Returning to Patricia Highsmith is always such a pleasure. And this novel in particular is such a delightful, despite late, “discovery” (thanks to Gillian Flynn.) A suburban marital thriller plays out like a magnificent war of the sexes tragedy where no extreme is incredible. The wife is pushing all the buttons, the husband is taking all the imaginable abuse, and then punishing her by killing others. The killer is both sympathetic and sociopathic. The wife is not a victim, she playfully and spitefully explores the boundaries of someones submission. And despite some critical opinion, this is not a “loveless” marriage that both characters are trapped in. A fatal marriage never is. One of the characters, in this case the man, is pathologically in love. And he is quietly destroying both — himself and Her — one chilling murder after another. Immediately after the second murder, Vic Van Allen, goes to a school concert to hear their daughter sing. He hands in his ticket at the entrance and the ticket says “Admit two”. Highsmith’s sense of humor is superb – it never fails to bring chills in the appreciating reader.
Category: Books
Books: Where'd You Go, Bernadette: A Novel by Maria Semple, 2013
A “delightful” reading and a “glittering” prose..The book invites such definitions and the irony of the quotation marks. It is really imaginative and fresh and very often – quite funny. My problem with it is that its “charm” outweighs its author’s talent. I value more the “menace to society” aspect of the mother character than all the cuteness of the child. The book becomes too cute, especially towards the end.
The TED talk episode is hilarious, outstanding…
I could not get rid of the impression that I am reading a Young Adult novel. Is it because the YA mentality is gradually taking over the entire American literature?
Books: The Circle. A Novel by Dave Eggers, 2013
A nice dystopian novel which reads with pleasure. The style is crisp and light as in Zamyatin’s We and the balance between sarcastic humor and dark insights is just right. We follow an inspired young lady, Mae, into her spiraling path: literally – spiraling up in the ranks of her corporation driven by ambition and willingness to be perfect at work and do good in the world and metaphorically – spiraling down into a state of brainwashed enthusiasm for “transparency”. The critique of the corporate culture of advanced high tech companies is scalding. The tensions between “secrets” and “morality” are examined bravely and honestly. Eggers describes a world permeated by a sense of creeping totalitarianism.
Occasionally the book becomes repetitive but in a way this “circling” is necessary to build the ominous presence of “the Circle”…Gospodinov could be developed more as a character.
Otherwise, Very Good!
Books: The Blazing World, 2014. A Novel by Siri Hustvedt
The great idea to dig into the essence of modern art and the nature of taste (“What is taste?”) and what is left of art if it is dissociated from the celebrity, the persona of the artist — squandered.
Beckett’s Murphy was rejected by the publishers forty three times…Why not write exactly about that? “Without the aura of greatness, without the imprimatur of high culture, hipness or celebrity, what remained?” What is taste, again? This is the main point here but it was pushed aside by the author eager to make tired feminist arguments… The premise of the book is that a woman has to pass her artistic work as a man’s and only then watch it being appreciated – as “muscular, rigorous, cerebral”. How transparent, oversimplifying and pathetic in a way.
It is not enough to state that “it is not about sex”…A book built on intellectual argumentation has to take the debate further, no? The novel is inventorying endlessly the sins of man against woman through numerous literary references. “No one rejoices more in revenge than women, wrote Juvenal” — how misogynist! But haven’t we dealt with the past already? Everything is a symptom of misogyny. Ms. Hustvedt’s response to Juvenal is “And I say, I wonder why, boys. I wonder why.” And really – why.
The novel is built on several narratives commenting and undermining other narratives, a lot of silly role-playing, the use of “masks” upon “masks” upon “masks” and other similar postmodern crap. Most of the text involves pretentious commentary on classic authors from Kierkegaard to Zweig. The status of the book as “fiction” is quite shaky. Intellectually – it is a mess.
And a symptomatic self-revelation of Ms. Hustvedt’s is waiting for the reader on the book jacket: she is defined here by her “PhD in English from Columbia” and the fact of not mentioning in her bio that she is the wife of Paul Auster. If she was not a celebrity would I be reading her book? Sorry, it is really not about sex…
Books: Sycamore Row, 2013. A Novel by John Grisham
Wanted to check out what John Grisham has written recently. The short answer is – a very weak book. He is bored of himself and it shows. The book is repetitive, banal, and flat. The “racial card” is played without passion.The thrill is gone…
Books: Gone Girl. A Novel by Gillian Flynn, 2012
It is a smart, well written novel in the tradition of Patricia Highsmith. It is very hard to follow in her footsteps but Ms Flynn manages to do that pretty well. The novel follows a very complex structure and especially in the second half when the “trick” with Amy’s diary is revealed, walks on the razor’s edge trying to balance logic and conflicting psychological motivations. Often it seems the author is almost about to trip switching between the narratives of He and She but eventually manages to pull it off neatly, collect all loose ends and turn it all into one huge metaphor of male-female love-hate stand-off and psychological warfare. “One situation – maybe one alone – could drive me to murder: family life, togetherness” Patricia Highsmith is quoted to have said…Ms Flynn’s novel is an intricate illustration of that statement with a little bit of Porfiry Petrovich thrown in — his role being played by a female local cop…The language is witty with that type of wittiness that misleadingly steers the reader into “chick-lit” territory only to make them realize later that this genre affiliation is severely ironically undermined.
Books: Paris: The Novel. Edward Rutherfurd, 2013
Could not finish this book by internationally best selling author of historical fiction Edward Rutherfurd.
It is a combination of a Paris tour guide and a soap opera intertwined with French history on high-school level.
Think about the vast audience out there that actually reads Rutherfurd – readers endowed with intellectual naivete and literary innocence…
Books: My Struggle – Part 1. A Man in Love – Part 2. A Novel by Karl Ove Knausgaard, 2012, 2013
I resisted liking My Struggle. It won me over slowly after I had finished the first half of the book and at the end of it I was convinced that it is one of the best books I have come across recently. The ending of the first part of My Struggle (the events following the death of Karl Ove’s father) is an example of some truly great writing without even trying to be one. This is actually the secret of the book – it is great literature pretending to be a documentary account of simple everyday events. The book has some of the magnificent qualities of Scandinavian literature – the somber tone, the harrowing honesty to oneself to the point of self-flagellation and to the point of cruelty when it concerns the others, the fearless embrace of life. It is written in the great tradition of Ibsen, Strindberg and Bergman…And of course, it owes a lot to Proust but in a sense, it is also quite anti-Proustian. This book deals with the nature of memory but not in the narcissistic way that can be so boring in Proust. It dwells on the minutiae of life with a sense of desperation – the desperation that life has no essence, that there is nothing beyond the string of fleeting moments which can never be satisfactory because one is always speeding towards the next moment dreaming that it would be more complete. The sense that the present cannot be truly experienced because one always is in want of something else.
I have never been so conscious of the oppression of small talk and socializing as after reading Knausgaard. His account of a child’s birthday party is more valuable than a book with dozens of fictional characters vainly searching for happiness. His descriptions of a drive home after a failed attempt at vacationing with his family, or a Christmas party with friends, or trying to return a soup in a restaurant, or just smoking outside his apartment building and observing the kids’ play, etc. etc. — are more insightful than hundreds of pages of many (critically acclaimed) novels.
Sometimes, the emotions conveyed are so true, so close to reality, that because of that lack of fictional distance between the narrator and the reader, one just wants to close the book and cry.
I don’t want fiction, I want to read Knausgaard.
“Too much desire, too little hope“
Knausgaard
Books: Flour Water Salt Yeast. Ken Forkish
My friend Sibylla gave me the perfect gift — a cookbook about baking artisan bread. It turned out to be much more than a collection of recipes. It’s an ode to bread! After Garlic and Sapphires this is the first cookbook that I read with such pleasure. Mr. Forkish renders the thrills of baking bread vividly and with love –the tactile nature of the work, the magic of the rising dough, the smell of the levain, the simple elegance of the cinnamon-brown pain de campagne and the fantastic aroma of freshly-baked bread in the morning…
Have you ever thought of what a bread-tasting event would be like? Mr. Forkish offers this experience in his bakery.
The book also perpetuates the glory of the life-style change myth – a man’s dream of leaving everything behind and becoming a baker, or a wine-maker, or a restaurateur, or whatever… The author was adventurous enough to make that leap of faith himself. After 20 years in the IT business he started his own bakery in Portland. A very successful one at that!
Ah, the romance of waking up at 4 AM to bake bread….
Sibylla Chavdar’s perfect hand-made bread photographed by her.
Books: Troubling Love. A novel by Elena Ferrante
I decided to give a second chance to Ferrante hoping to read something of the quality of Days of Abandonment. Troubling Love is satisfying to an extent. It is a bold and ambitious book which tries to capture the complexities of a mother-daughter love-hate relationship. The narrator Delia, struggles to understand her relationship with Amalia, her mother, on the day after her mother’s death by drowning. As Delia puts it quite appropriately at some point: “I was here to cross a line”. And she does cross that line. Occasionally, she also crosses the line of literary taste getting lost into convoluted psychoanalytical kitsch. Had the narrative been simpler, crisper, Delia’s digging into the past in order to recover the truth buried under convenient post-factum rationalizations and lies, would have provided a more revealing and cathartic experience. The “truth” about Amalia’s past, not surprisingly, revolves around her husband’s jealousy, his violence, her lover (imagined by her child-daughter), her repressed sexuality. Delia both wishes for, and hates and fears her mother’s erotic liberation. One of her childhood memories is of her sitting with her parents in a summer theater, her mother furtively glancing around in the dark, her father possessively putting an arm around her shoulder: “Amalia after a stealthy look sideways, curious and yet apprehensive, let her head fall on my father’s shoulder and appeared happy. That double movement tortured me. I didn’t know where to follow my mother in flight, if along the axis of that glance or along the parabola that her hair made in the direction of her husband’s shoulder.I was beside her, trembling. Even the stars, so thick in summer, seemed to me points of my confusion. I was to such an extent determined to become different from her that, one by one, I lost the reason for resembling her.” Good writing.
No lipstick! Book & Film Reviews 