Tag: Books

Books: The Names, A Novel by Florence Knapp, 2025

The novel is celebrated as a remarkable debut… How is the quality of a book relevant to whether it is a first or a last one? It is also praised for being “original” – precisely the quality that it lacks. One can easily detect how it was planned and designed (or rather concocted) to achieve the effect it has on part of the female reading public. One can hardly imagine a male having any interest in this book.

Its “scheme” is so transparent that it is offensive….It is a novel that could be AI-generated or could be a product of a young achiever who just completed her Creative Writing class with an A+. It demonstrates certain skills on a sentence level. As a whole, it is simplistic and schematic. Its premise is preposterous – the different names a woman can select for her son determine his fortune. The first choice is the name of the abusive father, Gordon, the second is Julian, preferred by the mother, and the third is Bear, picked by the child’s sister. Predictably, the wildest choice leads to the happiest life story, while the name “Gordon” dooms the bearer of this name.

Obviously, the book is about the choices a woman can make to set herself free from an abusive marriage. How many more books can the female audience digest and laud that tackle abusive marriages? What does the book add to the artistic interpretation or psychological analysis of the issue? I can’t see the point. But this is the damage that the book club culture and creative writing classes have brought upon literature. Anyone who can read and write thinks that “there is a book in me”. The book clubs brainwash the potential reader with mediocre standards where everyone can “relate” to plots and characters using their own experience. No one has ever taught them that books are not to be judged from “experience”.

In addition, the whole notion of “female writing” – who came up with this nonsense? But now it has become like a self-fulfilled bad prophecy! There is now a “female writing” called to life, and it is bad. Did Mary Shelley write like a woman? No and no!

The book clubs and their followers created trends where books like “Flow Like a River” and “Where the Crawdads Sing” became the standard of female writing. Books where woman is one with nature and nature is one with woman…The funny thing is that these writers are thought to be “feminist” while they are promoting and reinforcing the most patriarchal trope of womanhood – the “nurturer”, the “earth”, the “procreator”. And because these books are successful, they become the model for future creative writing students to perpetuate that trend. How very annoying!

Books: Flesh, A Novel by David Szalay, 2025

Somewhat disappointing for a Booker-nominated novel! But aren’t they all recently?

Szalay tracks in a coldly observant style the life of a boy from behind the Iron Curtain who is sexually abused by a 40-something woman, the age of his mother. The boy becomes obsessed with the older woman, which leads to the accidental murder of her husband. From now on, things go downhill for the main character – although on the surface, his life trajectory is quite successful, financially, socially, and sexually. We follow Istvan, who leads a life as an “out of body” experience, unable to fully engage emotionally with his female partners. On the other hand, we see him capable of deep hatred – towards his stepson, and deep love – towards his own child. Istvan is not just an unsympathetic character. He develops into quite a monstrous person, and despite his overwhelming unhappiness, he never appeals to the compassion of the reader.

If Szalay’s intention was to show the effects of a totalitarian society and its sexually and socially frustrating system on a generation of people who got to experience the collapse of this system, the result is quite unsatisfactory. Istvan’s story could be anybody’s story. The author seems to have little, if any, knowledge of life behind the Iron Curtain.

If Szalay’s intention was to show the effects of childhood sexual trauma on the life of an innocent boy, this has already been done by Ian McEwan in “Lessons” (2022) in a most brilliant way.

Books: Days at the Morisaki Bookshop, Novel by Satoshi Yagisawa

What is the appeal of a Japanese novel of 150 pages that makes it an international bestseller? The novel is very unpretentious and uneventful with a very light plot and still a page-turner.

The narrative takes you through the ordinary lives of ordinary people with a low horizon of expectations from life – nothing beyond love, work, and family. A hike in the mountains is described so simply and effortlessly that it has the effect of a still-life painting. It focuses your gaze and sucks you into the reality of the everyday made to look mysterious and strange through the power of language. It makes the coolness of the night breeze or the fatigue and excitement of a mountain climb acquire a fresh deep meaning.

There is a lot of melodrama but it is so mellow and tender that creates a sub-genre of its own. Let us call it – the mellow-drama. The painful is combined with hope, death is not an end.

Books: The Lying Life of Adults. A Novel by Elena Ferrante, 2019

I have previously had mixed feelings about the writings of Elena Ferrante. My esteem of her rose after the film adaptation of “The Lost Daughter” by Maggie Gylenhaal, a truly original and thought-provoking film. My initial complaints about her fiction were related to the first part of the Neapolitan quartet – “My Brilliant Friend” which I found cliched and uninspiring, especially her very traditional class-struggles approach. In contrast – I was impressed by “Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay” which is an example of an in-depth look into the motherhood and womanhood themes of her previous books and a sort of more incisive continuation of “The Lost Daughter.” In the former, I enjoyed the string of character studies – contradictory and complex, the prose – dense and subtle, the non-judgemental representation of opposing kinds of “femininity,” the ambiguity of female strife for independence as a mix of libration and egotism. “We all narrate our lives as it suits us.” writes Ferrante. This is the powerful message of “Those Who Stay and Those Who Leave” – and it is the meta-revelation of the first-person narrative in that novel.

In “The Lying Life of Adults,” this principle is taken to a level of arbitrariness. An exceptionally smart girl, the author wants us to believe, is debunking the “narrative” of the adults that surround her as lies. Doing that she builds her own, supposedly innocent and honest, narrative. Not a new thing, by the way (i.e. What Maisie Knew) . The problem with the narrative of the coming-of-age girl, is that at some point the “disbelief” cannot be suspended. It becomes impossible to give credit to her unusual for her age intelligence, her interest in higher matters of politics and philosophy, the impression she creates for adults and peers, and her supposedly penetrating representations of the adults in her life. This time, Ferrante is invested too much in binary oppositions: ugly-beautiful, dreamy-cynical, rich-poor, entitled-self-made, so that instead of transforming into psychological “depth” the oppositions come across as confusing and arbitrary. In the main character’s narrative everything becomes possible and hence — not engaging.

Books: All the Lovers in the Night, a Novel by Mieko Kawakami, 2022, originally published in Japanese 2011

My first experience of Mieko Kawakami’s writing, a novelist and poet from Osaka. Very impressive talented prose! The first half of the novel is a fascinating in-depth description of excruciating loneliness.

A socially awkward Fuyuko, the protagonist, a proofreader by profession, finds it extremely hard to communicate with people. She discovers that having a drink helps. Slightly ironic and hurtfully honest, the narrative progresses through the daily ordeals of being alone. Proofreading becomes a metaphor for a specific attitude to life – reading without really getting into the content of the book but just looking for the errors in it… Another topic that is developed intricately to reach metaphorical power is the physical aspect of light and color. Kawakami’s descriptions of the mundane sometimes reach Knausgaardian dimensions.

The “female condition” is represented in several well-written scenes – the protagonist examining the shelves of a modern bookstore self-help section, her first sexual experience, her conversations with two female friends – the “happily married with children” one, and the “sleeping around fashionista.” Kawakami is not interested in making judgments, she is recording the female tragi-comedy in a cool incisive style.

The second half of the novel, with the appearance of a love interest, is more banal as a story because it is seasoned with the hope of happiness for the main character. And the hope of happiness takes a trivial form, promising the reader an American rom-com finale. But no, Kawakami is not providing one. An appropriate ending for a novel like this is finding strength to triumph over disappointment.

TV: Feud: Capote Vs The Swans, 2023, Creator Ryan Murphy, Dir. Gus Van Sant, Max Winkler, Jennifer Lynch

Unfortunately, the second installment of Ryan Murphy’s “Feud” is not as good as the first one. The dramatization of Betty Davis’ and Joan Crawford’s conflict was really great! It involved the manipulated context of this feud, the role of the media and the industry, and two great characters – it was a really demo of dramatic writing and a great pleasure to watch with the excellent performers!

“Capote Vs The Swans” lacked the dramatic energy that draws you in, the “feud” was illustrated, not acted out. The focus was on Capote’s idiosyncrasies, his loneliness, self-destructive behavior, narcissism, relationship with his mother, etc. (Tom Hollander was great playing Capote.) But the characters on the other side were underdeveloped, they were an illustration of an age long gone now, they were the “swan song” for the socialites of 1950s New York. The series strong point was the nostalgic feeling it induced despite the intended “criticism” of the New York high society from that time. An elegy for the women who were buying their “gardening hats” at a particular time of the year or who were fussing about the perfection of the edges of the invitation cards …was that ironic or sad or glamorous! It seems – the latter…And you could sense it in the way the “swan” performers enjoyed playing their roles – Naomi Watts, Diane Lane, Calista Flockhart, Chloë Sevigny….