity to understand. Bron is a painful character to spend time with, but the book is interestingly enough structured around that for me to find it bearable.
Delany imagines such interesting cultures, and makes them feel lived in. In the appendices he suggests, as general s.f. advice, that every detail ought to be seen twice in different contexts - and it works! Example: this is the second of his books I've read that has an entirely new and fascinating form of fine-dining culture, contrasted significantly with a different sort of meal taken somewhere else.
I also love, without having yet fathomed or perhaps being intended to, the other significant regularities he creates. Colored numbers, in this book, appear on walls and screens and diagrams and necklaces, each appearance netting together with all the others. I can't describe the trajectory of what these mean, but I sure experienced it when a number of a new color showed up for the first time.
As often, Delany leaves the structure of the book so up for grabs, and there's so much pleasure in just learning what it is as it goes along, that I won't describe the plot - this is also useful because it means I can go to bed now. But Triton hovers on the edge of a war with the Inner Planets, and Bron experiences shifts in living and love which may or may not offer an angle from which things can be fixed.
