Reviews and Comments

This book is about a Palestinian coming to terms with what happens when he is able to return to the land he was driven from. We see the distinction between his idea of Palestine and his encounter with the place and his people. Barghouti's life is upended in every way when he is forced into exile at various moments (from Palestine, from Egypt, constantly forced to move and migrate) - this transforms his relationships to people, to place, even to things. The book shows the ripple effects of Zionism, and it is written by a poet, so we are immersed in these problems in an intense way

A collection of poems, many of which are inspired by Persephone. Averno is a crater lake in southern Italy, and according to the book jacket it was "regarded by the ancient Romans as the entrance to the underworld."

My favorite moment is in the poem October, a moment where it's not clear whether the writer is speaking to their friend or calling the earth their friend:

"The brightness of the day becomes the brightness of night; the fire becomes the mirror.

My friend the earth is bitter; I tihnk sunlight has failed her. Bitter or weary, it is hard to say."

This is a picture of a working class town in West Virginia, told in narrative fragments.

Here's one fragment that gives you a sense for how the narrator, a young boy living in the town, paints the picture:

"Yellow

Everyone is downstairs crying. I walk upstairs to Grandma's room. It is dark. Her dirty pink house shoes are lined up by the nightstand like she just got into bed. The covers on her side are pulled back like she just got out of bed. I leave and ask my mom how Grandma died. My mom says she just turned yellow and died. What, I say. You heard me, she says, she just turned yellow and died. I will never eat dandelions again."

Don't get my wrong. If Vandermeer writes it, I'm going to read it. But I don't know quite what to make of this one. I loved the beginning, the middle was okay, and the last third was a slog. I think @sophist_monster's theory is that Absolution mirrors the Southern Reach Trilogy, which would track nicely since I love Annihilation, like Authority, and can take or leave Acceptance.

I will say that the book's blending of so-called technology with so-called nature (cameras that are seemingly organic, that change and morph as soon as they are examined, and that are eventually "shucked like oysters") is fantastic and vintage Vandermeer.

The book also does interesting things with time - time has always been weird in Area X, but it seems to take center stage in this book:

"Amid all this sea wrack, the excesses and mundanity, the heavy fog of the moment, what none of them - him, the locals at the Village Bar, the biologists - could divine Correctly was Time.

Not so much the passage of time, with which the locals were well familiar, as the way in which past, present, and future collapsed into each other. The mind became confused by the intermingled layers and whether the portents were ill or benign. Because so much on that coast, humid and hot and closed off, decayed spring to life decayed sprang to life. The eye, misled, did not know what was truly and forever dead. The eye did not know where to focus, could not tell what might next be resurrected." (33)

Even in a book that I wasn't gripped by, I can count on Vandermeer to keep me going with passages like that.

K Allado-McDowell wrote this book with GPT-3, mixing their own voice with that of the LLM. The only rule they followed while writing was to make it "as cringe as possible." I'm interested in how the book is steeped in the bodily (lots of sex) while also making clear the lack of connection in a world shaped by social media. The main character is lost in a world of people who are the "main character," looking for community in religious communities and raves. They never find that community - they mostly just offer hallucinatory episodes (GPT) is good at that.

Sally Rooney gets hate, but I'm convinced that people are made that she's so good at such a young age. She's great at relationships. I want to write a paper about her use of the word "Yes" in this book - it comes up during so many internal monologues, across characters. Characters stumble into an understanding of something and say "Yes." I'm not sure if it's a tick across her novels - I've never noticed it before.

Beautiful book.

"Even at this distance, Jupiter is incomprehensibly vast. We stare through the porthole at its soft milky hue, the watercolour whirls, repeating our unbelief. K looks at the settings on the screen showing the camera feed. Something in the rendering of Jupiter looks too virtual, too predictable. It's exactly like the images I've seen of it before. This is a senseless thing to say, of course, but I expected the gas giant to appear different when I saw it myself, so close. It looks too perfect, too controlled. It lacks independence, as if conforming to our expectations, which is ironically not what we expected at all. You're in shock, Tyler says. We all are. It isn't the camera, or the screen, K, it's us. We don't know how to see it." (357)

The tide has certainly shifted in the U.S. when it comes to the conversation around Palestine, and this book is more evidence of this. It is tempting to think that because Coates is the author, this book will somehow break through or crack open the rhetorical situation and allow things to be said that have, to date, been deemed unsayable. But I think that's a dream. Unfortunately, the shift in public conversation has tended to coincide with a ratcheting up of the killing of civilians. Those who think that rhetoric and discourse are an alternative to violence will have to contend with that fact.

"An inhuman system demands inhumans, and so it produces them in stories, editorials, newscasts, movies, and television. Editors and writers like to think that they are not part of such systems, that they are independent, objective, and arrive at their conclusions solely by dint of their reporting and research. But the Palestine I saw bore so little likeness to the stories I read and so much resemblance to the systems I've known that I am left believing that, at least here, this objectivity is self delusion."

In a recent review of The Remains of the Days, I said that Ishiguro's characters "revel in tedium," and this happens again in Never Let Me Go. This time, that tedium is their attempt to make sense of their lives. It's either unthinkable or too difficult for these characters to accept that they are just disposable, that they have no interiority. The book is evidence that they do in fact have that interiority, but the ending makes clear that there's a whole set of cultural machinery set up to treat them as resources rather than people.

In that review of The Remains of the Day, I said the book "is deep in the weeds of something that seems ridiculous while all of these other more important things are happening around the edges." I'm realizing that this is Ishiguro's modus operandi. He's not ignoring the important historical events - he's just telling us what happens around the edges of those events.

This is a beautifully written book that focuses on Camden, New Jersey, where I teach. I was also lucky enough to meet the author during a visit to campus. The strongest feature of this book is its ability to sit with the complexities of urban spaces that are constantly exploited, "revitalized," ignored, bulldozed, exoticized, and more. Romero grew up in Camden, and she wrote the book during a return visit to the city after her home was gone. It's a work of poetry, narrative, and analysis. It's rare to see an author pull of all of these at once.

Anderson can craft a sentence and a story. He's also great at historical fiction, and this one is quick, funny, and based on historical events. I was raised Catholic and was always weirded out by relics - this book leans into that weirdness.

This is a detailed study of Mobile Image, an artist group that built innovative projects using telecommunications in the 1980s and 1990s. Super detailed account of their experiments with satellite technology, videoconferencing, BBSs.

Most importantly, if you've seen the hullabaloo about the "portal" in NYC, you should know that Mobile Image built that in 1980 - a live, synchronous video connection between LA and NYC. It was called A Hole in Space and there's footage on YouTube.

This is the second of Ishiguro's I've read (the other was Klara and the Sun), and I'm struck with how much his characters love to revel in tedium. In this book, it's done to comedic effect often (since the narrator is obsessed with the details of what makes a "good butler" or what counts as "dignity"). But it then surprisingly dips into a love story and Nazi sympathizers. The book is deep in the weeds of something that seems ridiculous while all of these other more important things are happening around the edges. In the end, it works.

The introduction to my edition says that the third part of this book was initially its own thing, and that makes a lot of sense. The first two parts of the book offer a kind of nest for the last part of the narrative.

An intergenerational story, which seems to be a trend in the 20th Century Japanese fiction I've read. Bleak also...kind of another trend. I have tended to link both of those things to WWII, but this one was published in 1914, so that theory doesn't hold up.

I bought this book because Jeff VanderMeer blurbed it. It was not what I expected. All the issues with tech (AI, privacy, virality, inequity and inequality, the difficulties of parenting in a world of devices) are right on the surface. The book reads like YA fiction, but it doesn't appear to be marketed that way. I skimmed through to the end to figure out the narrative payoff, but mostly this book just wasn't what I was expecting.